Colin Harvey – author

Time to see what other people are doing on their blogs:                                                    

Gareth L Powell writes about a new anthology —2020 Visions— that’s out now. Stories by David Gerrold, Ernest Hogan, Mary Robinette Kowal and of course Gareth himself. I’ll have to check that one out.

Frederik Pohl is writing about his marriage to Judith Merrill, and is busily engaged in a verbal war with Kornbluth bigrapher Mark Rich over ‘hateful libels and lies,’ which is rather sad, so I’m going to move swiftly along.

Meanwhile, Charlie’s Diary has a terrific picture of Edinburgh in the snow, but has moved on with an updated post  about Utopia.

Eugene Byrne offers us his historical joke of the week.

Luc Reid examines at what point a habit forms.

And finally, James Maxey discusses abolishing the minimum wage in the USA.

I started this blog post yesterday, but had very little time, so you’ll have to use your imagination and pretend that it’s Wednesday, and not Thursday. (Hey, why shouldn’t I demand a bit of reader contribution?) Anyway…

I had my first Genre session on SF yesterday. I wanted to approach it with the open eyes of a student with no previous knowledge of the genre, and have no preconceptions that might blinker me. But it was an odd feeling, because you can’t undo what you know.

The result was that I kept hearing things that I’d heard before in a slightly different  way, rather as if I was hearing echoes of voices. Delany on Heinlein and his dilating door, Adam Roberts and his definition of SF as “where the marvellous is framed within a materialist understanding of the universe,” and Darko Suvin and his Novum (the new).

The lecturer is Antony Nanson, who reviews for Vector among other places. He has a wealthof knowledge and understanding of genre in general, but of SF in particular. I haven’t volunteered that I’ve published work, and he hasn’t asked. But he must have some idea….

…especially as he put up four scenarios for people to use to create an SF-nal world. And scenario number 2 was Damage Time, to a tee.

I now have to write a short-story in collaboration, which will be a new experience.

Now it’s off to meet the BSFA in London.

Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes.

I was going to take the day off, but the weather is so bad that we’re stuck indoors so I have little option to stay in and blog…especially since I’m still not a hundred per cent. Which brings me as neatly (and as lamely) as a Radio 2 presenter to today’s post…. 

About six weeks ago, a friend wrote to me about a visit to a Detroit bookstore.  A couple of days ago, while confined to bed, I recieved an update:  “The thieves have apparently had their fill {and stock is in]: note that Winter Song is shelved between Charlaine Harris and Erica Hayes. Apparently the bookstore thinks Winter Song is vampire porn. Congrats, Colin, that’s a good market to be in!”

Hey, do you see me complaining? I’ll take vampire porn anyday…except that it doesn’t appear to be Winter Song — it’s been so successful that we’ve had to cunningly disguise it as Damage Time. 

Joking apart, that’s been a feature of the two books coming out so soon after each other — one sells through, and the other one takes its place.  It happened in Bath, as well. Does that mark a new trend, of short-life displays.

Since it  is out today, I felt I ought to write a few words –unfortunately, I don’ have a bottle to crack against its bows– but yea, verily, I declare this novel Damage Time to be out as of about…5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Actually, it’s probably been out for hours or days. These distinctions are entirely artificial, like birthdays, and Christmas. What actually changes, because a clock ticks over? This is what distinguishes from the animal kingdom, of course…that we can consciously note the time. But at times it can get a little out of hand…I’m thinking of the Millenium for example, but yes, today probably applies as well….

Anyway, enough waffle. There are two more flash extracts up on the site with experimental artwork by moi, based on Chris Moore’s stunning cover.

And since it’s still Halloween Week over at suite101, I’ve posted a review — this time Gary MacMahon’s fine but harrowing The Harm.

(it’s amazing how many variations on that you can get by omitting one letter from that title — I variously typed ‘he harm’ and ‘the ham’ and ‘the arm’ before finally getting it right…)

And only after I’d posted this, and the links went Facebook, Twitter, etc, did I realize that it’s actually 5 days to release. The UK releases on Thursdays -it went out on the 7th– while the US unleashes books into the trade on the last Tuesday of the month. Doh!

But back to the original post…

I was up before dawn this morning and nearly lost my fingers twittering in the dark (I had to alternate removing my glove to press the keys and put it back on when my fingers went numb) which meant that one tweet took twenty minutes, so Alice and I scuttled back into the warmth in record time.

This morning I’ve subbed a couple of poems to a magazine; I’ll be amazed if they take them, since the whole process was a little tongue in cheek, but I’ve long given up trying to second guess who will buy what, and who will reject it.

And I’ve tidied up the order of the Damage Time extracts, so hopefully new -and returning- readers will be able to run through them a little more smoothly, and added Chapter 7. I’ll add two more sidebar chapters next week in the run up to the US release (which is a whole 7 days away! eek!) and on the big day will post one last extract, which is a main narrative chapter linking into the two sidebars.

Right, onto revisions and uni homework. Abyssinia!

Damage Time is officially out in the wild today, although a few rogue copies cut the wire earlier this week and scrabbled out under the noses of the guards — Donna and Matt saw copies on their travels in Bath yesterday, while Cybermage has already posted a really nice review. The US will see copies creeping out from the 26th of this month.

And there was a nice piece of serendipity with the William Gibson talk that I attended down at the Watershed last night. Gibson spoke eloquently, if a little raggedly (I dread to think how many of these presentations he’s done) on a number of subjects, one of which is how much faster the world evolves now than -say- forty or fifty years ago.  “The only novels from that period who even came close to predicting the exquisitely fucked-up complexity of 2010 are [John Brunner’s] Stand On Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up,” he said.

Those novels cover different topics; while Brunner’s works cover over-population and pollution, I’ve chosen as themes a lurching toward post-technology. But the similarity is in the narrative style; I’ll freely acknowledge that the sidebar chapters owe a lot to Brunner’s montages, especially in the magnificent Stand On Zanzibar.

I’ll blog more on the Gibson talk on another day.

Yesterday an item on the 6am news added to the feeling that life often seems to imitate art. It was a report that cited that ‘60% of  high earners would like to keep working past retirement age.’

Well, duh. I would like the option of working past retirement age, given that I count writing as work, as well as my passion.

But I don’t want to have to hold down a second job, or have to get up at some ungodly hour in the cold and dark, which are less likely to be faced by those in the higher-earner tax bands.

But what really depressed me was the motivation for the headline. Why didn’t the news item tell us how many low earners want to work past retirement age? Because that’s what that headline was really about — yet another attack by lobby groups working for those interested in lifting retirement age, and targeting the voiceless.

It feels as if there are wave after wave of attacks on the lower paid, the vulnerable and the other miscellaneous have-nots, led by primary influencers promulgating the idea that we should work longer and longer for less and less salary; it starts with how unfair it is that people retire, and once it has been established that people can work past retirement age, then the next step is to ensure that people must work longer.

Following on from the shamefully slanted headlines about how public sector employees are paid more than the private sector* it feels at the moment as if there is a media blitz against anyone but the most affluent, while the real architects of our current financial situation behave with impunity.

Our system is supposed to take care of us from the cradle to the grave — the difference will be how long we have to work in the run up to the latter. It’s an idea that fuelled Pete Shah’s fury in the opening to Damage Time as his retirement age is raised at three weeks notice to seventy-five.  Yes, the pensions issue needs addressing. But not in the way it is being done.  Or we’ll have another life imitating art scenario, but of massive civil unrest — not just in the UK, but in the US, where the penions time-bomb is even bigger.

Right, I’m going to put my soapbox away.

* based on a survey comparing only full-time employees; most public sector workers are part-time, while the full-time ones tend to be consultants, specialists, etc.

I’ve had my pre-holiday haircut, joining Kate and Tourette’s Dog in the Shorn stakes, and found on my return that even the vegetation was getting in on the act; a pair of tree-surgeons have arrived to trim one of the beech trees that gives the house it’s name. It’s a lovely-looking tree, but it’s now dangerously close to the overhead power lines. Good timing, considering that we’ll be on the road for Poole in another couple of hours — they couldn’t have cut it much finer… (boom boom!)

We’re heading south to dog-sit for the in-laws in Poole, and I’m looking forward to ten days of walking on the Purbeck Hills, lying in and take-aways.

I have no idea what internet connectivity we’ll have. In theory there’s wi-fi, but they’ve already had connectivity issues so hopefully I’ll be logged on as usual on Thursday.

Or it may be that the next time I surface will be at Fantasycon on Saturday.  Angry Robot have pulled stock of three new titles  (including Damage Time) which aren’t available for another three weeks out of a magic hat somewhere, and I’ll be joining Andy Remic and Mike Shevdon in the dealer’s room to sign copies.

To get to Nottingham for the 12 o’clock launch requires me to catch the 06.25 train… for which I’ll probably have to surface in the dark (whimper) …you’ll probably hear the groaning on Saturday all the way up in Nottingham! Still, it’ll be good to catch up with the extended AR family, plus various other old friends from previous Fantasycons.

So I’ll either see you here, or at Nottingham, whichever occurs first.

A late arrival to the Dark Spires team of contributors, former Death Ray  editor and SFX columnist Guy Haley has had quite a lot to say for himself lately, and rightly so.  A few days after we thrashed out the last few edits to ‘Outside,’ his disturbing paean to post-industrial Swindon for the anthology, he launched his blog. (I especially liked the page on that beast of a cat of his — somehow I suspect that Tourette’s Dog may have met her match.)

Among his first half-dozen posts came the news that he had sold a pair of intriguing-sounding novels about a team of 22nd century detectives, Richards and Klein to Angry Robot Books. I particularly liked Guy’s take on the future, that —like the past, [it] is a foreign country, not an alien world.  And that irrespective of technology, people will still have the same emotions as now. That mirrors my own feelings about it, although I suspect we articulate them in very different ways.

The next day he posted about Dark Spires, announcing his sale, plus some general thoughts of his and mine on the anthology.  What struck me this morning is that while there are an equal mix of SF and fantasy stories in the anthology, and while half of said fantasy stories (and one of the SF stories for that matter) slide some way into varying shades of darkness  –thereby re-igniting the old dark fantasy vs horror debate– his is the only out and out horror story in the anthology. And it’s penned by an SF writer. There’s versatility for you.

We need to keep a wary eye on this Haley chap, or at the rate he’s been going, he’ll be taking over the world before you know it…

This is shameless self-indulgence, I know…but forgive me. I’ve been working for this for thirteen years and I’m going to enjoy it for a few more days. Maybe one day I’ll be completely blase about having a book actually on shelf instead of the vast virtual warehouse of Amazon, Book Depository, etc. But that day hasn’t come yet!

There’s this vast warehouse of a shop that covers three floors in Portland, Oregon. It’s a bit of a legend by all accounts — and even I’d heard of Powell’s Bookstore.

A friend of mine who was there on holiday sent me a snap of the front of it which looks pretty unprepossessing, but inside is a wonderland of books…

…and there it is — out in the wild.

Not quite next to Joe Haldeman or Harry Harrison, but close enough. 🙂