b0t#2
Edited by Grant Stone
All articles copyright 2011 by their respective authors. Published by permission of the authors
Cover art by Grant Stone
Design and layout by Mark S. Deniz
Typeset in Garamond and Times New Roman
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Welcome to the second issue of b0t!
I could tell you what's in this issue. I could give you all manner of tantalising introductions. I could do that. But yanno, the whole issue is right there on the next page. So I think the best thing to do is stop wasting your time and let you get to the good bits.
Thank you for reading. Enjoy.
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Contents
We all Have a Piers Anthony Phase: John Klima
Space Man: Ashley Storrie
A Walk in the Country: Tim Jones
Remembrances of Things Future - A Journal: Fábio Fernandes
A sign from the south - the origin of Semaphore: Marie Hodgkinson
Stina Nordenstam - Queen of Kooky: Mark S. Deniz
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We All Have a Piers Anthony Phase
by John Klima
If it was my brother’s fault for me finding genre and becoming a fan, my mother definitely facilitated my continuing love for it. Whenever we went out, whether to the grocery store or mall, I always came home with a book. My mom always says, “I was never going to say no to a book.”
And I knew that and took advantage of it.
It was great to know that if I went to the store with mom I could get a new book. I was already getting books from the library, from friends, as gifts for holidays, but this was a new resource.
If books were my drug, my mom was my supplier.
Now look, I feel weird putting it that way. My mother would never advocate that I use drugs, but that’s almost how our relationship was were books were concerned. I had a need, an almost insatiable desire for books, and my mom was always there to supply a fix.
Being a basically good kid who did ok in school, my mom didn’t question my book choices much. Sure, she gave them a cursory glance, but I’m not sure that a ten- to twelve-year-old should be reading Stephen King. Or Piers Anthony.
I can almost hear the question on your lips. If ten- to twelve-year-olds aren’t the perfect Piers Anthony audience, then who is?
If you’re talking the Xanth books, well I would agree with you. Lots of genre fans find their way through Piers Anthony’s Xanth books. I’ve never read a Xanth book. I don’t say that proudly, as some elitist nose thumbing at those who have. At the same time, I’m not planning on reading one any time soon.
No, my Piers Anthony phase came through his Bio of a Space Tyrant books. Five books’ (there was a sixth in 2001 which I haven’t read) worth of the Cold War spread out into the Earth’s solar system: Jupiter is the Americas, Saturn is the USSR and China, Earth is India, and so on and so on. The titular space tyrant narrates the story and chronicles his rise from refugee to President.
Perhaps you’ve all experienced this: your family knows you like books so they’ll go into the bookstore and pick something out for you; they don’t ask if there’s something you want, they just grab something off the shelf and give it to you. It hasn’t happened to me too many times, and it’s always odd when it does.
One day my mom gave me the first book in the Bio of Space Tyrant series. She obviously didn’t know anything about it. The book is filled with explicit sexual imagery and violence, often together. There are a lot of rape scenes, which my young brain didn’t comprehend. In all honesty the scenes were confusing (both titalating and horrifying) as I had a rudimentary understanding of reproduction/sex (thank you public broadcasting) but had no experience with how the mechanics worked.
But like any drug, it was exhilirating and I wanted more. I knew it was elicit and that I shouldn’t be reading it (the book would have certainly been taken away from me if my mom knew what was going on in the books). Since this was the first book, I knew I could ask for more and I wouldn’t be told no.
It was funny, given that it only took the word of my brother to keep Elric away from me, but my mother of her own recognisence had brought me a book that was more explicitly violent and sexual than anything the albino did.
I called this a Piers Anthony phase because I think we all go through a moment early on in our reading lives when we devour books from one author who serves as a transition from juvenile books to adult books and for many of us Piers Anthony was there with his Xanth books (although today with the wonderful complicated YA novels, maybe this doesn’t happen as much). I know that Anthony is used as a joke in many instances because of the perceived juvenile quality of the Xanth books, but honestly, he’s quite successful with them and they bring a lot of readers into genre. I find nothing wrong with an author who can make of a lot of fans for science fiction and fantasy.
It wasn’t too long after the space tyrant books that I was given Stephen King’s Night Shift. My sister had been begging to go see The Children of the Corn movie and being told no. Well, as I’ve said before and I’ll say again, like a good younger brother, I wanted to see the movie, too. I knew I would never be allowed to see the movie, so I did what I considered the better option: I asked for the book.
Why it was not ok for my older sister to see the movie but it was ok for me to read the book is logic I can’t even begin the unravel.
If you’ve not read Stephen King (I have to assume you’ve heard of him, right?) he doesn’t exactly hold back when it comes to sex and violence. Night Shift doesn’t have much in the way of sex, but it’s certainly graphic where the violence is concerned. It was the early 1980s and I was right on the cusp of the horror explosion and just cutting my teeth on reading adult books. The rest of the decade was going to be a fun ride for the little horror reader in me.
I no longer read much horror. But Night Shift is still one of my favorite books of all time and I hold the Piers Anthony books in a, maybe not cherished, but special nostalgic place in my heart.
Have I been able to overcome my addiction to books? To be honest, I’ve never tried.
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John Klima previously worked at Asimov's, Analog, and Tor Books before returning to school to earn his Master's in Library and Information Science. He now works full tme as a librarian. When he is not conquering the world of indexing, John edits and publishers the Hugo Award-winning genre zine Electric Velocipede. As of 2010, the magazine has also been nominated for the World Fantasy Award four years in a row. In 2007 Klima edited an anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories based on spelling-bee winning words called Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories. Klima is currently editing an anthology of fairy tale retellings called Happily Ever After which will be published in 2011. He and his family live in the Mid West.
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Space Man
By Ashley Storrie
Both of my parents worked when I was younger, they ran a bar in the east end of Glasgow. For those of you unfamiliar with the “East end” it’s a place where the life expectancy is 10 years less than that of a person living in Baghdad… needless to say I spent a lot of time in front of the television or reading books; upstairs above the pub, listening to the ruckus but sheltered from it, alone, learning film lines or poems off by heart. I knew every word and action in Chris Columbus’s “A night on the town.” Or “Adventures in babysitting” as it was called here. It had a great scene where a little girl finds her favourite super hero in real life. And If I wasn’t watching that, I was watching musicals, again learning every line and shimmy and Yee-Haw: Mum used to say I was a gay man trapped in a little girl’s body.
On Sundays I would take my musicals down to the bar and perform them for the drunks and bums, men who spent more time talking to me than they did
their own kids. I would jump up on the bar kick my legs and sing about the deadwood stage, Gordon my Manny would sometimes slide me along the bar like Dorris Day!
And then the show ended, in a bizarre and some might say Dickensian twist of fate my grandfather died and forgot to write his will down, I lost everything, my house, my tiny bedroom and the murals my mother had painted on the wall, my pub where I performed on a Sunday, my family, my friends… and along with everything went Dorris, Fred, Judy, Liza, Frank and Ginger and all the other smiling, singing and happy people who represented the golden years of my childhood. Before Daddy went to bed for three years, before mum became angry, before I hid under my bed and ate whole loafs of bread to fill some void inside me.
And that’s where my new dad comes in, he wasn’t a real man my mother found to replace my father who still found it difficult to get out of bed after all six of his brothers betrayed him, because their father hadn’t loved them. William Shatner entered my life bringing with him Star Trek and a new bunch of smiley happy and most importantly fair people, people who knew the difference between right and wrong. William Shatner has been my role model, through High school, university and even now as I work my way up the ranks as a Writer. I print mini homage’s to him in almost everything I do. Strange as it may seem, a sex addicted space ship captain/ kinky cop/ lusty lawyer shine out compared to the special needs, emotionally stunted bank robbers I grew up with.
And with William Shatner came a whole legion of spacemen and women, from television and film and books. Strapping men with big chins who would arrive and take me away from the little space under my bed where I hid and ate bread. Captain Picard re-sparked my interest in Shakespeare; Margaret Atwood took me to a future that terrified and delighted me, Arthur C Clarke had me looking up into light polluted skies in the hopes of an alien race who’d set my world to rights. And then Harry Potter… Harry Potter who was never a space man but was the same age as me technically, and whose world was torn apart like mine, I wept when I didn’t receive my Hogwarts letter.
When I was 13 it was pretty well established amongst my teachers that I wasn’t going to be a brain trust or a super sports star, they all accepted for some bizarre reason that I would be a performer. They were actually quite pleased about it, when the school had charity auctions of the pupil’s art work, teachers would clamour for my hideous renditions of chalk chickens in the hope I’d one day be famous and they could sell them on. Chalk chicken nest eggs!
As a precocious child who likes to perform there’s a lot of pressure on you to stick at it and become famous. Even to this day, even though I no longer harbour dreams of playing Evita, I still feel the grinding, bone curling pressure to do well. To succeed in whatever it is I’m doing, because that’s what people expected of a chubby 13 year old girl who knew every word in Calamity Jane and could do an eerily spot on impression of Sir Alec Guinness.
So with all the raising I needed, gotten from an over wrought mother who wanted to be a comedian of all things, a father who had changed his ways and now slept a lot rather than constantly and good old uncle/dad/pappy William Shatner tucked in my brain, I dreamily entered my first career meeting with Mrs Nobbs and saw the huge pile of applications for RADA and RSAMD and LAMDA and lots of other places with D’s and A’s in their titles and I panicked.
“And what do you want to be when you grow up?” Mrs Nobbs asked as if she were just going through the motions.
Mother had already told me not to say “owner of a rollerblading transvestite restaurant” not because she thought it was a bad idea but because I’d already told my teachers that was an ambition and had started a fight with a born again chemistry teacher.
“A space man.” I replied, having forgotten the word astronaut.
I’ve never seen Mrs Nobbs look so shocked, and she once walked in on a group of teenage girls watching Hard-Core gardening porn in her office. She choked on a breath mint that wasn’t really working and looked at me waiting for me to utter the punch line.
“I want to go to space.” I repeated tentatively, the stress of other people’s expectations making my spine curl.
“You dropped physics and… and you don’t take part in any physical education.” She uttered a look of shock etched in her dull face. “You need physics and… Ashley you can’t go to space.”
“oh.” Was all I could muster. To be honest at 14 how can they expect anyone to know what they want to be when they grow up? I’m 24 and I’m still not sure, some days I think I want to write for HBO and other days I think I’d like to be the person who washes elephants at the zoo and at 14 I still thought that Alec Guinness impersonator was a viable career path… I had dreams of being hired to stand in parties and say things like “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” and “In my experience, there's no such thing as luck” In my best Guinness voice and be paid for my service, unfortunately there’s no section for that in the job centre.
I continued to live a relatively isolated life, lost in my own world of space men and wizards, I got too tall to fit in the cranny under my bed which for the longest time had served as my escape pod. The years dragged on, my school shut down and I got moved, I started to make “friends” and went out to bars where I’d nod and smile and drink and secretly wonder what I’d do if a Klingon walked in. I wouldn’t say it out loud though, I’d just smile and not say anything and let my “friends” kiss men with teeth missing in bars like that one in Star Wars “Mos Eisley Spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.” Obi Wan Kenobi’s words would roll in my head.
My father at this point had managed to cut his sleeping down to only half the day, and I discovered that he was not only depressed but that he also had Asperger’s and now an excuse for his bad behaviour. One Sunday morning at around 3am I came home, later than my curfew dictated but to be honest my mother was on the other side of the world making people laugh and dad… well what was he going to do? Go to his bed in a bad mood? I stumbled into the living room, the TV was on and William Shatner was standing there, old and fat and shouting “Denny Crane!” my dad paused the recording and beamed up at me.
“He’s got a new TV show!” he exclaimed excitedly, smiling for the first time in years as if his depression had not been the result of financial ruin and a thieving family but instead because of William Shatner’s flagging career.
“That’s good,” I said as I stared at my now aged father both on the screen and off.
“You got a letter yesterday.” He said indicating a thick envelope.
“I’m going to university.” I said taking off a pair of hideous high heels.
“You gonna be a space man?” dad laughed remembering the worried letter he’d received from my career counsellor 4 years before.
“no… I think I’m going to write about them” I said and pressed play on the paused TV show ready to see what my pretend daddy was up to.
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Ashley got her first acting part at the age of three as 'the wee girl in the metal tea urn' in the movie Alabama.
She performed with her mother Janey Godley at the 2010 Edinburgh Fringe in the daily chilren's show Tall Storrie & Wee Godley.
Be sure to check out Ashley and Janey's podcast, Janey Godley's Podcasts
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A Walk In The Country
By Tim Jones
It rained a lot last winter in Wellington, and by the time I’d got home from work, I didn’t have much enthusiasm for heading out into the Town Belt or the streets of Mt Victoria for an after-dinner walk. But, fortunately for my psyche, if unfortunately for my waistline, I had another alternative: I could crank up my son’s PlayStation 2 and spend an hour beneath blue skies, running over the green pastures inside the world of DragonQuest 8.
I grew up in the days when a computer game meant either the text world of Adventure – “you are now entering a labyrinth without a battery”, or something along those lines – or the immense graphica
l sophistication of Pong. If I wanted a walk in a photorealistic wilderness, my options started outside the front door of my house and ended in my flat’s epic year-end tramping expeditions in Fiordland.
Fast forward twenty years, in which the great strides made in game development pretty much passed me: twenty years in which I acquired a wife, and we had a son, and that son had a friend called Jack, and Jack’s pride and joy was his family’s new PS2.
Like any proud but exhausted parent, it was a great relief to drop my son off at Jack’s place and know that I had the next couple of hours free – just as, in a week’s time, we would welcome Jack to our place. But at the end of that couple of free hours came the difficult task of extracting our son from the company of Jack and his PS2.
It was one such occasion, as I wearily slumped on our friends’ couch trying to persuade our son that it was time for him to put his shoes and socks back on, that I paid attention to what was on screen — and I was amazed! Such depth of field, such clarity – and the green grass, and the blue sky, and the distant trees revealing their scale as the game’s protagonist jumped and twirled his way towards them. It was Jak and Daxter, and I was hooked.
A couple of years later, when our son had his own PS2, I tried the game. I have the reaction time of an arthritic snail, so I’m not the ideal player for a platformer (and proved completely unable to beat the fearsome Klaww, the second of the three bosses, without my son’s assistance). But it didn’t really matter. The part I loved was exploring the landscapes, and I was surprised to realise that the elation I felt when first seeing a new vista in the game was indistinguishable from the elation I felt when cresting a new ridge in the real world and seeing new territory beyond.
Our son subsequently got the sequels to Jak and Daxter, but neither the grungy cityscape of Jak II nor the desert setting of Jak III appealed to me as much as the green pastures of the original. So I moved onto another game with even wider green pastures, the fantasy RPG DragonQuest 8.