(Is it truly possible to look goofy posing with a macho Predator novel? Er, perhaps…)

Predator: South China Sea should be in bookstores roughly sometime this coming week, along with Brian Evenson’s Aliens: No Exit.

I’ve got a couple of copies in hand now and it’s a really handsome volume. I’m pretty pleased with it. Not to mention, it led to a book deal with Tachyon for Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for 21st Century Writers (2009) because of this post.

Thanks again to everyone who helped with this novel. As always any errors are my own, but thanks to Dave Larsen (weapons info), Ekaterina Sedia (Russian info), K.J. Bishop (seedy parts of Bangkok), and Horia Ursu (Romania info). Also thanks to my first readers: my wife Ann, Desirina Boskovich, Clare Dudman, Jukka Halme, Tessa Kum, David Lynton, David Moles, Cat Rambo, Mark Berntsen, and Jonathan K. Stephens. Also thanks to those who inspired aspects of certain characters in the book: John Gustat, Tessa Kum, Ben Peek, Horia Ursu, and, er, a rock star who will remain unnamed. HUGE thanks to editors Victoria Blake and Rob Simpson.

But that’s not all! After the cut, read about further Predator goodness…or badness…in the form of foreign and limited editions! (Next weekend: who would star in the movie, and the best taglines from the novel.)

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In case you missed it, here’s the link to my latest Huffington Post column. I wish I’d written it after this past week of disgusting hate-incitement by the McCain campaign as I would have added some commentary about that. I watched the McCain/Palin crapola unfold with a sense of impending doom and sadness (like witnessing the needless sacking of the Shire after you think the good guys have won). And then to see McCain finally have to rein it back in because even he could see he was just giving racist lunatics legitimate cover…the whole spectacle was depressing and sickening.

In lighter news, I received contributor copies of these two beauties (story in the former, comics summation in the latter):

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First, thanks so much to Vandana for a great week of blogging (she will be posting a goodbye sometimes today).

Second, just a reminder that my wife Ann VanderMeer will be at the KGB Weird Tales reading/event October 15th at 7pm. The readers are Micaela Morrissette, Karen Heuler, and Jeffrey Ford. I’m delighted to be in the audience for three such fine readers. Hope to see you there.

Science fiction writers have often imagined the various ways the world could end. An oft-encountered method is the end of the world through nuclear war. In many of these scenarios the danger looms clearly, and the villains are recognizable. But what if disaster crept upon us, slowly and surely, while we lived out our lives? What if we were warned about it but because the scale of it was longer than our lives, or because it seemed impossible to believe, or because we didn’t know what to do, or because it wasn’t clear who to point fingers at, we continued with our lives as though nothing was going to happen?

I can imagine the last two lines of the story.

And we did nothing.

And the world ended with a whimper.

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When I was around ten years old my family moved from New Delhi to the town of Patna, in Bihar, for two years. Patna was a small, untidy, sprawling little town (relative to Delhi) and the area where we lived consisted of large, old-fashioned houses set among enormous gardens. We stayed with my grandparents, and a little way from their house you could see fields. Sometimes my brother and I would wake very early and go on a trek through the fields, pausing to watch a farmer and his bullock drawing water from a well, or looking at pond life in a ditch filled with rainwater. In the evenings there would be kids playing cricket in the big maidan in front of the house, and my brother and I would be there too (it was in those days that I developed my now-lost skill as a fairly fearsome spin bowler). Some of the pariah dogs that lived in packs in our neighbourhood would join in, especially if we were playing football (soccer). Pariah dogs are descended from the earliest domesticated dogs — they are a tribe unto themselves, and live parallel lives with humans in towns and cities in India. They are also beautiful, intelligent animals — you can see some really nice pictures here.

One of these pariah dogs was a brown and white dog of noble bearing whom we called Moti (the word sounds like “more-thee” without the ‘r’, and means “pearl”). As he was a regular on the football field, we became friends. He would come over to our house if he wanted a meal. Sometimes he would walk me home if I was late returning from a friend’s house. There was a boy who lived next door who was friendly with Moti too, but he wanted Moti as a house-dog. So he trapped the dog for three days in his house, spoiling him, feeding him delicacies and playing with him. But at the first opportunity, Moti escaped.

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So free am I, so gloriously free

Free from three petty things:

From mortar, from pestle, and from my twisted lord

Freed from rebirth and death I am

And all that has held me down

Is hurled away.

These words were written by a woman called Mutta who lived 2600 years ago, in Northern India. They appear in a book that changed my life. The book is Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, edited by Tharu and Lalitha. The translation of this particular poem is by Uma Chakravarti and Kumkum Roy.

When I first came across this anthology some fifteen years ago, it was a revelation. I knew that there was a history of women writing in India, that women had written some of the verses of the Vedas, among Hinduism’s oldest scriptures (first written down from an even older oral tradition about 3500 years ago). But the depth, the richness and the immediacy of the voices in the anthology took my breath away. At that time I had no future visions of being a writer but over the years the words of these women has enabled me to feel part of a continuity of voices through the centuries.

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When I was a kid growing up in India, my first exposure to things science-fictional (sort of) was through a series of fat little books in Hindi that could fit comfortably in my hand. The stories were an indiscriminate mix of earth-bound fairy tales and cosmic voyages, and their flashy covers and melodramatic dialog immediately caught my imagination. I’d already heard the great epics from my mother and grandmother and these little books seemed to be in the same vein. By the time I was eleven, however, I’d discovered Asimov, Clarke and Bradbury, and there seemed to be no real SF written by Indians. In my teens I came across the occasional story published by cosmologist and SF writer Jayant Narlikar, but that was it.

Now, many years later, I know that science fiction in India has had quite a history. But in a country where there are eighteen distinct languages apart from English, and thousands of dialects, it is quite easy to be unaware of traditions in other tongues.

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Continuing on the theme of paradigm shifts — there are, of course, those that occur as a result of particular experiences by particular people. Among the most significant ones I’ve experienced occurred when I was a 17-year-old fresh out of high school. In that dizzying period of freedom between the end of high school and the beginning of college, I went to the Himalayas on a trek. I was part of a recently formed group called Kalpavriksh, a loose-knit, unstructured collection of students interested in the environment (later to become one of India’s major environment groups: check out their site here). The lot of us, mostly New Delhi-based teenagers and a few college students in their twenties, took off that summer to study the Chipko movement. This is one of the most famous grassroots environmental movements in the world. Illiterate village women are its backbone — it is a non-violent movement that has no single leader. For the most part it is an attempt by the local people to save their remaining forests from the depredations of timber-hungry industries and the government, but it has also evolved into a movement for social change. Villagers in the Himalayas depend on the forest for survival, so to them this struggle is not about an abstract philosophical or sentimental idea. The word Chipko means “to stick to” in Hindi, and in fact the desperate tactic of the activists has been to put their arms around the trees and stand between them and the man with the axe.

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Greetings! Thanks to Jeff for giving me the opportunity to bring some thoughts and speculations your way. Today I’d like to start by talking about experiences that drastically change the way we view the world. Sometimes these changes take place over a long period of time, and sometimes they are sudden and dramatic. I’ve had my share of both. I’d like to share some paradigm-shifting experiences (including books) that have not only indelibly impacted who I am but have (naturally) affected how I write and what I write about. I invite others to share such experiences if they are so moved.

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I’m very pleased to welcome Vandana Singh as the next guest blogger for Ecstatic Days. Vandana Singh is an Indian writer whose short fiction has appeared in zines such as Strange Horizons as well as a number of anthologies, most recently Clockwork Phoenix (Norilana Books, ed. Mike Allen). Her novella, “Of Love and Other Monsters,” was published in 2007 as part of Aqueduct Press’s Conversation Pieces Series and is reprinted in volume 25 of Year’s Best Science Fiction (2008, ed. Gardner Dozois). Upcoming work includes a new novella for Aqueduct Press, and a short story collection, “The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories” from Zubaan Books in New Delhi. Vandana is also the author of the ALA Notable book “Younguncle Comes to Town” (Viking Children’s Books 2006, and Zubaan Books, New Delhi, 2004) and a sequel, “Younguncle in the Himalayas” (Zubaan Books and Penguin India, New Delhi, 2005). She currently lives in the Boston area with her husband, daughter and dog, and teaches physics at a state college.

Note: The guest blogger schedule going forward is as follows…

Oct. 13-Oct. 17 – “X”

Oct. 19-Oct. 24 – Will Hindmarch

Oct. 27-Oct. 31 – David Moles

Nov. 3 – Nov. 7 – Jukka Halme and Tero Ykspetäjä (Finnish SF/F)

Nov. 10 – Nov. 14 – Cherie Priest

Nov. 17 – Nov. 21 – Meghan McCarron

Nov. 24 – Nov. 28 – Mark Teppo

Dec. 1 – Dec. 5 – Felix Gilman

After which, I’m back…