Internet Possibilities, Gene Wolfe, and The Fifth Head of Cerberus

Internet Possibilities, Gene Wolfe, and The Fifth Head of Cerberus

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The Fifth Head of CerberusReading The Fifth Head of Cerberus, I was struck by the way the book seemed eminently suited to the internet age. Never mind that it was written in the early 1970s. Like many of Gene Wolfe’s fictions, it’s a text whose nature is in harmony with the way the internet allows a text to be scrutinised; its depths, its meanings, its allusions — or at least some of them — can produce multiple readings, any of which can be valid, but which deepen the work as a whole the more of them you can think of and hold in your head at once. And can any one reader imagine as many different readings as a community of readers will produce?

The internet’s helped change the way an audience interacts with a story. Fan communities discuss and break down details on blogs and message boards; it’s most obvious with TV shows and serialised comics, where analysing past stories may help predict future plot developments, but it’s there also for stand-alone narratives like movies and novels. To an extent it was always there, whether in the form of literary criticism or of things like fanzines and APAs, but the internet’s made that degree of interaction and communal scrutiny far more common.

On one level it’s obvious why Wolfe’s writing thrives under this sort of analysis. A typical Wolfe story will seem simple on the surface, with a few odd gaps or apparent contradictions in the narrative; but, when investigated, those gaps or contradictions will seem to suggest a different way of reading the story, suggest that what’s actually happening is something larger and perhaps more disturbing than what appears to be going on, suggest perhaps that the story that’s actually being told is completely other than it appears at first glance to be. A lively critical community — and Wolfe has an active mailing list and a wiki dedicated to his work — can help unpack these subtleties, and clarify some of the possibilities confronting the reader. The Fifth Head of Cerberus, though, is an example of how a community of readers can be even more useful.

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BookPage Reviews The Desert of Souls

BookPage Reviews The Desert of Souls

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desert-of-souls2Howard Andrew Jones’ novel The Desert of Souls will be released Tuesday, Feb 15.

But the early reviews have begun to appear, and it’s obvious the excitement surrounding the book is already starting to build.  Here’s an excerpt from the review at BookPage:

In the space of the first two sentences… Howard Andrew Jones has captured the reader. By the end of the first page — and in my case, the first paragraph — the crisp, evocative imagery has gripped one’s attention… that grip only tightens in the pages that follow.

The Desert of Souls has been described as Sherlock Holmes meets the Arabian Nights meets Robert E. Howard. The comparisons are apt, and in the case of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous duo, overt. The martially adept Captain Asim partners with the erudite Dabir, a scholar whose principle weapons are his piercing intelligence and keen observations… Fantastic adventure ensues. Though this is only the first book, the tandem of Asim and Dabir shows great promise to be worthy of the “great fictional duos” mantle worn by the likes of Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Bilbo and Gandalf, and even Kirk and Spock.

The rich tapestry of 8th-century Baghdad recalls some of Scheherazade’s most engaging tales, and the supernatural horrors faced by Asim and Dabir during the course of their adventures could just as easily have menaced the likes of Conan, Solomon Kane or Bran Mak Morn…. At its heart, Jones’ work is a great read — a page-turner in its purest form. As such, The Desert of Souls is a powerful place — it can wreck sleeping schedules, cause chores to be neglected and, best of all, make one yearn for the next installment.

The complete review by Michael Burgin is available here. You can pre-order The Desert of Souls at Amazon.com and other fine bookshops.

Rich Horton Reviews The Bell at Sealey Head

Rich Horton Reviews The Bell at Sealey Head

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bell-at-sealey-headThe Bell at Sealey Head
Patricia A. McKillip
Ace (288 pp, $14.00, September 2009)
Reviewed by Rich Horton

I think of Patricia McKillip a little like I think of Van Morrison. Which is really not a terribly useful comparison, because I don’t mean it to apply to their respective styles… rather, I mean to say that McKillip is one of those writers who reliably issues a novel every year or two, always enjoyable work. In the same way I look for a new Van Morrison album every year or two, and they are always satisfying.

Now it can also be said the McKillip’s novels, as with Morrison’s latter period works, are fairly small scale affairs, and while they show a certain range and a willingness to try different things, they aren’t groundbreaking masterpieces, either. (But as McKillip had the Riddle Master books early in her career, and the utterly gorgeous Winter Rose somewhat later, so Morrison has Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece. Though here the comparison rather breaks down, because fine as The Riddle Master of Hed is, it’s no Astral Weeks. Which is hardly an insult – Astral Weeks being arguably the greatest album ever to come out of the pop/rock idiom.)

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Kicking Off Howard Andrew Jones Month

Kicking Off Howard Andrew Jones Month

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desertofsoulsIt’s the start of Howard Andrew Jones Month here at the Black Gate blog.

You have to do something pretty special to get a whole month, even if you’re Managing Editor of Black Gate. But publishing your first two novels — The Desert of Souls and  Plague of Shadows — from two different publishers, not to mention writing an essay for John Scalzi’s “Big Idea,” holding your first book signing, conducting a sweepstakes, getting picked up by the Science Fiction Book Club, publishing an original online story, being the subject of a multi-part interview, writing the Afterword for Robert E. Howard’s Sword Woman, appearing in Black Gate 15 (twice), being a guest blogger, and writing regular columns here at Black Gate, all in the same month… yeah. That will do it.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be telling you more about the incredible Howard Andrew Jones, starting with the breathless reviews for his first novel The Desert of Souls, a classic Arabian Nights fantasy and “a page-turner in its purest form” (BookPage), on sale Feb 15. It’s the best novel I’ve read in many years, and you’re not going to want to miss it.

Short Fiction Review #34a: Noam Chomsky and the Timebox

Short Fiction Review #34a: Noam Chomsky and the Timebox

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287“Noam Chomsky and the Time Box,” Douglas Lain’s lead story in the January-February Interzone, is a time travel yarn that  re-visits the time-honored trope of is it possible to change the past and, in attempting to do so,  how do you avoid inadvertently screwing it up worse than it already is (see Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” for the classic take on this “butterfly effect”)?  Or, is it the case that time is an immutable continuum in which the very fact that you’ve traveled back in time (and thus has already happened in the past relative to your present timeline) something that has already occurred in determining the “future”?  Another way of putting this is, if you were given the chance to go back in time to kill Hitler, could you?  And, if you could, as bad as evil as Hitler was, might it cause something even worse?

These days, with physicists with straight faces contemplating notions of a multiverse, there’s speculation that rather than a linear topology, any particular point in time is a potential branch portal to potentially infinite outcomes in co-existing alternative universes.

Lain puts a nice spin on this, with a narrator who is a geeky tech reviewer blogging about his experiences with the “Time Box 3.0” personal time travel machine that warns “plainly and in 36 point Helvetica: TIME BOX IS PARADOX FREE. DO NOT ALTER FACTORY SETTINGS.”   Needless to say, that’s the same as an open invitation to any hacker to do exactly that.

The story, however, is less concerned with the philosophical and moral conundrums of  time travel and attempts to change the future (i.e., the present we live in) than it is a satire of both the 1970s (“…I could hear Carole King’s every breath as she crooned about how it was too late and how we should just stop trying. Listening to music from the 1970s was probably a mistake.”) and the second decade of the 21st century (“I’m nearly forty and yet I was dressed like a teenager from 2012. I was wearing loose blue jeans that hung down below my wast exposing tartan boxer shorts…[eyeglasses] made of transparent plastic, and filled with red ink. Cool, not?”).  Our hero acknowledges as axiomatic that  “you can’t kill Hitler,” but thinks perhaps very small alterations at the “seams of time” (i.e., where dimensions of multiple branching possibilities might meet) could avoid an ecological catastrophe in 2012. Consequently, he decides to try to connect the paths of Noam Chomsky, the linguist who conceived the notion of a “universal grammar” inherent in human consciousness and radical left wing philosopher (who, by  the way, also makes a fictional appearance in Lydia Millet’s “Chomsky, Rodents”) and psychedelic mystic Terrence McKenna back in 1971 when both are taking the same flight from Chicago O’Hare Airport as a means to enlist this unlikely pair towards subtly reshaping the future.  Speaking to McKenna and his girlfriend while they are smoking hash in the airport parking lot, the narrator relates:

I said that I’d come back to save the world…I wanted them to see how far away they were from the root of their problems.  They could trip out as much as they wanted, but the multicolored chaos they brought back would either be bleached out with Clorox or slapped on the Clorox bottle as part of a rebranding campaign.

p. 9

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part Four – “The White Peacock”

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part Four – “The White Peacock”

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fu-manchu-and-company“The White Peacock” was the fourth installment of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu and Company. The story was first published in Collier’s on March 6, 1915 and was later expanded to comprise Chapters 11-13 of the second Fu-Manchu novel, The Devil Doctor first published in the UK in 1916 by Cassell and in the US by McBride & Nast under the variant title, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

The story gets underway with Dr. Petrie scouring the criminal district of Whitechapel Road with its Jewish hawkers and crowds of Poles, Russians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, and Chinese immigrants. Petrie notes that he never sees a face wholly sane or healthy among these underworld denizens he terms “a melting pot of the world’s outcasts.”

resurrection-de-fu-manchuThe reader quickly learns that Nayland Smith disappeared the previous night having set out in search of Shen Yan in Limehouse. Inspector Weymouth and his men are searching frantically for some sign of Smith. Consequently, Petrie’s paranoia (and xenophobia) is increased dramatically with the disappearance of the friend he holds above all others and who personifies the British Empire and Petrie’s sense of stability.

Petrie meets up with Inspector Ryman at the police station and learns they have already begun dragging the Thames in search of Smith. Petrie learns that Weymouth raided Shen Yan’s when Smith failed to emerge after entering the gambling house. No sign of either Smith or Burke, the American detective that accompanied him or of Shen Yan has been found.

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“A Paladin, a Fighter, or a Thief!” S.J. Tucker Gives Away a Freebie

“A Paladin, a Fighter, or a Thief!” S.J. Tucker Gives Away a Freebie

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Photo by Kyle Cassidy
Photo by Kyle Cassidy

“Come bards from the north, elves off the moor
Gamers off work get down to the store
Scratch your neighbor what’s underneath?
A wizard or a cleric or a thief!”

Musician S.J. Tucker (of whom I have spoken at length) has released a FREE SONG on her website, entitled “D&D.”

And it has orcs and elves and paladins in it (oh, my!), ’cause she’s just that cool.

She writes in her LiveJournal:

This is my first time writing and releasing a parody: “D&D” is sung to the tune of “The Napoli” by Mr. Steve Knightley of British folk group Show of Hands. …Definitely give a listen to the original as well as to my parody version–it’s every bit as cool for different reasons, being about a (relatively recent) shipwreck…there’s piracy.

…This is very exciting for me, guys, not least because I have proof now that my years of filling out character sheets has, in fact, paid off…or it will, if you help me spread the word. Please download the song and share the link with others–encourage friends to explore my other available downloads as well; you know how it works, every little bit makes a difference!

Check it out! It’s way fun. And I’ve never even played Dungeons and Dragons in my life!

Brian Jacques (1939 – 2011)

Brian Jacques (1939 – 2011)

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redwallBrian Jacques, author of the Redwall series of anthropomorphic fantasy novels and the Castaways of the Flying Dutchman books, and one of the most popular fantasy authors of the last several decades, died on Monday, February 5, 2011 in Liverpool. He was 71.

I first discovered Jacques in 1988. I had just left Canada to finish my Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, and the covers of his first two novels — Redwall (1986) and Mossflower (1988) — captivated me the moment I laid eyes on them in a campus bookstore. I even had a poster of Jacques’ fifth novel Salamandastron in my dorm room. His charming fantasies set in and around Redwall Abbey, a place of refuge in a dangerous world, featured valiant creatures and daring adventure.

But it wasn’t until I was running my first website a decade later that I discovered what a phenomenon Jacques had become. I was editor of SF Site, and talking to Bettina Seifert, publicist at Penguin/Philomel. Jacques was now appearing in hardcover, and she offered to send me all his books for review.

Tempting, but that seemed like a few too many titles to commit to. So instead I offered Bettina a compromise: why not just send me what was still in print?

She agreed — a little too quickly — and a week later a box of hardcovers landed on my doorstep. A very large and very heavy box.

mossflowerInside were Brian Jacques’ novels. All of them. Every single book he had ever written. They were all still in print, in beautiful hardcover editions.

Here’s what I wrote in my rather sheepish article in 1998:

Now, maybe this doesn’t mean a lot to you. But perhaps you’re not an established science fiction author who just watched your Hugo Award-winning novel from the early nineties go out of print. Or a mid-list author finishing a three-volume series, already getting letters from frustrated readers who can’t find the first two volumes. Unless your name is Stephen King or Robert Jordan, you get used to having your work go out of print. And no matter who you are, you don’t get used to having your small print-run paperbacks returned to print in hardcover by a major publisher, ten years after they first appeared.

Except for Brian Jacques, apparently.

Jacques enjoyed this popularity until his death.  He wrote 22 novels of Redwall, including last year’s The Sable Quean and the upcoming The Rogue Crew (scheduled for release on May 3, 2011).

He also published three novels in the Castaways of the Flying Dutchman series, as well as two short story collections and several books for younger children.

Jacques had a vivid imagination and a unique storytelling gift, and I’m grateful he shared them with us.

A Review of Warbreaker

A Review of Warbreaker

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warbreakerWarbreaker
Brandon Sanderson
Tor (688 pp, $7.99, June 2009 – March 2010 mass market edition)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

In the stand-alone fantasy novel, Warbreaker, Brandon Sanderson, best known for his Mistborn trilogy, gives us a story in which the goal is not to fight and win a war, but to prevent one from occurring. The rival kingdoms of Idris and Hallandren are on the brink of war based on a centuries-old dispute, and at the novel’s start it seems the only way for Idris to prolong the uneasy peace between the two realms is to fulfill the letter of a treaty signed at the close of the last war. The treaty stipulates that when the Idrian King’s oldest daughter reaches her majority, the King will provide a daughter in marriage to the ruler of the Hallandren – a fantastically powerful immortal monarch known as the God-King.

The catch is, the treaty doesn’t specify exactly which daughter the Idrian king had to provide in marriage.

Vivenna, the King’s eldest and most-favored daughter, had been trained from birth to be a wife to the God-King. But the Idrian King cannot bear to part with her, and sends instead his youngest daughter Siri, a girl as free-spirited and undisciplined as her older sister is serious and sober-minded. Thus the events of Warbreaker are set in motion as the ‘wrong’ daughter is sent from her mountain home to the fabulous Hallandren capital of T’Telir, with her older sister – shocked by her father’s actions and concerned for both Siri and the fate of their two kingdoms – running away to follow close on her sister’s heels. Once in T’Telir, both sisters get embroiled in plots and counter-plots that may mean a disastrous war for their homeland.

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First Jetpacks. And Now a Robot Orders a Scone

First Jetpacks. And Now a Robot Orders a Scone

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anybots22It’s been a good week for the future.

Just a few days after we announced the tardy arrival of jetpacks (finally!) here in the 21st Century, a robot was spotted ordering a scone in Mountain View, California.

Yes, a real robot. This future overlord of humanity was manufactured by Anybots, Inc. (also of Mountain View), and was caught on camera purchasing a pastry at Red Rock Coffee by Aaron96121, who posted this amusing 5-minute video on YouTube.

Anybot specializes in “telepresence robots,” that are controlled remotely and allow people to attend meetings around the world. They are mounted on a motorized base and can be controlled from any computer through a web browser.  They also have built-in video and voice capability, and reportedly retail for $15,000 – $30,000.

They’re also decent tippers, if the video can be believed. This particular robot was fetching a scone for its current master, an Anybot engineer, doubtless before returning to its normal routine of plotting the eventual overthrow of mankind.

As one astute commenter at YouTube posted, “I for one welcome our scone-eating robot overlords!”  Amen to that, brother. As long as I get a jetpack.