Gavin Smith - Four Way Interview

Gavin G. Smith is the Dundee-born author of the hard edged, action-packed SF novels Veteran, War in Heaven, Age of Scorpio, A Quantum Mythology and The Beauty of Destruction, as well as the short story collection Crysis: Escalation. He has collaborated with Stephen Deas as the composite personality Gavin Deas and co-written Elite: Wanted, and the shared world series Empires: Infiltration and Empires: Extraction. His latest title is The Bastard Legion.

Why science fiction?

Good question. I grew up with 2000AD and then all the first wave cyberpunk writers, and then a little later the new space opera writers like Iain M. Banks and Peter F. Hamilton. So a love of the genre is an obvious answer. I do think that the speculative genres offer us an excellent tool to take tricky problems facing humanity an comment, warn or even cathartically deal with them. It’s also nice to escape to other places.

Why this book?

After finishing writing the Age of Scorpio trilogy I felt like I’d been trying to fly before I could run. As much as I loved it I suspect it’s a little self indulgent. I felt like I needed to hone my writing a bit more, and I wanted to write something that was simpler and hopefully fun (though people still seem to think it’s very dark). In music terms I’d done my prog album and now I wanted to write some stripped down rock’n’roll.

What's next?

Good question. I’ve written a couple of novellas written, possibly in another genre… I’m still plugging away at the script writing, I’m hoping to have a short script of mine filmed in late Feb and I have a feature length script that I have some rewrites on but is garnering some interest. In terms of novels I’m giving some thought to a day-after-tomorrow cyber-thriller.

What's exciting you at the moment?

All sorts of things, I’m a media junkie. I’m trying to work out what a 21st C bible as a computer game would look like, in fact I’m finding the whole culture around gaming very interesting at the moment. The resurgence of cyberpunk sort of makes sense particularly with the efforts some people are going to to make the world (more) dystopian but it still took me by surprise.

Comments

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein, but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

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