Richard [K] Morgan's News and Views

Good cause first, obviously. Would you like one of these?

More importantly, would you like to contribute some dollars to an undiluted good cause, to wit, the protection of children from exploitation and abuse. The guys at Ten Angry Pitbulls have come up with a cool way to raise funds for this advocacy group, and they've managed to sign up a number of authors to the gig, among them such luminaries as Andrew Vachss, Dennis Lehane and Nick Hornby - and me. Quite how I end up in such august and best-selling company, I'm not entirely sure, but if it's good enough for Vachss, it's sure as shit good enough for me. They don't make moral integrity meters high enough to measure that guy.

Plus - it's a cool shirt, right? Big fuck-off sword, splattered gore and all.

Anyway, check out the site, check the links, make sure you're cool with it all. Gonna be the indispensable fashion statement of 2010!

Plus - I'm sticking my nose out of the winter snow early this year. February 5th to 7th, I'll be a guest of honour at this gig in the Kingdom of Daan Saaf. And said gig is the occasion of the long drive I mentioned above. Turns out plane and train connections from Glasgow down to Camber Sands are a bit complicated, so I'm cutting that particular Gordian Knot by piling in the car and driving down, all 490 miles. Should be fun, in a Mad Max, white-line nightmare sort of way.....

Okay, so for all you North Americans 490 miles doesn't sound like a lot - I was once humbled at a book signing in Cincinnati (or was it Madison?) to find that two fans had driven about that far for the day just to meet me and get my scrawl - but take it from me, for a Brit, that's a long drive, not least because it involves trying to find a decent detour around the sprawl of our beloved capital. Which reminds me - if anyone down in that part of the world knows a route that doesn't involve parking on the M25 for two or three hours, and would like to share it, you will have my undying gratitude for that charitable act.

Maybe see you down there.

Well, it took quite a while for this to happen, but here we are. I pop open my mails yesterday, and find the following. Quote:

Mr. Morgan,
It is unfortunate that you have decided to become an agent of subversion for the homosexual lobby. I quite liked your books until now.
Seeing as you did not bother to offer (me the reader) the courtesy of indicating the abnormal political/sexual sub-plot of your book on it’s dust jacket, I choose to reciprocate by not offering you the courtesy of perusing any of your future titles.
With Regards,
Anthony Diener

Eek.

Reminds me a bit of Agent Smith's spiel to Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. That scary-polite government psycho thing before he glues Neo's mouth shut and dumps a cyber-worm in his belly-button. "Tell me, Mister Anderson, of what use is a word processor if you're unable to....sell your books?" Or maybe: "From this day forth, Mister Morgan, either you choose to write red-blooded, violent and manly science fiction - or you choose to seek your readership elsewhere." It's that strained politeness, so squee-gee-and-soap-on-thin-glass, so nails-on-a-chalkboard screechy and brittle, that you'd almost rather you'd reeled in a roaring, foaming-at-the-mouth, Klan-robed ultra-thug - mainly because you know that really that's what's lurking just under that patina of psuedo-civilised disdain.

Homosexual lobby, fer fucksake???

Oh yes. "They are believed by some, Mister Anderson, to be the most dangerous lobby alive."

To be honest, I had expected something like this much sooner. But my inherent lack of faith in human nature was confounded, and a remarkably cool attitude to The Steel Remains has prevailed up until now. Oh, there were a few adverse amazon rants, but I've grown accustomed to those (and seem to garner them anyway, whatever I write about). And we had some rather queasy talk about gratuitous sex scenes in a few web reviews and on some messageboards. But there was no actual nut mail before now.

But now, I'm left with this rather creepy image of a shadowy bookcase somewhere out in the mid-west, where my novels are shelved alongside Atlas Shrugged, the Sarah Palin autobiography, and the collected works of Ann Coulter.

Shudder.

And Home of the Brave Pepper-Spray Wielding Uniformed Thugs.

So this week Peter Watts, brilliant Canadian hard SF writer, marine biology PhD, good e-cquaintance of mine, and by all accounts all round nice guy in the flesh, was pepper-sprayed, beaten up, and imprisoned by US border guards as he tried to leave the US for Canada. His crime apparently consisted of having the temerity, when pulled over, to exit his vehicle and ask what was going on (twice, because they ignored him the first time he asked). More detail here on his website, and here at Boing Boing. Long and the short of it, he's now been bailed out and is safely back home, but looks like facing charges, crippling legal costs, and a possible two year jail sentence for "assaulting a federal officer". Yeah, right. Bookish, forty-something marine biologist and SF author takes on a squad of armed border police. Of course he did. Happens all the time.

Couple of things:

1) Please go over and express your support for him in whatever way you can - moral, financial, or informational. Looks like there'll be a defence fund in the New Year, but right now I suspect the greatest value lies in getting the word out as widely and vocally as possible.

2) What the fuck happened to the US? (Okay, rhetorical question, I know). For me, the most terrifying thing about this is not what happened to Peter itself, but the scads of US citizens currently posting about it who seem to think that Peter pretty much had it coming; that getting out of your vehicle and remonstrating with law enforcement officers is an act worthy of a beating and jail. Jesus, talk about Daddy-fixated - do what the authority figure tells you, boy, and jump to it! Don't ask questions, don't get out of the car.

What is this, Germany 1933?

I guess this provides some insight for relative youngsters like me as to what it must have been like to be involved in the Civil Rights movement, back in the - currently fashionably vilified - sixties. Plus ca change, eh?

One wonders what the Founding Fathers would have done. Stayed in the car with their collective lip firmly buttoned? Somehow I doubt it.

So my local DVD rental store has this 3 for 2 deal on new(ish) releases, and as a result I've recently found myself watching a lot of add-on, look-it's-for-no-extra-charge-might-as-well-have-it, third-choice movies.

Depressingly, a high proportion of these have been SF.

Equally depressingly, on viewing these movies, my lowered, oh-well-not-like-I-paid-for-it expectations have been pretty much seamlessly met.

Is it just me? Let's see. Here, in alphabetical order, are the last three SF movies I rented - try to guess which one wasn't a third choice freebie, which one I actually paid for (and felt good about paying for when I'd seen it).

Moon
Star Trek
Terminator: Salvation

For extra credit, fit each film with one of the descriptors in the title of this post.

Very happy right now - my obsessively pre-ordered Black Rebel Motorcycle Club live CD/DVD package showed up this week, and in between zipping in and out of the country, I finally managed to grab the time to sit down and watch the DVD in full.

Fuck me, I'd forgotten how good those guys are.

I saw this tour, back in 2007, though I had to drive four hundred miles to my old hometown, Norwich, to see it and the gig itself was a little soured by segments of the audience who evidently considered themselves way too cool to show any real enthusiasm. (It also featured drummer Nick Jago storming off part way through - something that Peter Hayes and Robert Been handled with remarkable aplomb and an achingly good accoustic set). And all those things considered, it was still one of the five finest gigs I've ever seen. My only regret is that I didn't make it to the one in Glasgow - I was down with flu that night, had to give my tickets away to friends - which is one of the three dates, along with Dublin and Berlin, that feature on this DVD. Because by the look of it, those gigs were everything the one I saw was, but turned up to eleven.

So you have barking, snarling guitar and bass riffs, the likes of which you have to go right back to the early Stranglers to find comparison for. You have Wall of Sound power reminiscent of the very best of the Jesus and Mary Chain, but somehow tighter and more energised as a result. You have a striding, throbbing lope to the music, a strength settled into like a freight train building speed or a high performance engine when you drop a gear. You have the genuinely soulful interludes - Been's rendering of Ewan MacColl's sixty year old anthem Dirty Old Town, complete with crowd support, Hayes's flawless performance of the band's own sheerly poetic O/D accoustic lament Faultline, the skyline aching chords and moan of All You Do Is Talk.....

But most of all what you have here is consummate musical talent. Peter Hayes and Robert Been - these guys are capital M Musicians. You watch them swap bass, lead, rhythm, back and forth across the front space of the stage like it's nothing, and carve up the vocals between them, the way you'd share the driving on an overnight long haul; you see them roll out piano, harmonica, fucking trombone (I kid you not), and a cello bow to stroke in the opening of the aforementioned All You Do Is Talk......... And throughout it all, you see the steady flame of a genuine passion for the music, an attention to the songs that brings them out fresh and changed for the occasion. You see an intensity of engagement that not one band in a hundred can bring off.

And when it's all over, you can feel a little package of emotion lodged solidly there in your chest and throat, transmitted to you entire with all that passion and sound over the two hours of your life just gone by.

That, my friends, is Soul. It's the shape of life, captured and made to sing. And there are no finer exponents of that dynamic working in music today.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are putting a new album out in March next year and will tour in support, February to April in North America, April to May in Europe.

See them if you can possibly can.

So - long time, no post. Is my life really that boring? (Don't answer that). Have I really sat in a puddle of disinterest since I got back from Australia, and done nothing worth talking about since?

Well, no, in fact I've been doing a bunch of stuff that I'm not allowed to talk about. Or more correctly a bunch of stuff I can now talk about a bit - but you can't tell anyone else about this, because it's a secret, just between us. Shsh.

Happened like this.....

About a year ago, and out of the blue, I got an e-mail from one John Miles, an enforcer (okay, not really) for the British arm of EA Games. He had a proposition for me, was I interested? Interested, of course, was putting it mildly. Video gaming is the only thing in my life that I would fully qualify as an addiction. I like a fairly limited number of games (there's an awful lot of dross out there), but those I like, I really like, and will play them until the game paths, enemy spawning points and scripted incidentals are graven into my synapses. Some game spaces I probably know better than the streets of the city I live in. And, as I've said once or twice on this site, I think the gaming medium has a potential for storytelling every bit as charged and exciting as literature or film. So was I interested? Yeah - just a little bit.

Well, John flew up to Glasgow to buy me lunch, and brought with him fellow enforcer Jeff Gamon and development capo Colin Robinson, who framed their proposition thus: was I interested in coming aboard with EA to write and script for a particular game project they had going, with a view to other game projects thereafter, and if so could I be in Berlin in a week's time?

Talk about your offers you can't refuse.

That was a year ago. Now, without breaking any Non-Disclosure Agreements, I can cautiously reveal that I've been pulled in to consult on three separate games, have spent more time on airplanes and in overseas hotels during the last year than in my entire previous life, and have hit one of the steeper learning curves of my creative existence. Gaming turns out not only to be exactly as fascinating a medium as you'd expect, it's also a very young industry and its norms have yet to be fully formed. So while it shares some characteristics with the movie world, gaming has yet to produce its version of Story guru Robert McKee or the cut-and-dried writing formula requirements that have strangled so much creativity in places like Hollywood. What you can put into a big budget game is still very much up for grabs, and what's more, with the breakneck pace of technological development backing the field, it's constantly changing as well. One producer I'm working with at the moment likens what we're doing to working in Hollywood circa 1920, when everyone was still working out what you could do with this wild, new medium called film; the only difference is that the rate of evolution in technique for video games is running at about a dozen times the speed it ever did for film. The field is open, the potential huge and, in story terms, only just beginning to be properly tapped

For a writer, that's a pretty close definition of paradise.

And it hasn't hurt that the projects I'm working on are all science fiction, so while I chisel patiently away in fantasy at The Dark Commands, my SF muscles are being kept in trim by the concepts at the heart of each game.

So if I've been quiet recently, my apologies; it's just if I'd talked, I would have had to kill you afterwards......

So it's out - the B format MMP of The Steel Remains, complete with reader-drawn map of the Yhelteth Empire and Trelayne League territories to the north. A handsome piece of work if ever I saw one and, I am assured by its author, utterly geographically sound. Not to mention revised numerous times with fanatical attention to detail.

See, the competition winner, one Ravi Shankar, turned out to be not just a fan of my books, not just a fantasy fan in general, but also an enthusiastic amateur fantasy map-maker. Anybody else know these people exist? Well, it was news to me. Anyway, Ravi's entry to the competition blew every other submission out of the water - and that's no reflection on the quality of other submissions. Ravi's map was full-colour shaded, painstakingly scaled and contoured, and accompanied by three pages of small-font notes explaining the rationale behind each mapping choice he'd made. Not only that, but when we sat down to dinner, he grilled me thoroughly on any discrepancies between what he'd drawn and what I'd imagined, explained gently to me why some of what I'd imagined, ahem, didn't quite stand up to geographical sense, Richard, and then insisted on incorporating all the agreed changes and sending me the revised copy for approval. Three times over. He even included a couple of extra place names for me that don't crop up in The Steel Remains at all, but which feature prominently in the sequel.

He also turned out to be great company. Malaysian-born, British-educated, London-based - a high-powered litigative lawyer in the corporate employment field, governed from what I could see as much by conscience and principle as by career, well-travelled, a connoisseur of good wine (and a seasoned consumer of same), a mercurial and erudite conversationalist, a fine story-teller. Seems stereotyping of the epic fantasy readership has been a little wide of the mark....

Anyway, you can check out his work (aside from the example in the book) at www.cartographersguild.com. And, Ravi, if you're reading - take a much-deserved bow, man.

Now - I've got to go and get Ringil out of Hinerion before he has to kill anybody else; fortunately he has a map (and now so do I).

So here's how it works:

I'm taking a shower and through the steamed up glass I spot something on the bathroom floor - something organic and oddly twisted looking, and pretty much the size of a couple of my larger fingers folded over each other. I step out of the shower, curious; and almost at once I realise that this something (in fact it's a broken segment from the strap on my wife's leather toiletry bag) is neither alive nor dangerous.

And I'm disappointed. To the depths of my being.

Quick tumble of conscious memory catching up - I am no longer in Oz.

You can blame some of this blurriness on jet-lag (and age) - at 43 years old, it takes a while to fully shrug off the ten-hour difference between Sydney and Glasgow, not to mention the twenty-something hours of economy class flight and airplane food you face if you want to make the trip. But that's not really it.

What it is, I'm home now, but there's this Other Place and it's still in my head; a place where you can watch kangaroos as tall as men go chest to chest and brawl like incompetent pub drunks, all loose, straight-armed pushing and punching and blindly averted faces; a place where you can lick the green arses of ants and they taste like lime zest; where spider webs can drape a road signpost thickly from top to bottom like something out of some cheesy post-apocalypse SF movie. It's a place where you can get bitten (I did) by a spider the size of a gardening glove, and count yourself lucky it wasn't something altogether smaller and deadlier; where a metre-long lethally poisonous snake can put in an appearance at the beach and all anyone does is give it a wide berth as it heads up the sand for the long grass beyond at a power-walker's pace. A place where you might meet a two and a half metre tiger shark coming the wrong way around a coral formation and watch as it eddies disinterestedly past you, snout seeking something smaller than you to eat. Strange how you're never as scared as you think you'll be. Strange how you adjust.

Strange how you miss it.

Hmmm......time for an update, perhaps. Let me just get out of my bathers here and find a terminal....

Okay, first things first; here's an up-to-date list of the gigs I'll be doing on the eastern side of Australia this month, starting with Melbourne, next week:

Guest speaker at Melbourne Science Fiction Club, Friday 7 May @ 9pm Address: St David's West Brunswick Uniting Church, 74 Melville Rd, Brunswick West, VIC http://msfc.sf.org.au/index.php

Guest speaker at Nova Mob, Saturday 8 May @ 12pm Address: Community Room, Northcote Library, 32-38 Separation St, Northcote, Melbourne, VIC

Book signing at Galaxy Books, Thursday 21 May @ 17:30pm Address: 143 York Street, Sydney www.galaxybooks.com.au

Book signing at Gaslight, Saturday 23 May @ 3pm Address: Unit 10, 83 Wollongong St, Fyshwick, Canberra www.gaslightbooks.com.au

Event/Book signing at Pulp Fiction, Tuesday 26 May @ 6:30pm Address: Queensland Writer's Centre, 109 Edward St, Brisbane, QLD http://www.qwc.asn.au/
http://www.pulpfictionpress.com.au/Contact.htm

If anything last minute gets added to these, I'll try to post it as soon as I know. Meantime, hope one of these gigs is close enough for you to make it. See you there.

And meantime, there's western Australia. WoW.

Where do I start?

Whale sharks? Kangaroos? The sun melting molten into the Indian ocean? These weird crows with a little knot on their throat and a croak that starts out all macho and then tails off into a little whinge? Pelicans chasing toddlers for fish? Dolphins rolling on their backs and turning pink coz they're pregnant and happy? The best damn Vietnamese food I've ever tasted? A river canyon with striated multiple stripes of beige and red rock like someone kidnapped Ellsworth Kelly and transported him back to the days of cave-painting? Lethal, snake-swift aikido done with real and really fucking sharp blades, seasoned through with equal grindings of humour and humility before the form? Giant clams gaping sky blue and black, the swirling colours of a really mellow acid trip framed between massive coral-crusted corrugated jaws? Soft rose light at sunset spearing horizontal across endless brush? A highway right out of Mad Max 2, painted gunshot straight onto the soft rise and fall of the landscape ahead, all the way to the horizon and beyond?

Man, I seen all that and more, these last few weeks. All that and more. My head is full.

So. Some pretty massive thanks are in order, then: to the illustrious Perky, aka PRK, aka Paul Raj Khangure and the whole SwanCon 09 committee for bringing me out here in the first place, treating me like royalty throughout my time with them, and launching me and Virginia northwards with all the good advice and best wishes anyone could wish for. I'm having a blast guys, and it's all down to you!

To be continued.....

Formal notice: the Great January Sale in February and March will end at midnight GMT on Sunday March 29th. Payments received before that deadline will be processed and the books sent out. Anything after that, I'm afraid, will fall into the void.

The sale has been a great success - I now have the novel experience of being able to move from one side of my office to another without tripping over a pile of books or a cardboard box. So many thanks to all who took part - we must do this again sometime - in another seven years, say, when my piles of author copies have once more built up to skyscraper proportions.

And like the bulk of those author copies, I also will soon be Gone - to the other side of the world for a taste of Australian fandom and a country I have been itching to see for what feels like forever. The curious thing is, the Land of Oz has always seemed slightly mythical to me - yeah, sure, I know it has to exist because I keep meeting people who come from there (eg. my brother-in-law) and besides you can see it in the atlases and the history books. But somehow, the concept of a place that's eight thousand miles away through the ground beneath my feet just has a completely fantastical ring to it. As do things like the duck billed platypus and the kangaroo. I mean - an upright, bouncing rat as tall as a man? Come on! Sounds like something out of the Mos Eisley spaceport bar. In fact, I still remember talking to an Australian EFL colleague in Istanbul who told me that in her house back home, you could get up in the morning, go into the kitchen to make coffee and see the kangaroos grazing in the back garden - it was at that point I suddenly realised that at some visceral level I didn't really believe in kangaroos; not the same way I believed in sheep or tigers or elephants - there was just something too strange, too otherwordly about the idea of them really being there, crouched down and grazing right outside the kitchen window.

Well - going to get that perception gap sorted out pretty sharpish. For those of you already over there in the mythical land of Oz, I'll be joining you, first in Perth, the City of Lights (there you go, another wholly fantastical concept - a city in splendid geographical isolation turning its porch lights on to greet an orbiting astronaut as the darkened globe turns and he passes overhead) from April 8th to 13th, and thereafter during May in Melbourne, Hobart, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane, details to follow.

See you there!