Tag: Transported

Ten Reasons Why Transported Makes a Great Present

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Presents. We all need to come up with them from time to time: for Christmas, for birthdays, for other holidays. But what to buy? For many situations, the answer is short story collection Transported, by Tim Jones (which you can buy online from Fishpond, New Zealand Books Abroad (for both overseas and New Zealand residents), or Whitcoulls). Here’s ten reasons why.

Teenagers: Although – or perhaps because? – Transported wasn’t written with a Young Adult audience in mind, I’ve heard that it’s doing well in high schools, among both boys and girls. So if you’re looking to buy a present for that young man whom you wish would read more, or that young woman who has recently started writing short stories, Transported is the book to give them.

Adults: But just because Transported is a good gift for teenagers doesn’t make it an unsuitable gift for adults. Transported is packed with adult themes and content. There’s sex (discreet), violence (not too much), and language. In fact, it’s nothing but language from the first page to the last.

Fun: Transported is fun. Don’t take my word for it: listen to reviewer Mike Crowl, who says: “Tim Jones’ Transported is a pleasant surprise. None of the tales have that kind of super-seriousness about them that’s typical of NZ short stories. Instead, they’re an intriguing mix of tongue-in-cheek, subtle humour, history turned inside out, and sci-fi”.

Funny: It’s not only fun – it’s funny. There are jokes, quips, and jests. There is surrealism, absurdism, and plain old silliness. Reviewer Rosemarie Smith says: “The mix is clever and compelling, and though there may not be much riotous laughing out loud, there’s many a quiet chuckle.” So Transported is the perfect book for buses, trains and planes, where riotous laughing out loud won’t go down well.

Proudly local: Transported is as New Zealand as the All Blacks, Lemon and Paeroa, and our banking system – oh, hang on a minute …

But anyway, the contents include stories set in Southland, Fiordland, Dunedin, and Wellington. Palmerston North gets a look-in too. It’s as New Zealand as a Tourism New Zealand billboard!

Confidently international: Tired of stories set in provincial backwaters? Ready to go exploring? Then take a trip to the Caribbean, Russia, the USA or even Dubbo. Investigate the inner workings of the Soviet Politburo, the Australian Tax Office, and the College de France. Meet famous historical figures such as Michel Foucault, V.I. Lenin and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Live a little!

Boldly outerspatial: Hard to find presents for the alien in your life? Cow tipping and rectal probing not really doing it for them any more? Then invite them to kick back and relax with tales that encompass election campaigns contested by talking kangaroos, eyes that work like telescopes, and how alien immigrants are received by the inhabitants of a typical New Zealand street.

Epiphanacious (not sure this is actually a word, but what am I, an author?): Everybody knows that proper short stories must include an epiphany, a still, small moment in which the protagonist experiences a moment of revelation about his or her life. New research reveals that 11 out of the 27 stories in Transported contain an epiphany. That’s over 40% proper short fiction in one compact volume!

Value for money: Transported contains 27 stories, and its recommended retail price is NZ$27.99. That’s only a dollar a story (apart from a few inconvenient cents which we can account for as “rounding error”). A buck a story? That’s real value!

Readily available: Sure, you can buy Transported online, but it’s also available in lots of New Zealand bookshops. A full list is here, and it includes Whitcoulls, Dymocks and Borders branches, Unity Books, and many independent booksellers, such as McLeods (Rotorua), Page and Blackmore (Nelson), and Wadsworths (New Plymouth).

So there you have it. Transported. You will be.

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!

Downtuned to Nowhere: A Metalhead’s Journey. Part 1: Youth and Young Manhood

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I listened almost exclusively to classical music until I reached high school. Musicals, and occasional outbreaks of the reel and strathspey in the capable hands of Jimmy Shand and His Band, were as ‘pop’ as we ever got, while at school, it was Alex Lindsay and His Orchestra who ruled the roost:

“Do you like to dance?”
Oh no, thought Robinson. Please, not that. Last night, he had run through a range of possible disasters, but he had never dreamed it would come to this. In Standard 3, the teacher, Mr Willis, had made them do folk-dancing. Mr Willis concealed an elderly record-player somewhere about his person and would, with the aid of a series of frayed extension cords, set it up in the playground. He would then produce one of a series of records by Alex Lindsay and His Orchestra, put it on, and order the children to line up in pairs and do the strathspey, or the springle-ring, or whatever other bizarre form of torture appealed to him that day. Mr Willis (for those were innocent times) would take the hand of some mortified girl and lead her through the required steps while the other children watched silently. Then he would remove the needle, return the tone arm to the beginning of the record, and watch as they shuffled around, with a hey-nonny-no and a tirra-li-li and a bow for Good Queen Bessie.

(From “Robinson in Love”, one of the stories in my collection Transported. Autobiographical much?)

Then, at high school, I discovered rock. It was 1973, and Deep Purple and Uriah Heep ruled the roost. Someone – it may have been Athol Fricker – had a record player which he was allowed to coax into life in the common room at lunchtime. I listened, entranced, to this alien music, and something clicked into place. I loved classical music then, and I still do now, but now I knew I had been born to rawk: and, though I like many genres of music, there’s nothing that stirs my blood so much as a crunching riff, a pounding drum, and a lead guitarist showing he* can play scales really, really fast – also known as “spanking the plank”.

In short, I’m a metalhead from way back.

The passion has waxed and waned: later in the 1970s, newly independent in Dunedin, I hewed to the line of the New Musical Express, at the time a haven of jejune postmodernism, and if it wasn’t punk or new wave, I was obliged to dismiss it (trying to pretend, as I did, that I felt no excitement as Chic and the Village People on the one hand, and Yes, Jethro Tull and Iron Maiden on the other). I was mainly into Thin Lizzy then, as they were one of the few metal bands of which the NME approved.

For most of the 1980s, the nearest I got to metal was the angular, cerebral progressive rock of King Crimson (although they do get pretty darn metallic at times). It was easy to dismiss metal then, for that was the era of “hair metal”, bands with all the heft and weight of Snowtex.

It took one video to change my mind. I was living in the Township of Gordon Housing Collective in Dunedin, and one flatmate, Louise, and another flatmate’s boyfriend, Eddy, would go on and on about how great this band of young Bay Area metallers, Metallica, were. Yeah yeah, I thought, reaching for the latest Dexy’s Midnight Runners album [check timing]. Finally, Eddy prevailed upon us to watch the video for Metallica’s new single, One. It was serious music played by serious young men. Fantastic music: tight, powerful, engrossing. I was hooked all over again. I worked my way through Metallica’s oeuvre (soon to take a controversial left turn) and discovered other bands like Megadeth and Pantera.

One of the marvellous things about metal is its variety of sub-genres – how’s this for a found poem? And in some respects, I’m stuck in the past, at the point marked “thrash metal”. Metallica took me with them when they changed to the more groove-oriented hard rock of Load and Reload. They made one of the best and most revealing rock documentaries you are ever likely to see, Some Kind of Monster – the classic being the cardigan-wearing therapist who pushes the band too far when he wants to start writing their songs — and one of the worst comeback albums ever released, St Anger. Now they are back with new album Death Magnetic, and on what I’ve heard so far, it’s a return to somewhere on a par with … And Justice for All (one parallel is that both Justice and Death featured a new bass player who is buried so deep in the mix as to be almost inaudible), and not too far behind their classic second and third albums, Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets.

That’s enough for now. More in Part 2 … but let me leave you with Metallica’s finest moment, Fade to Black.

*Lead guitarists in heavy metal bands are almost always male. Why, when so many leading violinists (for example) are female? A number of reasons come to mind, sexism first and foremost. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be that way. (The sound quality isn’t great, but note the guitarist on the left. This band, Beneath the Silence, won Smokefree Rockquest 2008).

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!

A Review, A Colony, A Competition, Several Genres, and a Beautiful Thing

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Time for one of those posts that covers just about everything:

A new review of Transported

Rosemarie Smith has given a positive review in the Southland Times to my short story collection Transported (which you can buy online from Fishpond, New Zealand Books Abroad (for both overseas and New Zealand residents), or Whitcoulls). This former Southlander is pleased to see another good review of Transported in a South Island newspaper.

Wellington Writers’ Colony several steps closer

I blogged a while back about Doug Wilkins and his plan to set up a Wellington Writers’ Colony, modeled on the Sanchez Grotto Annex in San Francisco. Those plans are now several steps closer to fruition. Doug needs just one more writer on board to make the Colony a reality. I have now seen the space he’s planning to use, and it is well-lit, stylish and comfy. If you would like your own dedicated writing space alongside a group of like-minded writers, then contact Doug at dbwilkins@gmail.com or 021-138-5050.

New Poetry Competition

Bookhabit.com and the New Zealand Poetry Society have jointly announced a new poetry competition, with prizes for poetry in both written and performance (audio or video) format. The competition begins on Monday 22 September and runs for six weeks, and the prizes on offer are attractive:

PRIZES

* 1st US$500, 2nd $200, 3rd $100 – each section
* Overall Winner $500
* All prizes in US Dollars.

Judged by the New Zealand Poetry Society

* People’s Performance Choice $500 (Audio and Video section only-
awarded to the person delivering poem)

Judged by registered Bookhabit users

For the full entry conditions and other details, see http://www.bookhabit.com/competition/competition.php.

The Great Genre Debate Continues

The questions of genre which have been discussed on this blog by Johanna Knox and myself (here and here), plus plenty of commenters, are alive and well in the blogosphere. A couple of examples:

– Michael Chabon and Jeffrey Ford on why genre tags don’t matter.
– Charlie Anders asks Do You Really Want Science Fiction Books To Be More Literary?

A Beautiful Thing

God-With-Us is Reginald Shepherd’s last poem, written as he lay dying. It’s a beautiful meditation on faith, belief and doubt. I think it might be the best poem I’ve read this year, and I have read some very, very good ones.

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!

What Is Interstitial Fiction?

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A couple of months back, I made the bold claim that my short story collection Transported is an example of interstitial fiction. “Ah-hah,” you might have thought to yourself, “I must get down to my local bookshop and raid the interstitial fiction shelves at once!”

Or, more likely, you wondered what on earth I was talking about. An understandable response, because “interstitial fiction” hardly trips off the tongue. But interstices are gaps or cracks, in this case gaps or cracks between genres, and much of what I write falls within those cracks. Things that fall through the cracks don’t always get much attention in this cruel world of ours, so this post is here to wave a flag – a multicoloured freak flag – on their behalf.

The concept of interstitial fiction, sometimes called slipstream fiction, is an American invention. It began to be used within the science fiction field in the mid 1990s to describe stories which tended to be published in certain science fiction magazines and anthologies, but which it was difficult to classify in conventional terms as SF.

These stories often used the traditional materials of science fiction – space ships and aliens, time travel and alternate histories – for non-traditional ends, with emphases closer to literary fiction than genre fiction as it had been previously written. Alternatively, they treated mundane materials in science-fictional ways. A parallel development occurred in genre fantasy, often bringing it closer to magic realism than had previously been the case.

Meanwhile, especially in the US, fantasy and SF elements were increasingly being incorporated in mainstream fiction. For example, the novels of Michael Chabon are marketed as literary fiction rather than SF or F, yet most of them have elements which bring them within one or both of those genres in a formal sense. Margaret Atwood, so vigilant against any claims that The Handmaid’s Tale or Oryx and Crake are science fiction (although, as stories set in an imagined future which extrapolate aspects of our own world, they clearly are), nevertheless wrote The Blind Assassin, which interleaved mimetic realism and pulp science fiction within the same novel.

And that’s what interstitial fiction is: fiction that mixes genres, in particular, fiction that interleaves the realistic and the fantastic.

Transported qualifies as interstitial fiction in two ways. It contains a mixture of literary fiction and speculative fiction stories in the one volume (together with some surrealism and flat-out weirdness), and it contains individual stories that mix genres. The paradigm example, and one of my own favourite stories in the book, is “Win a Day with Mikhail Gorbachev”, which mixes science fiction, travelogue, celebrity profile, political history, literary criticism, and the early short stories of Arthur C, Clarke, and comes out with – well, with interstitial fiction.

You can read “Win a Day with Mikhail Gorbachev” as part of the New Zealand Book Council’s Read at Work promotion (although there’s a couple of paragraphs missing from this version), or in Transported. You can learn more about interstitial fiction at the Interstitial Arts Foundation. And you can take the wildest ideas you have, mix and match them without regard to genre, and end up with a story that can still find a home with receptive readers.

UPDATE

Helen Rickerby has posted a long and thoughtful assessment of Transported on her blog, which references this post and various others from “Books in the Trees”. Thank you, Helen!

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!

Another Good Review for Transported

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This review of my short story collection Transported, by reviewer Mandy Evans, appeared in the Marlborough Express on 19 August 2008.

Transported by Breadth of Imagination

Expect to be transported by this collection of short stories and you won’t be disappointed.

From a neighbourhood debate about aliens moving in next door, a changing climate resulting in kiwifruit growing in Otago, an eye transplant that allows a man to better see the stars, and a country so crowded there’s standing room only, Tim Jones’s imagination and his pen range freely.

Jones has previously published two volumes of poetry, and one earlier collection of short stories, however, this is the first work of his I’ve read.

I found his writing polished and easy-to-read. His protagonists are all distinctive characters and the writing tone for each story reflects this. I particularly like that Jones has taken such diverse situations that at times seem like stray thoughts that would flit through most people’s minds and disappear, and turned them into thoughtful stories.

While not every story in the book was to my taste this just serves to prove the breadth of Jones’s imagination. I loved The New Neighbours which featured aliens living among humans. After The War, which tells the tale of one of Tolkien’s Orcs, also appealed to me.

One of the essential ingredients in a short story is its power to surprise; to produce the unexpected. I derive a great deal of satisfaction from reading a collection that does so with a flourish. Most of the stories in this collection finished with a satisfying element of doubt, ensuring the stories linger in the mind.

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!

Is Literary Fiction a Genre?

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Via a comment which Steve Malley left on my blog, I discovered a vigorous — and very comment-rich — discussion by genre fiction writers on the perceived deficiencies of (some) literary fiction, a discussion carried on here after starting here. (Coincidentally, Polly Frost tackles the same topic from a different angle over at The Short Review.)

Apart from the debatable characterisation of Chaucer as some kind of early literary academic, I thought it was a very interesting discussion: and since I write both literary and genre fiction, and have even folded both in together in my short story collection Transported, I thought I would try to come up with a response.

At the core of Charles Gramlich’s complaint is this question:

Can someone please explain why “literary” writers get to freely eviscerate the normal rules of writing but don’t get called on it, while you or I would be pilloried soundly if we tried the same thing?

My immediate reaction was to say that “the normal rules of writing” apply to genre fiction but not to literary fiction, but that did not seem adequate. I’ve read plenty of books which are classified as genre fiction (in particular those genres I’m most interested in, science fiction and fantasy) but which break the rules Charles lists.

What’s more, literary fiction seems to have rules of its own. In a New Zealand context, these might be:

Write mimetic (“realistic”) fiction …
about middle-class and upper-middle class characters …
with no significant political interests or concerns …
who do not experience anything which could be labelled a “plot” …
and whose close personal relationships …
… and personal emotional development are of paramount interest in the fiction.

These “rules” have changed over time; formerly, working class characters were more common, and latterly, the stranglehold of realism has eased. But I think the most characteristic feature of literary fiction is the absence, or at least the downplaying, of plot, and of narrative in general.

After the fashion of Carrie Bradshaw, doyenne of Manolo Blahniks and really large closets, I ask the readers of this blog this question: are the set of characteristics I’ve listed above a reasonable description of much New Zealand literary fiction, and if so, are they distinctive enough to act as a set of rules for literary fiction?

In other words (Carrie sits cross-legged on her bed, looking down at her laptop):

  • Is literary fiction a genre?

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!

Transported: Reviews

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I thought it was time to collect the reviews of Transported that are available online into one post. So here they are:

That’s all the online reviews I know of. If you’ve seen another, please post a comment with the details.

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!

A Watched Book Never Sells

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So I’m sitting in the food court area of Wellington Airport. I’m heading up to Auckland for a conference. Due to bad weather, my flight has been delayed for 90 minutes. That’s bad – it will make the kind person who’s picking me up from the airport late. But it has a good side: I’ve had the chance to sign the copies of my short story collection Transported in the Wellington Airport Whitcoulls.

The staff are very well organised. The books are on a nice little display cabinet near the entrance to the shop, and they have a pen and a bunch of “Personally Autographed” stickers close at hand. I kneel down in front of the display, sign each book, and carefully place a sticker on the front. There are 17 copies to sign – that’s good, because I know the bookshop started with 20. I rise to my feet (wishing I hadn’t decided to wear both my jacket and my raincoat onto the flight as the easiest way of carrying them).

But now I’m about 50 metres from the bookstore, nursing a coffee, doing a spot of work, and peering intently at the foot traffic into and out of Whitcoulls. Nobody is stopping at the display of Transporteds. Are they too low, too far below eye level? Should I have piled them up higher when I put them back on the stand? Is the blue “Personally Autographed” sticker on the front putting people off? (I prefer the way Unity does it – instead of putting stickers on each book, they put a nice “Signed Copies” notice on top of the pile.) And, though I really like the cover, does it stand out enough from the gaudier books around it?

Eventually they call my flight and I head off to Auckland. The conference goes very well. While waiting for my flight back to Wellington, I sign the copies in the Auckland Airport Whitcoulls. There are less of them, and they are modestly hidden on the shelves. It’s still good to see them, though, these old friends in unfamiliar places.

I’m aware this is all rather pathetic. I’m aware I should get over myself. Just as a watched pot never boils, so a watched book never sells. But whenever I walk past a bookstore that stocks Transported, I find it very hard not to go in and see if any have sold. Half the stock in the Wellington Borders has sold – joy! None have sold in Dymocks – damn, if only I’d been able to give a more exciting description of the book when Bruce Caddie asked me how they should describe it to customers.

The world faces multiple, interlocking problems: peak oil, climate change, food shortages … the list goes on. I have work to do, a family to love, and a novel to be getting on with. But I took some visitors to Wellington Airport today, and – I stopped after farewelling my visitors and counted – now there are only 15 copies on that display. Two more copies have sold – yes!

Even the outrageous carpark fees (if only we had light rail out to the airport!) can’t dampen the feeling, so precious, so fleeting, of success.

UPDATE

A review of Transported and author interview with me have just been published by The Short Review. Thank you, Tania and the team!

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!

A Short History of the Twentieth Century, with Fries

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This 600-word story appears in Transported. It was first published in Flashquake and has also been translated into Vietnamese.

By the time they got to the Finland Station, Lenin and his posse were famished.

“What’ll it be, boss, Burger King or McDonald’s?” asked Zinoviev.

Lenin rustled up the kopecks for a quarter-pounder and fries all round and they set to chowing down. By the time he finished, Lenin had had a better idea.

“I’m tired of this revolution business,” he said. “Let’s set up a chain of family restaurants instead.”

It took a while to convince the Mensheviks, left-SRs, and other petit-bourgeois elements. Nevertheless, Lenin’s will prevailed, and Party cadres fanned out across the land in a sophisticated franchising operation. By the end of 1917, Moscow and Petrograd were under complete control, and Siberia was falling into line. Lenin’s Bolshevik brand — “the burger for the worker” — was taking command.

The big international chains didn’t take this lying down. With an aggressive combination of discounting, free giveaways, and sheer intimidation, they muscled in on the Bolsheviks. For four years, the struggle went on. The starving inhabitants of Northern Russia woke up each morning not knowing whether the Golden Arches or the Hammer and Sickle would be standing atop their local fast food outlet.

It was a bad time all round, but at the end of it, the red flag with the yellow emblem reigned supreme across Russia. Crowds flocked to enjoy the cheery, efficient service and chomp their way through the basic Bolshevik burger or such additional menu choices as the Red Square (prime Polish beef in a square bun) and the Bronze Horseman (horse testicles on rye — an acquired taste). Fuelled by Bolshevik burgers, Russia was on the move. Tractor production went up twenty per cent. Electricity output doubled in five years.

After Lenin choked to death on a fishburger on 1924, new CEO Joseph Stalin launched a full-scale campaign of collectivisation and industrialisation. Horse testicles were out, borscht was in. These changes were far from universally popular, but, as the slogan went, “You can’t say no to Uncle Joe”. From Murmansk to Magadan, it was Joe’s way or the highway.

The years 1939 to 1945 were bad ones for the Bolshevik brand. An ill-advised attempt at a strategic alliance with Schickelgruber’s, an aggressive new German franchise, ended in disaster. The names Leningrad and Stalingrad will forever be remembered from that period as examples of poor service and unusual burger ingredients. But Schickelgruber’s was finally seen off and the Bolshevik brand entered a new phase of expansion. It was time, said Uncle Joe, to export Lenin’s legacy to the world.

This wasn’t an unqualified success. What goes down well in Kharkov can cause indigestion in Kabul. The expansion policy did net Bolshevik the important Chinese market, but even there, Russian attempts to include cabbage in Chinese burgers were soon met by Chinese demands that all Bolshevik meals include a side-order of rice. Before long, there were two competing Bolshevik brands, and then three once the Albanians got in on the act.

It was the beginning of the end. Weakened by the massive costs of enforcing brand compliance in territories as diverse as Kazakhstan and Cuba, the Bolshevik empire collapsed in debts and squabbling. It was all over for one of the major franchises of the 20th Century.

For a nostalgic reminder of those days, take a trip to the Finland Station, where you can still see a statue of Lenin addressing the workers, burger in one hand, fries in the other.

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!

Of Montanas, Skodas and Likeable Things

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Montana Book Awards

The biggest thing first: congratulations to all the winners, and all the nominees, in the Montana Book Awards, which were announced in Wellington on Monday night. In particular, I want to congratulate Mary McCallum, who won the Best First Book of Fiction and overall Reader’s Choice Awards for her novel The Blue, and Jessica Le Bas, who won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry for her collection Incognito. Charlotte Grimshaw’s Opportunity – a short fiction collection – won the overall Fiction award, and Janet Charman’s Cold Snack the Poetry award.

The Skoda Diaries

The Skoda Diaries, a new story by me – one of my short, weird ones – is now online at Southern Ocean Review, which also has a nice capsule review of Transported and a number of other books (including Swings and Roundabouts: Poems on Parenthood).

If you seek a key to the Skoda, you might want to read up on the history of the Social Credit Political League. Of course, most of this particular short fiction is fiction, but the “controversial construction project” referred to in the Wikipedia article was the building of the Clyde Dam on the Clutha River – the moment when Social Credit jumped the shark.

Likeable Things

Groomed by a Bird, a poem by Emma Barnes

The cover of My Iron Spine, a poetry collection by Helen Rickerby

St Clair Apartments, a painting by James Dignan

Why I Write, an examination of motives (one motive per blog post), by Sean Molloy

You can buy books by Tim Jones online!