Chris Beckett's Fiction

Rights deals for Dark Eden

Chris — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:38:59 +0000

Rights to Dark Eden have now been brought by (in this order) US, Turkish, Russian, French and Polish publishers. Details here on my agent (John Jarrold’s) website.

It’s actually quite appropriate that, after the UK and the US, the first publisher to take Dark Eden on should be Turkish, because in the back story to the book, the planet Eden was first discovered by five people, two of them British, two American, and one (Mehmet Haribey) Turkish. That’s the reason Mehmet is a common name in Eden, along with Michael, Angela (or Gela), Dixon and Tommy.

Dark Eden out as audio book

Chris — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 22:13:20 +0000

I’m very pleased to say that Dark Eden will be available as an audio book at the end of this week. I haven’t heard it yet myself but here are two narrators and I assume they share out between them the various male and female narrators within the book.

The thing that gets me is that it’s more than 13 hours long. Did I really write 13 hours-worth of words?!

Hold on me

Chris — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 21:48:58 +0000

Here’s a very short video: a collaboration between my daughter Nancy, performing her own poem, and artist Georgia Yorke who has beautifully animated it. I am biased of course, but I think it is quite brilliant, a perfect little story in words and images.

New revised Marcher

Chris — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:37:16 +0000

I haven’t even finished the rewriting, and it won’t come out until mid-2014, but the cover has already been designed: a new revised edition of my second novel Marcher, from Newcon press. More info here. Here’s the beautiful cover by Ben Baldwin:

Cover design for Marcher by Ben Baldwin

Morocco

Chris — Mon, 06 May 2013 13:31:11 +0000

I spent the week before last in a place on the coast of Morocco called Oued Laou with two old friends, Clive and Jonathan. Jonathan has a small house there and speaks Moroccan Arabic, which earns him huge respect.

The last time I visited him there, the trip inspired my story The Peacock Cloak. On the hills around the town, cistus flowers, admired by Tawus at the beginning of the story, grow in great profusion.

Much of the ground, though, is intensively cultivated by small subsistence farmers who grow wheat, barley, peas, lentils, onions and figs, all packed in tightly together, and keep goats, sheep, cows and chickens.

They live in very small and simple single-storey houses consisting of a brick wall, topped with flat layers layer of branches and twigs, and then a covering of loose earth (though some of them now have added a polythene membrane, a solar panel, or even a power line). As I looked out at the little hillside village below I imagined people living pretty much as they do now in houses pretty much like these for thousands of years, while successive invaders – Romans, Vandals, Arabs, Spaniards – broke over them like waves with their various projects of subjugation/improvement/religious conversion/enlightenment/ modernisation. Just like Tawus.

And like Tawus too, we found ourselves to be the objects of fascination and even wonder. One old woman stood with her hand over her mouth as if to stifle shrieks of incredulity, while her more confident daughter questioned us sharply about ourselves. Where did we come from, France or Spain? (There were only two options, I understand.)

They insisted we came in for mint tea and fried eggs. The goat wandered in after us and settled down comfortably in a corner of the bare earth floor. The daughter looked across at it and drew a finger over her throat to indicate the goat’s fate after Ramadan, telling us of the many uses to which its meat and skin would be put.

The tea was like polo mints dissolved in water. The eggs were delicious too.

Science Fiction

Chris — Sun, 05 May 2013 10:21:03 +0000

I attended a seminar on an SF module, led by my friend Prof Rowlie Wymer. Rowlie was describing a particular SF short story. I forget which story it was, but it had all the virtues that are the hallmarks of good SF, a certain kind of disciplined playfulness. And the thought came to me that ‘science fiction’ is correctly named, not because it necessarily deals with science, but because of a certain similarity between its methodology, its creative strategy, and the scientific method. You take the world as we know it, you manipulate certain variables, you see what happens, you explore the implications. As another professor, Ian Stewart, said at the Clarke award event, science fiction is about ‘what if’.

Dark Eden wins Arthur C Clarke award!!

Chris — Thu, 02 May 2013 22:41:38 +0000

I’m absolutely delighted that Dark Eden has won the Arthur C Clarke award. I’m feeling a bit dazed today (though very happily so), and sleepiness is starting to catch up with me, so I won’t attempt to write much about it now. (There are few thoughts here written earlier in the day for the Atlantic Books website, and the award ceremony itself is on video here.)

I will say though that I have been extremely touched by the number of people who have contacted me one way or another to say ‘well done!’ It’s not so often in life that you get a whole bunch of people warmly wishing you well all at once. It feels absolutely great! And it really is much so easier to write when you feel that people are cheering you on.

Podcast on Cambridge 105 radio

Chris — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 17:58:35 +0000

Here’s a podcast of an interview on Cambridge 105. I even got to pick some songs.

Dark Eden shortlisted for Clarke award!

Chris — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:16:06 +0000

I’ve just learnt that Dark Eden has been shortlisted for the Clarke Award. I’m very pleased!

The Peacock Cloak launch (2)

Chris — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:31:24 +0000

The Peacock Cloak was officially launched in Bradford on Friday. This is just a reminder that it will be launched again, along with Ian Whates’ Growing Pains, at Forbidden Planet, Shaftesbury Ave, London, this Saturday (April 6th), at 1 – 2pm, just to make sure both books are properly afloat. Details here.

I’ve posted some reviews of The Peacock Cloak here.