Charles Edward Tuckett's Yuletide Message

My Christmas gift to you.  First published on NewMyths.com, December 2018, reprinted in '24 0s & a 2', available from all good... no, hold on, available on Amazon.

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Charles Edward Tuckett's Yuletide Message

It was the second glass of wine that was making Charles Edward Tuckett reminisce. In his twilight years at the corporation he’d felt quite proud to be one of the silver surfers who had, against type, taken to the new technology. He liked dropping his reading glasses onto his nose, squinting at the screen. The machines then had been comfortingly boxy, beige like the walls of his dentist. They whirred when they were first turned on, then beeped, before a flowing screen of runic code gave way to his “desktop” — like the Wizard of Oz unwittingly revealing himself momentarily before pulling the curtain back around.

But what was on his desk that last day, his retirement day, was different. A “docking station,” he’d been told. For laptops. Machines that came with you to meetings. He looked at it like a horse eyeing a traction engine, realizing that he only liked new technology as far as it could be tethered; after that he was no longer sure who was master and who was servant.

As the world had quickened he had thickened and slowed. There were now flaps of skin below the eyes of the face that stared back at him from the shaving mirror.

“I think I’ll stop looking in mirrors,” he said to his son-in-law across the table, over a candle shaped like a snowman, a natural continuation of his inner monologue but outwardly a propos of nothing.

“Is that why old men grow beards?” Jeffrey responded playfully. He’d had at least four glasses of shiraz.

Charles Edward Tuckett grunted as his daughter bustled in with the Christmas pudding, brandy-soaked flames flitting and flickering blue.

“You really shouldn’t,” Charles Edward Tuckett said, surprising even himself. “All this—” and he waved a hand across the table.

“Why not, Dad? It’s Christmas. Christmas is for family.”

“You have Jeffrey’s family. And work. That’s more family than family.”

Wendy paused, a spoonful of gluttonous pudding between dish and plate. “What do you mean?”

“You must have already had more Christmas dinners than you can stomach. And then you have to accommodate me.”

Wendy poured cream. “But what you said about work being more like family than family?”

“Well, isn’t it? I spent more time there than with you and your mother. Quality time. Daylight hours. You have a sense of purpose, a sense of achievement. Family doesn’t give you that. Not in the same way.”

“I like coming home to family,” Jeffrey said, “but because of what it’s a contrast to. I’m still thinking about work at home. I’m not sure I’m thinking so much of home when I’m at work.”

“But what about when it’s over?” Wendy wondered. “You come home to family. How often does work remember you? Family remembers you.”

“Percival remembers,” Charles Edward Tuckett said with gravity. “Wallace Percival. He was my manager, briefly. He remembers, and calls me up every Christmas. He called just a couple of days ago.”

“That’s nice,” said Wendy breezily.

“You must have got on well,” Jeffrey said.

“Reasonably, I suppose.”

They chewed their pudding. Wendy related a story about their nieces, Jeffrey’s nieces, strictly speaking — a skiing holiday, a twisted ankle, the welfare of a hound. Jeffery was quiet, pondering. “You worked with him, you say, briefly?”

Charles Edward Tuckett dredged his mind. “A month, maybe three. He arrived to look after the south-east just before they restructured.”

“And he phones you up?” Jeffrey was intrigued. “Why?”

“To wish me Happy Christmas.” Charles Edward Tuckett was conscious that he’d just spat pudding in his surprise.

“No. I mean, why you? You worked together for a few months out of a career of decades. There must be hundreds of people that he knew just as well or better.”

“I suppose he rings lots of people over Christmas. My point was that I’m not forgotten.” He waved his spoon for emphasis.

“I bet he rings at exactly the same time,” Jeffrey said.

“Bang on. Five past three, December the twenty-third. Every year.”

“Do you find he can’t quite recall past events? Or relate back to what you’ve talked about previously?”

Charles Edward Tuckett considered. His son-in-law had a point. But what was he suggesting? That Percival had the beginnings of dementia?

“You don’t think,” “Forget it,” Wendy and Jeffrey said over each other, exchanging looks. Charles Edward Tuckett looked from one to the other, his eyebrows knotting. There was a meaning here he wasn’t quite grasping.

“It’s just,” Jeffrey began, sounding as if he was regretting the conversation’s direction of travel, “it sounds very much like your Wallace Percival is a me-jah.”

“A what?”

“A me-jah. A bot. A program that this Wallace Percival uses to make calls and put things online. It does his social media so he doesn’t have to.”

Wendy put her hand across her father’s. “It’s not that big a deal. Lots of people use me-jahs. I do. Mainly to respond to people who tweet pictures of their dinner. But then, it’s probably their me-jahs that have put them up there to start with. We all do it.” But the old man’s shoulders had slumped.

“Look,” Jeffrey said placatingly, “me-jahs work on the basis that they reproduce what you would do: they imitate you. If you’re inclined to call up old acquaintances at Christmas, then your me-jah will do that. So, Wallace Percival’s me-jah calls you up because that’s what he’d do. More wine?”

Charles Edward Tuckett through he ought not, but held his glass out anyway.

#

For ten years or so Charles Edward Tuckett had enjoyed his calls from Percival. Initially he’d been surprised, suspicious that Percival was meandering towards touching him for money, or inveigling him into some Ponzi scheme. But not so; it was just an old-fashioned Season’s greeting, a throwback to when people cared.

But recently, come to think of it, it tended to be Charles Edward Tuckett downloading his review of the year. He had even come to look forward to composing his monologues and ad-libs in advance. But he’d heard very little of Percival’s year. Was that just because he, Tuckett, liked to talk, or was it because Percival was, in reality, a “me-jah”?

He brooded on the matter until New Year’s Day. And then he phoned Percival.

“Wallace. Charles Tuckett. I enjoyed our chat the other day; thought I’d call and wish you Happy New Year.”

The voice at the other end of the line gave away a degree of bemusement combined with pleasure at being the recipient of a call, even if wheels were clearly turning in placing the name. “Charles. Happy New Year to you.”

“Wallace. I thought that I’d just correct something I said the last time we spoke.”

“Charles, no need, social chit-chat.”

“No. You remember I told you about Wendy, my daughter? About her children?” And thence followed an elaborate but ultimately banal story about his grandchildren, about their impending skiing holiday but the boy had twisted an ankle doing a paperchase — “Did you know they still did those, Wallace? Thought they were Victorian” — and that the girl was worried whether the dog would be alright whilst they were away. “Do you recall all that, Wallace?”

“Well, I…” Wallace Percival hedged, really not sure he recalled having been told the tale. Weren’t there nieces, not grandchildren? And then, out of politeness, “Wendy… Jimmy and… what was it? Tabatha?”

“I don’t have grandchildren,” Charles Edward Tuckett said coldly, common courtesy not being an issue when talking to machinery. “Wendy can’t. Medical condition. She’s barren. There is no Jimmy or Tabatha.”

Silence.

“Charles?” asked Wallace Percival, confused.

“Happy New Year, Percival,” Charles Edward Tuckett signed off brusquely.

#

Wallace Percival put the phone down slowly, carefully. He wasn’t sure what to make of Tuckett’s call. Although they had worked together only briefly he had always held him in high regard, made sure he had a number when Tuckett retired.

Should he call him back? His hand hovered near the handset. He felt he should, but the path of least resistance got the better of him.

His children had suggested that he hand his calls over to a me-jah, but he’d never wanted that. Christmas was about connecting personally. In retirement Percival had built up an extensive network for nothing but the pleasure of human interaction. That, and a background fear that his ever-increasing 'senior moments' — had Tuckett told that story, or hadn’t he? — presaged oncoming dementia, and that keeping mentally active was as good a medicine as anything else on offer.

But with each passing year Percival’s Christmas call list began to look more and more demanding. He’d considered just sending cards, a round robin letter. But that just wasn’t the same and he was determined to hang on to what had become a tradition.

Still, with Tuckett off his list that would be one less call to make, his burden lifted, albeit marginally.

#

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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

Catmandon't? Catmando!

Remember me telling you about Felis Sarcasticus, my story that cheekily tried to break Clarkesworld's rules, but still get published?

Well, Wyldblood left the door open for it if I trimmed it to a 1500-word flash and, slightly starved but in no way dishevelled, it slunk in through the crack and you can find it here, probably licking its genitals because it can.

I failed to mention that not only was this a go at seeing how many of Neil Clarke's directives I could rail against, but I tried to make the task even harder for myself by basing Wilson on Bernard Manning.  For those of you who don't know, Manning was the apotheosis of the racist, sexist 1970s comic.  If you have a Manning VHS you'll probably hide it behind the kiddie porn when the vicar visits.

Of course, trust the Australian Andromeda Spaceways Magazine to complain, not only about the implausibility of a story set in space with a cat (Alien? I said, ALIEN??!) but that the cat wasn't sarcastic enough.  Some people, eh?

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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

The Curse of L. Ron Hubbard

That'll get the Scientologists' backs up...

For those that don't know, L. Ron Hubbard as well as being a science fiction writer and founding a religion, as one does, also set up a writing competition, Writers of the Future.  It was one of his better moves, his way of paying it forward and, as far as I can tell having thrown my hat into the ring sixteen times, not a way of reeling in adherents.  That said, I've yet to get the invite to dress as a penguin and accept a gong.  I'm vulnerable when dressed as a penguin.  I'm not sure what I'll agree to.

Eligibility depends on avoiding getting anything sci-fi over 3000 words professionally published more than three times.  This is something I have proved exceptionally able at, having an almost god-like gift for it.  There's a non-life changing cash prize, but the main benefit is the profile-raising, the networking, the workshopping, as well as the expenses-paid event (bring your own penguin suit).  And, natch, your story crops in a very highly regarded annual anthology.

As previously blogged, I've just had a second silver honorable in a matter of weeks (the competition is quarterly, but confirmation of placings can be a tad erratic).  Sounds great, if misspelt, but take a look at the list: there are a lot of us.  Honorable mention is pretty much just an encouraging way to say 'fit for purpose', and I've had a number of entries that didn't even do that.

It's now three and a half years since I was a finalist (yes, my writing bio does call this 'recent', but I'm thinking big here, like geological eras big) and one of the things charming contest director Joni Labaqui said when I went from finalist to losing finalist was that editors will be eager to read manuscripts that reached such nosebleed heights.  I'm not so sure.  If anything, I've struggled to get stories that have been through the contest to fly (and that's without editors knowing their status).  I’m beginning to wonder whether there’s some curse on stories that have had the WoTF stamp of near approval.

Here's the roll call.

Q2 2016/17, that losing finalist, was a weird fiction parallel worlds, post-apocalyptic tale about graptomancy.  Clarkesworld, Asimov's, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Liminal Stories, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed, Analog, Strange Horizons, tor.com, Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, Interzone, and another dozen pro and semi-pro venues have said no, and only tor.com went out of their way to say nice things about it.  List of SFWA-recognised venues left that fit genre and length: zero.  That said, the Grinder (where you can find links to all the publications mentioned) shows it as the story with the longest waiting time for the pro-paying market it’s currently with, so here’s hoping.

Q4 2016/17.  Honorable mention.  A 3,500-word alt. history horror story.  Thirty-one rejections, including one from The Dark in, as noted on my spreadsheet, 'five fucking minutes'.  A near miss with Asimov's, though.

Q3 2017/18.  Honorable mention.  A 9,000-word cyberpunk fantasy.  Batted away by another ten venues, but recently invited back by Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.  Since pushed away again by them at a slimmed-down 7,500 words, but with a coy eyelid flutter and wave of the fan, more rewrite notes, and a suggestion it can still shed some fat.  One of us is reeling the other in slowly.

Q2 2018/19.  Silver Honorable.  A 4,000-word Frankenstein's monster tale set amongst 1970s Jewish New York tailors.  I don't make things easy for myself, do I?  One of my personal faves, it has not proved a fave with any of thirty-seven venues who've also seen it, although Analog had nice things to say about it.

Q3 2018/19.  Silver Honorable.  A 14,000-word horror triptych.  Rejected by another seven since.  Analog liked its (or my) style, Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, however, gave it such scathing feedback (Hard to tell who the main character is or what sort of world this is... garbled... disjointed and jarring... lost interest... incredibly unlikable from the get-go... after the time-skip, it got more and more annoying... a rambling, mystical, murder story... by the end, it had made no and did not make, any sense... did any of it actually happen?... good for the first part, then slowly drowned in a sludgy quagmire of eldritch goo) that it got even under my thick skin and I haven't sent it out since. 

Q3, 2019/20.  Silver Honorable.  A time-travelling yarn, was rejected by seven SFWA-recognised venues as a 3,500-word effort before being rebuilt from the ground up and submitted to WoTF as a 9,000-word story.  So far only rejected twice elsewhere but being a rewrite and above 6,000 words inevitably limits pro-market possibilities.

Q4, 2019/20.  Silver Honorable, after being unplaced a year earlier.  8,000 words, psychopunk-cyberpunk.  Rejected seven times, including most of the SFWA-recognised venues it could go to, in an earlier draft; already booted into the long grass by Apex in its current form.

Another eight have failed to place.  Of those, one, an 12,000-word slab of weird fiction that grew out of a 5,000-ish (it varied) story rejected by twenty-three venues (including WoTF in 2015), got a rewrite so fundamental it's essentially a whole new story.  Of its first incarnation Charlie Finlay said "I got to the end of the story and had no idea what it meant either..." , which I took as a complement.  He also gave some advice about strengthening it, which I took on board, so it's a disappointment that it didn't tickle the WoTF judges in either guise.  Another has been politely declined seventeen times, but has been held for over eighteen months by Nightscape Press for a possible volume 2 of Nox Pareidolia. 

The other six have racked up 104 rejections - including a near miss with Shoreline of Infinity and encouragement from Strange Horizons, but not many other positives - with only three eventually published: Litter Picking on the Moon; The Loimaa Protocol, which also made it into this year’s Best of; and May Nothing but Happiness Come Through Your Door.  The first two are anthologised in 24 0s & 2, too.

So, the numbers are clear.  Getting your name on the roll all of almost worthies correlates with total failure to launch, whereas proof of an inability to write leads to a fifty percent success rate (and the Grinder tells me fewer than a quarter of the pieces I’ve written get snapped up for cash).  So, the curse of Writers of the Future is proved?  Yes?

Not so fast, I think.  If every pro venue adopted such a stratified approach, above simple acceptance, rejection, or, by exception, an encouraging note, I think you’d get the same mix, with the confusion of Analog’s and WoTF’s warmth and Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shore’s antipathy towards the same text being nothing newsworthy.

We’re in William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything” territory.  You'd think that the market for science fiction would have some kind of consensus over what's required, but once you hit a basic quality threshold it becomes a very subjective game.  What's meat and drink for one editor is stinking bilge for another.  You can go mad by trying to follow the market or stay true by writing what you want to write about and, if the market bites, then so much the better. 

I'm currently polishing a 10,000-word tract set in two parallel St Petersburgs, neither of which is this world's St. Petersburg, about an aging mathematics professor who becomes the number zero.  First port of call, Writers of the Future, Quarter 1, 2020-21.  Should be right up WoTF's street - and box office poison everywhere else...

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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.

In praise of the SFWA Craft of Writing blog

In an attempt to raise my game from just missing the transom to... well, in all probability, only just missing the transom (brought home by both a second L Ron Hubbard silver honorable in a matter of weeks, and reaching the semi-finals but no further in the Cast of Wonders flash competition), I've been poring my way through the SFWA's Craft of Writing blog, all the way from Media Tie-ins: Why They are Nearly Impossible for Beginners To Publish to Butchness and Liminal Mortality in SF, only skipping the calls for writers' workshops which have been and gone.

I'd like to say I've read them all so you don't have to, but, to be honest, there's a nugget or two in everything. That said, in my journey from oldest to newest, there was a hardly surprising shift from solid, foundation, 101, do's and do-not-do's, to shorter, more personal, more political thinkpieces.  There's also a third category of posts: technical, but niche, such as this excellent piece - go explore and find what gets you through the night.

But if, like me, you're interested in the where do I need to put my slot A to fit my tab B, here are some of the wheatiest, least chaffy postings:

• Writerisms and other Sins; A Writers' Shortcut to Stronger Writing
• If creative grammar were an Olympic sport, this sets out the criteria for a perfect score.
• You and Your Characters
• A bit verbose, but includes excellent person specs for the team you want, as well as descriptions of suspicious persons you're advised not to approach.
• Mistakes in Writing
• If you can't get it right, at least use this list and make sure you don't get it wrong.
• Being a Glossary of Useful Terms in Critiquing Science Fiction
• Turkey City Lexicon - A Primer for SF Workshops
• Language defines the world; the richness with which we use language determines the richness with which we see the world.  More than lists of terms, more than helping clarify your thinking, these enable you to think and speak sci-fi.
• A Checklist for Critiquing Science Fiction
• Hardcore critique guidelines
• Critiquing in a Workshop context
• All covering similar ground; vital for workshopping, extremely very very useful just for looking at your own work.
• The Theory and Practice of Titles
• I don't think I have that great an issue with titles, but then I don't sell many stories - perhaps I should reread?
• Murder Your Darlings
• Strategies for reducing your stock to a flavourful jus, story-wise.
• Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions: Magic and Magicians
• One of many posts about worldbuilding, which isn't quite the technical 101 that I'm aiming for with this list, but it deals with internal consistency in story-telling a bit more than most.
• Aphorisms for Writing Science Fiction
• Not sure I buy all of these, but at least I have to stretch to think why they may not be the case.
• Key Conditions for Suspense
• The motherlode.  This is actually the table of contents to a 27-part technical tour de force on the mechanics of genre fiction.  For free.
• 10 Books for Writers Focussing on Craft
• ...and I've bought The 10% Solution on the strength of this.
• 5 Things To Do In Your First 3 Paragraphs
• Does what it says on the tin.  Now it's your turn.
• 60 Rules for Short SF (and Fantasy)
• You won't sign up to all of them, but just thinking out why you disagree is a useful exercise in itself.
• 25 Reasons Readers Will Keep Reading Your Story
• Another one of the 'let me go through this list and see if I can't make things stronger' school of blog posts.
• What's Wrong with Cheesecake?
• A brief introduction to antagonists via restating some fundament truths of fiction that bear repeating
• How to Write a Sentence
• Think you learnt that in lower school?  Not like this, you didn't.
• Variations of Villany
• Moustache-twirling or genuinely creepy?  A miscellany.
• Painting Characters into Corners
• That's the easy bit.  This deals with how to get them out without too much mess.
• How to Know When You're Done Revising
• And, more importantly, the steps beforehand.
• Translating the Hero's Journey into a Linear Plan
• Actually, translating every character's journey into a narrative arc; good if you like creating lists as a way of avoiding writing (did I really say that?).  I may end up tattooing Act 2 belongs to the antagonist somewhere. 

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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

Turns out I'm a racist... I had no idea...

I've recently had a couple of near misses, short story-wise.  I've hinted at the frustration caused before and, mentally, I'm in the same territory that I was a year ago.  Must be an October thing.  The only difference between a near miss and a swift rejection is that the former wastes so much more time.  Otherwise, it gets you to exactly the same place.  An inch really is as good as a mile.

One was from token-paying Wyldblood, for a short that started off life as an exercise to see how many of Clarkesworld's rules - the bit here that's prefaced with "this is not a challenge" - I could break in one story.  It has a talking cat and, originally, even a punning title: Catmandon't.  

On the back of that rejection, I had a fascinating email exchange with editor Mark Bilsborough, in which his take on the reality of the cat was quite different to mine.  I'm not saying he was wrong and I was right - as Ursula K. Le Guin's said, "The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp.  The reader reading it makes it live: a live thing, a story" - and Mark's take was quite legitimate, although I’m not completely at the extreme end of the ‘if a story is read in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it, it makes no sound’ spectrum.

Incidentally, Mark and I are the only two British silver honorables(sic), in fact, the two highest placed Britons, in the latest quarter of the L Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future.  Congratulations to us, although I guess that's another near miss if you're being glass half empty about it.

The other rejection I had in mind was from Flash Fiction Online, who published my Product Recall some three and a half years ago. This story, which was with them for over seven weeks rather than the fortnight it usually takes them to put me back in my box, made it to the final 5%, and, as I assume is reserved for the cream that isn’t the creamiest, editor Suzanne Vincent offered me feedback.  A nice touch, much appreciated, thank you.

I’m used to the editorial trope that there are more publishable stories than they had space for, so expected something along the lines of good but not good enough, too similar to something else, didn’t quite do it for me...

But, fuck me... “Tension is lacking... started off quite well but didn't get going after that... much of the story is little more than internal monologuing, without much really happening. And when something does happen, I'm not sure about the significance of what happened... interesting but not developed in a convincing way... the resolution isn't satisfying because the character's reaction isn't one of understanding or empathy... I think the story is trying to do too much... I didn't find this believable... I’m not really engaged in the conflict here or the science behind the solution. It just comes off as kind of bland overall... This for me is bland... I'm not really sold. The conclusion isn't great...  I started skimming near the end. The writing wasn't bad, but there was nothing to hook me... the end falls flat for me.”

Christ.  What do they say for the ones they don’t like?

I can take all of those on the chin and, once you've had several gins and a good cry, it's all grist to the rewrite mill.  You can’t please all of the people all of the time, although those people do seem to be disproportionately more populous amongst slush pile readers.  But I do think there’s a sense of proportion missing here.  I’m writing sci-fi.  Hand-waving, rubber science, sci-fi.  I’m not writing the Great American Novel.  It’s not my credo that I'm setting out from my hermitage high in the hills.  It’s meant to be a throwaway 1000-word entertainment.

I'd hate to see what these people make of Star Wars - or, perhaps they think having your spaceship attacked by your estranged father-in-law and throwing a message in a bottle into space to be found by your unknown brother is convincing; that Jawa sandcrawler looks perfectly stable on the Tatooine surface; that the best freighter pilots in the galaxy are bound to be found on a planet with no evident industry or other obvious need for interstellar logistical infrastructure; that there’s nothing odd in an armed freighter; that Mos Eisley spaceport clearly has at least another 93 docking bays; and that it is perfectly, naturally normal to get out of your means of transport within sight of your destination and talk about it, as though to an unseen audience.  Oh, hold on...

But what got me were the readers who felt they were reading a story about beauty, and that I’d set my Malay-German heroine, Lilly, up to be a white man’s demonstration of how ugly Asians are.

This rather threw me.  Actually, threw me an extremely long way.  As far as I was concerned, I’d written a story about the disconnect between internal emotional states and facial expressions as externally perceived.  Aesthetics wasn’t even on my radar.  I don’t think there’s a single element that steers the reader that way, except in a seeing your parents fighting in an inkblot kinda way.  You can be Mila Kunis frowning, or one of life’s unfortunates grinning; the two aren’t related and if I didn’t clearly say they weren’t, it’s for the same reason that I failed to point out they weren’t correlated with the price of fish, either.

Plus, I’m rather fond of Lilly and, even though she’s fictional, I thought she was illustrating a universal truth, that we may be serene on the surface but we're all paddling like crazy underneath, and I feel slighted that there’s even a suggestion that I think she’s a minger.

The thought that I’m left puzzling over is, were my story genuinely about "anti-Asian stereotypes and Western standards of beauty", would any of the slush pile readers have mistaken it for a simple story about the (mis)perception of facial expressions?  I’m inclined to think not, because the woke aren’t on the look-out for that, are they, like religious zealots checking their toast for faces?  But mention in passing that you prefer Blonde on Blonde to Back to Black and you may as well put on a pointy hat and call yourself Grand Wizard.

So, yes, a story needs a reader and a writer, and the two together make the dance.  And if reader and writer muddle through and it transpires one was dancing a mambo and the other was working on the basis that it was a rumba, maybe something interesting might come out of it.  But if I’m coming to tango, don’t go complaining to the judges that I’m dancing a goosestep, because that may just start an argument...

Twenty-four sci-fi, slipstream and new weird stories.

Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

Published by William Holly and available now on amazon.com, .co.uk, .de, .fr, .es, .it, .nl, .jp, .com.br, .ca, .mx, .au, and .in.   

Enjoy

Death - some thoughts

Death.  There’s a lot of it about at the moment. We've just passed a million Covid deaths (although, strictly speaking, that number is with Covid, not necessarily from Covid.  The BBC article linked gets that small but important detail right; it took me a few moments to find a link that didn't say 'from' - shame on you, Guardian, amongst others).

I suppose one thing I didn't imagine was that the apocalypse would be so drawn out.  I thought that the asteroid would hove into view around breakfast and we'd all be toast by elevenses.  Or the zombies would round the corner and rip our throats out before we even realised they were looking a bit peaky.  I didn't think it would take months...

Joking apart, this isn't the apocalypse, of course.  It's war.  The mistake of every war is that it would be fought like the last. We turned up with horses in World War One, dug trenches in World War Two, and have failed to realise that China's bio-experts kicked off World War Three some months ago, and it would be fought with a virus, not by soldiers.  Who'll dominate the world after this?  China.  (Say it in a Donald Trump voice: it makes such hokum sounds absolutely undeniable).

Whether the war theory is true or not, we're dealing with it in our different ways (or, as far as I can tell, the correct way if you're Korean or Swedish).  I appreciate most people reading this blog live outside these drizzle-swept shores, so won’t have seen the double act of Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, the telly-box warm-up act to our beloved leader, Boris.  Boris: creator of whiff-whaff, writer of bollocks on the side of buses masquerading as promises to the credulous, father of the masses as well as to the masses.  Boris.  Don't get me started. 

Anyway, back to Chris n' Pat.  They’re good people, delivering spin-free science, guiding the politicos through pretty much unknown waters.  In one of their most recent gee-up the nation PowerPoints, one statistic stood out for me.  That was that somewhere around 6% of us have antibodies, possibly two or three times that number in the cities.

Very little was made of this, either by Whitty and Vallance, or subsequently in the media.  Why?  This sounds like great news to me.  Four million or so Britons with antibodies.  Given we've only had 400,000 positive tests, that means that nine times that number of people have had it, and not had a Scooby-Doo.

I've tested my theory that the significance of this has passed people by, by asking a representative sample of the nation (okay, my own children, but there's an even gender split) whether, if they were completely asymptomatic, they'd prefer a Covid test to come up positive or negative.

Negative, of course, they cried.

Why? Wouldn't you prefer to know that you're in the 90%, ill but not suffering, generating antibodies whilst you go about your day totally unaffected.  Otherwise you're still blind to how SARS-CoV-2 will hit you.  Roll on the day when we, like Manaus, have reached herd immunity.  It's either that or a vaccine, and the latter isn't guaranteed.

But I have a gut feeling that the world at large will see it like my kids.  Minimise the infection rate at all costs, because we've come to believe that death is something we can escape - even if it's killing our economy and mental health, even if it's a natural part of the world, unavoidable unless you keep yourself wrapped up in cotton wool and clingfilm forever, that hunt for a vaccine notwithstanding.

I wasn't actually going to use this blog posting to talk pandemic, other than in the sense that we finished our lockdown voyage through the Marvel Cinematic Universe in viewing order, or at least the parts Disney+ allows us to see (wither Spiderman?).  I appreciate these films are old news to most people, that as a semi-pro science fiction author it's no doubt incomprehensible to most that I haven't already seen them all, that in all probability every definitive word has already been written about them.  But what struck me, and what I'd like to throw out into the blogosphere, whether previously penned or not, was how lily-livered the whole thing was about death.

Yep, he's on about death again.

When half the cast went the way of ash in the wind in Infinity War, I said that I would walk out if they somehow returned in Endgame.  They did, I didn't - but only because I quite like the way it was handled.  But my point remains: they didn't have the conjones to kill their characters.  Because they know we don't have the conjones any more to handle it.  There always has to be a way back.  Unlike in life.

I just don't think it's healthy, and I don't mean that ironically.  If you want irony, then I'd argue that we're seeing the taboo of death driving public policies that will cause more death and suffering than they avoid, and that is beyond ironic.  Poverty harms.  Poverty kills.  In the long term.  And, boy, will there be a lot of poverty about for a very long time.  But the politicos feel they have to do what they're doing, otherwise they have blood on their hands, despite pandemic deaths being above, but not multiples above, annual norms.  (Hint: people die all the time, every day.  Sad, but true).

This is made up on the cuff, without any great academic research (but if there's a PhD grant out there, I'll be happy to spellcheck it and add some footnotes) but I have a theory that the bloodiness of children's entertainment correlates to the proximity of death, the degree to which death as a normal part of life is in the zeitgeist.  Fairytales used to be darker and bloodier than we remember them.  Even more recently, there were some stunningly shocking children's movies when I was growing up.  Two words: Watership Down.  Two more words: fuck me.

It's noticeable how tame cinematic adaptations of fantasy literature are, with classics like Lord of the Rings or Narnia, written in a time when every able-bodied male got a chance to engage in politics by other means, having battle scenes reminiscent of children at play.  Fall over and lie still if you're dead.  Very few people ever get maimed; it's binary between dead and not-even-scratched.  Even worse, in our game over, put another coin in the slot world, we're used to getting up again and keeping on playing, resurrected.  Shock us, startle us, but whatever you do, don't kill anyone.

I'm slightly baffled by the lack of ripples in popular culture from the so-called Spanish Flu, which immediately followed the Great War.  My thinking is that it was because we'd become punch-drunk with mortality, rather than it not being worth writing about.  Different shit, same outcome.  Death was everyday, and whilst I'm not saying people were more resilient a century or more ago (okay, I'm thinking it), I don't think there was a taboo around death that we now have to get over first.  Death happens.  Live with it.

All hail medical science for pushing death so far away.  It's no longer prosaic, quotidian.  We've forgotten when it was a numbers game.  But out of sight doesn't so much mean out of mind, but can' remember what it looks like.  We think that it can be defeated, that we have a right to life.  It's like an exotic fruit in the supermarket that we can just walk away from - what exactly are you meant to do with it? -  until it gets served up to us unexpectedly and we need to grapple with it without knowing which bits to suck up and which to leave behind.  We've forgotten it gets us all in the end.

Now may be a really good time to reintroduce death in our storytelling as an everyday reality, not a false ending that our heroes can come back from.  I think we may be doing the world a favour.  Just a thought.

Twenty-four sci-fi, slipstream and new weird stories.

Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

Published by William Holly and available now on amazon.com, .co.uk, .de, .fr, .es, .it, .nl, .jp, .com.br, .ca, .mx, .au, and .in.   

Enjoy

Overcast 134

Please allow me to direct you over to The Overcast, where you'll find that episode 134 is my story, a heart-warming tale of sexual convenience and robotic ponies, 'The Button at the Base of his Spine':

And, after you've listened, feel free (well, not free, but for about the same price as a coffee) to read it and twenty-three others here:

Twenty-four sci-fi, slipstream and new weird stories.

Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

Published by William Holly and available now on amazon.com, .co.uk, .de, .fr, .es, .it, .nl, .jp, .com.br, .ca, .mx, .au, and .in.   

Enjoy

Double tap

Delighted that Black Beacon Books have taken my story, 'Driverless', for their 'Murder and Machinery' anthology next year.  A story rejected thirteen times, albeit held for consideration by Apex, before I gave it a fairly fundamental polish informed by my 'credo', cutting it down by a fifth compared to its original length whilst adding a more satisfying ending.  After that, it was accepted on only its second foray into the market.  Proof if proof were needed...

Meanwhile, Daily Science Fiction have taken my flash 'Three Wishes' for my fourth appearance in it's (web)pages.  And, if I'm noting the number of times it's been sent in to fight its rivals in the slush pile, this was just it's fourth sortie.  Equally delighted.

Can I say delighted again?

#

Twenty-four sci-fi, slipstream and new weird stories.

Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

Published by William Holly and available now on amazon.com, .co.uk, .de, .fr, .es, .it, .nl, .jp, .com.br, .ca, .mx, .au, and .in.  

Enjoy

Al Gorithm: Britain’s least wanted

There’s been trouble at'mill, recently.

For those of you who live outside these shores, our young bright things have in recent weeks been receiving academic qualifications that, in any other year, would reflect exams they would have sat in the early summer.  Covid-19, of course, carried off our exam season alongside our elderly, but the whippersnappers still deserve an envelope of letters.

So what those who know best did was put teachers' assessments through an algorithm (a word many, many more Britons now know than they did in July) that took into account factors such as teachers maybe wanting their charges to do their best and being a bit too glass half full.

Quite why baffles me, but those powers decided to then publish both the teachers' assessments and the revised (or, if you read the press, 'downgraded') markings.  Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed by embarrassed back-tracking so that teachers' grades prevailed.  (It's actually worse than that - kids get the higher of the processed grading or whatever Mister Chips thought of first).  We’ve even had the brilliant life-imitates-art-imitates-life story of a girl who wrote a story about academic grades being decided by an algorithm being upgraded after being initially downgraded by the algorithm.  

This has particularly piqued my interest, as it straddles both my professional life in human resources, where bringing consistency to performance assessment within one company, let alone one nation, is an unwinnable war, and science fiction.  I was even briefly a ministerial speechwriter during the Blair years focused on performance management in the teaching profession.

Teachers are brilliant at teaching.  If I say anything different, I'm liable to be chased by a mob and strung up from a lamppost ("The NHS is crap!  How could I possibly be making it worse?!").  But what teachers are not in a good position to judge is how their assessments compare nationally, let alone to the school down the road.  There needs to be some calibration, some standard setting, some way of adjusting for the schools who consistently over- or under-estimate.

Of course, the powers that be got the algorithm wrong.  I'm not about to defend how they did it, but it needed to be done.  Relying on teachers' assessments alone has had the effect of devaluing the nation's academic qualifications (pass rates at 16 have jumped from 70% to 79%; A-grade equivalents by a quarter), and completely shafting the higher education sector, who are obliged to take in everyone who successfully achieved the bar set for them, a bar set when pass rates were expected to be 'normal'.

I also sympathise with teachers.  If this happens again, would I want to know that little Johnny Flick-knife's grades are solely down to me rather than me being one of several arbiters in this?  Probably not.  We separate teachers and examiners for the same reason we separate out judges and juries.

But what fascinates me is how the country has reacted to the idea of an algorithm.  We may as well have called it Jimmy Saville.  And that's where the sci-fi comes in.  Because an algorithm is a sci-fi thing, a dark, malevolent, invisible force that can never mean good news.  It's Orwellian, Big Brother-y.  It's decisions being made about us, things being done to us, without us even being in the room.  It not just us not having a say, it's us not even being aware that we're being talked about.

But we shouldn't be scared of algorithms (and, if you are, you're gonna simply shit yourself inside out when you meet the T-1000-meets-Alien-meets-Freddy Krueger bitch that is the heuristic).  An algorithm is simply a set of rules.  If then.  That's all.  Yes, it can be used for ill, but it's a tool, and like any tool, you can use it to bang a nail into a wall or a nun into a coma (not sure why I grabbed hold of that image, but anyway).  

Heuristics save lives.  Take the Goldman Index.  It's an algorithm to decide on the small matter of whether you're dying.  Or you could get a doctor's opinion.  Put your money on the former if you want to maximise the chances of living.  Why?  Because doctors bring a whole lot of baggage that's inevitable with messy human thinking.  It's this messiness that we mistake for sophistication, that makes us believe that 'everything has been taken into consideration' and that can only be a good thing.  To quote Malcolm Gladwill's 'Blink', which is where I first read about it, “Extra information is more than useless; it’s harmful; it confuses the issues. What screws up doctors when they are trying to predict heart attacks is that they take too much information into account.”

You want another?  Heuristics are better at making trades on the markets than humans.  The linked article concludes, humans will be overseeing and validating what the machine is doing, but perhaps the lesson from the Goldman Index is that humans shouldn't have the right to veto if only the algorithm sees what truly matters and filters out the noise.  But would the masters of the universe allow that?  Aren't we humans made in the image of God?  We create the machines, so how could they be more powerful than us?  Go figure.

We need a bedding in period to accept the machines, even when screwed to the floor, even as equals - a deeply unsettling idea - which is what my Wall Street story 'The Thirteenth Floor' is about, published in Third Flatiron's 'Gotta Wear Eclipse Glasses'.  Go and support a small press by buying it.

And, when you've read that, here's another two dozen.

Twenty-four sci-fi, slipstream and new weird stories.

Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

Published by William Holly and available now on amazon.com, .co.uk, .de, .fr, .es, .it, .nl, .jp, .com.br, .ca, .mx, .au, and .in.  

Enjoy