Which SF book… oh dear

I am drawn to post-catastrophe survival stories and read three in a row recently. George Stewart’s Earth Abides, Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I’d read Stephen King’s The Stand last year and it rather like Earth Abides in many ways.

All classics in their own right but each leaving me wanting. I am a glutton for good writing – when I read a phrase and say, ‘I wish I wrote that.’ I didn’t get that from Earth Abides. And yet the courage and persistence of the main character doing what most decent men would do over the years and charting the way Nature would reclaim North American cities is admirable. It comes under that category that so many SF stories written in the mid 20th Century fall in where the protagonist is nice – and so lacks that gritty conflict modern readers want. Yet Miller does that in Canticle. Terrific writing, scary deaths of the main characters and yet amusing in a noir way. I suppose the book troubled me as it is about how faith – especially the Catholic Church in whatever morphed form it has post nuclear war – is necessary to pull Mankind through. It’s done tongue in cheek and I can still enjoy the way the story is told and smile at the characters. The Road is marvellous with grit and conflict around each dark corner yet hope is wired all the way through.

For the next Chester Library SFF book group meeting this coming Saturday 3^rd December we are having a Desert Island Discs session where we each suggest a SFF book we couldn’t live without. That is sooo hard. I am also at a disadvantage to many of the others in that although I have been reading SF for decades my rubbish memory denies me the opportunity to recall enough details to talk about most of them. Also I have been writing more than reading in the last ten years. To top that I don’t normally like to re-read books on the grounds that life is too short. Besides the fact above that I am drawn to post-apocalyptic stories, I also want to be awed by vistas new, which generally means exploring new planets or weird places. And I want to enjoy the writing style. I’ve no time before Saturday to read Gene Wolfe’s books and the many others I see listed on ‘must read’ compilations on the web. I think M. John Harrison’s Light is high on my suggestions though I may yet cause issues with some by suggesting one of the best books I’ve read for writing style and imagination: The Collector Collector by Tibor Fischer. It is fantasy rather than science fiction but imagine a story from the point of view of an ancient non-human entity, who collects souls that collects items. It was Fischer’s The Thought Gang that re-energised my urge to write. It’s all his fault!

I don’t suppose I’m allowed to have my own Exit, Pursued by a Bee as my chosen book. Ha ha.

This Space Intentionally Left Blank

I have a file of story ideas I’ve collected over the years. A kind of todo list – about 50 pages long.
Thinking of making time to write one up as a December crit group story I saw I’d written a potential title:
This Space Left Intentionally Blank.
So what is the story? Dunno, the rest is blank. Shortest story I’ve written.

Perhaps it is a literary equivalent of that enigmatic short piece of music that has no notes… John Cage’s 4’33

Promo Friday at several writing and publishing forums today so I’ve plugged the Kindle version of Hot Air Grab a copy of ebook Hot Air while stocks last. Feisty woman protagonist is abducted after witnessing a crime from a hot air balloon. I was arrested on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca while fieldworking research for Hot Air. This, vid trailer, reviews and purchase details from http://geoffnelder.com/hotair.htm

Also my Science Fiction mystery Exit, Pursued by a Bee at http://geoffnelder.com/exitbee.htm

On the run again in Urmston

I was in a hurry coming out of Sainsburys yesterday so ran a little. I heard hoodlums running behind me (they might have shouted but I’m hard of hearing) so I ran faster. They caught up and stopped me. Two Police Communitiy Officers demanded to go through my two carrier bags and asked why I was running. I said I didn’t want to leave my wife on her own with grandson in the park too long. They found my receipts among the gingerbread men, fruit and newspapers and let me go. Then I had to explain to wife why I was late…

Never a dull day for Nelder.

One positive – the policewoman took one of my writing business cards. You never know… she might buy one of my books.

king death by Paul Finch

Another fine piece of short literature from Spectral Press. link and purchasing here.

 

Rodric cannot believe his luck during the medieval black plague. He was immune, unlike virtually everyone in the area he wandered – between Cannock Chase and the Welsh border. So he looted with impunity though he theatrically dressed in black armour just in case he met resistance. Of course England wouldn’t be the green and pleasant land in the song, and award-winning author, Paul Finch, steeps us in the stench of rotting bodies, and plays with the retaking of the environment by Nature. To keep us engrossed in the medieval experience we are treated to a wonderful lexicon of the ages: Jongleur, rambraces, rerebraces, miniver, bascinet, seneschal, sokemen, and my favourite – ouches of gold. To save you reaching for Dictionary.com there is a glossary bringing up the rear though the context is usually enough to keep you going. Rodric meets a young unnamed lad with the result of more potential riches and yet an undoing. The former servant takes Rodric to his castle and its subjugation from the terrifying plague is described with splendid detail.

 

Readers might consider some of the tale as overdescriptive and the style could be tightened but it is excused by the beauty of the narrative: ‘The implacable silence was haunting. It was a listening silence, Rodric fancied, an eavesdropping silence…’

There is a wonderful peak in the story’s suspense and it is right at the end. Whether the boy or Rodric is the true king death is up to you.

 

 

more acks and an email from space

A good way to fill your book’s acknowledgements page is to go through the relevant e-mail folder. The Left Luggage / ARIA folder held over two hundred emails. Many were the to and fro mails from the BSFA Orbiter group. Also from its original literary agent, Christopher Hill, then from various editors, who’d helped me out. I also found one from space. Okay not outer space… that would be weird, but he did e-mail me from the International Space Station! I needed to know what the struts of the ISS were made of. I needed them NOT to be magnetic in the story. I found the technical information for the tendering of the struts but no confirmation of what they were made of in the final construction. So I sent off an email. What I didn’t expect is a reply from Leroy Chiao, while he was still in orbit in early 2005. Wow.

Another expert telephoned me in 2007 while I was researching and writing the second ARIA volume. I had used star chart software to see where the stars and moon were in the sky over the South Pacific at dates in 2016. Trouble is I used two different programs and they gave me different answers so I sent a query to Astronomical societies in Australia and New Zealand. The phone rang one day and it was Professor Alan Gilmore from New Zealand. He is famous for asteroid spotting but took time out to tell me Sirius, the Dog Star, wouldn’t be visible on a particular night. He said he’d buy the book when it is published. Yeay, a guaranteed sale!

There were other experts too but sadly I’ve lost those letters and emails. For example a retired Royal Navy Commodore gave me advice on aspects of sailing across oceans in small boats and a Rarotongean chatted to me and sent me photos of her island. I can’t remember their names. Please forgive my carelessness. Authors, make notes for your ack page!

Here’s another possible cover art although I have a feeling the idea has been used already.

Acknowledgements for ARIA

ARIA is the new name for my science fiction trilogy of which the first is called Left Luggage. ARIA is an acronym of a amnesia-creating virus released from a case left on the struts of the International Space Station. The book is being published in 2012 by LL-Publications and I thought carefully over the last few days to write a page of acknowledgements. That page is in its first draft but I will post it here because it astonished me how many writers, some famous, have been involved. There have been other folk who I have not named, and who have encouraged me over the years though they have not actually read the manuscript. In particular Gladys Hobson and Brian Withecombe. Like me they had a literary agent, Christopher Hill, who was a sham. He reported to me with detailed progress reports of how Left Luggage attracted interest at HarperCollins and Crown publishers. I was offered a five-figure advance, as were many of his other clients. Sadly, it was all in Hill’s demented mind. He’d not sent our books anywhere and he’d sat in his Edinburgh home in a kind of Walter Mitty stew. I’d even met him over dinner at an Edinburgh hotel and he was smartly dressed, spoke eloquently, and seemed well-educated – all the attributes of what I imagined a literary agent should be. Except he wasn’t as over 60 of his “clients” found out. Many of us belong to a Beyond Hill yahoo group and have had our successes in spite of or maybe because of that weird experience.

So here is the first draft of my acknowledgements page. Feel free to shout if I have missed you or erred.

—-

This novel would not have been possible without Daisy. Her twenty-four gears allowed my legs to rotate up the Welsh slope of Horseshoe Pass near Llangollen making my heart thump so fast my brain – freshly oxygenated – buzzed with an original idea. It was such a novel concept I dismounted at the summit, rushed into the Ponderosa Café and demanded a scrap of paper and a pencil. Thus ARIA was born.

I have trawled files to trigger my memory of all those editors, friends and critiquers who sculpted then polished ARIA to the diamond it now is. Any flaws are not their fault but mine.

The first real editor to lacerate my script and teach me about Point of View and strong characters is Doug Watts from the Jacqui Bennet Writing Bureau. My Hollywood-based pal, Jessie Lilley-Campbell helped me with Americanisms and pushed Left Luggage under the nose of Brad Linaweaver ¹, (Battlestar Gallactica co-writer) who endorsed it. Each chapter cranked their way through the tough critique group of the British Science Fiction Association’s Orbiters including Terry Jackman, Mark Iles, James Bloomer and Ian Clark. Encouragement came from award-winning SF writer Jon Courtenay Grimwood², and Stargate novel writer, Sonny Whitelaw. Urging me on were publisher Neil Marr of BeWrite Books, friend and guru Les Floyd, American writing tutor and award-winning writer, M. Kenyon Charboneaux³, and my American literary agent and friend, Rebecca Pratt. A wonderful writer in her own right, Bec Zugor, advised me on the Italian language uttered by mad Doctor Antonio Menzies. Louise Bolotin of the editing services, Plain Text, helped me with early chapters and query letters.

After all that help, and from too-many-to-mention-others, surely the manuscript would be perfect? Ha ha, but then I sent it to friend, hard-nosed crime writer, and agent, Allan Guthrie. Whoa! Advice from the world expert on pleonasms and tight narrative meant that I started over again.

During this time other novels and over fifty short stories had fled my fingers onto the world, so my style evolved, and is still developing. Perhaps it is in the bronze age now. In the last minutes Zetta Brown and Billye Johnson tweaked and poked ARIA further. Thanks to them and everyone.

None of this would have been possible if my wife had insisted I went out and found a proper job after I left teaching, so ultimate thanks to Gaynor and to my ever-tolerant grown-up kids, Eleanor and Rob. Above all they understand that when I am staring out of the window, I am really working.

NB the image is my sketch potential cover art.

¹ “In Left Luggage Geoff Nelder asks the most important questions of life.”

² “Geoff Nelder wears science fiction like other people wear clothes.”

³ “Memento meets the Twilight Zone.”

Coll de Rates

One of the highlights of the year for my legs was their glee in reaching the top of the mountain pass in Spain known as the Coll de Rates. At the risk of divorce I took off from home last week, flew into Alicante and enjoyed a cycling break at Ciclo Costa Blanco see their website here. The hotel is a sports specialist one, the Albir Garden Resort situated five miles north of Benidorm. I hired a lightweight road bike (a German make – Bergamont Dolce) and boy did it make a welcome change from my heavyweight Dawes Super Galaxy touring bike with panniers etc. The original Bergamont I hired was all Carbon Fibre but it was too long for me and Terry Kerr, the founder of CCB, allowed me to swap for a more suitable sized Bergamont though it was aluminium with Carbon Fibre forks. It was so light that my muscles, used to powering my Dawes, shot it in wonderful acceleration from every traffic light stop. Brilliant. It did feel rather twitchy if I stood on pedals for steep sections and gusty winds played with me more than on my heavier beast. The Coll de Rates is often on the Tour of Spain (Vuelta) route because it is about 600 metres with 40 bends – many hairpin – in only 7 km. There is a timing device called a Stoppomat snf I punched my card at the bottom and – eventually – the top. I was just so pleased to have sufficient breath at the top to enjoy the rest of the day cycling 50 miles through mountains, villages, vineyards and olive groves. You should try it.

I suppose I had the urge to do this because my 64th birthday is coming up on Guy Fawkes night (5th November) and someone said at my age I’ll have to slow down. Nooooo! Or, at least I’ll have to speed up first. Photographs rarely do justice to steep inclines and the grandeur of mountain views but here are some I took.

The tunnel is on the N332 main road. It isn’t too bad cycling on this smooth tarmac as long as the rush hour is somewhere sometime else. I chicken out and ride on the hardshoulder but hardened locals whiz by me on the main stretch. The tunnels are interesting and not so long you are in the dark.

This photo is from the summit of the hill climb.

Note the clouds. I knew the forecast was for showers so I took my laptop and took the opportunity to write a few thousand extra words on the third volume of my SF trilogy: ARIA. Really pleased with its progress and on my return was delighted to find LL-Publications had taken on Billye Johnson as my editor. She has already sent me a first draft file and I’m working through it with eagerness now to see this book out.

Okay, so here is a photo of me on the bike at the hotel. I should doctor it but I won’t.

Time travel note. FF to 2013 and discover the future in ARIA: Left Luggage details at http://bit.ly/HNYyq4