The End of the Beginning

Odd feel­ing; start­ing a novel, that is. You don’t know if it will actu­ally turn out to be a novel. There is an equal like­li­hood the story will splut­ter and die like a sud­denly beached fish. At the moment, I have some ideas that refuse to tes­sel­late. I hope my gentle read­ers won’t be offen­ded if I don’t go into them in too much detail. Suffice it to say that I’m read­ing some excel­lent oral his­tor­ies of women anarch­ists in 1870s Russia. An intriguing archi­tec­tural folly known as the Amber Room will fea­ture. Much of my research, at present, involves listen­ing to the Enemy at the Gates soundtrack (crikey, doesn’t it sound like the music from Schindler’s List?) and sketch­ing young Georgian revolu­tion­ary poets.

When I was writ­ing my last novel (which is now in the hands of my agent), I kept a run­ning word count on the blog. I don’t think I’ll do this again. Not because it isn’t fun to share pro­gress, but because a word count is essen­tially mean­ing­less. Flashback — that last novel — clocked in at about 120,000 words in first draft. The ver­sion I sent off to Mr Jarrold was…let me check…73,000. On the face of it, the novel lost almost 50,000 words. But it lost even more than that, because many of the words that remain are brand-spanking new ones. So a word count isn’t all that indicative.

What’s the point of this blog? To record and expand upon some of the issues that con­fronts the writer. Alas, 90% of these issues con­cern deal­ing with the pub­lish­ing industry. For example, the pub­lisher that had expressed an interest in put­ting out the second edi­tion of Deja Vu got cold feet. Deja Vu will remain out of print until I can set it free with a new pub­lisher or (which seems more likely at this point) use a ser­vice like Lulu to self-publish it. If the lat­ter comes to pass, I’ll have some­where to point people when they ask for a copy.

I was talk­ing about the point of this blog. I wanted to make clear that I’ll keep away from the ups and downs of the pub­lic­a­tion pro­cess in the next few weeks. I’ll try to focus on the writ­ing pro­cess itself. For a long time, I’ve wanted to present real-time win­dow onto my word pro­cessing applic­a­tion, where read­ers can see the words appear as I lay them down. Corrections, addi­tions and dele­tions would appear too. When the book is fin­ished, I’d fig­ure out a way of rush­ing through the foot­age like a time-lapse photo, and the novel would grow before your very eyes. But I haven’t figured out a way to do that. Maybe I’ll try again for my next novel.

Finally, a word on the writ­ing life itself. The year has been busy so far. This sum­mer, we relo­cated from Exeter to Canterbury, and I’m still catch­ing up on freel­ance work. And now I find myself run­ning psy­cho­logy sem­inars totalling six hours of teach­ing per week. I’ve got some great stu­dents and the job, frankly, is much more fun than writ­ing. Which is to say that it’s much more fun than writ­ing for the point­less hell of it. Art for art’s sake is well and good, but I’m not writ­ing nov­els just so I can put them in a drawer and show my grand chil­dren. I’m writ­ing in order to be read. Plenty of edit­ors are get­ting back to my agent say­ing how much they like my stuff, but don’t have space on a given list, don’t have the money to mar­ket it, and so on. (Oops. I said I’d try to avoid writ­ing about these tribu­la­tions.) My point is that, if I’m going back to uni­ver­sity teach­ing, lov­ing it, get­ting paid actual money, it might be a good idea to do it full time and for­get about the writing.

Big talk, I know. And, don’t worry, I am about to start another novel. I still believe in writ­ing and I believe in books. But the next time someone tells me to ‘Keep going! You’re almost there!’ with two thumbs up and a grin, I might det­on­ate. It’s my thirty-first birth­day next week, and it’ll be almost fif­teen years since the pub­lic­a­tion of my first short story. I’ve ‘kept going’ for fif­teen years. In the mean time, I’ve picked up a degree or two, but never really thought very hard about my aca­demic career because I was con­fid­ent that, one day, I’d be a full time writer. I guess there comes a point when scrap­ing together enough for the rent gets to be less fun, even if it does allow me to write ‘full time’.

Happy Halloween!

A little off the top

The Guardian Review has become a some­what tired pub­lic­a­tion in lat­ter days, but seems to have woken up with a splut­ter in the past couple of weeks. Writers like Ursula K Le Guin and Michel Faber are sup­ply­ing some insight­ful reviews to counter the book-weary scrib­blings of the staff crit­ics. One piece, in par­tic­u­lar, caught my eye this morn­ing (which is Saturday, 22nd September). It was writ­ten by Martin Wagner, an entertainingly-disgruntled chap whose play The Agent will be run­ning at the (fit­tingly bel­li­cose in name) Trafalgar Studios this summer.

Wagner’s exper­i­ences with naff agents made me snig­ger in that know­ing way designed to make my girl­friend ask what’s so funny. To wit:

Chances are that if you are a writer little fur­ther down the food chain [than Julian Barnes et al.], but lucky enough to have an agent, they won’t be doing much for you. Restless writers, like I used to be, may change agen­cies fre­quently, only to find out that after a brief hon­ey­moon period all is back to nor­mal — for most writers chan­ging agen­cies is like rearran­ging deck­chairs on the Titanic as they watch the prom­ises of their career go down the drain.

In this para­graph, dear reader, blooms the bit­ter fruit of truth. Let us each take a sloppy bite.

To be sure, even the smal­lest of agen­cies will need incom­ings of sev­eral thou­sand pounds a month. Given that new writers sel­dom receive advances, and that mod­er­ately suc­cess­ful books will only make a few grand over their life­times, it does make sense that an agent will pay greater atten­tion to those cli­ents who pull in the green. Fair? No. But this is the pub­lish­ing industry.

Wagner goes on:

Maybe one of the prob­lems is that agents simply don’t get paid enough? While a 15 per cent com­mis­sion is plenty if you’re rep­res­ent­ing an [sic] JK Rowling, what about 15 per cent of an author who could reas­on­ably call him­self a suc­cess if he got an advance of £2,000 for his first novel — a mere £300?

Indeed. How much office space can one rent for £300? There wouldn’t be room for a tea pot.

Let’s recap. Being a writer in the sense of being an artist, pro­du­cing some­thing of worth, and hav­ing someone tell you it’s OK — that’s good. Being a writer in the sense of being self-employed, work­ing for free much of the time, work­ing seven days a week, count­ing pen­nies like an impov­er­ished stu­dent — that’s not so good. But the lat­ter is, alas, what the stars almost cer­tainly have writ­ten for you. Despite appear­ances, there is very little money in pub­lish­ing. It moves slowly because pub­lish­ers don’t have the resources to pro­cess sub­mis­sions. (My own agent, the redoubt­able and very nice John Jarrold, tells me not to worry that a given pub­lisher hasn’t got back to him after six months; some of his other authors have had to wait years. That word bears repeat­ing: actual years. You know, those things you have less than one hun­dred of.)

I’m not sure if ‘the agent’ is the prob­lem. Indeed, it seems that they are now more essen­tial than ever because pub­lish­ers eschew the slush pile. This means — as Wagner points out — that agents have become, de facto, arbit­ers of manu­script saleability.

What’s the solu­tion? Well, let’s go with the idea that pub­lish­ers — i.e. col­lect­ing of book-loving people who want to make money — are not, in sev­eral senses, in a pos­i­tion to best serve those who cre­ate the product that they wish to pass on, with a mark-up, to the pub­lic. Wagner makes the claim that ‘to most pub­lish­ers writers are about as import­ant as farm­ers are to Tesco — they know that there is an end­less sup­ply of pro­duce’. That will hurt the feel­ings of some pub­lish­ers, but isn’t a mil­lion miles from the truth. Of course, a pub­lisher who instig­ates a rela­tion­ship with a writer on the basis of their sub­mis­sion will then trans­form the rela­tion­ship into some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent; there is now the poten­tial for the writer’s actions (i.e. the post-publication sup­port cir­cus known as ‘pub­li­city’) to have a huge impact on the num­ber of sales, and it makes busi­ness sense to treat the writer like one of the fam­ily. But, as any writer knows, the ini­tial reac­tion of (usu­ally embattled) pub­lisher to the offer a manu­script is akin to that of a house­holder open­ing the door on a Jehovah’s Witness.

Let’s turn to the music industry. Apple (formerly Apple Computer) is the third largest music reseller in the United States, via its iTunes music store. This music is not sold through shops, who ask for a mark-up. It is sold dir­ectly to the con­sumer — though middle men still exist. They’re called Sony, Time Warner, and so on. They still impose their cut, but they’re get­ting squeezed because Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, has strong ideas about such notions as stand­ard­ised pri­cing for single songs, and is using his mar­ket dom­in­ance to sup­port changes that, to my mind, are quite proper and bene­fi­cial to con­sumer and record­ing artist alike (such as EMI’s recent decision to strip copy-protection tech­no­logy from its songs).

Apple’s iTunes store is inter­est­ing because it demon­strates a poten­tial for ver­tical mar­ket integ­ra­tion. What’s that? Basically, a vertically-integrated mar­ket is one that, as we look at the lad­der between con­sumer at one end and artist at the other, Apple is in the pos­i­tion of sup­ply­ing each rung. We’re not far from a point, I think, where record­ing artists upload their con­tent to the iTunes store, bypass the tra­di­tional record­ing industry, and receive pay­ment dir­ectly from Apple on the basis of units sold.

But who will pay for record­ing stu­dio time and publicity?

The same people who always paid for it, m’laddo: the artist. Most deals, as far as I can tell, build in pub­li­city fees, agents’ fees, and stu­dio time into the record­ing con­tract. The artist does not see a penny until all the paraphernalia of full pro­duc­tion are paid. This hap­pens too, incid­ent­ally, in book pub­lish­ing (as far as I know; cer­tainly in those con­tracts I’ve looked at). Writers effect­ively pay for their own pub­li­city because pub­lish­ers only cough up on roy­al­ties once the publisher’s own out­lay has been recouped; this includes all sorts of little charges, includ­ing pub­li­city. It also includes the advance…which makes the advance the equi­val­ent of a bank loan.

What is the tra­di­tional basis of the publisher’s exist­ence? (1) Centralised, pro­fes­sional mar­ket­ing skills. (2) Money to cover the ini­tial out­lay of a pub­lish­ing run. (3) Literary expert­ise with which to select the best works from the pro­duce they are offered.

As for (1), your mileage may vary, but I rather think that the author’s fin­an­cial and tem­poral invest­ment in pub­li­city often equals or sur­passes that of his/her pub­lisher, these days. For (2), it now costs very little indeed to pub­lish a book (so little, in fact, that I use Lulu.com to privately pub­lish single cop­ies of my manu­scripts in book form because they’re easier to read than on-screen or in loose-leaf). The caveat, though, is the iner­tia of brick-and-mortar shops like Waterstone’s. They demand such dis­counts that a per­fectly adequate Print-on Demand (POD) book can’t be sold through their tills. There is evid­ence, though — chiefly of dimin­ish­ing mar­ket share (see Scott Pack’s blog for sev­eral pieces on this) — that these shops are under pres­sure to change. For (3), we’re all aware that slush piles have effect­ively van­ished from most pub­lish­ers because of their lim­ited resources, and have been passed on to agents.

Is there much of a role for middle­men any­more? Well, I think ‘yes’. At present, the curi­ously bonkers aspects of pub­lish­ing are main­tained by years of tra­di­tion and the iner­tia of book chains. There is suf­fi­cient pres­sure on the sys­tem to force a change, though, and that will creep on in.

Anywho, these are just some thoughts promp­ted by Wagner’s art­icle. Exciting times, I feel, are ahead.

Serendipity

By happy acci­dent, I find myself in an Internet cafe in Canterbury (I’m in a very gloomy corner, face lit by the glow of the laptop key­board and screen). Progress report: Still no phone, there­fore no real Internet access; inter­ested to note that I’ll be teach­ing intro­duct­ory psy­cho­logy for six hours per week, start­ing next week; learn­ing the admin­is­trat­ive ropes of Christchurch Uni; look­ing for­ward to the arrival of a friend later tonight.

Serendipitously, I’ve just received word from the good Neil Ayres that a new magazine (stew­ar­ded by him and some col­leagues) has been launched. It’s called Serendipity, and you can read it for free here. Notably, it con­tains a short story by upcom­ing author Aliya Whiteley and an inter­view from down-at-heel pen-for-hire Ian Hocking with David Mitchell — thanks to Postmodern Housewife for tran­scrib­ing it. Read and enjoy. Then leave a com­ment on the blog and tell them how much you enjoyed it.

…Returning to my gloomy corner.

Pastures new

In a few short hours’ time, my girl­friend and I will be mov­ing to Canterbury. Sad to leave Exeter, but we’ll see what excit­ing things hap­pen in Kent. Thanks to BT — who could teach ninjas a thing or two about stealth — I won’t have a phone (and thus Internet) for a longish time at the new address, so blog post­ing will be fairly infre­quent. And if you email me, my reply might be delayed.

Anyone want to do some transcribing?

A little back­ground first. Neil Ayres — author, friend of this blog, and cyber-henchman for the Blue Pootle — is about to launch an online ven­ture that may (or may not be) a magazine devoted to magical real­ism and/or light fantasy. Neil has asked me to con­trib­ute an art­icle based on my inter­view with David Mitchell (which is avail­able from here).

The thing is, what with my ten­o­syniv­itis (trans­la­tion: my wrist ten­dons are inflamed), I’m not able to tran­scribe it. I need a won­der­ful reader of this blog to volunteer.

I hear your sar­donic chuckle. But wait! Remember what I was say­ing last time about the lim­ited avail­ab­il­ity of Déjà Vu, and how it’ll cost you an arm and leg to get hold of a copy? Well, the per­son who tran­scribes this inter­view will receive a free copy of the Déjà Vu: Special Edition. This spe­cial edi­tion is a phys­ical perfect-bound book. The text has been revised. It has no ISBN. There will prob­ably be no more than three cop­ies of it prin­ted, ever.

Sound tempt­ing? Leave a com­ment. You’ll have to tran­scribe using the audio file here and the dead­line is September 7th.

Plus your life!

I often have con­ver­sa­tions with non-British people about Britain, and one of the things they com­ment on — some­what apo­lo­get­ic­ally — is that things in this coun­try don’t seem to work very well. I’m quite proud to be British, and I’d rather not hear these things, but, damn it, they’re basic­ally true. Why? Not sure, but the smart money is on the tend­ency of British people to avoid con­flict and rarely complain.

I’ve been a British Telecom cus­tomer for about three days and I am about to file a com­plaint. Why? Because I’m mov­ing house and I’ve got enough to deal with without mup­pets like BT mak­ing a simple phoneline install­a­tion unne­ces­sar­ily complex.

Come with me now as we enter Hocking’s World of Irritation.

Last week, I signed up with BT. Despite the hard­ware being already installed in the new house — this means that the BT engin­eer does noth­ing more than a simple recon­nec­tion — we have to pay an install­a­tion fee of £124.99. If someone had lived the house before us, we’d have to pay noth­ing for a recon­nec­tion, des­pite the work of the engin­eer being essen­tially identical.

Grumpy? Nah, just warm­ing up.

When I called BT to sign up, I was on the phone for about half an hour and got dis­con­nec­ted before talk­ing to any­one. They simply HUNG UP. Fine, I thought. I’ll just use the web site. So I pootle on over to the com­puter and enter all my details. Everything — except the cru­cial install­a­tion date.

This is cru­cial because — bizar­rely — Sky wants to have their set-top box con­nec­ted to my phone line. They won’t install their equip­ment without a BT line already act­ive. If it isn’t, I’ll have to res­ched­ule with them.

And it is cru­cial because I need to have a BT line installed before I can even think about get­ting an Internet connection.

Back to BT. The email says that I’ll be con­tac­ted within three work­ing days.

There will be no prizes for those read­ers who guess that the three days cheer­fully elapse without a phone call.

Fine, I think. I’ll call ‘em using the num­ber sup­plied at the end of the email.

10:00 AM this morn­ing — whist­ling, I call BT.

10:30 AM — the phone is answered by a nice Scottish gen­tle­man who tells me, with a chuckle, that I’ve called the wrong num­ber. He offers to be put me through to the right one — the sales depart­ment. Great! I think, thank­ing him.

11:15 AM — the phone is answered by a nice English lady. She tells me that I’m through to BT broad­band. Mmm, I say, I think the pre­vi­ous must have made a mis­take. She pauses. Yes, she agrees, he must have. Do I wish to be put through to the right num­ber? Great! I say.

12:15 PM — after swap­ping phones because the bat­tery in the first one is dead, I finally give up.

I know! I think. I only want an install­a­tion date, after all. I’ll see if I can do it online. (If you’re won­der­ing what I was up to all morn­ing, I was mark­ing stu­dent scripts.)

I see a link for ‘track your order’ on the main BT page. I click it, and find myself in the BT Broadband sec­tion. It seems that you can only track an order online if the other is for BT Broadband — not any of their other ser­vices, like, I don’t know, let me pick some­thing at ran­dom; a ‘phone’ line?

No prob­lemo!

I then click through myriad con­tact forms — no email address, oh no — until I find the one marked ‘Contact us about an order for a new line install­a­tion’. Bingo! I cackle, start­ling the gerbils.

Ah.

The form wants me to insert my BT phone line num­ber. But I don’t have a BT line. I WANT to have one. That’s the whole point of this form, isn’t it? I fig­ure WTF and enter a dummy num­ber. I’ll show them impish!

Ah.

The form wants me to enter my account number.

I don’t have a fuck­ing account number.

I’m not yet a cus­tomer. I just want an install­a­tion con­firmed before it’s TOO LATE and I have to go to Sky and re-arrange THEIR install­a­tion date, for­cing myself to walk through the won­der­land of SKY CUSTOMER SERVICE a second time.

Weeping, I go back to the BT web­site one last time.

They want it to be easy for me con­tact them, to facil­it­ate my exper­i­ence, to plus my life.

I want it too.

I am going to complain.

Déjà Vu — a snip at £248.71

One of the most com­mon ques­tions I get about my first novel, Déjà Vu, is, What was it like work­ing with Denzel Washington? Ah, he was lovely. (In case my humour is lost on you, Déjà Vu the movie and Déjà Vu the book are two sep­ar­ate and unre­lated entit­ies.) The second most com­mon ques­tion is, How much money do you make from it? Answer: not a penny. Though the book got some very pos­it­ive reviews, it never had a pres­ence in any of the high street shops, and the odds were pretty much stacked against it, des­pite my radio and TV (YorkTV — ah, what a morn­ing) appearances…or per­haps because of.

Constant read­ers might recall, from a post earlier this year, that the ori­ginal pub­lisher of Déjà Vu, The UKA Press, were going to dis­con­tinue pub­lish­ing the book because of cash flow prob­lems. Well, that did indeed come to pass. Déjà Vu went out-of-print in March of this year. So is Déjà Vu dead in the water? Not quite.

But, Ian, where can I get a copy of Déjà Vu?

It looks like Amazon US has one copy left — held by International Books of Maryland, USA, who are ask­ing $92 for it — des­pite the lan­guage being lis­ted as Spanish. Over at Amazon UK, someone (from the US, bizar­rely) is selling a used copy — repeat, used — for £248.71. Unless you’re a col­lector who thinks that the first edi­tion will increase in value from this already-astronomical fig­ure, you’d be much bet­ter off down­load­ing the audio pod­cast, which is unabridged and free.

Look, will there be a new edi­tion of Déjà Vu or not?

That’s a good ques­tion. John Jarrold, my agent, seems con­fid­ent, but the wheels of pub­lish­ing turn slow. Back in January, one pub­lisher expressed an interest in bring­ing out a second edition…but that was January, and noth­ing has happened since. Meanwhile, I’m com­plet­ing Flashback, so any­body who wants to find out what happened to Saskia at the end of the first book will soon have their curi­os­ity sati­ated. Well, I say ‘soon’…

Flowers for Algernon and the humbling experience

In the first year of sec­ond­ary school, it was my habit, with some friends, to visit the lib­rary dur­ing our lunch break and read. Nothing ter­ribly eru­dite — mostly Doctor Who, for me. But, one day, I noticed the chap oppos­ite read­ing some­thing called Flowers for Algernon. What a dumb title, I thought. My book was called the talons of Weng-Chiang, which I guess showed him. Afterwards, I asked him about the book and he said — a little defens­ively — it was very good. The book, he claimed, was based on A Clockwork Orange. Now, I’d heard of A Clockwork Orange; it was a Stanley Kubrick film laced with so much sex and viol­ence that it had been banned by the Queen. Suddenly, ‘Flowers for Algernon’ didn’t seem like such a wimpy book after all. But then a second friend cor­rec­ted the first. The film of A Clockwork Orange had been adap­ted from the book of the same name. This one was dif­fer­ent. So I for­got all about the book and it’s girly title.

About twenty years later, I’ve just fin­ished it. And damn if this isn’t one of the best sci­ence fic­tion works I’ve ever read. There are bet­ter books, I’m sure. But as an example of the poten­tial of sci­ence fic­tion — of the heights the genre can reach — this book is one in a mil­lion. Daniel Keyes, I tip my hat, sir.

Charlie is a retarded (to use the 1966-era term) adult who volun­teers to be the sub­ject in an extraordin­ary piece of psy­cho­lo­gical research. He will undergo brain sur­gery and sub­lim­inal re-programming in hope that his IQ — cur­rently 68 — can be doubled. (Shades of A Clockwork Orange right there, I guess.) The pro­ced­ure has already been per­formed on a labor­at­ory mouse called Algernon. This mighty mouse can learn much faster than his con­spe­cif­ics, and even beats Charlie in early maze-escaping tasks.

The book is writ­ten in a diary format that pur­ports to be Charlie’s first-person ‘progris riport’. As the report devel­ops, Charlie blooms into an intel­li­gent human being, com­ing to real­ise that the people he had regarded as friends in his life (spent mostly as a cleaner in a bakery) were mak­ing fun of him. His reg­u­lar Freudian ther­apy ses­sions reveal, too, deep-seated psy­cho­lo­gical trauma rooted a rejec­tion by his mother and the struggle between his iden­tity as a ‘retard’ in a world cre­ated and run by ‘nor­mal people’.

Soon, Charlie starts to pon­der the world of ‘nor­mal’ people as he becomes, briefly, ‘nor­mal’ him­self — before sur­pass­ing them all to mas­ter second lan­guages, math­em­at­ics, eco­nom­ics, and any other field of endeav­our he turns his atten­tion towards. A dis­lo­ca­tion occurs between his present self — an eru­dite, cyn­ical and lonely man — and his past self — a naive, unin­tel­li­gent, happy per­son. Who owns his new iden­tity? Is it gov­erned by the sci­ent­ists who gave it to him? Is it his own? How can it be his own when he feels schizo­phren­ic­ally dis­so­ci­ated from his pre­vi­ous life, the ‘real’ Charlie?

In time, the exper­i­mental nature of the intel­li­gence treat­ment, together with the increas­ingly erratic beha­viour of Algernon, puts a limit on Charlie’s new life. Soon he will revert to pre­vi­ous self. Will that mean a death, or a return to what is right and God-given?

In sum, this is a great work of American lit­er­at­ure. It works sim­ul­tan­eously on a num­ber of levels. It made me con­sider sci­entific eth­ics to a greater degree than I ever have before. And it’s a whirl­wind of a story. The scene in which Charlie decides to ‘kid­nap’ Algernon from the podium of a sci­entific con­fer­ence and run away had me punch­ing the air. And the last lines put a tear in my eye. Why aren’t all books like this one? Why aren’t mine?

Don’t open the box

Michael Stephen Fuchs — who first hit our book­shelves with the tech­no­thriller The Manuscript (which I reviewed for Pulp.Net) is back. His new work is more-or-less in the same genre, and a spe­cific one at that: Our her­oes and/or heroines are under­go­ing an exist­en­tial crisis and some form of Psychic MacGuffin (that might resolve said crisises) presents itself with a flash two thirds into the book; her­oes and heroines then fall over them­selves in an effort to claim the MacGuffin before Others do. The Others will be tot­ing an embar­rass­ment of weaponry and many fire-fights will come to pass before the MacGuffin is taken, by either our heroes/heroines or the Others…with exist­en­tially inter­est­ing results.

If this book was a car, it would be very dif­fi­cult to handle, look swanky, and have little boot space…but you’ll have a soft spot for it all the same.

The main prot­ag­on­ist is a woman fight­ing for mean­ing in her life fol­low­ing the death of her elder brother. Though British, she has fled to California where she works as a com­puter pro­gram­mer tasked with con­struct­ing arti­fi­cially intel­li­gent ‘bots’ for first-person shoot­ers. Prior to this, she was an aca­demic spe­cial­ising in AI. She lives — some­what improb­ably, it has to be said — with a Bonobo chim­pan­zee and spends her days in con­ver­sa­tion in with her office mate, Thad, a hunky-but-married com­puter engin­eer. Both of them have issues with whether or not their lives can have meaning.

For a thriller, the Pandora’s Sisters is actu­ally quite slow to start. Fuchs patches this a little with a ‘flash­for­ward’ sec­tion that shows how much peril the pro­togan­ist will get into — in the Vatican, appar­ently, and it will involve hal­berds and Swiss Guards dressed like Bavarian school chil­dren. Until then, the book com­prises a some­what frus­trat­ing com­bin­a­tion of char­ac­ter navel-gazing and occa­sion­ally inter­est­ing mini-essays on aspects of pop­u­lar sci­ence, par­tic­u­larly evol­u­tion­ary psychology.

I had a mixed reac­tion to the philo­sophy in this book. Fuchs is a philo­sophy gradu­ate, and no doubt knows his stuff. But his char­ac­ters — some of whom have PhDs in related fields — seem to pro­duce, for the most part, rather weak philo­soph­ical ram­blings of the kind one reads in bad under­gradu­ate essays. Now, a work of fic­tion isn’t an essay, and this might well be the res­ult of Fuchs smooth­ing out some of more dif­fi­cult bits…but I was disappointed.

For example, one of the dangers (to iden­tity) of apply­ing evol­u­tion­ary psy­cho­logy to human beha­viour is that, to an extent, a com­pon­ent of our beha­viour must be determ­ined by the inform­a­tion in our genes. …But that does not mean that the remainder is fod­der for our free will. It is con­trolled by the inform­a­tion in our envir­on­ment. And the com­bin­a­tion of these two com­plex inform­a­tion sys­tems — the human body and its envir­on­ment — cov­ers the extent of our beha­viour. Though the char­ac­ters in Pandora’s Sisters search for mean­ing as some­thing hid­den, almost, in the genes, it seems that a mean­ing­less­ness is already appar­ent in their dis­cus­sions about evol­u­tion­ary psy­cho­logy, com­pletely inde­pend­ently of any ‘Pandora code’ in the DNA. And yet, as far as I can tell, they don’t con­sider this.

The other dif­fi­culty I had con­cerned the notion of con­scious­ness. There are lots of good argu­ments that counter the ‘ghost in the machine’ dual­ist of Descartes and oth­ers, and (speak­ing with my cog­nit­ive sci­ence hat on) most neur­os­cient­ists today see con­scious­ness as a ‘wave crest’, if you will, of many com­pon­ents that, in them­selves, do not show ‘con­scious beha­viour’. The per­spect­ive is one of evol­u­tion­ary con­tinu­ity, too, with chim­pan­zees, for example, seen as hav­ing the pre­curs­ors con­scious­ness (because of their shared ances­try with mod­ern humans). But the char­ac­ters in this book see the emer­gence of con­scious­ness as a mys­tery that some­how con­founds evol­u­tion, just as nine­teenth cen­tury crit­ics of nat­ural selec­tion though the eye was too com­plex to evolve (in fact, it has evolved sev­eral times inde­pend­ently). I just didn’t buy it.

Still, I recog­nise that this is a work of enter­tain­ment. Once the guns come out, the novel switches gear into a dream-like actioner where char­ac­ters dis­cuss their favour­ite auto­matic rifles, per­form start­ling feats of derring-do, and gen­er­ally bust caps in vari­ous asses. Fuchs’s prose is sharper and wit­tier than before, and he’s kept the focus on fewer char­ac­ters. Definitely worth a look.