Richard [K] Morgan's News and Views

So, it's been a week of major surprises.

First and foremost, the major surprise that Black Man took this year's Arthur C Clarke award. Anyone who was there will be able to attest to how blown away I was by that, and suffice it to say I'm still walking on air nearly a week later.

Next major surprise - Croatia and Zagreb. At the start of last month, I got an invitation to attend SFeraKon '08 in Zagreb as Guest of Honour, and accepted without giving it a lot of thought. It was a part of the world I didn't know, which for me usually serves as next best thing to a reason to go, and the timing meant I could fly back via London just in time for the Clarkes. As for Zagreb itself, well, it sounds kind of ugly in English, right? And I had this vague image in my mind of nasty grey Soviet-era architecture and a depressed East European economy......

Not. Quite.

Zagreb in fact turns out to be this small, mostly sunny and incredibly beautiful little city on the slopes of green hills, littered with gorgeous Austro-Hungarian Empire architecture, thronging with cheery blue, clanging trams and full of laid-back, friendly people. High speed trips back and forth across the country in the company of my Croatian publisher, Neven Anticevic, did nothing to dispell these general impressions. In the east, Osijek is a tranquil provincial capital beside a broad, unpolluted and swimmable river, buildings still somewhat diliapidated by the war (and in some places, repaired with specific intentions to recall the fighting - shrapnel damaged chunks of wall replaced by bricks of a different colour, scarring specifically preserved elsewhere...) and surrounded by green fields and woodland. In the west, Pula is an ancient (Roman and before) town still flaunting the traces of its long history; there's a colosseum in white stone, intact and towering enough to easily compare with the one in Rome itself, ancient city gates, also intact..... The coastline recalls southern Italian beach towns in both landscape and architecture, and I'm told that as you head south towards Split and Dubrovnik (something we didn't have time for) it just keeps getting more and more beautiful.

Culturally, Croatia was for me (and even more intensely for my wife Virginia, who is Spanish) a weird combination of very familiar and very alien. There is an attitude here to family and to food which is pure Mediterranean. Kids are the centre of attention everywhere, eating is an important aspect of life (rather than just the fuelling up it tends to be in the UK) with thriving open markets for fruit and veg, broad arrays of (genuinely - check out the eyes) fresh fish and seafood, and everywhere buyers and sellers who want (and have the time) to talk about the produce as if it actually mattered what you put in your stomach. To this extent, it all felt very much like being back in Spain. But at the same time there's a dash of something far more north European in the slightly sober-looking coffee houses, the well behaved traffic, the more sedate, quieter pace of things when compared to the frenetic speed and volume that Spain likes to operate at. And of course there's the language - Croatian, helpfully lettered in Roman rather than Cyrillic characters, but still a million miles from a Romance tongue, full of harsh slavic sounds and peppered with a selection of loan words that I sometimes recognised from my very rusty Turkish. It's fascinating to read (well, look at) and listen to, but it's not a tongue I had any confidence about getting easily to grips with. My publisher concurs - it is, apparently, incredibly grammatically complicated (as it seems are most slavic languages), with endings for everything, and the antique declensional complexity of Greek or Latin. We spent the whole six days we were there eternally grateful for the high levels of English speaking competence among the Croatians we met.

We're going back, for a more leisurely holiday, as soon as humanly possible. I'd recommend it to anyone.

Okay - third major surprise. A little while ago, Pete Crowther asked me for a guest editorial piece for this year's Worldcon edition of Postscripts. I wrote him a rant about the endemic factionalism in SFF, and how fed up I was with it. Pete declined to use the piece and it's now posted over in "Articles" on this site. Go have a look if you haven't already. I stuck it up there without really giving it much thought, and then promptly forgot all about it.

Wow. When, after a couple of days haring around in Croatia, I finally sat down and opened my e-mail, it was packed with responses; readers, writers, publishers and editors, all basically saying "dat shit needed to get said". Which was all very gratifying, despite the surprise. In a couple of cases I'm still in e-mail correspondence with authors, wrangling the details of where we agree or disagree on the subject.

Slightly less gratifying (though kind of funny) was the way the article was taken in the blogosphere. Eg: To my contention that SFF needs to stop squabbling about who's more valid and just get along, the way the crime genre largely appears to, one blogger immediately leapt in and defended said squabbling along the lines that of course SFF does that stuff more than crime fiction, because, hell, SFF has all these so much more important existential themes to deal with than crime. Sigh. And then a significant US writer of horror fiction stormed to the breach, decrying my refusal to blame readership patterns on some evil corporate marketing plot as an attempt to make us all wear the slave collars of the evil corporate publishing industry. Bigger sigh. Worse than that, I then get snarled up with this guy in exactly the kind of pointless back-biting blog catfight I'm so fed up with seeing. Tempers go from zero to rage in nothing flat, and round we fucking go again. It would seem that shit is contagious.

So - I quit. Cold. Going to put my money where my mouth is and just not do that nerd rage shit no more. Those who get off on it, or on the equally irritating superior-new-form-of-the-genre thing are welcome to the field. I'm out.

Going to get on and write a book, instead. Details to follow.....