Robert Bagnall's Blog, page 9

Okja - bacon sarnies, anyone?

I finally caught up with Bong Joon Ho's 2017 Okja, a film superior IMHO to the over-lauded Parasite.  There.  Nothing like getting the controversy in early.

As you can probably tell from that gambit, there's a lot I liked about the movie - from Jake Gyllenhaal's bonkers (and virtually unrecognisable) TV naturalist to the loveable (but not loveable enough to put me off bacon) Okja.  And credit to the effects people for remembering that post-violence physiology is as much about swelling as bleeding. 

There was, however, one element that grated.  It's how the film portrays our view of genetically modified organisms (GMO).  The story relies on Tilda Swinton's Lucy Mirando, CEO of the Monsanto-in-disguise corporate villains, hiding Okja's genetically modified roots under a smokescreen of a bucolic miracle, mother nature handing us this uber-porker through her munificence and benevolence.  It plays to - and worse, reinforces - all the misunderstanding about GMOs.

What is it about humanity's sudden mistrust of genetically modified plants and animals?  We've been genetically modifying them for millennia, just by guesswork.  It's called cross-breeding: putting the tastiest animal in with the biggest and picking out the ones that have both traits from the litter, or grafting a heavy-cropping stem on to a hardy rootstock.

Genetically modifying flora and fauna in the modern sense is no different, it's just doing it with the lights on and the boxing gloves off.  We can see the mechanism under the bonnet, pick out the gene combinations for colour, flavour, yield and disease resistance.  We no longer have to guess.

How we use GMOs may be problematic, of course.  Making a grain resistant to pesticides allows you Agent Orange the farm at the expense of every living thing other than your cash crop.  For clarity, I think that is a BAD THING.  But it doesn't make GMOs a bad thing.  It does, however, mean that GMOs open up a whole new world of bad things.  It's like saying that the invention of the internal combustion engine was a huge evil because it allowed the development of tanks and warplanes, forgetting that it also gets food into our shops and people to hospitals.

But a cursory search of the internet shows that many, many people have swallowed the whole Frankenfood scare story, more so amongst the young which, to me, demonstrates that the power of the social media echo chamber outguns the classroom's ability to teach people to think rationally.  GM foods cause cancer?  Well, let me name a couple of really quite natural consumables that do that just as well - tobacco and alcohol.  QED: being GMO or non-GMO has nothing to do with it.

Given this, and the resistance we've seen to Covid-19 vaccines, I wonder whether it's possible to produce something akin to Asimov's three laws of robotics, but for humanity's stance towards innovation?  How about:

If I can see how it works, I'll trust it (e.g. the wheel)If I can't see how it works, but it brings me entertainment or pleasure, I'll trust it (e.g. the Internet, street drugs)If I can't see how it works, but it predates me, I'll trust it (e.g. fire)Everything else is witchcraftAs a species, we're fucked, aren't we?

#

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.

Perhaps I'm part of the problem?

I sit before you splenetic and confused.

At the weekend I attempted a palace coup, as one does on a sunny Saturday in early Spring, to wrest control from those asleep at the wheel of the local branch of a national environmental body I recently joined (reading previous blog postings will provide dots for you to join).  For a little less than twenty-four hours, I was co-chair and co-treasurer, before the out-going chair decided that a constitutional rule requiring attendance at six prior meetings in order to be nominated for a committee role still held, hence my nomination, and therefore appointment, was invalid.

Given a) the meeting was to revive a moribund group and form a new committee, with few long-standing members having the continuing energy to push things forward, b) this was only the group's second meeting since 2019, and c) there were only eight of us in the room, two of whom wished to be shot of their responsibilities, with few others enthusiastic, and we needed four committee members, draw your own conclusions.  You may cite a focus on following procedure over achieving results: RMS Titanic, deckchairs, etc.  Mine is that they'd rather have the climate rise by two Celsius than me in a position of influence.

Why that may be so is, I think, illustrated by a drabble that I submitted to Solarpunk magazine.  Now, Solarpunk declares itself to be 'a publication of radically hopeful and optimistic science fiction and fantasy'.  My drabble concerned a bioengineer who solved the climate crisis, leaving her empty and depressed.  So, she lit the fuse of an even bigger problem, giving her life renewed focus, even if it left the rest of us like boiling frogs in a cauldron.

I sent it to them as much as a joke as anything; it fitted their brief, if not their ethos.  I sent it to them mainly because I enjoy being awkward and contrary (see above), but also to prick the smug 'it'll all be all right in the end' bubble that I see regularly.  Because, and this is what's driving this posting's title, I do wonder whether we, science fiction writers, do not carry an iota of responsibility by being a little too good at our game.

Yes, let me repeat, perhaps some of us, not all of us, are just a little too prescient.

I'm looking at you Mark Twain, inventor of the internet.  And you, Douglas Adams, father of ebooks.  Stand up, Hugo Gernsback, and admit you gave us Facetime.

Science fiction is littered with examples of predictions that actually came true.  And I think this may have fooled us into thinking that if we all hang around long enough, there'll be some magical technological solution along in a moment.  That Apple will save the apple, along with all the other flora, plus the fauna, including us.  Just look how we invented a vaccine whilst living through a live, interactive, global performance of Soderbergh's Contagion.

Just because we can write the solutions, and get really, really lucky every so often, doesn't mean we have, or ever will have, the solutions.  For every self-driving car (ta, Ray), there's faster than light travel or time travel.  Even those who don't make this basic category mistake are, I think, lulled into a false sense of security.  I know it isn't true, but I bet I'll be responsible for more carbon going into the atmosphere than coming out today, and I should be panicking more about it than I am.

Now, you may have expected Solarpunk to have batted my piece straight back to me.  But no, they liked the writing, and asked me to expand it and align it to their philosophy.  Make it positive.  Make it hopeful and optimistic.

At first, I guffawed - they'd misunderstood, hadn't got the joke, the snowflakes.  Rewriting as requested would negate the whole point of the piece.  Then I thought about it, tossed it over in my mind, saw it from the other side.  And now my drabble has doubled in length - still a quarter the length of this post - but guess what: Alex the bioengineer has solved the second problem she set herself, and has made the world an even better place.  I'm going to send it off to them today.

If it ever sees the light of day, I'd like to be clear that it's utter hokum, but optimistic, positive hokum.  Don't be fooled into thinking any of my hand-waving science signals a possible solution to the environmental crisis within.  But I rather like it.  We need more of it as the water levels rise and the trees catch fire.  Help take our minds off things.

#

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.

See target, hit target

Regular readers who aren't Russian bots trying to break into my bank account (why don't you go and invade a country or something... oh, you are) may know that I have a target of selling three stories a year or I pack it in, concentrate on draught beer in a can (cognitive dissonance in a can, more like) and daytime TV.

Well, that target was hit in twenty-nine days this year, and if you want to restrict it to three new stories, then I can report that took just thirty-nine revolutions of our little blue marble.  Here's where you'll be able to find new words from me sometime soon:

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. That, and T-Shirt Sales, a Pratchett-like satire on rock music and The Four Horsemen and rewrite of a radio sitcom pilot I wrote whilst at university, sent off to the BBC, then forgot about, will appear in Mystery and Horror's 'Strangely Funny IX'.  I'm particularly glad it's out the door as it has Covid-references which are already pushing past their 'best before' date...The Digital Mortician, which first appeared in Big Pulp in 2013 will be available again through JayHenge's 'Phantom Thieves & Sagacious Scoundrels'.  I keep sending them stuff and they keep accepting 'em.  Which is nice.Working Late, a previously unpublished drabble, has gone to Black Ink Fiction's 'Legends of the Night' strand.  I know what you're thinking: it's a drabble! Hey, from where I'm sitting, it's a sale.A story that I still think of as The Watcher will be published as Minerva Revealed in Off Topic Publishing's 'Wayward and Upward'.  The change of title comes from the anthology being themed around pre-written music, with the stories and poems all sharing titles with the tracks.  I don't quite know how I feel when stories I've lived with for a while are published under only recently-adopted aliases.  A bit like when you see your children in clothes they've chosen for themselves for the first time, I think.Another reprint and another satire, Dangerous Paranoia - the Choice of a New Generation, first published in 2011, will be out again courtesy of Story Unlikely, a slightly weird set-up to the extent that the Grinder credits their existence but refuses to countenance them, as submission is taken as a one-sided agreement for them to publish if they want.  Hence they'll only be sent reprints by me, but it'll be good to see this one stretching its legs again for the first time in over a decade.I had hoped to add Galaxy's Edge, the highly regarded periodical started by Mike Resnick, as opposed to the Disneyland ride but the rewrite notes promised 'within forty-eight hours' last month have yet to appear...  Wormhole in time and space, anyone?

#

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.

If the chemist's was on Kepler-22b

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

As put by Douglas Adams, and so ably illustrated here, by Neal Agarwal.

#

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.

'Ready Player One' by Ernest Cline

Contains spoilers

I always wondered what happened to Peter Pan.  Turned out he was busy writing 'Ready Player One'.

Having just finished it, I'm left with mixed feelings.  One the one hand, it's a page-turning ride.  With the final lines of each chapter, I wanted to know what happened next.  Isn't that praise enough for what's just meant to be a bit of escapist genre fiction?  Cline's not pretending to be writing The Brothers Karamazov.

So, what irks?

There's a formula going on here, so front and centre that I can feel myself being played.  I feel exploited; ever so slightly dirty.  And I can't think of a better way of putting what feels off about it than quoting Ursula Le Guin on Tolkien, that the "peculiar rhythm of the book, its continual alteration of distress and relief, threat and reassurance, tension and relaxation: this rocking-horse gait (which is precisely what makes the huge book readable to a child of nine or ten) may well not suit a jet-age adult."

And the thing about formulae is that they are so… well, formulaic.  If you play ‘guess what’s next’ you’re not going to need that many lives.  That the hero wins in the end and the pantomime baddie gets their comeuppance?  Check.  That victory is snatched from the jaws of defeat again and again?  Check.  That the macho avatar hides a geeky lesbian?  Not so much check as pre-checked by the focus group of wokeness.

And I guess that’s part of my gripe.  If we were living in some Orwellian society (whaddyamean ‘if’?), this is exactly the kind of brain tranquilliser they’d be feeding me keep me politically onside.  I don’t feel I’m getting Ernest Cline so much as Ernest Cline’s view of what it is he thinks I think I want to hear.  I want Ernie to stretch my envelope, not pander to me.

Part of the what leaves me uneasy is the amount of time the book spends in its game playing metaverse.  Not that it’s a problem in itself, but the lack of impact of the real world on this false reality feels phoney in itself. There’s a sort of importance given to things in inverse proportion to what's really important.  People die in the real world but I get a sense that the right motions are autistically gone through, but that's all they are - motions.  Even more basically, does Parzival ever stop to piss?  I wanted this to turn out to be a game within a game, for Wade Watts to be an avatar of an off-page protagonist and everyone else in the story to be constructs of the game.  Only then could I buy Parzival’s continual will-he-won’t-he-fuck-me-he-has progress.  I wanted that ending because there’s a level of escapism that’s just too much - think Alice versus heroin.  Anything else stretches credulity.

But perhaps this just reflects that I am not the target audience.  I’m not a teenager. I own a couple, standard issue models.  And any other owner will know the drill.  The coffee mugs that cease to be visible once they've been emptied, hence never need to be returned to the kitchen.  The way world peace is easy but self organisation isn't.  The floordrobe.  For them the real world is a distraction from their screenlife, no matter how much you try yelling at them.  Explain, and they just look at you like lions in the zoo look at you, dead-eyed, just waiting for you to stop talking. That’s behind my j’accuse up top.  Peter Pan never grew up - and this feels like it’s written by a perpetual adolescent.

Of course, Spielberg went and turned this into a movie.  But, remember, Speilberg's the guy that greenlit the ET game, regarded as the worst game ever released.  Just saying.

#

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.

End of Term Report

Another year down, a year in which writing science fiction, at least of the dystopian near-future variety, has seemed a little pointless, given yesterday's dystopian near-future is covered daily in the newspapers.  But what else to do, methinks?

This year's numbers are, well, big: 530 submissions, 18 acceptances, 397 flat refusals, and 56 replies with some message of hope.  Or messages like this: 

"I'm sorry, I found this story unsavory and unpleasant with a disturbing ending.  I think at certain points it was attempting to be clever or rough-edged but was just distasteful.  Written with undeniable skill, it is nonetheless full of nasty, evil people.  While it is a good set-up, unfortunately they win, going against the sort of story we prefer, where evil doesn't win."

Guess you can't please all of the people all of the time.  (Nasty, evil people?  Some of my favourite characters.  Actually, I'm rather proud of that critique - how naïve and limiting to want good to triumph every time...)

So, let's review:

'The Loimaa Protocol', was taken by The Chorochronos Archives in March.  The one review on Goodreads rates my contribution, a reprint of my most recent entry in 'The Best of British Science Fiction', as five stars, with the three word summary 'Dreary, buildup, strong'.  Go figure.'The Pizza Bug', a previously unpublished flash, was taken in May and appeared in September, in Handmade Horror.'General Katutian Surveys her Triumph', a drabble, sold in May to Martian Magazine (for the second time, but this time they changed their minds and actually published it).  It hit the interweb in October.'Roadkill', a sci-fi horror that's been knocking around in various forms for years (originally as a screenplay I entered in a competition;  apparently liked it and it was allegedly wanted by the National Film and Television School before BSE closed the countryside in 1996) was accepted for The Needle Drops... in May.  It’s available.  Go buy it.May also saw 'Nobody Sees the Cleaner', a new flash about a dwarf pulling off a bank robbery, taken for Die Laughing: An Anthology of Humorous Mysteries, which came out at the end of July.The Fool, a reprint, was taken by the forthcoming Grandpa's Deep-Space Diner in June.'The Hundred Dollar Fortune', a new story about a time-travelling, fortune-telling orang pendek, will be coming out in the second volume of Cryptids Emerging in February. It sold in June.Daikaijuzine bought 'My Avatar has an Avatar', previously published in Daily Science Fiction, in JulyJayHenge, who took 'The Fool' in June, took another reprint, 'The Star of Jingdezhen', for Phantasmical Contraptions & More Errors the following month.August saw Bourbon Penn take 'The Disappearing', an unpublished weird fiction which had been shortlisted by another publisher two or three years before who then went into hiatus; I decided to cut my losses by sending it back out. I'm glad the ever-interesting Bourbon Penn picked it up. It appears later this year, I understand.'Arlecchino', an unpublished horror short about an aging clown, was taken by Dark Dispatch in September for their forthcoming anthology of identity horror stories.I don't like a year in which I fail to get something into Daily Science Fiction. They took 'School Project', a time-travelling eco-sci-fi tale, in September - but have just passed on another at the second round stage after sitting on it for three months, which marks a return to the frustrating norm.'Karl, I Hope You Don’t Read This Letter', another time-travelling flash, was taken by Etherea in October and appeared soon after.'Inktomi and the Skyship', a science-fantasy with a hint of horror, hasn't yet appeared in Wyldblood, but it will. It sold in October.'Tesla luvs Waymo 4Ever', a drabble reprint, was another sale to Martian Magazine in October. It's also the 100-word version of the 4000-word 'Driverless', which appeared in 'Murder and Machinery' last year.November saw another reprint sale: 'Death of a Medicine Man', a mystery thriller with a hint of the occult, to TexArcana.'Gordon Knott', a drabble, was taken by Black Ink in November. I can't say sold, because this was an unpaid gig. Despite this being a few weeks ago, I obviously regarded this as being so perfunctory that I'd forgotten it and am still sending the story out. However, as their website returns a 404 error, maybe that's the best thing...And lastly, 'The Photograph', a gothic(ish) horror set in a world where the rule of physics are slightly different, was taken by Crow Toes Quarterly in November and is due out... today.

All eighteen sales actually cover a period under eight months, illustrating the feast and famine nature of this game.  It was a somewhat frustrating start to the year, with nothing selling for almost three months, once an abortive sale to Exterus was chalked off early on.  But, eleven of them are new stories, and four of them well above flash-length, with a good proportion sold at semi-pro rates or better.

But there have been the usual frustrations as well. Remember I was slowly reeling Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores in with a story for which they'd asked for rewrites three times?  Well, in the end that slipped away.  That rejection came on 1 March, a dies horribilis on which I also received rejections from Asimov's, Apex and two from PodCastle, with rejections from F&SF and Flash Fiction Online the day before, amongst several others.  None of them unexpected; I would just like to breathe in between.

As for the rest? The obligatory two silver honorables and two unvarnished honorables from the L Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Award and, no, I haven't finished that novel yet...

#

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.

If Aristotle wrote Squid Game

Contains spoilers...

...which is a completely irrelevant warning, because the whole planet has seen Squid Game, apart from us.  Or, more accurately, has seen all of Squid Game, whereas we're only up to episode 6.  And, just to confuse matters further, I'm writing this as though I've only seen the first two, which is when I mentally sketched out my thinking for this post.

Because, much as I've taken to the whole peppermint-accented Grand Guignol since, I was left feeling hugely underwhelmed after the first episode.  In fact, up until halfway through the second episode I was convinced that this may be building up to a textbook example of 'how not to'.

Let's just review the first episode and a half:

Seong Gi-hun is down on his luck, having accumulated enormous debts whilst becoming estranged from his daughter and ex-wife. At a train station, a well-dressed man asks him to play a game for money, then offers an opportunity to play more games with much higher stakes. Gi-hun accepts, is knocked unconscious, and awakens in a dormitory with 455 others, identified only by numbers. It is explained that the players are all in dire financial straits but will be given billions of won in prize money if they can win six games over six days. The first game is a deadly iteration of Red Light, Green Light, where anyone caught moving is shot dead on the spot.

With over half of the players killed in the first game, many survivors demand to be released. Using the game's third clause, they successfully vote to cancel the game and send everyone home, but without any prize money. Back in Seoul, Gi-hun goes to the police, but no one believes him except Detective Hwang Jun-ho, whose brother received the same invitation card and has recently disappeared...

The above is taken from Wikipedia, which fails to mention that when we meet him Seong Gi-hun lives with his ailing mother and thinks nothing of stealing her bank cards to finance his addictions.  This is not a nice person.  This is a person who you would be delighted to see locked up and off the streets.  Yes, he can do that winning baffled look and the more time you spend with the character you forget his lack of moral compass, but repeat after me... this is not a role model.

Years ago, I attended one of 's workshops.  I recall discussing what may lead you to root for a hero, and high up on the list was undeserved misfortune.  Not misfortune, but undeserved misfortune.  That first word was really important.  And this wasn't John Truby's idea, he was just passing down a nugget of wisdom that's been knocking around since Aristotle.  It's innate, hard-wired.  We can't help thinking in these terms.

To save you clicking on that last link, here's the crucial line from the deep thinkers at Tufts University: "The hero must not deserve his misfortune, but he must cause it by making a fatal mistake, an error of judgement, which may well involve some imperfection of character but not such as to make us regard him as 'morally responsible' for the disasters".  Sorry, stealing mum's bank card wasn't a misstep, it was the actions of a character rotten to the core.  Morally responsible for the kimchi he's in?  Absolutely.

But that isn't even my main gripe.  At the risk of sending one of my hobby horses lame through over-exertion, story requires there to be a hero (doesn't need to be singular or even human) trying to achieve something (anything!) who needs to overcome obstacles to get there.  Others will say that there needs to be a personification of those obstacles (an antagonist) and our hero needs to evolve, but they're not necessities.  They'll improve the end product, sure, but you can still have a story without them.

Let's tick them off.  Hero.  Subject to the comments above, check.  Obstacles.  The story is designed around the six couldn't-be-more-obstacle-like-if-you-tried games in six days.  Check.  Achieving something.  Clearing his debt.  Right?

Not so fast.  Clearing a debt, or making money isn't an aim, or at least not an aim that's particularly interesting, story-wise.  Doing something - robbing a bank, closing an impossible deal, driving trucks filled with unstable, leaking nitro-glycerin up a long and rocky mountain road to plug an escalating oil refinery blaze - to make the money, now that's the interesting part.  Not the cash.  What you have to do to get it.  Do you want to see a story about a football manager funding his toddler's obscure treatment by winning the cup or getting sacked?  They both sound dreadful, but the second sounds a whole different level of dreadful.

And what does Seong Gi-hun have to do to win the money?  Not lose.  Not do something.  Avoid an outcome.  It's not even like there was a leaderboard after the first game, it was simply a matter of not failing.  And watching people avoid an outcome is really, really boring.

And whilst it becomes quickly apparent later on that there is an incentive to be the only winner at the end of the race, that isn't how the first episode is set out.  It's a case of you don't need to succeed as long as you don't fail.  There can be as many winners as you like.  In theory, everybody could have won the first game.  So, we have a dislikeable main character trying to avoid, rather than achieve, something, without any sense that the number of winners is in any way rationed.  How did this get green lit?

It's only when Hwang Jun-ho comes on the scene looking for his brother - a positive, definite objective - for a character with undeserved misfortune that I found myself engaged.  It was like a switch had been flicked.  Now I wanted to know what happened next.  But ninety minutes in?  Seriously?  I didn't know we could be so relaxed about story these days.

I'm sure John Truby would have set the whole thing up differently.  Hell, I think Aristotle would have done so too.

#

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.

A cause for concern

A well worn science fiction trope is humanity stumbling on to a higher intelligence.  By definition, it’s tricky to write, and very often we end up concocting aliens with super-human powers, rather than intelligence that somehow operates on a whole extra dimension.  What would that even look like?  Think if ants were to be able to do sudoku, or a gecko plot a political campaign.  What would a similar leap be for us?

Well, yesterday, I think I may have stumbled on an insight.

I turned from reviewing coverage of my team’s galling 96th minute defeat to a relegation rival to reading that global warming is melting the arctic permafrost, causing it to release carbon dioxide, increasing the rate of global warming and therefore defrosting of the poles, in a spiralling nightmare equivalent, in greenhouse gas emission terms, to dropping another China on to the planet.

Objectively, I knew these issues were of such vastly different scales that no sane and sentient intelligence could react to them the same way.  But I couldn’t help but do exactly that.  It’s hardwired, no doubt down to still, biologically, needing to assume there's a sabre-toothed tiger hiding behind the postbox until disproved.  And, I suspect, it may lead to the ultimate destruction of the species.

A higher intelligence would give each of those two scenarios the weight they deserve, treat them intuitively as vastly, cosmically different.  But not me, not this homo sapien - and, I would suggest, not the vast majority of homo sapiens.

I mentioned it to the good lady wife, who said her main concern was the eczema on her elbow.  ‘Nuff said.

#

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.

Is it right to have favourites?

No, not amongst your children - what could possibly be wrong with that? - I mean amongst your stories.

I’ve just finished final edits on 'The $100 Fortune', which will appear in Dark Cheer, Cryptids Emerging from Improbable Press next February.  The story of a fortune-telling, time-travelling orang pendek, I think it may be the best thing I’ve written.

Coming back to it some months after last looking at it gave me a perspective I’m rarely allowed once a piece is accepted.  It meant I could read it cold, like a real reader would, which led me to notice things like a change in setting that wasn’t flagged up, hence had failed to move the scenery in the reader’s mind.  It allowed me to tweak elements like that, and elsewhere where I hadn't quite said what I meant or meant what I said, shave a bit more fat off here and there, and so forth.  Recently reading Stephen King’s excellent 'On Writing', whilst telling me little that wasn’t in Ken Rand’s brilliant '10% Solution', reinforced many of those lessons and helped me spot those redundancies.  If the rest of the two volumes is as good as I think my piece is, they should be a cracking read.

#

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.

People of Earth, your attention please - read more!

Apparently, it makes you more open-minded, improves thinking skills, and even helps you live longer.  And whilst you're deciding which great work of literature to start on next, perhaps you'd like to give 'General Katutian Surveys her Triumph' published on Martian, the magazine of science fiction drabbles, a go.  It's only a hundred words, so it won't delay you getting to the Kafka or Chekov.

If that's not long enough for you, then there's always 'Karl, I Hope You Don't Read This Letter', on Australia's Etherea Magazine, a bit longer, but still under a thousand words.

Just whilst you're deciding, you understand. And, if you're still uncertain you could just plump for...

#

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.