Tuesday, October 30, 2007
My World Fantasy schedule
My WFC Schedule
Wednesday-Monday: I'll be in the bar
Come by and see me, won't you?
Monday, October 29, 2007
Three Unbroken
SOLARIS TO PUBLISH NEW CHRIS ROBERSON NOVEL ONLINE FOR FREE
THREE UNBROKEN
Based on the sixty-four elements of the I-Ching, Three Unbroken follows the lives of three soldiers from their induction into the armed forces to their eventual fight for survival on the frontline. The events of the novel are contemporaneous with those of The Dragon’s Nine Sons, the first novel in the sequence, set to be published by Solaris in February 2008.
In a bold move, Solaris Books plans to serialise the entirety of Three Unbroken on their website for free, at a rate of two chapters per week.
The project will start in late November 2007, with details to be confirmed on the Solaris website nearer the time.
The novel will then be published in book form in 2009.
Watch the Solaris website at www.solarisbooks.com for more information.
Consultant Editor George Mann said of the deal “I’m delighted to be working with Chris again and this is a truly exciting project, not least because it’s our first online publication. Chris is exactly the right person to do this, and Three Unbroken will be an excellent introduction to the Celestial Empire for those who have yet to discover its delights.”
are taking the stuff of genre fiction and turning it into a whole
new literary form - a form for the 21st century. A talented
storyteller, he has a unique ear, a clever eye, an eloquence all
too rare in modern fiction.”
Michael Moorcock
a refreshing originality...”
SciFi Now
Sidewise Award for his story ‘O One’, continues that tale’s vein
– in this alternate timeline, Imperial China dominates the world
in place of
setting by transferring it to a partly terraformed Mars ruled by
the Mandarins. The atmosphere is sumptuous, the invention
lavish; the experience of reading the story is mind-expanding.”
Locus
or call George Mann on ++44 (0)115 - 900 4172
www.solarisbooks.com
Book Report
As I think I mentioned a little while back, I picked up the first Dinotopia book shortly after it was published, and it knocked my socks off. There was something about the way it treated something clearly fantastically in such a frank, straightforward manner that reminded me of Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet's Gnomes books, which I'd obsessed over years before. At the time it didn't occur to me that Dinotopia was being marketed as a children's book, just that it was a book with a broad all-ages appeal that would have ripped the top of my head open if I'd encountered it as a kid.
Rereading Dinotopia now, a decade and a half later, I think it holds up brilliantly. And I look forward to introducing Georgia to it, when she gets a bit older. It's in the loving little details that the work really shines, the little textual glosses to the illustrations that don't even get mentioned in the accompanying narrative. But the narrative itself, ostensibly reproduced from Arthur Denison's travel journal, stands nicely on its own, as well, a Lost Worlds adventure in the grandest sense. And while the style may lack some of the color or poetry of the imagery, which carries most of the water here, it suits perfectly the somewhat uptight Victorian scientist.
A few years later I picked up the second entry in the series Dinotopia: The World Beneath. While I pored over the images, though, looking through it carefully, at the time I don't think I actually read the text, for reasons that escape me now. My reading this week was the first time to properly go through the book, then. This second installment continues the adventures of Arthur Denison and his son Will, this time picking up threads introduced in the first volume, and returning Denison to the titular world beneath the island of Dinotopia, where they find the remains of a lost superscientific culture. Storywise, this is great stuff, and the images and textual glosses are every bit as engrossing as in the first book. The narrative, though, perhaps suffers a bit from being written in a straight third-person narrative, instead of the limited first-person of the first book. Rather that the text being an object of this world, just like the images supposedly painted by Denison's own hand, the text here is a more traditional third-person narrative, told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. Things that worked well in the voice of Denison's journal have a tendency not to work as well here, or perhaps to be fairer it works, but to a different effect. This is much more clearly a work intended for children, it seems, rather than the more all-ages appeal of the first installment. There's a lot to love here, but I felt at times as if I were eavesdropping, as though I wasn't part of the intended audience.
A few years ago I picked up a second-hand copy of Dinotopia: First Flight online, having somehow missed it when it was first released, but I read it for the first time this last week, having not even had much opportunity to look through the images before now. This is the most clearly juvenile of the series, but works excellently on those terms. With a brief framing sequence that sets the narrative up as a legend read by young Will Denison, the story itself is set at the height of the superscience culture Arthur Denison discovered in the previous book. There's some clear nature vs. technology dichotomy at work, as the hero, a student at a flight school where pilots control mechanical drones by remote control, leaves his superscience home and strikes out into the more naturalistic world beyond, befriending a host of dinosaurs and pterosaurs, finally becoming the first pterosaur-rider. The book also includes a board game, worked into the cover itself, which I'm looking forward to testing out with Georgia when she's a few years older.
Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara
Finally, the latest installment, Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. This is something of a return to form, with the narrative again being a journal in Arthur Denison's own voice. But more than that, this is certainly the best book in the series since the first, and arguably the best overall. The narrative seems surer, the images somehow richer and more details. And the level of invention is nothing short of brilliant. The Fibonacci Gardens, where the structure of seedpods and flowers contains hidden mathematical laws. The Saurian Tree, carefully cultivated over generations to represent the phylogenetic structure of the entire dinosaur order. The Celestial Navigator of the township of Bilgewater, a community made of repurposed Pilgrim sailing ships, now ready to sail off into the heavens when the last trumpet sounds.
Accompanying Denison's journal are all of his sketches and paintings, complete with textual glosses, as in the earlier books. But in addition, Gurney has incorporated something little used in the earlier installments, but used here to phenomenal effect: the architectural cut-away. I was reminded of David Macaulay's series of architectural books (Castle, Cathedral, Pyramid, etc) that I obsessed over as a kid. Gurney may have done this sort of thing once or twice in the earlier installments, but if he did they didn't make much impression, even just a week later. But in Journey to Chandara he does it again and again, each time with a lovingly obsessive amount of detail. We get the interior layout of one of the Bilgewater ships-cum-buildings, the layout of the mountaintop city of Thermala, the interior of one of the Seated Colossi (complete with the brown-stains running down the outside where the privy hole runs out), and an amazingly detailed look at a windmill.
Journey to Chandara is a true all-ages book, perfectly suitable for younger readers but with a great deal with which to reward old fogeys, as well. And the production quality on the present edition is unassailable, with the boards bound in a faux-dinosaur-hide pattern, with a ribbon book-mark bound in, and a detailed map of Chandara printed on the reverse of the dust jacket. If the previous (and now out of print) installments in the series are reissued in editions like this, I'd be seriously tempted to pick them up in new editions, just to have the complete set.
In reading the series all in one go, I was somewhat surprised to see all of the locales visited in the later installments included in the maps of Dinotopia in that very first book. And looking at the map again now, I can see that there are still a fair number of places still unvisited. I can only begin to imagine the amount of work that must go into one of these projects, hundreds of pages of fully painted images, to say nothing of the kind of research and design that must be involved. But I hope that it doesn't take too long, and hope that Gurney is already at work on the next installment, because I'd love to take another dip into his world.
Labels: bookreport
Friday, October 26, 2007
Free Fiction Friday: "Trick or Treat"
Last year I posted Timmy Gromp's Christmas adventure, in observance of the season. Seeing as next week is Halloween, by which time I'll be in Saratoga Springs for the World Fantasy Convention, now seems as good a time as any to break out Timmy's Halloween tale.
In this bit of silliness, as in "Timmy Gromp Saves Christmas," Timmy collides with J.B. Carmody, the hero of Cybermancy Incorporated, about whom I was writing quite a lot at the time. (It may help to know that Timmy's favorite curse-word is "assbug," for reasons explored in another story. Or perhaps it doesn't help, at that...)
Trick or Treat:
A Public Service Announcement
by Chris Roberson
“I got a moldy old apple,” Joey Cuellar.
“I got a rock,” Timmy Gromp said, and quickly added, “Assbug.”
The three boys, trawling the twilight suburban streets of
In that spirit, the parents of Timmy, Bobby, Joey, and any number of other neighborhood children had decided that this year, if the kids wanted Halloween costumes, they would have to make them by hand. Which explained why Timmy, Bobby, and Joey, of all their contemporaries, were wandering the streets in ratty old bedsheets, ragged holes cut in place of eyes. (Timmy, of course, had cut far too many holes in his sheet, leading the other two to express their long-held belief that Timmy was, in fact, an assbug).
“These treats suck,” Bobby concluded, to which Timmy and Joey responded with hearty movements of their sheet-wrapped heads.
“We should try some tricks, instead,” Joey answered, poking the browned skin of his moldy apple with an outstretched fingertip.
“I got a rock,” Timmy said.
“I know,” Bobby said. “Let’s go get some rotten old eggs from the dumpster behind the market, and throw them at houses.”
“Yeah,” Joey answered. “Let’s start with Rangi’s house. His parents talk all weird, and their house always smells like a spicy dog exploded in it.”
“A spicy dog?” Timmy asked.
“Whatever, assbug,” Bobby said. “Okay, we’ll start with Rangi’s house, and then we’ll do Ackbar’s. His parents dress funny.”
“And if there’s any eggs left, we’ll do Timmy’s house last.”
“Hey!” Timmy said.
“Not so fast kids,” said a voice from somewhere above and behind them.
The three ghosts turned, bags of bounty clutched against their sheet wrapped chests, and looked up into the eyes of the man towering over them.
“Hey, guys!” Bobby said. “It’s J.B. Carmody, the Cybermancer.”
“And A.J. Jabbar, his faithful companion,” Joey added, pointing out the giant man at Carmody’s side.
“Hey!” Timmy said.
Carmody knelt down on one knee, bringing his head nearer the boy’s level.
“Now, we couldn’t help over hearing you boys, and I have to say that I’m surprised to hear good Americans talk that way.”
“That’s right,” the giant A.J. added forcefully, his head nodding somewhere up in the darkness.
“What do you mean?” Bobby said.
“Why,” Carmody answered, “to single someone out, just because they look different, or talk different, or have different customs, is about the worst thing I can think of.”
“Yeah, it’s a good thing you’re already wearing white sheets, kids,” A.J. said, smacking one giant fist into the palm of his other hand, “because all you lack now is a burning cross or two.”
“Simmer down, Jabbar,” Carmody said. “But A.J. is right, kids, when you get right down to it. It makes no sense to judge someone on the basis of their race, religion, or culture, and to direct irrational hatred and cruel punishments against them for expressing their god given freedoms.”
”Right, boss,” A.J. said. “Better to direct irrational hatred and cruel punishments against people for the stupid things they say and do.”
“Exactly, Jabbar,” Carmody said. “Now, kids, do you know anyone in your neighborhood who says or does stupid things?”
“Well,” Bobby answered, “I saw mean old Mr. Wilson kick a puppy the other day.”
“Mrs. Grant steals her neighbor’s paper every Sunday,” Joey said.
“And my parents won’t let me read Clockwork Storybook,” Timmy said.
“Okay, kids, that’s great, now you’ve got a list to work with,” Carmody said. “Next time you round up rotten eggs to throw, or soggy toilet paper to wrap around trees, or a paper bag of dog droppings to light on fire, remember that you shouldn’t hate someone for what’s on the outside. Hate them for what’s on the inside.”
“Thanks, Mr. Carmody,” Bobby said.
“Yeah, you’re the greatest,” Joey said.
“I got a rock,” Timmy said.
“Good luck, boys,” Carmody answered, waving them on their way to gather up ammunition.
“Cracker white devils,” A.J. said.
“Jabbar,” Carmody scolded in mock-menacing tones. “Have you forgotten the true meaning of Halloween so soon?”
The giant blushed, and shook his head.
“I’m sorry, boss,” he answered. He joined Carmody in waving at the boys, already loping their way down the street to the market. “Ignorant, small-minded creeps.”
“Much better,” Carmody said with a wink.
Labels: freefiction
Thursday, October 25, 2007
The Hypernaut
If you're not familiar with the series, it was Moore's early '90s homage to 60s Marvel Comics, published by Image Comics, and featuring a host of talented artists who would later work with Moore on projects like Supreme and the America's Best Comics line. The idea was to replicate the feeling of early sixties Marvel comics, complete with cheap newsprint, letters pages, and fake ads. Most of the characters were pretty close to the originals to which were homage, if one is being generous, or parody if one is not. Mystery Incorporated is a quartet of astronauts who return to Earth with powers, the Fury is a young wisecracking New Yorker with acrobatic abilities, Horus is a mythological god who shares his existence with a normal man, USA is a star-spangled super-soldier, et cetera, et al. But two of the concepts, while they started out mirroring familiar Marvel types, quickly developed into novel and really quite interesting ways.
One was Johnny Beyond, who is a kind of beatnik Doctor Strange (and really, why wouldn't the mustachioed Stephen Strange in his Greenwich Village brownstone have been a beatnik, after all?), who is featured in a nutty crosstime story. The other is the Hypernaut.
It's clear to see how the Hypernaut was probably intended as a take on Iron Man, but it's just as clear that the concept quickly grew in entirely different directions. The Hypernaut is a former test pilot who, after an accident that wrecks his body, is picked up by an alien vessel. His unseen benefactors, unable to repair his body, instead upload his consciousness into a cybernetic sphere, which can be housed in any one of a wide variety of robotic bodies, and induct him into an interstellar guild of protectors called the Hypernauts. He takes up residence in Hyperbase One, a floating satellite, along with an alien monkey named Queep.
There's a little bit of the THUNDER Agents character Noman here, a bit of Green Lantern, perhaps a bit of Iron Man. But really it's just an excuse for Moore to play around with concepts like Flatland and the higher dimensions. The story itself, a big idea framed within in a brief lighthearted adventure story, is similar in a lot of respects to some of the strips Moore did earlier in 2000AD, and would later write for the various ABC titles.
There's a whole sad tale about how the 1963 series never came to its conclusion, and the projected "Annual" that would have wrapped the stories up was never completed. But the issues that did get published are well worth seeking out. Each stands on its own, functioning both as a parody/homage of and commentary on a particular subgenre of sixties superhero comic, while at the same time function as perfect examples of sixties superheroics. And threaded through the background of each story are little bits and pieces that add up to a larger story. It's possible to piece together what the story of the Annual would have been.
In any event, check out the Again With the Comics blog to read the complete story of the Hypernaut and the Higher Space, and check the back issue boxes if you should happen to find yourself in a comic shop. 1963 is smart, good fun.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Darth Vader in Love
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
PS Publishing at 50% off
There's all kinds of great stuff in the catalog to choose from. And if you've ever wanted a copy of The Voyage of Night Shining White for your very own, in hard cover or trade paperback (or both, for that matter) this would be the perfect opportunity to pick it up. And as I'm sure Pete would tell you, books make great stocking stuffers!
Monday, October 22, 2007
My Cute Kid...
... or is trying to decide if they look anything like leopard food.
(Georgia's grandmother had bought her a pirate outfit months ago, but in the last two weeks Georgia has decided that she has to be a leopard for Halloween, instead. And so she was Pirate Girl for the neighborhood Halloween carnival, after which we went and bought the leopard costume--it's actually a cheetah, I think, but don't try telling her majesty that--which doesn't quite fit, but which Allison is in the process of altering.)
Book Report
Frank Espinosa's Rocketo: Journey to the Hidden Sea: Volume 1
I first noticed Rocketo when it was originally being serialized in individual issues by Speakeasy Comics. I stopped picking up the individual issues before Speakeasy went belly up, but fortunately for all of us, Image Comics picked up the series when the original publisher went under. Twelve issues have been published to date between the two publishers, which together represent the first "book" of the series, "Journey to the Hidden Sea," the first half of which is collected in this first volume. And this first "book", of which the present volume is the first half, is only the first of four in a projected series, forty-eight chapters in all.
Confusing? Not really. Just understand that what you're getting here is a beginning without an end (or rather, with an ending that's of the cliff-hanger variety) and everything else follows.
As pointed out in a interview I linked to back in 2005, Frank Espinosa " is a world-class animator with many credits under his name," including everything "from re-designing the complete Looney Tunes characters in 1992, to creating series of Looney Tunes US Postage stamps. If that weren't enough, he also designed the Baby Looney Tunes characters." And as I remarked at the time, I was glad that I'd already finished work on my own Paragaea: A Planetary Romance before starting to read his new comic. After reading this first collection, I'm even more glad. Rocketo is inspired by many of the same things that fed into Paragaea, and is a world-class planetary romance in its own right. I don't think it's any accident that the outfit that the titular hero Rocket Garrison wears is more-than-a-little reminiscent of that often worn by Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon.
Rocketo takes place in the post-historical world of Lucerne, at some unspecified point in the future. In between now and then, all sorts of things occur, mankind has achieved a true golden age, in which "mankind had not only pried loose the secrets of science but the mysteries of the heart. Art, literature, music... all reached a point that has never since been equaled." The moon had become a "portal to the stars and beyond, through time, through space and through dimensions." Naturally, nothing golden stays, and it all goes wrong when an alien invader called the Ull destroys the moon, sending its fragments falling to earth (shades of Thundarr the Barbarian, perhaps?) and ravaging the world. In the ages that follows, mankind adapts to its new, altered terrain, genetically altered to suit each of the new environments created by the catastrophe: bird men, fish men, dog men, and more. And a new kind of human is designed to navigate in a world that has last its magnetic field, making travel from one region to another all but impossible. Called Mappers, they are "the compass of humanity, the explorer, the way-lighter."
The story of Rocketo begins generations later, with the son of one of the twelve mapper bloodlines, Rocketo Garrison. His father had been expelled from the guild for marrying the wrong woman, but Rocketo still inherits all the genetic potential of the Mappers. When his parents are killed while he's still an adolescent, he's sent to live with a family friend, himself a Mapper, and when he's of age he's sent off to the Mappers Guild to be trained. A young tearaway, though, Rocketo never makes it to school, instead opting to become a kind of Pony Express rider, carrying mail on a flying horse, climbs a few mountains, goes deep sea diving, gets into barroom brawls, hunts for treasure, and when war breaks out joins up with a cavalry of flying fire horses. He's captured by the enemy, who use his Mapper potential to help control a giant robot by telepresence, and when the bad guys have won he's turfed out, only to end up manning a lighthouse atop a huge sentient island. He gets mixed up with Spiro, a dog man he knew from his treasure hunting days, who has hatched a plan to penetrate to the heart of the Hidden Sea, a mysterious region from which no Mapper has ever returned alive. And that's really where the story begins.
This is that kind of story. The level of invention is high, and every few pages brings some terrific new idea. The art is a cross between the fluidity of classic animation and the richness of newspaper artists like Alex Raymond and Hal Foster. The only downside I've found is that the characters are kept somewhat at arm's reach from the narrative, and so it's difficult to get too invested in them emotionally, but the world is so rich and the action is so nicely paced that I was still engaged enough to continue.
I've just discovered that there is a second volume already published, which presumably completes the "Journey to the Hidden Sea" story arc. From posts on his message board, it appears that Epinosa is hard at work on the next arc, "Journey to a New World." I'm hoping that he sticks with it, and that sales on these first volumes justify the series's continuation, because I for one would very much like to see more of Rocketo's world, and to see where his journey ends up.
Highly recommended to anyone who find appealing the description "a planetary romance that combines the aesthetic of classic animation with the richness of Alex Raymond and Hal Foster, complete with flying horses, dog men, and sentient islands."
Labels: bookreport
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Explore New Worlds
Friday, October 19, 2007
Free Fiction Friday: A Fencing Lesson
In this stand-alone chapter, the young Hieronymus Bonaventure, who later features in Paragaea: A Planetary Romance, receives a fencing lesson from Giles Dulac, who may or may not be related to the Jules Dulac in the story "Secret Histories: Peter R. Bonaventure, 1885" (but which will be made clear in the forthcoming End of the Century. And along with fencing, Hieronymus received a bit of a lesson in history, as well.
Set the Seas on Fire
by Chris Roberson
February 1795
It was late afternoon when Hieronymus Bonaventure arrived for his lesson at the disused carriage house, not far from his parents’ home. He was running late, as usual, and Giles Dulac was there waiting for him, as always, already standing on the makeshift piste at the centre of the packed dirt floor, sword in hand.
‘Considering that the only fee asked of you is your devoted attention, young master, I wonder that your habitual tardiness does not bespeak some lack of commitment to your studies.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Hieronymus said, changing from his woollen coat into a jacket of heavy canvas. ‘My father was taking me to task for a… disagreement I had with Cornelius this morning.’
Dulac answered with a weary sigh. ‘You and your brother will share a roof for some years to come, and so must come to some accord. The only alternative is that one of you should manage at last to kill the other, which solution I don’t recommend.’
‘It is an attractive notion.’ Hieronymus gave a sly smile, as he slipped the padded plastron over his head and shoulders, and drew the heavy leather gloves over his hands. ‘At least then I could be reasonably sure that my books and papers would remain where I put them, and not be later found strewn across the floor with a nine-year-old boy’s fingerprints outlined in jam upon them.’
‘Ah,’ Dulac said, nodding with mock solemnity, ‘but what of your sister Claudia?’
‘Not to worry.’ Hieronymus picked up his own sword, tucked his wire-mesh mask beneath his arm and took his place on the piste opposite his instructor. ‘She doesn’t like jelly.’
In response, Dulac raised his sword in a quick salute, and without another word came en garde.
Hieronymus returned the salute, pulled the mask over his head and fell into position, legs bent with his feet shoulder-width apart, front foot pointed straight ahead, back foot sideways. His sword arm was held loosely before him, point towards his opponent, his back hand held up behind his head.
The sword still felt strange in his hand. He’d been studying with Dulac for more than two years, but had only within the last month begun to fence with an actual sword, and not an iron bar twice a sword’s weight. Two years of swinging a few feet of iron, his muscles protesting daily, all the while desperate to move on to more advanced studies. Since he’d shifted from the iron to a proper sword, though, Hieronymus had to admit that Dulac had been right, and that training with the excess weight greatly eased his facility in handling the real thing.
Today, he was using a French foil with no crossbar, constructed of fine
‘Begin,’ Dulac said, patiently waiting for Hieronymus to make the initial attack.
Hieronymus went into a lunge, which Dulac easily parried, and while Hieronymus tried to retreat, Dulac quickly riposted, scoring a touch to the middle of Hieronymus’s bicep. Even through the thick sleeve of his canvas jacket Hieronymus could feel the sting of the hit. He’d been hit there so often in recent days that he had developed a seemingly permanent bruise, gone past purple to a greenish-yellow, a viridian circle surrounded by a rim of sallow flesh, like a miniature ringed target.
Dulac recovered his position, and regarded Hieronymus through narrowed eyes. ‘Again.’
Resisting the urge to rub his stinging bicep, Hieronymus returned to the en garde position, and began his next attack.
For the next quarter-hour, the carriage house echoed with the ring of crossed swords, the clash of steel. Attack. Parry. Riposte. Attack. Parry. Riposte. And with hit after hit, the bruises on Hieronymus’s pale flesh multiplied beneath the padded plastron.
When Dulac had first taken Hieronymus on as a pupil, he’d ordered him to forget everything he thought he knew of swordplay. Hieronymus had spent some years assembling a small personal library of fencing manuals, and had studied them with single-minded intensity, gaining a whole new vocabulary of terminology but, Dulac insisted, little insight. It hardly mattered that Hieronymus could use terms like imbrocatta, stocatta, or punta riversa; if his muscles didn’t know what those movements felt like, then the words were useless.
So it was that Dulac’s training had focused on movement, not on vocabulary. Hieronymus scarcely knew what any of the techniques he’d so far learned would be called in Mr Angelo’s famous fencing academy in
‘Don’t watch the blade,’ Dulac barked, drawing Hieronymus’s attentions back to the moment. ‘Watch my eyes. They’ll tell you everything you need to know of my movements.’
The lessons continued. Attack. Parry. Riposte. And bruises piled upon bruises.
Finally, Dulac called an end to the bout. ‘Enough!’
Dulac motioned for Hieronymus to remove his mask. The instructor seemed about to hurl his foil to the ground in frustration, but instead just fixed his pupil with a hard stare.
‘In the salles d’armes of
Hieronymus stifled the urge to lower his gaze and shuffle his feet, and instead, as Dulac had taught him, looked his instructor in the eye and spoke in as clear a voice as possible. ‘I’m not certain, sir.’
‘Hmph. But you’ll agree with me that your thoughts on not on your efforts, I take it?’
Hieronymus drummed his fingers on the wire-mesh of his mask for a moment before answering, nervously. Finally, he said, ‘No, sir. That is, yes, I agree that I’m not concentrating.’
‘Very well,’ Dulac said with an indulgent sigh. ‘Perhaps a brief interval will allow you to collect yourself, and then we’ll try again.’
Glad for the respite, Hieronymus set his foil and mask on the floor, and took long draughts from the jug of water sitting near the wall. He tried not to meet Dulac’s eyes, as shame and guilt warmed the back of his neck.
The truth was that Hieronymus knew precisely what was occupying his thoughts, and distracting him from his fencing. But Dulac had long months before insisted that he forget such matters as soon as he entered their makeshift salle, and the punishment for infringing upon this restriction was an additional series of strenuous and time-consuming muscle-toning exercises.
Even in the face of such punishment, though, Hieronymus found himself almost entirely unable to control himself and, after nearly emptying the jug of water, turned back to Dulac. In as casual a manner as he was able, he said, ‘Have you heard the latest news?’
Dulac, who was intent on cleaning the blade of his foil, glanced up, his left eyebrow cocked. ‘Oh,’ he asked, though it was clear he knew perfectly well the answer. ‘What news would that be?’
‘Of the capture of the Dutch fleet by the French army,’ Hieronymus said, excitedly. ‘Under the command of Jean Pichegru, it appears, the French crossed the frozen Zuyder Zee river and seized the ships trapped in the winter ice.’ So animated did he get, as he recounted the anecdote, that he seemed nearly ready to dance a jig. ‘It marks the first time in history that a navy has ever been captured by an army.’
Dulac treated him to a half-smile. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that, young master. History is a considerable deal longer than you might expect, and the catalogue of past events, now all but forgotten, is nearly endless. You would be surprised at what strange things have happened before, and will happen again.’ He paused, significantly, and added, ‘But am I mistaken, or was there not some stricture against discussing wars and news of wars during our sessions?’ Though Dulac’s tone was on the whole playful, there was clearly steel beneath his words.
‘Oh, I beg your pardon, sir!’ Hieronymus answered in a rush. ‘But… but it’s all too… Well, sir, just this week we’ve heard the news of the fall of the
Dulac sighed. ‘Little more than a decade since William V of
‘My mother says that the Netherlands has been virtually a vassal of King George ever since the war, scarcely less a puppet state than this Batavian Republic set up by the French, and that William was only able to control the Patriots amongst his own population through the intercession of Prussian troops.’ Hieronymus paused, and with his eyes lowered went on in a subdued voice. ‘That’s what my mother says, at any rate, based on what news she has from her own father.’
Dulac pursed his lips in an expression of sympathy. ‘So your grandfather is well, and weathers the recent troubles?’
Hieronymus nodded.
‘His name is Cornelius, too, isn’t it?’ Dulac asked.
‘Yes,’ Hieronymus answered. ‘Or near enough. Cornelis van der Waals. My brother was named for him, after a fashion. Just as I was named for my father Jerome, I suppose.’
‘A cartographer, wasn’t he?’
‘He made maps for the Dutch East India Company.’ Hieronymus raised his chin, his tone suggesting pride commingled with awe. ‘Of the coastlines of
‘So what career would you prefer, then?’ Dulac narrowed his eyes, looking close at his pupil.
‘I don’t know,’ Hieronymus said, with a shrug he couldn’t suppress. ‘But I know I don’t want to spend my life confined to a dusty library. I want to see the world!’ He began to pace the floor, hands curled into ineffectual fists. ‘Mother says that I have her father’s temperament, passed down through her. Father says that I have the fidgets, and need only discipline to make of me a scholar.’
‘And what do you say?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hieronymus repeated, wearily. ‘Sometimes I don’t know if I’ll ever get to leave home.’
Dulac tactfully failed to point out, as he’d done many times before, that Hieronymus was not yet fourteen years old, and had scarcely reached the stage where leaving home was an imminent proposition. Instead, a momentarily silence stretched between them, in which the tutor regarded his pupil with an amused expression.
Finally, Dulac chuckled. ‘So, young master, you are not much of a diseuse de bonne aventure, after all.’
Hieronymus didn’t understand, as his look made evident.
‘Do I take it you don’t know the meaning and history of your own surname?’
‘Oh,’ Hieronymus said. ‘I had always understood it to be a cognate to the Italian buonaventura, or “good luck”.’
‘Perhaps.’ Dulac nodded. ‘But in French, dire la bonne aventure, or “to speak the good adventure”, means fortunetelling.’
Hieronymus’s mouth reformed in a moue of distaste. ‘So my name is French?’
Dulac laughed at his pupil’s consternation. ‘I’m not sure of its ultimate origin, but so far as I know, the name Bonaventure originates in the Varadeaux region which, you may be happy to know, while it was formerly a possession of France, is now under the control of the Prussian king. But whatever its roots, it is a name of which to be proud.’
Hieronymus blew air through his lips, making an undignified noise. ‘I see no reason to take pride in my name.’
‘Oh, no?’ Dulac mimed surprise. ‘Then perhaps you should count yourself lucky that you are not able to share those sentiments with Etienne Bonaventure, who served king and country in seventeenth-century France, in the days of Louis XIII and Richelieu. I doubt a musketeer of his calibre would take so kindly to the casual dismissal of a name he bore proudly? Or perhaps Amandine Bonaventure, opera singer and swordswoman at the turn of the eighteenth century, who affected male dress and counted men and women alike amongst her conquests, both martial and amorous?’
Hieronymus’s eyes opened wider as he parsed that last statement. ‘Men and women?’
‘She was as willing to face either sex with her blade, and just as willing to welcome either to her bed.’
If possible, Hieronymus’s eyes opened even wider.
‘And what of Achille Bonaventure, who in the sixteenth century explored the new world with Jacques Cartier, journeyed to the kingdom of Saguenay, and helped found La Society de Lucien? Did he fight and bleed only to have his good name dismissed so casually by his namesake?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And perhaps you’d like to…’ Dulac paused, his words choked off, and a brief expression of pain flitted across his features, before vanishing again. Regaining his composure, he continued. ‘And perhaps you’d like to explain yourself to Michel-Thierry Bonaventure.’
Dulac fell silent again, for a brief moment, and his gaze drifted to the middle distance.
‘Who was he, then?’ Hieronymus asked, somewhat overwhelmed.
‘Michel-Thierry was a mercenary with whom I served in the DeMeuron Regiment. And he was my friend.’
Hieronymus’s breath caught in his throat. There was a quality to Dulac’s voice that he’d not heard before, and this marked the first occasion on which Dulac had revealed anything of his life before their initial meeting.
‘What is that? The DeMeuron Regiment?’
Dulac turned and looked at Hieronymus, wearing a strange expression, almost like he was seeing the boy for the first time.
‘The regiment is a Swiss company of mercenaries, its name taken from that of its founder and first commander, the Comte Charles de Meuron, veteran of the regiment D’Erlach and the Swiss Guard. During the majority of my tenure with the DeMeuron, the regiment was in the employ of the VOC, better known in English, I suppose, as the Dutch East India Company.’
Hieronymus felt like he was a beat or two behind, slow to catch up to the pace of the revelations. ‘So you… You were a soldier?’ If so, it confirmed many of his suspicions about his instructor.
‘For a span,’ Dulac admitted, his tone subdued, ‘and not for the first time. But I’m in no hurry to be one again, and never will, if I can help it.’
Hieronymus puzzled through what Dulac had said. ‘But you are British. How did you come to serve a company of Swiss mercenaries?’
‘I was recruited in the region of Varadeaux in 1782, as was my friend Michel-Thierry. We served together four years, seeing action on three continents, countless islands and seemingly half of the world’s oceans.’ Dulac fell silent once more, and again his gaze drifted to the middle distance, lines forming around his eyes, perhaps the sign of some dimly remembered pain.
So Dulac had begun his soldier’s career when Hieronymus had been scarcely a year old. Hieronymus found it difficult to imagine what the younger Dulac must have been like. Whatever the details, it was clear that Dulac’s experiences as a mercenary had marked him in some way, and though there were no scars evident in his skin, perhaps there were other forms of scarring, more subtle and yet more indelible still.
‘What happened to your friend?’ Hieronymus asked at length. ‘What became of this Michel-Thierry.’
Dulac turned, and for a long moment looked at Hieronymus in silence, studying him closely. ‘He died needlessly,’ Dulac finally said, breaking the silence with an air of finality that suggested that was an end to the topic.
Something seemed to pass between them, in the silence that followed, and Hieronymus wondered whether there was something he was expected to say, or to do. But before he could act, whatever the case, Dulac leapt to his feet, snatching up his foil.
‘But enough of such sombre topics,’ he said, striding back to the piste, forcing a bright tone into his voice. ‘While we do our warming-up exercises, to limber our limbs, I’ll tell you a bit about my days in the DeMeuron. You mentioned
Dulac sliced his foil through the air with a whistling sound, while Hieronymus tugged on his gloves and fitted his mask over his head.
‘Tell me, young master,’ Dulac went on, ‘in your mother’s stories of her father, have you ever heard mention of the word Rangaku?’
With a shake of his head, Hieronymus allowed that he hadn’t. Then, while he went through a series of lunges, thrusting his sword hand forward and throwing his other back for balance, his instructor examined his technique and explained.
‘It is the Japanese word for “Dutch learning”, and is used to mean any knowledge derived from the west. As you are doubtless aware, for hundreds of years the island of Japan has been closed off from all contact with the outside world, with one notable exception, namely, the Dutch, who are allowed to maintain a “factory”, or trading post, on Desjima, an “island” of wood constructed in the bay of Nagasaki. Mind that foot, young master, you continue to turn it inwards and you’ll regret it in the long run. Desjima is intended to act as a buffer between the Japanese and the base barbarians of the west, and as such the Dutch are prohibited from passing over the narrow bridge from the wooden island onto the Nagasaki shore, and the Japanese are banned from entering Desjima—except of course for the ladies known as yūjo, though perhaps your ears are still too young to hear about them. Keep that back leg straight in the lunge, or you lose your support. There are occasional exceptions to these restrictions, scholars periodically allowed onto the
A familiar half-smile tugged up one corner of Dulac’s mouth, and he paused for a moment, chuckling to himself.
‘That is where Michel-Thierry and I come into the story, and where the problems begin. Now, let’s try a few bouts, and see if your attentions are with your efforts.’
The pair took their positions facing each other on the piste, saluted and then closed, crossing swords. As they fenced, Dulac continued to speak, perhaps testing Hieronymus’s concentration, perhaps just not willing to leave off, interspersing his anecdote with instruction.
‘The head of the Dutch factory is called opperhoofd, and carries the equivalent position in the Japanese hierarchy to that of a daimyo, a rank something like an English duke or count but with considerably more power. Like the daimyo, once a year the opperhoofd was called upon to journey to Edo, to pay obeisance to the Japanese ruler, the shogun, and to present him with gifts—which gifts the Shogun had invariably selected in advance, so that the legation served as little more than freight-carriers with bespoke goods. Try to expend as little effort as possible to redirect the point of my blade. Here, begin a simple attack and I’ll demonstrate.’
Hieronymus thrust his sword’s point forward, and Dulac simply swivelled his wrist, describing with his own foil a small circle around Hieronymus’s blade, turning it aside.
‘Always an economy of motion. Never engage in flourishes or wasted effort, but apply only the resources necessary to the task. Again. Now, as I said, Michel-Thierry and I had been seconded as a security detachment to Desjima, and when it came time for the opperhoofd’s annual pilgrimage to the shogun’s palace, we were selected to escort him. You see, the opperhoofd had made some enemies among the Japanese gentry, those who quietly opposed the shogun’s policies, and while these malcontents were hardly eager to rise up against their own ruler, they could with greater ease take out their frustrations on foreign dignitaries. As a result, shortly before the legation was set to depart from Desjima, word was received that assassins had been hired to take the opperhoofd’s life. However, by Japanese law only civilian members of the opperhoofd’s staff could go on the pilgrimage, and so Michel-Thierry and I were forced to pose as the opperhoofd’s scribe and the factory doctor. That Michel-Thierry’s penmanship was horrible would have been apparent even to Japanese unable to read the letters, and so he was selected instead to play the part of the doctor. You should anticipate, and attempt to turn a defensive manoeuvre into an offensive one. Try to feint the first parry to draw out the attack, and then use the second parry as your real parry for the riposte. That’s it, now again. So it was that on a bright spring morning the opperhoofd, Michel-Thierry and I set out from Desjima on the long journey to Edo, under the watchful eyes of our escorts, the shogun’s own warriors. The journey took days, in which Michel-Thierry and I were constantly vigilant, never sure from what corner danger might present itself, or in what guise death might come for the opperhoofd. Finally we reached the Nagasakiya, the residence prepared for the legation, where we were to wait until summoned.’
Dulac took a step back, barely winded from his exertions, while Hieronymus felt his heart pounding in his chest, the blood rushing in his ears, trying desperately not to pant.
‘Keep that elbow tucked in. Your arms and legs seem always to want to rush away from your body, but your thrust loses its impetus if your arm is out of line. As it happened, our stay in the capital lasted for more than two weeks, during which time we waited on the shogun’s pleasure, and busied ourselves as befitted the Dutch legation. Michel-Thierry, as the supposed doctor of the legation, was expected to meet with the local practitioners, to exchange techniques and the like, while the opperhoofd met with merchants in an attempt to negotiate better terms for the VOC, with me at his side keeping careful record of the interaction. That’s it. Now, we’ll see what happens when the attack fall just short, but your attacker does not withdraw. I regret that I was unable to see Michel-Thierry’s star turn as a doctor myself, but then I was busy keeping careful watch over the opperhoofd, looking out for any sign of danger, and so had to forgo the pleasure. Finally, we were called to court where, after presenting our gifts, we were expected to perform Dutch dances and songs for the shogun.’ Dulac chuckled. ‘I don’t know that “O Dag, O Langgewenste Dag” has ever had a sorrier interpretation than that we gave it, but nevertheless I maintain that I remained in tune, whereas Michel-Thierry would likely not have been able to pronounce a convincing Dutch vowel if his life depended on it. In any event, the opperhoofd paid proper homage to the shogun, and received a token gift of plum wine in exchange, and then we were sent on our merry way back to Desjima.’
Dulac, without missing a beat, returned en garde, parried and then immediately riposted, at which Hieronymus dropped into a squat and thrust with his sword, all in one motion. As he’d hoped, Hieronymus managed to drop completely beneath the point of Dulac’s foil, and scored a slight but undeniable hit on Dulac’s chest with the point of his own foil.
‘Good, good,’ Dulac said, nodding in admiration. ‘A risky move, but a useful one. But remember to keep your bell guard high, which should provide the maximum protection against your opponent’s point hitting your top shoulder.’
Hieronymus, now thoroughly winded, took off his mask and put his hands on his knees, struggling to catch his breath.
‘What…’ he began, raggedly. ‘What happened with the opperhoofd? And the assassins?’
‘Hmm?’ Dulac blinked for a moment, confused. He’d clearly lost the thread of the story amongst the details, fondly remembering his lost friend. ‘Well, as it happens, the assassins were simply smarter, and had infiltrated the staff of the shogun. When we returned to Desjima, the opperhoofd toasted his safe return with the plum wine given him by the shogun, and promptly dropped dead on the spot.’
‘Poisoned?’
‘Poisoned. Which, I suppose, should serve you well as an illustrative example. When dealing with the unknown—whether fencing an unknown opponent, entering a strange land, or dealing with a person or people unfamiliar to you—remember one thing: that the unknown is exactly that. Not known. The moment one assumes that he understands that which he doesn’t, he is inviting disaster.’
Labels: freefiction
Jack Staff Returns
Paul Grist's acclaimed superhero series, JACK STAFF, goes monthly starting with January's JACK STAFF SPECIAL #1.One of the lone islands of awesome in the giant sea of sucky superhero comics, Paul Grist's Jack Staff is a pure delight, never a disappointment, and always a reason to rush across town on new comic day.
"I've longed to put out JACK STAFF monthly for a long time," Grist said. "Luckily, I wasn't alone as Image's Executive Director, Eric Stephenson, has wanted the same thing. We've been working together to make it happen for awhile now and I'm happy to say we already have three issues in the can with a fourth right on its heels."
JACK STAFF made its debut through Grist's own publishing house, Dancing Elephant Press, but it didn't take long into his twelve issue run to catch Stephenson's interest. The book was soon relaunched under Image and introduced a new fanbase to Jack Staff and his massive supporting cast including the Freedom Fighters, Sgt. States, Tom Tom the Robot Man and Becky Burdock: Vampire Reporter. JACK STAFF SPECIAL #1 will catch up the uninitiated and provide the perfect jumping on point to February's JACK STAFF #14.
JACK STAFF SPECIAL #1 (NOV072015), a 32-page full color comic priced at $3.50, will be available in stores January 16th.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
New Review
This is an old fashioned, lost world adventure story, deliberately paced, and it even has a volcano in it. It's a form I've always loved, but it's hard to find new ones nowadays. The cover blurbs compare it to Lovecraft but it felt much more like William Hope Hodgson to me. And that's definitely a compliment.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Celestial Empire checklist
Stories
(listed in internal chronological order, rather than publication order; links to stories available online)
“Fire in the
“Thy Saffron Wings” – Postscripts (forthcoming)
"The Sky is Large and the Earth is Small" - Asimov's Science Fiction (July, 2007)
"O One" - Live Without a Net (Roc, June 2003)
“Metal Dragon Year” – Interzone #213
"
“The Voyage of Night Shining White” – Novella from PS Publishing (and in Best Short Novels: 2007)
“Line of Dichotomy” - The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume 2 (forthcoming from Solaris, 2008; also available as chapbook)
"Red Hands, Black Hands" - Asimov's Science Fiction (December, 2004)
“All Under Heaven” - Firebirds Soaring (forthcoming from Firebird, 2008)
"Dragon King of the
The Dragon's Nine Sons (Solaris, 2008)
Three Unbroken (Solaris, 2009; serialized online 2007-2008)
Iron Jaw and Hummingbird (Viking, 2008)
Metal Dragon Year
In case anyone is wondering, this is yet another entry in my Celestial Empire sequence. I just can't seem to stop writing the damned things.
In an interesting bit of serendipity (or synchronicity, perhaps?), after picking up "Metal Dragon Year," which is all about a space-race between the Chinese and the Aztecs in my alternate history, the editors (in the able persons of madman Jetse de Vries and Andy Cox) selected for publication a story by Aliette de Bodard entitled "The Lost Xuyan Bride," which just so happens to be set in an alternate history dominated by the Chinese and Aztecs. Rather than avoiding the parallels, the editors chose to highlight them, featuring both in the same issue with a bit of editorial mortaring, prologues written by me and Aliette, explaining how we both arrived by different paths at similar destinations.
The cover illustration, by the way, is by Kenn Brown of Mondolithic Studios, inspired by my story. Lovely, isn't it?
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Mapmaking
Conlangs
Last night I got caught up in one of those Wikipedia chains of association, where you start searching for one thing, end up following links to other topics, and before you know it have fallen down the rabbit hole entirely. In this case, I was watching old episodes of Star Trek: TNG as ongoing research for my Star Trek novel, and in a few of the Ron Moore-penned episodes we got a lot of Klingon action. I got to wondering what Marc Okrand was up to, as you will, since I don't remember having seen much about him since he devised the Atlantean language for Atlantis: The Lost Empire. One thing led to another, and I ended up back at the list of conlangs on Langmaker, for the first time in about six years.
In the intervening time I've "invented" two languages myself, though both are hardly deserving of the name. One, the native language of Kovoko-ko-te'Maroa, is really just Maori with a bit of consonant drift, while the other, the Sakrian language of Paragaea (which is itself a degraded form of Atlantean) is only a vocabulary of a few dozen words and a pretty simple syntax. Both serve their purpose well enough, but don't go much further than that.
But check out this list of constructed languages. Some of these people have put a lot of work into these, and it shows. I lost the better part of an hour just poking through here. I've been toying with the idea of another language, the dialect of the Varadeaux region of Switzerland which is name-checked a few times in the expanded Set the Seas on Fire, and in the forthcoming End of the Century. I think, though, if I did it again I'd put more effort into it than I did with Sakrian and Te'Maroan, doing something more along the lines of some of the efforts on this list.
In any event, check it out if the idea of modeled, artificial, or fictional languages is of any interest to you. Me, I find this stuff fascinating.
Starfleet Academy
Monday, October 15, 2007
Book Report
As I've mentioned a few times in the last few weeks, I've been reading the first installment in George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Usually a novel takes me anywhere from a day or two, to possibly a week, to finish. It took me exactly three weeks to read A Game of Thrones, and that's reading at least thirty minutes a day, as well as a few extended periods at night when Allison worked late. This is a big book, and it's a dense one, too. And it's the shortest of the series to date, by far.
Now, I'm coming pretty late to the party on this one, which was first published in 1996. For years I've been hearing about how great this book was. I think that Bill Willingham was the first person I knew who'd read it, but over the years I've gotten in from all corners, including most recently Jude Feldman of Borderlands Books.
I've never been one much for epic fantasy. I've only spent time reading widely in the subgenre twice, once for a span of a few years in high school, and then again for a time in my mid-twenties. In high school I didn't have particularly discriminating tastes, and so would read things I found in my school and public libraries, in used books stores, and recommended to me by friends. As a result, aside from a fair amount of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion stuff that I found in the school library, most of the fantasy I read was tied to movies, or related to or inspired by rpgs. A lot of stuff by Alan Dean Foster, an alarming number of Dragonlance novels, the gamers-in-fantasy-land novels of Joel Rosenberg. Then in my mid-twenties I went through a bit of self-education on the genre, but in that instance I started reading with "taproot" texts--James Branch Cabell, George MacDonald, Arthur Machen--and then working my way forward through the high points of the fantasy genre, stopping along the way at Robert E. Howard, Fritz Lieber, JRR Tolkien, Moorcock again, Ursula K. Leguin, et cetera. The only recently published fantasy I read at the time was urban fantasy, with stacks of Charles de Lint, Midori Snyder, Jane Yolen, and folks like that.
As a result, I've never actually read much epic fantasy written during my lifetime, and particularly not in high school when it seems a lot of other readers did. I was in college by the time Robert Jordan started his fantasy series, and I think Terry Brooks had only published the first two-thirds of his initial fantasy trilogy by the time I started high school. What I did read in high school, though, and even moreso in college, was the science fiction of George RR Martin. I picked up the first of the Wild Cards shared world anthologies within a week or two of it hitting the stands in mass-market paperback, and was immediately hooked. That volume and those that followed affected my brain in ways I probably still don't fully realize. From there I discovered Martin's short-story collections (have previously seen his stuff in the pages of Analog, to which I subscribed at the time). Then in college I found Armageddon Rag (the best book on the 60s and popular music I've yet read) and Fevre Dream (one of, if not the best vampire book I've read) in the shelves of the Undergraduate Library at the University of Texas. It was right around then, as I understand it, that Martin went to work in television, and aside from the ongoing installments in the Wild Cards series, his name didn't often appear in the new releases sections of bookstores.
Having never developed much of an affinity for epic fantasy, then, when Willingham started telling me about this new entry in the field by GRRM, I was conflicted. I was definitely interested in anything Martin did, but the prospect of diving into a fat fantasy novel, which was itself only the first installment in a longer series, was a little offputting. Still, I flagged it mentally as something to consider, and then went on reading other things. As time went on, more and more people praised "A Song of Ice and Fire" to the rafters, and I started getting little bits and pieces of the plot through osmosis. This was a fantasy at a human level, with real grit, and terrifically effective battle scenes. There was magic, but it was at the margins, with the focus of the attention being on real men and women who find themselves at a turning point in history.
I'm not sure what finally made me crack. It was a confluence of events that culminated a month ago in the sudden realization that I had to read this series, or at least the first installment. Because I've got this rule, you see, about only reading the first installments of series that haven't yet been completed, and I've got loads of books on my To Read pile. So three and a half weeks ago, right before leaving town for FenCon, I stopped in at B&N and picked up a copy of A Game of Thrones. That this B&N with its painfully limited selected had each of the four installments in the series in every available format--mmpb, tpb, and hc--was an interesting sign. (And that by last week they'd sold out of all of them when I came back for the second installment sold volumes, but more on that in a moment.) And then, sitting in the hotel bar that weekend, I started in on the story.
I was immediately hooked.
I've been toying with the idea of writing an epic fantasy for the last few years. Only recently have I begun to think about what I might actually write. For a long time, instead, I thought about what an epic fantasy should be, and in my admittedly limited experience so seldom was. I had a list of requirements, things that I thought should be included, things that should be avoided. All of this was the product of my self-education in my mid-twenties, which I approached with the rigor of a graduate level course, complete with syllabus and reading list, which as I've said only ran through the late sixties, perhaps verging a bit into the mid- to late-seventies. So far all I knew the "perfect epic fantasy" had been written in the last twenty or so years and I just hadn't read it yet.
Well, it seems to me that I've found it, and that George RR Martin has written it. A Game of Thrones is a damned-near-perfect book, and ticks off nearly ever item on my list of what an epic fantasy should do, and avoids every item on the should not list. The writing itself is skillful, deceptively simple, and worthy of careful study. And the level of invention is little short of staggering. The characters are well-drawn and nuanced, and the tantalizing glimpses we're given of the history and of the rest of the world make the reader hungry for more.
I finally finished reading the novel on Friday, a few hours after sending off to Solaris the first third of Three Unbroken, about which more later. This morning I begin work on my Star Trek novel in earnest. And sitting in the living room next to my chair is a copy of A Clash of Kings, the second installment in the series. Because even with my rule about unfinished series, even considering that it took me three weeks to read the shortest installment of the four books in print, when I read the last hundred or so pages on Friday afternoon, so much that I read was 100% kick-ass, so completely mind-bogglingly brilliant, that I couldn't wait to start reading the next book. On my way to pick up Georgia from preschool I took a long detour, visited two HPBs and two B&Ns looking for a copy of the book, and then this weekend found time to read the first couple of chapters. At the rate I'm going, I'm going to be reading nothing for pleasure but "A Song of Ice and Fire" until late this year, perhaps even early next year. And then I'll join the legion of readers hungrily waiting the next installment in the series. But honestly, at this point, I can't help myself.
So really, not recommended to anyone, unless you want to read what may be the perfect epic fantasy, and you have loads of time to commit to reading it. In which case this comes highly, highly recommended.
Labels: bookreport
A Mock Columnist
Anybody read his book yet? Allison and I flipped through it over the weekend, but lack the wherewithal at the moment to pick up a copy.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Lost Moore
Um, right...
If nothing else, though, this bit of windbaggery inspired Kevin Church to post the full text of Moore's script for Youngblood #4. This is the first I've seen of the script, though I'd seen a synopsis of it years ago after the line folded. This is the time-travel western story, in which the modern day heroes of Youngblood are transposed into the old west, while the wild west heroes of Young Guns are displaced into the modern day, and it is naturally chock-full of goodness and fun.
The fact that Liefeld has been sitting on anywhere from a few to a half-dozen or so full scripts (and god knows how many pages of treatments and pitches) written by Moore is just galling. There's also the conclusion to Supreme which, if I understand it correctly, exists in at least a notional form. If you're unfamiliar with the latter, it is something of a hidden masterpiece by Moore, only somewhat marred by wildly uneven art--some of it truly spectacular, some of it execrable; unfortunately, though, Supreme ended two issues before the conclusion of the story (it's somewhat more complicated than that, since the book was cancelled and relaunched in the meantime, and shuffled from one publisher to another, but the simple version is that it's something like a twenty-four part story of which only twenty-two parts have been published).
There are rumors about an actually "complete" collection of Supreme, which one hopes would include those final two scripts in text form, at least. The final issue to see print, with art by Rick Veitch, was a glorious paean to Jack Kirby, which even the addition of a few childishly crude figure drawings by Liefeld in the opening and closing sections failed to sour.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Free Fiction Friday: "So Far From Us In All Ways"
I've done two more stories with my version of a young Abraham Van Helsing, one in the pages of Adventure Vol. 1, and the other in the forthcoming Solaris Book of New Fantasy, edited by the inestimable George Mann. About the latter story, Nick Gevers had this to say in the most recent Locus Magazine:
"And Such Small Deer" by Chris Roberson, a tale of Doctor Van Helsing in the Dutch East Indies, embraces the grotesque in a neat conflation of Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells.The Solaris antho is highly recommended, by the way, and should be in stores shortly. And I imagine that George would agree with me that they make great stocking stuffers!
These three stories, for what it's worth, are actually the first three chapters of a novel, Travel Towards the Sunrise, which I may get around to writing one day, assuming that the stink of that crappy movie ever fades.
(And if anyone guesses that there might be a bit of Wold Newtonry in this story, and that the young Manchurian doctor Fu might be somewhat familiar, well...)