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Author: Steve Case

The Opportunity for Awe: An Interview with Scott Andrews

The Opportunity for Awe: An Interview with Scott Andrews

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Scott H Andrews Beneath Ceaseless Skies-smallBeneath Ceaseless Skies is a five-time Hugo and seven-time World Fantasy Award-finalist online magazine of literary adventure fantasy. In nine years, BCS has published over 475 stories and 200 audio podcasts by authors such as Saladin Ahmed, Richard Parks, Marie Brennan, Yoon Ha Lee, Aliette de Bodard, Bradley P. Beaulieu, Seth Dickinson, and more.  Find their ebooks and Best of BCS anthologies on Amazon and WeightlessBooks.com, their podcasts on Google Play and iTunes, and stories, artwork, new issues, and more at beneath-ceaseless-skies.com.

For nearly a decade now, BCS has been showcasing the work of both new and established writers in the realms of fantasy with a literary bent. My first professional sale was to BCS, and the magazine has published several of my stories since then, including my most recent, “Deathspeaker,” in the August 3rd issue. Recently I approached BCS editor Scott Andrews with some questions about “literary adventure fantasy” and its appeal to readers of sword & sorcery.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies publishes “literary adventure fantasy.” It’s pretty clear what those first two words mean separately, but can you explain the juxtaposition? What does adventure fantasy lack when it’s not literary (or gain when it is)? What does literary fantasy miss when it lacks adventure?

“Literary adventure fantasy” is my tagline for literary fantasy set in other worlds. The literary element that’s for me the most enjoyable and rewarding is a focus on character. A lot of secondary-world fantasy feels to me focused on the setting or the plot, but I like it on the characters, for example using narrative approaches like close points-of-view or conflicts that are internal in addition to external.

What adventure fantasy gains for me when it’s literary like that is the human highs and lows, the emotional exhilaration and gut-punch, that great literary fiction has. I love the line from Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech that the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. That may sound like highbrow English-class stuff, but there’s an author in SF/F/H today who I’ve heard reference that Faulkner quote:  George R. R. Martin. His fantasy is the most popular in the world, and he’s constantly praised for his characters and how realistic and emotive they feel. His work absolutely has those human highs and lows, those profound comments on what it feels like to be a parent or a sibling or a hero or a failure or a survivor. That’s character-centered focus I love to read.

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The Hilarity of the Strange: The Man Underneath: The Collected Short Fiction of R. A. Lafferty, Volume 3

The Hilarity of the Strange: The Man Underneath: The Collected Short Fiction of R. A. Lafferty, Volume 3

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The Man Underneath The Collected Short Fiction of R. A. Lafferty Volume 3-smallThe Man Underneath: The Collected Short Fiction, Volume Three
Centipede Press (368 pages, $100 deluxe hardcover, April 5, 2016)

He laid down a road paved with bright, deadpan madness for us to walk, mouths agape and eyes wide with wonder and trepidation.
– from the introduction by Bud Webster

Let’s talk about R. A. Lafferty. You may have heard of him before: a wild, raggedy old man from Tulsa, Oklahoma, whose work showed up in magazines and the pulps from the sixties to the eighties, who ranged through conventions for a while (according to legends always polite and often drunk), and whose writings rode the New Wave through its crest and recession.

Lafferty had a style that was utterly unique and impossible to imitate. (People have tried.) His short stories were difficult to categorize, and his novels were nearly impossible to read. Nowadays his work is largely out of print and hard to find. His short fiction is scattered across a hundred shores of old magazines, obscure chap-books, and out of print collections. A few of the more well-known ones, like “Narrow Valley,” turn up now and again in anthologies, but the majority are lost, and so one of the strangest, strongest, most distinctive voices from speculative American fiction comes through, if at all, garbled and faint and haunting.

All of this has changed with the publication by Centipede Press of the Collected Short Fiction of R. A. Lafferty, an ongoing series of gorgeous small press books of which the third volume is out and the fourth is on the way. When I say gorgeous, I mean well-designed hardcovers with cloth ribbon and a price point for serious collectors or for library purchase. (Making friends with librarians is my strategy for getting ahold of books like these.) But each volume succeeds in capturing and displaying the varied short stories of Lafferty, splaying them out on the page like a bizarre and beautiful Lepidoptera collection. Lafferty is most alive in his stories, and the random structure of each collection, which are not organized by chronological or any other logical arrangement, means you can step into a good representation of his work with any volume.

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We All Need to Read More Le Guin: The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin

We All Need to Read More Le Guin: The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin

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The Language of the Night Ursula LeGuin-small

The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
Ursula Le Guin, edited and with introductions by Susan Wood
Perigee Books (270 page, $4.95 in trade paperback, April 1979)
Cover by Mike Mariano

I need to read more Le Guin. It’s a deficiency I freely acknowledge and feel only slightly better about by adding that we all need to read more Le Guin. I know her through her short stories and the Earthsea books (which I will stack up next to the Narnia books any day), but I still have not read The Left Hand of Darkness or her other important science fiction works. I don’t have much of an excuse except time and the fact that I want to be what Le Guin calls a real reader. I want to be someone who truly digests, or rather, responds to what has been read; not, as I spent a good portion of my reading life, someone who simply goes from one book to the next, a consumer of literature, but still only a consumer regardless of the quality of what was consumed. So I read a book like Le Guin’s book of essays slowly, and I try to respond, synthesize, and recollect what she says not only about reading and writing science fiction and fantasy but also about human nature.

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There’s Something Magic About a House: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

There’s Something Magic About a House: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

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Howl's Moving Castle-big Howl's Moving Castle Greenwillow-smaller Howl's Moving Castle Eos-smaller

There is something magic about a house, or there should be. There are hints of this in James Stoddard’s The High House, in which the house is a universe unto itself, or in the Professor’s home in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which the house is a gateway to universes. We realize in some way that every house holds secrets, that every house is in some sense a castle, and that the portals of every house open either into a wider world without or an inner world within.

This ineffable something about houses motivates Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, which despite the title isn’t really about a castle but rather a house and the family that gets collected inside it. My kids and I are big fans of Studio Ghibli, so the 2004 animated film adaptation by Hayao Miyazaki was our first exposure to the work. Before seeing the film, I had not heard of the late British fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones. Howl’s Moving Castle remains the only work by her I’ve read, though she wrote at least two other novels in which these characters also appear.

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Something Terrifying and Wonderful: In Calabria, by Peter S. Beagle

Something Terrifying and Wonderful: In Calabria, by Peter S. Beagle

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In Calabria Peter Beagle-smallPeter S. Beagle has, by dint of his enduring classic The Last Unicorn, become the patron saint of these creatures among fantasy authors. But more than this, Beagle has become to fantasy writing a sort of patron saint of the longing that unicorns (when exhumed from the candied, polychromatic encrustations of the popular imagination) have come to embody. Beagle has resurrected the unicorn as a symbol to be reverenced, whether in his early novel or, as I have argued recently in another review, in the person of Lioness in his recent Summerlong. Unicorns represent the quiet desperation for a touch of otherworldliness, of the desire for something beyond or above or even just beside to press up against our daily lives. It is this longing for visitation that runs through his latest work, the short book In Calabria, and plays out on the confines of a rustic farm and in the life of a single isolated farmer.

Claudio Bianchi is an old man. He lives alone on a hillside farm in Calabria, the region of Italy forming the mountainous toes of the country’s famous boot outline. Calabria is scenic and slow, off the beaten path. Beagle plays into the timelessness of the place. His protagonist is timeless and isolated as well: solitary, cranky, and proud of the tiny, half-ruined farm he cultivates in the same manner his ancestors did a hundred years before. Beagle, who has had his share of trouble lately and perhaps longs for the sort of escape Bianchi’s life represents, sets a stage of idyllic isolation in rustic Mediterranean splendor. “The universe and Claudio Bianchi had agreed long ago to leave one another alone,” we are told early on in the story. “And if he had any complaints, he made sure that neither the universe nor he himself ever knew of them.”

It is not, however, this isolation and timelessness alone that draws a unicorn to Bianchi’s farm to give birth. Rather, Beagle leads the reader to understand it is Bianchi’s crusty humility and his compassion for and amiable companionship with the animals that share his land. It may also be because Bianchi is a poet. His reputation as such among his neighbors is something of a puzzle, as he never shares his poems or publishes them. He simply takes pleasure in fitting words together, in working them the way he works the soil, and leaves them hidden in the drawers of his desk. For perhaps all these reasons, a unicorn appears in Calabria and chooses a hollow in view of Bianchi’s back window to give birth to her young. “I am past visitations,” Bianchi asks the pregnant unicorn when it first arrives. “What do you want with me?”

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