Susan Maxwell's Blog

Mini-reviews 2

I suffer from intermittent insomnia, and always have some reading material, often downloads from Project Gutenberg, lined up on my e-reader to while away the sleepless hours. Here are three from this year:

Arthur Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913). Earth hurtles through poison ether, causing worldwide instant death. Heightened, unlikely fun (w/casual racism & sexism), with Professor Challenger & Co. Apposite reflections on human arrogance & fragility. No wonder I couldn't sleep.

Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1912, but frankly, not unfamiliar from 2020). The world's population reached...er...8 billion, & is almost wiped out by pandemic; its regression to barbarity is recounted by a former professor to his semi-feral grandsons. Hopepunk it ain't.

Awake long before the alarm. Reading one of E. Nesbit's Grim Tales ('The Mass for the Dead'); a lovelorn wakeful man who "reached a book and read till my eyes ached and the letters danced a pas fantastique up and down the page." Didn't work for him, either, nor did dumbbells, cold water, or poetry.

Nesbit was a favourite of mine when I was young, all the more so when later I realised that her life was less orthodox than Five Children and It, or The Wouldbegoods led me to expect.

And finally, something I read last year in hard copy during the hours appropriate to wakefulness: Jane Fraser's collection of short stories, The South Westerlies, though inner/lived experiences are not usually for me. Sad, nuanced, sometimes funny, the extraordinary thing about them is the constant, dominant, almost hyperreal main character: the Gower Peninsula.

Weekly Round-up: 2025 Week 6

Researching & Planning

Indulged in Saturday lunch at a favourite café, over which I discussed at length with the BdR Editor ideas for a conference paper (am currently planning an abstract).

Read two articles about archives and archivists in the popular imagination.

Writing

Drafted reviews for Seb Doubinsky’s The Sum of All Things and Stephen Oram’s We Are Not Anonymous.

Working on two pieces of non-fiction: one on archives and one on smallholding.

Finished first, rough draft of a short story about Samuel Beckett and Josephine Baker (part of my self-imposed a-piece-a-month challenge)

Began revision of cosy-mystery-in-progress Death at Hallowtide, now that the beady eye of the editor has indicated some high-level corrections to make.

Finished re-proofing And the Wildness (an eagle-eyed reader noticed a plot-hole last year: fortunately minor and easily fixable; also an opportunity to correct a few typos that had somehow snuck through).

Reconsidering Hollowmen  with a view to seeing if the polyphony of voices can be made a little less obscure. But only a little… It might also benefit from being reformatted and reissued in a bigger book size, to accommodate the more experimental aspects of text layout and help them work in a less cramped setting.

Reading

Have just finished Mervyn Wall’s Leaves for the Burning; still plugging away at Thomas Pynchon’s V, and also re-reading Dirty Tricks by Michael Dibdin when too tired and grumpy to face into the Pynchon. 

Also re-read Anthony Powell's A Question of Upbringing  to participate in an on-line book group that is discussing A Dance to the Music of Time over the course of the year.

Other

Sketched two dawn skies.

What I meant to do: watch an Improving Film. What I did: watched first three episodes of Series 7 of Midsomer Murders… Research, innit? Also watched two episodes of the TV adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which was much better than I had feared.

Went for a walk and saw, among other pleasant outdoor features, this ruined tower. It has the look of something that might well be made to serve the purposes of fiction one at some stage…

© Copyright Mike Searle CC BY-SA 2.0

Mini-Reviews 1

In line with one of my (many) new year's resolutions, I am trying to write at least a brief review note of what I read, as both aide memoire and an exercise in concision. I post them on Bluesky and Mastodon as I go along, and provide an 'omnibus edition' from time to time on this blog. I read a number of short stories by Ted Chiang recently, mostly from his 2002 collection Stories of Your Life and Others, and this forms the subject matter of this first omnibus post.

From Stories of Your Life and Others

Tower of Babylon 
An immersive, reflective story, in which the intention to build a tower to touch the vault of heaven answers an unasked question. Very effective defamiliarisation of the familiar: up, down, dawn, dusk...

Understand
Science-fiction existentialism as two views of the ultimate aim of human existence. Clever, convincing premise, but the super-enhanced narrator's account of his doings has a espionage-film-script feel to it that partially works, but I found it a bit unsatisfactory as prose.

I haven't listened to this reading of it yet, but might enjoy it a little more.

Division by Zero
A mathematician's existentialist crisis proved by mathematical formula. Touching, thoughtful, sophisticated echoing and balancing of opposites.

Story of Your Life
Rewarding foregrounding of linguistic, rather than military or hard-science, response to a first-contact event, and the transformation of a mind to one that collapses the usual progression to comprehension. Aliens, wonderfully, unresolved. Basis of 2016 film Arrival.

Seventy-Two Letters 
Steampunky:  industrialised golem manufacture, based on the doctrine of names, and the realisation that humankind has a limited duration, in alt-Victorian England. Atmospheric and intriguing. The solution either satisfies or alarms, depending.

Hell is the Absence of God
All of Chiang's worlds (so far) have been impressively imagined—like the best historical novelists, always the right balance, and type, of detail included. This one is a lowering elaboration on the nature of human devotion.

Liking What You See
Not so keen on this one. The idea is interesting, foreshadowing as it does the heightening of life and its appearances via social media/filters, but not that interesting. The characters drag rather than drive the story and the writing is too flat to compensate.

Other Stories

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate 
A very satisfying and engaging read. Inevitable echoes of Calvino's Invisible Cities but a lively and distinctive analysis, using time-travelling stories-within-the-story, of ideas about predictions, free will, and changing the past.

Exhalation
Chiang in fine form: a mechanical scientist, investigating why clocks are running slow, dissects their own brain to discover the consequence of the universe beginning "as an enormous breath being held." A  meditation on death, as well as a parable both scientific and philosophical.

The  Lifecycle of Software Objects
Relevant in a different way now, this explores the complex socialisation, rather than training, of AI entities. A sense of watching humans create problems they don't quite have the capacity to solve.

Weekly Round-up: 2025 Week 4

My blog posting happens in fits and starts, but I really do mean to be a bit more consistent this year. The scramble to find social media niches that are not toxic for one reason or another is in all probability futile, and wondering/worrying about its efficacy is also something of a distraction. So, while I still value the connexions I can make and maintain on Bluesky and Mastodon, I find that blogging and the blogosphere is a more comfortable fit for the way I write and approach the world. 

So each Monday, I will post a round-up of some of my activities and of interesting items that have come my way (I breezily ignore the irony that not a few of these items will have been brought to my attention on the very platforms that I am attempting to eschew). Here goes…

Reading

Thomas Pynchon's V; short stories by Ted Chiang, including the collection Stories of Your Life and Others; Stephen Oram's forthcoming We Are Not Anonymous (for review); Shane Weller's book chapter 'Beckett and Late Modernism' (for something I'm writing).  

Watching

The Limehouse Golem 
I haven't read Peter Ackroyd's book, and it must have been a tricky adaptation, but got good results. A bit gruesome (I have a low grue tolerance) but clever without being overengineered and layered without being confusing. Looked great, everyone was excellent. 

I also watched a couple of episodes of Michael Gambon as Maigret, which reminded me yet again that I should return to the books.

Links

Mylesiana 
Frank McNally in The Parish Review 'On Thooleramawns, Thullabawns, and Gawshkogues: The Role of Hiberno-English in Myles na gCopaleen’s Lexicon of Libel.'

Woolf and Music
Virginia Woolf was an avid consumer of music, and looked to that art form to inform her pursuit of a new way of writing. To mark her birthday on the 25th, a link to a video of Prof. Emma Sutton speaking to three composers who set Woolf's words to music, and in this recording, some of the music is performed.

My 2024 reading year

Now that we have both feet in the new year, I thought I would look back over my reading for last year. It was a busy enough schedule, as the works listed below do not include book chapters or articles read for academic purposes. 

While I was working on my PhD and for a long period afterwards, I read almost no 'serious' books for pleasure, but I have been gradually reclaiming ground over the past few years and am happy that I finally seem to have hit my stride again as a reader in 2024.

Some of these books were read for reviewing purposes anyway, but I plan to write mini-reviews of as many as possible as an excercise in concision and brevity. I will post these intermittently, but for the moment, here is the bare list—if not from A to Z, then at least from Ambler to Woolf.

The Mask of Dimitrios. Eric Ambler 1939; 2009 repr. Penguin.

The Schirmer Inheritance. Eric Ambler 1953; 1967 repr. Fontana.

Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. Vol. 1. Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan 2022. Academia Lunace. Luna Press.

Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. Brian Attebery 2014. Oxford University Press.

The Folklore of Wales: Ghosts. Delyth Badder and Mark Norman 2023. Cardiff: Calon.

The Butterfly Disjunct and Other Stories. Stewart C. Baker 2024. Interstellar Flight Press.

The Complete Dramatic Works. Samuel Beckett 1990. London: Faber & Faber.

Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury 1953; 2013 repr. Simon & Schuster.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag. Alan Bradley 2010.  Random House.

The Master and Margarita. Mikhail Bulgakov 1967. Translated by Richard Pevear. 2000 repr. Penguin.

The Saint of Bright Doors. Vajra Chandrasekera 2023. New York: Tor Publishing Group.

Pardon This Intrusion. John Clute 2016. SF Gateway.

Writing the Future: Essays on Crafting Science Fiction. Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst (eds.) 2023. Liverpool: Dead Ink.

The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales. Arthur Conan Doyle 1883; digital vers. Project Gutenberg.

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Umberto Eco 1994; 2004 repr. Harvard Univ. Press.

The South Westerlies. Jane Fraser 2019. Cromer: Salt Publishing.

Little Egypt. Lesley Glaister 2014. Cromer: Salt Publishing.

Averno. Louise Glück 2006. London: Penguin Books.

Faithful and Virtuous Night. Louise Glück 2014; 2015 repr. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Murder in the Manor. Fiona Grace 2019

Death and a Dog. Fiona Grace 2019

Ghosts of Archive: Deconstructive Intersectionality and Praxis. Verne S. Harris 2021.  Routledge.

The Centauri Device. M. JohnHarrison 1975; 2020 repr. Millennium.

Of Ochre and Ash. Eleanor Hooker 2021. Dublin: Dedalus Press.

The Twist of a Knife. Anthony Horowitz 2022; 2023 repr. Penguin.

The Lottery and Other Stories. Shirley Jackson 1949; 2009 repr. Penguin.

Antarctica. Claire Keegan 1999; 2023 repr. Faber & Faber.

You Should Have Left. Daniel Kehlmann 2016; Translated by Ross Benjamin. 2017 repr. Riverrun.

The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac. Louise Kennedy 2021; 2022 repr. Bloomsbury.

Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. R. F. Kuang 2022. New York: Harper Voyager.

Catfish Rolling. Clara Kumagai 2023. London: Head of Zeus.

My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror. Thomas Ligotti 2002; 2009 repr. Virgin Books.

The Hour of the Star. Lispector, Clarice. 1977; Translated by Benjamin Moser. 2014 repr. Penguin.

Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape. Manchán Magan 2020. Dublin: Gill Books.

A Memory Called Empire. Arkady Martine 2019. New York: Tor Publishing Group.

A Desolation Called Peace. Arkady Martine 2021. New York: Tor Publishing Group.

Tokyo Express. Seichō Matsumoto 1958; Translated by Jesse Kirkwood. 2023 repr. Penguin.

A Severed Head. Iris Murdoch 1961; 2006 repr. Vintage.

Invisible yet Enduring Lilacs. Gerald Murnane 2005; 2020 repr. And Other Stories.

Ice Apprentices. Jacob North 2025. Simon and Schuster.

The Quick and the Dead: Selected Stories. Mairtin O Cadhain. 2021 Collected edn. New Haven: Yale University Press.

The Thursday Murder Club. Richard Osman 2020. Penguin.

Talk of the Town. Jacob Polley 2009. London: Picador.

Mikhail Bakhtin. Alastair Renfrew 2014. London: Routledge.

Arrival. David Roche 2024. 21st Century Film Essentials. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Dolly Considine’s Hotel. Eamon Somers 2021. London: Unbound.

The Book Collector. Alice Thompson 2015. Cromer: Salt Publishing Limited.

Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. Peter Turchi 2004; 2005 repr. Trinity Univ. Press.

Lost Estates. Mark Valentine 2024. Dublin: Swan River Press.

The Collected Connoisseur. Mark Valentine and John Howard 2010. Leyburn: Tartarus Press.

Wonderbook: An Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. Jeff VanderMeer 2018. Revised & Expanded edition. New York, NY: Abrams Image.

The War of the Worlds. H. G. Wells 1898; digital vers. Project Gutenberg.

A World Beneath the Sands: Adventurers and Archaeologists in the Golden Age of Egyptology. Toby A. H. Wilkinson 2020. London: Picador.

To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf 1927; 1998 repr. Penguin Books Fiction. London: Penguin.

I read most of these books to the end; one had to be returned to the library unfinished as I was too busy to continue at the time, and I pulled the plug on a couple of others that were doing nothing for me after a few chapters. Most were new to me, though a handful were re-reads.

You can also see this overview in Goodreads. 

Happy Hallowe'en!

Just the right time for a quick plug for my short story, 'Hallowtide Boar'. It is not a Hallowe'en-y story, but it does take place on the day. Available as a standalone ebook or in the collection Fluctuation in Disorder, you can read a bit more about it in this blog post.

   
        books2read.com/HallowtideBoar books2read.com/fid

Short Stories 6: Necrologue

It's a while since I posted one of these, so here is a piece about another short story from my collection Fluctuation in Disorder (it is also available as an individual e-book). 

NecrologueRebarbative and foul-mouthed, the Necrologue's peripatetic life has taken them across an unspecified continent in the aftermath of a political and religious collapse. It is only when they face death that they realise the world has more to offer than conflict. The story is loosely linked to the Hibernia Altera sequence.

'Necrologue' was envisioned purely in terms of the voice, not an approach I often take. There is little detailed development of its environment, though, like 'Thicker than Blood', it is post-apocalyptic, or at least post-collapse. Choosing this familiar dystopian trope was not intended, as it often is, to instigate a speculation on how a person survives in such an environment. 'Necrologue' uses a disruptive event in order that things—specifically, the main character’s view of the world—do not fall back into the same places that they were in before. 

The nature of the disruption is generic, as is the main character: the Necrologue is unnamed, and their voice is quite simple: they are extremely angry. The unspecified catastrophe experienced by the society they live in was followed immediately by the rise of a religion that happened to have the best line at the time. But while the Necrologue was disrupted in common with everyone else, they were jolted individually out of conformity to the new regime and religion by a chance occurrence. 

Throughout the entire story the protagonist remains angry, foul-mouthed, and antagonistic. They take a great pleasure in infuriating every bureaucrat or cleric at every chance, and use incessant profanity to outrage expected norms of behaviour. 

At the same time, they consider the ethics or lack thereof in the world in which they live to be of overweening importance, and have dedicated their whole life to ensuring that those who have died are not forgotten, especially those who were not valued in society. They take great pride in this achievement, as being their most meaningful form of resistance. 

It is only at the end that the Necrologue realises the size of the shadow their anger has cast over their life.  
  books2read.com/Necrologue   books2read.com/fid

International Dublin Writers' Festival 2024

I attended the International Dublin Writers' Festival for the first time the other week. This was in line with my resolve to go against the grain, get out more, and interact with >shudder< actual people. My modest goal was to engage with other writers; the Festival offered this in spades and so much more. It was a great experience, coupling a friendly, hospitable ethos with excellent presentations from seasoned figures in writing and publishing. I met many lovely and talented people, and will certainly be back.
  

BFS 'Meet the Member' Profile

My cunning plan to become a cuckoo in more prestigious nests proceeds apace with this slot on the British Fantasy Society blog https://tinyurl.com/yeypxkxu. Thank you, BFS! Each Friday, a different BFS member is profiled; it is always a pleasure and often an education to find out about my fellow-members and their many interests and achievements. The Society itself is a friendly and active community, and offers a range of online events and workshops as well as the in-person annual Fantasycon. 

Going down rabbit-holes

I have added a page to my website to list some of the podcasts, blogs, journals etc. that I find myself turning to for distraction from inspiration for my work. 
https://sites.google.com/view/bdr-susan-maxwell/rabbit-holes 
Maybe you too will come to heed their siren songs!