Long delayed and long anticipated (by me, if no one else) the launch of my short story collection, Neon Leviathan, happened last week. There’s little to report, other than it all went well and afterwards, everybody bought me drinks. Is there a happier story that that?
Canberra, Australia, still has COVID-19 restrictions even though we’ve been lucky enough not to have any community transmission in months. This meant the launch was smaller than I’d have liked. What would I have liked?
Well, that every friend, writer comrade, high-school buddy, Kumdo confederate, and random stranger had attended. That would have been a blast. As it was, we were limited to twenty-five people in a wine bar. It was still a blast, albeit a smaller one. A large pop, perhaps.
More than twenty-five people ended up attending, so we (my friend and author Kaaron Warren), livestreamed the author talk to the people who had to sit outside the bar. That was somewhat frustrating but also completely appropriate to a cyberpunk collection: livestreaming discussion of a collection 
that critiques the power of mega-corporations, using software created by a venal mega-corporation that has used a global pandemic to enhance its power and reach.
Perfect.
I ended the formal part of the launch (the talking part, which took place before that far superior drinking part), with a reflection on memory. As a character says in one of the stories: everything is memory, save the thin edge of the present.
I noted that 2020 had been a long year. You may have noticed. I’ve heard people joke: 2020 is the longest decade hahaha.
But they may be more right than they imagine. Memories are formed by new experiences, by the vivid or the new or the shocking. People say time flies when you’re having fun, but they’re wrong. From the perspective of memory, time slows down when you have fun, because you form a memory of it.
You know the type of year when you go to the office or to your regular job, get stuck in a routine, where nothing much happens and you turn around and suddenly it’s December? We’ve all had those years. Those years move fast because there is so little to remember. We don’t have much to look back on.
This year feels like five years, or more, because we’ve formed so many new memories. We’ve lived – and are living through – a global pandemic. In Australia we started the year with 
environmental catastrophe, in the form of the worst bushfires in history. In Canberra where I live, we had the most polluted air in the world for weeks, the city shrouded in thick smoke. I couldn’t leave the house without having an asthma attack. This place felt like a scene from Blade Runner 2049 – orange, abandoned, dust covered.
A lot of us home-schooled for the first time. Learned a whole bunch of new technologies so we could work from home. A lot of us lost jobs (I did).
It was also an election year in the US, you may have noticed. Even here in Australia it received blanket coverage. There were moments where it felt like social divisions in America would boil over into something far more serious and destructive.
And so, everywhere in the world things are new and vivid and sometimes scary. So yes, we’ve formed many new memories and the year has stretched on and on.
The launch, however, was a good memory. It was my first and therefore something that will stick in my mind. It made my year longer, but also just that little bit better.
Now, on a more material level: if you want a signed copy of the collection, all is not lost. Contact me here: voight0kampff (AT) gmail.com.
Paperbacks are 20, Hardbacks 30. Postage in Australia is about 10 bucks. Elsewhere is a fair bit more. I’ll sign, inscribe, and send it out to you.
Just in time for Christmas.
