Things what fall through my letterbox

One of the pleasures of being a semi-professional (i.e. very occasionally I manage to persuade people to pay me) author is being sent copies of the anthologies I've made some small contribution to. These days it'll typically be an e-book, but sometimes a physical dead-tree-derived copy will arrive. Wahey! 

(This, no doubt, pales into insignificance compared to being a professional author, which would mean being sent boxes of books, yours and other people's, as well as money, drugs and naked dancers, on top of being bought Michelin-starred meals, holidays, cars, and granted freedom from disease, boredom and ennui. And eternal youth. Jealous? Me? Never.)

A red-letter day occurred earlier this month when one shelf on my Billy bookcase (80cm wide, not 60cm, I'll have you know) became insufficient to hold all the volumes which include my name somewhere on the table of contents. So, I thought it may be useful to show you some of the great items that have materialised through my letterbox.

So that you can go out and buy them yourselves. Not as an exercise in narcissism. Just to be clear.

BSFA's fourth Fission anthology, published in July, included my story 'Formula 719: A Cure Ennui'. This was written as a black comedy, but in reading the excellent introduction this appears to have been missed by the editors entirely. Having said that, on re-reading it, the humour was so black and bleak as to have been effectively redacted. Still one of my favourite stories, though.

Triangulation's 'Hospitium', their annual themed anthology, was also published back in July. It's got my story, 'Charabanc', which started life as a tale of black shuck, but relegated him to sleeping on a bus.

Legiron's 'Monster' is, as the name suggests, a monster anthology which missed Halloween, despite the pumpkins on the cover, coming out on Guy Fawkes Night, but probably during the day. Not that there's a Guy Fawkes Day. My Dartmoor-set 'Too Few Surnames' will also be performed on the London stage (as in, read with feeling) sometime in 2025 by Liminal Tales. The book seems to have been given a five-star rating on Goodreads by the author first listed in the description. Just saying... I'm sure it fully deserves it.

PS Publishing's 'Shadowplays' took so long to come out - my story 'The Charmed' was accepted in February 2023 - I was beginning to wonder if it ever would. This was the one I blogged about Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores describing as "unsavoury and unpleasant with a disturbing ending". Buy the book and decide for yourself.

Lastly, but very not least, the wonderful polymath Donna Scott (who, having included me in five Best of British Science Fictions (resting, not dead!), I regard as a quiet champion for my work) has republished - but not reprinted - my previously podcast 'The Trouble with Vacations' in Slab's 'Laughs in Space'. Hear it there, but please read it here.

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

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

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).

Doing better than anything Led Zeppelin ever released

Or anything taken from Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Or I Ran, by Flock of Seagulls. Or Summer of 69 by Bryan Adams. Or - and this one leaves my gob more than mildly smacked - Bowie’s Changes. But only, I hasten to add, if you restrict that apparently outrageous claim to singles released in the UK.

Because, this blog is in the UK Top 20.  Of science fiction blogs. Which is a far more important top whatever to be in, as I'm sure you'll agree.

Apparently what you're reading, right here, right now, is a "thought-provoking commentary on the genre's storytelling nuances... a blend of sharp critique and personal insight reflecting on how narrative elements—ranging from hard sci-fi concepts to surreal imaginings—should balance credibility and creativity.. exploring the thematic intricacies of fiction while raising questions about plausibility in speculative storytelling, emphasizing both intellectual engagement and entertainment."

Bloody hell. I am humbled. And more than delighted to find out I have, apparently, 36 Twitter followers which, given I don’t tweet - at least with any authorial hat on - I take to be an act of faith on a par with booking hotel rooms in Baku in order to see the ‘Orns lift the European Cup in 2027.

I would, however, take slight issue in the claim that I only post monthly, when only nine out of the last 128 months have been single-serving months, and only two years in the last decade have had fewer than two dozen musings.

Signing out on October's second post.

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

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

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).

The apocalypse: your fault

The very nice people from 100-Foot Crow have run my drabble ‘Dominoes Tumbling’ about the end of the world and your part in it. You’re welcome.

Leave 'Leave the World Behind' Behind

I thought I'd mention a couple of movies that have passed, via my retinas, to my brain over the last few weeks: 'Leave the World Behind' and 'Greenland'.  Neither is really science-fiction, but given the apocalypse is always SF-adjacent, and both deal with existential crises, it's in-scope as far as I'm concerned.

There's a lot to unpack about both movies.  Of the two, I'd steer you to Greenland.  It's a superior Saturday night beer-and-pizza movie, and superior overall to the heavier-weight Julia Roberts' vehicle which, I think, aims for inscrutable ambiguity but just comes across as annoying. (If you want to see that ambition realised, at least in terms of leaving loose ends flapping in the breeze, watch John Sayles' 'Limbo', a brilliant film my mind still flits back to a quarter of a century after my only viewing).

I could also mention that odd sense of scale and lack of consequence in LtWB.  A ship grounds on the beach, ploughing into sunbathers, and is less of a topic of conversation than if someone had seen a dog that looks like Benedict Cumberbatch. A passenger jet crashes a couple of miles up the coast from where the action takes place and, having done its duty story-wise in demonstrating planes are falling out of the air, has no impact thereafter on either witnesses or the environment.

Instead, I'd like to dwell on another aspect of both movies: where are all the people?  It's the end of the world. And it looks like only surnames P to Q got the memo.

Yes, Greenland has crowds outside the perimeter fence of the military bases (which always seemed to be half a mile off the highway - who knew?), but they reminded me of the moshpit at a 1991 Goodbye Mister Mackenzie gig at the Bristol Bierkeller I went to (the only time they played Bristol, I find - isn't the internet pointlessly brilliant?!), about three deep in pogo-ing fans ramming the stage and behind them - nobody... absolutely nobody. When Armageddon comes, it'll be standing room only all the way to the back. It'll be August 2021 in Kabul all over again.

Meanwhile, in LtWB you could see the city across the water, and neighbouring properties, but in terms of population per hectare it looked like somewhere the Unabomber may have holed up. For all I know, the distressed Latin woman Ethan Hawke drives away from may have been shouting 'I thought I was the last human left!' in Spanish.

Fact is, we're on a planet with a carrying capacity of, at best, four billion, with a population approaching 8.2 billion as I type. When it breaks - and it will - we'll need more extras than either production employed to portray it. Weirdly, if you look at which films employed the most extras to populate the biggest crowd scenes they are - with the more than honourable exception of Metropolis, and also Lord of the Rings - all historical epics, from when planet earth had way, way fewer people walking its surface. Christ, the Ten Commandments used 25,000 extras when the planet only had about 40 million people.

My story in Fission#4, 'Formula 719: A Cure for Ennui', deals with something very few people seem to have cottoned on to: every time we invent something that makes life easier, safer, longer, fewer people die which, apart from being a 'thoroughly good thing', means we are putting greater strain on the ecosystem that keeps us alive. A cure for cancer may kill us all. It's the ultimate catch-22. And on that cheery bombshell...

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

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

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).

I asked for incredible, not unbelievable

I've been watching a few series in foreign, as it were, and one that has had me pondering is Das Signal, a four-part near-future sci-fi from the land of discount supermarkets and Septemberfest.

It's utter hokum, of course, albeit with a likeable human element at its core, and engaging performances, particularly from youngster Yuna Bennett.  But all the way through, there's a sense of continually being pulled out of the story by elements that make you sit up and think - really?

For me, the first red flag appeared in the opening minutes of the initial episode.  In this, two astronauts returned to earth in a capsule, the fiery glow of re-entry blazing outside the capsule windows.  And that got me thinking: would a capsule really have windows?  Would you risk structural integrity by boring out portholes? 

To be fair, the Apollo capsules did have tiny portholes, which I was surprised at when I fact-checked it, but I suppose that was their only space when they weren't parked up on the lunar surface to play golf.  This capsule was merely these characters' shuttle back to earth; most of the time they're on the International Space Station.  But - hey, come on guys, support me here - I ask again, would they have given it such bloody big windows?  Does that make engineering sense?

The second red flag appeared moments later, when one astronaut refuses? fails? to deploy the parachute.  One: surely that would be automatic, based on height? Two: space capsules are both small and designed with every eventuality in mind; are we really saying one occupant can't reach all the switches?  What if the other occupant were dead or disabled?  People who design space vehicles are a tad above average, intellectual horsepower-wise.  They'll have thought of that.

So, even if the first red flag was something of a red herring, and would have been dismissed with VAR, I put it to the court that the second was legitimate.  You'd think, once you embark on this slippery slope, you can't stop.  But, in all honesty, I wasn't watching to pick holes, and I didn't want to, but when it's revealed the astronaut in question had historic addiction and psychological issues, and there is no way on earth (or in space) that she would ever have got anywhere near a space program, you can't  help but concentrate on batting the red flags out of the way so you can see the screen.

It's odd - the weightlessness of space was well done, and I know in space you're weightless, but it never once bothered me in Star Trek that everyone sticks to the floor like they're in a studio in Burbank.  But little things in terms of how humans act and react, and what happens in systems where humans set the rules, failed to ring true to a jarring extent.  

There's a famous (I think, although two minutes of Googling has failed to bring it up) example of ensuring an incorrect detail rings true.  Kubrick knew computers were becoming increasingly miniaturised, that by 2001 HAL would not be room-sized. But he also knew his audiences only knew computers being the size of a supermarket booze section in its own sealed room, so that's what he gave them.

There's also a wilfully obscure story I heard of attempting to get something to ring true and failing miserably: allegedly, a restaurant in India once served western food that was... well, all wrong.  The dishes tasted fine, but looked... odd.  Turned out the chef had a set of recipe cards that had faded in the sun, different dyes degenerating at different rates, leaving them as if seen through a blue filter.  And he had cooked all his food to match.

Do I care because I write sci-fi?  I don't think so.  I don't write hard sci-fi, and I don't much care if the sci is little more than magic in a box of flashing lights.  But I do need it to ring true.  Maybe we all have different 'ring true' thresholds, but I can't believe mine is significantly more finely tuned than the average couch potato.  I'd argue we all pick up the donks amongst the chimes; maybe I'm more conscious of them because I write, but my main concern is as an audience member.

So, here's the theory I'm leaving you with, my cod law of speculative fiction.  The more incredible the story, the more fantastical the plot, the more it matters that you get the details an intelligent spectator can guess at right (or give us reasons why the parachute can't deploy automatically; why Hadi can't reach the button; why Paula has been let anywhere near a spaceship...).  Then - and only then - will we give you licence to tell us the bits that we can't guess at.

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

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

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).

Why can't every day be Friday?

If any clown ever tries to argue that the diameter of the Moon being one four-hundredth that of the Sun, and the latter being four hundred times further away, thus enabling us to see the full magnificence of a total solar eclipse, adds up to proof of the existence of God, simply point out that God could have been far more helpful had He given us a year that divided into easier chunks.

Three hundred and sixty five and a bit days. That isn't a design feature, that's an oversight. (Although if it had been something convenient, like four hundred, we would have been robbed of Jesse Pinkman arguing for thirteen months in a year. Oh, hold on, I remember now: God moves in mysterious ways. So, yes, He clearly exists. Duh.)

And isn't a seven-day week messy? We didn't have that sorted out until 321AD when Rome abandoned its combined seven- and eight-day systems. That must have made planning your holidays tricky. (As a passing aside, I've discovered that Burmese Theravada Buddhism still employs an eight-day week, but bizarrely achieves this by carving Wednesday in half. At least they're clearer about what 'half way through the week' means.)

All this digression is by way of telling you that last Friday Cosmorama ran my story 'Some of us are Going on a Bear Hunt', and today, a Friday, Wyld Flash have 'We are all Made of Stars'. Why can't every day be Friday?

Enjoy.

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

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

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).

Faceless goats

Being of a vaguely scientific mindset, or possibly because I'm incorrigibly cynical, I try to ignore two occurrences of any phenomena on the basis it's no doubt co-incidence; only when I see three do I start to suspect a pattern. Even then, I wonder.

So, maybe this is nothing, or it may shine a light on the zeitgeist. Probably the former, but hey, it's a while since I offered any light philosophising here, so I'd appreciate some slack.

My first, meaningless on its own, data point was my stumbling upon the music of the band Kosmischer Läufer, an alias for the East German composer Martin Zeichnete, recorded as warm-up and cool-down accompaniment for Cold War-era East German athletes.  Spotify has five volumes of Krautrock-style ambient noodling. It's rather good.

My second data point, inspired by the soundtrack to Shane Meadows' Gallows Pole, was my discovery of the band Goat, who would be on hard rotation, if my laptop the sort of memory that rotates, but my limited understanding of solid state drives suggests something more akin to Harry Potter's pensieve or the Snow White's stepmother's mirror.

My third, triangulating the first two, was also inspired by the visual, this time Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall: the Bacao Rhythm and Steel Band whose take on 50 Cent's PIMP covers the fall that the movie goes on to anatomise - or do I mean pathologise? Like the first two, highly recommended. 

Spotify's artist biographies describes BRSB as "shrouded in mystery" and says "not much is known about the mysterious masked band" Goat. And Kosmischer Läufer? It may actually be the cosmic joke of a Scottish bloke called Drew who I doubt was even in primary school when the Wall fell. But he swears blind he picked Martin Z hitch-hiking, so who am I to say?

The connection is manufactured and sought-out anonymity in a world barraged by social media, FOMO, information-sharing, information-thrusting-in-your-face, and a general screaming me-me-me-ness.

I have more than a nagging sympathy with this approach. Whilst I don't seek anonymity - I write under my own name, and you can find out quite a lot about me, particularly the non-authorial parts of my life, if you Google hard enough - I'm not one of the jump-up-and-wavers on social media. I'd rather write, and if you stumble across me and like what you read, great, but if you don't, no matter, it doesn't make what I write any the less because of that. (Full disclosure: this approach does not lead to me being stopped in the street and asked for my autograph.)

I can't see how there could be anything subliminal in the music that leads me towards artists such as these three, but it does make me wonder whether I've unwittingly gravitated towards them because they gently push the spotlight away with their fingertips and let their wares do the talking for them? And, regardless of the answer, does it say anything about the world in 2024? 

We've always had Harper Lees and Thomas Pynchons - but theirs are more cases of reclusiveness than sought out anonymity. After all, neither adopted noms de plume, they just didn't like interviews and didn't return calls from strangers. And let's not forget all the Frank Sidebottoms, performing their schtick from within papier-mâché heads, or equivalent thereof. Same mindset, different millennia?

There still seems something categorically different about this artistic approach in 2024, and I think it's all about context. With the all-pervasive glare of social media, blanket online coverage, and the expectation of everything being curated for consumption, not giving your name and avoiding photographs becomes so much more of a positive act. It takes effort. 

In the same way that you only see who's swimming naked when the tide is out, you only see who wants to remain incognito when the floodlights come on and they seek the shadows. But the floodlights are on all the time and there are no shadows, which, in an odd way simply highlights the anonymous and reclusive. Catch 22.

I suggest giving World Music a spin whilst pondering that.

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

You're here, so surely you know how to do that?

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

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).