Faintheart

In which The Author experiences another mere coincidence

The book I'm currently working on is the third instalment in Christian Cameron's 'Age of Chivalry' series, which began with The Ill-Made Knight and continued in The Long Sword. I’d worked with Christian back in the spring, on the latest part of the 'The Long War' saga, so I was quite flattered when Orion approached me and asked me if I'd like to copy-edit his latest novel. (I won't reveal the title here, because I don't know whether it's been officially announced yet.) I'd like to think I did such a good job on The Rage of Ares that Christian himself asked if I was available. I haven't asked him directly, though. I'm not that conceited, after all.

Since I'm familiar with his style, and I'd had such a great time – buried under a mountain of books in Aberdare Library, some of which had probably been untouched since they arrived on the shelves – I jumped at the chance.

Well, I have to say that it’s been a bit like battling the Hydra. You put one query to bed, only for another two to spring up. I haven’t attempted to draw up a query sheet this time. Instead, I’ve been using the ‘Comment’ feature in LibreOffice Writer (the cheapskate’s Open Source equivalent of MS Word) to insert my Notes and Queries directly into the margin of the document.

Most of them are pretty short – 'Please see my Names Checklist', that sort of thing. A few point out homophones which have crept into the text. It happens to everyone, after all (see The Death of Rhydwen Williams in my other blog). A few of them – concerning points of historical accuracy or linguistic variations – are almost as long as the page they're pinned to.

Needless to say, I've been taking advantage of Aberdare Library's half-decent Reference section to deal with most of the obstacles I've come up against. On Thursday afternoon I took a photo of the collection of books I'd accumulated through the day, and sent it to Christian on Twitter.

(Incidentally, The Chambers Dictionary is the one I donated myself, as I told you in The Gift of Words. The Oxford Spelling Dictionary was also from my own personal stash, but when I upgraded to the latest edition I didn't need them both at home. I figured that Aberdare Library might take it off my hands, simply so they could say they had two dictionaries published after 1992.)

Anyway, I stayed there until closing time on Thursday, and didn’t bother reshelving them. Instead, I left a note on top of the pile, saying I’d be back in the morning, so they might as well stay there overnight. And on Friday morning I returned, along with five books from my own collection. I had the three Oxford University Press ‘Black Books’ -- essential parts of every proofreader’s and copy-editor’s toolkit. I also had John Julius Norwich’s book on the Popes, and a book on the Knights Templar, both of which I’d picked up in The Works in recent weeks.

I checked my emails and Christian had replied to my Tweet. Since he lives in Toronto, it came in overnight: Are all those for TGC? I replied, They're just the ones I was using yesterday. In the afternoon, I took another photo and Tweeted it to Christian, with the caption We're gonna need a bigger table.

As a matter of fact, we're gonna need a bigger library.

I had a quick look in the history section of the Lending department on Thursday afternoon. This might sound shocking, but as far as the reading public of Aberdare are aware, absolutely nothing happened in the world between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Napoleon. That extends the so-called 'Dark Ages' to nearly fourteen centuries: there's nothing on the Carolingian Renaissance, the Norman Conquest, the Crusades, the Hundred Years War, the Renaissance, the Wars of the Roses, the Age of Exploration, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the English Civil War, the Restoration, the American War of Independence, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution …

Even the one book which Rhondda Cynon Taf CBC Libraries do have in stock – a historical account by Judith Barker – covers the second half of the Hundred Years War. I only found that out after I'd requested a transfer. Christian's book is set during the first half. Go figure …

Anyway, the coincidence came about last night, in the Prince of Wales, of all places. Karen and I were chatting about our latest romantic disappointments: mine with Clare; hers with a chap she's keen on, but who – yeah, you've got it in one – 'just likes her as a friend'.

Karen said, 'Your trouble is that you're too much of a gentleman. Girls take advantage of you, because you're kind and good. You've got …' She hesitated for a few moments, searching for the right word. '… chivalry.'

Well, what do you make of that? Karen knew I was working on a book, but she had no idea of the content, or even the historical setting. Why on earth would she have chosen that particular word at this point in my life?

But I thought about it afterwards. As I said in The Return of the King?, I've always been a fan of King Arthur, going back to when I first encountered some of the stories in junior school. In particular, the Grail cycle is a long-standing fascination of mine. And I'm sure everybody knows the bare bones of the Grail myth, even if they haven't read the stories in much detail.

We all know that Lancelot let the side down because he couldn't keep it in his britches. Gawain was a worthy knight and a brave soul, but he failed to find the Grail. Only Galahad – pure of heart and mind and body – was vouchsafed the sight of the Grail, but even he was defeated by his own self-doubt, and the vision faded.

It's still an odd thing for Karen to say, isn't it? I certainly don't fit the description of 'chivalrous' as lived by Sir William Gold in Christian's novels, or as defined by Ramón Llull, who literally wrote the book on the subject. For one thing, with my back and shoulders, I'd be absolutely no bloody use in a fight. I'm hardly a staunch servant of our lord Jesus Christ, either. (We never did heal the schism between the early Church and the Discordian Heresy, after all.) Roistering and wenching aren't really my thing – chance would be a fine thing, as I found out last week.

But, like Sir William, I do like to meet people from different places and cultures, who've had different experiences and hold differing beliefs. My life is certainly richer as a result. In fact, just this morning I was chatting to Jamila on Facebook. I wanted to pick her brains about an aspect of Islam which crops up in the book, and which I wanted to double-check before I finalise the edit. I teased her that, throughout all her time studying Forensic Science, she probably never expected she'd be asked to act as an expert witness in a historical novel.

Anyway, that's this week's mere coincidence. Just thought you'd like to know.

A Few Weeks in the Matrix

In which The Author goes back to the Source

I recently landed the biggest proofreading job so far. Gollancz are reissuing William Gibson's 'Sprawl' novels – Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive – together with his collection of short stories Burning Chrome. Guess who got the gig to do all four?

It's been exciting for me, because they want these to be the definitive editions, and so I've been entrusted to bash a degree of consistency into the books. It's understandable, I suppose, because they came out at different times, and were presumably copy-edited by different people. I've been making long lists of charactes, product manufacturers (real and fictional), locations (real and fictional), and futuristic slang words, technical terms and foreign words, in order to apply the changes across the board.

It's been a fairly long time since I read Neuromancer, and I've never tackled the sequels before. As a result, I hadn't noticed just what a heavy influence Mr Gibson has been on the mainstream of science fiction over the past twenty years or so. I suppose the most obvious nod to his books was one of my favourite films of all times, The Matrix.

While the idea of plugging into a 'virtual reality' system anticipates Neuromancer by a few years – I've traced it back as far as Christopher Priest's novel A Dream of Wessex – it was the Wachowski Brothers who really brought the idea to a mass audience. While Mr Gibson uses the term 'the matrix' (with a lower case m) to describe the cyberspace world his characters explore, I think his vision of the internet owes more to the embarrassing graphics of Lawnmower Man than to our everyday experiences of surfing the Net. However, the character of the Finn, an AI construct who acts as an intermediary between the human protagonists and the sentient programs inhabiting the matrix, was a direct steal as the Oracle. (In Mona Lisa Overdrive the Finn even refers to himself as 'an oracle.') While the films owe a conceptual debt to Mr Gibson's books, the two media are worlds apart.

No, what I've got in mind is the subtle way in which Mr Gibson's ideas have spread into popular SF films and TV programmes over the years. Take Minority Report, for example. That's another great film based on a very short story by one of the Grand Masters of the genre, Philip K. Dick. You might not have noticed it unless you were looking, but the rundown areas of Washington DC are referred to at one point as 'the sprawl'. That's straight out of Neuromancer – as are the little mechanical spiders which the police use to search the building in which John Anderton is hiding.

Those same little spiders turned up again in the second episode of the revived Doctor Who, of all places. And it's though Doctor Who, perhaps surprisingly, that many of Mr Gibson's ideas have made it onto the small screen. In the two-parter 'Silence in the Library'/Forests of the Dead', Steven Moffat introduced the idea of an electronic interface which could record a person's consciousness for a short time. At the end of the second episode, all the characters who've been killed by the Vashta Nerada, and River Song, who sacrifices herself to save the Doctor, are reunited in a virtual world. That's a nod to Neuromancer, where the stored consciousness of a dead hacker known as the Dixie Flatline helps our hero crack the biggest encryption job of all time. In 'Time Heist', in the most recent series, one of the characters is an augmented human, who can plug hardware into a socket behind his ear. That's straight out of the Sprawl books as well.

Although they're some three decades old, and Mr Gibson has left the Sprawl behind to write more complex but less technologically biased books, his legacy in modern SF is huge and widespread. Read the books for yourself when they're reissued, and see how many winks to his ideas you can spot next time you're watching a film or enjoying the Doctor's latest adventures.

Several years ago, I became famous in the pub for remembering huge amounts of trivia which I could recall at a moment's notice. I used to tease my pals that I was going to start charging them for storing facts in my brain. That, of course, is the basic plot of 'Johnny Mnemonic' – later made into a rather disappointing but very stylish film with Keanu Reeves. And that's the reason I'm writing this today. The first story in Burning Chrome is, of course, 'Johnny Mnemonic'. Even though I had the book in front of me when I was working on the proof, the Voyager edition isn't without its production errors.

So, like Neo in The Matrix: Reloaded, I had to go back to the Source. If you've read my blog 'OmniScience' from a few years ago, you'll know that I was regularly reading this cutting-edge magazine of science fact, fiction and fantasy around the time that I was studying for my O levels, back in the very early 1980s.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I can now reveal the Source, as it was was revealed to me when I was about fifteen, and didn't have a fucking clue what was going on in the story at the time. Thirty-five years on, I still can't quite believe that I'm working on the reissue. When I wrote to Gollancz and told them I'd been a SF fan for most of my life, I don't think they believed me. Well, here's the proof (no pun intended!)