Tony Ballantyne

The Last Days of Loss

I have a picture here on my desk, drawn when I was 17.

I seemed to have spent my life up to the age of 40 accumulating stuff that I’m now going to spend the rest of my time sorting through and throwing away. One of the many things unearthed by the sorting process is a picture of a spaceship I seem to remember drawing when I should have been doing A level maths homework. It’s not a bad picture, in my opinion. I’m no artist, but when I found this picture I must admit I was quite impressed by my younger self – I’ve not thrown it away yet because I can’t decide if I want to hang onto it. The question I keep asking myself is how often do I really think I’ll look at it in the future? It’s not worth framing, so if I do stick it in a file, am I really going to take it out and look at it, or am I just delaying the inevitable and postponing throwing it away by a few years?

I could scan the picture, of course. If I do, the picture might live for ever. I back up all my files both locally and to the cloud, and because I backup to the cloud there may well be backups of my backups on servers around the world. There is a possibility that my backed up data will be around indefinitely.

If I don’t scan my picture, the paper will go brown, the picture will fade and eventually it will be lost or thrown away.

If I scan my picture, I’m giving it a chance to last forever, or at least for as long as there is someone maintaining the computers. I could do the same with everything I’ve written or drawn. No doubt in a few years everything we do will be recorded indefinitely. A few years ago we had no such opportunity. We may be the last people who understand this choice…

It’s a nice picture. Maybe I will frame it.

Serial Fiction

Just in case you haven’t seen the other posts, tweets, adverts or fliers…

This Easter my wife and I launched a new magazine called Aethernet. Aethernet is intended to be the magazine of Serial Fiction.

But before you go, why Serial Fiction?

The idea for Aethernet came from a conversation Chris Beckett and I had at Eastercon 2012. We were discussing the pleasures of reading serial fiction. I grew up reading comics where the stories were presented over time. V for Vendetta had an extra excitement when I read it in its original form in Warrior as I spent a couple of years trying to guess who V actually was (there was also an element of frustration when the magazine took longer intervals to appear and then finally folded.) Now, if you’ve only ever read the graphic novel, the mystery would have lasted only a couple of hours. When you have to wait a month between episodes, there is more time to consider the story. Both Chris and I agreed that Serial Fiction afforded an extra dimension to the reader…

But then we began to think about writing Serial Fiction. When I write a novel I start roughly at the beginning and then work through roughly to the end. Roughly is the word. I jump backwards and forwards, constantly changing things when I write any story, whether it’s 1000 word short or 100 000 word novel. More than that, the story I end up writing is never the one I had planned. What would it be like to write a story in the way Dickens and rest used to? How would a story evolve if there was no going back, if you had to follow the characters where they went? Would it be difficult? Would it require a different way of writing? Would it be a new challenge? Mostly, would it be fun?

Well, we’ve tried it, and I can report that the short answer to all of the above is a resounding yes.

The long answer is available in Aethernet Magazine. Most of the stories in there are still being written. We’re about four episodes in front of you due to the editorial process, and the twists and turns continue to surprise and delight us.

I’ve been inspired. My own story, Cosmopolitan Predators! starts in issue 2, and I’ll talk more about that another time.

Finally, one last piece of serial fiction. The Loving Heart is a spin off from Cosmopolitan Predators! and will be told through tweets. Follow @aethernetmag to read it. It will be starting in a couple of weeks…

Plot and Character

Marcus Gipps asked an interesting question on a panel at EightSquaredCon: do writers think of the plot first and then try to think of characters to go with it?

Since genres such as SF tend to be plot driven, I think there is a tendency for people to believe this to be the case, but it’s not the case. Plot and character drive each other.

Even the simplest of plots have characters, clichéd though they might be. If the hero is attacking the dark lord, you have two characters there right away, a good guy and a bad guy. You couldn’t have the plot without the characters: if the bad guy wasn’t bad, the good guy wouldn’t have a reason to attack. If someone just attacks someone else, the reader will just think why? If you take away the characters from a story, all you’re left with is machinery. You are, in effect, describing how a steam engine or a canal lock works. Both of these things are interesting, but they’re not a story.

Of course, just having a good guy and a bad guy doesn’t mean that you can tick the box marked character and then get on describing the world or the spaceships or the fighting. You may be writing a story but it won’t be a very interesting one, and this was what Marcus was really asking when he posed his question do writers think of the plot first and then try to think of characters to go with it? My answer? The plot suggests the characters, the characters suggest the plot. Listen to the characters, and they will tell you where the plot is going. Follow the plot, and the characters will react accordingly. If you don’t know what your characters will do, then you haven’t understood them properly, and neither will the reader.

EightSquaredCon was a great event, by the way. Superbly organised, there was a great atmosphere throughout the hotel. Well done to all involved!

protected void onCreate(Bundle icicle)

I heard a radio program a while back about found poetry. My favourite example was the message you see written out on the buttons you use to operate some train doors. Written from top to bottom it says:

Open Doors Close

The title of this entry comes from a basic Android program (the operating system that makes most of the world’s smartphones run). That phrase makes me think of some sort of Japanese Anime wizard character, who enters the protected void to create an icicle bundle to use against his enemy.

SQL commands are used for getting information from databases. An example would be
SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE Sex=’F’
which would find all your female customers. Seeing that always makes me want to write something like

SELECT integrity FROM life WHERE Hope IS NULL
Python programmers might write something like the following
class Music: def __init__(self):
Which sounds like something someone trying to be cool ten years ago might say.*

One of my favourites is the LISP command to add together two numbers, for no other reason than I like the look of it.
(+ 2 2)
What I really like about all the above expressions, though, isn’t so much the poetical aspect, but rather the way these expressions inevitably arrive by applying the logic of the programming language in question.

But more on that another time…

* Any python programmers reading this – I know the def __init__ should be indented. Wordpress keeps stripping out my leading spaces. If you have a solution to this, I’d love to hear it.

Not what you’re looking for? Try Tony Ballantyne Tech for real coding.

Eclecticism

A while ago I bought a USB turntable to transfer my records from vinyl to MP3. I copied a few across, but gave up in the end when I decided I would be better served by paying for a subscription to Spotify.

When I tell this story to my male friends, their typical reaction is that “Ah! But most of the records I own aren’t available on Spotify.” I can’t help thinking that what they are implying is that they have wider and more discerning taste than me. This may be true but there’s no need to rub it in.

Marian Keyes (don’t be misled by the chick-lit label, there’s a writer who really knows her craft) often makes jokes in her books about men and their record collections. I don’t know about men, but people do take pride in the breadth of their tastes. Ask someone what sort of books they like to read and they’ll usually reply something like “Mainly Detective Fiction, but I do like other things as well…” Well, yes, but nearly everyone would say the same. It’s rare to meet someone who only reads Detective Fiction, or Romances, or my own genre, SF. So why mention the fact that you like other things, too? Just say you like Ghost Stories and have done with it.

I don’t have a problem with being described as an SF writer, or an SF reader for that matter. There’s nothing wrong with being interested in a certain field. Eclecticism is great, but only up to a point. To take an example, every so often the BBC launches yet another radio program comes along which prides itself on its disparate play list. They never work. There needs to be some unifying theme or all you get is a lot of songs.

The human brain likes a just a little bit of order. Too much order and all you get is wallpaper patterns. Too little order and you all you have is randomness. The human brain is very good at picking up just the right amount of order when it looks at patterns. That’s how it can distinguish between a language and random collection of letters. That’s why it likes music which is at once familiar but with the occasional twist or quirk. The same goes for stories, by and large.

Of course, you will point out that there are many books and pieces of music out there which aren’t familiar at all, but people listen to and read them with great enjoyment. This is true, but I would wonder at the path by which people arrived at these books…

Cosmopolitan Predators!

… and now for something completely different.

Not a novel, not a series of short stories, but a little bit of both.

I had the germ of the idea for this years ago when I read Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. I love many things about Maupin’s writing, but one of the things that really caught my attention about the Tales was that they originally appeared as regular instalments in the San Francisco Chronicle.

That struck me as a really different way of writing. When I write a novel, I plan it out, write it, redraft it, change the beginning, change the end, redraft again… I’ve often wondered what it would be like writing a story as a serial, not having the luxury of going back and changing what I’d done. What would that mean? Would the characters evolve in a different way? The idea has fascinated me for years, however there’s always been one drawback. Nobody really publishes serial fiction any more.

I discussed this with Chris Beckett at Eastercon last year, and it turned out he was fascinated by the idea of serial fiction, too. So, it turns out were Keith Brooke, Eric Brown, Juliet E McKenna, Philip Palmer, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Ian Whates. We all wanted to write serial fiction, but there was no outlet for it…

So I decided to do something about that. My wife is an experienced editor, I have the IT skills and so…

Athernet Magazine will be launching on March 30th. Aethernet Magazine is the magazine of serial fiction. In it you’ll find serial fiction by the above authors, and by me. Cosmopolitan Predators! is just a little but like Tales of the City in that it follows the lives of a series of characters, however it scores over Maupin in that it has more robots in it.

The concept behind Aethernet Magazine isn’t a new one, but perhaps its a concept whose time has come again. See what you think…

500 Horse Burgers

It’s interesting to see how the media reacts to a story. When there’s a risk of infection, are they going to scaremonger or are they going to be sensible? It seems that in the case of the horse meat story they’ve decided to be sensible.

For those of you not following the British media, it has been revealed that some meals labelled as containing beef actually contain a percentage of horse meat. Some of that meat may have come from horses injected with phenylbutazone, or bute. Bute can have harmful side effects if taken by humans, and so is not an approved drug for humans.

The media could have run with a story along the lines of “Deadly Horse Burgers Infect our Children”, but instead they went for the far less reactionary “You’d have to eat 500 horse burgers to get a significant dose of bute.”

This is one way to quantify risk in way that people can easily understand. I remember back in the 1980s when AIDS awareness was first being raised, it was asked if you could catch aids from saliva – could you catch AIDS from kissing? Popular wisdom back then had it that you would have to drink a bucket of saliva in order to catch AIDS.

Now, I don’t know whether its true that you can be made ill from 500 horse burgers or a bucket of spit, I’m more interested in the way the risk is presented.

When the MMR scare was at its height a question frequently asked by the media was “Can you guarantee that the MMR jab is 100% safe?” The answer, as they must have known, was no. Nothing is 100% safe. So why ask the question? Why not say that you would need 500 injections or a bucket full of the stuff to quantify the risk?

I can only suppose because they wanted to scare people. This may well have been because they genuinely believed that MMR was dangerous and that people should be scared. Or maybe that’s just a load of horse burgers.

A Forest

I attended some training this week on teaching literacy to teenagers. I was told that the key to persuasive writing was to remember A FOREST: Alliteration, Facts, Opinions, Rhetorical Questions, Examples, Statistics, rule of Three.

Now, I don’t disagree with this. These are all effective techniques in my opinion. More than that, there is a circularity in education which means that if someone says A FOREST is the key to persuasive writing then the markscheme in some future exam will only judge a piece of writing to be persuasive if there is A FOREST there, and who doesn’t want to do well in an exam?

I dutifully wrote up my piece of persuasive writing and was given someone else’s to check. As is always the case I was asked to suggest improvements. The piece was very good, the only remark I could make was it had used too much alliteration. I was asked what I meant, too much alliteration, and I pointed out how this technique had been used at the start, in the middle and at the end of the piece. A good 15% of the piece was alliteration, alliteration, alliteration…

And that’s when something occurred to me. The difference between teaching English and writing. Don’t think I’m having a go at teachers, I’ve been one for twenty years. The point is that a teacher will flag up all the clever stuff in a piece of writing. They will point out the techniques the writer has used and discuss them with the class. And this is the right thing to do as the pupils will learn by example.

But now look at this from the writer’s point of view. They writer will have done all of those things, but if they know their stuff they won’t make them too obvious. They’ll have buried those tricks in the flow of the text; they don’t want the reader tripping over them.

It’s good advice to any writer: don’t remind the reader they are reading. Keep it flowing, if they’re stopping to admire your wordplay they’re not immersed in the story.

Les Miserables: Not SF

…well, you probably knew that anyway.

I saw the film last weekend. I like musicals, though this one is not a favourite – I think the music is rather uneven, magnificent in parts, almost trite in others. But this isn’t a film review or music blog even if I am going to write about Anne Hathaway singing I Dreamed a Dream.

Now, I don’t particularly like this song. I’m not sure that I liked it originally, I’ve heard it too many times to register it now.

…until Anne Hathaway sang it. I’d read what a great performance she gave, I wasn’t prepared for just how great. It’s a little unfair that a song, merely by its own popularity can become a cliché (think Bohemian Rhapsody or Nessun Dorma) but Hathaway made it sound as if it was being sung for the first time. More, she made me feel the emotions the song was trying to evoke. That made me think about writing…

It reminded me that one of the great things about literature is that sometimes it can take something commonplace and everyday and make the reader look at it with new eyes. It can retell an old story and make the reader experience it as if it were fresh. This isn’t what SF does. SF extrapolates a premise into something new, it’s not there to reveal something you already know.

I’m not saying that you will never read SF that makes you look at the familiar with new eyes. Of course you will. Avoiding cliche is part and parcel of good writing, and there are some great writers writing SF.

You’ll find romance in some SF, but SF is not romance. You’ll also find comedy, though that isn’t a necessary component. A good SF tale will contain many strands, but not all of those strands are necessary to make it SF.

Update 13 Feb 2013

I notice that Anne Hathaway won a BAFTA for her performance this weekend. No doubt she intends to thank me for the part I played in getting her noticed. I’ve not heard anything yet.

Stories from the Northern Road (Penrose 2.5)

The first ever collection from one of the UK’s finest SF authors: Tony Ballantyne, who has been a finalist for the Philip K Dick award and whose short fiction has featured regularly in Years Best SF anthologies.

A quartet of brand new stories set on the world of Penrose (introduced in the novels Twisted Metal and Blood and Iron) join five stories set in the Recursion universe to produce Stories from the Northern Road. This is Tony Ballantyne at his best.

Released September 2012, and as a Signed Hardback Edition, limited to 125 copies: £19.99

Author Archives: Tony Ballantyne