Slow Burning

and you thought you were cool…

2011-05-17T04:12:00.001+01:00

Newsflash

2011-01-07T14:42:00.001Z

Christmas Shopping

2010-12-19T02:28:00.000Z

This was a nice and strange read.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to try this or some other goodies, just go over to the author's website and paypal it away. There are a few bargains there.

Voodoo sunrise

2010-06-14T09:45:00.001+01:00

Sebastian's Voodoo from Joaquin Baldwin on Vimeo.

Getting a Tan

2010-06-06T23:57:00.000+01:00

You know those times when you fall inlove with a book, unexpectedly, just by seing it on a shelve at a bookstore, and out of the blue there’s this rush inside your guts that says

BUY! BUY! JUST BUY IT!

Well, I felt that with

and bought it and brought it home with extreme caution and been devouring it for the last week. Even after reading all of its short shorts, I keep going back to the illustrations over and over again.

I saw somewhere a list of more than ten awards won by this book, and I think they’re all deserved. It is a picture book. It is a word book. It is more than the sum of its parts. I have been talking with a portuguese friend of mine that is working in Australia, and so much of what he says resounds from the book. You get influences from all kind of artistic areas, all kind of personal and social concerns. You get a damn good book which you can devour in very small doses or gulp entirely in one sitting.

After the first pages, and not knowing that this is something of a permanent question around Shaun Tan’s work, I loved the fact that intentionally or not (it seems not) the book appears to be aimed to young audiences but soons gets out of that particular conceptual prison. I think this is an adult book that can be read by anyone of any age, done with taste and very very good techniques both in terms of its illustrations and its words.

So take a couple of minutes to go over at Shaun Tan’s website and look at this and other of his works. It will be worth your while.

I’ll leave you with a bit of prose from one of the tales, the 1st paragraph from “The nameless holiday” that, I think, beautifully encapsulates what the book is and what it points to:

“The nameless holiday happens once a year, usually around late August, sometimes October. It is always anticipated by children and adults alike with mixed emotion: It’s not exactly festive, but still a celebration of sorts, the origin of which has been long forgotten.”

You can also get a better view with an extract found here.

Enjoy. I did.

Another Kadrey

2010-05-26T23:28:00.001+01:00

Richard Kadrey is someone we unfortunately hear little about. But here he is talking about his latest novel, Sandman Slim

Jonze’s I’m Here – or not

2010-04-18T17:09:00.001+01:00

I watched this short by Spike Jonze with great interest. It is a simple story about love between robots. But the more I watched, the more I got restless. I followed the story of the poor sap that after falling in love with a robot girl keeps giving her pieces of him while she goes on casually losing her parts. Till it ends with the anticlimactic scene where he finally gives her his whole body, so she gets to be whole and him only a head. And this is sold to us as a goody lovey thing, full of feely-touchy scenes. You can’t get mellower than this.

Thinking about it, I get to see some things I really don’t like. Blind love to the point of idiocy for one, doesn’t strike me as cool or even cute. At another level, this kind of reverse engineering of the beautifully accomplished concept of Isaac Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man, seems gross, backwards and plain stupid.

The online packaging however is great, so go there and experience it if you can, and decide for yourself.

Volcanic Action

2010-04-17T20:18:00.000+01:00

Well, just when you thought the Old Norse gods were away, one of them decides to make an appearance. With gusto.

Iceland, one of the few world nations in the thralls of financial bankruptcy, seems to have a god finally interested in avenging it from the malfeasance of human commercial malfeasance.

Váli being the god of vengeance and retribution, it seems only right that he bears the blame for the more or less recent financial mayhem that took over Iceland.

So now we have the European airspace closing down due to the ash clouds generated by the accommodating volcano erupted in Iceland, so you can figure what that is going to mean for air companies, insurance companies, banks, et al.

Unfortunately, I think the ones who are going to take the major flak are the ordinary people (passengers, insurance buyers and everyone else). The gods are always unfair. Oh bummer.

Expanding your references – Letters of Note

2010-04-05T19:48:00.001+01:00

Letters of Note –Correspondence deserving of a wider audience, by Shaun Usher is a marvelous blog full of interesting gems. It shows images of original letters, along with faithfull transcriptions for easy reading, and very few commentaries (or even none). There’s something there which will appeal to everyone, from Joan of Arc, to Amelia Earhart or Philip K. Dick.

Just take the following sample, an excerpt of a letter from Laura Huxley, about the last moments of her husband Aldous, where after describing his calm passing, she talks of his novel “Island”:

«And now, after I have been alone these few days, and less bombarded by other people's feelings, the meaning of this last day becomes clearer and clearer to me and more and more important. Aldous was, I think (and certainly I am) appalled at the fact that what he wrote in ISLAND was not taken seriously. It was treated as a work of science fiction, when it was not fiction because each one of the ways of living he described in ISLAND was not a product of his fantasy, but something that had been tried in one place or another and some of them in our own everyday life. If the way Aldous died were known, it might awaken people to the awareness that not only this, but many other facts described in ISLAND are possible here and now. Aldous'asking for moksha medicine while dying is a confirmation of his work, and as such is of importance not only to us, but to the world. It is true we will have some people saying that he was a drug addict all his life and that he ended as one, but it is history that Huxleys stop ignorance before ignorance can stop Huxleys.»

Great stuff.

In this particular excerpt, I like the fact that she repels the notion of science fiction by stating that the novel isn’t fiction, and not from some disregard for the genre, but because its contents are modeled in true experiences. All very unliterary of course, if we go technical, but we get the idea. Island was not supposed to be a work of imagination but a descriptive one.

Well, I guess I’ll have to read it now. Off to the shelf again!

Some Fantasy Pointers

2010-04-04T20:33:00.001+01:00

Almost a year ago, over at M.John Harrison’s blog:

“The car industry offers fantasies of success, escape &, especially, competence (ninety percent of drivers rate themselves in the top ten percent of driving ability). The cosmetic & fashion industries offer the fantasy of perfectibility. The sports industry sells a fantasy of activity to people who rarely leave their cars or their sofas unless it’s to go to bed. From the iconography of Nationalism to the publicly managed death of a Reality TV star, cultural psychodramas have always been fantasies–some orchestrated, some spontaneous, most a mixture of both. All these elements are interlocked. You don’t have to be a theorist to recognise that. You only have to have lived in the 20th & 21st Centuries.

The world is constructed. It is imaginary from the off. Inside that imagined space, we act out off-the-rack fictions.”

And still, many many people won’t get this.

Undernatural Comment

2010-03-25T14:49:00.000Z

Sorry, but I just love this:

Why does Supernatural get the gist of vampires and urban fantasy et al without falling into the young angst crap? Maybe because it treats its viewers as adults. And well, good screenwriting and competent directing help a lot too.

Don’t get me wrong: I think teen angst is great. It has a function. Angsty teens like it and find a blameless, carefree escape from reality while thinking they’re being cool. Fine. They forgive rougher edges because they really can’t deal with them with full rational intent. Me, I just don’t consume it. Twilight? The Vampire Diaries? Soap opera with inelegant fantastic elements. ooooh they have mean vampires and intrigue and gossip and syruppy love, but then, that’s why they are still pure soap, of the inedible variety. Because their stories are really old, and really badly told. And there’s so much better stuff out there. Even Supernatural, which is a just a blend of traditional elements does it right. By getting its characters out of highschool. By pitching them against difficult odds, even impossible ones. And by keeping it simple. And by throwing of the talking angst bits too. And more, of course.

The main rule is: you don’t have to treat viewers as braindead for them to apreciate fantastic storytelling; you may appeal to their wits and inteligence. They’re humans: they’ll cope. They’ve been doing the smart bit for some thousands of years now. Hey: there are even writers doing it right for a couple of centuries now.

I’ll get you, you “#$%&*!!!

2010-03-15T10:57:00.001Z

Simply superb.

2010 reading adventures - 2

2010-03-01T20:38:00.001Z

Vikram Chandra is one of those authors whose books I’m in love with without ever reading a single one. Well, not actually: I’ve read roughly 100 pages of this Red Earth and Pouring Rain, his first award-winning novel, and I was completely mesmerized by it. A very big novel but hugely readable, about storytelling, written with marvelous wit and flair (as far as I got into it and according to the reviews – click the cover for some of them at the author’s site).

Somehow, I lost the book (I can’t honestly remember where or why). This was, if I remember correctly, around 1996 or 1997, and though I bought it again later, I never got around to finish it. Maybe this year I’ll get to read it, as well as his other two books, Sacred Games and Love and Longing in Bombay.

2010 reading adventures - 1

2010-02-28T16:18:00.000Z

One of the books I have eagerly waiting in my bookshelves is Drood by Dan Simmons. A behemoth with small font size, but from the guy who sometimes writes like a god.

And after hearing him talk about it, how could I resist?

What is SF all about today?

2010-02-01T10:50:00.001Z

Check SF Signal for Sarah A Hoyt guest post, about “The Death of Science Fiction: It Ain't Over Till The Fat Droid Sings”

Hoyt makes some good points here, as usual. And here’s my contribution on the subject.

Kids always want sense of wonder. Always did, always will. Science Fiction hasn't been able to provide it, true. We can only manage to produce the brainy or overly-prepared type of SOW they'll only like a bit later in life. Maybe because, for historic literary reasons, it has drifted into a sort of "we can't do simple stuff anymore"; and also, one must never forget that SF stems from the end of the beginning era of optimism & progress, so is it really a surprise that, in the generally-skeptic and educationally-driven present time, it doesn't work well as a written vehicle?

The little engineer has grown up and got old. He's not sick, but he senses death approaching. He won't take it lying down, though.

SF has long tried to battle this oncoming death with true jim kirk-star trek style. Cyberpunk, slipstream, new weird, steampunk, whichever, were valiant charges, but their mounts were never capable of a big enough stretch, right from the start - though they seemed to. The fact that we saw/felt it coming since the 80's is, however, a good lit track record - what other genres did this? which saw their deaths coming, and/or were able to try and do something about it?

The fight has been long and hard. And it appears it will remain so for awhile (we are generally-skeptic, remember?). The important fact is that we're raging against the dying of the light. So, if either if you are inlove with science fiction or just married to it, you have to ask yourself the question: where do I stand? Do I believe/want that SF evolves to its time, or will I shoot all my bullets agains the onrushing tide?

We don't know what's next, but we have to fight for it, to point ways and discover new ones to it, while blasting through the present. Hell, we’ll do it just for the fun of it too!

And that, my friends, is what SF has always been about.

Movie TGV, or Thanking Genevieve Valentine

2010-01-28T03:04:00.000Z

This one comes courtesy of Genevieve Valentine’s blog post over at Tor.com, a text about Christian Horror Classics. It’s a micro-review, superbly done with wit, flair and grace. As much as a christian horror classic is, by definition, not. It also encapsulates much of what I find wrong in many, many things lately.

I’ll transcribe it for you here (though you should check the article at Tor.com):

“It’s a Wonderful Life. I’m sorry, when an angel prevents you from killing yourself and then shows you terrifying visions of your miserable loved ones, that’s a horror movie.”

Mainly, what I like about this, is that I keep smiling every single time I read it. And that it looks to be reviewing a lot of people and day-to-day situations I keep seeing. But that is a multiversical slot which is of personal enjoyment.

Variations on the Repo Man

2010-01-17T12:48:00.001Z

Just take a look at the passage of Time…backwards:

Inception Coming

2010-01-11T15:11:00.000Z

Having developed a strong sense of rejection to all forms of bucolic settings and deep country melancholic narratives (with the roaring exception of some Bradbury and all of Clifford D. Simak, which I still enjoy immensely) I love urban fantasy in all its forms.

Lately, I’ve also been getting the urge to see and read plain SF tales in cityscapes, with no vampires or magic or victorian tropes. And a pinch of noir is always welcomed, so Christopher Nolan’s Inception seems to fit the bill. Some of the FX reminds us instantly of the fabulous Dark City from Alex Proyas, of course, but let’s hope it has some different tackle on the subject of urban moding.

Incidently, and on the theme, you may also want to read some of the tales from “Looking for Jake and other stories” by China Miéville and Paul di Filippo’s “iCity” from the second of the Solaris SF anthologies.

Free World SF Fiction

2010-01-08T03:34:00.001Z

Here’s a taste of The Apex Book of the World SF for you to sample, via Io9: The Wheel of Samsara, by Han Song

Future Stephen Fries Your Brain

2010-01-07T04:11:00.000Z

Here for a good laugh, courtesy of the incomparable Stephen Fry, in SF mode:

Take this Thing upon the brow!

2010-01-02T14:50:00.001Z

I’m sorry to have colonized Poe’s verse with some alien biotech in the title of this post, but it is really appropriate for its subject.

A nice way to begin the reading this year: Peter Watts short story for the current Clarkesworld January issue, entitled The Things

It is a narration of the facts from a science fiction-horror classic movie, from the viewpoint of the “supposed” monster. Although there is not much original story in it, Watts manages to make it interesting, piling up on his eternal theme of Identity (and also of Human Identity) filling it with his acknowledged darwinian reasoning and gut-wrenching inescapable conclusions. And this is one of the facts that make me think he is one of the few real hard science fiction writers out there. Paraphrasing horribly, one can say that in his writing whatever happens in science, stays in science. You got to love the guy for doing that.

As an aside, Watts has had a recent and very not good experience with US customs and may need your help with that. If you can, go check out this site about it (and complement it with Watts blog posts from December till now) and see how you’ll be able to help.

After going through all that, continue to read the Clarkesworld’s issue, including the Lucius Shepard interview, an author that needs no introductions (but if you don’t know his writing, be assured that you should).

Wow. I suddenly realized I got away from doing one of those end-of-the-year lists that pop up everywhere at this particular time (and in the summer also). I do not hate them, or am immune to them, but damn if they don’t seem to over-clone themselves…

Some good stuff from out there

2009-12-31T04:39:00.000Z

Via Ecstatic Days you can catch this great read about critics on rookie mistakes.

And may you all have a better year than this last one.

Help The Robinson’s

2009-12-31T04:24:00.000Z

After reading this, about the cancer-plight of the Robinson’s, I instantly remembered reading Stardance more than 20 years ago

and got through the various links, notices and calls for help around the web. Among the many things I found out there, I was enourmously touched by this video over at the Robinson’s website.

So this is me helping spread the word. There are several ways you can help and buying a short story is one of them.

World SF News editorial

2009-12-23T22:15:00.000Z

As a prelude to Christmas, read the article I wrote for The World SF News Blog.

It talks of science fiction and of some of the presents I’d like for the future of portuguese SF. And the future of many of the non-anglospeaking markets.

You can read it by clicking its title: “Having it all”

Starsuckers or Valuesuckers?

2009-12-22T21:51:00.000Z

This doc trailer looks interesting.

In fact, today we in the writing business also have to ask ourselves what we’d really like: to be famous or to be artistically recognized.

There are no easy answers, and I’d almost bet against manichaen stances, but then I come from a generation raised in the shallow belief that we should be always against the system, and tend to give value only to some sort of artistic recognition.

Charlie Huston rocks!

2009-12-22T21:40:00.004Z

Here’s a taste of Charlie Huston’s acclaimed vampire series, featuring the chandlerian Pitt, a rough vampire with a damned consciousness and a nasty temper, thanx to the good folks of Del Rey and Suvudu:

Already Dead is a noir novel. It's not particularly groundbreaking, but it is well written and interesting. Joe Pitt is not of an adolescent persuasion, and neither are his troubles, so for those expecting teenage angst are better off elsewhere (TV's The Vampire Diaries will probably satisfy you, though it shouldn't - ghastly stale and puerile storytelling - but chacun a son gout).

This is a ride well worth taking. Enjoy. There are more books after this one, and I've just received the next one "No Dominion".

Vampire urban mayhem? On Christmas? Cool! :)

On Mythago Wood and all things Holdstock

2009-12-09T18:48:00.001Z

No one has said it better:

“So I think I know why Holdstock moved from science fiction into fantasy: because he found a perfect science fictional idea that could be most satisfactorily explored through the medium of fantasy.”

This and much more of importance to be read in this blog post by Paul Kinkaid.

Holdstock

2009-11-29T13:39:00.002Z

According to Ansible, Robert Holdstock is going through a rough patch, hospitalized with an E. Coli infection.

Robert Holdstock was here in Portugal a few years ago. I met him with a bunch of other people, none of us having read a single word by him. He was kind with all of us, a great conversation ensued, where we got to know, for instance, that the minute he arrived at Lisbon’s Airport, on listening to portuguese talking near him, he had a flash of wrongness (“maybe I’m in the wrong place: everyone seems to be speaking russian or some east european language!”). It was an afternoon well spent and it all got me very interested in reading his work. The Mythago Wood series is a marvelous take on fantasy that successfully runs away from the Tolkien tropes and modes, brilliantly written, which has come to be an important part of my personal readings.

I hope he gets better.

Ryman’s When it Changed is out

2009-11-29T06:53:00.001Z

This looks very interesting. Edited by Geoff Rymann, with pieces from Justina Robson, Adam Roberts, Gwyneth Jones, Paul Cornell and others.

Click on the cover for the blurbs.

Me, I already bought it.

Here’s a good visual concept

2009-11-29T06:07:00.000Z

This is a concept that has been around in Comics and theater shows but has never been rendered this way, at least as far as I know.

Very good cinematic and storytelling potential in it.

Check it out.

Sorry, it is not my fault

2009-11-26T12:26:00.000Z

It seems that now you have an excuse if you are or turn into a road-rager:

Gasoline fumes.

It explains a lot. Really. But then there’s that consciousness thingy, the one that sets us off from lab rats and animals in general.

It’s not a simple question of course, but is good to know that, when you get the urge to be an ass-hole in traffic, it may have something to do with an oil-derivative.

Or maybe not. There' are lots of situations where you may have this sort of attitude. Blogging, for instance, is well under this category; how many times do you comment or post in violent reaction to what someone says, how many times does it look to you as a bit out of proportion?

Character flaw or toxic fumes? Well, you decide. Me , I’ll go simmer down with a good book.

Blast from the Past

2009-11-25T07:00:00.001Z

This is especially useful to young writers, an excerpt from a post by Frederick Pohl at his wonderful blog, where he talks about another iconic genre figure, Lester Del Rey:

“Lester had a whole other style. Lester took as his model some of the historically great editors of the past and, like them, questioned every phrase and comma in every manuscript he accepted and made the authors rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. It paid off — once when I was having lunch with Lester’s boss he told me that he believed Lester was the most profitable editor in the publishing industry — but it was arduous.”

So, the next time you find the urge to wriggle yourself out of editorial hints to your work, think again: it will probably make your work better.

By the way, just take a stroll through Fred’s blog – it is full of great insights and pieces on the history of SF. It is apropriately entitled “The Way the Future Blogs”.

Introducing myself to Karl Kerschl

2009-11-11T19:35:00.000Z

Surfing and finding interesting stuff. What more can a creative mind want? Well, now that I think of it… quite a lot really. Meanwhile, click the picture for an interesting free webcomic called The Abominable Charles Christopher, by Karl Kerschl.

New SF&F Award

2009-11-05T05:01:00.000Z

Catching up on the SF news at large I saw this great piece of news.

In the website’s own words:

“These Awards reward the translation of science fiction, fantasy and related fiction from other languages into English. They exist both to promote the fiction of non-English-speaking authors and to highlight the valuable work done by translators.”

World Fantasy Awards

2009-11-04T01:42:00.000Z

Well, a bit late but not much:

Here are some of the World Fantasy Awards:

Best Novel (tie): The Shadow Year, Jeffrey Ford (Morrow) & Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin; Knopf)

Best Novella: “If Angels Fight”, Richard Bowes (F&SF 2/08)

Best Short Story: “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss”, Kij Johnson (Asimov’s 7/08)

Best Anthology: Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, Ekaterina Sedia, ed. (Senses Five Press)

Best Collection: The Drowned Life, Jeffrey Ford (HarperPerennial)

Best Artist: Shaun Tan

you can find the rest here.

And if you haven’t read any of them, well, at least go read the Kij Johnson short through the link above asap.

New Space Opera 2 – free excerpt

2009-10-21T09:33:00.001+01:00

I’m not the greatest fan of online reading, and I’ve actually bought the book in question, but I couldn’t ignore the opportunity of give you this one:

read some of the short stories in New Space Opera 2 (ed. G.Dozois)

Joint Forces Paliative to Bad Writing

2009-10-02T16:08:00.000+01:00

Here’s some sound advice for both pro and newbie writers by Scott Berkun:

“People talk about a book being a “great read” but rarely does anyone explore why, and a big part of it is how the author and copyeditor work together.”

You can check the rest of this interesting post that is really about copyediting here.

Sometimes people just forget that good collaboration at a professional level greatly improves the final product. The less authors give in to the Diva complex, the more everyone gains. Yes, everyone.

Riverworld-Another SyFy blunder?

2009-09-28T13:38:00.000+01:00

I can’t even begin to tell everything that seems and is completely wrong about this. The characters wake up fully dressed? Inside the river? No Richard Burton, probably one of the greatest characters PJF ever done? I especially cringed when I read “from the acclaimed fantasy author Philip José Farmer”. Nothing really wrong about that, but you see, he wrote mainly science fiction and yes, his fame came from that, and OH BY THE WAY, Riverworld is COMPLETELY SF!

SyFy makes justice to its ever-growing unpopularity with genre fans and general inteligent human beings…let’s just hope it won’t be as bad as that… *sigh*

H.P. Lovecraft’s The White Ship

2009-09-13T01:01:00.001+01:00

In my neverending search for genre-related art I once found this gem from the late 60’s in a music anthology. If you just want to hear it, see the first movie, but if you’d like a peak at the guys chating this eerie thing, then see the second one (but with lousy sound).

Near cloud 9

2009-09-12T02:57:00.000+01:00

Very interesting, though the ending does not fully satisfy me. Shawn Acker’s short 2005 film, the basis for this year’s 9 manages to give a steampunk patina over a children’s fantasy setting, which is a perfect combination. Rag dolls, mechanical ruins, metal goggles, monster killer-robot, electric bulbs, deserted landscape… what more could you want?

Here is the short for you to judge. For me, it is refreshingly cool dark SF&F after the overdose of antiadrenalic adolescent vampire soap operas which the market wants us to take.

And you can watch this year’s movie trailer at the official 9 website. This is a movie I won’t miss.

A.R.O.G. – Art knows no boundaries

2009-09-10T03:34:00.000+01:00

A.R.O.G. Film Fragmanı 1 (www.fragmans.com)

Cof-Coffee

2009-09-09T19:45:00.000+01:00

I have to thank Trama, one of my favorite bookshops in Lisbon for this one. The only caveat is that coffee makes me sleepy rather than awake – it’s genetic, I assure you. However, one tends to perform stupid stunts happier if one is coffee-warmed inside…

in Clarkesworld’s 36th Issue – Andreas Rocha

2009-09-04T20:27:00.001+01:00

Of course I’m happy whenever I see a countryman’s name among SF popular venues like the great e-zine Clarkesworld. I didn’t know Andreas Rocha’s work till it appeared in this months issue, but I’m sure to keep an eye on him from here on.

Clarkesworld has consistently published the best online covers since its first issue. That we can see a portuguese name there, well, excuse me if it makes me proud. :)

So go and check both websites. This Clarkesworld’s issue is the 36th and has articles by vandermeer and Macauley. It is even sporting a contest offering free books.

Paranormal Music

2009-08-29T07:02:00.001+01:00

So after writing some 4k on a steampunk novelette and watching Juno, one movie I’ll remember for awhile in many ways, I got stuck with this precious thing and it’s getting hard to flush it. Mainly because I like it a lot.

And here are the Lyrics for those who want to relish the whole thing:

Antsy Pants - Vampire
I am a vampire
I am a vampire
I am a vampire
I am a vampire
I am a vampire
Vampire
I am a vampire
I have lost my fangs

I am a vampire
I am a vampire
I am a vampire
I have lost my fangs

So I'm sad and I feel lonely
So I cry and I'm very angry
And I hate some garlic
So I'm so no more sad and
Ache yeah yeah

I am a vampire and I am looking in the city
Pretty girls don't look at me
Don't look at me
Cause I don't have my fangs
But I have lost my fangs

I am a vampire
I am a vampire
I have lost my mouth again
I am a vampire
I am a vampire
I have lost my mouth again

So I get bone and I shred
So I eat popcorn and I lose the weight
And I sing with my best good-looking
And I want to play the guitar
But my guitar is out of tune

I am a vampire
I am looking in the cd
And the musical don't play with me
Don't play with me

Because I don't play with my mouse again
And I have lost my mouse again

Avatar – Teaser Trailer

2009-08-22T19:38:00.001+01:00

James Cameron raising our hopes:

Space Nazis Again!

2009-08-18T13:53:00.001+01:00

This looks great:

This looks a bit on Hellboy mode, but hey, I like it. And the screenplay is by Johanna Sinisalo, which makes it even more interesting.

Mars-errific!

2009-08-14T20:05:00.001+01:00

This was inteligently rendered by nature (lol) specifically to excite the yet unmapped gene responsible for sense of wonder in SF fans: an image of Victoria Crater in the Meriadiani Planum.

The place of course is Mars.

Thanx to Nasa and their little robots.

Honing skills

2009-08-12T13:28:00.000+01:00

I was very curious about this book and, after reading 5 of its essays, I’m more than happy with buying it. If you wish to sample it, something I absolutely encourage you to do, just click on the cover and it will take you to the author’s website where some of them are available to read. The first two articles especially, the ones on the definition of SF and the origins of the genre, are a must read. Incredibly rational, thought of, and iluminating, which is something Kinkaid has gotten us used to by now. This is one of those books you’ll keep getting back to again and again.

Drawing Reality In

2009-08-11T13:02:00.000+01:00

Let me tell you about a graphic novel and a series. Both are interesting takes on the absence of colour. Though not groundbreaking, they are very good and often spectacular. Both talk about individuals powerfully dealing with emotions and changing the fundamentals of their realities.

First one, I Kill Giants, by Joe Kelly and Ken Niimura, is a tale about a girl coping with reality. As you all know, this can be pretty gruesome, and the story is freshingly aware of this, nicely holding information to propel the story. The book fondles with fantasy tropes, and the question of it being reality or not is really beside the point, a stance I really really like. This one made me finish the reading in soap opera mode, with a lump in my throat and a smile in the face. Simple, efective and with some wonderfull quirks, I Kill Giants was a nice add to my shelves.

________________________________________________

Secondly, we get Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter, by Darwyn Cook. An adaptation of a Donald Westlake (Stark) noir novel that works two colours in a way most people can’t work with the full spectrum. This is adult territory, of course, and the fantasy comes from the gruesome outlook on reality, not from outlandish imagination. The story is your quintessential noir revenge tale, with a bad guy on a murdering spree to get what he wants, and we get the whole bunch of guns-crooks-broads as is usual. It is a good story, though a couple of times the graphic choices seemed to fail a bit (very short and completely forgetable instances). As the first on a series of three graphic novels on Parker’s books, I think it stands as a spectacular first aproach to content and character, and I’m really looking forward for the next three, where I think Cooke will have honed his skills around them.

You can read a preview here; you won’t regret it.

Retro Stuffing the Present – SF at Large

2009-07-27T07:49:00.000+01:00

I found this post by Teresa Nielsen Hayden over at Making Light and it got me thinking.

It is funny that such a common futuristic trope as “Moving Sidewalks” (well, maybe not so common today, not with short moving runways everywhere, but they were a sign of future things for a very long time), was actually old technology by the time it got to look as a sign of futuristic machinery. Now that I think of it, even today they look really strange and wonderfull:

Is it the open air? The velocity itself? The sense of being driven more-or-less beyond our choice?

How come a piece of old tech could give so much people a sense of “it can only happen in the future”? Of course, the fact that it never got to be popular tech matters (we may get moving stairs on airports and stuff, but whole city streets? not common), and it was never used massively, which made such knowledge utterly invisible to social consciousness, or formally non-existent, but does that explain all? I don’t think so. Mainly because a large part of influential cultural opinion was always aware of such a technical possibility. In other words, people tend to know what is or isn’t remotely possible to achieve with their present state technology; they can even calculate when innovations are plausible or not according to what they know they have.

If Heinlein wrote about moving sidewalks, and other writers and illustrators took the hint, and used them as futuristic stuff 40 years after its invention, why did it work that way successfully? Curiously, I remember they were pretty cool future stuff when I watched the Jetsons as a kid; I also remember asking myself why they weren’t used everywhere.

I believe Why and What Happened, are interesting SF questions.

I guess an answer may lie between the stated above and somewhere near the Golden Age Myth, so typical of human emotional responses both at conscious and unconscious levels. We marvel at things that look perfect as we believe they can be; sometimes we even think old things were perfect. A piece of crappy machinery can look pretty nifty with eyes like that.

However, it is also true that old things are sometimes much more modern and cutting edge than many things present. For this, one doesn’t even have to sidestep from literature into technology: just think about surrealist works of art and how cutting edge many of it still is, or how lame some of the modern stuff looks.

And the question may also get away from this: why do Blu-ray disks and 40’’ plasma sets look modern and futuristic, when screens and discs are so old news? And why does some new technology like segways and mp3 players and micro-machines on Mars look so retro or plain old?

Like I said, interesting stuff.

The thing is, a good SF writer can capture these emotions and objectify them, in order to produce pertinent images, glaring and quizzing metaphors…or just to get some cool stuff in the way. It is important to think about this if we want our future worlds or advanced alien societies to be credible, sustained, and believable. Also to elicit our beloved sense of wonder (never forget the readers). SF always managed this mainly by estrangement (red skies, gold-plated cities, whatever), but for the futuristic hold to take place you must know what makes the readers tick, what shenanigans one can use to make other improbable or impossible places real. Sometimes, we even use cool literary devices (so old now) like tweaking the language (A Clockwork Orange, The Void Captain’s Tale, etc.). These and more are our bag of tricks, so if you must write it, we also must learn what we think and feel about it.

So we get back to the beginning, to the part where I said that all of us have a notion of what is or isn’t possible with today’s technology. If we look at it with sound notions and an open mind we manage to extrapolate credibly. Now get out of here and go write some good solid Science Fiction.

Discovering the use of Humour, Sarcasm, and Irony

2009-07-24T00:43:00.000+01:00

Read the article:

About The Moon-Moon Hoax

The moon first came to existence in 320 B.C. by a tibetan monk as we can gather by the evidence of scrolls 45F and 35G of the Ur-Simulation Archive at Mount Zion's National Institute for Foreign Knowlegde in Gaza. All is freely available on the net, just google for "First Moon" (it's one of the first hits, dead-on).

It seems there were entire mass alucinations (a known fenomena) provoked by ergot-enlightened priests and maintained through the ages till today by sheer human effort (In China they have enough people for that, specially in the region of Fukyi-o. And India too - see the latest New Scientist for why this is so). So today there are thousands of young chinamen and boys inside secret and not so secret installations beneath the Great Wall (western region) currently employed specifically to do that: create the illusion of a spherical glowing object at specific intervals in our night sky. Check the area with google maps; you'll see the infrared marks in some of the photos of the Wall Area B.

Nixon knew this when he went there. His aledgely Peace gesture to welcome China to the World Nations modern scene was when they signed the treaty of non-disclosure of The Moon Existance Hoax and the creation of new gullags specifically for american comunists then in need to be put out of the country at the time (remember the McCarthy Reading Sessions, see the transcripts).

JFK inherited this diplomatic embarassmnent and proceded to contract a known film assistant of German Nazi propaganda queen Riefhenstal to produce the Moon footage we came to grow up with (a familiar obsession of the Kennedy Family, the use of propaganda means, is known to all).

This is all very troublesome to bear, since it shows that we as westerners, have been goaded to stupidity for more than 2000 years. We still, and suspect, will be for a long time. Today, technology isn't even able to get the Virgin guy up in the clouds more than a small amount of time - id such thing was possible, he'd have gone and stayed up there, for he's certainly that kind of nutjob. Technology also shows us that it has the habit of replicating itself, even re-invent itself (in a slightly different way from us: we use dreams and wishfulfilment).

What we do know is this:
Anyone with Photoshop & 3D Software Bezier realted can create fake movies, photos, 3D digital and Natural Objects. Hell, we are even able put it on Youtube, which must make an interdimensional inprint across all realities (for this check the long interview of Gareth Lisi on New Yorker some months back), making of the U.S.of A. the mother of all media acroos the multiverse!

So why are we waiting for this damned We-went-to-the-moon fellas to get some sense, while we should be convincing Putin to launch nukes on them china leftist governments. Russia owes us at least that, since we were the ones to convince the Pope to make them loose Communism. Let them do the hard work.

We should be here, in our homes, giving love and truth to our families (something that the same NASA hasn't been able to put on pills yet, though they they do - they're only available to astronauts (remember sometime ago the news about wive-beating astronauts - cold turkey is a bad thing).

We, the people should go through with our lives, into the great beyond, to the Heaven of God - the biggest and most important and dificult quest humankind will ever take.

Besides, we're the only ones in the world with the money to pull that one off.

O. Ben Fordian

(in The Pretorian Gazette, Karachi Editions, 09/10/09)

Obs: this was inspired by the enlightened conversation in the comment section of this post in DVice.

Reading List for You

2009-07-23T02:02:00.001+01:00

Go over to SFSignal where they’re running a couple of posts with favorite SF short stories. Many of the recomended pieces are available online, so you can have a go at some shiny trinkets.

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/07/mind-meld-memorable-short-stories-to-add-to-your-reading-list-part-1-of-2/

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/07/mind-meld-memorable-short-stories-to-add-to-your-reading-list-part-2-of-2/

You’ll also get the chance to think about how tastes have changed in the last 20 years. Many of the (even now) called “classics” don’t show up. It’s true that this only reflects thechoices of the posters, but nevertheless…intriguing.

Orbit’s Challenge

2009-07-15T04:35:00.001+01:00

This is fun.

Orbit is asking for contributions. Imagine the worst SF&F title ever and post it in the comments section.

Feel free to join the fun.

SF-reasoning at the movies!

2009-07-10T03:28:00.000+01:00

After reading this review of Transformers 2, you’ll understand why science fiction protocols don’t work for the general mainstream public. Yes, the same one who probably will forgive Michael Bay anything.

But please, go read it. Hope you laugh as loud as I did.

Have Blues, Will Write

2009-07-09T01:39:00.001+01:00

There’s an interesting post about the never-ending subject of “why writers write” over at The Fix online. Specifically, it’s more of a musing over the fact that negative elements in a writer’s life can (or not) contribute to more creativity.

Of course everyone will have a take on this, and the answers will vary from person to person. But it did get me to think about my own experience.

At one particular time, I was Assistant Director in an Insurance Broker firm. Work was stimulating, varied, moderately satisfying and time-consuming. but it stood for 3 years without writing anything worth a damn.

On the other hand, the most intense period of writing I had to this day, was the ending year at an admin job I honestly hated. Clerk job is not glamorous or especially rewarding as everyone knows, but I was, for all intents and purposes, inside a bureaucratic black hole from where it was absolutely impossible getting out of (instead of the obvious one of quitting it – that’s the problem of analogies, they never fully work).

Out of it, before and after working hours, I wrote like the devil was on my heels. And that felt great.

Now, let’s hope I have the chance to taste the other side as well: writing in a completely writer-friendly environment. When and if that happens, I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Shallow End of the Pool, by Adam Troy-Castro

2009-07-08T00:23:00.000+01:00

I first met Adam Troy-Castro’s work in the pages of the late and fondly remembered Science Fiction Age. Those were amazingly funny stories about a couple of idiots that had the habit of getting into the most outrageous situations, and I never forgot them. Some of those tales got collected in the out-of-print Vossoff and Nimmitz: Just a Couple of Idiots Reupholstering Space and Time a book that is on my must-buy list.

Searching for it I’ve found some others that interested me. The first one I read was this nifty little tale, a novella called The Shallow End of the Pool (click for an excerpt or on the cover image for the Amazon link)), and I was amazed by the sheer simplicity of the horrid premise und so forth. A sister and a brother who are groomed by their parents for an event-fight, where they’ll fight, in pure gladiator-style, on behalf of their parents, to settle a mere family dispute. It gets bloddy, allegorical, to the point that I got to see it as a variation of the Adam vs Eve motif, done with intelligence and flair. I highly recomend it. Meanwhile, it seem more people liked it, enough to get it a couple of award nominations, namely for this year’s Stoker Award and for the Black Quill Award.

This is getting worse by the minute

2009-07-07T02:37:00.000+01:00

Just type www.scifi.com and you get this beautiful disturbed executive-oriented opening screen:

“Imagine Greater”? not to mention the horrid “SyFy”?

If you also got to see the promo video, then you know it’s time to forget any hope you might have entertained before, about them. The promo is a pretty thing and…and…nothing more. Empty, like good corporate judgement.

One has to agree with Napoleon: there’s no limit to stup…aaaahhh: what’s the point?

Goodbye SyFy.

Free million-flavored story

2009-06-27T01:33:00.000+01:00

Straight from the guy who just placed a million-pound hope for billions of science fiction writers wannabes:

Alastair Reynolds reading his short story “Scales” at the Guardian online. Check it out – I’m going there right now.

Moon Trailer

2009-04-27T04:09:00.001+01:00

A bit promising, I think.

Nebula Award News

2009-04-27T03:37:00.002+01:00

Well, it's official. Here are some of the awarded works:

Novel
Powers - Ursula K. Le Guin

Novella
The Spacetime Pool - Catherine Asaro

Novelette
Pride and Prometheus - John Kessel

Short Story
Trophy Wives - Nina Kiriki Hoffman

You can check the rest and the specifics at the SFWA website.

And why do I get the feeling this time it didn't go as it should be...?

Federations

2009-04-06T20:01:00.000+01:00

This looks very very interesting, so click on the cover and go to the website, where you can even find several of the stories available for reading, plus a lot of other goodies.

It seems an interesting mingle of past & present voices, chosen by John Joseph Adams, in a style a bit different from his acclaimed “Wastelands” anthology.

Enjoy!

Where’s that flowery dream we like?

2009-04-02T17:46:00.000+01:00

The late 60’s and early 70’s draw a lot of people’s attention for obvious reasons. Some, like me, are even nostalgic about them, even though I never experienced them properly (I was born in 1969, and the portuguese revolution that reinstated democracy was in 1974).

And sometimes I wonder about the people who were there and did things that I like and can relate to. What are they doing now and how does their past projects for the current world. Does anyone still carries a torch? The answer is yes, and I’m happy to say that I’m not only talking about my own parents.

Blog-checking today, I found at least two (non-unexpected) voices still sounding great. I just seem to not find anything american right now, and wonder why.

Posts by Gwyneth Jones and M.John Harrison.

These are instances of real life stories with a rebelious tang that is probably impossible to mimic by those who have come after. They say every generation begets it’s own language, but I think it is more a question of creating a whole world while talking about it and living it. So don’t mind the stories, but think about all the ambiance, and what it implies.

Why the Turing test will never work

2009-04-02T17:13:00.000+01:00

Just check the following interview at Tor.com with Ronald Moore, executive producer of BSG. See what he says about all BSG end-stuff, and draw your conclusions.

Mine are very simple and simplistic: some people will always seem like a deformed version of an evil robot when they open their mouths, but others will only look silly. Either way you look at it, the lack of any deep inteligence (or just sound reasoning) is apparent. And we’re left with the debris…

So here’s the link:

Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Ron Moore’s Genius...in 60 Seconds#comments

and why do I think the Turing test won’t ever work? Simple, really: people are generally so good at impersonating simplistic and mindless A.I.’s that the border will always be smudged.

SF as reality improvement

2009-03-23T17:20:00.000Z

I’ll just give you this little snippet from Jo Walton’s review of the SF classic Empire Star by Delany over at Tor.com:

“Empire Star did that thing that only science fiction can do by taking something real and making it fictional in a way that makes it emotionally more real, thus giving it an emotional core that carries back to the real world.”

To be honest, this is what every good fiction does. But it is true that SF makes it with much more flair and imagination…

When it seems that the real world can’t provide for suitable hyperbolic metaphors that can go to the core of the necessry mental explosion that a writer wants to achieve, SF is arguably the only one who can come up with the “big guns”.

Writers in general want to tackle the real world, and they sometimes succeed though more on the comment-level than on the impressionistic uptake. SF writers, by a generous fluke of social serendipity, are able to change it, improve it, and generaly do it multi-layer style. That is why it is so cool.

The Hugo Nominees are out

2009-03-22T03:02:00.001Z

The novel list is so… pop, but then, that’s exactly what the Hugos are for, isn’t it?

Best Novel
Neal Stephenson - Anathem

Neil Gaiman - The Graveyard Book

Cory Doctorow - Little Brother

Charles Stross - Saturn’s Children

John Scalzi - Zoe’s Tale

…and you can check the rest here.

The good thing is that, as it happens with Doctorow’s book abovementioned, you can read most of the shorter works online for free, so there’s no excuse for not reading them. Go there and, if you like them, go buy books by their authors – they’ll apreciate it.

Take your Songline

2009-03-22T02:36:00.000Z

This is for those that like or want to know something about Australia.

I first got into it with the amazing book by Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (Bill Bryson’s account left me a bit cold), and now and then I renew my love for the country. This time, I have to thank Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist for pointing out this video commercial, a nice minute and a half of nice storytelling:

SF Award pit-stop

2009-03-18T21:59:00.001Z

So, according to SFCrowsnest, here are the nominees for this year’s Clark Award. One of the bloodiest SF awards around…

The Owl

2009-03-18T19:01:00.000Z

Science fiction and Fantasy are linked to music as everyone knows. Sometimes also through the atmosphere it evokes and explores, like the following.

Not a bad video (good up until near the end where it collapses into empty solipsism), but the music is way better. The ensemble is however, is very satisfying.

World, SF & It’s about time to do this sort of thing

2009-03-05T17:52:00.001Z

In the wake of a growing interest on SF & F by non-english spreaking authors, take a look at this blog:

The World SF News blog

Death Art Animation - dark humour

2009-03-02T14:31:00.001Z

this is grotesquely funny

Watch Death Art Animation | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Oracle - French SF short

2009-03-02T14:11:00.001Z

Watch Oracle Sub English (www.oracle-lefilm.com) in Animation | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Remembering Paris

2009-02-27T21:29:00.001Z

The Economy is dead, Farmer is dead, and I don't feel so good myself...

Re-Altered Carbon

2009-02-23T09:15:00.000Z

My countrymen may recognize the following piece. This is an exercise in creative writing I did some time ago for a portuguese lit website about the first of the Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard Morgan. In essence it is a mix of review and short story, and I decided to try it in English, see if it fitted well in a proto-amanglic sleeve, so if you find any portuguese nuances, I’m to blame for them.

«A bit frightened, the Critic watches as the figure approaches. In the esplanade, no one looks there, to the end of the street, as if one should forget that all things begin somewhere. The Critic touches his palm screen, trying not to think while Kovacs, the harsh main character of Altered Carbon, crosses to his side of the street. He calmly braces himself for an overdose of pulp and noir, gently seeping on his bittersweet coffee cup, recent flashes of the late Dennis McShade ¹ crossing his mind. There, amidst the vivid novel set, under the reflector shield, the cold rain does not fall, but there’s no possible way to underestimate a night like this, where the black throws wetness like sluggish metal shoals at a man’s senses.

As Kovacs walks, the black waters on the asphalt don’t waver. Fortunately, he’s not coming for the Critic (but for chrissake don’t sound it ks; it’s spelled Kovach; the ch sound is important, at least for him): on the nearest building, the neon signs were traded long ago for powerful pixelized light beams, and they wash over the Critic like old delirium red. This planet, the Earth, he thinks, is utterly confused, like an old hooker still trying to score. The image can be rude, but is not unfortunate: Kovacs eventually enters the brothel near the café, for sure one of the many that show up in this first novel by the other.

This Other, the Englishman that goes by the name of Richard Morgan, doesn’t belong in this set. His time has passed: for a short period, he walked among the quiet Portuguese fandom present at the Fantastic Forum which was held at the Fine Arts University in Lisbon, where he had the opportunity to talk, autograph and present himself as the writer of half a dozen very successful novels (plus a dark rendering of Marvel’s Black Widow). Now, he’s here no more, travelling the world promoting his others, more recent works, like the gritty The Steel Remains, a bleak fantasy that’s selling well and is considered hereby recommended if you happen to read in English.

With a slight bend to the wrist, the Critic finishes his caffeine shot. He knows that for each stimulated neuron in his brain there’ll be carnage and death inside the brothel next door, he knows that that is the purpose of Kovacs very existence, the reason for his new contract and for being himself written. This is one of the things that make him one of the tough ones.

Before leaving home this morning, before cleaning the palmtop like sharpening a razorblade pencil, the Critic had had the time to sigh in front of the broken bathroom mirror: old age was getting to him; Lady Death straining to take a peek, to take notice of him like an old woman staring from a window sill. The Critic gulped then, his throat dry: maybe this was the real reason for him to want to write about Kovacs. Maybe.

As a character, Kovacs is a tough man, constantly eluding death (the big unspoken theme of Altered Carbon), but also handing it in huge doses, like poisoned candies in a vice-filled schoolyard. He arrived on Earth beamed from Harlan’s World after being violently killed (he travelled by needlecast - tecnophilic wording are used here to re-inforce the science fiction tropes of novel). A death at the hands of Authority, a co-joined death: even the Critic’s heart misses a beat remembering Sarah, Kovacs’ wife, going down under a barrage of cold bullets. The two were off-ed without hesitation, after a night of preambular sex. The usual. Then, he’s hired by an earthling millionaire who apparently committed suicide. This is a mere hindrance to Kovacs, a pretext for him to be taken out of the cold storage, all made possible by big money and a convenient cortical stack.

And for this too, the Critic envies him. For the passionless winning over death, for the huge adrenaline fixes of everyday. Here in Lisbon, in this Socratic Age² filled with neocon holes, there’s not much of any of that. It’s as if he’s much nearer of another of Morgan’s books, Market Forces, which is a brutal take on capitalism, and that the author’s publishers, Saída de Emergência, may offer us soon, zeitgeist permitting. The casual winning over death’s barrier is there in the fractured lines on Kovacs’ own face, in his reflected wish of being like this, hard as nails, filled of short words and multiple silences, a true free spirit, corrosively stuck on his broken self, apart from those emotions that aren’t absolute fire or devastating ice. This is what happens when you’re de-sensitized from world & death.

Then, there are the bunch of oniric excuses, of purposeful literary schemes: the gorgeous women who walk through his path, who want him even when he’s not the one they love; the echoes of the soon to be lighted cigarettes, even when he can’t. The invisible wounds on the face of both the Critic and the readers open wide - they expose themselves to these common traits because they know precisely where they’re being taken, they know exactly what it feels like to be infected by a mystery thriller virus, and that it feels good.

When he left home this morning, the Critic knew that finding Kovacs would be easy. Despite Kovacs being put inside another body or “sleeve” (from the English word that invokes an organism’s passive capacity for being dressed and used by others in this future world, one of the additional benefits of having cortical stacks and of the possibility of being recorded in them), a body that belonged to another, someone whose past is also an integral part of this story. Easy also, despite Kovacs being not an average person, but an Envoy, a man with an elite military training plus-ed with 150 years of granitic muscular stances; a killing machine on neurochem, a drug which the Protectorate gives its soldiers to increase their strength, speed, and prime their senses, a drug which does extreme things to a guy’s character. As an ex-Envoy, Kovacs is filled up to his ears in neurochem, which brings him all sorts of advantages: in this state, an Envoy can hear the slight hiss of breathing from a long distance and have the speed of an oversized human cheetah; he’s even able to go primitive and elude the thousand surveillance traps, the street-cams, the satellites. But most important is that this Envoy, who stopped being one so long ago, is Takeshi Kovacs, and everyone knows he’s walk-through will leave a brutal and swift trail of killing and mayhem, for that is his personal signature. At last, easy because Bay City, where most of the Altered Carbon’s action takes place, is a city full of rough barrios and hardened ghettos as any other metropolis, and to get there one must only go around the corner of a book cover and blink the eyes, surfing the distraction of neurons.

This is all in the back of the Critic’s head now, as he watches Kovacs leaving the brothel. The news flash blindingly from the small palm screen as rays of cold light penetrate the bloody redness over the esplanade. The Critic suddenly asks himself if all this is science fiction or a noir mystery, but there’s no simple answer. The gadget’s images have a gritty gray quality like all the Protectorate’s rules (for this is the sort of political regime here), and they slam hard on the Critic’s understanding: they stereo-show Kovacs walking out of another building, an uglier one, a veritable house of horrors, with a severed head under one arm. This is also in the book, something that makes the Critic flinch and swallow hard as he remembers dozens of old Hollywood movies. On the little screen, under the deep scar of his new face, Kovacs has a strange, gleeful gleam in his eyes, as if he’s somehow satisfied, a person at peace with the neurons who keep firing that this is personal, that he’s taking it like that because he wants it so, because sometimes you just have to snap and say “I’m not taking anymore of this shit”.

It’s here that the Critic tries to think about the stuff that brings fire and ice to Kovacs in the story, but then the same Kovacs stops some 15 feet off, in front of him, looking for something, a smoke probably.

Trembling, the Critic inhales his own smoke, and gags while swallowing a rough and guttural “shit” at the same time.

Kovacs stiffens. The Critic knows he doesn’t need Envoy skills to hear the nervous swearing or see the dark halo of disordered nicotine hovering between them. Kovacs turns and stares hard into the Critic’s face.

Time stretches as, for the first time, he feels the acid stench of his own fear.

In less than a fraction of a second, Kovacs is on him, the deadly barrel of the Nemex facing his eyes, dead centre.

“Who are you?” he says in that sort of legal pidgin that amanglic is.

“I’m…I’m a Critic.”

The rain darts silently over the street tar. Above, the soft tingle of the reflector shield drives the rain away.

The Nemex, a weapon that Kovacs admiringly doesn’t put to much use in Altered Carbon, but that shows off loud in other books by Morgan, seems to roar like the sea, steady as hell. Then, Kovacs’ face leans on him, making it really personal, and whispers:

“Trailing me isn’t healthy; what I do isn’t pretty either. If you come along, don’t be surprised.”

In the Euclidean spurt that takes for the Critic to blink and finally clear his throat, maybe just to say that he’s just doing his job, Kovacs is already a shadow entering the nightly dark of the street end where an aircar, a futuristic symbol par excellence is waiting.

The Critic stands up. He’s not a tough guy, but he carries enough hardness in his eyes. He sometimes even believes himself to have a hammer and chisel on his soul. But above all, he just has to know: how Kovacs will make out, through the mystery, through the traps, through the double-crossings, through the novel’s pages.

So he closes his palmtop, flings the cigarette, and goes after him.

He knows that there’ll be more brothels, more sex, more violence, and more deaths. Pure storytelling. This will be a cruel world, of old and rich men who go suicidal, treacherous women, and lethal henchmen; a world where death is conquered by almost all thanks to brain-stacks which rec & save at blinding speeds; a world where true death is a catholic commodity or revenge served cold.

Well, the Critic doesn’t have a cortical stack , and the only body he can ever use is this one that is aching just for standing up. But despite the trouble looming ahead and the virtual prospect of imaginary death, he enters the night, the rain, without thinking twice. Adrenalin falls over his bones, a good mistery shrouds his future, an old story lies on the bookish horizon. The rising figure of a successful novelist stands over everything.

Yes, this will be a great journey.»

________________________________________________

¹ Dennis McShade was the pseudonym of Dinis Machado, a Portuguese writer who wrote 3 very successful noir novels. Coincidently, a review of one of these books was posted along with the above. Serendipity. A poignant remembrance since Machado had died less then two months before these were up online

² Reference to current Portuguese prime-minister, José Socrates – not the other plump fellow :)

My Desktop Wallpaper

2009-02-22T11:08:00.000Z

Drool at will - Simmons unleashed

2009-02-18T15:34:00.001Z

If this isn't good news, I don't know what is.

Del Toro gunning for Simmons after doing The Hobbit... I like it better than the news about Hyperion, which can make anyone shiver.

You can believe this: though His Master's Voice (written actually) online, here. A juicy interview by none other than Cat Rambo.

Tall Tale

2009-02-15T12:35:00.003Z

Yes, it's true, I managed to survive another St Valentine's Day:

my girlfriend didn't kill me.

I must be doing something right for a change.

About Jeff Vandermeer’s “Errata”

2009-02-10T12:18:00.000Z

You can read the story at Tor.com or go directly through this link.

Wow, what a ride that was. Vandermeer has a fantastic grip on means and material, and I enjoyed it immensely, but…

For starters, this is not an easy story. It demands knowledge of writing, of fiction in general, of “phantastika” writers and more. It is demanding on the reader, but for the large part, it manages to engage and sprinkle your neurons. Some of the comments on it talk about it’s surreal qualities, but I found very few of those. What it is is a post-modern romp if I ever saw one, and the fantastical elements are more technical than substantial. It is, after all, about Jeff writing a short story. Period. That he does it with genius and panache goes without saying, but I think it loses a bit of its nerve near the end. We are promised a Bang and are not really given one. Another problem (which is not really one) is that without SF&F fandom, the story would be uncomprehensible; it targets the community so bluntly that it couldn’t be published outside of it. Nevertheless, it is superbly written and you should read it, so go there and take a look if you want to ponder about what it takes to write a short story.

Ah! And beware the Gradus, he’s probably one of those superpowered villains that refuse to stay dead. :)

Ah! Cloning again…or not quite

2009-02-08T19:49:00.000Z

Inducible pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are made very simply (compared to cloning human embryos) by taking adult cells and artificially activating certain genes. This effectively turns back the cell "clock": it de-differentiates, gaining the properties and characteristics of embryonic stem cells, but without ethical compromise.

“The Stem Cells Wars are Over” by Neil Scolding

in Standpoint, Feb 2009

If this checks out, the ethical stuff is taking a huge turn, and science as a whole may benefit in face of the “mad scientist” fingerpointing that some revel in.

The truth is, wheter we like it or not, science fiction as a whole shares some of the blame on this. (but hey, no one’s perfect…yet) Mad scientists, as well as clone horrors and all sorts of science derivated horrors have been cruising the lanes of fiction for a long long time. It is true that intelectually deficient reading and huge knavel-gazing are really the ones to blame when we hear the voices of doom condemning science, but the fact remains that SF talked about it first.

But fiction is, well, fiction. And it is true some people tend to forget that.

People do the wackiest things

2009-02-03T01:18:00.000Z

Take a look at an improbable Austen mashup.

Who said you can’t inprove on the classics?

RoF RIP Statement

2009-02-03T01:11:00.000Z

Well, it seems that Realms of Fantasy is really going down the drain. Oddly, it doesn’t surprise me. Not one bit. Maybe it’s because I remember Science Fiction Age (Scott Edelman, Ed.), it’s elderly sister, which was so god-damned good and that was unrelentlessly killed in 2000 for RoF to continue its baby-step blind cruzade for mushy fantasy. Read the SFAge’s fiction index and weep at leisure. I wished the same could be said about Rof…sadly, I don’t think it can.

Back From the Living

2009-01-14T15:30:00.000Z

It’s official: I’ve survived the end of the year, so it is certain that you’ll have to bear with me a little while longer. Christmas sweets demons haven’t managed to overwhelm me, and the cold-hearted bugs of influenza were properly repelled from my stronghold. Fortunately, zombies of the family kind (everyone’s got one or two) were absent. Not so lucky with the Large Intentions Collider, which went a bit off-line, but it will soon be put to running again.

Anyway, between an overdose of BSG and the real work done, I also manage to have some ethically clean thoughts and wants. With this said, let’s begin the new year with a plea to help an interesting e-zine livicated to science fiction and horror. So, drop by the APEX website and their online store and buy a book, or any of the previous printed issues still available. On the way, take a few minutes to check out the stories they have online, for some brain stimulation, for they are well worth a shot.

And remember, we are on the verge of being obamized. Let’s wish for best with this one.

Eco-Laugh

2008-12-14T01:54:00.001Z

Watts on Science and science Fiction

2008-12-10T14:35:00.001Z

"I believe the genre can slip a little real science under the reader's guard, but more importantly I think it can help instill scientific attitudes."

See the whole thing here

Superheroes Haiku

2008-10-29T08:01:00.001Z

Over at James Maxey blog The Prophet & The Dragon there has been going on a competition of superheroe themed haikai (if I'm getting the correct plural japanese form of haiku).

My contribution was under the guise of simplicity, and appeared in this particular post. I reproduce the poem here for you to read. Haiku is a poetic form that, if taken to it's technical necessities, can be a hell of nuisance to master. This try, for instance, doesn't take to account the demands of theme to each particular verse, but it has some kind of wabi feeling to it, which is one of the few must-have intentions.

They say October
Is the superhero month
But leaves do still fall

Recent Reads - Morgan & Ryman

2008-10-28T08:34:00.000Z

Some thoughts about recent readings.

Market Forces and Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan

Air, by Geoff Ryman

Morgan, who visited us here in Portugal recently, is a curious writer. I found Altered Carbon a very good first novel, Noir-ish SF with a nice firm grip of voice. As for Market Forces, it is a hell of a novel, much more acomplished, and with more emphasis on setting than style.

Altered Carbon stems from the Kovacs character and it's Nemex-styled way of solving and viewing the world, while Market Forces is a very different animal, being a corrosive description of what some actual economic views are leading us to (and it is not a pretty sight). However, one cannot get rid of Chris Faulkner (the main character in MF), as one cannot avoid Takeshi Kovacs. Both stick to our minds as actual possibilities or wishful thinking personality traits (as Morgan says, who doesn't want, now and then, to just grab a gun a shoot some relevant bastards?), but Chris Faulkner isn't like that, at least not in the beginning. Chris begins as a standard good guy, although we know that he has already killed in the course of his way up through the corrporate ladder, but he has done so in a more, mmmm, acceptable or justifiable way. Then, he starts changing. Throughout the book, he is led to more radical actions and a complete immersion of his personality into, not only what is expected of him as a rising young steel cold young executive, but beyond that, into a sort of unknown type of breed...which we may eventually recognize as a sort of Takeshi Kovacs (and something tells me that Black Man/Thirteen, which I haven't still read, fits well into this). Ultimately, a hard man that lives amorally in a hellish system, and that inevitably makes everything personal, with only fire and ice in his veins. This, in the context of the careful worldbuilding in MF, also changes the reader: what began as simple whishful tinking traits, has turned into a practical nightmare - and it stares into our faces as if asking bluntly: do you want this? do you wish to be like this? Are you willing to let it turn into this? The reader ends the novel, his back pinned against the wall by the force of the arguments, and no answer is easy. On the other hand, Altered Carbon doesn't ask us that, it's questions almost camouflaged in Kovacs speech. I guess these are some of the main reasons why both books have the disparate performance, specially in the United States (AC was a best-seller, and MF went by almost unnoticed or at least not liked). AC is flash-bam mistery novel with sf-nal dressings, while MF is the real deal, pure thought-provoking speculative fiction, with no more gadgets than late modern cars and guns.

Which takes me to Air, another novel that tries to shoot us in the face with a diferent kind of warning and also little gadgetry. Progress is coming and either you change or you'll be eaten alive by it's coming. Mae Chung, the main character, is a force of nature that prefers to ride the new wave instead of being swelled by it; and she wants to save everybody else too. She's a great character; Ryman makes her suffer all the changes and betrayals in order, not to make her grow as a character, not to use her as a vehicle of this likewise cautionary tale, but with a diferent intent: Mae is a character that doesn't change, but which is changed; she doesn't grow inside, but she fulfills herself as most people don't.

Character. Some even say that all fiction is about that; even the most idea-driven hardcore Science Fiction. I'm a bit more suave in the matter: it can be, and in many cases it should be.

One of the beautiful things in literature is that we have to take it one book at a time; even our technical or moral outstances have to (and should be) analysed book by book. It is important to react, to be changed by what we read.

Mmmm. Some food for thought in this.

Women Writing Science Fiction - an article

2008-10-16T14:07:00.001+01:00

This is one of the most interesting articles I've read recently, both for what it says and for the insights we get by the whole reading of them, so do go and check it out:

Women Writing Science Fiction, by Susan Elizabeth Lyons at Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Curiously, one of the things that stroke a cord in me, and which has nothing to do with genre related issues, is something Pamela Sargent says about the classics of SF: "Now much of the canon is out of print".

This has been one of my concerns, since the lack of published SF classics is something that is turning out to be troublesome in my own country. Many classics were published in Portugal in now defunct (or rapidly aproaching death) imprints. So no new readers are benefiting of the acumulated knowledge and...well, everything good that comes from having classics and canon. This also promotes bad writing, or at least awkward wheel-reinventions.

But in the english-language markets it is also felt. Mainly with many mid-list, small-press related authors trying to just do what has been superbly done before. Now that I think of it, many top authors, specially in the best-selling range, are also falling on this pitfal.

Some webzines have noticed this, even if not on purpose, (IroSF and Strange Horizons come to mind) and we are getting more and more articles on classic stories and novels, but it is still not enough. Not by far.

___________________________________________

The depositions of a number of SF women writers in the article are enlightening at several levels. It is a must read.

Also, follow the links in it to other articles and debates that are very interesting indeed.

___________________________________________

I just wished there were more SF women writers in portugal than we do now.

'Sigh'

The Zombie Outlook

2008-10-14T14:01:00.000+01:00

I have to thank Peter Watts for posting this image on his blog, since I have no idea from where it came. But did I laugh? Hell yes!

New Scientist goes the Berserker Way

2008-10-02T14:00:00.000+01:00

Well, not quite. But it is a catching phrase, isn't it?

It seems New Scientist magazine is going to do a science fiction special, to come out November, the 15th. It's about time! One might say.

Plus, they're drawing lots for some sf books giveaway where you enter just by choosing and justifying what is your favourite sf novel.

It's horribly dificult to choose just one, but I ended up with A Canticle for Leibowitz. Could have been Mindbridge, Hyperion, Stranger in a Strange Land, Blindsight, Ubik, Stars My Destination, Way Station, or dozens of others. But somehow, A Canticle...sums it up, better than most.

Enter the Dark Flow

2008-09-29T14:00:00.000+01:00

It seems that the Universe, or better yet, the Unknown Universe, is at it again.

Now, beside the dark matter and dark energy, scientists have detected a Dark Flow...and it is moving to a particular region in the observable space.

SF stuff of the best calbre.

Space-Time alien structures travelling through galactic mega-clusters arriving like the wrath of the gods to...

...mmm...have to give it some thought.

The only thing that bothers me is if someone finds that this is Existence trying to give the Universe a gigantic enema. The concept is staggering.

Even Among the Bastards

2008-09-24T08:07:00.000+01:00

There's a famous buddhist story/event where (this is after he reached enlightenment), the Buddha is asked about Gods, the origin of the universe, etc. His answer is simply on the lines of "I've never talked about that, so why ask me?"

I was reminded of this while reading of a similar passage in a Sherlock Holmes story by Conan Doyle, where Watson is appauled at him not knowing that the Earth moves around the sun; Holmes justifies himself in a similar way saying that such a thing is not important in his everyday life so why should he get to know about it?

Considering what I have gained from my sf readings along the years, I stumbled upon a curious fact that many of you may also have: people are constantly surprised with, or smirkful of, a spontaneous ability I have of noticing inconsistencies. As, for example, on seing a movie and instantly detecting a plot contradiction, more than a companion moviegoer has been surprised or shocked about it, or even found it distasteful as if I was there just to spoil his/her viewing of the film, and not as I think it, as if the moviemaker was spoiling it for us (even when I only comment.about it AFTER seeing the flick).

At this point in life, when most people and essays and all sorts of doctrines say I'm joyfully getting to the downhill side of phisiology, I notice that I do that often, sometimes without noticing it. More or less automaticaly, one might say. Most people however don't do this; most people don't think this way. Surely, those are people who don't read science fiction for sf readers usually do this sort of thing! That or I've read to much Heinlein when I was young.

All humans, or at least those who try to use their neuron-apparatus, read with a set of preconceived notions and atitudes in mind (call it codes or protocols, many have). When the guy who asks the buddha what of the basic religious questions and he answers pointing to his misdirection, there are only two possible answers for the questioner: either he's enlightened by the tell, or he's not and will never get to understand the true meaning of the answer. As for Holmes, it is more of a reversed question: everyone knows of the copernican model, so why don't you? When he states the un-usefullness of it for his everyday life, he's telling the questioner what he is, which in itself is a way of rephrasing and turn back the question.

This kind of logic tampering is always iluminating. SF reading protocols get a reader to continuously question the text in certain ways that realistic mainstream lit does not. The Game, or inconsistency search, is one of them. Then there's the actual reading: words are rendered meaningfull not only for their intrinsic meaning, buit also by their positioning. I know a lot of people who upon reading "neuron-apparatus" will feel unconfortable and/or will ask me what the hell does it mean, while most sf readers will instantly see it as a technofilic sf way of saying "brain" or "thinking process". In the same way, while reading Heinlein's famous "the door dilated", either you're plunged in the enlightened reading of an sf novel, or you're being rubbed in the nose with a preposterous use of words that convey no rational meaning. Also the same with a Delany example of "monopole magnets mining operations". And the Buddha of course.

All this is old ground by now, but what amazes me is how often people wilfully ignore it when arguing about SF in general. In and outside the field. Grumbling about the mainstream snobish atitudes, or their readers "blindness"

without remembering all of this, is like baking omelets with no eggs. Of course, many of those derisive attitudes are plain old self-marketing in action (if we're not smug on anyone, no one will respect us! harummpff!). And it's always easy to have a public listen to what you say about what they do not know. Mainstream readers who never read any SF & F will tend to believe what they hear about it from mainstream authors and critics...who often don't know a iota of the genre.

So don't be surprised about all of this. The history of Literature is filled with genres and tropes that are vilified to later be salvaged, prooving the vilifiers to be wrong and stupid many, many times. Chivalry romance, and Betrayal novels come to mind, to name but two. But what I think has modeled today's mainstream vs genre atitude is simply this: the advent of the pulps. Cheap printing and distribution. Of course, before that we had the same problem with String Novels, and all sorts of popular printings (some of those are today's classics which is superbly funny). But the pulps really massive the thing. Suddenly there were stories available even for the lowliest of the poor! And they wanted to read for chrissake! Working women! Gosh, where's the world coming to? This democratization of readership was a one way ticket into the future, and who got there? Surviving pulp genre's are SF & F, and the mistery. Adventure went with the 60's. Romance thrives as it always have. Now we get Paranormal romance. It comes and goes folks, have no doubt about it. And people will always be here to read everything, and discovering sweet stuff on the way. Even among the bastards.

ConCERNing Reality

2008-09-16T08:26:00.000+01:00

Are we at all certain that Life, the Earth & Everything, didn't go boom with the LHC switch-on?

Damn. And they say science fiction doesn't make you think.

Seriously, for years no one gave a damn about the experiment. Then, for about one month, the LHC was everywhere Net & Print. Now it's the silence that echoes unhindered...

I remember the first time I read about a collider program gone wrong: Robert J.Sawyer's Flashforward. Interesting concept, thriller-type prose. The subject stayed with me for a long time, specially by mental comparison with the Atom Bomb Experiment: no one really new what would happen if they detonated it; some people even speculated that the reaction could go on forever destroying Life & Etc. SF authors wrote of nuclear accidents that really happened.

The result is that I've finished writing a novella in that mode. Very zeitgeisty of me.

Now let's forget all this nonsense and get back to the real life.

Agualusa, From Angola to the World

2008-08-29T08:10:00.000+01:00

To those of you who are sometimes wondering about fantastic fiction written in other languages and from elsewhere that does'nt bear the english mark, here's an interview I found, from almost a year ago in the Worlds Without Borders website.

José Eduardo Agualusa is an angolan writer that often uses fantastic tropes in his works. He writres originally in portuguese.

MEME: Top 48 SF Movie Adaptations

2008-08-27T08:42:00.000+01:00

Via Pat's Fantasy Hotlist:

«From Box Office Mojo's list of Top 48 Sci-Fi Films Based on a Book (or Story) (1980- present). (...)

Here are the rules.
- Copy the list below.
- Mark in bold the movie titles for which you read the book.
- Italicize the movie titles for which you started the book but didn't finish it.
- Tag 5 people to perpetuate the meme. (You may of course play along anyway.)
And now, the list...

1. Jurassic Park
2. War of the Worlds
3. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
4. I, Robot
5. Contact
6. Congo
7. Cocoon
8. The Stepford Wives
9. The Time Machine
10. Starship Troopers
11. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
12. K-PAX
13. 2010
14. The Running Man
15. Sphere
16. The Mothman Prophecies
17. Dreamcatcher
18. Blade Runner(Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
19. Dune
20. The Island of Dr. Moreau
21. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
22. The Iron Giant(The Iron Man)
23. Battlefield Earth
24. The Incredible Shrinking Woman
25. Fire in the Sky
26. Altered States
27. Timeline
28. The Postman
29. Freejack(Immortality, Inc.)
30. Solaris
31. Memoirs of an Invisible Man
32. The Thing(Who Goes There?)
33. The Thirteenth Floor
34. Lifeforce(Space Vampires)
35. Deadly Friend
36. The Puppet Masters
37. 1984
38. A Scanner Darkly
39. Creator
40. Monkey Shines
41. Solo(Weapon)
42. The Handmaid's Tale
43. Communion
44. Carnosaur
45. From Beyond
46. Nightflyers
47. Watchers
48. Body Snatchers

Also not tagging anyone, so take it home only if you feel like it.

Penguin Frenzy

2008-08-25T08:12:00.000+01:00

In the neverending strange realm of publishing, some ventures do seem strange. Or at least awkward.

Check this one of Penguin:

Network dating for booklovers.

At the same time I begin to discover that they are beginning to publish some science fiction and fantasy in their classics imprint, we also get this.

I guess it was an accident waiting to happen...

What Do You Want from Reviewers?

2008-08-19T08:33:00.000+01:00

This is interesting. While everybody's usually concerned about what sort of reviews they want to read, or publish, authors definitely have some thoughts about it.

So here's an opinion for you to take a look:

What Do Authors Want from Reviewers? (David Louis Edelman)

Weekend Reading round-up

2008-08-11T08:15:00.000+01:00

I woke up with the feeling that I'm reading both too much and too little, heaven knows why, so I've made a list of what actually went through my tired eyes this weekend. What came up was the following:

Novellas
Flashback, by Dan Simmons

Short Stories
SF one (2,5k), work related

Essays
by James Gunn:
How to be a good critiquer and still remain friends
Teaching Science Fiction
The Worldview of Science Fiction
The Protocols of Science Fiction
Others:
Teaching Science Fiction: Unique Challenges (1978, printed in SFStudies nov.79), interventions of Benford, Delany, Sholes, Woodcock and Friedman

Novels
some pages of Hunter's Run, by Abraham, Dozois and Martin

Plus the usual array of Interviews, blogs, science articles, news and soforth. I'll have to say it is not bad. In terms of quality reading I think it's pretty good actually. Particularly Delany and Gunn about the SF reading Protocols, classic essays that should be required reading for everyone in and out of SF (check them if you can, just click on the links), and the Simmons Novella, which is brilliant, though the ending didn't went with my expectations.

So I'll have to say that I got my plurimodal data mining operations in the inner encephalic casing of me working quite well thank you. If you read the Delany piece, you'll understand. Maybe.

Hugo Award Winners

2008-08-10T11:14:00.002+01:00

via Cheryl Morgan and Of Blog of The Fallen here are the Hugo Awards

Campbell Award:
Mary Robinette Kowal

Fanzine:
Mike Glyer, File 770

Fan Writer:
John Scalzi

Best Semiprozine:
Locus

Best Short Story:
Elizabeth Bear, "Tideline" (appeared in the June 2007 issue of Asimov's)

Best Novelette:
Ted Chiang, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (appeared in limited-edition chapbook form and in the September 2007 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)

Best Novella:
Connie Willis, All Seated on the Ground (limited-edition book from Subterranean Press; appeared also in the December 2007 issue of Asimov's)

Best Novel:
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

There are no big surprises here, besides David Langford leaving the chair for the younger Scalzi.
Congratulations to everyone!

Now I'll have to read Chabon and more of Mary Robinette Kowal...

World Ennui and the Hugo Awards

2008-08-08T22:09:00.003+01:00

Everybody's down at Denvention for the WorldCon.
Awards and massive overdoses of science fiction, either wrapped in author-packages or bottled as panels and meals and everything else you can think of.

And I'm biting my fingernails from across the world, in a tiny corner of europe, waiting to here about who won the Hugos. As usual, you can find many of the stories online, so check on them.

Meanwhile, I'll be sulking in my little corner.

*sigh*

Science Fiction did a wonderful job with this one

2008-08-05T09:00:00.000+01:00

This post (How SF prepared me for the Future)by Catherynne M.Valente while guest-blogging over at Ecstatic Days is just so damn funny. It's the sort of positive pill we all need.

Go Team Cyborg!

Fiction yarn

2008-08-05T08:42:00.000+01:00

I seldom post fiction fiblets. But here's one.

While you were just a possibility, I used to sit on the floor wrapped in an indian bathrobe mantle, with a paper feather stuck in a tennis badana on my head. I looked at the dark forest that covered the world beyond the railway, at the few stars above. There were the blackest bright nights, sometimes filled with a silvery round moon. I'd be going there one day, sure as death and taxes. I tried to eidetically remember what it was like to be in the wild feeling the cold breeze, sniffing green and the animals nearby.
This is a me that has survived Time.
It's a wonderfull thing to have a time machine in your head, fueled by intemperate neurons. But the secret of its success I believe lies in the fact that it is also a multidimensional travel machine, for it takes us to places not in this reality.
Unfortunately, Time does wear the machinery off; perhaps not intirely, but it inexorably erodes it.
"No problem: with adulthood comes pharmaceutical help." you say.
Maybe. But those are just different colours. It is not the same voyage, not the same trip.
So now I sit by the bed, the window faces me to the old buildings on the other side of the street. If I lean over a bit, I'll see a glimpse of the night sky up above. Black as the blackest heart. I lit a cigarrette, trying not to sleep.
And when I open my eyes it is a grey morning, and you're still there.

I guess it takes all kinds, hey?