Promotion of the Shameless Variety

A short story of mine - The Dark Blessing - is due to appear in the very fine ezine Silver Blade at the end of this month, and, in addition Beneath Ceaseless Skies has chosen another of my short pieces - The Bone House - for an Audio Fiction Podcast. And... my short story What Dread Words has been chosen by Carol Hightshoe to appear in Arcane Whispers 2: The Best of Sorcerous Signals.

All of these things make me rather happy, so what better time to indulge in a little more shameless self promotion?

For all those who might find themselves interested, my various bits and pieces of fiction can be found at the following locations (some right now, some later in the year)

Skin-Tight
Emerald Eye, The Best Irish Imaginative Fiction
http://www.albedo1.com/

Yesterday Today Tomorrow: A Fable
Everyday Fiction
http://www.everydayfiction.com/yesterday-today-tomorrow-a-fable-by-james-lecky/

The Song The Soldiers Sang: A Fable
Everyday Fiction
http://www.everydayfiction.com/the-song-the-soldiers-sang-a-fable-by-james-lecky/

Deepest Black
Jupiter SF
http://www.jupitersf.co.uk/index.htm

The Substance of A Dream
Mirror Dance
http://mirrordancefantasy.blogspot.com/2008/03/substance-of-dream.html

The Fearsome Knight and the Little Dragon: A Fairytale
Mirror Dance
http://mirrordancefantasy.blogspot.com/2008/11/fearsome-knight-and-little-dragon.html

The Season Without Sun
Aphelion
http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/shorts/2008/08/TheSeasonWithoutSun.html

What Dread Words
Sorcerous Signals
http://www.sorceroussignals.com/WhatDreadWords.html

The Iron Morning In The Metallic Sunrise
The Nautilus Engine
http://rnwrrn.googlepages.com/ironmorning

The Glass Cage
Aphelion
http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/shorts/2009/02/TheGlassCage.html

The Dark Blessing

Silver Blade

http://www.silverblade.net/issue3/shortstories7.html

Coming Soon:

The Children of Badb Catha
The Phantom Queen Awakes, Morrigan Books
http://www.morriganbooks.com/

The Bone House
Beneath Ceaseless Skies (scheduled for July 2009)
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

All That Grows
The Absent Willow Review (June 2009 issue)
http://absentwillowreview.com/

The Sins of the Land

Dark Fire (June 2009 issue)

http://usersites.horrorfind.com/home/horror/darkfire/

The Business of Murder: Writing and Rewriting

In the last few months I’ve had a fair few requests from editors for rewrites to various stories – in some ways it’s a good thing since it means that the editors in question are taking the submissions seriously enough to grub around in them and find those flaws which exists in virtually all my early drafts (and by early draft I mean anything and everything from the first to the final one where an editor goes ‘Yes, I’d like to buy it/ publish it now’).

Generally, I find that most rewrite requests seem to address the question of pacing in my stories. I’m a great believer in the long opening, in giving the reader a chance to settle into the story and the world it is set in, but these days I’m increasingly beginning to realise that perhaps the ‘medium opening’ is more efficient.

I’m also beginning to realise that not every word I put on paper necessarily deserves to be there.

A case in point is a story which I’m currently working on (superstition prevents me from naming either the story or the market, since I’ve always found that the best and surest way to put the hoodoo on something is to claim that something is a sure thing).

Briefly, it’s a sword and sorcery fantasy that deals with the nature of obsessive love (and also features some stirring battles, a bit of snappy dialogue, a scene set in a medieval coffee shop and a chess game!)

The first reaction from the market in question was ‘we liked it but can you trim the opening scene?’ My first reaction was ‘but I’ve made it as lean and efficient as I can, how can I possibly shorten it?’ Turns out that I could shorten it quite easily without losing either the sense or the build up.

Most of the cuts consisted of getting rid of superfluous words and rearranging the dialogue a bit so that, rather than three characters having a terse conversation, it became two characters having the same conversation without the third butting in all the time(!)

As a result of this and other rewrite requests, I’m beginning to realise that an awful lot of the business of writing consists of the business of rewriting, of paring things down or building them up so that the story can stand on its own. Very often writers tend to believe that the implicit is the explicit – that simply because they are fully aware of what is going on then the reader will also be fully aware. As a result, it’s often the case that readers and editors become confused or miss a vital point that’s staring them in the face (“but it was implied that the Jade Monkey was in the tower all the time”) when in fact it’s writer’s fault for not supplying the correct information.
It doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that readers need to be led by the hand through the intricacies of a story - readers are intelligent enough to pick up on the subtleties, red herrings and moments of misdirection which form part and parcel of any good fiction – it does, however, mean that everything needs to be present and correct for them to do so.

In plot terms it’s the old maxim of Chekhov’s Gun (if a gun is going to be fired in the third act then it needs to be seen in Act 1), a maxim that can apply to characters equally as well as props. A coward does not become a hero for no good reason, a hero does not simply run away from overwhelming odds simply because the plot demands it or, at a more basic level, if you tell the reader that Throd the Invincible is carrying an axe, it had better not change into a sword half-way through the narrative (unless, of course, Throd loses his axe and is forced to use a discarded sword despite the fact that he’s not a very good swordsman thus racking up the tension in the final battle with Vertorveen the Skull Eater. Of course, by calling the character Throd the Invincible in the first place you’ve already given the outcome away… but Throd the Rarely Beaten doesn’t have the same ring at all).

I always try to make my first drafts as polished as I possibly can – which is why I take such a long time over short fiction – but very often there is something (a line, a character, a lapse of internal logic) which causes the story to stumble anyway. Hence the business of rewriting.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that the story needs to be torn down and started from the beginning – I have enough confidence in my muse for that to happen very seldom – but it does mean that sometimes a character or concept or particular line of sparkling prose has to go. Yes, it’s time to ‘murder your darlings’ as the old saying goes, although I like to think of it as pruning rather than full scale slaughter. Sometimes the pruning comes from the author and sometimes it comes from the editor. Both are equally as valuable. After all, the business of any good editor is to publish good fiction and very often that outside eye, removed from the emotional attachment which most writers have to their work, can be invaluable.

Of course sometimes a problem can be fixed by a less abrupt method than the murder of darlings. Bringing a character, scene or event forward in the narrative means that both the story and the reader get to the crux of things that little bit more swiftly – and getting to the crux even half a page earlier can sometimes really increase the pace of a story (Throd meets Vertorveen on page three rather than page four, for instance, and it turns out that they are both questing for the Skull of Kalashtureen – Throd to grind it to powder so that he may heal his dying love and Vertorveen because he fancies a light snack before dinner).

This doesn’t mean that all fiction should hurtle towards its climax, rather that the sense of moving forward should always be there – the things that the characters say and do should always move the story towards the next scene, and the next, and the next. Often, those killable darlings are the things that prevent the story from moving forward, those moments where the writer has drawn overt attention to the fact that this is a story. In such cases it isn’t murder… it’s justifiable homicide.

Substance... or style?

In the early part of the twentieth century the French writer and critic Georges Polti published his Thirty Six Dramatic Situations, a descriptive list which was created by to categorize every dramatic situation that might occur in a story or performance.

The end result, arrived at by an intimate study of classical Greek texts, plus classical and contemporary French works, was a list of dramatic situations designed to aid writers in the construction of their work. By using the various situations either alone or in conjunction with one or several more, Polti sought to provide a solid analysis of fiction, rather than, say, a cast-in-stone check-list of exactly what needs to go into a story, novel or play.

Since then, there have been many, many books and articles written on the subject, some defining the basic number of dramatic situations still further (some claiming that there are only 20 basic plots, others lowering the number to 7, while Robert E. Heinlein famously declared that there are only 3: Boy Meets Girl/ The Little Tailor/ The Man Who Learns Better).

The general consensus of opinion over the years is that, regardless of which number you finally decide upon, the number of plots available to any writer are strictly limited. Add to this the constriction of genre and the number tends to drop even further.

Of course, all of this depends upon what exactly one regards plot as. In the classical detective novel or story the plot is generally thus: a crime has been committed and a detective is called in to solve the case. Taking this as an example, we can see that even such a limited plotline can encompass a wide range or writers and outcomes. The cerebral mysteries of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the two-fisted stories of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammet, the cutting satire of Ross McDonald, the gritty police procedurals of Ian Rankin or Ed McBain or the genteel country house mysteries of Agatha Christie or Niago Marsh. Stretch a point and you also encompass the work of Len Deighton, John le Carré, Ian Fleming or Eric Ambler.

With fantasy fiction the field might seem to be a little wider, but with much fantasy the plot boils down to: the world is being threatened by evil and it is up to the hero, either alone or with companions, to fight and destroy it: The Lord of the Rings, the Elric Saga, David Gemmell’s Drenai and Sipstrassi novels, and any God’s amount of doorstop tomes that have the words ‘Book One of…’ emblazoned on them.

So, given that the field for any genre storyteller is rather narrow, what is best… style or substance? Is it better to enthrall the reader with beautifully written prose and dazzling imagery (al a Clark Ashton Smith or Mervyn Peake or Michael Moorcock at his most outlandish) or is it better to craft stories that fit together as beautifully as a finely made antique chair, where the basic plot might not be outstanding but the characters and their struggles draw the reader in and keep him reading (David Gemmell, for instance, was a master at creating believable, all-too human characters, but rather often his plots boiled down to ‘siege of the week’ – a flaw which never stopped his stories being anything other than compelling).

In an ideal world the answer is ‘both’. Novels such as Anthony Burgess’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’ manage to combine a literary aesthetic with a tightly focused series of events (take away the nadsat argot in the novel and it’s still a brilliantly told story). Whereas a novel such as Chandler’s ‘The Big Sleep’ loses sight of its original jumping off point (the death of the chauffeur) rather early on, without damaging either the story or the characters in any significant way.

Of course, all writers develop a style either consciously or unconsciously. The simple act of placing one word after another is unique to the individual and whereas the nuts-and-bolts of writing can be taught (there are, after all, literally hundreds if not thousands of books and articles on the subject) style is very much a matter of individual choice.

Style or substance? The choice is yours.

To Plot.. or not to Plot

Very grandiosely, and in common with many other people in the world, I have decided that it’s time I wrote a novel. Or, perhaps more accurately, I have an idea which I think might make a novel. It’s so half formed that there’s not much point in going into it here, so let’s just say it’s a sort of gothic steampunk thing revolving around a group of young thieves and scavengers who live in an enormous railway station (now you know as much as I do).

As a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about the business of plotting recently. Ordinarily, I’m something of a free-form writer and much of my plotting is done as I go along. I usually start with an image or phrase and try and extrapolate the story from that – this usually entails moving back and forward through the story as I write, changing and tweaking and often discarding as I go along (a recently short story of mine ended up in a narrative cul-de-sac that necessitated scrapping almost 1,000 words of hard-won writing when I realized that one of the characters was totally superfluous to requirements). It isn’t perhaps the most ideal way to work but it’s the only way I know how.

However, the creation of, say, 80,000 words of fiction differs somewhat from the creation of 5,000 words. I’ve started novels before that simply disappeared under their own flimsy construction or got the point where my particular process of working could no longer sustain the narrative in any convincing way.

So… new approach called for, I reckon.

Plotting is a strange thing. As I see it, the plot of any story requires two vital elements – characters and events. Narrative springs from how you combine the two and from the smooth flow of one event into another. Or to put it another way… cause and effect.

To use a classic example from Forster’s Aspects of the Novel:

A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.

Even at my most free-form, I’m always thinking about cause and effect, how the actions of one character affect the scene, how that scene determines the next, what the outcome of the events are and how they effect the characters.

In practical terms it has meant lots of thinking and lots of note taking, trying to feel my way through a story as yet unwritten, working with characters who remain faceless and nameless (although some of them are beginning to work their way through the haze and into the light).

It’s a process that I find both stimulating and frustrating at the same time, that nagging feeling that somewhere in my mind and in the recesses of my notebooks there is a story to be told, a world to be created and explored, characters to be found and understood – and an awful lot of typing to be done.

I Find Writing Difficult

I find writing difficult. There, I’ve said it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to write – there is nothing in the world quite like it. I even like to read my own writing (not in an egotistical way, you understand, but sometimes it gives me a thrill to think ‘I wrote that’) and I get a real thrill out of the editorial process. I love to prune and shape my prose, peering into it for inconsistencies, repetition and the ever popular lapse of logic.

I love to create and explore new worlds – to grub around in them and discover exactly what they have to offer – and I love to follow the characters that I’ve created and see where they go next and what will happen to them.

But sometimes it’s just so damned hard.

Over the years I have read lots of books on writing – some good, some bad, some indifferent and some just bloody awful – in an attempt to make the process easier. Sometimes it works, and once in a while I manage to pick up a nugget of wisdom that helps the process and becomes part of my own method. More often, though I come away with a sense that I’m still missing something, that tiny vital piece of information that will turn me from a tortured hack into a more prolific and substantially less tortured hack.

Of course, this is nothing more than a pipe dream. I know beyond certainty that no such piece of information exists and that the only sure and certain way to learn more about the process of writing is to continue to write. And so I do… I write, I study structure and method, I apply the lessons I have learned (no matter how small) to the stories that I write. Most of all, I read. There are many, many writers I admire and I try to learn from them.

My difficulties arise, I have no doubt, mostly from the way I choose to write (or the writing method that has chosen me, I’m never sure which). I rarely plan in any great detail, I normally have at least some idea of the characters, the situation and where I want the story to go: but I very rarely have everything set down in stone before I begin to write. What’s worse is that when I do plan a story I tend to lose interest in it. It’s kinda a Chester Gould thing – Gould rarely planned too far ahead, working on the principle that if he could surprise himself then he could surprise the reader, too. (Mind you, it’s an elastic word and an elastic term – surprise can be relative, a turn of phrase or a description can surprise both writer and reader – and doesn’t necessarily mean a massive plot twist or a stunning turn of events).

Stephen King once spoke about how we ‘unearth’ stories and that is something I tend to agree with. I think that, as writers, we get the stories we deserve – the characters we create are tiny fragments of our own psyches given some ethereal form on the page, they mirror us in some way, even if that mirror is an utterly distorted one.

Still, nothing worthwhile is ever easy (or so they tell me) and I think that any writer worth his or her salt will occasionally struggle with their tales and, very often, the struggle leads to revelation – those wonderful moments when you cease to be a tourist in your own fictional world and instead become an integral part of it.

And that’s when it’s really worth it.

The Omega Man

The Omega Man (1971)
Directed by Boris Sagal. Starring Charlton Heston. Rosalind Cash. Anthony Zerbe.

I Am Legend, Richard Matheson’s brilliant 1954 novel of a world in thrall to a vampiric plague, has not been well served by film makers over the years.

1964’s The Last Man on Earth (L'Ultimo uomo della Terra) – despite a wonderfully tortured central performance by Vincent Price and a screenplay that was fairly faithful to the original material – suffered from a miniscule budget, while the recent Will Smith vehicle suffered from the reverse problem, resulting in a too-many-cooks broth that was deeply unsatisfying.

And then there is The Omega Man, a curiously enjoyable slice of 70’s kitsch in which Charlton Heston’s last man on earth battles mutant albinos in an errie, deserted Los Angeles.

Part muscular actioneer, part SF Christ myth (complete with a martyred Heston in the last reel) The Omega Man pays no more than lip-service to Matheson’s novel, recasting his everyman protagonist, Robert Neville, as a soldier-scientist with impeccable cultural credentials and a strong messiah complex.

Gone, too, is Matheson’s carefully reasoned vampire plague, to be replaced by the black-robed Family, led by Anthony Zerbe’s Jim Jones/ Charles Manson influenced Matthias, and featuring some of the funkiest natural afros this side of the Jackson Five.

It’s a strange mixture of wish-fulfilment – the end of the world as Neville’s private playground – SF and blaxploitation that really shouldn’t work but somehow does.

In large part it’s down to Heston’s performance. His Colonel Robert Neville is self-assured, yet tortured, caring yet callous, intelligent yet brutish (an extension, in many ways of his character in Planet of the Apes). Yet as the film progresses Neville/ Heston becomes a changed man, prompted by the arrival of a group of young survivors headed by Rosalind Cash, so that in the end, when Neville sacrifices himself, it is to create a world of which he himself could never be part.

This, however, is not to suggest that The Omega Man is a particularly deep or introspective film – there are too many shots of Heston with his shirt off and an uneasy fetishism of weapons for that – but rather that the subtext of this rather florid and, at times, downright silly movie manages to raise it to a level slightly above its otherwise ‘kill the bad guys, save the world’ plot.

To be brutually honest, The Omega Man has not dated well and now looks like a strange, too-hip-to-be-cool snapshot of the early 1970’s: the hair, the clothes, the music all belong to a bygone age and Heston himself is monolithic – the last decent man in America making a stand against drugs, hippies and new ideas (even if Neville's favourite movie is 'Woodstock') – an old-fashioned movie star trying to move with the times. Yet equally it belongs to a time when mainstream Hollywood was prepared to mix things up a little, to present its audiences with heroes who were flawed rather than merely tragic and a time when bri-nylon tracksuits were the height of fashion.

Taken with Planet of the Apes and 1973's Soylent Green, The Omega Man forms part of a curious trilogy of intelligent, literary derived SF – although far removed from their source material - linked together by an aging Charlton Heston and a pessimistic worldview from a pre-Star Wars age when cinematic science fiction was less reliant upon spectacle and more upon plot and character. And generally better for it, too.

GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD

In many ways, Michael Chabon’s ‘Gentlemen of the Road’ is a novel of contradictions. First, of course, it is an unabashed adventure story from a writer who has been best known for his, as Chabon himself notes in the after-word with a slightly self deprecating air, ‘serious, literary’ fiction. Secondly, there is the title of the book itself. Chabon’s preferred title was, and is, ‘Jews With Swords’ which Chabon mocks once again with the image of ‘Woody Allen… and a wavering rapier’.

Those points aside, the novel itself is rife with contradiction – an historical novel which reads like a sword and sorcery adventure (with exotic, and real, names and settings that echo the work of Harold Lamb as much as Robert E. Howard). His two protagonists – Zelikman the Frank and Amram the Abyssian – are poles apart physically and psychologically and form the central contradiction of the novel – being the principal Jews with swords (of the preferred title).

Then there is the writing itself, where Chabon eschews the straightforward narrative and plain English of many a genre writer in favour of a more literary approach - long, meandering passages, shifts in perspective and a pre-occupation with the inner rather that outer life of the characters in a ‘tell, rather than show’ fashion.

There is a long and (sometimes) glorious history of ‘mainstream writers’ working in the speculative realm – Orwell, Robert Harris, Doris Lessing, PD James, Len Deighton, Janette Winterson et al – which brings with it a certain sense of reinventing the wheel. Chabon, to his credit, does not attempt such reinvention, rather he has a genuine sense of respect for what has gone before (hence the dedication of the novel to Michael Moorcock) and never seeks to break with genre convention simply for the sake of it, or indeed to claim the genre as his own private playground (something he shares in common with the historical swashbucklers of Arturo Perez -Reverte).

The plot of the novel is fairly straightforward variant on ‘restore the disposed noble’ replete with a number of plot holes - lives are spared when logic dictates that the character should be slain, coincidence abounds, at one point Amram reaches for his sword when hitherto and henceforth he uses a ‘Viking axe’ and any moderately well read reader will spot the various plot twists long before they come.

All of this, naturally, is subservient to the main question: is it any good?

Well, yes it is. The strengths of the novel far outweigh its weaknesses – the sense of an exotic past is beautifully evoked, but never in a rose-tinted manner, the kingdom of the Khazars is a dangerous, exciting place and Zelikman and Amram (two heirs to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser) are amiable, competent companions for the book’s short length and Chabon’s dry sense of humour permeates the novel on every level.

Added to this is the fact that the UK edition is, quite simply, a very handsome object that in its physical appearance evokes a bygone age when books were things to be treasured as well as read.

In Gentlemen of the Road, Michael Chabon has succeeded in bringing swords to the literary market place and for that, if nothing else, he should be applauded.

FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL

FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (1974)
Directed by Terence Fisher. Starring Peter Cushing, Shane Briant. Madeline Smith. Dave Prowse.

Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell marked a definite milestone in both the history of British horror films and of Hammer Films in particular. It was the last pairing of the great Peter Cushing and the equally great Terence Fisher, the last time that Hammer would tread its trademark ground of MittleEuropa Gothic and the last time that Peter Cushing would play the Baron.

By the time Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell was made, Hammer was in dire straits. The once ground-breaking formula that had seen such films as The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula (aka The Horror Of Dracula) break box-office records in the late 1950’s was starting to look very old fashioned, its major stars were starting to age and at least one of them – Christopher Lee – beginning to tire of the increasingly lame vehicles offered to him. More than that, a new breed of horror films was beginning to emerge, mostly from the USA, that were edgier, often gorier and, quite frankly, a lot more hip than Hammer – Night of the Living Dead (1968), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).

Against this, what could poor old Hammer do?

Actually, with Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell, quite a lot. Eschewing the boobs n bums approach of many Hammer movies of the early 1970’s (particularly films like The Vampire Lovers, Twins of Evil and Lust For A Vampire) and going instead for a much more claustrophobic feeling, combined with a gleeful approach to the gore, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (daft title to one side) manages to be a final, joyfully bloody, roll of the dice for the ‘traditional’ Hammer movie.

Set almost entirely within the confines of an insane asylum where Baron Frankenstein (now known as Dr Karl Victor) has set himself up as resident surgeon and resident monster-maker, the movie initially follows the story of Simon Helder (an icy Shane Briant) committed for body snatching, illegal surgery, and all sorts of shenanigans inspired by his hero, Victor Frankenstein.

As luck would have it, Helder finds himself taken under the wing of the now clearly insane Frankenstein/ Dr Victor (his hands ruined in a fire, presumably the same fire that ended Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed) and together they continue the Baron’s experiments to cheat death and create life.

Fortunately the asylum is a rich source of raw materials – a hulking ape-like, homicidal inmate here, an insane sculptor there and, most importantly, the brain of an only slightly deranged violin playing genius to top it all off. In time honoured fashion, however, nothing quite goes to plan and instead of creating a violin-playing genius they create a revenge-fuelled madman (played with remarkable subtlety by Dave Prowse) who is eventually torn to pieces by the other inmates after a murderous and hugely entertaining killing spree.

Put in such bald terms there is nothing to elevate Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell above a slew of other monster-maker films and, indeed, the film suffers badly from its obviously low budget – the miniature shots of the asylum are unconvincing, the make up for the creature is less than satisfactory, the sets obvious cardboard and polystyrene and the rich Eastman Color that had been such a feature of the earlier movies is here replaced with a dull, if fitting, grey and green colour palette – but what elevates it are the performances from both the stars and the supporting cast.

Cushing is excellent as usual, his Frankenstein now a man prepared to go to any lengths and his insanity bubbling under the surface for all to see. Shane Briant (as icy and imperious here as in Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter) exudes the same chilling charm as the younger Cushing did in Curse of Frankenstein, John Stratton as the oily Asylum Director is enough to give anyone a delicious shudder of disgust and Madeline Smith as the mute Angel brings a vulnerability to what might have been simply a decorative role.

But it is the inmates of the asylum themselves who create the essentially uneasy atmosphere of the film – the strangely camp man in lavender who flits in and out of several scenes, the old man with a Jesus complex who is first seen mock-crucified against his cell wall, the cackling women and the howling men that could have come straight from Marat/Sade.

Added to this is Fisher’s unflinching eye for gore and viscera – always a feature of his best films and here, particularly given the relaxation of British censorship laws, given free reign – the hanging of Professor Durendel with his own violin strings, the jars of staring eyeballs, the Baron’s perfunctory treatment of a discarded brain, the brutal death of the creature, all of which bring an unsettling feeling to the film, best summed up in the moment when Baron Frankenstein, unable to use his hands, holds a severed vein in his teeth to assist Helder in an operation.

Depending on your point of view, Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell is either a fitting swan-song for the once great Hammer or a feeble attempt to recreate past glories at a time when the cinematic landscape had irrevocably changed (ironically due in great part to Hammer itself). Me, I incline towards the former rather than the latter.

A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

Like a lot of writers, I spend a fair amount of time reading submission guidelines (truth to tell, like a lot a writers, I read the guidelines a little more diligently than I read the magazines they apply to… but that’s another story).

After a while you become familiar with certain conventions, mostly along the lines of what the magazine won’t publish rather than what it will – no fanfic is always a popular one, as indeed are strict limitations on the overuse of vampires. However, recently I came across a magazine that has put something of a moratorium on the use of first person perspective in submissions, along with very strong instructions that the inner life of the character should be kept to an absolute minimum (something along the lines of ‘we want to see the character slay the dragon rather than have him explain why he is about to’).

As a form of shorthand this could, and has been, referred to as ‘cinematic writing’ – the writer using his words in the same way that a film director uses his camera – where virtually everything is externalized rather than internalized and a character’s actions, dialogue and appearance say everything about them.

Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the omniscient third person perspective (the old God’s Eye View) but I think that once you start to limit even that to a narrow focus you removed some of the most important tools in the writer’s toolbox.

Taken to its logical extreme it strips the narrative of anything subjective, making even dialogue conform to cinematic rules: if it can’t be heard then the reader can’t be aware of it. In turn, of course, it also means that any signs and signifiers have to be stripped away since, in general, they are also subjective: simile and metaphor can have little or no place in cinematic writing at its logical extreme since the camera makes no differentiation between objects. Thus even simple metaphors such as ‘He was as big as a house’ cannot be used unless their use is literal.

More than this, the narrative language of cinema and that of the page are very different animals. The tools that the novelist or short story writer has at his disposal are not exactly the same as those of the film director – who has movement, camera angles, voiceovers, use of colour, music, slow-motion et al – so that were a writer paints a picture with words, a director essentially paints a picture with many different brushes and palates.

Again, if one takes the principle of cinematic writing to the extreme, even a straightforward statement such as ‘The town was called Little Cutting’ cannot be written: someone has to mention the name of the town in their dialogue or someone has to see a road sign that tells them the name of the town. Similarly one cannot say ‘Jeff and Peter were brothers, Peter was the elder’, there needs to be a definite statement from one or another of the characters. At its basest this boils down to: “‘Hello, older brother,’ Jeff said as he entered the room.”

Of course, every writer makes a choice about how to tell a particular story and perspective is, well, a matter of perspective, but to utterly dismiss the first person is, to my mind, completely wrong. There are those writers who believe that first person perspective is a cowardly refuge – but this is to dismiss many, many fine stories and novels. Would Dracula be as interesting if told from a third person perspective? Frankenstein? The Wasp Factory?

What the omniscient/ cinematic form of narrative cannot do is look into a character’s thought processes or soul, and most certainly cannot give the same perspective as the camera. If one considers, say, the climactic gunfight in Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, with its use of mid-shot, close-up, extreme-close up and music one realizes that such a scene with all its tension is difficult if not impossible to recreate on the page. Certain quirks of an actor’s face, the colour of their eyes, their particular way of moving, their clothing, the cinematic baggage they bring with them all add to a scene – when Harrison Ford loses his hat in the Last Crusade, for example, the audience reacts to it for various different reason, all linked to both character and actor, a reaction which is hard to recreate by simply saying ‘as the tank hurtled towards the abyss, Indy’s hat flew off.’ Clint Eastwood narrowing his eyes in ‘Unforgiven’ has a resonance that mere words cannot hope to match.

To use a really extreme example of first person-most-positively-definitely-not-cinematic narrative:

Remembering- Do you hear, my little red?
Hold me softly. The cold grows.
I remember:
- I am hugely black and hopeful. I bounce on six legs along the mountains in the new warm… Sing the changer, Sing the stranger! Will the changes change forever… All humans have worlds now. Another change!
Eagerly I bound on sunward following the tiny thrill in the air. The forests have been shrinking again. Then I see. It is me! Me Myself, MOGGADEET-I have grown bigger more in the winter cold! I astonish myself, Moggadeet-the-small!
Excitement, enticement shrilling from the sun-side of the world. I come!… The sun is changing again, too. Sun is walking in the night! Sun is walking back to Summer in the warming of the light!… Warm is Me Moggadeet. Myself. Forget the bad-time winter.
Memory quakes me.
The Old One.
Love is the Plan, The Plan is Death by James Tiptree Jr

Any attempt to render the above passage as a purely objective narrative would miss so very, very much. Moggadeet’s internal thought processes could never possibly be captured by a straightforward, third-person omniscient/ cinematic narrative.

As human beings we experience life subjectively, everything we see, hear, touch, taste and smell is filtered through our senses and has a resonance for us which is unique to us (the taste of rich tea biscuits and orange squash, for example, takes me back to my childhood almost instantly and the smell of wood smoke on a warm summer’s day does much the same thing).

Ultimately, the writer of fiction has many, many tools at his disposal, tools which are unique to prose (as opposed to script writing) and it strikes me as being very wrong to dismiss any or all of them, cinematic writing included.

It all boils down to the right tool for the job - after all, you wouldn’t use a screwdriver on a nail, would you?

A LITTLE MORE SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION

My short story All That Grows has been accepted for the June issue of The Absent Willow Review. So what better time to indulge in a little more shameless self promotion:

Skin-Tight
Emerald Eye, The Best Irish Imaginative Fiction
http://www.albedo1.com/

Yesterday Today Tomorrow: A Fable
Everyday Fiction
http://www.everydayfiction.com/yesterday-today-tomorrow-a-fable-by-james-lecky/

The Song The Soldiers Sang: A Fable:
Everyday Fiction
http://www.everydayfiction.com/the-song-the-soldiers-sang-a-fable-by-james-lecky/


Deepest Black
Jupiter SF
http://www.jupitersf.co.uk/index.htm

The Substance of A Dream
Mirror Dance
http://mirrordancefantasy.blogspot.com/2008/03/substance-of-dream.html

The Fearsome Knight and the Little Dragon: A Fairytale
Mirror Dance
http://mirrordancefantasy.blogspot.com/2008/11/fearsome-knight-and-little-dragon.html

The Season Without Sun
Aphelion
http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/shorts/2008/08/TheSeasonWithoutSun.html

What Dread Words
Sorcerous Signals
http://www.sorceroussignals.com/WhatDreadWords.html

The Iron Morning In The Metallic Sunrise
The Nautilus Engine
http://rnwrrn.googlepages.com/ironmorning

The Glass Cage
Aphelion
http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/shorts/2009/02/TheGlassCage.html

Coming Soon:

The Children of Badb Catha
The Phantom Queen Awakes, Morrigan Books
http://www.morriganbooks.com/

The Bone House
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

All That Grows
The Absent Willow Review (June 2009 issue)
http://absentwillowreview.com/

KULL - EXILE OF ATLANTIS

For anybody who doesn’t know – and if you don’t, what have you been doing – Robert E. Howard was and remains one of the key figures in the development of modern fantasy fiction. His most famous creation, Conan, can probably take his place with such literary figures as Dracula and Sherlock Holmes in that minor pantheon of fictional characters who have taken on a life of their own after the death of their creator.

Like Holmes and Dracula, Conan has gone on to appear in countless works by other hands – most notably L. Sprague De Camp, Lin Carter, Robert Jordan and Karl Edward Wager – as well as appearing in comics, video games and two feature films starring Arnold Schwartzenegger (three if you count Red Sonja where his character is Conan by another name).

Yet before Conan there was another barbarian who sprang from the fertile mind of Robert E. Howard – Kull, exile of Atlantis.

Often unfairly dismissed as little more than a prototype for the more famous Cimmerian, Kull is a fascinating character in his own right, the stories often philosophical in tone and touched with a macabre atmosphere that lends them further weight.

There are similarities, of course, between Kull and Conan, both are barbarians-in-exile (Conan from Cimmeria and Kull from Atlantis) who seize a kingdom, both are men of action who find themselves alienated from civilised society by both nature and nurture and, in more concrete literary terms, the King Kull story By This Axe I Rule became the basis for the first published Conan story The Phoenix On The Sword.

But to my mind, Kull is the more interesting of the two: less of an innocent abroad than Conan, more world-weary (uneasy lies the head that wears the crown), a man who is searching for answers and his place in the world rather than an adventurer who regards the world as his playground.

The majority of the Kull stories remained unpublished during Howard’s lifetime, perhaps because they were so out of step with the action-oriented style of the pulps (the Conan story ‘The Frost Giant’s Daughter’ suffered a similar fate despite being one of the finest Conan tales) and only three –The Shadow Kingdom, Kings Of The Night and the Mirrors Of Tuzun Thune - saw the light of day prior to the rediscovery of Robert E. Howard in the 1960’s.

Yet the stories still remain largely unappreciated and undervalued, which is unfair on them. There is action aplenty in stories such as The Shadow Kingdom and By This Axe I Rule. But other Kull tales such as The Cat and the Skull (aka Delcardes’ Cat) The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune and The Striking of the Gong show another side to Howard’s writing, one in which action is sublimated by introspection – in these stories Kull finds himself placed in danger as a result of his own intellect and curiosity rather by a simple physical threat, and it is this aspect of the character that sets him apart from the swarm of muscle-bound barbarian heroes that followed in Conan’s wake.

Another delight of the Kull stories is the rich supporting cast with which Howard surrounded his hero – Brule the Spearslayer, once an antagonist who becomes Kull’s boon companion, Ka-nu the wily Pictish statesman, Tu the Chief Counsellor who provides a stark, and sometimes comical, counterpart to Kull himself – there is a sense of cohesion and a hint of the epic in the saga of King Kull which the Conan stories sometimes lack. Added to this is Howard’s muscular, energetic prose which, certainly in terms of pulp fiction, was streets ahead of the majority of his contemporaries.

Kull with a single mighty leap hurled himself into the room. Tu spun, but the blinding, tigerish speed of the attack gave him no chance for defence or counterattack. Sword steel flashed in the dim light and grated on bone as Tu toppled backward, Kull's sword standing out between his shoulders. The Shadow Kingdom


Then came a day when Kull seemed to catch glimpses of strange lands; there flitted across his consciousness dim thoughts and recognitions. Day by day he had seemed to lose touch with the world; all things had seemed each succeeding day more ghostly and unreal; only the man in the mirror seemed like reality. Now Kull seemed to be close to the doors of some mightier worlds; giant vistas gleamed fleetingly; the fogs of unreality thinned; "form is shadow, substance is illusion; they are but shadows" sounded as if from some far country of his consciousness. He remembered the wizard's words and it seemed to him that now he almost understood--form and substance, could not he change himself at will, if he knew the master key that opened this door? What worlds within what worlds awaited the bold explorer? The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune

Del Ray’s rather handsome 2006 edition of Kull, Exile of Atlantis, collects all the Kull stories including a number of unfinished drafts and fragments and some earlier scraps featuring Am Ra of the Ta-an (himself an earlier incarnation of both Kull and Conan) and features stunning interior artwork from Justin Sweet

Indispensable reading for those interested in the evolution of fantasy fiction, fascinating for those who wish to explore the literary origins of Conan and a bloody good read for anyone who likes their sword and sorcery with an intelligent and philosophical twist, the Kull stories deserve to be re-evaluated and rediscovered once more.

DIFFICULT BEGINNINGS

There's a perceived wisdom these days that everything needs to start with a bang, an event that drags the reader into the story. I even read a recent piece of writing advice which stated that every story needs to start with the hero in physical trouble or in action in the first sentence (the old 'I hoisted my pistol and pushed through the trees' or a variation thereon).

In a sense it's a throwback to the old pulp style of writing - the hook and backfill - start with a hero in terrible peril and then go back and explain to the reader how this came to be:

"Clinging by his fingertips to the sheer cliff face, Jed Colic glanced down at the two ravenous tigers prowling on the ground far below him and wondered how he had managed to get himself into this situation, again."

In truth, the hook and backfill technique isn't a bad way to start a story and runs in parallel to the excellent piece of advice about 'arriving late' in a story, but if every single piece of adventure fiction or SF or fantasy began with a moment of momentous physical difficulty for the protagonist what an incredibly dull world it would be.

I've lost count of the number of stories that I've read recently that have begun with a variant on:

"Look behind you!" Mothven screamed.
Kilfannon turned and saw the Grinfall beast rushing towards him."

Of course, the purpose of any beginning is to make the reader want to read on, but there are other ways of doing it rather than the immediate action or the killer first line. (although as a killer opener you'd go a long way to beat Camus' opening sentence from The Outsider: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.")

Sometimes, it's enough to write well, to create a mood or an atmosphere that hooks a reader's attention:

"During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country ; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher." Edgar Allen Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher.

"The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Or, if you must have the immediate danger element:

"Across the red drifts and mail-clad forms, two figures glared at each other. In that utter desolation only they moved. The frosty sky was over them, the white illimitable plain around them, the dead men at their feet. Slowly through the corpses they came, as ghosts might come to a tryst through the shambles of a dead world. In the brooding silence they stood face to face." Robert E. Howard, The Frost Giant's Daughter

Or to get a little more modern:

"As near as I can discover, Mortdieu occurred seventy-seven years ago. Learned sons of pure flesh deny that magic was set loose, or even that the Alternate had gained supreme power. But few people could deny that God, as such, had died." Greg Bear, Petra.

"From the hill north of the city, Rice saw eighteenth-century Salzburg spread out below him like a half-eaten lunch.
Huge cracking towers and swollen, bulbous storage tanks dwarfed the ruins of the St. Rupert Cathedral. Thick white smoke billowed from the refinery's stacks. Rice could taste the familiar petrochemical tang from where he sat, under the leaves of a wilting oak." Bruce Sterling & Lewis Shiner, Mozart in Mirrorshades.

With the exception of the Howard piece none of these openings shows us the hero in danger or indeed engaged in anything terribly exciting - Poe's narrator is riding towards the House of Usher, Conrad's is sitting aboard a ship at rest, Mozart in Mirrorshades begins with a description, Petra with a theosophical statement - yet there is an undeniable power to each of them a glimpse into another world that impels the reader further into the narrative.

Not everything in fiction needs to be fire and fury, even in something as action oriented as sword and sorcery there is still room to lure rather than bludgeon the reader:

"There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness. Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem sparkle drearily like the ice of the white seas; the speech of men is as the empty rattle of a jester's bell and the feel comes of things unreal; even the sun is copper in the sky, and the breath of the green ocean is no longer fresh." Robert E. Howard, The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune

“It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone, resting on each arm of a seat which has been carved from a single, massive ruby.” Michael Moorcock, Elric of Melnibone.

Arguably, both those passages represent the protagonist in trouble although there are no swords drawn or physical threats present, rather, the trouble they experience comes from a sickness of the soul. Action does not necessarily mean combat and narrative drive does not always imply the physical movement of the characters from point A to point B.

There are, of course, no hard and fast rules when it comes to writing. What may work for one writer and one particular story may not necessarily work for another. The hook and backfill technique applies to all of the stories mentioned here: using the opening of the story to hook the reader and then going on to explore their environment or predicament, it’s just not done in an obvious way.

And that, I feel, is the most difficult task facing a writer when he or she begins a new story – to avoid the obvious.

As a writer I have always found beginnings hard, middles difficult and endings damned near impossible. The preceding has been a little bit of writerly therapy for me which other writers may find of use (or totally disagree with, hey, I’m not setting myself up as an expert here). Thanks for indulging me.

THE DEATH OF THE SHORT STORY, AND OTHER TALES OF TERROR

The short story is in peril, or so we are told, and there are those who are confidently (and not without a certain amount of schadenfreude) predicting its imminent death.

At a casual glance, it’s easy to see why: magazines close every day (Realms of Fantasy, for instance, recently announced that it was to fold), the circulation figures for even the biggest genre magazines have dwindled to a shadow of their former selves, and the Big Publishing Houses rarely produce either single author collections or anthologies of new writing – even the prestigious Year’s Best anthologies are under threat these days.

Stephen King has described the short story as a dying art, although he is one of its last commercial viable exponents, and publishing trends veer more and more towards the doorstep novel or the trilogy form. Yes, things are in a bad way.

Or are they?

Although hardly an optimist by either nature or nurture I prefer to see the brighter side of things. Historically and culturally they often serve as very much an apprenticeship for those writers who go on to produce novels. In science fiction and fantasy they are very often the sounding boards for larger and more complex works, (Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep found its germ in The Little Black Box, for instance) or become an integral part of a ‘fix-up’ novel (such as Keith Roberts’ Pavane or Clifford Simak’s City).

Granted, there were and are those writers who find that the short story suits their style and temperament – James Tiptree Jr’s best work was, arguably, produced in the short field and similar case is true of Raymond Carver – and there are those writers who have produced a substantial body of work in the short form even when they have been principally known as novelists (Norman Spinrad, Thomas M. Disch, Michael Moorcock, to name but three)

Of course, Tiptree, Carver, Dick , Simak and a host of others were working at a time when magazine publication flourished, when experimentation was encouraged and there was a hunger for new product. Writers who chose the short form over the novel are working in a much different environment, yet at the same time there are literally hundreds if not thousands of new short stories being published every month on the internet. Quality varies, of course, but then again it always did. The e-zine or webzine, the natural electronic descendant of the fanzine or small press magazine, is in a healthy state as far as I can see, and there is a thriving community of writers, editors and illustrators who find their expression online.

What we have lost is, generally speaking, the professional printed market – those magazines who would pay high rates for short fiction – although they have been replaced with online markets who’s payscales often equal those of the printed media. What those critics who bemoan the state-of-the-art are really talking about is the death of the paying market, rather than the short story itself but then it has been very rare for any writer to make a living producing short stories.

It has, though, led to an evolution in the short story. The days of lengthy passages or large chunks of text have gone in favour of a punchier style more suited to reading online (imagine, if you will, trying to read One Hundred Years of Solitude online with its dense on-page appearance). Flash fiction is rapidly becoming a staple of online magazines – those stories of 1,000 words or less that take their tone from the very short fiction of Hemmingway, Richard Brautigan or Frederic Brown. Yet there is still a place online and in the world for the ‘traditional’ short story running anywhere from 1,000 – 10,000 words.

Similarly there are those small presses who continue to produce anthologies of new writing on good, old-fashioned honest-to-god paper, and print-on-demand books are rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with.

Far from dead, the short story has simply found new avenues, the difficulty for the reader is to sort out the wheat from the chaff, but then again it was ever so.

WHY I'M AT HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD

My story The Glass Cage is currently up at the very fine webzine Aphelion. I’m particularly pleased about this one since it was the first story I completed when I made my return to writing after a somewhat lengthy hiatus.

To mythologize myself for a moment, it’s part of my Shining Cities sequence of stories which so far consists of about half a dozen stories set at the end of Earth’s life-cycle (my contribution to the whole Dying Earth sub-genre of SF and F) two of which have now seen the light of day (the other being What Dread Words which appeared in Sorcerous Signals last year) and a third ‘orphan’ story – The Bone House – is scheduled to appear in Beneath Ceaseless Skies later this year (I call it an orphan story since it is set in the same world as the Shining Cities stories but makes no direct reference to them).

Now, I know that it’s a little strange to write about a series of stories that are (mostly) still at the ‘sitting on my hard drive/ in my drawer/ nothing more than notes and half-finished stage’ but shameless self promotion is shameless self promotion.

The Glass Cage was the first completed story of the Shining Cities sequence before I even knew that it was going to be a sequence (if that makes any sense) and is a fairly straightforward sword and sorcery tale but is the story that sets the tone for the subsequent Shining Cities tales: bleak yet hopeful, action orientated yet (I hope) philosophical in their nature.

Fiction set at the end of the world or the end of time has always fascinated me since it offers endless possibilities for tone, style and narrative choices. Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique stories with their dulled glitter and hedonistic cruelty, Michael Moorcock’s Dancers At The End of Time with their playful tone and larger than life characters, the slow entropy of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium where audacious feats are not simply the preserve of the characters but of the author himself, turning the very notion of what the stories mean directly on its head, the wildly colourful world of Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse and, of course, the jewelled prose of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth.

While I do not and never would compare myself to any of these writers it is because of them that I feel so at home at the end of the world (in a fictional sense). Added to that is a deep and abiding love and admiration for the work of Max Ernst who’s paintings, particularly Europe After The Rain and Silence, have always seemed to me to encapsulate the endless possibilities of The End.

Yes, I feel at home at the end of the world – so I may just stay there a little longer.

The Glass Cage: Aphelion
http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/shorts/2009/02/TheGlassCage.html

What Dread Words: Sorcerous Signals(http://www.sorceroussignals.com/WhatDreadWords.html)

A SCIENCE FICTION OMNIBUS

Edited by Brian Aldiss and originally published in the early 1970’s (as The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus), this is the book that turned me into a lifelong fan of speculative fiction. Over the years I’ve owned, lent and lost numerous copies of this book and its reissue by Penguin as part of their Modern Classics imprint is like bumping into an old friend you haven’t seen for ages and finding out that you still have a lot in common.

Although, in this case, the old friend has updated his image somewhat, lost a few endearing character traits and gained a few new ones, which is a roundabout way of saying that the old 70’s edition has been given a quick facelift with some old favourites being dropped in favour of newer stories.

So while things like William Tenn’s brilliantly satirical ‘Eastward Ho’ or Howard Schoenfeld’s postmodern experiment ‘Build Up Logically’ are conspicuous by their absence, their replacements, particularly James Tiptree Jr's ‘And I Awoke and Found Me Here On the Cold Hill’s Side’ or John Crowley’s ‘Great Work of Time’ more than make up for their loss.

Although not a broad overview of science fiction as a literary genre, or indeed a who’s who of SF, ‘A Science Fiction Omnibus’ offers some of the finest speculative fiction written in the English language including such giants of the genre as Isaac Asimov (Nightfall & Jokester), Harry Harrison (An Alien Agony), Robert Sheckley (The Store of the Worlds) Clifford Simak (Skirmish), A.E Van Vogt (Fulfilment), Brian Aldiss himself ( Poor Little Warrior) as well as more modern writers such as Bruce Sterling (Swarm) Greg Bear (Blood Music) and Eliza Blair (Friends In Need).

The stories here range in time, space and theme as well as in their place in the science fiction canon (the earliest being Asimov’s Nightfall, first published in 1941 and the latest being Eliza Blair’s Friends in Need and Garry Kilworth’s Alien Embassy, both published in 2006) to provide as good an anthology as one could wish, showcasing the breadth and range of speculative fiction.

It has been said that, at its best, science fiction holds a mirror up to the world – capturing the hopes, fears and aspirations of the society in which it was produced – and many of the stories here do just that: Ward Moore’s ‘Lot’, for example, is a perfect snapshot of Cold War pragmatism (it is not so much a question of If The Bomb will fall as When it will fall) while Clifford Simak’s ‘Skirmish’, with its insidious invasion from both within and without, echoes the fear of ‘the other’ that pervaded much of Western society in the 1950’s (and for that matter still continues to).

Similarly, stories such as JG Ballard’s ‘Track 12’, Frederick Pohl’s ‘The Tunnel Under The World’ or Damon Knight’s ‘The Country of the Kind’ perfectly illustrate the edgy relationship that science fiction has always had with the march of technology – half celebratory, half cautionary – while others explore a more philosophical territory, asking those Big Questions that more mundane literature simply cannot dare to ask – Harry Harrison’s ‘An Alien Agony’ or, again, Knight’s ‘Country of the Kind’.

Ultimately, of course, all good science fiction is about humanity and each of the stories in this fine collection has at its heart a deeply human strain; there are no thinly veiled wagon trains here, no wish fulfillment stories or polemics that cry ‘humanity uber alles’ but rather a thoughtful and reasoned use of imagination that richly deserves to be called classic.

The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus was away too long – it’s good to see it back.