Good things happening at the Cork Short Story festival 19th – 23rd September. See you all there.
Stand Magazine out now!
Stand Magazine is out now with new poems by Geoffrey Hill, and work by Irish poets Geraldine Mitchell and Shirley McClure.
I’ve got a short story in it.
Stand celebrates 60 years this year, making it one of the grand old dames of the British literary scene. It has published works by Samuel Beckett and Angela Carter, early work by Andrew Motion and lots of others.
Lemistry book review
I was asked to review
Lemistry a Celebration of the Work of Stanislaw Lem
for the Short Review.
But Tania Hershmann is taking a break from running The Short Review, so I’ll post it here while I look for somewhere to place it.
I first came across Lem in a story of his which was included in Hofstadter and Dennet’s 1981 popular philosophy book, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul. I went on to read His Master’s Voice and Solaris with an attitude of reverence that here was someone with insight into the future of mind in the electronic age. I gave up on his Tales of Pirx the Pilot. It was years before I could appreciate these stories for what they are: entertaining sci-fi adventures. Then over a decade later when I lived in Poland, I mentioned to a Polish colleague that I was an old Lem fan. He shook his head. All this fiction, he averred, was just Lem playing around and earning his crust. His real work was in the many untranslated essays.
Which all goes to back up the editors claim that “there are several Stanislaw Lems” as they put it in their introduction. And appropriately this celebratory anthology contains a wide range of approaches: new translations, fiction, essay, and criticism. It starts off with three Lem stories which have not previously appeared in translation. There follows thirteen pieces of fiction by British and Polish authors, grouped under the provocative heading ‘Reconstructed Originals.” Perhaps this is to suggest that elements of Lem’s consciousness have been transferred, through the medium of his writing, to the minds of these writers. The book concludes with four essays: three by scientists and one by science fiction critic and editor Andy Sawyer.
The three Lem stories have never before appeared in English. The selection captures Lem at his most impish (in the tale of an alien invasion defeated by a drunken villager) and also in a speculative frame, wondering at how to distinguish the virtual from the real. These might not be stories which convincingly demonstrate Lem’s genius, but they will be a rare treat for fans.
The first ‘story’ in the middle section of the book seems to be a review by Lem of a novel by Frank Cottrell Boyce. It’s up to the reader to figure out (OK, I used google) that the book is fictional, and the review is a ‘reconstructed original’. The piece is a fitting tribute to Lem’s own ingenious collection of reviews of fictional books.
5-Sigma Certainty by Trevor Hoyle is a journalist’s account of tracking down Philip K. Dick to get his theories on his Polish rival. The details are so convincing, I thought this might be a real account: there is after all no explicit indication that the middle section of the book is all fiction. Both here and in the first piece, there is a provocative blurring of lines between reality and fiction, just as some other stories blur the lines between virtual and conventional reality, or between organic and digital minds.
Some of the stories here can be enjoyed for their retro sci-fi feel. Others because they play around with some of Lem’s favourite tropes. Apart from the two already mentioned, stories to note include Stanlemian by Wojciech Orlinski, and Terracotta Robot by Adam Marek. There are a few weak ones among them, it has to be said, and maybe too many that are sci-fi based on the state of science in the 60s and not as it is today.
None of the stories meet the challenge Lem set himself in his greatest novels. That is, to be “a literature of ideas, reporting on mankind’s destiny.” And in particular, what shape mind/consciousness will take with the advent of new technologies. Child-care robots are upon us, software which buys and sells on money markets, computers which can drive cars and grade college exams. Neuroprosthetics is in rapid development. Digitally-enhanced human memory is around the corner.
This is not to be taken as a criticism of the selection in this book. But it is worth pointing out that just as the race to the future is accelerating, science fiction no longer takes on a role of prediction and exploration. And Lem took this role very seriously – or at least one of the Lems did.
Andy Sawyer’s excellent essay Stanislaw Lem – Who’s He? tackles this issue among others. It’s the high point of the book, and should be the first piece to turn to. The three essays from working scientists are also fascinating. It was a brave and innovative idea from the editors to include such a section. Hod Lipson’s essay in particular is very thought-provoking.
Lem was always way ahead of us, the blurb states. This collection makes some attempt to catch up.
New website
M y new website is ready, I think …. I’m still transferring content from the old website and ironing out any bugs.
It was high time for a change; I’ve had the same website since 2006. Let me know what you think of it – I’m still looking for something to replace that leather background.
Winged With Death
This is a review of John Baker’s novel Winged With Death which appeared in Dream Catcher magazine.
But just to sum it up – it’s brilliant, go out and buy it.
Winged With Death by John Baker,
Flambard Press (2009)
ISBN 978-1906601027, 291pp £8.98
Review …
‘It was 1972 and I was eighteen years old. I had jumped ship and watched while she sailed away.’
The narrator’s account of his decade in Uruguay gets off to a running start. A young man in a remote country is a recipe for picaresque adventures, and Montevideo is seething with political violence and sweating with the tango. On his very first day young Frederick runs into Tupamaros member Julio, gets a job washing dishes, and accepts the name Ramon Bolio. ‘That day in 1972 I was up for change,’ he tells us.
Ramon is in the privileged position of being able to mingle at all levels of society. He teaches English to a Capitan of the military regime, yet frequents the bars where revolutionary politics is discussed. Those around him are more or less born into their situation, but he has the choice of whether or not to engage with this world. He walks up to the most beautiful girl among the tango dancers and tells her if she doesn’t come home with him he’ll spend the night howling at the moon. You wouldn’t have done that back home in York, the reader can’t help thinking.
There is something unsettling about this young Ramon – a man with no fixed beliefs who is so easily able to cast aside his English habits. He tells us he has wrestled to reconcile the need for a credo with the conviction that life is just a flash in the pan. Events proceed with an hallucinatory clarity. The reader can picture the action of each scene perfectly, but the emotive layer is often elusive. ‘I had embraced a new life and new friends and commitments and my emotions and feelings were not repressed in any obvious way. I was a dancer. I was not a camera,’ he assures us, though the reader is right not to take the narrator at face value.
This tale of an adventurous youth is being typed up by the Ramon of three decades later. He is back living in York, in the house where he grew up. But the events in Uruguay have defined who he now is: his name is still Ramon Bolio, and he teaches the tango with a passion. His sixteen-year-old niece has gone missing. A dual plot drives the novel forward. Questions are thrown up about how the past has made him what he is today.
Ramon’s brother Stephen is intellectually a little slow. It is up to Ramon to take the lead in dealings with the police as they investigate the young woman’s disappearance. He confronts them as they commence digging up Stephen’s lawn.
‘Stephen, Debbie, they don’t have the nous for this kind of thing. If they’d killed her they’d sit down and cry. They wouldn’t hide the body.’ It’s a rather odd thing to say of his brother, and betrays a familiarity with violence. This attention to detail runs through the story and only slowly becomes apparent.
The characters, and in particular the narrator, are created with perfect psychological coherence. For example Ramon mentions on the first page that a slim volume of Gurdjieff was in his backpack. Sure enough, a hundred pages later he borrows a technique from the wily thinker. And after his first encounter with violence, Ramon’s narrative proceeds with the same manifest confidence as before, yet the new relationships he forms come across as increasingly erratic and unsound.
Montevideo and its dance bars, checkpoints, and growing atmosphere of fear is conjured up with great immediacy. All the while tango features as a recurring metaphor. ‘Tango is about memory, abandonment, love, defeat, death, sorrow and it is about standing before a beloved object and remembering that object as a living presence.’
John Baker’s novel is suffused with existentialist concepts: attachment, nothingness, the instability of the human being. His style owes more perhaps to Camus’ essays on Algeria than it does to the classic English novel. His prose achieves the almost impossible task of being as plot-driven as a thriller yet steeped in philosophy; an adventure story yet a sustained reflection on how to live life more fully. It is beautifully written, a tango of thought and action, its true power not apparent at first sight. It is imbued with a deep sense of mystery: not just the mystery of where the disappeared have gone, but the mystery of what connects an individual to be one person through time.
When I read this novel I was in the enjoyable position of knowing nothing about the author or his previous work, and resolved to keep things that way until I finished. ‘One of Britain’s most talented crime writers,’ declares a blurb on the back. Delete the word ‘crime’ and it hits the mark. This novel deserves a place in every backpacker’s pocket and on every thinking man’s bookshelf.
Reviewed by Aiden O’Reilly
Stand magazine
I have a story in the current issue of Stand literary magazine.
Stand has reached a venerable old age of over 50 years. It has published writers the likes of Beckett, Andrew Motion, Angela Carter, as well as many writers early in their careers. It has also put emphasis on translations of Russian and East European writers.
I got the issue through the post but it isn’t up on their website yet.
New poems by Geoffrey Hill, and work by Irish poets Geraldine Mitchell and Shirley McClure.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stand-Magazine/270598523017007
Valancourt The Viaduct reissue
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Irish Times Q+A