Harkaway's Occasionalities

Cloudsourcing / crowdsourcing...(I will not jump out of a plane)

2009-01-06T07:38:00.001-08:00

Sooo.... the UK and Commonwealth (except Canada) paperback of The Gone-Away World comes out in a month. It is nifty, shiny, special, gorgeous, black and red, and sexy. While it will not:

- make you younger

- make you tea

- make Theo Fennell create purely for you a set of diamond and ruby vampire dentures with a tungsten-kevlar woven substructure and built-in poison reservoir

... nor yet alas:

- make you irresistible to Hollywood crumpet

... nor even:

- unlock the hidden mysteries of the fighting arts of Ancient Mu

... it is all the same an important, even epochal moment. In the sense that it occurs during an epoch and is really important to me.

The thing is, this is a cold, cold winter. Not merely in the obvious sense that I just saw a yeti outside using a radioactive sheep as a woolly hat, but in the sense that we're all feeling more than slightly chilled by the fact that the entire world appears to be fiscally doomed. Thus, it occurs to me to do something other than be photographed in front of a wall full of books wearing a chequered shirt.

Voilà.

I want, apart from anything else, to wake everyone's sense of fun from hibernation, get you all out of bed. Unless bed is where you're having fun, which I grant is not impossible.

I wondered if I should go and learn to drive a tank or something equally Gonzo-ish, or enlist the help of some of my genuine martial-arts mates to get some action shots of me getting my backside kicked. (Again.) Although those always look waaaaay less cool than one hopes they will. There's an art to photographing action and martial arts, and much of it is in the lighting, and it's hard. Very hard.

The point is, you lot are wise. You are monsterclever and überslick. You have the fu of selling and imagemaking buried like rivers of molten hawt in your Jungian collective headspace. You can, if you put your heads together, suggest something which is in the mood of the book, which captures it a bit, in a way which I'm not necessarily going to - one reason for that being that I'm working on a completely different story now. So I would really really welcome your most thoughtful, deranged, outlandish, practical notions. You can email them or, ideally, attach them as comments on this post.

Please try very hard to think of something which will not cause me to get arrested or die. (Mike, I'm talking to you in particular there.)

The Inception of Gonzo Lubitsch

2009-01-05T00:47:00.000-08:00

I remember several things. Not all of them are true.

I had an enormous debate with a group of people about the nature of creativity, fan fiction writing, copyright and what it should do, and so on. It was one of many fascinating and ultimately utterly sterile arguments I had in the period of my life during which I got involved in great turbulent discussions online. Sanud.

Anyway...

Spurred by the discussion (read: "in a total rage with no one to blame but myself") I found myself half-writing a piece about storytelling as a prosthetic limb for exploring the non-physical world, and fictional universes as compressed aspects of authorial identity which are never disconnected from the author. Novels, I suggested, were a technology for extending human consciousness directly into the realm of ideas; a space suit for the mind - or maybe a space probe. Or something. To be honest, I don't really remember, and as you may have noticed by now the whole thing was pretty abstruse and even a little fanciful. I'm pretty sure I used the word "noesis".

Hey, look: I was serially single and in my twenties and furious about everything, okay? Can we just assume that almost everything I did until I was thirty causes me something close to actual physical pain when I think about it?

This whole, slightly insane conversation resulted in 1) me getting quoted in someone's Ph.D thesis, which is an honour I absolutely did not deserve, and 2) me reading a bunch of high-end media and literary theory of which I understood only fragments.

But nothing goes away. At least, nothing I read really gets forgotten. I ended up writing, further down the line, a couple of thousand words of super-ornate, bizarre semi-fiction, heavy with academic prose and references to movies and books, pretentious as all hell and quite incomprehensible. Two men who loved and hated one another were driving through an almost Roger Rabbit-ish landscape of singing cows and gas stations populated by post-national immigrants with transcultural names and remixed professions. In the back of the truck was the single most corrosive, explosive, and dangerous substance ever discovered: pure, liquid fiction. When a walkie-talkie fell into the container, it drifted through snatches of dialogue from a daytime soap in which two heterosexual men agonised over their inability to feel sexual attraction for one another.

Hoo, boy. Did I ever need a slap.

Everything in the piece was over the top, everything was pastiched, and this was how they all lived - in a kind of supersaturated stew of memes and movie plots so thoroughly mapped onto human life that it was almost impossible to take a decision which couldn't be traced to a multiplex. This was life in the Odeon Bible Belt. It was Neal Stephenson and Jeff Noon crossed with N. Katherine Hayles and Mark "I can't kiss you, we're monozygotic replicants--we share 100% of our genetic material" Leyner, speckled with John Wayne references and know-it-all post-university prose. It was Dashiell Hammet and Carl Hiaasen writing Narnia and Max Weber having hot cybersex with Murray Lachlan Young.

At least, that was what I thought at the time. Later (we're talking years later), when I re-read it, the zen jokes and the machine-gun clichés, the not quite West Wing dialogue and the interior monologue which deadpanned media theory and a murky fear of the plotline ("I'm not gonna take the fall in the mud: let Lubitsch be the Duke, and die heroically in some damn stupid way: I'm the guy the camera passes over, and that's fine with me.") felt horrible.

Plus, I had a day job. It was a crappy one, but it was mine, and I was determined to be good at it. In the mean time, at night, I was writing brochure copy for a company making modular bottlecapping machinery.

And getting into stupid arguments with people writing Ph.Ds.

So Gonzo went away (ho ho ho, that was unintentional, and I'm leaving it in) but the story never faded. Between sad, spirit-crushing development meetings and occasional paying jobs taking a strange, new story and turning it into a safe, familiar, old one with new fixtures and fittings, I kept finding myself looking at the pages I had. I wrote a few more. I had this acetate folder from Eric Abraham's production company, Portobello, which was more durable than most acetate folders. All the pages ended up in there, stuck under stacks of notes on other projects. My desk has no drawers.

And then... in 2006, suddenly, I couldn't live that way any more. It wasn't dramatic - at least, it didn't feel dramatic from within. I was getting married. That was dramatic. Everything else was sidelined. I couldn't take film work, because I knew I'd get the call half way through my honeymoon: we need a new draft by Wednesday. The film industry is completely ruthless, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. That wasn't something I was going to deal with. So I took a break. I started writing a book.

It wasn't The Gone-Away World.

It was a story about... well. I've still got the first fifty pages, so I won't tell you. I might do it next time.

But Gonzo and his friend wouldn't leave me alone. I got that acetate folder out and peered at it. I leafed through it. And then - I seem to remember - when I'd written some bits and bobs and re-tooled the thing so that it was more me and less me-trying-to-be-someone-I'm-not - I took it to Clare and said: I have these two stories. Here. Take. Read. Tell me which one makes you want to know more.

And she did. And she pointed at one.

Hello, Gonzo.

Rant, spleen

2009-01-03T05:59:00.000-08:00

So there's this place I hate. It has rude staff and bad food and it occupies a really nice property where there ought to be a good restaurant and it's so totally entrenched that even in the recession I doubt it will die. It should. It should die appallingly, and make way for something not awful. Let me tell you a little about its failings...

The food is bad. Even the chips taste of sickly horse.

The décor is old, and bad. There are cigarette burns in the sofas and they're the nicest bit.

The staff are always, always, always rude. Today we had a nice waiter, and the manager basically came and told him to stop being so darned kiss-arse and be more offensive.

The people who go there are also rude - not to the staff, which I would understand, but to other customers. My coat looks like it's been in a stampede because so many people walked across it. Why could I not get it out of the way? Because the staggeringly enormous man who had moved his chair into the aisle between our tables would not move his staggeringly enormous backside for even the one second it would have taken for me to get my coat corner from under him.

Did I mention that I want this place to die? I do. I want it to be evolved to death. And yet it clings on like some kind of ghastly zombie steakhouse, greenish hands at the throat of the restaurant trade and murmuring "reclaaaaiiimed meeeat".

And what honks me off more than anything, more than words can really convey, is that because it is convenient, otherwise rational and tasteful people will eat there. They will say "it's not that bad" and ignore the slightly clattery but infinitely better place across the road. They will say "it used to be okay" which is nearly true, but we're talking about fifteen years ago. They will squirm and weasel and self-immolate their way to another vile semi-frosted bean soup or mildewed salad or lamentable sandwich and they say "well, the location's great" or "the company was grand" and they do this goddam British Blitz Spirit cheer, and I want to point out once and for all that this is not the goddam Blitz. Okay? This is not the Normandy evac. There is nothing to gain from stiff-upper-lipping your way through food so bad even mould would send it back to the kitchen. This is the moment to say:

Welcome to the revolution, you ancien régime running dog lackeys of the catering-capitalist exploitative combine! The lunching proletariat has lost its affection for chains! Now you will regret the way you have made free with the brunch customers and mocked the pain of the casual coffee-drinker! Oh, yes, cartel-sucking flunky of the Imperialist Lunch Machine! Now you will be called to account for your lumpen mashed potato and your flaccid chips! Now you'll see the business end of a salad fork!

Did I mention I really don't like this place?

Because I don't. I just think it's not very good.

Yeesh. What a close to the year...

2008-12-30T01:06:00.000-08:00

It's not just that Israel is about to go into Gaza - although that's depressing enough as a situation. (And just for interest, here are a few links you may not have seen: Haaretz, the Times of India - check out the comments - the Parsi Times, and Al Jazeera.)

It's not even that this here recession is apparently going to get bad.

No, it's that the world is going buggo and Eartha Kitt died.

On Christmas Day, no less.

And she was, you know. Special.

Fare thee well, Eartha. You're a babe.

Day In The Life Of Chairman Sunday

2008-12-23T02:44:00.000-08:00

I am not responsible for this. My nieces felt it was of vital importance to national security that the dog be made to wear headboppers. Myself, I felt it was a dangerous slide towards the 80s, but who listens to me?

*sigh*

Anyway, the dog, being a lab and by nature a placid lass, was completely okay with the whole thing, which is more than can be said for me when they insisted I try them on as well.

No, sadly, I do not have a picture of me in headboppers to hand. There are enough ridiculous pictures of me in the world already.

All right, I'll try to find one, but honestly you can't see the headboppers clearly because of the eybrows.

Then there was Coatesfest 08. Awesome dim sum at the Jade Garden in Soho, and of course the company of The Man Himself:

Note carefully how aliens from the planet Moog have abducted my chin in order to perform vile experiments upon it. That kind of thing happens a lot when I'm near a camera. Under other circumstances - such as when my wife is looking at me - I mostly resemble a cross between the young Alec Guinness and a strapping Ralph Fiennes.

Damn those aliens and their chin-stealing ways!

Finally, on the way home, I became almost incoherent with joy and took several pictures of one of the most common surnames in China stuck over a restaurant. I can't help it. I just do get excited about these things.

Warning: Viking!

2008-12-21T09:10:00.001-08:00

Genius.

Oh, and viking is a really interesting word.

The Ministry of Curious Decisions

2008-12-20T10:08:00.001-08:00

Last year, Hampstead's streets were graced with some rather startling Christmas decorations. At least, I found them startling:

Oooh, dearie, dearie dear.

I do wonder whether Hampstead's merchants and burghers got a bit carried away in some wild academic flight of phant'sy and said to themselves: "well, the whole damn thing's Mithraic anyway, we may as well have a decent phallic symbol and just get it out in the open. And then later, we can kill a cow and have weeping virgins carry the corpse through Waterstones."

This Christmas, in an effort to avoid a repeat of the horror and embarrassment occasioned by this rather poor decision, our civic leaders have produced a new design.

One has to acknowledge, however, that there are problems with it:

Mordieux! Mes yeux... c'est horrible!

How is it possibly better to take the proud, porn-star madness of '07/'08 and transform it into this sad, castrato version of the same thing? Why, in fact, should we go into the new year in the knowledge that, in Hamsptead at least, '09 is the Year of the Tiny Winkie?

The Best Way To Waste Time With Your Clothes On

2008-12-19T00:45:00.000-08:00

Technically, I suppose, there's no reason why you should wear clothes to play Auditorium. I strongly suspect that Jeff Somers will play it with no pants on. It's not impossible that Scalzi will play it in between bouts of taping bacon to his cat. Actually, what I really love about that is not the picture of the cat. What I love is the Scalzi/Mrs Scalzi dialogue, which could so easily happen in the Harkaway home, if we had a cat and I was of a mind to baconise it.

(On the subject of Harkaway Towers, they're coming today to prop up the leaning wall, so all those of you who were thinking of coming around to stare at this wonder of modern times must now wallow in disappointment and defeat.)

Anyway, Auditorium. See how I linked to it again? That's how much I love it.

Basically, it's a puzzle, with music. The rippling lines appear on the screen (above: bottom right hand corner. Below: bottom left) and you have to get them to touch those boxes which look like graphic equalizers. When they do, the boxes fill up and start playing music. Get them all filled and you get a tranquil harmony and move on to the next level. For extra tricksomeness, only lines in the same colour as the box will light it up. Fortunately, passing through the coloured circles changes the lines to the colour of the circle.

The hard part: to achieve all this, you have a limited number of weird little circly things which divert the flow of the lines. These can be moved around and made bigger or smaller, which in turn magnifies or minimizes their effect.

The whole thing is actually very simple, and eerily hypnotic. I keep going back to the demo page, even thought I solved the available problems pretty quickly. It's just so pleasing. The latent scientist in me wants to know what happens to your brainwave patterns when you play. I suspect it's mildly hypnotic.

For those of you who only come here because you have in some way confused the hell out of Google: yes, there are puppies in the game, and lions having sex with sharks, and 'niples' from Seattle, and all kinds of astrology. But they are implied...

India is a Funny Shape (my ignorance micrsocopically diminished)

2008-12-18T00:22:00.000-08:00

It hadn't occurred to me that India was such a curious shape. I'm talking about that little whojimmy off to the east - although 'little' isn't really very accurate, as it's a couple of thousand kilometres across.

I also hadn't realised - mostly because I've never really thought about it - that Brunei (officially, the State of Brunei, Abode of Peace) was down there between India and Australia.

"Well, Harkaway," I hear you say, "that's all very well and I feel frightfully glad you've shared this rather ho-hum insight with the group, but if you're all finished with the geography lesson, I've got some more breadcrumbs to count and I've still got to finish ironing my collection of lightbulb boxes, so..."

Well, I haven't quite finished. Looking at the map, I found mysef thinking about Addeh Katir.

Addeh Katir, for those of you who haven't read The Gone-Away World yet (ahem ahem), is a small nation in the crook of the Himalayas which is the focus of a large and ultimately very significant war. Someone asked recently if I'd been there, and how the people felt about what I'd said about their home...

"The lunatic Harkaway has traduced our noble God-Emperor, Erwin Mohander Kumar. Should he dare to set foot once again in the land of the lake people, let his nose be struck from his face with a nine-iron and his corpse stuffed with apricots." E. Mohander Kumar, chief literary critic for life, Erwinville Times.

"Left-leaning satirists like Harkaway persistently fail to understand the economic realities of the underlying financial strata. The first rule of Transnational Fiscal Re-Inflationary Statebuilding is that the new entity must engage in robust discontinuation of debt-default, deregulation of the utility markets, and strenuous incentivisation of inward investment by global leaders. Get that done, and the market will take care of the rest." Mycroft Yarb, Addeh Investco Quarterly Report.

"There are no fire ants here. Also, it's quite unfair to suggest that we censor foodstuffs. I know of no incidents involving cat-related injuries. I think the whole thing is made up." Major Loff Hørenzij, Command Spokesperson, Addeh Expeditionary Force.

"They killed all my sheep. So that is right. Otherwise, I have heard that it is a funny book. I will ask my brother in London to send me the paperback in February." Choi Lak, farmer.

"Every word one hundred percent true. Most especially the good bits, which are about me." Freeman ibn Solomon, as relayed by the Konditorei Lauener, Basel.

Blatant Dog/Book Advertising Scam

2008-12-16T03:01:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I posted links - not images, links - to some pictures of dogs. I averaged twenty per cent hits extra per day, all coming by to look for poodles. It's slightly alarming. I already knew that I could jack up my numbers by talking about sex or astrology (particularly if I talked about weird sex or weird sex and astrology) but I hadn't considered the puppy power.

So: here is an actual picture of the coolest pup on Earth. She had just had an eye op, and her loving owners made her a cool pair o' shades to keep her happy.

Now: all those of you who got snared in here by the dog pic and have no idea what this is all about, go buy my book. It is almost as much fun as puppies, and will not pee on your sofa. Also, the US edition is actually huggable.

___________________

Writing this blatantly evil selling scam (and let's face it, I'm no Bernard Madoff) I came across the Flickr set of the UK edition's design process, which I looked at when the whole thing was zooming along and I hadn't really taken in the fact that I was going to be published... not at my most attentive. Looking again, I was fascinated.

As you might imagine, I still have a soft spot for this one:

I mean, you know. Bookbreaksinhalfandtheresabookinit! Yay!

And of course, there's the old title - which I like less and less, by the way, because no one can say it. Not even me, really.

And now I have to go and buy a Christmas present for my mother. Be good while I'm away.

Chairman Sunday's Monday Morning

2008-12-15T01:00:00.000-08:00

If you haven't seen this yet, go see it. But do not, in fact, imagine that you will emerge from the experience unscathed. You will become addicted. You will long for another chance to move the little wiggly lines around and make music.

It is an evil plot to take over the world. A very, very good one.

___________________

This is the Isle of Harris. Mrs Harkaway took me there a long time ago. We thought it would be fun.

I have to tell you, it was a bit like the surface of the Moon. I'd sort of imagined there'd be lots of little low-ceilinged granite pubs with hearty fires. The trouble is, the whole place was set up as a whaling station and it's mostly concrete. It's also, you know: remote.

___________________

I have slippers now. They keep my feet warm. That's a good thing, because it turns out that I can't replace the old, funky boiler here at Harkaway Towers without also replacing the kitchen, which I can't do without re-flooring the dining room, which in turn would probably mean redoing the staircases throughout the house, at which point I'd really be stupid not to address the problems with the soil pipes and the damp-coursing, and if I was doing all that, I'd have to be INSANE not to think about sorting out some extra space for when we decide to have tiny infant novelist-human rights lawyer children.

So the boiler is kind of a fixture for now.

___________________

Speaking of Mrs Harkaway, she's going to be in some kind of list of one hundred hot lawyers. I'm hugely jazzed about this, although I did blink when she came home on Friday, beaming with joy, and said:

"Honey, I'm going to be in a magazine as one of the hundred hawt-est lawyers in the UK!"

"ZOMG," I thought, "seriously? Tell me it's not a swimsuit edition?"

"No," Mrs H said, "it's not like some kind of Loaded Hot Barmaids thing. It's about the brainy."

Do you see how she did not hit me with anything or point out that I was being lecherous and infantile? This is love. Plus also, she started it by saying "hawt".

___________________

I feel I've cheated you slightly in this post; it's random and there are no links. So... here's a completely random link. It is a thing that I covet.

How Google Decided Matthew Alexander Was A Puppy

2008-12-13T11:27:00.001-08:00

I have absolutely no clue, actually. It is no doubt some species of technical doodaddery. Here's what's happening:

I'm getting a lot of hits from Google Images looking for the image of a poodle puppy I linked to a few days ago.

All those hits are coming through to the post about Matthew Alexander's really interesting book.

This seems unsatisfactory to everyone - partly to those who come seeking images of tiny fluffy dogs, but mostly to Mr Alexander, who is in exactly no sense a poodle.

Teh Interwebs haz weird.

Also, those of you who are for some reason coming to my site looking for the Covent Garden dressing gown place, it's in the southwest corner(ish) of the square in the cloisters, not in the central market bit, and there's this very, very tall guy with an incredibly cast-me-in-a-movie face who will sell you an amazing dressing gown.

At least, that's where Mrs Harkaway and I remember it being. We're not always super-reliable.

The (Matthew) Alexander Technique

2008-12-11T06:08:00.000-08:00

I broke off reading Flashman and arguing about climate change and writing my new book (well, okay, to a certain extent you could just about call this research) to devour Matthew Alexander's How To Break A Terrorist. It's fascinating and claustrophobic, and Alexander's commitment to the Geneva Conventions is heartening.

His position: control & fear = bad. Respect & hope = usable intelligence.

He was on TV the other night saying he knew of no instances where torture had gained valuable information.

One thing which worries me (and I accept that this feels like a very finicky, very donnish concern) is the number of times they lie to subjects about helping them out, getting them off the hook, and so on. On the one hand, clearly better than cutting someone up with a razor blade. On the other, making a bunch of deals and then reneging and putting the dupe back into circulation... it's not the best trust-building initiative in the world. And sooner or later, we have to build bridges and mean it. Alexander talks constantly about building rapport - but for him, it's a short term position. That's been our failing (and when I say 'our', I mean pretty much every nation in the industrialised world) for decades, even centuries, in dealing with the region. And our dealings with the region have been bloody for the entire time. Might be time for a change in strategy overall - what Alexander would call a new approach.

I mean, we can't just be at war for ever.

Eyebrows of DOOM!

2008-12-11T02:32:00.000-08:00

Every morning, I wake, and do battle with my eyebrows. I brush them, comb them, occasionally trim them. Occasionally I even use styling mousse. Some days, you just can't win.

On the upside, if ever I go bald, I shall just shove them back over my head and no one will ever know.

So, yesterday I launched myself onto the placid seas of the climate debate, feeling breezy and calm. With my usual gift for timing, I seem to have gone to the shore just as a universe of gliding monsters has become visible beneath the glassy surface.

(Melville reference! Yay, twenty points!)

So it's going to be an interesting time for this discussion, and if it turns out that the world is not doomed after all, well: yay! I can buy a big, loud sports car and live out my Steve McQueen fantasy.

The less said about which, the better.

But before you cash in your carbon credits and go on an automotive shopping spree, consider this from Dr Joanne Simpson, described by the Inhofe EPW Press Blog as "among the most preeminent* scientists of the last 100 years" and one of those cited as skeptical of man-made climate change:

A large group of earth scientists, voiced in an IPCC[1] statement, have reached what they claim is a consensus of nearly all atmospheric scientists that man-released greenhouse gases are causing increasing harm to our planet. They predict that most icepacks including those in the Polar Regions, also sea ice, will continue melting with disastrous ecological consequences including coastal flooding. There is no doubt that atmospheric greenhouse gases are rising rapidly and little doubt that some warming and bad ecological events are occurring. However, the main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system. We only need to watch the weather forecasts. However, a vocal minority of scientists so mistrusts the models and the complex fragmentary data, that some claim that global warming is a hoax. [...]

Decisions have to be made on incomplete information. In this case, we must act on the recommendations of Gore and the IPCC because if we do not reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and the climate models are right, the planet as we know it will in this century become unsustainable. But as a scientist I remain skeptical.

That kind of skepticism is definitive of being a scientist. It's like me saying I'm creative in my approach to storytelling. Aaaanyway. Interesting times.

And if it turns out we do mess up the world with CO2... well, hey, you can all come and live in my eyebrows.

(* "tautology: when even superlatives won't get the job done!")

Start thinking about this

2008-12-09T23:50:00.000-08:00

We've got twelve months to save the Earth. And, not incidentally, ourselves.

I'm going to mention this from time to time so that you don't forget, because I'm a bit agitated about it, and I'll be providing you with all kinds of charts and pictures over the year to gather a bit of momentum going into the Copenhagen Conference, but - even if you think of yourself as someone who believes in environmentalism - take a moment, now, to consider that.

We're actually hitting the deadline.

We tend to think of Climate Change as a future issue, if a serious one. I used to think we'd hit peak oil before the climate crunch, so we wouldn't have to make the same kind of effort.

(And our government would have you believe we can increase air travel and still decrease greenhouse gas emissions. If anything demonstrates the bankruptcy of our present way of looking at serious problems, it must be that.)

The Climate Change Crisis is happening now. We need to change how we live - perhaps radically.

Take a moment, just to register, in the quiet of your head, that this is a huge, extraordinary, remarkable moment, a terrible moment, and that you are in it and it is affecting you, and will for the rest of your life.

Because I found that experience... powerfully odd and alarming.

And then start thinking about what it all means.

I haven't linked to anything in this post, and I haven't included any pictures. This isn't about rushing off in different directions. This is about you.

Think.

It's the only way forward.

Books for the Short Days

2008-12-09T10:29:00.000-08:00

... or if you're in Oz, the long summer evenings.

Still confuses me entirely that Christmas is in summer down under. Seems most pekooliar. I realise that's insular of me, but I suspect it goes just the same the other way around.

By the way, I'm linking to Wikipedia and book websites rather than, for example, Amazon - because you guys read this from a bunch of different countries, and because while I love (love LOVE LOVE) Amazon and Waterstones and so on, I also love independent bookstores (is there a UK Indiebound? Anyone?) and I know a lot of you guys do, too. So buy where you want to buy. Just buy great books and read' em.

Anyway - books I've really enjoyed recently:

Sharp Teeth

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (and indeed Michael Chabon's entire backlist, pretty much)

Snow Crash (because if you haven't read it, y'oughta)

White Noise

Currently reading:

Flashman & The Redskins (George MacDonald Fraser - a man who could do the thing).

On the nightstand:

The Monsters of Templeton (to be started tonight) (2)

Child 44 (to be started as soon as I can find the copy I was half way damn through before I put it down and went to Moscow and now... grrr)

Nation

Un Lun Dun

War And Peace (yes, I'm entirely serious, it takes up a great deal of space on what is already a cluttered nightstand).

Waiting for it to arrive:

The Scent of Cinammon (about which, more anon).

As Seen On

2008-12-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

There's no question that the standard of cooking in British restaurants has gone up since I was a kid. And Jamie Oliver has made a big impression recently trying to get us all to cook, eat, and live healthier.

That said... you have to worry that the little packet of rosemary I bought from the shop has

As Seen On TV!

blazoned across the front.

(Dis)simulations

2008-12-08T01:32:00.000-08:00

What the hell is "simulated drowning"?

It's an expression the newspapers use to describe waterboarding. I'm just trying to figure out where the word "simulated" comes from. The only difference between waterboarding and drowning is that they don't actually let you die.

So here's a weird thought: if you gave someone local anaesthetic and then used a thumbscrew on them, would that be simulated torture?

Things I would prefer did not happen

2008-12-07T02:55:00.001-08:00

An asteroid strike has to be up there. It would be an entirely crappy event in almost every way. Actually, I honestly can't think of much of a plus. Well, I suppose theoretically it might nudge Earth onto a trajectory which would eventually miss a black hole or something, but still. Exactly no fun at all in the intervening quadjillion years.

Nuclear weapons, incidentally, are n ot the most useful way to deal with the problem. Do not get talked into putting nooks in space.

Are you tuning out? Too science fiction for you?

Try harder. This is your world now. It won't go away.

Or at least, we really better hope not.

'We are no longer passive victims of the impact process [...] We cannot shirk the responsibility.'

Seen in the street

2008-12-06T09:30:00.001-08:00

A curious dialogue between a Greenland Dog and a miniature poodle:

MP: wwwwoh! Hey, wow! You're totally huge! Look, I'm tiny! Supercool, huh? Yay, wow, is this your leg? It's totally, like, gazillions of miles high!

GD: Ohmigod. It's rat on a lead. Freakish and bizarre. Ohnoit'scomingthisway...

MP: Look, look, I'm a dog, just like you, but waaaaay smaller and with cooler hair!

GD: Juuust pretend you can't hear the rat talking. It will all be fine. Edge awaaaay.... now.

MP: Hah! You're such a kidder! We should play 'wolves'. Look, here, I'll be the wolf! Grrr!

GD: It's RABID! Rabid rat! Ahhhh!... Why does no one see the horrible danger of it but me? Oooh, woe! I'm doomed! DOOMED!

MP: Grrr! I'm gonna eatcha, big lad! Yeah! I'm the king of the wolfpack! Grrr!

GD: Can we go home now, please, master? The crazy ratpuppy is scaring me.

Sneering sneeriness.

2008-12-04T00:56:00.000-08:00

I'm spending a lot of time sneering at the moment. I find myself sneering in front of the mirror, sneering in the bath. I sneer at puppies, lamp posts, and groceries. When I finish a mouthful at lunch or when I look up from my desk, I tend to sneer a bit before I go back to what I was doing...

There! I'm doing it now!

Sneeeeeeeeerrrrr...

Sneer.

Sneerysneersneer.

So you may ask why I am sneering, and I will tell you.

I am sneering because of this:

A constitutional crisis was sparked yesterday when Michael Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons, all but accused the Metropolitan police of breaking the law by failing to follow proper procedures before searching the parliamentary office of Damian Green MP.

Oh, please.

Parliament, Parliament. This is sheerest hypocrisy.

You're quite prepared to curtail the civil rights of the entire UK population - you want to keep innocent people's DN A on the police database, you want (well, the elected Commons wants) to extend detention without charge (2), you happily surveil and spy, want the right to merge government databases in exactly the way you prohibit datasharing between private companies (2), you want to make everyone carry an ID card, and you took a swing at allowing evidence obtained by torture to be used in court in the UK.

You toerags.

And you Tories are up in arms about this... tell me, then, about Clive Ponting, and how you responded to his acquittal by junking the 'public interest' defense. Oh, wait... now that there is evidence to suggest that a Conservative MP my be technically guilty of an obscure offence, I keep hearing one particular phrase. What is that? Hang on... oh, yes.

Public interest.

So your man Damian Green has been subject to the kind of search which happens all the time if you campaign against the arms trade or the Heathrow extension, and somehow this is a grave threat to democracy.

You know what?

It is a grave threat to democracy. It stinks. But it is in no way as grave a threat as all the things you monstrously craven stinkweasels apparently do not care about at all.

So here is my open letter to Parliament:

Dear Parliament -

I absolutely understand how grumpy you are feeling right now about being abused by power and so on. It's great to have you standing up and fighting the erosion of our fundamental identity as a free country. I think we shall therefore forget that you came late to the party and embrace the fact that you have at last showed up.

Now... get your finger out and do your damn job. Stand up for us. Stop taking away our rights. Protect them as vigourously as you protect your own.

Thank you.

Except, oh, look. You haven't.

101

2008-12-03T07:20:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time, there was a plan to continue the crack in the jacket of The Gone-Away World all the way across the front edges of the book. (There's a technical name for them, but I can't remember what it is.)

It turned out not to look right, so we cast it aside.

However, my friend Helen's copy got goo on it. Actually, it is Italian red wine goo. Anyway, it looks kinda cool.

__________________

Given that maintaining a blog used to fall comfortably into my personal Room 101, I felt a certain bewildered satisfaction on discovering just now that De-icing was my hundredth post here. Almost entirely painless. Go figure.

Anyway, a couple of other things have occured to me since this morning, and since you're all here anyway... :

At my media training session yesterday (which by the way was amazing, and if you're a writer or any kind of person who may fin the course of their life be called upon to talk to the meeja, I cannot say often enough how much you need three hours of this to set you straight on all the things you think you know but don't) we got to talking about The Gone-Away World, which of necessity my interlocutor had just read. At the end of our first segment, I remarked that - although we'd done some pretty all-encompassing discussion of the book - we hadn't mentioned Science Fiction at all.

"Who on Earth," my teacher in the ways of Meeja Gongfu said, "would call that book Science Fiction?"

The answer is that I've had a lovely reception from some serious SF/literati, and a growly, grouchy response from some readers who felt cheated into reading a book which wasn't "proper SF". By way of contrast I've been accused of masquerading as a serious writer when I was peddling an evil crypto-SF-cootyganza.

Yes, I stole the term "SF cooties" from Nicola Griffith. This is particularly appropriate in this context, because here's a wee extract from her essay/dialogue with her partner, Kelley Eskridge, in which she describes meeting a critic:

"Oooh," she said, "you wrote Ammonite!"

"That's right."

She looked at the Slow River galley. "But why do you call your stuff sci-fi?"

"Well, actually I call it sf, but, anyway, that's what it is."

"No, no. Sci-fi is terrible, so I don't like it, but I like your book, so it's not sci-fi."

The essay is amazing, by the way.

___________________

So clearly I don't know whether Jason Stoddard's platform applies to my writing or not - although I definitely do think of TGAW as an optimistic story. I'm pretty sure it's not depressing.

I'd actually like to broaden the terms of engagement, anyway. I think it's more than just SF writing which tends to the bleak at the moment. I think there's a general trend that depressing equals profound, and funny means superficial.

I really, really don't believe that amusing books cannot be profound. In the first place, I believe - along with Monty Roberts - that you have to control all the available directions. What's the worth of sorrow if you don't also offer the possibility of joy?

___________________

My latest and greatest Strange Googling:

www'nick_splat'cow

I have absolutely no idea.

___________________

This is the building in Moscow which had the non/fiction festival in it. It's rather big; I couldn't get the banner in frame without leaving the car park and standing in the road. That is not, not, not a good idea in Moscow.

Anyway, it was right about the time I saw this banner and realised that it would cover most of an aircraft carrier that I started to panic. If not for Clare, I'm reasonably sure I would have hidden under a Zil or something.

De-icing

2008-12-02T23:36:00.000-08:00

Winter. Deeeeefinitely winter. I know this because when I went out to move the lean, green ecomachine we flippantly call 'the car' here at Harkaway Towers, it was covered in a thick layer of crusty H2O. Naturally, being as I am a prize pillock, I had no environmentally unfriendly alcohol-based frost-melting squirt, so I had to engage in the time-honoured and manly practice known as de-icing.

I actually felt rather good about that. Simple, purposive, easily-achieved tasks give a great deal of satisfaction, especially if a small but noticeable amount of effort is required to do them well. I developed a style, a panache almost; wide, sweeping motions with the hard blade of my yellow scraper, then a flip of the wrist to deploy the rubber strip and remove the snowy detritus. I had to do this rather more seriously a couple of times in Park City, Utah, when I was at the Sundance Film Festival and my rented motor was buried in six foot of fresh powder. That time, of course, I used a cardboard box as a shovel. I have a slight love-affair with Utah. It's somehow a special place.

I'd got about two thirds of the way through the process this morning when I realised I was handily de-icing my neighbour's car.

Oops.

However, having practiced on his lean, green ecomachine, I was able to finish ours in short order and move it to a new and more appropriate spot, just around the corner from the front door. I awarded myself a five point eight for technical merit and a five point seven for speed. Even the Russian Judge was unable to fault my stylistic performance, so I scored a full six there.

Speaking of Russians... Moscow.

Wow, where to start? Uhhhh... some of the questions from the floor:

Q: I have heard that the future of Britain is Islam. What would you say to this, please?

A: [Holy crap! We're discussing Islam now? And in Moscow? I'm a novelist, dude, I'm not David Milliband. Yowch...] Well, I think that's unlikely, but it's certainly true that we need to understand and work with our Muslim population in the UK, because we're allowing ourselves to marginalise them and that isn't good. The future is all of us. [Niiiice, Harkaway, you sound, like, totally clichéd...]

Q: Your book is featuring the apocalypse. Many things are coming to an end. The world, also. Please - in 2012 many calendars and cultures believe that we will also experience apocalyptic event. What is your opinion?

A: [Holy crap! Apocalypsism? Great. Whom shall I offend today?] Well, I'm an optimist. It's true that The Gone-Away World does have several moments which seem like the absolute end. But in fact, it's not one of these stories of destruction and privation. It's not about a scarred, sad population grubbing in the dust. It's actually about the traumatic recreation of the world, over and over again. It even has a happy ending. So I like to think we will, too. And the advantage of this position is that if I am wrong, no one here will ever know. [Hoo, boy. Laugh-line. Wait for it... Viktor the amazing translation expert is giving it his all... yes! YES! They thought that was funny. Yay!]

Q: Please, which is your favourite of the great Russian Novelists? Do you feel literary connection to one of them?

A: [Holy CRAP! I'm so damn ignorant by Russian standards. Aiee...] Well, I love Lermontov. I think Hero of Our Time is a splendid book, and I think it's fascinating to read it now and to see whether Pechorin is still as wicked as he obviously appeared to the contemporary reader. [Crap! Is he supposed to appear wicked or is the ironic title itself an irony? Holy crap...]

And so on.

Essentially, Russian intellectual thinking intimidates me a little. They have no fear of big questions. You're having a pee and the guy next to you leans over and asks what the meaning of life is in your opinion, and he will stand there and discuss that with his fly open long after the actual biological necessity is concluded for both of you. They're amazing. I love it there, but it's like drinking squash without water. You can't do it forever. On the other hand, it's stunning how quickly you can get seduced by it.

I haven't talked about Bykov yet. He's an extraordinary man...

Clare and I got off the plane at Domodedovo and were taken directly (via ScaryAlarmingTaxi) to a small café with a giant literary heritage. Apparently it has essentially always been a place for writers to drink and get in trouble, except during the Stalin times, when it was a library where, somehow, taking a book out could induce a state of euphoria almost indistinguishable from drunkenness.

And there, at a corner table in this 60s-looking, ply-panel room, was a huge man in a swirly pale blue shirt. He was drinking beer and vodka and eating something meaty from an oval plate.

"Miiiiister Harkaway! You are here! I, I, I am Bykov!"

"Dmitry Bykov! I am Harkaway"

"Yes! And I am Bykov. Your wife is beautiful. I have read your book. In it the world comes to an end in most remarkable way. Do you think this will happen? I also. I think we will deserve it. You want beer or vodka? I have both. Beer and vodka. Also liver. You think the world will not end? You are optimist! For my optimistic English friend, beer and vodka!"

And ten minutes later we were raising toasts to being doomed or not being doomed, and a guy from the Conservatoire was singing old blues numbers and stamping and Bykov was translating the broken English into his own version of the lyrics.

I cannot begin to tell you how much fun this was, or the more interesting things we talked about. I can only say it was one of the great evenings. And you need to understand, Bykov edits two magazines, presents a radio show (two?) and some TV. He is a novelist and a poet. This guy does more with his life in an afternoon, after a night without boundaries, than most people manage in a week. He's coming to London in April, I think. I do not expect the city to look the same in May.

Anyway... I need breakfast. More anon.

Vodka and Velocity

2008-12-01T23:45:00.000-08:00

Back from Russia and only a few minutes before I have to go and have media training. What's Moscow like? No one ever answers that question. They tell you a story instead. Why? Because the only way to describe the place is to share the experience. Just saying that Moscow is the city which stood down Napoleon and Hitler, which still has the apartment block where party officials lived under Stalin - and from which they frequently vanished - alongside vast wealth and vast poverty, which has a horrible HIV rate and a stunningly beautiful population... these things are not enough.

I don't have time to tell you stories right now.

I am, however, interested in the whole Moscow/story thing theoretically as well, in the I believe one aspect of fiction is the promulgation of massively compressed statements of your own second-to-second experience, like a vidcap of your what it is to be you. Dmitry Bykov (about whom more anon) suggested that fiction makes us deathless.

The other thing I will say is that drivers in Moscow have a varied understanding of speed limits, lane markings, and what constitutes survival-friendly conduct on the road. It is a vast stew of competing styles, interweaving and producing one great symphony of automotive terror.

Leave your bicycle at home.

So what's the vodka bit? You'll have to wait, I'm out of time.

Good to be home, though.