>>Nostalgia For Infinity

Acapella Zoo is a web and print ‘zine of slipstream/magic realist fiction based in the US – its editor is based in Seattle but its staff hail from across the States – and has been publishing since 2008. This, its fifth issue, features fifteen stories and poetry by twelve contributors; there is no non-fiction component, which is a shame, but the magazine does not need it. Its issues are not themed and there is no stated editorial intention to contextualise its stories. Instead it focuses on providing quality stories and poetry for fans of strange and cross-genre works, with a healthy mix of male and female contributors who are mostly but not exclusively US residents. I’ll focus chiefly upon the fiction, since as I am not a great reader of poetry I do not feel qualified to do more than passingly comment upon it.

The opening tale is Nancy Gold’s ‘Showtime’. This focuses on three children or young men who work as part of a travelling circus, performing simple morality plays which portray the classic conflict between good and evil. One of the trio wears wings made of collected feathers, playing the role of an angel; another, facially disfigured, plays the opposing part. The equilibrium of their triumvirate is broken when a young woman appears, a strange girl who collects wings but is drawn to the scarred ‘Gash’ rather than the boy who likes to play at being an angel. Ultimately, the strangeness of desire trumps the appeal of earning a buck through crude showmanship. The story touches upon themes of alienation, and highlights how an alliance built upon convenience and lack of alternatives is no match for equality between partners.

After a brief break for Feng Sun Chen’s poem ‘Eclipse’ – which, alas, I am unsure what to make of – there is Hayes Greenwood Moore’s ‘The Creature from the Lake’. At its heart this story is also about desire. A couple find an odd creature, wounded, near a lake, and nurse it back to health. The story is written from a woman’s perspective, and her partner soon becomes besotted with the beast they are caring for. As for the creature itself, it appears capable of singing, although more often it merely cries out in pain, and how much of the former is a misinterpretation of the latter is left to the reader to decide. The story ends with an unmade decision that, intended or not, functions as a metaphor for how easily relationships can be thrown askew by a variety of factors; children, marriage, affairs. Both of these initial stories have a strangeness about them that dissuades simple interpretation, a characteristic shared by many other offerings in this issue.

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Title’s a bit of a mouthful, huh? But then, the Harry Potter series is nothing if not occasionally clumsy.

I suspect that the Potter series may be the longest-running consecutive series of films, with 8 titles (including the unreleased follow-up to this entry) spread between 2001 and 2011. This excludes James Bond as the films are episodic. It’s an achievement in itself, and it’s also been a unique experience to watch the actors grow from very young children into (mostly) more skilful young adults – all under the tutelage of a variety of directors.

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Apparently I’ve never written about Interzone here on Nostalgia For Infinity, which honestly surprises me a bit as it’s the magazine I’ve been subscribed to longest (about six years now, since Andy Cox took over as editor). It’s the only SF magazine I read regularly, thanks to a mix of factors: its persistently cool design and artwork makes it something I’m rarely ashamed to be seen reading (unlike, say, fishboobs), its fiction tends to be an alluring mix of strange, characterful, thought-provoking and oddball whether the stories themselves are brilliant and mediocre, and it has some great non-fiction writers (Nick Lowe and David Langford contributing since the early days). There are issues I care less for, but it’s not for lack of effort of the part of IZ’s writers, editors, artists and other contributors.

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It’s a while since I reviewed anything from British genre publisher Abaddon Books (see here), and indeed since I read anything from them. I’ve got a certain measure of admiration for what they’re trying to accomplish but the fiction I’d read from them to date had not exactly blown me away. However, I didn’t count on a friend pressing this book into my hands and insisting that I must read it. “I thought it would be rubbish,” she said. “But it has zombie elephants!” She did, originally, pick it up on the basis of the barely-clothed “barbarian” woman on the cover (check out that underboob – now that’s what I call a literary quality, phnarr phnarr).

I think these two facts tell you just about all you need to know about the unique selling points of Anno Mortis.

Oh, sarcasm aside it’s fun enough. Here’s how it goes: in the age of Emperor Caligula (casual mass murderer and serial fucker of all things with holes), the barbarian warrior Boda (as in Boudica, get it?!) is brought to Rome to fight in the coliseum as a gladiator. She quickly gets caught up in some shady business involving dark rites and the bodies of dead gladiators. Around the same time, the feckless playboy and wannabe playright Petronius is forced into the apprenticeship of the Senator Seneca, who it turns out is involved in some shady business involving dark rites and the bodies of dead gladiators. I hate to spoil it for you, but they toootally end up sharing some adventures and unlikely chemistry!

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So here’s a post I wrote half of last October (Hub is now up to #108). The fact that I didn’t find the time or inclination to finish a short and simple review of a short weekly SF e-zine for three months pretty much sums up the creative death that was Q4 2009 for me. Thanks a fucking bunch, my life last year.

But it wasn’t all bad, particularly if you’re not me, because British SF & fantasy e-zine Hub Magazine published its hundredth issue. If you’re not in the know about the general life expectancy of magazines built around genre fiction it may not be clear what an achievement this is, particularly given that Hub boasts 10,000 subscribers (or, at least, is sent to 10,000 email addresses, which is not quite the same thing) and thanks to sponsorship deals with publishers is both solvent and a paying market for writers.

I’ve written about Hub before (#12-18 here, and #35-38 for The Fix Online) and have generally found it an entertaining if hit and miss read since then. So, as a landmark issue what does #100 exemplify about its run to date and what does it indicate for the future?

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Esteemed UK indie publisher TTA Press have been getting into the festive spirit with a flash fiction advent calendar on their blog. I was away at the 10 year anniversary ATP so unfortunately I missed the day when one of my stories went up. Chances are regular readers of NFI will have seen ‘Some Kind Of Superhero’ before, but if you haven’t why not give it a read? I can guarantee you will like it more than the shitty, powdery chocolate you get in a Tesco’s advent calendar.

I’ve written about the independent comics publisher Big Head Press once before, indirectly, when I wrote about their excellent story La Muse. Their tagline is “thoughtful stories” and this was certainly true of La Muse, a comic in which a young woman with superpowers set about to change the world to something better.

They have recently concluded the story Odysseus the Rebel, which begins ten years after the fall of Troy. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s a re-imagining of the classic Odyssey with a distinct spin. Writer Steven Grant (an industry veteran, thought as a comics n00b I’m not that familiar with his work – he did a Punisher mini-series and has written for most of the major IP of the biggest comics companies in the last three decades) presents a much more cynical view of the great Greek heroes. Achilles and Ajax are simple-minded bullies, Agamemnon a selfish murderer, and Odysseus is a man determined to make his own way in life in defiance of what is demanded of him by higher powers. Following the fall of Troy, Odysseus’s fate tangles directly with vassals of Poseidon – god of the sea – who demands that Odysseus bend his knee to the will of the gods. Odysseus rejects him, refusing to willingly play a role as a mere pawn. And so begins an Odyssey quite distinct from the one you may be familiar with, in which the plots and power struggles of the Greek Pantheon, heroes and monsters play out in a manner not entirely expected.

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(It occurred to me after writing the review of ‘Feels Like Steven King’ last week that I’d promised to post my Vector reviews online a month or two after they appeared in the magazine itself. That deadline has long since passed for the first three reviews, so I’ll post one on Saturdays for the first three weeks of August.)

This all-new story set in Brooks’ world of Shannara is not only its first appearance in a graphic novel, but also my first experience of the setting. Fans may wish to take my opinions with a pinch of salt.

Set after the events of ‘The Wishsong of Shannara’, ‘The Dark Wraith of Shannara’ resumes the story of Jair Ohmsford, a young man capable of using a form of magic known as the wishsong. As the story begins Jair’s sister has him swear not to risk using the dangerous wishsong again, but Jair is troubled by portentous dreams. The following day he learns that several old friends have been kidnapped, and so Jair and those allies he can round up set out to rescue them. Along the way Jair learns more about the wishsong and about his own potential.

This story is generic, inoffensive quest fare, featuring appearances by various characters who I assume will be known to Shannara fans. The central plot works well enough; it is unoriginal but comprehensible to a newcomer. But it is as a graphic novel that ‘The Dark Wraith of Shannara’ is flawed. » Read the rest of this entry «

[There was a totally hilarious picture of a boxer dog right here, but I was getting too much dumb traffic from people googling "lol", so I deleted it.]

If you’ve not been following, which is sensible, but want to get clued up, which is not, I’d recommend going here and sniggering at the fail on display. This is also amusing.

The most amusing thing is that genre magazines continue to use this sort of awful, juvenile artwork. Publishers should consider offering free pull-out brown paper bags in which to conceal your sordid little fantasies and skiffies. Even TTA’s Interzone, which has had a lot of great covers and artwork, has fallen into this painful trap on a few occasions.

On the Guardian website today:

Let’s stop sneering at fantasy readers

They might be the zit-ridden little brothers of science fiction geeks, but fantasy readers still deserve our respect

Making a good start there, then.

I wonder if this byline policy is also going to be extended to other subjects. Perhaps we can also look forward to Time for the violence in Tehran to end – even if those crazy brown folks do enjoy a spot of barbarism, or Calling for an end to rape – although she was totally asking for it, wearing that tight little miniskirt.

On the positive side of things it’s under a half-dozen comments into the thread that names like Mieville, Vandermeer, Swainston et al start getting mentioned. So we know that Guardian readers are capable of adult dialogue even if the paper’s editors may sometimes fall short.