Posted because I love Lynch, and this year sees the twentieth anniversary of the movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, one of my favourite films.

It’s got a Hieronymous Bosch feel, I think.

Read it here, leave a comment.

Elizabethan spies, supernatural threat, and the forces of Faerie – just in time for Christmas (or the holiday of your choice).

For US readers, this is the final trilogy of the nine-book sequence that began with Age of Misrule. Jack Churchill returns, along with the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons, Fabulous Beasts, Celtic gods, Ragnarok, the Otherworld and the wrapping up of every single plot-thread wound over the series.

Can I suggest to all the readers who have been complaining about Gollancz’s failure to reprint the long-sold-out UK version to pick this up on import. It should be available on both Amazon and the Waterstone’s site.

It’s a pretty major achievement to discover the location of the millennia-old quarry down to a few metres, but this also throws up some new mysteries. The rhyolitic rocks differ from all others in South Wales. The presumption is that they were chosen for a specific reason. How were they identified and why? There has been some interesting work done elsewhere into the acoustic qualities of particular stones at prehistoric sites. Is this important?

And this discovery has also kicked a hole in theories of how the stones were transplanted to Salisbury Plain. A consensus was growing that they were floated on rafts along the coast, but the exact location’s inaccessibility to water makes this unlikely. The old geologic theory – that the stones were pushed by advancing glaciers from Wales to Wiltshire during the ice age – is pretty flimsy as there aren’t any other Welsh rocks scattered around the Plain.

Mark Chadbourn on Google+

Artist tbc.

“They have discovered that waist-high boulders at the tip of the egg-shaped point along the ring to the position on the horizon where the sun sets at the summer and winter solstice – the longest and shortest day of the year.”

It’s now been delivered to my editors at Transworld in the UK and Pyr in the US.

Publication is scheduled for April 2012 in the UK. Not heard a date from Pyr yet. So tonight I will be having a beer or two to celebrate. And tomorrow…

Back to work on a new project.

The massed ranks of the internet love to pretend only one yardstick is necessary for books. Press this button for good, and this one for bad. Except, as the music industry has found out, the 21st century is all about nuance and complexity and mini-tribes. The mainstream is dead.

Some books just don’t travel well. That doesn’t mean they’re bad books, just that they’re not necessarily universal. Some novels work best when they’re communicating with a very narrow readership. Subtle, deeply-themed, with a great deal of unspoken communication because so much knowledge is already shared.

This is a long tradition of British fiction, and one reason why many UK writers have struggled across the Atlantic, but you can also find it throughout Europe.

Americans are much better at universal communication (unless the fiction is religion or sport-based when it hardly ever breaks out of their shores). I don’t know why that is, although I have a few ideas. The nation and its history is based upon the principle of Big Mythologies, and myth is a universal communicator with its symbols and archetypes. And film as an American art-form (okay, arguable, I know, but it has been embraced by the people as such) has infused the culture with its universal communication techniques.

I love the big books with the ubiquitous themes, but I’d certainly miss those fusty, quirky little stories about forgotten parts of a country’s culture if they came under threat in the current publishing climate.

The artist is Jean-Sébastien Rossbach.

I don’t do many signings, so it’s a good chance to get a lot of books signed, or talk to me about what’s coming up – or even ask for tips about getting published, if that’s your thing. (But if you ask for a tip, you have to buy a book…)

You can also find a new review of The Scar-Crow Men on the same site.

Always interesting to see how artists and designers interpret the books. No idea who created the image. I don’t have any say over these non-UK editions, by the way. Often, the first I find out about them is when the comp copies arrive on the doorstep.

A two-year Washington Post investigation has revealed the true extent of the top secret world created by the US Government over the past few years.

* one and a half times the population of Washington DC now have top-secret security clearances.
*In the last ten years, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence have been, or are being, constructed in the Washington DC area alone covering 17 million square feet or the equivalent of three pentagons.
* Fifty thousand intelligence reports are published every year, so many that a good number are ignored by time-pressed chiefs.

This hidden world has become so pervasive, so secretive and so unwieldy that “no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

Scientists have found cephalopods – including squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses – can use tools, navigate mazes, learn from each other, mimic other species and solve complex problems.

Yet they followed a completely different evolutionary line to “smart” vertebrates like chimps, dolphins and crows.

New Scientist reports: “Octopuses make it notoriously difficult to get recordings from electrodes inserted into the brain, because they can selectively shut off blood supply to an area of their body or brain. That’s if they allow the researchers to insert electrodes at all. Jennifer Basil, a cephalopod researcher at the City University of New York tells the story of one colleague who took on that challenge: ‘He thought the octopus was anaesthetised, so they put the electrode in and the octopus reached up with an arm and pulled it out.’ That marked the end of his work with octopuses. ‘He has worked with lots of animals but he said “that animal knows what I’m thinking. He doesn’t want me to do this so I’m not going to”,’ Basil says.”

You have been warned.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Readers begin to arrive…

Lyrically, there was nothing like them. Any band who can start a song, ‘Unctuous, prattling pecksniffs quake and quail and quiver, as the Badger Boys come down the street like pike down an empty river’ have got to be worth a listen…

New Scientist has a great article this week on eight codes that still remain unbroken, from the famous Voynich Manuscript to the CIA’s Kryptos monument to one of the final messages from the Zodiac serial killer.

Worth a read. You’ll have to sign up, for free, but you only get a window of a couple of days to check it out.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Vikings and cider. What’s more to want? ]]> http://www.jackofravens.com/2011/05/21/moira-canal-festival/feed/ 1 http://www.jackofravens.com/2011/05/20/your-soundtrack-for-the-rapture/ http://www.jackofravens.com/2011/05/20/your-soundtrack-for-the-rapture/#comments Fri, 20 May 2011 10:48:02 +0000 MarkC http://www.jackofravens.com/?p=720 Planning a party for when the worlds ends tomorrow with the Rapture and all the devout fly off to heaven?

Here’s your playlist…

Hellhound on my Trail – Robert Johnson
Aloha from Hell – The Cramps
Armageddon Days (Are Here Again) – The The
Queer – Garbage
When the Sun Goes Down – Arctic Monkeys
Godless – The Dandy Warhols
I’ve Got my TV and my Pills – Julian Cope
Heaven Up Here – Echo and the Bunnymen
Shoplifters of the World Unite – The Smiths
Love Will Tear Us Apart – Joy Division
Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell – The Flaming Lips
Beasley Street – John Cooper Clarke
Burning Sky – The Jam
Sinnerman – Nina Simone
Too Tough To Die – Martina Topley-Bird
Demon Days – Gorillaz
Big Night Out – Fun Lovin’ Criminals
Do Anything You Want To – Thin Lizzy
Burn it Down – Dexy’s Midnight Runners
Boys from the County Hell – The Pogues
(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Sympathy for the Devil – Rolling Stones
The End – The Doors

And finally…

I Think We’re Alone Now – Girls Aloud

This is a public event. I’ll be talking about the novel, about fantasy, history, philosophy, magic, writing – hell, anything which comes to mind, probably – and I’ll be doing a short reading too, and signing as well.

The venue: Waterstone’s, 1/5 Bridlesmith Gate, Nottingham NG1 2GR.
Time: 7pm
Tickets are £3. No idea what the limit is, but it’ll be on a first come, first served basis. You can get them in-store in advance, or call the store on 0845 034 9516.

This may well be the only official signing for The Scar-Crow Men so get in soon if you want me to scribble all over your pristine copy. Happy to sign any other stuff you’ve got too.

The answer has to be yes: there are limits to science. There are some things we can never know for sure because of the fundamental constraints of the physical world. Then there are the problems that we will probably never solve because of the way our brains work. And there may be equivalents to Rees’s observation about chimps and quantum mechanics – concepts that will forever lie beyond our ken.”

Interesting article in New Scientist (you’ll have to register, for free, to read it), examining how there could be some – perhaps many – things that we’re just not capable of discovering.

The author identifies a few – what lies beyond the cosmic horizon? how life began? – and then briefly dives in to the polarised consciousness debate (an area of personal interest). Here the argument is pretty much split between those who believe we will never discover what consciousness is and the reductivist mechanics who believe if we break down the brain just a little bit more we will find exactly which bit does what.

I’ve interviewed experts on both sides of the debate. From the snarky comment above, you might guess that I’m not 100% convinced by the reductivist approach and you’d be right. Roger Penrose’s suggestion that a quantum process underpins the nature of consciousness seems more elegant and interesting.

Worth a read.

You can listen to it here.

The story features Elizabethan spy Will Swyfte and a Christmas Eve siege of a country house by supernatural foces. It ties in to my current Swords of Albion series.

Elizabethan spy Will Swyfte investigating the murder of his friend, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, and discovering a supernatural threat: revenge, love, loss and high adventure.

You can find a new review of it here, from Falcata Times.

And you can find a new interview with me here, talking about the creative process, and a lot of other semi-incoherent ramblings.