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.

I don't class myself as a literary writer, despite the majority of my stories having a serious intent, but nonetheless I find Will Self's essay in The Guardian on the future (marginal at best) of the literary novel persuasive reading. Most chilling of all is his description of the present ecosystem in which many literary novelists make money to live on by teaching creative writing to would-be novelists. What does it mean for a purveyor of short science fiction tales to modest (at best) audiences like me? Perhaps nothing, but it doesn't stop me caring.