Now we find ourselves at an absolutely unprecedented moment, historically speaking. So long as the brain remained a ‘black box,’ something too complicated to be scientifically understood, we could indulge our prescientific conceits without fear of contradiction. Now that cognitive science is a multibillion dollar industry, these days are fast drawing to a close. The ‘crisis of meaning’ has come to a head. Either we’re something fundamentally different and things like meaning exists, or we’re simply more nature and meaning is a kind of fantasy.
Think about what makes fantasy, fantasy. Science. What makes gods, magic, spirits and the like fantastic—or especially fictional—is the fact that science has thoroughly expelled them from any rational understanding of the natural world. In this sense, you can look at fantasy fiction as Shrek’s swamp, if you like, the place were discredited traditional entities and posits go to live as shadows of their former, scriptural and folkloric glory.
What I set out to do was to write the first fantasy that self-consciously included meaning with gods, magic, and spirits, to write a fantastic apocalypse that mirrors our ongoing ‘semantic apocalypse’ in photographic negative.
[GdM] How has becoming a parent influenced the message you want to convey in your fiction? How has it influenced your writing?
[RSB] I’m manic about my work, and before our daughter came allow I could indulge my mania, lose myself writing for fourteen hours a day. So there’s no question that I wrote more before, in a bulk sense. But strangely enough, I think that luxury counted against the quality of my work. Part of the problem with inspiration is that you can never escape the memory of that inspiration when you begin rewriting, and that skews your ability to see excesses as excesses. So in a sense I think I’m writing less but better.
(That said, I really have been crazy productive despite not publishing anything in four years. I’m literally sitting on four completed drafts of four different books. My project for 2015 is getting each of these completed and ‘out there.’)
Otherwise, I feel being a parent has… it’s hard to talk about this without striking nonparents as pious, I realize… become ‘complete’—that I can now write with authority about a profound dimension of human existence. There’s no question that it has rewritten narrative boundaries for me: I know for a fact that I couldn’t have written Neuropath the way I did!
[GdM] What were your personal non-grimdark writing inspirations that have shaped what you currently write about today?
[RSB] A wide variety of literary writers whom I think are almost entirely irrelevant in this day and age. DeLillo. Wallace. Roth. Updike. Mailer. Munro. Walker. Buckler. They most all tell the same modernist morality tale, anyway, that of a protagonist struggling to hold onto meaning (failing or succeeding) in an apparently meaningless (nonfantastic) world. This is the narrative mould (and incestuous culture) I would smash if I could. That’s the thing about being blind to your blindness: no matter how narrow your view is, it strikes you as wide as the sky.
[GdM] What else can your readers expect to see from you in the next year or two? What are your plans for the future after The Unholy Consult (Aspect Emperor #3)?
[RSB] Books, fuck. Hopefully a bunch of them! I have a ‘no-blank page’ rule in effect until I have all these projects out the door.
[GdM] For new readers, where should their next stop be after The Knife of Many Hands?
[RSB] Anywhere but my blog! My big worry is that readers interested in my work check out Three Pound Brain and decide there’s no way I could write anything entertaining. But I can. You just have to stick with the world… I swear it.
It doesn’t get much more epic… or grim… or dark.
GdM would like to thank the guys at second-apocalypse.com and asoiaf.westeros.org who submitted question ideas for this interview.[GdM]
Review: Dirge
by Tim Marquitz
malrubius
Dirge was supplied to Grimdark Magazine as an ARC by the author.
Dirge by Tim Marquitz is the story of Kallie, a noble orphan disguised as a priestess of the goddess Oraua, who, further disguised as a man called Dirge, is a nearly invincible assassin and zombie-slayer. Left for dead by the minions of the evil Duke Freye, she was rescued by the brother-priests of the benevolent god Oraua, who run a refugee camp for survivors of an ongoing zombie plague directed by necrolords who, along with Freye and his nemesis, the Emperor Valtore, seek to rule Delham. Dirge is a relatively short, action-packed, bloody tale with a fairly complex set of character conflicts and an explosive climax. For readers looking for lots of “steel” slicing through “meat” and “waxen flesh flaking off” Dirge might be your feast of gore. For this reviewer, though, Dirge is a bit of a mixed bag.
No one who reads grimdark fantasy, or heroic fantasy as the case may be, does not appreciate a lot of action and a hero to root for. Dirge delivers the goods. Nearly every chapter contains a fight sequence. Whether it be Kallie lopping off the limbs of a dozen zombies or she and her nemesis, Tyril, slashing it out in the forest, there is no shortage of bloody action here. The plot has enough clever twists, turns, and surprises to keep the reader interested as Kallie’s predicament becomes increasingly precarious. Major events are well timed and spaced to provide maximum enjoyment, and a particular sequence involving a Krullanth (no, I won’t tell) is a truly frightening pleasure. The action and intensity build as new alliances among the forces of evil are revealed until Marquitz lets loose the dogs of war in an exciting climax. The bones of compelling fiction are here—conflict, action, heroism, rooting for the underdog, imaginative situations—and the stakes are high, as the entire world falls under the plague of the undead, and the forces of evil battle for the Heart of Ultir.
Most fantasy novels centre on a hero, and Kallie is certainly one to root for. She has been through hell and survived, thanks to her own toughness as well as the help she receives from the brother priests, Gaul and Darren. Having received the soul, for lack of a better word, of the dead priest Rellan, she is imbued with incredible strength, speed, and agility, and she is on a relentless mission of vengeance against her torturers as well as the ghouls who plague Delham. Along the way she finds herself pitted between enemies and struggling with her conscience as she must serve the hated emperor to help the refugee Eton folk. When her brothers volunteer her to capture, rather than kill, a live necrolord for a huge payoff that will secure safety for the Eton folk for generations to come, she finds herself up against a foe that just might be her equal.
Kallie’s story is in intriguing one, fraught with peril at every step, and replete with the kind of action readers expect from grimdark fantasy. Fans of fighting fantasy, especially, will find lots to like here. However, fans of the great writers in the genre—my personal faves are Abercrombie and Mark Lawrence—might find some tough going in Dirge. First off, there is relatively little dialogue in the novel, partially because Kallie does not speak in her Dirge disguise so her foes will not know she is a woman. The text consists of one dense, wordy narrative paragraph after another, all the way through with not enough regard for pacing. The story is utterly humourless with its one penis joke feeling like a breath of fresh air in a catacomb. More importantly, though, it seems to this reviewer that Marquitz goes a bit overboard with his narrative voice. For example, there are some awkward long sentences during a fast-paced fight scene: “She met each [blow] with a more balanced defence than she might normally, twisting her wrist at the impact to lessen the force, the blades redirected with less effort,” others that I struggled to make sense of: “she could only slay so many of the lords before humanity collapsed,” and some philosophical musings that seemed odd coming from an unidentified omniscient narrator: “How easily we fall in line, priest or peasant, the glitter of gold a certainty of compliance.”
In general, there is just way too much narrative for me.
Similarly, I felt that the development of Dirge’s characters and settings didn’t display the same effor
t expended into the description of action. Other than Kallie, the character cast felt a little two-dimensional, with the possible exception of the “old thief” Behr, who pleasantly surprises us by acting against our expectations in one pivotal scene. The villains are pretty much evil bogeymen, to be vanquished when the plot requires it. This stuck out to me as I was really hoping to see some depth in the antagonists. The same goes for setting. Other than one temple at the beginning of the story, the rest of the settings feel generic and hastily drawn, for example trees, clearings, a creaking drawbridge, a crumbling wall, and some yucky grey stuff that sticks to Gaul’s clothes.
Despite an abundance of slayings at the novel’s climax that would make even Shakespeare proud, there are enough open threads (and people alive) at the end of Dirge to indicate that a sequel might be in the offing. If so—and I hope it will be—I’m hoping to see the characters and the story speak for themselves a bit more and the setting to really come alive (eg. Like Lynch’s Camorr) in the second installment.
Overall, Dirge wasn’t as well developed as I look for in the books I read. Marquitz provides a story with tumid prose, and characters and settings begging for further development. However, for fans of assassins, zombie apocalypses and a swathe of butchery Dirge should provide plenty of gory fun and leave you looking forward to where Marquitz chooses to take the next instalment.
Dirge was published by Permuted Press on January 20th, 2015. Purchase links for Dirge can be found over at Permuted Press’s website.[GdM]
Excerpt: Dark Run
Mike Brooks
This is an extract from Dark Run by Mike Brooks, to be published by Del Rey UK in June 2015. Dark Run is currently available for pre-order on Amazon, Book Depository and Waterstones.
Randall’s Bar was at least a mile beneath the rocky surface of Carmella II and had all the inviting ambience of an open sewer. The sign over the door was simple neon tubes rather than a holo projection, the lightpool table inside was glitching and the air had the thin, sour quality which suggested it had already passed through too many lungs. It was populated by a dozen men and half as many women sharing little but the lean, dangerous look of overworked and underfed Undersiders, in various stages of inebriation but all seemingly determined to get deeper into their cups. He’d known better than to even think of asking Randall for a beer, and so was instead nursing a smeared glass tumbler containing a clear liquid which could have passed for paint stripper had its taste been a little more refined.
He had been in less inviting premises of his own volition, but right now he was struggling to recall more than one or two.
‘Hey!’ The thin, reedy voice was that of a kid. ‘Hey, mister!’ There was no indication he was being addressed.
He didn’t turn around, just kept his head low and his concentration on the glass of spirits in his hand. Then, inevitably, there was a tugging on the back of his armavest.
‘Hey, mister! Are you Ichabod Drift?’
Drift sighed and looked up at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar: sharp-boned features, shoulder- length hair dyed a shocking violet and kept out of his eyes with a black bandana, skin a golden brown which had everything to do with parentage and nothing to do with the minimal amount of time it had ever been exposed to a star’s ultraviolet radiation. He rotated on his stool and absent-mindedly reached up a hand to scratch at the skin around his mechanical right eye as it focused on the kid with a whirring of lenses.
Overlarge mining goggles stared blankly back at him over a dirty face topped by blondish stubble which, combined with the pitch of the voice and a near-shapeless one-piece overall – probably a cast-off from an older sibling – meant Drift wasn’t entirely sure whether it was male or female. He essayed a grin, the same winning smile which had worked him into beds and out of trouble more times than he could count (and when money was as large a part of your life as it was for Ichabod Drift, you had to be able to count pretty damn high).
‘Sí, soy yo,’ he said agreeably, ‘but who might you be? Kind of young for a Justice, aren’t you?’ Not that the Justices would be looking for him right now; apart from anything else, Ichabod Drift wasn’t an outlaw . . . exactly. He was, as old Kelsier used to say, ‘of interest’. Exactly how much interest, and to whom, rather depended on what had happened recently and if he had a suitable alibi for where he’d been at the time.
‘You the guy what killed Gideon Xanth?’ the kid asked. Drift felt the gloom of the bar take on a sudden watchful flavour. Xanth’s Wild Spiders gang had been a menace for the last eighteen standard months over three sectors of the semi-lawless honeycomb of underground passages, caverns and former mineshafts which made up the so-called Underside of the moon named Carmella II by the United States of North America. Drift had personally heard three different variants of the tale of how he and his partner had taken the Spiders down, then dragged Gideon’s corpse back to the Justices’ office in High Under to collect the handsome bounty posted on his scarred (and partially missing) head.
‘That was a way from here,’ he said, casually adjusting his weight so he was facing not only his youthful interrogator but the door as well, and letting his right hand idly drop into the general region of the holstered pistol at his hip. ‘I’m amazed word has spread so far, so soon. Where’d you hear that piece of news from?’
‘There’s a gang o’ men just come into town,’ the kid piped, ‘and they was asking about if anyone had seen Ichabod Drift, the Mexican what killed Gideon Xanth. Said they’d give ten bucks for whoever told ’em where he was.’
‘I see,’ Drift said, a grim sense of unease stirring in his gut. Not that he hadn’t been expecting this, but nonetheless . . . Something must have shown on his face, because the kid suddenly darted back out of arm’s length and scuttled for the door, as though worried that he (or possibly she) was about to be forcibly restrained from collecting the promised reward.
‘Hey!’ Drift shouted after the retreating shape. ‘Did you get a name from any of ’em?’
‘Only from the big guy,’ came the reply, nothing but a begoggled head now visible poking back around the door jamb. Drift raised his eyebrows and motioned with his hand to suggest that maybe the kid should quit stalling.
‘He said his name was Gideon Xanth.’
Then the head disappeared, leaving nothing behind but the swinging saloon door and a sudden atmosphere of expectation so tense Drift could practically taste it. Unless that was the bile.
‘Well, shit,’ he remarked to no one in particular, and slid off his stool to land his booted feet on the dusty floor. With the entire bar’s eyes on him he ostentatiously straightened his armavest, adjusted his bandana, checked his pistols and then strode towards the door. Bruiser, the ageing but still massive bouncer, nodded to him on his way past.
‘You sure you wanna go out there, Drifty?’
‘Just a simple misunderstanding, I’m sure,’ Drift replied with a confidence he didn’t feel. Bruiser’s forehead added some wrinkles to the lines already weathered into it as he regarded the scene outside.
‘Don’t look too simple from where I’m standing.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the Weasel piped up from next to him. Weasel was short and scrawny, and his job at Randall’s Bar was to look after anything Bruiser confiscated from customers – which basically boiled down to any firearm larger than a pistol, as only a fool would enter a Carmellan drinking den completely unarmed – and then return it to them as they left, guided by his perfect memory. ‘I’d say Gideon not actually being dead is pretty simple, really.’
‘Depends on your point of view,’ Drift replied, and sauntered out into what passed for Drowning Bend’s town square. The chemical tang of the leak in the nearby industrial outflow lingered in the air, burrowing into his nasal passages again now he was what passed for outside once more, while far above in the solid rock of the curved habdome roof the lights were churning out steady, reliable illumination. Which was a little unfortunate in some
respects; a few shadows to hide in would be rather convenient right about now.
The Wild Spiders were in the square. And sitting in his personal, custom-made, six-legged mechanical walker, the padded seat upholstered in what was rumoured to be genuine cowhide, was the imposing shape of Gideon Xanth.
Ichabod Drift had a momentary thought that maybe he’d just turn and head the other way, but then a shout went up. He’d been seen.
‘Drift!’ Xanth bellowed, his voice a basso roar. He flicked something large and shiny off his thumb, and Drift caught sight of the juvie diving to catch the promised ten-buck piece before fleeing into a side alley.
‘Hola, Gideon!’ Drift called back, settling his hands just over his guns. Two of them, at least; his backup was tucked in the small of his back under his belt. ‘You’re looking well!’
‘Looking well for a dead man, you mean?’ the gang leader snarled. ‘Boys, cover Mister Drift for me, would you?’
At least a dozen weapons of varying calibre and roughly equal deadliness snapped up to point straight at Drift, which did nothing positive for his levels of either calmness or perspiration.
‘That’s better,’ Xanth said, doing something with the controls in front of him and sending his walker clanking forwards while the Wild Spiders advanced on either side, their guns still trained and disappointingly steady. ‘Boys, we all know that Mister Drift is a fast draw and a fine shot, so if he starts looking twitchy then feel free to ventilate him for me before he gets any ideas into his head.
Grimdark Magazine Issue #3 ePUB Page 3