G for George

“God,” said Flight-Lieutenant H.B. ‘Mick’ Martin, DSO, looking up at the overflying plane, “is that a Lanc or isn’t it? What a monstrosity!”

It was, indeed, a horribly ungainly adaptation of a Lancaster. Like all the great aircraft of WWII, the Avro Lancaster conformed to the saying “if it looks right, it is right”, and few aircraft have ever looked better. The Lancaster was a superb heavy bomber, born from a terrible heavy bomber called the Manchester. The Manchester was underpowered, with a pair of straining Rolls-Royce Vulture engines (each Vulture being, in turn, a pair of Peregrine engines bolted to each other, the bottom one being upside down) trying to drag a 50,000lb aeroplane to a useful altitude and speed and, more often than not, failing at both. The Lancaster was even bigger and heavier, but it had long, graceful wings mounting four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. The Merlins were already known and beloved as the powerplants to the Spitfire, Hurricane, Mosquito and later the Mustang, and the Lancaster flew brilliantly.

It was also, as Martin had seen to his horror, adaptible. The Avro Lancaster B.III Special (Type 464 Provisional) was one of the most ungainly designs ever to emerge from a workshop. It was an extraordinary engineering achievement. Avro, led by chief designer Roy Chadwick, took the standard Lancasters in and, in just a few weeks, comprehensively mauled them. The upper turrets were taken off, to save weight – and, with the loss of two machineguns, incidentally removing a quarter of the aircraft’s defensive capabilities. That wouldn’t have been so bad if, to save further weight, most of the armour plating hadn’t also been taken away. Then there was the bomb bay, where the most startling and comprehensive destruction had been wrought. The bomb bay doors were gone and a chunk carved out of the fuselage. Beneath were two sturdy legs, each shaped like an open set of calipers. (One aircrew, seeing the ungainly arrangement, was heard to remark that the aircraft didn’t need wheels anymore – it could waddle to and fro about the airfield. The squadron leader described it as looking “like a pregnant duck”). On the aircraft’s starboard side a monstrous chain-and-sprocket drive, like the gearing off God’s own bicycle, attached to a lightweight electric motor taken off an obsolete submarine. The sprocket was for the bomb.

Ah yes. The bomb. Imagine a beer barrel, seven feet long, lying on its side. Imagine it filled with high explosive and weighing five tons. And now imagine, as you fly in your hastily-modified, lightly-defended aircraft just sixty feet – less than a wingspan – above enemy territory, that you have to spin that bomb at 500rpm and hope that it doesn’t shake your airframe to pieces.

This was Barnes Wallis’s revolutionary ‘bouncing bomb’, ‘Upkeep’, and these Lancasters had been modified to take it on one mission only. On the night of 16th – 17th May 1943 19 B.III Specials of 617 Squadron attacked the Moehne, Eder and Sorpe dams. The squadron had trained intensively for weeks, because the date of the raid was fixed: in mid-May the water levels in the reservoirs behind the dams were at their highest.

The man who trained the squadron and led the raid was Wing Commander Guy Gibson. He had two DFCs, two DSOs, and 173 missions – more than 600 hours of combat time – to his name. He was 24 years old. He and his aircraft, ‘G for George’, would be first to attack.

The flight to the Ruhr was not without incident. Although obsessive care had been taken to thread the bombers’ route past known flak concentrations and night-fighter bases, low flying in a heavy bomber carried its own risks. One aircraft, ‘H for Harry’, had a malfunction in its searchlights (two lights, shining from the bottom of the fuselage, that when their beams coincided told the crew that they were at the correct 60′ altitude required for a successful drop) and hit the North Sea. Its pilot, Rice, slammed open the throttles and hauled back on the control yoke, and ‘H Harry’ climbed soggily away. They turned for home once they realised the bottom had been torn out of the plane and the bomb had gone, much to the relief of the rear gunner, who had nearly drowned in his turret when the Lanc scooped up a couple of tons of seawater.

The first wave of nine aircraft, led by Gibson, had as their primary target the Moehne Dam. Holding back something like 135 million cubic metres of water – 134 million tons – it was an enormous concrete structure a hundred feet thick that the Germans already knew to be impervious to any known form of bomb. Even a torpedo attack had been thought of and defended against: anti-torpedo nets had been slung in front of it. (It was partly because of the presence of those nets that Barnes Wallis had decided his bomb should bounce: that way, it would skip clear over the top of them to the target.) That said, at least one man was not blind to the target the dam represented. His name was Oberburgermeister Dillgardt, and over the course of the three years prior to the raid he requested searchlights, barrage balloons, light flak, heavy flak and smoke screens. By the time May 1943 came around he had managed to get some 20mm guns posted, but nothing else aside from some ornamental pine trees to decorate the top of the dam. (Those trees, incidentally, had worried the hell out of the raid planners. It was not at all clear from the pre-mission reconnaissance pictures what they were, and they assumed that there had been a security leak somewhere and the Germans had posted more guns. They didn’t find out the truth until long afterwards).

Gibson’s nine were already eight. ‘B for Baker’, flown by Astell, hit high voltage electrical cables near the German village of Marbeck and crashed into a field, cremating everyone on board. The rest found the dam and Gibson went in first. He made one low pass over the target and then circled back for his attack run. Taerum, the navigator, flicked the searchlights on and Gibson lowered ‘G George’ down to 60 feet. The gunners on the dam were awake now, and they had the lit-up bomber to target. Red-coloured flak started curling in at the Lancaster, each red shot a tracer bullet to enable the flak gunners to track their fire, and each red shot representing only a quarter of what each cannon pumped out. Pulford, the flight engineer, juggled the throttles to keep their speed constant at 240mph. Spafford, hunkered down in the nose, called out course corrections as he took aim. He switched on the motor in the carved-up bomb-bay and Wallis’s portly mostrosity began to spin until ‘G George’ was thrumming like a live thing. From the nose came a deafening spattering crackle as Deering, the nose gunner, lashed out at the flak on the towers with his twin Vickers machineguns. Spafford called out “Bomb gone!” and ‘G George’ tore between the towers, Upkeep skipping along behind them, and they dived and vanished from the flak in the river valleys beyond the dam as Trevor-Roper, in the tail, took his turn to fire on the flak that had come at them. They circled back in time to see the explosion: a gout of white water erupted a thousand feet into the air and hung glistening in the moonlight. For a moment they thought the dam breached, but the water calmed again and the dam still stood.

Gibson ordered in Hopgood in ‘M for Mother’. Like Gibson he came in at sixty feet, 240mph, straight down the reservoir. The flak was ready for him. Shells hammered into the port wing, and the Lanc was already burning when she reached the dam. Her bomb-aimer was hit and he released Upkeep too late. The bomb bounced clear over the top of the dam and exploded on the power station below. Silhouetted by the explosion ‘M Mother’ was nose up, straining for altitude so the crew could bail out, but then the wing folded and she blazed into the ground like a meteor.

Martin, in ‘P for Peter’ (“P for Popsie” he always insisted), came next. This time Gibson flew across the dam as Martin thundered in at it, trying to draw fire from the vulnerable attacker. Deering and Trevor-Roper opened up, six lines of tracer hammering into the dam, mixing bullets with chips of concrete as they tried to put the flak out of action. Martin was for several seconds unnoticed, until the flak found him. He bulled straight though, Foxlee in ‘P Popsie’s nose firing back, and then the big bomber lunged between the towers and her bomb split the water but not the dam. He banked away, a little dicily: several shells had exploded in his starboard wing.

‘A for Apple’, Young’s aircraft, was up next. This time Martin joined Gibson as flak bait, and Young got through okay. Again the Upkeep went off beautifully, but the dam remained standing. Maltby, in ‘J for Johnny’, followed. It was the same as before. The bomb bounced into position with its customary accuracy and exploded, and again the great plume of water rose into the sky. Gibson called in Shannon to make his run, but Martin interrupted. “Hell, it’s gone! It’s gone! Look at it!” ‘P Popsie’, circling back, had been next to the dam when the concrete face spit and crumbled and a ragged hole a hundred feet deep and three hundred across gaped open like a wound. The water – all 134 million tons of it – came pouring out in a vast torrent 25 feet high moving at 20 feet a second.

As Hutchison, ‘G George’s wireless operator, sent the ‘mission successful’ signal back to Bomber Command, Gibson ordered Martin and Maltby home while he, Young, Shannon, Maudsley and Knight went on to the Eder. It took a while to find, as heavy fog was starting to come in, and Gibson circled several times before he was sure. At least there was no flak. The Germans didn’t think it was required. The reservoir nestled in a steep-sided valley surround by hills a thousand feet high. It was no place to try and fly a four-engined heavy bomber at treetop level at night.

Shannon tried first. He made six attempts, but he just couldn’t get the hang of the topography. Eventually he withdrew and continued circling, recommending that Gibson send someone else while he and his crew got their breath back and thought about the problem some more. Gibson told Maudsley in ‘Z for Zebra’ to go in. He dropped in very fast and came rocketing across the water. He dropped Upkeep alright, but too fast and the bomb bounced into the dam parapet and exploded with ‘Z Zebra’ directly above. Incredibly the badly damaged bomber got away, but Maudsley never made it home: night-fighters got him somewhere over Germany.

Shannon tried again. He made one attempt and missed; then he came back and tried again. This time it worked. He got down and got the speed and dropped Upkeep. The bomb bounced and slithered to the dam and exploded perfectly. When the plume cleared, though, the dam was still there. Gibson ordered in Knight in ‘N for Nut’. He was the only one left with a bomb. Shannon advised him over the radio, and ‘N Nut’ came sweetly across the lake and let go its bomb perfectly. It was enough. The dam burst, and fully 200 million tons of water came blasting through the breach, rolling down the steep valley at 30 feet a second. Gibson and his surviving planes turned for home.

There had been a third target, the Sorpe. Only two aircraft bombed it successfully. McCarthy, in ‘T for Tommy’, was the only surviving aircraft of the second formation. Rice had turned back after hitting the sea, while Munro had had his radio shot out over Holland and had had to turn back as well. Byers was shot down by flak and crashed into the Waddenzee while Barlow crashed into electricity pylons near Haldern. Of the third formation, the so-called ‘Mobile Reserve’, Brown in ‘F for Freddie’ joined McCarthy in successfully attacking the Sorpe, but the dam held. By the time Anderson in ‘Y for York’ reached the target the fog was too thick and he returned to Scampton with his bomb still on board. Townsend, in ‘O for Orange’ (who had had an exciting trip already: the wireless operator looked out to see treetops whipping past above eye-level, as Townsend took his bomber through forest firebreaks) attacked a dam which he claimed was the Ennepe but may have been the Bever. It was not breached. Ottley and Burpee, in ‘C Charlie’ and ‘S Sugar’ respectively, were dead without having reached their targets. Of the 133 crew who flew the raid, 53 died. At least 1,600 people were killed by the floodwaters, the vast majority of them non-combatants. It was a raid justified by the awful algebra of necessity: Germany’s industrial output for the region dropped significantly for several months, and perhaps people who would have died didn’t, as the tanks, guns, bombs and bullets that would have killed them were not made.Thousands of German soldiers were taken away from more pressing engagements elsewhere in order to rebuild the dams.

Many of the aircrew were awarded medals. They had done a difficult and dangerous job with supreme professionalism and courage, and the squadron as a whole – on the basis of a single operation, and after being in existence for only a few weeks – became one of the most famous in the airforce. Thirty-three medals were awarded, including DSOs for Martin, McCarthy, Maltby, Shannon and Knight and the Victoria Cross for Gibson.

617 went on to do other remarkable things. They sank the battleships Tirpitz and Lutzow; pretended to be a massive naval convoy sailing to Calais on D-Day and kept German defences tied up while the real landings happened in Normandy; they drained the Dortmund-Ems canal, crippling German communications; and they wrecked the V3 secret weapon, a battery of buried guns with barrels 500 feet long that would have been capable of dropping 600 tons of high explosive on London per day.

In work recently we were told to build a Dambusters model. The one we were given was the new 1:72 Airfix kit of the Type 464 Lancaster, ‘G for George’, as she appeared on the night of 16th – 17th May 1943. I built it and modified it a little – it has the full crew – and displayed it over a model of the Moehne Dam. The dam – though shortened – is also reasonably accurate. It has the 20mm flak cannon that damaged Martin and got Hopgood. It even has the ornamental pine trees. But as with any model, it improves enormously if you know the story behind it, and the story of the Dam Busters is one of the best I know.

On History

My friend Louis recently posted a blog which featured a ‘guest post‘ by his friend Peter. It concerned the death of Margaret Thatcher, and contended that this was a person who at least measured themselves against high ideals.

I do not propose to take issue with the main content of that post. I am not about to argue politics – I come from Northern Ireland, and I have a deep-seated aversion to stepping into that particular world of potential hurts – but Peter says something at the beginning of his remarks that strikes me as foolhardy. What he says is this:

“I struggle to understand the staunch hatred of some in their 20′s who cannot possibly have a recollection of her time of leadership. It also seems clear that even fewer can remember the country as it existed before her time in office.”

The problem here is that Peter, perhaps through nothing more than semantic imprecision (though I suspect not), has conflated the process of ‘recollection’ with the process of ‘understanding’. You do not have to have experienced something at first hand to be aware of its merits or faults. I have never starved but I know that to be in the midst of famine is catastrophic. I have never been subject to the exercise of merciless power but I know that totalitarianism is a brutalist form of government.

The problem goes deeper than this. By making the conflation Peter attacks the foundation of History (as a subject worthy of study) itself. His perspective is that of the Vietnam veteran of countless cliched renditions: “You don’t know, man! You weren’t there!”

Not being there is vital if one hopes to achieve a form of record that is anything other than hopelessly partisan. Not being there confers realistic potential to the aspiration to objectivity. A man who survives a battlefield may write memoirs of exceptional vividness but his appreciation of the battle itself is likely to be so coloured by personal experience that its objective understanding of the complexities of the event is sorely lacking. The prime example of this, at least recently, is Winston Churchill’s ‘History of the Second World War’. “History will be kind to me,” he declared, “because I intend to write it.” He did, and it was.

If Peter does not understand how people who did not directly experience events can form conclusions on them – particularly if those people are, like me, in their twenties – then I suggest he takes a look in his nearest bookshop, and see how many books there are on topics on which no one can possibly have any recollection. And I advise that he consider how many of them grew out of Masters or PhD theses written by people, like me, under thirty.

Gateway Drugs

There are many routes into fiction and the writing thereof. Some are more respected than others. One that draws more debate than any other, though, is Fan Fiction, or fanfic.

There are two opposing perspectives on this. One is that it does no harm. Some authors actively encourage it – JK Rowling is the most famous of these, although Stephanie Meyer also has her adherents. Famously, the ‘Fifty Shades’ trilogy started life as an eroticised fanfic (so-called ‘slash fiction’) using the characters from her ‘Twilight’ series.

Other authors take the opposite position. One writing more eloquently than most on the topic is George R. R. Martin, author of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ (upon which the HBO series ‘Game of Thrones’ is based). He explained his opposition on a number of grounds, not least of which was that it opened a kind of Pandora’s Box of non-control that would be difficult ever to reign in again.

As for me, I’m not sure where I stand. I began long-form creative writing with fanfic. I wrote X-Files stories with, yes, Mulder and Scully, and then I graduated to a much longer and more involved story, a first stab at a novel, that was set in Dale Brown’s universe of stories featuring Patrick McLanahan. That tale, called Stealing the Thunder, got to 20,000 words before I became aware of the particular relevence of the words ‘copyright infringement’. And it started off as one type of story before trying, desperately hard, to become something else entirely, lurching wildly from geopolitical thriller to hard military sci-fi. But it was a launch pad, and I took some valuable lessons from it, and I was able to lift the original character of an engineer called Paul Ray direct from those pages and give him his own enormous narrative that I am still writing.

Which brings me to where I stand on fanfic today. Should my books ever be published, they feature a sufficiently large and developed universe that it could probably withstand people playing there too. But I am jealous of my characters (in the sense of being protective of them). The metaphor of a sandbox is often invoked. I think it’s a good metaphor. It’s robust and adaptible. In this case, I say: Feel free to play in my sandbox, but bring your own toys. Some toys I may provide – I have a comprehensive list of spaceships of the Terrestrial Navy, for example, and should my books be published I would probably make that list available for people who wanted to start telling stories featuring them and their crews – but my characters are mine, and they’re off-limits.

Unless, of course, you have special dispensation. My good friend Chris and I once agreed, years ago (I wonder if he still remembers this?), to write short stories based in each others’ universes – my hard scifi one and his steampunk fantasy. I started writing one that featured a battle between insectile airships and blood angels; he wanted – or so he told me at the time – to write a story about the much-feared but little understood Black Choir of my trilogy. Since the Black Choir, at the time, was referred to only in a few scattered references spread over several hundred thousand words, he decided – not un-sensibly – to hold off until I had provided much more information. He is still waiting, because although I have now written almost 120,000 words of the book in which the Black Choir appear outright they have yet to make their debut in all their fearsome glory. Because I know and trust Chris and his authorial instincts, he gets to play with my toys, as and when he has the opportunity to do so. There are, as yet, few others I would allow the same freedom (one of them, as it happens, married Chris!).

I think it’s good to retain some modicum of control. But I can’t deny that I found Chris’s request flattering. To have toys considered cool enough that they are worthy of envy, even outright theft, reaffirms their value, even if you cannot possibly condone that sort of behaviour. To write a universe considered so interesting that other people want to explore it suggests that you have, indeed, found something interesting in the first place.

One potential advantage to my current lack of publication is the knowledge that I can happily get on with writing in that universe without the potential of some chancer to come along and claim I stole their idea. It also means that canonicity, in the event of publication, will be clear. And just for the record, I hereby lay claim to the story of the Stargazer War (set 30 years before the present trilogy) and the Enigma Variations and the defence of Civilisation (set 200 years later). Again, my toys, and not for sharing.

I think fanfic is a good place to start writing. But it’s not a good place to stay. Sooner or later creative writing has to get creative. In learning to fly you have to spread your wings, launch yourself away from the things you know… and soar.

Per Mare, Per Terram…Ad Astra?

From time to time, Dear Reader, I get annoyed about things. I usually feel the need to convey this displeasure, which is why on this blog you find rants on such topics as Jan Moir and Trafigura; the BNP; the Daily Mail; etc., etc… Are those things deserving of rants? Certainly. Are they hideous blights upon the cultural health of the nation? Without doubt. But they are not things in which I have a personal stake. The offensiveness of the Daily Mail does not actually impinge upon my ability to get on with my life.

However, gallumphing over the horizon comes the pustuled mastodon that is Games Workshop. And they actually have managed to pick a fight where I have a personal level of involvement.

But first, a few brief words of explanation. Games Workshop (GW) is a model manufacturer specialising in tabletop wargaming figures and vehicles, concentrating on fantasy and science-fiction games called ‘Warhammer’ and ‘Warhammer 40,000′ respectively. (They also do figures for ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’). My own involvement with the company’s products is fairly minimal – their paintbrushes are ghastly but some of the acrylic paints they sell are really good. Their scenic products are done better – and cheaper – by suppliers in the world of model railways. So I’m reasonably familiar wih their products, but I seldom have need of them. Basically, up until now, GW and I have nodded at each other in passing and carried on in our own ways.

That has now changed.

It has changed because of a woman called M.C.A Hogarth. She is a writer of science fiction and the author of an original novel called ‘Spots the Space Marine’. She made it available as an e-book on Amazon…until Games Workshop told Amazon to remove it from sale. You can read the whole sorry tale here, but the gist of it is this: GW believes that now that they are publishing e-books set in the universe of their sci-fi and fantasy wargames they own the common law trademark on the phrase ‘space marine’. Essentially, as far as GW is concerned, “All your space marines are belong to us.” And so Ms Hogarth, whose fiction has nothing to do with that of GW, was told by them to cease and desist.

This is staggering overreach, and for a very basic and simple reason: the term ‘space marine’ is a common usage trope in science fiction that goes back at least to 1932, before the founders of GW were even born. E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith made mention of them in his ‘Lensman’ series, but the doyen of the phrase is Robert Heinlein, who used the term in a number of novels and then defined it (albeit not by that name) in ‘Starship Troopers’, which then became required reading for the actors playing Marines in the film ‘Aliens’. ‘Space Marines’ is a phrase with a long and distinguished pedigree in science fiction, and for GW to come along and claim trademark on it is simply ludicrous.

I am not the only one to think so. John Scalzi, an author of military SF and the current chairman of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, was most displeased. BoingBoing joined the clamour of reprobation. Various other authors and knowledgeable types weighed in, as did the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organisation devoted to preserving and defending internet freedom). The upshot of all this heaped opprobrium is that Amazon has quietly reinstated Maggie Hogarth’s book for sale.

Games Workshop has stayed fairly silent on the whole matter, except for a Facebook post explaining that they were required – somehow – to make the claim of trademark infringement (however spurious everyone else knew it to be)…but that Facebook post has now been taken down. In any case, it is difficult to imagine what on earth they could say to mollify anyone at this point. They have annoyed science-fiction authors, readers, supporters of internet freedom, and many others besides. One group of people I could imagine as being more than a little annoyed are the individuals on this list; another group might be the scientists working on this concept.

They have also annoyed me, and, like I say, I do have a dog in this fight. My novels are military SF and they feature space marines. (Quite apart from anything else, I have an affection for Marines anyway and so there is no way I’m not including them). I am relieved to discover that GW, with this whole sorry escapade, have created a phenomenally huge PR disaster for themselves and are unlikely to try it again any time soon (it’s hard to imagine a more sure-fire way to annoy people than to say “We’ve decided we own something you know to be yours, and if you start using it we’re going to take it away – even if, as in Ms Hogarth’s case, some of the proceeds from sales of the book were going to a veterans’ charity”).

One final note. I work with a nation-wide model retailer. There has been some discussion, recently, between all levels of management about whether or not we ought to stock Games Workshop products. On the basis of this debacle, and seeing the contempt with which GW  appears to treat its customers, fanbase, stock-holders and all media outlets, I will be ensuring that my objection to forming any kind of business relationship with the company is heard at every level. There is no way I want either myself or my store to be associated with Games Workshop.

Per Mare, Per Terram, Ad Astra.

Hornby Gresley B17 ‘Sandringham’ leads a train of teak suburban coaches across the suspension bridge

The Next Big Thing?

A little while ago I joined an internet forum for authors (because reasons), and I have found in them a great source of comfort and support. Writing can be a fairly solitary occupation, regardless of whether it’s academic or commercial, and it’s good to have people on hand to spur you on. I have such people in real life, of course, who can offer words of encouragement (or, should you require it, dire threats), but it’s always worth expanding your circle of supporters.

Bearing that in mind, I was invited to participate in a blog-hop thing, whereby we discuss our WIPs. This is internet-forum speak for ‘Work In Progress’. I know, it’s not a lingo I’m very good at either. I keep having to ask what people are talking about. Anyway, there are ten questions to answer, and since Anna Zabo was kind enough to link to this blog I suppose I had better uphold my end of the bargain…

What is the working title of your book?

It is called ‘The Wings of the Dawn’. (That title is lifted directly from Psalm 139)

Where did the idea for the book come from?

This is a slightly more complicated question. ‘The Wings of the Dawn’ is the third of my trilogy. The idea for the story as a whole came many years ago, when I was sitting and bored almost out of my skull writing my GCSE English Language paper. I was required to explain what significance, if any, the shape of the bin-bags held in a comprehension, when I realised I could be having almost infinitely more fun doing some writing of my own. Science Fiction was my thing, and Military SF my sub-genre of choice, and that is what I wanted to write. Then I had this weird mental image, of a man running down a burning steel corridor having set it on fire himself – and that single idea eventually became the starting point for a trilogy that will be more than 800,000 words long when it’s done.

The first germination of the ideas that inform this book, however, started even before that, with a piece of information about some insanely cool physics that I came across in a Reader’s Digest when I was about 9 years old. And having sat on it for 20 years, I finally got to use it!

What genre does your book fall into?

This is thorough-going Military SF. Which is, I have learned, a difficult genre in which to work, because you have to be able to deliver all the elements one expects of regular SF while at the same time writing the military side of things with at least equal fidelity. This is, famously, something George Lucas never managed, which why ‘Star Wars’ is fun SF but terrible military SF. (Interestingly, some of the authors writing the post-film novels have done it much, much better – I would point to the ‘Rogue Squadron’ books by Michael A. Stackpole as an example).

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

This is a game I play all the time, but I think I have finally settled on my selection. Now, I have cast dozens of my characters, but for the sake of brevity let’s just stick to the main three:

From left to right – Paul Ray (Thomas Jane); Thor Trevelyan (Liam Neeson); Susan Rondahl (Famke Janssen)

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

After a year of war the Confederacy has been beaten to its knees, and must risk everything on one last desperate throw of the dice – knowing that if it fails, all will be lost forever…

(If you want more information, couched in rather less gnomic terms than that, can I point you to this?)

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I have no plans to self-publish.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

It’s not finished yet, but the hard part is done. There is one chapter, ‘Archers’, that is the clockwork mechanism at the heart of the novel, and if I didn’t get it right then the entire trilogy would fall down. Building up to that slowed me down terribly. However, that chapter is now well behind me and seems to have worked, so now the rest is just claiming one word after another…

But to give you some figures… the first draft of Ghost Among Thieves took 10 months. The first draft of The Passage of Daemons took 3 years (in my defense, I undertook an undergraduate and a postgraduate degree in that time – it wasn’t like I was lounging about doing nothing. Oh, and Daemons is just over a quarter of a million words long, so it wasn’t a small undertaking!)

To what other books in your genre would you compare this story?

As it happens, the book whose shadow looms largest over this trilogy isn’t actually in this genre. Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy is probably the biggest influence, a technothriller with impressive claims on veracity and scope. It even earns itself a sidelong acknowledgement in my text – one of the Terrestrial fleet carriers is called FSS Red Storm. But inside my genre the biggest influence is probably Peter F. Hamilton (someone else unafraid to write on a large scale). Stephen King’s The Stand had a major influence too – particularly on the second book (you know, the one about biological warfare) but throughout the trilogy as well.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The answer to that really is as simple as ‘I wanted to finish my story’. However, the next book is likely to begin a prequel trilogy, and it came about because I accidentally wrote a character that I really liked and couldn’t wait to write about some more. His name is Zadok (yes, like the priest), and he is one of my favourite antagonists.

What else about your book might pique your reader’s interest?

This is it! This is the big finale! This is where the questions are answered, the war is ended, the heroes and villains face each other for the last time! All the things I have been building towards get their moment in the sun, and as for the Crowning Moments of Awesome…there are many, and they are indeed awesome.

I am now required to tag other authors in order to continue the hop, so why not head on over to Jo, who has just finished her first draft of ‘All’s Fair’? Jo is one of my Beta readers (the people at whom I fire chapters as I complete them, and so read my books on the installment plan. Jo is excellent at this, picking up on things I miss, and making extremely helpful suggestions. Basically, Jo is ace) and a pretty mean author in her own right (write?), and you should totally hang out with her.

Go on now. Shoo.

Oh, all right: your moment of Zen for the day:

Jubilee ‘Australia’ poses at the head of a train of immaculate Stanier coaches.

 

 

I’m Brian. And so’s my squirrel.

I was in Marks and Spencers the other day. There is some very odd theology at work there. They have lots of sparkly cardboard animals dotted about the place. These are of varying levels of actual festiveness – reindeer (traditional), doves (less so) and squirrels (eh?). All of these animals, regardless of race, colour, creed and species, are wearing crowns. We are therefore to assume that somehow all these animals are to be considered King of the Jews.

And again I say: eh?

It gets worse. I too work in retail and I have been told that standing orders from our superiors mean that we must – must - play Christmas music from December. We have been told we must ding-dong merrily, by On High.

Usually what happens round about day 4 of this sort of thing is that I start thinking earnestly about sticking a bough of holly up someone’s fa-la-laa, and I turn increasingly Grinch-like. Ceaseless exposure does that to me, in the same way that exposure to gamma rays turned likeable Dr Bruce Banner into the green and rampaging Incredible Hulk.

It’s not just Christmas music that, when poured mercilessly and unremittingly out upon me, makes my inner child curl up and cry inconsolably. I blame the Logos for my aversion to any Christian music in which I am not participating. I could try to justify it (partially) by explaining that I think there is a real problem, somewhere, when descriptions of God’s relationship with Man become a sort of ceaselessly-droning aural wallpaper that slowly fills your head with mush – but mainly it was the endless repetition of monumentally bland Christian music, played eternally from a very small selection of CDs, that finally drove me round the twist.

Christmas is like that, only worse. Firstly, the selection of songs is very limited. Once you take out all the religious stuff (and it gets taken out, for fear of offending people) what you’re left with is shockingly bad. Noddy Holder screeches “It’s Chriiiiiiiiistmaaaaaas!” like the turkey is not alone in getting unexepected condiments forced into unexpected places, and he does this every 45 seconds if you are moving through a shopping centre at a normal walking pace. If you remain in one place, however, you can enjoy him on a much less frequent basis. He will be interspersed with other delights. And even the good ones – ‘Fairytale of New York’, for instance – lose their lustre round about the fifteenth time you hear them in a given day.

Secondly, everybody hates it. Christmas singles are novelty songs. The meaning of the word ‘novelty’ is ‘state or quality of being novel, new, or unique’. After 28 imprecations to ‘Stop the Cavalry’ it has ceased to be novel, new or unique and has instead become hackneyed, depressing and ubiquitous. And these are songs that everyone hears all the time because those in a position to put on music – DJs, the hollowed-out husks of managerial types with no soul – feel somehow beholden to a tradition that they have wretchedly created and now don’t know how to stop. The net result is that peace and goodwill to all men is put further off while everyone looks for enough ivy to strangle the little drummer boy and enough mistletoe and wine to justify some really bad office-party decisions.

You may think I’m getting a little ahead of myself by raising all this at the beginning of November. And I wish, oh how I wish, that that were the case. But I’m not. Boots started playing Christmas music on November the first. The decorations are in place in M&S.  The writing is on the wall, and observe it with fear and trembling, for it says “Must-Have Christmas Gifts’.

(Am I alone in thinking that Christmas would be a lot more fun, less hassle, and considerably more charitable if we were to realise that the words ‘must have’ stand in direct opposition to the more noble sentiments of the season?)

But there is almost nothing I can do. It has been determined at levels higher than I dare contemplate that my bells must jingle, my reindeer must be red-nosed and my grandmother needs to take road-safety precautions very seriously indeed on the night before christmas (where all through the house / one creature was stirring. It was my Famous Grouse). All I can do is to try and find Christmas music that is actually worth listening to, and construct that playlist in the hopes of staving off the inevitable psychotic break for as long as possible.

Your help in this endeavour would be greatly appreciated. So if you have any suggestions, please, share them in the comments section below.

Your moment of Zen for today:

Getting ready ahead of season, the Inverness snowplough is moved into position to deal with the worst of the snow, sleet and blizzarding foulness that might afflict Starlingford. Ho Ho Ho.

In The Ghetto

British railway modellers are a funny bunch. You knew this already, of course; as much as we like to pretend that Sheldon Cooper is not representative of the breed (at least its American sub-species) he does share certain identifiable quirks with the rest of us. There is an ever-increasing mania for ‘prototypical realism’, for example. As one gets older, spends more time (and money!) on one’s layout, one is ever more concerned with getting it looking ‘just like the real thing’. Or so it would seem – certainly it seems to be true of me.

I recently bought Hornby’s ‘Rare Bird’ train pack. A train pack, for those of you unaware of the subtle distinctions here, is different from a train set. A train set is the whole shooting match – locomotive, rolling stock, track, controller, transformer. A train pack, on the other hand, consists solely of the locomotive and train. It’s like a train set for people like me who already have all the track they need.

The ‘Rare Bird’ pack is particularly nice. It features a Gresley A4 – the world’s fastest steam locomotive – in BR Blue, and 3 de-liveried LNER teak coaches. This dates the set to (probably) 1951. This means I can run it on Starlingford when the layout is set up in its ‘Early Postwar’ guise. However, there is a slight problem with the train pack – a problem that lies with Hornby, not me. The problem is that an A4 on an express would be hauling somewhere between 8 and 15 coaches, and the pack contains only 3. And Hornby, in their wisdom, has not made available individual coaches in the correct livery to expand the rake. In consequence, I suspect I will not be running Kingfisher (the A4) with the coaches it came with: I will be running it at the head of a rake of 7 Bachmann BR Mk1s in their crimson and cream livery. The LNER coaches can go behind a BR Blue Holden B12 I happen to have (because my locomotive stud has now, officially, reached ridiculous proportions).

This is what railway modellers do, you see. We get stuff and then work out how to make it run as realistically as possible. I work in a model shop and there are a few regular customers who will come in and buy a whole stack of identical coaches and then spend ages renumbering them with T-cut and replacement transfers so that the running numbers (which you are unlikely to see, since they are 1mm high and likely to be going past you at high speed) are all different.

Something else that railway modellers demonstrate is an extraordinary fidelity. They get more and more specialised with regards to the trains they actually run. So they decide, for instance, that they like the LMS. Then they decide they like the LMS in the early 1930s. Then they decide they like the LMS in the early 1930s around Shap. And before you know it they have become ghettoised, refusing to go near any model that could not justifiably have been present at Shap in the early 1930s. After that, of course, there’s only one thing for it, and that is to start writing letters to the modelling press complaining that the manufacturers seem to have decided, en masse,  not to concentrate sufficient resources on addressing the specific needs of those who are modelling Shap in the early 1930s…

The situation is just as bad, if not worse, in literature. I’m not even talking about Academia, although it strikes me that an Ivory Tower is just a ghetto that’s gone vertical and has better plumbing. I’m in the middle of Peter F. Hamilton’s newest novel, Great North Road and even I – a fan of Hamilton’s and of technological verisimilitude – am beginning to get a bit tired of the endless alphanumeric designations that appear for new bits of kit. So it’s not simply a Jaguar convertible, it’s a Jaguar XJ-7 convertible. It’s not a Daedalus transport aircraft, it’s a Boeing C-8000 Daedalus strategic airlifter. I know why these things are there, of course – they’re thrown in for the tech-heads who love that kind of thing and in whose ghetto Hamilton has placed himself. Terry Pratchett once described (male-oriented) holiday reading as ‘a thousand pages thick and crammed with weapons specifications’, and it’s hard, from time to time, not to sympathise.

I’m particularly alive to it at the moment because I have just finished editing Ghost Among Thieves. When I first wrote it I thought there could be nothing better than a book a thousand pages thick and crammed with weapons specifications. I liked Dale Brown. So GAT was filled to the gunwales with that kind of extraneous detail. It may be important that you, the reader, know that the space-borne “aircraft carrier” FSS Gladiator is a Legion-class vessel (because that kind of detail explains why what happens next comes to pass) – but you definitely don’t need to know that its registration is CVE-682. That kind of thing can sit quite happily in a glossary without intruding on the main text.

In editing, what I have been doing – I now realise – is mild ghetto-busting. While the book is still hard military sci-fi it is no longer tech-head -oriented hard military sci-fi. And I’ve thrown in a few new things too. Going back and re-reading, tweaking and fixing up various things was a marvellous opportunity to insert interesting foreshadowings. There’s a painting term, chiaroscuro, that describes a technique of using light and shadow to suggest depth and three-dimensionality. What I’ve been doing, in my editing, is adding shadowy bits round the edges to suggest that there’s a whole lot more going on in the backround than is immediately apparent. And that has been fun. I’m helped, of course, by the fact that the second book and a major part of the third are written, so I know in considerable detail what happens next, and I can point to it, so that if you were ever to read the entire trilogy you would see things at the end that had been pointed to at the beginning. Even so, I’m able to read GAT in a much more streamlined form than ever before, and that has been more rewarding than I had anticipated.

Speaking of streamlining…something else I did (because reasons) was to try and condense my 182,600-word book into a 250-word synopsis. That’s tricky, but I think it worked out okay. You can read my attempt here, which has been updated with the new version.

I like science fiction. I like that it is so nakedly and unashamedly an ideas-driven genre. It’s my genre. It’s my ghetto.

Or, to put it another way, it’s home.

Your moment of Zen for today:

Gresley A4 ‘Quicksilver’, in original silver and grey livery, disposes of firebox ash after a fast run from Edinburgh. In the background A4 ‘Mallard’ moves off-shed to take over express duties.