Talking of mothers, or at least mothers-to-be, Amanda Palmer will be at St. George’s on Friday May 29th. I have a ticket. I hope to see some of you there. Neil sadly, has been booked for two events at Hay that day, so he’s missing the gig. It is a tough life being popular, because often your life is not your own.
If you want a ticket for the gig, you can get one here. Let me know if you are going.
As some of you may know, I am a big fan of Jeff Wayne’s musical version of the HG Wells novel, The War of the Worlds. It was first released in 1978, and you can get an idea of its popularity by the fact that it is still going strong now. In 2006 Wayne created a stage show so that the work could be performed live, and in 2013 a performance at the O2 Arena in London was filmed. Last week I picked up a DVD of it, and having now watched it I am pleased to have done so.
Obviously the new version has a very different cast. The seemingly impossible job of replacing Richard Burton in the part of The Journalist has fallen to Liam Neeson who does a remarkably good job. Obviously someone as high profile as Neeson isn’t going to be able to tour with a stage show, so his part appears on a giant screen. There’s a lot of green-screen work, which looks horribly amateurish compared to something like Peter Jackson’s Tolkien films, but does the job. Much more impressively, there are short sections in which Neeson appears on stage as a hologram, interacting with the live actors. That’s appropriately science-fictional.
Neeson doesn’t sing, of course. When he is required to do so his part is taken by Marti Pellow, formerly of Wet Wet Wet. Again it is a tough ask to take on songs originally recorded by Justin Hayward, but Pellow does OK. In any case I’ll forgive him a lot for the way he disposes of the idiot interviewer in one of the bonus features. Mr. Pellow is clearly a fan.
The original stage production saw Jason Donovan take the part of The Artilleryman, but for this production he has moved sideways and plays The Parson. He’s very good indeed. Kerry Ellis, who plays Beth, The Parson’s Wife, is a great singer but can’t match Donovan’s acting.
The part of The Artilleryman is taken by Ricky Wilson of the Kaiser Chiefs. He too turns in a superb performance. Wayne has got in a specialist rock front man, Will Stapleton of Jettblack, for the song, “Thunder Child”, and that works well too.
One of the most obvious things about the new version is that it has gone totally steampunk. The stage dressing, and even the outfits of the orchestra and band, are now all very clearly from an imagined version of Victorian England rather than the real thing. There is a little more material now that Wayne isn’t limited by the length of two vinyl albums, so the story is a little easier to follow, but you have to look for most of the new stuff.
From a musical point of view the best thing is the presence of Chris Spedding and Herbie Flowers (whom I believe were both on the original recording). However, my eye was caught by the woman playing harp and percussion. It turned out that she’s Julia Thornton, who has toured with Roxy Music and is part of The Metaphors, a band formed by Andy McKay and Phil Thompson. Cue squee from the aging Roxy fangirl. She also has good taste in corsets.
Strangely the albums appear to be only available as expensive imports in the USA, but the whole of the original version has been uploaded to YouTube if you want to look for it. Here’s a taster.
A new issue of Fafnir, the Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, is now available online. I shall definitely be having a read as there is no way I can resist an article whose abstract begins thus:
In this article, I argue both Margaret Atwood in Handmaid’s Tale and Sheri S. Tepper in Gate to Women’s Country use the same three ‘women type’ characters to explore ideal female gender roles and their relationship to society. Further, I argue that both authors use these characters as part of their bigger rhetorical engagement with the American gender essentialist political movements of 1980s.
It is written by a man too. This will be interesting.
There is also an essay celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Sun Ra. So gender politics and Afrofuturism (and jazz). What’s not to like?
One of the things I do to keep positive through the winter is watch the cricket from the southern hemisphere, particularly South Africa as they are almost in the same time zone as I am. They are currently playing a test series against West Indies, and new match started today. The game is being played at St. Georges Park in Port Elizabeth, and a group of local fans have a really good brass band that often strikes up tune during a match. This morning I was surprised and delighted to hear them playing this:
I see from the Twitter feed of South African sports writer, Firdose Moonda, that they’ve had that number in their repertoire for some time, so it is not a sign of anything new in South Africa, but it is very welcome to hear all the same.
And you know, we could do with some more songs like that right now. #BlackLivesMatter
From my all-time favorite Christmas album, the very wonderful Ramsey Lewis Trio.
Hopefully most of you are at least getting off work early today. Tonight you may be settling in for a nice meal, some wine, and perhaps a little whisky before bed. What better accompaniment to that than some nice jazz. Gentle beings, from their album, Live at the Gilman House, I give you Mr. Ogham Waite and his Amphibian Jazz Band.
I woke up this morning to find Kate Elliott on Twitter saying that she was old because she remembered the early days of MTV.
I am SO OLD that my then-fiance & I used to go to a frozen yoghurt store that showed MTV so we could watch music videos. (no cable at home)
— Kate Elliott writing yet another book, go figure (@KateElliottSFF) November 16, 2014
Well, of course, some of us are SO OLD that we remember the days before MTV. But that doesn’t mean that music video didn’t exist. Kate’s post sent me down a rabbit hole of researching the history of the music video, hence this post. It will contain a lot of embeds so for the sake of those who scroll down my home page I’m putting them all behind a cut.
BristolCon starts tomorrow evening. I’ll be moderating two panels on Saturday, as follows:
Music in my Writing: Music might be even harder to write about than Sex or Death, and yet it’s a really important part of the process for most writers. Many authors write to music or put together soundtracks of their own books. How does music seep into and influence our work? — with Gunnar Roxen, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Kim Lakin-Smith, Sarah Ash.
Steampunk and the Class System: Does steampunk ignore what goes on below stairs? Is it all top hats and parasols, or should we be looking more at the dark underbelly of industrialisation and Empire? — with Robert Harkess, Scott Lewis, Roz Clarke, Adrian Tchaikovsky.
If you have any burning questions you would like put to one or other of the panels, I’ll try to find time to raise them, but what I’d really like are as follows:
1. Recommendations of the best author playlists that you have found in books you have read.
2. Recommendations of the best anti-Imperialist steampunk story you have read.
First up on today’s show I had the fabulous Roz Clarke in to do a quick preview of BristolCon. We may have mentioned several people that you know. It gave me a warm and cosy feeling to note that almost all of the authors we mentioned had been on the show themselves at some point in the past.
At the half hour point I handed over to Paulette who had Rachel de Garang in from Breathing Fire, a black women’s theatre company, who are putting on a show in honor of Maya Angelou. I didn’t catch all of the content, but it sounded fun. With Rachel in the studio was performance artist, Joanne Tremarco, from the Nomadic Academy for Fools. They are in Bristol at the moment and Joanne’s contribution is something called Women Who Wank.
Of course we are not allowed to say wank on the radio. Tommy Popcorn and I were highly amused at the gymnastics Paulette went through to get the point over.
I provided all of the music for the show. Two of the songs Paulette played are from Maya Angelou’s 1957 album, Miss Calypso. She has a great voice, and was clearly thinking along feminist lines even back then.
I got the studio back for the final half hour and played a pre-record of an interview I did with the Jamaican LGBT activist, Thomas Glave, when he was in Bristol the other week. Amongst other things, we discussed anal penetration, which apparently you are allowed to say on the radio. I also played a couple of songs that have Kenneth Williams levels of innuendo in them, both about gay sex. I may also have had a thing or two to say about Mike Read’s pro-UKIP single, which I am delighted to note he withdrew from sale shortly after the show was broadcast.
If you want to listen to the show, you can find the first hour here, and the second hour here.
Well you can see how busy that was just from the title.
Firstly I had Edson Burton in the studio to talk about the Afrofuturism season at the Watershed. Well, I should have done anyway. What actually happened was that Edson fell through a warp in the space-time continuum and was a bit late. Fortunately my colleague, Tommy Popcorn, had been at the screening of the George Clinton film and was able to talk about George for a while. My thanks to Tommy for filling in so ably. Also I related the story about the Playtex seamstresses who made the Apollo spacesuits (which I got from Hannu Rajaniemi’s Guest of Honor speech at Finncon).
Edson finally made it to the studio and previewed some of the up-coming Afrofuturism material. The item on black superheroes on Saturday sounds good, and obviously I’m looking forward to next Wednesday when they’ll be showing Pumzi, followed by a film about black science fiction writers, including interviews with Chip Delany, Octavia Butler and Steven Barnes. The later will be introduced by Ytasha Womack (live via Skype from Chicago), and I’ve just been writing a web article to go with it.
The second half hour was given over to a young lady called Vanessa from Bristol University who is studying Caribbean men who have had prostate cancer. I discovered the scary fact that as many as 1 in 4 Caribbean men in the UK can expect to be diagnosed with the disease, a much higher percentage than for white or Asian men. No one knows why, and Vanessa’s research is an important part of trying to find an answer so that something can be done about it.
I note in passing that most trans women will have prostates and can therefore get prostate cancer. Most GPs have no idea about that.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
For the second hour I handed the mic over to Paulette who had some more political material. First up were a couple of ladies from the City Council who help run a scheme to regulate private landlords. This is obviously great for tenants, but it can also be good for landlords too because going through an approved City Council scheme can be cheaper than using a letting agency.
In the process of doing the interview Paulette and I discovered, to our horror, that it is now mandatory for private landlords to check that anyone they let property to has the right to be resident in the UK.
For the final half hour we welcomed three young people from the Bristol Somali Youth Network. Many of you will have heard the story of Yusra Hussien, the 15-year-old Bristol girl who is believed to have flown to Turkey. The tabloid newspapers have been spinning this as “radicalized Muslim girl flies to join IS”. The story we get from the Somali community in Bristol is very different. The young people of BSYN have been trying hard to give their fellow teenagers a sense of community and belonging, but that must be very hard when so much of the British media is so openly hostile.
Talking of BSYN, they have a wonderful project going at the moment to collect unwanted books and ship them to the library in Mogadishu. Hopefully I will have them back to talk about this in a couple of weeks.
You can listen to the second hour of the show here.
The play list for the show was as follows:
The track “Clouds” comes from Prince’s new album, Art Official Age. My thanks to Edson and Charlie Jane Anders, both of whom enthused about the album to me. It is a very Afrofutrist piece, telling the story of a Mr. Nelson who is awakened after being in suspended animation for 45 years. One of Prince’s collaborators on the album is Lianne La Havas, a Jamaican-British musician whom Karen Lord tells me I need to listen to. And hey, if Prince thinks she’s good, and so does Karen, that’s good enough for me.
Maryam Mursal is Somalia’s best known musician. Both of the tracks I chose come from her album, The Journey, which tells the tale of the seven-month trek she and her five children undertook to escape from the Somali civil war and find a new home in Europe. The album is co-produced by Simon Emmerson and Martin Russell of Afro-Celt Sound System, and is available from Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records. Peter plays, and sings backing vocals, on it. To find out more about Maryam and the record, go here.
Last weekend was Fun Palaces weekend across the country. (Follow that link if you don’t know what that means, because the concept is a bit nebulous.) The Bristol event took place in the Watershed and was science fiction themed. I missed the Saturday event, which was also part of the Afrofuturism season, because I was in Cheltenham, but I went along on Sunday because there were events being run by BristolCon.
I’m not sure how successful the weekend was. Turnout seemed to be quite poor, but I suspect that was largely a result of the events being free, and so many different groups being involved in the organization. The only people in a position to exercise overall direction were the Watershed folks, and they didn’t have much budget due to it being a free event.
Still, Jo, Roz & the crew got their program done, and hopefully they’ll get some good entries for their short story competition. In the final session Jo handed out some writing prompts. Oddly enough, the two I picked fit very closely to the story I’m hoping to write for Accessing the Future. Of course that story is nothing to do with Bristol.
Talking of Bristol, Edson Burton shared with me this fine illustration of Spaceport Bristol done by Ãrojan for the Saturday event.
In the evening the Afrofuturism season got going again with the short film, Afronauts, followed by George Clinton: Tales of Dr Funkenstein. We all got the funk. Edson and I will be talking Afrofuturism from Noon on Wednesday on the Ujima Women’s Outlook show.
Last night saw the first event of the Afrofuturism season at the Watershed. The main item was a screening of Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, a rare film about the amazing jazz musician, Sun Ra. The film was preceded by a short discussion involving Edson Burton, the curator of the Watershed events, and two guests from across the pond: Ytasha Womack and Floyd Webb. Sadly they were only able to attend by Skype, and the sound quality wasn’t always great, but I was very happy to get to hear Ytasha at last. I highly recommend her book, Afrofuturism, and am still distraught that it just missed out on being a finalist for Best Related Work this year. I know a lot less about Webb because he works mainly in film, but he certainly knew his black SF.
Sadly I had to leave to catch a train part way through the film. I also missed out on the dance party that was staged after the film by some of my colleagues from Ujima Radio. I’ll also miss out on Courttia Newland’s flash fiction workshop because I’ll be in Cheltenham tomorrow. However, I hope to be at BristolCon’s Fun Palace events on Sunday, and I see that there’s a film about George Clinton in the evening. Also, next Wednesday Edson will be in my studio to talk about Afrofuturism. I can guarantee that there will be plenty of that funky stuff.
It was my great pleasure to welcome four Australian writers into the Women’s Outlook studio today. Cat Sparks, Donna Hanson, Rob Hood and Matt Ferrer are on vacation together after Worldcon and kindly agreed to come and talk to me for an hour. We chatted away about what they thought of the UK, and eventually got onto talking about their books as well. Special thanks are due to Thoraiya Dyer for listening in all the way from Australia. I love broadcasting to the world.
You can listen to the first half of the show here.
In the second hour I was joined by Gary Thompson of 121 Creatives, a local design company. We had a chat about the design industry and the sort of work Gary does. It is hard to give an impression of his work without images, but if you check out his website you can see some of the things we were talking about.
Finally Paulette and Judeline joined me in the studio for a chat about the various things we had been up to in the past couple of weeks. There is a small amount of Worldcon reporting in there, though obviously nothing in depth because the audience is very general.
You can listen to the second half of the show here.
The playlist for today’s show was as follows:
Yesterday was Jamaican Independence Day, which I had planned to celebrate with a little bit of discussion of reggae history. We got off to a slightly rocky start because my first guest, Jonathan Pinnock, had trouble finding the studio. Clearly I need to revisit the instructions I send to people. Huge thanks are due to Judeline and the two young lads who came in and improvised a discussion for the first 15 minutes. Fortunately Jon arrived in time for the next segment.
Jonathan was in the studio to talk about his new book, Take It Cool, which is the story of his search for his namesake, Dennis Pinnock, an early star of the Lovers’ Rock sub-genre of reggae. He also covers this history of the Pinnock family with the founding of Jamaica, which made the discussion especially appropriate for the day.
Also in the studio was Natalie Burns (who is part-Trinidadian) from the Small Stories group who are co-hosting the Ann & Jeff VanderMeer event later this month. Small Stories sounds like a really interesting group, and one I’d like to get involved with. Nat, Jon and I had a good chat about writing, including the value of experience of being an advertising copywriter.
You can listen to the first hour of the show here.
I had the second hour off as we had turned it over to the Second Steps group who are well used to running their own shows. If you would like to listen to their discussion of health issues, go here.
The playlist for my hour of the show was:
Next week I’ll be talking to Huw Powell (Gareth’s brother) about space pirates.
OK, so it isn’t exactly at SFWA rates, but at least it isn’t in a book I’m publishing myself. And I am getting paid for it. Besides, just look at that cover.
So yeah, paperback copies of The Girl at the End of the World, Vol 2, containing my story, “The Dragon’s Maw”, are now available from Amazon UK. They should spread to the US soon, and ebook editions will follow shortly. With any luck they’ll also be available at Nine Worlds, Worldcon and Eurocon.
I feel a little happy dance coming on. This looks suitably apocalyptic.
Our good friends Cauda Pavonis have published the first video of their performance at the Airship Ball, one of the launch events for Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion. Our thanks to them once again for doing a special acoustic set for us in order to keep the venue happy. Here is “Terror in the Nursery”.
I should write a very long blog post, but it is gone midnight and checking the audio recordings is more important so I’m just going do describe the event thus: mostly awesome, with a side of sore feet and mild sunburn.
Special thanks to:
I’m online at the Ujima studios because I have a meeting this evening and won’t be home until late. Getting some blogging done is a much better use of my time than going shopping.
Today’s show began with my friend Eugene Byrne talking about his new book about Bristol during World War I. Eugene has collected a lot of great stories. The book, Bravo Bristol!, is available on Amazon around the world, but if you want to get a preview of the material there is a website and a free app (which includes suggested walking tours).
The next half hour featured some people from the Trinity Centre who are running music courses for young people. As luck would have it, I had a studio full of teenagers on a National Citizenship Scheme course. They didn’t have a lot of interest in WWI, but once we mentioned music they all lit up and basically took over the show. One of them was even texting his mates getting questions to ask.
You can listen to the first hour here.
The second hour of the show was all about the Fair Trade movement, featuring our good friend Jenny Foster whom I have had on the show before. With her was Lucy Gatward from the Better Food Company. It was an interesting and wide-ranging conversation. Also I got to explain who Thor really is. Because it is radio you did not see me playing air guitar in the studio.
You can listen to the second hour here.
The playlist for today’s show was:
The final two tracks were recorded live on the main stage at Bristol Pride and appear courtesy of Shout Out Radio.
What I should have been doing yesterday was sleeping. What I actually did was host a 2-hour radio show on climate change and green power issues.
We started out with a pre-recorded interview with Tobias Buckell whose new novel, Hurricane Fever, is just out (and is a lot of fun). I have a longer version of the interview that I’ll be posting on Salon Futura in due course. The reason I had Tobias on the show was that his latest books talk a lot about the effect of climate change on the planet, and in particular on the Caribbean.
Next up were Tasha & Tin from the Avon Coalition Against Big Biofuels. This was mainly a discussion about how all biomass is not equal. Chopping down rain forests in South-East Asia and transporting the wood to the UK to be burned is not, by any stretch of the imagination, green.
You can listen to the first hour here.
At 1:00pm we were joined by Steve Norman who is part of a group protesting about existing activities at Avonmouth. Any wonder what happened to your household refuse? If you happen to live in the South-West of England much of it got baled up and stored at Avonmouth docks waiting to be shipped to Scandinavia for incineration. The local seagulls got rather excited about this, and once the bales had been pecked open the local flies took an interest and started breeding. It got so unpleasant event the Prime Minister was moved to comment. And as there are not enough incinerators in the UK to cope, the stuff is now going into landfill again.
This is, of course, a complicated issue. Ideally we’d throw away less refuse, but recycling facilities in the UK are dreadful and the amount of packaging on things we buy keeps going up. Incineration is better than landfill, but incinerating safely is challenging and companies are tempted to cut corners. Also the ash left after incineration is nasty stuff. So we end up exporting refuse to countries who are prepared to pay for proper incineration, or whose inhabitants don’t protest incinerators as loudly.
My final guest was Harriet from the Centre for Sustainable Energy because I wanted to end by talking about what we can do to help with the energy issue. The CSE does a lot of good work helping people reduce their energy use, and even generate their own. I was particularly interested in Harriet’s comments that people are much less likely to protest green power schemes (such as wind and solar farms) if they are community-owned, and supply power direct to the community, as is generally the case in Germany and Scotland, rather than being owned by multi-national corporations and feeding into the Grid, as is the case in England.
You can listen to the second half of the show here.
The music for the show was chosen by the guests, mostly by Tin. The songs were:
And here, just for you, Tobias, is Barray Adamson once again.
For those of you who are in or around Bristol, here are a few things happening this weekend.
On Friday night at Foyles Rebecca Lloyd will be launching Mercy and the View from Endless Street. Becca and I talked about the books yesterday on the radio. I’ll post the Listen Again links to that shortly. If you are into deeply creepy short fiction, Becca’s work will be right up your street.
On Saturday there are two events at bookstores in the city. First up Lord Grimdark (aka Joe Abercrombie) will begin his campaign to terrorize the youth of the world with his first YA novel, Half a King. He will be in Waterstones in The Galleries from 1:30pm.
Not long after, at 3:00pm, Gareth L. Powell’s brother, Huw, has a book launch at Foyles. While Gareth is busily forging a name for himself as a writer of adult SF, Huw is looking to take over the kids’ market. Spacejackers looks like a lot of fun.
Finally Saturday is the date of the St. Paul’s Carnival. Ujima Radio will, of course, be out in force all day. We are also running an after party at the Malcolm X Centre. I can’t see me making that, because it doesn’t start until midnight I am leaving for Finland on Monday (flying out Tuesday morning).