This time to Daily Science Fiction. Slipped in just before the end of the year, so I can claim two sales in 2013. Which is exciting.
Year: 2013
Farewell to 2013
Another year come-and-gone. And an oddly segmented one at that, split between Montreal, Edmonton, and Whitehorse. For major life events, I sold another short story, I finished my Master’s degree in History at McGill University, I acted as best man at my best friends’ wedding, and I finally finished the book presently and finally known as The Sword’s Dominion. The summer term in Montreal was probably the most accomplished time in my life; I had moved to a new apartment much closer to the university and was studying a subject I loved while only a half an hour’s walk from the top of Mont Royal and less than an hour’s walk from the Old Port. I was, for once in my life, exactly where I wanted to be, but time passes and all good things must come to an end. So now I’m back in the Yukon, which has its own charms, and I’m at least back to writing fiction again. And, as you may have noticed, recording podcasts at a greater frequency since I’ve been listening to more and more of them. Continue reading “Farewell to 2013”
The Eternal Epic
I just read a great post on Black Gate today by Fletcher Vredenburgh about being an older reader of science fiction and fantasy in a world where the genre has expanded and diversified into a dizzying array of choices, leaving many of the once-classic works sitting on the wayside, unread, displaced by flashy newcomers in the field. I have a huge soft spot for heroic fantasy from the first half of the twentieth century, so it struck a chord with me–especially the idea that these works are still worthwhile even when the world has seemingly moved on from the very specific context in which they were written. The values of someone from a hundred years ago in our own country can be just as alien as when we cross the border elsewhere. But has everything mutated to the degree where the literature of yesteryear can seem unapproachable, where age is such a turnoff due to dissonance?
A Response
In response to recent assertions by certain authors and critics that including warrior women, or indeed strong female characters at all, in fantasy fiction is “anti-civilizational” and will somehow lead to the destruction of the western world, I only have this to say:
…For I would hurl your cities down
And I would break your shrines
And give the site of every town
To thistles and to vines.Higher the walls of Nineveh
And prouder Babel’s spires-
I bellowed from the desert way-
They crumbled in my fires.For all the works of cultured man
Must fare and fade and fall
I am the Dark Barbarian
That towers over all.-From “A Word from the Outer Dark”, by Robert E. Howard
Now excuse me while I go sharpen my axe. And prepare my pen. I’ve got a civilization to destroy.
Episode 10 – The Left Hand of Podcasts
One year after the initially-planned recording date, we finally get around to talking about the works of Ursula K. Le Guin–specifically, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Word for World is Forest.
The Return of Pulp
The rise of digital publishing has unexpectedly also seen the return of older distribution models for fiction. Serials are viable again, novellas as well. And most importantly for me, the pulps have returned in the form of the cheap e-book.
If you correct for inflation, today’s $2-3 pulp volume costs about the same as a dime novel from the early twentieth century. The format is, of course, different. But the style and reasoning aren’t. There are practically no distribution costs in releasing an e-book because digital content doesn’t require printing and binding volumes from a press. Even the yellowed paper of old required some up-front costs to get books to readers; even on the print side, now, digital printing means the reader, not the author or the publishers, pays to get a physical copy produced if he or she wants one.
The Telling
The Telling (2000) continues Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish cycle with a pattern familiar to readers of her earlier books: a messenger from the Galaxy-wide confederacy known as the Ekumen comes to a newly-contacted planet on an anthropological expedition. The Left Hand of Darkness has the same premise and takes place in the same imagined future, what changes are the characters and the planet’s society. Le Guin manages to exploit this technique without ever coming across as formulaic. Her writing strengths lie in strong, well-realized characters, and building interesting and believable cultures. The Telling is excellent.
Comic Dreams
When I was in elementary school, one of my many career aspirations was to become a syndicated newspaper cartoonist. I had comic idea after comic idea—Bernard the awful dog! Snakes, a comic about snakes! An epic fantasy comic with sword-wielding wolves! I wasted a great deal of paper on those.
Even at the time, my goal was unattainable. Opening up a newspaper these days reveals the exact same comic strips I read back then and wanted to imitate; in fact, many of the same comic strips that ran in the 1970s remain. A lot of these are legacy cartoons: Bill Keene’s son draws Family Circus, new B.C. strips come out of the estate, Charles Schultz is dead but Peanuts is a mainstay–at least no one has taken over drawing Peanuts because ack. The old strips have enough nostalgic cachet to continue whether the creator is alive or not, but newspapers have no incentive to pick up new strips and don’t have much room for them in the already-crowded comics pages.
The Annals of the Western Shore
It’s natural as writers get on in years to revisit themes and ideas from their earlier works, and perhaps explore them with greater depth or from a different point of view. The Annals of the Western Shore, published between 2005 and 2007, does not cover new ground for Ursula K. Le Guin, but it doesn’t really need to. Often, the sf community seems ignorant of Le Guin’s more recent novels despite her steady improvement as a writer and storyteller (Changing Planes is one of my favourites, though it’s not so much a novel as an imaginative ethnographic treatise). Her early contributions in the field were so overwhelmingly influential they tend to overshadow all else. On a sentence level, Le Guin’s writing is surer now than it was in The Left Hand of Darkness, and her deftness with language immediately engaged me with this newer trilogy.
Enthusiastic Audiobooks Does Ivanhoe
Enthusiastic Audiobooks strikes again, this time demonstrating that Ivanhoe (1820) by Sir Walter Scott does not lend itself well to reading out loud. But by St. Dunstan, we try our hardest, and in the most obstreperous way we can!
Enthusiastic Audiobooks: Black Beauty
One Last Sketch 
