So Hillary Clinton’s latest argument to keep herself in the race is taking the form of the human rights of the voters of Michigan and Florida, that to do anything other than counting the results of those “races” in full would be a violation of the voting rights of those people and anti-democratic.

Aside from the fact that, as some have pointed out, this is nothing more than a request which is knowingly unreasonable with a view to the only outcome being that the resolution can’t be made until the Democratic Convention and nothing really to do with the voting rights of those people, there is a question, or a framing of this debate, which I have not heard made so far and which I would be intrigued to hear Clinton’s response to.

That is, if this is all about the voting rights of the people of Florida and Michigan, then what about the rights of those who would have voted for Obama in Michigan but weren’t able to since his name wasn’t on the ballot in response to the Democratic party’s request for the candidates to not take part? Surely they have been deprived of the ability to vote far more than those who voted for her?

I haven’t actually heard much about the ins and outs of the decision to strip Michigan and Florida and the instructions to the candidates and their responses at the time - anybody have any links for me? It’s all moot now but I would be interested to see what Obama and Clinton were saying at the time their party were instructing them to not campaign.

In the end it is really sad that Clinton has been reduced to scraping together arguments that in the end make a mockery of democracy and the voters rather than stand up for them. If, as Rachel Maddow predicts, this goes to the convention and the Democrats lose because it’s all taken so long, what effect will this have on the Democractic voters view of Clinton? Or will she just spin it to say, “well i told you he would lose”?

Well despite the fact that I was informed a month or two ago that the Russian translation of I-O (all the stories in I-O plus some from Nothing Is Inflammable) had been published I’ve yet to hear a single word from the publisher, U-Factory despite several attempts to contact them.

The original contract was for 18 months and fair play to them they did pay up the advance that they offered me (after a bit of prodding). The initial 18 months came and went but I was prepared to let them keep the rights despite the contract effectively being invalid (it’s not like there were other publishers clamouring for my work…), this dragged on for about another 2 years in total so I think it was about 3 or 4 years in total from the time I signed the contract to the apparent appearance of the book.

I was supposed to receive 5 or so author copies upon publication but no sign of them and no word at all from the publishers. I’ve sent a couple of emails now asking what is going on but no response. I won’t be expecting royalty cheques any time soon then …

Thanks to Rosalind Jackson for providing the first real review of Pretty Little Things To Fill Up The Void on her site Warpcore SF.

“There’s no doubt that this is a bleak read: with touches of nihilism and characters who are bent on self-destruction you can hardly expect it to be jolly (but) Pretty Little Things To Fill Up The Void is exciting, quirky, and thought-provoking, as arresting as a beautiful corpse….”

As arresting as a beautiful corpse. Now there’s a pull-quote if ever I saw one!

So with Clinton getting her expected win in PA my feeling now is pretty strongly that she will be the Democratic nominee.

I watched the final Democratic debate on You Tube yesterday and was as appalled as many people are at the inaneness of the initial line of questions. Obama has made a lot of comments since that debate in that regard but it would have been nice for him to have shown it at the time, I think, though I could see how that would be interpreted as being whiney or “weak” though I think it’s far more about him gawking at the fact that he HAS to answer these silly questions than not being able to or not wanting to and good for him in that regard. I remember a short while ago a thing about Angelina Jolie giving an interview on her role as UN Ambassador and Darfur and at the very end of the interview she was asked about her suspected pregnancy and relationship stuff with Brad. Although this was cut from the interview it was still in the transcript and she actually admonished the interviewer saying “come on, don’t do this” and amazingly the interviewer actually agreed and backed down. It definitely is time for people to start saying “you know what, we’re not just going to answer whatever dumb questions YOU decide are going to be asked” to a media that is more concerned with headlines and personal scandal than actual matters of substance.

With that said I think that Clinton is going to take it for this reason - she is prepared to do whatever it takes whereas Obama seems to be doing his best to take the high road in certain ways and not just play the usual politico games. To me there’s been a real air of desperation about Clinton’s campaign over the last few months, like a football team that is down a goal with five minutes left and is scrapping wildly, panicking because they know it’s just about over with, but I think that desperation has meant that she will happily take the traditional (RNC) route of throwing dirt and skewing reality just to score political points.

Obviously politics is a game and Obama is still playing it but I really do believe him when he says he wants to change that. In the end, however, i feel that that will be his downfall. It comes down to the fact that one team may play dirty and hack players, fake dives, take sneaky pot-shots at other players when the ref isn’t looking and the other one take the high ground and not do that but unfortunately more often than not that will mean they will lose. The question is, is it worth sacrificing that high ground in order to win? And if you were to win using those old skool methods then what have you won exactly? Would it be worth Obama playing that game long enough to get into power THEN being in more of a position to set the tone that he is looking for?

I am still hopeful that the nature of Clinton’s campaign will mean that enough super delegates will go to Obama to give him the nomination but at the moment I just feel like she, or her campaign, is willing to headbut the goalkeeper whilst the ref isn’t looking then walk away innocently when the ball trickles into an empty net …

I know it’s getting to be old news now but I’ve been mulling over the recent scandal where FIA head cheese Max Mosely was caught taking part in a so-called ‘Nazi Sex Orgy’ by the News Of The World earlier this month.

I watched the You Tube clip created by the paper, a minute and a half long edit of over 5 hours of footage which claimed to show the F1 Supremo taking part in a sex orgy with 5 prostitutes who were dressed up as Nazi guards and concentration camp prisoners, who spoke German and variously dominated and were dominated by Mosely himself. Immediately I was struck by how hyped-up the whole thing was with the so-called German uniforms looking like nothing more than some male suit jackets and some military type uniforms, how the German spoken was a tiny fragment of speech that I could barely make out and that the concentration camp outfits were more like prisoner outfits from a cartoon than anything else. Granted, there could be a lot more to the footage than is in the clip but you think that they would put in clips that most strongly backed up their allegations, so assuming that it implies this is the strongest evidence they have - which is incredibly weak. You can view the video yourself to see what you think.

Regardless, beyond the old-skool, good-Christian outrage at the married father of two taking part in an orgy, the bulk of the criticism seemed to come from the Nazi overtones that the sex session had and these overtones are the one thing which Mosely has strongly refuted. Right from the very beginning he has actually taken a very honourable line of making it clear that this is his private life and the whole thing is nothing more than embarrassing - never apologising or excusing himself. This is all made more interesting by the fact that he is the son of Oswald Mosely, the leader of the British Union of Facists and who had Adolf Hitler as a guest at his wedding and apparently visited General Franco whilst on a boating trip. A playground for amateur psychologists, indeed.

With that said, accepting for a moment that Mosely WAS taking part in an explicitly Nazi-based fantasy, the question is does it really matter since it is just fantasy? A lot of vanilla people seem to have a problem distinguishing between the imagery in sexual (particularly BDSM) fantasies and reality - people who are into choking or breath restriction probably don’t want to literally suffocate someone, women who engage in rape fantasies don’t really want to be raped. It’s all about power play, about domination and submission and the specifics of what is representing that really aren’t all that significant in the end

But it does raise the question of is it morally acceptable for people to use real-life horrors in their fantasies if that’s all they are? Would it be okay for someone to roleplay, say, a Guantanamo prisoner or an Abu Gharib type situation if it was purely roleplay? Or is it, like some have accused Mosely, an insult to those who have truly suffered in these situations that are now being used for personal pleasure? I’ve mentioned before on my blog posts my own personal discomfort with the multitude of computer games based on specific and real-life war situations because it seems a little disrespectful to use a situation in which someone has genuinely suffered for your own entertainment or pleasure - but again, it’s not real, so does it matter as much?

The implication is, of course, that if he is taking part in Nazi fantasies then he must therefore be a Nazi himself. If he is then THIS is what should be attacked, not what his sexual preferences are and despite his past it doesn’t seem like he does have these tendancies. News Of The World and its ilk couldn’t fight their way out of a wet moral paper bag but it does raise some interesting questions about the morality of personal, private fantasies.

As a final note when i went to the News Of The World site i did note with interest that of the top five “most read” news articles at the time, 4 of them were to do with breasts. Nice.

Personally I think if it’s just fantasy then it doesn’t matter. I actually have a great deal of respect for Mosely standing up and saying that this is his private life, denying strongly the Nazi allegations but otherwise saying it’s none of anyone’s business. People seem to conflate the fantasy of taking part in Nazi style fantasies with actually being sympathetic to the Nazis. (Granted, the issue is made more complicated by the fact that Mosely is the son of the British Union Of Facists and Hitler attended his father’s wedding but that doesn’t affect the underlying issue of whether it’s appropriate to use real-life situations and circumstances through which real-life people have suffered in your sexual fantasies.

Still plugging away with GUERRA as best I can, still at around the 65K mark although the main reason for the lack of word count lately is because I reached a point which meant that I had to figure things out a little more before advancing. I knew basically where things were headed but had to work out exactly how to get there and make sure there was nothing needing ironed out.

The good thing is that I’m still pretty charged by the ideas and content of the n*vel and can see a lot of potential for further related short stories and n*vels. I’m not one for
world-building (in fact I pretty much hate it) but sometimes these things just evolve naturally as you start to write more and more and this, I feel, is a much better approach than sitting down and creating a world just for the sake of it, then writing a story afterwards. So often you can see when this is the case as you end up with writers going overboard in terms of taking you places and describing ever little nook and cranny in the sense that they feel they’ve put all this time and effort into creating the world so it would be a waste to not show you all of it.

But this city of guerrilla broadcasters and graffiti gangs battling against one another using memes and TV signals as much as they do Molotov cocktails is one that is really drawing me in the more time that I spend there. We’ll see how i feel at the end of the final draft but I can see more coming out of this place.

A short excerpt:

The screen has been labelled the Synapse from almost the moment that it appeared on the outskirts of the Simpatico favela and perhaps even before. The people who inhabited the cracked and degraded slum housing had gathered around the construction site which appeared one morning where a clothing factory had once stood and stories were swapped about what was being built.

Stories of elaborate new tower blocks mingled with those of high-tech prisons or Policie torture centres, of a replacement factory to bring much-needed jobs to the area or of refugee camps that would handle the influx of immigrants from over the hills. When signage bearing the logo of Kasicz Energy was unveiled a few weeks into the build from behind the yellow canvas sheeting that covered the construct most of the time, the theories became focused on a new power station or storage facility for the energy company.

But another week later, and with the scaffolding and sheeting peeled away like pieces of a scabrous wound, a giant TV screen, 100 feet wide by around 60 feet high, was revealed. The screen flickered to life that night as if receiving a broadcast feed from God and those gathered around it sat before it as if it were their altar. The first message was a minute-long advert which explained that Kasicz Energy sought to level the informational playing field and allow the favela to receive exactly the same information that others throughout the city would receive and so had built the screen to bring that to the people of Simpatico. A short speech by Alexsander Kasicz passionately reiterated the point, explaining that it was his belief that no citizen should be neglected in this way, and this message repeats on a daily basis in between the various newscasts.

It is a sentiment that many could see through - but not enough.

Each day jobless labourers and junkie housewives sit before it alongside neighbourhood children and people from other nearby slums who speak of one day having a screen of their own and they do not realise that the only equality Kasicz Energy is ensuring is that the people of Simpatico favela are as successfully indoctrinated as any other citizen. It is vital that these people - who have been most harmed by the actions and influence of Kasicz and the other power companies, who don’t have the money or time to seek out the broadcasts that swarm around the city - are controlled as readily as anyone else as it would be these people, should they be able to reach the truth about what goes on in the city around them, that would rise up the most powerfully, in number if not in might. And so the broadcasts that are bled out by the Synapse 24 hours a day, every day, have been carefully selected and sometimes even edited, to guide and distort the lens through which the people of the favela see their world.

Have just done another bulk send-out of review copies of Pretty Little Things To Fill Up The Void, something that has kind of been neglected because of time and money restrictions, but that I’ve been desperate to do to start generating some feedback and (hopefully) buzz about it.

So far I’ve sent copies mainly to authors to try and get some blurbs from them for future works - including Richard Morgan, Jeff Noon, Warren Ellis, Neil Williamson, Hal Duncan, Jack O’Connell and Paul DiFillipo - but obviously these guys are all very busy and the chances of getting anything back from them is vague (though worth it). Jack O’Connell, of course, was kind enough to give me feedback on Nothing Is Inflammable although with his new novel out he’ll no doubt be extra busy and it might be a little greedy to expect more feedback on PLTTFUTV. We’ll see though.

As nice as blurbs from “name” authors are, of course, the main promo for the n*vel will be in getting reviews from various places and so this is what I’m targeting this time. I’ve just posted off copies to Interzone/TTA; Vector; Warpcore SF; SFX; SFRevu; Skinny Mag and Spike Magazine so we’ll see how it goes. I’m just about out of review copies to send out so I might have to buy some more but I also think that’s all the main SF review places in the UK hit so from now on it’ll be a case of sending them to the states instead.

Here’s a question, in particular for other authors - do you think it’s worthwhile sending copies to major review places such as The Guardian and other newspapers? Obviously they will be receiving hundreds of books so the chances of them looking at a small press genre-fuzzy book by an unknown name is more than slim but then if you don’t try then you’ll never know. that said i only have limited funds and copies so can’t be chucking them out to just anywhere. What do you all think?