James Lovegrove – author

Publication day for Provender Gleed draws nigh, and I’ve received my author copies and they look lovely, as do the mass-market paperbacks of Worldstorm, also out soon. Credit for the redesign goes to Orion’s Lucie Stericker, who has laboured long and hard to come up with a series style that has a broad appeal without sacrificing genre sensibility. She has succeeded brilliantly, I feel, and I’m hoping that the backlist is going to receive a similar makeover soon. Noises from the direction of Gollancz editorial indicate that this is a strong possibility.

On the cultural front, I’m looking forward to listening to Goldfrapp’s new album, if I can just persuade Monty to loosen his stranglehold on the car stereo during journeys. About the only chance I get to listen to music these days is in the car, and Monty insists on his CDs being on continuous rotation, and I rarely get to drive anywhere without him in the back seat, so I’m building up a prodigious memory-store of nursery rhymes and folk songs but not enjoying much that’s new. It’s the same with DVDs. When Monty’s around I don’t get to watch anything except the ruddy Wiggles! (All-male foursome of Australian children’s entertainers. Sing songs. Do dance routines. Just about the gayest piece of kid TV I’ve ever seen.)

Speaking of DVDs, I have managed, at last, to track down a copy of the Vole Pogrom Collection. This has been on my to-buy list for ages. It brings together all of VP’s experimental short movies on one disc, including “Sunset Over Chocolate Bar”, “Homage To My Desk Stapler” and “Snap!”. The transfer isn’t too bad. The soundtrack gets a bit wobbly in places, but with Pogrom’s work one can never be sure whether that sort of thing isn’t deliberate. No extras, though. Even just a commentary would have been nice, but then the reclusive artiste’s reticence is renowned. Otherwise, the collection is everything I could have hoped it to be and I recommend it highly. Best viewed with the lights out and two rolls of kitchen paper and a length of wooden dowel to hand.

Meanwhile, courtesy of Chris Wooding, comes this: www.rereviewed.com/thedeepnorth. Check out the last paragraph of the August 11th entry. Spooky or what?

I thought I would share this image with you, taken by Orion’s lovely Sara Mulryan at Interaction in Glasgow last weekend:

It shows Lou (Mrs Lovegrove) and a certain other fellow pretending to be pirates in one of those wooden seaside-cutout thingies (actually located next to the Clyde, close to the tall ship aboard which the Voyager imprint’s convention party was being held). To avoid embarrassing the bestselling SF-noir novelist in question, I shan’t name him. I can tell you that he isn’t two feet tall in real life and that publishing this pic on my site may just wake his furies and that, if he were willing to cough up enough cash, market forces might compel me to take the image down again, although I doubt it. Heh heh heh.

The convention itself was great fun and I only wish I could have stayed longer than two days and had had a chance to explore some of Glasgow itself instead of being stuck in one small area on the outskirts next to the SECC exhibition centre. Maybe next time, at EasterCon.

As it was, I did some panels and readings, met up with old friends, stayed up horribly late, drank too much, and generally did all the things which, for the sake of one’s health and sanity, one shouldn’t do when one is pushing 40.

I was very pleased to meet a new Gollancz writer, Robert Scott, whose first novel, The Hickory Staff, I am immensely looking forward to reading. Robert’s an American but he definitely gets the British sense of humour. He also had a bunch of us playing a Spot-The-Lie game which led to us learning lots of worrying new facts about people we thought we knew well (and trusted). Like, did you know that rugged, handsome, vigorously heterosexual fantasy writer M*** C******** has snogged Elton John? And bestselling SF-noir novelist R****** M*****, when he’s not pretending to be a two-foot-tall pirate, relishes the fact that he was once sexually assaulted by two female work colleagues? And epic heroic fantasy specialist J**** B****** has slept with someone who slept with Steven Berkoff? I do now, and wish I didn’t.

One of Robert Scott’s truths, incidentally, is that he once composed a song in honour of his own penis. But then, let’s be honest, we’ve all done that at one time or other, haven’t we?

Provender Gleed isn’t out till September, but if you click here you can read a sneaky-peek preview extract. It’s an early chapter of the book which introduces several of the main characters and sets up the titular hero’s main dilemma. It also includes a possibly gratuitous use of the word ‘bifurcated’.

I’ve just returned from a weekend at the Paris Bookfair. As you may be aware, a French edition of Days has just been published, and seems to be going down a storm on the other side of the Channel, having received glowing reviews and garnered positive comparisons to Ballard, whom the French of course love. Lou, Monty and I stayed in the city as guests of that fine publishing company Bragelonne, and the weather was beautiful (springtime Paris in all its glory) and the personal welcome no less warm. Monty even had time for a brief amour with a lovely young thing called Celine in the sandpit at the Jardin du Luxembourg. Their eyes met across the bucket and spade and they gurgled sweet nothings to each other in the universal gobbledygook esperanto of toddlers.

Me, I was hard at work doing signings and being interviewed by journalists, including one from Le Monde and one from Liberation, French equivalents of the Times and the Guardian. I also was able to drool over the huge quantity of lovely-looking bandes desinees on sale at the bookfair, even though, with my painfully impoverished French-language skills, there was no point in me buying any.

I’d like to express my immense gratitude to Alain Nevant and everyone else at Bragelonne for looking after the three of us so well. It was a wonderful trip.

Coming back to England and the proper business of actually writing was like coming down to earth with a bump. However, those works of fiction don’t just compose themselves, you know.

Speaking of which…

On the short-story front, may I direct your attention to the following recently-published anthologies to which I have contributed tales?

The first is The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Stories (edited by Mike Ashley and Eric Brown, published by Robinson in the UK and Carroll and Graf in the US) which is a wonderful and — the title doesn’t lie — very large assemblage of homages to the French SF grandmaster, the hundredth anniversary of whose death has just passed. Most of the stories are offshoots of original Verne works, or else, like mine, ‘Londres au XX1e siecle‘, unofficial sequels thereto. It’s a lovely, thick, compendious collection, and a fitting tribute to the great man.

Second up is Constellations (edited by Pete Crowther and published by Daw) which is the third in what nobody but me is calling Pete’s Solar System Sequence, following on from Moon Shots and Mars Probes. The theme of this particular volume is – you’ve guessed it! – constellations, and Pete has gathered new tales from a veritable who’s who of contemporary British SF authors, and me, to create not only a hugely varied and enjoyable book but also a tasty sampling of the current, thriving, multidenominational church that is British SF (ghastly mixed metaphor, sorry, but who says you can’t eat a church?). My contribution, ‘The Meteor Party’, is a meditative earthbound effort that sits strangely well alongside excellent out-of-this-world tales by the likes of Eric Brown, Roger Levy and Adam Roberts.

Finally, I have yet another new tale, to be found at Paul Brazier’s recently-come-onstream site, Quercus. ‘The Last Change’ is one of my curmudgeonly, isn’t-technology-overrated? fictive grumbles which got a lot of psychic pus out of my system and is also, I like to think, quite poignant and funny.

After a shaky couple of months following my family’s recent relocation – the stress! – I’m nose back to the grindstone, working on a book I’ve been threatening to write for a while now. More details when the first draft’s done.

As 2004 draws to a close, I thought I’d offer a few reading recommendations.

Lately I have been mostly enjoying Rude Kids, an autobiography by the Viz founding editor and creator Chris Donald. It’s very funny, oddly sad, and at times highly illuminating – worth a look whether or not you’re a fan of the galaxy’s sweariest comic.

Then there’s Michael Crichton’s newie, State of Fear, which I tore through. As a novel it is … well, let’s just say it functions at a level just about recognisable as fiction (Crichton does not excel at characterisation or prose). Where it scores is as a bracing counterblast to the doom and gloom we’re currently being bombarded with from all quarters. Particularly interesting is the book’s critique, reasoned and apparently justified, of the scaremongering carried out by environmental pressure groups in order to drum up donations and the “be afraid” tactics adopted by governments in order to keep people in line and provide an excuse to pass draconian laws. Crichton tries to be unbiased but it’s clear that he regards science – proper scientific analysis and procedure – as the way forward and the answer to all the world’s ills. Which is odd, coming from the author of such techno-nightmare-scenario books as Jurassic Park and The Terminal Man, but there you go.

Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons seems pretty good so far (I’m 200 pages into it). Set on an Ivy League campus, it’s a proper, deeply detailed, old-fashioned Big Novel that still manages to be contemporary, touching as it does on the timeless issues of race and class.

Comics-wise, check out Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men. He’s halfway through a twelve-issue run, and has created the best X-title of recent years, hell, possibly ever. Luscious art by John Cassaday doesn’t hurt. Meanwhile former New X-Men team Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely are at the peak of their game with the three-issue miniseries We3, about super-enhanced lab animals, would you believe. Like The Incredible Journey meets The Six Million Dollar Man. And there’s a new series of Mark Millar’s Ultimates to marvel at. Hooray!

Finally, back to books, and an oldie but goodie. I’m two thirds of the way through Vole Pogrom’s Solar System sequence, having reached Volume 6, The Sultanate of Saturn. Pogrom, in case you don’t know, is one of the forgotten masters of the Golden Age of SF. Staggeringly prolific, as authors often were in those days, he turned out four novels a year on average, plus reams of short stories, and the Solar System books are among his best. I’d never heard of the guy myself until recently, when I received near-simultaneous recommendations from Adam Roberts, Roger Levy and Chris Wooding. I’m eagerly Dysoning up everything of his that I can find.

Here’s wishing you all a very happy, safe and successful 2005!

As if to confirm that it’s all change on every front for me, not only do I live in a different corner of Britain now, having relocated from East Sussex to North Devon, but I am the proud possessor of a revamped, rejigged and thoroughly reinvigorated website. As is abundantly evident, it’s spiffy-looking, with a cleaner, clearer design and layout, and is much more user-friendly than the last. There’s a new author photo in the biography section to replace the antiquated and somewhat blurry old one (now you can see me warts and all). There’s an exhaustively thorough bibliography section, which I shall keep updating. The homepage has a sexy array of my book covers, which will also be kept rigorously up to date.

All in all, I couldn’t be more pleased, and I would like to extend copious amounts of gratitude to my webmaster, Ariel, for all the hard work he’s put in, not to mention the great patience and forbearance he’s displayed over the past few months. I presented him with a list of nigh-impossible demands for the site, he came back with a somewhat saner list of counter-suggestions, and the result has still exceeded all my expectations. Thanks, dude!

The following is an excerpt from a “review” of Worldstorm on the admirable trashotron.com site, which is hosted by the equally admirable Rick Kleffel. I put “review” in inverted commas as Rick admits he hasn’t actually read the book yet. That doesn’t matter, though. Check out the Alien metaphor!

“Yes, it’s one-hundred percent true. James Lovegrove is arguably our most versatile and skilled writer of speculative fiction. Almost any one of his novels or novellas — from the Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominated low-key SF novel Days to his high-concept SF novel, The Foreigners to the scalding horror-tinged novella that launched the PS Publishing Line, How the Other Half Lives, to his elegiac Bradburyian collaboration with Peter Crowther, Escardy Gap, following Lovegrove is a bit like following the chest-burster around the ship after it departs from John “Really, Really” Hurt in Alien. You see him in one form, but before you know it he’s shed that skin and moved on to something entirely different. From last year’s apocalypso dance Untied Kingdom, a sort of feudal fantasy set in the post-present UK, he’s moved on to the eerily topical Worldstorm…”

The big news on the Lovegrove domestic front is that, around the middle of August, barring disasters, we will be moving house. We’re upping stakes and leaving picturesque Sussex county town Lewes behind for the more rural setting of a village in north Devon. Moving to the country has been a cherished dream of ours for some time, and we decided it was better to do it now, while Monty is still relatively small, than later. That way we won’t have to wrench him away from a school or other local attachments. He won’t even remember ever living here, which is slightly sad but there you go.

The new residence is a renovated farmhouse some ten miles from Barnstaple. It’s a beautiful part of the country, with broad sandy beaches and rolling hills and moorland and lots else besides. The house itself is about the same size as our present house but with rather less wallspace, meaning a small proportion of the library is going to have to go, worse luck. Actually, I’ve been intending for some while to dispose of some of the literary chaff that has been accumulating on my shelves, and this is the perfect excuse. The local charity shops are going to have a field day.

Another benefit of the move is that I am going to have a garden office built so that I can work at home but not in the home. That way everyone else can make as much noise as they want indoors while I’m frantically wrestling with prose. When the office is finished I will be a hundred yards away in my little insulated wooden hut, with only the cows in the neighbouring field for company. I’m now trying to come up with some kind of pun on “low” here but I just can’t manage it. You’ll all, I’m sure, be greatly relieved about that.

On the work front, I have just signed a contract with Orion/Gollancz for Provender Gleed and another book, which at present seems to be one that’s going to be called Shiftlands. I still have various other projects bubbling under, including something with a certain Adam Roberts. More on that if, when, it comes to fruition.

Gig has at last appeared, and has been acclaimed in several quarters as PS Publishing’s handsomest-produced volume yet. And who am I to disagree with that? Especially as it’s true. This is genuinely a lovely-looking book, and the content isn’t half bad either, I think. Why have you not bought it yet?

Worldstorm is imminent. Official publication date is September 23rd, but the launch party should be slightly sooner than that, as I’m likely to be co-launching with the aforementioned Dr Roberts. His new opus is titled The Snow, so there’s sort of a weather/climatic theme going on there.

Finally, I have recently achieved a lifelong ambition, which is to set a cryptic crossword. The result has been published in a national daily during the past week, and is, I hope, the first of many. I’ve always been a huge fan of crosswords and of wordgames in general, a fact that often finds itself reflected in my writing, and now I’m the proverbial poacher-turned-gamekeeper. The only reason I’m being somewhat cagey about where the actual crossword has appeared is that I wish to preserve the anonymity of my crossword-setter pseudonym.

And that’s it for now. I’ll post again after we’re safely ensconced in the West Country and supping scrumpy there.

As 2003 draws to a close and 2004 looms, I thought I’d let everyone know what I’m currently up to, work-wise.

Publication of Gig has been (slightly) delayed to January, which means I am still looking forward, even more now than before, to the book’s appearance.

In that same month the mass-market paperback edition of Untied Kingdom is due to come out. I’ve received my advance copies and it’s a fine-looking publication, garlanded with great review quotations. Expect hundreds of copies to be weighing down the front table at a good bookshop near you very soon (ahem).

At present I am approximately halfway through my next novel, Provender Gleed. I can’t say much about it here, because it’s unfinished and I’m always a bit superstitious about discussing something that’s not finished. However, I am having a great time writing it, which is always a good sign.

After that, what does the pipeline hold? Well, most probably a Young Adult novel (what they’re calling children’s books these days). Provisional title: The Heap. Possibly the first of a trilogy. And after that, I expect either to write a Worldstorm sequel, or another Barrington Stoke book, or something completely different. I just don’t know. I’ll have to see what grabs me, nearer the time.

I have also compiled a second short-story collection, Waifs and Strays, which if the gods smile on us could be winging its way into bookshops sometime in 2005.

2003 has been an up-and-down year: highs, lows, and a lot of hard work. My best wishes to you all for Christmas and for the New Year.

Sorry I’ve not been keeping on top of things recently, news-wise. Of course I’m going to blame Monty, who takes up all my available spare time and then some. No one ever tells you how long you spend with small children doing nothing except making faces and stupid noises at them. I wouldn’t make the effort, either, if Monty didn’t find it all so damn amusing.

Anyway, the main news is that I’ve just completed and handed in a first draft of Worldstorm. It’s a big old manuscript, weighing in at a hefty 200,000 words. Simon The Editor will no doubt pare this down in his skilful scalpel way to a somewhat more manageable size. Then again, there’s a lot of story and a lot of essential descriptive detail in the book, so I don’t expect there’ll be too many cuts (fingers crossed).

It turns out that Worldstorm may well be the first in a trilogy. There are certain characters and plotlines which seem to be crying out to be followed up on, and I already have basic outlines in my head for the two subsequent volumes. We shall see how it goes. In the meantime, I’m already gearing up for a new book, doing all the groundwork and storylining stuff that, for me, is truly the fun part of writing. I’m not going to say much else about the project as I’m very superstitious. If I talk about it now, I might not have anything to write when I sit down and begin on it.

As for actual books published, my second Barrington Stoke book (for reluctant readers) has just come out: The House of Lazarus, a substantial rewriting of the short story of mine which previously appeared in the Peter Crowther anthology Destination Unknown and my own collection Imagined Slights. The sales of its predecessor, Wings, have been startlingly good and to judge by the pre-publication uptake this one looks set to continue the trend.

And next month Gig is going to appear, courtesy of PS Publishing. I’m excited about this for many reasons but largely because the jacket is going to be fantastic and because PS have really got behind the concept of the book and are doing everything right with the design and packaging. Start saving your shekels now! I assure you it’s worth every penny of the cover price.