The cover of the forthcoming first story collection by Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck. Tidbeck attended Clarion San Diego this year, and we believe you’ll be hearing a lot from her in the future. She’s currently in the process of translating a lot of her own work into English.

Reza Negarestani’s first novel Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials is among my favorite books of the aughts, and the most original piece of fiction I’ve read in ages. I have to thank China Mieville for bringing Negarestani to our attention. We’re excerpting the novel in our anthology The Weird, and Reza is a contributor to our forthcoming Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities anthology, working off of an illustration by Mieville.

Think Borges by way of Lovecraft by way of William Burroughs by way of…well, Negarestani. This is a one-off original, by a writer who is only going to get better. For once an Amazon product description comes close to describing a book in all of its complexity:

At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. CYCLONOPEDIA is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth’s tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun. ‘The Middle East is a sentient entity – it is alive!’ concludes renegade Iranian archeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the ‘lubricant’ of historical and political narratives. A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along. Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil …

Buy this book.

(Thanks to all of the guest bloggers for the great ongoing posts!)
So Finch is out in the UK early next month, and so far it’s gotten a great review in Interzone and on Strange Horizons to go with raves in the Washington Post, B&N Review, LA Times, and lots of other places for the US edition, as well being a Nebula finalist and Locus Award finalist.

And then there’s the one that made me really laugh. The one where the reviewer seems to have been writing while he had a lemon stuck very high up somewhere that made him exceedingly uncomfortable and narsty-minded, the Tom Holt one on SFX. It genuinely, seriously made me laugh. Why in the name of all that’s holy would they give Finch to this guy to review? Were they trying to make me cry? The worst part is the cliche emperor-has-no-clothes reference (yep, it’s cause he’s moonin’ you). Well, I guess that means I’ve arrived…again. Or something. Anyway, go read it. And then go buy the beautiful UK edition anyway.

Okay, back to the salt-mines for me. Carry on.

And for comparison purposes:

(more…)

The LA Times has published my review of a history of steampower by William Rosen. They asked me to integrate some aspects of Steampunk perspective on it, so I did. Not sure if it’s a chemical or physical reaction, but go check it out.

A young Steampunk’s dream, William Rosen’s “The Most Powerful Idea in the World” manages to make sense of the many threads that together tell the story of the origins and applications of steam power. The book has a crackling energy to it, often as riveting as it is educational. Rosen, in pursuit of evidence, makes interesting, even exciting, such subjects as patent law from the Roman Tiberius on, technological innovation in ancient China and the role of practice in separating out accomplished performers from the “merely good.” If Rosen at times seems too hell-bent on single-minded pursuit of his enthusiasms, at least that’s better than a dull book.

In other news, SF Site published a review of Finch that makes no sense to me. Maybe my head is just too cotton-candy-and-nails from this damned cold, but just a couple of points. (1) Somebody pretty clearly skimmed parts of the book to come up with this sentence: “The problem is that by the time the book lets us in on the hows and whys, they have become largely academic.” Um, not true. Like, not true in any objective way. And, um, the inclusion of same is a powerful counter-example anyway to the thin characterization claim, which I’m not going to bother with anyway. I can’t get any closer in on a character’s thoughts, inside of their head, than in Finch, so phhhpt. And (2) I’m going to have to do a blog post on the idea of “constraint” when it comes to characterization, because the problem isn’t that John Finch is too constrained–and, indeed, despite his constraints, he *does* plenty of things–but that characters in most fantasy novels are *not constrained enough*. Plot devices and authorial intervention tend to smooth the path. Thus endeth the rant. I’m going back to bed. Heh. Maybe I’m the third bear. Yes, I’m sure that’s it. Good night all.

(Book covers as part of Tetris, courtesy of SF Signal)

SF Signal ran a Mindmeld where they asked me and others about essential short story collections. Go check it out. Here’s my list, sans descriptions.

1.The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
2.The Lottery & Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
3.Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
4.The Zanzibar Cat by Joanna Russ
5.Bloodchild by Octavia Butler
6.Star Songs of an Old Primate by James Tiptree Jr
7.The Seventh Horse by Leonora Carrington
8.To Charles Fort, with Love by Caitlin R. Kiernan
9.The Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. LeGuin
10.Tainaron: Mail from Another City by Leena Krohn

….and for something completely different, check out an excerpt from a genius old man’s Old Men in Love, over on Omnivoracious.

I’m a huge World Cup fanatic–planning on watching at least part of every match. For those of you who aren’t, or just need more to do :), there’s always the World Cup of Fiction. Which I just made up.

How do you play? Take one or more of the countries below and do a blog post about your favorite fiction/books from that place/those places. Perhaps leaving out the obvious suspects like the US and England. As for any rules other than that, I’ll leave it up to you.

I’ll tackle a few of these on Omnivoracious in the next couple of weeks, but overlap’s always good. If you do post something, please link it here, too.

What’re the countries?

(My Angela Carter collection; for a larger version, click here; I have Burning Your Boats, too, but it’s in the bookshelf holding our weird antho source material.)

Paul Charles Smith plans to cover all of Angela Carter’s fiction, and his first post is on her first collection Fireworks. I found Fireworks to be fascinating because it’s somewhat uneven–her evocations of a South American setting and a few others seem like mere stage props, not particularly convincing–and shows Carter finding her voice. Many stories are also clearly affected by her divorce and feeling isolated in another country. I’m not sure I agree with all of Smith’s analysis, but it’s worth checking out since he’s doing such a comprehensive series. One thing’s for sure–Carter was, for her entire career, profane, transgressive, and totally uninterested in uniformity or traditional ways of looking at things.

I’ve got an extensive essay on Carter’s work that’s currently housed at the Scriptorium. I haven’t looked at it recently, and don’t know if it holds up–I wrote it many years ago, when I was 23 or 24.

And if you’re not interested in Angela Carter, here’s our cat trying to get into my office.

NYTBR just published my review of Palmer’s first novel, The Dream of Perpetual Motion. A really good first novel. Basically, even though I had some quibbles that got cut for space considerations–the middle is too static–my feeling is that Palmer could write just about anything he likes. He’s got the full-on chops and the flexibility and depth. Very exciting.

I also have to say I really appreciated the NYTBR editor’s edit on this review. My original got a little too caught up in Palmer’s own convoluted structure/syntax, which is fine for his book but not for a review. It was nice to see all of that flensed so effortlessly.

In going through our library and acquiring books for our reading for The Weird antho, I’ve noticed once again the smell of books, and in particular the smell of the weird. Herein I disclose Part 1 of my findings, with a relatively small sample.

Jean Ray’s Ghouls in My Grave dates from 1965, and thus there’s a full-on must surrounding this slim paperback. The cover’s foxed and there are a couple of peculiar gray stains on the binding that add to the ambiance. The scent surrounding the book like a mist is a subtle yet sharp melange of cigar smoke, mold, gravel, and something in the background I can’t quite identify no matter how long I sniff Ghouls. Dry earth? Anyway, this is a classic case of the aging of a book creating the perfect smell for its subject matter. Indeed, one might speculate from this sampling that some reading experiences will only have the appropriate tactile element after an aging process has occurred. (Taken to its furthest extreme, Kerouac would require steeping in years of cross-country buses and cars and anything by Bukowski would need to be marinated in a bar for decades.)

(more…)