Musings of a Wannabe Speculative Fiction Writer
Posts that have a speculative fiction angle (should be almost everything on the site)
The host of the radio show, Nuke, begins to read Nicole’s bio at about the 4 minute 30 second mark, and my narration begins at about 5 minutes 15 seconds.
I enjoyed the story and had a lot of fun recording it. My thanks to Ms Rendall, it is always a bit nerve wracking to try and do justice to someone else’s creative endeavour. Hope she isn’t disappointed!
The premise is that a small group of gay science fiction fans split off from their local club after a somewhat dramatic sounding confrontation (which happens off camera but apparently involved setting someone accidentally on fire, amongst other things). At the same time Max, who has missed the meeting to go on a date, is desperately trying to hide his science fiction shame from his date, Dylan.
Dylan comes up to Max’s apartment for coffee just as the ejected members of the club converge on it to have a showing of a rare 1960s show.
I normally take a few episodes to get into a show, but this was absolutely hilarious from the word go. Minor references to science fiction lore and trivia pepper the show. The characters are funny, the dialog smart and the acting excellent. I usually comment on TV shows in series blocks and I will write a better review once the series is finished, but I wanted to post on this show early on so that if anyone is reading and is a fan of science fiction, they start watching sooner rather than later.
For Australian readers, the first episode is currently up on iView. It airs at 8:30pm on Wednesday nights on ABC1, or 10:30 Thursday on ABC2.
There were two stories in this edition. The first was Heaven and Earth by Greg Mellor, which uses the connection between two star crossed lovers as a thread to hold together a story documenting the evolution of the human race into a digital, perfectly connected society. I found it hard to get into the story, picking it up and putting it down quite a few times. Some of the imagery was beautifully rendered though and it was an interesting investigation of the topic of this kind of evolutionary convergence.
Love Death by Andrew J McKiernan explores the impact on a relationship where one of the participants dies but necromancy is a real option. A solid story without being spectacular.
Along with the fiction there is an interesting interview with author Felicity Pulman and an editorial on the rise of self-publishing in an electronic market. Carissa’s Weblog provides a good round up of some of the more interesting articles around on the web in the area of Australian speculative fiction.
Aurealis are also actively seeking feedback on their issues, which I think is a good idea I don’t see many magazines doing. There is an online survey for those that have read issue #46.
Now, Aurealis is still free so you can’t really complain about the price. An excellent way of keeping across the Australian speculative scene. I notice the next edition has a story by Jason Nahrung, who is an author whose work I’ve enjoyed when I come across it (Anywhere But Earth anthology and the Terra Incognita Speculative Fiction website most recently).
A new serialised story was started in this edition, Triggers by Robert J. Sawyer. The premise is interesting enough – a chance event causes a set of people in a hospital to suddenly gain access to the ongoing memories of another person. One of the people impacted is the President of the United States. The story is competently executed, but as you’d imagine this first instalment is mostly set up. I’ll probably save making any review comments until the entire story is completed.
I enjoyed the style of Ninety Thousand Horses by Sean McMullen, with its steampunk sensibility and an interesting protagonist.
Project Herakles by Stephen Baxter is one of the novellas in this edition. It tells the story of an alternate history 1960s United Kingdom where a newspaper magnate orchestrates a coup. There are also slightly infeasible giants involved. Interesting premise and the writing is good, but I couldn’t seem to willingly suspend my disbelief on the giants for long enough to really get into the story.
Doctor Alien and the Spindles of Infinity by Rajnar Vajra was the other novella. I enjoyed the core story, but there were a couple of info dumping sections that I found a little distracting. Otherwise a reasonable read.
Both novellas were stories that followed on from previously published stories in Analog. Readers who have read the previous stories might get more from this issue.
Also in this month’s edition was:
Debris is the debut novel from Jo Anderton, a Sydney based author.
This story has an interesting premise – a world that has been built around a form of magic, the manipulation of tiny particles called pions. The resulting society is not your typical medieval high-fantasy arrangement, rather represents an alternative development path that has incorporated pions into technology to reach a more urban level of development. I’d almost classify it as having a steampunk sensibility, that mixture of cool “technology” that can do some fantastic things, but with a slightly old fashioned feel.
The main character, Tanyana, is one of the elite in this world, able to manipulate pions to an astonishing degree. She is an architect who, with a linked circle of nine assistants, is able to use pions to create buildings and monuments of astonishing scale and aesthetic. She is in the middle of creating her greatest work so far when something goes horribly wrong. From her perspective she is attacked by “angry” pions. From everyone else’s perspective she loses control. When she wakes up in the hospital she has lost her ability to see and manipulate pions, but can now see the debris that pion manipulation leaves behind. The hospital also bonds her to a silver metal substance that can morph to create a suit or crude weapons which she can use to collect the debris.
This immediately catapults her from the highest tiers of society to the lowest – the ability to see and collect debris is considered a necessary but “dirty” profession. The rest of the story documents her struggle to accept her new role amongst the have-nots and work out what happened to her.
Character development of Tanyana is strong with a realistic, if irritating at times, reaction to such a major fall from grace. The slow development makes some of the later revelations more powerful, even if you feel like yelling at Tanyana to snap out of it at times. The story focuses almost exclusively on Tanyana, so other characters are not as well developed but enough is sketched out for the purposes of the story and perhaps future novels.
The relationships Tanyana formed with those immediately around her were generally adequately developed as well, although I thought one of the more romantic relationships didn’t read as well as the others. It made the eventual resolution of that relationship have less of an emotional impact for me, but this is a minor quibble.
I found the world building interesting. Details of the world, its background and history, as well as information on how the magic works, were sketchy. I didn’t mind this – I enjoy books that fill in the background gradually as you go. If this was a stand alone book, I would have felt a little dissatisfied with the amount of detail provided by the end. As the first book in a series, I guess I’ll just need to buy the sequel to find out more!
The plot moved along at a reasonable, but not particularly fast, pace. There were a couple of points at which I did find myself thinking that Tanyana could spend a little less time moping and a little more time getting on with things, but that probably says more about me than the novel.
It should be noted that Ms Anderton has also released a free short prequel story to Debris on her website. It gives a taste of the events leading up to the start of Debris – you don’t need to have read it to enjoy Debris, but it does set the scene for what is to follow.
So, I enjoyed this novel and will be reading the next in the series, Suited, when it is released by Angry Robot later in the year. Nice writing, good core idea and a world that I am very curious to find out more about.
I also reviewed this book on Goodreads. View all my reviews.
This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.
A Book of Endings is a short story collection by Deborah Biancotti. I first came across Ms Biancotti’s work when I read Bad Power earlier in the year, which I liked very much. As a result I’ve been eager to get my hands on A Book of Endings.
So, already being predisposed to like Ms Biancotti’s work, I got about three quarters of the way through A Book of Endings and felt compelled to click the “become a fan of this author” button on Goodreads. I enjoyed the way that characters were described and developed (difficult in the shorter forms), I enjoyed the turn of phrase used and I found the settings and language to be atmospheric. It was a great reading experience.
That’s not to say that I necessarily “got” every story. There were quite a few times where I had to go back and give a story a second read (or at least read the last few paragraphs very carefully) to draw a conclusion about what I thought had happened. In the Afterword, Ms Biancotti talks about her stories being criticised for having an unsatisfying ending (hence the name). As I’ve reflected back over my reading experience of the collection, I realised that I’d spent a great deal of time over the last week or so musing over various stories, puzzling and teasing away at them at the back of my mind while I formed an opinion on what I thought they meant. That, to me, is not an unsatisfying pastime.
(Of course, in re-reading the previous paragraph I realise an alternative explanation for my inability to achieve immediate comprehension could be a lack of intellectual horsepower on my part. I choose to believe that the stories are designed to provoke thought and thus have a deliberate level of ambiguity. It helps me sleep at night).
Ms Biancotti speaks in the Afterword about the theme of work that runs through many of her stories – one’s sense of identity outside of work, balancing work with life, the terrible things that can be justified as just being part of a job. It was interesting to reconsider some of the stories in that light when preparing for this review. That kind of reflection is not something I would normally do when I finish a book – a benefit perhaps of taking the time to write up a review!
There are 21 stories in the collection. I’m not going to comment on them all or give away much by way of plot/storyline (not useful when describing a collection of short fiction), but I will make comment on a couple of examples that particularly struck me.
The collection opens with a couple of intriguing stories that start off in a seemingly normal world, and get progressively weirder. Diamond Shell and Number 3 Raw Place create the sense of a contemporary setting, then gradually created a steadily increasing sense of the disconnection for the characters using supernatural devices. Both stories had endings that fell into the “read twice” category for me.
Hush was an interesting take on future world where human minds are mashed in with animals. Once I started to read it I realised that I had come across Hush before in audio form on the Terra Incognita Speculative Fiction podcast. The ending of this story really stuck with me.
I enjoyed the structure of Pale Dark Soldier, with the form of the story matching the state of mind of the narrator. Well developed and very disturbing.
The stories in the middle section had a more dystopian feel – futures with energy and water shortages for example. A good example was Watertight Lies, which particularly caught my attention for its very enjoyable dialogue and was certainly one of the stories where the ending was easily understood, but was somewhat of a cliff hanger, leaving you wanting to find out more.
Six Suicides was another story where our found the structure very interesting – interconnected mini-stories which gave an experience somewhat akin to peeling an onion as layers of the story were revealed.
I really enjoyed The Tailor of Time and King of All and the Metal Sentinel. Both stories focused on creatures acting out a pre-programmed course (literally in one case). The stories providing interestingly contrasting treatments of the ability transcend the limitations of your job, and I think it was a good choice to have the two stories next to each other in the collection.
I found Stealing Free to just be a fun story – I liked the level of the absurd (I’ve never ever thought of a thieving Salamander as the hero of a story). The vast bulk of the stories in the collection deal with more serious themes, Stealing Free did a good job of providing some comic relief – a transient lowering of intensity which helped sustain the reading experience.
The Razor Salesman did an excellent job of building tension throughout the story with a surprising result at the end. I found it quite gripping.
Overall I found this to be an excellent collection, thought provoking and beautifully written. It has reinforced my hope of seeing more work by Ms Biancotti in the future – I would love to see what she would do with a longer work. Highly recommended.
I also reviewed this book on Goodreads. View all my reviews.
This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.
Above/Below is made up of two novellas – Above by Stephanie Campisi and Below by Ben Peek. The stories are based in the same world – a world where the inhabitants have split themselves into two main groups. The inhabitants of Loft have built cities that take to the skies and float amongst the clouds, while the inhabitants of Dirt remain on the surface of the planet. It is a fairly blatant have/have not scenario – the citizens of the various city-states of Loft are relatively wealthy and healthy, using lopsided trade agreements to get what little they need from Dirt. By comparison, the citizens of Dirt live in poverty and sickness, with everyone suffering from what seems like radiation and other pollution related sickness.
The catalysing event of both stories is the literal fall of one of the smaller flying city-states (Adur). Above is set in another of the flying city-states Liera, and is told from the point of view of Devian Lell (a “cleaner” who works outside the city cleaning it of pollutants – a very low status job with a high possibility of sickness – and former dissident who has a now waning passion for finding out more about Dirt). He is reluctantly assigned to Dhormi, an ambassador from Dirt come to discuss the ramifications of the fall of the city of Adur.
Very like the Upper Decks in Richard Harland’s Worldshaker young adult novel, the world of Loft was painted in a very unsympathetic manner. The vast bulk of the citizenry exploit Dirt for raw resources without much thought to the consequences. Ms Campisi chooses to tell the story from a very low status individual who already has significant doubts about the society he lives in. As such, while some of the descriptive imagery is beautifully rendered, you don’t really get to see how the bulk of Loftian society lives.
Devian is buffeted by events, as a result I found the Above storyline to be a little passive. The prose was excellent, the imagery vivid, the protagonist well developed and described – I just found myself not really caring as much as I wanted to about the outcome of the plot.
Below is set in Dirt and is told from the perspective of Eli Kurran, a security officer in Dirt assigned to the diplomat who visits Dirt in the aftermath of Adur crashing to the surface. Kurran has recently lost his wife to cancer and is reluctantly recalled to duty for this mission.
Inhabitants of Dirt are exposed to radiation and other pollutants from the womb, and as a result have a very limited lifespan. To extend it, they have “purifiers” surgically embedded around their twelfth birthday. These have the appearance of metal spikes sticking out of the body, which expel toxins from the bloodstream and dramatically life expectancy (from an average of 22 to 48 – still not great!). This one feature stuck with me and created a strong visual image of the citizens of Dirt. Due to this and the general setting, Below had a much more dystopian feel than Above.
I felt a much stronger connection with Kurran than with Devian. Kurran, while still buffeted by events, seemed to take some measure of control over them. The story seemed a little more strongly plot driven than Above, perhaps with slightly less background and character development. The action scenes were well written, and while both novellas did not resolve all of the overarching plot elements I did get more of a sense of closure from Below.
I read the eBook version of the book. In the original print version, the books are printed using the “tete-beche” format (like some of the old Ace Double books released in the US). Theoretically it doesn’t matter which order you read the novellas in. Of course, having picked one order you can never really go back and try the other way around in the same way, but I think that reading Above then Below is probably the best. The understanding of the world and the relationship between Loft and Dirt you gain in Above makes the Below story more impacting. I’m not sure that it would make as much difference the other way around.
So, in summary both excellent novellas. If you like character development better than I suspect you’ll prefer Above. If plot is more your thing, then I suspect you’ll drift towards Below. But either way, the combination makes for a very satisfying read.
I also reviewed this book on Goodreads. View all my reviews.
This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.
Along the speculative fiction spectrum, horror is probably my least visited corner of the continuum. However, The Last Days of Kali Yuga is about as far from splatter punk and evil killer clowns as you can probably get. While supernatural entities do abound, more often than not the stories are about those nastiest of monsters – people. The language is raw, visceral and genuinely disturbing. It was an excellent read.
First for some general comments. When I heard my first Paul Haines story (The Devil in Mr Pussy on the TISF podcast) I was genuinely impressed but hadn’t realised that Mr Haines was so widely admired in the antipodean speculative fiction scene. The introduction to the collection contains short discussions by a number of other authors and editors about their experience of knowing not just Paul Haines the author, but also Paul Haines the man. I found these descriptions to be interesting and in many ways moving, but they also put me in the right frame of mind to read the rest of the book by giving me a hint of what to expect (from a perspective of tone, not content). If, like me, you are relatively new to Mr Haines’ work I would recommend not skipping over this introduction – it did add to the reading experience.
After each story is a brief afterword by the author describing the circumstances of the story you’ve just read, as well as a description of the general reaction it received and some insight into Mr Haines’ creative process. As a (very) amateur writer, I found these afterwords fascinating although they were slightly depressing in that they highlighted just how clumsy my own process is.
There are twenty stories in the collection, all of them excellent. If I was to write something about every story you’d still be here tomorrow, so I’ll just highlight a couple of the stories I found particularly compelling.
The collection opens with Doorways for the Dispossessed, a story exploring the dangers of seemingly harmless spiritual exploration. It was one of many stories in the collection inspired by Mr Haines’ actual travels across Asia and India. The premise is simple enough – imagine “astral projection” was actually possible but left you vulnerable to unsavoury outside forces. But the writing is so visceral in charting the emotional descent of the narrator that the very dark ending is shocking but, on reflection, perfectly logical.
Burning from the Inside amused me greatly with the concept of the city of Adelaide as an anti-spiritual nexus to offset the likes of Byron Bay. (For any overseas readers – Adelaide the capital of a small Australian state, Byron Bay is where people had traditionally gone to drop out of mainstream society and live the surfing/hippie lifestyle – although it is so expensive now that you need to be a really rich hippy to live there). It would certainly explain a few things about the two years I lived in Adelaide. I should hasten to add that the story isn’t amusing – more dark horror – but my amused reaction to the characterisation of Adelaide persists.
Several of the stories show the shallow side of urban living in the early 21st century. Taniwha, Swim With Me is probably the most blatant example of this, dealing as it does with a corporate retreat (an example of possibly one of the most shallow of modern day activities). As well as being a great story, I was particularly interested in the use of New Zealand mythology, which I haven’t seen much of in speculative fiction.
Mr Haines writes from some very unsympathetic perspectives – and his tendency in some stories to use himself as the protagonist means that he would be more at risk of readers ascribing some of the less savoury motivations of his characters to himself. It added a lot to the stories – making them darker and more disturbing. Father, Father is an excellent example of this style of story.
It is probably fair to say that Mr Haines doesn’t have a problem with depicting highly sexual content. Her Gallant Needs is a good example of this, with a sexual predator at the heart of the story. Mr Haines does not shy away from uncomfortable content in this regard – with potential victims being quite young. Giving the 80s setting, I found myself vicariously reliving my own desire to own an Atari 2600 during that time. I particularly liked the end of this story – achieving an outcome and happily ever after don’t always go hand in hand.
Towards the end of the book is the novella Wives. By far the longest work in the collection, it does the most world building and character development. It paints a picture of a dystopian future Australia where declining fertility and a general preference for male offspring has meant that women are few and far between, especially in rural locations. The story charts the course of Jimbo based in the Victorian town of Shepparton and his attempts to gain (buy) a wife and family. The world is brutal and hints of the attempts by an organisation known as the Cartel to establish a new society using their control of the supply of women and technology as levers (amongst others). There is little to like about Jimbo, and the displays of misogyny and racism almost distressingly overt but yet utterly believable. It certainly didn’t paint a rosy picture of our ability to overcome future challenges. But despite the bleak feel to the story and the lack of sympathetic characters (at least the lack of sympathetic male characters), I found myself unable to put the book down and read the novella in one sitting. The writing was compelling and the world was richly structured. You wanted Jimbo to redeem himself. I couldn’t even begin to guess at the ending and the story kept me hooked, wanting to know what would happen in the end.
The very last story (The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt) was the only previously unpublished piece in the book. It had an almost autobiographical feel, describing a version of Paul Haines having a mid life crisis. The story was deliberately disjointed, and I found myself having to read it a bit more slowly and carefully to know what was going on. It has a very unreliable narrator and jumps between the present and the past unpredictably. But it is a story worth a careful read.
I’ve tried to pick a scattering of stories to give a sense of the collection, choosing stories that I thought were representative. The collection as a whole is excellent – I highly recommend it.
I also reviewed this book on Goodreads. View all my reviews.
This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.
At the same time all this is happening, the spirits of this world (the djombi or undying ones) have stripped one of their more powerful brethren of the power of chaos, and gifted that power to Paama. The main thread of the story chronicles the effort of the spirit to recover his power from Paama and Paama’s reaction to having the power of chaos at her command.
The style of the novel was interesting and it was a quick read, with the story moving along at a good pace. The writing is lovely, but I must admit I didn’t feel a great degree of connection with any of the characters, so I found myself admiring the book at an intellectual level, but not really caring about the outcome.
I don’t know anything about African folklore, so I found the exploration of the world of the djombi fascinating. The complex interactions between the various spirits that was hinted at through the book were tantalising, and I would have been very interested in hearing more about that side of the world.
I get the sense that there might have been more layers of meaning in the novel than I am giving it credit for. Certainly there was a strong sense of characters, both human and djombi, learning lessons, rehabilitating and reconciling. To be honest I’m not a huge fan of being beaten over the head with morality – fortunately the lessons were weaved into the story with enough skill that I wasn’t completely thrown out of the narrative. Still, the story was driven more by an exploration of characters than a strong plot. This tendency, combined with my lack of emotional connection with the characters, was enough to dampen my enthusiasm for the novel.
I read this novel as a result of it being the subject of one of my favourite podcasts, The Writer and the Critic, this month (January 2012).
I also reviewed this book on Goodreads. View all my reviews.
This work by Mark Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.
Details of this and my other publications can be found on my bibliography page. Don’t get too excited – the list is distressingly brief so far.