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Posts Tagged ‘felix gilman’

Choice of the Deathless: a XYZZY Award finalist! And Fan Art! And things!

I’m in the middle of a, um, let’s call it moderately insane work cycle—writing one book at the same time as editing another, which should be possible in theory but involves a lot of gear-grinding and clutchless shifting in practice.  Both the next two books will be really good if I can bring the writing in line with my vision, though.  Y’all are in for a treat.

Interesting corollary: I seem to have become a better writer since mid-March, which was the last time I edited the next Craft book.  Or I’ve become a more exacting editor, one or the other.  What this means line by line is, I spend hours pacing and grumbling about a thorny issue of rhythm or rhyme; not the most pleasant experience, but the only way to get work done to spec and to standard.  Fortunately I have rewards in store once I hand in this manuscript: Felix Gilman’s The Revolutions, Hannu Rajaniemi’s Causal Angel (which comes out around my birthday!), and Jo Walton’s new book.  I’d include Elizabeth Bear’s The Steles of the Sky on that list but I’ve already read it, HA HA HA—which is no excuse for you, if you haven’t.  GO FORTH AND READ.

Anyway! All of that was a lead-up to saying that I lack brainspace for deep criticism this week.  Roll Cool Stuff Reel instead!

Choice of the Deathless Nominated for XYZZY Awards!

The annual XYZZY Interactive Fiction Awards were held at the beginning of the month, and Choice of the Deathless, my Craft Sequence choose-your-own-undead-legal-career-and-try-not-to-get-murdered game, was nominated for best setting and best NPCs!  It was an honor to be nominated, especially as someone coming from pretty far outside the modern IF community.  I didn’t win—I know it’s sort of funny to be announcing my nomination after the awards are in, but unlike the Hugo Awards, it doesn’t cost anything to vote in the XYZZYs which means vote mongering is a huge risk and I wanted to avoid any appearance of that—but I had an excellent time, and damn is there good writing in the IF scene.  It’s wild to discover work like Tom McHenry’s Dick-esque Horse Master, Porpentine’s game of abuse-survival-and-angel-fighting Their angelical understanding, and her equally insane subversive gut-punch ULTRA BUSINESS TYCOON III (If you’re going to play UBTIII, by the way, and you should, there’s one puzzle for which you’ll need this file).  I haven’t had enough time to play all this year’s XYZZY finalists, but I will, and you can bet I’ll have a close eye on the nomination list next year.  The full list is here.

Fan Art!

Deviantart user Piarelle hooked me up with some more fan art based on Choice of the Deathless—here’s a picture of R’ok, looking awfully polite for a demon mantis, and here we have a mild (but super cute) spoiler for a couple romantic endings of the series.

After all, just because you’re a skeleton doesn’t mean romance is out of the question.

And no, I’m not going to link to the relevant Oglaf comic. 🙂

Board Game Updates!

I played my first game with the Eclipse expansion packs (Rise of the Ancients and Ship Pack One) this Sunday; the Alien Homeworlds make sub-six player games much more interesting, and the new player races are warped in cool ways.  Right now the Syndicate seem powerful—but some of that may have just been chance.  Also, if you’re interested in spaceship fighting but can’t afford a three hour playtime, permit me to suggest Quantum, a sorta-4X that’s massively customizable, replayable, and portable, and evokes the spirit of a Vorkosigan Saga-esque space opera story better than anything I’ve ever seen.

What do I mean by that?  Quantum is a game of moving dice-ships (a very cool mechanic—d6s stand in for spaceships, with higher-number dice moving further while lower numbers pack more of a punch in combat) around the map, trying to muster the right combination of ships to orbit and conquer planets before your friends do.  Each of the six types of ship has its own special ability—and critically you don’t get to control what ships you deploy.  Each time you build a ship, you roll a die and decide where to place the resulting “spaceship” on the map!  On your turn, you’ll find yourself surveying a tiny and dispersed fleet composed of ships you never would have chosen, desperate to stop your fellow players from winning—or to conquer a new planet of your own somehow.  Whatever solution you find, it’s likely to be some insane combination of special abilities, luck, and lateral thinking, the kind of mad edge-case victory I love in the Vorkosigan books but rarely see captured in 4X gameplay.  Somehow Quantum gets you there 90% of the time, in explosive and kinetic fashion.  And all this in 45 minutes a game!  (Though they’re like french fries—you can’t have just one…)  If this sounds like your kind of thing, I strongly suggest you check it out.

And that’s all I have for you this week!  Be well, and if you’re in Mass. dress warm these next couple days.  April’s taking that whole “cruelest month” reputation to heart.

In Which Some Books

Today I split my time between the two next books in the Craft Sequence.  All morning I drafted the third novel, which is taking shaky shape, and in the afternoon, after a brief period of recovery, I dove back into reviewing my publisher’s copy edits for Two Serpents.  I don’t want the copy edit review process to slow down proper writing, and it hasn’t so far.  I wrote as much as usual today, and edited as much as I needed to, and I hope I can keep up that pace.  We Shall See.  One day is hardly a pattern.

I’ve been avoiding reading fiction for the last week or so as I get deeper into the new book, which is an interesting experience, and might not be helpful.  I find myself salivating for new worlds.  I linger over descriptions of books, and run my hands down spines as I pass them.  Sometimes I peek, just a little line from somewhere in the middle.  I already have my Christmas reading list, which I plan to dive into once I put the next book to bed for the holidays.  Shall I share?

Wallace isn’t fiction, sure, but he has such a strong voice I’m wary of reading his essays during the first-drafting process.  That’s what edits are for, I guess—belt-sanding away everyone else’s words from mine.

I noticed that the Wallace book has an essay on David Lynch.  I hope he’ll talk about the Dune movie.  I’m not all that optimistic, but who knows?  The spice may flow!

American Fantasy and The Half-Made World

I’m grooving on Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World – grooving is absolutely the correct word.  This is the closest thing I’ve found yet to my vision of authentic American high fantasy.  Gilman takes as his point of reference not 14th century hierarchical societies, but cowboys, Indians, and the railroad.  It’s not “Weird West,” because the world is not our own; the signs and signifiers bear as much relationship to those of the mid-19th century west as the Rohirrim and the Dunedain bear to actual medieval European forces, and as such, the book is both an excellent story and a crowbar for breaking open the shells of myth we’ve built around these signs.  Self-mythologizing, and self-deception, are all through this book, but at the same time, these aren’t uniformly negative forces.  Heroes can be evil; righteous men can be stultifying; enlightened psychologists can be drug addicts.  This doesn’t change the fact that they are, at least on occasion, heroic, righteous, and enlightened.

My favorite small touch here is the religion called the “Smilers,” a Quaker-ish faith with no content other than well-intentioned frontier optimism.  No mystical content, just the vague sense that if you keep smiling, and working hard, things will always come out all right for you.  The story drives home the extent to which, while these are all fine things to think, they aren’t quite enough.

I have no idea how things are going to end (there are 100 pages left), but for now, I’m loving this book.

What’s in a Fantasy?

Still reading Iron Dragon’s Daughter, and still impressed, though reading this book is like walking down a winding tunnel into a mountain: the further in you go, the darker it gets.  Maybe it breaks through into the light, but I’m not optimistic.  The light at the end of the tunnel, as Metallica said, might just be a freight train coming your way.

Poking idly around the internet for information on Michael Swanwick, I found an excellent 1999 interview with the website Infinity Plus, which touches on some of my biggest concerns about Fantasy as practiced on this side of the Atlantic.  Here’s a pull quote from Swanwick about IDD:

Consciously, I was trying to write a fantasy that was true to my upbringing and experience. When I went to Ireland in 1982, I saw castles and stone circles and fairy rings and the like for the first time, and they were none of them anything like how I’d imagined them! It seemed to me, then, that Americans had a lot of nerve writing Fantasy, when so many of the essential elements were alien to us. So when I came up with the image of a changeling girl forced to work in a factory, building dragons, I recognized it as an opportunity to utilize the kind of environments I knew and had grown up with: factories, and garbage dumps, and malls and stripper bars, and to invest them with a kind of faerie glamor, which would in turn comment fruitfully on the world we have.

For the last 7 years I’ve been thinking, talking, and writing about what Swanwick says there: elf-circles, castles, and hereditary nobility are all beyond our native experience as Americans.  We have privilege (mountains of it), and power, and authority, and a horrible history of slavery and discrimination, but we’ve never had dukes other than Duke Ellington, and our Kings are Elvis, Martin Luther King Jr, Nat “King” Cole, and Emperor Norton I.  At the same time, it’s hard to find a figure in English history and popular thought to compare with John D. Rockefeller, or William Hearst.  When I read American fantasy about European or French-style hereditary aristocracies, I start to feel as if a strange Orientalism, or something like it (Occidentalism?), is operating under the surface.

Which is not to say those books are bad – just that I feel there’s something complex at their core.  It is, however, nice to see many modern US fantasists setting their tales in US cities, and to hear about books like Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World, which use the mythology of the Old West, rather than some subconscious memory of medieval Britain, as a jumping-off point.