My thanks to Roger Fourt for pointing out this particular site to me: http://www.blur.com/shorts/rockfish/index.html Here you can find a short animated film called Rockfish, created by Tim Miller at Blur studios. It’s excellent. I felt impelled to email the guy and say so, and to wonder how long it would be before all actors end up having to sign on at the dole office. He emailed back to thank me, but also to tell me he is a HUGE SF fan and has The Skinner and Prador Moon sitting on his shelf. He’s also told me that they’re developing Rockfish i.e. turning it into something bigger. Bloody good luck to Tim Miller and Blur studios I say!
Author: Neal Asher
Digging Words.
Well, I can definitely say that today at 4.35 I saved Hilldiggers with the certainty that it can now wing its way to Macmillan. It’s a great feeling. Now I must return my attention to Line War, which at present stands at a mere 7000 words (Hilldiggers is 141,000 – just a little smaller than Brass Man).
With the completion of this book my word count, for Macmillan, now stands at over a million. In one of those silly calculations, instigated by my dad, I’ve worked out something daft. He asked me what that total would add up to in distance. I duly worked out an average word count per line of text them measured a line. It turns out that (just in the books) I write at a rate of about a mile a year. Since the first word of Gridlinked I’ve covered about seven miles. My hope is to circumnavigate the Earth, but I rather suspect I won’t live that long.
Ah well.
Many thanks to Kevin and the rest at Forbidden Planet for having me there signing books, and for helping clean up my bag, camera case and so forth. I turned up there slightly hung-over and in need of a coke, and before entering the store, took a few gulps from a bottle before returning it to my bag. The cap wasn’t on properly. Result: bag full of coke, three discount copies of Prador Moon sold in the pub afterwards, numerous soaked bookmarks and one defunct digital camera. Suffice to say it wasn’t particularly profitable trip for me.
Nice to meet (in the bookshop and in The Angel) Peter Haydies and Saba, Mark Croucher, Neil Mullins, Scott Hume and Jools Enticknap – who gave up on getting me to sign his second name when he saw I couldn’t even get the first one right! Thanks for an excellent evening, and I hope you enjoyed yourselves. You’ve learnt now that the SF writer is just as capable of talking complete bollocks after a few pints as any other mortal. In fact, I think that’s par for the course.
Here’s a reminder for those who might be interested or in the vicinity:
I’ll be signing copies of Polity Agent this coming Saturday the 7th October between 1 – 2pm at Forbidden Planet, 179 Shaftesbury Ave London WC2H 8JR. This shop is at the Junction with Neal Street. Nearest Tubes: Tottenham Court Road, Covent Garden, Leicester Square and Holborn.
If you can’t make it to the signing, don’t forget to pre-order your signed copy from the store. I’ll also probably be chilling in the pub around the corner afterwards too.
Have a good one.
There’s not much to say about a holiday when you spent most of the time lying in the sun, or drinking Retsina or Metaxa, or eating. But I really have to say something about the eating.
On our first night at the Athina Apartments we wandered down to the seafront of Anissaras – where a few restaurants were located – walked past a couple that looked okay but with décor a bit motorway services – then came to a place that seemed rather nice. It was called The Windmill and was a ‘traditional Greek taverna’. Stretching up from the road along the seafront a grassed area, scattered with tables and a couple of water-pump windmills, led to the restaurant itself. We wandered up to take a table then scanned the menu.
The both of us being seafood addicts – specifically prawns and other shellfish – we ordered the ‘shrimps’ which came three ways: boiled, fried or grilled. I chose fried and Caroline chose boiled. The dishes were about 10 euros each, along with a litre of Retsina at 7 euros. When these ‘shrimps’ arrived we knew we’d found a place we would be returning to.
To your average Briton, a shrimp is something not much larger than a cigarette butt. We’d seen the pictures in the menu so knew this dish would be otherwise, but weren’t entirely sure what we’d get. Now to us prawns are the size of a finger. These were king prawns – check out the picture – and you just don’t get them like that in Britain. They were fresh firm and meaty and the fried version you didn’t even have to peel. I ate just about everything but the shell around the head. The shell was like a seafood version of crackling. I’d ordered them fried because I’d remembered eating something similar in Rhodes longer ago than I care to think about.
Other food in this family-run restaurant was of similar quality, but for us the ‘shrimps’ were best. I recollect a German couple on the table next to us eating the mixed grill and finishing their meal just before ours arrived (this was on another evening, since we devastated the Crete shrimp population in that restaurant). When the guy saw what we were getting his eyes nearly popped out of his head and he had to ask me about them.
We ate in this restaurant for just about every evening of our holiday. We drank Retsina in their garden after each exhausting day on the beach and watched the owner’s nutty goat trying to climb on sunbeds. Why try somewhere different when you’re getting food, and service, this good? The family running the place were friendly and very good at what they did – picture here of them with Caroline. I’d recommend The Windmill to anyone holidaying in this part of Crete.
Back From Crete.
Okay, I’ve just been on holiday yet again (but I was writing stuff on the beach, and not in the sand) and, as before, I wasn’t going to announce that fact here to the Internet-cruising burglary community.
I wondered what it would be like in the airport, after recent events. We arrived early at Gatwick check-in and there was no queue at all. Wonderful. Then we saw the vast mass of people slowly tramping towards hand-luggage scanners. Having seen and read the signs, we had already removed all potential liquid explosives from our hand luggage, all pointy objects and all cigarette lighters. Coming up to the scanners we then found we had to remove our belts and shoes so they too could go through the scanner. While this was occurring, I noticed a chap in uniform having to go through the same process and wondered if the set of wings on his uniform jacket might be considered a dangerously pointy object. Obviously pilots as potential suicide bombers are more dangerous than, say, pilots who might feel inclined to make a short diversion to drop their plane on Canary Wharf.
On the way back from Crete we again carefully put all potential liquid explosives, lighters and pointy objects in our main luggage. Greek security pulled me over, pulled on gloves (thankfully only as a precaution against the skiddies in the case) then after a brief search ordered me to return all my cigarette lighters to my hand luggage.
Funny old world.
Time for another medical rant. Anyone who suffers from acne rosacea will know what miniocin minocycline capsules are. They’re the pills that can stop your face breaking out in postules or taking on the jolly red glow of a bottle-of-whisky-a-day Santa. In Britain, you need a prescription for these capsules and then have to pay the prescription charge of £6.95 for 14 of them. Guess what? In Greece you can buy a pack of 12 of them over the chemist’s counter for about 4.60 euros – about £3.00.
This turns me to thoughts of other inequities. Set up a still in Britain and Customs & Excise will be kicking down your door and pinning you to the floor with the barrel of an assault rifle in the back of your head. In Crete the national drink is raki (not ouzo, surprisingly) and it is not produced by big corporations but by little, unregulated family concerns. Perhaps this continues because of the Cretan attitude towards central government in Athens. In mainland Greece gun control is very strict, almost British. In Crete, if government rules go contrary to custom, they are ignored. Just about every family has illegal firearms, which they fire into the air during celebrations. Perhaps we should learn from this: perhaps if we all had guns in our houses nanny government would be reluctant to interefere in our lives.
Writing News
Good news on the selling front. Via Jeremy Lassen’s blog (I think) I’ve learnt that Prador Moon is in the trade paperback top five at Borderlands Books and that this is not the first time it has been there. Checking there myself I see that the month before last Brass Man was in the top ten paperbacks too. Shiny.
Also, in a break between books, I decided to sit down and produce some short stories. Maybe because I’m now more used to writing at length, these stories grew in the telling so I ended up with Alien Archaeology at 21,000 words and Owner Space at 18,000 words. I hesitate to call them ‘short’ since the stories I have submitted to magazines have usually fallen between 5,000 and 15,000 words. The good news is that though it’s long, Sheila Williams at Asimov’s has accepted Alien Archaeology.
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Before getting into this writing game full time, I was one of those guys you see driving around in a truck with the back stacked up with hedge cuttings or the best part of a tree, or I was the guy chugging around on a big mower on your local playing field. I did this for about fifteen years: worked hard during the summer then when things cooled down in the winter I did a bit of writing. During the winter I used to put on about a stone in weight, then come the spring and early summer I would dump that weight in about two to three months. Of course, that ain’t happening now.
It’s something people don’t realised about manual workers who move into a sedentary occupation. You’re fit, you have acquired the eating habits to support that level of activity, and you’re used to being out in the sun, sweating. One problem is that the reduction in exercise, and 0001.jpg)
sunshine, can make you more prone to depression. Another is the weight. I found that the stone I put on in the winter wasn’t easily going away and over the last five years my weight has been edging up. Exercise goes some way to alleviate this, but no amount of exercise can match five days of manual labour each week. I once worked out that on my ‘walk-behind’ day – when I went out with a couple of walk-behind mowers and cut private lawns – I was walking over twenty-five miles, fast, often carrying a heavy-duty strimmer or big mower bags of grass cuttings.
For the last few years I’ve been fighting the flab with low carb diets and, per week, nine miles of dog walking, 24 to 40 miles cycling and a few sessions of weight training. It ain’t enough, so now I’ve come up with a new diet plan. It’s not healthy, but I’ve been growing tired of being a fit fat bastard with and ever-increasing waistline. It goes like this: you work on the theory that if you keep shoving food into your gob and not burning it off you are going to get fat, so stop it. I stopped eating for two days and thereafter confined myself to one small meal a day. Feel hungry? Well, my stomach has shrunk so that’s not so much of a problem, when it does become a problem I smoke a cigarette. Feel tired and 0006.jpg)
lethargic? Drink a triple espresso.
Eleven pounds in twenty-two days – half a pound a day. You’d think I would feel knackered, but I don’t. I actually feel a lot better and am doing more. Think of the weight in 2lb bags of sugar. Five and a half of them would certainly strain the handles of a supermarket carrier bag, and I’m no longer carrying that. I might write a diet book…
Year's Best SF 11
A story called Mason’s Rats appears in here. I wrote it ages ago, then went on to produce Mason’s Rats II & III. The first two were published in issues 2 & 4 respectively of Orion (’92 & ’94). All three stories were then released as a booklet by Graeme Hurry’s Kimota. When in 2000 I finally got into ‘big publishing’ I had the pleasure of meeting an author whose books I’d enjoyed for about a quarter of a century – Tanith Lee. We met, chatted, exchanged books, and some time later I also gave her a copy of the little Mason’s Rats booklet. She loved it, and asked if I minded her sending it to Gardner Dozois at Asimov’s. I didn’t refuse.
Interestingly I’d already sent a short story to Gardner called The Veteran, which he accepted and published in the Asimov’s of June 2004 (also went on to be published in Japanese publisher Hayakawa’s SF Magazine, May 2005 issue). He also accepted Mason’s Rats I. It’s a tight and very short little story, amusing (I think) – something to enjoy but certainly not something to write huge dissertations about.
Yet here’s the weird bit. When the first story first appeared I found a review on the Internet – of the political ramifications and deep significance of this or that – that ran to more words than the story itself. When the story appeared in Asimov’s, a reviewer called Dave Truesdale slammed it in an editorial on his site Tangent somehow infering from it that I was a left-wing PETA-supporting animal activist, and demanding to know who accepted it because ‘readers have a right to know’. Of course my reaction was bewildered hilarity. A little bit of a row developed on the message board there, and now it seems that whenever rats are mentioned on the Asimov’s message boards, that story is often refered to.
It was all very strange.
Caroline has just got herself a new mobile phone which is so ridiculously packed with functions that you probably need to take some sort of course to work it all out. Amazing also is the size of the battery in the thing. Studying it last night, while drunk, and trying to cancel out the predictive text – she was trying to write ‘sorry’ to someone since she had texted that person a blank message, and we kept ending up with the word ‘sprout’ – I suddenly remembered some dreams I used to have.
When I was a kid I received as a birthday present one of those now archaic LED digital watches – the kind where you had to press a button to see the time since leaving the display on would flatten the battery – and later received an early Rockwell calculator. After that I would occasionally have dreams – and I mean REM sleep dreams not waking fantasies – about owning a digital watch that possessed all sorts of weird functions, and could display graphs and other types of information in colour. Strange. This was before I even considered trying to write SFF, so I guess the stuff I was reading was already having some sort of effect on my mind. We now have various devices that display information in that way, so those dreams were close to a correct prediction of the future.
Other dreams of that time were of looking up and seeing the sky full of traffic: huge quadrate vessels, like skyscrapers detached from the ground, tumbling through the clouds. Now, because the London airports are all within 60 – 70 miles of where we live, the sky is often scattered with airplanes and criss-crossed with vapour trails. Not quite there yet – we still need antigravity.