Personnel Dossier: Khamitova, J.

Name: Yemilia "Jema" Alexandrovna Khamitova-Romanovskaya
DoB: 6th June 2156, New Novosibersk
Augments: Hwangso HXC-1000 visuals, Stage II retroviral cosmetic rejuvenation

Education: Graduate of the Alliance Naval Academy class of 2176, received the Sword of Honour for graduating at the top of her class.

Instructor's Comment: JK was not the smartest or the strongest but she was, by some distance, the most determined. She never, ever relents in anything she does.

Military Service:  Commissioned as an Ensign in the Special Activities Division of the Naval Infantry. Military occupational specialties: Close Quarters Combat (Armed), Close Quarters Combat (Unarmed), Firearms, Explosives, Trauma Medicine. Awarded Combat Service Ribbon for the counter-insurgency action at [REDACTED] and the Naval Cross for her actions during the boarding of the [REDACTED].

Commanding Officer's Comment: One of the bravest and most action focussed junior officers that I have ever served with in the Sads. She was the first person through the hull breach on the [REDACTED] when we boarded it and the last person to leave it as it was breaking up.

General Intelligence Directorate Activties: Transferred to the GID in 2179 on the specific request of the Executive Director's Chief of Staff. Now performs assignments of the highest sensitivity and importance under the direct control of the EDCoS. No ratings within the normal GID evaluatory framework are possible as all activities are executed outside the control of the Operations Section.

Losing My Shit

T. E. Lawrence once famously left the manuscript for Seven Pillars of Wisdom at Reading railway station and, despite an offer of reward and beseeching newspaper advertisments, had to rewrite it from memory.

So how do I protect myself from this manner of catastrophic loss. In the digital age it is both easier and more complex but to mitigate the risks we first have to understand what they are.

The most obvious and likely scenario that could cause a writer to lose material would be a hardware failure on their computer. The best way to protect against this is an online storage service such as Dropbox, iCloud or OneDrive. These services will automatically make an online copy of the work and if, stricken by a hardware failure, one could simply resynchronise a new device. Happily, this would also preserve your work for posterity should your house burn down with you in it.

What such a service would not protect against is some manner of encryption threat such as a ransomware attack as the local encryption would rapidly be replicated in the online copy. Anti virus will provide some but not total prophylaxis against such an attack. In order to preserve documents from a ransomware attacked there has to be a copy which air gapped, i.e. not physically connected, to the infected network.

One way to do this is by having another computer or device which is only sporadically powered on to connect and synchronise its copy of the documents. Obviously, having a seperate computer for this purpose isn't ideal for everyone so an external hard drive is only seldomly connected would also work but you'd have to manage the file copying operation for yourself.

There is also the remote chance that the documents themselves could become corrupt and unreadable across all your backups. This happens much less frequently than it did in the ancient pre-history of personal computing but I wouldn't say it's impossible that it can still happen; particularly with very large and heavily revised files like, say, a novel manuscript...

This is my practice:

• Every chapter gets its own file and sits in its own directory. This protects against file and directory corruption for a work in progress. The very most I could lose is one chapter.
• My entire body of work is synchronised online with Dropbox. This protects against hardware failure and house fires.
• Once a month I start up a virtual machine on my PC which connects to Dropbox and synchronises all the files. This protects against ransomware and other malware as the VM is usually powered off and therefore the files inside it are invisible. If malware that encrypts virtual hard disk files appear then I may switch this function to seperate physical hardware such as an Android tablet.

The Stages of Blogging

Denial - I'm going to blog every single. Penetrating insights and witty aperçus will pour out of my fingers in an endless torrent.

Anger - Fuck, I can't think of anything to write about.

Bargaining - I'll write a blog post after this next hour of YouTube.

Depression - Nobody reads the fucking thing anyway. What's the point? Hint: there is none.

Acceptance - I'll blog sporadically when I've got something to say and an interesting manner in which to say it.

I think The Rutter Continuum has arrived at the final stage.

Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now, Baby

In vivid contrast to romantic rejection, which customarily arrives in a single crushing blow like a massive brain haemorrhage, literary rejection is more akin to having one’s muscle mass slowly consumed by flesh eating bacteria. The rejections arrive, one at time, heralded by the primitive two dimensional envelope icon of the Gmail alert. The effect of each rejection, while of minor significance in themselves, gradually accrete over time until the writer’s sense of self worth is nothing but a husk that will crumble to dust at a touch.

 The full article is on the Red Sofa NaNoWriMo blog.

Indestructible

For reasons over which we need not tarry I recently had cause to revisit the 1967 television show Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. There are several notable and interesting things about it which I shall get to shortly however the most amazing personal revelation was that, contrary to my recollection, I had never actually seen it.

Captain Scarlet, as it was ubiquitously called, was first shown in 1967 and, no doubt, repeated many times over on budget constrained British commercial television of the 60s and 70s. The theme tune, which was actually the closing theme, with its bombastic refrain of INDESTRUCTIBLE was a constant in the playground of my primary school in the mid 1970s. So I thought I was familiar with the Captain Scarlet canon. As I watched the 32 episode series I realised I was not and had never seen any of them.

To summarise, Captain Scarlet is was a Supermarionation, more commonly known as puppetry, production set in 2068 when Earth is engaged in some manner low key, shadowy war with Mars and its implacable autochthonous lifeforms: the Mysterons. The first notable observation is that the Martians, in an invention born of fiscal restraint, are depicted merely as projected circles of light. This gives a fresh and interesting take on the problem visualising alien life forms. They are also, for unknown reasons, oft given to broadcasting their nefarious intentions at the start of each episode.

The puppetry demonstrated several technical innovations over previous Supermarionation productions such as Thunderbirds. The puppets were larger and possessed of more conventional facial physiognomy compared to the Thunderbirds which had the goggle eyed look of a surprised pug. In Thunderbird and earlier shows characters walking always proved problematic as they moved as if having recently soiled themselves or suffered a grave injury to the genitals. Captain Scarlet skilfully obviates this limitation of string borne puppets by the simple expedient of never having any character walk anywhere ever. All scenes are transacted by stationary characters.

Captain Scarlet himself is a curious Christ-like figure whose resurrection from death is often a plot device. However, the most shocking thing about Captain Scarlet when viewed from these more sensitive times was the sheer scale of the violence and mayhem. Terrorism by crashing an airliner into the sea, assassination by suicide bomber and shootings too numerous to catalog were all considered perfectly acceptable early evening viewing for children in 1967.

On the whole, thoroughly recommended.

Three Full Time Jobs

That's what I've discovered writing to be. Obviously, theres no money in it so you are going to need a normal day job so that you can buy Gummy Bears and toilet paper. So that's the first job.

If you give the slightest fuck about the output then writing books is a job in itself. Not just the work of actually creating the book, but there is also the very considerable burden of proof-reading, consistency checking, research and general editing. That's the second job.

The third and final job is securing representation, writing proposals and marketing yourself and your work. It's immediately and transparently obvious to the most casual observer that publishers expect authors to arrive with an audience already attached and engaged. Why would they expend time and money marketing a book when the author can do it in between writing another book and bouts of Gummy Bear induced diarrhea?

Explorer to Prisoner in One Step

It's my observation that starting a new book can be a heady and liberating experince. The blanks pages stretch like an unexplored country on a map. Except, it's better than that as I can form the terrain according to my taste and will.

That's how I felt when I started work on Weft. My previous book, Redeeming Blood, was a tightly confined work as it was a sequel to Without a City Wall. I still very much enjoyed writing Redeeming Blood but its narrative and chronology was tightly constrained by what had gone before.

Weft, by constrast, was a completely different experience in its initial stages. As it shared no characters or events with my previous two books I was utterly unshackled and could do whatever pleased me.  What did surprise me was just how soon that book would start to form its own boundaries that had to be respected if the narrative arc were to be consistent and logical.

By the end of chapter 4, which would be about 20% of the way through the book if all goes to plan, my latitude to maneuver was already limited by the patterns of behaviour I had already established for my major characters.

So the moral of the story is: enjoy the liberty that the start of a new book affords because it doesn't last.

Starbound Interview with Lucinda Margaret K.

Transcript of an interview with the Gliese colonisation mission primary Pilot/Navigator from the United Nations Space Agency internal information channel Starbound on 1st August 2106.

Interviewer: Lucy, thank you very much for agreeing to join us on Starbound. We're very excited to have you here.

Lucy: Well, thank you very much. It's both an honour and a privilege.

Interviewer: Tell us a little about your background and family. Where were you born and how did you come to be an UNSA officer.

Lucy: I was born in Eurabian state of Northumbria in 2081. My father was a judge and a man of very fixed ideas regarding his childrens' scholastic prowess. All three of my brothers are borderline retarded and were therefore a profound disappointment to him in that regard. They all ended up in the army, obviously, but I went to boarding school were it transpired I had a modest talent for mathematics. Honestly, all three of them really are quite stupid. Can I say hello to them?

Interviewer: Er, that's great... And how did your UNSA career start?

Lucy: When I was 14, so that would have been 2095, my school recommended that I attempt the UNSA selection board. I did the preliminary aptitude and psychometric tests then I travelled to the UNSA Academy in Baikonur for the simulations and socialisation evaluations.

Interviewer: And you were accepted?

Lucy: Not immediately. I was rejected on the basis that I didn't respond in a positive manner to authority and would not take direction or follow process. So I thought that was that. However, a few months later they were having trouble getting candidates who could hack the requirements of the Pilot/Navigator track so they went to the bottom of the rejects pile and there I was.

Interviewer: How long did you spend at Baikonur?

Lucy: About five years, then I moved to flight training at the facility on Deimos. About four years ago I was assigned to the first Gliese flight as Pilot/Navigator.

Interviewer: What will the duties of the Pilot/Navigator be on the flight?

Lucy: I will do the orbital maneuvering of the colonisation ship, the Integral, at departure and arrival. I'll manage the reorientation of the ship from the accelerative to decelerative phases and execute the atmospheric entry and landing of the cargo containers. Finally, I'll fly the landers to the surface.

Interviewer: That all sounds very challenging. You must have moments of doubt and fear?

Lucy: No, I don't. This is a dangerous business and if I ever entertained doubts or fears I would have been killed ten times over by now.

Interviewer: Thank you very much, Lucy, for a fascinating discussion.

Lucy: Thank you.

Interviewer: Make sure you join us next time for an interview with Doctor Rafferty, the Integral's Flight Surgeon.

Lucy: You don't want to do that. She swears like a fucking docker.

Two Toes

Two Toes had got his the name the day the bunyip came out of the lake. It had heaved its ugly, steaming bulk from the dark brown waters and waddled over to Two Toes' favorite gum tree to rub its scaly hide against the trunk dislodging great skeins of bark. This was, in Two Toes' considered opinion, a diabolical infraction of the way of the world. 

He swooped, screaming, out of the gumtree, which was shaking violently under with the ministrations of the bunyip. Two Toes wasn't the biggest, strongest, quickest or cleverest galah in the forest but he was the bravest and most determined. Bravery and determination count for a lot in a fight with a bunyip. So Two Toes and the bunyip went at it in the sun dappled mud under the gum tree by the lake. They fought in a storm of feathers and drops of green bunyip blood. After a few extremely violent minutes the bunyip slunk back into the water lacking an eye. Two Toes had lost a toe from his right foot to the bunyip's snapping, serrated teeth reducing that foot's number of toes to the eponymous two. They both knew that the matter had been settled in favour of Two Toes and the bunyip never returned to the tree.

Two Toes was sat in the tree that was now indisputably his on the day the ghosts and their metal beasts came into the forest. His cousin White Wing, who was the dirtiest and foulest beaked galah in the forest, came flapping in to the tree.

“They’re ripping it all to shit, mate!” White Wing screamed while pointing one of his grimy wings to the cloud of dust and debris that was enveloping the forest on the Western shore of the lake.

“Who is?” Asked Two Toes.

“Ghosts and metal beasts!” White Wing’s shrieks reached an even more feverish tenor and he hopped from foot to foot on the branch in agitation.

“I’m going to take a look.” Two Toes exploded into the warm morning air with a crack of his wings. He’d heard tales of the ghosts and metal beasts from the sly and inquisitive magpies of the forest. They had been eating the forest up the coast for many years and it seemed they had finally made it to the forest around Two Toes’ lake.

He flew toward the dark brown cloud and roaring noises of the metal beasts. Settling on a branch next to the new clearing he watched the metal beasts spewing acrid black smoke as they ripped up and ate the trees. The ghosts who were smaller than the beasts scurried among and tended to them. Two Toes could not discern which was master and which was slave.

He was surprised when he was joined on his perch overlooking the devastation by a large and battle scarred magpie. Broken Beak was the leader of the magpies who held the forest on the western side of the lake as their undisputed fiefdom. Two Toes had some bitter and violent territorial disputes with Broken Break but they had now reached an accommodation based on guarded and mutual respect.

“I know what’s happening.” Broken Beak spoke in the usual magpie manner that left the audience in no doubt as to who held all the secrets in the forest. “The ghosts and the metal beasts are going to build a giant nest. I even know what it’s going to be called.”

“What?” Two Toes asked.

Broken Beak rubbed his chipped beak on one of his wings groom his feathers before he replied.

“Joondalup.”

Lem and the Library

My home town in England had a public library. It was built in 1903 at a time when the British Empire bestrode the world like a coal powered brass and iron colossus of mercantilism. It was a fine red brick building with a typically late Victorian Neo-Gothic rejection of symmetry. Inside it was magnificently appointed with mahogany shelves and balustrades that had doubtless been felled by hand in a steaming forest on the Bay of Bengal.

The interior of the library had a gallery that looked down into a central atrium. Such a thing would be unthinkable now, I assume, as the polyester clad underclass would regularly hurl each to their deaths from it. The library’s contemporary replacement is a concrete, steel and glass confection that was obviously constructed to the lowest possible cost and with the least possible amount of architectural imagination. From the pavement it resembles an abandoned car dealership of one the less prestigious brands.

It was in the original library that I discovered the works of Stanisław Lem. Lem was a Polish science fiction writer who was actively writing and publishing from the 1950s to 1980s. He never shirked from a deep investigation into philosophical and futurological matters yet remained eminently readable. In the English translations, at least. I am regrettably unable to comment of the accessibility of the original Polish.

Lem’s work was so profound and sagacious that Philip K. Dick theorised that the books had to be the combined effort of an expert panel of Polish scientists, philosophers and writers. Although Dick was, at the time, feeling antipathetical toward Poland as a result of some disagreement over royalties on his Polish sales.

The first Lem book that I discovered and the one that I would commend to new readers is Return from the Stars. It tells the story of an astronaut who returns from a voyage spanning centuries to discover that population of Earth have voluntarily submitted themselves to pacification in order to build a tranquil utopia. Not only is this book a penetrating meditation on what it means to be human and the nature of identity but it has also proved to be extremely prescient about the nature of technological development. Even though it was published in 1961 it predicts with eerie accuracy the ubiquity of electronic publication and distribution that is only just being realised now. Access to media, such as books and newspapers, is depicted as being instantly accessible by a tablet device known as an ‘Opton’. 

Stanisław Lem died four years before the launch of the iPad.

An Interview With K.C. Shaw

Kate Shaw is a fantasy author who was born in Atlanta, Georgia and grew up in East Tennessee, where she lives today. For her day job, she is a test proctor at a state community college. You can find details of her literary work here.

Kate and Jekyll

Tell us about the town in which you grew up.

I grew up in a tiny rural town in East Tennessee, which is in the southeastern part of the United States near the Smoky Mountains. Even today the town only has about 1,500 residents. It's half an hour's drive from anywhere really interesting--like a movie theater or even a supermarket--so I was eager to get out of there as a kid. I moved to the giant (by comparison) city of Knoxville, Tennessee after I graduated from college. Then about five years ago, after a lot of moves to different cities and states, I missed my quiet hometown. I moved back and actually bought a house.

When I was growing up, all the kids in town told spooky stories about Sawmill Road. We were all convinced it was haunted by the ghost of a bank robber who had wrecked his motorcycle and died during a getaway. A few years ago I was talking to my aunt--who also grew up in the same town--and mentioned the story. She laughed and said, "Your dad made that up when we were kids. I can't believe people are still telling it." I included the setting in one of my earliest published short stories, "Sawmill Road," published in Every Day Fiction in 2007, and used the ghost story itself in another story published in an anthology of Halloween fiction. Thanks, Dad. 

Sawmill Road

What character written by another author do you admire the most?

I greatly admire the character of Gen in Meghan Whalen Turner's book The Thief. It's told from first person and Gen is not an unreliable narrator, but the author still manages to keep secrets from the reader about him. I've read the book at least a dozen times, both because I love it and because I wanted to figure out how she manages to unfold those secrets as the book progresses.

As for admiring a character on a personal level, that would definitely be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz books. I grew up reading the series--my mom read them to me and my brother when we were little, and I read them to myself as I got older. In the books (as opposed to the movie), Dorothy takes everything in stride and is always positive. When presented with a weird situation she examines her options practically. I see a lot of her in my own personality. I still love the books.

When did you start writing your first novel and when did you finish it?

I wrote my first book in eighth grade, although since it fit in a single spiral notebook it was more of a long short story. I don't remember much about it but I'm sure it was awful. I wrote a no doubt equally awful (and short) book when I was about twenty, and a much longer but definitely a terrible book in my late twenties. I didn't start getting serious about writing until I was in my mid-thirties. The first books I wrote then were still pretty bad, but I've gotten better and better with every one I write.

I'm a fairly fast writer and typically complete a draft within a few months.

What are you working on right now?

Right now I'm between projects, but I think I know what I'm doing next. Remember that terrible book I wrote in my late twenties? It was an epic fantasy with a horse as the main character, and for some reason it popped back into my brain recently. The basic story idea was good and would make a great YA fantasy. I'm still in the early phase of worldbuilding and making decisions on where I want the plot to go, but this time I think I can do it justice.