Fire



Working late tonight in the bookstore we at least had the spectacle of the candlelit procession progressing along Princes Street in the dark of the winter night to distract us. Mostly children carrying flaming torches - my what a good idea, small kids with large, naked flames! - but also, for some bizarre reason, faux Vikings pulling a Longboat. Obviously the organisers of Edinburgh's much vaunted Hogmanay celebrations have decided to pilfer ideas from the Orcadian Up-Hellya fire festival where, dressed as Viking warriors, the locals haul a Longboat they spent months building to the harbour then ceremoniously set it ablaze like a Norse king's funeral.



This makes sense since the Orkneys have at least as much Viking ancestry as Celtic, if not more. What Vikings have to do with Edinburgh is beyond me. Being somewhat familiar with Scottish history I can tell you our Celtic ancestors spent most of their time fighting the Norsemen who kept raiding our lands, burning homes and ravaging the cattle. Well, at least until the Celts forced them to a proper battle at Largs, where they slaughtered them, chased them right into the surf and burned their boats. Brian Boru lead our brother Celts in Ireland to a similar victory at Clontarf. Vikings were one of histories great raiders, but they clearly were no match for enraged Celts in a proper fight. Must have been all that seal blubber ale slowing them down. Anyway, fair to say they have bugger all to do with Edinburgh or any Celtic winter ceremony, so it was all rather spurious. But then again, it looked great - men and young boys in home-made Viking costumes hauling a great Longboat by flickering torchlight, so who cares how historically innacurate it all is.



In the meantime the lights are strung across the bare, winter branches of the trees in Princes Street Gardens and the more garish lights of the carnival rides glow from the other side of the valley in front of the Bank of Scotlan'ds floodlit building on the Mound, in front of the medieval Old Town. In the Gardens, down in the valley the lights floodlight an open air skating rink, with the Victorian carousel above it going round, the painted horses glittering and kids skating on the ice - it's all rather beautiful and great fun. Now having a damned good time to pass the long, dark winter nights of Caledonia, that is something our Celtic ancestors certainly did. Cheers :-).

Last minute shoppers



Every year it seems people leave it later and later to buy their presents. Going to work on Monday most of the stores in Edinburgh had started their New Year sales early because the weekend before Xmas was so poor. Certainly in our bookstore it was busy, but not nearly as busy as it should be. Oddly Monday was far busier. Presumably a lot of folk thought they'd take the week off and do the shopping on Monday when it was quieter. Except most of them thought this was so it was bloody busy! Not looking forward to tomorrow's day at work at all, especially since after closing on Xmas Eve we are expected to set up for the fucking New Year Sale so it is ready to go first thing on the 26th. Quite why any store needs to be open on Boxing Day is beyond me and why some sad tossers have to go shopping on that very holiday morning when they have all just had a huge commerical blowout is also beyond me. It does make for poor shop workers who have been frazzled for two months over commerical overload for fuck all money being overworked yet again. What is wrong with people? Would it really hurt to wait till the 27th? Stay home, be with your family, teach your kids to play their new games! Or if they are really good games wait until they go to sleep and play with them yourselves!



Anyway, a happy season to everyone, except the bastards at Play.com who still haven't delivered my mother's main present after 9 days and refuse to even start a search for it until it is two weeks overdue. Safe to say if it hasn't arrived by tomorrow I won't be shopping with them again, especially since their original email promised it with 3-5 days over a week ago and I had to email the bastards twice before I got a response, despite their auto answer which acknowldged my email and promsied a reply within 24 hours but it took 3 days and another email to get a message effectively saying piss off until two weeks are up, so sorry... Ah, fine customer service...

Alphaville



Nice item on BBC-I about the emerging virtual dystopia on the Sims Online. Alphaville, it was thought, would be a virtual utopia where the 'residents' would create a perfect world in cyberspace but instead the virtual cities are crawling with psycho grannies, theives, muggers and murderers; a bit like downtown Nottingham after dark.

Fourth Craw



A nice Xmas animated card and poetry from my mate Brendan's new print and web design business, The Fourth Craw, which I am glad to say is doing very well. For those sassenachs amongst you, the name refers to an old Scottish nursery rhyme.

Peace of the season



May the quiet peace of the deep winter forest fill your heart.

May the strength of the earth beneath your feet always support you when you need it.

May the clear blue of the skies smile upon you and your loved ones in union with the earth.

May the warm fires of the winter-time warm your body and lighten your soul.

May the poetry and song of our people be your light on the long nights until the return of the sun.



From an ancient Celtic blessing I just made up.



Regardless of personal faith, persuasion or bad colour co-ordination, peace and liver abuse on you all.

Big Read rumbles on



Further to the many points made after the Big Read voted Lord of the Rings as top British book there is an excellent letter from Darren Nash, the editor of the superb Earthligh imprint that the fuckwits at Simon and Schuster grievously assasinated this year despite having a great list and some loyal readers. Darren takes those so-called literati (ie reviewers for broadsheets who are mostly failed writers themselves) and makes a fine mockery of them.

Uisge betha





A lovely surprise this week for me, especially welcome after my bout with some horrid flu that’s doing the rounds of our booksellers (perhaps we’re allergic to all these bloody ‘miscellany’ and ‘little book of’ cash-ins) - a bottle of 17 year old Bowmore to add to my fine single malt collection. From the Isle of Islay off the western coast of Scotland, whence come some of the finest examples of the water of life known to civilization. Smooth and peaty, warming against the winter, best served in a rounded-glass so you can swirl it and sniff the fine aroma before sharing it with friends by a nice fireside. Huge thanks to my vampette Jan and her husband, my mate Lin, the American Boffin (one day someone will realise your cutting edge alternate power cells are the way forward instead of burning dead dinosaurs).



The stress at work is, as you’d expect, utterly dreadful. All shops are busy at this time of year and bookstores suffer even more because we get some very stupid people in who never set foot in a bookshop except at Christmas to buy a present. This means they have not the faintest idea of how to find anything. Even the alphabet is a mystery to these dullards as the concept of ‘authors A-Z’ means nothing to them as they try to find the new John Grisham under ‘B’. Obviously we’d normally try to help someone like this but at this time of year with vast queues and a phone that rings off the hook and massive amounts of stock to be sorted, arranged and constantly tidied and arranged we simply don’t have enough free people to help many of them. Then there are the idiots who just ignore the fact it is Xmas and try to come up to the busiest till points in the whole store with a huge list of titles and get very shirty when we tell them there is no way we can help them look up a list of twenty obscure college books a few days before Xmas. One such customer complained loudly to a colleague only yesterday that this was ‘terrible customer service’. She pointed to the enormous queue of people behind him he was holding up and tried to explain to him that this close to Xmas we simply can’t do these sorts of things that we would normally be happy to help with and as they were college books could he come back a few days after Xmas when it was quieter? After all the colleges are closed… So of course he storms out.



Then there are the dreadful Old People Brigades. How a bookseller’s heart sinks when he has a massive queue of impatient Xmas shoppers who have left it all too late and are blaming the underpaid shop assistants for their own tardiness and then they have an Old Person Wanting Book Tokens at the head of the line. This most dreaded category of customers almost always wants an odd amount of tokens. No ten or twenty pound one, they must have eight or twelve or seven, which necessitates a much longer time to count out single vouchers t o make up the amount rather than a single denomination. They will then have to have the difference between our own gift vouchers and book tokens explained to them four or five times in increasingly loud, exasperated voices. When they come to pick a card they will take ages, carefully sorting through each card several times, taking them out, looking them over and always, always checking out the inside even although all of them are blank inside. They will then, after discarding ten or twenty designs mutter ‘is this all?’ before disparaging all of the cards and muttering loudly about the paucity of the cards on offer. When, after several minutes of this charade, with twenty people standing impatiently behind the Old Person waiting to be served, you try to goad them on by pointing out there are several designs including some simple blank ones if they don’t like the rest and that they are FREE they will eventually take one. You can’t imagine how much some people can moan over a fair selection of cards that are, after all TOTALLY FUCKING FREE, GRATIS, WITHOUT CHARGE! JUST TAKE ONE!!! And no, we don’t do fifty pence worth, granny, please learn the concept of inflation…Maybe we should sentence Saddam to work behind a bookstore counter every Xmas for the rest of his life. Then he would know the real face of suffering.



Still, it’s not all bad as the lovely Nicola at Gollancz sent me a copy of Richard Morgan’s next book (due March, expect rave reviews in the Alien) and the new Rob Grant novel. We’ve got Rob coming back for a return visit in January and after a little wrangling I ensured the event is in our branch and not the fancy bigger Edinburgh branch which has been getting all my suggested authors of late, despite the impoverished nature of their SF section. Rob’s gigs have always been great in the past so I am looking forward to seeing him again, should be a good night. Now we just have to see about doing something for Newton’s Wake in February - we have had a good launch night for each of Ken MacLeod’s books for several years now and they normally end up with us all going off to the Victorian environs of the nearby Guildford Arms afterwards, with Iain Banks and Charlie Stross coming along for support. Of course, all being well this summer we’ll need to see about doing something to mark the first UK publication of Charlie’s excellent and unusual Singularity Sky (due around the same time as Iain’s next SF novel) and Mike Cobley and Miller Lau are interested in doing a joint gig for us in the spring, plus we have our now-regular little SF Book Group each month that Alex and I run - so at least there are some good times to look forward to.

Haggis Hunt



A fun game across several web cams from the Scotsman newspaper of Edinburgh - hunt the Haggis (hence the name). Whisky optional.

Endless



After much to-ing anf fro-ing between myself, Ariel and James Lovegrove we finally wrapped on our super three-way coverage of the new Sandman: Endless Nights collection, now edited together by Ariel's tender hands and looking pretty damned fine if I do say so myself. These multi-reviewer discussions that we do occassionaly on the Alien for very special books are kind of becoming our trademark - something we can do that the more conventional SF media don't - or indeed can't - do due to all sorts of restrictions, but as a virtual publiaction we can be more flexible and experiment with fromats and presentations. Seems to go nicely with the readers and the publishers too, so another win-win situation all round. And on a similar note, very nice to look at the mass-market edition of Richard Morgan's superb Broken Angels and see quotes on the cover from our coverage. Nice.

Big Reading Bitch



Further to my comments on Lord of the Rings winning the BBC's Big read me old mucker Ariel has a rather good series of observations on both the predictable response from the so-called 'literary' commentators and also some of the implications for publishers and booksellers. He's certainly right on the money when he talks of just what a goldmine a well-managed SF&F section can be because it brings in so many repeat customers who are loyal to that shop - hell it becomes their shop - because the people running it know what they're doing, speak their language, run the right events, book clubs etc. And the result is solid sales month after month, someting I'm sure he's more than familair with from his days in Waterstone's in sunny Deansgate and their huge SF area.



Those solid sales also give you the support necessary to try experimenting with riskier new titles and writers - innovation and adaptation are always necessary in any business, book or otherwise but you need a solid, core business you can rely on to underwrite the riskier stuff. It's something I've always tried to do over my decade of running a mid-sized but pretty comprehensive fantastic fiction section. I've always seen reviews and recommendations, in store and in the Alien, as a bedrock of the process of highlighting new work and writers - especially since the mainstream media are so often hostile to the genre - and keeping an eye on the sorts of things my regulars buy and ask for.



And so we went from three or four graphic novels - for example - when I started to several drops of them new, turning over thousands every year - sales many of my colleagues in other bookstore lose out on, but more fool them. And guess, what? By the time the mainstream world caught up to what we all knew and started feting writers/artists like Joe Sacco for Palestine or giving Chris Ware the Guardian New Book Award for Jimmy Corrigan we were waaaaayyyy ahead. When it hit the headlines everyone sold out right away and the publisher was caught out in reprint because they didn't think it would win. We on the other hadn had stacks in our branch and sold and sold and sold because we believed in it and were ready for it Why? Because we knew what the good stuff was, we had it in, we shared it with our regulars and they rewarded us by buying lots of them. Our sales go up and the boss, even in these 'how many units can we shift' days where head offices try to run bookstores like retail supermarkets generally gives us carte blanche to add new titles, run book reading groups and hold events because he knows pretty much all of brings in far more loyal buyers, more sales, higher profile with other book buyers who these happy shoppers recommend us to, good relations with local writers who sign stock and give talks for us which brings in more readers and buyers...



So the commerical interest is served and more books are sold and reputations built up which bring in more customers, while the SF&F booksellers get some small satisfaction from being able to introduce readers to new writers they didn't know about. Despite all the bad things in my job these days I still get a damned good feeling when a customer picks up a book because one of us recommended it adn they thought, never heard of this, but, yes, this sounds good, let's try it and we also feel good when we know we're helping to boost sales and profile of a new writer. Those folks who pick them up come back again and again and I reckon some of them get a kick out of knowing they were in on the ground floor of a new writer like Ricahrd Morgan or Ken Macleod or Jon Courtney Grimwood because they read them before they became big because they saw them recommended early on in their careers when few folk knew who they were and went for it. And as Ariel says in his article, these people are drawn back to the genre and the smart bookseller knows how to use this. So we get to boost the profile of our favourite genre and the store gets better sales which lets us try more new things. We're still doing it, adding new styles, writers and genres to our section. I'll add some Gothic fun like Lenore, Boneyard, 30 Days of Night

or Gloom Cookie and Alex will keep tinkering around, adding Lupin and his beloved Nauassica Mangas. Keeps us interested, broadens our range and gives more sales to even more customers. I have a lady from out of town who comes in every few months and buys a pile of books for her boys. Since they polished off Potter and Pratchett she asked for recommendations a while back. Last time she was in and asked for more. As she took some of my suggestions she told me that our in-store recomendations and the reviews on the Alien that I'd told her about were now largely shaping her boys' reading habits. Now that's pretty rewarding as a bookseller and as a business you can be sure you've got those people for life if you treat them right.



Now if only we got a decent pay for all of this... And decent working conditions.... And enough staff... And a head office who would just let us get on with doing what we know to do... And lots of sexy cyberbabes at our events who like booksellers... And ...

Flight of fancy



"Flying - the dream of man and flightless bird alike."

Colonel Hap Hapablad in the Simpsons (the one where Sideshow Bob steals a nuclear bomb).



There's been a lot on about the centenary of powered flight, especially on the history channels. Those few seconds on 17th December, 1903 seem almost amusing to us now. Who would have thought that those tiny flights (120 feet in one, less than the span of many modern airliners' wings) would alter the world in a way that few inventions have? Secluded and breezy Kittyhawk seemed the ideal place and so it proved on a mildy breezy day. Within 6 years Bleriot had flown the English Channel and not long after the end of the Great War the technological advances it had brought to aviation lead to Alcok and Brown flying the Atlantic. Imagine flying the great and wild expanses of the Atlantic in a biplane, before the invention of proper instrumentation (that wasn't until 1929) through storms and featureless grey oceans.



Less than 40 years afterwards and the fate of the United Kingdom - and indeed the whole free world - hung on the new aircraft which defended these isles during the Battle of Britain as sturdy Hurricanes and the elegant Spitfires of RJ Mitchell soared in the skies, for the first time in British history our security no longer relying soley on our naval supremacy because flight had changed all the rules, something the Japanese fleet further proved in Pearl Harbour and the Royal Navy proved to the Italian fleet in the Medittaranean. The war ends and Chuck yeager is shoved back into his seat in his Bell X-series rocket plane to break the sound barrier in 1947. Less than 50 years have passed by this point. Only a decade after this my boyhood hero Gagarin makes his astonishing flight into space. Within the following decades Concorde makes her first supersonic flight, Harriers were learnign to lift vertically, hover and fly backwards and Amrstong and Aldarin take the lyrics of the song Fly Me to the Moon literally (taking a small piece of the Wright's Flyer with them as a mark of respect and of how far we had come).



All of this within seventy years. Think on that - something mankind had tried to do for millennia and within the span of a human lifetime we went from a few seconds of flight a few feet from the ground to Concorde and Apollo. A person who was a child when Orville and Wilbur took to the skies, being told of this stupendous news by an excited father could have been a grandparent recounting the tale to their grandchildren while watching the moon landing on television. Millenia of dreaming and finally we have a century of flight. Most of us have flown, often to foreign countries, covering continents in a few hours' flight has given us the freedom of our planet on a scale accesible to most people in a way no other humans in history have ever had. Most of our grandparents only a few decades back never had this experience; we take it for granted. We live in a time of casual miracles that we take for granted. Every now and again we stop and marvel at them, but most of the time we don't think about it. A plane flies overhead and most of us never look up. It takes events like the ending of Concorde or the first flight after the Challenger explosion to make us stop and look and wonder again at the things we can do.



As Beagle II nears it Mars destination I can't help but dwell on what the next century will bring. There's a good interactive history of flight on the BBC homepage and more on the webpages of the Smithsonian.

You’re in the bag, dad!



So Saddam has been collared at long last. Well, I won’t shed any tears over the old bastard, but can’t help but note it took the entire US army eight months to find him in a country they over-ran in days. That doesn’t bode well for their ability to spot terrorist suspects. And there is still that matter of Osama.



However, are we sure it is Saddam? I know the US government insists it took DNA tests before announcing the news to be sure, but we only have their word for it that this is him. And frankly their word is worth about as much as Tony Blair’s, which is to say, worthless, especially given they have lied to us before over this war and they had a pressing political need to find the old bastard.



Besides I looked this this dishevelled, ragged old man dragged from a hole in the ground with his unkempt beard and torn clothing and thought ‘crikey, they’ve got Lord Lucan!’ Seriously, it looks just like the supposed Lucan on the cover of a recent book where the missing nobleman looked like an ageing hippy. This was later revealed to be precisely because it was a picture of an ageing hippy and not Lord Lucan. Having seen Saddam tonight I think we now know where he went. Lucan went missing in the 60s, Saddam came to power in the 60s, both men are involved in murder and both have silly moustaches. Case closed. Well, it makes more sense than most books on Lucan.









Or perhaps he’s really the “it’s” man from the start of Monty Python?



Anyway, just remember Saddam spelled backwards is ‘Maddas’. Need I say erom?



Interesting sidebar - as I scoured Amazon-Waterstone’s online for this book image it of course suggested other titles I may be interested in if I bought a book on Lucan. The book? Robert Harris’s Pompeii. Hmmm. Missing nobleman from 60s swinging Britain and a novel set in classical Rome featuring a cast of thousands and a volcano. Yep, I see the link. They’re both books.

Wave of mutilation



Cease to resist giving my goodbyes

Drive my car into the ocean

You think I’m dead but I sail away

On a wave of mutilation

Wave of mutilation

Wave of mutilation

Wave.

I’ve kissed mermaids under the ocean

Rode the El Nino

Walked the sands with a crustacean

Could find my way to marry honour

On a wave of mutilation

Wave of mutilation

Wave…

T h e P i x i e s

Dante



After a chum doing this recently I decided to retake it. I'm sure I've been consigned to a different circle of Hell than the last time. Which is nice.



Perhaps I shouldn't have told them I was a mass-murdering, gun-toting, country-bombing dictator who enjoyed sodomising turtles while watching children tortured, eh?



Still, nice to see I am highly compatible with the circle for the lustful. Any available women reading this blog, please take note :-)

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Seventh Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Moderate
Level 2 (Lustful)	High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very High
Level 7 (Violent)	Very High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Low

Take the Dante's Divine Comedy Inferno Test



I was banished to the seventh circle. Guarded by the Minotaur, who snarls in fury, and encircled within the river Phlegethon, filled with boiling blood, is the Seventh Level of Hell. The violent, the assasins, the tyrants, and the war-mongers lament their pitiless mischiefs in the river, while centaurs armed with bows and arrows shoot those who try to escape their punishment. The stench here is overpowering. This level is also home to the wood of the suicides- stunted and gnarled trees with twisting branches and poisoned fruit. At the time of final judgement, their bodies will hang from their branches. In those branches the Harpies, foul birdlike creatures with human faces, make their nests. Beyond the wood is scorching sand where those who committed violence against God and nature are showered with flakes of fire that rain down against their naked bodies. Blasphemers and sodomites writhe in pain, their tongues more loosed to lamentation, and out of their eyes gushes forth their woe. Usurers, who followed neither nature nor art, also share company in the Seventh Level.



And they say God is Love and Peace and Forgiveness?

One Book to Rule them All



Well it’s all finished as of tonight, the Big Read votes have been counted. On one level I think the whole exercise was a waste of damned time. Far too many good books ignored and of course it does not for a moment reflect the nation’s favourite book because the voting is heavily biased in favour of England due to the population. Hence very little Scottish literary figures represented. Most shockingly no Alasdair Gray. Colleen McCullough’s Thorn Birds is in the top 100 but no Lanark? I asked the BBC why there was no break down of the voting in the different kingdoms of the UK and was told they would be doing something ‘soon’ and yet months later still nothing.



Also very pissed off with all the wanker celebrities taking potshots at Lord of the Rings and SF/Fantasy in general. One took shots at LOTR declaring Philip Pullman’s Dark Material’s trilogy was far superior. While I think they are a damned fine read the truth is they would not exist without Lord of the Rings, as indeed most fantasy trilogies would not. Bill Oddie also took a cheap shot at LOTR and ‘silly fantasy’ in general. This from the man who picked Wind in the Willows as his book and was a former Goodie, a show which had a giant kitten toppling the Post Office Tower and children’s TV show puppets like Dougal rebelling and chasing them round the garden. Not fantasy at all either. Bill claimed Wind in the Willows was not a fantasy of course, just as many others claimed anything they liked which was fantasy was not, of course, fantasy, so it was okay to enjoy them. Philip Pullman is not just a fantasy. Well, few truly good books are ‘just’ any one thing, but the genre skeleton it grows upon is FANTASY!. Why the hell couldn’t its champion, Benedict Allen, admit that? Why can’t adults admit that some fantasy is good literature? Newspapers are just as bad. What is this taboo about not admitting some SF&F is GOOD LITERATURE????



Still, once more JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings has topped the list, which does please me, despite my misgivings about the whole thing (although it has been utterly fantastic for getting people to READ!). Clive Anderson commented exactly what I was thinking - that LOTR topped polls run long before the excellent movies. A copy of the book is to be sent to thousands of school libraries across the UK, so once again the Geek inherit the Earth; a whole new potential generation of fantasy readers for us to capture (get them while they’re young, as the Jesuits used to say, although they may have had less honourable intentions considering what some of those priests have been up to).



Why is this book so popular? It beat everything in our Waterstone’s Book of the Century poll back in the 90s. We measure all modern fantasies against it. Why? I could point out the incredibly detailed worldscape that Tolkien crafts. In a fantasy you must have some grounding that gives the reader a form of reality - sounds strange but it is true and is something that Peter Jackson, the wonderful Kiwi Hobbit, has understood instinctively with the movie adaptations. Believable cultures, languages and traditions allow the reader to accept more fantastical elements such as wizards, talking trees and monsters. The eternal battle between good and evil could be another element. We all love that, it resurfaces time and again in all forms of art. The sense of history - as his grandson said tonight on the Big Read there was this sense of so many stories untold because of the richness of the history of Middle Earth (and indeed which spawned so many volumes of history later).



The truth is there is no one reason, or at least none I can fathom. All good books are woven like tapestries; so many threads come together to make it what it is. But if I had to pick one I would say that quite simply it is the power of Myth. Ray Mears, championing the book tonight, hit it on the nail when he said that it recalls the kinds of great sagas we used to tell around roaring camp fires long before we wrote stories down. Tolkien understood this extremely well. The heroic quest against the odds could be drawn from Arthurian romances as easily as Classical epics such as the Golden Fleece. The struggle for good, evil and morality and mortality seeps through the pages of Gilgamesh and Beowulf (a work Tolkien championed as an academic). It is something the finest modern fantasists understand and use, like Neil Gaiman in the Sandman series or American Gods, Ashok Banker in the Rama series or Holdstock in Celtika.



Books like The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the Philosopher’s Secret Fire have discussed Jungian archetypes and the universal mythic types which repeat throughout history and throughout cultures as diverse as Aborigines in Australia and Inuits in Alaska. Some Siberian nomads used to tell of the wise man of the tribe having to undergo his initiation rite. He would travel a long way to the edge of the world, passing many dangers. At the end he would have to climb the Iron Mountain which held up the roof of the sky. If he made it this far he would have to find the gap between the sky flapping around the mountain peak, sneaking inside, entering the Earth through the great rock face. Once past this obstacle he would finally face a tiny stone bridge over an endless, black chasm. Should he make it across this last trial he knew he faced certain death - he would be ripped apart by a dark, hidden creature inside the mountain. Afterwards he would be rebuilt with bones of iron - reborn anew, with the knowledge and power his quest had granted him, he would return to his people to lead them.



Recognise it? It’s Gandalf facing his own demon, the Balrog. It’s Sheridan at Za Haduum. It’s about ordinary people who do heroic things and are forever transformed by what they have to do. In the Sandman Gaiman once had Dream talk about the ‘true stories’ in the realm of dreams. These were the tales which are eternal and will be with us forever, across all times and cultures, because deep down they speak to something fundamental in our collective psyche. I’ve devoured myths since I was a child, cutting my teeth on Ulysses when I was in primary school and going on to Gilgamesh(the world's oldest written story - and it's an epic fantasy) and the Mabinogion as I grew up. I’m still amazed at how many times I find resonances within the fantasy books I read - or even the non-fantasy books - and the echoes of past stories which keep pushing from our hidden past into the present in new forms, reminding us of who we are.

Word association



This week's word association list from Subliminal:

1. Blizzard:: gizzard
   
   
2. J:: Gordon
   
   
3. Control:: anarchy
   
   
4. Blood:: drink!
   
   
5. Mysterious:: stranger
   
   
6. Annoying:: twat
   
   
7. Throat:: bite
   
   
8. Condom:: torture
   
   
9. Search:: web
   
   
10. Heartfelt::apologies
    
    

We all live in a Orcish submarine...



According to the Ten Things feature on the BBC-I page the Beatles once tried to buy the movie rights for Lord of the Rings from Tolkien, with John down to play Gollum. Such a shame we'll never know now how this version would compare against Peter Jackson's masterpiece (okay, still one to see, but I am confident it is as excellent as the first two). In my not so humble opinion Andy Serkis would not have had much to fear from Lennon's interpretation of Gollum somehow. Would the Beatles' Lord of the Rings have been as fine an artistic endeavour as Leonard Nimoy's Ballad of Bilbo Baggins? Ah, we shall never know, unless we manage to travel to an alternate dimension where it happened.



Pointless presents



Among the numerous adverts attempting to get us all to spend too much on credit for Xmas presents is an advert from Woolies attempting to persuade us to buy the DVD of David 'Ego' Blaine's recent stunt. A whole DVD of a skinny egomaniac in a plastic box on a wire. How fucking bored do you have to be to want to watch this? What do the extras consist of? The Making of the Box? Multiple camera angles of the box? Perhaps there is an interactive component where you get to throw things at his box just like most of the British population di to this insufferable twat.

Achoo!



Bloody flu/cold/SARS whatever bug has my respiratory system in a headlock. Sniffle, sneeze, sniffle, sneeze. One thing worse than developing a cold is developing it on your day off. Getting ill on your day off should be illegal, dammit. Still, not as bad as the flu outbreak in the US thankfully and it gives me an excuse for a good nip of single malt before bedtime.



Feeling knackered and downbeat and with a nose redder than bloody Rudolph's due to constant blowing I commence Operation Cheerup and start watching some good movies in between snorting Lemsip and producing snot like ectoplasm. Amelie never fails to cheer me up and The Big Blue is just gorgeous.

Return...



Only days to go to Return of the King. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy... On the 12th day of Xmas, Peter Jackson gave to me:



Twelve Shelobs webbing

Eleven Mines in Moria

Ten oliphants stamping

Nine Nazgul Riding

Eight elves a prancing

Seven dwarves a tossing

Six Roharim riding

FIVE GOLDEN RINGS!!!!!



but only one of them is the Precious, yes, yes, my precious....



Four Urak-hai

Three big movies

Two towers,

And a Hobbit smoking leaf in a tree.



Shutup, far narrator! Go backs to the bitsees abouts the golden precious....

USA TO HELP UNICEF



In a move to shore up the strained relationship with the United Nations they US administration announced they were taking unilateral action to help the work of their UNICEF organisation. "We bagged us a few kids on Friday and about ten last week," explained Major General Dwight N. Nukenburger III proudly, referring to the two of the msot recent fiascos in Afghanistant where US attack craft have bombed supposed hideouts of major terrorists only to discover they had actually bombed a bunch of children to death.



There was some puzzlement in the Press Corps as to why the Pentagon and Bush administration was so proud of this 'achievement' until it was realised they had somewhat mistaken the meaning of the anacronym UNICEF. It turned out the Americans thought it stood for United Nations International Child Extermiantion Force and thought, hey, we're good at that, let's do our bit to help the UN boys. Given the misleading and confliciting intelligence about terrorism which lead us into the war in the first palce this is not entirely a surprise. The general also outlined plans to deploy US school students in Afghanistan as they are considered the most effective force to use in killing children. And thus a proud US forces tradition established during the No-Gun Ree massacre in Korea is continued...

Legal Inuit-ition



A group of Unuit hunters from the Arctic are considering taking legal action to force the US government - and others - to get off their lazy, self-undulgent, oil-guzzling arses and do something about global warming. They claim the thinning of ice due to global warming is a threat to their way of life and as such is a human rights abuse.

Ancient willy



A brilliant story on the World Sex news which manages to combine paleontology with porno!





Literary (bad) shagging



Yep, also from the World Sex news is the details of this year's award for the worst sex scene in literature via the Guardian. Shortlist included Alan Parker and Paul Theroux but they were beaten by Bunker 13 by Aniruddha Bahal (Faber & Faber). Have a look and see just how limp between the pages these guys are (even in hardcover, fnar, fnar).

Arrrrrr



Caught Master and Commander this afternoon. Great fun, if not fantastic, although the sea battles were totally outstanding (as they should be after spending 180 million) and it is certainly a boy's film. The storm as the Surprise tries to round the Cape was amazing and the horrible decision Aubrey has to make - to save a man overbaord in stormy seas and risk the whole ship - seemed to be a direct homage to the classic British war-time sea film, The Cruel Sea, with Jack Hawkin's captain on the bridge of his little corvette during a U-Boat attack, having to decide if he should fire the depth charges while other sailors are in the water. If he stops he is an easy target, is he fires he will kill them... The crew of the enemy ship remain invisible for most of the film, which I thought at first made the film pretty one sided, but then when I thought about it I realised that this is how it would have been, never seeing the faces of your opponents unless you were doing broadsides or close enough to board.



I was also reminded of just how dangerous that journey around the tip of South America is. Nelson-era British sailing warships were the absolute peak of the sailing vessel's design - tough, fast, agile, durable. And a lot of them didn't make it around the Cape. Even today it is dangerous. I remember watching a documentary of the Cousteaus sailing from teh Falklands round the Cape in the Calypso II, which is a prupose built ultra-modern exploration vessel, with a composite hull and tall thin structures which are hi-tech metal wind sails (to cut down on polluting engines). Despite radar, sonar, satellite navigation, radio and hyper accurate charts they hit a series of rcoks and ripped a gash in the hull. If the ship had been built conventionaly they would have joined centuries of other sailors at the bottom of the ocean. As it was they managed to limp back to the nearest port.



I still recall that film because the year was 1986. The intrepid crew of the Calypso II had just heard about the Challenger disaster. In an incredibly touching scene they disembarked on the tip of South America and joined the most southerly lighthouse crew on the planet in their little chapel, one group of explorers paying tribute to another on a rocky outpost at the edge of the world where two great oceans meet. I wonder if, in a few hundred years time, people will read or watch documentaries of Gagarin, Sheperd, Amrstrong or Bob Ballard in his deep sea submersible or Coustea and marvel at the places they explored, the knowledge they brought back from places where no-one had gone before in such rickety and primitive craft.

Blades'n'bristles



It's getting utterly ridiculous in the world of men's grooming. I predicted this some time back and it has come to pass. Loads of adverts for FOUR bladed razors. Four blades? I recall when you used to get just one. Then it was 'two blades - one to shave you, one to shave you even closer'. Then we had three blades 'so sharp they need to be kept behind bars'. Now it's four baldes for the ultiamte shave (or latest ultimate as all of the previous were once the ultimate).



Now this is getting bloody silly. How much further can this go? In my adult shaving lifetime we've gone from single baldes to four. At this rate by 2025 men will have one hugely muscled arm to hold their 27 blade razor. Once men used a big old sharp straight razor. Or if they were tough they used their knife or a cutlass if they were pirates. The French used guilitones which did give a very close shave but had bad side effects, such as terrible razor rash (the secret is to moisturiser guys, never cologne).



By 2040 Gilette will introduce the laser-guided smart shaver which opens before impact to release 10,003 nano blade shavers. This will be a spin off from the US military programme to eliminate Al Queda activists by dropping self-targetting multiple warhead nano shavers over Islamic countries to shave those silly big bushy beards off the buggers. Tough guys will shave with a lightsabre or a phaser.



2368 - men use wormhole and FTL technology to travel send their facial follicles backwards in time to avoid the whole shaving thing entirely.



3518 - phycisists learn to manipulate mini black holes, using the tiny singularities to suck the follices right out of your face. Porno sales folk adapt it for the ultimate penis enlarger pump and send you lots of spam mail to tell you about it.



You know, I'm kind of glad I grew a beard this year. I shall join with me mucker Matthew and laugh at the four bladed numpties. Unless you're the wicked Kali-type living statue with multiple limbs aniamted by Ray Harryheusan there is no need to have more sharp edges than an Oscar Wild witticism.

Those weekly words



This week's word association from Subliminal:

1. Scrooge:: McDuck
   
   
2. Ribbon:: Blue
   
   
3. Physical:: tiring
   
   
4. Income:: a joke
   
   
5. Dream:: always
   
   
6. Notebook:: computer
   
   
7. Disney:: evil
   
   
8. Combo:: platter
   
   
9. Booty:: baby shoes (if you're British); arse (if you're American)
   
   
10. Skin::flick
    
    

Spreading the good word



Further to my comments - below - on the murals on the side of Saint John's church on Princes Street, their web master directed me to a page with some of the images when I complimented them on their diaplays- although not the latest one yet, but that's coming. The rector, John Armes, told me he was pleased to receive postive words on the murals as often he only hears feedback when someone complains about them. Ain't that always the way? Have to admit it's somethign I can be guilty of too - quick enough to complain about things that go wrong, service that is poor or activities that offend, but don't often send nicer communications to thank someone for doing good. I have on occassion, but not as often as I should have. This one if from last Christmas. You remember last Christmas? When Bush and Blair, both self-confessed devout Christians were out and out lying to us to create a context to bomb and kill people?

Early



Was I really at work by 7smeggin30 in the AM today? Ah, the Waterstone's way of life - fuck up budgets and staffing levels then make the remaining staff suffer for it, so there I am at 7.30am because obviously my day doesn't suck enough with ignorant Xmas shoppers, endelss queues, endless lists of work to do and no staff to do it. Thank goodness for new Chewable Prozac for Booksellers.



Still, I did notice the 19th century Bank of Scotland building on the Mound has installed a new floodlight system which cycles through various colours, always with the top dome in a contrasting colour. Set against the long hours of glorious darkness and the plain, white Xmas lights on the bare winter trees in Princes Street Gardens it looks great. And the person who does the series of excellent pictures on the big board outside of the mock-Gothic Saint John's church in Princes Street has surpassed themselves this time round. It features a giant George W Bush as a traffic cop, holding everyone else up while he lets through a car with Halliburton and Enron on the side :-). These pictures they put up are usually bang on the money - some of those during the war were very effective, being both humorous and thought-provoking and something which has been well designed to appeal to agnostic cycnics like me as well as the faithful. It's also a gorgeous church and at this time of year it is dark a lot and the stained glass windows are lit from within giving a lovely image to look at on the way home of a winter's night. In the summer there is a Fair Trade shop and cafe downstairs and you can sit outside with you coffee or tea and cake - right in the graveyard! Eating chocolate cake over the crumbling grave of some 19th century worthy, sheltered by leafy green trees is something I very much enjoy.

Fantasy Xmas bestsellers



That fantasy version of the top SF bestselling books for this Xmas are:



Spock’s Original Vulcan Miscellany - a small hardback choc-full of fascinating and utterly useless facts on the worlds of Trek, from the Pantone colour of the red secretary guard’s shirts to Jolene Blalock’s bra design. Just the thing to while away the time with other boring fans who wonder why girls don’t talk to them and just how they could go about getting a green-skinned Orion slave girl for those long nights. Still, it’s better than watching Enterprise.





The Bobbit - yes, yet another of those oh-so-wonderfully amusing pastiches belatedly cashing in - sorry fulfilling the public need for - on popular franchises by copying the decades old Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings. In the shire all the small, hairy creatures have names derived from the main name of Robert. Young Bobbo Bobbins has inherited an inflatable o-ring from his uncle who used it so sit on to relieve his haemorrhoids. Unknown to young Bobbo however, this bottom-comforting ring is the One True Ring and once supported the arse of the Evil Sporran, who legend tells became evil after sitting on a bunch of jaggy nettles while wearing a kilt with no underpants.





Milking It - the 27th instalment of the Great Artless Cash Cow cycle about a bunch of stock fantasy figures and situations. Perfect for morons who can’t be arsed being challenged with decent writing, ideas or characters. Probably written by some bloke with a big beard. And it will probably be late for publication anyway.





The Philosophy of the Making of the Essays About the Philosophy and Essays About the Matrix. Learn to talk even more mindless, meaningless bollocks than the Architect. Gasp as pseudo-academics who can’t get published in respectable journals churn out a pointless essay on a subject they don’t actually no much about as they’ve never seen any other SF film ever.





Bushed - an alternative history novel set in two time frames. In the present the world is being guided into a new dark age of fear, violence and horror as George W. Bush plots in league with Those Who Cannot Be Named to destroy Mankind slowly so the fear and pain will feed the evil extra-dimensional beings who will rule after our fall. Meanwhile in the future segment a young woman in a high-tech nano-suit sips Caledonian 80 in a bar in 26th century Edinburgh and plans to fix the whole of the past, probably using technology and socialism. Yes, it’s a new Ken MacLeod book. Only kidding, Ken.



Light of Earth - the tale of a struggling group of writers who have to battle the evil monolith of Giant Uncaring Publisherdom who threatens - unbelievably - to shut down their excellent SF stable. Coming soon from Mike Cobley, based on a true story.





Altered Broken Market - in Richard Morgan’s new blockbuster Kovacs finds he has to battle against a rampant free market economy run by neural clones of his own brain, who use their combat training for the jungle warfare of cut-throat capitalism. Amongst amoral lashings of the old ultra-violence and a bit of the old in-out Kovacs must face the evil leader of the Marketeers, Condoleeza Rice, while trying to negotiate another movie deal with David Geffen while being very cool and stylish and having at least one good shag scene.





Blood and Lace - androgynous vampires fancy each other, wear silly clothes they think reek of good taste, spout bad poetry and ponce around a bit before getting into a hissy fit over who was in who’s coffin last night. Oh, wait, that’s the new Anne Rice novel, isn’t it? And the one before that and the one before that…



Joe Gordon is a professional cynical bookseller who has seen to many manufactured crazes in publishing and distrusts everything, while strongly believing that everything he perceives is imaginary, including himself. In fact this article doesn’t exist, you only think you’re reading it and you aren’t really there. Oh bollocks, that’s back to one of those tedious philosophy and the Matrix books again isn’t it? He has decided to get on the gravy train by writing a fantasy trilogy called Pages about a handsome young bookseller who has magical adventures, entering new worlds by his books, assisted by his talking cats, a small anime bookseller who lives inside the Manga books and a bevy of delectable lady booksellers who all want him to be their bookmark when he’s not saving all the worlds. Hey. It’s no worse than bloody Harry Potter you know. Volume one of Pages will be published as soon as I can con some money out of a gullible publisher. Dave Langford will write a column of anecdotes in it’s honour and you will all love it.

Look, Ma - no hands!



The new laws banning the use of hand-held mobile phones came into force today. It is a sad measure of the decline of British civilization and a marker of just how damned stupid and arrogant so many people are becoming here that something as common sense as this has to be legislated by parliament. Every night when I walk home - or when I cycled - I cross some of the busiest city centre streets and junctions of our capital. And the sheer amount of drivers who are trying to drive one-handed through a four-lane junction which is choc-a-bloc with other cars bumper to bumper while several hundred pedestrians are trying to cross around them is staggering. I’ve narrowly missed being hit several times by buckets yakking on their phone and not noticing that they are driving through a green man crossing.



So I am pretty pleased the wankers are now being targeted and can’t believe it took so long to make this a law or that a law had to be created to enforce what is, after all, common bloody sense. There was a lot of rubbish on the news channels tonight about drivers being confused over the new legislation. Confused? Bollocks! They know exactly what it is - you can’t use a hand phone when driving, it’s pretty bloody simple. No hands-free kit, no calls. One guy on the news who was stopped tried to say he didn’t know about it all. Despite the fact it has been on the news and in the papers for weeks now. Some big companies such as Scottish Power have fitted hands-free kits in all their company vehicles to protect staff from falling foul of the new law. While this is good to see I have to wonder why exactly these corporate smegheads didn’t think on this before? It’s always been bloody dangerous, but now it’s illegal they take steps to ‘protect their staff’. Or perhaps to stop themselves from bad publicity and large legal bills. Why is it today they think they need them but not yesterday? Perhaps their brains have been so irradiated by cell phone use they can’t think anymore? I’m glad the Scottish police are prosecuting those who break this new law right away instead of the two month warning period. Let them wine - it’s like people who moan about the parking wardens in the Green Lanes - if you didn’t park in the restricted zone you wouldn’t get booked. Likewise if you weren’t so stupid as to try and phone while driving you wouldn’t get booked. What’s hard to understand?

World Aids Day



Two decades later - that we know of - and still millions are dying of this dreadful affliction. The numbers in Africa are now in the millions. This is not just due to the greed of western pharmaceutical companies ( and oh how I could rant for days about those bastards) or lack of money or facilities - although these are factors all too often - but also from many of the people who refuse to discuss or even acknowledge the disease, or try to treat it using what is basically a witch doctor approach. Even here in the west the numbers of the infected are going up again. My generation had dreadful but hard-hitting adverts targeted at them to warn them but the new generation doesn’t seem to get it and as a result the daft buggers are getting infected with all sorts of STDs at an alarming new rate. Maybe we should bring back the old “don’t die of ignorance” adverts. But not tonight. Tonight is a night to light a little candle for someone.

Those new phone laws



Okay, I guess some of the dimmer phone users out there could probably benefit from a clear-cut list of actions which cannot be performed in your moving vehicle after today.



Phones - no hand-held calls. Hands-free only with head set. Semaphore flags sticking out of the sunroof are also proscribed as of today and smoke signals will ensure you fall foul of both communications laws and emissions regulations.



Cooking - you may no longer use deep fat fryers in you car. Making fresh bread in your on-board oven plugged into the cigar lighter is also a no-no and even the portable microwave may only be used when stopped with the engine off.



You may no longer balance your laptop on the dashboard to play a quick round of Halo while stuck in traffic jams.



Shaving small household animals in a moving vehicle is no longer permissible. Neither is training animals - or small children - to perform amusing tricks.



The shooting of hardcore porno movies on digital cameras is no longer allowed in motor vehicles.



Highland dancing on the bonnet of your car is not allowed in traffic.



In addition to these rules the government is now considering other potentially dangerous fads in modern motoring. Dark tinted glass may be outlawed as both a safety consideration to stop these drivers running into walls at night and also on style grounds. Celebrities and drug lords will be exempted.



Obscuring your windows with stickers, logos or banners pronouncing your beliefs will be banned - Asian taxi drivers will be exempted.



Anyone driving a four wheel drive in a city setting with bull bars fitted will be transported to Afghanistan and made to help in reconstruction for two years.



‘Baby on board’ signs will carry a mandatory four year jail sentence and compulsory sterilisation of the offender.



And just to show I am even handed, pedestrians who run across four lanes of moving traffic or cyclists who cycle at night with no lights on their bike can be legally run over.