Author Archives: Ben

Jail a repugnant ass

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… is an anagram of “Julian Assange, prat”. But let’s leave that to one side and concentrate on the issues.

Assange is many things. Self-important prick is just one of them. Sadly that’s not illegal in most jurisdictions. In Ecuador it even verges on the compulsory. For the sake of argument here, let’s boil it down to two things. He either is or is not one or more of the following:

1. A tireless crusader for truth and freedom.

2. A sex pest.

These are not incompatible: it is quite possible to be both. Both of these need to be settled in a court. So far he has, in chronological order, upset the Swedes over (2) and the Americans over (1). That is therefore the order in which the court hearings should be heard. He should therefore be bunged off to Sweden with no further delay the moment he sets foot beyond the Ecuadorian embassy.

His supporters say that the Swedes will in turn just bung him off to the USA and he will never see daylight again. There is no reason to assume this is so. At the moment we are the country most likely to roll belly-up when the Americans come seeking someone, and offer our virgin daughters into the bargains. He would be in much more danger if the Americans had asked us to deliver him. I suspect we would do so without a second’s thought. Other nations however have more balls. ‘Twas but yesterday that a New Zealand court, overhearing the extradition cause of another self-important prat, had the nerve to tell the Americans it wanted to see more evidence. There is no reason to assume Sweden won’t do likewise.

(If guilty then that self-important prat deserves extradition and jailing if anyone does, but – and this can’t be stated enough times – that is for the court to decide. Not the Americans. Because that is how justice works in civilised countries.)

The Swedes may or may not hand Assange over to the US once they’re done, but they will first put him on trial under their own judicial system, without any outside interference, as is the right of any civilised sovereign state, on the sex charge. What is the alternative? Sweden would have to tell the women accusing Assange that their woes aren’t important enough to register on the big picture. It would have to tell its own citizens that the politically expedient desires of another country overrule their own rights.

The Swedes won’t do that. Even we wouldn’t do that, and we’re the Americans’ bitch. We handed Christopher Tappin over without a fight because of our blatantly ridiculous and unfair extradition treaty – but if we had wanted Tappin for something unrelated, we would have dealt with it in our own courts first. That is how it works.

Assange will either then be found guilty, and face the appropriate Swedish penalty, or found innocent and released. Either way, the Swedes might then hand him over to the Americans, who will almost certainly send him to jail for a long, long time. That is a bridge to be crossed once he has had his day in court in Sweden. The justice system can’t be short circuited or double guessed because of what might happen. The only certainty at the moment is that he is accused of sex crimes and should stand trial for them. There is no acceptable alternative.

Unless you want to be the one to look any woman in the eye and tell her she’s not important enough to matter?

Harry Harrison

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The deaths of elder science fiction statesmen and -women usually leave me cold because in the long run it’s what everyone does. In the case of Harry Harrison I felt I should make an exception. I spent a long time pondering why I felt this way, and came to the conclusion it was because Harrison had written novels and stories that I could read and enjoy at every level of my life – child, teen and adult.

Spaceship Medic was probably my introduction to hard sf: fiction that plays strictly by the rules of what we know about Newtonian/Einsteinian physics. The spaceship Johannes Kepler is hit and damaged by a meteorite and through a strictly logical series of events the ship’s doctor ends up as the captain, having to cope with a damaged ship and a mystery illness and mutiny and … and so on. I read this book when I was, what, 10? 11? Harrison was able to explain simple real-world problems like inertia, radiation shielding through water, and disease vectors while at the same time keeping the story utterly gripping for a kid. Part of the joy was watching our hero encounter a new problem every few pages, each described with impeccable accuracy and conciseness, and each to be solved in a way you never saw coming but which made perfect sense. I recall he eventually works out what caused the mystery illness sweeping the ship by mapping the cabins of the infected and the cabins that the meteorite passed through. John Snow could not have done it better.

From there I graduated to The Men from P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T., which told me that as well as being a great story teller Harrison also had a wicked sense of humour. Then a few years later 2000 A.D. ran a Stainless Steel Rat comic strip, which led me to seek out the books as a teen and introduced me to the concept of an anti-hero. The Rat series lagged a little after a while, and Slippery Jim’s strawman evangelical atheism gets boring; but then, Harrison also wrote “The Streets of Ashkelon” which show that he could do atheism – or at least, non-religioisty – most convincingly. No Christian will ever have to question or justify their faith after Slippery Jim DiGriz banging on at them about it, but after reading “Ashkelon”, you will at least go “hmm”.

And on top of that he could write polemics like Make Room! Make Room!, or just adventures like Rebel in Time, which bring home their message without preaching, by dropping their identifiable characters into new situations and making the reader experience them vicariously. Looking back, I came to realise that this was a common thing in much of his writing – he communicated his values, and they were good values, through his characters without the authorial voice intruding. It’s a neat trick.

It was always the middle-level Harrison that I enjoyed the most, where the fun and silliness met an engaging and worthwhile plot. The Stainless Steel Rat; Deathworld; The Technicolor Time Machine; the under-rated A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! (which features Brian Aldiss as Dean of St Pauls or some equivalent office). A role model for authors if ever there was one.

Phoenicia’s Worlds

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Many years ago I had an idea for a series. Posit: a network of human-settled worlds, linked by wormholes, throughout the galaxy. For two worlds to be joined, a wormhole terminus has to be towed there at slower-than-light speeds in a starship, its crew (naturally) in suspended animation for a voyage that takes decades. Each terminus can only link to one other, at the starship’s last port of call. This has been happening for centuries, and human civilisation is now an interwoven web of many worlds and cultures. The frontier of the Expansion is all the worlds that so far have been settled through a wormhole, but have yet to send a starship on to the next world.

Then one day the network goes phut …

Rather, from the point of view of our heroes on a world at the end of one of the lines, their link to the last but one world goes phut. Maybe the whole network shut down, maybe it didn’t – they have no way of knowing (not for years and years, anyway) when they are forced again to rely on lightspeed communication. All they know is that their world is heavily dependent on supplies that come through the wormhole for terraforming, and will become uninhabitable within decades, so the only answer is to get into their ship for the slower-than-light journey back to the last world that will help them re-establish the link.

That would be Book 1.

Book 2, of course, they go on to the next world down the line, and the one after that, and … you get the picture. And other starships will be doing the same thing so sooner or later their paths will cross.

Series!

Then I sat down to write the puppy … And decided I really didn’t have time or energy for a series. But I could at least write one book. Meanwhile, I was busy getting married and ghostwriting and all that kind of thing, which on top of not feeling terribly inspired for an actual plot anyway led to a severe case of blockage. I persevered and hammered out a rough approximation of an epic space opera. But I was never really happy with it. I submitted it to my usual publisher, but withdrew it again.

Meanwhile it bubbled away at the back of my mind, and trusted friends were allowed a peek at the work. They all agreed it didn’t work, but their suggestions and my own bubbling led to resolutions. The galactic background that we never actually get to see was too complicated. The fact that it involved two worlds with no connection at all to Earth made it all too remote. And I was still handicapped by the thought that it might be a series so, Trek-like, I was pushing the reset button at the end to damn well make the characters do what I wanted rather than what the story said they should.

All this led eventually to a much simpler, streamlined and better novel. Just two worlds, Earth and its first extra-solar colony. Just one starship. Still a big phut. But being able to link this all back to Earth, even the Earth of a thousand years hence, meant much more emotional resonance and a far more satisfying read for the reader. And the characters do what the story wants them to, so it isn’t the contrived, series-friendly ending I was after.

Then I heard that Solaris was looking for Young Adult titles. I have never really thought of any of my science fiction as Young Adult, but the fact is that it how it has been published, so I sent it in. And then withdrew it, because I had something else to send them and the something else was the direction I wanted to go in.

And then, out of the blue a month ago, I got an email to say that the synopsis I had sent in was still somehow in circulation, and they really liked it, and would I be interested in placing it with Solaris as an adult novel?

A grown-up novel by a grown-up publisher, for the first time in my novel writing life. I thought about it for, oh, milliseconds.

And that, boys and girls, is how you will come to be able to read Phoenicia’s Worlds at some point, most likely in the summer, next year. Updates will be posted.

And yes, I am already thinking of a sequel.