We are trapped in light
Circling the destination
Home ever more distant

In San Diego. Have not slept for 24 hours! Very tired, full update when rested.

In the excitement of my Welsh journeys, I haven’t mentioned that my story ‘Horizon’ is now confirmed for issue #6 of Murky Depths, debuting in December. w00t!

An extract from the opening of my new story, End Game. If anyone wants to help by offering feedback on the full story it is in the next post, password protected. Drop me a line and I will forward a password. damiengwalter@gmail.com

*****

Harvard names it a low risk run once too often. The fence makes his fat lipped grin as Spaceman memorises the number at a glance. He should take a walk up Main Street, get lost in the plate glass maze of store fronts and rich women, he knows it. But work is work, and besides, he always gets a game on when he visits the Algerian.

Spaceman steps off the tram two stops early, skips across four lanes of traffic and the central reservation, expert navigator of this outpost of the monoculture, this anyplace cloned from the flesh of London, New York, Beijing. He comes up on the tower from behind, sliding in through a fissure in the rusting chain-link.

They answer the buzzer fast. The Algerian and his boys toke hard and sleep late, but this morning the door opens quick. They do not even ask his name. Spaceman’s feet go heavy like lead. He could be standing on the surface of another planet, mass three times as great, weighed down by a crushing gravity. A girl shoulders her way out of the tower, pushing a buggy in front. Spaceman looks at a baby swaddled in pink, bright and grimy nylon. The girls eyes return him a dead addict stare. No more thinking Spaceman, time to go to work.

And he is through the door.

I interviewed Charlie Stross for todays Guardian.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,,2284587,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=10

OK, I admit it, sci-fi is boring. After endless Star Trek re-runs, innumerable badly scripted Hollywood movies and a thousand video games with pixel-deep narrative, the once wondrous ideas of sci-fi have become yawn-inducing. Fortunately for me, beyond the world of tedious mass media sci-fi, lies the exciting world of literary science fiction or “SF” constantly producing new ideas to satisfy my hunger for wonder. Now a radical sect of writers and critics claim that SF needs to abandon all those wondrous ideas, and concentrate instead on the everyday and the mundane. All hail the Mundane Revolution!

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I’d like to gamble that when clever people were kicking around ideas about how the internet would revolutise society, no one predicted the revival of the oral tradition. I know if anyone had told me I’d be using my super powerful computer to listen to stories much the same as my ancesteros told around the campfire, I’d have scratched my head and said ‘What?!’.

Perhaps because I’ve been lucky enough to have had a couple of great audio productions of my stories, Cthul-You for BBC Radio and Circe’s over at the Drabblecast, I’ve been converted to the potential of audio. Especialy for short fiction, which I think is just at the start of a great renaissance driven by audio.

I think the big abscence from this years Hugo and Nebula ballots is Steve Eley over at Escape Pod. If theres an editor who has brought more new readers into the genre in recent years I’d like to know about them. I’ve found more great stories on Escape Pod than any other venue, including the major magazines, and discoevered some of my favourite writers including Mike Resnick, Tim Pratt and Greg Van Eekhout. And although I’m biased I think Norm Sherman at the Drabblecast is such a top narrator, and his podcasts have such great production that he is quickly coming up behind Escape Pod.

Theres something about a well read story that beats more sophisticated forms of adaptation like video. Maybe because it isn’t an adaptation. You are getting the real story, and if the reading captures the voice of the text then it can be both a very intimate and a very powerful way to engage writer and reader. Its also convenient. Audio fits into our ever more hectic modern lifestyles. You can listen to a story on a commute, in the shower, at night in bed. You can also share it with other people – just like sitting round the campfire again, audio takes stories back to be a communal experience when we want them to be.

The spur for this post today was listening to Graves by Joe Haldeman on the Star Ship Sofa podcast. Give it a listen, it really is an amazing (and pretty creepy) story.

Anyone elese have any audio recommendations? I’m always looking for more good stories.