This week seemed to be dominated by TTA Press.

My copy of Interzone was clearly caught in the industrial dispute between postmen and the Post Office; when it became clear that that was the case, editor Andy Cox kindly sent me a replacement copy of 224 (He's a good guy like that).

And on the same day, my copy of Black Static 13 arrived from the same publisher. So from having little reading material, I now have lots. But I like it like that.

And on the same day Andy asked me for a short bio to accompany 'The Killing Streets,' which is scheduled for Interzone 225.

Yesterday I attended my first ever in-store signing as part of the Angry Robot launch party. I travelled up on the 10 o’clock from Bristol, queued twice for ticket machines that weren’t working, and navigated my way through the building site that is Central London. (“It’s the ‘lympics, innit?” Is the response to any observation or complaint, such as the taking off-line of an entire Underground Line – yesterday it was the Victoria Line’s turn…)

I still managed to get there in time and tracked the event down into the basement, where the rest of the pack had gathered, together with Danie, the FP Event Manager and Nic, who does their on-line publicity.

Various people wandered in, and at some point Nic pointed a camera at me and barked lots of questions for which I was completely unprepared; I suspect there’ll be a distinct deer-in-the-headlights look in my eyes when it goes up online. Hopefully I’ll get better at it as time goes by.

Dan Abnett, Andy Remic and I signed just about everything 'that didn't move (Danie, you will never know how close you came to the Pen of Doom when you stood still a moment too long!) and –before you could say “sign this”—it was over.

Off to the Angel with Juliet McKenna and the AR and FP teams, and then a dash across London to meet a friend for what may be the most expensive pint I’ve ever drunk. I’ll post a rant about the journey home on another occasion, since it threatens to obscure what was in all other ways a grand day out.

And now it’s back to work.

My novel Winter Song is to be published on October 1st.

To celebrate, Mark Chitty’s Walker of Worlds blog is carrying an extract every day this week. Click on the link to read it.

And on the 26th of September Bristol will be hosting its first con for many, many years at the Bristol Mercure House Hotel.  There will be signings, panels, and a disco in the evening. All profits will go to the charity Equality Now - tickets are £20, or £30 for couples.

See you there, I hope!

Ever since reading about Hope Mirrlees' 1926 fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist in the Curiosities section of F&SF back in 2000, I've had a hankering to give it a try, and finally found a copy of it in the Bath branch of Oxfam on Thursday.

Bear in mind that this is pretty much pre-genre; Amazing Stories was launched in the same year as it was published -in 1926-- and even the venerable Weird Tales was only three years old at the time.
 
Lud-in-the-Mist predates the three major fantasy influences of the twentieth century, Tolkein, Robert E. Howard, and Mervyn Peake, the last of which is probably closest to Mirrlees, although her setting is more pastoral than baroque.

The language is rich and the images are striking, yet I'm struggling to get into it, and the reason is that it refuses to bend and buckle to fit the standard narrative of the modern speculative-fiction novel. The first twenty or so pages are a travelogue outlining the setting for the novel, and only gradually does it ease into the main plot.

SF and crime are the most vibrant forms of fiction beacuse with their pulp origins they have plots, unlike most literary fiction which eschews narrative for contemplation, and which by contrast appears stagnant. Add to that the ideas inherent within SF and you have the reason for the success of the best SF novels, in that they combine ideas, characterization and actual narrative tension.

Lud-in-the-Mist presents a vision of what spec-fic might have been like had Hugo Gernsback stayed in Luxembourg, and for all the literati's up-tilted noses, I'm not sure that it would have been better. But it's also an interesting experience to realize that we are as much trained as readers as writers to 'fit' into the shape of the modern narrative, and heaven forfend the novelist who dares to break that mould.

 

Ted Chiang wins his first award at the second attempt.