Strange Horizons, August 2002

by Strange Horizons

  One other SF magazine, new to the 1990s, has published a few serials. This is Absolute Magnitude, which has featured serializations of novels by Barry B. Longyear, Hal Clement, Daniel Hatch, and Shariann Lewitt. Finally, Algis Budrys’ Tomorrow, now sadly defunct, ran a few serials during its run in the 1990s. More idiosyncratically, the Dean Wesley Smith/Kristine Kathryn Rusch project Pulphouse made an effort to go to weekly publication in the early 1990s. They never succeeded in publishing even close to weekly, but one of their innovations, intended to dovetail with such a rapid publication schedule, was to publish serials of very many very short installments. Thus, 15 parts of S. P. Somtow's novel Jasmine Nights appeared in Pulphouse between 1991 and 1993. This could conceivably have been successful with a truly weekly publication, but spread over a much longer time, I don't think such a program is workable.

  The Present, and Prospects for the Future

  Thus the present day, with serials rare enough to be remarked upon. And as we've seen, they are plenty of sound reasons for their lack of frequency. But, despite their shortcomings and inconveniences, I like serials, and I like seeing them in magazines. So I'm happy that Spectrum SF has run part of a serial in every issue so far. They have printed two novels by British SF veterans: “Drek Yarman,” by the late Keith Roberts, and “Bad Dream” by John Christopher; as well as the first novel by hot newer British writer Charles Stross, “The Atrocity Archive.”

  These serials show another benefit of serialization: an opportunity to rescue worthy but commercially uncertain projects from oblivion. For example, “Drek Yarman” was apparently written in the mid-80s, but as Roberts’ career (and health) foundered he was unable to place it with a publisher. It is undoubtedly a dark story, and its bleakness may negatively affect its commercial prospects. It is also fairly short. Thus it was perhaps understandable that no publisher would take it on. But it's a fine, different, work that I'm happy to have read. With John Christopher in semi-retirement, “Bad Dream” also may not be a novel a publisher can get behind enthusiastically.

  As for “The Atrocity Archive,” Charles Stross has pointed out that it is an untypical novel, not easily put in a genre. For career reasons, as Stross suggests, it might even be unwise for a new author to place such a novel with a major publisher in these days of the midlist death spiral. This is because such an idiosyncratic novel probably has limited commercial potential, which may reduce the book buyers’ orders for future novels. In addition, its uncertain genre (spy novel? comedy? Lovecraftian horror?) may result in confusion among the chains’ book buyers, who are alleged to prefer readily describable books, with certain expected sales and categorization. But as a serial, it's available for readers to find, without risking pigeonholing the author's name in booksellers’ computers.

  I suspect that the serial will remain, relatively speaking, a rarity in the magazines in the near future. But it will live on to some extent. Analog still publishes at least one per year (they have just finished running Robert J. Sawyer's “Hominids"). Asimov's recently ran their first serial in over a decade, with Silverberg's “The Longest Way Home,” though Dozois states that he has no express intention of publishing any further serials. Spectrum SF bravely continues to run them, I hope they will for a long time. I particularly like editor Paul Fraser's philosophy—he regards the serial as a home for otherwise orphaned novels, that may be too quirky, too short, or for whatever reason of suspect commercial appeal. (As Fraser notes, this is to some extent making a virtue of necessity: those are also the novels a new magazine is more likely to be offered. As well, Gardner Dozois suggests that if he were to publish future serials, he would prefer to use the space for good novels that won't otherwise be published.) And even some online magazines run serials—in Strange Horizons's case only two-part novelettes, but SCI FICTION often serializes novellas (even up to 40,000 words) in four parts throughout a month.

  The serialized novel has an honorable place in the history of this magazine-dominated genre. As the importance of magazines to the genre has diminished, it is no surprise that the importance of serials has likewise diminished. But there is still a place for them, and I for one will not regret the opportunity to read these words again—TO BE CONTINUED.

  * * * *

  Rich Horton is a software engineer for a major aerospace corporation in St. Louis. He writes a short fiction review column for Locus Magazine, a column for 3SF Magazine, and his essays and reviews have appeared in Locus Online, SF Site, Tangent Online, Antipodes, and elsewhere. For more about him, visit his Web site.

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  Interview: Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  By Cheryl Morgan

  8/12/02

  Jon Courtenay Grimwood is one of the hottest of the new breed of British SF writers. His blend of fast, stylish action with acute social awareness is winning him praise around the world. His last-but-one novel, Pashazade, was short-listed for the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. The sequel, Effendi, is a hot favorite to receive similar acclaim.

  This interview took place at the British National Science Fiction Convention (Eastercon) at the Hotel de France on St. Helier, Jersey, in April 2002.

  Cheryl Morgan: You seem to have a rather more traveled history than many people.

  Jon Courtenay Grimwood: Undoubtedly. I was born in Malta, in Valletta, several weeks early as my mother had a water-skiing accident. Nuns looked after me for the first few days of my life as it was thought I might not live. A year or so later I went to England for a bit, but returned to Malta when I was about four. We lived there for a couple of years and I had a Maltese nanny called Carmen who spoke Malti, a form of Arabic. She used to take me through the back streets to visit her family. Carmen was the first major influence on my life. After another spell in England, my family moved to the Far East and I would fly back and forth to England for boarding school. While in Jahore I was looked after by an amah called Zinab, who was the second great influence.

  We led a very privileged life, which I suspect has now gone. This was also in living memory of what the British called the Malay Emergency [a nationalist uprising]. And also a time of simmering racial problems between Chinese and Malay communities, leading to rioting and killings. Appalling levels of poverty contrasted with staggering wealth. Within one summer holiday it was possible to see dogs being strangled by collars made from wire coat-hangers, opium addicts, people living in battered shanty towns, wide-eyed children being betrothed in marriage at a very early age, and princely families so rich that they quite literally ate off gold plates.

  Much later we moved to Scandinavia and lived on an island off the coast near Oslo for a couple of years. I wanted to go to university in Norway, but the authorities rightly pointed out that they could give one of their foreign student places to a refugee, which would be infinitely fairer than giving it to someone from an affluent, Western background.

  Until recently I had a tiny house in the mountains of Spain. It was in an area that was once Moorish and therefore Islamic. From where I lived you could see ancient towers on the coast, and these were the towers of the Moors who were trying to defend their lands from the Reconquest.

  CM: And your life has continued to be somewhat unconventional; you are a single parent.

  JCG: Yes, and in fact my career as a writer is probably a direct result of that. My marriage came apart when my son was about four. When the time came for Jamie to go to school it became obvious I'd have to field him for quite a bit of the holidays. (He was still living with his mother at this point but she needed to work full time.) As a journalist/editor I had an option to go freelance, and though I tried part time work to begin with, that proved impossible, so I went completely freelance when Jamie was about nine, and he came to live with me full time when he was eleven. He's eighteen now.

  CM: What sort of journalism have you done?

  JCG: All sorts. I was one of the freelance writers who worked on Maxim
when it first started in the UK. I've written for Esquire, quite a lot of women's glossies, and for three broadsheet newspapers, the Independent, the Guardian, and the Telegraph. At the start I needed to keep body and soul together, so I'd write pretty much anything. I did a lot of “men's point of view” stuff for women's magazines in the early-to-mid nineties, because that was what was wanted. And I wrote a lot about the Internet for the broadsheets when it first started because there were few journalists who knew much about it then. These days I mostly review for the Guardian and write novels.

  CM: Was getting into novels something that you had always wanted to do?

  JCG: Oh yes, but it took me a long while to do it. When I was a teenager I wrote a very bad road novel but it was so terrible I threw it away. I wrote another two books in my mid-twenties and sent them to a reasonably famous editor. He wrote back and said he'd liked the story in the first but the characters weren't up to much, and the characters in the second were good but there wasn't any story. So what I needed to do, according to him, was to go away and write something that combined good story with good characters. I was so traumatized I didn't actually try again for about ten years!

  JCG: In the meantime I became a journalist and got used to getting stuff in print. So when I was made redundant from a freelance job sometime around the spring of ‘93 while knowing I had work to go to in the autumn, so I took the summer off and wrote neoAddix.

  CM: This is one of your cyberpunk vampire novels.

  JCG: Yes, set in Paris. It is the book in which I introduced my post-Napoleonic cyberpunk 22nd Century. It came out of an image that I had of a woman standing at the top of some stairs waiting to walk down to the Seine where she knew there'd be a body, and that a pathologist she hated would be there too. That was where neoAddix came from, but it was basically just me writing about all the places that I knew and liked in Paris. If there was a café I liked, then in it went. I'd also been having a series of brain scans, MRIs and stuff following some blackouts and a lot of that disquiet about being wired up to machines found its way into the novel. That said, it's a pretty bad novel.

  CM: Let's put this Tarantino thing to bed, shall we?

  JCG: Oh God! That was a line used by a glossy magazine to describe, I think, Lucifer's Dragon.

  CM: “William Gibson meets Quentin Tarantino."

  JCG: Yeah. It was perfect marketing speak so, understandably, Simon and Schuster stuck it on the first novel I did for them, reMix. And because the line was on the cover a lot of people used it. Some mag even stole it as a headline for a review, probably for redRobe. I think, it is gone now.

  CM: Well, it certainly put me off reading your work for quite a while. But then I have to say that in redRobe Axl Borja kills an awful lot of people.

  JCG: It's his job. He's an assassin. I should also mention that redRobe is loosely based on Under the Red Robe, a high Victorian novel by British writer Stanley Weyman. What Weyman did was encompass all of the Victorian values, and what I wanted to do was glance off the same story but encompass our values and show how different they are. So there's the name check in the title, the name of the village in the book, Cocheforet, is the same. There's a basic plot similarity between the stories. But concepts you can guarantee apply in the Victorian book: “heroic, upright if flawed killer gets the girl, repents, lives happily ever after,” those don't appear. I make damn sure that Axl doesn't get the girl. (A girl gets the girl.) redRobe is about taking a story and looking at it with a different set of eyes.

  CM: I really liked the gun as a character. It was good to have a major character who is an AI in a gun who is smarter than most of the other people in the book.

  JCG: Oh, he's infinitely smarter than Axl. The whole thing is that he's the dominant intellectual part of that relationship. Axl is just this rather flawed guy who happens to have a much smarter friend who just happens to be his gun.

  CM: And he finds much more interesting things to do with his life than being a gun, which I thought was a nice touch.

  JCG: Well, I thought that if we can have reincarnation for human beings, why can't we have reincarnation for machines?

  CM: And of course the main thing that comes across with redRobe is the sheer rage at the state of the world. Clearly, here is something that you have enormously strong feelings about.

  JCG: redRobe was written at the height of the problems in the Balkans. The West, in its wisdom, had decided to disarm one side but leave the other side armed, and somebody used the phrase “a level playing field” to describe this situation. It was a time in which premeditated rape was just beginning to be used widely as an act of war and an act of torture. You can say that rape has always been a part of war, but I think what happened in Bosnia was a systematic attempt to destroy a society by attacking the women within that society. And the West just stood there, was shocked and appalled, and did virtually nothing.

  We were meant to be helping these people. We were meant to be the United Nations. We were meant to be on the side of good, and this was just not happening. We were promising people that they would be defended. We were promising people that if they laid down their weapons we would guarantee their safety. We set up safe havens for civilians, and then pulled our troops out and wondered why thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered.

  If this had been done in the days of Communist Russia, or by an Islamic country or by China, we would have been outraged and would have been passing UN resolutions demanding that something was done about it. It took a long time for what had happened in the Balkans to filter through to Western consciousness—much longer than it should have done—and I think there was a real attempt to make sure it didn't filter through.

  CM: It still is fairly unknown. Certainly I didn't know as much about it as you have just described. But I notice that you said in your Kaffeklatsch that you read all of the papers every day.

  JCG: Not quite all of them: I regularly read the Times, the Telegraph, the Independent, and the Guardian. And then sometimes the Mail and the Mirror.

  CM: And this is a serious attempt to keep up with what is going on in the world?

  JCG: Yes. It comes out of being a journalist. For a lot of my life the first thing I've done each day is read the papers and cut anything that was relevant to my work.

  CM: How do you read so fast?

  JCG: Well, you don't need to. Often the same story appears in a different form in each paper, so I read one version quite thoroughly and I can then skim the others looking for the points of difference.

  CM: A common feature of your work is what has been described as “alternate future.” The traditional alternate history is set in a past where something has happened to make history develop differently. You write books that are set in the future, but where something happened differently in the past so it is not our future.

  JCG: That was a conscious decision. What I wanted to do was write alternate history without writing about the point of change. I wanted to talk about the point of change, probably obliquely, but have its impact felt further down the line. For my first four books, neoAddix through redRobe, the point of change is the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. In my version France under Napoleon III defeats the Prussians. Because of this, the German Empire never forms and the second Napoleonic Empire doesn't collapse. Those four books are set in the 22nd Century.

  Within the Arabesque series (Pashazade, Effendi, and Felaheen) the turning point is 1915 with the American President brokering a peace between London and Berlin and what we think of as the First World War remaining the Third Balkan Conflict. But again the books are set about 40 years from now. What I have tried to do is have, not just alternate history, but alternate society and alternate politics. Obviously it is about our world and what we do. It is a way to stepping outside ourselves and saying, “if that hadn't happened, how would we feel about this..."

  CM: It is a different approach to history, isn't it? The classic alternate history book is very much about the major events, the important p
layers. It is history focused on kings and generals. What you are doing is much broader.

  JCG: I'm talking about how society changes, and what happens when society changes. What happens if Christianity and Islam aren't automatically at each other's throats? What happens if the big conflicts in the world are not between East and West but still between France and Germany, if America remains semi-isolationist? If Russia was split in two, the way Germany used to be? Read the newspapers from the time and you can see that few in 1914 believed that within a few years monarchy would fail as the default form of government in Europe. There is a real sense in those papers that the status quo will last. And that makes me think about us, because we have the same sense of our world's permanence. That whole paper-thin Capitalism triumphant, end-of-history kick.

  CM: Moving on to the Arabesque series, this is an interesting time to be a writer focusing on North African/Arabic society.

  JCG: Yes, and at least one friend of mine has pointed out this may not be the best time to have novels out with Arabic lettering all over their covers. But I disagree because I think it is very important.

  The Ashraf Bey books, which are crime novels set in a 21st Century liberal Islamic Ottoman North Africa are an attempt to look at what happens when Western values and a liberal Islamic society cross, and what takes place in the gaps. What happens with the politics, what happens with society, what happens with civil rights, sexual rights, children's rights? There is still a hard-line Islam within my world, but it is south of the Sahara. It is a problem for the essentially Westernized communities of El Iskandryia, Tunis, and Libya. In the same way there are fundamentalist Christian societies, liberal Christian societies and pretty much agnostic, Christian-influenced societies in our world.