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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...

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...

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...

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