Blue Tyson at Free SF Reader has reviewed Hub 50 and my story Home Protection - which you can still read here.
It’s hard to know exactly what to make of the review. At first 3 out of 5 seems disappointingly low but the site has pretty high standards (the big pro US magazines average around 3.5 an issue) so three doesn’t seem too bad a score. And you can’t really argue with the summary (well, I could but it would ruin the ending).
So I had some bad news, then I got sick, and in truth I’ve spent most of the last week in bed feeling sorry for myself - it’s not a pretty sight - and I’m gutted that this coincided with Sci-Fi London (one of the weekends I look forward to most all year - I’d bought tickets for eight movies and got to see none of them) and the ACC Awards Ceremony.
Somewhere in the middle of that my contributions to Illuminations also took a bit of a kicking (well most of my favourites did anyway) - I’m not complaining about the review, just noting that this week I’ve had the tendency to focus on the negative.
So, I’m still croaking from this chest infection, but back to work today and some nice news… Douglas Hoffman has reviewed “Home Protection” on The Fix and liked it
I know one is supposed to take these things with equanimity - but it’s always nicer to get a positive word. I wrote “Home Protection” a long time ago (maybe three years?) and looking at it now all I see are the things I’d like to change but I’ve always liked the idea at the heart of the story and it’s nice that some new eyes saw it and appreciated it.
More soon.
Illuminations got reviewed at The Fix - under the circumstances the reviewer did a pretty good technical job of completing the review of an assignment I’d have hated.
He’s pretty tough on our little project (but fair, and his criticisms are solidly supported) though he finds quite a lot to like. I’m not going to get into the game of arguing with a reviewer - I’ve had the boot on the other foot too often (obviously when he talked about the bits he liked about my contributions he was very perceptive, wise even, and when he talked about the bits he didn’t like he was an ignoramus who deserved to be boiled in oil) but I would point out in editor Paul Raven’s defence that one of the decisions we made early on was to publish the stories without too much extra polishing (hence quite a few grammar nits surviving into the printed version) as partly it is supposed to reflect the quick, almost disposable nature of the FFF experiment. Perhaps we should have made that clearer in the introductions.
You can buy copies of Illuminations from our website (www.oddtwoout.co.uk) or order it from any bookshop in the UK using the handy-dandy ISBN978-0955866203 - you can even see the cover (and hopefully soon some content) at Amazon (though despite several pokes they’re still showing it as available only for pre-order).
Still, proving that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, the review has brought in a little flurry of sales in the last 24 hours - for which I’m grateful to Alvaro (the reviewer), Eugie (The Fix’s inestimable editor) and, of course, to the folks who put their money down.
So the past week or so have been a bit of a write off - insanely busy at work last week before discovering that a friend had died suddenly. I hadn’t seen him for a while, but I still felt like we had a lot of stuff still to do together and I’d just been trying to organise a get-together when the news arrived.
I still don’t quite believe it. The weekend was a horrible daze.
And, while it’s a minor matter in comparison, I’m dosed with something truly horrible which is making me feel like shit all day and stopping me sleeping at night in case I drown in my own mucus.
Yes, I’m feeling sorry for myself.
Remember when I did this?
Well, it has been selected for the final vote over at Mark A Rayner’s site.
Now I’m not suggesting that everyone who reads this should rush over here and vote for my creation just so I can win - oh no, that would be cheap and below my dignity (and yours) - but I recommend that everyone should go and look at my fellow finalists (!) in the competition because the other entrants are just so darned clever… Then you should vote for me just so I can win!
I’m in a final… I’m in a final… I’m in a final (dances around singing in an annoying little kid/Eddie Murphy voice)
I’ve been gettin spammed to death over the las few weeks so, somewhat reluctantly (since past experiences haven’t been great), I’m going to add a spam filter to the blog to see if it helps.
Let me know if you experience any weirdness when you comment.
Cheers
Well, it’s taken a while (I first sold the story when The Hub was still a print magazine (in fact I think I sold the story before the first issue even appeared) but 50 issues on, “Home Protection” is finally out in this week’s issue of The Hub.
Read it.
Enjoy it (I hope).
Tell the editor you thought it was great.
Donate a little bit of cash to the magazine.
At least one part of this story is even true!
I was born in a housing estate at the foot of a steep hill. The top of the hill is ringed with trees, ancient sessile oaks, wych elm and horse chestnut. The rooks owned the woods. These were big birds with heavy black beaks and bodies matt as coal dust but their hoods shone like satin and framed beaded eyes that saw everything.
Every evening the rooks welcomed nightfall with a great dance. The clamour, at first just one or two birds but soon dozens and then hundreds and eventually as many as a thousand rooks, swooped around and around in a black cloud as, in small groups, the birds returned from their day’s scavenging. In the valley below the housemartins and swifts zipped and flitted between the rows of houses but they flew in the shadow of the rooks.
Finally, at some unknowable signal, the rooks would drop from the sky to their roosts in the trees. For a few minutes the trees swayed and rattled as the birds noisily settled down and when all went quiet, night had come.
Nothing in the estate was safe from these birds. Cats, small dogs, rabbits - any kind of unwary pet or careless wild thing was a potential target. A ruffling of feathers, a chorus of rough croaks and something vulnerable would squeal. Afterwards the birds would stride casually across the road or on the little scrub of grass that was our playground and dare us to challenge them.
My mother was terrified of the birds.
I was the first baby born in our estate. It was newly built, a frantic response to the civil rights campaign for Catholic that was rapidly turning into the bloody Troubles - a door shut after that horse had bolted. My parents moved in while the houses around them were still being built and before people learned what it was like to live with the rooks. It was a bright spring morning and my mother left my pram in the garden - for all the shootings and the bombs erupting around them, that still felt a safe thing to do. She left me there and went back into the house to clean or cook or do whatever one of the thousand other things she did to make our lives that little bit better.
When she came back, just a few minutes later, a huge rook was sitting on the handle of my pram, staring in at me.
She screamed and rushed forward, waving frantic arms, trying to scare the bird away.
The rook just stared at her.
My mother stopped.
The crow looked at her, then back down at me, and then spread its wings and launched itself into the air.
My mother described the rook as a monster - vast as an eagle, darker than the night.
“The King Rook,” she’d called it and my dad had laughed at her.
But I know the King Rook is real.
He came back.
He came back and sometimes he took my things.
He took my Action Man from the garden, my toy car from the playground and my favourite tee-shirt from the washing line.
And I knew it was the King Rook because when he took something, he always left a gift.
A pyramid of snail shells, each one punched open and empty, the delicate skull of a rat, a pebble smoothed and polished by flowing water so that it shone like a jewel. And, one morning, planted in the centre of our tiny front garden like a banner, or a sign of ownership, a single perfect feather - so black that it hurt to look at.
They were magical signs. Signs that no matter how bad things got around me - and there were times when things got very bad - that I was protected. The King Rook was watching over me.
I have the collection of gifts spread in front of me now. If I concentrate hard, I can still feel the magic and the security. But it’s getting harder. My dad calls it rubbish, and sometimes I can see it with his eyes.
This is my last day in this house. Tomorrow I will leave for university. Tomorrow night I will be sleeping in a different country. I’ll come back, of course, but some part of me already knows this will never really be my home again. Part of me can’t wait to fly.
And part of me does not want to go.
It’s the end of September. The summer has been long and hot and even though you can already feel the days shortening, today has been warm and clear and the evening sky is bright and cloudless.
I wrap each piece of my collection carefully in paper and padding and place them in a plastic tub, then I put the tub carefully in the centre of my rucksack so it will be safe on the journey.
I go down stairs, give my mum a hug and go outside.
The rooks are coming home to roost, the first few already circling high above the woods, and tonight I want to watch them for the last time.
Tonight I am going to climb the hill and talk with the King Rook.
So I was over at Boing Boing, and they pointed me in the direction of this cute competition/meme on Mark Rayner’s blog - taking old adverts and giving them an sf makeover.
I couldn’t resist having a go - so here’s an old (and frankly distrubing) advert for Thorazine given a very slight twist (honestly, pretty much all I’ve done is replace “Thorazine” with “Carousel”).
This is the kind of news that warms the cockles of an old curmudgeon’s heart.
Charlie Brooker (consistently the funniest newspaper columnist to put ink on paper, grouchy old so and so, creator of Screenwipe (the episode he did on how news programmes work was a better dissection of the workings of television than anything I found in a four year media degree course), an “out” geek and promoter of quality sf to the masses) is to write a horror show for Channel 4 (well, he’s calling it horror, the head of C4 is calling it a thriller) called Dead Set.
As one of only three people in the world who loved Nathan Barley (which Brooker co-wrote), I’m officially excited.
And a further example of the way genre material is penetrating UK TV production.