My 25th published story, “The murder of Father Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin considered as the single men’s Olympics Luge final“, has just gone live at Sein und Werden.

I first read “The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a downhill motor race” by JG Ballard around 1979 / 1980, in one of the best sf anthonlogies I have ever read, Decade: The 1960s, edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison. (I wish they had followed it up with collections for the 70s and 80s, but I am greedy and should be happy with what I have.) I loved the title and the story, not knowing that it was a homage to Alfred Jarry’s “The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race” because dang those 60s sf folk were literate and interested in a bunch of stuff.

Who knows why I do anything I do, but I do know that I was thinking about nerve agents being smeared on Salisbury door handles, and cups of tea being poisoned with Polonium. (I wrote it before the Russian underpants bandits played around with Alexei Navalny’s smalls.) Who am I to think I can hang around with Ballard and Jarry? I’m at an age where I have stopped worrying about things like that, and they are dead so they can’t stop me.