Clockwork Angels I. Wonders in the World
On June 12 the new album by veteran Canadian power-prog-rock trio Rush was released. I went out in pouring rain to buy a copy because I had to have it that day. In reading what follows (the first of three posts, with part two here, and part three here), understand that I’m a fan, and that this has been my favourite rock group for over two decades. But then there are few casual Rush fans: bassist and singer Geddy Lee’s said that he thinks of Rush as the biggest cult band in the world.
Clockwork Angels, the group’s 19th full-length studio release, is worth talking about here because it’s a picaresque steampunk concept album. It is, technically, the first concept album of the band’s career; they’ve written 20-minute songs before, and they’ve had albums that examined one theme through different angles (like Hold Your Fire, in which each song examined a different kind of emotion, or Roll the Bones, which looked at various aspects of chance), but never one that told a single story as they do here. Drummer and lyricist Neil Peart has spoken about how he wanted this album to represent his highest achievement as a writer and musician; he set himself a considerable challenge, and I think pulled it off. The record eschews narration and plot-oriented lyrics, instead including brief sections of narrative prose in the album booklet while the songs present emotional high points and sometimes move the plot forward. It’s oddly like listening to the songs from a musical, with an accompanying plot synopsis. A full treatment of the story will be coming in September, with the publication of a novelisation of the album by Kevin J. Anderson.
I’ve been writing a fair bit lately about Canadian fantastika, and I’ll be doing so again next week, looking at a trio of grand masters who’ve just released what may be one of the most accomplished works of their career. But there’s been a bit of news lately about another notorious Canadian fantasy epic, so I want to talk about that first.
Fall From Earth
Triptych
Westlake Soul is twenty-three, a good-natured surfing champion with a loving family, loving girlfriend, and loving dog. Then a terrible fall leaves him in a vegetative state, unresponsive to the outside world — but, locked in his own mind, he’s a superintelligent superhero, astrally projecting to the moon and battling the mysterious villain named Doctor Quietus. Westlake can’t affect the outside world; can’t even twitch a finger, can only sit and be cared for by his mother and father and little sister, and the nurses they hire. But he can see what goes on around him, and react, if only internally.
When the Hero Comes Home is an anthology from Dragon Moon Press co-edited by Garbielle Harbowy and Ed Greenwood. It’s a surprisingly thin book, given that it holds nineten stories by twenty writers (including two Black Gate contributors, Peadar Ó Guilín and Jay Lake, in collaboration with Shannon Page). Its theme is exactly what it says: the homecoming. The point where the story usually ends. I have some reservations about how the book turned out, but the idea’s intriguing: what do you find when you make it back to where you began? Has the place changed, or have you?
Last weekend I went to Toronto to attend the 
In mid-March the news emerged that writer Alan Garner was returning to the storylines of his first two books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath. His next novel, Boneland, to be published this August, will complete the trilogy he’d always envisioned. Garner 
Sometimes, you need to grow as a reader to be able to appreciate a certain book. In 1996, I bought a paperback fantasy novel called The Memory Palace, by Gill Alderman. It was a whim, I suppose; maybe something about the cover appealed to me, or more likely something in the synopsis on the back, promising a story about a fantasy writer who gets lost in his fictions and confronts an archmage of his own making. Whatever the reason, I started in on it, swiftly lost interest, set it aside, and only came back to it sixteen years later.