This page is a rag-bag of miscellaneous links that I'll be adding to from time to time. There's no order or logic to it, but I'm allowed to go off the rails some time, right?

About me (biography)

Archive - interviews

Archive - features by me.

Pens - real pens with real ink.

Artists - the clever people who illustrate my books and short stories.

Biography

Yes, I'm English. I live in England. I write English English.(Except for the spelling, of course.) But for all intents and purposes, treat me as a North American author, because I'm not part of the UK SF scene, and my focus is pretty well exclusively the US market. To be honest, I'm not part of any SF scene. I'm not much of a joiner-in when it comes to SF, and, if the fancy takes me and the money is right, I'll write in other genres.

Writing novels is now my full-time job. But I still think of myself as that noblest of God's monkey-boys - a journalist. I went cold turkey on illuminating the world (whether the World wanted it or not) with relentlessly daily blogging, but I got bored with that, partly because there are way too many bloggers and assorted dickheads out there wasting bandwidth with half-arsed opinions, and the universe didn't need any more. Besides, I wasn't getting paid for it. But I still have a hard-wired urge to chase fire engines and harrass politicians. I planned to keep my hand in as a spin-doctor, too - fluent Weasel spoken here - but I found my evil persuasive Sith powers were best used to enhance my own image, thanks very much.

Like most writers, I've been around a bit. Most of my working life has been spent as a journo in TV and newspapers. At one time or another I've been an advertising copywriter, a media liaison officer for the police, a journalism lecturer, a public relations manager and a defence correspondent. I've served in both the Territorial Army and the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service (now disbanded, alas).

I now live in Wiltshire, where some very fine beers are made, but I come from Portsmouth, home of the Royal Navy and birthplace of the world's greatest engineer, Isambard Brunel - oh, and some chaps called Charles Dickens and Peter Sellers. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used to have a medical practice just around the corner from my old house and created Sherlock Holmes there, and H G Wells worked in a drapery store in the same road. Rudyard Kipling spent some childhood years in Portsmouth and Nevil Shute lived in the city too, so you can see there's something about Pompey that drives you to fiction. After that, you leave. It seems inevitable.

Portsmouth's well worth a visit, but the beer's not so good - except Pompey Royal, if you can still find it, and CSB, in Her Majesty's ships.

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INTERVIEWS

Interview in Some Fantastic :  feature at Emerald City and interview at Strange Horizons. Interview by Greg Frost at Infinity Plus. (Please read 'em before asking questions - they answer a lot!)

Star Wars En Direct radio - live interview from Celebration III.

Interview with Star Wars En Direct radio about TRIPLE ZERO, writing mad, bad and dangerous characters, and maybe even something about BLOODLINES. Warning: this is a two-hour programme!

Read Atlanta Science Fiction Society's interview with me here.

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(Reproduced from the Rage Against column, Matrix, December 2004, with the kind permission of the editors.)

By Karen Traviss

Those of us of a certain age will recall a comedy sketch where John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett line up in order of height and proceed to act out a social hierarchy.

Cleese, the bowler-hatted toff, says he looks down on both pin-striped middle class Barker and cloth-capped working class Corbett: Barker, with some relief, says that although he looks up to Cleese, he can look down on Corbett. And it feels like we're acting out that sketch in the SF/F community.

In our desperate bid to be taken seriously by the mainstream, whatever that is, we fall over ourselves to prove how literary we are. Whether we admit it or not, we're hurt by the Atwoods of this world who deny they're one of us, and by the insinuations that what we write (or read) is... rubbish. And if you're not literary, then you cling desperately to the second-best seal of respectability, that of being rigorously scientific.

Enter the New Snobbery: not all SF/F is equal. By creating an internal hierarchy, we the despised can find someone to actually look down upon within our own ranks.

The politics of the prison community come to life. If you wear the indefinable label of cutting edge, new wave, experimental or any other manly and respectable sub-genre, you're a gangland boss: you have carpet in your cell and the other lags give you a respectfully wide berth. Beneath you in the pecking order are the armed robbers, the traditional but serious SF/F writers, and beneath them are the burglars - populist SF/F writers.

But banged up in solitary for their own safety - with the granny-bashers and the nonces - are the slags who write media tie-ins and the peddlers of game-related fiction. Share a cell with one of those? I fink not, guv'nor. And some of the inmates in HM Prison UK feel they're a notch above their opposite numbers in the US State Correctional Facility.

At Worldcon this year I was on a panel that looked at respectability in SF/F. One of the debates was this: do we really want to be respectable? I suspect we don't. We want to keep the ghetto alive when the rest of publishing world - beyond the navel-gazing literary minority - doesn't really see us as geekdom, because it makes us feel a bit special, a bit rebellious. We're so addicted to this self-stigmatisation that we reinforce it in our own ranks.

I'm happy to slop out with the most despised. I've had the fascinating experience this year of being banged up both for an armed blag - serious SF in the USA, so perhaps plea-bargained down to breaking and entering by UK standards - and for the disgusting crime of media tie-ins. Some of my fellow lags have wondered aloud how an almost respectable writer allowed herself to sink into the pit of writing that sort of SF so early in her career.

Well, here's the answer: someone asked me to do it. And they pay me. I enjoy writing it, and readers enjoy reading it, and they buy my allegedly respectable titles, which they might never have done otherwise. And nobody stops you applying the same professional skill to media tie-ins. You can write good SF within its walls if you want to.

There's a breathtaking arrogance about sneering at someone's leisure reading choices, and it smacks of a Victorian exhortation to self-improvement. Inevitably, it's often accompanied by not having read the despised work but holding an opinion anyway, and seldom having spoken to the readers of media fiction.

You know what? These readers currently shambling around the exercise yard with the old lags like me have taken courses and done their OU degrees. Some of them even had a fancy education and responsible jobs before they were sent down. They're not stupid. They just got caught.

So let's not get too up ourselves about a pecking order within our genre. It's not just insulting to readers. It's also missing the point that there's no objective test for "respectable" fiction, so we're left with favourable opinion as our yardstick - and sales suggest that media fiction is seen more favourably than the respectable books (mine included) that these readers could just as easily buy.

But you'll have to excuse me - it's slopping-out time now. I just hope I don't run into any of those romance writers...

(Karen Traviss is a full-time SF writer, ex-journalist and general armed robber who does a bit of media tie-in now and then. She's currently on the run in Wiltshire. )

Copyright Matrix (the news magazine of the BSFA) and Karen Traviss 2004

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Pens

If you pound a keyboard for a living, you come to appreciate pens sooner or later. And I mean real pens, with nibs and ink and everything: not rollerballs, not ballpoints, not fibretips. Pens. Pens don't crash without saving your file. They don't hang mid-programme. And they'll still be around and in use many years after the technology used to build this site is long gone.

On the other hand, computers don't ruin your best white blouse or make a mess of your hands, unless you use them in a very strange manner.

Writers on pens (with thanks to Norman Haase, pen merchant par excellence and source of those handy little Hero pens from China).

John Mottishaw not only sells fabulous pens but customises nibs. Actually, that's like saying Michaelangelo did a bit of painting.

Old School Pens - UK company specialising in Sheaffer Snorkels, a real gadget-lover's pen if ever there was one.

Pendemonium - American pen specialists with just about everything you could possibly want by way of pens, pencils and stuff to go with them.

The Writing Desk - another UK company with a nice range of modern high-end pens and also a terrific range of inks.

Richard Binder does terrific nib conversions, among other things. He's the creator of the ItaliFine, a nib that's italic one way and an ordinary point the other way up. And, yes, it works a treat.

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ARTISTS

Take a look at the portfolios of the exceptional artists whose work has appeared with my short fiction and on the covers of my novels. Don't you wish you could paint like that?

Greg Bridges

Robert Hendrickson

Michael Gibbs

John Berkey

Rats

If more rats were elected to positions of power in government, the world would be a much saner place. And I'd be able to use my contacts in ratty society to get a cushy job. Seriously, rats are clean, clever, funny, discerning, and great companions.

They don't live long, I'm sad to say. I have no rats at the moment, but here are rodent chums who have passed on.

On his best behaviour.

Gone But Not Forgotten

Scotty died aged two and a half with a pituitary tumour. We took him in when his owner became so severely allergic to animals that she couldn't even touch him: she continued to visit just to see him, though. In that year that he was with us Scotty gave my family more delight and affection than most humans could manage in a lifetime. He was a big lad (two pounds at his peak) and his passions were Tesco chewy nut bars and ice cubes. I've had many rat companions in the past twenty years but Scotty was an exceptional personality and we miss him like hell. I'll let these pictures say the rest.

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Grappling over a piece of toffee

Debating whether to jump for it.

I had two pedigree dumbo girls, Blue Moon Anya and Blue Moon Angelica, AKA Inky and WiddlyBeast. We lost Inky to congestive heart failure and WiddlyBeast to (we believe) a liver condition. Rat princesses or not, they could have done with some table manners. And no piece of soft furnishing was safe from their teeth.

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Rupert finds some Cadbury's Dairy Milk.

Sausage doing chicken impersonations.

The following pictures are of my two much-loved "Social Services" rescue rats, Sausage and Rupert. I found homes for them and their siblings after a social services client found he had a pregnant rat and no suitable accommodation. Sausage (the agouti hooded chap) modelled himself closely on Homer Simpson but his brother Rupert (the Siamese) was a prince among rats. Sadly, they died within a few months of each other at the end of 1999/2000.

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Marbles - another rescue rat from the local RSPCA shelter - must have had a happier time with humans than Harry the Probably Wild because he was the friendliest rat imaginable when we took him in. He didn't so much settle in to life Chez Traviss as take over. He had his own armchair (see picture) and was an unpaid ambassador for ratkind, enchanting everyone who met him. Sadly, his health suddenly deteriorated after just five and half months with us and he had to be put to sleep after developing major heart problems. Of all the rats that have shared our home over the years, Marbles was the sweetest-tempered, gentlest and most affectionate, and he leaves a gap that will never be filled.

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Harry the Probably Wild was another rescue rat from the local RSPCA. The staff there, who seemed to know little about rats, said been dumped at the shelter in a terrible condition. I asked how he'd been delivered to them, and they said they found him waiting outside the small animal house. No cage.No box. Just a rat sitting there.

Er....no, that wasn't a dumped rat. That was a WILD rat, possible recovering from a dog attack or rat poison, and looking for shelter or a source of food. They just didn't seem to realise he was wild. He looked wild (there are subtle differences even in domesticated agouti rats) and he had wild rat behavioural characteristics. But seeing as the poor little bugger was in such a state, and I didn't think the RSPCA shelter was keeping its rats in acceptable conditions, I took him home - along with Marbles.

It took a long time to help Harry accept humans, but he turned into a gentle, loving old boy who was no trouble to anyone. I returned home one day to find he had died peacefully in his sleep.

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Pipsqueak (the black dumbo rat, left) had to be put to sleep on November 12 2003. She appeared to have a brain tumour: her character changed out of all recognition and we had to separate her from her sister Lucrezia ( the siamese rat, below) to stop her from attacking her. She was so distressed by the end that I regret letting her go on so long. They were both rescue rats from the local RSPCA. Deciding to end a small friend's life never gets any easier, however many times you face the decision.

Every rat, like every human, is an individual. Pip (aka Catherine de Medici) feared nothing and no-one, despite being tiny. She was a wonderful friend and hugely

entertaining company.

Lucrezia Borgia died in her sleep on September 1 2005, aged nearly three and a half. She had a good innings and enjoyed life up to the last day, despite being a little paralyzed in the hind legs through age.

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