Nancy Kress at Hugo House

I've just discovered that scifi author Nancy Kress will be teaching a short fiction class at Seattle's incredible literary center, the Richard Hugo House. It starts on March 19, right around the corner.

It's tempting. One of the first recommendations we received upon moving to Seattle was to a.) find Hugo House, and b.) take a class with Nancy Kress. But I'm not the fiction writer in the family; maybe I can talk the hubby into going. Vicarious Nancy Kress is better than no Nancy Kress at all.

I was happy to find one of her stories-- "The Common Good" -- in a recent issue of Asimov's, and I also hear that she contributed a story to the Gene Wolfe tribute anthology, Shadows of the New Sun. For some unfathomable reason, I haven't read it yet.

Here's an excerpt from a recent interview with Kress prior to her appearance at the 2013 ICON 38 in Iowa. (The interviewer is Alvaro Zinos-Amaro for Locus. The JS is Jack Skillingstead. The three are discussing their dream panel.)

[JS] If she has Maugham, I’d like Guy de Maupassant.

[NK] You can have him!

[JS] He was a great short story writer. And unlike your guy, he actually wrote something that could be classified if not as SF then at least horror, “The Horla”. A very famous story, in fact.

[NK] I thought we said we didn’t have to stick to sf or fantasy or horror writers.

[JS] We don’t have to, but I was just trying to make my dream panel interesting for the con audience.

[NK] Then I want Shakespeare on my panel!

[AZA] I’m surprised you didn’t pick him already. Or Jesus, or Buddha, or, say, Galileo.

[JS] Okay, I’ll have God on my panel.

[AZA] But you already have Theodore Sturgeon.

Me, I'd take Sturgeon any day.

Gene Wolfe

Did you know that Gene Wolfe was an industrial engineer who helped design the machine that makes Pringles potato chips? He's also one of my favorite authors, even though I am not particularly fond of potato chips.

I've read quite a bit of his work-- short fiction, long fiction, series, etc., even some poetry-- but not all of it. At the recommendation of a friend, I'm currently reading Peace. It's reminding me a bit of the Wizard Knight series, maybe, at least in its frame. Gene Wolfe likes using the frame tale as a device, and he's very good at it.

[*Edit: Oh wow...I finished Peace last night and immediately started rereading it. What a book. It wasn't at all what I thought it was going to be; in fact, I'm not sure what it is at all, aside from very good and very very unsettling.]

Here are a few images I've found.

These three are all by Bruce Pennington (top to bottom: Citidel of the Autarch, Shadow of the Torturer, and Claw of the Conciliator.) I found them in an article on Black Gate, an excellent magazine and general speculative fiction/art website.

This is Richard Bober's 1994 cover for the Tor release of Calde of the Long Sun.

Gene Wolfe also writes a bit of poetry, one of which won a Rhysling Award in 1978. It's called "A Computer Iterates the Greater Trumps" and can be found in Alchemy of Stars, an anthology of Rhysling winners. Here's part of it....

Trump (20)
The L6a6s6t Judgement, and my creed betrays,
Unlearnt foreknowledge of these coming days.
The angels come to smite the sea and land,
The anti-Christ for us-- and slays.
Trump (19)
The Sun the dancing children love,
Casts down this radiance from above.
Fusion, fission, no remission;
So small a house, so large a stove....

Now this is interesting: Chaosium, Inc. has released an rpg called The Chronicles of Future Earth, written by Sarah Newton and based largely on Wolfe's Urth. I have no idea what to say about the rpg itself-- I've never played it-- but it has some interesting maps. Here's another article at Akratic Wizardry and a review. 

This is my favorite cover image for Shadow of the Torturer. It was done by Don Maitz for the original Simon & Schuster edition of 1980. 

Wiki gods say, "...The Shadow of the Torturer won the annual World Fantasy Award and British Science Fiction Association Award as the year's best novel. Among other annual awards for fantasy or science fiction novels, it placed second for the Locus (fantasy), third for the Campbell Memorial (SF), and was a finalist for the Nebula...."

Wolfe's fiction has received quite a lot of critical attention, from within the genre world and from the literary world at large. In one particularly good review, "Mapping a Masterwork" by Peter Wright at Ultan's Library, The Book of the New Sun is compared to James Joyce's Ulysses:

It could be argued that The Book of the New Sun is science fiction’s Ulysses. Like James Joyce, Wolfe has ‘put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep professors busy for centuries over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.’ 13 However, to do so would be to deny Wolfe’s determination to wed the reading process with his particular conception of existence through his games playing. From his other fiction, it apparent that Wolfe perceives the world as an ambiguous round of perceptions and misperceptions in which the individual struggles, and ultimately fails, to apprehend the precise nature of existence.

 The three images above of from Japanese editions; artwork is by Takeshi Obata.

Artist Richard Vass did this cover for the Hungarian Delta Vision edition.

And Now, Space Poems

It's been a fairly poetic week around here and around the studio, and a fairly speculative one as well.

According to the Wiki gods, speculative poetry is poetry that "focuses on fantastic, science fictional, or mythological themes." Although that seems to cover quite a lot of territory, speculative poetry is usually considered a niche endeavor. 

The upside is that it makes it easier to find.

There's an association dedicated to the science fictional type of speculative poetry, and they publish a quarterly journal. Here's the current issue of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. 

Scifi poetry represents a dual challenge: it should stand as good poetry in its own right, even next to non-genre work, while also participating in the traditional subject matter of scifi. This excerpt is a good example; it's taken from David Barber's poem "Waving the Starships Goodbye" from the Autumn 2013 issue (Volume 36.)

"One day, the children will want to leave, tired
of our insistence on the weight of things,
like history, wanting space for its own sake...
....They are frozen in time
and it is us the centuries have aged so much.
Or vast ships, mountains really, wormed all through
by the slow generations born to those
who could choose, as emigrants do, their lives.
Everything is fine, except arriving.
What would such small strange folk do with planets?...."

"Cosmic Hive" by Nikalay Gutsu

And this is an excerpt from "The Other Night (Comet Kohoutek)" from Diane Ackerman's notable 1976 collection The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral:

"Last night, while
cabbage stuffed with
brown sugar, meat and
raisins was baking in the
oven, and my potted holly,
dying leafmeal from red-spider,
basked in its antidote malathion,
I stepped outside to watch Kohoutek
passing its dromedary core through the
eye of a galaxy. But only found a white
blur cat-napping under Venus: gauzy, dis-
solute, and bobtailed as a Manx. 

Pent-up in that endless coliseum of stars,
the moon was fuller than any Protestant
had a right to be. And I said: Moon,
if you’ve got any pull up there, bring me
a sun-grazing comet, its long hair swept
back by the solar wind, in its mouth a dollop
of primordial sputum. A dozing iceberg,
in whose coma ur-elements collide. Bring me
a mojo that’s both relict and reliquary.
Give me a thrill from that petrified seed...."

Another place to find good science fiction and fantasy verse is Strange Horizons, the weekly online spec fiction magazine.




And of course there's often poetry in Asimov's, too, on most newsstands.