George Sandison's Blog, page 3

Empty Space in the Kefahuchi Tract

On a long-haul flight, I read M. John Harrison’s Empty Space: A Haunting, the final part of his startling Kefahuci Tract trilogy. I found it compelling, bewildering, funny and shot through with an ennui of the uncategorisable. This is an immediate, pre-rationalisation, attempt to explain why.

For those not familiar with his work, Harrison is a ‘writer’s writer’ who has long-inhabited a fuzzy post-genre territory. Liminal is a word often used. Transitional, cross-border ideas. Given Empty Spac...

Mirrors, Mediums and Salt Lakes

Vice’s article about Australian photographer Murray Fredericks is right when it says he ‘intends to document the lake not just as a landscape, but as a medium in itself.’ The images they’ve picked out to accompany the interview are surreal and entirely beautiful things. I’ve seen the salt lakes in Bolivia, and well remember how they break your senses of distance and perspective. They are weird places, that challenge our assumptions about how we relate to space.

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Where it misses a beat, howeve...

2084, crowdfunding and interviews

Anyone who has been even slightly near Unsung Stories on social media in the last two weeks will have noticed that we’ve launched an anthology of dystopian fiction called 2084. The idea for this is pretty much – get writers to ‘do an Orwell’ and look into our future.

A few people have been asking how we managed to pull together our contributor list – which includes Christopher Priest, David Hutchinson, Lavie Tidhar, James Smythe and a bunch more excellent writers – so I’ll happily spill the s...

The Digger’s Tale

My story, The Digger’s Tale, has been published at Unofficial Britain.

Unofficial Britain is a great site dedicated to ‘unusual perspectives on the landscape of the British Isles, exploring the urban, the rural and those spaces in between.’ You can read stories and articles there, and I’d also recommend spending some time with the soundscapes.

The story was something that started scratching at me after I read Gary Budden’s Baleen – it was something about the way we treat dead bodies, and how...

Nine Night

John died last night. A heart attack and complications from surgery had kept him down for months. He grew pale at the end, his dark skin bleaching in the English winter. I wanted to count the gaps in his stained teeth that he always showed with that giant grin. The kind of man who forgot it’s an unforgiving city.

The kids were screaming in the basketball court, dominating the space with the shivering crash of railings and the inestimable joys of half term. It looked like another party to me.

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The City in Motion

I’ve been thinking about cities, how they’re always in motion. The city never sleeps, its arteries clog, its lungs fill with smoke. But that only describes how we use the space. Meanwhile, it regenerates.

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Museum Street, where You Me Bum Bum Train once lived.

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New towers in the City

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The three faces of London: Historic, developing and transitory

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The City, in predatory guise

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The crest of the wave

Best reads of 2016

There was a longer post here, once, back in the days before mysterious things happened to the blog whilst my back was turned…

We picked out our best reads of 2016 over at Unsung Stories. If you want good books to read, here’s what we recommend.

Autumn events – FantasyCon and Unsung Live

After a very busy summer with Unsung, at Nine Worlds, running events and making lots of books you think the sensible thing to do would be to take a break and enjoy the new and exciting world of married life. And you’re right, that probably is the sensible thing to do. But this is publishing, and there’s always another Con.

I’m going to be doing a couple of events in the next month, this time around short stories.

First up is FantasyCon in Scarborough, 23rd-25th September. Unsung will be runni...

Forthcoming story in Bourbon Penn

I’m very happy to say that one of my stories, ‘The Road Knows When a Journey is Over’ will be published in a forthcoming issue of Bourbon Penn. The story is set immediately after the apocalypse and deals with things like grief, loss and survivor guilt.

It’s an older piece of mine, but one that has been through several edits. It’s one of the ones I feel particularly close to, in fact, so it’s really good to know it’s found a good home.

I’ll post the publication date and how to read it as soon...

Egoism and the Hero’s Journey

I blame Ursula Le Guin.

I read The Dispossessed recently and, aside from the obvious depths I found around exploring unconventional political philosophy, the conflicts between home and self and the morality of knowledge, I was struck by a particularly technical aspect of the writing.

So I had a go at hammering it out over at the Unsung blog. And spare a thought for poor old Shevek.