Pendragon Chapbooks

[ChrisT]

With the in-all-but-name-closure of Triquorum, all accepted tales will become single chapbooks... Gingerbread and For You Faustine were free giveaways at previous FCon's, and earlier this year The Red House was published. At the Covention this year, I shall be inveiling Angel of the Silences by Simon Bestwick and The Legend of False Dreaming by Toiya Kiristen Finlay - both at the very reasonable £3.

As for Triquorum, it will be returning...

[iamacanadian]

HOORAY!

[ChrisT]

... and in case you haven't noticed, you can now purchase a PDF edition of each of the chapbooks for a princely sum of a quid. One pound sterling.

[Roy]

Dominic Green who has had more than 20 stories in Interzone, been nominated for a Hugo (The Clockwork Atom Bomb) and made Gardner Dozois' Year's Best selections at least twice has posted his review of Roy Gray's Pendragon Chapbook The Joy of Technology on his (Dominic's) Facebook page. So I've extracted it and posted it here for you.

Finally had a chance to read *The Joy of Technology* by Roy Gray in full, and it is indeed very, very rude. Being an SF story about the future of sex aids, though, it's going to be, and the rudeness never feels gratuitous. I found the story engaging, the characters well drawn, the jokes funny, and the setting depressingly realistic (the sort of father you don't want to have giving his son the sort of coming-of-age present a father shouldn't give).

Complaints? A couple of German spelling mistakes, and a lack of hyphens and commas in appropriate places (at one point the story referred to 'flat speaker panels cum projector screens', and given the subject matter, I found myself wondering what manner of device a cum projector might be). I'm afraid, though, that reality has overtaken art as far as Manchester City are concerned - Roy evidently didn't consider it possible at the time of writing that the Blues might dominate the Reds. Football, like lightspeed experiments under the Alps, has proven JBS Haldane right - the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we *can* imagine.

Roy's half-page apology for being rude at the beginning of his rude story was also very sweet.

[Roy]

And here is is part of Peter Tennants review of The Joy of Technology from his Case Notes reviews in Black Static 25. I have 'censored' it by removing a passage that might cause discomfort for some and cut it for copyright reasons.

....by 2019 the world seems to have recovered from its zombie problems just in time for TTA PR man Roy Gray to introduce us all to THE JOY OF TECHNOLOGY (Pendragon Press chapbook, 35pp, £3), and those who are easily shocked should take note that this is a sexually explicit work, very much so in fact.

Young Dennis’ estranged father is doing some bonding by taking his son to see their team play in Dusseldorf, and as a special treat before the match he takes him to ‘prap’ club The Joy of Technology. ‘Prap’ club, you say. What’s one of those? ......

It’s an intriguing idea, ... Gray doesn’t stint on showing how this kind of ‘adult’ entertainment could play out in the real world, but there’s a serious side to the story. ... Dennis is treated to an experience that he isn’t mature enough to place in any proper context, and the boy’s attitude to the opposite sex is completely changed by what he undergoes... and this is where I have reservations about the work. There is certainly a dialogue to be had on ways in which the sex industry is demeaning to women and the possible effects of sexually explicit material on impressionable minds, but in this particular scenario the change was simply too abrupt and dramatic to be convincing. Regardless, while I feel Gray overstates the case, there is no denying that he does so eloquently and with a powerful message about the ways in which technology is alienating us from each other, ...and the dangers that could lie in wait.