Bonus Excerpt for All: Space Oddity Liner Notes

It's Space Oddity month, so I wanted to give all of you something special ahead of the book launch--you are all the spaceship that takes me to the stars. (Another excerpt will still go up for those at that tier. This is just a gift for the whole fam)

So.

Here is the Great Acknowledgments Essay at the end of SO2, featuring many sadnesses, as has become the tradition with this series. I hope you enjoy it while I scramble to launch a book in 6 days. I love you all so much.

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Liner Notes

It is no easier to sequence the genome of Space Oddity than it was to lay out all the vastly many human beings who contributed culturally or personally to the writing of the weird loud glitterbaby that was Space Opera.

            But it must always start with Eurovision itself.

            In 1956, Marcel Bezençon and a small group of broadcasters and artists conceived something incredibly beautiful and incredibly silly: the Eurovision Song Contest, and the very idea that a continent that spent most of its time and energy punching various parts of itself with other parts of itself, could begin to heal its wounds with song, dance, goofy costumes, and goofier rules. Sixty-eight years on, it remains one of the most human, most hopeful, most ridiculous, and most human things this species has ever managed to pull off with the meager rock, star, and better natures we have to rub together. It is sincere, uncool, fearless, joyful, defiant, and way too extra for the sensibilities of any era it’s ever existed in, and that is what makes it perfect. Even when it’s a mess.

            Kind of like all of us.

            And between Space Opera and Space Oddity, the Eurovision Song Contest was cancelled for the first time in its history. When I first started planning Space Oddity, it seemed this was the only thing it could be about. The biggest thing that had happened to the Contest, and the rush of its return the next year. But then a European country launched a ground invasion of another for the first time in a long while, the world after COVID never really did find normalcy again but seemed to retreat wholesale into numbness and pessimism, and I began to ask questions like can an entire civilization have clinical depression?

I contracted COVID for the first time as I was writing the first draft, and finished it in an absolute fever dream of Original Recipe Coronavirus out-of-body agony and madness. The process of bringing this new weird loud glitterbaby into the world has been difficult and painful from jump.

            But Eurovision itself began in hurt and arced toward beauty. So maybe these books must hurt in their making to shine in their spreading. Or maybe that’s just a pretty thing to think when the bad times just keep on coming and rarely seem to notice how hard anyone is singing into the void to borrow a cup of meaning.

            Still, it is pretty. So we’ll go with it. That’s the whole spirit of the thing.

            I will never stop being grateful, not just for M. Bezençon, but for all the thousands of artists, crew, designers, organizers, and fans who have put their shoulders to the fiery hamster wheel of Eurovision and helped it roll through the 20th century and into this one.

            Thank you so much to Molly and Matthew Hawn, who introduced me to the ESC in London in 2012. To Charles Tan, who joked that I should write a Eurovision novel with totally out-of-proportion results. And massively to Navah Wolfe, who believed in it and acquired it and knew what it could become. Though she was not able to continue on editing this sequel, her guidance and firm hand with the original shines through each of these pages, and without her, both Opera and Oddity would vanish in a puff of cynicism.

            Which brings us to the hitchhiking elephant in the room, the one who always turns up when you attempt to write spacefaring science fiction featuring British folk, and for whom a certain overly clever badger nosing through these pages is most definitely named. Douglas Adams is simply the best there ever was.

I remember the day he died--too young, so painfully young--barely five years older than I am as I type these words. I was at university, in the days before the internet was everywhere and everything, and it hit us like a shovel to the head. My friends and I had grown up reading Adams. We read him aloud to each other and to others as an opening gambit in evaluating whether any given person could really get along with us, which is just terrifically insufferable when you think about it. All of us dearly hoped to meet him one day, and suddenly, it was just never going to happen. Ever. Right at the time of life when it begins to occur to the young that perhaps they are not so special as to be exempt from the linearity of time and the wall of death? That no matter how special the human, or how enormous their feats, no one is? What rude gesture could you give to the void of mortality in the face of all that? Because it thoroughly deserved one.

I went down to the shops that afternoon. And I bought a bowl of geraniums. (If you know, you know.) We went up to the roof of our university library that night and dropped it off the top, standing together holding hands as it shattered in a perfect corona of dirt and pot shards on the concrete below. We all genuinely meant to say oh no not again in unison. That was the plan. But somehow no one did. We all just stood there in the dark watching the flowers fall and break in silence.

Twenty-three years later I named a badger after him and made sure this book was almost, but not quite, 42 chapters long. Because you simply can never equal the greatest, you can only hope to come close. Occasionally.

There are just so many ways to say I love you in this world. Almost as many as there are to say thank you.

Here are several more.

Thank you to my stalwart, wonderful, and patient agent, Howard Morhaim, who stands as ever between me and total chaos.

Thank you to my Patreon supporters, a real life RSPCA who keep my world together practically and spiritually, but particularly Sean Elliott, Matthew Baldwin, Catherine King, Deborah Furchgott, Kim Scheinberg, Wesley Allbrook, Ella Kliger, Jahana, Cynthia Sperry, and the entire Discord moderation team. Solamen vincit omnia.

Thank you to my child Bastian, who has cheerfully put up with so many Mummy has to work todays. At Space Opera’s launch party, I was four months pregnant. Right now, that child is five and a half, writing their own stories about space (and also zebras) right next to me. I have talked a lot about books as babies over the course of my career, and there’s nothing like a real baby to make you realize how much easier books really are. But I made a beautiful rogue AI and when they dance through the living room in a Dracula cape, leprechaun pajamas, rainbow shoes, three of my scarves, and all of my eyeliner singing “Piano Man” into an empty paper-towel roll, I feel pretty okay about most everything ever, except how weird it feels to give birth to your own protagonist.

Thank you to Hadley and Charles Splane-Borja, Sophie Roth, Sue Fitton, Breezie Mackenzie, Melinda Titus, Joanie Divine-Hoar, and Tristram and Fiona for being my village.

Thank you to Emma Puranen, who helped me find, understand, and reasonably populate the Eta Carinae system, a very real bin fire in the sky.

On the topic of very real things, thank you first to Tony Conn, who has spent years working on a documentary about the old Megatron restaurant, for both massively assisting in my research into that beautiful beast and keeping the faith that this book, indeed, would both one day be finished and treat the beast with love. And thank you to Danny Blundell, who created the Megatron in the first place, teaching us all something rather important about doing stupid things with enormous style and ambition, and stubbornly continuing to do them, even when the bulldozers come. The Megatron was that perfect, impossible, brief union of the stupid and the beautiful.

In my finer moments, maybe I am, too.

In Space Opera’s liner notes, I said there can be no truly great pop music without sorrow, and if these books are pop albums, they are extremely committed to proving the axiom.

Space Oddity is dedicated to two people. One you’ve probably heard of. One you almost certainly never have.

Back in 2017, when I was far out in the weeds of Space Opera, trying to do something totally new for me and thoroughly convinced I’d already stuffed it completely, I went to a convention in rural France to win an award for a book I’d written years before, but which had only just come out in France. Much like Decibel and Mira, at the time it felt like I’d done something everyone loved once, and that magical time when I was in the pocket and the sun was shining on my brain was just…over. I was so afraid never be able to pull off anything that big or that good again, and that big good thing? I was twenty-nine when I wrote Fairyland. What if that was the best I would ever manage? Two months of being twenty-nine and then the sun moved in the sky and never lit me up again? I could almost see what Space Opera could become, but I had no confidence I could do anything but fuck it up sixteen different ways, seventeen if I really worked at it.

I was all the way down in an industrial vat of feels when I met Christopher Priest. Someone I admired enormously, but who knew me, as many male writers I admired enormously tend to, only because his girlfriend loved my books. Later that evening, that poor man made the mistake of asking me what I was working on and I almost burst into tears. I went full American on him, pouring out all my frustration and fear and insecurity and how heavy I felt that book on my shoulders, how close I thought it was to being good, but how far.

And Chris Priest, a man who suffered precisely zero fools, took me to church about it all. That beautiful man pep-talked me like no one ever has, true halftime sports movie coach style, full of profanity and passion and conviction that right when you think it’s all rotten is when you’ve almost got it right, and I just needed to say fuck it to everything but the work, and that included both my own insecurity and anyone who didn’t get it. It was so utterly what I needed in that moment. It was so fully what Goguenar Gorecannon became: loving advice wrapped in f-bombs wrapped in deep cynicism that is always a mask for a soul that longs to be an optimist, and is always looking for an excuse to try out hope.

So we drank all weekend about publishing and life and work and pain and joy. And then we sang a lot under the stars. It was one of the best weekends of my life as an artist or a human. And when Christopher fucking Priest tells you to stop fucking about because you can do this, you’d better bloody well go home and get busy.

When he died, a few months before I finished this book, another one I was so afraid of failing (and who knows, maybe I have), another one that seemed like it would never be done and could never be what I dreamed, I thought about that night on top of the library with the geraniums.

Oh no. Not again.

I think we all do a little better, strive a little harder, if there’s someone in our minds we desperately want to impress…and know is impossible to impress. Christopher Priest was that for me. All I want after that weekend in France is to make him proud. Maybe, if I worked my whole life and excelled beyond all dreams of literary merit, to make him smile. I don’t think he ever cared one way or another for geraniums, but when the void behaves this way toward the best of us, a gesture is always called for.

So here I sit, in the dark, in silence, after the prestige, pulling back the curtain to do the forbidden thing and show how the trick was done: without Chris, Decibel Jones never sings a note.

It would be so awfully nice if that was the only story of death I had to tell. But it isn’t. A few weeks before this book finally passed beyond revision, a dear friend of mine named John Peacock died.

I never met him in person, but he was part of my life online for almost twelve years. Whenever I needed a math or a science consult or even just more Bake Off episodes, he was there. When my child was quite small and the world was quite closed for business and terribly dark, I built a rocketship out of carboard and duct tape for my little one to dream in. I am not so good at building things. But John did the Pythagorean two-step for me, and drew me blueprints for various carboard control panels as beautiful as any Da Vinci sketch—you think I’m kidding, but I framed them.

John Peacock taught me how to make things fly. Including, sometimes, my own heart when it was near to finished even trying to walk.

Sentience, in the end, is only a little about being clever. It’s about how we handle each other. How we see one another. How we help. How we share. How we protect and how we love. How we catch someone when they stumble, and whether we can believe we will be caught when we fall.

I don’t know if there will ever be another adventure for the Absolute Zeroes. This may well be goodbye. But both people and books have caught me in mid-air, and I hope, in some small way, as we hurtle screaming through space together, that I and a few of my pages can return the favor.