Cause for wootage, I guess.\u00a0 (Although in my case it was a bit muted because I’ve been filling out my tax return recently and the only news that could really<\/em> cause me to whoop with joy would be the tidings that an asteroid had just flattened the taxation center at Sudbury, Ontario, where Canada’s dreams go to die.)\u00a0 But there was more.\u00a0 Within\u00a0 thirty minutes of receiving the SNCF news, Canada Post knocked at my door\u00a0 to deliver an author’s comp copy of the French sf magazine Bifrost<\/em><\/a>, in which was printed a French translation of my first-ever published story, “A Niche<\/a>” (which many of you will know as the first couple of chapters of Starfish<\/em>, with edits).\u00a0 Not just translated, either.\u00a0 Illustrated, too:<\/p>\n France, meet Lenie Clarke and Jeanette Ballard.\u00a0 Lenie & Jenny, meet France.\u00a0 I’m not sure who the artist is (the sig reads JuBD.\u00a0 Anyone?), although their vision of my apocalyptic world-destroying antihero is a bit more whimsical than my own.\u00a0 You may be surprised to learn that I’m not going to complain about the inaccuracies.\u00a0 The divergence from canon is so<\/em> radical that it’s obviously a deliberate artistic choice\u2014 these are the guys, after all, who regard Jerry Lewis as a genius\u2014 and in fact I kinda like it.\u00a0 It speaks to me in its own way, and what I hear it saying is, “Hey, you self-important humorless lemon-sucking purveyor of unrelenting grimness and despair:\u00a0 lighten up a bit, why don’t you?”<\/p>\n And I gotta say, point taken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Things are happening in France. I have been told that SNCF, that country’s national train service, wants to webcast an excerpt of Vision Aveugle from the culture wing of their (vast) web site.\u00a0 They do this on a regular basis, evidently:\u00a0 conscript some French actor or writer type to read a twenty-minute book excerpt.\u00a0 I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public-interface","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=418"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":426,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418\/revisions\/426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"uneniche\"](\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/uneniche.jpg\" "\\"uneniche\\"")
<\/p>\n