Backing A Book You Can't Read

My cover artist, Rapha Pinheiro, launched his crowd funding project for his next comicbook:

Salto is a Fantasy Steampunk, written and drawn in France when I was living in Angoulême to study comics. The book tells the story of Nu, an inhabitant of an underground city where everyone is made of fire. They live in this city for fear of the rain that plagues the outside world and rely on an oxygen factory to keep their flames burning.

After witnessing something he should not, Nu is bound to leave civilization and venture into the cave where he discovers a secret that can change the life of the entire city.



 

Since I don't speak Portuguese, I'll never be able to read this comic book.  It doesn't matter, because I'll still be able to enjoy the pretty pictures.  If you live outside of Brazil, you can't get the hard copy, but the digital copy will only set you back R$20, which is about six bucks.  As I type this, I'm one of 38 backers who have brought the project to 1/8th funding in five days, so Rapha has made good progress on funding already.

 

So if you like steampunk, and you like weird, alien vistas populated by creatures of living flame, give it a shot.  I backed it just because I like the art, and Rapha has been such an easy artist to work with. 

 

 

Just wait until you see what he worked up for my forthcoming space princess story - this space princess is a lot more helpless than Karenina, but you'll have to wait to find out why.

 

[EDIT:  Found out the comic itself is actually in English - it's just the Not-KickStarter that's in Portuguese.  So my headline is fake news.  Oops.  We regret the error.]







It's Research, Not Gravedancing

My morning commute has slowly evolved into the Diversity and Comics Roadshow.  For those not in the know, the nameless creator of this YouTube series talks comics.  Usually, he reviews a single issue of a comic book, but he also produces episodes on various subjects, many of which revolve around Marvel's self-inflicted gunshot wounds.  Not only does he provide interesting historical background information, he spots trends, and calls out the good and bad of every issue.  From his analysis of the artwork itself, it's obvious the man knows what he is talking about.  He is also a funny host with a dry wit and often a barely restrained rage that entertains even as it informs.

Most of the information that he provides in his autopsies of what doesn't work does me no good.  The constant litany of SJW and barely past their teens writing mistakes are not the sorts of things that I need to guard against.  But it's darn fun to be able to vicariously experience the dreadful writing and erratic plotting and clumsy left-wing preaching through D&C.  The guy tries to bridge a middle ground, but the egregious own-goals of Marvel are clearly pushing him hard into the welcoming arms of the alt-right.  His SJW takedowns and thorough and professional and hilarious.

The field of comics serves as a useful case study in the cancerous effects of SJW culture in general and feminism in specific.  Comic books themselves did about $1 billion in sales in 2016, compared to a global film market of $38 billion and video games market of $91 billion.  As a content creator in the literary world (the biggest of the four mediums at $127 billion), this serves as a powerful incentive to rein in any impulses you might have to sip from the SJW kool-aid.

With a smaller environment, we can more easily see the market effects of a little thing like erasing the biggest names in the industry (Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Spidey, etc.) and brown-washing them with brand new demographic placeholders.  Spoiler alert!  It's not pretty on either the creative or the financial side.


Or take this classic example of what happens to the sales of a comic book as it's main writer and intellectual shepherd continues to drink from the SJW kool-aid spigot:

 

That's a drop off in readership of 75%, and you can make chin music about dying industries and the death of print media all you want, and you'll still be left with a minimum 25% dropoff in readership due to the quality of the work produced.

 

While comic books are only directly analogous to literature, they are a powerful analogy.  All of the rules of plot, pacing, characters, personality, writer's voice, underlying messages, and so on apply equally to my chosen medium as they do to comic books. 

 

The dearth of quality writer's podcasts has long been a complaint of mine.  Oh, sure, it's easy to find podcasts full of NPR's "Writer's Almanac" style wankery.  It's easy to find writers talking about their own work.  Finding nuts and bolts analysis of what works and what doesn't when it comes to stringing sentences together is a lot harder.  Luckily, D&C doesn't just produce that style of critique, he floods the digital airwaves with it.

 

And my commute is all the better for having him along for the ride.

 





Unexpected Classical Music

Lately I've been enjoying a lot of saxophone quartet music while writing.  Saxophone quartets are grossly underrated.  String quartets get the headlines because in the small parlors of the 1700s, the lightweight and soft tones didn't blast the audience seated just a few feet away, but I'm partial to the sound of the woodwind, myself - and not just because I came of age listening to the sax-heavy soundtracks of the 1980s.  There's something clean and pure in this particular woodwind that lends itself to a quartet.  The natural blend of the different sizes of a saxophone, and the natural volume you get from them makes these perfect instruments for listening to on the streets and in the concert hall. 

But that's not what this post is about today.  Today's post is about the classic modern masterpiece that is the theme from "Super Mario Brothers".  Check this out:



Four movements.  Three styles.  Peppy, breezy, maniacal interlude, menacing, then back to the original theme with a huge flourish at the end.  That's a real crowd pleaser.

Speaking of which, have you ever been to a concert where the performer broke into this song?  It's electric.  Those first few bars are not just recognizable, they are beloved.  Everybody knows them.  Everybody loves them.  The intro of this song makes the crowd sit up, laugh, and pay attention.  They make people of all ages smile, and it's a safe bet they will continue to do so for the next 200 years.

Gingerbread Wolves: The Non-Spoilery Discussion

The Book of Lost Doors wraps up with one heck of a bang.  Misha sticks the landing.  The American judge gives him a 9.5!

There's not much to say about it that won't detract from your own enjoyment of the series.  Misha Burnett gives you the slowest of burns with this series, but that slow burn is a lit fuse burning its way to a great big powder keg.  In this final Misha puts a fresh, modern take on some old ideas that normally done so ham fistedly that a reader can be forgiven for a twinge of trepidation heading into that final confrontation.

What I can talk about without spoiling anything is Misha's writing.  He reminds me of Steven King without the bleak, broken on the inside, point of view.  Now, some people claim that King's writing horror fiction and so he necessarily will write about broken and vulnerable people.  Hogwash, I say.  Watching sympathetic characters struggle against the long, dark, uncaring universe detracts from the suspense.  You care less about characters you don't like, and characters you don't like describes almost all of King's characters.

Misha's a good guy and a good pal of mine.  Steven King is an ass that doesn't like my kind of people and won't shut about it.  So I'm necessarily going to be biased here, but...well, let's just rip off the bandage.  Misha is a better writer than King.

There.  I said it.  I stand by it.

They both focus mainly on the people and relationships.  The weird monsters and existential threats are icing.  They both spend as much time dealing with how the bizarre situations in the story affect the relationships between the characters.  They are both enormously creative. 

Where they differ is that reading Burnett's books doesn't leave you with that gross feeling of having just walked out of a porno theater.  You don't feel depressed and vaguely queasy and like you could use a good shower.  You don't put down a Burnett book and .

Burnett also doesn't have great openings, solid mid-sections, and then completely drop the ball in the end.  There are no "hand of god nukes Vegas" or "a gang bang with 11 year olds saves the day" or "the devil closes up shop after having spent a week wrecking a small town" or "the dimensional portal in the trunk of the car just stops working one day, like they do".  Burnett doesn't cop out - he gives you exactly what he prepared you for the whole time, with every action made by the protagonists being important, even little ones that didn't make sense at the time.  What you get is an epic confrontation with a satisfying resolution that leaves you sated and yet ready for more.

Really, the only comparison where Burnett comes up short is in the number of zero at the end of his savings account balance.

I'm done with King, but I'm just getting started with Burnett.

I can also talk about this:  If you're going to read this series, you have to read the whole thing or stop after catskinner's book.  That first volume is a nice, tight adventure yarn in which the, er, hero...finds peace and contentment with the, er, girl...he loves.  That's a nice ending.  You can quit there.  You'll have a few loose threads dangling and mysteries unresolved, but nothing too major, and a few of those mysteries don't ever get resolved, so seeing the series through to the end won't help you with those.

If you decide to move on after catskinner's book, trust Misha.  The next two books are just as well written, but the destination for James and his "if only he was imaginary" friend is a lot less clear than it was in the first volume.  Volumes two and three introduce new characters, new threats, and a lot more complexity.  James growing list of friends and responsibilities draws him into ever increasing dangers and puts him at odds with ever increasing threats.  They make fine individual chapters in the saga, but it's clear that their real purpose is to set up all of the dominoes for the last stage toppling, and that last topple is a real humdinger.

The Worms of Heaven

Misha Burnette's "Book of Lost Doors" series has become my dessert reading.

A large chunk of the reading that I do these days is dedicated towards a purpose.  I'm beta-reading as many novels as possible.  I read to help the Castalia House Blog readers find the good and avoid the bad.  I read one book a month for the PotMB Club in order to get fresh perspectives and bond over a common title.  With all of that reading, it's rare that I can sit down and enjoy the pleasure  of a good read for its own sake.

And a good read doesn't get much better than this series.  Supermutants powered by extradimensional elder gods running around the unseen corners of Saint Louis and engaging in the sort of political chicanery that made Vampire: The Masquerade LARPing so popular for so many years?  What's not to love?

It's that rare sort of series that starts off with glimpses of the weird, and then the more Misha pulls back the veil, and the more sense you can make of what's going on, the weirder it gets.  Most urban fantasy stories become more mundane the deeper into the eldritch corners of the world you go.  That's true to a limited extent in the "Book of Lost Doors", but only because even supermutants need a day job if they want to keep food on the table.  Which leads to an odd contrast between the regular joe mutants - like the superdense Blue Metal Boys who run a machine shop - and the high-powered executives that engage in corporate espionage and all of the petty and not-so-petty crimes associated with it.

And all of that - the action, intrigue, mystery, and adventure - all of it carries a weight far beyond those of most stories of this nature.  You care more about all of it because Misha deftly conveys the characters and the relationships with masterstrokes that don't just breath life into his characters, they make you care about them.  Even the really, really weird ones.  It's a shame more of the New Wave writers couldn't balance the character studies with action with the same skill as Misha, because if the guys in the 1970s could do what Misha does, I'd probably be heading up the NuWaveRev right now!

Kansai Cowboy

One of my Twitterbros has been publishing a serialized novel, one week at a time, over on Medium.com.  M. T. White's Kansai Cowboy tells the tale of an older Texas Ranger sucked into a crime investigations that hits too close to home.

White has a knack for writing mid-size Texas town politics that spiral out of control as men strive to cut their losses by taking a few legal shortcuts.  Throw some serious criminal elements at them and you've got a recipe for sloppy crime in serious need of a down to earth protagonist.  Steven Bowie, a past his prime Texas Ranger, is the sort of amicable good old boy you just know has the iron in his veins to make him a formidable opponent when push comes to shove.

This is the first time I've read along with method of publishing a story.  Serialized novels posted on blogs have never seemed worth the bother to me.  If an author doesn't have the motivation to write, edit, revise, and publish it, then why should a reader have the motivation to keep checking in on the novel's progress?

Things change.  I enjoyed White's Down to Sheol, so his writing is a proven commodity.  I know he has the motivation to see this thing through to the end.  And the use of Medium.com as a means of reminding me to check in when the latest chapter drops helps as well.  Add to that the busy state of my reading and writing schedule, and the lite-size pieces of Kansai Cowboy make it much easier to squeeze into my rotation.

So if you like modern crime drama, and you're willing to wait for it, give Kansai Cowboy a look.  The third episode just went live this past weekend, so it should be easy to catch up on the action.

Comics Exposure

Comic book fandom is one of those things that I've accreted through sheer osmosis.  Love the concept, love the culture, but never had the time, never had the money, but always had friends with both.  Whether it was reading an issue or two left on a couch or thrust into my hands at a friend's house, or catching up on trade paperbacks at the library (read: five years late), or just sitting back and listening to fans talk about the things, I've managed to keep up with all of the most important story lines.  Dark Phoenix Saga, Secret Wars, Supes punching reality in the face and rebooting the DC line, you're talking to a guy who can at least ask intelligent questions about what's up with the four color tales.

Now it's the internet's favorite complaints box, Twitter, that keeps me up on the latest dirt.  Or so I thought, until somebody passed me a link to "Diversity and Comics".  It's not what you think.  It's actually a series of thoughtful and intelligent reviews of comics by a guy interesting and funny enough to be sitting next to you at the gaming table.  Just check out the title on this bad boy:



Not only is the narrator an experienced and thoughtful reviewer of comic books as a specific medium, he has phenomenal insight into storytelling, heroism, action, and the all the rest of the #PulpRevolution's greatest hits.

Forget Game of Thrones, I'll be binge watching this for the next few days.

StoryHack, Issue Zero

Bryce Beattie recently put out the first issue of his action/adventure magazine as a proof-of-concept.  As a contributing author, for me to write a review of the magazine would be a bad idea.

 

But I'm going to do it anyway!

First, thought - don't take my word for it - download and read a copy for free.  Then you can decide for yourself whether the second issue KickStarter is worth backing.

StoryHack Action and Adventure has two things going for it:

1.  A central focus on action and adventure.  The contents cross genre lines with the first issue including pure fantasy, magi-tech, biblical fantasy, sci-fi, and even one story set in the contemporary real world.

2. Bryce's own vision.  One issue doesn't provide enough data to get your arms around Bryce's tastes, but you can get a feel for it.  My guess is that, as with Cirsova, after a few issues are out, regular readers will be able to point to a story and say, "That's a Bryce story."  The edges will be fuzzy, but there will be a certain feel to the kind of story that might appear in StoryHack.  Based on the limited size of the data set, it looks like they will be fast, furious, and fun, with just a hint of deeper meaning or passion to them.

The decision to include stories from a variety of genres was brilliant.  As a 'page one and straight on through til morning' reader, it was fun not knowing what each kind of story was going to be.  You may want to take a page from Cirsova and include a one sentence teaser before each story.  I never read them, preferring to go into each story blind, but (particularly when you've got a cross-genre magazine) a lot of readers appreciate that little warning about what to expect.  The hard copy/pdf has a blurb in the table of contents, but you don't have that in the Kindle version.

StoryHack: Year Zero also includes a few unexpected laughs in the form of Bryce's own advertisements.  In a normal magazine, these would be considered filler, but in Bryce's hands they provide a laugh, and more importantly, they provide a chance for the editor to engage directly with the reader.  What could have been wasted ink becomes a way for the reader to get to know Bryce a little better and begin establishing a relationship with him. 

That may not seem like much, but consider that most collections are a reflection of the editor.  The best magazines were synonymous with their editors, and you know from the editor's name what kind of story you're going to get.  Gernsback was pure pulp.  Campbell was men with screwdrivers.  Damon Kinght was lipstick smeared pigs in fancy ball gowns.   Both Gernsback and his stories were bold and daring.  Both Campbell and his stories were smart and technical.  Both Knight and his stories used pseudo-intellectualism to hide his incompetence. 

Pretty soon we'll have Bryce Style fiction, and that fiction will be a reflection of Bryce's personality. This is one reader that hopes those little injections of Bryce won't disappear once every column inch is bought and paid for.

 

New Release: Crazy Horses

Crazy Horses is now available on Amazon.com.

David J. West is the king of the weird west.  But he writes too fast. I haven't found time to read Scavengers yet, let alone free up space for the second book in the series. But you can now get both books in the series for just a couple of bucks.  His short stories are great, and if you love weird west tales, you should give him a look.

Watch Out!

I've made no secret about my hopes to read more works by the Old Reliables out there in the #PulpRevolution blog-o-sphere.  Well, Jesse Abraham Lucas isn't content to sit around waiting.  Jesse is putting together an anthology:

Back in the day a group of SF greats, Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert, Gordon Dickson, Harlan Ellison and Keith Laumer, each wrote a short story based on the same prologue. Apparently (I haven't read them, I'm going off the cover above just like you are) NO TWO ARE EVEN REMOTELY ALIKE. These authors had radically different styles, beliefs, and backgrounds, making it in theory an excellent idea, and the first thing I thought when I found out about it a day or two ago was, "I want to do that." So I did.

I'm not calling for submissions, I'm hand-picking our contributors, so if your name is on the list I'll publish your story, but I'll touch base with you on structure and clean up grammar and all that (of course I'm going to edit and contribute, I can't let this valuable exposure go by).

I'm so interested in seeing what comes out of this that I volunteered to beta-read whatever shakes out of his call.  It may be a few months before this title hits the market, but this also isn't the only example of this sort of organic content farming in the works.  You're going to see a lot of newcomers showing up in the market, and while their first forays might be a little rough around the edges, they'll get better.  Better yet, every one of these represents a literary cultural shift in the right direction, so I'm full-square behind them.

Public Service Announcement

These two books are nothing alike.

 

Just Whomever's book is a biting parody filled with in-jokes and digs at John Scalzi.  It's a fevered dream, descent into madness style narrative that barely hangs together, by design.

Johann Kalsi's book is a fantastic work of science fiction that could easily have been published and marketed without tapping into the thick, syrupy schadenfreude swirling around the release of Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire.  I received a review copy of this book, and I'm glad I did, because the advertising turned me off - I'm not a fan of Asimov - and without it, I might have missed out on an interesting read.

The Amazon blurb brags that, "Kalsi shows himself to be more Asimovian than Asimov himself."

I wouldn't go quite that far.  The Corroding Empire fails as an Asimov pastiche (tribute?) in a few ways.  It features a long string of characters who are well rounded and relatable.  It doesn't contain a strong undercurrent of smug superiority over the poor, benighted hoi polloi.  It doesn't make a case that the world would be a better place if only the poor, benighted hoi polloi would turn their every decision process over to the technocrats who really do know better than they what's best for them.

 

What it does contain are seventeen short stories and vignettes that document the long, slow, slide of a galactic empire into chaos as a small coding error multiplies and ripples out through the vast, interconnected networks that control everything in the galaxy.  Some of the stories are simple character studies.  Some are rip-snorting action.  Some consist mainly of people standing around talking.  You know, about science-stuff.

 

Even better, it's not about impartial technocrats willing to allow trillions to suffer NOW because it will make life better for people 900 years from now.  Instead, it's the stories of those who fight and struggle to make life better for the people suffering through the long, slow decline.  Even if they cannot fix the galaxy, they still do everything they can to fix their own little corner of it, to hold the threads of civilization together for just a little while longer.

 

And in that way, this isn't Asimov.  It's something far better.

In the interests of full disclosure, I might not be smart enough to fully enjoy this book.  The 17 stories are all tied together by a few recurring threads, the most notable of which is a robot named Servo, and while I did realize that these recurring threads are there, I wasn't able to really lock down all of the connections.  Place names that I thought were throw-away's turned out to be much more important than expected, for example, and while I'm smart enough to recognize the import of such things, in many cases, I couldn't tie them together in any coherent way.

That didn't lessen my enjoyment of the book at all, though.  Each story stands on its own just fine, and the common threads that run through them do provide a framework for understanding, even for a dullard like me.  But then, those subtle clues that pay off later in one way increase my appreciation for the work because they just make me want to read it again.  And rare indeed is the book that you finish, and can't wait to turn back to page one and read it all over again.

Further West

Yes, it's "further" and not "farther" in this case, because we're talking about the author David J. West again.  Now that I've had a chance to finish The Mad Song I've got a better handle on the guy.  Let's be honest, it might not be entirely fair to judge an author based on one book, but that hasn't stopped me yet, and it's not going to stop me now.

This collection contains twenty-one stories published between 2011 and 2014, and each one is a rollicking adventure in a different vein.  It's got everything from warriors gone a-Viking to mythos inspired space adventures, and even a few Crusaders going full Deus Vult.  The longer pieces are interspersed with one or two page vignettes and something I wish we saw more of these days - epic poetry about blood and thunder.  That style of adventure fiction shouldn't begin and end with Odysseus and Shakespeare.

In my initial take, I mentioned that the first few stories didn't give me the virtuous hero fighting for truth, justice, and the [insert local positive theme here] that represent all my favorite heroes.  By the end of the book, I got what I wanted. 

West seems to be a part of the Utah action-writer crew along with Correia and Torgersen, and his work reminds me strongly of Correia's.  They share a healthy blue-collar disregard for literary frippery in favor of a blunt, smash mouth style of writing.  I actually prefer West's writing to Correia's - the Monster Hunter International series felt cold and angsty to me.  So if you're looking for more in the Correia vein, West is a safe bet.

Given that these works are all a couple of years old, and that West writes at Pulp speed, I'd actually recommend starting with his more recent work.  He seems to be a pretty smart cookie, and it's a safe bet that his writing has only improved since he inked The Mad Song.  I haven't read his Porter Rockwell series yet, but it's on my short list.  If you've read it, let me know what you think.

*   *   *

My first novella, King's Dragon is free to download, for today only.
It's the story of a badass hero killing a big snake.
Think of it as my Saint Patrick's Day gift to you.

 

Towards a Self-Publishing Cearinghouse

The weak link in the self-publishing universe right now is marketing.  The best available tool for that job today is Amazon itself. 

Readers who spend too much time wading into online reading and writing discussions have it easy - there are too many great writers doing just that to read them all.  The riches are embarrassing these days, and you can't go a week without discovering a fun new writer to at least try.  If you don't spend the time soaking in the frothing broth of online literary discussions, then what do you do?

For a significant chunk of readers, finding what to read next starts and ends with Amazon's categories and recommendations.  As we all know, those are based on impersonal algorithms that track an unknown number of statistics to determine what books get shown to whom and when.  A big part of that algorithm is reviews - the more reviews a book has, the more likely Amazon is to recommend it.  That's why so many authors are constantly asking for reviews.  It's not just an ego thing, it's a marketing thing.  It's a system, and it mostly works.

The missing ingredient in the system is people.  It's pure math that can be gamed and sometimes spits out some wonky results.

Funny thing about people, they much prefer dealing with people than faceless algorithms.  They'd much rather have a flesh and blood reader they trust pointing them to works they can enjoy.   The dinosaur media filled miles of column inches by paying people to read and discuss the books they read, but now that they are the walking dead, all we've got is Amazon and our friends.

Someday, there will be a big, central website featuring a host of readers and reviewers and critics, and you'll be able to find somebody you trust to recommend works that are right up your alley.  If you want to be a mover and shaker in self-publishing, there's a huge vacuum in that space that needs to be filled.  Read and write consistently, and within a couple of years, a decent review website could build a big enough audience to earn some serious dough for the guy running it.  Especially if the site is dedicated to a niche genre.  If the fans of Genre X had a place to go when they run out of reads, a place where they didn't have read through backpages and backpages of material, but could easily find recommendations for their next read, they'd flock to it.

I'd do it myself, but as a writer and active participant in 'the scene' my reviews are happily and admittedly biased.  That and the sixty hour work weeks, audiobook recording, reading, blogging, and writing my own books.  Those don't help either.

I can offer a little something, though.  My tag cloud - located in the upper left sidebar - includes a tag called:

Recommendations

 

 

That tag takes you to all of my blogposts where I review or discuss books that I think are worth a read.  If you want to break out of the Amazon cycle, you'll find something on that list without any trouble.  It's a little clunky yet, but until we get that clearinghouse, it's better than letting Bezos choose what you get to consider.  And it's all been prepared by a living, bre - wait, let me check - yep, still breathing human.

David J West - First Impressions

You see this maniac right here?  He's where the #PulpRevolution rubber meets the literary market road.

Jesse Lucas wrote a great review of his Fangs of the Dragon, and then he started cropping up all over the place in my Twitter feed, and even participated in the Three for Three review day, so I figured he was worth a shot, and boy is he!

I grabbed a copy of The Mad Song off the Amazon shelf, because short fiction makes for a safer time investment if the 'seems like a good guy' persona hides a 'garbage writer' talent.  Three stories into The Mad Song, I can safely report such is not the case. It's too early for a detailed discussion of the David J. West oeuvre, but the early returns are positive.

Warning klaxons started going off during the opening section of the first story I read out of this collection.  The now-obligatory scene of a female warrior proving her mettle and proving to be more serious and competent than the rest of the men in the special forces strike force raised my shields.  We've seen this one a thousand times.  When she betrays the lead, and then he accepts her offer to double-cross her employers, I was on the edge of placing this one in the circular file.  Then she gets triple crossed and goes down like a chump, and that told me that it was time to stop trying to be the smartest guy in the room and just let Mr. West lead me along the swirling waters of his imagination.

He doesn't push all of my buttons.  There's a big one labeled, "Virtue" that's not getting much use.  In the three stories I've read, one protagonist is blackmailed into serving one bad guy against another, one just wants to survive a hazardous trip, and the third...well, she wants to save her kid sister from a plague/curse.  That's one out of three.  Not bad.  The two male heroes remind me a lot of Glen Cook's protagonist - you know the one, grizzled, cynical old man soldier just going along to get along - and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, I'd like to see more heroes doing the right thing because that's what heroes do, and less leading men stuck in a bad situation.

That's a relatively minor nitpick, though, because West writes action that is breathtaking.  West's stories rip along at hypersonic speed, with just a few pauses in the action to reset the dominoes and provide a little context for the next action sequence.  His set-pieces are imaginative, and writing pops off the page.  Reading West is like watching a pinball game - there's a lot of flash and chrome and noise and fury, and you're never quite sure where things are going next. 

So if you're in the mood for some short fiction that is unashamedly action packed, you would be well served to pick up one of his books.

My Three for Three

Happy Three for Three!  Today's the day to review bomb Amazon.com.  Pick three books that you really should have reviewed by now and write at least three sentences about them.  Post these reviews to Amazon and you are done.  If you pick your favorite independent author, you'll be doing them a solid favor by giving their profile a small boost thanks to the inscrutable working's of Amazon's algorithms.

My three books were as follows:

1. Two Stars for In Search of Wonder, by Damon Knight
2. Five Stars for Catskinner's Book, by Misha Burnett
3. Four Stars for Cirsova, Issue 4, by various

That last one only had one review when I submitted mine.  One.  The first two have a dozen each.  If you've read Cirsova and enjoyed it enough to look forward to future installments, you should do yourself a solid and post a review.  Every review increases the chances that more get sold.  More getting sold increases the chances of more getting made.

We Need to Talk About James Hutchings’ Poetry…

…And of course when I say, “We need to talk,” what I mean is, “I need to lecture you about.”

The mastermind behind Cirsova Magazine knew what he was doing when he commissioned “My Name Is John Carter” and spread it out over several issues.  He’s got me hooked on this literary drug, and every time he offers up another hit of this story, I’ll be right there sitting on the curb outside the Circle-K taking a hit.

For those of you who aren’t aware, “My Name Is John Carter” starts from a very simple premise: What if you retold “A Princess of Mars” not in prose form, but as a Homeric poem?

You might cringe at the blasphemic notion of twisting one of the all-time great books into long form poetry.  Sacrilege!  You would probably do that if, like me, your potential love of epic poetry was strangled in the crib by an education system that loves literary gimmicks above all else, that premise probably sounds tedious.  If, like me, your main experience with poetry consists of listening to the litanies of pointless phrases and empty alliteration spouted by “Poet Laureates” at the inaugurations of the God-Emperor’s predecessors or the dreary exercises thrust upon students in classrooms, you might even roll your eyes at the notion.

Slow that roll, my dude!

Hutchings strings rhythm and rhyme together to present a rollicking tale of adventure that is Homeric in scope, but that doesn’t pay the price of two thousand years of language and culture drift.  His wordplay is thoroughly modern, but no less epic.  Many writers fall head over heels in love with their own cleverness, but Hutchings dodges that trap by never letting his ingenious word choices overshadow the story itself.  To compare him to another classic poet, he writes poetry with the grace and style of a modern day Kipling.

I know what you’re thinking, but hold that thought for a few paragraphs.  Kipling’s neglect in American High School English classes is borders on child abuse.  Telling kids that poetry is great and then not exposing them to Kipling is like telling kids sculptures are great and then not showing them anything from the Renaissance period.  No art instructor worth his salt would fail to show students Michelangelo’s David as a prime example of just how good sculpture can be, and yet countless English teachers commit the same by showing students the literary equivalent of a statue made of used tampons.

Seriously, if the English teachers of America truly wanted to instill our youth with a love of poetry, they’d cram Kipling down their throats early and often, and leaven that fare with a light spice of Chesterton.  Trying to pawn off Maya Angelou as a worthy successor to these guys is like trying to pass a Big Mac off as prime rib.  Maya Angelou ain’t half bad.  Her craftsmanship is adequate, and her choice of subject matter is mostly inoffensive pap.  She might just be the best of what the modern poetry field has to offer, but holy cats is that damning the culture with faint praise.

Let’s get back to comparing Hutchings to Kipling.  Clearly, Hutchings comes off as second best in that comparison.  For one thing, Hutchings isn’t even telling his own tale – he’s ripping off Burroughs!  Granted, Kipling’s poems speak to universal truths of the human conditions and provide cutting and incisive insights into everything from war to romance and everything in between.  Kipling was a sage, a prophet, a patriot, and a realist all rolled into one.  Hutchings is just presenting a great tale, well told.

That aside – and admittedly it’s a pretty big “that” to set aside – Hutchings shares something very important with Kipling.  His word craft is clear and readable.

You wouldn’t think that would serve as high praise, and yet we’re talking about one eyed men in the land of the blind.  Like Kipling, Hutchings stands out amid a desolate wasteland of poetry marked by literary gimmickry specifically designed to block the reader’s attempts at understanding.  The modern way of poetry is to mystify, obscure, and block comprehension and understanding.  Modern poetry is an exercise in battle – the modern poets defy the reader to understand what he’s REALLY talking about, and the more obtuse the writing, the better.

Hutchings will have none of that.  There are four armed aliens to fight, princesses to save, and buckles to swash, and his rich and accessible word craft is as clever as it is unobtrusive.  Granted, his word choices often make me laugh out loud in awe at the sheer audacity of his writing, but it is the pure laughter of discovering an oasis in the midst of a desert.  That laughter is an expression of marvel that poetry could be used to such electric effect.  In Hutchings hands the choice of epic poetry fits hand in glove as a natural fit for retelling the saga of John Carter.  It harkens back to the days of oral tradition when poetry, rhythm, and rhyme were used to lend weight and meaning to the epic legends and histories.

In the end, and in the hands of James Hutchings, that simple premise gets turned on its head.  The question is not why tell John Carter’s saga in this manner, but why did it take so long to happen?

The only answer can be that it took a man with the talent and creativity of a Hutchings to get around to it.

Torchship - The Best of the 80s

Reading Torchship* brought me back to those halcyon days of the 1980s hen network television spent a full decade taking advantage of the reduced costs of special effects to churn out a steady stream of episodic ensemble genre shows that were as creative in their central conceit as they were clumsy in their execution. Much to my chagrin, the advances in special effects and willingness to spend money on genre fiction was not matched by a willingness to spend money on quality writing, and most of these shows died a quick death.

Torchship might have been one of those shows that fed and dashed my hopes. It has all of the elements. It has an interstellar cargo ship bouncing around a large setting. It has a generally stable crew of six, each with their own secrets and fully-fleshed out personalities. It has adventure, action, mystery, romance, and politics, all in equal measure. If only it was poorly written, it would have hit every note of those 1980 shows. Alas, Karl Gallagher drops the ball by writing in a clear and unobtrusive style that lets the characters and action speak for themselves.

Karl Gallagher’s novel about a tramp steamer in space – the science is decidedly on the “hard” end of the spectrum – actually encompasses a number of shorter stories tied together by the slow reveal of the pilot, Michigan “Mitchie” Smith’s, narrative thread. Her background and actions are a sort of sub-plot to the novel, but given the lack of a single over-riding plot it isn’t fair to call it a sub-plot. It’s really more of a narrative hook to tie the novel together and keep the reader’s interest. In that regard, it works. It’s done so deftly and skillfully that until the first interlude between stories, you don’t realize there’s more to the pilot than it seems.

Later, you realize that most of what you know about the pilot comes straight from her mouth, and that she hasn’t been telling the entire truth through most of the book. That’s a neat spin on the “unreliable narrator” concept which serves to hold the reader’s interest as well.

You should detect a pattern here. Karl Gallagher’s writes with a deceptively clear and transparent ease that belies the inner workings of Torchship. This book is like the proverbial duck placidly swimming across a pond, and with all sorts of furious activity churning the water beneath the surface. The surface workings are entertaining enough. Stories of a blue-collar shipping crew rescuing an heiress passenger from potential kidnappers, trapped on a deserted planet trying to hunt a professional hunter, hunting buried treasure, and ferrying a small horde of refugees to safety, all have a charm all their own. And every one would have been right at home on 1980s genre television.

As I mentioned, the book contains a number of short stories, but as they are presented in chronological order and the results of one adventure flow naturally into the next, it doesn’t feel like a collection of short stories so much as it feels like a travelogue through a fully realized sci-fi setting, and it’s a setting well worth exploring. The key incident in this future’s history is the end of humanity’s golden age when the AIs that made such golden times possible betrayed humanity and launched a pogrom that nearly wiped humans from existence. That underlying event gives the setting both a bit of a dark-age feel, and a post-apocalyptic feel, and the omnipresent feel of a massive extinction level event that could strike at any time. It’s a big sandbox, and Gallagher manages to explore enough to feel satisfying, but not so much that it starts to feel small.

All that aside, Gallagher really won me over with a minor scene midway through the novel. Any book that includes a scene where a man tells a woman to, “Go make me a sandwich,” and her response is a cheerful, “Okay!” earns bonus points on my scorecard. As an added bonus, the open endedness of the setting presented should provide a solid RPG background for anyone looking for a Travelleresque setting complete with big threats, easily understandable history, and enough room in the sandbox for any sort of adventure your players want.

You might not have been explicitly looking for a hard sci-fi blue collar ensemble novel that explores a fully realized future setting, but if that’s something that tickles your fancy, you can’t do any better than Torchship.

* I actually sprung for the audiobook add-on.  It was two bucks, and read by Laura Gallagher who did a fine job.  My only complaint is that her pronunciation of the word tourist, which gets used a lot, sounded more like "turrist", and I had visions of Charles Barkley's mother reading the story every time.  That's on me - don't let my foibles scare you off.  It's eminently listenable.

Schrodinger's Gat: A Review

Schrodinger’s Gat is a tight little novel that weaves a modern sci-fi thriller by tying age old philosophy debates to modern quantum physics.

The basic plot is that of a suicidal author saved from the fires of hell by a beautiful young girl. She distracts him just as he’s about to step in front of a train, and then leads him into a two-man conspiracy to prevent tragedies across the San Francisco Bay Area. She and the mad doctor for whom she works have built a machine that taps into quantum-theory to predict future tragedies, and race to stop as many as they can. The universe has other ideas, and before long the author gets swept up into a thriller story rooted in (as far as I know) accurate quantum physics, with a dash of metaphysics thrown in for good measure.

All of those fun intellectual exercises play a role in this story – the observer effect, Schrodinger’s Cat, paradoxes – and most of the background ideas should be familiar to long term fans of time-travel stories, science fiction, and popular accounts of esoteric branches of quantum physics. The theories and experiments are presented in this book a very accessible manner for those coming to these ideas for the first time, and woven into the plot in a way that won’t bore old hands already familiar with the idea.

Rob Kroese, pronounced KROO-zee it turns out, keeps the characters and the reader in suspense as the characters grapple with notions of free will, predestination, and meeting one’s fate on the road he takes to avoid it. Couple that with some gunplay, vehicle chase scenes, and knuckle biting escapes, and you’ve got yourself a tight little novel that might make your head hurt, if you think about it too hard.

One of the main characters in the book is named Heller, and that name triggered memories of Catch-22, a fitting comparison for this novel. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and in the end, you can never really be sure whether you really had a choice in the matter to begin with. The final confrontation is as epic as the ideas in the book, and while the end doesn’t leave the reader with a solid answer as to what, exactly, just happened…neither does philosophy or quantum physics. Which is just fine with this reader - a book like this is far more about the journey than the destination. And it does leave little doubt in one's mind about the appropriateness of the title of the book.

You expect some cleverness from a book with a title like Schrodinger’s Gat, but Rob Kroese races way past clever and doesn’t stop until he hits downright brainy.

Look Upon My Perks, Ye Mighty!

And despair!

Behold!  I bring you fire and knowledge!

That's right.
Jeffro's first magnum opus finally hits the market.  It's been a long time coming, and even those of us who followed the blog post series that inspired this have been slavering to get our hands on a copy of the final book.  It's been updated with additional analysis, new commentary, and discussions with and by some of the all time greats.

This might be the most important sci-fi/fantasy book of our generation.

It's hard to overstate the impact of Jeffro Johnson's scholarship.  The discoveries he made when he delved into the forgotten past of genre literature and the connections he made between the style that was and the style that exists today have inspired a new generation of writers to pick up the pen and a new generation of editors to pick up a check-book.  And this new breed's rallying cry of, "Regress Harder!" would never have sounded from the rooftops of social media had Jeffro not wandered in from the tabletop gaming wilderness and proclaimed the ancient wisdom buried by the zealots of a new religion of nihilism and destruction.  They scorned and vilified him for parting the dark curtain of their ignorance, yet he balked not!  Nay!  He fought them off, and in so doing his resistance rallied new converts to the wisdom of the ancients.

I am the least of these new authors.  But from the depths of my toils, I have seen a resurgent beauty among the pages of the self-published that I thought lost to the ages.  Perhaps those rare echoes of stories from better days would have bloomed had Jeffro not this forbidden knowledge, but even then they would not have found such fertile soil in the minds of like minded men who accepted the gospel of Jeffro into their hearts and resolved to do better.  And to ignore the pleas of the ones who buried knowledge of the Old Masters.  And to heed the wisdom of Jeffro, who showed us all a better way.

The old magic runs deep, and it is just as effective today as ever.

Anyone who ever thrilled to the classic tales of Tarzan and John Carter and Northwest Smith and Conan and Elric and Jirel owes it to themselves to read this book the better to understand how they stand the test of time.  Anyone who ever enjoyed the pale shadows and imitations of those iconic characters owes it to themselves to read this book, the better to understand what magnificent works undergird the modern hero.  Anyone who ever wanted to write a book that carried the weight of a "Three Hearts and Three Lions," the romance of "A Princess of Mars," the poetic action of a "Red Nails", or the grim tragedy of "A Black God's Kiss" owed it to themselves this book the better to understand the import of all those elements and how they weave together to make a story leap from the page.

In short, if you're a fan of fantasy or science fiction, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

2016 Planetary Award Nomination

It's nomination time for the 2017 Panetary Awards.  (Hat tip to Cirsova for alerting me.)  There are only two categories:

Shorter story (under 40,000 words/160 paperback pages)

My nomination: Images of the Goddess, by Schuyler Hernstrom, published in Cirsova Magazine #2

Gift of the Ob-Men was a nice little regression to a more ideal mean, but Hernstrom blew my socks off with Images of the Goddess.  The quality of this story sneaks up on you, as it starts with an innocent monk finagling his way into a quest for a sacred text, but with each successive character Herrnstrom introduces, his writing skills become more and more apparent.  The overall structure and tone are reminiscent of a Jack Vance, but carry the light-hearted touch of Pohl Anderson at his lightest, giving this work an increasingly complex and dramatic tone that culminates in an ending at once satisfying and leaving the reader wanting more.  Even the gag reveal at the tale's climax is handled with a deftness that amuses the reader without spoiling the suspense and drama of the story.

Longer story (novels)

My nomination: The Invisible City, by Brian K. Lowe

Brian K. Lowe evokes all the best qualities of an Edgar Rice Burroughs in this sprawling 'man out of time' epic that carries its protagonist, a World War I Yankee, to a far flung world populated by everything from alien invaders to downtrodden races to talking and sentient gorillas and...wolverines?  That's probably as close a description as you can get for the feral savages Dixon meets in his journey to free a slave race, rescue his infatuation, and save a princess from a corrupt nobleman bent on world domination.  Lowe's writing crackles with an energy and style that one doesn't often find these days.  it is both lyrical and brutal, and Dixon's voice is as authentic for a man of the early twentieth century as it is refreshingly noble and heroic in these days of science-fiction populated by con-men, complainers, and small potato heroes fighting for vague notions of, "don't judge me, man!" rather than fighting for liberty and justice for all.