The Writers’ Guild of America are on strike. This video does a fantastic job of explaining their cause: Why we fight
Whatever one’s position on the long term viability of protected content in the digital era, the fact is that at the moment big businesses are making big, big profits selling the product that writers help create, and the writers’ rewards are pitiful.
Comments(1) My latest contribution to the newly vibrant The Fix is a review of Electric Velocipede no. 12, which you can find by clicking here.
There will be a piece of flash fiction posted this weekend, even though I’ve missed my Friday deadline. Hang in there, it’s coming.
Comments(0) A little while ago I recommended Nina Allan’s superb short story collection, well I’m pleased to note that my excellent taste has been confirmed by Ian Watson and all the other folk involved in the Aeon Awards, who have announced that her story “Angelus” has won this year’s prize (and 1000 euro).
Nina’s story will be in the next issue of Albedo One (no. 33 just dropped through my door this week, more on that soon) but really, you shouldn’t wait that long. Buy her book. It’s really good.
Congratulations Nina.
Comments(0) The Fix is back! TTA’s short fiction review magazine has made the (sadly inevitable) switch online and is finally up an running - thanks in no small part to the significant injection of enthusiasm, organisation and determination of new editor Eugie Foster
It looks like things are going to update regularly and I’m excited, not just because I’m reviewing stuff on the site (see below) and that means someone else is sending me free stuff, but because I think that what short sf needs is a vibrant place where people are willing to talk about the stuff they’re reading and make critical demands of the stories that are getting published. There are too few places taking short sf seriously on the web - The Fix looks like being a very welcome addition to the sf scene.
You can find my paltry contribution to the relaunch in my review of November’s Analog .
Comments(0) 
You know for big, dumb apes, don’t we do some amazing things sometimes - this is an image of Europa rising over Jupiter’s clouds taken by New Horizons - what a picture! This was brought to my attention by Warren Ellis’s blog)
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_907.html
And since we’re talking about Mr Ellis I’d just like to take this moment to praise his recently published short graphic novel Crécy as a piece of work that pretty much everyone should pick up. It’s a shockingly foul-mouthed and violent retelling of the story of the British victory (English and, though Ellis is clearly loath to admit it, Welsh) over the French at the eponymous battle. It’s a pretty good history lesson, but far more important and relevant than that it’s an enormous amount of fun.
Well, I’m Irish, I grew up in
The book is every bit as rude and bloody as outstanding cover by Felipe Massafera and the excellent writing is backed up by brilliantly detailed black and white interior art from Raulo Caceres - who both also deserve boundless praise.
You can sit down and read Crécy in a single sitting, but you can go back to it again and again, partly because of the quality of the artwork but mostly because Ellis, on form, is just about the sharpest, funniest, nastiest writer ever to put words in bubbles.
Comments(0) “I don’t want to go in the cart,” cries the body, “I think I might go for a walk.”
It appears we can relax. Ridley Scott was wrong. Paul Howlett in today’s Guardian says science fiction cinemay still has a future. Hurrah!
Thank fuck for this. Stephen Pinker is a wise, wise, wanker.
This, though, seems incredible. A two second improvement in reaction time seems too good to be true - surely, even at my advanced age, my reaction time in twitch games is less than two seconds?
And thank god for the good folk at Kudos who, with Spooks and Life on Mars, are making the most stylish genre drama on TV (Spooks is sf, damn it, you know it is) - whose new production sounds as though it could either be a total mess or a really interesting take on a cross-time drama. I have no clue how this might work - each episode will apparently be set in a different time period - but given the producer’s track record I’m really keen to see what they do.
Comments(0) Ridley Scott is an accomplished film-maker – a man who has managed to transfer a practically obsessive desire for visual verisimilitude and a god-complex into commercially stellar and critically respected career. In terms of his films the brilliant claustrophobia of Alien, the enduring beauty of Blade Runner and the fantastic scale of Gladiator all stand out as movies anyone would be proud to have on their CV. Add to that Thelma and Louise and the most convincing portrayal of modern warfare yet to grace celluloid in Black Hawk Down (while not ignoring the problematic elements of that film) and it’s a history that can encompass the occasional stumble (Black Rain, Kingdom of Heaven, A Good Year) without losing any of its gloss.
What do we make of it, then, when the man responsible for two of the greatest genre films of all time argues that sf as a film genre is so tired and unoriginal that it may be going the way of the Western in today’s The Times.
Comments(6) MURKY DEPTHS
The first issue of Murky Depths came through my door today. I have to congratulate the publishers on their courage. This is a bold production. Glossy paper, American comic-sized, fiction from Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Richard Calder (although one is a reprint but not one I’d read before and the other a comic version of a story from Interzone that I really didn’t like) and a host of other less famous but familiar names from the short fiction scene. At £6.99 an issue, it feels expensive for a relatively slim volumebut there’s a really interesting mix of comic and prose here and it’s a lovely object to hold and I’ve always been a believer in rewarding those with courage, so I’ll be subscribing. I might even pester them with story submissions if I’ve got anything suitably dark but I really don’t understand the payment section of the guidelines:
“Currently set at £10 for maximum 5,000 words, prorated from 500 words up.”
Can anyone explain that?
POWER IN A UNION?
Committed trade unionist though I am (I work for one and I’m a member of three others) even I can’t work out what’s going with this story from Wired about bloggers seeking to set up their own trade union. To negotiate with who? On what collective basis? Huh?
If you’re earning a living writing online (or hoping to) and want a trade union, then you should join a union for journalists or writers (in the UK, hint, it’s the NUJ or The Writers’ Guild) who have plenty of experience dealing with the freelance and the underemployed writer and of helping you enforce contracts etc. The last thing the world needs is another half-arsed, badly defined union.
SECOND LIFE, PRIME TARGET
There’s definitely something of a backlash going on against Second Life at the moment. Stories like this one about it’s environmental impact, this one about it being a breeding ground for “virtual jihadists” (virtual jihadists seem like a much safer idea than actual jihadists, don’t they?), or a particularly harsh assessment of the business prospects for companies using the virtual world in this month’s Wired (story not yet online) seem to be cropping up every day. What once was a darling of the Web 2.0 seems to be taking some serious hits.
I’ve never been tempted by Second Life or any of the MMPORGs - I have enough trouble managing to run one not very organised life, I don’t know how I’d cope with two (it’s much the same reason why I’ve never been tempted to stray in my marriage, it’s just seems too much hard work for too little reward! Oh, and I love my wife - in case she reads this - and I look like Jabba the Hutt’s fatter brother).
So, anyway, it was nice to find out that at least someone still seems to be taking the virtual realm seriously. I really do think there’s a story to be written about Jesuits in cyberspace.
AND FINALLY…
Since I mentioned my wife, it was our 11th wedding anniversary this weekend and because we weren’t able to do anything special last year, we had a blow out. We handed our daughter to the granparents for a weekend of mutual appreciation, and then went and saw Spamalot (very obvious, very funny), had a superb meal at Richard Corrigan’s restaurant Lindsay House (if you’re going to blow a few hundred quid on a nice meal, this is a good option - I’m still having dessert flashbacks), and then the next day went to see Othello at The Globe - which is an excellent staging (all the women are especially good). It was my first time at The Globe, and it’s a fantastic experience. The sun was shining, the crowd was appreciative (even though the groundlings had to stand for the best part of three hours) and the way the performance used its little band of musicians exploited the venue brilliantly. I’ll definitely go back. In fact, I’d love to see The Merchant of Venice there in September. We also stayed in very, very nice London hotel.
What this all brought home to me, however, was how luxury is utterly wasted on the rich. At every turn this weekend we seemed to be being followed by people who looked and sounded much wealthier than us moaning about the slightest (and when I say slight, I mean requiring the presence of an electron microscope to find) inconvenience and turning their noses up at the extraordinary. It was reassuring to discover that the urge to perpetrate bloody revolution continues to burn not too far below the surface when confronted with such people. To the barricades comrades! Everyone deserves fine food, fancy wines, great entertainment and hotel showers that are like being refreshed by a sparkling mountain stream. Oh yes.
Comments(8) Jonathan McCalmont’s always provocative SF Diplomat blog has published an interesting piece on Iron Man.
His reading of early Iron Man as a straightforward, modernist, anti-communist hero is perfectly defensible, but I’ve felt there was always something more to Iron Man/Tony Stark’s character that, typical of the work of Stan Lee, has meant that there was scope for the character to grow and adapt.
McCalmont says: Iron Man stood partly for the might and freedom of the American capitalist but also for the idea that, through science, man can not only improve and better himself but also solve the problems of the world. Iron Man stood for progress and man’s scientific dominion over nature and his power to remake the world in accordance with his own desires.
But thinking about what actually happens to Tony Stark doesn’t necessarily only support that straightforward reading. Here we have a war-mongering, arms-dealing millionaire (and a feckless playboy to boot) who is taught a lesson about humility and how to be a hero only after he has his heart ripped to shreds and he is forced to rely on very unreliable (it was always failing at crucial moments) technology. Yes, as Iron Man, Stark can do amazing things but perhaps the most memorable image of Stark in this era is of him slumped in a chair with his breastplate plugged in just to keep him alive while he moans about how all his money, fame and technology can’t buy him happiness. This image becomes by far the most frequently repeated motif after Tales of Suspense 47, when Lee takes over the full writing chores on the Iron Man stories that he had previously only “plotted” which had then been scripted by Robert Bernstein) But even in the origin issue Lee describes Stark as: “This man who seems so fortunate, who’s envied by millions… Is soon destined to become the most tragic figure on Earth.”
Above: Iron Man strikes an iconic pose of misery, courtesy of Don Heck, Tales of Suspense 56.
Comments(0) Hello fellow denizens of the dimly lit, slightly compulsive world that is the blogosphere.
As i write this today I’m sitting in the lounge of a nice hotel in Newquay. Unlike the rest of the UK,which appears to be subsiding beneath grey clouds and a deluge that’d have scared Noah, I’m looking out beautiful blue skies and a rolling ocean of blue, not brown, water.
Note that I’m “looking out” and not actually outside. Two reasons for that - first I made the mistake of going outside for twenty-five minutes yesterday without wrapping myself in a blanket and so today I’m sporting arms and a nose that makes lobsters look like they’ve got a slight blush. One of the joys of being Irish and starting out a faint shade of blue instead of pink like the rest of the world - I burn easily.
The other thing keeping me inside is the crappy battery life of my “portable” - which seems to have finally given up the pretense that it ever works when not directly sucking the electrical equivalent of several flood-threatened power stations.
Nothing more substantial to say, except perhaps that the new issue of Interzone is a beautiful thing and full of interesting stuff too.
Comments(0)