Now Playing: Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Once again I must apologise for my slowness in responding to both comments posted here and emails sent to the Dendrocopus account. I'm getting there, but slowly. Thanks for your patience...
In the meantime, I've finished a couple of stories. One of them, "Monkey Suit", is a 5000 word piece set in the Revelation Space universe. More on that when I know for sure that it's going to appear where I think it will. The other story, a somewhat longer piece entitled "Pandora's Box", (not set in the RS universe) will be appearing as an original translated piece in Finnish in the SF magazine Tahtivaeltaja, edited by the inestimable Toni Jerrman.
I've always been fascinated by the texture of translated prose, especially that cool, icy detachment that seems to hover around prose that's been translated from a genuinely foreign language such as Japanese. I used to fantasize about paying someone to translate my stuff into Chinese or Russian, then paying someone else to translate it back again, just so that I could obtain some objective detachment on my prose, im the hope that it would turn out to read like the work of Lem or some other brilliant foreign-language SF writer. I also used to wonder if it was possible to be hypnotized into forgetting your own work, so that you could read it afresh. (I don't need to do that now - I get the same affect just by being 43 and reading stuff I wrote 10 or 20 years ago).
Anyway, a long time ago - 2004 at the latest - after several pints too many in a Helsinki bar, Toni and I came up with the idea of translating a story of mine into his native language, and then destroying all copies of the original english-language version - including mine. So that's what we're going to do, as soon as Toni has a good translation in hand. So I'll have a story that exists in Finnish, and Finnish only, and if I want to read it again, I'll need to pay someone to translate it back into English. Of course the fact that it's Finnish, not exactly a language everyone can dip into with the greatest of ease, only adds to the fun. Again, more on this when it happens. What wackiness, eh?
For me, I'm just about to dive into the rewrites on TERMINAL WORLD, then I need to do a short story for another anthology project, and then it's onwards and upwards with the new book. Currently reading: Azincourt, Bernard Cornwell. Currently listening: Ali Farka Toure: Savane. And the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, of course, which is very good.
