My memory cuts out around one, but nobody seems to have hit me.

[alexsarll]

Been a while since I woke up in the afternoon! Testament to the majesty of Soul Mole, I would say.

You ever read one of those print-on-demand books? I can see the appeal of the idea, certainly - there are books where it doesn't make economic sense to have a warehouse full of ready stock, but where the long tail means you can make money by having one ready to roll when someone flashes the cash. I was glad to see some when I realised Westminster libraries, presumably on the same jag that led them recently to acquire what looks suspiciously like the complete works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, had bought in a couple of POD editions of stories by the great Arthur Machen (acquaintance of Wilde, inspiration to Lovecraft, and inadvertent originator of the legend of the Angels of Mons). One of them I hadn't read; 'The Terror'. Which (in with the mixture of essential conservatism, structural imbalance, genuinely queasy horror and strange, pagan poetry one expects from Machen) manages, with its references to Huvelius' De Facinore Humano, to anticipate Ken MacLeod's conception of the True Knowledge - a philosophy founded on the most pessimistic cynicism about human nature which breeds utopian results. But, typically, I digress. The edition was not the one I had on my Facebook bookshelf, but one from www.kessinger.net and blow me, it was a disaster. I don't mean the cheapo production or binding, I expected that from POD. I mean the text. Words change spelling within a sentence, even the word which gives the story its title sometimes becoming 'tenor'. Paragraphs break
at random points in sentences. or punctuation appears where it is not wanted,, or already placed. It is, as best I can tell, the same text available free online here - though in an appropriately Machenical turn of events, such errors are, for no reason on which one can put one's finger, somehow less of an affront on screen.
Still, enough - the publishers distracted me from the text once, I should not let them so totally distract my account from it too. Over to Machen for the close, as he explains why conventional ideas of detection tend to let us down when confronted with the unprecedented:
"You can't believe what you don't see: rather, you can't see what you don't believe...mere facts, without the correlating idea, are nothing and lead to no conclusion."

Who could have guessed that "one of the world's most wanted men" would be a nasty piece of work called James Bulger? Makes me wonder whether Jon Venables and Robert Thompson really were just children-gone-wrong; I'm thinking in terms of a story about a time traveller's embarrassment at going back to the early twentieth century and bumping off a perfectly innocent baby who happened to share the name Adolf Hitler.
(In other dead child news, the McCanns' latest attempt to point the finger at anyone but themselves would seem to implicate cult superhero and Rorschach inspiration The Question. Who did always come across as a bit strange, but this really doesn't strike me as his style)

Anyone looking for a smallish, scuzzy but workable venue in North London - I can make a recommendation (if not an unreserved one) of Bar Monsta in Camden. I was there to see the Indelicates on Wednesday and while the sound wasn't perfect for the live bands (a bit of mic trouble, mainly), I've seen much worse in venues with better reps. The band themselves were charming as ever, opening with what I gradually realised were the lyrics to 'Breakin' The Law' over the intro of their own 'Fun Is For The Feeble-Minded'. Later I feared they were about to sell out by doing an encore, but having hushed the crowd's applause, Julia whistled briefly, then went back to putting her keyboard away. Heroine.

Comments

[redshira.livejournal.com]

I clicked on the link to see what rubbish the McCanns have come up with now, and look!

dark, greasy collar-length hair

It was SNAPE!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

He didn't die, just LOST HIS FACE by sorcerous means! And Madeleine looked like the young Lily! It all makes sense...

[redshira.livejournal.com]

EXACTLY! Makes more sense than a lot of the cack they've come out with in the last six months, anyway...

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

That "True Knowledge" concept sounds interesting - which MacLeod book is that from? I haven't been keeping up with him.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I only recently discovered him, and have been going from the start - the True Knowledge is from The Cassini Division. TBH, his more recent ones don't look as interesting to me, though I'm sure I will get round to some eventually once Haringey Libraries find me The Sky Road and I can finish The Fall Revolution.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

Oh, I have read the Cassini Division, but so long ago that I must have forgotten that bit.

Learning The World is a retread of A Deepness In The Sky, but with bats instead of spiders. I don't recommend it. The Execution Channel looks like his attempt (along with a lot of other good science fiction writers; viz Stross, Bear, McCauley) to move into the technothriller market, and seems a lot more interesting.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It was even in the blurb - "Ellen May Unspellable is a young woman with centuries of experience, no morality and the true knowledge".

Execution Channel was the one by which I was least tempted. Which Stross are you thinking of as technothriller? I can see it with the most recent McAuley, and even more so Richard Morgan, but Stross always seems more thoroughly SF-minded. Or horror/comedy/spy-minded in the Laundry books.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

The MMO heist novel, Halting State, which he says has sold a lot more than any of his other recent books.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Oh, OK - didn't think that was out yet.

TBH if there was anything of Stross' that I thought might be written with an eye on the market, it was that parallel world fantasy sequence he's just started. Wasn't going to bother with them, but the publishers just sent me the first so it would seem rude not to.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

Halting State is out in the US, but not the UK. He (understandably) keeps an eye on the market and thinks about what will sell or at least how his books will be marketed - it's pretty clear that he's not alone in concluding that space opera novels are going the way of the Western. One genre is set in a future that will never happen; the other in a past that never existed.

Where you draw the line between "mundane SF" and "technothriller" and so on is a marketing decision really.
Also look at Gibson writing an SF novel set in 2006, and Steven Baxter's latest (http://www.amazon.co.uk/H-bomb-Girl-Stephen-Baxter/dp/0571232795), set in 1962 and being marketed as a young adult novel.

I don't think any of this is a bad thing; it's a reaction to the realisation that runaway technological change and globe-spanning disasters are affecting our lives now, not in the year 3000. The only bad thing is that Gibson doesn't get reviewed in the literary press because he's "sci-fi", but when Jeanette Winterson reinvents the most hackneyed space opera, she's somehow writing great literature.

I've read the first three of the Merchant Princes books - it's really a gritty alternate history series designed to be marketable as fantasy. It's gradually discarding the fantasy trappings and becoming an out and out thriller now, and it's good at what it's trying to do.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was unsure with Merchant Princes whether it was the book or just the blurb that were very much aimed at a reader who's not me. I'm glad if it's the latter.

Agreed in principle about the whole problem of non-SF writers stealing out genre writers' thunder and doing so with inferior product, but I think Gibson's the wrong example - at least since Virtual Light, if not before, he's been guaranteed broadsheet coverage. Hell, these days most of them even take Pratchett seriously, which is real progress.

I think you're also a little pessimistic about the future for space opera. I did like what he did to subvert SO expectations in Accelerando and to some extent Glasshouse, but I think part of the ingenuity of the Mansour books is in finding a plausible way for us to get there from here.

But yes, I've been saying for a while now that these days, you're either writing SF or historical fiction. These days, the gap between writing and publication is enough in itself for the present to have moved.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

I got the idea that Gibson's book hadn't got a lot of critical coverage from this article by John Sutherland (http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2159309,00.html) (who admittedly has been known to get the wrong end of the stick about things). Also there was a Gibson fan blog complaining the same thing.

I get the impression that Spook Country got more coverage in news sections and technology pages than actual book reviews.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

That article appears to believe that Spook Country is the first artwork with an associated wiki, so I'm inclined to take its other claims with a fairly hefty pinch of salt.

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

I've not read A Deepness In The Sky, but personally I really enjoyed Learning The World.

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

Oh, and that sketch clearly implicates Richard Herring. I reckon he was researching a new show called "Fuck Me, I'm Four".

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

[applause]

Does Neil Codling have an alibi?

[darkmarcpi.livejournal.com]

With that hair and the brown jacket....there's something
*almost* 90s crimplene indie about him. Suede or Pulp spring to mind, though it's difficult to tell from that picture whether the suspect walked, ran or minced off.

Re: Does Neil Codling have an alibi?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I don't know about an alibi, but last I heard he did have a beard.

[the-elyan.livejournal.com]

You ever read a journal called humphrey_clarke? He's just vomited forth another of his infrequent but spectacular cascades of hot bile against the world around him - I saw it and thought of you...