Author: OJ

SFF, Short stories

The Best of Luna Station Quarterly…

OJ

Last year, my short story “The Absence of Feathers” was published in Issue 17 of Luna Station Quarterly. And that was cool! But now, LSQ has put out an anthology: The Best of Luna Station Quarterly: The First Five Years. And happily, “The Absence of Feathers” is included, available for the first time in print.

Of course, it’s not just me. Fellow Kiwi authors A.J. Fitzwater (“The Woman With Flowers in Her Hair”) and A.C. Buchanan (“Built in a Day”) are also included. As are two of my favourite short story authors, Chikodili Emelumadu (“Tunbi”) and Penny Stirling (“Tanith’s Sky”). Stirling, by the way, is the author of one of the finest short stories I’ve ever read (“Love Over Glass, Skin Under Glass”, published in Aurealis if you’re interested, and you should be. You really should be.).

So if you’re interested in a whole lot of fantastic short speculative fiction by women, this might be the anthology for you! You can check it out here.

Pop culture

Fuck off, Game of Thrones. Just Fuck Off.

OJ

I’ve put up with a lot from you. Westeros is a crapsack world, yes. Something that gives you an excuse to wallow in sexual violence, and wallow you have. Repeatedly, with little to no let up, with the most superficial treatment you can get away with.

Don’t think I don’t see how much this wallowing excites you.

That’s the worst of it. How gleefully you keep doing it. You put on appropriately sad faces and say it’s terrible, awful, it just shows how high the stakes are. It’s For The Sake Of Story.

Fuck off. Just fuck off, you awful fucking pieces of shit. I’m sick of seeing rape from you. I certainly didn’t want you to spice it up with the child rape of what may be the most abused character you have.

I don’t care how exciting you think it is. I don’t care for your awful fucking excuses about agency and empowering moments. Raping Sansa Stark is not giving her agency. It is not empowering her. It is doing the very opposite.

Which is why I will no longer be watching. It has become unmistakeably clear to me that this storyline – the rape of Sansa Stark – is something that is seen by you as necessity, something that had to happen eventually, because God forbid a young girl has a storyline without it. I mean, she’s young and pretty and alone. What else could you possibly write about? It’s a dramatic highpoint, I get it. And you’re absolutely not glorifying it. Of course not. This is a crapsack world, after all, and it’s important that we all wallow in it.

I’m not wallowing, not anymore. You’ll continue happily on without me, no doubt, secure in the knowledge that you’ve managed to reach a new low point. You’re brave. You’re edgy.

You can go die in a fucking fire. I will not be watching any more of this shit.

KiwiWalks

My new favourite book…

OJ

untitled1001 Walks You Must Experience Before You Die. This book is going to become the Bible of my life, I can tell. It’s the size of a couple of heavy bricks, so I won’t actually be taking it on any of the walks, but I am in love nonetheless.

It’s gratifying to see that I’ve done a small amount already! I did the King Ludwig Way in Germany with a German friend some years ago (we went to a Star Trek convention and then went walking), and there’s a handful I’ve already done here in New Zealand. Abel Tasman Coastal Track, and Kepler, and Milford, which are three of NZ’s nine Great Walks. I’ve also done bits of Te Araroa, the long pathway running down the length of the country. It’ll probably take me years to finish, but finishing TA is on my bucket list.

Also in NZ, I’ve done part of the Lake Waikaremoana Great Walk, though I had to abandon it halfway through when I fell down a bank and broke my arm. I’ve also done the Tongariro Crossing (the finest walk I’ve ever been on) which isn’t in 1001 Walks but is a day in the Northern Crossing, which is. Similarly, I’ve done the Rakiura Track on Steward Island, which isn’t listed but is four days on North West Circuit of the island, which is.

And I’ve visited Petra, in Jordan, where I spent less than an hour on one of the trails, the one going in, and all of that time I was ignoring everything about me in a desperate attempt to get into Petra itself, so I’m not really counting that one. I really want to go back for the much longer day walk.

So I’ve got incentive for some return trips. Of course there’s 1001 walks in this book so the likelihood of my completing them all is very slim. And that’s alright, because on a flick through I saw a page about a Chinese plank walk, and Hell No. I am not shuffling along that ridiculously high, ridiculously thin trail even if they do strap me on with a harness. Also, the happy predictions on some of the American walks: “If you’re lucky you’ll see a bear!”

I don’t want to see a bear. Not when I’m walking. Those fuckers eat people. You know what I could do against a bear? NOTHING. No thank you.

So with these torpedoing any possibility of completion, I feel free to skim through and pick out the walks which I want to do most.

Even then there’s far too many.

Current Count: 997 Walks to Experience Before I Die.

Novellas, Science, SFF

The Ghost of Matter

OJ

Ernest_Rutherford_LOCI’m happy to say I’ve just signed the contract for a new novella! The Ghost of Matter will be published in September of this year by Paper Road Press.

If you recognise the title, you’ll know what it’s about: Ernest Rutherford, the NZ scientist described as the greatest experimentalist of his time. It’s from a quote of his – “I have broken the machine and touched the ghost of matter” – regarding his work in atomic physics. Because I tend to write sci-fi and fantasy, there’s also actual ghosts in it. Ghosts and atoms and eeriness…

The Ghost of Matter is the sixth and final story in the Shortcuts series by Paper Road Press. They’re doing a second track of literary works down the line, but these first six stories are themed round “Strange Fiction of Aotearoa New Zealand”. The first one’s already out: Mika by Lee Murray and Piper Mejia, and the rest will be released at the rate of one per month until mine shows up in September.

SFF, Short stories

Crow

OJ

ApexMag04Easter weekend is over and I didn’t win the Vogel or the BSFA, alas! But they both went to worthy winners so can’t complain. Really, the pleasure lay in being nominated at all.

But it’s a new week now, with a new story! “Crow” has just been published in the latest issue of Apex Magazine. It’s online and free to read, so have at it. It’s my first story in Apex, and I was very pleased to place it there.

“Crow” is the third of my future-fishing-in-New-Zealand stories to be published. It only barely references the first (“The Mistress of Fishes”) in its nod to Carnival time, and it doesn’t mention the second (“The Mussel Eater”) at all, though there is some similarity. The robots of “Crow” are ecological guardians of fish stocks, and they’re in that position because they can’t be bribed or threatened or convinced to allow over-fishing. In that sense they’re similar to the Pania of TME, whose remit is to look after marine mammals. (I’m slowly populating New Zealand waters with predators… it’s fun!).

But if the Crows can’t be convinced, they can be sabotaged. It’s also widely known they can be sabotaged… but it never goes undetected, and the consequences are terrible.

NZ actually has a quota system governing its fisheries industry now. It’s pretty good, and the aim is of course to protect fishing stocks for future generations. But it’s not perfect… not yet, anyway. It lacks creepy iron conservators, for one thing.