Showing posts with label vampires. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vampires. Show all posts

28 January 2012

Books Update (part 94)

With my novel in the hands of various friends awaiting their (hopefully critical) feedback, and the bulk of the stories for Tales of the City not due until Tuesday, I find myself quite unusually at something of a loose end on a writing day. This has led me to notice that it's been over six months now since I last posted any kind of book review here.

This is shocking, really, because I've certainly been reading stuff, and not just heavily illustrated books about fire engines either.

All the more so recently, in fact, because I got a Kindle for my birthday. It turns out many of the habits I've picked up over years of reading paper books don't transfer to electronic devices, so that it's actually much quicker for me to read the same amount of text on a screen than it would be bound between two covers. (This despite the fact that a Kindle display is black-on-white, unbacklit and -- apart from the technological framing device -- pretty much indistinguishable from reading something on the page anyway.)

Reviewing everything in depth that I've read in the past six months (even if I could remember all of it, which I suspect I can't) would take a terribly long time, and probably be boring to read. So I'll give a few one-paragraph reviews of the more interesting stuff, and then head into Twitteresque one-liner territory for brief responses to the others.

(NB: All links in this post are to paperback editions of the books in question, regardless of the format I read them in. If you'd prefer me to start linking to the Kindle versions, do let me know.)

I thgought China Miéville's Embassytown was great -- cerebral SF of what we might now call "the old school", the New Wave tradition of the '60s and '70s with its interest in anthropology and politics and its worthy literary aspirations. Intriguingly for the Marxist Miéville, it's a recapitulation of the biblical Fall myth among other things, though mostly it reads as a homage to Ursula le Guin, who reviewed it in glowing terms in The Guardian. It's not flawless -- the protagonist is blurry, and the depiction of the disintegration of the titular society too protracted, going through supposedly distinct but actually very vague stages, rather as if working from a sociology textbook for post-apocalyptic societies. Overall, though, it's engrossing and ingenious.

Among the many, many books which it's scandalous I never read before reaching adulthood, let alone middle age (I'm on Dune at the moment), is The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. I'd always understood that this was an epic feminist reworking of the Arthurian saga, and it's certainly true that using solely female characters for viewpoint[1] gives an interestingly skewed perspective on the tradition. However... the opening hundred or so pages (the novel is, dauntingly, 1009 pages plus an unnumbered prologue in length) are entirely structured around which of two men Arthur's mother Igraine fancies, with much wittering on about ancient reincarnated souls from Atlantis, and it doesn't get a great deal better. Morgaine is by far the most interesting character, and even she's obsessed with Lancelot, Arthur and later Accolon. It's possible that the female characters' preoccupation with romance is meant to be making a feminist point about their role in such societies, but overall the book reads like a shambling hybrid of sword-and-sorcery and Mills-and-Boon. It does get better, picking up particularly with the political intrigues of the final quarter... but it's quite a slog, and not a rewarding one.

(Which reminds me, ask me about Dune in a few week's time.)

Another I'm ashamed of not having read before is Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, a seminal reinvention of the vampire myth whose influence in the media of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is as visible as that of Dracula[2]. It's a powerful exploration of loneliness and paranoia, but its revolutionary nature lies in its insistence on treating vampirism as a rational phenomenon, suseceptible to analysis through microscopes and epidemiology. It's a short read (I polished it off in a couple of evenings) but a compelling and impressively scary one.

Jill Paton Walsh's latest continuation of Dorothy L. Sayers's sublime Lord Peter Wimsey series, The Attenbury Emeralds, is a slight thing with a needlessly convoluted plot (not unlike Sayers' own Five Red Herrings, which is my personal least favourite of her works). The device of having the first half of the book consist of a lengthy flashback narrated in dialogue by Lord Peter and his manservant Bunter is weirdly alienating at first, but one gets used to it. The detective story itself is uninvolving in any case, the real joy of the book being the author's unashamedly fannish enjoyment of the characters, whose continuing lives are lovingly recounted. There's a particular turn of events near the novel's end which changes the status quo entirely in a way which few sequelists-of-other-authors would have dared. I've read reviews which suggest that these scenes also bear some interesting thematic freight, but on the whole the book has nothing of the depth of Sayers' more cerebral and sophisticated works.

The Islanders by Christopher Priest is a fascinating example of the "novel written as reference book" genre -- in this case, a guidebook to the Dream Archipelago, the setting of his earlier novel The Affirmation and a number of short stories. Like The Dictionary of the Khazars or The, ahem, Book of the War, the book constructs overarching stories across its multiple entries, with various strands (the lives of certain artists, a murder mystery) linking up in sundry ways at multiple points in the non-narrative. More than either of those, however, this book renders these links problematic and difficult, to the extent that any attempt to tease out a definitive "truth" founders in the gaps between the entries[3]. The book makes much of the Archipelago's inconsistent, or at least unfathomable geography, and the difficulty of navigating a straight course between these island-entries may be designed to mirror that. I decided long ago that trying to get them to make literal sense was not the best way to enjoy Priest's books, and with that proviso this is a fascinating book, often beautifully written.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo I thought was pretty poor -- apart from some attention-grabbing (but quite distasteful) violence, it had very little to recommend it. It's badly structured, with dull prose (in which people constantly note the dimensions and contents of the rooms they're in as if already planning a film set) and an apparent belief that corporate accountancy fraud is thrilling in itself. I've read worse bestsellers, but not ones I'd been led to believe were actually good.

OK, time to speed up.

Flashman was enormous fun -- the trick of making its anti-hero appealing is to give him absolutely no illusions about his own despicableness. I'll definitely be seeking out the further volumes, to further my knowledge of nineteenth-century military history as well as to enjoy the often hilarious writing.

Simon Armitage's verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is very enjoyable, too -- a sympathetic and populist modernisation of a poem whose chief barrier to accessibility is its language.

Michelle Paver's Dark Matter is a frankly terrifying story about a haunted Arctic expedition, and one man who finds himself alone in the perpetual night with a pack of huskies and an angry ghost. One for reading in the daytime, preferably in company.

Bad Things is Michael Marshall Smith by the numbers -- perfectly-paced storytelling with entertaining prose, but ultimately with nothing new to say. Think "Blair Wicker Man Project", and you essentially don't need to read the novel.

Terry Pratchett's Snuff is terribly disappointing, at least by the standards of previous City Watch books (because, let's face it, the Discworld series as a whole has always been hit-and-miss). In the light of his well-publicised medical condition, it's difficult not to see this as Pratchett losing his touch altogether, but I'm hoping it's a blip.

To end on a happier note, David "not that one" Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is excellent -- a fascinating story of European contact with the isolationist Japan of the 1790s, dealing sympathetically with both Japanese and Dutch culture (though somewhat less sympathetic to the English when they turn up), and tinged round the edges with smudges of the fantastic. It's well worth a read.
[1] Well, nearly. In fact, there's half a page (p981 in my edition) which is written from Mordred's point of view. In all I counted seven female viewpoint characters -- Igraine, Morgaine, Vivane, Gwenhwyfar, Morgause, Niniane and Elaine -- which is three more than most reviewers seem to mention.
[2] I certainly should have read it before writing The Vampire Curse, which covers some of the same ground. Oops.
[3] On the most obvious level, one character who is, according to the narrative, dead long before the guidebook is written, also supplies its Preface.

10 October 2010

Publicity (Self- and Other-)

1. Other-

Quite apart from not actually posting here for weeks, I've not done nearly enough to publicise the fact that my brother Nick has self-published a novel which seems to be gaining some approving reviews among fans of the kind of novel it is.

I don't really enjoy the idea of zombies, in the usually understood modern sense. I've no problem (other than credibility, obviously) with the idea of a vodou bokor raising the dead to act as his or her slave -- that kind of zombi I'm perfectly at ease with. It's the contagion-and-pandemic model of contemporary zombiedom which frankly gives me the screaming willies. I've always had a phobia of plague, and the idea of a horde of unwitting, pathetic carriers who don't realise how a pathogen has modified their behaviour terrifies me far more than any mere cadaver risen from the grave.

(Oddly enough, I'm perfectly at ease with the contagion model of vampirism. Indeed, I've happily written about it. Vampires are usually highly selective about whom they recruit to their ranks, however, which leads me to suspect that it's epidemics and pandemics which really terrify me, and not disease per se.)

All of which means I haven't actually read Breaking News: An Autozombiography. I should have, but I almost certainly never will. However, as I say, people who have read it seem to have liked it, so if you're less squeamish than I am about the whole concept you may well like it too. I'm sorry not to be able to provide a less pusillanimous endorsement.

2. Self-

I've just sent off a final submitted draft of my 10,000-word epic short story, "A Hundred Words from a Civil War", to be published in Obverse Books's forthcoming Faction Paradox anthology Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts. It is, as you may by now have gathered, a full-on sequel to my Faction Paradox novel Of the City of the Saved..., and I'm immoderately pleased with it.

For reasons which may eventually become clear, I've written eleven additional drabbles which won't form part of the final drabbleplex, but which I will be putting up on my website. I may as well post them here too, as occasional teasers from now until the book's eventual publication date. Meet Mnaea Marla:
     Mnaea Marla lies beneath the rubble, clutching the grenade. The enemy are searching the building. It’s only a matter of time. Her left arm is a useless crumpled thing, and both her legs are broken.
     Worst of all, her left head is dead, caved in bloodily under a falling brick. No surgeon can bring back that unique consciousness – her aggravating twin, her friend and lover, her conscience and tempter. They can never be together again now, except in death – death, and the hope of further resurrection.
     The enemy are close now. Marla primes the grenade, kisses herself goodbye, and waits.
(These alternative / deleted scenes are all one-offs with no link to the main story, so you're not missing out by not having the context.)

The book's out in February, supposedly. I'll try to post the other ten drabbles by then. It should force me to blog something every so often, at least.

3. Oh, and...

...There are, incidentally, zombies in "A Hundred Words from a Civil War". But not contagious ones.

29 April 2009

It's not the holy water, it's the font you put it in

It's been a little while coming, but The Vampire Curse has been reviewed at Sci-Fi Online.

Unlike last year's review of Nobody's Children, Richard McGinlay's opted to give the three novellas separate mini-reviews. He gives poor Kelly Hale (whose novella Possum Kingdom is for my money the best of the three) short shrift, but at least he likes Predating the Predators:
These are well-rounded and compelling protagonists, whose writings we want to read more of. Similarly intriguing is the elderly Bernice, whom we witness through the chroniclers' eyes. Philip Purser-Hallard captures the aged Bernice well, rendering a believably crotchety yet recognisable version of the character we know.
[...]
It’s my favourite story in this collection, and not just because of the accuracy of its typesetting.
It's always a morale boost to get good reviews, even when they do display an odd preoccupation with typography.

03 December 2008

As Promised...

...the not-particularly-long-awaited DVD-style extras pertaining to my novella in The Vampire Curse are now online at www.infinitarian.com, along with a handful of other things I've had hanging around.

First of all, we have notes on my novella, "Predating the Predators". DO PLEASE READ The Vampire Curse first, though, as these notes contain SPOILERS for the novella. You don't in any sense need to read these in order to understand the novella -- they're just intended as background, including some explanations of authorial choices and a few deleted passages to tantalise yourselves with. ("Predating the Predators" is actually one of the more self-explanatory things I've written, so these are pretty limited compared with, say, my annotations to the considerably shorter "Minions of the Moon".)

Also containing SPOILERS -- for both "Predating the Predators" and Of the City of the Saved... -- is "Unification Theory", a supplementary short story, featuring characters from "Predating the Predators" in the City. It's the first of these website extras that's been a crossover between different series I've written for, and I now need to resist the temptation to do the same with the rest of them. If I stick at this one (which, as the notes reveal, there was a moderately good reason for), I think it just about stops short of being self-indulgent.

And speaking of self-indulgent... a week or so ago, as well as updating my About the Author and FAQ pages to reflect The Vampire Curse's existence, I also added all the "About the Author" or "About the Contributors" biogs I've had published in various books to date. This comes with the facility to jump forward from one to the next (starting, as luck would have it, with Of the City of the Saved... and finishing with The Vampire Curse), so you can see how my self-image and verbosity have varied down the years since, er, 2004.

Since I was revamping the Short Stories page anyway, I've added another story, "Dave @1I8Σπ: A Romance of the Year 2006", which was originally published here on this very blog. Come Christmas I'll be putting up another short story, "Polarity", which went out with my Christmas cards last year, just as "Sol Invictus" did the year before. (Mind you, I'll be posting that here as well, just as I did with "Sol Invictus" last year.)

Finally, my latest Surefish column is up, and I've remembered to update the Surefish index on the website to reflect the fact. This one gives my usual woolly-minded christian perspective on the aspect of the SF writing process which I call worldbuilding, and JRR Tolkien referred to as "sub-creation".

[ETA: Damn -- it's just been pointed out to me that there's a linking error in the column. The reference to unreadable utopian fiction is meant to link to Wikipedia's article on utopian fiction, and not to CS Lewis's Cosmic Trilogy...]

Right, then. Hope some of that that's vaguely interesting to some of you...

24 November 2008

Curses!

One day soon -- potentially as soon as 2036, unless the retirement age has been bumped up by then -- I'm going to get round to posting some actual content here, rather than continually pimping my own writing.

In the meantime, though... I have in my hand a physical copy of The Vampire Curse -- the three-decker novella collection about Professor Bernice Summerfield and a number of vampires, featuring the novellas "The Badblood Diaries" by Mags L. Halliday, "Possum Kingdom" by Kelly Hale and "Predating the Predators" by me.

It was posted to me at the weekend by the publishers, and I'm impressed by their speed of turnaround since I mentioned having first sight of the cover in, erm, my last entry here. Which admittedly was a few weeks ago now, but I mean, it's bound and everything.

I'm currently putting the finishing touches to my website extras -- a bunch of annotations to the text, as per my usual custom, together with an exclusive short story featuring characters from The Vampire Curse in the City of the Saved. (Well, I had to do it sooner or later.) I'll update here once those are up at the website -- I probably ought to hold off until people have had a chance to read the thing, at least.

05 November 2008

Cursing Graphically

And in slightly less momentous news... Big Finish have released Adrian Salmon's very fine cover for The Vampire Curse. Which means I've been able to update my pages too, with a larger version of the cover and the actual back cover blurb. I've updated Peculiar Tomes, as well, and put in links to pre-order through Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Now I'd better get round to writing those extras I promised.

16 October 2008

Vamping it Up

I've just been proofreading the pre-print PDF of The Vampire Curse, which promises to be a very pleasing book visually, with some lovely typesetting and formatting. (There's no news on the cover as yet, but I'll update you when there's anything to show there.) The actual content is also fab, of course, with Mags and Kelly contributing clever, sexy, funny stories with the full complement of heart, brain and fangs, which my Predating the Predators is going to have some serious trouble following.

In theory, I think this ends my involvement with the book until I get my free copies through the post. In practice, I still need to write up some extra material to go on the website. Meanwhile, here's my one of the three bios which should be appearing in the back of the book:
Philip Purser-Hallard has written stories about alien shapeshifters, draconian diplomats, robot replicants, hermaphrodites, angels, men in the moon, the risen dead, an elderly science fiction author and a wide range of posthuman beings, but not previously about catholic priests battling evil space vampires. Most of his other stories also have academics in them.

Philip lives in Bristol, where he divides his time between writing and a job you don't care about. He writes a regular online column on science fiction and religion, and occasionally gives talks. He believes that one day in the future, humans will rise up and overthrow their feline masters.
And speaking of Wildthyme on Top (which, er, I was briefly, just then), I'm delighted to see that February 2009 is going to bring us four more Iris Wildthyme audio dramas. (Well, those of us who buy the "Season 2" box set, anyway. The rest of you get them spread out between February and April.) Written by various talented gentlemen (to whit, the resplendent Mark Michalowski, Iris' creator Paul Magrs, my old adversary editor Simon Guerrier, and Paul's brother Mark Magrs), the four CDs pastiche, parody or affectionately homage (according to taste) the four decades of Doctor Who which aren't this one -- ie, the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Which is what Iris was created for, after all.

Despite the work I've done for Big Finish, I don't generally plug their stuff here unless it's directly relevant to the subject of this blog (viz, Me). But for Iris I'll make an exception.

In other news, it turns out that standing for President of the U.S.A. means that people photograph and film you even when you're looking remarkably silly. And make satirical websites about your emergency stand-in, to boot.

28 August 2008

Re: Vamps

Now I've finally finished "Predating the Predators", my contribution to the Bernice Summerfield novella collection The Vampire Curse, I thought it was about time I put up a page for it at my increasingly antiquated website.

And lo, it came to pass. It's a bit minimal as yet, but I'll be fleshing it out later with stuff like the cover, the ISBN, the titles of Mags' and Kelly's stories, and the now traditional array of DVD-style extras. For the moment, the only real content is this off-the-cuff blurb, which relates to "Predating the Predators" alone:

Predating the Predators

Historians have long known that the eventful life of Professor Bernice Summerfield included more than one encounter with the paranormal predators known as vampires.

One such event which has so far received little attention from Summerfieldologists is the Murigen Infraction. This vampire infestation at Murigen’s First Colonial University coincided – if indeed it was a coincidence – with the First Interdisciplinary Conference on Vampirology, at which the distinguished Professor was a guest speaker.

Contemporary records, including the letters of a physicist and the journal of a Catholic priest, appear to place Summerfield and her granddaughter at the event. But what was their involvement in the affair? How could vampires thrive in a location with plentiful running water and near-constant daylight emitted by three suns? And what was the connection, if any, with Summerfield’s earlier expedition to excavate the ancient structure known (rather histrionically) as the Blood Citadel of Alukah?

This new sourcebook, assembled from contemporary documents by Prof. I.G. Ikigikato of Zebadee University, will finally allow students to decide for themselves.

I've also revamped all my pages which link to the Big Finish website, so that they now take you to the relevant product page rather than to a less than optimally cooperative redirect screen. At least, they do until Big Finish rearrange everything again.

For easy reference, those links are: (Eight Big Finish books I've been published in? Blimey. Still, that's with four different editors, so it's not like it's a sinecure or anything. Probably.)

21 August 2008

Lifting the Curse

I finally sent off my vampire story today, and I'm bloody exhausted. Now I just have to wait to find out whether Eddie the Editor likes it, and how much he minds that it's a third as long again as it should be.

This has been one of many things which I haven't, what with one thing and another, had the time to mention recently... but tomorrow I'm off to the Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham. B.'s been there for several days already, building a sculpture to which I contributed a chunk of text (the thing with the puns on Egyptian gods' names which I was mentioning earlier).

I'm not speaking this year, having once again failed to get organised. I'm also camping for the whole weekend, for the first time since... erm, I think it might be 1992. With good reason, because I loathe tents and everything that goes with, in on and around them. Especially the mud.

I will, however, be blogging for Surefish, as has by now become traditional. As in previous years, I'll post links to my Surefish entries here. (All of those links are broken now, such being the transitory nature of internet journalism. I don't know whether the entries themselves are still floating around the web somewhere.)

If you're very lucky, there may also be some photos of the sculpture.

08 August 2008

Bat Mehen

This week, for reasons of paranomasia and other forms of borderline insanity, I've been mainly writing puns about Egyptian gods. (I'll explain later...) If you feel I should have been writing about vampires instead, well, I'm not disagreeing.

Apologies again to those of you who've already seen this on one mailing list or another, but the only way to keep this blog going while I'm quite so busy is to run "The Best of PPH" while I'm on sabbatical. So...

I saw The Dark Knight on Wednesday. I thought it was great -- very enjoyable, with some brilliant acting. Some spoilers follow...

I didn't believe for a moment that they'd killed Jim Gordon. But at least it provided an opportunity to quote Brian Blessed.

Heath Ledger is, obviously, brilliant, playing the Joker as a shambling, demented individual with no social skills. He somehow manages to have tremendous charisma without any charm whatsoever, and makes the atrocities he sees as practical jokes seem like a convincing, almost rational response to the world around him. It's a more impressive performance than Jack Nicholson's, and that's not to denigrate the former. Where Nicholson's Joker made hideous things seem funny, Ledger's never lets you forget that they're hideous. But also funny. But hideous.

I've no quarrel with anyone else's acting, mind you, but even before his death it was always going to be Ledger who stole the show. I spent ages trying to remember who Maggie Gyllenhaal was, and why I didn't remember her from the first film.

The plot, however, goes somewhat to cock in the last third, with the Joker and Harvey Dent both spiralling out of control in different directions simultaneously. The film feels overlong, and really everything after the Joker escapes, maims Dent and kills Rachel could have been a 20-minute coda focussing on the Joker, with the Dent's revenge plot held in reserve for a future film.

Given the screentime the scarred Dent got, though, I was disappointed that more wasn't done with his duality as Two-Face. Admittedly this would also have been difficult to handle without disappearing into the realms of comic-strip psychology, but if they were going to put Two-Face into a realistic reimagining of Batman (and let's face it, Batman Begins is the most realistic film that could conceivably be made about a billionaire dressing up as a giant bat to fight a league of assassins and a drug-dealing psychiatrist with a bag over his head), I feel they ought to have done it properly.

Of course this isn't helped at all by the fact that Two-Face looks nothing like a horrifically scarred burn victim and everything like a genre movie special-effect, thus demolishing the carefully-constructed edifice of a realistic Gotham City where the villains really are tragically insane people, rather than cartoon characters. Gah.

Generally though, bloody good film. I could just have done with editing out most of the post-Two-Face Dent stuff and keeping it -- with entirely different design work -- for the next film.

(As it is, I'm wondering who they will have as the villain, assuming there is a third film. Two-Face is dead within the fiction, and they couldn't possibly recast Ledger's Joker. Catwoman's been ruined too comprehensively within recent memory by Halle Berry, and most of the other well-known Batman villains head off into the realm of the fantastical or obviously ludicrous. I'm wondering if the Mad Hatter could possibly work...)

19 July 2008

Dr Acula, Ph.D.

The reason it's been three weeks since I last updated this blog thing is that I've been up to my throat in writing this vampire novella, the day job's been really busy and B. and I have been away every weekend and faffing about with stuff most evenings. Some of these are perfectly pleasant things in themselves, but taken together they've tended to engender a large amount of stress and busytude.

Life's been so hectic recently I've barely had time to update my Facebook status, let alone write a blog post. Sadly, B. and I have had to turn down a party in London tonight as being just that one thing too many for the maintenance of sanity.

The novella's coming along nicely, though, you'll be pleased to hear -- I now have around two-thirds of it written, at a little over 20,000 words.

I realise that I've not said much about Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Vampire's Curse here, except to praise my co-authors and to drone on about writing the thing. At this stage I know little of Mags' and Kelly's stories, and they're not mine to talk about anyway. My third of the book (originally entitled The Predator Principle, which proved to be rubbish, and now called, still rather tentatively, Predating the Predators) is about the First Interdisciplinary Conference on Vampirology, which is first infiltrated and then gatecrashed by a coven of vampires.

It's a blending of genres -- as a vampire novella, it's obviously a horror story, and as the umbrella title suggests it has a certain schlocky Hammer vibe. I also decided to go for the authentic Gothic flavour of Dracula and its ilk, by building the narrative out of letters, journal entries and excerpts from secondary documents. It's also inevitably a campus novel[la], and equally inevitably (given that it's part of the Bernice Summerfield range) it's S.F., taking place in Benny's space-operatic galactic milieu.

Being me, I felt that those weren't really enough genre referents, so I've also introduced a Jesuit priest wrestling with an apparently intractable theological problem on a remote planet, thus tying nicely in with the rarefied but venerable S.F. subgenre of "Jesuit priest wrestling with an apparently intractable theological problem on a remote planet" stories[1]. In a revolutionary twist, mine's called Imogen.

In short, it's an allegorical-epistolary-gothic-horror-pastiche-campus-space-opera -- not quite on the scale of a a detective-ghost-horror-whodunnit-time-travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic, but not bad at only a little over 30,000 words.

I've also written my monthly column for Surefish, gone on a training course which may entitle me to do some Thought for the Day slots on BBC Radio Bristol, and am now working on a short piece for a kind of collaboration which is altogether new for me, though sadly neither earth-shakingly high-profile or notably paid (come back in late August for more on this).

Coincidentally, it's about something vampires are afraid of, although admittedly there seem to be quite a lot of objects that applies to.

[1] S.F. novices who feel disinclined to believe in this as a bona fide subgenre may wish to investigate Anthony Boucher's "Balaam", Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star", James Blish's A Case of Conscience, Philip José Farmer's Father John Carmody stories, the 80-page segment "The Priest's Tale" in Dan Simmons' Hyperion and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God. S.F. initiates who can spot any I've missed should feel free to chip in.

26 June 2008

Discuss

Ah. My latest column's up at Surefish. It's a bit meandery and mentions vampires, which accurately reflects my state of mind recently.

A point of discussion which you may find it interesting to comment on here:
I sometimes try to imagine a scientific discovery which would persuade me that my faith was spurious. As yet I’ve come up with nothing.
What do we (and by "we" I mean "you", given that I wrote it) think of this? If you have a religious faith, can you think of a potential scientific revelation about the universe which would convince you to become an atheist? If you're an atheist, what revelations (actual or hypothetical) do you think should so persuade me?

Or do you think the question's a meaningless one?

19 June 2008

Patagonia of Tiny Feet

OK. I'm not going to make a habit of this, you understand, but while I'm slavishly copying other people's ideas, Simon Guerrier has rather eccentrically requested me to select an S.F. book of my choice, turn to p123 and record the fifth sentence here.

Predictably perhaps, but also because I can reach it without getting up, I've chosen Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which says:
"It became the party's most sacred object, for it kindled in every mind the strong parental disposition so characteristic of Patagonians."
So there you go -- Patagonians like having babies. You heard it here first, unless of course you've read Last and First Men at any point during the past 78 years.

Because I don't really do "memes", I'm not going to oblige anybody to continue this. If you think it would be fun, feel free to link to this post and say I told you to.

I'm still trying to write vampires today, although I've also sent off another Surefish column. As usual I'll mention here when it's been put up.

I'd normally be writing tomorrow as well, but I seem to be obliged to turn up here and learn to cook tapas instead. Saturday I'll be attending festive Midsummer nuptials in Oxford, which will be fun.

06 June 2008

Blood Harvest

Note to the National Blood Service: you'll generally find me rather more sympathetic to a call for donations than I was yesterday. It's just slightly unfortunate that, when you phoned me, I was in the middle of writing a story about vampires, and therefore rather sensitive to the topic.

(But I love the fact that their website is at www.blood.co.uk. Perhaps they should let "Blood, blood, blood!" be their motto...)

22 May 2008

Stakeholder Society

The new regime at Big Finish's Bernice Summerfield product range (his name's Eddie) obviously believes in getting announcements out quickly. The new writing project I was being secretive about just the other day is out in the open now. It may now become slightly more obvious why I've been thinking about vampires this week.

It's another three-decker novella collection, much the same as Nobody's Children was -- and while I wasn't looking it's been given the appropriately Gothic title of Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Vampire Curse.

As it happens, this Benny anthology is an all Faction Paradox authors affair. As well as being fellow-contributors to The Book of the War, my co-conspirators Mags L. Halliday and Kelly Hale wrote Warring States and Erasing Sherlock respectively. (What with Lawrence Miles' Benny CD out in July, it's looking rather as if we're taking over.) Unlike me, Mags and Kelly also have Doctor Who novels under their belts -- the rather excellent History 101 and Grimm Reality -- and between them they run an exceptional Who fanfiction site, lostluggage.org.uk.

They're both very talented people and it's both pleasing and gratifying to be sharing a book with them. Now I just need to write my third of it...

20 May 2008

Planetary Romance

That review I mentioned of that book about these books is now up at Surefish. It may be more informative and persuasive than my earlier witterings, or of course it may not. Ignore the big pull-quote about feminism [ETA: now fixed], which appears to be from another review altogether.

In theory I should be having a column up this week as well. I'm not sure whether Andy's going to hold off on that one.

[ETA: Yes, the column's up too. It's about vampires.]

16 May 2008

Dougal, we are not watching aliens!

Hmm. So the Vatican's official astronomer has finally got around to outlining what James Blish predicted 50 years ago would be the Catholic church's position on the spiritual implications of extraterrestrial life[1]. (Admittedly he misses out the "sentient creatures without souls" category, but it's difficult to imagine that one catching on. Unless the aliens in question were militarily naïve and owned large amounts of oil, obviously.)

As Blish suggests in his introduction to A Case of Conscience, Fr Funes refuses to countenance the possibility that extraterrestrials might have experienced their own salvation event as well as their own fall from grace -- making it the church's duty, if they exist, to evangelise them mercilessly. He calls Jesus' incarnation "a unique event that cannot be repeated", which seems parochial to me.

There is, by assumption, only one divine Logos, the active principle of the Creator of the universe, but I don't see any reason to believe that this entity could only become incarnate once, or couldn't work towards the salvation of other planetary populations in other ways. (Nor does the Reverend Father cite any evidence for this. What does he expect us to do, just take it on faith?)

...And speaking of damned creatures doomed to eternal torment, I've just landed another writing gig. The usual reasons of commercial secrecy mean I can't say anything about it yet, but I'm looking forward to it already[2].


[1] Actually, Blish was quoting Gerald Heard,but since he doesn't cite the source and I'm largely unfamiliar with Heard's work I can't say where he gets it from. Look, if you want unimpeachable standards of academic rigour, go and read someone else's blog.
[2] There is actually a sequitur there, but it's one that won't become apparent until I can tell you more about the story. Sorry about that.