INTERVIEW: Katy Nicholas: “As the World Falls Down”

RELEASED ON JANUARY 15^th, 2020, just before COVID-19 slammed into our world, Katy Nicholas’s excellent debut novel, As the World Falls Down, about a worldwide pandemic that kills the vast majority of humanity, is one of the best novels I’ve read in the past few years.

Just a few chapters into it, I found myself thinking, where did this author come from? Though I’d never encountered her work before, Katy writes with all the assurance of a longtime professional, and her novel, while vastly different in every way other than theme, is right up there with modern plague classics like David R. Palmer’s Emergence and King’s The Stand. As the World Falls Down also differs in that it’s the first volume in a planned series, Cities in Dust, though it works as a standalone novel. I would argue also that this isn’t just a Science Fiction novel, but a crossover novel which the non-genre reader will also find accessible and enjoyable.

My curiosity thus piqued, I contacted Katy, and the following interview is the result.

DC: Katy, I’m so glad to interview you. As a writer and editor used to reading debut novels and work from new authors, it’s very clear to me that you’ve been writing for at least a decade. As the World Falls Down is absolutely seamless, one of the most refreshing, thoughtful, and best-planned novels I’ve come across in a long time. I abandon a great many books because they’re simply too formulaic or fail to make me care, but your novel surprised and delighted me at every turn. Tell us a little about your development process as a writer.

KN: Believe it or not, before As the World Falls Down, the last thing I wrote was back in 2008.  In high school, I wrote daily. I had no interest in school. I remember writing stories in my economics class. After I left school, I got a job, had a family, and I didn’t really have time to write. So, there was a ten-year gap before I picked it up again. I wrote half a fantasy story about a girl who could bring the dead back to life. Again, life happened, and I didn’t write anything more for another ten years. The first draft of As The World Falls Down was basically me learning to write again, if I’m honest. It was 40,000 words. I then scrapped it and started again. I must’ve written about 200,000 words in four months. Oh to be that focused again. I began writing the sequel straight away, but I scrapped that as well, and started again. I’m currently editing it, so hopefully it’ll be out in 2021.

DC: I can’t imagine what it must have been like to release a book about a worldwide pandemic in January and have one explode in reality the very next month. What was that like for you?

KN: It was very surreal. I mean, I’d spent half of 2018 immersed in this book about a pandemic. Turns out I was right about a few things.

DC: What sparked the idea for As the World Falls Down?

KN: I had a dream. That’s so cliché, isn’t it? I have very strange dreams. In about April of 2018, I dreamed about the scene in the book where Halley finds Nate on the couch in his cabin. I had no idea what the rest of the story was about. I finished the book in September 2018. Then, I edited it, with more re-writes. I began to query agents and publishers, but my queries were dire. Then I sent five pages to The Wild Rose Press, and they requested the first three chapters, then the full MS. I signed with them in March 2019.

DC: Without giving too much away, the novel opens mainstream and slowly reveals a widening paranormal/science-fictional theme. As a writer and editor, I can clearly see the work is very tightly structured and meticulously planned. And yet your story is solidly character-driven and suffers none of the rigid, mechanical feel of intricately plotted novels. Can you tell us a bit about your specific writing process, and how you approached constructing this work?

KN: My process is chaotic. I spend a lot of time talking to myself and wandering around acting out the scenes. Then I scribble down notes. Usually I don’t make a proper chapter plan until I’ve written half the book. I feel like I go into the ring with every story and fight each round until I’ve figured everything out.

DC: Your character work is superb. Halley and Nate, your protagonists, are exceptionally well-drawn and even the novel’s minor characters are round and well-developed. Do characters come to you, as it were, living and breathing with a backstory to tell, or do you put a lot of conscious thought into their development?

KN: It’s more unconscious thought. I can’t even begin to explain how my brain works. I love to read and be so swept up in a story that I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve not found a book like that in a really long time. I wanted As the World Falls Down to be that book. Even if I was the only person who ever read it. I also think I worked through a lot of my own personal trauma in this book. There’s a piece of me in every character— Halley more than most. None of the characters have the moral high ground either. Well, maybe Halley does. I explore that more in book two. I like moral ambiguity. I like flawed people who make terrible decisions for the right reasons.

DC: Your novel has a very satisfying roundness and texture. Nested mysteries and a sense of growing strangeness shading toward horror are interwoven with gentle notes of domesticity, of love for the pastoral beauty of the English countryside. And the love affair between your protagonists is, like so much else, exquisitely well-handled and developed, something not a great many SF authors manage. Do you read romance and other genres beyond SFF?

KN: I don’t really read romance. I usually read horror or fantasy. It’s the movies and tv shows that I watched in my youth that probably shaped my mind in terms of what makes a good romance. Princess Leia and Han Solo, Buffy and Angel, Robin Hood and Maid Marian. I like the idea of star-crossed lovers, even if it doesn’t end well.

DC: Though your actual writing style is transparent, refreshing, and entirely yours, I’m wondering where your literary roots lie. Are there any authors you feel influenced you, especially in terms of genre or thematic concerns?

KN: In my early twenties I think I read every fantasy author on the shelves of waterstones. I also love Alice Hoffman. She writes stories about ghosts, and magic, and mermaids, but it’s never really about the supernatural, its about the characters and their relationships.  

DC: As the World Falls Down is traditionally published by The Wild Rose Press in New York State. Getting a publishing deal is notoriously hard for new authors today. How did you go about finding your publisher, and had you considered going indie if you weren’t able to?

KN: I queried forty publishers and agents, using query tracker for the most part. I think TWRP were query number 30 or something. I blundered my way into the whole process— no idea what I was doing. I began querying in September/October and got signed in the following March. It was all rather miraculous to be honest.

I definitely considered self-publishing because I refused to let this book die. Some authors shelve their books. I can’t imagine putting your soul into something and then saying ‘oh well, I couldn’t get an agent so I’ll just forget about this novel and write something else.’ The more someone tells me I can’t do something, the more I’ll fight to succeed. 

DC: I know you’re active in the UK SF and comic convention scene. Tell us a little about your involvement and how you came to love the genres.

KN: My first ever sci fi convention was Destination Star Trek London. I only went because Scott Bakula was there. I was an obsessed Quantum Leap fan. I still am. I made friends online in the forums and we met up at the event. Since then, I’ve done many cons and made amazing friends. We try and meet up as often as possible but we’re all missing each other terribly this year. Covid 19 has put a stop to our antics.

DC: Of course, I’m very much looking forward to the next volume in the Cities in Dust series. Do you have a release date yet, or is this still open? And are you working on anything else in the meantime?

KN: The sequel had to be cut in half as it was such a long book. I’m almost done with it. I imagine it will be released in spring 2021.

DC: I know you live in southeast England. Apart from writing, what else do you enjoy doing?

KN: Being a mum and a carer takes up a lot of my time. I live near the beach which is great. I walk a lot. I find inspiration everywhere. I love people watching. I’m slightly obsessed with interior design. Whenever I can, I head down to Cornwall or Dorset.

DC: Katy, thanks so much for spending this time with us. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

KN: Thank you for reading. Thank you for your support.

• You can learn more about Katy at her website: https://www.katynicholasauthor.com/
• Follow Katy on Twitter at @KatyNDarkQueen
• Buy As the World Falls Down  at

1. Amazon US
2. Amazon UK    
3. Amazon CA     
4. Amazon AU

(other countries search by title & author)

 

To read more of my in-depth author interviews, click here

 

“A Fistful of Dynamite”: Director Sergio Leone’s Overlooked Masterpiece

Fifty-five years ago, in 1964, Italian film director Sergio Leone took the film world by storm with the release of A Fistful of Dollars. In the process, he singlehandedly created the spaghetti western subgenre and established Clint Eastwood as a screen icon. Initially panned by critics in Italy, Fistful nonetheless found a cult following; American critics, on the other hand, got the joke, and the rest is history.

Fast-forward to 1971. After three more westerns (For a Few Dollars More; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; and the glorious, epic, Once Upon a Time in the West) a tired Leone once again took to the dusty hills and arroyos of Andalusia, in southern Spain, to make the final, and most mature, of his western masterpieces.

I’d known of this film for many years, but somehow — despite being a lover of the subgenre — never got around to seeing it until this week, when I found it on Amazon Prime*. If you’re also a Leone fan, I can’t recommend this film highly enough: it’s jaw-dropping, spellbinding, and hugely entertaining.

A meditation on and a critique of both oppression and revolution, the film is visually sumptuous, with many sequences of sheer art — if you’ve seen Once Upon a Time in the West, you’ll get my drift. Coburn and Steiger’s (the latter fresh from In the Heat of the Night) acting is flawless. And Ennio Morricone’s score contributes a perfect, teasing, brilliant counterpoint to the action and the dynamic tension of the film, which balances tongue-in-cheek and sober social commentary.

Set in 1913 during the Mexican Revolution, the film, whose main themes are friendship, the dawning of social conscience, and class struggle, opens with a quote from Chairman Mao**:

“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Enter Rod Steiger as Juan, a raggedy-assed and apparently illiterate Mexican peasant; he soon turns out to be a wily bandit, modeled on the character of Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, with a gaggle of bastard sons for a gang. The first scenes of the film see an increasingly feverish, near-surrealist scene in which Juan is degraded and humiliated by a stagecoach full of rich upper-class Mexicans, who soon get their comeuppance.

As the bandits loot the stagecoach, an explosion up the trail interrupts their business. Moments later, James Coburn appears on a vintage motorcycle from a cloud of dust, very much in the manner of The Man With no Name. The initial face-off between these two is priceless, and Coburn soon reveals himself as Irish Revolutionary John Mallory, a man not to be toyed with on account of the fact that his duster coat is lined with enough dynamite and nitroglycerin to reshape large parts of the landscape.

As the plot develops, the continuing tension between the two protagonists develops into a strong, if unacknowledged friendship, and the initially simple story grows around them. One of the movie’s set-piece scenes, depicting a massacre of revolutionaries by the army, is straight from World War II… as is the German colonel who is the film’s rather surreal antagonist.

The movie’s name went through some interesting changes. In Italy, it was released under the title, “Giú la Testa,” which in English approximates, “Get your head down.” Originally titled, “Duck, you sucker!” in the U.S., the title was later changed to “A Fistful of Dynamite,” to tie in with Leone’s Dollar films. In France, where the film did very well, it was named “Once Upon a Time… the Revolution.”

The genesis of the film was equally tortuous. The screenplay was originally written for Jason Robards and Eli Wallach, who’d respectively starred in Leone’s previous epics, Once Upon a Time in the West, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but ended up with James Coburn and Rod Steiger in the leading roles. Additionally, Leone didn’t want to direct the movie himself, but after three other candidates (Sam Peckinpah was the second) didn’t pan out, and at Steiger’s insistence that Leone direct the movie, he finally acquiesced.

The review site Rotten Tomatoes gives A Fistful of Dynamite 91%. Brilliant, thoughtful, visually rich, and immensely entertaining, this is a film that deserves to be seen.

Are you a fan of Leone’s work? Have you seen this film?

Notes

* You can watch the movie here on Amazon Prime, or buy it here in various formats

** It’s worth mentioning that the Mao quote, along with several scenes, was cut from the initial 1972 release as they were deemed too politically sensitive for U.S. audiences. The film was banned in Mexico until 1979 as offensive to both the people and the Mexican Revolution.

 

The Curiously Personal Nature of Bad Reviews

Whether you’re a writer, plumber, dentist, restaurateur, or a vendor of online goods, sooner or later you’re going to get one or more mean-spirited and stinging reviews. It doesn’t matter an iota whether it’s justified or not: you can write the best book in the world, provide a flawless, customer-centric service, sell the highest quality goods, and you’ll still get them, those snide little one-star jabs out of the blue that drag your perfect five-point-oh average down to a four-point-something or worse.

As a writer, my personal experience is with Amazon. I’ve seen people with scores of four- and five-star reviews receive a one-star review that appears to have zero relevance to the book, or that is factually inaccurate. Occasionally the poster focuses obsessively on some inconsequential detail or scene which has, for whatever reason, sent them off the deep end. Sometimes the reviewer confesses to not reading beyond the first chapters; others, they state they enjoyed the book but the Amazon eBook wouldn’t open on the first try, or a print version arrived in the mail with a creased  cover and because of that they’re giving it one star.

It’s annoying and just plain wrong.

What is very clear though if you look carefully at these outlier reviews of a generally fine product or service, is the very personal nature of them: whereas good reviews are generally thoughtful and clearly phrased to be informative, targeted at potential buyers in a general spirit of helpfulness, the low-grade, plainly nasty review is often aimed as clearly as any poison dart at the service provider, vendor, or, in the case of books, the author. Personally, unequivocally, and with the intent to sting. It’s there for you to read, and is as targeted as a personal letter.

The worst reviews often fall into three categories:

• An intentional attempt by a competitor or rival to damage your product or service
• A mean attack of a personal nature from someone who dislikes you or has an axe to grind
• An issue not with your service or product, but instead the way it was delivered or handled by a third party

In the case of books, it also occasionally happens that person hasn’t taken the trouble to thoroughly read the book description or look at other reviews, and is not in the target audience for the book; instead of owning their shoddy research, they blame the poor author for not writing the book they wanted to read.

There’s no doubt that bad reviews hurt. It is, however, worth remembering that most potential buyers, on researching a product that has overwhelmingly good reviews and just one or two very negative ones, will either entirely dismiss the negatives or take the time to examine them. In many cases, a negative review gives itself away in its tone, or by the obviously incorrect or unfair detail in the text. Readers and buyers aren’t stupid, and while a terrible review may sting, it rarely will hurt the author, vendor, or service provider as much as the poster would like: often, it only makes the poster look stupid, emotionally unstable, or an outright liar.

One thing I always do in the case of these outlier negative reviews is click on the poster’s name. On most sites (Amazon is one), it takes you to a page listing all their reviews. This can be extremely revealing: I’ve more than once found that someone who’s left a nasty one-star review on a book or other product hasn’t posted a single other book review. In other cases, the reviewer gives all books of a particular genre bad reviews. This sort of thing says far more about the reviewer than the product.

Sometimes the list of products the buyer has reviewed reveals a great deal about them as a person, and, in showing us the things they spend their money on, lays bare their interests, even their obsessions, in a way that doesn’t always reflect well on them.

All of us who care about our writing, or the products and services we provide are at some point going to feel the sting of these intentionally unpleasant reviews. My advice is to trust that potential buyers, by now well-experienced in navigating the landscape of the online review ecosystem, are shrewd enough to see through these nasty little missives and not be influenced by them. It’s unfortunately just the way things are, and worrying about it does no good. The best response is to get on with one’s work and put out more good product for that vast majority of readers or clients who appreciate the true worth of your efforts.

Have you been the subject of nasty, personally-targeted reviews? What have you learned from these instances?

“Hands of an Angry God”: My Final Indie Book Recommendation for 2018

I’ve been doing more editing and book production than writing this year, and have been so impressed by the quality of some of the books I’ve worked on that I wanted to bring them to my own readers’ attention.

Douglas Martin’s Hands of an Angry God is the last in this series on exceptional indie novels.

Set in a remote wilderness inn at the start of the American Revolution, Hands of an Angry God is a dark, compelling tale of mystery, suspense, murder and, ultimately, Grace and redemption.

The novel’s protagonist, Dayne, the innkeeper’s eleven-year-old son, does not speak. In the author’s own words, Dayne “withdraws inward in search of voice and a family root, but the cruel death of a brother and repeated emotional failures with his father deepen his isolation. Bitter social and political adversaries trapped by a blizzard snarl the inn with danger and war. A conniving peddler riles all and brings ancient grudge and reckoning.”

Three things make this novel extraordinary, and one I believe you should read.

First, the story is one of the most resonant and visceral I’ve ever read. This is a gut puncher of a book, with fully rounded characters driving the action to its explosive climax in a way that would have made Shakespeare smile.

Second, the author’s depth of knowledge and research of the period renders the story utterly convincing in historical and social detail. And his portrayal of the dangerous wilderness that was upstate New York in 1776 is spellbinding.

Third, Douglas Martin’s writing style is pure prose poetry. His unique use of language, along with the points mentioned above, make this an absolutely unforgettable book.

All that said, this novel is a dark and dense read: if you’re looking for fluffy and happy, it’s probably not for you. But for those who like intense, visceral fiction, and who love to savour unique prose and dialogue that crackles with tension, Hands of an Angry God is a must-read. If, like myself, you enjoy historical fiction as real as it can be, all the better. Here’s a sample:

Dayne rocked back and forth, arms closed tight to his body. The water and woods carried unspoken rhythms, life as it came, yet also unseen spirits, omens and unkind nature. Over recent months ill change crept close along edges of the forest and into his father’s fields. Disturbance, violent upheaval would follow. The arrowhead proved it.

The lonely bird called again and an answer came from dense laurel thickets on the slope across the stream.

Alarmed, Dayne glanced up. His father said Indians sometimes made such sounds and often he ran afraid through fields and forest to escape unseen enemies. He peered uneasy, unsure among barren woods. Only the waterfall, the push of the creek and scratch of windblown leaves on the ground disturbed the quiet.

Dayne placed the arrowhead in his coat pocket. He would hide it in the fields far away from his eyes and thoughts. Cloth and hole covered over he gathered the kitten, turned along the path and crested the upper bank to overlook a narrow knobbed valley.

Scattered crop remnants poked uneven farm fields and a distant road creased wilderness beyond. Forbidding mountains loomed over all, stark and unforgiving, giant bony beasts buried restless and angry in the earth.

You can find the book on Amazon in both eBook and print by clicking here, or on the book’s cover image on this page. I first read it two years ago in draft, and think about it to this day.

That’s probably a wrap for me for the year. As for myself, I’m contemplating starting on a new novel in 2019. Thanks as always for following this blog, and I wish you the happiest of holiday seasons, and all the very best in the coming year.

Dario

 

 

 

The Devil’s Workshop: an interview with author Donnally Miller

When Donnally Miller hired me to copyedit his 400-page Fantasy novel, The Devil’s Workshop, he was partly looking for a reality check. The work had, like far too many terrific books these days, been passed over by scores of agents who would rather go with the standard safe, formulaic garbage. Nothing new there.

Now, freelance editors get a lot of commissions from new writers, and consequently one’s expectations are rather low. But just a few chapters into the edit of this novel, I realized what I was reading was no standard first novel but a polished, utterly compelling work of fiction. Curious, I sent Donn an email asking how long he’d been writing, and he replied, “thirty-five years”.

So what’s it about? Donnally describes his book as

A tragic love triangle set against the background of a ripping pirate yarn.

In a sea tale filled with witches, werewolves, pirates and Indians, there are many scenes of wit and whimsy, and many more of romance and dark intrigue. The main characters, Katie and Tom, have drunk a love potion and are fated for one another, but they have parted, just as a slave rebellion and an Indian war roil the waters and transform the landscape. They will search for one another through many hazards and perils.

And this is just the moment that Crazy Dog and his pirates have chosen to enter the mouth of Cutthroat Bay in search of the giant emerald that is the eye of Maddibimbo the monkey god.

The Devil’s Workshop is a delicious, sprawling, thought-provoking epic Fantasy so well-crafted I can only compare it the work of giants like Fritz Leiber, Gene Wolfe, and Ken Liu. The worldbuilding, character work, and dialogue are on a par with anything that’s ever won the World Fantasy Award. The novel is also replete with profound, humorous, and tragic insights into the nature of love, good and evil, society, power, and human nature.

This was, in short, a book I passionately felt had to be published. I advised Donnally to go indie, and the book is now finally out in the world. I strongly advise that you read it.

Now let’s hear from Donn.

 

DC: Donnally, thanks so much for letting me interview you. I know that you’ve been writing for over three decades now. Tell me a little about your trajectory.

DM: I’ve actually been writing sporadically on and off ever since I was in high school.  My first love was drama.  My mother used to stage abridged versions of Shakespeare’s plays in our backyard when I was growing up.  In college, I spent most of my time at the college theater, working on student productions.  When I got out of college I moved to New York with the intention of becoming an actor.  I also started writing plays at that time.  Acting never worked out, and I eventually had to get a real job, but I never stopped writing plays, I even got a couple of them produced Off Off Broadway, but could never get anything accepted anywhere else.  After many years I thought I’d try fiction, so I turned one of my plays into a novella and tried sending that off, but then again got nowhere.  At that time my wife was working in admissions at a local prep school.  A young man who was helping with their IT saw my wife reading a mystery in her office one day and asked if she’d be interested in reading a story he wrote.  So she read it and brought it home for me to read.  Anyway, she told this young man I was also a writer and he asked if I’d like to join a critique group he was in.  I said sure, why not?  And I started meeting with this critique group which would get together every month at the meetings of the New Jersey Horror Writer’s Association.  So I started trying to write the sort of stories they were writing, and when I wrote some that I thought were pretty good I tried sending them out.  Of course, none of them were ever accepted.  At some point I realized that nothing I wrote was ever going to get accepted anywhere so I thought what the heck, why not try a novel?  I was in my sixties then and I’d never written a novel before, but I was well read; I knew the effect literature could have on a reader and I also knew that nobody making a living writing commercial fiction was having that effect on me, so I thought I’d write the sort of book I liked.  And I did, and it was The Devil’s Workshop.

DC: Donnally, this is a complex, sprawling, epic work. How long did it take you to write?

DM: It took me two years to write, and then six months to revise.

DC: The Devil’s Workshop seems very strongly character-driven. Tell me a little about your process. Did you plot in detail, or just give the characters free rein?

DM: As a reader I can tell the difference between a character who’s been closely observed and inhabited, and one that’s being jerked around to fit the requirements of the plot.  So yes, absolutely, for me it all starts with the characters.  I had no idea of the plot when I began the book.  I don’t care much about plot and I certainly never read a book for the plot.  In fact, till I started researching what agents were looking for, it never occurred to me that anybody would read a novel for the plot.  I’ve seen infants of one or two years, when they get Christmas presents they often get more enjoyment from the box than they do from the gift.  That’s basically how I feel about people that read a book for the plot.  Of course you’re going to ask how can I then avoid plot holes?  But you’ll find that if the characters are acting entirely naturally it is absolutely impossible for plot holes to happen because everything will be motivated by what the characters want.  It’s only artificial plots that have plot holes.

DC: Your dialogue is exceptional, and it absolutely crackles throughout this entire work. How did you get so good at it?

DM: As I said, my first attempts at writing were plays, and I wrote nothing but plays for many years, so I worked hard on dialogue.  Dialogue is the best tool there is for revealing character.  I also had the experience of seeing a couple of my plays produced, and of hearing good actors give readings of my works, even if I had to pay the actors to do it.  There’s nothing that teaches you to write dialog like hearing it acted out.

DC: I know that your father actually compiled dictionaries¹. Tell me a little about that, and whether you feel that influenced your interest in fiction and writing.

DM: My father, George A. Miller, was one of the founders of the so-called cognitive revolution, and was the first person to create an online dictionary.  So I grew up around ideas about cognition and linguistics, and was familiar with Chomskyan linguistics from an early age (along with Shakespeare from my mother’s side).  A lot of the ideas that went into The Devil’s Workshop stem from that, particularly the idea that God is language.  When my father passed away, I had the pleasure of finding some of his early writings that he’d preserved from his college days, and one of them was an uncompleted novel that I’d never known anything about, but that must have meant a lot to him since he held onto it all his life.

DC: What first got you interested in Fantasy?

DM: I think that’s the wrong question.  The real question is why wouldn’t anyone be interested in fantasy?  I know what I was interested in when I was a boy, and I’ve seen my own boys grow up, and I believe that the first stories all people are interested in are fairy tales, fantasy, horror and science fiction.  Many people eventually move on and their tastes change.  Mine never really did.  There was a time in my late teens and early twenties when I started taking myself seriously and decided I should read something different, but even as I grew to love great literature I realized that much of what I loved about it was what Tolkien called an ‘arresting strangeness.’  So my love of fantasy goes hand in hand with my love of all reading.  What I’m not interested in is commercial fiction, including virtually all the fantasy being written today, but that’s because it’s dreck, not because it’s fantasy.

DC: The world in your novel, The Devil’s Workshop, is rich and complex, with a strong Alternate History feel. Did you intentionally craft it as an AH story?

DM: I was drawn to the Caribbean around 1700 because it was such an exotic environment, with pirates, Indians and slaves and I felt it had been underutilized in fantasy, unlike the typical medieval setting.  However, I didn’t want to do research to make it true to the real Caribbean.  I felt the Caribbean of my imagination was sufficient.  So I made up the world of the Coast.  This world clearly has had a classical period like the one in our world (there are references to the Bible and Socrates and so forth), so the idea was that in a world very similar to our own, when Columbus crossed the Atlantic, instead of discovering the New World that he actually discovered, he discovered this fantastical land instead.

DC: The book has a lot of strong philosophical elements and countless, very resonant insights into people. Your character work is remarkable. But I happily had no sense of a writer with an agenda which is, sadly, all too often the case with modern SFF novels. In fact, I’ve spoken to many authors who believe it’s their duty to imbue their fiction with social and political messages. What’s your feeling on this? Should fiction preach or entertain? Or can it do both?

DM: I’m glad you didn’t have that sense.  I would like the reader to be unable to spot the author intruding at any point.  Of course I’m intruding all over the place, but I don’t want to be caught in the act.  As to what fiction should do, I have no clue.  Writers should do whatever they’re interested in doing, but only if they’re able to do it.  You only sense writers with an agenda when they’re clumsy about it.  If they’re good at it, you just take it all in.  Did Orwell have an agenda when he wrote 1984?  You bet.

DC: Who are your favourite authors?

DM: In general, the writers who have taught me what writing is are Cervantes, Swift, Sterne, Fielding, Melville, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.  In the SFF field, Lord Dunsany, R. A. Lafferty, Jack Vance and James Branch Cabell.

DC: I know you’re a great fan of eighteenth century literature. What is it about the period and prose style that so appeals to you?

DM: Three books I discovered in my teens and valued highly were Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.  Of course they’re very different books, but one characteristic of eighteenth century literature is what I would call a devastating lucidity.  The authors of that period had a way of observing the world clearly and describing what they saw with elegance and precision.  For instance, try reading David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature.  If anyone is better at making the most complex, abstract ideas appear simple and understandable, I’m not aware of it. I find the writers of the Enlightenment can bring the world into focus for me, while most writers of today seem more interested in obscuring what they say.  Also, when you’ve been mocked by Swift or Voltaire you have been well and truly mocked.

DC: There’s also a very strong metaphysical element to this work, as the title implies, and supernatural forces have a lot of agency in this novel. Can you talk a bit about that?

DM: As a writer, I try to use words to make the reader feel and understand things that can’t be expressed in words.  I wanted to make the reader feel that the first principles of things, including such concepts as being, substance, essence, time, space, cause, identity, etc. are linked to forces or causes that transcend the powers or the ordinary course of nature.  Any attempt to explain this linkage can only end in failure, but maybe it can be experienced in a story.  I tried to tell a story that would leave readers feeling they live in a universe that is terrifying and inexplicable and at the same time give them a good laugh.

DC: Now The Devil’s Workshop is complete, do you have any future novels planned? Would you return to this world or do something completely different?

DM: No, I don’t.  All the time I was writing this novel I felt inspired, and I’d love to feel that again.  I have started something new.  I’ve written a dynamite first chapter, but I’m having trouble coming up with chapter two.  I’m sure it’ll come to me.  It has nothing to do with the Coast.  I have no plans to return to that world.

DC: Donnally, thanks so much for your time, and I wish you every possible success with this novel. Is there anything you’d like to add?

DM: There’s always something I’d like to add, but I never know what it is till later.  I guess I’d just like to say I hope everybody enjoys the book.

 

The Devil’s Workshop is available here at Amazon in both print and Kindle format. Just do it. 🙂

To learn more about Donnally Miller, The Devil’s Workshop, and the genesis of this novel, visit https://www.donnallymiller.com/

Notes

¹ Donnally Miller’s father’s remarkable online dictionary project can be found at https://wordnet.princeton.edu/  To input a word and utilize the database, just type it into the search box at http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn or click the link in the lefthand sidebar of the site.

 

 

Review: “The House of Shattered Wings” by Aliette de Bodard

The House of Shattered Wings by multiple award-winning author Aliette de Bodard is one of the most unusual and absorbing books I’ve read in years. How unusual? Let me count the ways.

First, it doesn’t categorize easily—and bored as I am with the cookie-cutter offerings from the big houses, this is a huge deal. Although shelved as Fantasy, this book is so much more. It’s Alternate History; it’s a Mystery; it’s a Supernatural Thriller; and it’s most certainly a major Gothic novel.

The story takes place in a late 20^th-century Paris devastated by the Great War that began in 1914—except that in this world the Great War was a supernatural one between warring gangs, or “houses”, of fallen Angels and their human followers. With no clear victor, the conflict has settled into a kind of supernatural Cold War in which the houses spy on and plot against one another in the ruined debris of the once-great city.

In the burnt-out shell of Notre Dame, surrounded by the hopelessly fouled black waters of the Seine, House Silverspires and its leader Selene struggle to maintain the house’s power and place among the others, and in particular to resist Asmodeus, the brutally cruel leader of House Hawthorn. But when the mysterious Vietnamese Immortal Philippe triggers a curse that brings down the deadly power of the Furies against Silverspires, Selene and Madeleine, House Silverspires’ alchemist, find themselves beset on every side. Especially since Madeleine—now perilously addicted to Angel essence—is an escapee from House Hawthorn. Added to all this is the mystery of Philippe’s connection to the Fallen Angel Isabelle, and the strange disappearance of House Silverspires’ founder, Morningstar (aka Lucifer).

De Bodard deploys the full range of her writing skills and inventive audacity in this dense and deeply melancholic novel. There are strong echoes of both Western and Eastern mythologies, of Milton’s Paradise Lost and the underwater Dragon Kingdoms of East Asian folklore. The novel’s characters are real and believable, layered with tragic pasts and complex motivations as they move through their haunted, broken city. Yet even as the action and intrigue—and sometimes horror—ratchet up relentlessly, there is always a vivid sense of remembered splendour and grandeur, a yearning for the vanished beauty and elegance that seems to shimmer just below the surface of the ruined city.

Those familiar with the author’s Obsidian and Blood trilogy will be delighted to discover this new world in what is hopefully—de Bodard seems to be keeping her options open in this standalone work—the first book in a new series. That this book is both darker and more complex is certain, and some may need a few chapters to adjust to its Gothic tone. But this is a powerful novel that sinks deep into the reader’s psyche, taking you into a world so rich and characters so compelling that they linger for months after turning the last page.

Don’t miss it.

Review: “The Grace of Kings” by Ken Liu

I don’t write many reviews. Quite apart from the time investment, few books grab me enough to move me to the pulpit. Of those few, even fewer in recent years have been Epic Fantasy, a genre I view with some wariness for its tendency to never-ending series and faux-Shakespearian dialogue. And as an unapologetic fan of Tolkien, my personal bar—not just for story, but for the level of craft needed to pull off an original work in this genre—is set very high.

So when I heard that multiple award-winning author Ken Liu was embarking on an Epic Fantasy series, I was intrigued. Liu—one of the most extraordinary talents the Science Fiction/Fantasy field has seen in the last several decades—never disappoints. And the fact that the series, named The Dandelion Dynasty, was going to be informed by and draw upon the Chinese Classics suggested this might be something new in a genre which I’ve generally found to be rather disappointing.

Well, “new” doesn’t come close. With The Grace of Kings, standalone first volume in the series, Liu knocks this one out of the ballpark. This isn’t just a terrific book, it’s an important one that comes at the epic tale from a different angle, with an unusual sensibility.

At 640 pages, The Grace of Kings, by the standards of the genre, isn’t a very large book. But the scope of lives, of events, of pure, unalloyed story that takes place here is more than most authors pack into a trilogy.

From the sweeping, cinematic opening scene, the author shows a command of his craft that delights. Like his characters, Liu takes great risks, using narrative techniques and pacings that, in the hands of another, would result in distancing and detachment. Instead, the cumulative effect of Liu’s technique, with its free-ranging viewpoint and delicious digressions as new characters are introduced, feels very close to the oral storytelling tradition at the core of every culture. As night deepens, we gather closer to the fire, listening with rapt attention, fully immersed in a world so real and characters so alive that, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Zelazny’s Amber, it’s impossible to not wholly believe in them.

But Liu gives us more than brave deeds and battles, love and loyalty, passion and betrayal, song and spectacle. From start to finish, and with not infrequent undertones of wry humour, The Grace of Kings is a meditation and commentary on power, and the ways in which that power seduces, drives, corrupts, and (in Liu’s own words) occasionally ennobles. This is a novel that embraces ambiguity and relativism, that makes simple judgments difficult, even impossible. In a world as real as ours, in which “good” actions can bring catastrophic results, and where people, feelings, and loyalties are subject to living, dynamic change, what is right? Who can see around all corners?

Not everyone likes to face ambiguity. For many—including those of a secular bent—the essentially Christian narrative of good and evil is more comforting. The fact that Liu can bring these questions before the reader without for a moment sounding preachy or sacrificing story, wonder, and sheer, breathless adventure is a supreme achievement—and you’d have to be dead to finish this book without asking yourself where certain lines are, or if they indeed exist. And to his credit, even at the very end, Liu never tips his hand, never makes judgments. He respects and trusts his readers to be smart enough to think for themselves.

But, you ask, what’s the book about? Well, here’s the sketchiest summary:

The islands of Dara, a sprawl of historically strife-torn, warring nations, are finally at peace. But that peace has been dearly bought: under the iron rule of the Emperor Mapideré, clans are split, families are divided, and men throughout Dara are forced by corvée to work for years at a time on the emperor’s monumental projects, often never to see their families again.

Against this backdrop of totalitarian brutality, a series of small events started by minor players—a corvée gang leader trying to save his skin by faking an outlandish prophecy; a wily, charismatic tavern rat named Kuni Garu; and the vengeful giant, Mata Zyndu, grim heir of a noble clan expropriated by the emperor—escalates by degrees into an armed uprising.

Before long, Kuni and Mata, now allies close as brothers, find themselves and their trusted followers at the forefront of a revolution that breaks the empire apart. But as their power grows, so does the complexity of the politics and the influence of their advisors and generals, paving the way for miscalculations, misunderstandings, and treachery.

And the players in Dara are not only human. The fractious gods and goddesses of this ancient land have their own designs, and are not above taking on human form to help their favourites in the power struggle unfolding in the human realm.

As upheaval grips this land of nobles and peasants, rascals and heroes, exotic creatures and wildly imaginative silkpunk technologies, Liu delights us with a cast of unforgettable characters, among whom Jia Matiza, a skilled herbalist and Kuni’s wife; Gin Mazoti, a female street urchin who rises to become the world’s greatest military commander; Luan Zya, a brilliant adventurer and Kuni’s master strategist; Kindo Marana, a tax collector reluctantly placed in command of an army; the Lady Risana, a clever illusionist and Kuni’s consort; and Gitré Üthu, the magic book of knowledge that writes itself, given to Luan by a mysterious teacher.

In conclusion, The Grace of Kings is a book whose audience extends far beyond the traditional readership for Epic Fantasy, a must-read for anyone who enjoys a great story.

Now where’s book Two?

___________

Full disclosure: I was a beta reader of an early draft of this novel, and also the editor/publisher of Liu’s award-nominated novella, The Man Who Ended History (in the 2011 Panverse Three anthology from Panverse Publishing).