>>Nostalgia For Infinity

I’m quite disappointed in myself. I’ve posted just a couple of pieces of flash in the last… what, four or five weeks? That’s pretty poor form (just like flash, the naysayers cry). All I can say is that I’ve been busy lately. I’m sure most of you reading this know what it’s like to have work kicking your ass for weeks on end, leaving you a drained and empty shell at the end of the day. Fun times, eh?

All effort to connect my laxity to the release of little-known independent title Grandiose Thieving of Automobiles the Fourth is misguided, seditious and punishable by death (unless you buy more copies of our book).

I’m pleased to say that we may have a couple of new Friday flash fictionists amongst us: Gaie Sebold, who to the best of my knowledge is the first of our Orbital ’08 panel attendees to join us in posting flash online, and Sarah Ellender. They’ll be posting on alternate weeks; the first piece, from Gaie last Friday, is titled Folie A Deux.

My F3 for this sunny and glorious week is a continuation of Turning Point, following on from Gareth and Justin’s additions in the comments thread. Last time around I imitated Gareth’s voice, so it’s only appropriate that this time I try at Justin’s. We’re metafictional, baby!

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Whoops – went slightly over the word count with this one. It’s just shy of 1,200 words. Hope you enjoy! And make sure you check out the rest of the gang (Neil Beynon has posted a piece, and we may yet see something from Gareth Lyn Powell, Paul Raven, Martin McGrath, Gareth D. Jones, Justin Pickard, Dan Pawley, Greg O’Byrne, Jay Lake and Ian Hocking – is that everyone, or is my list out of date?) plus the Futurismic Friday Free Fiction update (man, there’s a lot of alliteration about these days).

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I’ve belatedly discovered that my review of Futures From Nature, an anthology of 100 pieces of flash fiction collected from the pages of science journal Nature, went live on the TTA Press Blog a few days ago. This review was a bit tricky to write, as you can’t devote much time to any of the stories but nor can you discuss them all. In the end I just focused on the most obvious thematic or subject groupings and talked around those a bit. Ultimately I concluded that it was a great collection and well worth reading, though you’ll have to read the review to see me justify that statement.

Don’t worry – sooner or later I’ll post something that has nothing whatsoever to do with flash fiction. Perhaps about porn, or photos of cats, as this is what the Internet is for.

As previously mentioned our panel on flash fiction involved us all writing our own pieces of flash. Since we were basically writing ex nihilo I was a bit short of ideas, and so ended up writing several short pieces. The first drabble is a bit of nonsense based on one of Gareth D Jones’ potted ideas, the second is a thematically similar piece (with poor use of perspective) that occurred to me while writing the first, and then there are some silly six-word stories I wrote in the last five minutes of finishing-up. I should probably have focused on one longer and more refined piece, but hey. This is what I wrote, just as I wrote it during the panel.

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I never did get round to a second from-Eastercon piece, which is a shame, though with my laptop’s comedy battery perhaps not such a surprise. Still, here I am back at home with a sort of follow-up piece. This is less of a summary of my own experiences – which were many and diverse and thus incompatible with my perfectionist, completive approach to anecdote and account – and more a few random notes and links elsewhere.

• People at science fiction conventions have diverse tastes. Much of this is wonderful, and some of it is scary: I heard one attendee admit to liking John Ringo. In public, no less! This terrifies me.
• Anecdotes are wonderful: whilst buying one of the few novels I picked up from the dealer’s room (tight budget plus unread book stacks large enough to construct forts with), Frank Herbert’s The Dosadi Experiment, the bookseller (whose name now escapes me) told me about how she had gone into her first Eastercon in search of the book. She found it, and also her husband, which is just wonderful.
• On the subject of buying books, I was very restrained. I picked up Paul Kincaid’s What it is we do when we read Science Fiction – not the snappiest title but looks fascinating – alongside a volume titled The Undead and Philosophy. I later returned to pick up the BSFA Celebration anthology and the aforementioned Herbert novel, and on the Monday was given a review copy of Kim Lakin-Smith’s Tourniquet. I also got a few copies of some anthology or another.
• Justin Pickard seems to have enjoyed his first encounter with fandom and conventions, and has excellent summaries of a few of Saturday’s panels.
• I’ve now sold five copies of Illuminations. Admittedly the first was to fellow BSFA Orbiter scribe James Bloomer, and the next four were to family, but it’s still pretty awesome.
• Lots of photos are popping up on Flickr. Sadly every single shot I took is of atrocious quality. Did anyone notice my hands shaking over the weekend? Perhaps I was suffering severe withdrawal symptoms, or early-onset Parkinson’s Disease. Either that or I’ve just forgotten how to use that newfangled digital camera again. (Worst. Futurist. Ever.)
• The already-legendary Sex and the Singularity panel was easily a comic highlight of the weekend, with Charlie Stross’ hippo / leech anecdote no doubt soon to emerge as one of those horrendous “gotcha” intarwub memes. Oh god, the thought of some sort of goatse photoshop just emerged. Going to scrub brain now.
• Justin and I have agreed that some sort of story must be written involving Mary Poppins and Sherlock Holmes uniting to do battle with the dreaded Hijabzilla! This is an injoke which may be funny if you were at Mieville’s keynote speech and stayed for the Q&A. If not… well… just you wait.
• A few panels even got me to stick my hand up once or twice. I’ve found that at events involving fandom I revert to my old mode of a very shy individual who prefers to listen to others than pipe up himself (a side-effect of being surrounded by intelligent, often erudite, hard-working people who obviously care a lot about these subjects), but perhaps I’m becoming more comfortable in these settings. I suppose there’s nothing like people being wrongheaded to bring you out of your shell (oh, but I’d just got cable in).
• Dear David and Laura: I’m sorry I was incompetent at actually having a copy of our book with me, and that I missed you from Sunday onward. It was a pleasure to meet you both and I hope to do so again.
• Dear Third Row: thank you for having me along for Friday Curry. Apologies for my failures at Being Social. You are intimidating people (see above), and also wonderful people, and I admire you quite a bit. I really don’t mean to be rude.
• Please, someone scan in a copy of Lawrence Hale’s Space Train. The polarities must be reversed.
• The panel on Lovecraft resulted in my, upon returning home, reading a baker’s dozen of his shorter stories, and beginning to read Nick Mamatas’ Move Under Ground, which I can confirm is really very good (so far).
• On the train home I read a punk zine (Next Stop Nowhere #1) to cleanse my mind a little. Half of it was taken up with a Black Cougar Shock Unit tour diary, and I am now very surprised that apparently slightly angry frontman Alex Ulloa didn’t pull my arms off when JoN and I sang jokes about no one coming to see his band. Admittedly we were both drunk, and letting BCSU and Grabass Charlestons stay at our house, but he doesn’t sound the forgiving type. BCSU split up right after that 2006 UK tour, and I feel rather sad that our poor job as hosts may have contributed to that in some small way.
• That reminds me: my efforts to locate the confluence between SF and punk continue finding incremental success. Turns out that Neil Beynon’s other half, Gemma, has a brother who plays bass in No Choice. She was very surprised that I knew the band, which either says good things about my knowledge of The Scene or rather sad things about punk rock. Still, that was pretty awesome.

And now I must prepare to record a song with my still-unnamed band’s lead guitarist, who hopefully will succeed in not deleting seven hours of hard, drunken work when rearranging partitions. Wink wink, it’s fine really, these things happen.

Oh, and if we met at Eastercon, please leave a comment so I can investigate your blog/LJ/whatever if I haven’t already, and if we didn’t meet/speak and should have done, give me a good telling off and we can resolve to not do that again.

Just a quick post while I drink my tea – Charles Stross is doing his Guest of Honour piece at the moment and I don’t doubt it’s highly entertaining – with a few highlights of the Con so far.

• Our mid-afternoon workshop on Saturday was reasonably well-attended. The audience outnumbered the panel, which was no mean feat given that there were seven of us. We talked a little about the nature of flash and the reasons why we write flash on Fridays, and then everyone sat down to write a piece. I wrote two, plus some six-word shots, thereby demonstrating the fallacy of quantity over quality. Some of us – panel and audience – read out our pieces and offered some comment, and that was that! I think everyone enjoyed themselves and perhaps learned a little, which was great. We even sold a few books, and I was quite bewildered to sign several copies.
• Best programme item so far has been China Mieville’s GoH speech and Q&A. Possibly more on this later.
• I may have some photos from the BSFA Awards, but I suspect my shots are blurrier than the shakiest shakicam footage. Semper idem.
• I’ve never seen anyone pour a pint of lager quite as badly as some of the hotel staff are managing. Poor buggers: they clearly don’t know what’s hit ‘em.

News reached me this morning that SF giant Arthur C. Clarke passed away yesterday. His significance to the field need not be stated here, and there are plenty of obituaries elsewhere. R.I.P, Arthur.

The Deep Range and 2001 were my personal favourites from Clarke’s oeuvre: how about you?

SFnal news-and-gubbins blogsite Futurismic recently announced that it would be returning to the fiction-publishing game; maybe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you can sure as hell get it to recall the old ones. This being a rather clumsy lead-in to their first new story: Eliot Fintushel‘s Uxo, Bomb Dog.

This is not a review. I’m not going to go into too much depth, or get too critical, partly because I think you should just go read the story for yourself, but also because it’s political and satirical and juggles contentious issues like landmines and warfare and the wholesale slaughter of civilians for ideology and profit. You know, the sort of shit that’s only contentious if something’s not wired quite right in your head… and you see where I’m not letting myself go, right? So instead I’m just going to let myself ramble a little about why I like this story, in the hopes that you go and find out if you like it as well.

Anyway, the story’s set in the USA, at an undefined point in the future, or perhaps a little way up a parallel timeline that branched off somewhere in the C20. The country has been torn asunder by conflict, the horrors of war finally brought home to the USian public. The participants hardly matter. They’re just names, with perhaps hints of the ideology that lies beneath: Xians, Neo-Luddites, Anti-atheists, Lefts, Rights. They’re a tragicomic satirical sketch of the bizarre excesses of the USian political landscape, but they’re not what’s really important. For this Fintushel’s narration introduces some real-world statistics:

“Near the start of the twentieth century, ninety percent of war dead were soldiers. At the end it was ten percent. Now, into the twenty first, Nader bless and save us, they say it’s five.”

What’s important is the people, and it’s the people who are getting hurt.

The tale itself is brilliantly written, with a distinctive voice and a playful approach to its arduous subject matter; here and there little public safety announcement-style slogans crop up, like “USE YOUR PATE – CIRCUMNAVIGATE” – minefields, evidently. Fintushel’s tongue is planted firmly in his cheek throughout, as evidenced by the dominant, um, pseudo-religious movement of his USA being Naderism (complete with rubber noses, street parades and general amnesties). Fintushel’s characters are endearing and lovable; they’re not whole, many missing digits or limbs or worse, but they’re not broken. Not least of these memorable names is the eponymous Uxo, the last Bomb Dog – a Colonel in the United States Military and the recipient of a Purple Heart, no less. And they’re what gives the story its heart, its love of the living over dead machines and bombs. It comes down to a contest, too, with the living breathing Uxo put up against a cold de-mining machine under the moniker Volkovoy.

Anyway, I can only hope that this enthusiastic wittering has encouraged you to click the right hyperlink. Whether it’s because the story sounds appealing, or because you think I’m full of shit and want to point out why, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

A conclusion: if this is the shape of things to come, Futurismic will be… well, it’s already in my RSS reader. Is it in yours?

I put quite a bit of effort into ‘Love Story’ and ‘This Urban Aesthetic’ so I’m taking it easy this week. Still, I hope you enjoy this shorter-than-usual piece.

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The first draft schedule for Orbital 2008 is live. It’s not long now!

Hopefully I’ll feel less uncomfortable this time around – which last year was an inevitable consequence of Contemplation 2007 being my first con experience. Still, as I’ve been reminded a few times since, Contemplation was an undersized example as Eastercon goes, what with it being a last minute response to Convoy’s cancellation. Blah blah blah, con politics, blah.

This year I resolve to drink less, pipe up in a few seminars, get a bit more involved, that sort of thing. Oh, and actually do some reading at the con. That would be nice. But above all else, I hope to avoid last year’s hangover o’ death. Who remembers Sunday? I wish I didn’t.

(That said, I managed to write ‘The Flowers of War World’ through that hangover, so it wasn’t a total loss. Maybe this year I can get round to actually doing something with the story. Sigh.)

I’m on a panel this year, which is a little intimidating. Fortunately it’s more of a workshop than anything else, and I’ll be there with several other members of the F3 posse:

OW31 – Flash fiction with the Friday Flash Fictioneers – George – Saturday – 15:00
“The FFF guys encourage folk to come along and write a short, short story. Simple and fun – bring a pen and paper.”

Potted description shamelessly lifted from Martin. I’m not sure what to expect, other than a fairly empty room – the schedue may change but at the moment we clash with the George Hay Memorial Lecture, which last year was one of the con’s highlights.

Anyway, I’ll be there alongside Neil Beynon, Gareth Jones, Martin McGrath, Gareth L Powell, and Paul Raven – Gareth J is chairing the panel so it’s up to him what we do, but I expect we’ll talk a bit about flash fiction and then invite all present to have a crack at writing something.