Guest Post: “And the World Turned Gray: Gritty vs. Classic Heroes” by Kameron Hurley

January 23, 2014 Civilian Reader Guest Post Bel Dame Apocrypha, Del Rey UK, God's War, Grimdark, Gritty, Gritty vs Heroic Fantasy, Heroes, Infidel, Kameron Hurley, Night Shade Books, Rapture, Sci-Fi

Kameron Hurley is an award-winning writer and freelance copywriter who grew up in Washington State. She is the author of the book God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture, and her short fiction has appeared in magazines such Lightspeed, EscapePod, and Strange Horizons, and anthologies such as The Lowest Heaven and Year’s Best SF.

Also on CR: Review of God’s War

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I’ll sometimes hear folks musing about where the “gritty” hero came from. And though you’ll get a lot of knee-jerk responses of the “Well, it’s a reaction to traditional goody-goody heroes,” I’d argue, in fact, that gritty, unlikeable heroes have been around a lot longer than you’d think. Gormenghast wasn’t exactly full of heroes. It was full of idiots and backstabbers. We just didn’t celebrate them. They were funny.

Oh, sure, what littered the shelves as I was growing up in the ’80s and ’90s were indeed mostly traditional sorts, I suppose. But there were notable exceptions – Jennifer Roberson’s Tiger, Mary Gentle’s Ash, and let’s face it, you know, Conan wasn’t a sweetheart fun dude.

But the hero who broke all the rules – who didn’t really save the world, who didn’t get the girl that tore me up the most – was Fitz in Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice. I’d argue Hobb’s semi-tragic hero, who did not slay the dragon or win a kingdom (even Joe Abercrombie’s characters sometimes win a kingdom) or run off with the love of their life, was among the first to start the shift toward a hero who was a bit more gray, a bit more complex, and whose end was a lot less predictable than most. Fitz was the Catalyst. He was the person great events moved around. He was not the active agent. Only the spark.

In truth, on looking at a lot of fantasy heroes and heroines of the past, what I found had changed most between, say 1970 and 2004 wasn’t the level of grit or gritty. After all, there was a lot of dark, messed up stuff going on in the New Wave (The Stars My Destination, for a brief departure into SF-land, was hardly full of nice people). Instead, what changed was this idea that the good guys were always going to win. That the Big Bad would be defeated. So you got heroes like Fitz, and KJ Bishop’s war-wrecked veterans, who, it could be argued, often did more harm than good. Maureen McHugh writes complex characters whose endings always tend to be ambiguous, sort of non-endings, more abrupt halts than tying up all the loose ends.

What we’re falling in love with, over time, isn’t necessarily the grittiest jerk with a sword – we had Conan for that. What began to happen is that we craved more complexity in our stories. And with complexity comes a good deal of ugliness. The bad guys sometimes win. Sometimes it’s not even clear who the bad guys are. Oh, sure, folks wrote dark, complex fiction prior to when the term “grimdark” popped up, but grimdark – tragedy, complexity, brutality – of this type has been especially sought after from the early 2000’s. Just as New Weird started becoming a Named Thing, the dark fantasy writers were beginning to get more attention, too.

It’s been interesting to watch video games go through this same tilt toward the more complex, the tragic. I sobbed my way through Mass Effect 3, while the galaxy was being destroyed around me. And… I found it deeply cathartic. But… why? What are these complex stories giving me that fluffier, more comfortable stuff isn’t?

I’d argue this love of the grim and complex isn’t just about the maturity of an art form, but a reflection of the times we live in. The United States has been at constant war since 2001. That’s thirteen years of war. That kind of war – even one conducted on far shores, and brutally ignored in our media – seeps into everything. The world looks a lot more complex when you’re fighting in residential areas and sending drones to blow up wedding parties, doesn’t it?

Our fiction, the stories we were interested in, changed too. Because war gets into your bones. Veterans come home. The war they fought not only affects them, but everyone around them. It bleeds into everything.

And that seepage is nothing compared to the grim reality faced by those whose countries we waged war in.

So when people tell me that the rise of gritty, complex fiction is a reaction against traditional heroes, or something only aliened teen boys read, I can’t help but sigh. Because I’m seeing the desire for grim stories from another angle. From the position of a people who perpetuate violence on others but have very little experience of violence. People struggling to figure out who the good guy is, because, increasingly, as they look in the mirror they realize that it isn’t as clear as it once we.

We look for ourselves in our stories. It’s how we make sense of the world.

The gritty and traditional heroes are products of their times. We used to believe we were right. We’d always win. The world was black and white. As the world is split wide open with greater access to information and instant communication, many are waking up to that fact.

It’s the gray heroes we see – the ones who don’t always win. The ones who bring more war than peace. Who solve disagreements with brutality. With force. And fear. And fault.

We see ourselves.

And we’re not traditional heroes.

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Kameron’s God’s War, Infidel and Rapture are published by Night Shade Books in the US and Del Rey in the UK (only God’s War has been released so far in the UK).

US Covers

UK Cover (Paperback) for God’s War

An Interview with JOHN MEANEY

January 15, 2014 Civilian Reader Interview Gollancz, John Meaney, Nulapeiron, Orion Books, Ragnarok Trilogy, Resonance, Sci-Fi, Zeno

John Meaney is the author of the now-complete Ragnarok science fiction trilogy and more. His latest novel, Resonance, was published in December 2013, and I thought this would be a perfect time to get in touch and ask him about his work, the trilogy, and more…

Let’s start with an introduction: Who is John Meaney?

Just some weird bloke, you know?

A little grey-haired geezer who might surprise you by dropping into box splits at fifty-six years of age. Runs up mountains and lifts big, rusty weights. Pounds the crap out of heavy punch bags. Survived over forty years of martial arts training, despite or because of starting out as a podgy, asthmatic couch potato. Didn’t feel he’d accomplished anything until twenty-five years after starting, when he left the elite shotokan dojo of the late Enoeda sensei (as the least of the students) and realised what he’d been through.

As a young guy he dropped out of his original physics degree in his final year, due entirely to a philosophical crisis, and wrote unpublished fiction before getting his head together. He passed up the chance of finishing the degree and took a programming course instead, leading to his first computing job. At the same time, he studied all the higher-level physics and computer science modules that the Open University offered and gained his degree with the OU. Recognised as a physics graduate by the Institute of Physics, he later gained an MSc (with distinction) in Software Engineering at Oxford University. Despite being a working-class boy raised in Slough, he thinks that Oxford rocks.

He worked for three IT departments in the South East during the 1980s, was a senior consultant for a Very Large Software House during the 90s, and worked for an IT training company before becoming a freelance trainer and consultant, so that he could manage his time for writing books. Bizarrely, his most interesting computing assignments came after selling his first novel, and involved frequent travel to the US and Europe, and a couple of trips to Asia.

He lives in Wales, laughs a lot, and hardly ever takes himself seriously.

I thought we’d start with your fiction: Your latest novel, Resonance, was recently published by Gollancz. It’s the third in your Ragnarok series – what can fans of the series expect from this final book? How would you convince a new reader to check out the series?

In the first book’s prologue, you meet resurrected humans in crystal bodies, waking up on the Moon and staring up at space. One of the stars in Orion’s belt has changed colour, which means that a million years have passed since the humans lived their original lives. And the mysterious Kenna, their leader, makes it clear that the final battle, Ragnarok, is imminent.

After the first two books, readers know that a darkness has subtly influenced selected individuals across millennia of human history, starting in what we now call the Viking Age, and significantly during the twentieth and twenty-seventh centuries. And they’ll know that the darkness commenced its voyage from the far side of a cosmic void that’s one hundred and fifty million lightyears across, and has been heading for our galactic centre for at least that number of years.

They’ll also have been following the intricate links between the various timelines, both overt and covert, obvious and subtle. If the readers are astute, they’ll have paid particular attention to surnames, since a passing character in one timeline may be the ancestor or descendant of someone they know from another century.

What I’ve promised is Ragnarok, or Ragnaroekkr, as a galaxy-spanning battle that follows on from the previous machinations. And with luck I’ve delivered, with billions of resurrected humans following the nine leaders whom you may (or may not) expect. (One of the subtleties is that everything comes in threes and nines, primarily nines, matching Old Norse memes, including their cosmology.)

To the new reader, the good news is that you don’t have to wait for the ending! Try the books if you like multiple-timeline stories: there’s a 27th century timeline that forms the spine, comprising every second chapter, set in the Pilots future that features in four of my other novels. Cities where quickglass buildings alter their shape, including room furnishings, at will. A city-world in the golden fractal continuum that underlies this universe. Political intrigue within and across the universes.

The 20th century timeline features a Jewish physicist whom you first meet as a student in 1920s Zurich, before she escapes Europe to work in Bletchley Park and later for its intelligence-community descendant, one of the few who can perceive the darkness. Her conflicted Russian counterpart is an agent of that same darkness.

Among the Norse, a young warrior originally called Ulfr will also face the darkness, and in many ways become the enemy, while his actual enemy Stigr, the one-eyed poet, is his darkness-controlled nemesis. In total there are five important timelines running through the trilogy, with some others added painlessly as we go along .

And everything links together. I made it happen.

To the long-term reader, here’s something which appears to make folk smile: the Ragnarok trilogy spans a far greater period than my Nulapeiron trilogy, whose mere 1400-year duration is buried deep within the Ragnarok timeframe. In Resonance, the final Ragnarok book, some of the key chapters take place on Nulapeiron…

I haven’t just linked a tangle of timelines together in one trilogy. I’ve linked every single short story and novel that I’ve ever written in the Pilots universe, that’s twenty years of my life, all coming together in Resonance. And in a way that also works, so I’m told, for someone who’s not read any of that other stuff.

Spacetime is big. We are thin ghosts in a universe whose greatest density of stuff consists of something whose properties we don’t know and which we cannot see, hence dark matter and dark energy. For dark read invisible. And this is the universe we really, really live in.

My goal has been to write an exciting story that hints at the cosmic context which is all around us, all the time.

What inspired you to write this series? And where do you draw your inspiration from in general?

The general mental process involves a foreground/background duality. Fragmented visual images of particular scenes come to me, and set up a tension against a more abstract visualisation of – typically – weird but real physics.

For the latter, I mean concepts like the absence of timeflow, of past-present-future, from any of the equations that are considered fundamental. Time appears as a geometric dimension, not something with flow. And photons can travel a billion lightyears in a vacuum, can be created and destroyed with a lifetime that is literally zero in duration. Or they can be slowed down passing through a medium, and begin (after perhaps a billion lightyear journey that was instantaneous) to experience time.

This is John’s brain on physics…

More normally, one of the particular human images that came to me was Ulfr, a young Viking, walking into a village to see one of his friends tied to a post while the other villagers throw axes at him. I know where that came from.

When young, I read poet Padraic Colum’s Norse tales for children. A decade later, I read more deeply, and was struck by a particular paradox: gay Vikings (not a term you meet every day: stereotypes are insidious) were often punished in exactly that manner – tied to a post and used as a target for axes – while Loki and Odin were themselves practitioners of dark magic, called seithr, being shape-shifters and gender-changers. The Trickster and the All-Father both belonged to the dark side, at least partly, unlike Thor and his mates.

I use different spellings for the mythological names in the books, incidentally, partly because I got all geeky about Old Norse, partly to distinguish what I was writing from, let’s face it, the Marvel universe. (I’m not knocking Marvel. When I turned my beard into a goatee a few years back, I went round saying: “The truth is… I am Iron Man.” My extended family know I’m strange.)

Likewise, scenes from Gavriela Wolf’s student life in 1920s Zurich just popped into my head, but I can work out where they came from. Once, on one of several week-long business trips to Zurich, I wandered around inside the ETH, the university where Einstein studied and taught, at night when everything was deserted. (Because I could.) And in that mental landscape appeared distorted images of things that happened during my own student days in Birmingham.

Then of course there are the images with no obvious roots: humans of living crystal awakening on biers; Pilots flying through a golden universe with physically fractal dimensions; the glorious image of Labyrinth, the infinitely complex city-world I can scarcely imagine: depicting my mental image in detail would have been impossible, but it was mind-blowing.

Welcome to John’s brain on physics and fiction…

The trick is to be able to place all of reality subtly out of focus, any place, any time.

If you want to be weird, that is.

How were you introduced to genre fiction?

When I was five and eligible to join the local library (in north-west London), my mum took me to sign up and take home my first books, including the story of a young boy who hid behind some wooden crates before sneaking on board a rocket to the moon.

And hats off to television… It’s a huge time waster for adults with unfulfilled dreams, but Supercar and Fireball XL5 and Torchy the Battery Boy laid down some of the basic circuits in my brain. I was six when Dr. Who first aired, and boy do I remember it. I read my first Marvel comics at the same time: for me, the Golden Age of Comics is, well, six.

Two years later I was reading Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton, and my fate was sealed.

How do you enjoy being a writer and working within the publishing industry? Do you have any specific working, writing, researching practices?

Let me put it this way. I would never encourage anyone to become a writer. But if someone absolutely has to become a writer, then – provided they’re polite and honourable – I’ll do whatever I can to help. (Although, let’s face it, the best help is simply an instruction to knuckle down, write every day, read as much as you can, and live your life.)

As a profession, writing sucks. In fact it barely passes the definition of a profession, not when the average annual earnings for writing come to four thousand quid. Why do writers even bother to produce books for publishers? Oh, only because we have to. There’s a devil riding our backs, didn’t you know?

I could have earned an awful lot more by making different career choices at many stages, starting long before I got published, and staying full-time within the computer industry. One of many examples: when I received news of my first ever book deal, in 1996, it was via fax to my hotel room at Worldcon in Los Angeles. During that same trip, a computer industry contact offered me a job in San Francisco. But I had a book to finish…

On the other hand, consider the pop-psychological advice on how to spend money on yourself. Given a choice of a material item (which you’ll soon take for granted) or an experience, always choose the experience. It stays with you forever, and the joy can be fresh every time you remember.

No computing job could compare with the triumph of selling my first book.

As for working practices, I realised a long time ago that I needed to be able to trigger the right mental state at will. I wrote my first two novels on a busy commuter train, working long days for Europe’s largest software house, and training at one of the toughest dojos in the world. Cue music…

I write to movie soundtracks, particularly Hans Zimmer’s work, just as Anne McCaffrey used to. It was a strategy that worked for her, and when I tried it, it turned out to be perfect for me as well.

I also use a colour scheme (normally on a dedicated machine) that looks radically different from anything you’d see if I were performing any other task on a computer. My dedicated writing machine is permanently disconnected from all networks.

By preference, I write first thing in the morning, before any other major tasks.

Research-wise, I don’t do anything radical. For deep background on the next book, I read a dozen or fifteen books in one field I didn’t know, a couple of years ago while still in the middle of the Ragnarok trilogy. But that interest spins partly from a foreign trip made decades ago: hands-on stuff. When it comes to cities on Earth in anything like the present day, I use locations I know, at least in passing. Travel is a wonderful thing.

For Ragnarok, I did no directed research in advance. Rather, it came from my existing long term interests, from the Norse mythology to the Bletchley Park codebreaking and the dark-matter physics. While the trilogy was in progress though, I did have to dive in deeply, reading dozens of books, many obscure, as the bibliographies at the end of the books indicate.

It’s hard work. It’s supposed to be.

When did you realize you wanted to be an author, and what was your first foray into writing? Do you still look back on it fondly?

Aged eleven, and for three years afterwards, I found that my English teachers would accept short stories in lieu of essays for homework assignments, and I can remember some of them still. One featured a meditation on infinite reflections in a barber-shop mirror, foreshadowing my interest in recursion, meta statements and paradoxes. Another, supposed to be an essay entitled “The Salad Bowl”, turned into an assassination thriller set in a botanical garden. They were the beginning.

The year after that, a different English teacher poured scorn on the idea of submitting science fiction instead of essays. Her discouragement might have been as important as the earlier encouragement. Sod her, in other words.

The realisation that I wanted to write professionally occurred while I was a physics undergraduate. That was painful, because when you write for publication it begins with rejection. Fifteen years later, of course, that becomes sheer joy, when publication happens.

In my case that was a short story called “Spring Rain”, published in 1992 in Interzone, then edited by David Pringle. That man started the career of a huge percentage of British writers. And we are very, very grateful.

What’s your opinion of the genre today, and where do you see your work fitting into it?

The genre… Ask most people whether they like science fiction, and their answer will be based on Dr. Who or Star Trek, or a movie based on a game. Elements of written SF bleed out into the greater cultural awareness, but the process is subliminal. From the outside, the genre is misunderstood, as it always has been.

I don’t think this matters. When John le Carré was asked about the changes made to his story for the Tinker, Tailor movie, he pointed out that most people don’t read. Insisting on some kind of purity is irrelevant.

As for judging the state of the genre as We True Readers perceive it… I’m too aware of the books I haven’t read, the authors whose works I’m unfamiliar with, to form a judgement or want to. I will say that it’s a mature genre, which offers different challenges to writers compared to something new.

By that I mean, once there were the Three Big Names in our field. Now, no one could occupy a similar position. No space opera will ever have the impact of Foundation. Not unless someone breaks new ground to the extent that the genre itself is reborn.

As for my own work, that is seriously for other people to judge. I know that I’ve written each book to the best of my ability at that time. That’s all I can do. And of course, reading a book is a deeply personal experience, just like the writing.

Meaning and significance are decided subjectively and individually.

What other projects are you working on, and what do you have currently in the pipeline?

All I can say about the next book is that there will be one.

For most writers, and probably most people engaged on projects of great personal significance, public discussion of goals is the wrong way to go, while the optimum approach is to keep everything locked up in a mental pressure cooker. Keep pressurised until done.

That’s only a generalisation: Charlie Stross can discuss details of a new project in detail with his friends (it’s an honour to hear them), and people who know Larry Niven say that he’s the same. It works for them, clearly.

If I were writing more science fiction, which is going pretty well for me, I’d feel no need to be mysterious or guarded… but in fact I’m jumping to a totally new genre.

I’ve nailed the first draft of something very new, having previously thrown away a 65,000-word prototype. I’m taking it seriously.

Really seriously.

For a sedentary occupation, writing can feel a lot like a white-knuckle ride.

What are you reading at the moment (fiction, non-fiction)?

I’ve just finished reading the latest George Pelecanos thriller, immediately preceded by the latest C.J. Box. In the past month I’ve ripped through a lot of fiction, including Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, two Harlan Cobens, an early Robert B. Parker for the umpteenth time, and Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep. At other times my fiction reading drops right off, but not for long.

Non-fiction-wise, I’m currently reading Brian Clegg’s Dice World, Alfred Ayers’s Language, Truth and Logic, and Nick Lane’s excellent Life Ascending. Plus some heavy-duty computer science stuff, because I can.

What’s something readers might be surprised to learn about you?

I was Stephen King.

More precisely, I once spent several hours being Stephen King.

To add some extra precision: when I was learning advanced hypnosis from Paul McKenna, I used a technique called Deep Trance Identification… with trusted hypnotists around me. It’s method acting taken to its extreme, because it involves deep, deep trance, to the extent that your facial features and voice alter totally, as you become convinced you’re someone else.

The purpose is to gain insight into an individual’s talent. It’s also a controlled form of deliberate, temporary psychosis. I went so deep, I think I freaked out one of Paul’s assistants. But it was very interesting…

Afterwards, I had to leave the course venue and sit in a lonely graveyard for two hours to recover my own identity. If I ever did.

I should add that I’m a clean-living, teetotal vegetarian – the most mind-altering substance I would ever imbibe is coffee. I’m one hundred percent a rationalist (and hypnosis is a straightforward neurological phenomenon – a trance state is obvious when measured with even the crudest EEG – and mainstream medicine, used every month by the NHS for surgical patients who are allergic to anaesthesia).

But shhh… Don’t tell Mr. King. He’s got a phobia of therapists and hypnotists, though I can’t imagine why. What’s the worst that could happen? It’s not as if someone could, like, enter a strange trance and steal his soul. Surely he couldn’t believe that?

Ha, ha, ha…

What are you most looking forward to in the next twelve months?

Wouldn’t it be nice if “world peace” were a realistic answer?

Within SF fandom, I’m enormously honoured to be Guest of Honour at two conventions: Confetti in Gothenburg, Sweden – having been a guest at Fantastika in wonderful Stockholm last year – and the British national convention (Eastercon) in Glasgow, both happening in April.

In my fifth decade of martial arts training, I have fitness goals that are important to achieve this year, but the real joy is simply the continuing hard work of running, lifting weights, bodyweight exercises, bag work, solo drills and sparring with my equally mad mates. I look forward to every single training session, six a week at least.

In computer science, I’m looking forward to teaching another in an annual series of graduate training programmes that I enjoy immensely. A total blast.

And, oh man, the writing… Finishing the new book and finding out what happens next.

I can’t wait.

Resonance is out now, published in the UK by Gollancz.

“Shovel Ready” by Adam Sternbergh (Headline)

January 6, 2014 Civilian Reader Review Adam Sternbergh, Assassin, Crown, Dystopia, Headline, New York, Random House US, Sci-Fi, Shovel Ready, Thriller

The start to an interesting new dystopian series…

“I don’t want to know your reasons. I don’t care. Think of me as a bullet. Just point.”

Spademan used to be a garbage man. That was before the dirty bomb hit Times Square, before his wife was killed, before New York became a burnt-out shell. Now the wealthy spend their days tapped into virtual reality; the rest have to fend for themselves in the streets. Now there’s nothing but garbage.

So he became a hit man. He doesn’t ask questions, he works quickly, and he’s handy with a box-cutter.

When he’s hired to kill the daughter of a high-profile evangelist, Spademan’s life is upended. He will have to navigate two worlds – both the slick fantasy and the wasteland reality – to finish the job, clear his conscience, and make sure he’s not the one who winds up in the ground.

In the final few months of 2013, there was quite a bit of buzz around the genre sites related to this book. It has received a slew of great blurbs from respected and excellent authors. It was with great anticipation, therefore, that I dove into it when I received an ARC (quite a while ago, so I’ve been sitting on this review for some time). I enjoyed the novel, and Sternbergh offers up a rather convincing dystopian future, but one that at the same time felt slightly half-baked. The author has written a tightly-plotted novel that is certainly immediate and gripping. It left me wanting more, but not always in a good way.

Right off the bat, I should mention that this is another novel that dispenses with “proper” punctuation – specifically, there are no speech marks to indicate dialogue. This seems to be a style that is becoming popular again – before this, my latest read to take this path was Lavie Tidhar’s excellent The Violent Century. Unlike Tidhar’s latest offering, however, the lack of “normal” dialogue punctuation was confusing more often than I would like: the lack of differentiation between characters speaking would sometimes clash or merge less-than-seamlessly with Spademan’s internal monologue.

The main character, Spademan, is a “different kind of psycho”. He is quietly sociopathic, a product of an uncaring and dehumanizing New York city. Devastated by a dirty bomb, New Yorkers have either fled the city wholesale, barricaded themselves into their homes, or retreated to the outer boroughs. Wealthy and not alike have also retreated to a new, online reality – something akin to a steroidal, higher-tech Second Life – where ‘normal’ life can continue. This is where the bulk of international trade takes place, and the world of financial transactions in particular has retreated from the real world entirely, it seems. Interestingly, and related to the story contained herein, mega-churches have gleefully adopted the new technology as well. [That is all I shall say on that matter…]

The story moves at a breakneck pace, and we’re introduced to a number of interesting and varied, as well as believable, characters from a number of New York neighbourhoods and walks of life. His target and new job turns out to be not at all what he expected.

“Truth is, I have no idea what the next step should be. I’ve had jobs get out of hand, but not like this. I was hired to kill her, not adopt her.”

As someone who was having an extended moment of frustration with what felt like ever-increasingly-long Big Book Fantasies, its slim length was certainly welcome. I enjoyed the pace, but there was a sacrifice: world-building. Not only is the world beyond New York fleshed out at all, really (save the quotation, below), it also meant the world’s logic failed – I ended up not buying that so many people would remain in New York City. Suspending that frustration, though (and there were times when that was difficult), I did rather enjoy the novel.

“As for the rest of it, in in-between part, I hear it’s relatively clean and still open for business, like a plucky dollar store. No longer the land of milk and honey, maybe, but at least you can still get high-grade pharmaceuticals on every street corner on the cheap… Really, it’s just New York that got nuked, cordoned off, shut down, shunned. Capital of the world, cut loose to drift into the sea. The country’s soul, on a funeral pyre.”

The fact that New Yorkers stay in the city, despite the dirty bomb’s destruction and lingering radiation, and also the violence that rose in place of order, reminded me of the New York mentality Brian Wood showed in his masterful DMZ comic series. However, I think it worked much better in the graphic novel series – here, it felt that there wasn’t as much thought put into the world-building as there perhaps should have been. Bits and pieces felt forced, and to then not be fleshed out… Well, Sternbergh’s brevity was not always a boon (though, I repeat, it was refreshing amidst a sea of new, massive doorstoppers).

As the first book in a series, I’m hoping Sternbergh takes some of the time in his next (and future?) novels to flesh out this dystopian reality. As it stands, this is an engaging thriller, which happens to be set in a dilapidated New York City. Spademan is a good protagonist, and I’d like to read more, but this novel didn’t do enough to establish the world, and given the gaps, why people would remain in the city.

Recommended, therefore, but with the aforementioned caveats. An author to watch, certainly.

* * *

Shovel Ready is published by Headline in the UK (Jan.14/Jul.3 eBook/PB) and Crown in the US.

An Interview with PAT CADIGAN

December 17, 2013 Civilian Reader Interview Award Winning Author, Chalk, Classics, Genre, Horror, Pat Cadigan, Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, SF Masterworks, Synners, This Is Horror

A few days ago, I got an email from an editor at This Is Horror, a UK indie publisher. I haven’t been the biggest of horror readers, but the email was about Pat Cadigan’s latest chapbook, Chalk. I was intrigued, and will hopefully have it read and reviewed in the near future. I’ve been aware of the multi-award-winning Cadigan for years, though, and so I took this opportunity to interview the author. So, here we chat about her work, the chapbook, writing, and more…

Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Pat Cadigan?

I’m a recovering American and the mother of a grown son. I’ve lived in North London for almost eighteen years. Most people would know me as a science-fiction writer. All my novels are hard science-fiction (meaning they’re based on things that are possible now). I’ve won the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice, once in 1992 for Synners and again in 1995 for Fools. I’ve won the Locus Award three times: once for my short story, “Angel,” once for my collection Patterns, and most recently for my novelette, “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi,” which also received the Hugo Award in 2013. In between, I had cancer but it’s gone now. I keep busy.

I thought we’d start with your fiction: Your latest novellette (or chapbook, if you will), Chalk, was recently published by This Is Horror. How would you introduce it to a potential reader? Is it part of a series?

It’s not part of a formal series, but it is one of several pieces of short fiction set in the neighbourhood where I grew up in Massachusetts. They’re generally set in the early 1960s and while they contain autobiographical elements, they are not the story of my life. I just borrowed a few things to riff on. Or riff off.

What inspired you to write this particular story? And where do you draw your inspiration from in general?

Michael Wilson asked me if I’d be interested in doing a chapbook and I said yes. I’d never done a chapbook before and I’m always up for a new experience. I read the previous ones from This Is Horror and found them all satisfyingly variegated (and quite good). So I prayed to the Story Fairy (Dept. of Horror) and this is what I got.

I know how that must sound. My creative process is a black-box operation and I’ve been at this long enough (34 years professionally) to know what works best for me: tell brain to think, consider the elements involved – genre, length, my personal taste; allow the associations to marinate overnight in REM sleep; return to task the next day, try writing a paragraph, see what happens. The first paragraph written isn’t always the first paragraph of the story and it usually undergoes editing if not outright retro-fitting, depending on what I discover in the course of writing the story.

Paragraphs that don’t work end up in my fragment box for recycling.

How were you introduced to genre fiction?

We met in the dark. We’d already been making out for some time before I said, “Say honey, what’s your name?”

I had a library card for longer than I can remember. My mother would take me to the library with her and find books to read to me. Eventually, I learned to read myself and discovered that all the cool stuff was in the science fiction section. In those days – when dinosaurs roamed the net, before the discovery of flame – the genre wasn’t as stratified as it is now. Everything was science fiction – Heinlein, Bradbury, Clarke, Tolkien, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books, Richard Matheson, Jack Finney – anything with a fantastic element was science fiction. Judith Merrill used to edit a best-of-the-year anthology that was the same way – pure-quill hard SF by Mack Reynolds and Walter M. Miller, Jr., sat cheek-by-jowl with oddities from Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, and Tuli Kupferberg. My ambition was to be good enough to get into one of those anthologies. I still want to be that good.

How do you enjoy being a writer and working within the publishing industry? Do you have any specific working, writing, researching practices?

I love being a writer and I wouldn’t do anything else. For most of my life, I’ve had additional responsibilities – school, an outside job, motherhood, looking after my aged parent – so I learned to write as and when: late at night, early in the morning, lunch hour, weekends, sometimes reaching around the baby napping in my front-carrier to the keyboard, in hospital waiting rooms, on the train. If you really want to do something, you figure it out.

When did you realise you wanted to be an author, and what was your first foray into writing? Do you still look back on it fondly?

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a writer. As soon as I knew books and stories were written by people, I knew I was one of those people. My mother gave me her old Underwood typewriter – it was a monster. It must have weighed about five hundred pounds. You had to really bang on the keys and all the capital letters were half a line up from the rest of the word. I started out at 3 or 4, always typing “Chapter One” first. Finally my mother suggested that I should maybe try writing a short story first to get the hang of storytelling. But I preferred trying to write novels. Eventually, I hand-wrote several novels that were my cracked version of a mystery series. It was a kind of a cross between Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden, with occasional supernatural flourishes. I was very disciplined. Every chapter had to run both sides of the page, no less, no more.

This is an Underwood. It looks heavy as all get-out…

Later I had a sort of Doc Savage in space thing going for a while – by then, my Aunt Loretta had given me her portable typewriter, which was a lot easier on the fingers than the Underwood. Then sometimes, when my mother worked weekends, I’d go with her. She worked in the admitting office of a hospital and I wasn’t supposed to be there but as long as I sat in the back office and kept quiet, nobody minded. There I met my first IBM Selectric; I couldn’t imagine a machine more advanced, more futuristic. Selectrics were so expensive back then, only businesses had them.

Somewhere in there, I read the Isaac Asimov issue of F&SF in which he talked about his early attempts at writing, including something he called The Greenville Chums At College. I was delighted; I could relate. I’d just left the Greenville Chums stage of my own development and I knew I would persevere.

What’s your opinion of the genre today, and where do you see your work fitting into it?

I love genre and I read for pleasure as much as I can. But I don’t think of my work as “fitting into it.” I write genre fiction because I love genre fiction. I don’t write critical essays and I don’t do reviews, so you’ll have to forgive me for not answering that question.

People love genre fiction, in every medium – print (including e-print), TV shows, movies, and of course games (when was the last time you heard about a game that was all real, all the time?). If you want to see writers treated like rock stars, go to the American Library Association convention and watch how they react to children’s and YA authors. YA authors who work in genre get the most attention and adulation, because they keep kids reading.

Fine art is fine art and I have drawn inspiration from it in many forms. But to be brutally honest, the things people internalise most come from popular culture, particularly the genre portion. Everything I Ever Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten was soon followed by Everything I Ever Needed To Know I Learned From Star Trek. Some people might scoff but people tend to take their cues from things they enjoy, that give them pleasure, more often than from things they’ve been told are good for them.

So if people turn to entertainment, I try to provide good entertainment.

What other projects are you working on, and what do you have currently in the pipeline?

Right now I’ve just crawled out of Deadline Hell into Deadline Purgatory. I said yes to a lot of short fiction requests and they all came due around the same time. I have to plan better in the future so I can go back to work on the novel based on “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi.”

What are you reading at the moment (fiction, non-fiction)?

I’m reading a lot of science and books about the solar system. I had to take a few days away from everything so I could read Doctor Sleep, and I’ll probably re-read some other Stephen King books. When it comes to writing about the human condition, nobody does it better. Even if the books themselves aren’t completely successful – which doesn’t often happen – they still contain brilliant passages of superb writing and characters that are as real as anything.

And like everyone else, I’m waiting for the next Game of Thrones book from George R.R. Martin. At last, epic fantasy with a dirty face, dirtier clothes, permanent scars, and body odour. And occasional dragons.

I read a lot of crime fiction and thrillers, too. I like Nicci French and Minette Walters, among others.

What’s something readers might be surprised to learn about you?

I was an uncredited (and fully-clothed) extra in Linda Lovelace For President.

What are you most looking forward to in the next twelve months?

The London Worldcon. That’s going to be great!

***

Be sure to follow Pat Cadigan on Twitter and Live Journal; and also This Is Horror on Twitter on Facebook. Chalk is available to buy in print and eBook formats.

Short Story Reviews: RIVEN and HAND OF DUST by John French (Black Library)

December 5, 2013February 12, 2015 Civilian Reader Review Ahriman, Black Library, Chaos, Hand of Dust, Horus Heresy, Iron Hands, John French, Riven, Sci-Fi, Thousand Sons, WH40k

Two short stories by one of Black Library’s up-and-comers

RIVEN (Horus Heresy)

As one of the vaunted Crusader Host, Brother Crius stood as the representative of the X Legion upon the soil of Holy Terra, but when he learns of the death of his beloved primarch Ferrus Manus at the hands of the traitors, his stoic, mechanical grief imbues him with the strength and resolve to undertake a special mission on behalf of Rogal Dorn himself. Striking out into the stars, he searches for any signs of his lost Iron Hands brethren, hoping to bring them back to Terra to aid in the final defence of the Palace. The question remains – just who has survived the slaughter on Isstvan V, and what yet remains of them?

I’m always happy when a new piece of Horus Heresy fiction is released, and this one is by an author I have not read much by, before. The story follows Brother Crius, a member of the Iron Hands, struggling with the loss of his Primarch, Ferrus Manus. He is tasked by Sigismund, the First Captain of the Imperial Fists to seek out any other survivors of the Isstvan V massacre, and bring them back to Terra to bolster the defence against the eventual attack by Horus’s forces. Heading out, with the support of an Imperial Fists captain, what Crius and his companions discover is not at all what they were expecting – nor, actually, what I was expecting.

I like what French has done with this story. While I wasn’t entirely clear as to why Crius was incarcerated at the start of the story, the author nevertheless has written a pretty great story. We see a little bit more of what makes the Iron Hands tick, and also a little bit of the psychological damage that the death of Ferrus has caused. True, it’s still a relatively short story, so there isn’t too much of this, but I would certainly like to read more about the Legion pre- and post-Ferrus’s death. The final battle is pretty intense, and not over-described (which was certainly welcome to me). Overall, this is a recommended addition to the growing Heresy story.

AHRIMAN: HAND OF DUST

On Prospero, a solitary living soul walks across the shattered world. Beneath the ruined spires, Ahriman, exiled son of Magnus the Red and destroyer of his Legion, contemplates what once was, what is, and what may yet be. And amidst the dust of the long-lost paradise world, the sorcerer faces his mistakes and decides his destiny.

This (very) short story is part of Black Library’s Advent Calendar series of eBooks. It is also the second by French featuring the Thousand Sons (All is Dust, another micro-story, was released early last year). Hand of Dust follows one of the greatest sorcerers of the Thousand Sons traitor legion – Ahriam, the architect of the Rubric that ‘froze’ his fellow legionaries, in an attempt to rescue them from the fate that has plagued the sons of Magnus for centuries.

Hand of Dust is perhaps too short to really have much to write about it. The premise is interesting, and I think it could (and, perhaps, should) have been extended. It’s like a teaser for French’s writing and also his Ahriman fiction. It’s a good one, too. As with Riven, above, French’s writing is pretty solid and well-crafted. It is perhaps not as streamlined and fluid as some of the other, more-established Black Library authors, but it’s still very good. It will certainly be interesting to see how he develops over time.

French also wrote the first Ahriman novel, Ahriman: Exile (cover below), which is out now, and has now been bumped up my tottering TBR mountain. Ahriman also features in Rob Sanders’s Atlas Infernal and Graham McNeill’s superb A Thousand Sons (and a handful of other Horus Heresy novels). French will also be writing a follow-up to Exile, Sorcerer, which is due for publication in 2014.

An Interview with DANIE WARE

November 7, 2013November 11, 2019 Civilian Reader Interview Danie Ware, Ecko Burning, Ecko Endgame, Ecko Rising, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Titan Books

Danie Ware’s debut novel, Ecko Rising was very well-received by the SFF community, when it hit shelves last year. The sequel, Ecko Burning, is dropping imminently, and it seemed like a perfect time to grill the author about her series, writing, and more… Continue reading →

“Scars”, Ep.X-XII by Chris Wraight (Black Library)

October 27, 2013 Civilian Reader Review Alpha Legion, Black Library, Chris Wraight, Death Guard, Horus Heresy, Jaghatai Khan, Mortarion, Scars, Sci-Fi, Serialised Novel, WH40k, White Scars

The final serial episodes of this Horus Heresy novel

Of all the Legiones Astartes, the White Scars of Jaghatai Khan remain the most enigmatic and elusive. Born of a civilisation that prizes honour, speed and fearsome loyalty, their allegiance has yet remained unclear even as the galaxy is torn apart by Horus’s treachery, and both sides have apparently counted them among their potential allies in the war to come. But when the Alpha Legion launch an unexplained and simultaneous attack against the White Scars and Space Wolves, the Khan must decide once and for all whether he will stand with the Emperor or the Warmaster… or neither.

I’m going to keep this very brief, as this review covers the final quarter of a novel. Why ruin it for everyone? The synopsis above is that for the novel as a whole. I must say it is possibly Wraight’s best so far. Everything I’ve reported on from the first nine episodes is just as evident and well-written as in the chapters that have come before. We learn more about the White Scars, and their strange place alongside the other Legiones Astartes, and the Imperium at large. Wraight sets up a lasting conflict and antagonism that (I assume) continues into the “present” Warhammer 40,000 timeline. Two Primarchs face off against each other, and the result of that exchange dictates the fate of the White Scars going forward. These three episodes pack in a lot of action, and the battle-scenes are very well-written (better, even, than Wraight’s Battle of the Fang). I particularly liked the attention paid to the Scars’ as a Legion split in two – mainly because it’s not been particularly well-addressed in other novels. Wraight’s writing is excellent throughout – clear, crisply composed, and briskly paced.

To be honest, a good amount of the story’s impact was lost as a result of the serialisation – hitting cliffhanger moments works for TV series, but not so much for a Horus Heresy novel. Even though I read them in chunks or multiple episodes, I’m used to read a novel in no more than five days (when they’re really long) and as little as one or two days. Stretching one out over a couple of months just didn’t work for me. An interesting experiment, though.

Nevertheless, with the whole novel now available, I would certainly recommend this as a must-read for all fans of the Heresy series. Wraight’s first full-length foray into the era is a triumph of military sci-fi. I certainly look forward to his next offering.

The Horus Heresy: Horus Rising, False Gods, Galaxy in Flames, Flight of the Eisenstein, Fulgrim, Descent of Angels, Legion, Battle for the Abyss, Mechanicum, Tales of Heresy, Fallen Angels, A Thousand Sons, Nemesis, The First Heretic, Prospero Burns, Age of Darkness, The Outcast Dead, Deliverance Lost, Know No Fear, The Primarchs, Fear to Tread, Shadows of Treachery, Angel Exterminatus, Betrayer, Mark of Calth, Promethean Sun, Scorched Earth, Vulkan Lives, Scars (I-III, IV-IX), The Unremembered Empire

[I’m going to work at filling in those review-blanks – some I’ve already read, but there are a couple of oversights that need addressing. As I am always thirsty for more Heresy fiction, I think I may have to catch up pretty soon. Starting with Graham McNeill’s Mechanicum. Fallen Angels is the only other I’ve never read.]

Review: THE UNREMEMBERED EMPIRE by Dan Abnett (Black Library)

October 22, 2013January 18, 2024 Civilian Reader Review Black Library, Dan Abnett, Horus Heresy, Sci-Fi, Unremembered Empire, WH40k

Isolation, Confusion and Consolidation during the Horus Heresy

Far out on the Eastern Fringe, the realm of Ultramar stands alone. Having weathered the Word Bearers’ attack on Calth and the subsequent Shadow Crusade against the Five Hundred Worlds, the Ultramarines primarch Roboute Guilliman now draws all loyalist forces to Macragge as he contemplates a new future for mankind. With the arrival of more and more fugitives from the war that has engulfed the rest of the galaxy, all distinction between friend and foe is lost – isolated from Terra by fearsome warp storms, is Guilliman making a bid for power to rival even the renegade Warmaster Horus?

In The Unremembered Empire, Dan Abnett is firing on all creative cylinders. It’s an epic novel, in many respects – action-packed, momentous, a type of bridging point in the overall Horus Heresy series. I blitzed through this, and was left desperately wanting more at the end. A very good addition to the series. Absolutely addictive. Continue reading →

Review: FORTUNE’S PAWN by Rachel Bach (Orbit)

October 14, 2013June 3, 2015 Civilian Reader Review Fortune's Pawn, Military Sci-Fi, Orbit, Paradox Series, Rachel Aaron, Rachel Bach, Sci-Fi, Space Opera

The start of a fun SF series from the author of the Eli Monpress novels

Devi Morris isn’t your average mercenary. She has plans. Big ones. And a ton of ambition. It’s a combination that’s going to get her killed one day – but not just yet.

That is, until she just gets a job on a tiny trade ship with a nasty reputation for surprises. The Glorious Fool isn’t misnamed: it likes to get into trouble, so much so that one year of security work under its captain is equal to five years everywhere else. With odds like that, Devi knows she’s found the perfect way to get the jump on the next part of her Plan. But the Fool doesn’t give up its secrets without a fight, and one year on this ship might be more than even Devi can handle.

I only heard about this series a few weeks ago. About the same time, I learned that Rachel Bach was a pseudonym for Rachel Aaron, the author of the amusing Eli Monpress fantasy series (also published by Orbit). Knowing that, I had a good idea of what I might find in Fortune’s Pawn, and my interest rose as a result. On the whole, this met my expectations, and while flawed, I think it’s a fun, breezy start to a new sci-fi series that will please a great many readers. Continue reading →

Lazarus, Vol.1 – “Family” (Image)

October 12, 2013 Civilian Reader Comics, Review Brian Level, Dystopia, Family, Forever Carlyle, Graphic Novel, Greg Rucka, Image Comics, Lazarus, Michael Lark, Santi Arcas, Sci-Fi, Stefano Gaudiano, Volume 1

Writer: Greg Rucka | Art: Michael Lark, w. Stefano Gaudiano & Brian Level | Colors: Santi Arcas

Forever Carlyle, the Lazarus of the Carlyle Family.

In a dystopian near-future, government is a quaint concept, resources are coveted, and possession is 100% of the law. A handful of Families rule, jealously guarding what they have and exploiting the Waste who struggle to survive in their domains.

Forever Carlyle defends her family’s holdings through deception and force as their protector, their Lazarus. Shot dead defending the family home, Forever’s day goes downhill from there…

Collects: Lazarus #1-4 & “Family: Prelude”

Prior to this, I was perhaps most familiar with Rucka’s first two, excellent Punisher volumes (must remember to finish off that series at some point). On the strength of just those books, I knew I wanted to read more of his work. That’s when I started to read and hear about Lazarus. As soon as this collection was available, I snapped it up and read it in one sitting. All I can say is that the hype is justified. While short, this is a very strong beginning.

The story opens with a pretty long, brutal scene that gives us an eye-popping, wince-inducing introduction to the nature of a Lazarus:

Despite the above attempted-murder, Forever has plenty of… gumption left in her, and isn’t averse to doling out her blunt Family Justice:

Over the course of these four issues, we learn about Forever’s psyche – she is unsure about the society in which she lives. She feels disconnected from her family, uncomfortable with her purpose, her nature. One gets the feeling that she’s headed for a break with the Family. It’s going to be an explosive journey, I’m sure.

The book offers a short, tantalizing taste of the Lazarus world, the dystopia controlled by a select few Mafia-on-steroids-like families. We’re not overburdened with world-building, but Rucka gives us just enough in the story to get situated, leaving breadcrumbs for us to follow and keep us guessing and get us hooked. This book is a perfect example of how comics can be used to show us new worlds and stories, without resorting to telling (which I still find strangely common for a visual medium). Forever is sent to parlay with a rival family, the Morrays. We learn through her mission that there is at least one other Lazarus, a member of the Morray family. They have met before, and share a deep affinity for each other’s situation and understanding of their lives – given their nature who else, really, could related? Meanwhile, Forever’s family members, her “brothers and sisters”, are plotting against her, each other, and their father. This does not bode well for the future.

The pacing is fast but not rushed. It’s a dystopian world, the families appear in total control of the Americas, in a neo-feudal system that benefits the Families, while everyone else is categorised as either “Serfs” or “Waste”. It’s the argument against tyranny and the 1% writ large, exaggerated into a truly crushing social order.

Overall, this book is really quite excellent. I would have preferred a bit more world-building, sure, but I have a feeling this will be unrolled slowly and when necessary over the course of the series. The book is rather slim in length, which might leave people dissatisfied. I certainly would have liked more, but I see why the story was stopped here for the first volume. I can’t wait to read Volume 2. It’s not difficult to see why it has received so much praise. Very highly recommended, but if you need your comics more substantial in length, you may want to wait until the second collection is released/available before diving in them both together.