Max Gladstone's Blog, page 18

Serendipity

Apologies for my radio silence yesterday; the news, as you may understand, was a bit distracting.  I wrote my next scene, but beyond that… by nightfall I felt like I’d spent all day plugged into the Matrix.

I love that all the various branches of police and FBI worked together like gears meshing, conducted this careful and on-the-ball search of the Watertown area, and in the end we found the guy because, when we decided, well, he’s gone, some dude stepped out of his house and said, “Welp, better go check on my boat.”

Nothing shameful to the police in that.  ”The harder I work, the luckier I get,” goes the saying.  But it’s such a wonderful ending: ultimately we do all this work and get the guy because the people pay paying attention.

For now, I’m going to go have brunch.

Two Serpents Rise ARCs!

In lighter news, I am now the proud owner of two ARCs of Two Serpents Rise, the next book in the Craft Sequence!

Sure, my photography leaves much to be desired, but the book looks nice.  A pleasure to hold in one’s hand, too.

I can’t wait for folks to read this one.  Two Serpents Rise is also set in what I’m loosely terming the Craft Sequence—the same world as Three Parts Dead.  Two Serpents follows a different part of the story than Three Parts Dead, but don’t worry if you’re desperate to see more of Tara and company.  There’s plenty in the works beyond this.  I have a big story to tell here, and I’m excited to show you the first pieces of the world beyond Alt Coulumb.

A few more details about this book are floating around out there on the internet, including an early draft cover which we’re in the process of revising.  I’m a little trembly on account of this being the draft the long-lead reviewers will see—of all the silly things, I changed a critical character’s eye color in proofs, and the color change didn’t make the jump.  A small, important shift, but oh well.  For now, I’ll abide in excitement.

Two Days

Two days and I still haven’t been down to Boston.

Not uncommon: I live across the river, by the Somerville / Cambridge line.  We have coffee shops and restaurants and libraries and gyms and bookstores enough, and once those are accounted for I’m content to shuttle from one to the other to the other as the mood takes me.  I used to work in Seaport, but these days I only take the Red Line across the Charles to meet my wife after work, for drinks or a show.  I was born near here, but I only returned a few years back.  I’m nothing like a native, haven’t even assimilated much—like Shen Fu, I live in the floating world.

So I haven’t been to Boston in a while, and certainly not in the last two days.

I went down to MIT this afternoon to meet friends who have been out of the country for the last few months.  Lots of National Guard at the subway station, which confused me at first, before I remembered.  Like normal friends long-separated we talked about everything, which means, of course, that we talked about the marathon.  One knew a woman who was hurt, badly.  The other had trouble making it into the city this morning because of a bomb scare on the Framingham line.  The city shut down cell service, apparently, but you could still send and receive texts.  This didn’t make much sense to us.

About when it was time for me to leave, we received word that Kendall Square might be evacuated.  Another scare, maybe, or just procedure.  People coughed on the subway, on the outbound ride.  I could hear the movement of their feet.  Can I always hear the movement of their feet?  Do people always cough that much on subways?  Or were the voices gone?

A pen is like a knife; to observe is to cut.  That classic move, choreographed like an aikido sword form: step back from whatever, let the experience rush in, then slice it into manageable chunks.  But selection matters, and the slices that first occur to us are no more true than any.  They are just the closest echo of our minds’ diseases.

Today was the first day that felt like Spring—that being the first day the sky doesn’t intimidate you into bringing a jacket that zips or buttons up, the first day you don’t feel the weather’s other shoe about to drop.  Leaving the house this morning I saw an honest-to-God robin eating an honest-to-god worm, which I don’t remember ever seeing before, with my own eyes.  In Davis Square a man played acoustic guitar through an amplifier under budding trees, and in the T stop there a toddler danced on the counter of her father’s snack stand, singing tunelessly along.  And people did talk on the subway, and argue, and laugh, and my friends did return from their adventures with plans for more, and people reach out to one another in a thousand subtle ways.  Brick buildings shine bronze in sunset.  Across the bridge near Alewife station, the lane of traffic bound toward the Concord Pike was stop and go traffic, almost every car inhabited by a single driver.  Up the opposing, empty, lane a motorcycle zipped, two people on its back, her arms around his waist.  All that’s there, and it’s real.

But I will go to Boston, soon.

Marathon Checkin for People I Know

This is a horrible moment, and I’m creating this list in an effort to move some of the text message / cell phone load in my community onto the internet.  My wife and I are fine.  Much of this is redundant with Facebook, but I’m not friends on Facebook with everyone, and lots of folk I know don’t check Facebook regularly, so here’s a list of people who I’ve heard from & are okay:

Steph N
Dan J
Jon J
Vlad B
Marshall W
Matt M
Seth B
Lisa D
Vardit H-C
Richard H-C
Andre G
Jess G
Vicky
Stef F & Anna P
Heather F
Nat D & Emmy M.
Nat & Michelle W-R
Stu & Alicia R
Hyoun P
Mike & Lisa S
Benji S & Emily L.
Sarah M.
Todd & Lynda S
Lauren M
Amy Sarah E.
Anne C
Gillian D
John C.
Dave Hou.
Margaret R. & Josh
Kristin J. & Donald
Ankita T.

Feel free to comment to check in.

EDIT: I’m not posting full names because I’m wary of posting full names in the clear.  If you need any clarification, email me.

Distinct Style

It’s beautiful here in Boston, and after spending all morning writing (something I think is going to be awesome & I can’t wait to share with y’all) and all afternoon editing (another awesome thing I can’t wait to share) I’m about to take a walk and enjoy the remains of the day.  And I don’t mean the Kazuo Ishigo novel.  Or the film for that matter.

On Sunday, with a glass of lightly cut Aberlour and some very nice chocolate, I burned through the end of the Fionavar Tapestry, which was AMAZING and over the top in all the right ways, like the rest of the trilogy.  This series has sold me on Guy Gavriel Kay.  Then, yesterday, jonesing for fiction, I grabbed a copy of Pattern Recognition—I’m a little behind on Gibson.  The contrast is intense, like when you sprint into surf and trip due to how it’s different moving your feet through water vs. air, only in reverse.  I’m constantly impressed by the range of writing styles, even between people working with exactly the same toolset.  Lines, and words, and grammar, remain mostly constant if you don’t want to get all experimental and oulipo about it (not that there’s anything wrong with that)—yet you won’t find two people who use them in exactly the same way.

Not sure if there’s a point to that outside of vive le difference (la difference?).  Writing’s awesome, and so is the weather, and I’m headed out from enjoying one to enjoying the other.

 

Mahabharata, Sentences, and Cons

The weather’s turned all awesome up here in Boston, so I’m loving the chance to abandon my awesome winter coat for something a little more summery.  And I’ve spent all day listening to this sometimes sublime, sometimes ridiculous (and sometimes Sublime) gigantic summer playlist, which may be worth a listen if you are optimistically gazing in the direction of shirtsleeve weather.

Despite my disappearing into edits last week, I’ve produced some cool things you might like to read:

Over on Aidan Moher’s blog, I rant for a while on why the Mahabharata is one of the coolest stories ever and why everyone, but most especially fantasy fans, should read it.  Previous posts in this vein included my praise of Journey to the West and of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
In a slightly more sober note, I attempted on Operation Awesome to encourage writers everywhere to think carefully about their writing on a sentence-by-sentence level.  Slower, yes, but it pays dividends.
It’s now official—I’ll be talking with the redoubtable Ethan Gilsdorf about fantasy and literature at the Newburyport Literary Festival on the 27th.  Cool stuff!  Drop by if you’re in town.  Should be fun.

And this morning I started work on a Craft Sequence novella that has me full of wicked glee.  I can’t wait to tell this story sometime in the next couple days.

Hope y’all are well!

 

Short Fiction + Kay

I tend to write more long-form stuff than short.  Still, it’s been very nice over the last couple days to chisel this weird short post-singularity-space-opera-war-in-heaven-art-and-culture story out of nothing—one of the many virtues of short fiction is that I can deal with an idea and move on to the next in three days as opposed to three months.

Also, I’m about halfway through Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry.  Portal fantasies generally don’t excite me much, but this one’s different.  Since most of the book takes place in an ultraCeltic high fantasy land populated by mythical supermen, the presence of a bunch of folks ‘just like us’ gives the story extra emotional power, which Kay uses absurdly well.  The book depends on my being able to feel exactly the way our fish-out-of-water, Jen, Kim, Dave, Kevin, and Paul, feel at various key moments, and man does it succeed.   Riveting.  Aslo, incredibly fast-paced.  SO MUCH HAPPENS per book.  Trying to describe the plot to my wife last night, I realized I sounded like I was describing an epic metal album cover.

You know, something like this:

Only with more blood sacrifice and magic.  Intense.  A cursory review of the Webs reveals a shortage of Fionavar concept metal, which is a shame.  Someone who can play guitar should get on that.

Days of Recovery

Any training program needs recovery time.  Exercise, after all, tears muscles and otherwise stresses the system.  You don’t get better until you give that damage time to heal itself.  For example: after spending seven straight months sprinting toward done on a novel, one should probably take a few days of joyful rest, doing nothing with any particular purpose.

I intended today to be one of those days of rest, but instead, I was so inspired by the book I’m reading that I took a few hours this afternoon to start work on a random short story.  Rushing back into training too soon?  Maybe.  But I’m taking it slow, and more to the point I’m playing around in a world I’ve never touched before, with new characters, a new setting, new issues.  While I do love the Craft Sequence, it’s nice to take a step sideways and break new ground.  And, heck, ‘joyful repose’ can include writing, can’t it?  That’s why I’m in this game after all.

John W. Campbell Award Nominee!

I was just nominated for the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award!  (!!!!!!!!)  For those of you playing along at home, the Campbell Award is the Best New Writer award in Science Fiction and Fantasy.  It’s not technically a Hugo, but it’s voted on by the Hugo voters, administered by the Hugo Awards committee, and presented at the WorldCon Hugo Awards dinner.  So, um.  This is a huge deal.

I’m blown away right now.  Some past award winners and nominees include: George RR Martin, Jerry Pournelle, Felix Gilman, Diane Duane, Tad Williams (for Tailchaser’s Song!), Lois McMaster Bujold (!), Nalo Hopkinson, Jo Walton, John Scalzi, E. Lily Yu, Saladin Ahmed, John Scalzi, I’m going to stop now or else I’ll just re-copy the entire list.  It’s here—one of those lists where you know almost every name.  I’m honored, and awed, and really really excited to be nominated for this award.  Thanks so much to everyone who voted.  I’ve dreamed of being here.

For those of you who haven’t been here before, here’s a link to the book.  I like it, and apparently a number of other folks agree with me!  I hope you’re all having a wonderful weekend.  I sure am.

EDIT: And here’s the full list of nominees, courtesy of LoneStarCon!

Django, Law, and Wotan

My wife and I caught a showing of Django Unchained last Friday, and rather than drone on about my editorial progress I thought I might talk for a bit about the Wagner in this movie.  I don’t know how much Tarantino & crew kept Wagner in mind while making Django, but there are a lot of cool parallels, as @mattjmichaelson and I found when we sat down to compare notes.

The Ring Cycle first shows up in Unchained during the campfire scene where Django mentions his wife’s name is Brunhilde (or Broomhilde), and Dr. King Schultz labels him a “real live Siegfried.”  Beyond that Wagner disappears from the script, but he does hang around in the air, present though not evoked, especially as the story deals with questions of Law.

Both Django and Wagner’s Ring Cycle revolve in a way around the nature of laws.  Dr. Schultz has the ultimate power, to kill joyfully, without remorse or consequence, because of his position under the law.  Each of his murders (up to the last) occurs within a carefully defended legal framework.   When he offers Django the bounty hunter’s job, Django takes a new legal position, and new powers as a result.  (These are the only new powers he gains in the film, in fact—while we do see him target shooting, we never see him miss!)  Schultz’s power depends on his legal position—for all the lengths the movie goes to show him being a badass with rifle, shotgun, pistol, dynamite etc., it goes even further to demonstrate his skill at using the law to his advantage.  He doesn’t even plan to steal Broomhilde from her owners; he schemes to buy her.  His first explicit violation of law is Candy’s murder—also his last act in the film.  By transgressing law, he has broken his power.

In Wagner, Wotan, the father (and King) of the gods, holds his position through law—at the beginning of time, he traded his eye for the knowledge of runes (writing, needed for contracts), and took from the World Ash Tree a shaft of wood from which he made a spear.  On that spear, Wotan carved bargains and deals with all things.  This was his law, the law of contract, and it binds everyone and everything.  Including Wotan himself!  And this is Wotan’s great tragedy.  He is stuck inside the laws he made to build the world, the same laws that give him his might.  He cannot break free without breaking the world—even when by breaking his promise he might stop a great evil, such as the Ring of the Nibelungs, which grants its holder absolute power provided that he or she renounce love.  About a third of the Ring Cycle is dedicated to Wotan seeking a way around a promise he made—bound by his own spear—not to steal the Ring back from the dragon who holds it.

So here we have Schultz / Wotan, realizing the evil that exists in the world (Slavery as the Ring, which grants immense power to its masters if they renounce love / human compassion—we never see a normal loving relationship among the slaveowners in Django, even Candy’s sister is a widow), but that he can do nothing about it because of the Law.  (In the opera, Wotan starts off desiring the Ring; in the movie, Schultz starts off saying he will ‘make this slavery business work for [him]‘.  Schultz comes to despise slavery and slavers.  Wotan’s story is less clear and explicit, though I think he does, in the end, want Ring and Spear both broken.)  So in the end, he must break the law.  In the opera Siegfried, Wotan opposes the hero with his law-Spear, which Siegfried breaks with his sword Nothung (‘Needful’; maybe this is the Will-Sword?  Though that’s a bit of a reach), shattering Wotan’s power.  In the movie, Schultz shoots Candy, shattering his own power (and protection) under the law.

Opera and film both deal with the absence of law in their final acts.  Maybe (and I don’t have a fully defended thesis here, just spitballing based on my knowledge of the opera) one goal of Wagner’s Goterdammerung is to show the world with no law but that of the Ring, which is to say cruel desire: the gods are silent, and the hero Siegfried falls into the clutches of the scheming Gibichung family, who abuse his faith in their hospitality to enchant him, steal his wife, and ultimately murder him.  Brunhilde responds to Siegfried’s death by claiming the Ring and jumping onto Siegfried’s pyre, which consumes the Gibichungs as well as Valhalla, the abode of the Gods.  The Ring breaks forever, and the world, cleansed, is free to begin again.  (At least, this is one interpretation, very Schopenhauer-ish.  Wagner’s a slippery fish, though.  If y’all have your own opinions about what’s going on in the Ring Cycle, feel free to tell me!)

Obviously in Django Unchained our Siegfried does not die.  But Schultz’s death does end of the world of law, and leave Django in the hands of tormentors and traitors who seem immune to the hand of God.  (Who’s Hagen in this analogy?  Maybe Samuel L Jackson’s Stephen, who, as the head house slave, is ‘pretty low’ in Django’s own words…  Don’t know if I want to press the argument that far though.)  Anyway, Django escapes, and returns—to destroy the Ring (at least part of it) and wreak destruction on the world that forged it.  If we carry the symbolic logic out this far, I think it’s fair to equate the burning of Candyland with the burning of Walhalla and the Gibichungen Hall.  I wonder how the movie would have felt if Django indeed died, leaving Brunhilde to finish the job / destroy Walhalla.  Weirder, certainly, and less like a triumphant Western.

(Another parallel: we first see Brunhilde in the hot box; in Wagner we meet her on the mountaintop, surrounded by fire—hotboxed in a different way.)

This interpretation isn’t complete by any stretch.  There’s a lot in the film that doesn’t fit here—especially the intertextuality between this film and Inglorious Basterds, in which the backwoods sumbitch and the hypercompetent German swap good guy / bad guy roles.  (I wonder if Tarantino tried to get Brad Pitt in Django…)   In addition to all the intellectual games above, I thought this was a great movie, well-acted, compelling, human in the depths of its inhumanity, accessible and complex in the ways it deals with questions of law, power, morality, and justice.  Plus, Tarantino just keeps getting better at directing gunfights.

But the Wagner stuff is pretty cool, too.