Is the World Service making a ghastly mistake?

I was put onto this by a Russian friend who is concerned – as many people seem to be – that the BBC World Service’s policy of relocating journalists for the Russia and Asia services closer to their countries will lead to a reduction in quality, because in many cases it simply won’t be safe for journalists and editors to speak the truth. [OpenDemocracy][moreOD][expressindia] 

The BBC argues that it’s about getting feet on the ground. It’s notable that there’s a reduction in cost for the Beeb in doing things they way they’re doing them.

I don’t know enough about this to be sure what’s going on. Several things occur to me:

I have always assumed that the BBC World Service was an invaluable tool in putting our point of view to the world at large. I have also been told that the World Service was the only source of reliable news in any number of countries where local news was controlled by the state, and that this is still the case.

It may be that it’s increasingly tricky for our government to deal with countries whose leaders the BBC World Service takes to task on Human Rights and so on, because the Beeb is a state broadcaster. The President of Bastardistan may not be too impressed to hear he’s been described as a bloody handed tyrant on Desert Island Discs just before he has a meeting with our ambassador. And it’s not always easy to explain the concept of a free press. In a more media-conscious world, foreign leaders may be waking up to this situation and making pointed remarks about it. Possibly the government would rather this aspect of the Beeb faded away.

(If so, I’d say it was a bloody shame and they should grow a spine. Anyway.)

If this is a deal that’s been done, we should know what we got in return, because I doubt it’s worth it.

If it’s cost cutting, well, it’s not a great place to cut costs. We really do want to be offering our point of view to Asia right now, all things considered.

Belike, it’s a stubborn, bureaucratic cockup.

Anyway, there’s a petition here, although I’m not crash hot keen on the adversarial tone; I think the first thing I want is for this to get covered and discussed so I can figure out what’s going on. However, it may be I’m just ignorant. 

I reckon you can make your own judgement.

I just realised. The Stock Market is a wuss.

And let me tell you why…

Tim Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, was asked about China’s proposal for a global currency. He said he was ‘open’ to the idea. Result?

The dollar plunged instantly against the euro, yen, and sterling as the comments flashed across trading screens. David Bloom, currency chief at HSBC, said the apparent policy shift amounts to an earthquake in geo-finance.

“The mere fact that the US Treasury Secretary is even entertaining thoughts that the dollar may cease being the anchor of the global monetary system has caused consternation,” he said.

The Market is a wuss.

I mean, honestly. There’s no prospect of this happening in the immediate future. The diplomatic wranglings alone would take for ever, and all he said was that he was prepared to hear about it. In a couple of days, the Market will have recovered its sense of the dollar as the place to be, and it will go la-la-la-ing back. This drop was a jitter. It was a blip. Because the Market has the courage and fortitude of an Etruscan pygmy shrew. It’s not even that the Market is cautious, and responds in a measured way to the arrival of a new notion. Oh, no. No, it just heard something far off and a bit new and spooky mentioned in a press conference somewhere near the dollar, and basically weed itself.

And even worse, people bow to this twitchy, wah-wah-wah-all-the-way-home financial piggywig and its pathetic behaviour. They say Geithner ‘slipped’ or ‘made a gaffe’ by responding truthfully. The Market longs for neat, silly little fictions which make it feel good, and people massage its wimpy muscles and step around its fears. And it has more fears than Adrian bloody Monk. It says:

Lie to me, Daddy! That’s how I like it!

And they do. For all the testosterone cars and bikini models and fantasy islands, the Stock Market is a giant blouse, and you can say I said so.

A year ago or so, there was a moment when the Market came face to face with an unpleasant truth: that the whole system is based on nothing more than faith and confidence. It had been selling sub-prime mortgages to itself for a while, and they were – transparently – rubbish. That’s what sub-prime actually meant. It meant: these are loans we made to people who probably can’t pay them back. But look! We’re treating them as an asset!

And suddenly someone said:

Oh noes! These loanses iz baaad!

And the arse fell out of the global financial trousers.

But just before that happened, there was a sort of wobbly hiatus. The Market was in a state of what you might call unstable equilibrium, and it had been nudged, but it hadn’t fallen yet. At that moment, a Market which was as butch and gung-ho as ours likes to believe it is could have said:

[à la Clint Eastwood] A Market’s gotta do what a Market’s gotta do!

Or

[à la John Wayne] Well, Ma’am, way I see it, this whole thing is one entire hallucination. No cause fer alarum. We’ll just carry on as normal and it’ll sort itself out.

Because quite seriously, all that had happened was that people were seeing the truth they already knew presented in a form which they didn’t like. Absolutely nothing else had changed. A conscious decision to continue to function on the basis that everything was okay might actually have worked. I mean, it was only ever going to be the exchange of one piece of willful self-delusion for another.

Or it might have led to a crash. As opposed to, er…

So I say again. The Market is a wuss.

Worse yet, it appears to be some sort of neurotic fantasist of the kind often portrayed by Woody Allen. Look at that graph at the top of this post and assume it charts the market in water-dwelling animals on sale in Woody Allen’s home town in some movie where he plays… well, the guy he usually plays. Here’s how the graph works:

Oh my God! This is appalling. It’s the end of my life. She left me and she took my car and my stereo and my fish. I can’t believe she took the fish, we had a great relationship. I mean, I had a great relationship with the fish. The fish was absolutely amazing for me in my time of need. I’m buying a fish farm. That’s it! I’ll have thousands of fish to love me and I can reciprocate by feeding them. But what if a majority of them don’t love me? Or if my original fish comes home and finds me gone?

No. I can’t buy fish. But I could buy a dolphin, except I’m actually slightly allergic. Mind you, there’s that cute girl at the beach who really likes aquatic mammals. If I had a dolphin maybe I could…

I want a Market which can suck it up a bit better than this!

[This has been an Irrelevant Presentation sponsored by Authors Who Know Piss All About Economics. Thanks for reading.]

Questions people have asked me. Some of them a lot. Hence “Frequently Asked Questions”.

Because I need to be distracted from the precise order of catastrophe in the Moment Where Everything Goes Wrong (also known as the Dark Night of the Soul) in book the second. Have thought about it too hard this week.

1. How did you come up with The Gone-Away World?

Partly from my philosophy degree, partly because I am a huge pop science geek and I love pondering the weirdness of the universe. And it is so much weirder than we allow for in our everyday lives. So that was the quasi-scientific underpinning. 

Then there was some sociology in there, trying to answer the question I think sociology has really fixed on since WWII – why do we screw up so badly and where do horrible evils come from? I was – still am – fascinated by Stanley Milgram‘s notorious experiment.

You have to understand, though, that it came by degrees over the course of a year. I found a voice for it, a snappy, geeky, digressive voice which is my narrators’s thoughts and feelings. An ordinary mind, but emphatically not on an ordinary day. Except that, honestly, apocalypses do seem to be getting more common, don’t they? 

The story came from absolutely basic places. There’s a detective structure, as I’ve mentioned before, and a very simple premise:

World on fire.

Fix fire.

Live happily etc.

Of course, the literal fire is just the beginning. It’s actually more like the standard firebug plot:

World on fire. Put out fire. Find evidence of arson.

Chase arsonist, uncover conspiracy.

Bring villains to justice. New life.

The story is complex because each concept requires a huge amount of unravelling, and an alternative history of the world for the last twenty five odd years. But honestly, it’s not in essence a big thing. It’s layered – and that’s what happened over the year it took to write the first draft.

Will you write a sequel?

No. At least, not now, and probably never. I may write some companion stories if I feel the urge, using characters from the same world. I also loosely connected “All Or Nothing Days”, the short piece I did for the BBC, to The Gone-Away World, as well as to some short stories I wrote in ’98 and ’99 for Interzone. I haven’t sorted out a venue for “All Or Nothing Days” to appear in print, and yes, I should, and yes, I will. I’m also thinking about releasing it as part of a Harkaway eBundle for Stanza or something, but I need to get my head around that a bit more.

What’s next?

Well, right now this minute I’m sitting in a cafe working on the second book, which is – I hope – as weird and fun as the first. No, I’m not telling you about it. That drives my publishers crazy. Sorry.

I’ve also got another short piece out there which I trust will find its intended roost with a literary fiction magazine – a bit of writing which on the one hand is unequivocally Science Fiction, but which is also unequivocally literary. Because, you know, that’s going to make almost everyone scream and howl in fury and hate me, and I enjoy that kind of thing.

(I don’t, at all.)

Is The Gone-Away World Science Fiction?

It must be. It’s up for a Science Fiction award…

Look, I honestly have no idea what that question means. If you mean:

is this a trashy novel in which the heroine wears a silver bikini and gets tied to a mad scientist’s table, and then rescued by the hero before Dr Franzavius can unleash his sexotronic orgasmonster upon her supple curves, and the plucky Earthman then runs his foe through with a lasersabre before defusing a Protonic Detonator?

No. Although if you were actually to read any of those stories, you might find that they were a) vastly more interesting in terms of what they do and try to do than you think and b) kinda awesome in a retro cool/kitsch way.

[Actually, now that I say it, I quite want to write that one... in fact, yeah, wow, I have a totally amazing plan. Wow. WOW. Okay, where's my pen?]

If you mean:

is this a story which rests its narrative environment on a technological deviation from the world we experience, which in turn triggers a radical departure from the way things are, yet at the same time leaves room for familiar problems and wickednesses, which reflects our daily experience in odd ways, but which is basically a roaring yarn and not a pseudo-realist statement of gritty urban sorrow?

Then yes! That would be me!

I think the hard distinction some people would like to make between genre fiction of whatever stripe and literary fiction is either illusory or rapidly breaking down. I think many of these notions depend on marketing, and shelving.

That said, I’m a huge geek. Science Fiction is a much-maligned genre which – as many others do – embraces a wide world of possibility and style, some good, some bad, some brilliant. You will take my copy of Snow Crash from my cold, dead fingers. (After my head is frozen.)

Is The Gone-Away World Post-Apocalyptic Fiction?

Well, yeah, kinda. But I have this thing about that. Post-Apocalypse books have a few features I don’t really see in TGAW…

1. they’re depressing as hell. Mud, grime, loneliness, death in childbirth, zombies…

Well, okay, zombies aren’t always depressing, but kinda.

2. root vegetables. For some reason, grubbing for root vegetables often seems to form a large part of the atmosphere. I do not like root-vegetable fiction, especially not in films. The tendency to make turnip movies in Art House post-apocalypse cinema is particularly egregious.

3. forced-breeding programme drama. As in: “oh, noes, we haz no baybiez! The human race must propogates! Gives me ur weemin! Ai can haz orgy nao?” I have no time for this. It turned me off when it surfaced in Day Of The Triffids and it hasn’t gotten any younger. I have dark suspicions about why it crops up which I won’t go into.

4. did I mention turnips? Yes? Okay. I hate turnip drama. As long as that’s clear.

But yes, the world comes to an end in TGAW. At least twice, actually.

Is there gonna be a movie?

That would be awesome!

No. At least, so far, no one has stepped up. I need to get me some of that Whedon Juice: You Can’t Stop The Signal and so on. (Slogans in the comments section, please…)

I thought originally that I was writing an un-filmable book. Since then, a number of people have hit me repeatedly in the head and said that it would make a great movie and I should shut up. I have begun to see the wisdom of agreeing with them.

But it wouldn’t be cheap or easy, so it needs someone to gun it through. If you know anyone like that, please feel free to alert them to the availability of the rights… I want Johnny Depp for Ike Thermite.

What’s it like being the son of a famous author?

Uh. This one’s always hard to answer because I have nothing else to compare it with. I mean, I’ve never had another dad.

The simple answer is: it’s great. He’s a wonderful dad who is also a wonderful writer.

Are there advantages and disadvantages? Yes. For example…

Advantage: people pay a disproportionate amount of attention to me.

Disadvantage: I’m going to spend my life being compared with one of the best writers presently working in English, whose chronicling and critique of a definitive historical period are somewhat awe-inspiring, and whose approach to writing is in many ways utterly unlike my own.

Do you have to be really disciplined to write?

Yeah, but maybe not in the way you mean. It’s more fun to write than to do most other things, so working isn’t so much of an issue, unless it’s going badly on a given morning and then I’d rather blog about stuff than bang my head against an invisible wall which I will find a way round if I just relax a little.

The discipline is in saying: I love this bit. It is crap.

Or worse yet: I love this bit. It is good. It does not work here and I must cut it.

Do you read your reviews?

Yes. I like to know what’s going on. Also, the people who tell you not to are often the same people who call you to tell you there’s a great one (or a stinker) in such-and-such a paper or on some website or whatever. I think if everyone hated something I wrote, I’d have to stop reading, because it would make me sad.

Back to work.