Guest Blogger: Ed Greenwood

Ed Greenwood is the bestselling author of The Falconfar trilogy. He created the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons, has written over twenty Forgotten Realms novels, and has also written the Novels of Niflheim series for Tor Books. Ed has written us a guest-blog for today, all about why he writes so prolifically in his favourite genre - fantasy!

WHY I WRITE FANTASY

When I was a kid, there was no such thing as 'fantasy' on bookstore shelves.
No, I'm not older than dirt. The world had television when I was a kid, just not colour television. We had phones, too; they came in black, and had rotary dials, and you used them to talk to people—just talk. There were multiple postal deliveries in a day. We walked uphill both ways, to and from schoo... Ahem. Or so it seemed.
It was 1966 when I started to write fantasy. My local booksellers back then had some fantasy tales to sell; they just didn’t call them fantasy. Stories with magic were 'fairy tales' and shelved with other childrens' books; older stories involving magic, such as King Arthur, were in the classics section; horror tales lurked in a few lurid-cover magazines; Conan buckled his swash on the shelves of the action-adventure thrillers (near James Bond) or with the lurid mags next to the, ah, 'men's' magazines; and The Lord of the Rings, which was to charge far and wide across bookselling, hosts of imitators galloping in its wake, and thereby found the modern fantasy genre (often shoved together on the store shelves with science fiction), was then deemed 'literature' or 'mainstream fiction' and shelved there, under 'T.'
So fantasy didn't live in the bookstores so much as it hid out there. Fantasy lived in the public library (similarly overlooked as in the book shops), and thrived in my father's den.
The den was a dim, cozy place crammed with books, where war novels and Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples jostled with Tolkien and wartime pulp murder mysteries on the shelves. On some covers, men wearing fishbowls on their heads battled tentacled Martians with rayguns in one hand and scantily-clad women draped over them or wrapped around their feet. On others, dragons snarled into Conan's face as he snarled back (sword in hand, and yep, women who'd soon catch cold due to their textile-saving attire wrapped around him).
For reasons having to do with basic human nature, those colourful covers were what grabbed my attention.
Not exclusively, mind. I read everything. I mean EVERYTHING, including all of the radar physics theses and papers that were my father's professional books. Time and again I would rush to my father with my latest find and ask if there were sequels—and time and again he would tell me that the author of whatever I was waving excitedly was dead, and if I wanted to read any more about that iron-thewed hero or sultry seductress, I’d have to write it myself.
So I did. Some hundred and thirty-plus books later, I still am.
So that’s the short version of why I write fantasy.
(Even when I was five I didn’t buy the line “Then they lived happily ever after.” Reportedly I usually answered it, when my grandparents or aunts were reading me fairy tales, with, “Yes, but what happened NEXT?”
So that’s what I write about: what happens next.

YES, BUT WHY FANTASY?

Well, as it happens, I write all sorts of things, from Lovecraftian horror to pulp adventure to steampunk and space opera. With plenty of oddbeat mystery whodunits and modern urban horror and sf thrown in, for good measure.
Yet fantasy remains my first love. Partly for the sheer romance of crumbling castles, dragons diving out of the sky like great long-tailed bats with riders on their backs, knights in gleaming armor, and wizards... ah, yes: magic that works, instantly, in whizzbang spells that can topple keeps and blast those dragons to bones and ashes... or make those bones rise up again and reassemble into skeletons that obey the necromancer animating them.
To say nothing of swords that wait patiently, floating in midair in tombs for centuries, ancient curses that cause graves to open and long-imprisoned evil wizards to stalk the lands seeking revenge... all of that.
And partly for something else. Good fiction is about moral choices. Or rather, good stories almost always involve characters the reader cares about taking stands out of loyalty or bravery, and literally defending or fighting for principles or vengeance or a good and just cause. Fantasy allows a writer to strip away some of the frustrations and obstacles and gray areas in a civilized modern society and step into settings where the swing of a sword or the casting of a spell can have an instant, dramatic effect. Where gallantry—and villainy—can be clearly seen, where grim last stands can be highlighted for us all to experience.
Things shine or glow or gleam more brightly in a fantasy story. Something within me thrills to that.
There are other reasons, too. A fantasy writer can satirize real-life people, places, things, attitudes, politics, fashions, attitudes, faiths, and more without naming names and upsetting readers. As with science fiction, in a fantasy one can take a step back from real-life elements yet still ask “What if?” or warn “If this goes on—” about them. One has the breathing room to examine possible outcomes and perils without raising readers’ hackles with a too-direct criticism of something from real life.
I often enjoy using that room, even if only in the background, or in subplots that harmonize with the main storyline. (I love the feeling that there's a lot more going on in this fantasy setting than just my story.)
There’s also a trait of fantasy that appeals to my sense of justice. Established tropes of centuries of fantasy (moral lessons, poetic justice, and the like) let a fantasy reader revel in righting wrongs, smashing down evil, and leaving writer and reader alike feeling darned good about how things turn out. Escapism from the grit and dark moments of our lives, reassuring the reader that good can win, in the end, and life doesn’t always reward only the nastiest, greediest, most ruthless, or most handsome.
The aging non-athletic and less than beautiful strikingly nerd in me enjoys that.

WHY FALCONFAR?

Some readers may know me for my many books, both novels and game sourcebooks, set in the most famous fantasy world I created: the Forgotten Realms®.
A few readers may be familiar with other fictional settings I’ve invented, such as Aglirta or Castlemourn, or know that I happily participate in writing Arthurian tales, Sherlockians, and other forays into the fictional worlds of others.
Writing fantasy fiction that explores other worlds than our real one is what I do.
Which says nothing at all about this world, Falconfar, and this trilogy that looks over the shoulder of a befuddled non-hero (he’s not an anti-hero, he’s Everyman), Rod Everlar, as he gets caught up in a vaguely medieval, magic-happens fantasy world he thought he created.
So why Falconfar? Well, some readers have looked at the setup (fantasy writer sells world to large corporation, bad things happen) and decided I was writing about myself and the Realms. This trilogy was my poke at “evil” real-world conglomerates, as it were.
That’s not true at all. Really.
This is actually a story idea I’ve been kicking around since the mid 1970s—before most people knew anything about Dungeons & Dragons® and anyone but me had ever heard of the Realms.
I am not taking shots at any real person or company.
Rather, I was aiming at something that had bugged me about real-world-guy-steps-into-fantastic-setting stories from John Carter of Mars to that Connecticut Yankee who visited King Arthur’s Court: how is it that the real-world-guy always speaks or understands the language either right away or after a quick chapter of being taught (Lord Kalvan)?
And understand all about the world (or if he doesn’t, miraculously doesn’t offend anyone badly enough to get killed outright)? And is able to wow the natives with fountain pens and other everyday items and knowledge (such as when an eclipse is going to happen)?
And why do all these mild-mannered bumblers instantly become great heroes, or soon become the best swordsman on two planets?
So I wanted to explain away the first problem by having my protagonist be an expert on the fantasy world, yet not an infallible know-it-all (because he’s not the only “creator” influencing the world, so it can surprise him and hold danger for him and therefore be interesting for a reader), and at the same time look at someone who’s basically a good person, but is no hero and is never going to become one.
I also wanted to take a poke at two fantasy clichés from those old books: the super-powerful wizard (everyone thinks Rob is one, but he’s nothing of the kind, and we get to see that even the real mighty and dastardly wizards have feet of clay) and that scantily-clad lass clutching the feet of the hero: Rob right away encounters his own pleading lass, but she can mop the floor with him whenever she pleases; if any character’s going to clutch ankles and plead, it’s going to be Rob, not the other way around.
Why do I want to take these pokes and drop these notions and elements into a pot and give it a good stir?
Well, for the same reason I always want to write a book: to have fun. While telling a hopefully entertaining story, that surprises me at least a little when I’m writing it. In short, I want to get on a (literary rather than literal) horse, go for a ride, and see what happens.
So I did that.
With me? Let’s go for a ride, and see what happens...

SPOILING THE STORY

No, I’m not going to ruin Falconfar for you. I am going to chat a little about what side-trails I didn’t ride down, and what stories I’ve left untold.
Despite spending more than forty-five years detailing another fantasy setting, I happen to agree with Professor Tolkien (and many other writers) that a writer should leave a reader wanting more, or at least able to glimpse more of the world around the story. Bits of the world the narrative never visits, that we can see but never reach; a wider world beyond.
So I provided some glimpses, and wrote a little more about every place that got mentioned than appears in Falconfar and its predecessors, Dark Lord and Arch Wizard. So they fall feel real to me, alive and waiting for other stories to happen that I may never get around to telling. (If this world doesn’t seem real to me, how am I ever going to make it seem real to you?)
Part of that feeling of reality is also imparted by something else in the storytelling. I hate “too tidy” all–loose-ends-wrapped-up plots, where the bounds of credulity are strained by coincidences and the all-too-visible Mighty Hand of the author taking care of every last little conflict and mystery and injustice, so it can all end in a triumphant fanfare with villains slain or repentant, heroes victorious and marrying or being redeemed or ascending the throne or facing down the sand-in-face-kicking bullies of their childhood... ugh. Too cute. I don’t have to write those endings; Dame Barbara Cartland already wrote a lot of them. Very well, too.
So there are some loose ends here, some villains who get away, still very much active and villainous, to leave the reader wondering (and perhaps looking back over their shoulder a time or two; such prudence should always be encouraged...)
I will also deserve to be hag-cursed if I add one more novel to the groaning shelves of fantasies that take themselves too seriously, without any hint of humour in evidence anywhere between their covers. You don’t have to think my feeble attempts at being funny really are funny—but you do have to see that characters in Falconfar make jokes (some of them very bad), take pratfalls, and have no rust at all on their senses of irony. In Falconfar as in real life, people who take themselves too seriously are dangerous.
Which leads me to two down-at-heel rogues who are all too often buffoons, secondary characters throughout the Falconfar trilogy who are engaging and hopefully amusing and who obviously have more interesting days ahead, if someone doesn’t soon kill them, handing them fates richly deserved. I speak, of course, of Garfist Gulkoun and Iskarra Taeravund, a mismatched and rustic couple who roister through Falconfar and its prequels fulfilling the role that my father always assigned to my sisters and myself, when he sighingly referred to us as “the gravediggers to my Hamlet.” Long may they roister, scamp, and stroll, perhaps in other, later tales than this one.
Yet there is one thing that I want to convey above all others: readers, please be welcome in my world.
I made Falconfar for you.

~Ed Greenwood

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Guest Blog: Gail Z. Martin's "Days of the Dead" Tour

Hey all,

As you may remember, Gail Z. Martin - author of The Chronicles of the Necromancer (including The Summoner, The Blood King, Dark Haven and Dark Lady's Chosen and, with Orbit Books, her new title The Sworn) - likes to celebrate Hallowe'en every year with a big ol' tour of blogland, guest-blogging hither and thither and generally getting her internet self out there.

You can go to her official Days of the Dead Tour 2010 webpage to see her progress, including guest blogs, free chapters, giveaways, and podcasts readings. You can also jump on her Twitter account (@GailZMartin), where she's answering questions from readers and throwing up trivia questions every day.

Anyway, we've been gracious enough to let Gail take over our own little soapbox for a few minutes, and are proud to present:

Do we need death to make sense
of the world in truth and fiction?

Gail Z. Martin

OK, I write about a necromancer, so maybe I spend more time thinking about death and its variations than a lot of people. As an American, I know I spend a lot more time thinking about mortality than my fellow countrymen, because “some” is a lot more than “none” and in the States, thinking about death is outsourced to insurance salesmen, morticians and the clergy, so that there is more time for everyone else to shop.

I’ve started to reconsider the wisdom of our national aversion to admitting mortality, because I do believe that a culture that is afraid to think about death becomes neurotic in other ways because of that fear. Of course, a fear of dying also spawns a lucrative side-industry in everything from vitamins to Botox to cosmetic surgery, because we want to believe that dying only happens to old people, and if we never look old we’ll never be old and so the Grim Reaper will leave us alone. (Unfortunately, this has led to an oversupply of people who now look perpetually surprised, but that’s another problem.)

Looking Surprised: The little-known antidote to death.

For a nation that believes that death is optional if you just find the right pharmaceutical, we spend an inordinate amount of waking hours indulging in fictional representations of death, while doing everything possible to avoid thinking about the real thing. We also seem to have outsourced death to Hollywood and the entertainment industry. And did I mention a national fascination (and perhaps fetish) for vampires?

V-v-v-vampires?

Halloween (in the Trick-or-Treat variety) is a huge national holiday, arguably second only to Christmas in its utterly secular and commercialized celebration, and probably larger than Christmas in the consumption of beer. Come October 31, the vast majority of American children between ages 2 and 18 will grab a pillowcase or a plastic pumpkin and go door to door begging for candy, wearing a variety of costumes that range from Disney-cute to Scream-frightful. Bars and nightclubs will host huge Halloween-themed drinking bashes where there will be plenty of costumed participants, most going for a horror-glam look. Haunted house attractions will open the first weekend in October and run through Halloween, drawing around-the-block crowds with movie-quality special effects and an ever upwards-spiraling gore factor. Party stores not only stock up on fake blood and vampire fang prosthetics, but out-do each other with seasonal decorations including mangled body parts, zombie children and full-size animated robotic movie serial killers. Catalogs offer life-size mummies, vampires in coffins, bodies in spider cocoons, and headless horsemen. Pretty much every major city and large urban cemetery boasts at least one guided ghost tour.

Hallowe'en... the free market way!

I find this all pretty interesting because all the while, “real” death is something that people here shy away from discussing. Extremely high rate of gun-related fatalities? Any discussion is likely to start a fist fight. Higher-than-necessary mortality rates due to uneven access to affordable medical care? Until the recent Health Care Reform Act to correct the problem, not something most people worried about, and now a highly controversial election issue. Teen suicide rates and infant mortality rates (both high for a developed nation)—not on the conversational topic list. Grieving a recently deceased loved one? According to some in the psychology field, you’ve got two weeks to get over it, and then you need to take a Prozac and shut up already. Cemeteries have been replaced with “memorial gardens” with mow-over plaques instead of headstones. The morgue visits the home of the newly departed in an unmarked panel van, so as not to upset the neighbors with a hearse. Viewings and memorial services take place in rented professional locations, such as funeral homes and churches, instead of the front parlor.

Somehow, I think there has to be a happy medium (no pun intended) between Victorian death-obsession and modern America’s death-aversion. I also have this nagging suspicion that the less we talk about real death, the more we seem to need to gorge on depictions of fictionalized and sensationalized mortality. Whatever you try not to think about becomes an obsession.

A couple of happy mediums.

In fiction, the way a character and his/her society views death tells us a lot about the world in which the story is set. Culture and rituals around life and death underscore a fictional world’s deepest held fears and values, and influence the decisions and behaviors of characters. We see the influence of beliefs about life and death much more clearly in fiction than we can see them in real life because we ultimately stand apart from fiction, where the familiarity of real life and our own culture make it difficult to see what’s really there. One of the things that makes writing about a necromancer and a society where ghosts, the undead and other supernatural manifestations are real intriguing for me is that it gives me an interesting sandbox to explore and think about issues that are all-too-often left undiscussed. And maybe, just maybe, the same thing is what attracts readers to the growing body of paranormal fiction as well.

"Growing" doesn't say the half of it.

Thanks for reading this post — it’s part of my week-long Days of the Dead blog tour, so please catch the rest of my posts, contests, giveaways and goodies at ChroniclesOfTheNecromancer.com and my other partner sites. You’ll also find free downloads from my books, as well as freebies from some of my author friends as Trick-or-Treat favors.

Featured treat #1: downloadable excerpt from Corvus by Paul Kearney, plus a preview chapter of my new book, The Sworn.

Blood in the Water - Juliet McKenna

Juliet McKenna's Blood in the Water is now out in all good bookshops, in the US, Canada, and in the UK (despite, we hear, the best efforts of the UK snowpocalypse). Blood in the Water is McKenna's thrilling second addition to her 'Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution' series, which began with the critically acclaimed Irons In the Fire.

In Blood in the Water, the exiles and rebels who were determined to bring peace to the struggling people of Lescar discover that the dukes and duchesses in the kingdom won't give up their power without a fight...

"If you're not reading McKenna, you should be... Sorcery, mercenaries, and the little people rising up against their oppressors. I mean, what more could you want?"
-Kate Elliott

"Shows McKenna at her best, combining politics, violent action, and a concern for the domestic... it's fundamentally about clever people, trying to do their best, in swift-changing circumstances."
-Paul Cornell [on Irons in the Fire]

Juliet has been kind enough to treat us all to a guest-blog in celebration of Blood in the Water's release. Here she writes about some of the thought-processes involved in writing the novel, and her research and inspiration for writing historically accurate and dynamic battle-scenes...

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Blood in the Water?

Where does it come from?

Swords and sorcery. That’s one commonly-used way of describing what we write for those unfamiliar with the genre, especially when ‘adult fantasy’ conjures up entirely the wrong images. Swordplay has been central to tales of high heroics from The Iliad onwards. Conan cut a bloody swath through the Hyborian Age and Arthur gathered his knights around the table of Camelot. Great set-piece battles decided the fate of worlds and their peoples from Middle Earth onwards.

But where exactly does the modern writer, living in unparalleled peace and prosperity (certainly in historical terms) get inspiration for detailing the blood, sweat and tears of hand-to-hand combat as well as an understanding of the tactics and strategy of pre-gunpowder warfare? Because that stuff wasn’t any part of my historical education.

Don’t misunderstand me. Throughout school and university, I studied no end of wars. I can still wax lyrical on causes and consequences of World War I, on the rise of fascism in the 30’s, the defeat of Nazism and the post 1945 reconstruction of Europe. That was O Level. Then there was the English Civil War, with Edgehill, Marston Moor and all the rest, not forgetting the fighting in Scotland and Ireland (where, mind you, my Granny McKenna’s version of Cromwell’s exploits was significantly at variance with my history teacher’s). Add the War of the Spanish Succession over on the Continent, and the bloodshed culminating in the French Revolution and that was my A Level syllabus. Off to Oxford, I studied the Graeco-Persian wars, the Peloponnesian War and the internecine wars of the Roman Republic from Marius and Sulla onwards.

For every essay topic that included a battle, I’d diligently tackle the reading list to find out who was fighting, why they were fighting, who won and what that meant for whatever happened next. Only the details on precisely how these battles were won or lost were rarely considered important. There might be diagrams in the text books with arrows going this way and that, with those diagonal-slashed rectangles and the other ones with crosses in but no one paid them much attention. Granted, I recall my teacher deciding the discipline of the Parliamentarian cavalry at Marston Moor warranted a mention, compared with the failings of the Royalist horsemen, but I also remember spending as much time, if not more, discussing the tragic death of Prince Rupert’s beloved poodle ‘Boye’, given the dog’s role in Parliamentarian propaganda.

The deaths of the poor bloody infantry, of any age, were simply considered en masse, insofar as they affected one side or the other’s ability to continue the fighting. Or if they were funny, like the tendency of early musketeers to blow themselves up when their coil of burning match got caught up with their bandolier of gunpowder flasks. Seventeen year old girls can be very callous.

I got my first insights into the reality of warfare on a personal level through fiction. I read George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman books avidly as a teenager, and later, Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe stories (along with a few other insights which we need not discuss here). I got a particularly vivid introduction to the terrors and perils of innocent bystanders thanks to Georgette Heyer. Seriously. Her Peninsula War novel, ‘The Spanish Bride’, is based on a true story, that of Harry and Juana Smith, as detailed in his own autobiography. In her foreword to the book, Heyer mentions the various other Diarists of the Light Division as well as for instance, ‘Grattan’s Adventures with the Connaught Rangers’. Her Waterloo novel, ‘An Infamous Army’ has a two-page bibliography at the back. I can’t claim to have followed that up (yet) but discovering she had used such sources set me avidly reading historical biography and autobiography, a habit that persists to this day and which supplies me with all manner of useful and personal detail, crucial to conveying realism in fantasy fiction.

However, one thing I have learned from soldiers’ reminiscences is how little the rank and file sees of the bigger picture. This is a consistent theme, from ‘The Diary of a Napoleonic Footsoldier’, through Spike Milligan’s memoirs and Stephen Ambrose’s Second World War books, to the autobiographies of H Norman Schwartzkopf and Colin Powell, and most recently ‘Generation Kill’. I can even add something of my own experience here. A good few years of live-roleplaying showed me just how little one can know of some magic-user’s cunning plan ten feet behind you. All your attention is on the orc at the other end of your sword, so you skewer him before he kills you.

But if I was to write a novel detailing a military campaign, I knew I had to convey the bigger picture to the reader. I also needed to find ways to vary the narrative of battle after battle, to avoid repetitive depictions of the fog of war. To do any of that, I needed to have a thorough understanding of the strategic, operational and tactical issues that all the armies would face, embroiled in this Lescari Revolution. As with so many aspects of fantasy writing, only a tenth of that detail might actually make it into the narrative but the remaining nine-tenths is still essential to supporting it.

Fortunately, I knew I had an invaluable resource to hand, in my husband Steve. We had first met through our mutual interests in martial arts and wargaming. I had become interested in military wargaming through fantasy tabletop gaming while he had travelled in the other direction, from years of playing Squad Leader and re-fighting Napoleonic battles with little lead soldiers.

When one of my university essays had been on the Battle of Thermopylae, my tutor had specifically tasked us with unpicking the various contradictory primary and secondary sources. After the reading material simply deepened my confusion I had turned to Steve and his pal from the wargames club, Mark. They didn’t bother with academic analyses. They wanted to know the terrain, the forces on both sides, naval and infantry and the objectives of the respective commanders. The only reports they were interested in were the specifics offered by Herodotus. Given this information, they were able to explain exactly who did what and why and how it all fitted together. Professor Lintott was hugely impressed with my subsequent essay and keen to know what additional reference material I had discovered, compared to my floundering fellow students. He was lost for words when I explained the key contribution of two tool-design engineers from the Cowley car plant.

So as I prepared to embark on this second Chronicle of the Lescari Revolution, I sat down with Steve, plenty of blank paper and coloured pens and asked him to comment and advise on the battles I had sketched out to shape the plot I’d envisaged. As it turned out, I got an awful lot more than I’d bargained for. We analysed the terrain, the costs and logistics involved for each side raising an army, the time of year and the weather, the time taken to get troops from any given point on the map to a necessary destination, and in particular, the personalities of their commanders. Yes, we did draw up maps with those rectangles with crosses and diagonal lines. We ended up with spreadsheets detailing each units fighting strength and casualties; dead, wounded and captured, and factored all those considerations into what must happen next.

As we did so, these battles became very different affairs. Precisely how these victories were won, or defeats sustained, by the men and women on the ground, became central to the unfolding story. That was true both in terms of the bigger picture and in the individual tales of particular characters. Deaths that I hadn’t planned on became inescapable amid the wider carnage that we calculated in painful detail. Other survivals surprised me, presenting me and the individuals concerned with a whole new set of challenges. Several characters were presented with choices where their only logical course of action ran directly counter to my original intent. I had to jettison my outline on more than once occasion to maintain the internal coherence of the story.

Most important of all, it became inexorably more and more evident that this really was going to be a damn close run thing, or as Wellington actually said of Waterloo, “the nearest run thing you ever saw...”. Even then, once the fighting was done, the surprises weren’t over.


- Juliet E. McKenna

http://www.julietemckenna.com/

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The Four Authors of the Apocalypse: Ian Whates

An Optimist’s View of the Future

Okay, so here we are, the Four Authors of the Apocalypse, writing a blog for the same publisher that’s about to produce the optimistic SF anthology Shine. Contradiction? Corporate confusion? A lack of consistency? Absolutely not! Well, perhaps a hint of the last, but a wholly understandable one, don’t you think?

After all, I find a similar ambiguity in my own views of humankind’s future. In life, I tend towards a jovial manner and relaxed disposition (sort of comes with the territory when you’re as portly as I am), and much of my writing has a rosy, optimistic feel to it. Take the recently published short story “Growing Pains”, for example (free to download as a pdf here) – a tale of first contact and fruit farmers. When I heard Jetse de Vries was compiling Shine, I thought, “What a great idea; that’s right up my alley!” Yet the truth is that while I have written some pretty upbeat stories, few if any really hint at an optimistic future for our race. In the event, I was actually too busy to even attempt a story for Shine, which was probably just as well. I’m not sure how easy a challenge that would have proved to be.

I mean, when I look around for inspiration, I see:

WAR – conflict in the Middle East, conflict in Afghanistan, conflict in Iraq, the War on Terror, rumblings in Iran and a dozen other places around the Globe.

PESTILENCE – bird flu reared its easy head and then ducked down behind the parapets again, swine flu has made perhaps a bigger impact; if not this one then the next, we’re told. The pandemic will happen; it’s not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’. Then there’s cancer, all the eating disorders, the growing levels of obesity, diabetes etc etc…

FAMINE – We’re frequently reminded that Live Aid didn’t solve Africa’s problems, that famine still claims an appalling number of lives, and then there’s the alarming decline in the bee, which we’re told will cause the collapse of the world’s food chain and worldwide famine leading to billions of deaths.

DEATH: Take all of the above, and then add in everything else.

Perhaps, too, Apocalypse had a fourth rider who was a bit of a laggard and so missed the original roll call. Global Warming, it seems, has its own mounted hand-maiden: FLOODING. Where do rising sea levels and dwindling land mass fit into the traditional four categories?

So, it’s easy to see why anybody might find reasons for pessimism regarding humankind’s future prospects. And yet… and yet… we’re a stubborn, persistent, determined and resourceful bunch, we humans. I can well believe that tough times lie ahead and that, as some social historians have claimed, we might well be living in the very best of times right now; but I’m also convinced that we’ll survive, that as a race we’ll persist no matter how daunting the obstacles thrown in our way. ‘Men will die, Man be saved.’

A couple of years ago I heard Brian Stableford interviewed by Edward James, and, during their conversation, Brian said that he thought our civilisation would soon collapse with the loss of billions of lives. He added that the survivors, worldwide, would be numbered in mere hundreds of thousands. To this, Edward countered, “And yet you claim to be an optimist!” Brian’s response was, “But I am. I said there would be survivors, didn’t I?”

Count me among the optimists.

~Ian Whates.


Ian Whates lives in an idyllic Cambridgeshire village with his partner, Helen, along with a cocker spaniel and a tailless black cat. He recently organised Novacon 39, and has written up a con report for us here. His debut novel for Solaris Books, The Noise Within, will be out in May 2010.

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The Four Authors of the Apocalypse: James Lovegrove

Michael Crichton’s State Of Fear, an anti-environmentalist diatribe fashioned roughly in the shape of a thriller, concludes with an “Author’s Message”. In part, this asserts:

I suspect the people of 2100 will be much richer than we are, consume more energy, have a smaller global population, and enjoy more wilderness than we have today. I don’t think we have to worry about them.

The late – and admirable – Crichton was a far smarter man than I will ever be. His intellectual superiority, especially in matters scientific, means his opinions on climate change and global warming carry considerably greater weight and authority than mine ever will. I’d like to believe his prophecies to be accurate.

I just can’t.

Something in my gut tells me his optimistic outlook is wrong. More than that, any optimistic outlook is wrong. If you ask me, humankind is doomed to a future of rising sea levels, extreme weather events, mass starvation, resource wars, unsustainable mass-migrations from poorer to wealthier nations, animal extinctions, power shortages, and markedly reduced life quality and life expectancy. A hundred years from now I see a global population reduced by two or three billion, almost everyone sheltering from rampant flood waters in quasi-feudal enclaves, surrounded by husks of redundant technology and fighting off invaders with a mix of modern and medieval weaponry. A little bit Mad Max, in other words, and a little bit A Canticle For Liebowitz.

The stars? Intergalactic colonisation? The outward urge? Sowing the seed of humanity across the cosmos? Not a chance. Such grand visions never come to pass. No one is prepared to pony up the trillions necessary to fund that kind of dream-scale project. No one has the vision. Governments are irredeemably short-termist. They plan five years ahead, if that. This is why I don’t write space opera. To me it isn’t SF, it’s pure fantasy.

Things to come are things to dread. My two sons will grow up in a world where the best is past and where our present era will seem like a golden age – unlimited travel, plentiful food, material affluence, technological superabundance. They will look back on my generation with envious amazement, wondering how we could have been so reckless, so lacking in foresight, so wilfully vandalistic, so damn lucky. And all I’ll be able to do, if I’m still around, is apologise and say we couldn’t help ourselves. We tried but we just couldn’t break the habits of greed and squandering. We recycled our bottles and newspapers, but we knew it was a drop in the ocean. We installed low-energy lightbulbs, but our immense flatscreen TVs made up the difference in electricity consumption. We wanted to go veggie, but the lure of a fat juicy steak was too great.

I was in the dentist’s chair the other day, having a checkup. The dentist enquired about an article I’d written in the paper, prognosticating dire times ahead for planet earth. She told me, with a grim chuckle, that I was about to have a very uncomfortable experience at her hands if I genuinely believed everything was as dark as I’d stated in that piece. She would show her disagreement as only a dentist knows how.

With scenes from Marathon Man playing in my head, I desperately racked my brains to recall whether anything I’d submitted to the FT lately matched what she was describing. Maybe some book review where I’d blithely let slip that I reckoned civilisation was screwed? Then, light dawned. There’d been a case of mistaken identity.

“Oh, you mean James Lovelock,” I said. “The great prophet of eco-catastrophe. That’s not me. Definitely not. You can put away your rather enormous drill now. I disagree with everything the man says.”

I don’t, though.


James Lovegrove has published more than 30 books, including novels, novellas, short-story collections and books for teenagers. Having unleashed The Age Of Ra for Solaris, (reviewed here by Andy Remic) he’s about to follow it up with The Age Of Zeus in April next year.

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The Four Authors of the Apocalypse

Watch out for The Four Authors of the Apocalypse, a guest-blogging event taking place at the Solaris Books blog very soon!

Four of our best-selling authors, Tim Akers, Eric Brown, James Lovegrove and Ian Whates, have agreed to go head-to-head in a prognosticating, doom-laden blog-off, and they'll all be treating you to their particular visions of the future of the human race right here at When Gravity Fails over the coming fortnight.

Until then, I'll be stocking up my fallout shelter...

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Eric Brown's Ten Tips for Aspiring Writers

Eric Brown, the author of several Solaris Books including the Bengal Station series, has been kind enough to send us his top ten tips for aspiring writers:-

1. Write. Write as often as possible. Write even if you think you haven't an idea in your head. Write until the subconscious kicks in and ideas and words begin to flow. Remember, fiction is modular. You can always go back and lift out entire sections, rewrite them and put them back, improved.

2. Trust in the subconscious. Beginning writers are beset by fear. I was. I overcame the fear - i.e., the doubt that I had anything to say, the tools to say anything - by writing and writing and trusting in the subconscious. Write long enough and the old SC kicks in. Try it.

3. Read. Read everything. Read what you like to read, and what you don't like to read. Admire and attempt to emulate what you like to read. Despise and shy away from what you don't like. Work out how certain effects are achieved, and learn from good effects.

4. Write what you know about. Also, write what you don't know about. You'll find that if you do the latter, the subconscious will kick in and soon enough you'll be writing about something you don't know about as if you did. (Crazy, I know; but it works.)

5. Rewrite. Never rest on your laurels. Never think that what you've written, because it was so difficult to produce, is good enough. It can always be improved. Put the piece aside for a week, two weeks, a month, and then come back to it with fresh eyes.

6. Find one or two, or even three, people whose judgement you trust, show them your work and ask for criticism. It's hard, at first, to have your precious MS ripped apart before your eyes, but it's necessary. The process of finding those few critics might take time - as you discard those critics who offer nothing - but persevere.

7. Remember that conventional education, or intelligence, has no bearing on whether you'll make it as a writer of commercial fiction. You don't have to be a college graduate to write good stories.

8. Write about emotions. Keep a jotter just for the explication of emotions, of how you feel. Remember, every piece of fiction is about characters; those characters are human beings. They not only think, but feel.

9. Remember that the majority of readers read fiction not to learn, but to feel. We want to identify with characters, and we can only do that if the characters' emotions are described with sufficient fidelity and verity. If the reader believes in your characters, feels for them, wants to know what will happen to them, then you've won over that reader.

10. Keep description to a minimum, no matter how wonderful the world is you're describing. The reader isn't interested in your world as a world; they're interested in how your world affects your characters. Have your characters respond to the landscape, as seen through their eyes.

10a. Try to make your dialogue as naturalistic as possible. Use apostrophes. Don't say: "I will now go to Mars," but, "I'll go to Mars." Use 'said' rather than the million and one synonyms for said. Keep your stories pacey, unless you're imitating Proust or Thackeray. Short scenes, preferably. Keep the reader guessing. End on cliff-hangers. (And remember that there are always exceptions to the above.)

10b. Send out your MS and keep sending the damned thing out. Don't be discouraged by rejections. (I had twenty novels rejected before I sold my first.) And, when you are published, don't take bad reviews to heart. Remember: they're just one person's opinion. Every book out there will have readers who hate it, readers who will feel neither love nor hate for it, and readers who will love it and think it the best thing they've ever read.

Never stop writing. The only people who have failed at writing are those who have stopped.

Good luck!

- Eric Brown

Eric's newest Bengal Station novel, Cosmopath will hit the stands in January. In the meantime, watch out for more guest blogging from Solaris authors, here at When Gravity Fails!