Blood Runs East by S.H. Stratman
December 11, 2022 No Comments
Blood Runs East by S.H. Stratman My rating: 4 of 5 stars I enjoyed this sanguine romp through the Hong Kong of the early 1990s.
Chris Maden
Welcome aboard.
About Chris Maden
I am and always have been a voracious reader. I’ve gone through numerous phases – Sci Fi, Fantasy, Crime Novels, what is now known as YA, and commercial and literary fiction. I also enjoy biographies, history and philosophy, and writing about writing. My favourite poets are Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats.
My books are on Amazon and Goodreads, and both replicate posts on this blog. I am the current chairman of the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle, I am sometimes asked to review books for the Hong Kong Review of Books, and the Hong Kong Free Press publishes some of my rants. I am also a (somewhat grandiosely titled) Professional Reader at Net Galley.
But although I’m a bookworm, I spend more time outside the house than in it. I’ve done blue ocean yachting, high-altitude trekking, and made some progress at aikido until I did my back in. I also torture my neighbours and the local feline population with my guitar talents.
All of this needs money and time, so instead of whoring myself out to a day job, I run my own computer consulting company in Hong Kong, where I’ve lived for my adult life. You can read about that here.
Fiction
Fiction is fuel to our greatest faculty, the imagination. To imagine something is to create an image of it in our mind. Be it James Bond extracting himself from the clutches of SPECTRE, Raskoinikov committing the perfect murder or Frodo succumbing to the lure of the one ring, fiction enlivens our world with images that are of it, yet not of it. Because those images are so intense, they deepen and enliven our understanding of the world: they take us to cultures, places and times we could never visit where we meet the people we’ve always most wanted or feared to meet. We suspend our belief only to gain deeper insight, we laugh only to have reason to cry, and we rejoice in the power of the word.
The Natural World
My father was a rock-climber and mountaineer, my mother a sailor: I got the bug early. For me, the natural world – not the “environment” – is a place of fear and promise, of escape and hope. I am constantly redefining my relationship with it, yet, looking out of my flat at the edge of the world’s most crowded square mile, I reflect on the huge portion of the world’s urban population who have no such relationship, whose lives are confined to four concrete walls and a smartphone.
Applied Philosophy
If that sounds like a term from the same lexicon as “military intelligence,” think again. “Philosophy” as a word carries a whole lot of baggage, but “critical thinking” is an activity which enables us to lead better-lived lives. When something is wrong, yet you can’t quite put your finger on why; when a speech offends you even when nothing offensive was said, when you’re asked to fill out a whole load of forms which request the same information time and again, that’s your faculty for critical thinking engaging. Mine engages a lot, and you can find out why on the blog.
Publications
Here are my books, and books to which I’ve contributed. The writers in the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle have amazing amounts of talent, and I’m proud and humbled to appear alongside them in the HKWC anthologies. And, then there is my novel – with more to follow, I hope.
Price’s Price
My first novel, a romp through the underbelly of colonial Hong Kong
More detailsMasking the City
HKWC 2020: Short stories, not about HK but about what HK is like
More detailsComing to Our Senses
HKWC 2019: Short stories of epiphanies
More detailsHong Kong High and Lows
HKWC 2018: Short stories of high places and low days
More detailsHK24
HKWC 2017: Twenty four stories each in a different hour of the day
More detailsHong Kong Future Perfect
HKWC 2016: Twenty visions of the future of Hong Kong
More details
Articles
Read More »
Via Ai Monti – Road to the Mountains!
December 15, 2022 No Comments
I would have liked, when I was recently living in the area surrounding Lake Como, to have hiked the entire trail of the Road of
Another Conspiracy Theory
June 15, 2021 No Comments
Damp squib, not a smoking gun: how Hong Kong conspiracy theorists distorted a research project
Newsletter Signup
Save yourself some time and trouble. Instead of setting up RSS feeds or remembering to check in, sign up for an occasional digest.
(The newsletter uses mailchimp, which complies with the EU GDPR. You can unsubscribe at any time, and your information will only be used by me to send you newsletters.)
Contact Me
You know what to do…