Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Scott's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Wednesday, January 1st, 2020
6:22 am	Aloha. Hark, unto you an online journal is born. I do not automatically delete anonymous posts. In fact, I don't even automatically delete critical anonymous posts. But I certainly will automatically delete any cowardly, weak-sauce personal attack posted anonymously. If you're not going to attach an identity to your statements to back them up in some fashion, you might as well not even bother being a dick- your worthless scrawl is just going to vanish. Otherwise, enjoy.
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
12:46 am	THE VOYAGE OF THE SPACE BEAGLE by A.E. van Vogt It's been a while since I bored into a book like a hopped-up literary woodpecker, so here's some brain spillage originally written last year and never posted. Left: "Black Destroyer," 1939 Right: Current edition from Orb Books. Hot jets, Kinnison! What a jaunt in the way-back machine this is. I first became aware of The Voyage of the Space Beagle via Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials as a kid, and once again waited a mere two decades before reading the source material. At this rate, I'll have all of my seventh-grade math homework turned in by December, 2013. Voyage is a 1950 fix-up of four previously published short stories, forming a loosely chronological account of the titular Space Beagle's multi-year exploration beyond the confines of the Milky Way. Its thousand-man crew, chemically castrated for the duration to keep their minds firmly on Doing Science, is preyed upon by a series of increasingly dangerous creatures, and must also deal with internal pressures, scientific disputes, and a case of dreaded SPACE MADNESS. The Voyage of the Space Beagle was influential as all hell, out of proportion to what's actually on the page. Philip K. Dick claimed van Vogt as a major influence; so did Harlan Ellison. You can see it here, a distinct flavor that was carried into Ellison's early SF work. You can also see this book's profound effect on Star Trek, with its strange planets, predatory aliens, and mysterious threats to the ship. Van Vogt even took legal action against the producers of the 1979 movie Alien, a suit that was settled out of court, based on arguable similarities between xenomorphs and his own egg-implanting Ixtl. Voyage is an affable relic of the Big Science Done Big era of SF. The ship jaunts about at hyperluminary speeds, courtesy of Whoosh-Zoom engines powered by authorial whim. There are all the expected toys... gigantic heat-rays, semi-portable atomic furnaces, visiplates, vibrator guns. It has the same ludicrous-but-lovable feel of Doc Smith's Lensmen series, where scientific progress is almost always just a matter of dumping more power into a bigger thingamajig (if you yelled "BUS BARS!" just now, bless you). What it isn't, curiously enough, is a true log of a voyage and its voyagers. The episodic nature of the story would be less stark if there were some context provided, some glimpse of home, some notion of how the Space Beagle compares to anything else humanity is doing. Exploring vacuum in a vacuum is not as interesting as it could be. No real narrative integument was provided when these short stories were stitched into the vague shape of a novel. Also, the real heart of the book, for which the voyage is merely a framing device, is how an advanced interdisciplinary approach to the sciences called Nexialism proves the best solution to each of the Beagle's challenges when the more stratified and traditional sciences allegedly fall short of the big picture. This is all well and good as far as hobbyhorses go, but it would have helped the story if some of the solutions implemented to fend off each alien attack weren't so conveniently dim-witted. For example, in the novel's first major incident, adapted from the short story "Black Destroyer," a panther-like creature called coeurl feigns harmlessness to get aboard the Beagle. Coeurl is actually a ravenous, ultra-strong, life-draining predator, with the ability to detect and manipulate energy using whisker-like appendages. It can neutralize the deadly force of human weapons, a fact the humans realize once the thing is on the loose and killing people. So, when coeurl (constantly referred to by the men as "pussy")* locks itself in the Beagle's engine spaces, what do they do? Do they even attempt to poison it? To asphyxiate it? Nope. They wheel out their gigantic heat-ray projectors and start melting their way into the engine room. Yes. To deal with an energy-manipulating creature, they hurl more energy at it! While it's mucking with the ship's engines, no less. The Beagle is described as having a truly impressive workshop capacity, but even so, you'd think the notion of blasting apart your own engine compartment when your ship is thousands of light-centuries from home would give sober and non-libidinous men pause. What do they expect to do if they melt their propulsion center, break out the oars? There is also a puzzlingly gimlet-eyed overuse of purely speculative social science (though van Vogt deserves props for making his social scientist, Korita, Japanese in a time when the Japanese were not exactly sympathetically portrayed in much American media). Korita is constantly brought on stage to speculate on the social structure and cultural foibles of the singular aliens the Beagle encounters, always in the complete absence of any shred of context or evidence. Yet Korita is made to accurately diagnose potential weaknesses in the hearts and minds of these creatures (nobody even brings up the possibility that these entities might be outcast or atypical) This ain't science, even in a context that generously allows for atomic rayguns and Whoosh-Zoom engines. It's bullshit without a scaffold. Despite this, The Voyage of the Space Beagle still moves smoothly across the eyeballs in a way too many of its contemporaries couldn't aspire to even when they were fresh. It's reasonable and penetrable fun; penetrable, perhaps, because it had such a hand in defining a certain geometry of space opera still quite familiar to us decades later. Damon Knight was often criticized for his perceived harshness toward van Vogt's work, but I think Knight judged fairly in 1950 when he wrote: "...this department's thesis on van Vogt is (a) that the man has a very respectable talent as a writer, and (b) that he consistently misuses it." Van Vogt operated energetically in both the thoughtful and thoughtless modes of invention, and if he fell short of constructing mature narratives, at least he had the ability to occasionally evoke real feelings of mystery and awe. ***** *It is an exceptionally juvenile cheap shot, I admit, but it's difficult to keep a straight face at frequent reference to how the voyagers "beat pussy" and "chased pussy off the ship." They're two million light-years from the nearest woman and drenched in libido-deadening drugs; no shit they chased pussy off the ship. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 18th, 2012
7:03 pm	Bullet Points of Interest I am not playing Diablo III. I don't have much time for a new game at the moment (which is also why I'm not playing The Old Republic), but I'm pretty sure I could have found some intermittent pockets of time... if not for the fact that the game's DRM requires constant online connection, even for solitaire play, making it vulnerable not only to the usual bugs and tribulations of new software but to fluctuations in connectivity at both ends of the line (and indeed, the launch-day strain on Battle.net wasn't pretty). I hear expectedly good things about the gameplay, but I don't have any interest in adding copious amounts of extra teeth-grinding to my entertainment choices when I can help it. This isn't "a sense of entitlement" issue. When did the notion of not bending over for masochistic random aggravation in the course of our amusements become suspect? My copy of Skyrim doesn't jump out of my XBox 360 every time someone at Bethesda accidentally nudges a server. The Amber novel I was reading last night didn't burst into flames if I ceased to maintain psychic contact with Roger Zelazny's ghost. You say you've got a game that offers all the technological aggravations of an MMO, all the time, even when I'm not receiving any of the benefits? I say that makes my bookshelves look even more attractive than usual. En Taro Adun, Blizzard. For the first time since 1995, I'm watching one of your trains pull out of the station without me on it. Hey, that girl I like, booksmith extraordinaire Elizabeth Bear, has another delightful thingy freshly available. It, too, will not become unreadable when your internet connection goes down. Bear and I will be at WisCon 36 next weekend! I am not doing any panels or formal events (save for the mass signing thingy on Monday), but I have volunteered to be a dutiful bar-gnome at the CHICKS DIG COMICS launch party, in room 634 from 9 PM Saturday until Jesus-It's-Late-AM Sunday. Also: CHICKS DIG COMICS. Buy one. Read it. Use it to swat people who don't fucking get the picture. Just don't aim for their heads; the skulls are usually too thick for physical attacks to have any effect. At said WisCon, I will be handing over some papers to the awesome Lynne Thomas, and thereby taking my first step into the dark recesses of the SFWA Collection at Northern Illinois State University. It will not be a terribly exciting archive at first, but NIU will be the place to go in the future if you're a scholar wishing to be thoroughly bored by my manuscripts, juvenilia, and detritus. This is the first year in which I'm going to be attending a Worldcon, and also the first year in which I'm going to be voting on the Hugos. Much of that near-future time I'm not spending swearing at my internet connection will be spent dutifully reading the voters' packet material, which just became available. I am thoroughly impressed with just how quickly the more egregiously, obviously comprehension-challenged responses to John Scalzi's "Lowest Difficulty Setting" piece began to resemble rants from the motherfucking TIME CUBE guy. YOU ARE EDUCATED STUPID, JOHN SCALZI! Pro Tip: Time Cube Guy is not an emulational model. If you find your arguments resembling his in tone and coherence, back away from your keyboard. Apply vodka liberally to all unsoused brain nodules. When you awaken, open an account at the nearest clue store. I wish I could tell you a Very Neat Thing. Actually, I have three specific Very Neat Things I am kinda dying to announce. One is good to spill the beans on, one is nearly so, and one is still under publicity embargo. I'd kinda like to be able to spill more than one simultaneously, though, so let's hope I get some directions this coming week. Hints? You want hints? You have me confused with GRRM. I wish my bank account had me confused with GRRM. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 4th, 2012
1:19 am	Flat Box Furniture From Big Box Stores A little free verse ditty composed the last time I brought home an endtable requiring "minimal assembly." Dusted off for Cherie Priest, and for everyone who brings their furniture home in flat, heavy boxes. ***** TO THE MAN WHO DESIGNED THE TABLE I JUST ASSEMBLED Oh, it's death for you, my boy but not for a good long time. An elastic interval, shall we say, between points A and B where B is the furnace, and A a fine assortment of power tools. Yes, we're going to have some words, you and I Though whether they'll come before or after the piranha is an open question. I like to give my whims room to breathe. See, I never understood how events might conspire to make a supervillain but congratulations! I’m fresh from the forge. With hex wrench imprints on nine fingers. In fact, if I ever see another piece of lacquered particleboard ever again I'm going to punch a baby dolphin to death. Yes. And take the corpse to a childrens' hospital. And give it to a kid hooked up to a dialysis machine. Because it's not like he'll be able to run away. Not easily. By the way, when I said piranha you thought I meant tank? I meant solution. Seems I spent my aquatic horror budget on the blue-ringed octopus. Expensive! You wouldn't think you could slip such a thing through customs (and honestly you're not supposed to) but have you ever read Bruce Schneier's blog? Edifying stuff. Anyhow, pay attention now As this concerns you: My Allen Wrenches have just come white-orange off the fire and tied up like that, you look like a table. So much like a table. In very serious need of tightening. (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
12:04 am	What We Talk About When We Talk About Bear (II) So here I am in the lovely northeast, staying with the lovely girlfriend for a few weeks. Duty and Anxiety have collaborated on a performance piece called "Let's Fuck Up Scott's Desire to Post to His LJ," but tonight I'm shuffling those two anthropomorphized concepts off the stage and getting posty with it. I wanted to unroll a little bit more about Elizabeth Bear's work in relation to Range of Ghosts, with an observation about her stuff in general: One of the most telling things about an author's body of work is where their gaze keeps settling. Bear chooses time and time again to peer closely at characters devoid of traditional sympathy or empathy flags, characters that other authors might deploy because of their intrinsic inhumanity. Whether it's a battered, abandoned war-mecha ("Tideline") or a put-upon sex android ("Dolly") or a starport grafitti artist ("Two Dreams on Trains") or a goddamn Shoggoth (!)("Shoggoths in Bloom") or any of the myriad characters that have crawled, broken but unbowed, across the starships, cityscapes, and theatre stages of her prodigious stack of novels, Bear keeps an illuminating eye firmly on the ostensibly unsympathetic. From these easy-to-stereotype types she constantly dredges telling quirks and peels open inner lives. Bear doesn't much use the traditional trappings of mammalian cuteness to signal to her audience that it's okay to feel for something. There are no cute chirpy robots in her worlds, no wisecracking sidekicks, nobody singled out to wear one emotional stripe forever. In the Elizabeth Bear version of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Jar-Jar Binks wouldn't flail and shit-step and pratfall his way across the narrative; it goes without saying that he wouldn't be a half-witted pixellated Rastus figure, either. In fact, I am now ensnared in a tangent, and desperately sorry that the world will never see that movie as Bear might have written it. Bear pries secrets and desires out of the unlikeliest places; she reflexively invests her creations with agency the way too many authors habitually rub it out. Agency, by the way, is not a synonym for political authority or combat prowess or physical strength or social sanction within a narrative. Agency means that an author recognizes and respects that each character has motivation, wants, and an inner landscape; it means treating them as something more than props and puppets. It means writing them as though their hearts and heads have actual contents deserving of examination. The ability to swing swords and wear crowns and command ships has nothing to do with it. Bear gets this, with rare style and intensity. Everywhere she looks, even inside thick shells of cliche and cold bodies of metal, she finds people. This is an important thing to keep in mind when diving into Range of Ghosts... To be continued! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, April 13th, 2012
2:09 pm	Jim Hines' Rape Crisis Center Fundraiser: The Book of Bear and Lynch Jim Hines is doing his annual rape crisis centers fundraiser all month; as an incentive for donations to suitable organisations or crisis centers, he's offering a slate of neat prizes, raffle-fashion. All the details can be found in the post linked above. My partner, the lovely and talented Elizabeth Bear, has a little new book out that you might have heard of, called Range of Ghosts. Bear and I are making a hardcover copy of RoG our prize contribution to Jim's fundraiser. But this is no ordinary copy of the book... from April 16th to May 6th, Bear and I are zooming hither and yon across the northeast, from NYC to Boston to Albany to Maine and back again. We'll be bringing the book with us, scribbling dueling notes in it at each other, drawing in it, and inserting mementos, postcards, and other little surprises into its pages. By the time we're finished with it, it'll be one uniquely encrusted hermit crab of a book, chock full of weirdness. One of god's own prototypes, never even intended for mass production. And it can be yours... with a little luck, and with a donation to an extremely worthy cause. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 1st, 2012
12:08 pm	Ever the Reluctant Warrior, I Take Up My Sword for Justice Only after long consideration and with the greatest hesitation do I undertake a fair, thorough, objective, and even-handed examination of feculent man-thing John Scalzi's allegedly best-selling fantasy trilogy The Shadow War of the Night Dragon, and, more in sorrow than anger, set out to deconstruct the testament of lies he wears like a LARP costume too long unwashed. Astute readers are no doubt aware of Scalzi's extensive history in the fantasy genre where he, like a reverse Jesus Christ, labors ceaselessly to turn the heady wine of invention into piss-warm pondwater. If it were possible to make a clever literature-relevant metaphor about bread or fish here, you can rest assured that I would, but unlike world-class douchebastard John Scalzi I have an abiding sense of proportion and restraint. Tor Books, obviously hard up for cash (an anonymous but trustworthy source tells me that John Scalzi insists on being paid in jelly donuts frosted with gold leaf and black tar heroin), has undertaken to publish a manga version of Scalzi's absolutely stolen, plagiarized, misbegotten Shadow War of the Night Dragon trilogy. Come on! This is the worst thing Scalzi has done since he bribed the jury to ensure that his "experimental sexno-thriller" Colt Jackhammer: Pussy Magnet (Baen Books, 2010) won the Tiptree Award. And he did that last fucking year! The Shadow War of the Night Dragon, in a just world, would be more properly known as The Night Shadow of the Dragon War and the author bio would describe ME, plus maybe some tasteful mentions of my biceps and the photo would be of me flexing my arms over a book on feminism or something, and I'd be half in shadow like I was about to attack, you know, and punch sexism in the face. But it would be low-key, of course, because I am not one to toot my own horn, unlike twitchy weasel-dicked scum merchant John Scalzi. You see, in the winter of 1985, when I was 7, I began writing my very first epic fantasy, a work that eventually ran the full length of six Big Chief tablets. It was fresh, startling, and vital. Where my classmates unquestioningly accepted the bourgeois norms of such televisual soporifics as Thundercats and Silverhawks, I strove to question and subvert all genre essentialities. I called my mytho-fantabulist construct The Night Shadow of the Dragon War; no doubt you see the elegant refuted symmetry of my classist deconstruction and my tasteful shout-out to Omar Khayyám. If you do, you see more than the all-pilfering moral leper John Scalzi, who, near as I can tell, must have entered my house some time around Christmas, 1985, and stolen those Big Chief tablets. How, you ask, would John Scalzi, who was then 16 years old and living several states away, have even known about the existence of my early masterwork, let alone how to travel to my house without parental permission and break in without leaving any visible evidence? These are VERY EXCELLENT QUESTIONS in that they indicate just how thoroughly Scalzi prepared for his heist, and what obscene lengths he was willing to go to to get his hands on something so plainly beyond the scope of his half-eaten gerbil pellet of a brain. Considered from this perspective, these questions can only be described as damning. I have brought this evidence time and time again to Scalzi's publishers at Tor, and they have consistently obstructed my efforts to clear away the miasmic perjury-fog that wafts from Scalzi like stink from a man-sized colon. In fairness I should note that it would not be a particularly tall man-sized colon. Despite all hindrances, I take this battle very seriously and pursue it still. I give you my latest e-mail from editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden verbatim: "What part of "restraining order" do you not understand, you crazy motherfucker? Bother me about this again and I swear to god, our lawyers will eat your balls on toast. Are you stupid, or are you just fucking stupid? --PNH" This sort of abuse is absolutely typical of Patrick. It's why I submit all of my manuscripts to him using pseudonyms and why I am so going to laugh my ass off when he finally buys one. The ignorant FOOL. I look forward to the day that he tweets about his latest acquisition, not realizing that I follow him on Twitter and will immediately RT him with the evidence of his own blazing shame. Justice is like a lonely submarine. Sometimes it must lurk beneath the waves for months at a time until the target floats by. But I digress. In the end, what's important is this: The Shadow War of the Night Dragon is probably the worst thing John Scalzi has ever done. And he wrote the novelization for Meet the Spartans. (58 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 31st, 2012
5:16 pm	Computer Blew I started plotting an act of treason yesterday. My Macbook, my companion on literally every trip I've ever taken as a professional writer, is finally crawling off to the elephant graveyard. Just flipping it open knocks the wind out of it. Its case is pitted and battered by everything from cat fangs to hot coffee cups. I've been putting off replacing it for years, but at last the time and finances are right. And I'm buying a Windows machine for the first time in my entire life. See, I'm a Mac-ite of an old school. Not the oldest, but sufficiently old, harkening back to the late 80s. My school days were spent playing with the Apple II. In junior high I would stretch a point of my mother's school employee access to a more advanced lab filled with beige box Macs. She even got to borrow one from the district each summer, and much of my earliest coherent writing was done on them (as well as a lot of Chuck Yeager's Air Combat). So I've long preferred to work on the platform with which I'm most anciently and intimately familiar, and as far as my desktops are concerned, that's always going to be the case. But I've been wanting a token Windows machine, to serve as an operating environment for some stuff I can't talk about yet. And at this point a Windows laptop is more financially responsible than a new Macbook. But there are... issues with transitioning from the Mac-user mindset to a Windows-buyer mindset. It's perfectly possible to be a savvy, up-to-date, tech-minded Mac user, but the thing is, if you want to be a completely cotton-brained ignoramus, the Mac will accommodate you. You don't have to be able to count to four in order to buy or use a Mac. You don't even have to be able to identify the gas your lungs are metabolizing as you read this. As far as even the most comatose crustacean of a user need be concerned, Macs don't have tech specs. They have fucking mana bars. Buying a Mac is simplicity itself. You go to the Mac temple store or the Mac site. You pick one that looks pretty. There are drop-down windows that tell you they're powered by baby otter farts or wood nymphs or whatever, but you don't need to care. It arrives at your house, you unbox it, you plug it in, and it just works. It's amazing, how little of a shit you need to give about a Mac's innards most of the time. Here, let me show you my system profiler: My processor speed is bunny and my RAM is rainbow! This machine will last me for ten years. Contrast this with the process of constructing a Windows machine prior to purchase... suddenly your components are not installed and magically synchronized by helper elves. You actually have to pay attention to which device pairings will make the goddamn planet blow up. You have to research which video card is standard this week. You have to get the proper RAM chips in the proper configuration, and then get RAM in your RAM because you like RAM, and 64-bit that motherfucker plus an optical drive that doesn't cause cancer in mammals coupled with one of seventeen available versions of the OS, not all of which are supported by your thirty-six choices in Intel Core geometries. Suddenly it's less like using a website and more like that part in Star Trek IV where Spock is getting his fucking brain tested. And THEN, once you've built and received your new Windows laptop, o Mac-addict, you need to start paying more attention to another serious issue: security. See, while Macs are more popular and numerous than ever before, it's still a truism that most of the jackholes writing viruses can't be arsed to even target such a fringe-y cult when there are vast fields of incompetently-maintained Windows machines planted in neat furrows to be harvested. I've accidentally triggered or opened virus bullshit before, and it's like it just... senses I'm on a Mac, puts the gun back in its pocket, shakes its head, and leaves. Out of pity. But henceforth, it's like the atmosphere around me will be full of invisible flying dicks all striving to plunge themselves into my hard drive. I look forward to paranoia reversing the progress I've made in controlling my blood pressure. Now, having to fret about choosing a book-sized portable wonder box containing many times the processing power of the computers used to send Apollo missions to the fucking moon is definitely a "First World problem." I am just letting off steam with some unstructured grumbling. Please note the following: Yes, I know about Boot Camp. I still want a separate Windows machine I can set down beside my desktop Macs. I have already selected my laptop package. I already have supremely knowledgeable friends and associates lined up to assist with it. I do not want advice. I do not care what you think I should be using in place of whatever you think I'm using. Certain parts of my rant may have been exaggerated for comic effect. Mac users should optimally be able to count to eight, not four. My startup disk actually has a rating of strawberry cake, not chocolate. (40 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 30th, 2012
8:42 am	Dear Epic Fantasy of the Very Late 1980s... Look. This is hard for both of us. Let's not make it any harder than it needs to be. We had some fun, didn't we, back around 1998? You were fresh to me. I was fresh to the world of letters. I'd never seen anything like you, you with your thousands upon thousands of pages, you great thumping quadrilateral of a book. You citadel of wood pulp. You horse-slaughtering trebuchet missile of a fantasy sequence. I thought you were pretty keen. Alas, time has worked its alchemy on the pleasure centers of my brain, and they've become such fussy precision instruments. I suppose as adults the term we use is "more discriminating." Those old Sense-of-Wonder nodes are still there, resting in the deep darkness, but you can't just flounce on in unannounced and slap them like you used to. I've sort of rearranged the furniture, you see. It's like an obstacle course in there, and all the weak, lumpy, misshapen ideas that used to tickle me without trouble just can't find their way past the gauntlet. Maybe it's my fault, for conceiving the notion that we could recapture what we shared fourteen years ago. It started as an exercise in curiosity, and while it was rocky at first (my younger self had a great deal more tolerance for languorous chapters of fuck-all happening to anyone, and for thick-headed teenage protagonists too dim to walk in a straight line) my perseverance paid off in an ultimate reading experience that was not entirely excruciating. Heartened, I vowed to turn it into a sort of state-of-the-genre survey project, and continued to your second volume. Which is where the metaphorical primate had sexual relations with the hypothetical football. See, you've got this character who happens to be an unusually educated swamp-dweller. A wiry little man with a very able intellect, undervalued by his own people, and decidedly one of your more engaging characters. This poor fellow sets off on a journey by flat-bottomed boat, up rivers and across mangrove swamps, during which he dangles a hook and attempts to catch some nourishment. This he does, reeling in a fish of commendable size, a fish so large and powerful he can't immediately haul it into the boat for fear of snapping his line. No worries. He decides to let the fish tire itself out before trying again. Alas for him, he notices the dark shape of a crocodile slipping from the bank into the river, obviously intent on eating his lunch. I have to confess that I lacked the creativity to predict what our hero, the experienced swamp-dweller, quite an expert on dangerous amphibious animals, would do in response. He dove into the water and put himself between the fish and the crocodile. That's right. This lean, aging fellow, unskilled in arms, attempted to distract a crocodile away from a fish using his own mortal body, despite obviously knowing what crocodiles can do to human beings in water. I wonder why your author, so plainly enamored of the notion that this poor fellow's life needed Exciting Complications Leading to a Cliffhanger, couldn't find it in his heart to use any of the other narrative tools just sitting there, gleaming, ready and eager to be deployed. Why not endanger the boat with a bout of bad weather? How about an attack from hostile forces? How about a surprise attack by dangerous aquatic life? Nope. I'm afraid your author decided our swamp-dweller should do something transparently, frustratingly witless. Not merely an act born of hubris, arrogance, mental incapacity, or anger (though he attempts to lampshade things by having the character curse himself on those terms), but absolute plot-convenient stupidity without any laudable underpinning. That snapping sound you just heard was my suspension of disbelief as the trap door finally opened beneath it and the noose jerked tight around its neck. And so, I wish I could say "it's not you, it's me." While my tastes have changed, they haven't changed so much that I couldn't make a sincere go of it... until characters started literally feeding themselves to crocodiles to keep the semblance of a plot lurching forward. So yeah, it's definitely you, not me. Look, don't take it like that. You'll always have a place on my bookshelf. I'll always think highly of your worldbuilding, your well-earned sense of gravitas, and some of your beautiful riddles. We'll always have 1998. But what we won't have is characters feeding themselves to crocodiles for no good reason, okay? (27 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
1:18 am	RANGE OF GHOSTS (I): What We Talk About When We Talk About Bear So, in case my incessant noise hadn't already made it clear, today was release day for Elizabeth Bear's brand-shiny-new epic fantasy, Range of Ghosts. Honesty compels me to disclaim that this lovely lady is my better half, my girlfriend, my significant other, my partner. So, obviously, I have a vested emotional interest in seeing it do well for her... and you would earn my undying gratitude if you could just buy twenty or thirty copies (you don't need to eat this month, right?) as soon as possible. Powells | Mysterious Galaxy | Barnes & Noble | Amazon Now, with that disclaimer out of the way... well, look, you either trust me on this or you don't, and if you don't then no amount of fan-dancing on my behalf can possibly convince you that I genuinely love Bear's work, so you might as well mosey off and screw yourself while the rest of us talk. It's a touchy situation when two professional authors shack up together (even for long-distance relationship values of 'shack up'); there are no guarantees they'll like one another's work, and it takes big hearts to overcome fundamental aesthetic disagreements. So it's been quite a relief, as she's re-read my stuff and I've delved into her mountain of short fiction (having read most of her longer works) that, minor quibbles aside, we both really like what the other one writes. Virtually everything that I appreciate about Bear's work is crystallized in Range of Ghosts, her first full-on essay into unbridled epic fantasy territory. It's got Big Sweeping Ideas in Big Damn Landscapes for Big Damn Stakes, but it's written with Bear's characteristic efficiency and her utter disdain for faffing about. No gentle sixty or seventy page introduction to idyllic rural life before clouds cover the sun. No chapter after chapter of glacial Bildungsroman with a thick-witted teenager. The plot opens hard and fast and doesn't let up for 330 pages... for all that this is a big book in conception, it's lean and never listless. This is a fantasy novel with a distinctly non-European flavor, set in a rolling phantasmagorical Asiascape with vibrant analogs of Mongol, Persian, Chinese, Indian, and Arabic cultures (though they are nothing so lame and shallow as mere analogs). Think of the cultures that spanned the eastern portions of what was once called the "Silk Road," separated by vast harsh distances but intimately linked by trade. The world is more than numinous; the sky itself changes to reflect the prevailing paradigms of the people who live in each great region. In some places the sun sets in the west, in others it sets in the east, and the vaults of the heavens will re-order themselves in an instant (from a mortal perspective) as a character crosses a border. Bear isn't a writer one goes to for pulpy dehumanization; even her antagonists have friends and loved ones supporting them. She isn't a writer who provides easy wish-fulfillment; Range of Ghosts is all about one of her recurring themes, which is the price of everything. The price of power... the price of survival... the price of revenge... the price of living itself. All of the characters in Range of Ghosts are constantly measuring their desires against whatever currency their lives, souls, and lifestyles represent. Nothing is ever free or unexamined. Nothing is ever had without sacrifice or consequences. Bear isn't a writer one goes to for consolation or condescension. This isn't a treacly fantasy about how everything will come right in the end, how everything will be worthwhile, how the troubles and mysteries of living will sort themselves out just as soon as the right person has a sword shoved into them. Like all of Bear's work, this is a tale of grace notes hidden and concealed along the way, of small victories and moments to savor, even along the path that leads to heartbreak and hell. To say that Range of Ghosts is worth your time is to do it a major injustice through understatement. My take on the novel will be spread out in several installments across the rest of the week, so keep it in your thoughts... (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012
12:20 am	Locke Lamora Read-Along Bonus #4: YOU SUCK, LYNCH "Don't fall for all the commerical hype purporting that this book is the new fantasy. The only fantasy was in the author's head and he was not able to communicate that well at all. Which is too bad because some of the images are stark and clear and riveting and drew me deeper and deeper into the book.....against my will. The book is arrogant, clumsy, baffling, and too cute, too ingeneous, too contrived for words. The best bits were never developed. The best characters are the vicious sharks of Camorr and I wish they had eaten my copy." That's my all-time favorite anonymous Barnes & Noble review of TLOLL. Especially the last sentence. If you're going to trash my work, aim for a memorable closer. It's so much more fun than mere petulance. Honest dislike of my work has become a very easy thing for me to live with (as differentiated from dishonest/incomplete readings of a text and false/stupid personal accusations, which will always hit my small thermal exhaust port) because I have embraced a little magic spell that goes like this: De gustibus non est disputandum. Nothing in the history of human art has been universally popular or acclaimed. Nothing. Educated people of good faith and taste are still arguing the merits of War and Peace, for crying out loud. You think it shocks or offends me to discover that not everyone adores The Lies of Locke Lamora? Fucking get real. Naturally, a certain percentage of the book's critics are barely capable of using flush toilets and shouldn't be allowed out in public unless rolled in three layers of Nerf for their own safety. Another portion are the sorts of narcissists who are genuinely shocked each time someone else writes a book without their permission and oversight. And yet I think the vast majority of the book's critics are probably on to something... either sincerely incapable of interfacing with the work or accurately noting certain defects that preclude their enjoyment. Accurately? Yes indeed. Over the years I've come to strongly agree on several points with many critics of TLOLL. It's only natural to look back at something written seven-odd years ago in the light of how I'd write it now (or, no doubt, years from now). That isn't to say I'll ever do so. I happen to think that's another crippling variety of auctorial insanity. The Lies of Locke Lamora reflects the state of my craft and my person in 2004-5, and for better or for worse, it always shall. Much as I'd love to smooth it out, rewrite some of the rougher patches, clarify certain things, and slightly adjust a few of the characters, I think actually engaging in that sort of behavior is a trap. It's not my fucking job (and it shouldn't be my privilege) to keep old books in a state of perpetual revision. They're out! The children have left home. The text has been read. You've seen it, readers, and you can't un-see it. George Lucas is clearly going to be changing piddly, trivial, ridiculous shit in the original Star Wars films until he drops dead... and while I'd love those piles of money, I don't want that baggage. That myopia. So The Lies of Locke Lamora is going to look as it does now... forever. There will never be an Author's New and Amended Edition, reflecting how I write and feel when I'm 35 or 40 or 96, if I still have a pulse when those milestones roll past. Only in the most extreme circumstances would I consider that sort of thing, for a work that I considered fundamentally damaged or published contrary to my vision. "In the Stacks," for example, will be given a revision and an expansion, due to the fact that it was composed during the very darkest days of my untreated depression. As lovely as the response to it has been, I think it deserves better than I was able to give it (and meant to give it). The Lies of Locke Lamora, on the other hand, suffered from no lack of enthusiasm or energy during its composition. Its failures are honest and unmitigated ones. Let me share a few of my thoughts on the defects of my work with you: I think the most obvious structural incongruity in The Lies of Locke Lamora is that the interlude chapters, which start out as fully-developed narrative episodes, inelegantly transition to historical lectures and omniscient anecdotes. While I'd argue that most of them are still very relevant, and a couple are even essential, there's really no reason I couldn't (with a little more reflection) have made them in-universe infodumps rather than Voice of God. They could have easily been stories or lessons from Father Chains; a little diligent framing on my part and the incongruity would have been ironed smooth. Alas. Several astute readers have pointed out that what transpires between Locke and Felice is technically an abrogation of Felice's duties as a prostitute; that she swapped the terms of their encounter from foreplay to platonic massage awfully quick for someone who might want to stay employed. All of this is true. My excuse is that there is as-yet unrevealed backstory between some of the Bastards and some of the Guilded Lilies (and thus she had more liberty than a stranger), going back to when Chains did them a big favor years before Locke was born. However, I catastrophically failed to allude to this in the actual text. Pleading apocrypha when the apocrypha is still secret is not the equivalent of having written well. Many readers have issues with the swearing in TLOLL, and while I do sympathize, I have to confess to feeling completely unmoved over the matter. This is a novel in which people are drowned alive, immersed in piss, strangled, stabbed, poisoned, eaten by sharks, and viciously tortured in myriad ways. And yet they want to complain about the language? I simply do not accept the notion that loose obscenities (words not anchored in hateful attacks upon human identity) have any ethical dimension whatsoever. They're part of the great tapestry of our linguistic heritage, and if you're squeamish about them, I'm sorry... but that's your own problem. Here's another magic spell of which I'm very fond, from the old Roman poet Catullus: Nam castum esse decet pium poetam ipsum, versiculos nihil necessest Loosely translated: It's good and proper for a poet to be moral, but in no way necessary for his poems. Interestingly, if you read the entirety of that poem framing that sentiment, Catullus 16, you'll find that it's eye-scorchingly vulgar. Catullus, like Martial, wrote stuff that would make any latter-day moral scold have a coronary. Keep that in mind next time some self-righteous windbag starts bloviating about the upright virtues of the classical world... those old Greeks and Romans bowed to nobody when it came to blazing vulgarity. I suppose that's much more of a self-defense than a self-criticism, so I will say that there are many places in the book where I would, with deeper reflection or more developed aesthetic sense, not have scattered obscenities quite so haphazardly, but reserved them for greater impact and more creative conjunctions. I am not entirely happy with the way I deal with violent action in TLOLL. There is, I think, a little too much precision. Too much description of exact distances. Too little reflection of uncertainty, panic, and desperation as seen from the points of view of the participants. You can see a gradual evolution from the style of TLOLL to a more, er, "impressionistic" style in Republic. I suspect that this is because when TLOLL was written I was still a probationary firefighter, and by the time I got to Republic I'd had several years in which to experience roaring fires, claustrophobia, melting insulation, tumbling walls, hot ash burns, collapsing ceilings, and the like. My personal experience of risk and physical hardship has deepened since TLOLL, and my notion of what's important in the description of action has changed. I am also not best pleased with my portrait of the cultural mix in Camorr. I covered the Vadrans and the Therins quite nicely, but I did not adequately follow through on my intention to describe the Okanti and the Syresti, the dark-skinned people from over the southern seas. The Okanti are a disapora people and the Syresti are a little empire that easily matches the Therins in culture, art, science, and warmaking ability. Red Seas and Republic more accurately describe their place in the scheme of things. While there is some undeniable (and humanly unavoidable, I think) racial prejudice, the Therins have never been allowed to feel anything like the unbridled contempt Europeans once nurtured for Africans. The Syresti and Okanti always enjoyed technological parity with their would-be invaders, and punched them in their faces until invasions stopped happening. The Okanti have only dispersed on account of a civil war, complicated by some Supernatural Horribleness I might describe down the line. I give a shit about this in the context of TLOLL because it creates an incongruous visual impression of what I meant the Therin city-states to look like. There are far more dark-skinned cast members from Red Seas on, and as a result of my inattention in TLOLL, it looks like it suddenly started raining black people between books. Had I been on the ball, I would have clued readers in to the fact that they were there all along. I am belatedly ashamed of the fact that I used crossbow "quarrel" and "bolt" as mere synonyms. Last but not least, there is too much damned scaffolding for some of my prose in TLOLL. Too much description of meaningless character action (sighing, sighing, so much sighing!) rather than meaningful activity; far too much use of italics to emphasize when characters are saying something dramatic. All of these buttresses speak to a first-timer's lack of confidence in his work. While I certainly wouldn't just do a global excision of all the italics in the book, I bet I could find at least a hundred instances of italicization that could be thrown out without consequence. Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; a hundred times is YOU SUCK, LYNCH. (47 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
5:13 pm	The Ballad of Captain Placeholder Stuff's coming, kids, have no fear. I desperately needed sleep last night, and today I got up and crossed the state line to help move six million tons of stuff at The Source, the greatest comics and games store for hundreds of miles in any direction. It was heartening to see so many geek volunteers out in force to heave stuff around. I came home reduced to a state of noodle-hood. I will return. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 19th, 2012
1:29 pm	Shamelessly Cute Baby Picture Is Shameless Did I mention that I have a niece, Mayson? Nearly a year old? And isn't it cute how I say 'have' as though I were taking any sort of credit for her existence or care? Heh. Well, she's adorable, and when she's in high school I think she's going to be about ten feet tall. I'm also pretty sure she's a future author. The evidence: Note: 1. She's indoors, yet wearing sunglasses. 2. It's the middle of the day, and she's wearing pajamas and a blanket. 3. She already has an Evil Genius Planning Face. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 17th, 2012
10:51 pm	Locke Lamora Read-Along Bonus #3: Early Visual Aids While I very, very rarely create characters that are visually based on living (or once-living) actors and celebrities, it does happen from time to time. We all snatch inspiration and style where we can find it. The only sin in this department, I think, is to use a celebrity's name as a lazy shorthand replacement for actual description. I'll share some of my formative visual influences with you now. To be clear-- I am not match-making after the fact and I am NOT "dreamcasting" a live adaptation of my work. These are the only characters that had a genuine real-life model while I was conceiving and writing The Lies of Locke Lamora; that's why the list is so relatively limited. My initial conception of Father Chains was largely drawn from photos of author Dan Simmons. Weathered, sturdy, and wise, as I imagined things; a broad and towering shape to dominate a child's world, at once compelling and comforting. Simmons was and is a brilliant writer. It's a shame that in recent years he's gone down the rabbit hole of outright bigotry with his credulous, self-important screeds. Ah, well, we'll always have Hyperion. For the Gray King, I always had an eye on Michael Wincott. It's cliche to call an actor like this "underrated," since he's not underrated by anyone who actually looks for his work. He had a part in several major cult films including The Crow, the 2002 version of The Count of Monte Cristo, and Alien: Resurrection (in which he and his rag-tag band of extremely watchable rogues were the only bright spot). Come to think of it, he was Alan Rickman's straight man in Costner's crap Robin Hood flick, helping to anchor the only palatable bits of that movie, too. He was also superb in the otherwise bleh Along Came A Spider, one of those millennial "super serial killer" films that were stamped out by the half-dozen. Curriculum vitae aside, he's got wolfish looks, a gravelly voice, and a sinister presence he can turn on or off like a smile. Capa Vencarlo Barsavi needed to be a heavy fellow; heavy with age, heavy with responsibility, a human gravity well. Every seam on his face ought to tell a story; his eyes ought to flick, nervous but kingly, behind wrinkled layers of leathery jowl. One partial model was Brian Cox circa 2003 (as Stryker in X2: What The Hell is the Official Subtitle of the Second X-Men Movie Anyway?) but eventually I had to go with Kenneth Cranham. He has the lived-in face, the heavy physique, and the easy power of Barsavi. In recent years, he was Pompey Magnus on Rome and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in Valkyrie. For Jean Tannen, my initial model was Bruno Kirby as the young Pete Clemenza in The Godfather Part II. Round but spry, dapper rather than classically handsome, capable of instant deadly violence without worry or warning-- Clemenza was all those things, and a gluttonous lover of life. Bruno Kirby was also seen in the imperfect but fascinating film adaptation of Donnie Brasco. I'd be remiss in not mentioning the production designs of Dante Ferretti. What? Who the hell pays attention to production designers? Well, for several years in my late teens, I had an Interview With the Vampire film poster above my desk, and the name DANTE FERRETTI was at eye level whenever I was sitting and typing. Eventually, I got curious and googled the name, and discovered that he was responsible for the iconic look of a whole slew of movies I admired in some fashion, including but not limited to: The Name of the Rose, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Titus, Casino, The Age of Innocence, and Gangs of New York. It was his work on that last film that most vividly compelled me-- his set design is astounding, historical and phantasmagorical all at once. I knew the first time I saw it that I had been handed a seed pearl for the grimy splendor of Camorr. SUPER SPECIAL ADDED BONUS! This is one of those very, very rare occasions I mentioned above, and it's not in Lies. The character of Jasmer Moncraine, the dodgy Syresti impresario in The Republic of Thieves, is pretty explicitly based on Andre Braugher, one of my favorite actors of all time. You might remember him as Thomas Searles in Glory, or for his amazing portrayal of Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Street. He was also in The Mist and the 2004 version of Salem's Lot, the miniseries Thief and the recent series Men of a Certain Age. He's fucking brilliant; I'd watch him play a five-year-old white child. I'd watch him play Lady Macbeth. I'd watch him play me. SUPER DUPER SPECIAL ADDED BONUS REDUX: Just because you've been so well-behaved, here's another cartoon from the marvelous Anna-Maria Jung. It's Locke... or a parallel universe version of Locke, doing what he SHOULD have done before setting sail in Red Seas Under Red Skies. (27 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 11th, 2012
10:47 am	Locke Lamora Read-Along Bonus #2: Other Roads Not Taken I meant to put this up yesterday, but I was out at a birthday party and crashed early once I got home. Without further ado, your weekly dose of hidden lore: ***** After digging through my papers this week, I was surprised to find just how many scraps, notes, and lists had survived from the Early Days of The Lies of Locke Lamora. Far more than I had thought, and quite embarrassing in some respects. Some of the dumbest ideas I ever had are preserved like flies in amber, just waiting to go into the archives for posterity. Probably the NIU archives, since Lynne Thomas will kill me with an axe if anything else happens. Anyhow, here are some fun facts to know and tell about things that were changed or discarded before the final draft: The sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora was originally going to be called The Best Heretic Ever. The rough plot sketch was that Locke was going to pose as a religious prophet of some sort and wacky hijinks were going to ensue. The Best Heretic Ever was shelved about a quarter of the way through writing Lies, as I gained confidence in the world and the characters and felt free to detach myself from my previous outlines. The earliest cast list for Lies features four Capas: Jacobo, Barsavi, Vorchenza, and Riga. All of them were meant to be murdered (I know this will shock my readers) but it wasn't long before I combined them all into the solitary godfather figure of Capa Barsavi. The Gray King was originally called the Pale King. Dona Vorchenza was originally called "Dona Sarabella." From the same cast list, the first roster of the Gentlemen Bastards: Locke Lamora, age 28; "Gentle" Jean Tannen, age 31; "Long Tall" Galdo, age 26, and Venti Loose-Lips, age 22. Father Chains was originally going to be called, I shit you not, "Rude Trevor," age 40. This list also appears to have two younger apprentice characters, Petrava and Tomsa (ages 16 and 17) and a character named "Father Caladon." The words "Father Chains?" are written next to his name. This leads me to believe I had originally meant for a false priest to be some sort of adjunct member of the gang, and from him I grew the notion of chaining this priest to his temple, before finally deciding to roll this character in with that of the gang's mentor figure. "Long Tall" Galdo must be a reference to a character I played in several roleplaying games named Long Tall John. John was four and a half feet tall, a mercenary swordsman, and a complete idiot who managed to lead a charmed life. He popped up in several milieus and none of the games lasted. Overt comic relief characters don't do much for campaign longevity. The Thiefmaker was originally a double act, an old man and woman called the Maker and the Mother. A more developed cast list from a few months later is closer to the final product but still shows some deviations. Conte is listed as "Corte." Two additional noble families, the Agnellas and the Garamonds, are listed as Five Towers clans, though I seem not to have found any use for them. Bug is on this list, and "Long Tall" Galdo" has been transmuted to Calo and Galdo Sanza. Nazca's on this list as "Nasca," and there are two other female members of the Barsavi Clan: "Firavina" and "Cienna." Her brothers Anjais and Pachero were originally called "Udezo" and "Roje." The Falconer was originally called "Marek." I decided early on that this wasn't mysterious enough; I wanted to bring in the old tradition of sorcerers being secretive about their true names. "Falconer," incidentally, was the name of my Knights of the Old Republic II Jedi Guardian. (Dual-wielder. Blue and silver lightsabers. Light-side Jedi forever, baby.) This cast list also features "Runvical and Tomsa," a pair of guards at Capa Barsavi's Floating Grave. I think I meant for these guys to be some sort of running commentary/ minor comic relief, like the two dimwit guards that always manage to get caught up in the main action in J.V. Jones' Bakers' Boy books. Or, if I want to be more self-congratulatory, like Shakespeare. Regardless, I didn't find any room or use for them in the final draft. Jean was originally a much cruder sort of fellow. His early-draft lecherousness and sarcastic foulness were passed over to the Sanzas. Also, the original Jean had no recollection of his family and claimed to have been cut out of the stomach of a large fish on the Camorr docks as an infant. He was definitely kidding about this and was never meant to be a mer-baby. Karthain was originally called "Quarthain," but at the last minute I recalled that some GRRM guy had a city named "Quarth" in one of his obscure little books about thrones and dragons. One discarded opening for Lies was set aside and eventually became a chapter in The Republic of Thieves called "The Undrowned Girl." Another discarded opening featured several of Capa Barsavi's men and women being murdered by the Gray King's people. Wiping out nameless red-shirts struck me as a cliched grab for attention. A third discarded opening was a sort of scholarly discourse on the sharks of Camorr bay. It read (all errors and shitty construction intact): "Any scholar of the Therin Collegium can tell you that the Wolf Sharks of the Iron Sea are beautiful creatures when contemplated from a comfortable distance, which in their case is about two hundred and fifty overland miles. Any dockworker in the trade city of Camorr, on the other hand, can tell you that Wolf Sharks are big vicious bastards that make the warm coastal shallows around the city dangerous even if you never get your feet wet. Wolf Sharks, you see, like to jump. "The midnight indigo of their dorsal fins and upper back tapers to a waxy gray on their ventral surfaces; their bodies are packed to bursting with muscle as thick and touch as a bull's. Unfortunately for anything else moving in the water, Wolf Sharks really are as vicious and territorial as folk wisdom has it. Wolf Shark pups floating in utero will instinctively devour their weaker siblings. While they form packs later in life, only one pup in any litter will survive to be born to salt water. They're bad enough anywhere, but few people know why the ones haunting Camorr Bay are such voracious man-eaters. The answer to that lies with Capa Vencarlo Barsavi (himself, curiously enough, a former scholar of the Therin Collegium), the crooked master of Camorr's vast underworld." Yes, one detail that I didn't manage to work into the final story was that Capa Barsavi himself was to blame for the viciousness of Camorr Bay's predators, as he'd been feeding them enemies and failed henchmen almost nightly for twenty-two years. Although all the dangerous wildlife in Locke's world is turned up a notch or two from ours, and the seas are in places ludicrously dangerous, I have always felt bad about maligning sharks quite as shamelessly as I did in Lies. There was originally supposed to be just a bit more backstory behind their troublesome behavior. (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 5th, 2012
2:00 am	Forewarned is Forearmed...* Those looking to receive soonest notice of new and forthcoming scribbles by yours truly (those not in possession of a TARDIS, that is) can subscribe to the scintillating new SCOTT LYNCH NEWSLETTER mailing list (I opted for utility rather than cutesiness, though I knew I could easily attract 100,000 subscribers just by calling it SAM SYKES MUST DIE**). You can subscribe to it here. This is not a general announcement list or publicity list. It will send you notices of two things and two things ONLY: A. Official release dates for any of my major work from commercial publishers, and B. The availability of new work that can be purchased or read immediately. That's it. The newsletter will deliver NO other exhortations, messages, or notices, not even concerning my injury or death. Subscriber addresses will not be sold, exchanged, traded, or given away for any other purpose whatsoever. Spam sucks. Newsletter messages will not be frequent or frivolous. ----- * Which is quite distinct from four-armed, which requires you to be an alien. NO ONE IS STRONGER THAN KREED! ** I'm just kidding, of course, Sam.*** ***(It would be more like 200,000 subscribers.) (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 3rd, 2012
9:29 pm	Three Items of Note This marks the first week of my latest effort to fight back my anxiety and panic attacks and be more public. I have tried before, in various states of medication, and have never quite "succeeded." If I ever appear to be unduly short of temper or curt in any responses to comments, I'm sorry. I'm not the only one driving my brain when it comes to this stuff. Also, when I have accurate information about Republic to give out, I will give it out. It will blaze in every form of social media I use. My publishers will print publicity notices and shoot them directly into your brains with arrows. It will be the new high point in my ongoing fight against the most unexpectedly crippling and humiliating thing that has ever happened to me. Simon Spanton will grow wings and spontaneously age twenty years in reverse. Insane with joy, he will declare himself the God-Emperor of Greater London and you will have to fight a war to break the shackles of his mad tyranny. You will not miss it when it happens. This is really the last I'd like to say about it until it's time to say something useful. Also, fucking Mamatas and his fucking embed of Foster the People's "Pumped Up Kicks..." This song is the biggest fucking earworm I've encountered in years. The sonofabitch passed it on like a haunted DVD containing a creepy Japanese ghost. Well, the joke's on you, internet, because now I pass it on myself. Have fun doing everything in your life to the beat of this song for the next six weeks ("All the other dishes that I'm la la washing better wash better wash better la la la washing..."). (21 Comments |Comment on this)
8:53 pm	Locke Lamora Read-Along Bonus #1: It Came From Burger King The Little Red Reviewer, Dark Cargo, SF Signal, Scruffy Fiction, and My Awful Reviews (among others), dear people that they are, are engaging in a group read-along of The Lies of Locke Lamora all month. Major discussion should happen on the weekends, starting next weekend, and I'm going to try to do my bit for the process by coughing up some history of the novel and my own thoughts on it. So, every Saturday in March, I'll offer up some previously-unpublished fragments and my own criticism of my firstborn book. The Lies of Locke Lamora was born during my Shaggy Period. Before I became a firefighter and had to restrain myself, I experimented with assorted forms of sasquatchery-- goatee, beard, and hair down to my ass. Here's a charming sample: In early adulthood, I apparently slept sitting up. The only heartening thing I can see is that my hairline does not appear to have receded any since then... if anything, it's crept forward, like some alien parasite trying to eat my eyes. I honestly wish that I recalled more about the specifics of Lies' gestation, from 2000 to early 2004. I have a lot of notes, scraps, maps, and assorted paper detritus from half-assed attempts to start the book, but I wasn't keeping a diary at the time and I wasn't chatting with anyone else very rigorously about it via e-mail, so the electronic notion trail that has clung to every work since was never created. I do have a few surviving documents, however, and some tolerably reliable memories I might be able to taffy-pull into coherence. The first part of Locke's world to be created was the Kingdom of the Seven Marrows, home of the Vadrans, in the winter of 2000. While sitting at a Burger King on Robert Street South in St. Paul, Minnesota, no less. I sketched out a map of the Marrows on hexagonal chart paper and then scrawled a little note to myself on a napkin (I won the bronze in the 2000 Wannabe Author Cliche Olympics for that): "Why does it have to be set in another typical medieval dirt town?" With that self-flagellation rattling around in my brain, I advanced the timeline of my baby book from a pseudo-thirteenth century level of European development to a pseudo-sixteenth, give or take. That gave me a more populous, cosmopolitan, economically developed setting to play with, and was probably the major decision that eventually allowed me to produce complete chapters rather than infuriating two-page novel fragments. Once I had a not-stultifying setting to play with, it slowly dawned on me that my work could probably use something resembling a theme. This whole notion that my work could have some sort of "meaning" was freshly sprung in my brain-meat; it's one of the many epiphanies baby writers have ("Oh my god! I can write... an unreliable narrator! Holy smackballs... I can make allusions to annoying but highly respected works I hated in high school and make myself look really smart!"). Eventually you find yourself nestled snugly into the context of five thousand years of recorded human art, and you realize that you're not actually the first person to kindle these concepts.* You're more like the seventeen billionth. But when you're twenty, you think you're fucking Mozart just for managing to get your underwear facing the proper direction every morning. Anyhow, my original theme wasn't such a bad one, and I may play with it in future works (not Gentleman Bastard related)-- I thought I'd write something about the difference between accepted history and actual history, about the secret lives and struggles of critically important people who would eventually be forgotten, ignored, or derided when their times were chronicled. The moles in the gardens of history, as it were. Locke was conceived in this framework as a criminal-turned-spymaster who would, in objective reality, be directly responsible for preventing great disasters and saving the entire nation of Emberlain from invasion, only to be utterly paved over in all the formal histories. My framing device was going to be a series of snotty articles in scholarly journals from several centuries after he lived. I give you the text of the only surviving fragment of these things left in my papers, from late 2000: It is now difficult to credit that there was (or, indeed, could have been) such a person as Locke Lamora. The great weight of the historical record yields rumor, hearsay, and folk tales but scant evidence that a real man ever bore such a name. Indeed, the word "lamora" in the Loreni** tongue of the time, meant "shadow." It seems clear that Locke, like the Ten Honest Turncoats and the Rose of Parlay, is a colorful fragment of the historical imagination. To suggest that the Republic of Emberlain was, for any time at all, totally dependent upon the wits of a single man is a grave disservice to Emberlain Historical Journal Parthis, 1668 Embermarrow Press I never actually finished the quote. As I said, I don't think this is a bad framing device at all. With the right idea and the right author, it might be quite a lively and insightful one. But too much about it was wrong for the story I wanted to tell. Of paramount importance is the fact that offering scholarly treatises from the centuries after Locke's life would indicate that Locke's society actually survived and that he was remembered in any fashion. I can't give you any more specifics, of course, but let's just say that this is not a tension that I am interested in settling. I tossed the historical journal framework in the early days, along with my half-assed plans to give Locke hypnotic eyes and a supernatural voice. I then tried to make Emberlain (a tiny but financially powerful city-state loosely based on the Dutch republic, now canonized in the actual novels with that conception more or less intact) the entry point to the novel. In the first coherent scene I ever wrote, Locke and Jean ran a confidence game against a village full of Vadran farmers freshly in funds from selling off their harvest. Locke allowed himself to get caught for flagrant cheating at cards. When the villagers dragged him outside to beat and/or kill him, Jean appeared in disguise as some sort of lord or constable, and confiscated all the game's winnings as the price of his silence for ignoring the attempted murder. He then rode off into the sunset with his "prisoner." A basic, classic con game, to be sure. But again it felt all wrong. I didn't want Locke and Jean sweeping crusts of bread out of the mouths of people who'd count every copper to get through the winter; I wanted them to victimize ordinary folks when their ethics and vision failed them, not as a matter of habit. I also felt there was too much being left in the backstory... Locke and Jean were Camorri, but I'd never spent a paragraph describing Camorr, figuring out where they came from, or why the audience should really care. In medias res is a great place to start any story, but this was much, much too far into the middle of things. I decided I had to go all the way back to Camorr and childhood. The next year or so was spent churning out a lot of those worthless two-page novel fragments I mentioned; I knew at last where to set the story and what it should actually be about, but how the hell to get in past two pages was a tedious mystery. A couple of these fragments survive and they are among the most florid, deplorable, and over-wrought things I ever shat/typed (shyped?). You or your great-grandchildren can read them in my papers when I have kicked the oxygen habit. Eventually, however, I wrote one that was marginally less bullshit than its predecessors-- a languid, directionless opening in which Locke and Jean drift on a raft past the palace of a noblewoman they plan to rob. The description of this palace came straight out of a dream I had; I visualized a complex glass structure like an unfolding rose blossoming over the landscape. When I started trying to describe that place I realized that I couldn't stop. The mysterious glass was the key to Camorr. My exhortation to not create another stodgy medieval dirt town had at last come home to roost! All it took was a few years and dozens of false, unreadable starts for it to finally sink in. To be continued... ***** * Or you don't. Some people never do, and persist in telling themselves, their friends, their pets, and all the internet about it. Forever. Some extremely successful writers are surprisingly incapable of just rolling with that success, and end up screaming at the universe from behind the gleaming walls of their comfortably-furnished persecution complexes. Look for variations on the following two statements as telltale symptoms of this condition: 1. "I transcend and defy all genre but you idiots are too stupid to realize this." 2. "My ideas are revolutionary but you idiots are too stupid to realize this." ** Originally, Camorr was called "Lorem" and the Therin people were called "Loreni." Then I discovered that "lorem ipsum" is the universal standard in placeholder text and anyone who knew that would either be distracted or think I was trying to make a really lame joke. (30 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
6:24 pm	Against Big Bird, The Gods Themselves Contend In Vain I was a hard-core Sesame Street viewer from about 1979 to 1984, and my memories of the show are the sort of deep nostalgic tangle you'd expect, with a great deal of idiosyncratic noise blended into the signal. So, for many years, I carried around a vague but emotionally vivid recollection of a Sesame Street episode in which Big Bird and Snuffleupagus had witnessed the the passage of a soul to the ancient Egyptian afterlife, complete with the weighing of the human heart against a feather. I shit you not. For all those years, I just assumed that I was nuts, or that I was conflating a memory of a childhood dream with a childhood television experience. Not long ago, I was trading Sesame Street memories with that girl I like, and I determined to Google-fu my way to the truth. In the 1983 special Don't Eat the Pictures, assorted humans and Muppets are stuck overnight in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While Oscar, Bob, Cookie Monster, Olivia, and some small children are having the sort of mild and educational adventures you'd expect, Big Bird and Snuffy meet Sahu, a 4,000-year-old Egyptian prince (!) condemned to wander eternally in spirit form (!!) unless he can answer a riddle posed by a demon (!!!) that appears to him each night at midnight. I am not fucking with you. This really happened. There's Sahu! ACTUAL DIALOGUE from Big Bird: "Oh no! The demon's gonna be here any second now!" And here's the appearance of that demon, played by James motherfucking Mason. ( You know you want to keep going past the cut. ) (186 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 27th, 2012
7:03 am	Hear Me, See Me, Chase Me With Torches and Pitchforks I am the Extra Special Bonus Paul Cornell was Busy and John Scalzi was Unavailable guest for the SF Squeecast's most recent episode, "the Awkward Episode." I joined Lynn Thomas, Elizabeth Bear, and Cat Valente to squee about things and to answer about ten minutes of questions at the end (well, they would have been about two minutes of questions but I just don't shut up). You can find it at: http://sfsqueecast.com/2012/02/episode-9-what-i-like-about-you/ Also, in April I will be on the East Coast and doing several things in public. At the moment, I can tell you about: APRIL 18: Reading at KGB BAR in New York City As part of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB series, I'll be reading the evening of the 18th, along with Caitlín R. Kiernan. APRIL 24: Joint Reading/Signing with Elizabeth Bear at FLIGHTS OF FANTASY We'll be scribbling in books and blathering out loud in Albany, New York on the evening of April 24th. There is at least one more store appearance I'll post about when I have more details. (Comment on this)