Trailers of the City #6

Since the ebook of Tales of the City is due out today, with the physical codices to follow in a week or two, it's time for the last in my occasional series of trailers for the anthology.The sixth and final full-length story is by Mr Dave Hoskin:

Dave Hoskin is a writer living in Melbourne. His fiction has appeared in Doctor Who – Short Trips: Transmissions, Bernice Summerfield: Something Changed, Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts, Midnight Echo and World's Collider. His non-fiction has appeared in The Big Issue, Metro, Australian Book Review and Overland. His favourite colour is jam, his favourite band is world peace, and his favourite pastime is closed for renovations. Currently he has no bruises, but several scars. Some of them are visible to passersby.

I first encountered Dave's work in Something Changed, to which I thought his contribution was outstanding. His name didn't stick with me, though, until 'iNtRUsioNs', his splendidly disturbing piece in Transmissions -- again, one of the best stories in a far stronger collection. His Faction Paradox story 'Tonton Macoute' (the story of the Faction's cook, a pragmatic gourmet who takes on the qualities of the entities he eats, up to and including things like gods) -- and in particular the follow-up drabble Dave contributed to 'A Hundred Words from a Civil War', in which the resurrected Macoute finishes his preparations for eating the City itself -- convinced me that he was an author I wanted to write a full-length City of the Saved story.

Dave's story in Tales of the City is a quieter, more personal affair: 'Bruises' is a police noir with a strange theological twist -- not an unfamiliar genre in City terms, but one which Dave accomplishes particularly effectively. It takes the City's cheerily utopian and pluralist ethos to some very dark places... which is just what's needed as the book approaches the epilogue, 'Apocalypse Day'.

It starts like this:

     She started by licking the bruise off my face.

To read the story, buy the Tales of the City ebook, or order the physical volume, from Obverse Books.

Trailers of the City #5

Here's the fifth and penultimate trailer for Tales of the City, the anthology of short stories I've edited set in the City of the Saved and due to be published by Obverse Books on (at last estimate) 1 June.

Dale Smith's biog, rather unexpectedly, says this:  

Dale Smith: I need you to kill a man, they said. Two hundred, I said, and how do I find him? There was some website – www.dalesmithonline.com – but the only thing you got from that was that he had already died, sometime before the invention of the broadband modem. But I found him. ‘I know how to live forever,’ he whispered as I stabbed him. Nothing personal, just work. But his name wouldn’t die. Dale Smith, Dale Smith, Dale Smith: he was everywhere. He was dead, and he wouldn’t die. That’s why I’m here. I need you to kill a man.

Dale's modesty covers the fact that he's the most distinguished contributor to the book, with two Doctor Who novels, a number of plays, some short stories (for Obverse and others) and the single best novella published under the Time Hunter banner under his belt. I've always admired his writing, which is intelligent, emotionally engaging and unafraid to take risks, with an interesting predilection for biotechnology. 

I knew as soon as I saw Dale's pitch for Tales of the City that I had to publish it: the central character alone was so perfect for the City setting that I was cross at not having thought of her myself. It's called 'About a Girl' and if I had to classify it by genre, I'd call it a cyberpunk horror rockumentary.  Here's the first sentence:

     They called themselves The Twenty-Seven.

That might be enough information for some of you to guess the story's starting-point, but you're unlikely to guess the rest. To read the story, order Tales of the City from Obverse Books.

Trailers of the City #4

Update: Tales of the City has been moved up to form the first volume of year 2 of the Obverse Quarterly, ahead of the David-Bowie-themed Iris Wildthyme collection Lady Stardust. This means both that the expected publication date is early next month, and that I need to get a move on with these teasers.

  So:

Helen Angove began her working life as an electrical engineer on the south coast of England, took a brief detour as a pricing analyst for an electricity supply company (which was as much fun as it sounds) and then veered off in a different direction altogether by becoming a priest in the Church of England. Now, however, she is living with her husband and two children in Southern California, and is against all the dictates of common sense exploring the possibility of writing as a viable career choice. She has known Philip Purser-Hallard for longer than either of them might care to remember, and holds him responsible for inculcating in her a long-lasting love of science fiction. Her love of Jane Austen, on the other hand, she developed entirely on her own, and the blame for deciding to combine the two can be laid at the feet of no one else.

As that biog implies, I've known Helen longer than any of the other contributors -- since our teens, in fact, so that as she says we influenced each other's tastes in reading rather early.  Her writing is thoughtful and evocative and humane, and -- as she remains shockingly unpublished prior to now -- I'm delighted to be able to include a sample of it in Tales of the City. 

Helen's story, 'Highbury', is a comedy of manners, albeit with a nasty twist.  (I've actually thought for ages that the City of the Saved was a perfect setting for such a story, to the extent that my very first City proposal opened at a Jane Austen tea party with cyborgs and neanderthals in attendance.) Here's the first sentence:

     A gentleman should be allowed to consider a library a place of refuge: a room where he can have the reasonable expectation of temporary retreat from the distractions of domestic life and the interruptions of the fairer sex.

To read the rest of the story, order Tales of the City from Obverse Books.

Trailers of the City #3

This is the third trailer for the forthcoming short-story anthology Tales of the City, set in the City of the Saved and available for pre-order from Obverse Books. Here's the biog of Juliet Kemp, the author of the third story in the book:

Juliet Kemp lives in London and writes things down a lot. She has had previous stories published in the anthology Hellebore and Rue and in Eclectic Flash. She has a website at http://julietkemp.com where she talks about plants, building things out of pallets, and anything else that catches her interest.

I've known Juliet for some years now, and have been impressed by the quality of the fiction of hers I've read. Two of her stories, 'Things Found on a Beach' and 'Falling after Icarus', are available to read online (you can even buy the latter for the Kindle), so you can judge for yourself as well. (Juliet also writes articles and technical manuals for computer programmers, which I admit I haven't attempted to read.)

Her Tales of the City story, 'Lost Ships and Lost Lands', is a traveller's tale, a shipboard adventure with a twist, taking place in a District of the City unlike any we've seen before. The first sentence goes like this:

     The train rattled away and back out of Cerulean District, leaving Brianna alone on the open platform.

(You may spot a minor continuity issue here with Of the City of the Saved..., which I've taken the bold editorial step of ignoring completely.) 

To read the rest of the story, order Tales of the City from Obverse Books.

[NB: The splendid new City of the Saved logo is by Obverse's equally splendid in-house graphic designer, Cody Quijano-Schell, and will be appearing on my website shortly.]

Trailers of the City #2

Second in an occasional series publicising the forthcoming Tales of the City anthology -- although yes, I have to admit I haven't posted anything here since the last one.

Elizabeth Evershed is a freelance writer based in London. Since graduating from Durham University in 2009 with a PhD in late medieval and early Renaissance literature, she has worked in various capacities as a tutor and researcher, proofreader and copy-editor, and freelance consultant on plain English in the public sector. She is a regular contributor to Literature Online, where she has written critical biographies of a wide range of science fiction and fantasy authors from JRR Tolkien to China Miéville. The world of the City has provided her with a rare opportunity to combine science fiction, quasi-historical and campus fiction in ‘The Socratic Problem’, as well as have some fun sending up famous philosophers. Elizabeth writes comic literary fiction in her spare time and has just completed her first novel.

I've known Liz for a while: she was one of the founder members of a writers' group called Subway to which I belonged in the early noughties. (The group produced an anthology, Emerge, which included 'Scapegoat', my second published piece of fiction.)

Though Subway was a product of the internet era, we occasionally met in person for readings, workshops and social events, and I knew from these that Liz was a gifted, witty and highly intelligent writer. When pondering which authors I might bring in as contributors from outside Obverse Books' usual talent pool, Liz was one of those at the top of my list. I was delighted when she said yes, and I very much hope it won't be the last work she does for Obverse.

'The Socratic Problem' is, as I expected, a very clever and funny piece. It's a campus story, dealing with academic rivalries and clashes of ideas as the City's University of the Seven Ages appoints a historical celebrity as its Visiting Lecturer. Here's the first sentence:

     No doubt about it: Inigo Faber was having a dog of an afterlife, and, as dog days went, this was an uncommonly hairy one.

To read the rest of the story, order Tales of the City from Obverse Books.

Trailers of the City #1

Here's what Blair Bidmead, whose Happily Ever After is a High-Risk Strategy opens Tales of the City, has to say in his author biog:

Blair Bidmead, author of 'Happily Ever After Is a High-Risk Strategy', has had three short stories published previously – 'Party Kill Accelerator!' (in The Panda Book Of Horror), 'Now Or Thereabouts' (in Faction Paradox: A Romance In Twelve Parts) and 'Are You Loathsome Tonight?' (in Señor 105 & the Elements of Danger). He has a novel on the go, another in mind and a webcomic in his not-too-distant future. A musician, an artist and a (semi-) retired hedonist, Blair lives in London with his wife and two young children and is tired, but sickeningly happy. He thinks that talking in the third person only feels right when the Rock does it.

Blair was an unpublished author a few years ago, but his three published stories have been excellent, and are getting better. I'm particularly fond of 'Are You Loathesome Tonight' -- a smackdown between a Mexican masked wrestler and a dinosaur version of Elvis, taking place in 1970 Las Vegas and with a narrator who may well be Hunter S. Thompson -- which manages to be even madder than that brief synopsis makes it sound.

What really sold me, though, on the idea of getting Blair to write a City of the Saved story was his guest drabble in 'A Hundred Words from a Civil War', which convinced me in the space of 100 words that he understood and loved the City as a setting. (It's drabble number XXX, on p209 of the print edition of A Romance in Twelve Parts.)

A mix of not-necessarily-obvious genres was one thing I was keen to see in Tales of the City, and Blair's is a road trip story, with a hitchhiker cadging a lift with a surprising pair of travelling companions. Here's the first sentence of 'Happily Ever After is a High-Risk Strategy':

     So there I was; dawn at the truck stop by the ziggurat at the mouth of the Mesopotamian Interstate.

To read the rest of the story, order Tales of the City from Obverse Books.