Here we are at the end of the year. As promised last time, this issue is a short one, 'cause I didn't want to add newsletter stress to all the other stresses of this time of the year. But if you want more Nothing Here, check out the archive.
Alright, enough of that. On with the show.
Corey J. White (CJW) - The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne. Tweets @cjwhite.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Writer, reader, weirdo. Author of ‘Welcome To Orphancorp’ and ‘Psynode’. Host of Catastropod. ADHD, spec fic, feminism, cats. Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creature // Oh Nothing Press // MechaDeath physical edition available now
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / Apocalyptic Futurist / #salvagepunk / @m1k3y
So many amazingly terrible revelations in this article by Mohamed Elmaazi and Max Blumenthal.
Recent hacked documents have revealed an international network of politicians, journalists, academics, researchers and military officers, all engaged in highly deceptive covert propaganda campaigns funded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), NATO, Facebook and hardline national security institutions.
Look at Facebook listed there next to the other usual suspects. Has anyone mentioned this might be a problem?
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CJW: Meet the Safecracker of Last Resort
Here’s the latest article from Geoff Manaugh, he who wrote A Burglar’s Guide to the City which is well worth a read for anyone who’s interested in the intersection of crime and the modern city. I imagine this article will end up in Manaugh’s next book, but why wait when you can read it right now.
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CJW: Ethnic Futurism in the Gulf
A kind of city state (even though it’s part of a larger country) that exists as the successor of the nation state, with all of its conceptions of belonging and citizenship which feel, in places like Dubai or Doha, very 20th century. A kind of perfected Darwinian capitalism that involves the (vexingly, consensual) importation of foreign labour at wages just barely better than their home countries, coupled with paying top dollar for highly skilled expats. (Any semblance of a middle class is erased or collapsed in a frenzy of consumerist excess).
And when the job is done, when the city no longer has any use for you, your visa expires and you’re sent straight back home. This and the sense of Dubai as a city that’s prefabricated, 3d-printed, shanzhai on an urban scale. Climate-controlled, earthquake-reinforced environments (global warming be damned), top-down mandates that require 100% adoption of “green” technology, artificially landscaped neighbourhoods that rely on 100% desalinated water because the water table’s been completely depleted and it doesn’t rain anymore. And so on.
I wrote a thing about being a child during the Gulf War, tied into Fatima Al Qadiri’s Desert Strike EP, and this is a really interesting article/interview I came across while researching Al Qadiri’s work.
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CJW: To Slow Down Climate Change, We Need To Take On Capitalism
If you’ve been keeping up with our Climate Catastrophe Coverage (CCC for short), then there won’t be anything new here, but I still thought it was an interesting insight from one of the greats of hard sci-fi.
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CJW: The 2018 Black List (via Ryan K. Lindsay)
A list of the best unproduced screenplays of 2018. It’s worth a look if you’re a writer to see the synopses for all these scripts. See which ones work for you, and why.
MKY: Blue Remembered Earth - Alastair Reynolds.
I’ve been listening to this on audiobook for the past few weeks, and in the end was glad I didn’t waste any time sitting down and reading this. Harsh, but I really didn’t feel the ending, or the setup for the sequels. I’m kinda getting sick of scifi novels set in the 22nd Century that don’t give more than a passing mention to how we get through climate chaos - they just mention that the Resource & Relocation Wars, its version of the Jackpot (The Peripheral) or the Ravine (3BodyProblem), were horrible (who knew?), and things are better now for the survivors who’ve inherited a repaired planet and have their eyes on the stars once more. Space is the place etc.... In its near future everyone and thing is tracked and controlled via ‘the mechanism’ - a global… err, solar surveillance system, except if you’re a hipster on the dark side of the moon, and the most disturbing passage in the book for me is when wildlife are automagically euthanised to save humans. We got through climate change, but ‘anthropocentrism still rules the worlds’ is a legit horror to me, and if there was even a token critique of this, I missed it.But, these are all my biases and bugbears… Otoh, you get to hang with elephants in the midst of an Uplift. Which is fun, if you’re into those ideas (especially how it might aid de-extinction). Likewise, the transhuman merpeople of the Aquatic Nations seem like they’d be cool (but holy shit does this come nowhere close to Peter Watts’s Rifter books) and I am here for the Panspermian Imperative… but sell it to me as a progression of re-stabilzing the Earth System please, or I’ll have to write it myself I guess :P.
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MJW: My book of the year was Michelle Tea’s Black Wave. It’s a juicy, vibrant memoir/apocalyptic fiction book and I raced through it.
M1k3y’s naughty list, 2018:
HOMECOMING - the podcast was better. The podcast about adapting the podcast into a tv series was more interesting. The pilot for this was the least engaging thing I watched all year. Given its from the Mr Robot creator, whose FUCK SOCIETY opening kept me watching the show far longer than I might have otherwise, this is a thing.
YOU MIGHT BE THE KILLER - the twitter thread was a better (send tweet).
BERLIN STATION S3 - four eps in and it looks clear they’ve dropped the threads from the end of s2 (going after the white nationalist international). I haven’t been so disappointed since watching whatever came after QUANTUM OF SOLACE, the best of the nu Bond movies imho, which did the same thing, and I’m still mad we didn’t get Anarchist Bond vs the Corrupters of the Earth. Gah. That said, it’s basically BERLIN STATION: OKKUPERT, which is the prompt I needed to get back into that great Norwegian political drama, which is also all about da Russians and hybrid war - which people should’ve paid more attention to in 2015, i’m just saying.
YOU [Netflix] - Millennial Dexter/Hannibal meets Gossip Girl (i guess? Never watched it). Like, the lead legit looks like a young Will Graham and all. Good enough to occupy you while the world is on fire <insert heatmaps of the current Australian climate apoc>, not great enough to rival the greatest dark romance ever (Hannibal). Does a serviceable job peeling the masks off humans to show the monster inside, and functioning as a critique of the idea of a ‘prince charming’, but someone tell this otherwise tech savvy guy about DuckDuckGo already.
CJW ROUND-UP
Articles:
April 16th, 2018 – Stephen King’s The Long Walk and the Art of Dystopian Simplicity
May 24th, 2018 – Five Unforgettable Prisons in Science Fiction and Fantasy
May 31st, 2018 – The Ship of Theseus Reveals a lot about Sci-fi
Interviews:
March 26th, 2018 – Talking Void Black Shadow with Paul Semel
June 2018 – Profile written by m1k3y, published in Aurealis Magazine Issue #111
November 5th, 2018 – Talking Static Ruin with Paul Semel
And here’s a late arrival - I did a big, in-depth interview with Joeseph Simpson about Oh Nothing Press, MechaDeath, the VoidWitch books, and more. Check it out.
Books:
Killing Gravity - technically this was released in 2017, but the audiobook came out in 2018, so it counts. Paperback ISBN: 9780765396310, eBook: 9780765395085, CD Audio: 9781980013181, eAudio: 9781980013198
Void Black Shadow - Paperback ISBN: 9780765396938, eBook: 9780765396921, CD Audio: 9781980013150, eAudio: 9781980013167
Static Ruin - Paperback ISBN: 9781250195548, eBook: 9781250195531, CD Audio: 9781980014706, eAudio: 9781980014805
Those are Amazon links, but if you want to track the books down elsewhere, just quote those ISBNs at your local bookstore, or punch them into your webstore of choice.
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MJW ROUND-UP
A year it has been. It sure was 365 days, wasn’t it? I finished the third book in my Mirii Mahoney series, then completely rewrote most of it and it is due out in April, 2019. I recorded, produced and edited my podcast, Catastropod and debuted it in October. In August I headed across to Worldcon in San Jose as the DUFF Delegate, tying in a trip down the West Coast of the USA with stops in Seattle to see friends and meet fellow sci-fi fans, Portland for more friends and San Francisco to read at Writers With Drinks. For the end of the year, I worked on a new novella that I hope sees the light of publication at some stage.
Non-Fiction:
‘Out of Here’, Scum Mag, January 2018
‘Invisible, until…On harassment and power in literary culture’ Overland, September 2018
Podcast:
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AA ROUND-UP
Oh Nothing Press founded
MECHADEATH
Zine:
Designed by Trash.Been, written by Corey J. White, concept by Austin Armatys - Digital Edition, Physical Edition
T-shirts:
Karnak One and Two, art by Megan Mushi.
Ikamulum One and Two, art by Septian Fajrianto
Tzemeger One and Two, art by Dan Comerci
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MKY ROUND-UP
Adds to the chorus of ‘It’s been a year’. I didn’t write anywhere near as much for theposthuman.world as I planned to, but I’m pretty happy with this short speech I gave recently and put there: A new life awaits us on the Alien Earth. Also damn happy with writing fiction for the first time in a long time, and the best effort I’ve made to date… but that’s not out till next year’s Creeper Magazine, innit folx.
And Corey already linked to my profile of him so… onwards, and onto another hellish lap around the sun.
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JE ROUND-UP
CJW: Here’s a quick round-up of some of John’s recent work that has caught my eye.
Check out his personal work here, and his commissioned work here. His instagram is here - have a scroll, because there’s some really stunning photos there that haven’t made it onto his main website yet. The artist John is working with on CEL (and other mini comics) is Jon Weber - check out his instagram here.
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CJW: Anyway, I hope that whatever holiday you celebrate around this time of year, you had a fantastic time. 2018 has been a rough one inside this skull of mine. But I survived, and so did you. I’m not going to lie to you - things are going to get tougher and weirder for a while yet. Stay strong. Remember your friends and loved ones are there for you, and remember to be there for them. We only have each other.