Reviews / Interviews
Reviews of favorite Books, Movies, TV Shows, and Conventions
and Interviews with Local Authors.
KAREN TRAVISS: "I DON'T DO FLUFFY."
"City of Pearl" and Other Explorations
Interview by Laurie J. Anderson
August 2004
City of Pearl, a first novel by British writer Karen Traviss, was published by the Eos imprint in March 2004. It is a fast-paced military-oriented adventure reminiscent of the work of Vernor Vinge and Robert Heinlein. In it, a feisty female Environmental Hazard Enforcement officer named Shan Frankland, on a mission to save a gene bank, gets caught up in a conflict between four races (three alien, one human) over a planet that contains the genetic equivalent of the Fountain of Youth. With its strong environmental theme and exotic alien life that includes a race of peaceful, sentient squids (the bezeri), planet guardians (the wess'har), greedy spider invaders (the isenj), and a symbiote called "c'naatat", no wonder reviewers like Locus and BookPage call City of Pearl "a satisfyingly complex tale" and Karen Traviss "a writer to watch."
ASFS: What is your background education or training in ecological science?
Karen Traviss: None whatsoever. I have a general interest in all science and technology and I read science publications voraciously. I also collect scientist/engineer chums, who have been unstintingly generous with their time and have been wonderful about checking copy. I'm just a journalist, and if I have a specialty it's defense, politics and the emergency services. As we say over here, I don't do it, but I know a man who can...
ASFS: How much of Shan Frankland's attitudes reflect your own? Do you share her sympathy for marines and unflattering view of scientists?
Traviss: None of my characters are a vessel for my own views. I spent too long in public relations to want to write more propaganda; all I do is switch the light on in a dark room and say to the reader, "Look at this. Look what's going on. Make up your own mind." That's a journalistic technique. When I first started writing SF in 1998, I was worried that I would never find my own "voice", because as a journalist you can basically do any style, pastiche anything, fit in with any publication. But I found that my real voice was reportage. I write fiction documentaries with a view into the character's brain.
If you took any of the characters in CoP, I would agree with something in all of them and also disagree with them. I build the characters from the ground up, from family background to career. I know a lot of authors feel more comfortable with characters and ideas they sympathize with, but for me the challenge is to create characters who I don't necessarily agree with and make them credible. An academic in the UK SF field, Andrew Butler, neatly calls this "ventriloquising". I think that as a writer you have to be able to get inside a character who makes you feel uncomfortable and show why their actions make sense in their world view. If you don't go to places that scare and disturb you, you don't push yourself far enough as a writer. If I can make a bent copper and a war criminal into characters that readers like, then I've pushed the envelope a little further.
I wanted to explore some of the less flattering aspects of scientists because I hear some horror stories and, like any journalist, I like to examine the other side of the coin.
One thing I do agree with Frankland about is her respect for the Royal Marines. I was a bit baffled to see reviews that said the RMs weren't "mindless grunts", making a favourable point that they were portrayed as sensible and professional. In the UK, nobody would ever think of a Royal Marine as a grunt. They're elite troops. I also wanted to achieve a more realistic portrayal of fighting men and women - the ones that I've known and worked with - than the usual fiction stereotypes I see all too often. They're actually polite, self-controlled and intelligent. Not all saints, of course, but...
ASFS: How does the c'naatat occur "naturally"? Is it part of the bezeri marine ecosystem?
Traviss: Ah, the answer is a key spoiler for later in the series, I'm afraid...but it is natural, a microscopic life form that lives in colonies and can lay dormant outside of hosts. It's terrestrial, not aquatic.
ASFS: Why does Aras, the wess'har guardian of the planet shared by wess'har, bezeri and humans, tell the bezeri "whatever threatens you, threatens us." If wess'har technology is so superior, why do they need to protect the bezeri?
Traviss: It's an expression of solidarity. The bezeri are a fragile species and they have no way of repelling a land-living invader like the isenj. The wess'har are always ones to pitch in and help when asked - as Siyyas Bur recounts in that epigram - and they have the technology, so they make Bezer'ej a no-go zone. The concept of responding to a call for help is a significant part of the plot in the third book, The World Before, which I'm finishing at the moment. I'd dump a really big spoiler here if I revealed why the wess'har utilise technology the way they do.
ASFS: If all species are equal, how do the wess'har feel about wanton destruction of bacteria?
Traviss: You'll have to read Crossing The Line when it comes out in October - that very topic is debated! Wess'har have, as Shan Frankland points out in CTL, a seductive logic.
ASFS: Has the anti-corporate message in the novel earned you any negative feedback in other areas of your professional life?
Traviss: No, not at all, and it's not a message. As Sam Goldwyn said, if you want to send a message, call Western Union. This is entertainment. Oddly, it's made me lots of left-wing and liberal friends, which is a novelty for me. I was simply describing corporate behaviour. And everyone expects a journalist to be disrespectful of large corporations, don't they? I think they're big enough to ride the punches.
ASFS: Can you give us a rough idea of what the sequel to City of Pearl, "Crossing the Line" will cover? Will it wrap up all questions, or do you plan a trilogy (or ongoing series)? Will the romance between Shan and Aras heat up? Is it to be published now in late October?
Traviss: "Crossing The Line" deals with the next year in the timeline, when the Earth ship Actaeon reaches the isenj homeworld and the tension between the wess'har and the humans builds up and it all turns rather nasty. I got some shocked reactions from those who've already read it. No, it won't wrap up all the questions, because this is a trilogy, and the books are complete stories in themselves. And yes, I have more wess'har universe stories on the drawing board. (I have standalone titles and non-wess'har books planned too.) The romance between Shan and Aras isn't actually a romance, but you'll see what I mean by that in "Crossing The Line". But you know me by now. I don't do fluffy and I don't give my characters an easy time.
ASFS: Was your story "The Man Who Did Nothing", in the 2004 Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (just out at the time of this interview) -- intended as a wake-up call to the reader, or was it just your reaction to something?
Traviss: I'll have to be careful what I say here. TMWDN is the only story I have ever written based explicitly on real events. It was sparked by a comment from one of my staff when we were dealing with what I can only refer to as a very difficult public order situation, and she came out with a stunning line about the Antichrist. It fired me up (I always get
ideas in cartoon light-bulb fashion) and it fitted painfully well with another real-life incident that was pretty unpleasant both for me and for some colleagues. If you're asking if I agree with the basic premise that it's as evil to sit on your backside and do nothing about a
situation as it is to do something bad in the first place, then yes, I do think that. I often don't agree with the central idea of my protags but in this case I do.
ASFS: What was it like writing a Star Wars novel? How did you get the assignment?
Traviss: I was asked to write "Republic Commando: Hard Contact" after Lucasfilm and Del Rey read "City of Pearl" a while back. I never even thought about writing media tie-ins so it was a bolt from the blue, and it was enormous fun all round. Del Rey, Lucasfilm and LucasArts (the game people) were fantastic to work with and gave me free rein. Of course,
after nearly 30 years of Star Wars and 300-odd books, there's an awfully big canon to learn and fans will spot the smallest thing you get wrong, so I had a terrific bloke from Lucas on call to deal with continuity issues; I knew nothing about SW before I started but by the end of it I could bore for Britain on the subject. From a technical point of view, it's hard because you can't fall back on all those comforting analogies you're used to, like having "a surface like orange peel", because there aren't any oranges in Star Wars. So you're pushed to expand your writing skill. There's also the challenge that this is an adult book that also has to be suitable for young readers, so there's a real balancing act between adult themes and the way they're expressed. Yeah, I had the time of my life - a real kick up the backside for my writing and the chance to work with some lovely people. Oh, and a nice cheque.
I reviewed the original Star Wars movie in my early days as a journalist but I never dreamed then that years later I'd end up writing for Lucas. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I'm the only UK writer to do a SW book (as far as I know) so I feel it's something of a privilege.
ASFS: What do you plan on doing in Boston, outside of attending WorldCon?
Traviss: Well, I have sixteen appearances scheduled to date so my legendary capacity for extreme shopping is going to be challenged. But I'm an Olympic-class shopper so I'll hang in there and serious money will be spent, believe me. I'm going to hit Levengers (I'm a pen collector) if I have to crawl there on bleeding stumps.
I'm new to Worldcons - this is only my second - because my career has all happened a bit fast. I only had my first short story published in summer 2002 (Asimov's). This is my first year as a novelist and I have three titles out in one year. I'm loving every second of this and I love cons. I'm a full-time novelist now and I still can't believe people pay you for having so much fun.
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For more information, see
Karen Traviss website: http://www.karentraviss.com
City of Pearl - the Harper Collins website: http://www.harpercollins.com/catalog/book_xml.asp?isbn=0060541695
ANDY DUNCAN DISCUSSES “THE CHIEF DESIGNER” AND A FEW OTHER THINGS
by L. J. Anderson (September 2002 ASFS newsletter)
Andy Duncan's novella “The Chief Designer” is a fictional overview of the Russian space program as told through the story of its very real founder, the scientist Sergei Korolev, and the people he affected.
Beyond that, it casts light on a shadowy program once held in awe by both Russians and Americans. Such respect is extremely hard-earned, one comes to realize, when Alabama author Duncan details the actual physical depths from which his protagonist climbs. From the literal darkness of Stalin's mines, through the bleak spiritual vacuum of the Soviet system, over lives tragically sacrificed in attempts at ascension, Korolev unwaveringly sets his sights on the stars. It is a dream which offers the Russian people -- as religion had in the past -- the only way out of earthly constraints. Along the way Duncan provides, in quiet moments, glimpses of the resilience of the human spirit, sans trumpets, sans hyperbole. If you are looking for standard heroic fantasy, this isn't it. If you're curious about humanity's drive to the heavens, take a peek.
“The Chief Designer” won the 2001 Theodore Sturgeon Award and was also one of this year's Hugo award finalists in the novella category.
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1. Why this subject (the Russian space program)? What triggered this story?
DUNCAN: Years ago, in the now-defunct science magazine Omni, I read an article by James Oberg about NASA's veteran top engineer, whose name I now forget. In a single line of the article, Oberg mentioned that this guy was the closest American equivalent to the shadowy Soviet rocket engineer Korolev, known in his lifetime only as "the Chief Designer." I got a chill and thought, wow, I need to find out more about that Korolev guy! My second thought was, if I write a story about him, that's the title -- "The Chief Designer." So that was the trigger, but the larger question of why I wound up pursuing this idea for years until the story was done, while so many other ideas fell by the wayside, is impossible for me to answer. You can't question why the story ideas come; you're just glad they come at all.
2. Did the mix of science and religion occur to you from the start, or did it work its way in?
DUNCAN: From the start. When I first read that phrase "the Chief Designer," I thought of the old image of the "divine clockmaker," the Newtonian deity who set the universe in motion and then walked away. The whole Soviet government was run like a secretive cult, really, and so the space program was like the most secret inner cult of all.
3. At times Korolev seems to be God, at other times he comes across as Moses. Did you specifically intend one of these, or something else?
DUNCAN: Certainly I thought of the God associations, but I hadn't thought of Moses. I think you're right, though -- Moses and all those other patriarchs around whom so many of the world's religions are built.
4. What kind of research did you do for this story? Did you dig up actual anecdotes (like the Dolgov death and the Leonov airlock problem)?
DUNCAN: I read Oberg's book “Red Star in Orbit”, and I read chunks of the published diary of one of the cosmonauts, and I read a lot of articles in various magazines and reference books, and I photocopied all the pertinent photographs and charts and designs I could find, because my imagination is stimulated by visuals. Whenever I ran across a fact or an anecdote that suggested a dramatic scene, I ran with it, though I started embroidering and "improving" the fact the moment I started writing the fiction. The two scenes you mention were written that way.
5. The Novikov reentry section is great! Was it based on fact and how difficult or easy was it to write?
DUNCAN: Thank you. I wrote that section seven years ago, so it's hard to remember, but I don't think it gave me any particular trouble. It was one of the last scenes I wrote, so I knew the characters pretty well by then. It's based on fact, yes, in that one of the cosmonauts did have a horribly prolonged, fatal re-entry, and that one of the top Soviet officials did speak to him at the end, but 90 percent of that scene -- like 90 percent of all the scenes -- is made up. You steal whatever facts you think are cool and then run with them.
6. Did cosmonauts actually take tokens from Korolev into space for good luck? Are they really as superstitious as you portray them?
DUNCAN: I made that up, but for all I know they may have done something like that. I think every human being is superstitious to some extent, and folks in high-risk or high-stress professions -- cosmonauts, sailors, actors -- are more so than most.
7. Do Russians today revere Korolev, or is he still little-known? If he is known, on what level? What does he mean to them?
DUNCAN: Those are excellent questions, and I don't know the answers. If I ever get the chance to visit Russia, I'll ask around.
8. Was Korolev's assistant, Evgeny Aksyonov, a real person, or an amalgam of real people?
DUNCAN: Dear Evgeny is a made-up character, although I hope he seems real by story's end. I needed a viewpoint character with whom the reader could identify, and one who could live into the present day. Evgeny is like Pug Henry in Herman Wouk's “The Winds of War” -- he just happens to be at the right place whenever history is happening!
9. Any feedback on this story from Russians? If so, what have they said? Did any aspect offend them?
DUNCAN: I got one e-mail from a former Russian rocket engineer -- I wish I could remember his name, as I can't now find the letter -- who said he loved the story and that I got it exactly right! By which he meant, of course, not the historical facts but the mood, the atmosphere, the emotions. I was very pleased by that.
10. What are you currently reading?
DUNCAN: “Farewell, My Lovely” by Raymond Chandler.
11. What is the status of your novel ("Redemption Songs") and screenplay ("Liza")?
DUNCAN: They're in that happy, stress-free Utopia of projects that are well begun but not yet finished, with no deadline in sight!
12. How did your theatrical adaptation of Manley Wade Wellman turn out? What was the audience response? Any chance it will play in the Atlanta area?
DUNCAN: It's a short one-act, perhaps 25 minutes long, and has been performed exactly once, as a Saturday-night staged reading at the first TriNocCon in Durham, N.C., in October 2000. It went very well, and the audience loved it, thanks entirely to Wellman and to a visionary staging by a brilliant director, Jeanne Beckwith, who made my adaptation "play" much better than I had. As for it playing in the Atlanta area, see #13, below.
13. When do you next plan to be in the Atlanta area?
DUNCAN: I guess when the Atlanta Science Fiction Society next invites me! Lewis and Jayne gave me an ASFS T-shirt at Deepsouthcon. It's snazzy, and I wear it with pride. Thank you for your interest. I'm pleased people like "The Chief Designer." I like it, myself. -- Andy
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Andy Duncan's website is at http://www.angelfire.com/al/andyduncan
© 2002 Laurie J. Anderson (anderson_lj@Hotmail.com).
If you quote from any of this, please credit the source and let me know where it's used! Thanks!
ANARCHY, SURREALISM, DEAD AUTHORS, & AMBERGRIS ON THE ROAD, AUTUMN 2002 (Or, "I could get used to this...")
A review of the New Orleans Book Fair by Jeff VanderMeer © 2002
PART I: NEW ORLEANS
- Getting There
We limped into New Orleans the afternoon of October 25th, after the monotonous six-hour car ride from Tallahassee, Florida. There were four of us: me, Ann, Erin (Ann's daughter), and Erin's friend Evan. Erin at 17 and Evan at 19 are still in the throes of late adolescence, as likely to scowl or grimace as to smile, still uneasy in their own skins.
Erin spent the trip "Gothed out" in preparation for the first event: a reading sponsored by Fiction Collective 2 at the Mythique cafe. A highlight of our brief stop at a Mississippi Cracker Barrel Restaurant was the slack jaws and odd looks Erin got from the other customers. Apparently, in the Deep South, even in 2002, a Goth girl shall suffer other people's curiosity. Evan, son of gypsies, stick-thin, heir to Baudelaire and Rimbaud, contrasted with Erin by showing no regard for his appearance, from disheveled hair to the torn blue shirt (trophy of a prior Erin boyfriend, heirloom now) worn over a t-shirt, to the dirty nails and swatches of duct tape applied wherever least seemly. (Later, at the hotel, much to my relief, I would discover that it took Evan a good 30 minutes to affect that effortless look, with much scrubbing, arranging of hair for random placement upon the brow, and primping.)
Evan, as tortured Romantic poet, was much taken with scrunching up insect-like and triumphantly scribbling tortured Romantic notes in his tortured Romantic notebook. He projected a note of scorn, of disdain, that frankly unnerved me. I felt as if I was looking at a carbon copy of myself at that age. How had I gotten so old? Throughout the weekend, as an added layer of communication, Ann and I tried to jolly Evan out of his terminal mood, shooting the paper from our straws at him in restaurants and acting silly whenever possible, all of which he bore stoically. Although he tried to staunch the flow of a smile over his thin lips, once or twice he failed miserably to contain the laughter.
- The Mythique
Outside, we met up with Lance and Andi Olsen. Lance would be reading from his new novel, Girl Imagined by Chance, along with Michael Martone, author of The Blue Guide to Indiana, C.W. Cannon, R(alph). M. Berry, the head of FC2, and then a smattering of non-FC2 authors - namely myself, identified as representing the Fantastic Metropolis web site, and Rich Mackin, from Gorsky Press. Lance and I had only ever met once before - at a ReaderCon in the mid 1990s. Since then, we had served as judges for the Philip K. Dick Award together - almost a full year of intense discussion about various and sundry SF novels. We used to joke that we were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid from the last scene of the movie of the same name, because our opinions often differed from the other judges.
The Mythique itself was my ideal of the perfect reading environment. Located above a bar, it was swathed in soft light, the deep purples and blues and reds, the unique furniture, the Gothic artwork and masks on the walls, all creating an atmosphere in which surreal or experimental work could be read to best effect. Brenda had thoughtfully placed a copy of City of Saints in hardcover on the table in the back. Amongst the Fiction Collective 2 books, paperbacks for the most part, City looked like the monolith from 2001: dark, grim, shiny, unknowable. Seeing it in that context made me laugh: it seemed about to devour the other books on the table. It seemed about ready to walk off the table and disappear into the New Orleans night.
Before the reading began, Ann and I had the pleasure of meeting one of the great undiscovered painters in this country: Myrtle Vondamitz III. Her work hung on the walls of the Mythique, much to our delight. As one of the organizers of the book fair, Myrtle had been in touch via email and helped arrange for my article/interview(s) on books as artifact to be included in the book fair program guide. When Ann and I saw some of her paintings on a Web site, we'd fallen in love with her work. Using a kind of Gothic primitivism in which her grotesque figures were both part of the surrounding landscape and apart from it, Myrtle struck a deep chord in us. Imagine a combination of Chagall and Bosch and you're half-way there. (Before the fair, I'd forwarded some of her work to Forrest Aguirre, editor of Leviathan 4, and he'd immediately snatched up one of her pieces for the cover.) At the book fair the next day, we would buy one of her incredible paintings: a scene of several odd, beautifully - eccentric creatures or people standing and sitting beside a river, trees rippling through the background. The quality of the blues in the painting, the whorls of paint strokes that form the figures, the fluidity of the entire scene, while no individual figure appears to be in motion, reminded me of Angela Carter who wrote "The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter." This, all of it - Myrtle, the paintings on the walls, the atmosphere - made me relax. If what I read didn't go over well here, then it wouldn't go over well anywhere.
By the time we began, Mythique had filled up with people. Martone read first. I was next and chose to read from my new short story, "Secret Life," which has the advantage of being composed of a series of vignettes. I ended with a section on a mimic who infiltrates one floor of an odd office building: Gradually, they noticed several other strange things about their new co-worker. For example, despite the dress code, he did not actually wear shoes; his feet just resembled shoes. And when he ate his open-faced sandwiches of thick green paste, he swallowed in such a way that his large eyes receded into the back of his head as if pushing his food down like a frog...The mimic smelled of cardamom and mango, sometimes of pears, sometimes of fresh rain on newly-tilled soil. Sometimes he smelled like a thunderstorm, come up from the south...Anyone who looked the mimic full in the eyes found themselves falling. They would remember events or people they had not thought of in years. They would feel a sudden compulsion to leave the building. They would feel an ache, a yearning for something they could not quite name.
At the time I read those words, I had another yearning - a yearning for my knees to stop shaking. There I was trying to read a relatively odd yet emotionally resonant excerpt while my legs kept knocking together. Through a massive effort of will, I managed to control the involuntary shaking and complete the reading with, I thought, quite a bit of success. When I read something of this nature, a silence occurs for about five seconds between the end of the reading and audience applause. In that interval, I can usually tell whether it was successful or not. In this case, the pause was a watchful pause, a silence that meant the ending had sunk in, had gotten hooks into their minds. This is always a good feeling - although so entirely subjective that many hundreds of writers may live in the blissful delusion that such silence means something positive.
Lance followed up with his reading from Girl Imagined by Chance, a "hypercritical fiction" (or, as I call it, "a darn good book"). Girl Imagined by Chance concerns a couple, remarkably similar to Lance and Andi, who fabricate a child to foil/fool the "culture of reproduction". The novel plays with the word "reproduction", including a humorous anecdote about the singer Joe Cocker in which he's accused of being a Joe Cocker imitator. What I like about the novel is that Lance bravely exposes his own life to make his points; there is nothing as personal as creating an alter-you in your fiction, because people will tend to believe this alter-you is the real you. You must therefore live by their assumptions, on some level, for years after your fiction makes its way into print.
I'm afraid the rest of the reading was a blur punctuated by sudden rain. Cannon read pseudo-horror to musical accompaniment while Mackin read a series of hilarious letters he'd written to various corporations about their products. Ralph read a meta-fiction about buses that, in its convoluted illogical logic, spiraled into a kind of wonderfully neurotic madness. In terms of events where I've been paired with other readers, the Mythique event had the most consistently excellent prose.
Afterwards, all the readers, spouses, and a few others went across the street to a restaurant Cannon swore had exceptional New Orleans cuisine. Evan was sniffling quite a bit from some ongoing Romantic consumption. Erin was tired and bored - they both wanted to leave us to explore the nightlife, an idea Ann and I had thus far ignored successfully. Erin and Evan, by the way, claimed to have no opinion about any of the readings, in true contemptuous teenage fashion.
- The Book Fair
In retrospect, the New Orleans Independent Book Fair and the soon-to-come dealers' room at the World Fantasy Convention had more similarities than differences. However, at first glance, they could not have been more at odds. At the book fair, you had City Lights, Earth First Journal, Semiotext(e), Alternative Press Review, and Venomous Butterfly Publications, among others. At their tables, you could find subversive literature such as I Hate Capitalism and everything Noam Chomsky ever wrote - much of it xeroxed and saddle stapled in chapbook form, under $10, looking as punk as the proprietors pretended to be. In the dealers' room at World Fantasy, you could find $350 first editions of Angela Carter's novel Several Perceptions - a book rife with counter culture, but not likely to register with today's youth. At the book fair, the average age was 22, in the dealers' room, 102 (or, more charitably, 50). The temperature in the dealers' room was an even 78 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at the book fair an even 95 degrees Fahrenheit. I felt at ease with the politics on display at the book fair, but the Ministry of Whimsy table clearly fit more comfortably within the confines of World Fantasy's book room. The great advantage the book fair had was sheer exuberance and youth. Having mostly attended SF/Fantasy conventions over the past few years, this raw energy surprised me - and reassured me that books are not irrelevant to today's youth, that the book as object has not become something contemptible to a generation raised on computers and the Internet.
Barrister's Gallery, in which the book fair was held, is located on the edge of what can only be called a depressed section of New Orleans, in Central City, off of St. Charles Avenue. Signs proclaimed a coming renaissance for the area. However, all the signs in the world could not conceal the current poverty of the area. (This only bolstered its decadent appeal for Evan, who literally yipped in delight upon seeing one particular stretch of boarded up businesses.) Rising from this desert of abandoned buildings, soup kitchens, and assorted detritus, Barrister's Gallery serves as true Mecca in the wilderness. Standing five stories high, it has only one floor inside. Paintings in a hundred colors and styles shoot up the walls for all five stories - some outsider art, others not so outside but just as compelling. Sculptures, oils, masks - every sort of art imaginable. Surrounded by creativity in physical form, the book fair became merely the latest centerpiece of what is clearly a nexus of cutting edge creative arts.
The book fair took up only one side of the 8,000 square feet that comprises the gallery. On the right side, near the entrance, Myrtle had set up her Babylon Lexicon - a stunning display of handmade books from all over the country. From enormous "book machines" that incorporated boom boxes, to tiny books individually painted and sewn, the Lexicon provided dozens of vibrant examples of the book as art and artifact. The colors, the techniques, the sizes of the books varied as much as the individual vision. It made me glad to see that the makers of most of these handmade books were in their early twenties. I was also very proud that City of Saints & Madmen and The Exchange (deluxe version) were featured among the other books. The Exchange was clearly hand-made: the artist Eric Schaller or I put together each Exchange packet by hand. City was more ironically "hand made," being print-on-demand and therefore each copy assembled as ordered, with definite differences between each copy. Thus book making has come full circle, although not entirely happily.
But what I most remember about the New Orleans Independent Book Fair was sweltering heat. By the time we set up at 10:00 a.m., heat had already begun to infiltrate the gallery, intensifying as each new exhibitor set up. By 12:00 p.m., the heat had become unbearable, a live thing that manifested itself in the trickle of sweat under the collar, in the uncomfortable sense of sucking in twice-breathed air. At times, I longed to instead be marching with French legionnaires through the Sudan. Trapped behind the table in tiny chairs, careful not to move and thus disrupt the bookish neighbors behind us, Ann and I manned the Ministry tables for what seemed like 24 hours, but was actually only 8. A sense of fatigue crept in early on; there is something utterly draining about dealing with large groups of people for hours on end. You feel as if you must be energetic and "on" for each potential customer. You must continually smile and point out salient details about the books. You must repeat yourself endlessly. It seemed appropriate when Fiction Collective 2 disappeared two or three hours in, around noon. One minute their table was there, visible from ours, and then it was gone, either dislodged by the crowds, liquefied by the heat, or never there to begin with. (Later, we learned Brenda had had to go back to Tallahassee to take care of her sick son.)
At first, Ann and I really thought there was no way we could recoup our investment in coming to the book fair. Everyone was looking for zines, for items $10 and under. Every tenth person seemed to be homeless and looking for free books. Every other person was a starving artist or writer looking for a gig. Filmmakers desperately seeking distributors ("We publish fiction books. We don't distribute films." "No? But have you ever thought about distributing films." "No, we publish fiction." "Yeah, man, but distributing films is where it's at. You should think about it."), writers passing out copies of their manuscripts even when we indicated Buzzcity Press was closed and I no longer ran the Ministry of Whimsy.
Toward the mid-afternoon, things began to change. For one thing, we began to get used to the heat. Also, a few more people with money came in; one man bought over $100 worth of books. More people began to take a look at the City of Saints & Madmen's we'd brought with us; a couple sold. Sometime around then I realized that everyone was wearing white cotton gloves. At first, I had a weird flash of a fiction made reality - the protagonist of Edward Carey's excellent Observatory Mansions, Francis Ormey, wears gloves to avoid human contact. But no: gloves were issued for anyone entering the Babylon Lexicon and most people just kept them on when entering the book fair itself. At this point, Gleeful Moment #1 occurred: Evan walked by wearing the white cotton gloves. I quickly snapped his photo, Evan's stare baleful, then murderous as he realized what I had done. "What?" I said cheerfully. "Are you a fan of Michael Jackson?"
Then the time came for my reading at the fair. I was psyched - the reading at Mythique had gone well. This reading would go even better. I would read, appropriately enough, the gallery scene from my award-winning novella "The Transformation of Martin Lake." A little gallery humor should go over well. And then I'd follow it up by reading about an erotic font - a section of City of Saints that had always gotten belly laughs wherever I had read it.
The readings occurred in a space behind the gallery: a phalanx of white plastic chairs, with a single chair and microphone stand at the front. It looked a little like the kind of space in which someone reads a eulogy to the dearly departed. The audience consisted of about 15 to 20 people. The organizer of the event introduced me and I went up and explained a little about the hardcover City of Saints and the imaginary city it describes, Ambergris. I then launched into my gallery scene, in which our hero, the artist Martin Lake, must endure conversation with a potential buyer who thinks the painting in question is too large and wants it reduced in size. The excerpt includes Lake's laughably arch arrogance, an aside about the use of earwax to establish amber tones in paintings, and much else besides.
Three paragraphs in I was certain I had crashed a funeral ceremony, only where was the body? Gradually, I realized the corpse was me, not yet boxed, still behind the microphone. I looked up from time to time to a sea of indifference and mouths set as straight as dashes. As I went into the funniest parts, the silence grew and became more intense. I found myself rushing to get through the reading, knowing that it had Gone South, into the Gulf of Mexico, carried by the silty waters of the Mississippi. By the time I reached the font note section, I might as well have been in a morgue reading off body parts in a monotone, or among the stainless steel tables of a forensic pathologist's laboratory. The white backs of the plastic chairs were like tombstones. Not a smile. Not a flicker of a smile. I was sweating. I was laughing - I couldn't help it. The scene was just too surreal.
Mercifully, the reading ended and I rocketed off the stage and back into the insanity of the book fair. Never one to give up, I read the same material at the World Fantasy Convention to much laughter, but I can honestly say the reading I did at the New Orleans Book Fair, to a bunch of supposed anarchists, was a complete failure. I felt as though I should turn myself in to the police. After that, it was more despondent heat. The heat got hotter - the paintings seemed to glisten with it; I would not have been surprised if some of the paintings were actually a mirage - but the sales got hotter, too, so that by end of business, we had made $600, more than enough to cover our expenses. The last hour had been very good to us, with several City of Saints, Leviathan 3s, and Exchanges selling. (I should also note that Darby, Myrtle, and the rest of the book fair organizers had done an amazing job in terms of set up and also in terms of keeping everything on an even keel.)
- Hanging Out at the Bar and Heading Home
After so much intense book selling, all Ann and I wanted to do was relax at the local establishment where Nathan Ballingrud tended bar. I recounted to all assembled how I had first met Nathan at Clarion East in 1992. Nathan had scared the crap out of all of us the first day by locking himself in his room and typing nonstop for five hours. Most of us were just looking for a place to hang our clothes, but Nathan was already typing. We all felt unworthy.
The trip back to Tallahassee was uneventful, punctuated by only three events: breakfast at Denny's, during which the waitress, to my eternal amusement and Evan's decadent disgust, mistook Evan for my son; lunch at Ruby Tuesday's where Ann, Erin, and I (cohering as a family unit once again, after Erin's brief defection to the Isle of Evan), amused ourselves watching Evan fumble to find the "other side" of the salad bar, unaware it was a reflection; and the epiphany, making us almost old chums, that both Evan and I love the music of Scott Walker and The Dream Syndicate.
SMALLVILLE IN THE BIG CITY
A Review by Anne Brunsgaard
Here's a show I never thought I'd enjoy - I'm not a fan of Superman and I
positively retch at teen angst dramas - nevertheless I ended up really
liking Smallville, a show about the teen angst of a young Superman, i.e.
Clark Kent.
It's not so much the story line that I watch for, it's the well-defined
characters whose interactions with each other and reactions to stress,
though a bit predictable, are fun to watch and unfold at a good pace. The
characters have heart and, even though they are just too gorgeous and well
dressed to be believed, I found I began to care about them in spite of
myself. Unexpectedly, one of the most interesting characters turns out to
be Lex Luthor. Yes, an already bald young Lex just happens to live in
Smallville, exiled there by his domineering father to prove himself by
running the smallest factory in the LuthorCorp empire. In the pilot
episode, Clark uses his "special abilities" to save Lex's life and after a
bit of initial wariness, they become fast friends, almost the brothers they
each never had. Of course, Lex wants to know how Clark could have saved him
and Clark has to lie about it, even to his friend, so a current of
unacknowledged distrust runs beneath the surface of their friendship. We
the viewers know that, down the road, Clark and Lex become enemies, but
watching the twists and turns in that road is part of the pleasure of the
show.
The show's opening sequence is (uniquely) used to show the back story of the
meteor crash in Smallville and Clark being found by a flabbergasted John and
Martha Kent. I should mention for all you Dukes of Hazzard fans out there
that Clark's adoptive father is portrayed by the guy who played Bo Duke (or
is it Luke? the blonde one) and, speaking for myself, he's lost none of his
attractiveness with age. The plot lines of each episode deal mainly with
three things - Clark and his parent's efforts to keep his origin and
abilities a secret, Clark's gradual discovery of new abilities (yes, he's
still learning) and the usually negative effects of the "meteor rock", as
it's called, on the residents of Smallville. That last one, I will warn
you, is beaten to death with a stick. Just about every episode seems to
deal with yet another person given terrible powers by the glowing green
rock, which seems to have wedged itself into every nook and cranny in
Smallville. Of course, those affected inevitably end up in conflict with
young Clark, who is of course allergic to their source of power. It is at
least interesting to watch him get his future superhero training while
trying to figure out how to even get near the person he's fighting without
getting kryptonite sickness. (How weird, as I type this, apparently the
spelling program doesn't recognize a word like Smallville, but it does
recognize kryptonite. Huh!) What I personally find most intriguing about
the show is Clark's discovery of new abilities and his everyday uses for the
ones he has. Watching him casually lift tractors or ram fence posts into
the ground with his bare hands while "doing chores" on the farm is a hoot.
His parent's must save a lot of money on hired help. I can't wait until he
discovers he can fly, though I've heard that may not happen on the show, not
sure why. The writers also manage to throw in a fair amount of humor,
primarily by slipping in Superman in-jokes from the obvious, like the
Smallville High mascot's uniform (guess) to the subtle, or so my husband
tells me, I don't know enough of the S-man mythos to pick them all out.
To sum up, if you like a well-written, character driven show, then you
should definitely give Smallville a chance. I know I'm glad I did.