It occurred to me that, although I mentioned it at Futurismic, I didn’t plug my induction to the hallowed Locus Roundtable blog here at VCTB. So consider this an attempt to redress the issue: should you be interested, you can observe me firehosing my overly verbose and underinformed opinions around in the company of people far more knowledgeable, well-read and concise than myself, covering such topics as the aesthetics of science fiction, sf’s troubled relationship with the (un)foreseeable future, and the travails of genre taxonomy. You can also read my very own “origin story” about how I found my way into the scene (which is a high-water mark of self-indulgent introspection, even for me; selah).

The real purpose of this post, though, is to take the opportunity to post the full text of my response to the “SF vs The Future” question, which – thanks to its prodigious wordcount and numerous digressions – was shaved down somewhat before being included in the final article. To be clear, I had no objections to it being shortened, especially as, in light of the other responses, some of my points were inverted or rendered redundant; I include the full copy here primarily for the sake of adding it to my online archive of critical writing (which I mean to expand with a lot of my as-yet-uncollected reviews and essays in the months to come, time permitting). So, feel free to get stuck in – comments, curses and cries of “what the hell are you on about” are – always – more than welcome.

OK, so: those of you who follow cyberpunk’s very own apostate chairman-in-voluntary-exile Bruce Sterling with even a shred of the obsessiveness with which I do so (fanboy is as fanboy does, after all) will have encountered his word for the “problem” that sf (and almost every other sphere of human endeavour) is having at the moment: atemporality.

Paraphrasing somewhat (and confessing to considering myself to have the open licence on rewriting the concept to suit my needs that said concept implicitly embeds within itself): atemporality is basically end-case po-mo (and has also been labelled as “altermodernism”). It’s what the world looks like when the conceptual space you inhabit is – and always was – saturated with po-mo’s erasure of metanarrative; when you’ve learned from birth that if you don’t construct your own narratives pretty fast, someone else will construct them on your behalf. (And then charge you for the privilege of featuring in them, most likely, unless you’re on the lower tiers of their freemium package, in which case you’re getting some sort of intangible and easy-to-scale benefit in exchange for reinforcing said narrative. But I digress… which is very unlike me, I know, and your indulgence is appreciated.)

The Future (caps deliberate) was old-school sf’s metanarrative; The Future used to be somewhere awesome and clean which we could either build, conquer or travel to. But the closer we got to the real (uncapitalised) future, the more it looked like… well, a lot like today, really, or even yesterday, only faster, more ruthless, more worn at the corners, and packed full of grim new threats alongside a remarkably persistent cast of old classics (Teh 4 Horsemen Haz A Posse). The future isn’t somewhere that anyone – except possibly the more hardcore transhumanists, who are getting intriguingly vocal and self-assured of late – wants to escape to. Indeed, I think most of us, at some level or another, are more interested in escaping from the future.

So there’s your crisis… and to paraphrase the late Doug Adams, it’s a difficult crisis for us to see for the very same reason that a tourist in Trafalgar Square struggles to see England. What’s interesting is the schism between the two responses to it, which I’m going to hastily label Consolatory Nostalgia and The Future As Engineering Problem (and doubtless regret the choice of labels later, but hey, this is how the altermodern critic works – it makes sense to me at the moment I’m writing it, and that’s pretty much the best I can hope for).

Interestingly, you can see these same responses cropping up in a lot of other arts, though sf’s history of speculating about the future gives it a set of tools which, while available to many other types of artist, it has a unique familiarity and aptitude with. As such, Consolatory Nostalgia pretty much rules the world of music right now: a pandaemonium of subsubsubcultures, all based on reappropriating the nice idealised aspects of bygone eras (and, of course, glossing over the nasty bits, which tend to be spookily mirrored by events in The Now) by mimicking the sounds of that moment. (Interesting, though, how the 80s revival in music and fashion started long before anyone but the smarter economists saw our latest financial shitrain nudging its way over the horizon; a smart person with time on their hands could probably learn to read these things like tea-leaves… though monetising it – as always – would be the real challenge.)

Indeed, music seems to be going through its own double-dip creative recession; even the traditionally futurist field of electronica is deep in a trough of retro. Electronica was pop music’s High Modernist moment, the point after which the ultimate experimental possibilities were, if not actually exhausted, then at least demonstrated to be little more than intellectual curiosities. There’s only so much you can do with words of English on a page and still have it entertain and fascinate the average non-academic reader; in the same way, there’s only so many different things you can do with the frequencies between 40Hz and 40kHz, which is why pop music is increasingly homogenous, retro revivalism (ironic, faithful or otherwsie) and genre mashups are ubiquitous, and the only true groundbreaking steps being made in music are – quite literally – painful to listen to.

But back to sf, where the Consolatory Nostalgia approach gives us steampunk, increasingly baroque space opera and increasingly violent mil-SF. It’s nostalgia for The Future, for a future we now know we’re never going to get: a future where the imposition of White Western Male-brand hierarchy and order (and maybe a bit of empire, even if only economic in nature) automatically led to Better Things (if only for People Like Us).

Now, what’s interesting to me is that the writers and editors who stand accused by the traditionalists of breaking (e.g. Jetse de Vries) or abandoning the genre (e.g. Bill Gibson) are the ones cleaving most closely to the underlying impetus (if not the intellectual machismo and cryptoracism) of the original Cambellian vision of competent folk solving existential risk problems… or, in other words, of The Future As Engineering Problem. Now that it’s become plain that strong-jawed men with toolkits going places in rockets won’t change much for anyone but the strong-jawed men themselves, then that dream of strong-jawed manliness becomes Narcissus’ reflection. Why look at the real future when The Future we dreamed up before was so much more user-friendly? Much space opera and much mil-SF, as has been pointed out by far smarter folk than me many times before, is actually fantasy with rayguns, and is becoming more and more so; steampunk is fantasy with, er, steam. It is escapism. And there is nothing wrong with that, either; diff’rent strokes, and all that.

But you can get a fairly decent idea of what the future will look like if you stop staring into the mirror of The Future and turn your eyes to The Now. It’s not a pretty picture, granted, but from a writer’s perspective it’s packed full of interesting and genuinely terrifying ways to place your characters – and the rest of their species – in some very deep shit indeed, and without the need for any of the implausible aliens or FTL-powered empires or other stuff from The Future. But the sort of inquisitive mind that spots those potholes in the turnpike is probably the sort of mind that finds itself wondering if there’s a way to swerve and avoid them… or even take another road (the ultimate Route Less Travelled) entirely. We’re going to end up in the future whether we like it or not… so why not think about how we can make it slightly less terrifying? Or, like jaggedly gloomy gadfly Paolo Bacigalupi, become a sort of mudlark prophet, digging around in the slimiest recesses of our planetary psyche for the end-games of our wilful ignorances. “If this goes on…” is another classic sf riff, but the guy plays it on a guitar strung with cheesewire.

(I should note at this point that it seems eminently possible to use classic widescreen skiffy tropes to examine The Now in pertinent ways, and I would offer David Marusek as an example thereof; likewise, I’m sure there’s steampunk that does more than yearn for a past when the future was still full of promise, and that there’s small-m mundane sf that falls into every consolatory drinking-den it passes. These patterns are observed generalisations rather than proscriptive divisions, so tell the villagers to douse the torches and put away the pitchforks, mmmkay?)

So, to answer – at long last – Karen’s question: is sf struggling to catch up with the future we’ve found ourselves in? I don’t think it is; I think a non-mathematical half of it has lost all interest in the future (because it doesn’t look like The Future, refunds are not forthcoming, and re-runs are as comforting for the viewer as they are cheap for the broadcasters), while the other half is doing its best to not get sucked across the singularity and into the future before managing to come up with a way to survive the experience (with being able to walk away afterwards considered a definite bonus).

Sf isn’t struggling to catch up with the future; on the contrary, it’s schism’d and reeling from having met the future in person, unexpectedly and with some considerable threat of violence, in an alley behind a franchise restaurant in downtown Mumbai.

Regular readers (especially those from the Genre-fictional League of Critical Motherfuckers) will be aware that I loves me a good taxonomy.

And what do you know, here’s one now: a chap called Eric Van (who I’m not sure I know) has categorised the flavours of science in science fiction [via Niall Longshanks Harrison]. The list was originally developed to comment on sf cinema, but Van suggests it’s easily adapted to use with the written form; I am very much inclined to agree.

Of special note for its concise definition of a very slippery concept:

Bad Science. An attempt is made at one of the above categories, and although the science isn’t demonstrably Wrong, it still doesn’t work for you; it takes you out of the story and makes you wince at its stupidity. That’s Bad Science. Whether Speculative Science strikes you as Bad usually depends on your scientific knowledge. With the other varieties, Bad Science seems ultimately a matter of taste. That the alien mothership in Independence Day apparently runs the Mac OS is Fake Science, but for many it’s Bad Fake Science. Botching the hand-waving explanation is a classic form of Bad Science; The Force in the original Star Wars trilogy was (like almost all psi powers in sf) simply Magic Science, but the introduction of midichlorians in the prequel trilogy struck many as a turn to the Bad Side, in that the explanation added nothing. In fact, a good criterion for identifying Bad Science is that fixing it would improve the story—if Jeff Goldblum’s character had to struggle to interface with the alien OS, that could have been exciting and funny and needn’t have taken more than twenty seconds of screen time.

This, incidentally, is the one you always see from writers who thought they’d take a crack at writing sf without knowing anything of the genre beyond the mainstream cinema and televisual canon. As a result, it’s almost impossible to explain to them why it doesn’t work.

Three things make a post, as the old gag goes. So, try this for size:

Do Androids Sleep With Electric Sheep?

That’s the title of an intriguing book I reviewed recently for SF Site; the subtitle reads “Critical Perspectives on Sexuality and Pornography in Science and Social Fiction”, and I just couldn’t pass it up. Funnily enough, I don’t think anyone else expressed an interest… I guess I’ve finally found my niche in the genre criticism ecosystem, eh?

It’s an interesting book, albeit something of a mixed bag. Skip to the money-shot:

Like good science fiction, the material collected in Do Androids Sleep With Electric Sheep? leaves us with more questions than we arrived with; if you can stomach the subject matter (which shouldn’t really appall anyone but the most prudish and conservative, to be honest, though my perceptions may be somewhat skewed), this is prime fuel for your imaginatory engines. The focal character of James Tiptree, Jr.’s story “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” suggests that, as humans, “we’re built to dream outwards” [pp 239], to project our desire onto “the other”, whoever or whatever it may happen to be. It’s an insight that makes more sense each time you read it, and serves to underline the basic commonality between sex and science fiction, or indeed art in general — they are both ways in which we try to subsume ourselves into (or control and dominate over) that which we are not.

Love makes us do strange things, after all.

It really, really does.

The (Schis)matrix reloaded; criticism and subjectivity

I can’t remember where I saw the first link to There Is No Genre, but I do remember Casey Samulski’s opening post made me think [he/she]‘d have interesting things to say in future, and subbing to the RSS feed. Today, that trust was rewarded with a repost review of Chairman Bruce’s Schismatrix (which I fully intended to review after re-reading it late last year… and so it goes) with a coda born of hindsight:

… this really is the tricky part of good criticism. Ultimately, it is subjective. An author can do their best to ensure that a particular effect resonates with his or her readership but it’s no guarantee of that outcome. No two people read something identically. We each take to a work our own experiences, including previous works read, our own sense of beauty, and our own preconceptions about the novel at hand. This is not to say that you cannot have some objectivity in this process — I have read things that I haven’t enjoyed but that I have appreciated for their craftsmanship. Instead, I would argue that objectivity is something of a distant shore to be paddled towards but never landed upon.

Preference. Mood. Taste. These are all culprits at various times and they are inevitable, responsible for sabotaging even the most sober of inspections. In order to criticize well, you must remember that these reign over your judgment, tirelessly skewing your sense of direction. Most importantly, I think you can never pretend that you understand a work completely — there must always be the admission that you are only witness to what you were able to discern and that, like all art, this does not define what is actually there.

Yes, yes, and thrice yes; I always thought that subjectivity was implicit in any and every review ever written, but the peridic cycles of angst und wagling about negative reviews and uppity critics serves to demonstrate that’s surely not the case. And now for the resonant chime in a passing pair of sentences from Jeff VanderMeer in a Booklife post:

… there’s also the uncomfortable truth that no one is ever going to perceive your book exactly the way that you intended for it to be perceived. In coming into contact with the world the text changes, given an additional dimension by readers.

[image courtesy nurpax]

Reviewing while blindfolded

But what if, to stymie future complaints about reviewer bias and preconceptional baggage, you inverted the normal anonymity curve of the reviewing process, namely naming the reviewer (generally uncredited in a lot of non-genre venues, or so I’m led to believe) but concealing the author’s identity (and, presumably, publishing details) from said reviewer?

… the editors of this magazine asked if I would be interested in being part of an experiment in criticism. They were curious what would happen if we inverted the standard “anonymous review†formula—if instead of the reviewer having the cloak of anonymity, we were to keep the book under review anonymous from its critic, and thereby shield it from any and all prejudice—whether positive or negative, whether directed at the author, the publishing house, the blurbers, the cover art, etc. I swore several oaths to stay true to the project (Eds.: “No googlingâ€), and soon enough a book arrived at my house. Its covers, front matter, and endpages had all been stripped, and the spine blacked out with a Sharpie. I didn’t know what it was called or who wrote it or who was publishing it or when. I didn’t know if it was the author’s first or twenty-first publication. Fiction? Nonfiction? Genre? Self-published? I didn’t know anything (and at this writing, I still don’t) except that it wasn’t poetry. What could I do? I began to read.

Rose Fox of Publisher’s Weekly (thanks to whom I found that post) mentions that it mirrors periodic calls for genre venues to anonymise the slushpile – a suggestion plainly motivated by the “good stories lose out to established names” theory of short fiction publication.

The ones most readily identifiable–written by writers with very distinctive voices, or making use of familiar and copyright-protected characters or settings–would presumably be routed directly to the editors anyway, so generally anonymizing the slushpile seems like a reasonable way of reducing possible bias against authors with certain types of names. It wouldn’t do a thing to reduce unconscious bias against certain types of stories, but it would probably make it more obvious, which is not a bad thing.

Moving back to book reviewing, though, the point is made in the comments that with genre fiction, some sort of filtering is required (so that a romance reviewer doesn’t end up with a Greg Egan collection, f’rinstance)… but as I see it, that truism actually weakens the original thesis, which seems to be predicated on the ongoing fiction that there is some sort of objective measurement of quality that can be applied to all writing in the same way. With reference to the above links and quotes, I suggest that the myth of critical objectivity is long overdue for burial; there seems to be an evolving collective consensus on such matters when viewed en masse and at a distance, but once you zoom in close it’s subjectivity and personal opinion all the way down.

That this is unclear to so many people is a source of perpetual bafflement to me, but then so is Dan Brown’s status as a bestseller. So there you go.

Gonna be a pretty brief FPB this week; it’s a friend’s birthday bash this evening, and I’m well behind on my daily duties thanks to the ongoing mangling of my body-clock. I think I need to get out of the house in the daytime much more than I have; my diurnal cycle is offset from consensus reality by about five hours at the moment, and I doubt it’s doing me much good.

I did make it out of the house on Wednesday, though; I took a brisk stroll down to the seafront in the early evening. This is probably the best time of year to be in Velcro City; the days are long and the weather is clear, but the students are still busy wrapping up their years and the tourists have yet to descend like Asda-clad locusts. The city is fresh, bright and full of space. There is time to sit and watch, and think.

Even so, seeing a banana boat rolling in from the Caribbean triggers thoughts of places warmer, brighter and less familiar… I need to get out on the road again some time soon, I reckon.

Album of the Week

It’s a mark of how busy I’ve been doing other stuff that I’ve not reviewed much new music this week, and that which I have isn’t worthy of due props. So I’ll do another recommendation from the most-played lists on my Last FM account: far and away, my most-played band are Idlewild, and much as most fans will tell you they got progressively less interesting as their career continued, I’m very fond of the later stuff. Warnings / Promises is probably my favourite; it’s folky post-punk (or is it punky post-folk?) style is bolstered by a simple production job that eschews fancy effects and frippery, and Roddy Woomble’s lyrics speak to me in a way that never fails to inspire. Great album; go listen.

Writing about books

The This is Not a Game review has returned with editorial comments and suggestions; gonna nail that sucker over the weekend.

Freelance

Yup, hella busy on a couple of website projects still, hence my cave-mole lifestyle this week. Learning lots about MODx, though, which is good stuff.

Futurismic

Business as usual over at Futurismic; I got to talk about what the site means to me and what I try to achieve with it during yesterday’s recording of another Sofanauts podcast, which should be out on Sunday if you fancy listening to me blather on about teaching people the joys of thinking science fictionally about the non-fictional world we live in, and a lengthy but incoherent defence of the Mundane SF movement. Don’t worry, the other guests say plenty of interesting stuff; think of me as the comic relief.

Aeroplane Attack

Less than a week until gig number three; turns out that it’s now only a two-band line-up, which gives us a little more stage time in which to try out a work-in-progress tune and switch the set around a little. So lots of stuff to work on when we practice on Sunday…

Books and magazines seen

The drought has broken! Interzone #222 continues TTA’s run of gorgeous and genuinely sf-nal cover art:

A couple of interesting titles from Tor UK, also: item the first is a paperback of John Scalzi‘s Zoe’s Tale, which is tempting primarily because I’ve never read any of his fiction despite following the guy’s internet presence for a few years, and I’m curious to know what he’s like on the page.

Item the second is Winterstrike by the lovely Liz Williams. I’ve read a few books of hers before, but none of her ‘pure’ sf – a situation that needs rectifying.

And there was also a care package from my lovely clients PS Publishing, meaning that I’ve got (literally) piles of beautifully-printed books begging me to read them. There are worse problems to have, I think.

Coda

Right, that’s your lot – I’ve got stuff to do! Have yourselves a good long weekend, whatever you choose to do with it. Hasta luego!

You should buy this book – provided you don’t already own a copy of another edition, of course, though I’m sure Lou Anders and Ian McDonald would both be very happy if you did so anyway^[1].

Lou posted to show off the Stephan Martiniere steampunk cover art, which is pretty sexy in its own right^[2], but I’m reposting primarily because Desolation Road is one of my favourite novels, was McDonald’s first published book, and I don’t think it’s as well known as it deserves to be.

I wrote a review of it back in 2006 when I discovered it by chance in my local honeytrap second-hand bookstore; it’s not a great review even by my standards (in my defence, I’d not been doing it long), but my enthusiasm for Desolation Road stands even after three years. Best summed up by the blurb that declared it to be a cross-breed of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ray Bradbury’s Mars, it’s probably the only science fiction novel I can think of for which the adjective “charming” is not only appropriate but sincerely positive. Go find a copy, and read it.

[ ¹ - Actually, Lou's often quite vocally opposed to buying editions of authors from a different territory to the one in which you live, the argument being that every import you buy means potentially one less sale if the book is (re)published in your locale, so maybe you shouldn't buy the Pyr edition if you're not living in the US. But you should still read it, at the least; hunt a copy down on Amazon or ABE, or see if your library can borrow it for you. ]

[ ² - Martiniere rarely disappoints me, I have to admit. ]

You know, the solar system is just brim full of awesomeness. Check out the latest skinny on Mercury, once thought to be an unremarkable rock on the grand scheme of things:

Magnetic tornadoes form when the magnetic field in the solar wind links up to the field generated by a planet, a process called magnetic reconnection. Bundles of magnetic field lines connect the surface of the planet directly to the surface of the sun, and as the solar wind pushes them away from the sun, they twist and whirl like cyclones. On Earth, these cyclones (technically called “flux transfer events”) dance on the ionosphere, creating the Northern Lights and messing up GPS systems.

On Mercury, though, the twisters were 10 times as strong as any magnetic cyclones observed on Earth. With so little atmosphere to interfere, Mercury’s magnetic tornadoes are great spinning chutes that ionized gas can slide down.

“They act as magnetic channels or open windows that allow solar wind plasma from the sun, very fast and very hot, to come right down those field lines and impacts the surface,” said Jim Slavin of NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center. When the gas hits the surface, it knocks off neutrally-charged atoms and sends them on a loop high into the sky.

Now there’s a hard sf novum just waiting for someone to write it; maybe a system-wide power supply based around funneling the solar wind onto the innermost planet and then harnessing it somehow? Paul McAuley, I’m looking at you. [image courtesy thebadastronomer]

… but we have them anyway. Because since when did “need” enter into the rock’n'roll equation, eh? Behold!

Our drumber[sic] made up the logo, which we’re all rather chuffed with. Aircraft buffs will note that the plane depicted is a Vulcan bomber. Ever heard one of those take off nearby, say, at an airshow or something?

Well, know you know what Aeroplane Attack sound like. We’re playing our first gig tomorrow night. I am, to coin a phrase, kinda bricking it. But it’s going to a lot of fun – please come by if you’re in Velcro City for Saturday evening.

Writing about music

Shockingly behind this week for various reasons, but TDP is still ticking over pretty much daily.

Album of the week

This will surprise (and quite possibly appall) a few readers, but I’m going to plump for Shallow Life by Italian goth-metal-popsters Lacuna Coil. Oh yes, it’s cheesy as hell and totally overproduced, not to mention lacking any vibe of authenticity. But by hell it’s catchy, and sometimes that’s enough. Especially when you’ve only listened to two new albums in the last week or so…

… though if you’ll accept a reissue, the Brendan O’Brien remixed and remastered version of Pearl Jam‘s Ten (only available on the deluxe and hideously expensive version, folks!) is a well-executed polish job on an album whose primary flaw was always its budget production. Take a trip back to 1992 as it should have sounded.

Writing about books

Sheesh, what do you know – I’ve not written any reviews this week. Though, to be fair, I’ve been compiling notes for This is Not a Game, and that should pretty much write itself once I sit down and attack it for a few hours. I’ve also been mired in reporting on an unusually competent (but very long) novel typescript, so it’s not like my brain’s been having a holiday from books. Frankly, managing to squeeze in an hour of reading before bed is about all that’s keeping me sane right now…

Freelance

Much as it should do (what with it being my job and all) the ol’ freelance work has been really chewing up my time this week. And to little obvious progress; last week I finally bit the bullet and ordered my first dedicated server, and the last seven days have been largely focussed on learning how to set up and run the thing. Thanks to some helpful hints and hands-on tweaking from friends with relevent skill-sets (cheers, Phil!), the machine is now serving pages to the web. Those pages are only the demo pages of a sample MODx install, though, so lots of work still to do (on the server and in general). Aye caramba!

Futurismic

The Big F rolls on relentlessly; a new piece of original fiction goes up in seven days time, one columnist is about to change direction and another is about to join the fold. Plus the usual bloggery from the fuzzy line between today and tomorrow… won’t you come join us?

Books and magazines seen

Nothing at all this week, I’m afraid, with the exception of the latest issue of SOUTH Poetry. This is not a problem; I have plenty to read already.

Public appearances

April is shaping up to be the month in which I appear in the public domain as more than a mere pedestrian.

• Back on Wednesday night, the Aeroplane Attack gang were interviewed on a local radio station (which, as we pointed out at the time, is a weird thing to happen to a band yet to play their frst show).
• This afternoon saw me talking over Skype with Tony from StarShipSofa, long-time internet amigo Jeremy Tolbert and Tor.com‘s unfeasibly-multitasking Pablo Defendini for the second instalment of the Sofanauts podcast, which should be available at the weekend
• Tomorrow night is Aeroplane Attack’s debut gig
• Next Wednesday sees me attending the Arthur C Clarke Awards ceremony as an employee of the publisher of one of the shortlisted books

Cripes. And we’ve got another gig lined up for Monday 11th May, too. It’s like a runaway train, y’know? Exhilarating, but a bit scary too. But as Hunter used to say: “buy the ticket, take the ride”.

Coda

It’s a common refrain, for sure, but it should be evident I’m pretty busy. And I expect you are, too – whether it be with worky-type stuff or getting the most out of your weekend downtime – so I’m going to sign off before dosing myself up with pills in an attempt to shift the last of this headcold before tomorrow’s show. Whatever’s on your to-do list, have as much fun doing it as you can, OK?

Oh, and did I mention I’m playing a gig tomorrow? Yes? OK, then.

Hey, look – a post on VCTB that isn’t a link-dump!

Well, it’s kind of a link-dump… Karen Burnham recruited me for another SF Signal Mind-Meld, this time on the topic of the time-travel trope in science fiction. And once again I get to look like a hand-waving waffler among erudite and considered thinkers… at least I have consistency, eh?

[ Re: the title of this post - it's also the title of a vaguely time-travel-ish story that I started a couple of years ago and have, as yet, been unable to finish; a classic case of the amateur fictioneer biting off more than he can chew. Maybe one of these days I'll get round to finishing it. ]

An appropriate title for today, in some respects; after a few weeks of very passable sunny (though brisk) weather, Velcro City is once again drowsing beneath a sky the same dull grey as pre-dotcom computer hardware, the pavements slick with a noncommittal rain that suggests even the elements can’t be bothered to do anything properly today – bank holiday Friday, innit, mush?

Appropriate or not, it seems I never FPB’d any of the shots from the Mono show^[1] I caught the other week, so here you go:

Great band (as suggested by the liberal deployment of Fender Jazzmaster guitars, among other things). Good music for cold dismal weather, too.

Of course, if I was at Eastercon with the great and the good (and the weird) of British science fiction, I wouldn’t give a monkey’s about the weather. But I’m not, so I do. Selah.

About that service interruption

So, yeah, last week. To cut a long story short: my girlfriend finished with me. She had some justification for being upset with me; whether her response was proportional to the issue in question given the prevailing circumstances of her life is something only she can judge. I’m gutted, but I’m getting on with stuff. Life’s too bloody busy to sit around and mope; I neither need nor deserve pity.

That’s about it.

Album of the week

Suitably enough, the best album I’ve heard in the last few weeks has been Mono‘s Hymn To the Immortal Wind. Go buy it.

Writing about books

In a shock turn of events, I’m well behind on review writing – I need to get finished on Reading Science Fiction (eds. James Gunn et al), but that should be in some respects less challenging than a fiction review, given that it’s supposed to be criticism of criticism. Then again, I may prove to be fooling myself there. We’ll see.

I still haven’t reviewed Cyberabad Days, either, which is second on the priority stack. And last night I finished reading Chris Beckett‘s Marcher, so I need to do a reading journal entry for that as well. If you want to read a thorough review of Marcher by someone better qualified, Niall’s Strange Horizons piece is the one you need.

Futurismic

It’s business as usual at the world’s foremost near-future science fiction webzine… at least as far as content rolling out of the door is concerned, anyway. I have a big list of emails that need to be sent regarding new fiction purchases for the coming months, and it’s high time I got them done.

In other news, I’m in the process of roping in a new columnist to the team, which looks like it may work out pretty well. It’ll be good to have another new voice on board. Now, have you read Tim Pratt‘s story for this month yet? No? Well, get to it – it’s short but fun.

Freelance

It’s all go in on the business side of life at the moment, largely thanks to me dropping the metaphorical balls of productivity last week and scrabbling to get them airborne again. This is the major upside of not being at Eastercon, namely having a whole long weekend to get myself back up to speed (and to schedule) with a bunch of different projects and tasks. Which should, in turn, distract me from thinking about how much I’d rather be at Eastercon.^[2]

Plenty of other interesting stuff on the horizon, too. Myself and Adam Wintle of Mallmus Media are putting together a two-prong pitch for a fairly prestigious local project, which will be a lot of fun to do if we land it. We’ve also been swapping experiences with different CMS packages and hosting options, and I’m now pretty much convinced that it’s time to rent myself a proper VPS or dedicated server and stop pissing around with huckster hosting companies. Which means all I have to do is choose a good vendor and learn how to do command line sysadmin tasks… anyone got any Modafinil?

But hey, I’m busy, and there’s work in the inbox. That’s something to be grateful for.

Aeroplane Attack

So, it’s our first gig in just over a fortnight, which is pretty cool. We’re pretty confident that we’ve got our set sorted and rehearsed; now all there is to worry about are the logistical challenges of crowbarring a five-piece band who have four half-stack amps and a drum kit between them into the limited space available in the actual venue… well, that and selling more tickets, of course.

But hey, you can help with the latter by buying one yourself over the magical tubes of the intermuhwebs! Three quid for three bands, one of which is a frighteningly loud reincarnation of the fuzzy melodics of nineties grunge, shoegazer and alt-rock? That’s a bargain right there, so buy one right now.

Go on.

Books and magazines seen

No fresh books in the last few weeks (or rather “no books in which I’m interested and haven’t yet already seen a different edition or binding of”), but the turn of the season means that the quarterly poetry mags are starting to arrive. So far we’ve had Obsessed With Pipework and the newly redesigned Iota… if the latter’s content has improved as much as its outer appearance, it’s going to be a real contender.

Coda

So, not the most gripping of FPBs, but what can I say – that’s just the way it works out sometimes, y’know? Anyway, you’re probably either at Eastercon or doing something else to enjoy the long weekend, and I’ve got stuff to do, so I’ll play the hand of mercy and shut the hell up. Have fun doing whatever it is you’re doing, and take care of yourselves. Hasta luego.

[ ¹ - Like many venues nowadays, Digital uses those horrible light cans that have LEDs instead of incandescent bulbs. Great for the environment (and cheaper in the long run), but they make getting a decent shot of a live band with a cheap camera a virtual impossibility. Meh. Mono look good a bit blurred, anyhow. ]

[ ² - Yeah, like that's gonna work. ]

I’m a terrible person. I got in touch with the nice people at the BBC and they were good enough to send me an advance CD of Paul Cornell’s radio play adaptation of Iain M Banks’ “State of the Art”, oooh, weeks ago. It’s due to be broadcast any mnute now, and I’ve still not reviewed it; luckily Farah Mendlesohn does a great job over at Strange Horizons.

I have listened to it, though, and although it’s a little late I recommend that you listen to it too. It’s a great story (and, I think, the only IMB short piece set in the Culture universe, not to mention showing it intersecting with our own ‘real’ world), but it’s also a good conversion thanks to Cornell’s deft hand and the BBC voice actor types. The plummy luvvy tones of the ship Mind are just perfect, and Cornell has kept the important parts while making it an accessible story to the non-genre listener. If you miss the actual broadcast, never fear – the BBC iPlayer is your friend.

I should have said more and sooner, but life’s a bit mental at the moment – I’m posting this from my girlfriend’s front room, running Firefox from a USB stick because I can’t install stuff on her work laptop, you see. And it’s not all holiday skiving, you know – I’m up north to meet some clients and colleagues*.

While I’m here, I’ll just point out that I’ve cropped up in anther SF Signal Mind Meld; this time I unveil myself as the unadventurous reader you always suspected I was by being almost completely unable/unwilling to make any reading recommendations from outside the genre fiction field…

[ * - In the interests of complete honesty, I suppose it should be confessed that one such meeting does happen to be scheduled to take place in a very reputable curry restaurant on Saturday night... ]