I had considered running an article commenting on recent events, but I think there has been enough of sorrow, and quite probably, as I write this, a lot more to come. Instead, I’ll tell my happy story:

When I first put pen to paper with the intent of producing fiction I had my dreams about the future. I saw myself being wined and dined by publishers who were stunned and humble in the face of my sheer brilliance. The book I produced was a world shaker, it changed people’s lives and brought them on their knees to the alter raised to the writing god Neal Asher. Then of course I woke up and it was time to go to work, which I did for twenty odd years and am still doing. Now though, there is light at the end of the tunnel and I don’t think it’s a train.

For each of the many years in which I have been writing seriously and have actually had something publishable I’ve been buying either the ‘Writer’s & Artist’s Yearbook’ or ‘The Writer’s Handbook’. Each time I would go through that year’s copy and circle every science fiction publisher, and to each, one after the other, bang off a synopsis and sample chapters, blithe in my ignorance of the fact that my work would be one of the hundreds they received that month. I used the other side of the rejection letters that came back, to print out work I wanted to check through, or have someone else check through. I don’t like to think how much I have spent on stamps and envelopes.

I’ve had my successes: short stories published, collections, novellas. In another article for this magazine I have detailed that ladder climb with someone standing on my fingers. It made depressing reading for then there had been no happy ending. I digress, let me tell you how it happens.

During the summer I have a job which keeps me away from the processor: I cut grass, playing fields and the like, and relocate dogshit with my strimmer. During the winter I write all the time (and for those who say ‘you’re lucky’ my answer is ‘that’s how I arranged it’). The winter before last, just before Christmas, I was writing away when there was a crash behind me. In the hall the coat rack had worked its raw plugs out and fallen, so I was feeling a bit spooked when the phone rang, and it took me a moment to gather my scattered senses. With a screwdriver in my hand I answered ‘Uh?’ when a rather well-spoken chap claimed to be the editorial director at Pan Macmillan. He went on to explain that he’d received my synopsis and sample chapters of Gridlinked and would rather like to see the rest. Still befuddled, I picked myself up off the floor and tried to say something about the website I had just set up (£150 phone bill that quarter). He misconstrued what I was trying to say with the happy upshot being that I emailed him Gridlinked five minutes later.

I left things for one month. I didn’t want to be a pain and I have long taken the view that when you send something you forget about it and start work on something else. Towards the end of that month I was coming to the conclusion that what I had sent was, at 56,000 words, too short by today’s standards. I emailed the publisher to this effect, saying I could extend Gridlinked and perhaps they would also like to look at The Skinner which was 80,000 words. Almost immediately I received a reader’s report detailing the faults in the manuscript and saying precisely that – too short, but good. The publisher also suggested we should meet, and I took him up on that offer.

Three days until the meeting. In that time I worked very hard to increase Gridlinked by ten thousand words, for it is a fact that publishers, if they are going to take you on, want to know that you can produce. Reader, publisher, and myself, met in an Italian restaurant in The Strand, and a very long meeting it was. I took along anything I thought might advance my case: published novellas and collections, copies of reviews etc. The meeting moved, after a few hours, to a wine bar. After seven hours the reader took me to Liverpool Street as, without his assistance, I would have ended up sharing someone’s sleeping bag on the underground. Despite my drunken stupor I did not forget that the publisher promised to come back to me with an offer.

The offer came one week later and I was more than pleased. The publisher had obviously noted down much of what I had said and studied my website. The contract would be for three books (Gridlinked, The Skinner, and The Line of Polity – follow-up to the first) for which I would receive staged payments. The first stage came when I signed the contract, and now it was time for me to get on with some work.

Over the next couple of months the reality of what was happening was brought home to me time and again. Macmillan’s publicity department got onto me with a form to fill in giving contacts and asking me to tick off what I was prepared to do. I was invited along with my wife, Caroline, to attend the 2kon in Glasgow. I was also called into London to pose in litter-choked alleys for a photographer called Jerry Bauer – a nice friendly chap who has photographed Dirk Bogard, Julie Christie, Sidney Sheldon, Marian Bradley. I felt I was entering the Twilight Zone when he mentioned photographing Robert Silverberg and after I had repeated the name went on to ask, “Do you know Bob?” Yeah, me and ten million other SF readers.

Never, ever believe that it is going to be easy once a big publisher takes you on. At that stage you really begin to work, and everything before has just been playing. I increased Gridlinked to 134,000 words (in a very short time), then waited with a razor poised over my wrist. It was gratifying to be told that they were surprised at the speed at which I had done this, worried that I had padded and produced a load of crap, and pleasantly surprised that the final result was better than the original. Note to writers extending work: you do not swell the story you have written with pointless dialogue and description, you extend the story, you develop plotlines. Had I padded this book I’ve no doubt it would have come right back in my face.

After this, Gridlinked came back to me copiously edited. I have to admit I was dismayed at the extent of this editing, but have since learnt that in my case it was pretty minor. I went through it all taking onboard what I thought right and discarding the rest. Through this process I discovered some bad habits I’d been getting into, and probably learnt more in that one month than in the preceding five years. The book was accepted and is now on the shelves in the book shops in the large format version.

Now I am at the enviable point of having had The Skinner accepted and am awaiting the cover for that. Time to sit back and bask in glory? No, now it’s time for me to work very hard at The Line of Polity and make sure I produce something that cannot possibly be refused, because that can happen. You’d maybe think that with that first book taken by a major publisher that you’ve made it. Not so. You’d then think this the case with the second book. Guess again. The reality is that you have to ‘make it’ for every book. The reality for me as that I must continue to work hard. … But then that is better than the reality many are facing in the world today.

We live in a very strange society in which it is considered more dangerous to display an erect penis on television than it is to show, for example, someone having his throat cut. This is just one symptom of the strange disease that afflicts the so-called great and the good, bringing about in them a myopia in which they come to see sex as somehow a more heinous sin than violence. Certain words are not allowed because of their shocking sexual connotations, yet it is alright to show people being shot and knifed. The sex act itself must be ridiculously disguised, yet the scene in which someone is burnt to death is as realistic as possible.

This is just one of the crazy inconsistencies of this madness called censorship. If we are to suppose that films on TV cause children and the weak of mind (neither of which are likely to pay licence fees) to emulate them, this begs the question: which of the above would you want your children to emulate? The censors would of course want the lot censored and to feed us on a diet of gardening and cookery programs. I can only say that this would only lead to people turning off the television and seeking their entertainment elsewhere, perhaps out mugging pensioners to get the money to rent a decent video tape or two.

I hate censorship and would throw more weight behind the argument calling for it to be removed. It is wrong. It is another mishandling of power that takes responsibility away from the individual and in effect makes individuals more irresponsible. I wonder just how many really scientific studies have been made of the effects of TV violence on the individual. None I would warrant, simply because it would be impossible. For one thing there is no possible control group for any experiment or study. All that has really been done is the kind of statistical analysis that comes up with the result that ‘violent people watch more violence on television than non-violent people’, which goes nowhere in revealing why those people were violent and renders the analysis meaningless. Still though, censorship persists, and grows.

In the literary world that hideous creeping fungus called ‘political correctness’ is walking censorship in through the back door of children’s books, and I have to wonder how long it will be before it reaches adult books. How long before this force that has emasculated our teaching profession and police starts turning all fiction into an inane mush? How long before ‘conflict’ is removed from fiction because it is too … confrontational.
But how about a reversal?

There is a school of thought that believes TV violence to be cathartic, and that the people who watch it are likely to be more relaxed and less inclined to violence than they might have been. In Jung Chang’s Wild Swans she describes China, during the cultural revolution, as a pressure cooker without the relief valves of spectator sports or violent films. Now there, I think, is a woman more fit to judge morality than many. The same applies to literature: recently, an interviewer pointed out how the body count in my most recent book started high and continued to rise, yet my last encounter with violence left me feeling sick to the stomach because I had been involved in something really sordid. Those who are the spectators of violence are perhaps less inclined to take it up as a pastime – probably because they really know what it is. If violence is removed from all our forms of entertainment then people will lose a valuable learning resource and wander naively into truly dangerous situations. We cannot wrap everyone in cotton wool – because there’ll always be someone out there with lighter fuel and a match.

Unfortunately, the censors are very often precisely the people to whom we must perforce complain, and complaining to them about censorship would be the same as writing to an MP with the opinion that you consider politics unnecessary. Entrenched self-interest is as difficult to excise as a verruca. And the censors will never admit any argument that might reduce their power.

I have a friend who is in the music business just as I am in the writing business i.e. we’re contenders, but we both have to work for a living. In the winter we work together and much of our time is spent discussing our respective arts while sipping coffee and staring out of a truck window at the rain. When we each manage an ego bybass we agree that our pursuits and our attitudes are similar in many respects. Perhaps it is that Essex boy approach to the art world in that when you can bank it, it’s worth something.

My friend likes music that is clean, distinct, and not amenable to obfuscation. I listened to him play A Whiter Shade of Pale on the alto sax and understood what he meant. He does not like bad jazz. Many musicians claim to play jazz because it gives them ‘freedom of expression, man’. The truth is that they play it because it gives them freedom from discipline; from the necessity of getting it right. And thus, by a round about route, we come to the plotless writing that you often find under the slipstream label.

This writing is easy to spot. The protagonist usually spends most of his time wandering round an urban landscape pursuing a dysfunctional sex life while some vaguely weird things happen, just, happen. The piece you will read – I shall not call it a story – starts, runs for a few pages, then stops. There is no real beginning, middle, or end. It is authorial masturbation that leaves the reader thinking, ‘Well, what about me?’. Raymond Chandler said that when he felt a story was flagging he’d walk in a man with a gun. In slipstream the man remains on the other side of the door, nothing is resolved, and the reader wonders if there ever was anything to resolve. I get a lump of frustration developing in my stomach when I find myself reading one of these pieces and it slowly dawning on me that it is not going to have an ending, that the characters will not have changed and their squalid existence will just … continue. Why, then, is this stuff published?

If you listen to a piece of badly played modern jazz you will, if you have any sensibilities, wonder where the melody is. You’ll wonder why you’re listening to this disjointed annoying racket when the guy on the stool next to you will say, “Wow, … scale!” and you’ll nod your head knowingly and reply, “Yeah … man.” We all hate to appear ignorant. It is this hatred of ignorance that allows such idiocies as a soiled bed in the Tate gallery. It is the very same that allows the above described rubbish to appear under the slipstream label. People will remain silent about it because they are frightened of admitting that they haven’t got the point. There is no point. And those guilty of perpetrating it, writers and publishers, are very often those who get a bit too arty for their own good, and are cringing at the prospect of being accused of something so demeaning as science fiction. My goodness.

You are a story teller are you? If such you are then put yourself in front of an audience and tell your story. If, when you have finished, your story requires justification then it was not a story. A story completes. What you read was very likely slipstream. I am not saying you should not write this stuff. It is one of the better methods of beating the block and freeing up the creative faculties. Sometimes you’ll end up with a sentence or two, maybe a paragraph, that you can use in a real story.

When do you cease to re-write work? Simple answer: when you are no longer improving as a writer, when you feel you have nothing more to learn, when you have achieved perfection. It is an unfortunate fact that some writers do believe this of themselves. They are normally the ones who have achieved success, and are drunk on the adulation of those who think a past participle is something you’ll find in a linear accelerator.

For me revision of a story partially ceases when I feel I have achieved a required effect, might well attain publication, and have more interest in the next project. But while it remains in my processor it is still subject to a critical eye. I don’t believe there is such a thing as too much re-writing. You just reach the stage where you can’t go any further with a piece and move on to the next. In the process you jettison the bad and keep the good. You decide, and you base your decision on what you are after. Publication? Re-write for the market acting on feedback from editors and readers. Personal satisfaction? Don’t kid yourself. For my novella for Club 199 I took a thirty thousand word story and extended it by ten thousand words to fit it within their parameters, and felt perfectly justified in doing so. As far as I am concerned good writers are successful writers (though successful writers often degenerate into bad writers).

There is no quick-fix formula. It is obvious such a formula is profoundly wished for, as the sales of the ‘How To’ books attest. When the questions are posed as to the extent and method of re-writing the real question being asked is: how do I write well? The first step on the road for ninety percent of would-be-famous novelists is to learn how to use the English language. Get hold of books like ‘Fowlers Modern English Usage’, ‘Roget’s Thesaurus’, and perhaps a plain old ‘Mastering The English Language -S.H. Burton’. For many people the re-write required is the one to turn their masterpiece into something intelligible. It was not until I joined some postal workshops that I found out just how bad it was possible for some writing to be. I also learnt that those writers who really try to get a handle on the language are also the ones who tell the best stories. Understanding the structure is all. You’re not going to build a suspension bridge if you don’t know how nuts and bolts go together. The rest is badly written soap-opera.

So now you know how the English language works, have put a story together, and are looking at doing a re-write. You have looked at the story objectively and made sure that the bunch of flowers is beautiful rather than are beautiful and your hero still has the same colour hair all the way through. How does it look subjectively? Where, for example, can you break the rules to the greatest effect? The best of writers are the ones who know how to do this. Steven Donaldson once managed a one word sentence that had the skin on my back crawling (Of course I’m aware that it is not pc to like Donaldson; he’s too successful). The word was ‘Kevin’. No, not the spotty dickhead down the road. Kevin Landwaster who performed the Ritual of Desecration and whose spectre has just stepped through a door from the underworld. I’m afraid no English book is going to tell you how to achieve the same (though ‘The Critical Sense’ by James Reeves comes mighty close). The only way to learn is through hard work, reading, and listening to criticism, though for the latter you must judge what is relevant. There are no substitutes for these, just as there is no substitute for talent. When you re-write you must see the images and feel the effects of every word. You have to decide what to discard and what to keep. There are many sources you can tap to help you make these decisions. But in the end they are your own.

In the foreward of Space, time and Nathaniel (NEL 1971), Aldiss asks, ‘What happens to old science fiction? Is it as expendable as last year’s calender?’ to which the answer is, ‘Maybe.’ Nostalgia comes into play, and SF, though usually concerning the future, possesses a history worthy of study. In technical detail, science fiction stories do date quicker than bananas. Already with some of my own short stories I’m finding evidence of a lack of mobile phones, and when you look back to stories published more than thirty-five years ago you can but cringe when Captain Zorge calculates his next hyperspace jump on a slide rule. My edition of Stan (the acronym by which this book came to be known) can only be described as much loved and deeply in need of Sellotape. Just looking at the cover with its acorn-headed failed man gazing with its huge turquoise eyes into some immeasurable distance, sitting cobwebbed on a pile of bones, provides me with the thrill of remembered reading pleasure. Yet, Aldiss says of even this edition, ‘a whiff of period charm hangs over it’. However, Stan contains what for me are some of the classic short stories of the genre, and is well-worth a read for any of those who might think they are doing anything new. My favorite has to be The Failed Men. This excellent time travel story tells of a relief effort run by the fourth millennium Paulls to which twenty-fourth century humans have been recruited – both races brothers in comparison to the people, of millions of years in the future, that they are trying to help. And what is the plight of these last? They have buried themselves alive because they have ‘failed’. Put across in this story is the incredible frustration of the rescuers in trying to find out precisely what is meant by that failure – frustration in some cases leading to despair. No real explanation is offered and it is from this enigma that comes the appeal, that and the sheer story-telling ability. I don’t know whether or not this book is available now. It ought to be, not least for students studying the genre, but mostly because, slide rules aside, a good story is timeless.

The image that sticks in my mind, from the covers of early Science Fiction paperbacks, is of a robot, like the bastard offspring of a dustbin and a food processor, chasing a half-naked woman across some lunatic professor’s laboratory. Of course, as was the case with many SF pulps of the time, the stories inside were intelligent, and bore no relation to the cover picture. For this the writers should have fed the publisher feet-first into his own printing press. Ever since early SF writers cast the robot in the role of Frankenstein’s monster, the image of a sentient machine murdering its makers and taking over, has endured – examples of the type being Terminator, HAL, and numerous Dr Who baddies (I’m sure any of you reading this can think of many more). However, for machines to take over bespeaks a certain superiority that does not yet seem likely. First, we must make them better than ourselves.

Although we are even now developing computers that can out-think us in many specific respects, the science of cybernetics, and straightforward material technologies have a long way to go. A computer can beat a man at chess – great – but can it actually pick up the pieces and move them, recognise certain members in the audience, converse with its opponent, then walk away from the table afterwards? We can make a mechanical hand that has a more powerful grip than our own and it can move with eerie similarity, but will it function for eighty years without falling apart? We are an awfully long way from being able to create something that can outperform a human being.

All this is moot, though, for the development of human technology that has taken us from the flint arrowhead to the PC, follows an undeviating course. All our machines are merely tools – extensions of ourselves. Just as binoculars are an extension of human sight, books are an extension of human memory and communication, and just as pair of pliers is an extension of the human hand, the computer is an extension of the human mind. These are, in the main, indirect extensions. But we try to make them more direct all the time: soft shaped grips for the pliers; Windows, mouse, the virtual glove and voice recognition for the computers. We are moving closer all the time – getting into the machine.

Most direct extensions are at present the province of the medical world. Prosthetics have been around since before Captain Hook and in the last century most of us have seen moveable plastic limbs. Prosthetics are, like the rest of our tools, extensions of us. Now consider where they are going.

This technology is developing at an increasing rate: from such devices to assist the body, as do pacemakers and the Jarvik heart pump, we are leaping ahead to those that actually restore function, such as chips surgically implanted to restore sight to the blind. Already being tested are prosthetic limbs that can be surgically attached and wired into the nervous system (the most interesting advance being feedback i.e. making fingertips that can actually feel). Through people like Kevin Warwick, who is actively experimenting with implants to link him to a computer, and through advances in medical prosthetics, we will eventually reach a stage where the replacement is better than the part replaced, or will provide additional abilities. People are going to want these – needed or otherwise.

It could be argued that at this point it would be possible for the superior computer/AI mind to acquire its required physical interface with the world, strangle the mad professor, then march off to exterminate the rest of the human race. However, by then it would be too late for the machines to take over, for we will be as much, if not more than them. By the time we can build a machine that could destroy us, we’ll be able to upgrade ourselves to equivalent or greater efficacy.

Pursuing Warwick’s experiments to one conclusion, it will be possible for the computer to truly become an extension of the human mind – directly linked, not via a nerve impulse to open doors. This may come about as a medical technique for restoring/curing the brain damaged, or it might be developed as the next quickest way to get onto the Internet. Whatever. There will come a time when someone will be able to go into a shop to buy extended memory or larger processing power, and it won’t be for their PC, or rather, the lines will be so blurred that PC and person will be indistinguishable. Your future girlfriend won’t be staying in because she’s washing her hair, but because she’s running a virus check and defrag on what lies underneath it.

Often in SF, the humans are little different from us, and the machines vastly superior. The truth of the matter I feel is that in the next few centuries definitions of what is human will become rather hazy, and the individual of that future unrecognisable to us. In the end humans will be able to upload/download their minds into machines, extend their memory, leave part of their minds in machines, load machine minds and programming into their own. Their bodies might be more synthetics than flesh while biotechnology would have by then given us living computers. Pointing to different items and classifying one as a machine and one as a human being will be as difficult as distinguishing egg white and sugar in a meringue.

Of course, all the above refutes many of the plot elements of Gridlinked with its omnipotent AIs, psychotic android and indefatigable Golem, which goes to prove that truth may well be stranger than fiction, and that writers are not to be trusted.

The first time novelist or short story writer is up a certain well known creek without even a canoe. If you’re a politician, a film star, or a model  (you don’t even have to be able to write), the big publishers will provide you with a nice fat cheque and a power boat. The catch for a new author is that they might publish you if you’re known and as a new author you’ll only get known if they’ll publish you. It is also a sad fact that the likes of Harper and Collins receive two to three hundred manuscripts a week out of which they might publish two or three a year. Many large publishers freely admit that they will not even look at work unless it is submitted through an agent. It would also seem that these publishers are now run primarily by accountants and financial directors. Editors wanting to take on something new have to present this work to these people to justify the expenditure. As such justifications usually begin with, “Well this is like … ” the chance of anything groundbreaking being taken is minimal. The fact, I think, that all writers should be aware of is that these large publishers are not out to make books; they’re out to make money. So what other options are there? There are, thankfully, the small presses, and through them a gradual struggle up the ladder in the hope that you’ll reach a point where you can no longer be ignored.

Small press publications range from illiterate productions of stapled-together A4 sheets to some magazines indistinguishable from what you’ll find on the newsagent’s shelf. There are presses that produce paperback books of a quality that exceeds that of the mainstream publishers (How often have you had one of these mainstream paperbacks fall apart in your hands as you read it? How often has the cover picture and blurb born no relation to the contents?) It is worth noting exactly what ‘small’ means in the latter cases. It usually only refers to circulation, editor’s bank balance, and advertising. They are not necessarily small on enthusiasm or professionalism. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you can get any old crap published here, but also be aware that if you are good, you stand a better chance here than with one of the lumbering giants that has a stranglehold on the the news stands and bookshops.

Unfortunately the SF F and H (magazine) small presses are pretty much a closed circuit and it is quite possible for you to be very well known in them but not known outside. Very often the magazines published have a circulation that can only be numbered in the hundreds and not very many of them. The closed circuit is due to a large proportion of their readership being writers and by the mags only advertising in each other, (no doubt due to cost). What are you after though? If it is money then forget it. Payment ranges from a free copy of the mag your story is in to, if you’re really lucky, ten or twenty quid. The most I have achieved for short story publication was £60 from a magazine called Scheherazade and that was for ten thousand words divided over two copies. If it’s an audience you’re after then the most you can hope for is that for ten or fifteen minutes you will have the undivided attention of each of those hundreds of readers. Better than nothing.

A problem you’ll face, writing for these small circulation magazines, is their proliferation and their swift demise. I have frequently had stories accepted by magazines that have then folded before publication of said story. There is no fault here in the enthusiasm or even financial acumen of the editors. It is just that a circulation of any more than a few hundred seems a tough barrier to break. Some have managed to, but for every one that does it seems that twenty others go to the wall. That barrier I think is ultimately heart-breaking for many editors.

Another problem can be the lengths of time involved. In some cases you will not receive a reply for a few months, thereafter, if your work is accepted, it can be months and even years before you see your work in print, and see any cheque that might be involved. This is because small press editors have to work for a living and that job ain’t in publishing. They have piles of stories to read through and reject before they find your gem. And often they might only bring out their magazines quarterly or even yearly. You’ll often notice when looking at these magazines that they’ll have an issue number, but that the editor has not been brave enough to put on a date. In one case I had to wait three years from acceptance of one of my stories until publication. But let’s face it, if you’re a writer, you should be thinking about your next story on the way back from the post box.

Why write for the small presses if your ultimate aim is big time publication? To begin with the small presses are a superb training ground for the wannabes. Very often the editors of these magazines will take time to offer some criticism of your work (remember, if that criticism is ‘this is drivel’ that’s more than you’ll get elsewhere). You’ll also get a fair amount of feedback in the letters pages and even in other magazines. In this sense the closed circuit will work for you; many of these magazines have review columns and as well as reviewing films, and large circulation books and magazines, they review each other. Also, because of that proportion of writers in the readership, you’ll know that if you do get published it is not because of a lack of submissions to the magazine. The small presses are essentially a proving ground for the wannabe.

To break into the small press market you do have to buy magazines. Some magazines will only publish stories written by subscribers; a form of nepotism brought on by a desperation to get subscribers. Once you’ve bought a few magazines you’ll have a feel for them and from adverts in them you’ll find other mags to which you may send your scribblings. Each time you send something off (with an SAE and covering letter) you’ll quite probably get fliers from yet more magazines with your rejection or acceptance. It is quite easy to build up one hell of a list of possible markets. If you want to increase that list then get hold of publications like Zene, Light’s List, or Dragon’s breath. In the fifteen years I’ve been writing for the small presses I’ve felt no need to submit work outside the UK, but then I’m not someone who produces a story a day.

Once you’ve broken into the small press market (meaning that you have proven your worth to yourself, not that you have learnt the funny handshake) it’s worth looking at the small press book publishers in the hope of having something longer published. As you do these things take note of your achievements and utilise what leverage they might give to get you higher up the writing ladder. Unfortunately though you’ll find that small press book publishers face similar difficulties to those of the magazine publishers. So far I’ve seen three of them get into difficulties.Club 199, a publisher aiming to produce cheap paperbacks (£1.99, hence the name) had the printing side of things organised but not the advertising side. New Guild, whom I was under contract with, made the same mistake. Tanjen, has recently ceased taking on any new work. Sadly, these small publishers are up against the huge advertising machines of the large publishers, the clout they have with the likes of W H Smiths and Waterstones, and the spreading of costs over huge print runs.

For me my writing has been a gradual struggle up that ladder, the small presses being the first few rungs. Too often we hear of someone getting the x-thousands advance on their first book and hearing this lose sight of the fact that they are the exception. There is a lot of truth in the image of the writer struggling away in his garret then drinking himself to death. The reality is that writing is hard, getting published is hard, and that if you want easy money your best option is to become an estate agent.

It took me five or more years to get my first short story accepted and then that magazine folded before publication of my work. After that slight boost (and it was a boost; someone had actually wanted my work) I got more and more stories published, the occasional novella serialized, and a one-off novella published for a single cash payment. For my short stories my reward was a copy of the magazine and some complimentary letters (mostly). After another five years I was getting the occasional cheque – about enough to pay for a toner cartridge a year – then in the following five years finally gained some notoriety through the publisher’s Tanjen, with the production of another novella (The Parasite) then a short story collection (The Engineer). My story, I warn you, has been one of relative success.

If you want to find a plausible alien, go turn over the nearest rock and see what wriggles out, but to that I’ll add the proviso that you need to have some idea as to what put that squirmy thing there in the first place. Create an alien and you must have some conception of the ecology it arose from. It’s no good imagining some flesh-eating monster on some barren planet with nothing for it to eat but the human explorers who have just arrived (the get-out in the film that comes to mind is that the monsters were brought to the barren planet in a spaceship). However, that’s easily said and not so easily done.

“Gerrit off! Gerrit off!”

A four-foot long leech had attached itself to his hip. He fell in the sand and grabbed hold of the horrible thing in both hands to try and prevent it boring in even further. Jane grabbed up the line and began hauling in the rhinoworm while Ambel tended to Peck. He did the only thing that was possible in the circumstances: he grabbed hold of the leech in both hands, put his foot against Peck’s leg, and hauled with all his might. Peck let out a scream as the leech pulled away with a fist-sized plug of his flesh in its circular mouth. Ambel bashed the creature against a rock until the lump came free, then after trampling the creature to slurry he handed the piece of flesh back to Peck. Peck screwed it back into his leg, then wrapped a bandage from his pack round it to hold it in place.

Two of my favourite subjects are combined by the ecology of Spatterjay: immortality and flesh-eating monsters. The idea for this life-system was conceived in the short story (excerpt above and below) of the same name in my collection The Engineer (Tanjen) and there was fairly simplistic, but complete – skeletal. The story, along with another from the same collection (Snairls) formed the basis of what became The Skinner.

What’s in a name?

Names given to life forms can be misleading, and equivalent characteristics identified by untrained observers have led many to be misapplied. In America a hemlock is a tree whilst here in Britain it is a poisonous herb, so how the hell did that come about? How much more might be people’s misapprehension of alien life? Take leeches. These creatures are pretty horrible here on Earth, and when seeing something of similar habit and appearance oozing along a stream bed on an alien world it would be easy to reapply the name. Unfortunate then to discover their feeding habit is to take out lumps of flesh, that they can grow to the size of a hippopotamus on land and that of a whale in the sea, and that they can make you immortal.

“How old are you, Ambel?”

“Oh, a bit.”

Ambel rolled down his shirt sleeve and looked shifty.

“Come on. This is really important.”

“Don’t rightly know. Been on the ships for a while.”

Erlin wasn’t having that. “You do know. Don’t fob me off!”

Ambel looked uncomfortable.

“No one believes me,” he complained.

“I will.”

Ambel got up and headed for the door, as he opened it he mumbled, “Spatterjay Hoop was a crazy git.” He went out onto the deck.

Erlin sat down on the chair and shook her head. They were all crazy gits, and Ambel was no better. If he thought she was going to believe he knew Spatterjay Hoop, the man after whom this strange little world had been named a thousand solstan years ago, then he was probably worse. Ridiculous idea. Wasn’t it?

Erlin’s discovery that the bite of a Spatterjay leech transmitted a form of viral immortality, made that world a definite place to head for once the Zimmer frame was imminent. However, those seekers after eternal life became less enthusiastic upon discovering a world not cosseted by the Human Polity, where the incredibly tough and ancient hoopers might inadvertently tear off your arm, and where the leeches would continue to feed upon the hosts of the viral fibres – who were to them a reusable food resource.

Implausible?

Not really: why kill the whole animal when you can regularly harvest its flesh?

Oh come on…

Here on Earth, under that rock, you’ll find similar strategies. Pick up a veterinary book on helminthology (the study of parasitic worms) if you want to find some real horrors. One parasite’s cycle includes both sheep and ants. Inside the ant it alters the function of that insect’s brain so it climbs to the top of a grass stalk and there clings with its pincers, waiting for a sheep to come along and eat it. There’s another that gets inside a snail and so adjusts that creature’s physiology that it grows a thicker shell, thus protecting both parasite and snail. The downside being that the snail no longer has the resources to breed, whilst the parasite breeds inside it. There’s always a downside:

She had nothing left to throw up when she followed them into the basin in the top of the hill. She just retched a little. The rest of Peck was jammed, writhing about and making horrible noises, between two rocks. Erlin followed them down and watched in horror as they dragged him out and dropped him on the ground. All his muscles she could see, all his veins. His lidless eye-balls glared up at the sky. She advanced with her laser switched on. It was the only merciful thing to do.

“No!” Ambel knocked the laser from her hand. “Don’t you think he’s got enough problems? Find his clothes.”

Erlin dropped to her knees, not sure if she wanted to cry or laugh. No, this was not happening … but it was. When she looked up, Ambel and Boris were putting Peck’s skin back on him, tugging the wrinkles up his legs and pressing the air bubbles out … and Peck was helping them.

Do you wanna live forever?

Of course you do, but not if it hurts.

And what do you reckon is the most valuable thing on a world where money is worth buggerall, and life might be eternal?

Death.

The small leeches hang in the peartrunk trees and drop on any who might brush against the those fat trunks. Larger leeches squelch along the ground and sometimes take to the water where they wait with thread-cutting mouths agape for an unwary foot. On land they can grow as large as a hippo and taking a chunk, with a mouth the size of a bucket, from a hooper human can have some untoward effects unless that individual gets plenty of dome-grown food. It wouldn’t be much fun to have another skinner running about…

Reaching the size at which they can no longer support the weight of their slimy bodies the leeches take to the sea and grow ever larger. There the hoopers must hunt them for the treasure their bodies contain because, out of necessity, it is there that the oceanic leeches change in a very particular way. It’s the mouth, you see, when it finally becomes so large that harvesting flesh is no longer an option, the leech has to eat its prey whole, and obviously there are dangers in swallowing something in no particular hurry to die. Oceanic leeches begin to produce in themselves, in their bile, a poison that kills the immortality-imparting virus, and thus their prey. From this bile, by centrifuge and crystallisation, is refined a pure poison called sprine, which is worth more to hoopers than gold or gems.

Death.

All treasures are difficult to obtain – that’s the nature of the beast.

Ambel turned toward the rail just as the spout-like head of the leech lifted into sight. This head was just a long tube with a metre-wide mouth at the end. Inside the mouth was a red hell of revolving rings of teeth and reels of bone cutting-disks.

“Oh bugger,” said Ambel as the top half of the leech oozed over the rail and went after Anne. Anne leapt back and the leech cornered her against the wall of the fore cabin. There was real fear on her face. This was something no hooper could survive. With her automatic held out in both hands, she emptied the weapon’s magazine into the leech’s mouth, shell cases clattering to the deck around her feet. Shortly after the empty magazine hit the deck and she was groping at her belt for another one, sure she would have no chance to reload.

The thing about death is that you want it when you want it, and not before. The thing about sprine is that it is nice for a hooper to have that option. The thing about having such an option is that you always use it too late, and that on a world like Spatterjay the need for such is frequent. The leeches are bad enough, of course, but then there are the rider prill with their sickle legs, the glisters,  the frog and hammer whelks, and did I neglect to mention the mercenaries and their psychotic leader, or the homicidal aliens and war drones?

Come pay a visit…