The Stone Road had a deal in the US and Australia over the last day or so, and it was nice to see a bump in sales. Hopefully the book will connect with some new readers, and since I so rarely see it, here's a picture that is lovely to any author.
I helped launch Sam Maguire's anthology Far-flung on Friday. It was a lot of fun. I've a story in there called "We Crossed the Bright Blue Water" which looks at Death and how we deal with our inability to truly understand our parents. It's also another one of my psychopomp stories, one day I might actually have enough of these for a collection. It's a bittersweet thing, but there's a brightness to it too.
Anyway, here's my introduction to the launch of Far-flung. Despite my story, it's a great anthology, and if you like short spec fic, I reckon it's well worth a read - I enjoyed every story.
I love a good SF anthology. When I was young, I’d gobble down sf short stories and let them blow my mind. It’s where writers come to play, where they grapple with ideas, and experiment in ways that a novel resists. The most innovative work quite often comes from short stories. As a writer, you can smash ideas, and forms together, you can challenge the very shape of narrative. You can have fun.
These stories will take you places familiar and strange and more than a little messed up. In its pages you’ll encounter a mother wanting to get home from work in time to say goodbye to her son before he goes off world, A person stuck in a job and a city that is literally smothering them to death, a vampire just wanting a holiday and a bit of a fishing trip. There’s monsters and robot lovers, and the sense that things could be better if capitalism just got out of the way. There are taut morality tales, a quest story that is also an epistolary piece set in a tavern like no other, oh and watch out for the bugs.
SF is often justified as the genre that explores what it is to be human, but we kind of know what that is. SF writers are a bit odd, and they bring that light onto the world, and then they add explosions, or clouds of choking smoke.
Kafka once wrote: A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. Far Flungis that axe, except it’s not going for the sea, wherever that is. It’s going for the throat.
Far-flung will lift you up, and bring you down and make you see the world for the absolutely ridiculously strange, horrible and wonderful thing it is. Grab a copy, devour it, I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.
Here's a link if it sounds like your cup of tea.
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