You can walk for days in this 3-D world where the sun is always shining, except when the stars come out, and the grass is always green. There are competing attractions – such as the outfits of the voluptuous Jessica and the bizarre range of enemies one encounters, including aggressive capsicums and ill-disposed living boots – but for me the greatest pleasure of the game is seeing what lies around the next corner, and knowing, no matter what the weather is doing outside, that the sun will always be shining. DragonQuest 8 should probably be prescribed as a cure for Seasonal Affective Disorder – it certainly got me through last winter, and even though I’m now near the end of this massive game, I have felt much less compelled to play it on longer summer evenings. Heck, I’ve even taken walks outside in the real world!
But if you like exploring a lot of territory, Minecraft is the game for you, and between the urgings of my son and a recommendation by the editor of this ‘zine, I have recently started to explore it. Minecraft, available on the PC and Mac, is in some ways a step back in time to the days of the early Lara Croft games: everything is made out of blocks, and they are all one metre cubes. You’re made from blocks, and so are your enemies. They spawn at night, and since the game is on a twenty-minute diurnal cycle, that means you are always no more than ten minutes away from trouble — unless you’re sensible, like me, and run the game in Peaceful Mode most of the time. Because I don’t want to fight monsters. I want to explore. And what wonderful opportunities for exploration there are!
The world of Minecraft is generated procedurally: i.e., as you move from your starting point, new areas of the world are generated as you approach them, based on a number of basic biomes, from tundra through to rainforest. Once generated, these areas stay in memory, which means that you can explore vast areas – in fact, you can in theory explore an area eight times larger than the surface area of the Earth before the game runs into ‘technical limitations’. And you can build stuff as you explore: shelters, underground bases, mines, track and rail systems, and milestones. I’ve got into the habit of building pillars to show the path back to my base, or to mark sites of special interest. I stride through the world like a DoC ranger with an edifice complex.
The world of Minecraft is more than large enough to get lost in. I have been lost in the New Zealand bush – if only for a few hours – and it is not a pleasant experience. More often, I have been in a state of being not quite lost, in that I have had a pretty good general idea of my location, but not exactly found either. In such a state, it’s always a great relief to see a familiar landmark or a track marker and know that you are back in known territory.
Now I have had those experiences in Minecraft too. I have wandered off into completely new territory — a tangled expanse of seemingly identical, snow-covered hills — with no idea how to find my way back; and I have taken a wrong turning when going between known point A and known point B, and suddenly had the uneasy realisation that, while I’m certainly not far from anywhere, I am also nowhere in particular. Night is closing in, and even without the night’s monsters, it is becoming dark. There are sinkholes nearby, pits deep enough to trap me. I take a moment, try to think calmly, and decide to climb one more ridge to see if doing so will show me the way home.
As I crest that ridge and see one of my pillars off in the distance, the feeling of relief is no different from what I have felt when finding my route back to safety in a South Island forest. In the latter case, I am real physical danger; in the former, I am sitting in my living room, and am most at risk from the medical dangers of physical inaction. But my limbic system knows no difference, and so I make my way back into safe territory, and reach my home, and go inside, and save, and shut down. It’s dark in the game world, dark in the real world. Time to sleep.
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Tim Jones is a poet and author of both science fiction and literary fiction. He lives in Wellington. Among his recent books are poetry collection All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens (HeadworX, 2007), fantasy novel Anarya’s Secret (RedBrick, 2007), short story collection Transported (Vintage, 2008), and poetry anthology Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (Interactive Press, 2009), co-edited with Mark Pirie. Voyagers appeared in the NZ Listener’s “100 Best Books of the Year” list in 2009 and won the “Best Collected Work” category in the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Awards. Tim’s short story “The New Neighbours”, first published in Transported, was included in The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories (2009) and will be included in The Apex Book Of World SF, Volume II (2011). He was awarded the NZSA Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature in 2010.
The latest news about Tim and his writing is on his blog at https://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com
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Remembrances of Things Future – a Journal
Fábio Fernandes
Memory 2: 2010: Odyssey Two
That’s right. I will spare you the sense of wonder of my reading of 2001 – because of two things: first, I was too young when I read the novel (ten years old or less, I can’t remember for sure) and I hardly had any sense of wonder other than having in my hands the novel which inspired the famous movie (in 1976, that was I thought); second, it wasn’t until 18 that I finally got to see the movie and THEN I got the sense of wonder all right (later I read all about the Clarke-Kubrick collaboration and learned Clarke wrote the book at the same time the film was being shot, but you know it all)
When 2010 was published, it was tantamount to a collective orgasm to SF (and sci-fi – I still make this distinction, thank you very much), because it meant a return to a then well-known, acclaimed universe both by audiences and critics all around the world, and that was something to look for, especially when you’re a teen nerd craving to be accepted for some group – any group at all.
That was my case in 1984, when the book was translated and published in Brazil. I was slowly being accepted in my high school theater group, where I was to become not only an actor (a poorly-talented one, to say the least) but also a writer for the stage – it was during my period of study there that I was awarded a major national university playwriting award (that happened in 1985; I was 19 years old, but I wouldn’t see this play – very much adapted – on the stage until 1998; that, however, is another story).
The interesting thing about 2010 (aside from the wonderful, compelling story that to this day I still like very much – but don’t talk to me about 2061 and 3001, please) was right at the beginning of the book, at the Acknowledgments page, to be fair. There, Clarke paid his respects to a Brazilian guy I had never heard before: “Señor (sic) Jorge Luiz Calife, for a letter which started me thinking seriously about a possible sequel (after I’d said for years that one was clearly impossible).”
Aside from the small, forgivable faux-pas (the correct treatment in Portuguese in Senhor, not Señor – this last one is Spanish, a language we don’t speak in Brazil), Clarke was pretty much telling to the world that an unknown Brazilian man was pretty much responsible for 2010.
A couple of weeks later, he wasn’t unknown anymore. Neither to me nor to anyone who read papers in Brazil then.
Jorge Luiz Calife, then a science journalist working for a famous newspaper in Rio de Janeiro, was just publishing what would be the first novel of the first Brazilian science fiction trilogy ever – Padrões de Contato [Patterns of Contact]. He got a deal in a major publishing house – the same that had translated and published all Clarke’s books until then. When they bought the rights to 2010 and read the acknowledgments, they too wanted to know who that guy was.
The thing is, Calife was a HUGE fan of Clarke’s work, but not just that – he could emulate Clarke’s writing almost to perfection. The letter Clarke received also contained a short story called “2002” – a story which described the voyage of a ship to find out what happened to Discovery and its crew… including HAL. The crew of that ship, dubbed Discovery II, already had Dr. Chandra in it, as well as some of the scenes featuring the newly-changed Dave Bowman visiting Earth. Years
before Creative Commons, Calife told Clarke in his letter he was free to do whatever he wanted with the story, and he would never charge him a penny for it.
He never did, and Clarke, always a gentleman, never mentioned any of it – though he used many of the elements featured in Calife’s story in 2010 (enhancing and ameliorating them, in fact). Years later, Calife officially disclosed the story (I mean officially because “2002” was published in a Brazilian magazine in 1983, so everyone who wanted to compare notes was free to do so), but I never read any mention to it in English, so it may well be the first time this story is told.
Be as it may, I ended up becoming acquainted with Calife, who presented me to novelist and screenwriter Braulio Tavares, who by his turn introduced me to the (then) merry folks of the Science Fiction Readers’s Club, where I was very happy for years. The rest – just for now – is silence.
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Fábio Fernandes (@fabiofernandes) is a writer and a translator. He has translated more than 100 stories between novels, graphic novels, and comic books, among which A Clockwork Orange, Neuromancer, Snow Crash, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol.1, and many others. As a writer, he published an essay on the work of William Gibson (A Construção do Imaginário Cyber – in Portuguese only) and the novel Os Dias da Peste, the first volume of the Convergence Trilogy. He published a number of stories in English in online venues (including Hugo-Award-winner Starship Sofa) and in paper anthologies like Steampunk Reloaded and the upcoming The Apex Book of World SF, vol. 2.
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A sign from the South - the origin of Semaphore
By Marie Hodgkinson
I am, traditionally, full of Plans. When I was a wee thing, these plans mostly consisted of forming secret societies with my friends, the major tenets of which would have been solving crime and putting on fantastical plays, had either mysteries or production facilities been rather more available to us and the lures of Sim City 2000, Pokemon, and just running around out back like mad things rather less.
Then there were my various nascent careers as a movie script writer (& director, & actor, & person-who-will-totally-get-to-hold-the-video-camera-when-we-get-one) and board game designer. The most obvious theme for all of these plans and projects? Not one of them came to full fruition. The board games came the closest – I’m sure my prototype definitely-not-Monopoly-at-all is still in a box somewhere, and the Pokemon board game I was working at primary school stayed in my old classroom’s games cupboard for a while after I left – but even those suffered from the fact that I got bored before too long and never made enough cards for the games to be playable with any level of balance.
Several years passed. The internet first appeared in our house when I was eleven, and I patiently braved the plod of Z-free to channel my need to Do Things into, uhh, running a Redwall RPG community from a Geocities page. Good times. I can’t remember how that petered out in the end, but peter out it did; during its short life, however, I had my first taste of being a fiction editor.
The Redwall game was fairly basic: you made up the absolute coolest character you could think of, and then wrote stuff about them being cool and doing cool things. If these took the form of poems (epic) or stories (ditto), you could email them to me and I would reward your efforts with in-game gold for you to buy cool things with, and publish them in a special section of the site.
I didn’t think of it as editing; mostly, I enjoyed the fact that I got to dole out rewards as I saw fit. And, for a while, that was it.
Skip forward a few years. I’ve gone through five years of high school, and come out the other end ready to fall straight into university and that most useful of all degrees, a BA in English and Classical Studies. Overwhelmed by my first year of studies and already balancing a part-time job on full-time study, I decided it was time to return to my roots. I had already decided that I wanted to get into publishing, in the far-off of eventually; I had no idea what the publishing industry was like, locally or overseas; no contacts or experience of any sort.
So, I jumped right in.
This was in September, 2007. That December saw Semaphore’s first issue, published both in electronic format and in print, thanks to a grant from OUSA, the Otago University Students’ Association; since then I’ve published fourteen online issues of the magazine, and, since that first print issue, three best-of print books, the Semaphore Anthologies.
I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned a hell of a lot. I’ve cajoled friends and strangers into sifting the slush with me from time to time; I’ve taught myself how to make websites without the help of Geocities’ handy software, how to wrangle Word and Photoshop into doing almost exactly what I have in mind, and how to email requests to writers and artists without imposter syndrome putting knots in my stomach (most of the time).
And as I’ve learned, Semaphore has prospered. I’m flabbergasted by its progress; it still surprises me to hear people other than my captive audience of family and friends compliment it. I’ve published stories by one author, Sherwood Smith, whose work I’ve admired since I was fourteen or so. I’ve met amazing people, like Grant here, and seen their work crop up in ever-widening circles. It’s fantastic. There are still things I need to improve on – putting together only a single issue every three months means I sometime forget and have to relearn technical tricks with each new instalment, for example – but I’m very happy with how it’s all gone.
Later this year, I’ll be putting Semaphore on hiatus. I’m heading overseas, leaving the country for the first time since I was six and taking my big OE; I won’t be able to do Semaphore justice while I’m travelling, so I’m giving it a break. How long that break will be, I don’t yet know, but I am fairly confident that it won’t be permanent. Regardless, this June’s issue (which will technically be this May’s issue) will be the last for some time, and I hope it will be a good one. I think I’ve grown out of leaving things half-finished.
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Stina Nordenstam – Queen of Kooky
By Mark S. Deniz
Queen of lo-fi, queen of kooky; Stina Nordenstam, is, without doubt, Sweden's most interesting musical artist. Starting out in 1991 with memories of a color, (an album not without its flaws) Stina announced herself onto the Swedish (and world) scene with barely a whisper.
As is so often the way with talented artists, Stina built up a cult following, which eagerly awaited her second (and best) offering And She Closed Her Eyes, in 1994. It was here that Stina married her unique voice to incredible, haunting music coupled with those lyrics...
Stina, like other Swedish artists, has been criticised for singing in English rather than her native tongue, yet I, for one, am thankful that she has chosen to express herself in my language as her lyrics hit a chord in me much stronger than I believe they would had she written and sung in Swedish.
After And She Closed Her Eyes, expectation was high and this inspired Nordenstam to a change in direction. The haunting voice was still there, the lyrics still amazing, yet the music had taken a darker edge. Although Dynamite (1997) doesn't match the completeness of her previous release, it showed a maturing, developing artist, one who was interested in varying ideas within music. Those that had followed this picture-shy diva with interest were now hooked.
1998 saw Stina release an album that, for me, is typically her, a cover album of thirty odd minutes long. A cover album in itself is nothing new, yet what if it was a cover album containing songs that Stina had either not heard the original of or indeed had not liked upon hearing them? This was indeed an interesting approach to cover versions.
The result? Some extremely intriguing covers, culminating in the best track of all eleven, the title track People are Strange, which manages to be infinitely better than The Doors' original (which I also love).
Then came the glitch in the system, the blot on the cv; after successful albums and a keen following, Stina left the creative freedom of East/West and joined Sony Records, for the album This is Stina Nordenstam, resulting
in a 're-birth' unrequired and resulting in by far her weakest album to date. 2001 saw wonderful tracks such as The Diver, Welcome to Happiness and Clothe Yourself For The World surrounded by non-Stina tracks: Keen Yellow Planet and Lori Glory and it seemed as if we had lost the lo-fi queen we had come to love as she was engulfed by the Sony Hi-Fi commercial machine.
Yet all was not lost; 2004 saw Stina return with the aptly titled The World is Saved, a behemoth of an album, written, performed and produced by Nordenstam on her own label 'A Walk in the Park'. It is a dark, brooding, powerful album that is the nearest to And She Closed Her Eyes in quality and completeness and was also my own album of the year for 2004.
The world is truly saved.
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Recommended listening:
And She Closed Her Eyes – 1994
People are Strange - 1998
The World is Saved - 2004
Avoid:
This is Stina Nordenstam - 2001
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Mark S. Deniz is a publisher, editor and writer, based in the south-east of Sweden. Owner of dark fiction publishing company, Morrigan Books (https://www.morriganbooks.com) and its imprint Gilgamesh Press (https://www.gilgameshpress.com), Mark is also organiser of the various Awareness Months, viewable online. He has had several short stories published, primarily with Big Finish (https://www.bigfinish.com). His main blog can be found at You're in my Head (https://markdeniz.wordpress.com) and he is also a very keen listener to music (https://themusicreviewer.wordpress.com) and active cyclist (https://cyclinginostergotland.wordpress.com).