One of the first things I did after deciding to attend this year’s Eastercon in Birmingham was research the city’s culinary specialties, which is how I learned about the Birmingham balti, so famous the city has even applied for cultural heritage protection for the cuisine. On the first night of the con, award-winning writer Paul McAuley and I headed over to Shababs — which reportedly serves up the best — to check some out.

McAuley has published twenty-five novels — the most recent of which, Loss Protocol, was released in February — as well as more than a hundred short stories. A twenty-sixth novel, Heaven’s Grand Design, will follow. His fiction has resulted in five nominations and a win for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, seven nominations and a win for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, two nominations apiece for the Philip K. Dick Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, winning each of those once, as well as multiple nominations for the  British SF Association Award and British Fantasy Award.

He’s also co-edited an anthology, In Dreams, with Kim Newman, and published a Doctor Who novella and a BFI Film Classic on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. He wrote a regular book review column in Interzone magazine back in the 1990s, and since then has written book and film reviews and pieces of journalism for a variety of publications, including the Guardian and Independent newspapers, Crime Time, Arc magazine, New Scientist, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

We discussed his fascination with James Joyce and how it played out (or didn’t) in his own writing, why he’s thrilled the first short story he sold to a pro market was never published, the reasons he loves Los Angeles, what he learned as a scientist which helped him write better science fiction, why he compared his writing style to Raymond Chandler’s, the way his world-building takes place during writing and not before, whether or not his new novel should be considered science fiction, what I feel that hovel has in common with Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, our shared love of the ambiguous ending, what he learned by rereading his short fiction to assemble a career-spanning collection, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Shababs — (more…)