Apologies for being quiet over the last few weeks, but I have been kind of busy. I was off making my inaugural visit to the Great American Empire, and I can report on my return that our colonial cousins – despite poisoning themselves with excessive use of corn syrup – seem to be doing jolly well. In fact I was so taken with this new nation that I decided to get wed there, in the virtual reality gaming and entertainment construct known as ‘Las Vegas’, followed by an enjoyably relaxing honeymoon on the delightfully terraformed orbital spa ‘Hawaii’. It was quite splendid.

Anyway, having got back, cleaned the airliner grime from my frame, and started to recover from a severe case of desynchronosis – it’s clear I have a few bits of news to get you guys up to speed on. First off I’m very pleased to report that Paintwork is continuing to pick up glowing reviews:

“Havana Augmented is the third short story in Tim Maughan’s excellent Paintwork (2011), a collection that focuses on the meaning of artistry in a near-future cyberpunk landscape…(it) follows two streams of conflict. Paul and Kim battle with enormous robots which is, frankly, awesome. Mr. Maughan knows how to write an action sequence without letting it take over. The battles are short, streamlined, vicious and very, very fun…this is the crown jewel of an excellent collection. I’m a sucker for sports movies, especially when the game or match has some sort of Great Significance. Mr. Maughan tugs at my heartstrings with Havana Augmented – a giant robot smackdown with a country’s future on the line.” – Pornokitsch

“The title story Paintwork is an interesting examination of the lives and work of graffiti artists in the near future, trying to keep their art relevant in a world whose environments can become virtual with the blink of an eye. This is a Bristol story through and through, and Tim has done a great job of taking our landmarks and weaving them into a world that is very futuristic while remaining completely familiar to residents of the city…anyone who has an interest in urban art will draw much from this story. I loved Paintwork. All three stories show a writer with a real gift for accelerating the world we know into a believable future, with a deft local touch that adds an extra something for us Bristol folk…(it’s) a great read, that pinches a few ingredients from the SF greats and blends them with a unique flavour all of its own.” – Guide2Bristol

“Tim writes in a small subgenre that could loosely be called cyberpunk, but perhaps would be more accurately described as virtual reality fiction. He brings his near future VR fiction to life in a gritty and believable subculture, and he is very good at it…All three are excellent stories that transport the reader to the action…Tim’s work is a hidden gem. I’m very excited that a story I selected was nominated for the BSFA short fiction award, and I was excited to read this small collection. It is well worth your time.” – Rick Novy

As Rick mentions in that review, he was responsible for my first ever fiction sale, for which I am forever grateful. He’s got a book out himself at the moment – Neanderthal Swan Song – which I heartily recommend you go and check out.

In other – just as exciting – news I’ve got a couple of appearances coming up. First up is The Bristol Festival of Literature, where I’ll be taking apart in a panel looking at politics in sci-fi with the brilliant title “Should David Cameron read more Science Fiction?” It’s on Friday 21 October at Hamilton House in Stokes Croft at 6pm. Tickets are £5 and can be ordered here.

And then the very next day is Bristol’s own sci-fi and fantasy convention Bristolcon, where I’ve officially been announced as a guest. Not sure quite yet what I’ll be up to exactly there – more details as I get them – but with an impressive line-up of authors and artists I’m very honoured to have been invited. If you’re in the area it looks like an unmissable event, so come down and say hi.

Paintwork is out now – you can get Kindle versions from Amazon US and Amazon UK, and versions for all other popular e-readers (including iPad and Nook) at Smashwords.

Print versions are now available from Createspace or Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Quick post – just wanted to say thanks to everyone that came and checked out the See No Evil post last week, the response was phenomenal. Thanks especially to Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing for picking it up, and to all his readers that swung by.

So many people checked it out in fact that I ended up being interviewed about it for The Times, in this great article (paywall, sadly) by Simon de Bruxelles – extract below:

Tim Maughan, the Bristol-based science fiction author whose latest book Paintwork is about a graffiti art, disagrees. He said: “Does the art form loose some of it’s meaning and energy by not being an illegal form of rebellion? I think it’s pretty obvious the answer is no when you come down here and experience it.

Mr Maughan, who says he always felt the “neo-Brutalist” concrete architecture of Nelson Street was the vision of some dystopian future, added: “The scale of some of the pieces have just blown me away.”

I can’t empthasise that last point enough. See No Evil is very special, and you need to see it yourself if you can. if you don’t live in Bristol its worth making the trip. It should be up for a good few months yet – but Bristol City Council tell me that ‘no-one can say definitively – depends mainly on sale and redevelopment of old Magistrates’ Courts’. So don’t sleep on this, come and check it out.

Paintwork is out now – you can get Kindle versions from Amazon US and Amazon UK, and versions for all other popular e-readers (including iPad and Nook) at Smashwords.

Print versions are now available from Createspace or Amazon US and Amazon UK.

This weekend saw the final unveiling of the the See No Evil project in Bristol; Europe’s largest street art exhibition. It is, to say the very least, an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement. Graffiti artists not just from Bristol but around the globe descended on Nelson Street, transforming the whole area from drab, urban decay into what feels like a new – almost virtual – space. It is truly something that needs to be experienced, but hopefully some of the photos I grabbed (along with the many on the official Flickr page) will give you some idea of its scale and raw beauty.

My own interest in graffiti art dates back to my first introduction to hip-hop culture in the mid 1980s, when the first images of New York subway art started to make their way over the pond. Apart from their raw visceral energy, both art-forms struck me as intensely science-fictional. Both are about the appropriation of technology to create something new – hip-hop taking samplers and turntables to generate new sounds they weren’t designed to make, and graf taking car repair paint and the very architecture of cities to create new visual spaces and canvases. They are, perhaps, the most literal expression of William Gibson’s famous cyberpunk-defining phrase ‘the street finds it own use for things’.

Even before cyberpunk, the city has long been one of the defining settings of science fiction for those that dare to look beyond the standard tropes of spaceships and alien worlds. Science fiction frequently views the city as a machine, with those of us that live within it variably as components, parasites or even unwilling prisoners. Graffiti becomes one of the most visceral, immediate statements of rebellion for us urban inmates; a bold, organic riot of colour against our drab, sterile prison.

The science fictional aspect of See No Evil becomes even more heightened when you consider the history of Nelson Street. It is yet another example, amongst the hundreds that dot the urban landscape of Britain, of 1950/60s post war planning and architecture that aimed to herald a new, futuristic, technology-driven utopia. But of course the future’s greatest strength is that it can never be predicted and tamed, let alone designed or planned. The town planners and architects failed, and as the decades passed they watched their dreams descend into decay, shunned by popular taste and left to become associated with poverty, depravation and failure. And to add the ultimate insult to their injuries, they saw their utopian designs become the defining science fiction image of a dystopian future.

“The group of architects who put (the plan) forward combined super highways with dreaming notions of pedestrian decks to create squares of Venetian splendour where Bristolians would gather in their thousands on election nights six metres above the smoothly uninterrupted flow of traffic.

“The major central area civic contribution of the sixties was the complex of pedestrian decks that survive in truncated form above the street at Lewins Mead and beyond and which virtually nobody uses. This was to be the essential link between the Centre – or even Forum’s great piazza above it – and the Broadmead shopping centre and beyond.”

The Fight for Bristol (ed. by Gordon Priest and Pamela Cobb; Redcliffe Press, 1980)

It’s this idea that was the driving force behind the story that leads my collection Paintwork; the use of graffiti to reclaim the space in which we live from corporate control. The technology that is subverted in Paintwork may be far more exotic – augmented reality, nanotechnology and QR Codes – but walking around Nelson Street made me feel that somehow I had actually managed to catch a little taste of Bristol’s zeitgeist with that story. That part of town usually feels dead and deserted, but on Saturday it was rammed with bodies – Bristol residents that had come out to be enthralled and entertained; to reclaim this urban decay for their own expression and enjoyment. And the fact that this was an officially organised event, done with the guidance and support of the same city that once made the mistake of trying to guess and plan the future is not only exciting in itself, but perhaps shows us a fleeting glimpse of a real, achievable urban utopia.

Paintwork is out now – you can get Kindle versions from Amazon US and Amazon UK, and versions for all other popular e-readers (including iPad and Nook) at Smashwords.

Print versions are now available from Createspace or Amazon US and Amazon UK.

UPDATE: Paintwork is out now – you can get Kindle versions from Amazon US and Amazon UK, and versions for all other popular e-readers at Smashwords. Enjoy!

Not final artwork, but couldn’t resist sharing. Fantastic work from my much better half.

Paintwork will be out very shortly – in the meantime you can read a short extract here.

Right, I’ll try and keep this as brief as possible.

Last night, inspired by the latest ‘foreign pirates are killing anime’ outburst from the Japanese industry, I fell into one of my usual rants on Twitter:

“The anime industry avoiding the same elephant in the room as music industry did 10 yrs ago: consumers know worthless product when they see it.

My point isn’t about ‘defending piracy’ – it’s about giving it a cultural context.”

Well, I thought what I was trying to say was fairly straightforward – that like the music biz the anime industry had devalued its own product so much that it is hard to act surprised that people don’t want to pay for it. But judging from the flood of responses I got, apparently a few things need clarifying. Lets have a look:

Wow, what show are you talking about?

I’m not talking about any specific shows, I’m talking about how anime in general is – rightly or wrongly – perceived.

Your theory makes no sense, because good shows sell just as badly or worse as bad shows.

Well, for a start, that’s not my theory at all.

My point is not ‘anime doesn’t sell because it’s low quality’, it’s ‘it is seen as acceptable to steal any anime because it’s all viewed as disposable’. My argument is that this is exactly what happened to the music industry: in a desperate attempt to exploit every revenue opportunity while also reducing costs and investment it devalued its own product to the point that consumers feel little unease with obtaining it illegally.

Nah, it’s not the industry’s fault – people pirate because they are evil and immoral.

Um, maybe. I like to be a little less nihilistic than that. Besides, there are examples of people (I’m thinking Cory Doctorow and Radiohead here) in other media making a success of asking people for money while giving away their work. Perhaps what is needed is some risk taking and imaginative thinking?

OK you clever bastard, so what did the music industry do to solve all this?

Well, the industry itself did nothing really to solve it. What it mainly did was gripe and whine and bitch and demand pointless, ineffectual legal action while still taking the same attitude to the product it was churning out. Sound familiar?

In the end it wasn’t the traditional industry that tried to fix things, but Apple and iTunes that stepped in to present a different model.

WHAT? BUT iTUNES AND APPLE ARE EVIL!!??!?!!?

Yeah, OK. I know what you’re saying – iTunes has many, many issues. Sadly this is not that debate. What is interesting about iTunes is that it showed that by finding sensible price points, breaking up albums into smaller products, supporting micro-transactions and making the whole process very quick and easy it is possible to convince some consumers (in fact, a very large number of consumers) that buying legitimately is less hassle than piracy.

But the anime industry isn’t Apple! It can’t afford to start up a version of iTunes, plus the model doesn’t fit anime at all?

Sheesh, stop taking me so literally. I’m not saying an ‘Itunes for anime’ is the answer. Not at all. To be honest I don’t have a firm answer. I’m just some mouthy Brit on teh internets, its not actually my job to provide any answers. I’d like to think there are people out there in the industry who are much cleverer than me and whose job actually should be to come up with answers, and I can just go back to drinking and babbling on in an amusing chimney sweep’s accent.

But you must have some suggestions?

Well, if we can get back to what started all this: my main suggestion is that the industry stops whining about piracy and using it to deflect blame away from how it has devalued its own product. Connected with that it could stop throwing hissy fits and pulling simulcasts or not allowing foreign distributors from putting out boxsets and blurays. That would all be a good start towards calming down and trying to find a way out of this mess. Or maybe it really is too late.

So this just sounds like your usual ranting – you’re blaming the death of the industry on moe and lolicon and some shows that YOU don’t like despite being quite popular with fans.

Okay. Please – just take a deep breath and read this whole post again. Please.

But commercialization and sponsorship has been part of anime since day one, this isn’t a new thing.

Exactly – and the same is true within music – pop music has been used to sell other products etc since the 1950s. That’s not a criticism of my argument – its further evidence for it! You’d hope that after half a century of doing exactly what I’m describing here that both industries would act less surprised that consumers view their products as low value and disposable. I mean, how stupid do they really think we are?

But what is wrong with a show being disposable? I quite like some shows that I admit are disposable.

There’s nothing wrong with a show itself being disposable! There is always going to be disposable product in every entertainment industry, plus ‘disposableness’ is in itself – like quality – a subjective term.

The issue is this though: don’t whine about something being disposable if you made it that way. If you are a studio that makes shallow, disposable product then don’t act all surprised if people might enjoy watching it once, but don’t want to pay to own a handful of episodes of it on an overpriced DVD. You can’t blame them for that. Instead you need to find alternative ways of monetizing that one, single viewing. Or to price it far more realistically. Again this is how iTunes works, by charging mere pennies for products that its customers view as largely disposable. Not perfect for the artist and industry arguably, but its still a lot better than someone just stealing it.

Or, of course, you need to make a less disposable product in the first place….but lets stop there before we start going around in circles again, shall we?

Long-time readers will remember me showcasing the work of Bristol based anime and manga artist Rory Doona on the site before – well, he’s back, this time with a few pieces he’s done for UK anime distributor Manga Entertainment.

To quote Rory: “Manga commissioned me to create a new mascot for their latest series of adverts…I drew inspiration from some of my favourite mascot characters like Miyazaki’s Totoro and Bastian Balthazar from The Never Ending Story. The mascot is also accompanied with a pink haired girl on his travels as well. Both as of yet do not have a name but I can pass on any good suggestions to Manga from your blog readers, what do your readers think they two characters should be called?”

Hit the comments below with your suggestions – click any of the images to see full sized versions. And don’t forget to follow Rory over on Facebook to see more of his work.

Layout designs on the Manga ads by Jelly Creative.

The name Natsuhiko Kyogoku is probably unfamiliar to most anime fans, but the novelist has already had one of his works adapted – Madhouse’s 2008 series Mōryō no Hako – with a second, Loups-Garous, being adapted into a movie by Production IG and due for release in 2010. An expert in Japanese folklore tales and yōkai, the supernatural creatures that inhabit them, Kyogoku-san is best known in Japan for his award winning mystery novels. Unfamiliar with his work myself until now, I was intrigued when US publisher Vertical Inc sent me a review copy of his debut novel – and the first to be translated into English – The Summer of The Ubume.

Ubume is the first in his long running series of novels about Akihiko ‘Kyōgokudō’ Chuzenji, a bookshop owner and yōkai exorcist, and a character seemingly based in part on Kyogoku himself. However, reading Ubume for the first time it never feels like Kyogoku ever envisioned Kyōgokudō as the main protagonist, or perhaps never foresaw a series when writing it. The story is instead told, in first person, through the eyes of Sekiguchi, a hack journalist who comes to his old friend Kyogoku for advice on a story he is working on. It’s a bizzare and horrific tale of a local medical clinic run by the Kuonji family, and of missing children, a doctor that has apparently vanished into thin air and a woman that has been pregnant for over 20 months. It is Sekiguchi that investigates the mystery, and until the novel’s chilling climax Kyōgokudō plays little role beyond discussing the case and the alleged involvement of a yōkai known as a ubume with his friend. It’s here that we see how Kyōgokudō becomes an avatar in the book’s world for the author – despite their expert knowledge on the subject, both openly state that they do not believe in the existence of yōkai, instead seeing them as a metaphorical manifestation of societies desires, values and fears.

And it’s here that Ubume’s main themes come to the surface. This theory of folklore seems almost like common sense now, but in Japan in 1951 – when the novel is set – this would have been almost revolutionary thinking to the average citizen. In many ways Ubume is about Japan in the grip of post-war identity crisis, as it attempts to forcefully separate from it’s feudal, Imperial past and embrace a more western form of democracy and modernity. It is world full of tabloid newspapers and trashy magazines, screaming lurid tales of demonic women and yōkai possession, while elsewhere characters embrace medicine and quest for scientific discovery. Memories of war linger in the background at all times, while individuals talk of their struggle to come to terms with realising what they fought for was wrong. It’s here that Ubume’s yōkai metaphor comes to the fore, as Kyōgokudō repeats his mantra ‘there is nothing strange’, and we realise that we are watching a Japan that is undergoing a subtle yet monumental shift in it’s psychological, philosophical and intellectual make up. Whether an exploration of this time was Kyogoku’s original intent, or whether it just provided a convenient setting to tell his stories and illustrate his yōkai theories is never made clear. Either way it’s inconsequential; as readers we are given a valuable and fascinating insight and snapshot of a period in Japan’s social history that makes the book a fascinating read on it’s own.

It also, paradoxically, leads me to my single, very minor note of concern about Ubume. Much of this exposition is presented in the form of lengthy, deep discussion between Kyōgokudō and Sekiguchi – and while I found it a fascinating read others may find it a little impenetrable at first, especially as it begins in the first dozen pages of the book. For the first half of the book the plot moves very slowly as a result, but as a fan of this typically Japanese style of philosophical musing – and the works of anime filmmakers like Mamoru Oshii – I found it immensely enjoyable. And in the end, as with all intelligent literature, its worth putting in the attention it demands, as watching the mystery unravel and reach it’s startling, dark climax is another joy altogether. The Summer of the Ubume is yet more proof, if it was needed, that Vertical’s eye for spotting the more unusual and captivating work that Japan has to offer makes it a publishing force not to be ignored. Here’s hoping that Ubume is enough of a success to allow them to bring us more of Kyogoku’s novels. I know I can’t wait to read more.

Following on from the popularity of last week’s Parappa and Street Fighter in just 15 pixels, I thought i’d better share this. Alaskan Military School have been at it again, this time cramming a whole bunch of classic games into just 15 pixels and four minutes – all to celebrate Gamecity kicking off today.

Question is – how many can you name?

OK – the second non-anime/manga related post today, but when my good friend David Surman showed me this today I just couldn’t resist sharing. David is heavily involved in organising Nottingham based games-fest Gamecity, and – well, I’ll let him explain it himself:

This year we commissioned design collective the Alaskan Military School to produce an animation package to communicate the ethos of the event. We recently launched a series of viral spots that are the first part of this collection of new work.

They each take one of our favourite games at GameCity HQ and translate them into a 15 pixel grid. It’s Hyper pixel minimalism! We realised that you can communicate the essence of great, iconic games with minimal visual information. I think this approach echoes the values of the festival, to take a sideways look at games, and foster a creative space.

Too cool. But what about the festival itself? Don’t worry, David has more words for you:
GameCity is a lot of things, but most of all it’s an ongoing project to find out what a videogame festival could be.

Unlike a lot of videogame events, it’s not really a place to come and play them – we’d rather do that at home on the sofa. But if you do love videogames, you’re going to find lots here to enjoy. We’d like to think that there’s something at GameCity for anyone who’s interested in interesting things.

Get over to the Gamecity website to learn more

Someone is killing robots. Not just any robots either; apparently someone is hunting down and killing the world’s most powerful and famous robots. And this is a problem for Inspector Gesicht of Europol, not just because he’s been put in charge of tracking down the killer, but because the list of victims so far suggests he might be a target himself.

At first glance this mystery is the heart of Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto – a modern retelling of a popular story arc from manga god Osamu Tezuka’s most famous creation Astro Boy – but in many ways the detective story is just a framework for the author to explore a multitude of themes. Just as Tezuka used Astro Boy to present ideas of difference, prejudice and social exclusion to a young audience, here Urasawa (assisted by Takashi Nagasaki and supervised by Tezuka’s son Macoto) does the same – but with the knowledge that he is talking to an older, more mature audience. The result is something not only a little darker but perhaps subtler – the world Gesicht and his other characters inhabit is less black and white, the lines between robot and human more blurred. At some point in the past robots have attained sentience, and subsequently equality with their human creators, but this is still no utopia – prejudice and discrimination lurk below the surface. Anti robot sentiments are confused further by the fact that many of these sentient machines – including Gesicht himself – are near indistinguishable from humans, while others such as the beloved celebrity Mont Blanc – the killer’s first victim – are almost stereotypically robotic in their appearance. It’s an interesting take on a science fiction meme that has been made commonplace from Blade Runner, A.I. and a hundred novels; that while we see the human-like Gesicht treated with some suspicion, there is a very public, widespread outpouring of grief for the loss of the mechanical looking Mont Blanc. It is almost as though Urasawa is commenting on racial stereotypes and the media, and how often we are more open to accept public figures that fit with our preconceived ideas.

But it’s not just the human’s that are finding this new co-existence difficult, the robots themselves at times seem to be struggling with how they fit into this brave new world. We see Gesicht having to deal with not only the pressures of his own marriage, but also the effects the murders are having on the robot families of the victims. When he goes to have dinner with the gladiatorial celebrity robot Brando and his huge family of children he appears bowled over by their charm and warmth, but his reaction also seems tinged with something that could either be regret or alienation. Similarly, when he meets Atom – the Japanese child-robot that is based upon Astro Boy himself – he seems confused and slightly shocked that that the machine is exhibiting such wide-eyed innocence and childlike fascination for the world around him, especially when Atom himself seems incapable of explaining where these emotions came from. “Well, after pretending all the time,” the boy robot says, “I eventually really got it.” And in many ways this seems to be the core theme of Pluto – that why should robots, created by man to be superior to him in many aspects of form and function, with heightened strength and senses and the ability to edit and share their memories – experience reality on the same level as us? Why should they have to conform to our cultural and societal ideals and practices? With these questions asked Urasawa gives them an even deeper significance, with Gesicht, Atom and the other characters coming to represent our own, very human, everyday concerns about conformity and our roles in society. It’s done with an elegance and subtle sophistication in just these first two volumes that it leaves other works – perhaps most notably Neon Genesis Evangelion – stumbling around in their own philosophical mess, and marks Urasawa as a true master of science fiction writing.

Not that he stops there. The story is told in the shadow of the recently ended 39th Middle East War – a thinly veiled satire on real world conflicts (Urasawa substitutes ‘Robots of Mass Destruction’ for ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ as a reason for invasion), that has left those robots that fought in it even more confused about their role and purpose. While their Asimov-like programming is meant to stop them from harming humans, there’s no restrictions on killing other robots, a contradiction that has left the machine veterans even more confused as to whether they are really excepted into human society, and whether to imitate or reject the lifestyles and hypocritical values of their creators. This is highlighted best in the story of North#2, a powerful war-robot that attempts to put his past behind him by becoming a butler for a famous composer whose work he admires – going as far as to always wear a cloak to cover his terrifying, weapon-encrusted form. He yearns to learn from his new master, who at first refuses to accept a killing machine can truly comprehend music, and it’s a story of acceptance, guilt and self-loathing that Urasawa delivers with devastating emotional effect that makes the book essential reading almost on it’s own.

I realise that I’ve not talked much about the art in this review – as fascinated as I have become by the thematic ideas the story flaunts so effortlessly – and this is a little unfair. The books are gorgeous throughout, with Urasawa creating a unique and brave style that combines the realistic with the stylised, 1950s Tezuka view of the future. This is Astro Boy post Bladerunner; never quite dark enough to be cyberpunk or shiny enough to be The Jetsons, but somewhere solid and believable in the middle. Even at times when the classical, toy-like robot designs seem at first to jar against the deeper subject matter you later realise this is all part of Urasawa’s plan to make you confront his philosophical themes head on, and you can’t help but feel that no other artists could have done the narrative justice.

Just recently I gushed enthusiasm over Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys, and I’m conscious that I have just done the same over Pluto. Both, based on these first volumes, are masterpieces – the former for it’s accessibility and effortless, enticing story telling and the later for it’s mature, refreshingly unique philosophical take on a classic science fiction idea. Again I can’t recommend enough reading either, just as I can’t wait to get my hands on the further installments of both. An unmissable experience.

Review copies supplied by Viz Media.