>>Nostalgia For Infinity

There is an argument to be made that it is a difficult time to be writing action-packed fiction with a pulpish bent: more modern forms of entertainment media continue to grow in popularity, and whilst videogame narratives struggle to claw their way out of the ghetto of barely-coherent melodrama and machismo it seems probable that it will be the game, not the film or the novel, that will retrospectively define the youth of this generation.

There is also an argument to be made that this trend need not be relevant: there will always be space for novels that build themselves around action and adventure, and there will always be readers. The young are not the only demographic worth pursuing, and nor are they the only demographic who, to put it hyperbolically, enjoy having their adrenaline raced.

John Trevillian’s first novel, and the first of a trilogy, is what I would consider pulp fiction for the modern SF reader. It’s full of ideas, many of them – as is inevitably the case in a culture saturated with media production – familiar. It picks and chooses from sub-genres; the decadent megalopolises and megacorps of cyberpunk, the iconic villains and heroes of the more light-hearted end of post-apocalyptic fiction (an oxymoron, yes, but a highly entertaining sub-genre), the gun-porn and gung-ho attitude of MilSF, plus a smattering of satire.

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Hey, it’s a while since I posted one of these, right? Not since April ’09. Damn, how has it been so long.

So I was invited to submit a piece of flash fiction for a Christmas-themed issue of a dark fiction e-zine. The only real requirement was that it have a “ghostly” theme and the SF piece that crawled out of my brain doesn’t meet that requirement by most definitions of ghostly. This may be why the piece wasn’t accepted for publication. Regardless, I enjoyed writing it as I’ve written so little fiction in the past few years. I hope you enjoy reading it.

Merry Winterval, and fuck you Eric Pickles!

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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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So, postmodernism. Here’s a thumbnail definition, in case you’re interested: you know that musical flourish, duh-duh-durr!, those three doom-y crashing chords? Once upon a time they worked in context to send genuine tingles of dread through a cinema audience. Now to hear them is to think inevitably of the Dramatic Chipmunk half-turning to look at the camera over his chipmunky shoulder, eyes wild. Which is to say, that musical flourish has lost its original affect; it has become a depthless quotation in a shifting network of signification. It is now comic-bathetic instead of actually thrilling. That, to deploy the technical term, is what we call ‘postmodernism’, and one little-remarked-upon consequence of this state of affairs is the elevation of Godwin’s Law to an aesthetic benchmark.

An amusing and illustrating aside from Adam Roberts’s blog, in a post about John Meaney’s latest novel. I wouldn’t normally quote-and-run but this made me laugh, so ENJOY.

(In response to the last line I wanted to post a Futurama video clip; a Twilight Zone spoof where a man is trapped in a horrible nightmare. He pleads to someone for help: “why would I help you? You’re Hitler!” But alas, I cannot find it online.)

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.

…please, please try and get their voice right.

There’s nothing that ruins a story faster than characters who talk (or subvocalise) in an entirely unconvincing way. Based on personal and anecdotal experience it seems sprogs, kids and teens are the demographic writers tend to struggle with the most. This is understandable, to an extent; youth culture has a pace of change more rapid than science fiction has been able to boast for years. But you don’t get to make excuses for stories.

I don’t have any answers for writers who want to try and write contemporary youth well, but I’d suggest that irreverent cartoons beloved of children and young teens, TV shows that actually feature young actors (The Imbetweeners and Skins spring to mind, though I’ve seen little of either), and paying attention to the way groups of young people talk and interact is a more likely route to success than some painfully forced artifice that doesn’t even closely resemble your own youth.

Overall, though, you have to remember that kids are just like any other people. They don’t habitually pepper their sentences with buzzwords and pop-culture references – though in certain contexts they might. Some kids might use embarrassing substitutions like “freaking” or archaisms like “naff”, whereas others will cuss with the best of them. Whatever. If you are writing a character you need to ground them in a context, and that context will inform how they think, act and talk.

(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 «

Steven Deighan has been plugging away in the indie horror scene for almost a decade now, and published his first collection in 2006 (which I reviewed for now-defunct site Yet Another Book Review). It was a promising if unpolished set of stories and I felt it was worth keeping an eye on Deighan’s work. Now, along with illustrator Terry Cooper, he brings us a short graphic novel titled ‘Feels Like Stephen King’. At a bit under 40 pages it’s more of a graphic short story than a graphic novel, but who’s counting? Aside from hardcore comics fans who are already grumbling at my use of the term “graphic novel”, of course…

Deighan’s story focuses on a somewhat autobiographical subject: Eric Bain, a young horror writer who is struggling to get his work noticed by a publisher. As the story opens he receives a returned manuscript in the post, and at first is filled with anger at another rejection. Once he reads the cover letter, however, he realises that DM Publications wish to publish his novel ‘The Dying Game’. As his relationship with the head of the publishing house develops, however, Eric finds that his life is beginning to resemble something out of one his stories.

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[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.

I was going to lay off the blogging until NFI is stable again, but then a friend linked me to the Guardian CiF article ‘Life’s too short for thousand-page novels’. I have some sympathy for this perspective but I’m also familiar enough with CiF’s usual standard of literary and music journalism that I was expecting a train wreck. A train wreck of those little wooden trains that the Early Learning Centre probably still sell.

Sure enough, author Jean Hannah Edelstein manages to combine the CiF standards of overgeneralisation to the points of absurdity and inaccuracy with irrelevant asides and weak jabs at straw men. Let’s tap at the walls of her argument and discover the dry rot within.

Has anybody really got time for a novel that long?

There is a simple answer to this question, and it is ‘yes’. But then this is not rhetoric loaded with any degree of conviction: it’s a superficial attempt to generate debate, page hits and ad impressions. I’m a little ashamed to be contributing to this but we all have to get our jollies in some way.

Could it be that John Sayles is not able to get a publisher for his new book not just because the publishing industry is struggling, but because a thousand pages is just too many for a modern novel, and has been for years and years? In fact, I think it could.

I’m not familiar with John Sayles and not particularly interested either; what I’m concerned with is the absurd proposition that “a thousand pages is just too many for a modern novel, and has been for years and years”. It’s remarkably easy to find books that exceed or approach that figure (obviously these figures will vary depending on edition – mass market paperbacks will always be thicker than hardbacks): Nicola Barker’s Darkmans (848ppgs), Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (1248ppgs), Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (800ppgs), Hal Duncan’s Vellum and Ink (600ppgs each), Stephen King’s The Dark Tower (736ppgs), George R. R. Martin’s A Feast For Crows (976ppgs). Over in the USA Ayn Rand’s novel of grotesque self-interest, Atlas Shrugged, is currently experiencing a significant resurgence of interest among the more moronic wing of its chattering classes. That weighs in at well over 1,000 pages. With the exception of that last example these books were all published in the last four/five years. Quite a few of them sold rather well, and quite a few of them were critically appraised.

“But what about George Eliot?!” some of you will be inwardly shrieking. “What about Tolstoy?! Don’t make me come down there and smack you upside the head with a volume of War and Peace.”

Honestly. If you’re trying to make an argument about the “modern novel”, don’t immediately proceed to witter on about classic authors who died generations ago. This is surely elementary.

Stay calm, please: am I saying that we should go out and burn every copy of Middlemarch? No.

Of course this pointless tangent is immediately followed up with a Winner-esque response to an entirely irrelevant straw man.

She does have a fair point about J. K. Rowling and her vainglorious resistance of the editorial red pen. Rowling is an easy target if a fair one, but I’m magnanimous in vitriol so credit where it’s due.

I’ve no particular aversion to longer books. As an SF and fantasy nerd I’ve read plenty of doorstoppers. One of my favourite space opera trilogies weighs in at 1,000 pages per volume; I’ve read it twice, once in three days. But so far, in 2009, I’m sticking with shorter self-contained novels. So my personal tastes do align with the author’s, and these days I prefer to read novels around the 2-300 page mark. Of course I don’t mistake my preferences for demographic trends, and nor do I prostitute them for the purposes of empty rhetoric. Like so many Guardian Comment is Free articles this piece is a transparent and artificial attempt to provoke directionless debate, and says much about the decline of journalism and professional criticism into lifestylism and hollow distraction.

This blog post is 690 words long and would fit comfortably in an two-page A5 pamphlet.