Ambrose & Elsewhere

1. You stumble across one unicorn, then all of a sudden you’re in a herd of the reclusive beasts. I was looking for something else on Google Books this afternoon when I found that an old favorite of mine, Odell Shepard’s The Lore of the Unicorn, had been Googled. The book is still in print, and easy to find used copies of on Amazon and elsewhere, but it’s cool that the current publisher unleashed the whole contents for online reading (at Google and apparently on their own website, but apparently their server’s a little wonky; I couldn’t make a connection to it).

[Edited to add: They seem to have dropped the footnotes, though, so anyone thinking of buying a copy might be better off with an older edition. The Dover edition, which I snapped up in the 90s and has worn pretty well, has all the references, the index, and a couple of decent illustrations, all of which are lacking in the e-version online.]

2. Practically the only non-bad news from Mumbai in this terrible week concerned Emmanuele Lattanzi, a Neapolitan living in Mumbai who first escaped from the terrorists attacking the Oberoi hotel, and then voluntarily returned there to bring milk to his baby daughter and comfort to his wife, still imprisoned in the hotel. A small victory can count for a lot.

3. I only report this result because it’s so unexpected.

Your rainbow is strongly shaded red.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is says about you: You are a passionate person. You appreciate energetic people. You get bored easily and want friends who will keep up with you.

Find the colors of your rainbow at spacefem.com.

I suspect most people who know me might tag me with a frostier rainbow, and I don’t really get bored easily, except at sporting events. So it’s possible that this quiz is not 100% infallible. Caveat quaesitor.

Baroque music always makes me feel autumnal (and vice versa). There were more professional videos on YouTube, but I liked the way these guys swung into the 4th Brandenburg.

A happy Thanksgiving for those who celebrate it today; a happy Thursday to everyone.

Wednesday is my day to group-blog at the Black Gate website. My first entry is here, in which I babble incoherently about Morlock, unicorns, and my obscure feelings of dread when I think about Austin Tappan Wright. Feel free to comment there or here… or just tiptoe quietly away.

[edited to add]

There’s a burst of activity going on at the Black Gate site, with content being added on a more-than-daily-basis, and the new design includes RSS feeds. For those who want to keep track via LiveJournal there’s an account already set up: blackgatefeed.

1. One thing that’s been bothering me about all this news focused on Citigroup: it keeps reminding me of that terrible song by “‘Jefferson’ ‘”Starship”‘”–you know the one: “We Built This City.” (No, I’m not going to link to it. I don’t want that on my conscience.) Maybe Citibank used to use it in their ads, I’m not sure, but the association seems to be ineluctable (an ugly word for an ugly thing). I try to drive it out with this but it’s not working very well.

2. Work proceeds on the sequel to Blood of Ambrose. (No, I never get tired of linking to that page.) I wrote through one of those blank spaces over the weekend–one where I knew what came before and what came after and that something would have to happen in between but I wasn’t sure what it was. A voracious lake troll with braided ear-hair showed up out of nowhere–I literally had no idea that such a being existed in Morlock’s world. But he seemed to belong there, so I didn’t kick him out.

3. Groupblogging has started in earnest at the Black Gate website. David Soyka, BG‘s occasional short fiction reviewer posted Sunday; Judith Berman (author of the Nebula-nominated “Awakening” as well as the remarkable Native American fantasy Bear Daughter) posts today about conventions and intelligibility. Ryan Harvey and Howard Jones are also going to pitch in, and I’m slated for Wednesdays, starting this week. So I guess I’d better give it some thought in advance: these lake trolls don’t always show up when you need them. Busy braiding their ear-hair, no doubt, the heedless grishk-gnawing bastards.

Word on the street is that the peerless Holly Black and her peer, sf historian and YA author Justine Larbalestier, have tired of championing their favorite imaginary critters (unicorns and zombies respectively) in sordid smackdowns through all the back alleys and undertubes of the internet and are settling the matter in the only reasonable way, by co-editing an anthology titled Zombies Vs. Unicorns. That’s high concept so high it smacks of genius. Or some sort of hallucinogen.

I’m a noncombatant in the zombie-unicorn wars, but I have to admit I incline a little toward the widely loathed unicorn. They may have been pop-cultivated into my-little-ponies-with-spikes, but they still strike me as a powerful symbol of otherworldliness. There are no unicorns around here (wherever “here” is): if you see a unicorn you are there instead. I’m thinking of the occasional appearances of the unicorn in Zelazny’s Amber series (the original five, not the saddeningly inept sequel books), or Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Dunsany wrote a couple of stories (The King of Elfland’s Daughter and maybe the best of all the Jorkens stories, “Hunting the Unicorn”) involving unicorn hunts, a notion which has always struck me as deeply depraved. But at least Dunsany’s unicorns were remarkable beasts, whose presence indicated escape from the fields we know.

Unfortunately, that’s not what most readers seem to think of when they read the word “unicorn”, and it’s audience reaction that seals the deal (or doesn’t), not the writer’s intent.

Okay, so I’ve been blithely posting about squirrels and exoplanets as if there were nothing on my mind except my hair (not much of a burden these days). But truly all this while I’ve been seething inside with unshed news, and now it can be told.

The page for Blood of Ambrose is up at the Pyr site, along with the final cover art by Dominic Harman, who has done stunning art for the Temeraire books, among others. (The page text says that the cover is not final, which is technically true, as there are some design issues which may be tweaked, but that’s the cover image.) It’s in the nature of things that I would think this image is mind-blowingly cool: I especially like the murder of crows, the three moons, the Lankhmar-like cityscape of Ontil, and Morlock’s threatening stance.

Fans of the thrice-greatest Chuck Lukacs should not despair: I don’t think I’m spilling any secrets when I say that he’s contributing some typically great interior art.

As far as the text goes, the patient, persistent and insightful proofreader saved me from uncounted crimes and confusions, including chronic and persistent Capitalitis. (“The Fat Cat Lay On The Mat” is not really more impressive than “The fat cat lay on the mat”–it just thinks it is.) I did resplit a couple of the infinitives she unsplit for me, because I am starting to feel that the split infinitive is not so much a right as an obligation. But reading the novel again, with my eyes hovering right over the text (focusing on actual yes-this-is-really-happening-no-fooling publication), was an interesting experience, giving me a lot to think about (on a sentence level, even a word-by-word level) as I write new stuff.

Now, though, I think I have to get up from the keyboard and run around just to bring this buzz down to near-safe levels.

You know those demented squirrels who wait a moment before a vehicle comes along a street to dash in front of the wheels? One of these leaped out as I was biking past the other day.

“Hey!” I shouted, to scare him away, but by that time he had already bounced off the spokes of my front wheel. As I glanced over my shoulder he was dashing madly back whence he’d come.

I sort of felt like I’d failed to do my duty by Darwin and future generations of squirrelkind by not breaking his stupid neck. On the other hand, my bike still has clean hands, so to speak: let the local squirrels seek more willing filters for their gene pool, say I.

[I don’t know why I say “he.” I guess these guys always remind me of the dopey thrillseekers from old Mountain Dew commercials.]

Looks like we’ve finally got actual photos of exoplanets (better quality than VSOP planets, but more expensive, as I understand it).

Aftermath
Siegfried Sassoon

Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same–and War’s a bloody game…
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz–
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench–
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, “Is it all going to happen again?”

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack–
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads–those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

–March 1919

Deep Genre has had a couple of interesting posts lately about political values in epic fantasy–specifically the old “SF Diplomat” question of whether fantasy is inherently reactionary. The first was (by Kate Elliott, and the next by Lois Tilton; both have provoked interesting comment threads, and with luck there may be more posts to come.)

In the comments to Kate Elliot’s piece, Mark Tiedemann (a sometime Black Gate writer, among other perhaps more notable things) suggested that fantasy was not necessarily interested in politics–he described it as an “added benefit” for fantasy but not essential. “Fantasy is not about systems but about the essentials of self, and the problems of the given story are designed to reveal those qualities of character which are outside of or beyond ‘politics.'”

I was going to just comment with something like “Word!” or “True dat!” but my experts tell me that no one says that stuff anymore, and they also refused to tell me what people do say. (“For your own safety,” they keep insisting, as if that arrest for misuse of “groovadelic” in mixed company hadn’t been expunged from my record years ago.)

So instead I wrote

Great post and fascinating comments. I especially like Mark Tiedemann’s point. Matters of governance in a fantasy novel are rarely about politics; they’re identity symbols. This can be bad (in an Iron Dream sort of way) or good, but it’s not necessarily advocating reactionary political values. It has more to do with the Freudian “family romance.”

Kate Elliott wondered, in a very civil way, what the hell we were talking about. I can’t speak for Mark Tiedemann, but here’s what I was talking about.

Fantasy is most effective when it acts through symbols that rest pretty deep in the awareness (or beneath the awareness, if you buy into the whole subconscious thing). At the center of every adult’s emotional life is a struggle for autonomy that occurs in adolescence. One may be struggling against well-meaning (or not so well-meaning) caregivers who are reluctant to surrender their authority. One may be raised in perfect environment that encourages autonomy and self-responsibility, but one still has to go out and face the world, make one’s place in it. Somehow, this is part of everyone’s story.

Why do so many fantasies involve young sons of widows who grow up to kill the monster, defeat the king, marry the princess and rule the kingdom happily ever after? Some point out that these stories are very old; this is true, but it’s just begging the question. A story appeals to audiences because it speaks to them emotionally. Why does this story appeal to modern audiences or ancient ones?

It appeals to them because it’s a symbolic representation of the struggle for autonomy that everybody engages in. The kingdom isn’t necessarily a kingdom; it’s just a life where you get to decide what happens. The princess isn’t a princess; she’s the hot checkout lady at the grocery store or maybe the likeable mechanic at the gas station, depending on how you roll. In fact, the hero may be a daughter, more like Atalanta or Camilla, nowadays: the dynamic of the story is essentially unchanged. The story has a wide appeal because its symbols are wired into emotional hot-buttons that are part of everybody’s life.

Everybody struggles for autonomy–and everybody fails. Your princess or prince will have their own ideas how the shared kingdom should be run… and if they don’t, life may seem a little empty. Your princess or prince may not follow the script and will perversely prefer someone else. You may not escape from your abusive or well-meaning caregivers, and if you do you may find you’ve become one yourself, trapped by a self-image you despise. When you challenged the monster, he may have won the fight.

All these frustrations give new impact to the symbolic paradigm of how things should be, but also open up an appetite for stories that break the paradigm somehow, mixing fantasies of fulfillment with the grittier realities of unfulfillment. (The 21st century love of fantasy is the longing of Caliban to not see his face in the mirror. The 21st century dislike of fantasy is the longing of Caliban to see his face in the mirror. I should write these things down somewhere.)

Some people might say that science fiction does these things, too. Anyway, I would. Take classic old guard sf like Heinlein’s Puppet Masters: it’s all about the struggle for autonomy, against figures who are beneficient (like the Old Man who orders the hero around) and malefic (like the invading “slugs”) Spoiler behind the cut! Do NOT press the red button!