Ben Peek's Blog, page 27

Steampunk Revolution ToC

Full ToC for Steampunk Revolution :

I am pleased and very excited to announce the final TOC for my new upcoming anthology – Steampunk Revolution. This book is forthcoming from Tachyon Publications later this year. This anthology is the next logical step, the evolution of this thought-provoking and still wildly popular genre. We're rebooting the steam-driven past in order to start the revolution now.

And full TOC in alphabetic order:

Fiction

"Smoke City" by Christopher Barzak

"On Wooden Wings" by Paolo Chikiamco

"To Follow the Waves" by Amal El-Mohtar

"The Seventh Expression of the Robot General" by Jeffrey Ford

"Sir Ranulph Wykeham-Rackham" by Lev Grossman

"Beside Calais" by Samantha Henderson

"Ascencion" by Leow Hui Min Annabeth

"The Effluent Engine" by N.K. Jemison

"Goggles (c.1910)" by Caitlin R. Kiernan (original)

"The Heart is the Matter" by Malissa Kent (original)

"Urban Drift" by Andrew Knighton

"Arbeitskraft" by Nick Mamatas

"An Exhortation to Young Writers" by David Erik Nelson, Morgan Johnson, and Fritz Swanson

"Peace in Our Time" by Garth Nix

"Possession" by Ben Peek

"Clockroach" by Cherie Priest (new expanded version)

"Salvage" by Margaret Ronald

"Nowhere Fast" by Christopher Rowe

"A Handful of Rice" by Vandana Singh (original novelette)

"White Fungus" by Bruce Sterling

"Beatrice" by Karin Tidbeck (first time in English)

"Abraham Stoker's Journal" by Lavie Tidhar

"Mother is a Machine" by Catherynne M. Valente

"Study, for Solo Piano" by Genevieve Valentine

"Fixing Hanover" by Jeff VanderMeer

"Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil" by Carrie Vaughn

"Captain Bells & the Sovereign State of Discordia" by J.Y. Yang



Nonfiction

"Towards a Steampunk Without Steam" by Amal El-Mohtar (new expanded version)

"From Airships of Imagination to Feet on the Ground" by Jaymee Goh (original)

"Steampunk Shapes Our Future" by Margaret Killjoy (original)

"The (R)Evolution of Steampunk" by Austin Sirkin (original)

Steampunk Revolution

Just a quick heads up that my story 'Possession' will be reprinted in Ann VanderMeer's Steampunk Revolution.

I should start writing that new Red Sun story I've had floating around in my head for a while, as well.

Today's Inflammatory Comment

With all this recent talk of books for children, I find myself, occasionally, thinking that young adult books are a lot like pornography for retired people: I've seen it, but it doesn't excite me, so I'll pass, thanks. It's not really aimed for me, y'know?

So, a question?



Does this excite you?

Over at the New York Times, a bunch of young adult authors and columnists are busy telling everyone that kids books are breaking down the barriers because kids are demanding that they compete with their shit pop music from Korea, video games, and easy access to pornography. Somehow, that means adults ought to read it and love it. I don't really understand why we have to make books for kids somehow interesting to adults. It's okay if you dig the stuff as trash or if you never learned to read at school. Whatever. Kind of wish you'd all talk about cool books, though. Maybe you'd like to try Ben Marcus' The Flame Alphabet? No? On that kids book shit, huh? You know you're sucking up air I need to live? You ever thought maybe you ought to just be better read?

No?

How about senior porn, you tried that?

It's something you can grow into, at least.

Race in Fantasy

Saladin Ahmed writing about A Game of Thrones and race in fantasy:

When it comes to inherited conventions regarding race in epic fantasy, "Game of Thrones" is, in a sense, standing on the shoulders of dwarfs. The Lord of the Rings is the most obvious predecessor to Martin's work, and it's not hard to find subtle rhetorical responses to Tolkien in his books. When Time magazine dubbed Martin "the American Tolkien," it highlighted not only Martin's rather astonishing genius in world-building and narrative scope, but also the ideological baggage that all of us writing in the genre have inherited from our shared progenitor.

And it's heavy baggage indeed, however much we love Tolkien's creation. His half-sublimated wranglings with race are more complex and fraught than either his shrillest detractors or his most fawning defenders would have us believe. But there is some irreducible ugliness in his masterpiece that really can't be convincingly redeemed. The men of the global East and global South ("black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues") are monstrous and evil, naturally and culturally inclined to bow to Sauron, and to make war on the good men of the North and West. The bestial visages of orcs bear a striking resemblance to racist caricatures of African and Asian facial features. Above all, to be dark-skinned in Middle Earth is to be part of a savage horde – whether orcish or human – rather than to be a true individual.

Link.

The Importance of Diversity

The great lie that old writers tell new writers is that your work is not you. Don't take criticism personally.

Here's the truth:

Authors take it personally. A generalised statement, but one that is, more often than not, true. Authors take it personally for a number of reasons. Some are just fragile care bears who need to be kept in a fenced area and patted. Others just never got used to hearing a bad thing about themselves. Even more are just desperately trying to make a living. A bad review--whether the following is true or not--will be seen to impact on that. Other authors are trying to start a career. Behind each author is a new generation, a new group of men and women, each trying to be an artist, to make a living telling their tales, and you're aware of it. There's a finite number of positions available for authors who want to make a living from their work. Criticism, the first stop in having your work out in the public, can be often seen as a measure of success or failure.

I don't really care about the opinions of authors in relation to criticism. I'm sympathetic to some of it, but at the end of the day, I believe criticism is its own form of writing, with it's own audience and that audience is not meant to be author of the book under discussion. I have an academic background and I like writing criticism. The work is best when it's engaging, when it is meant to be as funny and cruel and loving as it should be for my voice, for I have my own critical voice. It exists next to my fictional voice.

I don't use it much publicly anymore, however, because the former was stopping the latter, and fiction is more important to me. On his blog, Ian Mond ( mondyboy ) draws a line between the recent Christopher Priest comments on the Arthur C. Clarke award, and my time spent writing about the Aurealis Awards. "A few years back we did have our very own Chris Priest dissecting the Aurealis Awards. Ben Peek* spent two years commenting on each category.** His critiques were honest and harsh and weren't necessarily met with smiles and congratulatory boxes of chocolate. It probably didn't help that he also mocked the award and those involved on his LJ. Peek was also a lone voice and so when he decided not to bother anymore… well that's when the crickets and tumbleweeds took residence."

I got tired of the personal abuse. There wasn't any engagement with it critically. There was either agreement or abuse, and the latter was pretty direct. I got tired of meeting people and having them think that they knew everything about me. I got tired of the fact that some people weren't nice when we met.

I didn't like that doors were closed to my writing.

I didn't like the fact that people could say to me, "You won't sell in Australia."

Now, in regards to Christopher Priest's post, there's nothing wrong with it. He didn't like something, he wrote a response to it, and in places it's funny, and in places, it makes a point about the literature on show. There are lots of problems in the world. Lots of real world issues, from war to starving children. The opinion of an author on an awards list is pretty tiny and it doesn't hurt anyone. It is an opinion. It offers alternative books. It makes some criticisms. It only drops the ball at the end, when Priest talks about the awards being canceled, because at that point, it's stopping an alternate view from co-existing beside his. It doesn't stop the alternate view from existing, but Priest would like it to die. He should just let that go. On the same level that there's nothing wrong with Priest's post, there's nothing wrong with the nomination list. It's a statement, you either agree with it, or you don't. That's it. At the end of the day, at the beginning of it, that's it.

In many ways, Priest's post is good. A diversity of opinions reveals a strength in a scene, and a range of opinions of what awards should and should not celebrate is part of that. Take a step back from it being personal and celebrate it.

Because the other side of it is here, in Mond's post, in Australia: "What's interesting is how little commentary there's been on the short list from Australian critics and writers, including me. Theres been no claims that the judges for each section were incompetent or that the awards should be canceled this year or that one of the books might have been written by a piss-soaked internet puppy. Instead we get some people note that the awards have been announced, the odd pat on the back to friends and colleagues and… well… that's about it."

He later goes on to discuss how he has not read much of the list. There's been a bit of that going round. People asking what was the last Australian book they read. When was it bought. The results have been pretty predicable, but then, what do you expect?

Australian speculative fiction does not encourage diverse voices.

Always Nowhere

Nikilyn Nevins is a Sydney based photographer. She used to be an infectious disease researcher, a hillbilly, a neuroscientist, and may still be vaguely American. She also happens to live with me, but you can't hold that against her.

This is her new website, with gallery and blog.

Link.

The Journey in Fantasy

"There's a lot of travel in fantasy novels."

No shit, right?

I am currently reading George Martin's A Dance With Dragons and I was reminded of that statement, partly because it is the travel I dislike the most in fantasy books, that meandering, plot padding, vaguely historical tour of a made up land. I've had very little tolerance for that kind of travel since I was a teenager and read a lot of fantasy novels. I've been known to describe Lord of the Rings as a bunch of hobbits walking down a road, stopping for lunch, singing, looking at trees, oh, look, walking, walking for hundreds of pages.

But wait!

A demon!

Half a page later, back to walking for six chapters.

Still, there's no denying that the journey of a character, or a bunch of characters, is important in a fantasy novel. Perhaps moreso than other books of different genres, since the journey brings, first and foremost, a sense of scope, of grandeur. No matter the success or not of the novel or series, that scope is one of the things that fantasy plies it trade in. Some of the work--and indeed, this can be applied to speculative fiction in general--would probably be better served by toning down the scope of its vision, by authors turning their tales more personal, more intimate. I can't really count the number of times that I, personally, have felt that the world was in danger and that I needed to do something about it right this moment and so I set out from home with a backpack and my mates. Maybe other people feel that represent their lives. Who knows. I pity your friends if you do. Still, there is the counter argument that for fantasy the scope, the sweep, the importance of what is happening, is part of the attraction. Take that away and perhaps, like a Bollywood film without dancing, you have lost some of the charm that exists for a lot of people.

For a fantasy novel, it's easy to connect a journey to a strong end goal and the quest is an easy way to solve that. Pick up person A, go to location B, steal item D, return here for instruction H. I remember David Eddings' Belgariad, which I read when I was thirteen or fourteen, did that a lot. It continues still. Steven Erikson's series was not immune to item securing. There's nothing wrong with it as an idea, but it can be a lazy plot device, and Erikson uses it both in both a good way and a bad way in his Malazan series. He did the journey and quest best in Dead House Gates, at least to my mind, with the retreating army struggling from point to point, the assassin who takes a book to a prophet, and the immortal whose memory is deliberately broken, but who wanders the landscape aimlessly with a guard who hopes he never remembers. He does it to less success in House of Chains, where the barbarian character leads his war party and later goes searching for a sword and a horse. The difference between the two, I think, is that the second feels so contrived, so created, that you can feel the hand of the author guiding the characters back and forth, while in the first, the overall result is a much more organic one, with the hand of the author hidden behind characterisation and narrative. It'll be taste that lets you go either way on the decision of what you find works and what doesn't.

Still, there is something interesting in the idea of removing the journey of the fantasy novel. At the moment, I can't think of any fantasy novel without one journey, but I am sure it's out there.* The question that interests me, however, is if by the removal of the journey you can still let in that sense of scope, that grandeur of the world you have created--I guess it's not too difficult to weave in back flashes, use characters from different parts of the world, and so on and so forth. But still, it's interesting, at least as a vague sense of thought and nudging around, a conversation to have with yourself that doesn't require an answer.

* EDIT: I do know it's out there. People are listing them in the comments, but a note for people coming by, I was mostly talking about high fantasy, a terrible term I know.

The Weird

Last night N. and I were standing in the kitchen, cleaning dishes and talking, when were heard a sound. We stopped, unsure what it was. It sounded like heavy breathing. We went to the back door--it was heavy breathing. A deep peeping tom breath every five, six seconds, loud, like it was in the dark. I turned the light on, but there was nothing. Still, we could hear it--in the back room with the windows open the breath seemed to move, the sound traveling along the edges of the house, emerging from the dark like on of the weirdest fucking things you have ever heard. My imagination was on fire, but in a bad way. Neither of us could still see anything and we had no torch and the sound, rather like a large, dying animal, did not encourage either of us to stop from the house.

Eventually, however, it stopped. I thought, "Shit, man, I hope that's gone to fuck over the neighbours." Why not, right? Just last week I learned that my sixteen year old neighbour had hacked my wireless to talk to her secret boyfriend. I figure she owed me one.

An hour later, however, it returned.

This time it was out of the front of the house, the sound creeping in through the open windows. A low, labouring breath. A dying animal, for sure, both of us thought. We could still see nothing and the sound kept up for a while, sounding similar but not quite the same, to this.



In the morning, when we went outside, there wasn't a single track, or disturbed bit of garden, or anything, but the internet had informed us that it was most likely a brushtail possum, either warning off another possum, or in heat. Either way, there appeared to be another possum around, and this did explain what had frightened the cat a month earlier, and the tracks that were leading up to the back door (where we used to keep the cat food, until the cat let us know that, no, some feral breathing animal was getting in the way, there, and she'd like to eat somewhere else, please).

After we had figured out the noise this morning--with such success, my day was already looking productive--I checked my email and found a message from a student in Germany who had had to do an excerpt of Black Sheep in an exam. He said he didn't like it, didn't plan to buy the book, but would I explain some things to him. That made me laugh. That's what education is about. I answered his question, and told him that I was pleased to see he'd suffered, since that's why I became an author.

Thought for the Weekend.

In Australian Speculative Fiction we are rapidly approaching a time where the fight for equality will not be on gender disparity, but instead on matters of race and sexuality.

More Dragons than Black People

I finished my rough draft of the novel a couple of weeks ago and decided I would call it the Godless.

"We no longer live in a world with divine judgment upon our souls. Rapists and lovers, killers and soldiers, it is you and I who decide what is right, what is wrong. It is our rules, our yokes, our morals and our authority that punish and celebrate."

The above is the quote I have at the start of the book. I wrote it months ago, figuring that I would delete it, but it remains. Indeed, I created an entire book within the book from which that quote is drawn. I decided to use it within the novel to detail the world after the gods had died, to convey to readers the consequences of what the war among the gods were.

The a degree, information like this helps the world building, which is one of those things I have gotten into in the last few years. There's something fascinating about turning out a whole world from various ideas and concepts and genre rules. The Red Sun stories, for example, were born out of the steampunk genre and my own concerns with the environment. The red sky, the broken ground, the hole through the world, the people who rebuild themselves from machinery, all of that came when I started welding environmentalism to steampunk, though I doubt much of it is easily seen in the finished work. The stories were never meant to be environmentalism, so a lot of it dropped out as the various plots and stories took over, but you have to start somewhere, and that was the initial concept.

For the Godless, I began with the idea that the corpses of the gods lay across the world, that they were part of the world, and that they conveyed questions relating to mortality, evolution, and creationism. Yet, I still had--and have--to make the world of dead gods believable.

One of the legitimate complaints against fantasy in general, I believe, is that a lot of the imagination in the work is lazy. It doesn't have to be, but a lot of books are, lets be honest, pseudo European landscapes without the scabs and smell, and the characters in them are pseudo British men and women who when they see a black person are more surprised than when they see a dragon or a divine entity. In fact, dragons probably feature more prominently than non-white characters in fantasy novels, a statistic that I have not researched at all, but which I'm pretty sure exists.

It doesn't have to be, however. The first step of world building across the fantasy landscape is done by the knowledge of the genre, rather than individuals. As a writer, you can rely upon the genre to do some work for you. As a reader, you no longer have to rely upon a new author of a fantasy series to create a huge, sprawling, fuedal complex society. Instead, you can rely upon your knowledge of the genre as a whole to do that for you. Just as you can rely upon the genre to tell you that magic is a power that takes time to learn. That knights are brave and when they are not, they have failed, somehow. You know dwarves have beards and live in underground. You know elves are pretty and elegant. You know dragons are dangerous. You know the gods are right around the corner. Different novels tweak things here and there to a various degree--pick your example, basically--but there's a base level of world building that the genre has created, and which both the author and the reader have to engage in, either to subvert, build upon, or go along with.

I don't want to make it seem like I am being overly cynical about the state of world building in fantasy, based on that last paragraph. There are elements to be cynical on--the reliance of European settings, the fact that the worlds are, generally speaking, so white, and that when non-white characters appear they are cultural cliches. Those are real issues, but they are also issues that some fantasy novels do engage with, and try to change. But a genre shared world building knowledge amongst the readership is neither a terrible, nor a great thing. It simply is part of the genre knowledge, and all genres, from romance, to crime, to SF, have their genre knowledge that lays the foundation of world building down for the author when he or she sits down to write.

The trick, then, for the author creating a new world, is how she and he will engage with the genre knowledge, the history, the work done by others, and the shortcuts that exist through that information for world building and characterisation. I find it interesting, myself, to weld my initial ideas into that, to see how they can fit into the genre and the world building, and to how you can change it and go with it. For example, in the questions of creationism and evolution, which lurk behind the idea of a dead god, and the world afterward, I have chosen to deliberately step away from the whiteness of the genre, though for anyone who knows my work, this won't be a surprise, and I've let ideas such as refugees and racial inequality slip into the book with an easy eye, because all of that is important to me. It's a multicultural world, and I do think all novels, no matter their genre, should reflect that.

Anyhow, better finish this up. Got some work to do this afternoon before a meeting and I suspect this is a huge, rambling, all over the place kind of post without any direction in it. But that's okay. Life's like that, some days.