Stephen Hunt's Blog, page 6

Back to the … Future?

A bit of a blast from the past, this week, with the revised editions of my first two fantasy novels – For The Crown and the Dragon, and its sequel, The Fortress in The Frost – hitting the streets in both print and e-book format for the first time in thirty years.

I offered to do the revisions to coincide with the Crown & Dragon RPG for #SavageWorlds, as it seemed a bit mean to gamers to have an RPG based on my Triple Realm universe without the accompanying novels to dive into. It’ll only take a week or so to give these two a quick clean-up, I reasoned. Did it, bol*^&&%s.

Whether it’s a weakness for word tweakery or escaping the prison of perfectionism freakery, I spent far longer than a single morning taking out a comma, while devoting all afternoon sweating putting it back in again. Many months later, in which I probably could have written an original fantasy trilogy, the deadly duology, the pernicious pairing, is back once more and street-legal for you.

If you’re one of my lovely Patreon supporters at https://www.patreon.com/stephenhunt, you’ve had access to the whole painful process and could download the e-books early as part of your support (with print copies landing soon for me to sign and get off to those supporting me at the ‘Lord Commander of the Dead Tree’-level and ‘Goddess Emperor: Order of the High Stoat’-level).

As for the rest of you, you can now finally get yourself over to Amazon at https://amzn.to/2BHI0Hi and https://amzn.to/3dGSEvP or put in an order with your favourite book-shop (via wholesaler Ingram – ISBNs 9780952288503 and 9780952288510).

All aboard the One-percenter Express?

Nice to see some semi-original science fiction content is still trickling through the streams, even in lock-down.

Enter Snowpiercer, on track left, steaming into Netflix. The science-fiction TV series of a Korean film based on a French graphic novel, Le Transperceneige.

The bonkers movie was by Bong Joon-ho of Parasite fame – the last movie I saw before Covid knee-capped all the cinemas – an Alice in Wonderland trip through an armoured ark-train carrying the last scrapings of humanity after a failed attempt at climate engineering to halt global warming has produced a Snowball Earth.

Given the film is more or less a one-trick Pony relying on its weird premise to draw class distinctions between the future and our current ‘Let them eat Cake’ societal set-up, I was curiously wondering how they’d draw the film out to TV series length?

Well, the answer is, let’s make it a murder mystery!

In the first episode, Daveed Diggs stars as Andre Layton: an ex-homicide detective who usually spends his days tending to his cage of food rats at the tail end of the train. That is, until he called by Melanie Cavill, the Tannoy Announcer of the Train, to help solve a murder due to Layton’s former profession as a cop.

Layton, while trying to negotiate better conditions for his friends, is reunited with his bitter ex-wife who is naturally also one of the suspects. After the Tailies revolt, they are talked down by Layton who agrees to help solve the murder while secretly plotting to infiltrate the front of the train to plan the next rebellion.

All fairly engaging so far. Murder on the 1%-er Express? I can live with that.

All aboard the One-percenter Express?

Towards the future?

As well as writing, I’ve also been using my extra time at home to think and reflect. I reckon there’s a lot of that going on at the moment.

I’ve often thought in years past how little winning a million or more quid on the National Lottery would change my life. I’m already doing what I love doing most … creating strange new worlds and filling them with characters doing amazing things in my books.

All I really need to do that is a Mitsubishi mechanical pencil, a pad of paper, a comfortable seat, and a cup of coffee (add time and quiet and bake for six months). And hey, I’ve already got all those!

There’s been a flurry of social media posts from depressed stars and tycoons who’ve suddenly woken up to such facts as (a) your seventy room mansion is just 69 unused rooms to feel lonely in – and a heck of a lot of extra vacuuming now your staff have buggered off (b) having a hundred million in the bank isn’t much good if you’ve got nothing much to spend it on (c) owning a garage full of supercars isn’t much cop when nobody’s there to be impressed by the size of your engine.

Normally, these woe-is-me posts might be greeted with some interest, but it’s amazing how sympathy for celebs has evaporated when your audience isn’t stuck in a LA fortress with a choice of swimming pools and is instead self-employed in a flat and worrying about real-life issues such as paying the bills, etc.

As Leo once said, everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themself.

And, as Wise Willard told me … never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you’re going all the way.

Hair Cut One Hundred

Well, I’ve just invested in a pair of hair clippers for a quarantine cut, and if things go wrong next week, I might have to start rocking the China Miéville-look – although not half as alluring as the author of Perdido Street Station, obviously (I’d end up more of a Poundstore Kojak if matters slip sideways).

On the work front, I’m posting chapters of the sequel to For the Crown and the Dragon (my very first book), The Fortress in the Frost, for my Patreon readers over at https://www.patreon.com/stephenhunt – this was the novel that coined the phrase ‘flintlock fantasy’ as a strange sub-genre, thanks to an Interzone reviewer … although if it had come out a few years later, I’m sure the moniker ‘steampunk’ would’ve been bandied about.

Also on the work front, I’ve been using the spare time at home to typeset and load all the books published under the Green Nebula imprint into Ingram Spark, to make them easier to order in print via book stores, libraries and such.

Are you interested in hardbacks of novels from the Sliding Void series, Mission to Mightadore, Empty Between the Stars, and the like?

This is an option from Ingram that wasn’t available via Amazon (which is paperback-only for most of their line). If you are, let me know and I’ll release them in this format, too. The options are hardback, or hardback in a slip-case.

Super-Dad’s Fortress of Solitude?

So, since the entire family has relocated back to Casa Hunty for the duration of the current contretemps, the increase in relative population density has made the serene act of writing, communicating with the muse, and milking the author cow’s creative teats for the milk of creativity a somewhat more fraught business than normal.

That is when I noticed a seven-foot-square-sized scorched Earth corner of the garden, more or less hidden away from sight from the house, in a shady weed-cleared nook where nothing good will grow in that benighted corner of the garden.

Or will it?

Spying this derelict terrain, my mind was immediately filled with spinning visions of the kind of man-shed-cave that regularly features in A.J’s Head to the Shed section of the Idler magazine (see https://www.idler.co.uk/article/sheds-in-the-time-of-lockdown/) – yes, Alex Johnson, author of the Haynes Shed Manual, and creator of shedworking.co.uk, you have a lot to answer for!

Super-Dad’s Fortress of Solitude?

I mean, Dylan Thomas wrote in his bike shed. Philip Pullman has a fine and very large author’s shed in his Oxford garden (actually, the garden’s more like a private parkland). My distant relative, Roald Dahl, built a one-room cottage in his garden to pen his works. So why not me?

Imagine the calm. The quiet. The warm comfort of snuggling up to a wooden desk in a snug environment! The lack of distractions. Why my word count could climb to epic 1930s Pulp-author proportions!

However, I suspect that by the time I can actually get a shed installed – either DIY-style or by greasing the palms of a socially distanced local shed-engineer with a few of my hard-earned Galactic Groats, our tiny home office will be returned to a state of tranquility by the subsidence of matters medical beyond my realm.

So, to man-shed or not to man-shed, that is the question of the moment? I’d like you to vote on it using the poll at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/does-the-author-stephen-hunt-deserve-a-writing-shed/, please.

Better to be lucky than good?

When the current COVID-19 situation started to bite, I wasn’t one of the people scrambling for toilet rolls, cans of baked beans, and finding locating an in-stock facemask as hard as putting socks on a rooster. This is because I’d already done my panic buying in late December last year.

I’d spotted what was happening in China and teased the two main pertinent facts out of their unhappy experience. (A) an unrestricted R0 as high as seven (translation: you might as well try stopping the wind) and (B) an ICU rate of c. 20 percent of those who catch it (translation: no medical system in the first world will cope well if that sweeps through everybody all at once).

Was I wise, or super-informed, or possessed of an advanced Ph.D. in Epidemiology and decades of cutting-edge genetic science in the field?

Nope. I was just dumb lucky.

I spent a large part of 2019 writing a science fiction book, ‘The Pashtun Boy’s Paradise’, which involved a large amount of research into real pandemics, past and potential. Forewritten is forearmed, as it transpires.

In my novel, the initial big pandemic out of China is nicknamed, ‘The Shanghai Shakes’, which is a little too close to ‘the Wuhan Wobbles’ for comfort.

I certainly hope that I am not tapping into some unconscious premonition of our actual future, because, in my book (out later this year & coming soon to my Patreon readers to beta-read over at https://www.patreon.com/stephenhunt), the pandemic leads to a limited nuclear exchange as geopolitical tensions rise between competing nations, mostly as a result of the severe economic downturn which follows the plague.

Don’t worry, though, as the book’s plot is set in the solarpunk near-future utopia that follows later in the re-built nations of the Free West.

Everything is beautiful and bountiful. Just not for everyone.

Well, it’s always better to be lucky than good. I think I’m the surreal living proof of that.

The Pashtun Boy’s Paradise

 

One More Conspiracy Theory?

I have a theory, and some might call it a conspiracy theory, although since it’s private to me, don’t expect to find it floating around any of those tinfoil hat web sites next door to ‘Elvis is alive and hiding in a Fort Knox sub-level’ or ‘JFK faked his assassination to retire and become a house painter in Alabama’.

Mine is that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider which opened in 2008 knocked the multiverse off course, and dropped me into a strange mirror universe which has increasingly got odder as it has grown more and more out of kilter with normality.

First, I became a fantasy and science fiction author, which is obviously a very silly idea. Next, several strange wars and political events were arriving in fast order which seemed statistically daft.

Now I find myself living in around about episode three of Fear the Walking Dead while expecting to emerge from my house’s bunker in about five months into a new great depression, a collapsing EU, and a fierce Cold War between China and at least some of the NATO powers.

Now, I know that one of you $%^$%^^ers out there is in on this experiment, and understands where the portal is that gets me back to the universe where I co-founded Facebook and married Scarlett Johansson and drink coffee on Friday mornings with Elon while giving him my invaluable insights about a Mars settlement.

I’d really quite like you to tell me where the dimensional rift is before the alien invaders arrive next year.

Please!

I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent Indian takeaway.

I’m writing this on Sunday, but let’s face it, doesn’t every day feel a little like Sunday, now, for the obvious reasons?

As Douglas Adams once realised, we are all entering The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul together.

Oddly, and against expectations, I find it a lot easier to re-read favourite old books and attend to the large pile of new get-around-to-some-time novels – while the attraction of TV has badly waned, even as Nextflix and Prime fill up with insistent backlogs of new series that I have either enjoyed in the past or marked out as potential to-watches.

Everything from Narcos, Better Call Saul, Tales from the Loop, Hunters, The Expanse, Titans, and Ozark, they’re all sending me emailed nags and insistent reminders like some jilted partner.

Life is getting smaller, but in the world of my piled and shelved tomes, the universe is forever expanding.

Will you join me in asking your Alexa to play Bossa nova music for an hour each afternoon from 4-5pm, until you finally hallucinate you are Dean Martin sipping Sidecars at the Sands Hotel with Lauren Bacall and Sammy Davis Jr. (or vice versa)?

Small pleasures, my friends, and a simpler pared-down life until this too shall pass.

Stay well, stay healthy, and hang loose.

Mission to Mightadore (Jackelian #7) hits the bookstores.

What I looked like back in the 18th century?

You can tell quarantine is starting to bite down on the Hunt work ethic and the loose threads of my already tenuous sanity … so, here’s what the Japanese artificial intelligence at https://AI-art.tokyo/en/ thinks I look like as a Renaissance oil painting.

As anyone who has met me knows, I ain’t no oil painting!

What I looked like back in the 18th century?

Envie Magazine: now with added Stephen Hunt.

Envie Magazine has an interview with me in their latest issue.

Check this fine publication out over at https://enviemagazine.com/

Envie Magazine: now with added Stephen Hunt.