Exo-Review: Colin Greenland on Margo Lanagan's 'Red Spikes'

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Margo Lanagan's quite wonderful collection Black Juice last year, I've been determined to complete her triptych of short fiction collections by getting hold of copies of both White Time (which, actually, I've just ordered from an Amazon seller for the handsome sum of £6.42 - nice!) and the third volume, Red Spikes, which as you can see from the pic is graced with some particularly fine cover art.

I'm particularly determined to acquire the latter (which isn't due until October; from Knopf in the US, unless Gollancz schedule a UK edition in the meantime..?) after reading this review on Strange Horizons by Colin Greenland, who's no slouch when it comes to wordsmithery either, let me tell you.

Also in this week's Strange Horizons reviews, Richard Larson reviews David Devereux's Hunter's Moon, which I read recently. It's a well-written review and I do I agree with much of Richard's analysis on the book. The weekly update email also promised a Paul Raven review of the Elastic Press antho Extended Play, but that must be appearing later in the week.

May 29, 2007 | Filed Under Books | 5 Comments

New client website re-vamp: AdamRoberts.com

Adam Roberts is one of the brightest stars in the UK science fiction firmament. His novels, novellas and short stories are always ideas-driven, usually highly challenging and often misunderstood, but you can rely on them being packed to the rafters with intelligent writing: literary allusion, metaphorical and metaphysical extrapolation, and some truly stunning visions of alternate worlds, alternate futures, alternate realities.

Adam has been a client of mine for going on six years now and his website has been through three different incarnations in that time. The third version of www.adamroberts.com went live yesterday, and I'm sure all will agree (if memory serves) that it's a big improvement on the first two:

This time out it's a Wordpress site, and I've been exploring the options that WP offers to use it as a site-wide content management system rather than just as a single blog page. Hence the bibliography section is self-contained within the WP setup, which means that if Adam wants to add to them, or tinker with them, he can do so to his heart's content, without waiting for me to have a few minutes free in my schedule to make the changes for him.

He can also drive his own news section as a full blog now, complete with RSS-feed for all you feed-grazers out there who don't even bother to visit the lovely websites that some of us have spent so many hours slaving over... (James, I'm looking at you...)

Adam also runs three other blogs (Europrogocontestovision, punkadiddle and Rambling Ad Rumpo) and I'm working on persuading him to bring those three within the main blog as well - there's some great content on them, and having it all in one place would really strengthen the main site. Between you and me I reckon that once he's seen just how far superior Wordpress is to clunky old blogspot he'll be looking to at least move those over to WP sub-domains of their own, but I think that bringing them within the main site on a by-Category basis would work even better...

May 26, 2007 | Filed Under Work | Leave a Comment

Break.com Oddness: United 300

What with all the deep, serious conversation around here this week, I reckon it's about time for a few minutes' light relief. Big thumbs-up to Ed Ashby for the heads-up on this one:

300 Spartans on a Plane - via www.break.com

Laugh? I nearly bought the loincloth... :)

May 24, 2007 | Filed Under Humour, Odd | Leave a Comment

Paul Raven on the Genre Ghetto

If you've been following the conversational thread that was kicked off by the On Fantasy... entry I posted the other day, you might also be interested to read Paul Raven's take on the 'Genre Ghetto' meme over at his Velcro-City Tourist Board blog.

Paul makes the very valid point that folks like us - genre fiction bloggers and blog-readers - probably have an overly-optimistic view of the health of the genre, as we're likely to be far more aware of the wealth of new talent on offer than the average genre book-buyer in the high-street might be.

And as it's the average etc. who gets to determine - through those all-conquering forces of supply and demand - just what gets published and therefore determines the availability and depth of the genre fiction field at high-street level, the question then becomes: how to avoid a situation whereby the interesting stuff published at the margins becomes marginalised even more, to the point of non-viability.

Paul argues for a more effective adoption of the technology available; which I totally agree with, hence all my recent talk of the need for increasingly sophisticated and trusted information filtering mechanisms (blogs, review websites, author recommendations of other author's work) to help the more discerning reader find the good stuff in the first place and then make an informed purchasing decision.

Paul also argues that:

"...mainstream publishing is a monoculture. Genre has always been somewhat of an independent annexe to it, and I think that in the long run its future survival is dependent on that becoming more the case than less...

He's saying that we dwellers-within should pick up the ghetto, carry it out of the city, then circle the wagons and start our own township out on the plains. Again, I'm all for that, although to be honest I was under the impression that this was pretty much happening already.

And I have always thought that there's far more mileage for genre publishers in concentrating on talking to genre readers and genre fans, than there is ever likely to be in any attempt to persuade some minute fraction of the mainstream readership to come on down to the ghetto they're so scared of and take a look around (we promise not to mug you while you're here - honest...) More on that in later posts, workload allowing.

Anyway, Paul's is a damn good contribution to the ongoing debate. Well worth a read.

May 23, 2007 | Filed Under Publishing | 1 Comment

New client website goes live: NorthStarDeli.com

I'm delighted to announce that my latest client commission site went live yesterday: www.northstardeli.com.

Bit of a departure from my usual line of work, you might think? But actually, there's a very definite genre connection lurking not so far beneath the surface, because the North Star Deli is owned and run by a family partnership that includes a certain Mr John Berlyne, proprietor of The Works of Tim Powers (which, I might add, is due for a renewal and transfer to a Wordpress platform in the very near future...) and UK reviews editor for venerable online genre 'zine SFRevu.com.

The deli itself is located in the South Manchester suburb of Chorlton; Jo and I drove on down there one Sunday a while ago and enjoyed some damn fine coffee and theoretical polenta cake (theoretically, John promised us polenta cake, but actually they sold out on the Saturday... a common occurrence, the polenta cake is very popular...) whilst we talked to John about books, writing, food, drink, and the current state of the world... as you do.

Fast-forward a couple of months to John and I having a very enthusiastic conversation over cartons of spicy far-eastern food in Manchester city centre one lunchtime, whilst discussing the enormous potential for developing the North Star Deli website into something far, far more interesting than just the usual online brochure-dump.

I spoke at great length about the concept of blogging as a means of developing an ongoing conversation: a very direct and immediate link between the Deli and its customers. John saw the potential immediately, and in turn introduced the concept to his partners, brother Adam and sister Deanna.

Thus, www.northstardeli.com is now reborn, on a Wordpress platform, with regularly-updated content and all the character, enthusiasm and foodie-knowledge you'd get from speaking to any of the deli team in-store. I think I'm right in saying that the North Star is Manchester's first blogging-deli, but I suspect it won't be the last, once word gets around...

It's the content that will be a winner though. It's early days yet, but I've already learned much - maybe too much (bacon-mints, anyone?) and speaking as an avowed foodie myself, I'm looking forward to future posts (particularly Deanna's recipes) with relish...

Check it out. Join the mailing list (e-bulletins should start going out in a couple of weeks, and you might learn something from those as well). Leave a comment or three. And if you live anywhere near Chorlton, get yourself down there and stock up on fine food and beverages from around the world, as well as plenty of fresh local produce. Sample the coffee. Enjoy the polenta cake (if you're quick...)

I just wish they'd open a branch in North Manchester (preferably Prestwich... in fact, just around the corner from me would be ideal...)

I reckon if they did that and then set up WiFi access in there as well, you'd never get me out of the place... :)

May 18, 2007 | Filed Under Work | 4 Comments

On fantasy and a preference for fantastical fiction

"If more writers didn't write 'fantasy' so self-consciously and follow imagined 'rules' of the genre then the whole thing might not be so hidebound and repetitive. It should be the most creative writing around but is frequently the most conservative."

From an interview with Steph Swainston that I've just posted over on UKSFBN. She also says:

"What I find jarring in fantasy is 'magic'. It's usually a way of systemising lazy plot devices."

It's always a question of subjective taste - horses for courses, each to their own etc. - but I do have to say that over the past few years, the sort of fiction I've most enjoyed reading recently has been exactly that: fantasy in name, but without all the trappings and paraphernalia of magic, or a magical 'system': no spells, rituals, wizards, glowing swords, enchanted artefacts, elves, dwarves, dragons, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

A few examples off the top of my head: China Miéville (Perdido Street Station etc.), K.J. Bishop (The Etched City), Scott Lynch (The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies), Alan Campbell (Scar Night; which I'm currently reading and thoroughly enjoying), Jeff Vandermeer (Veniss Underground), Jeffrey Ford (The Physiognomy), and indeed, Steph Swainston (The Year of Our War and No Present Like Time)... oh, and yes, I do realise I've just reeled off a list of mainly 'new weird'-type authors. I'm obviously a mainly 'new weird'-type reader.

The reason these books are labelled 'fantasy' is the incredibly rich sense of the fantastic that they're steeped in: exotic settings sometimes utterly unlike our own mundane world, populated by esoteric and idiosyncratic characters and fantastical creatures, or entities with powers and abilities beyond those of your average mortal man; an atmosphere that's strangely alien and weirdly compelling and that opens up huge vistas of imagination to your mind's eye. All the stuff you'd presumably expect to find in the pages of any fantasy novel - and do to varying degrees - but, well, without the sound of dice rolling in the background...

Having said that, there are a number of 'traditional' fantasy authors whose work I do still enjoy - or would undoubtedly still enjoy if I actually had the time to read them - George R.R. Martin, Steven Erikson, Greg R. Keyes, Glen Cook - as well as a few new fantasy authors who are writing in a more traditional style but whose work I nevertheless have found to be very rich and satisfying, such as Joe Abercrombie (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, who has a wonderful habit of twisting classic fantasy tropes until they beg for mercy) and Brian Ruckley (Winterbirth, a debut that, to be truthful, could have been enriched by the inclusion of stronger fantastical elements, yes, but promises much for volumes to come).

It all comes down to the quality of the writing, obviously, which in itself is the result of a blend of natural talent and sheer, bloody-minded hard graft; the honing and polishing of prose far beyond the "it'll do" state that seems so commonly acceptable to some. So I think Steph Swainston's point about "lazy plot devices" is especially pertinent. There are a number of fantasy authors - whose names are well know and need not be reeled off here - for whom the grazing of the cash cow seems to be much more important than the exploration of new territories, the uncovering of rich troves of concept and idea, the sheer joy of expressing an unbounded imagination. "It'll do, it's set in the same world, the same characters are back again, it's got lots of magic in it, they'll love it."

But then, perhaps you actually need a fair-sized dollop of that sort of thing to keep the genre viable. If we didn't have the cash-cow-herders churning out their same-old, same-old (to return briefly to one of yesterday's themes) to sell in vast numbers to their legions of adoring fans, then genre sections in bookstores would rapidly shrink, and publishers would lose the little leeway they currently have to bring out the more interesting work alongside the mainstream mass-market stuff.

Or perhaps it's just the way the genre market is structured that naturally lends itself to a gradual, progressive filtering process. You start - as nearly everyone starts - with the obvious, in-yer-face stuff: Tolkien, Eddings, Brooks, Goodkind, Jordan et. al. but then - and this is the important bit - you have a choice:

You can, quite happily, wallow around in the shallows for the rest of your reading life, just grazing on what's put in front of you by the booksellers and bean-counters, then move on to nothing more challenging than whatever comes along from the next batch of imitators.

Or, you can evade the nets of advertising and '3 for 2' promotions and wade a little deeper, guided by the online word-of-mouth of the brave souls who have ventured forth before you, to see what's lurking out there, amongst the reefs and rocks...

Come on in, the deep water's lovely... :)

May 17, 2007 | Filed Under Books | 63 Comments

Chouinard & McCalmont's Scalpel launches

Gabe Chouinard & Jonathan McCalmont's brand new genre review 'zine Scalpel officially launches today. Their Reviewerfesto proclaims that the 'zine is aiming "to serve as an outlet for what they have come to term 'street-level criticism', a style of reviewing that serves to bridge the gap between academic criticism and standardized reviews."

This sounds, to me, like a Good Idea. In these days of Amazon-fuelled review-lite, in which pretty much anyone, anywhere, can dash off a poorly-considered opinion in but a few moments and yet still be granted a public forum to air their half-baked views - what's more, a public forum that very directly and immediately affects a potential book-buyer's decision-making process - I think it's going to become increasingly important to develop increasingly sophisticated, trusted filters to help tune out the crap.

Come to think of it, this is pretty much what always I vaguely aimed to do with the old Alien Online project; admittedly with mixed results and without anything like Scalpel's explicit statement of intent. The problem with the TAO project was that it was just too broad-brushed, too admin-heavy, far too time- (and life-) consuming. Hopefully by focusing in on a specific content stream - reviews - the Scalpel boys will be able to avoid many of the pitfalls that put paid to the original TAO (although the process did result in a more tightly news-focused UK SF Book News site instead, so all's well etc.)

Anyway, here's hoping that Scalpel will quickly become one of those aforementioned trusted filters and do much to help lovers of the more refined arc of the genre fiction spectrum pluck the titles with true potential from amidst the dross of the same-old, same-old.

Launch-day content includes an editorial by Pat Cadigan, reviews of Adam Roberts' Gradisil, Hal Duncan's Ink and The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang, as well as a wide-ranging interview with Charlie Stross. So that should give you a pretty good idea of the tone they're keen to develop.

May 16, 2007 | Filed Under Reviewing | 4 Comments

More Dresden Files on the way

I learned by way of a recent Publisher's Lunch e-bulletin that Roc Books in the US has bought books #12 and #13 in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series.

I dropped Darren Nash of Orbit Books (Butcher's UK publisher) a line, and he confirmed that Orbit have already signed up books #9 through #11 and that #12 and #13 probably wouldn't be too far behind...

Speaking as a big Dresden fan - books and TV series both - I think that's great news. And I also think that there ought to be enough in the way of open story arcs and plot development in the first eight books to sustain the development of the series into the next five and hopefully beyond. As long as neither Butcher nor his editor start thinking that anything goes because he's got a TV deal - as long as the writing stays sharp and the action scenes stay fast and furious - then the risk of the law of diminishing returns setting in and ruining things should be minimal.

Which is more than can be said of some long-running series. I thoroughly enjoyed the first six or seven books in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. I thought they were well-written, sexy, action-packed, intelligent and above-all interesting takes on the modern-day vampire hunter mythos (and the earliest installment was published in 1994, - two years after the Buffy movie, but three years before the TV show hit TV screens, in case you were rolling your eyes already).

But then Hamilton's books started degenerating into little more than supernatural soft porn, with what seemed like minimal plot and not much in the way of character development to speak of either, and I just gave up reading them.

Hell, I'm no prude, but I generally want to get more from the fiction I read than just titillation and the occasional wise-crack. So when it got to the point where the sex-scenes were dominating the books rather than adding colour to them - becoming the point of the books, or so it seemed - then that was it for me. 'Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter' I was interested in. 'Anita Blake, Vampire Shagger'... not so much.

Incidentally, I read the first two of Hamilton's Merry Gentry books and they're even worse (or even better, depending on your point of view and preferences, of course...) so I've given the latest four of those a miss as well...

I admit, they might have improved drastically in the past couple of volumes... but then I wouldn't know. If you've read them and they have got a whole lot better recently, let me know, would you?

Edit 10.05.07 Dave Hebblethwaite sends me a link to John Grant's review of the second Merry Gentry book on Infinity Plus. Nice to know I'm not alone...

May 9, 2007 | Filed Under Books | 8 Comments

Last call for BFS 2007 nominations

The British Fantasy Society If you're a British Fantasy Society member, you have until the end of the day to send in your nominations for this year's British Fantasy Awards for work published or produced during 2006. The voting will then open sometime in the next couple of months and the winners will be announced at this year's Fantasycon in September.

There are two new categories this year: 'Best non-fiction' (I'll go out on a limb and predict that Cinema Macabre is a good prospect for that one) and the rather nebulous-sounding 'Best Newcomer' (for a specific title first published in 2006? A specific project or venture first launched in 2006? A writer first published, anywhere, in 2006?); for which recommendations are sought, but which will be decided by a panel of judges.

Slightly annoyingly, the BFS still haven't addressed the issue of the 'Best Small Press' category, which I've been muttering about for years. In recent years the shortlist has included a number of small presses (as you'd most likely understand the term to apply: independent amateur and / or semi-pro publishers, in other words) as well as small press publications (one year both PS Publishing and its magazine publication Postscripts were both short-listed, which most probably split the vote) and even websites; our own UKSFBN-precursor site, The Alien Online, was short-listed a couple of times in recent years. Which was very gratifying, of course, but also extremely wrong, as none of us (myself, Sandy Auden and our fellow contributors) would ever have considered ourselves to be a 'small press' per se.

Hence my minor agitation towards re-naming the category something like 'Best Independent Press or Publication', which I think could conceivably cover a multitude of sins and also be a lot more comprehensible to the BFS voters. I suggested it when I was on the committee a few years back, then brought it up at a couple of AGMs, but was told I had to send some sort of official letter of request to the committee. Never quite got round to doing that (so I suppose I can't have been that bothered, really...) but partly also because I didn't want it to sound like sour grapes on my part.

The committee has, however, finally combined the 'Best Anthology' and 'Best Collection' awards (presumably to free up enough in the kitty for the new, 'Best non-fiction' statuette) so fair play to them. Hey, I wonder if websites could be nominated for that new 'Best non-fiction' category? Hmmm. It doesn't specifically say so on the voting info page. Too late, anyhow. I sent in my recommendations a week ago.

And now, all you BFS members should do the same.

May 7, 2007 | Filed Under Books, Publishing | 3 Comments

Poll Results: Alt.Fiction 2008: 2 day event, or what?

May 4, 2007 | Filed Under Books | Leave a Comment

I am Jack's complete lack of blog time…

A wise blogger once ~~said~~ blogged words to the effect of:

1) Don't blog if you're too insanely busy to blog (which I most definitely am - head down on my major project, making good progress though...)

2) Don't blog if you're feeling blue (which I'm not, I'm actually really enjoying being this busy, as odd as that might sound... but it's still sage advice)

3) Don't blog if you haven't got anything worthwhile to say (but I have, I've got loads to stuff to talk about - new arrivals, recommended reading, recommended tunes, links to here, there and everywhere - just no time to talk in... no time dammit!)

Back as soon as I can be...

May 2, 2007 | Filed Under Life | 4 Comments