IN THIS ISSUE
October 2014
Issue 644 • Vol. 73 • No. 4
47th Year of Publication • 30-Time Hugo Winner
Cover and Interview Designs by Francesca Myman
Zombie Campbell Nominees and Accepters (l to r): Ramez Naam, Ann Leckie (for Benjanum Sriduangkaew), Julia Rios (for Sofia Samatar), Max Gladstone, Wesley Chu. See page 33 for our Loncon 3 report.
Interviews
Paul Park: Metafictional Demons
Kameron Hurley: Horror & Glory
Graham Joyce (1954-2014)
Appreciations by Peter Crowther, Mark Morris, Jo Fletcher, Sarah Pinborough, Simon Spanton, and Joe Hill
Loncon 3
Loncon 3 • Loncon 3 WSFS Business Meeting • Complete 2014 Hugo Voting • Complete 1939 Retro Hugo Voting
Main Stories
2014 Chesley Awards Winners • 2014 British Fantasy Awards Winners • Eaton Receives $3.5 Million Gift • Amazon News • Canadian SF/F Hall of Fame
People and Publishing
Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Ed Bryant, Ursula K. LeGuin, Andre Norton, Robert A. Heinlein, Charlaine Harris, Lou Anders, Arthur C. Clarke, and many others
The Data File
Young People Read More • Audiobook Sales Up • Where Books Are Bought • Forbes’s Top-Earning Authors • Future Library • E-Books in the Bathtub • B&N News • Awards News • Publishing News • World Conventions News • Announcements • Legal News • Book News • Financial News • International Rights • Other Rights
Special Features
Commentary: Kameron Hurley: The Status Quo Is Not a Neutral Position: Fiction and Politics
Locus Looks at Books
Gardnerspace: A Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois
Asimov’s 9/14; Interzone 7-8/14; Tor.com 7/20/14; Tor.com 7/29/14; Twelve Tomorrows, Bruce Sterling, ed.
Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton
Fearsome Magics, Jonathan Strahan, ed.; Upgraded, Neil Clarke, ed.; Tor.com 8/14; F&SF 9-10/14; Twelve Tomorrows, Bruce Sterling, ed.; Subterranean Summer ’14.
Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe
Bathing the Lion, Jonathan Carroll; Lock In, John Scalzi; The Doubt Factory, Paolo Bacigalupi; Field of Fantasies, Rick Wilber, ed.
Reviews by Faren Miller
The Moon King, Neil Williamson; Son of the Morning, Mark Alder; The Hawley Book of the Dead, Chrysler Szarlan.
Reviews by Russell Letson
The Peripheral, Willliam Gibson; Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!, Harry Harrison.
Reviews by Adrienne Martini
Lock In, John Scalzi; Kaleidoscope, Alisa Krasnostein & Julia Rios, eds.; The Revolutions, Felix Gilman; All Those Vanished Engines, Paul Park.
Reviews by Carolyn Cushman
The Seat of Magic, J. Kathleen Cheney; The Lost, Sarah Beth Durst; Otherbound, Corinne Duyvis; The Witch With No Name, Kim Harrison; The Winter Long, Seanan McGuire; Blood for the Sun, Errick A. Nunnally; Revenant, Kat Richardson; Wood Sprites, Wen Spencer.
Reviews by Tim Pratt
One-Eyed Jack, Elizabeth Hand.
Audiobook Reviews by Amy Goldschlager
Skin Game, Jim Butcher; The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman; The String Diaries, Stephen Lloyd Jones; Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link; Rogues, George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds.; Heirs of Grace, Tim Pratt.
Listings
Magazines Received: August • Books Received: August • British Books Received: July • Bestsellers
New and Notable
Terry Bisson: This Month in History
Other Obituaries
Other Obituaries: Kirby McCauley • Appreciation by George R.R. Martin
Editorial Matters
Graham Joyce • Loncon 3 • Locus Auction • This Issue/Next Issue
Corrections
Photo List and Ad List
Masthead
Return to In This Issue listing.
Paul Claiborne Park was born October 1, 1954 in North Adams MA. He attended Hampshire College in Amherst and worked in New York at various jobs – aide to city council members, construction worker, doorman, manager of a health club, and at an ad agency – while he worked on writing fiction.
He then spent two years traveling, mostly in India, Indonesia, and the South Seas, finishing first novel Soldiers of Paradise (1987), a Clarke Award finalist and first in his Starbridge Chronicles, which also includes Sugar Rain (1991) and The Cult of Loving Kindness (1991). Tiptree and Nebula Award finalist Coelestis (as Celestis in the US) appeared in 1993, followed by The Gospel of Corax (1996) and Three Marys (2003). His White Tyger fantasy series began with World Fantasy Award finalist A Princess of Roumania (2005) and continued with The Tourmaline (2006), The White Tyger (2007), and The Hidden World (2008). Sturgeon and Nebula Award-nominated novella ‘‘Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance’’ (2010) became part of All Those Vanished Engines (2014), a metafictional SF novel made of three linked novellas. Under the name Paulina Claiborne he wrote Dungeons & Dragons novel The Rose of Sarifal (2012); Claiborne also appears as a character in All Those Vanished Engines.
Other notable stories include World Fantasy and Sturgeon Award finalist ‘‘Get a Grip’’ (1997), British SF Award nominee ‘‘If Lions Could Speak’’ (2002), World Fantasy Award finalist ‘‘The Persistence of Memory, or This Space for Sale’’ (2009), and Shirley Jackson Award nominee ‘‘The Statue in the Garden’’ (2013). Some of his short fiction is collected in If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories (2002).
Park lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Deborah Brothers, married 1994; they have two children. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College.
•
‘‘My parents were academics. My father was a physicist, and my mother taught English. For a long time I tried to avoid anything that had to do with academia, certainly anything that had to do with English or science. It’s a little perplexing to me to find that I’ve gotten into academia through the back door, and am in fact teaching at the same institution where they taught for a long time, Williams College in northwestern Massachusetts. My mother believed in a strong foundation in fantasy for young children, all the way through to when people are teenagers. She gave me books that meant a lot to her when she was a child, like The Worm Ouroboros and books by C.S. Lewis and E. Nesbit, but she also bought me books and encouraged anything that had to do with fantastic literature.
‘‘Because of her I have much more of a fantasy background than a science fiction background. When I started writing Soldiers of Paradise, I knew it wasn’t fantasy, because I knew what fantasy was. But it was very unclear to me what I was actually writing. It wasn’t until I finished it that I found literary models and thought, ‘If Jack Vance can publish this stuff, if The Shadow of the Torturer gets published, maybe there’s a chance for me.’ Once I finished Soldiers of Paradise, I had a kind of epiphany in a national park in New Zealand. I found an abandoned copy of The Fifth Head of Cerberus. I picked it up in a little cabin by the beach, and thought, ‘This is great, this is the kind of thing in the universe of what I’m trying to do.’ It was a very encouraging moment.
‘‘A lot of things happen in my fiction through a process of accumulation rather than design. For example, I had loose characters wandering around in my stories and I hadn’t named them yet, so I gave them the name Paul Park as a placeholder. For me, naming characters is almost the most artificial thing you do in fiction. You have a character and you think, ‘Is this Joe Doakes? Is this Francesco Bellesandro? Who is this?’ At a certain point I just called a lot of them Paul Park. I didn’t think much about it. Maybe that contradicts the possibility that this is a postmodern ploy. Stupid me! When I started to pub
lish those stories it was natural for people to make some connection between the character and the author because we had the same name. It was something that happened by accident and turned into a pattern. As soon as there was a critical mass of those ‘Paul Park’ stories I found a way of making it into a meta text, creating a collection of stories about a mythical character who has the same name as myself. I had this character Paul Park, and for a long time his life was not at all like mine. There was some convergence, especially in the character’s written work, but the details of the life itself were very different.
‘‘From there, I got interested in the idea that you could see in somebody’s fiction, even in genre fiction or extremely mannered fiction, traces of that person’s actual life and experience. That someone could imagine they could see traces of my actual life and experience in my fiction. I found it interesting to invent another life, another experience that you could see in the same way, that you could see shadows of in the same text.
‘‘Some readers have already challenged the idea that All Those Vanished Engines is a science fiction novel, but I disagree. It’s not like every other Paul Park novel ever written, if that is even a sensible thing to say, but even so, certain elements are clearly genre elements. There are parts of it that are alternate history, parts set in the future, parts that partake of a diminished sense of the future that we’re familiar with through genre fiction. Even if, in some sense, those visions are qualified by the possibility that they’re made up, or they’re not real, or they’re constructs written by a character in the story, even so, they partake of the same tradition of science fiction. It’s more comfortable to read if you’re conversant with that tradition. I like the idea of it as a genre book. There should be a place in the genre that allows science fiction themes to express themselves in postmodern terms sometimes.
‘‘Nowadays, a lot of mainstream writers are writing fantasy. That’s partly because it’s the literature they knew as kids, and partly because (there’s some wishful thinking here) it’s where modern literature is going. When people talk about postmodernism, implicit in that is a rejection of the modernist emphasis on actual experience as it’s lived. That allows all kinds of possibilities for counterfactual ways of conceiving the world, which you can think of as an elaborate metaphor for interiority, or else you can think, ‘Well, this is just the landscape where this story takes place.’
‘‘Not everybody’s going to like my work. In a way, I sympathize with people who hate my work. I can imagine thinking, ‘Jesus, formally this is so complicated, can you just tell me the story? Irony is my least favorite thing. I want to stand in this story on my own two feet and feel the feelings, and not have to question my responses to the various situations.’ In some stories I write I try to provide that kind of experience – but not in All Those Vanished Engines. This story is intricately constructed, and part of that comes from the delicate balance of trying to integrate stories that are real into the fiction. Actual stories about things that happened with stories that are made up.
‘‘The kind of thing I’m writing started from a conversation with John Crowley, where I was telling him some extremely baroque story about my mother’s family from Virginia, that he refused to credit. I kept saying, ‘As far as I know it really happened like that.’ He said, ‘This is what you should be writing – this is what people will want to hear.’ I thought about that and said, ‘No, that’s not really true. There’s a difference between an actual family story and something that has the arc and feeling of fiction.’ All Those Vanished Engines is an attempt to take elements of my family stories and invent an artificial frame for them, where I can plug in certain sections where any reader will be able to say, ‘This is a true story. This section of the story is true. Now we’re in a section where it’s not true. Oh, here we are in a true part again.’ My guess is that different readers will have different judgments about what’s true and what’s false.
‘‘I was gratified by the Nebula Award nomination for ‘Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance’, which relied on the same technique, but also surprised. People said very unkind things about it online – that it was not a genre story, and that for stylistic reasons it belonged in some completely different category. Which I reject. While I have sympathy for the idea that there are themes, figures, and images that recur in the genre, I reject the idea that they are forms you can identify as true to the genre or false to the genre. I don’t like that feeling, although I understand that some readers associate genre writing with a certain specific type of formal structure. But I love stories that are simultaneously fantastical and not – Rachel Pollack used to write stories like that. It’s a wonderful tension.
‘‘Regardless, until the metafictional break in ‘Bracelets’, the first section in All Those Vanished Engines, it’s a fairly straightforward plot, the type where you might be able to predict what happens. Since the form later turns back on itself and there’s a certain betrayal in the subject matter, I thought I should start with something where a reader could say, ‘I can see it’s two intertwined stories, I can see how they resonate with each other, and I can predict what might happen in each one because I’ve read this kind of story before.’ If I started with something simple, that would be more effective when it changed later. It was a strategic structural decision. That whole section came from something my grandfather, a minor American surrealist painter, gave me when I was young, maybe 11: a copy of MC Escher’s print of two artists’ hands drawing each other. I had never seen anything like that, and I was astonished. He knew I was interested in writing and he said, ‘Maybe you can write something like that.’ That was 30 or 40 years ago. I always thought, ‘Would it be possible to write something that produced that same effect?’ ‘Bracelets’ is my attempt at that, but I also thought the story itself, where each strand of the story is narrated by a character in another strand, has to be quite simple in order for it to work.
‘‘Later, one of the devices I used is this mingling of actual and invented historical texts. For example, I used part of The Rose of Sarifal, the Dungeons & Dragons novel that I actually wrote under the pen name Paulina Claiborne, and interspersed it with a new, invented section, to reconcile it with its new purpose in the new novel. Or I used part of the actual transcript of my grandfather’s court martial for homosexuality during the First World War. And then there is a sermon that the Reverend Paul Park actually gave in the late 18th century. The first part of it, up until there’s an alien invasion, is real. These are all texts that exist from my family history. In each case, what I do is start with a real text, and at a certain point diverge from it, start to imitate it, and find a way to mix it with the ongoing narrative.
‘‘Another example is the way I mixed in an actual text I wrote for an art installation in the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, on the campus of an old mill building in North Adams. The heating system of the entire complex of maybe 20 buildings was all in this one building, which was open to the weather and contained a series of enormously evocative steam generators and condensers, now liberally encrusted with rust. Instead of tearing that all out and using it as gallery space, the museum said, ‘These are astonishingly beautiful machines in their own right – what can we do with them?’ They hired a guy named Stephen Vitiello, a well-known sound artist, to figure out a sound installation as you wandered through these machines. He suggested there be some kind of story to go with it. He said, ‘There’s a writer I really like who lives in this little town of yours. I’ll do this project if I can get Paul Park to write the text.’ One of the sound elements is the narrator telling the story, in this case a made-up story, of the genesis of this particular collection of beautiful engines and what they’re really for. The Sprague Electric Company, housed in the mill, was filled with actual secret projects, especially during the second world war, that were connected to the Manhattan Project.
‘‘The text of this installation forms the beginning of the second part of All Those Vanished Engines, the part
most firmly connected to the pressent, and to actual characters from my life. My parents and my sister make appearances as characters. I wrote it shortly before my father’s death and shortly after my mother’s death. As I was working on the exhibit I thought a lot about them. That central section is the one where it feels most interesting to explore this made-up character named ‘Paul Park,’ who is doing things I’ve actually done, writing things that are versions of what I’ve actually written, and has the same mother and father and autistic sister I have – and nevertheless doesn’t have much to do with me. The other details of his life differ – the person he’s married to is not the person I’m married to, his job is not the same as my job. Except for this kind of structure that surrounds him, the core of him is different from me.
‘‘My parents have passed away, so they’re not going to see this particular text. ‘Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance’ was published in F&SF in 2010, and my father wanted to read it. Like a coward I said, ‘Dad, your eyes are terrible. You can’t really read it in the magazine. Let me print you a copy.’ I made a redacted copy with all references to him taken out, and he very much enjoyed it. Once I had done that, it liberated me to use an altered version of the text in other different ways. Now, one of the things I do is I teach at Williams, and once I used the beginning of ‘Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance’, to play a kind of metafictional trick on my students. I give them the story and don’t tell them anything about who wrote it. It’s not until fairly late in the story that the narrator reveals himself as being named Paul Park. In the version I give them I’ve redacted it so he’s a professor at Williams College, and he’s teaching a class, and at a certain point they recognize themselves as students in this class. In the text itself I quote their writing assignments from earlier in the semester, especially ones I’ve read aloud as examples to the whole class, so that everyone will recognize what’s happening. They start thinking about the story as something very separate from them and gradually it becomes about them. The ending of the story is in the future, at the end of the class that they’re taking now, and predicts various terrible things that might happen among them.
Locus, October 2014 Page 1