Insight into the process

Recently author Jeff Vandermeer has been posting various notes and extracts from drafts on his blog, including ones that never made it into the 'final cut', on his blog. It's fascinating stuff.

In case you're reading this several months in advance of writing, in which case the posts I'm talking about won't be on the front-page anymore, I'll post some links up:

'Shriek: An Afterword - Genesis'

'Shriek: An Afterword - Alternate start to the war'

'Shriek: An Afterword - High level notes after completing first draft'

This selection is by no means definitive, and I'd heartily recommend a thorough exploration of the site, not just in terms of this material but because it's a damn good one.

In some cases it's like being provided with the literary equivalent of deleted scenes and director's commentary, and it definately allows new insight into the texts and the process that brought them to fruition. This sort of thing elevates Jeff's blog to a different level than that of many other authors, and is apart from anything else a very generous gesture to the readers, especially those who are writers themselves. You don't see this sort of thing very often, and it's a testament not just to the quality of Jeff's blog but also to blogs and their potential as a unique, invaluable format on the whole.

A hard-boiled haiku & why I love South Park

I'm an absolute sucker for the ol' incongruous juxtaposition. What that says about my particular flavour of wit I don't know.

I can't take credit for this haiku unfortunately, it's from Jsut's DeviantArt page.

"DAMMIT KOWALSKI
HAND OVER YOUR BADGE AND GUN
YOU ARE OFF THE FORCE"

Try to picture it being recited beside a waterfall in a japanese rock-garden. "Chief, I'm going to follow this case on my own whether you like it or not-" *tinkle of windchimes* "-and you can't stop me"

I tend to like things that show a self-consciousness of conventions, especially those of pop culture. It's part of why I enjoy South Park so much. Their parodies show a genuine, endearing fondness and deep understanding of the genres/programmes they're drawing from, and it shines through.

The Guitar Hero rock movie spoof, and the "Who's in charge here? Not anymore you're not!" sketch stand out in particular in relatively recent episodes, but going right back to the first series you can find, for instance, elements of John Carpenter pastiche in the Mecha Streisand episode. The 'spooky synth music' at one point made me laugh out loud when watching it again recently, something I never really knew the significance of when I first saw it all those years ago. Despite occasional off episodes and a few clumsy attempts at shock tactics, South Park just keeps on giving.

Harsh times

Is it just me or are things seeming decidedly dystopian these days? The 21st century started with a bang and it seems like we're now living in a very different world - but then perhaps in the 90s I was too young to fully appreciate 'the state of things' and maybe, whatever age you happen to be living in, there is a tendancy toward pessimism. Also I generally try (not always successfully) to put things in perspective: there are always bigger woes out there than those I've seen or imagined. It says something quite dismal about human nature, though, that we're not usually quick to remember this. "Me, me, me" is the credo.

I wrote something today inspired by certain circumstances that you may have heard about in the media. It's a rough first draft, but here's an extract:

“The university had been aflame for months. Some faculties such as Natural Philosophy and the Department of Hydrothermal Mechanics cobbled together engines from rubber hoses and old bathtubs of rainwater collected through smashed ceilings or in the few quadrangles not open to sniper fire in order to tackle the blaze wherever it encroached upon their territories. Others were not so fortunate: the poets watched sadly, with trembling lips and pens ascribble, as their halls were reduced to dark oaken ashes.

Government troops had issued the ultimatum: pay us what’s ours or we’ll come in and take it. The bean counters responded by reassuring themselves of the strength of their barricades and that, while the coin still flowed (even at a trickle) they would still remain to tap it. Casualties were many and missed. Students and academics tried to continue their activities as best they could.

One particularly striking set of lightprints that made the papers was of an assault on the eastern wing. A large lizard, one eye encircled by a monacle imprinted with targeting marks and with ragged filigree extending from its brain to a repeating rifle embedded in its back, scales a tower and makes a furtive entrance. A student can be seen struggling with the creature, eventually wresting back the tome it sought to steal and pawn for a few coppers, and next he is seen putting a deftly-aimed round through it’s unnaturally augmented head. In the final picture we see a sullen administrator demanding the hard-won book, presumably to line his own pockets or to fund the School of Mercantile Enterprise, one of the few faculties that the higher-ups deemed consequential and, of course, profitable.”

Harsh times indeed.

Futurama writers influenced by Borges?

I was reading my copy of 'The Book Of Imaginary Beings' today and came across this entry in the 'Fauna Of Chile' section:

"The Strong Toad is an imaginary animal different from other toads in that its back is covered with a shell like that of a turtle. This toad glows in the dark like a firefly and is so tough that the only way to kill it is to reduce it to ashes. It owes its name to the great power of its stare, which it uses to attract or repel whatever is in its range."

Now, what does that sound like to you?

Most anticipated books of 2009

Since January's almost left us, and with it all pretence of maintaining the flimsy bundle of resolutions I professed, as ever, to carry into the new year, it's time to speculate upon the blank page ahead.

It looks like it'll be a good year for books. I say this because, amongst other reasons, there's a new novel from China Miéville on the horizon.

China Miéville - 'The City & The City'

Here's what Amazon.co.uk has to say:

When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Bes el, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger. Borlu must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other. With shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984 , "The City & The City" is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.

Intriguing. Although I must confess my slight disappointment that the signs point to it not being another Bas Lag novel, it's been almost four years since 'Iron Council' and while 'Un Lun Dun' was fun, I've been positively champing at the bit for whatever comes next.

Miéville's stories are largely the reason I made the transition from reader to writer. I read 'Perdido Street Station' and 'The Scar' toward the end of my teens and they changed forever the way I looked at Fantasy fiction. In New Crobuzon I saw a city quite unlike those that I had become bored with in other works, one that resonated with my city, not merely one of some bygone year but the London that I grew up in and in which I still live. "Finally", I thought, "something relevant". On almost every rereading of the three Bas Lag novels I find new echoes of a world not a thousand years or miles away from that right outside my front door, for instance in 'Iron Council' with the "fast spat performative slang of the Dog Fenn Dozens" that seems a wonderfully sly reference to Drum&Bass/Hiphop/Grime MCing. New Crobuzon, of all the places that never were, feels the most like home.

China Miéville does cities like nobody else, combining the strange and alien with the familiar and somehow universal. His metropolises are all and none at the same time. Perhaps 'The City & The City' will epitomise this. Expectations are absolutely gargantuan.

Next up is 'Finch', the third book in Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris cycle.

Jeff Vandermeer - 'Finch'

Vandermeer's another writer who had quite an effect on me. The sprawling "patchwork-novel" 'City of Saints and Madmen' (another of those books that I think only the hardcover editions truly do justice) and its successor 'Shriek: An Afterword' showed me that Fantasy could be inventive in terms of form, that that kind of literary sophistication need not merely be the preserve of the stuffy so called 'higher echelons'. Like Miéville, you can't really compare Vandermeer's works to anything else out there. I think he writes from quite a different perspective and intention than most other authors working in these genres. He's the best at what he does, and nobody else does it like Jeff. Here's the blurb, taken from his excellent blog 'Ecstatic Days':

A noir thriller/visionary fantasy set in the failed state of Ambergris, 100 years after Shriek: An Afterword. The gray caps, mysterious underground inhabitants, have re-conquered Ambergris and put the city under martial law, disbanding House Hoegbotton, and controlling the human inhabitants with strange addictive drugs, internment in camps, and random acts of terror. The rebel resistance is scattered, and the gray caps are using human labor to build two strange towers. Against this backdrop, John Finch, who lives alone with a cat and a lizard, must solve an impossible double murder for his gray cap masters while trying to make contact with the rebels.

Nothing is as it seems as Finch and his disintegrating partner Wyte negotiate their way through a landscape of spies, rebels, and deception. Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.

The cat and the lizard watch intently. Something is about to happen. And they both want to know: who is Finch, really?

Who indeed? Although the previous two Ambergris books contained their fair share of darkness, this looks to be the grittiest, and Jeff has stated his pulp-noir intentions numerous times. It looks like 2008 may well be 'The Year of the Gumshoe'.

I applaud Vandermeer's decision to set this one far in advance of the previous. I don't think he's the sort of writer that would have a basic continuation from one novel to the next in any case, however there is a great sense of continuity in terms of the Big Picture. There has always seemed an air of latent prophecy, an expectation of terrible events to come hinted at and detailed subtly in other Ambergris fiction, and I feel as if we're about to see something come to fruition that we've known would happen since first opening 'City Of Saints'. We knew the greycaps would do it, and they did. Now what? I'm looking forward to finding out.

Finally we come to Ian McDonald's 'Cyberabad Days'.

Ian McDonald - 'Cyberabad Days'

The world: 'Cyberabad' is the India of 2047, a new, muscular superpower of one and a half billion people in an age of artificial intelligences, climate-change induced drought, water-wars, strange new genders, genetically improved children that age at half the rate of baseline humanity and a population where males out-number females four to one. India herself has fractured into a dozen states from Kerala to the headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalayas. Cyberabad is a collection of 7 stories: The Little Goddess. Hugo nominee Best Novella 2006. In near future Nepal, a child-goddess discovers what lies on the other side of godhood. The Djinn's Wife. Hugo nominee and BSFA short fiction winner 2007 A minor Delhi celebrity falls in love with an artificial intelligence but is it a marriage of heaven and hell? The Dust Assassin. Feuding Rajasthan water-rajas find that revenge is a slow, subtle process. Jasbir and Sujay go Shaadi. Love and marriage should be plain-sailing when your matchmaker is a soap-star artificial intelligence Sanjeev and Robotwallah. What happens to the boy-soldier roboteers when the war of Separation is over? Kyle meets the River. A young American in Varanas learns the true meaning of 'nation building' in the early days of a new country. Vishnu at the Cat Circus. A genetically improved 'Brahmin' child finds himself left behind as he grows through the final generation of humanity.

'Cyberabad Days' is the new short-story collection by the writer of 'River Of Gods' and would seem to be set in the same universe as the novel, which I would describe as a Post-Colonial, Post-Cyberpunk gem. In it we see a future a little different from those shown by the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, an India in the age of dirty neon lights and crafty, self-serving artificial intelligences. In moving the focus toward developing nations McDonald does something that I think is crucial to the Speculative fiction of the 21st century - he breaks down the barriers of Euro-American-centricism and allows a fuller picture to emerge, one that takes a wealth of influences from that which has been hitherto neglected. It's a process that I think began with the first wave of Cyberpunk and continues to this day.

The last collection of short fiction I read by McDonald was 'Speaking In Tongues', noteable for a great story called 'Floating Dogs' (think 'The Animals of Farthing Wood' meets 'Terminator'). 'Cyberabad Days' should tide me over nicely until Ian McDonald graces us with his next novel-length work.

This sunday: 'Night Of The Living Dead' - introduced by China Miéville

Screening of the Night of the Living Dead
China Miéville introduces George A. Romero’s classic zombie film

6.30pm, Saturday 31 January
Prince Charles Cinema
7 Leicester Place
(just off Leicester Square)
London WC2

"It was 1968, man. Everybody had a message… I think the anger and the attitude and all that’s there is just there because it was 1968." – George Romero

Since its release in 1968, critics and film historians have seen Night of the Living Dead as a subversive film that critiques 1960s American society, international Cold War politics and domestic racism. Others see the film as a grotesque echo of American involvement in Vietnam, or even of American capitalism with the zombies' victims symbolising the repression of the 'other'.

I'm tempted to go. I'd really like to, but in all likelihood I'll be too hungover. I missed an opportunity to hear Miéville speak at Brixton Library (I used to live a stone's throw from there) a while back and have been kicking myself ever since.

Tickets can be booked here.

An interesting metafictional idea...

...occurred to me when reading/commenting on this entry on Mark Charan Newton's blog (he's an intriguing new author by the way, one whose writings I'll definately be paying attention to in future).

Here's what I had in mind:

It's a story about a writer. He has a manuscript. So far, so samey. However...

What if you were to include extracts from that manuscript, various drafts during the editing process (including after feedback from publishers/friends/etc) and subtly show how the changes have occurred due to events in the author's life during the novel's span, changes in his/her attitudes, and the writer's relationship with the both the characters in the story and figures in his/her life?

Slight rewritings of the same scene in various ways can produce very different meanings, and I think it might be quite good to illustrate the author's psychological and emotional states not so much through the 'real' part but through the 'fictional'. Each fills in the gaps of the other.

What if, at the end, the final story/draft is almost entirely different from the initial one, forming a kind of story arc in itself, two journeys that mirror and contrast each other, and gradually the story being written becomes the main narrative and the writer's 'real life' plot-strand the secondary one? Or maybe in the end the one that you thought was fact was actually fiction, and vice versa, or maybe both were, or neither?

I know what you may be thinking. Yes I have seen the film 'Adaptation'. I'm thinking along quite different lines though, and also as far as I'm aware (correct me if I'm wrong though) I haven't heard of anything precisely like this in terms of literature.

I love metafiction. It's a wonderful concept, and the way it's been used over the last century or so has been one of the great successes of literary postmodernism in my opinion.

Two of my favourite metafictional works, in case you're interested, are Italo Calvino's 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller' and 'House of Leaves' by Mark Z. Danielewski. I recommend the hardcover editions of the latter. I feel like some books almost have to be read that way, a quirk I suppose, and this is one such novel. You'll see what I mean if you read it. You're in for a real treat if you do.

If you want to follow metafiction right back into the depths of history though, you'll invariably end up at the 'Thousand & One Nights'. I always seem to find myself there anyway.

The Turing Cops are on to me...

See above: something that popped up while commenting on Livejournal when I failed to do the "type the letters that you see" thing.

I now have an image of Wintermute sitting there scratching its head (figuratively speaking) and wondering "Is that an E or an A?".

I reckon they should implement the Voight-Kampff Test for greater security. Would love to be confronted one day with "You're in the desert, walking along on the sand, and all of a sudden you see a tortoise..."

Adolfo Bioy Casares - 'The Dream Of Heroes'

It was a few years ago when I first read Jorge Luis Borges' 'Book of Imaginary Beings'. I came to it in a roundabout way as is so often the case, through China Miéville's novella 'The Tain' which, I learned, draws influence from the former. I followed 'the Fish of The Mirror' back along the labyrinthine spiderweb of ideas that connects every writer to every other and struck gold. Soon after that I became utterly enraptured by Borges' writings and still continue to be.

It was in a similar way that I came upon Adolfo Bioy Casares. It was only upon reading Richard Burgin's 'Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges' that I first heard of the relatively unknown Argentine writer. He was a contemporary and friend of Borges and I took there to be no greater recommendation than his association with the author.

'The Dream Of Heroes' is the second book I've read by Bioy Casares after the enjoyable 'Asleep In The Sun' and over a week after finishing it I find it still bubbles up in my mind during quiet moments.

The novel concerns Emilio Gauna, a young mechanic in Buenos Aires who runs with a gang of other wayward youths headed by the menacing Dr Valerga. The story follows his attempts to recover the events of three drunken days and nights during the 1927 carnival.

On the back cover of the book there is this quote from the text, something said by the sorceror Taboada:

"You went on a kind of journey and now you are full of a sense of loss like Ulysses back from Ithaca or Jason remembering the golden apples... That journey (since we have to call it something) was neither entirely good nor entirely evil. For your own sake and that of others, do not repeat the journey. It is a beautiful memory and memory is life. Do not destroy it."

This extract encapsulates the novel: a vivid exploration of the bittersweet adventures of youth, of how we come to venerate these memories in later years, the effect this veneration has upon our psyche and subsequently upon our lives, and ultimately what may happen if we allow our wistful reminiscence to gain too strong a grip. It is a story that will resonate with anyone who has ever been young and acted foolishly, anyone who has gone on 'an adventure', and anyone who has ever remembered and longed to repeat things now far gone and better left that way.

Adolfo Bioy Casares was a powerful writer, one who understood the capacity of the human animal, with its irrepressible, irrational wants and needs, to pursue unwittingly its own destruction. I was lucky to pick up a hard-back edition of this out-of-print novel in such good condition and will treasure it for years to come.

Fictional Myths

I've been deriving a lot of enjoyment lately from thinking up and writing legends and folklore. This has taken place in the process of worldbuilding, 'doing the background' so that when I come to write the main narratives, stories and novel(s?) that take place in that world it'll be able to flow without having to stop all the time to come up with these things from scratch. I used to think this kind of planning wasn't important, and it could all be done on the fly. Little did I know.

The importance of research is something that has been drummed into me at various points during my degree, especially in terms of writing Historical fiction, and I would say Speculative fiction is no different in that it takes the same kind of rigour. "God is in the details." You have to know where you are before exploring it without getting lost, and a flimsy world will fall to pieces - it needs a solid foundation.

Returning to the subject of myth however, I find there is a wonderful simplicity to writing in this style that is its strength. It reminds me of the glee with which sometimes I used to embrace convention within certain types of fiction in the days when I was easier satisfied. From "There once was a..." or "They tell a tale in the land of..." onward I know what I'm doing, what tone to take, how to structure it, and so on. It seems at times almost like ancestral memory kicking into autopilot, as ridiculous as that may sound. There is a lyrical richness and sense of mankind's deep narrative heritage that is palpable in writing and reading myth and folklore, one that makes it difficult not to romanticise. It's the same reason that the 'Thousand And One Arabian Nights' continue to loom large in my thoughts and will do for some time hence. These narratives, or this broad style, I think, exist at the heart and in the origins of all others right up to the present, which is perhaps why it's so satisfying to reconnect with them, for instance, in the context of a novel.

Welcome

Straight to the point:

My name's Alex Carnegie and I'm a writer of fiction: New Weird, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Magic Realism, and anything a little bit odd. That last part may sound a little like the declaration of a someone in a cartoon tie, but there it is. I like colour. I like dreams. Nightmares too. Well, not literally...

I'll be using this blog, I guess, for the usual things people use blogs for. You know the sort of thing. You're pretty savvy.

As a writer though, I'll be writing about writing, and as a reader about reading, and as an anything about anything really. Mostly the writing and reading though.

I also have another blog, Old Shoebox, where I'll periodically be posting pieces (completed ones or scraps) that I haven't otherwise found a place for.

Now that the preamble's firmly set aside, I'd like to say once again: welcome to my blog.

Alex Carnegie

A beginning

A man sits at a computer. Sitting is all he does: he doesn't know how to begin.

He's supposed to be a writer, but at this precise moment in time the validity of this definition is, obviously, slightly questionable. Right now you might call him a sitter, or a smoker of cigarettes (unfortunate but nonetheless accurate) or even a tapper-of-his-foot-from-time-to-time. Not a writer.

"How is this meant to go?" he thinks. "I've seen how other people did it. It can't be that difficult, surely? It shouldn't be, really".

It's like coughing in the theatre, or taking the first shot after the break when playing pool. When it's done, it's done, and you can get on with things. He's overthinking the situation as usual. Best not to.

He begins to type:

"Welcome."

There.