Colin Harvey – author

Some months ago, a group of us writerly types on the net formed the Codex Blog Tour to cross-promote each other’s work. Codex is a group that’s open to writers with a promotional sale, or who have attended qualifying workshops such as Clarion, Odyssey or Viable Paradise. Many of us have blogs such as this one, and you may have read my interviews with Aliette de Bodard and Brad Beaulieu.

 One of the bonuses of this sort of activity is that it brings us into contact with writers who we wouldn’t normally meet.

Such an author is the mysterious Dark Historical author E.C. Ambrose, who has posted an interview with me on their website, in which I talk about Dark Spires at some length. That gives me an excuse to put up Andy’s lovely dirigible fuelling station again!

The alarm rang at 5.30 this morning – yes, it’s Summer term. Having done a 58-hour week last week (some holiday) it’s hard to notice any difference.

I left the house at 7.30, and caught the train into Bath, where a charming gentleman at the station refused to sell me the Plusbus part of the ticket I caught for uni, on the principle that I should have bought it in Keynsham. My argument that the station can’t actually issue PlusBus tickets cut little ice with him. Finally, he relented after consulting his supervisor– and I just about caught the orange bus into campus in time for the lecture. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, since missing this one might have affected my mark…

After much more rushing around I managed to get home at about 2.30, and even now I’m still catching my breath…

I shall return -hopefully less out of breath than today- tomorrow!

I posted last Monday about the blackbirds nesting just outside our kitchen. apart from the one casualty -the brood shrank from four to three chicks- the family Skanky have clearly been prospering, because this morning two of the three surviving chicks had fledged.

That left the one solitary survivor in the nest, and just before we took Alice for her daily constitutional, he too had left the nest. (You can just about make out Junior lurking in the thick cover of the honeysuckle in the lower right side of the photo)

By the time we had returned, he too had dropped to the ground.

Sadly, he’d gone next door like his two siblings, and the high walls mean that we won’t get to see them any longer. It would have been nice to have had them in our undergrowth, as had happened in prevous years, but the main thing is that they prosper. If all goes well, we may see them as they get older and learn to fly.

But I can’t help feeling a little lost, rather as any parents do when their kids (or grandkids) leave the nest.

Everywhere I turn this morning, I seem to be confronted by bits of technology not working as they’re supposed to, or in many cases not working at all. I’m starting to wonder whether I have some mysterious aura that fritzes machinery and electronics.

We have BT Vision which -in theory- allows us to tape and watch TV programmes at a later date with a simple press of a button on the TV Guide. Except that a significant  proportion of said programmes cut out after 5 to 10 minutes and insist that the recording has completed. BT told us some weeks ago that it was known problem which had been resolved. Not on our set it hasn’t.

Yesterday I thought I was close to completing my last film assignment; I’d written the text, all that was left was to upload said text to Blogger and paste in the links. Er, except that Blogger keeps crashing my machine when I switch from HTML mode to standard mode; then last night it refused to preview beyond a certain point; then it simply refused to save. I suspect that the blog post has reached a certain permissable size, but that’s only a theory, and Blogger Help is as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike.

Is anyone out there an expert on Blogger, by the way? If you, feel free to get in touch via colin@colin-harvey.com but put ‘from the website’ in your header. I’d hate for the spam filter to chomp you up.

In the meantime, I shall have to break the blog post into three and hope that that doesn’t contravene the assignment isntructions, and it also calls for yet more links to be inserted. With breaking the original assignment into three equal-ish parts that isn’t going to be a short job — and it may turn out to be due to some other problem entirely.

Lastly, we recently switched to British Gas. We are obliged to provide a meter reading online. Guess what? That didn’t take, so they asked me to call in via an 0800 number. And when I did, I got a “sorry, there is a fault” on the line.

Perhaps I have unrealistic expectations, but rather than being more convenient and saving time, as the ads claim, it’s actually considerably less convenient, and has added probably an hour two to my working day in each of the last couple or three days. Seriously, is anyone else having this level of technology fail?

It was a different world, then, you see.                                                              

Those of you under 25 won’t be old enough to remember much about life before the internet, when Facebook didn’t rule the world, and writers didn’t spend almost as much time social networking as actually writing books. It must seem as quaint as brogues and Sunday school.

In those days readers had to wait months, even years for their favourite author’s latest book to reach them. What else they got to read of those  authors was an ocassional interview in a magazine, perhaps -if you were Isaac Asimov or Frederik Pohl- there would be  an autobiography, written long after the event. Everything else had to be decoded from the actual stories. With the exception of Harlan Ellison, of course, who lived life as if he was on the internet long before it was invented.

It made the writers mysterious. What were they like, those men and women, who SF back in the early to mid 1970s? The most readers could hope for was a specially written afterword or introduction, which we pored over for clues. Of course, nowadays such reclusiveness is all but impossible.

Unless your name is Kate Wilhelm, of course. It’s ironic that I should know so little about someone I’ve been reading for over 35 years, especially since her memoir/ writing manual, Storyteller won her a second Hugo in 2005, and she’s taught dozens, perhaps hundreds of writers at Clarion for over 30 years. But that’s the way she seems to be — even in the case of Storyteller, the book was as much about others as herself.

When I first encountered her in 1975, I wasn’t that impressed. “Whatever Happened to the Olmecs?” didn’t have any of the flashiness of a Zelazny or a Delany. Indeed, it barely seemed to my unsubtle teenage self to be SF at all.

But year by year my knowledge and appreciation grew. I won’t list the award winners or the Best Of appearances; you can read them for yourselves. Welcome, Chaos won me over, and “Forever Yours, Anna” made me a fan – it should have won a Hugo to go with the Nebula, but the best stories don’t always win.

For the last twenty-five years she’s been writing mystery novels rather than SF, but many of those mystery stories were leavened with the fantastic, although equally as many weren’t. Be it SF or mystery, all her novels are character-oriented and shine with a beautiful prose style.

I’d been thinking about her more and more over the last couple of weeks, with her recent appearances in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the realization that she’s mastered not one but two genres with equal aplomb, and my two favourites at that. Because she’s lauded for her SF, but reading Skeletons today, I realized what an impressive writer she is.

Reading PD James, for example, a teenager in one of her books talks as if they’re ninety, because James can’t capture the voice of anyone but her own generation. Similarly, all Ruth Rendell’s novels, for all their quality, have that same pedantic, slightly prissy voice. But Lee, the protagonist of Skeletons sounds exactly like a twenty-five year old, caught up in something innocuous, which escalates inexorably into a political thriller.

Perhaps it was cutting through the clutter of some of the Transtories submissions* this week, and then reading the stories in A Flush of Shadows so soon afterwards that rammed home to me that there’s not a word wasted in her prose:

They walked on the hard-packed wet sand at the edge of the water. Lime green waves rose knee-high before they lost themselves in the froth. Flocks of sandpipers probed the sand, scattered at their approach, settled again as soon as they passed. (“With Thimbles, With Forks, and Hope)

* Which is not to denigate those contributors; I’m sure that when they have over fifty years experience, their prose will be as effective. 

Not a word out of place, not a spare adverb or pronoun. Perhaps I should follow her example, and bid you farewell, until the next time you stop by.

E-books? I can almost hear you groan and mutter “Not that old chestnut again!”

Yes, I know, it’s almost been done to death. Is the traditional book doomed? Will e-books supplant them? Etc, etcetera, etbloodycetera. In fact, some of you may read some of the points below and get a certain feeling of deja vu…

Well, it’s popped up in the news again with a BBC item on how e-book sales shot up last year. Which is good news for me as an author, since Winter Song and all my other titles are available in both formats.

And as a reader I think that it’s a good thing in principle. I don’t use up as much space as for dead tree books, for one, and while I’m not entirely sure about the environmental benefits,   I’m willing to be convinced.

But I’m hardly messianic about it, as some are (There’s an organization called EPIC made up of  e-book authors who are positively desperate to be proven right, that the traditional book is doomed – I’m not quite sure why they’re such zealots), and I don’t buy into the idea that the book is doomed.

For a start, the book’s demise has been prophecised since some bloke called Wells at the end of the nineteenth century mentioned it in The Shape of Things to Come, and it hasn’t happened yet. I seem to remember that with the advent of videos, pundits were gleefully predicting a similar death for cinema. What happened was that cinema changed its approach, making going to the films a social event.

Author readings at bookstores may be the first wave of a similar adaption in the book world, although that particular aspect may affect e-books every bit as much as traditional ones.

But while as a reader I approve in principle of e-books, I have several problems with the way they are at the moment, which is what has prompted this post. Increasing numbers or e-copies for review have caused me to scale back my reviews, and I only see the problem worsening.

E-books are being plugged because they represent a way for manufacturers to prise money out of you the consumer. You can’t upgrade a book – you can bring out new editions, but there’s no onus on you to buy it. Based on every piece of new technology of the last twenty-five years, that won’t be the case with e-readers; instead there’ll be a new version which probably won’t be compatible with the old one. So all these people who are gleefully converting their libraries to virtual will almost certainly have to do the same again with someone brings out The! All! New! NookPlus! But it’s a great way for publishers to cut costs, especially for reviewers.

Second, I’m still not absolutely convinced about the environmental case. Doesn’t the manufacture of Kindles and Nooks and iPads use up resources? And do downloads really have absolutely no environmental impact? I suspect that like the use of ‘clean’ fuels, we’re simply moving demand for resources from one area to another, as has happened in places like Indonesia when bio-fuel took off. And any environmental impact will only worsen with increased demand.

Lastly, and most importantly for me as a reviewer, I find reading e-books anything but the immersive experience I get with traditional books. In perfect light and sitting at the right angle, I can see the screen of my netbook, but that determines how and where I sit.  To have the print at 100% on pdfs, I find pages have to go across screen, so I continually have to back up to check I haven’t missed anything. Reducing the size to where it fits on a page makes it so small I struggle to read it. Printing pages out costs money, especially if it’s a 400-page book, for example.

As I get older, I’m becomingly increasingly oriented around what I can find in the local library, which in the case of Bath, is nine Kate Wilhelm novels I’ve never read…

I’m sure that future generations won’t have these issues, but I suspect that enough people will to secure the future of traditional publishing in some format or other.

Expect to see more posts when the BBC -or someone else- highlights the issue in the news again.

Many of the stories in the May 2011 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction have two broadly recurring themes, music and the apocalypse.

The Final Verse’ by Chet Williamson tells of a folk song with a long, dark history and of two bluegrass musicians’ attempts to track down its missing last verse. It’s dark, chilling, and steeped in authenticity. Highly Recommended.

Robert Reed

The ubiquitous Robert Reed, who seems to be everywhere –but who actually only appeared twice in F&SF in 2010- returns with two stories, the first of which is ‘Stock Pictures.’ An old man is mowing his lawn when a beautiful woman and her companion stop and ask if they may take pictures for use in books and catalogues. It’s a strange yet effective story which the editor’s notes say caused a certain amount of discussion in the F & SF office, and like many of them, it’s hard to say what it’s about. Nonetheless, Recommended.

‘The Black Mountain’ by Albert E. Cowdrey takes the reader to a relatively unvisited part of the French Quarter of New Orleans, where a developer does recurring battle with his friend over the fate of New Orleans’ historical buildings.

Steven Popkes

Steven Popkes’ “Agent of Change” is one of several stories dealing with environmental catastrophe (as is the Cowdrey), this time adopting a light-hearted tone. A real-life Godzilla is found in the North Pacific, and begins to munch whaling vessels. Recommended.

“Fine Green Dust” by Don Webb tells of the end of the world; this time it really is with a whimper, rather than a bang. One of the strangest stories to come out of Austin, Texas.

 Alexandra Duncan

Alexandra Duncan’s novella ‘Rampion’ is at the core of the issue. Set in the dying days of the Umayyad caliphate in southern Spain, it sets a bittersweet love story between a Muslim man and a Christian woman against a backdrop of the breakdown and descent into anarchy of a multicultural society. Much of F & SF’s ‘Ye Olde Fantasy’ is little more than modern man and woman draped in clothes, but here Duncan dives deep under the skin of the hero and his society. Highly Recommended.

 ‘Signs of Life’ by Carter Scholz is another in the long line of stories about scientists in which science itself is a protagonist, of which perhaps the most famous is Gregory Benford’s Timescape. This time the scientist is Jim Byrne, casualty of a collapsed marriage, unable to connect with his colleagues, driving all around him away. Byrne is in the last chance saloon of research when he stumbles across recurring sequences in junk DNA strand, but even when his life looks to be turning around, Byrne sabotages its recovery. Highly Recommended.

Scott Bradfield’s ‘Starship Dazzle’ features the latest adventure of Dazzle (“the world’s first surgically adapted talking mutt,”) who has been gracing the pages of F & SF for over a dozen years. This time Dazzle has talked his way into NASA and is fired off into space to make First Contact, while Bradfield’s wry wit is turned on the world of consumerism. Recommended. 

‘The Old Terrologist’s Tale’ by S. L. Gilbow is a campfire story. The campfire may be on another world, thousands of years in the future, but the men (and women) sit around the fire, just as in any traditional tall tale. It’s an effective reworking, though and is Recommended.

Robert Reed returns with ‘The Road Ahead,’ a sequel –or perhaps a prequel- to ‘Stock Pictures, in which much is explained, but Reed leaves some questions to remain. Recommended.

Kate Wilhelm

Kate Wilhelm’s novelette ‘Music Makers’ concludes the issue with another musical story; novice reporter Jake Manfried is sent to interview the companion of a dead musician in Nashville,  and finds a beautiful house in the middle of a commercial district. He also finds the musician’s extended family. Wilhelm brings all her charm and fifty-plus years experience to bear on a seductive, poignant tale of blossoming love in the Deep South. Outstanding.

Another fine issue, this one with cover art by Tomislav Tikulin

Ugh. Drat that alarm was my second thought this morning. My first was actually aaagh!! wassat? Before I remembered where I was, and more importantly, who I was. I hate that moment of dislocation more and more with each passing week.

Yes, Kate was back to work this morning, and despite the fact that it’s still officially the Easter holidays for us studenty-types, it’s back to work for me. So I posted something on the Film Mumblings blog, and I’m writing this, my 500th post here.

Most of this week -I suspect- will be given over to the final MAF blog, which is worth either 6 or 12 marks (I can’t remember which — it’s bloody important, though) and trying to whip the Genre critical piece into shape.  Although some thoughts about e-books are bubbling away, prompted by a news item about their burgeoning popularity, and I have some critiquing to do.

So I’d better get on with it…Abyssinia!

Our house seems to have become a haven for wildlife. mainly because we’re the only people not chopping trees down in our immediate area. The birds especially appreciate the nesting opportunities.

In the early spring we had three blackbirds slugging it out for bragging rights in the garden. And by slugging it out, I mean exactly that — they’re territorial little buggers, and by the end of the spring one of the birds looked the worse for wear, having lost his tail.

But Skanky the Blackbird -as we christened him- is nothing if not resiliant. Before we went away we noticed that he had a mate. Mrs skanky didn’t seem to mind that he was tail-less.

When we got back from the week down in Dorset, we found that Skanky and Mrs Skanky had nested in the honeysuckle outside our kitchen. And they had four chicks who make a helluva racket. Unfortunately we can’t get a picture since the honeysuckle is too thick (we’ll have to have a word with the neighbours to ask them not to trim it back) but as you’ll see, we have one of Skanky in all his tail-less glory.

I’ve been strafed at least twice by low-flying birds hurtling around the corner to and from the nest before changing direction like boy racers rounding a corner (on two wheels) and on one occasion Skanky had to handbrake stop to not hurtle into my chest. Assuming the cats don’t wipe the chicks out, we could soon have six blackbirds -including fledgelings- causing mayhem right outside our back door.

But it’s nice to have them there, and shows how reliant on our garden vegetation wild birds are.

Gosh, is it that time already? Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?

I was surprised when I added up the April stats — this has been the month with the longest hours yet, barring the adjusted November figures (Click on the link for an explanation). But despite working an average 60-hour week throughout the month, I’ve been nowhere near as stressed as November, which proves to my satisfaction that it was the complexity caused by a third job that posed the problems then.

The switch over to the summer schedule means that uni work has taken a back seat during the second half of the month, once assignments were completed and -depending whether I include reading- only twenty to forty per cent of my time was spent on coursework. Feature Journalism accounted for almost forty per cent of that, and thirty per cent was spent on Writer’s Workshop; those were the subjects with assignments due in the first half of the month, although I also wrote an essay  for a student competition as part of my FJ hours.

But over twenty per cent of my April hours went on just three projects — a story sub to Asimovs, a synopsis for a planned wip, and most importantly of all, as I mentioned yesterday, editing for Transtories.

I have three more pieces of work to do in May for uni, and perhaps a couple of tutorials to attend to get my marks fed back to me, and then I’ll be fully on the summer schedule. I’ll be a little sad in a way, because that’ll be the end of another academic year.

Note to self; don’t think too much about that — live in the moment, instead.