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Book Review: Through the Woods by Emily Carroll

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The back cover of Through the Woods claims that it contains five mysterious, spine-tingling stories. Sure, I thought, but really it’s not going to be that scary, right? I expected to feel the small frisson that comes with reading ghost stories and the visual delight of  paging through some cool looking art. Pleasant, simple, fun. A nice summer read. So I put it in my bag and took it to Vermont. Vermont, in case you were wondering, is full of woods. Let me properly set the scene here:  we’d gone for a weekend to get away from all the hustle and bustle of work and city life. We had not packed our laptops, we did not bring our phone chargers, and each of us brought exactly one book to read (Moss’ was the excellent Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, which I had already read). During the day, we stopped to meet friends for lunch in New Hampshire, and then hiked for four and a half hours in the green mountains, getting back to our car right as the sun was beginning to set. We checked into our hotel, The Vermont Inn, which was lovely and remote, and the sort of independent old inn that has lots of creaky charm in the stairs and floorboards. We ate a lovely dinner in the inn’s restaurant, followed by a delicious dessert cocktail — which tasted like a maple milkshake — in the inn’s bar. We soaked in the inn’s hot tub under the stars. And then we went upstairs, and read our books. Before bed.

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Mining the Genre Asteroid: Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds

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You’ve heard the story of the broadcast, I am sure. In 1938, Orson Welles put the US into a panic by doing a fake news broadcast about Martians landing in New Jersey and wreaking havoc.  That the broadcast was a trick on the populace, caused mass panic, and disrupted the entire United States one October night. But dig deeper, listen to the rhythms, the flow, the story of the radio play, and you will find a much richer text than the one imagined by your preconceptions. A story worth the attention of any and all genre fans. Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds radio play first aired on October 30,1938. The radio play itself was written by Howard Koch and Anne Froelick, with the production directed by Orson Welles, who stars in the play as Professor Richard Pierson, a fictional famous astronomer. Running about an hour long, the Radio Play is divided into several distinct parts: A Prologue/Introduction from Welles, a three act structure of the main story, and then a coda.

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My Superpower: Max Gladstone

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My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Max Gladstone to talk about how the power of Oblivion relates to Full Fathom Five. *** My writer superpower is Oblivion. Obliviousness to surrounding conditions may seem more a liability than a superpower — the kind of “gift” that gets you pancaked by a city bus because you tried to read a Buzzfeed listicle and cross the road at the same time. Obliviousness leads to working through lunch and dinner because you didn’t realize it was 7pm already, to bad plays in poker and go (oh, I didn’t realize there were two kings on the board), to sleep deprivation and household mess (what dust bunnies in which corners, now?). But it does help the writing. See, distraction is an enemy of word count. You know how the Force connects all things, carrying impulses and emotions from one end of the galaxy to the other? Imagine being a Jedi — I mean, a fully-realized one like Obi-Wan in A New Hope or Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, so in tune with the Force that it’s a state of being, not an ability you turn on and off. Walk down a street, as a Jedi, and emotions overwhelm you. Imagine trying to get anything done in that environment! Sure, Yoda and Obi-Wan lived on barren colony worlds to hide from Imperial death squads, but it’s quite possible that a peaceful remote hermitage is just plain more comfortable for folks with low-level always-on psionics.

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Business Time: Direct-to-Consumer sales

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Recently, HarperCollins announced that they’ve re-launched their site with a complete Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) store, selling physical and ebooks. Direct-to-Consumer sales are, for many companies, a great way to deal with disintermediation, that being, a disruption of the standard distribution chain. Companies like Amazon practice disintermediation, selling direct as retailers without needing field representatives and by surpassing/superceeding physical retail.

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Mining the Genre Asteroid: PAVANE by Keith Roberts

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In 1588, Queen Elizabeth, the Faerie Queen, was assassinated. Without her leadership, and with the rise of English Catholics in response, Spain found it easy to occupy England and bring her back to Mother Church. And with England so tamed, the throne of St. Peter took back the entirety of Europe from Protestantism, and then the world. James Cook had the flag of the Pope, not of England, when he landed in Australia. Spain controls the entirety of the New World. The Church keeps a tight control over technology and culture, as well, shutting down obvious lines of development. Semaphone wires, coal fired trains, and a residual feudal culture dominate England and the world. Black powder guns are still state-of-the-art weapons. Such tight control has its costs, and its victims. Now, though, almost four centuries after Elizabeth’s death, in a small region of England, the dominance of the Church in matters temporal and spiritual — in England and the world — may finally begin to loosen. All of this can be found in Keith Roberts’ alternate history classic, Pavane.

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