Part of the mission of Short Fiction Wednesday is that old SF standby, exploring new worlds and seeking out new civilizations, or, more prosaically, new fiction venues and new writers. Electric Spec is a venue that's featured in a previous entry (I really enjoyed that one) but which I hadn't heard of before I started Short Fiction Wednesday, and Prinkipria is newly found for this week's instalment. Prinkipria has been publishing just this year; maybe I just have a weird perspective because of the whole short fiction thing, but it seems to me that there are not only a lot of venues out there, but that they are steadily multiplying.
Print is dead, chums. Charging for stories, well, sadly that's also probably dead. Pay-walls are for half-dead Australian tycoons, not short fiction sites! It's hard enough to get people to read, let alone read short fiction, let alone pay for the (sometimes) dubious pleasure.
On that note, you may notice that Short Fiction Wednesday isn't the most critical review feature on the internet. I'm totally up front about this: Short Fiction Wednesday is about promotion and celebration, not frowning critical engagement. “But surely, Patrick,” I hear you say through the bugging devices I have installed in your skull, “Surely some stories are just no good?” Indeed so, and these stories don't make it to Short Fiction Wednesday. If I can't find something positive to say about a story, then I put it to one side and an appearance in Short Fiction Wednesday can be considered as a mark of quality from my wobbly old sensorium, whatever that may be worth.
I'd say, though, that easily three-quarters of what I read is just fine, not always perfect but well worth the investment of time (minimal) and money (zero) to read. When you take a look at the crappy novels that commercial publishers expect you to spend eight quid and a week of your life with, you will find that the stories featured here are pretty good alternative. So, without further ado, let's take a look at this weeks offerings...
Streetwise by Phil Emery is a slice of vaguely dystopian cyber-punky life. It examines the idea of the second chance, of the possibility we can use our children (although here it's a clone self) as a way to avoid the mistakes we've made through our lives. In this case we get to see the narrator in crisis when he sees his plans falling apart (or are they?) and he examines his own life and hopes and dreams.
Plenty of people (it seems to me) complain about the darkness of the SF vision, but I'm not sure if it's entirely fair to call this sort of story dystopia. It lacks the political engagement of a true dystopia and if your idea of hell on Earth is “some folk are rich some folk are poor; some folk are happy, some folk are sad” then, welcome to the jungle, creeps!
Instead, stories that are sometimes labelled “dystopia” have a more personal sort of misery in their sights. I think that SF's need to create a consistent world can make a subjectively negative world view seem like an overly objective description of a world. In stories with this kind of close POV and short window of exploration, the setting is more an expression of character. Some people are just downers, and I think Emery's narrator is probably one of them.
Emery does a particularly good job of creating a consistent world through the persistent use of neologisms, any of which on its own might be dubious, but add up to a highly individualised world. Perhaps there's a little too much going on, but Emery keeps us going through his story and offers his troubled protagonist a hope of something better in the future.
Interview With the Bigfoot is a really fun story (think about the title for a minute!) from Chris Morrow, who I hadn't heard of before. He's Pinkipria's featured author for June and he has a few ebooks out with Aspen Mountain Press - they've got an interview with him, too if you want to find out more.
I'm a bigfoot fan myself, an old Fortean from way back before it was cool and everything, so I particularly found this very appealing. Beyond the subject matter, I really liked Neal the amiable loser who has hooked up with the BFHA (the Bigfoot Hunters of America) as a way to get out of the house. The story has a sweet undercurrent about friends and friendship, but the main thrust is the enocunter with the big hairy bloke himself. He seems like a good natured source, but ... well, I shan't give away any more. Just saying “but” probably enough of a spoiler!
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Sunday, 27 June 2010
John Lennon: Naked
I just watched this. The first thing that struck me: when the hell did British film-makers lose the ability to make a show that didn't look like a bunch of luvvies in wigs? Eccleston did OK (bearing in mind that Lennon was seven years dead before the age Eccleston is now) but he had his performance to sustain the illusion. We could get inside him, so the visuals weren't that important, but the others didn't have that. They mostly just sat around wearing comedy moustaches bouncing us out of the dream everytime they opened their mouths.
It was worst with Paul, who was a vital part of the drama here. That fraternal bond was surely part of what sustained John for a while, but the Paul actor just never gt a chance. Plus, he played him like a mumbling druggie, like someone who has never been a mumbling druggie would play a mumbling druggie.
Next thing: okay, that's some sad shit, but there are millions of boys/men who go through this who aren't John Lennon. The doco tried to play it fair - "What about your son?" asks one of the many the sneering journos as John fucks off to America - but that just left it unfocused. John came out of that as selfish and spoiled instead of selfish, spoiled and damaged (which was surely the whole point).
It was almost redeemed by the scene where John plays his Dad "Mother". That should have been the whole show - a two hander based around that encounter, maybe 45 minutes. That could have been interesting, penetrating, revealing. That could have taken these specifics about a famous pop singer and made them universal about fathers and sons and the holes left in so many people's lives. That scene was the crux of it, the meat, but it was so meagre, and surrounded by so much pointless crap, about the lovable mop tops, it got lost.
The art of autobiography and biogrpahy is to make the particular universal; without that, all you're left with is tittle-tattle. With "Mother", Lennon managed that with startling brevity, directness and honesty. I guess that's why he was John, and these fuckers are just the fuckers they are.
There's a good video for the song from youtube (originally from the Anthology DVD?) but due to size I can't embed. Therefore, here's a link, sorry about that.
Combine it with this one, and the film's entirely superfluous. Anything you can't infer from them isn't important.
It was worst with Paul, who was a vital part of the drama here. That fraternal bond was surely part of what sustained John for a while, but the Paul actor just never gt a chance. Plus, he played him like a mumbling druggie, like someone who has never been a mumbling druggie would play a mumbling druggie.
Next thing: okay, that's some sad shit, but there are millions of boys/men who go through this who aren't John Lennon. The doco tried to play it fair - "What about your son?" asks one of the many the sneering journos as John fucks off to America - but that just left it unfocused. John came out of that as selfish and spoiled instead of selfish, spoiled and damaged (which was surely the whole point).
It was almost redeemed by the scene where John plays his Dad "Mother". That should have been the whole show - a two hander based around that encounter, maybe 45 minutes. That could have been interesting, penetrating, revealing. That could have taken these specifics about a famous pop singer and made them universal about fathers and sons and the holes left in so many people's lives. That scene was the crux of it, the meat, but it was so meagre, and surrounded by so much pointless crap, about the lovable mop tops, it got lost.
The art of autobiography and biogrpahy is to make the particular universal; without that, all you're left with is tittle-tattle. With "Mother", Lennon managed that with startling brevity, directness and honesty. I guess that's why he was John, and these fuckers are just the fuckers they are.
There's a good video for the song from youtube (originally from the Anthology DVD?) but due to size I can't embed. Therefore, here's a link, sorry about that.
Combine it with this one, and the film's entirely superfluous. Anything you can't infer from them isn't important.
State of Change Part Eight: Cuba Street Improv
Ah, Cuba Street! This, of course, was written years ago when Cuba Street was still (just) clinging to its boho vibe. Midnight Espresso was run by lunatics, the Working Men's Club operated out of that disgusting old hotel (the name of which I've forgotten), Mr Smiles had yet to be bull-dozed for the benefit of the motorway, the dusty empty World Trade Centre was still home to dodgy go-nowhere importers and East European trade missions. Silvios and Slowboat, Konditerei Aida (that used to advertise before the movies) and The Hole in the Wall Club. It may be hard to believe now, but the Matterhorn was once a poky little coffee shop selling sausage rolls and watery tea.
Time was, there was a line-up of second hand bookshops, and dole day could be happily spent sifting through the shelves looking for ancient artefacts at a bargain price. They've all been replaced by coffee shops now, feeding kiwi coffee snobbery (one of my old home's least appealing features, although food snobbery in general was well under weigh before I left). The Ferret bookshop still endures, as of my last visit, and I urge you to poke your nose in to its dusty, quirky wilfully anti-commercial corners to see if you can still catch a whiff of the way things were.
I guess if there's one thing I got wrong it was which way the Street would go. Obviously, I was writing about the present then, not the future, and I did understand how it was all being compromised and commodified, but little did I suspect the extent of the puke-inducing yuppie-fication that has occurred.
All of which doesn't have much to do with part eight of State of Change. Here we find Dylan at last backed into a corner and seeking a way out. What options are the left for him? Can he find a way out? Is a dignified exit still a possibility? Read on!
Time was, there was a line-up of second hand bookshops, and dole day could be happily spent sifting through the shelves looking for ancient artefacts at a bargain price. They've all been replaced by coffee shops now, feeding kiwi coffee snobbery (one of my old home's least appealing features, although food snobbery in general was well under weigh before I left). The Ferret bookshop still endures, as of my last visit, and I urge you to poke your nose in to its dusty, quirky wilfully anti-commercial corners to see if you can still catch a whiff of the way things were.
I guess if there's one thing I got wrong it was which way the Street would go. Obviously, I was writing about the present then, not the future, and I did understand how it was all being compromised and commodified, but little did I suspect the extent of the puke-inducing yuppie-fication that has occurred.
All of which doesn't have much to do with part eight of State of Change. Here we find Dylan at last backed into a corner and seeking a way out. What options are the left for him? Can he find a way out? Is a dignified exit still a possibility? Read on!
Thursday, 24 June 2010
The Still Point by Amy Sackville
“I will reach it,” Edward Mackley tells his new bride; “I will wait,” she replies. He doesn't; she does.
I know Amy Sackville. She was in my class at Goldsmith's and it was clear, right from the start, that she was working on something that was in a different class from the rest of us. I remember very clearly reading the passage depicting Edward Mackley's death for workshop, moved almost to tears by the horror of it. I didn't know what to say: “Don't change a word.”
Amy was quickly snapped up by an agent and found a publisher. The Still Point was adapted for Book At Bedtime on Radio Four, and part of the long-list for the Orange Prize. It's the sort of thing we all dreamed of happening, and there's something magical about seeing someone I know with genuine talent getting recognised after half a lifetime backing beautiful losers. In this case I have the added pleasure of congratulating myself for spotting it early on.
I'd only seen it in bits before, so reading the whole thing, and seeing for the first time how it all fits together, it's even more impressive. I hadn't read much of the modern story of Julia and Simon, and I see now how this part of the novel provides resolution to the old wounds of the Mackleys. The interplay of these stories enlarges them both. There are secrets to come out, and an enduring legacy of loss that reaches out across the century that separates the two stories. In isolation the passages are clever, moving, musical but seeing how it all comes together, reading all the connecting elements I hadn't seen before, I love it even more.
Edward Mackley turns back from the pole, but never gives up on life, even when all hope is lost. “I can't go on without”, Emily writes a single unfinished sentence in the notebook he gave her before he left, unable to finish the phrase, as if by finishing it she'll finish herself. It's a very British sort of failure, the unsuccessful Polar explorer who might be a footnote in some volume of exploration, the precursor to some else's more heroic tale, but here we look at the consequences of ambition gone unrewarded.
When do you stop? When do you give up? What do you do when all hope is gone? A friend asked me once “How can you sit there writing day after day, knowing that you'll never make it?” To be honest, I don't know. Once you set out there's no going back. Eventually you find yourself stuck on an island in the middle of a blizzard and there's no where else to go.
“I will reach it,” I tell myself, skin turned black beneath the ice. “I will wait,” I reply, and like Emily I'm waiting still.
I know Amy Sackville. She was in my class at Goldsmith's and it was clear, right from the start, that she was working on something that was in a different class from the rest of us. I remember very clearly reading the passage depicting Edward Mackley's death for workshop, moved almost to tears by the horror of it. I didn't know what to say: “Don't change a word.”
Amy was quickly snapped up by an agent and found a publisher. The Still Point was adapted for Book At Bedtime on Radio Four, and part of the long-list for the Orange Prize. It's the sort of thing we all dreamed of happening, and there's something magical about seeing someone I know with genuine talent getting recognised after half a lifetime backing beautiful losers. In this case I have the added pleasure of congratulating myself for spotting it early on.
I'd only seen it in bits before, so reading the whole thing, and seeing for the first time how it all fits together, it's even more impressive. I hadn't read much of the modern story of Julia and Simon, and I see now how this part of the novel provides resolution to the old wounds of the Mackleys. The interplay of these stories enlarges them both. There are secrets to come out, and an enduring legacy of loss that reaches out across the century that separates the two stories. In isolation the passages are clever, moving, musical but seeing how it all comes together, reading all the connecting elements I hadn't seen before, I love it even more.
Edward Mackley turns back from the pole, but never gives up on life, even when all hope is lost. “I can't go on without”, Emily writes a single unfinished sentence in the notebook he gave her before he left, unable to finish the phrase, as if by finishing it she'll finish herself. It's a very British sort of failure, the unsuccessful Polar explorer who might be a footnote in some volume of exploration, the precursor to some else's more heroic tale, but here we look at the consequences of ambition gone unrewarded.
When do you stop? When do you give up? What do you do when all hope is gone? A friend asked me once “How can you sit there writing day after day, knowing that you'll never make it?” To be honest, I don't know. Once you set out there's no going back. Eventually you find yourself stuck on an island in the middle of a blizzard and there's no where else to go.
“I will reach it,” I tell myself, skin turned black beneath the ice. “I will wait,” I reply, and like Emily I'm waiting still.
Wednesday, 23 June 2010
Wisdom from John K
Ren & Stimpy was probably as important in the development in my sense of humour as Monty Python. Just the other Sunday I spent a couple of hours chuckling over old R&S cartoons with my daughter (who's four) and loved all this stuff about farts and nose picking.
John K's blog (linked on the left there) is generally about cartooning and animation (and often, by extension, comedy in general). Just today we get this bit amazing wisdom:
John K's blog (linked on the left there) is generally about cartooning and animation (and often, by extension, comedy in general). Just today we get this bit amazing wisdom:
Jimmy Hatlo is one of these towering giants of cragginess. He appeals to the middle aged man in all of us. Even as a kid, I loved these man cartoonists and identified with them. I think in every lad - and especially in every red blooded cartoonist boy, there lurks a fascination with the world of adults. Adults are funny, with their rules, their bulbous noses, their red-faced frustrations, their mottled, moley skin and scraggly hair- their wrinkly knuckles and crooked stinky toes. Why are these people in charge of the world most kids wonder...and so do the cartoonists.Yup, I'm certain of it.
Short Fiction Wednesday
Last week I mentioned how often the stories I pick, more or less randomly, often turn out to have some kind of thematic connection... well, not this week!
This week we've got stories from familiar venues Futurismic and Flurb. Although I try and find new places, and I'm keen to highlight interesting and obscure venues publishing good quality SF and fantasy, there are places I keep coming back to. These two - along with Strange Horizons – have had a few of entries here before, partly because of quality, and partly because of how regularly they update. Regular updates, great content - not hard to figure out that successful recipe, I guess.
Of course, if you know of somewhere interesting then drop me a line via the comments and I'll check it out. Publishers and writers, don't be afraid to pimp your own gear – that's what makes the world go round!
So, first up is Miguel and the Viatura by Eric Gregory from Futurismic. This is a solid piece with a great line in extrapolating from a few key concepts. The idea of the viatura is similar to riding in last week's Lavie Tidhar story, The Night Train, but it's given a distinctly more ghoulish twist here. The obvious underlying theme is the exploitation of the third world by the first, and the lengths that the poor will go to help give their kids a leg up out of poverty.
Of course, life is never that simple and there are plenty of shades of grey here beyond a simple north-bad/south-good moral message. Gregory makes particularly good use of family relationships and the bonds of community expressed through gang and style-tribe loyalty to explore the different forces that push and pull in various moral directions.
This week's second story is one of those that comes out of the blue, and really blew me away. It's not a big story, or a huge message, or even that novel, but it's often the small and focused things that appeal to me most. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by the high standard at Flurb, but it gives off such a casual and easy going vibe that the discipline and razor sharp professionalism of the stories always catches me unawares! A lot of short fiction sites have fancy design and slick sci fi graphics, but the Rudy Rucker is happy to follow his own lo-fi aesthetic and let the stories speak for themselves.
Clod, Pebble by Kathe Koja and Carter Scholz is a really brilliant example of the classic short story form. It's got the really tight focus that all great short stories have. It has the penetrating gaze of the modernist masters, Katherine Mansfield or Anton Chekhov, zeroing in on a single incident with a tiny cast that opens up a whole raft human feelings and interactions.
It concretizes contrasting views of love described by William Blake in his Poem The Clod and the Pebble:
This week we've got stories from familiar venues Futurismic and Flurb. Although I try and find new places, and I'm keen to highlight interesting and obscure venues publishing good quality SF and fantasy, there are places I keep coming back to. These two - along with Strange Horizons – have had a few of entries here before, partly because of quality, and partly because of how regularly they update. Regular updates, great content - not hard to figure out that successful recipe, I guess.
Of course, if you know of somewhere interesting then drop me a line via the comments and I'll check it out. Publishers and writers, don't be afraid to pimp your own gear – that's what makes the world go round!
So, first up is Miguel and the Viatura by Eric Gregory from Futurismic. This is a solid piece with a great line in extrapolating from a few key concepts. The idea of the viatura is similar to riding in last week's Lavie Tidhar story, The Night Train, but it's given a distinctly more ghoulish twist here. The obvious underlying theme is the exploitation of the third world by the first, and the lengths that the poor will go to help give their kids a leg up out of poverty.
Of course, life is never that simple and there are plenty of shades of grey here beyond a simple north-bad/south-good moral message. Gregory makes particularly good use of family relationships and the bonds of community expressed through gang and style-tribe loyalty to explore the different forces that push and pull in various moral directions.
This week's second story is one of those that comes out of the blue, and really blew me away. It's not a big story, or a huge message, or even that novel, but it's often the small and focused things that appeal to me most. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by the high standard at Flurb, but it gives off such a casual and easy going vibe that the discipline and razor sharp professionalism of the stories always catches me unawares! A lot of short fiction sites have fancy design and slick sci fi graphics, but the Rudy Rucker is happy to follow his own lo-fi aesthetic and let the stories speak for themselves.
Clod, Pebble by Kathe Koja and Carter Scholz is a really brilliant example of the classic short story form. It's got the really tight focus that all great short stories have. It has the penetrating gaze of the modernist masters, Katherine Mansfield or Anton Chekhov, zeroing in on a single incident with a tiny cast that opens up a whole raft human feelings and interactions.
It concretizes contrasting views of love described by William Blake in his Poem The Clod and the Pebble:
"Love seeketh not itself to please,Blake's poem is nicely weaved into the incident of the story to lead the reader to it without bashing them over the head with it. All the events of the story point towards one or other view of love – Davies desire to present a gift to his daughter, his conflicts with his ex-wife, and the contrasting receptions of the two authors at the signing. These are classic enduring themes beautifully articulated with breathtaking efficiency and lack of sentiment.
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair."
So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite."
Sunday, 20 June 2010
State of Change: no new episode this week
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!
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!
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