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Digital Cats Come Out Tonight

I wrote this as the result of a half dream. The family had been to see Cats in the West End and I'd got to bed at about 1.00 am; then it was up at 6.30 am as usual to get the train to work. I was fairly woozy on the trip and I day dreamed about cats being let loose in a computer to catch "mice" — advanced forms of computer virus. Like in a barn or a house, there would be too many mice for the cat to deal with, but just the presence of the cat would make the mice keep low and not cause trouble.

Memoirs of a Publisher

Sale no. 2 came quite quickly, and was my first sale to Interzone. I was working for Jessica Kingsley Publishers, a firm which was a year old when I joined as its third employee. So, I was reasonably acquainted with the problems of setting up a new publishing firm, even if it wasn't something I'd done myself. The experience translated into Memoirs of a Publisher, and Interzone published it in January 1991; the retrospective adventures of an artificial intelligence called Oscar which, by accident, finds itself with a load of information it is unable to deliver to its human owner and so gets it published on paper. Not as silly as it sounds, since the worldwide Net ("Internet" wasn't a term I had heard then) is still reeling from the Net War, a period of unspecified nastiness in which AIs wreaked havoc on the world's information systems; in the aftermath, everyone is getting things down on paper again.

On the way, Oscar learns about the basics of marketing, editing and other publishing fundamentals. The story is sentimental and over-adjectival but, again, I love it. It was the first story I sent off that I knew was publishable, and it was.

Crush

My first two sales were AI stories and this made me wary, since I didn't want to be stereotyped into writing in one particular field. Unfortunately, the world at large thought otherwise: stories continued to come thick and fast and I carefully steered clear of AIs and computers, and not one sold. After two years I swallowed my pride and wrote a third AI story, based on an unfortunate event in my recent life when a teenage girl had developed a clinging, possessive crush on me. Let's not go into details: just say that writing Crush was an immensely therapeutic exercise, since I could say all the things I'd wanted to say in real life but didn't because I knew it would only make things worse. To give myself credit (no one else will) I tried to see things from the other side's point of view, too: in this case it's an AI that gets a crush on the human narrator, and it turns out that the AI was designed that way — a kind of emotional virus. Interzone bought it and it came 3rd= in the readers' poll for 1993.

Getting Rid of Teddy

Sale no. 4, to my great surprise. I didn't think it was Interzone's cup of tea but I sent it to them more to remind them I was alive than anything else, and they bought it. It was great fun to write — everyone should try and see the world from a four-year-old's point of view, now and again. Apart from having to do that, the greatest challenge was resolving the dilemma which faces one of the characters: how do you get rid of your son's teddy bear without arousing (a) his and (b) your husband's suspicion?

Another surprise was that the illustrator for the story made little Colin look very like the real (not psychically gifted, so far as I know, just precocious) four-year-old that I'd based him on. The full text is available, but not the pictures.

The Data Class

Sale no. 5 cleared up an irritating loose end — my story "The Input Class" that had started this all off. Rewritten as an AI story and keeping the original philosophy of the story but completely changing the plot and characters (this time it's an AI that thinks it's Karl Marx), it not only sold to Interzone but was translated into French for the French magazine CyberDreams, and has appeared in a Best of Interzone anthology. This makes it my most successful story to date — a very pleasant surprise.

Giantkiller

This story won an accolade in a letter to Interzone: it was a "technical success" as it presented that impossible thing, a sympathetic salesperson. The writer suggested I apply my talents to the ultimate challenge and write about a sympathetic telemarketer.

This is the last AI story I've written so far, and like The Data Class it was an older story that I dusted off and rewrote for the AI universe. The protagonist, Jacqui, is a salesperson and at first is only concerned with selling her company's product of holographic wallpaper on an exclusive housing estate. A priest, Joseph, is there for a similar yet different reason: he is concerned about the spiritual welfare of the inhabitants. Both are being obstructed by the same thing: the AIs that live in the systems of the estate and which are programmed to protect their owners from the outside world. To teach the humans human values they first have to teach similar values to the AIs. The giant that Jacqui has to kill is the spirit of fear and distrust that lives within the local net of the estate.

I have to admit to writing this story with my fingers mentally crossed. Joseph is eloquent about the rights and wrongs of door-to-dooring: they have the right to present the information, the householders have the right to say "no thank you" and then the salesperson should simply walk away. I might believe this — it's a philosophy based on an unhappy experience at the age of 18 when I was a Kleeneze door-to-door salesman for a couple of months, back in the days when I believed there was such a thing as easy money — but I certainly don't feel it. Salespeople are a pain in the butt, period.

And yet, they do have a function to perform. They do stop our lives from getting too cosy and they do help information circulate. But I repeat: once you say "no", that's it.

The Robson Strain

I'm pleased with this story because it's grittier and more realistic than any of the others. It might even be the nearest thing I've written to cyberpunk, in terms of the general pessimism of its outlook with street gangs, armoured police cruisers and religious nutters. Not so different from parts of the world today, of course. People who have read it assumed it was set in some nameless American city: actually, I was thinking of Reading. This is also a story about redemption, which is another reason why I like it.

The story features an invention for augmenting the intelligence of the animals, which I'm quite proud of. Viruses injected into an animal form their own network in a mammalian brain: chemical signals passed around it simulate the firing of neurons in the mind. These viruses would work with the creature's own instincts with the effect of apparently enhancing its intelligence. This is similar to a macguffin used in one of my other stories: see if you can spot which one.

Spoilsport

This story was great fun to write, simply for the personalities of the twin protagonists, Philip and Miranda. Philip prides himself on his empiricist approach to life: Miranda spends her life bouncing from one way-out theory to another. Just about every pseudo-scientific belief and philosophy ever devised has passed under her gaze at one time of another, and Philip takes great pleasure in showing up her beliefs for the rubbish he says they are.

In case you hadn't guessed, this story isn't entirely serious. Still it was a challenge: I have zero belief in astrology and a great respect for the empirical scientific method, but I've seen far too many stories where my own religion has been set up as an easy target by the author and then knocked down, and everyone applauds the author for being so clever. So, even though it hurt, I had to be nice about astrology too and show its positive sides (or, failing that, make them up). I even went so far as to read a book on sun signs to get the personalities of Philip and Miranda. If that ain't research, I don't know what is.

"Spoilsport" was originally published in Substance, a worthy attempt at a new British SF magazine which sadly died — not for want of trying — after four issues. I knew the editor, Paul Beardsley, had similar views to mine on astrology and so I sent it to him: rather worryingly, he accepted it almost by return. Had he actually read it, I wondered? To set my mind at rest, he asked for rewrites of the next story I sent him, The Grey People, before taking it. Still, the very last paragraph of the story here is changed slightly, to make it just a little less mawkish than the original.

Timevault

This is a Doctor Who story. I'm no great fan of spinoffery — Interzone's term for the plethora of novelisations, guides and so forth to spin off from television and film science fiction. Even though some of the fiction is very good SF, I still think it stifles the market of real originality. Also, if I write a story in the Doctor Who (or any) shared universe then I create very little, because everyone knows the background, the Doctor, the companions, the TARDIS ... however, if I write a story set in my own universe then I've created everything: what's more, I've created X versions of everything where X is the number of readers, because each one of them will imagine it slightly differently.

Being asked (asked!) to write a Dr Who story, though, helped me see why spinoffery is such big business: quite apart from paying the author's bills, it's fun to be let loose on a universe that you already know and love. Having the Doctor operate the TARDIS controls, or offer someone a jelly baby, or ...

What was important was that it be a science fiction story in its own right, not just a fannish Dr Who story. Perhaps to compensate for so much of the ground already being laid, it featured not one but two alien races of my own devising: the Crialans and the Lorq. The Crialans don't have bodies: Crialan bacteria grow a crystalline network inside their hosts which acts as a parallel nervous system and a Crialan intelligence is created spontaneously. I quite liked the idea of a race where new individuals emerge the same way, and with the same spontaneity, as the common cold — when the number of bugs in a given host reaches a certain level.

But my favourites were the Lorq. I'd imagined them years ago in an unpublished short story as the universe's Swiss bankers, and I revived them for this one. The Lorq were fun to write about: humourless and efficient. I made them four-armed teddy bears simply because I've always found making aliens anatomically a-human helps me as the writer: I can picture them as aliens, not as adults in rubber suits. Quite a conceptual breakthrough for Dr Who.

Now the Lorq have appeared in this anthology I probably can't use them in any other story of my own. However, if you ever see a story by me featuring a race of four-armed teddy bears called the Qorl, any similarity will be purely intentional.

Cathedral No. 3

Ever since I went to university near Coventry I've wanted to write a story about Coventry cathedral. Once you know its story it has that effect on you.

I bit the bullet years back and wrote one, thrumming with love and Christianity and general goodness, and for sheer ickiness it broke all known records. Fortunately I could tell it icked and sat on it.

Eventually one of the stalwarts of my writers' group, Gus Smith, suggested a way it could be de-icked, and I'm eternally grateful to him for the suggestion.

The Grey People

I can still remember the incident that inspired the Grey People, though it was several years before I actually wrote the story: going up the tower of Salisbury Cathedral and having the guide explain about the carvings we found up there. Every bit as intricate and ornate as the rest of the building, even though no one could possibly see them, because God could see them and the craftsmen couldn't possibly let shoddy work go just because mortal eyes weren't aware of it. The story starts with Malcolm Lloyd on top of Salisbury Cathedral, admiring the carvings.

The Grey People are Malcolm's personal enemy. They represent the grey, antiseptic blandness of the modern world and have always been in the background of his life, waiting for the right to moment to strike at him. Malcolm has learnt the odd trick or two for keeping them off, though his own life is a game of cat-and-mouse with them: he thinks up a new trick, they think of a new way of getting past it, he thinks of an even newer trick.

There is a lot of Orson Scott Card's Unmaker in the Grey People, though they are a lot less personal. The Unmaker is more than the Devil: he is entropy, destruction, the obliteration of detail and identity. He is often pictured in Card's Alvin books as water (or else water is his agent) because water is fluid and unfixed, and given time it will wash away anything. It's an effective picture of blankness, and what scares it away is making something: bringing order to chaos, in however small an amount.

Wingèd Chariot

Such an obvious title for a time travel story, I couldn't believe no one had ever used it. And yet, as far as I know, no one has. It is also the title of my second novel: similar subject, different story.

It has Cornwall and it has time travel: who could ask for anything more? It also — I hope — challenges the reader over the question: when does medical research stop being ethical? Experimentation on human embryos offends many sensibilities; and yet, modern anatomical knowledge wouldn't have been possible without graverobbing to supply the necessary anatomies. I don't offer answers, but the story arose from a desire at least to put the case for either side.

Heritage

Another Dr Who spin off, without the Doctor. The BBC finally woke up to the fact that there was money in Dr Who and didn't renew Virgin's licence to publish original Dr Who fiction, preferring to do so themselves. (Would that they would actually broadcast some again: they seem happy to make money off the fans, whom they plainly regard as mugs, while actually broadcasting effortless Star Trek repeats and homemade crap like Crime Traveller. The organisation that gave the world Dr Who and Blakes 7 is come to this. But I digress.) However, Virgin kept the rights to characters and so forth created in the books that it had already published, and one of said characters was a woman called Forrester. So, DECALOG 4 tells the story of the Forrester family over 1000 years.

Not as much fun to write as "Timevault" in DECALOG 3, perhaps because of the lack of the Doctor. Paradoxically, the lack of the Doctor to my mind makes the collection the stronger of the two: the stories have to stand on their own and the authors have created more that is unique and entirely their own work.

The plot twist in this story is an idea that has been at the back of my mind for at least a decade, based on an off-the-cuff aside in one of Arthur C. Clarke's essays. Can't remember which one, but I remember it striking a chord. The rest of the story was built around it. Hackwork, but money in the bank.

Pages Out of Order

For some time now I'd been more ambitious in my selling attempts, and I was sending stuff to the American magazines Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (IASFM, which from the tone of its editorials penned by the great man might have stood for "I Am So F*&"ing Marvellous") and Fantasy and Science Fiction. I gave up on Asimov's: I don't mind form rejection letters, but I do resent it when they're so darn patronising. F&SF, on the other hand, in the form of its new editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch, had started sending personalised rejections, which were far more encouraging. This had been going on for a couple of years. I can't think why I sent her a story set in an English public school, but I did.

Pages Out of Order is the only sold science fiction story I can name with such a setting — for the first half of its length, anyway. Time travel has always had an especial fascination for me, no doubt as result of too much Dr Who in my early years, and it features here: the "pages" of the title are the years in the life of a bullied schoolboy, Tom Melton. I won't go into the plot in any detail because I don't want to give anything away: just say it's a story of growing up, and friendship, and all sorts of sentimental stuff. Kris Rusch said it was a lovely story, would I make a couple of changes . . . I did, and she sent it back asking for just a final tweaking, as she didn't think the ending made what was going to happen sufficiently clear. After this unprecedented two rewrites, she bought the story.

I made the main characters of the story, Tom and his closest friend Will (the story's narrator), the same age as me, so it's also a story from experience of growing up in the late seventies and early eighties. The school is never named but in my mind it was the same school as I went to (Sherborne); however, three other ex-public schoolboys from two other public schools — Eton and Greshams — have told me they recognise their own institutions as well. I deliberately put a less favourable gloss on the place than my own memories tell me is strictly accurate: sorry to disappoint, but I don't recall any actual buggery going on (unless I was too young and naive to spot it) and the establishment was far more nurturing than I make out in the story. However, there is a Tom Melton in every school: one of our year was driven to shoplifting and was ultimately removed because of the level of bullying he received, and I'm sure the misery quotient in "Pages Out of Order" is only too accurate for members of every generation. Now isn't the place for me to sound off about the public school system: there's enough of that in the story, and elsewhere on this site.

The Fireworker

Many years ago an anthology was announced called Villains, which would present heroic fantasy as it really would be — decidedly unheroic. Grime, dirt, disease and general nastiness. So I did what I don't usually do and wrote a sword-and-sorcery(ish), anti-heroic type of story. The lead character is a not particularly likeable thief, conman and (in the original draft) murderer.

I didn't actually finish it in time for Villains so I've no idea if they would have accepted it or not. Dragon requested a rewrite as the initial version was just a bit too dark for them (said murder was of the anti-hero's boy companion — when I do anti-heroic, I do it properly, and Dragon's editor did say that parents of teenagers would probably sympathise with the sentiment, but ...) but still turned down the second draft because of its reference to castration — "above the line for for Dragon readers." Such sensitive souls, these D&D types.

But at long last it found a home in the new Australian magazine Altair. And I'm happy.

Trial by alien

I love good legal dramas and I've wanted to write one for a long time, with a human being put on trial by aliens in a human-style court but with the aliens doing the trying. I wanted the plot to revolve around something aliens could do but we couldn't, or vice versa, which would be the final clue.

When I'd finished my novel His Majesty's Starship, I realised I had the aliens ready-made, and it saved the trouble of inventing yet another race. So, this story is set a few years after the events of the novel: anyone who reads the story and wants to know what Rusties and humans were doing on the same ship, you can guess what to do.

The illustrations by Chris Witlow can be found at http://www.netdor.com/artist, with more of his oeuvre.

Correspondents

The premise of this story is that an unspecified era in our future known as the Home Time is sending back correspondents: people whose duty is to record and report on what is happening. The correspondents themselves are immortal, or just about: they can certainly live for centuries and are possessed of skills and abilities that no normal human has. Their memories of the Home Time are vague and confused. During the story we get a glimpse into what the true nature of the correspondents and the Home Time might be.

All this, however, derived from my original instinct to write a story about torture. We humans are capable of the most unimaginably brutal acts towards each other, and as a hang-over from my idealistic teen days I still catch myself thinking that if only the people inflicting the treatment could have the same thing done to them, they would realise how wicked they were and stop. In actual fact, of course, this ain't so at all: a Nazi put into a death chamber would emerge just as evil as ever. It's only in Star Trek that the baddies are enlightened enough to see the error of their ways: real life is rarely so obliging. Writing stories like this is my way of keeping my feet on the ground: I say to myself "wouldn't it be nice if ...", and by the end I'm telling myself, "no, it wouldn't."

"Correspondents" starts with the execution of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in 1556. Cranmer was burnt at the stake, a horrible and singularly un-Christian way to go, in Oxford: all in the name of religion, naturally (with a bit of politics thrown in).

Aboriginal SF took five years to publish this, but I forgive them: it had a tendency to come and go according to the finances available to it, but I left the story with them because it's a good magazine and I believed in it. Sadly Aboriginal is no longer with us.

"Correspondents", incidentally, was my first American sale, and provided much inspiration for my second novel, Wingèd Chariot.

Go with the flow

Ever been stuck behind someone who never had to worry about the car in front when he or she was learning, because it was at least ten miles away and there were only about ten in the whole country? Ever encountered another driver whose body may be with us but whose mind is evidently two or three planes of existence removed from our own? Ever wondered how it is possible for someone to drive so tooth-achingly, nerve-renderingly slow?

This is for you.

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Time's Chariot

New World Order

The Xenocide Mission

His Majesty's Starship