In short, the kinds of people H P Lovecraft, as a man who clung to his identity as an Anglo-Saxon gentleman of high class and classical education, would have despised. Shea does not so much separate the art from the artist, as much as inject a sense of compassion and a clearly stated need for community in his contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos. His characters frequently namecheck H P Lovecraft, and often have read his stories, such as At the Mountains of Madness (1936).
Shea’s satire even manages to punch up:
Of the Great Old Ones, the mightiest, dread Cthulhu, is among us already. He appropriates our souls, possesses our wills. Legions of his minions, his devout Ganymedes, already infest our corporate boardrooms, our governments, our churches. (‘Tsathoggua’)
That the story quoted above opens with a busybody named Maureen verbally abusing a homeless woman named Maxie is significant. Maureen thinks due to her wealth and status that she’s within her rights to attack Maxie for owning an old and tired dog. She demands that Maxie put her furry companion down. Having introduced the pair with this moment of conflict, the two women go their separate ways. Shea’s story continues with Maureen transforming into a carnivorous froglike creature, while Maxie gets to witness the impact of Cthulhu Mythos god Tsathoggua on San Francisco.
Shea’s main theme in this yarn is consumption. Maureen’s sense of her own status and moral superiority is based on her membership of a prosperity church. When she’s possessed by Tsathoggua and begins gobbling down dogs, neighbours, and a particularly unlucky park jogger, she confuses the monstrous instincts she’s experiencing for divine revelation. Her self-righteousness is literally monstrous.
Maxie, meanwhile, encounters a grassroots group of Cthulhu beastie survivors. They share tips on what these creatures are and how to avoid them while sleeping rough in San Francisco. It’s the humanist element of Shea’s story that most effectively subverts Lovecraft’s influence on the Cthulhu Mythos. Even confronted with cosmic insignificance, moments of kindness between people are shown to matter a great deal.
The same also follows for ‘The Presentation’. When four San Francisco graphic artists become aware that they’ve been hired by a shapeshifting fiend disguised as a corporate investor to produce an expensive mural, they perform their tasks with eyes wide open:
‘Just when your income starts getting good,’ muttered Jackie, ‘that’s when you have to really look at who’s signing your check.’
Whether it’s Silicon Valley, or a shapeshifting demon, these artist freelancers still need to pay their bills and mind their scruples over who they work with. ‘The Presentation’ has characters make passionate asides about the importance of art, but the twist involves a financial transaction that crosses the universe (suggesting that capitalism has a touch of the eldritch all on its own). For the story’s comic artists, their work keeps them sane and lets them sleep at night, even as they’re made aware that anything and anyone can be bought and sold.
‘The Pool’ is another of Shea’s contemporary allegories, with protagonist Darryl a former copywriter who has taken on work as a day-labourer to support himself. He’s on the wrong side of 50, and his body is taking longer to recover from hard work. Shea draws out Darryl’s financial precariousness well, with a colleague’s accident at a Californian home during a pool installation immediately raising fears of having to pay healthcare bills. Strangely, the crew’s boss agrees to pay the worker’s hospital fees if he doesn’t mention it was an onsite incident. But not before having the homeowner read a strange fax message ‘Eeya Fuh Thaggin Thoo Loo Eeya Shaw Gaw Thoy’, a telltale sign that this is a Cthulhu Mythos story.
‘The Pool’ is a blue-collar story that lets the reader get to know Darryl well. When he begins to have audio and visual hallucinations of a watery figure warning him of danger at the building site, Shea’s writing makes it equally possible that this is not a ghostly visitation, but a man worn down by fatigue and financial worry losing his grip on reality.
Another nice touch is his randomly encountering a worn copy of H P Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness in his hotel. When he intuits that the book’s tale of shapeshifting creatures called shoggoths has some connection to the pool site, this again feels plausible as an imaginative fancy of a man alone in a cheap hotel room.
In these Californian entries into the Cthulhu Mythos, the vulnerable, alienated and impoverished citizens of a gentrified San Francisco bear witness to horror. There is a sense of poetic justice in how they’re not targeted by the creatures that pursue affluent Californians. If these stories don’t so much set to rights economic injustice, there is a levelling of the playing field.
And in that fashion, these stories are a response to Lovecraft’s contempt for people of different races, faiths and genders. His inability to empathise with different people inspired him to imagine the complete annihilation of the human race as the correct response to an America slowly changing from what he recognised. Michael Shea retained the cosmic pessimism of Lovecraft but advocated on behalf of the marginalised in his storytelling even as California stripped away services for the most vulnerable and gave carte blanche to corporate overhauling of the state.
And in case it needs to be said, there are plenty of other writers serving up cosmic horror that are not named Lovecraft. Thomas Ligotti, P Djèlí Clark, Kaaron Warren and Victor LaValle spring to mind. Matt Ruff's novel Lovecraft Country (2016) has been adapted for television by Misha Green. Airing on HBO, the series centres on the black experience in an America of sundown towns and segregation, with Lovecraftian cults and monsters in the mix as well.
Perhaps most notably, Ruthanna Emrys, whose novella The Litany of Earth (published by Tor the year Shea passed away), uses the concepts of Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth to explore an allegory for World War Two Japanese internment camps.
The Author: Emmet O’Cuana
Dublin-born, Melbourne-based Emmet O’Cuana is a writer and critic. He’s also an aspiring home cook. One day, he dreams of owning a miniature goat. Website: www.emmetocuana.com.
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The Opposite of a Broken Mirror: My Time at Gollancz
Part 1
Darren Nash
To steal shamelessly from the opening line of what I was surprised to learn is Robert Silverberg’s only Hugo or Nebula Award-winning novel, A Time of Changes: ‘I am Darren Nash and I mean to tell you all about myself.’
Actually, I don’t (I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear). Firstly, because my story is nowhere near as interesting as Kinnal Darival’s, and secondly, because I’ve been asked to talk about my time working for Gollancz, not to give my entire life history, which football team I support and how I like my whisky (Manchester United or Richmond, depending on your definition of ‘football’; and with just the tiniest dash of water—in the unlikely event you’re interested). So here is my attempt to do just that. I’ve tried to make it entertaining and informative but not self-indulgent—this is not the story of Gollancz, but a necessarily subjective account of my time at Gollancz. I hope you find it diverting.
In which I discover that the future is coming, and I am unprepared for it
There are a number of places I could begin an account of how a wide-eyed Melbourne boy who grew up loving books about space found himself immersed in the heart of the British science-fiction scene, working for the world’s most prestigious SF publisher. I could give you a chronological précis of my UK career starting with Simon & Schuster and moving through my time at Orbit before arriving at the topic at hand, but I’m not sure what that would test more: my memory or your patience. I could pluck an otherwise unremarkable event from memory and solemnly proclaim that ‘this is where it all began’, but that would be a bit of a fib—or, at best, artistic licence—because the process was more organic than that.
If there was catalyst for the move it was probably—believe it or not—the Global Financial Crisis, which happened while I was at Orbit. I know Australia managed to navigate the eve
nt pretty much unscathed, but for the rest of the world it was a real thing with real repercussions. Having lost my job at the time of the last Australian recession in the early 90s and then been made redundant again at S&S when they closed Earthlight in 2003, I was perhaps over-sensitive to the potential fallout career-wise. So, in one of those idle moments when one thinks, ‘What would I do if I suddenly had to find a new job?’, I had a terrifying realisation: that I was in a niche area (science fiction and fantasy) in a niche profession (book editing), in a niche industry (book publishing). None of my skills were seamlessly transferable to another industry in the way that, say, accounting would be. To heighten my sense of career vertigo, Little, Brown (Orbit’s parent company) had recently appointed a digital specialist who was seated at our ‘pod’ of desks (learning otherwise-useless new terminology is one of the few joys of open-plan offices), and his conversations were making me acutely aware that I really had no idea about this brave new digital future that was upon us. Clearly something had to change.
Happily for me, the fates were aligning in my favour, and not for the first time, I have to admit. I was in the right place at the right time, talking to the right people. As I was casting about trying to update my digital knowledge and future-proof my skill set, Malcolm Edwards—one of the great British SF figures of all time (more on Malcolm later)—was looking for a digital publisher to bring to fruition his vision to rescue out-of-print science fiction: the SF Gateway.
Tabula rasa
I was extraordinarily fortunate on a number of levels, here. I already knew Malcolm, so I didn’t have to prove my science-fiction bona fides. We’d met at various SF functions in London, and aside from (obviously) having science fiction in common, we’d bonded over a mutual love of cricket (Malcolm was gracious enough to overlook the fact that I support Australia—although had Glenn McGrath not rolled his ankle on that fateful August morning at Edgbaston in 2005, he might well have been less forgiving!).
In choosing someone to bring a project such as SF Gateway to life, most people would have opted to find a young digital native who knew their way around HTML, CSS, CMS, FBI and WTF other tech-related jargon and hope that they would absorb sufficient science-fictional knowledge along the way. I will be forever grateful that Malcolm is not ‘most people’, and decided to choose someone who knew their SF history and was capable of learning the digital/technical aspects on the job. In fact, I was given an extraordinary level of trust in being appointed digital publisher, for not only was I allowed the space to learn the technical facets of my role on the job, I was given almost a blank slate from which to start. Malcolm knew what he wanted in broad brushstrokes but was content for me to bring it into being in whatever way I saw fit. The only prerequisite was that everything needed be completed in time for launching at a party to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Gollancz as an SF publisher, which was a little more than 12 months away.
As an aside, some of you might well be questioning that anniversary, given that Gollancz dates back to 1927, so I feel some explanation is owed here: Gollancz—or Victor Gollancz, Ltd, to give it its full name—was indeed founded by Sir Victor Gollancz in 1927 and published a wide range of high-quality fiction and non-fiction, including but not specialising in SF. It became the dedicated science fiction and fantasy imprint of Orion in 1998, two years after its parent company Cassell, and Orion, were both acquired by the Hachette Group. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that neither of those years sits comfortably with a golden anniversary in 2011. The answer to the conundrum is this: that although Victor Gollancz had published SF books on a reasonably regular basis throughout the company’s life, none of them was labelled ‘science fiction’. It wasn’t until 1961, after Gollancz published Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell, that Victor’s nephew Hillary Rubinstein introduced a dedicated SF list, published, marketed and labelled as such (and the company’s trademark ‘yellow jackets’ would become synonymous not just with Gollancz but with British science fiction). It is from this date that the 21st century Gollancz traces its heritage; hence, the 50th anniversary in 2011.
It was, in hindsight, a preposterous goal: publish a thousand ebooks, design and launch a website to provide a community forum and act as a hub for the curation of those ebooks, and design and launch an online edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (SFE) that would interact with the SF Gateway website in a mutually beneficial fashion—all within a little more than a year. I must have been crazy…
It’s a pleasure to be here
Actually, more than one person has questioned my sanity over the years—and as far as I know the jury is still out—but I certainly wasn’t crazy enough to turn down this opportunity of a lifetime. I’ve had a huge amount of respect and admiration for Gollancz since… well, since I was first aware of them as a publisher, so to find myself working there was incredible. If it wasn’t a dream come true, it was certainly in the same postcode and, as a result, the early days are a bit of a blur, to be honest.
I remember many rounds of conversations with colleagues from Finance, Digital, Contracts, Sales, Marketing, Publicity, Production, Group Digital and pretty much anyone who was even tangentially involved in ebooks or websites. As an aside, this was the first (and, to date, only) time I’ve ever been berated by a finance director—not for failing to remain within budget (I did) but for not having read a particular classic SF series (in the interests of full disclosure, it was Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld series; I’m not proud of this gap in my reading and even less proud of the fact that I still haven’t rectified the omission. I’ll get to it. Don’t @ me.).
One thing I do remember from the early days is going to the Finnish ambassador’s residence for the book launch of The Quantum Thief by the outrageously talented Hannu Rajaniemi, a Finnish writer then living in Edinburgh. The Quantum Thief was the first Gollancz book I read as a member of the Gollancz team, which set the bar ludicrously high—it was like encountering the mad love child of Iain M Banks, William Gibson and Michael Moorcock. In fact, the only thing more impressive than Hannu’s writing is his handshake, which I swear exerts more pounds-per-square-inch than a saltwater crocodile’s jaws. I learned very quickly that if I didn’t push my hand right into his, so the distance between fulcrum and load was reduced, I could forget about signing my name properly for the next half hour or so. I assume everyone’s aware of the saying that compares a person’s intellect to a fast-closing device for capturing animals? I was to discover over the next seven years that while many of Gollancz’s authors would prove to have minds like a steel trap, only Hannu had a grip to match.
Was it something I said?
One morning, perhaps not even a month after I joined, co-editorial director Jo Fletcher called a few of us into an office, closed the door, and told us that she would be leaving at the end of the year to launch her own imprint at another company. Given Jo’s 16 years with Gollancz and her stable of critically acclaimed and commercially successful authors, it’s fair to say that this was quite the shock.
This news dropped maybe a month before our scheduled strategy away day—which was to be held in Paris in order to enable us to attend the 10th anniversary party being thrown by our good friends at Bragelonne, France’s premier SFF publisher. I must say, even though I lived in the UK for almost 20 years, the thrill of being able to hop on a train and go somewhere like Paris for an overnighter—or, indeed, a day trip (I went there for lunch on one occasion!)—never wore off.
We had expected the strategy day to be pretty routine in terms of identifying challenges and opportunities in the year ahead and developing plans to address them but, all of a sudden, everything was in flux. Authors needed moving around, workloads needed redistributing, and I was not immune to the changes. Having enjoyed just a few weeks with the single responsibility of launching the SF Gateway and the SFE in a year’s time (a full-time job in itself), I now found myself being asked to be steward of Gollancz’s Terry Pratchett publishing, and putting my hand up to take o
n custody of the SF Masterworks. Although both incredibly prestigious jobs, they nevertheless added appreciably to my workload. Still: Terry Pratchett, SF Masterworks… what sort of idiot would say ‘no’ to those opportunities?
NOLI TIMERE MESSOREM
Looking after the SF Masterworks was very much part and parcel of the larger SF Gateway work—rescuing important out of print books and returning them to availability—so while it added to my workload, it didn’t require me to shift my focus terribly much. Discworld, though? That was a whole different kettle of turtles…
To be scrupulously fair to the group publisher who’d said to me, ‘It’ll be fine, it’s really just a calendar each year’, looking after Gollancz’s Terry Pratchett publishing was just a calendar each year.
For the first year.
Then, in 2012, the estimable Stephen Briggs produced a revised text of The Discworld Companion—restoring excised portions that had been cut from earlier editions for the sake of brevity and writing new entries to cover the Discworld novels published since the Companion’s last outing. This revised edition was given the fresh new title Turtle Recall (I was very relieved to get Sir Terry’s blessing on that one) and sent out into the (disc)world in October 2013.
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