I have a lot of artists who have influenced me, but by far the five that really blow me away are Caravaggio, Kathe Kollwitz, Thomas Eakins, Howard Pyle, and NC Wyeth. These artists all possess the drama, horror, fantasy, and redemption that I love in painting.
What’s more important – inspiration or perspiration? Is being an artist a higher calling, or a craft like any other?
My art has always been about inspiration and perseverance. I have always painted subject matter and worlds that inspire me emotionally on different levels. Sometimes those elements were found in the books that I read, experiences that I witnessed firsthand, or in my family.
Cover art for World War Z
The way that I fell into the arts or that the arts fell into me was a higher calling. Certain things led me to this path, and as I look back over 20 years of painting, I know it was a road that I was meant to forge. When I am in my studio I feel inspired to bring worlds to life. My work rises on the thick brushstrokes of windswept earth tone palettes that show humanity’s hardships and strengths.
Why did you choose to focus on horror/fantasy?
People always ask me why a majority of my art centers around horror/fantasy, birth, and death. It helps me understand the impermanence of life on this planet.
My work has always been about the human condition, and the hardships and triumphs that life gives us. I grew up in a real blue collar family. My grandfather had immigrated to America from Sicily to try to give us a better life. My father was a carpenter who was often out of work in the winter. I watched my parents struggle to take care of us in the most impossible conditions, always sacrificing the little they had for us to survive. Those were tough times, and really felt like I lived in a surreal Dickens world. When I first started painting I wanted to bring some of the things I witnessed to life.
Another reason was the influence of my cousin Angelo Rossitto (1908-1991). Angelo’s mother Carmela Caniglia left Sicily when my grandfather did and came to Omaha, Nebraska. Angelo decided when he was in his twenties to make a living in Hollywood. He met John Barrymore, who brought him into the business, and made films with Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi. He also starred in the famous 1932 Tod Browning film Freaks. He would come back to Omaha and tell us about his career and working with great writers like Ray Bradbury in the film Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Is there one work you’d particularly like our readers to see, either because it’s most representative, or because you’re especially proud of it?
At the moment I am very proud of the last three projects that I have worked on.
The first is William Peter Blatty’s 40th Anniversary edition of The Exorcist. I read the book when I was in high school. My uncle, Father Joseph Haller S.J. had been a Jesuit priest at the time in St. Louis MO in 1949. I remember him talking about the incident. So I felt very honored when Blatty and Cemetery Dance chose my artwork for his 40th anniversary edition. I created the cover and 13 interior pieces for the limited edition hardcover.
Birth Spring
The second project that I was honored to work on was Max Brooks’s World War Z (soon to be a major motion picture). Max created a brilliant surreal story of the ‘‘Zompocalypse’’ at its finest. When I was brainstorming his cover for the new limited edition, I wanted it to be a painting that was gripping and visceral. My idea was to have a single powerful image on the cover of an animated screaming zombie corpse that has come back from the dead. I wanted the image to feel aggressive, harsh, and full of terror. In my oil painting, I tried to make my corpse a truly living dead soul that has the qualities of heaven and hell, hence the halo (gold leaf) above the creature’s head.
The last and latest project that I am currently working on is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol 170th anniversary edition from Easton Press. Working with Easton Press has been an amazing experience. Their company really gets into the artist’s vision and lets you take the books and stories as far as your imagination allows you to go. So far I have created over 25 drawings and 10 paintings that will be featured in this rare edition. Dickens was one of my literary heroes, and to have the chance to tell the story through my art has been a dream come true for me. I have already started working with some museums and galleries to create a show to coincide with the release of the book. I will show the entire process of the project from preliminary sketches to drawings and the final artwork.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about you or your work?
I feel very blessed to have made a living at something that I love to do. Painting is my life and blood. For years people would tell me that my art was sick and demented without purpose. So many times I was left behind on the downside of up. Instead of giving into their insults and views of my art, I dug deeper and persevered. I channeled that energy into my art, and I stayed in the realm of what made me whole and who I am. I knew that it would come around someday and even if it didn’t that would be okay, because I was so happy living the worlds that I created.
As artists, it is up to us to create our own sense of reality. In an age of social and political upheaval, the artist is an anomaly. My art searches for the new spirit in modern figurative painting. Like the old masters, I have found vitality and life hidden amongst the layers of the human condition and have started breathing new life into the human form with visceral brushstrokes that are intimate, piercing, mesmerizing, and at times distressing.
Do you have any art shows or lectures coming up?
Yes, I will be giving a lecture and art demo at Creighton University in Omaha Nebraska on April 12. Then I travel to Iowa State University (April-17-21) for a lecture and solo art show. July 18-22 I will be heading out to NECON (Camp Necon). I am the artist guest of honor at this year’s event. I will also be at the Allentown Art Museum for this years IlluXcon (September 11-15). That is going to be one amazing show.
–Caniglia
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Ken Liu (
You’ve been publishing stories for a decade, but have become notably more prolific and successful in the past couple of years, racking up award wins and nominations. What do you think about this sudden success? Do you feel pressure, or has it boosted your confidence – or affected you in some other way?
My own sense is that everything you mentioned is related to an increase in my output around 2010 or so. To simplify somewhat, I made a conscious decision to write more and to engage in deliberate practice. The more I wrote, the more ideas I seemed to get, and that led to a nice positive dynamic.
The reaction to my work has surprised me, and I feel, by turns, gratified, elated, humbled. The experiences of the last few years taught me a lot about my own strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and I think that knowledge is going to help me produce better work.
Any plans to write a novel, or do you see yourself exclusively as a short fiction writer? If you do have novel plans, what can you tell us about them?
My first novel is an epic fantasy set in a world that my wife and I created together – we both have plans to do more with the world. Briefly, the setting is an archipelago with East Asia-inspired cultural elements. The technology is pre-steam silkpunk, and there are gods and magical creatures and other aspects of the fantastic. The plot is based on a reimagining of the founding of the Han Dynasty. I have a draft but a lot remains to be done. I’m both nervous and excited about how it will turn out.
You’ve had a story collection published – but only in Chinese. How did that come about? Any plans for an English-language collection?
Esther and Ken Liu (2010s)
Science Fiction World, the publisher of China’s largest speculative fiction magazine, has published a large number of my stories in translation the last few years. We thought it a good idea to put all of them together into a collection to reach new readers who didn’t get to read them in the magazine. I’ve been very pleased with how it turned out, and it seems to be well received by readers in China.
Right now, my focus is on finishing the novel. So I don’t have any plans for another collection (in any language).
Tell us about your work translating Chinese fiction into English. How and why did you get started doing that? Are there any authors our readers should particularly look for in translation?
It started largely as an accident. My friend Chen Qiufan (he also uses the English name Stanley Chan), one of China’s most prominent science fiction writers, asked me to take a look at an English translation of one of his stories for quality assurance. Since I’m a big fan of his work, I wanted to make sure that his unique voice came through in the translation. I started by making some suggestions and edits, but after a while, it became clear that I really needed to redo the translation from scratch. That story, ‘‘The Fish of Lijiang’’, was eventually published in Clarkesworld and earned Chen and me a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award in 2011.
I realized that although there is a lot of great science fiction and fantasy being written in Chinese, almost none of it is known in the West due to the lack of quality translations. Translating speculative fiction imposes unique challenges that are best handled by a translator who is also a writer. I was in a good position to perform this role, and so, for the last few years, I’ve been working at introducing more of China’s best speculative fiction writers to English readers. I’ve also branched out to do some literary translations, which I also find rewarding.
I just completed a translation of volume one of Liu Cixin’s SANTI trilogy (English title: The Three Body Problem). This is China’s most popular science fiction novel, and when the English edition comes out later this year, I hope readers here enjoy it.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about you or your work?
Dear readers, please buy my book when it comes out –
Ha, just kidding. To all the readers and writers who have encouraged me over the years and liked my work, thank you. I feel very lucky to get to tell the stories I want to tell and to find that they resonate with others. A writer really can’t ask for more.
–Ken Liu
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GARDNERSPACE: A SHORT FICTION COLUMN BY GARDNER DOZOIS
Asimov’s 2/13
Lightspeed 1/13, 2/13
Eclipse Online 2/13
F&SF 3-4/13
The February Asimov’s is a solidly entertaining issue, although there’s probably nothing here that’s going to end up on next year’s awards ballots. In ‘‘And Then Some’’, Matthew Hughes spins a fast-paced tale set in his Ten Thousand Worlds future – a busy interstellar milieu chockablock with con artists and thieves, admittedly inspired by the work of Jack Vance. It follows an operative who, in spite of beatings, druggings, and false imprisonment in a hard-labor camp, grimly pursues an investigation into a notorious fraudster’s claim to be able to create a device that will reach into other universes – a claim that, for once, dismayingly, may turn out to be true. The future where global warming has caused the sea-levels to rise and swamp the coastlines has become the go-to setting for most SF writers, but in ‘‘Outbound From Put-In-Bay’’, new writer M. Bennardo takes us instead to a future where a new Ice Age is slowly making the northern tier of the United States uninhabitable, for a suspenseful and well-crafted story about a woman forced to become a reluctant smuggler, with dire effects. Vylar Kaftan then shuttles us sideways in ‘‘The Weight of the Sunrise’’ to an alternate world where the Incan Empire survived the onslaught of Pizzaro and the Conquistadors, for a chewy story about a humble farmer who becomes embroiled in the deadly machinations of the highest levels of court society, and comes to hold the secret to preventing that deadliest of scourges, smallpox – a secret that ruthless people will do anything to possess.
In ‘‘The Golden Age of Story’’, Robert Reed shows us that it is possible to have a world with too much imagination in it. New writer David Erik Nelson gives us a rather silly use for time-travel, recruiting low-paid hand-labor, in ‘‘The New Guys Always Work Overtime’’. And new writer John Chu also tells a time-travel story of sorts: episodes are induced by a friendly alien for the reluctant protagonist’s own good, in a somewhat murky story called ‘‘Best of All Possible Worlds’’.
Much the same could be said about the January and February issues of Lightspeed: solid entertaining work, but nothing really exceptional. The best story in the January issue, the weaker of the two issues, is Matthew Kressel’s ‘‘The Sounds of Old Earth’’, an autumnal piece about the fading of one generation as a new generation rises, except that Earth itself is being lost with this old generation. The population of the planet is being moved to a New Earth, while the ecologically ruined old planet is scheduled to be sliced up for parts; the story deals with an old man reluctant to leave his home. I have some trouble with the idea that the entire population of the world could be moved elsewhere – although with the supertechnology this society possesses, being able to slice planets up like apples, who knows? – but the story is nicely felt and nicely characterized, and the frog pond that the old man has nurtured for decades and is reluctant to abandon to its fate is nicely symbolic of all the things about the Old Earth that are being callously lost in the process. Jonathan Olfert’s ‘‘Lifeline’’ is a near-mainstream story about the danger a Have faces when mingling with Have-Nots that could just as well be taking place in a bad neighborhood in present-day Dakar (or in any of a thousand other places around the world). It’s only made SF by the background detail of the destiny-predicting Lifeline system which sends the rich guy questing into the slums in the first place, which is sketchily explained and not well-integrated with the rest of the story. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s fantasy ‘‘Purity Test’’, is, as is usual with Rusch, competent and entertaining, although the stereotypical unicorn that shows up at the end is a bit disappointing. A.C. Wise’s ‘‘With Tales in Their Teeth, from the Mountain They Came’’ is a (sort of) retake of Fahrenheit 451, well-crafted with a psychologically complex protagonist, but the method of preserving books threatened with destruction by war, tattooing them on their bodies, is silly and probably leaves them even more vulnerable, something that works better symbolically than it would in reality. There are also reprint stories by Judith Berman, Daniel Abraham, Theodora Goss, Cherie Priest, and Jeffrey Ford.
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The February Lightspeed features another strong story by M. Bennardo, ‘‘The Herons of Mer de l’Quest’’, told as a series of journal entries by a frontiersman lost in the wilderness of unexplored North America in the 18th century who encounters and ultimately battles a race of strange and sinister heron-like beings. It’s good fun.
Also good fun is Carrie Vaughn’s steampunk story ‘‘Harry and Marlowe Escape the Mechanical Siege of Paris’’, an Origin Story (to use comic book terminology) of the odd team of Harry and Marlowe (one a swashbuckling aviator, one the Princess of Wales), whose subsequent adventures have been featured in Lightspeed before, and who are shown meeting here for the first time as they scramble to escape an invasion of Paris by killer robots reverse-engineered from alien technology found in a crashed spaceship. C.C. Finlay tells a fast-paced tale of an agent on the run, whose consciousness leaps uncontrollably from body to body, in ‘‘The Infill Trait’’. And Genevieve Valentine tells a tricky slipstreamish version (or versions) of ‘‘The Little Mermaid’’ in ‘‘Abyssus Abyssum Invocat’’. There are also reprint stories by Robert Reed, Mary Soon Lee, John Crowley, and Marly Youmans.
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The February issue of Eclipse Online
features two good stories. The better is ‘‘On the Arrival of the Paddle-Steamer on the Docks of V – ’’ by Peter M. Ball, a chilly updating of the theme of being abducted to Fairyland, set in a modern-day world where regular visitations by the Fairies are not only an accepted part of life, but even used as a tourist attraction. Ball’s Fairies are especially cold and ruthless, not at all nice creatures, and the story ends well for nobody, especially its bitter and hapless protagonist, who sees everything playing out in advance, but can do nothing to stop it or alter his own fate. The other February story, ‘‘Sanctuary’’, an all-too-rare appearance by Susan Palwick, takes us to a future where some kind of Rapture has taken place, leaving those not chosen struggling to survive in the ruins of society – similar to the scenario of the Left Behind books, except that Palwick’s Post-Rapture world is more surreal, where mewling, speechless fallen angels flutter around, crashing into things.
The survivors have developed strange abilities, and reality is fluid and mutable if not continuously watched, with nails turning into caterpillars, radishes into rocks, apples into marbles, and objects tossed in the air as likely to fall up as down. It’s a gripping story, but the only problem with it is that it doesn’t explain what in the world has happened, or why, or answer the question raised in the text, of what criteria was used by Whomever to decide who got Raptured and who didn’t, since conventional notions of good or evil don’t seem to have had anything to do with it. Maybe this is the start of a series or part of a larger work, and All will be explained there.
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The strongest story in the March/April F&SF is Albert E. Cowdrey’s ‘‘The Assassin’’. This is Cowdrey in his grim mode, as opposed to his more common comic mode, and few writers can be grimmer than Cowdrey is when he sets himself to be so – the story tells the (yes, grim) life journey of a naïve, idealistic, would-be assassin, who, after an attempt on a despotic leader, is captured and thrown into a slave-labor camp even more harrowing than the one in Matthew Hughes’s ‘‘And Then Some’’, and whom, after suffering years of Dickensian hardship, is brought round by an ironic twist of fate to take another shot at the same target. It’s all quite compelling, and the only minor quibble I have with it is that a random selection of inhabitants of Hilo, relocated to another island after a tsunami destroys their city, is not going to produce Cowdrey’s idyllic group of South Sea Islanders, well adapted to a primitive lifestyle, but rather a bewildered assortment of modern-day Americans struggling to deal with a life without cellphones, air conditioning, and pizza. Naomi Kritzer’s ‘‘Solidarity’’, a YA piece about a young girl struggling to survive in a corrupt Libertarian society after being disowned by her powerful and corrupt father, is similarly entertaining, although each story in this sequence becomes harder to fully appreciate without having read the earlier stories, and it’s become clear that this is actually a de facto novel serialization. Sean McMullen’s ‘‘The Lost Faces’’ is a supernatural revenge drama set in Ancient Rome – absorbing, except for the fact that the ifryt is so all-powerful that there’s little suspense about whether or not she’ll succeed (and the fact that the Roman Empire, far from being doomed, lasted for centuries after the reign of Caligula). Deborah J. Ross’s ‘‘Among Friends’’ is another historical piece, focusing on a Quaker farmer who is part of the Underground Railroad in an alternate world where everything seems much the same as in our timeline, except that sophisticated, sentient automatons exist; this kept reminding me, pleasantly, of Friendly Persuasion, although the analogy between slaves seeking freedom and automatons seeking to become self-determining is a little too one-to-one, and I could have done without the portentous historical cameo at the end.
Locus, April 2013 Page 7