Which reminded me of this other sff/music collision, which I found on some website or other recently (can’t remember where, sorry), and liked for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that it’s using possibly my single favourite song to have emerged from the 1990s Britpop frenzy:

In fact, let’s just have the proper version too, so that anyone unfortunate enough not to have heard it can do so:

Obviously, if you don’t like Britpop in general or Pulp in particular, or indeed that specific song, this post will have been a bit of a wash-out for you.  Sorry about that (although I know it’s too late to apologise now, down here at the bottom).

Me like.  Full gallery, taken from a wider range of publications, is at Pink Tentacle, a rather good blog of Japanese culture and technology, which is well worth more extensive browsing.  Check out, for example, the cool rice paddy art and the sfnal mega-projects proposed by Shimizu Corporation.

First, a wise and insightful (by which I mean complimnetary about my work, obviously) review of Speculative Horizons, Patrick’s St Denis’ anthology coming from Subterranean Press in a couple of months or so.  Apparently orders made through the Subterranean Press website get priority, so that should probably be your first port of call if interested, but it does seem to now be avilable for pre-order through the usual online channels (such as here and here) and they should be able to fill your order assuming it doesn’t sell out elsewhere first.  Either way, get your orders in!  Buy, buy buy!  Or not.  No pressure.

Second, one of the things I like listening to on my tiny little mp3 player: recordings of convention panels.  Yeah, I know.  Most folks like up to the minute tunes from popular musical combos; I like convention panels.  What can I say? (In fact, the truth is, to my knowledge there is not one single piece of music on my mp3 player.  Not a one.  It’s podcasts from top to bottom. Weird, huh?)  Anyway: panels.  You never quite know what you’re going to get with them, but that’s part of the fun.  Wordpunk radio has put out a few recordings from the recent Alt.Fiction event in Derby (which I’d recommend, by the way: I was at the 2008 version, and it was good fun.).  Here they are:

The Publishing Panel

The Writing for Comics Panel

The Authors from BBC Books Panel

The Fantasy Panel

It’s just like you were there yourself!  Virtual conventioneering!  There might be more to come for all I know, but those are the ones they’ve released so far.

Third and finally, I wasted a good two minutes with the entirely pointless I Write Like gizmo.  Here’s the verdicts:

First chapter of Winterbirth: I write like Margaret Mitchell.

Second chapter of The Edinburgh Dead: I write like James Joyce.

The blog post preceding this one: I write like Dan Brown.

So there you have it … wait, What?  Winterbirth is stylistically indistinguishable from Gone With the Wind?  Holy cow.  And as one of the legions of well-intentioned folk who’ve started but never finished Ulysses (and I even quite liked the bits of it I read, just couldn’t bring myself to see it through to the end, and my attention span’s much, much too short these days to launch another attempt on it – in fact, come to think of it, there’s a blog post somewhere in the category: ‘books I really quite like, but despite that never finished’) … anyway, I promise – promise – you The Edinburgh Dead is not remotely Joyceian.  Not remotely.  And surely if my blog posts were Dan Brown duplicates, I’d have an awful lot more readers, wouldn’t I?  And a bigger house, come to that.

Yes, it’s a graveyard with a fortified watchtower in it.  Why, you may wonder, would the good citizens of Edinburgh have found it necessary to defend their cemetries with miniature castles?  Here’s a case where the past, when viewed from enough temporal or moral distance, starts to look every bit as unfamiliar as any invented fantasy world.  It’s a pretty well known, if sordid, tale of our past, so will come as no surprise to many of you, but in 18th and 19th century Edinburgh – and a good few other places in the UK, since this was by no means a purely Edinburgh phenomenom – the dead required heavy duty protection of this sort against the living.  Strange, but very much true.

Fresh corpses were so much in demand for dissection in anatomy classes at the then flourishing universities, and in private anatomy schools of which there were a great many, that a veritable industry sprang up: graverobbing.  As I said, a well known tale, so no great surprise.  But this watchtower thing is a particular flourish on the story that I love.  Several of Edinburgh’s graveyards still have them: fortifications from which armed men could keep watch for the dreaded graverobbers (or Resurrection Men, which is the rather more dramatic name for them I prefer).

When you stop and think about it, it’s just too strange for words.  One of the country’s greatest cities had castellated towers in its cemetries, because a certain number of its citizens, including eminently respectable and indeed famed teachers of the medical sciences, were engaged in a racket that involved exhuming the corpses of innocent fellow citizens and cutting them up for the edification of students.  Weird.  And an enormously tempting historical oddity to play around with in fantactical fiction, of course.  Which brings me back to: the manuscript for The Edinburgh Dead will be going to the publisher soon (i.e. weeks rather than months).

Sub Press are donating 10% of the cover price of all pre-orders to the ACS, and they’ve now extended the period for which that condition applies until the end of June 11th, i.e. if you place a pre-order via this link before close of play Friday, you’ll get not only the book but also the warm glow of supporting a good cause.  And behold, there’s some good stuff in there, as the blurb makes clear:

Speculative fiction is wide in scope and styles, and Speculative Horizons showcases the talent and storytelling skills of five of the genre’s most imaginative voices:

In C. S. Friedman’s “Soul Mate,” it’s love at first sight for Josie at the arts and crafts festival when she meets the handsome Stephan Mayeaux. It all sounds  too good to be true until her newfound boyfriend starts to act strangely and unexplained occurrences begin to take place around her.

In Tobias S. Buckell’s “The Eve of the Fall of Habesh,” contragnartii Jazim must carry out one final assignment before the armies of the Sea People lay waste to the city he loves.

L. E. Modesitt, Jr. returns to the universe of his bestselling Recluce saga in “The Stranger.” A young herder’s existence will be forever changed by the unexpected arrival of the black-clad man recounting tales of angels living on the summit of the Roof of the World.

In “Flint,” Brian Ruckley introduces us to a young and inexperienced shaman who must venture into the spirit world to discover the source of the sickness which afflicts his tribe before they are all wiped out.

Talk to any cop working for Homicide, Narcotics, or Vice, and they’ll tell you that they get the worst cases imaginable. But in Hal Duncan’s “The Death of a Love,” you realize that they have nothing on Erocide

Anyway, here’s indisputable evidence that I’m on to something.  The seventh result on Google is … Lady Gaga.  I rest my case.  All important cultural phenomena (or should that be ephemera?) can be accessed through the gateway of crushed penguins.  Though whether this wholly unintentional Lovecraftian homage truly counts as an important cultural phenomenom I leave you to decide for yourself:

Yikes.  On the sfnal front, Lady Gaga does always make me think of something out of a William Gibson novel.  I suspect most of her fans are thinking of entirely different things while watching her …

As a brain cleanser, here’s the next oddity ‘crushing the fantic penguins’ led me to.  It appears to be a proposal to create some kind of inorganic monstrosity, all in the best interests of humanity.  I think.  I’m not sure I got my head around it all, though it sounds either bonkers or extraordinary:

To be fair, it’s probably not strictly bonkers: there’s a longer talk on the subject at the TED talks site, with much highbrow disucssion of the idea in the comments.

And finally, amalgamorphs.  A pleasing word, though I’m not sure it’s actually made it into any credible dictionary

It’s a 1936 Bugatti, recently bought at auction for … wait for it … over $30 million dollars.  That, in case you were wondering, is a great big pile of money.  Can’t possibly be worth it, you might think, but of course anything is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it, and I do think it’s a rather wonderful hunk of metal.  Those 1930s designers (and 1920s ones, come to that) really had some fantastic instincts.

The other thing of note is that as soon as I saw it, my first thought was exactly the same as the guys on Wordpunk Radio: it’s the Batmobile!  Or at least it’s got a startlingly similar vibe to certain iterations of Batman’s ride in movies and cartoons over the years.  Shame there are apparently only 2 or 3 of these in the world.  A few more of them on our streets would add a veneer of spectacle and class.

What is your favourite drink while reading?

Don’t actually drink much while reading (what if I spilled something on the book?  Horror!).  But tea is pretty much my favourite drink in all non-social settings, so that’d get my vote.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

Horrify might be a bit strong, but it definitely makes me a bit queasy.  I like my books clean so I’m highly unlikely to start scrawling annotations in one.  The only exception would be if I was reading the book for research, but even then I’m much more likely to take notes separately.

How do you keep your place while reading a book?  Bookmarks?  Dog-ears?  Laying the book flat open?

I feel a faint pang of guilt when considering this question.  I suspect the appropriate answer for a true bibliophile, someone who gives books as physical objects the full love and respect they deserve, is Bookmark.  But I haven’t used one of those in years and years and years.  I’m a dog-ear man through and through these days.  In my defence, I would never, ever mark my place by laying a book flat open other than for a matter of moments (like when going to get another cup of tea or something). Testing book spines to destruction is not my thing.

In fact, now that I think about it, it’s not quite that simple.  I read a lot of graphic novels, and I’d never dog-ear one of those.  It’s never hard to find where you left off in a graphic novel, ‘cos of the pictures and all, so memory works just fine for them.  Also, on the rare occasions when I’m reading a hardback, I’d never dream of dog-earing: that’s what the flaps of the dustjacket are for.  So it’s actually just the poor old paperbacks – which is what I mostly read, admittedly – that get the dog-ear treatment.  I guess the mass produced, mildly disposable feel of paperbacks makes it feel psychologically acceptable.

Fiction, nonfiction or both?

Both.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of a chapter, or can you stop anywhere?

Unless in an advanced state of exhaustion (or possibly boredom, I suppose) I’ll always be looking for a natural break in the text before I set a book down.  Leaving things in the middle of a scene would make feel a bit fidgety.

Are you the type of person to throw a book across the room or on the floor if the author irritates you?

Nah.  I’m the type of person to just quietly stop reading, put the book aside and go looking for another one if I’m not enjoying it.  If I found the actual author irritating rather than just the book, that would be a different matter: then, I’m probably not going to be reading one of their books in the first place, I suppose.  Come to think of it, I very rarely find books irritating: you can like or dislike a book, but I tend to think life’s too short to get seriously irritated by a book. (There are exceptions, of course, but we won’t get into that …)

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop and look it up right away?

I might, but it’s not happened in quite a long time, as far as I can remember.  I tend not to read the kind of books that would contain a significant number of words I don’t know.  Me no like think too hard.  Either that or I’ve got a truly brobdingnagian vocabulary.

What are you currently reading?

Most recently completed: Godland volume 4.  Thing I was reading last night: The Kalevala.  Thing I’ve been reading intermittently for ages (for research purposes), and may well be consulting again today: Burke & Hare by Owen Dudley Edwards (long out of print).

What is the last book you bought?

The aforementioned Godland volume 4.  Although I’ve got another graphic novel – Scalped Volume 3 – on its way to me (UK postal system permitting).

Are you the type of person who reads one book at a time, or can you read more than one?

Ha.  I wish I was the type of person who only reads one book at a time.  I used to be that person, back when I had an attention span, and plenty of time at my disposal.  Now I’m more likely to have as many as half a dozen books on the go at any given time, scattered around the house.  Some of them’ll never get finished, some of them are re-reads, some of them will go on hiatus and I’ll come back to in a month or three’s time.  It’s a shambles.  But, of course, some of them’ll grab hold of me despite my pathetic shortcomings, by force of quality or style or whatever, and force me to read them straight through.

Do you have a favourite time/place to read?

Not relevant.  It’s not a question of where and when I would like to read, it’s a question of where and when I can read.  Which as often as not amounts to in bed, at night.

Do you prefer series books or stand alones?

Don’t care.  I’m all about the quality, man.  If it’s good, I’m in.

Is there a specific book or author you find yourself recommending over and over?

Lots.  Dan Simmons, for the Hyperion books and The Terror rather than his whole catalogue.  Guy Gavriel Kay for pretty much his whole catalogue, at least as much of it as I’ve read.  Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.  War and Peace.  I could go on and on.

How do you organize your books? (by genre, title, author’s last name etc.)

Every couple of years – sometimes more often, sometimes less – I will make a valiant attempt to impose some sort of order on the books in the house.  I don’t try for anything too ridiculously ambitious.  Just aim to get all the spec fic clustered together, with all a given author’s books next to each other; get the non-fiction in a group, with a very vague common-sensical arrangement by topic or theme.  Literary fiction here.  Poetry – all three or four books of it – there.  Graphic novel series in sequential order, all grouped by publisher.  That kind of thing.  It doesn’t seem like too much to ask, really, not in the grand scheme of things.  Apparently it is, as the system’s usually displaying severe signs of wear and tear within a few months.  Sigh.

Fittingly, the first announcement on the new website is about a new story: my name is one of those appearing on a short anthology called Speculative Horizons.  It’s coming from Subterranean Press in the autumn, and is edited by Patrick St Denis of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist fame.  This is cool for various reasons, including that (a) Subterranean Press is a small press of very high repute so it’s nice to have even this slight involvement with them, and (b) my fellow authors in this anthology are of even higher repute so it’s even nicer to be assoicated with them in this way.  It’s also cool because 10% of the income from pre-orders made until the end of 21st May is being donated to the American Cancer Society.  So if this nifty little anthology is the sort of thing that might tempt you, please consider placing an order in the next few days!

I should add: no, my story in Speculative Horizons is not a Godless World story.  I wrote it just after finishing the trilogy, and really felt like turning out something a bit different. So it is fantasy, and it does involve death, and there is some violence and unpleasantness, but it’s also a bit more light-hearted than the Godless World stuff.  I’d quite like to write more stories featuring the same characters some day, since I know a lot more stuff that happens to them, but whether that’ll ever come to pass or not we’ll have to wait and see …