present is the new absent

Strange to be researching Barnes, from a distance, for a novel that seemed impossible to write while you were there. Still, those are the breaks. Or at any rate, the abandoned graveyards, pop cultural sites and tales of dismembered murderees. Also I feel a bit too like the central character of this. Author as absent detective. In fact it occurs to me thatthe point of view carefully delineated in that story, which tries to present its back to (put itself at an equal distance from) every kind of human event, is precisely what made the new novel impossible to write. I went up an alley in the first half of the last decade and then spent far too much time trying to minutely describe the wall I found at the end of it. But what’s new.

I wrote this a couple of years ago in the usual vague hope of trying to work out who was writing what. Now that I’ve finished that part of the book, & am no longer the absent writer in a vanished life, it turns out that I have to become the absent writer in a life I’ve hardly even got used to yet. This is just like finding one day you have really bad eyes, which, if they resolve one thing, won’t resolve another. The main problem is still to keep yourself an equal distance from everything, but this time in some very slightly less flattened-off way. I’ll be glad when this one is over.

(Actually, what’s been fascinating me about this from the beginning is that nobody in the book is connecting with anybody else in any sense & while showing that is important, having the text admit it would be outright death to the whole thing. That insulates you from the sentimentality of some otherwise quite good contemporary US writers, but makes things tense & bleak & you’re not to admit that either.)

Photo: Cath Phillips, 2013

some news

My new collection will be published later this year by Comma Press. It’s taken a while to get this sorted, and I want to thank everyone involved–also apologise to everyone else for the wait. Details as they arrive, here and from the Comma team. The book features eighteen short stories–five of which are original, unpublished & unavailable anywhere else and a further half dozen that will be new to most readers–and some flash fiction, much of which will be recognisable to habitues of the Ambiente Hotel. Contents include: a distributed sword & sorcery trilogy; two or three full-size sci-fi novels, one of which is two sentences and forty eight words long (fifty if you count the title); several visits to Autotelia, some that identify as such and some that don’t; and two final dispatches from Viriconium, neither of which would get house-room in an anthology of epic fantasy.

More details here.

midnight’s broken toe

I enjoyed this article for the way it makes the reality TV aspect of Trumpist politics so clear, but even more for: “Nobody wants to buy a little piece of confusion and sadness.” The deep honesty hidden in this image is the only true thing in the world as constituted now. I wouldn’t normally feel anything for TPT, but here she is, someone human among all these awkwardly-posturing orange mannequins, a woman with a brain tumour forced out of her own reality show into honesty by her terror at the approach of death. She became real, they’re still puppets operated by themselves (“selves” whose very idea of self is penetrated the market they maintain & exploit). That we aren’t winners in that rhetoric suddenly becomes the most powerful ground on which to build. If I’m playing anything on a loop now, it’s “Chimes of Freedom”.

note from the ruins

Epistolatory fiction of the near future based around a cache of emails found in a long-abandoned server farm below the Arctic Circle:

… your last mail … suspected for about 5 years there’d been some really big change we weren’t seeing. Something our definitions & our picture of politics simply wasn’t taking into account. That turned out to be what’s happening now, of course! … also had this feeling there were two elephants in the room, not one. … certain now it was AGW … [large amount of text missing ] … Capital was already thinking forward … climate denial always a way of buying time. The New Elite wasn’t just a kleptocracy, it was the kleptocrats ensuring their own survival & the survival of the kleptostate through the transition period … bastards … let everything outside the borders go to hell & hope to come out of it with an Arctic resource fiefdom … can’t point to what convinced me in the end, probably his Rosneft pay-off. Anyway, great to hear that the kids are doing well & see you soo

Some corruption of data, obviously, as you would expect given the circumstances, not to say the times.

the pellicci tract

“Stop here,” Aschemann ordered “We can have a nice breakfast here.” They swept into the kerb outside E Pellicci. A notorious cholesterol venue halfway down Neutrino, Pellici’s offered deco walls and cafe electrique. More important, Aschemann said, you could hear the food smoking in the animal fat. At that time of the morning Pellici’s was full of rickshaw girls in pink and black lycra gorging themselves on simple carbs. They stood awkwardly up to the counter, unable to use the seating, ducking their heads needlessly, embarrassed to be among people of ordinary size. Aschemann smiled around at them, one or two smiled back. Once he was eating he seemed to forget both his wife and the murders.

–Nova Swing, 2007