Trigger Warning

I discovered The Dying Earth when I was thirteen, in an anthology called Flashing Swords. The story was called ‘Morreion’, and it started me dreaming. I found a British paperback copy of The Dying Earth, filled with strange misprints, but the stories were there and they were as magical as ‘Morreion’ had been. In a dark secondhand bookshop where men in overcoats bought used pornography I found a copy of The Eyes of the Overworld and then tiny dusty books of short stories – ‘The Moon Moth’ is, I felt then and feel now, the most perfectly built SF short story that anyone has ever written – and around that point Jack Vance books began to be published in the UK and suddenly all I had to do to read Jack Vance books was buy them. And I did: The Demon Princes, the Alastor trilogy, and the rest. I loved the way he would digress, I loved the way he would imagine, and most of all I loved the way he wrote it all down: wryly, gently, amused, like a god would be amused, but never in a way that made less of what he wrote, like James Branch Cabell but with a heart as well as a brain.

Every now and again I’ve noticed myself crafting a Vance sentence, and it always makes me happy when I do – but he’s not a writer I’d ever dare to imitate. I don’t think he’s imitable. There are few enough of the writers I loved when I was thirteen I can see myself going back to twenty years from now. Jack Vance I will reread forever.

‘An Invocation of Incuriosity’ won the Locus Award for Best Short Story, which delighted me, although I considered it as much an award for Jack Vance as for my tale, and it thrilled and vindicated my inner mock-O-level-taking teenager.

‘And Weep, Like Alexander’

It has long been a source of puzzlement to me that none of the inventions we were promised when I was a boy, the ones that were due to make our lives much more fun and interesting in the world to come, ever arrived. We got computers, and phones which do everything that computers used to do, but no flying cars, no glorious spaceships, no easy travel to other planets (as Ted Mooney put it).

This story was written as part of a fund-raising book for the Arthur C. Clarke Awards. The book, Fables from the Fountain, edited by Ian Whates, was based on Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart, itself modelled on the club stories of the early twentieth century. (Lord Dunsany’s stories of Mr Joseph Jorkens are my favourite club stories.) I took the name Obediah Polkinghorn from one of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories, as a tribute to Clarke himself. (I met and interviewed him, back in 1985. I remember being surprised by the West Country burr in his voice.)

It is a very silly story, so I gave it a slightly pompous title.

Nothing O’Clock

I have wholeheartedly and unashamedly loved the television series Doctor Who since I was a three-year-old boy at Mrs Pepper’s School in Portsmouth, and William Hartnell was the Doctor. Writing actual episodes of the show, almost fifty years later, was one of the most fun things I’ve done. (One of them even won a Hugo Award.) By this time Matt Smith played the eleventh Doctor. Puffin Books asked if I would write a story for their book Doctor Who: 11 Doctors, 11 Stories. I chose to set the story during the first season of Matt’s run.

You might think you need to know a lot about Doctor Who, given that it is a fifty-year-old show, to enjoy this story, but you don’t need to know much. The Doctor is an alien, a Time Lord, the last of his race, who travels through time and space in a blue box that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It sometimes lands where he wanted to go. If there’s something wrong, he may well sort it out. He’s very clever.

There is a game in England, or there was when I was growing up, called What’s the Time, Mister Wolf? It’s a fun game. Sometimes Mister Wolf tells you the time. Sometimes he tells you something much more disquieting.

Diamonds and Pearls: A Fairy Tale

I first spent time with the woman who would become my wife because she wanted to make a book of photographs of herself dead, to accompany her album Who Killed Amanda Palmer? She had been taking photographs of herself dead since she was eighteen. She wrote to me and pointed out that nobody was going to buy a book of photos of a dead woman who wasn’t even actually dead, but perhaps if I wrote some captions they might.

Photographer Kyle Cassidy and Amanda and I gathered in Boston for a few days of making art. The photographs Kyle took were like stills from lost films, and I would write stories to accompany them. Unfortunately, most of the stories don’t work when separated from their photographs. (My favourite was a murder mystery, involving a woman killed by a typewriter.)