>>Nostalgia For Infinity

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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As noted in my 52 Books post, I recently finished reading Rad Bradbury’s classic gothic horror / coming of age adventure novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes. I just sent off my review to Vector’s editor, Dr. Kari Maund, so hopefully it will appear in print later this year.

My review of Paul McAuley’s The Invisible War has yet to appear, so I expect the Bradbury review will appear in the following issue. I’d guess at that being late Summer, but I may be wrong. As ever, I’ll update when I see the review in print!

I’m determined to stick as closely as I can to doing this every week, even if it means being late. So here’s yesterday’s Friday Flash, which I finished today after waking up too late to get to London for the protest against Israel’s war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Worst. Activist. Ever.

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SOME KIND OF SUPERHERO

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Taking my cue from Gareth L. Powell, here are my top ten Friday flash fiction stories of 2008.

1. Our Bright Horizons – A deliberate stylistic and thematic departure from much of what I’d written before. Difficult, but fun.
2. We’re Never Going Home! – the first of a series of latter-’08 tales with titles stolen from my favourite bands, and an attempt to fuse my love of punk rock with my love of surreal fantasy/horror.
3. Interdiction Zone – a mildly amusing – and slightly inhumane – piece of post-apocalyptic SF set in the same dying world as several other F3 tales.
4. Love Story – an experimental piece of fiction that tries to bind language directly into the narrative, a trick I freely admit I stole from Ellis Sharp (who does it much better than me).
5. My Mother the Robot – yet another stylistic experiment, this was written in the style of a young girl’s diary. You can either take it literally, or regard it as the sort of fantasies children develop to deal with parental divorce.
6. Watching the Valves – another post-apocalyptic SF piece which is inspired by both Mad Max 2 and The World Without Us (specifically the chapter about the Texas oil refineries).
7. This Urban Aesthetic – probably one of the few F3 stories I wrote that works well as a stand-alone story. One of only a few of my stories to receive a positive response in Zinos-Amaro’s review of Illuminations.
8. Bitterness the Star – it’s very recent but, to paraphrase Neil, I like the macro/micro scale juxtaposition. Has some thematic similarities with ‘Love Story’, above. I wonder why that might be!
9. Earthbound – the other F3 writers who commented like this quite a lot, perhaps more than I did. Just goes to show that writers oughtn’t listen to themselves too often.
10. Releasing Moments – a flawed 2nd-person perspective experiment that revisits the concept central to Carry These Songs Like a Comfort Wherever You Go.

I think the calibre of my writing has improved greatly over the last 12 months, especially where flash fiction is concerned. I’m proud of these stories.

This year I’ve written 23 pieces of fiction, which is a bit less than one every fortnight. I think my poor output over the last three months has really dragged this figure down. So it goes. Still, ‘Bitterness The Star’ last Friday brought my overall total to 39 pieces (or 40 if you include Excerpts from Eastercon as two, or 39 again if you exclude the over-long Half-day of the Dead). Roll on F3 ’09.

‘Tourniquet’, Kim Lakin-Smith’s debut novel, is an ambitious book. It is set in Renegade City, the rebranded-gothic British city once known as Nottingham. At some point in the city’s recent past the rock band Origin claimed it as a safe haven for “the sub-cultures of the world”; more honestly, though, Renegade City is for the self-identified gothic and industrial outsiders of the world.

Skip forward some years and Renegade City has become occupied by four distinct tribes. There are also the Drifters, a catch-all collective term for the disparate individuals who have chosen to make Renegade their home, and the Skinwalkers, a violent and tightly-knit biker clan united by their harsh camaraderie but denied recognition as a formal tribe. Meanwhile, the four members of Origin have become the Drathcor – essentially mysterious, vampiric figures leading aloof and secretive lives – and several of them rule the city alongside the tribe-elected members of the Management. An additional group, the Grallators, are responsible for maintaining some semblance of law and order in the city.

At the outset of the novel two plot strands are teased to the fore. Roses, the messianic frontman of Origin, is dead, killed in what may have been an act of arson or murder. Origin’s onetime drummer, Druid, is dispatched by Sophia – once the band’s bassist, now an objection of his desire and resentment – to investigate the truth of what transpired. For the first time in many years, Druid is forced out of himself and down into the streets of the city.

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I suspect that this week’s celebration of one year of Friday Flash Fiction will be slightly overshadowed by Post a Rejection Letter Friday. But hey! Righteousness is right on, right?

I’m afraid that this week’s submission is another last-minute piece of fiction, as today has proven to be a lengthy work day fraught with some personal issues, but a promise is a promise. Rather than rush through a fresh idea I’ve decided to return to a concept I’ve tried to write in the past: a story written from the perspective of a faceless videogame enemy.

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(This is the second in a series of posts retrieved from NFI’s predecessor, the short-lived Neverscapes. The third and final post will be appearing on Friday.)

I’ve found the British Fantasy Society publications I’ve received during my first year of membership to be of a disappointingly low standard. Prism, for example, is less impressive than most fanzines I’ve seen, and is mostly composed of news that’s already aging by the time it hits the doormat. What’s the point of carrying news in a quarterly ‘zine in the age of instant online content delivery? Then there are the reviews of small press publications written by the publishers and authors of other small press publications, also reviewed in the same issue. I suppose the coverage is nice, but it’s all a bit navel-gazing, isn’t it? Still, I’m told the BFS do good conventions, which must go some way to making up for the annual membership fee.

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Here’s my flash fiction for the last Friday of June – I hope you enjoy it. I think it may be the first thing I’ve ever written in second person so I’ll be interested to hear if you think it works.

I’ve just noticed that in exactly one month I’ll have been writing F3 for a full year. So far I’ve posted stories on 32 of those 48 weeks, which I think is pretty good going.

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