Sometimes, if you wait long enough, a dream can come true...

Forty years ago I bought a music cassette (remember those?) bearing the rather pompous title A Young Person's Guide to King Crimson. Up to that point nearly all my music purchases were in the progressive rock genre. I'd heard a few tracks from the band's 1969 debut album on Radio Caroline--and they certainly fitted that description. But the other tracks collected on 'Guide' were less easily classified. Some were angular, jazzy, dissonant; others were beautiful one moment and harrowing the next, as exemplified by the twelve minutes of musical alchemy that is Starless. Forty years on and that track remains my favourite piece of music, even though my tastes have long since diversified. I suspect that 'Guide' ultimately helped to point me in lots of different musical directions. Maybe that's why I still seek out new music.

At the time, my exploration of King Crimson's back catalogue occurred in the knowledge that the band had already split up, seemingly for good. Not only would there be no new music from them, but also I would never have the chance to see them play live. Luckily I was wrong on both counts. In the decades that followed new versions of King Crimson formed and subsequently fell apart, but none ever played Starless. I saw the Double Trio version twice during the mid-90s, and revelled in their live versions of Red and 21st Century Schizoid Man, but never once imagined that they'd play my favourite track. Wonderful though that line-up was, it lacked the requisite instrumentation and, more importantly, was focussing on playing new music. Fair enough. Some dreams don't pan out.

But King Crimsons come and go. In 2014 a new version emerged.

Last night, I went to see King Crimson play at The Hackney Empire in London. Their dazzling two-hour set, which featured tracks old and new, climaxed with the stage drenched in the deepest imaginable shade of crimson while the seven-piece band delivered a mesmerising rendition of Starless.

I'm not ashamed to say that I cried.

Sometimes the wait is worth it.

From my review of the Kindle edition of this intriguing near-future thriller:

"Overall this is a highly entertaining and thought-provoking first novel, which fully deserves a 4* rating. I've no doubt it will be succeeded by even better books by this talented writer. Recommended."

My full review is here.

Loncon 3 was my first big convention. I attended Friday to Sunday. Needless to say I had a great time. The only down-side was the fierce competition between "must attend" sessions. I missed so much that I desperately wanted to see. Ah well! A sign of a successful Worldcon, I guess.

One of the great pleasures for me was chatting to editors who've published my stories over the years, including Pete Crowther (PS Publishing, formerly editor of PostScripts, which is now in the highly capable hands of Nick Gevers); Henry Gee (Nature Futures, former) and Colin Sullivan (Nature Futures, current). I also enjoyed a brief chats with Luigi Petruzzelli, editor of Italian SF magazine Quasar, who has accepted my story The English Dead for translation and reprinting, and Ian Whates (NewconPress), whose anthologies I'd love to appear in one day (unsubtle  hint).

Some panels I particularly enjoyed: Lablit, SF and the Great War, anything to do with the sadly missed GoH Iain Banks.

Some readings I loved: Aliette de Bodard--a dear friend and great writer; Christopher Priest--one of my writing heroes. To interact with him, however briefly, about Spitfires was... Well, only aviation buffs will understand that one.

The Hugo Awards: slickly and concisely done. I did vote in a few categories, picked the short story category winner. All the fiction category winners were thoroughly well deserved. In fact a splendid roster of winners overall, showcasing the new, the diverse, the important. Those clinging to the old can go whinge in the corner, as far as I'm concerned. Something  of a shame that Doctor Who didn't win the Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form category in its 50th year, but having several nominations, it suffered from Split Vote Syndrome.

There were some great panels for those like me who obsess about archive television: Missing Believed Wiped (Dick Fiddy for the BFI), The (Doctor Who) Restoration Team. I was disappointed that the showing of Nigel Kneale's The Big Crunch was cancelled due to its non-availability in a projectable format, but the SciFi London people replaced it with the wonderful Red Shift (a superb Alan Garner novel filmed for Play for Today). Good work, folks!

But the most fun to be had was simply chatting to friends old and new, which is exactly as it should be.

I greatly enjoy reading flash* science fiction stories, as well as writing them. One can find some terrific examples in the Futures column of Nature magazine, also in Daily Science Fiction and Flash Fiction Online, amongst others. Yet despite its increasing market presence, especially on-line, flash SF suffers from a less than stellar reputation, especially amongst author organisations. Clear evidence of this is supplied by the Science Fiction Writers of America's recent decision to change its membership qualification rules. As a consequence, the usefulness of pro-rate flash fiction sales for qualification has been significantly downgraded. To me, this seems an odd thing to do. It's almost as if someone on the SFWA board has thought "You cheeky blighters, trying to palm us off with these easy-to-write micro-fictions. Well, let's put a stop to your little game..."

I can assure any doubters reading this piece that flash fiction isn't intrinsically easy to write, at least not well, any more than, say, miniature portraits are easy to paint, or tiny clockwork mechanisms for wrist-watches are easy to design and build.

Don't get me wrong: there's plenty of bad flash fiction out there--dependent on cliché and twist-endings--but that's true of any mode of fiction. There is nothing intrinsically stale, trite or undemanding about flash fiction. I shudder to think how much more intellectual effort I'd have to put into writing ten good flash stories, compared with a single story of comparable quality in the 5000-10000 words range.

Rather than simply complain about this state of affairs, I'll make a specific proposal. As far as I'm aware, there is currently no specific award for SFF flash fiction**. I think there should be. I don't know how a new award might be funded or administered, but perhaps the Hugo and Nebula committees could ponder the matter. And while they do that, perhaps they could also ponder the longstanding short fiction categories, namely short story (<7500 words), novelette (7500-17500 words) and novella (17500-40000 words). Are they still fit for purpose? To my mind, there is no intrinsic difference between a long short story (say, 7000 words) and a short novelette (say, 10000 words), whereas flash fiction is rather different in kind: a miniature short story***. In that respect, it is every bit as meaningful a category as novella (a short novel).

I'd be interested to hear what SF writers and readers think about this.

* Some still refer to such pieces as short-shorts.

** Please correct me if I'm wrong!

*** There's no widely accepted definition for flash fiction's maximum word-count. Some would argue for 1000 words, others 1500. I've also heard the argument that anything below 2000 words is not a proper short story. 

A science fiction short story by Tade Thompson. Strongly recommended. Buy it! (E.g. on Amazon, but doubtless elsewhere too.)

"A compelling, if gruelling short story, set in a near-future Nigeria. Bicycle Girl is not for the faint-hearted, as it includes some brutal scenes of interrogation, but this is a fascinating depiction of an all-too-credible future played out in a convincing (and refreshingly non-standard) setting. I'll be seeking out more fiction by this talented author."

Enough said?

One of people who bought my SF collection Moondust Memories told me privately that he found my story notes of particular interest, so I've decided to post some thoughts about my most recently published story, Time to Play, which you can read in issue 9 of Kzine. (Please consider buying a copy of this excellent magazine.)

Warning: spoilers ahead!

Most of my stories are either idea-driven or arise from a specific situation. Typically, I then cast around for suitable characters who might invest in that idea or situation. Sometimes they just turn up, demanding to be admitted into the story. That was the case with Time to Play. As usual, I let the characters follow their noses in the first draft, leaving me to sort out the resultant carnage in an iterative, post hoc way. It's not a recommendable writing process, but that's how I work.

Time to Play arose from a long-ago visit to the (fondly remembered by me) Virgin Megastore in London's Oxford street. I was sitting in the store's basement level coffee bar, watching and listening to various people noodling around on the guitars, keyboards and drums on sale there, when I wondered what would happen if everyone started playing the same song at the same time. So that was the seed idea, emerging from the extrapolation of a specific situation I knew well.

The characters who demanded to inhabit this story were not easy for me to write. I researched Patrick Doyle's physical condition as best I could, while trying to make his battle to find an outlet for his creative impulses seem credible. On the other hand, my antagonist, Reef, never revealed much to me. Who is he? Why does he do what he does? Does he realise (or even care) how others view his methods? Are there others like him? I can honestly state that I don't have answers to those questions, at least not yet. One editor who declined the story stated that it was actually Reef's story not Patrick's; that Reef was in fact the protagonist and should have provided the viewpoint. I do have some sympathy with her view, while fundamentally disagreeing with it. For me, Time to Play is Patrick's story: a tale of belated creative achievement, brought about via a prickly mixture of inspiration, collaboration and coercion.

Perhaps someday I'll write Reef's story too.

I didn't attend Wiscon 38, so I didn't hear N. K. Jemisin's GoH speech, which is reproduced here. It is important that her speech is read widely. I'd like to think we'd all want to belong to a diverse, inclusive, non-discriminatory science fiction and fantasy community, but what she and others have experienced proves that some people would rather rewind to the 1950s. That's not what I want. More importantly, it's not right, it's not just, and it isn't acceptable.

Evidently there is still an awful long way to go. That must change.

Anyone who knows me well, or has read more than a handful of my SF stories, knows that I'm a true child of the Space Age. So it rankles with me when I'm forced to admit that I probably won't live to see humans walk on Mars. Indeed, even seeing new boot-prints on the Moon during the next couple of decades seems a bit of a stretch. Perhaps China might manage it. I can't see anyone else getting close.

Yet despite my pessimism about boot-prints, it thrills me to realise that we live in a great age of exploration, albeit one conducted by robots. We have two working rovers on Mars, Cassini still orbiting Saturn, Rosetta soon to drop a lander onto a comet's nucleus, and Dawn and New Horizons heading for their close encounters with Ceres and Pluto respectively. First after first after first, either happening now or coming up in the next year or two. Invariably though, the SF writer in me (and lapsed astronomer too) is keen to know what else might happen during the coming decades. Might we see an orbiter probe Europa's sub-surface ocean with radar, or its cousin sniff the water vapour outgassing from Enceladus for traces of organics? Most challenging of all: might our robotic proxies go sailing on Titan? The second largest moon in the solar system, Titan boasts substantial bodies of liquid hydrocarbons near its poles. Wouldn't it be wonderful to see a view of Saturn, in all its ringed glory, rising over a hazy coastline?

If we can't have boot-prints, I'd settle for that.