Warning: may contain Steampunk!

Abraham Stoker’s Journal

— From the archives of the Bureau of Secret Intelligence, Pall Mall, London, Classified Ultra, for Head of Bureau Eyes Only —

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Bucharest –

I had finally arrived at this city, with darkness gathering, casting upon the city a most unfavourable appearance. Having checked into my hotel I drank a glass of strong Romanian wine, accompanied by bear steak, which I am told they bring from the mountains at great expense. I had not enquired as for the recipe.

I am sitting in my room, watching the dance of gas light over the city. tomorrow I set off for the mountains, and as I write this I am filled with trepidation. I have decided to maintain this record of my mission. In the event anything were to happen to me, this journal may yet make its way, somehow, back to London.

Let me, therefore, record how I came to be at this barbarous and remote country, and the sorry torturous route by which I came to my current predicament.

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My name is Abraham Stoker, called Abe by some, Bram by others. I am a theatrical manager, having worked for the great actor Henry Irving for many years as his personal assistant, and, on his behalf, as manager of the Lyceum Theatre in Covent Garden.

I am not a bad man, nor am I a traitor.

Nevertheless, it was in the summer of 18—that I became an unwitting assistant to a grand conspiracy against our lizardine masters, and one which I was helpless to prevent.

It had began as a great triumph for my theatrical career. Due to a fight between the great librettist W.S. Gilbert and his long-time manager, Richard D’Oyly Carte, over – of all things – a carpet, I had managed to lure Gilbert and his collaborator, the composer Arthur Sullivan, to my own theatre from D’Oyly Carte’s Savoy. We were to stage their latest work, titled The Pirates of the Carib Sea, a rousing tale of adventure and peril. The first part, and forgive me if I digress, describes our lizardine masters’ awakening on Caliban’s Island, their journey with that foul explorer Amerigo Vespucci back to the British isle, their overthrowing of our human rulers and their assumption of the throne – a historical tale set to song in the manner only G&S could possibly do it.

In the second part, we encounter the mythical pirate Wyvern, the one-eyed royal lizard who – if the stories in the London Illustrated News can be believed – had abandoned his responsibilities to his race, the royal Les Lezards, to assume the life of a blood-thirsty pirate operating in the Carib Sea, between Vespuccia and the lands of the Mexica and Aztecs, and preying on the very trade ships of his own Everlasting Empire, under her royal highness Queen Victoria, the lizard-queen.

Irving himself played – with great success, I might add! – the notorious pirate, assuming a lizard costume of some magnificence, while young Beerbohm Tree played his boatswain, Mr. Spoons, the bald, scarred, enormous human who is – so they say – Wyvern’s right-hand-man.

It was at that time that a man came to see me in my office. He was a foreigner, and did not look wealthy or, indeed, distinguished.

‘My name,’ he told me, ‘is Karl May.’ – continue reading!

Ballard on American science fiction:

Some [magazines], like Astounding Science Fiction [today: Analog], the front runner in both sales and prestige within the field, were heavily committed to space travel and tales of a hard-edged technological future. Almost all the stories were set in spaceships or on alien planets in the very far future. These planet yarns, in which most of the characters wore military uniform, soon bored me. The forerunners of Star Trek, they described an American imperium colonising the entire universe, which they turned into a cheerful, optimistic hell, a 1950s American suburb paved with good intentions and populated by Avon ladies in spacesuits. (p. 165)

. . .

Mary [Ballard's wife] listened to me for hours as I described the kind of fiction I wanted to write, urging me to keep up a steady flow of short stories and to ignore the strong hostility they provoked from the s-f fans within the field. I submitted my stories to the American s-f magazines that I had read in Moose Jaw [flight training centre in Canada], but all came back to me, usually with very dismissive rejection notes, which revealed the narrowness of mind that lurks behind American exuberance. A fierce orthodoxy ruled, and any attempt to enlarge the scope of traditional science fiction was regarded as conspiratorial and underhand. (p. 179)

. . .

It seemed to me that psychological space, what I termed ‘inner space’, was where science fiction should be heading. But I met tremendous opposition. The editors of the American s-f magazines were nervous of their readers, and would refuse to accept a story if it was set in the present day, a sure sign something subversive was going on. It was a curious paradox that science fiction, devoted to change and the new, was emotionally tied to the status quo and the old. (p. 192)

Anyway it’s a really interesting article – for me if no one else! – and raises up some themes I didn’t consider. I find Haifa absolutely fascinating, and one of the most marvellous places to set stories in. Here’s a snippet from the article that explains a little about the city and just why it’s so fascinating to a writer:

The city of Haifa is the venue of six stories by Lavie Tidhar. These stories were not written as a cycle, and only two of them are even directly linked through a shared character, but they all find an engaged setting in the ancient city of Haifa on the Eastern Mediterranean. This isn’t to say that they simply take place in a city called “Haifa,” a passive participant to the activity within it. Rather, Tidhar’s Haifa plays a role in all these stories, and through characteristics common across them, acts as a bridge between its local culture and the more universal enterprise of speculative fiction.

Four characteristics appear in one form or another in all of Lavie Tidhar’s Haifa stories: 1) the power of books and bookstores to shape the reality of the city and the way the protagonists perceive reality; 2) the city’s sanctity (especially with regard to sun and fire worship); 3) the eternal nature of the city, its harbor, and the mountain ridge on which it sits; and 4) the city’s ability to span the vast range of both history and mythology.

The city of Haifa as viewed from the port.

These characteristics are not unique to Tidhar. Speculative fiction is rife with books that expose reality as timeless and malleable. Michael Moorcock’s Tanelorn and Roger Zelazny’s Amber provide great points of reference with respect to cities the span space and time, acting as hubs for the world that exists around them. Yet these are definitively fictional cities, which raises an interesting question regarding Tidhar’s Haifa—do his stories merely apply fantastic conventions to Haifa, or are these fantastic features central to Haifa’s identity? We’ll see that whatever the answer to this question, this dynamic allows Tidhar to utilize Haifa to marry particular and local identity with concerns, themes, and conventions that are universal in scope.

As far as books and their power to affect reality, there is nothing special about Haifa besides a few locally iconic used bookstores. But the power of words is a vital trope in speculative fiction more generally, and it certainly a common theme in Tidhar’s work as a whole, highlighted by his recent Bookman trilogy.

As for Haifa’s nature as a meeting point and crossing point of times, places and realities, the answer may lie in the nature and history of Haifa itself. While it is the third largest city in Israel, Haifa was not one of the major towns of the region until the twentieth century. But it is an ancient port town, with evidence of settlement dating back to the late Bronze Age. It is situated along a stretch of coast that was one of the most important international trading centers in the Mediterranean for some 4,000 years. In recent history it gained importance as one of the largest deep-water ports in the eastern Mediterranean, and during the British rule of the Middle East as the gateway to the entire region. As such it has always been a nexus, a meeting place for people and cultures. Tidhar take this a few steps further. In his Haifa historical periods coexist side by side in the same city, timelines cross and meet and the city is a nexus not just for people from different places and cultures, but for the mundane and the mythical.

The Terraces of the Baha’i faith, located on Mount Carmel in Haifa.

The sanctity of the city can be traced back to the history of the region Haifa is located in. Haifa hosts the world center of the Baha’i religion and is sacred to this faith, but as far as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are concerned it had no major religious significance, especially compared to other cities in the Middle East. But the Carmel ridge on which it sits is a different matter. Mount Carmel is mentioned as a sacred place in the account of Thumose III’s occupation of Palestine in the fifteenth century BC; It is the site of Elijah’s famous showdown with the prophets of Ba’al and Ashera (1 Kings 18)—which implies that the site has an even older history as a sacred place; The city of Megiddo, made famous by the book of Revelation as “Armageddon” (Revelation 16), is along the ridge, less than forty kilometers from Haifa proper. – continue reading!

Just look at that cover!

The full list of nominees:

Best Novel

Cyber Circus by Kim Lakin-Smith (Newcon Press)

Embassytown by China Mieville (Macmillan)

The Islanders by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)

By Light Alone by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

Osama by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)

Best Short Fiction

The Silver Wind by Nina Allan (Interzone 233, TTA Press)

The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell (Asimov’s, July)

Afterbirth by Kameron Hurley (Kameron Hurley’s own website)

Covehithe by China Mieville (The Guardian)

Of Dawn by Al Robertson (Interzone 235, TTA Press)

Best Non-Fiction

Out of This World: Science Fiction but not as we Know it by Mike Ashley (British Library)

The SF Encyclopedia, 3^rd Edition ed. John Clute, Peter Nicholls and David Langford (website)

Review of Arslan by M J Engh, Abigail Nussbaum (Asking the Wrong Questions blog)

SF Mistressworks, ed. Ian Sales (website)

Pornokitsch, ed. Jared Shurin and Anne Perry (website)

The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the New Doctor Who (Foundation Studies in Science Fiction), ed. Graham Sleight, Tony Keen and Simon Bradshaw (Science Fiction Foundation)

Best Art

Cover of Ian Whates’s The Noise Revealed by Dominic Harman (Solaris)

Cover and illustrations of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls by Jim Kay (Walker)

Cover of Lavie Tidhar’s Osama by Pedro Marques (PS Publishing)

Cover of Liz Williams’s A Glass of Shadow by Anne Sudworth (Newcon Press)

He was the man with a thousand names. We best knew him as Amos Carmeli, under which name he wrote some of his most successful series, including The Young Detectives, The Young Sportsmen and The Sailors; under the name On Sarig he created Dani Din: The Invisible Boy, one of the most iconic figures of Israeli children’s fiction.

The Young Detectives Fly in the Artificial Moon (1958)

Dani Din became invisible after taking a purple potion created by Professor Katros; he spent the rest of him time fighting the various enemies of the State of Israel, including various Arab states, Saddam Hussein and – naturally – aliens.

The Sailors were a militant group of freedom fighters fighting the British under colonial rule in Palestine; the series ended on something of a cliff-hanger after a botched assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. The Young Detectives, memorably, flew into space (The Young Detectives Fly in the Artificial Moon), found the Queen of Sheba’s diamond and – of course – met Tarzan.

Gafni was prolific, and his career spun decades. His works were deeply nationalistic, and the figure of the Arab was a handy and persistent enemy for his (mostly) child heroes. He incorporated significant elements of science fiction and fantasy into his pulp narratives.

Etgar Keret affectionately parodied him in the short story “Gadi Din in Counter Espionage Adventures”, from his collection Missing Kissinger, written from the perspective of Dani Din’s son, and describing how Din pere is abandoned by the political and military establishment, later dying of liver damage caused by the mysterious purple potion. It is a memorable swan song to an entire era of Israeli children’s fiction.

My own Nights of Scorpion and Mystery (Hebrew Only) is ironic homage incorporating many of Ganfi’s various characters; in a more critical mode, The Master (published 2007 in Strange Horizons) is a longer, sober examination of a Gafni-like character in his twilight years, examining both his politics and influence and “replicating” a page in his style, in the fictional adventure The Young Riders Against The Master Of Terror:

“You can’t shoot me!” Arafat laughed, a demonic laughter that echoed like thunder in the dusty air of the ancient tomb. His dark beard shook with his evil laughter, and his eyes narrowed like two thin blades. “I have sold my soul to the great Djinn and no-one and nothing can stop me now! I am invincible—and I am not afraid of a little boy who is past his bed-time!”

“You killed my friend!” shouted Uzi, remembering the dismembered corpse of Rani Rimon as it swung, horribly mutilated, at the end of a rope, naked and wrapped in the blue-and-white flag of his country. Rani had saved Uzi’s life more times than he could remember: but the one time Rani needed him, Uzi was not there. Hot tears of shame strangled his throat now, and only one thought was on his mind: revenge.

In “The Master” the writer – here named Shaul Canaan (Gafni was a Canaanite, a member of a somewhat radical group of writers and artists in his early days) – is invited to attend a science fiction convention in Tel Aviv. It ends:

On his way back the shadows gathered in the corners of the streets, taking on the shape of secretive, misshapen kids. It had been a strange, disagreeable day; he was overwhelmed by his reception, by the size of the audience waiting for him in the chilly, air-conditioned auditorium. Ido had helped him onto the stage, where he sat alone, beside a wooden table with a bottle of water and a single glass sitting alone on its surface. He was handed a heavy microphone to speak into, and Ido took a seat beside him, both of them facing the crowd, which looked up to him, young faces curious in a bored, knowing kind of way that made him feel even more exposed, more lost for words than he had ever been in his life. He resented them then, and hated himself for feeling that way: they were, after all, the audience he had written the books for, the children for whom the new Young Riders were created. But he had never been able to relate to the young when they stopped being young, when life scarred them, when the books could no longer act as an anchor for them and they abandoned words for deeds, translated his harmless fantasies into action from which there was no turning back.

“We have with us today,” Ido had said, and his words returned from the two speakers on the two sides of the stage, amplified and echoed, “the famous children’s writer Shaul Canaan, author of the . . .”

He droned on, reciting Shaul’s many novels, moving on to a lengthy biographical description, and Shaul thought suddenly of Na’ama, and the feeling of loss intensified inside him, shifting on the inside of his stomach like an ulcer. Na’ama, he thought, where are you?

But she wasn’t there; of course she wasn’t. And that evening as he walked home under the lengthening shadows he missed her; missed her with a force that used no words, that had no narrative and no shape, and he knew then that he would not write again. He walked away from the children, while old, unwashed tears made a nest in his throat; and as he stepped down the wide street it seemed to him, momentarily, that he was no longer alone: that his creations had gathered about him like an honour guard, Lotem, and Shimi the Moroccan, and Skinny Moshe, and Daphna, and Danny the Knife, and their faces were no longer the innocent, beauteous faces of Sabras, drawn those many years ago by M. Aryeh. Now they were old and haggard too, like himself, scarred by the wars, by the occupation, by the changing of the world. They looked at him sombrely, and their eyes were empty and haunted, like the broken windows set in a long-deserted house which had fallen to disrepair; but Shaul just passed his hand over his eyes, warily, and when he had opened them the spectres had vanished, and he walked the rest of the way home in solitude.

I can say this of Gafni: he was a hack; his books were politically dubious, hastily written and lacked any pretence at literature; and yet, for all that, they have given this writer – and countless other children beside – untold hours of enjoyment. And that is a rare thing indeed.

Shraga Ganfi, 1926-2012. Rest in peace.

I will be participating in a panel at the SFX Weekender: “How do you put the punk into steampunk?” – Friday, 3rd February, 5PM

New review for The Great Game! Giving it 10/10 and saying “The plot is fast-paced, the book is action-packed, the cast of characters astounding … Every scene was vivid before my mind’s eye … an outstanding Steampunk novel. Gripping, multi-facetted, and fascinating.”

Remember we will be officially launching The Great Game at the SFX Weekender in only 2 weeks’ time!

Also a new review for Cloud Permutations, from Strange Horizons – a thoughtful examination of the novella, calling it “fascinating and infuriating” – works for me!

And my The Great Game related story, “The Stoker Memorandum” was sent out to subscribers of Daily Science Fiction this morning – it should be available free online in about a week’s time.

However, to talk about “good” or “bad” reviews is to miss the point. I’ve spoken before of the failing of most genre criticism, which is quixotic in its Formalist attempts to quantify texts – that is, when it does not engage with that other method beloved of genre, that of obsessive taxonomy.

What is far more interesting is to examine a text in terms of its inherent themes; in text as a cultural artefact; in what it can tell us about the society which produces it; and so on.

Palmer’s novels come from, and build upon, the pulp tradition of science fiction, though they draw equally on over a century of film. They employ homage in various ways (for instance in the naming of planets after major SF writers or characters, such as Pohl or GullyFoyle), and correspond with iconic pictures such as, notably, Robocop. They are fast-paced, bloody, often exhilarating, “over the top” in the manner of a Hollywood actioneer.

Yet these are merely technique. What slowly emerges – what fascinates about these novels – are they underlying moral principles at play. Palmer brings a way of looking at the universe that is – almost obsessively – concerned with both morality and evil. And these are worth exploring.

In Palmer’s universe, there is no God. Morality does not come from above; it is a fiction, a narrative, a product of human agency. And so is evil. One can see the lasting appeal of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, for instance, not for its edifices of pulp creations (Great Old Ones; Shoggoths; Sunken cities and sleeping Cthulhu; and so on) but for its sense of humanity as an insignificant part in a larger, indifferent universe. What Palmer argues for is that morality does not come from God. It comes from us.

In Version 43, the eponymous android is despatched to a remote planet to cleanse it from evil. He is the good cop in a bad world; the gunslinger in the corrupt mining town; the chivalrous knight. Raymond Chandler set the requirements for such a character in 1950:

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

Version 43 arrives at the planet. He is determined to clean it of the criminal gangs which rule the planet. He is killed, and is resurrected; again and again. He is Christ, if Christ had big guns and a bad attitude. And with every death, and every resurrection, Version 43 finds evil burrowing deeper; finds conspiracies nestled within larger conspiracies; and must elect to keep on fighting, in order to right the world.

It is that sense, I think, which uplifts Palmer’s work. Evil exists, and evil is human. Good exists, and good is human. Underneath the humour, the non-stop, bloodied action, the never-ending grotesqueries, there is a deep anger. The universe, Palmer tells us, is neither just nor caring. And hell is what people do to each other.

So it is in Palmer’s latest, Artemis, which concerns the adventures of the eponymous character, a book loving, cold blooded assassin who is variously a daughter, a lover, and a mother-to-be. It begins with Artemis getting herself thrown into the most secure prison in the galaxy, only so that she could break out, kill the warden in order to steal the information in his head, which she will then use to extract bloody revenge on the man who betrayed her.

Palmer here is using the oldest stories we tell each other. Revenge and retribution. But what is interesting is how each character is defined not by some inherent evil or goodness, but is seen as a product of its society, the hell humans construct for themselves and for each other. Take Artemis’s great love, Daxox, the man who betrayed her. Daxox is ruthless, a monster, who seems to love Artemis only to capriciously give her away to a subordinate who turns her into a robotic sex-slave for nine years, until she manages to escape. Daxox negates Artemis’s humanity by – literally – turning her into an object – and it is Artemis’s rage that drives the first part of the novel. And yet Daxox is not born evil. We are given a view of Daxox as a child under the self-same system of hopeless oppression, one in which his parents – the people tasked with guarding him and keeping him safe – are helpless. Daxox’s first crime comes from love – he murders the sadistic criminal who controls his family’s lives and who, in a horrific act, forces Daxox’s mother to perform a sexual function on him as her family watches.

Daxox may be evil, but his evil – his warped morality, if you will – is a product of systematic abuse. He is loved by Artemis and, even as she hunts him down to extract her revenge, she loves him still.

Revenge, however, forms only one part of the novel, the second of which concerns war. From the personal, Palmer pulls upwards, to view the story of individuals within the larger context of an entire human society that is unjust. As above, so below. And it is a war for justice, for a better world, fought by highly damaged, morally-broken humans.

There is something profound in what Palmer does here, and throughout the Debatable Space novels. They are, at their core, novels about humans who try to do the right thing in an indifferent and hostile universe, who still believe - not in a God or his messiah but simply that life could be made better, if not for themselves then for their children – and while still knowing, deep inside, that the world is neither friendly nor fair. That it is couched within a pulp framework – of exciting narrative, improbable adventure and cartoonish violence – that it is, in other words, highly readable - comes as testament to what Palmer is achieving here. To dismiss him would be a genre’s loss.

Not only returns to, but surpasses, the promise of the first volume of the series… I heartily recommend The Great Game; not only a satisfying read, but an enjoyable, fun, and interesting one too.

And here’s an actual photo of the printed book! I’ve not seen any yet myself, but this is proof they’re real! (courtesy of SF Signal)

And here’s another review of Osama!

Osama is several things; a hard-boiled detective novel, an alt-history and, in places, it feels like a document of the last decade or so. Also, impressively, Tidhar has created an intensely personal work, yet one which manages to keep some critical distance from what is an emotive subject. I wonder if it is this that makes Osama the most assured piece of work I’ve read by him… This is an incredibly brave, but more importantly, assured novel from Tidhar. It deserves a wide readership.

And hey, Going To The Moon is back from the printers and here’s proof!

It’s alive! Alive!

We’ll be launching both The Great Game and Going To The Moon at the SFX Weekender, 2-5 Feb. in Prestatyn, Wales. Should be fun!

There’s a nice write-up in the Guardian, too.

The full list of nominees:

Red Tentacle (Novel):
The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington (Orbit)
Embassytown by China Miéville (Tor)
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd (Walker Books)
The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers (Sandstone)
Osama: A Novel by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)

Golden Tentacle (Debut Novel): 
Among Thieves by Douglas Hulick (Tor)
God’s War by Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker)
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (Quirk)
The Samaritan by Fred Venturini (Blank Slate Press)

Inky Tentacle (Best Cover): 
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch; illustration by Stephen Walter, design by Patrick Knowles (TAG Fine Arts) (Gollancz)
The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan; design by Peter Mendelsund (Canongate)
The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco; design by Suzanne Dean, illustration by John Spencer (Harvill Secker)
Equations of Life by Simon Morden; design by Lauren Panepinto (Orbit)
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd; illustration by Jim Kay (Walker Books)

The winners will be announced on February 3 at the SFX Weekender convention held in Prestatyn, north Wales.

Going To The Moon is the story of Jimmy, a boy with Tourette’s Syndrom, who wants to be an astronaut when he grows up. The story follows Jimmy’s bullying at school and his evolving relationship with his chief tormentor, Ronnie. (Warning: contains graphic language!). It also includes aliens! Paul Cornell was kind enough to blurb the book, calling it “a brilliant interaction between art and words.”

The amazing art is by Paul McCaffery, who really brings it to stunning, vivid life.

This is a project very close to my heart. I owe Terry Martin, of Murky Depths, a huge debt of gratitude for believing in this project, for making it happen, for hooking me up with Paul and for shepherding the whole thing through until, at last, we have a book. It’s taken… a long time – and I think the end result is absolutely stunning. I only wish I could take more credit for it!

This will be officially released at the SFX Weekender in February – I’ll be there, holed up in Pontins with a dalek and 6 pounds of frozen sausages! And will be happy to sign copies etc. Meanwhile, you can pre-order the book directly from Murky Depths (it’s right at the top, just click on cover picture to be taken to the pre-order page) or, for your shopping convenience, from Amazon UK. But if you order direct, 10% will go to charity!

Going To The Moon is coming out at the same time as The Great Game, my next mass-market novel and the third Bookman Histories book. Both will be launched at the SFX Weekender – did I mention frozen sausages?

My next graphic project is the graphic novella Adolf Hitler’s “I Dream of Ants!”, with art by Neil Struthers – this will also be published by Murky Depths, possibly later on in the year.

Going To The Moon – artwork sample