Story Notes for ‘Ambiguity Machines’

In an attempt to revive this blog – in part because I want to respond to some dreadful things happening in the world that I am as yet unable to articulate – I am posting some earlier material that has been lying around. Here is the first of them. Some years ago I wrote a bunch of story notes for my 2018 collection Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories. Here’s the piece.

Ambiguity Machines: Story Notes

Most of the time I don’t set out to write a story with a particular message, intent, or plot.  The story starts with an image, usually of a character who may or may not be human, and a landscape of some sort.  Sometimes there are vague hints of the middle or the end, but no notion of how to get there.  In order to learn more about the characters, and indeed, to know what happens next, I have to write the story.  I am under no illusions that the story notes below will be of interest to many people, but I do find it fascinating to read story notes from other writers. And it would be nice to have a record for myself that I can look back on later. So here goes.

With Fate Conspire

When she walked into my head, she was only a woman of poor birth with an enviable self-possession, even fierceness – a woman with a certain rare ability, who, as she describes it, was “of no more importance than a cockroach.”  The story ended up involving one of my favourite songs, Babul Mora, composed by the Nawab of Awadh when he was exiled by the British – with its indescribable yearning for home expressed metaphorically as a bride leaving the natal family – so the story became a kind of time travel.  Now time is always fascinating to physicists, and since we know time is not Newtonian, we get to play with it.  Through this story I got to talk to some of my favourite historical characters – apart from the Nawab, also Rassundari, a housewife of no account in mid-19^th century Bengal, whose autobiographical extracts I had read in translation many years ago in “Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present” (eds Tharu and Lalita).  It was inexpressibly moving.  Academically I was already becoming interested in climate change and reading up on climate physics, which is very much in the background in this story but vital to the plot.  And so… With Fate Conspire, which first appeared in Solaris, edited by Jonathan Oliver.

Why KSR’s 2312 is a Fail on Many Counts

First I want to say that this is not a review, but my personal feelings about some aspects of the novel 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.  I’m not going to discuss plot points and language and story arc except where they speak to the points I do want to make.  And there are spoilers galore.  STOP HERE if you want to read the book first.  

The World’s Still Here

Well, it looks like the world is still here.  I’ve been so busy that it has been hard to find a moment to breathe. Much of the busy-ness is good, there’s just too much of it!  So this moment represents an attempt to breathe, and what better way to do that than to write a short, reflective post?  

Snow has fallen after months here in the Northeastern US.  It is at the moment just a thin blanket but I am still astonished at how a snowfall changes everything.  Sounds are muffled and the world becomes luminous.  My appreciation of snow is tempered by the need to shovel it when it is above a couple of inches, but for the moment it is nice to watch it falling outside my window.  Over a cup of tea and samosas it would be perfect, but I have no milk and no samosas.  Sigh. 

There is an interesting discussion about Climate Change over at Strange Horizons to which I’ve contributed.  Worth checking out. See here for a roundtable with some pretty cool authors and here for my article on the Durban talks in December.   

That’s all, folks, for now. 

 

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