The upcoming, action-packed novel Rags and Muffin will release on December 10th, just in time for you to cozy up with it over Christmas break. Taking place in a sweltering city somewhere in the tropics and featuring a lot of fiery explosions, Rags and Muffin will help you think warm thoughts during the cold winter.
You can preview it right now. Chapters one through four are available as a PDF file:
Rags and Muffin Sample Chapters (PDF)
Featured artwork: “Attack of the Abhumans” by Jeremiah Humphries.
The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. . Published by various, but available through Project Gutenberg.
Around the turn of the century, the Englishman William Hope Hodgson spent several years as a seaman before he attempted to make a living as a personal trainer, during which time he led a colorful life and even had a controversial run-in with Houdini. When making money from exercise didn’t pan out, he in 1904 turned to writing fiction in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe and ultimately produced a large body of work.
Recently, I read my way through the most famous of his writings, including The House on the Borderland, the stories of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, and The Ghost Pirates. Then, with much trepidation yet determination, I turned to the most gargantuan and formidable of his works, his novel The Night Land.
Twice before, I have tried to get through The Night Land. Twice before, I failed. But this time, I grit my teeth and slogged my way through, though I believe the effort took me almost a year (I read a lot of other things in the meantime, of course). Hodgson was never a great writer by any standard, but he could spin a good yarn from time to time; some of his stories set at sea show both a genuine knowledge of seamanship and skill at adventure-writing, and certain scenes in The House on the Borderland show him to be a competent action writer as well. But The Night Land is simultaneously a breathtaking work of imagination and a nigh unreadable act of self-indulgence and pretentiousness. It is Hodgson’s magnum opus—but the problem is that he knew it was his magnum opus, so he wrote like a middle-schooler picking up a pen for the first time, convinced that he was crafting a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
I likely would not have read this book if it did not come highly recommended by John C. Wright, the husband of my editor, who has produced a series of frightening and beautiful novelettes based on it (collected in Awake in the Night Land) and who insists that its fantastic elements are so important that its glaring flaws deserve to be overlooked.
Having read the novel, I haven’t decided whether to agree with him or not. On the one hand, yes, Hodgson forged a new path in the world of fantasy and deserves credit for such bold inventions, but on the other hand … the book is just awful. I mean it’s really, really bad.
If you hate Christmas, then I have a book for you.
Krampus: The Yule Lord, written and illustrated by Brom. HarperCollins, 2011. 368 pages. ISBN: 0062095668.
Krampus: The Yule Lord, a Santa Claus novel for people who hate Santa Claus, is undeniably entertaining, but someone would have to be a serious Scrooge to embrace it unreservedly.
This is, so I understand, the second novel by Brom, an illustrator and game designer who made his debut as a novelist with The Child Thief, a subversion of Peter Pan. He followed that up by taking on the jolly saint of Christmas, reimagining him as a brawny, sword-wielding Norse god locked in a mortal duel with a devil-like Krampus in a continuation of the ancient rivalry between Loki and everyone else in the Norse pantheon.
Since Brom’s first talent is drawing, the book is lavishly illustrated. Both the cover and the illustrations throughout are by the author.
And why the argument is stupid.
Look, I’m not going to take it personally when you call me a communist stooge because I think scifi and fantasy are 2 separate genres, but I reserve the right to mock you mercilessly for being ridiculous
— Robert Kroese (@robkroese) September 9, 2019
Recently, my Twitter timeline blew up with a rancorous debate between pulp-rev and indie authors over the question of whether science fiction and fantasy are the same genre or separate ones.
We have some writers claiming that the two are distinct, and appealing to the obvious differences between books such as The Martian and Sword of Shannara for evidence. Then we have others claiming they are the same, or that science fiction is a subgenre of fantasy, and taking Star Wars for evidence.
This is another iteration of a recurring debate throughout the history of science fiction. It is, like the Plato-Aristotle debate in philosophy, a conflict that appears repeatedly in different forms. As the argument takes shape, it reveals itself to be more or less another version of the Campbellian vs. New Wave argument, between those who want their science fiction pure and rigorously scientific, and those who … well, don’t.
Featured image: Character designs from Magical Girl Ore.
This is a section from the draft of Rag & Muffin, my next novel to appear after Dead to Rites. This passage may or may not be in the final version in this form:
Only one spot in Godtown did not swell with the cosmic beat nor touch the underside of heaven, but remained dark—a mere part of earth or perhaps of something lower than earth. That was the Talbot Refinery, which stood near the Green Line on the edge of the Elysian-occupied West End.
In the refinery, workers—mostly outcaste marjaras unable to find decent jobs anywhere else—committed the worst blasphemy known in this world: They took the Tuaoi Stones from the mines with which the Elysians had profaned the sacred Vindhya Mountains, and they performed unspeakable deeds to alter those pure crystals into something base and ignoble in order to feed them to the Elysians’ demon-possessed automata.
More powerful than any mundane science, the magic called Runetech had made the Elysians the masters of the world, but the ghosts in their machines hungered for profaned Tuaoi Stones. Thus, in the midst of the holy city, the Talbot Refinery was an outcrop of hell, and it alone could resist the flurry of religious ecstasy and exultation that beset the rest of Godtown every morning.
Just as Meru closed, Talbot’s portal, like a mouth of the underworld, opened to swallow a long string of buses containing the workmen for the morning shift. Like giant jacks dropped from the sky, anti-tank caltrops flanked the road leading to the refinery’s heavily fortified entrance. In a booth at the gate, an underpaid and overworked human babu did his best to check the workers’ and drivers’ papers, which were handed to him—with much shouting and babbling—through half-opened windows along the buses’ sides.
Looming over it all like a colossus and casting its stark and menacing shadow across this scene was an enormous machine, vaguely man-shaped. Thick, bulky armor enclosed it, and it bristled with weapons ranging from conventional autocannons and missile-launchers to rune-powered accelerators and psi-blasters. Every once in a while, one of the intricate symbols carved into the machine’s armor glowed blue or green, letting all below know that it was alive—and that it was watching them. Somewhere deep in its guts, dangling from anti-shock suspensors, was a thing that used to be human.
Key: The Metal Idol, episodes 2–3, “Cursor,” Parts 1 and 2. Written and directed by Hiroaki Satō. Produced by Shigehiro Suzuki and Atsushi Tanuma. Music by Tamiya Terashima. Studio Pierrot, 1994-1996. 13 episodes and 2 movies. Rated 16+.
Available on Crunchyroll.
Critics of Key: The Metal Idol often complain that it is a slow-moving show, and they’re not wrong. We’re already three episodes in (episodes 2 and 3 are a two-parter, sort of), and the story line still hasn’t taken off. However, the visuals are arresting, and there are enough intriguing details that it doesn’t feel sluggish.
Sakura, the best friend Key improbably ran into while in Tokyo, has taken Key into her apartment. What brought Sakura to Tokyo in the first place, we aren’t told, but she survives there by working numerous part-time jobs. After an evening of pizza delivery, she works all night at a video rental.
The sleazy pornographer we met in the first episode comes after her, though less aggressively than the first episode’s cliffhanger implied he would. As it turns out, he not only photographs naked children in his bedroom, but also works for a corporation that produces music idols. He wants Sakura to sign on and is willing to harass her until she agrees. Although tempted by the money, she turns him down, and she has a male orbiter named Tataki with a knowledge of martial arts who’s able to drive the sleazeball off.
Continue reading “Review: ‘Key: The Metal Idol,’ Episodes 2 and 3”
I recently stumbled on this video, a thoughtful discussion of the use of armor shaped to the female body, as frequently seen in anime and other fantasy works. The practicalities or impracticalities of such designs are of course interesting to me, since magical girls wear armor on occasion.
The topic, as the host acknowledges a few times, is perhaps over-generalized, since he is discussing a wide range of history with a lot of different armor designs. But it is an intelligent discussion nonetheless.
A few added notes on things the video mentions in passing but does not have the chance to discuss in depth:
The long-awaited day has arrived. Book one of the Jake and the Dynamo saga, The Wattage of Justice, the first American light novel from Superversive Press, is now available.
And here’s the book trailer:
The Kindle version is currently available. The paperback will come available within a few days.
This book features:
Read about it on the Superversive Blog, where Ben Zwycky describes the novel as a “gloriously over-the-top satire.”
And visit my new Amazon author’s page.
