>>Nostalgia For Infinity

(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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Since this blog is partly about me as a writer, I thought I should do the done thing and post occasionally about what I’m working on.

I’ve just finished another story for my writing group, a 2,500 word fantasy/horror tale. I started the first draft back in 2005, and although it’s now mostly rewritten it’s nice to finally see the project to completion.

It’s now been sent off to my group so I’ll wait and see what they come back with. For the time being I have some home recording to do…

GUD magazine is something of a bold venture in the current environment of declining short fiction sales (if not, I’d imagine, readership) – a dual online/print magazine presenting fiction, poetry and art across a swathe of genres, but with obvious literary aspirations alongside its generic focus. At 200 pages GUD is packing in a lot of content. I had intended to keep my review brisk, but at over 2,000 words I think I’ve failed in that. So it goes. Fortunately, it’s an interesting magazine to write about and hopefully to read about too.

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Well, here I am at my second Eastercon, and it’s a much larger and more intimidating affair than last year’s Contemplation. Fortunately I’ve bumped into fellow F3ers and friends Paul Raven, Gareth Powell, Martin McGrath, Neil Beynon, one Dev Agarwal (another thoroughly nice bloke), the one-man hive of industry that is Ian Whates, plus enjoyed a traditional Friday Curry with the Third Row contingent, so the feeling of being lost at sea is somewhat mitigated. However, as a result of this general ambience – of being simultaneous somewhere familiar, and entirely strange – I bring you this week’s Friday Flash Fiction: Deadblogging.

Oh, and don’t forget: buy our book! We have copies with us…

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Unbecoming is, to the best of my knowledge, Mike O’Driscoll’s first collection, and Elastic Press have done a sterling job bringing his unflinching examinations of humanity’s sinister aspects and fears to print. Reading the thirteen stories contained within it’s obvious that O’Driscoll has been ready for a book like this for some time. A common flaw with many single-author collections is inconsistency of thematic subject matter, a problem aggravated when writers have yet to settle into their own distinct voice. O’Driscoll deftly dodges these bullets with his memorable style and focus on a number of core concerns. Many of Unbecoming’s tales address the concept of identity and the extent to which it is transient and can be lost. Obsession is another recurrent theme, and to an extent so too is the importance of the act of creation over the artefact produced. What we do makes us who we are, not how we define ourselves.

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Do you see what I did there? Friday Fiction: F2. No flash for you this week.

I was going to post this up last Friday to capture some of that ghoulish Halloween spirit, but this was prevented by computer problems. (In fact, you’re mainly seeing this now because I retrieved it from a sent items mailbox on an old webmail account.) I’ve decided I still want to post it, as you guys deserve a longer piece to make up for my laxity with F3.

This is a 2,500 word story that I wrote about a year and a half ago. Looking over it now some of the writing is very clumsy, although I still like the nested structure. I’ve resisted the urge to change it, because historical revisionism is for politicians and the mass media. So I hope you enjoy this, despite my weak prose. It’s about zombies, and as we all know everything is better with zombies.

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Half-Day of the Dead

The ghoulish face scowled before him, an effigy of decay and corruption. The flesh was torn from one cheek as though by a serrated edge, and black blood had dried in streams running down from the wound. Ruptured capillaries had flooded one eye and its pupil gazed off at an unexpected angle. The hair was matted with more dried blood and filth. The skin itself was a lifeless grey, speckled with pus and scratches and tiny sores that wept fluid.

‘Incredible,’ he said. ‘It’s so… lifelike.’

The zombie visage bobbed before him, and the mouth shifted into a hideous grin.

‘Isn’t it though?’ the zombie replied. » Read the rest of this entry «

Just a throwaway piece this week, I’m afraid. I was hoping to write something better but I’ve been busy elsewhere: my PC now has a shiny new motherboard and PSU, I have another book review almost ready to post, and I’ve been planning my novel for NaNoWriMo. Well, I say “planning”, but I really mean “drawing spider diagrams and daydreaming of being fed grapes and wine by my naked publishing harem.”

Mmm. Publishing harem. Naked.

Have a little story:

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Revamped short fiction review venue The Fix has just been relaunched, and already there’s a good dose of spec fic reviewage online. Go have a read, bookmark/RSS the site, blog about it, spread the word, and all that promotional jazz.

While you’re there you should have a read of my review of Shiny #1. After all, I wrote it, and you’re reading this blog, so I presume you have some interest in the more coherent jibberish that springs unbidden from my over-chewed fingertips.

I hope I hope I hope I hope that my copy of this game is waiting for me, mewling desperately for me from the cradle of my doormat. Please, do not have failed me, Royal Mail.

It’s occurred to me that there are some things I can say about what I’ve seen of BioShock in the 360 demo that are neither here nor there, and some of them are moderately amusing to boot. I’ve jotted some of these down in list format, because Lists Are Fun.

• You can get drunk on whiskey. More games would benefit from this feature! The best case is when you find a bottle in a toilet next to a corpse. Mmm… now that’s a gentleman’s tipple. Lost in a strange underwater city? Drink from the bog.
• BioShock drunkenness lasts for just a few seconds, but comes with some significant vision blurring. No doubt a side effect of extended plasmid abuse.
• In a nod to our modern enlightened era – quite at odds with the isolated 1940′s community of Rapture – smoking reduces your health. Admittedly burning through a whole pack at once would leave the best of us a little wheezy, but what I like most is that it’s theoretically possible to smoke so many fags in-game that you’d instantly keel over dead.
• Despite the generally excellent level of thought that has been put into the game, there are some inconsistencies. Right after your first plasmid experience (see below) you blearily witness a pair of Splicers and then a Daddy and Sister prodding at you. But where do they go? The room in which this occurs has a sealed (broken) door at one end, and the other leads back to the bathysphere port and a dead end. The Splicers and Sister can crawl out, but there’s no way that Daddy could’ve gotten in or out.
• Your first encounter with plasmids comes when Jack finds a syringe in a broken vending machine. Without being prompted, he decides that it would be great idea to plunge this housecat-sized needle into his forearm and shoot up. I guess there’s a lot about this guy that we’re not being told. Sure enough, right after this experience Jack passes out on the floor. Classy.
• Speaking of inconsistencies, I knew where a Splicer was hiding on my second playthrough, but no amount of hammering on the door would entice him out until the game’s script triggered him. Shooter 2.0, eh?
• Hacking security systems makes things a lot easier. And the hacking minigame is fun. BioShock’s very fun in general, actually. I may have neglected to mention this amidst my enthusiasm.
• The music is excellent. The score is tremendously atmospheric, the use of 50s jazz in certain areas is spot on, and the initial section of the game features Django Reinhardt.

In late 2004 Ken Levine of Irrational Games, a games development company formed by refugees from Looking Glass Studios, announced the team’s latest project: BioShock, in many ways a spiritual sequel to Looking Glass’s cult System Shock and Irrational’s own System Shock 2. Fast forward almost three years and we now know much more about this title, which has become one of the most hotly anticipated games of 2007, and has already begun to garner significant critical acclaim. This is an impressive achievement in a year glutted with high quality titles, particularly given that BioShock is, at heart, a first person shooter that teeters between action-adventure and survival horror.

In BioShock gamers adopt the role of Jack, who in 1960 barely survives a plane crash over the Atlantic. A lighthouse situated near the sinking aircraft proves to be the entry point to an underwater metropolis named Rapture. The bathysphere journey down to the bottom of the ocean includes an animated tour of Rapture’s conception and construction, providing a rapid introduction to the game concept’s background and ideological underpinning. Built in 1946 by the Objectivist Andrew Ryan, Rapture was intended as a haven in which the best and brightest humanity had to offer could excel by the “sweat of their own brow”.

Predictably, something went wrong, and now the player – as Jack – finds themselves flung into a dying city ravaged by conflict. Broken men and women are roaming the corridors, some still wearing the shell of their humanity, and others yet more strange.

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