As I’ve mentioned previously I’ll be at Bristolcon later this month – and over on their site this week they’ve posted the official programme. It looks great – an amazing line up of authors and panelists – and I thought I’d take a few minutes here to highlight what I’ll be doing:

10.00 – When Did Science Become The Bad Guy?

Science seems to have become unfashionable and is now suffering from funding cuts. When and how did science lose its cool?

With Dev Agarwal (Mod), Eugene Byrne, Simon Breeze, Tim Maughan, Raven Dane & Jonathan Wright

13.00 – Copyright or Wrong?

Until recent changes in the law, copyright in the UK was regarded as being decades out of date, struggling to keep up with advances in technology. It’s clear copyright law must change and adapt in order to survive the impact of technology and remain relevant to new media. Copying is easy, affordable and everybody does it – what options does the creator have to combat copyright infringement? Or is it time to offer everything for free?

With Jonathan Wright (Mod), Juliet E McKenna, Mike Shevdon, Tim Maughan, Raven Dane & Bob Neilson

18.00 – Sci-Fi Now!

Sliding doors, tricorders, communicators, space stations, and exploration of Mars. What have we achieved that was only science fiction fifty years ago? What happened to teleporters, jetpacks and flying cars? Will we ever get our base on the moon for our vacations? If so, when?

With Gareth L Powell (Mod), John Meaney, Eugene Byrne, Dev Agarwal, Paul McAuley & Tim Maughan

I’ll also be doing a reading from Paintwork at 10.50 – straight after the ‘When Did Science Become The Bad Guy?’ panel.

Hopefully see you there!

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.

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.

Matt Brown is the adoptive parent of Anime Dream, and has written for the site for eight years. He’s an RPG gamer turned anime fan who lives in Florida and dreams of escaping, someday. A programmer and language enthusiast, he devotes most of his energies to slacking off, raising laziness to an artform. He maintains a pocket-busting love affair with Japanese music. His Twitter personality is MattB_AD. In a very exciting post for me personally, here he looks at an anime set in my adopted hometown of Bristol.

Picture a boy of hardly more than ten years. If you are such a boy, this won’t be difficult for you. Like most boys, wide eyed and innocent, this one is oblivious to the dangers of the world. He has parents who love him and provide for him, so that he might spend enough time with his imagination to get his fill, before biology rears its ugly head. He is curious about his world, his own home, and everything in between.

Disaster strikes. While the adults take care of adult matters like evacuations and blind panic, the boy slips out into a field, where no living soul is present to witness the spectacle of light that he experiences – it is all his own. Our view of the scene changes, weightlessly circling the sky and his frame. We see the green grass above as our bodies float in the sea of stars. The planet’s laser defense system unleashes bolts of light into the heavens, and we see how insignificant we are, next to the cosmos.

Picture a girl of sixteen years. If you are such a girl, you know everything I do and more. She is independent, intelligent, mature beyond her years – unlike the boys her age. Her mother and father are both respected military officers; she will follow in their footsteps, and on to greater status and responsibility when her service for the security of the realm is sufficient. While in training, she meets a boy about her age who is, like herself, a dignitary. Unlike herself, the boy spent his childhood on land, and she in space.

Disaster strikes. Her first chance at combat disappears with an order to remove this boy from the action. As she ferries him toward their destination, the journey is fraught with challenges. The boy reveals his talent for getting into trouble in space, only to redeem himself on the ground, where her feet are less sure than they were in the heavens. He uses his frail body and still-boyish voice to protect her, and if she took a moment, she would realize that he steadied her steps all along. Maybe she already has.

As boys and girls become women and men, the volume of life’s background noise increases to the point where nothing comes in clearly. In the midst of pursuit for fame, fortune, family, or something resembling either, we search for the signal that would connect us again with that source of all happiness. To Hiroyuki Morioka, the gender of childhood wonder is male, and the gateway to romantic love is female. But in a sense, every one of us is both – the anima and animus. The work I’ve just described is Crest of the Stars, originally a three-volume series of light novels which open his Seikai (star world) saga. Morioka’s work shows us a romance that is worlds apart and galaxies wide, but starts with simple boyhood curiosity, and that feeling that proves elusive in adulthood.

Now we travel to England, and back a half century, give or take. You don’t have any trouble going back in time, do you? Science reigns in the town of Bristol – particularly atop a hill, in a small boarding house over a restaurant named Tenkai.

The building’s owner, a beautiful young woman who goes by “China,” is quite adept at the martial arts, which she uses in diffusing fights in her restaurant, and breaking down a tenant’s door to demand rent. The tenant is Professor Breckenridge, a scientist/inventor nobody’s heard of, yet. To appease his landlord, he demonstrates his latest invention – a space reflection lens! She astutely points out that it’s no better than a mirror, before finding that it’s more easily broken than a mirror. Breckenridge likes to spend money on parts instead of rent, and keeping China at bay isn’t something he can alone. Enter Jim Floyd, his assistant, whom he charges with “China management.”

China has a soft spot for Jim, which enables him to sneak parts past her to the lab upstairs. He can’t get away with tricking her indefinitely, though, so China management and inventions are intertwined for the greater good. From small gifts like a genuine moonstone ring, to a birthday message on the moon’s surface and more, keeping China happy enables outlandish feats of science in Bristol.

According to Kenji Tsuruta, China first popped into his mind as secretary to “a sort of scientific Sherlock Holmes.” As he struggled to pay his own bills, the image of China overlapped that of his landlord, and his Spirit of Wonder had its spokesmodel. If discovery is the fuel of wonder, then the spirit is that which fosters discovery. In Tsuruta’s romantic brand of sci-fi, woman is that spirit, and accounting for her desires is the only way to satisfy those boyish dreams.

In “Miss China’s Ring,” Jim and the professor manage China by using their inventions to make outrageous birthday presents for her. In another story, Jim devises a machine that creates a shooting star, so that China can make all the wishes she wants at a predictable time. The formula is pretty consistent: China lets things slide because of her feelings for Jim, and the inventions are fun for her, too.

Across town, a woman named Windy waits for her husband to return from an overseas trip. Her illusion of having him to herself is shattered quickly; when Jack returns, he immediately starts hanging out with her father Gordon, and his buddies, Cooper and Shepherd*, who fifty years prior christened their group as the Scientific Boys Club.

Their story is based on actual science…sort of. Unknown to Windy, the purpose of Jack’s trip was to steal the Mars globe created by Percival Lowell, revealing locations of the now infamous “canals” which Lowell believed were evidence of intelligent life on Mars. This globe, plus a book on ethereal current written by Windy herself, would help the club make their dream of traveling to the Red Planet a reality! It’s a fine idea, but they overlook one crucial factor: Windy. Jack has to stop neglecting his wife, or the whole project is doomed.

Tsuruta’s stories intoxicate. Within their underbelly is the notion that all curiosity can be satisfied, as long as one sees to the forces that govern life and work, and returns that which is given. The converse is also implied: that science is hard, and the people who do it deserve support from everyone. China wants to see the canals, and due to a quirk in Breckenridge’s space-reflection telescope, she sees what she wants. The science club, by contrast, discovers that Lowell’s canals theory is wrong and calls him a liar, despite the irony that their ship, the “Spirit of Science,” is ether-driven – another failed theory, that enjoyed favor prior to the discovery of the photon and its reconciliation with the wave properties of light.

We now know that Lowell’s canals are an optical illusion. Perhaps the most interesting failure of Lowell’s was his “Planet X” theory, which stated that there had to be a planet past Neptune that accounts for the peculiar orbit of Uranus. The data which formed the basis of his theory was wrong, but his work led to the discovery of Pluto. Tsuruta’s work paints the scientific process and its results, both right and wrong, as a virtue deserving of praise, and Percival Lowell is a perfect model for this sentiment. Not every scientist’s work produces a breakthrough, but their contributions are meaningful and often subtle.

When we look to the stars, we see the past of the Universe, and the future of humankind. Time limits our activities off world and slows our progress, because space is so vast. For the Seikai saga, Morioka created the concepts of space-adept “Abh” fashioned by humans (in their own image) for exploration, and a two-dimensional “plane space” to even the score between space and time, to allow us to conceive of deep space travel and its societal implications. Seikai amusingly follows Tsuruta’s Rule: that man will continue to accomplish great things if the woman in his life is content.

Seikai takes time to show us that in Morioka’s vision of the future, little boys will still look to the heavens and feel the immensity of space, no matter what humanity will have accomplished by that time. Spirit of Wonder reminds us that while most things do not remain in the realm of science fiction forever, we can always dream.

*Bonus points if you recognized “Gordon Cooper” and Shepherd as the names of American astronauts. Both Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr. and Alan Shepherd were among the seven astronauts selected for the Mercury program. Shepherd was the first American in space.

Notes on availability:

The Crest of the Stars novels were released in English by TOKYOPOP, and are still widely available. The Banner of the Stars novels are not available in English. All Seikai TV series and OVAs, save for the Banner of the Stars III OVAs, were released in R1 DVD by Bandai Entertainment. Crest of the Stars was released in the UK by Beez Entertainment.

The Scientific Boys Club story is only available in English as an OVA series, published in R1 DVD by Bandai Entertainment in 2003. Copies are still fairly easy to obtain. The Spirit of Wonder manga is partially available in English, courtesy Dark Horse Comics. Miss China’s Ring received an OVA adaptation, which AnimEigo licensed. Unfortunately, that license expired, and copies are difficult to obtain in DVD, although VHS copies aren’t too difficult to snag.

Long time readers will be familar with the work of local Bristol artist Rory Doona, whose anime and graf inspired work I’ve had great pleasure in showing on the site in the past. Well, today Rory dropped me an email about his latest project:

The series is titled descriptively “Girls, Guns and Clouds” which pretty much sums up the subject matter. Certainly my love for Japanese character design shines through again but the focus on many of the images is to hint at a wider story and world behind each image.

The full works will be available to view and buy online sometime next month, currently aiming for around mid October. More details of sizes, prices and format will be available come mid October, which we also hope to be the release date online. Thanks for sharing these with your readers.

I think you’ll agree they’re breathtaking – more info on how you can own some of these prints when I have it.

I’m off on my travels again – not Japan this time, but the sun soaked Socialist republic of to Havana. Ten days of snorkelling, rum, fat Cuban cigars and blissfully internet free chilling awaits me. As a result there will be no updates here for a while – and my ninja-like accomplice Flotsky will be moderating comments here – and I’ll reply to them all when I get back. Apologies in advance.

But just as I’m leaving this town, I thought I’d leave you will with a little bit of homegrown goodness. As if Rory Doona and a certain well known anime blog weren’t enough evidence that Bristol is the anime culture epicenter of the UK, here’s a fantastic bit of giant Mecha CGI work from local artist Justin Dowling. Enjoy.

truth tv – giant bipedal weaponised military unit from Justin Dowling on Vimeo.

Following on from last week’s look at Rory Doona’s promo artwork for the TOKYOPOP UK summer releases, he’s kindly given me his latest work for them – this time with a vampire theme. I think you’ll agree it’s fangtastic.

I’ll be here the whole week. Tip your waitress. Try the veal. You’ve been a great audience. Goodnight everybody etc.

I just got dropped a tasty treat from Rory Doona – who some of you will undoubtedly remember from my recent look at UK manga artists – a look at his promotional artwork for manga publisher TOKYOPOP. The piece is to promote their forthcoming UK summer releases, so Rory went for a summer beach vibe with a giant-manga-squid-attack twist. Kind of reminds me of the end of Watchmen (the book). If it had been set in Blackpool.

More great images and some words from the man himself on its creation over at Rory’s blog.