If you go on facebook, you can join Minister Faust’s online release part for his awesome new novel The Alchemists of Kush tomorrow. Make sure to buy the book tomorrow, which is just a $2.99 e-book download. That’s a total steal. More on this book Thursday (I’m off the grid tomorrow). Signal boost as you will, weirdies. I’d appreciate it.

…Okay, so “Squidanthropy” might not be the final title, but I am happy to say that Centipede Press and my agent are wrapping up the details on a new collection of Ambergris stories, to be illustrated by the amazing Richard A. Kirk…

…except, it’s a little more complicated than that, as these things sometimes are….

Richard read City of Saints & Madmen recently and sent me a facebook message to say how much he liked it. I noticed he was an artist, and so I checked out his work. You don’t necessarily like someone’s stuff just because they liked yours, but in this case I was blown away. I have to admit I’d never seen his art before, and it’s wonderful. (It didn’t hurt that I then read his fiction—see below—and liked that, too.)

So since Richard had said he’d like to do a project someday, I pinged him and asked if he’d consider doing art inspired by his reading of City of Saints. I would then write Ambergris fiction inspired by his art. I suggested this because I’m genuinely curious as to what Richard comes up with, but also because I don’t currently have a way in to writing more Ambergris short fiction. I know from past experience that all I really need is the right kind of trigger, however.

Also, I want to get back to writing more short fiction, and short fiction that’s in my personal sweet spot. I can and do write personal fiction in a variety of modes, but lately I’ve been hankering for a return to the kinds of things explored through my Ambergris stories. What will probably result, too, will be tales set throughout the period of time covered by City of Saints.

Although the project is being pre-sold, there’re no pre-conditions on the stories, which is very attractive to me. Richard will create about 10 originals and a title page/cover (I believe). As he finishes an illustration, I will then write a story around it, so I can easily slot these stories around existing commitments. Some will no doubt be short, others may linger awhile. I’m going to go wherever his art takes me. The finished book will be between 35,000 and 60,000 words, depending. And since it’s Centipede, you know it will be absolutely beautiful. I’m very excited.

When I have pre-order information, I’ll let you know.

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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Archives: scroll down for previous installments. You bastards aren’t reading anyway.

Intel from surveillance today has had a thready, inconsistent quality. More than ever, I’ve been unable to see the patterns, to understand how it all fits together. In quick succession, glimpses of: a strange library on the top of a mountain, men struggling against a storm in an antiquated ship with huge sails, three women consoling a forth in a graveyard, enormous floating creatures shooting bolts of lightning at one another while below shouting crowds of people like shoals of fish ran back and forth. An ant struggling to hold a blade of grass. The innards of a clock winding down. A man praying in a temple.

But then attention seemed to resolve upon a wintery city under siege, the wings of our luna moths dusted with snowflakes, a battle played out under gray skies. The mortar fire was like the shriek of birds—and became the shriek of birds, because the starlings began to mimic the sound after several days. Glue and water boiled with bay leaves to make a terrible soup. Belts with nettle and vinegar for another soup. Rats tossed whole into the fire to roast, with no time to put them on spits, desperate men and women in rags shooting from behind pitted, gouged walls at their enemies. A slow-motion war in the snow, even in the best boots…and some didn’t even have shoes, wrapping pieces of cloth to protect blue-bruised feet. Stolid, sullen, broken architecture framing faces and bodies whose own architecture displayed the harsh lines and utility of starvation, even from under hats and layers of clothing.

But this war was not our observers’ objective. A room in a deserted hospital with its roof blown off, the snow falling and coating the floors—that was where our luna moths congregated in this blighted city. The moths formed a living green cloud covering the walls and tables. If any of the combatants had seen this happening they would have thought it a hallucination: moths impervious to the weather killing so many human beings. And there, on the tables, frozen canisters containing the cremains of psychiatric patients. Old, old, old, much older than the concepts the two sides were killing each other over. Remains that had become ossified, spilling out from the rusted canisters. Strange shades of azure and amber and bronze and frothy white. Soon, under the analysis of the moths, the canisters came to reside in our laboratory, leaving facsimiles behind. And the moths rose in a swirling funnel and disappeared into the sky, leaving attackers and besieged to their bone-cold torment.

In the laboratory, we now have twelve canisters of human ashes. Tomorrow there will be twelve people in the laboratory not there before. The angels seem excited by this discovery. But I have no idea what it means. It makes me feel uneasy.

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.