(Nothing But) Flowers at Great White Ebook Shark

By John McDaid | Saturday, 6 March 2010

The Great White Ebook Shark, a new online review site, just ran an excerpt and analysis of my short story (Nothing But) Flowers. I was thrilled to be in the company of folks like Peter Watts, Kelly Link, and David Nickle (not to mention Joseph Conrad) and the reviewer finds much to like in the story, calling the author "a craftsman of no small talent."

Not familiar with the inspiration for the story? It's a Talking Heads song, and you can watch David Byrne performing it live. You can read the story here on the site, or download in various formats from ManyBooks.net.

As of today, (Nothing But) Flowers has been viewed at least 9,000 times, which says something very powerful about Creative Commons licensing.

Full disclosure: The reviewer sent a draft before publication as a courtesy. I did not comment on anything they wrote.

Tags: 
Localblogging, sf

Comments

PixelFish

Wed, 03/10/2010 - 11:39pm

Glad to see it's having a story life and being read.

...she sings from somewhere you can't see...

John McDaid

Thu, 03/11/2010 - 6:02am

Hi, PixelFish...
I know, right? I feel so lucky to live at a point in history where a writer can put something up on teh Intertubes, and people can find it, link to it, convert it to other formats, and just generally spread it around. The scared, "clutch my ideas" people living in their paleotechnic print-house silos don't realize how much this mirrors the way culture spreads before Gutenberg (which is why Walter Ong called this the age of "secondary orality").

Cheers.
-j

Maddie_C

Thu, 03/11/2010 - 10:36am

I don't know anything about secondary oralities or what that's even supposed to mean. Sounds high-concept. Probably over my head.

But I know irony when I see it. The subject matter of your short story involves a vision of the world following the total collapse of our civilization. Your comment sings the praises of our great "point in history" with the Intertubes and culture spread and all that. Meanwhile, our bridges, roads and schools are crumbling all around us.

"And as things fell apart,
Nobody paid much attention."
-- Talking Heads

John McDaid

Thu, 03/11/2010 - 12:30pm

Hi, Maddie...
Basically, what Walter Ong means by "secondary" orality is that in our current world, culture can spread without writing.

The primary -- first -- oral world was human society 6,000 years ago, where everything had to be communicated by storytelling. Once writing was invented, we had a more efficient mechanism for passing along our stored and shared history (but writing created notions of authorship and copyright meant a world where people could "own" culture, rather than it being common property).

What Ong was noticing was how electronic communication brings us back to that world of freely shared culture. (I'm massively paraphrasing, of course. His book, "Orality and Literacy" is much more nuanced.)

So it is certainly true that *a certain kind of world* is collapsing, and the story mirrors that. Disaster fiction is usually meant as a parable about changes in our everyday world. Oh, except zombies. No parable. They're for real.

Best Regards.
-j

Portsmouth Citizen

Thu, 03/11/2010 - 1:07pm

jmcdaid wrote:
>> Disaster fiction is usually meant as a parable
>> about changes in our everyday world.
>> Oh, except zombies. No parable. They're for real.

I think they're all in the U.S. Congress.