Category: news (Page 26 of 26)

The British Fantasy Society is forty years old this year, and to celebrate, the current chair David Howe has been busy putting together a mammoth forty-story anthology entitled Full Fathom Forty. The book will be launched at this year’s FantasyCon in Brighton. I was surprised and delighted to find one of my own stories, ‘Feet of Clay,’ selected as part of the line-up.

‘Feet of Clay,’ which was originally published last year in the anthology Never Again, edited by Joel Lane and Allyson Bird, had a curious – not to say panic-stricken – genesis. Joel and Ally’s brief was simple: they wanted stories that expressed an opposition to fascism or any other form of racism or hate crime. Not a difficult sentiment to express, you might have thought, and I also believed I had my submission all worked out. As an older child and young adult I adored dystopian fiction. The strong anti-totalitarian message contained in such novels as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World and Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day was a positive reinforcement to the idealistic left-wing politics I was dabbling in back then, and I loved the skilfully cadenced call to revolution these stories inspired. The mixture of SF and politics was driving and compelling. More subtle explorations of these themes – Keith Roberts’s magnificent Pavane and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (possibly my favourite book then and still my favourite Wyndham to this day) made me even more of an addict.

The book that changed everything for me, in a political sense most immediately but in a more far-reaching artistic sense also was Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. It slapped my innocent face with its experience, stunned me with its tensely fought counter-arguments to exactly those questions I had been so devotedly pondering, and – most of all and most importantly – thrilled me with its radical and decidedly European style of engagement with the issues that mattered most to me: freedom of expression and the freedom to decide one’s own fate. What it also showed me – like Orwell’s great novel before it – was how political argument could be voiced in terms of a moving and compelling drama of the emotions.

(It’s a far cry from Chernyshevsky, believe me…… )

What stuck – and sticks – most about the Koestler was its ambiguity. When art is employed in the service of politics of whatever stripe, a dangerous game is being played – dangerous for the politicians (hopefully) and for the artist (certainly). No writer of any worth can ever place himself wholly and one-hundred percent in allegiance with any one party – if he does he’ll find he’s doomed as a writer. For me the ‘simple’ task of writing a story ‘against’ fascism turned out to be hideously difficult. The most obvious pitfall was cliche – it’s all been done before and so much better. Close behind it came the slipperiness of the arguments, the elusiveness of the ‘enemy’ himself: was the death of Heydrich worth the destruction of Lidice? Certainly not. The most obvious means of fighting oppression are rarely the cleverest.

I had decided the best thing to do would be to try my hand at precisely that kind of dystopian tale that had so caught my imagination when I was younger. I took a fragment of something I had tried to write a year or so earlier and turned it into what eventually became ‘The Silver Wind.’ A disastrous decision as it turned out, because Ally and Joel wanted stories of 6,000 words or less; ‘The Silver Wind’ came in at 16,000.

At that point I had precisely two weeks left to meet the deadline. I like to have at least a month to work on a story, and I was in a right panic. In a desperate effort to pull something out of the bag I tried something I’d never attempted before, and wrote the story outwards from the centre. The central scene I had in mind at least was clear to me: a father and a daughter, exploring the hills of the Derbyshire Peak District and talking about a death in the family. That was all I knew at that point, but once I got Jonas and Allis having their conversation it came together. The story even manages to make some points about fascism: not just the horror of its more outrageous crimes, but the insidious ambiguity of its legacy, the Midas-like toxicity of any form of violence, in whoever’s name.

Reading the proofs of the story for Full Fathom Forty I experienced that surge of surprise you occasionally get as a writer when you come upon your work unawares. It was more than a year since I wrote ‘Feet of Clay,’ and I felt glad I had written it.

If the ToC for Full Fathom Forty is anything to go by, this promises to be a book packed with variety and surprise, a genuine ‘snapshot’ of the face of British fantasy in 2011. The only story in the book (apart from my own) that I’ve read thus far is the Rob Shearman, brilliant and brilliantly original as always. The rest I shall have to look forward to along with the rest of you.

For those of you not coming to Brighton, you can pre-order a copy of FFF here

For some time now I’ve been hinting that I might have a new book in the offing. Well, I’m very happy to announce that I’ve recently signed a contract with Pete Crowther at PS Publishing for the publication of my book Stardust, which will appear in the autumn of 2012 as number 11 in the ‘PS Showcase’ series highlighting up and coming writers.

The question friends have asked me most frequently about Stardust is: is it a novel or a collection of short stories? The most honest answer I can give is that it is both. Although each of the ‘chapters’ in Stardust does work as a standalone story, they were written in sequence with continuing characters and references and were always meant to be published as a single unit. Two of the ‘chapters’ are substantial novellas. The work as a whole adds up to more than just the sum of its parts.

For these reasons and by virtue of my own gut instinct I prefer to call it simply a book.

For anyone curious to know what Stardust is about, I’ve written a ‘sort of’ synopsis, which appears below. I shall of course be posting updates on Stardust as and when, and would like to take this opportunity to thank Pete and the PS team for their support and appreciation of my work.

STARDUST – A SYNOPSIS

Michael Gomez is fifteen and he is a chess prodigy. He has never lost a game before, but he’s about to learn that troubles come in threes. As he leaves the sports hall where he has suffered his first serious defeat in a competitive tournament, he learns that his teacher and mentor is terminally ill with cancer. As he struggles to come to terms with what has happened, he finds himself drawn into a world he thought existed only in the movies.

The woman of his dreams is Ruby Castle, a charismatic beauty who became famous for her roles in horror films and then notorious for murdering her married lover in a jealous rage. Ruby’s glory days are long behind her, but for Michael her cinematic fantasy world is the only escape he knows from the world of chess.  As Michael is forced to decide if he is willing to make the sacrifices involved in becoming a professional champion, his reality begins to take on the dangerous glamour of a Ruby Castle film. Walking home across Blackheath Common he is apprehended by the Puppeteer, the evil genius of the film that made Castle famous. The man should not exist – and yet somehow he does.

The novel then takes us back to the world Ruby Castle grew up in, the isolate and sinister domain of the travelling carnival, and the story is taken up by Marek Platonov, a knife thrower with troubles of his own. Marek was Ruby’s childhood sweetheart. As her astrological twin he knew her better than anyone, but as they enter adolescence the two become estranged and Ruby starts to cherish dreams of becoming an actress and a future that does not include Marek. Castle runs away to London, where hard work and natural talent make her a household name, but a part of her is unsatisfied even by this. The films that make Castle famous do not have happy endings, and Ruby seems destined to suffer the fate of one of her own doomed heroines.

Castle’s story unfolds in a series of snapshots, of overheard conversations and fleeting glimpses, the myths repeated and reinvented by the people who in one way or another fell under her spell: an antiquarian bookseller with a passion for magical artefacts, the mistress of the poet who was once Castle’s lover, a young girl in a future Russia who dreams of escape. As the novel reaches its climax these worlds collide and the boundaries between the fantastic and the quotidian appear to break down completely.  Vernon Reade and Clarissa Goule, a middle-aged couple in the early stages of a new romance, go on holiday to the Canaries and narrowly escape being torn apart by a mythical spider god.  Strangely enough this is exactly what happened to the couple played by Castle and her lover in the film they made together just before Castle committed her crime of passion. Charlie and Vernon have a happy ending, the way all good Hollywood couples should – but is the ending we have been shown the true end of the story?

Ruby Castle is as much the sum of other people’s fantasies as she is a real person. In the end the world she lived in and the world that she created through her films become dangerously indistinguishable.

Stardust is the lure of fame, the fallout from a burning rocket, the evanescent glister of a vanished dream.