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Four Thousand Year Old Bread from Ancient Egypt

Four Thousand Year Old Bread from Ancient Egypt

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Here’s something you don’t see every day, some preserved bread from the Eleventh Dynasty (2134-1991 BC) from Thebes. I snapped this photo in the Cairo Museum during a recent writing retreat.

… and I’m afraid that’s all I have for you this week from Egypt. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m working as a ghostwriter and I have a heinous deadline for a novel due this Friday. I’m also finishing up a short nonfiction booklet and my own novel, the one I went to Cairo to write in the first place. A minor character knocked the plot sideways and added 10,000 words to it.

So if I don’t want to be eating this bread next week, I have to get back to writing. But here are some more pics because I love you.

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Black Gate Interviews Egyptian Science Fiction Author Mohammad Rabie

Black Gate Interviews Egyptian Science Fiction Author Mohammad Rabie

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51JYgQ68kPL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_One pleasant stop on my recent trip to Cairo was the American University’s bookshop near Tahrir Square. It’s a treasure trove of books on Egyptology and Egyptian fiction in translation. Among the titles I picked up was the dystopian novel Otared by Mohammad Rabie.

This novel, originally published in Arabic in 2014 and published in English in 2016 by Hoopoe, the fiction imprint of the American University of Cairo, is a grim dystopian tale of Cairo in 2025.

After several botched revolutions in which the people repeatedly fail to effect real social and political change, Egypt is invaded by a foreign power. The army crumples, most of the police collude with the occupiers, and the general public doesn’t seem to care. A small rebel group decides to take back their nation, and one of its agents is former police officer turned sniper, Otared. The rebels basically become terrorists, deciding the only way to get the people to rise up is to make life under the occupation intolerable, which means killing as many innocent civilians as possible.

The world Rabie paints reminds me very much of the insane landscape in Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things, with its violence, its cruelty, and its bizarre customs (in Otared almost everyone wears a mask) that begin to make sense once you learn more about the world. Throw in a nightmarish disease that affects only children, plus a national death wish, and you have a grim but compelling read. No science fiction novel has gut punched me this hard for a long, long time.

Mohammad Rabie is an emerging force in Egyptian letters. Born in 1978, he graduated from the Faculty of Engineering in 2002. His first novel, Amber Planet, was released in 2010 and won first prize in the Emerging Writers category of the Sawiris Cultural Award Competition in 2011. His second novel, Year of the Dragon, came out in 2012. Otared was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2016 (popularly referred to as the Arabic Booker). Curious to learn more, I sat down with Rabie (OK, I shot him an email) to speak with him about his writing.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Getting to Know Your Omniscient Narrator

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Getting to Know Your Omniscient Narrator

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sky god

With the exception of “Folksy Narrators” we often think of omniscient narrators as omnipotent sky-gods who are so vast and powerful that they’re unknowable entities. But looking at them that way hides away a helpful tool in crafting and revising our fiction.

(My blog on folksy narrators is here.)

On Friday, I was leading a seminar for Myth-Ink, the Columbia College genre writing student group, on how to do public readings. They were gearing up for when they’ll be the featured readers at my Gumbo Fiction Salon reading series next week. One of the young women was practicing the first two pages of a story about dragons. Her first read-through was fairly lifeless. She didn’t have confidence in her own vocal skills, and it didn’t sound like she had confidence in the story. We had already gone over many of the basic tips, so I took another tack. I asked her some questions.

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Derek’s Ridiculously Late 2016 Year in Review, or Book Deal!

Derek’s Ridiculously Late 2016 Year in Review, or Book Deal!

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The Quantum Magician - Cover 2, May 2017
Cover art! By Justin Adams

Black Gate readers were very supportive when I reported the start of my 2-year experiment as a more present parent and as a full-time writer in June of 2015. I am happy to announce some of the fruits of that experiment 23 months into this leave from work.

First of all, my son is now 12 years old and is a wonderful human being. He cares about others, listens more, has more self-possession and seems successful enough socially that girls keep calling him. I can of course, only take half the credit for that, but even if the only thing I accomplished in the last 23 months was my contribution to raising a responsible person, I would have called it a very successful sabbatical.

However, while he was at school, I went to the library to write or edit, and some good things have come of that too.

Last night, at 7:30pm, 6 May, while I was reading at Ad Astra, Toronto’s premier fan convention, a very dedicated but surely sleepy-eyed gentleman in Oxford was posting the press release announcing my first novel! The world English rights to the The Quantum Magician sold to Solaris Books in the UK in November, via my excellent agent Kim-Mei Kirtland, but the news has been under embargo for the last six months while cover art was being developed by the extremely talented Justin Adams.

The Quantum Magician is an sf heist story, basically Ocean’s Eleven meets Guardians of the Galaxy. I took many of the elements of hard sf and aliens that are found in my short fiction pieces “The Way of the Needle,” “Persephone Descending,” “Pollen From a Future Harvest,” “Schools of Clay” and “Flight From the Ages” and found something I’m really excited about: stealing things.

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Breaking Into Comics as a Writer: Mucho Opportunities

Breaking Into Comics as a Writer: Mucho Opportunities

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Fantastic Four Ego the Living Planet-small

I knew I wanted to be a writer basically when I learned how to write in English. That might have been as young as grade two, but certainly by grade three (I was in immersion school so we learned to read and write in French first).

My mother gave me my first four comic books in the summer between grades four and five, and I remember making plans with my best friend Eric (who liked to draw) about us making comics together.

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Worldbuilding a “Star Punk” Future

Worldbuilding a “Star Punk” Future

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Star Punk?
Star Punk?

You know the genre I mean. It’s the one that takes in Firefly, Dumarest… it’s Space Opera’s Sword & Sorcery. It’s Han Solo: The Early Years or Indiana Jones does Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, or Almost Any Clint Eastwood Movie Ever But In Space. It’s what Traveller RPG supports in all its incarnations. 

It doesn’t have a name, so I’ve taken to calling it “Star Punk.” Here’s how I  tried to define it in my guest post for uber SF meister Charles Stross:

They are all set in spacefaring civilizations where technology has somehow — with an authorial handwave — and my handwave is particularly cunning and internally consistent — failed to eliminate the human element, where you still need a human to pull the trigger or pilot the scout ship, and where nanotechnology, 3D-printing and vertical farms have neither eliminated trade, nor ushered in a crime-free post scarcity society. They all involve individuals or companions — adventurers, traders, investigators, contractors — pursuing goals of only local significance.

In other words, they could all be transcripts of particularly good Traveller campaigns.

Writing Star Punk, as I discovered when I started planning The Wreck of the Marissa, poses certain worldbuilding problems. (And, yes in this case, I really mean “universe building” but worldbuilding now has a specific technical meaning for writers and other creatives.)

The issue is this bit: where you still need a human to pull the trigger or pilot the scout ship, and where nanotechnology, 3D-printing and vertical farms have neither eliminated trade, nor ushered in a crime-free post scarcity society.

In a nutshell, any realistic starfaring future is unlikely to be like this. In fact, our technology is already breaking the Star Punk future.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The 9 Aspects of Story Promise

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The 9 Aspects of Story Promise

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trainspotting-small

At a novel writing boot camp I attended many years ago, at our first gathering, opening scenes written by each participant were read anonymously. One has stayed in my mind. It was a humorous gross-out scene that was literally bathroom humor. It was crass, and nearly everyone found it hilarious. I was one of the few who didn’t love it. At the time, I couldn’t explain what bothered me about it, beyond the fact that I don’t care for gross-out stuff or bathroom/body-fluids humor. Though I couldn’t find the words at the time, it wasn’t the indelicate content that was ultimately bothering me.

Only years later did I have the vocabulary and technical understanding I needed to put it into words: I doubted that it was an accurate Story Promise. Was the rest of the book going to be that scatological? Could the author maintain that high-energy gross-out humor for an entire novel? (Certainly, there are authors who can, but it’s a rare gift.)

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A Rose By Any Other Name . . .

A Rose By Any Other Name . . .

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AlicePeople can have all kinds of reasons to use another name, or to change their names permanently, for that matter. There are personal or family reasons, like marriage or adoption. There are political or social reasons, like marking a religious conversion, or immigration – though that last’s not as common now as it was in the early to mid-20th century. My own father, for example, changed his name to Malan because British authorities – to whom he had to report regularly as a displaced person after WWII – suggested that he try to sound less Polish since he was planning to stay in England. He chose a name much in the news at that time, and that’s why my brother and I are often asked if we’re South African.

Setting these examples aside, however, actors and writers are probably the next large group of people who frequently change their names – or at least use other names as a pseudonym, or nom-de-plume, if you prefer. (A friend of mine once referred to her real name as her nom-de-nom.)

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Multiple Personalities of Omniscient 3rd Person: Spotlight on “Folksy Narrator/ Storyteller”

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Multiple Personalities of Omniscient 3rd Person: Spotlight on “Folksy Narrator/ Storyteller”

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Discworld-small

This is part 10 in the Choosing Your Narrative Point of View Series.

This style is most often seen, within the fantasy genre, in fairytales, fables, and humorous fantasy by authors such as Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and others.

It is not unusual to see this technique used in other genres and subgenres, as well. It is characterized by a distinctive, often folksy, voice that clearly establishes an additional “character” in the narrative, who usually does not take part in the action. It is often, quite literally, a disembodied voice. This is true in Pratchett’s Discworld.

A good example of this is the oft-used introduction to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. The version shown here is from the opening paragraphs of The Fifth Elephant.

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Dark Dreams in Red Dirt

Dark Dreams in Red Dirt

Chicken Fried Cthulhu

It started with Arkham House, of course. The original Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos anthology strove to collect, and maybe even codify, the various stories written by Lovecraft’s contemporaries during their heyday; Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and others. That was back in 1969, right in the middle of the epic fantasy and sword and sorcery boom. Other anthologies of a similar nature followed, attempting to trace antecedents and well as descendants.

When the horror boom swept in during the 1980s, authors like Ramsey Campbell and Robert Bloch were releasing collections of nothing but their mythos stories. As the popularity and notoriety of Lovecraft’s works increased, smaller publishing efforts like Chaosium’s early collections themed around a particular Great Old One — The Azathoth Cycle, say — sold briskly.

Then things got a little nutty. Sherlock Holmes vs Cthulhu. Hardboiled Cthulhu, Frontier Cthulhu, High Seas Cthulhu, Cthulhu in Space, Cthulhu in the Future, and even erotic Cthulhu Mythos fiction (you’re on your own, there, pardner). There’s a List Challenge you can take, if you are so inclined, to see how many of these books you own or have read. I’d be very surprised if you have read them all. I’m into this stuff, and there’s a bunch I haven’t even heard of.

So, with all that being a given, why on Earth are we trying to publish Chicken Fried Cthulhu? What’s so special about the Southwest, anyway? It’s a great question. Let me give you the short answer: Joe R. Lansdale.

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