E-publishing: Think Three Times – a guest post by Tony Daniel

I’ve been on the road a bit this spring to SF conventions and such, and I’ve noticed a minor frenzy about self-published ebooks among writers, both published and unpublished. There are many blogs and newsletters out there that claim to be following a revolution, and I read several of them regularly. I’m also daily involved in the acquisition and publication of ebooks myself.

On one hand, I’m happy to see turmoil, as it frightens the hidebound publishing industry into attempting new things, which helps authors and readers. On the other hand, it seems to me that there’s a cultural bubble that has formed. There is certainly a big change, driven by the Kindle and the computer tablets, that is going on. But it is going on within established publishing for the most part. In a way, this is as it has always been.  Printing technology has been relatively cheap for thirty years, and self-publishing is well within the means of anybody with a decent job and some savings. But distribution of books is not.

This is not some industry conspiracy or technological limitation, but the fact that nobody, no individual reader, wants to read through a giant mountain of crap to find a couple of gems.  They surely don’t want to pay ninety-nine cents, or two or three dollars, per book for the opportunity to do so.  These essentials have not changed. Now a couple of friends of mine, such as Bob Kruger of Electricstory.com, are working on automated vetting systems (with a human component) and other ideas of various sorts that are totally legitimate and have a lot of promise.  Maybe technology can come to the aid of a reader trying to make a good selection on what book to read next.

But, and I say this with utmost conviction: most of the various ebook services—perhaps particularly the well-funded ones that look great and talk revolution, and may even be connected to mainstream publishing in some manner—are nonsense enterprises.  I don’t think they are crooked; not at all.  Just deluded.

At the moment, in a general sense, self-publishing your ebook will make you next to nothing and nobody will read it.  Even if you are the world’s best self-promoter, I would ask: are the people you gin up into buying the thing going to tell others to read it?  This is the real power behind publishing, for all its idiotic cronyism and decrepit practices.  It generally doesn’t put out absolute dreck.  Oh, it puts out a lot of dreck.  No argument there.  But it is generally trustworthy enough for a reader to take a chance on its products.  That reader then recommends the book to an acquaintance who crosschecks the friends judgment by determining if the book has a familiar publisher. And, since I’m convinced word-of-mouth sells ninety-five percent of all books, that moment of real, actual, not made-up legitimacy, is a huge advantage.

So I would say think three times about self-publishing.  Then think again.  And then, just as you’re about to press that “send” button, don’t do it.  Unless, that is, you want to start the small business of being a publisher yourself.  That is a different story, and it involves a commitment of years of effort that is not writing effort.  Most writers think they can do anything, of course, and are convinced in romantic fashion that they will have infinite energy to do so.  Some do.  I know a few successful small press entrepreneurs, such as, for instance, Patrick Swenson of Fairwood Press.  They are a rare breed. I know many others who have thrown away money best spent elsewhere.  I don’t know the path ahead, but I understand the current moment well enough. There’s a bubble that is about to deflate because there is just not enough money—which, despite desperate social analysis to the contrary, generally signifies interest from readers—to sustain it.

Tony Daniel is an editor at Baen Books, which is distributed by Simon and Schuster, and has an ebook retail site at Baenebooks.com. He is the author of seven science fiction novels, and several award-winning short stories.

• Tony Daniel at Amazon US and Amazon UK

Sad Songs, With Lots Of Drumming – a guest post by Ian R MacLeod

You have to be of a certain age to remember The White Heather Club. Back in the times when the TV was still in just one room in the house and you had to wait for it to warm up, vague grey shapes sword-dancing to tiddildy-dee music or singing about speeding bonny boats was what passed for light entertainment. Not that there was any choice, but it was a favourite in our family, my father being a typically nostalgic expat Scotsman. The first record that was bought for me (rather than that supposed landmark; the first you buy yourself) was a single of Andy Stewart’s A Scottish Soldier, which I remember enjoying a great deal. I also liked the theme tune to The Lone Ranger, which I didn’t then know was Rossini’s William Tell Overture. That, and Perry Como singing his way through the states of the USA (although I didn’t realise that either) in What Did Della Wear?

It’s easy to groan and try to shut the doors on the embarrassing things we thought we liked before we really knew about music. The novelty records and one hit wonders. But they’re there — they’re part of all our heritage — and their influence remains. My co-ordination is poor to this day, but apparently one of my favourite toddler pursuits was to go into the lounge and bang the poker against the coal scuttle and the fire grate; I’ve always been a frustrated drummer. I think I can still just about remember the noisy pleasure of those sessions, and perhaps that rat-a-tat martial drumming was the appeal of Andy Stewart’s song. That, and the solider dying.

Music was played each day on some big old gramophone as we marched into assembly at infants’ school, and again as we stomped around pretending to be dinosaurs or curled up like the seeds of flowers in something called “Music and Movement”. I have no clear recollection of what the music was, but it was “improving” and classical, and I reckon it may well have included some of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and the much more jagged Romeo and Juliet. He’s still a favourite composer. There always did seem to be something about classical music that I found interesting. My next “bought for me” single, actually an EP, came from my elder brother after I’d been to see Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, which takes its music from Tchaikovsky’s ballet. I remember being a bit disappointed as we sat waiting for “the tune”… but also how much I liked the nice lady ballet dancer photographed on the cover. One of my pleasures was to dress up in my sister’s old ballet costume, and pretend to be a fairy. I even went to school dressed that way once or twice when the occasion seemed to demand it. In those days no one seemed to worry about such behaviour.

After that, up through infants’ and on into secondary school, music, and dressing up, took a back seat. I had no great interest in what was becoming the “Top Ten”, but listened as most kids then did to Junior Choice on the BBC Radio’s Light Programme. I enjoyed songs such as The Little White Bull and The Ugly Bug Ball because they told a story, and particularly liked Puff the Magic Dragon, because it ended so sadly — “a dragon lives forever, but not so little boys…” But my two biggest favourites were Feed The Birds from Mary Poppins, and Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Great songs by any standard, and both filled with sad yearning. I suspect that this was the first music to make me cry, and to realise what an oddly glorious feeling that was.

My elder sister, meanwhile, had noticed this group called the Beatles, and I was very happy to dance along with her to the singles she bought and played on our new radiogram that sat in the lounge on the far side of the fireplace from the telly. Jolly, melodic stuff, and Mum and Dad liked the Beatles as well. In fact, everyone seemed to like the Beatles. But that very likeability made me wary. That, or perhaps their songs simply weren’t sad enough, and lacked the right kind of drumming. But I played Rain on the B side of Paperback Writer often, fascinated by the hypnotic way it drawled and jangled. My elder brother’s tastes went in the direction of Harry Secombe and Andy Williams, but there was one track on an LP of his that I also played and played. It was from an “original cast” (i.e. – not the people from the movie) recording of West Side Story, and was called The Rumble — a modern ballet piece, all jagged angles and mis-shaped chords. Then, and now, it struck me as fresh and sharp and brilliant.

School, being school, still involved random bits of exposure to music. We even used to get so-called “music lessons” each week for no reason any of us could understand, least of all the teacher. Still, one day he set about demonstrating the capabilities of his nice new stereo by playing us a surprisingly lengthy piece of classic music. To his credit, he explained how this symphony started sadly because the composer had had to travel to America without his family, and how it might help if we imagined him arriving on a big steamer into New York harbour, and to try to feel his spirits lifting as he sees the city skyline. I thought this was fabulous stuff, a story told in sound. And there was this churning sadness, those slow drums rolling…

A week or so later, I bought my first record with my own money, an LP of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and the music was even more fabulous than I remembered. In those carefree days, and I and most of my mates used to go home for lunch from our secondary school. As everyone else was out, I’d take my white bread and mashed banana on a tray into the lounge, turn on the radiogram, and let this music flow around me. This is it, I thought. This is something that I love. The sixties had moved on, and my mates were also buying records of their own. Not classical LPs, but singles from the charts by the likes of Herman’s Hermits and Sonny and Cher. I didn’t have any problem with much of this — I watched Top of the Pops just like everyone else — but at the same time I was happy to tell them that it was all a bit… well, simple.

So there I was, my head in the clouds and following on Dvorak with Holst’s Planet Suite and a compilation called Classical Fireworks which wasn’t quite on the same level. No easy decisions, seeing as LPs cost a lot. I liked being different — I liked liking stuff that other people didn’t know or understand or care about. As the radiogram had to remain in its sacred place in the lounge, I was also regularly inflicting my music on the rest of my family, or being told to turn it down, or evicted so they could watch telly. The Beatles, meanwhile, had gone a bit odd, and my sister seemed to have lost interest in them. Another of my random musical experiences at school was when our geography teacher took it upon himself to play their new LP called Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band instead of telling us about towns of the Potteries. I can remember hearing Lennon singing For the Benefit of Mister Kite, and thinking it was strange and wonderful, and like nothing I’d ever heard, least of all She Loves You and those other sugary hits. Not that I bought the record, of course. After all, I only bought classical stuff, didn’t I?

I had the radiogram in the lounge mostly to myself now, as my bother had left to get married and my sister was off at university, and my Dad only had a Black and White Minstrels LP and some Scottish pipes and drums stuff he played at New Year or when he got sentimental. When my sister returned with a boyfriend in tow, they were gracious enough to take me with them to see a film called 2001 A Space Odyssey, and my world was changed. Partly, of course, because of the look of the film, and the mystery of whatever story it was telling, but at least as much because of the music. Not just the iconic stuff by the two Strausses, brilliant though that was, but the other, weirder, pieces. When I played one of my mates some Ligeti from the 2001 soundtrack, I remember him commenting that he would, genuinely, rather listen to Mrs Mills on the piano. Which was great as far as I was concerned. More of this strange and wonderful music left just for me.

But, alarmingly, I found that I now rather liked some of the singles from what was now called the “Top Twenty”. Between buying Richard Strauss tone poems and exploring Karl Nielsen’s symphonies, my secret shame was that I thought some of Deep Purple’s stuff, and Alice Cooper’s, not to mention Cream and the Stones, was actually pretty good. I liked the drumming, and the riffs, and the sense of risk, and the jangling, twisting melodies. And then there was David Bowie. Not because of the way he dressed — my own dressing-up days were behind me — but because of the music. I particularly loved Life on Mars, with its soaring wistfulness, and Space Odyssey, because of Major Tom dying.

Maybe this pop and rock thing had something going for it after all. Not the stuff you heard all the time on daytime Radio One, of course, but by now I was listening to John Peel as I played with my Airfix soldiers on Sunday afternoons, and enjoying a new, different, sense of exclusivity. I never bought singles, but the first rock LP I bought was Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Pictures at an Exhibition. The classical link was obvious, but at least as important was that it came in Island’s cheaper Help series instead of at full price. That, and the cool gatefold cover. But it was great, and I absorbed it with the same edge-of-the-seat enthusiasm I’d had for Dvorak, Richard Strauss and Ligeti. I loved the shrieking, atonal bits where Keith Emerson attacked his keyboard. And then there was the drumming…

Ah! Drumming. It wasn’t something you got much of in classical music. Even Holst’s Mars doesn’t have the same propulsion as Karl Palmer at full tilt. My next LP, and the first live act I saw, was the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Drumming aplenty there, and brilliant solo playing. One of my favourite live musical memories is of John McLaughlin and Jean-Luc Ponty trading fours (although I didn’t then know what it was called) on the stage of the Birmingham Odeon. That, and Michael Walden’s thirty minute drum solo. For a long while after that, by now a sixth-former, then a college student, I bought complex jazz-edged rock music, often with very little singing. This was the era of prog rock, and there was plenty of this stuff to go around, although to my mind, as ever a musical snob, a lot of it was still a bit simple-minded. The Floyd, for example, who I liked for a while, at least until the NME laid into them for being lazily commercial. Not to mention Genesis. And as for Supertramp… Actually, I secretly loved my tape of a friend’s Crime of the Century because it was such a sad album.

From here on in, it probably all gets much more predictable. Step forward Henry Cow. Step forward Keith Jarrett and pretty much anything on the ECM label. That, and Steely Dan, and Joni Mitchell, along with a slow return to the classical stuff I’d always loved, especially the great, sad, romantic composers, combined with all the folk, ambient and avant guard music I began listening to. Thanks in major part to Richard and Linda Thompson’s brilliantly pessimistic I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, which starts with a song about suicide and ends with the fabulously bleak The Great Valerio, I finally realised that there was elegance and profundity in seemingly simple music. But probably the last great aha moment in my musical life came when I purchased, for no exact reason I can now remember, a copy of King Crimson’s Red. I already had In the Court of the Crimson King, but, if you discount the great cover and Twenty First Century Schizoid Man, that’s a surprisingly quiet album. I took Red from its sleeve, opened up the record player, which still sat in my parents’ lounge opposite the telly, and played it, and played it, and played it, and played it. Again. And again. I could play it now. In fact, I will…

The prowling thunder of the title track. The jagged, free-form of Providence. Above all, the churning mellotron chords which begin Starless, with that yearning guitar theme and those bleak lyrics about grey hope and sunsets that quitens to a riff which builds over clashing drums until the main theme returns in a howl of saxophones. Complex, intelligent music, played with a ferocious mixture of joy, anger and passion. Maybe it helped that Fripp and his band were imploding. Who knows? To me this is still, and always will be, earth-shatteringly brilliant. I could cry. I am crying. It all seems a very long way from Andy Stewart’s A Scottish Soldier. But then, I always did like sad songs, with lots of drumming.

Guest post by Ian R MacLeod

Ian R MacLeod’s “Snodgrass”, a story telling the life of a John Lennon who quit the Beatles just before they became famous, and ended up living in Birmingham and working for a while in the civil service will be shown in the UK on Sky Playhouse on 25 April.

Open Road Media will shortly be publishing all of Ian’s novels as e-books. They’re starting with a “Best Of” collection of short stories called Snodgrass and Other Illusions, featuring some favourites from his whole career, a few rarities, and individual afterwords.

For all the latest news visit Ian R MacLeod’s website.

 

The Long and Winding Road – a guest post by Colin Murray

There are many roads to becoming a published author. This was mine.

A few years ago, I found myself with some time on my hands. This happens quite often when you’re freelance: it seems that it’s either feast or famine. You complain about both but you much prefer feast. On this occasion, I was feeling just a little bruised as a new number-crunching, pie-chart-eating CEO decided that the publishing company where I had been successfully running an imprint for about eight years could no longer afford me and had ended what had been a mutually beneficial arrangement. (They had a vastly experienced editor at a cut-rate and I had some element of stability in my income. For what it’s worth, I had the last laugh: the bookseller who replaced me lasted just five months. I’d told the CEO that it would be six, but I didn’t mind being wrong.) So, while I was looking for replacement work (which came in surprisingly quickly), I, for no good reason, sat down and started to write a novel.

Of course, I should have known better.

I’d worked in publishing for long enough to know that it was rarely the path to fame and fortune, and that, far more often, it ended in tears and recrimination. But I had an idea and time on my hands and I’d also heard that a major publishing house was actively looking for new crime writers.

The writing went surprisingly well but, by the time I’d written the first hundred pages, I had a living to make and work to do and so I sent that chunk of the book off to one of the editors at the publisher and got on with my life, while continuing to write whenever I could.

Some six months passed before I received a very pleasant letter from an assistant editor, apologizing for taking so long and asking if there was any more to be seen as she thought the novel was pretty good and was planning to talk to her boss about it. Which sounded promising. As I had, in fact, more or less finished the book. I duly sent it off.

At that stage, having set things in motion, I thought it might not be a bad idea to contact an agent. I made a tentative enquiry and received a very positive response so I told him of the publisher’s interest and hoped that things might happen.

I guess I should have been even more wary than I was because in the publishing world, as in most areas of human activity, little is simple and straightforward. When my often elusive agent peered through the cloud cover on Olympus long enough to say, ‘Nothing would please me more than selling this for a hundred thousand pounds but that’s not going to happen,’ I understood him to be making a realistic judgement on the book’s worth. But I was wrong. What I didn’t hear was the suppressed clause, ‘and I don’t bother with anything that sells for less than that.’ My fault, of course, for not being cynical enough.

I knuckled down to some revisions and, after a while, my agent did arrange a meeting with an editor from the publishing house I had sent the novel to. He told me that my book was one of the most accomplished first novels he’d come across and I left the meeting with a warm glow, expecting my agent to hammer out a deal.

However, it turned out that the meeting was the one and only thing he did for me.

I rewrote again, sent the new draft off to him and the editor and then waited. And waited.  After five months of hearing nothing, I tried to contact the great man on the phone. I failed. I tried again. And failed again. In fact, I kept on trying for a month. And kept on failing. Eventually, I decided that maybe I wasn’t the client for him and that, ipso facto, made him not the agent for me. I wrote accordingly and, eventually, I received a gracious reply, admitting that he had not served me well.

Meanwhile, times had changed and the publishing house that had been interested in new crime novels was no longer looking for them.

However, this where the long story becomes a short one. I decided to represent myself and looked at lists I liked and sent the book off to Constable & Robinson. I received a very favourable reaction in weeks, an offer soon after and then a contract. Of course, I didn’t get a hundred thousand pounds but I was consulted on the cover and the blurb, the copy-editing was superb, everyone was enthusiastic and the rights people even placed the book with an American publisher.

And, no matter, how jaded and cynical one pretends to be, there is nothing like holding a copy of your first book.

What had I learned, apart from that? Not a lot that I didn’t know already. Agents and publishers can be very dilatory and can’t always be relied on, but there are some good guys out there.

Oh, and I now know that first-time novelists have long memories and nurture and cherish grudges. There’s one agent who won’t be getting any referrals from me, and British crime reviewers (who, for the most part, simply ignored the book) probably shouldn’t look to me for any favours for a decade or two.

But there are things that make it all worthwhile: a reviewer describing my book as ‘riveting and suspenseful’ and then exclaiming ‘What a terrific first novel!’; another saying that it was ‘brilliant’; and another talking about its ‘pounding suspense’. The fame and fortune are probably never going to happen, but I’d made a little money, I was a member of the Crime Writers’ Association, some people had read my novel and they hadn’t been disappointed. What more could I realistically have hoped for?

Colin Murray’s first novel, After a Dead Dog, a contemporary crime novel set in rural Scotland, was published in 2007. No Hearts, No Roses (‘quirky, engaging, Chandleresque’ Booklist), appeared in 2011, and September Song in 2012. Both are set in London in 1955 and feature the same main character.

September Song:

• Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes and Noble

No Hearts, No Roses:

• Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes and Noble

After a Dead Dog:

• Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes and Noble

The Penny Dreadnought Files: Transcript of the Debriefing of Agent #742C – a guest post by Mr Everington

“So, what can you tell us about these so called ‘Abominable Gentlemen’, Agent #742C?”

“It’s worse than we thought, sir.”

“What do you mean? I thought they were just writers?”

“Well sir…”

“And not even proper writers, but – and I can barely bring myself to say this – genre writers. People fixated not just on what isn’t, but on what can never be.”

“I’m not sure how we could ever truly know what can never be, sir”

“This isn’t a philosophy class Agent #742C. This is you telling me whether these Gentlemen really are Abominable. Or Gentlemen. What are they each like individually, when they’re not calling themselves damn silly names?”

“Alan Ryker is a cad, Sir, and Iain Rowan a rotter; Aaron Polson is a ruffian, and James Everington a n’er-do-well.”

“Hmmm. And are they really writers, or is it all just a cover for nefarious activities?”

“Well they do publish fiction sir. Both separately, but also as a group in a series of themed anthologies called Penny Dreadnought…“

“Well, it’s a nice title I give ‘em that. But no – genre writers. Can’t be any good.”

“And they’ve recently published all sixteen stories from the first four volumes in an Omnibus volume, sir. You can buy it on places like Amazon and Amazon UK – I’ve checked and it is legitimate sir. Proper artwork and formatting and all that. But…”

“But,  Agent #742C?”

“But I don’t believe a word of it sir! They’re supposed to be horror writers! This Penny Dreadnought thing should contain stories about zombies or romantically inclined were-bats! That’s what horror readers want, isn’t it? It’s what Mrs #742C reads sir, and…”

“I have no desire to learn the squalid secrets of your marriage, Agent #742C. So if it’s not that sort of thing, what sort of stories does this Penny Dreadnought Omnibus contain?”

“There’s ambiguity sir. Things that are unclear and make you think, long after you’ve finished the story… and… “

“Don’t falter now Agent #742C.”

“And strong prose and characterisation – like real books! There’s even stories based on the theme of ‘epistemic doubt’ sir! They reference Descartes.”

“Good Lord!”

“All the stories are like that sir. Literate and street-smart”

“You’re right, these can’t possibly be horror writers! What possible justifications can they give?”

“They claim they are part of a long line of ‘literate horror’ sir…”

“Wash your mouth out Agent 742C!”

“… which includes such people as Shirley Jackson, T.E.D. Klein, and Algernon Blackwood sir. They claim they grouped together as the ‘Abominable Gentlemen’ because they all shared similar sensibilities as writers, and wanted to band together to put out the best of their stories…”

“I don’t think I’ve ever come across a case as bad as this before. I don’t mind admitting to feeling some nausea.”

“They claim publishing their work together in this way allows them to increase their audience and allows their readers to find new and exciting authors. Further issues might even feature guest Gentlemen sir, of either gender, who are also writers of unashamedly high-brow horror…”

“I think I’ve heard enough. You’ve read this abomination – what do you suggest we do Agent #742C?”

“Nuke the site from orbit Sir?”

“Oh, you will go far Agent #742C.”

The first Penny Dreadnought anthology is available now and more information is available on the PD website. The Gentlemen themselves have been conspicuous by their absence since this debriefing took place, but hope to be bringing you more tales of nefariousness soon.

Whippleshield Books – a guest post by Ian Sales

I didn’t intend to set up my own small press. I had this science fiction novella which I thought was good enough to be published, but every small press I approached had a couple of years’ worth of material scheduled. I didn’t think a magazine would publish the novella because it has an extensive glossary – and the glossary is important to the reading experience. And, to be honest, I wasn’t entirely convinced editors would actually like my novella. I hadn’t written it in a science fiction mode… though it’s set in an alternate 1980s, is about astronauts stranded on the Moon, and makes use of an unexplained Nazi “Wunderwaffe”. But it’s not the sort of science fiction you see each year on the Hugo and Nebula shortlists. Besides, my novella was also the first of a quartet, and I’d sooner have sold all four as a single package… even though I hadn’t written the other three.

And then I agreed to edit Rocket Science, an anthology of hard science fiction, for Mutation Press (which was responsible for the Music for Another World anthology in 2010). The plan was to launch Rocket Science at the Eastercon in London in April 2012. It occurred to me this would be a perfect time to also launch my novella…

But the only way I was going to manage that would be to publish it myself. No existing small press, even if it agreed, would be able to turn it around so fast.

Self-publishing an ebook is one thing, but I wanted to do it properly. That meant making the novella, titled Adrift on the Sea of Rains, available in both paperback and limited edition hardback. Since I was going to all that trouble, I decided I might as well set up an actual small press, and make Adrift on the Sea of Rains its first publication. I especially liked that this gave me complete control over how the novella would appear in print.

However, I am unfortunately poor at art. I could have looked for suitable cover art on the Internet. Or perhaps used a photograph from the Apollo Moon missions. I did, in fact, experiment with some covers using both. But I wanted Adrift on the Sea of Rains to stand out, to not look like just another self-published science fiction novella. One night, I was watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert, and in it a character picked up a paperback book. Red Desert was released in 1964, and though the paperback in the film is Italian, it reminded me of the Penguin Modern Classic paperbacks on my bookshelves which used to belong to my father. I wanted something which resembled those books. After some experimentation, that’s what I ended up with: a cover filled with a grid of line-drawings of an Apollo LM, one of which is in grey. The art is actually relevant to the novella’s plot.

I asked a number of published sf authors I knew if they’d provide back-cover quotes. Those that agreed I emailed a PDF of the novella to. By the time I had the front cover finalised, all the quotes, ISBNs from Nielsen, and quotes from the printers, it was the beginning of March. I submitted print-ready files to the printer, and then fretted.

The first set of cover proofs had mistakes on them – made by the printers, not me. The second set were correct. A week before the Eastercon, a courier delivered five boxes of books, three of hardbacks and two of paperbacks. I was pleased to note the book had come out better than I’d expected. It’s not perfect, and if I could I’d make a few changes and release a new edition.

Since its publication, the response to Adrift on the Sea of Rains has been overwhelmingly positive. So far about ten reviews, all positive, have appeared online; and several people have tweeted that they thought it was really good. Of course, this means the pressure is now on to make the second book of the quartet even better…

As for Whippleshield Books… Yes, there are the other three books of the Apollo Quartet yet to see print. But I’m anticipating six to nine months between each one. Since I plan to publish two or three books a year, I’m going to need more material, so Whippleshield Books is open to submissions. But only of a specific type: novellas or very short linked collections, hard science fiction or space fiction, of high literary quality.

It’s likely I will be rejecting lots of submissions. I learnt doing Rocket Science that the definition of hard sf I was operating from wasn’t one shared by many of the people who submitted stories to the anthology. I have a very particular type of story in my head for Whippleshield Books – which, unsurprisingly, Adrift on the Sea of Rains, indeed the entire Apollo Quartet, sort of exemplifies – but I expect to be sent a lot of submissions which are very much not like that. The guidelines for Whippleshield Books can be found on the website.

More:

• Adrift on the Sea of Rains at Amazon UK and Amazon US.
• Rocket Science at Amazon UK and Amazon US, or direct from the publishers, Mutation Press.

Guest post: Worldbuilding… what’s not to like? by Richard Ford

Okay, I confess: I hate worldbuilding! Do I think a map is important in a fantasy novel? No, not really. Should a writer develop their own version of Elvish? Don’t be daft!

Now, before you leap straight to the comments at the bottom in a flurry of righteous indignation to demand how I can claim to be a fantasy writer without a deep and abiding love for all things ‘backgroundy’, let me explain.

Firstly, it’s not that I can’t do worldbuilding, it’s just that other people do it so much better. Having worked in the pen & paper RPG industry for several years, I’ve come across a lot of games with rich, lush backgrounds, created over decades by scores of contributors. How am I meant to compete?

The world of Faerun, in which the Forgotten Realms RPG supplements, computer games and novels are set, was originally devised by Ed Greenwood, but since then he has passed on the mantle to other creators who have gone on to develop its rich history, cultures and cataclysmic events, spanning centuries. Warhammer 40K’s Imperium of Man was first developed 25 years ago, but has since evolved into a behemoth of a background with scores of codices, computer games and over a hundred novels filling the gaps in the vastness of its space. One of the earliest RPG backgrounds was RuneQuest’s Glorantha, which has had not one, not two, but three ages. Count them! And trust me, I’ve worked on some Glorantha products and may well have let slip some continuity errors. Trust me when I say, the long time fans weren’t happy, but in my defence there’s a hell of a lot to know if you’re new to it.

And it’s not just RPGs. Star Wars now goes beyond the limits of the movies, crafting an intricate Expanded Universe which tells its tales across various media and in various timelines that cover thousands of years. These new stories from dozens of contributors are arguably as deep and abiding as the tales of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, to which anyone who’s ever played computer games in the Old Republic, or read the novels and comics that continue the background well beyond Return of the Jedi, will attest.

Skyrim, the latest Elder Scrolls computer game (number V, I believe) is the latest set in a world that continues to grow and expand as much, if not more, than any novel series or pen & paper RPG you might delve into.

But other novelists manage to build convincing worlds, I hear you cry, you’re clearly just a lazy git.

Well, that’s one explanation, yes. And you’re correct, other novelists do create their own living breathing worlds. Tolkien, the granddaddy of fantasy himself, as well as writing detailed appendices for his seminal works completed a twelve-volume history of Middle Earth (albeit released posthumously) as well as the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and more. George Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire is as close to a historical novel as you’ll get in the fantasy genre, and Brandon Sanderson has been developing the background for his Stormlight Archive series, starting with the doorstep-sized The Way of Kings (which to my shame I haven’t yet read, but it’s on the list) for the past ten years. Even Joe Abercrombie, who professes to spend little time on background, has still managed to craft a nuanced setting with an ancient and mysterious history.

So your books have no background? No world for us to dive into a swim around, all the while appreciating your worldbuildy unctuousness?

Well, not exactly.

As a fantasy writer you’ve got to at least develop a cursory background, even if your world is just a mirror for the one we live in. My first novel Kultus is set in the steam-powered metropolis of the Manufactory, although there is a world beyond its walls. With steampunk you’ve already got some recognisable aspects, some tropes that are familiar to the reader and some technological aspects that are at least similar to our own. Still, I think I’ve at least created a living world, even if I haven’t laid it out for the reader like a smorgasbord of historical events.

With epic fantasy on the other hand, which generally takes place in a medieval era of technology, you do have to develop a deep history, magic system, economy, etc. And here lies my problem – I’m currently writing a stonking great trilogy of the most epic of epic fantasies!

So what are you going to do? It’s going to be terrible! A shallow two-dimensional shell of a series!

Piffle and tosh I say!

It’s not just that other people do it so much better, that I’m not ready to flagellate myself for my lack of worldbuilding proficiency. At the end of the day books are about characters! Contrary to what you might have heard, characters are the foundations around which a novel is written. In fact they’re more than the foundations, they’re the bricks and mortar. Maybe even the roof too.

Background is merely window dressing, it’s the context within which you’ve created the book, but it’s certainly not the be-all and end-all. You can have a great novel with poor worldbuilding as long as the characters are living breathing people who leap out of the page and grab you, pulling you into their adventures and making you care for them. A world can be as rich and detailed as you like, but if the characters are two-dimensional, if you couldn’t give a monkey’s whether they live or die, the novel is ultimately doomed!

Saying all this (and at the risk of contradicting myself) the best novels in the genre are the ones which combine a strong, developed, fictional universe with strong, developed characters. And in many ways, these two things work hand-in-hand.

From my own experiences I’ve found that a world will develop organically around your characters and plot – which should always come first. When you’ve got a character who’s lived a life (at least in your head) you need to know where he’s been, what he’s done and who he’s done it with. That’s not to say you need to know the thousand year history of your world, but at least an idea of your characters’ experiences is crucial to building their depth.

So will I be developing the world for my epic fantasy? Will I be building its cultures and races and cosmology? You bet your britches I will. But I probably won’t beat myself up if I haven’t detailed who the king’s great, great grandfather was or what his capital city was called a thousand years ago. These are things that can be firmed up during the writing, and if the reader doesn’t need to know, then I don’t have to tell them. All they need to know about is the characters, and they should want to follow them through the story.

Oh, and they need to love them too… or at least love to hate them!

Richard Ford’s Kultus was published in October 2011, and is available from:

• Amazon UK
• Amazon US
• and many more places

Guest blog: Stephen Palmer on the writing of Hallucinating

I had enormous fun writing Hallucinating.

The novel began as a free festival inspired short story that I wrote in the mid 1990s, taking all my musical loves—Shpongle, Ozric Tentacles, Tangerine Dream, Hawkwind and so many more—and weaving them into an idiosyncratic tale… a very idiosyncratic tale of musical invasion and psychedelic mystery. Although I loved, and still love, the festival/alternative/underground scene, there was an element of the scene that I felt an irresistible urge to satirise, notably the occasionally obsessive belief in UFOs et al that so many alternative folk succumb to. And so a tale of real/unreal alien invasion was born, with real/unreal situations and characters who inhabited this underground world…

The story was “published” only on my website. After a while I began to wonder what happened next, following the alien invasion and the remixing of the western world’s economy. I was living in the Westcountry at the time, and, inspired by the beautiful local scenery and by artists such as Nigel Shaw and Carolyn Hillyer who lived on Dartmoor, I wrote the next part of the tale, that in the novel became Part 2, Return Of A Tune. By this time, the turn of the millennium, Sean Wallace of Cosmos Books and Prime Books had asked me when I was going to complete the tale, which he loved and was interested in publishing. My initial response was that I wouldn’t complete it—I felt the tale was too idiosyncratic. It was not aimed at my SF readers, rather at all my underground and free festival friends. But eventually the lure of the story got to me, I planned and prepared the rest of the tale and soon began writing it.

Hallucinating plays with ideas of reality and illusion. One of the ways I wanted to do this was to include cameo appearances by real underground musicians, and so I contacted as many as I could, asking them if they would allow me to use them in the novel. All but one answered: all positive replies. I was delighted. And so Ed Wynne, Simon Posford, Steven Wilson and all the rest appeared in the book. Some of these musicians took it really seriously! Phil Thornton for instance told me what synths he’d be using for his imaginary gig, while Simon Posford insisted on having purple hair. And there were many in-jokes about Tangerine Dream, Hawkwind, Ozric Tentacles and all my other favourites. Yes, I had enormous fun writing the novel.

The ultimate game was to have myself appear, and so I did, though that decision was condemned by one reviewer, who thought it too self-indulgent: “The narrative voice is quite obviously pitched at festival folk, and the cameos from (now octogenerian) members of bands like Ozric Tentacles and Shpongle are intended to please quite a specific crowd. This I don’t have a problem with, but I did feel that the cameos were a bit indulgent — too much so when one electronic artiste by the name of Steve Palmer puts in an appearance … Shame, sir, shame.” But for a novel that was written about the musical world that I love and am part of, and which deliberately mixed fantasy and reality, I felt my appearance was appropriate.

I was particularly pleased that so many of the in-jokes were appreciated by my readers. As one reviewer pointed out, Hallucinating is the novel in which my rather silly, surreal sense of humour is most obvious. Other reviewers found the tale baffling: “Nulight is the colorful character. But the idealism vs. pragmatism makes Kappa a more complex and in some ways more interesting character” (Aural Innovations). Others liked it: “It is important to remember the title of this book. As none of the characters spend much time actually hallucinating (apart from a few mushrooms), it calls into question the reality of what is being told. What, if anything, is real, and if it isn’t real, then who’s hallucination is it?” (Vector).

I did have plans to write a sequel, bringing in the American hippy scene, but never found the motivation to begin it. Hallucinating stands on its own I think, with its suitably ambiguous ending…

Guest Blog: Thank You For the Days – David Mathew

Hello there. Welcome. Pull up a cyberpew.

I’m going to squat in Keith’s house for a while… I promise not to make too much mess.

Over the course of a euphemistic ‘few’ drinks recently – a euphemism used rather too frequently on these shores – Keith invited me to write a Guest Blog. As we were both at that moment a full five or six millimetres away from authentic liver collapse, and as I had written a Guest Blog a matter of weeks earlier, I was happy to agree to do so. Why not? Now that I had published my first Guest Blog, I felt like something of an old-timer in the field. I was a veteran. Of course I could do another one!

Um…

What do bloggers write about again?

You see, I have never blogged – I have never really fancied it. This does not mean that I have ever been against the idea – not at all – but that it has never really seemed right for me. More than anything, I have never really felt that I had much worth blogging about. With the exception of chapter notes and memoranda to myself, everything I write already has a destination (or a prospective home to squat in, if you will). Who would be interested in reading what I squeezed out?

The fact that you are reading these words suggests that you disagree with my initial thoughts about blogging (you’re reading the words, after all), but surely no blogger would be foolish enough to assume that any old rubbish will do. No: it has been a pleasure to learn that bloggers take their role seriously, and treat their audiences with respect. While some blogging remains synonymous with ‘what-I-did-at-the-weekend’-type mini-essays, I no longer roll my eyes so much, or question what it is about this that I so dislike. Each to their own, right? If some people would rather write their diaries online, who am I to say that this will be something they’ll eventually regret?

Almost in spite of myself, I’ve come to like the fact that bloggers are abroad, keeping their ears and eyes to the ground. It doesn’t mean that I have to read them (perhaps the sheer weight of work that this would entail was what had left me so cool towards their existence in the first place); but it’s good to know that if I need an opinion – as opposed to a certified fact – on a subject, there is someone to offer me that opinion, and he or she is no further away than a couple of clicks.

Or to put it another way…

One of my interests is psychoanalysis, and it was via a blog (her own, oddly enough) that I learned recently that Elizabeth Young-Bruehl had died. Now, this might not be a name that you know, but I use the example as a way of illustrating my newfound respect for blogs and blogging.

But where does this leave me now?

Well, if I’m honest, I hope to draw a few readers’ attention to my novel, O My Days. Keith Brooke himself has honoured me with a fine review, for which I’ll be grateful. But while I’m crashing in his house, I hope he won’t mind my mentioning it once more… or describing a bit about how it came to be. To do this I’ll whisk you back in time, to 2006.

2006 was one of the strangest years of my life. It took me quite a while to understand that I was suffering from a delayed depression following the unexpected death of my father in 2005. I had taken on a job in the Education Department of a maximum security prison for young offenders (aged 18-21) in the south-east of England.

Well, right from the start I became aware of a peculiar prison language that some of these offenders had adopted: not jargon, not slang – an actual new language, with roots in English (obviously), but almost as distinct from it as Spanish is from Portugese. As might be expected, this language was used to exclude people from the group (myself included); but if the offenders did not know that I was recording words, phrases, and learning meanings by either sly or not-so-subtle means, then what harm was there in my game and in my research?

The idea of a book written wholly in this language did not take long to germinate. And although it was not an easy book to read, I have worked on more difficult projects! Every day I had a fresh stream (some might say fetid sewer) of neologisms, phrases – examples of language wrung out and distorted, made mangled and beautiful and new by strict rules of its language’s boundaries.

The plot is of course my own. While discretion and tact might not be bywords of a young offender’s lifestyle, very few of their gleefully-shared gobbets made it close to my final draft. (The one about the chicken theft, however, is reasonably close to what I was told.) Had I wanted to, I could have simply written up my diary every day… but that would not have made a novel. That would have made a blog: and it would have been bad practice to do this anyway, even if all of the names and dates and places had been changed. The conscience would have balked.

A novel is a work of fiction, a different beast; and I offer it to you, with something of a pun and piece of good music to end my time here – now – in Keith’s bathroom. (You wouldn’t believe the place.) If anyone is interested, a few links follow – or get in touch, by all means.

So if you’d be so good to jump up from your cyberpew and shift a little of the cyberfurniture around. Grab a partner, and dance, sway or sing along (or all three) to the following.

Are you ready with your air instruments?

I hope the Kinks fans and Elvis Costello fans will forgive me, but I have always preferred this version by Kirsty MacColl. So… thank you for the days.

David Mathew

Up-to-date information here.
New novel, O My Days, out now from Triskaideka Books. Click here for information.
Hardcover, paperback or e-book versions available.
Great review here!
New interview here! And a newer interview here!
Paranoid Landscapes orders here or here or the e-book is here. Review here.
Interview with me here, and another interview.
Selected interviews I’ve done at Infinity Plus (scroll down a bit).
Selected bibliography here.

Guest review by John Grant: The Dreamthief’s Daughter by Michael Moorcock

(Earthlight, 342 pages, hardback, 2001 )

In pre-WWII Germany, with the Nazis on the ascendant, Count Ulric von Bek is one of the many who look upon developments with dismay — but a largely passive dismay, for fear of the bully-boys. He is not allowed to continue thus, however, for the Nazis, in the person of his cousin Prince Gaynor von Minct, seek the ancestral sword of the von Bek family, Ravenbrand, as well as the Holy Grail, also entrusted to the family but reputedly lost by von Bek’s mad father. Von Bek contacts the Resistance, and, with the enigmatic Herr El and the lovely wildling Oona, who is like himself an albino, makes plans to retain the status quo. Another albino appears frequently to von Bek in dreams and visions — a berserk-seeming figure who has a savage cast to him.

Before much can come of any Resistance schemes, Gaynor has von Bek thrown into a concentration camp where, despite physical torture, he declines to reveal the location of Ravenbrand. At length, as he nears death, the albino of his dreams appears magically with Oona and an enigmatic British agent, Oswald Bastable, to free him. They flee to Hameln where, … la Pied Piper, von Bek splits open a rock using the regained Ravenbrand and they enter a subterranean realm, Mu-Ooria, populated by the mentally superhuman Off-Moo. Here they are pursued by Gaynor and his Nazi demon sidekick Klosterheim.

And here, too, the mysterious dream albino — who is of course Elric of Melnibon‚ — gains a greater reality, in due course managing to combine himself with von Bek so that the two become one. The dual entity returns to Tanelorn, where as Elric it discovers that Gaynor has ambitions far beyond the mundane ones of the Nazis: through forming a duplicitous alliance with the Goddess of Law, Miggea, Gaynor hopes to overthrow Chaos and gain the rule of all the multiverse. Elric, as an arch-prince of Chaos, must resist him.

The remainder of this tale twines its way absorbingly through various aspects of the multiverse — Moorcock’s great conceptual creation, the myriad related worlds in which stories are eternally played and replayed, with archetypes as the puppets of unknown puppeteers. In the end, of course, the balance between Chaos and Law is restored, at least for now.

The novel (although divided into three) has essentially four parts: von Bek’s time in pre-War Germany; his and Oona’s adventures in Mu-Ooria; the adventures of Elric and of the dual Elric/von Bek entity in and around Tanelorn; and the long, complex final section in which Elric, von Bek and the ever- resourceful Oona — who is Elric’s daughter by the dreamthief Oone, and with whom von Bek, despite an uneasy sensation of incest (for he and Elric are alter egos), falls in love — journey between the worlds and bring a resolution to the main conflict while also, in the conflict of this world, bringing a resolution of sorts by turning the tide of the Battle of Britain back against the Luftwaffe.

The four sections succeed to greater and lesser (mostly greater) extents. The Mu-Ooria sequences, with their Edgar Rice Burroughsian ambience, in the telling hark back even further, to the sort of 19th- or even 18th-century otherworld fantasy in which the otherworld itself is deemed to be of such marvel that the reader is intended to be entertained by somewhat painstaking, plodding accounts of the geography and populace rather than any plot advancement. There are longueurs here and also a sense of alienation on the writer’s part, as if Moorcock recognized while writing them that the sequences were failing to lift off the ground but could not abandon them because this section of the book is integral to the rest.

That rest, by contrast, in general sings. Von Bek’s experiences in Nazi Germany, and his growing knowledge that he is part of a greater mystery, are as gripping as any World War II adventure story. The sequences where Elric and later the dual entity must quest, with Moonglum, through the bleak and alien world into which the goddess Miggea has transplanted Tanelorn, like an orchid into a desert, are superbly conceived High Fantasy and eerily evoke the dream-sense; while the long concluding section — with the small exception of the clumsily handled, contrived-seeming sequence in which a dragon-mounted Elric and von Bek attack the advancing waves of the Luftwaffe, thereby giving rise to the legend of the Dragons of Wessex — demonstrates why Moorcock possesses the towering status he does in any consideration of the history of fantasy. In this final section he is creating new structures of fantasy, rather than recrudescing the old — a rare achievement, alas, in the modern genre.

Of great interest throughout is the question of identity and the workings, through the nature of the multiverse, of not just the multiplicity of a single identity but the coalescing into a single identity of a multiplicity; one has the sensation, reading this book, of this going on all the time in a kind of endless flow, as reality itself shifts and twists — rather like an analogy of the impermanent alliances the villain Gaynor forges with the different gods. Von Bek is at one and the same time both Elric and not-Elric, and that duality persists even once their two identities have fused. (The same obviously is true of Elric, who is both von Bek and not-von Bek.) Elric’s sword Stormbringer and the von Bek family’s sword Ravenbrand have a single identity, even though they are physically twain and remain so, even when in proximity. Oona is both a daughter and a lover to the double identity that is Elric- von Bek. Gaynor is at one and the same time a human being and an eternal Evil Principle. There are other examples.

That this is in fact a true nature of reality is plausible in a post-Heisenberg frame of reference (whose analogue might be Chaos, by contrast with Newtonian-style Law), which sees identity as a transient property, dependent upon, among other factors, the act of perception. It is pleasing to see such notions worked out in a novel of, ostensibly, High Fantasy — not a subgenre noted for its deployment of scientific thinking, and indeed generally marked by antiscientism.

This is also an intensely political novel. Time and again Moorcock explores the motivations behind the parasitic quest of tyrants for power and their obsessional need to stamp order (Law) on that which should not be ordered — to wit, humanity. The relevance of this is obvious when Nazism is the despotism under consideration; but there are not so subtly encoded references to other, more recent, “democratic despots” of the Right. The name of the Goddess of Law, Miggea, seems a clear anagrammatic reference to Maggie/Margaret Thatcher, a political figure who while in power earned the public hatred (or fear) of many surprisingly disparate creators. Here, for example, is Moorcock’s description of the world Miggea and her rule of Law have created:

Miggea’s was no ordinary desert. It was all that remained of a world destroyed by Law. Barren. No hawks soared in the pale blue sky. Not an insect. Not a reptile. No water. No lichen. No plants of any kind. Just tall spikes of crystallized ash and limestone, crumbling and turned into crazy shapes by the wind, like so many grotesque gravestones.

Later Herr El (aka Prince Lobkowitz), in talking of the rise of the Nazis but also of any regime of obdurate Law, however convivial its veneer — any regime that pretends the solutions to complex problems are simple, and then imposes through the use of power or force those simple, but (or hence) profoundly wrong solutions on the world — is the mouthpiece for a sideswipe at Thatcher’s American counterpart:

They are the worst kind of self-deceiving cowards and everything they build is a ramshackle sham. They have the taste of the worst Hollywood producers and the egos of the worst Hollywood actors. We have come to an ironic moment in history, I think, when actors and entertainers determine the fate of the real world.

Moorcock’s contempt for the politicians of Law is of course allowed to be seen more naked when the subjects under consideration are safely distant in history, like the Nazis and (in brief references) the Stalinist despots of Soviet Russia. Late in the book there is a long and hilariously — though darkly, bitterly — satirical scene in which a disguised von Bek, inadvertently thrust into a car with Rudolf Hess, must listen to an interminable outflow of arrant, antiscientific, credulously ignorant nonsense from the Deputy Fuehrer. Hess and by implication his colleagues in the Nazi hierarchy are portrayed as what Brian Stableford has termed “lifestyle fantasists”, the attempted reification of their particular brand of insane and simplifying fantasies involving, of course, untold human suffering. Hence Elric’s — and one presumes Moorcock’s — detestation of Law and adherence to Chaos.

As mentioned, there are some doldrums in this book, but they are in a relatively early part of it and easily ploughed through. Overall, The Dreamthief’s Daughter is mightily impressive not just as a demonstration of the fantasticating imagination in full flight but because of all the different aspects of meaning which it embodies — analogues, in a way, of the myriad diversely aspected worlds of the multiverse. It is one of those rare fantasies that merits repeated reading with, each time, a different facet of its full meaning to be derived.

This review, first published by infinity plus, is excerpted from John Grant’s Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews, published on September 19 by infinity plus ebooks:

A bumper collection – over 150,000 words! – of book reviews, many of full essay length, by the two-time Hugo winning and World Fantasy Award-winning co-editor ofThe Encyclopedia of Fantasy and author, among much fiction, of such recent nonfiction works as Corrupted Science and (forthcoming) Denying Science.

Scholarly, iconoclastic, witty, passionate, opinionated, hilarious, scathing and downright irritating by turn, these critical pieces are sure to appeal to anyone who loves fantasy, science fiction, mystery fiction, crime fiction and many points in between … and who also enjoys a rousing argument.

Warm Words & Otherwise is available from:

…amazon.com (Kindle format, $1.99)
…amazon.co.uk (Kindle format, £1.44)
…Smashwords (various formats, including epub, mobi, Sony and PDF, $1.99)


Guest review by John Grant: Collecting Candace by Susan M Brooks

(Small Dogs Press, 200 pages, paperback, 2005)

The nameless protagonist of this neo-noir piece first encounters Candace in a Florida bar, and is instantly captivated by her. Long legs, skimpy clothing, cute face, suggestive tattoo, beaucoup de bosomry — what sensitive, reconstructed male ascetic could resist her? He picks her up — or is it the other way round? — but not for sex: not only is she seemingly oblivious to the notion that sex might be anticipated, but his desire for her is entirely psychological, you understand, rather than physical, so that an act of sex with her would destroy the iconic Candace he has so swiftly created for himself. He wants to discover her mentally rather than carnally . . . with the carnal option perhaps left open for later.

What he discovers about her is that all the previous males in her life — notably her three husbands — done her wrong in one way or another, perhaps most particularly through their quite inexplicable eventual dumping of her. It soon becomes plain to the reader why all this inexplicable dumping went on: Candace is a vapid moron of the most tedious imaginable kind. The protagonist, however, effectively conceals this patent fact from himself, finding her a constant maze of fascination and desirability. He casts himself into the role of her Knight in Shining Armor, and sets off, with her in tow, to exact revenge upon those males in her past who have so grievously ill treated her. In merry road-movie-psycho fashion, the pair of them cheerfully and gruesomely slaughter Candace’s exes, the inspiration for their crimes being almost as much the searingly hot Florida summer as the protagonist’s obsessed quixotry.

This is a novel with a great deal going for it, and its central premise has a sort of brutal effectiveness. However, the fact that the central femme fatale is seemingly such a complete bimbo, complete with a love for the Bible coupled with a total inability to understand the first word of the New Testament’s message, means that soon the reader is filled with the same urgent compulsion to escape her company as her exes undoubtedly experienced. The protagonist is little better: the novel’s conceit, initially intriguing, that he can be capable of such profound self-deception over Candace, eventually plummets to become exasperation and even incredulity that he could be such a halfwit. If she were banging his brains out one could at least understand his addiction to her: is there a male who cannot look back on protracted periods of gonads-driven idiocy? But that’s not the case, and can’t be: he’s made her into a figure of chastity.

Collecting Candace could get around these problems if it were exquisitely written. Unfortunately, the writing is rather clumsy. Were the two central characters possessed of one single scintilla of appeal, this roughness could add to the novel’s overall noir ambience. As it is, the roughness soon begins instead to grate.

Oddly enough, Collecting Candace is worth reading despite all these adverse comments . . . if you can stomach the unremitting bleakness of its vision of the most Neanderthal aspects of, and indeed members of, modern American society. It is from such ground that there springs the culture-of-ignorance whose current dominance has done so much to topple our country so swiftly from the position of world leader to world laughing stock. Brooks is to be heartily and very sincerely congratulated on having managed, in such a brief work, to do so much to explain this phenomenon.

This review, first published by Crescent Blues, is excerpted from John Grant’s Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews, published on September 19 by infinity plus ebooks:

A bumper collection – over 150,000 words! – of book reviews, many of full essay length, by the two-time Hugo winning and World Fantasy Award-winning co-editor ofThe Encyclopedia of Fantasy and author, among much fiction, of such recent nonfiction works as Corrupted Science and (forthcoming) Denying Science.

Scholarly, iconoclastic, witty, passionate, opinionated, hilarious, scathing and downright irritating by turn, these critical pieces are sure to appeal to anyone who loves fantasy, science fiction, mystery fiction, crime fiction and many points in between … and who also enjoys a rousing argument.

Warm Words & Otherwise is available from:

…amazon.com (Kindle format, $1.99)
…amazon.co.uk (Kindle format, £1.44)
…Smashwords (various formats, including epub, mobi, Sony and PDF, $1.99)