Hal Duncan on Pretentiousness

Although it's really late for me and I'll have to wait until the evening to comment at length here and over there, Hal Duncan takes a post of mine from last week and riffs on it, with quite a few conclusions that I can agree with wholeheartedly. At the risk of distorting and overly simplifying his arguments, are not those who cry "pretentious!" at others at risk for self-labelling themselves as "hey, I'm this here dumbfuck who jus' don't git it, ya hear?" After all, the "elitist" accusation can bear amusing unintended consequences if one wants to push it a bit further. I know I have never desired to be mediocre or to "be one in a crowd," as it would seem the opposite of "elitist" would indicate. Best for me to be "out of touch" with that which would suck in my opinion than to embrace a rube's false egalitarianism. But it's almost 1:30 AM here and I fear I'll just ramble on. Feel free to respond, deride, cajole, etc., as I'll try to respond more coherently and less sarcastically in the evening. But do read Hal's article closely, as it brings up quite a few points well worth considering.

Best of 2007: A look back at the Best of 2006 Debut Novelists

There were three authors making their fantasy novel debuts in 2006 that I lauded in my Best of 2006 review. I thought before I announce the top three for 2007 that I would take a look back at these three novels (Hal Duncan's Vellum; Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora; and Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain) and see what each author managed to accomplish this year with their 2007 releases.

Hal Duncan, Vellum.

This book also made my overall Best of 2006 list at #2 due to its rich, multilayered prose. A complex but yet mostly rewarding story of a near-future event in which certain individuals gain the ability to travel here and there through a Multiverse-like setting of 3D time and space called the Vellum. Each is looking for the fabled Book of All Hours, which permits its holder literally to rewrite history by an erasure here, a scribble there. Over the course of the novel, we are introduced to archetypical characters such as Jack, Phreedom, and Seamus, among others. What each means in the end is revealed in Ink.

While I loved Vellum, I was not as enamored with Ink. Although a re-read almost certainly will improve my opinion of the work, when I read it soon after its February release, I couldn't help but feel that Duncan lingered a bit too much on the exploration of the Vellum at the expense of developing the end story and concluding this truly epic battle of Heaven and Hell under other guises. However, the characters continued to develop and ultimately we get to see more of the archetypes behind the seven characters that appear in this duology.

Ranking of 2007 Effort: Second

Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

This was more of a "popcorn" read, in that it is best to be read without trying to think too much about the characterizations or the plot development, since invariably there would be quite a few places for the nitpickers to go to work. It was apparently intended to be a "fun" read and using that as the main criteria for judging it last year, it mostly succeeded, despite a few ragged places around the middle and the choppy ending that perhaps ought to have been revised further to make it flow better. That being said, I enjoyed this novel.

The second novel in The Gentleman Bastards sequence, Red Seas Under Red Skies, I did not enjoy much at all. The "fun" elements were repeated too much for my liking, making for a duller and less enjoyable experience. Add to that the interminable plot to steal from the Sinspire and the ultimate downer of yet another pirate cruise, and I was very underwhelmed by this effort.

Ranking: A very distant third

Tobias Buckell, Crystal Rain

While at first glance this might seem to be the most shallow of the three (due to its relatively slender page count of roughly 350 pages compared to the 500+ page counts for the other two), Buckell displays a nice ability to cut to the chase and to lay out the story and the characters in a quick fashion without skimping overmuch on developing both. This is an adventure/mystery story (the mystery revolving around the lost memory of the main character) and the ending was satisfying. I thought back a year ago that this was a good, solid opener that held promise for future development in succeeding novels.

Well, my expectations were met and even exceeded a little bit when I read Ragamuffin this June. Expanding the story far beyond the planetwide scope of Crystal Rain, introduces a whole new layer of backstory and a host of new and interesting characters. While events here ultimately are tied into the events and characters of the first novel, I felt that Ragamuffin itself is little more than just the first true showing of what seems to be a very promising SF series. Of the three 2006 debuts that had 2007 follow-ups, this was the only one to show improvement over the first.

Ranking: First


And what about the candidates for the 2007 Debut Novels? Here are the names I'm toying with listed below. Keep in mind that I'm going to be thinking of a spec fic debut and not a general one, in case one wants to ask why a certain author made this list despite having three previous award-winning novels:

David Anthony Durham, Acacia: The War with the Mein

Jeffrey Overstreet, Auralia's Colors

Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

Best of 2007: The Next Ten

For those who may have wondered why Book X or Y failed to make my Top 12 Countdown list, I decided that I would post a list of ten others that I considered adding (again, there will be a separate list for short story collections and anthologies in the coming days), but ultimately decided not to for various reasons. Hopefully you'll find these works to be worthy of reading and discussion in the near future.


Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, A Companion to Wolves.

While this was one of the few animal companion stories that I have read and enjoyed (the few others that come to mind are too treacly for my tastes), not to mention the authors have constructed a multilayered society fraught with political, social, and sexual tensions, I ultimately decided against having this book appear on the Countdown for a very simple reason: I did not want to have multiple novels by the same author appear on the Countdown. Besides, any of these ten could have made the Countdown if I had chosen the list another time.

Tobias Buckell, Ragamuffin.

While I'll say more about this book and its author in an upcoming post on the three authors who made my 2006 Debut Author list, I can say that I believed that Ragamuffin showed necessary plot and characterization growth from 2006's Crystal Rain. I enjoyed this tale and its broadening of the storyline universe, but I decided to exclude it from the list more because I am expecting even more goodness from Buckell in his upcoming third novel, Sly Mongoose. It's just hard for middle volumes in any genre or storytelling form to win the prize (I think Monette's The Mirador was the only middle volume work I had on the Countdown), but like the others on this list, Buckell's work certainly would have been a worthy candidate for the Countdown.

Hal Duncan, Ink.

I loved his first volume of the Book of All Hours duology, Vellum, when I read it back in July 2006. It was full of interesting archetypes and the 3-D concept of time/place was done quite well. So it was with great anticipation that I preordered Ink, eager for its February release. I read it over a couple of days, but ultimately, it felt a bit "flat" to me, as if a string or two had broken in the performance. While far from a "bad" book, Ink for now (as I suspect a re-read might increase my opinion of it) is just merely a "very good" read, thus dropping it off of my personal Top 12 for 2007.

David Anthony Durham, Acacia: The War with the Mein.

Durham is not a new author; he has published three excellent historical novels (Gabriel's Story; Walk Through Darkness; Pride of Carthage) and in this opener to the Acacia trilogy, he brings a lot of the historical fiction tools to this secondary world setting. We see all sorts of links and chains that bind the Acacian ruling family to sordid things such as slavery and the drug trade, things not often talked about or shown in such books. While the more removed third-person limited style was a bit off-putting for those readers who wanted to immerse themselves in every sweaty, dank moment, I think it was an appropriate voice to capture the "historical" feel that I suspect Durham wanted this volume to have, not to mention that it made it possible for this story to be told in one 576 page volume rather than being sprawled out over multiple volumes. This book was one of the very last ones cut from the list (I originally was contemplating a Top 15) and I dropped it more because I am awaiting to see how the characters develop in the following two volumes. I suspect those volumes will be even more rewarding than this one.

Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss

This was an emotionally draining but powerful story of an aging photographer from the punk scene in the 1970s who has been having some nasty flashbacks from her past. More of a psychological horror novel than anything overtly "speculative" in nature, this was a very well-written and gripping narrative. The only reason it didn't make the Countdown (or even get a full review from me when I read it last month) is that I was left numb at the end - not the dull sensation caused by inferior prose, but rather that it was so overwhelming in places (having worked with and known teens that are going through the same stages that Hand's main character does) that I think it'll take time and a re-read later for me to be able to write a succinct review.

Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

Rothfuss certainly knows how to incorporate elements of oral storytelling forms into his story, as I got this sense on occasion that I was being "told" the story rather than just reading it. Kvothe was an intriguing character and there is much promise for the next two volumes in this trilogy for it to become a classic in the years to come. However, there were some rough patches in the characterization and the narrative flow. Not enough to damper the enjoyment much, but just enough for me to leave it off of the Countdown. Rothfuss, however, does have the potential to write a book that might make a future edition of the Countdown.

Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Well of Ascension

Despite having a tepid, lukewarm reaction to Sanderson's debut novel, Elantris, when I read it in January 2006, I found myself enjoying the first two volumes of the Mistborn trilogy when I read them back this summer. The characters weren't as wooden, the action was better-plotted, and the premise of "What would happen in the world if the Dark Side won?" made for an engaging opening volume. While I enjoyed The Well of Ascension almost as much as I did The Final Empire, it suffered a bit from the usual middle volume problems of lacking a defined and separate introduction and conclusion. For that, it gets an honorable mention but no place on my Best of 2007 Countdown.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin

For those who aren't familiar with Tolkien beyond The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, this expanded narrative (pieced together from various drafts by his son Christopher) of a dark, tragic First Age tale might seem unsettling with its "historical" feel and its rather nasty ending. I enjoyed reading this tale a lot in abbreviated form over the past 20 years and I thought Christopher Tolkien did a nice job in constructing a good narrative from all the bits and pieces his father had written over the years. However, this edition was little more than a compilation of drafts that I had mostly read elsewhere over the years, so it's mainly for this reason that I decided not to include The Children of Húrin in the Best of 2007 Countdown.

Daniel Wallace, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician

Although I have not read Wallace's other works (Big Fish being the most famous of those, I believe), I will try to correct that in the coming year as this was an excellent sleight-of-hand telling of a backroads circus performer and his tragic life. There are hints that the "negro magician" might actually have made a deal with the Devil for actual magical powers, but in this shifting narrative told by those who knew him best, the truth becomes buried under layers of artifice until a rather surprising history is revealed. I enjoyed this novel quite a bit and had the privilege of hearing Wallace read from it when he was in Nashville on my birthday back in July. It didn't make the Countdown more because it was hard for me to decide between that and a couple of others and ultimately those other tales stayed in my mind just a tiny bit more than this excellent tale did.

Zoran Živković, Steps Through the Mist

Serbian author Zoran Živković has written some delightfully meditative and interconnected stories over the years, in arrangements that he calls "story suites." In this collection, there are five women who have various interactions with a sometimes-metaphorical, sometimes-very real "mist," each of those encounters occurring at a pivotal point in the stories. These were very well-written, but not as moving as his earlier collection, Seven Touches of Music. For that reason, I decided to leave this work off of my Best of 2007 Countdown, although I certainly would recommend it to most people, especially those who are fans of Živković's earlier work.

Interview with Hal Duncan, Part II

In reading Vellum, I was struck with the sense that at times, this was a very personal book. Which scenes would you say stood out the most to you in an emotional sense as you wrote them?

In some respects the most personal and the most emotional scenes are two different things. Although, as I said, there's a fair amount of personal experience underlying the inner narrative of Jack Flash, his childhood in the schemes, I deliberately kept a certain detachment there, and sort of placed it all in inverted commas as an unreliable narrative. As much as I think fiction should be written in blood, sweat and tears autobiography, especially of the miserable-childhood sort, is just tedious and self-absorbed. That stuff is partly there to be stomped on.

The really important scenes, the ones that meant the most emotionally to me in writing, were those scenes in the faerie chapter where I parallel the crucifixion of Matthew Shepard with the murder of Puck. I was actually trying to absent myself from the writing there as much as possible, to put as little of me as possible into the story, to let the event speak for itself without any cheap sentimentalism. I suppose it's still quite personal, because the narrator at that point, Jack, his grief and rage are sort of expressed by the very fact that they're not expressed, if that makes sense -- and this is the form of grief I remember from my brother's death. A total lock-down of affect. A heart like a clenched fist. A sorrow and fury so fucking intense that any voicing of it would be so... banal as to be an insult. I still remember that feeling and, with that scene describing, basically, the murder of Matthew Shepard in all its cold brutality, well, that scene was written straight from the heart. The image in the Errata which follows that chapter, the self-mutilated Jack -- that's that grief let out.

The other scene that stood out most, and it's probably the scene I'm proudest of in the book, is one of those with Seamus Finnan. There's a few of the Seamus scenes that really mean a lot to me actually, because the soldiers of WW1, the Red Clydesiders, the International Brigades, with all of those I was deeply moved by the stories of the individuals I came across in my research, so when I came to write these sections I couldn't help but think of the reality underneath the fiction; but there it's as much the truth that makes it emotional as the fiction, so it's the scene where Seamus tells Anna the Prometheus story that really stands out for me. That's the thematic core of the book. That's my humanism in a nutshell.

The stories contained within Vellum appear to be reflections of human crises, not just the war between the Covenant and the Sovereigns, but also between humans and their emotions. Is it fair to say that a focus of the story is on human conflicts and discontinuities?

Absolutely. There's the political and religious aspects to the conflict between the Covenant and the Sovereigns, but even that can be seen on a human level as a sort of conflict of reason and passion, the rationalism of the Covenant who want everything neat and ordered versus the romanticism of the Sovereigns who want their old power and glory back. And really the whole war is more of a backdrop for the human stories of Phreedom and Thomas, Seamus and Jack. I'm not interested in just telling the darling-of-destiny story, where the hero comes from obscurity to save the princess and lead the rebels to victory -- not straight anyway. VELLUM is far more about the death of Thomas and how that changes everyone involved, the tensions it creates between Phreedom and Seamus, Seamus and Jack, the internal conflicts it creates within those characters, the way those conflicts are resolved -- or not, as the case may be.

And "discontinuity" is the right word. The characters are quite literally changed in the course of the novel. Identities are shattered and remade. Literally, in some cases.

Thomas, Phreedom, Jack, and Seamus (among others) each appear throughout the various stories contained within the Vellum. What would be the overall 'message/s' (pardon the pun) that these archetypical characters have? I'm particularly curious about Seamus and his roles as Prometheus and Sammael in the second half of the book.

I don't see them as having messages per se. I don't think you can't tie true archetypes down to a simple, singular significance. Instead, I think, they function as unmoored signifiers, metaphors for identity but where the meaning is not so much in what they are as it is in how they relate to each other -- as sister, brother, killer, lover, and so on. The way I see it, archetypes are the psyche's way of interacting with itself. I riff off Jung (and the ancient Egyptian idea of us each having seven souls) in breaking it down into seven major archetypes -- Self, Anima, Id, Persona, Shadow, Mana, and Ego -- but I don't see these as essential components, more as... perspectives, filters.

Anyway, the characters aren't meant as straightfoward allegorical ciphers, but that model is not bad if you want to understand the book as, in one respect, a study of grief: Thomas is the Self as puer aeternus -- not the sentimentalised Inner Child you hear about on Oprah, but Shakespeare's Puck, Barrie's Pan, an impish, irresponsible little bastard with nipping teeth and nicking horns; Phreedom is the Anima -- maiden and mother, guardian angel and avenging fury; Jack is the Id -- the chaotic vitality of our passions, repressed or unleashed; Reynard is the Persona or Superego -- the inner conscience, the self-editor; Joey is the Shadow -- the cold-hearted bastard inside us all; Don, is a Mana figure, as I see it -- the old soldier, a man of age and experience; and Seamus is the Ego -- the psyche as social being, the individual defined by their relationship to society.

That's why Seamus becomes such a focus for the ideological conflicts, because a humanist, socialist, pacifist outlook leads inevitably to such conflicts. Do you fight the fascists as a socialist, or refuse to fight them as a pacifist? Do you steal fire for humanity even if you know they'll hate you for it? Where the others have clear roles, he's the Everyman who has to make the hard choices of real life, and who has to deal with the consequences. He's the battleground between social mores and individual ethics, the tyrant Zeus and the rebel Prometheus. Personally, I've always seen Lucifer, the Lightbringer, as a Promethean hero on the side of humanity against a deity defined by his might. The "laws of God" are just society's mores. The fire, the enlightenment, given by Prometheus, the knowledge of good and evil offered by Lucifer -- that's individual ethics, and if it's a choice between the two I know whose side I'm on.

One of the reactions that I’ve heard from others reading Vellum is a wry observation that they could not believe that one of their favorite characters turns out to be Satan, or rather the Lucifer part. Have you heard similar reactions from other readers and if so, how did you respond to such comments?

I haven't really had that comment, to be honest, but then those who know me well wouldn't find it at all surprising that I turn one of the good guys into Lucifer -- or, more to the point, turn Lucifer into one of the good guys. At the risk of starting book-burnings all across the Bible Belt I'll hold my hand up and say I've always been pretty Antichristian. Don't get me wrong: I like the whole Sermon on the Mount thing -- lovely piece of pacifist socialism -- but this "washed clean in the blood of the Lamb" malarky? Jesus Christ died for your sins? No, I'll die for my own sins, thank you very much, and if I go to Hell (not that I actually believe in Hell), I'll be signing on for the next assault on the Pearly Gates, even if it's only as a stretcher-bearer.

I mean, there's two things to bear in mind here. One is a practical matter of what actually happens in the story. You have to remember that the unkin's identities are defined by their gravings and that Seamus is being royally fucked over by Metatron during the second half of the book. He's being turned into Prometheus because Metatron wants access to the knowledge only Prometheus possesses, who or what is capable of bringing down the Covenant. I can't say too much without giving away spoilers for INK, but it's not as simple as Seamus "turning out" to be Sammael; in the same way that Phreedom and Thomas have their own identities, their own gravings, overwritten with those of Inanna and Tammuz, Seamus's history is tweaked and twiddled so that Sammael is made flesh again in him.

The second thing -- and I can imagine some readers may well have problems with this -- is that if you look at it from a comparative mythology standpoint, I think there's a fair argument that the Lucifer/Sammael of the Apocrypha can be seen as another version of the Prometheus myth. He's the Godfather's right-hand-man. In some Gnostic or apocryphal legends it's actually Sammael who created the world and humanity, just like Prometheus. The Garden of Eden, with the serpent offering humanity wisdom, is a close parallel to Prometheus's gift of fire. Both tyrants, Deus and Zeus, are afraid of being usurped. Read Genesis without the Sunday School blinkers on and you'll find that God exiles Adam and Eve not for being disobedient but because he fears them eating the fruit of the tree of life and becoming as powerful as him. Explicitly. It's there in black and white. Prometheus is credited with bringing medicine and magic, all the arcane sciences to humanity. So are the fallen angels of the apocrypha. God turns against humanity and sends the Flood to wipe them out directly after the fallen angels start cavorting with them. Similarly, Zeus can't stand to see humanity thriving with these wonders gifted to them by Prometheus, so he sends the Greek version of the Deluge to destroy them all. If you look through the propaganda, Lucifer is the rebel hero of the story. He's just been given a bad press. Myth is written by the victors just as much as history is.

To me it seems self-evident, to be honest: if Seamus is Prometheus, then he's also Lucifer.

Two of the characters are gay. What has been the range of reactions that you have heard from people in regards to this, especially considering how these characters are portrayed throughout the novel? Also, how would you say the overall climate among readers is in regards to receptivity for homosexual characters?

The reaction's been overwhelmingly positive. I can't think of any responses I've seen that reacted against the homosexuality, and there's been plenty that have picked up on it as a good thing. The nearest thing to a negative reaction was a passing remark in John Clute's review, but that was because he saw the sex as self-indulgent, I think, a bit too redolent of authorial wish-fulfilment for his liking; it certainly wasn't about being uncomfortable with the characters being gay. Instead, where reviews or comments have mentioned the homosexuality it's largely been to praise the characters as rounded individuals; readers, gay and straight alike, seem to have felt that I've succeeded in elevating Jack and Puck out of the realm of stereotypes and tokenism -- which is truly gratifying. I really wanted to drive a big monster truck over the cliches, to blithely ignore any idea of what can or can't be done with gay characters, most of all for their sexuality not to be the be-all and end-all of their purpose in the narrative. I mean, yes, there's an element of the classic Gay Victim in Puck, and of the eternal Repressed Gay in Jack, but those cliches are set-up in order to be soundly thrashed, smashed apart. Yes, there's a part of the book which is about homophobia and its victims, but that's only part of a wider story about persecution in all its forms. And readers -- especially gay readers -- seem to have recognised the straightforwardness of this approach -- they're gay; big deal -- and found it... refreshing.

So, I'd have to say the climate seems pretty receptive. The field of strange fiction has always been pretty accepting of difference, I think. You do see a tendency to exoticise, fetishise, infantilise or demonise these differences -- to render them Other -- and a market for those works which is therefore receptive to gay characters as long as they fit into certain roles. The fetishisation of homosexuality in certain types of vampire fiction -- all those mooning sensitive poseurs in shirts with frilly cuffs, making doe-eyes at each other's luscious lips -- is something that particularly irks me; it's fricking softcore porn for Goth girls as far as I'm concerned, no better than having a faggot flouncing about for a few cheap laughs. But that Othering isn't the whole story. In a field of fiction largely written by geeks for geeks, I think, as often as not we identify with those outsiders. We write and/or read those works and see ourselves in the characters -- strangers in a strange land. That's me, we think, and I ain't no Other. Many of the most popular writers in this field, gay or straight -- Samuel R. Delany or China Miéville, Clive Barker or Neil Gaiman -- have quite happily placed gay characters right at the heart of their works, and nobody bats an eye.

Speaking of other authors, what changes have you seen in recent literature of the weird or fantastic? I’m wondering if there could be a strong case made for today’s SF reflecting the conflicts of the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s-1990s.

Possibly so, though I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask here as I'm pretty out-of-date in my reading. As cyberpunk, after the initial boom in the Reagan/Thatcher era -- when it was so pertinent, so relevant, to the nascent culture of consumerism and global capitalism -- seemed to gradually become genrefied and formulated into a set of noirish tropes and stylisms, co-opted into a superficial style which was all mirrorshades and technotoys, I have to admit I drifted away from the field for awhile, lost touch with what was happening. I spent a long time reading more realist or non-fiction works, ancient classics or marginal contemporaries, than I did reading within the field, so I'm not really in a position to pontifcate on the changing face of SF. I'd be liable, I think, to unfairly neglect writers from the not-quite-so-recent past simply because I haven't gotten around to them yet.

What I will say, kicking off your question is that there definitely seems to be an engagment with large-scale political and cultural issues in a lot of the work that's coming out now, which really interests me. In SF, you have writers like Geoff Ryman and Iain Macdonald looking to developing countries -- India, Cambodia, Brazil -- for stories of the future, which strikes me as an admirable sense of perspective, looking beyond the narrow Anglo-American worldview, focusing on something beyond one's own backyard and the same old junk scattered around it. My fellow GSFWC member, Gary Gibson, has a few timely things to say about religious zealotry and military prisoners in both his novels, ANGEL STATIONS and AGAINST GRAVITY, and I'm sure he's not alone in picking up on the current climate -- Richard Morgan being a case in point. Then in Fantasy, you have China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer, both of whose work deals with political issues far more complex than how the poor dispossesed prince needs to be restored to his throne. VanderMeer's SHRIEK, in particular, with the pointless war that blasts right through the centre of it, strikes me as pretty pointedly relevant -- though it's by no means a cipher for the War on Terror.

But as I say, I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask about this. It could be a shift towards greater political engagement, but it could equally well be that I'm not up to speed on a lot of what's been going on.

And finally a couple of not-so-serious questions:

Although I didn’t get to attend the last WFC in Wisconsin last year, I heard vague rumors about a lot of drinking and good times that occurred. Are there any funny stories to share of that time, such as which authors could best handle their liquor?

Unfortunately, I'm not sure I can answer that... on the grounds I may incriminate myself. No, my favourite story from last year's WFC can only be told in person, at the bar, with no recording devices or members of the law enforcement agencies present. I'd quite like to return to the US at some point, you see.

I will say that at Wiscon this year, having previously discovered the joys of the Governor's Club in the Madison Concourse at WFC (Brian, the barman mixes a mean White Russian), I managed to pretty much eradicate all memory of the Thursday night and had to spend the next three days asking anyone and everyone I ran across if they knew what I'd been up to. Having woken up in bed bright and early on the Friday morning around 9:00, I assumed I'd wigged out early when the Governor's Club shut ,and toddled off to my room. Oh, no. First I find out that my editor nearly tripped over me when he made it back to the room we were sharing at 3:00 in the morning to find me out cold, fully dressed on the (quite comfortable) floor. I have no memory of this. Next I find out that at least an hour after the Governor's Club closed John Scalzi walked into the elevator to find me swaying there with a White Russian in my hand (with ice unmelted and therefore clearly recent). Scalzi to Duncan: Hey, Hal. How ya doing? Duncan to Scalzi: I'm fucked. I have no memory of this either. Then there's the report of me sitting on the smoker's bench outside the hotel at 1:00 -- this from a worried bystander who, after seeing me stagger off through the lobby in a determined Z, responded to the revelation that I'd made breakfast with "He's still alive?!" Again, I have no memory of this. And I'm not going into the rumours that I finally heard, and had confirmed to my excruciating embarassment, of me hitting on another writer (albeit politely). All I'll say is that, as with the rest, I have no memory of this whatsoever.

Let that be a lesson to you: drinking is not big, it's not clever, and it doesn't make you look cool. Even if it is a lot of fun.

This last question is our version of the Rorschach Test for authors, to help us better gauge their personalities behind the quill/pen/keyboard: If you were to own several monkeys and/or midgets, how many would you own, and what would you name them?

Could I have Mexicans instead? I know you can't own Mexicans -- that's what we call slavery -- but then strictly speaking you can't own midgets either, and ethically speaking, monkey minions could also be considered rather dubious. No matter how well you treat them, you know, it's not their natural habitat. Unless, you're actually living with them in the trees, eating bananas and having mutual grooming sessions, of course, but then the whole ownership thing rather becomes a moot point.

No, I'd rather have Mexicans, or at least midget monkeys dressed as Mexicans, not so much real-life Mexicans but like the peasant kid in The Magnificent Seven. Come to think of it, seven would probably be a good number for these midget monkey Mexicans -- not too many, not too few. I'd have them all wear white linen and little red neckerchiefs, and every one of them would be called Pedro. That way, when I had some errand for them to run, I'd simply lean out the window of my villa and shout, Pedro! Scampering out of the trees they'd come, and the first one there would catch a shiny gold coin flipped through the air. To town, Pedro, I'd say. Quick, fetch the doctor! Or at least some very powerful painkillers. Si, Don Loco, Pedro would chitter, and be off like a flash.

One can but dream.

Once again, a great many thanks to Hal Duncan here. And for those curious, his next book, Ink, is due out in February. It was a real pleasure getting to do this interview.

Interview with Hal Duncan, Part I

Sometimes in order to understand a book, one has to know something about the author who wrote the book. What can you tell us about yourself, your background, and how it might relate to the creation of The Book of All Hours?

I'm a child of the 70s, brought up in a Scottish "New Town" -- a small town expanded with housing schemes to take the overspill from inner city Glasgow. It was supposed to give the families a better life, but the result was just a cross-breeding of small-town bigotry and inner-city gang-mentality. Some of the Jack Flash sections -- the "inner narratives" -- in VELLUM are pretty much straight description of that shithole and its hopelessness. My feelings about Kilwinning are sort of summed up in the story about the missing kid that the characters go looking for -- based on the real-life disappearance of this young boy, Sandy Thomson. The thing is, they moved the families into the schemes as they were building them, so all the kids used to play in the building sites. I've always wondered if he didn't end up in the foundations of one of the houses, victim of some horrible accident or worse. That's the way I think of the New Towns -- a dream gone sour, built over the corpse of youth, innocence.

And yet... somewhere along the way that lost boy became a Lost Boy for me, reimagined as an escapee from reality rather than a victim, off having adventures in other worlds, other times -- across the limitless landscape of the imagination which I've tried to represent in the form of the Vellum. He sort of fused with Luke Skywalker, Flash Gordon from the old serials, and all these other golden-haired heroes of modern myth to become this character I'd tell myself stories about as I lay in bed at night, before dropping off to sleep. I called him Flash, and there's a lot of him still there in the Jack Carter of THE BOOK OF ALL HOURS -- a sort of archetype of the id, bound or unbound. The hero, I think, is often a sort of vessel for our desires, a compensatory fantasy. I'm out to subvert the whole wish-fulfilment aspect now, I hasten to add; Jack's not simply the projected alter ego who gets to do all the cool shit you can't do in real-life; he's more than that, I hope. But that is where the character has his roots.

Anyway, as I hit adolescence things just went from bad to worse in this pebble-dashed suburbia where even punk had sold out to Skrewdriver and neo-nazi bullshit. Unemployment was sky-high, Thatcher was voted-in time and again by Middle England, and there was still the sense that the USA and USSR might blow us all to hell. In fact, where previous generations worried about the future, I think we just knew there wasn't any. If the nukes didn't get you, then AIDS would. And that was the real kicker. I mean, there's me trying to come to terms with my sexuality and suddenly along comes the "Gay Plague". Fucking brilliant. And of course I was the smart geek who couldn't walk down the street without some gang of arseholes picking on me. So I was the classic miserable whiny adolescent who Wanted To Die. Years before Columbine I dreamt of massacring my class-mates. I actually went to school in a trenchcoat, honest to God. I had all sorts of schizo notions about deals with Death. I'd send him some souls and he'd do me right when they gunned me down at the end of the killing spree. Death and me, we were on first name terms. I was ready to walk with him.

And then my brother died.

The wish-fulfilment fantasies, the narcissistic rage, the grandiose delusions -- all of that adolescent bullshit was just shattered by this diamond bullet of a truth: people die. Nothing else really matters a fuck, as far as I'm concerned. Or rather anything that matters does so because of that fundamental fact, that there are people, and that they die.

If this all sounds terribly nihilistic and depressing, it's not intended that way. I think of nihilism as a liberating philosophy; it's an abandoment of absolutes, of false certainties that bind us into ideas of destiny, fate. Without giving away any spoilers, the very last scene in VELLUM is an expression of the liberating power of nihilism as I understand it. And understanding the death part of that simple equation -- people die -- gives us a better understanding of the people part, of the precious fragility of human life. That's something that's at the heart of the book.

That is quite a journey to undertake. Which raises a related question: How did you take those elements and weave them into what became The Book of All Hours? Was it trial and error, or did the basic framework of the story come to you suddenly? For looking back (and forward), it seems as though this story both preceded and followed you for a long time.

It started as two completely separate Grand Projects, both of which fell apart into umpteen short stories and novellas which, it gradually became obvious, were part of one single over-arching framework. Back in the 90s the idea of the Book of All Hours had popped up in some experimental steampunk nonsense I'd been writing, (which also featured a prototype of Jack Carter). That early stuff was all shit -- I ended up burning it along with the rest of my wanky adolescent scribblings -- but some of the ideas carried over into the first Grand Project, a huge monster of a novel in four parts, themed around the seasons and times of day. It was going to be set in a city at the end of time, with bitmites flowing through the streets. It was going to be written in a language full of Joycean word-play and allusions. It was going to retell Parzival from the viewpoint of his half-brother, Feirefiz, with touches of the Bellerophon myth. It was going to be the story of Babel rebuilt, the Grail brought out of hiding, the great ur-myth that all other myths are only fragments of. It was, of course, utterly bonkers. I got a few chapters and a fuckload of notes written before shelving it.

The second Grand Project was more straightforward. Although it had a similarly obsessive syncretism at its heart -- in trying to incorporate all the gods and titans, angels and demons of every culture throughout history into the singular mythos of the unkin -- what I was planning was a set of stories which would share the same back-drop and a few of the same characters but would ultimately each stand alone. I got as far as a couple of stories before that project stalled too. I think that approach was just too limiting in terms of tone; it didn't give me the freedom to be pulpy one minute, poncy the next.

So I just abandoned the whole idea of a Grand Project and started writing short stories and novellas as they came, ignoring the correspondances and links between them, ignoring the fact that very few of them actually worked in isolation from each other. Things like the Jack Flash section, the expedition to the Caucasus, the Faerie chapter -- these were all written as individual stories at first. The guys at the Glasgow SF Writers Circle would tell me, this story is cool but it doesn't make sense unless you've read that one, that one makes sense but it doesn't really work as a story. Everything I wrote was like a... fragment of a broken hologram, you know, where each piece has a little area in tight focus but it also has a blurry image of the whole, the Big Picture. Eventually I found myself coming full circle, writing the story that would become the Prologue (which brought me back to the Book of All Hours), and two novellas which would become the Phreedom and Thomas chapters (which brought me back to the unkin).

That was the point where it all came together into the Book of All Hours. I started looking at those fragments as part of a puzzle, figuring out what the underlying story was and whether they could be arranged so that story would be told as much in the juxtapositions of narratives as in the narratives themselves. In a strange way, the basic framework was there right back at the start, a four act cycle based on the seasons and times of day. It just took me ten years to realise what I was writing.

In a previous interview, you describe Vellum as a sort of Cubist Fantasy. For the readers here, could you elaborate more on this?

On a superficial level, the fragmentation of the narrative into little chunks, the way these chunks are put back together with this bit or that seemingly "out-of-place" in linear time -- in one sense Cubism is just a good comparison for how the reader has to reconstruct the narrative out of these strange chunks, like the "bizzare cubiques" that gave Cubism its name. You have to step back from the work, see it as a whole, build the abstract story in your imagination rather than expect a straghtforward direct representation. To some extent I use the phrase Cubist Fantasy as a sort of warning. If you get Picasso and Braques, you'll probably get what I'm trying to do with VELLUM; if you hate that type of painting you may well hate the book.

On a deeper level though, I think there's some more fundamental similarities. There's an idea of 3D time that underpins VELLUM, an idea that as well as the forward-and-back linear time we're aware of, there's a side-to-side of parallel worlds, and an up-and-down of realities which work by different metaphysics entirely. Think of it in terms of story. A story starts at the beginning and goes in a straight line to the end -- the "frontal" time we recognise. But a story, the myth of Inanna's descent into the underworld for example, has variations -- in one version she has a single rescuer, in another there's two. So that's your parallel realities, your side-to-side time. And over generations these stories are retold, simplifed and/or complexified, revisions lain down on top of the old like sedimental strata. Think of the way James Joyce used the myth of Ulysses as a substrate for his novel.

So in the same way the Cubists were using fragmentation to try and represent a 3D object in the round, or as if from outside space itself, to give us a multi-faceted perspective on it, that's what I'm trying to do with VELLUM in terms of time -- to present the story as a 3D object, with the multiple perspectives all fragmented and folded together.

In reading Vellum, I was reminded of this quote by Borges: "The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." How would you relate the world of The Book of All Hours with this concept of authorial time/space, and to what degree (if any) would this tale reflect perceptions of our shared past/present/future?

I'm not sure about that Borges quote, because to me it feels too focused on the modern writer, on an idea that through their work we rewrite the past in our imagination, aligning the writers who came before into a heritage which culminates in this end-of-line product. So this modification of our conception of the past would be a way of establishing the lineage of one's work, of selecting one's historical precursors and setting them up as benchmarks, signposts pointing along the road to here and now, to this fiction which is mine. Now certainly with VELLUM there's a huge amount of referencing of past writers. I suppose you could see the book as establishing a lineage from the anonymous Sumerian scribe who wrote Inanna's Descent, through Aeschylus and Virgil, right up to James Joyce and Edward Whittemore, William Gibson and Michael Moorcock. But the linearity of the idea of "precursors", of past, present and future -- something about that makes me uncomfortable. It would feel self-aggrandising to co-opt these writers as my literary forebears, to represent them as steps along the road to me.

No, I think the focus has to be shifted in the other direction. Every writer, I'd say, sets themself up as a signpost -- on a junction in the middle of nowhere, where multiple roads converge. They set up signs pointing in different directions: Joyce, 100 miles; Aeschylus, 200 miles. In some respects that can be a way of orienting the reader, so they can triangulate the writer's "position" in relation to these landmark authors. And in establishing that junction of influences, the writer may well transform the readers concept of the past: Aeschylus is closer than they would've thought from here, just a short drive south; the road to Joyce is downhill from this point in authorial time-space, rather than the hellish uphill struggle if you're coming by a different road. A lot of what I'm trying to do in VELLUM is set up a junction where you can get from, say, William Gibson to that anonymous Sumerian scribe in a few minutes' drive. Because I think that's an interesting journey to make.

I'm not sure I'm expressing this very well. If you think of the 3D model of time, the Vellum, it's hard to talk in terms of past, present and future; that's just one dimension, and in that context, those other writers aren't being treated as linear precursors; they're perspectives, angles on the story-as-object. Aeschylean tragedy, Virgilian eclogue, Gibsonian cyberpunk, Joycean modernism -- I'm kind of trying to unmoor them from their temporal setting altogether, to bring them together such that the ancient becomes modern and the modern becomes ancient in the reader's mind. Don't think of Prometheus Bound as being of a dead past; it's as relevant, as present as when it was first written.

So would it be fair to say that in some senses at least, that one interpretation of the greater story unfolding within the Vellum is that of how we ‘place’ or ‘position’ ourselves in relation to other people, to other ‘landmarks’? Because it seems to me that one could make an argument (not THE argument, but merely an argument) that part of what is going on within the story is the active insertion of the Reader into the Text in such a way that temporal and spatial differences are being warped. Or is this a misleading interpretation of the story?

I think that's fair. I mean, the metafictional aspect of the work is right up front; in the Prologue where you have Reynard Carter finding this Book which, according to one legend, contains every story ever written and every story never written. Theoretically, then, it must contain his own -- and yours and mine too. And that idea is woven throughout the novel; there's a recurring theme of how we can become trapped in the story of ourselves, the roles we've chosen for ourselves but believe to have been chosen for us. Often in post-modernism that type of metafictional conceit is all about distancing the reader from the text, deliberately placing the story in inverted commas, as an artifice, but what I wanted to do was pretty much the exact opposite. I wanted the reader to find themself drawn into the text, to be actively engaged with it. You could argue that the central protagonist of VELLUM is actually the reader themself; instead of being an outside observer, the reader is being invited in as a participant.

The hope is that in folding all these pasts and futures, parallel realities and fantastic realms around and through one another, in reconstructing the writer's version of the story, the reader will also be constructing their own version. Maybe the best way to explain this is in terms of the Matthew Shepard section. There we have a real-word event fictionalised, fantasised as the murder of a faery. A simple retelling on that level can be emotionally powerful, but it's always going to be "just a story", filtered through the writer's words and images and distanced by its intrinsic nature as a representation; it's something we look at, not something we're in. You can -- and I do -- try to suggest a larger scope by drawing parallels to other similar stories -- like that of Thomas, Tammuz, Pan or Christ -- but still what you're left with is "just a story", albeit an eternally recurring one. At the end of the day those references only add extra depth to that representation. So what I wanted to do was use this metafictional idea that our reality, the reader's reality, is just another fold of the Vellum to collapse that sense of distance. In the past I've said that I wanted to throw the reader out of the story at the end of that chapter, to suddenly strip away the fantasy and point the reader out into the real world, to have them slam face-first into the brutal truth of a real-life crucifixion. But maybe another way to look at it is that I want to make the reader suddenly look down and realise that this is what they're standing on. They're walled-in by the fictions of Thomas, Tammuz, etc., but the solid ground they're standing on is the real story of Matthew Shepard.

In essence, what I'm trying to do is carve out an abstraction, the story as a space defined within those walls, fictive and real, with the reader positioned within that space, within the story, seeing it every which way they turn, hopefully even seeing it in places I haven't. So there's no escape, no cosy reassurance in the knowledge that these events happened elsewhere, elsewhen, in fiction or history. That 3D model of time, and the metafictional insertion of the reader into that timespace is a way of saying, look, this story is all around you, not just there and then but here and now -- my here and now, and yours too.

End of Part I