God, hes left as on aur oun.
Where were we.
Before we were so desultorily interrupted? Sorry to have left That Name pinned to the top of the pier for so long; let’s maybe look at it as sort of a metaphor for the bizarrely outsized impact his death and his works have had, even as his life and his work haven’t managed to break into the popular consciousness enough to even bother being forgotten. —I’ve been writing, of course I’ve been writing, writing the epic, and this was the year the third season got launched, which was a bit of work, but when that work is not going well, which it wasn’t, (which it isn’t, also, at the moment), then it tends to glower: the Scrivener window on that monitor over there, still waiting for its daily quota to be filled, it feels like an indulgence, typing up something else for somewhere else. (I really would rather it glowered when I’m off Blueskying, instead.)
—Let’s see, let’s see: I finally got to read the Elemental Logic books this year, which I adored: queerly grounded epickesque fantasy with the courage of its convictions to haul the story down some rather unexpected paths, and the way the magic is embodied in how the characters think is, well, magical. I’m late to this party, as I usually am, but it’s a good party, and there really ought to be more people here.
Then I went and read a Sudden Wild Magic, because Wm Henry Morris had to go and mention it on the aforementioned Bluesky: a really odd book, for one that’s so mildly, insistently normal: airy whimsy played po-faced for life-or-death stakes, and even the nice characters can be rather offhandedly brutally ruthless; I mentioned elsewere it felt like the first draft of the Bene Gesserit, but it also has the distinct air of a roman à clef of a writers’ group or circle or community, rather like How Much for Just the Planet.
Kelly Link’s Book of Love was—I mean, I didn’t not like it, there were beautiful sentences and loads of gorgeous moments but—altogether, it was somewhat ramshackle? Which is not the most perspicacious thing to say about the first novel written by an acknowledged master of the short story, I suppose, but there it is: Magic for Beginners, at less than a tenth the size, felt far larger and more epic.
I’m currently in the middle of Cecilia Holland’s only SF novel, Floating Worlds, which I could’ve sworn I’d read before, ages ago, but no, no; I think I’d started it, once or twice, but must not have gotten all that far, and somehow, dreamlike, it had merged with the memory of having read the Solarians in Venezuela at a very young age to make up the completed shape of a book on a shelf in the memory palace. —The Holland is much better than the Spinrad, though it’s dicey as hell on a couple of fronts; it hasn’t wrong-footed yet, and Paula Mendoza is up there on the list of favorite characters, so.
Next, I’ll probably be gearing up for a re-read of Eddison’s Zimiamvia books. Sean Guynes, as part of his ongoing essays on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy books, went and said some things about Zimiamvia that, I mean, it’s not that I think he’s wrong, or disagree on any pointed specific, but nonetheless my back was got up a bit: these are not dull and—well, all right, yes, there are patches that are rough going, but—but! these are not lifeless books. —There’s a lot of Eddison in the epic, and it’s specifically Zimiamvian Eddison: the Worm Ouroboros is great, and Lord Gro is also up there on the list of favorite characters, but I bounce off that book’s Boys Own Demon Lord protagonists, who never manage to catch me the way that Barganax and Lessingham have done, and Horius Parry, Fiorinda, yes, Antiope, even Anthea and Campaspe—toxic yuri avant le lettre. Among the prim and proper strait-laced taproots of what it is we hereabouts and now call “fantasy” (I mean, there they are, kicking off Lin Carter’s collection of Adult Fantasy books for Ballantine), these books are unexpectedly horny (but without the faux-courtly lookit-this-pinup say-no-more energy of works such as, say, Lin Carter’s), with an unexpected but undeniable thrill of queerness running through them, or at least to be read into them. That’s (some of) what electrified me, these glimpses, in passing; I want to go back to them with a more consciously discerning eye, to see how much of this possible there there really is in there, or might be. So I’m searching out essays, stashing bookmarks, the magic of interlibrary loan has secured me a copy of Anna Vaninskaya’s Fantasies of Time and Death, which on its own will have made this endeavor worthwhile, I think. Last time through a couple of years ago I read the OG Ballantine editions; this time I’ll be going back to the Dell omnibus from 1992, buttressed by the scholarly armature assembled by Paul Edward Thomas. —So there’s that, I guess, to look forward to.
Otherwise? I mean, what is there to say, in these dregs of an anno truly horribilis? The country’s on the verge of a sestercentennial no one seems to want to notice, much less celebrate, embarrassed as we all are, perhaps, at being the only country in the history of the world to have twice elected Donald John Trump to the presidency. I’m about to step over a threshold that will have me slouching toward a fifty-eighth birthday in the rubble of destructions already wrought that we can’t yet perceive. I have a day-job that is vital and important with co-workers I admire and adore at the top of a profession I accidentally fell into twenty years ago, and I do not make enough money to support the responsibilities in my hands. I write the work I want to write on terms I’ve set myself for an audience of dozens. I’m a fat and balding greybeard, I drink too much, I’m sure I’d be smoking the occasional cigarette again, if honey-tipped kreteks could be got for love or money. I should do more cardio. Every morning I wake up suffused with such dread that I find I cannot move until ironclad routine sets me in motion: cats must be fed, coffee must be brewed, words must be written, get up and put on the pants. “I do not think I know where we will be in ten years,” I wrote, back in 2006, and Jesus, would you look at us now.
—But still: I pay my taxes. I chop the wood, I carry the water, and I sit down when I can with my books and papers and do what I still love. —That’s gonna have to be enough, for now.
