Sluice Issue #21

Sluice  | Arthur H. Manners

Updates, recommendations and links

Issue #21

Hey friends!March rolls around already. Let's look at some interesting stuff I've encountered recently.

This Week's Recommendations

1. Film: Loontown: Lavie Tidhar's hilarious satirical-noir short story, It Happened In Loontown, has been adapted to a short animated film. A co-created project between Tidier himself and director Nir Yaniv, take 18 minutes aside and enjoy.

2. Books:The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Ray Nayler is quickly becoming sci-fi royalty, and justly so. This book is filled with sentient octopuses and robots, a fresh and interesting take on a near-future world, and plenty of meticulously researched neuroscience.

3. Poem:Not for That City by Charlotte Mew. I came across this poem in Clive James' anthology, Fire of Joy. This one melded with a few other influences to set me off on a new short story, exploring deep time and what it means to outlive everything we recognise. My favourite passage:   And if for anything we greatly long,    It is for some remote and quiet stair    Which winds to silence and a space for sleep    Too sound for waking and for dreams too deep.

4. Books:The Future Library Project. Katie Paterson's project to collect submissions from a single writer every year until 2114 has been underway since 2014. The century-long project involves storing these unpublished works in a vault until they are printed on paper made from a special forest being grown nearby. Writers involved so far include Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Ocean Vuong.

5. Article:An Exciting Time by Tim Kreider. Tim talks about the pity rather than excitement he feels when he hears about a friend publishing a new book, and how the nature of being an author has changed. "When I first decided to become a writer, authors were known as people who wrote whole novels entirely in bed isolated in cork-lined rooms or walked into rivers with pocketfuls of stones or were addicted to heroin and shot their wives in the head. It was not assumed they’d be eager to do AMAs on Goodreads or promos on Book-Tok."

Writing News

• My award-winning story "The Withering Sky" will be appearing in the short-story publication Underside Stories in early 2024.

General Life Updates

I've slowed down a bit after Christmas. Having Covid forced me lie around for weeks, which on balance turned out to be a good thing—sort of resetting my brain. I'm working more slowly on fewer projects, and I'm enjoying the writing process much more now.I have lots of stories on submission (20 submissions at the time of writing), and I'm content to let them trickle through the system. It's a slow time of year, which gives me plenty of time to regroup and push into the year with some exciting new projects. 

Where's Rolo?

We weren't sure if she'd enjoy this cat tree, given it was a bargain. But she does occasionally curl up and judge us from a distance.

Until next time, be good.

Best regards,

Art

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