John Dickinson

Time’s Chariot is a science fiction novel with a strong element of detective fiction. A future society has developed time-travelling technology. The technology is under the monopoly of a College, charged with making sure that the lessons of the past can be observed and used without history being disturbed. But rogue elements are up to something sneaky. Their tentacles penetrate high into the organisation and far back into the past. And our misfit hero – an officer of the College - is bent on defeating them.

Ben Jeapes is another of David Fickling’s authors, and David expects his writers to have a certain something (though we say it who shouldn’t). He looks for what he calls ‘narrative’, which I think means he expects us to tell a story capably in the good old way without too many gimmicks or wanderings. Now, I have to confess that I struggled with Time’s Chariot to begin with, partly because there’s a large cast of characters with strange names and it took me a while to sort out who was who. But then the story woke up, the game got afoot and I’m now reading with real pleasure.

The challenge with a time-travelling novel is how you deal with the paradox – the moment when someone goes back and changes the past in a way that affects a part of the story that’s already been told. It’s tough to do, because story-telling is by nature linear with a beginning, a middle and an end in that order, and a successful story must follow that pattern even if it doesn’t appear to. The easy way is not to have any paradoxes, or to invent reasons why they don’t happen. That seems to me to be a cop-out. In Jeapes’s story, paradoxes clearly can happen. So far they’ve happened off stage. You learn about them in asides from the main characters. We haven’t yet experienced one up close. But I’m reading on in hope. I have a theory that the bad guy whose death was faked at the beginning really will die in that incident, and has been dead for five thousand years before the main story began. Let’s see…

PS. Yes, there was a paradox. But it wasn’t what I expected!

Dad’s got an OBE! Let’s take a little time out to celebrate.

When I spoke to him after the announcement he said he thought it had been given primarily for his time as Chairman of the Society of Authors. I’m sure that’s right. There has to be an element of public service for an award like this. But it also looks like one more recognition of his writing and poetry. And I may be just a little bit biased here, but I think he deserves it.

There is something a bit special about this wordsmith. His brain goes everywhere. I used to be shocked how little research he did before sending his heroes to 6th century Byzantium or war-torn contemporary Africa. He didn’t read up about these places, he imagined them. And people who’ve lived in Africa say how vividly he’s brought the place back to them. He’s imagined himself into the skull of a dying old woman and a child of a prehuman species 200,000 years ago. He’s also worked out and published a theory that to be able to fly and breathe fire dragons must have been lighter than air – flying gas-bags, in fact. I remember him telling me about the day he tried this theory of dragon evolution on David Attenborough. (Apparently Mr Attenborough was not convinced.)

He writes for adults, teenagers and young children. His books are mysteries, fantasies, science fiction, ghost stories, pet stories, historical and contemporary political. He doesn’t do cookbooks and he doesn’t do chick-lit but there’s not much else he hasn’t had a go at. He doesn’t pander to fantasies about power or sex. His lead characters are thoughtful, often meek. I can recall a rare one or two who have special talents or powers, but those powers are not used to slaughter enemies or shake the world. If you meet a larger-than-life figure in his pages it’s usually a baddie, or someone who is marked for destruction. And he writes well. His books are strong on setting and character. I won’t list the prizes he’s won – it gets rather boring after a bit – but he’s deserved those too.

He’s written poetry all his working life. When he was a journalist he did humorous pieces for Punch. But he kept writing the stuff after he became an author, even though there was no prospect of getting it published. He writes short, compact pieces with tightly-woven rhymes and images of love, time and the passing of generations. He also wrote a series of intense poems about my mother’s illness and death. There’s now a volume of his poetry available through his website.

Peter Dickinson, OBE. Hurrah!

As half term loomed, the work-daemon called me to his office in the upper reaches of my mind.

Half term is no excuse for laziness, he said. I agreed it wasn’t.

You can shut the door, he said. You can leave the world its own devices. I want to see you writing. I said I would.

Productivity is the key, he said. Rhythm. Discipline. Discipline, I said. Yes.

Last half term was a travesty, he snarled. And I nodded meekly. I would do better.

And?

Well Monday was Bank Holiday. Much-loved friends were staying. No work got done.

Tuesday I was taxi for daughter and friend who were shopping for their joint birthday party. Also I was shopping to replenish stores after much-loved friends had departed. There’s no reason why a trip to the supermarket, plus associated unpacking and putting away, should wipe out an entire working morning, but it did.

Can’t remember what happened to Tuesday afternoon. Must have been something important.

Wednesday I did get some words down. That was after being taxi for daughter and other friend who were going to joint birthday party. (Was saved from further depradations by friend’s parents, who valiantly took the job of trucking whole gaggle of friends into Bristol and back entirely on themselves. Both are office workers. It’s not only the work-from-home types who see their productivity suffer at half term.) Any way, writing got done. Ta-daah! It might have been a struggle finding that rhythm for so short a time after having done nothing for days, but I had thought what I wanted to say and for two pages I said it.

It was Wednesday evening that son came and asked me for gift-wrap. Gift-wrap? ‘For Mum’s birthday present,’ he said.

Now, I hadn’t forgotten Thursday was Pippa’s birthday. I am not that sort of husband. I am the sort of husband who knows very well when his wife’s birthday is and then forgets he has to do anything about it. Not only was there no gift-wrap in the house, there was no present from loving self either. Fortunately the taxi-run to pick up daughter was due. Pippa thought she was doing it but I claimed it, swung by B&Q in the last half-hour before it closed and secured nice new gardening gloves. On return with daughter found that daughter had not got her mother a present either. So Daughter got gardening gloves to give to Mother and Wife got an IOU from Loving Husband for a new mobile phone. At which she laughed. Pippa is wonderful and I don’t deserve her.

Thursday. Pippa’s birthday. No work got done.

So it’s Friday. Work-daemon is pacing his office, furiously chewing on his cigar (I don’t know why I let him smoke on the premises). Daughter is off. House is quiet. Son’s haircut is not due until the afternoon. Lawn is getting long, but its haircut can also wait till the afternoon. (Mem. Must do something about that mobile – but maybe the afternoon will have room for that too.) The week is lost but not all is lost. Some work of noble note may yet be done. The screen is open.

And I’ve remembered.

The in-laws are coming tomorrow.

Solaris is a fascinating novel. A friend asked me if I had read it, after he had had a look at the typescript of my forthcoming science fiction novel WE. (More on WE in due course). I said I hadn’t. He kept asking me, and I kept saying I hadn’t. In the end he sent it to me.

It’s just as well I didn’t pick it up until WE was out of the door. If I had I might have despaired.

It’s fascinating in several ways. On the surface it’s a book about scientists confronted by a phenomenon that is simply impossible to understand. At the end of the story they still don’t understand it. This is a direct and fundamental challenge to those of us who believe that we can, in time, get the measure of the universe we’re in. And since the author, Stanislaw Lem, does not suggest there is anything like a god to cling to either, he leaves us in a pretty dark and cold place.

It’s also interesting because although it is classic science fiction, Lem isn’t interested in much of the science. Travel across inter-stellar space just happens. He doesn’t explain how. His planetary station moves on some kind of anti-gravity system, but he doesn’t describe it. That’s not why he’s chosen an SF setting. What he wants to do is isolate a small group of people and have them witness things that are completely out of human experience. The most important of these experiences - meetings with people whom the characters know are dead - could easily have been set in a gothic novel or psychological thriller. But in gothic or psychological novels we don’t expect to end up finding out all the reasons for things. In SF we do.

Then there’s the story-telling. The book is brilliant in building up the nightmarish atmosphere inside the station. The station itself is seedy and disordered. Many of the most disturbing things are only glimpsed by the reader, but amplified to us by the reactions of the characters. (Can a straw hat be terrifying? Yes it can. Read this, you lovers of explicitly gorey horror stories, and see how it can be done!) The situation builds and builds into an atmoshere of sustained chronic madness. And then… it goes away again. Nothing the hero does affects it. He is left contemplating loss, and futility. And so are we.

Does it work? I’d say not quite. What happens is that the hero wakes up and finds that matters have simply been resolved while he was asleep. In theory this might enhance the sense of futility, but I don’t think it does. I was left wanting more struggle and tragedy before the ending. It seems to be a classic example of a book where the author was more interested in getting into a situation than he was in getting out of it again. But it’s still a classic.

They’ve even made films of it - although I believe they’ve messed around with the ending.

I’ve been asked about the Flying Teddies.

It’s nothing to do with my writing. It’s the only thing on this site that has nothing to do with writing at all. But everything else I put in seemed so focused and Earnest that in the end I thought ‘The Heck with this - Let’s chuck a Teddy!’ So I did.

And let me assure you - in case you’ve never thrown a soft toy in your life - there’s something very satisfying about it. That moment when the little parachute mushrooms open the teddy comes swaying down under its brightly-coloured canopy… It’s better than alcohol. If a bit more trouble.

Now there are some things you have to get right. The parachute itself is fairly easy - all you need is the cloth from an old umbrella. You have to be a bit clever with the strings, because there must be six or eight of them at the parachute corners, but they have to come down to two behind the teddy’s back. You need a high place, a wide landing area, and light winds. (I mean that. Just imagine what chaos a teddy could cause by drifting at windscreen height across a busy main road. And trees and telephone wires have a strange attraction, too.) Above all this is a sport for soft toys, and only for soft toys. Do not repeat not think of trying this on the household cat! What you need is a teddy, or a toy rabbit or something like that. They don’t have to volunteer. I find they conscript quite readily.

Put them together and - Wheeee! There you go.

And you have time, as the parachute drifts downwards, just to think a few things. You can do that If you like. Wonder about life, and air, and the secrets of the universe. If you like. Or you can just stand there and love it.

Not everything has to make sense.

I am to attend a careers fair at my old school in a fortnight’s time.  This will mean sitting at a small table in a large room, surrounded by other tables at which will be seated stockbrokers, bankers, wine importers, possibly some civil servants and the occasional engineer.  I shall have a sign marked “AUTHOR” and a small pile of my books, and I shall look around expectantly while the fresh-faced children of stockbrokers, bankers, wine importers and possibly civil servants mill around among the tables trying to imagine what they are going to do with the rest of their lives.

At least that’s how I approached it last time.  This year I’m going for some more aggressive marketing.  The first thing I’m going to do is hide that sign “AUTHOR” and replace it with one of my own, which will read:

I AM AN AUTHOR
I DO NOT BITE
I DO NOT ALWAYS TELL THE TRUTH

I reckon that will bring them running.

Then, for discussion, there will be a couple more signs.  One will read:

AUTHORS ARE:
-  Poor
-  Mad
-  Oppressed
-  Prone to Self Pity
Interested?  Ask HERE for details.

And a third will read: THE NOVEL YOU ARE WRITING MAY BE THE LAST EVER WRITTEN.  (That’s about the e-book and how story-telling may change in the future).

Now, I planned all this with the aid of half a bottle of wine, and maybe it shows. I am forced to admit that when I write these things down they look pretty negative about the profession I’m supposed to be pitching.  I may lose my nerve on the day and settle for the pile of books and expectant look.  But here’s a couple of reasons why I may not.

First, because I want to strike a different note, and I don’t want to be apologetic about it.  In that room of city professionals, I want to say ‘You don’t have to go for the respectable, high-salaried career.  You can shape your life into something quite different.  Let’s talk about what that might mean.’

And second, because when I do get someone who wants to write, they don’t need much persuading to give it a try. I’ll be happy to talk to them about writing and to encourage them in what they are doing.  But I don’t want to leave them with too many illusions.  When I say that authors are Poor/Mad/Oppressed - well, there’s a truth or two that maybe they should know before they set out on this path.

The Self Pity bit is, of course, pure hyperbole.

Actually I think bankers etc may also know about Self Pity at the moment

Look, I like the careers fair.  I like meeting these young people.  And once I get going I can’t help being positive about writing. My eyes will sparkle and I shall be aiming to make theirs sparkle too.  I shall say to them that (never mind the future of the novel) there were story-tellers long before there were stockbrokers and there will be story-tellers long after stockbrokers have been forgotten. It may be film, it may be song, it may be theatre.  It may be some medium we cannot yet imagine.  But people will always want stories.  After food gatherers and shelter-builders, ours is the most essential profession of all.

It’s going to be fun.  And I may get a word with that wine-importer too.

I won’t name the book I’ve been reading.  I will say the writer is talented.  The setting - a seedy Jewish colony - is beautifully realised.  The (male) characters are grainy, flawed to the point of the grotesque.  Some of the scenes are mesmerising in their intensity.  And that’s why I found the novel overall such a disappointment.

It is a detective story, and a successful detective plot is very hard to do.  At the end of it readers must see that the answer was there for them all the time, if only they had looked at things in a slightly different way.  The stages by which the story reaches that answer are crucial.  And in this case, well…  The chief conspirator and the murderer are not simply disguised.  Up to the moment they are unmasked they do not appear to be actors at all.  Both confess when they have little need as characters to do so, but they have to do it because the storyteller needs them to.  And the central conspiracy, which the hero unravels on a single clue, proves to be an international CIA-style plot of the sort we have all read and watched many many times before, but which in this author’s hands feels flimsy and unconvincing beside the solidity of much of the rest of his book.  Grrr.

And you say - ‘Hang on, we’re talking about a detective novel, and you’re worried about plausibility?  What’s more implausible than the standard detective plot?  (Except the standard fantasy plot, Oh Writer of Fantasy Fiction?)’  Sure I’m worried about plausibility.  I do not mean real plausibility.  It is entirely plausible, in the real world, that villains might be inconsistent in their actions.  But with a novel there’s a reader, and the reader needs a satisfactory framework with which to understand the villains’ inconsistency.  If I tell you at the start of a story that this is a world in which there are fire-breathing dragons, you will be ready for them when they appear. If they appear without warning in the final scene and toast the baddies just as the hero is about to go under, you think ‘hey, where did that come from?’  This sort of plotting is the bones of all storytelling, but particularly so of detective fiction.  Are great scenes and complex characters a substitute?  They are not.  They are just beautiful skin.  Beautiful skin cannot mend a broken back.

Just because you only work three hours a day - at home, what’s more - it doesn’t mean you don’t get to have holidays.  Holidays are Allowed.  Sometimes they are Enforced.  I am in the middle of a stop-go holiday that threatens to take all February.  The cause is Kids.

First there was the snow.  There wasn’t very much of it, by some standards, but there was more than  Gloucestershire was equipped to cope with.  Roads blocked, ice formed, cars skidded - and schools closed.  Even the gritty headmaster of no. 2 child’s school was forced to close in the end.  He was about the last head standing in all of the county.  (I have this mental image of him going down at the salute while he and his school were gently buried in drifts of - well, not of snow, but of e-mails from parents and teachers alike saying Sorry, they were not going to make it today Because.)  And now the snow has melted, it’s half term.  So for much of the last three weeks I have been sharing my workspace with two young teenagers for whom entertainment these days is only entertainment if it comes through a screen(1).  Family policy is no computers in bedrooms.  They stay in the shared spaces where we can all at least be a part of what each other is doing.   And there are just two computers.  And there are three of us.

In theory this is simple.  The order of precedence is Work, Homework, Communication and then Goofing Off.  So if I’m working I get one and the kids can rip each other’s eyeballs out about who gets the other.  In practice - well, the truth is I’ve become spoiled.  There was a time when I could work away in a busy office whatever the chatter around me.  I would then come home and write a few pages of novel in the fifteen minutes while Pippa was in the bath or whatever.  I could do it then, because that was the only way I was going to get it done.  Now I’m used to empty rooms, a quiet lane outside and hours of time for Deep Thought.  The very presence of others in the house is enough to distract me.  Ten times more so if I know that soon I’ll be getting another tirade about how unreasonable the sibling is being.   It makes me tremble to the very core of my sensitive writer’s soul.  Oh, for a hut at the bottom of the garden - and I’m going to move the boiler down there too.

But aha!  An opportunity!  Older teenager has organised with friends to take the day out.  The forces of Hades are halved at a stroke.  All that remains is to neutralise the younger.  And I think of the bathrooms, and a slow smile spreads across my face.  The bathrooms, yes, yes.  The surfaces are coated with hairs and soap scum, the toilets are - well, let’s not be too explicit.  Get him started on that and I’ll be at peace for hours!  With a parents’ cunning, I stalk and pounce.  Negotiations.  A threat.  A bribe.  The deal is done.  Off he goes.  And I can settle with a sigh, fingers poised over the keyboard, mind beginning to fumble for whatever it was I had planned to get done this week.  I’m between manuscripts, aren’t I?  So it must be…

Door opens.  He’s back, willing but implacable.

“How do I clean a bathroom?”

Another sigh, but not of contentment.  The Holiday continues.

(1) Books are an honourable exception.  The thing about a book is that you can read a few pages and then go back to whoever’s hogging the screen and complain that they are hogging the screen.  Somehow this makes the next few pages that bit more satisfying.

I know a Little Old Lady in Painswick. I have a Long-Suffering Nephew in Leeds . I inhabit the gulf between them.

I go to the Little Old Lady when she needs help with e-mail. I show her how to attach a document. She ask how she can be sure it’s been received, and I tell her about read receipts. We got into this when I found she had typed out a page’s worth of text into her e-mail because she didn’t know about copy and paste. (Up to last year she had left all this to her husband.) She can at least manage the double-click on the mouse. Go, Little Old Lady! Not everyone can.

I go to the Long-Suffereing Nephew when I need help - chiefly with my website. Long-Suffering Nephew was building websites in the small hours every night from the age of about ten. As far as I am concerned this was time well invested, because it means I can go to him and say : “Dear nephew, sweet nephew, come and talk to your doddering uncle about style sheets…”

I won’t have a webmaster. I do the thing myself, for the same reason that I do my accounts myself. I want to be in control. Insofoar as I can be in control when I don’t know really know what I’m doing. Juggling between page editor and paint.net, trying to get the same effect on Firefox that you do on Internet Explorer - it’s a bit like wandering round inside a nuclear command bunker wondering which button turns on the light. This is why the site has a rather DIY look, and why I’m trying to improve it in the run-up to publication of The Fatal Child. It will also explain why it may shortly look as if there has been an accidental nuclear strike. (”It wasn’t meant to be that kind of launch.”) The book-like format I have adopted causes all sorts of problems, but I like it so I’m going to keep it. I talked wistfully to the nephew about putting in a page-turning effect, so that the page actually, you know, “turns” when you click on the link? He gave me the sort of look that happens in Transylvanian inns all festooned with garlic, when the passing traveller asks about the creepy-looking castle on the hill. Uncle, you don’t want to go there.

Well maybe I won’t. Not yet. Not while accidentally deleting the wrong <div> tag has the same effect as pulling out a brick from the bottom of a tower. But one day, who knows? Keep trying things. Never admit that you are beaten. In the words of W E Henley’s Invictus

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Or in my case: I am the master of my web/I am the captain of my screen.

I haven’t heard from the Little Old Lady for a while. Maybe she’s hunched beady-eyed over her own computer, building her own website with lots of glitzy effects that will make my jaw drop when I see them.

Another book launch looms. Faint prickle of sweat in the palms.

At least by now my publishers know what they need to know about me. They know it will be an uphill battle getting the attention of the harrassed trade press. It’s always an uphill battle, but they know the gradient. When you are new to the publicity folks you get the Publicity Inquisition. Thus (with apologies to Polly and Nina, who are the best and most professional publicity people in the world) -

PUBLICITY PERSON (Bright, brisk, and smiley); Tell us something interesting about yourself. Something we can shout about to the trade.

AUTHOR: Can’t they just read the book?

PUB: Yes of course. They’ll LOVE the book. But tell us something we can tell them when we send it to them - something about you that will make them sit up and take notice.

AUTH: Umm, well, born in London, educated at public school and Oxford, seventeen years in the civil service and then became a writer.

PUB: Really we need something a bit more dramatic. You against the odds. Deprived childhood? Battling cancer? Life ruined by alcohol? Jail sentence?

AUTH: No, no, not yet and no. I am having a bit of trouble making ends meet on that advance…

PUB: Celebrity lifestyle? Drugs? Divorce?

AUTH: You make me feel hopelessly adequate.

PUB: Well, lots of authors find this part difficult, but we really should try to think of something. Something to give you a bit of a star appeal.

AUTH: Like - sex orgies, style, sunglasses, implants?

PUB: Not necessarily…

AUTH. Wouldn’t say no to the implants, but I can’t afford them on the advance. Can’t they just read the book?

PUB: Oh, we ALL love the book. What about your writing? What inspired you to become an author?

AUTH: My father was an author.

PUB: Aha! Of course he was. (Reaching for pad and pen) What was the relationship like - creatively?

AUTH: He still is an author, actually.

PUB: … Something in the Kingsley/Martin Amis line would be good. Jealousy, oppression… Can we tell them he fed your manuscript to the dog?

AUTH: He’s been very supportive, I’m afraid.

PUB: Let’s try something else.

AUTH: I could tell you a funny story about the time he was teaching me to drive a car…

PUB: Something else, I think. You said you were in government?

AUTH: In the MOD, mostly.

PUB: That’s it! Ka-ching! Were you in the SAS?

AUTH: No.

PUB: MI6?

AUTH: No. And we call them the SIS now. At least we did in my day. And they don’t…

PUB: Did you kill anyone with your bare hands?

AUTH: I had a near-death experience with a spreadsheet once. You know, I’d have thought not being SAS and not being MI6 would put me into quite a small minority of writers.

PUB: Yes, but it’s not an interesting minority. Anything else?

AUTH: Look, why does it have to be about me? Why can’t they just read the book?

PUB: Oh, WE all love the book… (etc)

(The Fatal Child comes out in November.  It’s good.  Don’t take my word for it.  Read it.  You’ll see.)