Richard K. Morgan's Blog, page 9
December 15, 2012
End Notes
Couple of late-breaking delights to round out the year. The Cold Commands makes NPR’s best SF/F of the Year list, and thus finds itself in some very august company indeed. Kind words from Annalee Newitz of Io9 fame. (Many thanks to Linda Palapala and Milton Soong for the heads-up). And the BSFA have a late but very thoughtful review with an equally enthusiastic tone .
Meantime, I was going to hold over the next work-in-progress extract until the New Year, hence maintaing an even three month spread between posts, but that’s just anal now isn’t it? And it is Christmas, after all. So – Ho-ho-ho, and enjoy……….
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
November 1, 2012
The Curious Case of the Totally Oblivious Author
Wow, was I late to this particular party.
The Steel Remains won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for best novel – in 2010!
How the hell did I miss this?
I vaguely remember my US publicist mentioning way back at the beginning of 2009 that it might be worth putting Steel up for the Spectrum, but I never heard any more after that and promptly forgot all about it. Then I was in Australia for two months, then I was in games for two years – Stockholm, Vancouver, Frankfurt, London, New York, a fast blur of studios, hotel rooms and airport lounges and whoooooosh; that’s the sound of my work-life picking up velocity like some bullet train I’d inadvertently stumbled aboard, and I barely got the chance to look out the windows until early 2011, by which time I was speeding rapidly towards impending fatherhood. Then the fallout from that particular impact – sleepless nights, a ripped and torn set of new priorities, vaccinations and doctor’s visits, a move to Spain, a book tour for The Cold Commands, a houseful of Christmas guests in a house we barely knew, soul-searching about where to base ourselves for the next couple of years, research and local colour, a slow but steady flow of friends and family to check out the new circumstances, an eventual return home to water damaged ceilings and faulty central heating and the search for suitable bilingual nurseries/toddler groups and – oh look, it’s late 2012.
Well, that’s my excuse anyway, and I’m sticking to it.
So apologies to the Spectrum judging committee and award administrators for my utter fucking silence on this subject for the last two years. I am, of course, honoured to have won. The gay communities on both sides of the Atlantic were very supportive of what I was trying to achieve in Steel and gave me a great deal of good press and enthusiasm. This is the veritable cherry on the top of that response.
Ehm……could I have my award trophy now, please?
Incidentally, The Cold Commands got short-listed for the very same award this year, so it seems no-one’s bearing a grudge. Didn’t win this time around, of course, but can you really blame them? The judges must have figured they’d give it to someone who’d get around to saying thank you a bit more promptly…….
Sigh.
October 12, 2012
Something Beginning with P
So there you go – your basic alien monster movie.
You’ve got your dodgily-imagined alien planet with not very convincing unities of time and place, shot on location in some inhospitable corner of the globe in a bid to offer some naturalistic weirdness. You’ve got your conveniently breathable air. Your stock characters, your fairly predictable narrative arcs, your human victims in rapidly dwindling supply. You’ve got your monsters, cheaply done and looking like it, trading on a template already decades old. You’ve got a bit of cod-philosophising thrown in, some side commentary on god and faith, a bit of standard-issue sexual tension. You’ve got your violent struggle, your poignant loss, a pleasingly conflagrative conclusion and a quietly emotive coda.
And you know what?
Somehow, it all holds together – you’re gripped despite yourself, swept along, enthralled. It works (well, at least it did for me).
I’m talking, of course, about Pitch Black.
Oh, you thought I meant Prometheus? Oh, fuck, no! Whatever gave you that idea?
Well, okay it’s true Prometheus does feature monster effects that look like they cost about 50p to make and came courtesy of the reject pile from Fraggle Rock. It’s true that the planetary vistas look like a widescreen version of some shot-in-a-Welsh-quarry episode of Doctor Who or Blake’s Seven. (And, somehow – don’t ask me how, I’m just the consumer here – both monsters and planet manage to look less convincing than their 33 year old FX counterparts in the original Alien). It’s true that the script is littered with painfully crude Christian agit-prop, a factor made even more gapingly obvious by the deleted scenes my DVD copy came with. But these things, oddly enough, are not what makes Prometheus such a profoundly dispiriting experience to watch. Or at least, it’s not just those things……
See, I wanted to be fair. I wanted to be sure this wasn’t my inner Alien geek sulking because Prometheus didn’t live up to my fond teenage recollections of the original movie. I wanted to be sure it wasn’t my atheism, profoundly irritated by the invocation of gaahhd in conversations between supposedly hard-nosed adult professionals.
So, I went back and watched Pitch Black again, and lo and behold, despite the dodgily imagined alien world and the derivative monsters, Pitch Black is a great little movie. Sure, it’s not paradigm-shifting or iconic in the way Alien was (its monsters are borrowed more or less wholesale from Geiger stock, for one thing), but then few movies are. But the stock characters in Pitch Black behave in a way that’s coherent throughout; the religious ones strike interesting dialogue sparks off Vin Diesel’s avowedly materialist protagonist (and the religion itself is a decently imagined future faith, rather than something cut and pasted from contemporary middle class, middle American bible class); the narrative spine of the movie is tight and strong. You care about the characters, you care about the outcome, there ae some truly powerful moments (eg – did not know who he was fucking with!) and even a few small surprises thrown in. From pretty much the outset, your emotions are firmly engaged.
My strongest emotion while I watched Prometheus was irritation. Or, more accurately, a kind of weary exasperation that could only occasionally be bothered to flicker into genuine annoyance. And close behind that came boredom. I watched because I’d paid for the rental and out of some vague professional interest. But if, for some reason of parenting or other family emergency, I’d had to switch off the playback at any point, I’m pretty sure I would never have bothered to go back and finish it. For me, Prometheus had all the savour of some SyFy channel spin-off show, and all the emotional punch of a TV movie from the after-lunch slot. Prometheus is…….bland. Massively so. Prometheus is Alien for the Hallmark channel.
Recall the icky-snake-gets-in-your-helmet-and-then-orally-rapes-you sequence? Recall how far out and distant the shot was? And how fast it was over? Now compare that with John Hurt’s iconic death in Alien – close in, juddering camera, a tangle of thrashing limbs and agony, violent splatter of blood, and it just went on and on. That shit was horrific and personal, and you felt it as if you were there. Prometheus’s snake-in-the-helmet scene needed some of the same – so tight in you felt the claustrophobia, you felt as if you were in there with that guy and no way to even twist aside, let alone run. Recall the big-tentacled-thing-grabs-engineer sequence? Was it just me, or did it remind anyone else of one of the monsters from sixties TV show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, or – let’s be charitable – maybe Space 1999 circa 1977. Compare that with Veronica Cartwright’s superbly performed death in the original Alien – the tears, the weeping begging, the awful inevitability as that barbed tail slides out across the floor and up to gather her obscenely in, the sheer terror so suffocating that you were fucking relieved when the scene switched back to Ripley and the sound of Lambert’s death screams over the intercom.
See what I’m driving at here?
Did anyone notice that Prometheus was a fifteen certificate? Did anyone else notice how little actual blood or actual horror there actually was?
Ah.
Okay, Richard – so look, with such vast acreage of Meh under your belt, why the long post? Why get so hot under the collar after your professed boredom and mild irritation?
Well, boredom and weary exasperation were my feelings while I was watching the movie.
The anger came later.
Because it’s my feeling that this movie is something of a canary in a coal mine for the genre. Not that it’s the first such, not that the floor of the genre cage isn’t littered with other stiff little feathered corpses, but still, this one feels kind of pivotal. Once again, we’re seeing – having rammed down our throats rather like that snake in the helmet – a vision that assumes the audience for SF consists entirely of brain-dead teenagers and franchise geeks with the emotional range and imaginative capacity of a Skinner pigeon. Keep the age certification down for christ’s sake, otherwise we lose our core audience. Pander to the values of the antiquated middle class middle American cabal that is the MPAA (anyone seen This Movie Is Not Yet Rated) and we’ll keep our certification down. Reference the genre canon, and we’ll get the fans on board. Stick to superhero comic book story-telling – that’s all this sic-fi crowd can relate to, y’know. Seriously – we’ll make a fucking pile of money.
If Prometheus had just been a seriously crap movie, I guess it would have been okay. There’s a lot of it about, as Theodore Sturgeon will tell you. But Prometheus is not just a seriously crap movie – it’s also a profoundly cynical exercise in franchise mining, and that sticks in my throat. (As, to be honest, do the piss-poor monster effects – quite how you spend a hundred and thirty million dollars and end up with monsters less convincing than those in movies made decades earlier and costing a tenth as much, I’m not quite sure – maybe by the time you’ve paid for all the obscenely under-used, pissed-away acting and directing talent out of that one hundred and thirty million, there’s not a lot left for SFX. Or maybe it all went on marketing.) Prometheus set out to cold-bloodedly co-opt one of the finest genre movie IPs around, and milk it until it bled. And they got away with it. That’s what stings. That’s what puts me on the verge of despair for the future of the genre on screen.
To paraphrase the Manic Street Preachers, if you tolerate Lost, then your genre crown jewels will be next.
And – you know what – I take back every disparaging thing I ever said about Avatar. Compared to Prometheus, Avatar was a thing of beauty, a towering masterpiece of cinematic achievement – stunning special effects, a coherent narrative, an intelligent and even vaguely subversive thematic base. Acting talent being deployed, used to good human effect. Directorial talent stretching itself to the available limits. And - perhaps most important of all, something I didn’t actually see at the time, because it’s taken Prometheus to ram the point home – Avatar was quite clearly a passionate labour of love on the part of its makers.
I didn’t like it especially, but you can’t argue with that passion. And you can’t overstate the worth that passion brings to art.
Nor the novocaine numbness that you get when it isn’t there.
October 9, 2012
Rampant Imperialism
A date for your diaries if you live in or within reasonable striking distance of London. This coming February 16th and 17th, I’ll be Guest of Honour at Imperial College’s PicoCon.
As you’ll see from this link, I am not alone in this – fellow GoHs are:
Peter F. Hamilton - distinguished doyen of British SF who very kindly gave Altered Carbon a booster rocket of a blurb back when I was starting out, sent champagne to me on my first US book tour, and fed me one evening during Eastercon 2005 in the bosom of his own home, while also juggling the – I now appreciate – myriad heavy demands of early fatherhood.
Steph Swainston - one of the finest fantasy stylists to emerge this young century, whose work has been a subtle but pervasive influence on the Land Fit for Heroes novels, who knows – and holds – her whisky better than any man I know, and who lent me a book about seven years ago which I still haven’t returned – sorry Steph, will bring it down.
Kate Griffin/Catherine Webb - whom, uhm, I confess I know nothing at all about, but who is, I’m sure very talented and lovely to talk to.
So look, there’s really no decent excuse not to attend. Right?
See you there!
October 6, 2012
The Anti-Prometheus
Just saw Red State, and for me the ways in which it’s the antithesis of Prometheus are legion. Just for starters: I knew nothing about it, I had no expectations or anticipation going in, and I’m not a fan of its director. Prometheus is stuffed full of top drawer acting talent and big names. Red State has a cast that – with the exception of John Goodman – I’ve barely heard of. Prometheus was budgeted at 130 million dollars (if you believe Wikipedia), Red State got made for under 4 million. Prometheus, before the reviews came in, I would gladly have shelled out a tenner plus to see in 3D splendour at my local multiplex. Red State showed up through the door on DVD via my wife’s Love Film selection, and I nearly didn’t bother watching it at all (fifteen months into fatherhood, the twin needs for sleep and productive work hours hold me in a thrall previously unimaginable).
The prospect of viewing Prometheus at some future moment leaves me profoundly dispirited. I suppose I shall have to, professional interest and all. Seeing Red State left me energised and inspired. It reminded me why I love movies, why I love story-telling and ultimately why I write myself.
I’m going to reserve more definitive comment on contrasts within the material of each film until such time as I have – dispiritedly – shelled out for a DVD rental of Prometheus and actually seen it, because anything else would be grossly unfair. But I think some early estimations are in order. Prometheus appears, from the reports I’ve read, to be a soulless, confusing mish-mash of all that cool stuff you saw in that other movie and wanted more of. Red State is an utterly fresh and soulful mish-mash that works. Prometheus’s plot was going to be predictable from the get-go (which, NB, is not necessarily in itself a failing in a movie – it was also true of the original Alien). Red State was quite literally impossible for me to predict at any point past the initial twenty minutes in. Prometheus – apparently – looks for horror in CGI and the outer limits. Red State finds horror right next door and delivers it with scripted speech and tightly constructed human dynamics. Prometheus trumpets its philosophical concerns in full orchestral grandeur, from the earliest trailers on in – we’re after Life, the Universe and Everything here. Red State delivers a pair of taut little lectures on current religious and political state-of-play and leaves you to ponder.
Prometheus has taken over four hundred million dollars at the box office. Red State has just about made back its four million budget and change.
There’s a lesson in this somewhere, but I’m still not sure exactly what it is. I’ll get back to you.
September 21, 2012
Early Sighting
September 3, 2012
Visitation Rites
He felt the change as soon as he stepped over the threshold of the croft. It came on like icy water, sprinkling across the nape of his neck and his shoulders.
He tilted his head a little to send the feeling away, traced a warding glyph in the air, like taking down a volume from a library shelf. Around him, the croft walls grew back to an enclosing height they likely hadn’t seen in decades. The boiling grey sky blacked out, replaced with damp smelling thatch overhead. A dull, reddish glow reached out to him from the hearth. Peat smoke stung his throat. He heard the hoarse whistle of breathing, the creak of……
A worn oak rocking chair, angled at the fireside, tilting gently back and forth. From where he stood, Ringil could not tell what was seated there, only that it was wrapped in a dark cloak and cowl.
The ward he’d chosen was burning down around him like some torched peasant’s hut. He felt the fresh exposure shiver through him. Reached for something stronger, cracked finger-bones etching it into the air.
“Yes – becoming quite adept at that, aren’t we.” It was a voice that creaked like the chair. Wheeze and rustle of seeming age, or maybe just the breathlessness at the end of laughing too hard at something. “Quite the master of the ikinri ‘ska these days.”
His fresh ward shattered apart, no better than the first – the chill of the Presence rushed in on him. The rocking chair jerked violently around, from no agency he could see. The thing it held was a corpse. The shrunken mounds it made within the wrap of the cloak were unmistakeable, the way it skewed awkwardly in the seat, as if blown there by the wind. The cowl was tipped forward like the muzzle of some huge dark worm, shrouding the face. One ivory-pallid hand gripped an armrest, flesh shrunk back from long, curving nails. The other arm lay in the thing’s lap, was covered by the way the cloak folded there.
Even as the chill blew through him, something about that fact was scratching for attention at the limen of his being.
His hand leapt up, across, closed on the hilt of the Ravensfriend where it jutted over his left shoulder.
“Oh, please,” creaked the voice. “Put that away, why don’t you. If I can break your wards like sticks for kindling, how hard do you think it’s going to be for me to break that dinky little sword of yours as well? You know, for an up-and-coming sorcerer, you show remarkably little breadth of response.”
Ringil let go the Ravensfriend, felt the pommel slip through his hands as the Kiriath-engineered scabbard sucked the handsbreadth of exposed blade back into itself. He eyed the slumped form before him and held down the repeated urge to shiver.
“Who are you?”
“And still he does not know me.” Abruptly, the corpse loomed to its feet, out of the chair as if tugged there by puppet’s strings. Ringil found himself face to face with the worm’s head cowl and the blank darkness it framed. He made himself stare back, but if there was a face in there, dead or alive, it didn’t show. The whispering voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, down from the eaves of the thatch, out of the crackle of the hearth, out of the air just behind his ear. “You did not know me at Trelayne’s Eastern Gate, when your destiny was laid out in terms you could understand; you did not know me at the river when the first of the cold legion gathered to you, and your passage to the dark gate began. I sent a whole shipload of corpses for you when you were finally ready. So tell me, Ringil Eskiath – how many times must I look out at you through the eyes of the dead before I am given my due?”
It fell in on him like the thatched roof coming down on his head. The cloak and cowl, the stylised placement of hands, one raised to the arm of the chair, the other gathered in the lap, holding-
“Fifirdar?”
“Oh, well done.” The corpse turned and shuffled away from him, back towards the hearth. “Took you long enough, didn’t it? Wouldn’t have thought it’d be so hard to recognise the Queen of the Dark Court when she comes calling. We are your ancestral gods, are we not?”
“Not by my choice,” he said starkly.
But through his head it went, all the same – the call-and-response prayer to the Mistress of Dice and Death:
Firfirdar sits
Upon her molten iron throne
And is not touched
By fire
Is kernel heart of darkness to the blaze
It was ingrained – a decade of foot-dragging attendance at the Eskiath family temple, every week like clockwork until, finally, at fifteen years of age, he found the words to face his father down and refuse the charade.
By then, though, the cant was worked into his brain like tanner’s dung.
Firfirdar smiles
In shadows lit by liquid fire
And holds the dice
Of days
Holds dice for all, and all that is to come
Firfirdar lifts
The dice of days in one cold hand
And blows them free
In fire
Blows luck like sparks from out the forge of fate
“Yes, well.” The corpse bent stiffly into the shadows beside the fire-glow and the pallid, long-nailed hand reached a poker from its resting place against the stonework. Firfirdar prodded at the fire, and a log fell loose, cascading embers. “Fortunately, we’re not all dependent on your choices in such matters.”
“Then why am I here?”
“Oh.” The poker stabbed into the hearth a couple more times. Sparks billowed up the chimney. The voice rustled about in the flicker-lit, haunted spaces of the croft. “You were passing. It seemed as good a time as any.”
“You know, for a goddess of death and destiny, you show remarkably little sense of divine grandeur.”
The corpse leaned over the hearth, cowl pressed to the low stone mantelpiece as if tired by its exertions. The echo of Ringil’s words seemed to hang in the silence. For a long, cold-sweat moment, he wondered if the dark queen would take offence.
His fingers flexed and formed a brief fist -
Look, I won’t lie to you, Gil. No ikinri ‘ska ward is going to actually back down a member of the Dark Court. Hjel the Dispossessed, almost apologetic when Ringil asks him. It’s his magic, after all, his heritage he’s teaching here. But if you throw enough of them around, well – a faint shrug – you might buy yourself some time, I suppose.
Time to do what?
But to that, he gets no answer beyond the gypsy prince’s customary slipshod grin. Hjel is not what you’d call a consistent guide.
What he is, exactly, Ringil has yet to work out.
- and so….
He loosened the fist, forced his fingers to hang slack. Waited for the dark queen’s response
“Funny.” The corpse had not moved, was still bent there over the hearth. It was as if Fifirdar was talking to the flames. “Yes. They did say that. That you think you’re funny.”
A thick silence poured into the croft behind the hiss in that final word. All the hairs on Ringil’s forearms and the back of his neck leapt erect. He mastered the shudder, thrust it down and stared at the hunched black form. The shifting infinite possibilities of the ikinri ‘ska, swirling like water just below his fingertips…..
The corpse straightened up. Set the poker aside in the shadows by the wall.
“We’re wasting time,” said Firfirdar sibilantly. “I am not your enemy. You would not still be standing there if I were.”
“Perhaps not.” Behind the mask he kept, a cool relief went pummeling through his veins. He let the ikinri ‘ska subside. “But please don’t claim the Dark Court has my best interests at heart either. I’ve read a few too many hero legends to believe that.”
“Legends are written down by mortals, floundering in the details of their world, seeking significance for their acts where usually there is none.” The corpse hobbled back to its seat by the fire. “You would do well not to set too much store by such tales.”
“Is it inaccurate, then, my lady, to say that heroes in the service of the Court rarely end well?”
“Men who carry steel upon their backs and live by it rarely end well. It would be a little unjust to blame the gods for that, don’t you think?”
Ringil grimaced. “The Mistress of Dice and Death complains to me of injustice? Have you not being paying attention lately, my lady? Injustice is the fashion – for the last several thousand years at least, as near as I can determine. I think it unlikely the Dark Court has not had a hand in any of it.”
“Well, our attention has been known to wander.” It was hard to be sure with that whispering, rustling voice, but the dark queen seemed amused. “But we are focused on you now, which is what counts. Rejoice, Ringil Eskiath – we are here to help.”
“Really? The lady Kwelgrish gave me to understand that mortal affairs are a game you play at. It’s hard to rejoice in being treated as a piece in a game.”
Quiet. The corpse lolled back in the rocking chair’s embrace. The nails of its left hand tapped at the wooden arm-rest, like the click of dice in a cupped palm.
“Kwelgrish is…….forthright, by the standards of the Court.”
“You mean she shouldn’t have told me?”
The soft crackle of the fire in the hearth. Gil thought, uneasily, that the leaping shadows painted on the wall behind Firfirdar were a little too high and animated to fit the modest flames in the hearth that supposedly threw them. A little too shaped, as well, a little too suggestive of upward tilted jaws and teeth, as if some invisible, inaudible dog-pack surged and clamoured there in the gloom behind the dark queen’s chair, waiting to be unleashed…..
Very slowly, the corpse lifted both hands to the edges of the cowl it wore. Lifted the dark cloth back and up, off the visage it covered.
The breath stopped in Ringil’s throat.
With an effort of will, he held himself immobile. Looked back into Firfirdar’s eyes.
It was not that the corpse she had chosen was hideous with decay – far from it. Apart from a tell-tale pallor and a sunken look around the eyes, it was a face that might still have belonged with the living.
But it was beautiful.
It was the face of some fine-featured, consumptive youth you’d readily kiss and risk infection for, a face you might lose yourself in one haunted back-alley night, wake the next day without and spend fruitless years searching the stew of streets for again. It was a face that gathered you in, that beckoned you away, that rendered all thought of safety and common sense futile.
It was a face you’d go to gladly, when the time came; no regrets and nothing left behind but the faint and fading smile printed on your cooling lips.
“Do you see me, Ringil Eskiath?” asked the hissing, whispering voice.
It was like flandrijn fumes through his head, like stumbling on a step that suddenly wasn’t there. He reeled and swayed from the force of it, and the corpse’s mouth did not move at all and the voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.
“Do you see me now?”
Out of the seething, chilling confusion of his own consciousness, Ringil mustered the will to stay on his feet. He drew in breath, hard.
“Yes,” he said. “I see you.”
“Then let us understand each other. It isn’t easy being a god, but some of us are better at it than others. Kwelgrish has her intricate games and her irony, Dakovash his constant rage and disappointment with mortals, and Hoiran just likes to watch. But I am none of these. You would be ill-advised to judge me as if I were. Is that clear?”
Ringil swallowed, dry-throated. Nodded.
“That’s good.” The corpse raised pallid hands once more and lifted the cowl back in place. Something went out of the space around them, as if someone had opened a window somewhere to let in fresh air. “Now – to the business at hand. Walk with me, Ringil Eskiath. Convince me that my fellow gods have not been overly optimistic in their assessment of your worth.”
“Walk with you whe-”
The fire billowed upward in the hearth, blinded him where he stood. Soundless detonation that deafens his gaze. The croft walls and thatch ripped back, no more substantial than a Majak yurt torn away by cyclone winds. He thought he caught a glimpse of them borne away at some angle it hurt his eyes to look at. Gone, all gone. He blinked – shakes his head – is standing suddenly before a roaring bonfire, on a deserted beach, under an eerily luminescent sky.
“Walk with me here,” says Firfirdar quietly.
She’s unhooded again, it’s the same achingly beautiful dying youth’s face, but here it seems not to have the power it had back in the croft. Or maybe it’s him – maybe he has a power here the real world will not permit him. Either way there’s no punch-to-the-guts menace, no fracturing of his will and sense of self. Instead, he thinks, the Mistress of Dice and Death looks overwhelmingly saddened by something, and maybe a little lost.
“There is not much time,” she murmurs. “The dwenda have found a way back – though back is a relative term, as they’ll discover soon enough – and with them comes every dark thing men have ever feared.”
Ringil shivers. There’s a hard wind coming off the sea, stoking the bonfire, whipping the flames off it like spray from storm-driven waves, and leaching the heat away.
“Then stop them, why don’t you.”
A gossamer smile touches Firfirdar’s mouth at the corners, but it’s etched with that same sadness. Her eyes tilt to the sky.
“That was tried,” she says quietly. “Once. And your sky still bears the scars.”
He follows her gaze upward. The source of the eerie radiance slips from behind the clouds – the dying, pockmarked little sun he’s heard the dwenda call muhn. He shrugs.
“So try it again.”
“It will not be permitted again. Even if we could find some way to press upon the sky as hard and deeply as before, such powers must remain leashed. That was the pact, the gift of mending the book-keepers gave. We are bound by the codes they wrote.”
Ringil stares into the orange-red heart of the bonfire, as if he could pull some of its heat out and into himself. “So much for the gods. Maybe I should just talk to one of these book-keepers instead.”
“You already have, Ringil Eskiath. How else would you have returned through the dark gate except with its blessing? How else would you have come back from the crossroads?”
Memory stabs at him on that last word. The creature at the cross-roads, the book it held in its multiple arms. The razor talons it touched him with.
I should hate to tear you asunder. You show a lot of promise.
The branches buried in the heart of the fire suddenly look a lot like bones in a pyre. He turns away. He stares away along the shoreline, where the wind is piling up waves and dumping them out incessantly on the sand. Over the sound it makes, he grows aware that Firfirdar is watching him.
“That was the book keeper?” he asks reluctantly.
“One of them, yes.”
He locks down another shiver. Sets his jaw. “I was under the impression that I owed my passage through the dark gate to Kwelgrish and Dakovash.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes, you do. But – come.” Firfirdar gestures, away along the ghost-lit beach and into the gloom. “Walk with me. All will become clear.”
“Yeah?” Ringil grimaces. “That’d be a first.”
But he walks with her anyway, away from the useless glare of the bonfire, the heat it apparently cannot give him unless – the thought pops into his head unsought – he throws himself into its charnel heart and lets himself burn.
And that’d be a stupid thing to do.
So yes, he lets the dark queen link her arm through his – he can feel the chill it gives off through his clothing and hers – and she leads him away, under the dwenda muhn.
In the ghost light it casts, he notices, her feet leave no trace on the sand.
And, after a while, nor do his.
June 16, 2012
Oh dear oh dear oh fucking dear
A couple of months ago, in comments, I mentioned that while I was really looking forward to the upcoming Prometheus, I had some reservations:
“Yeah, I’m stoked too – killer cast, killer director and production crew. Could be something really special indeed.
But……
I confess to a couple of niggling worries:
First, is it just me, or does all the buzz about Massive Archetypal Themes, the Very Origins of the Human Race etc etc…. seem a bit overblown?
I mean, the original Alien was so humanly small-scale and scruffy – a tired, grumpy, half-assed freighter crew get tossed into a maelstrom of corporate betrayal and environmental hazard. All they want is to get home in one piece and get paid. Then all they want is to get home in one piece. Then all they want is not to die. Powerful thematic narrative ensues, embedded in these very mundane concerns.
I worry that Prometheus, in shooting for Massively Meaningful, is going to run the risk of coming off bombastic.
Secondly (and related, I think), is it just me, or does explaining the derelict, the space jockey and the eggs rob them of a lot of their power?
I know, I know we all want to know – but therein lies the power of the original movie; it’s an unrequited desire. We never do find out what that shit was all about, and that’s what makes it sublimely creepy and mysterious. Maybe the space jockey was the last remnant of just another grumpy half-assed freighter crew just trying to get home and get paid – a million years ago. Or a thousand, who knows? Maybe his kind are gone, maybe they’re not; maybe we’ll meet them round the next corner. Maybe the eggs were a random hazardous cargo, maybe an infestation, or okay, yeah, maybe a weapon and the space jockey some kind of biological warfare bomber pilot. Or maybe the xenomorphs and eggs are some part of the space jockey race’s own lifecycle that somehow got out of hand. It’s all maybes, and that’s what lends it power: We Will Never Know. The universe is ancient and infinite and strange – feel its cold breath on the nape of your neck.
By offering an explanation, by actually solving the mystery, you undercut the chill of Not Knowing – AND you run the risk of your explanation being nowhere near as cool or scary as the audience’s own various speculations on the subject. So your explanation needs to be Pretty Fucking Chilling and Cool, if it’s going to deliver over and above those risks it runs. I worry that it won’t be, that in fact it’ll be trite and Scy Fy channel dumbed down.
Truly hope I’m wrong, on both counts.”
So, now I’m thinking about changing my name to Cassandra
It’s as if Damon Lindelof got hold of a time machine a couple of years ago, zipped ahead to April 2012, and then went back and said “Hey, there’s this mid-list SF author called Morgan who’s got a bunch of misgivings about this movie. I know, let’s write a screenplay based entirely on those misgivings.
Or maybe it’s just that hiring the writer responsible for Lost to update what was the darkest, nastiest, most powerful SF movie franchise ever devised is a bit like setting out to re-make Sergio Leone’s Dollar Trilogy with the cast of the Muppet Show. Feasible in theory, but why the fuck would you do it?
Now, I hasten to add that haven’t actually seen Prometheus yet myself. And I suppose that Mr Rothwell there could (for reasons I confess I’m rather hard-pressed to imagine) be lying his arse off about the movie. But you know what – he’d be far from the only one (though certainly the most hilarious so far). No, I think, all things considered, this one is going to take the same priority place as the rather poor and wholly unnecessary The Thing prequel – i.e. rent it at Global Video some time when I’ve got nothing better to do and can’t find anything more promising to watch.
Oh, well – it all saves on baby sitting, I guess…..
Sigh.
May 3, 2012
Quest Fellow Blues
He’d paid the whores for the whole afternoon, but in the end couldn’t summon much enthusiasm for a third go round. Usually, two women at once solved that kind of problem for him, but not today. Maybe it was the smell of damp wool that still clung to their bodies even after they’d peeled naked for him, maybe the fact he caught the mask of fake arousal falling off the face of the younger one a couple too many times in the act. That kind of thing stabbed at him, took him out of the moment. He knew he was paying, but he didn’t like to be reminded of the fact, and back in Yhelteth he wouldn’t have been.
What’s the matter, Dragonbane? You never fucking happy? Up on the steppe, you craved all that southern sophistication you’d left behind. Put you back in the imperial city and you wish you could have the simple life again. Now here you are with simple whores in a simple back-gutter town and that’s not right for you either.
Ye Gods, he missed Imrana.
Wasn’t talking to the bitch currently, but missed her still.
So when the young one knelt before him on the floor and slipped his flaccid cock into her mouth, while her older companion sat on a stool in the corner, legs apart, lifting one pendulous tit at a time and tonguing the nipple with leering glances in his direction, he just grunted and shook his head. Hoisted the girl bodily from her knees – his cock slipped back out of her mouth, still pretty much flaccid – and set her aside. The older whore eyed him warily as he got up off the disheveled bed. He read her thoughts as if they were tattooed across her face. No telling what any paying customer might do when they couldn’t get it up, and this one here was big and battle-scarred, and a foreigner to boot, accent harsh and hair all tangled up with alien talismans in iron. Lurid tales of the Majak had percolated right across the continent in the last couple of centuries – they’d doubtless got as far as the Hironish isles long ago. Bloody steppe savages, disembowel a girl and cook her on a spit soon as look at her most likely if they got out of bed the wrong side one morning……
He forced a reassuring grimace and went to stare out of the window. Heard them move behind him with alacrity, start gathering up their clothes and the coin he’d left on the table. Light-footed, they left in what seemed like seconds and the door of his room clunked shut. He felt the relief it brought go through his whole frame. He slumped against the window frame, rested his head on cool glass. Outside, a light rain was falling into the street, clogging up daylight that was already past its best. A couple of children went past, splashing deliberately in the puddles and yattering some rhyme he could barely make out. He’d learnt the League tongue, more or less, while on campaign in the north during the war, but the Hironish accent was hard work.
Yeah, like their fucking awful food and their fucking awful weather and their fucking awful whores. Three weeks in this shit-hole already, and still no-
Commotion downstairs. A woman shrieked. Furniture went over.
He frowned. Cocked his head at the sound.
Another shriek. Coarse laughter, and men calling to each other. The words were indistinct, but the rhythms were Majak.
Uh-oh.
He grabbed his breeches off the bed, trod hurriedly into them on his way to the door. Shirt off the table as he passed, out into the corridor. Shouldered into it as he went down the stairs. No time for boots or other refinement, because-
He arrived on the ground floor of the inn, barefoot and undone. Surveyed the scene before him.
There were three of them. Shendanak’s men, just in from the street by the look of it, felt coats still buttoned up and damp across the shoulders from the rain. One had the younger of Egar’s whores grasped firmly by the crotch and one tit, was nuzzling and licking at her neck. The other two seemed engaged in facing down the innkeeper.
“Oi!” Egar barked, in Majak. “Fuck do you think you’re doing?”
The one holding the whore looked up. “Dragonbane!” he bawled. “Brother! We were just looking for you! Get your drinking boots on! ‘s time to light this shit-hole town right the fuck up - Majak style!”
Egar nodded slowly. “I see. Whose idea was that, then?”
“Old Klarn, mate! The man himself.” The whore bucked and twisted in the speaker’s grip. She sank teeth into his forearm. He winced and grinned, let go of her crotch, used the free hand to squeeze her jaws open and force her head back, clear of his flesh. Looked like she’d left a pretty distinct bite there in the thick muscle behind the wrist, welling blood and everything, but the Majak’s voice barely wavered from its previous slurring good cheer. Egar estimated he’d been drinking a while. “Said how we’ve been soft-soaping around these fish-fuckers for long enough. Time to get steppe-handed on their arses. In’t that right, boys?”
Growls of approval from the other two. By now they had the innkeeper bent back over his own bar with the flat of a knife blade tapping under his chin and his legs dangling a couple of inches off the sawdusted floor. They flashed cheery, inclusive grins at the Dragonbane.
Egar jerked his chin at the girl. “That’s my whore you’ve got there. Let her go.”
“Your whore?” The other Majak’s face was suddenly a lot less friendly. “Who says she’s yours? She’s down here waggling her tits and arse in grown men’s faces, she-”
“She’s paid until sunset.” Egar shifted his stance a little, squaring up. He nodded at the older whore. “They both are. They’re down here getting me a drink and a platter. So let her go. And you two – let him up as well. How’s the poor fucker supposed to pull my pint for me, if you have him pinned?”
The two Majak at the bar were happy enough to obey. Maybe they’d been drinking less, maybe they were just more intelligent men. They nodded amiably, backed off the innkeeper and let him scramble loose. The one with the knife put his weapon away with a sheepish grin. But the guy with his arm round the whore was going to be a harder push. As Egar watched, he tightened his grip.
“My coin’s as good as anybody’s,” he growled.
Egar took a casual step forward. Measured the room without seeming to. “Then get in the queue with it. Or find yourself another whore. You’re not having mine.”
The other Majak’s hand strayed down towards his belt and the big-hilted killing knife sheathed there. He barely seemed aware of the motion.
“You’ve got ‘til sunset,” he said gruffly, almost reasonably, as if trying to put the case to some court in his own head. “I’ll not need long.”
“I’m not going to tell you again. Let her go.”
Egar saw the other man make his decision, saw it in his eyes even before he went for the knife. His hand clamped down on the hilt, but the Dragonbane was already in motion. Across the scant space between them, bottle snatched up off the table to his right, sweeping in, and a braining stroke across the Majak’s head. He gave it all he had, was actually a bit surprised when the bottle didn’t break first time. The other man reeled from the blow, Egar stepped in after him, swung again, back-handed, and this time – yes! - the glass came apart in a burst of shards and cheap beer. The Majak went down, bleeding from multiple gouges in his forehead. The whore got loose and scurried behind her colleague, the injured man crawled dizzily about on the floor, blood running into his eyes. Egar curled one foot back, mindful of his naked toes and kicked the man hard in the face before he could get up. He brandished the business end of the shattered bottle admonishingly at the other two.
“You boys plan to paint the town, you aren’t going to start in here. Got it?”
Quiet. Beer dripped wetly off the jagged angles of the bottle stump.
The two remaining Majak looked at their companion, curled up on the floor and twitching, then back to the wet gleam of Egar’s makeshift weapon. Rage and confusion struggled on their faces, but so far that was as far as it went. He saw they were both pretty young, reckoned he might be able to play this one out. He waited. Watched one of them rake a hand perplexedly back through his hair and make an angry gesture.
“Look, Dragonbane, we thought-”
“Then you thought wrong.” He had his reputation and his age – things that would have counted for something among Majak back on the steppe, and might play here, if these two hadn’t been away from home too long.
If not, well…..
If not, he had bare feet and a broken bottle. And glass shards on the floor.
Nice going, Dragonbane.
Better make this good.
He put on his best Clanmaster voice. “I am guesting here, you herd-end fuckwits. My bond with these people compels me, under the eyes of the Dwellers, to defend them. Or don’t the shamans teach you that shit anymore when you’re coming up?”
The two young men looked at each other. It was a dodgy interpretation of Majak practice at best – outside of some small ritual gifts, you didn’t pay for guesting out on the steppe. Lodging at a tavern or a rooming house, say, in Ishlin-ichan, wasn’t considered the same thing at all. But Egar was Skaranak and these two were border Ishlinak, and they might not know enough about their northerly cousins to be sure, and in the end, hey, this old guy killed a fucking dragon back in the day, so……
The one on the floor groaned and tried groggily to prop himself up.
Time running out.
Egar pointed downward with the bottle. Played out his high cards. “And what do your clan elders have to say about this shit? Stealing another man’s whore out from under his nose? That okay, is it?”
“He didn’t kn-”
“Pulling a knife on a brother? That okay with you, is it?”
“But you-”
“I’m done fucking talking about this!” Egar let the bottle hang at his side, like he had no need of it at all. He stabbed a finger at them instead, played the irascible clan elder to the hilt. “Now you get him up, and you get him the fuck out of my sight. Get him out of here while I’m still in a good mood.”
They dithered. He barked. “Go on! Take your fucking party somewhere else!”
Something gave in their faces. Their companion stirred on the floor again and they hurried to him. Egar gave them the space, relieved. Kept the bottle ready at his side. They propped the injured man up between them, got his arms over their shoulders, and turned for the door. One of them found some small piece of face-saving bravado on the way out. He twisted awkwardly about with his half of the burden. The anger still hadn’t won out on his face, but it was hardening that way.
“You know, Klarn isn’t going to wear this.”
Egar jutted his chin again. “Try him. Klarn Shendanak is steppe to the bone. He’s going to see this exactly the way it is – a lack of fucking respect where it’s due. Now get out.”
They went, out into the rain, left the door swinging wide in their wake. The Dragonbane found himself alone in a room full of staring locals.
Presently, someone got up from a table and shut the door. Still, no-one spoke, still they went on staring at him. He realised the whole exchange had been in Majak, would have been incomprehensible to everybody there.
He realised he was still holding the jag-ended bottle stump.
He laid it down on the table he’d swiped the bottle from in the first place. Its owner flinched back in his chair. Egar sighed. Looked over at the innkeeper.
“You’d better keep that door barred for the time being,” he said in Naomic. Too the room more generally, he added: “Anyone has family home alone right now, you might want to drink up and get on back to them.”
There was some shuffling among the men, some muttering back and forth, but no-one actually got up or moved for the door. They were all still intent on him, the barefoot old thug with iron in his hair and his shirt hanging open on a pelt going grey.
They were all still trying to understand what had just happened.
He sympathised. He’d sort of hoped -
Fucking Shendanak.
He picked his way carefully through the shards of broken glass on the floor, past the stares, and went upstairs to get properly dressed.
He wanted his boots on for the next round.
*
He found Shendanak holding court outside the big inn on League street where he’d taken rooms. The Majak-turned-imperial-merchant had had a rough wooden table brought out into the middle of the street, and he was sat there in the filtering rain, a flagon of something at his elbow, watching three of his men beat up a Hironish islander. He saw Egar approaching and raised the flagon in his direction.
“Dragonbane.”
“Klarn.” Egar stepped around the roughing up, fended his way past an overthrown punch that skidded inexpertly off the islander’s skull, shoved them all impatiently aside. “You want to tell me what the fuck’s going on?”
Shendanak surfaced from the flagon and wiped his whiskers. “Not my idea, brother. Tand’s getting his tackle in a knot, shouting about how these fish-fuckers know something they’re not telling us. Starts in on how I’m too soft to do what it takes to find out what we need to know. Come on, what am I supposed to do? Can’t take that lying down, can I? Not from Tand.”
“So instead, you’re going to take orders from him?”
“Nah, it’s not like that. It’s a competition, isn’t it, boys.” The Majak warriors stopped what they were doing to the islander for a moment, looked up like dogs called off. Shendanak waved them back to the task. “Tand sets his mercenaries to interrogating. I do the same with the brothers. See who finds out where that grave and that treasure is first. Thousand elemental pay-off and a public obeisance for the winner.”
“Right.” Egar sat on the edge of the table and watched as two of the Majak held the islander up while a third planted heavy punches into his stomach and ribs. “Menith Tand‘s a piece-of-shit slave trader with a hard-on for hurting people, and he’s bored. What’s your excuse?”
Shendanak squinted at him thoughtfully.
“Heard about your little run in with Nabak. You really bottle him over some fishwife whore you wouldn’t share? Doesn’t sound like you.”
“I bottled him because he pulled a knife on me. You need to keep a tighter grip on your cousins, Klarn.”
“Oh, indeed.”
It was hard to know if there’d been a question in Shendanak’s voice or not. Abruptly, his eyes widened and he grabbed the flagon again, lifted it off the table top as the islander staggered back into the table and clung there, panting. The man was bleeding from the mouth and nose, his lips were split and torn where they’d been smashed repeatedly into his teeth. Both his eyes were blackening closed and his right hand looked to have been badly stomped. Still, he pushed himself up off the table with a snarl. Shendanak’s men bracketed him, dragged him-
“You know what,” said Shendanak brightly. He gestured with the flagon “I really don’t think this one knows anything. Why don’t you let him go? Just leave him there. Go on and have a drink before we start on the next one. It’s thirsty work, this.”
The Majak looked surprised, but they shrugged and did as they were told. One of them gave the beaten man a savage kick behind the knee and then spat on him as he collapsed in the street. Laughter, barked and bitten off. Then the three of them went back into the inn, shaking out their scraped knuckles and talking up the blows they’d dealt. Shendanak watched them through the door, waited for it to close before he looked back at Egar.
“My cousins are getting restless, Dragonbane. They were promised an adventure in a floating alien city and a battle to the death against a black shaman warrior king. So far, both those things have been conspicuous by their absence.”
“And you think beating the shit out of the local populace is going to help?”
“Of course not.” Shendanak leaned up and peered over the table at where the islander lay collapsed on the greasy cobbles. Settled back in his seat. “But it will let the men work out some of their frustration. It will exercise them. And anyway, like I said, I really can’t lose face to a sack of shit like Menith Tand.”
“I’m going to talk to Tand,” growled Egar. “Right now.”
Shendanak shrugged. “Do that. But I think you’ll find he doesn’t believe these interrogations are going to help any more than I do. That’s not what this is about. Tand’s men are better trained than mine, but in the end they’re soldiers just the same. And you and I both know what soldiers are like. They need the violence. They crave it, and if you starve them of it for long enough, you’re going to have trouble.”
“Trouble.” Egar spoke the word as if he was weighing it up. “So let me get this straight – you and Tand are doing this because you want to avoid trouble?”
“In essence, yes.”
“In essence, is it?” Fucking court-crawling wannabe excuse for a……. He held it down. Measured his tone. “Let me tell you a little war story, Klarn. You know, the war you managed to sit out, back in the capital with your horse farms and your investments?”
“Oh, here we fucking go.”
“Yeah, well. You talk about soldiers like you ever were one, so I thought I’d better set you straight. Back in the war, when we came down out of the mountains at Gallows Gap, I had this little half-pint guy marching at my side. League volunteer, never knew his name. But we talked some, the way you do. He told me he came from the Hironish isles, cursed the day he ever left. You want to know why?”
“Not really.” Tand sighed. “But I guess you’re going to tell me anyway.”
“He left the islands, married a League woman and made a home in Rajal. When the Scaled Folk came, he saw his wife and kids roasted and eaten. Only made it out himself because the roasting pit collapsed in on itself that night and he got buried in the ash. You want to try and imagine that for a moment? Lying there choking in hot ash, in silence, surrounded by the picked bones of your family, until the lizards fuck off to dig another pit. He burnt his bonds off in the embers – I saw the scarring on his arms – then he crawled a quarter of a mile along Rajal beach through the battle dead to get away. Are you listening to me, you brigand fuckwit?”
Shendanak’s gaze kindled, but he never moved from the chair. Horse thief, bandit and cut-throat in his youth, he’d likely still be handy in a scrap, despite his advancing years and the prodigious belly he’d grown. But they both knew how it’d come out if he and the Dragonbane clashed. He made a pained face, sat back and folded his arms.
“Yes, Dragonbane, I’m listening to you.”
“At Gallows Gap, that same little guy saved my life. He took down a pair of reptile peons that got the jump on me. Lost his axe to the first one, he split its skull and while it was thrashing about dying, it tore the haft right out of his grip. So he took the other one down with his bare hands. He died with his arm stuffed down its throat to block the bite. Tore out its tongue before he bled out. Am I getting through to you at all?”
“He was from here. Tough little motherfucker. Yeah, I get it.”
“Yeah. If you or Tand stir these people up, you’re going to have a local peasant uprising on your hands. We won’t cope with that, we’re not an army of occupation. In fact,” Egar’s lip curled. “We’re not an army of any kind. And we are a long way from home.”
“We have the marines, and the Throne Eternal.”
“Oh, don’t be a fucking idiot. Even with Tand’s mercenaries and your thug cousins, we have a fighting muster under a hundred and twenty men. That’s not even garrison strength for a town this size. These people know the countryside, they know the in-shore waters. They’ll melt out of Ornley and the hamlets, they’ll disappear, and then start picking us off at their leisure. We’ll be forced back to the ships – if some fisher crew doesn’t manage to sneak in and burn those to the waterline as well – and we haven’t even provisioned for the trip back yet. It’s better than two weeks south to Gergis, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to do it on rainwater and rat-meat.”
“Well, now.” Shendanak made a show of examining his nails – it was pure court performance, something he must have picked it up on the long climb to wealth and power back in Yhelteth. It made Egar want to crush his skull. “Getting a bit precious about our campaigning in our old age, aren’t we Egar? Tell me, did you really kill that dragon back in the war? I mean, it’s just – you don’t talk much like a spit-blood-and-die dragonslayer.”
Egar bared his teeth in a rictus grin. “You want a spanking, Klarn, right in front of your men? I’ll be happy to oblige. Just keep riding me.”
Again, the glint of suppressed rage in Shendanak’s eye. His jaw set, his voice came out soft and silky. “Don’t get carried away here, Dragonbane. You’re not your faggot friend, you know. And he’s not here to back you up, either.”
Egar swore later, if it hadn’t been for that last comment, he would have let it slide.
March 8, 2012
Just Fine and Dandy
Just spent a couple of days climbing here – my first outing on real rock for about four months, my first bout of serious climbing indoors or out for at least three. At my age you pay a price for that – I am sunburnt, tender at the fingertips and toes, a mass of tightly aching muscles and minor cuts and bruises, and it feels fucking great!!! Never realised just how much I missed those small, judicious doses of pain and being scared shitless.
Also feeling great about:
1) Pete Holmstrom of the Dandy Warhols got in touch and asked if I'd like to reprise my fictional biogs for the band on their new album, This Machine, which comes out next month. Slightly trickier work for me this time around, since there was no SF theme to the new stuff. But working off one of the stand-out tracks from the album, some fresh publicity shots of the band, and chasing my recent penchant for Implication rather than Spell Out, I came up with this. Enjoy.
2) The Cold Commands gets nominated for
3) Y'know, the whole fatherhood thing – just gets deeper, more intense, more wonderful with every passing week. Getting back into Ringil Eskiath's grim, murderous shoes is harder work these days, definitely……..
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