Book Review Up: Mind Over Ship by David Marusek
Well, another book review done and up! You all should check out Mind Over Ship for sure. High-concept science fiction with a kick. Here’s my review. And that is all!
Interview w/ David Bryan Russell
David Bryan Russell is the author of Enchanters, which I reviewed here. Appreciation goes to Mr. Russell for agreeing to do this interview. Here goes: First, can you tell us a bit about yourself? What drew you into authorhood, and why fantasy? I refer to myself as a ‘professional dreamer.’ My creative journey began in early childhood, inspired by adventure stories and mythology, especially the Norse sagas. I began writing around age 12, and concurrently started drawing about the same time. The visual arts eventually dominated my creative output, but my interest in literature never flagged. Regarding my preference for fantasy…well, the colourful Norse sagas lit the initial fire, followed by the body of fantasy literature that fortuitously began to re-emerge in the popular press during my late adolescence. In any case, I have always found the genre full of depth and meaning. In a sense, fantasy constantly seeks to re-imagine the spirit world, and in the process can provide insights to humankind’s most perplexing issues. What have been some of your influences as a writer? I’ve mentioned mythology and fantasy literature, to which I should add the imaginative output of such diverse artists as Caravaggio, Rubens, Jack Kirby, Frank Frazetta, NC Wyeth, Gaugin, Lautrec, and select Pre-Raphaelites, all of whom were excellent visual storytellers. What are some of your favorite books, whether fantasy or otherwise? Hmm…..an abbreviated list must include The Three Musketeers, Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield, Wind in the Willows, The Time Machine, Treasure Island, Walden, Women in Love, The Jungle, The Grapes of Wrath, 1984, Invisible Man: A Novel, Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, The Martian Chronicles, and the following books by Jack Vance: Tschai, Demon Princes, Durdane, and Dying Earth series, and Emphyrio. Could you tell everyone a bit about your novel, Enchanters? It’s a contemporary fantasy adventure, powered by love. I enjoyed writing the book, which allowed me to distill a number of concepts about magic, and of humanity’s relationship to the natural world. It’s clear from Enchanters that you have a vested interest in the state of the environment. True. This forms part of the motivation of the principal character, but Enchanters is no environmental polemic. What drew you to translate this into the world of fiction? It seemed logical for the character, and the hidden world of magic to which she belongs. Enchanters is a curious novel that tackles the issue of human pollution from a unique angle. What prompted you to create this side world, where the Enchanters exist as a sort of oppositional force to humanity’s lesser qualities? I would not view the Enchanters as oppositional; in fact, it’s clearly stated that they were once bound quite closely to humans. However, circumstances altered over time. In essence, Enchanters charts the personal journey of Glys Erlendsen into a heretofore unseen world, one in which the goals of humanity and those of the Enchanters are often at odds. How she deals with these dilemmas provides the basis of the adventure. Set in Norway , Enchanters seems relatively steeped in regional folklore. What about the country’s mythology that so fascinates you? As I mentioned, Norwegian cosmology stirred my imagination from an early age. The country is almost unique in Europe, in the sense that it never accepted the Christian concept of duality–that is, the existence of an absolute right, and absolute wrong. In simplistic Christian terms, god on one hand, the devil on the other. This flexible thinking–despite the brutal aspects of the Viking period–allowed for the eventual development of a rather egalitarian culture. Most importantly, however, Norwegians successfully held onto their beliefs in the spirit world, and to this day recognise the presence of fairies, elves, trolls, and other magical beings. In part because of these beliefs, Norwegians have an intense reverence for the natural world. I observed these singular traits during my first visit to Norway in 2002, and thereafter decided to set the Enchanters storyline in the country. Do you see fantasy as a great genre through which to examine the human condition as you have in Enchanters? Beyond question it is a supple medium for the exploration of the deeper issues of life. Alas, few authors recognise this potential. What drew you to publish with a small press, and how has your experience been with them? As you have observed, Enchanters is a unique novel. I felt that a small press would be more likely to recognise its potential than a globalist publishing house, where editorial departments routinely favour non-original (and non-controversial) material. What are some advantages, in your opinion, of being published with a small press? Personal attention, editorial and marketing support, and (most importantly) the gift of time to develop one’s ideas. What other projects do you have coming up, and can you tell us a little about them? The sequel to Enchanters, entitled A Shining Realm, will be released in Fall 2010. I am also currently outlining a new series of fantasy novels set in a fully-imagined world. What unusual piece of writing advice would you give to budding writers? Ignore contemporary trends, and develop the most original work you can manage. Be mindful that most writers are seeking to emulate film and television writing, which is inappropriate for the development of potent fantasy literature. Study the great books of the past, and of the present, especially those outside of one’s preferred genres. Now for a random question: If you could be the King (or Queen) of any country during medieval times, which country and why? I presume you refer to the European medieval period…It’s an odd question, since the era was miserable for rich and poor alike, primarily due to the cultural death grip of the region’s vile religious institutions. In any case, I myself am quite egalitarian, and would thus never consider occupying a position of life and death over my fellow human beings. And there you go!
Punking Everything in SF/F (Part Two): The Past (Punk)
Wouldn’t it be amazing if the strange words and concepts we have so gloriously accepted into pop culture were actually understood as the culturally/socially complex entities that they actually are by the same people that pass around the suffix “punk” like a beer keg at a frat party? Indeed, it would, but the curious thing about modern (or perhaps postmodern) culture is that much of the youth, the very ones who so readily claim to exist within the subcultural group called “punk,” who rage against the machine of authority without realizing that their vocal and visual forms of resistance (and even auditory through the likes of Green Day and their ilk) are nothing more than a continuation of consumer culture at its worst/best, have no idea, and no intention of learning, what the word “punk” actually means, or what its placement in human history entails for their strangely lucrative subculture. If that seems like a mouthful, it is, because the very nature of consumer culture is itself a conundrum of modern and postmodern ideals, clashing and wandering through a wasteland of personally useless nonsense, filled with people who are either dolefully aware of the pointless nature of their consumption of things or unwittingly a part of it. This is not to say that consumer culture, or, perhaps we should use its proper name, capitalism (late or otherwise), is necessarily bad. Rather, this paragraph begins to illustrate the reality of our existence in America and other Western capitalist democracies (or fascist states, where such things exist) and how pervasive capitalism is in our lives, so much so that many of us fail to notice its pull and tug on our pocket books. Teenagers today, for all their eccentricities and attempts at genuine resistance, have simply adopted a lifestyle or perception of the world that has been just as commodified as any other movement, ideal, and substance we have thus far conceived. Where am I getting at with this? The very nature of “punk,” as I conceive it, is that it cannot ever truly reject the dominant culture, capitalism, not if it, as a movement, expects to survive. Here you might ask: what is “punk?” You would be right to ask that. Punk originated, somewhat, in music in the 1970s or so, as many have claimed. True punk, the real, commodity-rejecting monstrosity that emerged quite literally as a counter-culture rather than a subculture, was largely a response to globalization, urbanity, and post-industrialization, an inherently commodity-rich point in our history that readily acknowledged the corporation as almost human. Curious as that may sound, it seems to make sense, because as capitalism began to spread across the globe, largely not by its own steam, but through the hands of those with the guns, so to speak, it gave new powers to the corporate entity to represent itself as a thing that could “speak for itself.” More curiosity abounds here as to why it took hardly any time at all for something inhuman in nature, almost robotic, to assume the vocalized subaltern without having had to shed blood in the process; well, at least not the corporate blood, but certainly the blood of pre-nationalist societies consumed into globalizing nationhood. Punk, to try to simplify here for brevity, invented for us the teenager as a market niche. Now, once relegated to the status of children, the budding adult had a place of his or her own, a place of music, bad or good, you pick, and protest against the “man.” How silly, then, that punk itself vied to create its own subculture as a consumer aggregate, with no real interest in affecting change at all. In its non-conformist nature, punk literally created a subculture that would eventually have its own marketplace, its own capitalist structures a la Hot Topic and other such gothic-ally obsessed teen hideouts. And teenagers bought into it, hook, line, and sinker, not necessarily through some malicious attempt on the part of punk itself, but because punk provided a place for them to go, where their voices could be heard by someone, even if that someone could do nothing to alleviate the perceived issues of society itself. Punk was at the cusp of subcultural America/Britain/Australia. In some ways, it was one of the first to take off, to become like a living thing embodied in the mind. It rejected the establishment (monarchy, democracy as fascism, etc.) and sought to ironically being non-conformist by conforming to non-conformism itself (and that might take a moment to contemplate, because punk’s survival relied quite literally on non-conformism to be a form of conformist thought, without reservation). You might view all this as a push against the nation state, a sort of anti-intellectual, anti-authoritarian monster with a chip on its shoulder. It is, because punk’s response to the world of the 70s and 80s relied almost exclusively on a resistance to the hierarchical structures of the nation, a rejection of what the nation state was doing or had done, and where it would go in the future. Punk style is forgettable, but its history, its move from a seemingly obscure subculture to universally recognized and commidified almost-dominant-culture, is not. It sat at the dawn of the invention of the goth, the black honky-tonk, the Christian rock movement, the punk music we are familiar with today, and various other movements that otherwise might not have existed if punk itself had not seized capitalism by its throat and wrangled the life out of it until the two could finally agree that they could work together. Too bad that punk got the raw end of the deal, because, after all, for something so dead set against capitalism and the nation state, punk has easily assimilated, if not without the occasional angered retort, into the dominant structures of nationhood and commidification. That is what punk is. It is not Green Day, for the punk music scene is nothing more than a dilution of what used to be legitimate attempts as subversion
Punking Everything in SF/F (Part One): The Present
Cyberpunk, steampunk, biopunk, and now greenpunk? When will it end? Fans have been punkifying science fiction and fantasy for decades, and it doesn’t seem like it will let up any time soon. With each passing moment, new ideas spring into the collective consciousness of SF/F fans, who, in turn, impart their selective, subgenre-crazed minds on all of us by bringing to task the next stage in science fiction and fantasy’s evolutionary ride. But are we getting ahead of ourselves, and is this constant segmentation of SF/F pointless or, at least, premature? What flaws are inherent in the frequent punking of speculative fiction? Publishers have yet to grasp onto the punk genres, and neither have bookstores, independent or otherwise. Subgenres have little use outside of the relatively isolated, and sometimes rabid, fanbase. Realistically speaking, it would be impossible to incorporate even a pinch of the subgenres in existence today into bookstores, with logical exceptions to the Internet–after all, Amazon has been kind enough to narrow the science fiction and fantasy sections into nebulous, cross-pollinating subcategories. So what is our obsession with subgenres (and sub-subgenres)? Are we inherently segmentative, meaning do we have an innate desire to categorize? That might be true, because it is without hindrance that we can see the makings of our own segmentarian nature in the desire to isolate ourselves. But here we might consider the distance of prejudice, which exists only insofar as personal grudges permeate the subgenre sphere. How many of those sub-subgenres are created simply to get rid of an unwanted swath of books? None? Perhaps we can only see prejudice as it exists in the academic, the purist academic who longs for the demise of science fiction and fantasy with an unhindered gaze. You can see the joy in his eyes when he looks down upon those who so willingly accept Margaret Atwood into their ranks. Or maybe he is a she, and the bitterness is just as strong. Who knows? What we do know is that punk, in its newest, and historically disjointed (disconnected) form is science fiction and fantasy fans’ greatest tool. Isolate the good, the bad, and the ugly, put them in the little jar of context-less wonder, and consume them as readily as a meat pie (or a veggie pie, should your personal inclination be to the earth). Punk is dead, perhaps, but alive too, reborn as a suffix with a mysterious past. And all this, the thoughts presented here, the continued arrival of punkified sub-subgenres, makes me wonder if we need to educate ourselves as to what punk actually is, or was, to properly evaluate whether our suffix-obsessive punking nature is well served in a genre so clearly complicated by its weaving in and out of popular culture and literature itself. Yes, that is where we should go next. To the punk-mobile. Let’s take our Peabody-and-Sherman-style journey into the past to unravel the not-so-distant history of a forgotten genre (forgotten, at least, by those not steeped in the rather confusing realms of cultural criticism and literary theory). Expect that post soon. For now, consider, if you will, the nature of subgenres, the drive to create them, and the question of whether doing is has a purpose other than for our amusement. And if you have thoughts, share them here, because your thoughts are of interest to me. I must consume them, like candy. Creepiness aside, comments are welcome. ————————————— Continue to Part Two (Punk), Part Three (Cyberpunk A), Part Four (Cyberpunk B), and Part Five (Cyberpunk C).
Disney Buys Marvel For $4 Billion
Matt Staggs brought this to my attention, but apparently Disney has purchased Marvel Comics for $4 billion USD. That’s right, the massive corporation that brought you Peter Pan and Hanna Montana now owns the rights to over 5,000 Marvel characters, or something of that nature. Might not sound like a big deal to all you reading this, but it’s certainly something to be surprised about. I certainly am surprised.
Animals and Empathy: Social Imperatives and the Future
Disclaimer: No, this will not be a long diatribe about why we shouldn’t eat animals and other such animal rights topics. It’s a brief look at our attitudes towards animals and where the future will likely take us. It’s related to science fiction. Honest. We live in a curious world where humans clash with the remaining members of the animal kingdom on a regular basis. Disrespect for the animal is two-pronged, for on the one hand we must separate ourselves from them, because they are inferior beings, but on the other, we split the human species by defining those of us who do not fit a particular cultural norm as animal. Society is resistant to anything beyond these two extremes, because we have a culture that, in most parts of the world, relies on animals for everything from social interaction to sustenance. Imagine if we changed our ways and suddenly became like the extremists want us to be? We would have to rely so much on our own kind, and whether that is something possibility within the limits of human consciousness, I cannot say. What I am getting at here isn’t so much the need for a change in how we operate; I will always consume meat, because that is my personal preference. Rather, I am proposing an examination of human attitudes, an alteration of how we view our animal brethren, and even ourselves, and an acceptance of the social/cultural imperative to use animals as tools for our survival. Nothing is suspect about the necessity for emotional maturity. We are a complicated species, no less complex than the chimpanzee or the baboon, excempt insofar as our technology dictates complexity, and within us we have the ability to enjoy empathy. The future will, undoubtedly, involve a paradigm shift in our conscious acknowledgement of the animal; vegetarians, vegans, and others will influence how we perceive the other beings that inhabit this planet, and, I hope, for good reasons. Why should we not at least understand that a cow does not deserve to be treated poorly, even if we’re just going to eat it when it gets big and strong? I suspect our distance is one of necessity, because to love our fellow animals as much as we might love a pet dog would constitute the steady recurrence of the betrayal of a social trust. You would not, I presume, kill Benji the Dog after raising him from puppyhood to the adult dog he would become, unless his existence directly threatened your own–and even then, you would likely feel bad about it if you are part of the cultural norm that seems to revere these sorts of creatures, but loathes others. Perhaps emotional distance is absolutely necessary, but such distance does not mean we cannot punish people like Michael Vick and even the myriad employees of slaughterhouses everywhere who find it necessary to mistreat the animals they will eventually butcher to feed the nation. These individuals make conscious decisions to cause pain to animals. Animals feel, even if they do not contain within their minds the ability to properly examine those feelings. Is it too much to ask that these animals get at least the most basic of comforts? After all, we grant death row inmates a final meal, and even read them their final rights, or whatever you call those religious prayers offered up as final penance for a lifetime of mediocrity. But, then we are back at square one: our resistance to the animal, to, perhaps, the unknown. Otherness. That’s what we often call this human imperative for separation. Built into the genetic structure of our kind, we are always considering new ways to segment ourselves from those that don’t meet our personal, or even societal, norms. The nerd, now seemingly adored, was once a social pariah; so too were women and people of color, constantly ridiculed and made inferior because of the circumstances of their birth. One cannot forget the resistance to animality in human culture, this push to define ourselves by an arbitrary religious or personal idea as non-animal, as separate, always and forever, from our animal brethren. Damn science for telling us otherwise. The future, however, may breed new life into the social apparatus of humanity. Slaughterhouses will become a thing of the past as artificial methods for cultivating meat become not only possible, but effective at recreating what we love so much in cows, pigs, and other edible creatures. While now we may scoff at the idea, it is only a matter of time before the consumption of the animal ceases to run parallel to the enormous quantities of slaughter and abuse. I would argue, here, that artificial forms of food production are essential to the survival of our species, unless someone can develop a method that suits all nations, all governments, and all peoples which can adequately reduce our population. Artificial means of production are the only way for our species to continue to feed itself and reproduce at our current rate, and even to potentially feed those that haven’t the means to do so themselves. That is the future, the utopian ideal that exists on the horizon. We can embrace it, or we can reject it, but ultimately, there will be a change, and our future selves will have to deal with it as it occurs. We cannot be resistant to change if it means sacrificing our ability to feel, or our ability to be human, or even biological beings equally as important to this planet as the bee or the rat or the elephant. But the assumption, of course, is that we are important, that we are special, in some way. True, we are special for existing, but the universe is a vast and complicated place, constantly making us realize how insignificant this little blue planet really is.