Dark Currents from NewCon Press

I’m very pleased that my very short story “In Tauris” will be appearing in the anthology Dark Currents, edited by Ian Whates, published by NewCon Press, and launched at Eastercon. This is a particularly exciting publication for me, because it will mean that this year is my tenth consecutive year in print. Other contributors are: Adrian Tchaikovsky, Adam Nevill, Tricia Sullivan, Rod Rees, Nina Allan, Andrew Hook, Finn Clarke, Lavie Tidhar, Jan Edwards, Emma Coleman, Rebecca J Payne, Sophia McDougall, Aliette de Bodard, V.C. Linde, and Neil Williamson....

Conspicuous Consumption

A rather rambling review of reading in 2011. (Some of) what I read over the summer I wrote about reading Ulysses here. And I did finish it, by gum. As you can see, I also had a feminist SF-a-thon over the summer. Joanna Russ’ The Two of Them and We Who Are About To… were probably the most awesome. Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères inspired some experimentation. The Book of the Night by Rhoda Lerman should be better known. I still have a pile of these to get through, hurray! I loved the Tiptree winner, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić (not...

British Science Festival 2011

Over the weekend, I hopped up to Bradford to take part in a panel discussion on “Science fiction and religion”. You can read more about the panel and my excellent co-contributors here. (Make sure you read the comments from the Doctor’s parish priest!) It was a very enjoyable session; lots of enthusiasm for Doctor Who, and some great discussion about, for example, how a theologian might approach writing sf, what sociology can bring to the mix, and much more. Here’s the text of my talk. Alien conmen and mad computers: Doctor Who, Star Trek – and...

SF Mistressworks

There’s been a lot of discussion in recent months about the lack of visibility of women sf writers, particularly within the British context, and the ease with which classic sf texts by women can disappear. Some of this discussion is linked from this post by Nicola Griffith, where she also suggests taking a pledge “to make a considerable and consistent effort to mention women’s work which, consciously or unconsciously, has been suppressed”. She calls this the Russ Pledge. I’m not really interested in opening that debate here, rather simply to...

Alien Nation

Last week I went up to Newcastle for Alien Nation, a two-day conference on telefantasy (i.e. British SF, fantasy, and horror television). James Chapman’s Inside the TARDIS and Catherine Johnson’s Telefantasy battled for citation supremacy, but surely the fairy godmother of the conference was Network DVD, purveyors of retro television series to the discerning. Gone are the days when washed out Nth generation video copies of UK Gold repeats were the only available window onto childhood memories. Network, we salute you. (Warning: clicking on the link to Network...

Reading Ulysses with Bishop Brennan

I decided that this would be the year that I would read Ulysses. I’ve made two attempts on it before, but stalled a little before 200 pages in (my edition is 700 pages long): so, after Lestrygonians. This time round I’ve got myself an audio reading to help me through. It’s an unabridged reading from Naxos Audio, read by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan. (You will perhaps know Jim Norton as Bishop Brennan from Father Ted.) Anyway, this has definitely been the way to go. I started a couple of days before Bloomsday, and after a month I’m halfway...

England and nowhere

This weekend my friend A. kindly did all the driving so that we could attend the Sixth Annual TS Eliot Festival at Little Gidding, Cambridgeshire. Yes, a TS Eliot festival. You can see the programme here. So a mixture of poetry readings, academic papers, music, and fannish squee, all a hundred yards from the church that inspired Little Gidding (which long-term followers of my life will know is my favourite poem). Ted Hughes reads: here and here. The dull facade and the tombstone Inside the church Simon Armitage did a fantastic job reading Little Gidding. He came...

An experiment in e-books

I got a Kindle last year, and I’ve been really enjoying using it. I’m thinking about the possibilities of self-publishing, but wondered about the technical barriers. I thought I’d experiment with some of my longer fanfictions, to see how easy the process was and whether I could get a look like that I liked. A Game of Chess is my first novel, written and published online across two crazy months in the spring of 2002. It’s a romance about Faramir and Éowyn, after the fairy-tale wedding. There’s lots of riding to and fro and being intense in...