Night of the Living Trekkies, Kevin Anderson and Sam Stall

Zombies wouldn't really be that big a threat in the Star Trek universe – they're basically disorganised, disconnected, weaponless Borg who wouldn't even be able to pilot a starship! Dr Crusher or the emergency medical hologram would take minutes to whip up a retrovirus to sort them out. Perhaps that's why the living dead in this book aren't zombies in the ordinary sense. What they are exactly is revealed in the course of the book; what they do is infest a Star Trek convention, as well as the surrounding city, leaving security chief and former soldier Jim Pike (get it?) with very few options in his efforts to save his little sister.

This is straightforward silly entertainment, with few ambitions beyond raising a chuckle, giving the odd thrill, and diverting the reader for a few hours. It's not a laugh riot – the tone is primarily serious – but there are lots of in-jokes. Like the hero's name they aren't particularly clever ones: a hotel named Botany Bay doesn't make much sense when it isn't in Botany Bay. The chapters take their names from Star Trek episode titles. Most of the best lines are lifts from Star Trek or Star Wars dropped into appropriate situations, but others caught my eye too. "He'd only just met this guy, but he'd already disliked him for years," says Pike of sleazebag Matt.

It's not all that frightening – apart from one brilliant scene where zombies in nearby buildings notice the survivors through the hotel windows - but the action moves quickly and efficiently. Klingon merchant Martock is at the convention to sell replica weaponry, and the survivors put the bat'leth and lirpa to good use. Pike is a resourceful and compassionate hero, with only one blind spot: for some reason, though he discovers early on that taser shocks have an explosive effect on the infections, he doesn't think of applying this method to fresh bites to prevent people turning.

There is a very good sense of place, with the hotel's layout being used cleverly. For example, using the stairwells to get around is a good plan, since the zombies struggle with doors – but what if the fire door on one floor was left open and zombies spilled out from that floor? Another sequence where the survivors move through a series of interconnected rooms is strategically intriguing, each room presenting a new challenge, the heroes learning from their early mistakes.

This isn't an official tie-in, and "any personnel claiming otherwise will be sentenced to one year of hard labour in the penal colony of Rura Penthe", but I doubt that will prevent it from finding appreciative readers among Trek fans. Once you've seen the cover and chuckled at the concept, actually reading the book doesn't add a great deal, but for what it is, it is done well, and if you like the idea enough to consider buying the book you're unlikely to be disappointed.

Night of the Living Trekkies, Kevin Anderson and Sam Stall, Quirk Books, pb, 254pp. Reviewed from a paperback ARC.

What Will Come After, Scott Edelman

What Will Come After is a collection of very literary zombie stories – and one excellent play – from Scott Edelman. The stories aren't interconnected, but they are more or less consistent in their approach to zombification. It isn't a plague passed on by bites – in most of the stories everyone who has recently died returns to life; undeath, rather than death, becomes the complementary state to life. (Understanding this helps to make sense of the first story, in which otherwise it's not clear how the narrator knows he is about to change.) Each zombie is extremely strong, able to rip humans and animals apart, and in most of the stories they display a shark-life sense for discovering their prey. In most the world goes on living, more or less, people coping (or not) with this new disaster just as they coped (or didn't) with all the others.

The collection begins with "What Will Come After", a stunning, poetic tale told in the future tense, where a writer describes what will happen after he turns. In "Live People Don't Understand" a young wife wakes to find herself beneath the ground, and decides upon revenge. "The Man He Had Been Before" concerns domestic violence. People find it hard enough to leave abusive partners in our world; how much harder to do it after the apocalypse? "Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man" finds a writer holed up in a library, in which he writes story after story, trying to find some kind of sense to it all. In a way it's the most traditional zombie story in the collection, with a protagonist ensconced in an impromptu fortress, having to make decisions about when and how to venture outside, but it's also the most expansive and playful of the stories.

"Live People Don't Understand" is built upon the plot and characters of "Our Town", a play by Thornton Wilder, and two of the very best pieces here also play with earlier texts. "Tell Me Like You Done Before" is a superb sequel to Of Mice and Men, which sees poor George pursued by undead mice and men across the dustbowls. Recommended to anyone who thought Steinbeck's ending too cheery. "A Plague on Both Your Houses" is a play in five short acts, a Romeo and Juliet of the living and the undead which I would love to see performed. (My own impromptu performance went down badly with the family.) Recommended to anyone who thought Shakespeare's ending too sad.

The remaining stories suffer only in comparison to the high standards of this collection; in most other books they would have been outstanding. In "Goobers" a projectionist working in a cinema showing nothing but zombie films finds an unusually appreciative audience, but the abrupt ending didn't satisfy. "The Human Race" concerns a woman who lost her family in the London 7/7 bombings, and learns to live again when surrounded by the dead. "The Last Supper" is eaten by the zombie who hunts down the last living human, in a story that reflects, I think, our own overwhelming greed with regard to the resources of our planet.

Stories like "Tell Me Like You Done Before" and John Kessel's "Pride and Prometheus" demonstrate that what's come to be known dismissively as the mash-up isn't the sole domain of quick cash-in artists; in the right hands it can produce works of art that have value beyond a catchy title and a chucklesome cover. This book shows, if it needed to be shown, that while we can in complete fairness be dismissive of particular books, and even dismayed by particular trends in publishing, it's always, always a mistake to dismiss an entire category of fiction. What Will Come After stands as an outstanding example of the literary potential of genre fiction.

What Will Come After, Scott Edelman, PS Publishing, hb, 194pp. Reviewed from a pdf ARC. Available in the PS Publishing store.

Isabelle, Andre Gide – and reading in French on the Kindle

Reading and reviewing The Translation of Father Torturo, with its themes of Catholicism and amorality, left me fancying a little Gide, and so here I am. A review of an established classic such as this seems rather redundant, and indeed part of my reason for reading it was to read something I wouldn't have to review, giving me a chance to catch up on all those reviews that are currently unfinished. But reading this book was a revelation to me, for reasons noted at the end of this post, and I was determined to share my discovery. Before that, I will say a few words about it; to do otherwise about such a marvellous book would almost be criminal.

This was a excellent short novel, though Gide himself I think would have described it as a recit (please excuse the lack of accents throughout this post). It concerns Gerard Lacase, who upon visiting an abandoned house with friends tells them how he first came there as a young man. His professed purpose in visiting le chateau de la Quartfourche was for research, towards a degree, but other things were on his mind from the very beginning. "Je sais de reste ce qui l'attend sur le sentier de la vertu; mais l'autre route?... l'autre route..."

The less virtuous path is that of the novelist: "des qu'on se croit ne romancier on s'accorde aussitot toux les droits". From the house and its occupants he wishes to extract every possible morsel of material for his fiction. Upon discovering the image of an absent mother, Isabelle de Saint-Aureol, he becomes determined to meet her, and to win her confidence. He pursues her as if in love, and the reader may wonder as to the lack of effect that the revelations of her poor character has upon his ardour.

This is a woman, for example, who has abandoned her disabled son to the care of her parents; a son disabled, it is implied, because she strapped down her stomach to keep her unplanned pregnancy a secret. ("On attribue l'infirmite de Casimir aux soins que sa mere avait pris pour dissimuler sa grossesse ...") Gerard watches her steal jewellery from her family, and yet his attraction to her is undiminished.

The answer is that his interest in her isn't truly that of the lover, it's that of the novelist, romancier rather than romancer. "Cette nuit que vous l'attendiez, prete a fuir avec lui, que pensiez-vous?" he asks with a particular lack of sensitivity about the night her lover died. An alternative reading is perhaps possible – he does after all say to himself disappointedly, realising the impossibility of eliciting love from cruel, selfish Isabelle,"est-ce la comme elle savait aimer?"

But he then says of her, "Je ne sentais plus aucun desir de la questionner davantage; subitement incurieux de sa personne et de sa vie, je restais devant elle comme un enfant devant un jouet qu'il a brise pour en decouvrir la mystere ..." Her mystery revealed, her story told, his interest evaporates, he moves on.

She is unchanged, and perhaps unchangeable, but he is not. His experiences have after all led him to the path of virtue: a real affection for young Casimir, for whom he provides a home. The novel suggests there is yet hope for those of us who, seeing someone in distress, has first or second the thought: this would make a good story.

However, my original reason for blogging about this book lies not with its content, but with the way in which I read it. What I realised here was that I could buy a French dictionary for the Kindle, set it temporarily as the default dictionary, and so use it to instantly look up the words I didn't know while reading a French novel. For anyone studying a foreign language, that makes the Kindle an utterly essential purchase.

Of course, little of this will come as a surprise to our American friends, who have had Kindles for years, but it's only been out in the UK for a few months, so we're still catching up.

The dictionary I bought was the Merriam-Webster French-English Translation Dictionary. I would have preferred a French-only dictionary too, because it's better when reading in a foreign language to stay within that language as far as possible – to build a framework of words that stands alone, rather than one requiring the scaffold of your English – but I'm sure one will be available before long.

As well as helping English people to read French books, how phenomenally useful the Kindle and its built-in dictionary must be for people learning English as a foreign language!

If using the Kindle in this way, I recommend upping the font size quite a bit, making it easier to zip around the page to find definitions.

The selection of French books on Amazon is not terrific as yet, the vast majority being texts also available for free via Project Gutenberg, so that's a good place to start. Bookmark http://m.gutenberg.org/ on your Kindle for easy access to the mobile version. Here are direct links to Flaubert, Dumas, Stendhal and Jules Verne.

Isabelle, Andre Gide, Project Gutenberg, Kindle edition, 1215ll.

The Translation of Father Torturo, Brendan Connell

Father Xaviero Torturo is, like many of the protagonists in Connell's later collection Unpleasant Tales, a man obsessed with change, though the changes he desires extend beyond himself and into the world in which he lives. He is a priest who, tired of being "the begrimed receptacle" for the offences of others, applies the philosophy, dedication and ruthlessness of the family trade – assassination – to his work.

"As a child he had been brutal, a kicker of cats, a resolute swatter of flies..." His parents savagely murdered, this boy is taken in by Uncle Guido, their avenger, a kindly murderer who would see him enter the church. Torturo's education is thus entrusted to cigar-fancier Father Falzon, who encourages the young prodigy to read very widely, and gives him a piece of deathbed advice: "Don't give yourself away. Not until you have them check-mated."

As Torturo's career within the church first falters, and then progresses at pace, he follows that advice to the letter, even withholding his plans from the reader. Though we are able to guess his intended destination – "playing the faithful servant", he hopes to "usurp the master" – his purpose and methods remain obscure. This allows us to appreciate the fruition of his plans all the more.

I almost felt as if I should have read this book in French – it reminded me very much of reading Gide. I can easily imagine it in Gallimard's Collection Folio alongside books like Les caves du Vatican. Perhaps that stems from the shared subject matter – Catholicism and amorality – but I think also there's a similarity of tone and a similar intellectualism.

The book's dedication nods to another gay writer of that period, Baron Corvo, on whose Hadrian VII this is roughly patterned. This novel could perhaps be criticised for its portrayal of homosexuals – Bishop Vivan, an early ally of Father Torturo, is something of a giggly, effete stereotype – though a defence is that the main characters, good and bad, are Catholic priests, not generally an occupation in which you would expect to find healthy, happy gay men.

The Translation of Father Torturo dates back to 2005 but is now available for the first time on Kindle, published I think by the author; a few typos and formatting glitches did no real harm. Some Roman Catholics might be pleased by its assumption or at least implication that the sacred relics of the saints hold actual, magical power; others might choose to find the perverted, corrupt priests that populate the book offensive. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this provocative and grimly amusing book to everyone else.

The Translation of Father Torturo, Brendan Connell, Kindle, 3417ll.

Fifteen authors who influenced you

Denis, Denis!

It's probably obvious that many of the non-review items on this blog began life as Facebook or forum posts that got a bit out of control… Here's another in that line, a little something to distract me from a backlog of reviews in various stages of composition.

It's the usual kind of thing: fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. An acknowledgment here to Tej Turner, who tagged me with this on Facebook.

I'm not really a writer these days – or at least not a writer of fiction. It's been a few years since I last completed one of my terrible novels, and I've never really been one for writing short stories. But these are the fifteen writers I came up with, fifteen writers who have done a great deal to shape my thinking about writing, and, by extension, reading.

Jean Racine – for his plotting, his approach to the dramatic unities. In my memory his plays are structured like arrowheads, shiny, sharp and ruthless. I've never written anything like that, but I always begin with that intention.

Jack Vance – for the humour, the creativity, the language, the cruelty, the shared universe of his science fiction. There's very little I don't love about Jack Vance's writing.

Michael Moorcock – for writing novels in three days, and for writing even better ones when he took a bit longer. Stormbringer, The Final Programme, A Cure for Cancer, Count Brass, Byzantium Endures – every one of them was a revelation.

Lionel Fanthorpe – for showing how easy it is to write novels; he taught me to think about what could come next, rather than what should come next. (I have yet to learn how to write good novels.)

Diana Wynne Jones – for being so interesting, for never repeating herself, even in sequels.

Denis Diderot – for Jacques le Fataliste. Its narrative playfulness astonished me. In English, Tristram Shandy played similar tricks, but I didn't read that until much later.

Gustave Flaubert – for the care he took over his prose, and Bouvard et Pecuchet. He's not a writer I would ever have had the patience to emulate, but he's important to me nevertheless: Flaubert and Fanthorpe stand at either end of a scale which measures the care you take over your writing.

Stendhal – for the novels, of course, but also for his acceptance of the fact that not everyone would like his work: to the happy few. One particular comment about his work impressed me deeply; whether it was one of my tutors at university, or an essay , or an introduction to his work, I'm not sure: that his sentences will often end with a word or phrase that changes the entire sense of what you thought you had been reading.

Jean-Paul Sartre – for plays like Les Mains Sales and Huis Clos. Sartre had an immense effect on my life: an excellent GCSE essay score persuaded me to study French literature at sixth form and degree level. I should really have studied maths, IT or science: I would have been an awesome accountant. My spoken French, however, is so poor that as I left the oral for my degree I heard the examiners begin to laugh.

John Brunner – for his perfect little Ace books. I would love to write short novels exactly like them in every regard.

Grant Morrison – for constant invention, and never writing down to his readers. He's written comics that didn't work, or were a bit confusing, or where his late scripts have caused problems with the art, but I've never read a Grant Morrison comic that felt pointless, average or dull.

Rhys Hughes – for writing the kind of thing I would like to write, saving me the trouble! And for making me feel better about my over-enthusiastic use of exclamation marks!

Terrance Dicks – for the spare emptiness of his prose. I grew up a fan of the Doctor Who novels as much as the television series.

Roland Barthes – for the relationship between the author and the text, and the interpretation of the text – and indeed the interpretation of everything else, from advertising to clothes. I doubt a day goes by without me thinking a thought influenced by Barthes.

Robert Silverberg – for the brilliant short novels of the fifties and sixties. If I have a true ambition left, it's to write a serious and profound short novel in that style.

I realise now that I should probably have included Philip K. Dick (for his reality-bending), Harry Harrison (for his humour and action), Russell T Davies (for his approach to rewriting) and Philip Jose Farmer (for his big ideas), but too late now. I had fifteen minutes to make my list, and these are the names I came up with!

I'm sure in some cases I've got the wrong end of the stick about a writer – are Racine's plays really as well-structured as I remember them? would Terrance Dicks even be readable now I'm an adult? – but it is after all how I remember them, faultily or not, that influences me.

Is the apocalypse too depressing for TV?

Like almost everyone else, I loved episode one of The Walking Dead. So why haven't I got around to watching episode two yet? For that matter, why did I never get around to watching season two of Jeremiah, or those last half dozen episodes of Jericho? I didn't get more than five minutes into Survivors!

I've read lots of post-apocalypse books and comics, and watched lots of post-apocalypse films. Usually I love that stuff. Give me a radioactive wasteland and a band of hungry mutants and I'm happy as Larry. I don't mind being made miserable once in a while – it's bracing! – but I think I'm reluctant to sign up for something that'll make me unhappy week-in, week-out.

I don't think it's just me: I was trying to think of a post-apocalypse programme that lasted more than three seasons, and didn't have much luck:

The Survivors - 3 series
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century - 2 seasons
The Tripods - 2 series
Jeremiah - 2 seasons
Three Moons Over Milford - 1 season
Jericho - 1.5 seasons
Survivors (remake) - 2 series

Maybe the problem is that the apocalypse is a nice place for a holiday, but not somewhere you'd like to live. TV shows become a part of the fabric of your life, and perhaps the apocalypse isn't well-suited to that.

The only programme I've been able to think of that broke the curse was the remake of Battlestar Galactica, which began with a nuclear holocaust and lasted five seasons (if you include the mini-series). Perhaps because, although it was gruelling and miserable, it was so good you couldn't possibly miss it.

I'm pretty sure I'll keep watching The Walking Dead until they stop making it, but, like BSG, it'll probably be one of those programmes I save up and watch in bursts.

Have I missed any programmes that lasted longer? Is The Walking Dead doomed to a fatal second season drop-off in the ratings, or can quality win out, like it did with BSG?

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #34

It's been a long time coming, but finally it's here! Unfortunately there are no female contributors to this issue, as previously discussed, but at least that means we don't have to talk about our feelings. Except for manly feelings about war and death and stuff, that is, and a bit in the convention report where grown men blub. But at least there are no girls around to see our tough facades crack!

What we do have though is a series of terrific stories, an indulgent editorial, our first ever convention report, and a huge review section: twenty-two books, seven movies, three audio reviews, one comic and one game. The cover is once again by the wonderful Howard Watts.

If you fancy taking a look, you could download the free pdf of this issue from us here (it's the perfect size for reading on an iPad), ebook versions are available for free from Feedbooks (including Kindle and epub versions), and the original version, a 156pp paperback, is available from Lulu for £3.99 (they also have a slightly higher resolution pdf available for free download).

Editorial:

• Why Aren’t I Reading My Paper Books Any More? Stephen Theaker

Fiction:

• The Chapel on the Headland, Rafe McGregor
• The Needs of the Dead, Jon Vagg
• The Frog God’s Chosen, Steve Cotterill
• The Free Dynamos and the Lone Island in the Sky, Mike Phillips
• Of Kith and Kin, Howard Watts
• Barney Wilson, Kevin R. Bridges
• Glass Houses, David Tallerman
• Name the Planet, Ross Gresham

Convention report:

• Mr Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction Goes to FantasyCon, Stephen Theaker

Reviews:

• Doctor Who, The Daleks’ Master Plan, Part II: The Mutation of Time
• Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons
• Doctor Who 133: City of Spires
• Blind Swimmer: an Eibonvale Press Anthology
• Blood Oath
• The Collected Connoisseur
• Crack’d Pot Trail
• The First Collected Tales of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach
• The Cult of Osiris
• Dinosaur Park
• Doctor Lerne, Subgod: the Scientific Marvel
• Fiction of Maurice Renard, Vol. 1
• The Empathy Effect
• Flirt
• Futile Flame
• Hell’s Belles!
• The House of Canted Steps
• Johannes Cabal the Detective
• The Library of Forgotten Books
• Ms Wildthyme and Friends Investigate
• The Occult Files of Albert Taylor
• Quartet & Triptych
• Rare Unsigned Copy
• The Terror and the Tortoiseshell
• Twisthorn Bellow
• Unpleasant Tales
• Magic Mirror: A Compendium of Comics 1983–1998
• Perfect Dark
• The Dinner Party
• Hunter Prey
• Ju-on: White Ghost / Ju-on: Black Ghost
• Iron Man 2
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
• Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
• The Storm Warriors

Here are the brilliant people who made this issue possible:

Kevin R. Bridges lives in the Pacific Northwest. (I would expand on Kevin’s bio to explain that the Pacific Northwest is part of the United States of America – but according to Feedbooks’ analytics the vast majority of our readers are actually American…)

Steve Cotterill lives and works in Birmingham.  He’s just starting out as a writer but his work has also appeared on the Horrorbound website and he is starting to plan his first novel.

Jacob Edwards is currently indentured to Australia’s speculative fiction flagship Andromeda Spaceways, as Jack of all Necessities (Deckchairs and Bendy Straws). To this issue he contributes a book review.

John Greenwood is the co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, as well as its most frequent contributor. His blog on rare and unusual books can be found at http://oxfambooksandmusicmoseley.blogspot.com.

Ross Gresham lives in Colorado. His contribution to this issue is “Name the Planet”. He previously contributed the excellent “Beyond the Fifth Sky” to Dark Horizons #54.

Rafe McGregor is is a crime fiction author who spends far too much of his time rereading the work of H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James. He lives with his wife in a village near York.

Douglas Ogurek’s Roman Catholic faith and love of animals strongly influence his work. He lives in Gurnee, Illinois with his wife and their pets. To this issue he contributes a pair of movie reviews. To TQF33 he contributed the astonishing “NON”.

Mike Phillips grew up on a small farm in West Michigan, where every summer he would tend sheep, mend fences, garden, build furniture, chop wood, and goof off. The time remaining he spent reading.

David Tallerman is the author of around a hundred short stories, numerous poems, reviews, comic scripts, and at least one novel.  Publication highlights so far include appearances in Chiaroscuro, Space and Time, Flash Fiction Online, and John Joseph Adams’s zombie best-of anthology The Living Dead. For more see http://davidtallerman.net and http://davidtallerman.blogspot.com.

Stephen Theaker is the eponymous editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. He wrote many but not all of this issue’s reviews, as well as the News & Notes and Contributors sections.

Jon Vagg mainly writes educational and coffee-table books. He is socially isolated, works late into the night and suffers from a highly deviant imagination. His stories have appeared, among other places, in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #30, Ignavia 3.2 and Ballista #7.

Howard Watts is an artist from Brighton. He has previously supplied covers for Pantechnicon, Dark Horizons and TQF.

So that's that! We're now hoping to do another two issues by the end of the year, catching us right up, and then next year we'll settle into a regular quarterly schedule.

Paid to blog?

Amanda Rutter of Floor to Ceiling Books has admitted being paid to blog about Steven Erikson's Malazan books for Tor.com.

The posts originally appeared on the Tor.com website, where you wouldn't necessarily have assumed that they were impartial, but more problematically some also appeared on her own blog, where she called the series "one of the premier fantasy series of recent times".

I've really enjoyed reading her blog, and the Erikson books I've read were fantastic, but this isn't good, and I hope that paying bloggers to read books isn't a widespread practice.

In this case I think Tor.com were clearly commissioning the pieces for their own website, and it was only enthusiasm that saw them carried over to the personal blog too.

Just for the sake of being open and transparent on my own part, nearly all the books, films and audios reviewed on this blog, at least from the last year or so, were provided to us for review.

There are no stories by women in the next TQF...

Peter Tennant, having read literally thousands of anthologies for the latest review column in Black Static, has produced a fascinating analysis of the gender balance in them: see Women in Horror Anthologies.

Peter asked Best New Horror editor Stephen Jones about this issue in an interview for the most recent Black Static, and coincidentally I asked Catastrophia editor Allen Ashley about it too, in an interview for the last issue of Dark Horizons, and both gave pretty much the same reply: I choose stories by quality, I don't have a quota system, etc.

This stuff is on my mind at the moment: there are no female contributors to the next issue of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction. And both books by women reviewed in this issue get a bit of a pasting.

I'm a bit unhappy about how that looks, but I do think our ratio of acceptances of stories by women is pretty much in proportion with our ratio of submissions by women.

When larger magazines make that point, the answer is usually that they should reach out to female writers and encourage them to submit, but that's not really an option for a non-paying zine like ours.

And even with bigger magazines that can be awkward: asking someone to submit puts you in a difficult position if the story they submit – the one they have written especially for you! – is not their best work.

On the website of Mslexia there's a thought-provoking article on women in writing, one which I think anyone working in the field should at least read: Three Cures for Mslexia.

One thing in particular caught my eye, in the context of discussing lower submission rates from women:

"The only exception we found was for writing competitions, where for some reason women seemed less inhibited: perhaps because competitions seem more of a lottery, and so less personally threatening; perhaps because it’s easier for them to find the time to complete a single poem or short story for a competition."

My experience with the BFS bears out the idea that women submit in greater proportions to short story competitions. 43% of the entries to the BFS short story competition this year were from women, while only 15% of submissions to Dark Horizons in the same period were.

(The competition and the magazine were both open to all fantastical genres. The same person was in charge of both, and both received roughly 150 submissions in that period.)

I don't want to go very far in speculating why the difference is so huge, but I think the perception that a competition is fairer must be a factor. The short story competition rules get disseminated further, through competition magazines and websites, so that might be another. Is losing en masse more appealing than being personally rejected? Does the prize make a difference? Are men just more willing to give their work away to non-paying markets?

Trying to answer some of those questions could very quickly lead the unwary onto dodgy ground. But it does seem to me that from examining the differences in submission rates, and the reasons for those differences, a way might be found to encourage more submissions from women, and hence publish more stories by women – which would be brilliant.

The Paperback Fanatic #16, and news of future issues

Issue 16 of the The Paperback Fanatic arrived a few weeks ago. It's one of my favourite magazines, and this is another excellent issue, full of (a) fascinating information and (b) saucy covers. The only things that would improve it are clearer issue numbers on the front and a contents page…

Articles this time include:

• Commander Amanda and Corporal Punishment
• Action, Romance and Mutants - the Doomsday Warrior and his pals.
• Strange Temptation: the Story of Stephen D. Frances
• ...From Acme Publishing! - The Magazine of Horror
• The Devil's Riders

There's also a huge letter from Crab-master Guy N. Smith.

Editor Justin Marriott has announced tentative plans for issues 17 and 18, both of which have articles pencilled in about overproductive heroes of mine and their adventures in publishing: Michael Moorcock and New Worlds in the former, Lionel Fanthorpe and Badger Books in the latter.

If anyone wants to relaunch Badger Books, give me a bell and I'll be your Bron Fane!

Subscriptions are ridiculously cheap, so it's always a good time to subscribe.

The Occult Files of Albert Taylor, Derek Muk

Professor Albert Taylor leads an informal team of paranormal investigators. "Granted," he says, "there's been a lot of hoaxes, but then there are the cases that just can't be explained by science and mediums. That are just too bizarre." And that's where Albert, a professor of anthropology and the paranormal in his early fifties, steps in. This book contains eleven of his investigations, taking in ghosts, aliens, vampires, psychics, cults and much, much more.

Taylor is a funny kind of hero, motivated less by the desire for truth than in hope of making a solid discovery that will "put him in the limelight regarding ghost research". During one moment of reverie, "He imagined himself being interviewed by countless talk shows ... I could be rich! he thought." He runs a magazine (The Occult Files) and thinks nothing of whisking his team off to Hawaii to look for vampires. He has little interest in his students, and seemingly no understanding of the scientific method.

This isn't a good book, though it's clear the author has made an effort with it. Reading it wasn't unbearable – it had at least been proofread – but it wasn't very exciting. The stories are generally dull and uninspired, with the worst, a stupefying plod through the mountains following a bigfoot, being dull, uninspired and twenty pages too long. The stories work their way through a checklist of bog standard creatures, the denouements uniformly anticlimactic.

Part of the problem is that there are very few surprises, since Taylor and everyone he encounters has the Sherlockian ability to guess exactly what's going on from the barest of clues. A guy thinks his girlfriend has been killed by Jack the Ripper? Mum thinks her daughter summoned a demon from another dimension with a ouija board? A UFO cult waits for their alien gods to visit? No spoilers, but Taylor very rarely discovers that anyone is wrong in their beliefs, however outlandish.

The other big problem is a complete lack of atmosphere. There's no real tension here, supernatural occurrences being too often followed by bathetic utterances such as "That was freaky!" or "Whew! I've never had so many goose bumps in my life"  or (hilariously) "I don't swallow ... everything that's shoved into my face." The dialogue is dominated by half-hearted banter and chitchat.

When members of the team die in what would surely appear to the police to be suspicious circumstances, there seems to be little consequence. The conclusions of "Dear Boss" and "The Sun Disc" would have had profound effects on American society, but again, no consequences. And despite Taylor's dreams of fame and fortune, he doesn't hesitate to utterly destroy any supernatural beings he encounters.

It's a book that's inordinately respectful of other people's beliefs, which was rather sweet, and I liked the way that each story ended with a Case Closed stamp, although the final twists often had the effect of making those stamps rather ironic. I thought of Taylor as a Will Ferrell character, declaring "Case Closed, Case Closed!" even as ghosts jeered at him from the shadows! Overall, not a book I'd really recommend, but it did have a kind of goofy charm, and I enjoyed it a bit more than I expected.

The Occult Files of Albert Taylor, Derek Muk, Impact Books, pb, 204pp.

Why aren't I reading my print books any more?

Yesterday I blogged about my realisation of how few of my print books I've been reading lately. The last time I read a print novel that I bought was in January of this year; the time before that was in 2008. I've got about 1100 unread books on my shelf – at the current rate I'd be lucky to read 50 of those before dying!

So naturally that got me to wondering why I've stopped reading them.

Getting lots of books for review

This is clearly a big factor. I'm getting lots of brand new books to review all the time. Nowhere near as many as Book Chick City, but enough to keep me ticking over. The novelty of a brand new book makes it more attractive, while the deadline for a review gives the reading a bit of urgency. Reading new books for review obviously leaves less time for digging into my collection.

But looking at my list of books read over the last couple of years, when I have had a break from reviewing, I haven't gone to my print books. I've bought books for the Kindle (Best Served Cold, Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, The Third Man, UR), and before that the Sony Reader (The Eyre Affair, Elder Scrolls: The Infernal City) or grabbed them for free from Feedbooks (The Pirates of Zan), Project Gutenberg (Stand by for Mars!) or the Baen Library (The Sea Hag).

So this can't be the only factor.

The chain effect

If I finish reading a book on the Kindle, chances are I just open up the next book I fancy on the Kindle and start reading that. My tolerance for hunting through my bookcases for particular books has withered away to nothing, for one thing! But also, when I finish a book I'm rarely sitting in my study surrounded by my print books. I'm usually lying in bed. Sometimes I'm on a bus or a train, or at the in-laws, or at a friend's house. If print books aren't handy during that crucial handover from one book to another, they're locked out until the next time I finish a book; my ebooks are always close to hand.

The way I buy books has changed

In the past, I would see a book I wanted and buy it right away, because it would probably be gone the next day. Even now, with Amazon, new books can go out of print very quickly. With ebooks it's a bit different. The publisher may eventually withdraw the book from sale, but they're not going to run out of copies, or dither over whether to reprint. I don't need to hoard books any more. So instead of buying everything I see, I download a Kindle preview, and once I've actually started reading the book – and if I like it – I buy it.

My bookshelves, on the other hand, are full of stuff that I thought I might want to read at some point. Graham Greene, Carl Hiaasen, James Ellroy, Marion Zimmer Bradley, C.J. Cherryh, Emile Zola, William Shatner. Great writers all, and I've read a novel or two by each of them. But I've anything up to a dozen more by each on my shelves, and I'm not desperate to read any of them right now.

Then there are the anthologies, the Best New Horrors, the Best New SFs, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, the Black Books of Horror, the Humdrumming Books of Horror, the Derleth, Haining and Greenberg anthologies – nothing wrong with any of them, but they've been sitting on my shelves for years waiting for me to feel like reading them, and as Shatner himself sang, it hasn't happened yet.

Now, I tend to only buy books on the day I'm going to read them. All those books on the shelves? I still might read them – someday – but probably not many of them.

Reading is nicer on the Kindle

Here's the nub of it. Paper books are not as much fun to read.

I'm not a booksniffer. Booksniffers are those people who, at the mention of ebooks, say things like "Ah, but you can't beat a real book", and accompany those words by opening out their hands as if they were the pages of a book, and for bonus points lift up the imaginary book to their noses for a sniff. They often close their eyes while doing this, which is an odd way to approach reading.

The strange thing is that, too often, they don't just express this idea as a personal preference, but hold it to be a universal truth, and are frequently shocked – and even angry – to hear people disagree. They honestly believe that people who buy ebooks do it under protest, or through aesthetic weakness, or in the dazzle of novel technology (pun intended), and so on. Some will even say that people using ebooks are deluding themselves.

But nope, for me, reading books on a Kindle is a much better experience than reading in print.

Of course, I accept that some people will always prefer print books. Maybe they really couldn't live without the smell of book mould. Many seem to expect an imminent apocalypse, given how worried they are about not being able to recharge a Kindle every three weeks. Most haven't even seen a Kindle, but know for certain that it's just like reading on a computer screen. They shouldn't worry: there will always be publishers and booksellers to cater to their fetish for paper.

But it is a fetish. From the Penguin Concise English Dictionary, a couple of relevant definitions. Fetish: "an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion" – check! And fetishism? "The displacement of erotic interest and satisfaction to a fetish." Exactly: the object of a reader's interest should in theory be the text of a novel, not the paper it is printed on. Displacing the interest from the novel to the paper is fetishism.

I'm still reading a few paper books every month for review, and my goodness they're annoying. Not in any big ways, but in lots of little ways that add up to an inferior experience overall.

Here are a few of the ways paper books annoy me:

• You have to transcribe any passages you want to quote – you can't just copy them across.
• You have to choose between using a bookmark to keep your place, or folding back the book's corners.
• The only way to search the text for a phrase is by re-reading the book.
• You can't read them in the rain.
• Lots of them are heavy.
• And bulky.
• Reading them in bed on your side is a nightmare.
• The text often disappears into the spine.
• Reading the book damages it.
• You can't change the size of the font when your eyes get tired, or when you get older and short sighted. If you need to read a print book in large print you have to hope someone publishes a large print edition.
• You need to buy – and build! – bookcases to store them on. They take up most of your house, if you let them. (And boy have I let them!)
• All those books are a huge fire risk.
• And once you've got them on those shelves, the only way to put them in order is to do it manually, one book at a time.
• And if you sort them by author, but then say want to see them sorted by publisher, date bought, date read, title or genre, it takes more than just a single click. They need to be re-sorted one by one, a process that could take days if you have as many printed books as I do. In practice, you will probably never sort your books in this way.
• When you buy a bunch of new books? You have to shuffle all the books on all the shelves along to make room. And probably buy a new bookcase. And build it. Or throw some books away.
• They are incredibly wasteful. Do you know how many books Oxfam pulps every year? How many are destroyed by bookshops who rip off the front covers to claim returns?
• No built-in dictionary. You need an extra book for that.
• No built-in encyclopedia either. Again, you need an extra book for that.
• No built-in highlighter. You can highlight with a pen, but it permanently defaces the book.
• If you do make notes in your print book, or highlights, you can't just export them to your computer. You have to type them all up.
• If you want to buy a new book, you have to either wait a few days for it to be delivered, or go and collect it from a shop.
• People look at you funny if you stand in a shop and read the first thirty pages of a book before buying it.
• If you leave the house with a new book and it turns out to be a lemon, you're stuck with it. You can't just switch to one of your other books.
• Paper books don't read themselves to you while you're cooking!
• If you go on holiday or travel for more than a day there's a limit on how many paper books you can take with you, and on how many you can bring back with you (I brought a suitcase full of books back from my honeymoon in Paris, and wished I could have carried twice as many.)
• If you buy a new paper book, only one person in the family can read it at once. You can snuggle up with the spouse and read together, but that only works as long as you're on the same page.
• When you've read a book, you can either keep it forever, in which case it'll take up space in your house until the day you die, or you can sell it or give it away to charity, in which case it will be gone.
• You can't carry all your books with you wherever you go. If a paper book makes an allusion to another book you've read, you can't check it till you get home. When reading Tony Blair's A Journey (perhaps unsurprisingly the only Kindle purchase so far that I didn't manage to finish!) there was a reference to the rewriting of clause 4. Did it agree with Mandelson's account in The Third Man? I wasn't sure, so, despite being in a pub, I switched to that book, searched for clause 4, and re-read Mandelson's version.

A militant booksniffer will have a counter-argument for all of these. They don't read in bed, so it doesn't matter if books are hard to read lying on your side. Their shelves are all in perfect order. Their eyes never get tired. Or they have a magnifying glass. They don't need bookmarks, because they remember what page they were on. Wanting to copy quotes instead of transcribing is lazy.

A lot of booksniffer arguments come down to laziness. Yes, they seem to say, paper books are a bit inconvenient, but if you weren't so lazy, you'd put up with it. The implicit argument is that print books are worth making the effort, that we're not working hard enough to keep them alive. But why should we? I care about novels being published, but I couldn't care less whether they're printed on paper or not. I spend hours every day reading, and so I want to make that time as pleasant as possible. For me, reading print books is like putting my TV on its side: I could still watch all the programs, if I made a bit of an effort and tipped my head, but why put myself to that trouble?

For some readers, each and every one of those counter-arguments will hold true, and the Kindle really would be no benefit at all to them. For example, Quentin S. Crisp has pulled a few examples out from the above list here with the intention of showing that none of them are particularly significant, but that's kind of the point. They're all very small things, but small things add up. The result, for me, has been that when I've come to choose what book to read next, the paper books have been at a disadvantage. The reading experience on the Kindle is a little bit better in every way, which in sum makes it quite a bit better overall.

It's like Hobnobs: I love the originals, but I very rarely buy them any more, because Chocolate Hobnobs are just that little bit tastier!

Conclusion

So I think those are the reasons I'm not reading my collection of print books any more. No big revelation, no great insight: they're just getting squeezed out by books for review, by books on the Kindle, by their own general awkwardness and inaccessibility. When I read a paper book now I find myself having to develop workarounds to do the things a Kindle would let me do without any trouble!

That's not to say I don't still love the paper books I own, or that if I lost my Kindle or Sony Reader I wouldn't go back to them, but they're second best now. Not by much – maybe just by a fraction – but by just enough that I never seem to pick them up any more, and I think the rate at which they are being shipped off to charity shops is only going to increase.

Is there any point in buying print books if I'm not going to read them?

I was thinking this morning about buying the new collection of short stories by Johnny Mains, With Deepest Sympathy, from Obverse Books. It looks interesting, and I liked the last book I read from that publisher.

But it's not out on Kindle, which made me think: am I ever going to read this? When was the last time I bought and read a book in print? I couldn't actually remember. So I went to look at my list of books read on Goodreads.

Leaving aside the Penguin 60s I used to read when collecting the children from school, I found that during 2009 and 2010 I read just one novel or short story collection that I bought in print format.

It was Mass Effect: Revelations, by Drew Karpyshyn, back in January of this year, when I was in the full throes of a Mass Effect obsession.

The one before that was all the way back in December 2008, when I read Derai, a fine book in E.C. Tubb's Dumarest series, and then October 2008, for Deb Olin Unferth's interesting novel from McSweeney's, Vacation.
 
I read books in print when they're submitted for review, of course, and I have bought the odd book in print this year, most recently The Seventh Black Book of Horror – I was keen to read the infamous "Bernard Bought the Farm"!

But buying print books – and filling up my house with them – starts to seem a bit pointless if I'm only going to read one or two of them a year – or none at all in 2009.

In fact, when I do fancy reading one of the paper books I own, especially the hardbacks, my first thought is to look it up in the Kindle store. I'd rather pay a few extra quid and read it on Kindle...

The Terror and the Tortoiseshell, John Travis

During the Terror, animals became human-sized and gained the power of speech – not to mention the intelligence to make that power useful. Having seen his gumshoe owner set upon by lions, Benji Spriteman (the tortoiseshell cat of the title) inherits his office, apartment and patter. There are few humans left, and Benji is dragged into the case of a serial killer preying on them, teaming up with scruffy Lieutenant Dingus, a tenacious basset hound who always has just one more question to ask...

Though the Terror doesn't seem to make a great deal of scientific sense, the world it's created is an interesting one, providing a very colourful backdrop for a detective novel. And as a detective novel, this works well. The murder mystery is a good one. There are plenty of clues, suspects, snitches and motives, and a series of intriguing plot developments. Benji rarely moves beyond a default private eye characterisation, and celebrity animal cameos – though entertaining – break the mood a bit, but the novel grips throughout.

The premise sounds cuddly (serial killer aside), but the Terror of the title is aptly named, leading to scenes of human abuse that, while provoking reflection upon the way humans treat animals, are often painful to read. For example, at the zoo Benji sees "a big striped Cat with a chair in one paw and a whip in the other" snarling "at something small in the corner of a filth-filled cage". These sequences, and those where Benji encounters animals unchanged by the Terror, show the novel at its most powerful and affecting.

Ironically in a book that has a lot of fun with the poor spelling of the rats who run the city's newspaper, The Terror and the Tortoiseshell is marred by shocking errors, including a wide selection of grocer's apostrophes. It's one thing to not know how to spell (lobster) thermidor or (chicken) coop, another to not know that the sentence "The diner's applauded" does not require an apostrophe. As an author I'd be embarrassed to have this published under my name; as a publisher I'd be begging the author's forgiveness for letting it slip through.

While I applaud the publisher's enthusiasm for ebooks and other modern forms of book distribution, and it is a very good book, I can't quite bring myself to recommend a book containing errors I'd be embarrassed to see in my six year old daughter's schoolwork. As an ebook, also, it's flawed, with the chapters not set up properly. But if a corrected edition is released, and you enjoy crime novels, it's worth a look. The end leaves the greater mystery of the Terror itself unanswered, and I'll certainly be looking out for future books in the series.

NB: the publisher has advised that a corrected Kindle edition will indeed be forthcoming, and that the current Kindle edition contains errors that do not appear in the printed editions.

The Terror and the Tortoiseshell, John Travis, Atomic Fez, Kindle, 4094ll.

Doctor Who: City of Spires

The Doctor is reunited with a much older Jamie McCrimmon, who has forgotten all their previous adventures together – which is strange, since he should at least remember the events of The Highlanders – and is fighting against the Highland clearances in the guise of Black Donald. But English soldiers are not the only dangers to the Scots. History is being changed. The sparking iron boots of the mythical Redcap terrorise the land. The Overlord has turned Grangemouth into a City of Spires, and he's sucking the very lifeblood of Scotland from its earth – but to what purpose?

There's plenty here for the Doctor to be outraged about, and Colin Baker's Doctor does outrage very well. The new-old relationship between the Doctor and Jamie is the story's main attraction, of course, and doesn't disappoint, although there's an irony in that if anything Frazer Hines sounds too young for the part. Each episode ends with a good cliffhanger, and if overall this adventure didn't surpass the best the series has to offer, it did entertain, for example with well-judged call-backs to stories like The Moonbase, and one very nice moment when Major Heywood pulls the Doctor up on one of his frequent – and usually ignored – allusions to being a time traveller.

Doctor Who 133: City of Spires, by Simon Bovey, Big Finish, 2xCD.