I have the same love/hate relationship with the country I live in as I have with Velcro City itself. On a day like today, with clear blues skies and a gentle breeze, I’m pleased to be sat here calmly, typing to the sound of traffic and birdsong with a long weekend approaching me; how could one find fault with England this afternoon?

Well, sometimes the bad things are literally too big to ignore:

Vermin and shysters; the BNP, only with better tailors and their mouths stuffed with plums. British-grown plums, of course. Wankers.

“Why worry about them,” people tell me. “No one takes them seriously.” Well, plenty of people take these seriously:

Graaaaaaaarrrrrgggghh.

Sorry, just needed to vent; it’s a common response to having left the building during the daytime. We now return you to our scheduled programmes.

Album of the week

One for the serious metal-heads this week: Daath are supposedly into Kabballah (the Hebrew mystical malarkey, rather than the wackadoo cult based upon it from which Madonna buys blessed mineral water) and all sorts of other stuff, but exactly how that affects their music I have no idea. Suffice to say that their new album The Concealers is that rarest of birds – a consistently powerful and heavy modern metal album with no filler and no gimmick-of-the-day. Go ahead, give your neck a workout.

Writing about books

The This is Not a Game review is half-written, as I managed to bash out one and a half thousand words on the train to London on Wednesday night. This is progress, not to mention the worst part of the process completed; now I just need to edit it up, supplement with quotes and digressions, polish and send. So, that’s an afternoon of the coming weekend taken care of…

Futurismic

Hey hey hey – it’s the first of May! Which is something to celebrate even if you disregard revitalised pagan festivals and political holidays spawned by a dying metanarrative, because it means there’s new fiction at Futurismic. This month I got to publish someone who lives little more than a stone’s throw away from me by comparison to our Stateside contributors; Stephen Gaskell’s “Under an Arctic Sky” is a geopolitical action-escape story done right, and you should go read it before leaving a comment to say what you thought of it. G’waaaaan.

PS Publishing

So, as most of you who’ll be interested will already know, I was up in the Big Smoke on Wednesday night, watching Ian R MacLeod take the 2009 Arthur C Clarke Award for Song of Time, a book published by PS Publishing, for whom I am contractor-publicist. It was quite a moment, and even more so for Pete and Nicky (and Ian, obviously) than myself. It’s a very prestigious title for a small press like PS to accrue, and for it to happen in the company’s tenth year of business seems fitting, somehow.

I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to work with people who care deeply about what they do. Seeing Pete’s face as the winner was read out has pretty much made my month.

Freelance

Work, work, work… there’s been a lot of catch-up this week as I recover from the setbacks of the beginning of April, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, I think. My server is up and running, and I’ve pretty much sussed the essential basics of running the thing, so now I can start using it properly as both a hosting and development environment. Some minor projects and tasks have been cleared off; some larger ones have mutated (mostly for the better), and a few more are looming on the horizon like braking supertankers. LIVING THE DREAM, YO.

[high-grade-geekery]I’ve finally abandoned all hope of learning to do anything with Drupal before the next ice age happens (if even that soon), and am defecting my loyalties to MODx, as recommended by good buddy Adam at Mallmus Media. In a nutshell, MODx looks to be a CMS that does everything all the others can do, but actually makes it possible for you to find all of the relevant options in one place without referring to a degree in database architectural philosophy that you don’t have. Plus it has a moderately revolutionary approach to theming and templates that fits much better with my personal design methodologies for larger projects… or, in other words, it makes more intuitive sense to me than the others I’ve tried before, and I think I’m going to enjoy development jobs much more as a result. Yay![/high-grade-geekery]

Aeroplane Attack

People tell us that our first gig went pretty well, despite some sound issues. The problem in a nutshell: the girl running the sound desk has never encountered a band who request that they not bother mic’ing up the amplifiers and simply run the kick, snare and vocals through the PA. End result: we didn’t sound quite right, but we still put in a decent showing and had a lot of fun. In case you were wondering how we sound, well, here’s a video recorded on a mobile phone. Horrible sound quality, but you’ll get an idea of where we’re coming from (and how loud we play); the tune is called “Song for Joseph”.

See? We don’t use the Vulcan bomber as our logo for nothing.

The next show is Monday 11th, and the sound guy will be someone we know a little better, so those debut issues should be sorted. We’re really looking forward to it; if you’re in the area, come along. I have tickets, if you’d like to buy one at the super-cheap advance rate of £2…

Books and magazines seen

No time for sourcing images today, but there’s a fresh hardback copy of China Mieville’s The City & The City sat on my sofa alongside a trade paperback of Sean Williams‘ latest Astropolis novel, The Grand Conjunction.

A more unusual score comes in the form of How to Build Your Own Spaceship, a pop-sci book by Piers Bizony about “the science of personal space travel”, which the publisher was nice enough to send me after I emailed them about it[1]. Nice Jetsons vibe to the cover art:

Lovely. Now all I need is the time to read it…

Coda

Well, there you have it – it’s been a busy few weeks, but then I always say that, don’t I? But hey, the weekend’s here, and that’s got to be a good thing. I think I’ll wrap this up, finish the Futurismic free fiction round-up and spend a few well-earned hours sat on my arse with my nose in a book… I hope you find something nice to do as well. Laters!

[ 1 - And many thanks to the man DT for the tip-off on that one, too. ]

Yeah, even if you didn’t end up with the president you wanted. You deserve congratulations for experiencing the first national election that was truly a global event – not just as spectacle, but from the aspect of influence. The first one that wasn’t just under your control.

The whole world voted for this one – with its eyes. And the world will vote for all the elections in the future, big and small. We’re next, here in the UK. And while I’m no great fan of parliamentary democracy, I can’t help but believe that this degree of scrutiny and passion can only make it better.

Welcome to the future. It’s going to be tough (because the future always is – this ain’t no pulp novel, kids), but a change is as good as a rest, as the saying goes.

Hey, Bruce Sterling, what should print newspapers do?

Yeah, I know, I’m a fanboy. When he gets it wrong, I’ll start being even more critical.

It’s a sad state of affairs when we need a Canadian ex-pat science fiction writer to say the things that our own press will do little more than tip-toe around:

To my friends, I say this: your Labour Party has taken my biometrics and will force me to carry the papers my grandparents destroyed when they fled the Soviet Union. In living memory, my family has been chased from its home by governments whose policies and justification the Labour Party has aped. Your Labour Party has made me afraid in Britain, and has made me seriously reconsider my settlement here. I am the father of a British citizen and the husband of a British citizen. I pay my tax. I am a natural-born citizen of the Commonwealth. The Labour Party ought not to treat me — nor any other migrant — in a way that violates our fundamental liberties. The Labour Party is unmaking Britain, turning it into the surveillance society that Britain’s foremost prophet of doom, George Orwell, warned against. Labour admits that we migrants are only the first step, and that every indignity that they visit upon us will be visited upon you, too. If you want to live and thrive in a free country, you must defend us too: we must all hang together, or we will surely hang separately.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been reading a lot of German 20th Century history recently, but this stuff is scaring the crap out of me too. Insert boiling-a-frog metaphor here.

[ ¹ - Actually, I can't think of anyone better to say it. And yes, I know others have said similar things - within sf and without - but few have Doctorow's audience. Kudos to the man. ]

No, Mr Brown. You are a weasel, a fearmonger, a small man in a big man’s expensive suit, and – like your predecessor, and many others – a panderer to corporate interests and waning governments with imperial ambitions which mirror that collapsed edifice which Daily Mail readers still feel should stretch around the globe by dint of nothing more than divine grace, stiff upper lips and unbridled paranoid bigotry based in a fundamental fear of otherness.

No one in the world ever has nor ever will do as much to curtail the freedoms I was fortunate enough to born with, Mr Brown, as you and others of your ilk. You wield fear like a whip, but you turn it on those you claim you are elected to serve.

What have you ever suffered or lost through the choices made by others on your behalf, Mr Brown? What have you given up to defend what you believe? What do you really know of fear, beyond the thought of losing the privilege you have amassed? Evidently not enough; as it has always been, the people will reap what the suits have sown. I hope that one day we will all turn around and feed it to you until you choke.

“Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant and I declare him my enemy.” – Proudhon

We now return you to what passes for regular programming on this channel.

Writing about music

Another slowish week, but that’s not at all unwelcome. Festival season means the PRs are all tied up promoting things I’m not yet a big enough wheel to be of assistance with*. I can deal with that.

Album of the week

Not a great deal to choose from, really, so The Offspring take the crown easily with their eighth album Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace.

Writing about books

The Love & Sex With Robots piece is all but finished; last few paragraphs and a brisk polish, and that badboy should be ready to roll out of the warehouse, so to speak.

I’m about a fifth of the way into Schmidt’s The Coming Convergence; it should be a swift read, because I seem to be a lot more technoliterate than the reader it is designed for (so I can skip a lot of the passages telling me stuff I already know).

Futurismic

The new Futurismic bloggers are settling in nicely, and by the end of this evening I should have fixed over 380 dead incoming links that got broken when the old Moveable Type installation collapsed on us – which I hope will boost our PageRank and SERPS somewhat, and bring with it a boost in passing traffic.

The other good news is it seems the Project Wonderful ad slots are starting to mature nicely, in that advertisers are recognising their worth and bidding competitively on them. I’m hoping for more growth in this area over the next six months – especially if the dead link fixin’ mentioned above has some effect.

Freelance

The tweaking of websites and the publicising of publishers continues at a steady pace; nothing substantial to show off yet, but there’ll be solid results by the close of business this month.

Books and magazines seen

It’s a lit-crit double whammy this week!

First off we have my long-awaited copy of Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics Of Fantasy – courtesy the author herself at last weekend’s AGM meet-up – which I have been looking forward to reading since hearing the framework of its taxonomy explained by Brian Stableford at last year’s Masterclass – bloody hell, a year ago.

Secondly I have my second review job for Foundation, namely The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (eds. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman) – which, as far as Amazon is concerned, has been out in the States since 2005. So either it’s getting a relaunch on this side of the pond, or Foundation’s reviews department makes me look like a paragon of organisation and productivity**.

I couldn’t resist it, basically, though I wonder if maybe I haven’t bitten off a little more than I can chew – I’m even less qualified to talk politics than I am lit-crit***.

But Ms Le Guin’s blurb praises the book as not just a good and valuable examination of her famous novel, but refreshingly jargon-free, so maybe I’ll be OK. One thing’s for sure, there’s gonna be plenty of food for thought in there.

Aside from those two heavy-hitters, some fantasy titles from Orbit are all for which we have to thank the deities of the postbox this week.

Coda

So, on the surface of it – and by any metric of meaningful use beyond the confines of my own emotional landscape – it’s been a pretty good week, if not as productive as I’d have liked.

However, things haven’t been entirely peachy; I shan’t go into details (because this isn’t LJ or MySpace) but I’ve been an emotional wreck for no clearly discernible reason, and have consequently been shitty to people who didn’t deserve it – so there’s a nice nugget of guilt for me to chew over the weekend. Mmm, tasty guilt.

Couple that with a growing panic about next weekend’s impending Masterclass (for which I’ve still yet to read anything from the reading list that I hadn’t read before receiving it), and a certain degree of riding herd on my new bloggers at Futurismic****, and it’s obvious with hindsight why I’ve been sleeping badly and unable to concentrate on anything. Hence nearly being assassinated by a blind taxi driver while cycling to the day job this morning tipped me into a state verging on hysteria.

Thankfully my line manager is a good person, and listened to me gibber for a bit before recommending I use some of my vast backlog of annual leave allowance and take some extra time off next week. End result: I’m working a two day week from Monday, giving me two clear days to attack the Masterclass material while clearing down all my other work; then I return to work the following Tuesday. Signing the leave sheet was such a tension-release that I almost wept. I suspect I’ve been letting things get on top of me a little.

But hey, it’s the weekend! And there are few ills that The Friday Curry doesn’t at least provide the illusion of healing. After which I may go and listen to hideously loud rock music in a side-street pub, if I haven’t already fallen asleep. Enjoy your weekends, folks – hasta luego.

[ ** Under-qualified like a toddler with dentist's tools, then. ]

[ *** Only kidding, Andy. ]

[ **** No discredit to them, by the way, they're doing great; it's just one of those jobs that eats waaaay more time than you ever expect it to before you start. ]

All things considered, I’ve been pretty cheerful of late – a situation I’ve worked hard to maintain, primarily through the sensible avoidance of political news of all types.

But sometimes you just can’t avoid the worst of it … and so now I’m off to the kitchen to make a pint of espresso which I can inject into my eyeballs to hopefully ameliorate the clangorous echoes of anthropogenic FAIL.

Why?

Well, I was prepared to put the election of this racist over-privileged buffoon down to the innately British habit of supporting the person least suitable for the post, no matter how nonsensical their ascension to said post would be.

But then this morning someone Twittered me a link to a news story about Americans holding prayer meetings at gas stations. So that God will help to lower the prices, you see.

And then I read about politicians – ostensibly on the same side of the political divide – not only discrediting one another simply because they want the big chair at the head of the table (and if I can’t have it nor can you, so nyaaah), but also quite deliberately undermining any remaining semblance of public respect for education and experience (and, seemingly, basic common sense) by playing the Everyman card.

Good grief.

The funny bit is that people regularly tell me that anarchism is an untenable political philosophy because it would invite greed, self-interest and mob-rule stupidity to take the wheel. In which case I’m not entirely sure, at this precise moment of time, what we have to lose.

Now, where’s my coffee? I worry that I’m slowly turning into Warren Ellis …

… if you have upgraded (or are about to upgrade) to Wordpress 2.5. To be fair, most of this should be obvious to anyone accustomed to learning software by getting their hands dirty, or who has been using Wordpress for more than a few months – almost everything is still there, but it has been shuffled around and prettified somewhat.

While it does explain how to squash some of the media uploader bugs (hint – the Bad Behaviour plugin), it doesn’t explain why the new image insertion protocols are so weirdly different. Yeah, that’s me – all stuck in my ways. Gimme back my automatically-created thumbnails, you bastards – The Dreaded Press requires them!

***

… if you’re going to talk about the Middle East.

The title is “What Every American Should Know About The Middle East“, but I can’t think of a huge number of Brits who couldn’t do with taking the three minutes it will take to have some completely misfounded notions defused.

Of course, as with all such things, the people who most need to read it are the ones who won’t or can’t.

Selah.

I am, by nature, a cynical man. A pessimist, even – especially when it comes to matters environmental. Some might even say overly negative. I’ve certainly shown evidence of depressive traits.

But even I feel like Happy Bozo The Happy Petrochemicals Clown by comparison to Peter Watts:

“There was never a time when things could be turned around with such petty gestures. You want to effect real change? You’ve got to address the root of the problem: human psychology. We evolved in the moment, we evolved to recognize imminent and proximate threats: pestilence, predators, an alpha male coming at us with murder in his eyes. The site of a rotting corpse or a deformed child makes us squirm; the toothy smile of a great white freezes our blood. But we never evolved to internalize graphs and columns of statistics. They may be real; they just don’t feel that way.”

That’s the most cheery paragraph. And just to preempt any possible confusion, I’m linking to that post because I think he’s utterly right.

Everyone thinks they have a novel in them. This storytelling urge apparently runs all the way into the Ministry of Defence, who’ve decided to rewrite a certain rather gory tale with no forseeable ending that’s set in the Middle East. After all, the truth – when unpalatable – is best covered up. Especially when the children might hear it.

Perhaps some children, encouraged by their parents or just simply contrarian by nature, will refute this fictionalisation of a massive financially-motivated war crime by any other name. At which point they will doubtless have their DNA sampled for a database that is just waiting to be hacked open like a decades-old pomegranate, under suspicion of having the potential to become a life-long offender – which, once stigmatised as such, they are most certainly more likely to become.

Sneaky little free-thinking scum-bags – they will be easily spotted, as they’ll be the ones who refuse to swear allegiance to a puppet monarchy.

[ The next person who tells me I should be more proud to be British is going to receive all the swearing that I just redacted from this post before publishing it, and then some.

The next person to blame the ills of the country on im'grunts or tur'rists will spend the next two days in casualty having my boot surgically removed from their arse. ]

This caught my eye at Forbidden Planet the other day, and I’m glad I filed it for further inspection. Basically, a British journalist (Dan Hancox) and a British cartoonist (Tom Humberstone, aka The Vented Spleen) are heading off to the US to cover the forthcoming election.

I’m sure I’m not alone in finding the US election process fundamentally arcane and baffling*. In fact, I know I’m not alone – I’ve had American friends cheerily admit it makes little logical sense to them either.

Everything I know about US politics I learned from Hunter S. Thompson**, and so I’m fascinated by the idea of two British guys aiming to do a Thompson & Steadman style campaign trail trek aimed at reporting back to Blighty on the process.

Not just because this is a pretty important election on a global scale, but because (however unwisely) I actually trust two independent counter-cultural blogger types to give me a better understanding of the process than the mainstream media. If nothing else, I’ll be listening to people I can relate to. Or think I can relate to, at least.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in following, they’ve got their “My Fellow Americans” blog up and running already, posting little preliminary details before the primary race kicks off in the new year.

Hell knows we’re going to be bombarded with information about it whether we like it or not – I figure I might as well stick with a supplier that provides a palatable flavour.

[* I'm not claiming the UK version to be any more logical, by the way. It is, however, vaguely more familiar.]

[** Yes, I know, that's hardly fair and balanced. Sue me.]