A nephew is doing a school project on climate change so he is asking family members for their memories of winters through the decades from 1960 onwards. Doing that for him, even briefly, has really underscored the changes I have seen through my lifetime so far.

I was born in 1965 and until I was 7, I lived in Lincolnshire. I remember snow every winter, but only after Christmas, falling in January and February. I remember walking to school in a woolly hat and gloves, and snowball fights in the playground. The heaters in the classroom would be covered with knitted gloves drying out with a faint smell like a wet dog.

When we moved to Dorset, and lived right by the sea on the South Coast, snow was very unusual. Winters were still cold though, with frosty mornings, and fog, and crisp brown leaves crunching underfoot. As a 6th Former, I would describe the changes in the seasons in my letters to my mother who was then living in West Africa, in Cote D’Ivoire.

I came to Oxford to study in 1983 and have lived in this county ever since, which is about as far away from the sea as it’s possible to get in the UK. Through the 80s, we would get a severe winter with heavy snow every third or fourth year, when the weather would be cold enough to freeze the small rivers, like the Cherwell which flows past St Hilda’s College where I was an undergraduate. I remember seeing ducks trying to land, not realising they were about to hit ice and skidding along on their bottoms. The weather would stay cold enough for the snow not to melt for several weeks, maybe even a month or more. Then the thaw would mean flooding in the bottom of the river valleys, which is why those fields are called water meadows.

Through the 90s, cold and snowy winters didn’t happen as often here, maybe every fourth or fifth year or less. I only remember a couple of occasions when my sons’ primary school was closed because of snow, and I think that only happened twice while they were at secondary school. The weather would warm up enough to melt the snow within a week. Winters were still chilly, but the really cold weather didn’t last as long. From 2010 onwards, a heavy snow fall has been unusual. I can only recall that happening a couple of times, and the snow melted within a few days.

There are still floods between January to March most years, following heavy rain that usually comes at the end of the winter. Sometimes these are bad enough to flood the new houses that have been built on the water meadows – as everyone with local knowledge confidently predicted. Flooding at all times of year is now a serious local concern.

Since 2020? I was sorting through my sweaters last spring and I realised I hadn’t worn my really thick, woolly jumpers at all for several years. It simply hasn’t been cold enough for me to need them, even though I don’t have the heating on when I’m working at home on my own. My friends and I tell each other about flowers and trees in our gardens getting confused and blooming at the wrong time of year. I have seen photos on daffodils at Christmas a few times on Facebook. This year seems warmer than ever. It’s mid-November and I am sitting here in a t-shirt without the heating on.

Er, excuse me, you may very well ask? Well, as social media becomes ever more fragmented and fractious, a blog is still one space that an author can use to maintain contact with readers. So I’m going to make more of an effort to post more day to day stuff on here. I’m still on Facebook, and you can find me on Mastodon as well now. I’m still on Twitter for the moment, and we see what happens over there, though frankly, I’m not optimistic.

So anyway, replacing the kitchen fridge means taking the souvenir magnets off the old one. Yesterday turned into an interesting retrospective on the various styles and designs used by the National Trust and English Heritage over the years, as well as prompting enjoyable recollections of family holidays and other travels.

The question now becomes, what do I do with them once the new fridge is in place? Replace them chronologically, as far as I can recall? Or should I group them by category, which at first glance would seem to be castles, stately homes, militaria, aquaria, zoos, miscellaneous? I shall give this some thought over the weekend.

We have them on the bread bin and the microwave as well. It’s very nice to look at them while I’m waiting for the kettle to boil and think ‘yes, that was a lovely day.’ If I’m not emptying the dishwasher or assessing the cupboards for the week’s shopping list, as one does.

Regular readers will recall me flagging up the Books on the Hill project last year, aiming to publish quick reads specifically intended for dyslexic adults, to encourage them to explore and enjoy the great range of fiction available these days. I wrote about that here.

I’m delighted to say the initiative has been a great success! Alistair and Chloe are running a second Kickstarter this year, offering another tremendous selection of stories to give readers a taste of different genres. You can find Open Dyslexia: The Sequel here. You will note that names from the bestseller lists and TV adaptations such as Bernard Cornwell and Peter James are supporting this splendid initiative. I was naturally most honoured when Alistair asked me – or rather, my alter ego JM Alvey – to write a short history mystery (12,000 words) for this year’s line-up.

What you may well not know – because I certainly didn’t, and yes, I am embarrassed by my ignorance – is that making a read dyslexia-friendly is a case of formatting and layout and similar. For an author, the writing process is exactly the same. I’m aiming to challenge, entertain and intrigue with this new Philocles short story in the same way that I do with anything I see published. The only difference is more people will be able to read it – and I love the thought of that.

This project really highlights how much new technologies can do to make books more accessible for people with dyslexia. And that makes the absence of such initiatives by the mass-market publishers glaringly obvious. The book trade needs to take a long hard look at this situation.

Last Wednesday, I headed into London with Husband to go to the second of this year’s garden parties at Buckingham Palace. Yes, really! It was certainly an experience.

Getting into London from Oxfordshire is so much easier now, using Oxford Parkway station near Kidlington. We got to Marylebone in good time – feeling a tad overdressed, even carrying my new hat in a bag. As we took the Underground, we started to see other people sufficiently frocked up that it was a fair guess where they were going. We got out at Hyde Park Station as the info said the queues at the palace back gate would be shorter. In fact, everyone was being marshalled towards the front of the palace instead, along Constitution Hill – which is pretty much level by the way. There was so much going on with Jubilee weekend preparations that clearly the normal routines didn’t apply. Anyway, since we were early we were thinking about taking a look at Hyde Park, but one of the many, many police around advised we go and get through the security check early, so we’d be at the front of the queue. This was extremely good advice. Waiting in the heat for about 45 minutes was a bit of a chore, but there were people to talk to, and things to look at – including many, many police with guns…

Once we got in, we had a pleasant stroll around the gardens, where there was lemon barley water or water on offer for anyone who might be thirsty. The grounds are big enough to have one military band by the palace (Welsh Guards) and another one (RAF) on the far side of the lawn, and for them not to be heard over each other. This is possibly why it didn’t feel overcrowded – even though there were apparently between 7000 and 8000 people there. Given the numbers, the way tea was served was astonishingly efficient. The main tea tent must have had twenty stations offering cakes, sandwiches and tea or Sandringham apple juice. Since we had gone for a walk rather than join the first rush, we queued for less than ten minutes – and when I asked what might be dairy free/vegan, the lady behind the counter waved at her elegantly morning-dressed supervisor who came over to talk to me. ‘Dairy free, madam? Of course. One moment, madam.’ He shimmered off like Jeeves and by the time the lady had loaded a plate for Husband and assured him he could come back if he wanted anything else, Jeeves reappeared with a dairy free plateful for me – which was lovely.

There were special presentations to the Royals up on the terrace, and then they (Prince Edward, the Countess of Wessex, Princess Alexandra, the Duchess of Cambridge) made their way across the lawn. The Yeoman of the Guard cleared the way – and Gilbert and Sullivan costumes notwithstanding, you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of their pikes. There was also a contingent of tall men in morning dress and top hats who were divided into ones engaging the public with charming conversation and making sure people didn’t get over-excited – and the ones who weren’t smiling, who weren’t talking to anyone, and who were constantly scanning the crowd. We didn’t join the scrum of people eager for a handshake or a photo. It was much more interesting to find a chair in a shady spot by the RAF band and people-watch.

All human life was there. People are proposed by sponsors ‘to recognise public service and celebrate people who’ve made a positive impact in their community’*. I talked to people involved in youth sports, Scouting, the NHS, local government, food banks, local voluntary organisations. It was all very relaxed – once we were inside the grounds, the only police in sight were in dress uniforms as guests. (Okay, and the ones in black tactical gear up on the palace roof) There were also a good few military personnel of all ranks – a spotters’ guide to uniforms and insignia would have come in handy. There’s a diplomatic tea tent so I’m assuming that accounted for the morning-dressed folk. Clerics of all creeds, levels of eminence and gender were around as well. The invitation said national dress could be worn, so there were some striking African outfits and gorgeous saris to be seen. A green silk shalwar kameez decorated with silver embroidery and pearls caught my eye, and a young Japanese naval officer in full dress uniform was accompanied by his plus-one in a stunning kimono. Or he may have been her plus-one, of course.

Once the Royals had reached their tea tent, we walked around the gardens and the lake a bit more and then went to sit and listen to the Welsh Guards where there was a breeze. Quite by chance, that meant we were in an excellent spot when the Royals walked back to the palace, so we stayed where we were, and got a really good look at the Yeomen and their pole-arms. And, oh, yes, at the Royals as well. The Duchess of Cambridge stopped to talk to three British-Indian ladies from Northampton, all in beautiful saris, who were standing just in front of us. The nice ladies, especially the oldest, were utterly, utterly thrilled, and that was lovely to see. Prince Edward was chatting to some else not far away. Either the Royals are actors who deserve Oscar nominations, or they were genuinely enjoying themselves. I’m going with the latter – given all the nonsense they have to put up with, being somewhere familiar and secure, and meeting people who are so visibly delighted to meet them must make for a pleasant day.

And then it was time to wend our way home. By the time we got back, thunderstorms had arrived, but we didn’t care. We picked up fish and chips en route and that rounded off our day.

*The Society of Authors put me forward on the basis of my various endeavours on behalf of writers.

Oh yes, says you, I remember it, Christopher Ecclestone and Simon Callow, great episode! Ah well, says I, it so happens I wrote a different story before anyone knew what Mark Gattiss was doing for the first season of the Doctor’s return.

Back in 2004, Paul Cornell was editing a Christmas anthology for Big Finish, and invited me to submit a story. I really enjoyed writing ‘Who the Dickens…?’, researching all the detail was fascinating, and Paul was very pleased with it. All was well until … the BBC spiked it. Sorry, that particular story was a no go for the forthcoming book.

Everyone was very nice, and thoroughly professional, and I was paid, and so while I felt a bit wistful, I didn’t feel in the least hard done by. These things happen with licensed property work. And when the new series aired, all was explained!

The story stayed in my computer archive because unlike a story of my own, I couldn’t sell it elsewhere, obviously. Then Paul contacted me earlier this year to ask if I’d ever done anything with it. No, as I explained, as far as I recalled without digging out the contract, the copyright and intellectual property rights belonged to Big Finish and the BBC, as is standard for such work. It would never see the light of day unless the powers that were gave their approval. Let me talk to a few people, says Paul…

Well, now you can read that story if you click over to Paul’s website and this year’s 12 Blogs of Christmas, free and gratis, to entertain you as this year draws to a close. Enjoy!

It’s time to share some news about a writing project I started around five years ago, to broaden the scope of my writing in these challenging times for authors. As a lifelong crime fiction fan and an erstwhile classicist, I reckoned historical mysteries set in Ancient Greece between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, had potential. There are plenty of good books set in Rome after all, so how about a change of scene?

I started my research, and thirty years after my undergraduate days, it was fascinating to see where thinking had changed, and what discoveries had been made. I plotted out a story, wrote a draft, sought no-holds-barred feedback from selected academic friends, and revised that draft. Then I started sending the project out on submission, working my way through a list of selected literary agencies.

A year of so later, I found an agent as keen on the project as I was. With the benefit of his fresh viewpoint, I reworked some aspects of the book, and he started pitching it to publishers. Six months later, we had a two book deal, with a view to launching an ongoing series. The plan was I’d write these books alongside my SF & fantasy, using the pseudonym J M Alvey to keep these books separate from my other work.

Things have not gone to plan. Not for any reason to do with my writing. Circumstances arise in publishing that authors can do nothing about, despite the seriously adverse impact on their careers. There’s no point in me going into the details. That would be unprofessional as well as unproductive.

I would simply like readers who might be interested to know these books are there to be enjoyed. Advance readers and reviewers have certainly taken to Philocles, a writer for hire in 5th century Athens who dreams of making his name writing comic plays for the great festivals. Check out the quotes on Amazon.

In Shadows of Athens, Philocles discovers a murdered man outside his front door, a few days before his new play is to be performed in the Dionysia drama competition. Is it just a robbery gone wrong? If so, why didn’t the thieves take the dead man’s valuables? Philocles wants answers, even though he has no idea where his investigations will lead. But who else is going to see justice done? Ancient Athens is a city with no police force, still less any detectives.

In Scorpions in Corinth, Philocles and his actors have travelled to the Isthmus, gateway to the Peloponnese. They are relying on a local fixer to help them stage a play there, to promote ties between the two cities. But Eumelos is killed soon after the Athenians arrive, and it’s clear that someone is out to wreck their performance. Philocles must find out who, but how? He knows his way around Athens but making enquiries in Corinth is a very different story.

Please feel free to share this and boost the signal.

The Green Man’s Foe is published tomorrow and since I’m not taking a laptop to the Dublin 2019 Worldcon, I’m posting this today, before I travel to Ireland. I want to acknowledge the part that my first literary agent, Maggie Noach, played in this story. One of the underlying themes of this particular novel is the idea of legacy, good and bad, and that has a particular resonance for me, in the unusual way this novel has come to be written.

As well as representing my epic fantasy fiction, while I wrote The Tales of Einarinn, and The Aldabreshin Compass, Maggie encouraged me to take my writing in other directions. She knew and loved the Cotswolds where I live, and more than once, we discussed the sense of history and folklore that’s so embedded in the local woods and villages. I wrote a draft of a novel about a country house being turned into a hotel, and a visitor from London who gets drawn into its secrets, that may or may not include the supernatural.

We were discussing how to improve on that, when all of us who knew and admired Maggie were devastated by her untimely death on 2006. Over the next few years, in between other projects, I went back to the novel a few times, and tried a couple of different approaches. Somehow, whatever I ended up with was never quite right. Looking at the dates on the files on the hard drive, I see that I last revised it in 2010 before finally setting it aside.

The success of The Green Man’s Heir in 2018 meant a great many people were asking me hopefully about a sequel. I certainly wanted to write one, but what would it be about? Frankly, I was at a loss until quite suddenly one day, when we were on holiday in the Lake District and I wasn’t even thinking about work, I remembered those drafts were still tucked away in my computer archive. When we got home, I searched out the back ups and realised I had the detailed setting, background characters and a framework of events that I could use for a whole new story, where Daniel has no doubt about the supernatural threat to this country house hotel project.

Once I stared writing, everything came together in a way that my attempts to rework that early draft novel simply never had. I only wish that Maggie was still with us to see the end result. I have no doubt what she would say. This all goes to show that no writing is ever wasted. That is most definitely part of her legacy to me.

World Book Day seems like an excellent day to post this 🙂

To recap, as the Guest of Honour at Novacon last year, I got to pick and discuss eight SF&Fantasy books that have had a lasting impact on me over my decades of voracious reading.

Rosemary Harris – The Moon in the Cloud

E Nesbit – The Phoenix and the Carpet

Robert A Heinlein – The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Larry Niven – Tales of Known Space

Melanie Rawn – Dragon Prince

Terry Pratchett – Men at Arms

Mary Doria Russell – The Sparrow

Dark Eden – Chris Beckett

Enjoy!

The last of my selection for Novacon, this book was published in 2012, so it’s a relatively recent read, but I want to find time to go back and re-read it. It’s another Arthur C Clarke Award winner, and I was one of the jurors who selected it. For myself, I found it one of the most original SF novels I’d read in years while at the same time harking back to so many of the classic SF elements and themes which first attracted me to the genre.

There’s a lost colony, survival against the odds in an alien, hostile environment, human ingenuity rising above these challenges, as well as human frailities – selfishness and greed – threatening all that’s been achieved.

The familiarity of these ideas extends beyond SF and I suspect have contributed signficantly to the favourable reviews and reception the book deservedly won beyond fan circles, from the sort of people who’d usually say they don’t like SF&F.

However, and crucially, as with all the best contemporary SF, this story isn’t merely rehashing these familiar elements as if that will somehow be sufficient to please both the Fans and those who prefer ‘real’ literature. Beckett brings these classic narratives all up to date by examining them through the prism of our own decade and its preoccupations. Once he’s done that, Beckett uses these ideas as tools to tell a story that’s unique and compelling in itself.

A trio of spacefarers were stranded on a dark world lit only by the bioluminescence of its intensely alien flora and fauna. Their descendants live a marginal and impoverished existence with a culture woven from half-remembered Earth traditions, coloured by misunderstandings and the consequences of that first desperate struggle for survival by people never intended to be colonists. Against all the odds, the population has grown to a point where the stresses on their meagre resources means something has got to change. Who will be the agent of change? John, who wants to venture into the snowy dark and see what lies beyond the confines of Circle Valley? Or David who wants to be in charge and have everyone do as he says? What consequences will follow as these two clash, for the women who have their own narrative handed down from mother to daughter which includes the admonition to never trust a man who believes the story is all about him. Then there are the other thinkers like Jeff who believes in focusing on being right here, right now and solving the problems at hand first of all.

It’s a deceptively simple story exploring some very complex ideas about humanity’s relationships with stories, from folklore through that well-worn adage about winners being the ones who write history to our own decade’s struggles with fact versus narrative embedded in the endless rolling 24 hour news cycle. This subtext underpins but never overwhelm an enthralling and fast paced story that’s shaped by unforeseen twists as well as characters’ choices. This simplicity extends to the language as Beckett writes in a dialect stripped back to its barest essentials which nevertheless contains clues and hints about the Eden population’s history. Uncompromising peril and surprises continue to the final pages where the ending proves both satisfactory and yet inconclusive. But that’s the nature of history. Individuals’ stories are only ever part of the ceaseless flow of events.

Since this first book came out, Chris Beckett has written two more stories set in this world; Mother of Eden and Daughter of Eden, which I thoroughly enjoyed (as you can tell if you’ve read my reviews of both in Interzone). These take place decades/generations later, so one more reason why I’d take this first book to the desert island is I know I could entertain myself for hours imagining how the different factions and populations got from the end of this first story to the societies we meet in later volumes. And then I could spend still more time analysing and admiring the skills of Beckett’s writing.

And if I was truly stranded on a desert island, a tale of survival would be a good morale booster – as well as an incentive to make me do whatever was necessary to get out of there!

This was one of those books it seemed everyone was enthusing about at the same time, when it won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 1998. For me, it was an enthralling read which gave me all those things I’d loved in Clarke’s work, Heinlein and Asimov but brought intelligently up to date. There were really alien aliens, a wide range of believable human characters (including women with opinions and agency) and a thought-provoking subtext as the plot explores so many facets of communication and miscommunication, issues of race and colonisation, among other debates about humanity, society and belief; religious and otherwise. Most important of all, the story does all this without getting bogged down. Lucid, literate prose keeps the plot moving swiftly along. Scene setting is vivid and the dialogue natural, all making for an immersive read.

Following the plot that demands the reader’s engagement. The narrative unfolds in different strands and you need to pay attention as you read them in parallel. We see events unfolding from 2019 onwards when the SETI project picks up alien signals from Alpha Centauri. How can an expedition to make first contact be organised and financed? At the same time, we follow the investigators in 2059 who are trying to work out why the expedition ended in such lethal disaster. There’s only one survivor and something inexplicably horrible has happened to him. Sustaining this balancing act between telling the reader at the outset that disaster has struck and then compelling them to keep turning the pages to find out precisely what has happened and then how is a mighty writerly achievement.

Rereading this book in 2016, with 2019 now on the horizon is an interesting experience. Near-future SF notoriously offers up hostages to fortune, especially with the things which writers fail to predict. How many authors devised plots that would be instantly unravelled by mobile phones? Well, mobiles are not noticeable here but their presence wouldn’t make much difference. Mostly, Doria Russell avoids the worst pitfalls by blending logical extrapolation from then to roughly now with a deft lack of potentially compromising detail. The Horn of Africa is a war zone. Countries in Central and South America have refugee, economic and health crises. How these things happened isn’t directly relevant to the story, so we don’t need to know more than the broad brush strokes.

Other apparently prescient things do catch my eye. How does word of the SETI discovery spread? When an illegal download of the musical signal effectively goes viral on what looks very like the Internet. How is an interstellar mission launched? Not by NASA, the UN or any such agency. Space exploration has become the province of non-state bodies. In this case, the Catholic Church, or to be more precise, the Jesuits, take on the challenge. Doria Russell doesn’t pull this out of thin air; there’s been an observatory in the Vatican since 1774 and the Church first became interested in astronomy faced with the challenge of calculating dates for Easter and other holy festivals. This maybe SF but there’s an awareness of the depth of history (and the lessons it can offer) running through this book.

But why get involved in contacting aliens? Well, what would the presence of intelligent life elsewhere have to say about mankind’s relationship with our supposed Creator? What will the faithful do with any answers they might find? More immediately, can explorers voyaging so far with such lofty ideals actually cope with the practical challenges of an alien environment, its ecology and a complex society they don’t understand when they’re at the mercy of powerful individuals whose own concerns are their priority. As those questions are answered, we learn the chilling truth of what happened and why.

I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting this book. I also recall recommending it widely at the time, including to friends and family who’d usually say they didn’t like SF but found this an enthralling read all the same. If you haven’t come across it before, do go and find it in your preferred format. And remember it the next time you see one of those ‘Best of/Must Read/Memorable’ lists that persist in erasing women authors from our genre. Ask why this book isn’t mentioned.