Please use the main menu links if you'd like information on my published fiction or my other projects and work as a writer of scripts for radio, film and small screen.
If you'd like to get in touch with me or my agent, details are on the contact page. If, on the other hand, you're just wondering what I've been up to recently then find me on Twitter or just read on:
Hey, I'm not here, I'm over there, on the site of urban fantasy author Nicole Peeler, talking about myth.
Here are some blogs which I think are worth a visit, some recent, some not:
John Scalzi on Why Publishing Will Not Go Away Anytime Soon. (Brilliant, funny, coruscating.)
Nicole Peeler on why Urban Fantasy matters so much. (A Scalzi connection here - this was a Big Idea on Scalzi's site.)
A great roundup of the Amazon scandal from Lilith Saintcrow, with her own cogent thoughts.
Plus today's blog from Lili; this is searingly honest and thought-provoking.
And, shameless as ever, here's a guest blog I wrote for the Orbit site.
Mercury, in colour
Image courtesy of NASA, and the Messenger spacecraft
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was one of of the great portrait painters of small town America. His paintings look like movie stills - and his style is much imitated by cinematographers. The movies Psycho and Blade Runner are both strongly influenced by Hopper's style, even to the the point of echoing specific paintings.
Hopper painted landscapes and seascapes, but his iconic pieces are cityscapes: interior and exterior images of the places where we dwell.
Imagine a jazz saxophone in the background, and taste that cherry pie:
Night Hawks
Chop Suey
Hotel Room
Summer Interior
House by the Railroad: This was the inspiration for the house in Psycho.
Last week was the week I didn't go and see The Road. I was weak - I was sure I wouldn't enjoy it! - so I bottled out and went to see a dumb SF actioner (Daybreakers) instead.
This week is the week I DID see The Road.
AARRGHH!
I'm sorry! it's a really fine film, I'm sure it is. It's had great reviews. The cast are great. It's beautifully shot. It's based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, who wrote No Country for Old Men, which I adored when the Coen Brothers made it as a movie.
But for me, movies like The Road don't tell a story; they wallow a story. The world is shit - wallow! Men can't look after their sons properly - wallow! Being miserable is really miserable - wallow!
My hatred of the film was so intense I didn't stay to the end. Does that mean I'm not entitled to sneer at it? Does it hell!
Sneer! Sneer! Sneer!
I lost the will to live when the pretty Mom gave up and walked away from her son, into the cold night, to die. Um, stick around Mom, your kid needs you! But I knew she was doing that to allow the manly man with the ridiculous beard to try and fail to look after his boyish son (known as 'the boy'). Wallow!
This is film as posh literature; it's story with the juice and heart and passion and suspense and humour and sexiness drained out of it. Mad Max is my idea of an apocalypse movie; The Road is just a wallow.
My mood of despair was heightened by the fact I saw this film as the second in a double bill of apocalypse movies. The first was The Book of Eli, in which Denzel Washington is fantastic, but where the cameraman ran out of coloured film (it's grey grey grey!) and the crux of the story is that everyone desperately wants and will kill to possess a King James Bible. Why? There must be other Bibles left; and if the world has ended, there are much better books to own. Like, The Great Big Book of which Plants Not to Eat Because They'll Kill You.
AARRGH!!!!
This is not a film critique; it is a rant. I have ranted. Enough. Calm now.
And what do you think about that business with Amazon!!!!!!
That was the buzz story of the week, and I ranted as much as the next writer. The issue is not how much e-books should sell for; the issue is that Amazon stopping selling books by writers who need the income from those books to feed their kids. Or if they don't have kids, to spend on porn or booze or wild parties, or whatever it is single people spend their money on.
That's my second rant of this blog: Mellow, Palmer, Mellow!
As a treat, I rented the box set of the TV series Fringe, which I was assured is a brilliant piece of work about paranormal stuff. Right up my street, something to fill my days now that I'm up to date on Supernatural.
Sigh. Am I missing something? I thought it was awful; an X-Files rip off with some of the most ridiculously bogus exposition I've ever heard. The high concept is that a looney called Walter (rescued from a mental institution by our female FBI hero) has single-handedly almost invented many many monstrous devices, which nastier people than he have perfected. So every time he sees an amazing thing - like the man who acts as his own power grid - Walter explains how he worked on an top-secret and evil experiment to create this very thing, all those years ago. Oh, and Walter has some form of dementia, and much hilarity is gleaned from that.
All in all it's just -
Sorry, I lack the energy to even rant on this.
And yet, rants aside, this was an adorable week for me. I wrote tons, I made new friends on that wondrous internet device, and I had the joy of hosting Lilith Saintcrow's SFF Song of the Week, which had me hooting with laughter. I've seen family, friends, and I read a wondrous graphic novel - Switchblade Honey by that genius Warren Ellis, of whom, more will be said on this very site in the near future. I wrote a blog for Orbit with the sweetly talented Robert Jackson Bennett, whose book Mr. Shivers is fine literature AND tells a story. And I was given the recording dates and a delivery deadline for my radio drama Art of Deception; and for writers, deadlines are like heroin. SUCH a rush of energy.
But in future, I will follow my instincts: life's too short to watch soul-less movies.
This week, Lilith Saintcrow, queen of evil and sexy urban fantasy, chose her SFF Song of the Week...to hear her fab and hugely popular selection, scroll down, or click on SFF Song of the Week on the Recent Posts bar to the left, or simply click here.
Also, every weekday for the next 2 weeks, my collection of SFF HEROES. Every day a different hero, male and female, who we can rely upon to save the world/universe from dark and nasty forces.
This week we've had:
Wolverine
Ripley
Clark Kent
Conan the Barbarian
and, today, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Other goodies: Astronomy Photo of the Week, Paintings of the Week, and, er, that's it.
And in the universe outside Debatable Spaces: I've been having a fascinating dialogue with Robert Jackson Bennett, author of the fascinating Mr. Shivers; and those sneaky devils at Orbit have intercepted our emails and put them on line.
To read the Palmer-Bennett dialogues click here for what I said, and here for Robert's response.
Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to find Miss Buffy Summers on my list of SFF Heroes. The heroine of Joss Whedon's seven series epic TV show has everything you'd expect in a hero - a smart mouth, a maverick attitude, a proficiency for kicking ass, and a total disrespect for authority. But she's also a generous friend, emotionally vulnerable, and keeps falling love with unsuitable guys (check the teeth first, girl!) She's also cute and dinky which, admittedly, can't be said of more traditional heroes - like Conan. (See below.) But that all adds to her appeal; huge physical strength in a small girl body.
In the course of seven series, Buffy Summers grows up, as does Sarah Michelle Gellar; it's an amazing journey to watch, and experience.
And to get you in the mood, let's start with the theme tune for the show, played by rock band Nerf Herder.
Today's SFF Hero feature is dedicated to Lilith Saintcrow, who was blogjay on this site yesterday and chose the wonderful Banned in Argo by Leslie Fish. (See below, or click SFF Song of the Week to the left or click here. Come on, come on, I can't make it any easier - find it!)
When writing the intro for her song choice, Lilith sent me an email telling me of her love for the soundtrack of Conan the Barbarian by the genius composer Basil Poledouris And this reminded me how much I love Arnie's movie of the classic Robert E. Howard tales. Never has Schwarzenegger been so muscly, so almost naked, and so utterly right for the role. (Well, except for his Terrminator role.) It's a smart, exciting, morally challenging movie, directed by John Milius who co-wrote it with Oliver Stone; and it defines Conan as the quintessential fantasy hero.
If you want to hear a bit of the soundtrack and see the trailer, click on the arrow below. Some still images follow.
Here's a brilliant, and hilarious song choice from Lilith Saintcrow, best-selling urban fantasy author, who is both prolific and inspired, and whose series protagonists include Jill Kismet and private necromance Dante Valentine. (I LOVE Dante Valentine; I also, ahem, love the wonderful books Lilith writes about her.)
Lilith Saintcrow writes:
I could sing Leslie Fish songs before I even know who Leslie Fish was. In those benighted days, while the Internet was in its dialup infancy and in any case hadn't bothered to come knocking at the doors of suburbia, one of my friends who went to Renaissance faires gave me a mix tape. Not a CD, an actual magnetic tape, that had mostly Leslie Fish and some Andreas Vollenweider and some Echo's Children. There was no track list, just the tape in a beat-up plastic case scrounged from the bottom of someone's older sister's car. I played that tape over and over again, fascinated that people were writing songs to go with fandom. I had no idea what fandom was, it was just such a revelation that other people loved these fictional worlds the way I did--and, in fact, loved them enough to write songs about them. I was utterly enchanted.
I can still remember--and sing along with--every song that was on that tape.
Cut to *mumblemumble* years later, to when the Internet has become a world-class library for fandom and I've got enough cash to pay for a high-speed connection. One day, I was humming Bones--the song Fish wrote about Dr. McCoy from Star Trek--and I thought, if I can remember the lyrics, I'll bet the Internet can tell me more.
Famous last words, right?
The jolt of joy that went through me when I realized I could buy a CD with these songs I'd been carrying in my memory is probably only comparable to the unbelieving joy I felt when I realized Echo's Children were singing in Elvish, dammit! Now I can see that my friend cherrypicked a few songs from a couple Fish albums, and that I can get to know much more of Fish's body of work. It's been like Christmas.
Still, those songs from the mix tape, lo those many years ago, stick in my head as my first love in filk. Bones. The Engineer's Hymn. And perhaps one of the funniest filk party songs ever created: Banned From Argo.
Enjoy.
When we pulled into Argo Port in need of R & R
The crew set out investigating every joint and bar
We had high expectations of their hospitality
But found too late it wasn't geared for spacers such as we
And we're banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn't want us anymore
Our captain's tastes were simple but his methods were complex
We found him with five partners each of a different world and sex
The shorepolice were on the way -- we had no second chance
We beamed him up in the nick of time in the remnants of his pants
And we're banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn't want us anymore.
Our engineer would yield to none in putting down the brew
He outdrank seven space marines and a demolition crew
The navigator didn't win but he outdrank almost all
And now they've got a shuttlecraft on the roof of city hall
And we're banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn't want us anymore
Our proper cool first officer was drugged with something green
And hauled into an alley where he suffered things obscene
He sobered up in sickbay and he's none the worse for wear
Except he somehow taught the bridge computer how to swear
And we're banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn't want us anymore
The head nurse disappeared a while in the major dope bazaar
Buying an odd green potion guaranteed to cause pon farr
She came home with no uniform and an oddly cheerful heart
And a painful way of walking with her feet a yard apart
And we're banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn't want us anymore
Our lady of communications won a ship-wide bet
By getting into the planet's main communications net
Now every time someone calls up on an Argo telescreen
The flesh is there but the clothes they wear are nowhere to be seen
And we're banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn't want us anymore
Our doctor loves humanity; his private life is quiet
The shorepolice arrested him for inciting whores to riot
We found him in the city jail, locked on and beamed him free
Intact except for hickeys and six kinds of VD
And we're banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn't want us anymore
Our helmsman loves exotic plants and the plants all love him too
He took some down on leave with him and he wondered what they'd do
The planetary governor called and swore upon his life
That a gang of plants entwined his house and then seduced his wife
And we're banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn't want us anymore
A gang of Klingons landed and nobody seemed to care
They stomped into the nearest bar to announce that they were there
Half our crew was busy therein and invited them to play
But the Klingons only looked at us and turned and ran away
And we're banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn't want us anymore
Our crew is Starfleet's finest and our record is our pride
And when we play we tend to leave a trail a mile wide
We're sorry 'bout the wreckage and the riots and the fuss
At least we're sure that planet won't be quick forgetting us
And we're banned from Argo every one
Banned from Argo just for having a little fun
We spent a jolly shoreleave there for just three days or four
But Argo doesn't want us anymore
(Wonder why')
I've never liked Superman. I enjoyed the Richard Donner movies, I've read some of the comics, but as a character he's never worked for me - because he's too powerful, hence a bit smug. Kryptonite is cleary the writers' desperate attempt to give him some vulnerability, but it doesn't wash. Superman is a lantern-jawed jock, and I kind of like it when he loses.
In Smallville, however, the young Clark Kent is a shy, insecure, sometimes awkward kid - and he really is vulnerable. He's coming to terms with his powers. He still lets his dad (initially) and his mom boss him around. He's crippled by his love for the beautiful Lana, but always get tongue tied. Clark Kent I like; Clark (as played by Tom Welling) is a hero I can identify with.
Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Alien and its sequels was the pioneer female action hero. She has no superpowers, but she's tough and ruthless, she can run like hell, she loves big guns, and boy, she's determined.
It was wonderful to see Weaver return to SF in Avatar - she's the best actor in it by far.
Once upon a time, women in SF and Fantasy stories screamed fearfully and waited for the guy with the biceps to save the day. No more; thanks to Ripley.
Wolverine is the greatest ever Marvel super-hero; and Hugh Jackman is the coolest actor in the X-Men. Tragically, however, the character has never been written for properly in the X-Men movies (in my view). And the stand-alone X-Men Origins: Wolverine is enlivened by the wonderful Liev Schreiber as Sabertooth, and is wonderfully shot by director Gavin Hood and his cinemetographer Donald McAlpine; but is still, in my view, a disappointment.
No matter; Wolverine is still the best there is at what he does. Here are some pics:
Here's a chunk of rock...the smallest object found so far in the Kuiper Belt, a circle of icy debris at the outer rim of the solar system, just beyond Neptune.
Mark Charan Newton has had some great news this week; Mark is represented by my own extraordinary agent, Mr John Jarrold.
Readers of this site will know that I'm an image junkie; take a look this week at the always great site A Dribble of Ink for some fab fantasy art covers, plus reviews.
io9 has a knowledgeable piece about the iPad and the dream of a convergence device; being a Luddite, I actually like the idea of speciality devices. A phone that takes emails is a boon for me; but I like having a computer to compute, and a telly to telly (?), and an iPod to play music. So the iPad appeals, literally, not at all. But hey, despair of me.
This site featured a Movie Zone blog about the classic movie THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL.
And, amazingly and fabulously, an SFF Song of the Week from Nicole Peeler that is so cool. Check it out, if you haven't already.
Plus, some very saucy Paintings of the Week last Sunday - check it out by going to the left of these words, finding Debatable Archives, and clicking Paintings of the Week. (So simple huh?) There are also some very nice Astronomy Photos of the Week lurking there.
Oh and my new blog on the Orbit site was this.
The beautiful painting above is by Vermeer; and it could only be by Vermeer. Even if you didn't recognise the actual painting, there's no other artist who paints domestic scenes with such care and lyrical attention to detail. Of course I'm no expert. If I were an expert I might think that this
is by Vermeer.
In fact, it's a fake painted by Hans Van Meegeren, one of the great forgers of all time, who was an inspiration for me when I wrote my radio thriller The Art of Deception. It's an incompetent and annoying piece, which doesn't look a bit like Vermeer; but that doesn't mean Van Meegeren was an idiot. Quite the opposite; his early Vermeer forgeries were very skilful, and looked pretty close to the real thing. But 'experts' dismissed them as forgeries. And so cunningly he invented a whole new style of paintings which he called early Vermeer; and his forgeries were the only surviving examples of this style.
It worked! Van Meegeren made a fortune, and he even sold a fake Vermeer to Goering.
But nothing can beat the real thing:
The Procuress
Girl with a Pearl Earring
I was in Brighton on Tuesday night to give a talk on writing for television, organised by the splendid media training group Lighthouse (I've run a number of courses for Lighthouse on creating TV drama series, which have been, to be honest, so enjoyable it almost hurts.)
My fellow guest was BBC script editor Esther Springer, who has worked on many many TV shows, including Survivors and Born and Bred, and knows more about telly than anyone I know. Esther told it as it is, and we had a lively session and a great discussion. It was a full house - about 70 people there - which shows what a passion for TV writing there is out in yon world.
Later in the week I had a meeting with ace producer Archie Tait, and we began cooking up some schemes. I also had a coffee with old friend, Dan McRae, who now has an important role in the British film industry (as head of development for a major distributor) but is as genial and entertaining as he's ever been.
Nicole Peeler's SFF Song of the Week - Sea Lion Woman by Feist - appeared on this site got a fabulous response, and I'm still getting great feedback for Al Reynolds' choice, Wings by the Fall. (Oh, and one of my screenwriting students at the London Film School loved Experiment IV, Tony Ballantyne's choice.)
I wrote a blog for Orbit - it's still there! - and a Movie Zone blog for this site about the classic SF movie THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. And I read Paul Cornell's wonderful CAPTAIN BRITAIN anthology of comics (he doesn't like the term graphic novel), featuring a Muslim superheroine. This tale blends magic and action in a truly wonderful way, and is gorgeously illustrated by Leonard Kirk.
I'm close to the end of epic space opera The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfield. I'm at that stage of not wanting it to end; but also wanted, desparately, to know The Twist. (Do NOT write in and tell me.)
My own epic space opera Hell Ship is proceeding apace, but I'm encountering a major problem: I have too many aliens! And all of them have different versions of phyics, and different terms for such things as hyperspace, teleportation and quantum physics. Damn, maybe they should all speak English.
Robert Jackson Bennett and I have been exchanging emails recently; and indeed, we may write up our thoughts in a blog. Robert's the author of the acclaimed Mr. Shivers, and he's a very smart and witty guy.
And I may - for now - be close to the FINAL DRAFT of my Welsh film Inferno. Fingers crossed.
I love movies, and I wish I'd seen them all. Or rather, all the good ones.
In pursuit of this ambition, I've been catching up on some classic movies, some of which I've seen before many times, some of which are new to me.
Today's blog is about the daddy of all SF films, the Robert Wise version of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951).
Stephen King writes about this in his wonderful book DANSE MACABRE. He compares it with the later movie EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS, an all action and terrifying tale of aliens invading Earth. Like much movie SF, he argued, EVTFS is really a horror movie; THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL by contrast, 'is one of a select handful - the real science fiction movies.' It's not, in other words, a futuristic version of a tale about the boogeyman. It's not like ALIEN, with its vagina dentata alien conjuring up primal fears that we didn't know we had. It's not about The Fear of Strangers, or of Otherness. It's a cool, careful, masterly dissection of what shits humans are, and how and why aliens are right to fear us.
This makes TDTEST sound rather cool and academic; but in fact, it's an amazingly taut film. I was delighted, in fact, to find that - despite a small special effects budget, and the incredibly over-precise diction of all the characters, that it's not a dated or 'old-fashioned' kind of classic SF movie that is better left dust-covered in the archives. Admittedly, the space suit worn by Klaatu the alien looks as if it was retained by some skinflint in order to be re-used by Cybermen in the sandpit in the early Dr Who eps. And the interior of the ship is sadly inadequate compared to the Tardis. But this film is, I discover, a masterpiece of suspense.
The plot, briefly, and without I hope too many spoilers: An alien spaceship lands on Earth
and a humaniform alien called Klaatu (Michael Rennie) emerges, accompanied by a huge robot, Gort. Klaatu comes in peace, but is treated with hostility by the authorities. And his attempt to summon a meeting of the leaders of the world is snubbed. So he escapes and - after befriending a young boy and her mother - explains to a kindly Professor with hair issues that the Earth is in deadly peril.
That's all I can say - if you haven't already, see the film! - but the genius of this movie is how much is achieved by the simple act of Defining the Peril. We know the Earth will be in dire danger unless certain things occur; and knowing that is enough. It's the opposite of 2012, where we have to SEE houses fall down, cars fall into the sea, planes fall from the sky, people dying horribly, in such graphic detail that it becomes, pretty quickly, a bit ordinary. (What! Only a hundred people just died! - what a yawn!)
Here the jeopardy is defined; the clock is set ticking; and it's terrifying. I was literally on the edge of my seat in the climactic sequence. Okay, the robot is not that scary - it has zappy eyes like Cyclops, but that's all it does - but we know what it might do. And because its potential power is so awesome, its very presence terrifies.
All this artfulness is of course - at one crude level - a result of budgetary constraints. Even in 1951 audiences liked action, not chat; spectacle, not thoughtful speculation. But with limited resources, director Robert Wise and writer Edmund H. North (working from a story by Harry Bates) dug deep into their bag of storytelling tricks and made us fear a man who does nothing malicous, at all, in the course of the entire film. But though he's courteous, and pleasant, Klaatu is an utterly cold and decisive character. If he has to kill, he will kill, and he will kill vast numbers of those who deserve to die.
Gulp.
For Klaatu is a rational being; and his rationality is the source of his scariness. You can't reason with him; because he's right. And you can't defy him; because, as the setpiece sequence of the movie proves, his power, casually executed, utterly dwarfs that of the humble Earthlings.
The music is another key element of this movie. Composer Bernard Herrman - who also wrote the scores for many of Hitchcock's great suspense thrillers including PSYCHO, as well as providing the music for THE TWLIGHT ZONE and some of the 1960s LOST IN SPACE - creates a chilling, haunting soundscape of singing voices and jagged orchestral crescendos. It's a style that's often imitated, but I have to say I don't think I've ever seen/heard a movie with such a brilliantly tense score. The opening sequence, when the spaceship lands and the tanks take their position, is utterly nervejangling, like having someone run a cold knife blade down your spine to test how thick the skin is.
At other times, the film IS dated. There's a lot of talky stuff, the girl (played by Patricia Neal) is very much the typical 'pretty, good Mom' character you always see in 50s movies. The army briefing scenes have a static, expository quality. And, even in 1951, what Mom would let a total stranger wander off with her kid...?
But for much of the time, Wise and North show remarkable adroitness in the way in which they use newscasters and telephone operators and soldiers in jeeps to convey a rich, busy universe of action, without spending too much money.
I saw this movie on a lovely collector's edition DVD which I bought last year at Eastercon, in that wonderful little stall on the far right. As always, I bought a bunch of old movies thinking, 'I must watch these some day.' Fortunately, that day, for this movie, was yesterday.
Did you know? (I know you did):
The band Klaatu, named after the alien in this movie, wrote the song 'Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft'.
The 2008 remake (a stinker, allegedly) stars Keanu Reeves, who actually IS an alien!
Here's a truly fabulous song choice from urban fantasy author Nicole Peeler, whose debut novel Tempest Rising is a witty and sensual thriller about a selkie in New England. Nicole is a Professor in her spare time (!), but wears her learning lightly. I love selkies, and have spent a lot of time in Scotland where they mostly live. And I always thought that selkies would kick the asses of vampires and werewolves; and so it proves.
Nicole Peeler writes:
Hello! Nicole Peeler, here. For those (ten) of you who know me, you know that I write for Orbit books, much like Philip. Only I write the dreaded . . . urban fantasy! Now, I am well aware that there is an element of more hard core sci-fi/fantasy readers who think urban fantasy consists of a bunch of women dressed like leather daddies running around with swords, alternately decapitating monsters and bonking vampires.
And, admittedly, this description is often accurate.
That said, I write a slightly different kind of urban fantasy. I write UF that’s based on my love of mythology, and one of my all-time favorite myths is that of the selkie. The very first time I read a selkie myth--I think I was twelve--I was transfixed. And not only with the beautiful selkie maiden, but especially with the idea of the half human children she inevitably leaves behind after finding her seal skin and returning to the sea.
Ultimately, these selkie legends are very much ones of victimization. The selkie maid is victimized when her skin is stolen; the human husband is victimized when his wife leaves him (and sometimes, if rarely, he doesn’t understand why because he never understood the import of the skin he’d found); and the children are victimized by losing their mother.
Which leads me to Feist, and her song, “Sea Lion Woman.” In many ways, this song is the delicious, grrrrl power, feminist answer to the selkie myth. For unlike her selkie cousin, the seal woman, Feist’s “Sea Lion Woman” is anything but a victim. Just drinking a cup of tea, she makes a rooster crow!
And you know what else they call a rooster. . .
I imagine Feist’s sea lion woman as the Black Widow version of my beloved selkie myth. The seal woman takes off her skin, and some man comes and steals it. The sea lion woman, however, takes off her skin, dons some pretty dresses and she does the calling, hoping the men who answer know what to do. And the ones who don’t? They get a knife in the back.
Those sea lion women are fierce, yo.
Sea lion woman
She drink coffee
Sea lion woman
She drink tea
And a rooster crows
Sea lion woman
She drink coffee
She drink tea
And a rooster crows
Sea lion woman
Dressed in red
Smile at the man
When you wake up in his bed
Sea lion woman
Dressed in black
Wink at the man
Then stab him in his back
Sea lion woman
She drink coffee
She drink tea
And a rooster crows
Sea lion woman
Dressed in white
Marry the man
And you'll spend a long sweet life
Sea lion woman
Dressed in green
Silver lining and golden seams
Sea lion woman
Dressed in blue
Call on the man
And hope he knows what he can do
Sea lion...
Sea lion woman
She drink coffee
She drink tea
And a rooster crows
Sea lion woman
She drink coffee
She drink tea
And a rooster crows
Sea lion woman
Dressed in the blue
Call on the man
And hope he knows what he can do
Sea lion woman
Dressed in red
Smile at the man
When you wake up in his bed
Sea lion woman....
My latest Orbit blog is here.
Alastair Reynold's choice for SFF Song of the Week is here.
Last week's blogjay was Tony Ballantyne, who choose this.
And this whole feature started with a song I often listen to while running on the treadmill at the gym, and dreaming of space.