The Magic Bullet and other medical stories (feat. Guy T Martland)

Another old story 'Sleeping Sickness' added to the blog. This was written in 1999, around the same time as Vice Versa. Probably in the same coffee shop. It found a home in this medical themed anthology.

Words of War published by Fiction Vortex!

I am very excited to announce that my story 'Words of War' has been published by Fiction Vortex this June.

You can read it on their website (click the picture above), or buy it from Amazon with a bunch of other great stories here (UK, US, DE, FR, JP).

I hope you enjoy it.  Here is a teaser, from the wall of a house in Bournemouth:

The New Galvanism published in Albedo 2.0 Fiction Showcase!

I am very excited to announce that my short story 'The New Galvanism' has now been published in Albedo 2.0.  You can read it here: www.albedo1.com

The story features the grave of Mary Shelley in Bournemouth, which I discussed in an older blog post here.

I hope you enjoy the story!

Blog Tour

So the idea of this is that I answer these four questions, posed to the other writers on this tour.  And then, I pass on the torch to another two people. Thanks to Dave L. Clements, for tagging me; he is currently Disturbing The Universe with his answers.  



1. What am I working on?


I'm currently just romping towards the end of the first draft of my third SF novel, tentatively titled 'The Machine Song Cycle'.  There are some aliens, machines and lots of weird plants. One of the latter, 'Creeping Heartskin', had its own post on my blog before it pollinated and spilled out into the real world, causing an environmental catastrophe in a few small countries. Sorry about that.

I've also been putting finishing touches to a few short stories, some of which are about to be published. Firstly there is The New Galvinism which will be appearing in Albedo One. And I've just had another story Words of War accepted by Fiction Vortex. The latter was one which made it through the whole Milford critting process. Both stories feature graves I have visited.


2. How does my work differ from others in my genre? 


My first (still unpublished) novels were a kind of throwback to the 70's golden age of SF. You know, the thin paperbacks with a spaceship on the front you see in second hand bookshops. I like the idea of a short novel - doorstops aren't the kind of thing I write; while it can be fun getting lost in them as a reader, I'm not sure I have the patience to write one...


With the new one, I've taken some old tropes in SF (think Aldiss' Hothouse, Harrison's Deathworld) and moved things on a bit, throwing tech into the mix. I've drawn on more recent work as well - Faber's Under the Skin informed some of the alien lifeforms, or maybe I was just thinking about Scarlett Johansson.

I suppose being a medic has an advantage when it comes to writing about blood and guts stuff. When I started my training, an anatomy teacher once told me that the terminology we had to learn in five years was the equivalent of learning a new language. That's a lot of words, and some of them get used.


3. Why do I write what I do?


I write because I have to. It is that simple. If I don't find time to write a few hundred words a day, the world just isn't a fun place to be. And the ideas start constipating my mind, cloying my thoughts until I have to purge somehow. Honestly, you don't want to know... it is disgusting.



4. How does my writing process work?


I sit in a room at the top of the house, put on some electronic bleepy future music, read through what I wrote last and dive in. I generally have some kind of idea about what I'm going to be writing, where it is going. As I write, other stuff often crops up though and takes me in new directions; this can be fun initially but then a pain later as you realise you have just destroyed/destoryed your manuscript (I nicked that from @jeffnoon). Sometimes the cat bothers me at a crucial moment - it has a fascination with paper and likes to be the first to read printouts of my stories, before eating them.

The next victims: 

....are currently languishing in a dungeon with Tyrion Lannister, awaiting their fate...

Creeping Heartskin

Croceus Pruriocardiotoxicus

A Xenoc plant, which colonises the trunks of trees, preferentially evergreens.  It subdues native plant life, absorbing resins which are toxic to species of Kletterweed.  Whilst the aforementioned toxins do not kill Kletterweed, the hardiest of Xenoc plants, they can subdue growth.  Creeping Heartskin is a hemiparastic plant, analogous to Viscum album or Mistletoe.  Seeds germinate on the branches of susceptible trees, shoots growing along the substrate, some eventually forming a haustorium.

Like all Xenoc plants, the large amounts of pollen released – the phenomenon of ‘blanket pollination’ - obviate the need for insect pollination.  The flowers are small yellow cups that exude large quantities of pollen for a week or more.  These flowers contain unusual forms of carbohydrate which can undergo accelerated fermentation and this characteristic has been often used to manufacture spirits such as Firenshine.  The bittersweet taste of these fermentation products is also the product of the aforementioned carbohydrates.

When contact is made between the shoots or haustorium and human skin, a form of spongiotic dermatitis can occur.  This is a usually relatively harmless form of eczema, although vesiculation is often reported and in some cases, a form of toxic epidermolysis can ensue.  Cardiac toxicity is also one of the more serious sequelae of contact; arrhythmias can occur when antigenic complexes formed in the allergic reaction interfere with the functioning of Purkinje fibres.  For this reason, those who have come into recent contact with the Creeping Heartskin should undergo cardiac monitoring.  Such effects do not occur when contact is made with the blooms of the Creeping Heartskin and the fermented products of these are safe to drink, providing, as with all alcoholic beverages, one does not overindulge.

References

Eventhrall J.  Case series: Croceus Pruriocardiotoxicus and toxic epidermal necrolysis – a rare reaction to skin contact. Xen Med J 2151; 4 (15-20)

Eventhrall J.  Croceus Pruriocardiotoxicus – a review of the pathological effects, their mechanisms and current recommended treatment regimes. Clin Xen Med 2152; 3 (45-71)

©Guy T Martland, 2014

As promised - some stuff relating to the new novel... I wrote this as background to the botany featured in the book.  There are other segments concerning other species, some of which are alluded to above, although I haven't worked out what I want to do with them all yet - maybe some kind of appendix?  Needless to say, my protagonist does, of course, overindulge.

In search of Uncle

I first encountered Uncle as a child.  Sometime after Christmas or a birthday I met him for the first time: he was an elephant, drove a traction engine and he wore a purple velvet dressing gown.  And he had something called a BA - I had to ask my parents what that meant.

Having worked my way through all the Enid Blytons and Arthur Ransomes, my parents began to feed me Roald Dahl, the latter illustrated by one Quentin Blake.  And then, presumably due to this artist being associated with the author J.P. Martin’s work: Uncle.  

Of all the books I read in my childhood, the Uncle books are those which return to me, again and again.  Reading Uncle and then its sequel Uncle Cleans Up was an unadulterated pleasure – I choose that word wisely, because there is something very unadult about Uncle, something which truly captures the free, fantastic imagination of a child.  I revelled in the world created by J.P. Martin, the excesses of the wonderful Homeward, Uncle’s home and a place that seemed never ending, full of unexpected wonders.  The scale of Homeward, the scale of J.P. Martin’s creation instilled in me my first sense of wonder at fiction.

I loved the names of the characters as well, with their descriptive and sometimes onomatopoeic qualities: Muncle, Butterskin Mute, Hitmouse, Beaver Hateman, Flabskin, Jellytussle.  At the time of first reading I didn’t really get the social overtones – the satirical way Martin wrote of the castle and its nearby slum, Badfort.  Instead, I was lost in the striking Owl Springs, Lost Clinkers, the subterranean baths, the trains and chutes that connected various elements of Homeward together in a scrambled Gormenghastian fashion.  In fact, looking back on it, this was Gormenghast for children and possibly one of the reasons why I enjoyed that book so much ten years later.

At University I raved about Uncle to anyone who would listen.  Friends looked at me oddly, wondering why I placed so much importance in a children’s book hardly anyone had heard of.  I began to break some of them, buying the readily available Uncle books for friends and girlfriends.  But it could never be the same for them – discovering Uncle in your late teens or early twenties could never do for them what it did for me.

My obsession with Uncle continued.  Having only ever had the first few books, I wanted to read more about Uncle and his adventures, but the last four books were nowhere to be seen.  I searched second hand bookshops in vain, and then the internet, coming across copies at extortionate prices.  I began to realise that there were other people like me out there, other Uncle obsessives, many of whom were Science Fiction fans like myself.  I heard of a writer whose website was called Owl Springs in reference to the aforementioned area just outside Homeward.

Then came the big blow – the reason why it seemed there were none of the later Uncle books to be found.  A number of people reported that there was a rich collector in the US who was buying all the copies he could get his hands on, thereby reducing their availability and raising the price of the remaining books sky high.  Much as I liked Uncle, there was no way I could justify spending 500 pounds on an old children’s book.  It was frustrating – who was this crazy collector?  Why were they destroying everyone else’s fun?  How selfish of them!

I decided to try a different tack.  I wrote to the original publishers, Jonathan Cape, informing them I was a devoted Uncle fan; it was essentially a plea for them to republish.  I was rebuffed, told in no uncertain terms that there were no plans to publish the remaining four books in the foreseeable future.  I got the distinct impression that the person who wrote to me was annoyed I’d even asked this question.

With a bit more research, it turned out that Uncle’s very nature, that of a wealthy, privileged individual and a little bit of a snob to boot, had been under fire.  In short, Uncle was likened to a rich, self-satisfied and gloating public school educated toff – who would want to read about that kind of person in the increasingly socialist naughties?  Could this be the reason why Jonathan Cape were unwilling to even consider republishing these books?  In my mind, this was totally missing the point of Uncle – his character indeed shows weaknesses, but that makes his altercations with the lowly folk of Badfort more exciting – sometimes you even want them to cause more carnage, disrupt the sometimes staid, stuffy existence of Uncle.  Even now, I find myself laughing out loud at the tricks the Badfort crew get up to, lessons of humility that Uncle often comes to accept.

So after a few years I gave up, returning instead, defeated, to my battered paperback copies of Uncle and Uncle Cleans Up.  A few years later, with some savings behind me, I decided that it couldn’t wait any longer.  I managed to pick up a tatty of copy of Uncle and his Detective for £40.75.  I narrowly missed out on a first edition of Uncle and the Treacle Trouble which was going for a steal – only to find out the buyer had immediately relisted it for over 400 pounds.  And then I found the last book, Uncle and the Battle for Badgertown, on an eBay auction that ended some crazy time on a Sunday morning when nobody would be awake.  I made sure I was.  A first edition ex-library copy which I’d purchased for £103.01 arrived a week later.  The other books were however still out of my price range and whilst I cherished my copy of Badgertown, I still wanted to read the other ones first…

A year later, still searching.  Lots more SF people talking about Uncle.  It seemed he’d developed a kind of cult following.  I felt at home – I clearly wasn’t the only nutter out there.  And then I found a website where some charitable person had uploaded pdfs of all the books.  They weren’t great quality files, but at least I could finally read all of the books and in sequence.  I felt a sense of relief, although slightly tainted by the fact that I hadn’t been able to hold the books in my hands, hadn’t been able to fully appreciate Quentin Blake’s drawings, which perfectly complimented the surrealist prose.

Then, last week, everything changed.  I discovered that all the Uncle novels were out there, republished.  I felt a flutter of excitement, the same excitement when my battered copy of Uncle and his Detective first arrived.  I flicked through websites, finally coming across Marcus Gipps’ genius Kickstarter campaign a few months back to get the books republished.  Apparently it had reached its funding goal of £7,000 in about four hours.  Permissions were granted and a book was published: all six volumes together, an omnibus edition.

My copy arrived a few days later: a beautifully bound hardback, nothing less than a work of art – one which you could clearly see had been a labour of love.  Famous writers have been brought in to proclaim their love for this wonderful and generous, if a bit stroppy, elephant.  There is even an enchanting introduction by one of his grandchildren, for whom Uncle must have genuinely been larger than life.

So now I and many other Uncle fans can rest easy, lost somewhere in the spiralling towers of Homeward. Thank you Marcus Gipps.  Thank you!  I hope to meet you someday to express my thanks in person.  You have done Uncle, his friends, even the Badfort crew - as well as the rest of the world - a great honour.

Link to original Kickstarter campaign site

Vice Versa

Another old story added to the blog: Vice Versa.  This was written in one sitting, back when I probably should have been studying.  I used to hang out in this coffee shop called CB1 on Mill Road in Cambridge - a place where fresh coffee was basically on tap - half price refills as far as I can remember.  The walls of the place were stacked high with second hand books, including a rather decent SF section, which provided a deal of procrastination.  They had open mic nights where I tried out some of my rather juvenile poems on the assembled handful.  Of the many unusual people who used to pop in during the hours I sat there, I clearly remember the man who walked around Cambridge with a raw, supermarket chicken on his head.  He claimed he was a performance artist, or rather someone who used this title to hide his madness behind.  Anyway, I'm sure this chap popped in during the creation of this story, but he didn't stop the flow of words.

The lovely people at Noesis liked this story and published it in what was my third and final appearance for them.  I now realise I am honoured to be sharing the pages with one Philip K. Dick award winning author: Simon Morden, creator of the fantastic Metrozone series.  Many congratulations Simon!  You certainly have set the bar quite high for the Noesis Alumni - but I'm working on it...

The pages are reproduced with kind permission by Noesis.  The artwork is by a chap called Ian Storer, a trainee lecturer in Nottingham at the time.  Oh, and as an aside, the exams worked out ok...