Author Archives: Ben

LoneStarCon3: or, what I did in my holidays

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Late August/early September saw me in San Antonio, Texas, for LoneStarCon3, a.k.a. Worldcon. Yee-haw!

The main thing to report: I enjoyed myself, and a lot more than I thought I would. I wasn’t expecting to go to Worldcon at all, until I suddenly found I had a book coming out in August. Ah well, if a week in Texas for a bit of self-promotion seems the best thing then who am I to argue?

San Antonio: a lovely town centre, though I can’t speak for the outskirts. Beyond the limits of a 30 minute casual stroll it might be a gang-raddled urban wasteland, though I’m guessing not. The nights were singularly unpunctuated by wailing sirens and gunshots; the loudest thing was the mournful cry of a passing goods train, which is such a delightfully American sound.

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An Alamo selfie

For starters, it has the Alamo, and it has the River Walk. The Alamo was smaller than expected, which shouldn’t really have been much of a surprise: most it consisted of empty space inside a large perimeter wall. and that space is now the plaza in front of it. The image that everyone recognises is the church inside the Alamo, where the few survivors (women, children and slaves; there was chivalry, of a sort) were able to huddle in the sacristy. I got to watch the History Channel presentation of what happened and felt like saluting.

The River Walk, from room 1922 of the San Antonio Marriott Riverwalk hotel

The River Walk, from room 1922 of the San Antonio Marriott Riverwalk hotel

The River Walk is a wonderful example of life handing you lemons and making gin and tonic. Major floods back in the 1920s led the city fathers to cut a drainage channel for the river. They could have paved over it and kept it as a storm sewer. But no, they decided to landscape it, plant it with trees and bushes, and create a shady network of walkways beneath street level that will get you to most places in the city centre. As well as being a handy means of pedestrian access, it’s lined with restaurants (and predatory pigeons that come and land on your table if you don’t get firm with them) and stalls of various kinds. Without it, San Antonio would just be a hot and dusty Texas town. With it, it’s something else altogether. Granted it’s a little like an overgrown Center Parcs and will never fool anyone into thinking it’s natural, but so what. It’s lovely.

So, Worldcon.

River Walk entrance

River Walk entrance

The venue: very nice. The Henry B. Gonzales Conference Centre is neither too big nor too small. Small enough that you can easily find people to bump into, large enough that the dealers room and associated exhibitions provided all the entertainment you could ask for. I never got bored or lonely, and that is all too easy to do at a Worldcon. I like time to myself and I like time with other people, all in the correct proportions – and I absolutely hate making friends from scratch in a crowd of strangers.

IMAG0634 As it was, I was able to meet up with enough old friends at key points along the Worldcon timeline, by design or by accident, to be content, and I made some new ones via personal introduction. All good. It was also cleverly designed to incorporate a spur of the River Walk, and blur the distinction between its indoor and outdoor space – not that there’s much danger of anyone getting confused with the difference in temperature: muggy heat outside, ice-cold aircon within.

Mine!

Mine!

The dealers room was a good size and I got to see one of my books on sale in North America, for the first time ever in my 15 years as a published novelist! All the previous have been available, but what with not being with specialist publishers have never found their way into the dealers room. But here these were, on at least three different vendors’ stands. How nice to be with a publisher that actually has a clue about these things. Needless to say, not one that I saw went unsigned.

And the programme … yes, the programme. Maybe it’s the law of averages, maybe I’m getting old, maybe it’s actually a sign of Worldcon’s success in covering a wide range of topics that represent the whole of the vastness that is fandom … but the programme didn’t enthral me. Not that it was bad, and I’m certainly not denigrating the astonishing effort by the army of amazing volunteers who put and hold it all together. But I can say that at previous Worldcons it hasn’t been hard to find enough concurrent items that I could cheerfully spend a whole morning or afternoon in one panel or another. This one – not so much.

But it was still good.

IMAG0665Most personally profitable item: the panel on self-promotion. I feel vindicated after hearing Teresa Nielsen Hayden say in public that if you’re one of those authors who would rather be boiled in oil than engage your fans in social media, fine – just be an author and write. A buoyant social media community is a joy to behold but there’s no point faking one. People can tell and it doesn’t work. Find what does.

Most pride-making item: Solaris presents – mighty editor Jonathan Oliver showing off his new acquisitions, i.e. YT and sundry others, to an adoring public. Well, we filled a few seats.

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The starboard bow, you say? But surely, in space navigation, we utilise a three-dimensional frame of reference, making such traditional two-dimensional terms obsolete? Oh, okay, sorry – fire torpedoes!

Most useful item: Lou Anders’ one-hour workshop on bringing screenplay skills to novel writing. A piece of advice I may actually cherish was: “Don’t watch movies for the story – watch them for the writers.” On that basis, I might actually make myself watch The Avengers. One of Lou’s many helpful tools was, if I remember right, the Fairly Useful Octagon of characters, which as best I can recall goes: protagonist, antagonist, mentor, bad example, believer, doubter, thinker, feeler. Or, as you might say and to use Lou’s example: Luke, Tarkin, Obi-Wan, Darth, R2D2, C3PO, Leia, Han.

Most enjoyable item: the one I was on, which was also the most moving one. This was Kim Stanley Robinson, Alastair Reynolds, Vince Doherty and YT discussing the legacy of Iain M. Banks. I was honoured to be a last-minute replacement for Pat Cadigan, who was double-booked. Al shared this whisky-related anecdote, which was quite sweet, and gives his own recollections here. I will correct him on one thing – I did meet Iain, once. Would have liked it to be more.

Jeapes the publicity whore.

Jeapes the publicity whore.

As for the self-promotion thing – the bit that made me go in the first place – well, no idea how well that went. I had t-shirts, one for each day, with the cover of Phoenicia’s Worlds on the front and the nice remarks by Simon Morden and Gareth L. Powell on the back. I have to say it’s quite nice not to be wearing them everyday anymore, though I did think of putting them unwashed on eBay so that dedicated fans can clone me.

(I blame the t-shirts – at least partly – on the cold I brought back with me. Americans generally have their aircon turned down way too low, and going from baking hot outside to shivering inside several times a day can’t be good for you. Native USians and others in the know wisely layer up; sad Brits like me go mad in the heat and wear as little as possible, so the air conditioning hits you twice as hard.)

And then I came home, and rather to my surprise started reading reports which suggest other people hadn’t enjoyed it quite so much, for a variety of reasons, not one of which had ever occurred to me. And that requires a separate post.

Sorry for J.K. Rowling

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When I sold Phoenicia’s Worlds, someone who meant well told me that I had obviously reached the point in my career where I could sell any old thing. I knew it was meant as a compliment; I also knew our starting points were so far apart that it would be a waste of breath trying to explain why he had actually just insulted me, every friend who critiqued it and Jon who bought it. So I muttered “whatever” (short for “whatever I can say that will make you think you’ve had the last word and shut up, let’s pretend I said it”) and changed the subject.

And that’s why I feel sorry for JK Rowling. The first couple of Potter books, tightly plotted and written, showed she could do it, before they turned into the bloated, unedited, rushed-out slabs that would have sold even if “DUMBLEDORE DIES ON PAGE 700” was stamped on each cover. She must so badly want to know she still has it and can sell on the strength of her writing alone, like she used to. She will never know if that’s so again.

This guy understands.

How the SOE and Pinochet ended up in a space opera

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phoeniciaExcept that, okay, they didn’t. But in an indirect way they did inform the development of Phoenicia’s Worlds.

In the early 1940s, Britain stood alone against the Third Reich, one small island facing a continent beneath the bootheel of a fascist dictatorship, with but a narrow stretch of water between them. If Britain fell then so would European civilisation.

So, naturally, everyone on the British side pulled selflessly together to fight the common foe, right?

Did they hell. The various intelligence and covert organisations whose job it was to fight Nazi Germany spent half their time fighting each other in an endless squabble for resources, rights and precedence. Read Leo Marks’ Between Silk and Cyanide – it makes for jaw-dropping reading. Things got to the point where the SOE operation in the Netherlands was so compromised that we were literally dropping agents straight into the hands of the Gestapo, and Marks knew this but he couldn’t get anyone to believe him. Or, if they believed, to care about it.

[Don’t just take Marks’ word for it. I’ve read the memoir of his opposite German number in the Netherlands, Hermann Giskes, who backs it up – and comes across in fact as much less of a monster than Marks imagined.]

And yet, if you had actively put it to one of those idiots in London that their activities were at best hindering our war effort and at worst helping the enemy’s, they would have been genuinely outraged at the suggestion. No one was actively, consciously betraying their country. As far as they were concerned they were all 100% patriots doing what was best for everyone.

So, take that thought and hold it: the ability, nay inevitability of human beings to concentrate on the small picture rather than the big and convince ourselves that it’s for everyone’s good.

Related to this is an even less rosy aspect of human nature: our ability to fixate so firmly on one unacceptable option that any other option, even if infinitely more unacceptable, becomes preferable. “X did Y but they achieved Z”: how many times have you heard that? It’s a false dichotomy: it becomes, in the mind of the apologist, a straight choice with No Other Way. Thatcher destroyed whole communities but she saved the economy. Stalin murdered millions but he modernised the USSR. (And no, I’m not equating Thatcher with Stalin – please.)

And any apologist for the late Iron Lady’s good friend Augusto Pinochet – and there are many of them – will sooner or later trot out the line “but he saved Chile from Communism.” Pinochet isn’t alone in the ranks of saving-the-world-from-Communism dictators but, for some reason, he is the one that has always particularly got my goat.

It is, to borrow Captain E. Blackadder’s pithy critique of pre-WW1 foreign policy, bollocks.

It was bollocks in Chile and it was bollocks throughout South America for every right-wing dictatorship propped up by the west because Communism was perceived as the only alternative. Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks.

Here is a strange fact about Communism that no paranoid right-wing loon ever seems to understand: no nation has ever turned to it out of perversity, and it has never been inevitable. What does it is desperation. You don’t want to be rich, you just want to have enough to look after your family, but you are so poor and the system so rotten that this will never happen no matter how much hard, honest work you put in. Then along come the Communists who say they will build schools and hospitals. Meanwhile the government grinds you into the dirt and expects you to be grateful for the privilege. So who do you turn to? You don’t know that the Communist’s promises will turn out to be pie in the sky. All you know is what you have now, and pie in the sky is better.

As the British proved so successfully in Oman – round about the time the Americans were pursuing their arguably less successful anti-insurgency policies in Vietnam – you fight Communism by being better. The Communists say they will build schools and hospitals. You make sure that the right side does build schools and hospitals. They surrender a little of their wealth and power – just a little – and, yes, military action is taken against the small minority of hardline insurgents. And you win. Pinochet and his vile ilk could have turned back the tide almost overnight by following this course of action.

But no. That would have meant being slightly more left wing, which was out of the question. Thus, to save this ghastly fate befalling the country, it became okay for a government to turn on its own people, spy on them, torture them, murder them, because the alternative would have been perceived as Communism – which it wouldn’t have been, of course, just a very mild case of social democracy – and that would have been totally unacceptable.

Humans, eh?

And so I came to write Phoenicia’s Worlds.

I didn’t write it to write about these themes and there are no overt references to either of the above cases in the novel. It certainly isn’t a commentary on or critique of the War Against Terror or the austerity package that is meant to save us all from a debt-ridden fate worse than death; I actually started to write Phoenicia’s Worlds before 9/11 so nothing more recent than that was on my mind. Instead, these two excerpts exemplify beliefs about human nature that are so entrenched within my being that, when the basic scenario of a beleaguered planet struggling for survival suggested itself, I knew exactly how people would react to it. And that was why I felt it would make a good novel.