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An Altered Author
Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon, on giving up the day
job, his movie deal with Warner Brothers, and making a big splash
in the hard boiled science fiction genre.
Del Rey: Your first
novel, Altered Carbon, which introduced the character of Takeshi
Kovacs, made a big splash on both sides of the Atlantic with its
distinctive mix of cyber-noir atmospherics and high-tech, hard SF.
How has your life changed since the book came out? Are you a full-time
writer now?
Richard
K. Morgan: Yes, I am. I gave up my day job back in the autumn
of 2002, a little more than six months after Altered Carbon came
out in the U.K. To be honest, this was largely due to the movie
deal with Warner Brothers--gratifying though the reception of the
book was, there was never going to be sufficient income from book
sales alone to justify quitting the relatively well-paid university
post I had at the time. But Hollywood cash works on a whole different
order of magnitude to publishing, and the option money alone was
more than twice what I’d ever seen in a single year, so quitting
to write full time was the obvious thing to do.
But oddly enough (or perhaps not), my life hasn't changed all that
much since. I still live in the same apartment, drive the same car,
and take approximately the same number of holidays abroad that I
did before. The only real difference is that I can finance it all
doing what I love and, more importantly, doing it as and when I
please. In practical terms, this means I can write and have leisure
time and a social life – things which for a struggling writer are
hard-to-justify luxuries.
DR: Is Altered Carbon progressing
toward the big screen? Who would you like to see playing Kovacs?
RM:
I was shown a draft script last year (which I was impressed
to see included a very large percentage of the detail from the novel),
and I’ve heard from a number of different sources that there's a
great deal of enthusiasm out there for the project both from the
screenwriter, John Pogue, and from Joel Silver, at whose behest
Warner Brothers optioned Altered Carbon. Since then, I’ve heard
nothing, so I’m assuming that development is ongoing.
The option comes up for renewal in the near future, so hopefully
I’ll get a better idea of how things are going then. Warner Brothers
will either renew, start principal photography, and pay the full
purchase price or simply hand the thing back to me and say thanks
but no thanks. I try not to worry about it too much--I find the
best way to deal with it is to put it to the back of my mind and
concentrate on my own writing. If it happens, it happens.
I have no major preferences as to who would take the role of Kovacs.
I always envisaged him (or rather the body that he happens to be
wearing in the story) as a bit of a blunt instrument–something along
the lines of Lee Marvin in Point Blank or Prime Cut, or maybe Burt
Lancaster in The Midnight Man or Lawman.
In terms of today’s acting talent, that could be a whole host of
powerful, battered-looking male stars--Robert de Niro, Willem Dafoe,
Harvey Keitel, Tom Sizemore, Jeff Bridges, even Mickey Rourke, now
he’s back in town. Kovacs above all should seem damaged and dangerous,
so anyone who can turn that in would be fine.
DR: Did you feel any pressure
to top yourself in writing Broken Angels?
RM: Well, there’s always a little of that I suppose, but
not as much as you might think. First, there were the logistics
of the thing–by the time Altered Carbon really took off, I had a
good two thirds of Broken Angels already written, and the worry
that it wouldn’t make such a big splash set in too late to affect
things much.
Also, Broken Angels is very different from its predecessor, so
I wasn’t constantly measuring the two against each other. I knew
that anyone who was expecting a second future noir detective story--a
carbon copy, so to speak--was probably going to be disappointed,
but that in itself didn’t carry much weight for me.
One of the joys of writing SF is that you aren’t as constrained
in what you can do as in other genres, and part of this at least
is because the SF readership tends to look for (or at least accept
and enjoy) something fresh in every book. (The crime fiction readership,
by contrast, does seem more inclined to want replica novels; I’m
actually very curious as to why that is, because I’m a big fan of
both genres.) I’d like to think that each book I write, even each
Kovacs book I write, will have a different feel and angle to it.
I don’t want to be just churning out the formula.
DR: Both Altered Carbon
and Broken Angels are set in a far future where human consciousness
can be remotely stored, backed-up, and downloaded into any number
of "sleeves," human or artificial, even across light-years.
How has this technology changed what it means to be human? Or has
it?
RM: Well, obviously the ramifications of sleeving technology
are huge. First and foremost, death suddenly ceases to be the great
leveller--instead, it’s just one more unpleasant aspect of existence
that you can avoid if you’re wealthy enough. Then there’s the fact
that human lifetimes start to get stretched out over time--the rich
and powerful can live for centuries by skipping from body to body,
and if you’re unlucky enough to belong to the criminal class, then
you can find yourself deprived of your body and stored as digital
data for decades or even centuries before being released into flesh
again.
This leads to massive social dislocation, which isn’t helped much
by the sprawl of human civilization over several different star
systems tens or even hundreds of light years apart. Being human
in this kind of universe offers some incredible rewards, but at
the same time it leaves the characters in the books open to a profound
sense of alienation.
However, none of this necessarily means that these human beings
have changed all that much at core. I tend to take a hard-headed
evolutionary psychologist stance on this. It’s taken us hundreds
of thousands of years to evolve into what we now are, and that isn't
going to change in a few centuries just because our technology leaps
ahead exponentially. The characters in Altered Carbon and Broken
Angels face radically different situations and facets of day-to-day
existence to those we face today, true.
But they still have to deal with those situations using the same
smart-ape hunter-gatherer deck we’ve been playing with since we
left central Africa. If you look back half a millennium instead
of forward, you can see quite clearly that although people were
infinitely more limited then than they are now in technological
(and thus civilizational) terms, they didn’t behave that much differently
at base. That’s why Shakespeare’s plays still resonate so profoundly
with us now; we have no problem bridging the gap of centuries and
understanding the motivations of his characters. Similarly, I don’t
imagine things will have changed much at that level five hundred
years from now.
DR: Did humans invent sleeving
technology, or was it derived from the technology of the mysterious
aliens known as the Martians? What can you tell us about this long-vanished
race and the part they play in Broken Angels?
RM: It’s never stated outright, but the base assumption
is that the sleeving technology is ours, deriving from the information
and biotech capacities that we are evolving now. Where the archaeological
discoveries on Mars have given a huge impetus to human science is
in the area of space exploration and communications. Basically,
the Martians left behind their astrogation charts, enabling us to
send colony barges directly to stars with guaranteed terrestroid
worlds around them. This is dealt with obliquely in Altered Carbon,
as background to the story.
In Broken Angels, the hunt for Martian technology comes to the
fore as Kovacs finds himself fighting as a mercenary in a war on
a planet whose principal source of wealth lies in its archaeological
leavings. Obviously, discovering an advanced alien civilization,
and worse still one that predates practically the whole of human
history, has had a massive impact on human culture and philosophy.
Everyone has their own take on who the Martians actually were and
what they might, or could, or should mean to us.
The novel deals with that impact and its long-term implications,
but as background to a rather tight problem of survival for Kovacs
and his friends. By the end of Broken Angels, we know a lot more
about the Martians than we did at the end of Altered Carbon, but
whether the human race is any better off for that knowledge is another
question.
DR: Kovacs’ future is a savage
one, in which the ruling UN Protectorate and an almost Byzantine
array of system-spanning corporate entities ruthlessly compete for
profits and power. Is this military-industrial-corporate future
meant to be a critique of present-day capitalism as practiced in
the West?
RM: Among other things, yes it is. Perhaps more than that,
it’s intended to be a critique of a general human failure to live
up to potential. I don’t believe there’s anything intrinsically
wrong with capitalism, just as I don't believe there's anything
intrinsically wrong with fire. Both have served as powerful engines
of human development and offer huge civilizational benefits if handled
correctly. In the case of fire, that means the provision of fire
extinguishers, a fire brigade, and hospital burns units. Unfortunately,
it seems to be beyond our capacity (or at least interest) to do
anything similar with capitalism.
Contemporary western capitalist models can best be imagined as
an immensely high-performance vehicle whose owners insist on stripping
out the brakes, airbags, fenders, roll bars, side impact protection,
and seat belts because, well, what's the point–all that stuff is
just going to slow us down, right? Er . . . no. Wrong. You need
that stuff or you’re going to crash and kill your passengers.
So similarly, the UN Protectorate universe is a model of human
stupidity operating out of control on an interstellar scale. The
potential of the Settled Worlds, the knowledge inherited from the
Martians, and the enormous technological leaps human science has
made are all just pissed away–fed into a machine that feeds a short-sighted
greed hierarchy and killer-ape tendencies. Sounds familiar, doesn’t
it?
DR: Does science fiction
have an obligation to engage the present as well as look ahead toward
possible futures? Do you try to be relevant, or just entertain?
RM: As a novelist, I don’t really think I have any obligation
other than to tell a good story. That applies to SF as much as any
other genre. But–and it’s a big but–I don’t think you can tell a
good story, at least not in this day and age, unless you provide
engaging human detail and a convincing backdrop.
Given what we discussed earlier about the relative immutability
of human behavior over time, I think engaging human detail and convincing
backdrop will inevitably force an engagement with present concerns
in any SF that concerns human beings. And in fact, even SF that
doesn’t concern human beings tends to feature post-humans or aliens
with remarkably anthropomorphic characteristics–which is fair enough,
because it’s hard to imagine an SF story inhabited by creatures
whose concerns are so alien to ours that we can’t empathize with
them.
Who on earth–ha!–is going to read something like that? Who on earth
is going to want to read something like that?? And who on earth
is going to want to write it??? So I don’t consciously try to be
relevant; it just happens. In trying to be convincing, I inevitably
find relevance creeping in. I create (or, to be completely honest,
I re-model) a future technology for Altered Carbon, and inevitably
the questions that want answering are: Who has control of this technology?
Who benefits? Who suffers? Why? In trying to answer those questions
convincingly, I look around at current technology and its social
impact. I extrapolate from what I see, and Bingo!–present relevance!
DR: Do you believe that technological
advances can bring about a utopia? Or is the belief in utopias just
another casualty of the twentieth century?
RM: In answer to the first question–no, definitely not.
The quality of a society depends on the behavior of the humans within
it. Of course, technology has certainly made it far easier for us
to get along in a civilized fashion. It’s given us levels of wealth
that (in the developed world at least) have minimized violent competition
over resources.
It’s helped us to build a body of civilizational assumptions about
how we should behave and an externalization of interior feeling,
otherwise known as Art, that helps bring us together. Most recently,
it’s helping us to see the complexity of the world we live in and
the necessity of engaging with that complexity in a constructive
fashion. But none of these things is going to solve the basic human
problems that disfigure our social systems.
There’s an interesting line in an otherwise unremarkable movie
called Enemy at the Gate where a Soviet political officer confesses
to a soldier that his faith in the tenets of socialism has been
destroyed by his jealousy over a woman’s affections. Even with the
most perfect sharing of wealth and resources, he realizes, there
will still be reasons to envy and to hate and to fight.
Unfortunately, he’s right–it’s the human element that messes things
up every time. So we won’t get anywhere near a utopia relying on
technology alone. We might have a decent stab at it through grassroots
empowerment and genuine education for life, using technology as
a trenching tool (so I guess that's a tentative no to the second
question), but even then you’ve got to wonder who's going to set
all that in motion–because it’s certainly not in the interests of
those with the power to make those decisions.
DR: Describe Takeshi Kovacs
for us. What makes him tick?
RM: At one level, Kovacs is the Protectorate’s chickens
coming home to roost. The Protectorate trained him as an Envoy,
used him, and then, when it couldn't trust him any longer, cut him
loose. At another level, he’s a man who grew up hating his father
for the violent domestic abuse he saw handed out to his mother and
sisters, but who never got the chance to mete out the necessary
retribution.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to map these two onto each
other and see that here is a man who has been betrayed by his authority
figures every step of the way. Violent and unpredictable retributive
acts against patriarchal authority are the inevitable result, but
so is a curious sensitivity, especially to women.
Kovacs is highly intelligent (you couldn’t be an Envoy otherwise)
and, by our standards, surprisingly well educated (future technology
makes it possible to acquire a varied and extensive knowledge base
far more casually than would be the case now). All of this simply
makes him more dangerous if you’re in his way. He is not a moral
man and does not, despite some rumors to the contrary, adhere to
any code of conduct, personal or otherwise.
He is, however, capable of great personal loyalty and a sporadic
empathy which can sometimesbalance out his more nihilistic tendencies.
The demons that haunt him most are the doubt he carries within himself
as to how human he actually is (Envoy conditioning has some peculiar
side effects) and, perhaps more importantly, to what extent he may
be coming to resemble the authority figures he hates so much.
DR: What does it mean to be an
Envoy? And what does it mean to be an ex-Envoy? To tell the truth,
I was a little surprised that there were any ex-Envoys; they seem
too potentially dangerous to both Protectorate and corporate interests
to be permitted to exist, at least judging by Kovacs.
RM: The Envoys were the Protectorate’s -- probably unwise--
response to the logistical nightmare of trying to govern the Settled
Worlds with only sublight space travel and supralight data transfer
available for linkage. In the event of offworld unrest, obviously
you can’t rely on sending Heinlein’s starship troopers out to put
down the revolt, because they'll get there years, decades, or centuries
too late. You can transfer the minds of said starship troopers,
as supralight digitized datafreight, and decant them into new sleeves
at the other end, but they're going to be too confused to perform
very well: new body, new planet, different gravity, circadian rhythm,
weather systems, biosphere, culture, etc. What they’d need more
than anything is a couple of months R&R just to get used to
the place, and even then they're still going to be tourists fighting
the locals, and they'll lose. You simply can’t run a repressive
sphere of influence like that.
The Envoys were created with the idea of conditioning elite special
forces with a system of Zen acceptance at a mental level–thus, when
an Envoy’s mind is freighted, the discipline goes with it and enables
the Envoy to cope, at superhuman levels of calm and assimilation,
when decanted into the middle of an alien environment and, quite
probably, a planetary war. However, in the process of creating this
conditioning for the Envoys, a number of incovenient aspects of
human personality architecture have to be demolished or at least
renovated, so it’s questionable if what comes out at the other end
quite qualifies as a sane human being. All very upsetting, but as
the political leaders of the time said, tough times call for tough
measures.
They had no idea how tough.
From the very beginning, the Envoys proved difficult to keep in
line. For one thing, their internal hierarchy was fluid and everchanging–officers
were elected from the ranks on a temporary basis and replaced as
soon as it became apparent they had had enough, which, given the
nature of the work they were required to do, was often.
This flexible internal system sat very poorly in liaison with external
agencies such as the other arms of the Protectorate military machine,
and caused a lot of friction. Envoys did not follow orders as such;
they worked towards negotiated outcomes and tended to see their
relationship with the military as one of semi-independent consultancy.
No one liked this (though politicians, military leaders, and corporate
figures were all quite happy to use it as currency in their own
maneuvering and infighting), but there was no perceived alternative,
and the one thing no one could deny was that the Envoys got results.
Later attempts to assert some measure of rigid hierarchical control
simply led to increased tensions, and decreased efficiency in deployments,
culminating in the military debacle at Innenin. By this time, disillusioned
Envoys were resigning from the service in substantial numbers, something
that the Protectorate had never envisioned and didn’t have the slightest
idea how to deal with.
Hasty legislation prevented these ex-Envoys from holding positions
of any political or corporate authority, or from borrowing sufficient
capital to swim successfully in the corporate ocean, and their numbers
were replaced with fresh waves of recruitment and conditioning.
It proved impossible to take any more serious measures against the
ex-Envoys because the Protectorate was afraid of repercussions from
within the Corps. Serving Envoys were disgruntled enough as it was
without giving them further cause for grievance, and they were still
the only military option that really worked over interstellar distances.
Meanwhile, ex-Envoys were faced with only two realistic choices
apart from poverty--they either offered their skills to the numerous
mercenary units who made up a substantial portion of the Protectorate
local levies, or they became criminals. They were superlatively
good at both.
DR: Aside from the fact
that he is wearing a different sleeve, how is the Kovacs of Broken
Angels different from the Kovacs of Altered Carbon?
RM: He’s not really different at all–same psychoses, same
sense of humour--unless you count his response to circumstances,
which is the pre-eminent Envoy skill. Altered Carbon saw him in
a relatively civilized context (San Francisco!), so his behavior
was relatively restrained.
In Broken Angels, he’s fighting (or a least trying to stay alive
in) a planetary war, and there’s a corresponding upgrade in his
ferocity. His actions are far more morally ambiguous than they were
in Altered Carbon, but that only reflects the lack of moral options
the war offers.
The keynote with the Envoys is that they get the job done, whatever
that takes, and as a result they really aren't nice people. Ex-Envoys
are even worse, because they lack any structured direction and getting
the job done tends to translate into not much more than personal
survival and gain.
Kovacs’ emotionally damaged background means that his perceptions
of what the job is can vary alarmingly, with corresponding vertigo
for the reader when you come along for the ride. His agendas are
perhaps ultimately more complex in Broken Angels than they were
in Altered Carbon, but the war simplifies matters for him brutally.
At the end of Altered Carbon, you were left with, in Kovacs’s words,
"something clean," but only because it became vital for
him to reject Reileen Kawahara’s taunts and believe that he was
in some way different from her. There’s a similar kind of rejection
in Broken Angels, but it’s far messier because circumstances dictate
that in war there is nothing "clean."
DR: What writers have had
the biggest influence on your work?
RM: In old-school SF, Poul Anderson. I read his Dominic
Flandry short stories at an early age and they made a tremendous
impact–it was the first time in SF that I’d come across morally
ambiguous characters and situations with real emotional depth. I
still think he was one of the finest storytellers SF ever had, and
I was genuinely upset when I heard he died in 2001.
Another old-school favorite was Bob Shaw, for the way he married
future technology with human fallibility and humor, but the next
big SF influence on me was William Gibson, whose short stories "Johnny
Mnemonic," "New Rose Hotel," "Hinterlands," and "Burning Chrome"
blew me away when I first read them in Omni back in the seventies.
Gibson also prodded me in the direction of noir crime fiction, because
at the time all the critics were calling him the Raymond Chandler
of SF, and that sent me out looking for this Chandler guy.
Crime fiction turned out to have a huge influence on my writing
as well, because there was a raw immediacy to it that you very often
didn’t get in SF (this, of course, was what Gibson had so successfully
imported into the genre and what the critics recognized as "Chandleresque").
My enduring favorites are James Ellroy, for the sheer psychotically
driven power of the writing, and Lawrence Block, for the chilling
noir realism of his Matt Scudder series--nothing to touch either
in the genre. However, I’ve also got a lot of time for James Sallis,
James Lee Burke, Walter Mosely, and Sara Paretsky because, after
Chandler, she was my first.
DR: It’s been said that
British science fiction is undergoing a renaissance, and that the
cutting edge of the genre has shifted there from the US. Do you
agree?
RM: Hmm–seems a bit harsh. I think there’s a tendency in
the U.K., every time we do something that sells in the U.S., to
start screaming, "The British are coming, the British are coming–it’s
the Rolling Stones and the Beatles all over again!" Yeah, sure,
there are a lot of excellent British SF/F writers working and selling
that work in the U.S., but it is a two-way traffic.
Some of the most interesting SF/F currently being written is still
being done by Americans–look at Jeff VanderMeer, Kelly Link, Ray
Vukevich. And I’d argue that guys like Gibson and Neal Stephenson,
while already well established, are still producing stuff that could
be qualified as cutting edge. So, for that matter, is Jonathan Carroll
(okay, I know he lives in Vienna and, come to that, Gibson lives
in Vancouver, but they are still both Americans).
And as to there being a British SF "renaissance," I don’t
know–that sounds a bit like hype to me as well. When is this renaissance
supposed to have started? Twenty-first century with Al Reynolds,
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, China Mièville? Well, Grimwood was
putting out his first novels to rapturous reception during the late
nineties, and even Mièville’s King Rat is from 1999. Stephen
Baxter’s The Time Ships won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1996. Okay,
so let’s say this renaissance started in the late nineties then.
But then you’ve got Ken Macleod, who kicked in a couple of years
before that, and Peter F. Hamilton, who’s been going strong since
the early nineties. And by the time you get back to the early nineties
you’ve got Simon Ings’ Hothead. Oh, and then there’s Iain M. Banks,
who’s been banging out his superb Culture novels since the late
eighties. And so back we go again, looking for the definitive start
of this renaissance. I think the truth is that British SF has been
in good health for some considerable time, and the renaissance is
more a marketing concept than anything.
DR: Your next novel, Market
Forces, will soon be out in the UK. Any news on the American release?
And is it another Kovacs novel?
RM: Market Forces isn’t Kovacs – it’s set in the near future,
about fifty years from now, and has a somewhat different narrative
structure and tone to the Kovacs books. It’s something I'd been
playing about with for a long time in parallel to writing Kovacs,
and forms part of a second contract with my U.K. publisher, Gollancz.
Technically, it should have been my fourth novel, but after some
discussion with my editor at Gollancz and our agent in Hollywood,
it was decided that I should prioritize Market Forces over Kovacs
3, as there was potential for another film deal.
The contract with my U.S. publishers, Del Rey, was for three Kovacs
books, but they’re publishing me a year behind the U.K. schedule,
so this shift didn’t create any problem–it’s just brought us up
to speed. However, I now understand that Del Rey is also very enthusiastic
about Market Forces and are looking at buying it as part of a second
contract, so it may be that it'll be published before Kovacs 3 in
the U.S. as well. Watch this space!
[Editor’s Note: Del Rey Books will be publishing Market Forces
in Spring of 2005.]
DR: Finally, what can you
tell us about Kovacs 3? Is there a title yet? How will it differ
from Altered Carbon and Broken Angels?
RM: The working title is Woken Furies, and the novel is
set on Kovacs’s home planet, Harlan’s World. It features (among
other things) the planetary ruling elite, the Harlan’s World yakuza,
centuries-old rogue weapons systems, the drugged up, wired-up mercenary
teams paid to decommission them, surfboard revolutionaries, and
a maniac religious cult.
In some ways it’s a return to the noir staples I used in Altered
Carbon--Kovacs is largely alone and struggling to unpick the knots
of a mystery while set upon by a wide variety of enemies. But in
this case, there's a substantial element of changing landscape that
didn’t feature in either of the other books; Altered Carbon was
limited to the environs of Bay City, in the classic PI style, with
one very brief excursion to Europe, and Broken Angels, although
it moved about a bit more than that, was really dominated by the
single overarching reality of the war, which rendered all locations
much the same for the protagonists.
In Woken Furies, you get a lot of exotic travel. Kovacs is on the
move, sometimes on the run, sometimes on the hunt, and wherever
he goes, we get to look out of the windows at the passing scenery.
You don’t get the ensemble feel of Broken Angels either, because
although there is a strong cast of secondary characters in Woken
Furies, they tend to come and go as the story follows Kovacs’ journey
(or voyage, really, as Harlan’s World is largely oceanic).
If there are echoes (and I like to think there are) of The Big
Sleep in Altered Carbon, and of The Good the Bad and the Ugly in
Broken Angels, then I suppose Woken Furies finds its resonances
in something like North by Northwest or The Thirty-Nine Steps. Of
course, that’s not the whole tone of the thing--the Kovacs novels
are far more cynical and ambiguous than anything by Hitchcock or
Buchan, and in the end, this is an SF novel above all else.
The implications of digital human storage and other associated
technologies still form the backdrop to the tale, and there's the
usual running critique of governance hierarchies, but I think what
I’m enjoying most in the writing this time around is the world building.
To some extent, the book is an exploration of Harlan’s World itself
as much as a detective story, because the mystery Kovacs finds himself
dealing with goes to the heart of what makes his home world tick.
The following material is being reprinted
from the Del Rey Internet Newsletter. To subscribe to this free,
monthly e-newsletter, visit http://www.delreybooks.com.
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OTHER CONTENT - April 2004
An Altered Author Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon, on giving up the day job, his movie deal with Warner Brothers, and making a big splash in the hard boiled science fiction genre. (INTERVIEWS)
Cyberpunks in White Nylon Now for something completely different. The, err, heroine of Marianne de Pierres' debut cyberpunk novel Nylon Angel, interviewed about her bust up face and life in a down and dirty future. (INTERVIEWS)
Holt
Right There
Fantasy author Tom Holt on whether it's really possible to write a SFF novel about office life, his first job as a porter in an auction-house, and the funniest thing he's ever heard. (INTERVIEWS)
Robot Stories Mark finds a film of five Twilight Zone-ish stories involving robots in some way. They are simple stories - most with a strong insightful element. All but one really says more about humanity than about droids. (FILM REVIEWS)
The hitch-hiker's guide to French Science-Fiction French SF has a glorious past - remember Jules Verne? - and, hopefully, a bright future. But Jean-Claude finds the present situation a little more difficult to decode. Especially when you try to evaluate it on the same scale as Anglo-American SF. (ARTICLES)
The Offworld Report April 04: Science Fiction Interviews with authors Joe Haldeman, Octavia Butler, Ramsey Campbell and Alan Dean Foster, Bruce Sterling on a solar Texas, David Brin on the future of news, why the geek shall inherit the Earth, and Locus ponders the way forward for print-on-demand ... aka POD. (NEWS)
The Offworld Report April 04: Weird Science Hello planet Sedna, Hong Kong gets a robot cop, why Yellowstone National Park may be about to exterminate all life in North America, the Rosetta probe heads for its comet and the Pentagon's new stealth bomber-like submarine. The Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea's flying sub, anyone? (NEWS)
The Tears of an Angel The Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off, Angel, has reached the end of it's bloodsucking run. But we know at least one fan who is seeing red over the decision to cancel the series. Taste her red rage here ... (ARTICLES)
Time And The Terminator Uncle Geoff ponders the paradox implicit in the statement: 'The future is not set.
'There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.' Time travel? Altering the past? What the heck is that all about. (ARTICLES)
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