And.... we're back!

Well, summer's over here at Pointless Philosophical Asides. The renovations are all finished for now - although "Posts of note" remains conspicuously empty - and we're all putting away our surf boards, dusting off our school blazers and contemplating the harvest of all the lovely seeds we planted before we went away.

First up, some comments I had on the subject of hype, inspired by reading The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. It's no reflection on Mr Rajaniemi's fine book, but hype does rub me the wrong way and... well, just read the post to learn more.

Next up, probably on Friday, we'll finally serve up my much-delayed review of Robo-Hunter vol 1, which has been in the drying cupboard since before the end of July, and then further fine flowers such as China Miélville's Looking for Jake, a collection of the first six issues of Marvel's wonderful What If?, my first thoughts in the current issues of 2000AD and much more besides.

But what, I hear you cry, of short fiction Wednesday? Well, I'm keeping that one mothballed for the meantime until I've caught up with other matters. It'll be back towards the end of this month, probably as a fortnightly rather than weekly feature from now on - I do have a day job, you know.

I hope you've all had a nice summer (or winter, depending on the hemisphere) and look forward to the comments that surely going to come flooding in!

Back soon!

Well, August is nearly over and the summer holidays draw to a close. Writing time has been very disrupted for me, thanks to various holidays and summer events eating into to my time. Just to complicate things, after a week away I discover my desktop has mysteriously given up the ghost. So I've had to dust off the spare laptop and rely on that, wonky keyboard and all.

I've also wasted a good proportion of the day trying to get the old desktop working, and thus didn't get done get half of what I wanted to do today, including much needed updates here. I've had a pretty frustrating couple of months, productivity wise, and that's why I took this official break, to try and catch up with all the chores and re-focus what I wanted to do... God, it never frigging ends does it!

Ah well, I still plan to get cracking again in the beginning of September and there's all sorts of treats ahead, assuming I can get them out of the hard drive of my old PC. I've got a review of Robo Hunter Vol 1 coming up as part of my series of retro-reviews of 2000AD, plus I've started buying new progs again and I'll be casting my world-weary eye over them.

Book-related OCD is satisfied!

I've been busy buying and reading books, and you can expect reviews soon. My formal review of The Quantum Thief is live on the Zone, so you can check that out, and I may or may not provide some further commentary. There's more I wanted to say about the hype surrounding this one that didn't fit in the review (and I think it's unfair to criticise the book based on my dislike of hype), but is increasingly relevant, I think, in today's hyped up world.

I've also found a cool, second hand bookshop while I was away (in Much Wenlock) and will have a couple of reviews of the obscure treasures i found there. One treasure was a Coronet edition of The Brave Free Men by Jack Vance, to match with the vols one and two of the Durdane series I already owned. I can now chuck away the ugly Ballantine edition I've had to make do with  up to now and have lovely matching spines on the book shelf. Hooray!

So, come on back on 1 September when Pointless Philosophical Asides will ride out of the wildnerness and back into action... if the wobbly internet connection on this shitty laptop will allow. Grrr!

Still Working!

I've replaced the temporarily closed notice with my new header image, but I'm not quite done yet. I've updated the pages on My Fiction and Reviews, but About Me and Posts of note are both still waiting for that magical Patickal pixie dust.

I have a couple of posts nearly ready to go, and we'll be back in action in September, so hang in there chums!

Short fiction Wednesday summer time semi-hiatus

I'm kind of busy over August, and I'd like to get some other work done for a bit. I'll be keeping up my reading log, as and when (and there's a review for the Zone coming up, so stay tuned for more unforgiving forensic work) but short fiction Wednesday is taking a break for a few weeks.

Don't worry, short fiction fans, it'll be back in September. In the meantime, why not enjoy some stories from the archive?

Short Fiction Wednesday

Your Life Sentence by CC Finlay
The Red Bride by Samantha Henderson

I really hate those types of articles that start “As some one once said...” and then go on to offer some really famous quotation - “As someone once said, ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet...’” I mean honestly! If they don’t know that, how can you trust anything else they have to say? 

Was it him?

It is therefore with some annoyance that I begin this week’s short fiction Wednesday with, “As someone once said, drama is conflict.” Was it Brecht? Was it Shaw? Was it Chekhov? Gah! It doesn’t turn anything up on google... maybe it’s just a truism from days gone by? Maybe it was Aristotle? Answers on a postcard please! 

Anyway, whoever it was, it's good point. Fiction thrives on conflict: some one has something that some one else wants, and the story hangs on how they about getting it, or not getting as the case may be. There are others sorts of fiction, I suppose, that can work in the hands of someone that knows what they’re doing or strikes it lucky, but the vast majority of fiction uses this very simple formula (usually, as Sam Goldwyn observed, hinging on the matter of fighting or fucking).  

Ut!

Apropos of this recent post about old timey comics we loved, here's the man himself, Bob Burden, creator of The Flaming Carrot.

That's him on the right with Jonathan Ross in the middle and illustrator Tommy Lee Jones on the left, at Comic Con in 2010 (just this last weekend).

Nice shirt, Bob!

The Complete Nemesis the Warlock Volume 1: Books 1-4

Credo!

 The big questions for a long-time 2000AD fan are this: when did 2000AD change, and what did it change from and to?

I think it's clear that it started out as a fairly traditional boys comics, updated for the post-sixties era, taking in some of the creative lessons learned from Action and giving them a sci fi twist. Early thrills were pretty much boys' comics staples – Invasion! and M.A.C.H. One were old fashioned tough guys; Flesh was a twist on the exotic jungle great white hunter story, with Old One Eye at its heart as a kind of animal anti-hero like in those Jack London novels; Harlem Heroes was a sports strip; and Dan Dare was a very clear indication that they were aiming for that core “boy” audience, probably with an average age of about twelve and a long tail going back to six year olds and petering out quickly after about fourteen.

Judge Dredd – which only began in prog 2, remember! - was an early indication of the direction the comic would take, with social satire and black humour similar to the types of sci fi movies we saw in the late sixties and early seventies – Silent Running, Logan's Run and especially the triumvirate of Charlton Heston apocalypse movies, Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man and Soylent Green. This was definitely something new in a boys comic – I'd seen the space adventure comics that had been brought out by the Commando comics people, for example, and they were much more trad space adventures than really engaged sci fi in the way of Judge Dredd.

Well, maybe we'll get to Dredd one day, but today I want to take a look at a story that signalled a similarly profound break from boys' comics that had gone before and was one of the clearest antecedents for the way the comic is today, Nemesis the Warlock.