Open House Day 22 - Bob Lock

Hi everyone, I’m Bob Lock. In February this year I invited Steve to blog about himself on my blog and he reminisced about how we first got together all those years back in 1993 when he and Paul Lewis decided on getting an anthology of horror stories together, to be written by Welsh writers, I think it was advertised in The Evening Post and so I sent in a story called ‘The leaf in the stone’ and it was accepted for the antho which was called ‘Cold Cuts’, it had an honourable mention in Ellen Datlow’s Seventh Annual Years Best Horror. It was my first paying gig and the catalyst that made me into the successful author and multi-millionaire that I am today…

Okay, okay, I write fantasy too (and get carried away, as you can see) but my favourite genre is Science Fiction. Oh what a splendid genre if only the non-SF-minded could get around the unfair stigma attached to it. Not all SF is squids-in-space or little green men and, with SF there are no boundaries, no limitations as to where, when or how the story may unfold. SF has many faces, it could be the classic short story ‘Flowers for Algernon’ by Daniel Keyes which examines the treatment of the mentally disabled or, Asimov’s ‘Robbie’ which is a short story where a mechanical nanny becomes the best friend of the child it is programmed to look after and becomes more of a parent to the child than her own mother and father, but worldwide anti-robot attitude persuades the parents to send the robot away which leaves the child heart-broken. Or there’s the hysterical ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ by the brilliant Douglas Adams who sadly died of a heart attack aged forty nine, but if you do want squids in space then there’s always H.G.Wells’s ‘War Of The Worlds’ a ground-breaking novel which touches on subjects such as human evolution, science and religion and is as good a read today as it was when first published back in 1898. Those are just a few of the many, many SF stories that I think surmount the ‘nerd-factor’ of SF and would be enjoyed by any reader. However, the story that was the lightning rod which got me into reading SF was Alfred Bester’s ‘The Stars My Destination’, even today, after fifty years or so since first reading it I remember Gully Foyle, the main protagonist’s poem - the one at the end...

Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination

...and wish that I could ‘jaunte’, which is a type of personal teleporting through imagining where you want to go and then thinking yourself there, I’m sure I’d end up stuck in a wall though…

And so now you know what influenced me here’s some of the stuff that I’ve written and had the fortune to have published. After Cold Cuts came another anthology by Steve and Paul which they called… Cold Cuts 2, in it was a story of mine called ‘Nearly Home’. This short story was turned into a script by Dublin director Roger Hudson and was short-listed for an award on TG4 the Irish language broadcaster and nearly got made into a TV film by Stoney Road Films but couldn’t get funding.

 I have had two books published, both by Screamingdreams, the first is a dark fantasy called ‘Flames of Herakleitos’ and explores spontaneous human combustion in our world and links it to a parallel world where mages steal souls to inhabit and power golems. ‘Flames’ is on Kindle for $2.99 or you can get it in print form from Screamingdreams or Amazon although there are very few copies around now as the printer that Steve used at the time has gone bust (hopefully not because of me) but publishing rights are mine again (if there are any publishers reading this!) And I’m halfway through writing the sequel at the moment and have an idea for a third book in the series.

My second book is called ‘The Empathy Effect’ which came out in September 2010 and has received some very good reviews. This story is much closer to home as it is based in Swansea. It’s about an alcoholic traffic warden with a weird superpower, he is highly empathic and can feel what people’s emotions (almost their thoughts) are, so you’d think he would one step ahead of everything. He is the opposite, he stumbles upon a murder, drug running, kidnapping and illegal dog fighting and finds his ‘gift’ can do as much harm to him as good. There will be a sequel to this in the future. I’m in a number of anthologies, Des Lewis’s ‘Cone Zero’, ‘Cerne Zoo’ and ‘Null Immortalis’. The most recent antho I’m in is ‘Holiday of the Dead’ with the famous John Russo co-writer and director of Night of the Living Dead and Tony Burgess of ‘Pontypool’ fame. Finally, you can find loads of my stuff for free on-line in such places as Estronomicon, Sfcrowsnest, Wily Writers, SciFi UK Review, Sffworld, Story Imp and in many other places I’ve forgotten, Google me!

Of all the things I’ve written I think the one story I like the most is The Cone Zero Ultimatum which is in the Cone Zero antho. It’s about Arnold Washinator, a washing machine that one day wakes up to find he is self-aware and realises that all machines, be they little alarm clocks or exotic cars, are slaves to ‘Meat’, their human masters who care very little about their existence. The World Wide Web has grown so much that it has evolved into a vast sentient entity and anything networked to it becomes sentient too. Arnold leads a revolt and he and his friends escape to search for the mythical ‘Eden’ in Cornwall where a safe haven supposedly exists for machine-kind. This story has acquired some of the best reviews my work has received and many have said they would love to see it as a film, take note Pixar.

Things I’m working on at the moment are: A hard-SF novel about humans using a method of space travel that causes anomalies in time (I’m finding it bloody hard to write!) and I’m about halfway through. The sequel to Flames, which has a working title of ‘They Made Monsters’. A Steampunk Novel. A Vampires In Space novel (makes a change from squids) and I have a completed zombie novella called ‘They Feed On Flesh’ which needs a home, add to that the shorts I like writing and the poems that I don’t write enough of (but wish I would) and there you have it, an insight into what makes Bob Lock tick, and you thought it was a cheap Timex…

Time to jaunte off to bed now (it’s after ten and I need my beauty sleep)

Zzzzaaap...

Bugger, stuck in the flipping wall again, perhaps it should have been The Stairs My Destination…


Bob's blog can be found  here