This morning when I was forced out of bed to answer the doorbell the sky was attempting to snow. A few drips of sleet landed on my naked torso as I signed for my brother’s Amazon parcel. That sad state of attempted snowfall reminds me of my own attempts at writing fiction, or anything else for that matter, over the past couple of months.

Always on the edge of a surprise storm.

tl;dr — Make sure you vote. I don’t care who for or if you vote yes or no for AV, just fucking cast your ballot. People died and are still dying today for the right to vote. Don’t waste yours.

Almost a year ago today, in the United Kingdom, we went to the polls for a general election. We all know the results: No overall majority for either Labour or the Conservatives. A coalition government between the Conservative Party and, as junior partners in government, the Liberal Democrats.

Today a number of different elections being held. In my own area there are just the local council elections and the referendum on the alternative vote. In one part of Leicester there are those two elections and a by-election to elect a new member of parliament and a mayoral election.

The important point I want to make is: if you’re registered to vote then make sure you vote. People have died to guarantee you that right and people are currently dying in North Africa and the Middle East for the right to vote. Fucking vote!

I should say that it doesn’t matter who you vote for. It isn’t my business who you vote for — it is after all a private ballot — although hopefully you are reasonably well informed on the people and the issues. Just go and vote.

But if you want to know what I think you need to read below the cut.

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It must be a sign that you are developing a problematic addiction to a computer game when you change your computer’s windows manager so that the game runs faster. On my Linux desktop instead of using Gnome I am now using xfce. It’s a far more minimal environment. I have gone through periods of using it heavily before. It lets me play Minecraft with a much higher frame rate than I was playing it with under Gnome. Also in full screen mode, which a very good way to lose track of time and end up playing a solid fifty minutes and let a mug of coffee go cold right in front of you. More importantly this machine is getting quite old and under this windows manager everything is a lot more responsive than it was under Gnome. I will probably keep using Gnome until the lack of native support for all my Gnome keyboard shortcuts for dealing with Rhythmbox, an iTunes clone, irritates me.

Recent activities in Minecraft include building a glass fronted house near the deep cave system I explored this evening. Also finding my first redstone ore and also a few blocks of gold ore. I don’t have any grand building project in Minecraft at the moment. The phase where I was excited and built and underwater house is over. My habits in this game are at the moment all about finding the deepest caves and exploring them for the rare materials inside.

There is an environmental lesson that can be learned while playing Minecraft. I’m sure of it.

I have decided that the most liberating object you can craft in Minecraft is your first compass. The ability to always be able to find home makes me feel much more comfortable just going for a wander to see the sights.

Last Saturday I took a break from playing Minecraft and went to Eastercon, the UK’s largest SF convention, at a hotel on the site of the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. Below is the post I made to Whitechapel’s “Vile Hugging Thread” about an hour after getting back home. To give you an idea how much food cost at the Hilton Metropole the burger I had in the evening cost me £15 and the total I spent on all the books mentioned below was about that much.

I went to Eastercon today. The usual tradition of missing junctions and getting lost on the way to conventions happened twice today. I blame tiredness. While there I spent far too much money, mostly on expensive food, but I did buy some books: J.G. Ballard’s High Rise, Harlan Ellison’s Shatterday, a copy of New Worlds 2 and M John Harrison’s Parietal Games. The copy of Shatterday was a bargain at £1 for a “tatty” hardback. Although the best deal of the day was being sold a new copy of Parietal Games for £6 instead of some of the eye-watering prices its available for online. Parietal Games is essential reading. My mind is blown right now. Utterly exhausted and kinda content.

I didn’t go to any panels, but I did watch Doctor Who in a room filled with hundreds of other people. That was a strange experience. Also didn’t find out anything about the new New Worlds. Sorry.

Edit: At this point I’m just mashing on keys at random until some meaning emerges.

Now I’m going to read The Dead and try to go for a run in the morning.

Still waiting for a response from a second interview. The sound of a broken exhaust muffler rumbling in the garage. Driving into the city after the rush hour. Enjoying the perfect light. Reading M. John Harrison’s Climbers while waiting for an interview at the job centre. Watching someone being scammed out of their benefits by the job centre. Being given details for a tax office job where applications close today. Finding that I maybe don’t have to sign on for two weeks. Escaping from the job centre without coming to harm. Wandering around the city centre looking for a place to get a coffee. Deciding to buy a unit of culture. Avoiding Dark Side because it feels deflated of enthusiasm. Avoiding cultural quarter just because. Finding myself in Waterstone Market Street browsing the general fiction stacks. Being tempted by Ferenc Karinthy and Yasunari Kawabata. Noticing a slim girl dressed in black reading. Her face covered by long tangled black hair. Pink converse trainers. Leaving Waterstones to find coffee. Trying to decide between buying a book and a copy of The Fountain. Discovering a new place will open in St. Martins in May.”Merchants of extraordinary tea & coffee.” Wandering back to Market Street. Looking at Karinthy and Kawabata again. Finding Joyce on the same shelf. Buying a copy of The Dubliners. Walking up the street to my favourite sandwich shop. Buying an egg and cress doorstop. Walk back to the car through Highcross. Remembering when I last visited Dublin. Deciding to spend the day reading Joyce in the garden and drinking Yerba maté. Arrive home still needing a coffee.

I spoke too soon it seems and now my throat feels like I’ve been necking Czech battery acid. Luckily Jasmine tea is delicious and soothes some of my ills.

(The photograph of tea on that page is beautiful.)

Yesterday, on Salon Futura, Cheryl Morgan published an essay called What is Genre Anyway? Personally, I disagree what a lot of what was written and hold a slightly different view on what genre is. I feel the argument presented was a work of apologetics rather than definition. But perhaps this is symptomatic of my age, upbringing and increasing feelings of alienation from “The Conversation.”

Those feelings aren’t going to be discussed here. What I want to counter is an idea presented four paragraphs into the essay. I don’t think that the wrongness of what was written invalidates Cheryl’s entire argument. Although it did reduce my sympathy for what followed.

The paragraph I disagree with is:

Another common complaint leveled at science fiction and fantasy is that they are “not real”. Apparently far more skill is required to set a story in the real world than in an imaginary one. This is a bit odd, because the job of a writer is making things up. Making up imaginary worlds is hard, at least if you want to impress discerning science fiction fans. Then again, I know people who complain that the likes of Picasso and Dalì are bad painters because their works don’t look like anything real. “Why can’t they paint like Constable,” such people ask. It is an opinion, but it is not one you’d find expressed by serious art critics, so why do serious literary critics cleave so to the real?

I disagree. I disagree with every fibre of my being. Everyone has an imagination. Everyone day dreams. Every night thousands of people spend their free time inventing stories in groups playing table-top role-playing games or writing stories of their own. Making things up is the most natural thing in the world for humans to do. It is an important component of what makes us all intelligent creatures. Even if a person is not creative with their imagination they still dream. To say otherwise is to demean others from a position of insipid and false superiority. The art of impressing “discerning science fiction fans” I believe is less about inventing fantastic imaginary worlds, but instead finding how far the real world can be pushed until it becomes not credible to the “discerning science fiction fan”.

When an author is attempting to write about the real world, that author has to look at the world and their position in it. For an author to produce a work of fiction which carries some measure of truth involves looking very hard at themselves as an individual and considering how exactly to represent their place in the the world. It involves a level of introspection that I believe is missing from most science fiction even so long after the transrealist manifesto. In some societies when the work is actually about real life this has a tendency to get the work banned or even the writer imprisoned.

So yes, I think the act of writing about the real world ungarnished by the fantastic is harder because it forces the writer to confront who they are with nothing to hide behind. Writing about the real world is at the very centre of every good story written, fantastic or not.

Where the hell is science fiction’s Raymond Carver?