>>Nostalgia For Infinity

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 «

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.

I forgot to mention this at the time, but the most recent issue of Vector featured my review of Ray Bradbury’s reissued classic Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Vector is the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association and is only available to members. The main BSFA site is here, Vector’s rarely-updated site is here, and the much more happenin’ Vector editor’s blog is here.

My thrilling week of daily flash fiction continues apace! Well, a second pace at least. If you missed Monday’s story, you can read ‘Wanderlust’ here.

Today’s flashfic is mostly an attempt to refresh my memory and to evoke a certain atmosphere or sense of place. It’s written in the same setting as, although it’s not contemporaneous with, a long story I wrote several years ago titled ‘Entropy in the Clockwork City’. That story has been sitting at first draft stage for some time and I keep meaning to return to it. It would be nice to get it polished up and try for publication. It’s been a while since I collected a rejection slip, after all.

I hope you find something to enjoy in this short piece.

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Heralded By Iron

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What’s this? Flash fiction on a Monday? This doesn’t seem right, not right at all.

But perhaps it represents an act of contrition. Perhaps the author has been lax, of late, has failed to write or post any fiction to this blog for some time. Shall we say four weeks? I believe we shall.

And perhaps the form that this act of contrition will take is the posting of a piece of flash fiction every day of this coming week, up to and including the now-traditional Friday, thereby restoring the karmic, fictitious balance for 2009.

Perhaps the level of quality demanded of the form this act takes may drop as a result of such pressures, but certainly the spirit of experimentation, the desire to push the authorial self, is as it should be in the established tradition of Friday flash fiction.

We shall see.

We shall see if the author can meet his own deadlines, yes?

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