The Ephemera

While, as I do believe, Mr Williamson is off at Eastercon, I thought I'd give some pimpage for the new e-book edition of his short story collection, The Ephemera. As Neil says:

Even if you bought the book first time round, we thought we might be able to persuade you to take another look at it by adding some interesting new material, including:
- lovely new cover art by Vincent Chong
- a fab new introduction by Hal Duncan
- a foreword by myself on the subject of ephemeral stuff
- notes on each of the stories
- three extra previously uncollected stories
- and last, but not least, a brand new story written especially for this edition.

It's a bit redundant to say I highly recommend it, but yeah, it's well worth picking up if ye've got one of them there whatchyemaflipadedoohickies for ebooks.

New BSC Review Column

The appetence for alterity…

The desire for Diversity Victor Segalen called it in his posthumous, fragmentary Essai sur l’exotisme. I prefer my terms, for the sense of affinity versus lust, deviance versus variety. And I’m not one for the pomp of concepts rendered as proper nouns, unless in a metaphor of domain — the ghetto of Genre, the city of Writing. But what Segalen’s suggesting is precisely what Abraham is reaching for — a flensing of what he sees as false exoticism. Writing on the cusp of modernity, Segalen seeks to shred the colonialist muscle and fat, strip back the notion to its skeleton and reconstitute the term:

Clear the field first of all. Throw overboard everything misused or rancid contained in the word exoticism. Strip it of all its cheap finery: palm tree and camel; tropical helmet; black skins and yellow sun; and, at the same time, get rid of all those who used it with an inane loquaciousness.

Some Humour

Saw this on Queerty and thought it was excellent:

GetFanged Interview

The very nice people over at GetFanged.Com invited me to do an interview a couple of weeks ago, asked me some damn fine questions too. The result, of typically Duncanian length, is now up on their (log-in required) site, but also usefully up on their Facebook page and on their wordpress blog. So if you fancy reading my thoughts on archetypes and personal semiotics, the evolution of the vampire trope, the psychotic delusion I've adopted as regards the Star Wars prequels, the ubiquity of Jack, and how Jakobson's model of the six functions of language is wrong... knock yerselves out.