Upcoming Event

Where?
Waterstones Piccadilly
203/206 Piccadilly
London
W1J 9HD

When?
Thursday, 25 July 2013, 6:30PM

Who?
Ben Aaronovitch and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith

Why?
 It's WRITER versus ACTOR in a no holds barred knock out conversation death match! Plus exclusive reading of extracts of the upcoming BROKEN HOMES by a man who can actually do all the accent (ie: Kobna)!

How?
For the low low price of £5 (or £3 if you're a Waterstones Card Holder) - tickets available in store or via 02078512400/ 02078512419 or events@piccadilly.waterstones.com.

Once More Into The Breach!

I swore I'd never go back to television!
But let's face it I was lying through my teeth.

Ben Aaronovitch(tm) is proud to announce that the Rivers of London series has been optioned by Feel Films.

Feel Films is run by Nick Hirschkorn and is currently producing Joanathan Strange & Mr Norrell for the BBC. Our aim is to produce a TV series that will blow the audiances's socks off and out via their earholes.

This is of course just the beginning of the process and there will be many many...many meetings and proposal documents and ideas being run up flagpoles etc but I'm hopeful we can not just get it done but get it done well.

Zeno Press Release here

Currently Reading: The Living Landscape

The Living Landscape
How to Read and Understand It
by Patrick Whitefield

Being able to read the landscape whilst on a walk makes a huge difference. It is like suddenly seeing the world in colour after being used to a lifetime of black and white. The Living Landscape looks in detail at landscape formation: from rocks, through soil to vegetation and the intricate web of interactions between plants, animals, climate and the people that makes the landscape around us. Each chapter is interspersed with diagrams, sketches and notes that Patrick has taken over two decades of living and working in the countryside. Patrick will inspire you to reconnect with the land as a living entity, not a collection of different scenery, and develop an active relationship with nature and the countryside. This book invites you to actively engage with nature and experience it first hand. Understanding how landscapes evolve is a useful skill for landscape designers, farmers, gardeners and smallholders but it is also a life-enhancing skill all of us can enjoy. Patrick offers us the enduring pleasure that costs nothing and yet offers everything.

I bought this totally by impulse while in browsing through Stanfords, London's most famous map shop, and took it with me to Herefordshire. By just the end of the first chapter I felt a much better understanding of the landscape around me(1).

(1) admittedly I was starting from a very low base here.

Orleans by Sherri L. Smith

REVIEW

I don't do full reviews of books. Partly this is because I don't believe that one's subjective and emotional response to a work of fiction can be explained through a misguided and futile process of deconstruction but mostly it's because I'm too lazy.

So here is my review of Orleans by Sherri L. Smith --- It's bloody brilliant and you should read it. Smith has created a world of terrifying beauty and populated it with characters and stories of such intensity that they will drag you screaming through the landscape until they deposit you breathless and emotional on the final page.

WORLD BUILDING

Now, as a writer, I have a craftsperson's appreciation for a skilful piece of work and one of the many outstanding aspects of Orleans is it's world building.

All storytellers create worlds regardless of their setting, the 87th Precinct is as much an act of secondary creation as Middle Earth or Westeros, the London of Bridget Jones is just as imaginary as New Crobuzon. Any author claiming that they don't concern themselves with worldbuilding is either talking bollocks or trying to distract from a lack of craft. That's not to say every writer needs to create their own languages and six thousand years of history in order to write a good book but it does mean that the so-called dichotomy between worldbuilding and story is every bit as false as the canard(1) of plot versus character.

It is not a zero sum game, all stories take place in a world created by the story teller and character and plot are the same thing seen from different angles.

So what is it that Sherri L. Smith does so well that impressed you - I hear you cry(2).

For a start Smith conveys her world in vivid prose, there's no point creating a world if you're too inarticulate to describe it or, worse, bury your reader under a metric ton of exposition to do so.

For the thing-after-the-start she's obviously done lots of research and then, and this is the really crucial bit, considered how every bit might interact with every other bit. What happens when industrial contaminants leach into the roots of the trees that have started to repopulate an urban area? What groups will be best placed to exploit the dangerous ground created when houses are covered over with silt?

And thing-the-last Smith has made the societies that populate her drowned city realistically complex. Often in a post-apocalyptic setting the author slips into the fallacy that low technology cultures lack both moral and structural complexity. Smith, with her blood group tribes, her vestiges of ‘civilisation’ – the nuns, the scientists, Mr Go, the churches – her freesteaders and bloodhunters has thought about the complex ways groups within a larger society interact. This is not simplistic end of the world wish fulfilment it is a fully realised complex society.

(1) as in an untruth not as in a duck or a pair of small control surfaces placed ahead of the main wings on an aeroplane.

(2) Or words to that effect

Upcoming Events

Here are some upcoming events - although judging by the gleam in tthe Orion publicist's eye there will be more.

Winchester - 22nd of June 2013
Newbooks Magazine's Readers Conference
Details are here.

The UK - 25th July 2013
Release Day - Broken Homes (Hardback)
+ the audio version.


London - 27th July 2013 - 2:00 PM

BFI 'Doctor Who at 50' Screening of Remembrance of the Daleks
Details can be found here but I think they may be sold out.,

Currently Reading: Afro SF

Afro SF
Science Fiction by African Writers
Edited by Ivor W. Haartmann

Stories from...
Nnedi Okorafor
Sarah Lotz
Tendai Huchu
Cristy Zinn
Ashley Jacobs
Nick Wood
Tade Thompson
S.A. Partridge
Chinelo Onwualu
Uko Bendi Udo
Dave de Burgh
Biram Mboob
Sally-Ann Murray
Mandisi Nkomo
Liam Kruger
Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu
De La Haye
Mia Aderne
Rafeeat Aliyu
Martin Stokes
Clifton Gachagua
Efe Okogu

Locations, Locations, Locations - Moon Over Soho

Moon Over Soho




View Moon Over Soho in a larger map

AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

CITIZENS OF NORTH AMERICA!

REJOICE!

I bring tidings of great joy!

And also tidings of slightly less great joy!

First the good news!

From henceforth the Peter Grant series, from BROKEN HOMES onwards, will be published by DAW. That’s right our intrepid police constable is joining the ranks of the yellow sided mass market paperback.

DAW also publish many of my heroes and intend to take advantage of that by blagging as many free copies as I can get my hands on(1).

DAW and I have decided to go with modified versions of the UK covers so at the very least they will be easy to spot.

And now for the news that is not so good.

Unfortunately the first slot open for publication in North America is Febuary 14th 2014 – sorry.

This is actually my fault for delivering late(2) but Betsy Wolfheim, an editor so legendary that even her emails are carved into the walls of lost temples, has said that if I can finish the next book on time she’ll be able to synchronise the release dates for five and six.

However to assuage your anger here is a picture of a humorous cat.

News that is pretty neutral!
An audio version of Broken Homes will be available in North America – ideally around the same time as the book release.

(1) I admit that that this particular aspect is much better news for me than it is for you.
(2) Although on the up side this will give new readers a chance to catch up with the first three books – just saying.

Currently Reading: Orleans

Orleans
By Sherri L. Smith

(Blurb) After a string of devastating hurricanes and a severe outbreak of Delta Fever, the Gulf Coast has been quarantined. Years later, residents of the Outer States are under the assumption that life in the Delta is all but extinct…but in reality, a new primitive society has been born. Fen de la Guerre is living with the O-Positive blood tribe in the Delta when they are ambushed. Left with her tribe leader’s newborn, Fen is determined to get the baby to a better life over the wall before her blood becomes tainted. Fen soon meets Daniel, a scientist from the Outer States who has snuck into the Delta illegally. Navigating the Orleans wilderness, they form an unlikely bond and, in the end, may be each other’s last hope for survival.

Locations, Locations, Locations: Rivers of London

View Rivers Of London in a larger map

You've Got To Write a Sequel Or Two

EDITOR (spoken)]
You see, Scribbler...

[sung] In this life, one thing counts
On the shelves, large amounts
I'm afraid these don't grow on trees,
You've got to write a sequel or two

You've got to write a sequel or two, boys,
You've got to write a sequel or two.

[WRITERS]
Large amounts don't grow on trees.
You've got to write a sequel or two.

[EDITOR (spoken)]
Let's show Scribbler how it's done, shall we, my dears?

[sung] Why should we break our backs
Stupidly checking facts?
Better get some chapters done.
Better write a sequel or two.

You've got to write a sequel or two, boys,
You've got to write a sequel or two.

[WRITERS]
Why should we all break our backs?
Better write a sequel or two.

[EDITOR (spoken)]
Who says crime doesn't pay?

[sung] Conan Doyle what a fool!
Threw his hero in a pool.
Literature’s fine, if you’ve got the time.
Get out and write a sequel or two.

You've got to write a sequel or two, boys,
You've got to write a sequel or two.

[WRITERS]
Conan Doyle missed his chance.
He had to write a sequel or two.

[EDITOR]
Take a tip from Patterson
He can sit back while it’s done
But I recall, he started small
He had to write a sequel or two.

You've got to write a sequel or two, boys,
You've got to write a sequel or two.

[WRITERS]
We can be like Jim Patterson
If we write a sequel or two.

[EDITOR]
When I see a genre niche,
Both my thumbs start to itch
Only to find some peace of mind
We have to write a sequel or two.

You've got to write a sequel or two, boys
You've got to write a sequel or two.

[WRITERS]
Just to find some peace of mind

[EDITOR AND WRITERS]
We have to write a sequel or two.

Currently Reading: Cider With Rosie and Akenfield

Akenfield by Ronald Blythe

Blurb
This colourful, perceptive portrayal of English country life reverberates with the voices of the village inhabitants, from the reminiscences of survivors of the Great War evoking days gone by, to the concerns of a younger generation of farm-workers and the fascinating and personal recollections of, among others, the local schoolteacher, doctor, blacksmith, saddler, district nurse and magistrate. Providing insights into farming, education, welfare, class, religion and death, Akenfield forms a unique document of a way of life that has, in many ways, disappeared.

Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee

Blurb
Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity or cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past.

Upcoming event 1st June 2013

BSFA AGM

Where?
The City of Westminster Archives Centre
10 St Anne’s Street
London SW1P 2DE

When?
1st of June 2013
The AGM is from 10 till 5 PM

What?
I'm on a panel talking about writing Doctor Who at 10:00 AM and then being interviewed at 14:30 PM

Why?
Why? Why? You ask? Because it's there my friend, because it's there!

Films That I Like: Scrooged

CROSS

We have spent forty million dollars on a live TV show. You guys have got an ad with America's favourite old fart, reading a book, in front of a fireplace! 

(beat)

Now I have to kill all of you.

We continue with my occasional series in which I blog about films I like and the particular aspect of the film that I enjoy. These are not reviews, there is no attempt at objectivity or to create a holistic analysis or in fact any analysis at all. It's just films that I like....

Scrooged

(1988)

Written by Mitch Glazer  & Michael O'Donoghue

Directed by Richard Donner

It has Alfre Woodward in it

Which is a good thing in any movie.

GRACE

He's fired? But it's christmas

CROSS

Thank you, call accounting, stop his bonus.

GRACE

(into phone)

Eliot Laudermilk - code nine.

It has an excellent Danny Elfman Score

He's love of interwining the cheery, the twee and the sinister suit the themes perfectly.

Design and Direction

It's beautifully directed by Richard Donner who gives some of the early Cross scenes a sort of terrifying granduer and moves things along with wit and economy. I'm particularly struck at the use of practical, almost theatrical stage effects used to evoke the supernatural elements. These were more common in the far off days before routine CGI but while the film has access to the state of the art (in 1988) optical effects it doesn't lean on them.Good examples are the arrival of the Ghost of Christmas Present and the use of editing to switch through time periods during the Ghost of Christmas Past sequence.

CROSS

Did our people do that? We're going to get phone calls.

J. Michael Riva's production design is also brilliant in this film, I love the off kilter hospital corridor in the Ghost of Christmas Future sequence and the underground sewer and impromptu tomb that Cross finds himself in earlier on.

Japanese Cover!

Jyo-ou Heika no Majyutu-shi

Wizard of Her Majesty

Boy Nightingale is well Bishōnen ain't he?