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Post by Doul on Aug 25, 2003 6:34:11 GMT -5
I would very strongly recommend the author Jeff VanderMeer. Like China, he writes very "wierd", alternative fiction/fantasy. Check out collection of short stories "City of Saints and Madmen" or his Sci-Fi novel "Veniss Underground" (released in US and soon to be released in UK).
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Post by Pale on Aug 25, 2003 6:46:35 GMT -5
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Post by Doul on Aug 25, 2003 6:48:46 GMT -5
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Post by Doul on Aug 26, 2003 3:01:48 GMT -5
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Post by Doul on Aug 29, 2003 3:18:10 GMT -5
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Post by Pale on Aug 31, 2003 6:44:37 GMT -5
Thanks Doul . Jeff VanderMeer wants your opinion about books… It may be new, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's better Author Jeff VanderMeer is currently running a survey about The Physicality of Books over at his Fantastic Metropolis website. He's asked more than seventy writers and editors about their connection to books - as an artifact, an idea, and a memory - and collated responses from Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, Milorad Pavic, Gene Wolfe, Tanith Lee, Peter Straub, Jonathan Carroll, M. John Harrison, Liz Williams, Jeffrey Ford, Karen Joy Fowler, Lucius Shepard, Michael Moorcock, Ellen Datlow, and dozens of others. Each person was asked five questions:- • What do you most like about the book as a physical object? • Do you have any rituals or procedures you go through after acquiring a new (or used) book? • Is it necessary for books to exist as physical objects in our increasingly electronic world? If so, why? • What recent examples stand out for you as exemplar of well-designed, well-made books? • Do you have any memory connected to books that you would like to share? Clearly a booklover, VanderMeer explained his own feelings about hardcopy books: "If we come up with something that's better, I'd switch over. But chances are, whatever we come up with will look remarkably like a current hardcopy book, even if it isn't made of paper. "In our search for the new - and the way in which companies try to get us to switch to new things as if you were a leper if you didn't - we lose sight of the fact that 'new' doesn't always mean 'better.' That's certainly the case with the new electronic books, which are still not convenient or practical. "In some ways," he continued, "I also see the erosion of interest in hardcopy books, should such a thing occur, as the beginning of the end for fiction. Books are immutable in their current form. As electronic ghosts, they become more malleable, they lose a certain constancy. For one thing, anyone will potentially be able to edit or change any part of a book that they want to. And as Jeffrey Ford pointed out in his answers to the survey, if everything becomes electronic, potentially everything can be altered in minutes - for example, history books. Control of information becomes simultaneously less possible and more possible. "But hardcopy books can also be great works of art - think of Morris' edition of the Complete Works of Chaucer. That three-dimensional, tactile experience becomes part of the reading experience. I wouldn't want to lose that." Read the survey at www.fantasticmetropolis.com and contribute your own answers on their message boards. www.thealienonline.net/ao_030.asp?tid=1&scid=6&iid=1869For VanderMeer's own answers, check out his blog at www.vanderworld.blogspot.com.
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Post by Clarkesworld Books on Sept 29, 2003 12:23:27 GMT -5
I finally received my order of THE DAY DALI DIED. Zipped right through it. I'm not really into poetry, but the rest of it was pretty good.
-Neil
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Post by Doul on Sept 29, 2003 14:06:47 GMT -5
i'm outta money right now, but hopefully once i get some i'll be buying that:)
here are two exceprts from Jeff's forthcoming Ambergris Novel "Shriek: An Afterword":
Once upon a time, a woman decided to tell a story about how she tried to kill herself but did not succeed. Her brother saved her from herself--and then sent her north to be dissected by various disciples of empirical religions. Until one day, when her brother's attention wandered, she escaped, and made her way south, to the fabled city of Ambergris and her mother's house. The bitter cold of the north, as cold as her own heart, followed her south to Ambergris. She could see her breath. The drone of insects faltered to an intermittent click of surprise, a sleep-drenched distress signal. She first saw her mother's house again through a flurry of snow, flakes sticking to the windshield of the hired motored vehicle. As they lurched down the failed road that led to the River Moth and her mother, the driver cursing in a thick Southern accent scattered with Northern cold, the dark blue muscles of the river came into view, and then three frail mansions hunched along the river bank amongst the fir trees. The river was silent with cold and snow. The mansions were silent too: Three weary debutantes at a centuries-long ball. Three refugees of a bygone era. Three memories. Although not her memories--she had never lived here--she could see the force and pull of the past in the glint from the wrought-iron balconies, from the hedge gardens sprinkled with snow. The faded appeal of the weathered white roofs that disappeared as the vehicle drove nearer, even the long, slender, hesitant windows reminded her of the tired places she had just left, with their incurable patients, their incurable boredom…The same lived-in appeal as the unstarched dress shirts her father used to wear, the white fabric coarse and yellow with age. They drove through the remnants of faeryland--the frozen fountains of the frozen front lawns, the pale statuary popular a century before, the ornately carved doors with their tarnished bronze door knockers--until the vehicle came to rest half-mired in snow, and for a heartbeat they watched the quiet snow together, she and the driver, content to marvel at this intruder: a strange incarnation of the invasion the Menites had long promised the lascivious followers of Truff. Then, the moment over, the woman who had been reluctantly resurrected, exhumed while still living, paid the driver, picked up her suitcase, opened the door to the sudden frost, and trudged up the front steps of her mother's house. The driver drove away but she did not look back; she had no inclination to make him wait. She had resolved to stay in that place and in her present state of mind she could not hold alternatives in her head without her skull breaking loose and rising, a boney balloon without a string, into the fissures of the cold-cracked sky. What if? had frozen along with the rose bushes. Her mother's house. What made the middle mansion different from the other two except for the fact that her mother lived there? It was the only inhabited mansion. It was the only mansion with the front door ajar. Icicled leaves from the nearby beech trees had swept inside as if seeking warmth, writing an indecipherable message of cold across the front hallway. An open door, the woman reflected as she stood there, suited her mother as surely as a mirror. She stepped inside, only to be confronted by a welter of staircases. Had she caught the house in the midst of some great escape? Everywhere, like massive, half-submerged saurians, they curled and twisted their spines up and down, shadowed and lit by the satirical chandelier that, hanging from the domed ceiling, mimicked the ice crystals outside as it shed light that mingled with the leaves in delicate counterbalance. Even there, in the foyer, the woman could tell the mansion's foundations were rotting--the waters of the Moth gurgled and crunched in the basement, the river ceaselessly plotting to steal up the basement steps, seeping under the basement door to surprise her mother with an icy cocktail of silt, gasping fish, and matted vegetation. Having deciphered the hollow, grainy language of the staircases, the woman strode down the main hallway, suitcase in her hand. The hallway she knew well, had seen its doppelganger wherever her mother had lived. Her mother had lined both sides with photographs of the woman's father, father and mother together, grandparents, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, cousins, friends of the family, followed by portraits in gaudy frames of ancestors who had not had the benefit (or curse) of the more modern innovations. She could feel herself progressing into a past in which every conceivable human emotion had been captured along those walls, frozen into a false moment. (Although, of course, the predominant expression, her brother--not to spoil the illusion of storytelling--would later point out, whatever the emotion, was a staged smile, with the only variation available "with teeth" or "without teeth", so perhaps, he would say to her later, parenthetically, outside the boundaries of fairytale-isms, she could understand the main reason he never liked to visit their mother: he had no wish to draw back the veil, to exhume their father's corpse for purposes of reanimation; wasn't it bad enough he died once?) Every step took her farther into the past until it was difficult not to think of herself as a photograph on a wall. The woman found her mother on the glassed-in porch that overlooked the river, her back to the fireplace as she sat in one of the three plush velvet chairs she had rescued from the old house in Stockton. The view through the window: the startling image of a River Moth swollen blue with ice, flurried snowflakes attacking the muscular, rise-falling surface of the water, each speck breaking the tension between air and fluid long enough to drift a moment and then disintegrate against the pressure from the greater force. Disintegrate into the blue shadows of the overhanging trees, leaves so frozen the wind could not stir them. Her mother watched the river, too, as it sped-lurched and tumbled past her window, and now, from the open doorway, her daughter watched her watching the river as the flames crackled and shadowed against the back of her chair. The daughter remembered a far-ago courtyard of conversation, a question posed by a gravelly-voiced friend of her brother: "And how is your mother? I know all about your father. But what about your mother?" The glint of his eye--through the summer sun, the crushed-mint scent from the garden beyond and she, with eyes half-closed, listening to his voice but not hearing the question. Her mother. A woman who had collapsed in on herself when her husband died and was never the same happy, self-assured person again. Except. Except: She had provided for them. She just hadn't cared for either of them.
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Post by Doul on Sept 29, 2003 14:07:08 GMT -5
The woman had not seen her mother for five years, and at first she thought she saw a ghost, a figure that blurred the more she focused on it. Wearing a white dress with a gray shawl, her mother sat in half-profile, her thin white hands like twin bundles of twigs in her lap. Smoke rose from her scalp: white wisps of hair surrounding her head. The bones of her face looked as delicate as blown glass. Of course, the daughter could see all of this because she was not actually in that room in the past but in another room altogether, and as she typed she could see her own reflection in the green glass of the window to her left, since she had always been the mirror of her mother and now looked as her mother had looked, sitting in a chair, watching the river tumble past her window. The daughter stood there, staring at her mother, clearly visible, and her mother did not see her…Dread trickled down the woman's spine like sweat. Was she truly dead, then? Had she succeeded and all else had been a bright-dull afterlife dream? Perhaps she still lay on the floor of her bathroom, a silly grinning mask hiding her face and a bright red ribbon tied to her right wrist. She shuddered, took a step forward, and the simple touch of the wooden door frame against her palm saved her. She was alive and her mother sat in front of her, with tiny crow's feet and wise pale blue eyes--the woman she had known her whole life, who had tended to her ills, made her meals, put up with youthful mistakes, given her advice about men, helped her with her homework. The woman dropped to her knees facing her mother, saw that flat glaze flicker from the river to her and back again. "Mother?" she said. "Mother?" She placed her hands on her mother's shoulders and stared at her. As if a thaw to Spring, as if an attention brought back from contemplation of time and distance, her eyes blinked back into focus, a slight smile visited her lips, her muscles stirred, and she wrapped her arms around her daughter. Her light breath misted my cold ear. "Janice. My daughter. My only daughter." What is it about distance--physical distance--that allows us to create such false portraits, such disguises, for those we love, that we can so easily discard them in memory, make for them a mask that allows us to keep them at a distance even when so close? At my mother's words, a great weight dropped from me. A madness melted out of me. I was myself again as much as I ever could be. I hugged her and began to sob, my body shuddering as surely as the Moth shuddered and fought the ice outside the window.
It would be nice to report that my mother and I reconciled our differences, that we understood each other perfectly after that first moment of affection, but it wasn't like that at all. The first moment proved the best and most intimate. We did talk many times over the next two weeks--as she led me up and down staircases in search of this or that antique she had acquired since my last visit--but while some words brought us closer, other words betrayed us and drew us apart. Some sentences stretched and contracted our solitude simultaneously, so that at the end of a conversation, we would stand there, staring at each other, unsure whether either of us had actually spoken. I fell into old routines, blamed her for not pursuing a career--she had rooms filled with her artwork and poetry manuscripts, but never attempted to find an agent or sell them. She chastised me for my lifestyle, for abusing my body--she had not missed the blue mottlings on my neck and palms that indicated mushroom addiction, although I had inadvertently kicked the habit in the aftermath of my attempt. And so slowly I worked my way toward the suicide attempt, through a morass of words that could not be controlled, could not be stifled, that meant, for the most part, nothing, and stood for nothing. One day as we watched the River Moth fight the blocks of ice that threatened to slow it to a sludgy grime, we talked about the weather. About the snow. She had seen snow in the far south before, but not for many years. She sang a lullaby for the snow in the form of a soliloquy. At that moment, it would not have mattered if I had been five hundred miles away, knocking on the doors of Zamilon. Her eyes had focused on some point out in the snow, where the river thrashed and fought the ice. The ice began to form around my neck again. I could not breathe. I had to break free. "I tried to kill myself," I told her. "I took a knife and cut my wrist." I was shaking. "I know," she said, as casually as she had commented about the weather. Her gaze did not waver from the winter landscape. "I saw the marks. It is unmistakable. You try to hide it, but it didn't matter. I knew immediately. Because I tried it once myself." "What?" She turned to stare at me. "After your father died, about six months after. You and Duncan were in school. I was standing in the kitchen chopping onions and crying. Suddenly I realized I wasn't crying from the onions. I just stared at the knife for a few minutes, and then I did it. I slid down to the floor and just watched the blood. A neighbor found me. I was in the hospital for three days. You might remember you both stayed with a friend for a few weeks--to give me some rest, you were told--and when I came back, I wore long-sleeved shirts and blouses. I had never heard even a rumor of this before. I was shocked. My mother had been mad--mad like me. (Neither of you were mad--you were both sad, sad, sad--like me.) "Anyway," she said, "it isn't really that important. One day you feel like dying. The next day you want to live. It was someone else who wanted to die, someone you don't know very well and you don't ever want to see again." She stood, patted me on the shoulder. "There's nothing wrong with you. You'll be fine." And left the room. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
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Post by Doul on Sept 29, 2003 14:07:58 GMT -5
Can a childhood memory be considered starting over? I don't think so. Not in the way the forests of Stockton are as real to me as the fetid, fungi-infested streets of Ambergris, maybe more so. Our house was right on the edge of that forest. It stretched on for thousands of acres, Stockton nestled within it like a necklace in its case, for Stockton, too, was riddled through with trees. The temperate climate meant that it never got below freezing and never became as hot as Ambergris. We had firs, oaks, all kinds of trees. The oak lined our streets. The firs were the wild ones, at our backs. The forest was wild and brambly. By the time I was thirteen and Duncan was nine, we had made that forest our own. We had colonized parts of it--created paths through it, little shelters made of fallen branches, part of an unfinished tree house. Dad never much liked the forest, but sometimes we could persuade him to go out into it to see one of our latest creations. Mom had a positive fear of the forest, which came, I think, from growing up in Ambergris. One day, Duncan decided we should expand our paths. We stood at the end of the path, where it petered off into bushes and pine needles and the thick trunks of trees, the bark scaly and dark. I breathed in the almost-mint freshness of the air, listened to the distant call of hawks and the tiny rustlings of mice and rabbits. Duncan was peering off into the depths of the forest. We were already more than a half-mile from our house. "We need to go farther," he said. Back then, he was a thin little kid, small for his age, with shocking blonde hair that would eventually turn to brown when we moved to Ambergris. He had bright blue eyes that sometimes seemed too large for his face. He liked to wear long green shirts with brown shorts and sandals. He said it was a kind of camouflage. I used to wear the same thing, although it scandalized Mom. Dad could have cared less. "How much farther?" I asked, skeptically. I had become increasingly aware that our parents counted on me to keep watch over Duncan. Ever since he'd gotten trapped in the tunnel, we'd all been more conscious of Duncan's pioneering spirit. "I don't know. But there's something out there. Something we need to find." His gaze was almost mischievous, almost worldly. "But there's all that bramble. We can just slowly continue the path, you know." "No," he said. "We need to go out exploring. No more paths. We don't need paths." "Well…" And then he was off. It was always like that back then. I didn't really have a vote, or any control over him, little brother though he might be. Off he went, into the forest, and I followed, of course. I can't say I didn't enjoy it. In a way, Duncan gave me a way to do things I wouldn't have done otherwise. The forest there had a gathered darkness to it because of the thick foliage and the way the leaves and needles blocked out the sun. To find a puddle of sudden sunlight in amongst the gloom was like finding gold, but only accentuated the darkness more. Duncan and I fought our way through and over stickery vines and close-clumped bushes. We felt our way over fallen trees, stopping only to investigate nests of salamanders, proliferations of dull red mushrooms. The forest fit us snugly--we did not feel claustrophobia, but neither did we feel free. The calls of birds grew strange, shrill, and then died away altogether. At times, we found ourselves walking on an incline. The few clearings became less frequent, and then it seemed for a long time like we were just walking through a dusk of dark-green vegetation. We had both begun to sweat, and I could even hear Duncan breathing heavily. We had come a long, long way, and I was not sure I could find the way back to the paths we knew. And yet something about this quest, this foolhardiness was hypnotic. A part of me could have just kept on going, hour after hour, with no end in sight, and been satisfied. The burn of good exercise. The doubled excitement and fear of the unknown. But, eventually, I reached a point where the fear outweighed the excitement. "Duncan!" I said finally, to his back. "We have to stop and go back." He turned, then, his hand on a tree trunk for balance, framed by the gloom, and I'll never forget what he said. He said, "There's no way to go but forward. If we go forward, we'll find out way back." It was like something Dad would have said. It didn't sound like a ten-year-old. "We're already lost, Duncan. We have to go back." Duncan shook his head. "I'm not lost. I know where we are. And we're not there yet. I know there's something ahead of us. I know there." "Yes, more forest," I said, thinking about whether or not I could carry a kicking, struggling Duncan all the way back to the house. Probably not. I looked up, the long trunks of trees reaching up toward a kaleidoscope of wheeling, dimly light-spackled upper branches and pine needles. In those few places where the light hit, I could see, floating, spores and dust and stray leaves. Even the air between trees was thick with the detritus of life.
had to post these in numerous posts as there is a 10,000 character limit.
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Post by Doul on Oct 19, 2003 14:06:19 GMT -5
VanderMeer's first novel (although he's been writing short stories for ages) Veniss Underground has just been published in UK. And i've just bought it;) Niiiiice cover. ;D
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Post by Clarkesworld Books on Oct 20, 2003 10:13:40 GMT -5
He has a new collection scheduled to be published in June 2004 by Golden Gryphon. It's called Secret Life. The cover art looks really good.
Here's a description from the publisher:
In 2002, when Jeff VanderMeer's first book-length short fiction collection, City of Saints and Madmen, made nearly every "year's best" sf/fantasy list, including those of Publishers Weekly and amazon.com, this merely confirmed what fans and critics alike had already known — that the future master of fantastical fiction had arrived. City of Saints and Madmen introduced readers to Ambergris — a brilliantly realized city of treachery, ritual, and decay, whose denizens include the mysterious "mushroom dwellers," where the juxtaposition of humor and horror forms a complex fantastical tapestry of the imagination.
Now, with Secret Life, VanderMeer's second short fiction collection, readers can return to the world of Ambergris, where the author has set five of these stories, including "Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose," a new story written exclusively for this volume. But Jeff VanderMeer is a man of many worlds, as reflected in his travels and in his fiction: "Balzac's War," set in the same milieu as the author's first novel, Veniss Underground, is a harrowing, powerful far-future novella that pits brother against brother in a landscape ravaged by war with Earth's newly sentient human-made species. In thirteenth-century Cambodia, a lone artist is torn between his love of his craft and his unspoken love for a woman in "The Bone Carver's Tale." It's seventeenth-century Peru, and in "The Emperor's Reply" and "The Compass of His Bones," the last Incan Emperor, having brutally fallen at the hands of the Conquistadores, seeks his revenge. And this summer you can join us at "The Festival of the Freshwater Squid," in Sebring, Florida, to observe the annual mating rituals of the mayfly squid.
Jeff VanderMeer, winner of the 2000 World Fantasy Award, has handpicked these twenty-three stories (three written exclusively for this collection), which reflect a diversity of approaches to key questions about the human condition: questions about mortality, love, obsession, and creativity. Secret Life represents the author's continuing effort to stretch the narrative boundaries of fiction while still entertaining the reader. Yet all of these stories are related thematically: transformation and what it means to be human — and the reader too will be transformed, into one of the faithful, a confirmed believer in the short fiction of Jeff VanderMeer.
With personal notes by the author detailing each story's genesis, and an Introduction by Jeffrey Ford, New York Times Notable Author and winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel for The Physiognomy.
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