Bruce Sterling's Pirate Utopia: Sidewise Award Finalist

From the Awards' website: "The Sidewise Awards have been presented annually since 1995 to recognize excellence in alternate historical fiction." This year, Bruce Sterling's Pirate Utopia is among the six finalists in the Best Short-Form Alternate History category.[1] The award winners will be announced on August 20, 2017.

Fortunately, Pirate Utopia is still available in hardcover, which is a must-see format for the period-specific (and quite marvelous) illustrations by John Coulthart. I've posted some of these illos in my blog posts of June 14, 2016, and July 14, 2016. Keep in mind these few illustrations are only a sampling, but hopefully enough to give you a taste of what's included in the book. (And let's not forget that the book also includes an enlightening 1,000-plus-word essay entitled "Reconstructing the Future: A Note on Design" from the illustrator himself.)

But getting back to the story itself, imagine that Harry Houdini, Howard Lovecraft, and Robert “Bob” Ervin Howard are members of a United States Secret Service delegation to the Republic of Carno in September 1920. Remember, this is an alternate history story! You can read more about Pirate Utopia's "Cast of Characters" in my June 10, 2016, blog post, in which I wrote about my initial work on this novella.

And in addition to the *starred* Publishers Weekly review I posted on October 6, 2016, here's the *starred* Kirkus review:

PIRATE UTOPIA
by Bruce Sterling; illustrated by John Coulthart

Noted sci-fi maven and futurologist Sterling (Love Is Strange, 2012, etc.) takes a side turn in the slipstream in this offbeat, sometimes-puzzling work of dieselpunk-y alternative history.

Resident in Turin, hometown of Calvino, for a dozen years, Sterling has long been experimenting with what the Italians call fantascienza, a mashup of history and speculation that's not quite science fiction but is kin to it. Take, for example, the fact that Harry Houdini once worked for the Secret Service, add to it the fact that H. P. Lovecraft once worked for Houdini, and ecco: why not posit Lovecraft as a particularly American kind of spook, "not that old-fashioned, cloak-and-dagger, European style of spy," who trundles out to Fiume to see what's what in the birthplace of Italian futurism-turned-fascism? Lovecraft is just one of the historical figures who flits across Sterling's pages, which bear suitably futuristic artwork, quite wonderful, by British illustrator John Coulthart. Among the others are Woodrow Wilson and Adolf Hitler, to say nothing of Gabriele D'Annunzio and Benito Mussolini. "Seen from upstream, most previous times seem mad," notes graphic novelist Warren Ellis in a brief introduction, but the Futurist project seems particularly nutty from this distance; personified by Lorenzo Secondari, a veteran of World War I who leads the outlaw coalition called the Strike of the Hand Committee in the "pirate utopia" of the soi disant Republic of Carnaro, its first task is to build some torpedoes and then turn them into "radio-controlled, airborne Futurist torpedoes," not the easiest thing considering the technological limitations of the time. A leader of the "Desperates," who "came from anywhere where life was hard, but honor was still bright," Secondari and The Prophet—D'Annunzio, that is—recognize no such limitations and discard anything that doesn't push toward the future. So why not a flying pontoon boat with which to sail off to Chicago, and why not a partnership with Houdini to combat world communism?

A kind of Ragtime for our time: provocative, exotic, and very entertaining.

Pirate Utopia is available direct from the publisher, Tachyon Publications, as well as Amazon.com, or your bookseller of choice.


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Footnotes

[1] The Sidewise Awards website has a complete list of the 2017 award finalists.

The Asylum of Dr. Caligari by James Morrow

[Added 02/05/2017: Expect to see this novella on many awards' short lists come 2018....]

I have been quite fortunate to have worked on not just one, not two, but three novellas by James Morrow that have been -- or will be -- published by Tachyon Publications. The first of these, Shambling Towards Hiroshima, was published in 2009.

The second, The Madonna and the Starship, published in 2014, was the focus of my blog post of November 24, 2013, in which I wrote of my work on this novella.

In that blog post I stated (and I quote): "James Morrow is an absolute master of the sardonic..." -- and with The Asylum of Dr. Caligari, his third novella from Tachyon, due to be published in June, James Morrow does not disappoint.

Here is the ad copy for the book:

The infamous Dr. Caligari: psychiatrist or psychopath? In this wry and satiric tour de force, award-winning author James Morrow offers a surprising and provocative take on a silent film classic.

In the summer of 1914, the world teeters on the brink of the Great War. An American painter, Francis Wyndham, is hired to provide art therapy at a renowned European asylum, working under the auspices of its mysterious director, Alessandro Caligari. Francis is soon beguiled by his most talented student, Ilona Wessels, whose genius with a brush is matched only by the erotic intensity of her madness.

Deep in his secret studio, Dr. Caligari, rumored to be a sorcerer, struggles to create Ecstatic Wisdom, an immense painting so hypnotic it can incite entire regiments to rush headlong into battle. Once Francis and Ilona grasp Caligari's scheme in all its supernatural audacity, they conspire to defeat him with a magical work of their own....

The story is all about a painting -- Ecstatic Wisdom (well, actually two paintings, but you'll have to read the story to learn about the other) -- and its effect on the viewer, or viewers, as they came in regimental numbers to view the painting(s).

Here's a brief excerpt from the story itself: Francis Wyndham is clandestinely observing Dr. Caligari at work on his painting:

Watching Caligari suffuse his canvas with whatever species of wizardry or variety of delusion possessed him, I decided his methods represented neither imagination abandoned by intellect, nor revelation tempered by logic, but a third phenomenon. He had beguiled both forces into a condition of mutual betrayal, reason convincing fantasy that violent monsters were desirable, fantasy coercing reason into abandoning its tedious allegiance to facts.

"Effundam spiritum meum in vobis, virtutibus! Perfectus es!"

Now he began spinning in circles—like a deranged dancer, or a whirling dervish, or a man inhabited by devils....

The Asylum of Dr. Caligari will be published in June and is now available for preorder directly from the publisher, Tachyon Publications, or from Amazon.com, or your friendly neighborhood bookseller.

Book Received: Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling

So while I was absent from blogging, life moved on...other projects were completed, books were received....

One such book is Bruce Sterling's Pirate Utopia, a beautifully crafted hardcover from Tachyon Publications.

In addition to the *starred* Publishers Weekly review I posted on October 6 last year, here are excerpts from a few more reviews:

1. From author Michael Swanwick's blog Flogging Babel:

Bruce Sterling has always had a complicated relationship with science fiction. He has a particular brilliance for writing the stuff and a noted loathing for its conventions. This explains much about Pirate Utopia, which is almost not SF and yet should prove eminently satisfactory to genre readers.

The Free State of Fiume was a real thing. Fiume was a port city which was seized by troops led by the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio. Very briefly, it became an attempted Futurist utopia.

The novella explores this strange phenomenon through the lens of the single worst member of the new government, exposing along the way the seductively poisonous appeal of fascism. At the end, after the inevitable has played out, Harry Houdini appears with two alt-historical pulp writers to implicate science fiction and fantasy literature in the whole mess.

It really is quite brilliant.

2. From Locus magazine's review by Gary K. Wolfe:

One can be reasonably suspicious of a novella whose alternate history is so obscure, contorted, and bordering on the absurd that it needs appendices to help us draw the connections, but the overall effect of Pirate Utopia is more chilling than comical...

The idea of a brutality as policy crops up repeatedly in the many discussions that make up the intellectual heart of the story, and you can't help but read forward a century or so to see how such ideas persist even today. In his interview with [Rick] Klaw, Sterling relates his tale to Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here and notes that, as Lewis said, fascism in the US "would arrive wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross under American circumstances." Pirate Utopia may seem to be about an ancient and almost forgotten struggle between Italy and Yugoslavia, but its themes are as relevant as this year's presidential politics.

3. From author Cory Doctorow on boingboing.net:

Sterling's Pirate Utopia captures both the excitement and the shabbiness of Futurism and fascism, the sense of trembling anticipation and the terror of merciless technocratic rule where corruption is considered efficient and meritocratic. For all that this is a very cerebral story -- much of the prose is distant and precise, like a Futurist's oiled machine stamping out words -- Sterling masterfully winds in all manner of blood and love and sorrow into the story, not to mention the odd belly-laugh.

This novella is a beautiful object, with the most amazing super-modernist black and white interior illustrations and a cover that beggars belief.

4. And lastly (though there are many more very fine reviews available on this novella) from Max Booth III on LitReactor:

This is a very short book occupied by an impressive cast of characters—most of them grabbed straight from history, although used in ways you might not entirely expect. This is a Futurism novel that looks at the past rather than the future. It's an alternate history clusterfuck of brilliant, whacky world-building and hilarious, bizarre characters. I am not going to discuss the plot, but I will tell you that, in the world of Pirate Utopia, Hitler passed away while saving someone's life in a bar, Lovecraft works not only for Houdini, but is also a member of the U.S. spy delegation—oh, and Mussolini has evidently been shot in the cock, which is of course wonderful. This is a book about piracy and Futurism. Building a world while stealing everything in it. When you have an oxymoron for a title, there's really no way to predict what awaits you, and Pirate Utopia exceeds all expectations. Also, make sure you stick around afterward for the impressive special feature essays and interview with Sterling. They'll help you make sense of what the hell you just read.

In his review, Cory Doctorow refers to the "most amazing super-modernist black and white interior illustrations and a cover that beggars belief." [Note: other reviewers have mentioned the artwork as well, but I simply didn't include that in my excerpts.] All the illustrations in Pirate Utopia are the work of John Coulthart, who has written a very enlightening 1,000-plus-word essay entitled "Reconstructing the Future: A Note on Design" that you'll find at the end of the book. You can read my blog post on my initial work on the novella, published on June 14, 2016, with a link to some of the interior illustrations (scroll down to the end of the blog); and a follow-up blog post on July 14, 2016, with additional examples of the illustrations.

Pirate Utopia is available direct from Tachyon Publications, and always through Amazon.com.

Pirate Utopia: The Starred PW Review

The Publishers Weekly starred review:

  Pirate Utopia

Bruce Sterling. Tachyon, $19.95 (192p) ISBN 978-1-61696-236-4

Cyberpunk progenitor Sterling's alternate history novella is bizarre, chock-full of famous people in improbable situations, and wildly entertaining, even when the worldbuilding seems to go a little off the rails. Lorenzo Secondari, a veteran of the recently ended Great War and forever changed by it, is the head engineer of the titular utopia, the Italian free state of Fiume. He and his compatriots build flying boats and fight communism while dealing with American secret agents, including Harry Houdini and Howard Lovecraft (who's now working as Houdini's publicity agent after going into advertising). Hitler died saving another man's life in a bar fight, [President Woodrow] Wilson was poisoned, and Mussolini's been disabled by a pair of bullets aimed "where a man least likes to be shot," so the Europe in which Secondari is attempting to create his radio-controlled airborne torpedoes and other gizmos is already massively different from ours. An introduction by Warren Ellis and an interview with Sterling sandwich the novel, both bearing an air of false gravitas, but the actual story is wacky and fun what-if-ing at its finest. (Nov.)

You can read the prior posts about my work on Pirate Utopia in my June 10, 2016 blog post and in my July 14, 2016, blog post.

Redux: Some Hard Facts About Pirate Utopia By Bruce Sterling

Did you read my July 14, 2016, blog post, in which I announced that Bruce Sterling's novella, Pirate Utopia, would be initially published in hardcover?

And at $14.95 no less -- extremely rare for any hardcover, especially one that contains pages -- and pages -- of period illustrations by none other than John Coulthart.

Shortly after posting that blog I learned about the caveat: the $14.95 price tag is indeed correct, but it's the Amazon-only

pre-publication price. Order the book from any other source and the price will be $19.95, which will also be the retail price after publication.

Now the problem with buying from Amazon is a) some people prefer not to support Amazon, and b) with a $14.95 purchase, you have to pay shipping, because $25 is the minimum purchase amount for free shipping on books (unless you are a Prime member).

But, I have an alternative solution:

With the assistance of Tachyon Publications, you can now purchase the Pirate Utopia hardcover through the Tachyon online store at the $14.95 price -- but you must use a coupon code at checkout, and this coupon code is only valid through Sunday, August 7. And if you reside in these United States and select media mail as the shipping option, shipping will be free.

A $14.95 hardcover, free media mail shipping, and you are supporting an independent publisher...It doesn't get any better than that.

The coupon code is MOREREDINK. Catchy, huh! But remember, it's only valid through August 7 -- that's a little over three weeks from now.

Here's the link to the Pirate Utopia product page at Tachyon Publications online.

The hardcover is the default option, so click the "Pre-Order Now" button, then enter MOREREDINK in the "Coupon Code" field, click the "Apply Coupon" button, and, if you live in the U.S., you should be good to go. Of course, you'll then have to pay for the book!

One more thing: this coupon will work for up to three hardcovers ($5.00 off on each of the three books), and since the publication date is November, you might want to consider purchasing a couple extra copies for holiday gifts.

Some Hard Facts About Pirate Utopia By Bruce Sterling

I recently completed my review of the page proofs for Bruce Sterling's forthcoming novella Pirate Utopia.

If you are on the Tachyon Publications list to receive a review/reader copy of the galleys, they should be shipping out to you shortly. If you have access to NetGalley, the Pirate Utopia e-galleys should soon be available as well. But if you aren't on the list, and you don't have NetGalley access, but you would like to review an e-galley of Pirate Utopia, then please leave a comment below: provide me with your book blog URL or venue for which you review, as well as contact information, and I'll be in touch.

As to the "hard facts": Due to popular demand, the alt-history, Futurist, dieselpunk Pirate Utopia, which was to launch as a trade paperback, will now first appear in a collectible hardcover edition for the mere retail price of $14.95. A Bruce Sterling hardcover for only $14.95? Say it ain't so!

Tachyon Pubs's marketing consultant, Rick Klaw, posted these words about Pirate Utopia:

Who are these bold rebels pillaging their European neighbors in the name of revolution? The Futurists! Utopian pirate-warriors of the tiny Regency of Carnaro, the unlikely scourge of the Adriatic Sea. Mortal enemies of communists, capitalists, and even fascists (to whom they are not entirely unsympathetic). 

The ambitious Soldier-Citizens of Carnaro are lead by a brilliant and passionate coterie of the perhaps insane. Lorenzo Secondari, World War I veteran, engineering genius, and leader of Croatian raiders. Frau Piffer, Syndicalist manufacturer of torpedoes at a factory run by and for women. The Ace of Hearts, a dashing Milanese aristocrat, spymaster, and tactical savant. And the Prophet, a seductive warrior-poet who leads via free love and military ruthlessness. 

Fresh off of a worldwide demonstration of their might, can the Futurists engage the aid of sinister American traitors and establish world domination?

In my June 10 blog post I shared the "Cast of Characters" in Pirate Utopia; and in my June 14 blog post I provided a sneak peak at some of the interior illustrations by John Coulthart, who also did the book's cover (above). Well, there are dozens of interior illos, and the three I provided simply don't do the book justice, so here are a few additional illustrations to whet your appetite:

Now imagine these illustrations in a beautifully done Bruce Sterling hardcover! Pirate Utopia will be published in November, and is now available for pre-order from Amazon or your fave bookseller.

* * * * *
A follow-up post (with a coupon code) on the hardcover price.

Redux: Bruce Sterling's Pirate Utopia - The Illustrations

In my previous blog post on Bruce Sterling's new novella, Pirate Utopia, I mentioned that the cover artist was John Coulthart, and that he had also written a 1,000-plus-word essay, "Reconstructing the Future: A Note on Design," to be included in the book.

What I didn't mention at the time is that John is also providing interior illustrations for the various sections of the novel. I didn't mention this because I didn't have access to any of the illos, then.

But I do now....

In that blog post I also stated that the story opens in Occupied Fiume, in January 1920: Lorenzo Secondari, the Pirate Engineer, and his group of Croatian pirates are off to the cinema to celebrate their new and improved torpedo, recently built at his Torpedo Factory. Here's the illustration for Section One: The Pirate Cinema:

And here's the illustration for the Pirate Utopia title page:

And lastly, here's the illustration for Section Two: The Ace of Hearts, who was a charismatic combat air ace and renowned expert in aerial reconnaissance (see "Cast of Characters" in my previous blog post):

So that's just a wee sampling of the interior illustrations by John Coulthart. Want to see the rest? Pirate Utopia will be published in November and is now available for pre-order direct from the publisher, Tachyon Publications, or Amazon, or your preferred bookseller.

Editing in Process: Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling

Cover Art by John Coulthart

Over the past fifteen years, I've worked on a few projects with author Bruce Sterling. The earliest project that comes to mind is Paul Di Filippo's short story collection, Strange Trades, which I acquired and edited for Golden Gryphon Press in 2001. Bruce wrote the introduction to this quirky collection of stories in which Paul reconstructs our (mis)conceptions about what it means to work for a living. Another project? In January 2009 I emailed Bruce for permission to use his story "Swarm," one of his Shaper/Mechanist stories, in my Alien Contact anthology. More than two years passed before the anthology was finally published, but published it was.[1]

Then in the fall of 2014 (September 18, 2014, to be exact), when I was on the hunt (and still am!)[2] for a new novella for Tachyon Publications, I immediately thought of contacting Bruce Sterling. Of course, to be fair, not only is Bruce one of my fave authors, but Tachyon publisher Jacob Weisman had previously informed me that he was a huge fan of Bruce's writing as well, particularly Bruce's short stories. Over email, Bruce and I discussed word length, fees, and such, and that was that. About ten months later, on July 14, 2015, I followed up with another email to Bruce. By this point, two of Tachyon's recent novellas on which I had worked had won awards: Nancy Kress's Yesterday's Kin had won the Nebula Award, and We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory had won the Shirley Jackson Award. If one is trying to promote a publisher's novella program, it always helps to have had previous novellas win awards.[3]

Bruce responded the very next day, stating that he just happened to have a novella available -- Pirate Utopia: "a 25,000 word dieselpunk alternate history yarn set in Italy in 1919." (The story actually takes place in 1920.) And, as "they" say, the rest is history, or, at least, alternate history.

About Pirate Utopia: Following the Great War, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States and tyrant of the League of Nations, gave Fiume away to Yugoslavia, which resulted in the Fiume rebellion and the rise of the Regency of Carnaro. The story opens in Occupied Fiume, in January 1920: Lorenzo Secondari, the Pirate Engineer, and his group of Croatian pirates are off to the cinema to celebrate their new and improved torpedo, recently built at his Torpedo Factory. Adventures ensue...including an eventual meeting with a team of American Secret Service Agents.

Bruce and I put together a rather detailed "Cast of Characters." I've already introduced Lorenzo Secondari; here are a few others (in abbreviated form):

Blanka Piffer: The Pirate Engineer's business manager, interpreter, and purchasing agent; a Fiume native and Communist union leader.

The Prophet [Gabriele D'Annunzio]: the military dictator of Fiume, its guiding light and great orator; leader of the "Desperates."

The Constitutionalist [Alceste de Ambris]: Carnaro’s greatest political theorist.

The Ace of Hearts [Guido Keller]: The Prophet's right-hand man; a charismatic combat air ace and renowned expert in aerial reconnaissance.

The Art Witch [Luisa Casati]: a Milanese millionairesse, patroness of the arts, and occultist, who entertained The Prophet.

Giulio Ulivi: a young visionary Italian radio engineer, who discovered a new form of radiation which he named the "F-Ray."

Other "characters" include Benito Mussolini, Guglielmo Marconi, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Harry Houdini, Howard Lovecraft, and Robert "Bob" Ervin Howard. But you'll have to wait for the book to learn the roles these individuals play in the story. And remember, this is an alternate history story.

The cover art for Pirate Utopia is brought to you by the mighty hand of John Coulthart. Evidently the period of time in which this story takes place is of special interest to John, and in fact he includes a very enlightening 1,000-plus-word essay entitled "Reconstructing the Future: A Note on Design." About the cover art, John writes:

...there's a nod to Soviet Constructivism on the cover, with colours, letterforms, aircraft formation, and a flag-waving crowd that suggest the propaganda posters of the period. If this seems at odds with the Futurism within, consider it a hijacking (or pirating) of the graphics of a rival ideology...just as Secondari pirates (or hijacks) the Lancia-Ansaldo IZM from the unfortunate Communists. That armoured car is accurately depicted, incidentally, as are the Caproni bombers on the cover and inside the book....

Pirate Utopia will be published in November and is now available for pre-order direct from the publisher, Tachyon Publications, Amazon, or your preferred bookseller.

Follow-up post on the interior illustrations.

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Footnotes

[1] My anthology Alien Contact was published in the fall of 2011 and contains 26 stories, and 165,000 words, of some of the best alien contact stories published in the past 30 or so years (from when the book itself was published). Here's my dedicated Alien Contact page -- start with "Beginnings..."

[2] In addition to Bruce Sterling, I contacted a handful of other authors to let them know I was acquiring original novellas for Tachyon Publications. It never ceases to amaze me when authors do not have the professional courtesy to even respond to such a query from an acquiring editor. I guess these writers have tons of editors breaking down their door to buy their stories. It must be nice. Just tell me you're not interested, or you're too busy, or whatever. You never know when you may have to work with me in the future.

[3] The Nebula Award win and the Shirley Jackson Award win for Nancy Kress and Daryl Gregory, respectively, were only the two most recent wins for Tachyon Publications -- and the two most recent novellas that I had worked on. In 2013, Nancy Kress's After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall won the Nebula Award, and was also a finalist for the Hugo Award. And Brandon Sanderson's The Emperor's Soul won that very same Hugo Award.

Hugo Award and Locus Award Finalist: Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds

I was fortunate to have worked on Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds -- I acquired and edited the novella for Tachyon Publications -- so I am quite pleased to be able to announce that Slow Bullets is now a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the Locus Award.

The winners of the Locus Awards will be announced during the Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle, WA, June 24-26, 2016; Connie Willis will MC the awards ceremony. Here is the complete list of the Locus Award finalists, including details on the awards weekend.

The 2016 Hugo Awards will be presented on the evening of Saturday, August 20, during a ceremony at MidAmeriCon II, the 74th World Science Fiction Convention, in Kansas City, MO. Here is the complete list of the Hugo Award finalists, including voting numbers.

I'd like to quote a paragraph from my June 8, 2015, blog post:

If you are unfamiliar with the various works of author Alastair Reynolds, then Slow Bullets would be the perfect starting point. If you read Alastair Reynolds already, preferring his longer novels and series work -- still, don't deny yourself the pleasure of reading this story, as Slow Bullets has more ideas than some novels that are twice its length.

And to further that aim (and to help promote the novella), here are my previous blog posts, in order of publication, on Slow Bullets:

February 9, 2015: Editing in Process...Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds

May 29, 2015: Now Shipping: Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds [includes quotes from Michael Bishop and Michael Swanwick]

June 1, 2015: Alastair Reynolds on the Genesis of his story Slow Bullets

June 8, 2015: "The pace of the novella is never less than breakneck": a review of Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds [from Green Man Review]

July 21, 2015: "Some readers may find themselves thrown off balance by the juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness—" [from the Los Angeles Review of Books]

October 21, 2015: Book Received: Slow Bullets Limited Edition by Alastair Reynolds [includes the Strange Horizons review]

And if you haven't gotten the hint yet, you should consider purchasing a copy of Slow Bullets, which is available from Amazon, or from any other fave bookseller.

Forthcoming from Tachyon Publications in 2016: Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling

Now available for preorder at Amazon and other booksellers.

(More on this novella once I begin my editing work.)

World Fantasy Award Winner: Daryl Gregory

In my February 27, 2014, blog post -- yes, 21 months ago! -- I wrote a bit about my work on Daryl Gregory's novella We Are All Completely Fine. And in that blog post I wrote, and I quote: "...we'll be seeing this sharp-edged story on many awards lists beginning in early 2015."

So, I was extremely pleased, but certainly not surprised, when I learned yesterday that Daryl Gregory had won the 2015 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella for We Are All Completely Fine, from Tachyon Publications.

The complete list of 2015 World Fantasy Award nominees and winners has been posted on the Word Fantasy Convention site.

And let's not forget the other award nominations, and a win, that We Are All Completely Fine has achieved:

Nebula Award nomination
Shirley Jackson Award winner
Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist
Locus Award nominee

Congrats once again to Daryl Gregory, and all the other World Fantasy Award winners and nominees.

Book Received: Slow Bullets Limited Edition by Alastair Reynolds

WSFA Press limited edition

The weekend of October 9-11 marked the annual Capclave convention in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Washington Science Fiction Association (WSFA). Each year, in support of Capclave's Author Guest of Honor, WSFA Press typically publishes a limited edition hardcover of the author's work. This year's Author GOH was none other than Alastair Reynolds -- and WSFA Press published a signed and numbered hardcover edition of the author's novella Slow Bullets, limited to 1,000 copies.

Tachyon Pubs trade paperback

Slow Bullets was originally published by Tachyon Publications as an original trade paperback, and as you may recall from an earlier blog post on February 9, 2015, I had a wee bit of a hand in the acquisition and editing of that book.

You can purchase the limited edition of Slow Bullets direct from the WSFA Press Bookstore for the price of $40.00; the original trade paperback of Slow Bullets (List price: $14.95) -- now in its second printing -- can be had from all major booksellers, physical or online.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the author, Alastair Reynolds, for graciously sending me a copy of the Slow Bullets limited edition while he was attending Capclave.

Here are a few excerpts from the lengthy Slow Bullets review by Tom Atherton on Strange Horizons:

...part of what makes Reynolds's new novel Slow Bullets so successful is this sense of escalation. What begins as run-of-the-mill space opera soon develops into a complex social thought experiment; an examination of the tyrannies of ambiguous language and the societal implications of textual preservation. It's impressive that Reynolds manages all of this big-picture stuff within the scope of an uncharacteristically short novel (just shy of two hundred pages), and does so while simultaneously retaining a sense of intimacy through a well-realised narrator whose own struggles with memory act as a microcosm of the book's wider sociological concerns. The novel is also interested in atavism (both technological and social), and so it's fitting that Reynolds has appropriated the imagery and themes of an older literary tradition, gothic horror, to tell this story; only in place of a dilapidated monastery inhabited by reclusive monks, Slow Bullets gives us soldiers-turned-scribes entombed inside a vast and decaying spaceship. Architecture is important here, as is the intersection of technology with biology. There really is a lot going on; a fact belied by the book's meagre page count. With so much to unpick, then, it’s probably best that we start at the very beginning and work forward from there.

...

It's all very pacy, with much of the actual process behind these fledgling democracies glossed over in a matter of sentences. It's a revelation-on-every-page sort of book. Fans of Alastair Reynolds looking for his characteristic descriptive depth and attention to technological detail might find themselves disappointed, but for what it's worth I enjoyed this change of tempo, which, if anything, demonstrates Reynolds's versatility as a stylist.

In fact, Slow Bullets has a lot of very nice stylistic touches. It's peppered with expressive little descriptions, such as this one about a book whose pages "detached too easily, the way wings come off an insect" (p. 13). I was also struck by the way that biological imagery is used to describe technology: slow bullets move by "contracting and extending like a mechanical maggot" (p. 16), hibernation capsules enclose "like an egg" (p. 21), and an automated surgeon-machine reminds Scur of "the hinged mouthparts of a flytrap" (p. 74). All of which sinister language reflects the relationship the crew have with the failing tech that surrounds them: dependency mixed with danger. The only complaint I have about style is that there are a few too many infodumps, which have the potential to interrupt the otherwise swift flow of Reynolds's prose.

...

The overarching tone of Slow Bullets, then, is one of tragic irony. The Caprice-ians' assertion that they are making indelible, accurate records ("we can’t tolerate mistakes" [p. 112]) is contradicted by how the novel itself treats texts. One character even comments on the inability of language to explain their situation; "She’s trying to describe something language isn't made to describe" (p. 118). All of the texts the survivors produce are, ultimately, unstable. Not only, as we've seen, are they up for interpretation and forgery, but they're also physically transient: the walls can be polished blank, the slow bullets over-written; the survivors' text-scarred bodies will die. Perhaps, deep down, they all know this. Maybe creating texts is just another way in which the survivors are performing society.

This would all be so much bathos, of course, if the novel presented itself matter-of-factly as an unequivocal, representational record. Reynolds's masterstroke, however, is to reflect this thematic concern for unstable texts by filtering the story through an unreliable narrator, making Slow Bullets itself something ambiguous and difficult to pin down. Scur, narrating from some future point, begins her story by telling us about her favourite poem, which is "about death and remembrance" (p. 10). This microcosmically echoes the themes of the novel, certainly, but remembrance, it turns out, isn't as straightforward a thing as Scur would have us believe. Her narration is frequently inconsistent and contradictory. She hubristically announces that she can "be perfectly sure of [her]self" (p. 100), yet phrases of an "I don’t remember" variety become refrain-like throughout the novel. "I should remember, but I do not" (p. 189). At one point her very identity is questioned: "So Scur is what she calls herself now?" (p. 141). We're also never given any explanation as to why, despite her protestations of innocence, she's counted among the war criminals onboard the ship. This is Scur's memory, but memories are biased, unreliable and prone to fanciful invention. With Scur as our only point of entry into this world, we can’t trust anything we read.

On Lucius Shepard

Cover Art by J. K. Potter

A few months after Lucius Shepard passed away, in March of 2014, my copy of Beautiful Blood arrived in the mail from Subterranean Press. This last novel, along with his book The Dragon Griaule, a collection of six stories (also from Sub Press), completes the tale of the 750-foot-high, mile-long dragon that has been in perpetual sleep for thousands of years -- but whose dark spirit gravely influences the inhabitants of the villages built around and on the dragon itself.

Typically, I would have written a "Books Received" blog post on More Red Ink to capture these two newly acquired titles. And yet...here it is more than a year and a half later, and I'm still struggling to write a Lucius Shepard blog post. I have a couple pages of hand-written notes on my desk, Notepad files saved to disk... Yet I'll snag any piece of an excuse to do anything else but write this blog post. For whatever reason that I have yet to pinpoint, this is just one of those posts that has become difficult for me.

Cover Art by J. K. Potter

In an obituary posted on March 20, 2014, on BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow described Shepard's work: "its originality, its dazzling language, its hardbitten and hard-won verisimilitude." Beautifully written, stylistic, provocative, hard-edged -- read any review of Shepard's work and you'll find words such as these used to describe his writing.

Lucius Shepard is one of the very few writers whose work requires that I always keep a dictionary to hand, because of the inevitable word here and there that I must look up.

If his work is not being used in literature and writing classes at the university level, then academia is truly short-sighted (or maybe just too caught up in the distant past, rather than the present).

During my eight-year stint (1999–2007) as an editor with indie publisher Golden Gryphon Press, I worked on three Lucius Shepard books, plus another of his stories that was included in a fourth book, an anthology. I still have most, if not all, of our email communications going as far back as 2001. Reading through these emails recently was definitely a trip down memory lane...and made accepting that Lucius is no longer with us even more difficult.

In 2002 I had been working on a new line of limited edition chapbooks[1]: Turquoise Days by Alastair Reynolds had been completed but not yet published, and Howard Waldrop had also committed to providing chapbook story A Better World's in Birth! -- so I hit up Lucius Shepard for a chapbook story as well. On September 23, 2002, he sent me the story "Maceo" for consideration. When I told him the maximum that I was able to pay for the story, he responded the very next day: "Unfortunately, [this amount] doesn't help me. I'm trying to raise a lot for my charity in Honduras and I've already been offered fifteen hundred for this and turned it down. So, sorry. But thanks for reading it...."

I didn't know anything about Lucius's charity at this point in time and I didn't feel it was appropriate to inquire via email, so I waited until we had a chance to chat in person. I don't recall if it was at the World Fantasy Con, or OryCon, or another con, but when we did meet (in a hotel bar, naturally), I asked. Lucius told me how the poor locals deep dive for pearls and over time they suffer the bends sufficiently enough that it permanently affects their health. The money he makes from writing goes to pay off customs officers, dock workers, and the like so that when his donations arrive (wheelchairs, for example), they get to their intended destinations. He spoke of the organization required to pull all this off and that he pretty much handled all the wheeling and dealing in Honduras himself.

I just shook my head in awe; it was hard for me to imagine Lucius working so hard in this fashion to help others in the form of a charity -- not that he wasn't capable of doing so, but given how he publicly defined himself, I was simply caught off guard. I was already working with Lucius on another project, and this is an excerpt from the mini bio that he provided me:

He has taught Spanish at a diplomatic school, owned a T-shirt company, worked as a janitor in a nuclear facility, and as a bouncer at a brothel in Málaga, and “beat his brains out” as a rock musician.

Somehow, that description just didn't fit the role of a charity worker....

[Update 10/21/2015: Who's looking after Lucius's charity now?]

Anyhow, this request for a chapbook story from Lucius led to a discussion about his two hobo stories -- "Over Yonder" and the unpublished "Jailbait" -- along with his Spin magazine article on the Freight Train Riders of America. All of which eventually led to the publication of Shepard's collection Two Trains Running, from Golden Gryphon Press in 2004. But that's for another blog post.

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Footnotes:

[1] You can read a bit more about my work on the limited edition chapbooks -- and how my query to Charles Stross for a story set me on the path of Stross's Laundry Files series -- by checking out this link on More Red Ink.