In Search of Lost Tim, by Chris Meade (digital fiction)
I just finished Chris Meade’s experimental fiction (what he calls ‘magical musical graphical digital fiction’), and I wanted to share. In Search of Lost Tim (the title is a pun on the original translated title for Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) combines drawings, videos, songs, puppets, slideshows, photos and prose to deliver an appealing tale of time travelling, love and loss. Tim of the title is actually Tim Times Two: one going through boyhood in the sixties, and one in the future, where everything has gone a bit Austin Powers (proving that everything comes around again eventually) and he’s a big noise in the the government. Future Tim communicates with Young Tim by means of the Futurizer, giving him missions to prevent the course of history being corrupted – the sort of thing every boy should have!
We see young Tim as a puppet, voiced by Meade, and read his accounts of his dull home life and crappy school life. The video segments, delivered as YouTube clips, are surprisingly touching given the simplicity of the puppet being used, while the diary passages are well written. Future Tim, along with his sidekick, known only as… Sidekick, is drawn in an engaging cartoon style. There’s also a genuinely bloggy-looking blog for a girl called Jenny, who seems to have stumbled across Tim’s time-spanning communications by accident, but turns out to be very central to saving the universe! Read more
Magazine Review: Black Static 5
I’m busy losing myself in David Moody‘s Autumn apocalypse, so expect a review of that series soon. In the meantime, and interspersed between my regrettably irregular reviews, I’m planning on popping up some comments and links to genre magazines I subscribe to, and refer to regularly, as well as a few web places that may or may not be of interest to you.
Black Static is edited by Andy Cox and published by TTA Press. After a few months’ hiatus, (wherein the publication formerly known as The Third Alternative – a mixture of sf, fantasy and horror – refocused on the darkside, redesigned with David Gentry‘s ambiguously appropriate artwork, and renamed), Black Static is now at a fifth issue, (although my timing will undoubtedly ensure that number six drops through my letterbox the day this review goes up).
What’s in it? An intriguing blend of consistently high quality dark fiction, and some fascinating non-fiction columns. On opening a magazine I inevitably find myself gravitating towards the latter, be it comment or reviews, before getting stuck into the fiction; so it’s these I’ll concentrate on first.
The 21 Steps, by Charles Cumming (digital fiction)
Penguin have launched a new site called We Tell Stories – subtitled Six Stories, Six Authors, Six Weeks – which is designed to showcase digital fiction. Each of the stories is a homage to a Penguin Classic, and the first is The 21 Steps, by Charles Cumming, which in title and style is obviously inspired by John Buchan’s classic The 39 Steps (which I admit that I have not yet read).
What makes this first story innovative is that is essentially a mash-up of a simple linear adventure story with Google Maps. The text appears in bubbles attached to points on the map (occasionally you get richer content, such as a text message actually shown on the display of a mobile phone, or a photo of what the narrator is describing), and as you click the links to move the story forward (there is a lot of clicking), the narrator’s journey is plotted on the map. As you switch from chapter to chapter, the style and scale of the maps change. This can be quite exciting at first – it starts in the new St Pancras International station (which I liked because they used to be a client of mine!) – but when the action is all set in one building, for example an Edinburgh hotel, it seems a bit pointless to have a bird’s eye view.
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The Bookgeeks Interview
Kat Falls
Kat Falls grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and now teaches at NU, where she is continually inspired by her students’ creativity. She started writing Dark Life as a writing exercise. Knowing that her 12-year-old son loved reading about the ocean, Wild West pioneers and, of course, the X-Men, she combined his interests and created the premise for a story that kept her up nights plotting and world-building.
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The Book That...
Robert Lloyd Parry: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
This special twentieth Bury Me… features grand panjandrum and actor Robert Lloyd Parry, the man behind the Nunkie Theatre Company, responsible for many an uneasy evening with the master of English supernatural stories…
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The Bookgeeks Competition
The Richard T. Kelly Column
Richard T. Kelly
Richard T. Kelly’s exclusive monthly column, in which he addresses various matters literary, writers and their books, the publishing business and his own experiences as a writer. Richard is a novelist, screenwriter, biographer and journalist, and you can read his column exclusively on our sister site, Bookhugger.co.uk.Connect with Bookgeeks
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