Chart / September

The best thing about working on a TV series as a writer: Bouncing ideas off other people and receiving instant feedback.

The worst thing about working on a TV series as a writer: Having ideas bounced off you and being expected to provide instant feedback.

As my career as a non-sci-fi writer is going nowhere fast (for some reason I thought the market for boxing/refugee crisis/Berlin party town novels was blowing up. It isn’t), I have thrown my lot in with a plucky bunch of people looking to bring the next Breaking Bad to the small screen. It means I likely won’t be doing other kinds of writing for the next few months, at least. I have to say that feels liberating.

I’M FREE.

Book of the month: The Space Merchants by Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl. Oh, what a shot in the arm this was for me. Critically acclaimed cyberpunk from the forward-looking days of 1953. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. Well, maybe not that, but a read that was actually enjoyable without needing to be grandiose or impart a Big Message or require me to have a qualification in horticulture in order to endure the flowery prose. There is - get this - a chapter of the book devoted to a protoplasmic, sentient mass of meat and tissue called Chicken Little that is regularly cut up into steaks to feed the downtrodden population of a neo-Victorian workhouse. This is all I want from a book.

Film of the month: Persona by Ingmar Bergman. Rumour has it the great director was unstable, but you’d never guess it from this descent into the depths of insanity, abortion, motherhood, homosexuality, sex and method acting. There are several shots in this film that cannot be topped, such as the moment when Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson lean toward the camera in profile, with Bibi’s face being overlaid by Liv’s in a kind of vampiric sexual synthesis that is more effortlessly, organically aesthetic than anything I’ve seen before.

Album of the month: For this already-too-cold month I will say Circuits by Moiré. Eight slices of tech house, nonsensically titled, metallic and tundra-like and futuristic. It’s what I’d expect to be listening to if I was ever transported to another planet with giant cities made of glass, where humans are made to fight android replicas for sport.

Music with which to stave off nuclear thoughts:

1 Joy Division - Autosuggestion

2 David Bowie - Subterraneans

3 Ryuichi Sakamoto - The End of Asia

4 Iron Curtain - Tarantula Scream

5 The Future Sound of London - Cascade

6 Aphex Twin - Milk Man

Chart / August

Did I realise that I didn’t write a chart post for July? Nope. Is that because I’m frantically working through the sequel to Reality Testing? Yes, indeed it is. Good guess.

It’s a funny time, revising a novel. Everything else goes out the window. The short story/essay mill grinds to a halt. The promotion for other books dries up. The vague idea of writing something for the website that isn’t a chart evaporates. The writing day becomes a battle of desire vs exhaustion, i.e. getting a passable draft down before becoming so sick of the novel’s world and the characters who populate it that I go off the boil well before the end, leading me to write such timeless sentences as “He looked through his eyes at the man who was looking at him” or “She had been trained to do it and it alone, like a train that is on rails and can’t go anywhere else because it is a train”. That kind of gold. One third still to go, and then I’ll start crafting something beautifully elegiac to submit to The Paris Review come wintertime.

News: Oh, I’m also working on a sci fi TV project. But it’s confidential so that’s all I can say. Sounds grand, doesn’t it? It most certainly is.

Film of the month: Forbidden Planet. We had a comic store called Forbidden Planet in Plymouth. Of the five or so years I spent there total, going into FP was the coolest thing to do with my time on a Saturday. Robocop dolls, Judge Dredd collections, mogwai-sized mogwai, the smell of weed and dust in the air. The eponymous film naturally has none of that, though there would likely be no Murphy without Robby the Robot. And who needs weed when you have Leslie Nielson playing a straight man? I came away from this 1956 extraplanetary extravaganza with one question on my mind: Who would win in a fight between the girder-carrying, bench-pressing Robby and the psychopathic, glamtastic Box from Logan’s Run? Both could take ED-209 in an instant, I reckon.

Book of the month: I have been reading the same book for the past six weeks and that book is American Gods by everyone’s favourite Gaiman. I like it and also I do not like it. The story is serpentine, but doesn’t seem to make much sense, and the writing veers from smart to clunky as hell within the space of a paragraph. By accident, I bought Gaiman’s “preferred” version, which contains 12,000 extra words his editor wisely cut out. That puts the word count at around 200,000, which seems excessive for “the adventures of a guy named Shadow and all the driving he did that time through snowy Americana”. I would really like to get it finished, because I have a bunch of other books waiting, but - like Shadow’s coin tricks - it never seems to end.

Album of the month: In a nice coincidence, it is a dead heat between punky upstarts The Chats with their sophomore effort GET FUCKED and post-hardcore heroes Chat Pile, who conjure up a series of nihilistic mechanical soundscapes in GOD’S COUNTRY. A very chatty month.

Music to mark a catastrophic rise in sea levels:

  1. Stimming, Robag Wruhme - Alpe Luisa

  2. Orbital - Smiley

  3. Jockstrap - 50/50

  4. Hudson Mohawke - Tincture

  5. Huerco S. - Plonk VI

  6. t l k - Most Alive

  7. boci - Time Weaver

The Castheiser Illusion

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Special post alert: Yesterday I had a short story titled THE CASTHEISER ILLUSION published in Green House Literary. I’m drawing attention to it because: 1. It’s very good, 2. It’s about people wilfully ignoring the climate crisis, 3. Europe is burning.

Set in near-future London, Stacks is an out-of-work astrophysicist struggling to find a reason to keep going when the outlook for humanity is so bleak. Then a chance encounter with an old colleague sends him down a rabbit hole of guilt, manipulation and mitigation. Soon only one question matters to Stacks: What - or who - is Castheiser?

THE STORY IS AVAILABLE HERE.

‘The prediction models think the next storm will wipe out half of London.’

‘Didn’t the last one do that already?’ Melchior laughed when he saw the look on Stacks’s face. ‘Oh, it’s no joking matter, I know. All those dead. But what else can one do? Better to see the humour in the situation than to fret.’

The Castheiser Illusion is the third story in an extended series set in the Sundown universe. The other two are Pawn’s Promotion and Combers. More to come.

Chart / June

And so it is June, and the thermometer spends all day edging 35 degrees like a porn addict. I’d say this has been rather a sorry month for humanity, what with the overturning of Roe vs Wade, the fourth month of unabated war crimes in Ukraine, the cancellation of Pride celebrations in Norway because of some mentalist, the famine in Sudan and the lack of support from Europe, the earthquake in Afghanistan and the lack of support from Europe, and the ongoing slow death of nature. If this thing of ours truly is an experiment instigated by higher beings to determine whether compassion and righteousness win out against greed and hate, let me just say that they’re shaking their five-dimensional heads right now and wondering what the fuck we’re up to. Perhaps July will be better. Perhaps 2023 will be better. Perhaps the next decade will be better.

News? None. I don’t know if it’s the after-effects of the pandemic or what, but people in the literary world are slower than ever to respond to 1. queries and 2. short story submissions. A couple of weeks ago I received a response to a story that I submitted back in August 2020. That’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 22 months. It was a rejection.

Book of the month: Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption and Hollywood by Danny Trejo. This was quite a read. I’ve liked Danny Trejo ever since I saw him at the tender age of 10 as the mute knife-throwing assassin in Desperado, and to get a few insights into the life of a certified badass was a welcome change of pace from the highfalutin crap I usually read. The man was mean, and he spent a long time in prison because of it, and somehow, despite the solitary confinements and aggression and riots, he emerged from it with (some kind of) god on his side and a desire to do good things in his heart. That’s pretty cool. Also interesting is the Latino community in LA, which I knew next to nothing about (aside from watching Training Day eight times), and the fact that Trejo was one of the OGs down at Muscle Beach. What a life that dude has had.

Album of the month: Hmm, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky by Porridge Radio, I guess. More indie rock, more post-punk, more simple riffs and simpler lyrics. I’m getting predictable.

Film of the month: One film I saw this month which was truly strange was Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull: A History Lesson. Directed by Robert Altman and starring Paul Newman, Harvey Keitel, Burt Lancaster and Shelley Duval, the thing plays out like someone’s half-remembered dream. I’m not sure who it was made for. It’s barely entertaining, Newman does little except brood and drink whiskey from a chalice, there’s no real narrative structure, and there are at least four scenes of women singing opera for no reason. If it was by Pasolini and featured a cast of youthful no-name actors speaking rapid-fire Italian then I would understand, but this was released by United Artists in theatres throughout the US. I love the subversive nature of M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye, California Split, McCabe & Ms Miller and The Player, but Buffalo Bill is a step too far for me. And so in conclusion I’ll award ‘film of the month’ to the brilliant Black Belt Jones starring Jim Kelly, if only for the foam-filled finale in a car wash.

Lights, camera, music:

1 Deftones - Error

2 Megadeth - We’ll Be Back

3 High Desert Queen - Heads Will Roll

4 Kal-El - Spiral

5 Alter Bridge - Ties That Bind

6 Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard - Valmasque