Manda Scott: The Crystal Skull

In the present (2007) Stella O’Connor and her new husband Kit are engaged in searching for a crystal skull believed hidden four hundred years earlier by Cedric Owen, the founder of a Cambridge college.  Stella finds the skull, one of thirteen believed to relate to a Mayan prophecy concerning the world’s destruction in 2012.  Stella races against time, conscious that at least some of her friends and colleagues are working to destroy the skull.  A parallel narrative, set in the sixteenth century, gives Owen’s story, and the secrets of the skull’s hiding place.

The Crystal Skull is in many ways the antithesis of the Roland Emmerich movie 2012.  Where Emmerich was concerned (again) with finding inventive CG ways to wreak widescreen Armageddon, this is a surprisingly intimate, human story.  There’s plenty of end-of-the-world material here (Mayan prophecies, astrology, ley lines) but these are used to tell of two relationships rather than concentrating on the more obvious big-budget excitements.   The writing is fine throughout, and there’s an especially good and well-sustained opening caving sequence.  The modern-day and Elizabethan narratives overlap well and the historical and scientific aspects are plausibly handled in the context of the wider story events.  Crucially, this isn’t a novel which seeks to convince the reader of its ideas; what it does do though is convince you that its characters have their beliefs/experiences and are acting upon them accordingly.            

Scott, Manda.  2008.  The Crystal Skull (London: Bantam Books), 539 pages, 978-0553817669

Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize 2012

The Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize offers £1,000 plus editorial and publishing advice to unpublished women authors over 21 years old with a novel manuscript.  The competition closing date is 27th April 2012.  You can find full details here and here.  

The Final Cut (2004, directed by Omar Naim)

America, the near future.  The rich can afford to have organic implants which record their every moment; these are used to provide their families with mementoes after their death. Alan Hakman (Robin Williams) works as a cutter, a specialist who shapes the raw footage into what are called ReMemories.  He's commissioned to ReMemory an executive of the company behind the implant technology.  He becomes distracted in his work, partly because anti-ReMemory activist movements are gaining in strength, including former colleague Fletcher (Jom Caviezel), partly because the ReMemory footage contains a possible clue to Hakman's own guilty secret from his youth.  


Though at times compromised by an awkward set-up and budgetary constraints, The Final Cut offers some intriguing thoughts on surveillance, on the subjectivity of memory and of our responsibilities to others and their wishes.  Performances are generally solid throughout and the ReMemory technology allows director Naim (this was his first film) to flirt in a rather more imaginative manner than is usual with the ongoing fascination with incorporating found footage into films.  Neither an outright SF thriller nor a character study of an obsessive loner, this nevertheless makes an interesting companion piece to Williams' similar performances in One Hour Photo and Insomnia.     

Limbo Quarterly - open for submissions

New literary quarterly is looking for submissions.  They're interested in short fiction, articles and poetry.  The first submission deadline is March 30th 2012.  Pop over to their website to get a flavour of what it is they're all about!

Polluto: Witchfinders vs the Evil Red - call for submissions

Polluto magazine is on the lookout for counter-cultural/subversive tales of witchcraft, spies, witchhunts, investgations, the paranormal, zombies: don't just revisit genre tropes but give them a sound kicking and a stern talking to.  Submissions are open until 31st March 2012 (unless the issue fills up first) and you can find more details (including rates of payment) on Polluto's website here.   

Dundee International Book Prize for unpublished novelists

The Dundee International Book Prize is open to unpublished novelists with a completed manuscript, and offers £10,000 and a publishing deal with Cargo Publishing.  Full details are available here and there's an entry form here.  The closing date for emailed entries is 1st March 2012.

Strange Chemistry: open door opportunity for YA SF/F novelists

Strange Chemistry is looking for science fiction and fantasy with a Young Adult readership.  If you're an author who's completed a novel that fits their criteria, and you don't currently have a literary agent, then the Strange Chemistry doors are open for a short period.  If you submit to them between April 16th and April 30th 2012, they'll read your material.  However (and please bear this in mind) make sure that you fit the criteria they specify on their website before you send anything.  You can find full details on this great opportunity here.    

Michael Jecks: King's Gold

England, 1326/7.  The former Edward II is being held captive by his son, who has assumed the throne.  An attempt at the old king’s rescue prompts a decision to move him from Kenilworth to Berkeley Castle.  Knight Baldwin de Furnshill and his companion Simon Puttock are among those commanded to protect the old king in being transferred and then to ensure his continuing protection. 

King’s Gold is a more complicated novel than the above synopsis perhaps recognises; there’s an awful lot going on, and in part it’s this comprehensiveness and Jecks’ interest in providing a cross-sectional view of medieval society that provides much interest, even though at times the central narrative inevitably becomes a little lost. 

We open with a glossary, then a cast of characters, then a five page author’s note then two maps.   Then a date which requires a footnote to translate it.  Jecks makes use of footnotes throughout to provide an extra-textual commentary/ongoing glossary to specific terms and dates.  The approach is cinematic at times, cutting from location to location as the various factions and characters (bankers, factions, rogues, ordinary working folk, a weak-willed priest) slowly converge on the castle at the centre of the story.  Jecks’ series protagonists Furnshill and Puttock make a late entrance; for a reader new to the series like me (we’re 30 books into this sequence of novels) it was interesting to see them take centre-stage. 

The writing is strong on character; Jecks is keen on an even-handed approach to his history, and on showing as wide a view of medieval life as the story will allow.  There’s some neat plotting and multiple mysteries to be unpicked, including one very well-done red herring that provides a stand-alone whodunit.  Research is foregrounded throughout so that we learn as we’re reading.  That might be distracting for some readers who might be more inclined to want to get on with the principal story, but if you’re the kind of reader who likes the journey as much as the destination, there’s much to relish here.        

Jecks, Michael.  2011.  King’s Gold (London: Simon & Schuster), 517 pages, 978-1849830836

Guardian/Sony FutureScapes short story competition

The Guardian/Sony FutureScapes short story competition is calling for short speculative fiction up to 3,000 words imagining what life will be like in the year 2025.  The competition closing date is 15th March 2012.  


There's a range of Sony-related prizes to be won, plus winning entries will be featured on Guardian and Sony websites.  Full details may be found here and here - there's also a range of specially-commissioned short stories including one from Michael Marshall Smith. 

60 second audio story competition

433 Magazine is looking for audio stories that last a minute.  There's a £60 prize for the best, plus runners-up awards.  Closing date is 31st March 2012.  You can find more information here.  

Unthology 3: open for submissions

Unthank Books is open for submissions for its third Unthology.  They're looking for short stories up to 6,000 words, novel extracts, essays and other non-fiction.  You can find more information here and here.  

In Time (2011, directed by Andrew Niccol)

America, an unspecified future.  Money has been replaced by time.  In a future where your body-clock begins a one-year countdown to death from your 25th birthday, time is now the only currency; to be bartered with, lent, traded and stolen.  Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) has been living on the clock for three years, hustling a precarious existence, caring for his mother (Olivia Wilde) and looking out for his deadbeat best friend Borel (Johnny Galecki).  A suicidal rich stranger bequeaths Salas 100 years, but the gift brings consequences; both Borel and Salas's mother die.  Driven by revenge and grief, Salas vows to bring down the system, pursued by Leon, a principled but ruthless timekeeper.


Andrew Niccol has either written (The Truman Show) or written/directed (Gattaca, S1m0ne) a series of high-concept SF movies, driven by a rare wit and intelligence, a left-of-centre perspective and, often as not, an intriguing visual style.  To some extent In Time is the same, though it's by some distance the least successful of these projects to date.  The premise is a mash-up of existing tropes (elements of 1984, Logan's Run, Harlan Ellison's short story Repent Harlequin! for starters) though that's not necessarily an issue; Niccol sets up the world efficiently with a few neat visuals and some good jokes ("99 Second Stores", characters with names related to brands of timepiece, that kind of thing).  


In a world where everyone is 25 or younger, there's some fun to be had with age-gaps and the Western preoccupation with the body beautiful, plus the cast affords plenty of eye candy to suit all tastes, unless youthful is not your thing.  Costume, set and production design is spot-on and distinctive (an apparently CG-free retro-future vibe with 1950s-inspired electric cars and sharp suits and dresses throughout) plus Roger Deakins photographs the film beautifully (it's all hard bright dawns and prime lenses).  It looks great, with a sense of dystopian brutality (lots of open spaces and concrete); almost a sister movie to aspects of Total Recall or Niccol's own S1m0ne.       
   
The issues are with the script.  There seems more attention being paid to the asides rather than to the main narrative thrust.  Salas is given two sets of motivation, but he deals with neither (he doesn't avenge his mother's untimely death, and his actions at the end of the film show he's not learned the lessons of Borel's).  He quickly forgets what he'd supposed to be doing, and the movie converts in its second hour into a series of chases and a love story (with consequent peripheral character activity) oddly similar to the centre of Titanic.  Aspects of In Time are much more simplistic than is usual with Niccol's writing and this is to the movie's detriment.  You'll be wincing with each supposedly-portentous time-related gnomic utterance well before the end of the flick.  The climax is low-key and is taken out of the protagonist's control, being reliant wholly on a secondary villain's forgetfulness, which is plain daft. 


A movie with some good ideas and a distinctive style, In Time is a good-looking though ultimately insubstantial experience.  There's enough here though to make this a cult film of the future, as it looks dandy and has a sense of cool, even though it doesn't follow through its ideas with sufficient rigour or ambition. 

Novelicious Undiscovered 2012 novel competition

Aspiring chick-lit novelist?  Got a novel project on the go?  Then here's the competition for you!  


Novelicious, in conjunction with Avon Books and Simon and Schuster is running a competition for commercial fiction aimed at female readerships.  


Enter the first 3,000 words of your novel by April 3rd 2012.  The twenty top entries will be shortlisted and put to a public vote.  


There's a range of prizes including manuscript feedback/critiques from Avon and from Simon and Schuster.  You can find full details here and here. 

Constellation - undergraduate submissions required

Warwick University's Constellation is seeking previously unpublished literary and cultural criticism from undergraduates.   Submissions should be 2,500 to 6,000 words and use MLA formatting.  There are two reading periods a year, in March and July.  For more details, see here.  

Apollo 18 (2011, directed by Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego)

1974.  A secret Apollo lunar mission with a military/defence payload to be installed on the Moon is compromised by first, evidence of a manned Soviet vehicle, then by an extra-terrestrial encounter.


Spoilers ahead, so tread warily if you haven't seen the film.  Apollo 18 is another entry in the "found footage" aesthetic of low-budget genre movies, and one that's quite refreshing in some ways.  The mix of hard SF and monster-movie fantasy is generally well done and the technical credits are excellent throughout.  There's a fair amount of effort gone into the conceit of having a range of cameras everywhere as well.  We mix handheld material shot by the astronauts, external motion-sensor cameras, stills, home movies, interview footage and 'official' NASA publicity material to tell the story.  


The story is slight and essentially a reworking of Alien (astronauts land to encounter bugs which host themselves inside humans; the space travellers have been sent there deliberately by their employer).  There's a few neat jump-scares too and much is made of the claustrophobic conditions inside the moon lander spacecraft.  The actors (all relative unknowns) are at least capable enough to convince.   


To some extent the wheels come off in the last act as the implausibilities threaten to swamp the storyline and a few errors in logic intrude (how does the bug get into the spacesuit? how do they get the footage back to earth? where's the Soviet orbiter vehicle?).  To some, these issues will be fatal, but Apollo 18 is, if you go with it, a sturdy little movie which promises much from director Lopez-Gallego and at least rings a few changes on the more usual supernatural faux-documentary offerings made using the "found footage" approach.   

Christopher Ransom: The Birthing House

Wisconsin, present day.  Conrad Harrison’s relationship is failing.  His career-driven partner is increasingly distanced from him; she may be having an affair.  Conrad’s estranged father dies, leaving him with a $500,000 windfall.  On impulse he buys an old house in a small town intending to give his relationship a fresh start, perhaps with children.  The house comes with a history, in part captured by the book of 19^th century photographs of it given to him by the previous occupants.  It was a birthing house, a refuge for single pregnant women.  Almost immediately, Conrad senses a presence.  The house is not empty.  Conrad investigates, becoming increasingly becoming convinced that the place is haunted, and that it won’t be happy until there’s another baby in the residence.

The Birthing House is a straight-up old-school ghost story/psychological thriller, playing confidently with familiar elements such as the house with a history, ghosts, photographs of the past with relationships to the present, inbreeding, body horror, small town murder and, perhaps, a Diabolique-style “they’re trying to drive me mad” storyline.        

Ransom’s writing is straightforward and similarly assured, setting up a yarn with a range of possible outcomes, and with some effective sequences.  The writing is clever enough to keep us guessing until the end (is Conrad mad, is his Jo, his wife, either mad herself of plotting to be rid of her partner, are the ghosts real and if so what do they really want?) though perhaps inevitably with a limited number of outs, readers may be disappointed if they work out the puzzle before the protagonist.  That said, this is more about the journey tan the destination, and Ransom keeps things suitably creepy throughout, leaving himself with enough to ratchet matters up in the last fifty pages.       

Ransom, Christopher. 2008. The Birthing House London: Sphere), 408 pages, 978-071541717

2012 Yeovil Literary Prize

The 2012 Yeovil Literary Prize has three categories open to submission: novel, short story and poetry.  The novel competition offers a £1000 first prize against three chapters and a synopsis; the short story and poetry competitions each offer a £500 first prize against 2,000 words or 40 lines respectively.  The closing date for all competitions is 31st May 2012.  Full details are on the competition website.    

Devon Writers Short Story Competition 2012

This competition is now open for previously unpublished short fiction of up to 3,000 words.  The competition offers a £400 prize fund (with an additional prize for writers based in Devon).  The competition closes on 31st March 2012.  Full details are available here.   

Frome Festival Short Story Competition 2012

The 2012 Frome Festival Short Story Competition is now open to short stories of between 1,000 and 2,200 words.  The competition closing date is 31st May 2012.  Full details are available at the festival website.      

Academy of Children's Writers short story competition 2012

The Academy of Children's Writers has announced details of its annual short story competition.  Fiction of up to 2,000 words (either a complete short story or the beginning of a novel) may be entered.  The fiction should be suitable for any child audience up to teenage.   There's a £2,000 first prize, with runners-up awards also.  The competition closing date is 31st March 2012.  Full details and an entry form may be found here.

Fantasy Fiction short story competition

Fantasy Fiction is running a short story competition for original and previously unpublished speculative fiction of up to 8,000 words.  There's a first prize of $500, plus a range of runners-up prizes and publication opportunities.  Entries close 30th June 2012.  Full details are available on the Fantasy Fiction competition website. 

Ariana Franklin: Mistress of the Art of Death

Cambridgeshire, the 12^th century.  Adelia Aguilar, a female doctor and anatomist, has been summoned at the request of Henry II from the continent to investigate a series of child murders in the fenlands.  Someone is butchering children, and suspicion has fallen on the local Jewish population.  As she works to determine what has happened and who is responsible, Adelia must battle the preconceptions of others, church and state vested interests, and her own moral and ethical framework as she’s increasingly placed out of her comfort zone.

There’s an initial test in terms of suspension of disbelief in getting the story going (Franklin is pushing the boundaries of probability all the time) but once you accept the premise (essentially an early medieval Kay Scarpetta) then this, the first of four novels featuring anatomist Aguilar, is a lot of fun.  There’s some tension in the novel between it being a serious character-driven piece and one that’s more securely a genre-friendly serial killer whodunnit; these tensions aren’t quite resolved and the end result is a novel that is not too sure if it wants to tell a yarn or a story. 

On the upside, the characterisation is great and there are some splendid set pieces (a feast is well done and the opening pages are utterly fantastic); the crimes are agreeably nasty (though lifted in part from Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon) and the villain’s motivation is intriguing, though insufficiently explored.    

 

Franklin plays fast and loose with authenticity; she says as much in a useful postscript, and the carefree attitude towards dialogue and spoken simile/metaphor is at odds with what feels like well-researched medical detail and some very plausible politicking, particularly in the novel’s later stages. 

That might be nitpicking, because though Mistress of the Art of Death isn’t faultless, it’s a very superior entertainment and the strength of the character writing carries the reader through.  

Franklin, Ariana.  2008.  Mistress of the Art of Death (London: Bantam), 528 pages, 978-0857500366

Edward Lear bicentenary flash fiction competition

Derbyshire Literature Festival is running flash fiction and poetry competitions in celebration of nonsense writer Edward Lear's 200th anniversary.  Poems should be up to 40 lines and fiction no more than 100 words.   Any entries should be original and previously unpublished.   The competition closing dates are both 1st April 2012.  Full details, entry forms and a guide from the competition judges are available here.

Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

New York, the 1940s.  Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay are brought together; one a refugee from Czechlovakia, one a native New Yorker.  Both are talented; an artist and writer, a storyteller and magician.  They team up to write for the pulps, then the nascent superhero comics.  Their signature character, The Escapist, is a hit.  Together and apart they battle their own foes; their displacement from the war against Germany, love and affection, fame and the perils of working in a cut-throat industry.  Eventually the partnership breaks, and though the comics industry moves on for them, Kavalier and Clay’s now-separate lives are destined to some together in the 1950s.

Kavalier and Clay is that rare thing, a novel which doesn’t have a weak point.  Even when the narrative breaks to take us away from New York and the comics industry milieu we’ve spent several hundred pages exploring, for a segue into the oddest of second world war episodes, the part feels related, if not integral to the whole.   

Throughout, Chabon’s love for his characters, for the world of the Golden Age of comics, of radio serials and cheap TV series featuring pulp characters, pushes us on.  His love for the creative process, be it hammering out words by the cent or producing ever more outlandish costumed superheroes, vigilantes and avengers, comes through; among other things, this is a story of different kinds of obsession, of fates intertwined and of the mundanity and the necessity of invention.  It’s also about magic, be it card tricks and escape stunts, pretence and hiding, folklore and real life.     

Chabon, Michael.   2008.  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (London: Fourth Estate), 643 pages, 978-1841154938

Joie - call for flash fiction contributors

Joie is on the lookout for writers of very short fiction: 300 words or less.  Full details?  Here.

Steyning Festival 2012 short story competition

A short story competition is being organised as part of his year's Steyning Festival.  Stories of up to 1,500 words, on any topic, may be entered.  The competition closing date is 31st March 2012.  First prize is £250.  There's also a children's short  story competition being run in conjunction.  Full details may be found on the festival's website.

Ashgrove House International Short Story Competition

Short stories up to 2,500 words may be entered for this competition, which is open until 27th July 2012 (there's a late entry date of 15th August, though that attracts a higher entry fee).  There's a first prize of £200, with a range of runners-up prizes.  The fifteen best entries will be anthologised.   Full details may be found here. 

Deborah Harkness: A Discovery of Witches

Oxford, present day.  Researcher Dianna Bishop, a witch who has decided not to use her latent powers, attracts attention from witches, vampires and daemons alike when she retrieves a mystical text from a library.  She eventually joins forces with vampire Matthew Clairmont, to try to uncover the true significance of the manuscript.  As Bishop and Clairmont work together they slowly fall in love.  Bishop re-engages with her magical powers as the stakes are raised; an ancient truce is unravelling and war between the magical species may be inevitable.

At its heart, A Discovery of Witches is a posh soap-opera, a slow-burn romance between a witch and a vampire.  There’s some background intrigue about longstanding alliances, Knights Templar-ish medieval orders, grimoires, DNA sequencing (magical and other powers are apparently the consequence of genetic mutation in this universe), but all of this is contextual to the will they/won’t they romance at the centre of the story. 

Harkness is strong on libraries and scents (this is a world where smell interestingly comes before visual stimuli) and information is painstakingly doled out.  Some will have an issue with the pacing (for me, it’s really slow) but others will enjoy the aspect of taking things easy, speed-wise. 

The blend of magical and ordinary world is well-controlled for the first few hundred pages, but as Dianna re-engages with her powers, that control slips, and much of the early pseudo-scientific rationale for assorted witchery, vampirism and daemonology (the latter already a tad sketchy) goes out of the window once teleportation-like and time-travel powers become invoked towards the end of this, the first in a projected trilogy.  Again, for some, 700 pages to set the ground-rules for a magical universe will feel luxuriously appropriate; others will start to want some answers, or start to think there’s no point pursuing them as the interior logic of the piece becomes shakier.

Harkness, Deborah.  2011.  A Discovery of Witches (London: Headline), 720 pages, 978-0755374045

RSPB / The Rialto Nature Poetry Competition 2012

The RSPB in association with The Rialto poetry magazine seek poetry on the theme (being interpreted widely) of "nature".  Poems of up to 40 lines are called for, and should be entered by the closing date of 30th April 2012.  There's a range of prizes from £1,000 down.  Winning entries will be published in The Rialto.  Full details are available here.