We Make The Village: The Kickstarter

Out now live and loud is the Kickstarter for We Make The Village, a new collection of short fiction by Canadian authors surrounding the theme of community, and what it means.

Put together by West Coast author Asha Jade Goodwin, this collection features a wide array of thoughts on what it means to be in and out of community with others. As per the Kickstarter page:

From rejection to acceptance, support to sacrifice; in this anthology, you’ll find a mix of it all, fiction and non-fiction, stories and poems. What does community mean? Who is a part of our community? How do we cultivate community in our own lives? What if we are rejected from our community?

We Make The Village will feature 40 stories from 30 Canadian authors and at least five original illustrations from a Prince George artist.

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More to the point, We Make The Village will feature “Rooming Situation,” a new short story from me that was written during a period where I was in some despair about the state of the housing market and the future of how we live together. That period has not ended, of course, and it’s worth taking some time to think through the consequences of a world where you aren’t likely to be able to buy a house if you didn’t own one by 2021 at the latest. Multiple roommate living situations become a sort of forced found family situation, and while that can be difficult to deal with, there’s also a certain magic in the relationships that get formed.

Until one of them snaps, of course.

There are a lot of great reward tiers available for We Make The Village and it’s worth the time to go through them. In addition to getting the hardcover edition, you can also get collection boxes with stickers, bookmarks, and postcards, as well as multiple copies of the book that you can give as gifts. The authors are from all over Canada, so if you’re looking to keep your elbows up, you might as well go all the way, eh?

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New Short Fiction: “If Alton Park Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats”

Up now on Just Keep Up Magazine is my latest piece, “If Alton Park Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.”

This one is a lovely bit of near-future paranoia about AI, creativity, and the urgent need to keep some things safe and separate from the all-devouring maw of the collective regurgitation machine. It’s called “If Alton Park Was A Gunslinger, There’d Be A Whole Lot Of Dead Copycats”, which of course is a spin on something nice Mingus once said of The Bird. Also as I read through it again I realize I put one of you in as a background character.

You can find it here:

New Short Fiction: “THE SALT FLATS”

NZCA Lines – Infinite Summer

★★★★

Released January 22nd, 2016 on Memphis Industries

Some have opined recently – in forums, at any rate – that the concept album is dead. This rather bizarre pronouncement is typically preceded by a question, something along the lines of “What was the last concept album you heard?” and expounded upon by a legion of adolescent rockists talking about The Wall, and why no one makes albums like The Wall anymore, and about how this is somehow indicative of the general death of music at the hands of those awful soulless pop stars.

The problem here is that every one of these people expects their concept albums to sound exactly like The Wall: dreary, overly grandiose, weighted down with its Very Important Conceptualizations and dripping with self-indulgent notions of Art, notions that are seemingly inextricably tied with bluesy guitar solos and radio singles. Thus, when an album like The Monitor, or Hospice, or good kid m.A.A.d. city comes along, their status as being a “concept album” is dismissed in these circles as they’re “too noisy”, or “too indie”, or “hip hop”. The kids wearing t-shirts of their parent’s generation will never accept them because they didn’t live through the 1970s or they’re not beaten to death by Rolling Stone.

Infinite Summer is another one of those albums. Michael Lovett, along with Ash guitarist Charlotte Hatherley and Sarah Jones of Hot Chip, has put together a science fiction story that has a lot in common with the sort of mystical concepts prog bands used to drown their albums in during the latter half of the 1970s. The sun has grown to the size of a red giant, and the destruction of the world is imminent. Half of the world, a sweltering urban jungle, has decided to give up and embrace the destruction; the other half believes that there’s still something worth fighting for and wants to figure out how to rebuild civilization into something lasting. In true Matrix-style fashion, both sides have time to throw a gigantic rave.

The dismissal invariably occurs here because of the fact that this is a concept album built around synths, processed guitars, smooth vocals, and the legacy of Daft Punk. It’s a relentlessly moving Europop-style album, and its disco bona fides mean it’ll never be accepted by the rockists as being a “true” concept album. Granted, the idea kind of falls apart when everyone starts dancing despite the impending doom of the human species, but at the same time it works, given that it seems like the sort of thing the human race would do in it’s hour of destruction. The tracks also get a bit same-y for something so conceptual, but there’s always something you can hang your hat on for the next listen, so each spin of the record brings you deeper into its folds. That there are a lot folds here is testament to the trio creating it; it’s at once sweaty, romantic, and stylishly aloof, and in the place where these three meet is a great big heart beating for all of us.

Not every concept album needs to sound like The Wall, and Infinite Summer is infinite proof as to why.

In Keeping With The Name Of The Blog…

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

Some disturbing food for thought on the continued silence of the night sky. Well, I suppose it’s not all disturbing. Just a few of the concepts, such as the one where the possible Great Filter is actually ahead of us and we have an infinitesimally small chance of proceeding into the wider universe. Actually, come to think of it, the concept about possible predator civilizations lurking out in the stars cutting off attempts at proceeding outward into the galaxy is the cause of more of my sleepless nights, likely because I played Star Control 2 at a very impressionable age. The idea is outlined rather well in the Wait But Why link, but I think it’s summed up best by the following passage from The Killing Star, by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski:

Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That’s when the monsters come out. There’s always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides.

It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can’t read minds.

Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distance shriek or blunder across a body.

How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, “I’m here!” The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, “I’m a friend!”

What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don’t want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out.

There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe.

There is no policeman.

There is no way out.

And the night never ends.

That’s the sort of cheery, smiling bit of thought-experiment that I’m always on the lookout for.