A meagre homage

JG Ballard died in 2009 on April 19 (I am a tad late to say ‘OTD’). I read his “The Voices of Time” in a paperback collection edited by Damien Knight, 100 Years of Science Fiction. (I was very happy to buy those two volumes, by the way, in the mid-70s, with part of the […]

The Luge! The Luge!

For your Winter Olympics reading pleasure in the short breaks between episodes of The Curling (not a Laird Barron novel), why not read my story with a title that threatens to break the Twitter character limit, “The murder of Father Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin considered as the single men’s Olympics Luge final“? A story that manages […]

Dave’s New year Meditations

Hey yoose lot, happy new year, and get some meditations into ya. Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don’t allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas? – Joseph Stalin Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he […]

Story #26 – “The Time-Traveller’s lament”

May I recommend for your reading … pleasure? … my most recent publication, and my final for 2021 (and who knows, perhaps my final ever?), The Time-Traveller’s Lament ? So many things to say about this, for a change. Thanks to the folks at Sci-Phi Journal. This is the second story of mine they have […]

Testostero

The opening of the first paragraph of Testostero by David Foster may be the most Australian thing* I have ever read, and it is not even set here: The most astounding feature of Venice to Noel Horniman, who at age forty is seeing it for the first time, is not the architecture – which seems […]

Horror as optimism

I knew what books she liked … – gloomy horror stories, Gothic novels with crumpled covers featuring a drawing of a Bat. Perverted monks, severed hands that murder people, coffins flushed out of graveyards by floods. Evidently reading this sort of thing confirmed her in the conviction that we are not living in the worst […]

RA – RA – STORY # 25

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 […]