Rivers of London Capital Comic
Sand Foxglove Summer, Titan’s Rivers Of London spin- off comic highlights one of Peter Grant’s smaller assignments. With author Ben Aaronovitch describing Body Work as “a story about haunted cars”, next month’s first issue fittingly opens with a man drowning after his vehicle plunges into the Thames at Putney.
“It’s more complicated than that but I don’t want to spoil anything,” teases Aaronovitch, who will co- write the five- parter with Andrew Cartmel. “The subsequent suspicious death investigation uncovers what the rest of the police like to call, ‘ weird bollocks’. This being a Rivers Of London case, it soon escalates into a life and death struggle in a junkyard and a surprising connection to a pre- war Folly case.”
Claiming that he is “quite ruthless” with their appearances, Aaronovitch insists that the novels’ supporting cast will only show up as and when they are required. “If there are no onscreen autopsies then Doctor Walid isn’t going to be foregrounded,” he notes, expressing admiration for artist Lee Sullivan’s depiction of his much- loved characters. “The first thing you have to accept when writing comics is that the art is stylised. Lee isn’t aiming for photo- realism; he likes his characters tall, thin and gaunt. Peter, Nightingale and Guleed don’t look exactly how I would have drawn them; they actually look much better than that!”
According to Aaronovitch, he and Cartmel have always been determined to embark upon an original tale rather than adapt an existing novel. “It’s a very different medium to prose, and there are things you can do in comics that you can’t do in books, such as visual gags and strategically placed splash pages,” he reasons. “So instead of fighting the medium, we thought it would be better, and crucially more fun, to play to the medium’s strengths.”
Ag ent Carter’s first season finally airing on UK TV from 12 July on Fox. Season two will move the action to LA.
Justin Molotnikov directing a two- part tale for Doct or Who series nine, while Steven Moffat has confirmed he’ll remain as showrunner until at least series 10.
Voting f or t his year’s David Gemmell Awards i s n ow o pen. Pick your favourite from the shortlist at www. gemmellawards. com, until the polls close on 17 July. Prizes will be presented at the Nine Worlds event on 8 August.
“I watch it for historic
reasons, to try to understand what this world was based on before I got here...”
We’re not sure Snoop Dogg realises
Game Of Thrones i s f antasy.
What would you write as
Roboteer The outcome of mankind’s first interstellar war hangs in the balance. Within weeks, Earth’s oppressive new government will finally crush its former colonies. But one ship on a secret mission stands to make all the difference. Its job: to sneak across human space to discover the secret of the terrible new weapon in Earth’s hands.
Though the starship Ariel is over a mile long and teeming with robots, its human crew are crammed in a shielded cabin just metres wide. Will KunoMonet is responsible for running a ship comprised of the most dangerous and delicate technology that mankind has ever devised. He is the Roboteer.
How long did you work on i t?
’ s cover blurb?
It took about nine months to write, originally, though I tinkered with the ideas and plot extensively before that. Getting it noticed took a decade.
Did your day job help you come up with the concept?
Absolutely. My background was in AI research and by the time I wrote Roboteer I’d worked extensively on human- computer interaction. What astonished me was the way machine intelligences were always portrayed as logical and supremely intelligent when the reverse is likely to be true. Emotional processing underpins embodied intelligence, and human- level reasoning is extremely hard to attain. That means we’ll have dim, emotional robots before we have cold, smart ones, and human intervention will have to make up the difference. I wanted to write about a future that reflected that reality.
Which SF/ fantasy authors would you like to be compared to i n a dream review?
Iain M Banks, Neal Stephenson, Dan Simmons, Frederik Pohl and Jack Vance.