Having read the deliciously macabre City of Saints and Madmen a couple of months ago, I had purposed in my ventricles to read more books by Jeff VanderMeer. For starters, check out In the Hours After Death and you’ll see what I mean. When I discovered that a newly published anthology, The New Weird, was edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, I ordered it immediately. If the first story is any indication, it’s going to be rewardingly surreal page-turner.
Perusing VanderMeer’s blog for writing tips, I found this nugget, in which (coincidentally or not?) VanderMeer mentions the author of the first story in The New Weird, M. John Harrison:
”One of the more audacious novels of the past few years, Light by M. John Harrison contains its own comment on labeling of fiction, I think. Whether Harrison intended it or not, the following passage speaks to the craft and art of creating fiction as well as anything in a book of writing advice:
‘Every race [humankind] met on their way through the Core had a star drive based on a different theory. All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another’s basic assumptions. You could travel between the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything. If your theory gave you a foamy space to work with-if you had to catch a wave-that didn’t preclude some other engine, running on a perfectly smooth Einsteinian surface, from surfing from the same tranche of empty space. It was even possible to build drives on the basis of super-string-style theories, which, despite their promise four hundred years ago had never really worked at all…It was affronting to discover that…’
The same idea applies to fiction-you can use an almost infinite number of approaches to achieve the same or similar effects. It is true that I tend to espouse a single or single set of approaches to fiction (in part because I believe in this kind of fiction, but also because I find it underrepresented), but this doesn’t mean I don’t like other approaches.”
2 Comments
July 12, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Hey Bill – check out the follow-up to “City of Saints & Madmen,” “Shriek: An Afterword.” It’s a great read, and will also get you ready to read the newest Ambergris novel “Finch” which is coming out next year!
Also, if you like SF, you should try his book “Veniss Underground,” one of my favorites.
July 12, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Thanks, Matt. I’m sure I will read all of those. VanderMeer is right up my mushroom-populated alley!