Jeff:
You’ve re-read A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 4)by George R.R. Martin, too, haven’t you?

Evil Monkey:
Yes. No way am I scaling the mountain that is A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Fivewithout reminding my brain of prior context.

Jeff:
What did ya think?

Evil Monkey:
What did you think?

Jeff:
On count of three, we both shout out what we thought…One…Two…Three!

Jeff/Evil Monkey (simultaneously):
CORPSEY CORPSEY STABBY BLEAK STABBY CORPSEY GROSS HORRIFYING CORPSEY CORPSEY

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(The messages on the cover of the GRRM advance reading copy are NOT from the author, but a hoax I played on my facebook friends. I repeat: A forgery.)

For the record, I am not going to apologize for pulling out all the stops in my prep for reviewing the new George R.R. Martin novel A Dance with Dragons. That means I have been rapaciously feeding off of all applicable Wikipedia entries, revisiting the fifth book, watching the HBO series based on the first novel, and in all possible ways trying to once again get a handle on this vast, sprawling cast of characters and situations. What? Sansa’s name changes? Wait. What? That dead character is actually kinda alive? Ewww. Oh, Iron Isles, why doth you have so many possible pretenders to the throne?

I defended the house from an assailant the other day with the Dance with Dragons advance reading copy. The assailant, with a long gray beard and carrying a leather-bound leviathan of a Bible, came running up the driveway with book held high, like some kind of bibliophilic hedge knight, and I met him with my Dance of Dragons, and we struggled mightily to an impasse, whereupon he gave up with a curse and we went and got some lemonade while I complained about how freakin’ huge and long this new novel is…

But. I do not apologize for my cheatery.

Carlos the Jackal was most famously associated with killings, kidnappings, and hijackings attributed to Palestinian terrorist organizations, but as with many purported idealists—including cold-blooded murderers like Carlos—as the authorities closed in on him and his networks, he became more of a terrorist-for-hire. The ideology became contaminated by his own ego, his need for money and security, his contempt for women associated with various the causes, and his own irrelevance in later years. In those later years, he lost discipline, focus, and became a pawn used by various countries, like Syria, to improve relationships with the West.

At least, this is the view taken by the mini-series/movie Carlos, which uses an often pseudo-documentary style to tell this fictional story, based on the known facts, of the infamous terrorist’s exploits. The movie doesn’t balk at showing the human cost on innocent civilians of Carlos’ actions. Nor is it afraid to be wide in scope, making the excellent decision to introduce new characters with a short titled description on the screen, with name and role in either the hierarchy of terrorism/revolution or of law enforcement. The conciseness of decisions like these allows the filmmakers to focus in detail on Carlos’ rise, the intricacies of his most infamous operations, and to explore his relationships with other terrorists and revolutionaries.

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In a wasteland ravaged by plague, Lumsden Moss steps out of a decaying prison. Armed with a satchel of yellowed notebooks containing the fragile memories of five murdered children, he is determined to track down and confront their killer. Lumsden, accompanied by a stranger, begins a long journey to the vast City of Steps where he is forced to confront the horrors of the past and present.

Richard A. Kirk is best known as a rather mind-blowing artist whose commissioned work has accompanied the fiction of masters like Clive Barker and Caitlin R. Kiernan. His art demonstrates a knowledge of the Grotesque wedded to his own unique aesthetic. That aesthetic is texturally complex and uses precision of detail to create marvelously outlandish art. Kirk strikes me as the kind of creator whose devotion to discipline provides structure within which he can unleash a wild imagination. The composition of his images often evokes a misleading sense of stillness. Action has either just occurred or is about to occur. But these images aren’t actually static—the movement is simply occuring at the micro-level as a form of acute seeing. As part of this intensity of vision, the environment around the subject matter is rendered in as complex a way—a living way—as the people or creatures foregrounded.

The fiction of Kirk, as exemplified by his first book The Lost Machine, shares many of these virtues, translated craft-wise for the demands of text.

The protagonist Lumsden Moss, a former school teacher, outlives a prison and sets out on a quest to track down the person he believes really committed the crimes. Along the way, he encounters an odd man named Irridis. Irridis has a halo of floating glass around his head—a deadly halo that functions as a weapon.

On their journey to the city where Moss believes he will pick up the trail, they bond despite Irridis’ sometime merciless qualities. A scene in which they are attacked by feral boys is rendered in a clear-eyed, economic way that exemplifies Kirk’s overall approach. When one boy fires at Irridis “Moss watched with horror as a plume of dust exploded up from Irridis’s shoulder. Incredibly, the shot did not seem to faze him….The glass objects whirled in a circle around his covered head like a deadly crown…The boys raced off down the the trail, but Moss heard the ripping of sticks as Irridis’ glass disks flew after them. Within seconds the disks returned and resumed their positions. Speechless, Moss could only stare down the empty, quiet trail.”

A lesser writer, lacking the necessary discipline, would have shown Irridis’s attack on the boys. Instead, Kirk evokes the “empty, quiet trail” to show they’ve been killed, and then cuts to these sentences: “Moss could not bring himself to look at the boy’s face. Leaving Irridis in the clearing, he carried the child to the beach and buried him.” The action itself is unimportant: what matters is how it came to occur and what happens after.

On a more macro level, the economy of the text impresses, in that Kirk isn’t afraid to skip days here and there in the journey to get to the important points. There are few wasted words here, and as a result the text holds the reader’s attention much more easily. This is especially important because at the novella length each exchange between Moss and Irridis must carry weight and establish character. In an odd way, there’s a luminous quality to their journey created by what’s been left out.

Similarly, Kirk brings his artist’s eye to The Lost Machine. Details have clarity because he knows better than to clutter up the text with more than the one or two compelling images that matter, before moving on to the next scene. For example, in the prison Moss comes across a dead fellow inmate: “Mr. Box had arranged the songbirds’ eggshells in a mandala pattern on the flor…Dead now, he sat in the passage with his back to his cell door, head bowed to his spread fingers where the latin names of innumerable songbirds were written in ballpoint pen. The eggshells crunched beneath Moss’s boots. Even though Mr. Box was in no condition to lecture him, Moss felt shame redden his ears.”

As their quest moves to the city of their destination, pleasing complications occur, as when Moss visits his sister, nicknamed Strange Buttons, to get “buttons” as offerings to three other sisters who may have information about the real murderer. What are the buttons? “They were indeed button-shaped but comprised of a spiral arrangement of seeds…In the center of each was a dehydrated spider with its legs folded inward. The spiders were stitched to the buttons with the same red thread she used for her labels.” The purpose of these buttons is as interesting as the description, and just one of the ways in which Kirk brings freshness to weird fiction. These scenes evoke pleasant, non-derivative echoes of a Decadent literature updated to the modern era.

Another delight for the reader is Kirk’s Gene Wolfe-ish approach to the milieu, which is possibly a post-collapse (or fantasy) Earth in which some people are called witches but there are also mechanical men. Folk cures side-by-side with science. In one great description Kirk writes, “At dawn, moss saw three women dropping loads of crumbling asbestos into the sea…On the strand the hulking remains of a great ship loomed in the fog, covered in the oxyacetylene scribbles of the shipbreaker’s dissection.” Such details might be thought to rest uneasily with talk of the supernatural and even with the rotting walls of the Kafkaesque prison Moss emerged from, but through some alchemy of the prose it all fits together to create a unique setting.

The unique resolution of Moss’s quest carries emotional resonance in part because of the tension at the level of craft between Kirk’s imagination and his restraint—the careful composition of Moss’s character throughout The Lost Machine wedded to original imagery and situations. It’s on the whole a masterful performance, even if there’s a predictability to one particular plot element. The novella is highly recommended and I am looking forward to Kirk’s future fiction with great anticipation. He’s definitely bringing a fresh voice to weird fiction.

Also including five illustrations by Kirk and featuring an introduction by Mike Mignola.

If you read the blog Shiksa in the Kitchen, you’ll have seen their recent rave review of our The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. The book is now available in e-book form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Barnes & Noble. (Coming soon to Weightless Books, for those outside of the US/UK!)

It’s a fun book, and I actually laughed out loud a few times while I was reading it. I think it would make a terrific host/hostess gift for a holiday party or dinner gathering. It might even make a fun bar or bat mitzvah gift– add it to the obligatory card and check to make things a little more personal. Perfect for people who love fantasy fiction.

You can also still get the book in the sumptuous little hardcover print version.

Ecstatic Days is pleased to present guest reviewer Grak-Pha Teekelp’s review of the new Spielberg-Abrams film Super 8. Teekelp is a space alien from a planet about 1,000,000 light years from here, and thus has a unique perspective on the movie. PLEASE NOTE: The review contains spoilers.

Super 8 From an “Extra-Terrestrial” Point of View
by Grak-Pha Teekelp (approximate name)

Well, um, I certainly don’t want to criticize Abrams or Spielberg, since I recognize that on your planet they’re popular filmmakers, even sometimes considered auteurs,** but while watching Super 8 me and some of the other “aliens” who sometimes drop by this solar system had a hard time suspending disbelief.

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As some of you may know, I’m writing a nonfiction book for Victoria Blake’s Underland Press entitled If You Lived Here: The Top 30 All Time Science Fiction and Fantasy Worlds. That book now has a recommendation site where you can submit your own favorites, with your explanation, and perhaps even be quoted in the book. Victoria will also be contacting booksellers for their thoughts.

If You Lived Here won’t be your standard reference text. It will be thorough, and well-researched, but it will also be irreverent, entertaining, and in some ways use a mutated form of the travel guide (and that world’s most dangerous places book) to showcase the material. It’ll include some essays as well, covering books or series not included in the top 30, a couple of lists, and illustrations.

What will be in that top 30? Well, we’re listening to you, even as we also have our own thoughts about it. George R.R. Martin, you say? Maybe Borges? Maybe Atwood? Possibly Delany? Who else? Everybody’s potentially in the mix.

So go ahead and cast your vote—we’ll be collecting your thoughts for at least two months—and you can also if you like discuss it on this thread—or over at SF Signal in about an hour. They’re being kind enough to signal boost it.

What is Steampunk?

Why do you write about squid?

Why do you write about mushrooms?

Why aren’t there airplanes in Ambergris?

Why are you so anti-fungi?

Why is your writing so weird?

Why are you so mean to your characters?

What are you wearing?

(Critics who use in-progress process posts as proof of anything in finished books are jerks and will not be tolerated.)

Avast! When you return to a novel you last looked at a few months before and you’re like me—which is to say, there might be three typewritten alternative drafts and two explorations in handwriting—it takes a bit to get up to speed. Is this me complaining about my own work habits? Hell no. The whole point of my process is inefficiency. Getting too quickly to where you want to go, getting there too smoothly, is antithetical to thinking through complex issues. You want roadblocks, confusion, chaos, and doubt. Unexpected, wonderful things come out of this approach, too.

But I have indeed spent the whole day sorting through variations and looking at the structure of the 25,000 words I’ve got on the page. One thing that just kept annoying me beyond belief was the amount of really cool exposition I needed to cut to keep the foregrounded story moving forward. This is pretty basic stuff, but sometimes your description is doing a lot of other things, like deepening character. Other stuff just needs to go or be rearranged.

What I did find is that rethinking the structure of Borne helped a lot. I had thought of the book as being in two parts, and the sort of book where you get a lot of context up front. As I was looking over scenes with the title character, I realized I should experiment with a three-part structure, and suddenly the whole idea of what scenes had to go where changed drastically, as well as what kind of approach this novel needs in terms of context and divulging certain kinds of information.

First off, thinking of the novel in three parts, roughly corresponding to stages in Borne’s development, meant that scenes involving other characters could now be spread out across all three sections. Before, I’d been thinking in terms of the narrator’s story arc, but that’s not going to be the structural determinant for the novel, as it turns out. Unspooling Borne-related stuff also allows this other spreading-out noted above. It also, for some reason, now means setting context will be situated more node-like at regular intervals along the way. This means the first place I go into extended description is much shorter, and the space created fills up with more of the emotional lives of the characters. And I can relax into that knowing the rest of what I need is coming later, and isn’t needed for reader understanding due to the new pacing and the new ways in which the past and present communicate with one another in the text.

It doesn’t even really matter if I wind up actually dividing the book into three sections, or I just hold that in my head as a construct and do chapters 1 through 20 without any section breaks. The point is, the re-think has allowed for better, more useful ways to distribute scenes and info, while also revealing what material isn’t needed at all. Something about visualizing the novel as a two-parter was also obscuring unintended repetition and wastefulness in what was on the page.

This is all a very dry way of saying that structure isn’t actually an abstract thing. It’s also not always an organic thing, in that you try out different approaches mechanically in aid of getting to a place where everything in the text becomes effortless and organic.

As a kind of side note, I’ve also had a great time on more of a sentence level applying lessons learned from Steve Erickson’s (author of Zeroville) edits to the excerpt of Borne appearing in Black Clock magazine. In the context of finalizing the piece for his mag, I thought of the edits as regular copy-edits, but in the context of revising and moving forward on new sections of Borne at novel-length, I now interpret them as character-related instead. Which is to say, most of the deletions and changes affect how the reader perceives the main character. What is understated by the cuts emphasizes different elements. What is now brought to the front also creates different emphasis. This in effect makes subtle but important changes to the character…and in charting why I think these changes were made, I have gained a much better understanding about the person I’m writing about, and this also now radiates out into my editing of the rest of the draft as it stands.

The good news, from my standpoint, is that because several scenes now bleed into part two, I am much farther along on the novel than I thought. It means I have new scenes to write in part one, but that’s preferable to being more adrift in the middle. This, too, is the advantage of thinking about the structure differently: I no longer have concerns about sag in the middle because of the redistribution of previously front-loaded scenes into that section. The third act is crystal clear in my head, so that was really the last challenge in terms of how to present the material.

Especially in a short novel, like Borne will no doubt be, getting it all right on this kind of technical level is key to the emotional resonance for readers. Pacing, correct development, managing progression aren’t issues of craft—they’re issues intrinsic to success at deeper, more psychological levels. Graham Joyce’s The Silent Land is a perfect example—if Joyce’s craft weren’t brilliant, his insight into human relationships would be useless, because it would be deployed within a malformed novel.

And so instead of a post on the movie Carlos or another Doctor Mormeck entry, you have this, my little weirdlings. I hope you find it interesting. Or maybe I don’t hope anything. Mostly, I’m just happy to be writing.

Sometimes goop gets in the way. Working through my novel Borne, I’m exasperated by some of the exposition that feels inert even though it may not be—it may just need to be recontextualized, broken up, or made to do more work through half-scene. So, goop below. I keep coming up with new combinations, new entry points, to make this stuff work. And sometimes, you just have to throw almost all of it away. Even posting the stuff here is a way of getting a clearer view of it–different font, different location can equal a new way of seeing it.

(BTW–not all of my blog entries are posting to facebook, so don’t rely on facebook for updates.)

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