Giant Squid Creations

Years ago there was a shop called Lazy Daze in Penrith. It sold second-hand CDs and books and I loved it. The owner had a terrible head for business though, whenever I bought things he'd do a rough adding up then round it down, sometimes quite a lot. I guess he hated giving change. And the stock was under-priced to start with. But he had some good stock, I got a lot of stuff from Lazy Daze. One such find was The Silkie , one of A.E Van Vogt's short novels, it cost me $2. At the time I'd buy pretty much any Van Vogt novel Lazy Daze had. I read most of them years ago, The Weapon Makers , The Moon Beast , The Voyage of the Space Beagle ... but when I tried The Silkie , for some reason I just didn't get into it. I stopped reading it not long after the prologue I think. So, I finally got around to reading the whole thing (all 156 pages). I'm not surprised the prologue put me off, for one thing there doesn't seem much point to it. We have this character who has a...

It's been far, far too long since I wrote here and I've read a lot in that time and written a fair bit too. I'll try to do some catch-up entries about some of the things I read, particularly Algernon Blackwood's short stories and a couple of trilogies I got through. The last book I finished was Across the Wall , which is a short story anthology by Garth Nix, an Australian fantasy author. I hadn't read any of his work before but I heard him in a seminar at Supanova one year and bought this volume afterward and got it signed, of course. I'm happy to say it the whole collection was delightful. The stories were a good mix but he has a distinctive style which I enjoy. They tend to action with a dark side with flashes of humour. It's also very readable and entertaining so I'll look into the Abhorsen cycle when I get a chance. Keeping on a signed at Supanova theme, I also read Kate Forsyth's Bitter Greens . This was a combination fantasy and historical ...

I was just sitting here playing a game on Facebook in a time I'd specifically arranged to do some writing, and while the guilt gnawed me further into inaction so I continued to play and feel more guilty, so worse, so less likely to do something constructive I remembered one of the things I wanted to write about. That is Felicia Day's book You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) . Felicia Day is an actress known for her roles in Buffy , Supernatural and others. I saw her in Buffy , but it was when I was belatedly introduced to Doctor Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog that I first really noticed her and learnt her name. Not long after that I was, also belatedly, introduced to The Guild , which is a web series (made before such things were things) that Felicia wrote and starred in. It's hilarious and well worth watching if you haven't. From there I naturally discovered Felicia's online media company Geek and Sundry - this time just as it was launching, huzz...

As Amanda's book led me to think of giant squids as a sort of personal emblem, it made sense that the next book I read be John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes . Of course, at the time I thought there was an actual kraken in the story, there isn't. This was my third Wyndham novel. The first was, unsurprisingly, The Day of the Triffids , which I read for English in Year 9. I loved it and I'd say it was an important novel in shaping my fictional tastes. Years later I read The Midwich Cuckoos , which I enjoyed but is a much slower story that relies heavily on a sense of wrongness and foreboding. The Kraken Wakes falls somewhere between the two. It follows a couple and their adventures in a bizarre and world-changing alien invasion. This is probably the only alien invasion story I've read where no-one on Earth knows it's been invaded till over halfway through the book. The narration is made by the husband and starts with an introduction that establishes that the inva...

I remember the first time I met Amanda Palmer. It was at a signing (for context here's a blog I wrote at the time ), so it was over fairly quickly. All I said was thank you, and I smiled. She smiled back and looked me straight in the eye. At the time I couldn't comprehend that she could be interested in me as much more than another face in a line of fans. The look in her eye said otherwise. Yes, she was in a daze, but in the moment she was searching me, looking for a connection, trying to see if I'd enjoyed the show - her Fraud Police were in force that night. She talks about eye contact and communicating by making these connections with people in her book, The Art of Asking . She also talks about the Fraud Police which I'll get to in a minute. For her, these connections are easy to make, second nature really. She's been making them since she was fresh out of college earning money as a living statue (and yes, earning is the right word, it's not a job I envy)...

Last night I stayed up later than was wise because I was so close to my destination and I had to reach it. And reach it I did, I finished A Dance of Dragons and am finally up to date with George R.R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Now I join the throngs waiting for the next book. It's called an epic fantasy and it really is in every sense, and reading it is certainly a journey. There are many fantastic vistas, especially when you get into the later books (which I guess will end up being the middle books by the time this thing is done), and I've loved visiting them and learning of the cultures and histories which are all vividly painted. The characters are equally strong and Martin alters the writing to fit each perspective well, which can make the text read in troubling ways at times, but these are troubling characters and disturbing times. The saga is certainly dark, with sometimes shocking violence and of course plenty of sex which is often quite twisted itself. H...

Most of my reading lately has been taken up with George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire as I try to catch up with the TV series and avoid spoilers (I'm into A Dance of Dragons ), but a couple of events recently saw me in need of my e-reader as opposed to thick epic paperbacks. As a result I read two short stories from old pulps. One was pretty dreadful if vaguely amusing. It was Hal K Wells' Cavern of the Shining Ones which appeared in Astounding back in 1932. The Shining Ones turn out to be a highly advanced alien race which came to Earth 10,000 years ago and went to war with the Atlanteans. They destroyed Atlantis but not before the Atlanteans had made the planet uninhabitable for them for 10,000 years. They went into suspended animation except for a small number who fled home so someone could come back one day and wake up the rest. It has some moments of suspense early on, not highly effective but they're there. It also has a quite blood-thirsty battle, but ...