Black Gate

The august editor of Black Gate once asked me to remove two occurrences of the f-word in a story, because, he said, of wanting to be able to sell the magazine to high-school libraries. While it proved remarkably hard to find a substitute with the resonance I wanted, in this case referring to brief and utterly non-romantic sex, I didn’t mind the request.

In contrast, I did mind another editor’s demand to remove quite a bit of content from my novel Bear Daughter. “Just because it’s in ethnography,” she kept repeating, “doesn’t mean it should be in your book!” One of the things she was most bothered by were the references to post-partum bleeding, and the magical protection it briefly provided against the Giant Carnivorous Bird of the Underworld. I still for the life of me don’t understand her squeamishness–especially given a couple of violent and bloody scenes, one involving exploding frogs and mass dismemberment, that didn’t seem to faze her at all. In this instance I kept the (female reproductive) blood. …

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The spring issue of  Conjunctions, the literary magazine of Bard College, is called “Between and Betwixt: Impossible Realism,” described as “postfantasy fictions that begin with the premise that the unfamiliar or liminal really constitutes a solid ground on which to walk.”  This is a follow-up to its “New Wave Fabulist” issue back in 2003, which I reviewed for Locus.

I like the title of this new edition (makes more sense to me than new wavey fabulous), though I’m not quite sure what “postfantasy” means, other than that because it is published by academia, “post”-things are kind of popular, as are terms like “liminal.” You can see the table of contents here, with links to some stories available on-line by Elizabeth Hand, Ben Marcus, Jonathan Carroll and Jeff VanderMeer.

Something I’m putting on my reading list.

Joe Mallozzi’s online book club is reading Moorcock’s The Stealer of Souls this month (there’s already been some discussion here; Moorcock himself will appear as guest today, Wed. 6/10/09). So I thought I’d say a few words about the book… but which book is it, anyway?

That’s not a rhetorical question. Geeky details beyond the jump, cobbled together from various copyright pages, the wise words of Mr. Wikipedia, and other stuff I read somewhere once or heard someone say.

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One of the best books I’ve read about writing (and, full disclosure, I don’t read many) is Samuel Delany’s About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters & Five Interviews (Wesleyan). When I say “best,” I don’t mean I was nodding my head the whole way through going, “Right! Exactly!” Although in many places I was. Overall, I was in constant dialogue, sometimes offering additional examples or counterexamples, sometimes arguing vociferously, sometimes muttering, “WTF are you talking about?” Almost every page was good for a long train of thought.

The subject of one chapter is illustrated by its title, “After No Time at All the String on Which He Had Been Pulling and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate Pieces So Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped….” Writing, Delany argues, has at least two technical levels. The sentences of a story describe a progression of events and occurrences, and this is what he calls the “text.” These sentences, though, are simultaneously “gesturing, miming, and generally carrying on about a supportive countertext that gives the story we’re reading all its resonance, highlighting, and intensity.” …

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So a lot of people are on the edge of their seats because Apple is introducing a new iPhone model next week, and some people have fuzzy pictures supposedly leaked from China that purportedly show that the new model will have a matte black case. I can hardly contain my excitement. I’m cynical enough to think that Apple itself might be leaking the sneak peeks as a way to generate buzz about what sounds to me as just some feature improvements so people will want to stand in line for two weeks at the wireless store until the new model is available and they can belong to the technical elite for a couple of days or so.

All of which reminds me of a recent short story by Bruce Sterling, “Black Swan” in the March-April 2009 (Issue 221) of Interzone. The protagonist is an Italian blogger-journalist (sounds a little like Sterling himself in some respects) who gets insider tips on new technologies from a mysterious source who is so secretive he can’t be Googled. There’s a lot of techno-speak and the plot hinges on the notion that the 1980s (when, perhaps not coincidentally, Sterling and his fellow cyberpunks first started making names for themselves) was a critical historical point from which multiple realities branched. The story also features Nicholas Sarkozy (yes, the president of France) and his actress-singer wife (yes, that wife).

Fun stuff and much more interesting than the gloss on the iPhone.

Should magic in fantasy fiction have a freakish perplexing quality that stands outside of reason or should it be a kind of alternate science, a para-physics (or para-chemistry or whatever) for a universe with physical norms that differ from ours?

This has been on my mind lately, for various reasons. And (like most people) when I think of the poetics of fantasy, I think of 18th C. skeptical philosophers.

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