Year's best

I can't find a good image of the cover, but the Twenty Eighth Annual Edition of the Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, is now out in the States.

It contains my long story from "The Mammoth Book of the End of the World", "Sleepover". Sleepover attracted almost zero attention upon its original publication (I know, moan moan moan), so I'm very grateful to Gardner for picking it for reprinting. As always, it's a blast to see my name inside the Year's Best, let alone on the cover.

Here's the opening:

They brought Gaunt out of hibernation on a blustery day in early spring. He came to consciousness in a steel-framed bed in a grey-walled room that had the economical look of something assembled in a hurry from prefabricated parts. Two people were standing at the foot of the bed, looking only moderately interested in his plight. One of them was a man, cradling a bowl of something and spooning quantities of it into his mouth, as if he was eating his breakfast on the run. He had cropped white hair and the leathery complexion of someone who spent a lot of time outside. Next to him was a woman with longer hair, greying rather than white, and with much darker skin. Like the man she was wiry of build and dressed in crumpled grey overalls, with a heavy equipment belt dangling from her hips.

‘You in one piece, Gaunt?’ she asked, while her companion spooned in another mouthful of his breakfast. ‘You compus mentis?’

Gaunt squinted against the brightness of the room’s lighting, momentarily adrift from his memories.

‘Where am I?’ he asked. His voice came out raw, as if he had been in a loud bar the night before.

‘In a room, being woken up,’ the woman said. ‘You remember going under, right?’

He grasped for memories, something specific to hold onto. Green-gowned doctors in a clean surgical theatre, his hand signing the last of the release forms before they plumbed him into the machines. The drugs flooding his system, the utter absence of sadness or longing as he bid farewell to the old world, with all its vague disappointments.

The finishing line in sight

I'm in the late stages of what will probably be the last substantial draft of BLUE REMEMBERED EARTH, mindful that while there will still be chances to make some minor changes further down the line, this is really the last opportunity to inflict major adjustments on the story. Along with detailed editorial feedback, I've also been fortunate enough to have responses from some "beta-test" readers who were generous enough with their time to take a look at the May draft. As always, emotions are mixed - these readers will inevitably pick up on plot holes and inconsistencies that you'd either thought were resolved or were not aware of at all, but at the same time it's encouraging to see that someone else is able to track through the plot from A to B to C and pick up on nuances that make it clear that they understood not only the surface currents of the story, but the implied mechanics of the invented world and its characters. That, in other words, they weren't completely bewildered and lost by chapter three. The hard part is sifting through those reader responses and deciding which you act on, and which you discard. Assuming, of course, that you can reconcile two or more sets of reactions which may not readily dovetail.

A book at this stage is essentially a done deal - a production slot is assigned, artwork commissioned, buyers (hopefully) persuaded of its worth. If a reader tells you that the motivation of character X in chapter Y needs a bit of tweaking, you can deal with that. If that same reader suggests that the entire premise of the novel is flawed, that the only possible course of action is a total rewrite or even abandonment, you have no real option but to discard their advice. That's never happened to me yet, but it's always a possibility. Writers are artists, but publishing is a commercial enterprise with schedules and expectations. The momentum may not be as unstoppable as that which governs the shooting and cutting of blockbuster films, assigned a tentpole release date a summer or two ahead which absolutely must be met, at all costs. But it's still momentum, all the same.

Shuttle

Brilliantly inspirational piece in the Guardian from astronauts Piers Sellers and Scott Altman on the space shuttle. I particularly like these words from Piers:

"I've flown on two shuttles and they both felt a little bit different. They are real ships with their individual characters and their own nicks and bumps. You look at the shuttle, it's not as if it's this pristine, shining, gleaming piece of metallic technology – it looks like a ship, it's got dents and burns and inside multiple crews have whacked the paintwork and you can see scratches and things. They are ships that have been operated and lived in and done these incredible voyages all with their individual characters. I am personally very fond of the shuttle. When they wind up in museums I'll go and see them and I'll be happy to see them like old friends."

Full article here.

Thanks to Piers I was able to observe the launch of STS-132 last year, a truly memorable experience. A year earlier I also witnessed (thanks to my friend Louise Kleba) the launch of STS-125, which was another Atlantis mission and one commanded by Scott Altman. As documented at the time, I managed to lose my camera hours after the launch but fortunately that didn't happen with STS-132.

Tweeting

Just a note to say that I've opened a Twitter account. It's early days yet but we'll see how it goes. Follow me on:

http://twitter.com/AquilaRift

This is part of a general profile-raising campaign ahead of Blue Remembered Earth's release in January, but hopefully I'll enjoy it well enough to stick with afterwards.

Year's Best SF16

Out now:

Features my story "At Budokan", about the future of rock promotion and death metal, which originally appeared in the SHINE anthology. I am very grateful to David and Kathryn for reprinting it, and to Jetse de Vries for buying it originally.

Welcome your new Space Pony overlords

I spent last weekend in Derby, attending the excellent Alt.Fiction, a slickly run and enjoyable cross-genre event with a nice mixture of SF, fantasy, crime and horror writers (and readers) present. As much a workshop as a convention in the usual sense, it was terrifically good fun and well situated in the heart of Derby, within easy range of restaurants and reasonably priced hotels. My thanks to Alex Davies for the invitation, and to the other guests and attendees for making everything so pleasant.

I delivered a guest of honour talk on the saturday afternoon. Before I got going, Cheryl Morgan presented me with this, which she had kindly ferried home from Stockholm:

This is the European Science Fiction Society Hall of Fame award for best writer, and I'm delighted to be the recipient in 2011, following on from my colleague and friend Stephen Baxter last year. When Cheryl emailed me from Stockholm to say the award was mine, I was doubly delighted because I hadn't even realised I was up for it. It's the kind of thing that makes you want to rub your hands and say "excellent" in a Mr Burns style.

The significance of the pony is that these wooden statuettes are a Stockholm speciality; mine has been transmogrified with a spacesuit and helmet. I understand that the other awards given out that night were similarly wacky.

I am immensely grateful to the ESFS for the award, to Cheryl for bringing it home, and to the organisers, guests and attendees of Alt.Fiction for an excellent time.

Onto book 2

While we're going through the slow process of editing BLUE REMEMBERED EARTH, I've begun to make tentative inroads into the second novel of the trilogy. I have a title, but I'm not telling the world yet - I may well change my mind.

IF BRE deals with the colonisation and exploration of the solar system over the next 150 years - along with some snapshots of life on Earth, in a peaceful, prosperous post-climate change future - then the second book leaps ahead several hundred years, into the middle of a centuries-long interstellar expedition to an extrasolar planet, a little of which we already learn about in BRE. Not to give too much away, but it's a kind of generation ship story - except there are lots of generation ships, launched over many years, forming an entire spacefaring community stretched across many light years - a bit like the flotilla in CHASM CITY, scaled up a thousand times. The Akinya family, who feature in BRE, show up again in the new book, although there are not really any overlapping characters.

I've often been asked about my working methods, and I've usually answered that I don't do a great deal of pre-planning, preferring to hew out a first draft through blood, sweat and toil. This time, though, I'm taking exactly the opposite approach, blocking out the book on a chapter by chapter basis before I write a word of prose. It may all end in tears, but I'm interested in shaking up my processes every now and then, and I think this will be a good experiment to try. I've tried the elaborate planning thing twice before, with REDEMPTION ARK and THE PREFECT, but in both cases I don't think I got the plot sufficiently well nailed down before diving into the writing. This time I'm determined to resist the temptation. We'll see how it goes.