So this is just a quick blog to open the year. 2015 is going to be a big year for me and my writing, at least that's the plan. I'm pushing my copywriting/editing service for small businesses too, there are a lot of small businesses out there who could really use some better website content and I can do that easily and at prices they can afford. Promo over :)
My submission to the Blackguards anthology via Ragnarok Publishing was unsuccessful so I'm going to make it the first of a series of prequel stories to The Scarlet Ring. It was about one of the side characters in the novel and what he was doing immediately prior to the beginning of the book. In fact, some of it probably overlaps if I think about it. I'm looking forward to getting Blackguards anyway, it has some great authors in it I haven't seen much of.
I've also just finished a submission for the Black Library's call for Deathwatch short stories. I haven't finished the story but they only want a sample. Fingers crossed on that one.
Meanwhile I need to get back to Hierophants' Fall (the sequel to The Scarlet Ring). I'm working on a timeline at the moment while testing Aeon Timeline, which I got a trial version of courtesy of NaNoWriMo.
Reading wise I just finished (finally) the Women Destroy Science Fiction issue of Lightspeed. As with all anthologies it had some misses but a lot of hits too. I was surprised by how many bleak stories there were, some were very morbid, but there were some good upbeat ones too. The flash fiction section was fun too.
I think the stand-outs for me Walking Awake by N K Jemisin, which told about parasites that took over human bodies and grew us for hosts, A World Shaped Like Bones by Kris Millering, which was about an artist alone in space with a man she killed accidentally for a very long time and making art from his corpse (reminded me of one I read in Nightmare #1 a bit) and The Cost to be Wise by Maureen F McHugh, which was a story of a mission where well-meaning people try to teach the locals, it ends in a massacre funnily enough.
More soon. I want this blog to be much more frequent this year.
Keep dreaming!
Showing posts with label Lightspeed Magazine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lightspeed Magazine. Show all posts
Friday, 9 January 2015
Wednesday, 15 October 2014
Initial Response to Each to Each by Seanan McGuire
I just read the opening story in Lightspeed No 49, the Women Destroy Science Fiction Special. It's Each to Each by Seanan McGuire. I'm torn over it in a number of ways.
It's about a Navy made up of genetically modified women, essentially engineered mermaids, and how the 'modifications' as they're called have unexpected consequences. The women begin to feel non-human, to lose all connection with land dwellers and to have a deep emotional and psychological connection with each other. It's a great idea and well examined in the story which is well written and clearly had an effect on me.
As I come to write this next point I realise I'm not as torn as I first thought. The idea of altered humans and the mysteries of the deeps reminded me of pulp age stories and I was thinking of ways it could have worked better in those terms. I was thinking about its atmosphere and how it could have been built up with a greater sense of fear of the unknown - as with the pulp horror I was thinking of. I even started to think how changing the narrator to the unaltered captain could have helped and thinking of ways the story could still work.
And now I realise that's the problem. The plot could still develop but the story would be irreparably altered. Fear of the unknown was not the point - in fact there's a certain lure to it. The story is about the new type of women, the way they've been shaped by the military which is driven by society, and how in so doing a new community/species/world is created. It does that perfectly. Is it an analogy for how society tries to shape women the way it wants them to look? Yeah I'd say so, there are parts that rather beat the reader over the head with that message, but it also goes beyond that to raise questions of humanity. It doesn't answer them, just raise them.
So it reflects society as it is but peers into deeper issues at the same time - which is the point of science fiction isn't it? I'm not so torn after all, I just needed to adjust my headset. Well done Seanan McGuire.
Keep dreaming!
It's about a Navy made up of genetically modified women, essentially engineered mermaids, and how the 'modifications' as they're called have unexpected consequences. The women begin to feel non-human, to lose all connection with land dwellers and to have a deep emotional and psychological connection with each other. It's a great idea and well examined in the story which is well written and clearly had an effect on me.
As I come to write this next point I realise I'm not as torn as I first thought. The idea of altered humans and the mysteries of the deeps reminded me of pulp age stories and I was thinking of ways it could have worked better in those terms. I was thinking about its atmosphere and how it could have been built up with a greater sense of fear of the unknown - as with the pulp horror I was thinking of. I even started to think how changing the narrator to the unaltered captain could have helped and thinking of ways the story could still work.
And now I realise that's the problem. The plot could still develop but the story would be irreparably altered. Fear of the unknown was not the point - in fact there's a certain lure to it. The story is about the new type of women, the way they've been shaped by the military which is driven by society, and how in so doing a new community/species/world is created. It does that perfectly. Is it an analogy for how society tries to shape women the way it wants them to look? Yeah I'd say so, there are parts that rather beat the reader over the head with that message, but it also goes beyond that to raise questions of humanity. It doesn't answer them, just raise them.
So it reflects society as it is but peers into deeper issues at the same time - which is the point of science fiction isn't it? I'm not so torn after all, I just needed to adjust my headset. Well done Seanan McGuire.
Keep dreaming!
Tuesday, 26 February 2013
Tasmanian Reading, Genre Issues & the Nature of Horror
Okay so I went away for a couple of weeks to explore Tasmania with my wife. I had hoped to do little entries here via the app, but very early on I realised mobile coverage down there is terrible in most places so it never happened. I did keep a journal however and I will sporadically type the entries up and post them here for those who are interested.
For now I just want to mention the reading I did while I was down there. The bulk of it was catching up on Nightmare Reader No 1 and the issue of Lightspeed Magazine I got as a bonus for backing Nightmare on Kickstarter (it was the October 2010 issue). I started with Nightmare and it was more than worth my paltry $3 pledge, which is a bad way of saying it was a solid literary journal with great stories. The one that’s stayed with me the most is Afterlife by Sarah Langan, which uses ghost children and ‘crossing over’ to present a tragic picture of very real woman whose non-supernatural plight was the genuine cause of distress if not horror.
Which leads to the interesting article at the back of the journal, The Other Scarlet Letter by RJ Sevin, discussing just what Horror is as a genre and why so many people shy away from the word. It essentially argued that the word has become tied to the schlock-horror side of the genre so people tend to assume anything else that might be described that way shouldn’t be. It made me think about how I view or have viewed Horror as a genre and I certainly used to connect it with schlock and gore; I only read my first Stephen King novel last year because to me he was the guy behind those B-grade movies I had no interest in seeing. How wrong was I?
I then moved to the idea that Horror was a strange subset of SF and Fantasy as any story within it would belong to one of them. This is further blurred by figuring out where the line between SF and Fantasy actually lies, sometimes it’s clear but others are almost indistinguishable. Hence Neil Gaiman can win major awards for all three genres for the same book. Genre is weird, and infallibly malleable. So now I tend to be a bit more open-minded on the subject.
After all, the stories in Lightspeed are technically SF but the ones in that issue had a bigger impact on me in terms of horror and mental disturbance than the actual horror stories in Nightmare. Particularly the reprint of Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back by Joe R Lansdale, which was a post-nuclear war story of a man wracked with incredible guilt featuring creatures that cross zombies with Triffids in that the plant kills you then takes over your body … yeah. It gripped me, with both hands and freaked me out. Then there was the man trapped in space forced to rationalise cannibalising his cryogenically frozen crew mates and so slowly went mad (in The Taste of Starlight by John R. Fultz). That was peculiar and chilling but his failure to even consider other options (there was at least one I can think of) weakened the whole impact for me.
On a completely different note the other thing I read during the holiday was JM Barrie’s play A Kiss for Cinderella, which I found at the Salamanca Markets for $2 (a 1937 hardback edition, $2, who was I to pass that up?) I wasn’t really sure what I was in for when I started it but I don’t think I was counting on it being as good as it was nor raising interesting questions in my head. I can’t even decide how to classify it, more problems with the whole question of genre.
It’s about a young woman in London during the Great War who is secretly looking after a group of orphans by scraping away and working at what she can. She’s one of those heart-of-gold waifs with an infectious charm that you expect from the man who gave us Peter Pan’s Wendy. She meets a policeman who is under the suspicion she’s helping Germans (only one, a four-year-old orphan so he doesn’t mind) and of course the two fall in love in that awkward Edwardian British way.
There’s a bit more to it than that including a delightful dream sequence where she fulfils her Cinderella persona, but I don’t want to get into the plot. The interesting thing for me was how Barrie had presented the script. It didn’t simply have dialogue and stage directions, it had narrative within stage directions so anyone reading the script is privy to information not presented to anyone merely watching a performance of it. We’re told of how the policeman met JM Barrie and discussed with him the question of true love for instance. We also understand why the dream sequence goes the way it does which would not be evident without his comments.
Of particular importance is the end however. It could be taken to be the expected happy ending but for one of these comments in the stage directions which is almost entirely ambiguous but seems to imply a very bitter twist to the whole thing. Which would give anyone mounting the play a big decision to make. It’s not a method I think I’ll ever employ but it’s certainly an interesting one and kept me thinking about something I might otherwise have glossed over as a light entertainment.
Keep dreaming!
For now I just want to mention the reading I did while I was down there. The bulk of it was catching up on Nightmare Reader No 1 and the issue of Lightspeed Magazine I got as a bonus for backing Nightmare on Kickstarter (it was the October 2010 issue). I started with Nightmare and it was more than worth my paltry $3 pledge, which is a bad way of saying it was a solid literary journal with great stories. The one that’s stayed with me the most is Afterlife by Sarah Langan, which uses ghost children and ‘crossing over’ to present a tragic picture of very real woman whose non-supernatural plight was the genuine cause of distress if not horror.
Which leads to the interesting article at the back of the journal, The Other Scarlet Letter by RJ Sevin, discussing just what Horror is as a genre and why so many people shy away from the word. It essentially argued that the word has become tied to the schlock-horror side of the genre so people tend to assume anything else that might be described that way shouldn’t be. It made me think about how I view or have viewed Horror as a genre and I certainly used to connect it with schlock and gore; I only read my first Stephen King novel last year because to me he was the guy behind those B-grade movies I had no interest in seeing. How wrong was I?
I then moved to the idea that Horror was a strange subset of SF and Fantasy as any story within it would belong to one of them. This is further blurred by figuring out where the line between SF and Fantasy actually lies, sometimes it’s clear but others are almost indistinguishable. Hence Neil Gaiman can win major awards for all three genres for the same book. Genre is weird, and infallibly malleable. So now I tend to be a bit more open-minded on the subject.
After all, the stories in Lightspeed are technically SF but the ones in that issue had a bigger impact on me in terms of horror and mental disturbance than the actual horror stories in Nightmare. Particularly the reprint of Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back by Joe R Lansdale, which was a post-nuclear war story of a man wracked with incredible guilt featuring creatures that cross zombies with Triffids in that the plant kills you then takes over your body … yeah. It gripped me, with both hands and freaked me out. Then there was the man trapped in space forced to rationalise cannibalising his cryogenically frozen crew mates and so slowly went mad (in The Taste of Starlight by John R. Fultz). That was peculiar and chilling but his failure to even consider other options (there was at least one I can think of) weakened the whole impact for me.
On a completely different note the other thing I read during the holiday was JM Barrie’s play A Kiss for Cinderella, which I found at the Salamanca Markets for $2 (a 1937 hardback edition, $2, who was I to pass that up?) I wasn’t really sure what I was in for when I started it but I don’t think I was counting on it being as good as it was nor raising interesting questions in my head. I can’t even decide how to classify it, more problems with the whole question of genre.
It’s about a young woman in London during the Great War who is secretly looking after a group of orphans by scraping away and working at what she can. She’s one of those heart-of-gold waifs with an infectious charm that you expect from the man who gave us Peter Pan’s Wendy. She meets a policeman who is under the suspicion she’s helping Germans (only one, a four-year-old orphan so he doesn’t mind) and of course the two fall in love in that awkward Edwardian British way.
There’s a bit more to it than that including a delightful dream sequence where she fulfils her Cinderella persona, but I don’t want to get into the plot. The interesting thing for me was how Barrie had presented the script. It didn’t simply have dialogue and stage directions, it had narrative within stage directions so anyone reading the script is privy to information not presented to anyone merely watching a performance of it. We’re told of how the policeman met JM Barrie and discussed with him the question of true love for instance. We also understand why the dream sequence goes the way it does which would not be evident without his comments.
Of particular importance is the end however. It could be taken to be the expected happy ending but for one of these comments in the stage directions which is almost entirely ambiguous but seems to imply a very bitter twist to the whole thing. Which would give anyone mounting the play a big decision to make. It’s not a method I think I’ll ever employ but it’s certainly an interesting one and kept me thinking about something I might otherwise have glossed over as a light entertainment.
Keep dreaming!
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