Galactic North (53 page)

Much of the hard SF furniture of my universe—slower-than -light travel, coldsleep, machine intelligences—draws from ideas and motifs in the work of Gregory Benford, especially his “Galactic Centre” sequence, beginning with
In the Ocean of Night
and
Across the Sea of Suns.
My fascination with cyborg spacers (and the baroque trappings of space opera in general) stems from early exposure to Samuel R. Delaney’s seminal
Nova.

The Demarchists, the faction that plays a central role in much of the history, is not my invention. Joan D. Vinge wrote about a demarchist society in her enjoyable pacey novel
The Outcasts of Heaven Belt.
It’s a real political term, derived from
democratic anarchy
, but I hadn’t encountered it before reading Vinge’s book. Vinge’s demarchists used computer networks to facilitate their real-time democratic processes; mine use neural implants, enabling the decision-making process to become rapid and subliminal.

Nor is one of my other factions, the Conjoiners, an entirely new conception. I suspect I was thinking a little of the Comprise, the human hive-mind culture from Michael Swanwick’s
Vacuum Flowers.
I tried to get inside the heads of my Conjoiners in the early Clavain stories featured here, and to suggest the inner workings of a realistic hive mind. Most of the Conjoiner characters I’ve sketched in any detail are, like Clavain himself, tainted by some residual connection back to baseline humanity. The Conjoiners are my attempt to portray a hive mind as not necessarily an evil thing.

The Ultras, the cyborg crews who control most of the starships featured in the sequence, are, I suppose, what
Star Trek
’s Borg would be like if the Borg took an unhealthy interest in Goth subculture. I got the idea of sleek, streamlined starships from Marshall T. Savage’s book
The Millennial Project
, which is a nonfiction treatise on galactic colonisation. I don’t know whether Savage’s arguments really stack up (I suspect not), but I did like the idea of inverting that classic SF trope of the “ship designed only for the forgiving environment of vacuum.” In any case, even if streamlining doesn’t make much sense (even if it would look wicked cool), you’d still want to make your collision cross-section as small as possible, methinks, which suggests that any future starship will tend to be considerably longer than it’s wide. Savage’s wonderful and frightening vision of far-future solar systems transformed into countless sun-englobing asteroid habitats, each of which would be filled with sun-filtering foliage (thereby rendering starlight green), also crops up in “Galactic North” and
Absolution Gap.
As for ship names, I bow to no one in my admiration of Iain M. Banks. But let the record show that the unwieldy names of my ships were a direct pinch from M. John Harrison’s
The Centauri Device
, not the Culture.

Okay: I don’t want to give anyone the idea that I stole
everything.
But debts must be acknowledged, and there are too many to mention here. I cannot omit Paul McAuley and Stephen Baxter, two writers who have both perpetrated future histories of their own, and who both showed great generosity to me when I was starting out. It was their short stories in the British SF magazine
Interzone
(stories with spaceships in: very much against the grain of what
Interzone
was generally publishing at the time) that encouraged me to try submitting my own material. But it was David Pringle who actually
bought
my earliest stories—including “Dilation Sleep” and two of the other stories included here (“A Spy in Europa” and “Galactic North”)—and it’s to him that I dedicate this book. Without those early sales, I’m not at all sure that I would have persevered in my efforts to become an SF writer, so in that sense I owe David and the rest of the
Interzone
team for everything that’s followed.
Interzone
, incidentally, is still going strong: if you like short fiction (and if you don’t, what are you doing reading this?), then you could do worse than take out a subscription.

To finish, all I can say is that if you have enjoyed my stories, and you like the form of the future history, there is a mountain of good stuff out there by other writers. I hope you have as much fun discovering it as I’ve had.

Enjoy your futures.