Notes from New Sodom

... rantings, ravings and ramblings of strange fiction writer, THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!!

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Save Kiana Firouz

Kudos to Richard Morgan for bringing this to my attention and kicking up some noise himself. I don't have time right now to blog in-depth, but I'll hopefully be able to add my voice properly in the next day or two. But as it is, this is important enough that I felt I should post the basics right away. From Coilhouse blog:

Kiana Firouz, 27 years old, is an outspoken Iranian LGBT rights activist, filmmaker, and actress. When clips of her video documentary work featuring the struggle and persecution of gays and lesbians in her country were acquired by Iranian intelligence, agents began to follow Firouz around Tehran, harassing and intimidating her. She fled for England where she could safely continue her work and studies.

She plays a starring role in Cul de Sac, a documentary film produced in the UK about the condition of lesbians in Iran, and based heavily on Firouz’s own life story. Directed by Ramin Goudarzi-Nejad and Mahshad Torkan, the movie will premiere in London in a few days. Since the trailer was posted on YouTube in December 2009, Cul de Sac has attracted global media attention, with thousands of views. Apparently, some of those views included members of Ahmadinejad’s puppet media in Iran. They know who Firouz is and what she stands for. They may want her to come back to the country she was born in to answer for it.


Britain has rejected her plea for refugee status, meaning she could be deported any time. Again, from Coilhouse:

In Iran, the punishment for lesbianism involving mature consenting women consists of 100 lashes. This punishment can be applied up to three times. After a fourth violation of Iranian law, a woman convicted of “unrepentant homosexuality” is finally executed by hanging, often publicly, in front of a howling mob.

Do I even have to say any more than that right now? Here's the petition to try and stop her deportation.

Labels:

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

An Old Interview...

done by Paul Cockburn of the GSFWC, for Dreamwatch, back in the day.

Labels:

Monday, May 17, 2010

Nowhere Town Publicity Shots

Lookee lookee! Some promo shots from Chicago UT's Nowhere Town:

Here we gots Jack & Puck:









And here we gots Jack, Chorus, Joey, the Barman and a Regular in classic Ramones stylee:







Two weeks to go!

Labels:

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Nowhere Town DVDs?

So, I had one commenter and a few mates asking whether DVDs might be available of the University of Chicago Theater Group's production of NOWHERE TOWN. (So soon now! Eek!) It looks like the guys over there have been chatting, and it might be possible, but they need to know if there's enough interest to make it worthwhile. So, if you'd be interested in this in theory -- and if you go to the UT website you'll see how high the production standards are from the short QuickTime thingy -- let me know in the comments here or drop us a line by email (hal AT halduncan PERIOD com). Just so's I can give em an idea.

In the meantime, watch this. It's awesome:

Labels:

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Speculative Horizons



It seems that over at Subterranean Press, they've just put up the pre-order page for the Speculative Horizons anthology, edited by Patrick St-Denis of Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, and containing stories from L. E. Modesitt, Jr., C. S. Friedman, Tobias S. Buckell and Brian Ruckley, as well my own "The Death of a Love." The latter of which it's nice to see described on the Sub Press page as "a story so wrenching it’ll rip out your heart and come back for your lungs." Heh. It is a somewhat twisted little story.

Anyway, as Sub Press say, "If that’s not incentive enough to preorder a copy, until the end of day, May 21, 2010, we’ll be donating 10% of the price of each copy sold direct through SubPress to the American Cancer Society." So, yeah, get in there sharpish and ye can have either one of the 200 signed, numbered leatherbound (niiiiice!) limited editions or the fully cloth bound hardback trade edition.

Labels:

Monday, May 10, 2010

Le Prix Spécial du Jury

I'm told that ENCRE -- the French translation of INK -- has been awarded the (first ever) Prix Spécial du Jury du Cafard cosmique. For them as reads French:

Une grande première cette année : le Jury du Prix du Cafard cosmique 2010 a décidé a une très large majorité de décerner cette année un Prix Spécial au roman Encre de Hal Duncan, publié par les Editions Denoël Lunes d’Encre.

Ce roman ne faisait pas partie des 5 oeuvres placées en tête de liste par les internautes mais, comme chacun le sait, le Peuple lui-même n’est pas infaillible ! Le Jury a donc voulu mettre également en lumière le formidable diptyque du Livre de Toutes les Heures de ce jeune auteur écossais, publié chez Denoël, dans la collection Lunes d’Encre.


And congratulations to Greg Egan, of course, for winning Le Prix du Cafard cosmique 2010 with his Océanique!

Labels:

Sunday, May 09, 2010

Fanfiction

So Diana Gabaldon kicked off a stushie with a post about her dislike for fanfiction. People got terribly irate in the comments apparently, enough that George R. R. Martin weighed in on with his take on it -- similarly opposed in principle. Unfortunately, he based part of his case on a comparison between Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft that Nick Mamatas pointed out was utterly wrong-headed. Other writers, pro and fan alike, have naturally picked up on the kerfuffle and propagated it across the interwebs.

Me, I blathered about this yonks ago, but what the fuck, let's give it another bash.

With a little qualifier that I'll come to, Gabaldon is right on all three counts, as I see it, when she says, " I think it’s immoral, I _know_ it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters." This doesn't mean I agree with the fanfic-haters though, simply that if you pay attention to what she's saying, it's hardly a big deal. (I'm ignoring the point-by-point argument where she addresses what comes across as something of a Straw Fanficcer, to be honest, because... yeah, whatever.)

So...

1. She can't be wrong about her own response; she's just reporting her reaction. That may not be palatable to fanficcers, but them's the breaks; some writers are just going to see any derivative work based on their creative output as... like a bad disco remix of "T.V. Eye" sung by Madonna. Deal with it. She is entitled to spew bile at the stinky turd you left on her doorstep as a present. If your writing is shit, don't expect her to be all "Gosh! For me?!" She is entitled to spew bile at the stinky fromage you left on her doorstep. If your writing is cheesy, many will like it, but her writerly stomach may turn at the gut-wrenching Gorgonzola stench of a Mary Sue. She's even entitled to spew bile at the stinky perfume you left on her doorstep. Your writing might be kinda sweet, delicately nuanced, quite lovely to many, but if it's based on hers all she's gonna smell is the stuff you've done to it that's just plain wrong, far as she's concerned. So you took a professional perfumier's scent, watered it down and chucked in a ton of vanilla extract. If it gives her the boak, that's tough titty.

2. She's not wrong that it's illegal; that's the actual law. Again, that may not be palatable to fanficcers, but again, them's the breaks. Published fanfictions are derivative works that infringe copyright legislation unless a) permission has been granted by the original writer or, assuming a US context, b) the reuse is sufficiently transformative that it counts as fair use, for values of transformative and fair use that are defined by the courts. Is there a grey area here? Not much of one. Parody is generally considered fair use, but homage is not. Fanfiction is not considered sufficiently transformative because it's basically unlicensed tie-in/spin-off fiction. Doesn't matter if you're selling the work or slapping it up on an interwebs forum. Doesn't matter if you carefully credit the original writer. Doesn't matter if you're not directly plagiarising the text but just using ideas -- characters and settings -- that "can't be copyrighted." If you're publishing a derivative work without permission, you're breaking the law. Don't fool yourself.

3. To say that she thinks it's immoral is a perfectly accurate report of her own ethical judgement. That "thinks" is contrasted with the emphasised "know" precisely to highlight the fact that this is a personal and subjective evaluation: that fanfiction is illegal is a fact; that it's immoral is her opinion. You might well disagree that opinion, but her expressing it is... well, the kinda thing writers do on their blogs. Go figure. Of course, this is where my qualifier comes in, because as far as I'm concerned she really ought to have said "unethical" rather than "immoral" for that subjective judgement, because "immoral" has a somewhat absolutist ring to it. And it's really about societal judgements rather than individual ones.

See, far as I'm concerned, mores are factual -- societal conventions of what's right and what's wrong, dicta that can be objectively verified as being part of the consensus or not part of the consensus. While the ethics of fanfic might be a matter of individual opinion, the morality of fanfic is a question of whether the culture-at-large accepts it or not. The question of whether it's "immoral" or not isn't a matter of whether it's really right or wrong, so much as it's a matter of what society's mores say about it. The reality? The culture-at-large is divided, with one community holding to mores in which fanfic is fine and dandy, one community holding to mores in which it's deeply transgressive. Outside those communities, the culture-at-large... kinda doesn't have much of an opinion on it at all.

So, OK then, how to navigate that conflict of mores? If she thinks it's unethical, and you think it's ethical, is there any way to break it apart and negotiate the minefield without everyone blowing up?

Well, first things first: to be honest, if she doesn't welcome fanfiction of her work, I'm inclined to think she can only be right about its ethical dubiety... when it comes to fanfiction of her work, that is... mostly. I mean, it's her call what is done with her fiction, including the characters and setting. The work is made public on the proviso that it remains her call (within the limits of fair use,) with the contract between the artist and audience set out in the copyright notice and the legislation it refers to. To publish an unlicensed derivative work is to breach that contract, and breaching an agreed contract like that is just plain old-fashioned bad form. That's a no-brainer, surely. I agree to do X as long as you agree not to do Y. I do X. You go ahead and do Y anyway. That makes you a prick.

Excuses can be made for ignorance, of course, (hence the "mostly") but not for willfully oblivious entitlement; that's also bad form. If you didn't realise you weren't supposed to do Y, you're not a prick. If I go all frowny and tell you, "Dude, you can't just do Y like that; it's recognised as bad form to the extent that it's written into the law," a response of "No, it's not; it's a legal grey area and you have no right to expect that of me," is kinda prickish again. The more defensive smokescreens you throw up, the more it comes across as an obstinate rejection of the writer's viewpoint, reeking of self-interest and disdain.

Put it this way: Any work of fiction is a service that's offered with terms and conditions. By default, as the law stands now, when you use any such service you're agreeing not to publish a derivative work based on it without permission, unless your reuse is sufficiently transformative. You're agreeing not to set up your own purely imitative service, unless the creator says you can. Not properly getting this because you don't understand the ins and outs of copyright, you might blithely break the agreement, set up an imitative service and, in doing so, break the law and piss off the original creator. But hey, you didn't realise, you even did it out of love, so it would be kinda churlish to decry you as a horrible person, right?

Some creators might even take it in the spirit it's intended -- as an act of tribute, a homage. Some will turn a blind eye as long as it's not done commercially. Some may even appreciate and encourage it. That's their prerogative, their permission to grant, by silent acquiescence or explicit acceptance. But that agreement is not a given. It's not the rule but the exception to the rule, and there's enough writers out there in the Gabaldon/Martin camp kicking up stinks about the legality that really you have to be pretty naive for it to go over your head for any period of time. And if you respond with bald-faced denials, that's just refusing to recognise the agreement at all, refusing to recognise, in fact, the creators right to offer that service on those terms and conditions.

Now, bear in mind, I don't include myself in the Gabaldon/Martin camp. You can throw all the justifications for fanfic at me and I'll probably just agree with them. But where pro writers are down on fanfiction, often it comes from a legitimate concern with the ultimate effects of their work as it has been reused in your fanfic. The whole "my characters are my children" line is a little precious for my liking, but even taking a less personal approach, characters and settings are powerful tools, and a writer doesn't have to let those carefully crafted tools be put to uses they don't approve of. You are not simply entitled to reuse the service they've provided you in a service you provide to others because of this. You might do something they find profoundly objectionable, and by providing you with the tools to do it, that makes them feel partly responsible.

If someone did some sort of inverse slash with my own Jack and Puck characters -- co-opting them into a personal fantasy and straight-ironing them in the process, turning them hetero -- this might well annoy the fuck out of me. Co-opt my queer fiction to a heteronormative agenda and damn right I'm going to be pissed off. Weave a right-wing subtext through it and of course I'm going to get grouchy. As a certified Sodomite, attuned to homophobic undercurrents, I'm intently aware of subtext in narratives, how superficially fun and fluffy entertainment can carry the dodgiest of messages. Racism and misogynism can be hard not to code into narrative. It's only a small step from a tongue-in-cheek anarcho-terrorist who Blows Shit Up without thinking things through to a narrative that glorifies "righteous" violence without the author thinking things through. Point is, I feel a social responsibility not to propagate unethical messages, and that extends to not wanting my characters and settings to be vehicles for them in the hands of others.

It's a moot point with my work, right enough. I'm not likely to have to worry about that any time soon. And, hey, if I haven't addressed any of the arguments made in support of fanfiction, it's largely because I don't actually dispute most of them. I just thought I'd fire my own two cents into the kerfuffle.

Labels: ,

Saturday, May 08, 2010

106 Club

Next Friday, I will again be playing Mein Host here:

Labels:

Friday, May 07, 2010

Mobile Phone

Alas, the Blue Brick is gone. Weep for the glory that is lost, a phone that could beat any other in a game of conkers:



If you know me to the extent of having my number, twould be grand if you can drop us a wee text, letting me know who you are, so's I can save it to the barren waste of the contacts thingy in my new handset.

In the Aftermath

How the BNP should be dealt with.

Nuff said.

Except, in passing, I'll just point out that those syphilitic cunts, festering pricks and pustulent arseholes got over half a million votes across the UK. Sure, they're a fringe party, but that's a good bit more than, say, the SNP who, you know, currently run the Scottish Parliament. The BNP may be just under 2% of the electorate, distributed across the country, but that's still one in fifty of us that are nazis. One in fifty of us that are self-certified and shameless, racist, homophobic fucks.

Just saying.

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

New BSC Review Column

It's polling day here in the Royal Borough of Kentigern, in the nation of Grand Albion -- my country of origin back before I became a fully-naturalised citizen of New Sodom. It's all terribly tense, with Labour terribly unpopular, but the Conservatives in a bit of a mess and the Liberal Democrats on the rise. To be fair, I don't have a lot of faith in either of the two that aren't, well, right-wing fucks, and the internationalist ethos of New Sodom draws me to a less bounded outlook when it comes to political borders anyway, but I do still have a soft spot for the old country, so I'll be watching the election with some interest. Hell, I may dwell in this New Sodom of the soul in virtual terms, in this artifice constructed of cliques on the internet, conversations in pubs, movements in this field of the arts or that, but yeah, in practical terms, sadly, my meat body still abides in my scuzzy bachelor pad in Kentigern, so I have no choice but to pay attention to the politics it's going to be saddled with for the next four years...

Monday, May 03, 2010

March On!

Over on his blog the other week, John Coulthard posted about this painting, Les Conquérants (1892) by Pierre Fritel:



Seeing it was something of a holy fuck moment for me, cause it's kind of the perfect illustration for a song I wrote a wee while back, a merry little ditty called "March On!" in the mode of Alex Harvey. (I say, "in the mode of," but "shameless homage to" might be more accurate. It's not hard to spot the glaringly obvious references to The Sensational Alex Harvey Band's "Dogs of War," including the opening quote -- from John Greenleaf Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie" -- which I've co-opted and fucked-over to my own ends.) Anyway, that spurred me into another experimentation with GarageBand, to see if I couldn't realise the song as it is in me noggin. Here, then, is the result. As ever, I'm not at all satisfied with my own inability to really carry a tune, but I've tried to make up for the tonal atrocities by, as we say in Scotland, gieing it laldy. Fuck it, I like the music anyway. Not sure how well it'll come across played through computer speakers. (Assuming the embedded doohickey works; it seems to be a bit temperamental right now.) Feel free to download and annoy the neighbours by playing it very very loud through iTunes or whatever.



Here's the lyrics, for reference:

March On!

"Who so touches a hair on yon grey head
Dines like a king! March on!" he said.
"And kill them all!"

Scorched earth, torched homes,
Empty temples, toppled thrones
Of ancient scions.
March on!
Blood, burning, Babylon,
Babies' bodies buried on
The tears of Zion.
March on!
Fire, fucking fury, rape.
Are we gods or are we apes
In our dominion?
March on!
Battles, banners, knaves and fools,
Carrion for the crows and wolves,
A feast of minions.
March on!

The God of Wrath, Deus Irae,
Calls out commands, has this to say:

March on! March on!
You dogs of war
March on! March on!
With savage jaws
March on! March on!
Ravaging breath
Over the corpses of our enemies
To victory
Or to death.

Cropped hair, chopped heads,
Bodies dance as marionettes.
It's revolution!
Marchons!
Fops topped, nobs offed,
Madame Guilloutine's the job
She's the solution!
Marchons!
See the Terror, see the hell.
Where the fuck's your Pimpernel?
Buying plantations.
Marchons!
Liberty, fraternity,
And universal slavery,
In chains of salvation.
Marchons!

Dead in his bath, the martyr Marat lies.
The blood-red flag it waves, and hear the rebel cry:

March on! March on!
You dogs of war.
March on! March on!
With savage jaws.
March on! March on!
Ravaging breath,
Over the corpses of our enemies...
To victory...
Or to death.

One Great Game and one Great War,
Trenches, tanks, esprit d'corps,
Slaughter in Flanders.
March on!
Batmen at the battle lines,
Officers with cheese and wine
Don't understand us.
March on!
One big push, two little boys,
Each one had a little toy,
But no wooden horses.
March on!
Rifle rigged with bayonet,
Over the top and to your death!
Slow through the corpses.
March on!

The Lords of War, the Dukes of Mire,
Disdain the scarecrow bodies ragged on the wire.

March on! March on!
You dogs of war.
March on! March on!
With savage jaws.
March on! March on!
Ravaging breath,
Over the corpses of our enemies...
To victory...
Or to death.

Black shirts, brown shirts,
Jack-boots beating dirt.
The Jews need clearing.
March on!
Fatherland, the Reich is here,
Here's a knife for Röhm the queer.
The Reichstag's cheering.
March on!
Poland, little Belgium, France,
Silver skulls, a dandy dance,
And Europe's weeping.
March on!
Auschwitz, Belsen, Zyklon-B --
Easier than A, B, C!
Six million children sleeping.
March on!

Bring brothel trucks for Jackie Brel!
Who'll be the next in line in the next living hell?

March on! March on!
You dogs of war.
March on! March on!
With savage jaws,
March on! March on!
Ravaging breath,
Over the corpses of our enemies...
To victory...
Or to death.

Bombs, bodies, Babylon,
Burning Baghdad, bloody Somme,
Ten thousand years.
March on!
Murdered, mutilated, maimed,
Mad and blind and bloody lame,
Stumbling in fear.
March on!
Bows and arrows, gatling guns,
Vandals, Mongol hordes and Huns,
Fields flowering red.
March on!
No reason, no rhyme,
No escape, the end of time,
The future's dead!
March on!

The naked and the wild, the foolish and the brave,
The legions of the lost come crawling from the grave

March on! March on!
You dogs of war.
March on! March on!
With savage jaws.
March on! March on!
Ravaging breath,
Over the corpses of our enemies...
To victory...
Or to death.

Labels: