Rjurik Davidson's Blog, page 6
August 25, 2014
Brisbane Writers Festival
Date Saturday 6 September
Time 2.00pm -5.00pm
Session Topic Masterclass – Short Story Critique
Artists Rjurik Davidson
Date Sunday 7 September
Time 1.00pm – 2.00pm
Session Topic Laws of Magic: A panel discussing building mythologies, legends, and magic systems in genre fiction.
Artists Rjurik Davidson, Trudi Canavan, Laini Taylor, Kirilee Barker
Date Sunday 7 September
Time 5.30pm – 6.30pm
Session Topic ‘Betwixt and Between’: A panel conversation on genre-blending: are genre conventions handcuffs or do they provide necessary structure? Can genre blending add colour to a well-established structure, or does it confuse the story?
Artists Kimberley Freeman, Kylie Scott, Rjurik Davidson
August 23, 2014
Meeting George R. R. Martin
At the Tor party at Loncon, I met and chatted briefly with George R. R. Martin. The conversation went a bit like this:
“Do you like cons, George?”
“I used to. I sound like an asshole saying it, but I’m too famous now. The worst invention in history is the mobile phone. Now I get so many people coming up to me asking for photos. Sometimes they don’t even talk.”
“Yeah, I was hanging out with China Miéville at a worldcon a few years ago, and he gets that a bit.”
At which point someone interrupted to get a photo of George. In fact, our entire conversation took place over about twenty minutes, because all the time people kept approaching him and asking for his photo. It was very, very hard to have a conversation with him at all. He acquiesced pleasantly to each request because he seemed like a genuinely nice guy, without much ego – though obviously we only met for a little while, so these are impressions.
After about an hour, he said to his friend or assistant, “I gotta go. They’re taking photos.”
This speaks, of course, to the nature of celebrity in the modern world. That people assume a level of status is conferred upon them by such a photo. “Look, it’s me and a famous person!”
Of course, such an action also lowers one’s own status implicitly. The celebrity hunter is trying to take something from the celebrity, rather than giving something to the interaction. And it’s kinda repulsive. From the celebrity’s point of view, the fan is just joining the legion of other fans who want the same thing from them. You become a cardboard cut-out, reified, bereft of individuality.
On the other hand, if you want to actually gain a celebrity’s attention, it’s my belief that you should treat them just as you treat anyone else. You invite them into a conversation, you talk to others in the circle and not only them, you try to give to the interaction rather than take from it. Of course, with someone like Martin, this was almost impossible, because the moment I talked to anyone else in our circle, outsiders would jump in asking for … photos.
I felt sorry for him, and felt like saying: “Leave the poor guy alone.”
No wonder he eventually left.
Andromeda Spaceways Reviews Unwrapped Sky.
There’s a new review of Unwrapped Sky over at Andromeda Spaceways. My favourite bit:
Davidson’s immersion is in the pungent, everyday workings of his world: he writes from within it, reminiscing almost, like a citizen of Caeli-Amur returned home from earthly cities far removed, now to act as the reader’s guide. Unwrapped Sky is at once foreign and familiar: a disturbed dream wherein dark fantasy makes its play, twisting at shadows to much the same effect as that of clouds taking fanciful shape in an idle mind’s eye. Beguiling, poetic, unnervingly close to the bone, Davidson’s first small step may well come to be looked back upon as having given impetus to a whole new readership to free itself from escapism and bound voraciously instead through those inky vistas unexplored.
August 19, 2014
Unwrapped Sky Melbourne Launch
If you’re in Melbourne on 18 September, please come along.
Rjurik Davidson
Book Launch
Join Editor of Overland Jeff Sparrow as he chats and launches Unwrapped Sky by author Rjurik Davidson. This book questions the role of fantasy and of politics. Is there a difference? What is the relationship?
Thursday 18 September, 6.30pm
Readings Carlton
Free, but you must book at www.readings.com.au
July 22, 2014
LonCon Appearances
If you’d like to come see me at LonCon, you can find me below.
Decontextualising Steampunk
Friday 15:00 – 16:30, Capital Suite 2 (ExCeL)
Is steampunk historically specific, or could any genre story benefit from a few more cogs and zeppelins? What are the pros and cons of exporting the steampunk aesthetic to stories set in other times and places? Can ‘the future that never was’ be extricated from the past it definitely did have? In other words, can you have steampunk without empire, and all that implies?
Who misplaced the Monster Compendium?
Saturday 13:30 – 15:00, Capital Suite 2 (ExCeL)
When was the last time a fantasy novel had a golem or a cockatrice? How long is it since someone fought a giant, flesh-eating beast instead of another dude with a sword? Where did all the monsters go? With quest plots out of fashion, deus ex machina ditched, treasure-hunting too economically simplistic, and stories more likely to lavish pages on their heroes’ motivations for fighting than on blow-by-blow battles with deadly creatures, is the monster still relevant in today’s fantasy?
Meet the New King, Same As The Old King
Saturday 19:00 – 20:00, Capital Suite 14 (ExCeL)
Why is fantasy so often about making the world better by getting the rightful king on the throne, rather than by doing away with monarchy entirely? Where are all the revolutions? Why don’t wizards use magic to create indoor plumbing and better infrastructure?
Autographing 5 – Rjurik Davidson
Sunday 11:00 – 12:00, Autographing Space (ExCeL)
Kaffeeklatsch
Sunday 16:00 – 17:00, London Suite 5 (ExCeL)
July 16, 2014
Review on Public Books
There’s a new piece on Unwrapped Sky by Public Books, written by Sarah Balkin. It’s a serious intellectual piece, and that thrills me no end. Balkin writes:
The novel is at pains to distinguish a politics of impersonality from a politics in which the ends justify the means. Davidson’s own means are a fantastic city and revised notions of life and death. Staring down at a burning city in the wake of revolution, Max pronounces, “Caeli-Amur is alive. Full of possibility. I hope it never changes.”
Unwrapped Sky does not fully endorse Max’s impersonal perspective—he does not realize the revolution has come and gone without him. But its depiction of the city as an organism livelier than its inhabitants suggests that for a posthuman aesthetic to become a posthuman politics, we must reconfigure our relationship to death.
July 14, 2014
Finncon 2014
My first Finncon finished last night – such a great convention. Just before the con, the newspaper Keskisumalainen did an interview with me, which was nice.
The organisers of the con were wonderfully generous, the guests – Elizabeth Bear, Hannu Rajaniemi (author of the terrific far-future science fiction novel Quantum Thief,), Cheryl Morgan, Scott Lynch – were great fun and terrible nice, the panels I attended interesting and fun. Hannu’s GOH speech was great, and he read a cool little story about a haunted space-suit which I’m sure will see print soon.
I was blessed to have the Hannu in several of my sessions. He also was good enough to come to my little reading and ask me some questions about Unwrapped Sky. Our conversations reached their zenith during my Kaffeeklatch, which he dropped in on, and during which we talked about writing technique. Both of us, it turns out, are interested in abstract models of story – technical questions – though we both recognise their limitations, I think. This conversation nicely dovetailed with a latter discussion I had with Elizabeth Bear about Robert McKee’s Story, and I think we share similar critiques about that book. It reminded me of an old article I wrote about McKee – after having interviewed him some years ago – still available here. In that piece, I wrote:
If McKee’s book is a good place to begin, his theory of storytelling is also extremely conventional. It centres around a protagonist with a need, who struggles to overcome obstacles to achieve that need. Structurally, McKee outlines the three-act story, so common in film. Though he registers other modes of storytelling – experimental ‘anti-plot’, four and five act stories – it is very hard not to see his ‘principles’ as dictums for very conventional, populist stories. Indeed, many Hollywood films comply with McKee’s ideas of storytelling without rising above the level of appalling.
In other words, his principles are not enough.
Bear has herself written about structure in an online piece I recommend.
By the end of the convention, I was typically tired, but reinvigorated, as any good con usually leaves me. Filled with ideas, thoughts, energy.
July 11, 2014
Some New Reviews of Unwrapped Sky
There have been a bunch more reviews of Unwrapped Sky. Typically, I haven’t kept on top of them all here, but here are a few:
Jeff Sparrow did one for Readings, which is here. Here’s some of what he says:
Yes, Unwrapped Sky deploys the familiar tropes of heroic fantasy: monsters and sorcery and godlike beings. But don’t let that fool you. This is primarily a novel of ideas: a book deeply invested in twentieth-century social struggles, a heroic fantasy in which the real protagonist is history itself.
Which is not to suggest that Davidson’s book is slow. On the contrary, it contains the requisite amount of treachery, murder, torture and magic. But Kata, Boris and Maximilian, throughout their adventures, constantly grapple an individual’s relationship with broader social forces. They make compromises and are compromised in turn. Or to put it another way, they are changed just as they change their world.
Kirsten Tranter reviews it for the Age and the SMH here. She wasn’t enthralled by the opening but:
This changes, however, around two-thirds of the way through the book, when Maximillian succeeds in his dangerous quest to uncover the secrets buried in the drowned city, with consequences that force him into new, surprising confrontations with others and, more importantly, himself. The question of what sacrifices might be necessary to enable real revolution is renewed, revitalising the story, which moves forward from this point with a new kind of energy and original vision.
Justin Hickey wrote a review for Open Letters Monthly. He wrote:
Unwrapped Sky is a rarer experience still. It’s a reef where genuinely tragic figures dart through dazzling grottoes—but not indefinitely. Not greedily. And yet, even if Davidson does write a sequel or three, and they stink, this volume will still be in the company of brilliant books like Hyperion, by Dan Simmons (which actually does have three mediocre sequels). But there are worse crimes against literature to consider—starting with the fact that millions of people read Martin’s series without knowing who Robert Silverberg, Gene Wolf, and Lord Dunsany are. The ocean that is epic fantasy goes less explored every year.
Finally, I was really thrilled to be reviewed in Africa’s Mail and Guardian by Gwen Ansell:
All Davidson’s characters face dilemmas and do bad things: Boris betrays his working-class roots to rise, and rapes a slave woman he desires; Maximilian struggles with the disciplines of making revolution; Kata kills. And in the community of revolutionaries she infiltrates, Kata also debates with the many other women fighting for change.
The nature of freedom and free choice illuminate the heart of this book, but the politics emerge from gorgeously baroque scenes, complex characters and tense action.
Finncon 2014
You can catch me at Finncon this weekend, where I’ll have a reading and mini-launch of Unwrapped Sky. You can also come join me for coffee at my Kaffeeklatch.
On Saturday, July 12
10:30
Book Launch / Reading
208, 10:30 – 12:0
13:00
Likeable characters in SF
L304, 13:00 – 14:0
14:00
Kaffeeklatsch – Rjurik Davidson
Cafeteria / Green room, 14:00 – 14:30
On Sunday, July 13
15:00
Aliens in Finland
L302, 15:00 – 16:0
June 22, 2014
Unwrapped Sky Review at Acerbic Writing
There’s a new review over at Acerbic Writing.
The newest addition to the Science-Fantasy subgenre, New Weird, is Rjurik Davidson. His novel, Unwrapped Sky, is one of those rare stories that manages to blur the lines between technology and magic, characterization and plot, and what is truly black or white. There’s beautiful imagination tucked in every page, and soon world-building becomes his greatest asset. And his double-edged sword.
