Review: Bloodshot Monochrome by Patience Agbabi
Category: Writing and Poetry

Bloodshot Monochrome by Patience Agbabi

Canongate Books 2008

Paperback, 77 pages

ISBN: 1847671535 / 9781847671530

Buy online at Amazon (US) or BookRabbit (UK)

£8.99

It's a thin book. However, if you're about to become the romper room for someone else's narratives, neuroses and hang-ups, it's cheery that the book is at least thin. They won't be here long. Maybe you can cope.

So Patience enters your romper room. 'Shots', the first of the five parts of this poetry collection, turns it around. She wants neither to invade, nor to assault. You've been invited into her sitting room, sat down with a glass of wine, and she gently soothes you with her lyrical voice. Don't be afraid, she says, I've serious things to say, but I'll say them gently, whilst the cat of my metre sits on your lap and purrs. It's okay to laugh, she says, when you get to 'On turning on the TV...' I'm glad you did, and was afraid you wouldn't.

So that by the end of 'Shots', you want to stay some more and listen. This is as well, because the next two parts, 'Monologues' and 'Problem Pages' are not quite as successful. 'Josephine Baker Finds Herself' is a genuinely clever, successful poem. 'Yore my type' is amusing, but you have to wonder how successfully Patience has entered this other world, or are we sharing a misconception of an alien lifestyle? 'Problem Pages', where Patience has famous writers set her questions which she then answers, may appeal to some, and be a useful resource for literature teachers, but it left me cold after the first couple.

In 'Blood Letters', Patience seems to return to letting us share her experiences. Not as comfortable as 'Shots', but we know each other by now, and it's okay to dare a bit and exchange more personal stuff. Exchange? Reading a book of poems? Yeah, you'll be surprised how you start talking back. Until, with 'Black and White and Red All Over', you're shamed into silence. Momentarily. Patience is not a vicious woman.

The last section, 'Vicious Circle', is a long work. Fourteen paired stanzas, highly structured, clearly thought out. I'm not sure I got the story first time around, but as I made my goodbyes and left this writer's room, buttoning an imaginary coat against an imaginary wind, I didn't feel I'd wasted time. I wanted to visit again, maybe ask some more questions. A good time out.

[[REVIEW BY Debbie Moorhouse for GUD Magazine]]

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GUD Reviews: Dangerous Games (antho)
Category: Writing and Poetry

Dangerous Games
Edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois

Ace Science Fiction, 2007
288 pages, ISBN 9780441014903
$8/Paperback

GUD doesn't normally review larger-press works, which is partially by choice (they tend to get enough press) and partially by convenience. I wound up with a copy of "Dangerous Games", however, via Jason Stoddard, who contributed "Moments of Brilliance" to Issue 0, and has been making waves both talking about the state of short fiction (he keeps stirring the pot over at his blog) and by appearing in a number of anthologies (latest is Ellen Datlow's "The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy").

The tagline for "Dangerous Games" is "In the reality shows of the future, people will literally be dying to win."  And that's not too uncommon of a concept in science fiction, but it's funny how far back it goes.  Eleven stories span from 1958 through 2005 (the majority of them being from the late 90's).  Science fiction is most often looking forward, and if it's not blatantly obvious from the title of the book (I didn't think about it until reading the preface--slim, but thought-inspiring), the collection is focused on the future of games.  A society can be pretty well defined by the games it plays, and at the heart of any game is conflict, so it's a great sandbox for speculative fiction of all sorts.

All of the stories are top-notch science fiction well within the bounds of the genre.  Most of them deal with television or virtual reality.  One of my favorites of the collection is Vernor Vinge's "Synthetic Serendipity", which only touches on VR tangentially--it's actually rather tough to classify, which is part of what makes it stand out for me.  The world envisioned is today's pushed hyper--data mining a skill learned in school, future shock an undeniable social problem, and strange half-virtual theme parks where anyone can contribute content.  Not all is what it seems, but that's not because the author is hiding something behind an "is it real or not" digital curtain.

Alistair Reynold's "Stroboscopic" reads as an instant classic--the heroic Everyman character up against impossible odds--and I was somewhat surprised that it was published as recently as 1998.  Conversely, Robert Sheckley's "The Prize of Peril", and Kate Wilhelm's "Ladies and Gentlemen, This is Your Crisis! could very well be contemporary fiction as opposed to science fiction, their being written in 1958 and 1976 respectively.  Cory Doctorow's "Anda's Game" is timely with the strange social and economic things going on with MMORPGs, and while the story is rather straight forward it's still a fun read; and if you're not familiar with the strange and social and economic things going on with MMORPGs it might be a good jumping off point for you.

Terri Dowling's "The Ichneumon and the Dormeuse" is another favorite--it's a medium- to far-future piece with the feel of a fable and some beautiful layering, touching on tomb-robbing, history/legacies, and identity; the characters are very real, as is the sense of time.

Jason's "Winning Mars" end-caps the collection; my introduction to his writing was this very story from its original publication in Interzone--but then I skimmed a few pages and wasn't very interested.  Reading it without Interzone's high-gloss format, I dropped into the story quickly.  It's a fun and clever take on one thing that could possibly get us to Mars: advertising.  Jason knows his marketing, and the "meta" of the execs building the show and trying to manage the show while various teams compete for the prize adds depth to what is on the surface yet another game show story.

All told, it's a lot of story (and a lot of stories) for your buck, and none of them are duds.  If you want some entertaining and occasionally informative or enlightening science fiction, this is a great collection.

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GUD REVIEWS: The House of Pendragon Book II: The Recruit by Debra A. Kemp
Category: Writing and Poetry

The House of Pendragon Book II: The Recruit
by Debra A. Kemp

Amber Quill Press, 2007
288 pages, ISBN 1592796990
$17/Paperback

(Indie Excellence FINALIST 2007 Book Awards)

It took me several pages to get into "The Recruit", the second book of "The House of Pendragon"; but I found that shortly after I entered the flashback that made up 99% of the book, I was well and truly hooked.  And while I would generally write the prose off as over-wrought, the tone of the language really wound up working for me.

I haven't read the previous book in the series, and Chapter 1 seemed to dump me into the deep end with characters and events I had no connection to, details of the Arthurian story I didn't remember or recognize.  But this is a what-if, and things have moved beyond Arthur's reign.  Lin is the daughter of King Arthur and Queen Gwenhwyfar, fostered to Arthur's sister Morgause; in this fosterage, her true identity was kept from her and she was raised as a slave to Morgause and her sons (I'm ignoring the framing story  here, whose point I'm not really getting, which is many years later where Lin has her own children and is coming back to Camelot in disrepair).

"The Recruit" is a proper mid-story arc, where Lin begins to come into her own.  She's brought to Camelot; her nightmares, if not behind her, are kept private (between herself and her "foster brother" Dafydd).  But coming from slavery, she's not ready to be a princess (another form of slavery to her); she enjoys some of the privilege at first, but ultimately pledges herself instead as a recruit to her father's army.  Lin is driven to out-perform against odds and preconceptions, and while her past does continue to haunt her she comes out the stronger for it.

For all its darkness, "The Recruit" is an uplifting and empowering story that pays homage to the Arthurian myth but also tells its own story, and brings both the Arthurian myth and its time period home in a much more real manner than I've read elsewhere.

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A website retrospective--two years!
Category: Web, HTML, Tech

Our latest design is by Danielle LeDesma, who I've had the pleasure of working with in a professional capacity over the last many years.  I count it a coup that GUD could afford (in trade) her services, and hope that the latest design better reflects the professionalism and feel of the actual magazine, and of "this outfit" as a whole.

There's still chunks of the site that need massaging (and some areas will get some restructuring along with the redesign), but I found it was easiest to just get the basic overhaul up and worry about tweaks as I get the chance.  We've been working towards this design since late November, with many revisions put on the table and scrapped.  It's probably not as exciting for you as it is for us--UI tends to be a more subconscious thing for site users--but I hope that the design makes for an easier landscape for using the site.

The page that got the most focus to start was the homepage.  We've put the current issue front and center--a brief blurb about it, a flavor image, an excerpt from the current issue--this is where the eye will go first.  Messaging about GUD in general comes under that, along with "previous issues", which is actually a tough thing to brand.  We're trying to push not only the current issue but every issue we've published, and it's constantly a tough line to find; especially as one of the things we're trying to push as one of our "differences" is that we're trying to publish content that will _last_, and as part of that we intend for no issue to ever go out of print.  If the magazine "takes off", we'll be paying royalities to our contributors and their heirs...

The areas of the template that mark the most striking change, other than the color scheme and textures as a whole, are the menu (now a vertical menu in the top right; with fewer and hopefully clearer options) and the sidebar (which presents the news and reviews more front and center).   The sidebar's messaging will grow over time to be more specific to various areas of the site (for now it's only different in the actual news and reviews sections).

This marks three designs for three issues, which is a lot considering what goes into it.  We spent six months before launching the business/site tinkering with various design ideas, and we went through several dozen variations of visual theme/color schemes/layouts before settling on what, in retrospect, was the "horror" design of the site.  "Simple" was the driving force of this idea, as it was with the layout of the actual magazine.  We achieved that with the magazine beautifully, I think, thanks to Sue Miller's work on it; but web design (versus development) was neither of our fortes.  Somehow we went astray of that goal for the website itself. 

The craziest part of the website was that while I knew splashscreens were abominations--I thought I knew how to make one "better".  We reduced our homepage to just the menu and a tiny splash of information.  Slowly the information that we wanted to push to the splash screen grew into being a homepage all on its own, and eventually we scrapped it and restructured the homepage accordingly.

I couldn't really say how the horror aspect of things leaked into it.  We're not a horror mag, per se; we're multi-genre, non-genre, slipstream, what-have-you.  But somewhere along the process the black background slipped in, and things just went from there.  I think originally the black background was supposed to be reflecting "coffee-shop manifesto", which was somewhere back in our brainstorming, but got let go over time towards a more "show it don't say it" line of reasoning.

The clouds design, then, was in reaction to that.  Every time I'd show someone the site, in person, I'd find myself saying, "but we're not a horror magazine".  And I never really had a good explanation for why the site didn't look different.  So I approached the site with the thought of making something "lighter", more neutral.  I hadn't divorced entirely from the light text on dark content, and I really liked the faux transparency effect of the almost-imperceptibly-dark bullets on the lighter bullets of the original.  Somehow "clouds" came up, and having effectively a tri-color site (blue left, white stripe, hazy right) seemed like a good way of showing our range.  Having the horizon askew, implicitly 90 degrees from things, was in part intended to make the point that we were different.

Different doesn't necessarily mean better, though, and while the design did escape from the "horror" feel, it was still harder on the eyes and mind than I wanted.  Menu placement was a problem, and the content area of the page became painfully cluttered without clear demarcations between the "content" content and the "sidebar" content.  I had to make the font large to make it easy enough to read on the background; and due to CSS clutter and the organic growth of this design in my spare time, there were inconsistencies all over the site.  I was fairly proud of a few elements--the main title with the "BUY NOW" sticker hanging off the top, for instance.  But as a whole it was not an easy site to read or navigate.

So on to version three--I'm sure it will have its own share of problems, and maybe there will be another retrospective, in time.  I'd love to hear what you think. :)

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Review: We, Robots by Sue Lange

We, Robots by Sue Lange
Aqueduct Press, 2007
98 pages, ISBN 1933500115
$12 / Paperback

As computers become smaller, faster, and more interconnected, I.J. Good's "intelligence explosion" becomes more and more a topic of conversation.  First popularized by Verner Vinge as "the Singularity" and more recently made technologically pop-culture with futurist/transhumanist Ray Kurzweil's non-fiction, the "moment" of artificial intelligence has a celebrated past.

Sue Lange's novella, "We, Robots", is volume 16 in Aqueduct Press' "Conversation Pieces" series, a series aimed at "facilitating the 'grand conversation'."  And "We, Robots" does a grand job of laying the foundation for conversation for someone not versed with the concepts; and it is an interesting story in its own right, told with somewhat of an Asimovian tongue.

"We, Robots" is a historical monologue delivered by Avey (an AV-1 robot, "[t]he latest in Parent Company consumer technology.").  Avey was bought at a big box store by Chit and Dal--to shuttle their child to and from school, paid for by HR Bill 931-206 - "every kid in the U.S. guaranteed a safe environment to and from school".  Avey watches over Angelina as she grows up, sometimes dropping straight into the story of it all, sometimes giving bits of post-Regularity thought.

The Regularity is Lange's conversational "What if?"  Humans fear the Singularity and take Steps to prevent a robot rebellion.  Their fear, of course, accelerates the process.  If that whets your curiousity, definitely pick up a copy.  It's a quick and easy conversational read with interesting thoughts interspersed throughout.

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GUD Goes to WisCon
Category: Blogging

GUD Goes to WisCon

This year's WisCon is being held at the Concourse Hotel in Madison, Wisconsin from the 23rd May to the 26th--and GUD is going to be there. You'll find our splendiferous magazine sharing a dealer's table with other goodies from SLF presses. None of our scary staff will be there, though, so if you care to buy a copy (or two, or three), nobody will snatch any ms you happen to be carrying and put a 'Rejected' sticker on it. Honest!

We're also planning GUD freebies for anyone who attends WisCon, so watch this space :).

Mention of the World's Leading Feminist SF Convention reminded me that there's been concern in the SF community lately about the representation of women's writing in the SF magazines (and awards). Many editors have been anxious to establish their credentials in this area. So why should we be left out?

I can't tell you the proportion of women to men submitting to GUD. We don't routinely track that data, and we received just shy of 1,600 submissions for Issue Three alone. A few too many to check through. We don't slush blind, either, although many of our contributors have usernames that aren't immediately gender specific.

I can tell you, however, that we have 43 discrete pieces slated to appear in Issue Three, and they break down as follows:

Art--Twelve pieces

Seven by F artists / Five by M artists (including the cover)

Poetry--eleven pieces

Seven by F poets / Four by M poets

Prose--nineteen pieces

Eight by F writers / Eleven by M writers

Reports--one piece

One by an M writer

Overall, twenty-two pieces by Fs as against twenty-one pieces by Ms. Works out as a nice balance, I think :), albeit an inadvertent one. GUD is also international--we have contributors living in Scotland, Israel, and France, to name but a few. It's not who you are, or where you are, but what you can bring to the magazine that counts. And our Issue Three contributors have brought a feast.

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Review: Echoes of Terror Anthology
Category: Writing and Poetry

Echoes of Terror anthology, edited by Katherine Smith, Garrett Peck, and Giovanna Lagana

Lachesis Publishing, 2007



Paperback, 412 pages



ISBN: 1897370067



$17.75

This Horror anthology is nicely presented, with an introduction that gives the reader a small taste of what's to come. The stories are topped by short commentaries from the authors on how they came to write their stories, and tailed by their biographies.



When it comes to the actual stories, however, the anthology is an exemplar of the Horror genre. That's either good or bad depending on your point of view. If you don't like traditional Horror, then there's little here that hasn't been done a thousand times before, sometimes done better, sometimes even worse. No innovation, no experimentation, just the same old tried-and-tested tropes and devices that Horror has used ever since its inception. If you do like traditional Horror, see above.



Looks Like A Rat To Me by Nicholas Grabowsky

A man's family is attacked by giant rats--or is it? The first person narrator is a cipher, and we don't get a chance to care about his wife and children, but the somewhat pedestrian narrative is almost saved by a killer last line.



With Love, Veronica by Ken Goldman

The overused trope of the patient chatting to his psychiatrist is dragged out for yet another airing, complete with the switch from first to third person at the end. The story's about twice as long as it needs to be, and that may be part of the reason why the punchline to this horror-by-numbers falls flat. Why the patient should be delusional about everything except his own looks is a question the story doesn't ask or answer.



Eating Crow by Garrett Peck

A happily-married woman is pursued by a killer crow in this overlong tale. The story's padded out with a lot of detail that doesn't advance the story or reveal character, making the narrative feel dull and plodding. The reveal at the end is so predictable it's hard to believe anyone would dare use it.



Fowl Play by Keith Gouveia

A dislikeable man enlists another, similar, to take revenge on the man who just sacked him by killing some ducks. Fortunately, the ducks have a supernatural protector. Unfortunately, the protector doesn't have a very vivid imagination.



Bug Powder by Meghan Jurado

It's business as usual for a cowardly drug dealer when a giant bug gives him some white powder to sell. The writing in this one is superior, but the story itself travels a well-worn path as Bad Things Happen.



When Black Fades to Grey by Andrea Dean Van Scoyoc

This story constantly defeats expectations. When Andrew approaches the cemetery, you might expect the story to progress to his encounter with his old friend Guy, but instead it mires itself in backstory. And more backstory. And yet more. When Andrew comments on Guy coming back into his life, you might expect the next paragraph to describe that reunion, rather than going in an entirely different direction. There is the core of an interesting story here, but it's hampered by the lack of a coherent plot structure and drowned in irrelevance. Important details pop up in the unlikeliest places or at the last minute--but so do insignificant details, making it hard to tell which is which.



November Girls by Katherine Smith

This is definitely a superior story to the rest. Although the plotline isn't new, the story itself is well written and engaging. Good pacing, a well-structured plot and a character who comes to life. Nice job--especially the ending.



The Tree by Katherine Smith

There's some good description in this piece, and an attempt at developing an is-it-the-tree or is-it-the-man story that doesn't quite pay off. With a little more thought and depth, this could have been a good one. It would work better perhaps if the hated wife weren't so hateable.



Clown School by J. Edward Tremlett

Some good writing here--the clowns are depicted well--and the pacing's good. Unfortunately, Bill, the central character, is presented as an unpleasant whiner, and his daughter the same, so it's hard to care about what happens to them in the end. I had to laugh when Bill had the thought that refusing to watch the clown's show would be as bad as hitting a child--this comes a few paragraphs after he did just that.



Crushing Giles by Stephen C. Hallin

A couple go to Salem and discover that a man who was prepared to be tortured to death rather than admit his guilt is somehow guilty after all. Lots of exposition-as-dialogue and some masochism.



Door Bitch by Dave Field

This one's so-so. Slow build-up, a genuinely nasty situation for the central character and her boyfriend, and a surprise ending. Not bad, but could have been tighter.



Tempest by Matt Hults

Some young people. A cabin. Acid rain. Blobs. Goes on a bit too long for what it is.



A Baker's Dozen by Nancy Jackson

A from-beyond-the-grave revenge story involving a bakery. There's a nice cross-generational touch but ultimately the story has nothing new to offer. And if Patterson has to have the significance of the ears explained to him, how can his antagonist be so sure anyone else will understand the message?



Interludes by Jodi Lee

Cowardly psychiatrist who has it coming is lured into a trap of pain and terror. Not sure there's much more to say.



One Hell of a Dell by Giovanna Lagana

A writer is severely punished for using a ghostwriter. Or, a moral tale about always reading the fine print. Lines like, "But he hadn't had a dose of Melanie Clavier in over a year and his manhood was in dire need of a romping..." make it hard to take this story seriously. Especially when you consider the duality implied by "dose".



Ice Cold Shakes by John Everson

Although this one starts out somewhat conventionally, it develops along interesting lines and has a strong, moody ending.



Science Fiction is often derided as a genre intended for hormonal teenage boys, and there was probably truth enough in this at one time. There's still some truth in it now. However, modern SF can also attract a more mature and educated audience--there's something for everyone on those SFF shelves. Horror, however, reads as if it's written for thrill-seeking adolescents, and, if anything, it's gone downhill since the age of Edgar Allen Poe. Everything's great when you're young and you haven't yet developed a yardstick to judge by--that's part of the secret of Rowling's success. Many of the tropes she employs have already been exploited to death, but her readers don't know that. Read slush for a little while, however, and you begin to realise that all Horror stories look the same. The genre desperately needs some cross-pollination from other genres, other art-forms; it needs to look beyond endlessly recycling the same tropes and the same forms. It needs to get past being read by thrill-seeking adolescents and those who write it, and being written only by those who read it uncritically. It needs to offer something to the outsider looking in if it ever wants to break out of its loop.



Definitely one for the hardcore Horror fans, with the honourable exceptions of November Girls and Ice Cold Shakes.



Note: a .pdf was reviewed.

[[Review by Debbie Moorhouse for GUD Magazine]]

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GUD REVIEWS: Amityville House of Pancakes: Volume 3 edited by Pete S. Allen
Category: Writing and Poetry

Amityville House of Pancakes: Volume 3 edited by Pete S. Allen
Creative Guy Publishing, 2006
284 pages, ISBN 1894953355
$14.95 / Paperback

AHOP is an annual collection of humorous specfic wrapped up in "hot buttered weirdness" [Don Muchow].   The third volume is built on three novellas with a bit of Crypt-Keeper-style book-ending.

"The UnHardy Boys in Outer Space", by Gary K. Wolf and Jehane Baptiste, is the shortest of the three, a tale of two misfits coming into their own on the /ISS Alpha VI/.  Misfit numero uno is Father Jack Edwards, a well-meaning but run-down priest; and his best pal is "science fiction author Michael Henry", a none-too-subtle foil for co-author Wolf's "Roger Rabbit" fame (I get the strong impression he's tired of being referenced as such).  Father Jack and Michael Henry have banded together against "The Fun Posse"'s pranks and the crew-as-a-whole's rejection of their existence on the space station, and the novella fills us in on much hilarity not directly related to the throughline--the characters and supporting characters are fleshed out and have a satisfying amount of arc for the length.  The story is pulpy and inventive, but primarily it's a fun ride, and I recommend it for that.

The second course is K.M. Praschak's "Paragon", which takes the science fiction much farther into space (and fiction).  The humor for humor's sake is turned down a few notches, but there's definite twinges of camp in this space opera.  Mankind has spread through the stars, there are other races (some related, some otherwise?), strange and disparate cultures and religions and technologies... and those are just the spices we get infused with this twisted action-hero-esque glimpse of a battle determining the fate (and origin?) of the universe.  The story's plot crosses generations and millennia, but we're introduced to it through a personal vendetta against Captain Meriwether, which has his crew and ship being towed out to a black hole to be disposed of.  I'm generally hesitant when any story plays the "epic" card, but this one made me believe it within the implicit rules of the story.

And then for dessert, we have "Dalton Quayle and the Curse of King Tuti Fruiti" by Paul Kane.  This nutty confection is a non-stop groan-fest (and I don't mean the mummy) that had me physically wincing as I read.  While I enjoy puns in day to day conversation, and as a social game, this was the densest such work I've ever tried to read (and I've enjoyed a Xanth novel from time to time).  The supernatural/mummy genre is plumbed to its roots, here, and a few cherries may have been harmed in its making.

AHOP is definitely a different kind of diner--and if you're the sort that would eat there, well, you already know who you are, I think.

[[Review by Kaolin Fire for GUD Magazine]]

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GUD REVIEWS: Coop by Jack Teeter
Category: Writing and Poetry

Coop by Jack Teeter

Swimming Kangaroo Books 2007

Ebook, 170 pages

ISBN: 9781934041574

$2.99

Jack Teeter's Coop is the story of a blackballed baseball coach making a comeback seventeen years after a car crash robbed him of his voice--and his livelihood. Matt "Coop" Cooper, a staunch supporter of desegregation at his Georgia high school, was harassed by the Ku Klux Klan after replacing a white player with a black one on the school baseball team.

When the story begins, former maths teacher Coop is stacking pallets. His grandson, who's on a school visit, comes to find him, and is astonished to discover Coop can speak. He recovered his voice unexpectedly, and hadn't told anyone, but chatting to the boy is impossible to resist. Their conversation sets Coop on the road to recovery, opening up the opportunity to be reconciled with his daughter and her draft-dodger husband, and to coach baseball again.

The story starts solidly, with some excellent writing, and it's thoughtful and engaging. Unfortunately, the narrative can't keep this up. The detailed descriptions of baseball practice are off-putting to someone unfamiliar with the game, but the story takes its worst downhill turn when it drops first person narration and changes to third. There are detailed descriptions of events and conversations Coop didn't witness--and they're not even that germane to the story. It's hard not to feel that a better way of telling this story couldn't have been found.

As the story continues, it begins to feel as if Coop's fate has been taken out of his hands--actions initiated by others are driving the story, not him. It's a shame, as Teeter has amply demonstrated that he can write, and write well enough to draw a non-baseball fan into a shamelessly baseball-oriented story. Coop's voice in the narrative is strong, and brings him to life immediately. It's the plotting that lets this down.

That said, if you have an interest in baseball, or in the story of a right-minded man standing up against injustice, this story is well written enough to be enjoyed.

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May 3rd is FREE COMIC BOOK DAY

In honor of free comic book day, GUD would like to offer you the free single-panel comic in GUD Issue 0 as a .pdf--oh, and the rest of the magazine comes with it!

FREE COMIC BOOK DAY IS OVER.  WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED FREE COMIC BOOK DAY! :D

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