I’m really thrilled that a fairly self-contained portion of the beginning of my novel-in-progress Borne is appearing in the just-released latest issue of Steve Erickson’s awesome magazine Black Clock. I’m even more thrilled to find out the loose theme: “Both in its contributors and subject matter, this new Black Clock finds women on the verge: of revelation, euphoria, madness and history.” And further thrilled to see that my friend the dynamic and awesome Katherine Min is included in this issue. I’m also very much looking forward to reading the work of the other contributors, including Sarah Vap, Jazmin Aminian Jordan, Geoff Dyer, Marisa Crawford, Kate Wolf, Rick Moody, Scott Bradfield, Samantha Cohen, and more.

You can buy the magazine here, and I highly recommend that you do. (Also, Borne the novel won’t be finished until December, and might not be published for another year, so…)

Below you’ll find a short teaser from the section of Borne running in Black Clock. It’s set in a somewhat Kafkaesque ruined, nameless city after a partial Collapse. An anonymous Company still creates bioneered creatures and sends them to places not yet Collapsed. Mord, a giant bear who used to be human, terrorizes the city. The main character came from far away—in my mind she’s Fijian, but that isn’t specified on the page.

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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.

I drank a book by a man named Radoslav A. Tsanoff while in the angels’ library last time. It was called The Nature of Evil, and in it Tsanoff related the philosophy of a German named Julius Bahnsen, who believed that reality was an expression of a single, unchanging force that expressed energy, expressed movement, through unrelenting slaughter throughout the universe with no other purpose. I had this book much on my mind as I finally set out to talk to Marty at the Grim Lighthouse.

This Grim Lighthouse existed in a temporal and dimensional abnormality. It was unstable, and it drew other realities into it so that ghosts truly roamed its winding stairs, its rooms, the grounds around it. And due to the nature of the abnormality, this Grim Lighthouse drew to it like a beacon meant for the purpose every evil, wretched, terrible act. To approach it was to approach a montage of horrors. And yet, and yet, it represented my best chance to talk to Marty, in a manifestation that walked amongst horrible marvels each and every day. And yet it was in a way one of the last lighthouses in that world.

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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.

What are you? I had asked.

Wouldn’t you like to know? It had replied, with a laugh like a rusty gate.

(It is probably best to admit that some of these entries are re-creations, transcribed from memory long after the events occurring within them. That some part of me could not face it all, everything, in the moment, and that my version of these events may be changed and eroded or enhanced by time. How can one be torn to bits by explosion—to know that in some other reality I no longer exist—and sit down the next month, and write “Dear Diary, Last Month I Was Blown Up.” Useless. Yet still it’s the little lie we’ll share going forward—that we’re both in the same moment, and the next, and the next. Forget I ever said anything; in some other reality you already did.)

I had recovered my senses enough to recognize that I had a passenger: something embedded in Smudge-me as I had myself been embedded in the wall of the explosion crater. It was a remnant, a trace, really, of a Remnant. A fleck of nano-metal that could only have been seen under a microscope. But I sensed it now. It had shifted within my body to a position right below the bellybutton that the tendril fed. I had enough of my senses back to analyze it, and then to recognize it. My first instinct was to eject it from my body, but I had been alone a very long time, with only my slow and incomprehensible thoughts…and sometimes, nightmares.

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UPDATE: Some have asked if I still have copies of THE TROIKA to sell in the original edition. Yes, I do, most all of them from the second printing. Please email me at vanderworld@hotmail.com for more details if you’re interested.

Way back in the 1990s, my Ministry of Whimsy press published a novel called The Troika by Stepan Chapman that had been rejected by 120 publishers and which the author had tried to salvage by sending out chapters as stand-alone stories. One of them came to Leviathan 1, an anthology I was editing in the early 1990s. It made no sense to me out of context, but I still loved it. I felt like I was looking at a puzzle piece of something larger, and so I asked Stepan if it was part of a novel, and if so if he could send more of it. He sent another piece as a submission, and this one was self-contained and we published it in Leviathan 1: “The Chosen Donor”.

Then he sent the full novel…and as I read it and the back of my skull began to explode and my brain to melt from the audacious brilliance of it…I realized we had to publish it.

We did, and not only did it win the PKD Award and also garner over 120 reviews world-wide, Stepan, in one of those ironies too delicious to seem real, sat at a table during the PKD Award ceremony with some of the most prominent editors who had rejected his manuscript—all of whom probably had perfectly valid reasons for rejection, in that it’s not a novel that fits smoothly into any particular marketing category.

What’s it about?

Under the glare of three suns, three beings travel across an endless desert. They argue, whine, wheedle and needle each other. Sometimes they switch identities when the sandstorms roar in. As The Troika rolls on, we learn more about Alex, who started out as a man, then became cyborg, then jeep. About Naomi, a veteran soldier who woke up from her cryogenic storage tank to a new life, now a dinosaur. About Eva, who fled her native land to escape her fate as an organ-donor for the emperor.

The novel reconstructs their shattered lives through amazing tour-de-force flashbacks while driving closer to the central mystery of why they are trudging across an endless desert. It’s a truly stunning book in so many ways I don’t really know how to begin. What I do know is that without reading The Troika I could not have finished my novel Veniss Underground, and without the lessons learned from The Troika I could not have taken any number of leaps of faith in my fiction. Nor could I have jumped into my current serial The Journals of Doctor Mormeck without the influence of The Troika—several techniques I’m using were first perfected by Stepan in his novel.

So, as we prep the e-book, I’m wondering if any of you remember reading The Troika and liking it this much as well, and if you’re writer, how did the book influence you, if it did? We’ll probably publish a selection of responses in the back of the e-book as a bonus for readers, along with some other cool stuff.

And, here’s an excerpt from the novel—one of the flashbacks involving the character who keeps morphing into mechanical avatars.

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In honor of the Tallahassee Lambshead Cabinet Extravaganza occurring this Sunday at Ray’s Steel City Saloon (info here), I’ll be posting some special new material connected to the anthology (order it here!).

Today, we have a special treat: an expanded version of one of the best micro-submissions to the anthology and an important part of Dr. Lambshead’s cabinet: Graham Lowther’s Ear-Eye…

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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.

Through all of my surveillance across worlds, through the stamen-delicate antennae of the luna moths, questions vibrate. A child asking his mother at bedtime “What is an angel? Do they really live in Heaven?” Are angels real? Do they watch over us? What is a fallen angel? Priests and scientists and believer and non-believers alike. Trillions of replications and icons, the alt-Earths awash in them. Numb, dumb marble statuary devoted to angels. Millions of books. Mutterings and prayers and interrogations and conversations. “What is an angel?” If I could answer any of them, I would say: “An angel is something so alien from yourselves that ‘purpose” becomes a meaningless word.”

But what did I really know? I knew what Gabriel told me, and sometimes a few words with one of the nameless others who I knew only by their faces as they glided effortless and ghost-like through the laboratory on some esoteric secret mission. I knew only that sometimes they carried objects with them on their way from one part of the laboratory to the other. An aquarium full mice and spiders. Three candelabras with old lavender wax runneling down their oxidated curves. Ancient, pitted swords that looked like they had come from some Bronze Age. Four angels once carried effortless the oddly balanced weight of a huge figurehead from the prow of a great ship of war, the glazed gold eyes of the woman mused for the sailors’ superstitions staring fixedly ahead as if their every effort were meaningless and unimportant to her.

I knew from the discoveries in the winter city that one way kill an angel was cremation. It was reversible, but it keep them silent and on a shelf for awhile, waiting for their release…and even that did not guarantee a sane or permanent return. Dust to dust and back from dust for awhile. The essential essence of an angel would show itself over time, a cannister turning turquoise or some other shade. No one knew what the colors meant, although one scientist named Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, who lived in India on an alt-Earth, acquired several and did research. Satyamurthy went mad from whatever he discovered but still managed to self-publish the results in a slim monograph entitled The Significance of Angel Ashes: The Contamination and Reconciliation of the Swedenborg Hypothesis. I found a copy on one of the slide in the angels’ library, and this quote was liquid in my mind when Gabriel joined me there: “Angelcide it seemed was a means of penetration. a sort of litmus test exposing the molecular nature of this immediate realty, the cellular weight of this momentary spot of cohesion in the flux of space and time.”

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In honor of the Tallahassee Lambshead Cabinet Extravaganza occurring this Sunday at Ray’s Steel City Saloon (info here), I’ll be posting some special new material connected to the anthology (order it here!).

First up is contributor S.J. Chambers’ rumination on Poe-pathy, associated to some degree with her contribution to the Cabinet antho, Dr. Lambshead’s Dark Room. The account of meeting Dr. Lambshead concerns hypnotic techniques, including the Valdemar Method, which enabled the doctor “to extract from even the most cavernous subconscious those diseases that afflicted the soul, as demonstrated in the mesmeric stories of Edgar Allan Poe.”

Tomorrow: An expanded treatise on the famed “Ear-Eye”!

THE POE BUG
S.J. Chambers

Have you experienced these following symptoms: soaring soul, existential exigency, speaking in cryptically symbolic metaphor, vertigo caused by sublimity, vision heightened by chiaroscuro, dead-dwelling or head-swelling? Do you suffer from daydreaming reflex with reveries that include blackbirds, scents of an unseen censor or aberrant alliterative applications? If you have answered yes to more than one of these, you may be suffering from Poepathy. A terrible disease of the soul, characterized by the affectation of the imagination and its degenerate interaction with the secular world, Poepathy is derived from continual contact of the reader’s imagination with that of 19th- century American author, Edgar Allan Poe, and the dependency upon Poe’s work for constant creative stimuli.

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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.

There was a ringing in my ears for a long time after the explosion. I mean, in my earholes. Except. I didn’t have earholes anymore, so where could the ringing be coming from?

I didn’t have a tail.

I didn’t have feet.

I didn’t have legs.

I didn’t have a torso.

I didn’t have any internal organs.

I didn’t have any veins.

I didn’t have any arteries.

I didn’t have fatty tissue.

I didn’t have muscle.

I didn’t have tendons.

I didn’t have sinews.

I didn’t have bones.

I didn’t have eyes.

I didn’t have a snout.

I didn’t have a mouth.

I didn’t have a head.

I didn’t have a skull.

I didn’t have a brain.

I would have felt the loss of each intensely if I wasn’t too busy surviving. I was just a scrap of flesh about one centimeter long, a bit of skin and flesh from approximately five centimeters southwest of my left foreleg, having detached from my lower neck from the pressure and shot out, accompanied by its brethren, the shrapnel of a scale model of Stalingrad, rocks, dirt, and a few hundred confused and splattering earthworms and ground-burrowing creatures rapidly losing their bodily integrity.

This was possibly the best decision Scrap-me had ever made, to join the general exodus, for said neck buckled and jellied with the heat and then spray-evaporated beyond saving, along with the rest of me.

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(The micro-cannisters that housed the 12 nano-brains of the Remnant within a test-tube spaceship that traveled the galaxy for more than a million years following the destruction of their civilization by the angels. Don’t get the reference. Read The Journals! Archive here.)

I’ve been on a tear with The Journals of Doctor Mormeck the last couple days, as might be obvious from the blog entries. I’m up near 30,000 words and think it will be about 45,000 or 50,000 in rough draft form when done.

I’m also posting little “outtakes” and snippets that will go into future entries as facebook statuses, usually with a real-world image involved. So feel free to friend me on facebook (it’s not my fan page, it’s my personal facebook page, jeff.vandermeer, on fb).

The images are interesting. Since the settings include several alt-Earths, I’ve continued to transform our world into fodder for the storylines, and thus more and more real-world images are coming into play. Some things, like the mecha-komodo above, I bought specifically for the purpose.

Anyway, hope you’re still enjoying the story, and feel free to donate to vanderworld at hotmail.com via paypal if you like it. Any donation $21 and above and you’ll get it in final book form, whenever that happens. I’m pretty much ignoring some book offers to finish this off, so it’s eating into my live-off-of income…

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.

By the rocking chair in the angels’ library, I found something odd when I returned there today. It had been shoved into a crack in the wall, which was improbable enough: a crack in that seamless, immaculate surface. But, then, it was near a small dried up pool of blood. A slide, like the other slides. But this one I had my avatar pocket and bring back. Something told me I shouldn’t “read” it in the library, or mention it to Gabriel. And so later, I sampled it, letting the liquid suffuse Mormeck mountain, soaking into every cell. It was short and odd and I could not tell if it was meant to be fiction or some secret surveil, akin to that recorded by the luna moths, that had been deposited in the library to disguise it. I could not even tell where it had been written or who had written it, except for some slight indication of the story being told in a bar on an alt-Earth, to a human child. This is what I “read”…

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