First, an apology. I’ve been unwell. My computer is distinctly unwell. The site’s been down thanks to the hosting. So no posts for a while. I’m going to try and do some movie reviews soon as I’ve seen some interesting stuff recently but for now, here’s another Friday Flash. Except what turned into a little character study seems to have twisted itself into a fragment of something much bigger – and frankly I’ve no idea quite where this is going (an alternate history re-writing of post-Falklands British politics is what seems on the cards but…)

 Anyhow, here’s what it is:

Rum and Slaves

The colour of the money passing through the accounts of DeGris and Languedoc may be as green as in any other bank, but the colour of its customer’s blood is invariably blue. The company began life as a goldsmith’s and issued its first cheque in 1668. Today it serves a liberal scattering of the world’s royal families and literally dozens of dukes, archdukes, counts and earls. A fortune alone is not enough to persuade DeGris and Languedoc to open its doors to a customer. Breeding, here at least, still counts.

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Some blogs – the big, first division guys with things like regularly updated content and actual posts about things and, oh I don’t know, audiences – are today doing a mixture of chest-puffing and preening at the arrival on their doorsteps of advance copies of the new Iain M Banks novel Matter.

I’m not.

Not because I’ve got too much class to rub my readers nose in the fact that I’m more important than you and own things plebs like you could never possess. I don’t have that much class. If I could rub your noses in anything, dear reader, I would.

I’m not boasting or showing off because no one at Orbit considers me important enough to send juicy freebies.

I realise highlighting this fact risks revealing to my few (my happy few) readers that this blog is strictly Blue Square Conference North territory – but hey, let’s face it no one out there was deluding themselves any different, right?

I have to buy my own books.

But don’t think this is one of those posts where the nobody outsider attacks reviewers for taking free stuff and “selling out to the man, man”. It’s not. I’d love to have people send me free things

So no, I don’t have bloody copy of the new Iain M Banks novel.

Yes, I am jealous.

And maybe a little bit angry.

But I still have my dignity. (It’s not like I considered offering to both review the book and to pose naked in publicity stills with the book to promote the review.)

It’s not even that I really, really want to read the book (though I do).

It’s that I want to be sent it free. In advance. Before everyone else. So I can boast too.

Is that really too much to ask? Really?

Almost on time – hey what’s five minutes?

The Decision that changed the life Fabrice Colliseo

A life does not flow evenly from spring to the ocean, its passage is broken by rapids and falls, twists and turns. The choices we make define a life’s course. Some decisions take us over a threshold where the effort required to backtrack, to paddle against the turbulence and cross to another stream, requires more strength and dedication than most can muster.

Which decisions will plunge us over a precipice? We may not consciously take a decision at all, but drift into the maw of the momentous. But, even when conscious of the act of choosing, sometimes the greatest consequences spring from the apparently inconsequential. Some lives change by turning right instead of left, leaving when they could have stayed, or saying “I love you” but meaning “I want you.”

But a few people know, the very moment they make their choice, that their life has changed forever.

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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.

Two cheats here, I confess. First, this is a Saturday Flash, because I didn’t get it finished yesterday. And second, at 1700 words, it isn’t even really a flash. But it is what it is.

Stone must roll

The rusting husks of Soviet-era industry litter the Balkans. Shuttered chemical plants smear rainbows across ground water in Serbia, cold and rusting furnaces rot in Bulgaria, in Montenegro the wind howls through the girdered skeletons of dead factories and in Macedonia, in Bosnia and in

Croatia vast plants with lost purposes are turning gradually into dust. Read more »

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.

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.

A while ago, just after I finished Old Man’s War, I threatened to come back to the blog and give a scathing account of why John Scalzi’s fantastically entertaining space opera was the single most wrongheaded book I had ever read. It was, I was going to tell you, a filthy piece of right-wing shittism of the kind that I thought even the sci-fi reactionaries had left behind. I was going to set Mr Scalzi straight on a few things, I can tell you.

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed. The very clever Niall Harrison from Torque Control had the good grace to stop me making an even bigger arse of myself than usual by pointing me in the direction of Nicholas Whyte (who, god bless him) took a bullet for the rest of us and got there first.

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