Authors Electric

I was looking through my Amazon orders the other day. One of my orders fell over – payment failed, apparently. Thanks so much, Amazon, for refusing to accept my VISA credit card after many years of loyal service! Although it wasn’t VISA that was declined – I had a few more weeks to go for that, so in anticipation I’d added a Mastercard to Amazon for future payments and made a test purchase (any excuse for another book). Except that the Halifax had cancelled the Mastercard without actually bothering to ask or inform me!  So I go into my local Halifax – only to be told that the card no longer existed on their system. At all. They cancelled it because I hadn’t replied to a message I never received. Of course, I could apply for a brand new card which would take around 30 minutes … 30 minutes? I went home and decided to get an American Express card instead which took me all of 5 minutes online.  Anyway, having made several test-purchases of books – these things just have to be don...

My youngest daughter, Zoë, came into this world in May, 1990, less than a year after the Berlin Wall came down. And by 1991, the Soviet Union had dissolved, ending the Cold War. "How lucky for you, my wee one," I said to her between spoonfuls of apple sauce. "You and your sisters will live free from the threat of nuclear annihilation that your mama and papa have known since they were babes!" What soaring potentials would thus be freed for their millennial generation, I thought! Little Zoë must have been the wiser right off the bat. One sign: my post-Cold-War child had no trouble getting the dark humour of Dr. Strangelove when she saw it as a pre-adolescent. I maintain, however, that I wasn't wrong about our millennials' potential. They have continued to amaze me with their accomplishments and character through these years. But how wrong I was about the threat, as we now see more clearly than ever on this first week and the second month of 2022. perhaps our ...

I have been walking past this amazing suburban garden for decades, going back to the years when I walked my two children home from school (they have both been serious adults for a very long time!) It's constructed by using very closely packed containers which can be moved around, re-arranged - so simple and so clever. In all that time, I have never encountered the gardener - of such tiny mysteries Alan Bennett monologues are made (if you've never heard of him, do Google him - he's well worth the effort.) Stories, like "A Lady of Letters", narrated in a beautifully crafted stream of consciousness by unremarkable people - people we mightn't want to share time with because they're so conventional and boring, people we'd pass un-noticed in the street - until something suddenly jars, something suddenly shocks. As a recent critic described reading these stories or listening to the monologues, it's like being on a night sleeper which chugs along peacef...

I never had E M Forster down as a reliable predictor of future inventions. He is remembered chiefly for novels in which nicely brought up English girls rebel against the class system that imprisons them, taking charge of their own lives and often causing havoc on the way.  When set against gorgeous backgrounds such as Tuscany, these stories make for ravishing films, most notably Merchant Ivory’s A Room With a View .  Florence: a ravishing setting Photo by  Maegan White  from  Pexels     But recently, as lockdown has forced us all into new patterns of (in)activity, each confined to our own Unit of Habitable Accommodation*, my mind has kept going back to one of Forster’s short stories I read as a teenager, decades ago.  The Machine Stops is – as far as I know – Forster’s only venture into science fiction (happy to be proved wrong, let me know, dear reader). As such I wouldn’t expect it to be particularly prescien...

There’s a saying isn’t there – about   knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing . But just how valuable is that nothing? I ran a writing science fiction workshop last week on a very wet and windy Saturday in North East Manchester. Now I don't write a lot of SF (far more crime these days), but given that a lot of the event was Dr Who -themed, with people in costumes, mask-making and a few props around, I suspect they booked me because of the Daemons DVD and anthology I was involved with. When I arrived, I was told that the workshop was fully booked and that the places had gone quickly. I was shown to a nice little room on a quiet corridor, I set up the tables, laid out some free books I’d acquired and waited for my delegates to arrive. A very nice chap turned up. An ex-EastEnders script-writer (yes, imposter syndrome started to kick in at this point), closely followed by another writer.  And nothing. We had a chat, liaised with the staff –...

It’s rare that I’m ever in both at the same time. Usually I’m in the wrong place at the right time, or very occasionally the reverse. Once, I missed an entire day of appointments because I’d convinced myself it was yesterday. Or tomorrow. I can’t remember which to be honest, but I know I did a lot of apologising! But rarely do the planets align in my favour …   I received an email from a library in North East Manchester a month or so back. Completely out of the blue – would I be interested in running a science-fiction writing workshop?  Well, yes, of course , says I, never one to turn down an opportunity. I mean how hard can it be? I’ve done enough talks and readings and the odd panel about writing; I’m sure I can run a workshop. On science-fiction? OK, I’ve never written much sf – though I grew up in the genre writing world, I’ve always been more of a fantasy writer, but some of my short stories have veered into sf territory and as a teenager, my reading fodder from a...

The future is here and it's everything, and nothing, like what we expected. It's taken a while longer to get here than I thought it would back while watching the Jetsons as a kid, but the future I dreamed of is finally arriving. And now that it is, it's much more exciting and more frightening than I ever considered it might be. The ever-present connectedness and constant surveillance combined with rapid scientific and technological progress means this is both a thrilling and a frustrating time to be a science fiction writer (but it's a great time to be alive!). Fifteen years ago, back before I began writing seriously, I started a far future story. Set one thousand years in the future, it featured technology such as cerebral-embedded computers, technology-based cyberpathic control, automated waste reclamation drones, clothing that could change colours based on the user's desires, tattoos with patterns linked to the owner's mood, and genetically engineere...

Recently a writer friend (who it has to be said ranges widely across genres)  remarked on how people wilfully discount huge swathes of  literature because of an apparent antipathy to one particular genre. In this I count myself guilty since, pace John Wyndham in his pomp, I have pretty much avoided sci-fi all my life.  And I doubt that this throwing down of the gauntlet would have stirred me to change my ways if three sci-fi books  hadn't come my way this year, all by writers whose work I knew in other contexts and which I was eager to read. So how did I get on? Avoiding any arcane discussion of what constitutes sci-fi and its near relatives, these books were remarkably different in the style of the narrative and the worlds they created and so I think I picked a good sample for my tour of future worlds. I found The Space Between the Stars by Anne Corlett (recently out in paperback) a gripping read, especially the opening in which heroine Jamie  contemplate...

As I type, the fearsome Beast from the East leaps from the sea, rises through the thermals (what thermals? The only thermals around here are my underwear) and tears at the window like Tove Jansson’s Groke, desperate for warmth and light and immediately blotting out any source of heat it encounters. In a few minutes I will venture out, take a brief walk along the cliff top (no danger of being blown over – only further inland) and hurry home to the sanctuary of my cosy flat. And yes, I’m aware of how fortunate I am – that there are rough sleepers out on the streets in these awful conditions, and yes, I’m ashamed to live in a country where this is allowed to happen. I’m also lucky to have the time and opportunity to write. And wow –   for some reason the muse has decided to pay me a few visits recently, after making herself scarce for quite a while. Having finally finished the second draft of a novel I’ve been working on for about two years, I seem to be inundated with new i...