No Smoking

Differences between Taipei and home that have begun to seep in: hardly anyone smokes. Walk into a newsagent back home, and there's always a vast, shrine-like display of cigarettes. Hundreds of packets. Walk into a newsagent here - or a 7/11 as they're known - you see about three, stuck up next to the counter. Go into a bar in Glasgow, it's guaranteed to have a mob of people standing and shivering in the rain outside and desperately clutching lit fags. You don't see that anywhere here.

Oh sure, you walk around the streets, and you see one or two people smoking. And I mean one or two. It just doesn't seem to interest people here so much. They just don't seem to be driven to clog up their lungs and everyone else's with foul, polluting smog.

It's nice.

Oh John Ringo, No

It's book reviews like this one (thanks for the tip, Baz) that make all the rest look utterly insipid by comparison. If Hunter S. Thompson had started reading Robert Heinlein when he was a kid, maybe he'd have ended up writing reviews like this one (of John Ringo's 'Ghost') instead of wasting his time hanging out with movie stars and interviewing famous politicians.

"You think that paragraph alone would make this book awesomely bad, but no. IT GETS MORE SO. Yes, you will be horrified by a lot of this, because Mike Harmon's adventures are by turns awesomely horrific and horrifically awesome; I freely confess that I cannot stop reading these books, because *I have to see what Ringo does next.* I do, however, have a finely-tuned defense mechanism: whenever something trips my circuit breaker, causing me to cringe away from the page, I utter aloud a cry that resets my noggin. You will probably need it yourself, so I provide it here, as a public service: "OH JOHN RINGO NO.

GHOST is Ringo's own admitted Lord King Badfic, his id run wild. By his own account, he was trying to write several books he was actually contracted for, but GHOST kept nudging at him, and finally he just wrote the damn thing to *make it go away* so he could get back to fulfilling his contracts. Ringo locked the spewings of his id away on his hard drive, until he mentioned in passing on an online forum that yeah, he'd written another book, but it was *awful* and would never see the light of day. Naturally, folks were curious, and when Ringo posted a sample, nobody was more surprised than him to find that the response was, more often than not, "Hey, man, I'd buy this."

Be warned - if you read it at work, coffee might spurt through your nose and everyone will give you funny looks. At least, when your jaw isn't dropping open in undiluted horror. And you'll have to resist the urge to mutter, 'Oh John Ringo, no!' at wildly inappropriate moments."

Genius.

Stealing Light paperback due soon

Just a quick note to say the mass market of Stealing Light will finally be out in the UK on 6/6/08 - about three weeks from now.

This week I have mostly been reading ...

Even though I gave up the idea of buying an e-ink book reader anytime soon a while ago, I've been slowly building what feels like a fairly large collection of openly available works released either by a publisher or by the authors themselves. A lot of them come from Tor, who've been releasing pdf versions of some of their better-known books every week or so in the run-up to their new website. But at last count, there's getting on for two dozen of them. Except they've just been sitting there, since I normally refuse to read a book off a computer screen; waiting for the day when I have something sort of book-like to read them from.

In the end, I broke and started reading them straight from the screen. What made this a lot easier than it might otherwise have been is being able to easily reverse the screen on my ibook with a couple of keystrokes. White text on black is much, much easier on the eyes.

But what's really good is I'm reading a lot more than I have in really quite some time. Of those books I've read so far, the absolute stand-out so far is Cory Doctorow's 'Little Brother'. I read his first two books - which didn't knock me out so much - but Little Brother is quite enormously good. And prescient. Isn't it nice when you can write about a book and get to use words like prescient? I'd say more about it, and use words like unputdownable, astonishing and utterly gripping, but it really deserves a blog entry all on its own.

The experience of reading these freely given books has made me swing more strongly towards the 'give books away for free, and they will come' philosophy. The ebook I read prior to Little Brother was another very well-regarded novel of recent times by another author, but having read it - and admittedly having quite enjoyed it - I didn't feel at all inclined to go and buy anything else by that author. Not because they're necessarily a bad writer, but because they don't give me that 'must buy' feeling I get when I stumble across something really good. By contrast, Little Brother is something I want a physical copy of, on my shelves.

If people aren't reading so much as they used to these days, it's largely an economic issue. It's a pain in the arse to go out and buy a couple of books and find you either don't like them or can't finish them. It's a drain on your wallet - particularly if you're a student or on a low income - a situation I was more than familiar with back in the day.

Buying two, three or more books in a row that you don't like or can't finish makes for an enormous incentive for many people not to buy any more books at all. But if you find something that really knocks you out - the kind of ur-reading experience that has you gripping the pages, desperate to know what happens next - it makes for an enormous incentive to buy everything else by that author. In other words, it creates customer loyalty. Sometimes intense, outspoken customer loyalty, particularly if the book reminds you why you started buying and reading fiction in the first place. And let me assure you, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother is one of those books.

Google Widgets

Okay - I just stuck a Google widget up on the left hand side of the page that should provide automatic translation into a variety of languages, some of which might even make sense. If you happen to speak one of those languages and what you're reading makes sense, drop me a line in the comments - even just to say 'yes'.

Waterstone's 'Book of the Month'

Just got an email from my editor Peter Lavery. Every month the UK book chain Waterstone's have a 'book of the month' thing where they promote a book in a particular genre - and Stealing Light, it seems, is going to be the 'sf book of the month' in June, when it comes out as a mass market paperback. Yay me!

Freeconomics

Since giving stuff away free online is a subject directly related to issues like Digital Rights Management, I found this Guardian interview with Wired editor Chris Anderson on his concept of 'freeconomics' fascinating reading, although I'm not sure I agree with everything he has to say by any means.

"The internet has revolutionised economics," says Anderson down his cellphone as he drives to work in California. "On the web, the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution are zero, or close to it. This means that you can now experiment with giving away one thing to sell something else much more than you could in the pre-internet era. Or you can experiment with third-party support, where you give away a product to sell attention to another. The traditional model is of giving 1% of goods away as samples in order to sell 99% of the product; on the web, you can give 99% away as free samples to sell 1%." You're kidding, I say to Anderson. And still make profit? "Sure. Why not."

Two Fingers to DRM

I just spent the better part of a fruitless, irritating, enormously frustrating hour on my girlfriend's windows-running laptop, attempting to make it play a collection of classical music she purchased from the Napster website several months ago. Since then, the computer has been rebooted, and using Napster's 'licence renewal' software to allow her to play that music simply doesn't work. Attempts to update licences by any means results in broken links and crashing software. For legally purchased tracks. By the end of the hour, I felt like picking the laptop up and using it to make a serious dent in something. especially if that something was the soft, squishy, worm-like face of whichever moron thought DRM was a good idea.

In case you're wondering, I regard myself as at least reasonably savvy with a computer (or at least Macs since I dumped Windows for good), but my girlfriend, like the vast majority of people, only needs or wants to know enough to switch hers on, type up documents, play some music while she's prepping for her day's work, and finally switch it off again. Issues like 'DRM' and 'restrictive licensing' are not familiar concepts to her - but they are to me.

This was my first direct encounter with DRM issues, since I only buy physical CD's (which are then ripped to MP3, and therefore act primarily as a backup), and never buy MP3 downloads. The experience left me in absolutely no doubt why people pirate music; the overwhelming feeling I had after all that time wasted trying to help someone play music which they had paid for was that I wanted to stand in front of the main offices of every music business actively supporting DRM and shout fuck you at the top of my voice.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a working writer, and I want to be paid for what I do. I know if I were a professional musician, I'd certainly want to get paid for what I do. I like to believe most people would happily pay for the art, writing and music they value. And although I've felt intellectually DRM is not the way forward for some time, the anger I feel at my encounter with restrictive software provides a certain emotional weight to the issue I hadn't previously experienced. I consider this to be a lesson well learned.

Britannica for free

The Britannica Encyclopedia recently started handing out free, one-year subscriptions to select online 'publishers' (meaning journalists and bloggers) who were required to submit details of their website or blog as part of the application process. That meant if your blog solely consisted of photographs of Britney's cleavage or an introspective analysis of your growing telepathic commmunion with the cockroaches living under your sink, the chances were you weren't going to get it. Fortunately, being a science fiction writer means you do get it, after a three or four day wait to find out if you make the grade.

Not only that, once you're signed up you can place widgets on your page that not only display a piece of information presumably pertinent to your blog entry, but that also links to the full Britannica article without the need for the casual blog-reader to sign up to it themselves. The same is true for straightforward hypertext links like the one in the next paragraph; click on it and you get the full article - but only that article. But what really matters is I now have full access to Britannica for a year, and that means I can do more research (when I'm not, you know, making stuff up, which is most of the time).

I couldn't help but compare two articles on the same subject, one in Britannica, and one in Wikipedia, on the Chinese god-emperor Fuxi (or Fu Xi, or Fu Hsi); the Britannica info is relatively sparse, but the Wikipedia article is highly detailed. Although it's also quite telling the depth to which the Wikipedia article goes into cinematic representations of Fuxi in a variety of Chinese fantasy films (The reason I'm checking such things is I'm naming two planets after Fuxi and his sister/wife Nuwa. History is apparently unclear on exactly which she was).

On an initial glance, I'd say the Wikipedia article is actually a lot more useful because of the depth it goes into by comparison to the Britannica article. I've heard people complain about the supposed inaccuracy of Wikipedia articles, but those same people never seem to have heard of a little thing called cross-checking.

If you need to make sure your facts are right, check at least two different sources of the same information and see what each says. That's where the value of a free Britannica subscription comes in - although it's own accuracy has been questioned or challenged, and being printed on paper is not in itself an automatic guarantee of such.

My usual research policy is to start with Wikipedia, then either google specific related terms or follow-through some of the online references often found on a Wikipedia page. Sometimes, of course, a trip to a physical library is required, but given I'm living in Asia for the moment, my research is by necessity almost entirely online. Good research, to my mind, means finding not only the commonalities in two sources of information on the same subject, but also gleaning minor but illuminating details to be found only in one or the other.

Now my routine is: check Wikipedia, check what Britannica says by comparison, see what a google search kicks up, ask friends and acquaintances for help if I need any more info related to their particular disciplines (amongst whom I count physicists, game programmers, artificial intelligence researchers, astronomers and those well versed in Babylonian mythology), and work on from there.

Lonely Planet

While in conversation with a Canadian travel writer of my acquaintance, Troy Parfitt (author of 'Notes From The Other China'), a recently published book by a one-time contributing editor to the Lonely Planet series of travel guides was mentioned. The book is called 'Do Travel Writers Go To Hell', and is by one Thomas Kohnstamm. Turns out he's been featured in a few newspaper articles, and the book sounds interesting enough to go straight into my Amazon wishlist. From an article in the Telegraph:

"The image of the conscientious travel writer has been dealt a blow by a tell-all memoir by a Lonely Planet author, who discloses that he spent more time chasing women and selling drugs than checking train timetables.

Modern guide books like to portray themselves as the definitive source of information on how holidaymakers can enjoy themselves in far-flung corners of the globe without damaging the environment or upsetting local people.

But in a warts-and-all account of how he came to write Lonely Planet's guide to Brazil, the American writer Thomas Kohnstamm has revealed a world where good reviews may be exchanged for sex or a free room for the night, and decisions on which restaurants to include are dependent on the whims of a hard-up author without time to check the details.

In Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?, Mr Kohnstamm, 32, discloses that there was nothing lonely about his three years travelling through Latin America, working on a dozen different titles."

He tries to explain himself here.

Reason No:546 why having the IQ of an amoeba is good news for science fiction writers

It occurred to me the other day, while referring to an online series of photographs of unfinished hotels lost in the Egyptian desert, that I've always had a certain fascination with architecture. This interest stems from my childhood, when I liked to build weird houses out of lego bricks. It reached its culmination in my just pre-teens, when I had to sit an IQ test of some sort. One of the questions - and here, I only vaguely recall something almost certainly coloured and changed by the intervening years, although it stands out sufficiently that I recall little else from that time - involved a series of highly simplified representations of a 'house'. Each drawing consisted of a simple rectangle with a roof - a low triangle - on top. Each had little squares or rectangles for windows, a door and a chimney; each had the door, chimney and windows arranged in different patterns. The question required me to pick whichever was the 'correct' house.

In retrospect, I believe the author of the test required me to pick the rectangle that had four window-squares neatly tucked up close to each corner of the main house-shape; a door, standing at the middle and bottom of the house-shape; and the upright chimney-rectangle positioned on top of the roof but slightly to one side. A classic child's drawing of a house, in other words.

Unfortunately, the author of said question perhaps hadn't anticipated it being answered by a kid obsessed with Marvel Comics and classic science fiction who admired not only the range of architecture evident in films like Logan's Run or Forbidden Planet, who not only held a special place in his heart for the underground lair of the Mole Man, an early nemesis of the Fantastic Four, but had also created several line drawings in the past of his own preferred abode, namely a continental truck-sized mobile home with caterpillar wheels, two levels, a roof-mounted observation bubble, and a tidy little fusion reactor for power where the engine should have been.

I picked a different house for my answer. Not the wrong answer, you understand; another answer. I knew they wanted me to pick the 'right' house, but I was already far too contrary and disinterested in other people's ideas of the right way to do things.

I picked the one with three windows, running in a diagonal line from the top left corner of the house-shape to the bottom right, with the front door squeezed in between the bottom right window and the very edge of the house-shape. My reasoning was simple; obviously the house was open-plan (a personal favourite), with an open stairwell running from one end of an attic-space that had been opened up for a second bedroom down to a front door to one side of the building, while interior dividing walls had been replaced and the supporting columns integrated into the general look-and-feel of the interior space. This struck me as a much more interesting place to live.

I stand by my decision. I suspect that if I'd answered the 'right' way I would now be a moderately successful Call Centre Manager rather than a moderately successful science fiction author. But then, later in life, I did another IQ test out of a book owned by a flatmate and proved to have an IQ of 17, so perhaps you should take anything I say with a pinch of salt.

The point of all this stems from the fact that what most impressed me about my visit to Malaysia was some of the architecture, specifically the twin towers that dominate the skyline there just as much as the equally lofty Taipei 101 tower dominates the skyline of Taipei, in a very science-fictional way. I could tell you about my visit to the bird sanctuary, or my tour around the Chinatown night-market next door to a gigantic mosque, but I can't deny I found myself constantly staring at certain examples of gargantuan architecture with a deep fascination.

So it was with some relief I read an article in the Guardian Online that proves I'm a long, long way from being alone; it seems the British Dan Dare comic strip, with its alien skylines and imagined architecture, was a massive influence on many modern British architects. I like to think the architects mentioned might have sat similar tests, and might also have picked the 'wrong' answer.

Lost Hotels

It occurs to me that writing a second draft of a book is a bit like making a highly detailed painting then putting it into a magic box that turns it into an instant jigsaw. Except you don't get to reassemble the jigsaw for another six months. And not only that, after those six months are up none of the pieces appear to fit any more, so you have to re-shape them by hand. One by one. Hundreds of them. Until they fit together. Sort of.

This blog on unfinished hotels lost in the Egyptian desert got mentioned on Boing Boing. It occurred to me if I were thinking of making a dirt-cheap sf movie set on another planet, preferably one featuring an abandoned colony, I could do a lot worse for shooting locations.

Films

A while back I mentioned something about writing a short - a very, very short script - for something to do with the BBC. As in, one minute short. It actually got filmed several weeks back and it's been completed, along with two other short-short films, and is getting shown in one of the viewing rooms at BBC Scotland in the middle of the week. Annoyingly/unsurprisingly, I can't be there, but I'm hoping I can persuade my 'script editor on the inside' to send me a copy. It's very nice when you can add a sentence like 'wrote a screenplay for the BBC and had it produced' to your writing CV. Even if it's, er, only a minute long. The film is called 'Unbound' and, with any luck, will prove to be very, very violent.

Back from Malaysia

Malaysia
I spent a long weekend there in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia along with my girlfriend; we were staying at my brother's house, and my mother was there at the same time, having flown in from Scotland for ten days or so. It's as close to the equator as I've ever managed to get, and I recall glancing outside the window at the satellite dish on the house exterior and noting it pointed almost straight up, whereas in Scotland I'm sure they're angled (somewhat unsurprisingly once you think about it) towards the horizon. The people are a mix of Malay and Chinese. I did visit the Twin Towers in the city centre, until recently the tallest buildings in the world. I wonder if it's possible to base a round the world trip on visiting purportedly tallest-buildings-in-the-world?

Editing
I'm about a fifth of the way through the rewrite/edit on the first-ish draft (like the concept of 'first draft' really has any meaning any more in an age of word processors), and so far everything seems okay. I only ever say something I'm working on is 'okay' because by the time there's enough there to pass any kind of comment on - usually by about the forty thousand word mark - The Book has simply become that thing I stare at for at least a couple hours a day. I simply can't judge it with any degree of genuine objectivity. It has, by this point, become little more than a Bunch Of Words; a Bunch of Words that a certain publisher so far appears prepared to write out large cheques for, a trend I hope may continue. I remain pleasantly surprised each and every time that cheque appears in my hands.

Actually, that's not quite correct. I can pass some judgement on what I'm writing. I measure the book by whether or not I start skipping paragraphs when I re-read a chapter I wrote several weeks before. If I catch myself skipping paragraphs, it's because what I've written is boring me. If it's boring me, I have the options of - cutting it out altogether, making it more interesting by inserting action or various revelations, or simply shortening it drastically.

Reviews
I finally got around to watching the Will Smith version of I Am Legend the other night. It's an experience that always reminds me of the Dumb Lieutenant in cliched cop shows. The Dumb Lieutenant is the guy who's always warning the hero - let's call him Brannigan - that if he crosses the line one more time, he loses his badge. Yet episode after episode, Brannigan is proved right in his rule-breaking methods; and yet the Dumb Lieutenant goes right back to shouting threats at Brannigan by the next week, despite the turnover of solved cases. The Dumb Lieutenant never learns.

Sometimes, when I watch Hollywood blockbuster science fiction movies, I feel like that Dumb Lieutenant. I worry I'll hate what I'm going to see. I know based on past experience, hating what I'm about to see is pretty much inevitable. Yet there's some part of me that believes against all sanity and experience that well, maybe, just maybe this'll be quite good because how could they get this wrong?

Like the Dumb Lieutenant, no matter how often the evidence fails to match my expectations, I refuse to learn.

And then they not only get it wrong, they get it so wrong that I remember the other problem with these Hollywood blockbusters - that I come away feeling insulted. So insulted I do things like immediately go to the Amazon UK website and post lengthy reviews starting with the words 'This film is an act of cowardice'. That's how insulted I felt.

Here's the review in full:

"This film is an act of cowardice. It takes everything that was good and original in Richard Mathieson's novel I Am Legend and removes it, along with the author's intended and necessary subtext, resulting in something so generic and ridiculously bland that it plays like a DisneyWorld version of 28 Days Later.

Let's be clear; the first half is reasonably gripping, but then it descends into a welter of cop-outs - most galling is the whole 'God sent me to help you' subplot. Even more galling is the end voice-over in which the film's makers pretty much demonstrate their complete and utter contempt first for Mathieson, and then for their audience. What happened, Mr Smith et al, couldn't handle the original, bleak but telling ending? Are you so scared of your own audience you just had to tag on that happily-ever-after, or chase away any sense of moral ambiguity on the part of the hero? Seriously, how can you or any of the rest of the people responsible for this turgid nonsense truly sleep at night, and was it worth it for the dollars you made off the back of it?

And by the way - although the scenes of a CGI abandoned New York are impressive, that doesn't extend to the CGI vampires who look, unsurprisingly, like stiff-limbed and unconvincing cartoons. And for creatures who have apparently been reduced to snarling, mindless beasts for the better part of three years, they do all seem to still wear neatly belted trousers. I also entirely fail to understand how an airborne virus can also give the infected the ability to climb walls like oversized geckos.

This is Romero for the after-schoolers; soft, bland, edges safely rounded off, with monsters whose decency is preserved and plenty of mentions of God 'having a plan for us all' that nearly had me kicking in the TV screen."

That wasn't the original review; the original review contained phrases like 'should be taken out and shot', and 'as morally justifiable as digging up Richard Mathieson's skeletal corpse in order to perform gross sex acts with his remains', but I wasn't sure Amazon would publish that.

short stories

Okay, so I finally got around to posting up that vampire story I mentioned some time ago in a previous post. I'm posting it on my own blog because, after submitting it here and there a couple of times, I just couldn't be arsed with the effort required and it ended up being shelved for a couple of years. A combination of reticence and typical, writerly what-if-everyone-hates-it kept it there until recently, when I was over at flurb.net, reading how Rudy Rucker started up his own personal e-zine because he, too, couldn't be arsed submitting his stuff to other people's e-zines.

The story is called The Ranch, and you can find it here. It's a vampire horror story, be warned, written a few days after making the statement at the Glasgow SF Writer's Circle that I hated vampire stories and there was nothing new or genuinely interesting that could possibly be done with them. By writing the story I quite possibly hoisted myself with my own petard but, at the same time, you know, the story is about why I hate vampire stories. Plus, I get to do a cheap willy gag.

Love or loathe it as you will.

start of second draft

The first draft of Stealing Fire is done, topping out at 132,000 words. I think I'm as happy with it as I am with any first draft, in the sense there's some good ideas in there, but this deep in you get the 'can't see the wood for the trees' effect that prevents you from gaining sufficient mental distance from the story to be sure you can be even distantly objective about its credits or failings. This distance can be achieved by the simple act of printing out the manuscript and leaving it in a desk drawer for two years before reading it again. Unfortunately, since I'm on a deadline, I don't have that luxury.

Nonetheless, I started work on the second draft/rewrite, which is proving to be fun, involving as it does some level of research. But the hard work of typing thousands of words every day, at least, is over.

Things I Have Learned in Taipei

That you should never throw out your shopping receipts because they've all got lottery numbers printed on them (the rationale being as far as I understand it that: shoppers will always ask for an official receipt, and the shop will thereby not be inclined to not record the sale for tax purposes). Why don't we do that?

You can fit one fully grown adult and at least three children onto a scooter.

Even large dogs fit quite nicely in the space underneath a scooter's handlebars, and can be trained not to jump out while their owner is doing sixty in the middle of heavy traffic.

That road rage is a concept largely confined, I think, to the British Isles; despite the density of traffic here, no one - I repeat, no one - gets upset.

That the one true universal language is spontaneous mime.

That drunken fighting in the streets is a cultural phenomenon, unrelated to the availability of alcohol well into the early hours (I've seen one drunk person in my whole time here).

That television programming back home looks an awful lot better once you see what's described as 'entertainment' outside of the UK.

increasingly scarce

Apparently there's less than two hundred copies of the hardback of Stealing Light out in the wild, so if you were thinking of getting one and haven't yet ... now might be the time, and I'd suggest ordering online rather than getting it from an actual bookshop given its current scarcity. It's unlikely that the hardback will be reprinted before the mass market paperback comes out on June 20th this year. It's still available on Amazon right now, and there a few copies for sale through Amazon-affiliated new and secondhand dealers.

my new favourite waste of time

First off, if you have any serious work to be getting on with, do not go to www.bitstrips.com. (from where this strip was taken, one of the best I've seen there - linking isn't as easy as it could be, and if it appears too small on your screen, click on it and it should open up much larger). Repeat, do not go. It's a black hole of time-consuming fun. Basically, it's a flash-driven site that allows you to assemble one to six panel newspaper-style comic strips with a ready-made catalogue of furniture, backgrounds and characters, the latter of which are heavily customisable. It took less than an hour for me to knock together two very professional-looking (I thought) comic strips. I'm not telling where mine are, because my efforts at humour are feeble enough without exposing themselves to the wider world.

Secondly, there's a very nice review of Stealing Light up at the Sci Fi London site, which is apparently closely tied to the Clarke Awards (he who has gone to the great monolith in the sky).

Progress continues on the last hard slog to the rough-as-hell-until-I-revise-it end of book two, though the other day I could hardly get any writing done; I literally stared at the screen slack-jawed, feeling burned out. But in the past couple of months I've come up with some ideas for the book that hadn't occurred to me when I started it. That's something I was pleased to find out when I started writing books; that you come up with really good ideas even when you're deep into a book, that can substantially change it in a positive and unexpected way.

I started thinking, as I often do, of books I imagine I might write at some indeterminate point in the future if I genuinely had the motivation and ability to spend a solid three months doing nothing but writing furiously 'between the books I get paid for', as it were. There's the non-genre ''40's Noir murder mystery based around the filming of a '40's noir murder mystery movie just before the US entry into World War 2' book. Then there's the definitely genre 'sort of ERB's Barsoom, but set in the near future and with weird and exotic alien tech on Mars' book (since I have a feeling intertextually self-referential, postmodern heroic pulp action may be the 'in' thing in the next couple of years). There's the 'mid-21C environmental disaster' book ... and some other stuff. Or maybe I should just get on with finishing this one ...