Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 116

New Crime Short Two-pack available: Seeing Red

I did another eight-hour e-book challenge and here is the result, a crime short two-pack about bad relationships leading to murder called Seeing Red.

There is some more information about the process of writing Seeing Red over at the Pegasus Pulp blog. And in case you’re wondering why I waited until now to announce a story that went live more than a week ago, I wanted to wait until the story was available at all major stores and particularly Apple tends to be slow. What is more, I’m trying to space out the promotional posts and there have been a few of late.

So here it is: Seeing Red

Two tales of bad relationships, angry women and murder

Seeing Red

It was supposed to be just sex. But then Dan gradually wormed his way into Maggie’s life and into her apartment. And though Dan insists that he loves her, Maggie suspects he is far more interested in her sixty inch plasma screen.

Living together brings out the vast differences between Maggie and Dan. And so Maggie’s patience is stretched to a breaking point to a breaking point, until an argument about pasta sauce and Dan’s addiction to ketchup lead to murder…

Third Time Lucky

Hilda’s abusive husband Walter has already survived two massive heart attacks. But the third time’s a charm… or is it?

For more information, visit the Seeing Red page.

Buy it for the low price of 0.99 USD, EUR or GBP at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Casa del Libro, Scribd, Inktera, txtr, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Der Club, Libiro, Nook UK, DriveThruFiction, OmniLit/AllRomance e-books, Flipkart, e-Sentral, You Heart Books and XinXii.

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The Speculative Fiction Blog Hop

Over at KBoards, a couple of indie spec fic writers got together and organised the Speculative Fiction Blog Hop, a variation of the popular Writing Process Blog Tour. Every participant answers four questions about our process and then hands on the baton to the next writer.

I’m up today, taking over from Jessica Rydill, author of Malarat and Children of the Shaman. Here is her bio:

Jessica Rydill writes fantasy and collects Asian ball-jointed dolls. This makes her living room an unnerving place to visit.

Many of the dolls are based on characters from her books. The bad guys stay locked in the cabinet.

Jessica wishes she could write like Russell Hoban. In the mean time, she has got a crossover going on between mediaeval fantasy with warlords, and steampunk adventure with lightning-wielding shamans. Plus Golems, Dybbuks, Kabbalistic demons and other nasties from Jewish folklore.

And now it’s time for the questions:

What are you working on?

On the speculative fiction front, I finally finished Debts to Pay, a new Shattered Empire novella focussing on the character of Carlotta Valdez, which is currently going through editing. I even found the perfect cover image, which looks just like I imagine Carlotta. I’m also working on another Shattered Empire novella, Shot at Dawn, which should come out later this year and puts Holly and Ethan into deep trouble.

On the non-speculative front (yes, I work on multiple projects simultaneously), I’m working on Little Girl Lost, part two of my romantic suspense series New York City’s Finest, as well as on a short holiday romance called Lonely this Christmas. Now writing a Christmas story in July is somewhat weird, but you have to start early in order to have it published in time for the holidays.

How does your work differ from others in its genre?

I believe that our writing is the sum of our influences. Now authors are different people from different backgrounds, with different experiences and preferences. And since those backgrounds, experiences and preferences influence our writing, it naturally follows that our work is different from the work of all those other authors.

According to Amazon’s author rank, there are approx. 22000 speculative fiction authors out there. However, none of those other 22000 speculative fiction authors has had exactly the same experiences growing up, worked the same jobs, read the same books, watched the same movies and TV shows. In fact, approx. 21950 of them don’t even live in the same country as me.

Why do you write what you do?

I read in multiple genres. And since I write what I like to read, I consequently also write in multiple genres.

However, speculative fiction has always been my first literary love, since it was the genre I latched on to, when I grew out of children’s books and made the switch to adult books (there was very little YA in those days and ever less worth reading). In particular, I fell in love with science fiction, mostly Golden Age classics as well as some 1980s works. So it made sense that I would write in the genre as well. Indeed, my first attempts at writing a novel was science fiction.

I like all subgenres of science fiction and have tried my hand at writing many of them, though space opera was always my first love. What is more, there is one crucial ingredient that can be found in all the science fiction I’ve loved in my life and that is rebellion, to the point that “rebellion against an unjust system” was part of my personal definition of science fiction for years. If a book managed to combine space opera, a sprawling galactic setting, lots of female character who kicked butt and rebellion against an unjust system, it was pretty much catnip to me.

Since I really loved space operas about plucky rebels fighting against an unjust system, it was only natural that I would try to write one of my own. And I did, as a teenager making my first attempts at writing. Alas, the result – a massive sprawling mess called the Femla series – was illogical, chaotic and frankly unpublishable and borrowed quite liberally from Star Wars as well as anything else that caught my fancy.

Eventually I grew up and recognized the Femla stories for what they were, namely an unholy mess. I also got on the Internet and found other science fiction fans, for the first time in my life. Alas, I also learned that the kind of science fiction I liked was considered hopelessly old-fashioned and found that I didn’t much care for the sort of science fiction that was considered hip. All this led to a massive creative paralysis, which caused me to abandon the genre I loved most in favour of other genres I also liked. At around the same time, I started selling short fiction in genres other than SF and decided I simply wasn’t fated to be an SF author.

Indie publishing changed everything, because it meant that suddenly I had the freedom to write what I wanted and publish it. And so, after dipping my toes into the indie pool with some backlist stories, I decided to try my hand at space opera again with all the elements I liked so much. Hence, Shattered Empire was born, the story of the Great Galactic Rebellion, told through the eyes of the people who fought it.

Meanwhile, the Silencer series was born out of my interest in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and my admiration for the authors who wrote for them. Because the old pulp authors had a work ethic like nobody’s business. For example, Walter Gibson, the man who created The Shadow, would write a short novel of approximately 40000 words every two weeks. And the results are still entertaining today, almost eighty years after they were written. In pre-indie publishing days, prolificness on the scale of Walter Gibson was pretty much unheard of, though now there are indie writers who come close to matching the work ethic of the old pulp scribes.

When I created the Silencer, I initially wanted to try my hand at writing like the old pulp authors did, loosely connected series adventures with a single heroic protagonist written at a fast pace. So I created a character patterned after the pulp heroes of the 1930s like the Shadow, the Spider, Doc Savage, Operator 5, etc…, only with a twist cause in his civilian identity the Silencer actually is a pulp writer. Of course, I didn’t manage to write as quickly as Walter Gibson, though I consider myself reasonably prolific. But I still enjoyed creating the Silencer and his supporting cast.

There are similar stories behind all of my works. For example, my crime shorts were inspired by the short crime stories that could be found in the backpages of many German magazines when I grew up. My historical romances were inspired by reading Anne Golon’s Angelique saga in my teens and watching a whole lot of French and Italian made historical movies on TV. New York City’s Finest was inspired by the sexual tension laced crime dramas that were so popular in the 1980s. Rites of Passage and Cartoony Justice feature characters I invented back in my early teens.

How does your writing process work?

I am what is commonly called a pantser. I usually have at least a vague idea of where a certain story is going, but I don’t use outlines. Most of the time, I have a flash of inspiration – a scene, an image, an idea – and simply start writing and see where it takes me.

For more complex stories, i.e. novella and novel length, I sometimes create a rough outline, when the story is approx. three quarters finished, by scribbling brief scene descriptions on notecards and shuffling them around to determine which order they go in.

In case of a continuing series like Shattered Empire or New York City’s Finest, I also have a rough series outline as well as a sort of series bible listing characters, settings, plot highlights, etc… The Silencer is a bit different, because the individual adventures are self-contained without an overarching plot. But I still have a series bible to collect information on characters, setting, equipment, etc… as well as notes for future adventures.

I write every day, including weekends and holidays. The absolute minimum wordcount goal I’ve set myself is at least 100 words of new fiction per day. Since I started tracking my wordcount back in 2005, I’ve missed my 100 word goal only once, when I was sick with the flu. However, these days I aim for writing at least thousand words every day, divided between several projects. I frequently exceed that wordcount goal, though sometimes I fall short as well.

I used to think that I needed a solid block of at least half an hour free time in order to write. Eventually, inspired at least partly by Dean Wesley Smith, I started writing in shorter bursts. Whenever I have a few minutes of free time, I write, even if it’s only a sentence or two. Cause even these few sentences do add up over time. I also carry a pen and a notebook wherever I go and use dead bits of time – waiting at the tram station or the doctor’s office or some downtime at school – to jot down a few sentences. Using every bit of free time to write has boosted my productivity enormously.

As I said above, I usually work on several projects simultaneously and cycle through them, so that if I get bored or stuck on one project, I can jump to the next one. This approach usually works quite well for me, though it can take longer for an individual project to get finished. However, earlier this month I found myself finishing several stories in quick succession and thus ran out of projects to work on. The solution was going through my folder of unfinished stories and picking one or two to continue.

 ***

Okay, that’s it from me. Next up is Kevin Hardman who writes some kick-arse superhero fiction. Here is his bio:

Kevin Hardman is an avid reader who made the mind-boggling decision to cross trade lines and become an author about a year ago.  He is the author of the Kid Sensation series and the Warden series.

Make sure to check out his blog on August 4 for the next stop on the tour.

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Dog Days Linkdump

It’s the Dog Days of summer, the hottest and sultriest time of the year, and also the time when supposedly there are more serious disasters and tragedies than usual. Thankfully, the dog days don’t always live up to this particular aspect of their reputation, but sadly this year they do.

And now for some links:

First of all, I’ve been interviewed by fantasy writer K.J. Bryen at Take the Plunge. We talk about writing, UFOs and pirates – the seafaring kind, not the kind that illegally shares digital media.

I also made a trio of posts over at the Pegasus Pulp blog, explaining why my e-books won’t be available via Amazon’s new Kindle Unlimited program, collecting other reactions to Kindle Unlimited from around the web and finally linking to some prime Amazon bashing from Germany.

In the speculative fiction community, the big topic is the decision of the WisCon committee to only provisionally ban former editor Jim Frenkel for four years after several incidents of sexual harrassment. Natalie at The Radish has the full scoop.

The Guardian has an interesting article about how the comment sections of articles about the conflict in Ukraine and recently the flight MH17 tragedy are flooded by pro-Russian comments and wonders whether this is an orchestrated social media campaign. I’ve been noticing a similar phenomenon in the comment sections of the German media. Lots of pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian comments, accusations of bias, similar wording (“murderous militias of Maidan” is a popular one) and often a liberal dose of anti-Americanism, too. There has been surprisingly little reaction to this in the German media, which is odd, considering it’s happening right in their comment sections and on their own Facebook pages. Here is a rare German language report on the phenomenon from kulturzeit. Comments are screened BTW.

John C. Wright claims to have found the secret to mindblowing perfect sex. The rest of the world begs to disagree.

German radio and TV personality Manfred Sexauer died Sunday aged 83. From the mid 1960s on, Manfred Sexauer introduced international pop music on the very conservative German public radio, which was something of a scandal at the time. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, he hosted the popular music program Musikladen on TV, where pretty much all of the big names of the era performed live.

I’ve seen a lot of Musikladen episodes over the years, both live and later as repeats. As music programs go, it was unique with its mix of comedy, political cartoons, international top acts, GoGo dancers (often topless in the early years) and early electronic effects. Here is the opening of the first Musikladen episode ever featuring Manfred Sexauer and co-host Uschi Nerke and here is a typical episode from the disco era (1980 in this case). Musikladen eventually became a casualty of MTV like most of programs of its type, though it survived in some form well into the 1990s on TV and to this day on the radio.

Finally, here is Manfred Sexauer in 1980 together with a very young Thomas Gottschalk and Frank Laufenberg rapping to the beats of the Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight (which had been performed live on Musikladen sometime before, though I couldn’t find the video). This piece was actually the first German language rap song ever.

Last but not least, here is a signal boost: Speculative fiction small press Hadley Rille Books is running an Indiegogo campaign to allow them to expand their operations.

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Prometheus and the problem with prequels

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) was on TV yesterday. Now after seeing the bad reviews this film got at the time, I bumped it down from “Head for the cinema now” right past “Get it on DVD” to “Watch when it’s on TV”. And now Prometheus came to TV, I finally did watch it.

Now given that a whole lot of smart people really really hated Prometheus, sometimes so much they posted several times how much they hated it, I expected a feat of truly epic badness.

However, Prometheus is not a feat of truly epic badness. Instead, it’s just a rather meh movie with some pretty bad science. So “meh” in fact that more than twice as many German viewers preferred to watch a rerun of the German crime drama Tatort (Crime Scene) instead.

Spoilers behind the cut, provided you need a warning for a two year old movie.

The Good: Prometheus certainly is a nice looking movie, but then it should be, given the enormous budget and current state of effects technology. The cast is solid, particularly Michael Fassbender and Idris Elba, who as usual steals the movie. In fact, if there was one thing that would have massively improved Prometheus, it would be more Idris Elba and less drippy boyfriend of Noomi Rapace. And please shorten the sex scene between Rapace and her drippy boyfriend and give us Idris Elba in bed with Charlize Theron instead.

The Bad: The science is absolutely atrocious and much of the plot hinges on the fact that the characters are all idiots who seem to have slept through their science classes and health and safety instruction and who have never seen a single SF film in their lives either.

In many ways, the movie is also predictable as hell. I mean, was anybody at all surprised that David as played by Michael Fassbender turned out to be treacherous? He’s an android in a Ridley Scott movie, so of course he’s going to be treacherous (and gets his head ripped off). In the end, the only survivor is a young woman – come on, we’ve all seen Alien. As for the reveal that Charlize Theron’s character was the daughter of the man who financed the mission a.k.a. Guy Pearce in old age make-up – I called that one right from the beginning, though I wasn’t sure whether I called it because the connection was so obvious or because I subconsciously remembered that tidbit from the various negative reviews.

However, plenty of extremely popular SF films have atrocious science. Star Wars, the Star Trek reboot, Transformers, Independence Day, Armageddon and every superhero film ever have science that is even more ridiculous than that in Prometheus. And plenty of movies have plots that are driven by the incompetence of many or most characters.

Take for example the biggest hit (in the US at least) of 2012, the same year Prometheus was released, namely the mighty Avengers. The science in The Avengers makes even less sense than that of Prometheus – it’s basically a movie about a glowing magical Macguffin that opens a portal into outer space. As for idiocy and incompetence, pretty much everything that happens in The Avengers can be blamed on the rank incompetence of SHIELD (with some contribution by Odin Allfather’s crappy parenting skills) – and that was before we knew that approx. half of them were really HYDRA operatives. Yet The Avengers is widely (and rightfully) beloved, while Prometheus is reviled with a passion usually reserved for the likes of Sharknado. So why do so many people hate Prometheus – a completely average and forgettable movie – so much, while they are willing to forgive the exact same sins in many other films?

Initially I assumed that the extreme problems many people had with Prometheus was due to the religious content. After all, the movie might be considered to endorse the idea of intelligent design with the “alien kickstarts development of life” scene at the very beginning. And then there is the fact that Noomi Rapace’s character is openly religious and wears a big silver cross around her neck. There is also some religiously flavoured debate about whether David the android has a soul as well as about the relationship between creator and creation.

Now I’m not religious and generally prefer my SF free of religion as well. In particular, I can’t stand theological discussions in my SF. However, the religious aspects in Prometheus did not bother me in the slightest. Of course, the whole “ancient astronauts as gods and bringers of life” concept is bunk, but concepts that are bunk can still make an enjoyable basis for fiction. Nor do I mind religious characters. Some people are religious, so it follows that some fictional characters will be religious as well. Besides, I viewed the attachment of Noomi Rapace’s character to her silver cross as well as her need to know who made humanity less as religiousness and more as the result of her missionary father’s untimely death. After all, we see in a flashback scene that the cross was a present from her late father*. As for the religiously flavoured debates between the characters, the average episode of the new Battlestar Galactica (which was inexplicably popular with the sort of people who hate Prometheus) had a lot more tedious philosophizing and theologizing than Prometheus).

Besides – and a lot of people seem to have missed that bit – the plot proves the various religious theories in the movie wrong. The alien gods want to destroy their creation and kill us all. Guy Pearce’s character realizes with his dying breath that “there is nothing”, i.e. no afterlife. And David, the supposedly soulless android, is not just the most developed character in the entire film (it’s telling that I can remember his name, but not that of the other characters), but also clearly has feelings, including a creepy infatuation with Noomi Rapace’s character. Hell, he even murders her boyfriend.

So what precisely was it that had so many people so upset about Prometheus, when it was no better or worse than a dozen other forgettable SF films? I guess in the end Prometheus was a victim of its overblown expectations. Because to those who were eagerly awaiting the release of Prometheus in the summer of 2012, it wasn’t just another SF film. No, it was a serious SF film in a sea of vaguely SFnal summer blockbusters. What is more, it was Ridley Scott’s return to the genre that had made him famous for the first time in thirty years. Finally, it was supposed to link Alien and Blade Runner together.

When weighed against those expectations, it’s obvious why Prometheus had to disappoint. For while viewers might be perfectly willing to accept bad science from Star Wars or The Avengers, Prometheus positioned itself as a serious SF film along the lines of 2001/Solaris/Gravity and we expect better from those. And in spite of the pretty visuals, Prometheus looks and feels a bit old-fashioned, more like a film from the 1970s than a film from the 2010s. It’s an Alien prequel, all right, but it feels like an Alien prequel made in approx. 1975 before Alien came out, rather than in 2012. Which means that it as a prequel it was actually more successful than the Star Wars prequels, which often seemed more like generic 21st century summer blockbusters than prequels to the Star Wars films we all know and loved.

And while the Alien prequel bits were among the better aspects of the movie, they only worked if you had seen Alien fairly recently. For example, the person with whom I was watching the film hasn’t seen Alien in twenty years and only remembered it as “that film where the monster bursts out of that guy’s chest and kills everyone”, so the Alien references were completely lost on them.

It doesn’t help that Prometheus has more than its share of plotholes and doesn’t even answer many of its own questions. For while the movie does offer a satisfactory answer to the question, “Why did the Engineers create humanity?”, namely the “Because they/we could” that Noomi Rapace’s drippy boyfriend offers to David, it never answers the question why they wanted to destroy us. Nor did the film answer the question why the various glyphs pointed at what seemed to be a random military base rather than the Engineer’s homeworld. And what was the lifeform that flickered in and out in one of the tunnels? And while we do get some kind of answers regarding the origin of the Aliens from the eponymous film series – apparently they were a bio-weapon created by the Engineers to wipe out humanity – the connection between the leaking urns, the wormlike things in the cave, the octopus/facehugger like thing in Noomi Rapace (and how did it grow so big anyway?) and the Alien that bursts out of the Engineer’s chest in the last shot is vague at best. Never mind that I for one never wondered where the Aliens came from – they just existed and didn’t need an origin. Which sums up why prequels rarely work. Because most of the time, prequels answer questions that no one ever asked.

Finally, it might be time to admit that just maybe Ridley Scott himself is somewhat overrated. True, he made two seminal SF movies more than thirty years ago. But since then? Sure, Ridley Scott made a lot of movies. Several of them were successful and won awards. But which of his post-Blade Runner movies have really held up? Gladiator maybe, though I for one never got the love for Gladiator, because IMO it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what made sandal epics fun. Ditto for Scott’s Robin Hood, another film which takes a fun genre and sucks all the fun out of it.

And even the appeal of Alien and Blade Runner is beginning to fade. Blade Runner gets worse with every new director’s cut that is released. It’s also a rather incoherent movie, a problem that it coincidentally shares with Prometheus. Alien holds up somewhat better and tells a coherent story. Nonetheless, I find that I no longer stop and watch when I come across the film on late night TV and that I haven’t actually watched it in at least 15 years. What is more, I’m beginning to wonder whether the fact that Alien works is more due to screenwriter than to Ridley Scott. And I suspect that if Dan O’Bannon had lived to write the script for Prometheus, it would have been a better movie.

Now Ridley Scott is still a director with a strong visual flair, which is apparent in Alien and Blade Runner and Prometheus and Black Rain and many others. However, he clearly needs a decent screenwriter, someone with the skills of Dan O’Bannon.

*BTW, has anybody noticed that there are no mothers in Prometheus? Both Noomi Rapace’s and Charlize Theron’s character have daddy issues, but no mother present at all. Plus, Ridley Scott once again demonstrates his issues with pregnancy by having yet another character implanted with a rapidly growing alien fetus.

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Austrian SF legend Dietmar Schönherr dies

Austrian actor and television personality Dietmar Schönherr died yesterday aged 88. Here are two obituaries from Die Welt und Der Tagespiegel as well as a video obituary courtesy of kulturzeit.

In spite of the surfeit of world news on this day, all news and cultural programs made room for tributes to Dietmar Schönherr. However, most of them focussed mainly on his time as a host of game and talkshows in the 1970s as well as on his humanitarian work (more on that later). And indeed Dietmar Schönherr introduced the talkshow to German television in 1973 (we shall forgive him for that, for he knew not what he wrought). And Wünsch Dir Was (Make a wish), a gameshow Schönherr hosted together with his wife Vivi Bach in the early 1970s caused not one but two TV scandals, when a game got out of hand and nearly drowned a family who had been lowered with their car into a swimming pool and when a when a 17-year-old contestant paraded across a catwalk in a transparent blouse (mild nudity alert). Particularly the transparent blouse is something of a giggler today, since only a few years later, such blouses were normal everyday wear. My Mom had a very similar blouse in the mid to late 1970s.

Beyond half-drowned families and transparent blouses, Wünsch Dir Was was one of the first interactive gameshows on German language TV. However, in those days before televoting participants in selected towns voted for the winner via switching on the lights in their homes or flushing their toilets! Which is a lot more bizarre than transparent blouses could ever be.

But German SF fans (and even many non-fans) will forever associate Dietmar Schönherr with the role of Major Cliff Allister McLane, commander of the space cruiser Orion 7 in the TV series Raumpatrouille – Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffs Orion (Space Patrol – The fantastic adventures of the spaceship Orion).

Raumpatrouille Orion is often called Germany’s answer to Star Trek. But this is wrong, because Star Trek and Orion both debuted within two weeks of each other in September 1966 and thus had to be developed independently of each other. I guess it was a case of an idea that was simply floating around in the Zeitgeist at the time. And there certainly are superficial similarities between Raumpatrouille Orion and Star Trek, since both shows star a spaceship with a multi-national crew and a dashing gung-ho commander. What is more, both shows tackled the social issues of the era, disguised as SF.

IMO Raumpatrouille Orion wasn’t quite as successful as SF as the best of Star Trek, since the SF components were mostly rehashes of well-worn golden age tropes (one episode plays very much like an Asimov robot story). On the other hand, Orion was generally better acted. It also had better and more regular female characters. The regular Orion crew consisted of four men and two women, including the wonderful security officer Lieutenant Tamara Jagellowsk, who is still one of my favourite female SF characters of all time. Female space fleet general (and apparently a former lover of McLane’s) Lydia van Dyke (played by Friedrich von Dürrenmatt’s wife Charlotte Kerr) appeared in several episodes and Margot Trooger guest-starred as the queen of the space amazons (like I said, the series had a thing for hoary tropes). The crew was diverse with regard to nationality and consisted of a Scotsman, a Russian (in the middle of the Cold War!), an Italian, a Swede, a Japanese and a Swiss woman. Alas, Raumpatrouille Orion was a 100% white show due to being made in what was still a very white country. One crewmember, astrogator Atan Shubashi is supposedly Japanese, but played by white actor Friedrich Georg Beckhaus.

Though Raumpatrouille Orion‘s special effects get some flak today, since many of the futuristic machines were assembled from common household devices (the navigation clothes iron is particularly notable), they were outstanding for their time and are lightyears ahead of mid 1960s Doctor Who and even edge ahead of Star Trek at times (though unlike Orion, Star Trek was shot in colour, which is less forgiving of ropey effects).

But what made Raumpatrouille Orion so special were the characters, particularly the Schönherr’s Commander McLane and his security officer Tamara Jagellowsk (played by Eva Pflug), whose sparring and chemistry created enough sparks to power not just the Orion but the underwater base where she was docked when not in service as well. They finally got together in the final episode.

Cliff Allister McLane is basically your typical gung-ho space hero, a guy who goes into danger guns blazing, for whom order are just optional suggestions and who regularly wrecks his spaceship (twice on screen and five times before the start of the series), which gets him demoted to patrol duties in the pilot episode and regularly brings him into conflict with the straight-laced Tamara Jagellowsk. McLane is something of a womanizer, extremely loyal towards his friends and a “rather average kisser” according to Tamara Jagellowsk. In the hands of a lesser actor, McLane would have been a sterotype. Dietmar Schönherr turned him into an icon.

As a product of the 1960s, Raumpatrouille Orion reflects West German anxieties about rearmament following WWII and a deep scepticism not so much towards the military itself (unlike the Enterprise, the Orion is a military vessel), but towards generals with little concern for human lives (McLane repeatedly acts against orders to save lives). Characters like the shouty General Wamsler and the icy intelligence officer Colonel Villa show how the average West German viewed the military, particularly its higher ranks.

Though part of the military himself, our hero McLane is closer to the counterculture of the 1960s. McLane isn’t a pacifist and indeed is perfectly willing to fight the shadowy aliens known only as “the Frogs”. However, McLane is a rebel. Orders are totally optional for him and definitely not to be followed blindly. Indeed, in one episode he berates two of his crewmembers for blindly following one of his order and thus putting themselves into danger. And – sorry Horst Schimanski – but Cliff Allister McLane was the first person to utter the word “shit” on German TV, albeit in adjective form.

Indeed, I can trace many of my problems with the “Rah, rah, space marines” strain of military SF right back to Raumpatrouille Orion. Because after seeing Cliff Allister McLane yelling at two of his crewmen and friends for following his own orders and thus risking their own lives in the process, the blind obedience and “Yes, sir, no sir” attitude of much military SF was difficult to accept.

Ironically, Raumpatrouille Orion caught some flak in the late 1960s from the usual suspects for its military content and was even called “fascistoid” at one point, which was the favourite accusation of certain leftwing pop culture scholars of the time to hurl at any kind of popular entertainment at all. It makes you wonder whether those people ever actually watched the show. But then those are the same people who called Captain America “a fascist idol” (Steve Rogers weeps and Hulk smashes) and who also accused Perry Rhodan, another German space hero, of “fascistoid tendencies”, even though Perry Rhodan allies himself with peaceful aliens against a militaristic Earth in his very first adventure and proceeds to destroy all nuclear weapons on Earth, instantly ending the Cold War by pissing off East and West enough that they unite against him. Fascistoid indeed. To quote Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Dietmar Schönherr was as much of a rebel in real life as on the the screen. Though he came from an aristocratic military family and made his screen debut in a Nazi propaganda film, he was active in the peace movement, was arrested while protesting the deployment of nuclear missiles and once called Ronald Reagan an “arsehole” live on TV. He also did a lot of humanitarian work, particularly in civil war-stricken Nicaragua.

As for Raumpatrouille Orion, you do not have to take my word for how good it was, but you can see for yourself, for all seven episodes are available on YouTube. So let’s rewatch a few episodes in memory of Dietmar Schönherr.

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Double Release: A new Shattered Empire novelette and a new Silencer story

The post title says it all really, for today I have no one but two new releases to announce. And not just any new titles either, but a brand-new adventure of the Silencer and the long awaited next installment in the Shattered Empire space opera series.

Let’s start with Shattered Empire. The new story is called History Lesson and that’s exactly what it is, namely Ethan giving Holly a primer on the history of the Fifth Human Empire. In the grand tradition of the space opera genre, any parallels to actual events are total coincidence, of course. And yes, I had a lot of fun liberally borrowing from postwar (West) German history.

History Lessson

The nights are long on the rebel world of Pyrs, most of the man and women hiding out there have demons that haunt them and everybody deals with those demons in their very own way.

For Holly di Marco and Ethan Summerton, two of the more than two thousand rebel fighters on Pyrs, the best way of staving of the nightmares is arguing about politics, eating sweets and getting drunk, very drunk.

But one long night of arguing about politics reveals some unexpected truths about the history of the Fifth Human Empire… and also about Holly and Ethan.

 

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As for the Silencer, Richard Blakemore’s latest adventure follows him out onto the nocturnal streets of Depression era Manhattan again, where after a long night of crimefighting, the Silencer is called upon to prevent yet another crime. Mean Streets and Dead Alleys is as close to a typical night out for the Silencer as you can get, for not even Richard Blakemore gets to battle master criminals every night.

Mean Streets and Dead Alleys

Wounded and weary after a long night of crimefighting, all Richard Blakemore a.k.a. the Silencer wants is to go home. But then he spots a young woman being stalked by three thugs, so the Silencer has to jump into the fray once more. However, when the Silencer follows the woman and her pursuers into a dark alley, he finds far more than he bargained for…

 

 

 

Find out more here or buy it for the low price of 0.99 USD, EUR or GBP at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Casa del Libro, Scribd, Inktera, txtr, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Der Club, Libiro, Nook UK, DriveThruFiction, OmniLit/AllRomance e-books, Flipkart, e-Sentral, You Heart Books and XinXii.

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Germany wins the cup, George R.R. Martin goes Swiss and the last bastion of masculinity falls

First of all, Germany won the 2014 World Cup tonight, making it Germany’s fourth win after 1954, 1974 and 1990.

I watched the match with my Mom (my Dad has caught a cold and went to bed after the regular matchtime was over), a bit annoyed that the match went into overtime, especially since I still had two pages of a very boring and complicated contract to translate (The customer needs it urgently – of course they do). However, the result was more than worth it and the match itself was very good as well, though not as stunning as the semi-finale against Brazil.

One thing that marred the event was that a man was stabbed to death during a fan gathering to watch the match in a cinema here in Bremen.

Switzerland may have gotten kicked out of the World Cup in the round of the last sixteen, by Argentina of all teams (don’t worry, neighbours, you have been avenged), and Swiss authors were given a hard time by the Bachmann Prize jury this year, but Switzerland has one reason to celebrate, namely that George R.R. Martin has graced our multilingual neighbour country with his presence, since he is guest of honour at the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival.

Now the German language cultural scene likes to pretend that Game of Thrones doesn’t exist, because it’s “just” fantasy and doesn’t have anything to say about the way we live, unlike those other US quality TV shows The Sopranos or Breaking Bad (because the lives of mafia clans in New Jersey or a cancer-struck highschool teacher turned drug kingpin in New Mexico has so much to do with the life of the average German). Honestly, I’ve seen/read interviews with Turkish German actress , who plays Shae, which seemed to consider her role in the German crime drama Tatort the pinnacle of her career and didn’t mention Game of Thrones at all. While you just know that if Ms. Kekilli had been casted to play a terrorist on Homeland or a drug dealer’s mistress on Breaking Bad, the German language cultural press would be all over it.

However, when George R.R. Martin is the guest of honour at a renown SFF film festival, at least our Swiss friends no longer have any excuse to ignore him. And so the Swiss public TV channel SRF offers this profile of the man and the series, while the Zurich based paper Der Tagesanzeiger has interviewed Martin. Der Tagesanzeiger has run background articles and reviews about Game of Thrones, both the TV show and the books, before. Apparently, the deputy head of the culture department is a fan.

Finally, one of the last bastions of masculinity here in Bremen has finally fallen: For the so-called Schaffermahlzeit, a black tie gala dinner for Bremen’s sea captains, merchants and political guests held annually since 1545, has announced that they will finally allow women to take part in the official dinner. Because up to now, female guests – mostly wives and daughters of sea captains or merchants – had to eat in a separate room from the male guests, though they were allowed to take part in the ball afterwards, probably because a ball involving only men would have been a bit strange. An old classmate of mine actually attended the women’s dinner at the Schaffermahlzeit once, accompanying her Dad, and quite enjoyed the experience.

Now there have been female guests at the main Schaffermahlzeit before. A female sea captain has been a regular guest since 2004 (by now, there are two female captains) and Angela Merkel was the first female guest of honour in 2007. But those ladies were exceptions, while the wives and daughters were still stuck in their separate room. But apparently not any longer. Hey, it only took 470 years.

If you’re wondering about the actual meal, it’s chicken soup, followed by stockfish with mustard sauce and potatoes, kale with Pinkel sausage and smoked meat, roast veal with celeriac salad, apples and plums and Riga style turbot with anchovies, sausage, fruit and cheese, most of which sounds rather weird even if you’re from North Germany. There’s also wine and a special sailor’s beer. Oh yes, and smoking is not just allowed but expected, though you have to use a claypipe.

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Mansplaining and Amazon Bashing at Klagenfurt – The Annual Bachmann Prize Post

This year’s Ingeborg Bachmann Prize was somewhat more low-key than usual, probably because everybody’s attention is engaged by the World Cup and it was a hot and tiring weekend in general. For more about the competition read this, this and this post from previous years.

I almost forgot that the Bachmann Prize was on, so I missed the first day, including the eventual winner Tex Rubinowitz and his story Wir waren niemals hier (We were never here), and only heard a few of the texts and subsequent discussions. My general impression, albeit based on a small sample size, was that this year’s crop of Bachmann Prize texts was rather mediocre to underwhelming. It’s an impression largely shared by German speaking critics and cultural journalists. For an example, see this write-up in the Swiss paper Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Echoing the NZZ write-up, there were pleasantly few texts this year about dealing with WWII/the Third Reich/Communist East Germany, which was a surprise, since three of the last four winners were texts dealing with these subjects (and two of them weren’t even particularly good). One of the texts I did manage to listen to, Millefleurs by Austrian writer Georg Petz, did touch on the current “rememberance mania” and the excessive celebration of the anniversaries of D-Day and the beginning of WWI, the manner of which Petz’s protagonist finds as distasteful as I do, but it does so in the context of a contemporary love triangle between a German exchange student, a French woman and her French boyfriend.

With fewer texts focussing on “our sorry history”, the majority of the texts instead focussed on the other big Bachmann Prize topic, the ennui of modern life, described in exhaustive detail. And so we got stories about conflicts between parents and grown children, stories about broken relationships and memories of past romances, stories about death and suicide, stories about drugs, stories about battling with bureaucracy. I’m not sure if those texts are necessarily better than the “our sorry history” stories, but at least they are stories about the way we live now and not about something that happened decades before the contestants were even born, filtered through second and third hand family anecdotes.

There is an element of public performance to the Bachmann Prize, as the statues require a public reading by the author in addition to the submitted texts. Indeed, the reading is such an important component of the competition that this year author Karen Köhler was disqualified, since she was unable to attend due to an accute case of chickenpox. And because the reading is so important, the author’s performance sometimes seemed to overshadow the actual content of the text.

This was very notable with regards to the discussion about the entries by the two Swiss contestants, where the jurors debated more about the performance than about the actual texts. The debate about Michael Fehr’s text Simeliberg, which I quite liked, focussed almost entirely on Fehr’s performance (Fehr refused to sit, but walked around, reciting his text as dictated by his iPod) as well as on his Swiss accent. Now Swiss German can be nigh incomprehensible to the Non-Swiss, but Fehr’s accent was perfectly comprehensible (and actually quite endearing). Immediately afterwards, Swiss writer Ramona Ganzoni, who is a native speaker of Romansh by the way, was accused by head juror Burkhard Spinnen of having “read her text to death”. By this point, I was beginning to wonder what the jurors had against the Swiss. Or maybe they had a problem with regional themes, since both texts were very Swiss IMO.

We also got some prime examples of mansplaining, mostly at the hands of the above mentioned head juror Burkhard Spinnen who didn’t want to see so many stories about mother/daughter conflicts and also couldn’t understand why Bruna, the protagonist of Ramona Ganzoni’s text Ignis Cool was suffering from low self-esteem, at which point I yelled at the TV, “Dude, if you were a woman you’d know.” City-born Spinnen also claimed to know more about cows than Ms. Ganzoni, completely disregarding the fact that Westfalian cows may behave quite differently from Swiss cows. Come to think of it, Spinnen also engaged in mansplaining last year, when he believed that a story about a woman finally finding the strength to break up with her jerky boyfriend was too hard on the boyfriend.

But the mansplaining and Swiss bashing at the Bachmann Prize were nothing against the Amazon bashing. The cultural program kulturzeit devoted more of its Bachmann Prize coverage to discussing Amazon than to discussing the actual competition. See this interview with Sandra Kegel, who is one of the jurors,, wherein Ms. Kegel spends more time complaining about Amazon and e-books than actually talking about the competition and the contestants. Moneyshot: Ms. Kegel laments that Amazon does not nurture and challenge writers like the traditional publishers do, while totally disregarding the fact that those self-publishing via Amazon mostly aren’t exactly keen on the sort of “nurturing and challenging” provided by traditional publishers.

There was also an interview with an Austrian independent bookseller complaining about Amazon as well as Austrian TV journalist Ernst A. Grandits (whom I normally quite like) calling e-books “a threat to literature”. Thankfully, several people disagreed with him and pointed out that e-books are books. Nonetheless, I was tempted to add “Destroying literature since 2011″ to my Pegasus Pulp tagline.

Now the event is called “Tage der deutschsprachigen Literatur”, i.e. “Days of German Language Literature”, so e-books and Amazon’s influence on German language literature are legitimate topics for discussion, especially given the current uproar about Amazon’s contract negotiations with Hachette in the US and Bonnier in Europe. Nonetheless, it is first and foremost a writing competition and I fail to see what Amazon has to do with that. Even if Amazon’s market share and indie publishing in general grows further, there’ll always be Bachmann Prize contestants, even if they may choose to indie publish their text later on. As for e-books destroying literature, I spotted a Kindle at the Bachmann Prize, used in lieu of a manuscript, two years ago and somehow the competition and German language literature managed to survive.

Finally, I’ll leave you with this delightful Bachmann bingo, courtesy of the Austrian radio station ORF 4.

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What a Match!

I’m normally not the world’s biggest football fan. Oh, I like football all right and I’m happy when our local first league team Werder Bremen wins (which sadly hasn’t been all that many times these past few years). But mostly it’s enough for me to know the result afterwards – I don’t actually have to watch the match live.

World Cups normally interest me even less than regular league games, because our national team is usually made up from a lot of players from clubs I couldn’t care less about and about half of them are Bayern Munich players at any given time. And Werder Bremen supporters normally don’t much like Bayern Munich, because the two clubs are archrivals.

However, yesterday’s World Cup semi-final, where Germany beat Brazil 7:1, was the big exception, since it was the best football match I’ve seen in a long time and a damn entertaining ninety minutes of TV in general.

I hadn’t actually planned to watch the whole match, since I was rather tired last night. Plus, I’d had a service tech at my home all afternoon long, repairing a leaky ACU. Besides – as I said – mostly knowing the result is enough for me.

I watched at my parents’. That is, my Mom and I watched on the first floor, while my Dad was in the basement catching up with some paperwork. When the first goal happened, approx. 11 minutes in, I went down the two flights of stairs into the basement to tell my Dad. A few minutes later, the second goal happened (scored by former Werder Bremen player Miroslav Klose, who is now the top World Cup scorer of all time with 16 goals altogether). So I went down the two flights of stairs again to tell my Dad and hadn’t even made it back up, when I heard my Mom cheering. “Don’t tell me they just scored another?”, I asked disbelievingly.

About two minutes later I had to go down to the basement yet again to report on goal No. 4. By the time goal No. 5 happened, my Dad had finally made it up to the TV room.

When the half time whistle sounded, I could have gone home, because it was pretty clear that Germany was going to win that match. But though I was still tired, I stuck around and watched Germany score two more goals and finally Brazil scoring their “goal of honour” in the last two minutes. All of which was fantastically entertaining, though I felt a bit sorry for the Brazilian players and fans, many of whom were openly crying. In fact, by the last two goals several Brazilian fans actually started clapping for Germany, which was really nice.

Also nice was watching German players comforting Brazilian players – often players who play in the same teams in the regular league games and thus know each other – after the game. At one point, several German Bayern Munich players were comforting Dante, a Brazilian playing for Bayern Munich.

No matter what happens in the final, this was one hell of a match. And it happened almost to the day sixty years after the so-called “miracle of Berne”, when Germany beat Hungary in the 1954 World Cup final (apparently Hungary were a contender back then) and also almost to the day forty years after Germany beat the Netherlands in the 1974 World Cup final. They took the cup once more, in 1990, which is the only German World Cup win I can actually remember, even though I was theoretically alive for the 1974 win.

Driving home, I was a bit surprised to hear quiet and sad music on the radio, because this was so not a night for quiet music. There still was very little traffic, though I did hear some fireworks and a few car horns (common in big cities, but not in the semi-rural suburb where I live).

Back home, I watched the late night news and logged onto the Internet. I saw a few stupid Nazi jokes/remarks on Twitter, which were not just not funny but also totally uncalled for, and actually unfollowed one guy over those tweets.

There also were some people complaining about people daring to watch and enjoy something as trivial as a football match and the news programmes devoting time to football coverage, when there is a massive crisis going on in the Middle East and another in Ukraine. Now I’m not a big fan of extensive sport coverage to the detriment of other news, but this was an exception. Never mind that both the half-time news and the late night news did cover the situation in Israel/Gaza and Ukraine. And expecting people not to watch a major sports event and celebrate a win is just contrary to human nature, especially since there is always something horrible happening somewhere in the world.

That said, missile shrapnel hitting the German cruise liner Aida Diva off the Israeli coast is not the most important bit of news about the situation in Israel/Gaza, even if some news programs tried to spin it that way.

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Linkdump, mostly about indie publishing, SF and climate issues

Over at the Pegasus Pulp blog, I look back on three years of indie publishing and share some metrics. I’ve also got another post listing research resources I used for the Silencer series and New York City’s Finest.

Forbes has a very good article from David Vinjamuri about how indie and maker movements are changing commerce in a variety of fields. When I started self-publishing three years ago, I used to post links to a lot of articles about indie publishing. I’ve largely stopped doing that, because the articles all started to sound the same after a while and the tone became increasingly strident, such as the whole “us vs. them” mentality displayed in the commentary about the current Amazon vs. Hachette conflict. However, I really like this Forbes article, because it looks at indie and DIY movements in a variety of fields such as music, gaming, crafts, film, etc… and doesn’t just focus on publishing.

Regarding the Amazon vs. Hachette conflict, I really like John Scalzi’s rather measured take on the subject, wherein he points out that both Amazon and Hachette are businesses focussed on their own interests and not anybody’s friend. Of course, the more enthusiastic fringe of indie writers begged to disagree, but then they always do.

The winners of the 2014 Locus Awards have been announced and again the slate looks pretty good. I’m particularly happy to see more love for Ancillary Justice.

A blog called Armed and Dangerous (name says it all) offers its definition of “real SF”, i.e. the sort of thing Heinlein used to write and John C. Campbell used to publish in Astounding (found via SF Signal). Anything else is “defective SF, non-SF or anti-SF”. Characterisation? We don’t need no stinking characterisation. It reads very much like yet another example of people yelling at clouds that SF has changed, while the rest of us are over here, doing our own thing.

Arisia Crystal has a helpful post explaining exactly how to vote on future Worldcon locations. Alas, it seems I cannot vote on the 2017 location with my Loncon membership, though I can vote on the 2016 location which is a choice between Beijing and Kansas City.

Spiegel Online has a fascinating article about how a monster drought and record heatwave hit Europe in 1540, resulting in a massive catastrophe and some excellent wine. The article is only available in German, but Pierre Gosselin offers a summary at No Tricks Zone. Australian SFF writer Patty Jansen weighs in as well and points out that weather conditions like in 1540 are quite normal for Australia, but devastating for Europe and even more so in pre-modern times.

The Virtuelles Literaturhaus Bremen profiles my pal Axel Knapp, literary translator and owner of the small press Mocambo Verlag, and recommends Poste restante – Postlagernd, a memoir by Hubert Kerdellant about working in the French and German postal service, translated into German by Axel Knapp.

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