The Eladogran Cosmogony

My fiction is based on a set of documents that came to me from a source which must remain secret. However, because this is my blog, where I may do as I like, I will here offer one document for the reader's perusal. If inclined to doubt its authenticity (or my sanity), please regard it merely as an exercise in mythopoeic verisimilitude and an attempt to gather my extensive notes into one place, somewhere among Plato's Timaeus, Tolkien's Ainulindalë, Blake's Book of Urizen, and The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.

The text comes from the counter-earth at the cosmic antipodes, though whether from the future, the past, or some other cycle I cannot say. It appears to be of Recusant authorship. The editor's introduction, however, is plainly the product of Enochite erudition, which tends to miss the point about most things.

The edition relies on secondary sources, namely, transcriptions of the original codex into the cylinders used by the Enochite archives. Cylinders are decoded by mechanical readers, and are known to be more durable than other forms of record-keeping, but even slight damage to a cylinder can make entire passages completely inaccessible, a drawback not shared by paper or baked clay.

Though I didn't scruple to make use of modern English punctuation and vocabulary in my translation, I did my best to retain the flavor of the original. One word posed a special difficulty, however. The nephelic tongue uses different terms for the human species as a whole and for the male of that species, while the English word "man" can refer to either. "Human being" is an unforgivable solecism, and "human" is, properly speaking, an adjective, not a noun. In the end I went with traditional English usage, though this does some injustice to the text.

The manuscript in my possession (which, strangely enough, is on paper, not a cylinder) is accompanied by a number of curious pictures. Unfortunately, the gamma radiation to which they were exposed during their long sojourn in the deeps of space has caused them to fade badly. I fear that the harsh light of a document scanner would only cause further damage. Even the darkened, climate-controlled room where I keep the manuscript has not proved entirely adequate. I may attempt to reproduce the pictures by hand at some future date. If I do so, I shall certainly append them to this post.

I caution the reader not to expect too strict an adherence to the letter of this document in my writing. The account reflects philosophical, mythological, historical, and topological traditions, whereas my stories are works of literature.

And now, on to...

At the Edge of the Sea

I'm pleased to announce that my story "At the Edge of the Sea" has been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It was inspired by Rachel Carson's books about marine life, Adolf Portmann's Animal Forms and Patterns, and Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur. I already wrote a bit about it here.

At any rate, the podcast is coming soon. BCS is one of the only venues for the kind of fantasy I like to read, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have my work appear there.

Upcoming Fiction

I'm pleased to report that my story "At the Edge of the Sea" is scheduled to appear on Beneath Ceaseless Skies in April, in both print and podcast form. This is my third story to appear in BCS. It's a slightly fractured, fantastic love story with metaphysical flourishes. When I was a kid my dad taught high school marine biology, and sometimes took me on fossil-collecting expeditions in the Hill Country as well as specimen-collecting expeditions to the coast. I loved poring over his copy of the Beachcomber's Guide to Gulf Coast Marine Life. My story is inspired by those memories, and also by Adolf Portmann's Animal Forms and Patterns.

To see (or hear) my previous stories at BCS, click here for Misbegotten and here for The Goblin King's Concubine.

Nightspore Forest of Ir

My most recently published story, "The Goblin King's Concubine," has now appeared in podcast form in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Journey through Nightspore Forest of Ir on your commute!

Lois Tilton of Locus Online reviewed the story, and had this to say:

Maugreth is on an expedition to find the lost princess of the house of Adul, there being a reward for her return. After a perilous journey of murder and betrayal, much of it on his part, he discovers her living comfortably in a village of the goblins, here called helborim. She agrees to be rescued but insists on bringing along her half-breed offspring.

"I know what you're thinking," said Minuë. "It's true, we're hideous to them. But to Cheirod I was a peerless prize. He brooks no dissent and consummates his every desire. Several of his wise men objected when he chose to adopt the fruit of my womb as heir. They were promptly impaled."

A dark, cruel fantasy, where the unlucky are devoured by spiders or suffer other gruesome fates. There is a strong retro tone to the tale, as the central image is that of a naked white woman held as a sex slave by a monster – or a creature that most humans would consider a monster. But this princess is a match for human or goblin. There is also a sense here of a larger world beyond the backwater where the story finds itself, nations and races and languages yet unseen. A maugreth, for example, is a term of disgust and we don't know why our character has chosen to call himself by such a name, although it certainly seems fitting, given his actions.

Which I suppose about sums it up. I wrote a bit about the story's inspiration in a previous post. I should probably also mention Heart of Darkness as a rather obvious source of inspiration. As to the sense of a larger world, I appreciate that insight; this is an episode in a cycle of stories centered on Zilla and his fate in Enoch, explored in a number of yet-to-be-published short stories and a complete full-length novel.

UPDATE: Thanks also to Fletcher Vredenburgh for his kind review over at Black Gate. I aim to please!

The Goblin King's Concubine

I'm pleased to report that my story "The Goblin King's Concubine" has just appeared in Issue 129 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. BCS is an excellent venue for literary adventure fantasy, and I'm honored to have my work appear there for the second time.

The story itself is in part a subversive tribute to Robert E. Howard. It's inspired by the "rescue" of Cynthia Ann Parker (mother of Quanah Parker) from the Comanches by Sul Ross and the Texas Rangers, an event also echoed in Howard's tale "The Vale of Lost Women." Howard's latent racism, which unfortunately mars several of his stories, is in evidence here, and my story explores chauvinism and otherness (and goblin villages and lycopod forests). But I also admire Howard as a small-town Texan who inhabited his locality through speculative fiction; as a writer, he stands head and shoulders above his various imitators and posthumous collaborators.

The character of Zilla, by the bye, is inspired by certain (to me, chilling) passages of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, e.g.:

Meanwhile there grew up in his son that much more dangerous and harder new type of skepticism—who knows how much it owed precisely to the hatred of the father and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to solitude?—the skepticism of audacious manliness which is most closely related to the genius for war and conquest… This skepticism despises and nevertheless seizes; it undermines and takes possession; it does not believe but does not lose itself in the process; it gives the spirit dangerous freedom, but it is severe on the heart…

They say that you shouldn't reveal the "bones" that went into making the soup of a story, but I presume that people clicking the link to this blog are interested in such things. Anyway, all of this concerns the matter; the form is something else entirely.

Evolutions

I paint as well as write, and I've read a lot of books about the visual arts. The useful ones come in four varieties: (1) books containing large, faithful reproductions, together with technical information on format, ground, medium, etc.; (2) instructional books by great artists; (3) biographies with accurate portrayals of lifestyle, education, means, methods, etc.; and (4) manuals of materials. Those prolix, pedantic, fluffy art books filled with explanations about how the dog symbolizes fidelity and Christ grew up in Jerusalem and Picasso's wife stepped on his girlfriend's hand, but no information on execution, are useless. The same goes for criticism, unless you need someone to tell you what to like and why to like it, and for instructional books written by hacks.

Anyway, I've discovered much the same about books on writing. Here category (1) is superfluous. Category (4) includes books like Nicholson's Dictionary of American-English Usage Based on Fowler's Modern English Usage, which I often read for pleasure. Category (3) is equally useful and equally rare, because aesthetes and literati would rather read about concepts, controversies, and anecdotes than art. And category (2) is rarer still. I don't understand why someone who's published one novel and teaches college literature would feel qualified to write a book about how to write fiction, but there it is: I've got one on my shelf.

All this is to say, I've been reading How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card, an author I greatly respect even if I don't always agree with his views, and I'm pleased to find it a worthy entry under category (2). It's obviously a bit out of date, but the advice is still mostly sound, both encouraging and sobering. I only wish it were longer.

In one memorable passage Card compares the professor-cum-writing-teacher to a wine-making instructor who takes it upon himself to evaluate his students' work based on the half-understood words of famous wine critics. Card also describes in practical terms the process by which great ideas come to maturity, using himself as an example. Here we get down to nuts and bolts, which is the only really useful thing in art how-to books. The idea that formed the basis of Ender's Game apparently came while he was reading the Foundation trilogy as a teenager, but naturally took many years to produce fruit. He also describes the development of Hart's Hope (my favorite of his novels)—how the city began as a sketch of a map, produced its own culture, and ultimately acquired a story. This prompted me to think about the ideas behind the stories I'm writing right now, and whether they're of a like provenance.

I wrote my first science fiction story when I was a college student—thirteen years ago!—and sent it off to the Writers of the Future contest, which, alas, I didn't win. No copies are extant, but its title was "All the Rivers" (from the line in Ecclesiastes), and it opened with a quote from Blaise Pascal: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." The story, which was based on a psychedelic dream I'd had thanks to skipping my meds for a day, involved a mad, self-proclaimed prophet-king wandering with an army in scrap-iron armor through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Like the phenomena described by our sacred philosopher, it was a bit pointless. But that same mad king and wandering army have, amazingly*, resurfaced in my recent writings, as has the proverb: All rivers pour into the Sea of Bitter Tears, but the sea is not filled.

Entropy! That's what I write about. The next year I'd married and moved from the dorm to a tiny apartment. A rain gutter ran down along the outside of our unit, and there was a leak where the siding had rotted, causing a carpet of blue-green mold to creep across the ceiling of our closet. The bedroom was always dark because the blinds were broken, and, when that caused the window AC unit to break down, the maintenance guys fixed it by cutting an AC unit-shaped hole in the blinds. We always had a box fan in the door to the bedroom in an attempt to keep the living room from getting so miserably hot in the summer. There was also a rat infestation, and I actually skewered two with the point of an umbrella. The building was torn down as soon as we moved out; the management tried to make us leave before our lease was up, which we successfully resisted, but we were the last to go, the other residents already having fled like…well, you know.

Why do I mention all these picturesque details? Because they're a picture of my soul at the time. It was a period when I was severing psychological ties to a small but fanatical sect while living an extremely conflicted double life and performing such public mortifications as preaching the end of the world barefoot while dressed in a habit I had sewed myself from burlap. As if this weren't enough, I was, under a math professor's direction, trying to teach myself differential geometry, general relativity, and cosmology. Like Severian the Torturer, I forget nothing, and I vividly recall sitting in my dark bedroom, where the only furniture was a mattress on the floor, listening to the rodents' pitter-patter in kitchen, and studying the Schwarzchild model and Hawking's Theorem. The slowness of my mind so frustrated me that I beat the walls with my fists until my knuckles bled. I still have the scars.

Did I mention that I'm autistic?

But I digress. While all of this was going on, I began producing an elaborate future history of Martian civilization. A prince, a sultan's son who spoke with a woman's voice and never went without a veil to hide his horrific rictus grin, made an appearance in the kingdom of Xanth. This fellow—also inspired by missing my meds—has come into my recent stories as well. In fact, he shows up in both the stories I've sold to Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

The stratospheric, ocean-girt tower that acts as a kind of axis for all my stories originated as a doodle maybe six years ago. The world in which my stories take place came into being a couple years later, but I'd been contemplating the idea of a counter-earth with paleozoic biota for some time before that. The Paleozoic Era has long fascinated me. When I was a boy I had a print of the famous Yale Age of Reptiles mural on the wall of my bedroom, beneath which was the board where I'd draw the genealogical charts of the Greek gods and heroes. I suppose the origins of my novel really go back to that.

Well, so, it seems that "there is nothing new under the sun," at least when it comes to my writing. Ideas percolate for decades without my being aware of it; characters that I'd long forgotten reappear in new guises.

One day, when I'm rich and famous and dead, some pedantic student of early twenty-first-century speculative fiction—the author, perhaps, of the obscure monograph Culture at the Crossroads: The Metaphysical Epic Pulp-Action Fantasy Movement and its Antecedents—will come across this blog post in the dusty archives of the Wayback Machine, and cite it in a chapter devoted to my works; from there it will find its way into the Fantasy Writing Reader, where some aspiring author such as myself will find it and benefit from it.

* I say amazingly because I hadn't realized how far back it went it until I was writing this.

Of Flying Whales

My About Me page lists such luminaries as Conrad and Melville as authorial inspirations. Metaphysically, I am an Aristotelian or (more accurately) a Thomist, of sorts; I read Thomas Aquinas through his great twentieth-century expositors, especially Etienne Gilson, and I believe that this has a heavy influence on my writing. My knowledge of the physical laws that appear in my works (usually to be purposefully flouted) was imbibed at the font of my mathematics doctoral program, through which I studied graduate-level quantum theory and cosmology. And, lest my pedigree be suspect, I can point to Carl Friederich Gauss, Prince of Mathematicians, as my teacher-to-pupil mathematical ancestor. (So can about twenty thousand other people, of course.)

This list of influences and credentials is, admittedly, impressive. Yes. But it would be incomplete were I not to add one more source that, due perhaps to childhood trauma, has never been far from my mind. Those of you, my readers, to whom the felicitious locution "You spoony bard!" is not unfamiliar will know that of which I speak. I refer, of course, to the video game Final Fantasy II (Final Fantasy IV in the original Japanese version) produced by SquareSoft for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in the early nineties. (The total number of random Google hits my blog has received to date just octupled.) After having completed the American version too many times to count easily, I obtained the original version together with an English language patch, and am proud to say that I beat it as well, despite the added difficulty.

I know that I've spoken dismissively of video games in the past. This is for three reasons. First, I am a grown-up now, and have better and/or more lucrative ways to spend my time. Second, they rot your brain. It's true. And, third, I don't like first-person shooter- or slasher-type games, and those took the market over in the late nineties. I liked the old two-dimensional games like Zelda, which could sometimes be quite beautiful. (I also love to peruse Owen Jones' Grammar of Ornament.) Final Fantasy IV (IIE) is, alas, not particularly beautiful*, although the re-release looks to have corrected this. It is a great sadness to me that I will most likely never play it, as I have no intention of ever spending money on the system for which it was produced.

No, what chiefly I loved FF IV (IIE) for was the grand sweep of its story. It is a remarkably coherent story, considering the number of ridiculous plot elements introduced into FF VI (IIIE), which I also played extensively. There is much for the writer-of-fantasy-series to learn here. The key is the gradual broadening of perspective. What begins with the dismissal of Cecil the Black Knight from the Red Wings of Baron ends with the defeat of the evil Lunarian Zeromus deep beneath the surface of the Moon. (I can't believe I remember all that.) The story follows something of a spiral pattern, with new characters, forces, and places being held in reserve until the proper moment. This works to maintain player interest. The same idea applies in fiction.

This is a matter of nuts-and-bolts practicality: you can't introduce all your characters in Book I and have them keep returning to the same familiar places throughout the series. It's boring. On the other hand, if you're writing epic fantasy and not episodic sword-and-sorcery, you can't let the finish line recede indefinitely. There has to be a point where whatever was causing the trouble in the Prelude to Book I is finally overcome, or else the reader will feel cheated. She'll get the feeling that you didn't know what the hell you were up to when you started, or else that it wasn't important enough not to alter in exchange for (ahem) enhanced financial security.

Another thing I like about FF IV (IIE) is its blend of fantasy and science fiction elements. Actually, it's pure fantasy, but it has spaceships and world-annihilating robot giants, which people tend to associate with science fiction. These things are given an air of strangeness and immense antiquity, though, and there's no incongruity in the transition from the spaceship (built, of course, to look like a glowing whale) to the lunar palace where our heroes meet Fusoya, Cecil's Lunarian wizard-uncle. I think this appeals so strongly to me because it tends to naturalize or humanize the aspects of our civilization (namely, industry and techonology) that I find most jarring, being a birds-and-flowers sort of fellow.

Well, FF IV (IIE) is one of those things I had to discover when I discovered it (early adolescence). I'm certain it wouldn't draw me now if I hadn't played it before. But game design is an art—in the sense of chair-making rather than of, say, Gilson's Arts of the Beautiful—and FF IV (IIE) is certainly a memorable product of its time, and one that, for one reason or another, affected me deeply.

A special welcome to all my new Google hits. Thank you for increasing my site's traffic. Alas, there are no games for sale here, no downloads, no hints or secrets or cheat codes. Go read a good book; or, better yet, go for a long walk and just listen. I recommend Moby-Dick and/or the National Park System.

* It did have a good score; I especially loved the overworld pieces.

Genesis of Antellus

The world of Antellus was born out of anxiety. It began as an attempt to work through my horror of decay and entropy and the eternal silence of the infinite spaces. My grandmother, to whom I was close, had just passed away, and the rapid deterioration of her mind—which became incarnate and lingered after her death in her disordered house—had troubled me. It still does. Antellus was not the first project I had undertaken, but it was the first I was driven to complete.

Despite its origins, Antellus is, I hope, far from being mere private musing. It represents a bridge between my mind and the outside world, an attempt to give others something worth reading, something rich yet entertaining. It aims to take a place in the canon of fantasy—in my own mind, if nowhere else—and to dialogue with the works I revere, while retaining the stamp of something written in our age of atomization and anxiety. It is not about autism, but it uses autism to probe the sense of alienation that seems endemic to modern life.

The idea of a living-fossil world of Paleozoic life-forms surviving at the cosmic antipodes had grown in my mind for a long time. The denizens of Antellus—moss-trees, giant mollusks, arthropods, primitive fishes, armored amphibians—all belong to archaic tribes now represented on Tellus only by what is most lowly. They slipped through to the counter-earth at the opposite pole of the universe in primeval times, then ceased to evolve because the demiurgic vicars had rebelled and forsaken the ministry of creation. The framing device with which the story opens represents a geometrical conceit that I entertained myself with while I was lost in the labyrinths of 11-dimensional theoretical physics. The world of Antellus is intended as fantasy, however. Its hierarchy of spiritual agencies owes much to the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, but also to Greek mythology and Arabian and medieval European folklore. The social structure of the world-city of Enoch is inspired by the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The level of technology is stationary, and might be described as Iron Age / Industrial Age / Art Nouveau. Religion is more or less “pagan,” but the various sects that come into the story are significant for their approaches to life rather than their doctrines.

My tales take place against the lurid backdrop of the heat-death of Antellus and the accession of its predestined god-emperor. The setting is a major force: it serves as a projection of the protagonists' anxieties and preoccupations. Their progress through the wastelands, moss-jungles, and ruinous cities of Antellus reflect the tortured landscape of their own hearts.