Shutting down for November

If you're a long-time reader of our magazine, I'm sure you can guess what I'll be starting tomorrow. Yes, a new novel. And this is going to be my first good one. I'm so confident this time. There are going to be themes, and characters, and descriptions, and all the sorts of things that you might expect to see in a novel by a proper novelist.

So things may be quieter than usual on the blog for the next month, but never fear, there will still be something to read on here: a selection of my Interzone reviews from 2012 and 2013 will appear on Mondays, with reviews from recent issues of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction probably appearing on Fridays. And we'll have a blog post within the next week or so announcing TQF49.

Have a good month in my absence, and wish me luck!

If you are taking part in the event, here are links to some of the fascinating things I've written about it in the past:

Fifteen tips for completing NaNoWriMo

Thirteen things I learned (or was reminded of) during Nanowrimo 2013

Twelve things I didn’t like about doing Nanowrimo in 2013

Twelve things I liked about doing Nanowrimo in 2013

Back when John and I were the Birmingham MLs, long, long ago, we created a handout for our local writers, with achievements, graphs to fill in, bits of advice, useful websites, etc. We haven’t updated it for a while, but it’s still available to download and print out on our old website.

Someone new seems to be in charge of the Nanowrimo website this year, and the FAQs have been changed to say it's okay for participants to carry on with works-in-progress and co-write their novels. Madness! I think we can safely ignore such nonsense!

The challenge, as it still (at least for now) says on the front page of the website, is to "Write a novel in a month!" Not half a novel, or the beginning of a novel, or the middle of a novel, or the end of a novel, but a novel. A 50,000-word novel in a month, start to finish. Writing any old 50,000 words isn't the same thing.

Writing a novel in a month is a goal with cachet, something non-participants understand clearly as a worthwhile thing to do. Being challenged to do it licenses us to be selfish for a month. To stop doing the dishes, or overtime, or being an good friend, or an attentive spouse, or a top-notch parent. Being challenged to write any old 50,000 words doesn't give people the same licence.

Anyway, that's what I reckon. Bye!

Ask Theaker's!

Is there anything you've ever wanted to ask the TQF staff? Why are we so mean to Howard Phillips? Is John Greenwood really a pseudonym? How ashamed are we of the cover art of issue 21? Now's your chance! In issue 50 we'd like to answer all your questions, about anything you like! And our answers will be honest. Or funny. To us, anyway.

Click here to submit your questions.

Theaker’s Fab Five: October 2014

My Panasonic five-CD changer stereo is still going strong, though I don’t use it as much as I used to since getting an iPod. Some of my recent purchases are still in their shrinkwrap, thanks to Amazon auto-rip. I still love my stereo, though – there are times when the iPod is out of power, and I just want to set a few albums going with a single button press, and not have iTunes grinding away at my PC’s innards. Last week my iPod got into a muddle after I duplicated a playlist and it made all the music on the thing invisible. Needs a reset but I can’t be bothered. So back to the stereo, and that means a new blog post. Here’s what’s in those five slots right now.

1. Syro by Aphex Twin

If you were to put an individual track on from this and ask me which Aphex Twin album it was from, I’d have no idea. But I’ve never listened to his music as albums, and I couldn’t tell you the names of more than half a dozen tracks. I just treat it all like one big album. Listening to this as a CD for the first time, it’s very similar to the Analord EPs I love so much: they’re pretty much my idea of perfect music. It’s what I imagined acid house would be like before I actually heard it. This won’t stay in my CD changer long, though, because of a bit of swearing. Tut, tut!

2. Ultraviolence by Lana Del Rey

The same thing applies to this one: quite a few naughty words, so I can’t have it popping up in the rotation when the children are doing homework in my study! I only got interested in Lana Del Rey recently, I think because of all the chat about the possible return of Twin Peaks, and David Lynch seems to be a big influence on her music – it just clicked. The Lana Del Rey persona feels like she stepped out of a movie, or a novel, perhaps by Philip K. Dick. Maybe this will become a favourite album, even if it’s a bit too creepy for everyday listening, or maybe it’ll end up filed with the fads. (I can’t even imagine the thinking process that once led me to buy albums by Dido or Blink 182!) But right now I’m really into it. I love the wooziness, the character, the melancholy, the odd tempos and structures. Feels drunk and high, like an album made after most people are in bed. (That weird pattern on the CD in the photo seems to be the reflection of a bookcase.)

3. Lost Sirens by New Order

My first reaction to this – eight songs that were originally planned to form part of their next album proper – was that it’s woeful. The lyrics aren’t great (“You’re one of a kind, high on my agenda”). The music is a bit MOR. And I still think that, but it’s growing on me. I’ve caught myself singing bits of it while doing the dishes. And at eight songs it has as many tracks as some of their proper albums. I’m not one of those people who ever wishes their favourite artists would just stop releasing records. Even a sub-par album can produce a great track – I doubt I’ve listened to Get Ready more than a dozen times, but “Crystal” is one of my favourite songs ever. Tentatively looking forward to their next record – Hooky’s left, but Gillian will be back, and they said in Mojo a while back that they had been looking again at Power, Corruption and Lies, which is my favourite studio album of theirs. I liked them best when they were being weird and cool, the tracks that were about noises and moods rather than verses and choruses.

4. The Virgin Years: 1974–1978, Disc 1, by Tangerine Dream

It was late at night, I had internet access because I had been doing an online thing for work, and I’d been listening to Phaedra by Tangerine Dream and been surprised by how good it was. I noticed two Tangerine Dream compilations on Amazon, The Virgin Years: 1974-1978 and The Virgin Years: 1977–1983, compressing all their albums from that time onto eight CDs, for about twenty quid in total. I’m a sucker for omnibus editions, so now I own far more Tangerine Dream albums than I really need to. Some of the later stuff sounds (at first listen, at least) to be abysmal, but this first CD is Phaedra plus side one of Rubycon, and it’s very good. I like space music. (And I reserve the right to change my mind about the later stuff once I’ve given it a better listen.)

5. Indie Cindy by Pixies

One of only a handful of albums I’ve reviewed for our magazine, I like it no less now than when I wrote the review. Super stuff. Black Francis never stopped writing great songs, and I never stopped buying his records (Teenager of the Year, Fast Man Raider Man and The Golem are all excellent), but songs on albums like Bluefinger and Petit Fours felt like they had been written for the Pixies, and I’m so glad they finally got it together. Just wish it had come in a proper jewel case. And it feels odd that “What Goes Boom” is first on the album when it was last on the EP. How can it be both a final track and a first track? It boggles me.

What next?

I’m looking forward to the new album from Public Sector Broadcasting. The War Room EP was great, their album too, and I hoped they might one day apply their dialogue-sampling techniques to old science fiction films. They haven’t quite, but it’s close enough: their new album is about the real-life space race. I think that’s going to be a real treat. But will I be writing about it in the next Theaker’s Fab Five, whenever that may be? Will the five-CD stereo survive another year? Will I ever find anywhere to keep all these bloody CDs? There’s only one way to find out: keep reading our magnificent blog.

The Tripods / review by Jacob Edwards

Challenging the rule of three.

When setting out to make The Tripods for BBC TV, producer Richard Bates faced the daunting prospect of having his work judged against two veritable institutions. Firstly, there was the source material: the critically and popularly acclaimed trilogy of books by John Christopher (the SF pen name of prolific author Sam Youd). Secondly, there was Doctor Who, in whose traditional Saturday evening timeslot The Tripods was to be broadcast, and against whose ailing ratings it would be measured as a successful (or otherwise) purveyor of children’s SF drama. Working in Bates’s favour was, of course, the strength of Youd’s post-apocalyptic, historically regressed invasion-cum-resistance adventure narrative, but also a budget of unprecedented splendour and the opportunity to shoot on location across England, Wales and Switzerland. Composer Ken Freeman – who’d previously played keyboards on Jeff Wayne’s musical interpretation of The War of the Worlds – synthesised a classic score full of portent and menace. Veteran Doctor Who director Christopher Barry was brought in to direct. The battle lines were set.

“This was when Richard Bates was making The Tripods. He scrupulously sent advance scripts and asked for comments and thanked me for them, but took no notice.” – Sam Youd, interviewed by Colin Brockhurst in 2009.

Star Wars: Maul – Lockdown by Joe Schreiber / review by Jacob Edwards

Blowing the horns of dilemma.

When the first Star Wars prequel, A Phantom Menace, was unveiled with grandiose, heraldic fanfare across cinema screens in 1999, the lightsaber thrum of expectation was always likely to sputter and fizzle. Disappointed, we were, and not just with Jar Jar Binks. There was also Darth Maul: the red-skinned, horned and tattooed, mad-eyed, devil-modelled Sith Lord, whose agility and snarling savagery promised a danger no less than that of the dark, prowling power of Vader, but whose ultimate delivery – standing non compos mentis while an erstwhile-dangling Obi-Wan springs up and out of the reactor shaft, force-grabs Qui-Gon Jinn’s lightsaber, somersaults over Maul’s head and cuts him in half – proved utterly, almost insultingly flaccid. This was someone with the Force aptitude to wield a double-bladed lightsaber and take on two Jedi simultaneously. To die with such ineptness… It was a dramatic let-down, the emotionally hollow like of which could only be achieved by such clumsy scripting as having Obi-Wan Kenobi, rather than allowing Darth Vader to strike him down in A New Hope, instead merely tripping on his own robes and accidentally impaling himself on Vader’s lightsaber. To have Maul dispatched in so undignified a manner was to reduce a martial virtuoso to the level of an extra from Japanese fight-fantasy Monkey, and pratfalling along with him went any aspirations the prequelogy might have harboured to match strokes with the original Star Wars saga.

Vale, Darth Maul: the true phantom menace of the film.

Sabrina the Teenage Witch: 50 Magical Stories / review by Stephen Theaker

Sabrina the Teenage Witch: 50 Magical Stories (Archie, ebook, 349pp) provides a cheap, comprehensive introduction to one of Archie’s most famous characters, a peppy teenage witch who, much as she did in the successful television series, usually lives with her aunts, Hilda and Zelda, and their talking cat Salem. Salem is an uncle who tried to conquer the world (or, in other stories, broke off his engagement with the head witch) and felinisation was his punishment. Sabrina is a good-hearted girl, but isn’t above using her powers selfishly. She’s usually an agent of karma (turning chauvinists into pigs, for example), at other times its victim.

Penny Dreadful, Season 1 / review by Stephen Theaker

Penny Dreadful is a new television take on an old idea: the out-of-copyright crossover. Here we have young Doctor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) and his monster (a marvellously melodramatic Rory Kinnear); Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), father of Mina; and Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney); plus four apparently unfamiliar characters: Josh Hartnett as gunslinger Ethan Chandler; Billie Piper as Brona Croft, the dying prostitute he falls for; Danny Sapani as Murray’s fighting manservant, Sembene; and Eva Green as Vanessa Ives, whose prim comportment conceals an ongoing inner battle with the forces of darkness.

Indie Cindy / review by Stephen Theaker

The return of the Pixies with Indie Cindy (PIAS, CD) has not been universally welcomed, coming in for particular scorn from those unhappy that Kim Deal is no longer involved. Her absence is certainly a shame, and there is a space on the album where her backing vocals should be (as there was on Trompe Le Monde), but it’s a bit hard on the remaining members to hit them with that stick. They did wait a decade for her to agree to recording new material, and she only pulled out after the studio was booked and the gear transported to Wales. You can’t blame them for pressing on in those circumstances – and I’m glad they did, because we now have a new Pixies album.

Tusk / review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Juvenile premise spurs tour de force of eccentricity, turns contemporary horror film formula on its head
 
As I walk out of a horror film, I’m typically thinking one of three things: great, so-so, or crap. However, every once in a while, there is another thought: did I like this film? Such was my initial reaction to director Kevin Smith’s Tusk (2014), a film whose premise involves a madman who wants to physically and psychologically transform another man into a walrus. Yes. You read that correctly.

Theakerly thoughts: what's making me happy?

This time I’m going to concentrate on what’s been making me happy this week, in honour of the segment at the end of Pop Culture Happy Hour, one of my favourite podcasts. Please just take it as read that my adorable little family is, as ever, making me happy, and that I am thoroughly enjoying my day-to-day work. I just don’t tend to talk about that kind of stuff in detail on here. Because you’re all vultures who would steal my life if I let you.

So, what’s been making me happy?

Expanding my daily to-do lists from ten to twenty items. At the core of it is still the ten big things I need to get done each day, but the other ten give me credit for all the daily stuff that needs doing – dealing with email, my morning pomodoro of writing, taking the kids to school, collecting the kids, and, erm, weighing myself. It’s good. Instead of the morning run being a frustrating obstacle to my tasklist, it’s now a nice simple job to tick off. Best of all, my weekday scores now produce a percentage. (91% last week!)

The Logitech k480 keyboard. Admittedly it’s a bit plasticky, and the T and Y keys on mine don’t work very well (a replacement is on its way), but this is going to be my best friend during November. A groove along the top lets it hold a tablet, and a dial lets you pick between three Bluetooth devices – which might not sound that amazing till you realise that to achieve the same thing with the Apple keyboard you have to power off all the other devices with which it has previously been paired. Really looking forward to taking this out and about for my November novelling sessions, and writing away on my iPod.

The backlog of reviews is finally starting to melt away. Well, it’s down to twenty. Twelve if you only count things I was given for review, and not things I read and began to write about. My goal for issue 50 is to completely clear the backlog, even if it means re-reading some of the books. A pomodoro (25 minutes) of writing each morning isn’t a lot, but it’s a lot more than nothing, and applied to short stuff like reviews it moves things along quite nicely, without getting in the way of anything else.

The new Aphex Twin album, Syro. It’s a lot like the Analord records, and those come very close to my idea of ideal music, so I’m very happy with it.

The youngest of our family gave me some sparkly dinosaur stickers to stick on the side of my PC.

Using my old Kindle again. Reading about the Kindle Voyage make me realise I’m kind of sick of the Kindle Paperwhite, and its damnable lack of buttons. I’m leaning towards the view that touchscreen ereaders are an abomination. The Paperwhite works better than any other I’ve tried (a Sony and a Kobo), but still, it’s a relief to get back to reading on a device that switches pages with a button press.

Nanowrimo is coming and I have an idea! This usually doesn’t happen until October 30. And I learnt a lot from taking part last year, which is going to help a lot in shaping my plans. Even though it was my umpteenth time taking part, it was my first serious attempt in a while, and my first finished novel in a good few years. I wrote a bunch of blog posts about my experiences last year (here, here and here), so I’ll be studying those carefully in the next few weeks. One thing I remember very clearly: don’t start a novel with someone flying through the air over the ocean alone with no way to talk to anyone, because what the heck are you going to write about? This year’s Nanowrimo starts on a Saturday, which is pretty much ideal for getting off to a good start.

If something’s been making you happy, let us know in the comments!

Game of Thrones, Season 4 / review by Stephen Theaker

Game of Thrones, Season 4 (Sky Atlantic/HBO) feels for a while as if it has hardly moved on from the beginning of the previous season. Jon Snow is still bumbling around beyond the wall, Sansa still wandering with the Hound, Daenarys is marching around Slavers’ Bay with her army, and Joffrey is still doing bad things like the bad little king he is. The weird army we saw marching at the end of season two has yet to arrive anywhere. In television we’re used to things moving rather more quickly, arcs concluding at the end of a season and new arcs beginning the season after. That doesn’t really happen with Game of Thrones, but season three came to a famously cataclysmic conclusion, and the ripples of that final episode become tidal waves in season four. It’s the aftermath of some things, the beginning of others, and there’s a great big battle by the end featuring the programme’s best special effects yet.

Return to Armageddon / review by Stephen Theaker

In Return to Armageddon (2000 AD, pb, 148pp) spacers find the frozen corpse of the devil on the other side of a deep space anomaly. As you’d expect of any mad scientist worth his salt, the on-board doctor extracts cells to create a clone. Or was it two clones? Two babies are found with his dead body, one cute as a button, the other with black wings and cloven hooves – the Destroyer! The dead are soon walking the spaceship’s corridors, and that’s just the beginning of a story that ends up with Earth under the devil’s rule, humanity nothing but the squealing meat of Satan’s servants.

From Dusk Till Dawn, Season 1 / review by Stephen Theaker

From Dusk Till Dawn is a television series produced and developed by Robert Rodriguez for his own El Rey network, and shown on Netflix in the UK. Unlike Blade: The Series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles or Stargate SG-1, this isn’t a sequel, it’s a remake and an expansion. The outline of the plot is mostly unchanged. The Gecko brothers (nephews of Nice Guy Eddie from Reservoir Dogs) are bank robbers on the run, trying to cross the border into Mexico. They take hostages, a widowed clergyman and his two unhappy children. They end up at a biker bar, a strip club where the star performer is several hundred years older than she looks. The one big difference is that supernatural elements kick in sooner, as Richie’s visions of a mysterious woman inspire him to kill.

Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork / review by Stephen Theaker

I had read in the later volumes of American Elf that James Kochalka was working on a video game, but I’d sort of assumed it was going to be a flash game for his publisher’s website or something like that. A big surprise then to find that Kochalka and PixelJam’s Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork (Pixeljam, played on iPod Touch 5; available to buy here) is a fully-fledged app store game, and an excellent one at that. It takes the Glorkian Warrior (whose first book The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza was reviewed in TQF#47) and his trusty backpack and gives them room to run and jump around at the bottom of the screen while waves of invaders attack from above. The backpack constantly shoots, leaving the Glorkian Warrior to worry about dodging bullets, completing missions set by little girl aliens in space armour, and collecting crackers and power-ups. They’re the usual type of thing: fireballs, missiles, wiggly bullets, a tennis ball gun. It’s all a play on Space Invaders, but Kochalka’s designs are so appealing and the gameplay so enjoyable that this became that rarest of things: a mobile game I played out of love rather than boredom or dogged determination. It’s funny, but fair, death always feeling like it’s your own fault, even when the immediate cause is a Magic Robot who throws exploding birthday cakes your way. Points and crackers earn upgrades. The last one, for collecting twenty thousand credits: ennui. The Glorkian Warrior begins to look bored if you stand still.  ****

Ernest et Célestine (aka Ernest & Celestine) / review by Jacob Edwards

A one-bear band and a winter’s dream for two.

Ernest et Célestine is the story of a bear and a mouse, who through the shared bond of imagination and creativity forge the most unlikely of friendships at odds with the proscriptive bigotry of their aboveground and belowground societies. Ernest is a musician, hungry and busking; Célestine an artist, orphaned and reluctantly indentured to the clinic of tooth collection and restoration. When Célestine dissuades Ernest from eating her, and instead leads him to the storeroom of a lolly shop, the sweet-toothed bear and the dreamy mouse end up on the run from their respective police. These implacable forces – lawful and righteous upholders of the great prejudice – in one poignantly damning scene find themselves to have accidentally mingled while in pursuit, and must each beat a wary retreat. They are suspiciously alike in their antipathy towards the two fugitives, just as Ernest and Célestine are alike in repudiating the conventional wisdom. It is a simple parable, guilelessly enacted.

As Above, So Below / review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Scooby Doo gone wild: no-frills subterranean archeological horror offers deep scares despite shallow characters/storyline
   
A group gets lost in a maze-like expanse and the threats escalate. Maybe some make it out, maybe none do. The Blair Witch Project (1999) employed the technique masterfully in a wooded setting. The Descent (2005) took the concept to an underground cave system inhabited by violent creatures. The less well-known but still impressive Grave Encounters (2011) used an abandoned asylum.

Edge of Tomorrow / review by Jacob Edwards

Henceforth, the deceitful must roll a giant jaffa up Hollywood Hill.

Most of Europe has fallen to an alien invasion. Humanity faces extinction. And yet, a new high-tech battle armour brings hope, this being symbolised by Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) who, thus kitted out as a new recruit, was able to kill hundreds of alien “Mimics” in a single day. On the back of this, mankind’s first victory, the combat gear goes into mass production and the army into recruitment overdrive, massing for a counteroffensive. As Major William Cage (Tom Cruise), glib spokesman for the powers that be, sitting safe at HQ, is pressganged into the front line as insurance against an anticipated public relations backlash post-war, so the scenario is set for Edge of Tomorrow (dir. Doug Liman), an action SF film based on Japanese writer Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s illustrated novella All You Need is Kill. Cage dies within the first few minutes of fighting, doused in the acidic blood of an alien he’s managed to take down. Face dissolving, he screams… and regains consciousness the day before battle.

Spoilers, inevitably, but then again the movie’s tagline is: LIVE. DIE. REPEAT. So, not too hard to figure out.

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett / review by Stephen Theaker

In City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett (Broadway Books (US); Jo Fletcher Books (UK), ebook, 9396ll) the cruel, capricious gods have been killed by the people they oppressed and all the miracles they performed have been undone, leaving a world that no longer quite makes sense, and is ruled by their former slaves, the Saypuri. Bulikov, former capital of the gods’ empire, has been left in a particularly curious state, with transparent walls, staircases that lead nowhere, and other weird anomalies. It is the year 1719 and a Saypuri investigator has taken it upon herself to look into the murder of a friend. Like Columbo, her plain appearance conceals a sharp mind. Dangerously sharp: it’s going to get her into a lot of trouble. Bulikov is rife with conspiracies and secrets.

Accessing the Future: interview with Kathryn Allan and Djibril al-Ayad

Kathryn Allan and Djibril al-Ayad are currently raising funds to publish a special anthology of disability-themed speculative fiction, Accessing the Future, to be published by Futurefire.net Publishing, and here is an interview with them. It sounds like it's going to be very interesting.

Hi Djibril, Kathryn. What made you decide to produce this anthology? What are your goals for it?

Djibril: Thanks, Stephen. This anthology will be the third produced under the aegis of Futurefire.net Publishing (after Outlaw Bodies and We See a Different Frontier), and all three are concerned with social-political speculative fiction from the perspective of under-represented viewpoints. The vast majority of the stories we have published reflect the understanding that oppressions are intersectional: so stories about imperialism recognize the fact that colonial oppression is closely tied in with gender oppression, with racism, homophobia and ableism. An anthology that takes as a starting point the marginalization of people with disabilities (both in reality and in literature), also from an intersectional angle, is a close fit to our aims as a press. We hope to raise enough money to produce a full-size, professional rate-paying, properly distributed anthology on this theme, with authors from a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives.

Apocalypse Now Now by Charlie Human / review by Tim Atkinson

With fantasy these days increasingly resembling the long tail of YA fiction, it’s a post-Potter world in which we’re living now.

And Apocalypse Now Now (Century, pb), the debut novel by South African Charlie Human, exemplifies that shift. Cannily positioned on the cusp of YA and proper grown-up fantasy, it owes a sizeable debt to J.K. Rowling’s creation, even when it’s reacting against it. Indeed, much of its appeal comes from its simultaneous celebration and subversion of the usual teenage wish-fulfilment tropes against the colourful backdrop of Cape Town.