Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "fantasy"
Catnap
A heart-warming rescue? Or a furry, freaked-out fantasy? You decide. From Pyrokinection webzine. For lovers of cats, poetry and graphic comics.
Catnap
Fritz! Now there was a cat: that
monstrous, malodorous, megalomaniac, marauding, mariajuanaphile
creation of Crumb. Sixties and Seventies
slip through a wormhole, spaced out in spacetime,
materialise the poor creature on my absent neighbours’ balcony,
transfix it among spiked anti-robber railings
it is too scared to back out of.
The cat shrieks, wails, howls
like a banshee, yanks us
from Sunday-morning dreams of long sleep.
Its instinct calls to our instinct;
we snap to our feet,
rush to save ourselves by saving it,
but Fritz is recalcitrant, its freaked-out fur frozen,
all energy focused on throat,
issuing warnings and pleas that drown the Cathedral’s bells
(its creator would chuckle).
Its lord and master, our neighbourhood hotelier,
is beside himself in the courtyard below.
We beam him up, with a gang of his workmen, converted to animal rescue, who compose a human chain to anchor him
as he stretches his yearning across the abyss
between next-door balconies.
The banshee screams,
sinks front claws into its ninth-life owner’s wrists,
thus gets hauled back through space, in time,
cocooned in human arms,
to the tableau outside my condo kitchen.
One by one, the humans disappear.
Fritz goes too.
Bryan Murphy is a retired translator who now concentrates on his own words and divides his time between England, Italy and the wider world. His work has recently appeared in Descant, Eunoia Review, The Camel Saloon, The Pygmy Giant, Rose and Thorn, The Rainbow Rose, Dead Snakes and The View from Here. His website, www.bryanmurphy.eu, contains a taster of his forthcoming novella, Goodbye, Padania.
Catnap
Fritz! Now there was a cat: that
monstrous, malodorous, megalomaniac, marauding, mariajuanaphile
creation of Crumb. Sixties and Seventies
slip through a wormhole, spaced out in spacetime,
materialise the poor creature on my absent neighbours’ balcony,
transfix it among spiked anti-robber railings
it is too scared to back out of.
The cat shrieks, wails, howls
like a banshee, yanks us
from Sunday-morning dreams of long sleep.
Its instinct calls to our instinct;
we snap to our feet,
rush to save ourselves by saving it,
but Fritz is recalcitrant, its freaked-out fur frozen,
all energy focused on throat,
issuing warnings and pleas that drown the Cathedral’s bells
(its creator would chuckle).
Its lord and master, our neighbourhood hotelier,
is beside himself in the courtyard below.
We beam him up, with a gang of his workmen, converted to animal rescue, who compose a human chain to anchor him
as he stretches his yearning across the abyss
between next-door balconies.
The banshee screams,
sinks front claws into its ninth-life owner’s wrists,
thus gets hauled back through space, in time,
cocooned in human arms,
to the tableau outside my condo kitchen.
One by one, the humans disappear.
Fritz goes too.
Bryan Murphy is a retired translator who now concentrates on his own words and divides his time between England, Italy and the wider world. His work has recently appeared in Descant, Eunoia Review, The Camel Saloon, The Pygmy Giant, Rose and Thorn, The Rainbow Rose, Dead Snakes and The View from Here. His website, www.bryanmurphy.eu, contains a taster of his forthcoming novella, Goodbye, Padania.
The Hardest Word
To write science fiction, even the dystopian kind, is to express optimism, for inherent in all science fiction is the claim that there will actually be a future.
The future in whose existence we can have most confidence is of course the near future, which has been shaped mostly by us old-timers. Because it is likely in many ways to be a dark future, today’s young people deserve an apology from us. So here comes one: “Sorry!” On behalf of my whole generation.
From my generation of Brits, it has to be even more heartfelt, because we had things so much easier than most people elsewhere, and therefore have more to answer for. We were born after the Second World War had ended; we had the National Health Service but no National Service; our politicians declined to send us to kill and die in Vietnam; we were nurtured on free school milk, given grants to study and found jobs if we wanted them. Naturally, we wanted more, though for everyone, not just ourselves. Indeed, we got more, but mostly for ourselves.
The end of those days of plenty was foreshadowed when a Minister of Education stopped milk being offered to the nation’s children and thereby earned herself the nickname “The Milk Snatcher” to rhyme with her surname: Thatcher, a word no longer connected with roofing so much as with a longing to return to feudal levels of inequality, a phenomenon that tends to favour the older generation, at least while pensions still exist.
To my eyes, today’s young people are showing amazing creativity, coupled with a superior resistance to bullshit, so maybe we can claim their education as our one success. Will that creativity and perspicacity be enough to guarantee them a future? Frankly, I doubt it. Our problem as a species, in my view, is that our technological evolution has far outpaced our social evolution. Nihilists who see the continued existence of human life as an optional irrelevance, from the left-behind “Neo-Cons” of yesterday to today’s “Islamic State”, are more than happy to use the former to forestall the latter, and their successors will have an even better chance of finishing the job.
So, probably, no future for anyone. That means that today’s science fiction is sheer fantasy. Dammit, I never set out to write Fantasy. To paraphrase Oliver Hardy: “This is a fine mess we’ve got you into”. Joking apart, to the youngsters, once again, sorry.
The future in whose existence we can have most confidence is of course the near future, which has been shaped mostly by us old-timers. Because it is likely in many ways to be a dark future, today’s young people deserve an apology from us. So here comes one: “Sorry!” On behalf of my whole generation.
From my generation of Brits, it has to be even more heartfelt, because we had things so much easier than most people elsewhere, and therefore have more to answer for. We were born after the Second World War had ended; we had the National Health Service but no National Service; our politicians declined to send us to kill and die in Vietnam; we were nurtured on free school milk, given grants to study and found jobs if we wanted them. Naturally, we wanted more, though for everyone, not just ourselves. Indeed, we got more, but mostly for ourselves.
The end of those days of plenty was foreshadowed when a Minister of Education stopped milk being offered to the nation’s children and thereby earned herself the nickname “The Milk Snatcher” to rhyme with her surname: Thatcher, a word no longer connected with roofing so much as with a longing to return to feudal levels of inequality, a phenomenon that tends to favour the older generation, at least while pensions still exist.
To my eyes, today’s young people are showing amazing creativity, coupled with a superior resistance to bullshit, so maybe we can claim their education as our one success. Will that creativity and perspicacity be enough to guarantee them a future? Frankly, I doubt it. Our problem as a species, in my view, is that our technological evolution has far outpaced our social evolution. Nihilists who see the continued existence of human life as an optional irrelevance, from the left-behind “Neo-Cons” of yesterday to today’s “Islamic State”, are more than happy to use the former to forestall the latter, and their successors will have an even better chance of finishing the job.
So, probably, no future for anyone. That means that today’s science fiction is sheer fantasy. Dammit, I never set out to write Fantasy. To paraphrase Oliver Hardy: “This is a fine mess we’ve got you into”. Joking apart, to the youngsters, once again, sorry.
Dementia with added superpowers
Last year, my 90-year-old stepfather fell victim to dementia. You don’t need me to explain how hard it was for him, or how rapid his decline. What surprised me was how he created an alternative world of his own and how steadfastly he maintained his central part in it until his body gave up on him. As a tribute, I wanted to suggest in my writing that even if we, as a society or as individuals, give up on people with dementia, they do not give up on themselves, and deserve admiration for it. That may sound pretty heavy, and labouring the point would be counter-productive, so I have not made “Charlie” the protagonist, and I have given him super-powers as a way of saying that we dismiss people with dementia at our peril. Now, I also believe that the very idea of super-powers is preposterous, so I have made Charlie’s limited and unreliable. And, to emphasise his humanity, I show him using them with both caprice and vindictiveness. I hope readers will not laugh at him, but laugh with him, and emphathise with him. Let us not forget that we are all more likely to get dementia than cancer.
Charlie has dementia, superpowers and deep black humour. Meet SuperOldie! http://bit.ly/1QoVeGR
Charlie has dementia, superpowers and deep black humour. Meet SuperOldie! http://bit.ly/1QoVeGR
Fine Fruit On The Nettle Tree
I'm very pleased to host this stage of The Nettle Tree's blog tour. You can find the book here: http://shop.claytonbye
The editors have asked me to comment on one of the stories that I found particularly striking. The Nettle Tree is an anthology that re-defines a genre – the Western – and does so largely by grafting elements of fantasy and science fiction on to it. Perhaps because I am a writer and fan of science fiction, I was most intrigued by John Rosenman's story, “State of the Art”, which, set in the future, looks at facets of our present and our past with humour and deep philosophical concern. Rosenman uses the tropes of the Western to subvert themselves, as technology from the future intrudes and overturns the apple-cart. He leads us to question what we expect from a Western, and why, and also to ponder whether “artificial intelligence” is a contradiction in terms. He achieves this with a splendidly light touch, and gives us the pleasure of seeing the new-style baddies get their old-style come-uppance.
Here are the book's details:
Title: The Nettle Tree
Publisher: Chase Enterprises Publishing
Editors: Kenneth Weene and Clayton Bye
ISBN (print): 978-1- 927915-10- 3
ISBN (eBook): 978-1- 927915-11- 0
Format: Trade paperback and e-book
Pages: 166
Genre: Speculative Western
Price: $17.95 (print) $3.95 (e-book)
The book and pdf e-book can be purchased at: http://shop.claytonbye
It is also available on Amazon in print form and on Smashwords for all e-book formats.
The editors have asked me to comment on one of the stories that I found particularly striking. The Nettle Tree is an anthology that re-defines a genre – the Western – and does so largely by grafting elements of fantasy and science fiction on to it. Perhaps because I am a writer and fan of science fiction, I was most intrigued by John Rosenman's story, “State of the Art”, which, set in the future, looks at facets of our present and our past with humour and deep philosophical concern. Rosenman uses the tropes of the Western to subvert themselves, as technology from the future intrudes and overturns the apple-cart. He leads us to question what we expect from a Western, and why, and also to ponder whether “artificial intelligence” is a contradiction in terms. He achieves this with a splendidly light touch, and gives us the pleasure of seeing the new-style baddies get their old-style come-uppance.
Here are the book's details:
Title: The Nettle Tree
Publisher: Chase Enterprises Publishing
Editors: Kenneth Weene and Clayton Bye
ISBN (print): 978-1- 927915-10- 3
ISBN (eBook): 978-1- 927915-11- 0
Format: Trade paperback and e-book
Pages: 166
Genre: Speculative Western
Price: $17.95 (print) $3.95 (e-book)
The book and pdf e-book can be purchased at: http://shop.claytonbye
It is also available on Amazon in print form and on Smashwords for all e-book formats.
The city and the city
Dead Simple
In Franc Roddam's 1979 film “Quadrophenia”, the gang of Mods coming down to Brighton for a weekend of violence stop their scooters on the South Downs when the coast and a shimmering town come into view and say, reverentially, “That's Brighton!”.
In reality, it was not louche, dirty, pulsating Brighton but the sedate retirement town of Eastbourne. Nevertheless, watching the film in Portugal, the scene was enough set off pangs of nostalgia and longing. Forty years later, back in Portugal, I'm still drawn to anything set in Brighton, which is what led me to Peter James's novel "Dead Simple". It is replete with evocative place-names, though it is a fantasy Brighton, in which a hard rain falls as it might in a post-apocalyptic Seattle, and all the police are jolly good lads and lasses, whereas we used to say that the city had “the best police force money could buy”, and woo works. This last is used by the author to set the story straight. Convenient car crashes also play a role. The characters are static and lacking in subtlety, unlike the real city's denizens, who give the place its true flavour.
In Franc Roddam's 1979 film “Quadrophenia”, the gang of Mods coming down to Brighton for a weekend of violence stop their scooters on the South Downs when the coast and a shimmering town come into view and say, reverentially, “That's Brighton!”.
In reality, it was not louche, dirty, pulsating Brighton but the sedate retirement town of Eastbourne. Nevertheless, watching the film in Portugal, the scene was enough set off pangs of nostalgia and longing. Forty years later, back in Portugal, I'm still drawn to anything set in Brighton, which is what led me to Peter James's novel "Dead Simple". It is replete with evocative place-names, though it is a fantasy Brighton, in which a hard rain falls as it might in a post-apocalyptic Seattle, and all the police are jolly good lads and lasses, whereas we used to say that the city had “the best police force money could buy”, and woo works. This last is used by the author to set the story straight. Convenient car crashes also play a role. The characters are static and lacking in subtlety, unlike the real city's denizens, who give the place its true flavour.
