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.
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New revised Marcher
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:
Morocco
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
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!!
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.
Dark Eden shortlisted for Clarke award!
I’ve just learnt that Dark Eden has been shortlisted for the Clarke Award. I’m very pleased!
The Peacock Cloak launch (2)
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.
US publication of Dark Eden and its sequel.
Broadway Books (part of the Crown Publishing Group) has acquired US rights in DARK EDEN and its sequel (MOTHER OF EDEN aka GELA’S RING). I’m very pleased!
Full press release:
PRESS RELEASE – MAJOR US DEAL FOR CHRIS BECKETT
Julian Pavia at Broadway Books (part of the Crown Publishing Group) has acquired US rights in the science fiction novels DARK EDEN and GELA’S RING by Chris Beckett from Michael Carlisle at Inkwell Management and Vanessa Kerr, Rights Director at Grove Atlantic in London, for a high five-figure sum in US dollars.
DARK EDEN was published by Atlantic’s Corvus imprint in 2012 and is shortlisted for the BSFA Award for Best SF Novel of the year, as well as being mentioned in several national papers as 2012’s best SF novel. The sequel, GELA’S RING, will be published by Corvus in spring 2014. The agent who did both world rights deals with Atlantic was John Jarrold.
‘Ravi Mirchandani is in New York and both he and Michael Carlisle have obviously worked their magic in regards to this offer,’ said John Jarrold. ‘Chris and I are delighted. He is a major author, whose talent is now being recognised both inside and outside the UK.’
Contact John Jarrold for further details.
First review of The Peacock Cloak
The first review of The Peacock Cloak is in today’s Financial Times.
It’s nice to be compared to Ray Bradbury, though I’ve never read The Martian Chronicles (or ‘The Pedestrian’ either as far as I can recall). But these things become part of the aether after a while. Bits and pieces of them find their way to us via the imaginations of many people, and we reassemble the fragments.
You can order the book now, in paperback or kindle, from Amazon (right now Amazon haven’t linked the two versions up, but they’re both there somewhere if you look.)
If you’ve read the book, and would like a little more background to the stories, I put a little link for each story here, with sundry thoughts and comments. It’s like the patter between songs at a concert, I suppose.
I don’t mean to be a bore, but…
Anyone looking through this blog would see that there are a lot of items about climate change. I’ve become very interested in this topic, and I’m going to write a novel about it (Slaymaker), which should come out in 2015.
What fascinates me in particular is the psychology of it. Have you noticed that, even if you have taken on board that this is a real threat, it’s extremely difficult to hold that fact in your mind? Or that to mention it too often feels like bad manners? ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ I feel like saying even as I write this, ‘I don’t mean to be a bore, but would you mind if I mentioned just once again that we’re plunging headlong towards a precipice?’
Somehow a whole battery of psychological defences come into play (the very defences, perhaps, that allow us to distance ourselves from the fact of our mortality) and these defences cause us to constantly sideline climate change as if it just were a detail, or some sort of minor irritant, rather than an existential threat to our civilization. On Monday, for instance, on the Today Programme on Radio 4, there was a discussion about the unprecendently weird weather in the UK in 2012 (not just in the UK either but in many other places including Australia) and the fact that we should expect this to continue. Later in the same programme there was an interview with Conservative MP Tim Yeo about nuclear power, shale gas and energy policy in general: yet no connection at all was made between the two items, and climate change wasn’t even mentioned as a factor to consider when weighing up the options.
On Wednesday, there was an item about biofuels on the same programme, in which an eminent scientist (Sir David King), questioned whether they really helped reduce carbon emissions, even though they could be used to meet our commitment to produce energy from renewable sources. John Hayes, the Energy Minister, told him that his concerns were ‘bourgeois’ and that he himself was a practical man whose main concern was to ‘keep the lights on’. The clear implication was that being concerned about climate change was a bit wet and middle class, and while he was prepared to toss a few sops towards the climate lobby, he wouldn’t offer more than that.
Well, of course many interest groups can be tamed with the judicious use of symbolic placation. But the physical world isn’t a lobby or an interest group, and it has no interest in symbolic gestures. We either do something about climate change or we don’t. It’s all the same to nature either way. The trouble is that it won’t be all the same to us.
