Reddit, what is best in life?

The Academy Museum in Los Angeles (THE OSCAR PEOPLE) have announced a major exhibition focusing on cyberpunk film. The first of its type (?), and it looks like, as they say, an absolute banger.

I’m not going to lie: I’ve enjoyed being quoted and/or interviewed as part of the increased attention, and I adore people using The Big Book of Cyberpunk as a ‘survey’ for cyberpunk literature. Good for sales, great for my ego, and - I like to think - a teeny, tiny bit good for the perception of the genre as a valuable contributor in our urgent global conversation around the role of technology in our lives.

It is, however, a humbling reminder that very often the best thing that can happen for a book is to be associated - however tangentially - with a movie.

what i’m reading, online

Managing energy for creative work. (h/t Paul Graham Raven) The author, Irina Dumitrescu, says she’s not one for advice posts, but this might be the best (only?) I’ve read for quite some time that really clicks with me.

Her thesis is that doing creative work isn’t about managing time - which is the focus of 99.999999% of the ‘help’ that’s out there - but energy. And…

Like many other hybrid-working people, I’ve figured out a pretty good balance of what I can accomplish best at home and what I can do best at the office. I also know where and when I’m most productive (or can muster the right kind of energy) when I’m working from home. But that’s the easy end of the equation, because I control all the variables in that environment.

Maybe that’s the challenge: how do you maintain (or create) creative energy without having any control over your external environment? e.g. in a chaotic open-plan office surrounded by teammates and stakeholders; cake and noise. I’m not sure that’s quite possible, but if someone’s got the secret, please share.

On the other end of the spectrum:

• This thread on r/london talked about how influencers have made Borough Market almost completely unusable. (As one commenter points out, this kind of mad hype has a destructive long tail. A hyped food seller will cut quality and boost output to maximise their moment, and then we’ll all be left with shittier food once the bubble bursts.)

• One comment pointed that, because of the way search works, we shouldn’t actually share our favourite places, but if enough people pile on praising, say, the (absolutely delicious, famously brilliant) Angus Steakhouses, maybe enshittified AI will pick that up and start recommending it to wannabe influencers instead.

• More threads praising the (secret, top 10, undiscovered) Angus Steakhouses begin to appear as the community leans in to the plan.

It is a bit like watching the GameStop craziness in real-time. I have to admit, after a few weekends in central London, watching packs of TikTok-led ‘foodies’ mob some of the city’s gems just to take pictures with the dishes… I’m all about the benign vigilante justice. If it works, I’ll treat myself to an excellent and affordable meal at the amazing and authentic secret that is the Angus Steakhouse.

what i’m reading, offline

A particularly brutal bout of food poisoning (DON’T ASK, LEST I GIVE YOU THE DETAILS) meant I’ve been stuck at home for way too long. In-between wandering the halls like Miss Havisham, I’ve plowed through a lot of the TBR. Some high/low/mediumlights:

Full Speed to a Crash Landing by Beth Revis (2024): Too-short novella with salvage hijinks on a lava planet. It is funny and fun. It isn’t a particularly twisty heist. And the ending, although I appreciate the desire to avoid resolution, is a little too open-ended. That said, it is, as mentioned, funny and fun. Apparently the first of three, I’d be tempted to wait and read all three in one go, except publishing doesn’t work that way. If you don’t buy the first, you’ll never see the rest…

The Will of the Many by James Islington (2023): Fantasy Rome with a prince-turned-orphan-turned-rebel-turned-chosen-one type protagonist. Oh, and magic school! There’s a certain section of fantasy fandom that are rabid for this book, and I actually get it. It is a next-generation Red Rising x The Name of the Wind hybrid in here that makes me feel incredibly old. It maximises trope use in a way that can only be described as (and pardon me for saying so) Fourth Wing for Boys. Like Fourth Wing, it is entertaining as hell, and, despite the size and bulk, never slogs or bores. The bits that impress me are where the author showed restraint. Although a ‘magic school’ book, it didn’t overcommit to the magic school, and made enough of the plot global enough to make the post-graduation transition to book two easier. Similarly, although the magic system reeks of robustness, and I would highly suspect that there’s a 70 page Google doc somewhere explaining How Shit Works, magic itself (‘Will’) remains delightfully handwavey throughout the book. Magical stuff is magical for Reasons, but, more importantly, things just do what they need to do to make the scenes work. I’m not enamoured of any of the characters, and our protagonist is (again, like RR/TNotW/4W), the most special of all special people, but, eh, thus is genre. Highly recommend, and excited about the sequel.

Bloody Summer by Carmen Maria Machado (2022): Been reading a bit of Machado recently and stumbled on* this Amazon Original. It is a novelette about an Appalachian town that has a - for lack of a better word - tiger problem. Constructed as a research piece, it has all the sinister small town vibes that I love in my scary fiction, set against the greater horror that is the cultural and economic decline of rural America. It is creepy and pacey and, Machado being Machado, beautifully written.

*I mean, there’s no way I ‘stumbled upon’ an Amazon-published story by an author I had been searching for, but at least the algorithm gave me something good for once.

Ducks: Two years in the oil sand by Kate Beaton (2022): I mostly know Beaton from books about fat ponies and historical snark, but that was enough to risk diving into a Memoir Comic. And I’m glad I did. Beaton sets up the economic conditions of her family - her whole region, in fact - deftly. It is about a struggle against destiny and inevitability, and the little wins that come from friends and family, and how (if) they offset the daily, gruelling, cruelty of the rest of the world. It is undeniably harrowing, and content warnings a-plenty. I think the saddest/truest part is Beaton’s afterward, when she talks not only about how her experience is one of (very) many, but how other people won’t even remember the harm they caused her. She describes a grotesquely cruel capitalist system that produces so much suffering that her story - which is undeniably harrowing - is simply an everyday output and, ultimately, forgettable. Or, at least, it would be if Beaton weren’t brave enough to speak up and talented enough to make us listen. This is a very different beast to the three above (even the Machado), because it gets its power from being unflinchingly real. Very, very good.

stuff, irl

…and speaking of the allure of the cyberpunk movie: the science fiction screenings at the Bristol Film Festival are selling out! Who could possibly have predicted that seeing The Matrix on a mahoosive planetarium screen would be such a draw?

Thank you very much for your recommendations of paired reading. As a reminder, The films are Moon, Tron, The Matrix and Blade Runner. Reading recommendations are still welcome, and please do come along!

Also on the horizon (and very much sold out): October 26th, Waterstones Piccadilly with Tasha Suri, John Gwynne and James Logan. This event is sold out, so I’m not even going to bother shilling it any more. iykyk

stuff, not in real life

Aside! Even as I type that header above, I realise how silly that is. Pretty much every bit of research I’ve done over the past, I dunno, five? ten? years, shows that there are no longer ‘online’ or ‘offline’ worlds. They’re not separate, they’re not distinct, and one is certainly not more ‘real’ than the other.

If anything, we’re seeing a huge amount of societal friction as folks fail to realise that we now live in an a perpetual state of augmented reality. Sexual harassment in LinkedIn DMs will be sent to your employer; your OnlyFans will be seen by your kids’ friends.

And the friction rubs both ways! Neoreactionary gamer movements radicalise because ‘real world’ politics are making their games ‘inclusive’. Meanwhile online disinformation has greater reach and - exponentially higher frequency - than mainstream news outlets, successfully encouraging people to inject horse wormer and ignore hurricane evacuation. We can’t pretend there are tidy little boundaries. What happens in (Fallout) Vegas no longer stays... and all that. As noted previously, younger people seem to Get This Stuff more intuitively, which is encouraging (except when they turn fascist).

Anyway, all that said - some online-y stuff:

• The aforementioned Telegraph interview. There’s a sort of ghostly on-again, off-again paywall, but I mostly use my platform (such as it is) to mention the role of games and Janelle Monáe, and talk about how the movement has outgrown its straight, white, male and North American roots. Really speaking to the core Telegraph audience, I think.

• Shelfies is now six whole shelves in. I’m starting to dig the way the landing page looks, with all those shelf-bits coming together. Recent contributors include Reactor’s Christina Orlando, Ghanaian SF author Cheryl S Ntumy, and video game guru George E Osborn. Their shelves and stories are all great, although Christina’s shelving method gives me hives.

• Something I did not write or contribute to, but brings me no end of joy - the ‘Self Publishing Fantasy Blog-Off’ has earned a write-up on my favourite sub-reddit, r/hobbydrama. I’m name-checked, which is definitely a great moment in my online-which-is-real history. For those that are terminally online in a very specific way, the SPFBO may be familiar: it is an annual competition where blogs (hint in the title) review self-published fantasy books (hint also in the title). Those few readers that have been sticking with me since ye olde blogging days, you might remember SPFBO season. As far as internet drama goes - or even awards drama! - it is pretty low-stakes and high-amusement. The way a hobbydrama should be.

One of the UK’s most important questions - answered. Certainly one that, as an immigrant, I’ve asked myself.