The SFX Weekender is one of the newest and most ambitious conventions on the UK genre scene. This year, I sat on a panel with fellow authors Ken MacLeod, Paul McAuley, Simon Bestwick, and Sam Stone, where we discussed the role of the apocalypse in science fiction. I also did a book signing at the Solaris Books stand, signing copies of The Recollection.

The best bit, though, was meeting people. I met friends old and new, and people I’d only ever spoken to via Twitter. I had beers with some of the most exciting and promising genre writers in the world. And when taking a photo, I even made a Dalek say “Cheese.”

UK science fiction and fantasy fans, writers and booksellers are among the most welcoming, supportive and accepting people I have ever been lucky enough to meet, and this weekend felt like time spent with my people, my “gang”.  So a big thank you to everyone, and I hope to see you all again next year.

In the meantime, I look forward to Eastercon…

15.00. WE’RE ALL DOOMED! Simon Bestwick, Ken MacLeod, Paul McAuley and Gareth L. Powell tell Guy Haley how genre could make the end of the world as we know it feel fine.

Simon and I will then be signing copies of our books and meeting readers in the ‘Bartertown’ area.

If you’re going to the event, please come and say hello.

The Black Horse
By Gareth L Powell

I’m standing outside a country pub at nine o’clock at night, holding a guitar case. In either direction, the road vanishes into the darkness. The wind smells earthy and damp. Inside, in the warm, I can hear Bill and Connie arguing. They’re going through a bad patch and life in the van’s become edgy and uncomfortable.

Bill’s the keyboard player and Connie’s the singer. We schlep around, from pub to pub, hall to hall, playing our music. A little blues, a little folk. As long as they pay us, we’ll play whatever they want. Some nights we attract a good crowd. Some nights nobody shows up. And some nights, like tonight, the van breaks down in the middle of nowhere.

“You’re fucking useless,” Connie shouts. I hear a glass smash. Bill curses. He’s been drinking since lunch, on and off.

“It’s not my fault,” he says.

She laughs and it’s an ugly, scornful sound.

On the other side of the valley, I can see headlights moving on the motorway, where it cuts through a gap in the hills. It’s a cold spring night. The stars overhead are hard and sharp and there’s mist hanging over the river.

And right there, in the middle of nowhere, it hits me. A cold certainty crawls up my legs and into my heart. I know we’ll never be famous. We aren’t going to make it. In fact, I’ll be lucky if Bill and Connie don’t kill each other.

And so I walk out. I drop my guitar case in the middle of the road and walk off. Away from the warmth of the pub, the fields on either side are dark and imposing. They’re so dark I can hardly breathe. But the clouds ahead are orange with the reflected lights of a provincial town, and the promise of something new on the wind.

I put one foot in front of the other.

I’m done with music.

The evening will run from 7.30pm-9pm. Entry is free, so please come along.

This is the thirteenth tale in a year and a day of weekly short stories set in The Split Worlds. If you would like me to read it to you instead, you can listen here.  You can find links to all the other stories, and the new ones as they are released here.

The Wishing Book

Monica dropped the boxes outside the bedroom door. The procrastination had to stop; the removal company would be there first thing in the morning. Her fingers hovered above the doorknob, the fluttering in her chest making her breathe rapidly. She shut her eyes as her hand fell to her side, clammy. She’d start on it after lunch.

After making packet soup using the only mug and spoon left unpacked, she perched on a box full of cooking books and stirred, imagining moving out with the small bedroom left as it had been for the last six months. In her fantasy, no-one new moved in and the house was soon cocooned in ivy, spiders filling the corners with epic silken landscapes. The room would stay as it was forever, even as the city crumbled around it, even as the house decayed and was slowly taken apart by nature’s assault, the pink, purple and white would remain perfect.

The phone rang, she jumped and lumpy pseudo-soup sloshed over the edge of the mug and burnt her fingers. Swearing, she hunted for the handset in the cardboard labyrinth.

“Monica? Are you moving house?”

“Hi Carrie.”

“Well? Are you?”

“Yes.”

“And when were you going to tell me?”

There was a long pause as various acerbic responses came to mind.

“I was going to ask if you needed any help,” Carrie added. She never could stand silences.

“Really?” Monica knew all her sister wanted was a chance to nose through her stuff and see how dusty it was beneath the bed and the sofa.

“Why didn’t you tell me you sold the house? I didn’t even know you’d put it on the market.”

“Slipped my mind,” Monica inspected the red skin on her finger. “I’ve been busy.”

“But it’s only been six months. Are you sure this is a good idea? They say you shouldn’t make life-changing decisions for at least a year after-”

“They?”

“The experts.”

“The ones on daytime TV?” Monica looked up at the ceiling, feeling her edges fraying. “Look, I’ve got stuff I need to do. I’ll call with the new address when I’ve moved in.”

“Have you packed her room yet?”

“I’ve got to go, there’s someone at the door.”

Monica stabbed the red button, shaking. “I didn’t tell you I was moving because I knew you’d have something to say about it,” she said to the dead handset. “And I knew it would be bullshit.”

She went back to the mug, the lumps had joined and formed a thick crust. She wasn’t hungry anyway. For a long time she stood there, looking out on the back garden, the grass so high she couldn’t see the plastic anymore. There was no way she was going to find the toys and pull them from the places they’d been left. She didn’t want her hands to be the last to touch them.

The tears drummed on the draining board. She’d made the right decision. Living there wasn’t living at all, it was noticing the silence, it was walking past that room at night and not going in to check on her. It was life cast in negative, everything defined by what didn’t happen there anymore. The kitchen table was now just the place where she once coloured and made dresses for her dolls. The sofa was merely something no longer jumped on, the bathroom a tiled box, bereft of squirted water and squeals.

“Just get it over with!” she shouted at herself.

As she climbed the stairs, Monica tried to remember the last time she went into the room but there was nothing. Instead, she remembered being six and running to the bathroom and yanking out the tooth that had been wobbling for days because she just couldn’t stand the build-up any more. Blood in the sink turned into blood on the pavement outside, six months before.

She opened the door.

Hesitantly, she stepped in, relieved and devastated in equal measure that it no longer smelt of her. There was a cardboard box on the sheepskin rug she’d forgotten. It had been there for weeks, full of things from around the house that had been scooped up and dumped inside. Her colouring pencils, the dolls which had been in the living room, pictures she’d drawn that Monica had taken off the fridge on one of the blackest days. On top was the book.

She lifted it out gently, smiling at the hundreds of hand-drawn stars decorating the cover. “Happy birthday Mummy!” she could hear her now, so clearly. She’d asked what it was. “A wishing book. A fairy gave it to me. I put the stars on it.” She’d asked how it worked. “You write a wish in it and it comes true!”

That was the day before she died.

Sometime later, Monica dried her face and got an empty box. She picked a bear off a shelf, laid it in reverently, then, sobbing, swept the rest in with one frantic sweep of her arm. Once loved toys were stuffed brutally into square brown prisons and she moved through the room like a mad thing, tearing the bedding off and trying to get it over with as quickly as possible. Her throat was raw, awful animal noises of pure grief filling the space.

When it was done she rushed into the bathroom and vomited. As she brushed her teeth, she decided to go to a hotel for the night, come back in the morning, unlock the door for the removals men and then just wait in the car until they’d emptied the place. The decision made her feel like she could make it through the rest of the day.

The book was lying in the doorway, presumably toppled in the madness, its stars glittering. She picked it up and without thinking why, got a pen from her handbag and opened it.

I wish you were still alive.
I wish that driver had seen you.
I wish you didn’t run into the road.
I wish I hadn’t left you by the car when I went back inside.
I wish it had been sunny.
I wish I hadn’t forgotten my umbrella.

She looked at the words until they were just nonsensical scrawls. The hallway grew dark, her back ached, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the page. A pressure built in her forehead until it throbbed, her fingers became numb and cold, the pen tumbled onto the carpet. The paper was eventually cast in an orange glow from the lamppost outside. An owl hooted and she wished and wished until it felt like her chest would split open and her heart would be sucked into the book.

Then the front door opened. Monica held her breath, waiting for her daughter to call up the stairs as if she’d just been playing outside.

“Mon? Are you still here?”

Carrie. The wishing book slid from her lap and closed, Monica slumped, spent. What had possessed her? There was no magic in the world. Not anymore.

—

Thanks for hosting Gareth!

I hope you enjoyed the story. If you would like to find out more about the Split Worlds project, it’s all here: www.splitworlds.com. If you would like to host a story over the coming year, either let me know in the comments or contact me through the Split Worlds site. Em x

See you there?

The Liminal - Event 2 from Weston super Television on Vimeo.

Are your first drafts as streamlined as the novels appear to be or does a lot end up on the “cutting room floor” so to speak?

“I edit as I go along. Each time I sit down to write, I start at the beginning and read through to where I finished at the end of the last section, making changes as I go. This means that by the time the first draft is completed, it’s actually been edited many times. That said, I did cut 20,000 words from Silversands.”

Following on from that, can you talk us through your self-editing process?

“A piece of writing – whether it’s a sentence, a paragraph or a whole page – has to have some sort of rhythm and flow to it. This is doubly true for lines of dialogue. I go back through and try to find that rhythm. I cut out unnecessary words and exposition; ditch adverbs; and replace everyday words with phrases that are more direct and striking.”

You can read the whole thing here, and read Stuart’s review of The Recollection, here.

But who are they?

Here’s the game: select four science fictional characters that you’d like to have a drink with, and place them around the same table. It’s a variation of the old “fantasy dinner party” game, only set in a tavern at Mos Eisley.

Here’s my answers:

1. Halo Jones – Alan Moore’s reluctant interstellar heroine paced the galaxy for two decades, looking for a way out. In her time, she was a stewardess, a soldier, a renegade, and a drunk – so I figure she’ll have some pretty good stories to tell, as long as we keep the catsblood flowing.

2. John Truck – The amoral loser and archetypal spacer from M. John Harrison’s Centauri Device is a man born to frequent such establishments. He’s been all over the sky. He’s a spaceship captain because he hasn’t got the energy to be anything else. He’s too lazy to avoid getting himself into trouble, and too stubborn to back out once he’s in it.

3. Slippery Jim Di Griz – Interstellar criminal mastermind, card sharp, con man, gourmet, and connoisseur of fine wines and spirits. Life would never be dull with the Stainless Steel Rat at your table. Listen to his stories and get involved in his schemes. Just don’t play cards with him.

4. Louis Wu – The protagonist of Larry Niven’s Ringworld novels is a two hundred year old man from Earth. Every couple of decades, he tires of company and launches himself into the unknown on a “sabbatical”, all alone in a one-man starship. He’s a man of culture and sophistication, yet he’s also been a wirehead, an explorer, a hyper-intelligent “protector”, ambassador to a savage alien race, and a god. Wu would be the voice of reason at the table. He’d be able to think his way out of any situation we found ourselves in, and having explored the Ringworld, he’d also have some pretty entertaining stories to tell.

That’s my selection. Who would you choose, and why?