Geoff Nelder's Blog, page 38

Into the Blast available in the UK

At last, Into the Blast (account of the skyjacker DB Cooper who was never caught)  is on Amazon.co.uk for both paper and ebook

http://amzn.to/hEudgH  paperback

http://amzn.to/i5ZY5U Kindle

Writing updates

Escape Velocity: the anthology is nearing completion. We've had the stories, poem, cartoon and editorials done and proofread for a while but two things held things up. 1) a few admin / finance issues but they're sorted now. 2) the extraordinary success of Into The Blast – the story of DB Cooper, the skyjacker in the 1970s, who was never caught. WordPress won't let me put a direct link to the Amazon (the dot com as only the first edition is on the UK version at the moment) selling for print or ebook.If you go to Amazon yourself and find Into the Blast revised edition you'll a very low star rating by one person. Apparently, he is upset that our research came to a different conclusion to him, he's brought out his own book and probably jealous of ours being the subject of a History Channel decoders programme. Healthy competition is fine in the publishing industry, though in the main I've only seen cooperation and friendship. Mean to diss your competition by putting low ratings for their products. Anyway, perhaps that reviewer will like our anthology, and it is due out in March.

I received a lovely rejection letter via my US agent this week. We didn't realise that the science fiction branch of New Deer Press was headed up by none other than Robert J Sawyer. My agent had sent them a query letter for my Left Luggage science fiction trilogy a long time ago and hadn't chased them. So she received this from the great man: "Please accept my profound apologies for being so long in replying — 13 months is unconscionable!. I don't work in the Red Deer Press offices, and they only just forwarded your query to me.  Your project is fascinating, but, alas, my little line of books only publishes Canadian authors, sad to say.  I do wish you the very best of luck elsewhere.

Rob Sawyer"

Wow, that's a rejection I didn't mind. Of course it seems odd for that publisher to only want Canadian writers and there's nothing on their submission guidelines to say so. Perhaps they receive a grant from their government. Anyhow, I mentioned this to some friends. One is Canadian and offered to help. We briefly discussed me marrying her, but that is problematical with both of us being already married. She is the charming Isabelle Prevost. Like me she won an award at Wuacademia. Her's is for a collection of short stories called L'Objectif – in French as you see. Here at Wuacemia. My Hot Air is there too.

A flash short story of mine is in a charity anthology, The Write to Fight. Supporting young olympic hopefuls it is available here. The story is written from the point of view of a sparrow. It is rare for me to write from an animal viewpoint but it was a way to imbue a lot of irony into how humans live.

I heard that another short story, The Examination, has been picked for the Queensland 100 anthology. All proceeds are going to victims of the floods in Australia this winter. No link yet.

Ben Larken's Pillar's Fall

Pillar's Fall: The Legend of Pillar – Book One, by Ben Larken

Reviewed by Geoff Nelder

A good policemen throws a young boy off a bridge. It saves life, but harbingers much more than simple life and death.

Paperback: 286 pages

Publisher: LL-Publications (October 31, 2010)

ISBN-13: 978-1905091874

Right from the start I fell into the easy style of Larken's prose. Now that's surprising given the uneasy depths that make up the story. Here we have Pillar, who seems to be a straight-forward cop, who doesn't need to make promotion waves because he has an idyllic marriage and all's well with the world – until he has throw a young boy off a bridge to his certain death. Now, that's some hook. Was he saving his own skin, or those of others, or was he being worked on by mysterious forces? Pillar can't or won't believe in the supernatural although he helps out at his local church. That is, he might accept the concept of God but has trouble with the existence of demons and angels, more believing in hallucinations or that some criminal mastermind is messing with him.

The clever plotting of this book has the reader – for a long time – trying to guess whether the ensuing ghastly deaths and voices, along with weird visions are the hallucinations of a troubled cop's mind or real? But then we are forced to consider what is 'real'? The unravelling of more horrors with increasing hints of his own involvement – like it or not – takes Pillar to the edge, several edges, along with the reader.

The use of a police detective, who is drawn into abnormal forces has precedent in Jon Courtenay Grimwood's masterful 9 Tail Fox. Pillar's Fall is at least as brilliant. Characters are paired then turn against each other. Love, empathy, friendship slide between the forces of evil here. The detective story aspect of Pillar's Fall is exceedingly convincing, probably a result of Ben Larken's experience working in the police force. I don't just mean the command structure and procedures but in the rivalry, and 'feel' of policemen encountering scenes of unbridled gore. The horror is more insidious than in most of the genre by the cunning use of moments of reflection, more so with tenderness. In particular, Pillar's love for his wife, Charlotte, results in near poetic phrasing such as 'her breath tugging on a soft snore'. No irritation there yet he is agonised by his love because of the awful secrets he's having to hold.

I particularly enjoyed this paragraph from Charlotte: 'I spend all day in counselling sessions, staring at people with dull, oppressed, dead eyes. And then on the drive home I see the same eyes on every commuter… Then I get home … your eyes are sad, but they're full of the essence of life. In your eyes I see a battle to figure it all out.' If only she knew, but then she yearned to know.

There are literary gems in the narrative I wish I'd written. Echoes are here of Wordsworth's The Child is Father of the Man, when Larken has children able to detect (some) ghosts when ordinary people cannot. A master class in creative writing sneaks in several places such as when Paula is decapitated in a section following her point of view. In any other book that would be the end of her narrative, but whoa! she continues – and it makes sense. Brilliant.

For those admirers of Ben Larken's debut novel, Pit-Stop, a work of genius, they will find shades of reflection here. For example we experience that state of limbo, with characters shivering with initial denial then comes the shock of acceptance. Detective Tom Pillar isn't in limbo although he is initially in denial. He is pilloried by his detective peers, but escapes and thwarts the dark force enemy, for now… until Book Two.

Purchase from Amazon

Worth waking up for

The wind woke me by rattling my window, but my eyes didn't fully open until they blinked at my inbox. Two Australian-related good news items. One, I have been accepted as a paid reviewer for Dare Empire: a passionate young publishing concern down under. Two, my short story, The Examination, has been accepted for the charity anthology, The Queensland 100. I am, allegedly, one of the headline authors!

The breeze out there isn't just rattling windows, but keeping me and my bike from lengthy rides. I'll just have to get on with writing my science fiction Left Luggage, and reading Gabriel Timar's SF novel, The Falcon Project.

A Fistful of Rubbers

A Fistful of Rubbers: The Sid Tilsley Chronicles – Book Two

Mark Jackman

Reviewed by Geoff Nelder



In an apparent contradiction of the title, there are surprising moments of philosophy and political intrigue here that no aficionado of vampire literature should ignore.

Paperback: 312 pages

Publisher: Logical-Lust (14 Nov 2010)

ISBN-13: 978-1905091584

I have been reading vampire stories for decades but it is only in more recent years that the genre has sprung a leak in conventions. New myths were generated by Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897 followed meekly by many writers. For example he invented the notion that vampires have no reflections, can be killed by a crucifix, warded off by garlic, and have to sleep in soil or a coffin. Jackman's vampires snub such stereotypes though for dramatic effect he keeps with Stoker's concept that vampires burn in sunlight.

In Book One: The Great Right Hope, many new and invigorating ideas were introduced such as the acknowledgment of vampire existence by some 'normal' people in authority and a Coalition created to govern this uneasy co-existence. Of course the excitement comes when vampires and humans break with the Coalition. The politics of such a dichotomy, introduced in Book One, is explored further in Book Two, but don't worry, there is no chance of you falling asleep. The action of Sid's right fist, supported by his Middlesbrough pals, and fuelled by Bolton Bitter beer, drives the story on its drunken, bruising and hilarious journey.

As we come to expect from Mark Jackman, there are ingenious and disturbing vamp-lit innovations. We learnt in Book One that Sid's fists can dispose of a vampire, while normally only decapitation can. In Book Two, one of Sid's drinking buddies, Brian Garforth, discovers that shagging his one-night-stand vampire lover, the most beautiful female on Earth, turned her to ash, making his jizz a more hazardous substance than a wooden stake. A fact leading to the eponymous title, A Fistful of Rubbers after a scientist invented a kind of condom six-gun. Another surprise is that vampire fathers often die in childbirth. Yes, you heard me correctly, but I'll let you read the rather touching reason when you read the book yourself. A bizarre yet intriguing novelty is when an uncontrollable beast of a vampire, Gunnar Ivansey, confesses his evil deeds to a priest. Fascinating.

In this sequel, Sid's fist remains mighty but the man himself is troubled. The Miner's Arms is closed (temporarily, don't fret), forcing the lads to discover new drinking emporiums forcing them to encounter people of differing sexual preferences creating extreme discomfort and shame, Worse, the political factions impinge on Sid and his friend in ways obliging them to retaliate. There's much more.

This sequel is more intellectual than Book One with its political and philosophical shenanigans, but fear not, Sid and his pals will always see you right.

Any fan of Sid Tilsley in The Great Right Hope will be uplifted and rightly beasted by A Fistful of Rubbers.

Purchase from Amazon UK

The Zargothian Tales

I've mentioned before in these pages that I edited the early drafts of a great young adult fantasy, The Zargothian Tales by a young Irishman, Aidan Lucid. Today, a video trailer was released for the book and it is excellent. Click on the link here and select the Like it button if you do. To my surprise I get a mention in a frame near the end. To buy The Zargothian Tales: Return of the Son of Hamorin by Aidan Lucid, visit the publishers, WordTechs.

The clever trailer was created by Su Halfwerk - well done, Su.

Codename Prague

Codename Prague

A Pulp Science Fiction novel by D. Harlan Wilson

ISBN: (PB) • ISBN 978-1-935738-05-3

(HC) • ISBN 978-1-935738-04-06

Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press January 2011

198 pages • Trade Paperback & Hardcover • 6″ x 9"

'…every spoken word is a message…'

Reviewed by Geoff Nelder

Recently, Max Bunny Sparber said that if a work is to be incomprehensible then do it deliberately. Reading Codename Prague brings this quote to mind quite frequently. Of course it is a work of genius: it might appear to contain pages of random thoughts but everything is mapped out.

In this bizzaro novel, an agent, Vincent Prague, impossibly assassinates The Nowhere Man with predictable yet random results. He is now a celebrity but this has awful repercussions with his limbs and life in constant jeopardy. Luckily he carries around his own spare parts. Prague's mission is to crack a code but the plot isn't important to this novel. It is in the writing that the reader luxuriates: sometimes so weird it seems that D. Harlan Wilson's keyboard wrote the odd page by accident on its own, while others are a blend of streams of poetic consciousness.

Set in the near future and yet with many hark-backs to fifties detective genre, there is mild horror, science fiction and much humour on every page. Consider some examples: 'The detectives were barely perceptible beneath the thick swathes of gore that caked them from fedora to flat feet.' And the whole of Chapter 06 reflecting on Prague's time in jail: '"Eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight, eighty-nine, nrrrrrrr…"

He trailed off. He hadn't been counting long. But there was nothing else to do. He grew bored of the count quicker than desired or anticipated. How long had he been incarcerated here? No more than a few hours. Maybe just a few minutes. Now what could he do?

This is what happened next: eighteen years passed…'

There are notions in the novel that paint the protagonist and his milieu in certain lights. For example he often encounters German names and language. Who can't be fascinated by the way Germans accrete words so much a single word can't fit over a doorway. Eg Wütendeswissenschaftlermunster (mad scientist monster) – five times on one page! Brilliant. The guttural feel of the German voice is echoed in actions and clothing. Methinks D. Harlan Wilson, or at least his characters, lean in fashion towards Deutch Erwache regalia – or Nazi chic Sturmabteiling attire, in Prague's words.

A touch of SF is spiced through such as when Prague finds his shoelaces undone and he orders them to do themselves up. Weirdness can be equally relished in such descriptions as of a bell-hop's sister, whose breasts are filled with low-sodium peanut butter and 'her hips swung like a pendulum as she walked'. I've been looking at the rear of women in a new way since I read that. Wonder if it'll wear off? Hope not.

Chapter 29 carries an editorial note that it should be deleted or the chapter should be the whole book. I can understand why – it is the epitome of bizarro – a long draught of 'spenpalatine ganglionneuralgia (Margarita brain freeze) beautifully crafted.

The novel is full of stimulating one-liners – you don't drown in a puddle of True Romance and there is even a sentence thus ". . . . . . . . . . ." ie full of itself. Such self-referential sentences, worthy of Douglas Hofstadter, pervades this book. There's even a graphic chapter – chapter 48. I have to quote: 'A man's shadow elected to cast the man…' Even the chapter numbers reach into decimal points then to negatives to the consternation of the narrator. Don't worry, there is a surprise at the end. You'd think a bizarro novel, where the joy is more in the reading than the plot, would not have a 'proper' ending but you'd be wrong. A denouement unfolds with exposition guaranteed, but whether you'll agree with it is up to you. Like other books, once you've paid for it, and read it, then it belongs to you not the author.

My congratulations to D. Harlan Wilson for an entertaining, head-hurting flamboyance called Codename Prague."

Smashing

And there's me thinking that after all the hype relating to Smashwords that the ebook of my humorous thriller, Escaping Reality, is doing well, my publisher says the ebook there has sold ONE copy today! Laugh or cry? Haha. Over the years around 2,000 copies of the paper version has sold, so we were trying the ebook as an experiment at less than a couple of pounds (or 1.99 USD). If you have a Kindle or Sony e-reader than why not try it? ER on Smashwords

Information on the story is here.

Cycling and writing

Sunday and we have torrential rain here in Cheshire. Okay, not the real downpours poor Queensland, Brazil and in other places in the southern hemisphere, but heavy for around here. On Australia and Brazil I am reminded of when I used to teach the Geography of Natural Disasters. We'd debate the issue of whether the regular monsoonal Bangladeshi floods were a Natural phenomenon or an avoidable human issue. It is mainly the latter, and the same goes in Queensland and Brazil. How many times do ecologists and hydrologist have to say to town planners: Don't tear down forests on valley slopes, don't build airfields or other large open tarmac areas on hills and don't build homes in flood plains? Ignore these obvious simple rules and after torrential rain you will get mudslides and rivers in flood. QED. I feel pangs of sorrow for people caught up in the disasters but anger at the mindless authorities allowing people to live in the wrong places.

So, today I set out on my Sunday bike ride in pouring rain. I cut it short to only a two hours 25-miler up into Wales, Hope Mountain, buy a paper at Higher Kinnerton and back again. I felt warm with the temperature being 10C and stopped halfway to strip a layer and swap full gloves for mitts. Rain doesn't bother me as much as it used to, or should, since August. I'd returned from a South Wales writing week, taking 2 and half days to do the hilly 150 miles in a deluge. The main problems are: drivers can't see me so well, I can't enjoy admiring views, and my brakes don't work when wet. Otherwise, I enjoy the leg rotation and while cycling solo can allow my imagination to think through plot problems and nightmare up new characters. I saw the aftermath of an accident this morning. A flashing Ambiwlans (ambulance for those who find the translation difficult!) already had the injured man while his motorbike lay on the grass verge on the Old Mountain Road at the junction with the A5104 at Penymyndd. My velocity was already low on account of the gradient – steep for the previous 3 miles – and the fact that I'd forgotten to empty my panniers, before I left, of shopping during the week: cans of kidney beans, packet of soya flour, a now stale packet of scones and miscellanea. Even so, I slowed more thinking that could be me in the ambiwlans having been hit by that blue car, who'd probably not seen the motor bike coming up the hill from Broughton, Chester. On the hand, motor bikes go much faster and have so little time to brake and take avoiding action as push bikes. I felt a bit safer after that and continued to fill my panniers more at the Higher Kinnerton convenience store.

My urban fantasy / historical novel, Xaghra's Revenge is now being considered by a publisher on the island of Malta. It would be marvellous if it was published in the islands the action is based on. This is thanks to a fellow player on the web-based itsyourturn.com, who lives on Malta, and has a friend, who is a published novelist, John Bonello, see his books published by Merlin Library. John is recommended Xaghra's Revenge to Allied Publishing, who publish The Times of Malta. Fingers and eyes crossed!

Star Trek, it isn't

Starry Track: generic voyage

By Geoff Nelder 266 words

Captain, a ship has uncloaked off the starboard bow.

Open a hailing channel.

No response and they're charging weapons.

Raise shields.

They've fired what seem to be neutron pulse cannons.

Hold on. Ready zuon torpedoes. Target their weapons.

Shields down 10% 20% 30% 40%

Belay firing. Go to warp nine.

Warp out.

Maximum Impulse, evasive manoeuvre.

Impulse out.

Target their engines.

Their cloaking device keeps coming on – can't target.

Captain, the doctor has fallen in love with the Chief Engineer.

Damage report.

Hull breached on Decks 12 to 34.

Evacuate Decks 12 to 34.

Too late.

Shields down 60% 70% 80%

Transfer all power from everything, including life support, to the shields.

Shields down 90%, and we can't… gasp… breathe.

Use what power is necessary for the replicator to make oxygen, and more shields.

We need to be inventive. Vulcan, come up with a new weapon.

I've noticed the frequency of their cloak is correlated linearly with their neutron pulse amplitudes, which by coincidence matches our online transfigorator transponders.

You mean we can deflect their cannon and turn them back on themselves.

That's what I said.

Make it so.

*

Captain, why did they attack us?

Our Humanity, including non-humans, meant we were a threat.

Captain, I've found a back-ion trace to their home world. It's in Alpha Quadrant sector 19659b.

Make a note of it for the Federation in Supplemental.

Aren't we boldly going there to show them we mean no harm?

It would go against the Prime Directive. They are bound to be changed by discovering our greatness, where it has not gone before.

(c) Geoff Nelder. Feel free to copy as long as my name stays attached.