Category: Books & Writers

Haiku Out of the Blue

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Frost first thing.

My friend and Ithaca College writing professor Cory Brown wrote to me about a new project of his, wicked haiku: a devil’s dictionary, wherein he posts cynical verse daily. Some of my favorites:

credit

the gift from two holes
the ass who lent it to you
and the one you’re in

self

the little cabin
in the woods you built before
it all fell apart

depression

a sometimes lethal
virus that you wish happy
people would contract

Every one of them is a sharp little piece of glass; Cory tells me he has over 700 more waiting to be scattered across the city sidewalk. And if it turns out you like poetry but didn’t even know it-tree, Cory also has a book you might enjoy.

The Gao of Bill

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Heartless Gao Walks Number Nine Hell.Never heard of Bill Ward? It’s your loss, though understandable. Despite having appeared in such pubs as Howard Andrew Jones’s Flashing Swords, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Kaleidotrope, and enough anthologies to burst an equort’s saddlebags, Ward remains shamefully underrated and unknown in the genre community.

Part of the handicap lies in the fact that as a short-story writer much of his work has appeared on paper rather than Paperwhite, which in modern times cockblocks discovery. Recently though, Bill collected and re-published his fiction as five e-books, each affordably priced at $3.99. Such value!

Interestingly my short story backlist sort of naturally fell into 30k-ish sized chunks of themed stories. There are two collections that are mostly heroic fantasy, sword & sorcery, or dark fantasy, those being ‘The Last of His Kind and Other Stories’ and ‘Mightier Than the Sword and Other Stories.’ ‘Heartless Gao Walks Number Nine Hell and Other Stories’ collects mostly ‘mythic’ type pieces, stories that are written in a style more akin to fables or legends. I also had enough for two science fiction collections, divided roughly into ‘naughty’ and ‘nice.’ On the naughty side we have ‘Named in Blood and Other Stories’ which is darker, grimmer stuff; ’20,000 Light Years to Lilliput and Other Stories’ is a funnier collection, less serious, and a bit more all over the place genre-wise.

Having previously purchased a copy of Heartless Gao (which at that point only contained the titular story), Bill sent me a copy of the expanded Heartless Gao Walks Number Nine Hell and Other Stories. Included are nine fantasies set in days of yore. Lust for wealth and the daughters of oracles drowns whole Hyperborean landscapes in “The Wroeth’s Grinding Bowl” and “The Old Man and the Mountain of Fire,” while Irish legends echo in “The Midnight Maiden” and “When They Come to Murder Me.” The Aesopic “How Antkind Lost Its Soul” satirizes corporate cubicle-copia; likewise, the repentant soldier-turned-monk Heartless Gao takes on the bureaucracy of a Chinese afterlife in the very clever and very worthwhile namesake tale. My favorites are the collection’s two bookends, “Gandolo of the Watchful Eye” and “Crow: A Triptych,” the first a rich sardonicism combining the best of Clark Ashton Smith and Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, the other an arc reaching from classical Greece to post-apocalypticism.

I wish Bill would write more, especially in the “Gandolo” style. His dry humor is rare among fantasists (you can hear the laugh track when most writers combine labyrinths and levity) and his stories are almost always whole narratives — you know, those things with beginnings and middles and conclusions — rather than the pretty scenes strung together in literary ostentation seen so commonly in the pro markets. Please consider this humble recommendation when spending your Christmas Kindle gift cards.

Elmore Leonard

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If there is a single writer I owe above all others, it was Elmore Leonard. Some of his ten rules I had cadged beforehand from Hemingway — which is where he grabbed them too — like the distrust of adverbs or not lingering too long on descriptions. The one that has really stuck with me is not using anything other than the word “said” for dialogue. I will also use “asked,” which is similarly neutral. The teachers actually scold my sons for using “said” in their writing; they want melodrama like “cried” or “pleaded” or “demanded.” I don’t worry too much because a big part of writing is throwing away everything you learned in school and paring down your style into something distinct. They’ll do it like writers do.

Valdez Is Coming was his favorite Western, which is understandable; its twist ending could be seen, like Unforgiven was for Clint Eastwood, as a kind of love-letter criticism of the genre. I’m partial to Cuba Libre, his Western set on a Caribbean island. His crime novels? Probably Rum Punch but that’s a tough call since it’s difficult not to compare it with Jackie Brown. Get Shorty is good. Freaky Deaky is fun, about ex-60s radicals trying to dynamite their way to riches (I watched the 2012 film version with Christian Slater on Tuesday — small budget but definitely worthwhile).

Leonard was the last of the pulp writers, a World War II vet who went to Detroit to scrawl ad copy and wrote Westerns on the side. I’ve read most of his early books, though years later a lot of them bleed together. The plots are forgettable because they derive entirely from the characters — there’s very few MacGuffins. It’s usually: this person wants revenge on that person, or to scam or steal from that person, and then coincidentally this other person or persons becomes involved, and the whole thing becomes knotted. His plots are tangled but never confusing; and there’s only a handful of characters to keep track of. The women are always smarter than the men and the men — this is something I really like about Leonard — are often undone by their vanity and ego. There’s a graf in Riding the Rap (I think) where the character imagines how he should wear a do-rag or a hat or something and how bad-ass he would look if he did that. Because ladies, men are peacocks. Just one thing among so many others Leonard got right.

Full Steam Ahead

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Reacting to IBM’s prediction that steampunk will reach the tipping point in 2013, Alternate History Weekly Update notes that, like it or not, corsets and goggles are the visible standard-bearers for the entire genre of historical what-iffiness:

Business News reported that IBM predicted steampunk will be the next major fashion trend in 2013. They based their prediction by having a supercomputer (presumably not a steam powered Babbage Analytical Engine) analyze “more than half a billion public posts on message boards, blogs, social media sites and news sources.”

IBM and, frankly, most people don’t distinguish between steampunk the visual-arts movement, steampunk the sartorial movement, and steampunk the literary movement, nor consider how much overlap between the three really exists. Cinematically I think saturation has already occurred; just as time travel was once a very explicit subset of science fiction but is now a common plot device in mainstream television, tropes like airships in the sky to telegraph an alternate reality (e.g., Doctor Who, Fringe) will continue to be absorbed into popular consciousness. I certainly welcome renewed interest in Nouveau style and Craftsman architecture and furnishings, but those stand on their own. As for fashion, I’m skeptical of who’s chasing whose tail. Designers may embrace Victorian callbacks like high boots and snug bodices — or even mirror steampunk’s notorious mix of 19th-century décolletage with 21st-century gam — but looking around at the women of New York and Connecticut, I’m certain any similarities occur independent of a cosplay community. Using steampunk as a marketing gimmick is different than drawing inspiration from it — an obvious deficiency of a metric designed simply to count buzzwords.

But will supposed popular interest in steampunk extend to what initially began as a literary trend? Magic 8-Ball says Outlook not so good. I doubt I’m alone when I question if alternate-history’s poster child has sunk to self-parody; for every VanderMeer collection, twenty girl-on-girl steampunk anthologies inundate Amazon. Meanwhile, some editors report a scarcity of appropriate material for their pubs. Would anyone not already a heavy spec-fiction reader pick up a Cherie Priest novel? Forget Main Street — has anyone already involved in steampunk ever read a Jeff Barlough novel? My guess is that the biggest in-roads are being made in the Young Adult market.

I’ve no reason to complain if steampunk as a whole has raised the profile of alternate history, regardless of whether the written variety — or at least, the inventive written variety — will ever be ubiquitous enough to reach a general audience. So chatter it up, Internets! And then go hit the Kindle store.

An Interview With Jeffrey E. Barlough

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Over at Black Gate, you can read my interview with Jeffrey Barlough, author of the long-running Western Lights series of alternate-history novels.

There’s nothing out there on the shelves like Jeffrey Barlough’s Western Lights novels. The series — called such because “the sole place on earth where lights still shine at night is in the west” — is a bouillabaisse of mystery, ghost story, and post-apocalyptic gaslamp fantasy. His seventh and most recent book, What I Found at Hoole, was published in November.

Dr. Barlough, who moonlights as a veterinary physician, kindly spoke to me about the world-building of the Western Lights, his latest project, and which Ice Age animal he’d most like to meet in a dark alley.

Barlough has flown under the radar for far too long; in a just universe, steampunk convention-goers would be cosplaying his characters and dressing up their pets as woolly mammoths. Here’s hoping the interview brings him a little more attention.