Messages

[Do you still hang out with your former protégé Mark Millar at all?]

Do you still hang out with your former protégé Mark Millar at all?
No.

Is that an estranged situation?
It's a can of worms. I met Mark when he was 18, and I really got on with him, because he laughed at all my jokes. He has the same sense of humor as me, he's very dark, and has that sense of humor, so we bonded. I used to phone him every day, and we ended up doing some work together on 2000 AD, which went well. It was funny stuff, we'd meet in the pub and get drunk and do this Big Dave strip, which was a comedy strip, and obviously, he was trying to get into American comics, so I got him on in Swamp Thing, and they asked me to write the book but I said, "Let's get Mark in, let's give him a job," so I consulted with him on the stories, and so on through the Nineties.

When he got the Authority book, his star started to rise, and at that point, he felt he was in my shadow and he had to get out, and the way to get out was to do this fairly uncool split. It was quite hard, I felt, but he had to make his own way, and he was in denial that I'd been there, because I saw a lot of his work had been plotted or devised, even dialogue suggestions were done by me right up until the point of The Ultimates. It was seen by him as a dimunition of his position, even though it wasn't, I was quite proud of him as a mentor. He's done well without me, he has his own style, he does his own stuff. It was kind of that archetype, you get caught up in that story.

You came out and acknowledged this, but that was after the estrangement?
Yeah. Before that, everyone in the business knew that I was working with him, it was obvious, I was 10 years older, I was already successful. His star rose, and that history became sidelined.

He still lives in Glasgow, is there a chance of bumping into him?
There's a very good chance of running into him, and I hope I'm going 100 miles an hour when it happens.

[Dinosaur Summer]

any chance of being able to get this as a subscriber (obviously pay extra) as unfortunately the comic shop in chelmsford seem to be adverse to anything to do with 2000ad

This seems a bit odd. Very few comic shop owners will refuse someone's cash unless they really, really, really hated the title/creator. Even if they don't order comics in advance, they'll usually get them in on request.

The previous only of Stevie's local was like that. Refused to order manga. Refused to get in copies of Ghost World for the  hip young ladiez came in looking for the graphic novel when the film was released.

In fact he used to under-order New X-Men as he refused to allow his best selling X title to be written by Grant Morrison.

That'd go a way to explaining why thisspandex chavinist sold the business & is now couriering johnnies for vending machine now. 

As nice as that promo image is, and considering this is IDW, I wouldn't count on the interiors looking that nice.

Snap. IDW's recent Jurassic Park mini co-written by hard SF author Greg Bear & Son went straight onto Stevie's pull list.

When the first issue shipped, in his excitement Stevie flicked through the pages before purchasing & promptly cancelled the rest of the series.

This wasn't due to it being manga-lite which Stevie understands is very popular withthe jids these days.

It was the insipid dino art.

Stevie can reach across to the bookshelf for a reread  of Bear's Dinosaur Summer whenever he so choses.

He really, really wishes the IDW Dredd well but is reserving personal excitement until more details are forthcoming.

Dedicated to those who still dream of Gerard O'Neill's High Frontier

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeHLS-1Tac8&feature=related

Yet his arc of DC's Legends of the Law proved beyond reasonable doubt  that he can't write Dredd for shit.

[Chasm City]

Kerrin, can you recommend one of his 'earlier, more sterile, cosmic destruction' books? I like reynolds off and on, but havent yet read anything to equal 'pushing ice', which i found almost worthy of clarke. I started revelation space, but didnt get on with it.

Chasm City is what  you need to get your chops around SBT. Not merely whole heartedly  deserving of it's 2002 British Science Fiction Association Award it reads like Wagner & Grant drawn by Ezquerra. It takes place in the Revelation Space milieu but can be read independently of the other books.

Which,  contentious as this may be, are on the whole  Reynold's weakest. Revelation Space is very much the promising debut novel – vertiginously high concept, an engaging setting let down by inordinate pages  developing characters who are ultimately not that interesting.  Redemption Ark is a corker which could do with a bit of a trim in places. But Absolution Gap?

Oh dear. ISHO it's a literary trainwreck of Trans-Siberian proportions  that feels as if  Reynolds had written it because Gollancz asked it of him.

The Prefect is a solidly written SF procedural that's reminiscent of Larry Niven's Gil Hamilton stories (there's a lot of Niven in early Reynolds) but Stevie's Pick of Reynolds' Novels are the later stand alones.

Both House of Suns (Edmund Hamilton & Doc EE Smith's rebooted in a 21st  Century Space Opera Year Zero)  & Terminal City   (simultaneously a homage to Clarke's City & the Stars, a critique of steampunk & the history of science fiction as a genre rendered as narrative) are just stunning.

That said, if the Clarkean Blue Remembered Earth is anything to go by this new trilogy will be the business.

I, on the other hand, am reading 'last and first men' by olaf stapleton (and not, as i mentioned to the lady in waterstones when looking for it, 'oleg mcnoleg'), which has no characters whatsoever...

Yet arguably –paradoxically-- it is the greatest science fiction novel ever written...

and you are indeed right - once it breaks free of the trappings of the retrospectively

...& a young Elizabeth II being impaled upon railings is the best bit!

Bad enough for you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqZiWTYXl7s

That's simply beyond brilliant! This is only the second thing* that's gotten Stevie excited about Star Wars since he was 15 years old.

*The first being scoring a double pass to a preview of the 20th anniversary Special Edition in 1997 in order to impress a certain young lady.

Oh... arse.

Kingdom: Call of the Wild trade but no progs for Stevie this week.

EDIT: Beaten to the punch by TB. Again.

Cracking Ron Smith art & eerily resonate with the contemporay situation in Afghanistan.

Which just goes to show how far we've come, eh?

Stevie has been to Paradise but has never been to me.

Both Prog & Meg.

The creator interviews are generally worth the cover price alone.

[Terminal World]

I don't think electricity is out-of-place or non-existent in the Steam-punk ethos -Moore & O'Neill had the merged Tesla & Edison appliances in LOEG- but I believe the dependence on oil and the combustion engine is kind of the next phase after 'steam'.

Alastair Reynold agrees.

On his tour de force Terminal World

My most recently published novel, Terminal World, was partly born out of a frustration with steampunk. I like the aesthetic of clanking, steam-driven machinery, but a couple of years ago I read a book on the history of the airship, and one of the things I took away from that was the fact that airships were a good idea for about 20 years: they existed in a niche period where we could build petrol engines powerful enough to move airships but still too heavy to be used in airplanes. Although they look very nice, poetic, and romantic, airships couldn't carry much and they were very cumbersome to operate. In the real world, they had no military applications once the biplane was invented.

"In steampunk, you get this situation where we kind of jam at Victorian-level technology. Why would that happen? So I started to think about what it would actually take, in a science fiction context, for a society to get stuck at a certain technological level. In Terminal World, even though people knew there might be technology beyond what they were using, they couldn't do anything about it, because of the Zones which limit them to a certain level of technology. (Of course, there are echoes of Vernor Vinge there.) I thought I'd have some fun crossing from one technology to the other, particularly if things break down and don't fix themselves again.

I've surprised myself a bit by writing something that could be considered Steampunk, as that certainly wasn't at the forefront of my thoughts a year ago. I like the aesthetic, of course, but at the same time I was concerned to come up with a plausible rationale for why a society would reach a kind of cod-victorian level of technology and not progress beyond it.

Like, if you can do airships, why can't you do bi-planes? And if you can do bi-planes, why not monoplanes and then jet fighters? That problem, in essence, is what underpins TW. It's not just steampunk, though. It's also got lashings of valvepunk and a kind of electromechanical, Bakelite-era aesthetic that appeals to me very much: rotary telephone dials, electric trains, switchboards etc. Bakepunk! I guess that's the Terry Gilliam influence coming in. I also read a very good book on airships a year or two ago, Doctor Eckener's Dream Machine, and of course having absorbed that there was a pretty good chance dirigibles were going to surface in my writing sooner or later.

I seem to have become hipster scum

Welcome to the club young chap.

"Lo! The pretty ladiez!!!"

Turn Dredd into fumetti so CF can get his 1000 quid's worth.