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Northern Lights with Stephen Palmer
240 Plays2 years ago
We were joined on this episode by Stephen Palmer, author of several genre novels including Memory Seed, Tommy Catkins, The Girl With Two Souls, and many more. His latest novel, Monique Orphan, was published in November 2021 by Infinite Press.
Stephen spoke with us about Philip Pullman's Northern Lights. We discussed the novel's call to action on the part of the protagonist, its rich and complex themes, whether it really succeeds in laying down its atheist credentials, and how Pullman drew the narrative out of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost.
Stephen talks about his own long career, including his latest novel Monique Orphan, the importance for writers of having something to say, and the equal but infuriating importance of luck to a career in writing.
We also stop by at The Judge's Corner to learn about copyright, hear the winning entry from December's 75-word writing challenge, by Cat's Cradle, and listen to some odd voicemails received by the Chronscast inbox.
Links
The Abyssal Awakening Of Mankind in Northern Lights and Paradise Lost
Philip Pullman's Introduction to Paradise Lost
Stephen Palmer's official website
Index
[00:00 - 59:10] Stephen Palmer interview Part 1
[59:15 - 59:44] Voicemail #1
[59:45 - 1:17:45] The Judge's Corner
[1:17:46 - 1:18:12] Voicemail #2
[1:18:13 - 1:19:51] Writing Challenge Winner
[1:19:52 - 1:20:24] Voicemail #3
[1:20:28 - 1:49:05] Stephen Palmer interview Part 2
Recommended
Transcript
Introducing Crohn's Cast and Hosts
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Crohn's Cast, the official podcast of SFF Chronicles, the world's largest SFF community. I'm Dan Jones. And I'm Christopher Bean.
Exploring Northern Lights' Plot and Characters
00:00:27
Speaker
This episode we'll be talking about Philip Pullman's young adult fantasy novel, Northern Lights, first published in 1995 by Scholastic UK. It's a story set in a parallel universe following the journey
00:00:40
Speaker
of Lyra to the Arctic in search of her missing friend Roger and her imprisoned uncle Lord Asriel, who has been conducting experiments with a mysterious substance known as dust. Along the way she encounters the mysterious and dangerous Mrs. Coulter and her vile monkey, travelling people known as Egyptians, armoured polar bears, clans of witches and the charismatic Texan aeronaut Lee Scorsby.
Achievements and Adaptations of Northern Lights
00:01:07
Speaker
Northern Lights is the first novel in his trilogy, His Dark Materials, and it won the 1995 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association.
Stephen Plummer's Literary Contributions
00:01:16
Speaker
It was adapted into the 2007 film, The Golden Compass, and more recently, and more successfully, I would say, into the 2019 BBC TV series, His Dark Materials, starring Daphne Keene, Amir Wilson, Ruth Wilson, and James McAvoy.
00:01:32
Speaker
And to talk about Northern Lights, we're joined by the author Stephen Plummer. Stephen is an extraordinarily prolific genre writer, and since his 1996 debut Memory Seed, published by Orbit Books, he's published 20 genre novels, including Hairy London, The Rat and the Serpent, the Factory Girl trilogy, and Tommy Kappkins.
00:01:51
Speaker
Generally, Stephen's books tackle themes of the environment and social injustice, but that's not always the case. His novel Beautiful Intelligence was a look at AI, artificial intelligence, that's detached from the ideas of spirit and consciousness, while his novel The Autist took a more dystopian perspective with its evocation of people enslaved to algorithms.
00:02:14
Speaker
Stephen's upcoming novels include The Conjurer Girl, Steampunk Trilogy and Cybergon, a near-future novel set in China which looks at the damage social media is doing to children. And on top of all of that, in 2021, Stephen made his non-fiction debut with a book about one of his favourite musical groups. The book's called Tangerine Dream in the 70s, about the hugely influential German electronica pioneers.
Stephen's Insights on Northern Lights
00:02:37
Speaker
And welcome to you, Stephen, and thanks for joining us. Thank you, Steve. Thank you very much for having me. It's a delight to be here, thank you.
00:02:42
Speaker
Right, well, so you elected to talk about Northern Lights for our very first episode, so I'd like to ask you when you first encountered Northern Lights, did you read it when it was first published or some other point?
00:02:59
Speaker
I read it a few years after it was published. At the end of the late 1990s I was living in Devon and I was actually working for Waterstones in Exeter so I started working there in 1998 and that gave me an immediate insight into the hot books at the moment and of course Harry Potter was huge then. I kind of spotted Northern Lights because as his
00:03:29
Speaker
fairly well I think now. I am an atheist and one of the themes of my writing is the place of religion and the reason that we have religion in human societies. So that was an immediate draw for me. I have to admit I did like the cover. I've got my three copies here of the novels.
00:03:52
Speaker
Interestingly, the Scholastic edition, which you mentioned, was actually published in two versions with a more YA-friendly cover and an adult cover, which, as you know, they did for Harry Potter. So I've got the adult cover for Northern Lights, and then for some reason I've got the two YA covers for the other books.
Analysis of Pullman's Trilogy
00:04:13
Speaker
But I did absolutely love them. I guess I must have read them at the very end of the 1990s.
00:04:20
Speaker
I remember when I was working at Waterstones I was in charge of the stockroom for the Exeter branch and the big drawer of 2001 was the amber spyglass. So we had vast, huge quantities of this book coming in under embargo as well. It had to be stored under embargo.
00:04:40
Speaker
So it was all very hush-hush and top secret. So I remember the love that was being given for this book and the big fuss that was being made about it. You don't embargo any old book. The Harry Potter books were embargoed. I seem to remember that the Amber Spyglass, I'm pretty certain it was stored over the weekend actually, but I can't remember now.
00:05:06
Speaker
So yeah, so I read them at the end of the 90s and then The Amber Spyglass in 2001 and for the first two novels I really, really enjoyed them. I thought The Subtle Knife was, even though I love Northern Lights, the thing that really stood out for The Subtle Knife was this depiction of a 12-year-old boy.
00:05:29
Speaker
looking after his ill mother. So in the BBC adaption, this is very sensitively done, you know, mental illness, we can call it that I think, mental health issues that people have. We in this country I feel are very poor at discussing this stuff.
00:05:53
Speaker
I have, in my own life, with people close to me, I have had hideous encounters with issues of mental health. So this is something that's very close to my heart. And it really, really struck me and really moved me how Philip Pullman wrote about this relationship between this young lad and his mother, brilliantly portrayed, as I said, in the BBC adaption, really superbly portrayed.
00:06:17
Speaker
So I loved The Subtle Knife at least as much as Northern Lights, which I think is generally read as a fantastic novel. I have to say, The Amber Spyglass for me was pretty much a fairly big letdown.
00:06:35
Speaker
It struck me that as with J.K. Rowling's fourth novel, the editors didn't dare take their hatchet to it. I forget the title of J.K. Rowling's fourth novel, but it's about two or three times as big as the other ones.
00:06:54
Speaker
And it did strike me, and well, I mean, not just me, loads of people, that, you know, because of her mushrooming fame at that point, that the editors maybe didn't dare take the knife to that book. And that is certainly the case, in my view, for The Amber Spyglass.
00:07:17
Speaker
What would you have streamlined? Much of the middle third. The middle third for me was a highly Miltonesque ramble through various levels of abstract.
00:07:33
Speaker
Could you be referring to by any chance the creatures with the trunks and the ones that move around on wheels and... The mulefa. The mulefa. That's it, the mulefa. It's nothing specific to be honest with you. I've just read your blog, Dan, about the influence of Milton. I read it when you published it, actually, because I was aware that this was relating to me. And I was really struck by what a terrific analysis that is. But I've just read it again.
00:08:05
Speaker
You're right. Pullman did want to not just evoke Paradise Lost, but I think follow it.
Cultural Impact of 90s Series
00:08:15
Speaker
Well, I think it's quite explicit in saying that Northern Lights, well, his dark material is in its entirety. It's a retelling of the same story and that the parallels between the two stories are right there and Paradise Lost itself is a retelling
00:08:32
Speaker
of the genesis story of Adam and Eve and the awakening of mankind. So just for anybody out there who's not aware that Paradise Lost is the epic poem written by John Milton, the English poet, John Milton in the 17th century. I think it was towards the end of his life and maybe around
00:08:51
Speaker
The 1660s, I believe, but that's off of the top of my head. And it tells the story of Satan, who's cast as a romantic or a chaotic hero, really, who's stranded in hell.
00:09:06
Speaker
in pandemonium after being cast out of heaven after the war in heaven with gods and he decides to exact his revenge against god but he decides that god is quite a dangerous and mysterious character which is fair enough and so he decides to not go after god directly but to attack his greatest most beloved creations which is mankind and so the story is that satan removes the scales from the eyes of mankind by tempting eve
00:09:34
Speaker
Into original sin and his dark materials is essentially a retelling of that story which becomes fairly apparent quite quickly into the piece although we don't get the revelation that Lyra.
00:09:49
Speaker
is the the avatar of eve into until some way into the subtle knife there was there was a lot in your first response to unpack there you know you're right that the if we go back a little bit there was this period in the mid 90s where you had this these two huge titan series that came out seemingly out out of nowhere really and they
00:10:15
Speaker
they were sort of culture defining, epoch defining really. Harry Potter has an entire industry built off of it and if you can't say quite the same of his dark materials, you're quite right. There was an enormous amount of love and affection and it's one of those rare books that goes from being genre fiction, a solid
00:10:38
Speaker
plant your flag in the sand, it's a fantasy fiction. It's not just fantasy, it's young adult fiction, and it just crosses over into the mainstream. So I wonder, do you think there's anything to that period in the 90s when Rowling and when Pullman were writing that there was this something in the air that allowed these very, very fantasy styled books to cross over into the mainstream?
00:11:04
Speaker
To be honest, I don't. I think there may have been elements of corporate publishing that fed into that. Since Jane Johnson's fantastic work at HarperCoins with Tolkien in the 1980s, fantasy has snowballed slowly into larger and larger things. My view is that what really tipped it over the edge was actually just
00:11:30
Speaker
Luck serendipity she became very very popular in America with the third book and then That sudden increase in popularity in that country. I mean, you know, they have population five times as large as Britain so
00:11:46
Speaker
Now, I know I am on record on Crohn's as being the vicar of luck, the person who ascribes so much to luck.
Pullman's Narrative and Religious Themes
00:12:01
Speaker
And I've kind of been discussing this recently with friends. It's been pointed out to me that I use the word luck
00:12:10
Speaker
eroniously, sometimes it is serendipity. I do believe very strongly that we authors
00:12:18
Speaker
owe far more to luck than to any other resource. I mean, you have to have something to say. You have to have talent, you have to be able to use words, and you have to have something inside you that needs to come out through words. But given that, the other 99% is luck. And I think J.K. Rowling was lucky. She wrote a terrific first book, which was spotted by somebody and was taken on, and they said to her,
00:12:47
Speaker
you know, oh, yeah, you'll sell 500, but don't give up the day job. So, you know, that was a true reflection of where she was then. I'm not sure about Philip Pullman. He did have a good profile before, and he was well known as a writer of finely crafted books. But again, I'm not entirely convinced that we could pin down why Northern Lights did so well, even in retrospect.
00:13:17
Speaker
Because there are so many strange aspects to why novels become popular, why they sell particular quantities. Well, the one thing you mentioned earlier, which is pertinent, you mentioned you're an atheist and the book deals with
00:13:36
Speaker
Well I think personally I think Paulman is coming at this from the perspective of an atheist and he's making the case that you don't necessarily need God in order to make the Republic of Heaven on Earth and the idea, you're talking about luck as well and I think one of the central
00:13:55
Speaker
themes of the of of not just northern lights but the whole trilogy is to to act is you've got to act and i think it's lyra says it herself towards the end of book three that the whole point of your life is to act and you've got to do so even if you are an author to bring it back to to us and and our craft and what we try to do when we're writing a manuscript you have to do you have to put yourself out there you know you can't stay in the cave you have to be
00:14:22
Speaker
not just inspired to do it but to go and act it out. I think you're absolutely right and of course the corollary of what you've just said is that if you act you must be a moral being. The whole point of morals is that you face choices and you act and you make those choices so I think you're spot on there.
00:14:43
Speaker
I was really struck down by your reference in your blog to the fact that even though Philip Pullman is a famous atheist, actually the book is at least as much about the church. It is a very anti-church book. You could argue actually that it is an anti-God book in some respects, but actually really his main target is the church and the Catholic church in particular.
00:15:08
Speaker
I think that's clear. Yeah, it becomes clear that it's less anti-God as the book goes forward. God is referred to as the authority in the book. It's quite clear. But it's the authority doesn't lie with the authority. The authority lies with those who were working in his name on Earth. So there was definitely an atheism movement bubbling away
00:15:36
Speaker
It was probably still more of a subculture, I think, in the 90s, but as the turn of the millennium.
00:15:42
Speaker
came then there was definitely a spike in ideas surrounding the New Atheism and I think Paulman's book's probably at the vanguard of that, you know, with people like Dawkins and Sam Harris and Hitchens. It's definitely, and they always say the artists get there first and Paulman is getting there, he's not the first because, you know, people like Nietzsche were saying it a long time before that, a hundred years before, but the artists generally get there first and he was there like five or ten years before
00:16:12
Speaker
anybody else in terms of driving this period of new atheism. For what it's worth, and I wrote this down, you may have noticed, I don't think he fully succeeds. I think he actually ends up making the case that you're not actually disproving the existence of anything, you're more making the case for acting, which is the
00:16:40
Speaker
What you would say is the driving force for most religious belief, anyway, is the drive to act and act specifically in the right way. He has rolled back slightly from his position, I think, in the first two books. I think he has moderated his position slightly. It's interesting, isn't it? This is another reason I'm not massively keen on the third book. It's a bit of a damp squib at the end.
00:17:05
Speaker
Now let me tell you a story which may intrigue you. When I worked for Waterstones we had an in-house magazine which was brought out I think once every quarter and Philip Pullman was one of the guests in one of the issues and all us booksellers were asked to send him questions.
00:17:23
Speaker
which he would answer in a big article in one of the Waterstones magazines. So I, as you might imagine, got involved with this and I asked him, I can't remember the exact question now, I've been looking for this issue of this magazine, which is somewhere in my house, but I just cannot find it. But basically my question was, did Philip Pullman think that he was debasing and diminishing his atheist credentials by using the symbols of religion?
00:17:51
Speaker
So he answered this in a very interesting way. He said that that was an intriguing question and that on balance he thought he was not diminishing his atheist credentials by using the symbols of religion.
00:18:05
Speaker
So, interesting answer. I personally don't agree with that. I think he did, by using such clear and obvious symbols, even though he had a target he was going for, I think that always does diminish slightly your case.
Symbolism of Demons in Northern Lights
00:18:25
Speaker
It's kind of similar to this thing on social media, isn't it, where people say, rather than bashing the things you hate, talk about the things you love.
00:18:34
Speaker
I was really struck by that when I first got onto social media about 10 years ago and I very rarely
00:18:41
Speaker
and do sort of bashing people, even Donald Trump. I did write a lot about Donald Trump on my blog, but it was kind of fact to try and understand why he was so extraordinarily dangerous, rather than actually saying, oh, I hate Donald Trump, oh, I hate you Donald Trump, I hate you Donald Trump. But that was a really intriguing answer, I thought, that he thought he hadn't diminished his case by using the symbols of religion.
00:19:06
Speaker
Let's dig into the book itself then, because there are plenty of symbols.
00:19:14
Speaker
scattered all around the book and there are clear parallels. It's going back to Paradise Lost very quickly and Chris has very helpfully noted that it was 1667, so I'm going to give myself a pat on the back for getting 1660s correct. The degree knowledge has not quite left my brain just yet. There are loads of symbols and icons that are scattered all around
00:19:41
Speaker
northern likes. And I think one of the most potent ones is the demons. And Chris, you had a good quote about the demons, didn't you? Yeah, he's said demons are saying something about the business of being human in an interview, which is much more speaks towards the more humanist side of this, linking with the atheist stuff, rather than talking about the religious stuff we've just been talking about. And I wonder,
00:20:09
Speaker
how much when Stephen's just said you know he seems to have backtracked over the past few years I wonder how much of that is down to the backlash because I know everything stays on the internet forever so all those interviews you know when you've been doing research for this episode reading that stuff there was a lot of bashing going on a lot of the stuff especially I mean the church is very knee-jerk reaction to any kind of criticism anyway and
00:20:35
Speaker
I wonder maybe, if that is why, when you were at Waterstones, that he might have changed somewhat now.
00:20:49
Speaker
I think so, yes. If he has backtracked, it is only a little. I think what he's done is he has sophisticated and enhanced his argument. I don't think his actual moral stance or his ethical stance has changed one iota.
00:21:08
Speaker
I think probably what's happened is that he has had an extraordinary level of success and that changes you. Even a man as comparatively advanced in years as Philip Pullman when he had his success, it does change you. And he will have had to have
00:21:26
Speaker
worked out on the fly how to respond to this extraordinary level of success of having vast numbers of people slug him off for things that he said.
00:21:44
Speaker
That's part of the course, isn't it? Whenever you become that level of big, that does become part of the course. But he's on record as also being a very staunch champion of freedom of speech, as you would expect most writers to be, I think.
00:22:00
Speaker
And that also brings him in line with his predecessor, John Milton, who also wrote a defence of free speech called Ariapagitica, which was railing against government censorship of the day. So, you know, in itself shows that stuff doesn't really change, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. So I think he would, we can't speak for Philip Pullman here, obviously, we can't put words in his mouth, we're simply discussing his works. But I would imagine that he would be
00:22:30
Speaker
staunchly defensive of anybody to say whatever they like because, well, that's the position that he's taken. And one of the ironies is that later, a few years after the Amber Spyglass was published, he ended up being defended.
00:22:42
Speaker
and applauded by the Archbishop of Canterbury. That's right, yes. And he's now, well, in recent times, he's shot to fame all over again with the BBC's the marvellous BBC adaptation of the Star Materials, which really is fabulous, maybe we can talk about that. But he's sort of shot to fame all over again and his star is shining brightly. And that means that, again, he's been getting brickbats over comments that he made on Twitter a little while ago.
00:23:12
Speaker
It doesn't really change, but I think a lot of people do mellow as they advance in years. But yeah, if we go back to the demons, because they are... Let's get really into the weeds of the book, really. That's what I would like to do, is maybe draw out some of the tools and the techniques that Pullman is using that makes this a particularly good book.
00:23:37
Speaker
There are so many things. I mean, I would like to talk about the armored bears and what they represent and how he uses them. But the demons are particularly clever as they are sort of a reflection of the human soul that's a guide and also a protector and a conversation point as well. So I wanted to get your opinion on the idea of the demons.
00:24:04
Speaker
What's the meaning behind them? How far do they go? Yeah, I have a very specific attitude to this because of my own particular beliefs and work. Philip Pullman is on record as having said that one of the reasons he invented
00:24:24
Speaker
Lyra's Demon in the first place is that when you start a novel, if it's just one character doing something or discovering something or going on a journey, that character has nobody to bounce ideas off, there's no conversation, there's no dialogue. So there was an interview somewhere quite early on, I think, where he said that actually one of the inspirations for Lyra's Demon was to give Lyra someone to talk to
00:24:50
Speaker
when she was hiding in the wine cabinet or wherever it is she hides, and all the subsequent adventures. Now obviously he did sophisticated that enormously afterwards. The problem I have with that, that actually, when I wrote my question to Philip Pullman for the Waterstones magazine, that was actually what I had in mind, because I have a very particular, one might even say, vehement attitude to the concept of spirit or soul, as anybody who's read my books will know.
00:25:18
Speaker
I think this is a particularly, in my view, this is humanity's oldest idea. I think this idea goes back 100,000 years, if not longer, to the very, very start of human life where we tell stories and we imagine stories and we imagine ourselves in stories. It's an incredibly ancient idea, I think, and this is why this idea has got extraordinary inertia and such very, very deep roots in our cultures.
00:25:49
Speaker
I really feel that in use, even though the demons are a lovely idea, and I love the idea that they are mutable until puberty. That's a terrific idea. It says so much about what Philip Bowman wanted to do about
00:26:06
Speaker
the attitude of the Catholic Church in particular to sex and sexual relations. It just says it all, it's a beautiful idea. But it's also very sophisticated psychologically as well. Even if you take away the religious element, it's
00:26:23
Speaker
The fact that you are completely malleable and you have infinite potential when you're younger, you could be anything that you absolutely want to be. Yes. As you grow, those options narrow and you have to choose. So it's going back to the idea of choice and acting as well. You have to choose to be something, to be something.
00:26:44
Speaker
Otherwise, you're nothing. Yes, no, I agree. I think it I think you're correct. I mean, obviously, Pullman's idea is that there is a very specific change when you hit puberty, which has a very specific relations relationship to how the Catholic Church in particular sees this stuff. But I do agree. My beef really is only a very personal beef. It's my
00:27:03
Speaker
you know, one of the things I enjoy writing about is why do we have this extraordinary idea that we have this immaterial spirit or soul inside us? It's an absolutely ridiculous idea if you look at it from certain perspectives. But it was an absolutely essential idea, in my view, in very, very early human societies, Neanderthal societies possibly. I read a lot about the Neanderthal
00:27:26
Speaker
species. Philip Pullman, Northern Lights, let's just stick with that. It doesn't just exist in the present day. Well, it does, but there are constant references to the antiquity of the dawning of the human age.
00:27:50
Speaker
One of the major themes is the tripanning, which is the drilling of the human skulls to let the angels in an ancient custom that sounds brutal. It sounds like a torture session, something you would do to torture somebody, but actually it was a great honor.
00:28:05
Speaker
bestowed upon the ancient shamans to let the angels in or let the dust in, as they say in Lyra's world. It's an extremely old idea and it won't go away. I think the demons, when I was reading it, the demons to me, they evoke
00:28:25
Speaker
Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio. The idea of Jiminy Cricket is great because he's a bug and your conscience bugs you. It's something that's always bugging you. And the demon is the same thing. I like that. I didn't realise that Pam
00:28:43
Speaker
is essentially just somebody from ira to talk to i think that was it wasn't the only idea but he's on record as saying that it was something that occurred to him as he was starting out writing that that lara needs someone to talk to you because you know for dialogue purposes and that's where the idea came from and there were other aspects that came in straight away.
00:29:03
Speaker
So yes that's a really good example of something as well as what an architect or an engineer would say is form following function something there that is really serving the writing itself and serving the idea of propelling.
00:29:22
Speaker
the novel forwards and making it engaging, so giving Lyra somebody to talk to. But out of that, he's stretched and pulled all of these very deep strands of meaning and possibility, which really become the roots of the book itself.
00:29:42
Speaker
It's very clever. Yes, it is. And of course, it's something that we, anybody who's writing, to bring it back to Crohn's, there are so many writers that you're thinking about the nuts and bolts of your writing and how to make it work, but then they don't have to be just nuts and bolts. They can turn into and they can evolve into something so much more, which is exactly what the demon itself does. It evolves and it becomes something more than it starts out as. Yes, yeah.
00:30:10
Speaker
And of course, there's so much fun to be had with designing demons that say things about your characters that otherwise you may not want to say. I mean, obviously the Golden Monkey is perfect for Mrs. Coulter. It's a lovely metaphor for her, you know, quite extreme character.
00:30:29
Speaker
That's an interesting thing actually. What do you feel about how they dealt with Mrs Coulter and her psychology in the BBC TV adaptions? Because there are only, as I recall, there are only two instances
00:30:43
Speaker
where the reasons why Mrs Coulter is so extreme are explored. One I think is in the abscission vaults, and one it is with Lee Scorsby. I just felt that that wasn't enough. For all that Ruth Wilson's portrayal is stunning, I would have liked just a little bit more of her cat so we know why she is quite so extreme.
Mrs. Coulter's Complex Character
00:31:07
Speaker
How do you feel about that? Well, in the BBC adaptation, I thought it was
00:31:13
Speaker
It was reasonably clear, especially in the second series, when Sir Charles Latrim, which is one of the characters from Lyra's own world, but who has established a doorway to our world,
00:31:29
Speaker
has set up a business in Oxford selling antiquities and has amassed a small fortune and bought himself a nice end of terrace house. I think he's even a detached house. He's clearly doing very well for himself and she misses call to visit him and becomes extremely regretful, remorseful as to what might have been if she had lived in a world where
00:31:57
Speaker
as a woman, she could have become an academic. This is after she meets Dr. Mary Malone, and she's staggered at how free she is. And it's interesting, just to go off topic from Mrs. Coulter for a second, because she's an extraordinary character for a few different reasons. She's as complex as Lord Asriel is, and we can go to Lord Asriel as well.
00:32:22
Speaker
Paulman talks about the Catholic Church in Northern Lights and subsequent books, and then he makes a very explicit point that in our world, which is where the Catholic Church is, we have these huge degrees of freedoms which are not permitted to
00:32:41
Speaker
The characters, such as Mrs. Coulter, in the other world, in Lyra's world, the Magisterium, haven't undergone that excision of church and state. So the Magisterium is the state, and in our world, that's not the case. And so that leads to enlightenment thinking, and that leads to
00:33:00
Speaker
expansion of women's rights and all of those different things which you don't need to list here but it's taken a said that once the church is taken it has its hand taken off the tiller then you have all of these different possibilities for expansion and knowledge and learning and mrs. Coulter I think is quite staggered.
00:33:21
Speaker
that that wasn't open to her despite her clear and obvious talents. And there's a lovely description of Mrs. Coulter in the book. Paulman describes her as smelling of metal. And when she gets angry, she gets very angry at Lyra at one point. And at that point, she smells of hot metal, which to me is the smell of industry. It's the domain of men.
00:33:48
Speaker
That's the point with Mrs. Coulter. She's very beautiful. She's described as staggeringly beautiful in many cases. She's very refined. She dresses well. She's ultra feminine on the surface level. But below that, she is completely operational in the world of men. And that's out of necessity. And it makes her very complex because she, as we go through the trilogy,
00:34:17
Speaker
We find out that she does love Lyra, even though she is extraordinarily cruel to Lyra, especially in the first book. She does love Lyra, but it's been suppressed. So in a Freudian sense, there's a dichotomy going on in Mrs. Coulter, where she is the protective mother.
00:34:38
Speaker
but that's been corrupted and she becomes what's called the devouring mother, which is where the protection has gone haywire, the protective element of the feminine, of the motherhood has gone haywire and is now some sort of hyper overextended version of itself. And that happens in the amber spyglass when she takes Lyra away. And what does she do with her? She puts her in a cave and gives her some sort of liquid that keeps her asleep.
00:35:04
Speaker
And that's the Sleeping Beauty story. So it's what happens when you're overbearingly protective of your children and you don't let them engage with the world in sort of love gone mad. And that's the negative element of the feminine, which you see in Sleeping Beauty. And she's woken up by Will the Prince eventually, and they go off and have the rest of their adventure. But she is capable of
00:35:29
Speaker
Eventually, she's capable of great love for Lyra, but it's suppressed because it has to be. Because to make the best use of her gifts, she has to take the only option that's available to her, which is to work with the Magisterium. And mostly, it's on their terms. One of the interesting things about the BBC adaption was that they dared to show her being ambivalent about motherhood.
00:35:55
Speaker
That is a very taboo thing in any Western religious society which is based upon. Well, is it? Because I think it's a very, very ancient theme in a lot of storytelling. It's there in Sleeping Beauty. It's there in the story of Snow White.
00:36:12
Speaker
It runs, it's a very old idea. It's counterbalanced in Northern Lights with the idea of the witches, who are the extremely positive element of the feminine. So it's balanced very well, and this is called
00:36:28
Speaker
She is, yeah, she is ambivalent and sometimes she's downright malevolent as well. So she's sort of a corruption of the feminine figure, you could say. She is a masterful character because she's so complex. There's still a great deal of love in there, but it's squashed down. Having her represented as ambivalent is still daring, especially these days, you know, like Stephen says,
00:36:56
Speaker
it was daring. And I think these days, it's becoming normalised. There's not this, you know, betrayal of sisterhood by not having a family or not being a parent if you're particularly if you're a woman, if you can carry on, you don't. It's a big
00:37:10
Speaker
It's a big issue and these days it's becoming a lot more to do with choice or choice rather is being allowed in terms of social mores and what the cultural capital of different countries are. And if you look at what's going on in America at the moment with respect to women controlling their bodies, you can't divorce a woman's child bearing ability from
00:37:36
Speaker
from whenever there's a woman involved in a story, that is part of her character. It's implicit. And I think if you play with that archetype and that stereotype, you can come up with something like this ambivalence, which is going to make certain people think that
00:37:58
Speaker
There's an element of not treachery to the sisterhood, but something that was expected that is not being upheld. I think most people, even in Britain today, which is a comparatively liberal country, I think most people today are still very, very uncomfortable with the idea of women not having children and being ambivalent about motherhood.
00:38:18
Speaker
And that's really interesting that the BBC chose to portray that in a couple of fairly crucial scenes in the first series. But yeah. That's critical to her character. And that, I mean, going back to writing, I mean, there's a good point about writing great characters is to make them complex. I mean, Mrs. Coulter may be a lot of things, but she's not one note. There's a lot of complexity to her. She could go either way. And in some ways, you're almost kind of, even though she's a villain,
00:38:49
Speaker
in Northern Lights. You're kind of rooting for her as well because you want to see what she's up to. It's not here. You're kind of on her side because she's such an anomaly in this hyper
00:39:05
Speaker
male-driven world which is still controlled by the Magisterium. So I think it's an instructive character and again she's counterbalanced by Azrael who has again elements of the positive masculine in his desire to protect Lyra and even more actually more pertinently the positive masculine
Character Analysis: Asriel and Lyra
00:39:29
Speaker
Element to go off and explore new lands and get new information and expand knowledge. That's all the positive masculine. But again, it's it over spills and it corrupts itself and he becomes tyrant, which is the negative masculine. He's unbearably cruel.
00:39:47
Speaker
and he's wicked and he's violent as well. I mean, with the way he views Roger Parslow when Roger finally turns up at the Arctic Station, he sees him like a wolf. That's how he views him, which is entirely right. Yeah, that's brilliantly done in the BBC adaption. It was a very moving section. It was because Lyra turns up
00:40:12
Speaker
And immediately his first thought is, no, no, no, this isn't right because he wants to use a child and sever the child from the demon to create the energy to open a rift in the sky and a portal to another world. And so he's despairing because he doesn't want to kill his own daughter. And then Roger walks in and his eyes change and it becomes like the wolf seeing the lamb who has wandered into his territory.
00:40:41
Speaker
Again, very complex character, and still, despite doing wicked things, you're kind of rooting for him as well, because again, he's sort of on the cusp of knowledge and thinking of what's possible and what's out there, and you kind of want him to succeed in that and see what he's up to. Yes, because he clearly has a fantastic plan.
00:41:03
Speaker
and of course that is a major plot driver, knowing that he's on the verge of some extraordinary discovery. That's told to the reader many times over Sheila, so that's a great plot to be through. We mentioned the witches a little bit earlier, Seraphine, Pecula and the tribal
00:41:26
Speaker
society that they have up in the Arctic North. One of the things that they talk about quite explicitly is the prophecy that surrounds Lyra. That's interesting in itself because it quite clearly marks Lyra out as one of the
00:41:44
Speaker
very typical chosen one characters that you see a lot of and it'll be interesting to sort of take that apart and what makes a chosen one character and why they're so popular. But I'll read a direct quote from Northern Lights and this is from Serafina Pekula.
00:41:59
Speaker
There is a curious prophecy about this child. She's destined to bring about the end of destiny, but she must do so without knowing what she is doing, as if it were her nature and not her destiny to do so. If she's told what she must do, all will fail. Death will sweep through all the worlds. It will be the triumph of despair forever." What do you make of that, Stephen?
00:42:23
Speaker
It's a very profound and intriguing thing. Destiny, in my view, is what I call a narcissistic concept.
00:42:35
Speaker
So my thoughts about narcissism, I use it in the most general sense possible, which essentially is a word which describes not just selfishness, but the way people too often can look at the world through their own lenses, their own desires, their own language, their own beliefs. Eric From, one of my heroes, was a particularly brilliant writer about narcissism.
00:43:05
Speaker
In my view, destiny is a narcissistic concept. It basically puts an individual at the centre of the world when they have no right to be at the centre of the world, because none of us are at the centre of the world, and it artificially puts them in the centre of the world and says, the world is relevant to you, and the world defers to you, when in fact the reverse is true. We defer to the world. So I think Pullman has hit upon something
00:43:30
Speaker
very, very profound here, that it is part of human moral growth. In fact, religions, the heart of many religions is this moral growth. This isn't a humanistic idea at all. This is a human idea that some religions have taken on board, including Christianity.
00:43:50
Speaker
it's a very, very intriguing double bluff. So she's destined to bring about the end of destiny. Now to me that says Lyra's story and her, what do you call it? Her
00:44:10
Speaker
uh expedient path is that she brings back the end of this concept where people put themselves in the center of the world and actually relate to the world in a way which allows the world to show its truth to them at the moment i really like that yeah many human beings at the moment i think put their truth before the world
00:44:32
Speaker
And I think that the world will defer to that. I think it should be all the way around. And I think that should be part of what religious thought. Here's a really cool thing that I heard not long ago. Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget.
00:44:49
Speaker
He wrote that the final stage of adolescent development was the messianic stage, the messianic complex, and it occurs in mid to late adolescence. So not quite where Lyra is, but she's knocking on the door of it. She is. And it's exactly that. It's a profound drive, a development in your character that
00:45:18
Speaker
pushes you and makes you feel like you're the one who's going to change the world, you're the one who's going to make a real difference in whatever field it is that you're interested in and he earmarked this out, it's a very specific adolescent phase but then you go out and you act this out and the world slaps you down because that's reality.
00:45:50
Speaker
Let's think about Philip Pullman and why he might have done this. Philip Pullman was a teacher. So Philip Pullman in his day job, as it were,
00:46:01
Speaker
understands that the teenage years of children and adolescents are an intensely egotistical phase of life. He understood that. It's very interesting when he talks about how
00:46:21
Speaker
Because he had taught so many lessons to so many children of that rough age group, he said that he saw a Lyra in every single class he taught. There's always a girl or a character, a boy, a girl character who has that quality of slightly vituperativeness, independence, you know, cheek, brilliance, because Lyra is brilliant as well.
00:46:47
Speaker
cheeky, a liar, as you said, and quite blase as well, and doesn't understand her place in the world. He sort of thinks she does, but of course, yeah, she doesn't. Yeah. And that comes from her having complete and utter agency over herself, which funnily enough, she doesn't. Yeah. But those kids in your class, because what you're talking about, Philip Pullman saying, I can relate to that. You know, I always have kids in my, not in every class, but there is always one,
00:47:16
Speaker
across a cohort, at least, that has that nouse and the gumption and you really, there is some different shine about them. Yeah. I think Philip Pullman spotted that and he's on record as saying that that was definitely something that fed into Lyra's character. Yeah. But those of us who are either parents or who have worked with children, young adults, as I do in my day job,
00:47:41
Speaker
We know that that age is an intensely egotistical phase of life. And of course, that is narcissism, writ clear. Well, Lyra is a great character. She's a great character for many reasons. And the fact that she thinks she's, if not perfect, she's got a pretty high opinion of herself. Her name is in the Amber Spy class when she's talking to the Harpy.
00:48:08
Speaker
Pullman makes it clear that they're not quite sure whether the harpy is saying lyra, lyra, or lyre, lyre, is a crossing. You're not quite sure which one it is.
00:48:20
Speaker
But she's caught out by her lies a couple of times, once with the harpy, but the other time when she's being interrogated in Mary Malone's office in The Subtle Knife. So she's definitely fallible and she's brought low by her own hubris a couple of times. So I wonder what it is about her that makes her such a great protagonist from a young adult perspective.
00:48:47
Speaker
I think a lot of it is that cheek. It's that desire to push boundaries, which almost every single young person has experienced that sense of not just actually pushing boundaries, but wanting to push boundaries. I think Lyra is a brilliant example of that. But of course, Lyra has a much larger canvas than most ordinary teenagers. If you're at school,
00:49:13
Speaker
That is a comparatively small canvas to push boundaries on with teachers or whoever it might be. Lyra has this extraordinary expanse of world. I mean, she does travel from Britain to Svalbard. How many teenagers have done that? So she does have a much larger canvas upon which to work. I think she's a great character. She's wonderful, yeah. And it boils down to what you said about teenagers or young people, children,
00:49:42
Speaker
want to stick out those cheeky ones and it just boils down she's charismatic, like she's been written as a charismatic character. He has charisma, good point. Yeah and I think when a child, there are two ways it can go, a child can be rude or cheeky to you, sorry a child can be cheeky to you, there's a thin line between rudeness and charisma and I think that's what he's done really well with Lyra. I agree, yes. It's interesting that even though she has
00:50:10
Speaker
infinite possibility and the canvas on which she paints herself onto the world is extraordinarily vast, like you said from Oxford to Svalbard and then into other worlds.
00:50:23
Speaker
And she is, I mean, she does satisfy this narcissism. What did you call it? A narcissistic complex, was it? Well, I have to be careful here. I use the word narcissism in a very particular way, in the most general way possible. Narcissism has various meanings in various contexts. It can be a clinically used word. Clinical psychologists will use that word in a very specific setting. Well, I think in a clinical sense, narcissism implies a certain psychopathology.
00:50:53
Speaker
I think we're talking about it more in the mythical sense. Much more general, which is the sense that I use it, and as I said, one of my great teachers, as it were, Eric Fromm, who was the great writer about Nazism, I think, in the 20th century, used it in that very general sense.
00:51:11
Speaker
I use it actually in a more general sense, even than Eric Fromm in my work, because I'm interested in the relationship between the human condition of which narcissism is one aspect and consciousness. I was just concerned that Eric Fromm had no understanding because he was born too early of consciousness. We've only in the last 50 years had a workable theory of human consciousness and he wasn't actually aware of that. So in some of my work, I try and link those two things together.
00:51:43
Speaker
That's quite interesting about mentioning consciousness because as soon as Lyra fulfils her destiny, which essentially is the awakening of her own adult consciousness, she is slapped down by reality. It's right at the end of the amber spyglass. She's forced to separate from will, which is reality kicking in and saying,
00:52:10
Speaker
Sorry, even though you did have this messianic arc that has delivered the world from tyranny and restored what was lost and freed individuals from the chain of the Magisterium, there's still a natural order of things to which she is subservient and she has to take a proper place in the world which is away from will.
00:52:39
Speaker
But of course, Lyra has the option of grief. Lyra has because she's human, she has the option of grieving. And that is her human way of getting over what the world has done to her. Because, you know, just through, you know, the world doing what the world does, at least she has the option of grief, which will which means that she will be okay. And that is how we cope with this stuff. We have that option as well.
00:53:06
Speaker
And the option to carry on. Which your grief is obviously one of the parts, isn't it? It enables you to process it and then take the next steps into wherever your life takes you.
Lyra's Journey Beyond the Trilogy
00:53:21
Speaker
Yeah, and Lyra will do that and she will have a life.
00:53:25
Speaker
I haven't read the other books. I haven't read the books he's written recently, so I don't know if that arc is followed. The Book of Dust, you're referring to. Yes, I haven't read those, so I don't know. No, neither have I. It's on my reading list. My wife Joe has read the first one, certainly, and she's halfway through the second one, and she says they're pretty good. The first one she said was that La Belle Sauvage was incredibly good, she said.
00:53:52
Speaker
We'll get onto that in the future, maybe, let's see. Yes, yes, definitely. Can I just ask, go back a bit, sorry, I meant to, I'm going to ask this before, if you think this is a logic issue rather than a thematic symbol, or symbolic issue, which is, the further the demon becomes from Lyra, the further Pan gets from Lyra, the more traumatic and painful it is.
00:54:21
Speaker
Is that, what is the point of that other than, okay, if we're separating the demon with this contraption and how is, how, how does that add stakes? What are the stakes of that? If the, you know, if a demon could always be distant from the host, if you, for want of a better phrase.
00:54:44
Speaker
Yeah, I never worked that out. I did note that obviously Mrs. Coulter has a different relationship with her demon than most human beings. And that obviously is a metaphor for her character. But to be honest with you, I feel the same as you. I feel slightly perplexed by that. Could it be fear? So the idea of the separation is more a primal fear of being removed from your spirit. And that's what makes it
00:55:12
Speaker
that the pain is almost psychosomatic. Well, I mean, this is called to a separator where she separates herself from the monkey. It's an it's an act of self control. And she actually uses those words to Charles Latrim said it's a matter of self control. Don't you have any self control? Or have you never met a woman with any self control? That's what it's like. It may be a case of
00:55:38
Speaker
fear and discipline. The fear of the consequences of being separated from your demon is so great that they drive the physiological symptoms that people like Lyra experience. I was just going to say, I think Pullman may be tapping into what is basically a universal human belief that if you believe in a soul, if it is separated from your body, that is a bad thing.
00:56:08
Speaker
I mean, there are any number of Greek myths and any other myths about that topic, so maybe he's tapping into that. What that actually means psychologically, I have to admit, I don't know, because my attitude to spirits and souls is so radically different to most other peoples. What were you saying, Chris? I think, yeah, I understand what you're saying, Dan, in terms of where it may come from, in terms of in-world logic, in-world characters.
00:56:37
Speaker
but the logic of it, at writing it, where did the idea come from? Where did Philip Pullman decide, okay, it's going to bring in this massive trauma if they're separated too far and it's going to cause so many problems because it's not. I don't know if I'm misremembering or if I've gotten things, but I'm trying to think of the pertinence of that other than maybe
00:57:00
Speaker
to sort of give more weight to the separation and also just the importance of a demon to a human being. But I'm with you, I was a bit baffled by that, yeah. Well, it could be that as you, well, by awakening yourself fully to the possibility of the world and the possibilities are potentially malevolent as well as being potentially
00:57:25
Speaker
beneficial and positive, then you have a degree of understanding that, I suppose, makes your soul at peace, which is a highly religious thing, really. It's almost like an idea of Zen in Buddhism, isn't it? It's like a state of enlightenment. It's not presented that way when Mrs. Coulter separates herself from the Golden Monkey, not at all. And yet that is with Lyra and Will.
00:57:54
Speaker
and they have a sense of being at one with the world or at peace with the world and so they're quite happy to let their demons roam free. Maybe it's to do with love, not just sexual maturity but real love because they're dangerously in love by the end of the third book to the extent that it's
00:58:24
Speaker
incredibly traumatic, the final act of the book. So maybe it's something to do with that. I mean, I don't know. I think it's a great question and I'm feeling for the answer. It's interesting that all three of us are baffled by that. I'm wondering if that says that Philip Coleman himself may not... Well, it certainly is. Okay, let's just go with the
00:58:48
Speaker
you know, Occam's razor is a plot device. And it works well. Maybe yes, maybe that's the authorial stamp. Yes. The soul is a nebulous thing anyway. So yeah, exactly. We have to, you know, don't don't try and pin it down. It's not gonna work. Right, let's take a break there. We'll join back with Steven in a few minutes.
00:59:18
Speaker
Hello, SSF Chronicles. I was wondering if you'd give me a call back. Seven-two of the lads have been adopted by aliens, and Tom is after breaking one of those, you know, the big roundy things with the lights. Anyway, the aliens are pure pissed off about it. It wasn't me. You broke it. He's right. Don't let Tom. It was you who broke it. Look, it doesn't matter who broke it. The aliens aren't going to care which one of us it was. Anyway, could you give me a call back when you get a chance?
00:59:47
Speaker
Now we're going to venture down to the judge's corner. Now anyone who's been on cross will probably have come across the judge who roams the boards looking for infringements and erroneous uses of gerunds. In fact there's a rumor going around that she keeps a black book containing the names of all such miscreants written in their own blood.
01:00:14
Speaker
probably got my own chapter. Anyway, her real name isn't actually the judge, her name's Damaris Brown, but she is a real legal professional and she'll be dropping in to provide us writers and listeners with some crumbs from the vast expanses of knowledge that she's acquired over her career. She's actually a former solicitor who's specialised in matrimonial and general litigation work
01:00:38
Speaker
including some advocacy in local magistrates and county courts, that she's also a writer.
01:00:44
Speaker
and managed to hook an agent with her first science fiction novel, which I've never seen, so it must be lost in her trunk under the bed somewhere. But alas, she lost the agent before he managed to sell any of the series. But since then, she's actually published numerous short stories, notably with Craxton Online Magazine, where she's had three long serials published.
01:01:09
Speaker
and where she's recently been taken on as a submissions editor so if you are submitting something into cracks in the magazine which you can find details about oncrons then the chances are that you will have to come up before the judge.
01:01:24
Speaker
She's also contributed to several short story anthologies and her story The Colour of Silence from the 2019 Anthology Distaff was long listed in the British Science Fiction Association Awards. This month the judge will be talking about something all authors should know about, including me. Copyright.
01:01:46
Speaker
Hi, I thought I'd start with copyright because this is an issue that worries a lot of newcomers to writing, but I recently realised that not even experienced writers always have a full grasp of its ramifications, mentioning no names, but
01:02:02
Speaker
Hi Dan! Anyway, first, a general legal caveat. I'll be talking in generalities, but there are differences in detail between legal systems and countries. If, for whatever reason, you need to take matters further, always check with a lawyer practicing in your own locality.
01:02:24
Speaker
So copyright. This is a form of intellectual property providing economic and moral rights over the use of original artistic work.
01:02:35
Speaker
Basically, that covers anything that's written, no matter how unartistic we might actually think it. So if you were following the court case between the Duchess of Sussex and the male newspapers over the letter that she wrote to her father, you'll know that actually part of her case concerned copyright because she did not give consent to the newspapers to reproduce it. And that is actually one of the basic
01:03:04
Speaker
rights under copyright, the right to govern who may reproduce or quote your work. Another, for instance, is who has the right to adapt it for performance, so a short story being recorded by someone, for instance. This is important to writers in two ways. First, in the rights that we have over our own work, some of which we may give away or sell,
01:03:34
Speaker
Secondly, how in our own writing we may use work that other people have created. Anyway, copyright is inherent. There's no need for us to do anything. It's there automatically as soon as we put pen to paper or we start typing. And that's the case in all the countries which are signatories to the Berne Convention.
01:03:59
Speaker
which includes the Americas and most of Europe and Australasia. There are some commercial organizations that encourage writers to believe they have to register their work to get copyright protection. Don't listen to them. It's not needed.
01:04:18
Speaker
do make sure you can prove that you wrote the work and when you wrote it. In times gone by that was obviously a little more difficult than today and what usually happened was that people would parcel up their manuscript once it was finished and send it to themselves and there it would stay still in its envelope with the date of postage firmly stamped on it and it would be left unopened until it was needed.
01:04:46
Speaker
Nowadays, obviously, we're always backing up our work on hard drives or memory sticks. So that will show the progress of your work. Because even if somebody tried to argue that they had got in before you and written the whole thing,
01:05:06
Speaker
nobody is going to be able to show the writing of that work all the way through so do keep various of your drafts as you're going and when you've got to the end don't delete them or keep some of them obviously keep them on memory sticks and hard drives but also think about emailing them to yourself or to a friend who can keep them so you've got the proof there
01:05:30
Speaker
I've said you don't need to register your work, but actually if you're in the US, it is advantageous to register your copyright with the US Copyright Office, which is part of the Library of Congress. It doesn't prove your ownership of copyright, though it acts as evidence, but it does allow for enforcement of your rights because legal actions for works of US origin
01:05:55
Speaker
cannot be started in US courts without it, and it also allows courts to award certain costs and compensation that otherwise wouldn't be available. Anyway, you've got your copyright, you can prove you wrote your story, you've registered with USCO if you're American, so now you're safe from anyone pinching your work.
01:06:17
Speaker
Well, no, sorry. The only sure way to prevent your copyright being infringed is never to let your work be seen by anyone. And obviously that's self-defeating. But having a right and being able to enforce it are two very different things.
01:06:37
Speaker
You've got to find out who's pinched your work. You've got to sue them. You've got the costs of suing them. You've got the costs of perhaps listening to their defence and dealing with it. Then, even worse, the costs of trying to get money out of them. And if they're overseas, everything's just doubled in cost. Frankly, for most writers, the litigation game won't be worth the candle. Nonetheless,
01:07:05
Speaker
If you're publishing, do add the copyright symbol, that's the little c in a circle, followed by your name and the year in the publishing page at the beginning of your book.
01:07:16
Speaker
in and of itself it's no protection, but it does mean that if somebody does infringe your copyright and you do get hold of them they can't argue that it was done in all innocence and ignorance, which actually might impact on the compensation awarded to you. So it's worth putting in there.
01:07:38
Speaker
Also, using the symbol makes it clear who should be contacted if anyone wants to quote your work. And that is the second relevance that copyright has for us as writers, how it might interfere with us using work that someone else has written, because we want to add meaning or significance to our work or just take a bit of reflected glory from quoting it.
01:08:04
Speaker
There's always been a tension between proprietary rights, on the one hand, and the public interest in allowing creativity to flourish on the other. And the Berne Convention allows for a right to quote, provided that a, the quote is of reasonable length,
01:08:24
Speaker
but reasonable is going to vary from case to case as well as country to country. And B, the copyrighted extract is clearly acknowledged as such and fully referenced.
01:08:36
Speaker
So if you want to use part of a poem which hasn't yet passed into the public domain, you should be fine if it's very short extract, a line or two, say. But you must refer to the poet or the copyright holder, if that person's different, in the publishing details page at the beginning of your book, or perhaps in the acknowledgments page, so long as you get out there that you are quoting someone else and giving the full details.
01:09:08
Speaker
In the UK and some Commonwealth countries this right to quote is effectively incorporated into the legal concept of fair dealing and the US has a similar concept of fair use. But again there are differences between the rules in the different countries but very broadly
01:09:27
Speaker
the courts are always going to look at how much is quoted and for what purpose and there are often exemptions for the purposes of parody, pastiche or satire so if you're taking somebody off you should be fine for that.
01:09:45
Speaker
but exactly how much can you quote? As far as I'm aware there's been a case law setting up precise limits because every case is going to vary but a UK court will take into account whether the market for the original work is affected i.e. would the copyright owner lose income because you've quoted a line or two which you know
01:10:07
Speaker
isn't going to be the case if it's only a line or two, but obviously if you're quoting huge chunks of it, that's a different matter.
01:10:16
Speaker
Also, the court will take into account whether the amount quoted is appropriate and not substantial, but that substantial is defined by quality as well as quantity. A few short but juicy extracts from a long letter may well be in breach if those extracts have a considerable impact on other people, and again with reference to the Duchess of Sussex's case,
01:10:43
Speaker
The male newspapers actually quoted a lot from her letter but even if they'd restricted themselves to just one or two quotes they probably would still have been liable for breach of copyright because of the impact on her and her family.
01:11:00
Speaker
So there are two areas to watch. So, as I've said, the letters, the copyright remains with the author, i.e. the Duchess of Sussex, in the case we've been talking about, even though the letter itself is possessed by someone else and you can read it because they've given it to you.
01:11:20
Speaker
The big area though, if you're thinking of quoting song lyrics, think again. Logically, there's no difference between quoting from a poem and quoting from a song, but by and large poets aren't litigious, but music publishers are. If you want to avoid any chance of getting a threatening letter, don't use any lyric unless it's in the public domain. Paraphrase or write your own songs.
01:11:49
Speaker
If you feel it's important to quote a few words, perhaps as much as a line, well, it's your risk if you want to take it. If you want to quote more than a line of a lyric or more than a reasonable amount of a poem or any other work, you will need consent. And as far as music publishers are concerned, that consent will come at a price.
01:12:12
Speaker
Whether a work is in the public domain depends on what is being protected and where the copyright is claimed. In the UK, written work is protected for 70 years from the author's death, which is why Jane Austen's work can be ripped off by all and sundry because she's been dead longer than that. She's been dead a long, long while.
01:12:36
Speaker
If there are two more people who wrote the work and their contributions can't be distinguished, then is the death of the last surviving author. In the US and Australia it's a little more complicated and it depends when the work was published and when the author died, but mostly it is the same 70 years after the author's death.
01:12:58
Speaker
There is actually an exception in the UK known as the 2039 rule to this. Some unpublished works are protected until 2039, if the author died before 1918.
01:13:17
Speaker
So if you happen to find a never before published manuscript by Jane Austen and you want to publish it today, you will need the consent of whoever now owns her rights, despite the fact that she died two centuries ago. So the moral is sit tight until 2040 and then you can publish it without any problems at all.
01:13:42
Speaker
Whether a work is in the public domain, how do you find out? Well, check for the author's year of death. That's your first recourse. But do beware that in the UK there is one case of perpetual copyright, and that's J.M. Barrie's play Peter Pan. All the royalties of that are assigned to the Great Ormond Street Hospital in perpetuity. Lyrics and music might be complicated, so if you want to check whether they're in the public domain,
01:14:11
Speaker
There are two organisations, the Petrucci Music Library and the Coral Public Domain Library. There are some things that are not protected by copyright, so titles, not even song titles as far as I'm aware, words and phrases in common usage and ideas. It's the expression of those ideas that is copyrighted, not the ideas themselves.
01:14:38
Speaker
But copyright might not extend to those things, but they could be trademarked. Trademarks aren't given automatically. They have to be applied for. And there are a whole host of rules about what you can do and how it's done. And it's really not worth the hassle and cost unless you're a Terry Pratchett or JK Rowling.
01:15:02
Speaker
and you need to protect your brand or you're seeking commercial tie-ups to make toys or something. If this is you, well, you need a lot more help than I can give.
01:15:11
Speaker
But trademarks will impact on us as ordinary mortals because some authors and organisations have trademark distinctive words. So Discworld, Star Trek, Star Wars, they're trademarked. So I can talk about them, but I can't, for instance, publish a story with those words blazoned on the cover.
01:15:33
Speaker
The UK does have a database of trademarks you can search online for it at the Intellectual Property Office and that reveals for instance that the word droid was registered in 2009 and 2015 and Space Marine in 1991 and 1996
01:15:53
Speaker
but only in relation to certain classes. So do those words cover what you might want to use them for? Well, if you're writing, probably yes, but I don't know. If you want to name a paint colour after them, perhaps not. You'd have to check. Now, economic rights provided by copyright can be transferred, as I've said, e.g. by sale.
01:16:17
Speaker
But an author also has moral rights and in the UK they can't be sold or given away, though they can be waived. The first of them is the right to be identified as the author of the work, but that does need to be asserted. So if you're publishing, do include a moral rights clause in the publishing details page of your work alongside your copyright.
01:16:43
Speaker
The moral rights also include the right to object to derogatory treatment of your work, which is defined as any alteration to a work which amounts to a distortion or mutilation of it, or is otherwise prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author. And I would so love to read a court report on a case where that's been claimed.
01:17:04
Speaker
There's also a right to object to a false attribution, which I also think is funny, i.e. being named as the author of a work that you didn't write, and the mind fairly boggles at that one. But anyway, no false attribution here because this is mine or mine, but that ends this very brief tour of copyright.
01:17:30
Speaker
Hello, I left a message to you earlier. There's Treva stuck up here at a damaged starship, and one of the aliens is after throwing her head all together. Jesus! It's your goodness! What's that? A ray gun. What kind of ray gun? I don't know a regular one. What do you mean, a regular one? How the fiddlesticks am I supposed to know what a regular ray gun is? Well, how am I supposed to know either? We're all gonna die! One of the things Chris and I wanted to feature on Cron's cast
01:18:00
Speaker
were the writing challenges that is one of the central parts of the SFF Chronicles forum. Their monthly challenge is either 75 or 300 word stories and a genre and a theme is chosen. So everybody is writing onto the same script essentially. And we came up with the idea of offering
01:18:22
Speaker
the winners of each monthly challenge the option to record their entry their winning entry and send it into us so that it could be played on the podcast and i'm delighted to say that we have our first winner our first broadcast winner the theme from december was a christmas carol and the genre was open and the winner was cat's cradle with his entry silent silent by cat's cradle
01:18:53
Speaker
The photograph was captioned, community outreach. Young people justice elves, my mother front and center, stood singing to tables of senior citizens who smiled, looked confused, or cried.
01:19:08
Speaker
I carried Mum's yearbook into the nursing home, hopefully its memories might reach her. I found her sitting with other Alzheimer's patients. She saw the choir photo and smiled, started singing, Silent night, silent night. I glanced around her table. People smiled or looked confused or cried.
01:19:36
Speaker
We should be saving here. Is there many of them still about? I'll take a look. Well, we're teaching out there. Yes. How many? I don't know loads. What do you mean loads? Did you ever think of counting them? We're going to die up here. Relax. There's bound to be a simple solution to this. I'll give the SSF Cloud away again. There's none that they don't know about spaceships. But what's wrong? I might start getting their answering machine again.
01:20:12
Speaker
I had this sense that you know what it's like when you're dealing with people online on forums and stuff and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Chronicles forum are very active but you're one of the lesser active members in term or you drop in and you might drop a zen wisdom sentence and then disappear for a few weeks. You've got this perception of being a sort of
01:20:35
Speaker
No, no, make visitor in the night who will drop into one of the forums, write one sort of Buddhist line of wisdom and then disappear again for many weeks. So I was when I when I was doing my research for this and I was looking at your website and looking at Goodreads and all the stuff on the Internet, I was really surprised. I knew you'd done a lot of material. You'd had a lot of material. I wasn't I wasn't prepared for the 17. I think it is.
01:21:04
Speaker
and the short stories and the prose poem. How is it you're so prolific? If you're saying luck is so important, is it being prolific and having luck? How have you
01:21:23
Speaker
Well, I suppose to start off with, I am quite old. I'm coming up to my 60th birthday, so I've been doing this for quite a long time. And, you know, I was first published 25 years ago, so that's quite a long time. So there's that element. Also, when I was a younger man, I was married, but I didn't have children with my then-wife. I'm divorced now.
01:21:52
Speaker
So because me and my ex didn't have children, my ex-wife was a really gifted artist, so we both had very strong drives to sort of, you know,
01:22:05
Speaker
be artists and have some measure of success as artists. We did discuss having children, but we both kind of sat on the fence and it just never really happened. So being brutally honest, the fact that I didn't have children in my 30s and 40s gave me a lot more time than most people have. So that has fed into the fact that I've been able to write more novels than perhaps other people. But I suppose the main
01:22:36
Speaker
The thing that I could talk about here is that I am by inclination, by nature, just extremely creative. I just have this very, very strong drive to create stuff. I do a bit of music, but mostly my main stuff I do is writing. That's what I decided I wanted to be in my mid-20s. I had this epiphany when I was 26.
01:23:01
Speaker
I was creating stuff then. I kind of was involved with role-playing games, but in a very unusual way. I was never a player. I was always the dungeon master, but I wasn't really a D&D player. I just had my own stuff that I was creating. And where this stuff was coming from, I don't really know. But then in my mid-20s, I just realized that I could be doing more of this. And as a fan of fantasy and science fiction, I just thought I'd try not a novel.
01:23:31
Speaker
There's more than, like Chris said, there's more than just the novels. I've seen that you're experimenting with some filmmaking at the moment. This is conditioned human, right? Can you tell us about that? Yeah. Well, Covid has kind of put the kibosh on that for the moment because, well, really, this links into my interest in
01:23:58
Speaker
What are we? Who are we? Why are we? Human beings. I've always been interested in what consciousness is, and I was extremely lucky in the mid-1980s to see Nicholas Humphrey's groundbreaking Channel 4 television series, The Inner Eye.
01:24:20
Speaker
I am a huge, huge fan of Nicholas Humphrey. I think he is an unrecognised genius of the level of Darwin and people like that. He's quite exceptional. He proposed what is known as the social intelligence theory of consciousness and through the 80s and into the 90s and up to about 2010, he has written about five or six books
01:24:44
Speaker
on the nature of consciousness, all of which are profoundly brilliant. His ideas are not generally accepted. His base idea that the social intelligence theory of consciousness is generally accepted, but some of the other ideas that he's had to explain the more difficult aspects of consciousness, for instance, what qualia are. So, you know, when we experience red in our minds, what is that?
01:25:09
Speaker
So, he does have an answer to that, but it's not an answer that everyone agrees with. Dan, how does this relate to the films then? What are you trying to achieve with films? Well, I made four attempts to write a non-fiction book about my ideas, about how I could synthesise Nicholas Humphrey's ideas about human consciousness, with Erich Fromm's ideas about the human condition, and my own ideas about the human condition. I mean, I didn't just take those ideas, I had my own ideas.
01:25:36
Speaker
and I failed four times over a period of about 30 years.
01:25:40
Speaker
So about three, four, five years ago, I just thought, OK, this isn't working. Maybe it's the medium that is wrong. So I have made films in the past. I had a band for 25 years and I was notoriously unwilling to talk about myself and the music that my band made. So to surprise my fans on the 20th anniversary of me starting my band, I basically made
01:26:10
Speaker
just with a camcorder, I made a documentary. I visited all the musicians that I'd worked with in their houses and I filmed them talking about the band. And I had a fantastic time. It was such enormous fun, seeing all my friends, having a laugh, filming the stuff. And then editing is the creative bit. It was enormous fun.
01:26:32
Speaker
So that gave me the interest in filmmaking. And then about three or four, five years ago, I just thought, OK, maybe the medium is wrong. Why don't I try and put the essence of my ideas into six short films? So my idea was to have six short films of 20 minutes each, where I would speak to camera where possible and basically give the essence of my ideas of what a human being is, why we are conscious,
01:27:01
Speaker
what the important aspects of the human condition are, what my beliefs are about those things, and then present them in a film. So it would be an artistic film, there would be artistic interludes, but a lot of it would be me talking either as a voiceover or to camera.
01:27:18
Speaker
So I wrote the scripts and I blocked it all out as filmmakers block out in boxes. And I just did the first little bit of filming when Covid struck. So essentially it's been on hold for about a year and a half. I will go back to it at some point. I've had a very difficult year in my personal life, my private life. So that's fed into it as well. But I am hoping next year or the year after to go back to that.
01:27:46
Speaker
All the scripts are written, all the film directions are written, all the music's done. I've done all the voiceovers. All the voiceovers are recorded, but I haven't actually been able to film anything because I haven't been able to get out for various reasons. It sounds very interesting. But you have managed to... I mean, you said you've attempted, what, four times to write the book, but you have completed a non-fiction book in the past year, haven't you? Yes. Which was about Tangerine Dream.
01:28:14
Speaker
Yeah again that came I mean you know I'll say again that came about to pure luck and I'm a big fan of the bank or renaissance and he may remember had a huge hit northern lights in the late seventies with any haslam singing absolutely gorgeous on and then there's someone to michael dunford was a really brilliant man.
01:28:34
Speaker
He was a writer of Meldy, like very, very few writers. So I loved that band. So when I found out by accident that Sonic Bond had published a book about Renaissance's music, the first book actually about their music, I bought it straight away. And then in the back it just said, if you want to write about a band that you like, you might like to approach this and pitch us an idea.
01:28:57
Speaker
And so I did that. I wrote to Stephen Lamb and said, OK, I adore Tangerine Dream. Love Klaus Schultzer. Very big fan of Ozric Tentacles. Why don't I write one of those? And he took me on. So it was great fun. I wrote the book about Tangerine Dream. The Tangerine Dream, I guess they've experienced a bit of a
01:29:22
Speaker
a renaissance in recent years, haven't they? Because wasn't some of their music used on Stranger Things, the Netflix show?
01:29:32
Speaker
watch very little TV and never had it. I'm pretty sure it was. I'm not sure if they recorded new tracks for it or if some of the older stuff was used. But probably new stuff Dan, because Eric Edgafroft died in 2015. Absolutely tragic. I was utterly gutted when I found that out. But the band has had a renaissance recently with
01:29:57
Speaker
because Edgar wanted the band to continue without him. So there are some very proactive members in that band doing stuff and they are writing and recording immaterial and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the music was being used.
01:30:13
Speaker
So tell us about the novels that you've got in the pipeline. Is it Cyber Gone, isn't it? The one about social media? Is that right? Again, that was a nice, extraordinary stroke of luck. I was on, basically, on a phone. At some point, Stephen, I'm going to ask you what advice. You've published 20-odd novels.
01:30:38
Speaker
over X number of years and must have a great deal of insight into what it takes you. I can't let you off the hook by just saying, well, it's just down to luck, really. Well, let me let me be serious. I mean, there is a huge amount of luck involved in this, but you do have to have what I would say. And when I say when I when I talk about this to people who want to hear me is that
01:31:02
Speaker
All authors, all true authors, do have to have something to say. They have to have something very deep and very urgent inside them that has to come out through the vehicle of words. And if you look at JK Rowling or Philip Pullman,
01:31:19
Speaker
or any major author who has got more than just one book out, who has a series of books out, or has passion for a particular aspect of life, that will be what is coming out in their novels. So I would say that to make that leap from writer to author, you've got to have something inside you that has just got to come out.
01:31:44
Speaker
And I do feel that's true about myself. So I have, you know, all these interests I have in why we are human and the relationship between religion and atheist thought.
01:31:55
Speaker
many other ideas of those type. Those are the themes of my work. Regardless of what the setting might be, the actual theme will be something big like that. So I guess the best example is probably the Factory Girl trilogy. So I think that's possibly the book I'm most
01:32:18
Speaker
proud of, to use that word, happy with. Can you tell us a little bit about the Factory Girl trilogy then?
01:32:32
Speaker
I had the title of the first book in my head for a year, The Girl With Two Souls. Just that title intrigued me. Who is this girl and why does she have two souls? So this basically related to the kind of things I think about in my daily life, about souls and spirits, all these interesting concepts. And then about a year later, I was watching Channel 4 News.
01:32:55
Speaker
And I suddenly suddenly ideas started to fill this is in the in late quite late evening, you know, eight o'clock at night, ideas just suddenly coming down into my mind about this about a scenario and a character that might be this girl with two souls. And after about five minutes, I suddenly realized that there was lots of ideas coming all at once that I really ought to write down. So I ran into my study, grabbed an empty notebook, grabbed a pen,
01:33:24
Speaker
muted the TV and just started to write this stuff down as it was coming to me.
01:33:29
Speaker
And I just carried on writing and writing and writing. I did about seven or eight pages. And it seemed to me as though about 20 minutes had passed. I'd written all this stuff down. Actually, two hours had passed. I looked up and it was 10 o'clock at night. And I had put down the template for the entire trilogy. It hardly changed when I actually came to write it. I'm a very strong believer in the idea that
01:33:57
Speaker
our subconscious minds are doing a huge amount of the work for us. I think this is particularly true of authors.
Writing Inspirations and Processes
01:34:04
Speaker
It's really important to listen to your subconscious when it has something to say and to almost take dictation from your subconscious. I feel that I did that in that two hours on that extraordinary evening, I felt I was taking dictation from my subconscious and getting this...
01:34:22
Speaker
yes maybe yes well yes actually you're right because this novel this trilogy
01:34:29
Speaker
says an awful lot about me. It is very much, I put absolutely everything into it that I could, everything. And I feel very, very attached to it. It's a work that I am really proud of. So yes, Chris. Can I just say that comes back to your earlier point for me, when you're talking about, you know, like Dan giving a hard time saying, come on, it's not just luck, give us an answer, or give us something.
01:34:59
Speaker
you're saying this trilogy is most reflective of you and your inner state or whatever, you know, your mindset is. And I think that speaks to the larger thing about, or an equally large thing, is it's not just a case of having something to say, it's about having lived a life or having lived, having experiences, because I noticed a lot of beginner authors, I don't know, sorry, not beginner authors, but younger authors or writers rather,
01:35:24
Speaker
There is a lot of escapism, or vanity, or fantasizing. And it comes from a lack of having experience. I know this sounds so incredibly, not elitist, but supercilious, because I'm hardly a well-known author myself. But having gone through a rather charmed life maybe, and not suffered certain experiences maybe, or suffered certain opinions,
01:35:52
Speaker
from other people being surrounded by something interesting, whether that's from your parents, your grandparents, or from, you know, just everyday life, I feel you don't have to have had a dramatic life, but you have to have been observant and aware of life to write. And it's not just this escapism, oh, I like, you know, sword and sandals, so I'm going to write that stuff. I very much agree, Chris. I very much agree. Yes, I think you're spot on there. Yeah, well, the the central
01:36:22
Speaker
themes of human life don't change over tens of thousands of years. That's why, you know, we were talking, you know, in Northern Lights, that's why the 30,000 year old story about Adam and Eve, it still stands up, even though there's no logic to it on a purely superficial level. But if you dig down into it, then we're actually there's quite a lot going on there.
01:36:46
Speaker
And it still stands up. So you live your life. And even if you don't think you've done much in your life, life will still do things to you, whether you like it or not. And you'll pick these things up and all of a sudden you'll find when you're writing, you have an armory of things that you know all of a sudden about the way that people are.
01:37:08
Speaker
that you can pack into your work. How often does that come to you? I was saying, how often does that come to you? That sort of download for the Factory Girl trilogy, how often did you experience that? Quite rarely. I experienced it for Memory Seed, my debut.
01:37:28
Speaker
I had it for a novel called Muetzenland which was not well received but was my passion for Africa and African music in particular. I also had it for Tommy Catkins. I was listening to Trick of the Tail by Genesis and there are three songs on that album
01:37:48
Speaker
which purely by chance managed to sort of contain the ideas that I was thinking about. It was the most weird thing. The idea about Freudian slumbers in Entangled and water in Ripples and Madman Moon, those ideas kind of emphasized themes I was thinking about.
01:38:10
Speaker
and gave me the idea of the World War I soldier returning from the Western Front to this mysterious island hospital in Wiltshire in the middle of a river. Again, that was a very, very specific and very strange personal event. I was literally lying on the sofa with the lights out in almost complete darkness, listening to a trick of the tale, thinking about what I might want to write next. And these three songs
01:38:35
Speaker
managed to encompass what I was thinking about. It was the weirdest thing. And I was living at the time in a town in Shropshire called Wham. And Wham basically is in north flat, north Shropshire, in what was formerly marshland, the area regularly floods. And even that fed into what I was writing about, how we think about water and what water represents.
01:38:59
Speaker
It was the weirdest thing, but I think that's another of my favorite novels. That's a novel that I wouldn't mind reading myself. I never read my own stuff ever, but I wouldn't mind getting a book of Tommy Cackins and reading it because there's something about it which is different. Interesting, yeah. I think those, that quicksilver, sorry not quicksilver, that lightning that comes sometimes
01:39:22
Speaker
are those stories that you contrive and are those stories which write themselves? And those are the ones that are, it's lovely when it just is, you put up your aerial and it just downloads into you. It's just wonderful. And I think, because we are all, you know, we are all characters, aren't we? We all write our own story. And so we have certain themes and ideas and tales which are deeply relevant to us. And those are the tales that our subconsciouses tell us.
01:39:52
Speaker
And it doesn't always happen that way. A lot of the time it's a difficult process and the birth can be protracted. So when it does start to flow, it's a good feeling.
01:40:09
Speaker
that's instructive to just keep trying because the more you write, the easier it is to get into that state of it flowing more easily. I must point out that even though I've written quite a lot of novels, some of them are crap.
01:40:24
Speaker
I mean, you know, I have written some rubbish as well. And so, you know, let's not let's look at that side as well. Well, let's let's ignore those ones. We're our own worst critics anyway, so. Yeah, let's talk about Cybergon. And when I heard the title, I had a flashback to being at university and reading Antigone, part of the Sophocles trilogy. So I thought, oh, it must be pronounced Sybogony.
01:40:53
Speaker
It's cyber gone, isn't it? It's cyber gone, yeah.
Themes in 'Cyber Gone' and Internet Impact
01:40:57
Speaker
It's basically a little idiom which is used in the novel to describe something I call END, Empathy Negation Disorder. So I've been interested in Chinese society for quite some time. It struck me that the Chinese use of the internet is highly unusual. It's free within China. It's almost Western within China.
01:41:20
Speaker
But the Chinese have huge barriers around it and over it. One's called the Golden Wall and the other one's called the Golden Shield. So there's this extraordinary unique dilemma in China where they have this Western-style freedom and this communist-style repression. And the great metaphor of that at the moment is the Internet in China.
01:41:45
Speaker
And I've been struck for many years about how social media and the digital world in general is affecting how young people develop. I do work with young people in my day job. I work at a school and I work in education most of my life.
01:42:03
Speaker
Maybe this is because I'm, you know, an older man now, but to my mind, social media and young people is a more damaging thing than a health. I mean, there are some good aspects of social media. I would never deny that, but I think
01:42:18
Speaker
I just feel that on balance, particularly for young people, the dangers are more dangerous than the benefits. So I put together this imaginary Chinese affliction, empathy negation disorder, where because of the way the digital world works, for instance, in making individuals anonymous, then there's the whole aspect of identity on the internet, which is far more free flowing than in normal human interaction.
01:42:46
Speaker
I put all these ideas together to create a Chinese family where the son, the young son, I think he's 11, has got E and D. So basically this child's father, who happens to be a technology expert, has to find out what the actual cause of this condition is, because the Communist Party have simply denied it even exists.
01:43:12
Speaker
I think it sounds very pertinent. Social media is still so young. We're definitely still in the Wild Wild West era of social media, in the same instance that in the Gold Rush era of the actual Wild Wild West, it was marked by lawlessness and exploitation.
01:43:40
Speaker
and sort of corrupted hyper-capitalism as well and the fleecing of the people who are trying to get rich in the Yukon and places like that in California. And we don't know. We don't have enough data of the effects of social media. The time span that we have of its operation since Facebook exploded and then Twitter followed it. The time span is too short. We don't know.
01:44:09
Speaker
It would be a great thing to have a specific podcast back with Stephen again coming back and talk about this. Let's get back to the book. When is it coming out?
Publishing Journey and Personal Insights
01:44:23
Speaker
I don't know yet. I've only just sold it.
01:44:25
Speaker
As I say, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, I happened to be on a particular Facebook group one evening, and the American lady who runs the group just said, oh, my publisher's looking for novels. So I sent Cyber Gone Across, and he said yes.
01:44:44
Speaker
pretty much straight away. I think he did read it, obviously, but it was about a week, I think. So there you go. So that's your golden piece of advice. If you're looking to get published, get on to Facebook.
01:44:59
Speaker
There's a serious... My serious advice would be... Especially if you're selling a book about the evils of social media. Yeah. My serious advice would just be never give up. I've almost given up twice in my writing career. There was a time at the start of the 2000s and then around about 2006-07 where I almost gave up because I was getting absolutely nowhere and it was just deeply depressing.
01:45:25
Speaker
I would echo that. Perseverance is key. I think that's probably a good note on which to end. I've just got one more very quick question, and that is, what form would your demon take? I've been asked that before, and I think it would be a raven. A raven? Good choice. Now, I know what Chris thinks mine would be. Chris thinks mine would be a nudibranch.
01:45:50
Speaker
Yeah, but it wouldn't be a nudibranch. I think I can't believe you remember that. Well, why would I forget somebody calling me my animalistic avatar a nudibranch? Flatworms or whatever. It's some sort of hermaphroditic flatworm. Well, mine would be a rooster. It wouldn't be a nudibranch. Oh, OK. Nice. And Chris, what would yours be? Well, I'd like it to be a pike.
01:46:20
Speaker
But it would probably be... I think it'd be one of those birds of paradise who do all the fancy arts. Yeah, some fabulous bird of paradise that couldn't fly but looked rude to him. He's got all the moves though, you know? Right, Stephen, thanks so much for joining us. It's been really interesting. It's been a real pleasure and good luck with everything you're working on. It sounds like you've got many irons in the fire.
01:46:48
Speaker
And I'm really interested in seeing how they all pan out. So thanks once again. Thanks very much for having me. You've been really interesting chaps to talk to and I've had a lovely time. So thank you very much.
01:47:06
Speaker
This episode of Crohn's Cast was brought to you by Dan Jones and Chris Bean, and this month's guest Stephen Palmer. Additional content was prepared by Damaris Brown, Brian Sexton, and Cat Cradle. Special thanks to Brian Turner and the staff at Crohn's. Lastly, thank you for listening, and don't forget to sign up to the world's largest SFF community at sffchronicles.com.
01:49:17
Speaker
You know I'm here