Janet Kagan has died. I loved her series in Asimov’s about genetic mishaps on a colony planet (“The Loch Moose Monster”, “Return of Kangaroo Rex” etc), collected in Mirabile, and was sorry when we stopped getting new stories from her. Now we never will again. All Frankenswine should fly at half-mast today.
[Seen at james_nicoll and Posted in Uncategorized 2 Comments
Endymion’s revenge:
the moon’s bright eye is shut,
and on its ashen lid
I see red shadows lie.
My flashfic “Brother Solson and Sister Luna” has gone live at Every Day Fiction.
It’s a vampire story, and a non-Morlock story. The specific genesis was seeing I Am Legend this winter and thinking, “This is impossible. The vampire-zombie-whatevers have completely obliterated their prey population and they should be dying off. They’re monsters with no visible means of support!” Then I got onto a line of thought (probably well-travelled by others before, but new to me) that vampires (as presented in the media) really could not exist. They are essentially prolific superpredators; they would hunt through their prey population in very short order and become extinct. A couple of days later I pounded out the story and sent it off. And now it’s in “print” as it were and people are commenting on it–not quite Instant Messaging speed, but close enough to justify the title to this entry.
The title of the story is a little too obscure, though. The viewpoint character is a narrow-minded minor-league academic (“They said to me, ‘Write what you know,’ so I says to them…”) and, to sneak my ecological argument against vampire stories into this vampire story, I made him an ecological biologist. This, and some other things in the story, suggested dark echoes of Francis of Assisi’s Song of the Sun, the first significant piece of Italian literature, where the sun is saluted as Frate Sole (“Brother Sun”) and the moon as Sora Luna (“Sister Moon”). At first the title seemed to me too much of a giveaway for the story, but in retrospect that looks like a symptom of how cloistered my thinking is getting.
There was a Zeffirelli movie about St. Francis, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, but apparently that doesn’t ring any bells with people anymore. I vividly remembered the TV commercials for this movie as I was typing out the title… but now I realize I must have seen them thirty five, thirty six years ago, in the early 1970s. I think I’m starting to get that old-folks memory, where it’s easier to remember things that happened a generation ago than what happened an hour ago.
Oh, pus and blasphemation! Steve Gerber’s dead. Among other things, he created the beyond-brilliant comic Howard the Duck (known today largely as the basis of George Lucas’ worst movie–yes even worse than Episode I, a truly epic standard of awfulness).
Well, all men and ducks are mortal, and Steve Gerber was a man, but I wish he had managed to duck the Reaper’s scythe this time.
The other morning, I was watching the previews for Spider-Man 10. (The logo for the movie is, of course, a very webby Roman numeral X.) I’m happy to report that, despite its somewhat schlocky tagline (“Spider-Man Vs. King Kong!”), the movie looks pretty good. In it, Manhattan has been flooded or sunk by aquatic invaders, who are going around the city with cannons that fire weird spider-frog beasties–not as weapons, but apparently as some sort of seeding program for the new aquatic ecology they have planned for NYC. Spider-Man was just initiating some sort of rapport with a spider-frog, via their mutual spider-sense, when my alarm went off and I woke up.
Why King Kong? I wondered. He hadn’t shown up in any of the footage I’d seen. (Although the flooding would be convenient for him; he’d be able to swim to the top of the Empire State building.) Google tells me that the phrase “Spider-Man vs. King Kong” has been drifting on the frothy surface of the internet for a while, so maybe I saw it somewhere. I’m also pretty sure that, in this continuity, Spider-Man’s romantic interest was Gwen Stacey, but again I don’t know why I’m sure: she never showed up in the previews.
I guess these and other mysteries will be resolved when the movie actually comes out, some time in the 2020s.
Most readers of this LJ will have already read about this, but I thought I’d mention: Mike Kabongo (a.k.a. onyxhawke) is running another one of his manuscript reading marathons, this one dubbed the Winter Workout. He really does give great feedback, so anyone agentless and interested who has an unsold sf/f novel in hand might want to give this a try. It’s easy, fun and improves the posture. Maybe.
Double Tongued Word Wrester hasn’t been too thrilling lately–e.g. their breathless revelation that step on means “cut” in the parlance of the drug world. (I mean, where did these guys spend the 1970s?) But they made up for it today with a new-to-me buzzword about screenplays: “Page 75.” That’s ““the dark heart of the narrative arc, this moment of failure represents a loss so profound that the viewer (or reader, as the case may be) is meant to abandon all hope of a tidy resolution. Well, almost.”
Another interesting site for narrative tropes I came across recently and serendipitously, thanks to these guys, is the TV Tropes wiki.
One could waste endless hours in trope-hunting, of course, and the fact that someone can caricature a trope doesn’t mean it’s a cliché or otherwise unusable. (I’ll always insist, for instance, that “white room syndrome” is not necessarily a mistake, but a perfectly valid way to begin a story.) Still, a browse through sites like this or the famous “Turkey City Lexicon” can stimulate the storyteller into realizing he is trying to reinvent the wheel (or something they used to use before there were wheels). At least, it can if the storyteller is me.
I walked over to the grocery store tonight through a pleasant dusting of new snow. On my way back I was crossing through a parking lot when I realized the random scrapings of fresh-fallen snow under my feet weren’t random at all: I was walking through a word about twenty feet long, inscribed into the snowy surface of the lot. As a philologist I was instantly captivated, of course, and as a fantasy reader (and writer) I was reminded of some electrifying scenes from The Silver Chair (my favorite of the Narnia books, and I hope they never make a movie of it).
So I had to stop and read the word, but (since I was standing in the middle of it) I had to take it in installments. The first part of the word was AS and when I turned around to look, the second part seemed to be HOF.
“AS-HOF,” I muttered. A temple of one of the Aesir. Someone had written an Old Norse word in giant snow letters and I had just happened to walk through it. How cool was that?
Unfortunately, on second glance, it turned out that there was a second S after AS and what I had thought was F was really LE. I reread the word and was no longer pleased to be standing in the middle of it.
For years I was sure I couldn’t write flashfic. In fact, if a story clocks in at less than 5000 words I usually feel it might be too short. But recently something snapped and I’ve not only been writing flashfic but selling it. Today my first effort along these lines, “The Gordian Stone”, went live at Every Day Fiction. (Morlock is a major character in it, but given the POV of the story I decided not to use his name.)
I’ve never published in a ‘zine that had an online comments section, and I think it’s an interesting and potentially useful innovation. Potentially dangerous, too, if a surly author starts quarrelling with readers there. But interactivity is something online publications can give readers (and writers) in a way that print publications can’t, so this seems like a good way to work the medium in a way that the medium works.
EDF dropped me a line yesterday to say that they’re taking another flashfic of mine, “Brother Solson and Sister Luna.” This is a landmark for me, as it’s the first story I’ve sold that is in no way shape or form a Morlock story. (I’m not planning to abandon the Crooked Man, but it would be nice to feel I have more than one string to my authorial bow.)
Because they had words like ἀιγίλιψ “destitute even of goats.” (I just ran across this word in Homer.) What makes it even better somehow is that it rhymes with “chicken-lips.”
My favorite Greek verb is also somewhat zoological: βοόω “to change into a cow” (an obviously useful expression).
