Welcome to Fantasy Friday! Every week, you are invited to write and post anything having to do with fantasy, science fiction, etc., right here in the comments: a passionate rant about Heroes, a bit of a story you’re trying to write, a review of Jay Lake’s fine book or China Mieville’s fine ass. Or vice versa. At 4 p.m., if we’ve got at least ten participants, we’ll choose the day’s most entertaining writer and PayPal them $10 on the spot. Go start your weekend off with a cold one on us! (Minors, make it a root beer.)
Opening scene of a short, Lovecraft-inspired story. The whole thing is posted at the link above (in my profile). I offered it online as an experiment. Anyway, here goes:
One Thousand and One Words
Paul S. Kemp
In the army I learned how to shoot three things: an M1 rifle at Germans, a camera at my fellow GIs, and pick-up lines at British girls. When I returned from Omaha Beach in 1944 with my foot shot up, Gerry shrapnel in my hip, and nightmares in my head, I learned that only one of the three paid.
A gig for shot-up former war photographers who had quit college to enlist in the Army proved hard to come by, so I did what I had to and hired myself. I moved to a one-room tenement in Boston and went freelance. To my surprise, I found I had a knack for civilian photography. I was good. And it pleased me to take pictures of things other than burned out Sherman tanks, dead Gerries, and the moonscapes left over from artillery bombardments. It did not chase away my memories of the war, but it made them seem more distant. I woke up screaming less.
By 1946 I shot pictures and wrote copy for most of the rags in Boston. I even became a decent reporter. No one would mistake my copy for Faulkner’s prose, but I did all right.
Then things started to change.
In 1947 Edwin Land invented the instant camera. In 1948 Polaroid sold the first instant cameras to the public. I bought a Model 95 with what little money I had and my job got that much easier. In 1949 fear of Communism swept the nation. By the autumn of 1950 no one cared about the Reds anymore. After all, the world was coming to an end.
Or so said the headline of The Chronicle.
The radio and diners were abuzz with doomsayers. I smirked and went on with life. After all, I’d gotten my dose of the apocalypse on Omaha Beach. I’d seen what men do to one another when they stop considering the other side as men. Hell, I’d photographed it afterward.
Besides, I had to eat, apocalypse or not. So I met the Chronicle’s Editor-in-chief, Edgar Walsh, at our usual watering hole to make my pitch. Before the world had sanded him down, Edgar had given me the best professional advice I’d ever received – ask a question, get out of the way of the answer, and follow the story wherever it goes.
Simple stuff, but wisdom often was.
Edgar wore his rain-soaked gray hat and gray moustache the same way – droopy. Like all good editors he nursed a gin and tonic; like all good reporters and ex-soldiers I took my bourbon straight. I brought along a copy of the Chronicle with its announcement of the pending apocalypse. After we’d made some obligatory small talk, I laid it on the table and pointed at the headline.
“What’s going on, Edgar? First Commies and now this. Business that bad?”
Edgar looked at the paper, at his gin. The bags under his eyes looked like gunnysacks. “People are talking about it, Jack. That means I write about it. Besides, something’s in the air. Lots of folks are afraid.”
“That’s nothin’ new.”
He smiled and it barely budged his bushy gray moustache. He looked tired, even for him. “No. I suppose it’s not.”
I eyed him over the rim of my bourbon glass. “I got something for you.”
Edgar polished off his gin and signaled the bartender for another. I took his cue and killed my whiskey.
“Is it good?”
“It is.”
“I can give you two-thousand words of human interest in Saturday’s early edition.”
I smiled like a catbird and it piqued his interest. I didn’t smile much. He leaned forward in his chair.
“What do you have, Jack? Spill it.”
“I have Howard Doyle.”
It took a moment for my words to hit him. When they did, I saw his dull eyes try their best to shine. “Doyle? Howard Doyle? You’ve got a picture?”
I shook my head. “Not yet. But he’s invited me out to his estate and I don’t intend to leave until I have one.”
“He invited you?”
My grin widened. “Yeah. A formal invitation. You believe that? The world really must be coming to an end because if that’s not a sign of the apocalypse, I don’t know what is.”
I had been trying to get a picture of Howard Doyle since the day I bought my Polaroid. He was as rich as God and as secretive as Lucifer. Everyone wanted to know more about him and wild speculations filled the society pages. Or at least they had before the end of the world had become front page news.
No one had taken a picture of Boston’s first citizen since before the war. When I was first trying to break into the ranks, I tried everything to get one, even resorted once to sneaking around the grounds of his mansion and trying to follow his Bentley in my old Chevrolet. No luck. His security had roughed me up a few times, but nothing permanent. They gave me to know that Doyle found my repeated attempts to corner him irritating. That didn’t stop me, but at least I knew what to expect from his muscle.
Edgar took out a cigar and lit. “Tell you what, Jack, you get a shot of Doyle, write five-thousand words to go with it, and I’ll put the whole thing on the front page.”
Keeping the excitement from my face, I nodded. “That’s what I wanted to hear. Dollars?”
“You know what I pay for front page copy.”
“But this is Doyle, Edgar. Howard Doyle.”
He considered, nodded. “Worth a premium. We’ll discuss the particulars when you have the shots.”
“Good enough.”
The bartender brought over our second round. Edgar took another slug of gin and stared off into space. After a time, he said, “What do you make of it, Jack? The moon, the storms and earthquakes, the disappearances? You think this is it?”
“What?” I asked, though I knew what he meant.
He raised his bushy eyebrows and waited.
I slammed my whiskey and stood. “I’ll tell you sometime what it’s like to hide in a shallow hole in the dirt while German artillery rains down around you. Then I’ll tell you what it’s like to walk through the aftermath, your ears ringing, shattered bodies half buried in dirt, guts hanging from trees like Christmas garland. No, this ain’t it, Edgar. It already happened.”
He nodded in understanding and buried his nose in his drink.
“Listen, Edgar,” I said. “If this is the end of the world, I’ll be sure to take a picture. Fair enough?”
He looked up at that, toasted me with his gin. “That’d sure as Hell get the front page.”
We laughed and I wished him well and walked out of the bar into a blistering rainstorm.
The air stank like rot, like the war, like bodies that had sat overlong in the sun. A sewer must have overflowed. Thunder rumbled and I tried not to think too hard about it. My combat boots thudded off the pavement. I disliked most everything about the Army, but Army-issue boots were the only thing that my shot up left foot could tolerate. I wore them even with my slacks.
The next night I and my boots drove up to Howard Doyle’s mansion, just as my invitation instructed.
* * * * *
I have to ask, and I mean no disrespect; Is Jay Lake just one person?
Every magazine I’ve picked up, website I’ve visited and anthology I’ve checked out in the last several months has featured something written by him.
I’ve been entertained by all of his work, don’t get me wrong, but I was given a parking ticket last week by an officer Lake and I wondered…
Let’s talk about pie. And death. But mostly pie, because that’s the first thing that comes to mind when Pushing Daisies starts. The unconsummateable love between Ned and Chuck is excellent, Emerson Cod is the freakin’ man, and Olive Snook dances a fine line between obsession and caring. That’s all great, but it’s the pie that drives me nuts. I want the doorbell to ring at 8pm and find a sliding box from the Pie Hole holding a tart apple pie with baked gruyere crust. America, if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can make instant pie gratification a reality.
Recently, with the upcoming anthology from the Vandermeers and the uncovering of the “lost” TTA-Press discussions, there has been much discussion of New Weird. What defines it? What was it trying to achieve? Did it ever achieve it?
What seems certain is that New Weird marked a significant break from the tradition of Epic Fantasy, dominated by such figures as Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, and Stephen Donaldson. However, I should like to put forward the argument that the most significant difference between Epic Fantasy and New Weird has nothing to do with the way the text approaches modern-day political concerns, or with the relative levels of escapism. Rather it hinges upon that ever important accoutrement of the fantasy writer: hair.
Compare the silky locks of “Wizard’s First Rule” scribe, Terry Goodkind with Mieville’s bald pate; the magnificent beard of modern-day master George R. R. Martin with the close-cropped stubble of the Tolkein-bashing Brit. Though I lack reference materials I would imagine that
the chest of new wunderkind Patrick Rothfuss is a rugged forest of hair while Mieville has waxed his and polished it to the point of reflection. This is the radical new face of fantastic fiction: sleek, airstreamed, and less likely to get tangled in low-hanging branches.
The repurcussions of this new shift in fantasy facial fuzz have still to make themselves clear, but I for one, plan on buying an electric razor.
The Sherriff, the Dog-Woman, and the Dead
In a little hill town of perhaps eight hundred people in northern New Mexico, a new sheriff has just arrived. Who knows where the old one went? Who knows what everyone is so afraid of? Certainly not the new sheriff, who sits in the ’70’s paneled tavern across the street from the sheriff’s station that is the social center of the town, drinking nothing and trying to get someone to talk. Nobody does.
Not that they aren’t friendly. In this town everyone knows everyone else; they know when somebody comes home from a long trip abroad, they know when a baby is born or someone dies, they know when someone new shows up, they know when someone disappears. Everyone welcomes the sheriff at their table. Everyone has a kind word or a smile, or even a hug. They are glad to see the sheriff. This town needs a sheriff desperately.
But no one will tell her why.
The sheriff is me: a worn-faced woman in her forties, in jeans and a long brown duster, with shoulder-length, wispy, unruly blond hair that looks at any given moment on the verge of going white. She is scared–I am scared. Justifiably scared, and growing more so by the minute.
People have been disappearing. They were disappearing before she got here; it’s why she came. It’s still happening. She doesn’t know everyone in town by name, but there are faces she saw when she got here that she doesn’t any more. Not that the rest would admit it if she asked. Not that they’d even answer.
Every conversation she starts ends in the same pair of warnings.
“Don’t go near the bridge. Don’t go near the barn.”
“Why?” she asks. They won’t say.
There are many barns, but the sheriff knows they’re talking about only one: the abandoned barn out at the north border of town, by the river. And there’s only one bridge: the one next to the barn.The sheriff leaves her car by the side of a dirt road and walks the grasslands with her hands in the pockets of her coat. It must be winter; the grass is still pale green, but the wind bites. She doesn’t know why she is here, except to get away from the people too frightened to help themselves. Something is following her: a shaggy, gray-brown dog, a strange mixed breed, perhaps of coyote blood. It keeps its distance, half-hidden in the grass, just watching. She has seen it before, walking alone on the street in town like a rabid thing out of its mind. She shivers.
She whirls on it. “What? What do you want?”
“Don’t go near the bridge,” it answers. “Don’t go near the barn.” And suddenly it isn’t a dog, but a woman–a small, older woman, hair even paler than mine, face even more worn–not frightening at all, in her turquoise plaid work-shirt and jeans. She is some kind of sorceress, a shape-shifter, a watcher like me, protecting the town–only she has given up.
Not frightening at all, yet I start awake with a gasp, and stare around the darkened bedroom wondering how I am to fall asleep again with the dog-woman waiting for me. I look at the clock. 4:00 AM. I could lie here awhile thinking happy thoughts, trying to force her out of my head. Or I could go back to that town and find some answers, and force the dream to my will.
I lay my head down on the pillow, and there I am again in the grasslands.
The sheriff drives north, her car bouncing wildly and kicking up dust, going much too fast for that old country road. But she has to know, and there’s only one place to find out: the place way out on the border of town, where the river churns past that abandoned old barn.
She doesn’t stop until she gets there, and perhaps she wouldn’t have even then, driven right on by her fear, over the bridge and out of this town for good. Only there isn’t any bridge, and there isn’t any barn.
She gets out of the car. The river roars, white-capped and dark, and all around it, scattered in the grass, half-buried in the pale orange dirt, are the ripped-apart tatters of the barn. It looks as if the river reared up out of its bed and tore that barn to bits with its jaws, and then just left it there, as if it knew the wood was diseased.
There’s no sign of the bridge at all. As if the way out of this town never even was. The sheriff gets back in the car, and slams the door.
What secret did they keep locked in that barn, and where is it now?
She wheels the car around and goes south, faster than she came.
In town, in the tavern across from the sheriff’s station, everybody’s waiting, even the dog-woman in the turquoise plaid shirt. It’s about to be dusk.
“What was in that barn?” the sheriff asks. Nobody answers. “You shouldn’t have gone there,” says the dog-woman. Then night falls, and she knows, because the lost townspeople are all around them in the dark–dead, but walking.
Zombies–not rotten and torn like the traditional ghoul, but half-melted, half-liquid, parts of them flooding out into the air in a cloud that the feeble streetlight fears to pierce. And they advance, and the townspeople just stand there like it’s all alright, and suddenly the sheriff remembers the twin nickel-plated revolvers, and suddenly they’re in her hands, and the dead people are falling in the street, and the living ones are crying out.
Twelve shots, twelve dead things on the ground, but there are more. The sheriff shoves one revolver under an arm and reloads the other, glancing sharply around at the living, accusing.
“What could we do?” asks the witch. “They’re our family.”
A little boy watches one of the shadows dart close. “They love each other. They just want us to be part of it.”
“Love,” spits the sheriff, her voice full of scorn, snapping the cylinder home.
Howdy, folks, and thanks for participating in the inaugural Fantasy Friday! We’re thrilled to see five writers joining us our very first week — this is exactly the sort of mix we were hoping for, from Michael’s and Paul’s fiction to Jonathan’s trendspotting to Matt’s and Adam’s musings.
Next week bring your friends! Remember: If we get ten posters, someone wins ten bucks…
Hang on guys, it’s not yet the following Friday.
So with that note, stolen from my own blog, a piece I wrote reminiscing of WFC’s past.
It was also said that Harlan had once autographed a woman’s breast. So now we move forward to a World Fantasy Convention. This is the professional convention for writers, editors and publishers. Everyone who attends is pretty much in the biz from some aspect. There is no fan track and no people in costumes. One night they hold the author signing and pretty much it’s a huge room with almost everyone who’s published anything sitting at tables so people can get their books signed. It could easily be 50-100 authors. Even my name was put at a table but since I’m an almost no-name Canadian it was pointless to sit at the table because few people would know me. So I wandered around.
I also don’t believe in getting autographs and don’t really see the point. I consider the author and not the signature important. So I started going up to the authors and asked them to sign my arms. As I said, the autograph would last a while and then be washed off and therefore no lasting signature. Everyone pretty much got into the swing of it, with female and male authors signing my arms. Harlan was there but I hadn’t got to him yet. At one point Jack Cady was signing my arm and Harlan came up to the water cooler, mouthing loudly to someone, What’s she doing? Why is she doing that?
So eventually I got around to Harlan and asked him if he would sign. Succinctly, he said, “No. If you have a piece of paper or a book, I’ll sign that.” I then told him how I felt about autographs to which he replied, you’re cute. But he didn’t sign.
I believe that if I had gone to him first as the prince of SF then he would have signed. After all it was there in his history. The next morning I was having breakfast with Ed (Bryant, friend of Harlan’s) when Harlan approached to check something with Ed. Then he turned to me and said, Why did you do that last night? That was very strange.
A compliment? Jealousy? Amnesia of one’s own past? I have no idea but I found it amusing coming from Harlan after the antics I’d heard he’s done.
“Fantastic” Literature vs “Realist” Literature
I’m a genre-denier. Or at least, I deny the kind of genre “outlook” that equates to taxonomy. I prefer to think about “kinds” of texts through modality, which I think was best defined by John Frow, who describes modes as extensions of certain structures beyond time-bound formal structures to a broader specification of “tone”. I think talking about modes is more precisely illustrative of how fiction works and hence how best to classify it…if you wish to classify it beyond “fiction,” that is.
People are welcome to further classifying fiction if they want, but fiction to me is fiction (even though I acknowledge that fiction is indeed a generic delineation, however broad).
Nevertheless, I would characterise “fantastic fiction” as “fiction that is very aware that it is fiction.”
What I mean by this is that it makes no claims to project an unbroken literary line of narrative realism. Realism, on the other hand, is a technique that attempts to get as close to a realistic picture of the world as it can. However, it is doomed to fail from the beginning. The “real” in realism can only ever be attempted, never achieved, since, however powerfully it may employ mimetic techniques, those techniques are in service to fiction…something that is never real! It has always seemed paradoxical to me.
“Fiction that acknowledges its fictiveness” also acknowledges that it cannot possibly approach perfect verisimilitude. Instead of attempting to adhere to narrative realism, fantastic fiction prefers to dispense with the attempt at imitating reality, because it knows it cannot do it. This is not to say that it does not take its queues from reality sometimes, of course, as a particular novel may otherwise resemble a realist novel except for one “fantastic” or improbable thing occuring (magic realist novels, for instance). Realist fiction attempts to deny its fictiveness, fantastic fiction does not.
The recognition that genre no longer has to be a dirty word (indeed, that it need not be a word AT ALL!) is at least a contributing factor to the melding between literary fiction and SF that many seem to think is going on. But I wouldn’t go searching for a name for this phenomenon. That the generic “boundaries,” however suspect, are in flux is a good thing. There is much more freedom for us writerly types. We need not be fooled into having to adhere to rigid rules and structures.
My argument however, is that genre (if we must call it that) is always in flux. The awareness that it is is probably what is going on with all this irrealist, slipstream, interstitial, magic realism, new weird etc etc. All these terms are attempts to tie down the textual fluctuations with a generic description. Old habits die hard I suppose.