Ben Peek's Blog, page 7

Dead Americans Soundtrack and Storynotes: The Funeral, Ruined

Originally published at Ben Peek. You can comment here or there.

‘The Funeral, Ruined’ is a companion piece to ‘The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, Not Little Boys’. I am still not quite sure how that happened.

I wrote the story originally for Ekaterina Sedia’s anthology, Paper Cities, a book based on an exploration of the city. I had not planned to write a ‘Red Sun’ story – that is, perhaps, one of the ways they get written – and I had certainly not given any thought to writing a companion piece to a story published in Australia for an anthology that would be published in America and organised by a Russian born editor. If I had thought about it, I might have thought that this would limit the appeal of the story, and certainly limit my ability to sell it, and I might not have created Issuer, or Linette, both of who I had a great fondness for once I began writing them. In the end, however, the story was purchased, Paper Cities went on to win a World Fantasy Award, and no one said anything about the story being a companion piece to another, possibly because no one in American had read the Australian published piece in the first place…

At times even I wonder how I’ve managed to stay in print for seventeen years.

‘The Funeral, Ruined’ is one of the few pieces of fiction I’ve read to a group. I am, by and large, not a fan of readings. I find them difficult to sit through as an audience member, and I find them difficult to do as an author, but I did both in a hotel room in New York in 2008. Mostly, it’s the performance side that turns me off. I think most authors are awful, and I think that about myself, as well. I also don’t write to be read aloud. My opinion has always been that spoken word is a different form to the read word, and that there are different tricks, styles, and needs that you ought to do when you do one verse the other. At any rate, in New York, I managed to convince a friend of mine to participate in the reading with me, and we alternated the two voices of the story between us, and I thought came out pretty well. At least, no one threw anything at us, and everyone seemed mostly appreciative when we finished, which you can read as you wish, really.

 

(This is a story note for my collection, Dead Americans and Other Stories, which is available now. The song is part of an illusionary soundtrack that I am putting into each of the posts for amusement, but if you owned the book, you could listen to it in the final moments of the story, if you were so inclined. If you don’t own a copy of Dead Americans and Other Stories and you haven’t read ‘The Funeral, Ruined’, then you should follow the links and buy a copy. If you’re not sure about all the American stuff, it may help to imagine a British man named Chris reading the letters of the story out.)

The Dead American Tapes

Originally published at Ben Peek. You can comment here or there.

 

Well, they’re not really tapes, but I like to imagine those old, 70s film style tapes of conversations when I do interviews. I also like to imagine that you all wear giant headphones while listening to this interview I did with Sean Wright for the Galactic Chat podcast. We talk about Dead Americans, the Godless, and such exciting things like the ethics of reviews, race in science fiction, and so on and so forth. I’m not going to lie, I completely mispronounce Butler’s Xenogenesis series, but I do manage to get ChiZine right.

For those of you without big headphones and giant tape machines, I have a print interview with Kirstin from My Bookish Ways. We talk about Dead Americans, research, Lucius Shepard, and I may accidently call Butler’s last novel Kindred, when it is clearly entitled Fledgling.

Now, off to get the day moving, and to continue pushing to the end of the new book.

Dead Americans Soundtrack and Storynotes: The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, Not Little

Originally published at Ben Peek. You can comment here or there.

I wrote ‘The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, Not Little Boys’ for Cat Sparks’ last Agog! collection, Agog! Ripping Reads.

Cat’s Agog! Press was one of the children born out of the success of Eidolon, a magazine – or perhaps perodical would better describe it – edited by Jonathan Strahan, Jeremy Byrne and Richard Scriven. Running throughout the 90s, it gave a venue for people like Shaun Tan and Sean Williams to begin their careers, and introduced people to the work of authors like George Turner, Rosaleen Love, Terry Dowling, Lucy Sussex, and more. Alongside Peter McNamara and Margaret Winch’s big anthology Alien Shores, which was a watershed for the local scene in terms of the range of quality and content it presented, Eidolon was one of the most influential venues produced in Australia for local speculative fiction, and its influence on a new wave of artists, headed by Cat Sparks, cannot be ignored. Sparks – who was coming from a photography and graphic artist background – would build upon what the previous generation laid down, and with the rise of the internet and social media, bring a much more media savvy and friendly PR face to her high quality anthologies. Eidolon’s greatest flaw was that it spoke to the very limited audience – the old traditional SF crowd, also known as the Old Boys Club – and Sparks’ easiest advancement on the path they laid down was to break into all the new audiences defined by age and gender. Her four collections would establish a lot of new authors, such as Paul Haines, Deborah Biancotti, Rjurik Davidson, and Kaaron Warren, and would pave the way for a lot of new presses to emerge in variations and advancements of her model. Much of the local scene in terms of their online presence and the physical quality of their product owe a lot to her.

Personally, I always found Cat to be very generous to me, and more often than not, right about what was not working in one of my stories. For example, in my original version of ‘The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, Not Little Boys’, I had huge slabs of blank text in the letters, meant to signify burnt pages. I have no idea why I thought it was a good idea and Cat was pretty quick in pointing out to me that it was pretty shit. At the time, however, I am fairly sure I sat around and told myself what a genius I was, since that is usually how those things go.

‘The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, Not Little Boys’ was the second Red Sun story that I wrote. I did not plan to make a world out of it after ‘Under the Red Sun’, but I had enjoyed writing it enough that it just stuck, and I found myself writing this. It was inspired by the wars that I had seen throughout the world, and the growing awareness I had of the huge imbalance that existed between the West and other countries when it came to the West’s capabilities. I found – and still find – it nauseating to read an article that laments the loss of one or two white soldiers while casually listing the number of non-white combatants in the thousands, each a nameless villian to be thrown in a mass grave. I cannot understand the mind that allows such a distinction to be made, and I find it, on all levels, deeply offensive.

The soundtrack today is from the comedian Bill Hicks, who died in the 90s, but whose work remains shockingly apt for the world we live in.

(This is a story note for my collection, Dead Americans and Other Stories, which is available now. The song is part of an illusionary soundtrack that I am putting into each of the posts for amusement, but if you owned the book, you could listen to it in the final moments of the story, if you were so inclined. If you don’t own a copy of Dead Americans and Other Stories and you haven’t read ‘The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, Not Little Boys’ then you should follow the links and buy a copy. Bill Hicks would completely endorse it – or, you know, send copies to politicians in America as a warning, which you could do as well, if you like.)

Dead Americans Soundtrack and Storynotes: Johnny Cash

Originally published at Ben Peek. You can comment here or there.

In school holidays, my parents would take us out into the country, where friends and family lived. We would get up in the dark (you had to make good time, you understand, and we could not afford a night in a hotel) and we would pile into the car, two adults, two kids, and a dog. They would take us out into big, dry empty pieces of land along roads that had no gutters and ended in ragged bits of tar on the side of the road. The trips would take anywhere between eight to twelve hours and my parents had a collection of cassettes that would rotate through the tape deck of the car, and it is there that I learned about American country music, and where I first encountered Johnny Cash.

He was never just a country musician, of course, but my father, who if left to his own devices would alternate Johnny Cash with Australia’s Slim Dusty, didn’t really care about that crossover shit.

Cash followed me a little through the years and when I wrote the first of what would be called ‘Dead American’ stories, it probably wasn’t a surprise that he ended up in there, a figure to juxtapose against the image that the States was presenting to the world under the Bush administration. ‘The Dreaming City’, which appears before ‘Johnny Cash’ both in this collection and in publication, was really a prototype of the Dead American stories, but ‘Johnny Cash’ was always the first.

The form of the story, however, owes itself to the great British writer, J.G. Ballard, and a short story he wrote entitled, ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’. His story as longer, and in the grand scheme of authors who read something that their betters have done, I thought that by cutting it in half I could make a stronger form of it. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but you ought to check out Ballard’s story as well. For the completists of this tale of inspiration, the very excellent Lucy Sussex then went and used the format in her piece ‘Robots & Zombies, Inc’, if I remember the title right, and for a moment I thought the form had reached a new popularity. By all the magazines our faces graced, you can see how it worked out.

‘Johnny Cash’ was originally published in Shadowed Realms, an online flash magazine of dark fantasy and horror, edited by Angela Challis and, I think, Shane Cummings (the latter only did so for a while, if I remember right, and I can’t remember if he had stopped by then or not). It was a fairly high end ‘zine for the time, and Challis and Cummings would launch a few high end horror things later, but the kind of horror that they ultimately wanted to champion had, I suspect, done its dash for the time being, much like Westerns. Eventually, the two faded out much like a lot of small press publishers. Still, ‘Johnny Cash’ started there on Shadowed Realms, and it did fairly well for a little story inspired by Ballard and Cash.

No prizes for guessing today’s soundtrack, though.

 

(This is a story note for my collection, Dead Americans and Other Stories, which is available now. The song is part of an illusionary soundtrack that I am putting into each of the posts for amusement, but if you owned the book, you could listen to it in the final moments of the story, if you were so inclined. If you don’t own a copy of Dead Americans and Other Stories and you haven’t read ‘Johnny Cash’ then you should follow the links and buy a copy, because otherwise Jesus died for nothing.)

Dead Americans Soundtrack and Storynotes: The Dreaming City

Originally published at Ben Peek. You can comment here or there.

In the Australian speculative fiction scene there is a myth that you cannot sell work about Australia.

I heard it fairly early in the scheme of things, in the final years of High School, back when I was starting to try and sell stuff. I can’t remember who I heard it from first, but it was repeated by a lot of writers I met, each of who said, ‘People overseas don’t want to buy anything Australian,’ which was essentially advice to an author to cut out anything cultural, from history, to landscape, to politics, because it was believed that no one wanted to read about Australia. The argument is a tiny corner in a much larger debate throughout speculative fiction about what readers want, and what sells, and what does not. On its global plate, the exclusion of voices that are not white, male, straight, and Western, has given rise to a monoculture genre. It’s also wrong. As is shown by readers who demand diverse voices, characters who are non-white, non-male, non-straight, and non-Western, do sell, and do have an audience, and speculative fiction as will stronger and more equitable as a genre when this is realised completely.

In Australia, years of this debate has resulted in an startling lack of work written about the country and the people in it. It should be said that there is some – the short fiction of Lucy Sussex, George Turner’s novel Genetic Soldier – but for the most, the work is the monoculture speculative fiction that characterises much of the genre. In a country founded on immigration that aimed destroyed its indigenous culture before turning on new immigrants, it is a sad thing to see. There is so much available in the narrative quest to understand Australian identity that it is shame that the belief that Australia doesn’t sell, and is of no interest, has turned authors away from the topic.

Forrest Aguirre bought ‘the Dreaming City’ for the fourth volume of the Leviathan series. The third volume, co-edited between Aguirre and Jeff VanderMeer, had won a World Fantasy Award, and so it was a pretty big deal to be in the next collection – especially for me, since it was my first big, international sale, and it bought me recognition, introduced me to a lot of people, and was by and large, quite positive for me.

It is also a story about Australia and about the search for Australian identity in a post colonial landscape. There’s a lesson in that, really.

(As an aside, a different version of the story would go on to form the opening of a mosaic novel about Sydney, A Year in the City (a second story, ‘White Crocodile Jazz’, which appeared in the anthology Sprawl, is also part of it). For the book, I cut out the non-fiction part of the story, and altered a few other bits. I had not planned for ‘the Dreaming City’ to be the opening of the novel, but once I had written it, I felt so strongly about what it said to me about Australia that the rest began to fall into place. It took me three years to finish A Year in the City, and I think it is one of my most ambitious novels, a book about Sydney and Australia, about multiculturalism, and equality, and where each narrator is written in a different style and voice. I submitted a smaller version of it for my doctorate, but the whole thing has, for the most part, been a book few people have seen. Hopefully that will change soon. My girlfriend – the photographer Nikilyn Nevins – has been taking photos for it and laying it out into this huge, mammoth, insane thing that we will crowdfund/self publish once its finish. It will be loved by maybe the five people who buy it, two of which will be me and her, but it doesn’t matter. Upon our deaths, someone will claim it to be brilliant.)

 

(This is a story note for my collection, Dead Americans and Other Stories, which is available now. The song is part of an illusionary soundtrack that I am putting into each of the posts for amusement, but if you owned the book, you could listen to it in the final moments of the story, if you were so inclined. If you don’t own a copy of Dead Americans and Other Stories and you haven’t read ‘The Dreaming City’ then you should follow the links and buy a copy, because it’s good for you – and the new body I am purchasing, one bone at a time. I have a toe now.)

Dead Americans Soundtrack and Storynotes: There is Something So Quiet and Empty Inside of You it Mus

Originally published at Ben Peek. You can comment here or there.

 

I began writing ‘There is Something So Quiet and Empty Inside of You That it Must be Precious’ after I read an article about a mosque being burned to the ground.

I don’t remember where exactly that I saw it, not now, but I remember that it was in Missouri, and it was a small little thing that served fifty families or thereabouts. I also remember that the thing that caught my eye about it was that it had been the second attempt to burn it down. After reading it, I had this strong image of a cop standing outside it, a body burned up inside, and the image of the teeth, clenched in death.

I wrote it originally for Deb Layne’s next volume in the excellent anthology series, Polyphony (Forrest Aguirre stepped in for Jay Lake on this volume, but more of Forrest tomorrow). Deb is one of the best people I’ve met and was behind my book, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth. She gave me a chance to push the boundaries in that book, and the success of the narrative in ‘There is Something So Quiet…’ owes a lot to her confidence and support then. Unfortunately, the economics of the world conspired, and the eighth volume of Polyphony didn’t happen, and in the intervening years, I never tried to sell the story elsewhere. I had never imagined it being elsewhere until last year, when myself and Stephen Michell were going through Dead Americans. I wanted to put it in because I considered it the companion piece to the final story in the book, ‘theleeharveyoswaldband’, which Deb (along with Jay Lake) published in the seventh volume of Polyphony. Music links together the two pieces, and whatever else you wish to decide is, most likely, there as well – but the link between the two is also the opportunity and support Deb Layne provided in the work and myself.

‘There is Something So Empty and Quiet Inside of You That It Must be Precious’ is a story that I get a deep personal satisfaction out of the structure of. It is one of the rare stories I have written that I feel, when I go over it, that the last line unlocks a deeper, more important meaning to the piece, one that allows for a second reading to take place. As with all things, the mileage of the reader varies, and certainly, in my experience, what the author often thinks and feels is at times dramatically different to the reader, which is one of the joys of being read, but in this particular case, I do feel a deep sense of something falling into place exactly how I wanted it to do so, and for that, I have always thought well of it.

Well, that and the fact that it has the longest title I have ever written, which is its own prize if, like me, you have a long history of people telling you how awful your titles are.

 

(This is a story note for my collection, Dead Americans and Other Stories, which is available now. The song is part of an illusionary soundtrack that I am putting into each of the posts for amusement, but if you owned the book, you could listen to it in the final moments of the story, if you were so inclined. If you don’t own a copy of Dead Americans and Other Stories and you haven’t read ‘There is Something so Empty and Quiet Inside of You That it Must Be Precious’ then you should follow the links, and buy a copy, because it’s good for you. And it saves a poor, starving American from being devoured on the road by capitalist monsters that cannot be described for all the Lovecraftian reasons.)

Lucius Shepard

Originally published at Ben Peek. You can comment here or there.

 

In the later years of his life, Lucius Shepard claimed to be uncomfortable in America, but he always returned to it. In such a way, I thought, it often mirrored the relationship his fiction had within the speculative fiction genre.

He died on the 18th of March and I am saddened greatly by the news. I met him online years ago, hanging out on the old Nightshade Boards. We would swap jokes and watch INXS Rockstar, despite the fact that neither of us liked INXS (there was quite a few of us in on it, and I don’t think any of us liked INXS, actually). I’d send him music, occasionally. I meant to do send him more in the last few months, but I could never find anything I thought he’d like. Besides the jokes and shit we’d spend our time doing – and which form the majority of my relationship with him – I cannot ignore the fact that he was very generous to me as a new writer. I remember being surprised when he tracked down and read some of my stuff, and being very grateful when he helped me out during a bad time with writing. Lucius got nothing out of that, but he gave his time, and I was always aware of the generousity of the act. I remember the first time I was in the States giving him a call from the hotel I was in – I was at the World Con, and he hadn’t been able to come, and said I should give him a call, I think mostly so he could gossip, because he loved that, as well.

I liked him very much.

I like his fiction, as well, and I wanted to talk about that, here, for a lot of people ought to read it. It was unique, both in terms of voice and content, with these long, looping sentences and protagonists who were unlike others in the genre. Often male, they were informed by a working, or lower class existence, quite often at the end of the downtrodden path, or they were symbolic figures who represented a socio of cultural interest Shepard had. He was hugely influenced by the struggles of men and women in Central America, and that could be felt throughout his work, but other things, such as the plight of hobos on the rails, and the justice given to cops who racially targeted and shot innocents in New York, also inspired him. The latter two can be found in two small books, the first called Two Trains Running, and the second, Floater. Both are excellent.

Shepard’s body of work often felt to me to be divided into two camps, that of the eighties and early nineties, and that which came after a break, in the late nineties until now. The early work, defined by novels like Green Eyes and Life During Wartime, and collections such as The Jaguar Hunter and the Ends of the Earth, did not seem as focused in its intent as the later work to me. At times, it felt very visual, as if the strangeness of his worlds held him captive, and this is probably best examplified in the excellent novella, ‘the Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter’, in which a woman enters the body of the huge and comatose dragon Griaule, and discovers the life within it. There is a hallucinogenic quality to it, one that while still present in the later work, feels more prominent in the first half of his career, as if it were often guiding and informing his work, and not merely a part of it.

In the second half, the work felt as if became more focused on character, and themes. Viator, perhaps the best of the later comparisons to ‘the Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter’, told the story of three men on an abandoned freighter, but Shepard took the hallucinogenic quality of his writing, and structurally changed it – each paragraph would open with a single sentence, before the rest of it unfolded in a long, winding complex one – while guiding his narrator clearly through the book. A fine book, the ending was marred by Shepard’s personal life at the time, and he returned to it to fix it in an edition called Viator Plus later (he added an extra twenty thousand words to it, from what I understand). Nevertheless, it is not the strongest of his work at the time, I feel. That I believe was Floater and another book, entitled A Handbook for American Prayer, which told the story of an ex-con who, upon being released, found fame for work he had written in jail.

Most of Shepard’s work sat at a novella length, and entirely difficult and bitch of a length to sell, especially to the readers of a genre for who bigger books mean more immersion, and are often reluctant to buy smaller ones. But the immersive quality of his work was never in doubt: collections such as Trujillo and Dagger Key were huge, mammoth beasts, made from a dozen or so pieces that when fitted together, could compete with any series. The stories within those two collections were uniformly excellent, made from inspired years, and I believe they are better works than the Jaguar Hunter, for which Shepard won a World Fantasy Award and helped greatly establish him early in his career.

There was also the Dragon Griaule, released in the final years of his life, an excellent collection made up of all the Griaule pieces that revealed an amazingly complex and full fantasy landscape few series could equal. Lucius was never shy about admitting that he hated fantasy – “I can’t stand elves and shit,” he said to me more than once – and, much though he would probably want it another way, his creation of Griaule, the six thousand feet long comatose, but malevolent dragon, will persist as one of his most enduring works, and rightly so.

Many people will write many things about Lucius Shepard, both as a person, and as an author, but the one thing I do hope is that you, if you have not read his work, or have not invested in the depth and complexity of it, do so in the days and months and years of his passing.

Dead Americans Released

Originally published at Ben Peek. You can comment here or there.

 

Today is the release of my collection, Dead Americans and Other Stories.

It is a book made from around eighteen years of writing and publishing short fiction, and primarily draws from two strands of my work, the first being my Dead American stories, and the second being my Red Sun stories.

I picked the stories that appear here because I believe they provide the most complete vision of myself as an author while also keeping to the dark, weird fantasist vibe going through the book. It features stories where a band is named after the murderer of a dead president, where the work of Octavia E. Butler is turned into an apocalypse meta-narrative, and where John Wayne visits a Wal-Mart. It presents a world where a dying sun shines over a broken, bitter landscape and men and women tattoo their life onto their skin for an absent god. It has a girl who was in a band that wasn’t very good, Mark Twain dreaming of Sydney, and it answers a questionnaire you never read.

It is, I think, pretty cool, and it has something for everyone, and occasionally nothing for the rest.

However, like the majority of short story collections released in this day and age, it needs to be supported by people, and shared around. Dead Americans will succeed or fail on how you talk about it, especially at the start here, and so I ask you, if you’ve enjoyed the book itself, or enjoyed one of the stories when they first appeared, or anything else I’ve read, to please share the details of the book around.

Thanks for your support,

Ben.

 

Advance Reviews.

 

“Ten speculative fiction stories illuminate the talent of this Australian author… Failure is always an option for Peek’s protagonists, but even if they can never reach the heights to which they aspire, they can at least envision them, a rarity in a field that too often rejects progress. Although Peek’s appropriation of other people’s lives for his own purposes can be disquieting, readers will be seduced by the outrage that drives much of his fiction and Peek’s undeniable skills as a writer.”

–Starred Review, Publishers Weekly.

 

“The strange stories of Australian author Ben Peek resist categorization, freely sampling from elements of horror, postmodern metafiction, SF, alternative history, and fantasy. But then hybridization is one of his main themes, with different selves often occupying the same body, or, confusing matters even more, the same self in different bodies. Making things all the more difficult, and interesting, is the fact that in Peek’s world none of these mixed parts get along.”

–The Star.

 

 

“In some respects though, reading Dead Americans, which collects some of his best work over the last decade, is the best way to discover him.  You get to see a good range of work and you get to see a consistent facility with words and style.  I have no reservation in saying that he’d be one of Australia’s best writers.  He demonstrates in Dead Americans, the ability to play inside the science fiction genre, riffing off it’s history or building dark futures so real that you shake the ash from your coat after reading. Then with seeming ease he will walk you into some fractured liminal zone between genres where you don’t quite know where you stand or what the rules are.”

–Adventures of a Bookanaut.

 

“Peek shows a good understanding of what it is to be human as well as the ability to shed light on the subject through the bizarre and absurd. Some of the stories, such as “There is Something So Quiet and Empty Inside of You It Must Be Precious,” did not work as much for me but they were still enjoyable to read for the writing ability that is on display with every word of the book. There are other stories, such as “The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, Not Little Boys” and “John Wayne,” that are just masterful both in their concept and execution. It is clear from this collection that Peek is a literary force to be reckoned with.”

–Examiner.com

 

Artists in Australia: Nothing But Scum

Originally published at Ben Peek. You can comment here or there.

“Artists like everybody else are entitled to voice their political opinions, but I view with deep concern the effective blackballing of a benefactor, implicit in this decision, merely because of its commercial arrangements.”

–George Brandis, Minister for Arts.

 

It’s hard to be an artist in Australia.

It’s hard for a number of reasons, but beyond logistical reasons such as population, culturally, the truth is, Australia has not had much time for the arts. The current Minister for the Arts, George Brandis, for example, is currently displaying that in the above quote, taken from the resent Transfield and Biennale disagreement, in which Artists protested against the corporations involvement with refugee detention centres (a job they campaigned for through donations in the recent election and were subsequently rewarded, resulting in the Red Cross being fired). The response from the government, who were criticised for their refugee program through this act, resulted in a torrent of angry politicians, from Malcolm Turnball who called it “viscious ingratitude” on the part of the artists, to George Brandis who decided that, well, maybe the Australian Government would just stop funding the Biennale. He said it as if, somehow, conservative Australian Governments had a long history of supporting the Arts, and he said it also without one moment of self awareness as, in his other portfolio as Attorney General, Brandis continued to campaign for racial vilification laws to be removed because it violated freedom of speech.

In case you think that’s an isolated case in the Australian Art Landscape, allow me to present Prime Minister Abbott comments, when responding to a question about Chris Kenny’s lawsuit against the satirical political show, the Hamster Wheel, for a portrayal of him fucking a dog.

Asked by 2GB’s Ben Fordham on Thursday whether the ABC’s legal defence of the show was a good use of taxpayers’ money, rather than apologising to Kenny, the prime minister said it was a “fair question”.

“The point I make is that government money should be spent sensibly and defending the indefensible is not a very good way to spend government money,” Abbott said.

“Next time the ABC comes to the government looking for more money, this is the kind of thing that we would want to ask them questions about.”

The response, strikingly similar to Brandis’, reveals not only the Government’s opinion against anyone who criticises them, but also their deep, abiding disgusting for artists of all kinds.

It is, as I said, hard to be an artist in Australia.

Dead Americans and ‘Upon the Body’

Originally published at Ben Peek. You can comment here or there.

 

Reviews for Dead Americans and Other Stories are starting to emerge.

Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review and said nice things:

“Ten speculative fiction stories illuminate the talent of this Australian author (A Year in the City). Primarily focused on short fiction, Peek has written about two dozen short works in a variety of venues in the decade and a half since he was first published; this collection represents the best of that body of work. Herein can be found a John Wayne caught in a struggle for the soul of America, famed science fiction author Octavia Butler cast in the lead role of a Butler-style post-apocalyptic tale of asymmetric relationships, Mark Twain drawn into the brutal conflicts of colonial Australia, and immortals who regret too late the decisions that sent them into a second, inhuman life. Also included is a short but informative introduction to Peek and his work by Rjurik Davidson. Failure is always an option for Peek’s protagonists, but even if they can never reach the heights to which they aspire, they can at least envision them, a rarity in a field that too often rejects progress. Although Peek’s appropriation of other people’s lives for his own purposes can be disquieting, readers will be seduced by the outrage that drives much of his fiction and Peek’s undeniable skills as a writer.”

It also picked up a nice notice in the Toronto Star:

The strange stories of Australian author Ben Peek resist categorization, freely sampling from elements of horror, postmodern metafiction, SF, alternative history, and fantasy. But then hybridization is one of his main themes, with different selves often occupying the same body, or, confusing matters even more, the same self in different bodies. Making things all the more difficult, and interesting, is the fact that in Peek’s world none of these mixed parts get along.

Can’t complain, hey?

In other news, John Joseph Adams has picked up my story, ‘Upon the Body’ for Nightmare Magazine. It’ll appear somewhere in the future, and I’ll let people know when, naturally. It’s a Red Sun story – which means that there two new ones this year.