Light blogging here for awhile, as I’m completely immersed in the Shared Worlds SF/F teen writing camp. Still, above is the cover art for the SW teen writing book and below a couple of photos. More soonish.
Today our anthology The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories from Top Authors and Artists
How You Can Help!
If you like the anthology—an LA Times recommended summer reading selection—and want to support unique ideas like hybrid fiction-art books, here are some of the things you can do to help:
—Buy the book. It’s currently selling on Amazon and elsewhere for a ridiculously low price for a fully-illustrated oversized hardcover. Buy it for friends. Buy it for family.
—Review the book. Blog, review site, or on a sandwich board in front of your local bookstore. Any mention, especially noting whatever you really liked about the book, helps immensely. And a limited number of additional review copies are available for review sites; email me at vanderworld at hotmail.com if interested.
—Review it on Amazon. Go to the Amazon sales page for the book and tell other readers what you liked about it. A quick and easy way to help get the word out and create interest.
—Make sure local booksellers carry it. The anthology seems to have a strong presence in bookstores, but you can always encourage booksellers who aren’t stocking it. You can even tell them its by some of the same people who brought them The Steampunk Bible, which has done very well.
—Request it from your local library. Making sure your local library knows about the anthology not only increases library orders but allows multiple people to enjoy the book.
—Spread the word through twitter and facebook. Tell people about the anthology through social media, using one of the links below. Lots of excerpts have been posted in various places—choose your favorite.
—Come to the author events (more to be scheduled). We’ll be having lots of fun, including telling tales out of school, so to speak. Current schedule here. (We should have at least one prominent West Coast event to announce soon.)
NOTE: Bloggers (non-contributors) who post the link to their mention of the antho in the comments thread will be in the drawing for a free copy of the book, signed by the editors, as well as a copy of the coffee table book The Steampunk Bible, along with a few surprises…
More Info on the Anthology
I think by now, if you’ve followed this blog, you know the idea behind this unique anthology, but in case you missed it…
After the death of the famous Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead at his house in Wimpering-on-the-Brook, England, a remarkable discovery was unearthed: the remains of an astonishing cabinet of curiosities. In keeping with the bold spirit exemplified by Dr. Lambs¬head and his exploits, HarperCollins now proudly presents fully illustrated highlights from the doctor’s cabinet, including exciting stories of adventure and reproduced museum exhibits. The Cabinet anthology is a secret history of the 20th century, an art book with over 70 images, and a treasury of modern fantasy containing work by over 85 creators, including some of the genre’s most exciting names. Suitable for both YA and adult library collections.
Contributors include Holly Black, Greg Broadmore, Ted Chiang, John Coulthart, Rikki Ducornet, Amal El-Mohtar, Minister Faust, Jeffrey Ford, Lev Grossman, N.K. Jemisin, Caitlin R. Kiernan, China Mieville, Mike Mignola, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Garth Nix, Naomi Novik, James A. Owen, Helen Oyeyemi, J.K. Potter, Cherie Priest, Ekaterina Sedia, Jan Svankmajer, Rachel Swirsky, Carrie Vaughn, Jake von Slatt, Tad Williams, Charles Yu, and many more. Eighty-five in total!!
Links to Unique Content!
Here are links to some of the coverage so far, with more planned on at the Huffington Post, SF Signal, Suvudu, Fangoria, and many, many others.
Kirkus Reviews–Exclusive Mike Mignola image and Lev Grossman excerpt
Amazon’s Book Blog–Exclusive Mike Mignola image and Cherie Priest excerpt
Barnes & Noble Book Club–Rave review by Paul Goat Allen
i09—A table of contents feature with exclusive Greg Broadmore image
Weird Tales—My lovely co-editor talks about the more macabre side of the cabinet anthology, with excerpt from stories by Kiernan and Michael Cisco and Aeron Alfrey art.
Weirdletter—A view from Italy
Ecstatic Days—Right here on my blog I’ve posted an exclusive excerpt with commentary from Reza Negarestani (with China Mieville art)and a disgrunted artifacts image created by Rikki Ducornet.
Contributor Posts—Posts by contributors have included interesting glimpses into the cabinet by artist Aeron Alfrey, artist John Coulthart (with many images), writer Amal El-Mohtar, and writer Jayme Lynn Blaschke.
* Note: I stole some of the general “help out” info from Cat Valente’s livejournal.
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. Also, let me know you’re still reading by posting a comment. Story context:
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. 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 day has passed…I had not thought much about my namesake, the Mountain That Remained Behind…until now. Now I think about Mormeck Mountain constantly, wondering what he would do in my stead, because Mormeck Avatar feels compromised by this Komodo skin, this carefully mimicked Komodo brain, this Komodo flesh—so seductive in its strength and speed. Komodo-me likes to stop suddenly and change direction, to go bounding through the snowy woods, to suddenly scuttle up the sides of buildings, feeling the lovely ache and pull of gravity on muscles. Komodo-me makes decisions quickly, too quickly sometimes, and is seduced by the comfortable friendship he has with Sergeant Pavlov, almost to the point of becoming dog-like in wanting to please…although, perhaps that is Mormeck Avatar’s fault, too.
We went out to the place where the soldiers had found the laughing German soldier with his head on backwards and flames coming out of his head. It was safer now to go there than before as the Germans had been forced to retreat from the area, even as they had made gains in places farther south.
Rather, Pavlov through a third party ordered the two soldiers back there, and I followed invisible. Pavlov had had them provided with a two-way radio and they had been told that from time to time someone might ask them questions using it. He didn’t bother giving me a two-way radio.
“My theory, Mormeck,” Pavlov said, “is that given a rational option for a voice coming out of the snow that they will take it. I would like to see this theory tested. Besides, your voice is a little raspy.”
What rational theory would explain the sound of a huge reptile moving through snow, I asked him.
Pavlov shrugged. “The human mind is a remarkable thing.”
So I’m bored today. So I’m gonna ask you a question. If any fantasy/SF authors got in a battle against one another and they had to fight through proxies like weapons, allies, etc, and were able to summon up anything weapon-y from their novels, including beasties as allies, to use in that conflict…what match-ups would you find interesting, and whose weapons would help them win?
Personally, I’d like to see Pern dragons versus GRRM dragons, sand worms versus Smaug, space squid versus…something.
If everybody mentions just male authors, I’m gonna send my fungal weapons after you. And they burn.
Only thing I really didn’t get is Tyrion Lannister and most of his kin being flayed alive by the Iron Kings and their skins used to create an airship for the dragon queen to travel to Westeros in. Kinda weird.
Just a little something Jeremy Zerfoss is working on for Shared Worlds teen writing camp this year. The students will get visits from guest writers Nnedi Okorafor, Minister Faust, Ekaterina Sedia, Will Hindmarch, and myself, along with editorial guest Ann VanderMeer.
Shh. Top secret.
Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance. Context:
Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels. Mormeck helps conduct surveillance experiments across alternate realities, currently focused on a hundred thousand alt-Earths. 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.
Returned to the winter city usually called Stalingrad but on this alt-Earth known as “Volgograd”, Russian, German, and the subsonic language of the Komodos crammed into me. I appeared in a crush of snow, dropping reconstituted through five feet of air with none to see me. I tried to change my molecular structure immediately, but this was impossible. No one was around. Not even a rat. Without hesitation, I shed all but a tendril of myself and runneled into the substrata and found a sluggish worm, became a worm, found a rat, became a rat, tunneled up and found a dead human, thawed that, became that. All the time paranoid, afraid that some Presence might find me. But it didn’t happen.
I don’t know how long this process took—I was too engrossed in it—but long enough that I had gotten over the aftershocks from being devoured by Seether. There’s a horror in being ripped at, being torn apart, that has nothing to do with pain—the pain had been deadened—and everything to do with the pulling, the ripping rendered numb. It felt to me as how it would feel to a human if peeling off the dead skin from a sunburn, but instead, with the same level of intensity, long swathes of flesh came with it. What had the humans felt so long ago when the angels had sent out their holy bears to bring back specimens.
Did those hunted down think that after their savage deaths they had been to Heaven? Did they misinterpret the smiles of the angels?
Not me. I knew I had been brought to a kind of hell. Under siege. On this alt-Earth, the date was December 14, 1942. The Germans and Russians had fought themselves to a stand-still for over a year, and both sides barely existed as coherent fighting forces in the city despite the reflexive sending of more reinforcements and supplies. Air support had become almost non-existent. Trotsky was plagued in the Far East by an all-out Japanese assault upon his borders. Hitler had launched an attack against the East Coast of the country known as the United States, after a failed revolt by his generals, and spending much of his time keeping his supply lines safe and ruling Europe and part of Africa.
This winter city was now forgotten and full of corpses, almost equally divided between the two sides, but poorly ruled. Into that lawlessness had come spies and profiteers and, oddly, an area scooped out of the boundaries near the Volga that now served as a kind of neutral zone. And everywhere, too, the komodos roamed, silent and invisible, their brand of life-taking unnoticed amongst so much carnage.
I became human hidden behind a ruined, frozen wall, hearing the soft crunch of a patrol across an ice field that once been a courtyard, and the sound of mortar shells, and a low clear moan somewhere distant, and a gasoline-blood smell that had soaked into the snow. The shouts of men and women accompanied by machine gun fire. The sun was a blood-orange at the horizon, but it had been that way for hours.
Dusk, and I’d stolen the dead man’s clothes, his boots, his gun, and his face. I discovered I was cold but I could freeze through and it wouldn’t matter. I was now part of the Russian side: Trotsky’s White Army, stalemated with the German Christo-Fascists…the information dissolving into my brain like a painkiller, each new fact bringing me calm. I would always have a map in my head, always know exactly where I was, and thus how far away from home.
Mormeck Mountain rarely knew outright fear, but I was an Outpost—I could as good as die before being saved, and the Mountain would remain if I disappeared to my last cell. From the first, then, in that new and tactile place I found I had become autonomous and through rebirth as worm-rat become my own person. A dead person. I looked like a dead person. I had to.
The dead man had had a name, but I didn’t want to know it. I had to know only that he’d been on patrol and a sniper’s bullet had taken him, and now he would lurch up and find another patrol or wander, seeking others, seeking a certain…Presence.
But the swift-shifting komodos that found me first.
Note: Like this serialized long story/novella? Paypal me what you think it’s worth to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of whatever anthology it eventually appears in, or any initial stand-alone book version.
Archive: Journals of Mormeck
The first six of the twelve recovered in canisters from the war-torn winter city came back to us sane but with their memories wiped clean and their motor functional infantile. The seventh was insane at first. They resurrected him from his own ashes and he screamed with the first breath of air in his lungs. He was one of the angels, but still he screamed, as if he didn’t remember. His name was given to me as “Kathar,” and he had been tortured in the winter city.
After a time, Kathar stopped screaming and regained the preternatural confidence that marks all of these “angels.” Kathar had been on surveillance elsewhere but something he had seen that now existed as a hole in his memory had sidetracked him. Before he had been taken, Kathar had destroyed his own wings, changed his eyes, created for himself a uniform of white-and-gray that matched the besiegers, who he thought were winning the war. Then the other side had found him, and brought him to a hospital that wasn’t for sick people but for experiments. There, he was interrogated and tortured, and when he didn’t talk they burned him alive, some inkling having formed in his captors’ minds, Kathar said, that he was not entirely human.
This was all I knew because this was all I observed before the others took him someplace more private for a full debriefing. Some time afterwards, the leader of our laboratory, who calls himself Gabriel “but only as a joke” came to confer with my laboratorial avatar. Gabriel has my respect, but I think he likes his naming joke too much; a joke can grow into a truth, and a truth become someone’s burden.
Gabriel came to recruit me in a new way, one that went beyond our agreement. “Kathar tells a story that disturbs us greatly.” As his mouth curled upward in an almost-smile that his kind could not help. “He says he came into contact with a presence, and that this presence influenced his captors—first in the capture itself and then what happened afterwards. Kathar believes that under cover of the torture, this presence took something from him.”
I knew that the angels had their enemies, that part of their purpose in establishing the laboratory was not simply to monitor for irregularities, for things that might naturally create instability, but also to combat interference from others. They had never named these “others” to me, and it had not mattered to me. For me, if I must be honest, just the opportunity to glimpse through surveillance a hundred different worlds was enough.
But when I questioned Gabriel on this point, he shook his head, and even the half-smiled seemed oddly tinged with doubt…even fear. “This is nothing we have encountered before. No one has watched us, the watchers, before without our knowledge. Those who know of us, know because we wish it.”
Then he told me they needed my help, that someone needed to return to that winter war, in that particular reality, and investigate, report back. It could not be the remote surveillance of the luna moths. It could not be another angel, because this presence could track them “as if we have a recognizable heat signature” that registers on their instruments. Gabriel said they needed me to go. They needed my budded avatar to go because Mormeck Mountain could change not just Mormeck Outpost’s appearance but also the cellular composition. “You will go, with our instructions,” Gabriel said, “and as soon as you are there, you will alter yourself to perfectly mimic the humans there. The presence may sense your arrival, but then you will go dead to them.”
Was this, perhaps, what Gabriel and his kind had been moving toward all along? That I become not just monitor, home, and house to their efforts, but also active spy? Part of me wanted to scream as Kathar had screamed, at the thought of the unknown, but the greater part felt a great upwelling of an emotion close to happiness. My avatar was me, yes, but also separate from me. Once embedded in the winter city, my avatar’s bond with Mormeck Mountain would be broken, and we would have to synchronize our memories once I returned to myself, but I was as much me as Mountain as avatar, and vice versa. It was not even that my avatar would be a copy of me—we both were emissaries of a greater whole, a city, a host, that happened to appear as one creature. If Mormeck Mountain were to come to grief while Mormeck Mobile roamed a far-off place, then it would be Mobile that became Mountain, over time, lacking only a week or a few months of memory.
In a word, I said yes to Gabriel, and they prepared me for the journey today. I received four objects to take with me, all made very small. They briefed me on the specifics of the local conflict in a place “most commonly known across the alt-Earths as Stalingrad” and noted that in this particular iteration of that conflict “The forces of Adolf Hitler, a genocidal despot, have laid siege to the defenders, soldiers for the Soviet Union, an empire run by a autocrat named Trotsky.” He hesitated then, as much as Gabriel ever hesitates. “Complicating matters slightly, a third force works in Stalingrad: a highly evolved carnivore not native to Earth, with supreme powers of camouflage and working without the knowledge of the human population. We call them Komodos after an Earth species, but that’s not really what they are; and they are neither our enemies nor our friends. You can trust no one. Trade allegiances, even shape, as necessary.”
“Where do I start?” I asked.
“In the hospital where we found the ashes,” Gabriel said. “Any orthodoxy, any ideology, whether progressive or repressive, is a weakness, Mormeck. Anyone free of it can manipulate it, while anyone who is a true believer cannot be free of it, and will react in one of a limited number of ways. Use their ideology against them.” He had uploaded into my avatar a complete knowledge of all factions, including the Komodos—their history, their beliefs, and the wider context. I was also equipped with new languages that felt itchy in my avatar’s mind. I decided, too, to bring my “journal” with me, hidden within a sealed pouch of skin against my thigh. I could write in it without taking it out of my body.
“And what of the presence?”
“You will encounter proxies of the presence, and you will know them because in their speech and their actions they almost but not quite match the orthodoxies of which we have spoken. You will record all information about the presence that you can, and you will not engage the presence unless forced to.”
“And if I am in danger?” After the seventh reconstituted from ash, the last five had been placed in a secure facility. All five had suffered psychotic breaks as soon as they’d regained consciousness.
“We will give you the coordinates for doors back.”
Then it was just a matter of traveling to Stalingrad. Except the journey wasn’t as easy for me as for the angels. They carried that power in their bodies, the knowledge of it, the ability for it. They were doors, in a sense. But only they could open those doors and go through. For me, as for anyone else, the process was perilous and painful. My avatar would have to walk across the lawn outside of the laboratory, into the little forest, and there be devoured alive by the sentinel bear known as Seether. He would strip my flesh down to the bone with claw and fang, and feast on my remains…and when I was nothing but bones, he would crack the marrows and eat all of me…and then and only then would I travel across the alt-worlds to my destination, knit back together. I would not scream because I would suppress my nerve endings first, but it would not be a pleasant sensation. Seether too was a door—ancient and feral and containing worlds. He too was, in his way, as aesthetically pleasing as the luna moths or any other of the angels’ discoveries, experiments, and inventions. But not to the traveler. To the traveler, he was the very experience of violent death, even though was no other way.
Of course, the angels came to watch. To them, it was funny, and their half-smiles became broad and merry even as my view of them dissolved in a sudden spray of my own blood and tissue.
Avaunt!
(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.
Award-winning writer Jeff VanderMeer's final novel in his Ambergris Cycle, Finch, has just been published in the the UK from Atlantic's Corvus imprint. His writer guide Booklife and associated Booklifenow website focus on sustainable creativity. Forthcoming books include The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities and The Steampunk Bible. His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Library of America's American Fantastic Tales, and several year's best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post Book World, Omnivoracious, The New York Times Book Review, the B&N Review, and many others. If you like the blog, please consider buying one of Jeff's books as he is a full-time writer. More...
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