Escaping the Trunk

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw what Cory Doctorow wrote about my story:

This week’s Escape Pod podcast story is Madeline Ashby’s βoyfriend, a marvellous, sweetly romantic science fiction story about teenagers who use clever artificial intelligences as “training wheels” on the way to their first real love, but who quickly find themselves substituting the warm companionship of their imaginary friends for the confusing and fraught people around them. It’s got Ashby’s sly humor, heart and it’s got clever to spare. I bought Madeline’s first published story for Tesseracts 11 and it’s wonderful to see where she’s gone since.

Note: I thought about snipping his entry, but fuck it: I’m pleased as punch at what Cory had to say, and I want to keep it forever in my own archives. Seriously, I’m wiggling in my chair, right now. I’m also blogging from my foresight class. (That’s a no-no, kids. Do as I say, not as I do.) Ironically, we spent the day talking about future uses of mobile phones.

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A story of mine called “Off-Track Betting” has finally found a home, and you can read it here, compliments of Rudy Rucker, who was kind enough to give it a home. As I told my workshop (who might not remember the title, as I wrote the story some time ago), “it’s about alien nanites who communicate through interpretive dance, and the illegal gambling communities that spring up around them.”

I swear it’s a serious story. Even with the interpretive dance. No, really. It’s about, uh, interrogating the myth of a unified nation, and, er…critiquing depictions of the female cyborg body at labour. And stuff. Yeah.

Snip:

The Motes let Xian go, and she tucked herself, twitching and sweating, into a loose ball until the crane plucked her like fruit from her sector of the performance space. The Motes really had a lot to say, this session, and her body had contorted in ways it hadn’t since her People’s Colonial Circus days: her toes near her eyes, her spine a half-circle. A nurse pulled Xian’s collar down and slapped on a pain patch. Xian’s body, so light in this space, took on a false heaviness as the drug worked at softening the impact of what the Motes’ molecular machines had done to it. Someone gave her a drink – potassium and sodium chloride and all the chemicals the Motes liked to mimic when their machines broadcast signals through a Dancer’s nervous system, bypassing the brain’s own signals. She needed to replenish. She needed to sleep. She needed to place her bets.

Also there’s a funny picture of me at the end of it all. I had initially intended for an edited, prettier version to be sent, but somehow it didn’t get through. Clearly the internet is punishing me for my vanity. I’ll just leave it as is.

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I have an article in the most recent (Fall/Winter 2008) volume of Asian Cinema, and it’s called “Heim Movies: The Return of the Cyborg Double in the Ring Franchise.” I came home to find this waiting for me, and I couldn’t be more pleased. Reading the article over again gives me just the confidence I need to roll out the next chapter of my thesis, and polish up the existing ones.

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