Obnoxious Bigots. . . Obnoxious Bigots. Sounds like the name of a tongue in cheek right-wing blog, doesn't it. Hey, maybe we should adopt the ephithet, make it our own like they do in the ghetto. Yo, Obnoxious Bigot, wha's up? Way to go, Obnoxious Bigot!. Nah, it doesn't really have the right jaunty ring to it. Listen to me. There are no feminists. There's no such thing as feminists. There are women who speak up, when they see defamation, injustice and corruption in the world around them. There are women who can't speak up, because they are too busy getting raped, getting the sh*t beaten out of them, or maybe watching their children starve. And there are women who keep quiet, smile sweetly and take the dirty money. That's the whole story.

Thank God for common decency. There's more of it about than you would think, in football, and in other areas of my benighted country. Except for in the Tory party.


Sorry about that, rant over. To business. My second story collection from The Aqueduct Press was published at the beginning of this month, but distribution has been delayed (due to the extreme weather). My copies finally reached me yesterday. I really like that cover, and many thanks to Kath Wilham for following my suggestion up and sourcing it, plus many thanks to CERN Educational, for letting us use it. I am not so sure about the introduction chosen by my publisher. To be perfectly frank, I'm puzzled as to what that disingenous Steven Shaviro essay, entirely about one story he didn't much like, is meant to achieve. I don't think it does anything for my collection. Ah well, maybe he's family or something.

Anyway, same as I did for The Buonarotti Quartet: the stories.
(warning: this is a bit long)

The Universe Of Things, Storynotes


In The Forest Of The Queen: The Monsec American Monument is a real place. The forest in the story is a real place, and cropped for firewood by the commune, just as described. We drove into it, we left our car at a meeting of green, smoothly mown, thickly tree-bordered tracks; just as described. We walked into the trees, and were walking over ground that was hopping with tiny dark-skinned frogs. Never seen so many little frogs. We got a little lost, and that felt a little strange: we found ourselves again, and there was (but this was at a different forest margin) an old French forester who said “You can go in, but you may not come out”. Back in the car, for a while it was touch and go: so many crossing trails, and surely far more trees than we’d passed on the way in. We knew we’d escaped when we reached the cottage converted into a bat refuge, but I wondered if maybe everything had changed; if this was really the same world as we’d left. The rest is fiction.

I’ve sought these liminal, uncertain experiences all my life. The most developed example I’ve written up as fiction is a novel called Kairos. It’s that Arthur Machen feeling, it’s what the term numinous actually means; and you should ask my brother David about it.


Total Internal Reflection. An early try out for the tech and drug mediated Grail idea.


Red Sonja And Lessingham In Dreamland. It’s about Red Sonja, ie Brigitte Nielson (a favourite movie). It’s about Lessingham, as in the heroic, not to say decoratively fascist, Fantasies of Eric Rucker Eddison (shared private tutors with Arthur Ransome as a boy, but I’m sure you knew that). Someone once told me (what stirrers you people are!) that Eddison fans in the US found it “very offensive”. Back off. I’m a huge Eddison fan, in my fashion, and that�