North Cornwall Book Festival and Armadacon

Photo: Daniel Hall

Sarah McIntyre and I had a great time last Friday at the North Cornwall Book Festival. It was a long drive, especially for my son, who had had a collision with a low-flying skateboard the previous day and looked as if he'd just gone six rounds with Jack Dempsey, but once we got to Endellion there was a warm welcome from chairman Patrick Gale and the rest of the team, and I finally got to meet Matt Haig (and learned that his wife's brother is none other than the great Dave Semple, who drew the excellent cover illustrations for my Goblins series).

Ever since Sarah and I started doing the Cakes in Space show we've been haunted by the knowledge that sooner or later we'd forget a major prop, and sure enough we did - the Nom-O-Tron somehow didn't make its way into the car. But Sue Harbour-Robertson, owner of the lovely house where the festival was held, came to our rescue, providing us with random vegetables and bits of electronic equipment, so the crisis was over almost before we'd had time to start panicking.

You can find Sarah's blog about it all here.

That was the last Cakes in Space event of the year, but we'll be dusting off our spacesuits again for various festivals and schools events next spring.

I'll be doing another West Country event soon; the ArmadaCon science fiction convention in Plymouth. The programme is starting to take shape over on their website, and I know that the guests will also include Doctor Who writer Andrew Cartmel. I'll be talking about my own work from Mortal Engines to Cakes in Space, and I'm also putting together a talk about some of the things which have influenced me over the years.

Unfortunately the North Cornwall gig meant that I couldn't make it to BristolCon this year, but I gather it was as good as ever, and next year's has already been announced, with Jaine Fenn and Jasper Fforde as guests of honour, so I will make sure I get there on September 26th 2015.

Incoming Conventions

Next month, Sarah McIntyre and I will be unleashing our Cakes in Space show in the very appropriate  surroundings of Nine Worlds, a three day SF/Fantasy convention which is taking place near London Heathrow.  Nine Worlds is about 'gaming, film, cosplay, fandom, literature, science, geek culture, meeting people and having a really big party'. We've heard a lot of great things about last year, so we were delighted to be asked to contribute to the children's programme.  It's nice to see a con offering so much for kids. But it offers a lot for everybody else too, as you can see from the packed programme and massive list of guests.

I'm attending Nine Worlds as one half of Reeve & McIntyre, but if anyone wants to talk about Mortal Engines or my other books just get in touch via the comments below or on Twitter or Facebook and we can arrange to meet up.

Then in November I'll be doing a solo appearance at ArmadaCon in Plymouth, where I guess I'll be talking more in my Mortal Engines/Larklight/Goblins/Dr Who capacity. ArmadaCon has been running every year since 1988, and this year's theme is Fantasy. It even has a goblin on its poster, courtesy of cartoonist and illustrator Stuart McGhee...

Much to my annoyance, I don't think I'll be able to make it to BristolCon this year, but that shouldn't stop you going; it's a wonderful, friendly convention, and this year's guests of honour include the very wonderful Emma Newman.

BristolCon

Kicking the dust of the YLG Conference from my heels last Friday, I high-tailed it down to Bristol, where BristolCon was taking shape at the Doubletree Hotel.  It's the third year I've attended BristolCon, and this time I was to be Guest of Honour - which is a considerable honour, when you consider how many fine writers there are in or around the Bristol SF scene.

One of them is Emma Newman, whose Split Worlds series of urban/fairy fantasy stories I can highly recommend (and I'm not usually a fan of urban fantasy or fairies). She interviewed me as part of my Guest-of-Honour-ing duties, and we talked about some of the things that had influenced me, including favourite films like Excalibur and Brazil, and my own long and inglorious career as a no-budget movie director, which started when I was 12 and first got hold of a cine camera and sputtered on until about 1990, when I thought of a story so overambitious that even I knew it wasn't worth trying to film it myself, so I wrote it down instead and it became Mortal Engines.

Unfortunately the lighting at the Doubletree always scuppers my attempts to take photographs, and this year I was so busy that I forgot to take any anyway, but here's a snap that Ian Cairns posted on Twitter, showing me in full flow. As you can see, Emma even provided tea (future interviewers please take note!).

Two packed programmes of panel discussions and readings run throughout the day at BristolCon, which means there's always something you want to see (and it's usually on at the same time as something else you want to see). I managed to be in the audience for a couple of good debates, including one called 'How to Poo in a Fantasy Universe', which wasn't quite as scatalogical as it sounds and was really about how such earthy details can help to make a made-up world feel more real.

There were others which I would have liked to see, too, but there's so much else to do, and too many excellent people to catch up with! I was sorry that Tim Maughan and Kim Lakin-Smith couldn't make it this year, and Jeremy Levett is busy being a jolly swagman in Australia, but it's always good to talk to Gareth and Becky Powell (Hive Monkey, the sequel to Gareth's Ack Ack Macaque, will be out soon) Ian Whates, Cheryl Morgan, and Jonathan L Howard (whose Katya's World is also about to gain a sequel, Katya's War).  I won't attempt to list all the people I met because I'll only go and leave someone out, but I enjoyed talking to Lor Graham and will be listening to Rambling Through Genre, the podcast which she runs with Max Edwards and Doug Smith (who were also at BristolCon). And there were some fantastic little steampunk/goblin sculptures in the art room, the work of fantasy sculptor impsandthings... And Scott Lewis and Roz Clarke were full of fascinating folkloric knowledge, and @Mrs Hirez made the best chocolate brownies I've ever tasted!

It was all still going on in the bar when I went off to bed around midnight, and the tireless committee (well I assume they were tired, but they never seem to let it show) were already making plans for BristolCon 2014, at which Emma Newman and Jon Courtenay Grimwood are to be the Guests of Honour. I hope to be there too!  Many thanks to Jo, MEG, Roz, Heather, Claire and the team for inviting me this year, and for running such a fabulous and friendly convention

Countdown to BristolCon

This coming Saturday is BristolCon, where I'll be doing Guest-of-Honouring duties alongside Storm Constantine and Mark Buckingham.  If you're within reach of Bristol and like SF, fantasy and/or meeting lovely and interesting people, I'd highly recommend it.

There will be two packed programmes of panels and readings running throughout the day. My bits will include:

11. - 11.45  Kaffeklatsch - which is foreign for a cup of coffee and a natter (cake, too, if I can organise it). It's too late to book a space, apparently, but there are four available on the day, first come, first served.

16.00 - 16.45 I'll be interviewed by/in conversation with the brilliant Emma Newman (right) who is the author of the Split Worlds series among many other things. (I'm reading the first, Between Two Thorns at the moment, and it's excellent.)

16.50 - 16.55 Reading - I guess this crowd will be a bit too old for Oliver and the Seawigs, so I'll probably read from my story We Know Where We're Goin', which appears in the new Solaris Books anthology The End of the Road. (Editor Jonathan Oliver commissioned it at last year's BristolCon).








18.00 - 18.45 Panel event: Beyond Arthur: We continue to mine the Arthurian legends for fantasy novels, film and TV, but there’s a wealth of more obscure myth and legend anchored in the landscapes and collective memories of Britain, including the South West. Our panel discusses some of the potential inspirations that lurk beyond the beaten paths, in the forests and lakes beyond Avalon.
With Gaie Sebold (moderating), Roz Clarke, Catherine Butler, me, Scott Lewis

The rest of the time I'll be hanging around the convention, and watching a lot of the other sessions. The programme is packed with good stuff and great speakers, and you can peruse it here. You can also BristolCon on Twitter and Facebook

BristolCon is on Saturday, 26th October at the Doubletree (formerly Ramada) Hotel in Bristol. Membership is £20 if you book in advance, or £25 on the day.

BristolCon 2013

BristolCon, the South West's premier science fiction & fantasy convention, will be taking place on the 26th October this year, and I've been invited to be one of the Guests of Honour. I'm not sure quite what my schedule will be yet, but I'll definitely be doing an event about my work, and probably sitting on some panel discussions too, and just hanging around meeting people. I have a busy autumn of events planned, but they're all about Oliver and the Seawigs, so this will be a chance to talk about my older books, my recent brush with the Whoniverse, and anything else you fancy, really.  I'll post details of my full schedule when I have them.

If you've never been, BristolCon is well worth a visit. It's grown from a small, afternoon event to a fully fledged one day convention, with 250 people attending in 2012, and presumably more expected this year. The programme is designed to allow people from south and central England and south Wales to attend without having to stay overnight, although 'more bar-centered activities' carry on late into the evening for locals and those of us who will be stopping over. (And if you do plan to stop over, there's plenty more to do and see in Bristol, one of my favourite cities.)

I've been to two BristolCons now and thoroughly enjoyed the friendly atmosphere and the chance to meet all sorts of interesting and talented people. The other Guests of Honour this year are author Storm Constantine and comics artist Mark Buckingham, but there will be loads of other writers and artists there too: here's a list of those who have already booked. There will be events and discussions throughout the day, and also an art show and a dealers' room.

Sadly, it looks as if the Gromits which are currently decorating Bristol will be all gone by October...

                                                                 Photo: BristolCon

Membership is £20 if you sign up before October 25th, or £25 on the door. All the details are on the BristolCon website, and you can also get updates via Facebook  and Twitter. Hope to see you there!

Tim Maughan's 'Paintwork'

Reading this recent interview with Tim Maughan on the Sense of Wonder blog reminded me that I've been meaning to repost my Solitary Bee review of his short story collection Paintwork here.  As you'll see if you read the interview, Tim and I are very different sorts of writer: he despises nostalgia and escapism, which are my stock in trade.  But while I'm rummaging happily through the toy box of discarded Sci-Fi tropes, it's great to find someone writing science fiction that's inspired by the real world.  If you haven't read Paintwork yet it's very good value and highly recommended - and I hope it marks the beginning of a very important and successful career.

If you'd asked me before I read Tim Maughan's debut collection Paintwork, I'd probably have said that 'Hip, cutting-edge cyberpunk with a techno-rave attitude' wasn't really my cup of tea.  The observation, familiar from William Gibson and other cyberpunk writers, that the street finds its own uses for cutting edge technology, is indisputably true, but I've never really sought out books and stories based upon it - my own imagination is stuck too firmly in the pre-digital age.

But luckily I happened to sit on a reading by Tim Maughan at last year's Bristolcon, and I was immediately struck by both the crisply imagined near-future setting and the energy of the language.  "...it wasn't the gait-trackers, face-clockers or even the UAVs that got 4Clover in the end. The word on the timelines had said it was a Serbian zombie-swarm hired by an irate art critic that had tracked him down and smeared his co-ordinates all across the Crime and ASB wikis."

There are three stories in this short collection, and each is is set in the same very near and very credible future.  In the title story a graffiti artist called 3Cube stalks the mean streets of Bristol, hacking into the QR codes on virtual reality advertising hoardings to overwrite their corporate messages with his own artwork. In Paparazzi, which again takes place in Bristol,  a documentary maker is hired by powerful players of a MMORPG to infiltrate the game and and secure incriminating footage of a rival faction.  In the third story, Havana Augmented, two young Cubans hack illegally downloaded VR games into new and startling forms.  Each story is short (the whole book runs to 102 pages), but they have a power that is missing from many much longer works, and they linger in the memory.

Personally, I liked Paparazzi the least, but that's because I've never really played a computer game, and find it hard to visualise immersive VR environments or understand their appeal; it's still a perfectly good story.  I preferred 3Cube, busy replacing the advertisements of tomorrow with his own haunting artworks, and the young heroes of Havana Augmented, who hack and soup up their Virtual Reality robo-warriors as skillfully as the previous generation of Cubans augmented their 1950s American automobiles.  There are some exhilarating moments as their massive, digital 'mechs' do battle in the streets of Havana. Indeed, all the stories capture the excitement of the technology that is coming our way.  But, while they are far too subtle to be called 'Dystopian', these are not upbeat visions of the future.  Dystopian stories are basically escapism, smashing up the real world with all its complex problems and replacing it with one which is ostensibly worse, but usually far simpler.  The stories in Paintwork build on the far scarier notion that the future will be just like the present only more so.  Each is about a talented young person who is trapped or tricked by the corporate interests which control their world - interests which have little use for them, or for their skills.  The technology of tomorrow is, all-too believably, used purely in the service of selling us stuff , like the 'spex' which everyone in the world of Paintwork wears, allowing them to see the virtual reality adverts and logos plastered all over it.   When the hero of Paparazzi is asked to meet someone at Starbucks he he just blinks at the Google Earth logo at the bottom of her virtual invitation and his spex show him a trail of football-sized coffee beans hanging in the air, leading up Bristol's Park Street to where, "High in the sunny Bristol sky he could see a ten metre high latte hanging like a hot air balloon, the huge green arrow suspended from its underside pointing down at the store's location."

Of course, Google are actually testing VR specs as I write this.  Paintwork is built around technological developments so imminent that in a few more years I suspect we'll all have them: we'll all be following trails of virtual coffee beans into the future.  Tim Maughan's achievement is to take these dawning possibilities and spin them into pacy, cynical, neo-noir short stories.  I hope he's got a novel in the works.*

Philip Reeve

* He HAS!

Paintwork is available in print or electronic versions from various places: here's a link to Tim's website and further details.

(I notice on the Smashwords site it says that 'This book contains content considered unsuitable for young readers 17 and under,' so You Have Been Warned... but I'm not sure what the unsuitable content is. There are some four-letter words among the dialogue, but nothing you couldn't overhear in the average primary school playground. It strikes me as a book that a lot of teenagers would enjoy.)

The 'Hip, cutting-edge cyberpunk with a techno-rave attitude' quote comes from Gareth L. Powell

This review first appeared on my semi-derelict sister blog, The Solitary Bee.

Weirdness in Wiltshire, Science Fiction in Somerset*

The Trowbdridge Arts Festival will be kicking off this weekend with a Science Fiction and Fantasy day on Saturday (15th September), which will include readings and talks by what can only be described as a glittering galaxy of stars, including  Jonathan L Howard and Moira Young.  Further details on the festival website.

Sadly I can't get to Trowbridge, but I'll definitely be in Bristol on October 20th for BristolCon - where I'm looking forward to meeting all these lovely people.  Membership is £20 in advance, or £25 on the door. I'll definitely be going (I had a great time last year) and I'll write a longer post about it when I know what I'll be doing there.

*I probably mean 'Science Fiction in the Bristol Unitary Authority', but that doesn't alliterate.