I've been at a wedding and therefore have missed a week of updating State of Change. Part eight will appear next Sunday. In the meantime, here's a handy catch-up sheet for those following at home
The Epigraph
Which is pretty important and, I think has come true in the years since I first read it. Here it is, since it's not very long:
“No longer content to wait for social movements to bubble up from the ‘burbs, young, fresh and sniffing for product, a cute symbiosis of media outlets and cultural product firms synthesize them between themselves. ...Far from being a credible claim to futurity, the Marketing Plan follows a relentlessly sideways logic of replacing one product-rhetoric-art’n’theory mix with the next, different from the last in exactly the same way as the last was different to the batch before that. ...Hype may very well be the future of culture.” - McKenzie Wark, “Cyberhype”, World Art, November 1994.
Introduction
Some words of excuse by the author.
Part One: The Fear
In which we are introduced to our hero, Arlo Makepeace Dylan, and his millieu.
Part Two: The Offer
Dylan hears some bad news and is thrown a lifeline.
Part Three: A Little Bit Like A Lobotomy
Dylan undergoes brain surgery and meets his new flatmates.
Part Four: The New Direction
Dylan has some unusual experiences and attends a party.
Part Five: The Silver Machine
Some more unusual experiences, and another party.
Part Six: Mind Fuck/Body Fuck
Things get a bit nasty and a decisive event occurs.
Part Seven: Psychedelic Supernazis
In which a Belgian is accidentally murdered.
Only three(ish) parts to gonow, true believers!
Sunday, 20 June 2010
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
Shine: An Anthology of Near Future Optimistic SF edited by Jeste de Vries
Back in 1995, when I arrived in the UK desperate to become a writer I was looking for a way "in" to the UK SF scene. I think it was Andy Cox (then editing The Third Alternative, now editing Interzone) who put me in touch with Tony Lee of Pigasus Press, editor of the small press mag The Zone. Tony didn't buy any of my stories (at that time - he later bought my story "Insured for Murder" for the Premonitions anthology) he suggested, with charming naivete regarding national rivalries, that as a New Zealander, I might be interested in writing a profile of the Australian writer Greg Egan. Well, as it happened I was already a huge fan of Egan (we all were back then!) and that was the beginning of a non-fiction writing blitz that went on for nearly a decade.
Between 1996 and 2007 I wrote dozens of reviews and articles for The Zone, first the print magazine and then the website. I'd previously been working as freelance editor and journalist in New Zealand, and I'd been keeping a reading journal for a while so I was already tempered for this type of work, and I picked it up pretty quickly, I think. Among my favourites are my reviews of The Emperor of Dreams, the Fantasy Masterworks collection of Clark Ashton Smith stories, my double review of The Day of the Triffids and the authorised sequel, The Night of the Triffids, Lint by Steve Aylett and Jack Vance's last novel Lurulu. I was also very pleased with some of my longer pieces, such as this overview of Jack Vance's work and my interviews with Micheal Moorcock and Kim Newman (who were both utterly charming).
I wrote quite a bit about comics, too and was pretty pleased with my reviews of the marvel Essential volumes for The Fantastic Four and Howard the Duck, and some obscure eighties numbers I remembered from the 80s such as Skreemer and Kid Eternity. Most particularly, I wrote quite a bit about Alan Moore, including this profile that I was very happy with, a review of The DC Stories of Alan Moore, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vol 2 and finally Black Dossier.
That was the last review I wrote for The Zone, an oddity in 2007 that came out of the extraordinary day I describe in the review, because by that time, I'd more or less given up on it and it was the first thing I'd written for them in nearly two years. (I wrote a variation on this piece for the Kapi Mana News, which I posted on this blog here.)
Why did I stop? Well, there are a few reasons. Most importantly, I'd only ever got started as a kind of distaff project to my own fiction writing, and I'd found that it was beginning to take over from fiction all together. As my life changed (kids, new job) I found that I didn't have so much time for writing and I really wanted to concentrate on my fiction (a bit like this blog...). This seems to have worked and I've published stories in each years since then and written another novel, so I think I was right to give that more space.
I had also grown a little jaded with reviewing, for a few reasons. It had started to become a bit formulaic for me. I was getting tired of random "if you like x you'll like y" style reviews, and I wasn't interested in pushing the pseudo academic direction that seemed the only alternative to me then. I was also getting bored and annoyed with the books. I realised I took much more pleasure in old second hand things or reprints than i did in the new novels coming out. I wondered what the point of it all was - who cared what I thought? Who was I really writing for?
That review of Black Dossier is an important turning point. Because of the events surrounding it, and the influence of the MA in creative and life writing at Goldsmiths that I was in the middle of just then, I began to see another way. I began to think of books not as puzzles to be taken apart and solved, but as mirrors that reflect who we are when we read and that reflect into the past of our lives, and as experiences we carry with us into the future. I started this blog on the advice of David Marston (of David marston writes) and I've been influenced in this by his blog, especially his recent entries about politics and the election. I became interested in the idea of the letting the personal and subjective elements of myself leak in to my reviews, and that's when I thought I might be ready to write reviews again.
So, my review of Shine is kind of an experiment. I'm reasonably happy with it, although I think I still felt perhaps overly obliged to address the work and not myself (perhaps it was just that sort of book). There's a balance to be kept, of course, and I don't think my reviews for The Zone will be as personal as the writing I do here about my reading, but I think I can do a bit more than I do on this occasion. It'll be a bit more occasional than it was at my height (and I have a blog to care for now, as well!) but hopefully I can find new ways of thinking and writing about books in the future.
Between 1996 and 2007 I wrote dozens of reviews and articles for The Zone, first the print magazine and then the website. I'd previously been working as freelance editor and journalist in New Zealand, and I'd been keeping a reading journal for a while so I was already tempered for this type of work, and I picked it up pretty quickly, I think. Among my favourites are my reviews of The Emperor of Dreams, the Fantasy Masterworks collection of Clark Ashton Smith stories, my double review of The Day of the Triffids and the authorised sequel, The Night of the Triffids, Lint by Steve Aylett and Jack Vance's last novel Lurulu. I was also very pleased with some of my longer pieces, such as this overview of Jack Vance's work and my interviews with Micheal Moorcock and Kim Newman (who were both utterly charming).
I wrote quite a bit about comics, too and was pretty pleased with my reviews of the marvel Essential volumes for The Fantastic Four and Howard the Duck, and some obscure eighties numbers I remembered from the 80s such as Skreemer and Kid Eternity. Most particularly, I wrote quite a bit about Alan Moore, including this profile that I was very happy with, a review of The DC Stories of Alan Moore, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vol 2 and finally Black Dossier.
That was the last review I wrote for The Zone, an oddity in 2007 that came out of the extraordinary day I describe in the review, because by that time, I'd more or less given up on it and it was the first thing I'd written for them in nearly two years. (I wrote a variation on this piece for the Kapi Mana News, which I posted on this blog here.)
Why did I stop? Well, there are a few reasons. Most importantly, I'd only ever got started as a kind of distaff project to my own fiction writing, and I'd found that it was beginning to take over from fiction all together. As my life changed (kids, new job) I found that I didn't have so much time for writing and I really wanted to concentrate on my fiction (a bit like this blog...). This seems to have worked and I've published stories in each years since then and written another novel, so I think I was right to give that more space.
I had also grown a little jaded with reviewing, for a few reasons. It had started to become a bit formulaic for me. I was getting tired of random "if you like x you'll like y" style reviews, and I wasn't interested in pushing the pseudo academic direction that seemed the only alternative to me then. I was also getting bored and annoyed with the books. I realised I took much more pleasure in old second hand things or reprints than i did in the new novels coming out. I wondered what the point of it all was - who cared what I thought? Who was I really writing for?
That review of Black Dossier is an important turning point. Because of the events surrounding it, and the influence of the MA in creative and life writing at Goldsmiths that I was in the middle of just then, I began to see another way. I began to think of books not as puzzles to be taken apart and solved, but as mirrors that reflect who we are when we read and that reflect into the past of our lives, and as experiences we carry with us into the future. I started this blog on the advice of David Marston (of David marston writes) and I've been influenced in this by his blog, especially his recent entries about politics and the election. I became interested in the idea of the letting the personal and subjective elements of myself leak in to my reviews, and that's when I thought I might be ready to write reviews again.
So, my review of Shine is kind of an experiment. I'm reasonably happy with it, although I think I still felt perhaps overly obliged to address the work and not myself (perhaps it was just that sort of book). There's a balance to be kept, of course, and I don't think my reviews for The Zone will be as personal as the writing I do here about my reading, but I think I can do a bit more than I do on this occasion. It'll be a bit more occasional than it was at my height (and I have a blog to care for now, as well!) but hopefully I can find new ways of thinking and writing about books in the future.
Short Fiction Wednesday
As I've mentioend before, I just choose these stories in a kind of random way, surfing around various sites - often in a bit of hurry - until I find something that looks like it's going to be interesting and isn't too long or too short, and then print them out to read later, on the train or in bed or whatever. I'm surprise how often the stories I pick have similar or contrasting themes. Maybe I make the connections myself subconsciously, maybe they'd appear to connect whatever they were, or maybe the muses guide my hand, who can say? Whatever the cause, this week I have found two stories that deal with questions of the self and identity.
He Angles, She Refracts by Rob Vagle (from Heliotrope) could be fantasy or surrelism, but I think it skirts a fine enough line to a low-context far future SF tale in a pleasingly unfathomable future. In this story, we see the mind turned in on itself in extreme narcissism. In this world, it seems that some people, perhaps the rich and indolent, care for nothing so much as apprehending their own perfected bodies in a series of mirrors. This is clearly portrayed as a weakness, a moral lapse, that leaves them vulnerable to malevolent seducers who steal their images.
There is some hope for escape shown through the lowly servers, who try and help the main character after she's seduced, but instead she turns to another, a man, who has been similarly robbed of his images. The possibility of connecting with another is there, but it's heavily implied that this is just another form of narcissism, with the two just using each other is reinforce their own delight in their physical beauty.
Vagle the captures the characters' self-regarding natures nicely. While the main character is somewhat obnoxious, we can still empathise with the pain and shock of being tipped out of her comfortable coccoon by the villainous seducer. We see how she's brought this on herself, but we still hope she finds a way out. The ending, with all its ambiguities, is satisfiyingly unsettling and has wider implications about relationships and what we want from those closest to us.
The Night Train by Lavie Tidhar (from Strange Horizons) is a solid piece of bio-tech future post-cyberpunk that aspires to something more than its exotic setting and crime story plot. The writing is extremely vivid, and seems to spring naturally from what I know of the seedier elements of South East Asia, gleaned from travel documentaries and Asian crime movies. Tidhar presents a particularly imaginative take on the transhumanist biotech future that includes extreme body modification and AIs slumming it in rented bodies in a kind of post-human equivalent of prostitution. This malleability of the body and plasticity of a more-than-human mind call into to question where we place the limits of the self if they no longer exist in the corporeal fles,h and the illusion of a constant consciousness is tested to the limit.
It's definitely a story of two parts, though - the pulpy gangland hit and the more intriguing relationship between the body guard Mulan Rouge and the AI (or downloaded human mind) Darwin's Choice. The thought prvoking stuff is wrapped around a rather self-conscious genre frame of cyber-punk hit girls and crime melodrama. Tidhar explicitly references Neuromancer in the opening line - "Her name wasn't Molly and she didn't wear shades, reflective or otherwise." - and Heinlein's Friday shortly thereafter (I don't know who Noi, Porn and Ping are, but they might well be similar references).
This made me consider another issue, that of quality. Short Fiction Wednesday isn't really in the business of qualitative reviews - I just want to draw your attention to stories that interest me and hopefully tempt you into reading them. I've got a lot invested in short fiction, as a reader and a writer, so I want to do my part to make sure the scene is healthy and diverse. However, I have been pondering which of these stories is better.
My gut says that the Tidhar story is better - it's imaginative and vivid, and almost reeks of the South East Asian streets it takes its inspiration from - but my head prefers the careful unity of Vagle's story. The slightly meta genre discussion lessens The Night Train, it's a distraction from the main business of the story that's not adequately enfolded into the thematic thrust. In Vagle's story, the business of the seducers is what triggers the change in the characters, but the gangland murder plot feels bolted on in Tidhar's story, as if it's something he felt he had to include. The business about Molly and Friday sounds apologetic, as if deep down he knows that the story he really wants to tell is the story of mulan Rouge and Darwin's Choice.
It's too much to expect perfection, I know, and I get fed up with the various review sites that do, where good books or stories are castigated for not being great, but in the case of The Night Train it's so close, and the author even seems aware of the problem, that I think it bears comment.
He Angles, She Refracts by Rob Vagle (from Heliotrope) could be fantasy or surrelism, but I think it skirts a fine enough line to a low-context far future SF tale in a pleasingly unfathomable future. In this story, we see the mind turned in on itself in extreme narcissism. In this world, it seems that some people, perhaps the rich and indolent, care for nothing so much as apprehending their own perfected bodies in a series of mirrors. This is clearly portrayed as a weakness, a moral lapse, that leaves them vulnerable to malevolent seducers who steal their images.
There is some hope for escape shown through the lowly servers, who try and help the main character after she's seduced, but instead she turns to another, a man, who has been similarly robbed of his images. The possibility of connecting with another is there, but it's heavily implied that this is just another form of narcissism, with the two just using each other is reinforce their own delight in their physical beauty.
Vagle the captures the characters' self-regarding natures nicely. While the main character is somewhat obnoxious, we can still empathise with the pain and shock of being tipped out of her comfortable coccoon by the villainous seducer. We see how she's brought this on herself, but we still hope she finds a way out. The ending, with all its ambiguities, is satisfiyingly unsettling and has wider implications about relationships and what we want from those closest to us.
The Night Train by Lavie Tidhar (from Strange Horizons) is a solid piece of bio-tech future post-cyberpunk that aspires to something more than its exotic setting and crime story plot. The writing is extremely vivid, and seems to spring naturally from what I know of the seedier elements of South East Asia, gleaned from travel documentaries and Asian crime movies. Tidhar presents a particularly imaginative take on the transhumanist biotech future that includes extreme body modification and AIs slumming it in rented bodies in a kind of post-human equivalent of prostitution. This malleability of the body and plasticity of a more-than-human mind call into to question where we place the limits of the self if they no longer exist in the corporeal fles,h and the illusion of a constant consciousness is tested to the limit.
It's definitely a story of two parts, though - the pulpy gangland hit and the more intriguing relationship between the body guard Mulan Rouge and the AI (or downloaded human mind) Darwin's Choice. The thought prvoking stuff is wrapped around a rather self-conscious genre frame of cyber-punk hit girls and crime melodrama. Tidhar explicitly references Neuromancer in the opening line - "Her name wasn't Molly and she didn't wear shades, reflective or otherwise." - and Heinlein's Friday shortly thereafter (I don't know who Noi, Porn and Ping are, but they might well be similar references).
This made me consider another issue, that of quality. Short Fiction Wednesday isn't really in the business of qualitative reviews - I just want to draw your attention to stories that interest me and hopefully tempt you into reading them. I've got a lot invested in short fiction, as a reader and a writer, so I want to do my part to make sure the scene is healthy and diverse. However, I have been pondering which of these stories is better.
My gut says that the Tidhar story is better - it's imaginative and vivid, and almost reeks of the South East Asian streets it takes its inspiration from - but my head prefers the careful unity of Vagle's story. The slightly meta genre discussion lessens The Night Train, it's a distraction from the main business of the story that's not adequately enfolded into the thematic thrust. In Vagle's story, the business of the seducers is what triggers the change in the characters, but the gangland murder plot feels bolted on in Tidhar's story, as if it's something he felt he had to include. The business about Molly and Friday sounds apologetic, as if deep down he knows that the story he really wants to tell is the story of mulan Rouge and Darwin's Choice.
It's too much to expect perfection, I know, and I get fed up with the various review sites that do, where good books or stories are castigated for not being great, but in the case of The Night Train it's so close, and the author even seems aware of the problem, that I think it bears comment.
Monday, 14 June 2010
It's oh so quiet...
Isn't it though? I've got a lot on right now - it's That time of the year for me - so I'm not posting as much. Plus, work has gotten busy again, and I have less time to bunk off and spit out posts on this and that.
I'm also holding off blogging about Shine until my review goes live on The Zone - I'll provide a short, complementary perhaps entirely tengential commentary here when it does. Otherwise, reading has been slow - I found Shine a slog, perhaps an early indication of which way the review's gonna go and The Still Point is a fine novel, but not my usual thing, so that one's going slow, too.
Not sure what I'll read after that, but I'm inclined by some crime. I'm also tempted to re-read Vance's The Demon Princes (for the zillionth time) cos it's been a few years and I do realy enjoy it. And, since I read Beyond Black, maybe Wolf Hall.
In the meantime, here' the video of that Bjork song, leached from youtube:
I'm also holding off blogging about Shine until my review goes live on The Zone - I'll provide a short, complementary perhaps entirely tengential commentary here when it does. Otherwise, reading has been slow - I found Shine a slog, perhaps an early indication of which way the review's gonna go and The Still Point is a fine novel, but not my usual thing, so that one's going slow, too.
Not sure what I'll read after that, but I'm inclined by some crime. I'm also tempted to re-read Vance's The Demon Princes (for the zillionth time) cos it's been a few years and I do realy enjoy it. And, since I read Beyond Black, maybe Wolf Hall.
In the meantime, here' the video of that Bjork song, leached from youtube:
Sunday, 13 June 2010
State of Change Part Seven: Psychedelic Super Nazis
I've posted part seven of my novella State of Change over at its own blog. Things start to get really weird now, and a life time's reading of Fortean and conspiracy stuff begins to show. Some questions get answered, some new ones come up and a Belgian gets machine gunned. There's something for everyone this time around!
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Short Fiction Wednesday
My Father's Singularity by Brenda Copper (published at Clarkesworld) has an illuminating take on what's become a bit of cliché in recent years. The story cleverly shows us two sides of the imminent (yeah, right!) techno-rapture, when old stick in the muds like me won't be able to tell our children from our home appliances. The narrator finds himself on the cusp of manhood just as the wave of new tech crashes. Just as he is leaving home, it happens all around him and he grasps all the opportunities it offers. When he returns home, though, he discovers his father – who has meant so much to him – no longer recognises.
The prose is a little rough here and there, particularly at the start, but it's still a wonderfully poignant story that keeps the loving relationship of a father and son at its heart. It outlines what we stand to lose in the rapid uptake of technology, without becoming a dire warning or a propaganda tract. It presents both sides in an even handed way, a beautiful exploration of ideas rather than a harangue.
This weeks second story comes from a new webzine called Lightspeed. These guys have hit the ground running, with an excellent publicity campaign that saw them prominently featured in i09, and elsewhere online, announcing their arrival. They have, correspondingly, garnered quite a bit of attention – well done you Lightspeed folks!
If this story is anything to go by, this could be one to watch. I'm Alive, I Love You, I'll See You In Reno by Vylar Kaftan is a beautiful, poetic story of love and separation that effortlessly weaves it's science fictional elements into the characters' lives through incident and metaphor. It's a wonderful poetic piece that I found absolutely breathtaking.
Between them, these two stories offer a fantastic lesson in using relationships in SF stories in a convincing way. Very often, stories of this type clumsily spread relationships over a concept without the two ever quite meeting (I've written a few like that myself). Here, the two are intimately entwined, the one growing out of the other as naturally as in life.
The prose is a little rough here and there, particularly at the start, but it's still a wonderfully poignant story that keeps the loving relationship of a father and son at its heart. It outlines what we stand to lose in the rapid uptake of technology, without becoming a dire warning or a propaganda tract. It presents both sides in an even handed way, a beautiful exploration of ideas rather than a harangue.
This weeks second story comes from a new webzine called Lightspeed. These guys have hit the ground running, with an excellent publicity campaign that saw them prominently featured in i09, and elsewhere online, announcing their arrival. They have, correspondingly, garnered quite a bit of attention – well done you Lightspeed folks!
If this story is anything to go by, this could be one to watch. I'm Alive, I Love You, I'll See You In Reno by Vylar Kaftan is a beautiful, poetic story of love and separation that effortlessly weaves it's science fictional elements into the characters' lives through incident and metaphor. It's a wonderful poetic piece that I found absolutely breathtaking.
Between them, these two stories offer a fantastic lesson in using relationships in SF stories in a convincing way. Very often, stories of this type clumsily spread relationships over a concept without the two ever quite meeting (I've written a few like that myself). Here, the two are intimately entwined, the one growing out of the other as naturally as in life.
Tuesday, 8 June 2010
Where is hope and wonder?
So, this week a book blog Guardian thing decided to make the point that Philip K Dick's prose was a little kldugy, from time to time. I wouldn't really argue with that, after all Dick wrote fast under heavy financial constraints and often the influence of drugs, so if there's the occasional flub we shouldn't be surprised, but even so it's a small-minded and stupid criticism to make.
By and large Dick's prose is pretty good, and often wonderful. Deckard's dialogue with Mercer in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for example, of the creepy descriptions of the half-life clinic in Ubik are magnificently controlled. Also in Ubik, there's the hilarious opening scene where Joe Chip argues with his door over whether the 25 cent opening charge is a fee of a gratuity. These scenes - plucked from the top of my head - are brilliantly realised, and there are moments like this all around his books and stories.
You could go through any great writer, it seems to me, and isolate a few paragraphs where the prose doesn't quite measure up - even Homer nodded - but why would you?
Well, the answer is simple - web hits. This silly little piece has generated a lot of hits from flabbergasted commenters (yes, me included) spluttering refutations. That's what it's all about.
"Pink Floyd are over rated!"
"Martin Amis is an Arab-hating hack!"
"Dali was a sell out nutter!"
"Mozart is bourgeois toss!"
This kind of commentary infects the web as bloggers - both professional and amatuer - attempt to generate traffic. The blogosphere (sorry!) is alive with puffed-up little attention whores, wannabe giant killers flinging their vapid feaces in an attempt to attract attention without creating one damn thing of value of their own.
This is why I'm not linking to the article. You can find it easily enough on your own, if you like, but don't bother. It's dreary pretend controversy for its own sake that will only make you cross.
I suppose the rejoinder is to point at all the review blogs that give superficial, fawning reviews off the latest ARC to hit the blogger's doorstep. That's just part of the marketing machine, just hype that's easy to ignore. Even hype is a more defensible practice than generating attention through wilful ignorance and stupidity.
Well, here at Pointless Philosophical Asides you'll find none of either. On the one hand, I want to share the things I love, communicate what's special and brilliant about them. On the other, my reading log includes a honest appreciation of books and stories, acknowledging the good and the bad. I guess that's why I never get any traffic...
By and large Dick's prose is pretty good, and often wonderful. Deckard's dialogue with Mercer in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for example, of the creepy descriptions of the half-life clinic in Ubik are magnificently controlled. Also in Ubik, there's the hilarious opening scene where Joe Chip argues with his door over whether the 25 cent opening charge is a fee of a gratuity. These scenes - plucked from the top of my head - are brilliantly realised, and there are moments like this all around his books and stories.
You could go through any great writer, it seems to me, and isolate a few paragraphs where the prose doesn't quite measure up - even Homer nodded - but why would you?
Well, the answer is simple - web hits. This silly little piece has generated a lot of hits from flabbergasted commenters (yes, me included) spluttering refutations. That's what it's all about.
"Pink Floyd are over rated!"
"Martin Amis is an Arab-hating hack!"
"Dali was a sell out nutter!"
"Mozart is bourgeois toss!"
This kind of commentary infects the web as bloggers - both professional and amatuer - attempt to generate traffic. The blogosphere (sorry!) is alive with puffed-up little attention whores, wannabe giant killers flinging their vapid feaces in an attempt to attract attention without creating one damn thing of value of their own.
This is why I'm not linking to the article. You can find it easily enough on your own, if you like, but don't bother. It's dreary pretend controversy for its own sake that will only make you cross.
I suppose the rejoinder is to point at all the review blogs that give superficial, fawning reviews off the latest ARC to hit the blogger's doorstep. That's just part of the marketing machine, just hype that's easy to ignore. Even hype is a more defensible practice than generating attention through wilful ignorance and stupidity.
Well, here at Pointless Philosophical Asides you'll find none of either. On the one hand, I want to share the things I love, communicate what's special and brilliant about them. On the other, my reading log includes a honest appreciation of books and stories, acknowledging the good and the bad. I guess that's why I never get any traffic...
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