One step forward, one step back

If you've ever had to knock on a lot of doors - maybe you're a postie, or, like me, have done a stint or two of political canvassing - you'll be familiar with video doorbells, like Ring. Actually, it'll probably be Ring, and it's slightly off-key, trying-too-hard-to-be-cheery chime.

You may also have noticed how many internet-linked smart doorbells have become dumb to the point of dead, lacking even the functionality of a knocker unless torn from the wall and banged against the door. With Ring, I assume the on-going subscription costs - we're all too strapped for cash these days - are driving people away, although I see a lack of love for the product, too. 

I'm not here to discuss Ring's financial well-being - there's plenty written about that already - nor Ring in particular. We've recently stripped out our Vuebell, a cheap, subscription-free Ring-imitation that never worked brilliantly - it would chime several minutes after the caller had given up, but at least captured a photo of who we'd missed - when our upgraded internet hub proved incompatible. My point is a more general one about technological advances - and regressions.

Because technological advances are like the tide coming in - there's an overall move forward, but moment to moment, waves still wash back and forth. Subscriptions seem to be one of the drivers for a half-step backwards. I don't recall ever having to pay a hire charge for a stereo or camera or other piece of hardware I bought, other than in the sense of renewing the batteries every so often

Software used to be a product, and you relied on Microsoft to recoup their fixed costs by pricing it appropriately. But now I have to subscribe to Office, the assumption being that in two years time I'll somehow hate the version of Word or Excel that perfectly meets my needs now. Presumably their desire to tweak outweighs our real desire to buy their improved versions. You can stop now, Gates. Oh no, you can't...

And don't get me started on my printer. I've recently discovered that if I cancel my printer cartridge subscription, my printer will stop working. I kid you not. There's a similar business model with electric vehicles, requiring you to pay extra to progressively unlock software - not add software, note; unlock functionality the car already has. As one Redditer (is that a noun? it is now) so aptly puts it, "Charging extra to "unlock" it later is just ransoming parts of your own vehicle back to you".

We'll get over this moment in history. The tide will keep moving forward but, at this precise moment, I can't help feeling we're surfing a technological wave receding backwards.

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how?

My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Meet a man mistaken for a robot, a robot which learns the meaning of irony the hard way, a Frankenstein’s monster with a future in tailoring, a talking cat, a talking car, several time travellers, and a host of other characters.

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.

  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).

Centuries up for batsman and bowler...

Clearly I'm a big fan of metaphors that'll be lost on those from the colonies, or at least those that had an issue with taxation without representation... Only kidding, you guys across the Pond. I know you understand and appreciate satire. From here, we can only assume most of what your leadership is up to is performance art...

For those for whom baseball is the bat-and-ball game of choice, in cricket a batsman scoring a hundred runs is known as 'a century' and is regarded as a 'good thing'. A bowler conceding a hundred runs is not really known as anything at all, but is thought of, if it is thought of at all, as a 'bad thing'. Please take any discussions of declaration bowling offline, thank you.

My personal bowling century was brought up by my one hundredth rejection from Clarkesworld. Yes, one hundred. Go, me! I'd like to pretend I've got close to pitching something through Neil C's transom but, looking at my figures on the Grinder, the longest he's taken to laughing me back into the street was eight days. I've had near misses from most of the big beasts of short speculative fiction, but not Clarkesworld. I keep trying.

Meanwhile, my batting century is that, in an idle moment I thought I would see how many stories I've placed (my boilerplate cover letter had a vague "ninety-odd"), and found, with my appearance in last month's Utopia, that I was up to one hundred. As a picture of me raising... what? a laptop? would look silly, here's somebody far, far better at cricket than me showing how it's done in the traditional manner.

Actually, I thought I was up to one hundred and one, but "The Other Brother Grimm", my fantasy about the bungling youngest Grimm brother lost to history, which had been destined for Mystery and Horror LLC's Strangely Funny series, has just been released back to me with the series on hiatus.

This isn't in itself newsworthy - publishers and publications come and go - but I would like to shout chapeau! to Sarah Glenn and Gwen Mayo, who collectively make up Mystery and Horror LLC, who, in returning previously held stories, have paid their authors as per contracts. Given the press's hiatus is despite their best efforts, standing by their contracts is a decent and honourable thing, which they could easily have dodged (what was I going to do? sue through the American courts for the price of a couple of pints?). 

It's also in stark contrast to, say, the actions of Carrie Cuinn (and, lest we forget, I'm not the only one who's had a gripe about her unprofessionalism) or Roxie Voorhees. How I wish I'd said what I really thought in that post...

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how?

My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms

Meet a man mistaken for a robot, a robot which learns the meaning of irony the hard way, a Frankenstein’s monster with a future in tailoring, a talking cat, a talking car, several time travellers, and a host of other characters.

Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.

  

2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
“Brilliant stories, well written!” (five stars, Amazon).