Those nice folk at SF Signal occasionally ask me to pitch in on their “Mind Meld” collective-interview thingies, and I’m always happy to take part, usually because they ask me questions that I haven’t thought to ask myself. The latest example: What books/stories do you feel are just as good now as they were when you first read them?

Unusually for me, I didn’t take the opportunity to deconstruct the question (though I could have done – are the stories in question just as good in the same way, or is it that they always seem to have something newly satisfying to offer on each return visit? There’s a deep-seated nostalgia in genre fiction – and in culture in general – that I flich from instinctively, and I can’t think of any book that I return to as “comfort food”, but that’s a personal preference rather than an edict). I also decided to skip briefly over one of my biggest lasting favourites because I’ve mentioned it so many times before in previous Mind Melds… so go find out what I (and a number of other smarter and more erudite folk) picked out.

Emergent pattern of interest: Ursula LeGuin makes a very good showing, though with a selection of different titles. Maybe quality does matter after all, eh?

Paul Cornell is one of UK fandom’s most ubiquitous (not to mention relentlessly cheerful and charmingly modest) figures, and I’ve spent plenty of enjoyable beer-fueled hours chatting with him on a whole variety of subjects.

Not being much of a television watcher, however, I’ve largely missed out on much of his professional output as a writer… but here’s my opportunity to get in on the ground floor of his new project. Paul is lead writer for pilot-stage BBC techno-horror drama series Pulse; you can see the pilot here at the BBC’s website, or on actual real telly tomorrow night (9pm, BBC3).

And what better an excuse to drop the man a line and ask him some questions about writing in general and Pulse in particular, eh? None better. None better at all.

PGR: Imagine (for a disturbing and hallucinatory moment) that I’m a cigar-chomping Hollywood director – gimme your elevator pitch for Pulse. Stat!

PC: It’s a medical horror show, about conspiracy and dark experiments within the NHS.

PGR: OK, now the additional layer of challenge: how would you convince someone who doesn’t go much on supernatural or horror themes, or who doesn’t watch much genre TV (or maybe both) that they should pay attention to this series? What’s the USP?

PC: ‘Supernatural’ is the wrong word: our horror is technological in nature.  And if you like the gothic, if you like dramas about intense, disturbed relationships, I think you’ll find a lot to interest you in this.  The thing about horror that people forget is that it’s deeply about people and how they relate to each other.  I think that gets lost when a lot of modern horror movies are ironic thrill rides. We want you to love our characters, and to not want to see bad things happen to them.  And then bad things happen to them, and you’ll have to hope they get through it.  It’s about our female lead being challenged, and finding out how resourceful and hardy she is.

PGR: I believe this is your first series as lead writer, yes? What was the hardest thing to adjust to in that position? And by contrast, what’s the best bit?

PC: I’m not sure. It doesn’t feel like it’s all down to me, it’s still a team effort.  I really enjoy being part of this team, they feel like old school producers but with a modern sensibility.  I like the idea that I’m at the heart of putting together the plots for the rest of our season, and tying it all together at the end.  Working with other writers is going to be interesting too.

PGR: You’re a multi-format writer – television, comics, short stories, novels. Do you have a favourite mode, and if so, what is it that draws you back to it? What are the most enjoyable aspects of each, from your perspective as a creator?

PC: Prose is my favourite thing. A part of my brain actually finds writing it to be relaxing. It’s still work, but it sorts something out inside me. Comics and TV are both fun because of the different opportunities offered, in terms of telling stories in other people’s worlds, and because of the contributions of other people. Being a novelist must be lonely, but I hope to find that out by ending up just doing that in a few years.

PGR: There’s been a lot of discussion recently about TV series endings – more specifically, their tendency toward frustrating endings. How do you balance the creative constraints of the format with your preferences as a consumer of the same sort of material you produce? Do you find yourself thinking about what the audience will say about the shape of a plot while you’re writing it, or does that concern creep in at a later stage (if at all)?

PC: I’ve been frustrated with the reaction of a part of the audience towards the ending of Lost, which I loved. I think some people want a lecture with diagrams rather than drama. I’d like to hear how on earth they think some of the ‘answers’ they were after could ever be dramatised, let alone during a dramatic conclusion. ‘Jack, I love you, but… what were those polar bears doing here?’ (Especially when the answer to that one, and to a lot of these, is in the previous seasons.) You have to have an internal audience, but you can’t let them limit you. Indeed, you have to be willing to hurt them, because that’s the job of drama, to make them feel anxious, tense and, yes, often hurt.

PGR: With Pulse, one presumes you started with something of a blank slate, character-wise… but with your comics work and your writing for the Doctor Who franchise, you’ve had to take well-established characters and bring them to life, balancing a respect for the canonical (as policed by vocal and passionate fandoms) with the need to make them relevant to as wide an audience as possible. Can you tell us a little bit about how you developed Pulse in the early stages? For example, did you start from some character ideas, or did the characters emerge from the concept? Is it harder work, or is it a kind of liberation?

PC: I’m the third lead writer on Pulse, so you’d have to ask the very talented Ben Teasdale about a lot of that. I started from a script, and moved some way away from it. That process included a lot of character work, a lot of discussion about what sort of people we needed in the mix to give us potential conflicts and interests later in the series. Doing your own thing is always liberating, and I really feel like they’re mine now, but that’s a required feeling no matter what you’re writing. I feel Lex Luthor is mine right now, but I’m simply wrong about that!

PGR: That’s a point worth raising – the sense of ownership and, in some cases, entitlement that fans feel for characters. It’s probably as old a phenomenon as fandom itself, but the internet has made it easier for fans to state their minds in public. How do you feel that’s changing the attitudes and approaches of writers in various media? Do you think things were substantially different back in the “good old days”?

PC: I don’t think they were. Dickens and Conan Doyle found themselves under the same sort of pressure. Ownership is something an author strives to create between an audience and the characters. I just wish said audience were more conscious of the process sometimes, and didn’t feel so much that the characters had chosen to befriend them of their own volition.

PGR: As a fan yourself, do you ever find the writer part of you wrestling with the fan? I’m thinking particularly of Doctor Who here, which has a fandom that – from the outside looking in, at least – defends its darlings with the savagery of a mother wolf. If there was one writerly rule or necessity that you could explain to fandom, what would it be?

PC: That there’s real sexism, racism and homophobia in the media, and that hurting your favourite character and making you cry isn’t an example of it, but us doing our job properly. That’s the ‘not being conscious of the process’ bit I’m talking about above. There are people out there now actively campaigning for ‘drama’ that doesn’t hurt.

PGR: On the flipside of that, have there been any occasions where you felt the fans of a franchise you’ve worked on called you out with justification? Or, alternatively, any massive screw-ups made by other writers with a character or property that you’re a fan of yourself?

PC: Oh, loads. Back when I wrote Who novels I paid a lot of attention to reviews and adjusted what I was doing: it was pop music, those were the only audience. Nowadays, it’s much more complicated, you’re part of a whole group of lovely and talented people, whatever show or comic you’re working on, and you never want to say “we didn’t do as well as we could have” in public, because what gave me the right to speak for everyone else? (And no, I don’t have any particular thing in mind.)

I generally think that any fandom will, once we’ve got beyond the fact that the characters have got their brains in a vice, speak, when you listen to their collective average voice, and not the millions of individual voices all saying different things, only the truth. And that’s usually exactly the same truth the mainstream consumer will speak, only done with more awareness and concern about the text, and a bit more excited madness because of it.

PGR: Is that part of the appeal of writing novels and short stories, then – that chance for a sort of creative autonomy, to be king of your own sandbox and beholden to no one? Do you find yourself saving up ideas for your own prose work because you know you’ll be able to do it your way?

PC: I think that’s one of the appeals, although complete autonomy isn’t what you’re after, you always need someone to give you another perspective. It’s impossible to save up ideas like that; if an idea fits, you use it.

PGR: If you could work with any writer or writing team, dead or alive (or even imaginary), who would it be? What sort of project would you do?

PC: I’d like to have been at the Marvel Bullpen in the 1970s, when there was a huge mainstream audience and a lot of cutting edge work was being done. Not that there isn’t now, but there’s a flavour to the Bronze Age stuff that you don’t get anywhere else.

PGR: What do you see happening in the screenwriting world in a few decades time – for a start, will the internet kill off the traditional broadcast channels? Where will the money for good drama come from? Have you looked at any alternative funding models for your work before, or will you in the future?

PC: I think broadcast is indeed close to being over for the younger audience, though give them what they want and they still come flocking. But the TV audience is, on average, much older, so we’ll still have watercooler shows for a while yet. I think the iPad and its successors are about to change everything, and we’re about to see a lot of approaches as yet undreamed of arise from chaos.

PGR: Lastly, what do you hope will be your writerly legacy to the world – the thing you’re best remembered for?

PC: A novel, I hope.

Well, we’ll have to wait for Paul’s novels (though based on the short stories I’ve seen, they’ll be worth waiting for). But you don’t have to wait long for Pulse, as it’s going live at 9pm UK time on BBC3 tomorrow (or Thursday 3rd June 2010, for those of you who’ve come here from the future of the internet).

Visitors from the future may find that the trailer isn’t online at this link any more, but those of visiting in the present have no such excuse. So clickity-click, go watch it, like it on Facebook, all that stuff… and as Paul says, “please leave a comment, because it all helps towards us getting a series.”

Well, you heard the man. If you want quality television to get made, go support it.

China Mieville, on being asked whether TC&TC is an “interstitial” work:

I consider it a crime novel, above all. The question of whether or not it’s fantasy doesn’t have a stable answer; it’s to do with how it’s read, what people get out of it, and so on. Certainly I was very aware of genre, and of the fantastic, and there’s a certain kind of (I hope good-natured) teasing of readers about the whether-or-not-ness of a fantastic “explanation” for the setting. And other issues, I think, about the drive to world-creation, and the hankering for a certain kind of hermetic totality that you see in fantasy, and so on. Not I hope that that stuff is heavy-handed, but it’s there in my mind. I don’t mind whether other people think the book’s “splipstream,” or “interstitial,” or whatever. I think of it as within the fantastic tradition, but for me that’s always been a very broad church. Whether it’s “fantasy” in the narrower sense, I don’t much mind. Certainly I’m not abjuring the term—it would be ungrateful and ridiculous for me to distance myself from a set of reading and writing traditions, and a set of aesthetics and thematics that have furnished my mind since forever.

And on whether he has sympathies with allegorical readings:

Personally I make a big distinction between allegorical and metaphoric readings (though I’m not too bothered about terminology, once we’ve established what we’re talking about). To me, the point of allegorical readings is the search for what Fredric Jameson calls a “master code” to “solve” the story, to work out what it’s “about,” or, worse, what it’s “really about.” And that approach I have very little sympathy with. In this I’m a follower of Tolkien, who stressed his “cordial dislike” of allegory. I dislike it because I think it renders fiction pretty pointless, if a story really is written to “mean” something else—and I’m not suggesting there’s no place for polemical or satirical or whatever fiction, just that if it’s totally reducible in a very straight way, then why not just say that thing? Fiction is always more interesting to the extent that there’s an evasive surplus and/or a specificity. So it’s not saying there are no meanings, but that there are more than “just” those meanings. The problem with allegorical decoding as a method isn’t that it reads too much into a story, but that it reads too little into it. Allegories are always more interesting when they overspill their own levees. Metaphor, for me, is much more determinedly like that. Metaphor is always fractally fecund, and there’s always more and less to it. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that in no way do I say some of those readings aren’t valid (though I must say I have very little sympathy for the “East” versus “West” one, which is explicitly denied in the text more than once), but that I hope people don’t think the book is “solved” by that. I don’t think any book can be so solved.

Fascinating full interview by Paul Witcover, compiled for the TC&TC paperback edition backpages, available at The Inferior 4 + 1.

Yes indeed; the tables are turned on me as Charles Tan of Bibliophile Stalker puts me to the question, primarily about stuff I do in the genre fiction world but veering off into other stuff as well. Reading it may make you understand why I tend towards reticence around new acquaintances; I’ve seen the looks on faces when I just open up and waffle at full bore. As such, replying to Charles’ questions was a lot of fun.

It also took me around three hours. What can I say? I type slowly.

Briefly donning the meta-hat of intellectual narcissism, it’s interesting to see that snap-shot of my mind, taken as it was right at the end of last year, before I’d made the decision to go freelance full time. So many things have changed in just four fast months. Time flies when you’re living the dream, AMIRITE?

OK, so this opener isn’t strictly a photo, but it’s my blog, and I can break the rules any time I want to …

Cyberpunk Lit 101

That’s my alter-ego, Isambard Portsmouth (the scruffy bugger in the, er, cowboy hat), sitting in on a literature discussion class taking place in Second Life. The work being discussed was Neal Stephenson’s seminal Snow Crash … so we were stood in the metaverse talking about the text in which the concept of the metaverse was arguably first laid out. That appeals to my warped taste in philosophy; your mileage may vary.

It was an interesting discussion for one major reason; the kids on the course were US college age, so 18 or thereabouts. Which means that Snow Crash, or at least the bits that deal with technological change, doesn’t really shock them at all. The metaverse is just there, y’know? What’s the big fuss about?

Still, there was some interesting chat about burbclaves being a new way of couching sf’s traditional obsession with the (encounter with) / (fear of) the “other”, or the “alien”. And it’s interesting to see SL being used as a teaching platform, which I’m reliably informed is a real growth industry at the moment. More research required, methinks.

Self-mutilation for fun and fashion

The following is a special request from a reader who shall remain nameless. On finding out that I was booked in for a body piercing this week, they said “oh, well I hope you’re going to blog the evidence.” I wasn’t intending to, but for the cause of contemporary subcultural anthropology, how could I refuse?

However, because some folk read VCTB in their workplace, and some may simply be squeamish or uninterested, I will supply a link to follow rather than posting the pictures directly here.

Warning: the following link is possibly NSFW, and definitely not for trypanophobics – nor people who dislike the sight of the un-muscled torsos of 30-something blokes having pieces of metal stuck in them.

With the warning delivered, I can now present – a Flickr set of Paul Raven getting his nipple pierced.

We now return you to our regular programme.

Writing stuff: Alan Wilder interview, flash virginity lost

It’s been a slow week for writing jobs; nothing new to report. But I will point interested parties to the published version of my interview with Recoil’s Alan Wilder.

While no jobs have materialised this week, I have at least been out hunting for work. Why, only yesterday I applied for a writing position … albeit one doing interviews and similar for a, uh, “gentleman’s magazine” based in Second Life, but hey – if they’ll pay me, what the hell. It’s all portfolio.

And while not writing in the freelancing for money sense, I managed to complete and post “Downtime”, my first piece of Friday Flash Fiction, as per Gareth Powell’s new blogging meme. Whether it’s any good or not, I have no idea. I’m just pleased that I managed to finish and publish something I’m not utterly ashamed of. Go me!

Books and magazines seen this week

The use of the plural is a bit brash, really, as it’s only one of each. In the magazine intray, we have:

• Issue #39 of Obsessed With Pipework poetry quarterly

And a book I’ve long been looking forward to receiving:

Tobias Buckell – Ragamuffin (Tor Books, June 2007; ISBN-13: 9780765315076)

Tobias is a co-blogger at the recently resurrected Futurismic, but I’d have thoroughly enjoyed his first novel Crystal Rain even had I never heard of the guy before. I’m pretty confident that this sort-of-sequel is not going to disappoint. So, yet another gap to chisel into the reading schedule!

Miscellania

Well, thanks to a slow week (with two days out of action thanks to a cold), I find I’ve reported all but the most utterly insignificant events of my life in the past week in the material above – so, no miscellania. You must be gutted.

Which means all that remains is for me to bid you all a good weekend (with better weather than the last one, hopefully) before I wander off to fetch The Friday Curry Of Justice.

So, have a good weekend! Hasta luego!

Here’s a shot from back in May, which I’m becoming convinced was about as much summer we’re going to get this year:

I have no idea what sort of plant that is, nor the identity of the little critter either. I just liked the textures and colours. Taken at the Rock Gardens on Southsea Seafront, for them who’s interested.

Speaking of plants … I mentioned last week that the builders came and took away the old condemned gas fire from my flat. This permitted a rearrangement of bedroom furniture, with the end result that a greater number of my houseplants can now indulge in the south-facing window:

The view would be nicer if there wasn’t a house in the way, and if the garden flat hadn’t had its scruffy but verdant garden paved over when it was renovated a few years back. Selah. It’s better than bugger all.

A first step in freelancing

Well, I’ve been battering on about it for ages, and I’ve even written a few pieces that have paid me token amounts in the last six months, but this week represented a first for me – I sent out an invoice for some copywriting work.

A real invoice, for real work, for real money! I’m pretty stoked about it (though obviously I’ll be more so once the money arrives); while I’m nowhere close to making a steady income yet, this is a first step on what I hope will be a long road … a road that gets progressively less steep, with any luck. So, yay me! Wh00t, etc.

Catching up with ex-colleagues

Went out to an friend’s leaving party for an hour or two last night; he’s just left the same library that I departed three busy months ago. It was really nice to see the old gang, and made me realise that as much as I like my new job, I really miss the sense of community I had in the old one.

They’re great people doing a tough job for worse money, and good friends too. So hello, Portsmouth library staff, if any of you are reading. You guys totally rule.

Phonecalls with the (somewhat) rich and famous

As mentioned last week, I did a telephone interview with Alan Wilder on Tuesday – and I’m pleased to report that I got the sound recorded perfectly, transcribed the conversation and sent it in to my editor at Subba-Cultcha, who seems pretty pleased with it and will be running it (I assume) next week.

Alan Wilder was once described as being ‘the only musician in Depeche Mode’ before his departure from the band in 1996; nowadays he makes music under the moniker of Recoil, a studio-collaboration project that (sadly) never plays live. Mr Wilder was a charming and interesting interviewee, and I can heartily recommend the new album, subHuman – I was a fan before doing the interview.

Books seen this week

Another slow week on the reading materials front, with only one new title. I got an email midweek from a gentleman called Peter D. Smith, wondering if I’d be interested in seeing a copy of his new book that discusses the role of science fiction in inspiring the development of the Cold War ‘Cobalt bomb’ – the device central to the movie Dr Strangelove. It sounded pretty intriguing, so I invited him to send me a copy of it:

Smith, P. D. – The Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon. [pub. Allen Lane, May 2007; ISBN 978-0713998153]

It’s a real doorstop of a hardback, too – 576 pages! But it looks like a well-researched piece of work, and the sort of thing I can probably read in amongst other titles (which I still can’t do with fiction, for some reason). I’ll share my thoughts about it here when I’m done.

The ephemera of life

After a ten month wait, British Gas have finally managed to commit the fifteen keystrokes that mean I actually receive paper bills for my electricity! I’m tempted to wait for ten months before paying them any more money as a matter of principle, but bitter experience tells me that its not worth toying with utility companies, no matter how inept and cludgy their customer service systems are.

Futurismic is back up, though not fully operational – hard-working head honcho Jeremy managed to export the hefty back catalogue of posts from the evil-tempered Movable Type installation into a nice fresh WordPress database. Now all we need to do is get the backline machinery tuned up, and a nice new theme design, and we’re back in business.

Any web-dev types fancy taking on a low-budget WordPress theme hack? Get in touch and we can talk money – we don’t need anything too hardcore, and it’ll need to be cheap, because it’ll be coming out of my own pocket.

***

I think that’s about it – if that little lot hasn’t bored you to tears or killed a dull ten minutes at work, I don’t know what will. But my stomach tells me it’s time to go fetch The Friday Curry, so I’ll wish you all a good weekend – hopefully one blessed with better weather than we have had for the last week or so.

Hasta luego!

Dalian Hansen isn’t real in the way that you or I are real, but he’s at least as real as the person who created him as his Second Life persona chooses him to be. Dalian is about to become the first Second Life avatar to publish a book in which the majority of the plot takes place in Linden Labs’ notorious virtual world.

He’s not the first novelist in SL, nor is the book the first to deal with the concept of the metaverse, nor is it the first book to appear in full in SL – but the combination of the three is a first, as far as I can tell.

As the book inherently has a science fictional theme at its heart, not to mention being written by someone who is a virtual extension of a real person in a way that would have been unimaginable outside of science fiction less than a decade ago, I figured I’d like to chase him down and ask him some questions about the project.

***

PR: So, tell me a little about yourself – what do you do in SL, and in RL* (if you don’t mind talking about both)?

DH: “Dalian Hansen is an Avatar that exits in Second Life. Among his many virtual projects as a computer generated simulation, Dalian is the Creative Director for Tretiak Media LLC (a SL Development firm which owns the SLQuery.com data engine service), Architect for such in-world clients as IBM and ABN-AMRO, and former Creative Director of the popular monthly Second Life magazine, SLBusiness.

His Anima connects to the virtual world from Manchuria, China. This meat version of Dalian’s digital persona is recognized as an internationally award winning Creative Director and photographer. He is also one of the first foreigners to host a Chinese network news program in China.”

PR: Have you always been a fan of science fiction novels?

DH: “I was always a fan of science fiction stories, but as a kid I didn’t read many books. So TV, movies, and comics were my primary exposure to the genre. As my tastes matured, I found novels and my imagination to be more entertaining.”

PR: Any favourite authors or books?

DH: “I like the classic Science Fiction books from Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert and Philip K. Dick. These guys understood the science of the fiction, and its social effect. They built a world around the technology and made it believable. I would say that Dean R. Koontz remains a big influence on me. I have read over 40 of his books that go back to the beginning of his career, when he wrote pure science fiction.”

PR: Have you always wanted to be writer?

DH: “My written work has been published for years in some form, I just never made a living from it. As a kid, I had all these visual ideas but lacked the talent to express them with my hands by freehand drawing. So I turned to writing as a way to paint pictures with words. It also meant I was not dependant on anyone to create my vision.

As I got older, the computer was a big liberation for me. It was a tool that allowed me to finally express these ideas in pictures. As a result, I eventually became a Creative Director for major advertising agencies and made TV commercials and such for international clients. I still enjoy writing, but being a visual artist puts food on the table. Plus, writing takes a great deal of time and emotional commitment. It is like a relationship because it consumes the mind and requires a constant focus, at least for me.”

PR: Tell me why you’ve chosen to write directly about Second Life – a personal fascination, or marketing decision?

DH: “I wanted tell a story where Second Life was more than just an environment, it would be like a character. There have been many guide books about Second Life and short stories about virtual avatar adventures. But this is my attempt to bring the idea into mainstream fiction.

I took well documented points in Second Life history and combined them with real people and fictional characters to invent a mythical story and secret world. After all, reading a book is still the ultimate virtual reality for the human imagination, and establishing this lets Second Life exist in your mind and not just the computer. So I wanted to offer a fun story connected to Second Life in the spirit of old dimestore pulp fiction novels.

“Anima” is just the beginning of a bigger saga I would like to tell. I really don’t care about fame or profit from this or future books. It was just something I wanted to do. I set my mind to it and the accomplishment is its own reward. I don’t expect or care if the novel is a success. And even if it is an utter failure, I’d rather accept that than the regret of not trying.

After all, not very much in science fiction is completely unique or original. But many stories can evolve a popular theme into something fresh and entertaining. That is all I have tried to do and never intended to deliver a groundbreaking epic.”

PR: Do you see there being a long-term future for the written word as entertainment? And if so, do virtual worlds have a part to play in it?

DH: “Human history has been documented by the stories we tell. Whether by campfire in a cave or on a computer terminal connected by the world wide web. People have told stories long before the written word was invented, which basically turned spoken sounds into pictures. The written word is just a medium. It is our nature to tell stories, and the environment only changes how this is done or what we use to do it.

Printed books created an explosion of information in their day. The Internet has created another such revolution. Technology will always provide different opportunities, but I think the purpose remains the same. Whether a story is written, painted, acted, or virtually simulated, the method is meant to communicate. The written word has been a useful tool, and it stands to reason that it will continue to have a relationship and place even in the virtual age.”

PR: According to the synopsis I read, your novel deals with SL as being a very serious and very real part of the protagonist’s life – can you tell me how you see the penetration of synthetic worlds into meatspace going in the next decade?

DH: “No one could have guessed the effect of the Internet on world cultures. It is easy to draw parallels about the direction of the metaverse, but there are many side effects that cannot be predicted. For example, velcro was invented for the space missions. The internet was invented to protect American military computers from a nuclear attack. I think the bigger effect of the future metaverse is in these side effects. Sure, it will be a simulated world where we can interact. But with the freedom it offers, economic opportunities, and technology it inspires, these other effects will be more far reaching. The influences and habits of the Internet are now far more powerful than the tool itself.”

[* Note for meatspacers - RL is Second Life slang for 'real life'.]

***

I think the real take-away for me here is that someone so obviously deeply involved with the metaverse believes there’s a valid future for the written word as entertainment – an interesting contrast to the ironically technophobic Old Guard of the genre.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding with any book is in the reading. But Hansen seems to be able to talk the author talk pretty well, even if he doesn’t seem to bothered about the project being a commercial success, so I’ll be trying to fit it into my reading schedule at some point soon – I’m curious to see what he’s come up with.

A final morsel to chew over – if it’s possible for a virtual avatar to publish and promote a book, how will this affect the gender and cultural biases that currently plague genre fiction? Will initialising and anglicising names go out, in favour of writing under an entire assumed persona – one that isn’t necessarily even human in form, let alone gendered or coloured?

This is a little off-topic for VCTB, perhaps, but I feel I’m entitled to a bit of self-aggrandisement every once in a while.

So it is with great pride that I link you towards my (site-leader) interview with Bob Balch, guitarist of desert-rock veterans Fu Manchu, and my review of Fu Manchu playing Southampton’s Nexus with support from the excellent Valient Thorr.

Any VCTB regulars who read a lot of (or indeed any) music journalism, please give me some feedback – it’s hard to be objective sometimes, and my editor at that site is too busy to critique my work before publishing it …

… oooh, added bonus: my interview/review combo piece with Franz Triechler of Swiss industrial act The Young Gods is also available on teh intartoobs.

And I’m off to review Electric Six tomorrow night. Rock and roll, eh?

More metaversal antics from the world of books  - GalleyCat reports on publishers getting to grips with Second Life. Random House are going for the local library feel by starting a book discussion group for readers – with plans to get authors all av’d up and rolled out for digital meet-and-greets at some point down the line.

Transworld, however, seem to know the value of a good flame war. They’re screening a looped video of Richard ‘God Delusion’ Dawkins in-world talking about his latest controversial opus, and

“[o]utside the auditorium, Transworld have built two message walls, one for supporters of Dawkins’ thesis and one for the dissenters.”

That’ll be an interesting location to check out for the duration of the screenings, I’m thinking. Nothing like a faith fight to set the blood pressures soaring.

***

Meanwhile, The Guardian has been chatting to Philip Rosedale (aka Philip Linden) about Second Life, the runaway universe he has created. They try to draw him out on some hot topics, but he stays pretty cool under fire:

“TG: You are running a real economy but it is essentially a dictatorship, one headed by you, Philip Linden – as you are known in SL – the dictator.

PR: Yes, but it is a subtle question. If a country establishes a record of repossessing land for no real reason, then that colours the extent to which it’s a dictatorship. We haven’t done that. Could we shut the servers down if we get pissed off with somebody? Yes, we could do that but we haven’t and I think it is very unlikely that we will because it would so risk everything we have built.”

And on the porn issue?

“TG: I understand that porn is the biggest part of the economy.

PR: I don’t think it’s the biggest, but it’s hard to tell. Some of the transactions are person to person and some are transactions from vending machines. Sometimes the transactions have some text that allows us to tell what it is but people are so inventive that we don’t always know.”

As if being based on porn did any harm to the original internet! For a guy who’s currently under fire from the press (and constantly under fire from his user base) he deals with PR pretty smoothly. But the sooner the open-source iterations of the software get going, the safer a position he’ll be in – talking a good game is fine, but pretending to be deaf has never helped any business. SL has some serious operational problems, and its regular population are getting very annoyed by being continually fobbed off with filigree while the bugs go unsquashed.

***

That’s not stopping people developing it as a platform for more than hyper-real kinky antics and combat sims, though. TerraNova has an interview with Rebecca Nesson, who is using SL as a platform environment for distance learning classes that have previously been run on websites and via email:

“I think that the Second Life had quite a lot of advantages for people. One of the main things is that Second Life really allowed us to create a sense of class community — something that develops fairly naturally in a face-to-face class. So students appeared at class and had that chance to meet each other, something that rarely, if ever, happens in distance education classes [using] previous technologies. And that helped keep students engaged in the class.”

Think about that for a second, and bear in mind the flood of overseas students that come to the UK (or the US) to be educated. That’s not a cheap proposition for, say, a Chinese or Korean family, even a well-off one. A virtual platform like SL could become a much cheaper way of getting the same education – why fly half-way round the globe when you can just log on to your PC for four or five hours a day? The world is getting flatter – and I don’t mean geographically.

***

And, as I keep saying, this will effect authors eventually. The effects of the internet and the Long Tail are already causing fundamental changes to the lives of independent musicians, for example:

“Along the way, [Jonathan] discovered a fact that many small-scale recording artists are coming to terms with these days: his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the “you rock!” variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton’s love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he’s now feeling guilty about being rude.”

I know a lot of writers resist the temptations of blogging for exactly that reason, and it’s a logical approach. Whether or not that invisibility will hinder their career (because nothing gets Google juice like blogging regularly) or help it (will an air of mystery have a cachet of cool in a transparent world?) remains to be seen.

But see it we will – and Second Life (or something like it) will be the next step on from this, as Jason Stoddard suggests. New formats for a new era, perhaps?

The inclusiveness debate seems to be gathering pace to become the current blazing topic of the sf-nal blogosphere. I’m keeping my mouth shut quite firmly – not because of any particular shameful or virtuous opinions that I feel I should hide from view, but because I believe that in these sorts of situations, if you feel you have nothing original or constructive to say, you’re best off keeping your lip buttoned. Jonathan McCalmont has a good overview of the situation, however.

I mean, I can see there’s a male/white/Western/Anglicised bias in sf, but I have no idea how the hell we should go about changing that situation. I’m not even sure if it can be done purposefully, either – I think it may be one of those things that can only change slowly over time as generations succeed each other. It puts me in mind of a quote from Poincaré, talking about the way that scientific theories and ideas tend to stay in currency while their progenitors are still around:

“Science advances … funeral by funeral.”

***

Talking of views dissenting from the canon, I thoroughly enjoyed the channelled ire of Liz Henry taking the freshly-fueled chainsaw of feminism to the old wood of Anne McCaffery’s Pern novels:

“The main thing Lessa seems to do in her capacity as Weyrwoman is to serve food. She’s always deftly serving F’lar’s dinner. She pours the klah during important meetings. She clears the table a lot too, and rings for food. Which appears magically from a dumbwaiter from the Lower Caverns where all the slutty kitchen women live. You could go through the book and mark up all her waitress moments.”

I cut my sf-nal teeth on those books, but you don’t read from a very critical perspective at eight years old. Hindsight is a curious thing.

And talking of feminism and diversity in sf, Cecilia Tan has reposted an old interview she did with Octavia Butler, which is well worth the time it takes to read:

“What do you think is going to happen to the human race in the next millennium?

Pretty much what is happening now. Why should anything different happen? There will be technological innovations and biological innovations, but things will be essentially how they are. The future is not some mystical magical place. The future is moment to moment. Thirty years ago we didn’t have the computers we do now, but we’re still doing the same things.

Meaning, even if the power grid collapses on January first, human beings are still going to be pretty much the same.

The human being is essentially lazy.”

Smart lady; I must read some of her books soon. Or rather, I’ll add her to the ever expanding list of authors I must pay attention to – a list that grows in inverse proportion to the amount of time I have available for reading things I want to read. *Sigh*