Jul 24 2018

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexievich

I can’t even imagine the amount of work Svetlana Alexievich put into writing this book: not just tracking down, transcribing and editing the testimonies of these brave, undervalued women, but also the sheer weight of bearing witness to so much courage and heartache. The Unwomanly Face Of War is an exceptionally moving historical document written over the course of decades, and I’m pretty sure that’s the only way she could have borne it: by having time blunt the edges of all the emotion these women poured into her, allowing it to distance her enough to keep working and collecting and reading and writing this almost overwhelming deluge of valor in the face of tragedy.

When Germany broke their treaty of non-aggression with the USSR, the vast majority of the Soviet people thought the war would be over quickly. They didn’t know how badly Stalin’s purges had crippled the military, and as the war progressed, more and more women — who’d been raised all their lives to not only fervently love the Motherland but also to consider themselves equal in capability to men, regardless of what the men thought — seeing that their menfolk weren’t coming home, enlisted and demanded to be sent to the front, too. The USSR, as a matter of fact, had one of the highest percentages of women in the military in the 20th century, and certainly in World War II. Women were famously used as snipers and pilots, but were also active in every front-line military branch and specialty, from anti-aircraft artillery to armory to laundry, from medical aid to tanks to sappers who worked at demining long after the war was over. Women were also important elements of the partisan and underground militias as the Germans occupied more and more territory. These women were a crucial part of the Soviet Victory, but their stories were too often obscured and untold. They faced discrimination getting to their posts and discrimination coming home. Ms Alexievich set about fixing at least one wrong done to them: the feeling that they had to keep quiet about their wartime efforts, as if they had anything to be ashamed of simply for picking up the arms of their fallen comrades and fighting on to victory.

TUFoW is simultaneously an extremely readable book — credit to Ms Alexievich’s editing and prose — and a difficult book to get through. I cried a lot. It’s a terrific historical document that absolutely deserves a Nobel prize for its author. Personally, I’m not the biggest fan of the Russian literary style, but if you are more into it than I am, you will absolutely love this book (*cough*Doug*cough.) But if you have any interest in war, or in history, or in feminism, then I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Our interpretations after may be different (I do feel that Ms Alexievich was very gently disproving her interviewees’ ingrained sexism by giving a platform to the many different voices that showed, collectively, how important their femininity had been to preserving their humanity and fighting spirit) but I’d be greatly surprised if reading this oral history wasn’t a revelatory experience for everyone.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/24/the-unwomanly-face-of-war-an-oral-history-of-women-in-world-war-ii-by-svetlana-alexievich/

Jul 18 2018

Viva Warszawa by Steffen Moeller

Quite by accident, Steffen Möller has found himself one of the most famous contemporary Germans in Poland. He moved there in the mid-1990s for no particularly profound reasons — looking for work, looking for things to be slightly different, looking into a society that was changing rapidly, looking at a place that was at once nearby and distant — and fell into a role in the long-running soap opera “M jak Milosc” (L for Love).

He was cast as the unassuming German next door, and appeared in seven seasons of the show. He did not become a household name, but most definitely a familiar face for a large segment of the Polish population. (The show has run since the year 2000, and as of the end of May this year, 1377 episodes had been broadcast. By some measures, it is the most-watched drama on Polish television.) It was quite a change from the anonymous language teacher he was when he first came to Poland, but it does not seem to have affected the affable persona he shows in Viva Warszawa, his third book and his second about Poland.

As the title implies, the book is a very fond look at Warsaw, where he has lived for most of his time in Poland. Roughly speaking, he alternates between historical bits and chapters about particular areas or themes, with those largely based on his personal experience with the city. In contrast to many people born and raised in Poland, he not only loves the country, he quite likes it as well. After roughly two decades there, at the time of publication, he has seen considerable change and relates the continuities along with the new developments, helping the book live up to its subtitle Polen für Fortgeschrittene (Poland for Advanced Learners). For example, when he first moved to Warsaw, bicycling in the city was considered strange, dangerous, and possibly suicidal. Having biked from the city center into the countryside and then back again at the end of a two-week tour across northern Poland in 1997, I can attest to two of those three. In recent years, however, bike lanes have been added to the streets, and bike-sharing schemes have gained significant numbers of riders. Public attitudes have changed as well.

Möller is a genial companion as he ranges across the city, and lightly back and forth in time. He does not shy away from the many difficult issues in German-Polish relations, but he always addresses them in the context of specific people, and is generally optimistic about present and future. As with Viva Polonia, the book’s short sections and breezy tone make it fun to read. He wears his learning lightly, showing why he likes Warsaw so much, and inviting readers to join him in pleasure and exploration. Viva Warszawa!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/18/viva-warszawa-by-steffen-moeller/

Jul 18 2018

Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente

What if all of those 19th-century notions about the nature of the solar system were true? Venus is swampy and rainy, Mars is mostly dry but turns out to be good country for kangaroos, Neptune is covered by an immense and stormy ocean, the moon really does have seas. And more: the moons discovered by modern science are all present, most of them inhabitable, plenty of them inhabited by larger or smaller groups of humans. There are currents in the luminiferous aether that whisk ships to the outer reaches of the solar system in mere weeks. And still more: Pluto and Charon are joined by great, void-leaping vines, while nearly all of the worlds support indigenous life, if not life that the humans recognize as sentient. And yet still more: the people of all the worlds are crazy about movies, with Earth’s moon replacing Hollywood as the industry’s home, but the Edison family have locked down all the patents on color and sound, so most movies well into the 20th century — decades after the first crewed rocket flight in 1858 — are still black and white silent pictures.

That, more or less, is the setting of Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente, a book that is ultimately about transcendence, but along the way touches on filmmaking, gossip culture, growing up in an artistic family, growing up in a ruthlessly commercial family, art, truth, fiction, conventional morality, metafiction, and a few other things as well. There isn’t really a plot, or rather there are several and they add up to the story that Valente is telling about the setting she has devised and some of its most emblematic people. The book comes together like a documentary film, which is entirely fitting because one of Valent’s main characters is the documentary director Severin Unck, who is the daughter of the commercially renowned director Percival Unck.

Valente skips around in the timeline, with some scenes set just after the turn of the 20th century and others as late as the 1960s. She likewise jumps among numerous narrative forms: interviews, movie scripts, meeting transcripts, and several others in addition to narration that appears straightforward genre fiction at first but turns out to be something different entirely.

Severin is dead, or thought to be dead, presumed inhumed, at the book’s opening, although for much of its course she is a little girl navigating the moviemakers’ worlds from an unusual perspective. For what turns out to be her final project, she brings her regular crew of filmmakers to the site of a settlement on Venus whose settlers all vanished simultaneously. Similar things had happened on Mars and Pluto, decades earlier. Severin wants to unravel the mystery or, failing that, she wants to make a movie to show the rest of the worlds what they found when they went to have a look.

Radiance spirals around the time on Venus, showing it bit by bit, but showing the decades before as well as the effects of that visit on the survivors’ lives. Or possibly showing those effects; there are indications that some of the sections of the book are actually a movie (or movies) that characters in other sections are talking about making. The stories within the book are also about reaching toward transcendence, one of the things that can happen when that barrier is crossed, and the near impossibility of communicating back across it. It is a radiant ending to a book that isn’t quite like anything else.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/18/radiance-by-catherynne-m-valente/

Jul 17 2018

The War In The Dark by Nick Setchfield

I cannot get over how stunning that cover is.

Anyway! This is a really cool mash-up of old school James Bond and what I feel is best described as Lovecraftian horror, with demons and cultists and sorcerers galore. It is 1963, and British Intelligence agent Christopher Winter is set to complete the assassination of a traitor, a priest named Father Costigan. Winter feels a bit badly about going after a man of the cloth, then doesn’t know how to feel when the priest turns into a flesh bag of murderous insects. Winter’s echo man (which is a term I’d never heard before for cleaner — I learn a new thing every day) goes missing and the next thing he knows, Winter is being hauled in for a debriefing that seems to involve a lot of drugs. Winter’s life very rapidly goes to shit, and he’s soon run away to Vienna, pursuing the only lead he has to the nightmare his life has become: the name of a broker in the occult, as well as a national secret that is his only currency in his search for answers.

In Vienna he meets the deadly and self-contained Karina Lazarova, whom he discovers is more than just a double agent. They wind up going on the run together, evading capture by both sides as they strive to collect all the pieces of a book written in a language of fire that could hold the key to not only ending the Cold War but, if they’re not careful, all life as they know it.

So here’s the thing with both the works of Fleming and Lovecraft: the characterization isn’t the greatest. Nick Setchfield stays true to his predecessors in putting together a thrilling, macabre tale of espionage, reliquaries and demonology, but I couldn’t help feeling as if our characters had only the barest traces of personality, and then usually in relation to a loved one (e.g. Winter with Joyce, Malcolm with Tobias.) Defining a character by their external relationships is fine, but I really wanted more interior life. Why, for example, had Tobias and Karina become the persons they were? Oh, sure, we had a brief sketch of Karina’s background, but why was she so willing to let Winter go with her? It’s a little weird when the most understandable characters on the page are a near-cadaver (Kelly) and a soulless killing machine (the Widow.) I literally had no idea what drove Malcolm or Karina to do the things they did. That said, I was pleasantly surprised at Malykh’s reasoning: even if it was wrong/flawed, it was still very consistent for that character.

This was a really fun concept novel that fell short — perhaps deliberately given its source material — on characterization. It had as many cool occult twists as it did spy thrills, and it’s pretty great to go along with Winter as he slowly unravels the web of deceit that’s been spun around him. I’d love to read more novels set in this world and am honestly rather surprised that I’ve never encountered anything like this before.

(Edited to add that yes, I have read and love Charles Stross but the few stories I’ve enjoyed were more FBI than CIA, so clearly, I need to read more of his work!)

The Frumious Consortium is participating in a book tour for The War In The Dark, so stay tuned for our author interview on the 25th! In the meantime, check out some of the other tour dates in the infographic to the right.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/17/the-war-in-the-dark-by-nick-setchfield/

Jul 16 2018

Die Jungfrau von Orleans by Friedrich Schiller

At the opening of The Maid of Orleans, as Schiller’s five-act verse tragedy is known in English, France is divided among three parties: English troops who have taken Paris and the north in pressing their king’s dynastic claim to the French throne, southern lands held by the Valois king Charles VII, and Burgundy in the middle ruled by Philip the Good. Philip is also a Valois but has sided with England because men of Charles VII murdered his father. Thibaut d’Arch, whom Schiller describes as a wealthy landowner, has three daughters: Margot, Louison and Johanna (Joan). In the initial scenes, Thibaut laments France’s division and the likelihood that war will soon come to his area. In advance of that probable catastrophe, he consents to the marriage of his two older daughters to their intendeds.

Joan, however, worries him. She is young and should be full of life, but she is not like the other young women. Raimond, her admirer, defends Joan, saying she loves the mountains and the outdoors, that she is attuned to higher things, that she could have come from another age. That’s precisely what worries her father, who has had a prophetic dream three times of her on the throne of the kings in Reims, wearing a diadem, with all bowing to her. It foretells a steep fall, he says. Raimond defends her, saying she is the most talented of all, that everything she creates pours forth happiness.

Joan has been on stage through these two scenes, but silent and still. She does not move until Bertrand, another landowner, joins the party and relates the curious story of how at the market earlier a Bohemian woman had pressed a helmet upon him before vanishing into the crowd. “Give me the helmet!” are Joan’s first words in the play. Bertrand replies that it is nothing for a maiden. She tears it from his hands, saying “Mine is the helmet, and it belongs to me.”

History turns.

Bertrand says that a knight is about to tell the allied English and Burgundians that Orleans is prepared to come to terms. Joan counters immediately, “No agreements! No surrender! … The enemy’s fortune will shatter at Orleans … He is ready to be harvested. With her sickle the maid will come,/And mow down his proud stalks.” Bertrand says miracles don’t happen anymore, and Joan basically tells him to hold her beer.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/16/die-jungfrau-von-orleans-by-friedrich-schiller/

Jul 13 2018

An Interview With Daniel Godfrey, author of The Synapse Sequence

Q: Every book has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. How did The Synapse Sequence evolve?

A: I find a few different ideas have to come together before I’m able to write a novel, otherwise I don’t have the critical mass to get beyond short story stage – or have something that runs out of gas far too early.

I had in my mind that an air crash investigator would make a great detective, and a plot relating to a foster child. Both of these things had to snap together with the idea of having a technology that could be used to explore witness memories. The decision to run a separate (but connected) storyline relating to the main character (Anna) looking back over events came much later, but seemed a good thematic fit.

Q: I enjoyed the push-pull nature of humanity’s interdependence with Artificial Intelligence throughout The Synapse Sequence. Do you consider the novel a cautionary tale regarding human rights vs the safety and convenience provided by modern/future technology? If so, how do you believe we should draw the line between the rights of the individual vs the collective?

A: The increasing use of artificial intelligence is undoubtedly going to generate positives and negatives for society, and politicians will likely be forced to decide where it can and can’t be used (as is alluded to in The Synapse Sequence). However, I don’t believe ‘the line’ is static. For instance, I recently visited a reservoir that had been created by flooding a valley that had once contained several villages. “Imagine them doing that now,” someone in the visitor centre remarked. At the moment, the rights of the individual are probably given higher priority than ever before. How long this will last – in the face of global pressures, including climate change – is up for debate.

Q: Do you write with any particular audience in mind? Are there any particular audiences you hope will connect with this story?

A: I describe my writing as an ‘out of control’ hobby, which I’m pleased has found a home at Titan Books. I don’t like to get bogged down in the technology and instead focus on forward momentum. Hopefully this means it will reach a wide audience.

Q: The Synapse Sequence is, at its heart, an exploration of the link between time and memory. You also explore time travel in your previous books in the New Pompeii series. What drives your fascination with the mutable nature of time?

A: I suppose the fascination is more with non-linear narratives rather than time or time travel. The non-linear approach allows you to approach a story from a few different angles, which can be run at different paces between the crossing points.

Q: What is the first book you read that made you think, “I have got to write something like this someday!”?

A: I’m going to have to be slightly controversial here: what fires up my creative side more than anything else are movies, and growing up when I did, I am very much influenced by what came out in the 1980’s. Empire Strikes Back, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters. I really like seeing how the plot strands start to weave together as events build to a climax.

Q: I really enjoyed your writing tip for new writers on your website, which is essentially “Finish your book.” How long did the process of learning this take you, and is there any other advice you’ve learned since that you’d like to impart?

A: I see and hear this a lot actually: that writers have this new idea and they’re so keen to get going on it that they set off and soon come to a halt – they’ve burned through that initial enthusiasm – and then instead of focusing on why it went wrong it’s easier to start on the next shiny new thing.

The turning point for me came when I set myself a challenge that I could not start the next thing until I finished what I was writing, even though I knew it wasn’t good enough. It’s the only way to learn about structuring the all-important mid-section of the book.

The only thing I think I would now add to this is that it’s very useful to know (roughly) what your key beats are: how does your story start, what kicks off the main action, what happens in the middle to up the ante, how do you progress to the end, and how do you finish? You then have something to aim at as things are being written.

Q: Do you adhere to any particular writing regimen?

A: I have a full time job so 90% of my writing is done on a Sunday, and I aim for about 2,000 words on that day. I do editing (which can include re-writes) at other times, but only when on deadline.

Q: Are you a pantser (someone who writes by the seat of their pants) or a plotter? Given the structure and twists of The Synapse Sequence, would I be wrong in betting it’s the latter?

A: The Synapse Sequence was the first book where I’ve agreed an outline with my publisher prior to starting work. It was interesting to learn that process, but mainly I just like to have my key story beats and work between them as I’m going along. New Pompeii (my first published novel) was written very much in my spare time as a hobby (before getting an agent, let alone a publisher), and I’d started Empire of Time (the sequel) prior to it being signed to the publisher: so I just needed to give a brief description of what I’d already written.

I must say though that the outline was useful: it kept me focused and reduced the amount of aborted time going down plotting dead ends. It also made the editing much, much easier.

Q: What can you tell us about your next project?

A: I have a few promising ideas, but am looking for the final piece to make them work.

Q: What are you reading at the moment?

A: I’m sort of between books at the moment. I’m just about to start Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill. It’s on the shortlist for the Clarke Award, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. The book I’ve just finished was The Midnight Line by Lee Child.

Q: Are there any new books or authors in science fiction that have you excited?

It’s great that there’s such a lot of variety at the moment: books I very much enjoyed last year included Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit, Natasha Pulley’s The Bedlam Stacks and GX Todd’s Defender. From this year’s selection, the top two have both been space operas: Gareth Powell’s Embers of War and Dominic Dulley’s Shattermoon.

Q: Tell us why you love your book!

A: Aside from the amount of time and emotional investment I put into it? ☺ I suppose the risk with near future science fiction is that things can happen as your writing, and it takes a long time to get a book written and published. It’s been quite fun to see a lot of stuff in the book start appearing in the mainstream media; whether that be the use of AI in the police force, better understanding the mechanics behind memory, or the policy responses to automation (the most high profile of which is Universal Basic Income). I think the book has come out at the right time, so hopefully it will resonate with those who pick up a copy.

Thank you so much for having this discussion with us! 
Thank you for inviting me to be interviewed on your website!

~~~
Author Links

Daniel Godfrey
Twitter

~~~

The Synapse Sequence  was published June 19th 2018 and is available via all good book sellers. My review of the book itself may be found here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/13/an-interview-with-daniel-godfrey-author-of-the-synapse-sequence/

Jul 10 2018

The Con Artist by Fred Van Lente

So I thought that reading this on my Fire would be superior to reading on my Paperwhite but the sketches weren’t formatted very well for Kindle so meh. I did really like the idea, tho, that you could find clues in the sketches to help you solve the mystery (why yes I was a Cam Jansen fan as a kid!) It probably works better in execution in physical format, as the Kindle versions tended to break the line drawings in half, which doesn’t make for good clue hunting. I also kinda expected the interior sketches to be closer to the art style on the cover. Each is fun to look at in its own right, but it felt a bit like false advertising given how different they are.

As to the story itself, I really enjoyed the insight into the con-going experience from the talents’ point of view. I’m a con-goer from way back, having enjoyed both comics and gaming cons before they were taken over by Hollywood celebrities, but strictly as a consumer/card flopper/dice chucker. Oh, there was the one con I helped run an RPG room, but usually I’m just there to play games and buy stuff. Tho I did hang out with Chris Claremont a lot at that one Baltimore Comic Con. Er, back on topic: I also really enjoyed our hero’s opinions on the meaning of creating as well as the relationship between creators and fans, particularly in niche entertainment. The Con Artist is a lot of fun for people familiar with geekdom, and super informative for those who want to learn more about San Diego Comic Con and the comics industry.

What TCA isn’t great at is telling a good mystery story. There’s the bare bones of one there, and there are a bunch of great set pieces, but the writing is wildly disjointed, with the emotions often feeling uninhabited (with the great exception being Mike’s interactions with Violet, but not necessarily her actions otherwise.) I didn’t feel a single emotional connection with anything that happened besides aforementioned exception. Perhaps this had to do with our protagonist feeling a little disconnected from life himself, a little numb from what’s clearly his depressed state of mind, and while that lends itself to veritas, it doesn’t really lend itself to entertainment. Still, an interesting experiment of a novel that I would like to see more tried of in future.

Oh! When Fred Van Lente talked about the perilous financial security of comics artists and writers, who earn at the mercy of their publishers, it reminded me very much of one of my favorite writers from the 90s and his current plight. William Messner-Loebs did a run on Wonder Woman that I still think of fondly, but has been reduced to living out of his car with his ailing wife. If you can spare a few dollars to help make up for a system that lacks any sort of social net for people who’ve done their best to entertain us, please go to his GoFundMe page and donate.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/10/the-con-artist-by-fred-van-lente/

Jul 05 2018

The Book Of Hidden Things by Francesco Dimitri

In all honesty, I can’t decide whether I liked that ending or not. It sorta demands more storytelling when this book is clearly complete as it is, and while I could not help but smile in satisfaction at the last word of the novel, I also felt — in hindsight and not, crucially, at the time itself — that it leaves things open-ended in a way that is less “here, go play with your imagination and interpret as you will” and more “teehee, there is more that I’m not telling you, too bad.” Which, for a book named after the book written by one of the main characters, the charismatic and possibly insane Art, is fitting despite, and perhaps in some small part because of, how unsatisfying it can feel.

Well there, that’s enough metaphysics in fiction for this review: let’s talk about the plot. Four friends return to their small hometown in the south of Italy every year to catch up on old times. There’s art photographer Fabio, lawyer Mauro, surgeon Tony, and Art, who lives in Casalfranco again after years of gadding about abroad. Only this year, Art doesn’t show up, and the three friends’ search for their missing mate sets into motion a tale that is partly fantastical, uniquely Italian and wholly mature.

See, it’s been so long since I’ve read adult fantasy that I’ve almost forgotten how weirdly real it feels compared to YA. To a certain extent, it’s hard to really categorize The Book Of Hidden Things as a fantasy novel, when the three friends easily concoct reasonable explanations for most of what they run into. TBoHT is primarily a book about friendship, a deep dive into the psyches of these very different men and the roads they’ve taken since leaving their small town beginnings. There is betrayal and violence but above all a deep and abiding bond between the four of them. TBoHT is a celebration of male friendship that also examines family ties and religion in ways that are even-handed and convincing. I was a little concerned, at the beginning, that the women in the book would be cardboard cutouts, and while they’re clearly supporting characters, they are complex and strong and their own people, not merely consigned to being passive wives and sisters and girlfriends.

Shockingly, this is the author’s first book in English, after establishing himself as a master of fantasy in Italian. I’m so glad Francesco Dimitri has decided to write in English, as it really allows those of us unfamiliar with his mother tongue to enjoy his writings as he intends them (no slight to translators, who do very important work, but nuance occasionally gets lost when writing from the original.) His depiction of an Italy that is at once modern, fantastic and deeply rooted in history is a joy to experience.

Oh! I should warn you: the depiction of the hanged dog on the cover is accurate to the contents of the book, so if that kind of thing bothers you, you might want to skip this.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/05/the-book-of-hidden-things-by-francesco-dimitri/

Jul 01 2018

To Kill A Kingdom by Alexandra Christo

A savage yet still somehow YA retelling of The Little Mermaid fairy tale that eschews insipidity and gender tropes, but has some really annoyingly poor language choices throughout. Princess Lira is a siren, seventeen years old and raised by her mother the Sea Queen to be a deadly killer. Her preferred target is the princes of the Hundred Kingdoms and, once every year, she finds one to draw into the ocean before ripping his heart out as a trophy. When she accidentally saves the life of Prince Elian of Midas, her enraged (and quite frankly a bit deranged) mother, punishes her by turning her into a human. Only if Lira kills Elian will she be returned to her natural state.

But Elian is a killer himself, a hunter of the sirens who prey on humanity. Preferring the wide ocean waters to the kingdom he is heir to, he sails around the world with his handpicked crew, searching for a way to end the siren threat once and for all. When a man comes to him in a tavern, promising an ancient artifact that could effect this, Elian cannot help but be intrigued. When his and Lira’s paths cross, Lira too becomes privy to this information, and forms her own plan to make the powerful artifact hers.

On the whole, it’s a thrilling tale of pirates and treasure hunting with sassy, believable characters; terrific world-building, and a plot that essentially takes the fairytale we all know and mostly love and gives it a fresh interpretation with 100% less romantic pining and 100% more self-actualization and ambition. There were some really odd gaps in the logic (e.g. Sakura’s stay in Midas made not a lick of sense; I didn’t understand the mermaids’ motivations half the time; how did Kardia just suddenly show up in the conversation) and there were a lot of inappropriately used words. Not that there were profanities, just that some of the conversations were absolute drivel because the words were being used as nonsense babbling. Elian at one point asks Lira if she needs him to keep a secret, and she responds that she needs him to keep a favor but then asks him for something that is in no way, shape or form a favor, and I guess that at that point they’re so worn out from their journey that this seems the height of wordplay but it’s really not and it’s kinda annoying, in the “stop trying to make fetch happen” sort of way. I appreciate the inventive use of language but that was not what was on display here. And while I liked that the book was told from alternating viewpoints, I think it would have really helped if those had been demarcated by chapter headings or somesuch instead of randomly switching without warning.

Anyway! It was still a really cool retelling of Disney’s version of the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale, and I greatly enjoyed it, with those few exceptions. I especially liked how it examined radicalization and deprogramming, albeit lightly, as well as trust and the benefits of laying down arms. The female characters were complex and multi-dimensional throughout and I especially enjoyed the relationship between Lira and Madrid. Bonus points also for being a standalone novel and not part of some unnecessarily multi-book behemoth.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/01/to-kill-a-kingdom-by-alexandra-christo/

Jun 27 2018

An Interview With G. S. Denning, author of My Grave Ritual

Q: Every series has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. Reading A Study In Brimstone, I figured this series would mostly be a light-hearted spoof, so have been greatly excited by how it has developed into an intriguing, complex ongoing narrative with the release of My Grave Ritual. How did the Warlock Holmes books evolve in your mind and on the page?

A: You know, I thought it would be a simple spoof, too, for a minute. The day I started, I sat down to write a short story, just for yucks. But that night, as I lay in bed thinking about it, I realized I didn’t want to. I’d started to like the idea too much. I realized it could hold a series and—judging by the history of geek-love for Sherlock—I figured I could get it published. So I dove right in.

Q: Do you write with any particular audience in mind? Are there any particular audiences you hope will connect with this story?

A: I think the audience is… me. And all the people out there who are basically me. The Whovians. The Sherlockians. The lovers of Adams and Pratchett. The people who should probably stop giggling at fun geek stuff and get a real job,  but who resist with every fiber of their soul. Hi guys! Here’s a book for you.

Q: What is the first book you read that made you think, “I have got to write something like this someday!”

A: I think it was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I already loved sci-fi/fantasy. And I already loved humor. To see them married like that made me so happy! But there wasn’t enough, you know? I’ve been churning out geek humor for over two decades, but mostly on the stage, not on the page.

Q: Your author biography states that you did over two decades of improv before finally learning to write stuff down. How did your experience with improv inform your writing process?

A: Improv taught me to write. It taught me what an audience likes and how to feel when my story was on the ball and when it wasn’t. If you want to write, I highly recommend trying improv. Oh, as a special bonus: anybody who has to make up 8 stories per night while a live audience watches is not going to suffer from writers’ block.

Q: Do you adhere to any particular writing regimen?

A: Someday, I’d love a writing regimen. Sigh… Someday… Right now I’m still working 40 hours a week doing MRI and trying to keep my two young kids happy and alive. The books you’ve been reading were written a few hours at a time at coffee houses or burger joints that will let me sit in a corner table and write. I steal time after the kids are asleep or between dropping them off at school and heading in to work. I swear 50% of book 3 was written at Red Robin on Friday nights after work.

Q: While reading A Study In Brimstone, I was certain you were a pantser (someone who writes by the seat of their pants) but by the end of My Grave Ritual, I’m convinced you must be a plotter. Which do you think you tend to be?

A: Well, you were never wrong. I’m a bit of both. I tend to figure out the large plot/thematic points I want to hit and write towards them. Oh, and I have help on this particular project. A famous British dead guy wrote all my plot outlines for me a hundred years ago. Any of you pansters out there who want to try writing to an outline, but don’t know how to make a solid plan, try this: write a parody. Strip the muscles and skin off a beloved old story. Keep those solid and venerable bones, but give it new flesh. It’ll teach you a lot.

Q: Given your broad background in geekdom, what made you choose Sherlock Holmes pastiche specifically as your means of expression?

A: It was an accident. I had just watched the first episode of the BBC’s Sherlock and found myself recommending to a fantasy writer that she build a powerful-but-flawed character like Holmes for her book. She said Holmes would never work in fantasy—how would you ever adapt that. On the drive home, I started laughing, because the answer occurred to me and it was so simple: everybody thought he was magical, anyway, so all you had to do was let him be. Then I thought up the pun Warlock Holmes. I was so excited. I ran upstairs to Google it and see what the geeks before me had done with that joke. There was nothing. So I sat down to write it myself.

Q: What has been the reaction of Sherlock Holmes fans to your novels?

A: Surprisingly good. I thought I was going to get flamed so hard. I am, after all, messing with one of the most beloved literary figures of all time. But I’m doing it lovingly enough, I think, and with enough nods and Easter-eggs to the originals that the Holmes fanbase has been exceedingly welcoming to me. There was one guy who gave me a one star review and called the series “Openly-flaunted degeneracy.” That was so choice, we were going to use it as the top blurb on the back of book 3, but he took it down. Boooooo!

Q: Readers can expect the fourth and fifth books in the series, The Sign of Nine and The Finality Problem, in April of 2019 and 2020 respectively. What can you tell us about your next project, whether it be these upcoming books or something else entirely?

A: Let’s see… Book 4 is all about Watson’s darkest days. He’s trying to figure out how magic and Moriarty and Adler work and he’s injecting himself with a mystic solutionn to have prophetic dreams. It’s slowly killing him, but he can’t stop trying to get that last clue he needs to best Adler. Book 5 is all about Watson’s adventures in matrimony with Mary Morstan. I also have a YA novel done and ready to market if my agent ever decides to give it a spin (you listening, Sam?) It’s basically Romeo and Juliet if the Montagues were the Indiana Joneses and the Capulets were mad scientists.

Q: What are you reading at the moment?

A: My own stuff, over and over? The original Holmes stories, over and over? Oh! Actually I’m re-reading Scott Lynch’s Lies of Locke Lamora. Really satisfying fantasy con/heist story. Highly recommended.

Q: Are there any new books or authors that have you excited?

A: What I’m really excited about now is actually a literary trend I’m hoping will take off. I am able to do my books because Sherlock Holmes is moving into the public domain. The other one that is going in right now is the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft. I can’t wait to see what people do. Who’s got a humorous Lovecraftian series? I want to read it!

Q: As a self-proclaimed “terribly friendly geek”, what is your favorite geeky pastime and why?

A: Pen-and-paper role playing, especially with authors and improvisors. If you play kick-in-the-door-kill-the-monster-take-its-treasure-style, live RPGs are just crappy seconds to video-game RPGs. But, when the stars align, when you get the right group and a narrative-based adventure, you get to be a character in your favorite story, ever.

Q: Tell us why you love Warlock Holmes!

A: The size of it. There are so many original stories, so many beloved characters, so many mysteries and plots that I really get to take my time and let Warlock grow and expand at the pace I want. I’ve got a nested plot structure. Each mystery has its own plot. Each book has an overarching plot (Book 1 is the intro. Book 2 is Holmes’s origin and Watson coming into his own as an adventurer. Book 3 is the villains coming in to mess the boys up. Book 4 is the descent into darkness). And the series itself is the story of how Holmes and Watson broke the world. The sheer size of the original canon and the geek-world’s collective patience with my series means I get to let it grow and change.

Thanks for taking an interest in Warlock, Watson and me. As long as you guys keep reading ‘em, I’ll keep writing ‘em!

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Author Links:

g s denning

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My Grave Ritual was published May 15th 2018 and is available via all good book sellers. My review of the book itself may be found here.

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