Ancient Logic

Earlier this year I finished reading Liu Cixin's Dreams of Forgotten Earth series. It struck me that a trilogy that began as a techno-thriller concerning a message from outer-space quickly morphed into a space-opera set within the solar system, and then by the third book changed to a mind-bending description of the end of the universe. Part of Liu Cixin's gift as a writer is using the plausible speculations to plow ever deeper into the unknown. This is not a series that can be read out of order, as each book lays the groundwork for what comes after.  Petroglyphs by Morgan Crooks (2017) Which got me thinking. How do we classify different types of speculative fiction? I'd like to propose an alternate way of thinking about genre fiction: tiers of vocabulary. This idea is, in part, inspired by how language is approached in the field of education. When writing a lesson or developing a curriculum, an educator will consider what words a prospective student may need in...

May brought a deluge of amazing stories. In particular I think these works captured my mood throughout this month of revelations, disgust, and hope.   Look, this is meant to be a post about art - short literature specifically. However, I don't think you can understand art in isolation from politics, society, or whatever else is going on at a particular moment. A writer cannot help but weave elements of what circulates through their brains during the writing process (or at least I can't). Editors and publishers cannot help but respond to things that speak to a moment in time. Do I know for 100% that these stories reflect the situation in this country? No, I do not. I do think each has something to say about this moment. "Machine of the Devil" by Maria Haskins. I've praised Haskins work before in these monthly round-ups for her well-crafted, tightly wound short fiction. This flash piece highlights her talent for embodying large themes in very small packages...

If find myself pressed for time this month and absolutely overwhelmed by the various media I'd like to tell you about.  Pretty much my reaction throughout this film. First up. I watched Guardians of The Galaxy Volume 2, okay? So you can get off my back. And? I loved it. About as much as the first one, honestly, give or take a joke or two. What it misses in novelty and sheer comedy (this is a percentage thing: there are more jokes and fewer of them completely land) it more than makes up for resonance and, you know, feelings. It's actually damn impressive that the first movie 1) got made in the first place 2) worked as well as it did. There are five characters I doubt many had any reason to care about and by the end of the first flick, you loved them. Total surprise. So that's the first film. The second film surprises by taking all of this very, very seriously and finding ways of making you care about such diverse topics as the attempt of a green and purple siste...

With all that happens around a person's 40th birthday, I somehow managed to find some time to read some excellent short fiction in March. The ones included below come from a variety of online magazines but I'm not going to pretend that this is an exhaustive list: Things Crumble, Things Break by Nate Southard. Liked this one quite a bit. Chemical spill or accident leaves a town of crippled, their bones so fragile a gentle push could stave in a chest. A man and his girlfriend contemplate leaving their quarantine even as a heavy sadness fills in all of the weak parts of their determination. The horror here is in the ease of emotional investment in fragile, doomed beings.  In the Shade of the Pixie Tree by Rodello Santos (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) something about this reminds me of Lord Dunsany: a sweet but ultimately tragic tale of a young witch and the slow unwinding of a difficult spell. Fantasy that takes familiar tropes like pixies and witches and makes them new a...

February was a bit busy. I attempted to finish reading the collection my story, "Killing the First Gods," appeared in "A Book of Blasphemous Words." At nearly thirty stories, I'm afraid I didn't quite finish the book in time but what I read gave me quite a few more names to follow. A Sack Race to the River by Chris Kuriata. ( The Book of Blasphemous Words ) This one left a mark. The story of a father who is attempting to save his sons from some awful apocalyptic fate by stuffing them in a burlap sack reminded me of that Bill Paxton movie, "Fraility," but the payoff here is a bit more epic and weird.  Youth Will be Served by Andrew Fox. ( Nightmare ) In Florida, a leviathan offers youth in exchange for the lives of a few sacrificial elderly. Wrapped up in this is the desire to help those in pain and the inevitability of decline and death. What really came through in this story is the sense of unspoken menace, the constant peril of al...

I'm back home from Arisia 2017 and other than being completely exhausted I'm feeling very good about the experience. To sum up my impressions of the panels, experiences, and spectacles of this year's con I guess I'd say the theme was communication. Me at the "Alien in Aliens" panel, Arisia 2017 (photographer: Lauren Crooks) During my first panel, Putting the Alien in Aliens with Steve Popkes, Dennis McCunney, and Sonia Taaffe, the conversation centered around this question of communication. In comparison to other panels centered on this topic - the creation and appreciation of truly alien extraterrestrials - the focus here was not so much the biology or composition of the aliens as the limited ability of we poor human beings to understand any potential creature from another solar system. Is this even possible or plausible? Or is communication with aliens one more implausible feature of science fiction we all collectively ignore like faster than ...

The stories that spoke to me last month involved regret and longing, exploring that uneasy intersection between having too little and wanting too much. In particular, Lavie Tidhar’s piece had this really cool aspect of looking at realistic moment in the future with an eye towards fantasy, wishing for something that has already outlived its time. Andromache and the Dragon by Brittany Pladek (Ideomancer) An unusual dragon composed of all of the inanimate and living flotsam around it terrorizes a seaside town. The dragon can feed on things like desires and in so slaking its hunger removes the wants and wishes of a town. Andromache of the title witnesses all of this, a strangely objective and patient morsel. Backpack by Stefan A. Slater. (Betwixt) A short story about disposing of fears and doubts in your own way. Dryly philosophical. The cork won't stay by Nate Southard. (Nightmare) A bleak take on mind control about the ways grief makes monsters of us, the pointlessness of ex...

Another tough month to whittle my favorite stories to five or so I prefer for this column. In particular Nightmare and Clarkesworld offered several fine stories. The Wanderer, in the Dark of the Year by Kris Millering (Clarkesworld) Now this is why I read Clarkesworld. Fantastically invasive story that reminds me of Michael Swanwick’s Passage through Earth last year. A kidnapped correspondent bonds with an alien taken in by anti-Roma terrorists. The alien described as a kind of mitochondrial mat and the unusual structure of the narrative: multiple beginnings and endings communicates effectively how much was lost and gained during the encounter.  Five Spikes by Nicholas Diehl (DSF) Excellent macabre story about a boy, a witch, and zombie spikes. The closest thing I’ve read to a Shirley Jackson story in a while. The Cellar Dweller by Maria Dahvana Headley (Nightmare) Another great story from Headley. This dark fantasy is a little bit Gaiman, a little bit Barker, and a whole ...

Although not as obvious as poetry, prosody has an important role in making prose enjoyable to read. Chances are a piece of writing you like involves a deliberate and conscious application of rhythm and sound to achieve a certain effect. Sometimes these effects are obvious (Livia Llewellyn  comes to mind) and sometimes the effects are vestigial (almost non-existant), such as a writer like Andrew Weir. Personally I like either type of writing. There are times what I want is simple: writing that gets the job done. Other times I want to wallow in words, savor them, reveling in the heady brew of challenging diction and intricate rhythms. A handful of works I’ve read recently use prosody to achieve a specific effect within writing that’s not typically thought of requiring close reading. As luck would have it, three of these examples even revolve around a common theme - forensic science. Relatively unadorned style is doubly effective because it goes by unnoticed by reade...

March turned out to be a busy month and I fell behind, way behind, on reading short stories. Having caught up, I’m putting down my thoughts on a selection of stories that really grabbed me last month. - Once Lost, Gone Forever by Gwendolyne Kiste (Electric Spec). Good creepy story about two friends able to disappear people they meet. The theme here is ancient - the ends don’t justify the means - but the horror comes from how thoroughly the casually amoral behavior of the protagonists seeps into the fiber of the story. - Dogs by Bruce McAllister (Tor.com) Excellently creepy tale of the death dogs of Mexico. Far and away my favorite work from last month. The atmosphere of this story, a visceral and relentless dread, really worked for me. One of those stories that makes other writers very, very jealous. - Cassandra by Ken Liu. (Clarkesworld) Ken Liu is on fire. I put him on my top five last year for short fiction with "Clockwork Soldier" and here he finds a way of ma...

Ann Leckie’s “Ancillary Justice” gives me a chance to talk shop. In a science fiction novel, like the Radch series, a writer is confronted with the need to express novel concepts through the English language. Whether introducing an alien species or a new technology or simply a specific style of dancing, a author must choose from three basic options. Wind Sculpture near Loretto Chapel, Santa Fe. Taken by Morgan Crooks (2013) One: use common English analogues to express concepts similar to ones more familiar to readers. So instead of calling an alien fork a Quedebblian food-trident, call it a fork assuming it has the same basic function. Secondly, a writer could resurrect a less frequently used word and apply it to the situation - think the Wachowski sibling's use of the word 'Matrix.' Finally, a writer might created a neologism. This last category is in someways the most broad as it includes portmanteaus, figurative transliterations, and out-an-out inventions. Howeve...

I tried an experiment in 2014. I sought to read enough of speculative fiction published this year (as opposed to three decades ago as was my habit) that I would be able to understand it for myself rather than be told about it at the end of the year. This post is an effort to summarize what I found in short and long fiction in 2014, the themes that I saw repeated and the trends I saw embraced. I’ll start with a topic that seemed to echo from one end of speculative fiction to the other: Lovecraft. H.P. Lovecraft’s legacy is a complicated subject in speculative fiction. Like many others, I owe a tremendous debt to Lovecraft’s legacy, one that I’m often flummoxed how to acknowledge. I have enjoyed his works, drawn inspiration from his mythologies, and been influenced by his vision of a vast and indifferent universe. The problem is Lovecraft, even in terms of his contemporaries, was an unreformed, unrepentant bigot. What’s worse, his personal biases seeped into his writing in...

This was not the book I intended to read first after finishing Peripheral. But I knew within the first five pages that I would be reading this from cover to cover before I read anything else. That’s the power of a good book, of an arresting story. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (the now uncovered pseudonym of YA author Catherine Web) is that.  The simple idea behind the novel, a tweak of the Groundhog Day, is that certain individuals, called Kalachakra , are reincarnated into their own lives existence after existence, living the same span of time from infancy to death again and again. Harry August, for example is always born in 1919, spends his routinely traumatic childhood in Northern England, before winding up dying some time around the fall of the Berlin Wall. In different hands I think this novel could have easily been basically  contemporary fiction. Recall the Time Traveller’s Wife as an example of modern literature’s increasing appropri...

I got my panel assignments this morning for  ‪#‎ Arisia‬  and I'm very pleased to announce I'll be on the True Detective panel. This was my top pick for the convention and I can't wait to have a good conversation on the weird fiction influences on this show. I also got on the Speculative Fiction: Year in Review panel which I intend to use to talk up a banner year in electronic publication of short fiction. I also got on a panel on running great (RPG) games, which is timely because I'm currently in one of my absolute favorite campaigns. I'm also hoping that I get a chance to read some of my work so hopefully in the next few days I can report  good news on that front.

The video below was released by the Air Vehicles Directorate, a branch of the US Airforce, to promote the concept of swarms of small drones released into an urban environment to conduct surveillance and assassination missions. Other than the ornithopter manner of the drones hovering and darting through restricted airspace, there isn't much here that hasn't been seen in other drone models. What really makes this striking is to see all of these elements, the remote monitoring, the use of man-made power sources such as power lines, the visual navigation systems and lethal payloads, placed into something small and ubiquitous. Present drone technology has essentially produced remotely piloted airplanes, small and relatively expendable, but not that many steps removed from a piloted airplane. But the notion of militarized swarms hiding in plain sight, living off of existing power systems to me seems a very radical notion, and one I haven't really seen fully explored i...

When examining the meaning of fantasy literature, such as "The Darkness That Came Before," by R. Scott Bakker, one has to first overcome a significant problem with the genre as a whole -- it's relationship to history. Fantasy, as it's often written and enjoyed, is meant as escapism. Fantasy literature often plucks the most romantic and dramatic elements of the popular conception of European medievalism, adds a dash of magic and monsters, to erect the vague  skene in front of which the traditional stories of disguised princes, princesses in peril, and wandering wise men appear. A reader goes to this world with idea of entering a fictional space separate from the 'real world.' The details of actual history serve to ground the story, help support the suspension of disbelief, not educate the reader about life in castles. So how can such cavalier appropriation provide any actual insight into the past? Fantasy does have a value to serious inquiry into hist...

Before I start giving my impressions of Steve Carell's mediocre disaster comedy, I'd like to offer an explanation on why I feel it necessary to review the movie now. After all, "Seeking A Friend," come out in the summer, disappointed at the box office, and left barely a ripple afterwards. However, after sitting through a panel in Arisia looking at all of the SFF movies that came out in 2012, I was surprised to this movie didn't even merit a mention. I'm not sure how common that reaction was, but it seemed curious to me. Say what you want, "Seeking A Friend," absolutely poses a speculative question; what would happen if the world learned its end was nigh? The movie begins with a couple pulled over on the side of the road listening to the final word on a doomed space mission to advert catastrophe from a giant asteroid called Matilda. As the radio pronounces the world's last and only hope dashed, Dodge (played by a glum and tacit...

Are stories about utopias morally superior to stories about dystopias? By writing about futures where governments break down, resources run dry, pandemics run rampant, and zombies wolf down unsuspecting pedestrians, are we making those things more likely to happen? Give credit where credit is due, +Robert Llewellyn  asked a provocative question in his post to the the sci-fi community the other day. Does the preponderance of dystopian, post-apocalyptic (a word he doesn't actually use, but I feel fits his description of most zombie movies) come from the fears of the ruling class (predominantly white, anglo-saxon and rich)? Are these futures presented to us because that's the future the elites fear, one of rapidly reduced power and prestige?  Robert quickly back-tracked from his question on whether or not dystopias are ever written by the under-privledged. Of course there are, from all over the world. There are also plenty of writers from conservative or elite backg...

Characters have a need to feel competency. Once all of the other basic needs have been met - enough to eat and drink, a sense of security, and acceptance from peers - it is natural for human beings to seek out opportunities to feel good about themselves. To feel important and clever. In literature, this type of conflict is difficult to describe because it tapers away to questions of love and acceptance on the low end and issues of ethics and morality on the upper end. Also, I think many people have a mixed reaction to obviously talented people having those abilities tested. On one hand, professional sports wouldn't exist if we didn't, on some level, enjoy watching talented performers push themselves in competition. But on the other hand, we tend to mock or revile those people who seem too proud of their own accomplishments or too flashy in victory. "Don't spike the football." This is a tough balancing act for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Put sim...