Hollywood Animals in the upcoming Interzone #295

Just a quick not to say that my short story Hollywood Animals will be in the December issue of Interzone, issue #295. Preorders are up now, with full TOC at the link.

It’s the first story I’ll have published that sits under the banner of Crisp SF. Crisp isn’t just about genetic engineering (taking its name from CRISPR technologies) but about genetic engineering in a world struggling under the weight of rampant capitalism and/or catastrophic climate change. The cli-fi angle is non-existent in Hollywood Animals, but it has a heavy emphasis on labor relations. To my mind,  a resurgent union movement is one of the best current real-world examples of the little people (here workers specifically) pushing back against the constant grinding demands of the same capitalist system that is both driving climate change and standing in the way of us making timely changes.

I’m excited to have a story in Interzone and to have something else out in the world. Strangely enough, 2022 has been the year of short stories for me – Night, Rain and Neon, Phase Change, and now Interzone. Now I just have to hope that I can sell a novel or novella by the end of the year.

Night, Rain, and Neon – a Cyberpunk Anthology

Night, Rain, and Neon cover

I think I mentioned some news on the short fiction front, and here is the first of three that I can announce. I have a story, Digital Salt, in the forthcoming Night, Rain, and Neon anthology published by NewCon Press.

The story has some parallels to Repo Virtual, so if you wanted something new in a similar vein, this might tide you over, or if you wanted a slab of new cyberpunk from a bunch of fantastic writers, you could do much worse than this anthology.

From the preorder page:

Released on July 1st 2022, to coincide with the date William Gibson’s genre-defining novel Neuromancer was originally released in 1984, Night, Rain, and Neon is a collection of all new stories written by some of the sharpest and most insightful authors of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk fiction around, curated by editor Michael Cobley.
 
“Back in the mid-80s William Gibson remarked that at one point he saw science fiction as a handy tool that he could use to pry open the cranium of the embryonic digital zeitgeist and do a bit of rewiring. Since then, numerous waves of tech, eco-awareness, politics, music, games, and smart gizmos (wearable and driveable) have washed over and through us. Our dwellings have gone from shells veined with broadband wiring to safehouses infused with plumes of wireless connection while our phones speak and ping and offer oblations to the greater networks that enfold us all.” – Michael Cobley
 
Come see what the near future might hold…
 
Contents:
Introduction by Michael Cobley
Hello, Goodbye – Stewart Hotston
Four Green Fields – Ian McDonald
All The Precious Years – Al Robertson
Forever in Scotland – Callum McSorley
Assets – Keith Brooke & Eric Brown
The Still Small Voice – Louise Carey
Mindstrings – Jeremy Szal
Tabula Rasa – Danie Ware
Collision Detection – Tim Maughan
We Appreciate Power – Gavin Smith
A Game Of Clones – Justina Robson
Accumulated Damage – Simon Morden
The Thirteenth Clone Of Casimir Ivanovitch – Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Elijah Of The 1000 Faces – Gary Gibson
VR Enclave – DA Xiaolin Spires
Digital Salt – Corey J White
Terms And Conditions – Joseph Elliott-Coleman
The Goruden-Mairu Job – T.R. Napper
About the Authors
 
Available as an A5 hardbacks and a special edition hardback, signed by all the authors, limited to just 100 numbered copies.

Preorders are open now.

Some recent odds and ends

Happy 2021, wherein we’ll have to continue to fight for a better future because our governments and the corporations have no interest in working for it unless we make them.

Anyway, I’ve got a few bits and pieces to share.

Australian science fiction author Corey J White proves that cyberpunk is not dead in his first full length novel Repo Virtual. Set in a slightly in-the-future Korea Repo Virtual is a fast moving tale that features evil megacorporations, plucky gamers, AI and robot dogs.

Some great contemporary cyberpunk books – including Repo Virtual, Infomocracy by Malka Older, and Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor – to check out if CP2077 left you feeling disappointed.

Lost and Found

This piece was originally published as a bonus issue of the Nothing Here newsletter.


I don’t know that this piece is entirely ready – it’s very much a case of writing to work something out, rather than writing something I’ve already worked out.

But, I am in NYC, and I will be very busy, so it’s either send this now, or probably not send it for a week, and I didn’t want to keep you waiting.


The accumulated detritus of lost futures piles up around us. At this current point in time, most of these futures are neon-tinged and haunted by an analog synth soundtrack. Old futures. Safe futures that would not have looked out of place at any point in the past 35 years. My entire life has been lived under the neonoir-black shadow of these 80s visions.

Hollywood is weaponising this nostalgia. Think Ready Player One – an otaku obsessive’s ode to the video games and films of the 1980s. As pointed out by Cuck Philosophy, it uses state of the art CGI to render a perfect simulacrum of a comfortably safe retrofuture. It reinforces the (frankly toxic) notion that your fandoms will one day matter, that you aren’t wasting your money, time, energy, and life on these trivial pieces of pop-culture ephemera. That you are right to place too much of your identity into these corporate properties. Or Blade Runner 2049, a chronological continuation of the most iconic lost 80s future. The entire film an apparent attempt to check Ouroboros’ gag reflex.

In the Black Mirror episode San Junipero, the gorgeous 80s simulation is literally used for palliative care. This begs the question: Is our mainstream culture dying? Are these the last neon soaked moments of collective engagement before Vangelis plays us off to the great beyond? I truly hope not.

I can’t think of 80s futures without also thinking of cyberpunk, and there too is a resurgence. All across the zeitgeist is cyberpunk imagery, (again) drenched in nostalgia but often lacking the sociopolitical undercurrent that gave the subgenre its suffix. As futuristic as it still appears, cyberpunk represents another retro future, one stripped of vital parts and presented as pure artifice; aesthetics divorced of context. (Whatever else people might say about Repo Virtual, they can’t claim it’s drenched in nostalgia – it was my attempt at writing a cyberpunk of the now.)

Cyberpunk 2077 is stepping on those the mainstream has cast underfoot, when trans people are the closest thing we have in real life to the extreme body modification popularized by cyberpunk stories (Stellarc notwithstanding). We’ll know more as the release date of Cyberpunk 2077 approaches, but the recent battles for the rights of trans people within the gaming industry and gaming spaces (and certain tweets from CDPR’s marketing team) mean we are right to be wary. We need new futures, we need queer futures, trans futures, non-Western futures. Any retrofuture that stands in the way must be discarded.

All these 80s futures loom so large in the collective unconscious that maybe I can’t see the forest for the trees. They are not the first lost futures, they will not be the last. The Gernsback vision of a Jetsons future with robotic maids and flying sedans seems as distant (or as close) as it did when Hugo was first publishing Amazing Stories. We have Alexa, Siri, and all the rest in our homes, and UberAir plans to launch a flight service in the next couple of years, but in the way of our reality, as these fantastic possibilities tumble down the funnel of possible futures and manifest in the real, they coalesce into something both incredible, and boringly commonplace. Your robot maid can order cornflakes when you’re running low, but she can’t dust the mantelpiece (and, of course, she’s still a she by default). UberAir might take you on carefully planned routes to designated landing spots, but we won’t have breathtaking aerial highways carving through the air in synthetic migratory routes. We can only render the fantastic with the tools of reality, crushing impossible 4th dimensional geometries into something ever disappointing in its actuality.

(The exception is, of course, nuclear war. The Cold War obsession with atomic holocaust – countless novels, stories, and films; the Mad Max vision of the desolate wasteland – can seem quaint in moments of global stability, but if that lost future is ever found, the reality of it will be anything but mundane.)

And what of found futures? Think Jules Verne and his startlingly accurate calculations/predictions for the future of space flight – the way that his fictional future was rendered through the work of engineers and scientists decades later. The way our space future was found, and subsequently lost, currently existing in a technocapital limbo, waiting to be resurrected for a plutocratic exit strategy, or a brand new frontier on which to wage war.

Or consider the SR-71 Blackbird. This plane was used by the US Air Force from 1964 to 1998, but for the first 27 years of use, the aircraft remained classified – a slice of the future rendered real but hidden from view. It was the fastest and highest flying aircraft of the time, its pilots needing to wear spacesuits to cope with the conditions high up in the stratosphere. It “could map terrain using a side-scanning sonar, aim a radar up to 45 degrees to the side, and interrupt enemy communication and radar signals.” As Jay says at the above link:

Imagine being Joe Schmo on main street in 1964… Sitting outside a drug store (not a Starbucks) […] It’s a time before ‘real’ commercial airline travel — the first flight of a 747 is still 5 years away. The closest thing Joe has to the idea of air travel is a 1st generation airliner like a De Havilland Comet and only then because he heard about it on the radio […] and Black and White TVs are still sold more than colour.

Meanwhile, you tell him this: there exists a separate world of classified technology and just one of those things is a Mach 3 Stealth Plane that can fly to the edge of space.

Do you think you could tell Ol’ Joe this without his hackles being raised? Do you think he’d believe you? There would be much shaking of heads and remonstration. I’m not sure Mr Schmo would accept it at all. It would just bounce off the carefully constructed bubble of Red Reality that he’s unknowingly internalised. At the time it would be indistinguishable to him from UFO reports.

And that brings me neatly to another potential found future – the fervent hope embedded in today’s talk of UFO disclosure. For all we know UFOs exist in a similarly hidden space, waiting for declassification to reveal the secrets of alien existence or a “new” old type of science lost since the time of Edison and Tesla. That might be an extreme example, and some of you are probably rolling your eyes, but the Blackbird is a perfect case study – a look at the ways the future could already be here, weaponized and classified, kept exclusive to the military and elite until the rest of us catch up enough to be worthy of their truths.

Or another example. Recently the NSA gifted two spy satellites to NASA. Each of these satellites was equivalent to the famous Hubble telescope, but instead of being used to further scientific understanding of space for all of mankind, these were pointed down at the Earth to track our movements. Now, just think: these were hand-me-down satellites, meaning that the NSA no longer needed them because they had something even better in place. If once our technological advancements were made with a view to look outside the Earth, to vaster possible futures, now instead our best hardware and software is being made for relentless ubiquitous surveillance, advanced exoskeletons and robots are being designed to increase the military capability of the already-dominant global forces, and AI engineers are working to make Wall Street richer.

This is why we need new futures, wherever and whenever we’re able to generate them. They can’t be sequestered away for the purpose of keeping us content in the status quo. Our lost futures should be forgotten, cast aside in the search for the new. We need new futures to challenge us, stretch us beyond our horizons.

Let a thousand futures bloom. Let the warehouses of the elite be plundered, let hidden and lost futures be found and spread to every corner of the globe so that we can begin to imagine the truly new.

REPO VIRTUAL Cover Reveal

Repo Virtual cover - art/design by Christine Foltzer
Repo Virtual cover – art/design by Christine Foltzer

The cover for Repo Virtual was recently revealed over at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog. I say a little at the link, and there’s also a blurb for the book (I don’t think it’ll be the back cover blurb, but it’s how I pitched the book to my editor at Tor.com Publishing), so have a look at the link if you want more information.

The book isn’t out until April 2020, but already someone on twitter told me they preordered it, which is fantastic. Soon enough I’m hoping I can talk about a preorder incentive package I’m trying to put together. More details here as soon as I have them.

And a big thank you to Warren Ellis for the fantastic blurb. Not only did he find time to read it in his #1000mphclub schedule, but he got back to me in no time at all – which makes me think that even for a 100k word novel, I’ve written something quick and compelling.

I’m really proud of this book, and can’t wait for it to be out in the world… riding that zeitgeist wave alongside the folk at CDPR.

REPO VIRTUAL Announced

I’ve been busily working away on a novel, and now I can finally talk about it. REPO VIRTUAL is a cyberpunk heist novel, due for publication in 2020 – the most cyberpunk-sounding year yet.

Carl said this in the announcement:

It’s a special pleasure to guide an author through multiple stages of their early career. Since I acquired Corey J. White’s first novella, Killing Gravity, I’ve had the joy of watching his craft develop from book to book. In November he’ll complete his Voidwitch Saga trilogy with Static Ruin, capping off the story of Mariam Xi, one of the most interesting and dangerous characters in space. And now I have the honor of announcing that Tor.com Publishing has acquired Corey J. White’s debut novel, Repo Virtual, a cyberpunk heist story that layers action across real and virtual realities in the hunt for the first true strong AI. Repo Virtual was acquired in a deal negotiated by Martha Millard of Sterling Lord Literistic.

And here’s my comment:

I’m so excited to be working again with Carl Engle-Laird and the rest of the team at Tor.com Publishing on my debut novel. They were a joy to work with on the Voidwitch books, and I’m thrilled to be taking this next journey with them. Repo Virtual will be a fully 21st Century take on cyberpunk, showing the environmental and sociopolitical repercussions of the rampant corporations that cyberpunk warned us about, and perhaps helped to normalise.

Needless to say, I’m really excited to be working on my debut novel. It’s totally different to working on a novella (or even three novellas), but I think I’ve got something special here. I can’t wait to share it with you all.

More news and info as it comes to hand.

Turkey City Lexicon

It’s been a while since I did a writing advice post, and I just came across this post via Cat Rambo’s twitter feed. The Turkey City Lexicon is a collection of terms that help define some common pitfalls in science fiction, as seen and defined by a number of SF voices, including some of those who were integral to the creation of the cyberpunk subgenre.

Sadly, most (if not all) of these pitfalls are still common in SF today, so it’s worth reading to see where you might be able to tighten up your prose.

And just to prove I have some ability for self-criticism, here are some I know slip into my work (hopefully most of it is stamped out before publication, but maybe not:

“Burly Detective” Syndrome
This useful term is taken from SF’s cousin-genre, the detective-pulp. The hack writers of the Mike Shayne series showed an odd reluctance to use Shayne’s proper name, preferring such euphemisms as “the burly detective” or “the red-headed sleuth.” This syndrome arises from a wrong-headed conviction that the same word should not be used twice in close succession. This is only true of particularly strong and visible words, such as “vertiginous.” Better to re-use a simple tag or phrase than to contrive cumbersome methods of avoiding it.

Not Simultaneous
The mis-use of the present participle is a common structural sentence-fault for beginning writers. “Putting his key in the door, he leapt up the stairs and got his revolver out of the bureau.” Alas, our hero couldn’t do this even if his arms were forty feet long. This fault shades into “Ing Disease,” the tendency to pepper sentences with words ending in “-ing,” a grammatical construction which tends to confuse the proper sequence of events. (Attr. Damon Knight)

“Said” Bookism
An artificial verb used to avoid the word “said.” “Said” is one of the few invisible words in the English language and is almost impossible to overuse. It is much less distracting than “he retorted,” “she inquired,” “he ejaculated,” and other oddities. The term “said-book” comes from certain pamphlets, containing hundreds of purple-prose synonyms for the word “said,” which were sold to aspiring authors from tiny ads in American magazines of the pre-WWII era.

Tom Swifty
An unseemly compulsion to follow the word “said” with a colorful adverb, as in “‘We’d better hurry,’ Tom said swiftly.” This was a standard mannerism of the old Tom Swift adventure dime-novels. Good dialogue can stand on its own without a clutter of adverbial props.

Check out the full list here, along with introductions from both Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling.