Posted on

Rationing Immortality

Written in September 2023 but for some unknown reason not actually posted until January 2024.

I’m not long back from a beach holiday, which was the excuse — well, the impetus — to do what I could do on any idle Tuesday: put down my phone and pick up a novel.

If my own, slender attempts at fiction have anything in common, the theme is immortality. In The Good Shabti, Pharoah Mentuhotep takes the after-life for granted, while amoral scientists attempt to reignite dead brains. ‘Round Trip’ considers, inter alia, what one might do with eternity, and what could animate someone to want to live forever. ‘Frozen Out’ is about cryogenics.

Immortality is also the theme of Void Star by Zachary Mason. This is spec-fic where two variants are presented: anti-ageing; and the possibility that one might upload one’s consciousness into a computer, to be preserved and propagated (and perhaps, if one suffers a catastrophic injury, to be rebooted).

Continue reading “Rationing Immortality”
Posted on

Three Science Fiction and Fantasy Books I’ve Been Thinking About A Lot During The COVID19 Lockdown

So, voluntary self-isolation becomes a mandatory lock-down.

Plenty of people have been discussing relevant films, TV shows and literature that deal with pandemics, deadly diseases and the like. GIFs from Shaun of the Dead, and all the other zombie movies, fill my timeline.

As for me, I have found that my mind keeps wandering back to three books I read in recent years, which all include moments of apocalyptic lock-down.

Continue reading “Three Science Fiction and Fantasy Books I’ve Been Thinking About A Lot During The COVID19 Lockdown”
Posted on

We Need To Talk launched for The Eve Appeal

b0328d09-393b-4fe7-a646-36c6ecb8cf2b

 
Update: PDF of my story here.

I’m delighted to have a story featured in the anthology We Need to Talk, launched yesterday.  The publisher is Jurassic London—here’s the blurb from their website:

All of us, at some point, are involved in difficult conversations. Whether that’s tough talks with clients or bosses, or break-ups, or coming out, or telling someone you love them, or giving advice to that friend who just doesn’t want to hear it. Some conversations are even more difficult, as sufferers of any potentially serious illness will know.

But one thing’s for sure, these conversations are fascinating. So much so that we’ve teamed up with Kindred and The Eve Appeal, to launch a writing competition on the theme of difficult conversations.

My story is called ‘Frozen Out’, an awkward conversation between a husband and wife.  Its inclusion in the anthology is all the sweeter because the other eighteen stories are uniformly excellent.

All profits from the sale of the book are being donated to The Eve Appeal to help fund its important work fighting women’s cancers.  Hard copies of the book are available from Foyles, either in-store or via their online shop.  You can get an e-book version from Amazon.

We Need To Talk was launched yesterday at Foyles on the Southbank.  Jenny Aims has posted about it on the Kindred blog.  There’s a photo of me in it.

We Need To Talk is an awareness raising project, so let’s be aware.  The Eve Appeal chief executive Athena Lamnisos wrote the afterword for the book, and it was published earlier this week on the Huffington Post, under the title ‘We Need To Talk About Vaginas‘.

Continue reading “We Need To Talk launched for The Eve Appeal”
Posted on

Four reasons why I probably won't win the Shirley Jackson Award

I gatecrashed the Hugo-nominated Pornokitsch blog to post this review of my competitor novellas.  I also put this on Medium, just because.

I’m delighted and honoured to have been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, for my novella The Good Shabti, published by Jurassic London. However, there are four good reasons why I probably won’t win.
The first reason is the Ceremony of Flies by Kate Jonez (DarkFuse). Our protagonist, who calls herself Emily, is an unreliable cocktail waitress, an unreliable road-trip buddy and definitely an unreliable narrator. We meet her serving drinks in a Las Vegas casino, but before long she is on the run in a 1971 Pontiac Convertible, driven by an equally dubious gambler named Rex. Their journey takes them from the bright lights of Sin City, via suburban Barstow, to ever more remote and decaying locales, until she arrives at what might just be the end of the world.
Jonez’s parched descriptions of this doomed trajectory are fantastic. There are Joshua Trees and Stucco churches, and flies everywhere.  The soaring temperature is evoked so well I thought my Kindle might overheat.  And there is no let up—Every apparent relief, every opportunity for a cool breeze or a quenching of thirst, is just a further heightening of the characters desperate plight. Is this Emily’s personal hell for the many crimes she has committed? Or some wider vengeance? Continue reading “Four reasons why I probably won't win the Shirley Jackson Award”