Archive for June 2014
I recently read and reviewed Pen Pal, a most extraordinary novel by Francesca Forrest. Click here to read my review of Pen Pal, but the super quick summary is that this epistolary novel focuses around the relationship between a girl named Em who lives in a floating community off the Gulf Coast, and Kaya, a political prisoner. Through Em’s letters and descriptions of her life, Kaya realizes she may have more in common with this girl than she thought. This is a powerful and profound story of marginalization and empowerment.
Francesca was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about the novel, living in Japan, indie publishing, and her passion for helping preserve native and minority languages.
Let’s get to the interview!
LRR: The novel is written in an epistolary fashion, with letters, diary entries, e-mails, even newspaper articles. Why did you decide to present the story that way?
FF: The novel grew out of a story that evolved on Livejournal. Em’s message in a bottle, was just as an idea that came to me one morning, and people wanted more. I had had the idea of Kaya in my head for years, and I thought, what if she were the one who answered? So a few days later I posted her response. And then, every few days, I’d post another letter. I really loved the format and thought it worked well for a serialization because the wait for the next post gave the readers the experience of waiting for the next letter, just like the characters.
When I decided to turn it into a novel, I decided to supplement the letters with diary entries and other “evidence” so I could tell a richer story. I think it’s interesting to think about what people choose to reveal where, and to whom, and I tried to play with that with the characters’ letters to different people, and with how what they write in their diaries differs from what they say in their letters.
LRR: Can you tell us a little about how this story came together, and what your inspirations were?
FF: Kaya’s story grew from two dreams I had: one in which a witch, or maybe a goddess, asked me to resurrect a defunct festival in her honor, and one in which a priestess was held prisoner in temple over a volcanic crater. I asked myself how those situations could be tied together, and that got me thinking about cultural suppression and why and how it happens—and then I could see how there’d be parallels to the situation of Em, whose community floats alongside, but keeps apart from, dry-land society. Other inspirations: I was enchanted, long ago, when I heard of jubilee, an event that happens fairly regularly in Mobile Bay, Alabama, and occasionally elsewhere: fish flood the shallow waters near shore so thickly that you can go out and just scoop them up by the armful. This became the dawn of seagifts in Pen Pal. And I was inspired, too, by the story of the pen pal correspondence I mention on the Pen Pal website, between Manuel Noriega, back when he ruled Panama, and Sarah York, a young American girl. That story raised so many questions about adult and child interactions, ulterior motives, and the intersection of the personal and the political.
artwork by Kelsey Michele Soderstrom
I’m posting my thoughts on the Hugo nominated short stories all week. You can read Sofia Samatar’s nominated short story “Selkie Stories Are For Losers” over at Strange Horizons. Click here to see how far I’ve gotten in my Hugo reading.
here’s what I thought:
She knows all the stories, the one where he hides her skin in a locked trunk, the one where it’s hidden in the attic, the one where it’s in his knapsack. And always in the end, the Selkie finds her skin and returns to the sea. Our narrator knows these stories like the back of her hand, yet she adamantly refuses to share them with her closest friend Mona. And since her Mom left, she could really use a friend who isn’t interested in Selkie stories.
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There was that magical moment when I realized exactly what the title was referring to. In Selkie stories, the reader is always meant to feel sorry for the Selkie who is trapped on land, and such stories reach their end when the Selkie finds their skin and returns to their underwater family. We’re rarely shown the other side of the equation. It’s not “loser” as in “shape of an L on her forehead”, it’s “loser” as in the one who lost something, the one who found themselves on the losing side of a conflict, of history, of the law, of magic.
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She’s a little jealous of the Selkies in the stories, I think. That they inevitably return to their families like nothing ever happened, and that their families want them back. Everyone in “Selkie Stories are for Losers” seems to have something they are trying to return to, and failing. Here on land, we don’t have a choice – life marches on, leaving us behind.
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I loved the unpretentious, fearless, nothing-to-prove writing style. Like the best magical realism, this could be the narrator’s exact experience, or it could be a coping mechanism for what’s happened in her life. Sometimes when reading magical realism, I really do think about the possibility that an unreliable narrator has come up with a coping mechanism. That’s not meant as an insult to the character or the story or the author, it’s just an added dimension for me when reading magical realism. It’s fun for me to think about what’s really happening in the context of the story, and what the narrator is just making up.
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I read the story a few times, and never did learn the name of the narrator. On the one hand, unnamed narrators are a pet peeve of mine, but on the other hand it means she could be anyone – my neighbor, the waitress at that little diner, the girl giggling with her friend at the corner store.
Taking a bit of a break from Hugo stuff (but not really), today I’m talking about Iain M. Banks’ Inversions, which I’m reading along with kamo of this is how she fight start, Brittian from Two Dudes in an Attic, and Matt from Feet for Brains. Head over to their blogs to see what they think of the book so far.
Chapter 12 is the magic stopping point for this discussion, and sometime next week we’ll all post about the end of the book. I always like to guess what’s going on, so I’m sure this first post of mine will be mostly observations, guesses and predictions. Inversions is the “culture novel that isn’t”, which makes it an excellent first Banks novel if you’ve never read him before.
All the guys are gonna be talking sportsball references and other intelligentsia, and I am umm…. not going to be.
When kamo was first telling me about the book, he mentioned the phrase “hiding in plain sight”. Now, he’s read this book before, so I was assuming he used that phrase for a particular reason. Remember those Hidden Pictures games in Children’s Highlights? how one large “hey! that’s a duck!” would leap right out at you, but you had to stare a little longer to find the spoon that was in the bark of the tree, or the banana that was in the swell of the waves in the lake, or the hippo that was in the clouds? Reading Inversions is a little like that, with secrets hidden in plain sight, and also simply disguised as things that wouldn’t be noticed by the other characters. For example, this is a complex science fiction novel disguised as a rather straight forward epic fantasy novel, complete with kings, wars, torturers, apprentices, concubines and spies.
Lemme ‘splain. Apologies that this sounds plot heavy, Banks is one of those writers who puts so much subtext in that there is about nine novels jammed into the 12 chapters that I read. So yeah, it’s kinda plot heavy, but that’s nothing compared to the subtext. And it doesn’t ever feel heavy. This isn’t a book that’s going to break your brain (at least what I’ve read of it so far won’t).
Also? SPOILERS.
All of the Hugo nominated short stories are available to read online, and you can read Rachel Swirsky’s lyrically haunting “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love”, from the March issue of Apex Magazine, here. (I’ll be posting reviews of the Hugo Nom’d short stories all week)
Here are my thoughts on “If You Were A Dinosour, My Love”, by Rachel Swirsky.
Half song, half prose poem, half prayer, with each paragraph beginning with the last phrase of the previous paragraph, the story put me in the mind of how a masterfully composed symphony returned to variations on a theme.
The title is the first line of the story, and it builds so very slowly – she’s going through a thought experiment of if he was a dinosaur. That his singing voice would be beautiful, that the geneticists would be all over him, that so he wouldn’t be lonely they would clone a mate for him, and even though she’d have lost him to a lady dinosaur, she wouldn’t be sad for losing him.
This is not a story, this is a kaleidoscope, with each touch, each incremental move of the barrel bringing something completely different into focus, taking you somewhere else, taking you one step closer to where the narrator is, at first, afraid to go. She wants to give you the imaginative, the impossible, the fantastically beautifully absurd before forcing you down to reality. You’re not sure where the story is going, you’re spiraling towards something, obviously, but the pitch perfect imagery is such a distraction that you don’t really care where you’re going. And then the end smacks you like a T-Rex’s jaw clamping down on your neck, and you suddenly know, without a doubt, exactly where that first sentence came from, where every sentence and thought came from. But a T-Rex is not about to eat you, this is reality and you are unfortunately, doomed to live.
You’ll be lured in by the lyricalness, pulled in further by the inescapable emotion, and then profoundly moved by the haunting devastation. This story killed me a little bit, and then I read it again, and it killed me a little bit more. A truly amazing piece.
The Madonna and the Starship by James Morrow
published in June 2014
where I got it: received review copy from the publisher (thanks Tachyon!)
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With a cover like this and promises of provocative satire, how could I not read it?
Kurt Jastrow has the best day job a science fiction writer could ask for. In the 1950s, at the peak of live television, he’s the lead writer for Brock Barton and his Rocket Rangers. A show every nine year old loves, Jastrow writes three shows a week (with Monday and Wednesday’s shows ending in cliffhangers, of course), and squeezes in a few minutes of actual science at the end of every episode. It’s not a glamorous life to be sure, but Kurt has plenty of time to polish his science fiction stories, harass his shellshocked editor, and try to convince fellow writer Connie Osborne to go out on a date with him.
Everything was going swimmingly (if rather ho hum) for Kurt, until he gets a visit from extra terrestrial ultra-rationalists, who want to thank him for doing such an amazing job promoting scientific enlightenment via Brock Barton and the real science demonstrations at the end of the show. The aliens want to give Kurt his award on live TV! And oh, they want to punish anyone who isn’t rational like they are, namely the few million people who tune into the network’s religious programming every Sunday morning. Almost sounds like the alien invasion script someone like Kurt would write for a much better TV show than Brock Barton . . .
Irredeemable, by Jason Sizemore
Posted on: June 17, 2014
This post is part of the Irredeemable blog tour! Check out Tomorrow Comes Media to see other bloggers involved with this tour and learn more about other blog tours.
Irredeemable, by Jason Sizemore
published April 2014
where I got in: purchased the e-book
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Advertised as a horror anthology, Irredeemable has plenty of awful people who get exactly what they deserve in horrific ways with no hope of escape. But it’s also peppered with Urban fantasy stories, straight up science fiction tales, and the most horrific stories in which yes, someone did something bad, but surely not so bad to deserve what they get. And this deep in the Appalachian hills, where fear, religion, suspicion, and xenophobia run rampant, there’s always someone available to get what they deserve.
If straight up, nail biting, edge of your seat horror is your thing, be sure to read “City Hall”, in which a human resources department employes a very unique method of saving taxpayer dollars; “Ice Cream At the Falls”, an open ended story in which you’ll probably be cheering when this particular asshole gets exactly what he deserves after learning the truth about a false conviction; “Sleeping Quartet”, in which “what could possibly go wrong?” is taken further than you’d expect, and “The Dead & Metty Crawford”, which is the absolute creepiest most disturbing zombie story possibly ever written, among many others.
Quite a few of the stories have an urban fantasy and science fictional twist, and it didn’t surprise me in the least that those were the ones I was most drawn to. Throw in aliens, or zombies, or voodoo, or robots, or space stations, and I am all over that. And Science Fiction horror? Now we are talking! If this paragraph is sounding like more your cuppa tea, “Plug and Play”, a darkly humorous story about a drug mule; “Mr. Templar”, in which robots are all that’s left on Earth after an apocalypse; and “Sonic Scarring”, in which what’s left of humanity hides in the hills after an alien invasion were written just for you.
With everything from gothic horror to post apocalyptic science fiction, the connecting thread is that of characters trying to escape the consequences of their decisions, and nearly begging the reader to forgive them.
Be sure to check out the rest of the blog tour hosts, and Tomorrow Comes Media for more information on their other blog tours!
After reading Jason’s short story collection Irredeemable (watch for the review later today!), I was brimming with questions for him. The interview below just scratches the surface of everything I wanted to know about the collection, where his ideas come from, all the other projects he’s involved in. Luckily I’ll have plenty of time to question and pester him later this year when I see him at ConText! And if you’ve got questions yourself, be sure to pester Jason on twitter, @apexjason. We should probably ask him when he finds time to sleep. 😉
Let’s get to the interview!
LRR: You know those “book blind dates” at bookstores, where they cover a book in brown paper, and write things on the paper like “historical fiction!”, “dinosaurs!” and “ray guns!”? What should go on the outside of Irredeemable when it’s covered up to be a book blind date?
J.S.: “Just deserts!”
LRR: What are some of your favorite stories in the collection? Which ones were the most challenging to write?
J.S.: As a huge geek and software developer, I find myself interested in issues involving artificial intelligence and evolving consciousness. “Mr. Templar” is my post-apocalyptic take on that concept where humans destroy the world and only a small handful of androids and robots still exist. Mr. Templar is searching for his creator. It is a bittersweet, touching, and charming story, and by far my favorite.
The most challenging to write was “For the Sake of Pleasing.” I wanted to write something longer than 10,000 words outside a sub-genre I usually write in. At the time, I was reading the Night Watch series by Sergei Lukyanenko, and wanted to try my hand at a dark fantasy similar to his. It took me months to get “For the Sake of Pleasing” to a point that made me happy.
In case you ever need to talk me into doing something, the magic words are Iain M. Banks.
Kamo over at This Is How She Fight Start is organizing a read along of Banks’ Inversions for later this month. Join Kamo, Two Dudes in an Attic, and myself, as we convince the rest of the universe that Iain M Banks was the best thing to ever happen to said universe. Because you’ll be joining us, tweet Kamo or comment on his announcement and let him know you want the deets. Come on, it’ll be fun!
The first sentence of the Wikipedia for Inversions page states
Banks has said “Inversions was an attempt to write a Culture novel that wasn’t.”
I didn’t scroll down any further, didn’t want spoilers.
I’m only about 50 pages in so far, and at least twice I have already audibly exclaimed “damn I love you Banks” while reading. If I don’t respond to tweets or e-mails for the next 24 hours, this book is why.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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