I’m delighted to announce that after years of work and delays and hurdles, I’m due to release my novel Void Station One on November 1st.
A literary science-fiction novel, it follows a man who resolves to commit suicide by piloting his spacecraft into a black hole.
The e-book version is ready to pre-order now here: (US / UK). I’ve also commissioned a designer to create an amazing paperback version – full details of this will follow over the next couple of weeks, but is also due to be released on November 1st.
In the meantime, readers may wish to read my novelette Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, which I wrote after Void Station One in a similar style and covering complementary topics. It is available now at the above link.
Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman
Thursday 22nd September 2022
Manchester Arena, Manchester, England
It’s a strange homecoming that takes a man to the farthest reaches of the universe. But strange things are the stock in trade of Oldham lad (and internationally renowned physicist) Brian Cox, whose Horizons Live tour winds down with a return to Manchester. Galaxies, suns, quantum mechanics and, of course, black holes – oddities that, when delivered by Professor Cox on stage tonight, seem as natural as the air outside.
I was sceptical of the Horizons Live tour before booking my ticket. I passed up the opportunity to see the Manchester show when it was originally scheduled and it was only because of its Covid-induced cancellation that I was given a second chance on this Thursday night a year later. I wondered what it would involve: it would be a visual treat, no doubt, but would such an extravaganza turn it into a circus? Would its discussion of astrophysics be too complicated or, in trying to reach laymen like myself, would it be dumbed down to the point of insult? I read popular science, listen to podcasts, even write my own science-fiction; what, I asked myself as I opened my wallet, would I be getting out of Horizons?
🌃🔭This evening, we're lucky enough to explore 'Horizons' with @ProfBrianCox!
Professor Cox, too, is aware of the strange dimensions of his show. On stage tonight, he remarks with warmth on how so many people have shown up for Horizons in an arena usually reserved for concerts. There are mathematicians in the audience. Cox mentions that his support act, the comedian Robin Ince (who also co-hosts his podcast), told him not to refer to the show as a lecture, “not at these prices”. It’s a joke, of course (though an inaccurate one – have they not seen the current level of tuition fees?) but it addresses the elephant in the room. Horizons Live is an astrophysics lecture, but in the best possible sense. It’s a lecture delivered by a charismatic and knowledgeable lecturer at the top of his game, augmented by powerful cinematic imagery far beyond what you’d find in a university lecture hall.
It is this imagery which, with all due respect to Professor Cox, is the main selling point of Horizons Live. As Cox leads us through a two-hour tour of the universe and our knowledge of it, covering gravity, spacetime, black holes, quantum physics and the origins of life on Earth, this backdrop shifts between various interactive images of stars and galaxies to match his script. The visuals on the screen are incredible; some use the same technology used to create the black hole in the film Interstellar (as Cox acknowledges); others I recognise from the inspiring short film Wanderers. For one brief moment, Cox’s iPad fails and he appeals to an IT geek off-stage (IT being the only vocation that deals in witchcraft more than an astrophysicist). Otherwise, the display is in perfect rehearsed synchronicity with Cox’s delivery, punctuating his points as he makes them.
At its best moments, this is awe-inspiring. The most striking moment comes when Cox presents one of those high-resolution images of the universe captured by space telescopes, but moves us through it in 3D. All the galaxies shown in the image are calculated at their correct distance from one another, and we move forward through them as through a flock of fireflies. I’ve been sitting quietly throughout the whole show, but at this moment I’m also quiet in my soul. I can’t think of anything that has impressed upon me so greatly the sheer scale of the known universe. Any residual scepticism I have about Horizons Live has vanished.
A new image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, similar to the one Cox pulls a rapt audience through in 3D. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI.
Another welcome feature of the show is the contribution of Robin Ince. Recognising the intellectual heaviness of the lecture, Professor Cox turns the stage over to his companion during various intermissions, in which Ince has the daunting task of delivering some science-based stand-up comedy, but in such a way as to make our return to Cox’s serious lecture seamless. This Ince carries off with aplomb, remarking on our collective furrowed brows and equation-induced headaches, and contrasting his own looks with the similarly-aged Cox’s rock-star features (“time ages us at different speeds”; “a man who declines to follow the law of entropy”). It’s a valuable part of the show: when Ince emerges to provide relief during a later intermission, it’s a crucial intervention at a point when our minds have begun to unspool in following Cox’s discussion of quantum mechanics.
I cannot provide a full review of Horizons Live as that would involve discussing in depth the ideas Professor Cox unpacks. And, as Ince might say, that would require me to have some understanding of what’s going on. But it’s to Cox’s great credit that he can summarise his key points without talking down to the audience, and lead us on a tour through the universe and its hidden trails without us ever feeling lost, or needing to grip his hand more tightly. There’s a confidence to Cox’s lecture and a naturalness to how it unfolds. From Einstein’s equations, he explains, there emerged so many questions and inquiries, and he weaves important but lesser-known luminaries like Karl Schwarzschild and John Wheeler into his scientific tapestry with skill.
There is, however, one concept which dominates the evening, just as it dominates our imagination when we think about the universe. “I want to talk about black holes,” Cox says. He has a book about them coming out in a couple of weeks, and clearly they are on his mind. They are the “Rosetta stones” for understanding our universe, he says, and he talks us through their emergence in post-Einsteinian theory, the scepticism and then acceptance shown towards the idea of them, before talking about Hawking radiation and the black hole information paradox. When the big screen behind him shows the famous photograph of a black hole, captured in 2019, it’s an image no doubt familiar to everyone in the audience, such is our fascination with them.
Cox’s anchor in this discussion is the Penrose diagram, which is used to explain the relationship spacetime has to black holes. It remains on the screen as Cox discusses the event horizon, singularities, world lines and the multiverse – it’s a marvel that Cox is able to lead us down this path without losing us. The use of diagrams might sound off-putting to one who has not seen the show, but they are used sparingly (earlier, Cox unpacks an equation he has put up on the screen, something which, in a nod to the Arena’s more usual musical acts, he calls an “equation solo”). The more powerful visuals mentioned earlier dominate, and the show as a whole is well-balanced between popular science and providing glimpses of the cutting edge.
The Penrose diagram used by Professor Cox in Horizons Live, also available as a t-shirt at the merchandise counter. Spacetime bulges in the middle when I wear it.
It has indeed been a strange homecoming for Cox. I’ve been to the Manchester Arena multiple times, both before and after the attack in 2017, but no visit has been as peculiar as this: thousands of people listening intently to an astrophysics lecture. For all the spectacular visuals, the night has essentially been one mild-mannered man talking on stage. It’s been a great display of human intelligence and inquisitiveness, not only from Cox but from the audience who have eagerly followed him on his path. Even the comic Ince returns to the stage to deliver a profound poem he has written.
Our curiosity has been indulged, but rather than sated, the show has inspired us to ask more about the universe. Cox quotes the physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who wrote that beauty is that which resonates with us on the deepest level, and certainly the night and the stage has produced plenty of beauty and resonance. Even black holes, which in the popular imagination are imposing destroyers of stars, are shown to be key to our future understanding. They are phenomena that link universes together in a web of Penrose diagrams; the eddas of black holes which proliferate throughout the universe perhaps not holes but stitches of repair.
One of Professor Cox’s stated aims for Horizons Live is for audiences to leave with a greater sense of wonder at their world, and to go out into the night and look at the sky a bit differently. But in thinking back on the night I have a moment of understanding before even leaving the Arena. And as I drive home through the Manchester night, fog settles on the road, yet the thought becomes even clearer. At the start of the show, after the stage lights ebbed and the arena went dark, and the professor emerged to begin his tour of space and time, members of the audience who had not yet reached their seats used the light of their smartphones to find their place. Searching in darkness, with small lights used to illuminate their path; while, before them, the story of the universe is already unfolding.
[Author’s Note: The collective noun used here for a group of black holes, an ‘edda’, is my own invention. It is inspired by the Poetic Edda that speaks of Ragnarok, the assembling and the twilight of the gods.]
August has been a hectic and frustrating month for a number of personal reasons not worth going into, and it means I’ve not had time to compose a feature blog post here. Instead, I have a few updates perhaps worth mentioning:
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is now available on Gumroad.
After experimenting with Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service for a few months, I have decided to expand the availability of my literary sci-fi novelette Wanderer to other platforms. While still available on Amazon Kindle, the ebook of Wanderer is now available in epub, mobi and pdf formats on Gumroad. It has already recorded its first sale there (a generous £6, against the £1.50 RRP, under Gumroad’s voluntary “name a fair price” principle), with more platforms to follow.
The Amazon experiment was worthwhile, but constricting: its Unlimited service requires exclusivity, but it doesn’t really do anything to elevate the visibility of its titles. The only real engagement through Amazon came when I used one of my designated promotional periods to offer the ebook for free for a limited time. Speaking of which…
The first reviews have been coming in for Wanderer.
During the afore-mentioned promotional period on Amazon, I promoted the offer on various social media platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads and Reddit. Despite its reputation as hostile to self-promotion (which is usually well-deserved), Reddit proved to be the most productive of these. The subsequent traffic to my Wanderer story saw it spend the weekend atop a few of Amazon’s bestseller lists.
I was brought down from these heady heights by some of the usual Reddit frustrations, but I also got good feedback from a number of Redditors. It also led to some of my first Amazon reviews, which were uniformly positive and can be read here. Suddenly, with the addition of verified customer reviews and star ratings, Wanderer’s lonesome posting on Amazon began to look respectable. So too the Goodreads listing.
A special long-form review on LibraryThing.
LibraryThing is a Goodreads-style website that I’ve been using regularly to post book reviews for years, and it led to my first unsolicited review for Wanderer back in May. However, I was delighted to receive a review this month from the LibraryThing commentator known as Waldstein. Alex is perhaps the best long-form reviewer on the site and someone who has provided gracious feedback on a number of my own long-form reviews since he read my review of Lolitaback in 2017. I posted excerpts from his astute review of Wanderer on my Instagram account, but the full text is beautifully composed and is worth reading in its entirety here.
Hopefully reviews will continue to come in for Wanderer – and hopefully they will continue to be positive.
Updates on Mick’s Café.
One of my other projects has been the subreddit Mick’s Café, a place I set up to find and post hidden gems in contemporary literature, music, fine art and film. I posted its mission statement on my blog here. However, after some promising initial growth and engagement, it has now stalled. I’m not sure how else to get the word out, or how to encourage engagement from its current membership (which stands at 68).
Reddit’s hostility to self-promotion even extends into mentioning your subreddit on other subs, and it’s wearying to source opportunities, and compose posts and comments (for both Wanderer and Mick’s), only to see them removed, shadowbanned or downvoted, even when I’ve followed the byzantine and often-contradictory rules many subs possess. At the moment, it seems that, with Mick’s Café, I’ve created the only corner of the internet where people don’t feel inclined to offer their opinions. I suppose that’s a feat in itself.
My own book reviews.
I continue to write reviews of everything I read, and while August might appear to be a leaner month than others (five or six books, where I might usually read a dozen), this is in no small part because I decided to tackle Anna Karenina, the huge novel by Leo Tolstoy. This has long been on my list to read, as I’m sure it has been for many others, but I didn’t want it to be just another title crossed off my list. I tried to give it the attention it deserved, and I composed my thoughts on the book here.
I’ve always written these reviews for my own edification, often not realising precisely what I’ve enjoyed or disliked about a book until I’m writing my own review of it. Nevertheless, I’m always surprised whenever someone mentions they’ve read them, whether this is another user, like Waldstein above, or another author.
I had cause to be particularly surprised this month, because a review I wrote last year, on the contemporary novella Milton in Purgatory, had come to the attention of its author, Edward Vass, and he posted excerpts from my review on his Instagram. This unexpected interaction reinforced a point I’d like to make to my own readers and prospective readers: as a writer, it’s great to see reviews of your own stuff. Not only for the sales it might encourage, but because writing (particularly self-published writing, like in my case) is often a very lonely and futile endeavour, and good reviews can often make the struggle seem worthwhile.
So anyone who is interested in Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, please check it out – and reviews are particularly encouraged!
You are walking blindly through the dark streets in the middle of the night. A fog has settled and nothing seems to be happening. The world seems empty. You wander off the beaten path and realise you are lost. Then you hear some music coming through the mist from up ahead. It sounds good. Damn good. The sort of thing you’ve always been looking for but didn’t have the words to express. You see lights. The fog clears and a bar appears ahead of you. The sign says “Mick’s” and the door is open. You go inside.
Mick’s Café is a sub I recently created on Reddit. The intention was to establish a place to find and share the creative gems hiding in our contemporary culture. It hopes to amplify artists who ought to be better known, to try and counteract a culture that seems to gaudily push superhero movies, autotuned music and superficial fiction into our faces.
If you feel that our popular culture doesn’t offer up much of worth, Mick’s is the place for you. If you’ve ever told a friend about a great book or band or film and been met with indifference, here’s the place to find receptive ears.
The subreddit was founded on 4th July 2021 and has been steadily growing its membership since. The idea behind it came about for two reasons. The first was when I realised that whenever I came across an artist I liked, it had always happened through serendipity. The things that were promoted in the media were always corporate, superficial, juvenile, but every so often I would stumble across something by chance and think “there should be billboards dedicated to this”. There would be – if our culture still had a healthy appreciation for art, instead of platforms manipulated by money, hustle, networking and the general decline in standards. I wanted to find a happening place where I could be introduced more reliably to the stuff I only really found infrequently and by blind chance.
The second reason was a more selfish one. Much earlier, I had realised there didn’t seem to be much genuinely literary writing around. I wanted to provide some, and so I wrote a novel. However, when I finished the manuscript, it was rejected repeatedly by the publishing industry. They said (those who replied, at least) that the book was good – but not commercial enough. I increasingly noticed articles and tweets from literary agents and publishers who glibly mentioned that they’d found great writing in their slush piles, but had rejected it because it was “too difficult to sell”. I read these tweets and thought, “I’d want to read that book”, but a gatekeeper had decided I never could.
I came to suspect that perhaps one reason there weren’t many impressive books around was because they were being nixed at source. Regardless of whether my own writing was of any worth, it seemed the industry was prioritising pulp that could be sold easily, and then blaming “market forces”.
The good stuff must surely be out there, but the people creating it aren’t being backed by the shot-shy creative industries. Where are our contemporary Dylans, Hemingways and Van Goghs? Perhaps they’re toiling away without an audience. Meanwhile, celebrities and vloggers get multi-million-pound book deals, and there’s a deluge of derivative, formulaic fiction.
I decided to self-publish some of my own writing but, as I suspected might happen, I found it just about impossible to find an audience. For writers, it’s a hostile environment. Good writing can’t stand out amid that same deluge of formulaic trash, and honest artists are drowned out by those who shout the loudest. I found that my promotional efforts were unfocused and ineffective. Social media in particular seemed a mess, pandering to outrage, short attention spans and the lowest common denominator. Even on Reddit, for which I initially held out some hope, I discovered most of my posts had been shadowbanned – even, ridiculously, from subs that explicitly said writers could promote their work without fear of being shadowbanned.
My suspicion is that many people are yearning for art with integrity, but don’t know where to go. Creatives lose confidence and are distracted from their art by the exhaustion of the self-promotion hustle. Audiences are starved of real, sustaining art to experience and they lose faith in their own culture. It’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, the sound from the noise. People can’t connect. That’s when I realised that if I wanted to find a happening place I needed to make one myself.
Mick’s Café takes its inspiration from Rick’s Café in the classic film Casablanca. I hope the subreddit will, in time, generate its own vibe and culture; a place to find hidden gems, cultivated by a community that has standards. I also hope it will become a place for sincere artists to find a platform and, in this respect, Mick’s is inspired by the dissenting force of the French Impressionists. When Monet and artists like him were prohibited from displaying their work at the official Salon in Paris, they set up their own exhibition instead. It changed the course of art history.
It may seem too ambitious, even hubristic, but it’s hoped that the sub will become an influential hub for the sort of creative endeavour that has integrity, purpose and meets a certain artistic standard. A place for things that are dying out of the world, that aren’t really amplified elsewhere in our society. If you’ve ever thought that the films released today don’t match the standards of previous decades, that musicians or writers don’t compare with those of the past, this could be your opportunity to try to change that. At Mick’s, you can join a community of people who are trying to find those artists who do compare: exciting new films which don’t get the box office returns; musicians who invest in melody and musicianship; writers who work for years on an original manuscript instead of weeks on a formulaic thriller.
If this sounds appealing, you might want to head over to this obscure corner of Reddit and take a look around the Café. Come up to the bar and tell us about the hidden gems you’ve found: the books, the bands, the films.
And if you leave and you pass any recommendations on to others, let them know you heard it at Mick’s.
You can visit Mick’s Café on Reddit by clicking here.
‘Night Shadows’ by Edward Hopper is a public domain painting accessed via Wikimedia Commons.
Perhaps it’s the budding writer in me, but I can’t shake the feeling that I ought to start my first post with something profound and attention-grabbing. Perhaps I should be wracking my brains out trying to come up with something uniquely personal and yet universally relatable.
But having spent a while now obsessing over how to build the website (and developing a greater respect for coders and webmasters), I know that if I allow myself to become too consumed by all the things that go along with trying to promote one’s own writing nowadays, I’ll be keeping myself from doing much actual writing.
As I write this post, I’m addressing an audience that isn’t even there yet (and may never be). It’s hard to know what to write when many things are still up in the air. And when they settle, where should my focus be? Here? On social media? Or should I be focused on my other projects?
It’s a question that will hopefully become clearer over the coming weeks. At time of writing, I don’t even know if this blog will become a regular thing. I’ve written hundreds of book reviews on LibraryThing over the years – some of them even worthwhile – and that’s always been my outlet. I enjoy it and hope it will continue. But will traffic – if it comes – necessitate a focus here, where I can prompt people towards a mailing list? Every new writer is told the mailing list is the most effective way of building an audience.
The only thing that is certain at this time is that the website is up and running and Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is available to read right now, exclusively on Amazon Kindle. The future course of my fiction writing is dependent on a number of circumstances, not least the reception Wanderer receives and the size of the audience it generates. It could take off and provide me with options and opportunities, or it could sink like a stone and make this first post my last.
This is a new experience for me, so don’t hesitate to share your opinions (this is the Internet, after all). You can do so here in the comments, in an Amazon review, or through the links posted on my Contacts page.
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