Simon Ings
An autobiography
"I was born in Horndean thirty years ago. It's on the trunk road between London and the naval town of Portsmouth. We lived on the edge of the town, where the ribbon development began. All the proper buildings stopped at the end of our street: beyond was all insane.
You walk for miles past lawns of tall dead grass and glimpse, now and again, far away down crazy-paving drives, houses of peeling green press board and untreated corrugated iron, sheds on concrete stilts surrounded by fences of rusted chicken wire: sometimes knee-high walls, their bricks Post Office red with a thick poisonous resin; the mortar white, a kitch criss-scross. Hand painted. Madness.
I went back there recently -- to get there you drive through towns with names like Hurtmore and Noning -- and found it struggling with its own incapacity, the way an Alzheimer's patient kicks furiously at a door he has forgotten how to open.
I think now it wants to be something other than itself: the Swan -- the old name is inscribed above the main entrance -- has been renamed the Perequito, and each window stencilled with a parrot, so that for a fleeting moment the patrons may imagine themselves in the land of the Bacardi commercial. I went round the market and found other, more usual escapes: dolls, toys, Ian Flemings, scratched K-Tels and Stereo Moments, second hand video games and role playing books.
Beyond the market there are half a dozen TV repair shops. I wonder what sort of damage a TV suffers here; I have this receurrring image of the children of Horndean and Clanfield and Waterloovile, desperate for release, taking turns to hammer at its vibrant, particoloured screen in the hope of breaking through.
Given all this, I'm not surprised to find that my work's called Cyberpunk. That, surely, is the point of it -- that it isn't about the future, but rather uses the future as a metaphor to say things about the world as it is."
Bibliography: Novels
(Texts are from back covers.)
HOT HEAD
1992
Grafton - an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN 0 586 21496 8
Malise has a problem. She's come downwell to Earth after spending too many years in deadly space combat. Her muscles have wasted away, her past is a confused torture of events she'd like to forget, and her brain is wired up to data-fat - addictive military hardware strictly ilegal on Earth. She came back for a rest. But there can be no rest for the woman who can save the world.
Years ago artificial intelligence probes were sent out into the solar system to mine planets inaccessible to Man. The operation was highly successful - until the AIs stopped communicating and started breeding. Now a mass of highly intelligent machinery hundreds of miles wide is heading for Earth. It's indestructable and it wants more metal. And no-one knows how to stop it.
Locked away in Malise's head is a blueprint for survival which she doesn't know is there. And when she meets Snow, who offers her the chance to escape into the dreamy, virtual world of cyberspace with the help of a revolutionary new data-fat, she doesn't want to know.
But sometimes there is no choice...
City of the Iron Fish
1994
HarperCollins Science Fiction & Fantasy
ISBN 0 00 647653
Only a fool would ask what strange providence, amid an inferno of scorching heat and splintered rock, saw to the care of the cool, well-watered municipality which is the City of the Iron Fish. The seafaring traditions of the City, the tang of salt in the air, are sustained by powerful magic, and by bizarre ceremony of the Iron Fish.
But young Thomas Kemp is enraged by the City's contradictions - and, like a fool, sets out in search of an answer to the conundrum. Turning his back on the City, Thomas strides towards the limits of reality armed only with curiosity. It may kill him. Worse, it may not be enough. Worst of all, his companion Blythe, who is as carefree as her name, might be the one to discover the meaning of the City's isolation.
Hotwire
with graphics by Simon Pummell
1995
HarperCollins Science Fiction & Fantasy
ISBN 0 00 647724 0
... blazes a multimedia trail to the edge of the new cybernetic world order, where artificial brains have grown beyond the reach of language and interface direct by dream and vision ...
ONLY CONNECT
From the web of fibre optics cast across the world, thinking cities are emerging. Ajay had a future once, birthing them for the Haag Agency, first Delhi, then Milan. But when a rich woman seduces him into betraying his employers, Ajay's expertise becomes available, freelance, to the ruthless mayor of Rio de Janeiro. Rio craves something special. It wants to be made human.
For this, Ajay must steal rare technology from a new Frankenstein whose name is Snow, a wetware expert long since dead and transformed into a mad orbital machine. No match for Snow, Ajay finds himself laid out on a slab, one of Snow's obscene experiments in production-line biology. Snow's manufactured daughter, Rosa, needs a new toy ...
Bibliography: Short Stories
Blessed Fields Other Edens 3 (ed. Evans & Holdstock) Unwin Hyman Ltd., London 1989 Dreyfuss Dogs Fear No.10 October 1989 The Braining of Mother Lamprey Interzone No.36 June 1990 Different Cities Zenith 2, (ed. David Garnett) Sphere Books Ltd. London 1990 The Cathedral at Baleares Scheherazade 3 Hothead R.E.M. No.1 1991 Something Sweet (with Charles Stross) New Worlds, (ed. David Garnett) Gollancz, London 1991 Bruised Time New Worlds 2, (ed. David Garnett) Gollancz, London 1992; reprinted in The New Nature of the Catastrophe (ed. Langdon Jones & Michael Moorcock) Millennium, London 1993 The Dead (with M. John Harrison) The Sun Rises Red (ed. Chris Kenworthy) Barrington Books, Preston 1992; reprinted in Interzone No.67 January 1993; reprinted in Best New Horror 4 (ed. Stephen Jones & Ramsey Campbell) Robinson, London 1993 Witchy Miriam's Book R.E.M. No. 2 1992 Grand Prix OMNI June 1993 Traffic Touch Wood (ed. Peter Crowther) Little, Brown & Co., London 1993 The Black Lotus OMNI: Best Science Fiction 3 (ed. Ellen Datlow) Omni International Ltd., N. Carolina 1993 Tolkowsky's Cut (with Charles Stross) New Worlds 3 (ed. David Garnett) Gollancz, London 1993 Swallow Sorcerers (ed. Katherine Kerr) HarperCollins, New York (scheduled) Rapids Critical Quarterly Vol 36 No.4 Winter 1994 Volatile OMNI March 1995 Keeping Alice Vengeance Is HarperCollins New York (scheduled) Open Veins OMNI (scheduled)
Reviews
A collection of any reviews I can get hold of. (expired links removed - 2001)
We have several books by Simon Ings in the icsf library, please see the database for details.