The Awful Truth About Forgetting

L. Jagi Lamplighter has done it again: the fourth of the Rachel Griffin books is out, as of yesterday. This is a delightful series, based on a storyline devised by Mark Whipple, about a girl whose memory is supposedly perfect—she forgets nothing, and can bring to her mind anything she’s ever seen and replay it like a recording, even slowing it down as needed. This quirk, even more than the fact that she’s British nobility or that she’s a magic user at a school for sorcery, drives the plot. What brings it into high relief is that she lives in a world much like our own a few years in the future, but suffering from a strange sort of amnesia: no one (Rachel included) remembers anything about the great monotheistic religions of the world. (The polytheistic ones are still going strong, however.) Perhaps it’s a parallel world where the monotheistic religions were never invented; that would almost make sense, except there are certain details that don’t fit...

The explanation for the mystery is still elusive, but readers do get some more hints in THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT FORGETTING. I had the privilege to read a draft of it awhile back. As I recall, besides dealing with danger and intrigue, Rachel has some more usual schoolgirl fun and anxieties in this book: but lacking Rachel’s perfect memory I’m going to read it again this winter. The cover picture is of a particularly gorgeous and magical scene.

There are also five black and white illustrations in the book, drawn by John C. Wright himself! They ought to be in the table of contents too. If you want to turn to them, I found them in chapters 2, 5, 12, 22, and 37, either the beginning or end of each of these chapters. They also appear in this terrific trailer by Ben Zwycky (music by Gilbert and Sullivan, can’t go wrong!).

Another good installment in Rachel’s story. I hope we don’t have so long to wait for book five!

Pulpy Titles as Starting Points

I've always wanted to write science fiction and fantasy, but only recently had my first success at conceiving of a real story with plot and characters and everything, finishing it, and getting it accepted in an anthology. The story is "Kings of the Corona" and you can (and should!) read it in the anthology TALES OF THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, edited by Anthony Marchetta. A friend who doesn't use Kindle bought the print edition and showed it to me, and it's very handsome. I was struck by what an excellent gift it would make to some book-lover for Christmas or any other holiday of your choice.

Okay, enough promotion for today. I'm currently working on several writing projects. One is a short story with a working title "The Stowaways" (I hope to rename it eventually) whose first draft I've finished. I'm taking my mind off of that for awhile so I can come back to review and revise it later with a fresh mind: based on how my work went on "Kings of the Corona", it seems to me that a lot of the magic comes in the revising and polishing stage. Meanwhile, I'm also about ready to start manuscript work on a story for Superversive Press's Luna anthology, and I have a pretty long line of other ideas I'm anxious to get cracking on after that.

Then there's this concept from Brad Walker on the Superversive website, of writing serialized fiction on one's blog. I've actually been considering that for awhile, and I'd like to do that too: I hope it would spur me to increase the regularity of both my blogging and my writing.

Where do ideas for good, pulpy SFF stories come from? There's lots of advice out there. One idea is to start with a title and make up a story for it. I decided to experiment with that, and loaded a database with a vocabulary taken from titles of Doc Savage stories, with a few I added myself that I thought had a similar flavor, and set up a routine to combine these at random (though with a few rules) and randomly interspersed with numbers and "of" and "of the". Then I let it crank out some titles.

Most of them were just nonsense, but I kept track of some that seemed interesting:

• The Swords of Saturn
• The Undersea Manhunt
• The Six Magic Moons
• The Poison War
• The Deadly Shadow
• The Mysterious Dimension
• The Two Fantastic Quests
• The Sky Tournaments
• The Disaster Comet
• The Child of Europa
• The Fearsome Labyrinth
• The Future Eagle
• The Crystal Dragon
• The Goblin Star
• The Green Portal
• The Caverns of Io
• The Avenging Pirates
• The Meteors of the Sargasso
• The Midas Ogre
• The Cloud Wizards
• The Fiery Castle
• The Encrypted Arenas
• The Four Suns of Mercury
• The Ocean Ambassadors

There are a lot here that seem suggestive enough that I'd pick them off the stand and thumb through them. "The Four Suns of Mercury"--what's that about? Does some evildoer create a space warp and swipe the whole planet out of the solar system to a new sun, where our heroes give chase and force him to flee to yet another sun, and another? Or could there be miniature artificial suns created to orbit the planet--and for what purpose? Perhaps some extra suns are INSIDE the (surprisingly hollow) planet of Mercury?

Or "The Undersea Manhunt": your fugitive flees in a submarine, in the dark and still mostly-unsettled three-quarters of the globe in the near future. How does the hero catch up with him? What's "The Goblin Star"? Perhaps a tiny white dwarf that's been approaching Sol without our noticing for centuries, and due to pass by shortly--but will the brutish inhabitants of its orbiting planet be content to pass along with it? How the heck can "The Encrypted Arenas" be a thing? Perhaps they're virtual? What's the point of encrypting them? Is something going on in them that the participants need to remain secret?

My evaluation: this is not a bad way to stimulate story ideas. As I say, I already have a longish list of "to-be-worked-ons", but please feel free to take on anything here that strikes your fancy. Maybe leave a comment if you do so I know the title has been done, when I look back on this years later.

Review: Paragons: An Anthology of Superheroes

Russell Newquist of Silver Empire was so good as to send me a review copy of Paragons: An Anthology of Superheroes which I've been enjoying very much this past week. Thirteen tales of original superheroes make up the collection, exploring the theme of heroic adventures with fantastic powers.

There’s a wide variety of length and tone here. Steve Beaulieu’s “Medusa” is a good choice to introduce the anthology, being about a 1000-word short look at a superheroine’s isolation, followed by what I think must be the longest one in the collection, Kai Wai Cheah’s “Nightstick”, an intricate novella of a dark superhero fighting to protect his city in a near-future where many people, both good guys and bad, had suddenly acquired extraordinary powers.

Morgon Newquist, who also edited the book, wrote “Blackout”, which delves into the characters of two heroes: the optimistic and candid Jameson Hirsch, and his more brooding and tormented friend, Michael Turner, in an introduction that for me harkened back to G. K. Chesterton’s stories of Father Brown and his frenemy, Flambeau. The subtitle is “A Serenity City Story,” which makes me hope to see much more of their interactions with each other—and the still-mysterious Rhiannon Argall, for whose love they are rivals.

Jon Mollison’s knack for stories of high adventure with heroes motivated by deep family love comes through again in “Like Father”. Dawn Witzke’s “Deadly Calm Returns” takes a lighter look at a superhero’s family life and had the people in the donut shop where I read it wondering, I’m sure, why that fellow kept bursting into laughter. Declan Finn’s “Weather Witch” has his trademark well-told fantasy action. It's one of the few "origin stories" in this collection, and one of the few not set in a city.

If "Nightstick" had a darkness to it that reminded me of Batman, "Someone is Aiming for You" by J. D. Cowan made me think of The Shadow (though I blush to admit I still only know that series through the Alec Baldwin movie): a dark drama between good and evil metaphysical forces. The final story in the book, "Stalina" by Sam Kepfield, tells of a Khruschev-era idealistic Russian superwoman, devoted to Truth, Justice, and the Soviet Way...like many of the stories here that seem to cry out for sequels, "Stalina" made me want to read more about her.

A lot of these stories could be turned into series, and I hope at least some of them will be. I found Paragons to be a terrific read, and I'll be looking for more.