Matt Ruff's Blog, page 29
February 19, 2016
Transcript of my conversation with Paul Constant (& more!)
The longer I keep my eyes closed, the deeper my thoughts become.
Some end-of-publication-week notes:
* A transcript of my onstage Q&A with Paul Constant is up at the Seattle Review of Books. If you couldn’t make it to the Elliott Bay event and are curious what you missed, check it out.
* I also did a Reading List of “5 favorite books that mix real and supernatural horrors” with the A.V. Club’s Ryan Vlastelica. You can check that out here.
* Meanwhile, over at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy blog, Sam Reader has put together a handy author primer for people new to my work who want to know which Matt Ruff book to read first.
* A reminder: I’ll be at Seattle Mystery Bookshop TOMORROW at noon, hanging out and signing books.
* Signed copies of Lovecraft Country are also now available at the University Book Store (where I’ll be reading on March 4), Elliott Bay Book Company, Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, and of course from Secret Garden Bookshop.
February 18, 2016
Noon signing SATURDAY at Seattle Mystery Bookshop
Had another good reading last night, at Third Place Books—thanks to everyone who braved the downpour and came out.
My next event is tomorrow SATURDAY, February 20, at noon, at Seattle Mystery Bookshop. I’ll be hanging out, chatting, and signing books. [Sorry for the confusion, but when I wrote this post I was under the impression that today was Friday. N.B., it’s not.]
You can also catch me next Thursday, the 25th, at Queen Anne Book Company (reading starts at 7 PM), and on Friday, March 4, at the University Book Store (7 PM). In between, I’ll be taking a trip down to Oregon, appearing at Sunriver Books & Music at 5 PM on Saturday, February 27, and at Powell’s City of Books at Burnside at 7:30 PM on Sunday, February 28. [N.B. #2 — these dates and times are all correct.]
February 17, 2016
Reading tonight at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park
Last night’s launch event at Elliott Bay was amazing—many thanks to the staff, my onstage interviewer Paul Constant, and all the friends and fans who came out.
If you’re in the Seattle area and would like another chance to catch my act, I’ll be appearing tonight at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, starting at 7 PM.
I have a few more Seattle events coming up in the near future, as well as readings in central Washington, Portland and Sunriver, Oregon, and Vancouver, BC; check the appearances tab for the complete schedule.
February 16, 2016
Lovecraft Country on sale today
It’s hard to believe, but publication day is finally here! Some quick notes:
* The book should be available at your local indie bookstore, but you can also order online using one of the links on the Lovecraft Country main page. For fans outside the U.S., Book Depository is a good bet; or if you want a signed copy, drop an email to Secret Garden Bookshop.
* In addition to the hardcover and ebook editions, there’s also an unabridged audiobook, read by Kevin Kenerly.
* In last Friday’s Seattle Times, Nisi Shawl writes that Lovecraft Country is “bound to appeal to any reader who wants to delve into the strangeness of our land’s racial legacy.” Over at the Seattle Review of Books, Edward Austin Hall has some other very nice things to say about the novel. Sam Reader of the Barnes & Noble SF and Fantasy blog calls it “a compulsively readable horror-fantasy.” At Tor.com, Alex Brown asks, “Is it too early to declare Lovecraft Country my favorite book of 2016?” And Cory Doctorow’s rave review, an advance excerpt of which appears on the book’s back cover, is posted in full today on BoingBoing.net.
* I’ll be appearing tonight at Elliott Bay Book Company, starting at 7 PM. I’ll be reading from the novel, talking onstage with Seattle Review of Books cofounder Paul Constant, taking questions from the audience, and signing books.
* If you can’t make it to tonight’s launch event, you can also catch me tomorrow night at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, starting at 7 PM.
February 11, 2016
In five days
Lovecraft Country goes on sale next Tuesday. Six books into my career you’d think I’d be jaded about this stuff, but in fact I’m excited enough that it’s been difficult to focus lately. So here are some quick notes:
* If you haven’t done so already, you can download a preview of the novel in PDF format. My book tour schedule is here. If you’d like to get a signed copy but can’t make it to any of my appearances, the folks at Secret Garden Bookshop can hook you up (you can contact them by phone at 206-789-5006 or via email, and they do ship internationally).
* The book has been getting some great early buzz: Next week’s Booklist gives Lovecraft Country a starred review, and Bookpage calls it “vastly entertaining.” Amazon.com has selected Lovecraft Country as one of its best science fiction and fantasy books of the month. And today I woke up to find that Aaron Coats at the Chicago Review of Books had written me this nice love letter.
* Also being published next Tuesday: Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, another Lovecraft-themed story with an African-American protagonist. I’ve been hearing rumblings about this one for a while and am very curious to check it out.
* Via this morning’s Twitters: Twentieth Century Fox has given a green light to an adaptation of Margo Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures, about a group of African-American women who worked as computers for NASA during the Cold War.
* Another severed human foot has washed ashore in the Pacific Northwest. As long-time blog readers know, this happens often enough to be a thing.
* And finally, in the political realm, H.P. Lovecraft, like Donald Trump, continues his inexorable march towards total world domination:
January 26, 2016
Lovecraft Country PREVIEW
Three weeks to publication! For the impatient and the curious, here’s a preview to whet your appetite: a PDF of the first 23 pages of the novel.
And for the still-curious, here’s a post-preview FAQ:
Are there fantasy or supernatural aspects to the story?
Yes. The fantastical elements ramp up slowly, but part of the conceit of Lovecraft Country is that Atticus and George get to star in real-life versions of their favorite weird tales. Each of the novel’s chapters, in addition to advancing the main plot, has a mini-adventure focused on a different member of Atticus’s extended family. I won’t spoil it, but the chapter titles hint at what you’re in for: “Dreams of the Which House”; “Abdullah’s Book”; “Hippolyta Disturbs the Universe”; “Jekyll in Hyde Park”; “The Narrow House”; “Horace and the Devil Doll”; and “The Mark of Cain.”
Are any of the main characters women?
Yes. Atticus’ aunt Hippolyta, his childhood friend Letitia Dandridge, and Letitia’s sister Ruby are all major characters with their own subplots.
Does Cthulhu make an appearance?
In the novel, the Cthulhu Mythos is fiction, but the characters encounter a number of real-world analogues to Lovecraft’s creations. For example, in “Abdullah’s Book,” George and the members of his Freemasons’ lodge sneak into a museum after hours to steal a copy of what is essentially the Necronomicon. Oh, and that big thing busting branches in the woods is… well, you’ll find out.
I’ve never read any Lovecraft. Will the story still make sense to me?
Yes. You may miss the odd allusion, but the novel is self-contained and tells you everything you need to know.
Sounds awesome! When can I read the whole thing?
The novel’s on-sale date is February 16th, but you can preorder it right now from your local indie bookstore, or through the links on the Lovecraft Country page of my website.
What if I want a signed copy?
Check the appearances tab for the current schedule of where I’ll be reading and signing books. I’ll also be signing stock at other bookstores and will post on the blog when I’ve done so. Finally, you can always order signed copies of my books from Secret Garden Bookshop (phone 206-789-5006 or drop them an email)—they ship anywhere, including internationally.
January 21, 2016
Proofreading Fool on the Hill, 28 years later
cover illustration by Dietrich Ebert
This spring, Grove Press will be publishing a new edition of Fool on the Hill, with a new design, layout, and cover art.
The redesign meant that the book had to go through copy editing and proofreading again, which meant that I had to reread it. In the past, revisiting Fool has always been a bit weird for me. Since it is a first novel, and one I wrote more than half a lifetime ago, I’ve generally compared it to looking at my old high school yearbook: there’s a pleasant sense of nostalgia undercut by a tendency to wince at my younger self’s lifestyle choices (that hair? really?).
This time was different, though. Maybe it’s turning 50, but I found I was able to appreciate the book entirely on its own terms for the first time in decades. I really liked it.
There were a lot of little bits of business that I’d completely forgotten. For example, I was amused to realize that one of the talking dogs in the novel—Bucklette, the evil Republican Collie—was almost certainly inspired by Ann Coulter, who was a student at Cornell at the same time I was. (We only met once that I can recall, but she was already infamous as a co-founder of the liberal-baiting Cornell Review. Some things haven’t changed.)
About the copy editing: I mentioned this in a previous post, but just to reassure longtime fans, there have been no alterations to the original text, beyond the correction of some very old spelling and punctuation errors. I even rejected a number of suggested grammar fixes, on the grounds that 22-year-0ld me knew when he wanted to use an unorthodox verb tense. But Gnossos Pappadopoulis’s name is finally spelled correctly.
The new edition should be available sometime in May, and an updated version of the ebook, free of the OCR errors that plagued the original, should come online at around the same time. I’ll post again when I have a more exact date.
January 19, 2016
It’s (really!) a book
cover design and illustration by Jarrod Taylor
Last Friday the mailman brought me the first copy of the finished Lovecraft Country. This photo doesn’t do it full justice, but it’s a thing of beauty. Hardcover, with cloth pasted over boards, like the Hardy Boy books I had as a kid. The aging effect that was used on the ARCs has been amped up even further, so that it looks and feels as if it really could be that old. Very cool, like an artifact from an imaginary past.
The official publication date, February 16, is just four weeks away now. I’ll be reading and signing books that evening at 7 PM at Elliott Bay Book Company; in the following days and weeks I’ll be doing additional readings in Seattle, Portland (OR), Sunriver, Wenatchee, Leavenworth (WA), and Vancouver, BC. Hope to see you there!
January 1, 2016
December 22, 2015
Star Wars (SPOILERS!)
I saw it with Lisa over the weekend and we did enjoy ourselves. The Force Awakens benefits enormously by comparison to the prequels, and we’d made a conscious decision to not think too hard and just have fun, so long as it didn’t totally suck, which it didn’t. But afterwards, when we switched our brains back on and started talking about it, we realized there was a lot of stuff that either didn’t work for us or should have been better.
The main issue is that the film tries to do too much: Introduce a slew of new characters, bring back the old cast for an encore, atone for the prequels, lay the groundwork for future films, deliver as much fan service as possible, etc., etc., with the result that the actual story ends up being repeatedly shortchanged. There were characters and plot points that felt more like placeholders for future development: “There’s not much here now, but come back for Episode VIII (or IX) and you’ll be amazed!”
Some thoughts:
* Lisa and I agree that Rey was the best part of the movie and the core of what could have been a much stronger film. Not surprisingly, she’s got the most complete character arc, and the stuff that’s left hanging—Is she Luke’s daughter? Why did he abandon her?—felt like it was OK left hanging.
* I liked Finn, but his back story doesn’t fit the character we see on screen. He’s way too normal and emotionally well-adjusted for someone who’s been raised since childhood to be a nameless stormtrooper. What he acts like is an ordinary guy who went through the wrong door at the military recruiting center, accidentally joined the Space Nazis, and deserted when he realized they weren’t just being ironic with the swastikas.
* One online suggestion that I liked: Instead of having Rey and Finn stumble across the Millennium Falcon and conveniently bump into Han Solo ten minutes later, Han should have been living on Tatooine 2.0 from the beginning, with Rey as his apprentice and/or foster kid. That would have linked the new and old casts from the start, brought Harrison Ford in earlier (definitely a good idea), and saved several minutes of screen time that could then have been spent on other things.
* Midway through the film, Lisa leaned over to me and whispered, “Is that the guy from Ex Machina?” Yep, Poe is played by Oscar Isaac, who was also Nathan in Ex Machina. (And General Hux is Caleb!)
He’s a great actor, but in this movie he’s playing a type—Charmingly Rogueish Space Guy of Indefinite Origin—rather than a person, and his arc is both predictable and emotionally hollow: I knew immediately that he’d survived the TIE fighter crash and that he’d show up later to save Finn, but even if I’d been wrong it wouldn’t have mattered, because I wasn’t invested enough in the character to care whether he lived or died.
* And then there’s Kylo Ren, aka Darth Vader Lite. Adam Driver is another really good actor, but an actor I associate strongly with his role on Girls, so my first thought when he took his mask off was, “You cast Hannah Horvath’s boyfriend for this? That’s… a bold choice.”
His association with Lena Dunham aside, I just didn’t find him that sinister (a problem shared by the film’s other villains). His back story—he’s Leia and Han’s son, and he was Luke’s Jedi pupil until he went Dylan Klebold on his classmates—is delivered entirely through exposition. The original Star Wars did that with Vader’s back story, too, but the difference is, Vader was fricking terrifying even before Obi-Wan explained who he was. Where Vader snapped necks and force-choked people, Kylo expresses rage by hacking up computer workstations with his light saber. Not that scary.
His best scenes are the ones where he goes up against Rey, particularly the one where he tries to Force-read her mind and instead triggers her nascent Jedi powers (which is communicated to the audience without a word of exposition—nice!). Even there, though, he comes off as more pathetic than dangerous. And giving Rey an antagonist who’s so clearly her inferior makes her story less compelling.
* The fact that we’re told about Kylo’s back story rather than shown it also made Han Solo’s death much less affecting. I should have been gutted by that scene—Han murdered! By his son!—but my actual thought process when he stepped out on the bridge was more like: “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say old Han was about to get a light saber in the chest, here… Would the Disney suits really have signed off on that?… Gosh, I guess so!”
Until he got his pink slip, Harrison Ford was great, and again, I wish he’d had more screen time. It was nice seeing Carrie Fisher again too, but she didn’t have anything to do—her main role in the film was to react passively to what other characters were doing, which struck me as a very poor storytelling choice. Why not send her with Han to try to save their kid, and let her work out her grief with a blaster?
* So the bad guys built another Death Star and the good guys blew it up. How many times have we seen that, now? Yes, it’s iconic, and if you’re doing a Star Wars remake/reboot/fan service delivery vehicle, you kind of have to include it, but… do you? Really? I mean: It’s bigger! It eats stars for fuel! It can destroy multiple planets in one shot! And I kinda didn’t care.
* Other story elements that seemed either pointless or wasted opportunities: C-3PO and his mysterious red arm; R2-D2 and R2-BB Pellet; Brienne of Stormtroopia; whatever the hell that big thing on the throne was (Snape? Snoopy?).
* It did end well: the closing scene with Rey meeting Luke Skywalker (Dad?) was genuinely affecting, and Lisa suggests that it made the whole film seem better than it was. Now that the hand-off between generations is complete, I’m hoping that the next episode—written and directed by Rian Johnson, yeah!—will be better. But even if it isn’t, of course I’ll go see it. And try not to think too hard.
