I am delighted to say that a debut novel I worked on as an editor last year, Marco and the Pharaoh’s Curse, by Paul Purnell, is out now as an e-book. Very generously, Paul is donating all profits to two charities, Guide Dogs for the Blind, and Hearing Dogs for Deaf People.

Marco and the Pharaoh’s Curse is a thrilling fantasy adventure for 7-12 year old readers. Available for Amazon Kindle now, a physical edition will follow. Here’s the official blurb:

The Beatrice sank in the Mediterranean Sea two hundred years ago. Lost to the world – until now.

Divers are preparing to plunder her ancient treasure, unaware that any interference its the unusual contents will trigger a catastrophic event.

The terrifying consequences of the divers succeeding are unimaginable.

Twelve-year-old Marco and a mermaid, Lois, are the only ones who can prevent it. Have they overestimated their abilities?

They have 48 hours to journey the treacherous underwater route from Malta to Sardinia to fetch help and then return.

Time is tight, but that’s the least of their problems…

This has been a most unusual week, in that three books I worked on as editor have arrived in the space of five days. On Tuesday the physical copies of speculative fiction anthology Improbable Botany were delivered. Beautifully illustrated by Jonathan Burton, the book contains excellent stories by Rachel Armstrong, Cherith Baldry, Eric Brown, James Kennedy, Ken MacLeod, Simon Morden, Stephen Palmer, Adam Roberts, Tricia Sullivan, Justina Robson and Lisa Tuttle.

Then, two days later, Lynne Chitty’s debut novel, Out Of The Mist was delivered, a quiet, thoughtful story of coming to terms with the past and new beginnings. And this morning it was the turn of the autobiographical Find Another Place by Ben Graff. I was thrilled to see the acknowledgement, which reads, in part: ‘My editor Gary Dalkin helped me to better navigate this story than I could have done alone. His care and precision have played a big part in making Find Another Place all it can be. I am grateful for his friendship.’

One of my clients, Ben Graff, has his first book, Find Another Place, coming out on March 28. I worked with Ben helping him find the structure for the book, which as it says on the cover is: An autobiographical meditation on family, focusing on childhood, parenting, the passage of time, loss, love, faith and memory. I encouraged Ben to dig deeper into himself, writing additional chapters and finding the essence of material, a complex tapestry of autobiography and family history. I’m very proud of the resulting volume, and I know Ben is too.

Find Another Place (Amazon link) will be published by Troubadour, priced £11.99. Here is the text from the back cover:

“Families are their stories,” said my grandfather Martin that late autumn day in 2001, as he placed a clear plastic folder containing his journal into my hands.

Part historical meditation on people now gone, part detective story and journey of discovery, the book speaks to how we remember and re-assess what has gone before and how we make sense both of our here and now and the future. My grandfather had always wanted to be a writer and he gave me his journal shortly before his death. After many endings, paper often remains. Letters from my parents written in the 1970s before they were married, together with a handful of poems, extracts from diaries and other materials all form part of this reflection. It is possible to get to know people better, even after they are gone.

A family’s interactions with the Isle of Wight, in war and peace, happy times and sad, run through the narrative. As does a relationship with literature, the desire to write and a passion for the game of chess. Anyone who has ever lost a parent; had a child or reflected on the fragility and beauty inherent in everyday life will enjoy this book.

If you spent November obsessively engaged with National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), you weren’t alone. It’s estimated that worldwide in 2013 around 400,000 people took part in the challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. One of the ideas behind NaNoWriMo is to help writers get into a daily writing habit by simply getting a lot of words down, and to that end the project emphasises quantity – an average of 1667 words a day – over quality. Polishing can come later, and while inevitably many of the thousands of novels written as part of the annual event are, let’s say, not very good, excellent work can result.

Novels which began during NaNoWriMo have become bestsellers – titles including Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and Persistence of Memory by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. But note that I wrote, ‘novels which began …’ The finished novels were considerably refined than the first drafts uploaded at the end of various Novembers. If your NanoWriMo novel ultimately proves nothing more than a means of establishing a regular daily writing habit then it will have been an invaluable experience, but if it is to have a chance of commercial publication then November was just the start of a process which will involve additional drafts and editing and proofreading and revision, until the novel is good as it can possibly be.

But if you stuck the course, don’t forget to take time to celebrate. Print out that NaMoWriMo certificate and display it with pride. You did it. You hit the word count and ended up with, however messy, the draft of a novel. Or at least something as long as a novel. Which is to say, you wrote a lot of words very quickly, which is both the achievement, and now, perhaps, something of a problem. The problem being that your great mass of words might be twice as good if it were half as long, because so far it’s essentially all been about quantity.

And so you could be facing the crash which can follow the high of completing the NaNoWriMo challenge. The question looms – I did it, but is it any good? Or was I just fooling myself, wasting my time? Or if you didn’t take part in NaNoWriMo, perhaps you have a first draft of a novel which you finished recently, or some time back, or even years ago, but then didn’t know what to do with, and so have done nothing, being overwhelmed by what you have created, unsure how to proceed.

However you came by your raw manuscript, here I’m going to look at the next steps towards ending up with a polished, finished novel. Some writers will even tell you that what follows is the part they enjoy most. That now free of the initial pressure to get something, anything(!) down on the page, they can cheerfully dive into the process editing and rewriting.

One thing you can now do is enjoy the fact that you no longer have to rush. That you can approach things at a more measured pace. And you can set yourself some sort of timetable. You don’t have to do everything, or indeed, anything, now. Enjoy Christmas and the New Year, then come back to things afresh. But that’s crazy, you might be thinking. I’ve written like mad, and now you tell me to do nothing! I might as well not written in such a frenzy all November!

Well consider the working methods of one of the most successful popular novelists ever, Stephen King.

King is known for writing fast. So fast that he sometimes publishes two or three novels a year, as well as a handful of short stories and smattering of magazine articles, reviews and other pieces. But the fact that King writes quickly does not mean that he produces each book in a hurry. That he just goes from one, finished, to the next. No, what King does, as he explains in his exploration of the novelist’s craft, On Writing, is put each newly finished draft in a draw for months while he works on something else. It might be that only when he has written a complete draft of another book, that he will he return to the earlier manuscript. Then he takes it out of the draw – King always prints out everything as insurance against digital failure, so perhaps you should too – and settles down to read it with the advantage of distance. The time elapsed allows him a degree of detachment, free of the initial buzz of creativity, with which to better assess his work. He can come to his own fictional creations almost as if they had been written by someone else. This distance – and you can see it attested to in the notes King writes in his books, which will often end with the dates the novel was begun and finished, dates which can be as much as four years apart – quite simply allows a writer to see what is wrong with their work, what needs to be improved, and what should be cut. When we have just finished writing we are too close to the work to see it clearly, and will tend to either over-rate or under-rate it. Either conclude that we have written a timeless masterpiece, or something so terrible it should never see the light of day. So allow Christmas to clean your mental pallet, and come back to your work with a manageable timetable for development and a fresh perspective.

Now Stephen King doesn’t, so far as we know, participate in NaNoWriMo; though he did once challenge himself to write a novel in six monthly episodes, and the result became one of his best books, The Green Mile. But King does say that his first drafts tend to be over long, filled with material which on reflection simply isn’t needed. This might be anything from dialogue which doesn’t further either character development or story, because the same points are covered elsewhere, or diversions from the main story which lead nowhere important. Whatever the problems might be, King says that on average he finds he can comfortably cut 20% from his first draft without losing anything significant, and end up with a book which is tighter, more focused and gripping. Cuts can range from individual words or lines, to entire scenes, subplots or characters.

I’m going to suggest that if a seasoned professional like King, with a career spanning five decades, who knows the art of novel writing inside out, still ends up with first drafts from which he can cut 20% and improve things by doing so, then you can cut at least as much from your novel and make it better in the process. And if you wrote your manuscript for NaNoWriMo then the likelihood is that it is far more overly wordy than a more traditionally created work, and that it would likely benefit from even more extensive pruning. Perhaps as much as 50%. Because when we write quickly we have a tendency to write sloppily, throwing in everything with abandon, because we know we can fix it later.

Well later is now (or after Christmas) and we should spend the season of joy and goodwill planning a little homicide. Kill your darlings! (The first draft of this post had a whole paragraph about how this well known saying is generally attributed to the American writer William Faulkner – but I killed it in revision.) In his 1916 book, On The Art of Writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’

Quiller-Couch meant cut anything – a line of dialogue, a description, a joke – which no matter how good by itself, detracts from the whole; from the characters, the theme, the development of the story. It is advice which stands a century later.

So now you read your manuscript again, as objectively as you can. Don’t be afraid to be impressed by anything which is good. But be ruthlessly critical in seeing what is wrong. Remember, even if you don’t, professional readers, agents and publishers will, and they are far less likely to be kind to you than you are yourself. Be your own worst critic. Don’t leave the job to anyone else. Be prepared to tear your work apart so that you can rebuild it better.

You will probably, especially if you have written your draft in a month, be embarrassed by some of the things you have put on paper, and might determine to cut or revise them right away. But hold a little while longer. Word processors allow the line between writing a draft and the process of continual revision to blur into one homogeneous process, so that in the regular course of things you may never produce discreet drafts. And herein is one of the great advantages of the NaNoWriMo process. You end up with a complete draft, and rough as it will inevitably be, what you have created is a valuable thing. Don’t waste it with instant revision. Remember how perhaps you spent months or years working more conventionally on a novel and never reached the end because your word processor was always as happy to go back and polish what you had already written (and rewritten) as it was to press on until the end, which maybe never came, but receded, like the horizon, forever.

Well you have your first draft. Read it all the way through, and don’t change a thing. You wrote in haste. Now is the time to change tactics and reflect at leisure. As you read make notes, either in a notebook, or perhaps using the ‘comment’ function in Word. But however you do it, make observations about what you have created. What is good, what you really like, and what doesn’t work, and why. Note what might be kept but will need reworking. And as you read, and as you go about daily life, think about what you’ve written, and get to the heart of the matter. Because before you start pruning you need to know what to cut, and to know what to cut you need to know what the book is really about. What is the core, what is the subtext? Whose story is it? What was all the furious creation really about?

Strange as it may seem, it might not even be obvious just what the book is about. Or who. This can be especially true with a novel written quickly, where just to keep the words and plot spinning you might have introduced more characters than are necessary, simply to fill a function in the story. American crime novelist Raymond Chandler said that every time he got stuck he had a man walk through the door with a gun. NaNoWriMo encourages that sort of solution, but it doesn’t always stand in the long run.

All that said, let the manuscript sit, then read, take notes, and work out what it’s all really about, which characters are needed, and which minor characters can be combined, or even replaced by someone quickly looking something up on their phone. Which locations, story elements, lines of dialogue or description, are key to the book, and which are packing, first thoughts about which you now have better ideas. What can be combined and condensed and refined to make a better, more refined, coherent work. Where the contradictions are in the story or the behaviour of the characters. These will need to be resolved.

And then you can set about a ruthless course of genocide on all those darlings. All those bits which seemed so good at the time, but which now make you go what on earth was I thinking? Save your manuscript under a new file name – adding ‘second draft’ will be fine – then work through it with your notes and your newly found insights and remove everything that doesn’t need to be there. This isn’t, yet, the time for polishing the prose; there is no point in expending time and effort something you may change later. For now go ahead and give yourself permission to get rid of things – if you change your mind you can rescue cut material from the first draft. Which is why you retitled your document before starting anew.

A lot of what you cut will probably come in the form of dialogue. Why? Well have you ever listened to the way people talk in real life? Real human beings don’t talk like people in a book. They are not, in the main, as, smart, clever, witty, focused. Literary dialogue generally gives the impression of realism, but actually cuts what is said to the essence. Good dialogue in a novel isn’t littered with all the trivia of everyday conversation, the repetitions, the sentences which simply fade into nothing. The polite niceties which oil the wheels of social intercourse are greatly reduced on the page. Every hello, goodbye and introductory digression about the weather, sport, or Elaine’s new baby are not faithfully transcribed. Yes, all that’s the stuff of life, but it’s not the essence of fiction. And yet, especially if you’ve written a novel in a month to a deadline and word count, that’s exactly the sort of stuff you may well have written by the ream.

Now is the time to hunt it out of your manuscript and get rid of it. Along with all the bits and pieces your rereading tells you are no not needed for the long haul. And when you’ve cut all the obvious deadwood, then you are ready for some serious rewriting from start to finish.

But that’s another story.

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A version of this article first appeared in Writing Magazine, the UK’s best-selling magazine for writers

The UK edition of Literary Wonderlands is now out, published by Modern Books. Here you can see the UK edition, the beginning of my chapter about Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J.M. Barrie, and the US edition playing spot the difference. I also wrote the chapters on I, Robot (Isaac Asimov), Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) and Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson). I will be taking two copies to Sledge Lit 3 at the Quad in Derby on Saturday (25 November), where they will be joining many other fine books as prizes in the raffle.

I’m delighted to share one of Jonathan Burton’s superb illustrations for Improbable Botany. Check out the Kickstarter for this anthology of new stories about fantastical flora by Cherith Baldry, Eric Brown, Ken MacLeod, Simon Morden, Adam Roberts, James Kennedy, Stephen Palmer, Justina LA Robson, Tricia Sullivan, and Lisa Tuttle, plus the opportunity to obtain A2 art prints of all six of Jonathan’s illustrations and the cover artwork. This particular illustration is for Lisa Tuttle’s story, ‘Vegetable Love’.

Jonathan Burton’s illustration for Lisa Tuttle’s Vegetable Love

I have recently edited a new anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories about fantastical flora. The book, Improbable Botany, features authors who between them have won the Arthur C Clarke, British Science Fiction Association, John W. Campbell Memorial, Philip K. Dick, Nebula and Prometheus Awards, and been nominated for many more. The writers are: Cherith Baldry (co-author of the New York Times best-selling Warrior Cats series), Eric Brown (The Kings of Eternity, the Langham and Dupré crime novels, the most recent of which is Murder Take Three), Ken MacLeod (Intrusion, The Corporation Wars), Simon Morden (the Metrozone series, Down Station / The White City), Adam Roberts (The Real-Town Murders, The Thing Itself), James Kennedy (The Order of Odd-Fish), Stephen Palmer (The Factory Girl Trilogy, Memory Seed, Beautiful Intelligence), Justina Robson (The Quantum Gravity series, Natural History, Switch), Tricia Sullivan (Occupy Me, Dreaming in Smoke, Maul), and Lisa Tuttle (The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief, The Mysteries, Windhaven (with George RR Martin)).

As part of the project I have interviewed all ten of the contributing authors, not just about Improbable Botany but about their writing in general and much more besides. Below is my interview with Tricia Sullivan, whose latest novel, Occupy Me, is nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her novel Dreaming in Smoke won the Clarke Award in 1999. Other works include Maul, Double Vision and lightborn.

Improbable Botany is being published by Wayward, a London-based landscape, art and architecture practice, and funded via Kickstarter. The book is illustrated by Jonathan Burton (The Folio Society, Penguin Books, Random House). One of the Kickstarter bonuses is a free e-book which will include all the interviews, though they will also be published individually in various places. The only time they will ever appear all together is in the Kickstarter e-book. The Kickstarter also offers the opportunity to acquire A2-sized art prints of all six of Jonathan Burton’s interior illustrations, as well as his breathtaking cover art.

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Gary Dalkin: Your story for Improbable Botany, ‘Who Lived in a Tree’, offers an unusual perspective on a radically transformed London – it is narrated by a tree. Without giving too much away could you explain something of how the story came together?

Tricia Sullivan: I’ve been a tree freak since I was a kid. I just love them, and I spent a lot of childhood time around trees and up in their branches. I considered trees friends, so maybe in some ways the story was a wish fulfillment fantasy. I wrote it in the fall of 2012, and I’d been reading about ideas for the greening of London (plant walls, etc) and also about the ‘internet of plants’ from Stefano Mancuso. I wanted to play with the idea of a symbiosis between humans and plants in which the connective talents of trees could be exploited for mutual benefit, so I took a big stretch with the research and let my imagination go. I think it would be much nicer to inhabit a living London than a stone one.

At the same time, I was going through a lot of anxiety about my parents’ ageing. I wrote the first draft while my father was alive and more or less OK, but I was very aware of the increasing frailty of both parents, who lived 3500 miles away and would have nothing to do with the Internet. So it’s a story of the rise of the plants, but also of the decline and death of old creatures and old ways. When I came to revise the draft for submission a few months after my father’s unexpected death, I was struck by how personally prophetic the piece felt.

Gary Dalkin: The notion of human-plant symbiosis, and of the ‘internet of plants’ is so intriguing, and such advances are being made bio-engineering, that I wonder if you have any thoughts about why botanical SF remains so comparatively under-explored? It would seem fertile soil for the imaginative writer …

Tricia Sullivan: Well, Sheri Tepper did The Family Tree and I think Kameron Hurley has done some SF with plants. And of course, Jeff VanderMeer has done fungi. I’m sure there are others. I suspect the lack is down to commercial viability. A lot of SF nowadays stands on the shoulders of older generations. History provides a cultural shorthand that means  writers don’t have to work too hard conceptually if they don’t want to; they can focus on e.g. their thriller plot, or other aspects of the work that interest them. However, if you break into a whole new region–like plant symbiosis–you’ve got the full weight of socio-scientific speculation to carry all by yourself, in addition to working all the party tricks of commercial writing. Novelists, anyway, have got to have all the storytelling and worldbuilding solid as rock if they want to sell their work, because publishers are extremely risk-averse. So it would be a fantastic challenge to writers to have a go, but not a small one.

Gary Dalkin: Any publisher which operated without any consideration of risk would presumably not stay in business long, but to be extremely risk-adverse would seem to be contrary to the very nature of truly imaginative fiction. Have you personally found problems with this conservative (with a small c) tenancy in publishing, and would you say this risk-aversion has been consistent throughout your time as a published novelist, or have things become better or worse?

Tricia Sullivan: I’m lucky in that I’ve never had a big problem selling my SF to UK publishers, and I’ve never had a publisher try to tell me what to write in the sense of ‘we want to see space opera’ or something. Every SF book I’ve written, I’ve sold to a major house, no matter how bad the sales figures that came before. The failure of my work to pull in readers is where I suffered for a lot of years, thinking, ‘If only I could write something easier and with broader appeal…’ because I desperately needed the money. But the breadth of appeal of one’s work isn’t something one can control, necessarily. For me that was tough to accept, more so than anything publishers did or didn’t do.

The state of the industry is a bewildering topic and publisher risk-aversion is the least of it. I’ve had no choice but to decide to write for love, in the cracks of my life, and forget the money. There is no money, for most of us.

Gary Dalkin: Where do you think genre publishing might go now, in a commercial sense, and can traditional publishing survive when readers are rapidly becoming accustomed to 99p, or free, self-published e-books, and even e-books by name authors regularly being sold for next to nothing?

Tricia Sullivan: I think anybody who could answer that question would get a pie, and they should certainly tell the rest of us post haste. From the author’s point of view the rise of crowdfunding offers another way to get paid, and many authors are going hybrid (mix of self and trad publishing). Social media opens new avenues. Take Kameron Hurley. She has built by hand the platform she stands on, and that’s above and beyond her skill as a novelist. That’s a lot of work, and not everyone has those extra skills or the sheer determination to keep making noise. I reckon it helps to be extroverted or to be able to fake being extroverted–or, as in Kameron’s case, to be driven by strong emotion. Aliette de Bodard is another luminous newer writer who is beginning to achieve name recognition by sheer hard work: years of writing copious short fiction, blogging, working social media, networking, late nights, no pay, hard hard work–and she, too, is burning with a drive for something larger than herself. Again and again, I’m seeing risk-takey writers bootstrap themselves into their careers.

Gary Dalkin: You’ve blogged about being inspired by Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible to let go of your ‘various science fiction induced hang-ups’ about what you ‘could or could not write’. And the result is Occupy Me. There is a sense that real science is outstripping where most SF is prepared to go, and now you are now considering a PhD in physics. If it came to a choice, can you see yourself leaving SF completely behind for a career in physics? And where next for your fiction, given that you wrote ‘Kaku takes the attitude that the impossible is a set of shifting goalposts’?

Tricia Sullivan: I love writing, and when it comes to science fiction I am the real deal. At the same time I’ve already flipped a switch in my head that assumes I’m finished insofar as publishing goes. With that acceptance comes a great sense of freedom. My mojo is high. Full-time study plus part-time work plus family plus writing is my reality. If I do a PhD will it make more demands on my energy than that? Probably it will slow my writing down. I’m fairly difficult to stop.

Doing science and/or teaching science means playing a part in human progress, no matter how small or devalued a part (and I have no illusions there). I want use my abilities in service to the world in the years that I have here.

I’m writing a super girly SFF mystery right now for Gollancz, Sweet Dreams Are Made of This. After that I’ve got a fair chunk of my intergalactic breastfeeding novel on deck. This is the Sea builds on the cosmology I started setting up in Occupy Me and will be therefore completely whacked-out. It’s dirty work but I feel like someone has to push the envelope. I haven’t figured out the mechanics of the science/story interface because I’m dealing with technologies that are really, really different from the ones we have a narrative shorthand for. I try to write from angles that are underexploited, that yield insights you don’t otherwise get.

I will go on bewildering people as long as given licence to do so. It’s good for me and them, bit of brisk exercise never killed anyone.

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Improbable Botany is a brand-new science fiction anthology about alien plant conquests, fantastical ecosystems, benevolent dictatorships and techno-utopias

This is the book plants don’t want you to read…

Improbable Botany features newly commissioned short stories by ten multi-award winning science fiction authors:

Ken MacLeod, Cherith Baldry, Eric Brown, Simon Morden, Adam Roberts, James Kennedy, Stephen Palmer, Justina Robson, Tricia Sullivan and Lisa Tuttle.

Lisa Tuttle’s story, ‘vegetable Love’ appears in the anthology I have recently edited, Improbable Botany. Here is a review I wrote for Vector of Lisa’s 2005 novel, The Mysteries, reissued last year by Jo Fletcher Books.

A detective novel requires a mystery. The title of Lisa Tuttle’s novel is as up front as can be. However, two things soon become apparent, that in this novel people are themselves ‘mysteries’, and that this is no conventional detective story, in that so far as anyone can tell, no crime has been committed.

Ian Kennedy is an American expat in London, barely making a living as a private detective specialising in finding missing people. On the verge of middle age and thinking about a career change, another American, Laura Lensky, asks him to find her daughter, Peri, who disappeared two years ago in Scotland.

While Peri has abandoned her old life of her own free will, naturally Laura wants to know that nothing bad has happened to her daughter, that she is alive and well. So too does Peri’s one time fiancé, Hugo, a young filmmaker. Though while his is concerned, his life has moved on; he has a new girlfriend who would not appreciate Peri’s return.

Kennedy, meanwhile, is driven to find those who have gone missing because of mysteries in his own past. Mysteries that have taught him how perceptions can be affected by memory, hope and fantasy. For years Kennedy remembered his father stopping the family car in the middle of nowhere, getting out, walking into a field, and then vanishing before his eyes. Later Kennedy realised this did not in fact happen. His father simply went to work one day and didn’t come home, absconding to start a new life. An incomprehensible trauma came to be explained through an inexplicable fantasy. Then later still, Kennedy found that not even the fantasy was his own invention, but something he had read and later forgotten in a book. A supposedly true story which itself turned out to be fabricated. An urban legend. The layers of unreality accumulate.

History repeats itself when one day the love of Kennedy’s life, Jenny, simply walks out and disappears. That was ten years before the novel’s present, and with nothing left in America, Kennedy relocated and made a new life in England. The story unfolds through Kennedy’s investigation into what has happened to Peri, a narrative which mixes past and present, paralleled with the gradual revelation of his own mysteries: his youthful discovery of what really happened when his father left, and his later enquiry into Jenny’s disappearance.

Set against this is Peri’s story. The tale Laura and Hugh have to tell is one that raises more questions than can comfortably be answered, pointing to a supernatural explanation which Laura refuses to consider. And yet Kennedy is ideally placed to investigate, having been recommended to Laura by the one person who would know that this case would resonate with him because of a further mystery in his past. Once before, Kennedy investigated a missing person, the circumstances of which bore uncanny parallels to Peri’s disappearance, circumstances that would seem impossible to anyone else, and for Kennedy, impossible to ignore.

And so Kennedy finds himself in Scotland, confronting a sometimes painful personal history, exploring the edges of a deeper, more universal mythological past, the ancient mysteries, clues to which might be found in various tellings and retellings of Celtic legends. Sometimes people disappear.

Between the main chapters Tuttle inserts short accounts of various vanishments, and sometimes of people who came back. Meanwhile Kennedy, Laura and Hugh come closer to finding what has happened to Peri. The novel asks, do they each want to face the truth, and when they do, how will it affect them? What will they do? The Mysteries is a slow burn of a book. It pulls the reader in gradually, skirting the edge of the supernatural, the numinous, and the unknown. When once it gathers pace the final third has a ferocious grip.

There are moments of great tension, of a building sense of dread and malevolence, though this is not horror or even dark fantasy. The supernatural here is simply different, ‘other’. There is even a hint of some form of scientific explanation. The otherworldly characters have their own purpose, which only tangentially intersects with the everyday realm of human life. There are no true monsters or villains. The ‘other’ is not some dread Lovecraftian domain, though it can be hazardous, fraught with peril. Rather The Mysteries is a story of choice, about engagement with the world as it is, about love. It contains several love stories, exploring different sorts of love, selfish, sacrificial, romantic, familial, doing so while telling a story which, while not especially complex in terms of detective fiction – there are no great plots, crimes or conspiracies – takes fine advantage of the detective novel format. For what is a detective story if not a metaphor for the quest to understand the nature of the world, for addressing that which we instinctively recognise is out of kilter, seen only through a glass darkly?

And if that sounds vague, fear not that it will all end too ambiguously for satisfaction. In this review I have deliberately avoided more than a hint of the central mysteries of the novel. But everything is lovingly resolved in a book that, alongside The Silver Bough, may well be Lisa Tuttle’s finest achievement to date.

Eric Brown is one of the UK’s leading science fiction writers. Since making his first sale to Interzone in 1986 he has published more than 50 books. His novel Helix Wars (2012) was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award and two of his short stories have been honoured with the British Science Fiction Association Award. Murder By The Book (2013) marked a departure, being the first Langham and Dupre Mystery, a crime novel set in the 1950s. His latest titles are Jani and the Great Pursuit, the second volume of a Steampunk series set at the height of the British Empire, and Murder Take Three, the fourth Langham and Dupre novel. He writes a regular SF review column for The Guardian.

Eric Brown has written the story ‘The Ice Garden’ for Improbable Botany, the new anthology I have edited. Here we talk about all manner of things, from fantastical flora in fiction, and why Eric has recently turned to crime. 

Gary Dalkin: ‘The Ice Garden’, your story in Improbable Botany, has something of an old fashioned feel to it. Although clearly taking place in a world of mobile phones, it evokes an earlier period in British science fiction. The characters are so polite, formal, gentlemanly. The setting itself is of an earlier time. Is the sense of continuing a tradition something which especially appeals to you? The story has certain elements in common with your novel The Kings of Eternity, which of the novels of yours that I have read, I think is the best.

Eric Brown: These days I read a lot of fiction set in thirties, forties, and fifties Britain. I’m attracted to the mores and manners of that period, to the prose-style, and to the fiction. I’m writing a series of crime novels set in the fifties at the moment, and I find that the best way to research the period, even better than reading non-fiction about the fifties, is to immerse myself in the fiction of the time. Perhaps as a consequence of this, my writing, my prose, is beginning to reflect that earlier fiction. (Also, I must admit that I find some modern prose too slick and not to my taste, whether that’s in SF or crime.) And also, I like the strange feeling in some of my SF – principally The Kings of Eternity, which you mentioned, and the Starship novellas, as well as some stories – that is created by the anachronistic juxtaposing of a future setting (more so in Starship) against perceived ‘old-fashioned’ prose-style and values. (Jack Vance did this in so much of his work, a futuristic setting rubbing up against the almost Jacobean, or Restoration, manners and mores of his characters and societies). So perhaps the above is my long-winded way of saying yes, I suppose it is my continuing a tradition.

Gary Dalkin: Speaking in terms of traditions, there is one, not extensive, but it exists, of exploring strange botany within speculative fiction. We could go back to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ and trace a line through John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, right up to the mushroom people of Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch. We might even take in The Little Shop of Horrors on the big screen, and on the small screen, a Doctor Who story like ‘The Seeds of Doom’. Yet overall this remains a relatively small set of stories. Do you see a rich territory ripe for future fictional exploration, particularly give the possibilities opened up by genetic engineering? Are authors missing out by generally not considering the intersection of fiction and flora?

Eric Brown: You’re right, it’s a ripe and fecund branch worthy of future exploration, which would bear much fruit and maybe even vast blossoms. Sorry. Earth-bound tales exploring the genetic engineering side of botany would be one avenue to explore – the other, which I’m drawn to, would be xeno-botany set on alien worlds: this would offer real, wide-screen scope for stories. Keith Brooke has done a series of extraterrestrial flora stories, but to the best of my knowledge they’re thin on the ground. (I’ve used exotic, alien flora in various of my own tales, but they’re mainly alien window-dressing, to heighten atmosphere, and don’t really explore the science, or extrapolate from the science, of xeno-biology.)

The Ice Garden, illustration by Jonathan Burton

Gary Dalkin: Is this because you generally prefer ‘soft’ to ‘hard’ science fiction? You once said in an interview with Keith Brooke that ‘hard SF leaves me cold because I don’t like reading pages and pages of science or scientific extrapolation at the expense of characters and emotion.’ Is that still the case – certainly your work is frequently powerfully emotional, often evoking what seems to me a very English sense of melancholy. Would that be a fair statement?

Eric Brown: Yes, very fair. I think I’d find Hard SF difficult even if it did have excellent characterisation (which some of it does). I’m just not that interested in the ins and outs of technology and science: I don’t read mainstream fiction to be told how a TV works. I’m interested in how people and societies are affected by ideas that stem from technological and scientific innovation, but I find that so often in SF, technological explanation gets in the way of psychology… Also Hard SF dates so quickly, so if it contains no real human beings what we’re left with, years down the line, are Hard SF novels with cardboard characters and outmoded ideas; novels which are nothing more than curiosity pieces – like Asimov’s, for example. I find that the older I get, the more I want to read about human beings and how they interact. I’m glad you think my work powerfully emotional – that’s what I often try to achieve. I much prefer Soft to Hard SF – though my favourite term is Quiet SF.

Gary Dalkin: I remember reading your first novel, Meridian Days, shortly after it first came out, and it certainly had a quietly powerful impact. It really struck a chord with me, especially against a lot of rather more gung-ho Hard SF – perhaps because we’re both Yorkshire men of a very similar age. So I think Quiet SF is the prefect description. Anyway, it seemed to immediately fit into a lineage along with the works of say, Michael Coney and Christopher Priest and establish you as a writer to watch.

There’s a certain haunted melancholy to your best work. Something of loneliness and isolation, of loss and the irrevocable passage of time, yet combined with a sense of beauty and of wonder. It’s not something I often see in American SF, but it’s there in the closing passages of Shelley’s Frankenstein, in Wells’ beach in the far future in The Time Machine, it’s there in the vast cosmic visions of Stapledon and Clarke. Do you think this sensibility is something particularly British, something you recognise in yourself as a writer and as a person, and if so, where do you think it comes from? Is it some essential part of the British character?

Eric Brown: I wonder if it’s an essentially European sensibility? Could it be that as we inhabit an older civilisation, are surrounded by constant reminders of human-made history, this imbues us – perhaps on a subconscious level – with a certain melancholy, a reminder of our insignificance in the grand, cosmic scheme of things? I wonder if the beauty and wonder comes form our having to make the best of the situation… I don’t know. I think I’ll leave that one to the philosophers. It’s odd that you should mention the beach scene in Wells’s The Time-Machine. To me, it’s one of the most affecting images in all SF, and I was knocked out by it when I read the novella when I was sixteen. I still use the iconic image of the swollen sun in my work – it’s always cropping up! As to my own work, I’ve often written about loneliness and isolation – it’s a great theme, a great sympathy-hook, and can be a great driver of narrative (the striving against isolation, the quest for redemption): though perhaps I’m not using it so much these days.

Gary Dalkin: Right from Meridian Days your work has shown a fascination with artists and writers. You’ve written about fictional writers in, for example, A Writer’s Life and The Kings of Eternity, as well as in your new Langham and Dupré series of mystery novels, and used real writers such as H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, and Jules Verne as characters in your work. The question is why? Is it something as simple as following the old adage to ‘write about what you know’?

Eric Brown: I suppose a part of the attraction is that I know about writers and artists, so therefore I write about them – but I’m fascinated by writers and artists, the process of creation, and how these people relate to the world. I know, or have known, a lot of creative people, and find the creative process and the ‘artistic’ way of looking at the world – or rather at one’s relationship to reality – a perpetual source of interest and of ideas for drama. I think that even when writing about other people, you’re really writing about yourself. And I’m pretty sure that the process of creation, in my case, is not so much about my making sense of the world, representing it in a way that other’s might recognise, as making sense of my inner self and my emotional reaction to the world. I’m a great believer in the power of the subconscious, and I think that my best work (The Kings of Eternity, Kethani, The Serene Invasion, Starship Seasons) was largely dictated to me by what was going on in the sub-strata of my head. I’m constantly amazed that when I sit down for a shift at the PC, two hours later there has emerged on the page things that I never consciously realised I’d be writing about. That’s the old subconscious at work.

Gary Dalkin: Which leads me to wonder, considering that your stories are very much proper ‘stories’ in the traditional sense of having a plot and a clear beginning, middle and end, how much of a planner are you in your writing, as opposed to letting your subconscious have free reign and following where it will? I’m particularly curious because your Langham and Dupré novels are mysteries, so do they perhaps require a different approach, one requiring more detailed planning in the construction of intricate plots? And why start writing a crime series now, after 25 years writing science fiction? Is it something you’d long wanted to do?

Eric Brown: When I began writing many moons ago, I was a great planner. Everything had to be meticulously worked out in advance. That was because I was uncertain of my ability, and had no, for want of a better word, ‘architectural’ technique. With years and wordage, I’ve developed technique, and my subconscious, informed by my technical know-how, has taken over. Now I have a slight outline in mind when I begin, but I follow my subconscious. The odd thing is that, yes, you’d think that the crime novels would take more plotting, but paradoxically that’s not the case. I have a situation, a murder, perhaps a twist or two, a cast of suspects, and the detective and his accomplice(s). I start with little notion where the story is going, and it writes itself. That said, the crime novels need more rewriting than the SF. I find I need to go back and ‘plant’ things, clues in dialogue, red herrings, verbal misdirections. In a way, writing a crime novel is more like compiling a crossword puzzle. Why did I start writing whodunits after twenty-five years of writing SF? Well, I’ve always loved cosy crime – I was turned on to reading at the age of fifteen by Agatha Christie – and a few years ago I had an idea for a crime novel that had to be set in the fifties (for DNA reasons). I loved writing the book so much, and liked the characters and the era, that I decided to do another. They sold, and I’ve just completed the fifth. They’re a great antidote to writing SF. I’ve written elsewhere about the literary freedom of writing mainstream, as opposed to SF. I can use simile and metaphor, which I can’t in SF, and write eccentric characters, again which I can’t in science fiction.

Gary Dalkin: That’s fascinating. Could you go into why you can use simile and metaphor and create eccentric characters in your crime writing, and explain what the barriers are to doing the same in science fiction? Are there any other freedoms the mainstream opens up which are difficult or impossible in SF?

Eric Brown: You don’t come across many similes in SF because when a writer likens something to something else, the object he or she likens it to must be familiar to the reader. If that object is familiar, of this world and of this time, then the writer immediately undercuts the sense of futurity he or she is attempting to maintain, and so loses reader credulity. In the crime novels I can write eccentric characters, but they don’t often appear in my SF because again I’d be in danger of undercutting the reader’s sense of futurity. I think this is because eccentric characters are only eccentric in relation to the environment they inhabit, and as science fictional futures might be described as ‘eccentric’ in themselves, it makes the job of writing eccentric characters which are eccentric in relation to their settings very hard. These characters can only be ‘odd’, eccentric, in relation to the setting the reader knows best – the here and now… which again undercuts that sense of futurity.

Other freedoms are the obvious things: you don’t need to create a new world (or universe, or future) from scratch: the world you’re writing about is instantly familiar to the reader (even if it is 1955). I can concentrate on character – make character a primary concern – whereas in SF it can be secondary behind setting, or even tertiary behind setting and idea. (There are times when I’ve been writing SF when I find the setting is so vast that it almost dwarfs the characters. I found this in Helix. And what I mean about the setting being ‘so vast’ is that I find myself describing the setting – or even thinking about it – to the detriment of the character building)… Also, in the crime novels, I don’t have to deal with Big Ideas: it’s enough that the ‘idea’, as it were, is the twist, or the murder method, or the denoument. It’s great to write crime novels, but I like to vary them: I alternate between the genres, and this keeps me fresh… I like to think.

Gary Dalkin: Yes, eccentric characters in SF to tend to undercut the established reality of any setting a writer has established, so perhaps tend to lend themselves best to satire or comedy – there’s little shortage of eccentricity in, say, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Of course there are plenty of science fiction crime stories, from Asimov’s The Caves of Steel through to a film like Inception. It seems like an interesting but tricky hybrid to pull off. Would you say that, to combine the genres a writer must be even more careful than usual ensure that the reader knows exactly what is and isn’t possible in a given future world? That the crime aspect has to work both within the technological boundaries of the imagined world but also sociologically, that is, with a particular imagined legal system? It wouldn’t be very satisfying if a crime was solved by applying a previously unmentioned piece of technology, or the story hinge upon an hithertofore undisclosed aspect of some future society’s law.

Eric Brown: I think you’re right. Whenever you write SF, of whatever sub-genre – SF-crime, space opera, planetary romance, satire, dystopia etc – you must be careful to let the reader know the ground rules. You must play fair with the reader. I’ve written three crime-SF novels, to the best of my knowledge – the Virex trilogy, set in New York in the 2040s, about a pair of private eyes. Thinking back, I recall having to carefully set up the world, and the technology – in this case virtual reality – to make everything work. And you’re right – perhaps an exception to my rule about eccentricity in SF is in comedy, like Hitch-Hiker’s Guide… and Red Dwarf. (I wonder if that’s why I didn’t care for either – especially Red Dwarf: I tried to watch it again and again, but its parochialism, its retro-anachronism, constantly put me off. I just didn’t believe it.)

Gary Dalkin: I didn’t believe Red Dwarf either. Perhaps the humour itself springs out of mocking the very world building which is essential to taking the genre seriously. I thought it interesting that the writers seemed to deliberately undermine any sense of story logic, in that each series would very obviously ignore the cliffhanger on which the previous series had ended. It was almost as if they were saying that on no level should anyone take anything about their work remotely seriously.

At the opposite extreme, having just mentioned Inception, it brings to mind a criticism that is sometimes levelled both at that film specifically, and at Christopher Nolan’s work in general – that it lacks humour. Or perhaps Nolan realises that laughter can be the enemy of suspension of disbelief. But to move on, you are a very prolific writer. A survey of your website reveals that you’ve published at least 27 novels for adults, 11 for children, 13 novellas, 11 collections of short stories, as well as various  other works, including two volumes as editor. There are other stories you’ve written which have yet to be collected, and presumably other novels which you’ve already written which are due to be published over the next year. Could you say something about your working habits – I think it would be an inspiration for others who are looking to become professional writers – and, given your output, do there ever comes times when the ideas simply don’t come? If so, what do you do to get the words flowing again?

Eric Brown: Once I’m working on a project I start and don’t stop until it’s finished. (Twenty years ago I’d write three two-hour shifts a day, finish at nine p.m. and go to the pub, day in, day out, including weekends, until the hundred thousand word first draft was in the bag, which usually took a fortnight or a bit longer. I was single then. After that, I’d leave the book for a month, come back to it and take a couple of months to pull it to pieces and rewrite). These days I do two shifts a day and don’t write at weekends, and I never go to the pub. A book takes a month, and a couple of months to rewrite. I once feared the blank page, or rather the daunting task of filling three hundred of them, but experience – doing it a lot – has got rid of the fear.

I no longer really plot a novel, but sit down with a vague outline, a setting, and a cast of characters, and start writing – and the subconscious takes over. I never run out of ideas – the sub-con will produce them, once I’ve started writing – and I don’t believe in writer’s block. Of course there are patches of novel that are sub-standard, first time round, but novels and stories are modular: in the rewrite, I take those flawed bits out and replace them with passages that work. I suppose some writers, and beginning writers, might be tempted to stop when they hit these passages – but don’t give in to the impulse: write through the rubbish, and you’ll come through the other side and start writing stuff that works again.

These days, writing isn’t the difficult thing, but getting novels sold for decent money. I wish I could leave that to my subconscious!

Gary Dalkin: To get decently paid for writing, that would be like the 90s all over again! Finally, you’ve already mentioned which you consider to be your best novels – The Kings of Eternity, Kethani, The Serene Invasion, Starship Seasons – but you are also a remarkably prolific writer of short stories. For a reader who has just discovered your short fiction through Improbable Botany, which of your eleven collections would you recommend they read first, and if you could pick just two or three stories, which would you say are your very best?

Eric Brown: That’s the hardest question you’ve posed so far! I’m afraid I’m going to mention more than just ‘two or three’ stories!… I’ve had to look back at my tales and remind myself of my favourites. As to which collection to try first… I’d like to think they were all very different, and my writing style has certainly changed over the years, since my first in 1990, The Time-Lapsed Man and other stories. I was leafing through Blue Shifting earlier, and found myself reading “Epsilon Dreams”, which I’d forgotten: it was as if I were reading something by another writer. I did enjoy that story: I think it combined a tight plot with decent characterisation. “The Time-Lapsed Man” is a particular favourite of mine, because of the idea – probably one of the few original ideas I’ve ever had! The fix-up novel Salvage contains two tales I’m proud of, “Laying the Ghost”, and “Cold Testing”. Some of my favourite tales are collected in another fix-up novel, Kéthani. I particularly like: “Thursday’s Child” and “Onward Station”. So perhaps the answer would be: start with Kéthani!

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Improbable Botany is a brand-new science fiction anthology about alien plant conquests, fantastical ecosystems, benevolent dictatorships and techno-utopias.

This is the book plants don’t want you to read…

Improbable Botany features newly commissioned short stories by ten multi-award winning science fiction authors:

Ken MacLeod, Cherith Baldry, Eric Brown, Simon Morden, Adam Roberts, James Kennedy, Stephen Palmer, Justina Robson, Tricia Sullivan and Lisa Tuttle.

promo of interior illustrations by Jonathan Burton for Improbable Botany

Yesterday I posted about the launch of the Kickstarter for the new anthology of fantasy and science fiction stories I have edited, Improbable Botany. The book contains stories by writers who between them have won every major award in the fields of science fiction and fantasy: Ken MacLeod, Cherith Baldry, Eric Brown, Simon Morden, Adam Roberts, James Kennedy, Stephen Palmer, Justina LA Robson, Tricia Sullivan and Lisa Tuttle.

The book has cover art and six full colour interior illustrations by the award-winning artist Jonathan Burton. Above is a promo image for the interior art. Find out much more about the book, support the Kickstarter and get an edition with a limited Jonathan Burton art print at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waywardplants/