January 25th, 2008 § 3
I may be running out of small conversational gambits with which to open my F3 posts. I suppose I could just launch straight into the story, but then I’d have to think of a new place to put the More tag. Hmm, this is a tricky one and no mistake. Fortunately I’ve gotten four sentences out of it, so I can get on with the story now.
Oh, this one is a few words over 1,000, so I suppose that technically it’s not flash fiction. On the other hand – it’s my blog. Like Prince Adam, I have the power.
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January 23rd, 2008 § 2
The 2007 BSFA Award shortlist has been announced:
Best Novel
Best Short Fiction
Best Artwork
BSFA Fiftieth Anniversary Award: Best Novel of 1958
Predictably, the non-fiction category didn’t quite make it: “although a number of works were nominated there was no consensus and so no shortlist could be formed. A non-fiction award will therefore not be presented this year.”
It’s a shame, of course. Hopefully a reading list will be compiled as last year, at least. Maybe we can also avoid repeating last year’s non-fic debate. Happily, Farah Mendlesohn has set up a LiveJournal community for discussion of non-fiction SF and fantasy writing.
January 21st, 2008 § 2
In ‘Walthamstow Central’, author Ellis Sharp pushes the boundaries of what readers have come to expect from literature. Part other-worldly police procedural, part science fiction thriller, part political diatribe, with these components alone the novel would be fascinating. But more interesting is the engagement with the artifice of the text. The lines between author and authored, between reality and fiction, between character and history and time are all blurred, and this technique pervades every element of the novel.
Sharp’s narrative technique is underpinned by a certain sense of weariness, both with life and with fiction, and this tiredness is shared by his characters. In a telling early scene, PC Daisy Spenser converses with PC Andy Scurr in his home. The narrator asserts that “the dialogue was as banal as the interior of the kitchen in Scurr’s flat”; minutes later, Daisy makes her excuses to leave:
“Your speech has a cold, narcotic quality. It’s dead.”
[...]
“The sooner we stop this dialogue the better.” (All quotes p.39-40)
These lines are issued and acknowledged without comment, accepted as part of the world in which the characters operate – or, more precisely, the narrative. Indeed, immediately after her departure Daisy reflects momentarily on Scurr, before realising that her mind is open, that her interior monologue is exposed for all to see. She draws a mental curtain before her taxi driver reads her thoughts. It’s perhaps too late, as the reader has already parsed them.
Even a simple exchange such as this is telling. There’s a critical weariness with the mundane triviality of human social interaction, the cold and passionless sexual endeavours of men like Scurr. Observations about the banality of this dialogue, of the emptiness of the setting, not only characterise the voices and faces of ‘Walthamstow Central’, but also critique the lack of ambition and imagination in fiction that does not seek to step beyond this. » Read the rest of this entry «
January 18th, 2008 § 2
Chances are that by now, if you’re a PC gamer, you’ll have played Valve Software’s innovative and endearing Portal. If you’ve completed it, as you should have, you’ll have also heard Jonathan Coulton’s fantastic song – written from the deranged perspective of GLaDOS – ‘Still Alive’.
A quite different piece of Portal-based music is this breakbeat track made with various samples from the game. Its title is ‘The Device Has Been Modified’ but the author is a little unclear – I’ve seen different names given around the web – but the most commonly used is Victims of Science. If they have a website or are on MySpace I’d be happy to give them a link, but thus far I’ve not found any such thing. This version in video form is also quite nice.
Finally, if you want to hear the in-game soundtrack, use this thingy to rip it out of your steamapps directory. You can also use that to grab the spoken audio – so you could, for example, have Windows announce startup with “Look – we’re both stuck in this place. I’ll use lasers to inscribe a line down the center of the facility, and one half will be where you live, and I’ll live in the other half. We won’t have to try to kill each other or even talk if we don’t feel like it.”
<3 Portal.
January 15th, 2008 § 3
I was waiting to post about this until this page was updated, but it’s been a week now. So feh.
I am lacking an adjective for exactly how proud I am that my flash fiction story, ‘Grey Matter’, has been nominated for a BSFA Award. It’s one of a dozen short fiction nominations Martin McGrath put forward.
There’s something to be said about paper dogs and asbestos cats as far as the award itself is concerned, but what matters more to me is that nomination. That means a lot. Appearing on a long list of nominees is great – knowing that at least one person rated something you wrote so highly – and has given me a boost of confidence in my writing, thereby encouraging me to push myself further. Which, at the end of the day, is what being a writer is about.
In short: thanks, Martin!
January 15th, 2008 § 0
Back in August ’07 I reviewed some of Hub magazine‘s earlier electronic issues – about a baker’s dozen on from the switch away from its dead tree origins. You can read my thoughts here if you so wish. Thanks to The Fix, I’m now returning to “Europe’s most popular free electronic fiction magazine” to see how things have been going. Except that I didn’t link the two reviews, as The Fix probably has a slightly higher readership than this blog (recently upgraded from “man and dog” to “man with several dogs and possibly a small child who wants to be elsewhere”).
You can read this new review here. You can’t comment there, though, so you might want to do that on the forum. Or perhaps you could post comments here! Behold my exclamation mark of desperation.
January 13th, 2008 § 6
I have a great idea for something a small group of SF writers could do. Basically, every week, on a Sunday, we post one piece of flash fict– yeah, so you see where I’m going with that.
Unfortunately I missed Friday’s deadline due to the dayjob keeping me busy during the day and leaving me exhausted in the evening. Semper idem. Remember to check out the other flash fictionists, all of whom managed to meet the deadline… I’ll be over here, hanging my head in shame.
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January 11th, 2008 § 0
Not: yet. Day: long. Author: tired. Coming: tomorrow.
January 10th, 2008 § 0
Ralph Briggs, editor and maintainer of Yet Another Book Review, has announced that the site will be winding down and closing in the near future. His reasons for this are his own and if he wishes to announce them publicly, I’m sure that he will. The site has yet to announce its impending closure, perhaps because Ralph is waiting to see if anyone else wishes to take the reins (and the cost of hosting it). We shall see.
In any case, although I’ve not contributed a review there for some time, I’ll miss YABR. At the behest of my friend KC Heath I joined the staff there in 2005 and began to write and submit reviews of recently published books as well as classics. This was part of the fun of YABR: as it was a hobbyist rather than pro website, there was freedom to review whatever you wanted (so long as there was a genre connection), however you wanted. As a result I got to dabble with trying different sorts of reviews, from the “book report” summary style review to a quasi-academic approach. It also gave me an intellectual reward that I’d been missing since leaving university which spurred me to a greater (if still limited) involvement in what I’m coming to think of as “critical fandom”.
Thanks to YABR, I learned a lot and had some fun, and these two things are amongst the best in life – right after seeing your enemy driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of der wimmin. Farewell YABR, and thank you Ralph.
January 8th, 2008 § 0
PC gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently posted about a reviewer coming clean and admitting that his review of Mass Effect was tainted by his own faults playing the game. He’d forgotten to level up. RPS saw a chance to discuss some of their own gaming cock-ups, and invited readers to share as well. Many of us did.
Now RPS have compiled a list of the top 10 reader stupidities, and I’m proud to have made the grade. I am officially Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s third stupidest reader… when I was 7.
