Richard [K] Morgan's News and Views

So here's how it works:

I'm taking a shower and through the steamed up glass I spot something on the bathroom floor - something organic and oddly twisted looking, and pretty much the size of a couple of my larger fingers folded over each other. I step out of the shower, curious; and almost at once I realise that this something (in fact it's a broken segment from the strap on my wife's leather toiletry bag) is neither alive nor dangerous.

And I'm disappointed. To the depths of my being.

Quick tumble of conscious memory catching up - I am no longer in Oz.

You can blame some of this blurriness on jet-lag (and age) - at 43 years old, it takes a while to fully shrug off the ten-hour difference between Sydney and Glasgow, not to mention the twenty-something hours of economy class flight and airplane food you face if you want to make the trip. But that's not really it.

What it is, I'm home now, but there's this Other Place and it's still in my head; a place where you can watch kangaroos as tall as men go chest to chest and brawl like incompetent pub drunks, all loose, straight-armed pushing and punching and blindly averted faces; a place where you can lick the green arses of ants and they taste like lime zest; where spider webs can drape a road signpost thickly from top to bottom like something out of some cheesy post-apocalypse SF movie. It's a place where you can get bitten (I did) by a spider the size of a gardening glove, and count yourself lucky it wasn't something altogether smaller and deadlier; where a metre-long lethally poisonous snake can put in an appearance at the beach and all anyone does is give it a wide berth as it heads up the sand for the long grass beyond at a power-walker's pace. A place where you might meet a two and a half metre tiger shark coming the wrong way around a coral formation and watch as it eddies disinterestedly past you, snout seeking something smaller than you to eat. Strange how you're never as scared as you think you'll be. Strange how you adjust.

Strange how you miss it.

Hmmm......time for an update, perhaps. Let me just get out of my bathers here and find a terminal....

Okay, first things first; here's an up-to-date list of the gigs I'll be doing on the eastern side of Australia this month, starting with Melbourne, next week:

Guest speaker at Melbourne Science Fiction Club, Friday 7 May @ 9pm Address: St David's West Brunswick Uniting Church, 74 Melville Rd, Brunswick West, VIC http://msfc.sf.org.au/index.php

Guest speaker at Nova Mob, Saturday 8 May @ 12pm Address: Community Room, Northcote Library, 32-38 Separation St, Northcote, Melbourne, VIC

Book signing at Galaxy Books, Thursday 21 May @ 17:30pm Address: 143 York Street, Sydney www.galaxybooks.com.au

Book signing at Gaslight, Saturday 23 May @ 3pm Address: Unit 10, 83 Wollongong St, Fyshwick, Canberra www.gaslightbooks.com.au

Event/Book signing at Pulp Fiction, Tuesday 26 May @ 6:30pm Address: Queensland Writer's Centre, 109 Edward St, Brisbane, QLD http://www.qwc.asn.au/
http://www.pulpfictionpress.com.au/Contact.htm

If anything last minute gets added to these, I'll try to post it as soon as I know. Meantime, hope one of these gigs is close enough for you to make it. See you there.

And meantime, there's western Australia. WoW.

Where do I start?

Whale sharks? Kangaroos? The sun melting molten into the Indian ocean? These weird crows with a little knot on their throat and a croak that starts out all macho and then tails off into a little whinge? Pelicans chasing toddlers for fish? Dolphins rolling on their backs and turning pink coz they're pregnant and happy? The best damn Vietnamese food I've ever tasted? A river canyon with striated multiple stripes of beige and red rock like someone kidnapped Ellsworth Kelly and transported him back to the days of cave-painting? Lethal, snake-swift aikido done with real and really fucking sharp blades, seasoned through with equal grindings of humour and humility before the form? Giant clams gaping sky blue and black, the swirling colours of a really mellow acid trip framed between massive coral-crusted corrugated jaws? Soft rose light at sunset spearing horizontal across endless brush? A highway right out of Mad Max 2, painted gunshot straight onto the soft rise and fall of the landscape ahead, all the way to the horizon and beyond?

Man, I seen all that and more, these last few weeks. All that and more. My head is full.

So. Some pretty massive thanks are in order, then: to the illustrious Perky, aka PRK, aka Paul Raj Khangure and the whole SwanCon 09 committee for bringing me out here in the first place, treating me like royalty throughout my time with them, and launching me and Virginia northwards with all the good advice and best wishes anyone could wish for. I'm having a blast guys, and it's all down to you!

To be continued.....

Formal notice: the Great January Sale in February and March will end at midnight GMT on Sunday March 29th. Payments received before that deadline will be processed and the books sent out. Anything after that, I'm afraid, will fall into the void.

The sale has been a great success - I now have the novel experience of being able to move from one side of my office to another without tripping over a pile of books or a cardboard box. So many thanks to all who took part - we must do this again sometime - in another seven years, say, when my piles of author copies have once more built up to skyscraper proportions.

And like the bulk of those author copies, I also will soon be Gone - to the other side of the world for a taste of Australian fandom and a country I have been itching to see for what feels like forever. The curious thing is, the Land of Oz has always seemed slightly mythical to me - yeah, sure, I know it has to exist because I keep meeting people who come from there (eg. my brother-in-law) and besides you can see it in the atlases and the history books. But somehow, the concept of a place that's eight thousand miles away through the ground beneath my feet just has a completely fantastical ring to it. As do things like the duck billed platypus and the kangaroo. I mean - an upright, bouncing rat as tall as a man? Come on! Sounds like something out of the Mos Eisley spaceport bar. In fact, I still remember talking to an Australian EFL colleague in Istanbul who told me that in her house back home, you could get up in the morning, go into the kitchen to make coffee and see the kangaroos grazing in the back garden - it was at that point I suddenly realised that at some visceral level I didn't really believe in kangaroos; not the same way I believed in sheep or tigers or elephants - there was just something too strange, too otherwordly about the idea of them really being there, crouched down and grazing right outside the kitchen window.

Well - going to get that perception gap sorted out pretty sharpish. For those of you already over there in the mythical land of Oz, I'll be joining you, first in Perth, the City of Lights (there you go, another wholly fantastical concept - a city in splendid geographical isolation turning its porch lights on to greet an orbiting astronaut as the darkened globe turns and he passes overhead) from April 8th to 13th, and thereafter during May in Melbourne, Hobart, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane, details to follow.

See you there!

Yes - some of you will probably have already noticed that The Cold Commands has surreptitiously changed its name to The Dark Commands, and is also now showing a UK publication date in mid-2010.

Sad but true. On both counts.

The title change alone is a big disappointment for me - I loved the alliteration of the thing (my London editor's idea, curse him, not mine), and the thematic implications. But unfortunately, the way the narrative is unfolding there's nothing remotely cold about any of it; worse still, there are a number of components that have fairly demolished any hope of using any title containing the word cold.

Dark, on the other hand..... Well - you know me by now.

I'm also pretty pissed off - with myself - about the publication push-back, but there's not a lot to be done about that either. Basically, I've spent the last year trying to kick start the second narrative for Ringil and Co, and the process has been fascinating and frustrating in about equal measures.

See, I'd always talked a good fight about making each book in this trilogy a self contained novel, but it wasn't until quite recently that I realised how deeply satisfied I was with the ending of The Steel Remains. Sure, there are loose ends, but when wasn't that true of one of my books? But my characters all ended up where I wanted them to be, they bedded down into the consequences and outcomes of what they'd seen and done with the pleasing clunk of emotional deadbolts falling into place - so rolling them all out of bed again, splashing water on their faces and getting them to open up and let in the morning light has proved a lot more problematic than I'd expected. I started at least twice and then had to tear up what I'd written because it was some weak-assed shit. Worse still, when I did finally get onto what felt like the right track, it involved at least a couple of scenes that I really didn't want to write. If you guys thought The Steel Remains was brutal, you ain't seen nothing yet.

And won't see it for a while yet, either. Sorry about that.

These scheduling issues are further complicated by the fact that I'm off to Australia in April and will be there for a couple of months, doing bookshop signings, SF club appearances and general publicity in Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane and Tasmania, and kicking off with a Guest of Honour gig at SwanCon 09 in Perth (oh, okay, yes, alright, and having some serious antipodean downtime along the way). I'll post details of those gigs later in the month as my publishers in Oz and I get them thrashed out. Meantime, you can get more on SwanCon from their website which is here.

And back here in Scotland, the great January sale in February has spilled over into March. It should run for at least a couple more weeks. There's an update on what stuff I've got left posted in Comments on the original entry, so if you're still looking for something, check it out or drop me a mail. I'll be locking up the store before I head out to SwanCon, so there's not a lot of time left, but until I serve notice of that, it's safe to assume we're still rolling.

Happy New Year!

Bit of a crisis of office space right now. I have author copies of my stuff piling up everywhere, and it's getting so I've forgotten what colour the floor beneath all the cardboard boxes is. So - for a limited period only - I'm offering a bunch of my books for sale.

Basically, the deal is this: I'll sign and/or personalise to e-mail order as requested, and then sell you the resulting copy for cover price plus postage. If that seems fair, all you need to participate are:

1) A pay-pal account
2) A home address
3) Some money

To save time and math, I'm going to band all postage costs at a couple of basic levels - Big (hardback, trade paperback) and Small (mass market paperback). This will obviously vary with destination, but will always include whatever tracking option is available for the parcel in each case.

So - mail me with what you want, I'll let you know if I've got copies, and I'll give you a price. If you're agreeable to that price, you make the payment into the pay-pal account I give you, and I'll send the book off as soon as confirmation comes through.

For now, you can assume that I have multiple copies of UK and US editions, both paperback and hardback (where hardback exists), as well as a sprinkling of translated editions in about twenty other languages, and also a few audio-books (which I'll sign in marker on the back of the case). As I say, this is for a limited time only, specifically for the purposes of clearing some space on my shelves, and I expect (I hope!) supply will decline quite fast - so if you're interested, for either yourself or a gift for someone else, I'd advise you to get in quick!

Saw something extraordinary last night. Saw the Dandy Warhols live.

Which is something I've been trying to do for about a year and a half now, ever since I ran into Pete Holmstrom at a book signing in Portland and was bowled over to find he read my books. Ever since then, Pete has been brandishing free tickets and backstage passes at me whenever the Dandys showed up in the UK, and every time I managed to find myself locked into some other engagement - convention in Italy, anniversary in a stone circle on the outer Hebrides, like that....

Well, no more.

The Dandys blew into town last night, played the Glasgow ABC, and blew out again, headed for Dublin. In between, they turned in what has to be one of the most mind-blowing gigs I've ever seen. I mean, I thought they'd be good, I expected them to be good, but this.......

Where to start? The fact they wandered on stage with no more ceremony than a high school band doing a soundcheck? The fact that by the end my throat was raw with yelling and my arms ached from shoulder to wrist with held-high hand clapping and mad waving about? The fact they shrouded standby anthems like Godless, Not if you Were the Last Junkie on Earth and Bohemian Like You in a swirling fog of guitar sound, holding the audience breathless until the giveaway chords swam up like sea monsters, broke through and turned us all into raving, screaming maniacs once more? The fact that Wasp in the Lotus still sounds like it's a building coming down on you? The fact that what you'd once believed were softly modulated retro-eighties lullabies like You Come in Burned and The Last High turned edgy and raw with the power coming off the stage? The fact they played for two hours straight, no breaks, no retreating off stage at any point for anyone?

Pete Holmstrom stands like some moody dark elf out of myth, a whole switching sequence of different snarling and moaning guitars held low in his arms like he's just torn them bodily up out of the Earth and they weigh a lot, or need gentle soothing before they'll behave. Zia McCabe puts out a twisting, jiving, lost-in-it-all vibe as she works huddled black machinery, sends out bone shuddering waves of sound and raises a tambourine to the crowd like a warrior queen lifting a standard for salute. Oh, and somewhere in there, she finds time to play harmonica too. Brent DeBoer, way up front by usual stage set-up standards, wears a beautific beam plastered across his face for the whole gig, puts in sweet harmony backing vocals, and knocks the drums about like it's something he could do standing on his head if he wanted to, y'know. And Courtney Taylor-Taylor fronts the whole assembly with schizo double-mike vocals, slicing guitar counterpoint to Pete's wall of sound (and vice versa), brief switch-out to percussion that goes smooth as a new-razor shave, and a virtuoso delivery that puts undoubted truth behind the thing he told me earlier backstage - that you write these songs for yourself and no-one else, because it's what you want to hear, or what's the fucking point?

And it doesn't hurt that backstage these guys are as amiable and unassuming after the event as if they'd just finished a twenty minute soundcheck. I expected them to be wiped out, collapsed on sofas, uncommunicative with post performance endorphins.... Instead, they stood around chatting quietly, to the faint smell of Courtney making toast for himself and burning it. Good gig. Yeah, glad you liked it. Felt pretty good to us too. See you again soon.

Oh yes.

Been wanting to write about this for a while now, but I've been struggling with my own anger for a way to do it that won't earn me an unwelcome visit from some stony-faced Special Branch officers. Someone asked me a little while ago in interview if my experience of asshole students when I was still an EFL teacher (finest example being the Egyptians who fronted a colleague of mine with the delightful quip Ah Hitler - now there was a guy who knew how to handle the Jews) has now ebbed as a source for the rage that informs my writing. My answer was something along the lines of yeah, it has, five years out of the profession is a long time. But I'm never short of fresh sources of rage - just look at the papers.

Well - let's look at the papers:

There is this

And this

And this


For a full view on this stuff, you're best just googling something like "Diego Garcia judgement" and backing up through all the links it'll give you. Probably when you're done you'll be as angry as I am.

The question is - what do you do with that anger?

Well - and here comes the visit from Special Branch - it'd be very tempting indeed to suggest sending a detachment of armed men to the homes of our charming Foreign Secretary David Miliband, and Law Lord Hoffman and his majority-ruling chums, and any British politicians still living whose grubby, murderous fingerprints can be found on the Diego Garcia affair (the dead ones could just have their graves desecrated). If any of these people have dogs for pets, said dogs would of course have to be gassed; then their homes could be demolished and they themselves, with their families, could be escorted at gunpoint to some unpleasant form of ocean transport (say a bulk freighter registered out of Liberia) and transported to Port-au-Prince, where they could be dumped on the quayside with fifty quid each in their pockets and the clothes they stand up in, and be told to fuck off and make a living whichever way seems appropriate to the circumstance. Meantime, the ground their homes stood on could be used to build something nice for the Americans - say a statue of George Bush with Tony Blair's tongue up his arse.

These people would, of course, as British citizens, expect some recourse under law for having suffered these outrages - but they would be gently reminded that, in Lord Hoffman's words, the law giveth and the law taketh away, and guess what, guys, today is a taking-away day. David Miliband would be told that of course what was happening to him was most regrettable and we don't excuse it, but we don't feel like doing fuck all about it either, so get on and deal, David.

Sigh.

No, I don't advocate any of this really - I'm too fond of dogs, for one thing. And I believe in the rule of law. My problem is that I believe in it for everybody. And when the law is twisted and broken at the highest level, I believe that those who abuse their power to do it should be punished with correspondingly massive sanction. At a minimum, any living British politician involved in this on-going crime against humanity should go to jail for life. And the Diego Garcians should go home with honours and abject apologies from the British government and whatever funding is necessary to in some small way redress the colossal injustice against them.

And until that happens, any British citizen who's still proud of their country, I will have words with outside.

It must feel very good to be an American today......

Certainly brought a couple of tears to my eye, and it wasn't even my election. Watching the coverage this morning, it occurred to me that we're still only groping our way round the edges of what this means, both in the US and abroad. The long term impact it's going to have could easily be as great as that felt when the twin towers came down; in fact, in many ways I'd say this is the Anti-9/11 - a massive, visceral but this time positive shock to the geopolitical system of the world, an event on the American landscape whose physical facts are far outweighed by the significance of the emotional shadow they cast, and an overwhelming sense that things have changed.

Don't know if any of that promise will get usefully harvested in the long run, but for now I'm just happy to breathe in the rich aroma of potential and enjoy the day.

Only in America, eh.

Outstanding!

This is nice - The Steel Remains just got nominated for the David Gemmell Legend award. Link is here

That's the good news. The bad news is that judging by the amount the book is getting discussed, it doesn't have a kitten's chance in a washing machine of winning.

Ah well, it's not the winning, it's the taking part, eh. That's what the British will tell you. Or that's what Bill Bailey will tell you that's what the British will tell you, anyway.

But feel free to zip along there and vote for it anyway. And thanks in advance if you do.

Ehhh....?

Waddya MEAN you don't think it was THAT GOOD ACTUALLY??? Heretic!! Stone him!! Stone him!! Where's my beard? Stone him!!

Well, you lot have really gone and done it now, haven't you........

Not sure what I did to deserve it, but as of the last couple of months fan-mail volume has gone right through the roof. I am totally bogged down with kind words. As a result of which, I've finally had to admit defeat. From now on in, I'm not going to be able to answer mails directly.

Boo - hiss!!!

Yeah. It doesn't feel good, doing this, especially since the people who fanmail me are arguably core among those who've contributed the most to the success of my books. What a reward for all that enthusiasm, eh? But logistics is logistics, people, and if I don't change something here soon, I'm not going to have any time to actually write the books themselves.

So here's the plan:

1) Please feel free to keep mailing me - I will certainly (at some point) read and appreciate every communication I get. You will still be getting through.

2) Professional communications - requests for interviews, queries about film rights, game tie-ins, other side projects etc - will be answered as soon as I can get to them. This is still the right channel for that stuff.

3) From now on, I will be enabling the comment facility on this blog, so feel free to drop in with, well, comments. Praise, confusion, abuse, back and forth chat, whatever occurs to you. I'm aiming to use a little of the time this change will free up to post a bit more often, and I will try and drop my own comments into the mix from time to time as well. I'll be around.

Keep in touch.

And many, many thanks.