I don’t know which bit of that title has me shitting my pants with excitement more. Read more »

Posted October 24, 2008 Comments(1)

Back from NewCon 4 today - congratulations to everyone involved in a pretty great little convention - Iain Banks, Ken MacLeod, Paul Cornell and Storm Constantine were excellent gohs and Iain Banks in particular seemed in fine form. Add to that an unscheduled, brief but very gracious appearance from Northampton’s most famous son, Alan Moore (who seemed genuinely amazed that there were other people interested in science fiction living in or willing to visit Northampton - though having spent a little time in the town, I think I understand what he means, no offence to any Cobblers out there) plus some good debate, cider, three very different bands on Saturday evening, a BSFA birthday cake (very tasty) and lots of familiar faces (and a chance to put some faces to familiar names - Hello Geoff Nelder!) and the even really exceeded my expectations.

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Posted October 13, 2008 Comments(1)

So, I opened up my inbox today to find this waiting in the comments section of my “about” page:

Dear Sir

As the owner of Eskragh Lough for the past ten years I have been mde aware of your writing relating to my property by a number of distressed parents whose children frequently fish and use Eskragh Lough Fishery and Outdoor Pursuit Centre. Searches have shown no truth in your writing and as a result I would contend that your writing has damaged the reputation of our business. I would ask for your immediate proposals together with either substantiation or withdrawal of this defamatory article.

your sincerely

Anita Ross LLB

Wow. Let this be a lesson to all you aspiring writers out there - even the lakes and rivers of the land can now rise up and accuse you of being “defamatory”. There is a real Eskragh Lough near where I grew up, I never imagined anyone “owning” the lake, I certainly never imagined it being a business. Isn’t it wonderful how times have changed.

Anyway, Anita (presumably a relative of Donovan Ross who is listed as owning the lake) writes from an email address at “McKinty-Wright” who proclaim themselves “one of Northern Ireland’s leading law firms” - and that “LLB” after her name clearly means she’s serious about this legal stuff.

The bit that stings most is the line: “Searches have shown no truth in your writing…”

While my story “Eskragh” is obviously a work of fiction - and therefore does not contain “truth” in the literal sense (y’know, ”I made it up” - none of my friends really drowned in that lake just like I wasn’t really haunted by rooks in my youth, have never really watched a man pull wires from his head to escape a technologically enhanced reality or really been hunted by aliens who use sound as a weapon) I would have hoped that anyone who had conducted “searches” on the text might have found a deeper, emotional truth in the story. Clearly my writing has failed to touch Anita, which on a professional basis is obviously disappointing.

So I have responded:

Dear Ms Ross,

 

Thank you for your email and for reading my blog.

 

In response to your comments I’d like to make a number of points:

 

• The “article” you refer to is clearly presented as a work of fiction – hence the title “Friday Flash” – so that any reasonable reader should be aware that the events related in the story do not represent a narrative of actual events.
• It nowhere mentions the entity “Eskragh Lough Fishery and Outdoor Pursuit Centre” and plainly doesn’t defame that organisation on any reasonable reading of the story. Your argument can’t be that I defamed the body of water that constitutes the lough, can it?
• I seriously doubt that a webpage on an obscure blog (I can’t give precise figures, but I do know that the page containing the story has been viewed fewer than 400 times in the fourteen months that it has been online according to my ISP’s records – the number of actual readers is certainly much less than that) can be demonstrated to have had any significant negative impact on your business.

 

However, in the interests of goodwill and to alleviate any possible concerns of those “distress parents” (none of whom, sadly, bothered to contact me for reassurance), I’m happy to add the following text to the top of the story to warn any unwary visitor who happens to stumble upon my blog while looking for details of your company.

 

“At the request of the owners of the real Eskragh Lough Fishery and Outdoor Pursuit Centre I would like to emphasise that this is a work of fiction. The Eskragh Lough mentioned in this story is an imagined one and bears no relation to the real one near Dungannon. The imagined Eskragh isn’t even in Tyrone. The imagined Eskragh is probably somewhere in County Armagh.

 

I happily played in and around the real Eskragh for many years as a youngster and came to no harm and, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever drowned in the real Eskragh Lough. The real Eskragh Lough isn’t particularly deep but, in my experience, it is usually cold.”

 

I trust this will be satisfactory.

 

Yours,

 

Martin McGrath (BSc, MA, PhD – if we’re putting letters after our names)

I’ve spent several hours this evening wondering about this. My first reaction was to tell Anita to bugger off and grow up, but UK libel law is a sod and not something to be messed around with, even though I’m confident that the idea of defaming a lake would be laughed out of even a Northern Irish court.

I won’t remove the story as it clearly isn’t libellous or defamatory. I thought long and hard about even adding the disclaimer - mostly because I think it is patently unnecessary, partly because I think it demeans any reader who might stumble across the story and partly because I’m a bloody minded. In the end I did because I thought of a way of doing it that made me laugh.

Overall, though, thw whole thing is pretty depressing on a number of counts:

• that people out there are willing to try and chuck legal weight around on the flimsiest of pretexts without the courtesy of a polite request first
• that someone can either deliberately or through ignorance (I’m not sure which is worse) misconstrue a piece of fiction in this way
• that the UK laws on defamation are so nuts that I have to spend any time at all wondering whether I should take this seriously.

 If you’re going to comment, please be sure not to libel anyone!

Posted September 13, 2008 Comments(5)

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.

Posted April 14, 2008 Comments(1)

My review of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 2, (edited by Jonathan Strahan) is now online over at The Fix for those of you with yearning to read 5,500 words that were dragged like healthy teeth from the gums of someone with very strong gums (god, sometimes my mastery of the English language is terrifying, isn’t it).

And actually that’s not true, the words came out really easily - not writing 15,000 words was the hard part.

Other stuff I’ve recently written is up at the BSFA’s spiffy new Matrix Online website - including a longish article comparing the relatively few ups and not inconsiderable number of downs in the cinematic histories of comic book giants Marvel and DC, and reviews of Southland Tales, Battlestar Galactica: Razor, In the Shadow of the Moon and Jumper. Sadly you’ll have to be a member of the BSFA to read all that - but if you aren’t, why the hell not?

Hopefully I’ll get some more reviews up over at Matrix soon. I just need an hour or two to sit down and write them up.

Posted April 9, 2008 Comments(0)

ISBN 978-0-9558662-0-3

ILLUMINATIONS is a new anthology from small press Odd Two Out Publishing showcasing original, cutting edge short fiction from eight up-and-coming young British writers.

When British author Gareth L Powell started adding short weekly pieces of flash fiction to his website back in July 2007, he didn’t expect anyone else to take much notice.

But soon there were seven other writers doing likewise - Paul Graham Raven, Gareth D Jones, Martin McGrath, Dan Pawley, Justin Pickard, Neil Beynon, and Shaun C Green. Together, they have become known as the Friday Flash Fictioneers.

Flash fiction stories are complete short stories told in fewer than 1,000 words. Quoting from his introduction to the anthology, Gareth L Powell says:

“Adhering to this restricted format can be a valuable exercise for a writer. It’s often a lot trickier than it looks. You have to make every word count. Every thing in the story has to be doing something because there just isn’t room for extraneous waffle.”

The Friday Flash Fictioneers come from diverse walks of life – musicians, office workers, freelance journalists, students, magazine editors – and this new anthology collects together the best of their weekly output.

Edited by Paul Graham Raven, the pieces range from mainstream literature to far-out speculation; from horror to humour; from outright fantasy to straight-faced space opera.

All the stories in ILLUMINATIONS are published under a Creative Commons licence that permits them to be reproduced in the public domain as long as no profit is made in the process.

Copies of ILLUMINATIONS: The Flash Fiction Anthology will be available to order for £6.99 from Odd Two Out Publishing, or from the authors themselves.

All profits from the sale of ILLUMINATIONS will be donated to the NSPCC.

Alternatively, The Fictioneers will be running a flash fiction workshop as part of Orbital 2008, the British Science Fiction convention held at the Raddisson Hotel, Heathrow over the Easter weekend. Convention-goers are invited to come along to quiz the team and have a go at writing their own extremely short fiction.

{So this is mostly why things have been quiet around here for the last few weeks. The big secret is out! And I now have the seed of my own publishing empire. Much, much more than this in the days to come - for now, just buy a copy, ya cheapskate!}

Posted March 14, 2008 Comments(0)

The Coen Bros are to direct The Yiddish Policeman’s Union!

The very thought sent a little shiver of excitement and anticipation down my spine. 

The Coens and Michael Chabon together in one project.

And the Coens back in the snow for the first time since Fargo!

http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2255888,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

Posted February 12, 2008 Comments(1)

So - finally I get back to the blog.

My old PC is dead and gone and I’m currently running a cheap pile of junk until I can save up enough pocket money to properly upgrade… I’m gradually working my way back through recovered email - if I haven’t got back to you, I’m getting there. Still enough of my problems.

Or not.

I clicked on Forgotten Worlds website today, just to check whether anything was going on and to get the email address to chase up when they intended to publish “Be Aware” - a story of mine they’d promised to buy and print. And the message there read: Read more »

Posted February 10, 2008 Comments(0)

You can read my review of The Maker’s Mark: Remnants now at The Fix.

If nothing else, it’s marginally shorter than having to read the whole book.

Posted December 5, 2007 Comments(1)

So, two good pieces of news for those who like Joss Whedon’s work (and hey, if you don’t, I don’t want to hear it).

First, I picked up the first collection of Buffy season 8 today from Forbidden Planet (one of the advantages of my job is working around the corner from the UK’s greatest comic shop and Forbidden Planet isn’t far away either). It collects issues 1-5 of the Dark Horse series and it’s really rather good.

Then I get home and find out that Fox (yes, Fox!) have commissioned not just a pilot but seven episodes of a new Whedon TV show - Dollhouse - that will star Elisha (Faith from Buffy) Dushku. When we’ll get to see it - given that not only is the US film & TV industry facing a writers’ strike, but the Directors’ Guild and the actors’ union also have big negotiations coming up that could lead to a perfect storm with all three unions out either consecutively or all at the same time - is still up in the air. But on the whole this is good news.

Posted November 2, 2007 Comments(0)