“The Indignity of Rain” in Interzone

My latest story, “The Indignity of Rain” – the first, chronologically, of the Central Station stories, is in the latest issue of Interzone.

The smell of rain caught them unprepared. It was spring, there was that smell of jasmine and it mixed with the hum of electric buses and there were solar gilders in the sky, like flocks of birds. Ameliah Ko was doing a Kwasa-Kwasa remix of a Susan Wong cover of Do You Wanna Dance. It had began to rain in silver sheets, almost silently, the rain swallowed the sound of gunshots and it drenched the burning buggie down the street, and the old homeless guy taking a shit by the dumpster, with his grey pants around his ankles, got caught in it, his one roll of toilet paper in his hand, and he cursed but quietly. He was used to the indignity of rain.

Story sale: “The Indignity of Rain” to Interzone

This blog’s a bit quiet recently… I’ve been toying with some political posts but can’t get the energy to write them. I’m mostly working on a novel at the moment (or, well, three, to be honest), so it’s taking up a fair bit of time.

Anyway, one of those novel projects in the “mosaic” novel Central Station, which I talked about a little before.  It’s made up of stories that add up to a unified narrative. Or that’s the idea anyway! The first of those stories to be published was The Smell of Orange Groves in Clarkesworld (and in a couple of the Year’s Bests anthologies), and the second was “Under the Eaves” in Robots: The Recent A.I.

A third one, “The Lord of Discarded Things” is forthcoming in Strange Horizons.

I’m glad to say the fourth to be picked up – but the first of the series, chronologically – “The Indignity of Rain” – has just been picked up by Interzone magazine, possibly for the very next issue. I love Interzone, and I still get a real kick every time I have a story there!

I’m very excited by the Central Station project, which is slowly edging towards completion. Now if only I could do a cook book!

“The Last Osama” Published in Interzone!

Dropped through my door this morning, my copy of Interzone #237, containing my story “The Last Osama”, a sort of postscript to Osama (the novel).

I was riding through the lowlands, the horse’s hooves scattering dry dust into the air. An inflamed red sun hovered on the horizon like a damaged eye, leaking tears of yellow and blue and tendrils of puss-like white clouds. A group of men in the distance were hanging Osama. I stopped my horse on the crest of the hill and looked down. They were too busy, drunk with power and excitement, to notice me.

That was a mistake.

There were around seven of them. They were dressed in torn green clothes, like uniforms. The Osama was between them. They had formed a circle around it. One of them had a rope.

The Last Osama Title Spread

Here’s the title page of “The Last Osama”, coming very soon in the November issue of Interzone Magazine. Art is by Steve Hambidge. Click to embiggen, as the kids say!

“The Last Osama” to be published in Interzone

Very glad to say my 7000 word story “The Last Osama” will be published soon in Interzone. “The Last Osama” is my own personal postscript to the novel and the two short stories, “My Travels with Al-Qaeda” and “Wrong Number”.

In other Osama news, Strange Horizons has a long, in-depth review of the novel by Michael Levy, concluding that:

Moving seamlessly between intense realism and equally intense surrealism, Osama is a powerful and disturbing political fantasy by a talent who deserves the attention of all serious readers.

Audio: “The Insurance Agent” now at Escape Pod

Glad to say my latest story to be up at Escape Pod is The Insurance Agent, first published in Interzone. It is read by Christian Brady.

The bar was packed and everyone was watching the Nixon-Reagan match. The fighters were reflected off the bar’s grainy wood countertop and the tables’ gleaming surfaces and seemed to melt as they flickered down the legs of the scattered chairs. The bar was called the Godhead, which had a lot to do with why I was there. It was a bit of an unfair fight as Reagan was young, pre-presidency, circa-World War Two, while Nixon was heavy-set, older: people were exchanging odds and betting with the bar’s internal gaming system and the general opinion seemed to be that though Reagan was in better shape Nixon was meaner.

I wasn’t there for the match.

The Godhead was on Pulau Sepanggar, one of the satellite islands off Borneo, hence nominally under Malaysian federal authority but in practice in a free zone that had stronger ties to the Brunei Sultanate. It was a convenient place to meet, providing easy access to the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and, of course, Singapore, which resented the island’s role as a growing business centre yet found it useful at the same time.

She wore a smart business suit and a smart communication system that looked like what it was, which was a custom-made gold bracelet on her left arm. She wore smart shades and I was taking a bet that she wasn’t watching the fight. She was drinking a generic Cola but there was nothing generic about her. I slid into a chair beside her and waited for her shades to turn transparent and notice me.

‘Drink, Mr. Turner?’

I liked the name Turner. It was Anglo-Saxon generic, a mid-level executive’s name, white as beige. ‘Call me James,’ I said. I liked James too. You could tell what a James Turner did just by hearing his name. The rest of me was tailor-made for the name, had been for some time: I had the kind of tan that suggested I had been East for just long enough to have acquired it, black hair that was short but not too short and had a decent but not overly-expensive cut, pale blue eyes behind shades that cost a lot of money to look like a knock-off.

There was a suggestion of a smile in the corners of her mouth and she said, ‘I don’t think I will.’

‘Mr. Turner, then,’ I said. ‘One name’s good as another.’ – continue reading, or listen in audio!

LGBT Stories

I’ve written a few stories that have LGBT characters or themes though not, when I look at it, an exceptionally large number. It just occured to me it could be interesting (for me, if no one else) to go over my short stories database and extract some common themes or group stories together, of which this is a first post.

A lot of the time, my reasoning is that, if there is a romance in the story, it might as well be a same-sex romance – girl-meets-girl or boy-meets-boy instead of boy-meets-girl, to reduce it to a plot component. Other times I’m interested in exploring sexual themes explicitly – most predominantly in the Gorel stories (of which more later). I’ve been particularly interested in Kathoey (Thai/Lao transgender, or “third sex”) as they’re very much a part of everyday life in Laos, with, it seems to me, far more acceptance than ever in the “enlightened” West, and they tend to crop up in stories.

I have no idea if I’m doing a particularly good job or not. My guiding principle is fairly simple though – people are people, and sexual identity is one part of a person. I can well imagine some characters who are consumed by sexual orientation/gender identity to the extent it overshadows everything else, but I’d imagine that’s quite rare, and can apply equally whether you’re gay or straight. Anyhow, here is a handful of stories with LGBT themes.

High Windows – Strange Horizons 2006 – an alienated teenage boy travels across the future solar system, trying to find his place in the world. One reader comment said it was “basically internet porn, given a veneer of respectability … thinly imagined, flaccidly written and altogether unstimulating. ” Another wrote: “This story is truly a work of sick self indulgent porn.”

“High Windows” obviously (I think) corresponds with some of Samuel Delany’s fiction as well as with Philip Larkin’s poem ”High Windows”. It also includes a line about transitioning that both I and the editors thought would be problematic, though it hadn’t been commented on.

It is interesting that the readers above equate “sexually explicit” with “porn”, though I have no problem with it. I did write a couple of stories that deal specifically with pornography and that you might want to check out – 304, Adolf Hitler Strasse on Clarkesworld and “The Love-Craft” in Postscripts (not online).

Covenant - Apex Digest 2008 (but reprinted online in Basement Stories) – a story about religion and aliens which features a lesbian couple. If “High Windows” was a story about alienation and sex, here the romance is simply another part of the story.

“How To Make Paper Airplanes” – published in the special Mundane SF issue of Interzone, 2008, edited by Geoff Ryman, and not online, alas – deals more explicitly with a gay relationship in a culture (Vanuatu) where it is both socially unacceptable and illegal, though again this is one aspect of the story, about four men stranded on a desert island and the meeting of alien (yet human) civilizations.

The Night Train – Strange Horizons, 2010 – well, this little beasty is somehow a Theodore Sturgeon Award nominee, has two reprints in Year’s Bests anthologies, and is available in audio at Escape Pod. I have to admit I mostly wrote the story because I love the night train from Bangkok to Nong Khai, and I love the Hua Lamphong train station. I found the various comments on how the story “exoticises” strange, as for me it was writing about everyday life (admittedly in a somewhat weird future). The main character is a kathoey, the story adopts and corresponds with American cyberpunk tropes and ends, I thought quite appropriately, with a cup of tea.

There are other stories, I think, but those are the more prominent ones. The other stories I wanted to mention are the Gorel of Goliris stories, of which the first one to be published is the novella Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God (PS Publishing 2011).

Two more Gorel stories will be published in PS Publishing’s Postscripts anthology series – “Black Gods Kiss” and “Buried Eyes”, and a small collection of Gorel stories (probably titled Black Gods Kiss) will be published by PS next year.

The obvious inspiration for Gorel has been C.L. Moore, with her Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith stories, though with Gorel it was obvious to me from early on that it would be more explicit, almost to the point of the gratuitous. I did want to write something that had plenty of sex and violence – my guiding line for Gorel early on was that he’d “kill anything and sleep with anyone”, though in the course of Pot-Bellied God he enters a fairly stable menage a trois relationship (at least for a while!) and also, I suspect, falls in love. I’m looking forward to finding out what Gorel gets up to next!

Interzone #234

My latest short story is now available in Interzone #234: “In The Season of the Mango Rains”.

Catching up!

It’s been an incredibly busy two weeks, encompassing, at various points, book signings, meetings, Eastercon, the Clarke Award, Sci Fi London and shooting the start of a documentary – so now I’m back home, back on antibiotics, and back in bed. The weather, in case you’re wondering, is gorgeous!

Quick catching up:

• How to sign an e-book!
• Guest-post at the Boston Book Bums Blog, on Strange Places to Buy Books
• My latest short story, The Ambiguity Clock, is now online at Daily Science Fiction
• I’m a judge at the forthcoming Science in My Fiction contest!
• Awesomely in-depth review of Camera Obscura over at Tor.com, by Mike Perschon!
• I sold a new story, “Passage”, to Daily Science Fiction
• The next issue of Interzone will include my short story “Mango Rains”

Also, if you’re after a signed copy of Camera Obscura, these can be found at Forbidden Planet, London; Foyles, Charing Cross Road; Waterstone’s Kingston (Bentall Centre); Waterstone’s Birmingham, New Street; and, if you happen to fly British Airways, you can also find them at W.H. Smith in Heathrow Terminal 5.

New story in Interzone!

My latest story is now out in Interzone #230, sharing pages with fellow Angry Robot writer (and unstoppable force of nature!)  Aliette de Bodard, and celebrating 25 years of Nick Lowe’s Mutant Popcorn film reviews. Lowe is, absolutely, the best genre film reviewer around and, as Kim Newman rightly says in the magazine, the first thing anyone opening Interzone turns to. I know I do. (Of course, I’d like to think that, when I have a story in Interzone, that’s what people turn to first of all, but…)

Great cover art, too, by Warwick Fraser-Coombe!