tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6881955190673497242024-03-13T00:46:45.037+00:00The Gutterbound StargazerDr Glyn MorganUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger62125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-21228101098945038332019-08-04T19:33:00.001+01:002019-08-04T19:36:57.914+01:00The First Reviews for Imagining the Unimaginable<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i9q0tjTMFPs/XUckjBCpiZI/AAAAAAAAnoE/I3dHlDjVZiwIyK2RCc7HTIWxKpKZZ6q8ACLcBGAs/s1600/Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="615" data-original-width="421" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i9q0tjTMFPs/XUckjBCpiZI/AAAAAAAAnoE/I3dHlDjVZiwIyK2RCc7HTIWxKpKZZ6q8ACLcBGAs/s320/Cover.jpg" width="217" /></a>I'm delighted and somewhat over-awed to have received the first two reviews for my forthcoming monograph <i>Imagining the Unimaginable</i>. Not only are they lovely and flattering reviews but they're from two wonderful scholars on the back of whose own excellent work my study is in no small part built upon. Thank you to both!<br />
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“At once theoretically sophisticated and readable, Glyn Morgan's study makes a notable contribution to the field of Holocaust literature by showing how Anglo-American speculative fiction – a genre encompassing science fiction, fantasy, and alternate history – has reflected, as well as shaped, the evolving memory of the Holocaust.” <b>– Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Professor of History, Fairfield University, USA</b><br />
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“Expanding the canon and extending the debate about representation, this thoughtful, wide-ranging and critically-aware book charts new territory in our understanding both of the Holocaust and of speculative fiction.” <b>– Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK</b></div>
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<a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/imagining-the-unimaginable-9781501350566/">The book is out in January 2020 from Bloomsbury Academic</a>.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-79872479163798357872019-07-26T14:56:00.000+01:002019-07-26T14:57:45.481+01:00My WorldCon Schedule: Dublin 2019At the Dublin 2019 Worldcon I'll be presenting a short paper about some of the issues and questions we're asking in the upcoming Science Fiction exhibition at the Science Museum:<br />
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<b><u>"Rethinking Science Fiction in a Museum Setting"</u></b><br />
<i>18 Aug 2019, Sunday 15:30 - 16:20, Odeon 6 (Academic) (Point Square Dublin)</i><br />
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I'll also be appearing on the following panels:<br />
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<b><u>Educating Children in How to Avoid a Dystopia</u></b><br />
<i>16 Aug 2019, Friday 16:00 - 16:50, Wicklow Room-2 (CCD) </i><br />
Dystopian and utopian societies are popular in YA novels likeThe Hunger Games. However, serious ethical concerns about technology, sustainable resources as well as complicated political structures are often glossed over. What should children know about the dangers associated with these societies? What environmental and human costs are in fictional worlds and how do they relate to the real world?<br />
<i>Amy Sundberg, Dr Glyn Morgan (The Science Museum, London), Dr Wanda Kurtçu (California State University, Hayward) (Moderator), Nicole Givens Kurtz (Mocha Memoirs Press)</i><br />
<i><br /></i><b><u>Luddites of SF</u></b><br />
<i>17 Aug 2019, Saturday 17:00 - 17:50, Liffey Room-1 (CCD)</i><br />
Not all SF evangelises about technology; many genre works actively critique it. But SF that protests or criticises tech is labelled anti-tech or Luddite, even though the original Luddites protested only tech they saw as anti-humanist. Can SF reclaim the original meaning and change the narrative?<br />
<i>Renee Sieber (McGill University) (Moderator), Dr Glyn Morgan (The Science Museum, London), Auston Habershaw (MCPHS University), Avner Shahar-Kashtan.</i><br />
<i><br /></i><b><u>Portrayals of mental health in genre</u></b><br />
<i>18 Aug 2019, Sunday 12:00 - 12:50, Wicklow Hall 2A (Dances) (CCD)</i><br />
<u>Content warning: may include discussions of suicide and self-harm, mental illness and ableism, eating disorders.</u><br />
Mental health used well can drive a story, create believable motives for characters and even greater awareness amongst the audience. However, these issues are not always treated sensitively or realistically. This panel will explore examples of mental health issues in genre fiction and consider their implications and accuracy.<br />
<i>Alasdair Stuart (Escape Artists) (Moderator), Penny Jones, Dr Glyn Morgan (The Science Museum, London), Devin Madson</i><br />
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A really interesting selection of stuff, I'm excited to be taking part. Come and say hello if you see me at any point!<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-12040296456648426292018-03-05T00:18:00.001+00:002018-04-15T13:50:43.373+01:00SF Interviews Mar-Jun '18Sci-Fi Sessions continues apace with a wide range of events schedules over the comings months. As ever, these events will be held in the art gallery space in the basement of Waterstones Gower Street. Tickets will appear on Waterstones.com soon but in the meantime place these dates in your diaries.<br />
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<b>March 19th: </b>#SciFiSessions no. 6 - Zoe Gilbert and James Brogden.</div>
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<b>April 16th:</b> #SciFiSessions no. 7 - Golden Age Science Fiction panel (in association with the British Library) with Mike Ashley, Pat Cadigan, John Clute, and Roger Luckhurst.<br />
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<b>May 14th:</b> #SciFiSessions no. 8 - Claire North, Megan Hunter, and Anne Corlett.<br />
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<b>June 13th:</b> #SciFiSessions no. 9 - Emma Newman and Adrian Tchaikovsky.<br />
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Hope to see you there!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com082 Gower St, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 6EQ, UK51.522448 -0.1321809999999459325.8673765 -41.616555999999946 77.177519499999988 41.352194000000054tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-72127349304094288732018-01-06T14:09:00.000+00:002018-01-06T14:09:49.498+00:00SF Interviews Jan-Feb '18A new year brings new SF interviews. I'll be talking to five authors in January and February and as ever it would be great to see you there.<br />
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<b>Mon 15th Jan</b> - #SciFiSessions no. 4 with Lucy Hounsom, Vic James, and Anna Smith Spark in <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/bookshops/gower-street">Waterstones, Gower Street</a> [<a href="https://www.waterstones.com/events/sci-fi-sessions-the-fantasy-edition-with-lucy-hounsom-vic-james-and-anna-smith-spark/london-gower-street">tickets</a>]<br />
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<b>Mon 15th Feb</b> - #SciFiSessions no. 5 with Gareth Powell and E. J. Swift in <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/bookshops/gower-street">Waterstones, Gower Street</a> [tickets coming soon]Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-56468978167603134852017-10-22T23:33:00.003+01:002017-10-22T23:38:51.343+01:00SF Interviews Oct-Nov '17I may post about these in more detail later, but for now here's a schedule.<br />
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I've got a busy few weeks ahead of me interviewing a real variety of excellent writers of SF, if you're around then central London then some of these talks might be of interest to you:<br />
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<b>Mon 30th Oct</b>: #SciFiSessions no. 2 with Alison Littlewood and M.R. Carey in <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/bookshops/gower-street">Waterstones, Gower Street</a> [<a href="https://www.waterstones.com/events/search/shop/gower-street">Tickets</a>]<br />
<b>Weds 8th Nov</b>: Cory Doctorow and Ada Palmer in <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/bookshops/gower-street">Waterstones, Gower Street</a> [<a href="https://www.waterstones.com/events/search/shop/gower-street">Tickets</a>]<br />
<b>Thurs 9th Nov</b>: Gary Budden and M. John Harrison in <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/bookshops/gower-street">Waterstones, Gower Street</a> [<a href="https://www.waterstones.com/events/search/shop/gower-street">Tickets</a>]<br />
<b>Weds 22nd Nov</b>: Anne Charnock for the BSFA monthly meet, upstairs in <a href="http://www.artillery-arms.co.uk/">The Artillery Arms</a> [FREE]<br />
<b>Thurs 23rd Nov</b>: #SciFiSessions no. 3 with Nick Harkaway and Paul McAuley in <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/bookshops/gower-street">Waterstones, Gower Street</a> [<a href="https://www.waterstones.com/events/search/shop/gower-street">Tickets</a>]<br />
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I've given myself a hell of a lot of reading to prepare for all these, but it's going to be worth it to meet and chat to so many excellent writers about so many marvellous books. Please do join us if you're able.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-79425825833259123122017-08-27T13:00:00.000+01:002017-08-27T13:00:32.466+01:00#SciFiSessions 1: Adam RobertsI'm really excited to be able to announce a new series of monthly events at <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/bookshops/gower-street">Waterstones on Gower Street in Bloomsbury</a>. Each month I'll be talking to some science fiction, fantasy, or horror writers about their work. The aim is to showcase some of the most mind-expanding, exciting, innovative, and fun fiction in our genre today and we're calling these events Sci-Fi Sessions!<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wEditj3UmsQ/WaHhN583P_I/AAAAAAAAcaE/Jk4xRTSUXjgjhvebogQylMwOioJn2-QUwCLcBGAs/s1600/AR2016photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="620" height="192" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wEditj3UmsQ/WaHhN583P_I/AAAAAAAAcaE/Jk4xRTSUXjgjhvebogQylMwOioJn2-QUwCLcBGAs/s320/AR2016photo.jpg" width="320" /></a>Our first session will be held on <b>September 25th at 6.30pm</b> and I'm delighted to be welcoming Adam Roberts, three times-nominee for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, professor of 19th Century literature at Royal Holloway University, and a leading scholar of science fiction. Adam will be discussing his latest novel <i>The Real-Town Murders</i>: a murder mystery thriller in the style of Alfred Hitchcock, set in near-future England. Adam has been a keynote speaker for me for both <a href="http://currentresearchinspeculativefiction.blogspot.co.uk/">CRSF </a>and <a href="https://sidewaysintime.wordpress.com/">Sideways in Time</a>, and I wrote a chapter for <a href="http://www.gylphi.co.uk/books/Roberts">the collection of essays based on his work</a> edited by Anna McFarlane and Christos Callow and published by Gylphi in 2016. I've known Adam for a number of years now, and been a fan of his fiction for even longer, so I can be sure this will be an entertaining and insightful conversation.<br />
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As a bonus, he'll also be joined by another exciting writer who will be announcing in the coming days. Watch this space!<br />
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Tickets for the event are £6 (£4 for students), you get a glass of wine on arrival, and if you buy a book on the night you can claim your ticket price as a discount. You can buy them in store or online, here: <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/events/sci-fi-sessions-adam-roberts/london-gower-street">https://www.waterstones.com/events/sci-fi-sessions-adam-roberts/london-gower-street</a><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com082 Gower St, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 6EQ, UK51.5224783 -0.1320187000000032651.521860800000006 -0.13327920000000326 51.5230958 -0.13075820000000327tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-62723834533702621732017-08-26T21:17:00.000+01:002017-08-26T21:17:07.189+01:00Madness is Better than DefeatOn Wednesday 13th September I'll be conducting my first interview as a resident of London: talking to <i>Granta </i>Best Young Novelist (2013) <a href="http://www.nedbeauman.co.uk/">Ned Beauman</a> about his fourth and latest novel <i>Madness is Better than Defeat </i>for Waterstones Gower Street.<br />
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Ned Beauman is the author of <i>Boxer, Beetle</i>, <i>The Teleportation Accident</i>, and <i>Glow</i>. His books have been nominated for numerous awards and are filled with a love and appreciation for science fiction, narrative trickery, and darkly wicked humour. It should be a good evening.<br />
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Tickets are £6 (£4 with a student card), you get a glass of wine on arrival, and if you buy a book on the night you can claim your ticket price as a discount. You can buy them in store or online, here: <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/events/madness-is-better-than-defeat-an-evening-with-ned-beauman/london-gower-street">https://www.waterstones.com/events/madness-is-better-than-defeat-an-evening-with-ned-beauman/london-gower-street</a><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com082 Gower St, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 6EQ, UK51.5224783 -0.1320187000000032651.521860800000006 -0.13327920000000326 51.5230958 -0.13075820000000327tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-9364585492970615722017-03-12T18:10:00.003+00:002017-03-12T18:10:59.629+00:00King's College London Speculations - 23rd March, 6pm<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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On the 23rd March I'll be a giving a talk as part of <a href="http://www.kcl.ac.uk/">King's College London</a>'s new series of talks "Speculations". To be held at 6pm at K6.63 King's Building, Strand Campus, King's College London<br /><br />My talk is entitled <b>Blurred Lines: Interplay between Biography and the Fantastic in the Graphic Memoir</b><div>
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Comic books represent a narrative medium which fuses visual information with text in a manner very likely unique, certainly amongst commercial markets in the West. Perhaps because of their pulpish origins, and their recent history of writing themselves into literary respectability, comics and graphic novels have an unquestioned ease of association with speculative fiction and the fantastic. This presentation will examine a subset of texts which exploit this association by blending elements of the fantastic with the non-fiction of graphic memoir. These fictive breaks within otherwise realist narratives challenge traditional notions of biography and memoir and their necessary adherence to mimetic representation.<br /><br />As such, these blurred narratives become especially useful when discussing experiences which challenge the limits of communicative narrative: trauma and ill mental health, as such this examination of fictive incursions will use examples from Steven Seagle’s <i>It’s A Bird</i>, Katie Green’s <i>Lighter Than My Shadow</i> and Paul Dini’s <i>Dark Night</i>, amongst others.<div>
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The talk is free to attend so if you're in the area please do come along.</div>
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I was invited to present my paper by the series organiser <a href="https://twitter.com/S1nead_Murphy">Sinéad Murphy</a>.</div>
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The facebook event for the talk <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/101768443691748/">is here</a>.</div>
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'Speculations' engages in current research in speculative and science fiction, but with a particular interest in intersections across a spectrum of disciplines which engage in varieties of speculative thought.<br /><br />'Speculations' is supported by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King's College London.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-30760788790106686662017-02-25T00:40:00.000+00:002017-04-28T15:00:54.587+01:00A Conversation with V.E. Schwab (August 2016)<div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: center;"><i>A Conjuring of Light</i>, released 21.02.17<br />
Disclosure: I got this copy free courtesy of Titan Books, <br />
as I did with my copy of <i>This Savage Song</i> for the interview</td></tr>
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<i style="font-style: italic;">A Conjuring of Light</i><i>, </i>the final book in V.E. Schwab's fantasy trilogy <i>Darker Shade of Magic</i> series has been released and I'm looking forward to diving into it. Victoria <a href="http://www.tor.com/2016/02/03/ve-schwab-a-darker-shade-of-magic-television-adaptation/">has also announced</a> that following a bidding war the series has <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/gerard-butler-neal-moritz-team-adapt-fantasy-novel-a-darker-shade-magic-978771">now been optioned by Sony</a>, with Gerard Butler's production company G-BASE set to produce, the intention being to turn this colourful and exciting trio of books into a limited run series, with Victoria herself writing the pilot!</div>
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With all this going on, it seemed that it was the perfect time to finally get around to doing something with the audio recording I made when I interviewed Victoria for an event in Waterstones Liverpool in August 2016. I was asked to sit on the audio for a couple of months because we accidentally leaked some teeny details about the book cover for <i>A Conjuring of Light</i> which weren't supposed to be out in the world at that time, but then I got really busy finishing my thesis and all that entailed and so this audio just sat in on my hard drive for a while.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Interview in action</td></tr>
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At some point I'll come back and transcribe the interview, and re-post it here, but in the meantime have a listen to the original audio. We mainly discuss the first book in another V.E. Schwab series <i>This Savage Song</i> as that was the book being toured at the time, but we also cover <i>Darker Shade of Magic</i> stuff, some <i>Vicious</i> stuff, and some other nice anecdotes. Overall it was a fun interview and Victoria was the perfect subject. Thanks again to her, Lydia at Titan Books, and Waterstones for making it happen.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: center;">Some of the audience in Waterstones Liverpool</td></tr>
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NB - For now I've left the questions from the audience in the audio. Because we only had two mics it's almost impossible to hear the actual question so there are quiet pauses towards the end of the recording, but I paraphrase the questions where I can. Later I might come back and try to do something to improve the quality here if I can.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-16379425111715998352016-06-22T20:32:00.002+01:002016-06-22T20:32:36.800+01:00Space in Science and Popular CultureThis week I was delighted to be invited to chair a panel at the <a href="https://www.ifb2016.com/">International Festival for Business 2016</a> being held at the Liverpool Convention Centre. Organised as part of their "Blue Skies" programme in collaboration with Liverpool's <a href="http://www.writingonthewall.org.uk/festival.html">Writing on the Wall</a> literature festival. Tricia Sullivan had been invited to participate but was unable to make it.<div>
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I was the chair of the panel which also included Ra Page (founder and editorial manager of<a href="http://commapress.co.uk/"> Comma Press</a>) and Andy Sawyer (librarian of the <a href="https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/library/sca/science-fiction/colldescs/foundation.html">Science Fiction Foundation Collection</a>). We had a really interesting conversation about the interplay, overlaps and inconsistencies between space travel and exploration in reality and in science fiction.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-29a_oG2H44o/V2rmwwpIF8I/AAAAAAAAVnI/OWjFAfm_EVQwLMAL-nHoWDebpAWOLfqhACLcB/s1600/IFB2016.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="282" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-29a_oG2H44o/V2rmwwpIF8I/AAAAAAAAVnI/OWjFAfm_EVQwLMAL-nHoWDebpAWOLfqhACLcB/s400/IFB2016.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">L-R: Me, Andy Sawyer, Ra Page</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
We touched on the new space races between developing economies such as China, India, Nigeria and others, and the race between different commercial companies, mainly in the USA. The panel also highlighted that co-operation, as well as competition, has been at the forefront of humanity's space adventure with the<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html"> International Space Station</a> as an obvious example. Andy commented about how this would likely please Arthur C. Clarke and how elements of contemporary space science are still within the realms of what he was interested in, despite how far we've come from many of the ideas of science fiction in the early days of space travel.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There was some scepticism about relying on commercial bodies to push us onwards in our space endeavours because of both the financial risks they may be unwilling to take, but also because their visions can often rest on one enthusiastic entrepreneur who won't always be around to pursue the projects into long term goals: Richard Branson driving Virgin Galactic forward for example.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The militarisation of space was talked about, both as a risk in the future but also as a present day danger given how little we know about what is floating above our heads. This connected with the dangers of space given how crowded the immediate vicinity is becoming with junk, <a href="http://gb.imdb.com/title/tt1454468/">Gravity</a> (2013) depicting these dangers on the screen.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OFtG_QZd74c/V2rnPkfSH8I/AAAAAAAAVnQ/85VkP7fsXeQpeQppjX4DCPyrt4JXTp7cQCLcB/s1600/IFB2016%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OFtG_QZd74c/V2rnPkfSH8I/AAAAAAAAVnQ/85VkP7fsXeQpeQppjX4DCPyrt4JXTp7cQCLcB/s400/IFB2016%2B2.jpg" width="226" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In front of Writing on the Wall's time machine</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
We spoke about the contrasts between science fiction's fondness for dystopia or disaster fiction in space versus the actual space programmes we've embarked upon which are largely presented as being utopian in design and aim.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It was also underlined that science fiction has certainly had an influence on space travel on a personal level with a great many of the men and women who are engaged in space science citing reading and watching science fiction as being amongst their earliest inspirations. This becomes evident when you notice, for example, that of the five <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Vehicle">Automated Transfer Vehicles</a> (ATVs) constructed and flown by the European Space Agency, four were named after European scientists and the fifth was named Jules Verne. (Similarly, the robotic barges used by <a href="http://www.spacex.com/">Space X</a> in their ambitious rocket landing procedure are named after ships in <a href="http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/banks_iain_m">Iain M. Banks</a>'s Culture novels: <i>Just Read the Instructions</i> and <i>Of Course I Still Love You</i>; not to mention the space shuttle test vehicle <i>Enterprise</i> and the Virgin Galactic ship of the same name).</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It was a fun event to do, if in (for me) a slightly unconventional setting of a business festival. Thanks to IFB2016 and WoW for having me and to my co-panelists for being great conversationalists.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-74298140190901048222016-04-20T22:28:00.000+01:002016-04-20T22:30:11.550+01:00Call for Papers: Vector Special Issue: Science Fiction and MusicWe are seeking to publish a few special themed issues of <i>Vector: The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association</i> in coming years, tackling various themes and topics which we feel are under represented in the articles we see more regularly. The first of these will be a special issue on <b>Science Fiction and Music</b>.<br />
<br />
We are seeking 4000 word articles on the topic of science fiction and music, if you would like to discuss a concept or submit an abstract prior to submitting your article then please get in touch, but this is not a necessary requirement.<br />
<br />
We are interested in papers on all aspects of science fiction and music which may include, but not be limited to:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Specific artists or groups</li>
<li>Specific pieces or albums</li>
<li>Comparative studies of musical pieces against each other, or against literary texts</li>
<li>Papers on popular music</li>
<li>Papers on classical music</li>
<li>Papers on soundtracks and scores</li>
<li>Papers on the use of music within science fiction of all mediums</li>
<li>The representation of music in literature</li>
<li>The representation of literature in music</li>
</ul>
<br />
Articles are due by September 19th, and accepted articles will appear in print in an issue of <i>Vector </i>at the end of 2016, or the beginning of 2017.<br />
<br />
Please send your papers with a short bio note to the <i>Vector </i>editor e-mail: <a href="mailto:vector.editors@gmail.com">vector.editors@gmail.com</a><br />
Feel free to also send any queries to this address.<br />
<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-41196890703967325112016-04-05T19:03:00.002+01:002016-04-05T19:05:42.334+01:00Interview with David Mitchell<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Last year I had the honour of interviewing David Mitchell about his novel <i>The Bone Clocks</i>. The interview took place in August 2015 at <a href="https://ohmeohmyliverpool.co.uk/">Oh Me Oh My</a>, Liverpool and was organised by Sceptre Books and Waterstones Liverpool. </b><b>I transcribed the interview and it can be found below. This transcription originally appeared in Vector #281. Quotations from it also formed an important part of my analysis of The Bone Clocks which <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/war-in-pieces-violence-and-conflict-in-david-mitchells-the-bone-clocks">appeared in the <i>LA Review of Books</i></a> in 2015.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1pWOyHCYqLo/VwP1HyHz43I/AAAAAAAAUNc/DYkEShqDm6oKJ9gCACEBwb88fPY-BqVew/s1600/20150813_222353.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1pWOyHCYqLo/VwP1HyHz43I/AAAAAAAAUNc/DYkEShqDm6oKJ9gCACEBwb88fPY-BqVew/s320/20150813_222353.jpg" width="180" /></a><b>Glyn Morgan</b>: It’s
sort of a homecoming for you, in a sense, because you were born just up the
road.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>David Mitchell</b>:
Yeah, I was born in 1969 in Ainsdale, which I guess, back then was a newish,
probably aspiring-lower-middle-class-ish branching off of Southport, which I
understand was considered quite posh. Two of my earliest memories: one was
playing in sand dunes at Ainsdale and a horse running past a high speed, along
the surf… this is sounding a bit like <i>Chariots
of Fire</i> isn’t it… and my mum saying “that’s Red Rum”. The second memory is
being brought to Liverpool for a birthday treat, and the treat was going to
Littlewoods and having a ham sandwich! I can still taste it, this was about
1974 I guess (we moved down South in the mid-70s, hence my accent), but it was
white bread, margarine, and a single layer of ham, but you know how – even when
there’s not much ham in it, because it’s the mid-70s – the ham sort of
impregnates the crust around it. I’d nibble off the crust first, but it was a
slightly more hammy crust than a non-ham sandwich crust would have been, and I
just remember how fantastic it tasted. Sorry, that’s my North West story,
exclusive to Oh Me Oh My, I’ve never told that story before.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: I was
thinking about the connections between yourself and Liverpool. Not just the
near-Southport connection but your second novel <i>number9dream</i> (2001) is a song by one of Liverpool’s favourite sons,
and I only realised the other day that <i>Cloud
Atlas</i> (2004) is named after a song by one of Yoko Ono’s other husbands.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: That’s deep
research! Yes, it was a Japanese composer called Toshi Ichiyanagi. So yes,
there are these hidden connections going on. There’s football as well, which is
like your daemon in the Philip Pullman books: once it’s set, it’s set for life.
Whoever you’re supporting when you’re five, for better or worse (and for the
last few years my God it’s been the worse, but maybe this year will be
different) they’ll be your team for life. So, I think of Liverpool every time I
click onto <i>The Guardian</i> Sport website
and see how they’ve done and it’s like a web of connectivity with this fine city.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: How would you
describe <i>The Bone Clocks</i> (2014) if
you were summarising it to someone without giving too much away, but just
enough?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: In the States
they have something called an elevator pitch which is where you pitch a film to
a wolfish film executive when you’re trapped in an elevator before he gets out,
or she gets out, at the top. So the elevator pitch for <i>Bone Clocks</i>…? It is the story of its protagonist, Holly Sykes, who
we first meet as a fifteen year old, kind of teenage punkette, then we encounter
her as a young woman, a girlfriend in the 90s, then as a mother and a partner,
then as a widow, and then as an accidental writer of sorts, and finally in the
2040s in the West of Ireland as a grandmother. Throughout this arc of a life,
her life is erupted into by a battle between two groups of pseudo-immortals:
one of which is more or less benign, the other which is decidedly predatory.
Holly is, in the beginning, a fairly unwitting pawn (in chess terms) in this
battle but by the end she just might be its decisive weapon. Ping. The elevator
doors open.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
[At this point David reads from <i>The Bone Clocks</i>. He reads from section 3 of the novel: “The Wedding
Bash”. Pages 268-274 of the 2015 paperback published by Sceptre. It’s a section
narrated from the point of view of Ed Brubeck, a war reporter, attending a
family wedding in 2004. The specific part which David read from details a
frantic run through the hotel and out onto the pier outside after Ed wakes from
a nap to realise that his six year old daughter has disappeared whilst he
slept. Whilst not relevant to what follows in this interview, it’s interesting
to note that in the course of his mad dash through the hotel Ed stumbles upon a
science fiction convention, a moment which leads to some humour amidst the
adrenaline.]<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: There’s a lot
of horror in <i>The Bone Clocks</i>…<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: And not just
the quality of the writing!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: …I’m not even
going to touch that, because it’s just so patently untrue. There are lots of
different types of horror in <i>The Bone
Clocks </i>and that section in particular is definitely the horror of someone
who is a parent.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: It’s based on
two real life events. One <i>being</i> with
a dad who lost his kid at a busy Japanese festival in quite a large town, some
years ago. And of course part of me was “of course I’ll help” and feeling
terrible, but there was the evil part that is inside every single writer that
was “mmm, must take notes”. We did find the boy, he was fine! Then, as if in
cosmic revenge, some years ago I lost my daughter in a drapers shop in the
small town in West Cork where I live and I was afraid she had left and was
wandering on the streets outside when she was happily sitting in a corner
playing with curtain rings. It took me about twelve minutes to find her and
those were the worst twelve minutes of my life.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: But at least
you used them to good effect…<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: Ah it’s a
writer’s consolation that, no matter how awful it is, at least one day you can
use it. Something happened a few months back and you know when you’re blubbing
so badly that snot is coming out of your eyes and tears are coming out of your
nose, and I happened to catch a glimpse of my reflection and I thought “ah so
that’s what I look like, that’s what crying looks like”. That’s a nice
consolation. I interrupted you with a massive interruption, I’m sorry.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: No it’s fine,
I’m here to facilitate interruptions! So, I suppose given the power of that
memory, there’s a lot of you coming through in that character’s voice at that
moment: of you looking for your daughter?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: Yes, through
the prism of Ed.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: People have
referred to you as a ventriloquist or sorts, because of the uncanny way you are
able to do voices and I think in particular your style of novel, where we jump
between different first-person narrators, shows that off to particularly good
effect.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: This might
sound like a weird combination of false modesty and colleague bashing but I
feel like complimenting a writer on his ability to do voices is a bit like
saying to an actor: “wow! When you played that role I thought you were someone
else, I didn’t think you were you!” Isn’t that part of the job? I know
different writers have different specialities, and some have skills that maybe
writers who can’t do voice as perhaps less dexterously have that I don’t have,
so I get that, but I think it should come with the job: it’s part of the craft
and you develop it if you want to develop your craft. The second thing is, it’s
maybe necessitated more in my case: I like the first person, it’s my home style,
it’s my square one. I become someone else and then I know what they’re going to
say and what they’re going to do and that’s the plot and the dialogue taken
care of for starters. I also like the Virginia Woolf <i>To the Lighthouse </i>multiplicity of points of view and once you have
those two things: a fondness for the first person and a fondness for
multiplicity then you better be a half-way decent “ventriloquist” otherwise
your novel will blow up on the runway.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: I’d like to
ask you about the other voices in <i>Bone
Clocks</i> though, and how challenging they were for you to write. First, the
most important character in the book, Holly, who narrates the first and last
sections of the book. She’s also your first female point of view. How hard was
it for you to put yourself in a frame of mind to write a female protagonist?
Was it a different challenge to writing, for example, Jason from <i>Black Swan Green </i>(2006) who is another
teenager in the 1980s?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: Obviously
it’s more daunting because male is my home gender. A lot of fantastic female
writers have written a lot of fantastic female characters, and male characters,
but femininity is their gender. In the same way I’m kind of nervous about
writing Americans because there are all the great American writers who have
written American characters. It’s daunting because it’s easy to publically and
humiliatingly fail. So, with some trepidation is probably the answer. My wife
happens to be female, which due to some recent extremely enlightened
legislation in the Irish Republic is no longer anything that we take for
granted, but she was helpful with that section.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
Secondly, or thirdly, or
fourthly, I can’t remember where we’re up to now - that’s the problem when you
use those number adverbs you can really get into hot water quickly can’t you? –
I’ve got a theory that if you went to a comprehensive school then the future
writer is at an advantage, if you had a more privileged background, then you’re
at a disadvantage once you leave your home stratum. If you went to a
comprehensive school… I was at school with girls like Holly is what I’m trying
to say: they were skinheads, or skinheads’ girlfriends, they wore Doc Martins
with red laces, not knowing that was a National Front thing, but they did it
anyway. Maybe they did know… They would have been quite willing and able to
have kicked the crap out of a bookish, stammering, middle class kid like me.
Once or twice they probably did. But I now thank the memory of their Doc Martin
steel tips landing in my face because it meant that I could study them and
store them away and use them years later and so I drew on my comprehensive
school for Holly. It was hard to get her voice, how you portrayed the demotic:
more vernacular? Earthier accent? How East End should I make her? Should I lose
the “h” with an apostrophe? Do it too much you sound like Dickens’ urchins, if
you don’t do it at all then you’re missing a trick, you’re losing a chance to
develop a character and resonate with what’s in a reader’s mind. So it took me
quite a while to settle on a balance to represent her.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><br /></b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: You had a
similar struggle with your pervious book <i>The
Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet</i> (2010)<i>…</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: That was a
nightmare!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: Because you
were toying with writing in a historically accurate dialogue but that it ended
up reading like <i>Blackadder</i>, I think that’s
a version of the book we’d quite like to see!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: I did, yeah.
It’d be funny for five pages and then it’s just urghh. I wrote it first person
and then hit the problem “what language are they thinking in?” Are they
thinking in 18<sup>th</sup> century English? (Or Dutch or Japanese, represented
in English). In the beginning I combed through 18<sup>th</sup> century novels,
which is a good excuse to read them. Have you ever read Smollett? He’s not read
much these days, it’s really good fun. He’s really smutty! It’s the kind of
book you see in libraries in National Trust houses that are never looked at and
left, but he’s really good if you get the chance.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
I constructed this core of
vocabulary and did about fifteen pages of <i>Jacob
de Zoet </i>in that voice, but yes it was ridiculous. That taught me that if
you get it right you get it wrong: what you have to do is collude with the
reader in the creation of, in this case, bygone-ese, or in the case of Holly a
kind of “East-End-ese”. It’s not accurate but (the closer you get to the present
day the less true this is) sometimes accuracy can be an inhibition, it can be a
disruptor. When you’re writing a historical novel you need to create bygone-ese,
I think there’s a geographical present day version of this too. It’s more
important to chime with how the reader believes people in this demographic did
and do speak than it is get it bang on accurate. The “lest” vs. “in case” argument
is an example of this: “bring your umbrella in case it rains” that’s quite
twentieth century, we used to say “lest”, and so on the border you need to work
out is it “lest” or “in case” we’re dealing with and go with instinct.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: The next
character in <i>Bone Clocks </i>is Hugo
Lamb, who is a completely different proposition to Holly…<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: Oh he was
fun!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: People who’ve
read the book know how loaded a sentence like “he was fun” is in relation to
Hugo. Hugo Lamb is a character people might remember as the cousin of Jason
from <i>Black Swan Green</i>, he’s a pretty
nasty piece of work, let’s put it that way.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: He’s amoral.
I read the <i>Ripley</i> books by Patricia
Highsmith, the first one [<i>The Talented
Mr. Ripley </i>(1955)] is sickeningly gripping: he’s not even immoral, he’s
amoral. He’s an artist of ethical dubiety! So there’s Ripley in there: I want
him to seduce the reader with his charm and then royally shaft them. There’s
also some Sydney Carton from <i>A Tale of
Two Cities</i>: he’s a great character, you think he’s this monster, this
coward, but he’s got a spark of lightness in him that when it <i>really</i> counts it flares up, and I wanted
to give Hugo an ending like that. I wrote the book, handed it in and thought “hang on, he’s still alive! He’s
still out there somewhere!” He’s about thirty-five years younger than he should
be but he’s out there.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: I want to ask
you about Crispin Hershey, whose section was my favourite within the book, but
before I ask you a real question about him I want to ask about something
specific. At one point when we encounter him he’s teaching creative writing, he
advises his students to write letters to themselves as their characters. Is
that an actual technique from your playbook?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: He’s a slowly
self-redeeming, uninviting soul, whose arc is facilitated by his friendship
with Holly, the first real friendship with a woman he’s ever had. He doesn’t
even realise he loves her. He’s clawing up Mount Enlightenment. He is who he
is, but when he talks about writing, that’s him talking about something he
cares about: and he <i>does </i>care about
words, and he <i>is</i> a sentence geek,
this stuff matters to him; that’s when he’s not a fool and he’s not
superficial, it’s pretty much the only time when he cares very deeply, and so
when he speaks about writing he means it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: So these tips
from Crispin Hersey we, as aspiring writers, can take as being reasonably good
tips?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: If you want
to. I say that not to seem clever, but in a way writing is something you spend
your life learning how to do and you never quite get there, you never finish
learning about writing, that’s why it’s such a great job. It’s a combination of
learning other people’s tips and seeing what works for them and also forming
your own core… we’ve been calling them tips but perhaps understandings… of what
writing is and what it’s about, what works for you. It will differ depending on
who you are and what your experiences are, so what Hershey says is how I feel
it works for me at the moment but I wouldn’t say they are prescriptive, I
wouldn’t say I AM THE WAY!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: Whether good
tips or not, I love even the way that you/Hershey talk about writing: saying
that ‘adverbs are the cholesterol in the veins of prose’ and ‘half your adverbs
and the prose pump twice as well’, that’s wisdom you feel you should have on a
T-shirt. But if it was fun to write the sociopathic Hugo Lamb, how much more
fun was it to write the cantankerous author Crispin Hershey?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: It’s always
fun when you get to say the things you don’t get to say. Give him the lines you
have too much respect for hard working people to actually ever offend them by
saying. Hershey is a sort of legitimate outlet for passive aggressive pent-up
fury… But don’t worry!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: I think that
everyone who has read both <i>The Bone
Clocks </i>and <i>Cloud Atlas</i> really
wants to see him in the same room as Timothy Cavendish [one of the narrators
from <i>Cloud Atlas</i>: a small press
publisher who hits the big time].<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: I thought
about it. Maybe I will again in the future. Hershey is my first ever
writer-character, I’ve always avoided it, I was afraid it would seem or feel
somehow incestuous. It’s said somewhere that when a writer starts writing about
writers it’s a sure sign that the creative aquifers have run dry. So when I
wanted to write about writers, or talk about Art (with a capital “A”), then I
used musicians; I translated it into songwriters and composers but then, for
whatever reason, it felt right - like it was time. I wouldn’t do it in a
half-hearted way, I really wanted to write about the world and time spent by an
author on the road, as opposed to in a small hut somewhere. This is where he
lives: he’s more of an author than a writer these days, which given the number
of festivals around the world can happen to people. I’ve known people who you
meet at the beginning when a hardback comes out, at the Hong Kong festival or
something, then my book moves into my past and I write something else, then the
new book comes out and I’m invited to wherever and I meet the same author, and <i>they’re still there</i>, and they’re <i>still</i> promoting the same book! It’s the
curse of winning the Booker by the way… It’s a curse that many of us don’t have
to suffer, including me! But it can be better for the book than it is for the
author. Crispin Hershey is an example of an author whom the mercurial Gods of
Prizes have smiled on once (for his book <i>Desiccated
Embryos</i>) but it has become larger than he is or has been and he is now its
employer. So in a way it’s a cautionary tale. His cardinal vice is vanity, he
believes his own reviews, believes what has been said about him, and he hasn’t
got people around him to remind him to take out the wheelie-bin, to ground him.
So he’s sort of a little reminder to myself to not believe the good reviews,
and to not look at the bad ones either.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: Of course a
bad review plays a key role in Crispin’s section of the book…<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: Which is also
a sort of “wet dream” of a revenge plot which writers have had about revenge on
negative reviewers. I don’t do that but what happens to Crispin might well be
what would happen to me were I to exact revenge on certain people in the media
who will remain nameless… Well I say nameless, except in the next book I might
change the name very slightly, have something awful happen to them and the name
will be close enough that they won’t be <i>sure
</i>if its them, and they’ll go to their graves not knowing if I’ve hexed their
lives through fiction, and the lives of their children and pets… It’s very
petty, but it makes me feel better.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: Well, on the
topic of bad reviews... Whilst I loved the book, there were elements of <i>The Bone Clocks</i> that some people wrote very
harshly about, specifically the fantastic element, which really seemed to stick
in certain reviewers’ craw.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: It did didn’t
it. The same quarters who opened fire on Kazuo Ishiguro for his book <i>The Buried Giant</i>, which I loved. There
seemed to be a call that semi-respectable writers shouldn’t be dabbling in
genre, it can sometimes come from the other side as well…<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: “Don’t play
in our playground”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: Yes. I wanted
each stage of Holly’s life, each section of the book, from the 80s to the 2040s
to a degree to have its own genre. So we have Thatcherite social realism in the
80s. At the other end of the social scale we have a sort of rich kids, Tom
Wolfe <i>Bonfire of the Vanities</i>-ish
thing going on with the 90s. We’ve got a war reportage section in the Ed Brubeck
section, a pastiche in Hershey’s section. A fantasy in the fifth section, and
dystopia in the sixth. For some people that’s kind of against some sort of
unwritten constitution and if you mess around with genre like that within the
covers of a single novel then you DESERVE TO BE TAKEN DOWN! But you write what
you write. You can’t be a slave like that, you just have the book you want to
write and the first loyalty is to that. You have to finish that book, you try
to bring it into being as truly as you can.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: A key part of
the fantasy section are two themes which you’ve used repeatedly throughout your
work: the spirit and reincarnation, and human predation. This seems to be the
section within the book where they meet.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: I’d add a
third, if I may, and that’s mortality. The book, in that section, offers a
Faustian pact which is me having my midlife crisis really. If you could not
grow old, if you could keep the looks you have when you’re young, if you could
have an endless, squanderable bank account of days, what would you be prepared
to pay for that? Would you, for example, be willing to amputate your
conscience? Would you be willing to have all that if someone else had to pay? I
mention this now because fantasy is in service of <i>that</i>. It’s sort of a real theme, not the Faustian pact they’re
offered, but a need to come to a working accommodation with ageing, with the
fact kids are being born the whole time: people are moving into their twenties
and thirties as we’re moving into our forties and fifties. The moment you’re on
the centre stage of the world, the world begins nudging you towards the wings.
It’s <i>Make Room! Make Room! </i>or the old
kids song “and the little one said: roll over, roll over”. As we become members
of an older generation to be superseded by a younger one. This is a social
realist topic, it isn’t fantasy. This is something we need to do! We need a
healthier relationship with aging than fear! And so the jiggery-pokery with
genre is in service of all this.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: It did seem
to me that the reviews that were snottiest about fantastic elements in (to use
a lazy term) “literary fiction”, have the appearance of those that don’t read
much fantasy. They seem to think it’s a genre that’s always play and that’s
incapable of serious topics, themes, tropes and examinations of the human
condition.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: And they seem
to never care to look backwards, I mean what about Dickens? You’ve got <i>Bleak House</i> and someone dying of
spontaneous combustion. Some of the greatest novels ever written are fantasy.
What about <i>Master and Margherita</i>: as
Neil Gaiman pointed out that you’ve got a talking cat who uses a machine gun
and it’s a brilliant novel and it’s about Stalin and totalitarianism and art.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: And all the
books we call magic realism, which is a label I’ve heard you don’t particularly
care for…<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: Have I said
that somewhere?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: At some
point, yes.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: This is the
curse of the internet, it never forgets.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: I suppose to
be fair, I think you were at the time being critical of the term being applied
to British writing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: I feel it was
invented by South American writers in a South American context when they were doing
something very specific that related to the politics of the 70s and 80s in
their region. I felt it was somewhat lazy to transpose it to anyone anywhere
who writes a book where someone suddenly sprouts wings, turns into an angel,
and flies off. But maybe it is okay, I don’t feel that strongly about it
really. But sure, <i>A Hundred Years of
Solitude </i>is a great book, why is that allowed and <i>A Buried Giant </i>isn’t? And who says so? And why does it matter?
Surely the only thing that matters is if the book is any good or not?! Not if
someone has written with particular tropes from a particular genre. Find
something more intelligent to not like the book for. It’s all quite new,
Dickens used fantasy and no one ever called him a fantastic writer, it was all
just writing back then. Why do we need borders in the middle of a book shop?
Why bother with all of this?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: I mentioned
the horror of parenthood earlier, and the fantasy sections are supernatural
horror in a sense, the last sections of the book are something else. It’s stuck
with me. Someone else described it as Post-Anthropocene Horror, post-human age,
or post-oil.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Glyn/Desktop/Abridged%20David%20Mitchell%20transcript.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> I
feel it’s an issue very close to your heart.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: I fear it
will be close to everyone’s heart, or it should be. I’m forty-eight and I might
have had the best of it, I don’t know, we’ll see. We are members of, and
beneficiaries of, a civilisation that is pretty much dependent on oil. I flew
here because of oil; lights, heating. The food that’s in our stomachs right now
that is keeping hunger at bay was produced thanks to an agricultural system
that converts oil into food. The clothes we’re wearing were made in oil powered
factories, by slaves, in other parts of the world and then brought to us by
container-ships: international trade, essentially it’s just oil. Solar power is
great for lightbulbs but we can’t shift stuff, the distribution networks aren’t
there. The food arrives in our supermarkets thanks to a complex distribution
network and it’s just oil, oil, oil. They’re not making any more of the stuff
and what’s left is getting harder and harder to extract and more expensive, in
terms of oil, to extract. The hungriest industry of all is oil extraction, it
sort of eats itself and then gives us the leftovers. But yeah! Our civilisation
is in trouble. Let alone climate change, let alone what that’s doing to our
planet’s life support system and its ability to keep safe our civilisation, to
preserve it, our civilisation is itself an addict of a drug which there is an
ever dwindling supply of. Is that a bit concerning?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>GM</b>: It’s very
concerning, which is why that last section of the book is so affecting.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>DM</b>: Thank you. It
would have been tempting in a way to finish the book at part five, but then I
realised I mustn’t. It would have followed quite an identifiable Hollywood
template where you have the apocalyptic battle and then stop, but actually
there’s been this other thing going on the whole time that Holly’s life has
been following its course, as our lives are following their courses now, our
civilisation is on borrowed time and unless it changes its ways and, depending
on which scientist you speak to perhaps we’re already ten years too late,
perhaps not. We’ll see.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>David ended the discussion with a reading from his then-forthcoming short novel Slade House.
He then took questions from the audience but my dictaphone was unable to
capture them or the replies but I offer here a few brief summaries:</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li>The first question was from a nuclear physicist in the
audience asking about David’s thoughts on that particular form of energy. He
said that he recognised the arguments for its necessity to “plug the gap” but
didn’t really know enough about it. What he did know was very worrying to him
and that was that the legacy of nuclear power has its own horrors and dangers.
He references <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/runit-dome-pacific-radioactive-waste">the Runit Dome </a>in the Marshall Islands, a legacy of nuclear tests
by the USA during the Cold War, the structure holds 111,000 cubic yards of
nuclear waste and is threatened by poor maintenance and rising sea levels.
Similarly, he pointed out that the clean-up and containment costs of the
Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan are roughly equal to the Irish economy, which
clearly means nuclear power isn’t a viable safe option for everyone.</li>
<li>Another question asked him which genres he would most like
to play in next. He replied that he’s been recently very interested in Iceland
and so something with Vikings, or Greenland, or the Sagas, is probably in the
queue. Particularly, he’s interested in writing something set 30 years after
the end of <i>The Bone Clocks </i>and set in
Iceland. He also admitted to being fascinated by the 18<sup>th</sup> century
harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti who was decidedly average until the final
years of his life when he wrote 550 sonatas of brilliance. The inversion of the
more familiar child-prodigy figure appeals to him and he wondered what might
have triggered that sudden awakening of genius.</li>
<li>Finally when asked for further advice for aspiring writers,
David replied: write something every day, feel encouraged when you read what
you wrote last week (even if you think “God this is awful” work out <i>why </i>it is awful), reward yourself by
enjoying the good bits, and cultivate and nurture your instinct – it is your
friend and you will need to trust it.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<br />
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Glyn/Desktop/Abridged%20David%20Mitchell%20transcript.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> I
actually took this term, and specifically its application to <i>Bone Clocks</i>, from Dr. Sarah
Dillon who made a passing reference to the novel during her keynote lecture at
the <a href="http://currentresearchinspeculativefiction.blogspot.co.uk/">Current Research in Speculative Fiction</a> (CRSF) conference 2015. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-60391061925776119412016-04-04T11:50:00.000+01:002016-04-20T23:08:55.817+01:00Eastercon 2016 - Mancunicon - Convention Report<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Cggy36BUfKw/VwI5A5SvRxI/AAAAAAAAULY/A1Rir1CY3zsGMWB3YhrqIXscPhRSNnEkg/s1600/Mancunicon2016-Logo.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Cggy36BUfKw/VwI5A5SvRxI/AAAAAAAAULY/A1Rir1CY3zsGMWB3YhrqIXscPhRSNnEkg/s200/Mancunicon2016-Logo.png" width="200" /></a></div>
Last weekend I attended my first Eastercon: <a href="https://www.mancunicon.org.uk/">Mancunicon – the 67th British National Science Fiction Convention</a> – at Manchester’s Hilton Hotel housed in the Beetham Tower. I’m a relative newcomer to the organised fandom scene, my only prior experience being Loncon 3 (Worldcon 75) last summer. Whilst obviously smaller in scale than Loncon, the Manchester convention still provided a packed weekend of panels, people and pints that left me exhausted, impressed and inspired in roughly equal measure.<br />
<br />
I had quite a busy convention, appearing on four panels as a participant, three of them on the Sunday and a fourth on the Monday.<br />
<br />
My first panel was also the one I was moderating: “1980s Trailblazing Comics”. I presided over a brilliant conversation between <a href="http://tonykeen.blogspot.co.uk/">Tony Keen</a>, Eric Steele and Karen Brenchley as they reminisced about the comics that they fell in love with in the 80s. My first (non-<i>Beano </i>or <i>Dandy</i>) comic reading was Marvel’s (really not very good) <a href="http://comicvine.gamespot.com/onslaught/4045-43814/"><i>Onslaught </i>Saga </a>in the mid-90s so my knowledge of 1980s comics comes purely from what has become historically (or more honestly, commercially) important, as such it was fascinating to hear the trio take the conversation beyond <i>Watchmen </i>or <i>Dark Knight Returns</i> and discuss John Byrnes’s <i>Fantastic Four</i> run, the material in <i>2000AD</i> and <i>Warrior</i>, and other less well-remembered titles from the <i>Teen Titans</i> of the time to <i>Cerebus the Aardvark</i>.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-x0icMWE2ogQ/VwJA_8K_wII/AAAAAAAAULo/2bBnfmiqcx4bdpkvWbS3XNgEI4YXjmQ6Q/s1600/CejbaSKWIAEsS8q.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-x0icMWE2ogQ/VwJA_8K_wII/AAAAAAAAULo/2bBnfmiqcx4bdpkvWbS3XNgEI4YXjmQ6Q/s400/CejbaSKWIAEsS8q.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Book Review in the Age of Amazon" L-R: Chris Kammerud, Martin Petto, Me, Martin Wisse, Sarah Pinboroguh. photo: <a href="https://twitter.com/penelopebabs">Penny Reeve</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Following on from that I was a panellist discussing “Book Reviews in the Age of Amazon”, I was in discussion with Mancunicon Guest of Honour <a href="https://twitter.com/SarahPinborough">Sarah Pinborough</a>, blogger <a href="http://cloggie.org/wissewords2/">Martin Wisse</a>, and outgoing <i><a href="http://www.bsfa.co.uk/">Vector </a></i>Reviews editor Martin Petto, ably and capably moderated by Chris Kammerud, co-host of the <a href="http://www.storyological.com/">Storyological </a>podcast. The discussion was a lot of fun, especially getting to spend a bit of time chatting with Sarah who I last met in Liverpool when doing an event to promote her novel <i>The Double-edged Sword</i> some six years ago-or-so. We debated how much stock readers put in reviews whether Amazon, newspaper, blog, or anything inbetween; as well as the importance of those reviews to authors themselves, to their publishers, and the impact of reviews on sales and reception. Inevitably we also had to discuss the problems with the anonymity of online reviews, made most pressing by some well-documented instances of sock puppetry and, of course, the “Leathergate” controversy (which, since it’s an issue from a different fandom, I had to explain the audience. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/04/sock-puppetry-publish-be-damned">You can read your own summary elsewhere</a> if you don’t know the sordid details). The discussion mainly focussed on the different forms of review and their values, it may perhaps have been nice to dig more deeply into what actually makes a good review (regardless of venue) but then that’s a whole panel topic all of its own.<br />
<br />
My third and final panel of the day discussed the question of “Are We Diving into a Superhero Crash?” with <a href="http://www.emeraldsong.com/">Emmeline Pui Ling Dobson</a>, Lilian Edwards, and <a href="http://j-applebee.tumblr.com/">Jacq Applebee</a>, moderated by Alison Scott. I suppose it hinged on how we interpreted what was meant by a “crash”: financial, qualitative, or something else. My personal interpretation was a financial crash triggered by the bubble bursting as audiences lose interest. Of course there’s no evidence of that happening just yet but my thinking is that unless the big studios diversify then it’s inevitable. The panel pretty quickly re-worked itself to a discussion on diversity not just of plot types and style, but of casting and character. Jacq in particular made some powerful points about diversifying the racial and sexual profiles of superheroes, reserving high praise for <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Universe">Steven Universe</a></i>. I’m loving some of the diversity and originality in comics from <i><a href="http://marvel.com/comics/series/18468/ms_marvel_2014_-_2015">Ms. Marvel</a></i> and <i><a href="http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Unbeatable_Squirrel_Girl_Vol_1_1">Unbeatable Squirrel Girl</a></i> to the <i><a href="https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/the-wicked-the-divine">Wicked & Divine</a></i> and <i><a href="https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/sex-criminals">Sex Criminals</a></i> but the panel seemed to agree that we’ve not seen enough of this getting through to the films or television series and that this needs to change for the genre to have a long-term future.<br />
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On Monday I was on a panel on “The Definition of an Editor”. I was a late draft onto this panel which featured Farah Mendlesohn, Lizbeth Myles, Michael Rowley and Graham Sleight (and in a change from the programme, was moderated by <a href="http://www.strangehorizons.com/StaffBios.shtml">Niall Harrison</a>). The panel took as its starting position a 1976 <a href="http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/budrys_algis">Algis Budrys</a> quotation: <i>“An editor, with respect to genre, publication medium, market potential or previous training, is an individual who can establish a monopoly position within the minds of a sufficiently large body of contributors so that this position becomes the standard of excellence for that genre.”</i> In all honesty, I would have felt more comfortable moderating this panel as, similarly with the 1980s comics panel, it was something I felt I was still learning about rather than had fully-formed opinions ready to air with an audience. I was by some margin the least experienced editor on the panel and my fully flaring impostor syndrome (as well as the fact that by this point in the con I was pretty tired) meant I was probably quieter in the discussion than I would otherwise prefer. It was nonetheless an insightful examination of how the role of an editor has changed over the years, how it shapes the work and is shaped by the industry, and even the differences and similarities between editors of fiction and non-fiction.<br />
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Beyond the panels I attended as a participant, I also sat in the audience for many brilliant discussions. I won’t make a detailed description of all of them but I will take a moment to pick out some highlights from the schedule.<br />
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I saw three of the Guest of Honour conversation events and they were all brilliant: Ian McDonald was interviewed by Peadar Ó Guilin in a masterclass of an interview which feels like a relaxed conversation but reveals intriguing anecdotes and humorous quips whether that by the categorisation of Ian’s novel Luna as “Dallas on the Moon” or “Game of Domes”, or that it was the subject of a six-way bidding war for its adaptation rights. Ian Whates was also a great choice to interview Sarah Pinborough as he was able to take us on a tour of her publishing history whilst also allowing her the space to tell her own stories and, seemingly, forget she was on stage leading to more than one observation or comment that required a humorous apology to her elderly father who was watching from the audience. Aliette de Boddard was interviewed by Kari Sperring, both had already impressed me on other panels and seeing the two of them discussing the historical and cultural roots of Aliette’s work was a real insight.<br />
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I also got to attend my first BSFA Awards ceremony which was precisely the right tone: lacking in ostentation and self-importance, instead focusing on a sense of good humour and enthusiasm. The winners were Adam Roberts for best non-fiction, Jim Burns for best artwork, and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/28/aliette-de-bodard-picks-up-two-sci-fi-awards-for-startlingly-original-fiction">Aliette de Boddard for *both* best short story and best novel</a>.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KALlybZgWfs/VwJDP1aAOxI/AAAAAAAAUL0/Mcgy83enQNIOmAxqCMmGi0W13sxblV-Cg/s1600/20160326_180358.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KALlybZgWfs/VwJDP1aAOxI/AAAAAAAAUL0/Mcgy83enQNIOmAxqCMmGi0W13sxblV-Cg/s320/20160326_180358.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">BSFA Award Winners: Jim Burns, Ian Whates (collecting for Adam Roberts), and Aliette de Boddard</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I came away with a ridiculous number of book recommendations from very stimulating discussion on the “Year Just Gone and the Year to Come” panel. Panellist E G Cosh helpfully collected most of the recommendations into a single list <a href="http://egcosh.com/2016/03/29/eastercon-2016-recommended-reading/">which you can find here</a>.<br />
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The “Place, Identity, Story” panel was another highlight with a great discussion ranging from Tiffani Angus’s passionate geeking out about gardens, as chronotopes (is chronotopiary a thing?) heterotopia, to the unique characters of cities like Manchester and London. The quote of the panel (if not the convention) has to be from Ian McDonald though who remarked of himself <i>“I’m Dickens at heart really… with better sex”</i>.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rhtzW0SWyyc/VwJD5p3RORI/AAAAAAAAUL8/Bq5_6pTI8XM7NbAL6lPX5jofL1EHnMPEQ/s1600/20160328_130006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rhtzW0SWyyc/VwJD5p3RORI/AAAAAAAAUL8/Bq5_6pTI8XM7NbAL6lPX5jofL1EHnMPEQ/s400/20160328_130006.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Place, Identity, Story" L-R: Ruth EJ Booth (m), Russell A Smith, Tiffani Angus, Kari Sperring (standing in for Taj Hayer), Ian McDonald</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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The "Criminality in SF" panel was also brilliant, not only for the way they quickly put down and moved on from a bizarre audience question which became an anti-EU rant. It was also another top panel for book recommendations as the panellists shared their thoughts on science fiction/fantasy – crime fiction crossovers and where the genre-blending worked best: Scott Lynch’s T<i>he Lies of Locke Lamora</i> got a lot of love, as did Adam Roberts’s <i>Jack Glass</i>.
The true highlight of the con, however, has to be the people.<br />
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I also want to reserve special praise for Taj Hayer’s play <i>North Country</i> which was performed by a trio of actors from <a href="http://www.freedomstudios.co.uk/">Freedom Studios</a>. The product of his creative writing Ph.D, Taj’s play is set in a society ravaged by disease where most of humanity has died off and society has collapsed. The play is set in and around Bradford and dealt with the consequences of apocalypse for racial tensions and identity in a manner I’ve rarely if ever seen in a post-apocalyptic text. It was a thought provoking and moving piece of drama that should you have an opportunity you should absolutely see for yourself.<br />
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It was great to meet up with existing friends such as <a href="http://www.sf-foundation.org/masterclass">Science Fiction Foundation Masterclass</a>-mate Val Nolan, and fellow PhD-ers Meg Macdonald and Taj Hayer, authors and publishing people, as well as make loads of new friends, too many to list here, who I’ll hopefully see again at cons and conferences in the future.<br />
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Overall I greatly enjoyed my first Eastercon and will definitely look forward to attending more conventions in the future. I heard from others (and saw on twitter) that some attendees had problems with the hotel, particularly the frustration with waiting for lifts up to the rooms in the tower but since I was staying the Palace Hotel around the corner I didn't have any such problem. Complaints that the rooms panels were being held in were too small were something I *could* relate to however, at multiple times audience members had to squeeze into rooms to sit on the floor and the rooms could get quite hot and stuffy as a result. It was unfortunate but I couldn't say it was a major detraction from my personal convention experience (in all honesty a greater inhibitor of my enjoyment was the price of drinks in the bar, but then hotel bars are what they are).<br />
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<b>Thanks to everyone I shared a panel with, who moderated my
panels, all the great people I met and chatted to in the bar and panels, and to
the convention team for organising a great day. </b><o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-55240626193892184752016-03-23T20:21:00.003+00:002016-03-23T20:23:23.205+00:00My Eastercon 2016 Appearances<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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The full schedule for Eastercon 2016, aka Mancunicon, <a href="https://sites.grenadine.co/sites/mancunicon/en/mancunicon/items?day=0">can be found here</a>.</div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-73031101336432638912015-04-29T11:37:00.000+01:002015-04-29T11:37:12.967+01:00Interview with Gareth L. PowellThis interview originally appeared as "An Interview with Gareth L. Powell Talking About a Monkey", <i>Vector</i>. no. 278. pp.8-10. It was conducted to mark <i>Ack-Ack Macaque</i> winning Best Novel at the BSFA Awards last year (an accolade for which it tied with Ann Leckie's <i>Ancillary Justice</i>, Tom Hunter conducted the mirroring interview with Ann which you can read <a href="http://www.geekpound.com/post/116738898893/made-of-win-interview-with-ann-leckie">here</a>)<br />
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<b>Glyn Morgan: <i>Ack-Ack Macaque</i> started as a short story (In <i>Interzone</i> #212, Sept 2007. Winner of <i>Interzone</i> story of the year), talk us through the process of that story's development and how it became a novel.</b><br />
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<b>Gareth L. Powell:</b> The original Ack-Ack story was told from the point of view of a suicidal young man named Andy, who had just been dumped by Tori, his artist girlfriend, in favour of an executive at a media company. Not only had this executive, in Andy’s eyes, taken his girlfriend, he had also adapted, softened and neutered her creation, a web animation about the adventures of a World War One monkey pilot named Ack-Ack Macaque – and to be honest, Andy’s not sure which loss hurts him more, the loss of his girlfriend or the loss of his favourite cartoon. Warren Ellis memorably summed it up as: “The commercialisation of a web animation into some diseased Max Headroom as metaphor for the wreckage of a fucked-up relationship.”
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jlfUJG4477I/VUALUGBXJtI/AAAAAAAAMHk/mCQrwfP49os/s1600/AckAck.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jlfUJG4477I/VUALUGBXJtI/AAAAAAAAMHk/mCQrwfP49os/s1600/AckAck.jpg" height="320" width="198" /></a>I wrote the story as a comment on what used to be called the ‘Disneyfication’ of popular culture. The Ack-Ack Macaque character starts out spiky but gets softened by the corporation that buys the rights to his series. I was originally going to call the story ‘The Monkey That Ate The Internet’ but once I’d introduced the character, he started to take over, and I decided his name made a catchier title.
As you mentioned, ‘Ack-Ack Macaque’ went on to win the 2007 <i>Interzone</i> readers’ poll. The character – who was only supposed to be incidental to the main story – seemed to strike a chord with readers, but I had no plans to write anything more about him.
Over the next couple of years, I moved my focus from short stories to novels. Pendragon published my first, <i>Silversands</i>, in 2010, and Solaris published <i>The Recollection</i> in 2011.
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After <i>The Recollection</i> appeared, Jonathan Oliver at Solaris asked if I had another book I wanted to write, and I immediately said yes. I’d been kicking around an idea for a murder mystery set on a gigantic Zeppelin in an alternate future where Britain and France had merged in the 1950s. So I wrote up a synopsis and sent it to him. Only, while I was writing the synopsis, something unexpected happened.
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The idea for the novel revolved around several not-quite-human characters. I wanted to talk about the nature of humanity and of what it means to be human by coming at the question from the perspective of characters that weren’t sure they qualified. I had Victoria Valois, who’d had half her brain replace by synthetic neurons following an accident; her dead husband, the murder victim, who now existed only as an electronic simulation; and the Prince of Wales, who discovers his origins aren’t as straightforward as he might have supposed. In order to complete the set, I needed a character that had never been human but was able to think and communicate with humans… and there was Ack-Ack Macaque. He had been smoking his cigar in the shadowy depths of my imagination, just waiting for a chance to leap back into the daylight.
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<b>GM: <i>The Recollection</i> was also based on a short story (in this case one published in your </b><br />
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<b>collection <i>The Last Reef and Other Stories</i>) is the short story a formative part of how you think about novels?
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<b>GLP:</b> Sometimes a short story’s simply too short, and the central idea needs more space in which to be explored. Short fiction is a great tool for taking a look at one aspect of an idea, character or situation, but you really need to move out to novella- or novel-length in order to gain a three hundred and sixty degree perspective.<br />
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<b>GM: At first impression <i>Ack-Ack Macaque</i> and Ann Leckie’s <i>Ancillary Justice</i> seem like very different books but actually they contain a number of overlapping themes or concerns: most notably the human-AI-machine relationship. Of course you mix this up still further by introducing 'animal' into that group as well. Some of your other work also brushes these issues and <i>Hive Monkey</i>, sequel to <i>Ack-Ack Macaque</i>, builds on it in a big way. Is this a personal concern or, given Ann's book, do you think there's something in the air?
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<b>GLP:</b> In some ways, I think science fiction has always been about our relationship with technology, exploring the myriad ways it shapes both our society and ourselves as physical individuals – and, right now, we’re living in an age of profound change.
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As science fiction writers, it isn’t our job to accurately predict the future – history has shown that accurate soothsayers tend to get burned at the stake – but to explore instead a range of possible futures as a means of commenting on the world of today.
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When I was at school in the mid-Eighties, hardly anyone had a mobile phone and home computers were something of a novelty. Since then we’ve moved so many of our work and leisure activities online, and encoded so much of our public identities into social media profiles, that legitimate questions can start to be asked about the extent to which the Internet has become a neural and cultural prosthesis for communication and memory storage.
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As science fiction writers, we have to look at all this and ask ourselves what the implications are. In the macaque books, I’m asking what it will mean to be human when personalities can be recorded and ‘run’ on computers; when whole chunks of your brain can be replaced by faster and better components; and when we have the capability to ‘upgrade’ animals to human levels of thought. And I’m trying to entertain you while I’m doing it. I’ve taken a Philip K. Dick sort of approach. I’ve given you a quartet of fast-paced adventure stories that you can enjoy as such, but I’ve built them around some fairly weighty philosophical questions about the nature of family, grief, loyalty and what it means to be a human being in this crazy, accelerating world.
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<b>GM: As you’ve mentioned, the books are also alternate histories, set in a world where France </b><br />
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<b>and the United Kingdom merged in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis following a proposal from the French Prime Minister to Anthony Eden [a genuine historical event, in our timeline the offer was turned down]. What was it that attracted you to an alternate history rather than a straight near-future story, and why this particular turning, or jonbar, point?
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<b>GLP:</b> I wanted to tell a story with Zeppelins and very powerful computer processors, and to do that, I felt I needed an alternative setting. The Anglo-French Union appealed to me as soon as I read about the French Prime Minister's offer in a Guardian article. It would have been a Europe dominated by a combined France and Britain. Think how the culture would have been different, how the politics would have played out... In the books, I throw in a few details - just enough to give the reader a flavour of these differences without swamping them in historical detail. For instance, I make reference to the Beatles playing their formative residency in Paris instead of Hamburg; of the Citroen HY filling the niche occupied in our world by the Ford Transit; and I postulate a kind of bilingual slang called ‘Franglais’. Perhaps, most importantly, I relocate the silicon revolution from California to Cambridge, where computer technology flourishes under the leadership of British scientists and inventors such as Turing and Sinclair.
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And as for the Zeppelins? Well, I had to come up with a historical and political/economic rationale for them, too...
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<b>GM: In <i>Hive Monkey</i>, you make a reference to the 8 Nations Rugby Tournament. As a rugby fan, I have to ask: who are the additional two nations?
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<b>GLP:</b> I will leave that as game for the rugby aficionados among my readership.
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<b>GM: You smuggle a lot of in-jokes into your writing. From the surely obligatory reference to <i>Planet of the Apes</i>, to <i>Star Wars</i>, to music reference like Sparks and Jeff Beck. Is this type of easter egging a personal joke/game, or are you trying to add some extra fun for the reader, and if so, are there any references you've put into one of your books but been disappointed to find no one seemed to get, or that you had to take out because an editor thought it was too obscure?
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<b>GLP:</b> The references I drop into the books are mostly for my own amusement. My novel, <i>The Recollection</i>, had loads of them - such as the William Pilgrim Home For Displaced Time Travellers - but I try not to let them interfere with the story. I don’t crowbar them in, just sprinkle them in lightly as they occur to me. Sometimes, they’re hat-tips to classic stories, such as <i>War Of The Worlds</i>; other times they’re just random scraps of pop culture ephemera that jump into my head while I’m typing. I hope readers who notice them take them in the spirit in which they’re meant: as a bit of extra fun.
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<b>GM: The third book in the Ack-Ack series [came out in January 2015]. Was it always going to </b><br />
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<b>be a trilogy, is this a definite final book or do you see yourself returning to the monkey at some point?
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<b>GLP:</b> I initially wrote <i>Ack-Ack Macaque</i> as a standalone novel, but was overjoyed when Solaris commissioned a sequel. <i>Hive Monkey</i> came out in January 2014 and expanded the canvas, allowing me to explore the nature of the alternate world in which the first novel was set, while still elaborating on themes of humanity and family. However, as both books were quite different, and there were still a few loose ends, I knew I’d need a third instalment to tie it all together and bring the story full-circle.
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In <i>Macaque Attack</i>, we meet an older, wiser macaque. He’s beginning to realise that he can’t be a loner forever, and he’s starting to admit to himself that he cares about the people around him – the dysfunctional ersatz family of characters he’s accumulated over the previous two volumes.
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Having spent so much time in the company of Ack-Ack, Victoria, K8 and the rest of the main characters, I too had become very fond of them. They had all grown and developed over the course of the trilogy, and I wanted to make sure I did them justice. I think I did.
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As it transpires, not only has <i>Macaque Attack</i> turned out to be their biggest and wildest adventure yet, it also features characters from my earlier space opera, The Recollection – which means that all four of the books I’ve written for Solaris form part of a larger tale, and the trilogy has become a quartet!
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I have no immediate plans to return to Ack-Ack in the near future, but don’t count him out of the game just yet. I may have other projects on which I want to work, but that doesn’t mean I won’t return to his world at some point, if inspiration provides the right story.
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<b>GM: What are you working on next, post-macaque?
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<b>GLP:</b> Since completing the third monkey book, I’ve gone back to writing space opera. I have one finished novel, and I’m currently writing another that could potentially form the first instalment of a new series.
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Thanks to Gareth for taking the time for this interview. You can find out more about him and his books at <a href="http://www.garethlpowell.com/">www.garethlpowell.com</a>. <i>Macaque Attack</i>, the third instalment in the <i>Ack-Ack Macaque </i>trilogy was published on 15th January 2015 by Solaris. Follow the monkey on twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/ackackmacaque">@AckAckMacaque</a> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-53625975308308520082015-04-08T15:54:00.002+01:002015-04-08T15:54:33.924+01:00Interview with Lavie TidharI recently read <i>A Man Lies Dreaming</i> and have since been bringing it up in all sorts of conversations, some appropriate, others not so. It's hard to describe what the book is about whilst still doing it justice and not spoiling anything for those of you who might read it in the future so here's the official synopsis:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Deep in the heart of history’s most infamous concentration camp, a man lies dreaming. His name is Shomer, and before the war he was a pulp fiction author. Now, to escape the brutal reality of life in Auschwitz, Shomer spends his nights imagining another world – a world where a disgraced former dictator now known only as Wolf ekes out a miserable existence as a low-rent PI in London’s grimiest streets.</blockquote>
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An extraordinary story of revenge and redemption, A Man Lies Dreaming is the unforgettable testament to the power of imagination.</blockquote>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v50Symxn1-k/VSVAnubLpeI/AAAAAAAALSw/HRQ-ueiLReA/s1600/Lavie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v50Symxn1-k/VSVAnubLpeI/AAAAAAAALSw/HRQ-ueiLReA/s1600/Lavie.jpg" height="320" width="212" /></a>I was lucky enough to have lunch and a lengthy chat with the author, Lavie Tidhar, at Worldcon. We spoke about my research, the book, and about shund (Yiddish pulp fiction, essentially). I hadn't yet read the book but it sounded fascinating. Once I read it I knew it had to be included in my thesis and I decided to take the opportunity to get back in touch with Lavie and ask him a few questions. What follows is the interview I did with him. I've published it here because it's probably too specialised to go anywhere else, but hopefully you'll enjoy it. I want to thank Lavie for taking the time to indulge my interest and research, and for his generous and detailed replies.<br />
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<ul>
<li><i>A Man Lies Dreaming </i>was part of The Guardian's selection for Best SF Novels of 2014.</li>
<li>Part of The Scotland Herald's selection for Best Crime Novels of 2014.</li>
<li>Part of LA Review of Books selection for Best Crime Novels of 2014.</li>
<li>On the Locus Magazine Recommended Reading List for 2014.</li>
</ul>
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It was also one of my novels of the year, with the caveat that it is a challenging, twisted, and disturbing read. This is part of why I loved it.<br />
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It was recently released in paperback and is available from all good stockists, <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/a-man-lies-dreaming/lavie-tidhar/9781444762945">such as the one who pay my wages...</a><br />
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<b>Glyn Morgan: When did you decide you wanted to write A Man Lies Dreaming, and what brought you to the specific idea of Hitler/Wolf as a Private Eye in London? </b><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k1b52a511wg/VSU_vLn6z9I/AAAAAAAALSQ/3iifLYtPe0I/s1600/AMLD%2Bcover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k1b52a511wg/VSU_vLn6z9I/AAAAAAAALSQ/3iifLYtPe0I/s1600/AMLD%2Bcover.jpg" height="320" width="200" /></a>Lavie Tidhar: The idea - the need, really - to do a novel about the Holocaust was something that I always knew I wanted to do. It was something I dealt with in other novels - the short, weird SF novel <i>Martian Sands</i>, as well as - to a smaller extent - in <i>The Violent Century</i> - and in several short stories, but I needed to be fully committed to it, and to do what I do, which is essentially to write about something from an askew angle. It's a novel that explicitly addresses the question of <i>how </i>to write the Holocaust, after all, as much as asking if you can even ever do that.<br />
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I remember getting the idea - I'd just moved back to the UK, it must have been 2011 I think - I was in a temporary flat, almost empty, and I sat there, at 1 o'clock at night and I thought: <i>Adolf Hitler, Private Eye</i>. It was actually - I think, I realised it much later - it's a throwaway line in one of Philip Kerr's novels, and I was reading him at the time, but what struck me was not so much the audacity of the idea as the crazy thought that if anyone could - maybe, just maybe! - pull it off, it would be me. I don't mean this in a hubristic sense at all - I simply mean that it's such a ridiculous idea, such an <i>offensive </i>idea really, that you'd be mad to try it, and that to make it work you'd need to bring to bear a certain weight of a historical connection. I mean, I'm third-generation to Holocaust survivors. It's something that's had a profound effect on my life, that's been with me all my life. So that shapes a lot of it or, rather, it hovers over the book.<br />
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And of course, the story of Hitler as a pulp detective - while it was - I wouldn't say <i>fun</i>, but I enjoy that sort of pulp writing, the tropes etc - but that on its own would be meaningless, it would be empty. The only way it could work is if it is grounded in the reality, in Auschwitz. So Shomer was always there, it's his story. My editor, Anne, got that straight away, and she really pushed me to strengthen it too, because for me, for a long time, it was Wolf's story - mostly because Wolf's story is escapist, it's fiction, while Shomer's is the unbearable reality. So you can see which sections I preferred to write. The whole novel is about escape and, ultimately, about the impossibility, the futility of escape.<br />
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So the idea was late 2011, but I didn't write it. I was busy on <i>The Violent Century</i> then. And that took, well, <i>forever</i>. It was a hard slog. And then when Hodder bought<i> The Violent Century</i>, we did discuss what the next book would be, and I did float it - I think Anne suggested the name should be Wolf, not Hitler, which made a lot of sense in hindsight - but it was sort of agreed I'd do another book (actually one of the two that I'm trying to write at the moment!).<br />
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So no one really knew about it, though my agent was going around I think telling people, who tended to react with a shocked look and a laugh. I mean, we talked about it as the unsellable book. So I did my best to not write it! I mean, it would have been idiotic to actually write this book.<br />
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I spent a long time trying not to write it. I worked on all kinds of other books and none worked. It takes me a long time to get an idea into the right shape and form, as I'm learning. (A recent book I tried to write, it turns out, was actually meant to be a graphic novel, for instance).<br />
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But I was running out of options fast, and running out of time, and I sat up one night, this must have been 2013 maybe, and I was itching so hard to write that opening line, and I thought, well, just do it. Just sit down and write it and see what happens. No one needs to know! It was the same feeling I had with writing <i>Osama</i>. Try it. No one needs to know if you fail.<br />
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So I did, and that was it. I had to keep writing. I wrote the first draft very fast. At night - midnight to 3am, usually. Crazy hours. It was a disturbing sort of experience. I wanted to do it fast to get it out of my system, to not have to keep doing it, spend more time with Wolf.<br />
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Then it was sort of - it went through a kind of painful editorial process. I knew it wasn't quite right, <br />
but I was a bit resistant to criticism, I have to admit (I can admit it now!), so it all took a long time, but I did it. It basically came down to cutting a couple of voices - I was trying to juggle too many balls, narratively speaking - and that was hard. Strengthening Shomer's part, giving him more of a voice, a past. More cutting... let's just say I didn't enjoy this part!<br />
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I was also terrified Hodder won't publish it. I mean, I was asking a lot of them. And I was just very lucky with my editor, I was very lucky with all of it. They really got behind it, and it actually came out! I mean, I still can't quite believe it. I'll be honest - I write a fair bit, but I'm not sure I'll ever write something I'm as happy with again as I am with <i>A Man Lies Dreaming</i>. You don't get too many chances like that. And I probably wouldn't want to relive the experience!<br />
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<b>GM: Was Shomer always going to be a writer of <i>shund</i>, and why pick up the historical writer (the victim of the mauling from Sholem Aleichem) and place him into Auschwitz rather than use a contemporaneous writer or create a new one altogether?</b><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cZymGETZQzs/VSU_vp53-II/AAAAAAAALSY/ttVI3uDZoZQ/s1600/TVC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cZymGETZQzs/VSU_vp53-II/AAAAAAAALSY/ttVI3uDZoZQ/s1600/TVC.jpg" height="320" width="203" /></a>LT: I didn't pick the historical writer, merely the name - Shomer means "guardian" or "watchman", and I liked it in contrast to Sholem Aleichem ("peace be upon you") - "Shomer Aleichem" would mean "He who watches over you" (the Yiddish writer was called simply Shomer). The irony inherent in the historical author and in Sholem Aleichem's attack on him is pretty central to the work, though. That is, the conflict between "popular" or populist genre fiction and the "high" art of literary fiction. The book tries to interrogate those two modes, while making fun of them, though its sympathies are quite likely with "low" art, and it's reflected equally in the debate between Ka-Tzetnik on the one hand, and Primo Levi on the other.<br />
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I was actually interested in my fictional Shomer for a while, and I wrote a mini-biography of a somewhat different version of him some time before writing <i>A Man Lies Dreaming</i>. The idea of the Shomer also finds its way into this new book I’m trying to write, in a small way, as the Shomrim, or Watchmen, were significant figures in the early days of the Jewish settlement in Palestine. I like to extend motifs from one book to the next, just as <i>The Violent Century</i> implicitly references <i>Osama</i>, and <i>A Man Lies Dreaming</i> implicitly references <i>The Violent Century</i>.<br />
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But to answer the question more succinctly, it was the meaning of the name I was interested in, not the historical author, who died peacefully in New York long before World War 2 broke out.<br />
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<b>GM: Pulp Private Eyes, Marlowe etc..., are always put through the wringer. With a writer like Chandler we're cringing when Marlowe takes his beatings, with your book we might cringe because of how graphically you describe a scene of violence, but we're also sort of okay with it, there's a sort of justice in Wolf being beaten up by Jews (and even more in being beaten up by fascists after being mistaken for a Jew). You said you "needed" to write a novel about the Holocaust, were scenes like these a sort of catharsis for you? How often, if at all, did you have to reign it in and "go easy on him"?</b><br />
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LT: Well, I mean, I like the formula story, I like structure, and to me the detective story is great because it allows you to go around asking questions - I'm not remotely interested in the actual mystery (as is pretty evident in this book) but simply in what it allows me to do. I like to work with - and react against - the forms of story we expect from familiarity. So, if you're writing a hardboiled story, your detective by dint of convention should be beaten up at least three times! And there's something very funny about that, I think, there's a sort of grim fatalism in the hardboiled genre, that the beatings almost become rote, they become another part of life - and that adds another sort of bitter irony to the story of a man incarcerated as Shomer is.<br />
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But there is also a deeper structure at play, which is the transformation of Wolf. The circumcision scene was essential, and it was technically a difficult one to write - it's very funny, to me, but also it had to be done just right, and I remember how tense I must have been writing it, afraid to get the notes wrong. It's funny, and it seems essentially as meaningless cruelty, maybe, but it assumes a growing significance as the book progresses. The moments of violence Wolf experiences are ironic points in the book. His suffering isn't real. It's just pulp. I find graphic descriptions are often quite funny - the less you describe, the worse you make something, and part of the... the <i>vulgarity </i>of <i>A Man Lies Dreaming</i> is a sort of humour. I think the humour is essential to underscore the real horror of the book. The parts you don't describe, because there aren't words to describe them with.<br />
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<b>GM: As a Jewish writer interested in both the Holocaust and science fiction, what is it that you think employing sf tropes (alternate history in <i>A Man Lies Dreaming</i>, but also superpowers in <i>The Violent Century</i>, etc.) can bring to Holocaust fiction?</b><br />
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LT: I don't know that I've ever been described as a "Jewish writer" before... and I don't think <i>A Man Lies Dreaming</i> was reviewed by any Jewish publications, for instance (though my forthcoming charity anthology project, <i><a href="https://lavietidhar.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/out-now/">Jews vs Zombies</a></i>, has got a lot of interest, by contrast!). I think the idea of fantasy-as-escape has been explored in Holocaust fiction before, and mine in a way is an argument against fantasy - an argument I have been having with myself over the course of <i>Osama </i>and <i>The Violent Century</i>. These are the tools I have. Moreover, I think genre tools allow us to look at reality in a different way, to defamiliarise it, and that's very powerful, to me. I don't know that I can honestly write the Holocaust: but I thought I should try.<br />
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<b>GM: When writing a piece like <i>A Man Lies Dreaming</i>, do you worry about possible controversy when playing these thought experiments with the Holocaust, or do you relish that?</b><br />
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LT: Well, good literature should aim to unsettle; to shock - but at the same time, it seems to me that we are in a world where one cannot be shocked anymore, or not very easily - we are in a world where we are constantly bombarded with the crudest images, something that would have been unimaginable only a few decades before. With <i>Osama </i>there was a lot of worry initially about possible controversy, which never materialised, and so after that I stopped worrying much about it. It also seems to me that using the tools of genre fiction is an excellent way of passing under the radar. Since it is very often marginalised, you can get away with a lot more (after all, it's 'just fantasy'). I find that very useful.<br />
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<b>GM: Sort of the same question with regards the sexuality of the novel. Is that juxtaposition of fetishism and the Holocaust the result of you employing <i>shund </i>tropes, an extrapolation of the various rumours about Hitler's own sexual mores (which you mention in the notes to the book), or a little of both?</b><br />
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LT: I have been interested in the links between fetishism and Nazism for a long time, ever since I read a - very interesting - academic article about it years ago, as a student. This was linked powerfully for me with the whole world of Israeli "Stalag" novels, which I found out about by accident - they were well before my time, so I never saw them or read them - but I found their sudden appearance, and popularity, in 1960s Israel fascinating. I was also doing a lot of research about Hitler's life, and it helped that his sex life, such as it were, is so tied up with the same themes. It begged to be written about, and I have to admit I took great joy in just how ridiculous the sex scenes are.<br />
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<b>GM: Do you think the Holocaust has become, in a way, too familiar or "normalised"? If so, and sf or sf-like texts defamiliarise it, do they help to reinstall some of the otherness and horror of what happened, or cheapen it?</b><br />
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LT: This is a question that actually has two, disparate answers. Can we normalise the Holocaust? What worries me, as a writer, as a person, as a Jewish writer, maybe, is that what is shocking - what is incomprehensible - about the Holocaust is not the <i>scale </i>of it. It's the industrialisation of those deaths, the banality of the human machine which manufactured those deaths while absolving the individual of any responsibility. It was mass murder by paperwork.<br />
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What makes me angry - and I say this as the descendant of Holocaust survivors, as a Third Generation (which comes with its own set of problems) - is that we may use the Holocaust to absolve <i>ourselves </i>of responsibility. Ethnic cleansing, mass murder, the industrialisation of death, these are all ongoing things. We must never forget the Holocaust! - one may cry - and in the same breath curse at the damned immigrants coming over here. Or invade a country for a made up reason, killing hundreds of thousands and destroying countless other lives. Or build a huge separation fence to keep another nation in a ghetto and then bomb it.<br />
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Do we normalise the Holocaust? We <i>have </i>normalised it. We're saturated by images of death and cruelty. There are now firms in the Philippines whose sole job is to filter youtube videos of the worst, most vicious acts humans are capable of. <i>Which we commit and then record on camera so we could share it on social media.</i><br />
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That said, yes, I also agree with the sentiment, that to an extent the Holocuast has been turned into pop culture. There's a poem by an Israeli poet I like, Eli Netzer (who was my boss for a short while!), that talks about the keyrings you can now buy at the Auschwitz gift shop. It's the Nazis as pulp villains, it's all of that, but as long as we don't forget, I'm not even sure that's necessarily a bad thing. I can't personally watch the images from Auschwitz. What they showed Eichmann at his trial, when he didn't bat an eye. I physically can't watch it, and I can't imagine who can. And is that the only way to discuss the Holocaust? There is that famous quote from Theodor Adorno, that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric", but frankly that's, well, it's shit. Netzer, who I mention above, is himself a survivor, and you have Celan, you have Pagis, whose "Written In Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car" is I think an outstanding poem. How can you demand of the survivors, or their descendants, not to react to the Holocaust? Not to try and interpret it, in artistic form, in poetry or fiction or film? And then, too, do only we - the survivors' descendants - have that right?<br />
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The second part of my answer is to do with my conception of literature. <i>Everything </i>is a story. Every narrative voice has an <i>I </i>behind it. Whether we are reading a novel or a historical chronicle, there is a narrator, there is someone with an agenda and a voice, telling us something, failing to tell us other things. There is no truth in writing, and in that respect, I kind of resent so called "realist" fiction, since that's all it is, ultimately - a fiction. It practices a form of mimicry, it pretends, if only to itself, to only showcase the real world, but it is no different to the worst excesses of pulp in its essential dishonesty. What's worse, I find that it often comes to serve the leading ideology, which itself shapes people's perceived reality. I talk about this a lot more in a forthcoming non-fiction book I’m doing with my friend, Shimon Adaf.<br />
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As a non-realist writer, I reject that. The tools of science fiction are the tools of irony and doubt, of liminality. By being dishonest from the get go, by saying, like a street magician, "I AM NOW GOING TO LIE TO YOU", I feel I am actually able to tell the truth. Paradoxically. The problem is that genre fiction’s inherently commercial nature hasn’t lessened but increased dramatically in the last two decades. We’re bombarded with product. To me it was a literature of the counter-culture, of rebellion. Maybe I’m naive. I write out of a sort of idealism. I don’t think I feel entirely comfortable in either camp.<br />
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<b>GM: Where do you go from here? What's the next project?</b><br />
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LT: This is a very good question, and not one I'm sure I can answer honestly... I am currently, as mentioned, working on my first non-fiction book, a book-length conversation with Israeli author Shimon Adaf, about politics and writing (and yes, we discuss the Holocaust as well). This book also includes two pieces of short political speculative fiction, one by each of us, in which each is a minor character in the other's story. We're just signing the contract for it, but we don't have a working title yet - it should be out next year, I think. It's quite exciting for me, as it's a book I wanted to do for some time.
And I’m trying to write a couple of new novels. One about the nature of the universe, and one about Israel/Palestine.
You know... the easy stuff!<br />
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Once again, my thanks to Lavie Tidhar.<br />
If you are interested in his work please visit his blog: <a href="https://lavietidhar.wordpress.com/">https://lavietidhar.wordpress.com/</a><br />
He's also on twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/lavietidhar">https://twitter.com/lavietidhar</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-8660503433097441202015-01-27T16:32:00.004+00:002015-01-27T16:36:26.368+00:00CfP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2015I should have posted this here ages ago, but here it is:<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><u>Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2015</u></b></span></div>
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Monday 8th June 2015 </div>
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University of Liverpool </div>
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With Keynote Lectures from: </div>
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Dr. Andrew M. Butler (Canterbury Christ Church University) </div>
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Dr. Sarah Dillon (University of Cambridge) </div>
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Returning for its fifth consecutive year, CRSF is a one day postgraduate conference designed to promote the research of speculative fictions, including SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY and HORROR; showcasing some of the latest developments in these dynamic and evolving fields. CRSF attracts an international selection of delegates and provides a platform for postgraduate students to present their current research, encourages discussion with scholars in related subjects and the construction of crucial networks with fellow researchers. The University of Liverpool, a leading centre for the study of speculative fiction and home to the Science Fiction Foundation Collection, will host the conference. We are seeking abstracts relating to speculative fiction, including, but not limited to, papers on the following topics:<br />
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•Alternate History •Alternative Culture •Animal Studies •Anime •Apocalypse •Body Horror •Consciousness •Cyber Culture •Drama •Eco-criticism •Fan Culture •Gaming •(Geo)Politics •Genre •Gender •Graphic Novels •The Grotesque •The Heroic Tradition •Liminal Fantasy •Magic •Meta-Franchises •Morality •Monstrosity •Music •Non-Anglo-American SF •Otherness •Pastoral •Poetry •Politics •Post-Colonialism and Empire •Proto-SF •Psychology •Quests •Realism •Sexuality •Slipstream •Spiritualism •Steampunk •Supernatural •Technology •Time •TV and Film •Urban Fantasy •Utopia/Dystopia •(Virtual) Spaces and Environments •Weird Fiction •World Building •Young Adult Fiction.<br />
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<b>Please submit an abstract of 300 words for a 20 minute English language paper and a 100 word biography to <a href="mailto:CRSF.team@gmail.com">CRSF.team@gmail.com</a> by Monday 9th March 2015. Queries can be sent to the same address.</b><br />
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A PDF of the CfP can be downloaded from <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4DNnD_AmJQmaGhKem1uTkRjVnc/view">this link</a>. Please share this information widely with all who may be interested.<br />
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Although CRSF only accepts papers by Postgraduate students and those who have recently completed their Ph.D, we welcome delegates from across the genre spectrum: from fan to professor, via author and undergraduate student.<br />
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/792292280849757">Join the facebook event here.</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-16766207471435360112014-11-14T23:19:00.003+00:002014-11-14T23:19:54.007+00:00CfP: Sideways in Time: Alternate Histories and Counterfactual NarrativesCRSF 2015 is still in the planning phase but the call for papers for the other conference I'm organising next year is already available. <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B15Mt8FVT0sGbWhIYXRPNVAyeVE/view?usp=sharing">Click here to get a PDF version</a>, or visit the blog: <a href="http://sidewaysintime.wordpress.com/">http://sidewaysintime.wordpress.com/</a> which has all the same information as I'm about to post right now...<br />
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Sideways in Time is an Alternate History Conference to be held at the University of Liverpool - in association with Lancaster University. This interdisciplinary conferences will bring together scholarship in science fiction, fantasy, historical and literary fictions, as well as historians and counterfactual thought-experiments, to discuss those fictional narratives that deals with alternate histories and parallel worlds.
We are pleased to announce <b>Karen Hellekson</b>, <b>Adam Roberts</b>, and <b>Stephen Baxter</b> as our keynote speakers. Karen Hellekson is a leading authority on alternate history fiction (<i>The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time</i>, 2001). Professor Adam Roberts is a leading science fiction critic and also an award-winning author who employs alternate history elements into some of his fiction (most notably <i>Swiftly</i>, shortlisted for the 2009 Sidewise Award). Stephen Baxter is currently a judge of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, as well as being one of the former winners (“Brigantia’s Angels”, <i>Voyage</i>).<br />
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<b>Why Alternate History?</b>Alternate history has a long and international pedigree. Whilst most cultures and literary traditions can trace their own heritage of alternate history, alternate history arguments in the Western Canon can be traced into antiquity with Livy’s meditations on Alexander the Great. In their modern form, they emerged in France in the early 19th century before crossing into English at the latter half of the century. The form also become popular with historians and essayists, a notable early history collection being <i>If It Had Happened Otherwise</i> (1931) edited by John Squire which included counterfactual essays by, among others, Hilaire Belloc, Andre Maurois and Winston Churchill. It was not until H.G. Wells's late novel <i>Men Like Gods</i> (1923) that the form crossed into the territory of science fiction, and was not truly popularised until Murray Leinster's crucial story "Sidewise in Time" published in <i>Astounding </i>in 1934.
Since 1934, the form has become a staple of science fiction and fantasy story-telling, sometimes including time travel or magic as a means of explaining the cause of the alternate history. However, the form has also been adopted by the literary mainstream with writers who chose not to relate their alternate world to our own, instead taking the lead from conventions of historical fiction. As such, alternate history has attracted such non-genre writers as Nabakov, Kingsley Amis, Robert Harris, Philip Roth, Michael Chabon and many more.
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Despite a long and diverse history, alternate history has attracted surprisingly little scholarship. This conference will attempt to establish lines of communication which will rectify this deficit. <b>It is hoped a selection of the essays presented at the conference will be made available as part of a published collection.</b><br />
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We are interested in papers analysing specific alternate history texts from all mediums including novels, cinema, comics and beyond. We also welcome broader papers on the various periods, subgenres, movements and modes of alternate history including steampunk, retro-futurism and more. Papers can be based on, amongst other things, theory, texts, cultural surveys, philosophy, and media studies.<br />
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<b>Please submit a 300 word abstract to <a href="mailto:sidewaysconference@gmail.com">sidewaysconference@gmail.com</a> along with a 50 word bionote by December 15, 2014.</b>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-50462362593049483472014-05-08T18:40:00.001+01:002014-05-08T18:42:09.171+01:00Lunchtime Classics 2014For the third year running I've organised a series of readings and talks by local experts on books which they're passionate about. All talks happen in the Illy cafe of Waterstones Liverpool One (12 College Lane, L1 3DL), they're free and open to anyone.<br />
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The schedule is still being finalised but two of the earliest events are confirmed:<br />
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<b><u><a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1481718438726969/">Lunchtime Classics: <i>Under Milk Wood</i>, presented by Dr. Chris Williams and Owen Teale</a></u></b><br />
<i>Tuesday 20th May, 1pm.</i><br />
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This year marks a number of anniversaries which Lunchtime Classics will be marking. Amongst those is Dylan Thomas's Centenary. With that in mind, please join us for what will no doubt be a fascinating discussion of Thomas's landmark work <i>Under Milk Wood</i>.
Dr. Chris Williams (University of Liverpool) will present the work to us, drawing on his own extensive expertise on Thomas's work to describe what makes the play so special.<br />
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Chris will be joined by actor Owen Teale (best known for his roles as Alliser Thorne in <i>Game of Thrones</i> and Fluellen in <i>The Hollow Crown</i> BBC mini-series). Owen is playing the part of "First Voice" in a new adaptation of the play which is showing at Liverpool's Playhouse Theatre from Monday 19th - Saturday 24th May.<br />
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For more information on the Playhouse Production of Under Milk Wood please visit <a href="http://www.everymanplayhouse.com/show/Under_Milk_Wood/1021.aspx">their website</a><br />
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In June, I'll then by doing my own talk on Vonnegut:<br />
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<u><b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1481718438726969/">Lunchtime Classics: <i>Slaughterhouse-Five</i> by Kurt Vonnegut</a></b></u><br />
<i>Wednesday 4th June, 1pm.</i><br />
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I'll get around to posting a more complete schedule once everything has been confirmed.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-76100445912893181912014-03-04T00:39:00.001+00:002014-03-04T21:47:51.431+00:00Torque Control: Personal LogI've not really made a song and dance about it, because on at least one level I was convinced that someone would realise they'd made a mistake and stop me from doing it before I even began, but a while ago I was approached about taking on the position of Features Editor of <i><a href="http://www.bsfa.co.uk/bsfa-publications/vector/">Vector: The Critical Journal of Science Fiction</a></i>.<br />
<br />
I can't claim that I'm the most qualified person for the job, but I can promise that I'll devote all of my available energies to doing the very best work that I can. I've been a member of the BSFA for a few years and have enjoyed reading <i>Vector </i>and contributing reviews for the journal.<br />
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So from now on, for the foreseeable future (or until they realise their mistake...), I'll be editing four issues a year and writing the famous "Torque Control" editorials to open each one. I don't have any sort of grand vision for the journal, in fact for the first few issues I'll just be happy if I don't stuff it up completely and no one notices that the editor has changed. That said, once I'm comfortable enough to feel like I can begin to change things, I do want to move <i>Vector </i>towards being more representative of modern science fiction, and of the BSFA membership.<br />
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In my mind this means a more diverse journal. Diverse in terms of the different formats of science fiction itself (not just books, TV and film), but also diverse contributors and topics which reflect more than just the white middle-class, middle-aged male perspective. And yes, I realise that I'm already into negative equity being an editor who fits into at least three of those four old-guard criteria, and who - worse - is replacing a female editor, Shana Worthen, who did sterling work in the post. But Shana has moved onto pastures new, and new challenges, and I've been asked to take the job so here I am.<br />
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I'm going to post the contents page of each of my issues here once they go to print. If you're interested in seeing the work and being involved in the British Science Fiction scene then why not <a href="http://www.bsfa.co.uk/join-the-bsfa/">consider joining the BSFA</a>?<br />
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If you're interested in contributing to <i>Vector </i>then get in touch, you don't need to be a member to submit articles and I'm willing to read anything by anyone. I'll be publishing based on merit and whether of not the material is appropriate for the journal, not on discriminatory grounds (either positive or negative), but I <i>will </i>be encouraging more submissions from more diverse sources.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-77097660638680165292013-12-09T11:02:00.000+00:002013-12-09T11:02:26.704+00:00Call for Papers: CRSF 2014The Call for Papers for Current Research in Speculative Fiction 2014 is now here!<br />
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The conference will be held on Friday 20th June at the University of Liverpool.<br />
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We are proud to be able to announce two brilliant keynote speakers with Dr. Mark Bould (University of the West of England) and Prof. Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck University London), both will be giving lectures as part of the conference schedule.<br />
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Now in its fourth year, CRSF
is a one day postgraduate conference designed to promote the research of
speculative fictions, including <b><u>SCIENCE
FICTION</u></b>, <b><u>FANTASY</u></b> and <b><u>HORROR</u></b>; showcasing some of the
latest developments in these dynamic and evolving fields. CRSF attracts an
international selection of delegates and provides a platform for postgraduate
students to present their current research, encourages discussion with scholars
in related subjects and the construction of crucial networks with fellow
researchers. The University of Liverpool, a leading centre for the study of
speculative fiction and home to the Science Fiction Foundation Collection, will
host the conference.</div>
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We are seeking abstracts
relating to speculative fiction, including, but not limited to, papers on the
following topics:</div>
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•Alternate History •Alternative
Culture •Anime •Apocalypse •Body Horror •Consciousness •Cyber Culture •Drama •Eco-criticism
•Fan Culture •Gaming •(Geo)Politics •Genre •Gender •Graphic Novels •The Grotesque
•The Heroic Tradition •Liminal Fantasy •Magic •Meta-Franchises •Morality
•Monstrosity •Music •Non-Anglo-American SF •Otherness •Pastoral •Poetry •Politics
•Post-Colonialism and Empire •Proto-SF •Psychology •Quests •Realism •Sexuality •Slipstream
•Spiritualism •Steampunk •Supernatural •Technology •Time •TV and Film •Urban
Fantasy •Utopia/Dystopia •(Virtual) Spaces and Environments •Weird Fiction •World
Building •Young Adult Fiction.<span style="background-color: black; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 1pt none black; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 10pt; padding: 0cm;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Please submit an abstract of 300 words for a 20 minute English
language paper and a 100 word biography to <a href="mailto:CRSF.team@gmail.com">CRSF.team@gmail.com</a>by <b>Monday 10<sup>th</sup> March 2014.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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For further information email the conference team at <a href="mailto:CRSF.team@gmail.com">CRSF.team@gmail.com</a> or visit the <a href="http://currentresearchinspeculativefiction.blogspot.co.uk/">website</a>.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-38495512158831393282013-10-03T21:42:00.001+01:002013-10-03T21:42:39.235+01:00What If? .... Africa Hadn't Been ColonisedI'm in the middle of a chocka few months at the moment but the internet is nothing if not adept at finding interesting distractions and methods of procrastination. One of today's offerings came when idly trawling the internet for images relating to alternate history and counterfactuals. This image caught my eye and let me to Rachel Strohm's website where she hosted it and explained the story behind it:<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 22.796875px;">One of the questions I’m often asked by friends who haven’t studied African history is what might have happened to the continent if it hadn’t been colonized. It’s interesting to look at the following </span><a href="http://cyon.se/Bilder/Alkebu-lan-1260.jpg" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: black; line-height: 22.796875px; outline: none;">map</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 22.796875px;"> of African politico-tribal units circa 1844 by Swedish artist </span><a href="http://cyon.se/" sl-processed="1" style="background-color: white; border-bottom-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: black; line-height: 22.796875px; outline: none;">Nikolaj Cyon</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 22.796875px;"> in the light of this question:</span></span></blockquote>
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Make sure you click to embiggen, it's well worth it.<br />
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<a href="http://rachelstrohm.com/category/2-places/">Read the rest of Rachel's article here</a>, including some thought experiments about how this map might have been formed and how it might have developed.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-69896341359056048002013-06-14T14:05:00.001+01:002013-06-14T14:05:56.613+01:00CRSF 2013I've just posted up the schedule for this year's Current Research in Speculative Fiction on the conference blog.<br />
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Head over yonder and take a look if you're interested:<br />
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<a href="http://www.currentresearchinspeculativefiction.blogspot.com/">www.currentresearchinspeculativefiction.blogspot.com</a><br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-56018244481955918302013-06-02T22:54:00.000+01:002013-06-04T12:13:58.263+01:00Hay Diary 2013<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://glyn-morgan.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/hay-diary-2012.html">Last year</a> I went to my first <a href="http://www.hayfestival.com/wales/">Hay Literature Festival</a>, I was stewarding the event for three days and had a great time. There was never any doubt in my mind that, if it was at all possible, I would be back for 2013.</div>
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And back I went, for [effectively] six days this time. I did my best to tweet as I went through the festival, but stewarding duties and phone battery drainage frequently conspired to keep my phone out of use. Nonetheless, for the interested, an archive of my Hay twitter experience can be found here: <a href="http://storify.com/GR_Morgan/hay-diary-2013">http://storify.com/GR_Morgan/hay-diary-2013</a>.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Home sweet home for six nights</td></tr>
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<u><b>Day 1, Thursday:</b></u></div>
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Arrived later than planned, having been late leaving Liverpool but also getting stuck behind [seemingly] every tractor, lorry, caravan and overly cautious driver (30 on a straight, good visibility national speed limit road!) between Chester and Welshpool. The sky was threatening rain but held off on the most part, although a brisk wind made putting up my tent all the more difficult. Eventually arrived at the festival site to find that everything had moved around since last year. I have a pretty good memory for maps and places so this completely messed up my orientation, but everyone was in the same boat and a few walks around the site got everything straightened up in my head.</div>
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One of the best things about stewarding Hay is eating in the staff canteen tent. A local pub provides the meals and they're always tasty with an unlimited supply of sides, plus drinks. Since I hadn't actually done any work I wasn't expecting to get fed on day one but I was fortunate enough to be given a meal voucher anyway. The whole time I was at the festival I didn't pay for any food (other than an ice cream, but it was worth it), and three large hot meals a day really takes the sting out of the long hours and having to camp.</div>
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I was then sent along to the Barclays Pavillion tent, a 1000+ venue to stand by a fire escape and watch <a href="http://www.noahandthewhale.com/">Noah and the Whale</a> and their support act <a href="https://soundcloud.com/thumpers">Thumpers</a>. Underwhelmed by NotW (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_world">!</a>), they were quite stiff and not very exciting. They picked up a bit towards the end, although perhaps that was just because they were playing the older hits which I was familiar with. The crowd seems to agree as they were much more subdued than any of the other gigs I went to over the course of the festival despite being the only sellout event I attended in the Barclays tent. If anything there was a real danger the support act had the better performance.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Just a small slice of the queue to get a signed book from Julia Donaldson</td></tr>
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<u><b>Day 2, Friday:</b></u></div>
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On site by 9am and the cycle of (at least) 13 hours working days begins. After a full English breakfast I was assigned to the Google Big Tent (capacity c.600) where I would stay for the duration of my time. The people you meet are another great thing about working at Hay and this year proved no exception. Whilst I would meet and chat to many people over the course of my time there (although not in the canteen - I'm terrible at canteens. Head down, eat fast, get out), the team at Google really took me in and were exceptionally friendly and welcoming. Thanks guys!</div>
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The Google tent is the third largest of the venues which means we didn't get the biggest of names but nor did we get smaller more cultish figures. Most of the speakers our tent would attract would be academics, journalists, historians, politicians, and the like, with a healthy spread of children's authors.</div>
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It was another nearly wet, windy day, and the morning was taken up with Hay Fever events (the Children's festival embedded within Hay festival proper). Seeing Liverpool stalwart <a href="http://www.jonmayhew.co.uk/">Jon Mayhew</a> give a talk to 300 or so kids about Jules Verne, Captain Nemo and his <a href="http://jonmayhem.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/found-in-translation.html">new book</a> was particularly lovely. After that we fell into a more familiar rhythm with some fascinating talks. I'm not going to list everything I saw, if only because my memories of specifics are likely to be hazy, but some highlights included two sessions with Cambridge University professors: the first a great talk by <a href="http://www.polis.cam.ac.uk/contacts/staff/haslam-jonathan.html">Jonathan Haslam</a> about the history of Russia's Secret Services from the Revolution to the (almost) modern day, and the second a talk on Nanotechnology by <a href="http://www.nanoscience.cam.ac.uk/directory/mew10@cam.ac.uk">Mark Welland</a> who did a great job of explaining and illustrating the complexities of the Nano world as well as its applications.</div>
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The Google tent was also right next to the bookshop so I would often catch glimpses of big names I hadn't been able to see as they made their way to their signings, as well as have lovely chats with the bookshop staff (comrades in arms). </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jon Ronson on stage in the Google Big Tent</td></tr>
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<u><b>Days 3-6, Saturday - Tuesday:</b></u></div>
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Saturday and Sunday we were blessed with glorious sunshine, which contributed to Saturday being the busiest day Hay has ever had. I'm not a hundred percent sure but I think I heard someone say that at peak there were over 10,000 people on site. Looking around at how busy it was even during the slots when most people should have been inside tents at events I could believe that estimate. Hell, there were enough people in the queue to get books signed by Children's Laureate <a href="http://www.juliadonaldson.co.uk/">Julia Donaldson</a> to ensure a pretty considerable minimal attendance.</div>
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The weather wouldn't hold out though and both Monday and Tuesday it not only rained but as bitterly cold. This does bring the mood down a little and you do get the occasional punter snap at you after you inform them their event has been moved to a different tent (a regular occurrence that most festival goers take in their stride) but generally the public are a friendly and understanding bunch and even some pretty poor environmental conditions don't stop them bantering to you whilst they queue up to enter the venues.</div>
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I saw some great events over these days. <a href="http://www.jonronson.com/">Jon Ronson</a> was particularly entertaining and <a href="http://www.marcusbrigstocke.com/">Marcus Brigstocke</a>'s "Brig Society" gig was a brilliant way to spend an evening. Some of the kids events surprised me, I knew Derek Landy would be an entertaining hour having seen him do a signing at Liverpool, but was pleasantly surprised to find the <a href="http://www.beastquest.co.uk/">Beast Quest</a> / Adam Blade (in character as wizard Aduro) event quite amusing, although as Adam Blade is a shared pen name I don't know which author gets to dress up and sign books, or whether the publishers hire an actor, but it was fun nonetheless.</div>
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You get the same kind of surprises from adult events too. I had an idea I'd find the debate on "The Future of News" with representatives from Google, the BBC and The Telegraph interesting, but I would have expected a talk about China's economy to be quite dry and jargon based. Instead <a href="http://www.lindayueh.com/">Linda Yueh</a> gave an entertaining and informative explanation about how China's economy has grown, what this means and what might happen next. She used plenty of jargon but she broke it all down in a clear and easily understood way, showing why she's the BBC Chief Business Correspondent. Similarly, I wouldn't have expected to enjoy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherard_Cowper-Coles">Sherard Cowper-Coles</a> talking to <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/the_hub/presenters/default.stm">Nik Gowing</a> about <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Ever_the_Diplomat_Confessions_of_a_Forei.html?id=PuZUAGLvfRsC&redir_esc=y">his time in the Foreign Office</a> but some of the anecdotes he shared about characters like Tony Blair and Robin Cook were both insightful and hilarious. Being in an event you wouldn't have chosen to attend and actually finding it really informative and enjoyable is something I particularly enjoy about stewarding Hay, and that sentiment is common to most stewards I spoke to.</div>
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Another thing stewards get their kicks from, other than just attending these events for free, is spotting celebrities in the audience. Given the kinds of events at the Google tent it wasn't uncommon or surprising to see people to vaguely recognise from newspaper editorials and such, as well as the likes of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/correspondents/nickrobinson">Nick Robinson</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/BBCAlagiah">George Alagiah</a> sitting in the crowd. But then that's Hay all over, you can be walking back from the loo on a quiet evening to realise the person walking alongside you is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_Williams">Dr. Rowan Williams</a> (he of the crazy eyebrows and former Archbishop of Canterbury), or be standing around trying to organise people into an orderly queue and be asked for directions by <a href="http://leemacklive.com/%E2%80%8E">Lee Mack</a>, almost knock over <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Straw">Jack Straw</a>, and have a quick word with <a href="http://www.carlbernstein.com/%E2%80%8E">Carl Bernstein</a>.</div>
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Best feel good sensation of the festival has to go to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadou_%26_Mariam">Amadou & Mariam</a>. A blind couple, and their brilliant band, from Mali who had the Wales tent jiving away on Tuesday night. It really warmed my heard to see young kids dancing with their parents, and old people (and I mean really old people) standing up and boogying along. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Amadou & Mariam bring the Wales Tent to life</td></tr>
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<u><b>Day 7, Wednesday:</b></u></div>
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I cut my final day a little short in order to head home in good time, and to meet up with my cousin in Hay-on-Wye for an hour, but I was sorry to leave. Despite having been dog tired since day two, I have so much fun at Hay there is no doubt in my mind I'll be trying to head back next year. If I hadn't needed to be back in Liverpool it would have been extremely hard to tear myself away (I missed <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10062260/Jeremy-Irons-on-his-love-for-TS-Eliot.html">Jeremy Irons reading <i>Four Quartets</i></a>!).</div>
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When I got back I worked out how much I'd spent on the trip (£30 petrol + £55 camping and parking) - not including the few signed books I bought, versus how much I'd saved if I'd had to pay to see all the events I saw (although without the hindsight I now have, I wouldn't have paid to see all of them, including many which I actually turned out to enjoy) and it turns out I made a net saving of at least £144 and that's not taking into account food and drink (all those free meals vs. the occasional pint in the evening and that gorgeous peanut butter and chocolate ice cream). So, if you've always wanted to go to a festival like Hay, but are intimidated by the price it seems pretty clear that stewarding is the way to go.<br />
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But its not just about the money or the events (or, indeed, the food), it's about being part of something big, something special. Something which is genuinely inspirational and which always sends me home wanting to read more, write more, think harder and be better than I am. I'll be there come 2014, will you?</div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1Hay-on-Wye, Powys HR3, UK52.075697 -3.125907999999981352.0561775 -3.1662484999999814 52.0952165 -3.0855674999999811tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688195519067349724.post-54417871733366302532013-04-22T23:03:00.002+01:002013-04-22T23:03:38.474+01:00Lunchtime Classics 2013The Lunchtime Classics series of reading and micro-lectures which I organise begins again this Wednesday with my talk on H.G. Wells and <i>The War of the Worlds</i>.<br />
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