I signed up to get a free copy of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s October/November “All-Star Anniversary Issue”, in exchange for which I am supposed to blog about it in some capacity. (See Gordon’s post about it in the F&SF blog, though I believe it’s now too late to sign up for your own.) I did this once before, last year sometime. Not sure if this means it’s an annual thing or if he does it all the time. I only ever hear about it when posts about it in his LJ. Anyway, it’s a good deal. Try it sometime.

So here we go.

The “All Stars” are as follows: Geoff Ryman, Robert Reed, Tim Sullivan, Albert E. Cowdrey, Steven Utley, Stephen King, Scott Bradfield, Laurel Winter, Terry Bisson, Carol Emshwiller, M. Rickert, Michael Swanwick, Sophie M. White. Woo. Those are indeed a lot of all-stars. And I actually read every one of those stories. I felt obliged, what with the free copy and all. I did not, in fact, enjoy them all. Surprise. Out of 13, 5 made me happy.

I will mention some of the other 8 only in passing. Stephen King delivered what he can be relied upon for: readable prose and an endearing character. Terry Bisson’s one-handed read, “Private Eye”, actually entertained me significantly more than any other story of his I’ve read. Carol Emshwiller is one of those people I feel I ought to love, but whose writing never grabs me. Robert Reed and Tim Sullivan’s stories both had enough interesting stuff in them to be maybe a third as long as they were. Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Inside Story” made light of Hurricane Katrina in a way I just couldn’t get behind… also, all his deep-southern characters talked like they were from New Jersey. Couldn’t figure that out, ’cause apparently he is from there.

On to the good stuff!

Geoff Ryman’s “Days of Wonder” was cool. Far-future thing with human-animal hybrids carrying fragments of human knowledge hidden in their DNA. Awesome idea, stretched just a little too thin, so the sharp edges of the story’s bones stuck out and poked me a handful of times. Had it been 2,000 words shorter I would have perhaps been awestruck.

Steven Utley’s “Sleepless Years” was about a suicide resurrected by science to be poked and prodded, full of interesting philosophical ruminations on the nature of life and afterlife, and the indistinguishability of hell from institutional medicine. A bit light on impact, but the ideas carried it for me.

Mary Rickert, as far as I’m aware, is incapable of writing a less than phenomenal story. “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account” freaked me the hell out. A totalitarian future USA in which abortion is not only illegal, but punishable by death. Profoundly unsettling. Somebody should give this lady a Tiptree.

Michael Swanwick’s “The Scarecrow’s Boy” was a fun far-future thing with a robot scarecrow hero and a sentient car sidekick helping a little kid escape political persecution in another totalitarian US by fleeing to Canada. What is it about totalitarian USses that makes them so fun to hate? Possibly their plausibility? Thank you, Mr. Swanwick.

Sophie White’s poem “December 22, 2012″ takes some enjoyable potshots at those sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting impatiently for the Mayan apocalypse. Accurate and fun.

I mostly skipped the nonfiction, as I usually do. Lucius Shepard doesn’t much like comic book movies, I gather. And as usual, I wish those plodding introductory paragraphs that come before each story would just go away and not come back. Sadly I doubt it will happen.

To sum up: Swanwick! M. Rickert!

I finally recovered, somewhat the worse for wear, my copy of Jan Morris’ Last Letters from Hav. I got to finish the last twenty pages, and now I get to talk about how Morris uses dialogue.

Like I said in that other post, the object is to understand how dialogue is used in fiction not driven exclusively by plot and character.

Letters from Hav is a travel narrative about a fictional city located somewhere along the south Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor. My edition includes a two-page spread of kickass high fantasy style maps of the city. In terms of content, I would say the book is about 80% worldbuilding, 15% character, 5% plot. Stylistically, it is beautiful, deceptively simple. Here’s the opening:

I did what Tolstoy did, and jumped out of the train when it stopped in the evening at the old frontier. Far up at the front the engine desultorily gasped, and wan faces watched me through crusted windows as I walked all alone down the platform to the gate. There was no pony trap awaiting me of course (Tolstoy’s reminded him sadly of picnics at Yasnaya Polyana), but a smart enough green Fiat stood in the station yard, a young man in sunglasses and a blue blazer beckoned me from the wheel, and in no time we were off along the rutted track towards the ridge.

Characterwise, we get the slightly fictionalized, nearly-transparent POV of Morris herself, functioning, as in the best travel writing, largely as a vessel for the eye. Gradually one acquires the impression of a quiet escapist struggling to drown her own questions of identity and self through immersion in alien experience. She rarely speaks except to ask questions; often she will opt to narrate her own part in a conversation while delivering explicitly the dialogue of others. This emphasizes that the focus is meant to be on the city and its inhabitants, rather than on herself–without every quite managing to divert us from the fact that there is no such place as Hav, allowing us, through implication, to come eventually to an understanding of the city as a metaphor for Morris herself.

The denizens of Hav, in their mode of speech and purpose, fall into three categories: outspoken intellectuals, opinionated, idle people in positions of power, and those of the working class. From the working class people we get the flavor of the dialect. Morris is referred to almost universally as “Dirleddy”–a mashing-together of “Dear lady”. These characters appear fleetingly, often in crowds, and speak briefly and to the point–often with jocular good humor.

I wore my toweling hat from Australia to go to the Serai. “Başinda kavak yelleri esiyor,” a passer-by said without pausing, which being translated from the Turkish means “There is the springtime in your hat!”

Both the intellectuals and people in power are prone to long, not-very-plausible speeches relating anecdotes about Hav’s history, politics and culture. Hav has a complicated history of colonization and occupation by many of the world’s military powers: Ottoman, French, British, German, Russian. Each culture maintains a presence in modern Hav, and each is represented by at least one eloquent mouthpiece. In this way, Morris creates an impression of overwhelming diversity and cultural complexity contained within one city. As I’ve said, some of these diatribes are long and not very believable as anything an individual could spontaneously rattle off—even from an intellectual or politician. She does make an effort to break them up with narration, granting some impression of a more spontaneous, realistic conversation recounted from notes. But it’s certainly not the kind of dialogue that would generally be considered “good” from the perspective of ye plot-oriented genre writer. But it’s not like all these people are just convenient mouthpieces for info dumps either: every one of them has a discernible agenda to get across and a personality that shows through in the details they choose to provide. On the other hand, the style of speech doesn’t actually change much from diatribe to diatribe. Intellectuals can be distinguished from political figures in that they’re more willing to break from formality and more open about inserting their opinions into the story they’re telling. Other than that, sentence structure and delivery remain surprisingly consistent among representatives of the three categories. And yet somehow it works.

Coffee arrived, flavored with camomile, together with biscuits on little scallop-edged plates, and the Caliph asked if I would like to see something of the house.

“You know its history, I dare say? Count Kolchok built it for his mistress, the dancer Olga Naratlova, who came to Hav with Diaghilev. Everything was taken from the house when Kolchok died, but I have had her portrait painted in memoriam“—and he showed me on the wall above our sofa a large and sickly representation, doubtless taken from a photograph, of a dark turn-of-the-century beuaty, full length, leaning in a dress of satiny red against a truncated column.

“What became of her?”

“Ah, you must ask the Bolsheviks. She went home to Russia in 1918, and was never heard of again.”

Poor Olga. She sounds a lonely figure, hidden away here in such secluded luxury, and she is lonely still, for hers is the only portrait in the whole of the Caliph’s house—”and just think what the Ikhwan would say, if they knew I had her!”

For all those of you, my beloved early readers, who remember, whether with fondness or disquiet, those lovable, disturbing, unfathomably evil, shotgun-toting, buggering gay cannibal centaurs: Beneath Ceaseless Skies has bought a centaur story! Specifically, “Of Thinking Being and Beast”, which is one of my favorites. I am psyched. Not only because the centaurs occupy a special place in the blackest portion of my heart, but also because Beneath Ceaseless Skies promises to be such a kick ass online magazine, where the centaurs will share the page with the likes of Charles Coleman Finlay, Chris Wilrich, Yoon Ha Lee, Margaret Ronald, and so on with suchlike awesomeness. See the announcement here on their forums, where you can also have a look at all the other great stuff that is forthcoming.

I took the Mythological Profile Test and found out that I am a Kirin. Which is like a magic flying deer/unicorn with dragon-scales that brings good luck. And beer.

If it weren’t for the beer, I believe I would be mildly annoyed.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s mushroom season in Western Mass. After all the rain we’ve had they’ve been popping up everywhere.

Berkley’s Polypore Polyporus berkeleyi
Mixed black birch and hemlock forest, Mt. Toby State Reservation These things can grow up to 50 lbs. And they’re edible. I had a taste: very much like steamed shredded chicken, except, you know, a mushroom.

Orange Mycena Mycena leaiana
Mixed deciduous forest, Mt. Toby State Reservation

Painted Suillius Suillius pictus, with slug.
Mixed oak and white pine forest, Mt. Toby State Reservation
update—turns out painted suillii are also quite good eating. After taking this picture and doing the necessary identification research, I found an absurd cache of them on an island in Pawtuckaway State Park, NH, tasted a couple, found them amazing, and subsequently devoured a whole lot of them as salad components and pizza topping.

Giant Puffball Calvatia gigantea
Grassy lawn, Sunderland, MA
Puffballs are dee-licious—firm and chewy on the outside, spongy and soft on the inside. As you can see I took this one home. I sliced it, sauteed it in butter until golden brown, and ate it for lunch!

(This is not—as can readily be determined by the heart-shaped collar, dazed expression and intact left eye—the Pirate King, but rather Muffin, aka the Floof, aka Moosh-Vazool the Night-Hob. And so on and so forth. But you get the idea.)

As promised (though belatedly): here, in mp3 format suitable for bedtime listening, is my newest story about that lovable, ass-kicking, non-boot-wearing-yet-still-swashbuckling cat, William-O the Pirate King. From the TNEO Slam 2008. Please reproduce, distribute, etc.

William-o the Pirate King in: A Steely-Gray Christmas 3.75 mb.

Oh—and if you’re interested in back issues, the other two audio stories can be had here.

“Funnel clouds sighted in western Mass.” —Boston.com

This picture was taken in Sunderland half a mile from where I live, in the backyard of a farmstand that sells me zucchini and ice cream.

Also:

For two days straight now, on the old Dingle road, we find dead butterflies, Monarchs, their wings stiff and bright, the soft black butter of their bodies wriggling with ants. Angels, tigers. The natural industry of dying.

—Sean Reagan at Douglas A. Martin’s Shoes, who seems to have accepted my meme challenge.

Woo western Mass!

Just got my contributor copies of Murky Depths issue #5, which features my story “Misty Rain”, complete with a seriously creepy illustration by Wayne Blackhurst. I have to admit I am pretty blown away. I mean, I guess I knew it was a horror story while I was writing it, but damn…the art makes it ten times creepier.

Actually I’m quite impressed with the magazine in general. The production values are high, it is packed full of both comics and prose fiction and features some beautiful art—particularly the cover art, by Luke Cooper, of a besneakered, pistol-packing grunge angel—and best of all, it looks like a comic book. Yeah!

, , if you have not already submitted to them, I suggest you do so.

Well, I meant to write something today about Jan Morris’ Last Letters from Hav, which is a phenomenal book with a strange and challenging structure that holds all kinds of lessons for somebody like me who would absolutely love to sell fiction on the merits of weirdness and style alone. But, big turkey that I am, I took the book with me to Boston this weekend and forgot it somewhere, so cannot accurately quote examples.

Instead I thought I would just try laying out the bones of the argument I would have tried to make.

This year’s Never-Ending Odyssey workshop master class focused on dialogue. I consider myself not so hot at dialogue, so was looking forward to an opportunity to learn why and what I could do about it. But as lecture after lecture rolled off me like water off a duck, I began to realize that part of what makes me do poorly at dialogue is that I don’t enjoy writing it, and maybe what stops me from enjoying it is the fact that good dialogue, at least in the sense that it was being taught here (by genre writers, for genre writers) doesn’t serve the same purposes in the kind of stories I like to write (those with atypical structure and nontraditional plot).

I came home from TNEO with the idea of looking through great examples of the kinds of fiction I do like to write and figuring out where and how their use of dialogue diverges from, say, the snappy repartee of a Raymond Chandler detective, and where (if at all) it follows the same rules. Last Letters from Hav would have made a great case study (and still will if I can figure out where my copy went), because not only does it lack a traditional plot structure, but it’s designed not to read like a work of fiction at all. It’s fiction masquerading as nonfiction. So its characters aren’t required to further any plot, but rather are expected to act like real people: random, arbitrary, at times even dull, driven by their own purposes rather than the author’s, yet in reality just as constructed and unreal. Especially since one of Morris’ strengths is the style of her prose, so in order for us to believe Letters from Hav as a continuation of her actual nonfiction writings, we have to experience the “real” residents of Hav as filtered through the author’s erudition and wry commentary.

Which, of course, I can’t really do, because I haven’t got the book.

But the idea is to do a similar thing with a variety of atypical fiction. Borges and Lucius Shepard immediately come to mind, but I’ll throw in any other idea/theme-driven (rather than plot-driven) prose stylists I can come up with. Poe? Ray Bradbury? Vonnegut? Ken Kesey? Umberto Eco possibly. Maybe even Dostoevsky.

Obviously this is going to be a long-term undertaking.

Would you see what no human eyes have seen? Look upon the moon. Would you hear what no ears have heard? Hearken to the cry of the bird. Would you touch what no hands have touched? Put your hand to the earth. Verily I say to you that the moment of God’s creation of the world is yet to come.
–Aurelian of Aquileia