Pilgrims launch – photographs!

Yesterday was the launch of Pilgrims at the White Horizon, and, astonishingly, even though it was the night of the UK premiere of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the last ever episode of The IT Crowd, people came!

A few photos of the event, which took place at The Light House Media Centre in Wolverhampton.

Here is Michael Thomas reading from the book:

And from a distance:

And here he is being quizzed about the book by Campbell Perry:

As I mentioned at the launch, this is probably the oddest novel I’ve ever finished reading. But then it is a sequel to The Mercury Annual, a book that ended with what was effectively a sixty-page conversation!

Be sure to give this one a chance to cast its peculiar, poetic spell on you!

More information about the new book will appear on the site tomorrow, to coincide with its predecessor being free for a few days.

Dodger by Terry Pratchett, reviewed by Jacob Edwards

Dodger by Terry Pratchett (Doubleday, hb/pb, 347pp). Tuppence more and up goes the donkey.

Dodger is a tosher – a youngster who scavenges for lost valuables in the sewers of Victorian London. Toshers generally live short and sordid lives (a tosher who makes it to his thirties is considered most venerable indeed), but Dodger is not just a tosher. He is also a geezer – somebody cunning and street-smart, a paragon of underclass wiles; someone who knows everyone and is known to all. And besides this, Dodger is more than handy with a pair of brass knuckles. When he rescues a young lady one particularly noisome evening, he finds himself thrust suddenly into the role of upstanding citizen. Determined both to protect the girl and bang to rights her erstwhile tormentors, Dodger must bring his artful talents to bear upon the upper stratums of society. And all the while keeping his new suit clean.

Dodger is marketed as a young adult novel, which unusually for Terry Pratchett does not take place within the realms of his much-beloved Discworld series. The distinction, however, is quite arbitrary. The only young adult feature of Dodger is its protagonist (in truth Pratchett shows fewer inhibitions than usual in touching upon mature audience content), while London itself presents with such squalor and debasement that it could easily pass for a borough of Ankh-Morpork – at least in the early Discworld novels, before that city started to benefit from what has proven to be an ongoing societal renaissance.

One of Dodger’s most notable features, and perhaps its greatest strength, is that Terry Pratchett in no way romanticises the cobblestoned London we so often find associated with gentlemanly mores and stately carriages being pulled clippity-clop through the mist. Rather, he takes aim at the city’s underbelly and displays almost porcine delight in wallowing in its filth, smog and human detritus. The writing as ever carries a light tone, but with Dodger Pratchett has taken considerable pains to keep his subject matter down to earth… and not infrequently in the sewers below. The exception is Dodger himself, whose precocious sangfroid must surely be at odds with the reality of his station. But such is the magic of storytelling. The fantastical element, though small, is what distinguishes Dodger from historical fiction, or for that matter from the insidious proselytising of Dodger’s new acquaintance – journalist and soon-to-be novelist Mr Charles Dickens.

In assembling the dramatis personae for Dodger, Terry Pratchett has quite cleverly mixed historical notables (Dickens, Disraeli, Peel, et cetera) with fictional archetypes (Dodger, Solomon, Sweeney Todd), the conceit being that Dodger and company must have been real people upon whom Dickens then drew in writing his novels – particularly Oliver Twist. This pseudo historicity adds a certain intrigue to Dodger. In fact, it may well spur some readers to further investigate the period thus dramatised. Equally, though, it seems to have placed something of a constraint upon the plot. Whereas devotees of the Discworld novels (including its purportedly young adult Tiffany Aching books) have come to expect from Pratchett a certain convolutedness of narrative – an atmospheric pea-souper in written form – Dodger’s storyline is not so intricate, and plays less to the reader’s sense of unfolding mystery. This is a failing, perhaps, but only in relative terms; and by way of trade-off there manifests a gloriously heightened sense of characterisation, not so much in Dodger himself but rather in the steaming, pungent London it is his misfortune to inhabit.

Dodger offers up something slightly different from Terry Pratchett: lighter than his coming-of-age classic Nation (2008); more darkly shaded than his Discworld novels; Dodger is a book both witty and sincere – as tellingly sharp as Sweeney Todd’s razor.

Pilgrims at the White Horizon: launching on Friday at 7.00 pm, Wolverhampton

In 2009 we published a novel by Michael Wyndham Thomas, The Mercury Annual. That was a mistake. I love the book and I’m glad it’s been published, but it deserved a better publisher than me, one dedicated to publishing books and bringing them to readers’ attention rather than squeezing them in around a quarterly magazine! I haven’t made time to do any of the books I’ve published by other people any justice.

However, undeterred by my rubbishness Michael Thomas came back to us with the follow-up, and after a dilatory gestation period Pilgrims at the White Horizon will finally be launched this Friday, at 7.00 pm, at the Light House in Wolverhampton.

In this volume Keith is dragged off to Valiant Razalia, a far-off world hardly anyone remembers – because it only ever appeared in one panel of one comic strip in one British annual! – by bizarre alien beings who think he’s their creator and want him to finish the job. Along for the ride is Keith’s daughter, for whom it’s at least a break from her studies.

This will probably be the last book I publish for a while by anyone but me and John (unless I decide to give book publishing something more than a half-hearted go). I’ve taken an absolute age to get it ready for publication and I feel terrible about that. But it’s worth the wait. If you can’t make it to the Light House, watch out for it on Amazon this weekend.

Event: Book launch! Of Michael W. Thomas’s new novel, Pilgrims at the White Horizon. Date: Friday, 27 September 2013, 7.00 pm to 9.00 pm. Venue: The Light House Media Centre, Wolverhampton. http://www.light-house.co.uk/.

For more information about the author see: http://www.michaelwthomas.co.uk/

Ten films I’ve seen three times or more

Wednesday is list day. This is list #7. Ten films I’ve seen three times or more:

1. The Thing
2. Death Race 2000
3. Time Bandits
4. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (and IV, VI and VIII)
5. The Matrix Reloaded
6. Superman: The Movie (and II, and III)
7. Big Trouble in Little China
8. The Wedding Singer
9. The Thing from Another World
10. Quatermass and the Pit

Which films have you watched to death?

Theakerly thoughts #7: Library of Birmingham, impromptu interview, Goodreads battle-shelving

Thought 1. I took our children to see the new Library of Birmingham at the weekend. I’ve got mixed feelings about it. It’s a good-looking building, inside and out, though one can’t help imagining what it might start to look like once the cost of keeping it looking so nice kicks in. It feels rather like a London building that has teleported to Birmingham. It’s odd to walk into a library and not know where to find the books. The open plan means it’s quite noisy, more like visiting a popular museum than a library. One fluff is a row of spinning red reading chairs lined up along a long desk, even though the desk is impossible to reach when sitting in those seats. I hated those chairs at first, but sitting in them later completely converted me, and now I want one for my office. I got the children to crawl underneath looking for a manufacturer’s name, but they let me down. So if anyone can point me in the right direction, please do!
     The library does have plenty of nice places to just sit and read, and I could quite easily see myself popping down there to get some reading done. It doesn’t feel like there are any more books than in the old library: see my photo below of the woefully understocked (or perhaps just extremely popular) horror section. The new children’s section is nice, but out of the way, and the circular desk surrounding the staff discourages queuing, which encourages squabbling and irritation. The series of huge steps at the back will be brilliant for storytimes, though I overheard the staff saying they were too busy to actually have any, and its large rectangular plastic cushions were being thrown around and used to construct forts and rafts rather than sat on. It’s exciting to see the range of cultural activities planned for the library overall, and I hope that doesn’t stop once the launch period is over.

Thought 2. My post offering authors a few points to consider before getting stuck in over a review has been pushing up our page views like no one’s business, and a writer turned up in the comments who had done just that, with us, a couple of years ago. I took the opportunity to interview him about his reasons for doing so, and I think the answers give a useful insight into the way some authors persuade themselves that this really is the right thing to do. The conversation left me with the feeling that there’s little point advising anyone not to attack a review. If they want to, they will, they’ll draw a line wherever it needs to be to put the review on the wrong side of it. And people who aren’t inclined to get huffy about reviews will nod at the advice and just do what they would have done anyway. Can I really claim my self-control is any better on this issue when I’ve never been confronted by a review with which I really wanted to disagree? (Well, apart from this, arguably, but I’d suggest that doesn’t count as a review.) I’ve had pretty bad reviews, for example a two-star one in SFX of my second self-published novel (here it is), but I can hardly say, look, I didn’t start an argument with the reviewer, because I didn’t want to argue with him. In fact, I thought the review was spot on, and if anything much kinder than the book deserved!

Thought 3. Goodreads have tightened up their rules on certain matters, in particular prohibiting the battle-shelving of books, making quite a few people really unhappy. For example, if an author has done something to earn the opprobrium of militant readers, they might till now have found their books added to shelves like “not-in-this-lifetime” or “author-to-avoid”. You might expect me to be against Goodreads on this change, but I do get it. For one thing, leaving stuff like that up could get them into legal trouble. For another, the people using those battle-shelves were almost always people who hadn’t read the books and who had no intention of reading them. So visiting a book written by a dodgy author you’d see little about the book itself, but dozens of comments about the author, and that was unfair to the books. Even complete gits can write good books.
     I have more sympathy for people told by email that loads of their reviews had been deleted as part of the site’s purge of this kind of thing, but anyone who has been on Goodreads for more than five minutes should know that such things are a fact of life there. Rogue librarians wrongly deleting or merging books, questions over whether single issues of comics and magazines should be included in the database (you could easily write a review of something only for the item to then be deleted), the sudden withdrawal of Amazon’s metadata at one point: this stuff happens all the time, and if that’s the only place you’re putting your reviews (no for me) or tracking your reading (yes for me) you’ve got to regularly download a spreadsheet of your booklist or risk losing it. Click on Export to a CSV file on this page.

Thought 4. “And f— you again, Aaron Sorkin, for hiring Constance Zimmer, Olivia Munn, Kelen Coleman, Natalie Morales, Alison Pill, Chasty Ballesteros, Hope Davis and Margaret Judson and leaving their fucking clothes on.” Ugh. It is 2013, right? Between that and this, I’m done with AICN. Looking forward to watching The Newsroom, though, which just arrived from Lovefilm.

Alien Legion Omnibus, Vol. 1, by Alan Zelenetz, Frank Cirocco et al, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The French Foreign Legion in space: a perfect set-up for a long-running comic, and Alien Legion Omnibus, Vol. 1 (Dark Horse, ebook, 352pp; Dark Horse app purchase) collects the eleven issues where it began. These stories were originally published by Marvel’s creator-owned line Epic Comics in 1984 and 1985. There’s no slow build-up here: the first words of the first panel are “Sneak attack, major”, and there’s not even time to activate energy shields before Harkilon photon accelerators take out the main engines and Nomad Squad is crash-landing in an escape shuttle on Wedifact IV!

Alien Legion is a slightly odd series in that it seems to have been treated as a franchise from the beginning, copyrighted to Carl Potts though he doesn’t contribute as a writer here (he inks one short story). Alan Zelenetz writes all of these stories, while Chuck Dixon wrote many later issues. Pencils on the first six stories are by Frank Cirocco, with Chris Warner taking over for the final epic, “Slaughterworld”, not that the switch was particularly noticeable; the style is very consistent. Larry Stroman and Terry Shoemaker chip in with pencils on a few shorts.

The foreign legion premise means the comic needn’t contrive to gather a bunch of disparate characters with desperate pasts. Most interesting is Sarigar, his serpentine lower body always striking, both visually and literally. Durge is a slow-moving tank of a character who develops a pill-popping problem. The psychic powers of four-armed medic Meico, survivor of an ecological catastrophe, play a useful role in many stories. The breakout character is Jugger Grimrod, basically Wolverine in a helmet. He never stops feeling like a cynical copy, even if it is fun to see Wolverine fighting a war in space.

Alien Legion is generally good entertainment. It lacks the verve and imagination of the better creator-owned work of the period (Nexus, for example), but it’s well put together, and if you want to read light, reasonably exciting stories about soldiers in space with low key ongoing story arcs, it does the trick. Titan have announced an Alien Legion mini-series by Potts and Stroman for 2014, and the fact that new issues are still being published thirty years after the series began shows the strength of the idea. That the comic is still so little-known is a sign, perhaps, that the idea’s strength has yet to be fully exploited.

Fifteen things to consider when tempted to respond to a bad review of your book

Fifteen things to consider when tempted to respond to a bad review of your book:

1. Hundreds of thousands of books are published every year, and this person chose to read yours. Millions didn’t. Your gratitude for that should really outweigh your irritation at them “getting it wrong”.

2. If you respond, this will be for many, many people the only thing they ever know about you.

3. The book isn’t an exam you have set for readers. You don’t need to mark the answers at the end.

4. Before you get mad at someone for not paying attention, consider whose job it was to make them pay attention.

5. If a review is egregiously wrong, someone else will point it out. If no one ever does, it’s probably because no one is reading the review anyway. You know how people are about correcting other people on the internet.

6. Banish the phrase “set things straight” from your thoughts. That path leads only to the dark side. Be insouciant. Look at the picture of Jughead that illustrates this listicle: that’s you, that is.

7. Like a punch-up with a kitten, this is a fight you lose as soon as it begins, whatever the outcome. There is no way to win, nothing to gain. Let it lie and, if you must, comment on it indirectly later.

8. Unless it’s on Amazon, the review that bothers you so much will be forgotten before long, if anyone even notices it in the first place. The best way to make sure a bad review is never forgotten is to make a big fuss about it.

9. If you really can’t resist, at least spellcheck and punctuate your comments before posting them, or you’ll look like you’ve lost your temper.

10. Write your reply offline, on your PC, and take your time over it. Make it as short as you can. Aim for zero words.

11. Not many people, in the scheme of things, will buy your book at all. A variable percentage of those will read it. A very small number of those will be inspired to write about it. Not many of those will write about it when it is still in bookshops. Even fewer of those will have a significant platform for their writing. Don’t make yourself a writer that those people want to avoid writing about. And don’t make them give up writing reviews altogether because they’re sick of being hassled.

12. Remember that you haven’t read the book yet, not like they have. You’ve seen the words and read the sentences, but you brought to your reading all your notes and ideas, the unwritten backstory, the plans for the sequel and the roads not taken, and they didn’t. They’ve just read the actual book.

13. If your author chums are cheering you on, ask yourself if they’ve ever done it themselves. Are they supportive on Facebook, where the wider internet can’t see, but curiously absent from the blog comments? Sure, they’re glad that someone is doing it, but they know how daft it is, how bad it is for the reputation. They’ll let you take one for the team, but the team doesn’t have your back, not on this, not unless you can find a way to make it not about the review.

14. Still determined to set things straight? Read this blog post summarising author meltdowns from 2012 and see how it tends to go.

15. Oh sod it, man, go for it. Get stuck in. It’s never good for you, and it may be upsetting for the reviewers you’re about to browbeat, especially if your fans join in and start sending death threats, but it’s entertaining for everyone else,  and it gives us something to write hit-bait blog posts about. Like this one.

Wednesday was supposed to be list day. This is list #6.

Theakerly thoughts #6: audiobooks on Kindle, author firewalls, Mike Barrett

Thought 1. I’d forgotten how much I liked listening to audiobooks on my Kindle v.3 (the grey ones, now renamed Kindle Keyboards). Unlike an iPod it has little speakers that are fine for speech, and there’s a headphone jack for playing the books out to stereos, speakers and headphones. The older Kindles are even compatible with Audible files, and keep your place in them. Best of all, you can’t do anything else with the device while you’re listening. I have a bad habit of playing an audiobook on, say, the iPad, then wondering what else I could do while listening, and five minutes later turning off the audiobook because I’m reading a newspaper article and not paying the book any attention. You can’t do that with the old Kindles.

Thought 2. Ironic that the staunchest defender of an author who dived into a comment thread to set a reviewer straight is the same fellow who said this last May when explaining why he doesn’t review self-published books:

“We don’t know how you’ll react. The erratic behaviour of the author mentioned in [another article] is a strong illustration of why we don’t read self-published authors. We don’t have a firewall between us and the writer. Books from publishing houses that don’t have any self-published books give a level of detachment between what we write and the reaction we’ll get.”

So last year it was all about firewalls and detachment from the author’s reaction, this year “I welcome author’s [sic] comments” and those who don’t are bullies. Perhaps it’s different when the author is relatively famous.

Thought 3. During the all-too-brief time I edited Dark Horizons for the British Fantasy Society, some of my favourite articles were those by Mike Barrett on the history of fantasy and horror publishing. Some of those articles, plus several others, have now been collected in an Alchemy Press collection, Doors to Elsewhere, with an introduction by Ramsey Campbell. The articles were carefully researched, educational and well worth your time. More information here.

The Resurrectionist by E.B. Hudspeth, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The Resurrectionist by E.B. Hudspeth (Quirk Books, hb, 192pp; review copy supplied) is a very curious book. Billing itself as “The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black”, it combines sixty pages of stories about his life with over a hundred pages of anatomical illustrations of eleven mythical creatures: sphinx, siren, satyr, minotaur, elephant-headed boy, chimera, cerberus, pegasus, Chinese dragon, centaur and harpy. Before reading the book, one assumes that these will be specimens of cryptids Dr Spencer Black had discovered, acquired and dissected, but one finds out, unexpectedly, that he was in the business of creating the creatures himself, that these are all guesses, deliberate fakes, used to illustrate his theories and show what might have been had the evolutionary process been a little more forgiving. We hear how he began by stitching parts of human and animal corpses together, before trying his hand, with some ghastly success, at operating upon living beings, first animals, and then humans, including his own son. As one might guess, this does great harm to his family life and medical reputation.

This is an intriguing project, but while one appreciates the careful work and thought that went into it, it isn’t, unfortunately, very interesting to read. A quote on the back cover that mentions Jorge Luis Borges can be accounted for only by his having written about fictional works of reference; this isn’t a book that plays intellectual games. It’s awfully dry, the fiction unpredictable only in so far as it’s about a mad scientist with a passion for fashioning freaks, rather than the discovery of fantastical creatures (though Black claims that at least some specimens are real). The fiction does the job it is asked to do, putting the diagrams in context, but it is very much by-the-numbers and has little to say that you wouldn’t have guessed at from a flick through the book. It’s like the functional, got-a-job-to-do text used in art books like The Tourist’s Guide to Transylvania or The Diary of a Spaceperson to thread disparate images together, and one wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the two elements of the book were at one point intended to be intertwined.

But although I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone looking for a good story, it would make a quirky (double meaning intended) present. The cleverness here is in the detail of the drawings, not the writing that introduces them, though for most people seven pages of skeletal and muscular diagrams of a three-headed dog will be six pages too many. One group of people might really appreciate this book: fantasy writers. Because when your centaur gets an arrow in the butt you can look him up in this book and then cleverly discuss the damage to his semimembranosus. A fully-fledged book of this kind, ditching the fictional trappings, but covering a more expansive range of creatures, might well see Hudspeth as ubiquitous on fantasy writers’ shelves as Oxford or Fowler. As it is, it’s an unusual reference book to which few people will ever need to refer.

Theakerly thoughts #5: Left Behind, PCHH, Simon Amstell on Wait Wait

Thought 1. Received our first ever payment from Amazon in respect of Kindle sales. I think we finally reached a magical £20 barrier, and it only took three years or so! The future is bright!

Thought 2. I’m beginning to wonder whether, if one purpose of genre societies is to give people involved in that genre something in common, the mistakes they make can actually be a good thing. Writers are happy to have something to talk about, about which to be interesting and clever, even if it makes them mad. The logical consequence of this is that societies should actively plan to do something controversial on a regular basis!

Thought 3. Ranjna and I have finally started to get into Breaking Bad. In the same way that it’s hard to get Ranjna to watch dramas made in the UK, it’s hard getting me to watch dramas without aliens or spaceships. I try to kid myself that Breaking Bad is set in the early days of Borderlands, before things got really crazy, or maybe a retro town in the Firefly universe. Lawrence of Arabia was much more fun when I imagined it was set on Arrakis.

Thought 4. We watched Left Behind: The Movie last weekend. It’s an odd film about an attack on the United States of America (and, though not shown on screen, the rest of the world) by the shadowy head of a religious organisation with its roots in the Middle East, who kills over 125 million people directly (I think that was the number), many of them children and babies, all of them entirely innocent and wiped from the face of the earth in an eyeblink. Untold millions more are indirectly hurt and killed, for example as a result of planes and cars crashing after their drivers are killed. Astonishingly, the film sides with the quislings who think the best course of action is to start worshipping the mass murderer! Hopefully the second and third instalments will show us some real American heroes who won’t stop fighting till they end his atrocities forever.

Thought 5. I love shredding my to-do lists. Partly because it’s so satisfying to be done with the day’s work, and partly because we have lovely orange Niceday to-do pads that make very attractive strips, but also because there’s absolutely no need to shred them at all, and I love the idea of someone patiently piecing them together in the hope of finding some useful personal information.

Thought 6. I also love Pop Culture Happy Hour, the podcast from NPR, which I started to listen to a couple of months ago. It’s refreshing to hear people talking intelligently about their love of television, movies, games, comics and music, without the specimen-on-a-slide feel that you get when similar subjects are considered in, say, the BBC’s Late Review. They talk about what they love, but don’t ignore the things they find problematic. They’re also really decent about avoiding spoilers, which makes it listenable even for those of us in the UK.

Thought 7. Still on podcasts, Rambling Through Genre, Episode 8 features Lizzie Barrett, one of the jurors on this year’s British Fantasy Award for best newcomer (also known as the Sydney J. Bounds award), which comes up briefly, though Lizzie is appropriately discreet! The sound quality is poor, but Lizzie and the hosts have lots of interesting things to say. Well worth a listen. Elsewhere, Lizzie has suggested that such awards might be better judged anonymously to lessen bias, which is an interesting thought, one that might become practical as more publishers submit work for judging electronically. It would be harder to make it work with paperbacks, which often have the author’s name on every other page. It would also, as Lizzie mentions, mean nominations couldn’t be announced until the judging was done. But certainly an idea worth bearing in mind, and a good thought experiment.

Thought 8. I hope not to become a word count bore, but my plan to write 250 words a day seems to be working out. I’ve kept the chain going for over three weeks now. Admittedly, many of those words have been going into blog fluff like this, but the reviews are stacking up too, as well as a few bits of fiction. By the time we reach November I hope my writing muscles will be all set for NaNoWriMo, which I haven't won once since standing down from being an ML. I’m also finding it quite therapeutic; where things are bothering me I can write something about them here. Some thoughts may not ultimately be suitable for publication (there were originally thirteen thoughts in this post!), but it’s healthy to write them down and get them out of my system.

Thought 9. I was listening today to Peter Sagal’s appearance on NPR’s trivia quiz show, Ask Me Another (podcast 222, from 5 September 2013), and he was asked about the worst ever experience when hosting his own NPR quiz show, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, which is like a laid-back, avuncular version of our own News Quiz. Turns out it was the time they had Simon Amstell on as a panellist. Can’t believe I missed that one. Sounds like a classic example of Amstell’s comedy of awkwardness. Apparently he made fun of the show’s beloved topical limericks and the crowd turned against him! Peter Sagal said Amstell had obviously never heard their show before (how many people in the UK have?), but you can’t imagine they’d seen anything of his either if his approach came as a surprise. Peter Sagal did say he found it very funny. I hope I can track that full episode down, but there are highlights here.

Thought 10. I’ve been listening to the five new Pixies songs so much that I’m beginning to worry about wearing them out, so I’ve mixed in a few Black Francis/Frank Black/Grand Duchy songs that are in the same vein. “Black Suit” is the one of those that I’d really like to hear the Pixies record or perform. Always makes me think of Matt Bomer in White Collar.

Interview with the Vampire: Claudia’s Story by Anne Rice and Ashley Marie Witter, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Interview with the Vampire: Claudia’s Story (Headline, hb, c.224pp) is adapted from the relevant parts of the novel by Anne Rice, and she is listed as the author, but this book seems to be essentially the work of Ashley Marie Witter. Memorably played by a creepy young Kirsten Dunst in the film adaptation, Claudia was turned as a child, and is cursed to remain a child forever, causing her much frustration and angst; she will never be a woman.

This graphic novel charts the course of her dismay; it begins with her eyes opening, ends with them closing. We see her waking from near death and being turned, her first hungry feeds, her efforts to escape with Louis from their mutual maker, Lestat, and her tragic fate in the Paris sunshine.

Well, tragic-ish – she is a serial killer! But without her desperate desire to grow up, she and Louis would have stayed away from Europe, and would not have fallen into the orbit of the more powerful, older vampires.

This story isn’t without interest, looking at the unusual familial relationships that might develop among vampires not bound by our social considerations. Lestat and Louis are all at once father and son, lovers, brothers, friends and enemies, and fathers to Claudia, the baby they had to save the relationship.

In the emotional manipulations of Lestat the book shows how a dominant vampire might exert his will over others, something often taken for granted or demonstrated through violence in such stories; he’s an abusive father, a domineering mother and a bad uncle, all in the body of a moody pop star.

As the relationship between Louis and Claudia, following their escape from Lestat, shades into a love affair between an adult and a child, it all feels uncomfortably icky. We learn eventually that they don’t have a physical relationship, but in Paris they are said to be “in love”, and there’s a fair bit of nuzzling and sweet talk. It’s a book about an abused child who is upset because a grown-up won’t abuse her some more; it’s unnecessary to explain why that didn’t appeal.

The manga-romance-style artwork plays into that theme, but is generally quite good, even if there’s not a lot to distinguish one pretty boy vampire from another. However, the colouring, a few shades of greeny-beige with splashes of red when required, makes the book look rather samey and unappetising, while the text, typeset in an unsympathetic font rather than properly lettered, and all in italicised sentence case, makes the dialogue and captions a trial to read. Recommended only for fans.

Theakerly thoughts #4: TTA reviews, 2000AD, holidaymakers

Thought 1. My review of Alison Littlewood’s new book Path of Needles appears in the forthcoming Black Static #36, and my review of the star-studded audiobook World War Z: The Complete Edition will probably appear in Interzone #248, out at the same time. So look out for those! Thanks to book review editors Peter Tennant and Jim Steel for giving me the opportunity to strut my stuff on a respectable stage. Lifetime subscriptions to both magazines are now available, and very much recommended. How much I wish now that I’d taken out a lifetime sub to Interzone when I was a teenager!

Thought 2. Another magazine I wish I’d subscribed to sooner is 2000AD. Though I’ve read dozens of the collections and reprint magazines, and subscribed to the Judge Dredd Megazine (for about a year) and the 2000AD Xtreme Edition (until it was cancelled), I don’t think I’d ever read two issues of the original comic in a row. Somehow I missed out on it as a kid which is a shame because I would have loved it; I adored the work Pat Mills and John Wagner were doing in Doctor Who Weekly. The last one I remember buying must have been a decade or so ago, since it featured a Spice Girls in space strip! I wasn’t impressed enough to buy another issue. And while I loved the Xtreme Edition, I found the Megazine a bit of a drag, the strips too short, samey (just by virtue of being all Dredd-related), and slow to progress (because it was a monthly). (I do however treasure the pack of Dredd playing cards that was supplied set-by-set over four issues! I use it at work, for measuring/rewarding my progress through long proofreading jobs!) But when Clint came to an end last month I realised I was going to miss the experience of reading comics as serials, so I bought myself a year-long sub to 2000AD, and I am really enjoying it. It’s not just the content, though that has been interesting, varied and much more suited to grown-ups than I’d expected, but also the experience of having a brand-new comic delivered through the door every week, seeing the stories develop, waiting for cliffhangers to be resolved. Arriving on Saturday morning makes it a great reward for the week’s hard work. Super. If I have the money spare when the time comes around, I’ll definitely be renewing my sub.

Thought 3. It’s been a year now since I deleted my Facebook account. I do miss the gossip, squabbling and drama. Have I missed anything good?

Thought 4. Do holidaymakers really prefer print? This article on the Telegraph's website says they do. But hang on a minute, do you really think they do? Doesn’t that just seem bonkers? Between us, my family read somewhere between twenty and thirty books during a five-day holiday this year. We would have needed an extra suitcase to carry that lot!
    And if you read the Telegraph article, a couple of things become apparent. For one thing, it’s only in the headline and lede (which are not usually written by the journalist) that it’s claimed holidaymakers prefer printed books to e-readers.
    The claim in the article is actually that the “the feeling of holding and thumbing through a real book was the main reason that 71 per cent of travellers said they would pack one over a slimmer, electronic version”.
    The main reason they said “they would”, not that they actually did!
    Read on and you discover the source of this research: Heathrow Airport’s retail director!

Finches of Mars by Brian Aldiss, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Finches of Mars by Brian Aldiss (The Friday Project, epub, 2782ll; reviewed from Netgalley epub) is a dry report, in thirty-four short chapters with footnotes and an appendix, on the colonisation of our neighbour following the discovery of water in a great underground lake. Inspired by Herbert Amin Saud Mangalian’s argument that “humanity on Earth was doomed, and that the only solution was to send our best away, where they could strive – on Mars and beyond – to achieve true civilization”, the universities of the world collaborate first in sending two hydrologists, and then in building, maintaining and populating six towers, close enough to each other to avoid isolation, but distant enough to maintain independence. Each tower gathers speakers of one language family, to promote harmony. For similar reasons a decision is taken to allow no religious people on Mars. While problems back on Earth multiply and worsen, the colonists face their own troubles, most particularly the difficulty of bearing children on Mars. We learn most about the West tower, and its friendly relationship with the Chinese tower, friendly at least until door guardian Phipp shakes a member of the Chinese delegation by the throat. Phipp is Sheea’s partner but not the father of her baby, the first to survive childbirth, and takes offence at being congratulated.

The main theme, I think (as indicated by its title), is an examination of how living on another world – “a steady environmental change” – would affect humans, both in terms of the physical changes caused by a different gravity, and in how it might “act like a switch on our consciousness and our extended consciousness”. Colonising other worlds, it suggests, is not just a matter of building domes and oxygen pumps, but also of accepting the influence of new evolutionary pressures. As far as Earth goes, this book presents a worst case scenario, and through Mangalian (who has the last word, the appendix a summary of his influential book) argues that the worst case is inevitable. The recommendation is to spread our bets and keep our expectations low. As long as we rely on this one planet to keep the human race alive, and as long as we keep doing our best to muck it up, we’re on a knife edge, a few bad decisions (like that of Phipps, say) away from becoming a footnote in geological history.

The book is rather angry and pitiless in its dissection of humanity. Noel, the colony’s leader, may ultimately declare that “We are the great resource”, but the book doesn’t seem to particularly care whether we survive, wondering through Mangalian whether “this creature who has unsparingly overrun the planet deserves its self-inflicted misery”. Leaving the zealots behind on Earth seems like a good idea, especially when colonists returning to Earth face threats from suicide bombers, angry at their attempts to escape from God’s sight. But when hope seems to fade on Mars, with devastating consequences for the hope of all humankind, there’s a sense that perhaps some irrational faith in the future, for all its foolishness, might have been helpful: “Hope was such a hateful weakness. It sang out, sprang out, when least expected.”

The meticulous examination of such themes makes for a talky, thinky and theatrical novel, with figures moving on and off stage to say their significant words and think their significant thoughts – and I liked that about it. A Hollywood blockbuster version of exactly the same story can be imagined (and of course it would give away all the twists in the trailer), but this isn’t it. Finches of Mars will apparently be the last science fiction novel from Brian Aldiss, which is a great shame since this fascinating, provocative book, so dense with thoughts and speculations that a review can only draw out a handful of threads, is certainly not the work of an author in decline. If this had been his first book, one would eagerly anticipate the second.

Theakerly thoughts #3: female avatars, Abrams, worst son ever

Thought 1. The new MGMT single “Your Life Is a Lie” has taken a little while to grow on me, but now I’m loving it, and singing it till my family begs me not to, albeit with slightly altered lyrics (”Your life is a lie / I like to eat pie / Aeroplanes fly / You’re making me cry”). It must be hard when your first big single is such a definitive rock statement. Where do you go from that? Well, I think they’ve found some interesting places.

Thought 2. Apparently it’s a thing that lots of men don’t like playing games with female avatars, to the point that the female Commander Shepard in Mass Effect and its sequels has acquired a separate label: FemShep. Supposedly only a small proportion of men play as her. This baffles me, and not for feminist reasons. Quite the opposite: lecherous reasons! If I’m going to spend thirty hours in a third-person game staring at a character’s bottom, I’d rather it was a female bottom! And ideally my wife’s! In pretty much every game where I could choose a customized character (Mass Effect, Oblivion, Skyrim, Saints Row the Third, etc), I’ve created one that looks an awful lot like Mrs Theaker. Okay, so sometimes I give her green skin, or blue hair, but that makes her easier to spot in the thick of battle. So I find it really weird that dudes are so adamant about playing as blokes. Perhaps they need to identify more closely with the player character than I do. Maybe they play online more than I do, and prefer an online avatar that will closely resemble them. Or maybe it’s a variety of homosexual panic: playing as a female character means you tend to attract romantic interest from male characters. Well, whatever. Doesn’t matter what those guys think of Commander Ranjna Shepard, they still owe their lives to her bravery!

Thought 3. An old thought, this. A review begun a long time ago but out of date before it was published. My thoughts from last year on watching the first few episodes of Person of Interest:
     Long-time readers will probably have guessed that I disagreed with Howard Watts’ scathing assessment of J.J. Abrams’ television productions in his review of Alcatraz, in particular when it came to Lost, which I’d rank among the very best programmes I’ve seen. Many people have an inflated idea of how many mysteries in Lost were left unanswered, possibly because they were answered as the programme went along with little fanfare, and so the masses who turned up for just the last episode thought they hadn’t been answered at all. In fact, there’s an irritatingly stubborn and just plain irritating idea abroad that the last episode revealed the whole programme to have been set in purgatory, which of course it didn’t. (The “purgatory” bits were a sequel to the events of the island, not an explanation for them. Their main purpose, I felt, was to show us the characters in different situations, letting us distinguish which of their characteristics were the result of circumstances, which were innate.) Alias and Fringe were brilliant at times, and even Felicity had its moments!
     I didn’t get around to watching Alcatraz (it was still piling up on the TiVo when it was cancelled), so I’ll defer to Howard’s opinion on that one, but I have been watching Person of Interest, Season 1, executive produced by Abrams, but created and written by Jonathan Nolan, co-writer of the Batman film trilogy.
     John Reese (Jim Cavaziel) is a war veteran living on the streets recruited by mysterious, wealthy Finch (Michael Emerson) to intercede in situations where someone is going to die, the twist being that he doesn’t know if the name he’s got is the victim or the murderer. It’s been excellent so far, the premise a successful cross between The Equalizer and Quantum Leap, with potential for one-off stories and longer arcs. Maybe it’s just my knowledge of the programme’s writer talking, but it’s not at all far off a Batman television series, albeit with the money transferred from Batman to Alfred, as Reese monitors each situation from the shadows before unleashing his violence skills at the crucial moment. He has some marvellous dialogue, my favourite from episode one being the warning he gives a crooked police officer: “I don’t particularly like killing people, but I’m very good at it.” One to check out, even if subsequent episodes tended more to the procedural than the exceptional.

Thought 4. Because the person who writes an FAQ has to write down the question as well as their answer, FAQs can sometimes provide an interesting opportunity to consider the difference between the questions that are being asked, and the questions someone thinks they are being asked.

Thought 5. Another old thought. Two hundred words on the subject of Once Upon a Time, that I decided weren’t suitable for publication as a review, given that I’d only half-watched the half of it that I watched:
     Once Upon a Time, Season 1 (Five) hasn’t been essential viewing for me, but the three female quarters of our family love it, and each casting announcement for season two (Mulan, the Little Mermaid, Captain Hook, and so on) has been a big deal for them. Superficially very similar in concept to the comic Fables, with fairytale characters living in our world (in this case in the town of Storybrook), it has played out very differently, with much of the focus being on events back in fairyland, which has the odd consequence that the programme’s lead character (Emma Swan, daughter of Snow White, sent to grow up in our world Superman-style) only appears in its best bits as a baby. Structurally it’s very similar to Lost, with the flashbacks focusing on a character at the heart of that episode’s current-day story, with revelations about that character’s history toying with your expectations of how that story will resolve. My favourite episode so far featured Grumpy the dwarf, born from a giant egg, and his doomed romance with a fairy (played by Amy Acker). The present day stories were at first a bit ordinary and repetitive when contrasted with the invention and magic of the fairytale stories, but as memories of that other world return it’s all becoming more interesting overall. Worth a look.

Thought 6. I’ve bought a wired Xbox 360 controller and the Xpadder software to let me use the controller on my PC. Not to play games, though maybe I will eventually, but more for when I want to lean back (or stand up) and read something on the PC screen without being tied to the keyboard and mouse. It’s taken a bit of customization, but it’s working quite nicely now. As with many of my previous brilliant office innovations (battle board, laboratory coat, daily scores out of ten), the family have mocked me for it.

Thought 7. Noticing that today was the first day of September, I realised that meant last month was August. Then thought, hang on, isn’t my mum’s birthday in August? No!!! I’m the worst son of all time. But every item on her Amazon wishlist is now on the way to her. And now I need to pluck up the courage to phone her.

Theaker’s Fab Five #4: soundtracks

Been over a year since I did one of these, and that’s because I’ve gone through one of those periods where I don’t use my stereo much, other than to output meekly the sound from other devices. First I went through a phase of recording lots of radio on the TiVo, and running it through a long audio lead into my office. Then I realised how many good BBC and NPR podcasts there are now, and had a brilliant time listening to those. I signed up to an Audible monthly plan again and listened to lots of audiobooks. And I’ve pretty much stopped buying CDs, because I don’t have anywhere left to put them. Amazon MP3s are very convenient, downloading automatically or available in the cloud wherever I need them, and they’re often very cheap, so I’ve taken to them in a way I never did with iTunes.

But this week I was in the mood to stick in CDs and leave them to play, and so we have a new Fab Five filling the five slots of my five-CD stereo. Let’s hope it never dies.

1. The Definitive Horror Collection, CD3: 1983–1977

The newest CD here, one I bought out of sadness that there was never a science fiction follow-up to the three volumes of Silva Screen’s Space and Beyond (see below); this was the closest thing I could find. The four CDs work their way back into the history of horror, this one starting in 1983 with Mark Ayres’ version of the Nightmare on Elm Street theme and ending in 1984 with Ghostbusters. Haven’t had much of a chance to get into it yet, but I was a little disappointed that some of the tracks seem to be repeats from the Space and Beyond series (Ghostbusters, Aliens), and a noisy instrumental version of “Bad to the Bone” from Christine drags on a bit too long. On the other hand: The Thing! Halloween! The Fog!

2. Alien Invasion: Space and Beyond II, CD1

One of my favourite CDs of all time, with suites from The Day the Earth Stood Still, Dune, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (how could music as vibrant as Jerry Goldsmith’s “Klingon Attack” emerge from such a ponderous film?), When Worlds Collide, The Thing from Another World and the original Battlestar Galactica. I’ve been enjoying it so much I bought The Definitive Horror Collection, above, and sought out a CD copy of the original Space and Beyond (featuring Lifeforce, Capricorn One, The Black Hole, Enemy Mine and lots of Star Trek), to replace one of the very few cassette albums we hadn’t yet thrown away.

3. Final Fantasy S Generation, Official Best Collection

Strange listening to this again. I know these tracks, composed by Nobuo Uematsu and selected from the first three Final Fantasy games on the Sony PlayStation (hence S Generation, as opposed to the companion album’s N (for Nintendo) Generation), used to mean something to me, but now they just remind me that I used to feel something when I heard them, rather than making me feel anything again. Instead, listening to this makes me reflect sadly on how little I enjoy most Japanese games these days, with their frustratingly jobsworthian approach to game saves, cut scenes and grinding. (“These days” in this context meaning: since we had children.) I haven’t finished a game in this series since Final Fantasy VIII. Having said that, “Liberi Fatali” and “One-Winged Angel” still give me a bit of a shiver, just on their own merits.

4. Space 3: Beyond the Final Frontier, CD1

Aliens, It Came from Outer Space, Robocop – I love the music on here. The recordings are so clear, use stereo so well, and sound so brilliant played quiet or loud. There are a few reviews of these albums on Amazon that go on about them not being the original versions. Pshaw! That’s what I like about them. The original versions are usually out there if you want them, in crackly mono in stop-start sequences that make little sense in isolation and feature a handful of refrains repeated ad nauseum. This is something different, with the highlights of the soundtracks made into short, elegant suites, played by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, and mastered to perfection. A Space and Beyond IV pulling together some of the best science fiction and fantasy themes of the last decade would be brilliant.

5. Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Vol. 2: New Beginnings, 1970–1980

I barely remember listening to this before, which makes me think it must have been a Christmas or birthday gift, quickly overlooked in the rush of new toys! It includes “music, effects, atmospheres and ambiences” from four Doctor Who stories from the Pertwee years, “Inferno”, “The Mind of Evil”, “The Claws of Axos” and “The Sea Devils”, compiled, produced and remastered by Mark Ayres, who was also involved with the three Silva Screen albums mentioned above. The Pertwee era isn’t my favourite period of the show (although oddly I loved the Target adaptations, perhaps because the overlong stories made for fast-paced books), but this works well as an album, spoilt only by featuring five too many variations on the theme music.

Theakerly thoughts #2: Netflix, broads with swords

Thought 1. I am loving the new My List option on Netflix UK. I can see why Netflix were against its introduction at first, on the grounds that if you are adding films to it to watch later, that means you don’t actually want to watch them now, and quite possibly never will, especially after you get tired of seeing them in your list every day. Books that have just arrived are always more exciting than those already on your shelf. So I won’t add any films to it, but it’s brilliant for television shows, creating what we’ve always dreamed of: your own custom channel.

Thought 2. In yesterday’s Theakerly thoughts I mentioned a con that had decided against having an official policy on sexual harassment, and it turns out they’ve been just as unimpressed by the idea of panel parity, and responded rather bluntly to a writer who asked if it might be applied to the panel onto which he had been invited. And today we hear they’ve invited a feminist writer to appear on a panel called “Broads with Swords”. Gah!

Some parts of the UK scene do seem to have a mediumly old-fashioned view on these things, i.e. they’ll agree of course that sexism is a bad thing, but disagree with the idea that any action is required. The problem for those parts of the UK scene is that the internet is bringing them into regular contact with more progressive elements, whose use of social media tends to be rather more adept.

After John and I attended a convention panel last year on sexism, he noted wryly that the eminent writer who pooh-poohed the idea that anything should be done had kept a microphone to himself for the entire panel, leaving three women – including the panel moderator – and one right-on fellow to share two between them, meaning he could break in at any time (and did), while the women on the panel had to negotiate before speaking.

Thought 3. Don’t think from the above that I’d consider myself a good feminist. My wife would assure you that I have a long, long way to go. But dudes, we should at least try. Or at least try to look like we’re trying.

Theakerly thoughts #1: games for kids, cons, French Kindle

I don’t know whether this will be a new regular feature on the blog or a one-off embarrassment, but a tip of the hat to Peter Tennant’s “Thoughts for a …” posts at Trumpetville for the format I’m copying. The appeal is that it gives me somewhere to write down these thoughts, things I can’t put to any practical use elsewhere, but I’d like them out of my system so I can think about other things! Let’s clear my cache.

Thought 1. It’s funny how many games whose content makes them totally unsuitable for children feature mechanics that make them utterly perfect for children. Saints Row the Third features obscenity and violence by the bucketload, but it also lets you create a totally customised player character of either gender, dress them in a variety of wacky clothes, choose from dozens of fun hairstyles, and then pick four cool friends to run around with. And there’s a kitten car! Tekken 6 is all about smashing each other in the face, but give it to a toddler and they’ll soon discover that every single button on the controller makes something unique and interesting happen on the television screen. Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare does feature zombies, swearing and lots of unpleasantness, but you can also have a really nice long ride on a selection of horses. In Borderlands 2 you regularly meet mutants who are keen to cut you up and eat your entrails, but the jump-in, jump-out co-operative split-screen mode works perfectly, death brings instant resurrection and missions don’t reset when you die. There was justified controversy when the mechromancer character was described as having a “girlfriend mode”, but the idea of a character specifically aimed at less confident gamers is long overdue and very well implemented (you customize your robot and it does most of the fighting for you). And yet when you play games specifically aimed at children they are nearly always (the very best Lego games being the exception), unpleasant, unresponsive, counterintuitive, maddening and just plain awkward to play. No wonder kids want to play our games! The creators of children’s games need to look harder at adult games and see why they work for children. And the creators of adult games should consider creating cut-down cleaned-up kids versions. In the meantime, I’ll keep letting our children have a supervised go, with the sound turned down, on selected portions of the above games.

Thought 2. John Scalzi’s pledge regarding sexual harassment at conventions was a typically clever and principled move. Over a thousand people then co-signed his pledge, but how many of them meant it (which Scalzi clearly did), and how many signed because they want to be seen as one of the good guys? It’ll be interesting over the next year or so to see how many people will stick to the pledge if conventions refuse to post (and be prepared to enforce) sexual harassment policies. Hopefully that won’t be an issue, because most conventions will see the sense in the request, but at least one convention has declined to post a policy on its website, and though it may well be probably completely unrelated, one prominent publisher, a co-signer of the pledge listed as an attending member on the con’s website, has recently said they won’t be there after all.

Thought 3. Matt Hughes, one of my very favourite writers at the moment, has temporarily reduced the price of 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn to next to nothing. I reviewed it here, but at that price you should really just buy it!

Thought 4. Because I like games, I’ve always liked gamifying my work. Earlier this month I used a dusty copy of Lord of the Rings: Risk to set up a battlefield in my office. The idea is to focus on whether jobs are on my desk, or off my desk. A figure is assigned to each job, and stuck with blu-tack to a card with that job’s name. Figures representing the jobs on my desk are placed threateningly in Eriador (near The Shire), figures for the hobby jobs (BFS, TQF, TTA reviews) on my desk get as far as Arnor (Bree, Rivendell), while the figures representing jobs I’ve got off my desk lurk in Rhûn (the lands beyond Mirkwood). Needless to say this has provoked much ridicule from my family, but I’ve found it jolly useful.

Thought 5. I wonder if there would have been such a fuss about “former child” Miley Cyrus’s performance at the VMAs if she hadn’t looked like she was having such a laugh! The outfit and the routine were kind of tacky, but it was meant to be. I remember taking one daughter to see Miley’s Hannah Montana concert film in 3D, and being appalled by a scene where Miley states flatly after an accident that she won’t do a dangerous lift again, only for her mother to say, yes, you will. I don’t think she would put up with that now.

Thought 6. I read a blog post a month or two ago by a writer who had been writing and working for free for various big companies – contributing to blogs, reviewing, slush reading, I guess – and in the post he talked about how upset he was that none of them had given him paying work. I felt sorry for him, but it seems to me that if someone’s already working for free, giving them a job would mean you don’t get that free work any more. You might as well hire someone whose skills you can only get by paying for them. I don’t mind writing for free – it’s my hobby, and it’s good to have an outlet. But I won’t write for free for a company that is making money out of it.

Thought 7. Not sure when they appeared, but I’ve only just noticed all the new French books in the UK Kindle store, and I’m a bit giddy about it. It looks like all the big French publishers are on there now (Folio, Gallimard, etc), and what’s more my Kindle has at some point acquired a French language dictionary (much better than a French-English dictionary, since it encourages you to think in that language rather than waste time mentally translating). I’m currently reading La Vallée Infernale in Tout Bob Morane 1 on a Kindle Paperwhite and it’s been brilliant to tap on difficult words and get instant definitions. Shame to hear modern language learning is in decline in the UK, because there’s never been an easier time to do it. When I was first learning French at school, the first book I remember being given to read was a Sartre play! Much as I loved it, I’ll never understand why they didn’t start us on the equivalent of a Ladybird book and let us work our way up.

Thought 8. Ben Affleck as Batman! No one saw that coming! Except all those articles a while back that said he was in talks to star in and direct a JLA movie. He’ll be brilliant. Batman being in Man of Steel 2 suggests the thing I was most troubled by in Man of Steel (you know, the bit towards the end) wasn’t a poor film-making decision, but rather the set-up for a fascinating second film, an event with consequences, like the destruction of [spoiler] and [spoiler] in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek. If anyone could send Superman to the naughty step, it’s Batman.

Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #44: now out!

Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #44 is now out! It features five stories, arranged roughly in the chronological order of their settings: “A Lesson from the Undergrowth” by Charles Wilkinson, “Snow Crime” by Allen Ashley, “The Return of the Terrible Darkness” by Howard Phillips, “Black Sun” by Douglas Thompson, and “Milo on Fire” by Ross Gresham.

You’re going to love them. (Except the Howard Phillips one.)

The review section isn’t quite as long as last issue’s, but it still features five books (Dodger, A Game of Groans, Martian Sands, Señor 105 and the Elements of Danger and Star Wars: Scoundrels), three films (The Host, Star Trek Into Darkness and World War Z), and two television programmes (Astronauts and Doctor Who: Shada).

The editorial explains why I’m not retiring the magazine just yet, and the cover is once again by Howard Watts.

Links

Paperback edition: Amazon UK / Amazon US
Epub version (free)
Mobi version (free)
PDF version (free)
Kindle Store: Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

Contributors

Allen Ashley is currently editing Astrologica: Stories of the Zodiac for The Alchemy Press, and has stories due in the next BFS Journal and the Eibonvale Press anthology Rustblind and Silverbright. (Four contributors to this issue appear in that book: Allen Ashley, Charles Wilkinson, Douglas Thompson and John Greenwood.)

Charles Wilkinson’s short stories have appeared in Best Short Stories 1990, Best English Short Stories 2, Midwinter Mysteries and London Magazine. A collection, The Pain Tree and Other Stories, was published by London Magazine Editions.

Douglas J. Ogurek’s work has appeared in such publications as the BFS Journal, Dark Things V, Daughters of Icarus, The Literary Review, Morpheus Tales and WTF?! He lives in Gurnee, Illinois with the woman whose husband he is and their five pets. His website: www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com.

Douglas Thompson is a Theaker’s Quarterly veteran, several of his stories having appeared in these pages. He is the author of seven books: Ultrameta (Eibonvale, 2009), Sylvow (Eibonvale, 2010), Apoidea (The Exaggerated Press, 2011), Mechagnosis (Dog Horn, 2012), Entanglement (Elsewhen, 2012), with Freasdal and Volwys & Other Stories due in late 2013 from Acair and Dog Horn Publishing respectively. See: http://douglasthompson.wordpress.com for more information about his activities – plus poetry!

Howard Phillips is one of this magazine’s most prolific contributors, though he has been absent from its pages for far too long, or, those of you who have read his work might say, not long enough. Poet, musician, philosopher: he does it all, though none of it well. In this issue’s instalment of his memoirs he must face his own sexism.

Howard Watts is a writer, artist and composer living in Seaford who provides the cover to this issue. (I spent much of June and July reading his unpublished but fascinating novel, The Master of Clouds. I hope a publisher picks it up soon, because it irks me no end to have read a book that cannot be included on my Goodreads list.)

Jacob Edwards supplies us with several in-depth reviews this issue: Dodger, Star Wars: Scoundrels, Star Trek Into Darkness and Astronauts and Doctor Who: Shada. However, he remains indentured to Australia’s speculative fiction flagship Andromeda Spaceways, editing #45 and #55 of their Inflight Magazine. The website of this writer, poet and recovering lexiphanicist: www.jacobedwards.id.au.

John Greenwood performs his usual co-editorial duties on this issue, and his own fiction has appeared recently in Rustblind and Silverblight, Bourbon Penn and The Ironic Fantastic (forthcoming), receiving such good notices that Stephen now regrets disabusing people of the notion that John is merely a pseudonym adopted for his more scathing reviews.

Ross Gresham teaches at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Other instalments of the Milo/Marmite saga have appeared in TQF34 (“Name the Planet”), TQF41 (“Milo Don’t Count Coup”) and M-Brane SF (“Spending the Government’s 28”).

Stephen Theaker is the eponymous co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, and supplies fewer reviews than usual to this issue, unless he writes more in the gap between putting this section together and sending this issue to press. His reviews have also appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Prism and the BFS Journal. He has two lovely children and an indulgent, supportive wife.

Arctic Rising by Tobias S. Buckell, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Arctic Rising by Tobias S. Buckell (Del Rey, pb, 340pp) is set the day after tomorrow, in a world much changed by the melting of the ice caps. Our protagonist is Anika Duncan, who enters the book with a season three feel; this might be her first book, but it isn’t her first adventure. She’s in the middle of an exciting life, and would have had plenty to tell us about even if the book’s main plot didn’t kick in, from a past as a mercenary to her budding relationship with an almost-legal drug dealer. But none of that is why she’s in trouble: it’s because of her conscientious approach to her work.

Floating in an airship over the Arctic for the United Nations Polar Guard, keeping an eye out for the illegal dumping of radioactive waste, she barely has time to back up the readings of her neutron scatter camera on a chip before the crew of a dodgy-looking vessel pull out their rocket launchers and blast her ship out of the sky – before turning their boat around to run her over for good measure! Her co-pilot doesn’t make it out of the hospital, and from that point Anika is on the run, pursued – as lovers of action thrillers would expect – by the bad guys and her own employers too.

Tobias Buckell is a writer I know from his (very sensible and well-reasoned) blog rather than his books, which often seems to be the case these days. The book’s cover quotes John Scalzi as saying that “Tobias Buckell is stretching the horizons of science fiction”. He’s probably talking about other work; here, if anything, he’s stretching the horizons of the action thriller. It’s exciting, fun and smooth, competent and confident, and a bit of a trojan horse, taking environmental issues to an audience who might not otherwise be receptive to them. The big speech on the environment is cleverly left to a villain, meaning those types who blow a gasket over “left-wing” politics (is the environment still considered a left-wing issue anywhere but the US?) in their action can take it or leave it.

What the book does extremely well is consider how rising sea levels could produce a very different world, geopolitically, with newly fertile Canada in the ascendant. Its most interesting point is that once a new status quo is in place, even one that seems disastrous from our present point of view, there will be people happy with it, making money from it, who will actively fight to prevent things being put right. And in the character of Roo we get a keen sense, without being clubbed over the head with it, of what it is to live in a world where the circumstances of your life are decided by more powerful countries: his island home drowned in the rising ocean levels, and now he is a freelance spy working for nations that can’t afford their own intelligence networks.

Del Rey books seem to give me that old-time library feel. Their books have illustrative artwork on their covers, have good hooks, and are not so voluminous that a three-week loan would not be long enough to read them. They might not always be the kind of books I’d buy myself, but they’re the kind that I’d pick up and read on holiday if I saw a copy unattended. In some ways this feels like a book ideal for reluctant readers. The type is nice and big, the chapters short and punchy, action following action with rest and recovery times kept to a minimum. Don’t read the back cover text past the first paragraph: it gives away all of the book’s major twists, even those that only come in its final chapters!—Reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Saga, Vol. 2, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Saga, Vol. 2 (Image Comics, tpb, 152pp) continues a comic that has been outstanding from the very first issue. Writer Brian K. Vaughn and artist Fiona Staples are producing a science fantasy space opera that, for this reader at least, felt like Star Wars for adults – and this volume is very adult indeed, including towards the end the fellatio and ejaculations that caused such consternation at the Comixology offices! They are displayed on the television screen face of Prince Robot IV, one of many pursuing Marko (from the moon of Wreath) and Alana (from the planet Landfall), starcrossed lovers with a brand new baby (who narrates the series), across the galaxy. Bounty hunters are on the way too, once they’ve wrapped up their own storylines, but first to catch up with the couple in this book are the paternal grandparents, horns and all. They’re under the impression that their son has been kidnapped – because why else would he go on the run with one of the “evil fucks with the wings”? – and so they sold the house to buy themselves teleportation devices.

I thought this was fantastic. It’s a bit saltier in places (double meaning intended) than I really enjoyed (just out of a general embarrassment over the sweaty stuff), and a storyline about child prostitution was so horrible that it threatened to overwhelm the rest of the comic. But the art is spectacular, the story always fascinating, the relationships significant and often touching, even when they involve bad people like bounty hunter The Will and his Lying Cat. In this volume we see how the romance causing all the trouble began, which features a surprising twist on the meet-cute. We see how peppy Alana was before she became part of the galaxy’s most wanted couple, and see how their relationship grew out of sharing books. That’s a good place to start: Mrs Theaker and I got together after sharing a copy of Discourse on the Method, both being broke in our first days at university. And yesterday I was sharing Saga with her, downloading the first few issues to her Kindle Fire, because I reckon she’ll love the series as much as I do.—Reviewed by Stephen Theaker