Last week, I mentioned that I'd started reading The Execution Channel, the new novel from Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod that Tor Books will be publishing in June. Over at MacLeod's blog, The Early Days of a Better Nation, it turns out that he's revealed the novel's origins:

"I started muttering about how we'd done New Space Opera, and now maybe we should try New British Catastrophe. My editor and my agent got wind of this and pointed out that near-future political stuff and SF disguised as technothrillers were doing very well in the charts*, and if this time I promised to write something like that with no obscure TLAs—which as you know stands for Three Letter Abbreviations—for obscure political sects they would be very happy for me to do it, so I did."

The revelation came during a talk delivered to a sci-fan fan group, during which MacLeod also passed along the standard writerly advice to "take out as many adverbs as possible," but then gave it a new twist by talking about how much he loves the style of the Icelandic epic Njal's Saga, which led to yet another bit of literary wisdom: "My advice to anyone here who is writing fantasy is: walk past the shelves of fantasy trilogy bricks. Head for the black Penguins. Steal from the best."

*William Gibson's Pattern Recognition being the most obvious example, but there's also Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy of global warming novels, which concluded with the recently published Sixty Days and Counting. Of course, I could mention Incendiary, the Chris Cleave novel unfortunate enough to come out just as bombs actually did rock London, but that was a "literary novel," and critics would probably glare at me if I called it science fiction...

(photo: Beth Gwinn for Locus)