The stuff what I done in 2024

This has been an oddly exhausting year, although it feels like I haven’t done as much as usual.

Partly that’s because for the first time in two decades I have spent most of the year without publishing contracts or other writing commitments, so there’s been less external pressure to slog on through stuff. Plus I dug deep and eventually found the good sense to walk away from a potential project. And I also had to pull out of three conferences  (one for political reasons, two for health reasons) but in each case did so early enough to steer the replacement invitations to others every bit as, if not more, qualified than me, apart from not being middle-aged white guys.

Also, everything slowed down and became more complicated because we had builders working on the house for nearly four months, and then in November my still-undiagnosed-after-a-decade seizures returned, with a longer tail of fatigue and sludgy cognitive processing. (To add to the fun, NHS Wales has no access to NHS England records, so they know nothing in terms of the results of previous neurological and cardiological investigations. Which means I am right back at the start of the whole process, with a slew of hospital visits to look forward to in the new year.)

But it was also the year in which we got a pair of Indian runner ducks, Sarah Jane and Servalan, who lived in the house with us from the age of five days until their feathers came through properly six or seven weeks later, shitting everywhere and insisting on trying to stand on our shoulders to make us look like particularly crap pirates. With duck crap down their backs. (Thanks Dave and Daisy for bringing them home to us, and for unexpectedly turning them into a housewarming gift from the world’s oldest continuously operating video store.)

And it was, as that parenthesis skilfully foreshadows, the year in which we belatedly had our housewarming party.

It was also the year in which, in the same week, I got to introduce a 50th anniversary IMAX screening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and to meet John Sayles and Maggie Renzi (sort of). Oh, and we went to a party with Keanu Reeves (sort of, but in a different way).

Thanks to an invitation from Sarah Lohmann to speak about cinema, time-travel and sf for the Speculative Temporalities Literaturwissenschaftliches Kolloquim at ETH Zürich, we got to spend an April week in Switzerland, during which I could have died on an alp from my own stupidity and we saw, an hour later in an unrelated incident, an avalanche.

Thanks to a bunch of invitations from Jaak Tomberg (initially via David Hartley), we got to spend a May week in Estonia, mostly Tartu, where I: 

  • gave a paper on 150 climate fiction short stories at SFRA 2024: Transitions (the above-mentioned wisely abandoned project I’d backed myself into for the conference I ended up pulling out of for political reasons)
  • hosted an event with Cory Doctorow on the enshittification of the internet (for The Grand Futurological Congress literary festival)
  • gave a reading from The Anthropocene Unconscious and, embarrassed by quite how long I’ve been dining out on that book (whether counted from the 2016 Cardiff keynote where I first started talking about the Anthropocene or the 2018 Liverpool keynote where I first presented a version of the book’s key idea to a room full of people), also read the first three paragraphs, written that morning, hopefully my next book, Climate Monsters (for Translation Agency, the guerilla programming running alongside the literature festival)
  • was interviewed, along with Amy Cutler and David M. Higgins by the Estonian equivalent of the BBC (at least, that’s how it was described to me)

And thanks to María Abizanda Cardona, I spent a couple of October hours in Spain (sadly only virtually) in conversation with the Association for American Studies/ Sociedad española para el estudio de los Estados Unidos de América Young Scholars Reading Group at the University of Zaragoza.

Late 2023 and early 2024 were taken up with line-editing, copy-editing and proof-reading a pair of edited volumes with old friends, both of which were then published within a couple of months, which is freakily swift and rather disorienting for academic publishing:

I suspect the latter is the last book I will ever do with a for-profit academic press – Routledge have always been okay to work with apart from the outrageous exploitation of authors/editors and the sometime shoddy subcontracting of production work, but I’m just so fed up and disgusted with the whole sector’s naked profiteering and increasingly obvious lack of interest in the content of what they publish. So I’m kinda done with that, I guess.

I also

  • wrote my first ever introduction to a graphic novel, the English translation of Kateřina Čupová’s adaptation R.U.R.: The Karel Čapek Classic (Rosarium 2024)
  • published a review of ‘Steven Rawle, Transnational Kaiju: Exploitation, Globalisation and Cult Monster Movies’, Transnational Screens 15.1 (2024): 118–119
  • drafted a chapter on contemporary dystopian cinema, with which I remain deeply dissatisfied but hopeful that my editor and fellow contributors can help me figure out why it doesn’t work – and how to fix it
  • examined Tom Andrews’s PhD, Climate Change in Anthropo-Temporal Quasi-Fantasy and New Weird Fiction (Anglia Ruskin University 2024).

I have also been a guest on three Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever podcasts – on King Kong, Flash Gordon and The Creature from the Black Lagoon – and am currently sidling up to doing prep for a different podcast series to talk about Solaris and for my first ever DVD extra, where I will be talking about…oh, wait, I’m not supposed to tell anyone about that yet…

On 17 May, I introduced Georgiy Daneliya’s bonkers Kin-dza-dza! for Forbidden Worlds festival at Bristol Megascreen, and on 21 July Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at Dale and Tucker vs. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: A Double Bill of Hicksploitation Classics for Horror Without End/Forbidden Worlds at Bristol Megascreen (21 July) – and just four days later (25 July) I finally met John Sayles. Sort of.

I was supposed to meet him back in the late 2000s for a TV thing back when I was writing The Cinema of John Sayles: Lone Star but that fell through. And then I was supposed to do a live on-stage event with him for the UK premiere of the 4K restoration of Matewan, but Covid hit and he caught it and the festival was cancelled for lockdown anyway. But now finally, albeit via Zoom, I was going to interview him and Maggie Renzi for 15 minutes at the Cinema Rediscovered festival at the Watershed directly before the UK premiere of the 4K restoration of Lone Star (the first of his films I actually saw in a cinema, back in 1996).

So I’m sat there, at the front of an absolutely packed cinema, with half a minute to go, when the tech guy comes down for one final check of my mic, and says ‘You know he’s still not there, but Maggie’s happy to go ahead with it anyway’.

Reader, this was the first I’d heard of John’s absence. Apparently, he was out playing basketball (he’s 73!) but was on his way back and would join us – and no sooner than I’d been told this than it was time to begin.

Fortunately, I’m so fucking woke I’d already planned for my first question to be for Maggie. Who was beyond fabulous. And we had fifteen minutes of fun. The crowd loved it. And then sadly it was time to wrap up.

And I was just about to say “Sadly, it’s time to wrap up” when suddenly John appears in the background in a basketball shirt and the kind of tiny tiny shorts you see him wearing in photos back in the 1970s and 1980s, prompting some discussion later as to whether he was actually wearing any. I’ve checked the footage: he was, but it was all a bit Basic Instinct, especially when – 16 minutes into a 15 minute interview – he Will Rikered over the back of the chair next to Maggie. There was just time to ask one question: while you’re still obviously active as a writer, it’s been 11 years since Go For Sisters, so is there ever going to be another John Sayles movie?

Which is when, at Maggie’s prompting, he told us about the western they hope to start filming in February. Based on a pulp story from the 1920s (presumably unearthed while researching his new novel, To Save the Man, due out next month). Shot on Leone’s old sets in Spain. With Chris Cooper. All they needed was a saleable name to play the younger cowboy and the money would fall into place…

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