Report: London trip – Three of the Best! @ FP

Well there was a couple of days gap on the blog as I made a trip across the country from Cardiff, Wales to London, England. It’s not that bad a trip. One small train ride and then one longer fast-ish 2hrs 30min Great Western Train into  Paddington before jumping on the tube.

The reason for the trip? Three of the Best! @ Forbidden Planet – The launch event for Kraken – China Miéville, City of Ruin – Mark Charan Newton and Apartment 16 by Adam Nevill, though in Mark’s case it was a hot of the press pre-launch as FB would be the first place you can get it as it’s not out until the 4 June 2010 (same date as the paperback of Nights of Villjamur btw).

So what was the hook?

Try to meet China as he’s been the talk on the blog over the last few weeks in the great is it SF debate for The City & The City and the thinking man’s fun that is Kraken.

And I wanted to support MarkCN on the launch of his second book. I’ve been chatting to him around the web and met him at Eastercon. I enjoyed Nights a lot, it’s not perfect, but for a debut, off to a great start and City of Ruin has had a couple of sneak reviews as review copies only arrived Wednesday so were still print warm in FB on Thursday.

I’ll admit that Adam was a nice added bonus but not the main reason for a round  trip that started at 8.30am and ended at 1.40am. But horror is back to the fore.

I’ve made few trips to London and I always have a great time. Usually cause I get to gossip with Liz from MyFavouriteBooks and Thursday was no different. Now if there is someone who is great to talk books with it’s Liz.

As I don’t get to London that often I managed to fit in a couple of visits to some publishing peeps. Me and Liz had a pizza lunch with a publicist from Orbit. It’s just nice to see people as more than an email message. I don’t know were the time went. We just talked books especially The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms becoming a focus of bloggers from both sides of Atlantic and how that wasn’t something that could be planned. We (as bloggers) just chose that one.
And I’m really looking forward to the new Charlie Stross Laundry novel, The Fuller Memorandum.

Bob Howard is an IT specialist and field agent for the Laundry, the branch of Her Majesty’s secret service that deals with occult threats. Overworked and underpaid, Bob is used to his two jobs overflowing from a strict nine to five and, since his wife Mo has a very similar job description, he understands that work will sometimes follow her home, too. But when ‘work’ involves zombie assassins and minions of a mad god’s cult, he realises things are spinning out of control. When a top-secret dossier goes missing and his boss Angleton is implicated, Bob must contend with suspiciously helpful Russian intelligence operatives and an unscrupulous apocalyptic cult before confronting the decades-old secret that lies at the heart of the Laundry: what is so important about the missing Fuller Memorandum? And why are all the people who know dying …?

I was enjoying myself so much I was late for my next meeting. Not good when someone has put aside some of their busy schedule to have a coffee. But the lovely man from Gollancz still took me out for a coffee and went through some of the great books they have coming out over the next few months. I’m saying great, not because he took me for coffee, but because he found a great selection that I think you’ll like.

The most exciting one for me is The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rejaniemi. It might be this start to the blurb… ‘Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits are known throughout the Heterarchy – from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to steal their thoughts, to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of the Moving Cities of Mars…’

A under the radar book as I’ve not seen around is Dog Blood by David Moody, which was surprising due to the buzz around Hater. And one of those things about book chat is people can hand sell you a book. He definitely sold me on trying Robert Rankin again- a writer I enjoyed immensely when I was starting out reading but got a little to insular in my taste.

Well it seems that he’s taken on War of the Worlds with Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions:

The pickled Martian’s tentacles are fraying at the ends and Professor Coffin’s Most Meritorious Unnatural Attraction (the remains of the original alien autopsy, performed by Sir Frederick Treves at the London Hospital) is no longer drawing the crowds. It’s 1895; nearly a decade since Mars invaded Earth, chronicled by H.G. Wells in THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. Wrecked Martian spaceships, back-engineered by Charles Babbage and Nikola Tesla, have carried the Queen’s Own Electric Fusiliers to the red planet, and Mars is now part of the ever-expanding British Empire. The less-than-scrupulous sideshow proprietor likes Off-worlders’ cash, so he needs a sensational new attraction. Word has reached him of the Japanese Devil Fish Girl; nothing quite like her has ever existed before. But Professor Coffin’s quest to possess the ultimate showman’s exhibit is about to cause considerable friction amongst the folk of other planets. Sufficient, in fact, to spark off Worlds War Two.

We also talked about the big three coming early next year – Abercrombie, Lynch and Rothfuss. And it looks like 2011 is going to start off with a big bang.

So at this point my head is already buzzing with books and what do I decide to do? I go for a pre-book signing  browsing session in Forbidden Planet. Now going in there to browse is dangerous thing. I had a paperback limit which excluded the high interest Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis and The Sorcerers’s House by Gene Wolfe.

Instead I bought these mostly inspired by Short Story Month:

So having prepared and desensitised myself to temptation I was ready to meet up with rest of my blogger and twitter friends that had spontaneously decided this was a unmissable event. This as you might have seen on twitter if you follow me wasn’t as easy as you’d expect. Finally the lovely Sharon come and rescued me at the same time that Liz was Google Mapping the Cafe we were meeting in. The power of twitter and internet saved me. And my own iPhone ninja skills were definitely lacking.

Anyway I settled with a coffee and said hey and hugged a few people that I’ve only chatted to online and caught up with lots of others. Just when the crowd had almost reached critical mass we headed to the event.

Now I have to say at this point that this might feel a little too friendly and cozy. But was always surprises me is how welcoming and open everyone is. This reading lark is an amazingly generous shared passion. It’s not a blogging thing, it’s a fan thing. Though this is going to be lot of blogger talk as they are my posse as it were. But everyone at the event – blogger or not – looked like they where enjoying the whole chaos melee going on.

Part of the pre-event milling I bumped into Graeme – who talked babies, well Hope, his gorgeous 3 week old baby girl and he was true to form by running off almost instantly to be somewhere much more important. Great to see him and see pics of Hope.

Now it get’s a little blurry. Mostly as I was staying out of the queue/signing frenzy having several random conversations along the way especially random when James turned up. Another of those rare and fab events considering he’s in Manchester most of the time.

Finally the queues died down a bit and I saw my chance. I took a deep breath and said hello to China Miéville – not that he’s scary or unapproachable in fact he’s lovely – but when in fan mode you’re going to know much more about him than he’s going to know about you, even if you did get mentioned in the same breath as him in The Guardian.

I got a great song lyric quote:

and he picked up a theme that I’ll come back to later:

I grabbed Adam Nevill for his sig as I genuinely have heard some great stuff about Apartment 16.

I left Mark until last, and annoyingly didn’t get him to sign the hardback of Nights I’d lugged to England with me. Next time!

All the signing done and the books below bought it was time for the pub, well a room in the back of a members and guest only club: The Phoenix, where after a whole day of drinking and travelling I managed to create the defrost scene from Austin Powers.

Having a bunch of opinionated book lovers in once place raises some interesting conversions that could make whole blog posts on their own but here are a few thoughts that you may or may not want comment on:

The burning shelf. If your house is burning what books do you want to save? Well to make everyone’s life easier in my house there is one shelf on a tall standard 6 shelf Billy bookcase that is the shelf to save. This makes things simple. These are the books that are personal to me and irreplaceable. Signed editions mostly or rare limited or ARC editions. What would you put on your shelf?

The next are thoughts on the whole death of SF thing. I got a whole new perspective on the idea of fandom. We do I think forget that genre fans are by far the best at support a wide range of authors. That isn’t to say that we can’t all be doing a better job of spreading that love around but when you consider that lit fic especially is harder to break into do  you realise how generous we as a collective.

Plus an unknown debut genre author is generally going to do much better in terms of sales then there is a much higher percentage of readers that are willing to embrace and try new things.

Though I did get a lot of support for my stance that SF especially doesn’t do hot new more cold and calculated – I’m tempered to a degree by the reality of new authors in non genre face a much tougher time.

Speaking of tougher any gathering that contains China Miéville has to include the topic of challenging. If you ever have to take to an author about their books, especially ones who writer obscure lyrics as part of dedications, when it doesn’t half sharpen your mind. I described that I thought his books picked apart and reconstructed and idea rather than set out to tell a truly narrative tale that comes out of a journey. Fair comment I think. We discussed if all novels should be challenging to their readers.

Now it’s an interesting question because like going to the gym the more you challenge and train your muscles then the fitter you get. And I’d say that was true of reading. You become a fitter and healthier reader the more you challenge yourself. You have to develop and change to accommodate the writers intention.

The point that struck me though is that not everyone is China Miéville. Not everyone can or wants to write a novel that is challenging to their readers. It’s come up before that editors can offer suggestions to an author to improve a script but sometimes they have to accept that is far as a writer can do with their own skills in order to improve/update/alter a work.

I’m of the opinion that the skill and the intelligence needed to make something that is challenging and isn’t shit is hard and I’m not the write person to buy or read a book that is an others failed experiment to improve their own writing.

A topic that has been floating around is fanfic. Now James hates it. But I asked him what he makes of professional writers writing tales about Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson for example. As those are fanfiction. They just happen to be by professional authors that can do something with the characters. Also some Warhammer 40K is also fanfic really.

Plus Lovecraft, after reading the intro Cthulhu’s Reign, I discovered after reading the intro to encouraged I can definitely see that fanfic that is dangerous and pointless when written to alter or extend a fans own personal version of the tale – think new Harry Potter or Twilight tales.

But when done well by a considered storyteller with the appropriate characters it can be a wonderful thing. I’m especially biased as I’m listening to fanfic Sherlock Holmes stories bought together by John Josepth Adams and lovely how authentic they feel.

Going back to the whole death of SF thing as we we’re talking classics and why I thought it should be personal choice rather than some expected choice – maybe even going so far as a personal cannon – someone said (and I really can’t remember who suggested:

Classic Fantasy: or, if we gave you £50 to spend on “the best” fantasy, what would you get?

And that’s what it boils down to when you have to spend your own cold hardwired for cash what would you actually buy rather than merely suggest that someone else might want to like.

Worthing thinking about as I’ve said before – you are actually spending someone else’s money recommending a book so you want to be careful they’re going to thank you for it.

I did indeed give MarkCN a quick tarot reading, which was interesting though not ideal with an audience.

Oh and my take on the whole reviewers vs critics things is perfectly illustrated in a point I made. Critics have to spoil twists. They have to examine and explain. A critic couldn’t do the writer as a whole justice without  pulling it apart. A reviewer has to tell you what a book is about, how the author goes about telling their tale and then having to tell you if in their opinion they think you should buy it.

So reviews and criticisms have two different points and two different approaches – that doesn’t say that reviewers can’t be critics or vice versa but the outcome is different.

And last theme that come out was Twilight – not a great amount of love in the group from people who’d actually read it but that wasn’t what really fired the passion it was the Twighlight-ification that was more worrying. I know publishers have to sell books but I saw a couple of covers in FB that made my blood boil. It really did. Namely these:

As Paul pointed out on twitter I was slightly flustered as it’s so hard to spend quality time with everyone and feeling like you’ve at least said hello to people. Though online is a great place to chat nothing beats meeting people in the flesh.

Now lots of my fellow bloggers have done a great job describing their own view of the event:

• Speculative Book Review
• UnBound!
• Speculative Horizons
• Mark Charan Newton
• Adam Nevill
• Dark Fiction Review
• Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review
• Paul C Smith
• Floor to Ceiling Books

And to end, I’ve said this before, if you can go meet your heroes. They are mostly human, they are, if they are genre authors (though I’m sure there a more than a few exceptions) humble and lovely. You’d be amazed by to warm feeling when you meet a group of people that share your passion at the same time as meeting your favourite author.

I had a great time, met many more people than I’ve mentioned and I’m looking forward to another. and if you’re interested and too nervous to come don’t be – though you might want to connect with a few people like twitter-ites or bloggers first if you’re going to come alone – they’ll sort you out.

Oh and here are some random (stolen from Flickr) pics: