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.

It’s hard to walk down a street in urban Tokyo without being reminded of the ever-present earthquake threat. Large signs on nearly every street notify you of emergency procedures and direct you to evacuation points. While it is undoubtedly drowned out by the background noise and visual blur for the average Tokyo resident, for a tourist it can seem quite startling or disturbing at first, and feel like health and safety overkill. Until, that is, someone points out to you that experts predict there is 70% or higher chance of an earthquake measuring 7.0 magnitude on the Richter scale hitting Tokyo in the next 30 years. It’s a terrifying situation for an urban population that large, and one that forms the basis for Studio Bones and Kinema Citrus’ eleven part series Tokyo Magnitude 8.0

After the scene-setting of the first episode there doesn’t seem to be an awful lot more to say about the show plot wise. School has just broken up for summer, and 12 year-old Mirai Onozawa is reluctantly taking her 8 year old brother Yuki to a robot exposition on the artificial island of Odaiba when the quake hits, and they team up with female motorcycle courier Mari to slowly pick their way through the wreckage of the city and get home. And that is about it. Sure, there are some great action sequences along the way, and a few moments of true suspense and peril, but otherwise there really isn’t much else going on with the storyline; this is pretty much standard disaster movie material. Which is where Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 pulls out its trump card – by presenting the audience with a genre its already familiar with, it gives itself the chance to explore some subtle and deep themes, with the end result being a surprisingly satisfying and emotional drama.

The first episode opens with angsty teenager Mirai wishing something terrible would happen to Tokyo – a sentiment already voiced by characters in another show from last season, Production IG’s slightly disappointing and flawed post 9/11 drama Eden of the East – but before that we’ve already been subjected to TM8′s impressive opening sequence, a montage of black and white line drawings of various Tokyo landmarks destroyed by the earthquake. The images seem to mimic the painstaking detail of architectural designs, only to joyfully celebrate introducing chaos and destruction. It can be seen almost as a reminder of science and engineering’s ultimate futility against the power of the natural world and the environment, but there also seems to be a further commentary on human nature and society. Throughout the series there is a feeling of excitement as Tokyo and its citizens are descended into utter chaos as their transit systems are rendered useless and the precious cellphone network fails, and it was something that reminded me instantly of the disaster novels of science fiction author J.G. Ballard. Ballard focused on and discussed the voyeuristic, almost primeval desire for us to be witness to large scale disasters, in what Bruce Sterling once described as ‘psychic wish fulfillment’. As terrifying as it may be we want to see the destruction, and even more we want to see the aftermath, because we want to see what our controlling society looks like with the electricity gone, the buildings turned inside-out and the laws no longer enforceable. It is the ultimate act of human rebellion, deep seated within all of us, the wish to have the very nature of the mundane, day-to-day reality we are forced in inhabit ripped apart, and to see what life might be like outside our cell-like routine. Arguably all disaster fiction attempts to fulfill the same need, but not only does TM8 do it with graphic style and flair, it also balances it with perfectly with it’s second, more obvious, theme.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is primarily about death. As much as we we enjoy the spectacle of destruction, the series never lets us forget that death stalks the upturned streets. We frequently see bodies, and although usually covered as they wait for collection, this serene anonymity seems to add a certain oppressiveness to the atmosphere – especially when couple with scale. We frequently see lots of bodies. Schools, churches and other public buildings are filled with them, lined up in calm, neat and respectful rows awaiting to be identified. In fact, death almost becomes the only order in the characters’ world; the cold, pristine makeshift mortuaries offer a stark, peaceful contrast to the random chaos of the rubble outside. Presenting this to us through the eyes of children allows us to step away from our conventions and preconceptions, and while it’s not a new trick in anime – the likes of Grave of The Fireflies and Barefoot Gen did it decades ago – TM8 brings it all up to date, with very identifiable characters and a recognizable contemporary setting.

And mostly it works. On occasion there is a feeling of overt sentimentality or less-subtle emotional manipulation, but usually TM8 delivers it’s human drama with distressing authenticity. This holds true through to the end, and even if you see the inevitable twist in the story’s finale coming from miles back it doesn’t make the bombshell any less gut-wrenching, and makes you want to watch it over again to see if the clues were there all along. At its heart TM8 has a largely positive message amongst its chaos and suffering, that people are fundamentally good, that perhaps are sometimes suffocating society is a small price to pay for our safety and civility. For a child centered, family show that at first looked to be promising little more than thrills and adventure Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is a satisfyingly deep show, and evidence that Japan can, when it wants to, still produce television based anime that is both thrilling and poignant.