Ann and I did a podcast about Odd?, the Lambshead Cabinet, and The Weird for Functional Nerds. I babbled on a bit, but it still turned out good. We talk about process, labels, doing so many projects, transmedia, etc.

Congratulations to Jennifer Brozek, the winner of the ODD? antho contest on SF Signal. Her true-life story will be included in ODD? #2 and she receives a three-issue e-book subscription to ODD. The two runner-ups, Ryan Lindsay and Weird Vision, also receive a free subscription.

By now, if you read this blog, you have a good sense of our new anthology series ODD?, we hope. Fiction that falls between classifications. New translations of stories from the past century. New fiction from great new writers. Targeted reprints that cut across false mainstream and genre lines, many of them from out-of-print or rare sources. Tending toward the surreal, the darkly fantastical. Where else can you get Amos Tutuola side-by-side with Jeffrey Ford, Caitlin R. Kiernan and Leena Krohn, Rikki Ducornet and Hiromi Goto?

Want to come along with us on a wild and exciting journey? Now’s the time to sign up. Support the kind of literature you love. Make sure it’s nourished, so it can flourish. All the details for subscriptions and more can be found below. We will also roll out a new website soon.

—Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

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URGENT, for long-time readers: Temporal Distortion Event, Level 9. Extent and Duration of Wave Unknown. There is no time engineer to monitor. Avatar Entries #12, #13, #14, and #16 have irrevocably changed.

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. A full-on 34,000 recap is compiled in one place, here with the entries since easily found in the archive.

I made my way farther and farther East, a Demon within me and angels on my trail. I had a whole century to kill before I could rescue myself but I wanted to be as far from the winter city as fast as possible. I abandoned my idea of traveling incognito and tiny upon tanks or trucks—it took a constant vigilance that made me wary of the Demon somehow breaking containment.

I traveled almost always by night, sometimes as a translucent komodo and sometimes as a human being. I became used to the wandering without a map except the one inside my head, of avoiding cities, towns, and villages. In some ways it was easier because of the war and in others harder. Certain kinds of security were lax and others more vigilant. I watched thousands of soldiers pass by, and as many tanks, from the cover of trees. There were desperate people on the road and off the road, and areas so tightly controlled by Trotsky’s secret police that if not for the lack of young and middle aged men you might not even realize that their country was under attack. Some places held more traces of angels and others fewer. I became wary of single footprints in the snow and the sound of wings and anyone who would meet my stare.

Then the snows got worse, and even I sometimes felt the chill, and beyond that the lack of Pavlov—of someone to talk to. The only thing I could talk to had nothing nice to say.

Avatar, do you like being a lackey for nothing, for no gain of your own? Is it important to you in some way?

I preferred traveling in the komodo form, not the human. Being human took more practice, even just in terms of the number of facial muscles; my mouth always felt sore. Besides, humans were herky-jerky and tic-ridden and repressed and unpredictable. Humans couldn’t smell through their skins, had terrible reflexes, and no tough exoskeleton to compensate or even a mind-shield. I could read their brains like rows of peeled leechee fruit. Humans were sacks of flesh, blood, and shit that flopped around for fifty to ninety years and then fell over dead. I wanted no part of that…but over time I would learn. You can learn anything if you have a century to practice. Almost anything. I could slowly teach a human shell to smell through its skin, for example, but form follows function—the process would be jury-rigging at best, unnatural and awkward.

Tell me, Avatar, do you think you’re anything other than a ghost, an echo? You’re a disposable to Mormeck Mountain as fingernail clippings are to human beings.

And the entire way what was unreconcilable within me would hiss or whisper to weaken my mind even as I contemplated trying to excise it by knife blade anyway just to be rid of it.

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By now, if you read this blog, you have a good sense of our new anthology series ODD?, I hope. Fiction that falls between classifications. New translations of stories from the past century. New fiction from great new writers. Targeted reprints that cut across false mainstream and genre lines, many of them from out-of-print or rare sources. Tending toward the surreal, the darkly fantastical. Where else can you get Amos Tutuola side-by-side with Jeffrey Ford, Caitlin R. Kiernan and Leena Krohn, Rikki Ducornet and Hiromi Goto?

Below you’ll find all the information you need to make up your mind. Want to come along with us on a wild and exciting journey? Want to be there from the beginning and see it grow? Now’s the time to sign up. Support the kind of literature you love. Make sure it’s nourished, so it can flourish.

Going forward, you can also help us by embedded or linking to the video above.

—Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

****

Each volume of ODD? will contain surreal, weird, fantastical, strange reprints (some of them not available otherwise except in expensive limited editions), previously unpublished stories, and new translations of classic and hard-to-find stories. This first volume features, among others, Amos Tutuola, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeffrey Ford, Rikki Ducornet, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Hiromi Goto, Stacey Levine, and Jeffrey Thomas—with new translations by Gio Clairval, Larry Nolen, and Brian Evenson of such classic writers as Gustave Le Rouge, Leopoldo Lugones, and Karl Hans Strobl as well as a brand-new story by Leena Krohn! (Full table of contents here.)

The print versions will appear at the same time as the next e-book installment–i.e., ODD? Vol 1 will appear in print at the same time as the e-book of Vol 2. Every year starting in 2012, we will publish two volumes.

You can subscribe now and be assured of receiving each volume at a reduced price. It’s a chance to support a cool new project that brings you fiction from writers from around the world.

—For the 3 initial volumes in e-book form, $19.00 (regularly $21)
—For all 3 initial volumes in trade paperback form, $42 (regularly $45)
—For the next two volumes in e-book form and all three in trade paperback form, $51 (regularly $59)

—Shipping and handling within the US is included free for print volumes; outside of the US please add $25

Or, become one of our valued “Oddkins” for $65 and receive the e-book and trade paperback versions *plus* all kinds of…odd and unique extras…with the delivery of your trade paperbacks. (US only offer: Extend it now to an additional year for only $110 total.)

—Oddkins living outside of the US alas must add $30 to cover shipping.

A “Super Oddkin” at $275 receives every volume until we die or the series is discontinued (this $275 value is guaranteed with books of equal value written or edited by us should ODD? end early) For those outside of the US, a Super Oddkin status is $400.

—You may designate different delivery email/addresses for the print versus ebook versions if ordering both; i.e., give one version as a gift.

Send a check made out to “Jeff VanderMeer” to POB 4248, Tallahassee, FL 32315, or paypal to vanderworld@hotmail.com - you must confirm via email before October 22 that you plan to take advantage of this offer.

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. A full-on 34,000 recap is compiled in one place, here with the entries since easily found in the archive.

I no longer send an avatar to write in the journal on the jungle floor. I write it here, at the heart of me. If Gabriel finds it, he finds me. Thousands or millions of years from now some other Risen species on this planet will find my journal, incomplete, and need to make up the rest of the story themselves. The rest stays with me.

Everything has continued as before, except now I am relegated to watching the endless recurring loop of an alt-Earth where a civilization pushes south from the Arctic. Floating ghost-whale employed as spirit weapons against the pale-skinned invaders eclipse the sun. Psionic walrus riders channel their power through their mounts’ tusks, the power sent out enough to shatter an enemy soldier’s bones into finely-ground dust. The walrus riders chant for focus as they advance and the enemy soldiers ripple and flop into screaming death and the walruses roar from the vibration of the force emanating from their tusks, will never get used to it.

I feel as if my bones have been turned to dust, but I cannot fall, I cannot give in or give up.

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Ann just got these titles in the mail from Twelfth Planet Press, the first in their new Twelve Planets series. All three are story collections.

Nightsiders by Sue Isle (intro by Marianne de Pierres) – “A teenage girl stolen from her family as a child; a troupe of street actors who affect their new culture with memories of the old; a boy born into the wrong body; and a teacher who is pushed into the role of guide tell the story of The Nightside.”

Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts (intro by Helen Merrick) – “The world is in greater danger than you ever suspected. Women named Julia are stronger than they appear. Don’t let your little brother make out with silver-eyed blondes. Immortal heroes really don’t fancy teenage girls. When love dies, there’s still opera. Family is everything. Monsters are everywhere. Yes, you do have to wear the damned toga.”

Thief of Lives by Lucy Sussex (intro by Karen Joy Fowler) – “Why are certain subjects difficult to talk about? What is justice? Why does it matter? Why do writers think that other people’s lives are fair game? And what do we really know about the first chemist? Welcome to the worlds of Lucy Sussex.”

In my opinion, Twelfth Planet Press is one of the best indies in the world, and this new series is compact, sharply designed, well-thought-out, and featuring a good mix of established and newer writers. I just love it thus far—and Ann’s contributed an introduction to the next book in the series, a forthcoming title by Deborah Biancotti.

You can order these books at the Twelfth Planet Press website. But why not go one better—you can also subscribe to the series there.

Alisa Krasnostein is the mastermind behind Twelfth Planet Press, and she’s up for a World Fantasy Award this year. She fully deserves to win.

An interesting discussion here, based on this quote from China Mieville. I understand why this is a new concept to the interviewer—referencing “those utterly fascinating texts which contain not a single impossible element, and yet which read as if they were, somehow, fantastic”—but it’s not a new concept in the larger scheme of things (nor do I think China’s presenting it as such).

As I commented:

“It’s an important point China is making, but while it may be new to the interviewer, it’s not a new concept. It’s an argument I’ve been making, along with several other writers, for decades. It’s also something John Clute has explored to some extent in his criticism, and I think literary journals like Conjunctions have also explored it. The fact is, there are fantasy novelists who read like realists and supposedly mimetic novelists whose world view and approach make them read like fabulists. The importance of stressing this similarity/difference is that it gets us away from using the terminology of commodificaition of fiction and what are often just marketing terms that reflect “accidents of birth.” If you’re a Kafkaesque writer from Eastern Europe, you’re likely to be published in the mainstream. If you’re a US writer like Michael Cisco, you’re likely to be published through genre imprints. These arbitrary issues and contexts don’t really tell us much about the works themselves, or their complexities and contradictions…which is why “genre” vs “mainstream” is so pointless.”

I recognize I may be riffing off of only part of China’s quote, but it’s the part that most interests me and is most irritating in terms of how people tend to compartmentalize literature.

I was just revisiting this, taking a piece of the fantasy lecture I’ve been delivering since the late 1990s, and expanding on it for the Inspiration chapter in the writing book I’m working on for Abrams Image:

“But, conversely, does it really matter if the imaginative impulse results in the ‘fantastical’ in the sense of ‘containing an explicit fantastical event?’ Is it something a writer should worry about definitionally or practically? No. For a certain kind of writer a sense of fantastical play will always exist on the page. This is often what we really mean by the voice of the writer. Talking bears have moved in next door. Does the reality of whether they actually have matter more than the quality of the metaphor? Perhaps not. Consider Mark Helprin’s A Winter’s Tale and his World War I novel A Soldier of the Great War. A Winter’s Tale includes a winged horse and other fantastical flourishes. A Soldier of the Great War contains no fantastical elements, and yet in its descriptions, its voice, Helprin’s animating imagination behind the story, this novel also reads as invested in the fantastical. The writer Rikki Ducornet can write as lyrically phantasmagorical a novel as Phosphor in Dreamland and an as intense yet fiercely realistic story collection as The Word Desire…and yet they exist in the same country, perhaps even come from the same area of that country. This is the power of one type of unusual imagination.”

The writing book is still in rough draft form, but it’s forcing me to close in on more precise terminology and an expansion of the idea, so we’ll see where it ends up in a couple of months…

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. A full-on 34,000 recap is compiled in one place, here with the entries since easily found in the archive.

Did you never wonder why the angels would commit genocide against the Remnant across all possible worlds? Did it never cross your mind? said the thing hiding inside the scrap of Remnant hiding inside of me. Never in the history of shrapnel had such a tiny wound caused such profound complications.

the thing hiding inside the scrap of Remnant hiding inside of me would say soon enough, if not just yet.

But I hadn’t wondered. I had taken the angels’ actions as evidence of their arbitrariness, their particularly disengaged form of ethereal evil, as I was coming to see it. I hadn’t known that an entity that had shot into my body riding a tiny piece of metal would come along to tell me my assumption was wrong. I hadn’t thought that I had anything other than a bit of Remnant inside me. But now it became clear that something had come along with the Remnant.

I hadn’t thought that I had anything other than a bit of poor oppressed Remnant inside me. But now it became clear that either something had come along with the Remnant or I had misunderstood something fundamental about the Remnant.

Obvious because a taste like the sour inner lining of a walnut shell permeated my entire being as I stuck like a limpet to that tank headed East—and something surged out from the tiny Remnant fortress inside of me and attacked my brain.

For a millisecond I froze. In another millisecond I had morphed back into a full-sized komodo spasming and thrashing as if my attacker were riding my back. I crashed off the tank into the hard incline alongside, and from scrubland into forest, remembering to switch to invisible mode soon enough that cries of alarm faded into disbelief…and then I was not paying any more attention to the soldiers above. I was raging invisible through the forest, heading for anything that smelled, through the walnut stench, like water. For there was a fire in my brain as my cells fought other cells. Something had attacked me from the Remnant stronghold, that was all I knew, and as the battle raged, my cells snuck out the essence of my consciousness to another part of my body closer to my tail than my head. But still the invader pressed, and came closer to total control. At the maximum moment of tension between intrusion and escape, I ejected my head from my body, left it rolling and hissing and monstrous and horrible while my neck worked at tying off blood flow. It was an egregiously blunt reversal of normal lizard behavior.

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Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. A full-on 34,000 recap is compiled in one place, here with the entries since easily found in the archive.

They’ve taken her away from me. They’ve taken her away from me. They’ve taken her away from me. They’ve taken me away from me.

Gabriel came down like a colossus in flames—smashing through the roof of the library where my avatar sat reading love poems, his wings ablaze and the look upon his face hideous. My avatar was flung headlong into a corner, and I experienced a moment of disorientation throughout my Mountain self.

He stood there unable to speak for a moment, teetering and smoldering in his own anger with his head bent down to stare at me. He was enormous, his body taut and muscular, so that with his white robes he looked as if made out of chiseled marble. A burnt hellish scent cut through the air and the aftershock vibration of his presence was like a wave.

Then my link to my surveillance moths cut off. Then my links to visuals and other sense collectors beyond my mountain self. Then there was just me and my link to my avatar. I could see nothing else, hear nothing else, be nowhere else. My avatar and my self might as well have been the same, and with that realization came the irrational fear that if my library avatar died in this moment, I died too.

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SF Signal is hosting a contest for ODD?, our new antho, that will be judged by Jeff Ford.