Category: News

Same book, same publication date (September 2016), two different approaches. The one at top is Gollancz’s UK edition; the other is Titan’s edition for the USA. I have been waiting a long time for the Gollancz cover to be finalized, partly my fault because at first I said I liked the original draft, then changed my mind. I was away travelling for much of May, and assumed things would happen while I was away. At last, mid-June, I think these two are now the ones.

The choice of cover illustrations is often a vexing one for the writer — at least I find it so. I am not bereft of visual imagination, but whenever I try to reconceive something I have written in visual terms I find myself irresistibly drawn to the mental images I formed when actually writing. As these are usually imprecise as to detail (they are a kind of imagined soupy mix of ideas and characters) they are not much help.

This is of course why publishers have art departments, who supposedly regard the work with fresh eyes, and commission images from that position.

I have always rather liked the traditional paper-wrapped books they use to publish in France: a kind of grey or beige or off-white, with just the title and the author’s name. Whenever I tentatively raise this idea, the publishers clearly think I’m a bit mad.

I had been hoping to put up an early image of the covers (UK and USA) of my next novel, The Gradual. The Titan cover for the USA has been agreed, but Gollancz and I are still discussing what should go on the British cover. I should like to place the two images side by side, as they are of equal importance to me. Maybe in the near future? I have now seen and corrected the proofs for the UK edition – publication set for September 15.

Earlier this month we took a short holiday in the highlands of Scotland. It is almost impossible to convey the sense of beauty, awe and peacefulness you gain from seeing so much open scenery, so here are a few photos of what we so briefly visited. We returned refreshed, but with an unmistakable feeling that the Devon countryside, which normally we relish, now seemed a bit, well, flat …

None of these pictures would make a suitable cover for the novel, by the way.

 

Storm Imogen blew the vanes off our local wind turbine. It left the rest of the place a bit wet underfoot. All these pictures were taken within 500 metres of our house.

Here is the cover by Valancourt Books for their US paperback reissue of The Space Machine, which was first published by Faber & Faber some 40 years ago. (Yes, that’s FORTY. It’s not the sort of sentence I’m keen on writing. Read it quickly, please.) Valancourt’s edition is going on sale next month, March 2016.

Unlike a child that might have been born in 1976, The Space Machine is 40 years old only by date: it is not an adult, certainly not a middle-aged adult, but a child of its time. My time, in fact: it was my fourth novel, which I started writing more or less straight away after completing Inverted World. It is to my eyes still fresh to read, although I know that if I were to try to write something like it now I would probably muck it up. Lacking self-consciousness can be an advantage.

By the way, this year marks the 150th anniversary of H. G. Wells’s birth. His life and mine overlapped by just over three years, so I inappropriately think of him as a contemporary. I realize now, with hindsight, that my writing of this novel might seem like a bumptious act. At the time, part of what impelled me was the realization that I was then more or less the same age as Wells had been when he was writing his scientific romances — I still consider those to be his best work in fiction.

This is the cover for Valancourt’s new paperback edition of A Dream of Wessex, which they will be publishing in the USA in March.

It is good to see the novel published under its real title at last — when it came out the first time the American publisher (Scribner) changed it to The Perfect Lover. This was partly my own fault — my choice of earlier titles in the USA had turned out to be contentious and I reacted wrongly to that. Two of the titles I had put on my earlier books had led to changes in the USA. Harper & Row changed Fugue for a Darkening Island to Darkening Island, then Inverted World to The Inverted World. Although both these decisions were only slightly mystifying, and the changes only seemingly minor, they led inevitably to confusion in databases and catalogues. I was already fed up with the argument I had to have with the publisher every time (I won two of the arguments: Indoctrinaire and The Space Machine went out in the US with the correct titles), and later I was also fed up with explaining what the difference was to bibliographers, librarians, and so on. It went on for years.

When I completed A Dream of Wessex my then literary agent said that no one outside the UK would have the faintest idea what the word ‘Wessex’ meant, and he proposed a title change. He eventually suggested Future Perfect, which seemed OK for a time — the manuscript went out under that title. Then the British publisher, Faber & Faber, said: ‘No, this is no good.’ They preferred the original! A familiar problem immediately returned, this time in reverse. But to my irritation, even the concession about not alarming American readers by mentioning ‘Wessex’ led to a new argument about the title. Scribner wanted a harmlessly bland formulation, and their change soon seemed not only inevitable but by this time, for me, it was habitual and traditional. The phrase ‘the perfect lover’ is actually used in the novel, but it’s a passing remark — no more than that, a momentary insight, a reflection by one of the characters.

Valancourt’s smart new edition will, I hope, put an end to all that. There is a selection here of the reviews of the original Faber edition — this includes an image of the Faber cover, which is, incidentally, based on a little-known watercolour by the painter Paul Nash.

Meanwhile, here is the cover illustration Valancourt have put on their US paperback edition of my 2002 novel The Separation. This was published back in June 2015, but for some reason the copies Valancourt sent to me did not reach me. I only became aware recently that the book was already out. Until now, or at least until June last year, The Separation had never achieved a mass-market paperback in the USA, so this new release is especially pleasing to me.

The Separation is a novel set during WW2, but it’s the part of WW2 that I have always found interesting: the period when Britain ‘stood alone’, when the world war was actually a European war (but no less serious for that), a time when the USA, the USSR and Japan were not yet involved. After June 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded Russia, it became a worldwide conflagration, more deadly and damaging, a grim conflict with consequences for everyone on the planet. My novel is anti-war in intent.

Here are some of the reviews of The Separation, when first published in hardcover, in the UK and the USA.

If you have not bought a computer printer this year, an internet router or modem, a television set, a hair-dryer, a vacuum cleaner – all is well. If you are thinking of replacing the one you have, read on!

Sometimes the law changes inconspicuously: you hear something on the news, and you understand it and take it in, but it doesn’t have the press of urgency and so within a short time you tend to forget it. The consequence of this kind of forgetfulness has just happened to us.

A couple of years ago we bought a new coffee filter machine. We found one on special offer in Morrisons: £10 for a basic unbranded model. It worked swiftly and made good coffee, and with its large pot (which the manufacturers call a ‘carafe’) we had something that did exactly what we wanted it to do. In short, it sat quietly in the kitchen, exhaling a pleasant smell and from time to time muttering little contented noises. Hot coffee was on hand all day.

Last week it brewed its final pot, the heating element under the hot plate at last burning out. We ordered a replacement from Amazon. Familiar brand name, more or less basic design. (Not £10, though.) It arrived safely the next day. Unsuspecting of an event that was to waste our time for the next couple of days, we set it up, ran clean water through it, then made a pot of coffee.

Coffee filter machines are basic technology, whose simplicity is quickly grasped by anyone who uses them. The water is drawn down from a small reservoir, passes through an insulated heating element in the base, and is then expelled upwards to a nozzle where it drips on to the coffee grounds in a filter beneath. The fresh coffee percolates into the carafe, where it is kept warm by the same heating element under the hot plate. The new machine did all this, but we couldn’t help noticing that it had a number of extra buttons, a timing device, special lights, etc.

While we were still looking at the manual the main special light went out. The hot plate began to cool. We turned it on again. Then we noticed that our radio had stopped working. When we moved the coffee machine away the radio started working again. The new coffee machine was clearly emitting not pleasant smells and little contented noises, but a death-ray of radio interference. We were still trying to find somewhere we could have both appliances (in a kitchen, available free surfaces close to a power socket are not plentiful) when the coffee machine turned itself off again.

Amazon has an excellent, hassle-free returns service, which I recommend.

The next day we went into our local market town to find a replacement, one we could look at in the shop to make sure it wasn’t afflicted with the same level of high-tech irritation. The only problem was that none of the four shops we visited (including a huge general-supplies warehouse on the edge of town) had any in stock. This was surprising – we had assumed filter machines were common consumer products. We ended up driving a further distance to Barnstaple, where there is a branch of Currys. They had two models on sale: we bought the simpler, cheaper one. This too had extra buttons, a digital clock, LEDs that were said to change colour.

We ran fresh water through it, then made a pot of coffee. The radio continued to work, but a few minutes later the filter machine turned itself off.

It was only then that a faint, distant memory arose of some EU-inspired legislation change. A visit to Google confirmed the worst (here and here). From the beginning of 2015, many electric or electronic devices aimed at the consumer market have to turn themselves off if they are not used after a certain, fixed period of time. The reason: an urge to conserve energy, not in itself a bad thing, but because the new rules are aimed at consumers there is nothing we can do about it. There is no discussion, nothing to argue about – climate change is threatening the world. Things are being made differently now.

Governments, local authorities, big corporations are of course free to continue to waste energy however they like. A visitor to any big city after dark will see a blaze of lights, signs, displays, engines running, things being cooked, devices turning, vehicles rushing around. A night flight across North America or Europe will reveal the glare of city lights, which are sometimes so bright they dazzle even from five miles above. Hundreds of thousands of aircraft fly constantly above North America and Europe and everywhere else, millions (perhaps now billions) of cars and other vehicles gulp down fuel every minute of the day. There’s practically no point in trying to list the many ways in which energy is wasted constantly, by everybody, everywhere. The present British government is drawing back from supporting renewable energy sources, and now plans to ruin the environment of the countryside forever with plans to frack in quest of two or three years’ worth of “independent” fossil energy. For these reasons, our little one-kilowatt coffee maker has to turn itself off to prevent global warming.

My next modem, should the current one expire, will turn itself off if “no main task is performed”. Our vacuum cleaner, which noisily, swiftly and efficiently sucks up the usual weekly detritus of dust, bogies, cat hair, etc., will have to be replaced one day by an “eco-friendly” low power machine, which will take twice as long to do the same job and no doubt use up more electricity in the process. I have spent the last two weeks trying to find a decent light-bulb for my reading lamp, one which is bright enough to read a book by, but does not cast a pattern of variegated illumination on the page. I did not realize the difficulty of buying suitable light sources was a symptom of the same cause that now prevents me from having a supply of hot coffee all day: the meddling, inappropriate urge of some mad bureaucrat in Brussels, unresisted by a compliant British government, who wants to control how ordinary people use the precious fossil resources of the world.

This was of course why we had to search around Devon for a shop that carried even a small stock of these now more or less unsuitable coffee machines – people don’t want to buy them any more. And it was also, I now realize, why Morrisons were selling off their old stock at knockdown prices last year. I wish we had bought ten of them.

Patrick Ness’s extraordinary fundraising endeavour for the migrants (Save the Children) has passed the half-million pounds mark. It is genuinely mind-boggling. Rejoice, and join in the excitement here.

But although those Syrian families and lost children are justifiably grabbing the headlines, don’t forget that the crisis on the British doorstep, a short distance away in Calais, has not gone away. Mary Jones’s initiative is to build up the little library that has been created in the migrants’ encampment. This is about somewhere to find shelter, somewhere to read a book, somewhere for the kids to play and learn, somewhere to learn a new language, somewhere to keep warm as winter approaches. Please see my earlier post here.

Mary Jones wants to raise a modest £10,000 — she has recently passed £3,000, with just over two weeks to go. Her project is flexibly funded, so every donation will reach her, even if the main target is not reached. This is a link direct to Mary’s fundraising page.

Predicting the future – events, developments, discoveries – is not the main aim of writing speculative fiction. All fiction is made up, so when you make up a story set a few years into the future you inevitably throw in a few guesses about such things. Most of them, nearly all of them in fact, turn out to be wrong. But every now and then, by accident, by following a hunch, by a stroke of luck, we get things right.

By exactly that sort of good or bad luck, I now witness an upheaval of historical proportions taking place across Europe. Some forty-five years ago my second novel, Fugue for a Darkening Island, dealt metaphorically (as I saw it) with such an upheaval. Things were bad in the novel – I believe them to be just as horrific in reality. More so, in fact. I make no claim for the novel, but the Gollancz paperback edition of 2011 has a new Introduction that attempts to set the context.

On a matter of much less importance:

The Met Office in the UK has decided that from this winter all storms arriving in Britain and Ireland will be given names, in the same way as cyclones in the Pacific and hurricanes in the Atlantic are named. They are soliciting suggestions from the public for a naming system in alphabetical order. I modestly suggest that the search could be a short one as I have already created a unique naming system. I think the weather people should adopt it straight away.

In my novel The Adjacent (which came out in 2013) I described a series of violent weather systems, partly a result of climate change, called temperate storms. The book is set some time after the season has begun, so the earliest named in the book is TS Danielle Darrieux. Mme. Darrieux is followed by Edward Elgar, Federico Fellini and Graham Greene. Soon to come would be TS Hermann Hesse, but the story moved on and Herr Hesse was not required. Before the book begins, northern Europe has already been ravaged by the (undescribed and unmentioned) TS Alan Alda, Brigitte Bardot and Charlie Chaplin.

The difficulty of finding a storm with the initials I. I. was something I shrank from, but considered that eight storms were probably enough for one winter in Europe, and certainly more than enough for the purposes of my novel.

Something I discovered while researching this subject was that the naming of storms was started by the American author George R. Stewart, in his novel Storm (1941).