The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain

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Quick post on this one:

In the Venn diagram of "international travel," "American author," and "humor," not many titles fall in the cumulative overlap. Yet because I like to think I might have a claim to all three at times, I wanted to read a book during this build-up to moving to Ireland to which I could relate, or which I could at least appreciate.

So I picked up the old copy of The Innocents Abroad that's been sitting on some shelf or another for over five years now, ever since I bought it at a book market in London, and gave it a go.

Whatever a writer's own inclinations, reading Mark Twain is an educational experience. His prose is an exemplar of intellectual vernacular, of sentences as involved and complex as any Victorian yet which are as easily understood as the speech of a dear friend.

I feel confident having his voice echoing in my mind as I embark on this new adventure abroad. His skills and influence cannot but strengthen my own writing.

(Though reader be warned: apparently, some copies of The Innocents Abroad don't include the full text. They are filled with promises of reaching the Holy Land, only to cut you off somewhere in the Mediterranean without so much as an indication that you've been cruising through Volume 1 of some indeterminate number of volumes. Not that I'm bitter or anything. At least it's not Mark's fault.)

The Hotel New Hampshire, by John Irving

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As I dig into the craft of writing, certain questions of The Canon continue to puzzle me. The Canon for me was established in high school as this set of writers who had Made It, who had done more than merely create Literature but had indeed shaped it, altered its course, defined what we high school students were destined to read.

Then, for anyone who reads a book after high school, The Canon becomes a much fuzzier reality (though still very, very real). Some rebel against it--if it's Canonical, it ain't cool; many in this crowd will defend Watchmen to the end as if no one has accepted it as Literature. To so many people who think like this, anything with Literary Merit must be boring, self-indulgent, and never intended to sell more than ten copies. Some other people struggle to alter The Canon's definition; an entire branch of Academia is dedicated to finding J.R.R. Tolkien a place in The Canon. (I happen to agree with them.) And some expand The Canon to include anything Literary.

This is where John Irving's writing puzzles me deeply. His work is Literary--probably every single review or endorsement mentions somewhere its Dickensian qualities. Yet he sells incredibly well, has several books adapted to film, and has even won an Oscar. And the content. Literary my arse!

But why not? Why shouldn't a story that includes incestual lust, motorcycle-riding bears, an Austrian brothel-slash-hotel, and a baseball-bat-wielding blind man named Freud be acceptable Literature?

Apparently, it is. (Though try describing this book to anyone, anyone, and they'll think it's all kinds of messed up. Also, if you recommend it to your remarkably picky selective English friend, he will probably be speechless for the first time.) At least, it's not shunned the way genre fiction is.

(Note how genre doesn't get the Winnie-the-Pooh capital letter treatment. Think of your snottiest college professors, and now think about how they would say "genre fiction." It deserves a leering italic font!)

I don't mean to come across like a complete relativist here, but I just wonder why we value some works over others. The Hotel New Hampshire may not be Irving's best-known book, but some lucky kids get to read his writing in high school. Yet this book has moments that make Tom Robbins say "Daaaaaayum!" And I'm pretty sure, no matter how rock-star popular Robbins is, he will never be considered as Literary as Irving.

The Canon will never be fully decided or even understood. But contemplating it cannot but be a healthy activity for the book-minded folks of the world.

Leviathan Wakes, by James S.A. Corey

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When I wrote about Bitter Seeds before, I mentioned that it bumped the next book on my list from the top of the genre-novel-of-the-year list.

This is that book.

Already, Leviathan Wakes is garnering incredible feedback and sending massive ripples through the genre waters. (I have it on hearsay that a top bookbuyer at a major bookseller thinks it will resuscitate the science fiction genre.) And it's only the first in a (three-part?) series. It's a damn fine book, co-written by two damn fine writers who also happen to be two damn good and really damn smart guys.

The book receives enough praise elsewhere that I don't need to parrot it all here. But I don't see enough discussion about what this book does to genre expectations (and it may well be that I'm just looking in the wrong places). The words "space opera" get bandied about all the time with this book, which is valid, but it goes so far beyond that.

Leviathan Wakes has two main narratives: Holden, a Serenity-style space captain, and Miller, a noir detective.

Screech the brakes, right? The former half of that equation sounds like warmed-up leftovers, and the latter sounds entirely out of place. That's what I loved about this book, though. Holden might have the swagger of Mal Reynolds, and he might be the captain of a Firefly-esque crew, but the narrative takes him in entirely different directions, sometimes more subtly than others. Holden is optimistic where Mal is realistic. Holden believes in doing right--not relatively, not half-assed, but wholly, repercussions be damned. You start off believing him to be a cookie-cutter moralist space captain,* but he's got... shapes. His sides get cut out and taped back on in different ways, so that by the end of the story, he's got a different form than at the beginning.

*Wait. There's a cookie cutter for that?

And Miller? This book made me wonder why the noir detective ever went out of style. (I'm convinced he never did -- his form simply changed, first into James Bond, and then in a number of fragmented directions.) He's got all the vices and problems you expect, except... he feels soggier, somehow, than Spade or Marlowe. This is a man who's been through the sewers of existence, and didn't come out as clean and shiny as the characters in Buffy do when they emerge from the sewers.

I'm not a genre writer--at least, not in the strict sense that the James S.A. Corey amalgamation is--but this book has affected more than my writing. It's informing the stories I tell. That's why any authors who turns their noses at a particular form deserve to have bookshelves fall onto them. Inspiration can come from the most unlikely of places. And how cool is that?

(Oh, and you want to talk endings that wrap everything up while still delivering a kicker that makes you salivate for the next volume? This book's got it good.)

Bitter Seeds, by Ian Tregillis

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[If you're down for a toys-in-the-sandbox brawl between warlocks and superheroes, go let your mind wander for a bit while your grown-up eyes read the rest of this post.]

For the amount of books I read (all of which I used to post about on this blog, though lately that number has dropped to those that beg more thoughts or insight from me), I'm often surprised by how few of them grip me, grab me, snag me, and refuse to let go of me until I turn to the back cover and discover the promise of no more pages.

Bitter Seeds is that rare book, and it could hardly have been written by a friendlier guy.

Ian Tregillis was one of the science fiction and fantasy authors featured at this summer's Mythcon conference in Albuquerque. In coordinating these writers' track panels, I met and shot the shit with some of the authors (including Daniel Abraham--check out the interview below--and Ty Franck, who co-wrote a book I'll be posting about soon), all of whom are pretty cool guys. And as if anyone doubted the intelligence of solid fantasy authors, these panels proved just how sharp this collection of Southwest-based writers really is. (Shout out to Melinda Snodgrass, Carrie Vaughn, Robert Vardeman, and Jane Lindskold, too!)

Then there was Ian. If you saw him in a crowd and had to label him, you would say something like "physicist." Which he is. Abraham called him (and I'm paraphrasing here) a fucking genius, and he's hardly exaggerating. But on top of that, he was incredibly eloquent with his words, giving with his time, and open with his ever-increasing fan base.

And almost none of us had heard of him before Mythcon.

Okay, I'm done touting him as a person. You don't buy some stranger's book because he's a nice guy. But Bitter Seeds is excellent. It's the first volume in a trilogy (The Milkweed Triptych; the second book doesn't come out til summer 2012, and I'm already considering a pre-order), and what an opening salvo it is.

If I pitch the book as an alternate history of World War II, where the Nazis scientifically create superheroes and the British turn to warlocks, you may think it sounds hokey, a hapless mish-mash of fantasy and sci-fi. But it ain't. This book is excellently crafted, and it does what so much fantasy doesn't (and to its detriment): the powers of its characters are limited, and they come with severe cost.

This story isn't a young boy's sandbox dream clash between magicians and Superman. Each wizardly process demands British blood sacrifices. The superheroes last only as long as their batteries--and these orphans-cum-lab rats all have their own shortcomings. Doesn't that just ring true, despite the fantastical nature of it? So many great leaps we make as individuals and as a society come at some cost. Besides, what fun is a great achievement if it comes without any inherent risk? That, to me, is why Tregillis's book pulls off its alternate world so effectively.

Not to mention that the hardcover edition (can't speak yet for the paperback) is incredibly handsome. I hope the publishers make the whole trilogy match, because so few books these days look this good on a shelf. And so few books that look good on a shelf make for reading this fine.

If you buy one genre book this year, make it Bitter Seeds. And I say that with the painful realization that the next book on my list would deserve the mantle almost any other year, with almost any other competition.

V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

How I have gotten this far on my nerd cred without having read this book is beyond me. Thank all things good that I was not mauled for ever saying "The only Moore book I've read is Watchmen. (And no, the movie of V doesn't count. Not even close. Not after reading this. Whoa.)

V for Vendetta is hardly the first story about a society where people don't stand up for their rights, those inalienable pieces of civilization that so often become classified as "privileges" and are pushed aside for "necessity's sake." The few seeking to control the many under the guise of order and safety, and sometimes even prosperity, happens all the time in the real world, that precise one in which we live. Moore just fabricates a new one, one that might have been conceivably possible at the time he wrote it.

Though the key has changed, the melody stays the same.

As is often the case, one voice raised does little good. A lot more than no voice at all, to be sure -- but one voice can be quelched. One voice can be silenced. One voice can be talked around and over until it sounds like mindless babble. Sometimes, when the drivel is loudest, it becomes reason.

By not raising our voices all at once, all together, to speak out and say "no," V argues, we relinquish control. We hand over freedoms and our liberties hilt-first.

In the story, the oppression comes in the forms of genocide, of pervasive surveillance, of an inability to speak up without being brutally muted. But really, how is that different than the America we live in right now? (Other than the pervasive surveillance. We might not be at Moore-level England, but we have already given up far too much right to privacy, and too much of it entirely willingly.) Our government (not to be confused with our executive branch, though that branch as a whole is playing far too nice and like enormous wusses) has been deciding and is continuing to decide that the privileges of the very few, very wealthy people and the biggest of corporations are to be preserved above and beyond the most basic rights of every working-class and middle-class woman, man, and hell, even child in the United States of America.

And what do we do? We bitch and moan, we gripe and complain. But those deciding that the richest cannot pay a little more in taxes, that we have to play chicken with our country's future in order that those least harmed by the latest recession continue to thrive, have not had the fear of the public put in them.

If all people in this country voted only by their financial interests in the next election, each and every one of those bastards would be run out of office by 90% of the vote. (And for once, I'm being conservative.)

If every person in this country would let it be known that they cared about what decisions are being made on the public's behalf and that every person were willing to do something about it, I guarantee the current financial "crisis" would be a non-event. It would be past. It would never have been existent.

This isn't about Republicans or Democrats. It's not about labels. V is labeled a "terrorist" by the English government because he fights against its interests. But what V has that modern-day terrorists don't is this: he is not fighting for an ideology, but for ideals. He is not blowing up buildings to make people afraid, but to open their eyes and bring them to action. He attacks symbols not for what they represent, but for how they have been corrupted from their origins.

Do we need to blow up buildings to be heard? Hell no. But our society is not as oppressed as V's England.

Not yet.

Al"brew"querque

Well, whaddya know. I've got a new blog project -- but don't worry, it won't spell the end of Alone at the Microphone. It's completely different in every meaningful way. (Except for, you know, being a blog.)

It's called Al"brew"querque, and it's a blog about beer. Jenny and I began co-writing pieces a while back about beer and the places one finds beer. We finally figured that other people might enjoy what we have to say. And so far, the response has been positive.

So mosey on over to Al"brew"querque and get your yeast on! (Wait, that sounds bad. Get your malt on? Get your hops on? Get your water on? Get 'em all on!)

A Shadow in Summer, by Daniel Abraham

About a month ago, I had the extreme pleasure of interviewing Daniel Abraham, a fellow graduate of the University Honors Program at UNM and one heck of an up-and-coming fantasy writer. This post is technically for the first book in his Long Price Quartet, A Shadow in Summer, though we only discuss that quartet briefly in the interview below.

Rather than write more thoughts of my own, I'd like you all to see how the interview went. Mr. Abraham was incredibly gracious to let me conduct this interview for Mythprint*, and his responses gave my mind-cow plenty of cud to chew.

*An abbreviated form of this interview appears in the June 2011 edition of Mythprint, the periodical of the Mythopoeic Society. While it doesn't appear to be up yet, the full text (identical to the below) is intended to appear here. The interview was over a month ago, and obviously I read the book before that... but I wanted to wait until Mythprint had a chance to run before reproducing the interview here.

Here you go (I am in italics, Mr. Abraham in normal font).

Daniel, we are tickled that you will be attending Mythcon 42 in Albuquerque as part of our Writers’ Track series. Most of the attending authors are from this region, though all of you are published nationally. So it’s nice to get some people who’ve made it in a very real sense.

God it’s weird to be in that group! It doesn’t feel like it, that’s all.

Have you experienced yet what it’s like to be recognized as “Daniel Abraham,” the name on the book cover?

I’ve had a couple times where people acknowledged that I exist and it was weird, it was very strange. The tiny, little, small pathetic drop of fame that I have gotten is still pretty surreal.

When we set up this interview, you said you wanted to talk about “low-status” literature and its role. So what have you been thinking on that subject?

I have this kink about economics. One of the things that I get out of it is that you don’t judge people by what they say, you judge people by where they spend their money. So, for example, if I say that by god I’m a leftist Democrat and I spend all of my money supporting right-wing Republicans, I’m a right-wing Republican. When you have somebody who’s doing one thing and saying another, you judge them by what they do, not what they say. So I take that and look at what books people are buying. I understand there’s one class of very high status books. A Brief History of Time. Tremendous best seller. I’m not sure anybody read it. I think we mostly got it to put on our coffee tables to show that we’re very smart.

This is the Stephen Hawking book?

Yes. Nothing against Stephen Hawking, I’m sure it’s a fine book. I have it. I haven’t read it. Abstract cosmology is not something that actually, I think, speaks to the American soul in the way that seeming smarter than the guy next to you really does. So I think there is this class of books that you buy in order to look clever. And that’s cool. I understand why you do that. But then there’s a whole bunch of books, like the majority of publishing, that are guilty pleasures. And they’re the kind of places I play. They are the fantasy, and the science fiction and the mystery and romance—romance is still the one that everybody, I think, looks down on intellectually. I mean, folks writing space opera sneer at romance. And romance has I think the largest and most powerful following. So something interesting is happening there. This goes back to judging things by what you put your money on. They put their money on romance, and they put their money on genre, on these things that don’t lend social status. So they must be doing something else. I think it’s clear that romance is sitting on a huge discomfort that we have as a culture, as a nation, about whether we individually are lovable or if we’re going to die alone and rejected. It’s a huge seller because we are all suffering that. I think when we see this huge popular upwelling in some genre, in some group of related literary projects that aren’t respectable, that they’re offering comfort to things that need to be comforted. I think that urban fantasy is sitting on a real discomfort about women and power. When I say that it sounds like this is some sort of necessarily progressive feminist thoughtful literature. I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s feeding off of and lending comfort to a real confusion and a real discomfort. Not that it’s offering solutions to it. People confuse that. Urban fantasy isn’t about reconciling our feelings with women and power any more than romance is about how to build a healthy relationship. They’re not didactic, they’re not there to improve you. They’re there to offer you comfort. Genres are where fears pool. So you see genres that have gone away—Westerns are gone. They were huge, and they’re gone. Whatever they were answering, people stopped needing it. I don’t know what it was. And I don’t know that all of the genres we have now will survive forever, I don’t expect they will. But right now I think those literary projects, those low-status things, are really the best barometer of what’s bothering us.

You called these the guilty pleasures and very much separated them from how-the-universe-works books. Why do you think that, when we feel the need to address something, we want to ensconce ourselves into it, make contact with it, but not necessarily figure it out? Why romance books instead of how-to-be-happy-in-a-relationship books?

I don’t think those are antithetical. I don’t think you can’t do both, but I don’t think that what you come for is a how-to book. It’s the same reason you don’t always eat granola for breakfast. We do things that are pleasurable and comforting because we are creatures of pleasure and comfort. And solving problems realistically kind of makes for lousy stories. Having a really sane, balanced, centered life means you’re low drama. That’s not what fiction does.

If as you say this low status literature addresses something in our societies that makes it popular, what is it about fantasy literature in general, or yours specifically, that makes people crave it?

Epic fantasy—think J.R.R. Tolkien, even Stephen Donaldson—is about war, and we are in America right now really confused about war because we’ve got like two and a half of them going on right now, and we don’t talk about it and we don’t really admit to our sacrifices about it and there’s this weariness about war. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is a story about the futility of war, it’s a story about the morality of disarmament, about the actions of individuals being the only force of salvation. That’s a real criticism of war. If you look at Martin and A Game of Thrones, what you have is this fantasy that’s very reminiscent of the Wars of the Roses in which there are no good guys, there aren’t many bad guys, there is this tremendous multivalent ambition and it’s a bleak, bleak world. Now why does that speak to us? Because we’re reading The Economist, and it’s there.

What I see in people’s reactions to me is that people who like my stuff like it because I love all my characters. I love my bad guys, too. I want to see my villains forgiven. I want to see them understood. I think that may be the literary project I’m working on. I didn’t mean it that way, but when people read my epic fantasy, I can get them to root for whoever’s point of view the chapter is written in. Even when the characters are going to kill each other. And it’s not ambivalent so much as multivalent.

It’s interesting that you’re talking about war when at least the beginning of The Long Price Quartet has this threat of war lingering, depending on the outcomes of these few individuals we see in the narrative. But there is no war.

Not in that one. Book three is called An Autumn War because there’s this war. But I don’t like battles. I don’t like battle scenes. I don’t like fight choreography very much.

I’m going to give you two scenes. There’s the battle scene, where you have the great armies arrayed against each other, and the tactics of the battle, and the blood and the screaming and the destruction and the courage. There’s another scene after the battle, we have three soldiers walking down the street one way, and a woman and her child walking the other. Everybody knows that the woman’s husband probably died in the battle that the other three soldiers just won, and one of the soldiers gives the kid a piece of candy. One of those tells me more, one of those is more interesting to me. And it’s the one where you’re thinking, “OK, if that kid takes the piece of candy, if he doesn’t take it, what does that mean? What does it mean that it was offered?” It seems to me the violence is actually pretty simple, and the things that surround violence are more interesting.

Have you read Tolkien’s “Homecoming of Beorthnoth?” It’s his piece set on the field of “The Battle of Maldon” after the battle has ended. To me, that’s the same sort of thing where you have the battle and then that moment afterward that says much more.

And who we are, and what the consequences are.

I have seen similar discussion going on just this week with the Osama bin Laden assassination, where people are saying, how do we respond to this? What do we do? Because how we treat our enemy says more about us than it does about the enemy.

I have been thinking a lot about bin Laden and about his kind of literary project. He was an amazing self promoter. He was stunning. In point of fact, he wasn’t very much of a threat to us, you know? More people die every year from car wrecks. If you look at it coldly, and you look at the numbers, al Qaeda’s not a big threat, and what he did was not a big threat. But the narrative that came out of it was so powerful, and the way that he married that narrative to his personality and to his life was so powerful and so effective that I look at his death and I see this huge cultural relief. The catharsis we feel because that one guy died, I think is a testament to how well he did his job. You know, I’m not particularly a man of violence, and I felt the world lighten up a little bit when I heard the news. And yeah, I think there’s a difference between celebrating his death and acknowledging that release.

I should probably make sure you get your plugs in. You have written more than The Long Price Quartet, and we’re hoping that you can get Mythcon 42 attendees reading other things. But The Long Price Quartet is set in this very Asian-like culture which is very unusual in Western fantasy. So can you talk about the decision you made to write in that kind of world?

Especially when you’re starting off as a writer, there’s tremendous encouragement to embrace originality and do something new. I wanted to do something that felt very different, that stood out from what other folks were up to. And one of the ways to do that was to have it not be the traditional pseudo-medieval world. I also did some weird stuff with the structures of the books, with the big time jumps between the books and a fairly small cast of characters. And what I was really reaching for was to do something I hadn’t seen before. And I think those books did what I wanted them to do. They didn’t light the world on fire sales wise, but that’s always a crap shoot. But artistically, I’m very comfortable with how those books came out.

How do you feel they impacted your development as a writer?

They gave me practice. The other mandate going into that project was to figure out how to write a novel, because I did a lot of short stories before those books. And I felt pretty good about the rhythm of a short story and how a short story works. And I was pretty clear that I didn’t know how to write a novel, because, I’d done three, maybe three and a half, four, before I started The Long Price Quartet. And they sucked less each time. But they still sucked. And in fact, when I finished the first book of The Long Price Quartet, A Shadow in Summer, my first readers, the people who were critiquing it as I went along, my writers’ group, all said, “It’s beautifully written, I don’t know what’s going on, and I hate your main character.” And I wound up throwing the book out completely and rewriting it from scratch.

Being part of that writers’ group in New Mexico and being from here—I had a friend once call Albuquerque a “not real part of the world”—as an author, how has the Southwest influenced you or provided you with inspiration?

One of the things that’s been interesting to me, thinking about growing up here, is that the American narrative of race has never been my experience. When you look at the American narrative of race, the story we tell ourselves about race, it’s about white folks and black folks. Where I grew up, it’s about Anglos and Hispanics. And that’s a totally different dynamic. I live in a place that is the occupied territories. I live in a border town. I live in a place where some people identify as American and some people identify as Mexican, and I’ve always felt a little bit like a foreigner traveling other parts of the nation. I’ve always felt a little bit outside the narrative of my culture. And I kind of like that. That sense of being from something that’s not quite real—and when we say not quite real, we mean not quite part of the overwhelming narrative. That gives you, I think, a certain power over the narrative. I like that. I enjoy that. Also, growing up I had access to literatures that you don’t get other places. My dad would read me short stories by Enrique Anderson Imbert, and he would translate them on the fly as he read. And they were all these amazing stories about these fantastical and weird and disturbing things. Part of my experience of literature was those things I don’t know that you get when you’re living in other parts of the country.

Racism’s going to be any place. No matter where you go, when you get folks who identify as different races, it’s going to happen. We’re a tribal species, it’s what we do—but here, you have that racial divide with power on both sides. I’m in New Mexico and if you have a Hispanic surname, you’re electable. When you have that level of power equality and difference and acceptance and distance, it’s… I think New Mexico is a very humane place. Apart from the grinding poverty.

Your chance to pump yourself. Do you have any new or upcoming works you’d like Mythprint readers and Mythcon 42 attendees to know about?

Specifically, yes. I’d like you to know about The Dragon’s Path, which is the first book in The Dagger and the Coin series, my next epic fantasy. I’m also coming out with an urban fantasy series under the pen name M.L.N. Hanover, The Black Sun’s Daughter. So if you want to talk about what I think urban fantasy does, and women and power, there’s that. And I have a book coming out with Ty Franck [also attending Mythcon 42] called Leviathan Wakes, which is a space opera, coming out in June. Right before Mythcon. It has a big spaceship on it.

Perfect! Thank you, Daniel. I’ll see you again at Mythcon 42 this July in Albuquerque, New Mexico.