Gallant little Iceland may be under attack by a conspiracy of hedge funds.

Krugman sounds the alarm.

I went on holiday to Iceland once, and found it full of natural beauty and charming, civilized people.  I rode in a dog sled!

If any directors of predatory hedge funds are reading this blog, may I suggest destroying the economies of Cyprus or Côte d’Ivoire instead? Rather too sunny for my taste.  I regard them as fair game.

On March 29, 2008, Felix Gilman was attacked by an unidentified assailant, shortly after opening an unexpected package.

(more…)

For the Amazon book blog, w/Jeff VanderMeer, here.

As a reward for sitting through that terrible load of old nonsense, here are some moderately NSFW pictures from eroticfalconry.com.

(more…)

Who wants to get really fucking sad and angry on a Friday afternoon?

Yes you do. Yes you do.

This is testimony from Iraq Veterans Against The War, at the recent Winter Soldier v.2 hearings.

This is the worst, I think:

This is the worst too:

So are these.

So are all the rest.

The VanderMeers’ New Weird Anthology now has a MySpace page, and apparently there’s free downloads and a discount on the book  and podcasts and et cetera.  I don’t really understand podcasts, but apparently the kids today like ‘em.  Also, the MySpace page keeps crashing my browser.  I don’t know, maybe the kids like that, too.

A French review!

Issued in any year-end 2007 on the other side of the Atlantic, Thunderer is the first novel of its young author, Felix Gilman.

And for a first novel … It is not far from the stroke of genius! The author shows what would become a sub-genre in its own right, a story whose main figure is the city where the action takes place. And the fantasy has already cited many prestigious but also mythical who have managed to permeate the imagination of readers, sometimes for decades now.

So what can we propose nine small newcomer from nowhere, which plays at the outset of the Reference and winks by naming its vile Ararat? Well, it gives us a city full of magic and verve, where the gods are much more in touch with their “faithful” that in many stories.

On the trail, among others, Jack Sheppard - no, not that of the series Lost! — Felix Gilman brode we provided a blueprint and particularly abundant, which is not without a certain power of evocation.

However, the novel would not be provided without blemish, and after all, what could be more normal. Coming back to allusions, admit that the choice of the author sometimes seem to flirt with strict name-dropping, this tendency to launch any particular name simply for the sake of form, without referring to the substance.

Mention also ryhtme not always the most controlled, where you just feel that the young author can be localized somewhat on the roads led to traverse the exotic flavors and fragrances, but without real input as to the plot itself .

And now that “enough” not to content ourselves fully, while a tiny spark could further propelled the Thunderer, the ship like the novel, to other high again, flying over the crowd.

Felix Gilman is undoubtedly a true talent, but probably still a bit raw, like his novel, very good, but a bit rate of excellence worthy of the highest marks surprises.

Then there’s this, which I’m not even 100% sure what language it’s in, and neither Google nor Babelfish can translate it for me. Norwegian? Swedish? Finnish?

Weigh your options carefully.

I have invented a new subgenre.

It’s a cross-genre mix of financial journalism and horror, and I think its time has very definitely come.

I can’t decide whether to call it weird finance or financepunk.

In keeping with the genre’s origins, I demand a 30% commission in perpetuity on the profits of all future weird finance/financepunk stories, with an unlimited option to purchase outright at market price.  Consider yourselves notified.

What’s happening in the markets? 

“We’re exposing parts of the capital markets that most of us had never heard of,” Ethan Harris, a top Lehman Brothers economist, said last week. Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary and current Citigroup executive, has said that he hadn’t heard of “liquidity puts,” an obscure kind of financial contract, until they started causing big problems for Citigroup.

I can explain.  A “Liquidity Put” is simply an alternate-universe financial instrument.  “Liquidity Put” is a corruption of its true name, Lloigor, or the Black Collateralized Debt Obligation Of A Thousand Young. 

Ordinarily the Liquidity Put is unable to exist in our universe, being composed of antimatter, sin, non-euclidean angles, mathematical paradox, and G.A.A.P. improprieties.  Every 100,000 years, however, there is a Conjunction of the Markets, and some of the unnameable aspects and penumbras of the Liquidity Put penetrate our reality. (Simultaneously, millions of dollars in innocent stocks and bonds from our world fall helplessly into the nether Exchanges in which the Liquidity Put swims, where they are devoured instantly by the nightmare financial instruments of the lower realms).

Typically, the Liquidity Put will bury itself deep within the books of unsuspecting investment banks, then set about the business of corrupting the souls of bankers with its foul whisperings.  Entire trading desks have been known to fall to its unholy worship.  The burning of frankincense and the uttering of the secret names of God may drive off the Liquidity Put while it is new to our world and weak; but once it has taken root, no force on earth may dislodge it.  It cannot be killed.  It cannot be hedged against.  It cannot be tracked to its lair.  It can exist in a thousand books simultaneously, without double-counting.  Even to attempt to account for its financial risk profile is to go mad.  May God have mercy on Citigroup.

 Fig 1: A Liquidity Put Breaching Our Universe (Artist’s Impression)

So Joshua Palmatier asked me a couple of weeks ago to take part in a sort of group project where a lot of writers would all post their synopses, and we’d all link to each other, and I said yeah, OK because that’s basically how I operate: if you ask me nicely to do a thing I will do that thing.

For the unitiated, the synopsis is a thing you put together when submitting your book to agents or publishers.  It can be a page, or five pages, or ten pages, depending on the submissions requirements of the particular agent or publisher.  It’s a marketing tool, essentially.  It is horrible to write a synopsis.  To distill your book to bare plot bones and upbeat marketing cliches!  To reduce all your attempts to build atmosphere to two, maybe three adjectives!  It is the bane of the aspiring writer’s existence.  Lend me your ears: let me whine to you of the horrors of the synopsis.

The point of this group exercise is supposedly to help aspiring writers get a sense of how a synopsis works, how there are all sorts of different successful synopsis formats out there, etc, etc.  I suspect there’s also an element of public masochism for the writers — that’s certainly what I’m getting out of it.

Here is a synopsis I wrote up for Thunderer.  Spoilers, obviously, for all major plot points, as blunt as possible. 

The bad news is that this isn’t actually a successful synopsis.  I submitted this awful thing to about fifty agents without success, and finally landed an agent without a synopsis through the dark art of networking.  The second book was sold without a synopsis or anything else on the basis of the first.  It’s very probable that this is a very bad synopsis indeed.  I think my discomfort with the format shows through, which is deadly.  I offer it as a cautionary example.  I’ll probably take it down it a few days: it’s oddly embarrassing having it up on the internet.

 UPDATE: That’s enough of that, I think.

 As an apology for wasting your time, here is a video of three muppets singing Danny Boy.

 And here are the other participants:

(more…)