I hope my favourite sci-fi newsletter, Ansible, won’t mind if I reproduce the following paragraph verbatim. Not only is this matter one that outrages me, but Ansible’s treatment of it is just brilliant. Anyway, enjoy:

Peter Watts, Canadian sf author beaten up and pepper-sprayed by a US border guard in December (see A270), was convicted on 19 March for ‘failure to comply with a lawful order’. Apparently it’s a felony to be even slightly groggy and hesitant when told to lie down on the ground by someone who has just punched you repeatedly in the face for asking a question. Sentencing should follow in late April. As they phrased it at Making Light: ‘Peter Watts has been found guilty of being assaulted by a border guard.’ Another notable victory in the War Against Tourism.

“The War Against Tourism”! I love it.

Of course, it’s no so funny for Watts. For his part in the incident where he was stopped, bullied, and beaten up by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers – whilst trying to return home to Canada – he now faces up to two years in prison.

Don't judge this one by its cover.

When Jeremy C Shipp asked for people willing to read the ARC of his forthcoming novel, Cursed, I was keen but nervous. I’ve been following Shipp on Twitter and enjoying his quirky humour. I’d noticed that Jeff Vandermeer – whom I greatly admire – thinks highly of him. And I’d read an interview Shipp gave in which he described the themes of the book – sounding intelligent and articulate in a way most authors don’t. It all made me want to get my hands on that book! But… Shipp is known for writing weird, bizarro, paranormal stories and, as my regular reader will know, I’m not really into that.

What if I hated it? Shipp seems like a really nice chap. The last thing I want to do is take his book and then trash it.

But I needn’t have worried. From the first page, no, from the number at the top of the first page (#12), I was hooked. The writing is light, clever and witty. The characters are painfully human, touchingly self-aware, and really nice, in a dysfunctional, I wouldn’t really want to spend an evening with one of them, sort of way.

It is a book about being cursed. Ostensibly a story about Nicholas and his friends Cicely and Abby who are trying to find who cursed them so they can get their lives back, there is another book just beneath the surface, about people who are damaged and hurting and the cruelties they suffer in a world that blames them for being who they are. It’s about the real-world curse of being what life made us.

It is dark. For all its tight writing, flashes of insight, and sprinkles of lovely humour, the book never lets you forget that our hero and his friends are suffering, that this is not a nice world they inhabit, that bad things are happening to them and everyone they love. All the time. Relentlessly.

So I’m very relieved to say I can recommend this book to everyone. Shipp has obviously stared into the abyss of the human condition and the abyss has just as clearly invited him over for a drink and a chat.

Hell, most people will like the paranormal stuff anyway.

You can order your copy of Cursed from the publisher, Raw Dog Screaming Press, Hyattsville, MD, USA. ISBN (hc) 978-1-933293-86-8 (pbk) 978-1-933293-88-5.

Dead America by Luke Keioskie

Let me come clean. Luke Keioskie is a friend, so I’m bound to be a bit biased about his work. On the other hand, he’s a friend I admire and respect for his work, so the fact that I like what he writes isn’t that big a surprise.

I first came across Dead America eighteen months ago when it was an unpublished manuscript that I got a sneak peek at, and I’ve been dying to read the whole thing ever since. The premise is just so good. People have stopped staying dead when they die. They’re not much different after death. They just tend to decompose a bit. The background to the book is a nation that is trying to come to terms with this new reality. The Newly Dead are pressing for the same rights as the living. The living are protesting on the streets that the Newly Dead are taking all the low-paid jobs. New businesses are springing up to serve the needs of the dead – especially the need for cosmetics and embalming.

The story, written in a hard-bitten, noir style – the perfect counterpoint to the horror and craziness of the setting – is about an ex-cop, P.I. trying to solve a murder and getting into more trouble than it seems he can handle. It’s fast paced and as good a P.I. story as you’ll read all year, but this particular noir detective story is a much darker shade of black than anything else you’ll find on the shelves. True to the genre, the story is told with a lot of humour – but that too is deliciously black.

To sum it up, Dead America was simply a terrific read. It was lively (and deadly) fascinating, allegorical, and great fun from beginning to end. I just hope there’s a sequel.

You can buy Dead America here.

I suppose I was as shocked as anyone to hear that Quartet Press has closed down even before it was launched. (Publishers Weekly has the full story.) It’s sad for Don Linn, Kat Meyer and the others who set up the venture that they couldn’t see a way to make it work. What I found much more shocking, however, was the fact that they had already signed publishing contracts with seven authors before they discovered that their business plan had a flaw in it. That means there are seven people who now have to tear up those contracts and go back to querying agents and publishers.

As you know, I recently signed a book contract with Lyrical Press and I’m right where those seven authors must have been – I’ve had the champagne, I’ve told all my friends and family, I’m planning the pre-launch, the launch and the post-launch publicity, I’m working through the editing process with the editor, and I’m just coming to accept the fact, just daring to let it sink in, that I have, at last, after all those years of trying, fulfilled a lifetime ambition and I’m about to become a published author.

Can you imagine how those seven people must have felt when they got the phone call – or the e-mail – from Quartet telling them it was a false alarm and their dream hadn’t come true after all?

My God! If there was ever a group of traumatised individuals badly in need of counselling, it must be those seven people. O how my heart goes out to them!

Will Smith fans going wild for sci-fi

I watched ‘I Am Legend‘ yesterday evening.

I admit it, I have a soft spot for Will Smith. There’s hardly a film he has made that I haven’t enjoyed – even ‘Hitch‘ was OK – and some I know I will watch again (including ‘Independence Day‘ and ‘Enemy of the State‘.) So I was willing to give ‘I Am Legend’ a go, even though I didn’t really fancy yet another post-apocalypse zombie movie.

But I was very pleasantly surprised. It was a good film and, better still, it was real science fiction. It had a pretty improbable but not impossible premise – that the end of the world would come through some well-intentioned piece of genetic engineering  – a virus that would kill off 95% of the population, leave 1% unaffected, and turn the rest into (almost) mindless, piebald, nocturnal canibals. The story was about one man – Will Smith – who is one of the immune survivors – perhaps the only one. Everyone else, he believes, has been eaten by the zombies. He lives alone in New York, hunting deer in the streets, and working on a cure for the virus as he slides slowly into madness.

Given the initial premise, everything about the film is plausible and well-realised. Mr. Smith gives an excellent performance, as ever.

The film is based on the book ‘I Am Legend’ by Richard Matheson, which I must read one day. I’m not expecting ‘Kalki‘ (my favourite post-apocalyptic novel) but I suspect it is the intelligence of Matheson’s writing that comes through and makes this a good film despite the usual Hollywood dumbing-down process.

I found this fun little widget whilst browsing Technorati. (Yes, I’m a geek.) And I configured it to be interesting. It compares the rate of use of the terms ‘sci-fi’, ‘science fiction’, ‘fantasy’ and ‘horror’ in blogs on the Web over the past 90 days.

Keyword popularity across the Blogosphere

This chart illustrates how many times blog posts across the Blogosphere contained the following keywords.

sci-fi vs. science fiction vs. fantasy vs. horror

» Configure this widget for your site!

Interestingly – but not surprisingly – ‘fantasy’ and ‘horror’ get a mention almost three times as often as ‘sci-fi’ and ‘science fiction’. The surprising thing is that it is only three times as often.