Stories from the Northern Road (Penrose 2.5)

Cover art by Fangorn

The first ever collection from one of the UK’s finest SF authors: Tony Ballantyne, who has been a finalist for the Philip K Dick award and whose short fiction has featured regularly in Years Best SF anthologies. A quartet of brand new stories set on the world of Penrose (introduced in the novels Twisted Metal and Blood and Iron) join five stories set in the Recursion universe to produce Stories from the Northern Road. This is Tony Ballantyne at his best.

Contents:

1. Introduction

Stories from the Northern Road

2. A Note from the Author
3. Four Blind Horses
4. Janet Verdigris
5. Isabel and the Outlandish Robots
6. The Robot Behind Me

Recursive Tales

7. LDA ADD STA JMP JIZ END
8. Restoring the Balance 1
9. Restoring the Balance 2
10. Seeds
11. The Sixth VNM

Released September 2012, as a Signed Hardback Edition, limited to 125 copies: £19.99

www.newconpress.co.uk

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Why I wrote Twisted Metal…

The Edinburgh SF Book Club recently met to discuss Twisted Metal.  They asked me to provide them with a little bit of background to the book.  Here it is…

https://tonyballantyne.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/duality-materialism-and-why-people-like-robots/

The main inspiration behind Twisted Metal is here on my blog:

…but that’s not the full story.

The working title of TWISTED METAL was THE BOOK OF ROBOTS. That was never going to be a commercial title, but I liked the way it literally described not only the novel itself but also the rather biblical “Book of Robots” within the text; and that it also sounded like the sort of big SF picture book I used to read when I was a child.  One of the reasons for the manga like illustrations within the novel was to make the book look like an old illuminated manuscript.  The joke on the robots is that they don’t believe in their creator when they clearly have one.  The reader can form their own conclusions about our world.

TWISTED METAL was partly inspired by the nature and form of old ballads:  the idea of old stories that subtly change in the telling over the years.   I have since written a quartet of stories: STORIES FROM THE NORTHERN ROAD based on old English ballads but set on Penrose.  These may eventually see the light of day if Macmillan ever get round to giving me the go ahead to publish them.

The names in TWISTED METAL weren’t chosen by accident.

Karel should need no introduction to SF robot fans, his wife Susan dropped her maiden name of Calvin.  Turing City and Penrose offer differing thoughts on the nature of machine intelligence, and the countries of Segre, Bethe, Wein et al are all connected.  Even Artemis featured in my previous Recursion trilogy under another name.  Whilst reading the book, you may want to spot the connections, SF and otherwise, between the names.   The only original name, by the way, was made up by my daughter who, when she heard I was writing a book about robots said “You should have one called Banjo Macrodocious, then.”  I realised that she was right, and he was so included.  She also came up with Wa-Ka-Mo-Do from BLOOD AND IRON.

There comes a moment in the development of every story when I have the realisation that finally allows the transition from my mind to the page.  For TWISTED METAL, this eureka moment came when I figured out the mechanism by which robots reproduce:  with the women twisting the shape of a child’s mind and the men looking on and having to trust what they were doing.  This led to the book’s original opening line:  Two robots were making love in the middle of an electrical storm.  The preceding paragraphs were added later to make the opening more commercial.

TWISTED METAL and BLOOD AND IRON were originally going to be one book, but the characters developed a life of their own and the first book expanded.  Kavan, in particular, was only going to be a minor character, but such is the nature of his belief he quickly invaded more pages than he should have.  That’s why Karel and Kavan have such similar names, by the way.  If I were to write the book again Kavan would be called Arban and would play the cornet beautifully.

There is a third, as yet untitled, book that completes the trilogy.  Personal circumstances have meant that it is as yet uncompleted, but in time I hope that both Karel and Kavan will finally make it to the top of the world.

Blood and Iron Extract

I finished checking the page proofs for Blood and Iron today.  I’ve posted an extract over on my website:  follow the link http://www.tonyballantyne.com/?page_id=178

Stone Age, Iron Age

I’ve just got the copy edited manuscript for Blood and Iron from Macmillan and I’m busy working through it.  It always amazes me the inconsistencies the copy editor picks up.  The MS must have been read by at least six people by now, including me,  and none of us noticed that I used the same word eight times on one page, or that one character knows another’s name even though they’ve never met before.

The copy editor also queried the fact that I said the Stone Age came after the Iron Age.  In fact everyone so far has pointed out this is the wrong way round.  They’re right of course, but I state here, for the record, before the reviews come in, that on Penrose the robots learned to handle iron long before they learned to handle stone.  In fact, for robots, the Iron Age means the time of the birth of the robots.

Okay, I make it me 1, copy editor 552 and counting.

Morphobia Alligator

Morphobia Alligator

Meet Morphobia Alligator, one of Sebastian Winnett’s inspired illustrations for Blood and Iron.

Morphobia Alligator is built to a different, and much older, design than that adopted by the robots in Twisted Metal.

What do you think?

Duality, Materialism and Why People Like Robots

Can a robot be capable of thought, creativity and emotion?

Many people and religions would answer “no”, believing that some spirit or soul within us is responsible for our thoughts.  This concept is known as Duality: the idea that the body and thoughts are two different things.  However, in the past hundred years or so, work on computers and the study of such natural phenomena as Emergent Behaviour have led to the materialistic belief that the mind can be explained in terms of  nuts and bolts and levers arranged in different patterns (or more accurately through an arrangement of cells and electrical impulses).

Now, materialism has been a common theme in SF for the past few decades.  One manifestation of this is the “mind running on a computer” idea. After all, if a mind is not some separate spirit or soul, and is instead just the result of physical interactions, then why can’t those interactions be modelled on a computer, pretty much the same way as the World is now modelled on Google Earth?  I used this idea myself in my Recursion trilogy where minds hopped freely back and forth between processing spaces. But whilst writing Divergence, the last book in the series, I became aware of the following problem: once we accept the ideas of minds jumping back and forth between computers, we are almost back at the idea of “souls” jumping between physical containers. On an intellectual level we are thinking “Materialism”, but subconsciously we are back at Duality.

So I decided to write a book that was unmistakeably materialistic.  I came up with the idea of using robots, robots that would take a piece of wire and twist it into a new mind. These robots would seek out metal to make children, and, when resources were short, they would fight other robots for metal just as humans fight each other for land and food.  I liked the idea, and the novel that eventually became Twisted Metal began to unfold. The novel deals with robots that are capable of thought, creativity and emotion, and of anger, hatred and irrationality, but each with a mind made up of nothing more than a piece of metal twisted into shape by his or her mother.

But I digress.  I wanted to say why I think people like robots.  And I think it’s this fascination that they are the same as us, but oh so different.  You take a piece of metal, you twist it into a robot, and what you have there is exactly what you built.  It may malfunction and try and kill you, it may learn how to love you, or it may just hoover the carpet, but what you are looking at is materialism in action.  And this, for many people, is their first glimpse that the world may be stranger than they think…

(The above originally appeared as an article in SciFi Now Magazine)

KISS

“No, father, you never did care about anything except your precious job.”

This is a line from Blood and Iron, spoken by a young woman to her father, and overheard by a nearby robot.  Given the circumstances in which the words were spoken, I originally used an expletive in place of precious.  But then I realised that as the words were being translated by computer as the young woman spoke them, and robots don’t use human expletives which tend be organically based, the sentence would probably read

“No, father, you never did care about anything except your rusting job.”

This is logical, but it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to the reader at first glance as it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing a young woman could say.  I could have put in an explanation (a common writers’ mistake, in my opinion), but that would have slowed down the action, and worse, taken the reader away from the scene and reminded them they were reading a book.

I love a complicated plot, I love hard SF, but when it comes to the writing I always like to Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Anyway, Blood and Iron is finished and should be with Macmillan now.

Blood and Iron

Follow this link to my website to see Jon Sullivan’s amazing cover for Blood and Iron, published April 2010.

Redrafting

Julie, a friend of mine, came up with a perfect description of the process.

She said that when you first write a story it’s like a baby:  perfect and precious in your eyes.

After a few redrafts it grows into a young child: you see that  it has its faults, but you love it anyway.

But as  you keep rereading and improving, a story becomes a teenager, lurking in its bedroom and complaining that you don’t understand it anymore. Catch it on a bad day and all you can see is its faults- everything about it irritates you.   If you’re honest with yourself, you realise that you’ve both been in each others company too long: you’ve both changed.

By that time you’re looking forward to the day when your story can go out into the world and start earning a living.  That’s when you can both see the best in one another again.

Blood and Iron

The sequel to Twisted Metal will be titled Blood and Iron.

For most of the time of writing it was known as Untitled Robot Book, and that’s the name that appears on the contract, but the title itself caused me more problems than any other story I’ve written.  Odd really, bearing in mind I’ve had the novel plotted since before I started Twisted Metal, and the characters virtually wrote the story themselves.

But I just couldn’t figure out what the title was going to be… until my agent advised me just to read through the MS.  “You’ll find it there in the text,” he said, and he was right.  Right in the middle of Chapter 10, in a meeting between humans and robots, there was the phrase Blood and Iron.

This time, unlike with Twisted Metal, I looked up the phrase on Google.   Coincidentally, Bismark used the phrase (or almost used it: he said “iron and blood”) in a speech confusingly known as the “Blood and Iron” speech.  Further checking showed there was no “Blood and Iron” video game.

None of that mattered, really.  Blood and Iron felt right. I knew that was the title.

I’ve seen the Jon Sullivan’s black and white rough for the cover, by the way.  It looks amazing.  The plan is to have the background in blood red, the foreground character in iron grey.

I’m currently thinking about starting book 3.  To me, it will be “The Book of Robots” but that’s not a very commercial title.  I’ll let you know what I come up with.