This blog-site is being used to serialise my novels. Traditional publishers were astonishingly slow about jumping on the chance of showering me in money and opportunity, so rather than have these stories languishing on my hard-drive and back-ups, I thought I would achieve a sort of completion by making them available here. The navigation is not intuitive on this lay-out so please use the Chapter Index and Links page to move from one installment to another; the link that is “hello world” is the first post.
The stories that I write are, broadly speaking, set in the same kind of environment, that of an imagined world in an unspecified future time where things have not exactly gone to hell in a hand-basket but most people are looking over the abyss with capacious pieces of wicker-work about their person. What I have tried to do is create a circumstance that is very familiar to me, but where certain things have gone a little further towards their logical conclusion (like consumer capitalism) and where things that really did happen had slightly different outcomes (like the Saffron Revolution). I am not sure that what I write is science fiction; I am not a mathematician so any understanding I have of hard science will be by analogy, but it is not intended to be magic realism, which is not a genre I enjoy, and it certainly isn’t realism, which I have not to date much fancied either. What I have tried to do is tell likely, but not true, stories, set in an environment which might quite easily have been, but is not.
In similar vein, my characters are intended to be familiar but altered; they are as complex but less complicated than most people really are, mainly, I think, because I have made self-awareness a usual, and well-articulated, habit of mind. So the opacity that occurs from people either not knowing themselves or being unable to express that knowledge is removed, leaving only the intricate cogs and whistles beneath. Many of the characters are technologically enhanced and all of them are quite old – in my environment, childhood is dramatically shortened, people live for up to two centuries and the prime of their life is very long – but the main difference I think between this fiction and reality is the clarity; it is an attempt to understand, not to depict. So the characters, like the landscape, are familiar but unfamiliar; if the stories are set in what Italo Calvino called “the pale fields of the moon” where all alternative realities take place, then they are inhabited by people arising from that lunar landscape, which is both very familiar and very alien.
Some of the stories I have written are intended to be series, like detective stories (Good Red Herring) and a series of children’s stories, which I will probably blog later. Most are stand-alone tales but they are in a shared environment which I am trying to dole out like pieces of a jigsaw. It took me a very long time to come around to this way of writing; I was terribly impressed by James Joyce saying that he wanted it to be possible to reconstruct Dublin from Ulysses. Then after I had spent a long time trying to recount the facts in vaguely autobiographical stories, I realised that two people present at the same event will not give the same evidence and that my diamond-clear memories of my life did not amount to a hill of beans when it came to what “really” happened. Then I read Invisible Cities and realised that Joyce was probably wrong, too. So the settings are the same, the socio-political circumstances are the same and characters from one novel turn up in others, either by reference or in person, but it is not my intention to use fiction to explain every detail of the environment I have made up. Instead I would like to use stories to clear the fog here and there, to tell enough stories from enough different angles that the whole can be deduced from the parts, like a palaeontologist deriving a dinosaur from a heel-bone. There is a story-arc but there is no authorized view, just glimpses through windows.
