Well, enough doom and gloom. Here’s the excellent cover of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction edited by George Mann. Cool cover and, of course, a cool collection of short stories. To quote: This is an eclectic collection of all-original science fiction stories from some of the foremost luminaries in the genre. Featuring new tales of far future murder, first contact, love and war from such well-regarded and award winning authors as Peter F. Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Adam Roberts, Jeffrey Thomas, Eric Brown, Paul Di Filippo, Neal Asher, Jay Lake and Ian Watson, this collection is sure to delight all fans of good science fiction.
Tag: Bits
Bill Asher
He was a jazz musician, a lecturer in applied mathematics, fly fisherman, one-time RAF pilot and the husband of Hazel Asher for 57 years. My mother had heard people say that when someone dies it immediately looks like something is missing. We had difficulty ascertaining that he was dead. I visited him and my mother on the morning of the 15th and noted that he seemed not to be breathing. We were only sure he was dead after turning off the anti-bed-sore mattress and the oxygen, and then by putting a mirror to his mouth and checking pupil response. Later we observed that the only spirit missing from his body was the whisky – something he stopped liking a few weeks before in a surer sign that he was on his way out. I began making phonecalls and available family descended: my wife Caroline, brothers Martin and Paul (our other brother Bob lives up in Chester so the logistics are more difficult for him) and Martin’s fiance Kath. We let the district nurses know what had happened and they turned up to remove the morphine feed and tidy up a few bits. The doctor came to pronounce death and a little while after that I removed his wedding ring from his hand for my mother. Next came the funeral guys 
to collect him, and very professional they were. The guy who first came in immediately assessed the situation. There was none of this hand-wringing pretense of deep sorrow. They took him away. The following day I nipped to the doctor’s to collect a doctor’s certificate which then needed to be taken along to the registrar, along with other documents, so the death certificate could be issued. Interesting contrast in the registrar’s job, only an hour or so before he had been marrying someone. On dad’s death certificate the registrar put ‘non-small cell lung cancer’, which is rather misleading since he had also had cirrhosis of liver, cancer of the pancreas and quite possibly his bones (died before that could be checked) and the therapies he’d received had supposedly reduced the growth in his lungs. I guess it’s easier to put something like that down rather than ‘trauma of operation to put in a bile-duct stent, trauma of internal bleeding caused by arthritis medicine taken while in a weakened state and the traumas of chemo and radio therapy which were pointless for a man just a few months away from his 80th birthday’. Really, in the days when they used to put ‘old age’ on a death certificate they were closer to the truth. Only an extensive autopsy would bring the truth any closer, and what would be the point of that? 
Next Martin, my mother and me went to the funeral home to organize things there. While there my mother belatedly produced his donor card. After some discussion we decided that his liver might have made a handy sieve but his other organs were probably a no-no. The only part of him that might have been of use were his corneas, and for some reason the word had been crossed out on the card. I then pointed out that unless there was some big push on toenail transplants there was not much left of him that would be useful. Really, it is rather a waste if your body goes into the grave labelled ‘Hardly Used – One Careful Owner’. Dad certainly got plenty of mileage out of his. You laugh and you use humour, and you cry. What else is there?
Solicitous enquiries then about flowers, death notices, limousines and a religious service (this last received with a snort of laughter by my brother). All of these were rejected by my mother. My dad is dead, what is left is a well used-up husk that needs to be dealt with. Next Monday he is being buried in a woodland grave without marker, in a cardboard coffin. All the family will then celebrate his life at a wake. One of the guys who collected the body said, “Look back a little; look forward a lot,” which is about right.
Book Club Prador Moon.
I just received this from Jonathan K Stephens:
I’ll hand you over to him now: I’ve just received the new SF Bookclub catalogue and what do you think I saw? Prador Moon, in a full page spread on the back cover! Great big header “This Time, Crabs Eat Humans“. Also nicely blurbed by senior bookclub editor Andrew Wheeler: “This short, zippy novel is the prose equivalent of a great Saturday-afternoon monster movie, so just sit back and munch some popcorn as the killer Prador launch their assault on mankind. Trust me: you won’t regret it.” Very nice.
Cancer.
Just to keep you guys updated with the situation in the Asherverse: though the writing is going well and I fully intend to supply you all with your fix of outrageously violent and complicated science fiction, things ain’t going that great on a personal level. Over the last year, I’ve entered that town called shitsville, the one we all have to enter at some time or other, in that my father is dying of cancer. It’s in his lungs, liver and pancreas and, with the traumas of frequent visits from paramedics and frequent visits to the hospital, he has been steadily going downhill. Now we have reached the endgame. A hospital bed has been delivered, along with an oxygen supply and liquid morphine, and he’s now ensconced in the music room where he used to practise on his saxophone and clarinet (as well as being a lecturer in applied mathematics he was also a jazz musician too). He now looks like someone straight out of Belsen, and is eating less. Dying. That’s all really. Not sure when I’ll be posting here again. Maybe I’ll be doing it lots, maybe I’ll be gone for a while. Bear with me.
Snippet.
I found this on the Dawkin’s website courtesy of a comment by one Sancus: “The association of modern atheism with Stalin and Mao has long got out of hand. I plead with anyone reading this to loudly stand against this association by revealing that Stalin and Mao are closer to religious figures than they are to modern atheists not just because of dogmatism, but because they share rejection of self-ownership.
It is the denial of the right for an individual to own herself that is the common and shared cause of both religious and Marxist injustices.” Damned right.
Waffling.
Mmm, perhaps I need to do a little less ranting here, not to stop pissing people off, but to keep myself sane. Really, if you look for it, there’s enough in the media every day to get one frothing at the mouth. Perhaps the anger is rather like depression: it’s there first and then looks around for an excuse to exist. Nice thoughts. I’m closing on 50,000 words of Line War and maybe I should deliver an early RSI warning: I think this is going to be a big one. I keep going in to writing say section of the story and come out the other side of it having not quite got there. Plenty of drama, but the aim I set out to achieve each time seems to take two sections. Also, at 50,000 words (which for me is usually more than a third of a book) the war itself has hardly got past the digging of trenches stage. I mean … I’ve only blown up one world for goodness sake and the death toll hasn’t moved into eight figures yet. A hundred edited pages of Hilldiggers are behind me and more are on the way. I’ve had two reader’s reports on it and on the whole they’re good. Sales are looking good too. The hardback sales of Polity Agent are over half again those of Voyage of the Sable Keech, but then I’m finding that I’m getting more readers coming back for more in the Cormac sequence than I am with stuff set on Spatterjay, which was rather surprising. What else? My weight hovers at about 12 stone, despite the fact that we’ve nearly polished off a barrel of homemade stout (this weekend I’ll be making five gallons of bitter), fitness seems good, despite the cigarettes and, really, I seem to be on top of everything. I just wish I had another set of hands and another brain to keep up with demand … note to those wannabes out there, if you really are aiming for publication success and not just pissing around, produce loads of stuff, loads, because if you do get there, it’ll all soon go.
Misty
Where's my liver?
Ah, there’s hope for me yet: “British scientists have grown the world’s first artificial liver from stem cells in a breakthrough that will one day provide entire organs for transplant. “
Now all I need them to do is start growing lung tissue…
Rather doss-about day today. Rather than write anything I just sat and read Terry Pratchett’s ‘Thud’.
Snippets 1.
I’m now about 13,000 words into Line War and only one planet has been depopulated. I must be slacking. Readers might be glad to know that a certain brass guy has become a little miffed with certain recent events…
Well, the dieting regimen I mentioned last month http://theskinner.blogspot.com/2006/09/before-getting-into-this-writing-game.html certainly seems to have done the job. That is, the regimen whereby I eat bugger-all, smoke plenty and drink espresso. I can even tuck in my shirts, having now lost precisely one-and-a-half stone, have a 32 inch waist and am thinking that maybe I can ease up a little.
My camera replacement (after a series of unfortunate events involving a bottle of coke and a hangover) is a Nikon Coolpix L4, and seems to do the job I require of it. I considered getting myself a digital movie camera then forgot the idea. Do I want to experience a larger proportion of my life through a lens?
Barrel of stout brewing away in our kitchen here. Should be ready in about a week, whereupon I’ll move it out in the shed to keep it cool. Um, maybe I should keep to the diet…
After the recent demise of our VHS video recorder, we searched in the local supermarket for a cheap replacement. Nothing doing; old technology. I finally bowed to the inevitable and bought a DVD HDD recorder (Liteon). Excellent machine, and somewhat easier to use than the old VHS.
Short stories: one called Bioship has been taken by George Mann for his The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction.
Right, back to work.
My thanks to Roger Fourt for pointing out this particular site to me: http://www.blur.com/shorts/rockfish/index.html Here you can find a short animated film called Rockfish, created by Tim Miller at Blur studios. It’s excellent. I felt impelled to email the guy and say so, and to wonder how long it would be before all actors end up having to sign on at the dole office. He emailed back to thank me, but also to tell me he is a HUGE SF fan and has The Skinner and Prador Moon sitting on his shelf. He’s also told me that they’re developing Rockfish i.e. turning it into something bigger. Bloody good luck to Tim Miller and Blur studios I say!