>>Nostalgia For Infinity

I’ve belatedly discovered that my review of Futures From Nature, an anthology of 100 pieces of flash fiction collected from the pages of science journal Nature, went live on the TTA Press Blog a few days ago. This review was a bit tricky to write, as you can’t devote much time to any of the stories but nor can you discuss them all. In the end I just focused on the most obvious thematic or subject groupings and talked around those a bit. Ultimately I concluded that it was a great collection and well worth reading, though you’ll have to read the review to see me justify that statement.

Don’t worry – sooner or later I’ll post something that has nothing whatsoever to do with flash fiction. Perhaps about porn, or photos of cats, as this is what the Internet is for.

As previously mentioned our panel on flash fiction involved us all writing our own pieces of flash. Since we were basically writing ex nihilo I was a bit short of ideas, and so ended up writing several short pieces. The first drabble is a bit of nonsense based on one of Gareth D Jones’ potted ideas, the second is a thematically similar piece (with poor use of perspective) that occurred to me while writing the first, and then there are some silly six-word stories I wrote in the last five minutes of finishing-up. I should probably have focused on one longer and more refined piece, but hey. This is what I wrote, just as I wrote it during the panel.

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I never did get round to a second from-Eastercon piece, which is a shame, though with my laptop’s comedy battery perhaps not such a surprise. Still, here I am back at home with a sort of follow-up piece. This is less of a summary of my own experiences – which were many and diverse and thus incompatible with my perfectionist, completive approach to anecdote and account – and more a few random notes and links elsewhere.

• People at science fiction conventions have diverse tastes. Much of this is wonderful, and some of it is scary: I heard one attendee admit to liking John Ringo. In public, no less! This terrifies me.
• Anecdotes are wonderful: whilst buying one of the few novels I picked up from the dealer’s room (tight budget plus unread book stacks large enough to construct forts with), Frank Herbert’s The Dosadi Experiment, the bookseller (whose name now escapes me) told me about how she had gone into her first Eastercon in search of the book. She found it, and also her husband, which is just wonderful.
• On the subject of buying books, I was very restrained. I picked up Paul Kincaid’s What it is we do when we read Science Fiction – not the snappiest title but looks fascinating – alongside a volume titled The Undead and Philosophy. I later returned to pick up the BSFA Celebration anthology and the aforementioned Herbert novel, and on the Monday was given a review copy of Kim Lakin-Smith’s Tourniquet. I also got a few copies of some anthology or another.
• Justin Pickard seems to have enjoyed his first encounter with fandom and conventions, and has excellent summaries of a few of Saturday’s panels.
• I’ve now sold five copies of Illuminations. Admittedly the first was to fellow BSFA Orbiter scribe James Bloomer, and the next four were to family, but it’s still pretty awesome.
• Lots of photos are popping up on Flickr. Sadly every single shot I took is of atrocious quality. Did anyone notice my hands shaking over the weekend? Perhaps I was suffering severe withdrawal symptoms, or early-onset Parkinson’s Disease. Either that or I’ve just forgotten how to use that newfangled digital camera again. (Worst. Futurist. Ever.)
• The already-legendary Sex and the Singularity panel was easily a comic highlight of the weekend, with Charlie Stross’ hippo / leech anecdote no doubt soon to emerge as one of those horrendous “gotcha” intarwub memes. Oh god, the thought of some sort of goatse photoshop just emerged. Going to scrub brain now.
• Justin and I have agreed that some sort of story must be written involving Mary Poppins and Sherlock Holmes uniting to do battle with the dreaded Hijabzilla! This is an injoke which may be funny if you were at Mieville’s keynote speech and stayed for the Q&A. If not… well… just you wait.
• A few panels even got me to stick my hand up once or twice. I’ve found that at events involving fandom I revert to my old mode of a very shy individual who prefers to listen to others than pipe up himself (a side-effect of being surrounded by intelligent, often erudite, hard-working people who obviously care a lot about these subjects), but perhaps I’m becoming more comfortable in these settings. I suppose there’s nothing like people being wrongheaded to bring you out of your shell (oh, but I’d just got cable in).
• Dear David and Laura: I’m sorry I was incompetent at actually having a copy of our book with me, and that I missed you from Sunday onward. It was a pleasure to meet you both and I hope to do so again.
• Dear Third Row: thank you for having me along for Friday Curry. Apologies for my failures at Being Social. You are intimidating people (see above), and also wonderful people, and I admire you quite a bit. I really don’t mean to be rude.
• Please, someone scan in a copy of Lawrence Hale’s Space Train. The polarities must be reversed.
• The panel on Lovecraft resulted in my, upon returning home, reading a baker’s dozen of his shorter stories, and beginning to read Nick Mamatas’ Move Under Ground, which I can confirm is really very good (so far).
• On the train home I read a punk zine (Next Stop Nowhere #1) to cleanse my mind a little. Half of it was taken up with a Black Cougar Shock Unit tour diary, and I am now very surprised that apparently slightly angry frontman Alex Ulloa didn’t pull my arms off when JoN and I sang jokes about no one coming to see his band. Admittedly we were both drunk, and letting BCSU and Grabass Charlestons stay at our house, but he doesn’t sound the forgiving type. BCSU split up right after that 2006 UK tour, and I feel rather sad that our poor job as hosts may have contributed to that in some small way.
• That reminds me: my efforts to locate the confluence between SF and punk continue finding incremental success. Turns out that Neil Beynon’s other half, Gemma, has a brother who plays bass in No Choice. She was very surprised that I knew the band, which either says good things about my knowledge of The Scene or rather sad things about punk rock. Still, that was pretty awesome.

And now I must prepare to record a song with my still-unnamed band’s lead guitarist, who hopefully will succeed in not deleting seven hours of hard, drunken work when rearranging partitions. Wink wink, it’s fine really, these things happen.

Oh, and if we met at Eastercon, please leave a comment so I can investigate your blog/LJ/whatever if I haven’t already, and if we didn’t meet/speak and should have done, give me a good telling off and we can resolve to not do that again.

Just a quick post while I drink my tea – Charles Stross is doing his Guest of Honour piece at the moment and I don’t doubt it’s highly entertaining – with a few highlights of the Con so far.

• Our mid-afternoon workshop on Saturday was reasonably well-attended. The audience outnumbered the panel, which was no mean feat given that there were seven of us. We talked a little about the nature of flash and the reasons why we write flash on Fridays, and then everyone sat down to write a piece. I wrote two, plus some six-word shots, thereby demonstrating the fallacy of quantity over quality. Some of us – panel and audience – read out our pieces and offered some comment, and that was that! I think everyone enjoyed themselves and perhaps learned a little, which was great. We even sold a few books, and I was quite bewildered to sign several copies.
• Best programme item so far has been China Mieville’s GoH speech and Q&A. Possibly more on this later.
• I may have some photos from the BSFA Awards, but I suspect my shots are blurrier than the shakiest shakicam footage. Semper idem.
• I’ve never seen anyone pour a pint of lager quite as badly as some of the hotel staff are managing. Poor buggers: they clearly don’t know what’s hit ‘em.

Well, here I am at my second Eastercon, and it’s a much larger and more intimidating affair than last year’s Contemplation. Fortunately I’ve bumped into fellow F3ers and friends Paul Raven, Gareth Powell, Martin McGrath, Neil Beynon, one Dev Agarwal (another thoroughly nice bloke), the one-man hive of industry that is Ian Whates, plus enjoyed a traditional Friday Curry with the Third Row contingent, so the feeling of being lost at sea is somewhat mitigated. However, as a result of this general ambience – of being simultaneous somewhere familiar, and entirely strange – I bring you this week’s Friday Flash Fiction: Deadblogging.

Oh, and don’t forget: buy our book! We have copies with us…

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News reached me this morning that SF giant Arthur C. Clarke passed away yesterday. His significance to the field need not be stated here, and there are plenty of obituaries elsewhere. R.I.P, Arthur.

The Deep Range and 2001 were my personal favourites from Clarke’s oeuvre: how about you?

Spend long enough nosing around online punk/hardcore communities – quite often punkers congregate around torrent sites, where it’s easiest to obtain rare, deleted old records – and you’ll be quickly made aware of just how many obscure bands there are out there. More often than not they produce one or two records and then split up, drifting into other projects. Well, why not – that’s part of the joy of the D.I.Y. scene, which supports innovative creative endeavours and the pursuit of fun over the manufacturing of a brand – sorry, band – identity.

One such group was Financial Panther, who I came across accidentally having asked Buz at the Punker Bunker (Brighton’s best indie record shop for punk, hardcore and ska, and also possibly the tiniest room in the city) if he had anything I might be interested in. “Try Financial Panther,” he said. “Their EP sounds like some band or another.” Which was awesome, as some band or another are an all-time favourite of mine.

Anyway, what I ended up with was a 6-track self-titled EP filled with cynical snarling emo – not that “Toni&Guy MySpace” crap, but something made by people who had actually bothered to listen to bands like Rites of Spring, Still Life, Evergreen or whatever (I’m not trying to draw comparisons here, just pointing a broad metaphorical finger at the early US emo/screamo movement). Being a relatively recent band FP were closer in sound to Planes Mistaken For Stars if those scene stalwarts had been interested in simpler melodic songwriting, but FP boasted an aggressive knife-fight edge way beyond melodic hardcore outfits like Hot Water Music, Dag Nasty or Jawbreaker.

With lyrics like “always just the boys marching along to the beat of an amputee movement” you could tell this band not only cared a lot about the punk rock and hardcore scene, but they cared about it enough to be pissed off. This struck a chord with me – and it helped that the music had exactly the blend of melody and raw, guttural noise that appeals to me greatly.

The band split not long after releasing this EP. Some of them went on to form a grindcore band called Landmine Marathon. Grindcore! As far as I’m concerned it’s mostly a comedy genre*, though I guess they might not agree. Still, on the strength of their MySpace tracks it looks like they’ve moved into thrash metal territory.

Since Financial Panther have broken up and will probably never reform, and I’d be surprised if you could buy legitimate copies of this EP anywhere anyway, I figured I’d put the whole thing up here for download. Unfortunately I don’t have a scanner or I’d include the artwork, which is pretty neat.

Financial Panther – self-titled EP
2004, D.I.Y. release

1. Pushing at the Margins
2. Black Ops and Wiretaps
3. This Town Could Be Your Life
4. Low Tide in Knife City
5. The Ghost of Cynthia McKinney
6. The History We Never Taught

Enjoy!

* = Well, except for all the trendy haircut grindcore that, I hear, gets tru kvlt metallers kinda pissed off. Which is fair. I mean, I don’t like seeing shit like Fightstar being described as emo. It’s a bit like someone trying to convince you a pint of warm Bovril is, in fact, delicious cool Guinness.

So my favourite thing about grindcore is a demo tape an old housemate bought via eBay. It was by a short-lived Italian grindcore band; I forget their name, but they were probably big among the few hundred people worldwide who bother to seek down obscure Italian grindcore demo tapes. Anyway, the front cover had the usual ludicruous artwork – all dismembered women, guts everywhere, amputated limbs, that sort of thing. They were probably called “Mutilated Cunt” or something. Anyway, inside the cassette case, the whole insert was taken up with a spread that said “GRINDCORE AGAINST SEXISM!” It was awesome. That band, they got the joke. Sadly a lot of other grindcore bands, well, I think they take it at face value. DISMEMBERED FACE VALUE.

Late, as usual, and just a very short piece. Hey, why not go read that awesome announcement again?

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Odd Two Out press has announced the release of Illuminations – a new anthology showcasing original, cutting edge short fiction from eight up-and-coming young writers, including your host, who is not above stealing press releases when a bit pushed for time.

Illuminations collects together the best Friday Flash Fiction posted by myself and the other Friday Flash Fictioneers.

Edited by Paul Graham Raven (of Interzone and Futurismic fame), the sixty-eight pieces in Illuminations range from mainstream literature to far-out speculation; from horror to humour; from outright fantasy to straight-faced space opera. And being flash fiction they are all less than 1,000 words long, making the book perfect for dipping into.

The collection is available in paperback from Odd Two Out Press for £6.99 including postage and packing, and can be ordered directly via: http://www.oddtwoout.co.uk/buybooks.html.

From the web site:

“Friday Flash Fiction started out as a writing exercise on the blog of fast-rising sf author Gareth L Powell but quickly became a bona fide web phenomenon with writers from across the world taking up the challenge. Illuminations presents some of the best Friday Flash Fiction, collected in print for the first time.”

The featured writers are: Dan Pawley, Gareth D Jones, Gareth L Powell, Justin Pickard, Martin McGrath, Neil Beynon, Paul Graham Raven, and Shaun C Green. We come from diverse walks of life – musicians, office workers, freelance journalists, students, magazine editors – and this new anthology collects together the best of our weekly output, along with introductions from myself and Paul.

All the stories in Illuminations are published under a Creative Commons licence that permits them to be reproduced in the public domain as long as no profit is made in the process.

Copies of Illuminations: The Flash Fiction Anthology will be available to order for £6.99 from Odd Two Out Publishing, or from the authors themselves. All profits from the sale of Illuminations will be donated to the NSPCC.

Alternatively, The Fictioneers will be running a flash fiction workshop as part of Orbital 2008, the British Science Fiction convention held at the Raddisson Hotel, Heathrow over the Easter weekend. Convention-goers are invited to come along to quiz the team and have a go at writing their own extremely short fiction.

From the back cover:

“Join the Friday Flash Fictioneers as they take you on a whistle-stop tour featuring the best of their stories from the last twelve months. From bright dawn on new worlds to the darkest shores of our own planet, from heartbreak to laughter – nowhere is off limits as long as it can be told in a flash. Spellbinding, unpredictable and entertaining. These small flashes – these illuminations – showcase the powerful art of very short fiction and reveal a group of writers for whom the sheer joy of storytelling shines through every word.”

Place your order(s) at: http://www.oddtwoout.co.uk/buybooks.html.

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On a personal note, it’s enormously exciting to see this project come to fruition, and I can’t wait until I have a copy of it in my hands. It’s also fantastic to be rubbing shoulders, in print, with my fellow F3 writers. Today’s Friday Flash Fiction will be posted later today – as my press release theft indicates I’m rather busy at the moment! In the meantime, why not go investigate my comrades-in-keyboards or the Odd Two Out website?

Plug, plug, plug.

Via PunkNews comes an announcement that makes me outrageously happy: veteran Gainesville, FL punkers As Friends Rust are to reform to play a clutch of European shows, including at least one in the UK.

Full details are yet to come but the following appeared on their MySpace page:

“Europe is on in August. We’re coming clean about that shit. UK and Belgium shows already confirmed. Seven years later, five shows only, and probably never again. Bring your dancing shoes.”

It seems to have vanished now, but I’m hoping that means “getting more details” rather than “cruel prank”.

As Friends Rust were one of my first introductions to Gainesville punk and to this day they remain one of my favourite bands. Despite only producing a few EPs and one album they were rarely less than excellent, and I can only imagine that these reformation shows will be worthy of the descriptor “legendary”.

In somewhat related news, two ex-AFR members and Matt Finch of Current (also featuring ex-AFR members) launched a new label last month: Sound Study Recordings. Their first signing is (surprise!) Gainesville’s Liquid Limbs, who are a decidedly odd bunch making some strange and strangely appealing music. They’re in the studio at the moment recording their first full-length. For now there’re some demos to listen on MySpace.

Now someone just needs to announce that Hot Water Music are going to play some European reformation shows, possibly alongside Apocalypse Hoboken or Kid Dynamite, and I’ll be happier than a pig in several different kinds of shit.