Okay, she’s a lot like me in ONE way.  I also, um, love reading books.

I find I’m naturally attracted to characters with a hint of evil in their souls.  Like Lena, or indeed Flanagan, in DEBATABLE SPACE. Or Saunders in RED CLAW.  Even Sharrock in HELL SHIP is a warrior, and hence a cold blooded killer.

Some of the characters I’ve created in these books are, however, Good Guys. Version 43, for instance, in the novel called (would you credit it?) VERSION 43 is an honest cop in a dishonourable world.  He may have flaws but he’s not corrupt.  In fact his main flaw is that he’s not nearly corrupt enough.  He is, exasperatingly, too good to be true; because he’s a cyborg and not a true human.  But, as time goes by, he gets more and more human…and that makes him, in my view, easier to warm to.  And he’s also very good at his job, of enforcing law and order, usually by killing people.

Artemis, though,  is very much at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum of amorality.  She is a one woman killing machine.    But does that make her an unsympathetic character? Well, I’d argue not. Because she has reasons for what she does.  Good reasons…

But she’s flawed, without a doubt. Highly flawed.  Murderous – sometimes selfish – obsessive – and vengeful.  I like characters with flaws;  perhaps because I am myself a character with many flaws… And I believe firmly that characters who are nice and full of virtue aren’t the ones we root for when we read stories.  That’s why Satan is the one we cheer on in Paradise Lost, not those wretched angels; certainly not God.

Mulling on this theme, I’ve coined the term ‘Rootability’, to refer to that special quality in a character that makes us want to root for him, or her.  Tyrion Lannister (in George R. R. Martin’s  Games of Thrones series) has it in abundance. Eddard Stark is far more heroic. Daenerys is more exotic, and has those wonderful dragons. But Tyrion is the evil dwarf we love to hate; he’s the underdog; he’s the smart one.

Harry Potter, for my money, DOESN’T have Rootability. He’s too powerful.  He’s too nerdy. He has those glasses. I’d like those stories much more if Hermione were the heroine – the ‘little girl’ who no one takes seriously but who always wins the day.  But then again I’m strange; and JK Rowling’s fans seem to like Harry’s books just the way they are.

So to define the essence of Rootability in a story is to reveal something about yourself.  I like strong female characters.  I like flawed characters.  I like funny self-deprecating characters.  I like characters who have to make complex moral choices and don’t always get it right. Those are the characters I tend to root for.  But then again, I also root for Conan the Cimmerian in the Robert E. Howard stories, and he’s not female, he’s not flawed (he’s the perfect example of what he is) and he never makes complex moral choices – he does what he does according to his code, with nary a moral qualm afterwards.  But I root for him because he’s indomitable.  He just keeps on keeping on.

Not every protagonist has to have Rootability.  You can enjoy a story for the sake of the story; you can enjoy following a character without ever wanting him, or her, to win.  But for much of the time, it’s a key element in the strange process of the enjoyment of fiction.  We root for the good guy, or we root for the bad guy, and that shows we really care.

Rootability is close to Empathy of course; and Empathy is akin to Madness.  That strange Madness whereby the bookaholics among us lose ourselves in strange worlds, and identify, and sometimes overidentify, with the characters in those worlds.  But it’s possible to have empathy with every single character in a multiple-POV story, and still only truly root for one, or maybe two of them.  There are people who rooted for Willow, not Buffy, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  There are certainly people (I’ve met them) who rooted for Cordelia. There are others (strange people) who rooted for Xander.  Who you are affects who you root for.

This is, by the way, the third novel I’ve now written with a female protagonist – the others are Lena in DEBATABLE SPACE, and Sai-ias in HELL SHIP, who isn’t in my view Rootable, because she’s Nice, but I still love her.

Artemis is, I suspect, though don’t tell the others, my favourite of these three protagonists.  She narrates the whole novel; she’s in every scene; she has a thirst for vengeance; and she lives, oh boy, she lives.

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The selections  have been fabulous, as you’d expect, with such a huge wealth of science fiction and fantasy related songs to choose from. But for my money, the intros have been even better than the music — some of them are love poems to favourite songs, many are rich in autobiographical detail, and all offer insights into the writer’s heart and soul.

I relish Mike Cobley’s account of his experiences at University when selecting Space Station Number 5. Stephen Hunt has written a gorgeous account of his youth as a young geek in love with Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip; before maturing into the very grown up and sophisticated geek that he now is. Mike Carey wrote a joyous piece about Genesis, a band who also dominated my teenage years. Adam Roberts wrote a piece about Gary Numan that made me laugh out loud. Lilith Saintcrow chose a filk song that made me laugh out loud even louder.

I have to confess that I’m not, myself, a great musical aficionado; I love music, but I can never remember the names of tracks, and I’m never the one who knows in which year a particular single was released. I’m not like Al Reynolds, with his encyclopedic knowledge of cutting edge bands, and I certainly can’t compete with the coolest of musical dudes like Richard Morgan and Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Paul Raven; or  indeed Adam Roberts and James Lovegrove, who once had plans to write the definitive  book about SF/F music (and I hope one day they do).

No, I’m just someone who  love particular songs inordinately and excessively, and will play them endlessly over and over while running or at the gym. Things I’ve Seen by Spooks was one such song that carved grooves into my brain; at one point, I even quoted from it in Debatable Space, before rights issues forced me to pen some original lyrics. Crazy by Gnarls Barkley is another song that I became besotted by — no rude comments please! — and I Put a Spell on You by Nina Simone has cast a similar spell more recently. Darkness at the Edge of Town by Springsteen is tattooed into my frontal lobe;  as is Maria Maria by Carlos Santana; not to mention Hope by Shaggy. I listen to lots; but some songs I love so much it hurts.

These days, I must admit, I’m one of the iPod Shuffle generation — skipping from Dad Rock to Avril Lavigne (my daughter loads it on to my iPod for long trips) to the Hold Steadies to Shakira to Beyonce & Destiny’s Child (*blush*) to Theolonius Monk. But my teenage  passions, in the 70s, were the prog rocks bands like Yes (whose Starship Trooper was selected by Ian Whates, to the great annoyance of Pete Hamilton), Genesis (Carey’s choice), Pink Floyd (strangely overlooked), Bowie (thanks James Lovegrove!) and mind-numbing  stuff like Black Sabbath (I think Paranoid was my first ever album purchase). Patti Smith at Knebworth lingers in my memory as one of those great moments in growing up. Brand X were at the same gig, I seem to recall. Tangerine Dream (chosen by Stephen Palmer) in Cardiff. Blue Oyster Cult in Swansea (why has no-one picked Don’t Fear the Reaper?). 10 CC at Cardiff Castle (look, what can I say, I was a total nerd and really loved them, then).

Frankly, no music I’ve heard since has QUITE  the same potency as the teen year faves — or maybe I just don’t listen as much, or with such quasi-religious intensity. Then, I could listen to an album ten times in a week.  Now, it’s 2 or 3 times then it goes on to Shuffle.  So I have great sympathy with the blogjays who travel down the Nostalgia Road when making their choices.

But the younger and/or cooler blogjays are always there to freshen my references. I’d never heard Feist until Nicole Peeler chose her version of the  awesomely evocative old English ballad Sea Lion Woman; listen to the song, read Nicole’s books, and you’ll FEEL the synergy. My producer friend Archie Tait (from the hippy generation, but totally up to date with his musical preferences) chose Yoshimi and the Pink Robots by the Flaming Lips, which I’d never heard before and which really wowed me. And Jesse Bullington introduced me to the band Bal-Sagoth, who are SERIOUS fantasy dudes, and that was a real eye-opener.

Because of my own  time constraints, I’ve not managed to run one of these songs EVERY week — but I’m hoping to up the frequency in the next year or so.  Until I run out of writers; or run out of songs with SF or fantasy elements; which I suspect will not be for a very long time.

Anyway, if you want to listen in, click on this link. And here is my selection, not in any order, of my Top Ten SF/F Songs of the Week from my blog Debatable Spaces:

After the Gold Rush by Neil Young: Selected by Peter F. Hamilton
(THIS WEEK’S SELECTION!!!!)
Beat the Devil’s Tattoo by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club:
Selected by Richard Morgan
Manhattan Project by Rush: Selected by Ken MacLeod
Wings by The Fall: Selected by Alastair Reynolds
Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden: Selected by Tricia Sullivan
Time by Tom Waits: Selected by Robert Jackson Bennett
Banned from Argo by Leslie Fish: Selected by Lilith Saintcrow
Sweet Thing by David Bowie: Selected by James Lovegrove
Marquee Moon by Television: Selected by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Sea Lion Woman by Feist: Selected by Nicole Peeler
Are Friends Electric? by Gary Numan: Selected by Adam Roberts

 That’s a top 10 consisting of 11 choices; in hommage to Spinal Tap.

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In other words, unless the SF writer in question has a compellingly good excuse, there should ALWAYS be aliens.

Some aliens are allegorical; they’re a way to explore themes of, er, alienation and identity. Some aliens are just B.E.M.s — aliens of the bug-eyed and monstrous variety, who are only there to be zapped or blown up by a muscular hero. But some aliens are the good guys, who rebuke us with their higher moral code. That can be a little tiresome — my own theory/thesis is that for all its flaws, the human race will not prove to be the MOST evil or pernicious species in the universe. Plus, nobody loves a goody-two-shoes.

It is, I’d argue, pretty much impossible to write a credible alien, unless you ARE one. All a writer can do is hint at a strangeness beyond comprehension; which tends to result in aliens that come across like Buddhist monks, or dysfunctional nerds with no social skills. I know no examples of the former;  but most of my friends fall into the latter camp. So, actually, aliens to me aren’t all that strange.

It’s also pretty much impossible to create an ORIGINAL alien. There are only so many permutations of carbon-based life-forms that can be imagined. Two legs, three, four, or many more. Head in the wrong place. Different eyes, more eyes than we’re used to, no eyes at all. The marvels of the insect kingdom have inspired many SF writers;  the monsters of the ocean deep are also a great source of inspiration. But frankly, if it’s not a crab or an insect or a squid or a snake or a dog with the head of a jackal, it’s going to be an alien disguised as a human being.

However, I’m endlessly fascinated in aliens; as a theme, and as a source of entertainment. In my first novel Debatable Space (UK | US | ANZ) an alien called Alby was the best friend of my hero, Flanagan. In my second novel Red Claw  (UK | US | ANZ) I chose to explore the classification of aliens by human scientists — who are thrilled beyond belief to have so much so many new species and types of life to study and taxonomise – in the context of a  revenge thriller storyline.

And in my newest novel Hell Ship  (UK | US | ANZ), I decided to step aside from the human universe entirely. Hell Ship is a story about courage and cowardice and fear and hope and love in many universes, none of which are our own. All the characters are alien to us, and to each other; and yet, between them, friendship and — dare I say it? — romance can be possible.

And so I thought I’d write a massively dense and highly researched blog about my favourite aliens, from books, TV and film. And, since I’m a nerd, (N is for…) I thought I would do it as an A-Z.

Then I thought that would be WAY too hard. So here’s an alphabet sprinkling:

 H     is for Hroshia. In Robert Heinlein’s delightful book The Star Beast a giant alien called Lummox lives in a suburban home, eating next door’s roses, having stowed away on a spaceship many years ago. Lummox is big, he has eight legs and he appears to be as smart as the average dog. In fact he’s superintelligent and a spaceship full of Hroshii have come to rescue him … Daft stuff, but I love this beast.

 E     is for ET,  of course. ET is modelled on aliens supposed encountered during the heyday of nutso alien sightings; and it’s no coincidence that he looks like a foetus. Or is he more like a worm? Childlike yet wrinkled and old; there’s something utterly loveable about him. The genius of the film (scripted by Melissa Matheson, directed by some bloke with glasses) is that you see everyone and everything from a child’s POV (literally so in the opening sequences, where the camera appears to be held by a man walking on his knees.) Like Heinlein with his Hroshia, Spielberg/Matheson play the alien = cute card, to great effect

  L     is for Lirilla. She’s my favourite alien in Hell Ship — a mysterious elusive beautiful creature who speaks without syntax and flies with astonishing speed from one part of the eponymous Hell Ship to the other in the blink of an eye. In my mind (a strange place without doubt, but my thoughts do dwell there) she’s Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream; and she’s also the hummingbird in Red Claw.

 L     is for Luxan. If you like your aliens baroque, extreme and comical, look no further than Farscape, the Australian sci-fi show that was made in conjunction with Jim Henson’s company. There is only one human character in this entire series (well, apart from one episode which APPEARS to be set on Earth). His name is John Crichton, and he’s a bit dull. But among the aliens who share his ship is Ka D’Argo, a huge Luxan warrior with tentacles sprouting from his head and funny coloured skin. This is one of those roles which actors dread – a five year contract, spent ENTIRELY IN A LATEX BODY SUIT. No word he’s so darned cantankerous.

 S     is for Spock. Unlike Ka D’Argo, Spock is only a LTTLE bit alien. If it weren’t for the ears, he could pass for human easily; and often did in those time travel episodes. Spock is one of the great creations of SF, because he is human in every respect bar one — his lack of emotion. Except, in very many episodes, and numerous movies, he DOES have emotion.  Grudging emotion, that only emerges in the closing stages of the story, like Colin Firth in The King’s Speech. Essentially Spock is  a Yorkshireman; it was cowardly of Leonard Nimoy not to play the role in that accent.

 H     is for Hive-Mind. Ah! A sneaky one. A category choice rather than an actual alien; although there are a number of fictional aliens actually called Hive-Mind. But the kids in Midwich Cuckoos are a hive-mind. The Borg are a hive-mind.  The Overlords in Childhood’s End are a hive-mind. It’s a simple alien-by-extrapolation-from-the-insect-kingdom concept.

 I     is for Isaac. I did wonder about featuring the Ixtl — who feature in a great A.E.Van Vogt story The Voyage of the Space Beagle — but I decided to err on the side of plugging another of my books. Isaac is a major character in Red Claw; an intelligent avian with telepathic powers who is befriended by our protagonist; and who has a bizarre sexual cycle. ’Nuff, as Stan Lee used to say, said.

 P     is for Puppeteers. The Puppeteers – who feature in several of Larry Niven’s stories, including Neutron Star and Ringworld — are centaur like beasts with mouths on their arms (like puppets) who are quintessential capitalists but utterly cowardly. Apart from one called Nessus, who is capable of bravery — and has therefore been diagnosed as insane. These witty weird monsters captivate me; and yet they are not alien at all. They are utterly recognisable types, in a strange morphology.

However my favourite aliens of all times are the Tribbles. Those loveable fast-procreating creatures starred in the memorable Star Trek episode The Trouble with Tribbles. They were created by newbie writer David Gerrold who, so the story goes, admitted to the producer that he’d been influenced by a Robert Heinlein story with a similar concept. Heinlein was therefore contacted to see if he was  liable to sue for plagiarism; and he admitted he’d nicked the idea from someone else.  Cool!

But I can’t include Tribbles in my brief list, because that would spell:

H

E

L

L

S

H

I

T

And that would NOT be a good idea.

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Another favourite of mine is the joke about the writer who died and was offered the option of going to Heaven or to Hell.  So he went to Hell, escorted by St Peter, and was shown a room full of writers chained to desks, being beaten and whipped and abused by demons. He didn’t fancy that, so he went to Heaven and was shown a room full of writers in chains, being beaten and whipped and abused etc. The writer, baffled, asked what actually was the difference between the two places? And St Peter said, “In Heaven, the writers all have book deals.”

I love writer jokes because they’re all true;  writers are crazy people who only write because they have to.

In the course of my career I’ve met a lot of writers.  Almost all of them nice, a couple not so nice.  I’ve worked with theatre writers and movie writers, including one Oscar winner (“The British are coming!”), and as a writer myself I’ve written prime time TV cop shows, thrillers, movies (2, as co-writer), and a pretty wide variety of radio plays, as well as writing SF for those nice people in Orbit.  [NB the software on this site is programmed to automatically amend  the words 'my bloody publishers' to 'those nice people at Orbit' - clever, huh?]

Writers, you’ll be interested to hear, are all the same, no matter what medium they write for.  We’re all, in other words, wonderful, warm-hearted, generous, and totally obsessed with the ideas in our own brains.  We’re also inclined to carp; Kieran Prendeville once told me that the apposite collective noun is a ‘whinge’ of writers.But some writers are sprinters. Those are the TV writers, and the movie scribes.  Like lions, they sit basking in the sun for ages (or down the boozer); but when the gig comes along they get fired up with insane amounts of energy, work non-stop, and DON’T WRITE STUFF. That’s the art of being a great screenwriter; all the stuff you don’t say.  The implied meanings; the gaps between the words.  Less is

You see what I’m saying?

Oh and you have to be good in meetings.  That means you have to be energised, and practised in the art of persuading the producer in a tactful and ego-affirming way that their  ideas are all idiotic should be staked and buried at a crossroads.

But other writers prefer the marathon. That would be us SF novel writers, who have to create an entire universe filled with credible tech stuff and many many characters all of whom have to have different personalities, in the course of a story which contractually can’t be less than 110,000 words.  AND we have to describe things. A screenwriter can say:   INT. AMAZING SPACESHIP FULL OF ALIENS – DAY, and leave the rest to the production designer and director.  The novelist has to actually create everything!

When I write a novel, I tend to sketch things in at first; then fill in the details with every subsequent pass. It’s a process of slow accretion of detail.  When I write a screenplay, I do the opposite; every rewrite means taking out more and more.  A three page speech becomes a one page speech. A one page speech becomes a three line exchange.  That tiny shard of  dialogue somehow, or so we hope, still retains everything that was there in the original long version; but with less words.

But there is a reason why writers do what they do; and it’s about power.  That’s the bit the writer jokes neglect; writers have power.  And in different media, writers have different powers. When we write novels, we are gods – we create an entire world.  We clothe our characters, we design our spaceships, we create family relationships, we even kill people!  (Especially me!   I’m renowned for my bloodthirstiness as a writer; though in real life, I rarely kill, and only if REALLY provoked.)

But in drama, writers are even more godlike; because we have the power to control actual  people, not just words on a page. There’s no joy more exquisite than sitting down at a readthrough with a bunch of talented actors, and hearing them speak YOUR words.  They stop being actors, they become players in the imaginary universe the writer has created.  They fight, they quarrel, they even have sex.  (Radio sex scenes are, by the way, SO funny to watch.)  And the words on the writer’s page become manifest in characters who live and breathe;  who needs LARP!

Those moments of godlike grandeur are, sadly, brief; but they make it all worthwhile.

And usually of course writers are surplus to requirements once a drama is being made. There’s nothing duller than sitting on the set of a drama you’ve written, knowing that NO ONE WANTS YOU THERE.   And sometimes writers can even be barred;  as happened to me when, ahem, I was listening to one of those aforementioned  radio sex scenes in a play I’d written,  with the actors lying on the bed in a small cramped room,  and my tummy rumbled.  The mike picked it up beautifully, of course , and it was a case of Palmer – out!

For me, one of the biggest   differences between  writing prose and  writing drama  is in the editor/ writer relationship.  All writers need editors; but for the print writer, there’s usually a one-to-one relationship between a writer and an editor, and meetings are conducted in a highly amicable and relaxed fashion.

Drama writers have to be team  players however; and script conferences can be heated and crowded affairs. And there are pros and cons to that. At its best, the process of  brain storming a story with a small team of producer/director/script editor/writer can be inspiring; in fact, it can be the best bit of the writer’s job. But at other times, “feedback” can be a deafening whine. It’s particularly onerous in television, where there are armies of people who all insist on having  input – producers, exec producers, directors, commissioners and so forth.  And sometimes, in the worst case scenarios, script notes flow remorselessly down from level to level; the senior BBC executive gives notes to the junior BBC executive, who gives notes to the executive producer, who conveys those notes  to the producer, who passes those notes on to the script editor, who then delivers the notes to the writer. It’s  like being at the bottom of a chocolate fountain; except, unfortunately, it’s not always chocolate.

This is why the script editor’s role in television is often defined as being the “writer’s friend”. With notes flying from all quarters, a friend is really what you need!

I do, I have to admit, hugely enjoy the discipline of moving from one medium to another.  I love the variety. I love the script conferences. And I love writing for actors – and relish the fact that they  will grumble bitterly if their character arcs aren’t right,  and will often ask the writer to CUT lines of their own dialogue, if that will make the drama stronger.  Now that’s what I call integrity…

But despite the constant adrenalin rush of drama writing – and the fact you actually meet people! – nothing can beat the pure joy of writing a sentence that sings, in a book that will forever sit on the writer’s shelf; to be cherished like a beloved child, but without the tantrums.

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But the brief this time was to explore the potential and craft of SF in a one- day workshop for writers new to or experienced in that genre; and I was pleased to find it was a sell-out.

I began the day by discussing some general concepts of writing that are particularly important for SF — namely worldbuilding and POV.  I read a chapter from Hell Ship, featuring Sharrock, his cathary, and his lost village. And I then read  a section from The Book of the New Sun, a fantasy novel that’s actually SF (although, since it’s Gene Wolfe, that’s never ENTIRELY clear) and which is a masterly example of how to create a world with a detailed geography, culture, and language all its own.

Words are the key in my view; those magic phrases that feel real, yet evoke strangeness. Wolfe’s genius is to use words like ‘autarch’ and ‘fuligin’ and ‘asimi’ which sound invented, but are in fact real words that have fallen out of use, or are utterly arcane.  World building isn’t just about making maps and writing future histories; it’s about the poetry of words that imply as much as they describe.  At the other end of the spectrum, a military SF writer like Dan Abnett has to invent words for GUNS; like the PDW (personal defence weapon) and PAPS and hardbeams and M3A pipers and thumpers, all of which feature in his fab new book Embedded.  If the jargon is right; the world feels real.

I also talked about Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire, which is the masterclass in how to manipulate POV to create great action sequences. And I talked a bit too about Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, which creates a stunningly real near-future world in prose so beautiful you could kiss it.

Then I asked a room full of strangers to create an alien for me …

And in the afternoon session, the writers pitched their own original story ideas — and I found myself immersed in a vast range of weird and wonderful stories, in a room (this was taking place in a museum of medicine based on the collection of an 18th century surgeon) full of skeletons and organs pickled in jars. Utterly surreal, and quite engrossing. I wish all those writers well and have urged them to keep me in touch with what they do.

The highlight of the day for me though was that period in the morning when I was sitting at a desk, doing nothing; surrounded by people passionately arguing about ideas and concepts and characters, as they endeavoured to create their alien.  We ended up with four of them.  A malleable alien, which can change its shape and merge with other aliens to create a larger entity.  A sloth-like reptilian alien with wings.  An alien virus, that can impart the gift of empathy on its human host.  And an alien that feeds on energy that can expand its membranes to become the size of a room; and which is able to float freely in space drinking in the heat from the sun.

Four great aliens!

This day was very much a busman’s holiday for me, because I’ve spent a large part of my career working as a script editor/creative producer and screenwriting tutor.  And I have to admit, there’s no joy quite so special as being there when OTHER people are being creative.

No really, I’m quite serious about that!  A writer’s life is often a very boring  one; it’s all about sitting on your lardy bottom in a room on your own, wrestling with various half-baked thoughts, haunted by a deadline.  But to feel the heat generated from the creative fire of an entire room full of writers — well, if I were a vampire, I’d be immortal from drinking in that energy.

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Romance, for instance. I don’t claim to be well-read in the romance genre, but I will admit to having indulged, from time to time, in a passion for passion. The main object of my affection was Maeve Binchy – who writes Irish feel-good sagas about community life with lashings of romantic cliches. And who is also, by the way, one of the greatest storytellers of our age, up there with Stephen King. I’ve also read the Welsh novels of Iris Gower, the Regency romances of Georgette Heyer and the superbly evocative tales of Catherine Cookson, the great mistress of grit-lit plus, well, quite a few others that were dreadful but I enjoyed them anyway.

Crime was once my profession (as a writer and script editor for TV crime dramas) and also my hobby. I love bleak noir, locked room mysteries, nostalgic period detective stories, and modern police procedurals. My favourite crime writers are Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Rex Stout, Carl Hiaasen, Donald E. Westlake AND Richard Stark…and many more. Crime is a great genre; it gives us a chance to wallow in evil and still feel good about ourselves. Nowadays, I haven’t the time to read much new crime fiction (apart from the excellent Stieg Larssons) but evil-wallowing continues to be my favourite pastime, expressed in, ahem, other ways.

I also love thrillers – I see Gerald Seymour on my shelf up there – Ken Follett is a favourite of mine – I’ve read virtually every Wilbur Smith ever written, I’ve worked my way through John Grisham and Frederick Forstyth, and still have a fond spot for the thrillers of yore like the tales of Edgar Wallace and John Buchan’s great epic Richard Hannay tales (of which The Thirty-Nine Steps is the first but not the best.)

Oh and Westerns! Don’t get me started on Westerns. Though there my passion was for a single author – Louis L’Amour – who wrote Shalako, Heller with a Gun, Hondo, The First Fast Draw, and many more, all of which I’ve read. Larry McMurtry is great – but he really can’t compare.

Some of this diversity of reading experience came about as a result of a period when I was working full time reading scripts but also novels for film companies – which meant I’d be paid to write coverage on every novel by a given author, in a multiplicity of popular genres. That’s how I got through the Wilbur Smiths, which otherwise I might have sniffed at. I read the Georgette Heyers when looking for projects for a TV company; the same with the Maeve Binchys. But having read them, I came to adore them.

This may be one reason why I’m such a fun of the genre-mashup – mixing up varied genres in one great big simmering pot. My view is, since all these genres are so great, it seems a shame not to use them ALL. So my recent novel Version 43 for instance is a blend of noir (the Dashiell Hammett influence), SF, fantasy (yes, there’s some magic in it), gladiator epic ( you have to read it to know why), horror (it’s VERY yucky) and, yes I would truly argue this, Romance. Indeed, I”d go so far as to argue that all my novels to date are romances: guy meets girl, they don’t get on so well, violent shit ensues around them, and reluctant love slowly blooms. Hey, just because I kill hundreds if not millions of characters in every novel, doesn’t mean I’m not a great big soppy romantic!

The one glaring exception to this rule is Hell Ship, which comes out next year, and which DOESN’T have a Boy Meets Girl structure. Instead, it’s the story of Tentacled Alien Meets Fire-Breathing Alien, they don’t get on so well, violent shit ensues around them, and reluctant love slowly blooms. I mean, what could be more romantic than that?

The influence of the romance genre on the science fiction and fantasy genres is worthy of a thesis in itself. Among my favourite pulp novels of all time are Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels – the tales of John Carter of Mars – which are shamelessly influenced by the romance genre, with a muscular manly hero constantly rescuing damsels, Misunderstandings Getting In the Way of True Love, and so forth. The books in short shamelessly and brilliantly adopt and adapt the Mills & Boone romance tropes within the SF genre (in Synthetic Men of Mars, for instance, Boy Meets Girl; Boy has his Brain Surgically Inserted into the Body of a Green Alien; Girl falls in Love With Him Anyway. Aaaahhhh!!!) And the paranormal romance strand in urban fantasy has become a major subgenre in its own right; perhaps controversially for some readers, though not for me. (Surely, EVERY popular novel should have a romance? Or am I just – um – embarassing myself here?)

One thing that fascinates me is how easily these different genres do come together, and become entangled to form something fresh-yet-familar. SF noir – the chimaerical union of Raymond Chandler and Isaac Asimov – is a huge and popular subgenre; and fantasy and science fiction traditions are often intermingled in both classic and recent SFF (as in Peter F. Hamilton’s audiacious Dreaming Void novels, which blend future science in one story strand, with psychic powers in a medieval type fantasy universe in a second strand.) And Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer seamlessly merges the horror tradition with the high school movie genre tradition; then mixes in screwball comedy; and in that one memorable episode, mashes it all up with the unlikely genre of Musical.

There are of course some eye-catching mashup combinations around at the moment – zombie novel meets Jane Austen for instance – as well as the less obvious examples of the merging of different narrative and genre traditions I mention above. And there’s no doubt this approach doesn’t suit everyone; author Scott Westerfeld, for instance, has argued that some genre mashups cannot EVER work – for instance, a driver’s ed manual with an unreliable narrator (!)

But my belief is that Genre-Mashup is fast becoming a genre in itself. In fact, damn it all, stealing here from the the comic books, I would go one step further still and describe it as the Mashup Super-Genre. To truly savour and wallow in the Mashup Super-Genre approach, though, I guess you have to like ALL the genres in the mix.

You have to be, as I am in fact, a total genre slut.

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But I guess you already knew that, huh?

Come on, tell the truth here. You, I’m talking to you!

Maybe you’ve been trawling through my emails, hmm, yeah? Find anything juicy?

Or perhaps you keep an automatic log of all my Google entries. So every time I type ‘conspiracy’ or ‘evil empire’ or ‘oppressive surveillance culture’, a little light goes on in a computer somewhere and my name is flagged up as a potential trouble-maker.

Just because

Sorry, that sounded rude, I didn’t mean you! Not you guys, the loyal readers of the Orbit blogs who have a  passion for science fiction and fantasy and don’t, in fact, spend your time engaged in espionage activities. I wasn’t attacking you. It’s those other guys I was addressing – the ones who work at GCHQ and the Pentagon, who spend their time spying on us. They do!   They really do!

Remember the sequence in Se7en in which the cops discover that Kevin Spacey  is the killer by analysing the records of who has been borrowing books on serial murder and the Seven Deadly Sins from the public library system?  They tracked him down by knowing which books he’d read!

That plot device seemed like a reach at the time; but these days, Amazon keep tabs on all of us.  They know our reading habits, our preferences, we sometimes even tell them what we think of the books we’ve read.  They know everything! And what, I sometimes wonder, do they actually think about me? I buy books on warfare, torture, miltary interrogation, magic, witchcraft, and I even buy the graphic novels of Warren Ellis.

Does that not add up to the portrait of a serial killing drug abusing suspect-torturing warlock with a bad attitude to authority?

If we assume that the Pentagon can hack into the Amazon database – and of course they can, I’ve seen movies where spotty teenagers can do that stuff! – then I am clearly a marked man.

you’re paranoid

I once worked with a writer called Mike Cullen – a lovely Scottish screenwriter – who told me about ‘cookies’.  It took me a while to fathom these weren’t cookies of the yummy edible variety; but once I understood how my computer can be used to spy on me via invisible bits of code, I’ve never felt safe.

Then more recently, I attended a talk given by Charles Stross who explained how my computer can be turned into a ‘slave’ by drug cartels and global pornographers to forward their messages, assignations, and obscene material.

So now I’m the hub of a global empire of crime! And I don’t even get to see the profits, or wear the bling.

Also, I’m watching re-runs of The X-Files at the moment; that’s making me

doesn’t mean

even more conspiratorially jittery.

And what about Gnosticism! I mean, isn’t that the most paranoid theory ever? The Gnostics believed that all reality is an illusion. It’s not real! We just think it is. That’s a haunting concept that has been used as the basis for many fine movies, including The Matrix, The Truman Show, and Dark City.

But when you think about it – isn’t that odd? Why are there so many movies steeped in Gnosticism? I mean, it’s an ancient and arcane belief system; why is it so popular? It’s not as if we’re being deluged with movies about Zorastrianism!

So maybe, I sometimes wonder

they’re not out to get you!

if there is in fact a global conspiracy of Gnostics, based in Hollywood, trying to convince us that our world is an illusion and we are all just simulacra playing our pre-ordained roles.

The fact there is no evidence for such a conspiracy just proves there is a conspiracy; and they’re covering it up!

Maybe aliens have landed, and have taken over the world.  That would explain Tony Blair.

Or maybe -

Hey, why am I telling you this stuff?  You already know it.  By “You”, I mean you, the GCHQ/Pentagon guys!  I know you can hack my computer, and listen to my mobile phone calls, and analyse my loyalty card to study my shopping habits.  You probably even know which TV shows I watch.  You may even read my blogs!

And perhaps – is it possible? – you can hear my thoughts?

If so, suckers, listen to this:

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Hi Robert

I finished Mr. Shivers a couple of days ago, and I’ve been mulling about it since.

Why does it make me think of the story of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil?  That’s not the story of your actual novel, but it has that feel about it.  Very haunting. And I loved the sequence in which [THIS SENTENCE IS A SPOILER AND HAS BEEN DELETED - The Guy from Orbit].

What made you pick that world?  And how did you research it?

One of the things I’ve been aware of in the last few years as a science fiction novelist is how ‘world building’ is both a blessing and a curse.  It’s a blessing because creating a world from scratch -  naming planets, creating civilisations, inventing styles of clothing, and sometimes even making up  jargon – is a joy.  And it’s a curse because, well, you can get lost doing that stuff.

My secret fear is that one day I’ll enter the realm of Debatable Space, sit down in a bar with a bunch of spooky aliens and scary space pirates, and never return.

World building is something only SF and Fantasy writers do.  Literary writers and historical writers and crime writers observe worlds. They read books and newspapers, they check facts, but all the real work has been done for them.

But SFF writers have to make it up. We are realist writers of imaginary worlds; and we work much harder than those literary guys.

The curse of world building though is that you have to be consistent.  Dates have to match.  The Future History has to be consistent and coherent.  And that can be fun; but it can also can be dampening to creativity.  One solution is to have lots of parallel universes – not for any valid creative reasons, but simply to excuse any inevitable errors.  Okay, in this book it may seem as if the writer has blundered by saying that Betelgeusans have six legs and four eyes (instead of four legs and six eyes, as they had in the previous novels); but that’s because it’s a parallel universe!

And, in one of these parallel universes, science fiction writers never cheat, or cut corners, or tell lies, or drink too much. But not in this universe.

Anyway, that’s what we  SFF writers do for a living: create universes from scratch. In other genres, however the world is already built; someone (God), or some thing (emergence and evolutionary forces) has already done the heavy lifting.

In my previous career I wrote mainly crime dramas, and research was my god. I used to read books on crime, and meet police officers and criminals and hear their stories. And learn about their worlds. That’s always fascinated me; how different sub-cultures and groups create their own reality.  If you’re a copper, you live in copperland; if you’re a criminal, all your friends are criminals and all your value systems are skewed accordingly.

That research keeps paying off, since a lot of my SF stories and characters are influenced by criminals and coppers I’ve spent time with.  Because those people are, frankly, much more interesting (oops! should I say this?) than my actual friends.  My friends are almost all writers; they watch telly in the evening and sit at the computer all day. Like me, they don’t do anything.  But cops and robbers and murderers are always out there, breaking or enforcing laws, and often putting their lives in peril.

They are, in short, the stuff of which heroes and villains are made.  In fact, now I come to think about it; I really miss spending time with these guys.

And the thing which intrigues me about this whole ‘worldbuilding’ concept is this: Which worlds do we build, and why?

They are never, let’s be frank, nice worlds. Look at the world of Avery Cates, created by Orbit author Jeff Somers – it’s crap! People are very violent.  Our main character is a career criminal and an assassin, and we’re meant to condone his behaviour, and root for him.  It’s a dystopian world, not a utopian world; because that’s what readers want to read about.

Imagine a future in which men and women live together in harmony, and treat alien species with respect, and there is no war, no injustice, and no appalling bloody brutal murders.

How dull would that be!  There are in fact a number of SF books with such utopian visions; but they tend to bore me rigid.

No, to build a world you’ve got to take all the most awful, ghastly immoral aspects of our actual world and place them in some exotic (even if it’s grimly so) setting.  It could be a medieval type society with warriors killing each other; or a future world in which war and genocide are a matter of course.  That’s the real trick of world building; you don’t build just any old world, you build a really scary world.

And I guess the trick you play with Mr. Shivers is to find an historical world in which things were really crap for very many people.

This was my challenge with my newest novel, Version 43. Without giving too much away about the predecessor novels, Debatable Space and Red Claw, I would just say that it’s not entirely out of the question that the good guys win.  So, it occurred to me, what then?

If the Clanton gang are all killed, peace arrives in Tombstone; and who wants to watch that movie?  If the Evil Empire is defeated, it can be replaced by the Really Nice Liberal Democracy: bo-ring.

So with Version 43, I had to invent a new universe – the Exodus Universe – where the bad guys are still in charge.

And then I had to name the planet on which my story takes place – and I called it Belladonna, which is a pretty word with a deadly connotation.

And then I had to visualise the architecture. Decide on the transport system.  Choose a clothing style for the characters.  Invent a system of government.  And decide on the language.  In Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess devised his own language and vocabulary for his characters; as Orwell did in 1984. But Orwell was clever enough to have a  future world in which evolved English is spoken – so only a few words are different. In far future worlds – anything beyond the 23^rd century – language may have changed enormously, and be incomprehensible to anyone alive today.  But no publisher is going to publish a novel in a language no-one speaks; so a cheat is always needed. There needs to be a flavour of difference in the language, enough to give a tang; but essentially it has to be in the reader’s language, or the game is up.

I play a trick in Version 43, to explain the retro feel of the clothes and some of the vocabulary.  I like tricks; they keep the reader on his or her toes.

And after writing that novel, I realised; worldbuilding is more than half the fun.  So rather than writing novel after novel with the same Future History, I’m aiming to ring the changes with my future books. Yes,  I wasn’t entirely kidding about those parallel universes….

Anyway, Robert; that’s all from me for now: I have to create a universe before lunch….

- Phil

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I not only remember the scenes, I remember how it felt. I can feel the water on my flesh, the wind in my hair; even now I can evoke those memories at will.  I can also visualise the bookshelf on which the book was placed in my local library.  Indeed, I also remember the covers of the books by Willard Price about two American boys who travel around the world having adventures – on an African safari, on a whaling ship and so forth. (Their job was to collect animals for their – humane – zoo, not to kill them.) I can’t remember the names of the characters, or the plots; but I remember being on a whaling ship. And I remember being roared at by a lion!

It should be borne in mind that I have a really crap memory.  I bump into old school friends and can’t recollect them at all.  I once lost my car for half a day because I forgot where I parked it.

But I remember the emotions I felt whilst reading books that I read decades ago.  And that’s because I wasn’t just reading the story: I was in the story. I surrendered myself to the tale, body and soul and all five (and sometimes six) senses.

I was mulling about this the other day after watching James Cameron’s movie Avatar.  I think I give nothing away when I reveal that the premise of the film is that the crippled hero has an ‘avatar’ who is a blue alien.  This clever conceit allows the audience watching the film to become, imaginatively, an alien, for those crucial CGI scenes on the planet.  In other words, you start by imagining you’re a human; then it’s a small step to imagining you’re a human who, via a virtual gizmo, inhabits an alien’s body.

This is all good fun, but there’s a much more straightforward way to achieve the same effect.  Just read an SF book whose central characters are aliens; and you can be those aliens, without any intervening technology.  (And without laborious exposition either.) 

This is the joy of reading, and this is the power of the imagination.  Forget the internet, forget the iPod, the iSlate, or the iWhateverthenextthingis.  The imagination can top all these.  It can turn words on a page into vivid synaesthetic experience; it can make us feel pain and rage and heat and cold and lust and the tender touch of skin on skin.  The words may be in pBook or eBook form or they may be on a computer screen; but the real magic happens in the space behind your two staring eyes. 

However, it’s a fact that some people read differently to the way that you and I read. (I’m taken it for granted that anyone who’s on this website loves reading. If not, you must be seeking a pron site with a very similar name.)  The way we read is: intensively, and unconditionally, and obsessively.   We want to lose ourselves in worlds, we want to be captivated by concepts, we want to care about and root for characters.  And in pursuit of this intensity of experience, we’ll patiently read all sorts of crap books till we find the books that truly and deeply speak to us.

And within this community – our community – of bookaholics, there are some who are, frankly, even more obsessive than I am.  I’ve been looking at a thread on an American site called Book Blogs in which readers describe what lengths they will go to in order to read a book.  They will cancel  meetings; read while driving in traffic; read while waiting for medical appointments; some people even read in the shower. (There are, as you may already know,  two shower-reading techniques: 1) read while the conditioner is in your hair and the water from the shower is off and 2) read while the shower is on, but tilt your body away from the spray.)

So far I’ve not heard of anyone who reads while having sex; but let’s be honest now, have you never ever, whilst in the throes of passion,  thought for a moment or two about the book you’re currently reading?  (No? Never? Is it just me? [Thank heaven my wife isn’t reading this blog.])

There have in fact been a number of serious academic studies of how people read books.  One of the best I’ve ever read is a seminal paper called ‘Readers and their Romances’ by Janice Radway, based on a study of a American book group of women who love romance fiction.

I’m not myself a fan of romance fiction – we’re talking here really hardcore romance of a highly formulaic kind, not novels that happen to have romance in the story.  But I’m always fascinated to hear about anyone who loves books; and what I learned from this study is that the women who love ‘trashy’ romances are smart and sophisticated and read this stuff because they, sophisticatedly and for complex emotional reasons, love this stuff.   They don’t read these books because they don’t know better; they read them because they want to live that experience.  (Tortured by love; ignored by the man you love; quarrelling with the man you love; and, finally, united forever with the man you love; or various permutations thereof. )

Reading is a form of mediated daydreaming; and these daydreams works for those readers, which is absolutely and entirely cool. 

However,  after reading Radway’s paper, I’ve always been haunted by some of the conclusions that emerged from her interviews.  She discovered in particular that the members of this reading group (they were literally a group, known as ‘Dot’s group’) often felt let down by the books in their beloved genre that were actually being published, but still bought them because, ”Sometimes even a bad book is better than nothing.” 

This to me is  a sobering affirmation of the power of book-obsession; these women would sit and read terrible romances, because they wanted to read good romances. And as they read, they were constantly making allowances and imagining how they would react and feel if the author had written the darn story properly in the first place.   (Note: the study was done in the early 1980s; things in that genre might well be different now…I really wouldn’t know!)

This is active reading at its most extreme:  it’s reading the book as it ought to be, not as it actually is.

My point here is that there’s no other field of activity where consumers are so astonishingly forgiving. Imagine eating an awful meal in a restaurant, and then going back the following night to eat a second awful meal, because it’s the only restaurant in town…

In the world of SF and F,  I don’t think this degree of reader-frustration exists – the books genuinely do deliver the experience their readers want, whatever that might be.  (At least, I certainly hope that’s the case!)

But the undeniable truth is:  lovers of books really love books.  And when a novel delivers on its promises and potential – when we believe the world and are lost in it – we don’t need virtual reality booths or avatars to dwell on alien planets, or inhabit the bodies of blue-skinned Na’vi.  We can just be  there.

Or  we can be – somewhere else. In a medieval society; in the Shire; or on a planet where dragons dwell.

Reading, in other words,  is the first and best virtual experience technology, and [I’m sorry, I don’t have time to finish this blog - I have to get back to my chapter….!]

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It was, I am pleased to report, another great year for historical fiction.  The bestseller charts over the last twelve months have been dominated by Alrick Moloney’s saga about the life and times of a typical British family in the years between 2050 and 2090, entitled Floods, Earthquakes, Solar Flares,  Suburban Riots and School Fees. And this year’s Booker Prize winner Why My Life Lacks Quiddity  by Martin Amis was a tour de force realist exploration of the angst and anomie experienced by a middle class family in Islington after becoming infected by the zombie plague and was written, of course, by a third generation cyborg reincarnation of the son of the great novelist Kingsley Amis. 

At NTropBooks we are proud of the fact that we are the only company in the UK publishing fiction online, or indeed at all (after the regrettable but necessary abolition of paper in the 2080s.)  However, since the recent re-collapse of the global economy and the reintroduction of the barter system, we have been forced to introduce a series of radical cost-cutting measures.  All our writers are now paid in groats, which are genetically engineered goats that produce alcoholic milk; and we are delighted to say that not a single one of our writers has objected to this new system. And our fantasy imprints and science fiction imprints have now been abandoned, since modern readers have no desire to read such nonsensical, far-fetched tales of impossible and unlikely events. 

The readership for epic heroic fantasy novels, in particular, has declined to zero, following the invasion of Earth by falcata-brandishing warriors from a parallel dimension in 2075.

Crime novels, however, are still flourishing, though we do not publish them, and nor does anyone else; however the underground market for stories about smart detectives solving elegant locked room mysteries is buoyant, especially among members of the literati, the Italian and Martian Mafia families, and the military AIs.

We are pleased at the modest success of our numerous movie and TV tie-in books, though sadly none of the movies or television dramas made it into production, because of the budget cuts imposed by the World Government and its commendably astute ruling elite, namely Ba’aaiif__ee, and Quwiiiszz-+, who are managing the Earth’s affairs on behalf of their people back on whatever alien planet spawned them.

And an exciting new development is our series of literary novels tailored for niche minority groups who have, hitherto, been neglected or patronised by ‘genetically normal’ genre writers. Thus, we have the magnificent Nae Blud the Day by Dominic Impaler, a stream of consciousness tale of a day in the life of a Glaswegian vampire welder. We have The Satanic Shoe Diaries by Lilith Hellspawn, a witty chicklit comedy about girl demons and their obsession with designer footware.  And we have the thought-provoking Hairy by Sharon Landis, a coming-of-age story about a werewolf from the rougher end of Battersea and the ghastly class prejudice she encountered when she went to Oxford (where she studied Classics, made lots of friends, and eventually, after being acquitted of eating her tutor, left to get a job in the City.)  

We are hoping that next year – provided those wretched Incan prophecies don’t come true, and assuming also that the Galactic War between the Throlls and the Bardars is once again averted – will be even better for us here at NTropBooks.   We love books, even really arid boring books of the kind that we find ourselves publishing these days; and we fervently believe,  despite our minimal download tallies and complete absence of customer feedback,  that you love them too!

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