Every week, I post links on my blog and explore others for personal fun. It's a feast of ideas, and I am going to share the context with anyone who cares to read. I'll also comment on what I am reading. Have fun, but let's start with something on a darker note first...
Sign here, please... (Yes, you!)
The matter of girl who was shot in Pakistan for campaigning for education for girls has seethed in my mind: a poisonous brew of caustic acid and bubbling anger that darkens my mood several notches. Did those deluded sons of jackals think they were being heroic or righteous? I suspect it was nothing more than jealousy: one of the most common methods of dealing with the disparity between those who are elevated and those who are on the same level as sewer trouts is to drag people down. Martyrdom is not happy or glorious, but do help to make the thing count and hope it backfires on the filth by signing the Avaaz petition, here...
Stories for stories
Leading this week's pack of story inspirations, a couple of straw dolls are making waves in Taiwan, where dark arts are suspected. A Taoist monk appears to be calming things down. A woman taking part in an aquabike class was accosted by a large octopus, begging the question, what would Cthulhu do if his domain was turned into a sports resort? A man who lost his car after a bender was reunited with his car a couple of years later, so what was the car doing during that period? Zombies got some rehabilitation this week as they were spotted delivering canned goods to the needy. It begs the question, when is someone going to jump on the vampire bandwagon and start providing them with brains substitutes? (Thanks to Lisa McCourt Hollar for the link.)
Reading and writing
Tracie McBride shared an interesting link on fairy stories and children. Folk tales and fairy stories in their original forms are typically violent and disturbing, however the article tells us that the stories help children to come to terms with their inner turmoil. Read the article, here...
On that topic, I'm a fan of the newish genres, 'mythpunk', 'fairypunk' and 'magic realism' as they open up new avenues and story lines with interesting possibilities for speculative thought. If you are interested in this kind of thing, take a look at Neil Gaiman's 'Murder Mysteries' (one of the best and most thought-provoking stories ever written, in my estimation) in the collection 'Smoke and Mirrors' and Tad Williams' 'War of the Flowers', which is sadly not yet available in Kindle format.
The Guardian notes a shortage of fiction with climate change as a part of the premise. Thinking back, I can remember a short story about a boy who wished summer would last forever, and that movie with the massive global storm (The Day After Tomorrow). Climate change is one of the most threatening issues of our time, so it is a bit of a surprise. Perhaps though, it is a case of Al Gore's 'boiled frog' scenario. Read it here...
Kim Newman's 'Dracula Cha Cha Cha' finally showed up for pre-order and in Amazon US, no less. It was scheduled for release on 13 October. I cleared the decks for it, but it didn't show up on my Kindle. Investigation showed that there were problems with the format leaving me with a case of extreme frustration. It has finally arrived. You can find it here...
While I was waiting for 'Dracula Cha Cha Cha' I dug into my unfinished copy of Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2000 and was gratified to come across two very imaginative stories, 'Naming the Dead' by Paul J. McAuley and 'Pork Pie Hat' by Peter Straub. It also contains a Halloween Street item by Steve Rasnic Tem, which I hope to read to my daughter at Halloween. The edition which I have on my Kindle is now untraceable in Kindle format on either of the Amazons, so I seem to have the ghost of a book in my Kindle. Cool bananas!
AND my annual treat, the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 is due out, later this month.
Mother Nature and other terrifying things
BBC asks a pertinent question about global population growth. Can we be sure that the figure of 10 bn by 2050 will not be higher? Stats are generally a highly educated thumbsuck based on the conjecture of distributions and trends in the impenetrable language of calculus, but unforeseen variables and chaos theory (simple english version, here...) have a way of questioning everything we expect in a very real manner. Read the article here...
IO9 riffs about the 7th extinction. The upper limit for one of these extinctions is two million years, but a number of factors make it seem as if it might be just around the corner. Read the article here...
And finally...
Yet another justification for grass, this time conjecturing that Jesus and healers in the time of Judea used the weed in potions. I'm not a big one for recreational substance abuse, because I need my mind working and dopy smiles don't work for me, so I take it with a pinch of salt. Read it and snigger at the next round of impassioned arguments, here...
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