Tim Jones's Blog, page 44
February 17, 2011
Out Of It No Longer Out Of Print
In November 2010, I blogged about Michael O'Leary's cricket novel Out of It in the context of NZ cricket poetry anthology A Tingling Catch.
At the time, I said that Out Of It was out of print. The good news is that now it's available from Amazon as a Kindle ebook. You can find out more about it, and about Michael's many other books, at Michael O'Leary's new site - and Mark Pirie has a comprehensive new site as well.
While we're on the topic of new sites, check out my new Amazon.com author page - there will be a UK version along in due course.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.
February 14, 2011
Tuesday Poem: Pukerua Bay, by Anne Harré
Pukerua Bay
for Jane
The city is a sheath of glass and low sun, clouds puff puffing
the blue sky, a lazy menace across the bay. I have the promise
of lunch (or at least a decent morning tea) waiting down
the liquorice motorway. In the car I breathe my way to the sea.
The light is deafening, Kapiti rolls itself, stretches itself on the horizon
and I follow your instructions along the beach, over the wooden
walkway, past baches, homes and views that defy the imagination,
to the single Norfolk Pine and long steps up to the house. See this,
you say pointing to the tangle of weeds, un-mown lawn, Jerusalem
clover planted under the cross, those dots are the blood that dripped
down, that's what we were told, Catholics like a bit of drama, you say,
your skirt gently flap flapping. When I leave I take some away with me
but, unsure of what book to use, I press them in-between the pages
of the Shorter Oxford, under 'h' for heart.
Credit note: "Pukerua Bay" was first published in JAAM 27 (2009).
About Anne Harré
Anne Harré has a BA from the University of Canterbury in Music, American Literature, History & Politics. In 2001 she completed the diploma in Publishing and Editing from the Whitireia Polytechnic. She has also successfully completed several undergraduate papers from Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters. Though slightly convoluted, her work history has included stints as a music teacher, a book seller, time with The New Zealand Book Council, Trustee of The Randell Cottage Writers Trust, and freelance editing.
Her poetry has been published in Jaam, The New Zealand Poetry Society Anthology, The NZ Listener, and non-fiction and reviews in The Christchurch Press and the DominionPost. As well as design and layout, she has been a past editor for the NZPS anthology. She lives and works in Wellington.
You can see all the Tuesday Poems at the Tuesday Poem blog.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.
February 9, 2011
Harry Potter And The Hegemonic Norms
Scene 1: Harry Potter, orphaned at a young age, has grown up in the household of Lady Penelope de Vere Jones, Now, on his eleventh birthday, he is looking forward to attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry with his friends.
This happy scene is disturbed by the arrival of Dobby, a house elf, on a motorcycle he has stolen from Mr. Rubeus Hagrid, a horticulturalist.
Dobby: Harry Potter must not go to Hogwarts!
Harry Potter: Mumsy, this beastly elf is saying I must not go to Hogwarts with all my chums!
Lady Penelope: I'm sorry, my darling, but in this family we have always obeyed the diktats of elves clad in riding leathers.
Scene 2: With Hogwarts no longer open to him, Lady Penelope has sent Harry to Dungeness Secondary Modern. Lunchtimes are difficult.
Jenkins: Oi, I'm a working-class stereotype brought in to add ambient menace, and I don't like the way you're looking at me, Potter.
Harry Potter: Have a care, Jenkins! Don't push me, I warn you!
Jenkins: Push you! Wot are you going to do, Potter, if I push you .. like ... this ... Ow! Ow, wot you dun to me?
Harry: You'll keep your distance, Jenkins, if you know what's good for you! Or there'll be more where that came from!
--- interpolated scene ---
From the staffroom window, the Head and Mr Quail, a senior master, observe the goings-on in the playground.
Head: If I didn't know better, I'd say that great lout Jenkins was scared of Potter.
Mr Quail: That Potter's a rum cove, all right. Odd things keep happening around him. I think we should keep an eye on that one, Head. And as for Jenkins -
Head: Men like Jenkins built the Empire, Quail. Once they could be relied on to kick six bells out of Johnny Foreigner upon the command of a senior officer. Now they are ruining the schools of this great nation.
--- end of interpolated scene - back to the playground ---
Jenkins: I'll get you for this, Potter, just see if I don't. I'll...
Potter: You'll do what, Jenkins? Eh? You'll do nothing, and be glad of it.
The bell rings.
Scene 3: After school, Jenkins approaches Potter, palms outwards, treating him with a wary respect.
Jenkins: Potter, I don't like the way you use your privileged narrative position to enforce hegemonic norms.
Potter: I say, Jenkins!
And so the two boys became fast friends, laughing and joshing together in the playground, although sometimes, at the end of a long day, they became slow friends.
After their school days were over, Jenkins went off to kick six bells out of Mr John Foreigner. Harry Potter married a daughter of dentists who was herself a dentist.
Scene 4: Long years after their deaths, the ghosts of Jenkins and Potter still haunt the playground of Dungeness Secondary Modern, now a re-education centre for Liberal Democrat MPs.
Ghost of Jenkins: That wife of your was a bit of all right, eh? Eh, Guv?
Ghost of Harry Potter: If only I could remember her name.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.
Harry Potter And The Unfulfilled Destiny
Scene 1: Harry Potter, orphaned at a young age, has grown up in the household of Lady Penelope de Vere Jones, Now, on his eleventh birthday, he is looking forward to attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry with his friends.
This happy scene is disturbed by the arrival of Dobby, a house elf, on a motorcycle he has stolen from Mr. Rubeus Hagrid, a horticulturalist.
Dobby: Harry Potter must not go to Hogwarts!
Harry Potter: Mumsy, this beastly elf is saying I must not go to Hogwarts with all my chums!
Lady Penelope: I'm sorry, my darling, but in this family we have always obeyed the diktats of elves clad in riding leathers.
Scene 2: With Hogwarts no longer open to him, Lady Penelope has sent Harry to Dungeness Secondary Modern. Lunchtimes are difficult.
Jenkins: Oi, I'm a working-class stereotype brought in to add ambient menace, and I don't like the way you're looking at me, Potter.
Harry Potter: Have a care, Jenkins! Don't push me, I warn you!
Jenkins: Push you! Wot are you going to do, Potter, if I push you .. like ... this ... Ow! Ow, wot you dun to me?
Harry: You'll keep your distance, Jenkins, if you know what's good for you! Or there'll be more where that came from!
--- interpolated scene ---
From the staffroom window, the Head and Mr Quail, a senior master, observe the goings-on in the playground.
Head: If I didn't know better, I'd say that great lout Jenkins was scared of Potter.
Mr Quail: That Potter's a rum cove, all right. Odd things keep happening around him. I think we should keep an eye on that one, Head. And as for Jenkins -
Head: Men like Jenkins built the Empire, Quail. Once they could be relied on to kick six bells out of Johnny Foreigner upon the command of a senior officer. Now they are ruining the schools of this great nation.
--- end of interpolated scene - back to the playground ---
Jenkins: I'll get you for this, Potter, just see if I don't. I'll...
Potter: You'll do what, Jenkins? Eh? You'll do nothing, and be glad of it.
The bell rings.
Scene 3: After school, Jenkins approaches Potter, palms outwards, treating him with a wary respect.
Jenkins: Potter, I don't like the way you use your privileged narrative position to enforce hegemonic norms.
Potter: I say, Jenkins!
And so the two boys became fast friends, laughing and joshing together in the playground, although sometimes, at the end of a long day, they became slow friends.
After their school days were over, Jenkins went off to kick six bells out of Mr John Foreigner. Harry Potter married a daughter of dentists who was herself a dentist.
Scene 4: Long years after their deaths, the ghosts of Jenkins and Potter still haunt the playground of Dungeness Secondary Modern, now a re-education centre for Liberal Democrat MPs.
Ghost of Jenkins: That wife of your was a bit of all right, eh? Eh, Guv?
Ghost of Harry Potter: If only I could remember her name.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.
February 7, 2011
Tuesday Poem: Aramoana Border Post
Aramoana Border Post
"Dunedin, that's a fact!"
said the smelter proponents.
It wasn't and would never be.
Our border post was a fact:
a jaunty little hut
perched on the dirty haunches of the road.
"Welcome to the Independent State of Aramoana!"
We had passports, visa stamps, the lot.
We stood outside in white coats and flagged down passing cars,
asked them their purpose, invited their support,
a dollar here or there to save the saltmarsh, the houses
the sandbar and the incandescent dunes.
We were an enterprising bunch. We had sent letters
to Zurich, Paris, Auckland
promising trouble should the corporations ever get this far.
They never did. Market failure or a failure of nerve
kept them away. There would be other darkness
but the place itself remains,
lonely, unpolluted:
Bear Rock, the dunes, the saltmarsh.
The low and sand-choked pathways of the sea.
Poem credit: This poem is from my first collection, Boat People (Copies still available for $5, folks - email me!)
Tim says: In my early twenties, I was involved in the Save Aramoana Campaign, which successfully opposed the building of an aluminium smelter at Aramoana, at the entrance to Otago Harbour - a proposal strongly supported by Rob Muldoon and his National Party government. The declaration of the "Independent State of Aramoana" was a highly effective piece of PR for the campaign, and a lot of fun too.
Thirty years on, I don't hear too many people saying they wish there was an aluminium smelter at Aramoana. But another National Party government with a similar penchant for Think Big projects is encouraging New Zealand and overseas companies to dig up and process 6 billion tonnes of Southland lignite, which would lead to massive greenhouse gas emissions - big on not just a New Zealand, but a world scale. Through the Coal Action Network, I'm opposed to that plan too. Some bad ideas never really go away.
You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.
February 2, 2011
Recent New Zealand Speculative Fiction: "Returning" and "The Game"
As well as reading New Zealand speculative fiction collection A Foreign Country over the holidays, I also read two New Zealand speculative fiction novels: Returning by Pat Whitaker, and The Game by Lee Pletzers. Here's what I thought:
Returning
I enjoyed Returning, and it kept me gripped throughout: I always wanted to know what would happen next. I thought the novel had an outstanding first third, went off the boil for a while in the middle, and returned to form with a strong and moving ending.
Returning is the story of Arthys, an alien exiled on Earth, and his attempts to return home. As such, it's not dissimilar to some of the books of my favourite hard SF author, Hal Clement. The first section in particular is a gripping evocation of the alien protagonist's coming to terms with his bizarre new environment and his limitations within it.
Returning is, broadly speaking, a science fiction novel, but it also has elements of romance, alternate history and war novel. Keeping all those aspects in play requires the chutzpah and epic scale of a Thomas Pynchon or a Neal Stephenson - it's very hard to do in a novel of less than 250 pages, and the attempt to do so is what, for me, made the middle section of the novel less successful.
That's where the war and alternate history aspects of Returning come to the fore, and although the material of these sections is interesting in itself, I felt that the amount of exposition required overwhelmed the narrative for a while.
The good news is that the novel comes back to its original virtues in its final section, to reach an ending that is both moving and appropriate.
This is the first of Pat's books that I've read; Returning leaves me wanting to read more.
The Game
Lee Pletzers is a horror writer; I reviewed his earlier novel, The Last Church, in 2009. Like The Last Church, The Game is horror with some science fiction elements.
The Game is about a virtual reality computer game that sucks its players in more completely than its creator intended - and sucks him in, too. The entity controlling the titular game has a nasty imagination, and as in The Last Church, various characters suffer highly unpleasant fates.
One of the things that irked me about The Last Church has been fixed in The Game: the proofreading is much better. (That might sound like faint praise, but as a writer, badly-proofread books really annoy me!) And, while the basic idea isn't new, the plot is well worked out.
But, based on both The Last Church and The Game, I think that Lee Pletzers could take a lesson from Stephen King. King's best horror novels work because of the care he has taken in creating believable main characters. When bad things start happening to them, we care.
In contrast, The Game has a lot of characters, operating independently or in small groups - as you do in a game - to whom a lot of bad stuff happens. Lisa, the daughter of the titular game's inventor, is as close as the novel comes to a central character, but I never felt deeply engaged in her struggles and her fate.
So my recommendation for Lee's next novel would be to scale back the number of characters, breathe life into a few of them, and only then put those well-established characters under threat. That would be a horror novel to get my pulse pounding.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.
January 31, 2011
Tuesday Poem: 1917
A hard day's plotting gives a man a thirst.
For Lenin, it's something dark and strong,
a Black Mac for his blackest moods.
Trotsky can't decide: maybe an Export
maybe something brewed with ice.
"V. I. -"
"Wait on, Leon, just the dregs to go." A pause,
the glug and swish of beer. "Aaah. That's better.
You were saying?"
Trotsky looks up, face serious
above a thin moustache of foam. "V. I.,
why don't we just take over?
The Tsar could never stop us. He's
still chugging Lion Red from cans."
It's settled. Trotsky will inspire the workers.
Lenin will fuel the revolution
with crates of Lowenbrau
smuggled in from Zurich by sealed train.
Drink deep, Leon. Bottoms up, Vladimir Illyich.
Life will never look this simple or this clear again.
Tim says: This poem from my first collection, Boat People, seemed like either a good, or a completely inappropriate, choice after a week of revolt and revolution in Tunisia and Egypt.
Check out all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.
January 26, 2011
Recent New Zealand Speculative Fiction: "A Foreign Country"
Over the summer holidays, I finished reading New Zealand speculative fiction short story anthology A Foreign Country: New Zealand Speculative Fiction, edited by Anna Caro and Juliet Buchanan.
I have a story in "A Foreign Country", so it would feel weird to review it. Instead, I'm going to mention some stories that I particularly liked, one story I loved, and one story that has a problem: mine!
Anthologies of New Zealand speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy and horror) aren't published very often, so it is always a treat to see a new one. The even better news is that there are many strong stories in this volume, and none that I thought didn't deserve a place.
Among my favourite stories are the opening story, "The Future of the Sky" by Ripley Patton; "No Hidden Costs", by Matt Cowens; "Miramar Is Possum Free", by Richard Barnes; "Tourists", by Anna Caro; "Dreams of a Salamander Nation", by Susan Kornfeld; and "Pastoral", by Philip Armstrong. They are all strong stories, well-told, that engrossed me. In some, the New Zealand aspects weren't particularly important; others had an essential New Zealand-ness that really shone through.
My very favourite story in the book is the final one, "Back and Beyond" by Juliet Marillier. It's meta-fiction - fiction about making fiction - but, lest this sound forbidding, it is very much grounded in personal experience and personal emotion. A woman who is, perhaps, not too dissimilar to the author seeks a way back to a land and a time in which she was young, free and powerful.
The story has added resonance for me because it takes place at the site of the old Dunedin Children's Library, which was next door to one of the places I used to live in Dunedin. The Dunedin Children's Library was where the Dunedin branch of the National Association for Science Fiction used to meet, and thus, the place where I was introduced to science fiction fandom and science fiction fans. The story's protagonist gazes on a view I've also gazed upon.
But even if I'd never been within cooee of Dunedin, this story is moving, vividly told, beautifully characterised, and good speculative fiction as well. It's the perfect conclusion to a very good collection of fiction. You (and your local library) deserve a copy of A Foreign Country.
Oh, and that story with a problem? My story "The Last Good Place" takes place in a much-altered future in which the mainland of New Zealand has become uninhabitable, and civilisation - of a sort - clings on to New Zealand's subantarctic islands, centred on the largest such group, the Auckland Islands.
But what I should have realised is that many readers have never heard of the Auckland Islands, and think the story is taking place in a future, drowned Auckland City! It's a perfectly understandable confusion, and I should have thought of it - but I didn't. Sorry, folks!You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.
January 24, 2011
Tuesday Poem: Riverine Elements, by Robin Fry
Riverine elements
(water, wind, earth, fire)
Led deeper inland
by the sinuous body of the river
civilisation followed the contours of this valley
named for a man no one remembers –
a river that gathers its waters from the depths
of the green land and from the sky.
In flood it swells over its stone floor
pushing great logs down to its delta
where storms return them
for children to ride like beached
whales along the sands of Petone.
The walls of hills are giant handrails
defining the valley, guarding its settlements
from the ferocious appetite of the ocean
earth's rocks folded and faulted
through slow millenia
tamed and carpeted now to foothills
"where sheep may safely graze."
Rail and roads followed the river
opened the folds of the hills
where houses perch like eagles' nests
their windows gazing south to
an eternity of snow and water.
It is winter now
and Tararua's icy breath
fogs the river flats
wreaths the goblin trees of Rivendell
the bush-clad terraces of Kaitoke.
Bare willows march their torches of flame
along the river banks
and soon, this clear, cold evening
the day will die around us in the colours of fire.
Credit note: This poem is from Robin Fry's 2010 collection Time Traveller, published by Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop and available from the publisher.
Tim says: Time Traveller contains a number of Robin's best-known poems, such as the superb Hurry, which won the open division of the New Zealand Poetry Society's International Poetry Competition in 2008, but when I read this collection I was especially drawn to this lovely poem about the Hutt Valley.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.
January 19, 2011
I Only Read It For The Interviews
One of my tasks this week is to draft the questions for my first blog interview of 2011, with poet Owen Bullock. I've been conducting author interviews since 2008, and here is how you can access them:
Links to 2008 interviews (third item in the post)
Links to 2009 interviews
Links to 2010 interviews
February
An Interview With Bryan Walpert
March
An Interview With Robert McLean
April
An Interview With Vana Manasiadis
May
An Interview With D J Connell
June
An Interview With Penelope Todd
July
An Interview With Chris Bell
An Interview With Kathleen Jones
September
An Interview With Renee Liang
October
An Interview With Kerry Popplewell
November
An Interview With Douglas Van BelleYou can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.
