Hyde Bound

I've updated my website today, with the blurb for Tales of the City, which currently looks like this:

After the end – ours and the universe’s – there is the City of the Saved. A repository for the uploaded souls of all humanity, the City is a technological utopia, a secular heaven. Heroes and villains, angels and monsters may be found in the City, but many ordinary people live here, too.

Well, all of them in fact.

In these stories, the first by writers other than the City’s creator Philip Purser-Hallard, we meet six of them. A hitchhiker, a lecturer, a tourist, a socialite, a twin, a cop: ordinary men and women living an extraordinary afterlife.

These are their tales.

(Sadly it now looks as if 1 June was an optimistic publication date, and the actual release of  Tales of the City is likely to be closer to the end of the month.) 

The updates make liberal use of the new City of the Saved logo, as designed by Cody:

I've also uploaded a bunch of recent microfiction from my Twitter account, @trapphic, including some new additions to my sequence of Victorian literature mashups, which I'd thought were pretty much played out:

‘Miss Havisham was an amateur. Henry Higgins, a dilettante. To make someone a real lady,’ the Baron avers, ‘you must start with the basics.’

* * *

‘You!’ gasped Edward Hyde, cringing. ‘But – how?’ ‘We have our friend to thank for that,’ noted Henry Jekyll, nodding at the Time-Traveller.

I've been busy with multiple other things as well, including a brief introduction for Obverse Books' forthcoming Faction Paradox titles, a draft of a short story (slightly longer than 'A Hundred Words from a Civil War', though not as long as 'Minions of the Moon'), an imminent change of day-job and a small child with chicken-pox. Some of these have been more enjoyable than others.

Desultory update

I've spent most of today writing this year's Christmas card story (see here for past examples -- I'll be posting last year's closer to Christmas itself). I keep ending up writing these at the last minute, which is annoying -- I keep noticing all the stuff that's wrong with them when I go back to look at them later.

Anyway, this one is the longest of these stories I've written to date, at a little over 2,000 words. It features a character from The Vampire Curse, and unless you're on my Christmas card list you won't get to see it till next year. Sorry about that.

In other news... I'm told that the audiobook version of my novella Peculiar Lives, read by John Leeson, is finally now available from Fantom Films. Various unforeseen delays have made it a long wait, but I'm very much looking forward to seeing what the voice of K-9 makes of the voice of Erik Clevedon.

And if you're not following @trapphic on Twitter, you may want to peruse the fresh microfiction I've uploaded to my website, along with that drabble from the other day. I think the latest one is actually my favourite:

A year in Faerie lasts a century on Earth – or in a hollowed asteroid in sublight flight. Fairy rings are cheaper than cryogenic suspension.

A Bunch of Five Four

1. Today I'm trying to finish my working synopsis for the prospective novel I was calling The Arrow and the Circle, and have now renamed (under what may be the too obvious influence of Christopher Priest) The Devices. Once I know what the shape the plot takes, writing a 120,000-or-so-word novel in which it all happens should be, er, simplicity itself.

This clearly calls for diligent application and undivided concentration on my part. Hence this blog post.

2. I've managed to keep @trapphic, my Twitter account for microfiction, going at a steady rate since reviving it for the New Year. For those who can't be bothered to join Twitter (and you're not missing a huge amount, unless you're the kind of person who's desperate to be informed whenever Stephen Fry scratches his right ear), I've appended more stories to the already lengthy back-catalogue on my website. I'm quite pleased with some of them -- the Quaestor's tale[1] in particular is one I'd like to revisit at greater length.

Being an enormous narcissist, I'm always interested to see (either from comments on Twitter itself or, more commonly, after reproducing the stories on Facebook) which of the stories receive most approval from readers. Some of the ones I've been most pleased with turn out to be overly complicated, the way they hang together neatly in my head failing to reproduce itself in anybody else's. (This failure is, naturally, mine entirely as the person trying to communicate the ideas in question.) I was, for instance, much more impressed with my own account of an alternative history of Vikings and Egyptians on Mars, recounted in Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, than anybody else seems to have been[2], while what I thought was a throwaway metafictional joke turned out to be the most popular story I've posted yet[3].

3. A couple of weekends ago B., R. and I made the trip to London, to attend both a friend's birthday party and the British Museum's Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler exhibition, which closed last Sunday. We'd been intending to visit the latter back in December, but the difficulties of reliably transporting a baby 100 miles in a car intervened. This time, through careful booking of advance train tickets and two nights in a rather good hotel, the whole enterprise became substantially more feasible.

The exhibition was impressive, although limited by the failure of many Mexica artifacts to survive the Spanish Conquista. The sophistication and variety of what was on display was a strong reminder of the complexity of the Aztec civilisation and its occupied territories, as well as of the relativity of human cultural values. Despite their ability to make a simple carving of a bunny rabbit look terrifying, there was evidently nothing special about the Mexica that was "savage", "primitive" or "inhuman". And yet they built a culture around ripping the hearts out of living victims in numbers that ran into at least the hundreds of thousands. It's a conundrum which is difficult to get one's head around (and has produced two extremely good, though very different, Doctor Who stories). The exhibition naturally offered no glib answers, but seeing items which were routinely used by the people in question helped to make the abstract question considerably more concrete.

I was amused by the exhibition's use of the term "deity impersonator", which made what I assume was a fairly straightforward sacramental role sound like an exotic drag act.

(The party was also lovely, and R. extremely popular at it -- although we had of course to leave for our hotel bed, and his cot, relatively early. We also managed to meet up with one of his godfathers on the morning of the Sunday, which was nice.)

4. In "Prose I Didn't Write" news, I've recently managed to finish two more books: The Corner by David Simon and Edward Burns, and Transition by Iain "Look, no M!" Banks. I want to say more about both of them soon, but... well, I really ought to be getting on with writing that thing of my own. I'm now reading The Panda Book of Horror, Obverse Books' follow-up to last year's Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus which I bored you all about at the time.

5. [Edit: See separate post above.]

STORY NOTES:
[1] Within the reservation my badge meant nothing. The tribal authorities ran the show. ‘You’re on Catuvellauni land now, Quaestor,’ I muttered.

[2] Our sky-craft’s snake-prow glints proudly / As we stand sturdy on Tiw’s red world. / Bronze bowmen hail us, bragging of Horus. / We fight...

[3] ‘Once I’d had the idea, the book wrote itself. After our creative differences and arguments about royalties, it erased itself out of spite.’

Yeah, well,

right. The unexpected resurgence of a previously moribund writing commission FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE means I probably won't have very much time to blog for the next couple of months. Erm, again.

I know I've been saying that sort of thing rather a lot recently. I wish I were able to keep this blog updated as frequently as I used to a couple of years ago, but what with imminent procreation and a paying job, I hardly ever find myself with the time. (It's not just you either, dear reader -- I've also turned down a couple of offers of paid writing work this year. Hey ho.)

I'm still just about managing to keep up with the microfiction on Twitter, although I think my previous daily posting rate is overly ambitious. If you're not able to follow on Twitter or Facebook, the latest (decent) stuff is available, as usual, here. I quite like this six-word one:

Decimate: one tenth of a friend.

Meanwhile... Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus is due out this very Wednesday, and you can still pre-order copies from Obverse Books. My polymathic fellow author Cody Schell is producing promotional artwork for various stories in the book, and he's already released a poster for my short story, "Battleship Anathema", which you can see on my website. Cody's poster for Paul Magrs's "The Dreadful Flap" is up on the Obverse Books site, and I've also seen the one he's done for his own story, "Iris Wildthyme y Señor Cientocinco contra Los Monstruos del Fiesta", which is equally fab.

So far my story is the only one I've seen, and I'm very much looking forward to reading the others. I'll be banging on about this more once it's released, I shouldn't wonder.

Argh, I have to go right now. I'll try to update again soon.

Books Update: Mars to Magrs

Lord, I'm being useless at the moment. Keeping the twittering classes entertained with daily microfiction isn't helping me keep up, either with the personal writing projects I'm working on or with this blog. Speaking of which...

Here lies Billy Joel Underton (1984-2011, 1947-1981) with his beloved wife Deborah (1925-2010). This monument erected by his son and father.

This one may be slightly more obscure than I intended (Was Billy Joel named after the popular entertainer or after his "grandfather"? Was there an original Mr Underton whom he replaced?), but I like it anyway.

Still. I've wittered enough recently about the fiction I've written -- it's time to give other people's work a turn. Here's a roundup of what I can remember reading over the past -- blimey, about three months now.

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, I said I'd come back to this one. I've blogged quite a bit about the experience of ploughing through the trilogy over the course of more than half a year, and I haven't really the heart to give the experience the dissection it deserves now. Suffice it to say that this colossal triptych defines and delineates Mars as a human society, with plausible political, social and religious movements -- and original developments in philosophy, morality and even physics -- which initially are merely transplanted to, but later respond to and eventually arise from the planet's stunningly evoked landscape, the whole amounting to a complex, monolithic yet realistically textured history of a kind which SF has rarely, if ever, managed to convey. It's a towering achievement.

And yet... it could have been done, quite honestly, in half the length or less. It's true that the sheer time it takes to read assists in giving a sense of the characters' own epic struggle with history, culminating finally in the long-sought Martian utopia of their dreams. But sheer length isn't the only technique that could have achieved that, and frankly there are others that would have been kinder to the reader. Robinson states upfront that he's put 17 years of research into these books, and he's keen to give us the benefit of his prior thinking in every area from geomorphology, astrophysics, mathematics, etymology, ecology, cerealogy, economics, social history, politics, anthropology, comparative religion, nuclear fusion, psychoanalysis, hydrology, alchemy, soil biology, oceanography, metallurgy, chemistry and botany, to sailing and kite design. It's utterly exhausting.

My other quarrel with the trilogy is that many of the original protagonists survive well into their 230s, simply so that we can have a consistent viewpoint on the progressive development of Martian history. The "longevity treatment" is a separate novum that has nothing directly to do with colonising Mars, it adds a spurious extra malthusian pressure which the future doesn't honestly need, and -- given that some of the political clashes are intergenerational -- it absurdly obliges us to accept characters in their 80s or 100s as bold young rebels. It also limits the organic development of new points of view which would have helped keep the whole thing fresh: as it was, my favourite section of Blue Mars wasn't even set on the planet, being the section where the Martian great-granddaughter of the first astronaut on Mars visits Mercury, Earth and Miranda.

Werewolves in Their Youth by Michael Chabon: Chabon's a brilliant writer, but I didn't feel his imagination had the room to unfurl itself in these short stories. Though told from various points of view and with some clever variants, these are all essentially portraits of middle-class American marriages in collapse. They're well-written and fun -- except when Chabon strays into the area of US sports, making no concessions to the ignorant reader and becoming completely impenetrable -- but basically inconsequential. The one exception is the final story, "In the Black Mill", an exuberant and loving Lovecraft parody attributed to the nonexistent pulp author August Van Zorn, which nonetheless manages -- if I'm reading it correctly -- to implicate the unthinking antisemitism of Lovecraft and some of his pulp-writing peers in the attitudes which led to the Holocaust.

The Casebook of Carnacki - Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson: I could, if I had the space and time, say almost as much about these nine brief vignettes as about Robinson's Mars books. Stories of an Edwardian ghost-hunter whose scientific approach means he explains away as many supernatural phenomena as he endorses, these always leave you guessing as to exactly where they're going, and are at times genuinely very creepy. There's a weird cinematic feel to them, as if Hodgson was writing with a medium in mind which scarcely existed -- I'd love to see a Carnacki feature film combining elements of, say, "The Haunted Jarvee", "The Horse of the Invisible" and "The Hog". These stories are relatively neglected -- certainly compared with Lovecraft's -- but well worth seeking out.

Top Ten: Beyond the Farthest Precinct by Paul Di Filippo and Jerry Ordway: Hmm. Alan Moore's original Top Ten series, together with its 1940s prequel The Forty-Niners, are scintillatingly-plotted, clever, entertaining police procedurals set in a city where everybody's a superhero. Having apparently lost interest in the series Moore has farmed it out to others, in this first instance SF writer Di Filippo.

Sadly, despite a few clever jokes, he has none of Moore's deftness of touch, and it's painful to watch his diminution of the characters. The cybernetic-American Joe Pi, who in Moore's comics deliberately talks like a cliched sci-fi robot largely in order to freak people out, now apparently just talks like that; while the religious police characters, whose respective christianity and satanism were formerly just single facets of rounded believable personalities, now rant about "infidels" and "blasphemy" exactly like every other religious character written by a lazy atheist. There's even an utterly gratuitous appearance by Jesus in a Superman costume, which makes no sense on any level except pointing and laughing at what a crap god Jesus is.

These points are especially galling since Di Filippo's idea of continuing Moore's eclectic aesthetic is to steal his villain wholesale from Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, a novel deeply informed by Dick's sincere, if highly eccentric, interest in christianity. (Di Filippo makes no effort to disguise his source here, even referring to his steel-eyed demiurge as "the Hell Ditch Pilgrim".) This follow-up is a disappointment; I'm hoping other writers will do better with the property.

Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross: I spoiled myself, I think, by making the inventive Accelerando my introduction to Stross's work. This, an earlier novel, is certainly better than Singularity Sky which it sequels, but still nothing more special than a generic post-cyberpunk space opera. Stross inhabits the safe genre-SF niche like a jigsaw piece, with no apparent wish to stretch his pseudopodia a micrometre beyond its confines. I'm not sure I'll bother with any more Stross, except perhaps Accelerando's sequel Glasshouse.

The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod: Another police procedural with religious characters, but this time written with a conviction and sympathy that's rare in an author who doesn't share their beliefs. This is a fascinating counterpoint to MacLeod's earlier near-future thriller The Execution Channel, whose tagline read: "The war on terror is over. Terror won." In this second future, terror lost, and the major world powers have enacted strict laws enforcing secularism in public life, defining religion as a private matter which official bodies are forbidden even to recognise. MacLeod doesn't shy away from the repression which was entailed in creating the resultant secular utopia, but as presented it's one I'd cheerfully live in. Of course there are religious individuals who disagree, and it's their attempts to bring others round to their way of thinking that drive the plot.

The Night Sessions is several very clever things, including a philosophical meditation on the relationship between faith and power, and a convincing portrayal of nuts-and-bolts police work in an information-rich post-cyberpunk future. (It also steers refreshingly clear, for MacLeod, of the topic of the inevitability of the revolution of the proletariat.) It doesn't entirely satisfy as a story, something that's true of a number of MacLeod's novels, but it's well worth reading for the world it portrays.

Conjugal Rites by Paul Magrs: The third in Magrs's "Brenda and Effie" sequence, about the Bride of Frankenstein trying to keep her Whitby B&B running smoothly whilst getting embroiled in various multitextual crossover adventures, reads as usual like the bastard love-child of Buffy Summers and Alan Bennett. For important plot reasons this one's told in the third person, and I missed being addressed by Brenda's voice, but it's still an awful lot of fun. This one sees Brenda the Bride, Effie the witch and former girlfriend of the sinister Count Alucard, and ageing child-bride Shiela Manchu meeting up with their various departed loved ones during a day trip to Hell. It's fab.

Since that lot, I've started on The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. It's entertaining enough, but I'm waiting for the bit where it stops being a knowingly postmodern rewrite of Michael Marshall Smith, and starts justifying the critical hype that's splattered all over the cover.

And that's all the literature.

140 Characters in Search of an Author

During an idle moment in Tuesday's lunch hour I created a second Twitter account, cleverly named "trapphic ", as a conduit for the 140-character microfictions I've been posting there occasionally. By 2:30 it had been picked up and recommended by Dave Gorman (the famous one, that is), and by the time I left work it had over 100 readers.

(The presence of celebrities in Twitter is strange and confusing, partly because of the possibility of sudden unexpected celebrity endorsements, but also because I haven't a clue who many of them are meant to be. I'm lucky Dave Gorman was someone I'd heard of, really, or I'd have been completely mystified)

The uptake rate has died down a bit since -- it's currently at 122 -- but I'm feeling the pressure to keep them entertained.

Rather than treating the 140-character limit imposed on tweets as a maximum, I've been pretending it's an absolute, and working precisely to that length. The resulting form is an odd one, because it often means exchanging a word or phrase that works perfectly for a slightly less sparkling one which fits the count. (Of course it's possible to fudge this to some extent by fiddling with the punctuation. Names are also useful, because you can always change them if they're a few letters too long or short.) Occasionally, though, the space will unexpectedly open up for an additional adjective (say) which finishes the whole thing off perfectly. It all tends to confirm the Oulipian principle of creative inspiration through willingly accepted constraints.

Being a perfectionist tinkerer, I'm finding the impossibility of going back and editing my tweets frustrating. It's all useful discipline, though.

More generally, it strikes me that the very short story, rather than being the haiku of the prose world, is rather like a cartoon caption without a picture. The trick is to give just enough information that the reader constructs their own mental image, thus completing the story. My favourite of the ones I've posted so far runs:

‘It’s true,’ Alice conceded. ‘I can climb from a room into its mirror image. But however would my ability be useful to this Dr Van Helsing?’

This requires the reader, having recognised this as an Alice in Wonderland / Dracula crossover, to follow through on the logic and complete the story. The actual punchline lies in the answer to Alice's question, some distance beyond the words themselves.

In a rather delayed response to my sudden following, I've updated my website with a shiny new microfiction page, and a fresher, cleaner design for the front page and some of its subsidiaries. (Aside from the rotating quotes at the top, the design isn't substantially changed from the six-year-old version, but the fonts and colours look a bit more modern. Well, I hope.) The whole site still needs a comprehensive overhaul, but I'm unlikely to manage that any time soon.

I wanted to put a feed from trapphic in here as well, but it doesn't seem as if Blogger allows the existence of more than one Twitter feed on a page (or if it does I'm too dense to work out how to juggle the code). Since this is, when all's said and done, a blog, I've kept the feed from the purserhallard account and included a trapphic feed on the microfiction page. I may fiddle with the template on the right there to link to that.

Twittishness

I finally succumbed to peer pressure and adopted Twitter a little over a month ago. (And yes, if all my friends jumped off a cliff I'd probably do it too. I'd miss them.)

Since then I seem to have posted there 83 times (84 including one I removed, which ill-advisedly commented on... ah, er, never mind). Assuming the code I cutandpasted has done its job properly, you should be able to view a selection of my recent wisdom imparted through the Twitter medium in the sidebar over to your right. (No, about a screenful from the top. That's right, there.)

[Edit to add: Oh, hang on -- not if you're reading the page for this individual post rather than the Peculiar Times homepage. Which you will be, if you followed my link from Twitter. Try here.]

I'm not going to start tediously repeating what others have said about the differences between Twittering and blogging -- suffice it to say that it is a different, and still reasonably novel, way to organise one's thoughts which is a lot more reactive and context-based. When it's used properly it can also help those stray ideas which wander across one's mind avoid becoming irretrievably lost in the spongy crenellations of undergrowth.

It's also a pretty good way to keep in touch with anyone else who spends most of the day parked in front of a screen, without it interfering too much with one's work. It's also handy for breaking news (although note the inevitable date on that article), and... oh, all sorts of stuff. At its best it's a little like being immersed in a direct-brain-fed gestalt stream-of-consciousness of the kind I imagine our grandchildren participating in almost constantly while they're awake. Provided such a thing supplements individuality (blogging in this restricted instance) rather than completely subsuming it, it has its interest and value.

Admittedly I'm making an effort to follow contentful stuff like daily crossword clues, microfiction and even microbiography rather than all the celebrity cigarette-break guff. (It's true that celebrities can occasionally be spontaneous and interesting -- but their interesting moments tend not to be spontaneous, and the converse applies.) I'm also trying hard not to be tugged into the tweeness of the jargon (whereby "tweeness", for instance, would have to mean the Twitter equivalent of a penis, because it begins with "tw" and rhymes).

...OK, so perhaps I am going to tediously repeat what others have said about the differences between Twittering and blogging. Sorry about that.

Anyway. Some of the stuff you've missed (assuming you're not reading them already on Twitter or Facebook) follows. There's probably a high-tech way to reveal them here, but I'm going to stick with what I know and cutandpaste them instead.

Microfiction (140 characters, to fit the post limit perfectly, seems to be the preferred form):

purserhallard To cheat death, Dr Ebbinghaus slowed time to an asymptotic standstill. Nobody experienced anything ever again, but at least they were alive.
11:29 AM Mar 27th from web

purserhallard Celebrity Exorcism: St Patrick vs Glycon! #sixwordstory
12:42 PM Mar 17th from web

purserhallard Diurnal amnesia is common in incipient lycanthropy. Some women learn of the condition only when an ultrasound scan reveals a litter of cubs.
10:19 AM Mar 17th from web

purserhallard "Eternal life, somatic control – they needed to rebel somehow. Odd though, the young hobbling down the streets, wrinkled and silver-haired."
9:00 AM Mar 16th from web

A handful of random pieces of what one might charitably call microcriticism:

purserhallard Actually: everyone, I love The Wire. Its humanity, empathy and rage at an obscene world make it everything The Sopranos should be and isn't.
6:51 AM Apr 1st from web

purserhallard ponders the eschatology of Desperate Housewives.
10:22 AM Mar 21st from web

purserhallard Modern art, n. Term used by lazy, unoriginal people as a byword for laziness and lack of originality.
9:53 PM Mar 19th from web

purserhallard thinks Carnacki the Ghost-Finder is more like Bagpuss than Scooby Doo. When he goes to sleep, all his friends go to sleep too.
10:30 AM Mar 5th from web

Puns:

purserhallard resists the temptation to add "Abraham van Hesling" and "Buffy Summers" to the list of stakeholders.
11:41 AM Mar 23rd from web

purserhallard Tachycardia, n. Medical term for overexposure to Hallmark products.
9:30 AM Mar 9th from web

And a crossword clue:

purserhallard , in self-directed anger, betrays fellow agent with steel (8).
5:56 PM Mar 31st from web

Most of those are the kind of random rubbish I wouldn't dream of posting here -- which makes Twitter, where the scrutiny's less intense, the ideal repository for them.

Triptych of Stuff

1. S.F. authors -- the unacknowledged legislators of the world. (Thanks to Geoff Wessel for the link.)

My favourite paragraph:

Instead the writers used their time to pontificate on a variety of tangentially related topics, including their past roles advising the government, predictions in their stories that have come to pass, the demise of the paperback book market, and low-cost launch into space.

The neocon ranting is somewhat less funny, admittedly, though more or less what I'd have expected from this particular clique of hard-S.F. practitioners. What the article doesn't mention is that Niven and Pournelle have been itching for a shot at statesmanship for a while now: their 1985 novel Footfall has a pair of strangely familiar S.F. writers advising the U.S. government during an alien invasion.

I'd pay good money to see a U.K. equivalent of this group, with the likes of Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod explaining to Gordon Brown why technology makes the revolution of the proletariat inevitable, and why he might as well hand over power to the people now.

2. For various reasons relating to small publishers and the extreme commercial pressures they face, most of the writing contracts I've had have involved flat fees -- I deliver the manuscript, I get paid, then the publisher takes it and sells it as best they can without having to worry about any further outgoings in my direction. There's one exception, who I won't name for obvious reasons of confidentiality, and they sent me my first genuine actual royalty cheque last week.

Hurrah for royalties! B. and I were so excited that we went out and blew the entire £21.72 on a modest pub lunch. Rock and roll!

3. If you're on Facebook, you may have been reading the products of the Six Word Stories writing group. If you aren't or haven't, then you'll be momentarily distracted to know that I'm the runner-up in their fortnightly writing contest with a werewolf story:

"You teach, like, anthropology?"
"No -- lycanthropology."

Yay me.