Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 42

The Once and Future Felicity Savage

(From back in the day, when Savage had books out from HarperPrism and ROC)

Back in 1992, I was part of a Clarion East class that included Cory Doctorow, Dale Bailey, Nathan Ballingrud, Pam Noles, and a certain great young writer named Felicity Savage. She went on, still a teenager I believe, to get a book deal and have a few novels out…then disappeared. Even wrote about that back in 2006.

Now she's popped up years later in Tokyo, and she's got her own blog/website from which she's selling new fiction in ebook form, under what look like more than one pen name. She was great and had great potential back then, but I can't wait to see what she's up to fiction-wise now.

The Once and Future Felicity Savage originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on October 27, 2011.

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The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (Mountain)–Entry #24

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. A full-on 34,000 recap is compiled in one place, here with the entries since easily found in the archive.

Millions of alt-Earths died out every year. One experienced mass extinctions due to cat litter and plastics and on top of that nuclear holocaust. Another remained verdant but personless when warlike aliens that resembled large terrestrial sharks declared the human race guilty of marine genocide. Elsewhere the dominant species of intelligent giant raven engaged in biological warfare of such a global type it destroyed them and their human slaves. And so it went, on and on. Trillions lived and trillions perished. Biomasses were inherently unstable. Bags of flesh and bones with brains didn't keep well.

Against this background, the angels' own situation seemed like just one more kind of slow extinction, but it would not come soon enough. In the library, I learned there had once been a war amongst these "angels" for reasons never given, and it had snuffed out worlds…but after there had been hundreds of them, not millions, and that was a good thing. A new angel was inert and cold for thousands of years until some miraculous combination of conditions brought it to life amongst its brethren. They switched from war to special ops most of the time, with exceptions like the extermination of the Remnant. They grew craftier and colder. They lost the thread, didn't realize. Went on anyway. Didn't matter. Was Matter.

I should have felt sympathy but I could not. (But…should I have felt sympathy?)

All I could think about was Marty, standing with her at the top of the lighthouse, having survived the horrors we'd seen walking up. Looking out over the scarred and corrupted ocean and the darkness of the horizon against the shadows of the waves. There was an old-fashioned record player there, in the little space she'd made her own next to the vast beacon that dominated that level. She put on music before we went back down, although I could have left at any time, have dis-inhabited my luna moths, let the skeleton they held up fall to the floor…but that would have meant leaving her alone with the horror…and even though I knew she'd lived with it for months now, I selfishly did not want to leave before she was free of it for a moment.

So she played music, because the music allowed her something to focus on, the sound crowding out the other sounds, the other images trying to creep and crawl into her head. It wasn't Mozart, not as I had heard Mozart, but it was some echo or shadow of a Mozart who had existed on this Earth. This Mozart had lived longer than the default Mozart. This Mozart had grown into middle and old age, and his music had grown with him, so that his Requiem wasn't unbearably sad and yet uplifting…no, instead it had an underlying wistfulness that managed also to be mischievous, as if a fresh green vine spiraled through a funeral plot, its leaves disputing the inevitability of death. And this vine wound through our heads as we descended the spiraling stairs through the scenes of murder and rape and torture that superimposed themselves upon the interior of that place, which was so unmoored from time and space that thousands of realities impinged upon it…and every one dire and horrific and yet at the same time in its repetition of the acts human beings could perpetrate one upon another utterly banal, utterly numbing. If only not so fresh to the senses. If only not so superimposed. If only the dying did not seem to supplicate with their eyes, or to accuse, or to convey an inevitability that stabbed deep into the brain. Did the way only the most terrifying and horrible deeds accumulated around the Grim Lighthouse mean that somewhere the opposite occurred, and why? It was a mystery. It would always be a mystery.

This is all a way of distancing myself from those moments because I can still see each image as violent and immediate as if I were still there, and I must at times think these terrors into a particular cell of myself, and lock them there, exile them from my memory palace…although they always creep back in again, so that if I think of Marty, they slowly appear in the background, gradually crowding around.

Meanwhile, I spend my free time in the library seeking clues about the source of the angels' civil war, clues about the rebel angel I read about before—anything that might add to my understanding. I know better than to seek more clues about my own kind. They'd never have left that information in the library. Gabriel isn't stupid. Or maybe he is, but not in that way.

Gabriel approached me in the library about my surveil of the Earth where the Arctic army continually advances and then hits the time hiccup and starts all over again. It was the first time we had talked since our confrontation.

"What have you learned?" he asked, and I found the question curious because surely none of my initial analysis could match whatever they already knew.

"Nothing much yet," I said, cautious. It was peculiar, how Gabriel acted as if nothing had happened between us, but it was better than his anger. "I notice mostly that the advancing army seems to have some subconscious understanding that time keeps re-setting itself. The European invaders seem to have no such underlying knowledge. So that their efforts in defense are always as vigorous, but over time there is a slight…crumbling…in the will of the Arctic army. It is almost unnoticeable, but in spying on their strategy meetings, there is a barely perceptible weakening of resolve. The words are the same, or almost the same, but they are not delivered with the same force…and sometimes the ghost whales seem to shudder right before the re-set."

Gabriel stared at me, a murderer set in marble. "Can you imagine what we could do if we could replicate this effect elsewhere, Mormeck?"

"No."

"We could stop massacres. We could halt corrupted civilizations without taking more intrusive measures."

"You could delay massacres."

Gabriel shrugged as if it were the same thing.

To forever be teetering on the edge of evil, of bloodshed…was this an existence to be envied?

It occurred to me in that moment that Gabriel came to me because he saw some limit to the angels' ability to analyze, to observe. That somehow he thought I brought a unique quality to this surveillance.

At the bottom of the Grim Lighthouse, where I said goodbye, not knowing it might be for the last time, I promised Marty I would be back. For her, it was just having someone to talk to. For me it was something different. And I feel I am stuck now, that I am stuck in an endless loop just like the Arctic army, because Gabriel is giving me the chance to pretend nothing has happened, to go back to what it was like before…

And so, dear journal , now I drift, half of me reconciled to Gabriel's implicit offer and half of me still searching for whatever it will take to cast them out, to avoid forgetting, to undertake revenge. And another part of me trying to figure out who I am. (Perhaps that is what Gabriel wants? A mountain divided against itself is a mountain compliant.)

Meanwhile, Marty slowly dies as the last keeper of the Grim Lighthouse and dozens of worlds die as they naturally would, because that is the way of things.

I do not sleep because mountains are never really asleep, but sometimes I dream of my avatar—somewhere out there in the worlds, full of agency and freedom, and most particularly free of this dilemma, this situation, where I cannot seemingly move forward. Paralyzed. For a mountain to be paralyzed may seem like a strange thing, but nonetheless…

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (Mountain)–Entry #24 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on October 27, 2011.

Functional Nerds Podcast About Odd?, Lambshead Cabinet, The Weird, and More!

Ann and I did a podcast about Odd?, the Lambshead Cabinet, and The Weird for Functional Nerds. I babbled on a bit, but it still turned out good. We talk about process, labels, doing so many projects, transmedia, etc.

Functional Nerds Podcast About Odd?, Lambshead Cabinet, The Weird, and More! originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on October 25, 2011.

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ODD? Antho Subscriptions–and SF Signal Contest Winners!

Congratulations to Jennifer Brozek, the winner of the ODD? antho contest on SF Signal. Her true-life story will be included in ODD? #2 and she receives a three-issue e-book subscription to ODD. The two runner-ups, Ryan Lindsay and Weird Vision, also receive a free subscription.

By now, if you read this blog, you have a good sense of our new anthology series ODD?, we hope. Fiction that falls between classifications. New translations of stories from the past century. New fiction from great new writers. Targeted reprints that cut across false mainstream and genre lines, many of them from out-of-print or rare sources. Tending toward the surreal, the darkly fantastical. Where else can you get Amos Tutuola side-by-side with Jeffrey Ford, Caitlin R. Kiernan and Leena Krohn, Rikki Ducornet and Hiromi Goto?

Want to come along with us on a wild and exciting journey? Now's the time to sign up. Support the kind of literature you love. Make sure it's nourished, so it can flourish. All the details for subscriptions and more can be found below. We will also roll out a new website soon.

—Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

****

Each volume of ODD? will contain surreal, weird, fantastical, strange reprints (some of them not available otherwise except in expensive limited editions), previously unpublished stories, and new translations of classic and hard-to-find stories. This first volume features, among others, Amos Tutuola, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeffrey Ford, Rikki Ducornet, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Hiromi Goto, Stacey Levine, and Jeffrey Thomas—with new translations by Gio Clairval, Larry Nolen, and Brian Evenson of such classic writers as Gustave Le Rouge, Leopoldo Lugones, and Karl Hans Strobl as well as a brand-new story by Leena Krohn! (Full table of contents here.)

The print versions will appear at the same time as the next e-book installment–i.e., ODD? Vol 1 will appear in print at the same time as the e-book of Vol 2. Every year starting in 2012, we will publish two volumes.

You can subscribe now and be assured of receiving each volume at a reduced price. It's a chance to support a cool new project that brings you fiction from writers from around the world.

—For the 3 initial volumes in e-book form, $21.00 (receive one bonus ebook from Cheeky Frawg's upcoming ebook line if you subscribe now)

—For all 3 initial volumes in trade paperback form, $45

—For all 3 volumes in e-book form and all three in trade paperback form, $56

—If you've already bought the ODD? #1 ebook, we can start your ebook sub with #2

—Shipping and handling within the US is included free for print volumes; outside of the US please add $25

Or, become one of our valued "Oddkins" for $70 and receive the e-book and trade paperback versions *plus* all kinds of…odd and unique extras…with the delivery of your trade paperbacks. (US only offer: Extend it now to an additional year for only $115 total.)

—Oddkins living outside of the US alas must add $30 to cover shipping.

A "Super Oddkin" at $350 receives every volume until we die or the series is discontinued (this $350 value is *guaranteed* with books of equal value written or edited by us should ODD? end early) For those outside of the US, a Super Oddkin status is $500.

—You may designate different delivery email/addresses for the print versus ebook versions if ordering both; i.e., give one version as a gift.

Send a check made out to "Jeff VanderMeer" to POB 4248, Tallahassee, FL 32315, or paypal to vanderworld@hotmail.com - specify epub or mobi (Kindle) formats if subscribing to the ebook edition.

ODD? Antho Subscriptions–and SF Signal Contest Winners! originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on October 24, 2011.

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The Journals of Doctor Mormeck's Avatar–Entry #17

URGENT, for long-time readers: Temporal Distortion Event, Level 9. Extent and Duration of Wave Unknown. There is no time engineer to monitor. Avatar Entries #12, #13, #14, and #16 have irrevocably changed.

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. A full-on 34,000 recap is compiled in one place, here with the entries since easily found in the archive.

I made my way farther and farther East, a Demon within me and angels on my trail. I had a whole century to kill before I could rescue myself but I wanted to be as far from the winter city as fast as possible. I abandoned my idea of traveling incognito and tiny upon tanks or trucks—it took a constant vigilance that made me wary of the Demon somehow breaking containment.

I traveled almost always by night, sometimes as a translucent komodo and sometimes as a human being. I became used to the wandering without a map except the one inside my head, of avoiding cities, towns, and villages. In some ways it was easier because of the war and in others harder. Certain kinds of security were lax and others more vigilant. I watched thousands of soldiers pass by, and as many tanks, from the cover of trees. There were desperate people on the road and off the road, and areas so tightly controlled by Trotsky's secret police that if not for the lack of young and middle aged men you might not even realize that their country was under attack. Some places held more traces of angels and others fewer. I became wary of single footprints in the snow and the sound of wings and anyone who would meet my stare.

Then the snows got worse, and even I sometimes felt the chill, and beyond that the lack of Pavlov—of someone to talk to. The only thing I could talk to had nothing nice to say.

Avatar, do you like being a lackey for nothing, for no gain of your own? Is it important to you in some way?

I preferred traveling in the komodo form, not the human. Being human took more practice, even just in terms of the number of facial muscles; my mouth always felt sore. Besides, humans were herky-jerky and tic-ridden and repressed and unpredictable. Humans couldn't smell through their skins, had terrible reflexes, and no tough exoskeleton to compensate or even a mind-shield. I could read their brains like rows of peeled leechee fruit. Humans were sacks of flesh, blood, and shit that flopped around for fifty to ninety years and then fell over dead. I wanted no part of that…but over time I would learn. You can learn anything if you have a century to practice. Almost anything. I could slowly teach a human shell to smell through its skin, for example, but form follows function—the process would be jury-rigging at best, unnatural and awkward.

Tell me, Avatar, do you think you're anything other than a ghost, an echo? You're a disposable to Mormeck Mountain as fingernail clippings are to human beings.

And the entire way what was unreconcilable within me would hiss or whisper to weaken my mind even as I contemplated trying to excise it by knife blade anyway just to be rid of it.

When you get where you're going, when you have to wait for as long as you have to wait, you'll listen to me. You will.

One night, under a full moon, in an icy cold, beside a lake, I could stand my human limitations no longer. I discarded my clothes, which I had only the day before, managed to steal, and I manifested in my most magnificent komodo presence. My form fled out across the surface of the lake, the moon searing the ice. I wanted some kind of escape. I wanted an escape from a century of the waiting I knew that lay ahead of me. I wanted to escape from my Demon. I wanted to escape from the idea that I was just a reflection, a mutation. And even as I stared at myself in the sheen of the ice, what I couldn't escape was the irony that I felt the most free in an incarnation that was even farther from my true identity.

It was then I realized that another reflection stood beside me in the lake ice.

I held a human child roughly by the hand.

I stood beside the lake with a girl who could not have been more than nine dressed only in a nightgown. She was whimpering as my claws dug into her wrist and she'd given up struggling either because it hurt worse when she did or she'd realized I was too strong.

I recoiled from what I had done, but now that I was aware of her I could not let her go for fear she'd run off into the night and freeze to death.

Avatar, you don't exist within this world—you live outside of it.

She had dark hair and eyes bright with the moonlight and the image of my serpentine head peering down at her. She looked shaken but unharmed, besides the damage to her wrist. She was muttering words —sometimes phrases to ward off evil in a language she could not possibly fully understand, and in other moments sobs of things I could understand: "Don't hurt me. Please don't hurt me. Please take me home." There was a sour stench of fear about her, but a kind of deep-seated defiance too. She was doing the best she could.

A monster had taken her sleeping from her bed and did not remember

doing so.

Now the monster would have to put her back and try to make it right. Except: how would she un-remember what she'd seen? In ten years when she was almost a grown woman, would she remember this? Would she be changed by it? Would returning her now erase all of it, as if she'd had a nightmare and then woken in the morning to find out it wasn't real?

You think you've got me caged, came the Demon's voice. You think you know the limits of what I am. But you don't, avatar. You really don't.

I didn't answer, although inside I shook with rage. Instead, I gathered up the girl in my arms and somehow we found our way back to the cottage she had come from, and, changing size, entered through the window, and I laid her head down on the pillow of her bed. This time, I woke the parents with my clumsy efforts, for they slept on cots on the other side of the room.

You could kill them all, right now, if you wanted to. No one would

ever know it was you.

They stared at me as if I were unreal. They stared at me as if I could not possibly exist. They had not a word between them, and I had no words for them. Nothing that might be of use. I could not even think of what could be said. I could not even know what the future held for the girl, if the parents would un-think me and thus restore her in their minds to who she was before she'd been taken. Or not.

I stole away into the night, headed for any place as far from human beings as possible.

I must not let my attention drift.

I must not let the words of the Demon create spaces between my thoughts.

I must be ever-vigilant.

But no one can be ever-vigilant.

Can they?

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck's Avatar–Entry #17 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on October 23, 2011.

ODD Subscriptions, Oddkins, and More–Last Day at Reduced Rates!

By now, if you read this blog, you have a good sense of our new anthology series ODD?, I hope. Fiction that falls between classifications. New translations of stories from the past century. New fiction from great new writers. Targeted reprints that cut across false mainstream and genre lines, many of them from out-of-print or rare sources. Tending toward the surreal, the darkly fantastical. Where else can you get Amos Tutuola side-by-side with Jeffrey Ford, Caitlin R. Kiernan and Leena Krohn, Rikki Ducornet and Hiromi Goto?

Below you'll find all the information you need to make up your mind. Want to come along with us on a wild and exciting journey? Want to be there from the beginning and see it grow? Now's the time to sign up. Support the kind of literature you love. Make sure it's nourished, so it can flourish.

Going forward, you can also help us by embedded or linking to the video above.

—Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

****

Each volume of ODD? will contain surreal, weird, fantastical, strange reprints (some of them not available otherwise except in expensive limited editions), previously unpublished stories, and new translations of classic and hard-to-find stories. This first volume features, among others, Amos Tutuola, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeffrey Ford, Rikki Ducornet, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Hiromi Goto, Stacey Levine, and Jeffrey Thomas—with new translations by Gio Clairval, Larry Nolen, and Brian Evenson of such classic writers as Gustave Le Rouge, Leopoldo Lugones, and Karl Hans Strobl as well as a brand-new story by Leena Krohn! (Full table of contents here.)

The print versions will appear at the same time as the next e-book installment–i.e., ODD? Vol 1 will appear in print at the same time as the e-book of Vol 2. Every year starting in 2012, we will publish two volumes.

You can subscribe now and be assured of receiving each volume at a reduced price. It's a chance to support a cool new project that brings you fiction from writers from around the world.

—For the 3 initial volumes in e-book form, $19.00 (regularly $21)

—For all 3 initial volumes in trade paperback form, $42 (regularly $45)

—For the next two volumes in e-book form and all three in trade paperback form, $51 (regularly $59)

—Shipping and handling within the US is included free for print volumes; outside of the US please add $25

Or, become one of our valued "Oddkins" for $65 and receive the e-book and trade paperback versions *plus* all kinds of…odd and unique extras…with the delivery of your trade paperbacks. (US only offer: Extend it now to an additional year for only $110 total.)

—Oddkins living outside of the US alas must add $30 to cover shipping.

A "Super Oddkin" at $275 receives every volume until we die or the series is discontinued (this $275 value is guaranteed with books of equal value written or edited by us should ODD? end early) For those outside of the US, a Super Oddkin status is $400.

—You may designate different delivery email/addresses for the print versus ebook versions if ordering both; i.e., give one version as a gift.

Send a check made out to "Jeff VanderMeer" to POB 4248, Tallahassee, FL 32315, or paypal to vanderworld@hotmail.com - you must confirm via email before October 22 that you plan to take advantage of this offer.

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ODD Subscriptions, Oddkins, and More–Last Day at Reduced Rates! originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on October 21, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (Mountain)–Entry #23

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. A full-on 34,000 recap is compiled in one place, here with the entries since easily found in the archive.

I no longer send an avatar to write in the journal on the jungle floor. I write it here, at the heart of me. If Gabriel finds it, he finds me. Thousands or millions of years from now some other Risen species on this planet will find my journal, incomplete, and need to make up the rest of the story themselves. The rest stays with me.

Everything has continued as before, except now I am relegated to watching the endless recurring loop of an alt-Earth where a civilization pushes south from the Arctic. Floating ghost-whale employed as spirit weapons against the pale-skinned invaders eclipse the sun. Psionic walrus riders channel their power through their mounts' tusks, the power sent out enough to shatter an enemy soldier's bones into finely-ground dust. The walrus riders chant for focus as they advance and the enemy soldiers ripple and flop into screaming death and the walruses roar from the vibration of the force emanating from their tusks, will never get used to it.

I feel as if my bones have been turned to dust, but I cannot fall, I cannot give in or give up.

Gabriel: "We gave you speech, mountain. We gave you the kind of intelligence that is considered human. We gave you those things so that you could help us. If you met others of your kind, they would not recognize you. They would cast you out. We are all you have, we are your family."

Part of the price I paid was apologizing to Gabriel for my duplicity, for my "meddling," to acknowledge the debt I owed him and his kind. That I understood I was special, was chosen, was nothing like others of my species—and that I understood what he had done for me. That I was grateful. And not to mention Marty to him, not to remind him of Marty. I did not know what they might or might not have done to her, nor whom watched her now if anyone. The thought of it insufferable, and yet I had to suffer it and to be patient.

Gabriel just nodded and went about his business as if my apology had been expected. He had deemed it time to decant another canister stuffed with angel dust. Time to resurrect another screaming blackened immortal entity. I did not have the stomach for it. I went back sullen to my surveillance because what better proof of loyalty?

The ghost whales sang as they advanced across the barrenness of an alt-Earth stripped of natural resources by an alien race that had dropped by and left again millions of years ago.

The whale-song was a deceptively sonorous psych-weapon that could break eardrums and brought fear to the invaders. The invaders had come from across the sea and had misjudged everything that could be misjudged. They had occupied territory and torn up the land while dismissing indigenous tech that was not inferior but simply different because it existed across dimensions, requiring only unity of purpose to coalesce with stark ferocity. Those who had retreated had done so for strategic not tactical reasons. Now the invaders fell back in disarray, still unable to grasp the scope of their mistake.

This Earth also existed in a kind of temporal hiccup where everything kept happening over and over again. The spirit-whale advance would reach a certain point, re-set, and begin again—so many times that now the commanders of the northern armies headed south, and their civilian leaders, knew like an echo of an echo in their brains what was happening—a subconscious message received from the near future—and in a thousand minute ways were intent on altering their decisions to try to effect some sort of change. Gabriel had told me that eventually the hiccup would feel the combined psychic pressure of this and it would end…but not even the angels knew if that reality would then proceed normally or cease to exist. They needed someone to watch for the signs that this might be about to happen.

And even as I diligently watched and reported back, I also sought other knowledge. After a week, professing a morbid interest, I asked Gabriel to let me access information on my species, and he gave it to me.

Did I remember my youth? Had I anything to add to whatever I would learn? No. I don't remember anything except a kind of awakening, a kind of growth. I remember the vines and the bushes and the trees growing over top of me and the soil and how it all accreted around me and me into it.

The information on my species, which called themselves a name I cannot render into English nor even really understand or articulate, made much clearer the divide between Mormeck Mountain and Pure Mountain. My species is inward turning in its gaze and attention. Our culture is biological, cellular, environmental, a language of texture and anatomy, and though hundreds of miles exist between us on most worlds where we can be found, still there is a quick-silver bond between all of us…except to me. That bond was broken long ago. I don't even feel an echo of it.

We adapt to so many planets because we are born to become whatever our environment requires from us, to intuit the environment so completely that, over time, we understand it more completely than any native species. All of our intelligence is predicated on this turning inward, and within that space, each mountain discovers worlds and worlds of information and experience. We do not needs outer worlds because we carry worlds with us. We do not need to conquer because we spend our lives conquering ourselves, integrating, spreading, allowing a space for other beings to grow with us.

Experiencing this, I realized how different I truly was. I retained the ability to change my cells, to encode them with my intelligence. I reproduced by flinging pods out into space just like my cousins, but I was not like them. Whatever "gift" Gabriel had given me by altering me, it had made me understand the culture that created ghost whales and used walrus riders more than I understood my own kind. "Revenge" would have been a term unknown to my cousin mountains. "Ambition" would have been meaningless. "Love" would have meant something more communal and ever-lasting than I understood love now.

What did Mountains know of property or of shopping or of going to the movies?

Meanwhile, I watched my alt-Earth as some of the angels hid their wings and traveled there and let the spirit whales dissolve them into the past as a kind of strange jest or joke. The most adventurous would wait until the very second of the temporal hiccup before diving in, and thus be subject to any number of dangerous and random possibilities. Those who survived their comrades would find and bring back and restore their memories. It may have been meant as some kind of adventure, even some sort of rite of passage, but I thought there was a hint of desperation and sadness to it. That the angels, Gabriel included, really wanted to forget, but had to disguise that impulse as play.

Before I left the Grim Lighthouse the last time, in that temporal morass of instability, I sent a message to my avatar in the winter city. An incomplete message. A message that may never reach my avatar. But I sent it nonetheless, if only to make some use, some sense, of that place, to deflect the horror of it. Like tossing a message in the bottle into the maelstrom of a whirlpool.

I am my own lighthouse now, sending out a signal through my thoughts to Marty, to all the Marty's. To wait. That I'm coming. That I am beginning to find a way.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (Mountain)–Entry #23 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on October 20, 2011.

Things That Make Me Ecstatic: Twelve Planets Series with Lucy Sussex, Sue Isle, and Tansy Rayner Roberts

Ann just got these titles in the mail from Twelfth Planet Press, the first in their new Twelve Planets series. All three are story collections.

Nightsiders by Sue Isle (intro by Marianne de Pierres) – "A teenage girl stolen from her family as a child; a troupe of street actors who affect their new culture with memories of the old; a boy born into the wrong body; and a teacher who is pushed into the role of guide tell the story of The Nightside."

Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts (intro by Helen Merrick) – "The world is in greater danger than you ever suspected. Women named Julia are stronger than they appear. Don't let your little brother make out with silver-eyed blondes. Immortal heroes really don't fancy teenage girls. When love dies, there's still opera. Family is everything. Monsters are everywhere. Yes, you do have to wear the damned toga."

Thief of Lives by Lucy Sussex (intro by Karen Joy Fowler) – "Why are certain subjects difficult to talk about? What is justice? Why does it matter? Why do writers think that other people's lives are fair game? And what do we really know about the first chemist? Welcome to the worlds of Lucy Sussex."

In my opinion, Twelfth Planet Press is one of the best indies in the world, and this new series is compact, sharply designed, well-thought-out, and featuring a good mix of established and newer writers. I just love it thus far—and Ann's contributed an introduction to the next book in the series, a forthcoming title by Deborah Biancotti.

You can order these books at the Twelfth Planet Press website. But why not go one better—you can also subscribe to the series there.

Alisa Krasnostein is the mastermind behind Twelfth Planet Press, and she's up for a World Fantasy Award this year. She fully deserves to win.

Things That Make Me Ecstatic: Twelve Planets Series with Lucy Sussex, Sue Isle, and Tansy Rayner Roberts originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on October 20, 2011.

The Booker Prize, "Fantasy," and "Mainstream"

An interesting discussion here, based on this quote from China Mieville. I understand why this is a new concept to the interviewer—referencing "those utterly fascinating texts which contain not a single impossible element, and yet which read as if they were, somehow, fantastic"—but it's not a new concept in the larger scheme of things.

As I commented:

"It's an important point China is making, but while it may be new to the interviewer, it's not a new concept. It's an argument I've been making, along with several other writers, for decades. It's also something John Clute has explored to some extent in his criticism, and I think literary journals like Conjunctions have also explored it. The fact is, there are fantasy novelists who read like realists and supposedly mimetic novelists whose world view and approach make them read like fabulists. The importance of stressing this similarity/difference is that it gets us away from using the terminology of commodificaition of fiction and what are often just marketing terms that reflect "accidents of birth." If you're a Kafkaesque writer from Eastern Europe, you're likely to be published in the mainstream. If you're a US writer like Michael Cisco, you're likely to be published through genre imprints. These arbitrary issues and contexts don't really tell us much about the works themselves, or their complexities and contradictions…which is why "genre" vs "mainstream" is so pointless."

I recognize I may be riffing off of only part of China's quote, but it's the part that most interests me and is most irritating in terms of how people tend to compartmentalize literature.

I was just revisiting this, taking a piece of the fantasy lecture I've been delivering since the late 1990s, and expanding on it for the Inspiration chapter in the writing book I'm working on for Abrams Image:

"But, conversely, does it really matter if the imaginative impulse results in the 'fantastical' in the sense of 'containing an explicit fantastical event?' Is it something a writer should worry about definitionally or practically? No. For a certain kind of writer a sense of fantastical play will always exist on the page. This is often what we really mean by the voice of the writer. Talking bears have moved in next door. Does the reality of whether they actually have matter more than the quality of the metaphor? Perhaps not. Consider Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale and his World War I novel A Soldier of the Great War. A Winter's Tale includes a winged horse and other fantastical flourishes. A Soldier of the Great War contains no fantastical elements, and yet in its descriptions, its voice, Helprin's animating imagination behind the story, this novel also reads as invested in the fantastical. The writer Rikki Ducornet can write as lyrically phantasmagorical a novel as Phosphor in Dreamland and an as intense yet fiercely realistic story collection as The Word Desire…and yet they exist in the same country, perhaps even come from the same area of that country. This is the power of one type of unusual imagination."

The writing book is still in rough draft form, but it's forcing me to close in on more precise terminology and an expansion of the idea, so we'll see where it ends up in a couple of months…

The Booker Prize, "Fantasy," and "Mainstream" originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on October 19, 2011.

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The Journals of Doctor Mormeck's Avatar–Entry #16

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. A full-on 34,000 recap is compiled in one place, here with the entries since easily found in the archive.

Did you never wonder why the angels would commit genocide against the Remnant across all possible worlds? Did it never cross your mind? said the thing hiding inside the scrap of Remnant hiding inside of me. Never in the history of shrapnel had such a tiny wound caused such profound complications.

But I hadn't wondered. I had taken the angels' actions as evidence of their arbitrariness, their particularly disengaged form of ethereal evil, as I was coming to see it. I hadn't known that an entity that had shot into my body riding a tiny piece of metal would come along to tell me my assumption was wrong. I hadn't thought that I had anything other than a bit of Remnant inside me. But now it became clear that something had come along with the Remnant.

Obvious because a taste like the sour inner lining of a walnut shell permeated my entire being as I stuck like a limpet to that tank headed East—and something surged out from the tiny Remnant fortress inside of me and attacked my brain.

For a millisecond I froze. In another millisecond I had morphed back into a full-sized komodo spasming and thrashing as if my attacker were riding my back. I crashed off the tank into the hard incline alongside, and from scrubland into forest, remembering to switch to invisible mode soon enough that cries of alarm faded into disbelief…and then I was not paying any more attention to the soldiers above. I was raging invisible through the forest, heading for anything that smelled, through the walnut stench, like water. For there was a fire in my brain as my cells fought other cells. Something had attacked me from the Remnant stronghold, that was all I knew, and as the battle raged, my cells snuck out the essence of my consciousness to another part of my body closer to my tail than my head. But still the invader pressed, and came closer to total control. At the maximum moment of tension between intrusion and escape, I ejected my head from my body, left it rolling and hissing and monstrous and horrible while my neck worked at tying off blood flow. It was an egregiously blunt reversal of normal lizard behavior.

Then I stomped the compromised head into mush. Temporarily defeated, the attacker's remaining cells retreated to the wall of the Remnant scrap before I could destroy them.

I spent a shivery, miserable time in the woods regenerating my head and seeing things blurrily through hastily created foot-eyes while quarantining with even more rigor this hideous, this treacherous scrap. This Demon.

Because that is what the thing inside me said it was, the thing I dubbed the Demon even though it was just an organism like me.

They sought to root out my kind as you will seek to root out me, the Demon said to me, as they have for millions and millions of years, creating echoes of this conflict across all the universes. They saw how we lived upon the minds of the Remnant, unseen, unheard, unknown. Did you think it was coincidence that Remnant expedition came across the angels? Not at all.

I sought blitzkrieg options for this parasite, this high talker who might in fact be low concept—who could tell; was I supposed to believe its stories, its rants or treat it like a fast-talking ring-worm?—but the truth was all I could do is continue to quarantine the scrap and put up an impenetrable wall of security cells…which still could not drown out his voice echoing through my brain.

We survived even those millions of years the twelve Remnant wandered the galaxies in exile. Waiting.

Any attempt to move the Remnant-Demon scrap through my body and out of the most convenient natural or home-made orifice would have meant an unacceptable risk of contamination—as would sending in cell-soldiers to kill the infiltrator.

Is the Remnant in there with you? I asked. For the Demon emanated a presence sadistic and so at odds with the Remnant that it had become immediately clear I hosted not one interloper but two.

For once it did not answer, bluster, or lecture. Instead, it sent further scouts into my cells, but my cells, forewarned, destroyed each one. Whatever the Demon was, it could be countered. It could be contained. But I knew it would be a constant, distracting battle.

So now I limped East with my new slightly leaner head, never able to let my guard down, with only the memorized address given me by Pavlov to give me a purpose.

You're a piece of something bigger, aren't you? the Demon had said, ruminating. Something…tastier.

Even now I had not quite shed the echo of Mountain Mormeck, despite becoming more fully myself.

If this Demon still existed within me by the time I could find a portal and return home, what would I be endangering?

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck's Avatar–Entry #16 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on October 17, 2011.