Shores of Night

Earlier this year (about two months ago) I started running a monthly game of Night's Black Agents. It's a game I'd wanted to try for a while, hitting most of my interests, spies, vampires, crazy stuff, and so on in a single game. It's flexible enough to adapt to different groups and the encouragement to iron out details with your group fits my gaming philosophy of sharing ideas with the players; essentially treating gaming as a creative group project rather than a way for GM and players to oppose each other. The game offers four modes of play, each emphasising a different aspect of being a spy. A game based on Bond is as valid as Bourne epic, or a Smileyesque Wilderness of Mirrors. The vampires too are based on a number of different types, from the classics like Dracula, strange experiments that produce mutants, or alien stones (channelling Tim Powers' novels, The Stress of Her Regard and Hide me Among the Graves), and reaching back to pre-Christian times, and su...

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is. Kurt Vonnegut

Who are you? Who am I?  Simple questions, but not ones I'm convinced have a straightforward answer. On the surface, they can be answered by stock answers, our names, our sexes, genders and so on. Dig in a little further and we may find something else waiting for us. It's akin to taking a chair and simply saying that that's what it is, without considering the style of the design, the wood used to make it, the presence of a maker's mark etc. Similarly our identities are composed of our sex, gender, class, sexual orientation, and many other factors. Add to this that we commonly wear masks, adapting who we are to our circumstances; I am not the same person with friends that I am with my family, or the same person at the doctors that I am at work. These masks may be so fine I don't notice the difference but they're still there. If I were to dissect myself I would say that my various aspects are as follows: Male White Middle Class Husband Man?  Christ...

She clings to the top of the building, letting it take the weight of her wings as she rests. She sags, lifting the harness from her shoulders; freeing them from the contraption’s embrace for a little while. The wings are heavy, the delight flight brings is tempered by the fear they will drag her from the air. Below, London seethes with life, passion and all the things those bring, hot pinpricks that crackle across her senses, alerting her to potential sins. She misses the cool zephyrs of home, Third Heaven, so different to the scratchy, fetid air here. She misses flight, real flight, rather than the gliding approximation the crude bronze wings allow. She chafes at the goggles and mask that keep the city’s pollution at bay: London air is too dirty to fly without such constraints. It is over a year since the man in the smoked glasses and the purple suit captured her, dragged her out of Third Heaven in his strange machine. He butchered her wings with an obsidian knife. ...

Recently I posted a question on Facebook, asking what emotion lay at the heart of Steampunk. Punk and Goth, and even Hippy I can understand; but when I look at Steampunk and it's gewgaws and thingamajigs, I don't understand the emotion that lies at the heart of it. One of the people who responded made a point of saying that Steampunks dressed like Victorians, but did not think like them. I confess this comment stopped me in my tracks, because on one level it suggests we are a different people, almost a different species to our Victorian ancestors. Quite apart from the hubris that suggests, and the rather sweeping statement that captures over six decades of thought and declares 'we're different to all of that' (seriously, all of it? a period that gave us minds as diverse as Karl Marx, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Emmeline Pankhurst and many, many more? Truly we live in an age of luminaries to be able to make such a judgement). I was slightly staggered by the lack of...

A selection of fairy tales by Angela Carter, the Bloody Chamber returns the form to an older time, drawing on the folk tales as they were before the Grimms began the trend of infantilising them. This produces a stew of tales that are at once more adult, more Gothic and more dangerous than the callow versions most of us read as children. Carter's willingness to put a feminist spin on the tales she reinterprets makes them punchier, more dangerous and she inevitably crosses into taboos subjects: sex is hardly a stranger in these stories, and carries a political significance all of its own. The protagonists of each tale are, by and large women, with only Puss in Boots stepping outside that decison, providing the reader with a cat's eye view of the proceedings. This decision, to rely either on the perspective of men, or animals, others men in many respects, and men are depicted in a variety of ways. On the one hand they are shown as separate from nature, and the world in dire...

A book by Greenery Press, Radical Ecstasy concerns sex magic. To be precise it looks at BDSM and spirituality and how the two interconnect, drawing parallels between BDSM, Tantra and the sort of Shamanic ritual practiced by Fakir Musafa. As always with Greenery Press, whom I confess I'm very fond of, the book is written in an approachable style, with the authors, Dossie Easton and Janet W Hardy, drawing on their own experiences and providing anecdotes to embellish their points. I like this approach, it makes me feel as if I have two mentors rather than being preached at by someone sat in an ivory tower, even if its not going to be for everyone. It shows me how human the authors are and that they have their own troubles and so on, rather than painting an unbelievable, but very pretty image of their lives as perfect. Tales of relationships ending, of the troubled pasts the characters recount may not leaving their troubles at the door, but does tell you that they are real people,...