by Tad Williams
I have no contracts at the moment. I’m in an interestingly comfortable place financially. I’ve finally got the retirement savings up to the point to where I don’t actually need another advance to live until I can finish the next book, though it gives me possibly more artistic freedom than I quite know what to do with. I’m having to figure out where I’m at now if I’m not rushing to get paid before the lights get turned off. That will be the next challenge, I guess. What is my next phase as a writer?
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:
John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed, is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Epic, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a four-time finalist for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. Forthcoming anthologies include The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (2013, Tor), Oz Reimagined (2013, 47North), Wastelands 2 (2013, Night Shade Books), and Robot Uprisings (2014, Doubleday). He is also the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.
David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.
Artist Gallery: Yannick De Smet (a/k/a Norke)
Artist Spotlight: Yannick De Smet (a/k/a Norke)
Galen Dara
Yannick De Smet (a/k/a Norke) is a Belgian illustrator and concept artist. You can find out more about him at Norke.be and at his deviantART page (http://norke.deviantart.com/).
How did you get your start as an artist and what was it like transitioning into a freelance career?
I’ve always wanted to be an artist and I spent a lot of time drawing and sketching as a kid. At the age of fourteen I went to an art school and learned a lot about the discipline. It takes a lot of effort to learn to draw with little effort. Fortunately, I started with some very good teachers who were able to pass on the love for sketching and painting. At eighteen, one of my teachers gave me the tip to buy a drawing tablet and learn to work with Photoshop. I created some little paintings at school and a classmate urged me to upload them to deviantART. Then I started to learn about other artists and tried to blend in.
Your digital paintings are beautiful and really reflect your initial training with traditional mediums. What was that transition like, from paint to pixels? Do you ever work traditionally nowadays? (Either for professional or personal projects?)
When I bought my first tablet (Graphire 4) I wasn’t a big fan. I kept on using the mouse as I didn’t like how it felt. My teacher told me to hang on, saying it’s something that needs time. It took me a few weeks to finally accept it before I used it on projects. By that time I was proficient in Photoshop, so the technical part was easy. Creating single layer paintings feels natural when you’re traditionally trained. Of course when the project asks for a multilayered way of working, it’s just a click of a button. I must admit that using the computer has almost replaced any traditional work. I just like the fast, nondestructive techniques. It’s not smelly, it doesn’t take ages to put up and doesn’t take a lot of space. Whenever I work traditionally, I’m building something like a maquette or a statue.
Your painting “Let Me Catch a Break Guys” is awesome on so many levels, especially after reading your tutorial on how you created it. I have a special place in my heart for a woman with a sword, and loved the preliminary sketches where you talked about wanting to create this real warrior, one with feelings, human limits, the exhaustion of battle. That really resonated with me. How did the idea for this piece come to you?
I fantasized about war and battle and a good story to paint. The idea was to paint a strong female fighter who knows her limitations, not the type who beats twenty well-trained men, then dusts off her shoulders and walks away—not the Hollywood type of hero. A warrior that has feelings and needs to rest; she could be sad about something while taking a break.
Where do you typically find your inspirations and motivations?
Watching movies is always a great start for new projects. Whenever I see a movie about dinosaurs, I want to paint some dinosaurs. After seeing Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, I want to paint massive sceneries. I’m not a gamer, but my girlfriend is. Watching her play games often gives me inspiration for painting as well.
You’re very involved in art education and art community building: creating tutorials and organizing art events. How did you get started doing that and what are your plans for the future?
It would be unfair to have learned so much from other artists and keep everything for myself. When I heard deviantART had a chat room area, I created my own chat room for helping other artists. By talking to them, I learned that most don’t want to learn how to paint a nose—they want to know how their favorite paintings are created. Therefore, I started to make walkthroughs of my paintings. At each step, I take a screenshot and attach that to the previous screenshot. This way people can see how a painting has grown. Whenever explanation is needed it can be easily provided. Apart from that, I wanted artists to meet each other. I started organizing meetings and workshops around the country. Sometimes we did workshops, such as nude model sketching, or an art exhibition with our members’ art. Often we went sketchcrawling: We would meet in a different city each time and start sketching whatever we saw. It has taught me a lot about other artists’ approach to capturing what they see. Each month I organized the Themed Art Challenges where we would give a theme and a one-hour time span to create their vision on that theme.
I loved your tip about flipping the canvas as a way of getting a fresh view and spotting trouble areas. What other things do you do when you hit a lull in a piece, or otherwise run into an artistic roadblock?
As a kid I used to look at the clouds and try to see all kinds of shapes. This could be used to start projects. A tip I got from Scott Robertson was to draw all kinds of different shapes on pieces of paper, scan those in and import them into one document in Photoshop. Playing with the layers, it’s possible to create random shapes. At one point you might see a huge mountain, at other moments you could see a couple walking in the streets. I sometimes grab random photos from the internet and skew, rotate, cut and paste until I start to see a composition that might work. Another tip might be to start scribbling until you see something you might want to expand.
As a freelance illustrator, what does a normal workday look like for you? What are you doing when you are not working on an art piece? (Do you have any non-art related hobbies?)
I love playing basketball and badminton, but apart from those I don’t have any non-art related hobbies. I love goofing around with Sketch-Up. I constantly measure things up and try to recreate them in 3D. Is watching a good movie considered a hobby?
What are some “level-up” phases you can point to in your education/career: things, events, etc. that pushed you to a better (or different) working method?
I could say the Themed Art Challenges (where you take a theme and a one-hour time span to create a vision on that theme) has pushed me to my limits. What I learned from that is the importance of having deadlines. Whenever you’re working on a project, try to use deadlines t
o push a rush of creativity. It’s not easy to do so, but it will help you in the future. Projects like concept art or backgrounds for games often have a tight deadline and might push you to finish them in a very short time span.
Who are some of the artists that have inspired you?
I’ve always had a weak spot for James Gurney. The way he masters light and shadow is amazing. Often I browse through his work if I need some inspiration. Old masters like Bouguereau and Raphael often inspired me to push details. On the digital level, I like the work of Stanley Lau, Marko Djurdjević, and Yanick Dusseault, three artists I’ve been following since my early years.
What are you working on right now? Anything you are particularly hoping to work on next?
I’m working on a series of concept paintings for a game. I’m also trying to create a printed artbook and building my own scaled Tardis (Doctor Who fans should understand!).
Galen Dara likes to sit in the dark with her sketchbook, but sometimes she emerges to illustrate for books and magazines, dabble in comics, and hatch wild collaborations with friends and associates. Galen has done art for Edge Publishing, Dagan Books, Apex, Scapezine, Tales to Terrify, Peculiar Pages, Sunstone, and The Lovecraft eZine. She is on staff of BookLifeNow, blogs for Inkpunks.com, and writes the Art Nerd column at Functional Nerds. When Galen is not online you can find her on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, climbing mountains, or hanging out with a loving assortment of human and animal companions. Follow her on Twitter @galendara.
Hat Tip to the Masters: Homage in Science Fiction
Jamie Todd Rubin
My first “ah-ha” moment reading science fiction occurred while engrossed in Gregory Benford’s magnificent novel, Timescape. About two-thirds through the book, I encountered the following passage:
Gordon headed for the physics building, perspiring from the effort of carrying his big brown suitcase. Among a knot of students he thought he saw a familiar face.
“David! Hey David!” he called. But the man turned away quickly and walked in the opposite direction. Gordon shrugged. Maybe Selig didn’t want to see an old classmate; he had always been an odd bird.
It seemed to me there could be no mistake. Benford was making a cryptic but deliberate reference to the main character in Robert Silverberg’s remarkable novel, Dying Inside. I nearly burst with glee at the connection. But I was still an uncertain reader in the genre and perhaps I was simply reading too much into the passage. There was only one way to find out: I asked Dr. Benford. He confirmed that it was indeed an homage to Silverberg.
Since then I’ve delighted in the depth and breadth of homage in science fiction literature. It comes in many guises: Pastiche, oblique or recursive reference, parody, and intertextuality are just a few of its masks. It is also nothing new in science fiction and it propagates like a wave through the decades.
It is well known, for instance, that Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series paid tribute to Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In the years since, plenty of writers have paid homage to Asimov’s work in some form or another. Randall Garrett was probably among the earliest, with his story “No Connection” (Astounding, 6/58), an almost identical title to Asimov’s “No Connections” (Astounding, 6/48). Adam-Troy Castro paid homage to Asimov’s robot stories with his wonderful lead story in the debut issue of Science Fiction Age, “The Last Robot” (11/92). More recently still, Cory Doctorow has written stories like “I, Robot” and “I, Row-Boat” which carry this particular thread into the present century.
There is a delicacy and art to homage. It is not something an author necessarily semaphores to readers. The beauty of an homage rests in its subtly, as when a story is working on multiple levels: the story itself, and the tribute it pays to the past. A reader unfamiliar with the work being so honored can still enjoy the story. The added bonus is for those who recognize what the author is doing. Ray Bradbury did this with his classic collection of interrelated stories, The Martian Chronicles, those stories being a science fictional pastiche of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
I think of these interrelationships between stories as a web. Each strand in the web represents a relationship between stories. Some of those strands are homages. As in any web, there will be hubs around into which many strands convene. And indeed, within science fiction and fantasy, such hubs exist. Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, particularly in their “Lewis Padgett” guise, seem to be at the center of one such hub. William Tenn’s (Phillip Klass) “Child’s Play” (Astounding, 3/47) is the story of a man who uses a machine intended as a toy for children of the future, clearly a nod in the direction of Padgett’s stories like “Mimsy Were the Borogroves” (Astounding, 2/43). Robert Silverberg’s “The Iron Chancellor” (Galaxy, 5/58) was another pastiche of Padgett.
J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is another hub on that web. Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney’s 1969 novel Bored of the Rings was an early parody of Tolkien. In the 1980s, Stephen King’s The Stand also paid homage to Tolkien, an attempt at Tolkien’s grandeur in an American setting. More recently, Pat Murphy in her Max Merriwell guise has produced the science fictional There and Back Again.
Unlike some authors, King admitted his homage to Tolkien, and indeed, some authors do make this clear to their audiences. Harlan Ellison’s “Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World” (Dangerous Visions, 10/67) was not only an homage, but a direct sequel to Robert Bloch’s “A Toy For Juliette” (Dangerous Visions, 10/67). Isaac Asimov reported that his “Azazel” stories of the 1980s were his attempts at homage to a favorite author of his, P. G. Wodehouse. But I think homage is most effective when done subtly, when it becomes an added bonus for the careful reader, the chewy center within layers of story.
The desire to tip our cap to stories of the past continues undiminished today. Some are obvious, like John Scalzi’s hilarious homage to Star Trek, Redshirts. Others are more subtle, like Barry N. Malzberg and Robert Walton’s “The Man Who Murdered Mozart” (F&SF, 3-4/12). We have even experienced it recently in the pages of Lightspeed, with Jake Kerr’s “The Old Equations” (7/11) and Tobias Buckell’s “A Game of Rats and Dragon” (11/12).
Homage, in all of its forms, seems to me to be a sign of respect. Even in parody, an author is giving a wink and nod of acknowledgement to a work that has endured. Whatever form that nod takes, it adds another thread to the intricate web of interrelationships and provides a careful reader with Easter eggs that produce those wonderful “ah-ha” moments.
Author’s Note: I’d like to thank Barry N. Malzberg, Paul Weimer, and Mark Stackpole for their valued input and contributions to this article.
Jamie Todd Rubin is a science fiction writer and blogger with stories appearing in Analog, InterGalactic Medicine Show, Apex Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and 40K Books. He writes the “Wayward Time Traveler” column on science fiction for SF Signal, and occasionally appears on the SF Signal podcast. Jamie also writes book review and interview columns for InterGalactic Medicine Show. His interest in the history of science fiction led him to begin “Vacation in the Golden Age,” a series of biweekly posts reviewing each issue of Astounding Science Fiction from July 1939 through December 1950. He is the Evernote Ambassador for paperless lifestyle, writing frequently about going paperless. Jamie lives in Falls Church, Virginia with his wife and two children. Find him on Twitter at @jamietr.
The Infill Trait
C.C. Finlay
Every time I fall asleep I wake up in a different body.
Every time I wake up I know one thing and one thing only. Everything that follows starts from that one thing, the only thing that matters, and what matters is who we are and who we want to be, because no one else can ever be the we for me.
I snap awake and know one thing.
I am a hero I am a terrorist.
A wrinkled old hand shakes my wrist again. This is what woke me this time, in this new body, this odd body, and because I am disoriented, I slap the hand away, try to jump
to my feet to run, but, because it is a new body, a body unfamiliar, I trip and fall.
I hit the carpet, with one arm fortunately flopped under my face. My drool-slicked cheek comes to rest on my wrist. A stuffed toy—a threadbare dog—spills from my fingers. My stomach wants to spill on the floor beside it.
The same wrinkled hand reaches for me again. My head rolls sideways, so I can look up the arm’s bony brown length. At the other end is an old Indian woman in an orange sari, with gray hair braided down to her waist. Worry furrows her brow and a tiny fear is planted in her eyes. She speaks a language I don’t understand.
“I am a hero I am a terrorist,” I whisper.
It’s the one and only thing I know. Everything that follows starts with that one piece of knowledge. Even so, I have enough sense to mumble the final word. Because I’ve been here before, must have been here immediately before, in the body before. So I have an awareness, immediately aware of the something-in-the-airness.
Voices buzz in half a dozen languages. Announcements in English and Spanish sound through an intercom. Feet rush past, fleeing suitcases on tiny wheels down long corridors. Something roars.
The airport.
Right. Definitely not the place to share that I am a hero I am a terrorist. Too many civilians here, but no one clear to know, not even security. Our only real security will come from the IPAE protocol: infiltrate, penetrate, assassinate, extricate.
So I can’t let them find out I have the infill trait.
Only five to ten seconds have passed. I slap my face, pinch my cheek with rough uneven fingernails—who is this person who chews their fingernails?—trying to shift from inert to alert, sickly to quickly, to remember where I am, who I was.