Quick words on digressive genetics, evil capitalists, and Mark A. Rayner

This book surprised me--no, I mean it really surprised me. In the first chapter, monkeys and a Kimono dragon crash a wedding, send an old lady to the hospital, and generally succeed in making you laugh very, very hard.

This is a whole new kind of Crossing Chaos novel. Even more than Vital Fluid, it forgoes elaborate textual mechanics, but still succeeds in telling a complex, dynamic story: an organic one. (The aesthetic text is many things, but let me just say, it is not natural). Some really interesting concepts make their way in there as well; and like I said, it's very, very funny.

This is a story of the digression from man to primate--actually, no it's not. Instead, the narrative is delivered from what might seem (but isn't) a secondary perspective. Mostly, a bunch of really cool people hang out, fall in love, do acid, drink alcohol, have illicit sex, cross-generational sex, vendetta sex, and... monkey sex? There are evil businessmen, drug dealers, thugs, katanas, clove cigarettes, and ghosts. (Yup, ghosts.)

One of my favorite things about this book is how natural it all feels. Having finished it, I have trouble believing that, in some form or another, the characters don't exist (excepting Shute--I know he exists). There are some really poignant moments in there, often at extremely unexpected times, which makes them more poignant still. The ideas are good, and most importantly, fresh.

If you're interested, you can win a free copy (or appear in Mark's next book). Check here for more information... I think it's a pretty good deal.

http://markarayner.com/archives/368

New Story in Saucytooth's

A new story of mine, "Waiting For the Rain," is available on Saucytooth's Webthology alongside some of the most interesting authors writing today, including Forrest Aguirre, Steve Aylett, and V. Ulea.

http://www.crossingchaos.com/Saucytooth_Webthology.html

Sometimes. Fucking. Never.

Is one of those rare books I can't criticize so much as rave about. I'll admit, for the first time with a Crossing Chaos novel, I had a few doubt going into it. In general, I'm more interested in work that renovates form than work that destroys it--it didn't help that there was a Kenji Siratori quote on the back.

But God, was I fucking wrong.

Sometimes Never is one of the most stunning peices of avante-garde science fiction ever written. It's something like what you would get if you combined Kathy Acker, the aforementioned Kenji Siratori, and added some of the word-play from Finnegan's Wake alongside some serious philosophical/metaphysical dimension--then an aesthetic of cracking glass.

This is seriously one of the most exhilerating, impressive things I've ever read. Seriously. If I'd known what it was sooner (originally I didn't know there was an actual novel in there--in context, the first twenty pages of "noise" proves extremely effective, but I wouldn't want over a hundred pages of it), I would have bought it a long time ago.

Beyond this point, there isn't much that can be articulated; rather, it needs to be experienced. Embrace the noise. It is most certainly not empty.

My writing

I realized I haven't talked about it at all yet, so here's an update on the status of my current projects:

Sunshine In the Valley: Sixth novel. Metaphysical fantasy about a village surrounded by living walls. I sent this out to a few publishers until I realized I wasn't happy with the draft--my main idea was to convey an inconceivable time and place, and then I realized a few Americanisms had crept in. I'm going to get rid of them, tighten the structure a bit, and try again. It's the only of my recent novels in which the plot can be understood, though it's by far the most complex. At some point I'm going to write a sequel that has absolute nothing to do with it.

The Life, Times, and Tragedy of Edward William Locke the Third: Meta-text; examination of literary theory; postmodern chronicle; exercise in character study (in which nothing in learned); extremely surreal, with extensive influence from avante-garde theater; like I said, extremely surreal; treatise on history and time. I just finished it about a week ago, so the last chapters are in a really shitty draft right now, but I really like this. I've wanted to write this character for years now (without realizing it), and it felt really good finally to get the chance. Also, since it's technically historical fiction rather fantasy--or magical realism, I suppose--I'll have an easier time pitching it to literary publishers.

Absence: Still doesn't work quite right. Possibly it contains the best writing I've ever done, but I made the mistake of writing a mosiac novel (even though I hate mosaic novels). I thought it would be cute to write a novel (loosely) about the Christian that was completely devoid of Christian symbols but was instead full of ideas from philosophy, particularly Descartes and Spinoza. It has some really fucking cool ideas in it but a horrible treatment of homosexuality and revolution. I've tried writing around them until I finally relized I would have to write over them.

The Reawakening: is set to be rewritten as a short story six to ten thousand words long. It's gonna be fucking awesome.

Green Lights/Purity of Vision: Tentative title for novel number eight. It's going to be completely different from anything else I've ever done before--a contemporary novel about... life, with actual likable characters--though with an equal degree of formal innovation. I have a really cool structure in mind: all of divided into six to eight sections, each named after a color (with some colors repeating), in which the components of reality alter according to the color, with some characters getting taken out, others getting replaced completely, and some gigantic shifts in time and place. (Did I mention... surreal?)

I've also got quite a few short stories (and one experimental play) showing up in small publications in the next few months. I'll post links here when they come out. Then, of course, I have two stories in Quantum Genre On the Planet of the Arts--and next summer... Voices.

Michael Cisco: Outlining An Aesthetic Register

I've had an interesting relationship to the works of Michael Cisco. Originally I came across The Divinity Student on Amazon and thought it looked amazing--except that edition was out of print, and so I forgot about it. A few weeks later I found another reference to his work, checked out his website, and immediately bought every novel he'd written. This is a bad habit of mine (as my post concerning China Meiville probably conveys), but the results were much more positive than they often are. I spread my readings out over the space of a few months--completing The Divinity Student twice--and finally got around to the The Tyrant this week.

I can't help but be disappointed in the lack of criticism dedicated to Cisco--really, there isn't any, as most reviewers are so intimidated by the language they emphasize nothing but how different they are. I certainly wouldn't disagree with this, but I think they fail to identify even the most prominent aesthetic stratum on display--and when discussing Cisco, that means you haven't said anything at all. This isn't a conclusive essay in any sense--certainly, an informal one--but I hope to penetrate at least a bit within this territory.

Cisco is undoubtedly one of the foremost stylists within speculative fiction. His works feature horror overtones within a number fantastic contexts, leaning heavily towards the surreal. Based on the prominence of images in his work, and position within independent lit, I'd place him next to Zoran Zivkovic and Forrest Aguirre despite their dissimilarities (seriously... this has nothing to do with Leviathan--seriously), and perhaps make some yet more distant comparisons to M. John Harrison or Carlos Fuentes in Terra Nostra. Cisco seems to be extensively influenced be Burroughs (obviously I can't say for sure--anyway, this takes place within a framework of reapplication rather than imitation), particularly if he undertook a brief course in Faulknerian sentence structure....

Imaginative fiction, particularly the New Weird, is the literature of synthesis. Cisco embodies this more than any other author I've seen--and among them, he's probably the one I enjoy most. The Divinity Student and The Traitor are nearly masterpieces--his others noticeably less so, but I get the feeling he's yet to write his definitive piece. It seems like people only pay attention to The Divinity Student... hopefully at some point this will change, even if I'd agree in saying that, at this point, it's probably his best. (If they made a movie on it he could become the next Anthony Burgess....)

Cisco seems concerned primarily with phenomena beyond (perhaps beneath) the realm of articulation. Actions manifest as associations rather than definite psychological objects. Due to his punctuation schemata, the prose is like a sequence of iron bars, pulsing with electricity, featuring fairly consistent internal mechanics and a prominent sense of authorial disassociation, occasionally with a hint of a scientific tone. Possibly I'm taking my above theory too far, but this allows associations to be presented as they are experienced: indistinct within the greater perceptual unit.

Also, I'm going to try real quickly to dispel the notion of similarities between Cisco and Wolfe. I've read every novel by both (next to Delany, Wolfe is my favorite science fiction author, so I'm almost an authority on this). Although the two both feature a significant diversion from the conventions of speculative fiction, that's about as far as it goes.... The Divinity Student (a stoic male character) and the architecture of San Venificio recall The Book of the New Sun a little bit, but... not really, and the mechanics of their fiction are so disparate as to be nearly incompatible. Wolfe operates primarily upon a medium of omission, so that his novels are like majestic broken machines--conveying (as an intellectual construct, only after a greater sense of the pages has been obtained) the obscurity immediately apparent within the first page of any Cisco novel--and generally complex (note my abstract use of the term) in an entirely different manner.

On another note, as someone who never, ever reads horror, a number of the images in Cisco strike me as gaudy, even when their presentation is not... but the absence of a certain problem makes up for it entirely: Wolfe is a fairly serious right-winger (and it shows), whereas the undertones of nihilism, anarchism, and misanthropy that inform Cisco's work place him on the exact opposite side of the spectrum. Considering his chosen genre--in which these ideas are often decorative at best--its not surprising to find them here, and he does a decent job presenting them; but interestingly, they're featured in the protagonists.

Cisco's books almost present themselves as studies in isolation, portraying characters who are terminally cut off from society, their energy channeled into one or another occupations (excepting only The Golem, in which this becomes a journey): therefore, in a spiritual sense, his characters are all artists.... Not that you can blame him. Really, it's impossible to be an author producing admirable material (or really, an intellectual of any sort) without being a bit of a misanthrope--as well, we experience a similar sense of distance from the cities that populate these works.

Anyway, in conclusion, while his work isn't perfect (not that I pretend to be his perfect reader--like a said, I never read horror, and I'm only passably interested in darkness, be it visual, psychological, or metaphysical), Michael Cisco is undoubtedly one of the most interesting authors working in English right now. I am, of course, immediately biased towards anyone applying sophisticated styles to the fantastic--but you can't go wrong in checking him out, whether to expand your sense of language or to witness the extent imagination can be taken to.

Umberto Eco

has a fairly large brain. Still, I can't help wishing he dedicated more of the digressions to philosophy than history (or rather than history in particular, history that doesn't have to do with Christianity). Name Of the Rose has been just as good as I expected, but before reading it, I thought of picking up Baudolino, and that might have been the better pick, since I've heard it has a heftier touch of the imaginative about it. I misunderstood the topic a little bit before picking it up--not that is hasn't been fantastic so far (I'm about 200 pages in). Still, it's been very informative so far, and I've never before been convinced that Christianity and Western Europe were quite so poor a match as I am now; not to mention that Eco reads fairly well despite translation. There's even a character based on Borges, even if, for some reason, that character happens to be a close minded, fundamentalist Christian. At the very least, he has the voice of a prophet.

I originally decided to pick up Name Of the Rose (after putting it off for years) after hearing Delany discuss Eco in 1984.

Thomas Pynchon and Inherent Vice

This new book looks really, really bad. I'm going to pick it up the day it comes out and do nothing else until I've finished it--but still, I'm going into it with really low expectations. Going off what I've heard about it so far, that's the only safe choice (and did anytone read that excerpt that was available? that was NOT Pynchon).

That said, I'm still fairly excited. It's not everyday new Pynchon comes out. In the last forty years or so it's happened what... six or seven times? Especially after Against the Day (which was more of a post-Gravity's Rainbow masterpiece than I had ever allowed myself to hope for), I'm willing to forgive him about anything.

It's always possible he might be putting out another book in the next few years. In that big ten-year gap before Vineland, there's no telling how many projects he might have begun. (If Joyce is any indication, the stress if writing a masterpiece can be rather difficult--and Pynchon, of the two, has always been the one more inclined to sloth.) I'm figuring he probably worked most of them into Against the Day, but there might be a few left, right?