Titanic and Tupac

Partly to help me at the end of the year (when it comes time to come up with nominations for awards) and partly just because I live under the perpetual misconception that other people are interested in what I think, I thought I’d use this blog to keep track of the good short stories I read during the year. My only hesitation is that, in doing so, it’s going to reveal what a flibbertigibbet I am when it comes to reading short fiction – skipping from publication to publication whenever things happen to cross my path (or are handy when I need spend some thinking time in a small room – ahem!)…

 
Try not to dwell on that image while I recommend:
 
“The Raft of the Titanic” by James Morrow in The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories eds Ian Whates & Ian Watson
One of the handful of new stories in this volume, The Raft of the Titanic is an allegorical tale that follows the fate of the passengers of the Titanic who, instead of leaping into the Atlantic’s freezing cold waters, build themselves a vast raft in the two hours between striking that unavoidable iceberg and the great ship breaking asunder and heading to the bottom.
Missed by the Carpathia and assumed lost, the crew and the passengers must make a new world for themselves and ultimately make a decision about the world they left behind.
The story is, of course, preposterous, but the ending is no less powerful for all that – as the chaos of the First World War encompasses even their raft.
I’m an unabashed fan of James Morrow’s work and I loved this story.
 
 
“Tupac Shakur at the End of the World” by Sandra MacDonald in Futurismic
You can be as post-modern as you like but you still don’t have a really effective story if you can’t pack in an emotional punch as well. Sandra MacDonalds’ story manages to combine both in a powerful little tale of post-apocalyptic longing. Yes there’s tonnes of film and book references and lots of nods and winks to the reader but there’s also a central character in whose fate the reader is willing to invest some energy – even if the cast of characters around her are straight out of central casting.
There’s never going to be a happy ending in a story like this but, even knowing that going in I think the final paragraph will catch in most readers’ chests. It’s powerful stuff.

 

 

Posted by admin on 3 Mar 2010 | Tagged as short story reviews | Comments(1)

The revolution is only a train stop away

There is a revolutionary movement growing in this country. British people are defying those in authority and forcing the powerful to change their plans. At the moment the movement is small, but it is growing and the time when those in power will be forced to strike against the agitators or surrender to anarchy is fast approaching.

It started in St Albans.
 
The battlefields are the trains and platforms of First Capital Connects’ shambolic empire.
Posted by admin on 1 Mar 2010 | Tagged as Uncategorized | Comments(0)

Otis Gibbs “Joe Hill’s Ashes”

 

 

Funny how things workout sometimes. No sooner had I finished rambling on about the PSA’s political songs than I got an email from singer Otis Gibbs saying that his new album Joe Hill’s Ashes was available for download.
 
I’d never heard of Otis Gibbs until I saw him support Billy Bragg just over a year ago – where he did a great job – and persuaded me to pick up all his albums in the bar after the show. Grandpa Walked the Picket Line, 49th and Melancholy, Once I Dreamed of Christmas (not exactly an anti-Christmas album, but perhaps a realistic Christmas album – one where Santa stabs Lloyd the Reindeer in a bar fight and features the classic Crap for Christmas) and One Day our Whispers are all good examples of the blue-collar American singer songwriter’s art. There’s bits of folk and bits of rock and bits of blues and a dollop of country. Reading about his life (http://otisgibbs.com/) and listening to his lyrics you can see that Woody Guthrie was a big influence on the young Gibbs – and there’s some of Guthrie in the music, but the most obvious influence is Steve Earle (though, perhaps inevitably, there are threads from the likes Dylan, Springsteen and Willie Nelson on some of the tracks on some of the albums). Read more »
Posted by admin on 26 Feb 2010 | Tagged as Uncategorized | Comments(0)

Political songs

So the Political Studies Association is holding a ballot to identify the top ten political songs as part of their 60th Anniversary celebrations. Below the break is the list of the songs they’ve put forward – I’m listing them all because you can’t get to it unless you’re a member of the PSA (members can also nominate one song of their own…)

The songs are: “chosen to represent different times and places, but also to reflect the various ways in which music is allied to politics – in expressions of protest, but also of patriotism and propaganda.” Read more »
Posted by admin on 25 Feb 2010 | Tagged as Uncategorized | Comments(4)

Back again

So, long time no blog…

 
No excuses, just busy, but that’s probably going to change over the next few months so I thought I’d get back on the horse and see whether we cleared some hurdles (or something).
 
So, straight to business, having lost a lot of work to a computer malfunction recently I’ve been writing quite a lot. Read more »
Posted by admin on 25 Feb 2010 | Tagged as Uncategorized | Comments(0)

Dead dogs and weird children

 

 

Wil Wheaton’s dog died – losing a pet is horrible. I know the cynics will roll their eyes but if you’ve lived with an animal – especially a dog – it’s almost impossible not to imbue them with human characteristics. They become friends. And they’re more reliable than most humans. I can still be brought to sudden tears if the memories of my childhood dog’s (Rusty) death sneak up on me…
 
Wil’s post reminded me of the weirdest thing that happened over the weekend.
Posted by admin on 27 Aug 2009 | Tagged as Uncategorized | Comments(0)

9

 

 

Shane Acker’s 2005 short film 9 is an exceptionally rare beast. It has beautiful visuals but it isn’t content to assume that the viewer will be content with eye-candy and so it creates a complex world and a touching story and effective characters to make you really care about what happens. And it does all this in less than eleven minutes without a line of dialogue and with excellent action sequences.
 
It is top quality science fiction movie-making.
 
The stitch-toy aesthetic of the main characters was extraordinary – and I assume whoever made Sony’s Little Big Planet was similarly impressed because if Sackboy wasn’t inspired by Acker’s visuals then god really does move in mysterious ways – but the really clever thing about 9 is the way it places this cute characters into a post-apocalyptic salvage-punk world of horrors and to tell a tight, coherent story with wonderful economy.
 
See for yourself on YouTube:
 

 
Anyway, to say that I loved 9 when I first saw it would be an understatement and I’ve wondered since whatever became of the clever director who’d made that film and what he’d do next. I presumed, like most talented film students he’d ended up making irritating commercials for big corporations.
 
So I actually did a little jig of delight when I opened this week’s Screen International to find a review of … 9… a new full length feature by Shane Acker distributed by Focus Features and produced by Time Burton and Timur Bekmambetov (amongst others).
 
There’s a Holywood-ish trailer (http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2476081689/) – with a little bit of a voice-over man vibe going on at the start – but that’s not enough to dampen my enthusiasm, because the look and feel of the original seems to have survived the transfer from short to full-length feature, even if the characters now have voices.
 
9 opens across most of the world in early September but the UK won’t see it until 30 October – which just isn’t fair. Still, I’ll be in the queue…

 

 

Posted by admin on 25 Aug 2009 | Tagged as news | Comments(0)

Not waving, drowning in Stephen Baxter’s Flood

Let me start that I really enjoyed Stephen Baxter’s Flood. It’s a ripping yarn, well told by an author who, it seems to me, has reached a new level with his writing. I think Flood might be in the top five of my favourite Baxter novels. It is one of his most accomplshed.

 
But I have a niggling problem with the book.
 
It’s certainly not that the fact that I’m feeling over-familiar with Baxter’s work. Even though he seems to be writing so many novels (it feels like a dozen a year, but it can’t be that many, can it?) that it’s difficult to keep up, Stephen Baxter has recently become a far more diverse and accomplished author than I ever imagined possible. Some authors who churned out so much material might be criticised for watering their work down or drowning readers with filler.
 
That’s certainly not true with Baxter.
Posted by admin on 29 Jun 2009 | Tagged as review | Comments(0)

Wordpress 2.8 & Internet Explorer

It appears that this blog isn’t being displayed properly in Internet Explorer. I believe this is one because of one of the (many, many, many) glitches that appear to have been introduced into Wordpress with the release of version 2.8. I’ll try and fix it, but this leads me to offer two pieces of advice.

1. If you have a Wordpress blog DON’T UPGRADE TO 2.8 – it’s an utter dog. What use, for example, is blogging software that won’t let you type in text unless you install a plug-in text editor?

2. Don’t use Internet Explorer. But hey, that’s just common sense.

Posted by admin on 27 Jun 2009 | Tagged as boring technical stuff | Comments(0)

The City in The City

Call me an idiot – you won’t be the first – but it wasn’t until half way through China Mieville’s The City and The City that I realised I’d grown up in Beszel/Ul Qoma.

 
This was even more annoying because, for most of the (otherwise very pleasant) time spent reading the novel I’d been thinking to myself: “I’m really, really enjoying this, but I don’t believe that people would really behave like this.”
Posted by admin on 27 Jun 2009 | Tagged as review | Comments(1)

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