I’ve just re-read Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers – a book I originally read when a teenager. What little I remembered of reading the book then, had since been swamped by the lurid images from Paul Verhoeven’s silly but enjoyable film. I probably would not have read it again but for two circumstances: firstly my mother happened to bring home a copy from the charity shop in which she works, and secondly, the strident claims that Heinlein is fascist/right-wing/libertarian from members of the British SF establishment, piqued my interest, for it is often the books recommended by the same critics and self-styled academics that bore me into a coma.

My second reading of this book gave me what I’ll describe as the Dad’s Army effect. When I watched that series as a child, I laughed along with the slapstick and enjoyed it on that level. Watching it later as an adult, I began to appreciate the adult humour. Starship Troopers can appeal to the SF-with-boy’s-toys oriented adolescent just as much as to an adult with the same orientation. But reading ideas of how human rights and privileges should be earned and should be equally balanced by responsibilities, I began to see why Heinlein is disliked by so many, then I hit chapter eight.

There are those who consider his work ironic – satire – when he is describing his future society, but that’s wishful thinking on the part of people who cannot accept that someone who produces such lucid enjoyable work does not buy into their political beliefs. His satire is in fact directed against the society of his time, and of our time, of which he is unstinting in his scorn. Not accepting the cop-out that he didn’t really mean it, it would seem then that Heinlein advocates corporal and capital punishment “…they(wrongly) assumed Man has a moral instinct.”  his narrator tells us, this, after detailing how the delinquents of the twentieth century were never really deterred from going on to become full-time criminals. How they never, in the puppy-training analogy he uses, had their noses rubbed in it.

He comments on a death sentence carried out on someone who kidnapped and murdered a little girl: Well, if there was no way to keep it from happening once, there was only one sure way to keep it from happening twice. Which we used.  The old liberal platitude has it that the death penalty is no deterrent to murder, which is like saying that hitting a paving slab at 125 miles an hour is no deterrent to jumping off the Eiffel Tower. Well, you’ll only do it once. Of course such arguments are too simplistic for the politically correct and ‘socially aware’, but he has a pop at them as well on the subject of corporal punishment: “…the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ‘child psychologists’. It was too simple for them, apparently, since anyone could do it using the patience and firmness needed in training a puppy. I have sometimes wondered if they cherished a vested interest in disorder…”

Such simplicity is not relished by those who studied psychology, sociology et al at the universities where they also received their political indoctrination. (It’s sad that so many enter the SF world via the same route and consider themselves radical, when really they’re only joining the establishment.) Such people have not so much a vested interest in disorder, but in over-complication, because that way they can wrest control from poor normal plebs. “You must not smack your child, bring him to the child psychologist and if that doesn’t work, we’ll dose him up with Ritalin, then during his ensuing life this severely screwed-up human being can keep any number of counsellors, psychologists, social workers & sociologists in employment.”

Reading about Heinlein’s work I discover that he did not write ‘literature’ and that his later works were weighed down with didactic right-wing/libertarian tracts. Of course, had those tracts been left-wing/liberal, he would have been on a higher pedestal in Britain than the one he presently occupies – his work branded as serious literature containing much important social commentary. You gotta laugh.

Starship Troopers was first published forty-six years ago. Read chapter eight if you cannot be bothered with the whole book. In the political zeitgeist of today’s Britain Heinlein is not accepted as a visionary, but that will come after the lunatics presently in control of our society have finished shovelling their excrement at the fan, in the time when we have to clean up the mess.

A is for Alien, not because it was the best film of the series, but because it was the first. Here at last SF film lost the rubber head syndrome and on screen we saw something difficult to laugh at. Not only that, space lost its 2001 polish, the Nostromo bore more of a resemblance to a working JCB than many of the shiny toys we’d grown used to, and you could just about smell the hydraulic oil, and the BO.

B is for Blade Runner, because it has to be.

C is for Cicada Scream, the title I’ve chosen for a book I’ll one day write about Crete. On hot still days whilst driving down from Papagianades to Magrigialos the sound these insects make blends into one long loud scream. It sounds like madness which, considering our experiences here, seems to perfectly sum up this place.

D is for Dexter, the TV Dexter and not the books. I love the series, can watch it again and again and, I have to say, the character appeals to my inner psycho. Yeah, sometimes I would like to be him, carving up the scum of this world who laugh at our soft police and wimpish justice system. The only problem with me taking on this role as that I wouldn’t be so stringent in my selection process as him. At least, I wish he really existed.

E is for Essex. Well, you can’t be more of an Essex boy than being born in Billericay and I have to support this county that comes in for so much stick from elsewhere in Britain. White stilettos? Yes, I’ve seen them, usually on some slightly inebriated female lying on the pavement of some inner city much further north. Thick Essex girls? If you say so, though oddly most of them seem to work for a living.  Rich builder boys and scrap merchants, wealthy oiks with no taste? Very true … Essex is a county where the class system has been badly injured.

F is for Frappe which is now, amidst those drinks with no alcohol in them, my favourite. It took me a while to get used to this drink because I had to lose the idea that I was drinking a coffee that I’d left out too long and really needed to put in the microwave. I also have to add that Greeks drinking hot small cups of bitter coffee is an impression that’s a generation out of date. They drink frappes, lots of them.

G is for Germany for a couple of reasons. We took a short break in Berlin some years ago and there found some of the most polite and helpful strangers we’d ever met. Also, Baste Lubbe, my German publisher, has bought every book I’ve ever written, some of them even before they were anything more than an idea, and maybe a title.

H is for Hornet. My stuff about hornets being intelligent you might think a product of all my previous SF reading, and I guess the hivemind aspect does. But let me tell you a story. Before I could earn money from writing I once repointed a three-storey Victorian house. Whilst I was poised precariously atop two roped-together scaffold towers I glanced to one side and thought I saw a helicopter in the distance. It took me a moment to process that it was actually a large hornet rapidly approaching. I had nowhere to run. The thing flew over, hovered over my bucket of mortar, dipping to inspect it. It then flew up to inspect the work I was doing on the wall. At this point I did something akin to abseiling without a rope, finally diving in through a window my workmate was repairing. The damned thing followed us, not angrily. It just followed. We had to leave that room and close the door between, checking every now and again until the thing went away. It did, but then returned many more times that day. The thing that stuck with me was its seeming intelligence – no bumbling about like a wasp or a bee. The hornet hivemind germinated then.

I is for Iain M Banks with his talking guns, crazy AIs, and spaceships so large just a glimpse of one might crash a civilization. His books were the first I ever bought new, having acquired my SF fixes from a second-hand book shop until I read a story of his in Interzone. His books weren’t in that bookshop, so I bought Consider Phlebas. I’m very glad I did.

J is for Jacaranda. Damn, the name has been in my head for years and I’ve been seeing those beautiful blue flowering trees for years too. Only in the last month have I managed to connect the two. Well, I’ve always said that when I feel I’ve got nothing to learn it’s time hang up my keyboard. It’s certainly not that time yet.

K is for Karate. In days of yore it made me the fittest I’d ever been and is the only sport that ever appealed to me. Because I didn’t take all the tests I should have done, I only reached the level of green belt, about which I’ve over-used a joke concerning people being unable to build houses on me. I once fought in a competition at Crystal Palace, left in a state of euphoria until the bruises started to come up on my ribs and I discovered I’d broken my toe.

L is for Lachrymal. I once read an old dictionary from cover to cover and this was one of the words I found there. It’s a noun and one you won’t find in a more modern dictionary. A lachrymal is a small vessel made to contain the tears of the bereaved, and is buried with the dead. I used it quite a lot in a fantasy trilogy still awaiting on my hard drive – this was before I lost the neophyte writer’s attraction to baffling the reader with an obscure vocabulary.

M is for Mundon, where I spent a quarter century of my life

N is for Nautilus, no, not Verne’s submarine, but the creature it was named after. Like someone else writing here, I too have an attraction to and an admiration of molluscs. The damned things are fascinating. Did you know that some snails manufacture a barbed calcite spear inside themselves to harpoon their mate? The nautilus, as well as being an odd creature of this nature, is also quite beautiful and strange, which is probably why Sniper ended up in a drone shell of that shape.

O is for Occam’s Razor, which is absolutely right, and a great name for a spaceship.

P is for Parasite. I’ve always been fascinated by biology (all sciences really) and when, maybe fifteen years ago, a vet acquaintance offered to loan me a book on helminthology (the study of parasitic worms) I accepted. So, the brain worm, whilst in that stage of its life cycle when it occupies an ant, will make the ant climb to the top of a stalk of grass and cling there, awaiting a grazing sheep, which it the worm’s next host. Another parasite, occupying a snail, will make the snail grow a thicker shell to thus offer more protection to both parasite and snail, but kill the snail’s ability to reproduce. Well, all of this resulted in numerous short stories. It’s also to blame for the Spatterjay leech.

Q is for Quantum because in science fiction we don’t use abracadabra.

R is for Raki. Ouzo is the drink usually associated with Greece but raki is the one you should associate with Crete. Every village here has numerous stills, kazanis, and during October and November the roads are occupied by pick-up trucks carting about crates of grapes and large brown plastic barrels. I’m told that like grappa, raki is made from the leavings from a wine press, but I’ve yet to see that. At the kazani right next to our house they mince up grapes in barrel, allow the mix to ferment for a few weeks, then stick this lot straight into a still. Nothing quite like raki warm from the still, drunk in good company, to wash down barbecued pork, garlic bread, raw cabbage with salt and lemon juice, pomegranites. And the stuff is cheap here. Three Euros will buy you a litre, if someone hasn’t already given you gifts of more of the stuff than you can drink. It’ll be the death of me.

S is for Scorpion. I was writing Scorpion Memory during our first time on Crete. When I finished it, Night Shade Books felt the title too obscure and wanted it changed to Shadow of the Scorpion. By the time Macmillan took it on I’d already shared a house with the creatures, and had the pleasant experience of hearing one thud down on my pillow beside my face. The word seems almost precognitive, but it’s just coincidence.

T is for Terminator because the Golem owe him a lot.

U is for Unseen University where wizards eat and drink too much and smoke roll-ups, so are very familiar to me. It’s a place sitting at the centre of Ankh Morpork, which seems to sit at the centre of Discworld, at least in my mind. Thank you Terry Pratchett for endless hours of excellent reading, for the wisdom, and for slyly being ‘guilty of literature’. Collect your accolades and laugh.

V is for Volkhavaar by Tanith Lee. Never read a bad one from her but this one is my favourite. Here worship creates the god, long before Pratchett’s Small gods. I feel she single-handedly created the gothic fantasy genre, and few have written it so well.

W is for Waylander, one of David Gemmel’s many heroes. Here’s another writer all of whose books I’ve enjoyed. Being unashamed to entertain seems a very good survival trait in the publishing world, and a path I always seek to follow.

X is a bastard. Open a dictionary and words beginning with X only occupy one page. I won’t go for X-files, because I didn’t really enjoy that silliness, and I’d rather hit myself in the face with a frozen kipper than watch The X-factor. How about xenophobia – the stick that xenophobes use to beat others with.

Y is for Yamas. Cheers!

Z is for Zelazny, for books I read until they were falling apart and had to put away because I had nearly memorized them.

INORGANIC ORGANICS

I have to wonder how many people actually carry out the quite simple exercise of checking the meaning of words in a dictionary. Doing so, they might learn just how much gobbledegook is being flung at them every day. And just how much advertisers and those with more political motives, are perpetually playing on their fears and ignorance. Hypo-allergenic shampoo, for example, is not one that prevents allergic reaction, just one that contains lower levels of the proteins that do cause an allergic reaction. The compound word means ‘less allergens’ – one of those utterly meaningless statements of which advertisers are fond because there’s less chance of Trading Standards jumping on them. The question you have to ask is: less allergens than what? A patch of stinging nettles? A wasp’s nest?  Obviously the intention of putting these buzz-words on bottles is not to inform, but to blind with science. Perhaps realising this people could then ask themselves why fruit additives are good or why washing with herbs will give you an orgasm? At its root, all this obfuscation is playing on the simplistic idea that natural is good and chemical is bad (This ignores everyday facts of life e.g. because we drink chemically-treated water we are utterly free of natural cholera and amoebic dysentery), which brings me, by a roundabout route, to the incredible ignorance surrounding the word ‘organic’.

While driving around in rural Essex it’s quite common to see signs up advertising all sort of items for sale – knackered lawn mowers, ancient cars, flowers, honey – and some of the signs display literacy ranging from the poetic to the abysmal. But just lately I’ve been noticing a trend set by ‘greenies’, adopted by supermarkets, and promulgated by stupidity. Now you can buy organic manure, organic cheese, organic eggs… Do the people who started this strange craze have any idea what ‘organic’ means? Could they please explain to me what inorganic cheese, manure or eggs might be?

If you are green then you’ll probably think it means items produced without any of those nasty chemical thingies. What utter drivel. Everything is made of chemicals or their constituent elements. They are not something recently created by evil science but something derived from what is already here. Monosodium glutamate (flavour enhancer) … yuk, we don’t want any of that – far too many syllables. Ever wondered why tomatoes enhance a dish? Because they’re packed with MSG. An essential chemical we must ingest every day is sodium chloride: the product of a metal that if held in the hand would result in you being hospitalised shortly after, and the basic constituent of mustard gas. It is also a chemical three oxygen atoms away from being a powerful bleach and weed killer. How about these terrible sounding compounds: diallyl disulphide, diallyl trisulphide, S-2-propenylcysteine sulphoxide … The list is a long one, but can be contracted to one word: garlic.

That which is organic is something relating to or derived from plants or animals, or it is any of a class of compounds based on carbon. Interestingly, a final definition in the dictionary I’m presently studying, is: any substance such as a pesticide or fertilizer derived from animal or vegetable matter. So, organicfood that you buy in the supermarket can have been sprayed with a nicotine insecticide or the organic chemical DDT. In fact few insecticides and fertilizers are not the product or organic chemistry, so they are organic. In fact, some of the most poisonous substances on this planet are products of organicchemistry, whether performed in a laboratory or in the more potent chemical laboratories inside living things. Oh my goodness, chemicals, I hear you cry. Sigh. Get with reality. Curare is organic, so why not spread some of that on your whole-grain bread and see how you get on? And next time you buy yourorganic potatoes, remember they could have been sprayed with the organiccompound agent orange and that would make them no less ORGANIC!!

Jayson and Michelle Whitaker were initially refused permission to have a designer baby by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Apparently it was ‘unlawful and unethical’ to save the life of their three-year-old son with a bone-marrow transplant from this second baby. Thankfully, sanity finally prevailed, and now the deed has been done.

Putting aside questions about who comprise this ‘Authority’, whether or not they were elected (or another fucking quango), and what right they have to make such life-and-death decisions, it can be seen that this is one of the sillier examples of the hysterical fear that has gripped this country for too long, of ‘interfering with God’s work/nature’. The biggest bugbear is ‘GM’, though in the Whitaker case all the parents were doing was selecting the right child, not altering its DNA. ‘Unlawful and unethical’ in all cases such as this are vague terms modern hysterics have now transposed with the vaguer ‘against God or Nature’. These are applied to everything from Human fertilisation to GM crops. But first, let’s look at human DNA.

As our medical technologies advance it is becoming increasingly obvious that most of the diseases killing us now are due to faults in our own DNA or in themselves need studying and tackling at a genetic level. Cancer, though in some cases having a viral or bacteriological cause, propagates by copying errors in the genetic blueprint. To truly defeat it we need to learn how to correct or completely delete those errors, straight chemical intervention mostly just delays the Reaper. The AIDS epidemic that is killing millions is caused by a virus that actually uses the T-cells of our immune system to propagate itself. Again straight forward chemical intervention does nothing more than delay the process. Real results are coming from us taking apart this virus and our own DNA so as to learn how to tackle AIDs. Cutting-edge genetic research is the answer – not reliance on God or Nature.

The subject of GM crops is another one to get people banging their tambourines. Along with my acquisition of a garden came the beginning of a whole new vocabulary. I can now use the words hellebore and aquilegia and actually know what I’m talking about. I now also have a use for epithets, which I use less commonly in my writing, as prefixes for the words slug, snail, ant, and aphid. What, you ask, has this got to do with the GM debate? In reply I can tell you that I recently took part in the slaughter of the innocents. Two handfuls of slug pellets yielded me two litres of dead snails which I duly transferred to my council-subsidised composter. My garden, I’ll have you know, is just about big enough to get the Queen’s head on. Beyond it is a field in which it would fit many thousands of times. A friend of mine is a farmer and he applies slug pellets from a spreader on the back of a quad bike and my few handfuls, I know, translate into sacks full for this purpose. The environmental cost of this is but a small proportion of the whole. Thousands of gallons of potent herbicides and insecticides are poured onto our land every year. GM crops need few of them, their yield is greater, therefore less land has to be used to produce the same amount of food. When are the hysterics going to realise that in this case we are already in a deep and poisonous hole from which GM just might drag us?

The arguments against GM range from the apparently cogent to the plain silly. Tampering with the human genetic code will produce Midwitch Cuckoos who’ll take over, and consign old humans to the waste bin. Rubbish: it will result in years to come in the eradication of hereditary diseases, of faults, of people dying young or living lives governed by pill bottles, injections or the next pull on an inhaler, and it will be a slow process. There’s the idea that some super plant may wipe-out or displace established species. We’re already doing this with herbicides, and compared to what the natural world produces we are amateurs. Do the hysterics visualise armies of triffids marching across the English countryside? Get real. What we’re having trouble with, is what nature produces. What the hell is so frightening? Could GM produce poisonous plants, killer insects or animals, virulent and fatal diseases … er, nature already seems to be doing a pretty good job in those departments. Really, anyone who thinks that genetic modification is going to produce monsters that billions of years of evolution has not already produced is, frankly, an idiot.

Nature or God, however, do provide us with natural and godlike things. There’s famine, plague, and other disasters that belittle our paltry attempts at the same. More species have been wiped-out by nature than we are ever likely to wipe-out. While we piddle-about with out little wars and exterminations nature comes along and puts us in our place. In the first world war we killed millions. The flu that came along after killed many millions more. Genocide? We’re rank amateurs. Black death killed twenty-five million, which was a third of the Earth’s population at that time. So, when you hear people ranting about nature and how we are playing God, please point out to them that we are not playing. We are trying to solve some serious problems and take control of our own existence. As for nature: we live in a world that is completely unnatural and, in reality, the only way any of us is going to get back to nature is when we’re buried in a paper coffin under a tree.

We live in a society obsessed with the idea of youth, and frightened of the plain facts of aging and death. To avoid facing up to them people will lie, behave as if those facts don’t exist, refuse to wear hearing aids or glasses, dress young, have Botox injected and wrinkles cut away. But worse than all this are those who offer up the obviously untruthful promise of eternal youth.

One look at the advertising thrown in our faces every day will illustrate this. An evening of TV adverts will give you such gems as a model who has only just managed to clear up her acne in time to sing the praises of a hypo-allergenic-polyfiller-in-wrinkle-cream. Another cream will reduce the seven signs of aging, so we can all be glad that such a simple product will protect us against incontinence, arthritis, dementia, heart failure, blindness, hearing loss and a tendency to harp on about the good old days. You can boogy down on the beach sipping a drink containing enough sugar to rot the tusks off an elephant, and somehow this will transform you into a white-toothed youth. There’s the deodorant that keeps you perpetually available to your latest boyfriend, which is probably useful if you live the active skateboarding life promoted by your latest brand of tampon.

Magazines and catalogues are as bad if not worse. See the girdle clinging to the curves of that model who has just returned from shooting an advert about a shampoo that apparently gives you an orgasm. Observe young Adonis modelling the latest truss. And read all those articles promoting foods, New Age treatments, lifestyles and internal décor that’ll keep you perpetually this side of the Styx and apparently on the underside of thirty.

The horror of all this is that it works – many people believe it. It is doubly unfortunate, therefore, that this lying ‘in spirit and in fact’ extends well beyond the mercenary and cut-throat worlds of advertising and glossy magazines.

Consider government health warnings on cigarette packets. If you smoke you can get painful, humiliating, or disfiguring diseases that can be fatal. This is all very frightening until you ask, “How many of us don’t?” We all die. Few of us are lucky enough to die in our sleep. Most of us die from some kind of lingering malady. If you drink, don’t imbibe more than twenty-one units in a week. Heavy drinking can lead to liver failure and death (unless you’re a famous footballer of course). Both of these aberrant behaviours can lead to all sorts of terrible illnesses ranging from impotence to heart failure. Again, such warnings ignore the fact that avoiding such habits does not result in endless perfect health. You are going to get sick and die anyway, and not at the age of ninety-two with your nurse bouncing up and down on your willy. But ignoring this fact is carried on through to our health service with horrible results.

This seeming inability accept the inevitability of death (which admittedly has always been a human trait) has resulted in a health service that refuses to give us an easy way out and, with increasingly poisonous treatments, prolongs the horrible process. Get yourself a painful lingering terminal illness, and you can guarantee that the NHS will extend your suffering for as long as possible. Your only way out would be to suck on the exhaust of your car but, unable to drive that you sold it years ago, or perhaps cut your wrists, if your hands didn’t shake so much. But neither are really viable while you are trapped in a hospital bed. Your dignity is irrelevant, of course. How dare you, by your very presence, prove that none of us lives forever? How dare you be old or ill? How dare you die?

The idea that old is bad and new is good is one that permeates some quarters of our culture and sees its expression in the New Labour verses the ‘forces of conservatism’ in the political world. The former seems intent on destroying anything old even when having nothing better to replace it, the latter wants to hang onto the outmoded even when something better is available. But before anyone switches off, I’m not going to get into a rant about all that – this magazine isn’t big enough – I’m going to look at it as applied to science fiction.

For many, SF has to be primarily new and innovative. Now, while I agree that SF should open our eyes to possibilities never seen before (though that is by no means all it should do), I also feel it should never close our eyes to the eminently likely.

Some while back I produced a story in which I named an android manufacturing company ‘Cybercorp’, and was told the name was nothing new. But being much used in fiction, is that name less or more likely to be used in fact? Already we are coming out the other side of rebranding for the sake of it. Consignia is now once again the Post Office and most people know that Corus really means British Steel. Of course I could have named my company Epsilion Floogle Bugler Ltd or Rumbatious Pumpwhistle, but I came up with the Cybercorp in the same way as many company names are formed (when advertising executives are not becoming ‘creative’ and disappearing up their own fundaments): Microsoft, Vodaphone, Telecom, Railtrack – simple basic and descriptive. But my real contention here is that though something may be old hat, that doesn’t make it bad, wrong or unlikely. I know it’s a distasteful prospect for some, but it is quite possible that sometime a company will be formed and it’ll be called Robotics Inc. Though, going off at tangent here, the most likely name, for a future manufacturer of androids, is Honda.

Zap guns and rocket ships (or squids in space) are what SF is all about, apparently. I can take issue with that straight away. 1984 certainly isn’t and, despite what Jo Brandt might think, it’s classic SF. Other books in the genre that don’t fall under that supposedly derogatory description: The Time Machine, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Frankenstein, Half-Past Human (T J Bass), Hawksbill Station (Silverberg) … I’m probably preaching to the converted here. However, what’s wrong with zap guns and rocket ships? Certainly the terms themselves are cliches, but what about the ideas and the reality behind them? Must they be abandoned because they are no longer new? Many years ago the American military asked Congress if they could test a ground-based laser for knocking out satellites (refused). Microwave beam weapons were employed during the Gulf War to screw Iraqi communications. The taser has been in use for a ages and now, in the process of being developed, is a taser that uses no wires – the utterly cliched SF stun gun. Even my nieghbour, working years ago for Marconi, was developing specialist transformers for powering military lasers. All zap guns, all real. As for the rocket ships … well erm, there’s this thing called the space shuttle, a couple of years ago the first ion drive was tested in space, there are plenty of contenders for the $10 million prize for putting a privately-funded craft up into space (twice in a limited period to prove it’s viable proposition), there’s the prospect of many more missions into the solar system, rocket ships have put two robots on Mars. I won’t go on.

Only writers of utterly dystopian futures of technological collapse think zap guns and rocket ships won’t figure in them. To ignore these supposed old cliches of SF makes about as much sense as ignoring trees because they have too often been used in fiction. It is plain wrong to discount something because it is old and well-used. Things, in general, become that way because they work, because they are right, and because no one has thought of a plausible alternative. New doesn’t mean good or right and old doesn’t mean bad or wrong, they just are what they are.

The boundaries between the very ill-defined genres of fiction have always been blurred and always will be. This is a good thing as the ground in those grey areas can be very fertile. It has brought us the hardboiled detective Brother Cadfael, Robert Graves’ wonderful family saga, that war/historical/romance Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and many more besides. But why oh why this continual need to search for new labels?

In the genres of science fiction and fantasy this is especially noticeable, and often maddening. I was dumbfounded to discover that Jurassic Park was labelled in a fast-seller list as the genre ‘dinosaur’, and on principle it is highly unlikely I’ll ever read Oryx & Crake. SF&F have an image problem for some, and this is why they try to label parts of it differently. Forever in search of respectability they grope for new names for the fiction they write, read, criticise or publish. But where are they looking for this change in attitude? Who are they actually hoping will look upon them in a different light?

Many in the mainstream literati intelligensia sneer at these genres. This is in spite of the fact that they take up about twenty percent of the fiction market, have resulted in many of the most successful films in recent years, and, science fiction specifically, is hugely relevant to today’s culture with its rapid technological change. Where will anyone have first come across videophones, genetic manipulation, satellite lasers, and missiles that think for themselves? In SF, of course. And it is to those who sneer, that those in search of new labels are going cap in hand pleading, “Please, take me seriously. I’m not really involved in that awful science fiction or fantasy stuff!” This is not only insulting to some great past authors, it is bloody annoying for those who are writing SF&F right now. How dare these people grovel for acceptance from those who don’t have the imaginative capacity to grasp science fiction or fantasy? And how gutless they are to not claim these genres as their own.

But why seek the approval of the mainstream literati establishment, especially when those seeking that approval often style themselves as ‘radical’? More blurred lines. It is because SF&F have their own literati intelligensia who stand astride the line between SF&F and the mainstream: one group standing with their feet in both worlds. They enjoy the creativity and ideas of the first but loath its status. They like the status of the other but do not enjoy its pedestrian limitations.

Some would also have us believe that what they are labelling is something new. What conceit, what arrogance, or what pretension and ignorance. One can only suppose that they have not read widely enough. There’s also some misapprehension of how the English language works in this age when if you’re bad, man, you’re good, and if you’re cool you’re hot. Like the PC lobby they hope that changing labels changes attitude, when in fact current labels change in people’s perception. And the delusion that this rebranding (for that is what it is) will work, is misguided. It will not cause what has been rebranded to perform better. Perhaps they should call the new thing Consignia Fiction, or Corus Fiction – that should do as much good.

There seems a belief, ascribed to by many of those writing short science fiction today, that nothing of importance happens unless it is set in the ‘mean streets’ of some city. On the whole the works stemming from this will be based on some student or other urbanite living a squalid existence in a seedy flat, while experiencing either relationship problems, or angst about an inability to have a relationship at all. Often, the writers are displaying a lack of imagination by casting themselves in the lead role in the only setting they have experienced. From the other side, there are many writers of fantasy who cannot step away from the image of their characters questing through the wilderness or some agrarian idyll, though that usually stems only from the secondhand experience gained throught the books they have read. Getting back to the cities though: are the writers of much urban science fiction nowadays suffering from the same delusion as the fantasy writers?

Cities and the country bleed into each other. There are towns, villages, single houses and an infinite combination of everything inbetween; industrial sites in the country; city parks; wastelands being reclaimed by nature; connecting rivers and transport systems; and, fuckit, urban foxes. And of course in both directions there is a continuous exchange of people: wide varieties of commuters and ‘overspill’ and many so-called ‘country’ people moving into the cities to work. The dividing line, unfortunately, is near illusory, perceived mainly by resentful minds. Cities no longer have impenetrable walls around them with gates that are closed up at night and the countryside is no longer filled with Barny Hayseed clones chewing on straws and muttering about ‘tham thar towny buggers’. This perception displays the same blinkered vision as the present urban government, which legislates for cities and against the country – damaging those millions dwelling in between and polarising the attitude of many others – or of those dwellers in a time warp, the fox hunting lobby, who manage to piss off all camps.

Britons live in a huge and wonderful variety of environments. Along our coasts there are many people who have tried to opt out by living in their boats, others divide their lives between boats and often much neglected coastal houses, there are huge transitory populations on the sea on oil rigs and in container ships, many millions inhabit suburbs, large populations live in villages where their only real connection with the countryside is that they notice it from their car whilst caught behind a tractor on their weekly visit to Asda, there are inclusive island populations who don’t even think about any division between city and country, there are towns where the countryside is only a step away and in which the residents truly live their lives in both.

Of course, everything I’ve just written is also blinkered, for I’m describing Britain today. Maybe, an SF writer should be thinking of tomorrow’s Britain or an alternate one, or both. Also, Britain contains only a small fraction of the world’s population – there are actually other countries, and some very different ways of life. As for our urban environments? Even now the computer revolution is beginning to decentralise white collar professions, so what need to live in the city? Robotic manfacture is whittling down the required work force so what future need of industrialised towns? And the financial imperatives that originally made urban dwelling a necessity, will they last? Umph! Still today, still parochial!

What about undersea dwellings, orbital communities, nomadic populations, cave dwelling morlocks, people adapted to live under the sea, people loading their minds into VR, even nomadic minds leaping from artificial body to body? Ach, I could go on and on, but the point is made: urban SF writers, lift up your heads, take a look around and try to imagine yourself somewhere else. Oscar Wilde quipped about how he may be lying in the gutter, but he’s looking at the stars, some people, it would seem, are lying face-down in that same gutter.

So, on February the 1st 2019 there is a chance, cosmically speaking, of a large lump of rock slamming into Earth. According to ‘expert opinion’, so the media told us on the morning of this announcement, this thing is a mile and half wide and will impact with enough force to wipe out a country the size of Britain. This was then upgraded, within an hour, to be one capable of wiping out the USA – a change I put down to both media hype and a dearth of information. Of course experts will vie with each other to predict greater and greater disasters to get themselves on television, so you can expect by the time you read this that the asteroid will destroy all life on Earth. But then maybe it could. What happens if it hits the oilfields, what changes might it make to the weather, might it perturb Earth’s orbit enough to sling us into an ice age or turn everything to desert? I’m not an expert, so I can’t really say.

At present, measurements are not yet accurate enough to tell us precisely what will happen. The asteroid will probably miss us completely and go round for another try in ex-thousand years time. What is certain is that measurements will become more and more accurate as the asteroid draws closer. Personally, I hope that they show, in the near future, that the asteroid is certain to impact. This is not because I am a nihilist, but because such a state of affairs would impel the kind of hardtechnological advances not seen since the World Wars. We have the time and ability to stop this thing, but we would have to get off our arses to do so. Such a threat could pump huge amounts of cash, heretofore blown on military spending and idiot bureaucracy, into giving us a firmer foothold in space. Resultant developments would be hugely beneficial and solid – we would not be able to afford the dipstick mistakes that have wasted the last few Mars’ missions – and I can see that how once the rock is blown off course there’ll be no turning back. Suddenly we’ll be dwellers in a huge and hostile universe, not post-Copernican Earthlings. And even those grandads saying, “Well, we didn’t have those new-fangled asteroid thingies in my day,” will have to sit up and take notice.

For the SF writer there are other situations to extrapolate. Taking the phrase ‘capable of wiping-out the USA’ it is almost inevitable that the Bin Ladens of this world will say that it has been sent to do just that. Let me predict that they’ll name the asteroid ‘The Fist of God’, and that fundamentalist terrorists will do everything they can to sabotage any project to change its course. Because there will be no guarantee that the project will be successful, a more careless attitude to life and liberty might prevail. Maybe the Western World would take this opportunity, in the purported interests of humanity, to flatten the Middle East and take control of the oil. Don’t doubt this possibility. It’s worth being reminded that the firepower of a couple of nuclear submarines could do the job. Have people already forgotten what atomic bombs can do, and more specifically, neutron bombs? Perhaps Pakistan and India will take this opportunity to settle their differences – end-of-the-world scenarios being an excuse for all sorts of mayhem. Will China just sit back and watch all this? And, there is always the most unlikely possibility: this could be a unifying influence on the entire planet.

Taking an even larger and more tongue-in-cheek view, one might even wonder about the timing. Consider how fortunate we were to have a moon that strips away atmosphere thus preventing this planet going catastrophically greenhouse and ending up like Venus – a moon that also gives tides so that life developing in the water will certainly also end up on land. Previous impacts wiped out life forms that would not have led to us. The asteroid that drove the dinosaurs extinct ended the 160 million-year reign of creatures that showed no signs of growing brains larger than peanuts. Aptly-timed ice ages then led to the survival of creatures with an interest in banging rocks together. A hundred years ago we would have been unable to do anything about the approaching cataclysm, moreover, probably would not even have detected it.

This is all obviously the determinist 20/20 hindsight of the bible-thumping trench survivor: “God loves me, that’s why the shrapnel took the top off of Harry’s head and not mine.” But it’s just as obvious that the aliens sent this rock, and that we have seventeen years in which to prove ourselves fit to join the galactic community.

The events of last September were horrible, but I will not grope for hyperbole since that has already been used to excess. Anyone, of the Western world, who was not stunned by this terrorism, was either in a coma or utterly without empathy. But now that we are less stunned, and the images of aeroplanes crashing into tower blocks are now cynically being used to decorate T-shirts, it might be useful to step back and take a look at the language, the rhetoric, that was used, and the hypocrisy and self-regard it reveals. For a writer, if he is to be any good at his job, must learn from something like this.

News reporters were the most immediate guilty parties. Obviously they were shocked by the story they were telling, but their tendency to stray from pathos to bathos and make outrageous assertions was inexcusable. Apparently the world has been changed forever by these events – something that will come as a surprise to anyone who lived through the blitz, Lockerby, Dunblain and numerous others, (the only differences being of definition, rather than of final physical result). However, the reporters were not so shocked as to forget to remind us of who they were, or to burble on at length to acquire more screen-time for themselves. We also got plenty of the usual ‘I am going to stick to my script even though you have just answered the question I am about to ask’ the ‘Let’s go to our reporter at the scene who knows less than we know here, but what-the-hell’ and the eternally insensitive and idiotic ‘Tell me how you feel about having had your husband incinerated?’

Politicians found this a wonderful time for their usual two-faced rhetoric, but the present lot, with their political correctness and tendency to blame victim rather than criminal, experienced some difficulties. Our Prime Minister carefully called what happened ‘mass’ or ‘global’ terrorism, to make it distinct from normal pub bomb variety, or the kind in which a soldier has the back of his head blown out, (for which you are provided with a get-out-of-goal-free card and your organisation is given political weight), before running to President Bush’s heel with his tail wagging. The opposition were quick to follow his lead, knowing that the zeitgeist would not allow them to point out how the government had been crippling the armed services it was now sending into action, and was a soft-touch for home-grown terrorists. Other world leaders damned the atrocity and also pledged undying support (entailing plenty of bombast but no bombs), which we knew they’d renege on in a month or so, as they did.

Our politicians and media came out of this whole farrago lower than my original low estimation of them (When Julia Roberts in ‘Pretty Woman’ said, “Slippery little suckers” she wasn’t referring to the snails she was attempting to eat, but to the MPs and BBC execs she’d just spotted at a nearby table). It is unsurprising how few people bother to vote at elections. And it is unsurprising how many people are purchasing satellite systems in search of something worth watching on television. During events like this, I am always reminded of an illuminating class for English language I once attended. We were asked to read an article about the same events in papers with opposing political leanings, and to compare them. Do this and you begin to see just how much the English language can be bent to a particular agenda. Keep this sort of thing in mind and you become painfully aware of the bullshit the media is throwing at you every day.