>>Nostalgia For Infinity

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.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a piece of Friday flash fiction. I hope to post another entry later in the day explaining why. For the time being, here is another story that is technically too long to be flash, clocking in at 1,171 words.

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FUNERAL

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Contains lots of comics. It’s been a jolly long time since I did one of these. Read on to find out why (hint: it wasn’t because of comics).

Disclaimer: these aren’t formal reviews so much as musings on what I’ve read. Full reviews can be found here.

Previously: Books 1-2, Books 3-4.

5 – Marc Ellerby & Jamie Rich – Love the Way You Love Vol. 4, 5 & 6

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I made it to Friday, and managed four pieces of flash fiction over the course of the week. Not quite five but it’s a decent showing. You’ll have to imagine me saying that sardonically and throwing pointed looks at some of my fellow flash slacktioneers.

Today’s story is fairly lightweight, I’m afraid, as I’m a bit idea’d out after a busy week and managing to fling myself off my bike yesterday (thus, I feel like I’ve been beaten up… by tarmac).

The title is shamelessly stolen from the excellent Fuck Buttons.

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Colours Move

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What was that about the author meeting his own deadlines?

Yeah, I’m pretty much made of fail. Oh well. Here’s today’s flash fiction. This one’s about punk rock, which will no doubt impress my regular readers as it’s a subject which I so rarely touch upon. The soundtrack for this one is (Shut) Up the Punx!!!

If you missed ‘em earlier in the week, here’s Wanderlust and here’s Heralded By Iron.

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PUNK’S NOT DEAD

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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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Here’s this week’s F3, which is another music-based rather than genre story. I’m not happy with this one but I’m not going to have any time to rewrite it or write an alternative piece, and I’m determined to stick to publishing one story a week. Some of my thoughts in the comments – I wouldn’t recommend reading those until you’ve read the story, of course.

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Breaking the Circle

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Two days late is still better than never.

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THE TIME BEFORE I TURN

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This week’s Friday flash is themed, as per the suggestion of Gareth D Jones: the theme is “altered film titles”. I’ve cheated slightly because Space: 1999 was never really a film, just a hokey old TV series. But according to Wikipedia, a few feature-length pieces were cut together, so I reckon I get away with it on a technicality.

Kudos to James Hunt for suggesting the title – bet he didn’t think I’d actually write it – and also to Seb Patrick for some other awesome suggestions. They were all much better than my original idea of trying to do Transamerica, and almost certainly would have involved less appalling failure.

If, like me, you’ve never actually seen Space: 1999, then the Wikipedia plot summary may help make sense of this story.

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MYSPACE: 1999

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