My latest story, Pollatomish, was in Clarkesworld #191

Things have been a little hectic of late, with family health issues, summer holidays and changing employment to contend with, so I hands-down failed to promote my story, Pollatomish, which appeared in the August issue of Clarkesworld.

It’s about rockets, family, place, immigration, resource stripping, gig economies gone mad and radicalisation, but as usual all set in a small Irish locale. If it ain’t broke etc.

It was a pain in the ass to write. Like many other writers I follow on Twitter, the Covid years left me either unable or unwilling to write fiction (like there’s a difference), so it was good to know that I can still formulate made-up ideas and transfer them to someone else’s skulls merely by scribbling.

For this, I wanted to break out of the universe my previous two ‘squiddy’ stories were based in, but still wanted to keep things on my home island. It grew from a seed planted by the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees in my homeland, who were placed in what were referred to as ‘direct provision’ centres, where people spent years waiting for their asylum status to be established, often in pretty abysmal conditions.

Similarly, Pollatomish is a real place, although I’ve never been there, so anyone familiar with it will have to forgive any licence I’ve taken. It was chosen because it is on or very near the route of a pipeline built by the Corrib Gas Project, a deal between the Irish State and various oil companies to tap the Corrib natural gas field in the North Atlantic. During the protests against the onshore processing of the gas, campaigners asserted that the plans were unsafe, that the economic benefits were overstated and that the Irish authorities jailed protesters at the request of Shell. The Garda Síochána (Ireland’s police force) also faced accusations of using excessive force in breaking up protests. Where better to situate a rocket factory in a crumbling world?

While neither story is really mine to tell, it wasn’t a huge leap to assume that once/should we become a space-faring species, we will very likely replicate all the morally and ethically dubious practices we have on Earth as long as someone makes a buck from it.

It is my third story to appear at Clarkesworld and while Irish writers (at least those writing in English) cannot in any way claim to be underrepresented in general, there aren’t that many of us writing short-form science fiction. Clarkesworld’s eye for left-field, non-US and ‘slow’ stories has benefited me massively in that regard. Thanks as ever to the now Hugo-award-winning Neil Clarke, and team, for publishing it. Neil’s nod for Best Editor (Short Form) at the Chicago Worldcon at the start of the month was richly deserved and very much overdue. And Neil, I do hope that atones for my ill-judged “always the bridesmaid…” remark in Dublin. 😉

Pollatomish has been positively reviewed a few times, which is nice:

Tangent Online said “the author depicts the setting in evocative detail, in a way sure to appeal both to those familiar with Ireland and those who are not”, which is very kind of them and just what the story was aiming for.

SFRevu called it a “Nicely told, bittersweet tale.”

And it has picked up some very kind comments on Twitter:

4)Pollatomish by Finbarr O’Reilly: Irish activist granddaughter rebelling against greedy space colonization companies organized labour unrest in colonies. It ends badly for all involved. Strong social commentary and multi generation family bonds well presented

— GCL (@GCL_Boisset) September 1, 2022

Just read "Pollatomish" by @finoreilly in @clarkesworld, a great sci-fi that hints at wider life-altering technologies (especially how they're being wielded as tools of exploitation), but really hones in on the small towns and villages, often ignored in SFhttps://t.co/34r04ehkn7

— Jonny Pickering (@JonnyPickering_) August 11, 2022

Today I read “Pollatomish” by @finoreilly in @clarkesworld. This story is extraordinary – I was especially struck by the musicality of the prose.

— J. M. Eno (@jmenowrites) August 4, 2022

Thanks to all concerned. I know you are not supposed to read your reviews, but it is always nice to get such comments. Even if some people don’t regard what we do as ‘lit-er-a-choor’:

Ever wonder what my inbox is like? pic.twitter.com/SlZRW7C0fe

— clarkesworld (@clarkesworld) September 17, 2022

So, as usual, I encourage you to defy the naysayers, go read this story, and all the others in the August issue of Clarkesworld.

Cheers.

Fin’s Dublin2019 Worldcon report

Well, it’s done — the 2019 Dublin Worldcon has joined the choir invisible, it has ceased to be, etc. In a way, I am very, very glad — last I saw, there were more than 5,500 people in attendance and that is about 5,497 more than I am usually comfortable with.

However, in another, just as contradictorily real way, I am sad it’s over. It was only on the fourth day that I really hit my stride, culling every other panel I wanted to see (back-to-back attendance is nigh-on impossible even when the panels are in the same venue), getting over the shyness enough to greet people I “know” from Twitter in real life and remembering to eat enough, drink enough water and, when things get a bit much, just to get outside in the sporadic sunny spells that rolled over the CCD’s glass barrel.

I don’t share all the loves and fandoms of many of the groups of people there, nor they mine, there is something eminently comforting about being surrounded by people who  love and create fantastikal books, TV shows, movies, games, songs, whatever.

As a ‘business of writing’ event, I don’t know if it was successful or not, as I have no frame of reference. But I did meet Neil Clarke, the editor of Clarkesworld, whose two acceptances paid most of my way to attending Dublin2019, who did reassuringly ask when he can expect to see my next story (I am a bit mortified that I forgot to thank him for publishing two of them already and failed to offer him a drink, but I guess that will get easier at future cons too).

I met Dr Jack Fennell, literally a gent and a scholar, and marvelled at the depth of academic knowledge on display at his kaffeklatsch. Buy his book, A Brilliant Void. 

I encountered the first real-world fan of something I’ve written, whose glowing and enthusiastic welcome really picked me up after what had been a long and dispiriting day – thank you Zia.

I had a lovely chat with the brilliant writer Vina Jie-Min Prasad over tea in Bewleys, and was inspired by her knowledge of SF writing and its craft.

Best Of British Science Fiction 2018 cover – image is Les Edwards’ Chasing the Lightship

And I attended the first book launch on the other side of the writer’s table. The good news is I didn’t pass out with nerves, managed to sign my name reasonably intelligibly on some books, and the book sold out, so the publisher was happy, which I am told is important. You can still buy the book – The Best Of British Science Fiction 2018, edited by Donna Scott, from Newcon Press.

The panels I attended were all pretty good, but the highlights for me were Ian Watson at the alternative history panel; Alexandra Rowland on hopepunk (emphasis on the punk – that goes for you too, cyber-, steam-, diesel- and bio-); Kate Heartfield and  Elsa Sjunneson-Henry on some guy called Shakespeare; Michi Trota and Julia Rios on America under Trump — JFC;  Jo Walton everywhere I saw her, regardless of topic; and the Irish 2000AD panel — with David Ferguson, Maura McHugh, William Simpson and Michael Carroll — which was easily the funniest I saw at the con.

Worldcon was chaotic, tiring, and occasionally infuriating, but I left Dublin, which has changed so much since my college days, full of information and inspiration, having met and listened to some amazing people and with a resolve to take this auld writing lark a bit more seriously.

And that can’t be bad.

An Irishman in The Best of British Science Fiction

The Miracle Lambs of Minane, first published in Clarkesworld in October of last year, has been selected for inclusion in The Best of British Science Fiction 2018.

Best Of British Science Fiction 2018 cover – image is Les Edwards’ Chasing the Lightship

To say I am pleased would be an understatement. A look at the table of contents over at editor Donna Scott’s website should explain why. To be listed near these writers – such as G.V. Anderson and Natalia Theodoridou, who have written some of my favourite short stories over the past couple of years, and Alastair Reynolds, Lavie Tidhar, and Dave Hutchinson, whose names I can see on my bookshelves – is both daunting and flattering.

As an added bonus, the book, which is published by Newcon Press, is being launched at the 2019 Worldcon in Dublin. So odds are I’ll get to meet at least some of these people in a city where I spent most of my 20s.

I’m delighted that such an Irish story will get an outing at the first Irish Worldcon (second one in Cork in 2026, anyone?) and I’m very grateful to Neil Clarke at @clarkesworld for publishing it and the connected Last Boat Builder in Ballyvoloon in the first place.

As a final note, just to assuage the fears of my parents and my friend Marjorie, a place in the Best of British Science Fiction did not mean I had to surrender my passport, nor have I sworn allegiance to Her Maj. They are a fierce inclusive lot, the old SF community.

From A-lists to World War Z

Mark Evans

Brilliant interview with Max Brooks by Empire magazine here. I haven’t seen World War Z yet because I haven’t read the book yet. Must rectify that before a member of the undead snacks on my cerebellum. Great insights into the writing process, shenanigans with Hollywood, politics with China and steadfastly refusing to do his work any disservice. A tip of the hat to Mr Brooks.
Choice quote…

I went looking for a zombie survival guide. Nobody had written it, they were all off ‘having a life’, and I didn’t have that problem so I thought, ‘You know what? I have two extraordinary gifts: I have an excessive compulsive disorder and unemployment. And I’m going fuse them into a book.’ So I sat down and wrote zombie survival guide.
Max Brooks

PS, Yes, his dad is Mel ‘Blazing Saddles’ Brooks. Which raises the question – was Mongo a bean-eating zombie?

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How they took that 360-gigapixel panoramic shot of London

There’s a nice video piece on the BBC website on how they took that record-breaking panoramic shot from the top of the BT tower. I quite like the bit which says the top of the tower “only” moves 12 inches in 100mph winds.

The company behind the shot, 360Cities.net, has panoramas from around the world on its website including this moody shot of the river running through Cork city.

 

UV been framed: science photographs that are literally out of this world

Awful puns aside, there are two photos this week that absolutely blew me away. The first is from the amazing Curiosity rover, beaming back high-res images from the surface of Mars. This week it took one at night:

Mars under a blacklight – like a 90s nightclub

It may not seem like much, but this is a picture taken in the absence of sunlight on a planet that is at least 34.6 million miles away. The idea is to see if anything fluoresces under ultraviolet light. That the camera is mounted on a nuclear-powered, laser-wielding robot car only adds to my awe at what Nasa and its engineers and contractors come up with.

The second photo is from a camera that spent a mere five minutes outside Earth’s atmosphere, strapped to a rocket.  Five minutes is not enough to take a usable picture of my incessantly blinking extended family, but it was apparently enough for scientists to snap a 165-frame flipbook of ultraviolet radiation that was  detailed enough to solve one of science’s weirder solar conundrums. Watch the video — that is the thing responsible for all life on this planet:

Tougher copyright laws could finish Irish newspapers off

Once upon a time, people paid to have their businesses listed in the Golden Pages. Once upon a time, it was against the law to give somebody information about where to get a perfectly legal abortion in a foreign country. One day, I will have to tell my incredulous children these stories about things made irrelevant by the internet. Yesterday, I was given a third.

Once upon a time, newspapers used to sue people for sending them an audience.

Apparently, “there is a fight under way that will have an enormous bearing on the future of the news industry in Ireland”.

Gather ye round kids, and I will tell you of Y2K, SARS, Blur-vs-Oasis, Pippa Middleton’s bum and many other tales that were blown out of all proportion by Irish newspapers.

At the centre of the supposed row (really just a conference organised by the National Newspapers of Ireland) is a review into Irish copyright law and the doctrine of “fair use”. Leaders in at least two of the Irish newspapers, the Independent and the Examiner, maintain that search engines “steal” their content without paying a penny in return.

The Irish Independent yesterday wrote:

“Website giants are taking journalism at no cost and offering it for free — even though it is costing jobs and livelihoods in the trusted media sector.”

The Irish Examiner wrote:

“The scale of the piracy is astounding. In 2010, while every media company in the country shed jobs and cut costs to the bone, a single search engine operating in Ireland offered around 150,000 newspaper articles that cost publishers an estimated €46.5m to generate. Last year that site offered more than 350,000 articles at a cost equivalent to more than €110m. And all without paying one cent to those who created those articles.”

We know (because it was in The Irish Times) that the “website giant” and “single search engine” mentioned is Google, no stranger to such accusations — Rupert Murdoch once referred to them as a “piracy leader”. But at least he had the courage of his convictions and stopped the search engine from indexing The Times when it went behind a paywall (it has resumed listing since then. I wonder why?).

It is that point more than any other that shows up the ludicrous hypocrisy of newspapers complaining about search engines “stealing” their content.

Newspapers have thrown up the shop shutters, spread out their wares and asked Google to please tell people about them. Or, as the Examiner puts it, a “process … hardly different to what we more commonly describe as theft”.

So why don’t they just ask Google to stop? Every newspaper website contains a file called robots.txt which tells Google what it may or may not index. If the executives at the Indo and Examiner want Google to stop listing everything on their websites, they just have to push a button. Or at least ring the editor, tell him to ring the head of IT, and he will ask Jim, “on the website”, to push the button.

But, of course, they will not. If they shut Google out, their online advertising revenues, already small, will fall. This is not a moral argument, with newspapers telling search engines to do the right thing and pay their way. This is newspapers demanding a renegotiation, saying “please sir may I have some more”.

Irish newspapers are in trouble. Circulations are falling, ad revenues are falling, and digital revenues come nowhere near to making up the difference. And the managements of Irish newspapers do not know what to do.

If you question that, take another look at those numbers:

“Irish industry group the National Newspapers of Ireland (NNI), of which The Irish Times is a member, said Google had offered 150,000 newspaper articles in 2010 that had cost publishers around €46.5 million to produce. Last year, this increased to more than 350,000 articles that cost the industry €110 million to originate.”

At a time when publishing has never been more widespread, easier or cheaper, these guys think lax copyright is the problem, not that each article costs them an average €314 to produce?

Let us completely ignore the fact that newspapers regularly “copy and paste” material from other sources, both public domain and not-so-public domain, and pass it off as their own, original, copyrightable work. Let us not hold our breath when we ask: do they always pay freelance newspaper contributors to reprint their copyrighted work online?

€314 per article? I don’t know what shift rates are like in Ireland these days but I’m guessing they’re less than that and I’m guessing most papers expect more than a story per day.

If this were any other industry, it is journalists who would be asking the sensible questions:

• Doesn’t Irish copyright law already make selling somebody else’s original work as your own illegal? (Yes, for a given value of original.)
• Would this be difficult and costly to enforce? (Yes, incredibly so.)
• Will it stop people reading “free” news online? (Of course not.)
• Will print publications be subject to the same rules? Digests in The Week and The Economist both carry more text than a Google link. Will they have to pay?

Newspapers are not dying because people online can read their stories without paying them. Newspapers are dying because the property and recruitment booms ended, because classified ads moved online, because they were poorly managed (aimless regional expansion, propping up vanity titles in London, €50 million for myhome.ie, anyone?) and just because technology passed them by for almost 20 years.

You are not going to solve a 21st-century technological problem by strengthening a law introduced to regulate 18th-century printing presses.

The Examiner says “Newspapers do not want or expect special treatment”, but that is not how it looks. Earlier this year, Alan Crosbie, the chairman of Thomas Crosbie Media, which owns the Examiner, essentially pleaded for a portion of the TV licence fee that funds RTÉ.

John Lloyd, a contributing editor to the FT, said the speech was driven by “the passion of desperation”. Given the parlous state of TCH finances reported in The Phoenix last month, it is unlikely that desperation has gone anywhere.

Paywalls are often suggested as a cure for newspapers’ revenue woes. I’ve written here before about why I think they’re not, but the main reason is that there will always be other sources of news. Such as the BBC and, in Ireland, RTÉ. They are not going anywhere as news-gathering organisations, despite the wishful thinking of the NNI, and as long as they’re around, Google will have news content to link to.

Google will not pay you for the privilege of linking to your content. The notion is akin to Borris-in-Ossory demanding payment from anyone who gives directions to a motorist, because it cannot extract enough money from them when they arrive. Google will just stop indexing your websites and traffic will dry up.

It is hard to think of a more misguided, and pointless “row” to be having in the face of the difficulties Irish papers are enduring than over whether copyright is strong enough. In 20 years’ time my kids will be asking what it was.

“Boss, circulation’s down, ad revenues are down, the kids are all reading for free online. What do we do?”

“Somebody get me a Golden Pages. We need a copyright lawyer.”

Everybody complains about Twitter, but nobody does anything about it

Apologies to Mark Twain* for bowdlerising his quote, but it has happened again – somebody has made something up on the internet, without a thought for fact-checking or journalistic integrity. What’s worse is they then used the unregulated media of Twitter and Facebook to spread these lies. Worse still, this latest fabrication sullies the name of that fair and balanced journalistic institution, Fox News. Laugh? I nearly tweeted.

Padraig Belton, in the Irish Independent, told us yesterday that the world is not always as it seems. To support this skeptical world-view, he cites the infamous “Brian Cowen hangover” interview and this picture that did the rounds last week:

Fox News. It's bad, but not this bad

Belton says:

In both cases, social media and citizen-journalism – not long prior heralded engines of a new democratic dispensation – were manipulated in political hatchet jobs.

Political hatchet jobs? I can see how the Cowen interview may have been politically motivated, but what’s the political motivation for “Fox News is rubbish”? Even if you could answer that, who cares? It’s not meant to be journalism. It’s meant to be a joke.

To illustrate the dangers of photo manipulation, he could have used North Korea’s nine-foot soldier, or Iran’s cloning-tool wars.  But he wanted to illustrate the threat of Twitter, so chose a joke.

That joke took a report of a multiple murder and tried to get a laugh at the expense of a cable channel renowned for screaming hyperbole and screw-ups. For example, the original, undoctored image was taken from a Fox News broadcast in which they mistakenly used a picture of Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live to illustrate an item on Sarah Palin. Here’s the video (if you can trust it):

Belton then trots out a litany of other supposed deceptions, some of them nothing to do with Twitter or Facebook – such as the Sunday Times using an illustration of John ‘Soap’ MacTavish, a character from the Call of Duty game, in a graphic of a failed hostage raid – and some of them actually unearthed by social media themselves, such as ITV’s mistaken use of video game footage in a documentary about IRA links to Gaddafi:

Jokes aren’t journalism

It is Belton’s mixing and mashing of media and platforms – very 21st century for such an avowedly traditional journalist – as he takes in broadcasters, papers, Twitter, Facebook , Wikipedia, and Youtube, that makes his point so hard to pin down.

The Fox News image is a joke. The Guardian’s Cowen tape and ITV’s IRA documentary were inadvertent foul-ups. The 50-cent commenters of China and Wikipedia editors of Capitol Hill are engaged in politics less filthy than the past (remember ‘ratfucking‘?). The  RTE-bashing over the Sean Gallagher debate continues the Indo’s delusion that a false tweet lost him the presidential election rather than his floundering inability to decisively rebut its fabricated content on the night.

So what is Belton’s point? If it were simply “do not believe everything you read online”, well, duh. However, he concludes:

Quality journalism, employing social media like Dorian’s portrait to preserve the likeness of vitality, is too quick to abandon its fact-checking traditions.

That sounds depressingly like a newspaperman putting his own trade on a pedestal of probity (despite every print journalist you ever met knowing someone who has massaged a quote, fudged a statistic, or concealed one of their screw-ups). Belton is in good company – John Fleming had a go at Twitter a couple of weeks ago on Hugh Linehan’s Irish Times blog, John Waters has borne the internet curmudgeon’s cross for the Irish Daily Mail (they don’t put his columns online, funnily enough), and Eamon Delaney maintains, terrifyingly, that we should regulate what has become a “cacophony of noise, but at the lowest common denominator”. Conor Brady and Alan Crosbie have both supported calls for State support of the press, which would just bring regulation by another route.

Time for some whataboutery

Donald Segretti faked a letter to discredit one of Nixon’s political rivals. Newspapers followed it up, yet nobody denounced the postal service as a network used by liars. The Sunday Times agreed to print the “grotesquely … fake” Hitler diaries, yet the writing and serialisation of memoirs remains inexplicably legal. If a newsroom takes an anonymous call that contains libellous information, we do not blame the telephone network. If a lobby journalist misinterprets a hand-written note from one minister to another, we do not call for the regulation of paper and pencil.

If a journalist prints or broadcasts material from social media networks, or wikipedia, or a message board, or email, and never bothers to check whether it is true, it is not a failure of the internet, it is a failure by the journalist.  

Flesh-and-blood sources feed bullshit and PR bumf to journalists in person and on paper every day, but they have developed tools for sniffing it out. Newspapers should be extending the use of these tools online and developing new ones when they fail, rather than indulging in this incessant hand-wringing over media their correspondents barely understand and rarely use. Complaining about the climate isn’t going to change it.

“A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar”

– this one is really by Mark Twain. *The one in the headline is by his friend, Charles Dudley Warner. I knew that, but wrote it anyway.

Making money from your newspaper’s archives

JFK on Cork's Patrick St - buy it now

The Chicago Reader, a free alternative weekly, has put online its archive of long-form film reviews. It’s the latest in a line of print publications (such as Vogue and The New York Times) trying to figure out a way to add to the value or extend the reach of older content they own and have already paid for. Adam Tinworth lists an interesting couple of additional uses of archival material on his blog (M&S lingerie anyone?).

I’ve harped on about this before, using the example of the Irish Examiner’s archive of great Cork photos (that’s JFK on Cork’s Patrick Street, above).

But seeing a paper publish an archive of its film reviews brings the issue into sharper focus for me. Because print publications have been aggregating and publishing their non-news archive material on paper for years. In film, the obvious example is the annual Time Out film guide. But the Daily Telegraph has printed volumes of its renowned obituaries, a compilation of Yorkshire Evening Post cryptic crosswords accompanied me around the world and The Economist even publishes its in-house style guide. In hardback.

Newspapers are experienced at wringing extra revenue from their non-news content. Some of them are transferring that experience to their online operations – Vogue’s online archive costs $1,575 a year.

But many more are sitting around wringing their hands because “newsgathering is expensive” and no one wants to pay for “journalism”. It’s far from an original statement but it cannot be repeated often enough – readers never paid for journalism. They paid for the bundle – the crossword, the weather, the stock pages, the fashion pages, event listings, movie reviews. And newsgathering has always been the most expensive part of generating that bundle.

Parts of it are worthless a month after the event. Thanks to the internet, parts of it are worthless after minutes. But some  parts are worth something a year, a decade or even a century later. Isn’t it time papers figured out which is which and started devoting more attention to bits that can provide either readers’ cash or readers’ eyeballs for years?

What’s in David Carr’s backpack?

I am a sucker for these things. CJR asks New York Times media columnist David Carr to go through his bag.