"Salt and Sorcery" at BCS

It never rains but it pours, as we say in my hometown.* Three days after the hotly-anticipated release of my novel, The King of Nightspore's Crown, my latest short story, "Salt and Sorcery," is out at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Go check it out!

The story is inspired by a few of my favorite stories by the likes of Catherine Moore, Fritz Leiber, and Michael Moorcock; Herman Melville's meditations on whiteness; the 2015 Yuggoth Pluto flyby; and, of course, salt. But that's not all! BCS Issue #205 also features the beautifully written "A Deeper Green" by newcomer Samantha Murray, and Turtle Caravan, a weird, lovely painting by Marek Hlavaty.

One of the things that's always drawn me to sword-and-sorcery is its proximity to science fiction on one side and to weird / cosmic horror on the other. Sometimes I think it's closer to either of these than to epic fantasy, which frankly tends to bore me these days. I remember reading once in some literary essay the suggestion that sword-and-sorcery stands close to sci-fi because its worldview is fundamentally technological (sword) and scientific (sorcery). And as for cosmic horror, we can take Conan's word for it:

"A devil from the Outer Dark," he grunted. "Oh, they're nothing uncommon. They lurk as thick as fleas outside the belt of light which surrounds this world. [...] Some find their way to earth, but when they do, they have to take on earthly form and flesh of some sort. A man like myself, with a sword, is a match for any amount of fangs and talons, infernal or terrestrial." ["The Vale of Lost Women"]

There you have it. The steppes of the Hyborian world border on outer space.

My story is so titled because it takes place in a salt pan. I read a bit about such formations for the writing of it. That's how my stories often originate: I get interested in some scientific topic, like the fruiting bodies of funguses or the mating habits of horseshoe crabs, and begin romancing about it.

So go check out "Salt and Sorcery" at Beneath Ceaseless Skies! And if you like that, my friend, check thou out my novels, Dragonfly and The King of Nightspore's Crown.

* Actually, we never say that in my hometown.

The Words of Metal

I recently came across this interesting study at Degenerate State, a blog run by "an ex-physicist working as a data scientist".

The author reports on an informal analysis of word use in heavy metal lyrics as opposed to the "standard" American English represented by the Brown corpus, a collection of documents compiled by linguists in 1961. He defines a measure for the "metalness" of a word as the logarithm of the ratio of the frequencies of the word in the respective corpora. Basically, the more times a word appears in the metal corpus, and fewer times it appears in the Brown corpus, the greater its metalness will be. Each word has to appear at least five times in the respective corpora in order to be included in the study.

The most metal word is, apparently, burn, which has a metalness of 3.81; the least metal word is particularly, which has a metalness of -6.47. The top twenty most metal words are: burn, cries, veins, eternity, breathe, beast, gonna, demons, ashes, soul, sorrow, sword, goodbye, dreams, gods, pray, reign, tear, flames, and scream. The top twenty least metal words are: particularly, indicated, secretary, committee... Ugh, let's just stop there. This news story on the analysis puts it this way:

What you can infer from this is that the metal English is spoken from a timeless, elemental, and darkly ethereal space, while standard English is unremarkably deskbound. Perhaps this is why we hunger for metal in the first place.

Now, look at some of those metal words. Burn. Veins. Eternity. Beast. Demons. Ashes. Sword. Gods. Flames. Reads like a good old Robert E. Howard story. Which goes to show you what we already knew: metal loves sword-and-sorcery, weird horror, and even epic fantasy.

I'm not exactly what you'd call a metalhead. I'm not regular about listening to music of any sort, and rarely leave the mainstream. But I can say that I'd rather listen to certain brands of metal (the red part on the right of this cluster dendrogram, to be specific) than pretty much anything else, with Metallica's "Wherever I May Roam" at the dead center.

What I most like about Metallica is the way it sounds (duh), but I'm also drawn by the lyrics, which have a kind of dark, quasi-biblical, historical-mythological resonance, with occasional touches of H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. Their best songs inhabit this dark desert landscape in my mind, imbued with a certain atmosphere that I can't quite describe but have tried introduce here and there in my writing.

Since I'm about to release my novel The King of Nightspore's Crown, it occurred to me to see how metal it is. Turns out it's pretty metal. In my highly unscientific count, I find that burn (or close variants, which, I know, is not quite fair) appears 28 times; cries (and variants), 98; beast, 67; demon (or daemon, rather), 22; sword, 90; dream, 51; scream, 25, etc. Each of the top twenty words appears at least several times, with the exception of gonna, which I don't use when translating from the nephelic tongue, for a total of 430 occurrences. By contrast, only five of the bottom twenty words appear, with 13 occurrences in all, and several of these in tongue-in-cheek dialogue.

This graph plots the metalness of all 10,000 words used in the study against their word length, with the horizontal axis representing metalness and the vertical representing length. I note that my stories (which tend to feature lone warriors pitted against primeval beasts, ancient aliens, and elder evil) are situated in the bottom right-hand corner, while my work e-mails (which deal with academic advising, faculty governance, and program assessment) inhabit the upper left-hand corner. And, certainly, my writing does take place in a "timeless, elemental, and darkly ethereal space," while my work life, it must be confessed, is "unremarkably deskbound".

Talk about your double lives. Sure, some might deride S&S (and metal) as puerile escapism. But who's to say which of these two lives is the real one, eh? Maybe I just keep my staid day job so that I can escape from the "timeless, elemental, and darkly ethereal space" of my burning dreams of gods and demons.

The City in the Sea

The print edition of The King of Nightspore's Crown, the second book of my Antellus tetralogy, nears completion. I hope to have it out sometime in late July or early August. This works out perfectly, as my novelette "Salt and Sorcery" is due to appear at Beneath Ceaseless Skies in early August. Don't miss it!

But, to tide you over, here's some images. First we have the (tentative) front cover.

 

Then my personal favorite, the spine:

 

And the back cover:

 

In case you can't read it, here's the back pitch as it currently stands:

It has been one year since Keftu, the last phylarch of Arras, established an itinerant society of misfits in the bowels of Enoch, the rust-stained city of stone, mankind's omega. The end of all change is at hand, hastened by the machinations of the veiled warlock Zilla. What can one outcast warrior do to halt the slow slide into tepid chaos? Keftu is about to find out. His quest will take him from the crumbling tenements of Enoch to the black jungles of Ir. He will form alliances the like of which he would never have dreamed. In the end, he may lose his soul to gain...

THE KING OF NIGHTSPORE'S CROWN

Last but not least, here is the map, turned sideways, as you will have to turn it if you wish to consult it while reading the story:

However, I consider it sloppy writing to rely on extraneous objects like maps, and the attentive reader should be able to gather all relevant geographical details from the text. On the second or third reading, at least. Also, I'm always wanting to get into Rhûn and Harad when I read The Lord of the Rings, so it's possible that this map is not entirely adequate...

Rather than pontificate on the story's various influences and antecedents, as I am wont to do, I'll leave you with Edgar Allan Poe's "The City in the Sea," which provides a fitting epigraph.

THE CITY IN THE SEA 

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne 

In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie. 

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathéd friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down. 

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye—
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene. 

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones.
Shall do it reverence.

If you haven't yet, I hope you'll consider checking out Dragonfly, the first book in the series, which is available from Amazon.

A Frontispiece and Map for Nightspore

A possible frontispiece for my upcoming novel, The King of Nightspore's Crown:

I spiraled silently down through the night,
slipping in and out of the pyramid's glow.

Scratch drawing in India ink. Since the cover is so organic and curvilinear, I felt that something starkly geometrical and minimalistic was in order.

And here's a pencil sketch of the map. It shows all the small sea of Tethys, rather than just its northeastern corner, where the first installment played out. Obviously the lettering has yet to be worked into it.

 

The Tower of Bel stands in the middle of the sea, linked to the coast-long city by a web of jointed viaducts. The equator, which I haven't drawn, runs through the Tower. This should go without saying, since the Hanging Gardens of Narva (reached from the Tower via space elevator) are in geostationary orbit, and such an orbit must lie over the equator, at a height about equal to the earth's circumference. (There, I knew I didn't take all those physics courses for nothing.)

 

I've decided that the image needs to sit sideways on a single page, rather than be split across two facing pages. The latter expedient is often resorted to in paperbacks, but here seems particularly unsatisfactory, seeing as how everything in my map lines up on the central meridian. The sideways map is a compromise, too, but The Silmarillion features one, at any rate.

 

Anyhow, Enochites imagine the solar system as revolving like a Ferris wheel rather than a carousel, so I suspect that they'd be OK with this either way.

Here, for comparison, is a draft of the map that appeared in Dragonfly:

And Here's Another Wrap-Around Cover

At long last, I have more or less finished the cover painting for The King of Nightspore's Crown, and here it is:

It measures something like 12" x 9", painted on my trusty block of Arches hot-pressed, using a lot of Indian red. Other colors include burnt umber, cadmium red, gold ochre, Naples yellow, sap green, chrome green, cerulean blue, and French ultramarine. No black was used, as I find that it merely deadens the colors, but I have a lamentable weakness for Payne's gray (the only mixed color I use), and this contains some black pigment.

I started the picture in January and finished it today, working mostly late at night. There were about two months in there when I literally didn't have a single weekend to myself, due to various things that came up. A significant portion was painted while rocking a very light-sleeping baby with my foot, which takes a certain amount of coordination. What a life, what a life.

Anyway, on to other material elements. There's a bit of Henri Rousseau here, and also some Samuel Palmer. Like Palmer, I do love a good moon in a painting, especially a crescent moon.

I also looked at some book covers that I like, including one by Kinuko Craft for Perelandra and another by Leo and Diane Dillon for a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Another thing I really like are big murals of prehistoric life, like the ones at the Houston Museum of Natural History, or Zallinger's famous Age of Reptiles mural at Yale. My stories take place in a Paleozoic world, so this seems a fitting inspiration. Here we have a dimetrodon trying (and failing) to hide behind a stand of calamites.

Most of the plants are purely fantastic, however, in the sense that they have a place in neither geological antiquity nor my novel. I honestly just drew the shapes that pleased me, and colored them according to the same principles.

To paraphrase Winnie-the-Pooh, you just have to let things come in where they want. So the cover is more evocative than illustrative. I don't suppose any cover artist is in complete accord with the writer's ideas; I'm no different, even though I'm the same person.

As I've mentioned before, there are a lot of things to think about when making a wrap-around cover. In creating my festival of wrap-around cover art the other day, I began to surmise that much of it (the cover of Xiccarph, for instance) was trimmed down from pieces larger and more symmetrical. To produce a painting that will serve as a cover without serious cropping, you have to make sure that it falls naturally into three sections (front cover, spine, back cover) while remaining a unified whole (because you are a principled artiste who could do no less).

My spine, I think, is particularly successful:

There, wouldn't that look handsome on your bookshelf? Whether the other parts will come together remains to be seen. No doubt I'll have to tweak things a bit.

To get an idea of the truly glacial pace at which I paint, reflect that I worked through unabridged audiobooks of Titus Groan, The Bloody Crown of Conan, Dracula, King Solomon's Mines, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Imaro, Imaro 2, Nostromo, In a Glass Darkly, The Brothers Karamazov, and The House on the Borderland while in progress. That's not counting the time spent listening to Pink Floyd and the Doors.

I wanted very much to listen to Emma, which happens to be one of my favorite novels, but was afraid that Miss Woodhouse would make me lose my take-no-prisoners sword-and-sorcery mojo. I'm not joking about that. There's enough pink in the picture as it is.

Stay tuned for further developments in the publication of my upcoming novel.

Hard at Work or...

Let's take a little break from our long-winded castigations of much-loved children's book authors to take a look at what I've been working on lately.

First exhibit, the cover of my upcoming book The King of Nightspore's Crown:

Ha ha ha, just kidding. (I probably had too much fun making that.) Here is the actual painting, in its current state of completion:

For your viewing pleasure, here's a close-up of the lovely mosses:

and here's the two dudes fighting:

As you can see, I've got some Oceanic and Central American influences going on here. Wouldn't this make a cool movie? I'd go see it. Maybe I'll try to interest Guillermo del Toro in optioning the series. If that works out, I'll probably insist that Doug Jones portray at least some of the abhuman characters.

I'm still leaning toward making the left-hand side of this image the front cover, which would maybe look something like this:

As I hope is abundantly clear, I'm still going for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy look. The design's a bit busy, perhaps, but that's kind of my trademark.

*

I've been listening to Joseph Conrad while painting, which seems fitting. I've also been re-listening to the Imaro books, in anticipation of acquiring the further volumes. Something about the Imaro stories reminds me of the freshness of the old pulps. No doubt this owes partly to the newness of the setting, but there's an earnest seriousness to Saunders' stories that puts me in mind of Robert E. Howard. I like the wilderness stories the best.

A reader objected the other day to attempts to "erase" authors from history. Regular readers of my blog know that, while I may get in a high dudgeon about this or that, I'm quite shameless when it comes to filling my own skull with garbage. I would also defend to the death (or some such rhetorical extremity) the right of the writer to depict the ugly side of life in an ambiguous way. And I don't apologize for reading and liking authors who hold opinions that I or others regard as morally repugnant.

But that doesn't mean that commenting on authors' viewpoints is off-limits, either. It's a free country!

So, suppose you get irritated by something that pervades an author's work – an author you happen to really like on the whole. You want to do something about it. There's a few things you can try. You can grouse about it on your blog, and see where that gets you. That's one approach. You can repudiate and utterly contemn the author's works and urge others to do so. We might call this the bonfire-of-the-vanities approach. Or you can just write your own awesome stories in the same genre, with a certain amount of subversion and subtle commentary.

Which seems like the most fun?

Inspired by such ruminations, I here announce the inception of an alternate-history sword-and-sorcery subgenre set during the time of the Spanish conquests. Of course my protagonist will hail from Puerto Rico. Of course he will be of mixed ancestry. And of course his adventures will take him across an alternate Texas in search of God, gold, and glory. Just like me!

After careful consideration, I propose "sword-and-santería" as a name for the subgenre, having briefly considered but ultimately rejected the "arquebus-and-sorcery" label. I've written one story so far, set in the location of the town where I live. From here I think he will wander out to the painted canyons of the west, to encounter cosmic weirdness and mete out sudden vengeance. No doubt his perambulations will eventually take him to all the really interesting places in the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central America. It's Conrad and Cather meet Howard and Lovecraft, Kane and Conan meet Coronado and Cortés. I wish my antihero luck in his morally dubious adventures.

Tower and Fish

Midnight painting madness continues apace. I am happy to report that I have almost one half of the cover (whether the front or the back I don't yet know) of The King of Nightspore's Crown more or less completed:

I say midnight painting, though of a truth much of this was produced on weekends, mostly while "napping" the baby by bouncing her little chair with my foot. She wakes up the instant I stop this motion, and it takes quite a bit of coordination to keep the bounces out of the picture. And yet somehow I've never been able to dribble a basketball.

At any rate, here we have an abstracted version of the pseudospherical Tower of Bel reaching up into the stratosphere against an Enochite skyline, with the Leviathan that symbolizes both primeval Chaos and the all-powerful State swimming into a brackish hemlath swamp. Some aspects remain to be touched up, but I like how it's going so far.

In case you've forgotten, here's the original sketch of the cover in toto:

The pigment is somehow mixed with the identical purple dresses of Cora and Clarice, the resurrection of the mummy Xaltotun, the beheading of the vampire Lucy Westenra, the squashing of the witch Gagool beneath a heavy door, the revelation of Pip's benefactor on a storm-tossed night, and the horrible spontaneous combustion of the rag-and-bottle merchant Krook. As you can see, I paint very, very slowly.

I am tentatively to have another art show this summer. My friend who runs the gallery, a forward-thinking MFA and art instructor at the local college, is always just a tiny bit disheartened by my staid attention to naturalism, my addiction to illustration, and my meticulous planning. So I hope to complete a few more abstract and spontaneous pictures before now and then to gladden his spirit. To that end, I'm working on the Chicken Man:

He was originally drawn to please my four-year-old daughter; the ghostly image of Margo, her orange dinosaurian crony, may be seen through the Chicken Man's right leg, on the next page of my sketch book. Why he's called the Chicken Man I don't know. Perhaps because it's a hard world for little things. His pathos fills me with sad tenderness.

His body is formed from turning a random squiggle into a surface by converting the crossings into shaded twists, forming (in topological terms) a punctured surface. This particular surface happens not to be orientable, as an examination of his right hip suffices to indicate. It follows that he's not a Seifert surface, though I wouldn't tell him this to his face. His genus is nine. Well, ten, if you count his little toe-loop.

Man, the obscure geometry and topology references just keep coming tonight. Maybe the pressure is starting to get to me.

Nightspore Update

We take a break from our series of rambling Robert E. Howard posts to bring you an update on my novel.

The working title is The King of Nightspore's Crown, though this may change for practical reasons. I do think it's cool-sounding. These days I'm working on revising the manuscript, which I completed in December. Here's a draft of the elevator pitch / back description:

The last scion of an extinct tribe, Keftu thought he had found a place among the misfits of Enoch's underworld. But the veiled warlock Zilla plots to revive the city's semi-divine oversoul, and all those who refuse assimilation will be destroyed. A homeless outcast, Keftu must single-handedly thwart Zilla's plans and wrest control of the sea-beast Gorgantiphon. With the aid of perilous alliances, he cuts a swath through a world of paleozoic darkness and daemonic splendor, from the dunes of the Fireglass to the decayed heart of Nightspore, in a desperate bid to steal the Star of Morning and confront the secrets of his own past.

I'm also at work on the book cover. As before, the finished product will feature a wrap-around cover in the style of mass-market paperbacks from the seventies. Here's my initial sketch:

The style owes to Samuel Palmer, Henri Rousseau, and certain book covers that I happen to like, among other things. I've transferred the image to my watercolor block and started painting. Here's what I've got so far:

I'm liking it pretty well at this point, so hopefully this doesn't jinx me! As far as fidelity to the text goes, it's more evocative than illustrative. But here at least is a case in which the cover artist has actually read the book all the way through. I'm still at work on the painted portion. I paint extremely slowly, with a size 0000 brush. On the whole, the painting is going to be quite dark, with the right-hand-side a glowing nocturnal scene. That's what I've got in my head, anyway.

I'm not certain yet which side would be best as the front of the cover. I could see it either way, depending on how the colors develop. For instance, something along the following seems rather nice to me:

 

 

The lettering's probably too light for the finished product but you get the idea. Then again, the marketing department would probably rather see a pair of guys hacking at each other on the front cover than a carnivorous placoderm fish. So we'll see how things develop.

Rites of Spring

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

— "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" 

Life on earth is divided into three main phases: the Paleozoic Era, the Mesozoic Era, and the Cenozoic Era. The Cenozoic is the most recent, and saw the dominance of mammals and the evolution of man. The Mesozoic is most famous for the dinosaurs.

Rudolph Zallinger's 1947 Age of Reptiles mural at Yale University. I had a copy of this
on my bedroom wall when I was a kid. The right-hand part inspires my writing.

But it's always been the Paleozoic Era to which I'm most drawn, partly, perhaps, because it's older and more mysterious, partly because it's much less popular. There is no Carboniferous Park cinematic franchise, no iconic image of Raquel Welch in a fur bikini with a lumbering moschops in the background.

I've also always been drawn to lower life-forms, like mosses and marine invertebrates, which dominated in the Paleozoic.


From Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur.

And then, too, there's the mysterious mass extinction event known as the Great Dying (perhaps not unconnected with the flying polyp wars), which took place at the close of the Permian Period, wiping out something like 96% of the world's species, beside which the demise of the dinosaurs much later in geological history pales in comparison. The world of the Paleozoic is almost like an alien planet, with giant sea scorpions, enormous dragonflies, terrifying armored fishes, forests of towering mosses, and huge carnivorous amphibians.


An artist's 1906 rendering of a coal swamp with
tree ferns, scale trees, and giant scouring rushes.

My love of things prehistoric and paleozoic is goes hand in hand with my love of their depiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, incorporating motifs from the Art Nouveau and Art Deco eras. It is easy to forget that science is all inference and paradigm, colored by the environment in which it flourishes. I grew up reading books from the public library, hence came to know the primeval world through the outdated paleontological renderings of that earlier epoch, redolent of quiet museums of natural history where upraised fossils were their own silent testimony. Each period has its own idea of the world, and the prehistory of the early twentieth century is, to me, haunting and dreary and brutish and lovely.

Image from Disney's Fantasia (1940).

The part of Disney's Fantasia set to my favorite piece of music, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, though quite different from the original ballet (and, somewhat apocryphally, derided by the composer), is a perfect evocation of my feelings for the era. It's like a Tiffany lampshade with primeval monsters engaged in a grim fight for survival.


Tiffany stained glass window (c. 1890).

H. P. Lovecraft had something of the same sentiment, I think, with all his strange elder races combining primitive plant and fungoid forms with echinoderms and arthropods. To make a full circle of some of the connections here, I note that Nicholas Roerich, who designed the costumes and set for the original 1913 production of The Rite of Spring, is referred to by Lovecraft in At the Mountains of Madness, and mentioned in the same sentence as that famously erudite gentleman, Mr. Alhazred:

Through the desolate summits swept ranging, intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.

Do you see what we've done? We've made a complete circle: Paleozoic → Chthulu mythos → Nicholas Roerich → The Rite of Spring → Fantasia → Paleozoic.

A member of the Great Race of Yith [source]
featured in "The Shadow out of Time."

This is how my mind works. I find loops of connections, draw my own morals from them, and make them into stories. Whether the results are intelligible is another matter. My current literary endeavor, The King of Nightspore's Crown, has a long segment inspired by both the animated film and the ballet. (The latter, a sequence of quasi-pagan rituals choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, was so avant-garde that it sparked a riot at its premier. Watch a reconstruction, sans riot, here.)


One of Roerich's backdrop designs for The Rite of Spring.

There's a lot to think about in setting a story against a Paleozoic backdrop. For one thing, there is no grass, hence no fields, meadows, prairies, or steppes. As a matter of fact, there's practically no terrestrial life beyond the limit of the coal swamps. There are no birds singing in the background. Flowers, fruits, bees, and butterflies are absent. So are milk and bread and wine and honey, and wool and cotton and linen and down.

This makes metaphors rather difficult. Can one say that the wall of an ancient crypt is "honeycombed" with tombs, or that an old man is "waspish"? Are airships flown by "aviators"? Are the embarrassed allowed to be "sheepish"? Can the recalcitrant be "cowed" into submission? Is there a "bloom" on a young girl's cheek? Can an oaf make "asinine" comments? Can dawn-tinted clouds wear a "rosy" hue? Do cozening enchanters speak "mellifluously"? Do mighty warriors flex their "muscles"?

Indeed, how far does one go in "winnowing" out words with connotations that violate the rules of the world? As a person who consults an etymological dictionary on a regular basis, I could go crazy fretting about things like this. In the end, I suppose it's all a matter of ear. Whatever you do, the important thing is to not call attention to it. Still, it's worth noting that the great fantasists generally are very careful about word choice.

J. G. Ballard's strange and lovely Drowned World, which I just finished reading, is another literary work featuring the Paleozoic. Though framed as a post-apocalyptic tale, it centers around man's evolutionary regress to a still-present genetic past.

In The Sea Around Us, marine biologist Rachel Carson claims (with what truth I know not) that the chemical composition of human blood represents the salinity of the primordial seas from which our amphibious forebears arose. And zoologist Adolf Portmann discusses in Animal Forms and Patterns how widely differing species share similar embryos, so that the first stages in the development of a man are almost indistinguishable from lower vertebrates and even arthropods. We are still as segmented as millipedes in our backbones.

Trilobites, eurypterids, and horseshoe crabs,
from Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur.

So perhaps it would be no difficult matter to slip backwards, or even to step sideways to another branch of the evolutionary tree, an idea I sometimes explore in my stories.

                                                                       for
yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if like a crab
you could go backward. 

— Hamlet

The Tower of Bel in California

In 1991, an engineer by the name of Eugene Tsui designed a building that would have solved all of San Francisco's current housing shortage problems: the Ultima, a mega-tower one mile wide and two miles high, with enough room for one million residents.

Tsui based his design on African termite mounds:

The structure is designed to consist of 120 levels, each with its own mini-ecosystem featuring lakes, skies, hills, and rivers. In place of an air conditioning system, aerodynamic windows would help to cool the interior. Just as water from the bottom of an African termite mound cools the rest of the structure, waterfalls on the lower levels—and a giant surrounding lake—would also provide natural air conditioning (cool air rises and is warmed by bodily activity on the upper levels). And a series of mirrors at the building’s core would reflect sunlight throughout. [source]

You can check out the stats here. Imagine, only $150 billion! That's just $150,000 per resident – not bad on the Bay Area real estate market. Unfortunately, the residents of San Francisco remained unconvinced:

"San Francisco has this prejudicial view of what architecture ought to be, and it's a very backward and provincial view," Tssui says. "There's a very strange, discriminatory prejudice for retaining that ancient model of San Francisco [at the turn of the century]. It’s been a huge challenge to defy that, and I've had nothing but troubles trying to create something innovative and meaningful and purposeful." [source]

Tell me about it, Eugene: nothing makes me think of the words "backward," "provincial," and "discriminatory prejudice" like San Francisco.

If you've read my novel Dragonfly (and if you haven't then I hope you will), it will be plain why Mr. Tsui's proposal interests and amuses me. But let's hear it from the draft of its sequel, The King of Nightspore's Crown, in which Keftu makes his first attempt to enter the Tower of Bel:

The sun climbed to the meridian, and land was out of sight; the sun declined before my face, and darkness mantled the earth. The daystar pursued its appointed course and rose in the east again. The earth was a watery ball, the viaduct a thread stretched across its face, a path from infinity to infinity.

And then at last like a faraway giant it strode through the waves, a faded pillar against the gray-gold bowl of the sky, the axle of the ocean-wide wheel, linked to the rim-city by iron spokes. It marched toward me as the white-hot sun sank again to the sea. 

No longer was I a voyeur peeping through a picture-viewer's lenses. It was there before me, the city's crown and pinnacle, the center toward which all men strained, the font from which all culture flowed. From the sea-floor to the stratosphere it rose, its weight upheld by girders that stood on the abyssal plain. Above the waves its shape was like an irregular, many-sided pyramid whose slanting faces became ever steeper as they narrowed, curving upward rather than converging upon an apex, forming a pillar like a tapering prism which, from a distance, looked like a sharp spike set to goad heaven itself. 

Its smooth gray sides were gradually resolved into a mosaic of windows and hangars and terraces. A sunlit corpuscle descended upon its stratospheric crown like a spark of divine inspiration. The viaducts that converged at its broad base were so many slender spider-threads. 

The rail-car crossed into the annular belt of floating crops just as the sun began to melt into the horizon. The sea-vegetables were tended by helots, but no helot lived in the Tower. They were brought over from the coasts in weekly shifts. 

The belt was miles across, and dusk had fallen before the car gained the inner boundary. The Tower had by that time swollen to occlude the sky, its faces aglitter with silver diamonds, its stratospheric crown yet ablaze with the light of day. 

The train was passing over the ring of pleasure gardens now. The paper lanterns were like colored fireflies visiting the floating plats.

Like the Ultima, the Tower of Bel is an edifice built to house a city, featuring miniature ecosystems and supplied with piped-in sunlight. Unlike the Ultima, space elevators link the Tower's stratospheric crown with the Hanging Gardens of Narva, a toric space-palace in geostationary orbit. The Tower is located in the middle of the Tethys Sea, with its bulk partly upheld by the force of buoyancy; the ocean provides a natural cooling system, like Mr. Tsui's moat (ahem, lake), but also ensures that the riffraff of the city can be held at arm's length.

Of course, the Ultima was designed before the Tower of Bel, but I didn't know of it. Believe it or not, I even based my design on termite mounds! (The biota of Antellus are Paleozoic, so hymenopteran social insects such as ants, bees, and wasps are off-limits. So are grass, flowers, milk products, butterflies, bread, and wine.) It's kind of scary when life imitates art...

Mining the Bible

The Book of Tobit isn't the most well-known book of the Bible. For one thing, it's very short; for another, it's not in all Bibles. Catholics refer to it as "deuterocanonical," indicating that it is not in the current Hebrew Bible, but regard it as canon; to Protestants it is "apocryphal," hence non-canonical.

The events Tobit describes are placed in the 8th century BC, but it was probably written in the 3rd or 2nd century, or at any rate sometime after the return from the exile. It was written in Aramaic, but most modern editions are based on one of several ancient Greek versions. The Aramaic and Hebrew versions were thought lost until fragments were found in Cave IV at Qumran. St. Jerome claimed to have based his version for the Latin Vulgate on an Aramaic copy.

The book is, according to most scholars, a kind of religious fairy tale:

Tobit is a righteous Israelite living in Nineveh after being deported by Shalmaneser, the king of Assyria who conquered the northern kingdom. He adheres to the Mosaic law, practices charity, and is especially solicitous regarding the burial of the dead. This gets him in trouble with Sennacherib, Shalmaneser's successor, forcing him to flee for his life. (There are some historical errors here, but I'm presenting the story as-is.) After Sennacherib's assassination, Tobit's nephew Ahiqar (a Near Eastern folk hero) pulls some strings to allow for his return. He takes up his dead-burying activities again, prompting the derision of his neighbors. After burying a man strangled in the marketplace, he sleeps in the open, and birds poop in his eyes. This causes cataracts and, eventually, blindness. He prays for death.

Meanwhile, a young Israelite woman named Sarah, who lives in Ecbatana in Media (in modern-day Iran), is experiencing troubles of her own. She's gotten married seven times, but every time, just as she was preparing to go to bed with her new husband, the demon Asmodeus (from the Persian aeshma daeva, demon of wrath) appeared and killed the groom to prevent their consummating their union. Her maid accuses her of having strangled them all. She prays for death.

Both prayers are heard by God, who sends the angel Raphael to make things right.

Tobit sends his son Tobias to Media to retrieve a large sum of money he deposited there many years ago. Tobias enlists the service of a young man (Raphael in mortal disguise) who claims to know the roads. While en route, a fish tries to eat Tobiah's foot as he's bathing in the Tigris River. He catches the fish, and Raphael advises him to keep the liver, the heart, and the gall. The first two repel demons when roasted, and the third is a cure for cataracts.

They reach Sarah's house. Tobiah marries Sarah and they go to the bridal chamber. He places the liver and heart on embers prepared for incense. Asmodeus is driven by the smoke into Upper Egypt, where he is bound by Raphael. Tobiah and Sarah rise to say a prayer together. It's a prayer of thanksgiving that goes from the cosmic to the intimate, dwelling on the heavens and the earth, Adam and Eve, sexual complementarity, mutual support, sincere love, and the hope of growing old together.

Sarah says, "Amen," and they get in bed together. Sarah's father, who had ordered a grave to be dug in the night, has it filled in when he discovers the happy outcome. The money is retrieved and the couple goes to Nineveh. Tobiah applies the gall to his father's eyes and is able to peel the cataracts off his eyeballs. The angel then reveals his true identity:

I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who present the prayers of the saints and enter into the presence of the glory of the Holy One.

He also gives some insight into the nature of his supposed corporeality:

All these days I merely appeared to you and did not eat or drink, but you were seeing a vision.

Years later, from his deathbed, Tobit admonishes his son to return to Ecbatana, for the prophet has preached the destruction of Nineveh. So Tobiah and Sarah and their family return to Media, where they hear about the fall of Nineveh and praise God.

All in all, it's a strange, beautiful tale full of bizarre happenings and vivid details that passes freely and unapologetically from the scatological, the visceral, and the sexual to the angelic and the divine. It's entertaining – it could almost be the basis for a story in the Arabian Nights – at the same time as being edifying and thought-provoking. More than anything, viewed purely as a story, it's a wonderful mine for writers.

John O'Neill of Black Gate fame recently mentioned his surprise that fantasy authors don't do more with Biblical material:

When I was editing fiction for Black Gate, I was always a little surprised at how many writers were eager to tap the dead religions of Ancient Greece, Rome and Scandinavia, and how few seemed interested in the rich storytelling of the Bible. Maybe it was an overabundance of respect — or, more likely, a lack of real familiarity with the source material.

I suspect that, culturally speaking, it's just too close, for believers as well as non-believers. There's a sense of ownership. We know the Bible, or so we think. It's old hat.

The truth is, the Bible has a lot of weird, sexy, and violent parts that don't come up in Sunday school. The Old Testament is a Bronze-Age epic of love and revenge and worship and war, rich in historical detail and local color, with poetic images that are some of the most beautiful in any language. It's a bridge from the cosmic to the historical, establishing a supernatural link and parallel between the Temple liturgy and the creation of the universe.

Even the New Testament has more strangeness to mine than most people suspect. Think, for instance, of the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, in which Jesus casts the demon called Legion ("for we are many") out of a tomb-dwelling demoniac, but, at its request, allows it to enter a herd of swine, which promptly drown themselves in the sea. That story alone prompts countless questions about the nature of the world of spirits; it makes you feel like you're catching just a glimpse into a strange and frightening plane with its own secret laws.

One fantasy author who did do a lot with Biblical material is Madeleine L'Engle. I read her Time Quartet many times when I was a pre-teen. My favorite was Many Waters, in which the "normal" Murray twins Dennys and Sandy are accidentally time-warped into the days leading up to the Deluge, where they meet the patriarchs, fall in love with a beautiful young woman, and come into contact with nephilim, seraphim, virtual unicorns, and tiny wooly mammoths. When I was in the fourth grade I began a project of reading the King James Version of the Bible, and Many Waters went hand-in-hand with the strange things I was encountering there. I even dressed as Japheth for Book Day in the fifth grade.

I happen to do a lot with Biblical material myself. The world of Antellus represents a blend of Greek and Semitic mythology. Like L'Engle, I'm especially drawn to the first part of Genesis, from the creation accounts (there's two of them, you know) down to the Tower of Babel. Robert Alter's Genesis: Translation and Commentary (W. W. Norton) is an excellent non-religious translation. I'm also fascinated by the mythologies of other Semitic peoples, especially the Arabian/Islamic jinn, on which I base my nephelim, as well as some of the other ancient Jewish traditions. But I have a special affection for Tobit, which is one reason I chose my pen name as I did.

So, go read your Bible. If you don't have one, get one. I'm sure you can find someone more than willing to give you a nice one for free, even if you tell them that you just want to mine it for material. It just might not have the deuterocanonical books in it...

A Black Gate Review of "The Scale-Tree"

Fletcher Vredenburgh offers a nice review of "The Scale-Tree" in his July short-story roundup over at Black Gate:

Raphael Ordoñez dives into the blacker depths of storytelling in the “The Scale-Tree.” Zeuxis, a “flying artist and geometer”  and his family live in a tower in Enoch, the great world-city that features in several of Ordoñez’s other stories as well as his novel, Dragonfly. Zeuxis tries to provide for his family by selling his paintings but it’s a constant struggle. 

When he dies in a flying accident his wife and two children wind up in the middle of a tale inspired by the Grimm’s “The Juniper Tree” (think creepy step-parent, a child at severe risk, and a meal you should definitely not eat). This is one of the more unsettling stories I’ve read in months and one of the best. Ordoñez’s writing is rooted in the less genre-bound styles of early fantasy and fairy tales, coupled with a contemporary concern for creating more complex and fully human characters. If you haven’t read any of his work till now, this is the perfect place to start.

I keep up with Black Gate because a shocking number of people who like to read the same slightly obscure things I do hang out there (thank you, Internet), so as always it's a pleasure to have my name appear in its cyber-pages.

"The Scale-Tree" Reviewed

Lois Tilton has reviewed "The Scale-Tree" at Locus Online. It's thoughtful and appreciative, which is as much as any writer can ask.

The traditional fairy tale has a flat narrative and characters who tend to be types rather than fully-realized individuals: there is the King, the Witch, the Stepmother. One advantage of retelling these tales is the opportunity to add dimension. So that instead of a generic city, we find ourselves in “Enoch, the world-city that surrounds the sea on three sides like a giant omega”—not only a neat image but an example of the way the text mixes words from the Hellenic and Hebrew. Here live Zeuxis, an artist who takes aerial photographs from a sort of ultralight flier, and his wife Helen, who, like many aging couples in the tales, want to fulfill their lives with children. They perform a rite that brings them a son and a daughter. All is more or less well with them until a brute happens to see a picture of the daughter, Philomena, and immediately covets her. Before long, Zeuxis is dead, the brute has become Mena’s stepfather, and we know his intentions. 

I like the twist of giving the usual stepmother a male guise. The story mingles several classic fairytale tropes, including some that go very far back indeed, but I have to say that the conclusion, which follows one well-known story almost word for word, is rather a disappointment after the creativity of the earlier elements. What I like best here, though, is the well-imagined cosmology behind this world, and the views of Zeuxis on the artist’s life:

“We’re conduits. When we stop the outflow, no more can flow in, and we stagnate. We die daily to live. It’s the flow that matters, not the possession of what’s not really ours anyway.”

Check out the review here. Incidentally, the dialogue about art mentioned by Ms. Tilton comes from a conversation I had with my six-year-old son, who was very angry at me last summer for selling some of my paintings. I'm still somewhat anguished about the selling process myself, and the story was written partly as a way of coping with my first public exhibition, partly as a symbolic exploration of abstraction in the visual arts, which I pontificated about in Part II of my post on The Arts of the Beautiful. Paul Klee had a lot to do with this story.

In related news, I'm pleased to announce that my story "At the Edge of the Sea" will appear in the upcoming Beneath Ceaseless Skies year's best anthology. Stay tuned for further details.

"Love in the Isle of the Combinators": Free Fiction

This is my first published story. It originally came out in The Colored Lens, but their rights are non-exclusive now, so I'm placing it here for whomever might be interested. You can still buy the magazine from Amazon.

The ghulim around which the story is centered play a role in my stories, particularly in Dragonfly and "Witch of Anûn." They represent some theological / psychological / biological speculations on my part. 

I see rationality as a black-and-white trait: an organism either is or is not rational and self-aware. This is a philosophical view. It accords well with modern biology, though, because inheritance does seem to be "digital" rather than "analog," characterized by genetic on-off switches, Punnett squares, and the rest, not by gradual continuous changes.

So, what if rationality in mankind began in only a few (say, two) individuals? What of the other members of the species? Scientists have recently told us that mankind could not have stemmed from a single female, and, perhaps with a similar motivation, children at parochial schools have for untold years delighted in asking their teachers whom Adam and Eve's children married.

Well, perhaps the rational soul was passed on as a "dominant trait," so that the offspring of a human being and a beast in human shape would be another true human being, not a "mixture" of the two. And perhaps the force and/or forces (I'm trying to be ecumenical here) responsible for the awakening of these anthropoid apes tasked them, not only with the care of the earth and the naming of the creatures, but also with the husbandry of their fleshly kin, treating them, not as equals, but not exactly as animals, either, with the possibility of "intermarriage" as a kind of religious vocation akin to celibacy.

The state of grace would then be characterized by the gradual diminution of the sub-rational population, which would continue to be nurtured with the dignity due their station until only rational descendants remained, while the fall from grace would be characterized by the persistent presence of the sub-rational and their treatment as animals or chattel. In such a fallen world, the dominant culture might regard inter-couplings as taboo, and the stature of a man might be measured by the dignity with which he treats his fleshly kin, though all such dealings would be tainted with "original sin." 

My ghulim are inspired partly the sub-rational deep-sea mermen glimpsed by Ransom in C. S. Lewis' Perelandra, partly by Mike Flynn's amusing and thought-provoking essay "Adam and Eve and Ted and Alice," and partly by my own reading of Thomas Aquinas and Etienne Gilson. But they have been filtered through the turgid medium of my wayward brain, so I wish to emphasize that none of these authors bear any blame for what is to follow.

The text has been lightly edited so as to accord with the current state of my invented terminology. It has also been made slightly less crass. It's a story about true love in a cracked world. I hope you enjoy it.

Love in the Isle of the Combinators

Linimer's fingers caressed the brass dial. Six plus four minus one choose four. The engine rang out its answer, one note in a mechanical symphony. Sixty combinators danced along the face of the machine, up and down the Hall of Computation.

Nine choose four and nine choose five is ten choose five. Six hundred fingers flew over the cogs and stops. Slanting sunbeams streamed through the high windows, making gnomons of the workers and gold dust of the whirling motes. It was evening.

"The Scale-Tree" at Beneath Ceaseless Skies

My newest story, "The Scale-Tree," is out at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, together with "The Insurrectionist and the Empress Who Reigns Over Time" by Benjanun Sriduangkaew and an audio podcast of "Stone Prayers" by Kate Marshall. On the cover this month is Migration by Julie Dillon.

As always, it's an honor to have my work appear in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, a wonderful venue for literary adventure fantasy, and the first and only magazine I really aspired to when I started trying to get published.

My story is inspired by brother-and-sister fairy tales like "Hansel and Gretel" and "The Juniper Tree"; as I've mentioned here several times, my evenings are often spent reading Andrew Lang's collection of many colors to my kids. I'd seen The Night of the Hunter for the first time not long before writing it, so that's doubtless in the mix as well. It also goes somewhat more deeply (and elliptically) into the mythological-topological underpinnings of the world in which my novel, Dragonfly, is set.

I hope you read and enjoy my story, and the others as well.

Literary Chorizo

I continue to labor away at The King of Nightspore's Crown, the sequel to Dragonfly. Various things are going into the stew, including ancient Athenian lawgivers, Prairie School architecture, medieval bestiaries, the national park system, Heart of Darkness, Andrew Lang's fairy tale collections, the history of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, and assorted giant monsters and prehistoric creatures, not to mention all the usual suspects among my favorite genre writers. They say you should never watch sausage being made (or, around where I live, chorizo), but I tend to assume that people who visit my blog have strong stomachs.

Incidentally, I have a story called "The Scale-Tree" coming out in Beneath Ceaseless Skies sometime in the not-so-distant future, which will provide interested readers a glimpse into the topological-mythological underpinnings of the counter-earth at the cosmic antipodes.

It's kind of strange, really, but I get the feeling sometimes that I'm exploring a world that's already there, rather than inventing a new one of my own. It's a bit like mathematics, which is accomplished much more by fiat than people suspect. The mathematician says, Let it be so!, and it is so, and he or she goes down into the world that he or she has made and explores it. That's how I feel about Antellus. Its axioms established, it developed on its own, down to the least detail. Fortunately, as Gödel's incompleteness theorems have established, I still have infinitely many avenues of freedom open to me. Or something like that.

 

In other news, I'm toying with the idea of creating a new edition of a public domain fantasy classic, like The Worm Ouroboros, for sale through Hythloday House. I have sketch of a wrap-around cover inspired by Persian miniatures that I may try to work up over the remainder of the summer. I have no idea if there'd be a market for such a thing (well, ha ha, of course there's not, but I'm Quixotic that way), but it would please me to produce it all the same. To my knowledge there's never been an edition with a map, so there's that.