Chart / September

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Who’s ready for Pacific State? Not me!

The advance review copies are out, the book blog tours are booked, and the world is waiting with baited breath to see if the people’s climate fiction champion, Grant Price, can follow up on the non-smash-hit Reality Testing with a deeper, more complex, more mature and more acerbic textual examination of the climate-ravaged corporatocracy. The only way to find out is to BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY. Fell those trees for my books! Fork over your cash to Amazon! Perpetuate the cycle!

A new low this month in Novel Heaven, Short Story Hell: a short story I submitted in April 2022 was returned to me with the note: “Thank you so much for trusting us with your work! As we are revamping our magazine as a poetry chapbook publisher, we have decided to return all submissions to their owners”. I think I paid a $10 fee for that. Strange business, literature.

Book of the month: Shuggie Bain. Heartbreaking, bittersweet and beautiful. Like a Ken Loach film written by Betty Smith, I devoured this novel (way after everyone else jumped on it beacuse of the Booker thing). The writing is deceptively simple, the characters reassuringly complex, and more than once I wanted to reach into the world created by Douglas Stuart and lift poor Shuggie out of it. This is a book that mums and high-falutin’ dudes alike can love in the same and different ways. It also reminded me of one of the best comedy sketches of all time.

Album of the month: If I divide it evenly between The Beggar by Swans and The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan, will I be accused of being so pretentious that I could give Paul Auster a run for his money? I don’t care. I like them both. Swans because it’s maybe Gira’s greatest accomplishment, Roan because why would I ever say no to saccharine-laced-with-fuck-you synthpop.

Film of the month: So I watched The Faculty for the first time since I was 14. What a weird film. Salma Hayek shows up for like two scenes. Robert Patrick plays the T1000. Usher is a shit-talking football star. Josh Hartnett is a 28-year-old high school student with weird hair. There’s a whole ten-minute-long scene that’s an ‘homage’ (rip-off) to The Thing. It doesn’t feel like a Robert Rodriguez movie, not beyond a few superficial flashes of style (sure, why not introduce the main characters with a freeze frame and their names written in graffitti like it’s The Warriors?). It’s still fascinating, though. And short. Just as I was properly settling into it, there was the final boss trying to murder Mr Frodo in the school’s own Olympic-sized swimming pool. Definitely worth watching again.

Profuse music:

1 Jun Fukamachi - Urban Square

2 Tangerine Dream - Rain in the Third House

3 Vril - Manium

4 Ana Roxanne - It’s a Rainy Day on the Cosmic Shore

5 Japan - The Experience of Swimming

6 Steve Hillage - Garden of Paradise

Early praise for Pacific State

Pacific State is currently doing the rounds with publications and bloggers – and a couple of early reviews are in. The hardworking fellows over at Los Angeles Book Review magazine had the following to say about the climate-punk extravaganza:

Pacific State is rife with iconic, well-timed lines. A remarkable, exciting experience is provided by its clever blending of realistically presented future concepts, rebellious characters, and spine-chilling action. It got my heart racing, my creativity stimulated, and my intellect completely engaged, much like seeing one of the movies from the Mission: Impossible and The Matrix series. If you enjoy futuristic, fast-paced sci-fi with fascinating technological details, this book is for you.

Pretty good, no? The reviewer did also say it lacked nuance, which is likely true. But so did Robocop.

More welcome words have winged their way to me from the magazine LoveReading, which shouts that:

The plot eases you in gradually, following Owen and Mia as their paths begin to cross. This is a clever way to incorporate world-building and is a reason why I didn’t feel as though I was missing out by joining the story in book two. There are also questions raised about the power of capitalism woven subtly into the narrative and a hint of change leaves the door open for future books. I think Pacific State is a quick and entertaining read. Fans of dystopian science fiction would definitely enjoy this series.

To top it off, they’ve awarded Pacific State its possibly coveted ‘Indie Books We Love’ status. They sent me a sort-of sticker, which I’ve added below. It’s like sports day at school, isn’t it, where everyone gets a prize.

check out my geocities page for more stickers

Chart / July

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Here we go. The Pacific State promotional machine is shuddering into life. Ungainly, reluctant, in need of a good spritz of oil if it wants to actually go anywhere. An early five-star appraisal from the world’s worst book review site, Readers Favorites, has the following to say:

“The story is excellently written, and it exceeded my expectations by far. There was never a dull moment with all the twists and turns. The suspense kept me on the edge of my seat.”

Honestly, if you’re a writer: don’t bother submitting it to that website. It’s utter trash. Yes, I’ll still quote it, but I’d be better off asking ChatGPT to give me a review.

And here’s another from Ben Scharf, producer at Andere Filme and director of the short film Darwin’s Fox, which won the 2022 Cannes Shorts Award:

“Price is redefining sci-fi. Gone are the days of cardboard characters, artifice and an overemphasis on technology. What we get instead is a dissection of the human condition in a reality that is twisted just far enough to serve the story. Playful, exhausting and crafty, all at once.”

That’s how you write a critique.

In other news, I have a short story appearing in God’s Cruel Joke magazine (print & online) this month. That’s right, I found a magazine to submit to that didn’t charge me $10-20 AND paid me….it is possible. I’ll post the link when it’s up.

Book of the month: Absolutely Boys in Zinc by Svetlana Alexievich. Utterly harrowing and heartbreaking, Alexievich gathers testimonies of soldiers, nurses and civilian contractors who took part in the Russian war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, as well as accounts from mothers and wives of the dead. The stories of the mothers are the saddest. What I find astounding is that these accounts sound similar to those emerging from the current conflict in Ukraine: duping conscripts into travelling to a warzone, leaving soldiers underequipped and starving, bludgeoning the population wholesale with cheap propaganda. Obviously I’m not saying “they should’ve given these boys more of a fighting chance!”; it’s just amazing that the Russian high command evidently didn’t learn anything in the intervening 44 years (more power to Ukraine). It has taken me a good couple of months to read, because a few pages is enough to send me into a misery spiral.

Film of the month: TETSUO: THE IRON MAN. Good God, what a film. It is the most insane hour of celluloid I’ve ever seen. I’d been planning to watch it ever since I was 16, but after reading so many accounts online about how low budget and nonsensical it was, I wasn’t willing to part with cold, hard cash for a copy. Fortunately, Criterion had the film up for a little while, and I feasted on it. Body horror, ingenious camera angles, no-holds-barred sex, an exacavator drill and a giant mecha battle. It’s amazing.

Album of the month: Grian Chatten - Chaos for the Fly. The Fontaines D.C. singer delivers a punchy collection of chamber pop in his signature drawl. I like.

A moveable feast:

1 Kettenkarussell - Maybe

2 Fejká - Hiraeth

3 Route 8 - This Raw Feeling

4 Out Of Place Artefacts - PROCYON

5 Lxury - Oblivion

COVER REVEAL: Pacific State

Okay, here we go. The second novel in the Sundown Cycle is called PACIFIC STATE and it will be released by Black Rose Writing on 21 December 2023.

What’s the rumpus? Just this:

On the streets of Berlin all morals can be bought for a price, and Owen Resler sold his long ago. Once an underground dissenter, now a corporate drone, he spends his days reluctantly manipulating data for Big Pharma. Across town, notorious gun-for-hire Mia Warsaw is putting together a team to assassinate one of the city's more unscrupulous business moguls—and she needs someone to handle the ones and zeroes. When Warsaw crosses paths with an increasingly desperate Resler, she hands the former radical an ultimatum: he can either succumb to death by a thousand bureaucratic paper cuts or take a chance with her. Of course, there's no guarantee he'll survive that, either…

Below is the cover, hot off the 90s graphic novel press. The Ryan Gosling tech bro looks slightly worried, but I assume he simply forgot to take his creatine that morning after his MR-assisted workout.

PACIFIC STATE is a sequel to Reality Testing only in the sense that it takes place in the same universe. It is a standalone story. It will be available for pre-order soon enough.