Neil Gaiman to publish a new NEVERWHERE story (with some help from George R.R. Martin)

Way back in 1996, Neil Gaiman penned the BBC mini-series Neverwhere, adapting it into a novel a year later. Almost immediately after the story first appeared, fans noted a continuity error where the character of the Marquis de Carabas recovered his coat after it had apparently vanished forever. Gaiman promised to explain all in a short story, enigmatically entitled 'How the Marquis Got His Coat Back', but got a bit side-tracked with other projects.

The Marquis de Carabas as portrayed by Patterson Joseph in the original BBC TV series of Neverwhere.

It's been a while coming, but the story will finally appear in a new anthology entitled Rogues, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. Rogues - the thematic sequel anthology to 2010's Warriors - will likely be published some time in 2014.


The full story list is as follows:

George R.R. Martin “Everybody Loves a Rogue” (Introduction)
Joe Abercrombie “Tough Times All Over”
Gillian Flynn “What Do You Do?”
Matthew Hughes “The Inn of the Seven Blessings”
Joe R. Lansdale “Bent Twig”
Michael Swanwick “Tawny Petticoats”
David Ball “Provenance”
Carrie Vaughn “The Roaring Twenties”
Scott Lynch “A Year and a Day in Old Theradane”
Bradley Denton “Bad Brass”
Cherie Priest “Heavy Metal”
Daniel Abraham “The Meaning of Love”
Paul Cornell “A Better Way to Die”
Steven Saylor “Ill Seen in Tyre”
Garth Nix “A Cargo of Ivories”
Walter Jon Williams “Diamonds From Tequila”
Phyllis Eisenstein “The Caravan to Nowhere”
Lisa Tuttle “The Curious Affair of the Dead Wives”
Neil Gaiman “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back”
Connie Willis “Now Showing”
Patrick Rothfuss “The Lightning Tree”

Blackout by Connie Willis

Oxford, 2060. Thanks to the invention of time travel, historians are now undertaking field trips into the distant (and not-so-distant past), blending in with the 'contemps' to study history in motion. The laws of time travel prevent history from being changed: major 'divergence points' in history are unreachable and history will always course-correct. At least, that was the theory. When a historian visiting World War II Britain makes an unexpected side-trip to Dunkirk (one of the divergence points), something does change, and he and two other historians working in the same period find themselves unable to get home. Increasingly worried that they may have altered the course of history, they try to find one another and pool their resources...but in the chaos of the Blitz, that's easier said than done.


Blackout is the first half of an enormous single novel written by Connie Willis over a period of about five years. The second half is published under the title All Clear. The two books are set in the same 'future history' as Willis' Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, though it is not necessary to have read those books to understand this one. Blackout has been well-received, and is the favourite to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year.

Reading the book, it's hard to see why. Blackout and All Clear should have been a brilliant, compelling and tight 400-page or so page single novel. At almost 1,300 pages (between the two volumes), it's instead a massive, bloated and swollen book so packed with filler and minutiae that it's hard to plough on through the novel. The author has spent weeks and months researching the Second World War in extreme detail and by God, every single last bit of that research is going in the novel whether you like it or not.

Which of course is an immediate problem when some of the research turns out to immediately be wrong. The novel takes an astonishingly Anglo-centric view of the war. The historians from Oxford fifty years from now constantly make ludicrously inept statements along the lines that Hitler could have won the war if he'd achieved his objectives in the Battle of the Bulge, or that Dunkirk was one of the single most important moments in history. It takes two-thirds of the novel before someone even grudgingly admits that the Russians may have played some role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The WWII contemps taking this role would be fully understandable (most of the book takes place during the Blitz, many months before the USSR enters the war), but the supposedly educated and expert futuristic historians making these claims is just bizarre.

Furthermore, one of the conceits of the entire 'time-travelling historian' series is that Oxford in 2060 is very much like Oxford in say 1955. The conceit is, by now, tired and twee, and fortunately one of the benefits of the structure of the novel is that we pretty quickly leave 21st Century Oxford behind. After the historians 'change history' (or the point where they think they did) we stop getting scenes set back in 2060, so we're as much in the dark about what's happened as the characters are. This is one of the book's better notions and does introduce some narrative tension towards the end of the novel. However, Willis' research again seems to have failed when a character discusses how it's illegal for a 17-year-old to have sex. Not in the UK, it isn't (the age of consent here is 16). I suppose it's possible the law changes between now and then, but the utter lack of expansion on the statement (whereas every single other thing in the book is explained twenty times over) leads to the conclusion that the author didn't bother with some rudimentary fact-checking.

Once we get to World War II and the Blitz, things pick up a lot. The Blitz has a romantic image in the eyes of many people, but the reality of dealing with the threat of death on a daily basis was rather uglier than the popular myth shows, and Willis, to her credit, engages with these themes and ideas straight away. For every person showing the 'British bulldog' spirit and a stiff upper lip, there are more who are so traumatised they flee the city altogether, or suffer from severe stress-related issues. People had to develop psychological defences to deal with the situation, focusing on routine or distractions, and these ideas come across very well. The depiction of life in war-torn Britain is refreshingly real and grim rather than the more traditional and cliched view seen elsewhere.


Character-wise, the book has problems. First of all, the POV system is a bit odd. Several characters with POVs at the start of the novel - other historians visiting 1944, later in the war when the V1s started landing - abruptly vanish with no explanation a few chapters in, leaving their stories hanging. Even if they are revisited in All Clear, it'll still be many hundreds of pages since they last appeared (though there's a potentially very clever way around that, one I'm hoping Willis goes with in the follow-up). A bigger issue is that our three principal POVs - Eileen, Polly and Michael - are all rather bland and lack defining characteristics. When they eventually meet up, this gets worse with Eileen and Polly becoming almost indistinguishable, and Michael only being defined by a foot injury he sustains early in the novel in Dunkirk. Oddly for a novel using the limited third-person perspective, it's actually the secondary and supporting characters who really come alive in the novel. The people who share Polly's bomb shelter and decide to form an impromptu acting troupe are a highlight, as are the ridiculously destructive children Eileen has to look after in a stately manor.

The pacing can best be described as torturous. It's not enough to be told that a character takes a ride in a train. We must be told that they have difficulties getting a ticket, and once they get a ticket there is then tension over whether the train is going to turn up or be cancelled. When the train does arrive, we are told about the character's difficulty in securing a seat and then their observations on the countryside as it passes. When another character steps off the train to talk to a station master and takes slightly too long, it's a spellbinding moment of drama and tension in comparison. Characters also have a habit of repeating the same thing to themselves fifty times over per chapter, usually as they're doing something gripping like trying to buy some stockings and musing on how soon Londoners will have to go without. And people talk about the plot far more than they actually do things to advance the plot.

The overall feeling of reading the book is one of wading through treacle. Yet, there are moments that make the pages upon pages of filler worth it: the more visceral and harrowing account of the Blitz than we are used to in modern depictions, the solid and intriguing cast of supporting characters, and the overall mystery behind the closure of the time drops (the portals leading back to 2060). For all that it seems to take forever to get there, Willis does at least make the book's basic premise and story interesting, interesting enough that you may be inspired to read on (or at least look up the plot summary on Wikipedia, which may be less rewarding but also considerably less frustrating).

Blackout (***) is a book with enormous problems that almost sink it completely, but the author battles back into the 'worthwhile' category with impressive period research and some genuinely interesting ideas. But for many readers, the bland lead characters, tweeness of the futuristic setting and immense amounts of filler may prove too much of an obstacle. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

New covers and book info

From Gollancz's new catalogue, some interesting news about next year's releases.

In February and March 2011 Gollancz are reissuing the first two novels in Sophia McDougall's alt-history Romanitas Trilogy, Romanitas and Rome Burning. Previously released by Gollancz's parent company, Orion, these books have now moved to the SFF imprint and have some new cover art. In May 2011 they are also being joined by the final volume in the trilogy, The Savage City:


In March and June 2011 Gollancz are releasing the British editions of Connie Willis's duology of Blackout and All Clear:


In May, Stephen Deas's Order of Scales is released, the conclusion to his opening Memory of Flames trilogy:


An interesting new novel, out in February, is Rivers of London, the start of a new urban fantasy series called The Last Apprentice Wizard. This book intrigues as it is written by Ben Aaronovitch, who started out writing scripts for Doctor Who towards the end of its original run. He was responsible for the well-received Season 25 serial Remembrance of the Daleks (and its spectacularly good novel adaptation, a fine novel in its own right) and the, erm, somewhat less-well-received (but lots of cheesy fun) Battlefield of a year later.


In June Brandon Sanderson's Elantris gets its first UK release as well. No sign of cover art yet, but I imagine it will be in a similar vein to the minimalist white covers for the Mistborn trilogy and The Way of Kings.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

Christmas, 2054. The 'net' is a technological breakthrough, a device which allows people to travel back in time to observe the events of the past. Historians use the net to go back and observe history in progress, but anachronisms and those intending to change the past are not permitted through. Whilst the net has mostly been used to travel to relatively recent periods of history, the Mediaeval department of Oxford University is preparing to send a young student named Kivrin through to the year 1320. No sooner has she gone through, than chaos erupts: a virulent disease sweeps through Oxford, striking down most of the populace and a quarantine is enforced that prevents the faculty from retrieving Kivrin. Back in the 14th Century Kivrin becomes used to living in the Middle Ages, which none of her training has really prepared her for, but it soon becomes clear that something has gone horribly wrong, and she is not when she is supposed to be...

Doomsday Book was originally published in 1992 and won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novel. It mixes elements of traditional time travel stories with elements from a disaster movie: Kivrin is trapped in the past and her friends in the present are unable to help her as they themselves are dealing with a pandemic. This is a nice spin on the cliche, with the present-day storyline given just as much attention (if not more) than Kivrin's misadventures in the past. The notion of disease and illness lies at the heart of the book, and seeing how futuristic medicine can barely stop the pandemic from killing people makes the sections set during the Black Death even more horrific in comparison. The novel also acts as a curious comedy of manners, or even a farce, with characters' own blinkered viewpoints and opinions mean that they are unable to effectively deal with the unfolding crises. At times this makes the book a frustrating experience, as some characters are obtuse to the point of total ludicrousness and gives an oddly tonally inappropriate dose of humour to the novel.

What keeps you reading is the depth of research that has been done here: 14th Century England is brought to life vividly, with the characters painted richly and convincingly. Unlike a lot of writers (such as say Ken Follett, whose Pillars of the Earth is an utterly unconvincing depiction of medieval life), Willis makes the point successfully that the medieval period was one where people's beliefs and thoughts were totally alien to our own, and understanding how they thought and acted on a day-to-day level is extremely difficult. She succeeds at this admirably.

The 21st Century sections are less successful, mainly due to the stupidity of certain characters meaning that you lose any belief that these people would actually attain the roles or positions they have. There are also a number of plot strands in this sequence which are completely left unresolved: it's never made clear if it was user error or a deliberate act by Gilchrist that resulted in Kivrin being sent to the wrong year, and the mystery of what happened to Mr. Basingame, who vanishes before the book even starts and whose fate is much debated by the other characters, is never answered. The lack of communication between major characters is also completely unbelievable and adds to the frustration levels of the novel.

Doomsday Book (***½) features some stunning and deeply affecting sequences set in the 14th Century. Those set in the future are less compelling, and there are some moments of reader frustration to be had, but overall the book remains a vivid and memorable reading experience. The novel is published by Bantam in the USA. It doesn't currently have a UK publisher, but the US version is readily available from Forbidden Planet or via Amazon.co.uk.