Colin Harvey – author

One of the things I’m most looking forward to at Eastercon this year is getting my hands on a copy of  The Sixty: Arts of Andy Bigwood .

In case you’re unfamiliar with his name, Andy has done the artwork for my two of my three previous anthologies, so I freely admit to a tinge of nepotism. But more pertinently, he’s has been a finalist for the BSFA award in three of the last four years, and has won twice, for his cover for Ian Whates’ Subterfuge, and the year before for Cracked World for Whates’ previous anthology DisLocations. (sigh, I knew them both before they were famous…) So the BSFA think he’s good as well. 

One of the things I love about Andy’s work is that with its spaceships and other SF tropes it’s reminiscent of the cover art from the early 1970s, by artists like Bruce Pennington and Eddie Jones; but while Andy’s work is tech-heavy, there are hints that he’s beginning to experiment, to play with other form.

As I said last time, I’ll be signing both books, as will lots of other authors, such as Gareth L Powell and Andy Remic; The Sixty includes all the aforementioned, plus my own Displacement, Sam Stones’ Killing Kiss, and many, many others. All illustrations are accompanied by short passages from the texts illustrated, and Andy may have an original short story or two in there from various authors.

It promises to be a wonderful book.

Like the rest of the students on my course (and everyone else, I guess) I’m still in the middle of the pre-Easter deadline crunch. That hasn’t been helped by problems with the Minerva system causing one of the assignments to disappear into a cyberhole, only for the new deadline to be in the middle of the maelstrom.

The upshot is that blog posts may be far and few between for the next couple of weeks.

But while I’m here…

…part of my workload is to finalize the selction for Transtories over the next couple or three weeks, since I have some forty-five stories to read through. (I’ll post the full stats tomorrow) I may post acceptances on Twitter.

Right, better get on with it. I’ll be back sometime to talk more about anthologies…

It was raining earlier, so deciding that we’d wait it out, I’ve just returned from a late trot round the park with Alice. Rarely have I needed a walk so badly as a result of reading a book.

I’ll come back to that in a moment, but first a quick reminder that there’s just one day left to submit to my anthology Transtories. 

But back to why I needed that walk.

I’d just read One Day by David Nicholls, and found myself shocked by the violence of my emotional reaction; walking Alice round the park meant that I had a chance to work out my thoughts about why I’d gotten so upset.

But first, a warning.  There is a major spoiler following, and while I’m not normally reluctant to reveal twists if they’re germane to the ending, this would actually destroy the very effect I’m trying to explain – SO FINISH READING NOW if you don’t want to know what happens.

The plot of One Day revolves around the long-term love affair between Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley, students in Edinburgh who share a one- night stand after their graduation ceremony on St. Swithin’s Day, 1988 (that’s July 15th, for those of you who don’t know the legend). The novel charts their anniversary over the next nineteen years – usually they spend it together, but sometimes just write to each other.

Because by 1989 Dexter and Emma have gone their separate ways: Emma finds her ambitions worn down by life in the late 80s and 90s; she takes up acting, in an interactive drama troupe, then gets a dead end job in a fast food chain, before training as a teacher. Dexter drifts through life on charm, before blagging his way into the media on the strength of his looks.

In the late 90s Dexter’s fall from grace as a TV presenter is as sudden as his rise, while Emma quits her teaching job after an abortive affair with her headmaster. Dexter marries while Emma lives alone, but they continue to see each other each year, and there is never any doubt that love will prevail in the end.

Are you still reading? Didn’t I tell you to stop? Okay, on your head be it…

Dexter finds that his wife is cheating on him, and the following year Emma is shocked by how gaunt he looks after his marriage implodes. Emma by this time is a successful children’s novelist living in Paris, but realizing that this may be their last chance, she leaves her boyfriend to return with Dexter, helps get him back on his feet, and they marry on St Swithin’s Day, 2003.

So far, so contemporary romance; I know exactly where this is heading, except that there are still sixty-five pages to go, and there must be another twist. Sure enough life’s not so good by 2004; Dex and Em are trying for a baby, and they quarrel, and they arrange to meet in the evening to celebrate their anniversary – it’s a working day in the shop for Dexter, while Emma tries to write, goes swimming and heads for home:

The rain became heavier, oily drops of brown city water, and Emma rode standing on the pedals with her head lowered so that she was only vaguely aware of a blur of movement in the side road to her left.

The sensation is less of flying through the air, more of being picked up and hurled…the people crouching over her seem fearful and are asking her over and over again are you alright are you alright. One of them is crying and she realizes that she is not alright….

Then she thinks of Dexter…he’ll wonder where I am, she thinks. He’ll worry….

Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and she is gone forever. (pp.384 – 385) 
 
I’m a little embarrassed now at how much I mourned a fictional character. It took me several minutes to be able to pick up the book again, and continue, now in a very emotional state, reading what happens over the last fifty pages. Which is not at all what I expected — but I won’t tell you, because you’ve had enough spoilers for now.

All writers manipulate their readers, but Nicholls is extremely adept, while I had some personal hot buttons which Nicholls pressed. Dex and Em are depicted in all their beautiful and awful detail, and Emma reminded me so much of my ex, while the sheer shock of the accident only adds to its verisimilitude; if TV has one massive failing it’s (generally) telegraphing plot twists through the soundtrack.

The strength of the novel (and the point of this rather rambling post) is that you may think that you know what’s coming, but life doesn’t give you spoiler alerts.

Award winning author Aliette de Bodard was kind enough to offer me the chance to guest post on her blog. For reasons that I make clear on the blog, I decided to talk about Winter Song, which proved to be an interesting exercise. It’s been so long since I’ve worked on the book that it was like revisiting an old home. The actual blog post is here — do drop by to read it, and while you’re at it, have a poke around the rest of Aliette’s site, which is one of the most fascinating on t’net.

We got the unexpected bonus of a bit of unforecasted sunshine this afternoon, so after several hours of cutting and pruning, and re-jigging, to take a break from the Hamster-Wheel of Doom that is my Writer’s Workshop assignment, I persuaded Kate to go and visit a garden near Saltford.

Aside from a railway line just over the back fence, and the A4 with its relentless traffic at the front, it’s a pretty nice place. Visualize -if you will- the hawthornes and cherry trees in blossom, the flowers nodding in a gentle breeze. And over the fence, rabbits hopping around in the field. They’re safe enough, especially with the two cows leaning on the fence, running interference for the rabbits in between chewing the foliage on the fence.

Well, it was a nice break, but now it’s time to return to the Hamster-wheel; now I’m hunting quotes from my reading material, in order to convert a narrative to an essay. Or maybe I’ll just leave it as a narrative…

Have a nice Sunday Evening, whatever you’re doing.

This morning we noticed that the various bird life (blackbirds, finches, pigeons and tits of various sorts) were getting a little antsy.

Then Kate noticed the Sparrowhawk sitting on a branch in the apple tree just above the bird feeder — as if he was sitting, waiting for breakfast. We get the occasional birdstrike in the garden, a random scattering of feathers, but this is the first time he’s taken to waiting.

It’s oddly appropriate, gievn my reading material of late. In an attempt to re-evaluate some of the standards of the SF and fantasy genres, I’ve been re-reading some of the standards. Before Microcon, it was Dune, The Man in the High Castle and Pavane (I was giving a presentation on Alternate History).

Since Microcon, my reading has been the original  Earthsea trilogy (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore), together with the two more recent novels, which are most definitely not children’s books (many people still argue about whether the original trilogy is; since Sparrowhawk is a youth in the first novel, and teenagers feature in the second and third volumes, I’d classify them as YA).

But Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (which actually isn’t the last book) and The Other Wind (which at this point is) are books about loss of vitality, about change, about growing old and even death. Tehanu is as bitter as wormwood, a novel in which Tehan is powerless throughout most of the book, the victim of random (male) violence and pointless cruelty.

Tehanu won the 1990 Nebula, a rare accolade for a fantasy novel, but IMO The Other Wind which shares a theme with Keith Roberts “The Passing of the Dragons” (bit of a spoiler there) is the better novel. Or maybe it’s just more to my taste. But that’s not to say it’s any lighter. But neither book is in any way YA.

Hawk, as Sparrowhawk now calls himself, is now seventy, still a vital man, but long past his physical prime, spending his days fixing the farmhouse and trying to persuade the goats to stop breaking into the vegetable plots. Hawk spends most of the book off-stage, left behind by the events that have seen dragons attacking people’s crops on other islands. Instead it’s Lebannen from The Farthest Shore, Tenar and her daughter from Tehanu and a number of other characters who dominate the novel. It’s a novel about the inevitability of death, and the actual desirability of a finite lifespan. Unlike our modern society, Hawk, Tenar and the mages are actively sought for their wisdom.

Those two points got me to thinking about our society. I’ve written before about the way our media fixates on youth and tends to depict the old as a burden, even a problem. That’s started to change slightly with a recent BBC series –when teenage meets old age– but much of the media coverage highlights the ‘problem’ of pensions.

We’re now all going to be made to work much longer –I estimate my retirement age will be seventy, Kate’s will even be seventy-five– and this is justified by the claim that we’re all going to live much longer. But while all the debate is about the length of our life-spans, no one seems to consider the quality of life, rather than the length of them. Does anyone really fancy dragging their osteo-arthritis ridden bodies out of bed on a Monday morning into their eighties? What about the increasing spread of dementia?

Perhaps we ought to change the parameters of the debate from how long, to how good?

After a glorious day out in the sunshine, it’s back to the grindstone with a vengeance, although the continuing sunshine helps to soften the grind.

What is less wonderful is that I have eight deadlines due in the next nineteen days; six of them are academic, including three in two days, two of them on the same day.

Of the two to do with writing, one of them is out of my control, so I just have to keep a watching eye on it.

The last one is for Transtories, the anthology I’m editing for Aeon Press (publishers of Albedo One); if you’re looking to sub a story, you have another week to get it into me.

If it all goes quiet around here, you’ll know why — I’m already having to put some new projects on hold until the deadline crunch has passed.

Last week James Bubear, a 1st year student at Bath Spa University, went missing after a night out at a club. Police are becoming increasingly concerned because James’s disappearance is completely out of character and he has had no contact with any friends or family since he went missing.

It is also known that James lost his mobile phone during the day on Sunday and that although it has now been picked up by somebody, it has not been handed in.

Police are urging whoever has it now to contact them and return it. They said that the person is not in trouble.

James had been on a night out with friends at Vodka Revolutions bar on George Street on Sunday night in Bath.

The 18-year-old was last seen leaving at around 10.30pm and walking off alone. James, who is originally from Llandrindod Wells in Wales, was walking back to his student flat in Waterside Court on Lower Bristol Road, and it is believed he may have followed a route along the river.

Anyone who has seen James or knows of his whereabouts is asked to call Bath police on 0845 4567000

Sadly, James is not the only person missing, and just when his profile needs to be kept elevated in the media, his story was eclipsed by that of a search being mounted in Savernake Forest for 22-year-old Sian O’Callaghan. Without wanting to dismiss the threat to her safety, it’s a shame the BBC couldn’t have spared a few moments to report on the fact that there are now two people missing — instead of granting one searcher two soundbites, and several minutes of time to the whole story.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that there are double standards at work when  it comes to missing people; young trumps old, pretty trumps plain, and girl trumps boy.

Or perhaps that’s just my imagination?

Whether or not it is, it doesn’t help find James.

Ask around; pass this on; don’t let him be forgotten.

Well, that was nice; two days of reading (the original Earthsea Trilogy for any of you who are interested, reacquainting myself with Le Guin’s almost pitch-perfect  prose) interspersed with dog walking in the sunshine and dinners out in the evening.

We left Poole at about 7.20 this morning, and when we’d cleared the traffic down in Dorset (not helped by lorry drivers incapable of reading the signs advising them that the road ahead wasn’t wide enough for them) made good time to the campus.

Which was oddly deserted. A fairly large minority of students weren’t in today, presumably because they were working on assignments, but the effect of the first sunshine on a semi-deserted campus and my being back after a ten-day absence was to make the place feel quite unfamiliar.

I’m sure things will settle down again in a day or two, and it’s no bad thing to have a feeling of dislocation for an SF writer.