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Author: Matthew David Surridge

Ursula Vernon’s Digger

Ursula Vernon’s Digger

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DiggerThe Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story was first given out in 2009. The category was a nice idea, especially given the increased prominence of comics in the media landscape, but I have to admit that up to this year, I’ve been underwhelmed by the choice of winners. Or, more precisely, winner, singular: Phil and Kaja Foglio’s webcomic Girl Genius took the award three times straight. I don’t dislike the comic, but from what I’ve read, I’d be hard-pressed to identify anything in it that makes it worth a major award ahead of any number of series — Hellboy or Mouse Guard or Wednesday Comics or RASL or All-Star Superman or you name it. After their third win, though, the Foglios announced they would decline to accept a nomination for the next year, in the interest of helping to establish the validity of the award. So the 2012 Hugo went to another title: Digger, a webcomic by Ursula Vernon. I find it’s much more interesting.

Digger is a 759-page fantasy story (free online, or available in six printed volumes) about a talking tough-as-nails wombat named Digger-of-Unnecessarily-Convoluted-Tunnels, who gets lost and finds herself in a strange land filled with gods, humanoid hyenas, magic, oracular snails, and mysteries. Digger wants to get home, but it looks like some unknown force has manipulated events to bring her to the temple of Ganesh where she surfaces. Who and why? That’s the central mystery that unfolds through the tale. Digger makes friends, makes enemies, and takes several harrowing journeys before all is settled.

It’s a comedy, and an effective one, but with a number of serious themes running through it. Vernon seems to have something to say, and the talent to say it well. Her storytelling’s strong, and she handles mythology deftly — both the mythology of various cultures of our world and the mythology of the story she’s creating.

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Bad Habits

Bad Habits

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Little, BigI’ve been thinking a fair bit lately about how I read what I read, and how I enjoy it. Or, what’s in it that I enjoy. It seems to me that much of the pleasure in my reading comes about from bad habits. Which is to say, habits that I can’t help but think ought to be bad, but which nevertheless feel central to the act of reading. Maybe that feeling’s an illusion; maybe it’s the secret why bad habits become habits. At any rate, I thought I’d be self-indulgent this week and throw out what I’ve come up with, as I’d love to hear if any of it resonates with anyone else’s experience of reading.

My first bad habit is a tendency to make a preliminary judgement about a book after only a page or two. Maybe even less. That’s a judgement that can, and often does, change as I read on. But it still feels like I’m having a response — equal parts emotional, imaginative, and rational — based on incomplete information. Of course one has the right to a first impression, and of course it’s worth keeping an eye on whether the book you’re reading is repaying the time you put into it. But the reaction I have is something broader than that; it’s a kind of synecdochic sense of the book that derives from reading a small part of it. And it can be not just misleading, but horribly misguided.

A book like The Lord of the Rings grows as it goes on; it grew as it was written, and its shape as a story tends to reflect the way its characters go on journeys to unexpected places. A book like Little, Big (which I think is the best post-Tolkien novel of the fantastic I’ve read) keeps building thematically and narratively as it goes on, and makes that act of building into a structural principle of the novel: the fact that the story gets bigger the further in you go relates directly to one of the major themes of the book. So in both cases, you can’t really judge the book from the opening pages, and in both cases it may be a while before you really get a sense of what’s going on. In both cases that distance, that development, how the registers change over the course of the story, is key to the whole experience.

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DeMatteis and Muth’s Moonshadow

DeMatteis and Muth’s Moonshadow

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The Compleat MoonshadowThere was a time in the 1980s when it looked like Marvel and DC Comics might slowly evolve into something like mainstream book publishers: publishers who gave creators fair deals respecting copyright, and who lived off of the publication of new titles rather than the exploitation of intellectual property from decades previous. That hasn’t really happened, so far as I can see. Both companies dabbled in various kinds of creator ownership, but both appear mostly to have retreated to the relative safety of work-for-hire deals in recent years. Vertigo, a DC imprint featuring better deals for creators, seems to have become more strict in their contracts, and the recent departure of their founding editor doesn’t seem promising for the imprint’s future. Epic, Marvel’s attempt at a creator-owned line, largely faded away in the 1990s (though Marvel does still occasionally do some creator-owned work through their Icon imprint). Before it died, though, Epic published what might have been the best comic series in the 1980s to be printed with a Marvel Comics logo, up there with Walt Simonson’s run on Thor: J. M. DeMatteis and Jon J. Muth’s twelve-issue series Moonshadow. Later reprinted by Vertigo, with a slightly changed conclusion, Dematteis and Muth also created a sequel, Farewell, Moonshadow, now reprinted along with the original series in a paperback collection of the whole work, The Compleat Moonshadow. It’s a weird, heady mix of science fiction and fantasy, of fairy tale and scabrous parody. I want to talk a bit about it here.

Moonshadow is a curious coming-of-age story. A hippie named Sunflower is abducted from Earth by smirking balls of light called G’l Doses, who have the power of gods and utterly inscrutable motives; one of them impregnates her, and their child’s named Moonshadow by his mother. The book is his story, told by an aged Moonshadow recalling his youth. He remembers his growing up in the G’l Doses’ ‘zoo’ before his exile in company of his mother, his cat, and a faceless furry humanoid named Ira who’s all id: sex drive and scatology. They kick around the universe, and Moonshadow becomes orphan and outcast; alternately soldier and nanny, confidant of kings and outcast untouchable. He grows older, encounters sex and death and things of the spirit. It’s picaresque on a grand scale, the plot loose, characters fading in and out, recurring and being abandoned.

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Zenna Henderson’s The Anything Box

Zenna Henderson’s The Anything Box

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The Anything BoxAs so often happens, I was at a book fair the other week when, again as so often happens, I stumbled on a book by a writer I’d heard of at some point and about whose work I was vaguely curious. In this case, the writer was Zenna Henderson and the book was a collection of sf and fantasy short stories called The Anything Box. Which, upon reading, I found to be quite intriguing.

Henderson was born in 1917 and died in 1983. Most writing I’ve found about her online (including her homepage, her SF Encyclopedia entry, and this excellent appreciation by Bud Webster) mention some or all of the following things: that she was a Mormon, that she taught Japanese-Americans in an internment camp during World War Two, and that she was one of the few women writing sf in the 1950s under an obviously female first name. Her work has influenced Orson Scott Card, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Connie Willis.

Henderson seems to be best known for her stories about the People, refugee aliens trying to make lives for themselves on Earth. None of those pieces are in The Anything Box. These stories stand alone; most, but not all, focus on teachers, children, and domestic life. Their technique is mainly simple and direct: straight-ahead narrative prose, eschewing tricks of chronology or unreliable narrators. “Things” uses alien vocabulary extensively, and “Turn the Page” borders on a Bradbury-like expressionistic lyricism, but on the whole the book is good solid 50s commercial prose. Which does some unexpected things.

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Speaking in Tongues: Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire

Speaking in Tongues: Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire

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Voice of the FireTypically in these blog posts, I write about some work of fantasy, science fiction, or horror; of fantastika. I’m not sure whether the book I want to write about this time round can be described as any of those things. It’s not always, in fact, easy to distinguish what is fantastic and what is not. Does the distinction lie in what the writer has in mind, or in how the reader interprets the text? If a man who believes himself to be a magician writes about magic, is that fantasy or mimetic fiction? The author describes the world as the author understands it. The reader, reading, then sees the world as the author does: so writing is perhaps inherently magical, a possession. All words are magic words. All stories are true.

“All stories are true”: that’s a quote from Alan Moore, writer of classic comics like Watchmen, V For Vendetta, and From Hell. Writer also of a prose novel called Voice of the Fire. Except technically it’s not a novel, unless really it is. Moore’s Voice tells twelve tales set in his home city of Northumberland, stretching across six millennia. Each in a different era, each a different first-person narrator. Language and style shift with the passing years. But imagery and motifs bind the thing together. Repeated actions echo across centuries. Spirits, or things like spirits, are perceived; also ghosts of times past or to come. Moments of inspiration, fires in the heads, reveal distorted visions like shadows cast against the far side of a movie screen. Stories are told, all one, but sure interpretation eludes the consciousness of the Platonic audience, sitting in the dark and throwing cold popcorn between their jaws. One must resignedly surrender linearity, rationality, understanding, and submit to the flashes of language that rush on and double back, making a lattice of meaning too large to hold in consciousness.

If the book works. I go back and forth on whether the thing succeeds as well as it might. But even to wonder is perhaps a sign of success. It is a maddening work of language: change caught in language, language as agent of change, change worked on language over time.

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Phyllis Ann Karr’s At Amberleaf Fair

Phyllis Ann Karr’s At Amberleaf Fair

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At Amberleaf FairFor some time I’ve had the idea that there are unknown treasures yet to be mined in the deep veins of 80s fantasy. That among all the many titles published in those years are overlooked tales that are worth digging up. I don’t necessarily mean neglected masterpieces, though that’s possible. I mean little gems: books offering unexpected or idiosyncratic takes on the genre. Books that to some extent operate by conventions of their own. Books that suggest slightly different ways to do things. I want to write here about an example of what I mean: Phyllis Ann Karr’s At Amberleaf Fair.

Karr’s published poetry, essays, and short stories, as well as The Arthurian Companion, are a sort of encyclopedia of Arthuriana I find immensely useful. Her first novels were published in 1980, which saw both the romance My Lady Quixote and the fantasy Frostflower and Thorn. She’s published several other novels since, some under the name Irene Radford; At Amberleaf Fair came out in 1986. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy tells me that several of Karr’s short stories feature Amberleaf Fair’s main character, but that (as of the Encyclopedia’s publication) none have been collected.

Amberleaf Fair is named for the gathering at which its story takes place. It’s an autumn trade fair in the community of East’dek. A toycrafter, Torin, proposes marriage to Sharys, a magician and healer in training; but it looks like she’ll instead choose Torin’s friend, an adventurer named Valdart. Then Torin’s brother, an accomplished ‘magic-monger,’ is struck down with some sort of illness; Valdart’s ceremonial present to Sharys, effectively his marriage proposal, is stolen and the evidence points to Torin. Torin and his friend, the storycrafter Dilys, try to work out what has happened, along with a judge named Alrathe — but the story is less about the mystery and more the tale of the relationships of the various characters as the fair goes on, and their choices in life, and how they balance their desires and their duties to their family or society. It’s understated, quick, and entertaining.

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Dorian Hawkmoon: The History of the Runestaff and The Chronicles of Castle Brass

Dorian Hawkmoon: The History of the Runestaff and The Chronicles of Castle Brass

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The Jewel in the SkullA little while ago, Fearless Leader John O’Neill posted here about Tor reprints of Michael Moorcock’s first four Dorian Hawkmoon books being remaindered (you can still get them at Amazon). It had been years since I’d read that original Hawkmoon series, and I’d never read the second series of three books that followed, despite having them sitting on my bookshelves. So in the wake of John’s post, I thought it was well worth taking another look at Hawkmoon’s adventures. I vaguely remembered enjoying the first series; would it hold up?

That first series, The History of the Runestaff, dates from the late sixties. The Jewel in the Skull was published in 1967, The Mad God’s Amulet (originally published as Sorcerer’s Amulet) and The Sword of the Dawn both came out in 1968, and The Runestaff (originally The Secret of the Runestaff) was published in 1969. A few years later, Moorcock wrote another three books following the adventures of Dorian Hawkmoon, Duke of Köln, The Chronicles of Castle Brass; these books tied Hawkmoon more closely to Moorcock’s mythos of the multiverse and the Eternal Champion — concepts tying together all Moorcock’s fiction writing. 1973’s Count Brass and The Champion of Garathorm were followed in 1975 by The Quest For Tanelorn, presenting a possible ending for the overall saga of the Champion.

In a post at Tor.com, Moorcock recalled writing the first series:

My old method of writing fantasy novels was to go to bed for a few days, getting up only to take the kids to school and pick them up, while the book germinated, making a few notes, then I’d jump out of bed and start, writing around 15-20,000 words a day (I was a superfast typist) for three days, rarely for more than normal working hours — say 9 to 6 — get my friend Jim Cawthorn to read the manuscript for any errors of typing or spelling etc. then send it straight to the editor unread by me. I have still to read more than a few pages of the Hawkmoon books.

He’s also said that

It took me three days to write the Hawkmoon books. I used to say that I COULD do the job in two days, but it needed a third day for that extra polish… I used to spend a few days in bed thinking over the story, get up to write it, then go back to bed for another day or so. It was to do with best use of energy.

And:

I doubt if I would have written them had it not been for the fact that I’d burned out on doing comics for Fleetway and wanted fiction which was owned by me rather than owned outright by the publisher. Economically I could earn in three days what those books made me ($1000 a book) from Lancer so I gave myself three days to do them in.

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Ursula Pflug’s After the Fires

Ursula Pflug’s After the Fires

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After the FiresI don’t remember where I first came across Ursula Pflug’s name. I know I’d seen it mentioned in several places before I stumbled across a collection of her short stories, After the Fires, at a recent book sale. From what I’d heard, she was a Canadian writer of literary fantasy, which was enough for me to take a chance on the book. On the whole, I think that was a good call.

What I’ve since found out about Pflug, mostly from her website or her publisher’s: She’s been publishing short fiction since 1981, and has sold over fifty stories. After the Fire, published in 2008 by Tightrope Books, is her first collection. She has a novel out from Tesseract Books, 2001’s Green Music, and another, Thin Wednesday, now looking for a publisher. An editor and creative writing teacher, as well as an essayist and playwright, she was formerly on the board of SF Canada, the professional association of Canadian speculative fiction writers.

There are ten stories and a poem in After the Fires. I note that the first piece in the book, “Memory Lapse at the Waterfront,” was her first published story; it was made into a short film in 1986 which is viewable online. One of the other stories, “Python,” won a short fiction competition in 1997, but only saw print in 2003, in Jeff VanderMeer’s Album Zutique anthology of surrealist fiction — then was reprinted in Mapping the Beast, VanderMeer’s selection of the best stories from Album Zutique and the Leviathan anthologies.

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Arthur Machen and “The Great God Pan”

Arthur Machen and “The Great God Pan”

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The Great God PanArthur Machen first published a version of “The Great God Pan” in 1890, in a magazine called The Whirlwind; then revised and extended the tale for its republication as a book in 1894, when it was accompanied by a thematically-similar story called “The Inner Light.” It’s a fascinating work, creating a horrific mood mostly through suggestion and indirection. Nowadays, one looks at it and notes very Victorian attitudes toward women. At the time of its original publication, the story’s implied sexuality caused real scandal.

Machen was born in Wales in 1863 as Arthur Llwellyn Jones-Machen; the ‘Machen’ was his mother’s maiden name, which he later took for his pen name. His father was a clergyman, and while Machen’s lifelong interest in the occult and the weird seems to have been sparked by precocious reading of his father’s library, his family was too poor to send him to university. Following the publication of a long poem in 1881, Machen lived in London as a journalist and translator. He married in 1887, meeting occultist A.E. Waite through his wife. She died in 1897; in 1900 he joined Waite’s Order of the Golden Dawn. In 1901, he became an actor, and remarried in 1903. He continued to write, and in 1914 one of his short stories, “The Bowmen,” inspired the urban legend of the Angels of Mons. He died in 1947.

Machen’s literary reputation has seen several ups and downs, starting during his lifetime. The controversy surrounding “The Great God Pan” seems to have blackened his name, but there was a re-evaluation of his work in the 1920s. H.P. Lovecraft hailed him as a contemporary master of the supernatural in literature, and Lovecraft’s mythos was significantly influenced by Machen’s fiction, including “The Great God Pan.” Today, Machen is considered a major early fantasist, with “The Great God Pan” one of his masterworks. I want to look in some detail at the story, and consider some of what’s going on in it (that involves a complete plot summary; you can read the whole story online here first, or listen to a reading of it here.)

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Joyce Carol Oates’ Gothic Quintet, Part IV: My Heart Laid Bare

Joyce Carol Oates’ Gothic Quintet, Part IV: My Heart Laid Bare

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My Heart Laid BareFor the past three weeks, I’ve been looking at Joyce Carol Oates’s Gothic Quintet, in preparation for the publication of the fifth book in the sequence, The Accursed, set for next March. I started off with 1980’s Bellefleur, which I thought was brilliant. Then I looked at 1982’s A Bloodsmoor Romance, which I found interesting, but not up to the first book’s level, perhaps due to my unfamiliarity with the romance genre. Last week, I considered Mysteries of Winterthurn, from 1984, which impressed me quite a bit. Now, this week, I look at 1998’s My Heart Laid Bare.

It may be worth noting that while My Heart Laid Bare was published in 1998, it was written in 1984. Similarly, The Accursed, under its original title The Crosswicks Horror, was first completed in 1981. Both books were revised in the years since, and I wonder if that might help account for the fact that My Heart Laid Bare has a rather different feel than the other ‘Gothic’ books. Nothing evidently supernatural happens in it. It’s only nominally Gothic in atmosphere, and the narration’s relatively straightforward — it’s told in omniscient third-person, unlike Bloodsmoor or Winterthurn, and is stylistically more restrained than Bellefleur (which admittedly is not saying much). Still, it’s a wild, wide-ranging look at American life in the early part of the twentieth century, incorporating several self-consciously melodramatic touches. It fits in with its predecessors nicely, and overall serves to round off Oates’s Gothic sequence as we’ve had it so far.

The book follows grizzled con-man Abraham Licht and his sons and daughters, from 1909 through to the Great Depression. A prologue suggests that they’re the descendants of a scheming eighteenth-century servingwoman who impersonated her mistress, was caught and sent to America; at any event, the novel shows us the Lichts consistently changing identities, some of which are false and some of which become true. Besides Abraham, we have his three biological sons, his older boys Thurston and Harwood and his younger Darian; his two daughters, Millie and Esther; and his black adopted son, Elisha. Over the course of the book, the children leave and betray and (occasionally) return to Abraham, as Abraham himself plots for money, for power, and, perhaps most importantly to him, for another marriage.

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