December 2, 2018

Prose, more prose, gloom and doom.

Updates

Not much to write home about this week as the year winds down and everyone retreats into their respective bunkers to tool up for the onslaught of the coming year.

Curriculum, of course, continues apace with one of my absolute favourite pages. Check it.

Project wise I’m currently working on another short prose piece, this time about absent fathers, parenthood and the crushing weight of expectation. Fun for all ages. A few more tweaks and this one will be ready for submission, I think.

Comics wise I’m currently circling a few potential stories that I want to iron out and get straight so I’m ready to hit the ground running with them in 2019.

Editing-wise I’m in a bit of a dry spell at the moment, which always comes around this time of year as everything slows to a holiday induced crawl.

I’ll use that as a timely reminder that I’m available for editing/project management for creative projects be it comics and/or prose.

Books 2018

So, a quick tour through some of the books I enjoyed this year. My comics reading dropped off a cliff this year, mostly due to the fact I don’t have a really practical device to read digital comics on anymore. Suggestions?

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

An excellent and thought-provoking play on the Frankenstein narrative, this time moving the action to the titular Baghdad as it seethes and contracts in the wake of American occupation.

Saadawai gives the creature here an almost vigilante-like mission, but weighs it against the idea of endless, circular conflict that threatens to envelop all around it. Haunting and savage.

Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine

A micro-history based around the relationship between technology, corporations and the military industrial complex. Levine’s book peels back some of the half-truths of the internet ‘origin story’ and digs into some of the more malicious and murkier aspects of its creation and ongoing use. As we see more and more examples of big tech collaborating with big government Levine is here to tell us that nothing much has changed.

The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander

Take the story of the real-life Radium girls, mix in a little fiction and sentient elephants and you have one of the most lyrical and heartbreaking books in recent memory.

Bolander tears into capitalism, industry and the destructive nature of the human race, skipping between two narratives that build to an extremely effective climax. Timely.

Tiny Crimes by Various

Forty short (very short) prose stories in the crime genre from a number of different authors. I was sold before I’d even looked at the table of contents, but the book itself doesn’t disappoint. Think of it as a prose version of Ed Brisson’s awesome Murder Book.

New Dark Age by James Bridle

Probably my favourite non-fiction book of the year. Bridle posits the idea that despite the human race having more data about the world it lives in we are currently drowning in a sea of incomprehension.

The drowning metaphor isn’t without purpose as Bridle draws together everything from the internet to climate change. It is a damning portrait of our ongoing ignorance in the face of looming destruction, both real and existential. Essential reading.

The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay

I’ll start with the plot description:

“Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. Their closest neighbors are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road.

One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, “None of what’s going to happen is your fault”. Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: “Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world.”

From that simple set up, Tremblay begins to pile on the tension until it becomes unbearable before delivering an absolute gut punch of a plot turn.

With a single location the narrative lives and dies on its character work and this one soars.

Honourable Mentions

All of the above came out in 2018 to the best of my knowledge. If I’d included books outside of that then the list would have been much longer.

• Gnomon by Nick Harkaway - an absolute beast of a book encompassing surveillance, identity and storytelling itself. Gnomon is a hugely ambitious book with Harkaway juggling multiple narratives, characters and bits of lore. He manages to pull it off.

• Killing Gravity by Corey J. White - A novella that if you’re a subscriber to Warren Ellis’ newsletter you will have heard much about. A jet-black, punk rock slice of space opera with a killer central heroine in Mariam Xi. The only reason I’m not blasting my way through the other two in the trilogy is that I want to savour the world Corey has built here.

• Things We Lost in The Fire by Mariana Enriquez - A collection of short stories that comfortably sit under the umbrella of ‘modern gothic’. Enriquez paints a picture of modern Argentina whose past is always waiting to leap from the shadows and drag the unsuspecting back into its maw.

• She Said Destroy by Nadia Bulkin - Another short story collection, this time fusing elements of the mythological with the modern, with an eye to upending some of the tropes so prevalent in the horror genre. Bulkin’s tales are also all infused with socio-political elements that make them much more effective. There is a passion and anger that sits beneath the work here that makes it a thrill to read.

• The Murders of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson - Another one that only really needs a description of its genius setup:

“For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember, she’s been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born, identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.

Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she also knows that as long as she survives she’ll be hunted. No matter how well she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl who looks just like her?”

Thompson takes this concept and runs with it, painting a picture of what a life lived in fear can do.

Links

• China are now actively recruiting children to be part of a new AI Weapons development programme.

• The Quietus take umbrage over the idea raised by a recent Vogue article that this has been a bad year for horror. On the contrary…

• Vonnegut’s Ice Nine is kind of real.

• The Intercept talk about the horrendous death toll in America’s post-9/11 conflicts.

• It’s December so the ‘Best of 2018’ lists are starting to roll in. Here‘s Eric Kohn’s list at Indiewire.

• A nice piece over at Todd Klein’s blog about prepping comic scripts for lettering (Via Kieron Gillen’s Newsletter)

• Half-Life is pretty much my ur-text for video games. It recenty turned 20 and the folks at The Ringer reflect on its legacy and impact.

• Staying on video games this Waypoint post on how players and scientsits (you read that right) in Spelunky are tweaking the rules of the games reality with an almost arcane set of rules and practices. Very inside baseball, but equally as fascinating.