Robert Bagnall's Blog, page 7
February 10, 2023
Machine Learning Difficulties
Each morning, when I switch on my PC, I play a little game with myself...
Stop sniggering at the back...
No, nothing like that. What I do, when my laptop powers up and that Microsoft Windows travelogue-porn image (what the bon mot in geek-speak? wallpaper? background? I think it may be lock screen...) pops up pre-login, is try to work out where it is.
Obviously, natural features - coastline, mountains, flora, fauna - only tell you so much. Yes, you can differentiate between temperate and tropical, but otherwise bits of South America look a lot like Africa or India or South East Asia.
No, what I prefer are pictures of man-made features, cityscapes, buildings, industrial architecture. Even the European countryside, with its distinctive field patterns, is distinctive from an American landscape. And then I try to guess where it is. Where have I seen houses like that before? What side are they driving on? Who has that signage?
This morning, I was presented with a picture of a railway bridge. Judging by the semi-tropical flora, my first thought was 'Georgia', before deciding that there was no way on earth that the USA would allow so narrow and dangerous a structure - Christ, I can see the rails from below.
I revised my guess to Vietnam. Turned out to be Georgia. Apologies, Vietnam. My sympathies, Georgia.
One criterion. That's all the algorithm has to cope with. I've been doing this for a couple of years and Bill Gates still sends me pictures of rainforest. Very pretty rainforest, I'll concede, but it doesn't fit my one and only, and not - let's face it - very hard to work out measure.
Which leads me to conclude that the robots won't be taking over anytime soon. But also that we might want to look elsewhere for the cure to cancer and solution to climate change. Just for everybody relying on technology to dig us out of the hole of our making. Just saying...
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Click on the images or search on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?
2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
January 18, 2023
My face on your screen
There's a bloody enormous picture of my face on Shotgun Honey's website. Quick, quick... follow the links so you can get away from my gurning phizog as fast as possible, or possibly just click here to take you to 'So Sue Me', my nasty little noir-ish flash and first published story of 2023...
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Click on the images or search for them on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?
2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd.
January 1, 2023
End of Term Report #2
So, we pass the half way point with fifteen acceptances. Here's the second half of the year:
July 11th: Strong Branch's 'Tales from the Radiator' podcast strand take Audit's Abacus, previously published by Daily Science Fiction. This is the only story that I have ever had people come to me to republish - in that case, they had nothing to offer, but Strong Branch put a few dollars in the pot, so here it is again. Another sale, another pint...
July 21st: Mark Bilsborough's Wyldflash accept The Naming of the 'Ark Royal', a previously unpublished flash involving a spaceship launched by a fictional British monarch who, oddly, must have found himself one place further up the queue between acceptance and publication in September.
July 31st: Dragon Gems accept The Credo of Comrade January, a previously unpublished, long for a short (10k) weird fiction story about parallel universes and the square root of minus one. I make life difficult for myself, don't I? No news on publication date.
August 7th: Spacemaid, a slightly dreamy, but previously unseen, flash gets into a car badged Factor Four and drives away. It appears in Issue 15 in August.
September 12th: Eric Formley's Troopers slips an abridged version of military SF How Did They Get You? - originally featured in 2019 in James Gunn's Ad Astra - the King's shilling and it appears in late September.
October 1st: Shotgun Honey grab my unpublished noir flash, So Sue Me. Scheduled publication date: 12th January 2023.
October 18th: submitted back in March, B Cubed Press agree to reprint Charles Edward Tuckett’s Yuletide Message in their anthology, 'Holiday Leftovers'. It first appeared on NewMyths.com and, later, on this blog. It's out, and a physical copy is apparently on its way to me, fighting its way through the current wave of postal strikes.
November 15th: WolfSinger Publications come in for The Hazamesam Seance, a genre-flipping story that starts in 1950s rural Ireland and ends... well, not on this planet. It's destined for their 'Ring of Fire' anthology. It's another story that has racked up well over 50 submissions - in fact, I'm really not sure how many, it being one of my first stories, before I kept a strict record of submissions, a Theseus' Ship of a tale, initially a ghost story, then rewritten into sci-fi around ten years ago, and rewritten again recently with its second change of title.
December 28th: To end the year with a round two dozen acceptances, Don't Eat the Bundyroot will appear in 'Under the Stairs: An Anthology of Homebound Horror'. I was in two minds whether to take them up on the offer, this being just a section of a 14,000 word novella that's done the rounds but which I now won't be able to submit again, at least as an unpublished novella - but markets dry up quickly at that length, plus if I didn't want them to take it, why send it?! But the 'we love it' email does tend to crystalise one's thinking - maybe I was just sending it out to verify it was as good as I thought it was...
So, 424 submissions have garnered 24 acceptances - 17 of previously unpublished stories - and 373 rejections. A bumper year, but one unlikely to be repeated as I'm simply not writing stories at an adequate replacement rate. That said, I'm hopeful of at least the requisite three sales in 2023. But only time will tell...
And no, I haven't finished that novel yet!
Happy New Year!
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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?
2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
December 22, 2022
A picture tells a thousand words (or, in this case, three that tell about 1500)
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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?
2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
December 7, 2022
End of Term Report #1
Another year down with not much good news, other than that all-pervading interactive pandemic franchise seems to have run its course. That said, these things tend to come back bigger but rarely better, with all the subtlety of bodies on the street, foaming at the mouth. It'll probably have Timothy Olyphant in it next time. Don't say you haven't been warned. On a personal note, our 2022 was going quite well for about 29 hours until somebody smashed our car window to steal the loose change we keep for parking. Hopefully we'll all be granted a longer stay of execution before the bubble of New Year optimism inevitably bursts next year.
But on the highly-irrelevant-in-the-big-scheme-of-things writing front, 2022 started well and got better. Here's the first half:
January 9th: Mystery and Horror LLC take my story, …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. That, and T-Shirt Sales for 'Strangely Funny IX', which comes out in July.
Always good to get off the mark early. Barely a token payment, I did wonder about letting a fairly fresh story go when it hadn't got the usual fifty rejections under its belt - but there's a limited market for humourous sci-fi and fantasy. I sense a market getting more po-faced all the time. And I had to fight for that ellipsis in the title.
January 26th: The Digital Mortician, a reprint, is taken by JayHenge for 'Phantom Thieves & Sagacious Scoundrels'. Nice people, they've taken a number of my previously published stories for their weighty anthologies. As submissions for this one only close on 10th December, not sure when it'll be out.
January 29th: Working Late, is taken by Black Ink Fiction for 'Ctrl Alt Del' which appears in April. More back and forth over this 100-word drabble (is there another kind?) than for many a longer story.
February 8th: A story I think of as The Watcher, but retitled as Minerva Retitled to fit with the anthology's theme, will appear in 'Wayward & Upward' from Off Topic Publishing. Although it can't be found on Amazon, I am assured it's out and that a complementary contributor copy is coming from the colonies...
February 11th: Story Unlikely agree to reprint Dangerous Paranoia, The Choice of a New Generation , one of my first published stories.
It appears in early May, with a somewhat weird preamble culminating in "After reading, you could very well surmise that the author and I have plenty to disagree on (and even that could be miscalculated). And yet I have no qualms about publishing his work. Why? Simple. He tells a good story."
Well... err... that's very nice. But I wonder whether Unlikely's editor is confusing character with author?
April 8th: at the 52nd time of trying, Devil Ray at the Doorway is bought, by Medusa Tales. It appears in their first issue in June. A second issue comes out later that summer, but nothing since - I hope this is just a stutter.
April 10th: contrastingly, Daily Science Fiction takes Hell Is... on only its second sortie into publishing-land. It appears in October. DSF's current submission hiatus is potentially torpedoing my annual - or better - story placement, having now had four stories published this decade. I hope they open again soon.
April 12th: Aurealis take Thus with a Kiss I Die, a tale of evil corporations, mind-transference, with a dash of Shakespeare. It's scheduled for March 2023.
April 15th: on a run akin to the 60's British invasion of the US pop charts, another acceptance, and this one knocking it out of the park (JK Rowling wouldn't think so, but context, people, context).
This one is Sunrunner, taken by Third Flatiron for their 'After the Goldrush' anthology, which appears in July. In fact, this could count as two acceptances, as I also cheekily simsubbed it to Parsec Ink for their Triangulation series, and they unexpectedly took the bait, so I had to withdraw. Four submissions in total, two acceptances. Maybe I'm getting better at this making-stuff-up thing that I do.
April 17th: Edinburgh's Shoreline of Infinity takes alt. history transmigration of souls tale The King of China's Mirror. Another one that's been sent out numerous times and come back without finding a home fifty times. After a rewrite to move it from first to third person and a question over why they'd sent me a contract at their old, lower rate of pay (don't want to fall back on any Scottish stereotypes, but...) it cleared the transom. No news on publication date.
May 3rd: Tales from the London Soviet, a collection of five dystopian drabbles, is picked up by Shacklebound for their 'Dystopian Drabble Showcase'. Lucky really, as it was written specially for it, and I'm not sure who else would have been interested. It drops in July.
May 5th: After Abercrombie , about the consequences of unintended time dilation, is quite unexpectedly published, for real money, by Page & Spine, who are in the process of transforming themselves into a non-paying venue. I blogged about the strange no-contract-required way in which it appeared overnight like mushrooms on the lawn.
June 6th: Mithila Review buy my weird fiction take on modern art and ESP, which they retitle They Who Scream America. Wikipedia say it is the only international science fiction magazine published in India, which makes me disproportionately proud - look Mum, published on four continents! Four continents in two months!!
June 13th: Shacklebound, back for more, grab My Avatar has an Avatar, a DSF reprint, for 'Mods', which hits the virtual newsstands in September. Great to see my name on the cover. Again.
June 15th: not even sure if this should count, but The Moth is shortlisted for the Defenestration Prize. I give it no support on social media, as I prefer these sort of things untainted by begging to the point of losing my dignity. In the end, I can rest easy, basking in the knowledge that at least one of the judges didn't completely hate it.
No, of course it didn't win.
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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?
2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.
November 19, 2022
Unsought feedback
Maybe it's a Groucho Marx, I wouldn't want to be a member of a club that'd have me as a member, thing, but I recently left the British Science Fiction Association. As somebody who's British, writes science fiction, and has appeared in half of New Con Press' 'Best of British Science Fiction' anthologies, you'd think we'd go together like ray guns made out of sink plungers and expository dialogue. After all, it's mission is 'to support and promote SF in all its forms', and one of those carbon-based forms is me.
So, what's led to this estrangement, this parting of the ways? Well, as they can't be bothered to ask when a member leaves (you'd think that'd be fairly basic), I thought I'd pen a few thoughts that they may or may not stumble across.
As a starting point, I have to wonder what it was I wanted to get out of joining the BSFA to start with. I'm not one for dressing up as a storm-trooper or some jelly-headed alien and 'celebrating' my favourite franchise, so joining a sci-fi society isn't really me. I'm not even sure I have a 'favourite franchise'. Marston's, maybe? The sort of sci-fi I imagine is celebrated at events ending in 'con' sit on that uncomfortable continuum between cringy and cartoonish.
If you're here because you've read something or things by me and want to find out a bit more about how I tick, you'll probably have worked out a strong sceptical, absurdist streak, a recognition that homo sapien 1.0 tends to be the limiting factor in almost everything we try to do. Those cons with their cheerleading, let's-do-the-show-right-here vibe don't really cater for my mindset. Perhaps I'm being cruel. Perhaps there's a Kafkacon where people dress up in various states of transition from human to insect. I might just be able to go with that.
No, if anything, my joining was an attempt to add a veneer of credibility and professionalism to my work, demonstrate that I'm in it for the long run, looking to progress and improve in my output and - in short - put me closer to publishers and agents. But as a base camp on the Matterhorn of getting agented or (properly) published, if there was a BSFA-sponsored wormhole to the top of the slushpile, nobody mentioned it.
As to improving myself as a writer, I had high hopes for the chance to join one of their writers' group, which they call Orbits. Frustratingly, it took over a year (I think, without checking email trails) to get on a short story group, and I never got out of the queue for a novel-writing group. And, when I did get there, having expected others with an encyclopaedic knowledge and innate understanding of the Turkey City Lexicon it was all a bit... how shall I say: blind leading the blind? Don't get me wrong, they were all very nice people, and there was some incisive feedback, but I had expected to need to run to keep up.
But the most frustrating aspect of being in Orbit were the house rules of email feedback only, and no resubmissions. I challenged both, and was put back in my box. On the first, if we're a society, can't we be social? Zooms, Teams and Google hangouts make that easy (irony alert: sci-fi society refuses to embrace technology!) and there are simple rules that writing groups usually adopt about giving and listening to feedback. And both that, and the no resubmissions rule really stifle the dialogue that underpins improvement. Stories succeed in the rewriting, not at first draft stage. So, what does it encourage? Lots of half-baked tales, and not ones that have had their structure honed first, then given flesh with as little fat as possible. Best of luck with that, fellas.
That said, I wish Mark Bilsborough, Wyldblood-supremo, all the best in his new role of Orbit overlord. Perhaps he'll be a little less flat-earth over how they are run.
Which left my member benefits being a succession of magazines which, although occasionally absorbing, mistook the genre as worthy of chin-stroking quasi-academic over-analysis combined with a forgiveness of chimpanzee-finger-painting-quality dross on the grounds that almost anything has artistic merit, consistent with a belief amongst those who don't create that there's always some great meaning or plan in what we do and we aren't just throwing bits together in the hope they stick in a mildly entertaining way, presented in the village newsletter style of a please-send-a-stamped-self-addressed-envelope-and-wait-28-days-for-delivery-for-an-accompanying-guide to Look Around You.
Actually, I think I may have just worked out why they'd be reluctant to approach me for feedback...
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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?
2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd.
October 26, 2022
Hell Is...
...hopefully not reading 'Hell Is...', my latest story on the ever excellent Daily Science Fiction.
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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?
2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd.
October 12, 2022
Blade Runner 2019 and 2049 - a tradition maintained
Contains spoilers
I am, and always have been, a huge Blade Runner fan. If asked for my top three films of all time, it'll be there, together with The General, The Third Man, and Casablanca - come on, who doesn't have at least fifteen in their top ten? - despite it having a plot hole that's more sinkhole than pothole.
I am referring, of course, to the need for Holden to put suspected replicant Leon through a Voight-Kampff test to confirm that he is a replicant, even though his and his confederates' mugshots are in circulation. Leon doesn't even attempt a disguise.
I've read desperate post-hoc attempts to explain this - that it took longer for the photos to come from off-world than the replicants themselves did - but seriously? have you seen the tech in this world? Are we saying that they had to wait for the snaps to develop, wash the fixer off, then queue at the post office? It's almost embarrassing.
And, even if we accept that sort of abject nonsense, we are then expected to accept that Deckard goes to the Tyrell Corporation headquarters to run his Voight-Kampff test against a Nexus-6 example as a sort of dry run in a safe environment, sceptical that it would work.
So, not only is using the test clearly still a requirement after Deckard has the photos, he doubts it would provide useful. So why this strategy, rather than just going 'fuck it, I'll identify them from their faces like any other criminal'? Simple answer: because it's one of those stories where the plot points go A, B, C and if you can't sensibly, logically or coherently get from A to B it doesn't matter because getting from A to B is all that matters, B in this case being about putting Deckard and Rachael in the same orbit.
Hence it's wonderful to see Blade Runner 2049 keeping up the tradition. It may even be why I have a great deal of fondness for it, whereas my heart typically sinks at the prospect of any sequel, prequel or spin-off to movies I hold dear.
So what's 2049's cybercrime? Having established that a replicant can bear children - a fact, if widely known, we are told, would pull civilisation apart (would it? would it really?) - Ryan Gosling's K then hunts for Rachael's child in order to find out how flesh could be born of machine. That I haven't misunderstood is confirmed by this bit of the IMDB plot synopsis:
The only way [Wallace] can meet the ever-growing demand for more Replicants is to engineer specimens who can procreate. Tyrell obviously learned how to do this, but his records were destroyed in the Blackout. The only way to learn Tyrell's secrets is to find Rachael's child.
What I don't get is what would a child tell you about the way in which it was conceived? I don't think anybody's suggesting that he or she would be able to simply report anything useful - the circumstances of Rachael's death and burial suggest they may not even be aware of their unique origins. The conceit is that the child could be somehow dissected for the answers.
Really? How? You can't tell from my DNA whether I was conceived in the typical manner (do I need to draw you a diagram?!) or I was a test-tube baby or my birth mother was a surrogate. So why think this offspring's genes may spill the magic beans?
Yes, I'm sure the baby will have DNA like any other baby (or maybe not, but even then...) but I've never heard it said that it's possible to pull mother and father apart, as it were. Maybe having child and Deckard could tell you something about Rachael that her bone fragments won't yield? If that's the case, maybe somebody would have made the point...
Oh, I forgot - it's all about getting your plot from A to B to C, and if you can't do that sensibly, logically or coherently it doesn't matter because getting from A to B to C is all that matters. Hand wave, hand wave, nothing to see here, move along now...
Still love it, though.
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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?
2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd.
September 13, 2022
Will I ever be a centrefold?
Bloody hell, I hope not. But I never expected to be a cover star, either. Out today.
(Just to be clear - it's only my name on the cover... not my face)
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Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?
2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd
September 2, 2022
Spacemaid
It's like a mermaid. But in space. Click here and see if you get the idea...
#
Click on the images or search for these on Amazon. You're here, so surely you know how to do that?
2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
Twenty-four slipstream stories. Frequently absurd
