Chairman of the bored

I don't choose what to watch or read with a view to posting on this blog, but given I've set myself finding something to say twice a month, sometimes you sit down and think oh good, I'll definitely have something to say about this...

Which brings me on to Everything Everywhere All at Once.

That's winner of seven Oscars Everything Everywhere All at Once. The best written, best directed, indisputably best film of 2022, Everything Everywhere All at Once. You know, the one with three of the best four performances of 2022. Yes, that Everything Everywhere All at Once.

And... And... To be honest, I'm struggling.  Struggling to make sense of it, but not in a peeling back the layers of metatextual meaning sort of way, more in a poking its amorphous mass and wondering is-that-it sort of way.

Don't get me wrong: it's very well acted, and fits together amazingly, and the effects are what we've come to expect as the second quarter of the twenty-first century comes into view on the horizon: seamless and mesmerizing. But it has minimal story, and the continual balletic fight scenes were done way better in The Raid. Plus who the baddie turns out to be felt tonally clunky and made the whole thing cartoonish, so much so I could imagine this being a Jim Carey vehicle thirty years ago. In fact, is it a comedy with insufficient laughs?

Or is it the diverse casting that has everyone wetting their pants over this? Is that still a thing worth commenting on? We've had Oscar-winning Parasite and a Black president. Don't we all know that you don't have to be white or male or straight to be talented? Hasn't this all drifted into the world of 'so what'?

Which is what I've filed this under. Sorry.

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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.

Ring of Fire

...stop sniggering at the back - my story isn't about the morning after the phall before - and go and order one, using the code NR2023 to get 15% off.

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

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

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.

No, not a bear...

...perhaps something much worse.

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

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

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.

Why not seeing something coming is not necessarily a good thing

Contains spoilers.

Okay, so I'm about four months behind the curve - but isn't speculative fiction about the future meant to comment on the present, so why can't my blog post in the present comment on speculative fiction about the future from the past? - but I have a couple of things to say about the ending of the BBC/HBO adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.

I did read the books, oh, the best part of twenty years ago.  To be honest, so little of the latter half of the narrative has stuck with me, other than the faintly farcical image of animals on wheels, that I had no idea what was coming.  And little more of what just happened when it did.  Apparently, it was a fairly faithful telling.  I may go back and re-read them to see if I can make sense of them now.

The series tied many storylines up around Christmas and apparently left many fans distraught.  I think I fall more in the mildly irritated camp.  Not that the two young lovers weren't allowed to get together, but the manner of the insurmountable barriers in their way.

My issue revolves around foreshadowing.

Foreshadowing is not merely one of the basic tools of the writer, setting things up to be explained later in an emotionally or intellectually satisfying or elegant way, but also a kind of writers' law of thermodynamics.  Every action leads to an equal and opposite... you get the idea.

There's a bit of the former in my gripe, that not every storyline arced.  I would love to have seen what happened to James Cosmo, Anne-Marie Duff and the other Gyptians.  But maybe it's right that their lives and those of the leads intersected for a moment, and then went their separate ways.  That's life.  There's no breach of a fundamental law there.

But there is in introducing a new rule of the game just before the final whistle.  That we learnt in the final reel only one window between worlds could remain open was fine - we had seen the chaos and carnage caused by dust moving between worlds.  That's foreshadowing.  But the rule that nobody could remain safely in the world into which they were not born, hence Will and Lyra must separate forever... absolutely no ground work was laid for this, no sense of looking back at previously inexplicable symptoms or behaviour that could now be understood.  Just a witch's pronouncement and a lame, 'oh alright then'.  Which makes it nothing more than a thinking person's deus ex machina.  Sorry.  Not good enough.

Of course, given this was scripted by Jack Thorne who has a strong and deserved reputation for knowing what he's doing, it's entirely possible I missed all the clues and I've just made an arse of myself by writing this blog post.  But, looking back on the narrative, in this case, I think not.

I sympathise with those wanting Will and Lyra to have ended up together.  I think they are asking for some kind of cosmic benevolence.  I'm looking for something a tad more fundamental: cosmic order.

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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.

Nice

Well, this is nice, isn't it?  Always good to have your name on the cover, and a damn nice cover it is too.  Why not buy a copy so you can verify it's just as nice inside...  I will warn you, though: 'nice' is probably not the first word that springs to mind to describe The King of China's Mirror, my noir-horror time-traveling, alt history contribution.

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

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

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.

I've got mine - have you got yours?

Issue 158 of Aurealis, that is.  It's got my "Shakespearean subversion of the idea of the evil corporation" (their words, not mine), Thus With a Kiss I Die' and plenty more...

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Click on the images or search on Amazon.

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

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 chaos and riots, the screech of machines...

Almost three years ago, I wrote "At some point over the last couple of weeks I’ve stopped merely writing science fiction stories and started living in one."

Well, it's happened again, but this time we've been living in the opening salvoes of a sci-fi movie.  Uncle Sam was shooting down UFOs.  Literally, as in underline 'Unidentified', highlight it in pastel blue, then biro asterisks either side.

A craggy four-star general was sent out to tell the world, quite reasonably, that he wasn't ruling anything out about their origins thus allowing the possibility of a close encounter of the second kind.  This messaging fubar then had to be countered by a White House Press Secretary with five (movie) star good looks, who told us there had definitely been no casting calls for aliens.

And then?  Well, it's all gone very quiet.  Surely they've found the wreckage?

You know how this would go from here if it were Hollywood?  Everybody would be gripped to their screens, waiting for the next revelation.  They'd be putting their automatic weapons down in Ukraine, slack jawed.  An unshaven Italian would forget to shout at a female family member.  An Englishman would stir his tea... and never stop.  But, in reality, no...  Don't know about other parts of the world, but even with no confirmation of what they actually were, we went back to focussing on the usual smorgasbord of death and political cockwomblery.

The issue comes down to a lack of sonder.  Sonder: n. the realization that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.  As writers, we have a tendency to forget that everybody is a hero in their own story; in space opera, your cast of thousands do not simply exist to propel the protagonist's narrative forward.  They've all got their own to keep spinning.

There's a quote relating to the opening of World War II I've been trying to find - I have an idea it was George Orwell, but it was probably something far more quotidian, a voiceover on a documentary or a throwaway movie line - along the lines of "the country was on the brink of war, but people still read their newspapers from the back."  Black Country genii Pop Will Eat Itself once sang, "I have seen the future, and this is how it begins: in chaos and riots and the screech of machines".  How wrong they got it... the end will begin by us looking in the wrong direction.

Of course, as we all know deep down, the first act is being rounded off as I type, by the surviving alien occupant of the downed craft walking into a Denny's in one of those rectangular states where nobody's ever seen the ocean, to befriend a credulous child who does his best to hide his new BFF from the black suit and sunglass-wearing authorities...

Watch the skies.  You have been warned.

#

Click on the images or search on Amazon.

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

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.

Machine Learning Difficulties

Each morning, when I switch on my PC, I play a little game with myself...

Stop sniggering at the back...

No, nothing like that.  What I do, when my laptop powers up and that Microsoft Windows travelogue-porn image (what's the bon mot in geek-speak? wallpaper? background? I think it may be lock screen...) pops up pre-login, is try to work out where it is.

Obviously, natural features - coastline, mountains, flora, fauna - only tell you so much.  Yes, you can differentiate between temperate and tropical, but otherwise bits of South America look a lot like Africa or India or South East Asia.

No, what I prefer are pictures of man-made features, cityscapes, buildings, industrial architecture. Even the European countryside, with its distinctive field patterns, is distinctive from an American landscape.  And then I try to guess where it is.  Where have I seen houses like that before?  What side are they driving on?  Who has that signage?

This morning, I was presented with a picture of a railway bridge.  Judging by the semi-tropical flora, my first thought was 'Georgia', before deciding that there was no way on earth that the USA would allow so narrow and dangerous a structure - Christ, I can see the rails from below.

I revised my guess to Vietnam.  Turned out to be Georgia.  Apologies, Vietnam.  My sympathies, Georgia.

And it is on that basis and that basis alone that l ask for more of that sort of thing.  Or not.

One criterion.  That's all the algorithm has to cope with.  I've been doing this for a couple of years and Bill Gates still sends me pictures of rainforest.  Very pretty rainforest, I'll concede, but it doesn't fit my one and only, and not - let's face it - very hard to work out measure.

Which leads me to conclude that the robots won't be taking over anytime soon.  But also that we might want to look elsewhere for the cure to cancer and solution to climate change.  Just for everybody relying on technology to dig us out of the hole of our making.  Just saying...

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

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.

 

My face on your screen

There's a bloody enormous picture of my face on Shotgun Honey's website.  Quick, quick... follow the links so you can get away from my gurning phizog as fast as possible, or possibly just click here to take you to 'So Sue Me', my nasty little noir-ish flash and first published story of 2023...

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Click on the images or search for them on Amazon.

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

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.

End of Term Report #2

So, we pass the half way point with fifteen acceptances.  Here's the second half of the year:

July 11th: Strong Branch's 'Tales from the Radiator' podcast strand take Audit's Abacus, previously published by Daily Science Fiction.  This is the only story that I have ever had people come to me to republish - in that case, they had nothing to offer, but Strong Branch put a few dollars in the pot, so here it is again.  Another sale, another pint...

July 21st: Mark Bilsborough's Wyldflash accept The Naming of the 'Ark Royal', a previously unpublished flash involving a spaceship launched by a fictional British monarch who, oddly, must have found himself one place further up the queue between acceptance and publication in September.

July 31st: Dragon Gems accept The Credo of Comrade January, a previously unpublished, long for a short (10k) weird fiction story about parallel universes and the square root of minus one.  I make life difficult for myself, don't I?  No news on publication date.

August 7th: Spacemaid, a slightly dreamy, but previously unseen, flash gets into a car badged Factor Four and drives away.  It appears in Issue 15 in August.

September 12th: Eric Formley's Troopers slips an abridged version of military SF How Did They Get You? - originally featured in 2019 in James Gunn's Ad Astra - the King's shilling and it appears in late September.

October 1st: Shotgun Honey grab my unpublished noir flash, So Sue Me.  Scheduled publication date: 12th January 2023. 

October 18th: submitted back in March, B Cubed Press agree to reprint Charles Edward Tuckett’s Yuletide Message in their anthology, 'Holiday Leftovers'.  It first appeared on NewMyths.com and, later, on this blog.  It's out, and a physical copy is apparently on its way to me, fighting its way through the current wave of postal strikes.

November 15th: WolfSinger Publications come in for The Hazamesam Seance, a genre-flipping story that starts in 1950s rural Ireland and ends... well, not on this planet.  It's destined for their 'Ring of Fire' anthology.  It's another story that has racked up well over 50 submissions - in fact, I'm really not sure how many, it being one of my first stories, before I kept a strict record of submissions, a Theseus' Ship of a tale, initially a ghost story, then rewritten into sci-fi around ten years ago, and rewritten again recently with its second change of title.

December 28th: To end the year with a round two dozen acceptances, Don't Eat the Bundyroot will appear in 'Under the Stairs: An Anthology of Homebound Horror'.  I was in two minds whether to take them up on the offer, this being just a section of a 14,000 word novella that's done the rounds but which I now won't be able to submit again, at least as an unpublished novella - but markets dry up quickly at that length, plus if I didn't want them to take it, why send it?!  But the 'we love it' email does tend to crystalise one's thinking - maybe I was just sending it out to verify it was as good as I thought it was...

So, 424 submissions have garnered 24 acceptances - 17 of previously unpublished stories - and 373 rejections.  A bumper year, but one unlikely to be repeated as I'm simply not writing stories at an adequate replacement rate.  That said, I'm hopeful of at least the requisite three sales in 2023.  But only time will tell...

And no, I haven't finished that novel yet!

Happy New Year!

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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon.

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

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.