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Centuries Ago and Very Fast
The stories in this collection relate tales from the life of Vel, a gay immortal born in the Paleolithic who jumps time at will. We encounter him hunting mammoths, playing with reindeer tripping on hallucinogenic mushrooms, negotiating each successive wave of invaders to keep his family and its land intact, living as the minor god of a spring, witnessing the hanging of “mollies” in seventeenth-century London as well as the Stonewall riots in twentieth-century New York City. Vel has had more lovers than he can remember and is sometimes tempted to flirt with death. Centuries Ago and Very Fast offers fascinating, often erotic glimpses of the life of a man who has just about seen it all.
Advance Praise
The eminent novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany “Witty, vivid, and very thought provoking, these interwoven narratives of the most sophisticated of primitive lusts start with a gay caveman who happens to have been around over fourteen thousand years. Finishing an afternoon tryst with a Puerto Rican drag queen at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, he and his new friend wander back to Greenwich Village to end up smack in the Stonewall Riots of late June '69. Then we go hunting (and killing and dressing and eating and a few other things that might raise your eyebrow) a mammoth. But that's only the beginning. (Want to learn the right way to celebrate the winter solstice?) Ore's little book has intelligence and charm. Really, you've just got to read this!”
Reviews
“In Centuries Ago and Very Fast , Rebecca Ore pulls off an audacious using the raw language and deliberate focus on sexual encounters of 'slash' fiction to relate a series of linked episodes and moments of reflection from the stupendously long life of a gay male, from his earliest days as a mammoth-hunting caveman to around the present.”
— Faren Miller, Locus June 2009
“The tone of the stories is a balancing act between the serious and the comic. One of the most difficult books to describe I've read recently, this should appeal to fans of literary SF, satire, and nifty prose, and it is almost certainly not going to be what you're expecting.”
—Donald D'Ammassa, Critical Mass 4/22/09
“Ah, a true power chord is infinitely replenishable, given enough talent on the part of the author. And Rebecca Ore proves this to the max with her new novel in stories, Centuries Ago and Very Fast .... Vel is utterly believable—and believably strange—as a fusion of pre-modern, postmodern, and timeless attitudes and habits. He narrates most of the book, with some chapters from Thomas's POV, and he comes across as the ultimate alien in our midst.... A cousin to our species, yet not exactly in our direct lineage.”
—Paul Di Filippo Asimov's Science Fiction , March 2010
“ Centuries Ago and Very Fast by Rebecca Ore (from the truly amazing Aqueduct Press) has a kinetic energy and hard-to-define originality that held me captivated from first word to last. Profane—scandalous?—the book wraps stories around stories, combines the surreal with the mundane and every-day. A story like “Acid and Stoned Reindeer” that I thought was either genius or chaos when published by Clarkesworld works much better in the context of the other stories. I'm not really sure how to describe a book that includes lines like “We'd run out of mammoths. The ponies looked nervous.”, but I tend to come down on the side of finding it fascinating, although I know many readers will find this collection difficult.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, Locus Online , February 11, 2010
Advance Praise
The eminent novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany “Witty, vivid, and very thought provoking, these interwoven narratives of the most sophisticated of primitive lusts start with a gay caveman who happens to have been around over fourteen thousand years. Finishing an afternoon tryst with a Puerto Rican drag queen at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, he and his new friend wander back to Greenwich Village to end up smack in the Stonewall Riots of late June '69. Then we go hunting (and killing and dressing and eating and a few other things that might raise your eyebrow) a mammoth. But that's only the beginning. (Want to learn the right way to celebrate the winter solstice?) Ore's little book has intelligence and charm. Really, you've just got to read this!”
Reviews
“In Centuries Ago and Very Fast , Rebecca Ore pulls off an audacious using the raw language and deliberate focus on sexual encounters of 'slash' fiction to relate a series of linked episodes and moments of reflection from the stupendously long life of a gay male, from his earliest days as a mammoth-hunting caveman to around the present.”
— Faren Miller, Locus June 2009
“The tone of the stories is a balancing act between the serious and the comic. One of the most difficult books to describe I've read recently, this should appeal to fans of literary SF, satire, and nifty prose, and it is almost certainly not going to be what you're expecting.”
—Donald D'Ammassa, Critical Mass 4/22/09
“Ah, a true power chord is infinitely replenishable, given enough talent on the part of the author. And Rebecca Ore proves this to the max with her new novel in stories, Centuries Ago and Very Fast .... Vel is utterly believable—and believably strange—as a fusion of pre-modern, postmodern, and timeless attitudes and habits. He narrates most of the book, with some chapters from Thomas's POV, and he comes across as the ultimate alien in our midst.... A cousin to our species, yet not exactly in our direct lineage.”
—Paul Di Filippo Asimov's Science Fiction , March 2010
“ Centuries Ago and Very Fast by Rebecca Ore (from the truly amazing Aqueduct Press) has a kinetic energy and hard-to-define originality that held me captivated from first word to last. Profane—scandalous?—the book wraps stories around stories, combines the surreal with the mundane and every-day. A story like “Acid and Stoned Reindeer” that I thought was either genius or chaos when published by Clarkesworld works much better in the context of the other stories. I'm not really sure how to describe a book that includes lines like “We'd run out of mammoths. The ponies looked nervous.”, but I tend to come down on the side of finding it fascinating, although I know many readers will find this collection difficult.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, Locus Online , February 11, 2010
168 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2009
About the author
Rebecca Ore
34 books19 followersRebecca Ore is the pseudonym of science fiction writer Rebecca B. Brown.
Rebecca Ore was born in Louisville, KY, out of people from Kentucky and Virginia, Irish Catholic and French Protestant turned Southern Baptist on her mother's side and Welsh and Borderer on her father's. She grew up in South Carolina and fell in love with New York City from a distance, moved there in 1968 and lived on the Upper West Side and Lower East Side for seven years. Somehow, she also attended Columbia University School of General Studies while spending most of her energy in the St. Mark Poetry Project. In 1975, she moved to San Francisco for almost a year, then moved to Virginia, back and forth several places for several years, finished a Masters in English, then moved to rural Virginia for ten years, writing s.f. novels and living in her grandparent's house after they died.
Rebecca Ore was born in Louisville, KY, out of people from Kentucky and Virginia, Irish Catholic and French Protestant turned Southern Baptist on her mother's side and Welsh and Borderer on her father's. She grew up in South Carolina and fell in love with New York City from a distance, moved there in 1968 and lived on the Upper West Side and Lower East Side for seven years. Somehow, she also attended Columbia University School of General Studies while spending most of her energy in the St. Mark Poetry Project. In 1975, she moved to San Francisco for almost a year, then moved to Virginia, back and forth several places for several years, finished a Masters in English, then moved to rural Virginia for ten years, writing s.f. novels and living in her grandparent's house after they died.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 19, 2018
This was an odd book. It’s a collection of interrelated short stories about a 14,000-year-old gay man who can travel through time. It follows him from cave man times to the present where he has a relationship with a thirty something cop. It’s an intriguing premise but not necessarily always executed well. I found myself sometime stumbling over clumsy prose, but pushing through because it was so interesting. In the end, I had to say I was satisfied with the book, I just wished it was written a little better.
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Come visit my blog for the full review…
https://itstartedwiththehugos.blogspo...
February 10, 2013
I cringe at author events when some one in the audience asks, Where do you get your ideas? But when I read what Ore's novel, or series of linked stories, was going to be about, I admit I wondered, How does someone think up this stuff?
Vel is a 15,000 year old man who never ages past the prime of his young manhood. He is not immortal, since he could die of an injury or by violence, but except for growing a new set of teeth every century or so, he stays both in excellent shape and immune to disease. He is also a traveler in time and space, a skill he discovered by accident but that has proved handy over the millennia. While other clans are starving during hard times in the Pleistoscene, he can run out for pizza or kill an auroch. In 18th century London, he advises his relatives who run the antique business that supports the family: Buy Hogarth. Invest in woolen mills. Snatch up copies of Gulliver's Travels, the anonymous author is really Jonathan Swift.
And he is gay. HIs homosexuality is accepted by his clan. It is neither unusual nor of particular interest. Men like Vel cut down on the competition for women, and Vel and those like him can both hunt with the men and care for children who might otherwise we be strangled at birth as that one-too-many child for a still nursing mother.
As for his longevity -- most of the clan die young so there are not many elders to comment on Vel's preternatural youth. For a time at least. And for the first 13,000 or more years of his life, the fact that he is "magic" is considered a blessing by his clan. Remember those take out pizzas and fresh auroch steaks. And I admire Ore for not attempting to explain her absurd but enjoyable premise. What explanation would not be either hopelessly convoluted or silly. And just slow things down. How many genre writers today would see Vel as the potential protagonist of a series of bloated 800 page novels? Ore wraps things up in 150 pages.
The narrative incorporates mammoth hunts, the Stonewall riots, sodomy laws in 18th century London, various brief episodes from other time periods, and Vel's present-day, long-term relationship with Thomas, a local policeman in Somerset, where Vel's family maintains an ancestral home. Some of the story concerns the practicalities of Vel's situation -- he has realized that he can only reappear as his own nephew so many times and thank God New Jersey, in the 1960',s doesn't require photo I.D.'s for a driver's license. Ore can be very funny with other almost throwaway details, such as Vel's introduction of modern-day lube to medieval sodomites. They are too pleased to ask questions
But the central narrative of Vel's relationship with Thomas is sexually robust and realistic, as Thomas comes to terms with the fact that he will age while Vel stays young. "..I wanted him to remember me in 10,000 years," Thomas confesses. But he realizes that Vel must have worked out the mechanism for moving on to other lovers when those times arise. The final scene, involving Thomas's death, is moving and complex.
In a brief afterwards, Ore describes the book as a form of slash fiction, that branch of fan fiction that imagines same sex relations between established characters; i.e., Capt. Kirk/Mr. Spock (boring), Starsky/Hutch (who hadn't already guessed?). She says that she did not want to go the popular route of starting a YA series, and since she had written some pornography in the past, this story line presented itself. (Had some of the sex scenes here been her first foray into pornography, she would have proven herself a natural at it.)
But this is not slash fiction proper. These are not established characters and the millennia-spanning time frame places the book in another genre. I am not sure what that genre might be, but Ore has made it her own. She titles her afterwards, "Slash is for Girls," and her publisher is a feminist press from Seattle . Apparently the market for slash fiction is girls, and it is unlikely that straight male readers are going to respond too enthusiastically to the more graphic moments in this book. (See other reader reviews for further details.) But in Centuries Ago and Very Fast Ore plays an excellent game of physical detail and heady ideas. It deserves a wide audience.
Vel is a 15,000 year old man who never ages past the prime of his young manhood. He is not immortal, since he could die of an injury or by violence, but except for growing a new set of teeth every century or so, he stays both in excellent shape and immune to disease. He is also a traveler in time and space, a skill he discovered by accident but that has proved handy over the millennia. While other clans are starving during hard times in the Pleistoscene, he can run out for pizza or kill an auroch. In 18th century London, he advises his relatives who run the antique business that supports the family: Buy Hogarth. Invest in woolen mills. Snatch up copies of Gulliver's Travels, the anonymous author is really Jonathan Swift.
And he is gay. HIs homosexuality is accepted by his clan. It is neither unusual nor of particular interest. Men like Vel cut down on the competition for women, and Vel and those like him can both hunt with the men and care for children who might otherwise we be strangled at birth as that one-too-many child for a still nursing mother.
As for his longevity -- most of the clan die young so there are not many elders to comment on Vel's preternatural youth. For a time at least. And for the first 13,000 or more years of his life, the fact that he is "magic" is considered a blessing by his clan. Remember those take out pizzas and fresh auroch steaks. And I admire Ore for not attempting to explain her absurd but enjoyable premise. What explanation would not be either hopelessly convoluted or silly. And just slow things down. How many genre writers today would see Vel as the potential protagonist of a series of bloated 800 page novels? Ore wraps things up in 150 pages.
The narrative incorporates mammoth hunts, the Stonewall riots, sodomy laws in 18th century London, various brief episodes from other time periods, and Vel's present-day, long-term relationship with Thomas, a local policeman in Somerset, where Vel's family maintains an ancestral home. Some of the story concerns the practicalities of Vel's situation -- he has realized that he can only reappear as his own nephew so many times and thank God New Jersey, in the 1960',s doesn't require photo I.D.'s for a driver's license. Ore can be very funny with other almost throwaway details, such as Vel's introduction of modern-day lube to medieval sodomites. They are too pleased to ask questions
But the central narrative of Vel's relationship with Thomas is sexually robust and realistic, as Thomas comes to terms with the fact that he will age while Vel stays young. "..I wanted him to remember me in 10,000 years," Thomas confesses. But he realizes that Vel must have worked out the mechanism for moving on to other lovers when those times arise. The final scene, involving Thomas's death, is moving and complex.
In a brief afterwards, Ore describes the book as a form of slash fiction, that branch of fan fiction that imagines same sex relations between established characters; i.e., Capt. Kirk/Mr. Spock (boring), Starsky/Hutch (who hadn't already guessed?). She says that she did not want to go the popular route of starting a YA series, and since she had written some pornography in the past, this story line presented itself. (Had some of the sex scenes here been her first foray into pornography, she would have proven herself a natural at it.)
But this is not slash fiction proper. These are not established characters and the millennia-spanning time frame places the book in another genre. I am not sure what that genre might be, but Ore has made it her own. She titles her afterwards, "Slash is for Girls," and her publisher is a feminist press from Seattle . Apparently the market for slash fiction is girls, and it is unlikely that straight male readers are going to respond too enthusiastically to the more graphic moments in this book. (See other reader reviews for further details.) But in Centuries Ago and Very Fast Ore plays an excellent game of physical detail and heady ideas. It deserves a wide audience.
May 13, 2009
Later: I finally read the author's afterword, which explains that this is "slasher girl fiction," which in part refers to pornography from a woman's point of view. Whatever.
A fun premise: A gay caveman, Vel, has lived for 14,000 years already, and he can time travel not only between centuries but also between epochs. Other than that, these linked stories aren't heavy on the sci fi. Many are told from Vel's point of view, some from the point of view of his modern-day partner, who's a cop.
I didn't expect a lot from a book whose acknowledgments read in part, "to my agent......who said the longer version just wasn't working, and to the people at Harper Collins who allowed me to not have this count as an option book." I thought the book could have been even shorter; a couple of chapters in the middle are decidedly dull. Or maybe the solution should have been to give the book more time to be developed.
What I enjoyed most was the first of several stories where Vel is living in a Paleolithic nomadic band, in the time of the mammoths. It was interesting to think about the drastic differences from modern life (e.g., "When a woman bore a baby before an earlier baby could walk she decided which baby to keep and which baby to strangle"). But only the first of those scenes was thoroughly enough researched (or imagined) to be compelling. The author also did a good job of choosing Vel's modern-day circumstances: where he would live, what family members he would live with, and what his modern-day job would be (antiques dealer, of course!)
This book is packed with explicit gay sex scenes; they're almost instructional in their detail. Anyone wanting hints about making love to a man (including a man who's an incest survivor) could benefit from them. In fact, one of the scenes features a mixed-gender Paleolithic teenaged couple doing just that, by watching Vel and another boy have sex. This is a literary book in its way, but it's also as low-brow as a caveman.
A fun premise: A gay caveman, Vel, has lived for 14,000 years already, and he can time travel not only between centuries but also between epochs. Other than that, these linked stories aren't heavy on the sci fi. Many are told from Vel's point of view, some from the point of view of his modern-day partner, who's a cop.
I didn't expect a lot from a book whose acknowledgments read in part, "to my agent......who said the longer version just wasn't working, and to the people at Harper Collins who allowed me to not have this count as an option book." I thought the book could have been even shorter; a couple of chapters in the middle are decidedly dull. Or maybe the solution should have been to give the book more time to be developed.
What I enjoyed most was the first of several stories where Vel is living in a Paleolithic nomadic band, in the time of the mammoths. It was interesting to think about the drastic differences from modern life (e.g., "When a woman bore a baby before an earlier baby could walk she decided which baby to keep and which baby to strangle"). But only the first of those scenes was thoroughly enough researched (or imagined) to be compelling. The author also did a good job of choosing Vel's modern-day circumstances: where he would live, what family members he would live with, and what his modern-day job would be (antiques dealer, of course!)
This book is packed with explicit gay sex scenes; they're almost instructional in their detail. Anyone wanting hints about making love to a man (including a man who's an incest survivor) could benefit from them. In fact, one of the scenes features a mixed-gender Paleolithic teenaged couple doing just that, by watching Vel and another boy have sex. This is a literary book in its way, but it's also as low-brow as a caveman.
April 20, 2013
Reading about gay sex isn't my thing, and certainly wasn't what I expected when I bought Centuries Ago and Very Fast. Despite that, I enjoyed reading it; I would have enjoyed it more with less explicit descriptions of the sex acts, but then this not very long novel, would be a not very long novella.
[If I'd read the previous paragraph before buying the book, I probably would never have read it. That wouldn't have been a tragedy, but I would have missed out on an interesting book.]
I enjoy time-travel stories, even the kind where we just get vignettes out of the life of a very long lived individual. (This was certainly one of the highlights of "The Highlander" TV series for me.)
It's hard to decide if this is a novel, or a collection of short stories about a single character with other recurring characters.
The stories in Centuries Ago and Very Fast come in two flavors. On one hand we have some short stories scattered across time about Vel, a 14,000 year old gay man. On the other hand we have some short stories about Vel's relationship with Thomas, a contemporary 30 something (?) year old gay English policeman.
Vel's descriptions of his life in prehistoric times were my favorite parts of the book; but the parts about Vel and Thomas are the parts that made Vel seem human.
You probably shouldn't read this book if reading about explicit gay sex offends you. But if you can get past that, it's a pretty good fantasy/sf novel.
[If I'd read the previous paragraph before buying the book, I probably would never have read it. That wouldn't have been a tragedy, but I would have missed out on an interesting book.]
I enjoy time-travel stories, even the kind where we just get vignettes out of the life of a very long lived individual. (This was certainly one of the highlights of "The Highlander" TV series for me.)
It's hard to decide if this is a novel, or a collection of short stories about a single character with other recurring characters.
The stories in Centuries Ago and Very Fast come in two flavors. On one hand we have some short stories scattered across time about Vel, a 14,000 year old gay man. On the other hand we have some short stories about Vel's relationship with Thomas, a contemporary 30 something (?) year old gay English policeman.
Vel's descriptions of his life in prehistoric times were my favorite parts of the book; but the parts about Vel and Thomas are the parts that made Vel seem human.
You probably shouldn't read this book if reading about explicit gay sex offends you. But if you can get past that, it's a pretty good fantasy/sf novel.
July 25, 2010
The premise certainly is intriguing: a gay caveman who finds that he is not only immortal, but can travel in time too. Rather than center the whole book on all the unusual situations that could arise from that, the author chose to focus on how immortality might affect his interpersonal relationships through time. That would be OK, but what those relationships are about is mostly depicted in lengthy, jarringly explicit episodes of homosexual sex. The highly sexual passages never really meshed with the immortal caveman storyline for me, and the combination puzzled me until I read in the Afterword that the author has previous experience in writing porn, and is interested in slash literature, which puts existing fictional characters (ie, James T. Kirk) into sexual situations. Although this aspect did not appeal to me, I found Ore's writing at times spellbinding -- I think she is a very good writer. I was however left still wondering, "After living 15,000 years, would a person really still have interest in sex?"
August 17, 2011
A truly enjoyable tale of a gay 14,000 year old "neanderthal" who can "slip" between time periods. Certainly not for everyone, so I understand the varying ratings. I loved it-- a little collection of adventures both erotic and visceral that are truly original. I'll never think of "yuletime" the same, nor mammoths, for that matter. I appreciated the chapters devoted to his mortal partner Thomas and his observations of living with such a being who is still as human as he is. . . . Ore's afterward regarding today's "slash fiction" is revealing, and appreciated. Now I am eager to start the second installment.
September 29, 2013
I've been reading Rebecca Ore for decades. She packs intimate scenes from different millennia into a slim volume, and my head is spinning after reading it. This one was a bit more of a challenge than most of her other books because she ventures into gay male erotica, which is not my cuppa. That said, in her afterword she puts it in context: "slash is for girls" referring to a kind of fanfic I'd never heard about.
Her descriptions of pre-Christian Yule ritual, and Palaeolithic life as experienced by the primary character, range from the hilarious to the very moving. Suspend your idea of what "now" means, either back then or yet to come.
Her descriptions of pre-Christian Yule ritual, and Palaeolithic life as experienced by the primary character, range from the hilarious to the very moving. Suspend your idea of what "now" means, either back then or yet to come.
October 28, 2010
Fascinating, odd book of inter-linked short stories that tell of the long life, relationships, traditions, hunting, and sex acts of a possibly immortal, time jumping Neanderthal man. Ore's afterword of the book being an intentional fully original, fictional slash fic (highly emotive male/male love-sex stories usually populated by already created fictional characters [Kirk/Spock] or real life celebrities [Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan from Lord of the Rings. Seriously, it's on the net] apparently written by lesbian or bisexual women primarily) gives a new layer to it all.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 18, 2010
You guys. This is crazy. I made everyone read the parts about SPOILER the reindeer giving the protag head. Which was a hallucination but I didn't normally tell my friends that part. And I love the book for letting me make them all read that. But there would be some detailed shit on slaughtering a pony or doing it inside a dead mammoth and I would want to die and have to work myself up to picking the book up again.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 27, 2012
I'm not going to finish it. Billed as sci-fi, it seems more the rambling tale of two gay lovers, one a modern cop, the other a 14,000 year old time traveler. Lots of explicit sex and boring scenery from various eras. I'm sure there's an emerging theme about sexual violence in there, but I'm really not interested.
The writing is good, I just don't care about the story or the characters.
The writing is good, I just don't care about the story or the characters.
January 14, 2015
i can't stop laughing, i love it when stuff like this happens
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews