Meme

Saw this on Elizabeth Bear’s LJ.

Pick up the nearest book to you.
Turn to page 45.
The first sentence describes your sex life in 2012.

“Yes,” I say with dignity, “I’ve been through a great deal.”

- Zoo City, Lauren Beukes

BRB Slaying Dragons

I have an addictive personality. For Christmas, I got The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Needless to say, I’ve put in a lot of hours on the game in the past week.

It’s a pretty great game – a big open world with some gorgeous environments, and so, so much content to explore. You can’t go a few minutes in the wild without stumbling across another cave, fortress or ruin. And then there are the random encounters with thieves, bandits, wild animals, and, of course, dragons. It has more content than you could see in a single play through, thanks to the choices you get in parts of the game, and a lot of dynamically generated stuff that means you’ll often run into something a little different – enemies that happen to come upon you at the same time might wind up fighting each other as much as they do you.

I’ve barely scratched the main storylines, preferring to see out a lot of the side content first. This game could keep me busy for weeks to come.

Read in 2011

• Scott Pilgrim 1-6 – Bryan Lee O’Malley
• Superman: Red Son – Mark Millar
• The Empire of Ice Cream – Jeffrey Ford
• The Dark Knight Returns – Frank Miller
• Against All Things Ending – Stephen R Donaldson
• The Crippled God – Steven Erikson
• Empire State – Jason Shiga
• A Game of Thrones – George RR Martin (reread)
• Only Revolutions – Mark Z Danielewski
• A Clash of Kings – George RR Martin (reread)
• How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe – Charles Yu
• A Storm of Swords – George RR Martin (reread)
• A Feast for Crows – George RR Martin (reread)
• A Dance with Dragons – George RR Martin
• Dune – Frank Herbert
• The White-Luck Warrior – R Scott Bakker
• The Troika – Stepan Chapman

A year with lots of epic fantasy, the highlight being Martin’s A Dance with Dragons. Overall, though, my favourite out of these has to be The Troika – I can’t resist something so inventive and different.

Hello 2012

The Troika

Stepan Chapman’s The Troika is brilliant. A surreal fantasy about a twisted family – an old mexican woman, Eva; a Jeep, Alex; and a Brontosaurus, Naomi, travelling together across an endless desert. It’s engaging and wildly inventive, a book of layered dreams and delusions, featuring guardian angels, fiddler-crab cops, Plasma Wars, and insanity.

Published by the Ministry of Whimsy Press in 1997, it is unfortunately pretty hard to find a copy of these days. And that’s a damn shame.

Here’s a taste.

I know that what I did was wrong and futile. But I’ll make it up to you, Eva. I’ll take you to a quiet little cemetary. We’ll be happy there, among the tombs and the cedars. The snow will bury us for the winter. No one will disturb us. I have a plan. I shall amplify and elaborate you beyond your wildest dream of yourself. With my forceps, clamps, and bone saws, I will inlay your ribs with mercury and thread seashell copper spirals through your thigh bones. I will microtome your shoulder blades and spread them fanwise into angel wings. Disdiscovering physiology, disinventing dissection, I shall dilate your tissues into a gradually expanding cosmos of flesh. At first, none of the work will make sense to us. But I have my reasons. In spring, we’ll burst up through the melting snow, machine and flesh merged, machine forests, flesh cathedrals. So descend, my laser lamp. Set free your razor brilliance. Slice and peel, fold my love into origami, crown her with pulmonary flowers, and let slender bronchial vines wreathe the brow of my dead bride. For then I may brush back her raven-dark hair with a mermaid’s comb, just so, like the dark of the moon. Dear dead Eva, my only friend, this is all as it is meant to be.

Things

• The World Fantasy Awards were given out at this year’s World Fantasy Convention a little over a week ago, with Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death taking the Best Novel prize – another one I’d been meaning to add to my pile. Full results on the official site here.
• I read one issue of Electric Velocipede (issue 12, Spring 2007) before picking up another novel. I guess I’ll slip these old zines in between my other reading instead of all at once.
  I have two more Velocipedes left. Digging through my cupboard yielded 7 issues of Weird Tales (4 or 5 unread) from 2007 and 2008, one HP Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror (think it came free with a Weird Tales), and the Bull Spec from last year.
• Jeff & Ann VanderMeer have started a new online publication, Weird Fiction Review, with all sorts of great, weird content, that’s well worth checking out.
  Right now there’s a bit of a focus on the VanderMeers’ new anthology, THE WEIRD: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Stories, which collects over 100 years of weird fiction, including works in translation some of which have never before been published in English.

Overdue zine catch-up

I’m not sure why, but I’ve always found it easier to pick up a novel than read short stories. This has led, unfortunately, to collections in my to read pile tending to linger longer, and the few magazines I’ve bought over the years going unread.

I’ve had subscriptions to a couple of magazines in the past – Weird Tales and Electric Velocipede – but only got about halfway through the issues before I stopped finding the time. I know there is a lot of good writing I’m missing in the field of shorter work.

So, a few years late, I’m catching up. Before I move onto another novel I’m going through the unread issues, which are from around 2007-2009, along with one issue of Bull Spec I bought last year after seeing a recommendation.

Who knows, maybe I’ll enjoy it enough to try another subscription, and not waste it.