Photo c/o Iain-Banks.net

It is with great sadness that I have learned today of the passing of Iain Banks, who also wrote as Iain M. Banks.

A message posted on Banksophilia, a website set up to provide fans with updates on the author, quoted his wife, Adele, saying: “Iain died in the early hours this morning. His death was calm and without pain.”

Iain announced back in April that he had been diagnosed with cancer of the gallbladder and that it was terminal; news which sent shockwaves around the world.

As a writer held in great esteem by so many, we felt the shock very keenly here at the BSFA. Iain was, of course, one of our directors, and his work is beloved by many of our members. He won the 1994 BSFA Best Novel Award for his novel Feersum Endjinn, again in 1996 for Excession.

On the few occasions I had the opportunity to meet Iain Banks, I found him warm, witty and generous. I know that I, personally, will always remember those times with great fondness. It was so wonderful to discover that a writer whose work I loved, was also a person I very much liked.

Iain is going to be very much missed by the science fiction community and beyond. Our thoughts go out to Adele, and Iain’s family and friends.

Iain Banks: 16.02.54 ~ 09.06.13

Could you give a brief description of Communion Town for new readers?

Communion Town is a sequence of stories about an imaginary city. The subtitle is A City in Ten Chapters, and the idea is that the book builds a mosaic picture of this invented place from the perspectives of many different citizens: in the first few stories, an immigrant finds herself in trouble with the city’s paranoid authorities, a folk singer falls in love with a rich girl, a child has a scary encounter by the canal, a hard-boiled detective is drawn into a surreal investigation, an abattoir worker suspects his boss is a murderer… I wanted to capture a feeling I’ve always got from cities where I’ve lived, which is that they’re strange, secret places with all kinds of weirdness hidden just under the surface of everyday life.

Does working as an English teacher help with and influence your writing?

I think so. It’s an excellent day job for a writer, not least because it involves reading lots of books and thinking hard about how language works. And universities just feel to me like hospitable environments for writing. I know some people think academia sits uneasily with fiction-writing, and I can understand the argument that an academic subject like English Lit has to be orderly and systematic, whereas fiction needs to be wild if it’s worth anything. But I’d say that’s a positive tension — the point of fiction being that it’s a free, irresponsible place outside all the frameworks and institutions within which you ordinarily live. So writing and teaching bounce off one another nicely, for me, and having a day job also means I sometimes get to talk to other human beings, which is a plus.

What is your writing process like?

Slow, disorganised and largely made up of procrastination. I do a lot of planning, like drawing diagrams of the plot, transcribing stuff from notebooks, making maps, working out characters’ biographies and so on. All of that seems to be necessary to get to the point where I can face the horror of the blank screen — but then when I do try to write a sentence, the preparation melts away and I end up producing something with very little resemblance to the plan. I’m still trying to establish a process, really, because with Communion Town it was all quite experimental. I had some stories to tell, but I didn’t initially know where they were heading or how they were linked, so I proceeded by trial and error, and the more I worked on the stories the more they spoke to one another, and drew together into whatever fragmentary unity the book turns out to have.

The novel touches on a number of very interesting themes that I’d like to ask you about – firstly, the flaneur. You’ve taken this idea of the flaneur in a very interesting trajectory away from Baudelaire and even Walter Benjamin – could you explain a little bit about this central (but shadowy) figure in your work.

The flaneur is a recurring character in Communion Town — he’s this sinister figure who roams the streets, popping up every now and then to interfere in the lives of the citizens. He’s always lurking at the edges of the story, and, like the city itself, he appears in different guises as the book goes on: he’s a busker, a canal boat dweller, a political agitator, a serial killer, a ghost. Each time he’s another kind of urban wanderer, another manifestation of the life of the city. He made his presence felt quite gradually in the writing of the book — as I was redrafting the various narratives and working them into closer unity, I noticed that this nameless figure kept appearing, looking slightly different each time but always with the same air of menace. He clearly wanted to haunt my characters, but I wasn’t sure why. When I realised he was a sort of flaneur, I looked up Baudelaire’s essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ and found this:

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world–such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito… Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness…

That phrase ‘a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness’ helped me see what the flaneur was doing in the book — it suggested someone so absorbed in the environment that his identity breaks up and he ceases to be quite human, becoming a wandering incarnation of the city instead. For Baudelaire this seems rather a joyful condition, but Walter Benjamin is more dubious about becoming ‘one flesh with the crowd’ — for Benjamin the flaneur stands for the hollowness of modernity, with its transformation of all relationships into commodity exchanges: ‘The intoxication to which the flaneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers’. The flaneur is a way of thinking about the ambiguous appeal of dissolving into the crowd, and about how cities do bring people together, but only in flawed, compromised forms of communion.

One thing that surprised me about the flaneur of Communion Town was that he turned out to be a storyteller — he’s a kind of ancient mariner who wanders around looking for someone who will listen to his tale. The reason for this wasn’t immediately clear to me, but I think it has to do with an Edgar Allan Poe story called ‘The Man of the Crowd’, which opens with Poe’s narrator watching a busy London street. He spots an old man with a horrible but strangely fascinating face, and decides to follow him. The old man walks through the city all night with no apparent purpose, always going with the crowd, and eventually the narrator concludes that it’s impossible to make sense of his behaviour: ‘The old man is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow, for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds.’ Poe’s Man of the Crowd has a story, but we’ll never know it, because ‘there are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told’. The flaneur of Communion Town has such a secret, and he’ll share it with you if you’re foolish enough to listen.

There also appears to me to be an interest in psycho-geography – each character building up their own city (each a flaneur in their own right) but each story/individual interweaving in other character’s ‘towns’ – what was the inspiration for this premise?

The book‘s organised around the idea that a city is a fluid world which looks very different depending who you are and what kind of life you’re living. As I understand it, the word ‘psychogeography’ was coined by Guy Debord and the Situationists in the 1950s, and for them it was about the notion that cities aren’t stable, singular realities that can be objectively described, but are fundamentally subjective, surreal phenomena comprised of the experiences of those who pass through them. I tried to build this idea into the form of the book, so that while the city is always itself, it also becomes a new place for each character — and while the various characters’ paths interweave at various points, the book’s also interested in how city lives often don’t intersect, and how people get lost and lonely and fail to know one another.

Debord’s psychogeographical map of Paris could have made an alternative cover illustration for Communion Town (http://imaginarymuseum.org/LPG/debordpsychogeo.jpg), but even better would be a drawing called ‘La Citta Analoga’ (http://www.gizmoweb.org/2010/05/su-aldo-rossi/), by an Italian designer, architect and urban theorist called Aldo Rossi. I love this image because it does exactly what the book tries to do: it’s a patchwork of incompatible ways of looking at a city, in many different styles and scales, all mashed together. That might even be the flaneur hovering at centre-left. Rossi wasn’t a psychogeographer, but Communion Town owes a debt to his ideas about cities, specifically to the idea that a city is a system of memory, ‘the collective memory of its people’. For Rossi, the city is a built environment expressing human needs and purposes in a solid, lasting form, and the bricks and stones are less important than the underlying dream-life that gives them their shape. A city is a pattern formed by human lives as they flow through time and space — in other words, a city is a story.

It also leads into the notion of the town as a ‘strange attractor’ – each story being a reiteration of the town (and the flaneur) – what was the thinking behind this approach?

My maths isn’t good enough for this question! But, based on my vague wikipedia-type understanding that a strange attractor is an iterative equation which causes complex shapes to emerge unpredictably out of chaos, I agree that this makes a nice metaphor for how the book works. Each section takes the same equation — the idea of city as story, and flaneur as storyteller — and shifts the values slightly so that these ideas manifest themselves in a new way. And as the book goes on, I hope, the different iterations of the city interact with one another and more complex patterns arise.

The thinking behind this was to try to allow the text to define its own structure and meaning, rather than imposing everything from above in a conscious, deliberate way. I was interested in the concept of emergence, the phenomenon in which complex systems are generated spontaneously out of a large number of interactions between smaller, simpler elements, in fields ranging from economics to animal behaviour. So for instance the complex behaviours of an ant colony emerge from the interactions between individual ants which follow simple rules; or in the human brain, higher functions like consciousness emerge from the interconnection of many individual neurones; or the world wide web displays large-scale organised structure in spite of being a decentralised, unplanned system. And cities are emergent phenomena too, containing many elements of human design but also displaying spontaneous forms of order. Rossi writes that ‘with time, the city grows upon itself; it acquires a consciousness and a memory’, which seems like another way of saying the same thing: the city has a life of its own, and although you’re part of it, you’ll never know the whole story. That’s why cities are uncanny places.

Your novel also moves between different styles and genres of storytelling (the Holmes-esque detective, the Kafka-esque interrogation, the 40’s detective) yet they all fit into this city you’ve created – what were the reasons for this inspired method?

This was the original motive for writing the book. I wanted to try writing in a lot of different styles that I loved as a reader, and see if I could cram them all into one storytelling space. My private method was to think of each story as aspiring towards the voice of a particular favourite author (G K Chesterton, M R James, Angela Carter, Alasdair Gray and M John Harrison are in there, amongst others). For a learning writer, the point of this kind of approach isn’t necessarily to produce faithful imitations — it’s just that it gets you started, and with luck you work your way through pastiche and into something that feels more like your own voice.

One effect of mashing up different kinds of story is that the reader has to become alert to shifts in genre. Each time you enter a new section of the book, the frame changes and you have to ask ‘what kind of story are we in now?’ Some readers seem to like this and others find it annoying, but I came to feel that the mixed-genre method made sense for Communion Town, because that’s how cities work. It’s not just that a city is a mass of stories coexisting in the same place — it’s that those stories belong to different genres. They work by different sets of rules and contradict one another’s basic assumptions, but they have to rub along together nevertheless.

You’ve written a brilliant (and creepy) debut – what was the most enjoyable aspect of it all?

My best experiences in writing so far have definitely been the moments when the work-in-progress did something unexpected. You hear people talking about this kind of thing and it always sounds wanky, but it’s true that at a certain point, the language starts generating its own logic, and the text does things the writer could never have come up with alone. The book turns out to be cleverer and more purposeful than you are yourself, which is serious fun.

What’s next for Sam Thompson the novelist?

I’ve got lots to learn and I just want to keep going: at the moment I have two books in early planning stages and I’m working on both while I wait to see which one takes over. One’s more or less straight lit-fic realism, and the other’s a weird post-disaster fantasy with monsters. I’m still having trouble choosing between genres.

Our earlier post regarding the 2013 AGM was only about the formal meeting of the BSFA. But we are, as usual, having a whole day of events in conjunction with the Science Fiction Foundation.

Here are the details. Remember that it’s at the City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10, St. Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE.

10 am Welcome (BSFA)
10:05 am Writing Dr Who – Ben Aaronovitch, Simon Guerrier, Una McCormack, Caroline Symcox, Graham Sleight (moderator)
11 am Gaie Sebold interviewed by Helen Callaghan
12 pm – 12:45 pm BSFA AGM
12:45 – 1:30 pm Lunch break
1:30 pm – 2:15 pm SFF AGM
2:15 pm – 2:30 pm – Naomi Mitchison bibliography launch – Roger Robinson, Caroline Mullan
2:30 pm – Ben Aaronovitch interviewed by Edward James
3:30 pm – Humanism in Science Fiction – Gaie Sebold, Roz Kaveney, Paul Kincaid
4:25 pm – Thank you (SFF) – Edward James

We have to be out of the venue by 5 pm.

We’re welcome to bring sandwiches, snacks, drinks etc. into the venue, so picnicking during the AGMs is an option.

The designated pub for the day is the Old Monk Exchange on Strutton Ground (at the end of Old Pye Street).

From the pen of BSFA-shortlisted writer, Tim Maughan, comes PAINTWORK: a short film based on his original short story, produced in association with Arc Magazine.

Set in near-future Bristol – the city that brought us Banksy (in the near-past) – it follows augmented reality graffiti artist 3Cube as she illegally transforms an advertising billboard into a work of high-tech street art. The film focuses on the relationships between technology, advertising and the control of public spaces.

The creators claim that Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée was a major influence and Paintwork similarly uses still black and white photography to tell the story. For this, the talents of photographer, Laurie Eagle, were employed as well as Alan Tabrett’s skills in computer animation. Audio is provided by two stalwarts of the Bristol music scene in the form of narration by MC Koast and an exclusive soundtrack from influential dubstep producer Forsaken. Based on the title short story from Maughan’s critically acclaimed collection, Paintwork was premiered in an early form in February as part of the arts festival Sonic Acts in Amsterdam.

With this film, Maughan’s story is itself augmented, offering us a distinct taste of city noir; the urban grimness juxtaposed with the crispness of monochrome imagery, rooting this futuristic tale in the uncannily familiar.

But don’t just take my word for it. The film is available to watch right here.

Arc Magazine is a digital quarterly imprint from New Scientist, featuring fact, fiction and opinion concerning the future.

…Good SF and Fantasy written in less than 140 characters?

Impossible! Or is it?

Take the challenge, take part in the @BSFA’s

TWEETFICTION TWEETSTREAM

DURING EIGHT SQUARED CON – EASTERCON 64: 2013

And get your tweet considered for streaming at the BSFA Awards Ceremony and inclusion in future BSFA publications!

The Tweetstream

• is free to enter, of course

• each author is allowed multiple entries

• is open to writers of any age and nationality, including professional authors and BSFA Committee members.

Story Format Suggestions & Encouraged Behaviour

• Stories can be in any language! But must fit entirely into a single tweet.

• Submissions should be original – they should be the sole work of the author/s in whose name they are submitted

• Stories can be Science Fiction or Fantasy – we encourage a broad definition of what those terms mean.

• Stories should not feature characters/locations/ etc. that are part of other copyrighted works &emdash; i.e.nothing set in the universes of Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, etc.

• Please include the hashtag #tbsfa &emdash; which leaves 134 characters for creativity

• Simply tweet your story (including the hashtag #TBSFA as stated above, we’ll pick it up)

• Unless notified to the BSFA via tweetfiction@bsfa.co.uk the use of #tbsfa will be assumed to grant permission for the BSFA to reproduce at the awards ceremony or within future membership publications.

Administration

• Of course entries could commence any time but we would encourage entries to coincide with Eastercon so we would suggest start posting from midnight Wednesday March 27^th 2013.

• We would suggest the closing date for submissions is midnight (GMT) on Tuesday April 10^th 2013.

• If anything is unclear, or if you have any questions, please email tweetfiction@bsfa.co.uk

Have fun & JOIN IN !

Mark Egerton, one of the many fine volunteers at The Cinema Museum in London, is looking to make the landmark a home to Sci-Fi movies and its passionate fans. After putting together a season of Star Trek movies, Mark has big plans – so long as he can get the support of his fellow fans and film buffs.

“I was waiting ages for someone to put on Star Trek : The Motion Picture so in the end I made it happen myself – and programmed the season having realised that there were seven main crew members in Star Trek and seven movies that mainly featured these actors – so I thought…why not have double bills with a Star Trek teamed up with a film starring or directed by one of the seven actors,” said Mark.
“Beyond this I want the season to be a success so that it can be continued and we establish Sunday afternoons as a Sci-Fi slot at the museum. I’d love to screen complete runs of UFO and Babylon 5 – so would like to show TV as well as film. But I need bums on seats.”

If you’re a fan of great Sci-Fi movies check out the blurb below and follow the link to see more about this fantastic project.

The Cinema Museum is delighted to salute the original seven crew members of Star Trek with seven double bills – the Star Trek movies from The Motion Picture through to Generations paired up with individual movie projects starring, or directed by, one of the actors.

http://www.cinemamuseum.org.uk/2013/star-trek-season/

Every year the organisers of the Arthur C Clarke Award release the full list of novels submitted for consideration by the judging panel. This is not a long-list, but rather the full list of submitted titles which the judges will debate and select their shortlist of six titles.

2012 was a record year for submissions with 32 publishing imprints putting forward a total of 82 novels for consideration, a jump of over a third from last year’s equally record-breaking total of 60 titles.

Award Director Tom Hunter said:

“The profile of the Clarke Award is rising year on year, and this is reflected in both the number and diversity of titles submitted for consideration for this year’s prize. We feel it’s more important than ever to make this full list available to everyone so SF readers everywhere can see both the scope of the genre and also appreciate the challenge the judges face in selecting just six titles to go forward on their shortlist.”

The shortlist for the 2013 Arthur C Clarke Award will be revealed on Thursday 4 April, with the winner being announced in a special ceremony hosted by The Royal Society in London on Wednesday 1 May.

The full list of submissions…which six would you pick?

The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian (Grant)
Crewel by Gennifer Albin (Faber & Faber)
vN by Madeline Ashby (Angry Robot)
Zero Point by Neal Asher (Tor UK)
The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi (Atom)
Pure by Juliana Baggott (Headline)
Juggernaut by Adam Baker (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
Nod by Adrian Barnes (Bluemoose)
Turbulence by Samit Basu (Titan Books)
Iron Winter by Stephen Baxter (Gollancz)
The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (Sceptre)
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (Corvus)
Exit Kingdom by Alden Bell (Tor UK)
The Troupe by Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit)
The Dream Killer of Paris by Fabrice Bourland (Gallic Fiction)
Existence by David Brin (Orbit)
alt.human by Keith Brooke (Solaris)
Helix Wars by Eric Brown (Solaris)
The Folly of the World by Jesse Bullington (Orbit)
Empire State by Adam Christopher (Angry Robot)
Celebrant by Michael Cisco (Chomu Press)
The Lost Men by David A. Colón (Elsewhen Press)
Caliban’s War by James S. A. Corey (Orbit)
London Falling by Paul Cornell (Tor UK)
The Twelve by Justin Cronin (Orion)
Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan (Canongate)
Earth Girl by Janet Edwards (HarperVoyager)
The Eternal Flame by Greg Egan (Gollancz)
The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Stranger’s Magic by Max Frei (Gollancz)
Blue Friday by Mike French (Elsewhen Press)
The Thousand Emperors by Gary Gibson (Tor UK)
EVE: Templar One by Tony Gonzales (Gollancz)
Blackout by Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Ward by S.L. Grey (Corvus)
Champion of Mars by Guy Haley (Solaris)
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway (William Heinemann)
Empty Space by M. John Harrison (Gollancz)
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (Headline)
Wool by Hugh Howey (Century)
Worth Their Weight in Blood by Carole Jahme (Mira Books)
Insignia by S.J. Kincaid (Hot Key Books)
The Games by Ted Kosmatka (Titan Books)
The Company of the Dead by David J. Kowaski (Titan Books)
Age of Aztec by James Lovegrove (Solaris)
Intrusion by Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
The Killables by Gemma Malley (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus (Granta)
In the Mouth of the Whale by Paul McAuley (Gollancz)
Chimera by T.C. McCarthy (Orbit)
Transmission by John Meaney (Gollancz)
The Glimpse by Claire Merle (Faber & Faber)
Railsea by China Miéville (Macmillan)
Kimberly’s Capital Punishment by Richard Milward (Faber & Faber)
Thy Kingdom Come by Simon Morden (Jurassic London)
LiGa by Sanem Ozdural (Elsewhen Press)
The Chosen Seed by Sarah Pinborough (Gollancz)
The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter (Doubleday)
Boneshaker by Cherie Priest (Tor UK)
The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi (Gollancz)
Pulse by Tricia Rayburn (Faber & Faber)
The Demi-Monde: Spring by Rod Rees (Jo Fletcher Books)
Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz)
Jack Glass by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
Triggers by Robert Sawyer (Gollancz)
Redshirts by John Scalzi (Gollancz)
The Fury by Alexander Gordon Smith (Faber & Faber)
The Explorer by James Smythe (HarperVoyager)
The Testimony by James Smythe (Blue Door)
Crandolin by Anna Tambour (Chomu Press)
Deadfall Hotel by Steve Rasnic Tem (Solaris)
Entanglement by Douglas Thompson (Elsewhen Press)
Communion Town by Sam Thompson (4th Estate)
Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis (Orbit)
Ecko Rising by Danie Ware (Titan Books)
The Outcast and the Little One by Andy West (NewCon Press)
Alif the Unseen by G.Willow Wilson (Corvus)
Place of Dead Kings by Geoffrey Wilson (Hodder & Stoughton)
The Method by Juli Zeh (Harvill Secker)
The Return Man by V.M. Zito (Hodder & Stoughton)

BSFA – Wool has launched in print to a great reception – can you explain what it feels like to have your work do so well?

HH: It’s been nothing but exciting. I used to be a bookseller for years so I know how difficult it is, how slim the odds are and how freakishly lucky I am that it really makes me appreciative of it. But, it’s been such an unusual route. It’s not like I planned this or set out to achieve this so I’m kind of stumbling through it so a lot of times I feel like it isn’t even in my control. I’m like an amazed spectator.

For those who don’t know, can you tell us how it all came about?

HH: The series started out as a 50 page short story and it was something I’d had in mind for a longer novel but I was so caught up in my other writing that I eventually felt that I just had to get this idea I had for the Wool series down. I published it and basically forgot about it; I didn’t think anything would come of it and within several months it was outselling everything else I’d ever written. I started getting emails and reviews asking for more so I dropped everything else I was doing and started on part two. I wrote the rest of the series over this three month period of just living in this world and doing nothing else.

Can you explain a bit about the series and what the inspiration was behind it?

HH: It’s difficult to describe the story without spoiling it as every plot turn is a spoiler. The story is based on the idea that these people live underground and they don’t have any memory of anywhere else other than legends of people living above ground. The worst thing you can do in this society is express an interest in going outside. They have one view of the outside world which are these wall screens on the top level. In my mind it was like staring at twenty-four hour news and seeing how bad it is out there. So I asked what does it do to our perception of the world and who are the people who are brave enough to challenge that and go out there and see it for themselves. So the story of Wool is about the people who are brave enough to challenge the ideas of their dystopian world and the unfair hierarchy that has been placed upon everybody.

Did you have the whole series plotted out or did the success of the first e-book and the demand for more spur you on?

HH: The story I had in my head was written in that first part of Wool but as a much larger novel with Allison alive and involved. In order to write it as a short story I had to truncate it down and tell it in flash backs and it worked really well that way. It gave it a much tighter prose and allowed the reader to finish it and get to the end really quickly. Everything else after that I had to plot out. After the success of the first part I had to sit down and think ‘what is the rest of the story?’ and make it up from there. And, it was a challenge, as you know I didn’t have a lot of characters left alive.

You’re not afraid to kill off major characters either – was that done on purpose or part of the working out process that came with the demand for more?

HH:  It can be difficult for a writer to kill off characters but I’ve seen what happens as a reader when so many new players are introduced – you end up with a hundred characters and you can’t do any of them justice. The best way to keep a plot focused is to wrap up some story-lines as you introduce new ones. But, to be honest, it happened as an accident. After the first part was finished I wasn’t planning on writing anything else and with the second book I needed a transition to my main actor so I used another character to do that and then got her out of the way. The effect was to start the third book so the reader was sure that the main character was dying. It was really an opportunity to make the reader uncomfortable and it seems to work as I get a lot of hate-mail from people in the middle of book three and then they email an apology once they read book four. I take it as a huge compliment.

The idea of truth in the series seems to relate to certain aspects of modern society – ie. Wikileaks, the war on terror – were these ideas that fueled your work?

HH: Absolutely. While I was writing this the Arab Spring was in the news and Occupy Wall Street was going on, the economy was crumbling and then the Presidential election was starting. I follow all the current events as well as reading about philosophy and psychology so for me the question of the books was a kind of Hobbesian vesus Rousseau argument: whether or not we’re born noble savages to live free or whether we need a figure, a leviathan, to keep people in check. I don’t think there is a comfortable answer to that. People like to think that if everyone was free we’d treated each other fairly but the reality is you leave it open to a government with a Stalin or a Napoleon and something that is worse than what was there before. It’s not an easy thing to talk about because we like to think the revolutionaries are more benevolent than the people they deposed.

You seem to consider the gray area of truth and power in the books – that it can be both liberating and dangerous, that it can be mistaken for other things and perceived in many different ways – did you set out to write that..?

HH: Yes, deliberately. It is interesting that a lot of people find the weakest character in the book to be a person who doesn’t seem to have a position. But, in my mind there is a leviathan who maintains stability played out on one side and then there is the other main character who represents freedom for the sake of truth, to let everybody know what happens regardless of the outcome. This ‘weak’ character is the one caught in the middle who sees that you need rules and structure. But I wrote this guy as the unsympathetic character who is the most grounded in his position.

You use an interesting metaphor throughout, namely Wool – how did that come about?

HH: It started off as just the two meanings – having the wool pulled over your eyes and the steel wire-wool pads used in the first book – and when you get to the end you see the twist. When I got to the second book I saw a way to weave in more meanings.

How does it feel thinking about the Wool series being made into a film by Ridley Scott?

HH: 21^st Century Fox have bought the rights and they recently had us out there and we met with some of the executives at the studios. We’ve got someone writing the screen play now and if that goes well we can start pitching it to get the green light. I love films so it’s crazy to think that my work could get made onto the big screen. I initially argued to be involved in the screenplay even though I didn’t have much of a desire to do that but really I wanted people who knew what they were doing in charge. To be honest, I just want to be able to sit back with a big tub of popcorn and watch the film.

After the success of your e-book – what are your ideas on this form of publishing?

HH: I think this could be the direction of things. Look at the amount of blogs that get made into blogs. With e-books it’s just another way of getting stories out there. I think it’d be helpful for people to re-frame the way they think of e-books as websites. A million websites go up a month – it is one of the greatest freedoms we have to put our voice out there. Most of them will never be seen by anybody but if you fill it with incredible content then word of mouth will see it becoming successful.

Over at Fantastic Literature Limited there is a great selection of rare and out of print science fiction. From first editions of Dr Who to rare Star Trek novels and all manner of magazines such as Interzone and Black Static. If you’re a fan or a collector check out www.fantasticliterature.com for the full stock list.

Papers are invited for the first international conference on the work of British writer Adam Roberts. Crowned the “King of High-Concept SF”, his novels have been shortlisted for major awards such as the Philip K. Dick Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the BSFA Award. His fiction “represents some of the best work being done in our 21st-century genre” (Locus). Writing for the New Scientist, Kim Stanley Robinson argued that Roberts’ 2009 novel Yellow Blue Tibia should have earned the Man Booker Award, and Niall Alexander has similarly privileged Roberts within contemporary literature, stating that “Roberts stands head and shoulders above many of his contemporaries, pushing this and that genre every which way but loose, year in and year out” (SF Signal).

Author of thirteen novels, Roberts is influenced by the modern classics of Golden Age SF and Victorian poetry, and his fiction offers us unique visions of this and other worlds. A society where people photosynthesise sunlight. An army of interconnected consciousnesses that functions as a single person. And alternative histories, where Jonathan Swift was telling the truth about the Lilliputians or where Stalin hired a group of science fiction writers to make up news of an alien invasion. His latest work, Jack Glass, is indicative of this ability to stretch and combine genres and has been called “an attempt to shackle together the golden age of detective fiction with the golden age of SF” (Christopher Priest, Guardian).

This is, of course, only one of the many Adam Robertses, the writer of New Model Army (2010), By Light Alone (2011) and so many others. There is also Professor Adam Charles Roberts, who’s written The History of Science Fiction (2007), co-edited The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009) and teaches Victorian Literature and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. And finally, there is A.R.R.R. Roberts, writer of such parodies as The Sellamillion (2004), The Va Dinci Cod (2005) and The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo (2010). A writer of many-dimensions, Roberts contributes to contemporary speculative fiction in a unique combination of modes: he writes it, he writes about it – both as a scholar and as a critic – and, of course, he parodies it.

This event aims to bring together scholars, critics, writers and fans for the first academic conference dedicated to the literature and ideas of Adam Roberts. Papers are welcome on any topic related to Roberts’ writing from academics, researchers, fans, and anyone else interested. Topics might include, but are not limited to: -‘High-Concept SF’ and the Novel of Ideas
-Writing science fiction in the 21st Century: responsibilities and challenges
-Military SF, Political SF, Philosophical SF
-Britishness / British humour, sarcasm, style
-Utopia and Dystopia
-Unreliable Narrators
-Heroes and Antiheroes
-Postmodernism: Metafiction and Intertextuality
-Writing under nicknames: alternative writer identities
-Propaganda, Deception, Conspiracy Theories
-‘Practicing what you preach’: writing fiction with an academic background
-The role of technology
-Cynicism and Satire
-Depictions of Britain
-Dictators, Mass-Murderers, Criminals
-Crime Fiction in Science Fiction, Genre within Genre, and beyond Genre
-Space Colonization and Galactic Empires
-Pop Culture and Parody
-Alternative History
-Power
The conference welcomes proposals for individual papers and panels from any discipline and theoretical perspective. Please send a title and 300-500 word abstract for a 20 minute paper along with your name, affiliation and 100 word professional biography to newgenrearmy@gmail.com by 15th February 2013.

The conference is organised by Christos Callow, PhD candidate, Department of English, University of Lincoln and Dr Caroline Edwards, Lecturer in English, Department of English, University of Lincoln. The conference is sponsored by Gylphi: Arts and Humanities Publisher and the English Department of the University of Lincoln.

New Genre Army: An International Conference on the Writing of Adam Roberts

Friday 5th April 2013, Department of English, University of Lincoln

Sponsored by Gylphi: Arts and Humanities Publisher and the University of Lincoln. Part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers series

Keynote Speakers: Professor Farah Mendlesohn (Anglia Ruskin University) Dr. Andrew M. Butler (Canterbury Christ Church University)

Response and Q&A from Adam Roberts

For more information or to respond to the call please contact:

Christos Callow
University of Lincoln

http://ulincoln.academia.edu/ChristosCallow

Dr. Caroline Edwards
University of Lincoln

http://phone.online.lincoln.ac.uk/cedwards

Email: newgenrearmy@gmail.com