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Archives for October 2008
Mailbag: I Am 8-Bit Sequel, Naming Kids Anakin
Mailbag time. In this post I mentioned the book I Am 8-Bit: Art Inspired by Classic Videogames of the ’80s. The author of that book, Jon M. Gibson, writes:
Hey David. Glad you dig the book! We’re putting out an even bigger volume early next year, so stay tuned! Lots of great art that you haven’t seen yet!
Cool. So if you’re one of the folks here (and there were quite a few) who expressed an interest in I Am 8-Bit, keep an eye out for the follow-up as well.
In response to my recent post about naming children after fictional characters, writer buddy Mike Canfield writes:
I don’t know about books, but I was on a bus a few years ago and witnessed parents trying to get the attention of their toddler son “Anakin.” Well, it’s better than “Boba,” I guess.
Yeah, or Dooku. Nobody should be named Dooku … not even Dooku.
Although Tobias S. Buckell brings up an interesting point:
But isn’t naming a kid Anakin much like naming a kid Adolf? I mean, strictly speaking?
I don’t know. What do people think? Is there something a little off about naming your kid Anakin, considering that his namesake, Anakin Skywalker, went on to become Darth Vader, a character who deployed WMD and wiped out an entire planet’s worth of innocent civilians?
Dead But Dreaming Anthology Reprinted by Miskatonic River Press
My first-ever anthology appearance was “The Disciple,” which was published in Dead But Dreaming, a book of Cthulhu Mythos fiction from DarkTales Publications. The book received a great response from readers. For example, Matthew T. Carpenter, who has reviewed 100+ Mythos books on Amazon.com, calls Dead But Dreaming “The absolute finest Lovecraftian collection of new fiction in more than a decade.” (He was also nice enough to mention my story as one of his favorites: “The best of these stories were excellent reads: ‘Bangkok Rules,’ in which a hitman finds he didn’t really want to know too much about his employer; ‘Why We Do It’ shows us life as a cultist; ‘The Disciple,’ about learning how to contact ancient evil entities in a university seminar setting; ‘Fire Breathing,’ about how callously victims are selected and how little anyone cares; ‘The Other Names,’ about learning to read by picking up the wrong book; and best of all is a vision of the end of the world in ‘Final Draft.’ It’s not that the rest of the stories were low quality. I just singled out the ones I liked best for special mention. I really do wish we could see more anthologies like this. A belated bravo to all who were involved.”)
Unfortunately, very few people ever got to actually see the anthology, because the publisher went out of business the same week that the book was released, and only 75 copies were printed. How hard is it to get a hold of one? Well, a few used copies are available on Amazon, but they’re a little pricey:
Fortunately, Dead But Dreaming is now being re-released by a new publisher, Miskatonic River Press, so hopefully the book will get a bit more exposure this time around. The book is apparently at the printer as we speak, and there’s a page up for the new edition at Amazon. And this time they even listed me as one of the authors:
That’s the first time I’ve been listed like that as an author at Amazon.com. It’s a small thing, but in the publishing world you have to take what you can get. I also like how they put that (Author) next to my name. So next time I wonder, “Am I really an author?” I can just go and check on Amazon.com. “Oh, yup. I am. Says so right there.”
For more on the anthology — including the complete table on contents — see my page for “The Disciple.” (That page also includes the illustration for my story that was done by Allen Koszowski for Weird Tales, and a link to the Pseudopod horror podcast audio production of the story.)
“Resistance” by Tobias S. Buckell on Escape Pod Podcast
Tobias S. Buckell’s story “Resistance” is now available as a free podcast from Escape Pod. This story features Buckell’s dreadlocked superhuman badass character Pepper (pictured below) and originally appeared in John Joseph Adams’s anthology Seeds of Change.
Naming Children After Literary Characters
I like this staff recommendation card for Roger Zelazny’s The Great Book of Amber from Kepler’s bookstore in Palo Alto:
And okay, yeah, I’ve considered it too.
I remember one time I actually came across an Amber internet message board where several teenagers had posted and said that their parents had named them after Amber characters. And of course there are a number of kids named after George R. R. Martin characters. I wonder how often this sort of thing happens, and what books have inspired the most kids’ names. It seems like the ultimate compliment for an author to receive — far more so than any award or review or whatever.
The Verdant Passage by Troy Denning
I just came across this in the bookstore. Wizards of the Coast has repackaged Troy Denning’s novel The Verdant Passage in a really nice-looking trade paperback edition:
The book is set in the Dark Sun game world (which Denning co-developed). This is the campaign setting I was most into when I played Dungeons & Dragons back in middle school. It’s basically Lord of the Rings meets Mad Max (most vegetation has been wiped out by life-devouring magic, gladiatorial combat is big, and the hobbits are all feral cannibals). The world is absolutely brutal. All player characters were supposed to start out at level 3 just to give them a fighting chance, and even so you were supposed to roll up three or four characters per player because it was just assumed that the characters wouldn’t be lasting long.
This new edition of the novel uses the same cover art (by Brom, whose spectacular artwork was always key to defining the look of the world), but with the addition of that gigantic black number 1. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had this thing involving book series with numbers on them — those damned numbers practically compel me to collect the whole set, and that they put the number in gigantic typeface on the cover … I mean, that’s just not fair. It took an enormous act of will to return this book to the shelf.
It did remind me, though, of an incident I’d completely forgotten about. I read The Verdant Passage during a day that I stayed home sick from school. I spent the whole day reading, and as is wont to happen when you spend hour after hour reading a book, the book started to seem more and more real and reality receded further and further into the background. This effect was amplified by the fact that I was running a tremendous fever, and by mid-afternoon I had become positively delirious. In the story, the band of heroes — which includes a gladiator — discover that the vile sorcerer-king intends to sacrifice everyone in the arena as part of an evil magical ritual. I remember crawling out of bed toward the door, but being too weak to keep going, and I lay there on the floor with my forehead pressed into the carpet, with sweat just pouring off me, and I was somehow convinced that I was both myself and the gladiator character, and that if I didn’t manage to drag myself off the floor and out the door and go save the world, then everyone was going to die.
Eventually, of course, my fever came down, and I realized that I am not in fact a totally badass gladiator warrior. (Wait. Or am I? Actually, I guess I kind of am. But I digress…) It was actually a pretty cool experience, and sort of made me wish that I could read books while delirious more often.
I Am 8-Bit by Jon M. Gibson
Holy crap, what a find! While browsing through the Art section of the bookstore last night I came across (and instantly acquired) I Am 8-Bit: Art Inspired by Classic Videogames of the ’80s by Jon M. Gibson (and featuring a foreword by Chuck Klosterman).
This book combines some of my greatest loves (pop surrealist art, ’80s pop culture, and videogames), so I probably would’ve bought it even if most of the art was only so-so, but actually the artwork is spectacular, and I like just about everything in here. Sorry art critics, but my favorite art tends to be quirky, representational, and narrative, and this stuff fits the bill perfectly. In Amanda Visell‘s Level 1016, Frogger hopelessly contemplates an endless landscape of criss-crossing traffic-heavy highways. Ryan Bubnis‘s Mourning the Loss of the Princess depicts Link with vacant eyes, rotten teeth, and threadbare clothing. The artist explains, “I was never skilled enough to beat Gannon and save Princess Zelda … So I thought it would be funny and interesting to revisit Link years after his defeat and see how he was coping.” In Martin Cendreda‘s Luigi Bros., Lugi stares dejectedly at an arcade machine and laments, “How come it’s never called ‘Luigi Bros’ …” In Greg “Craola” Simkin‘s Pac-Man in Hospice, a decrepit Pac-Man sits in a rocking chair and is fed an IV drip of pac pellets while characters from other videogames of the era cavort about him. And finally, in Jason Sho Green‘s Putting the Super in Mario, Mario faces a bed upon which the princess is splayed, naked and seductive, and an uncertain Mario checks the cheat sheet he’s written on his palm, which reads “up up down down left right B A start.”
2008 Presidential Debate, Round 3
If you missed last night’s presidential debate, this pretty much sums it up:
And here’s a public service announcement:
Free Fiction from Alpha Workshop Writers
Fellow Alpha staffer Karina Sumner-Smith‘s story “The Voices of the Snakes” is now available as a free audio program over at Podcastle. The story, told from the point of view of Medusa as she converses with her head of snakes, is beautifully written and evocative.
“Hello poison, hello grave-specter, hello nightmare,” the little green grass snake called, his tiny voice high and all his sibilants hissed. He flicked his tongue and uncurled his sleepy coils. “Hello dung heap, hello monstrosity, hello ruin.” |
This podcast appeared last week over at Fantasy magazine, and while I was over there I noticed that another Alpha person, workshop alum Jeanette Westwood, also has a story up, “The Banyan Tree,” which I remember reading at Alpha.
Social Bonding Through Horror
Last night I swung by Borders in downtown Palo Alto, and of course I checked out how they were doing in terms of stocking books that include me. (One copy of the Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008 trade paperback, three copies of the mass market paperback, and a princely five copies of The Living Dead.) While I was there in the horror anthologies section, a father and his son — who looked about twelve — appeared. The dad was introducing his son to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. The son took down a volume and said, “Does this have that ‘Call of Cthulhu’ story?” and the dad said, “Yeah, so either get that one or ‘At the Mountains of Madness.'” The son said, “What’s that about?” and the dad said, “Well, it’s about these … mountains … of madness.” (I guess it’s been a while since he read it.) Anyway, it always warms my heart to see a father and son bonding over unnameable eldritch terrors.
And speaking of The Living Dead, last week’s New York Review of Science Fiction reading series with me and John Langan went swimmingly. The event was scheduled against the second presidential debate, so I was a little worried that that would affect the turnout, but in fact quite a lively crowd showed up. (One attendee suggested that, given a choice between zombie horror and presidential politics, the audience had gone with the less-scary alternative.)
Before I read my story “The Skull-Faced Boy,” I told an anecdote that went something like this: “I’d never really written any horror before, but back around the time I graduated from college my life had become so miserable that horror was the only way I could express all my angsty angst. I’m happy to get a chance to read this story tonight to a live audience because this sort of reminds me of going on camping trips as a kid and telling ghost stories around the campfire. In fact, I went on a family camping trip shortly after writing this story, and so I actually did once read this story around a campfire. One of the people along on that trip was one of my dad’s colleagues, who went on to become the first and only female tenured physics faculty member at Stanford. She’s not a big horror fan, and I think the story really freaked her out. It’s been years now, but every time I see her she still mentions how scared she was by my story about the vampires, and I have to tell her, ‘Actually, it was zombies … geez, I thought you were supposed to be smart.'”
John Langan also posted about the evening (he notes some interesting points of congruence between his story and mine), and so did Jordache, who reports of the story I read, “The story follows a young sentient zombie during a zombie invasion and what happens to him when he gets in contact with his still-human family. I really enjoyed the story and was moved by it. I wasn’t expecting to be moved by zombie stories … I expected a lot of gore. It says a lot about the quality of the stories in this collection.” I also met for the first time the writers Carrie Laben, Rhodi Hawk, and M. M. De Voe, as well as Hippocampus Press editor Derrick Hussey (who you can see in this clip from The Ali G Show). (Also present, apparently, was David Wellington, author of the Monster Island zombie series, though I never really got a chance to say hi.)
My Absentee Ballot for the 2008 Presidential Election
My absentee ballot for the 2008 presidential election:
David Barr Kirtley, John Joseph Adams, and John Langan at NYRSF Reading Series
Just a reminder that tomorrow night I’ll be appearing alongside John Joseph Adams and John Langan at the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series at South Street Seaport to promote the anthology The Living Dead.
John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley on Hour of the Wolf
This morning I appeared alongside John Joseph Adams on Jim Freund’s Hour of the Wolf radio program on WBAI 99.FM in New York to discuss John’s recent anthologies The Living Dead and Seeds of Change. I also gave a reading of my story “The Skull-Faced Boy.”
Humorous zombies?, Joe Hill, Owen’s King’s Who Can Save Us Now?, Seeds of Change, The Living Dead cover art
Part 2 – Reading
“The Skull-Faced Boy” by David Barr Kirtley, read by the author
Part 3 – Callers
Andy Duncan, Zora Neale Hurston, George Romero, From Dusk Til Dawn, Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead