Category: Art, Film, Literature

Reading Journal, January 2012

Okay, so this year I’m going to keep a record of my reading — for schoolwork, leisure, research; whatever. Since devoting myself to becoming a professional writer in early 2010, I’ve read a crap-load of incredible books. Books I wouldn’t have ever bothered with had I not received a much-needed nudge from King’s Just After Sunset and On Writing to begin to take myself seriously as a creative individual who wants to one day write for a living.

But I don’t really remember all of them, at least not well enough to spout off an inclusive list — so from now on, I’d like to know what I’ve read, what I’d like to read, and what my feelings about a given book were. Whenever I make a list of books I plan on reading, that never happens. I find new things, hear about new things, and move on; so I’m going to read what I want as I go along, with the single goal of reading a lot.

Also, I’ve gotten into a bad habit — thanks to something Neil Gaiman once said — of stopping halfway through books that aren’t holding my attention. The downside to this is, I finish fewer books; the upside is that I read more often, and don’t waste time on books that don’t tickle my fancy.

Since January’s almost over, it’s as good a time as any to talk a little bit about the books I’ve gotten through so far this year.

First, I started reading Hellhole by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert around the first of the month. By page 290, Chapter 38, I’ve lost interest in the plot. There are toomany characters that aren’t fleshed-out enough for me to give a damn. And the way the aliens are described, and their names — come on, guys. Get serious. I was a huge fan of the novel Dune: The Battle of Corrin, which I read in high school not long after discovering the elder Herbert’s original Dune masterpiece, and so I was expecting a lot more from this new trilogy. Anderson, for instance, is a tremendous writer. His work with Star Wars, D.C. Comics, etc., has set him apart as a veritable powerhouse in genre writing. But Hellhole feels rushed, flat, and unfeeling.

Then I picked up William Gibson’s Distrust That Particular Flavor, a collection of nonfiction essays about culture, technology, futurism, art, and interesting observations about the mundane. I read it in roughly two sittings, over the course of a day and a half, and…I’ll let my review at Digital Science Fiction save me the trouble of repeating myself.

I chased that shot of genius with a pair of guilty pleasures: Drew Karpyshyn’s Revan and James Luceno’s Darth Plagueis. The former was an enjoyable return to the Old Republic as fans of the original-Xbox Knights of the Old Republic games understand it, but it ends with a rather dark, somewhat vague denouement meant as an obvious setup for the recently-released Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG. Darth Plagueis, on the other hand, is a welcome dose of exemplary writing — the kind of thing you don’t expect from Star Wars, but you sometimes get when the cover has a name like Luceno, Matthew Stover, or Terry Brooks on it. I won’t spoil much, but one thing that piqued my interest about the novel is that the hardcover edition jacket has Darth Maul on the back of it, lightsaber activated and face twisted with fury. Also: Darth Sidious as we’ve never seen him in the films. Plagueis himself, well, by the end he’s underutilized, his apprentice having become the novel’s true protagonist and dominant viewpoint character, it seems; but he is one of the most intriguing characters in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, and the prequel films would have benefited from his role in the machinations of the Sith.

As of now, I’m about thirty or forty pages into George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, the first volume in his acclaimed epic fantasy series. I don’t usually read fantasy, but I’ve caught myself saying multiple times over the past year or so that I’d like to get into the genre as a way to stretch my writerly muscles and find another literary love. So far, I’m finding that Martin was exactly the gateway drug I needed. The characters are well drawn, believable; and the worldbuilding is phenomenal. Like many other geeks, I’m completely enthralled at present by Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – and so now seemed like as good a time as any to test the fantasy waters. I’m glad I did.

In school, I’m presently reading or rereading: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (utterly incomprehensible to the modern reader, and largely devoid of effective comedy, but intriguing nonetheless if I take the time to read slowly and with care); Remaking the Modern by Farha Ghannam, an ethnography of present-day Cairo; and Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poetry authored by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I’m trying to keep an open mind, and read these with earnest, but it’s difficult. With schoolwork, there’s always a great science fiction book I could be reading instead — and I’m ready to get the hell out of school in general.

From First Draft to Year’s Best: A Conversation with Dave Hutchinson

Dave Hutchinson

Dave Hutchinson was born in Sheffield in 1960. After reading American Studies at the University of Nottingham, he became a journalist and is now currently unemployed. He’s the author of five collections of short stories and one novel, and his novella “The Push” was shortlisted for the 2010 BSFA award for short fiction. He has also edited two anthologies and co-edited a third. He lives in north London with his wife and several cats.

Dave, thanks for agreeing to drop by for an interview. The last time I saw “The Incredible Exploding Man,” it was a rough but ingenious first draft freshly written for Jeremy C. Shipp’s Yard Gnome Army Fiction Writing Boot Camp. It was recently published in the acclaimed SF anthology Solaris Rising, edited by Ian Whates, alongside some of the biggest names in the field. Now I’m looking forward to getting Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology and reading it yet again, among a selection of the finest science fiction stories published throughout 2011.

What are your feelings in the wake of this tremendous success?

Not only that, but it’s now on the longlist for the BSFA’s short fiction award. It’s an odd feeling. I did Jeremy’s course — which I can heartily recommend to everyone — because I had a lot of time on my hands, I wasn’t writing anything, and I’d never done a writing course before. I’m completely self-taught — which in my case is just a euphemism for “hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s doing” — and I thought it might help point out the errors in my own writing. Somehow it didn’t occur to me that it would also involve writing a fresh piece of fiction, and when Jeremy dropped that bombshell on us I sort of panicked. You saw the extremely lumpy first draft and you know how bad it was; the fact that it went on to be sold, and then picked for Year’s Best, and then get longlisted, is entirely down to the comments of you and our fellow Boot Campers. It would almost certainly be a different story without all that input. So, how do I feel about it? Very pleased, obviously; I’ve had more people come up to me and say they’ve enjoyed this one story than I think all my other stuff put together. It just seems to have tickled a nerve somewhere.

The story features some pretty freaky science, showcased in the form of a pretty original militarized-superhero tale. Care to explain the basics of the scientific concept that inspired the work?

Hah! You know, even though it’s so recent I have no idea where the story came from. It sort of bolted itself together in my head spontaneously out of all kinds of junk that was floating around. Mostly I made it all up. There’s some stuff in there about string theory and a kind of quasi-dimension called Calabi-Yau Space, but I’ve only the vaguest understanding of that stuff; any half-bright physics graduate would shoot holes through the science.

After the other students and I gave you feedback on the story, how did you go about revising it? What pieces of advice from first readers were most helpful in the second draft?

Basically I realized I’d approached the whole thing wrong. The first draft was in the present tense and I think someone pointed out that it would work better if the central character was the narrator. So I took it to bits and did it again. The opening scene in the White House Situation Room — which incidentally I was quite pleased with — didn’t really impress anyone, so that went. After that was gone I needed a new opening, and once I had that the structure of the second draft settled down. I gave the narrator a sidekick, wrote some back story for the sidekick, and by the time I’d done all that it started to look like a proper story. Very hard work, though.

Was Solaris Rising the first place you sent the story? What was your reaction when you got the news that it would be published alongside works by the likes of Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, et cetera?

Yes. I got an email from the editor saying he had some room and did I have anything to send him. I had something finished, but it was about three times too long, so rather than let the opportunity drop I sent him the second draft of “Exploding Man” as soon as I finished it, and he bought it. It got a little tweaked afterward — the original was set at Fermilab and I suddenly realized that anyone who actually knew anything about Fermilab would tear the descriptions to bits, so I made up a fictional high-energy physics lab in a fictional town in Iowa instead. As for the book? Well, you dream about having a story in an anthology with writers like that. It really is very mighty company to be in.

It’s been about six months since I read the piece, but the overall impression is still very much with me — it’s sort of a frightening story, but the requisite sense-of-wonder that empowers so much of the best science fiction is alive in full force in “The Incredible Exploding Man.” Care to give your own summary of what the plot entails, without giving too much away?

Hm. How to avoid spoilers…? It’s really about an ordinary bloke suddenly being pitched into an extraordinary situation following an accident at a particle accelerator, and the choices he has to make after that.

Your writing is obviously very competent, which means you’ve no doubt been at this a while, honing and refining your craft, but also presumably reading widely in the genre. Who are your biggest literary influences, both within the science fiction section of the bookstore and beyond it?

Within science fiction, Larry Niven and Keith Roberts. I thought quite a lot of Niven’s earlier work had a kind of breezy So-Cal quality to it that I liked very much. Roberts, I thought, was one of our finest science fiction writers — his best stuff has an intense connection with the English landscape, particularly the landscape of Dorset. I would also love to write half as well as Eric Brown, Chris Priest, Charlie Stross, and Peter Hamilton, very considerable writers each in their own way. Outside science fiction, Raymond Chandler and Len Deighton. I just love their way with dialogue.

How long have you been writing, and to what author would you say you most owe the urge to scribble?

I’ve been writing properly since I was sixteen, so about 35 years. I’m not sure there’s one writer who prompted me to start; I read a lot of Heinlein and Asimov and Bester and Niven and E. E. Smith and many other writers when I was a kid, and I guess at some point it all reached a kind of critical mass and I decided to have a go myself.

What other influences have had an impact on your writing, literary or otherwise? Any particular band or artist whose music you enjoy listening to while writing?

I’m deeply fond of the English classical composer Ralph Vaughan Williams; his stuff has the same kind of connection to English landscape that Keith Roberts’s fiction has, and that’s kind of influenced some of the stuff I’ve done. I used to listen to talk radio a lot while I was working; for some reason it annoyed me so much it helped me concentrate on what I was doing. These days I’ll just put my Walkman on shuffle. I’m a big fan of Rush, which I suppose dates me a bit, but I’ll listen to pretty much anything for background.

I love Rush! They’re one of those rare classic-rock bands that only seems to get better and better over the course of their career.

What’s your opinion on the sudden surge of Hollywood-level interest in science fiction? Since the success of Avatar, we’ve seen a sequel to Disney’s Tron, a reboot/prequel to the brilliant classic Planet of the Apes, and Ridley Scott is in talks to direct a second installment in the Blade Runner universe following the release of his latest SF film, Prometheus; hell, science fiction seems to be just about everywhere in the mainstream. Would you say this is a good thing, and what project, rumored or confirmed, has your inner schoolboy-geek giddy with anticipation? (I know I’m most looking forward to the recently announced live-action TV series, Star Wars: Underworld, which producer Rick McCallum is describing as a blend of the Star Wars universe and The Godfather!)

It’s funny; to me there seems to have been a steady stream of big-budget science fiction films for years, going all the way back to Star Wars. It’s just that there are more of them these days. Which is good; I always think that films are a useful gateway drug for potential science fiction readers. What has heartened me enormously is the sheer quality of writing on genre television shows these days. Series like Battlestar Galactica and Carnivale had some of the best writing I’ve seen for a very long time.

Dave, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to drop by and have this talk. I look forward to getting my hands on Dozois’s Year’s Best for 2011, and I wish you continued success in this crazy but thrilling vocation!

Alex, it’s been a genuine pleasure. Thanks for the questions!

“The Incredible Exploding Man” can be found in Solaris Rising, ed. Ian Whates, and will be reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection, available July 3, 2012, and also featuring fiction by Catherynne M. Valente, Robert Reed, Stephen Baxter, Lavie Tidhar, Jay Lake, Peter S. Beagle, Michael Swanwick, and Tobias S. Buckell, among others.

Follow Dave on Twitter, where he tweets as @HutchinsonDave.

Book Review: Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson at Digital Science Fiction

Over at DigitalScienceFiction.com, my review of Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson is live. This is my first blog post written for Digital Science Fiction; and, hopefully, the first of many. Here’s an excerpt:

Take the trope of the cyborg, for instance. A symbol, a science-fictional image as well as reality, Gibson argues that in today’s world we fail to see the forest for the trees, so to speak — that our “literalist” sensibilities blind us to the truth of our existence: that the Net, or cyberspace, is itself a very real, very vital, and utterly enormous cybernetic organism.

Questions about the merit of ideas like the so-called Technological Singularity, or transhumanism, posthumanism, et cetera, are rendered moot in Gibson’s view, in light of the reality that we already exist — in a fully physical sense, whether we’re readily aware of it or not — as organic units within a larger cyborg (he employs the metaphor of the capital-B “Borg,” from the fictional Star Trek universe). That we are, quite literally, participants in a global, liminal state of being — transhumanist, if you prefer — that points to the inevitability of science-fictional concepts like human drones with a shared consciousness, or hive mind, and “a humanity where unaugmented reality will eventually be a hypothetical construct, something we can only try, with great difficulty, to imagine.”

Still Alive

Okay, okay: Quick update.

School is coming to a close. Not winding down, as the expression goes, not yet — but it’s getting close to being over. I have a ten- to twelve-page research paper I’m working on, I have two or three major essay-based tests to study for, a ten-minute presentation to do, but then I’m fucking done.

At least until next semester. (The last one, finally.)

After that? Well, okay. Here’s the official announcement: I’m writing my first novel. I’ve got a couple of short story ideas brewing in the back of my mind, science fiction stories, but I’m saving those for afterward. I don’t want to get in the way of what has the potential to become a really, really interesting dark fantasy novel. Or horror novel. Or weird transgressive satire. I don’t give a shit what people end up calling it, because chances are that no one will want to read it. It’s a first novel — maybe you didn’t catch that part.

I’m calling it DOOMSTER, but you can call it whatever you want. Don’t call it crap, ’cause that’s rude as hell. Just ignore it, if you think it’s crap. Please.

I’ve got a lot of brainstorming notes and a very broad outline written, with some truly inspiring characters and ideas, but I honestly have no idea what it will end up being. It may prove to be a trunk novel. It may end up self-published. It may sell to a small press publisher like Raw Dog Screaming Press, who I think are doing some fantastic work in the field of horror and the weird right now, or somebody bigger. I dunno.

I just want to write a novel, and have some fun with it.

To write the book — here comes that advice bubbling up again — that I would want to read.

(Meanwhile, I’ll also be filling out applications to Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey. Fingers crossed.)

So what have I been reading? That’s relevant.

First: Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk’s earth-shattering debut novel from 1996. My favorite book, well, ever. Must’ve read it a hundred times. It’s been instrumental in motivating my lazy, stressed-out ass to hunker down and get a novel done. Finally. Before that: things like Horns by Joe Hill, and Palahniuk’s Damned. More recently, Jeremy C. Shipp’s Cursed, George Carlin’s posthumous memoir, Last Words, and The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy. I’ve been watching my favorite childhood anime series, Robotech.

This is where my head has been, when it’s not at school. Doing schoolwork.

By the time I get around to diving headlong into the novel draft next week, my head is still going to be here. I think that’s okay, even a great thing. These are books I love. The myths I’ve built my life around, to put it boldly.

They’re the reason I’m managing to make my homework fun in this last, final stretch.

Here’s the block quote that opens my final Buddhism term paper, for fun:

I would put forward that the next thing is going to be a story, because right now, people really don’t have a big story, a big software… They don’t have a big meta-narrative story; they don’t have a big story like Christianity was a big story. So right now, we need a really big story… And that story doesn’t have to be in conflict or in reaction to the current story, because I would say, right now, you don’t change anything by protesting anything… You give people a more effective way of living their lives, they won’t give a shit about foreign oil, you know? You give them the right story, and you make their cars obsolete, it’s gonna be like, “We are just swimming in oil. What are we going to do with all this oil?” And you can do that within the culture without reacting to the government, the war, whatever. Because in a way, by reacting to it, you’re wasting energy…you are making it stronger by giving it this token little resistance, keeping it in place. So your job, I would say, is to come up with a story like that, that makes all of the things we worry about so much right now completely beside the point… We won’t even think about them, because your story will be so incredible. I don’t know what that story is, but that’s why…if I can make my case, somebody’s gonna come up with that story.

–Chuck Palahniuk (Postcards from the Future)

The paper is called Karmic Demons and the Power of Compassion: Buddhist Philosophy as a Basis for Modern Myth, and I’m hoping to craft it into a kind of short fiction-writer’s manifesto. A foundation for the rest of my literary career, at the risk of sounding presumptuous, or even pretentious.

Because I’ve come to love the ideas that lie at the heart of Buddhist thought (even though I’m not, nor will I ever be, a Buddhist), I seek to imbue my stories with them — but only if I can achieve that without growing deliberately didactic. In this essay, I’m going to explore Buddhist ideas in existing stories and the larger philosophical truths they represent, and then explain the utility of such ideas from a contemporary storyteller’s perspective.

To give you an idea of the paper’s meat-and-potatoes content, the preexisting basis for my argument, here’s my works cited bibliography:

  • Bacigalupi, Paolo. “Pocketful of Dharma.” Pump Six and Other Stories. San Francisco: Night Shade, 2010. 1-24. Print.
  • Dick, Philip K. “Beyond Lies the Wub.” Paycheck and Other Classic Stories. New York: Citadel, 1990. 27-33. Print.
  • Hill, Joe. Heart-Shaped Box. New York: Harper, 2010. Print.
  • Hill, Joe. Horns. New York: William Morrow, 2010. Print.
  • Loy, David, and Linda Goodhew. The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004. Print.
  • Mitchell, Donald W. Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
  • Okorafor, Nnedi. Who Fears Death. New York: Daw, 2010. Print.
  • Palahniuk, Chuck. Damned. New York: Doubleday, 2011. Print.
  • Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. Print.
  • Postcards from the Future: The Chuck Palahniuk Documentary. Dir. Dennis Widmyer, Kevin Kölsch, and Josh Chaplinsky. Perf. Chuck Palahniuk. Kinky Mule Films, 2003. DVD.

Total Geekout

Over at io9.com earlier today, horror novelist Joe Hill — author of my all-time favorite novel, Horns — participated in a digital Q&A. Fortunately, I finally got the chance to ask Hill the very question that’s been burning in my mind for over a year now:

Hey there! Thanks for the great questions guys. So I guess I’ll just quote your questions, and see what I have (if anything) for answers. First up, from Alex J. Kane:

Q: “What I’d love to know is: How do you develop your characters? Do you write extensive sketches in place of a plot outline? Or do you craft them as you draft the story? I’d love to know where these folks came from.”

A: For the most part, I just sort of feel my way along. Every day, when I sit down to work, I hope I’m going to learn something new about one of my characters: what music they like, how they feel about their mother, what turns them on, what they won’t tolerate. Developing an extensive character sketch ahead of time would rob me of the most enjoyable part of the process.

At the same time, this is also the most challenging part of working on a story, and can lead to setbacks. In all three novels – HEART-SHAPED BOX, HORNS, and the new (unpublished) one – I wound up writing lots of material about certain characters, trying to find the right sound to their voice, struggling to find their emotional center. And most of that material never makes it into the book. I had to write it, for myself, but it isn’t inherently interesting to the reader.

Cat-Faced Goblin Fruit Merchant

Cat-Faced Goblin Fruit Merchant

‎Cat-Faced Goblin Fruit Merchant | Ink Drawing | 11″x14″

For Sale! This piece is available as a framed original black-and-white drawing; as a custom, one-of-a-kind eBook Cover with titles; as a custom web graphic or banner/header image; or as a framed, full-color illustration. Color available in any category upon request. Email me via the contact form, or leave a comment below, if you think you might be interested.

(The above image is a low-resolution, slightly cropped preview.)

Alex’s Halloween Flick Recommendations

One of the presumptions I make with this blog thing is, anyone who comes here and reads this puppy probably values my opinion somewhat. Another is, most folks who read this will already be reading horror novels and other fantastic fiction year-round, so instead of tossing out some ideas about what to read this Halloween, I’ll give you my prescribed list of the ten best fright films ever, ’cause, you know, I wouldn’t want you wasting your time watching bad movies:

  1. George A. Romero’s Creepshow (1982). This fun, campy tribute to the old horror comics of the 1950s and -60s is scripted by none other than terror maestro Stephen King, who stars in the film alongside his son, writer Joe Hill, Ed Harris, Hal Holbrook, Leslie Nielsen (in one of his most memorable performances ever!), and Ted Danson.
  2. Frank Darabont’s The Mist (2007). This tale of cosmic terror, starring Thomas Jane, Laurie Holden, Toby Jones, and Marcia Gay Harden (in a role to rival the villainy of even Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter, or Darth Vader), follows the harrowing struggle of a father and son trapped in the supermarket — as if that isn’t horrifying enough! — during a mist-borne invasion of otherworldly terrors. What is terrifying isn’t necessarily the interdimentional spiders, mammoth insects, or even the Lovecraftian Behemoth-Flea-Thing, but rather the individuals who polarize and wage war among a microcosm of humanity (inhumanity?).
  3. Michael Doughert’s Trick ‘r Treat (2007). Brian Cox, Dylan Baker, and Anna Paquin bring unforgettable performances to this episodic web of interwoven terrors. A kind of Halloween-themed Creepshow homage, this film shines on the basis of a solid, tightly woven (if a little understated, or even vague) script and some genuine scares.
  4. John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). I don’t call myself a purist, and I’m definitely no snob when it comes to picking films, but I’ve so far refused to watch Rob Zombie’s modern retelling of the classic Michael Myers film that launched the “slasher-flick” subgenre that has come to define horror cinema in recent decades, for better or worse. A chilling soundtrack, an organic story that flows like a deep, deep knife wound, and career-defining performances by veteran actor Donald Pleasence and a young Jamie Lee Curtis make this timeless film both a visceral and psychological exploration of evil that will live on long after its imitators have faded into obsolescence.
  5. Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999). Perhaps Burton’s most underrated, and subtly terrifying work, Sleepy Hollow is rich beyond measure with atmosphere, stellar performances from a mind-blowing cast, and convincing studies of supernatural tropes such as witchcraft, the undead, and that cheerful little place we call Hell. Stars Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, Jeffrey Jones (Edward Rooney from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), Emperor Palpatine — er, Ian McDiarmid, Michael Gough (the original Alfred Pennyworth), Michael Gambon (Dumbledore!), and Christopher Walken, minus his head.
  6. Dennis Iliadis’s The Last House on the Left (2009). Iliadis takes first-time director Wes Craven’s brilliant 1972 premise and gives it the visceral, adrenal, downright savage production it deserves. A young girl is brutally raped after watching her friend get stabbed to death in shockingly believable fashion. When she shows up at home, bloody and too exhausted to speak, her parents realize they’ve been giving shelter to the most vile band of murdering rapists — played brilliantly by Garret Dillahunt, Aaron Paul, and Riki Lindhome — they’ve ever had the misfortune of meeting. Revenge ensues.
  7. Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary (1989). Stephen King adapted the script from his own novel of the same name, so one would almost be better off just reading the damn book — a masterpiece of macabre literature — but since it’s Halloween and movies are the flavor of the night, this haunting little film should keep you up all night. Or for several. Fred Gwynne (of Herman Munster fame) plays the cautionary-uncle figure Jud Crandall, who knows the secret of the Pet Sematary — and warns Louis Creed (played by Dale Midkiff) of the dangers of playing God through ancient, death-defying magic. I remain convinced to this day that this is the film that warped my young, impressionable mind as a child; it’s the reason why I “write this awful stuff.”
  8. Ti West’s The House of the Devil (2009). A retro horror flick reminiscent of the 80s but twice as good as anything that inspired it, The House of the Devil is a suspenseful tale of a Satanic cult seeking a babysitter for a job that doesn’t involve children. One of the most satisfying — and downright unforgettable — climaxes in the history of horror cinema.
  9. John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). This exploration of the alien other, of Cold War-era paranoia, and of humanity’s dissolution in the face of unthinkable terror is one of the finest horror films ever crafted, not because its special effects are stunningly real (they’re not), or because the acting is Oscar-worthy (most of the performances are merely workable, with the exception of Kurt Russel’s and Keith David’s), but because it deals with abstract sociological concerns on a microcosmic scale, and with unparalleled brilliance. The description of the alien, and the scene toward the film’s middle, when one of the humans bares its alien instincts in an inhuman shriek, and is set swiftly ablaze with a flamethrower, make for one of the most thought-provoking portrayals of science intersecting with a deeper, psychological brand of horror that ends on a resonant, haunting chord more than worth the price of admission.
  10. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Janet Leigh’s infamous shower scene, punctuated with the artful dilation of her pupils and the spiral washing of her blood (rendered black, due to the film’s appropriate lack of color) down the drain, is one of the most memorable moments not only in the history of horror and suspense, but in all of cinema. Anthony Perkins’s portrayal of quiet, repressed sociopath Norman Bates — and, let’s not forget, mother up in the bedroom window — is another example of a performance that will outlive most of its predecessors, excepting only the likes of Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon. Vince Vaughn’s performance in the contemporary remake is by no means bad, but I have to argue that it’s yet another example of a modern film reboot that is simply unjustifiable, artistically and otherwise.

An Interview with Tobias S. Buckell

Tobias S. Buckell

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has written six novels, including the New York Times Bestseller Halo: The Cole Protocol and Arctic Rising, due out from Tor Books in February. He currently lives in Ohio with his wife and twin daughters.

The Xenowealth novels are awesome examples of your work, and I know a lot of fans are really excited that you’re going to be picking up where you left off with Sly Mongoose. Care to tell us how much time has passed between Sly Mongoose and the new project, The Apocalypse Ocean?

Roughly fifteen years. Just enough time for everyone to relax, and for some of our characters to have some bitter memories about the conflicts that were winding down and being sorted out at the close of Sly Mongoose.

As a fan of your universe, and especially of intriguing characters like Nashara, I thought the short story “Placa del Fuego” was a great taste of what the Xenowealth still had to offer readers. Part of me even feared that I was getting a peek at what might have been, rather than what is coming. Will that story be contained in the new book to some degree, or is that the end of Tiago’s story?

“Placa del Fuego” is a great taste of what is coming! It was originally the opening chapters of the book, formed into a short story for Clarkesworld after my editor at Tor and I decided to go in a whole new direction. I really want to use Tiago and Kay as important parts of The Apocalypse Ocean, and their points of view will feature heavily in the book. I’ve actually got parts of Kay’s chapters written already that come right after “Placa del Fuego” takes place, where she flashes back to her own life, and how she came to power at Placa del Fuego. Kay’s got these alien-bred abilities to manipulate people and read micro-expressions, and she’s had such a brutal life, she wants retribution for all that. And she has the tools to make everyone around her miserable.

While there were plenty of incredible ideas in Ragamuffin and Mongoose, one of the most interesting things I’ve seen you do in a story was the alien creature called the Doacq, the mouth of which is actually a wormhole. Was there any particular tidbit of scientific speculation that led you to dream up such a character, or did it come as something that was just artistically inspiring?

I’ve always loved the science of wormholes (what science there is; they’re  somewhat more on the fantastic side of it all). The Doacq is a bit on the way-out-there side of things: an alien creature with a wormhole for a mouth. I imagine one would die of radiation from that. But the Doacq is an artificial biological construct, so I’m looking forward to revealing a lot more about it as the book goes along. The idea is mostly a horror image for me, a creature with an impossibly large mouth that can swallow you off to…somewhere, haunting the streets for purposes unknown…

You’ve written a lot of really fun blog posts about your writing process, especially back when you were working on Sly Mongoose and The Cole Protocol. Has drafting a novel changed much since you started to work on Arctic Rising?

Not really, to be honest. I’m still a huge fan of the software Scrivener for organizing myself and making a complex book understandable. I still prefer to write at night. From January to last month I’d actually been working at a morning shift writing and editing some copy for a company. It was a good contract, but the morning hours really hit the fiction productivity hard, I realized. The contract changed right as I was considering quitting to a different time, and I’m now back to writing late at night, and that means more fiction. That led me to feel that I could promise doing something like Apocalypse Ocean and not be over-reaching.

What are you looking forward to the most in returning to the Xenowealth books? Any particular character, or just the scope of your unique universe?

I find Pepper so much fun to write, but I’m honestly looking forward to bringing Nashara back into the mix. She’s really the only personality that’s going to work to balance Kay out.

You’re prefunding the fourth installment of the series through Kickstarter. Do you mind telling us about your motivation to go that route? How does it feel to see the amount of support you’ve been getting in such a short amount of time?

Well, there’s always a dilemma about what to do with a book that’s part of a series. I could shop it around and try to get someone to pick it up. After all, Sly Mongoose is about to come out in paperback around April. The previous books did really well in pre-orders, but hit that awkward bookstore spiral where they kept ordering fewer copies. So overall, people ordering directly compensated, and the core readership of those books grew, but I was getting fewer bookstore sales. Growth stayed flat, or just slightly up in sales for Sly Mongoose.

So I knew finding another publisher for it would be a long haul. Worth it, but a long shot as well, mainly due to the declining bookstore sales.

Then there’s the fact that I like to experiment. I have a short story collection up for sale with Wyrm Publishing, and then I did the eBook myself. I’ve written about how I experimented with the price and sales data. I also published a book about writing with some of my failed stories called Nascence. Again, I was experimenting with eBook sales.

So to me, I decided to use this as a way to test Kickstarter. I’ve seen a number of fascinating projects by people happen via Kickstarter. And Tim Pratt and Mur Lafferty’s successful projects convinced me that it might be a great way to continue the series faster than normal.

In general, I’ve been fascinated by Kickstarter since I contributed to Stacy Whitman’s project to create a new publishing company for multiracial science fiction and fantasy young adult novels. To me, the use of Kickstarter for creative projects was more of a real revolution than eBooks. To me eBooks are an evolution — we are changing some of the middlemen and royalty structures — but ultimately it’s very recognizable. But getting people to prefund a project solves a very real dilemma authors have about how successful the project is before you start it. Knowing that you have a hit in hand before going forward, to be capitalized for your project from the get go, is going to be incredibly empowering.

One thing that seems very exciting is how much more creative control this project is going to allow you. Can you tell us a bit about the design aspects, the editing process, your plans for marketing and so forth?

Pablo Defendini has been a friend of mine forever. He’s a fantastic graphic design guy I met back when he was doing all sorts of cool stuff at Tor. I’ve dug his graphic design ever since I saw a test poster he did for Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. He did the existing art you see at Kickstarter for The Apocalypse Ocean, and if we’re successful, at certain higher backing levels, we’re going to do even more, like create a custom map of the Xenowealth, and do some interior illustrations for the book! This is the sort of stuff I don’t find myself being able to do on a normal novel project, and that is so cool!

I recall reading somewhere that you’re under contract to write at least one more novel for Tor following the release of Arctic Rising. Do you have any idea what you’re going to do next?

I’m working on a novel called Infringement, based on a short story called “A Jar of Goodwill,” also published in Clarkesworld. It’s going to be a compact, near-future space opera about the nature of intelligence, humanity, and conquest.

Since most of us reading this are writers, is there any advice you’d like to offer emerging authors of science fiction?

Read lots of stuff outside the genre; don’t get too caught up in everything. Focus on the writing. Write as much as you can without breaking anything.

Given the current state of the industry — with everything from crowdsourcing to electronic publishing to print-on-demand and online magazines — do you think there’s any “best” or “safe” route to take, or is a career in writing fiction something that can only happen through happy accidents and persistence?

It’s a lot of persistence. No matter what route you take, there’s going to be that need for persistence. All overnight successes are over a decade in the making, or more. I’d say, pay attention to the authors who have the literary life you want, and see how they did it and what it took and is taking to be like them. Don’t buy hype from people telling you how to do anything. Go look at a career you like and see about what that platform is under it.

And in the course of learning about it, you’ll probably forge your own route.

I did the classic thing: I sold short stories to break in and get my name out there, but also to learn a lot of the fundamentals of writing. I sold to various professional magazines (online and print) and anthologies. That, and the fact I kept a frequent blog for many years, got me the notice of voters and an award nomination. That got me the notice of an agent. After writing and polishing a novel many times, we got many rejections, but finally sold that novel. That’s my approach from 1996-2006. It’s the old school way, and it worked nicely for me with a little bit of boost from the blogging.

I still work with Tor/Macmillan for my books, I’ve just added new channels to where my stuff goes. I’m always keeping an eye on how lots of people make a living at fiction! I tend to be platform-agnostic. As long as I get to keep writing fiction, I’m happy.

Any writers or books besides your own you’d like to recommend, especially to science fiction fans?

The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge is out soon, and I’m reading an early review copy of it.

Of all the fun technology you get to play around with in your work, which would you love to use in your own everyday life the most, if you could?

Back in the day, when I was writing Ragamuffin, I was obsessed with augmented reality devices and technologies. Now they’re here, but I live in an area where the data hasn’t spread really. I can’t wait to get out to NYC and use the Layar app on my iPhone soon!

The Eyes Have It: Sight, Blindness, and the Telling Expression in Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”

The first footnote beneath the text of Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” explains that, when asked if the meaning of the poem can best be summarized as “he that endureth to the end shall be saved,” Browning replied, “Just about that” (251). The end spoken of being, at least in part, death, this reveals a great deal about the psychological atmosphere with which Browning composed the work. The apocalyptic imagery, the chaotic state of the narrator’s consciousness, and even the image of the Dark Tower itself imbue the poem with a distinct deathly tone. And yet most intriguing is the image of the “hoary cripple” (2), whom the narrator — the titular Childe Roland — asks the way. It is this figure with whom the narrative begins, and also with whom Browning begins a motif of imagery focused on facial expression, blindness, and sight. Using this motif of facial expression and eyesight, Browning establishes that reality is ultimately subjective, and may be largely dependent on one’s imagination and how well attuned one is to the realm of the spiritual.

From the outset of the narrative, Roland distrusts the cripple, noting his “malicious eye” (2). What of this cripple, though? Is the narrator’s assessment of the figure as malicious accurate? The aspect of the would-be hero’s journey — and the apparent aimlessness with which it is ultimately made — lends a bit of irony to the narrator’s attitude toward the cripple. It is quite possible that in the wasteland Browning describes — “grey plain all around [...] to the horizon’s bound” (53-2) — the direction given is irrelevant, or even that the cripple tells the narrator the truth. For instance, that Roland feels he has been lied to, and yet eventually finds his way to the prophesied Tower, is at least some evidence to contradict his suspicions.

Following the description of the cripple’s eye as “malicious” (2), the narrator describes his mouth: “scarce able to afford / Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored / Its edge” (4-6). This image brings the reliability of the narrator’s regard for the “hoary cripple” (2) into further question. If suppression of the cripple’s glee is possible at all, how are we to prove that there is any glee in his expression at all? Might not this merely be the narrator’s own distrustful tendency — lack of faith, one might put it — bleeding into his interpretation of this particular perception? One might be so bold as to argue that the figure is merely smiling.

Browning’s emphasis on imagination, on the fantastic, only intensifies as the narrative moves into its second stanza, wherein Roland “guessed what skull-like laugh / Would break” (10-11). The image of laugh as skull-like is purely the narrator’s own speculation, and yet the image is too deliberately strange, too deliberately original, to be dismissed. Given the absurdly elusive nature of the Tower, and the supernatural image of Roland’s peers gathered “in a sheet of flame” (201) to glimpse him arriving at his lifelong quest’s end, the use of the skull in place of the previous descriptions of the cripple does not seem overbearingly outlandish. In fact, it only serves to reinforce the work’s unifying mood of weariness and death; one might go so far as to conclude that the cripple “with his staff” (7) is the traditional figure of Death Incarnate found throughout art and literature, particularly in the paintings of the Romantic Period or mythological figures like the Greek Charon. Of course, we are limited to drawing such conclusions on the basis of the narrator’s questionable descriptions, which makes any claim to certainty on the matter dubious at best.

Even the desolate landscape through which the road to the Dark Tower winds is regarded as having a kind of face, or at least a capacity for facial expression. At the day’s close, it casts “one grim / Red leer to see the lain catch its estray” (46-8). Its estray, in this instance, is surely the narrator; and given the construction of the previous lines, it is unreasonable to suggest that the subject of this sentence could be anyone or anything but the day itself. Roland goes on to describe the “starved ignoble nature” (56) of the wasteland, even claiming that “inertness and grimace, / In some strange sort, were the land’s portion” (61-2). Again, the land — this time the barren earth, instead of the setting sun — is personified, and moreover, with a grimace. Since objective reality as we understand it has no capacity for facial expression, we must conclude that such sinister sights are merely illusions born of the narrator’s imagination.

Nature itself speaks in favor of this understanding: “See” (63), it says, “Or shut your eyes” (64). There is perhaps a kind of irony in this statement, if the act of Nature speaking is to be taken literally, but its meaning seems the primary intent of the lines. If sight in the traditional sense of the word is deceptive, and therefore it would be better to shut one’s eyes rather than to continue eyeing false perceptions, then almost certainly Browning is illuminating a key truth about human consciousness: To see, one needs not eyes but imagination; that the sight afforded by the mind is at least as important as mere ocular perception. Since the footnote mentioned at the start of this essay reveals that the poem came to him “as a kind of dream” (251), we can be certain that Browning holds the vision of the mind’s eye in high regard.

Two stanzas after Nature speaks directly to the narrator, Roland encounters a “stiff blind horse / [...] stupified” (75-6). While he is uncertain whether the animal is alive or dead, and stops to ponder the question, he gives no sign of uncertainty regarding the creature’s blindness; and yet, in the following stanza, the horse is described as having “shut eyes underneath the rusty mane” (81), which seems to trivialize or at least draw attention to the narrator’s claim of the horse being blind. So much of Roland’s regard for his fellow travelers among the apocalyptic plain is, given the scope of the text and the images therein, more or less unfounded. We are given the statement, and then in most of the aforementioned cases, one specific image serves to contradict the narrator’s perception — which is, more often than not, that the reality through which he is traveling is unsatisfactory or even, in the case of the crippled, skull-like figure, malicious. Without bringing into account the meta elements of the narrative, it seems that it would be to the benefit of Roland — as well as that of readers — for him to shut his eyes and seek the path toward the Dark Tower within, rather than without.

Having been thus instructed by Nature in its wisdom, Roland explains that “I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart” (85). Looking inward, the first image he sees is that of his fellow knight’s “reddening face” (91), which extinguishes his “heart’s new fire and [leaves] it cold” (96). Once back in the realm of raw perception, he describes the road to the Tower as “my darkening path [...] / “no sight as far as eye could strain” (104-5). And so, having experienced the vision of mind and memory, his eyesight has been further diminished. When at last he arrives within reach of the Dark Tower — “[a]fter a life spent training for the sight” (180) — Roland describes it as “blind as the fool’s heart” (182). Concealed by “two hills on the right” (176) and “a tall scalped mountain” (178), the Tower has eluded him not because his eyes were poor but because he failed to consider the idea that it might be hidden. The years he has spent wandering about the world in search of the Tower at last come to fruition, and even now he fails to see the purpose of his quest. “Not see?” he asks, “because of night perhaps?” (187).

There is a sense of tragedy to this final failure, although it does not seem to matter, in the end. A “ghost not fit to cope” (22), Roland is but a spirit of great persistence, come at last to fulfill his quest. In the moment of his completion, of his death, and of his journey’s end, his lost peers “stood, ranged along the hillsides [...] / To view the last of me, a living frame” (199-200). The sheet of flame mentioned offhandedly in this stanza may be seen as not only Roland’s noble end, then, but perhaps more specifically as “the Last Judgment’s fire” (65) said by Nature to be the only end to “set my prisoners free” (66). That Roland’s long-lost brethren await him in flames at the Tower says much of its purpose. As it was always his destination, and sole occupation, as a lifelong questing knight, it is first and foremost the place of his fulfillment. Because of the apocalyptic nature of the poem, and the fantastic manner in which his fellow knights are described in the final stanza, one can rightly argue that the Tower — the Dark Tower, most importantly — is a symbol of the death that awaits us all in the completion of our lives. Childe Roland describes the Dark Tower as the sight for which he has spent his whole life training (180). Sight, then, can be seen in this powerful and artistically rich work as vision, as the ability to reunite with the supernatural — his fallen peers — and as the acknowledgment of one’s own inevitable finitude without sacrificing the honor of succeeding in one’s purpose.

Works Cited

Browning, Robert. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Rpt. in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, Concise Edition. Eds. Thomas J. Collins, Vivienne J. Rundle. Toronto: Broadview, 2005. 251-5. Print.