Thoughts On Fantasy

I decided to take photography because I've been using photographs as a basis for doing my Dada/Surrealism-influenced fantasy art for Swill. Unfortunately, I seem to be developing a taste for photography in itself. Great. Just what I need. A new form.

What next? If it's dance, I might have to kill myself.

Well, if you didn't think I was an overweening ass before, this might just change your mind. I've got a couple of hours before I have to leave for school and nothing pressing that I can actually do, so I thought I'd write a bit about my philosophy of fantasy, how it evolved, and how I apply it to my own work.

As a child, my introduction to fantasy came when my parents decided to read the Hobbit to me. My maternal grandmother, Jean Bishop, was one of those who fell in love with Tolkien's work as it was first published, and she passed that inheritance on to my mom.

The Hobbit obsessed me. It let me live in another world, one far more satisfying than my own. My life seemed -- how does it go? -- flat, stale, and unprofitable. More than his words, Tolkien's illustrations gave me a sense of uplift, of expanded life, a sense that there was (despite the fears and suffering he portrayed) a better place than mine.

I think that in many ways, the pleasure we take in stories of other times and places, of fantastic people, creatures, and events, derives from the same roots as the impulse motivating religious belief. For many, religion gives them the same thing Tolkien gave me -- an escape hatch.

So throughout my childhood and teen years, I searched out as much fantasy as I could -- and my criteria for approval was distance from conventional reality.

This eventually led to my explorations into religion, the occult, spirituality, Forteana, and so on. I wanted that imaginary escape hatch to be real, but the more I looked for it, the more I realized that it didn't exist. If I hadn't pursued the numinous with intellectual rigor, I'd probably still have a vague belief that there's a supernatural influence in life.

This led me to ignore many of the strongest virtues of much of my favorite fiction. Lord Dunsany --

A few words before we go on. Lord Dunsany is the single most influential figure in fantasy. The two main schools of twentieth-century fantasy are the Weird Tales writers and the later Inklings, who included both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. He was in many ways a better writer than those who followed him, more mature, more original, more humorous, more wise in the ways of the world.

Most of those who followed him were enchanted, as I was, by his use of words, the way he summoned up an atmosphere of other worlds. His writing, especially his early writing, was consciously influenced by the Bible. This added a strong whiff of the Orient (apologies for the use of an outdated term, but in our cultural history there's a difference between the Orient and Asia) to his work. He recognized that the Bible, however much it's influenced the Western world, was a work of Eastern folklore and folk history, one whose essential mindset is exotic to the West.

As an adult, when I read Dunsany I still appreciate that exoticism -- but more than that, I'm conscious of his sense of irony and satire. When appreciated in full, his escapism is grounded firmly in the reality of the human experience.

Dunsany's awareness of mythology is congruent with Tolkien's fascination with the folk literature of Northern Europe. What I'm saying is that fantasy has its deepest roots in religion and folklore -- in stories that people really believe in. It's that sense of conviction that allows us to experience escapism. I've always read myths and fairy tales and so on with the same mindset that I bring to fantasy.

As a kid I was distressed to hear the speculation that The Lord of the Rings was a parable for WWII, with Sauron playing the role of Hitler. It seemed to make the whole thing a cheat. But when I read more of Tolkien's personal history, it seemed to me that the War of the Rings drew more from his experiences during WWI, and that many of the emotional beats in that story seemed to come from Tolkien's life, I had the opposite reaction.

The connection with reality made the story deeper, richer, more personal.

Look, these days I find the Lord of the Rings absolutely unreadable. And I've tried. The first volume begins entertainingly, but by the end I wanted to beat the living shit of of Tom Bombadil, and I hit The Two Towers like a bullet hitting Lexan. But I still respect Tolkien and wish happiness to those who truly love his work. I just don't see this as a novel written with a readership in mind. It's intensely personal, clearly the product of a deep-rooted compulsion, and for most of us it's inaccessible.

My growing feeling that escapism functions best when firmly rooted to the human experience was reinforced by the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories of Fritz Leiber. Leiber is a highly variable writer; he's done some absolutely dreadful stuff but at his best? He's one of the best. Honestly, he should be recognized by the Literary Establishment. I will flat-out say that Our Lady of Darkness is one of the two most direct influences on my novel The Ghost Rockers. (The other would be Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The Ghost Rockers isn't that much like either of them, but the influence is there.)

My absolute favorite Fafhrd and Mouser story is the farce Lean Times in Lankhmar. It is fucking hilarious, the supernatural just barely peeks in through the window, the satire of religion is pitch perfect. And yet it's set in another world that's clearly realized to the point where you smell it, you taste it, you feel cobblestones under your ass as you sit and listen to Fafhrd sing.

Edward Eager was another strong influence for me, and later John Bellairs. They both specialized in the intrusion of the supernatural into daily life. In Eager's works, this led to comedy, and in Bellair's, this led to horror. As much as I loved works like the Oz books and The Phantom Tollbooth, the way the fantastic and realistic elements were neatly separated from one another disappointed me. Either there is an Oz or there isn't -- and if there is, Dorothy isn't going to be the only person or thing traveling between the two worlds. That sense of separation seemed to make the fantastic elements of the story into a dream.

Or a lie.

You may notice that I spend little time discussing current fantasy. The fantasy I love is the product of a singular and eccentric mind, and most of what was written after the clearly plagiarized Sword of Shannara has been product. I'm certain that much of it is good product but it just isn't what I'm interested in.

I suspect that Dungeons & Dragons has much to do with it. Hey, I was rolling polyhedral dice back when you had to buy them from TSR and they were made out of shitty plastic that made them look like a Transformer's venereal scabs. I still read RPGs even if I don't play them.

But they gave people a clear model for creating a fantasy, a series of methodical steps that lead to the production of a world, characters, and a narrative. And that's what this stuff looks like to me -- the product of a method. All perspiration and no inspiration.

So when I set out to write a fantasy, I had a number of clear goals in mind.

1) It should offer escapism -- it's my job to show you amazing things that you will never see anywhere else.

2) It needs to connect strongly with reality in a way that makes the real fantastic and the fantastic real. The world of daily life and the other world are the same fucking world, even if it takes a while for the characters and the reader to see this. You ever think that virtually all humans throughout history would regard the way you live as exotic, magical, fantastic?

3) It should be personal and honest. There is a longstanding tradition of writer's putting elements of themselves in their characters, especially in Sword and Sorcery fiction. There's a lot of Robert E. Howard in King Kull, a lot of Moorcock in Elric, a lot of Leiber in Fafhrd. And to be honest, I'm a hell of a good character. Early in my current drive to become a writer, my sister and brother-in-law told me that my best fiction was the stuff I wrote in my own voice, my conversational voice. "It makes me feel like I'm in the presence of an incredibly powerful mind that's totally devoted to not being a psycho killer," was what my brother-in-law said. I've kept that statement in mind while writing.

4) It should be true to my time, place, and culture. I want to write a piece of epic fantasy that relates to my people, and derives from current folk culture. So while I'm trying as hard as I can to write real literature, I am consciously drawing on everything from popular music to movies to comic books, along with the deeper well of world mythologies and religious traditions.

5) It should be absolutely convincing. I'm thinking of Lovecraft's dictum that a horror story should be as carefully planned and executed as a hoax. It is my goal to have the fantastic elements of the book be the kind of thing that some people might actually believe in, no matter how bizarre they might be. To have the supernatural elements ring true to a degree that would have allowed me to start a cult based on them if I hadn't used them in a novel.

6) Finally, and in many ways most importantly, I wanted make this something that was truly unique, a real one-of-a-kind, and so I turned to sources of inspiration outside the fields of genre fiction. I brought surrealistic techniques to bear, I used direct observations from life, I started out by writing completely intuitively before organizing the material into a cohesive narrative. Dreams and visions (I'm crazy -- I get visions) and music and art and even evolutionary science play more of a role in what shows up on the page than Tolkien and Howard do.

Whew.

Sometimes I suspect that I think too much about this stuff.

I Really Shouldn't Do This: The Guardian's Science Fiction And Fantasy Novel List

This is the piece that's in the art show tomorrow and is being printed in the Laney Tower today... Hmm. That makes it my most-published work of art.

Over at the Biology In Science Fiction blog, Peggy has responded to a meme -- The Guardian published a long list of must-read novels and included one hundred and forty-nine SF and fantasy novels. See her post for more details.

Anyway, I read down the list and found myself thinking -- so here's my annotated version. The novels I've read are in bold. And having gone over the list, I'm not fond of it. It smacks of committee work -- one guy is interested in proving that some of this stuff is Real Literature, someone else is fixated on Klassic SF, another person it way totally Goth...

And if you're going to do a representative list of fantastic literature, you need to include more stuff from outside Europe and North America. Where are the Latin American Magic Realists? (Although where I come from, we call those guys fantasy writers.) Where's Amos Tutuola? Where's A Voyage To The West or The Ramayana? And why aren't there more children's books?

And I was irked that my favorite group of North American fantacists, the Weird Tales crowd, got totally shafted.

My main complaint was that this was restricted to novels. One thing that really bugged me was the continual inclusion of second-rate novels by people who should have been on the list for their short fiction.

And the methodology behind the listing seemed weird -- some series were included under one heading, others were broken up, others had a couple of books from a series listed seperately. Like I said, this feels like the effort of a poorly-coordinated group.

Oh, well -- this was still a fun little stroll down memory lane. Perhaps I shall construct my own lists -- Ten Worthwhile Supermarket Horror Novels, Ten Genre SF Books That You Don't Have To Be An SF Fan To Enjoy, Ten Fantastic Novels From World Literature, Ten Novels That Gave Birth To Modern Genre... It's something to think about.

Now, on with the kvetching!

1. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Kinda cute. If you like this, read Robert Sheckley instead.

2. Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
It was okay -- his Hothouse and The Malacia Tapestry were both a lot more fun.

3. Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
I tried but I just bounced off of it. I dunno; I'm just not that crazy about Asimov's stuff. I loved his robot books and Lucky Starr novels when I was a sprat but as an adult, eh.

4. Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
5. Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
I've been meaning to check these out for a while but have been put off by the whole, "I am a writer, these are not science fiction," schtick.

6. Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
Been meaning to get around to this guy, too. Got one of his books on the shelf.

7. J.G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)
8. J.G. Ballard: Crash (1973)
This one's sitting on the shelf. Ballard is one of those people I'm supposed to like more than I actually do.

9. J.G. Ballard: Millennium People (2003)

10. Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
One of my favorite books. I must have been through six copies of this and I currently don't own a copy -- people borrow them and I never get them back. Good-natured nastiness with a curiously domestic edge, perfectly captures the vibe of 'child as a compulsively superstitious religist.'

11. Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
It was okay, I guess, if you like big loud noisy weird space opera.

12. Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
I have yet to read a Barker novel that was anywhere near as much fun as The Books Of Blood. His first was more controlled; this one wobbled around a bit.

13. Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)

14. Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
A real hoot, especially for those of us who are Morlock sympathizers. (My first Thaumatrope submission: "You do understand," the Morlock said, "that it's in very poor taste to fuck them.")

15. Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio (1999)
A ridiculous premise, competently executed. I've read a bit by Bear but aside from Blood Music I've never had much enthusiasm. I'm just not in his target audience.

16. William Beckford: Vathek (1786)
Great, great fantasy, wonderfully decadent. It's Arabian Nights stuff written by a brilliantly degenerate nobleman.

17. Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
A hoot and a half. The beat version of Cyberpunk, fast dense high-tech lowlifes.

18. Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
In the second and third grades I went through a phase where I read nothing but Ray Bradbury. Now the only stuff I can take is The October Country. Another guy who's really worth listing because of his short fiction, although I've come to find his use of metaphors hooty in the extreme.

19. Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
Read some of her short fiction; hipster stuff, kinda bored me. Isn't she the one who wound up with a suicide-scented edition of one of her books, due to an immolation in a warehouse?

20. Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (1798)

21. Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
Tried it; it was impenetrable. Another writer I wish I liked.

22. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
Hilarious stuff but I just didn't get the connection between the main storyline and the Pontius Pilate flashbacks. Well worth reading, though.

23. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
This is the kind of thing I wonder about -- is this here because it's a readable novel, or is it here because of its historical significance?

24. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)
Not the most impressive of Burgess's works but a mean little bit of lit-flavored pulp. I used to have a sheet that my brother handed out to his friends containing all the terminology from this, 1984, and Brave New World.

Duncan also went through a phase where the only shirts he wore were Clockwork Orange T-shirts based on the movie poster. Once in public I pointed out to him that his shirt was actually a Sigue Sigue Sputnik shirt; he tore it off of his body. I mean, tore -- grabbed the chest in both hands and ripped. God, I miss that stinky bastard.

25. Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
I went through a Burgess phase when I was twenty-three -- it was his book on Napoleon that ended the binge.

26. Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912) 27. William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
You want an explanation for me? In the fiction section of the Richmond Public Library these two authors were mingled together indiscriminately and that's how I read them. Nowadays, with my visual imagination Edgar reads just as pornographically as William -- 'naught but a sword-belt' translates to 'pretty much butt-naked.'

Naked Lunch was one that I put off reading for a looooong time and when I got to it, it was just as hilariously appalling as I'd been told. I have very mixed feelings about WS Burroughs, though. On one hand he's a childfucker who shot his wife in Mexico; on the other hand I've found him one of the most useful writers I've run across, in terms of expanding my creative toolchest.

But if I only allowed myself to appreciate art by genuinely good people, I'd be shit out of luck, now wouldn't I?

28. Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
This one's sitting by the side of the bed right now. I've got a hell of a lot of respect for Butler's work. She never takes the easy way out; her depth of thought is admirable and her work is strongly moral.

29. Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)

30. Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
I've got a copy of Cosmicomics that I've started any number of times. It seems great; I have no idea why I've never gotten more than ten pages into it. Perhaps that says something...

31. Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
I went through a Campbell phase as well; my favorite is still The Face That Must Die. Quite unpleasant in a good way; this guy knows his crazy.

32. Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) 33. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
These were childhood obsessions; my mom paid me a buck to memorize Jabberwocky when I was three and it's still on tap at a moments notice.

I'm also in the habit of picking up the various differently illustrated editions -- Barry Moser, Ralph Steadman, etc.

Shame about the whole pedophilia thing; that does give it a taint. See Burroughs.

34. Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
35. Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)
I've got a copy of The Bloody Chamber on the shelf. She's one of those writers I'm supposed to love, so I'm feeling a bit hesitant about actually cracking the covers.

36. Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
Right, so was this SF or fantasy? I'm still irked at Chabon's disingenous introduction to Thrilling Stories -- he acts as though plot-oriented short fiction was dead when he knew damned well that genre fiction is the Serenghetti of the short form. He's good, though.

37. Arthur C Clarke: Childhood's End (1953)
Loved Clarke as a child and still take great pleasure in Tales From The White Heart.

38. GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
This reads like the work of a very nice fellow indeed.

39. Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
It's sitting on the shelf.

40. Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)

41. Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
The Mojo Nixon cover of the song of the same title rocks.

42. Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
Again, on the shelf, but it looks like one of those books where sooner or later you have to get up and go to the bathroom in order to read a reverse-printed passage in the mirror and life is fucking short, you know?

43. Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)

44. Samuel R Delany: The Einstein Intersection (1967)

45. Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
46. Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Delany and Dick are both writers I ought to like but don't. (Not entirely true -- I have thoroughly enjoyed short fiction by both.) See Angela Carter; this is why I'm shy about her.

47. Thomas M Disch: Camp Concentration (1968)
Someone else whose best is their short fiction. Pretty decent poet as well. This one is great until the cop-out happy ending.

48. Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)

49. Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)

50. John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
This one's on the shelf. The missus recommended The Sot-Weed Factor as well.

51. Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
He's developed into a quite decent novelist; his single issue stories in the Sandman comic book series remain his strongest work. He's someone who works the same field as magazines like Unknown; his agriculture improves the quality of the topsoil, if you'll forgive me the hooty metaphor. (See Bradbury.)

52. Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)

53. William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
When this came out I was going through my above-mentioned Ramsey Campbell phase. I was sick of science fiction and getting deep into punk rock. When I read about this the phrase cyberpunk thrilled me so much that I avoided reading any so that I could just mentally riff on the concept -- here's some of what I came up with.

Another Duncan memory -- we had a power struggle for a while. I wanted him to read Neuromancer; he wanted me to read this story he'd found in an old Omni called Johnny Mnemonic. Each of us knew we'd found the best SF ever. Duhr. More a phase than a great work; still great fun.

54. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
The Yellow Wallpaper is bone-crushingly miserable and transmits massive testicular guilt.

55. William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
I read it in one period in high school -- one of those assigned texts that just captured me. For that hour I lived that book.

56. Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
Read it a couple of times; kinda sorta liked it.

57. M John Harrison: Light (2002)
Sitting on the shelf.

58. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
I tried to reread Tanglewood Tales recently -- god it was awful. Rapacinni's Daughter is great, though.

59. Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
I like me some Heinlein when I'm in the mood but this was just plain bad. The Dawn Of The Horny Heinlein. And not horribly entertaining like Farnham's Freehold; it was dull as well as dirty. Not hardcore porny; dirty minded masquerading as wholesome.

60. Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
I read this while my family was driving back and forth to Oregon; it was worth the carsickness. I'm gonna try it again but I'm afraid it might not hold up.

61. Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)

62. Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
I've had two copies of this and have never read the damned thing.

63. James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Man, I loved this one. I should go back to it soon. Realistic, visionary, full of the whiff of true madness. Funny as fuck, too.

64. Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
Dude wrote an asinine self-satisfied rape of H.P. Lovecraft that made me want to smack him. Fuck you and everything you stand for, Houellebecq. It's your kind that gives hyperintellectual solipsistic nihilism a bad name.

65. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
Read this again recently; not bad at all.

66. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)

67. Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
She's so good -- but the works of hers I love the most are her humorous domestic memoirs, Raising Demons and Life Among The Savages.

68. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
Tried reading The Golden Bowl; I could not care about his characters and I did not like his prose. Boredom carried to an exquisite pitch.

69. PD James: The Children of Men (1992)

70. Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)

71. Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
I keep getting her mixed up with Diane Wynn Jones, which certainly isn't fair to either of them.

72. Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
I haven't read enough Kafka but what I've read I've loved.

73. Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
It jerked my tears when I was eight or nine; doubt I'll ever want to read it again.

74. Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
Still haven't seen the Kubrick film based on this one... I enjoy King but he needs either discipline or an editor with a chair and a whip and a pistol loaded with blanks. I'm of the opinion that he could be a lot better than he is -- that he has chops he hasn't used yet.

75. Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)

76. CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)
I heard one of these as a book on tape a little while ago; genuinely hateful. The racism and misogyny in his works are not fucking subtle. I have to wonder whether or not he was a dick in person.

77. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
I need to check out more of this guy's work -- ever read Carmilla? Ooh-la-la, that one carries an erotic charge.

78. Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
Haven't read this one but The Cyberiad is one of those books I read every few years. Funny, funny stuff, both clever and smart, full of remarkable wordplay. I really should read more Lem.

Interestingly, a work pal once recommended the writer Michael Kandel to me. I loved Strange Invasion but found it strangely reminiscent of The Cyberiad. That was because Kandel was the translator.

79. Ursula K Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990)
I read and loved the first three when I was in Jr. high; I've been saving the more recent ones for a binge when I'm emotionally vulnerable enough to really appreciate them.

80. Ursula K Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
I'm supposed to read this one, aren't I?

81. Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
My Independent Study sponsor in high school gave me this one. I really owe that woman a debt; I can see her face and hear her voice but her name has been stolen by the years. Man, she had to put up with some ugly shit from me.

I found this alternately fascinating and frustrating -- I was a lot more genre-oriented at that age and her refusal to play by the rules bugged me.

82. MG Lewis: The Monk (1796)

83. David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
Sitting in a stack of books at the top of the stairs.

84. Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
Loved his first four novels, liked his next three, haven't read any since. Why are so many of the best SF writers Scots socialists?

85. Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)

86. Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)

I've read a couple of books by him; not bad, not good.

87. Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
Another writer with a half-assed novel on the list and brilliant short fiction that should be here instead. Why the fuck did the specify novels?

88. Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Sitting on the shelf.

89. Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
Loved it -- brutal and depressing, just like me. But it's a realistic story -- why the hell is it on this list?

90. Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
Someone else I'm supposed to like -- it's Blood Meridian that I really want to read.

91. Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)

92. China Miéville: The Scar (2002)
Lousy prose, many dull passages, both more than compensated for by brilliant moments of visionary imagination. Hmm. Kinda like The Night Land, now that I think of it. My favorite of his thus far. For a while I thought he was the next Gene Wolfe; then I noticed the prose. But hell, Gene Wolfe isn't the next Gene Wolfe anymore.

93. Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)

94. Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
Sitting on the shelf.

95. David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)

96. Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
I've read a good chunk of Moorcock and I just am not that crazy about his stuff. I suspect I'd like the man, though.

97. William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
I dug The Woods Beyond The World but I was in the mood for it. More interesting than good.

98. Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
Sitting on the shelf.

99. Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
The missus has been reading Murakami; she was surprised to find out that Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World was one of her first presents to me. I really dug it and should read more of his stuff.

100. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
Got a copy of Pnin on the shelf; have been hesitant.

101. Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)

102. Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)
Loved it as a kid, it's influenced me strongly. Great, but not very good. I read Niven with the same feeling I get when I eat candy, and do neither very often. Still, he's influenced me.

103. Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
I tried reading this one. Just not good.

104. Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
One of my absolute favorite writers. But again, it's his short work I love the best. The twist ending here is predictable but the side-trips more than justify the book.

105. Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)

106. George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)
Like everyone else, I reread this in 1984. Been meaning to read Down And Out In Paris And London.

107. Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
I just don't like his stuff. I dig shock value but gimme a break, you've got to have something else there. But people I respect love his stuff so I'll probably try it again.

I do like the movie based on this book, though. More than I ought to.

108. Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)

109. Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
Haven't read the second two; loved this one. He writes like an artist but in a good way.

110. Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953)
Reread this recently; just wasn't as crazy about it as I was when I was a kid. Kornbluth wrote some top-notch short fiction, though.

111. John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)

112. Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- ) (A few of them)
More substantial than Douglas Adams; still, it seemed more like product than literature. Not bad, though. I'll probably read more. His Strata was a nifty riff on Ringworld.

113. Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
Really well done but it seemed to labored to be truly entertaining.

114. Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000)
I really enjoyed these but I felt that they fell apart at the end. His shorter novels like Clockwork are among the most strongly plotted fiction ever. Every writer should study them.

115. François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
Whenever I've sat down to read this one, I've found myself incapable of resisting his exhortations to the reader to drink. So I've never finished it.

116. Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

117. Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)

118. Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)

119. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)
I can't even remember if I gave up on these with the fourth or the fifth volume. At one point I was reading a collection of old Robertson Davies newspaper bits from the fifties and he included a deconstruction of a play with a hoary old cliche plot dating back to the 1800s. It was the plot of this book.

120. Geoff Ryman: Air (2005)

121. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
Again, ought to try him.

122. Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975)
Read Alyx recently; eh.

123. Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)
When I was a kid I hated this for being sad but read over and over again anyway. I hear it's a fuck of a lot better in the French.

124. José Saramago: Blindness (1995)

125. Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)

126. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
Read the version illustrated by Bernie Wrightson for the pictures; found myself empathizing more with the creature than with any other literary figure I'd read to that point.

Imagine you're the creature. You're living in a shed, you're held together by stitches, and you're teaching yourself to speak and read with the help of a book.

That book is The Sorrows Of Young Werther. Bummer, dude.

127. Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
I tried but I just couldn't do it. Seemed like a Gene Wolfe ripoff; I was probably unfair to Simmons, who has written stuff I've liked.

128. Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
Sitting on the shelf.

129. Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
His lead character is named Hiro Protagonist. You just can't lose with that sort of thing.

130. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Amazing. Structurally fascinating. Really, this should be much more highly regarded.

Of course this was written on a coke binge and I've had to deal with some coke freaks in my life so I may be biased.

131. Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
I've tried. I picked up an Edward Gorey-illustrated version at a yard sale recently so I suppose I'll try again.

132. Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)

133. JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937) 134. JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
Massively influential in my life. My first book was The Hobbit, which provided the key cultural reference for most of my childhood. TLOTR was my grandmother's favorite fiction.

Shame they aren't all that good. TLOTR in particular doesn't read as though it was meant to be read. I'll give Tolkien this much -- he may not have known a damned thing about women but unlike Lewis, at least he thought they were probably a good idea. Sorry, Inklings.

135. Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)
Really sadistic at the end. Loads of fun.

136. Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
Sitting on the shelf; my favorite is still Cat's Cradle.

137. Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)

138. Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)

139. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
Her Kingdoms Of Elfin was brilliant; I need to score another copy.

140. Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)

141. HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895) 142. HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
Most of his stuff still works quite well -- he's a genuinely good author. Very fond of this stuff. I'm thinking about doing some illustrated editions for self-promotional purposes, actually.

143. TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
Sitting on the shelf; was read to me aloud as a child and I loved it.

144. Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)

145. Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
I was fixated on this one for a while. One of those brief, "This is the best book ever," things. I've been meaning to go back to it...

146. Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928)

147. John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
Decent prose but a ridiculous plot. Still, he's always good for an afternoon's light reading.

148. John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)

149. Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

Baffu's First Story Complete.

For your reading convenience, the whole story is in the comment section of this post. Strictly rough draft, completely off the top of my head -- but I think it's a solid start.

That said, I have no idea what the title is.

Baffu's First Story: Part Nine

“Good enough,” Doctors said. “Good enough.” Then he looked at the potted plant and got up from his couch. While he had been speaking the rain had thinned and then stopped, though clouds still hid the world beyond the sky. “I think the buds have been softened enough for the blossoms to…”

Baffu got up and went to the plant. Doctors was right; one of the buds was splitting. Baffu held his finger out and the blossom crawled onto it, seeming grateful for the warmth. Its cluster of crinkled petals pulsed and swelled, turning into wings. Its eyes glowed with the internal light of coals under ash.

Full text in comments.

Baffu's First Story: Part Eight

“You mean whore’s paisley,” Baffu said. “I’ve heard that after a time it turns women into men.”

“Not so, not so,” Doctors said. “But it does have certain… unfortunate cosmetic effects. Thusly, it is only used on the lowest grade of prostitute, one whose employer intends to use and discard them. Now if I may return to the story – and I trust you’re paying attention?”

Baffu nodded.

Full text in comments.

Baffu's First Story: Part Seven

Doctors stared out at the potted plant with its struggling luminous buds in silence, then drained his cup. Baffu picked opened a third bottle and poured for both of them.

“So?” he asked.

“So, indeed,” Doctors said. “The next time the Justice of Black and Gray saw the student the young man lacked the modest dignity that had formerly been his hallmark; the student turned this way and that, his scholar’s robe open so that his private parts were displayed to any who cared to look. That is because his sash was around his neck and he hung from a rafter in his room. It was the restauranteur who found him when the smell of the student was stronger than the smell of cooking."

Full text in the comments.

Baffu's First Story: Part Six

He gestured to a plaque on the wall; it was much like the one Baffu had seen in the court where Doctors acted as judge but older and simpler in design. Carved out of fine-grained ivory and inlayed with colored wood and shell, it showed four figures, posed close together; a tall stern man with a dour face, a calm woman with a look of keen intelligence, a dark angry youth, and a gently smiling girl with downcast eyes.

“Kneel before them,” Doctors said. It was a command.

Full text in the comments.

Baffu's First Story: Part Five

“Older brother, I need your advice,” he said. “You know I keep the peace out in the market. Well, now they’re asking me to settle disputes and I fear it won’t be long before I’m working your main line of business.”

“So I hear,” the old man said, and curled his lips in a shape that only resembled a smile.

Full text in the comments.

Baffu's First Story: Part Four

There were no lanterns, no candles. The square patio and the porch surrounding it were lit only by the steady pink-and-yellow glow from the buds of the potted plant that was the evening’s focus. It was Doctors’s (so-called because of his meritorious degrees in medicine, literature, engineering, and of course jurisprudence) first blossom viewing since he’d been exiled to the City of Wealth (so-called because of the wealth it brought to the Four Empires, its name a cruel joke to locals like Baffu).

Full text in the comments.

Baffu's First Story: Part Three

“Spend night?” First Wife asked.

“Depend drunk, we,” Baffu said.

“La, la,” First Wife shook her head, then broke into the language of the poets. “My beloved younger brother, our venerable repository of justice and wisdom is anxious for your company.” She hooked a thumb in the direction of the patio and lapsed back into Market. “Out there, got bottle. Food soon.”

The complete version of this page is in the comments.

Baffu's First Story: Part Two

The giant Baffu crawled through the service entrance, scarred knotty knuckles pounding the bone floor like mallets. First Wife rushed toward him holding a towel and once he was fully inside he sat cross-legged and bent forward so she could dry his hair.

“Walk in rain, you.” First Wife spoke in Market pidgen and her voice had a companionable, familiar nag to it.

“Try fly, older sister. Don’t work,” Baffu said. He extended his hands and flapped. Carefully.

The full section is in the comments...

Baffu's First Story: Part One

No pictures today. Sorry about that...

So I want to apply to this writer's workshop, Viable Paradise. They want somewhere in the neighborhood of eight thousand words of fiction -- one or two stories or a chunk of a larger work. What makes this tricky is that what you submit is what you work on over the course of the workshop.

I want to get in, so I want to send my best work -- but if my best work works, why would I want to spend a week having it prodded at? It seems as if I'd rather spend the time working on something that needs help.

I thought about it and realized that I have a story that contains some of my best stuff -- but the story isn't quite there. It was good enough to be published in issue seven of Monday Night but it still feels as if it's not quite there. Nothing that's in submission to a pro market is allowed but Monday Night is strictly small press. So that takes care of story number one.

That leaves me with story number two. And that problem has been driving me out of my mind. See, Viable Paradise is a SF/Fantasy-oriented workshop. That appeals to me because my genre side has been a wee tad hampered by the writers I work with. It's great to have had so much of a mainstream/literary influence on my work but genre fiction is important to me as well.

But my first story, God's Tourists, is about five thousand five hundred words long. And I don't have any fantastic fiction that's short enough to fit into the remaining space.

I wanted to do something really SF-y for the second story. I wanted to do something action-oriented.

I haven't been able to come up with an idea.

So in casting around I remembered a story idea that I should be able to write within the permitted word count. The thing is, is that the story uses character and setting details from what I intend to eventually be my Big Work, the series of novels that I want to write for my bread and butter in the long run. I've been working on it both mentally and on paper since I was a kid. It was the subject of my first attempt at game design -- I tried to write it as an adventure game before there was Dungeons and Dragons.

The shape of the thing has changed radically over the years, going from goofy far-future SF to weird fantasy, from being intentionally escapist to being a tool for confronting issues both personal and political. It's really, really ambitious and I wasn't going to try and tackle it until I had at least one successful (in the artistic rather than the commercial sense of the word) novel under my belt.

Thing is, there's still a lot of work to be done. A lot of world-building is still ahead of me. Much of what I'm going to do is gonna have to be changed because I cannibalized a good chunk of the material for my current novel-in-progress...

And part of this story touches on elements that are central to my pal Allison's big work in progress. They actually predate my friendship with Allison but I'm nervous about working her side of the street, especially on issues as sensitive as this.

But I need a fucking story. So here's the deal.

This is a test boring. This is an experiment. This is the first attempt I've made at working with these characters since I've achieved any success with my writing.

So I'm gonna liveblog the story. Gonna do a draft of the whole thing today and then send it out to my Monday night writer's group. I'll post each page (ending at the last completed paragraph) as I go. I'll lead each post with a sample paragraph and then put the rest of the page in the comments section.

See you next post...

From The Valley Of Lost Projects: Princess Lucinda And The Missing Moon

I ran across these when I was looking for paintbrushes yesterday afternoon. (I swear I had a fistful of decent brushes but they're nowhere to be found. Wound up using a child's watercolor brush, then went to the art store.) I'd forgotten all about this one...

I've posted this image here before. It's the only finished piece I did for this project -- if any of the sketches below had been rendered, they would have been done either as pen-and-ink pieces or in this style.

Four or five years ago I suffered a fit of affection for my princessophiliac nieces and granddaughter and decided I was going to write them a fairy tale.

Unfortunately my tendency toward grisly imagery, convoluted prose, and class warfare (when I think of knights and princesses I picture myself in a stable with a pitchfork) wound up making the creative process a lot more difficult than I'd thought -- and I when I realized that my target audience would find this work intolerable I gave up on it.

I was also just starting to take my writing seriously and my kung fu was weak. The paragraphing in particular made this story a lot more difficult to read than it should have been.

Still, clumsy and amateurish as it it, when I was preparing it for posting I felt a little interest stirring. Maybe it was the Oz-noir abortion I was messing with a little while ago but now there's a temptation to go back and mess with it... I guess at some point I'm going to have to write a fantasy influenced by both fairy tales and my tendency toward the hardcore. "Once upon a motherfuckin' time..."

The start of the story is posted in the comments section if you're interested.

Crit List 2: The Land Of The Lost

Ah, how rarely do we get to recapture the dreams of childhood!

Only a total dick would neglect to post a dinosaur (Gorgosaurus libratus) image along with a Land of the Lost post. And only a total dick would fail to acknowledge that he totally swiped the pose and proportions from one of Gregory Paul's skeletal diagrams.

There are a lot of people in paleo art who really should cut Mr. Paul a check... I don't steal from him in my serious pieces but can you spot him in my sketchbooks? Yes, you can.

Well, I hadn't intended to revisit another childhood memory for a while but Brian Switek's post on the upcoming Land of the Lost movie was too opportune to ignore. Let's talk about the original Land of the Lost.

See, back in the day I was a fan of the original show and I've watched it recently -- and it's worth discussing here.

When the show debuted in '74 I was a ten year-old Edgar Rice Burroughs fanatic. His Pellucidar series, set in a hollow Earth filled with a mishmash of prehistoric animals ranging from labyrinthodonts to mamoths, was my particular favorite.

(I might go into Burroughs in another post -- but I have to confess that I lost interest in his work for decades after a particular passage in Tarzan at the Earth's Core where a stegosaur gnashes its flesh-rending fangs and folds its plates into wings, using them to glide down a mountainside in order to attack Tarzan. I closed the book -- all the Frazetta-painted buttocks in the world weren't sufficient motivation to read Burroughs after that.)

Anyway, as soon as I was able to read I systematically hunted down every lost world fantasy in any library to which I had access. So when I started seeing the Saturday morning TV ads for Land of the Lost I was in heaven.

And the show did not dissapoint -- it seemed to me to be real science fiction, the characters were involving, and I was fascinated by the world they created. It was produced by Sid and Marty Croft, whose other shows like H.R. Pufnstuf and Sigmund the Sea Monster had always impressed me as kinda dorky and creepy -- but here, the creepy vibe really worked for me.

Flash forward to a year or so ago when I had been dragooned into going to Best Buy, where I spotted the first season of Land of the Lost. After a brief and pathetic tussle with economic reality and the question of whether or not this was something I needed to own I grabbed that sucker. As soon as I got home I put it on to play.

My first thought was that the effects were shockingly bad -- the rafting trip that runs through the credits is hilarious. And the overacting was pretty amusing as well. They only had a few clips of rubbery malformed dinosaurs in action which they repeated over and over.

But I kept watching. And something strange happened.

I started to enjoy it not just as camp but as adventure fiction. As science fiction. The kids started to ask for it when they came to visit. The missus started wandering away from her video poker and succulent websites when I was watching it.

This was the H.R. Pufnstuf take on The Lost World and it was, in an admittedly very limited way, good. How the hell did that happen? How did they do that?

Hey, if anyone associated with the entertainment industry is reading this, it's simple. Two words. And with these two words you can conquer any production limitations that have been placed on you and produce something entertaining and involving -- something that has a legitimate shot at success. Those two words?

Good writing.

I'm not talking about great writing. I'm talking about solid conventional storytelling coupled with a degree of genuine creativity. Good, professional commercial fiction. Land of the Lost had the perfect TV combination of the big overarching story and complete stories in each individual episode. Series like Lost and Heroes could benefit from the study of Land of the Lost.

And if you're a SF reader, here are some people who wrote scripts for the show. Ben Bova. Larry Niven. Theodore motherfucking Sturgeon! Of course as the story man for the first season David Gerrold deserves the lion's share of the credit for this.

(Hey, if you aren't in the know, Sturgeon at his best is one of the best short fiction writers America has produced thus far. No shit. Vonnegut fans, think of the name Kilgore Trout. Then read the name Theodore Sturgeon. Then hie thee to a bookstore or library but pronto.)

There are a few specific factors in the writing that are worth pointing out. First off, while the show had a very conventional moral center (which isn't an issue for me -- there's nothing wrong with the perrenial values of love, humanity, and self-sacrifice) it allowed its characters a degree of moral ambiguity you rarely see in storytelling addressed to children.

The characters could be short-tempered with one another. They could have moments of despair and fear. They could be unreliable allies -- and allies didn't have to be friends. And friends weren't always allies.

Also, the mythology of the show, the world it built, showed a quality of depth and imagination that was really involving. The slowly revealed nature of the technology behind this strange artificial world and the story of the mysterious lost race that built the land were actually interesting. They could easily have been used as the basis for a story for an adult audience.

There was a willingness to put the characters in real danger that I never saw in any other children's show. It had a quality of high drama that really impressed me as a child -- and that quality was still there when I watched the shows again as an adult, once I got past the cheesiness and found myself sucked into the story.

Speaking of cheesiness, the hilarious overacting I mentioned at the start of this? Turns out it's very effective. It's not the work of amateurs. It's a different style of acting and one that works in this kind of thing. More stage acting than film acting, if you know what I mean.

When the characters fight with each other, especially the two juvenile leads (Kathy Coleman and Wesley Eure, for the record), you get the sense of a real squabble. And Coleman's scream comes from the Fay Wray school -- she sounds scared and that makes things scarey.

All the actors were able to portray fear, anger, and concern in a way that brought (and brings) an unexpected emotional weight to the show.

Again, this is strictly on a pop-culture Saturday-morning level of achievement but it's still worthy of respect and appreciation -- if this is the kind of thing you like, you'll like it.

A Truly Horrid Idea and Applebee's Is Just Plain Nasty

You used to be able to get these Japanese felt-tip brush pens -- they had a terra cotta-colored rubbery exterior and a fine brush on one end and a thick brush on the other. When they started going dry you could pull them open and dose 'em with more ink. I loved those pens. Where did they go?

This piece was fun to do -- just whip it out in ten minutes or so. Working fast was the point. No sketching, no preconceptions -- just let the hand do what it will. I need to start sketching again.

It used to be that the words used for verification of hominid status for purposes of spam blocking -- the kind you find on comment pages and so forth -- were usually just smears of random consonants.

But a while ago they started sounding like words -- usually the kinds of words you'd see used in really bad fantasy or science fiction novels, the kinds that come with a map and a glossary.

When I mentioned this over on Glendon Mellow's site he called me on it and said I had to write that book. God help me, I think he may be right. So I've started saving the verification words in a document on my desktop.

I've got four words so far. Bactrin, Flediton, Plogu, and Pulas. See what I mean?

This can't possibly lead anywhere good. And it's not like I need another project -- but there are times when something reaches out and beckons to you irresistably. God only knows I read enough of the bad old stuff in my youth -- I've always loved pulp fiction and as a youngster I wasn't what you'd call discriminating.

This could be the start of something terrible.

Speaking of repulsive messes, I had one of the worst meals of my life today.

I cook. I'm a good cook. My food tastes better than what you can get in most restaurants. My grandaughter won't eat eggs unless I make them, when my sister was married she asked me to make stuffed mushrooms even though the event was catered. The caterers ate almost all of them before they got set out for the guests. My brother-in-law has been known to call me the day after he's eaten one of my meals and try to talk me into going into the restaurant business.

So today when I was taken out to lunch at Applebee's it was, quite literally, the first bad food I've eaten in years.

I mean, I had forgotten what bad food was like!

It's going to take me a long time to forget this.

The missus has a broker. Her old broker would send her chocolates and champagne every year. Her new broker just sent her a twenty-five dollar Applebee's card. When we walked in the door there was a sign on the outside of the building that said that the purchase of one of those twenty-five dollar cards would get you a bonus five-dollar card. Which figures.

Jesus, it was disgusting. I knew I was in for a disaster but I'd hoped it would be like eating a sack of chips -- you don't feel good about yourself but you keep eating it for the taste. Nasty, regretable, and yet oddly pleasing.

There was no pleasure. There was no taste, aside from the buffalo wings, which were actually frozen chicken nuggets bathed in this sauce... plastic? Cigarette butts? There was a harsh chemical tang to the red-orange glutinous paste that clung to the horrid little wads of breading and the look on the missus's face when she took a bite of one justified the entire meal for me.

The midget bacon cheeseburgers were utterly without flavor of any kind. No onions, no mustard or mayo. No flavor to the bacon. How do you get bacon with no flavor?

The side salad came with stale croutons and a huge mound of cheese and more of the soul-free bacon. The whole thing was assembled as if the people working in the kitchen hated food. When they were kids they saw food kill their dad and they've been seeking vengeance ever since. Or something. You couldn't get food that bad without a motive! And a can opener. I swear, the lettuce was from a can. Every dish was assembled from packaged processed foods. It wasn't a meal, it was a fucking industrial byproduct.

The idea that we were surrounded by people who had come here expecting a good meal was depressing. The idea that they thought they'd been served one was appalling. Partway through the meal I whispered to the missus and granddaughter, "Hey, do you think our waiter would eat out at a place like this?"

NO.

It doesn't matter how many Rachel Ray recipes they put on the back of Triscuit boxes, it doesn't matter how much truffle oil they have at Costco. If a restaurant like Applebee's is flourishing in America then our national palate is a shame, a sham, and a disgrace.

Time to slowly sip a quart of water and reflect on tomorrow's lunch -- which, with luck, will be at Bo McSwine's barbecue. Brisket, blues, and Belgian ale will wash the last pasty oligineous taint of Applebee's from my mouth and restore my parched and weary soul. And if it ain't at Bo's, it'll be at a decent burger joint, Al's Big Burger or The Red Onion.

Please, oh please let it come to pass.

Crit List 1: The Borribles (expanded as of 12/16/08)

These covers were painted by Don Maitz. If there's any objection to my posting them by anyone associated with the books, I'm happy to take them down.

When I started this site I intended to do a fair amount of reviews and criticism. When I did my piece on Jurassic Fight Club I wound up backing away from that. First off, I found that I was doing the standard web snark attack -- and I found that I didn't like being that kind of person. When I realized that my snotty remarks were being read by creators who had worked hard and honestly it made me feel like a shit.

And the fact that it garnered me more hits than anything else I'd done took me aback. First, I want people to come to this site to see my work, not to read amusing slams on someone else. Second, I'm kinda self destructive and when I saw that I was achieving some kind of success I scuttled away from it as fast as I could.

See, this is a site about being a creator and about trying to make the move to being a pro. So any reviews or critical pieces need to be done from that perspective.

So I'm going to throw myself back into the fray and talk about a series of fantasy novels that have been a source of pleasure to me for decades. They've also given me a lot of help on my novel. Let me tell you about it.


When I was a kid there was one fantasy series that my family was familiar with -- The Lord of the Rings. It was my grandmother's favorite. She was one of the few who read it when it was first released and it was her favorite book. The Hobbit was the first book I had read to me as a child.

But as important as J.R.R. Tolkien was to me, he never really spoke to my life. That was part of the pleasure -- he took me entirely out of my world. But even as a child I was disgusted by the nationalism and classism inherent in his work. (How can anyone not cringe at the relationship between Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins?) That's not to say that he was a bad person -- but his world view was not one that I could accept without criticism.

When I was in high school, I found a fantasy book that took place in a world that was very, very close to the one that I lived in. That was Michael de Larrabeiti's The Borribles. This was a fantasy contemporaneous with and parallel to punk rock. It had heart and it had guts and it spoke to me in a way that no classic fantasy novel ever had. It was bitterly satirical, strewn with trash and covered in graffiti. This was a world where I belonged, where my friends belonged. It was fantasy in the gutter, in the alley, in the dumpster. It was grim and ugly and violent -- but it was redeemed by humanity and love. This was a world I could live in.

The basic idea behind the series is that children who for one reason or another live on their own and take care of themselves turn into creatures called Borribles. Borribles don't age, they don't grow. They can be recognized by their pointed ears, which they usually cover up with a watch cap or long hair. While they sometimes mingle with normal children they've established their own society, a varied collection of tribes usually organized along racial or cultural lines, named for the territories they inhabit.

Their enemies are the forces of conformity and heirarchy. Specifically the police (having grown up in a predominantly black community where the police force contained a racist gang who called themselves the Cowboys, I could relate to this) and the non-human Rumbles. If you have any familiarity with the Wombles of Wimbledon you won't have any trouble recognizing the Rumbles...



Here's a dirty little secret. Writing -- or, rather, editing -- fiction has ruined my appetite for reading. I read everything with an eye toward how it could be improved. Commas, dialogue attribution, point of view -- I can't let go of the technical side of writing.

But a few months back when I was in the thick of writing my novel I reread the Borrible books and found that they sucked me right in and still moved me. I was conscious of the crudity of the prose -- I wished I could take a red pen to them. The point of view is an omniscient one broken up by passages told from the perspectives of various individual characters and the shifts in POV frequently seem capricious. There are any number of moments where emotions that are made clear by the speech and actions of the characters are explicitly described by de Larrabeiti.


But as I read the books I dropped my mental red pencil as the simple power of direct storytelling over-rid my critical stance and swept me away.

A big part of this has to do with the intensely imagined quality of the work. The characters and settings are tangible, vivid, odiferous -- the continual appeal to all of the senses immerses you in de Larrabeiti's world.

His sense of action is very instructive to anyone who anyone who writes adventure fiction. His fight scenes are absolute classics -- if he hadn't been in a few fights himself I would be greatly surprised. At the end of volume two there's a scene I've jokingly described to friends as the greatest shovel fight in world literature. It's actually in strong competition for best fight scene, period, right up there with the fight between Flay and Swelter in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast.

Spoiler Alert! For those who are interested, James Benstead of Tallis House publishing very graciously sent me this manuscript page from the third draft of the above-mentioned shovel fight from The Borribles Go For Broke. Caution -- contains climax!

But most importantly, the characters were all acting from strong, believable motivations. With a few plot-enhancing exceptions you know exactly what all the characters are doing and you know exactly why.

And that helped my novel. Here's how.

In the Borribles the motivations for the various characters are so clean-cut as to be diagrammatical. The bad guys want to either take advantage of the lead characters or they want to crush any sign of social deviation. The values that the good guys (and these books) hold dear are simple ones: Make a name for yourself. Live free. Don't let anyone get away with fucking with you. And above all else take care of the ones you love. Any death, any suffering is preferable to failing to live up to that creed.

If you've got a problem with those values, I have a problem with you. Those who think these books inappropriate for children must imagine that being a young person guarantees a life without hard decisions, without threats. This simply isn't true. I'd rather the kids I love be ready to face the world with open eyes, strong hearts, and a willingness to either stand tough or make sacrifices when the situation demands it.

When you put those motives together in opposition you inevitably get a story that's clean, involving, and moving. It's mathematical, mechanical -- and yet organic.

So after re-reading these books I went back and asked myself what my characters wanted, what their values were -- and how those values would bring them into conflict with one another. It brought my book to life.

The Borribles trilogy is available in both individual volumes and a single-volume compilation from Tor Books.

Michael de Larrabeiti died last April. I wish I'd had the chance to meet him and say: Thank you, Mr. de Larrabeiti. Don't get caught.

(Click here for a look at Journal Of A Sad Hermaphrodite, a very different and more mature work by de Larrabeiti.)

From The Valley Of Lost Projects: The Mask of Gold -- A Complete Short Story Posted In The Comments

After the great wave swept away the atolls of his kingdom, Kanatanka fled into what he thought was
an endless ocean --

Only to find himself in a strange land --

Filled with strange creatures.

In the distance he sees it...

The Black Tower

And of course there's something else that goes along with this kind of nonsense -- something possibly NSFW.

About a year or so ago I started working on what was intended to be an online adventure comic strip. In order to make life easy on myself I decided to do something simple and familiar. (Note to self -- this never works.) There are certain tastes of mine that are like malaria -- I can go for years without thinking to indulge them and then they resurface and I'm swept away on a feverish tide.

In this case it was Sword & Sorcery. When I was a kid back in the seventies there was a revival of this form of fantasy, spearheaded by the work that Lin Carter and L. Sprague deCamp put in on Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. Ballantine Books has recently republished all of Howard's Conan stories (among others -- the Soloman Kane series being a particular favorite) and going over those rekindled my interest in this very minor sub-genre.

(As an aside, in a lot of ways this revival was fueled by the population of the Lord of the Rings -- even though the Weird Tales crew was active long before the Inklings. Conan predates Frodo.)

Here are two different ways of looking at S & S. First is that it's the fantasy equivalent of hard boiled fiction, that it was Howard taking the more mannered tradition established by William Morris (yeah, that William Morris) and Lord Dunsany and giving it a gritty, here-and-now perspective. The characters are going to be gutter-dwelling underdogs before they achieve greatness, and they're more likely to be motivated by a need for drinking money as by destiny. Magic isn't so much the organizing principal of the cosmos -- it's more like a Saturday night special. And so on.

From another point of view S & S came about as the result of Howard combining two genres -- historical adventure and horror. Howard's setting for the Conan stories was a thinly-veiled Europe, Africa, and Near East and his historical precedents were taken from any time that struck his fancy -- everything from the Neolithic to the Edwardian period.

I've always wanted to try my hand at that stuff. But I wanted a non-Eurocentric background -- a big part of my pleasure in fantastic literature derives from a sense of exoticism and other people have been playing in Howard's sandbox for so long that most work modeled on his stuff is dull, dull, dull. I wanted something different.

Hmmm. A vague pre-historic setting with a wild mix of creatures and cultures... Hey, you know where and when they had a great mix of critters just begging to be used in this kind of story? Miocene Central America. This would predate the evolution of man -- but this is a freaking fantasy, man. And there are rumors of everyone from the Polynesians to the Chinese having left their mark on prehistoric Central America. So I decided to go the Howard route and include anything that felt like fun rather than construct something that was intended as serious speculation.

Thus was born Kanatanka -- AKA Conan the Samoan. As a young king, his forbidden love led to the destruction of his island home. Fleeing the destruction, he finds himself in a strange new land...

The initial story, Tribes of the Black Tower, was partially inspired by my brother-in-law, Aubrey Ankrum. He was telling me about a show he'd seen about cairn builders and their practices of worshipping their ancestors. As he described how they'd creep through the narrow passages into the chamber where the bodies lay I found myself vividly imagining the experience and when we got to the part where they reached the chamber...

Well, the idea of what would happen to people breathing the gasses of decomposition came to me in a fashion that was not subtle.

"Dude," I said, "they were totally huffing corpses. They were getting high off that shit!"

And there was borne the degenerate cult of the Black Tower.

I wound up having to ditch Kanatanka as the novel proved too demanding. But as part of the experiment I tried writing a story using the character and setting. Aubrey thought it was the best thing I'd ever written; Rob thought it was the worst -- that it lacked the anger and fear that grounds the majority of my work. I can't figure out where to send the damned thing so here it is, in the first comment section. Hey, everyone, free story!

I will say that it was about as much fun as I've had with fiction. I didn't write it so much as sit back and transcribe the movie I was watching and when I was done it needed almost no edits to get it into its current state. So put yourself into a seventies state of mind -- picture Kanatanka airbrushed on the side of a van -- and read The Mask of Gold.

I think I may have to go back to Tribes of the Black Tower when I'm done with the rest of the novel...