When Geeks inherit the Press

I don't usually review publishers on this blog but why not? An innovative bunch of bibliophiles like AngryRobot are well worth celebrating and with their reader-centred, geeky passion, they are quietly changing the landscape we all write and publish in. Angry Robot is the brainchild of MarcGascoigne, its MD, who on Thursday last regaled LeicesterWriters' Club with tales of life on the inside of the machine. Formerly peddling genre books to 'spotty 14 year old boys' in Warhammer shops, his success in this niche led to the publisher giant HarperCollins approaching Gascoigne in 2009 to 'come do something innovative for us.' It's to his credit he knew exactly what he wanted when that offer came knocking. Angry Robot's mission was to break out of the mould of 'books with spaceships or wizards on the cover', as their mission statement says:

'To the new generations of readers reared on Dr Who and Battlestar Galactica, graphic novels and Gears of War 2, old school can mean staid, stuck in a rut. “Crossover” is increasingly the way forward and you’ll find plenty of it here … if there’s an energy in a book that gets us jumping up and down, we’re all over it.'

So far, so good for sci-fi/fantasy fans – but what about the rest of us? Gascoigne's business plan also intended to shake up the prevailing mode of publishing. 'Corporate monoliths', move over – 'we're hobbyists, fans, geeks, nerds' – the people behind Angry Robots are the readers as much as they are the producers and marketers. For geeks, read 'people with a passion for sharing stories'. They therefore proposed a 'menu of formats' that includes Physical paperbacks, Limited run special editions in leather or hard-covers, eBooks, Downloadable audio and release of the text in all of these formats simultaneously. I lost track of the plot twists he related around ownership and sell-ons with the publishing giants but they still have 'partners' in Faber and RandomHouse and the mission is intact. An example of their reader-friendly approach is their current offer of the Angry Robot Clonefiles programme;

'a growing number of indie book shops in the UK and the US are able to offer their customers both the paperback and eBook version ... for just the price of the paperback. So you can buy the ebooks for yourself and give the paperbacks to your friends and loved ones as presents.'

See? They get that readers enjoy both the physicality of a well-produced paper copy and the convenience of e-readers. And they know that part of the pleasure of reading is sharing stories. This is especially true of the genre they deal with where typical readers get through dozens of books and tweet and blog about them, in between running up costumes for another steampunk convention or trying out the last game. (These are the same fans who kept Dr.Who going through the dark, wasteland years by writing their own fanzines and novelised episodes.)

 

 

 

I have been especially impressed by Angry Robots' canny approach to harnessing their readers' passion for 'finding the good stuff' and passing it on. On their website, they are recruiting a 'RobotArmy' of reviewers and bloggers who can 'Take the Robot's Shilling' and download Advanced Review Copies in exchange for an 'honest review' on sites which have their own established genre audience. (Loving the BattlestarCylon references btw in the red-eyed robot logo.) Recently I watched on Facebook as Rod Duncan's new Steampunk novel, TheBullet-Catcher's Daughter garnered dozens of reviews, interviews and blog tours months before the official launch. Gascoigne told us they only have 5 people working for Angry Robot, yet they have hundreds or possibly thousands of committed fans sifting and promoting 'the good stuff'.

So the occasion for this fascinating industry speaker was a book launch of TheBullet-Catcher's Daughter, a new title by Angry Robot. The event was hosted by Leicester Writers' Club and the author was our own Rod Duncan, a long-standing member, previous crime-novelist and well-respected writing tutor. It drew the crowds who rose to the invitation for Steam-punk fancy dress with a gusto that would have endeared the boys from the BigBang Theory. Marc, who delivered an entertaining history of the new genre ('Steampunk is what happens when Goths discovered brown') turned up in the uniform of a Nerd. The rest of us sported hat-pins, airship goggles and scarlet brocade corsets. As ever, I'm grateful to Ambrose Musiyiwa for his photographs which captured the fun and the readers' rapture at Duncan's taster chapter. We snapped up copies, snaffled cake and not a one of us won't have learnt something about how to keep our readers close in the game of 'pass it on.'

The Eye in the Door

This book is shockingly well-written. Think Dante's Inferno with an undertow of Stevenson's Jekyll & Hyde, bundled into a respectably precise historical novel.  The second in Pat Barker's WW1 Regeneration trilogy, it quickly outstrips the first novel in its revelations about a war we think we know and in its power to move and unnerve us.

The first book, Regeneration was fascinating in its insights into the world of Craiglockhart's military mental hospital and the pioneering treatment of the true-life Dr. Rivers. If you've been impressed and scarred by the poetry of Sassoon and Owen, you'll relish the portrayal of their friendship in this brief haven from the Front. I hadn't realised Owen's poetry was rooted in River's 'dream therapy' as well as Sassoon's editorial eye. The novel probes how the British Establishment declared Sassoon temporarily insane rather than deal with his powerful Declaration Against the War and traces the collusion of his humane and conflicted doctor with that process. I like very much in this novel that we only revisit the landscape of the war itself through the men's night-terrors and memories ceded under hypnosis. Their phobias speak far more loudly than their mutism or stumbled confessions; such as the man who cannot eat at all after his front-line encounter with another man's guts. This distancing device actually made the battle scenes far more terrifying.

Craiglockhart Military Hospital in WW1 -
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/wilfred_owen_gallery_06.shtml

But 'Eye in the Door' is a darker beast, if that seems possible, after the trench-bound nightmares of River's patients in Craiglockhart. In the second novel, Barker has melded her forensic period research with her considerable powers as a storyteller to surprise us with a Home Front that is as dystopian as the hell of No Man's Land. This is the world of MI5's pre-cursor, the 'dirty war' of propaganda and spying. As much as Rivers is applying early Freudian techniques to helping his patients defuse their post-traumatic stress, so Barker is probing the twisted psyche of a nation at war with itself. Her story pulls in two landmark court cases that defined the neuroses of an age - the rigged trial of a working-class pacifist woman for allegedly planning the murder of Lloyd George - and a libel trial in which '47,000' of Britain's elite were reckoned to be colluding with the Germans for fear of being exposed as 'sodomites' and 'degenerates'. Barker is very astute about how the cult of masculinity in WW1 threw up this frantically homophobic backlash during the most intense years of the war. Episodes detailing the brutality meted out to conchies and strike-leaders broaden the picture of a state ruthlessly suppressing dissent with some positively Orwellian scenes in prison cells.


However that's just the backdrop - because what really rivets us is the figure of Billy Prior, a soldier home on sick leave, roped into the intelligence service while he struggles to digest the horror that caused his breakdown. Prior proves to be a far more compelling protagonist than Sassoon. A working-class man who achieved officer rank, he is now thrust into the company of the class he so despises. A bitter, angry, caustic yet ambitious soldier, he is secretly terrified by his own hatred of civilians and the violence he senses simmering beneath the surface. To add to his self-loathing, his sexuality is also urgent and aggressive, veering into the 'deviant' in an episode of 'cottaging' that seems all too familiar. Rivers is the one person who can save him, yet their sessions often flip over into a verbal sparring that threatens to drag the doctor's own traumas into the light.

The novel's feverish atmosphere, all graphic social realism shot through with something almost surreal, is heightened by two powerful motifs. The 'Eye in the Door' is a throwback to the shell-shock incident that first unhinged Prior. But it also alludes to his new role as a spy in the service of an increasingly repressive state. And then there is the Jekyll and Hyde allusion, which not only attaches itself to Prior's bouts of memory loss but seems to say something about the whole culture of soldiers disassociating themselves from the violence of combat, as Rivers realises.

Johnny Lee Miller & Jonathon Pryce as Prior & Rivers in film

The barely contained rage and fear of Prior is a grenade we continually expect to go off in the novel. But he is possibly saner and a good deal more self-aware than the society that has recalled him from the trenches but which will soon re- assess his 'fitness for active service'. Although Barker's war-torn England is a deeply disturbing world, I was reluctant to leave it at the end of this second book and certainly want to see more of both Prior and Rivers in Part Three. Taken as a whole, this trilogy is a towering achievement of storytelling and a fittingly complex response to the catastrophe of the so-called 'Great War'.