Category: Fiction

Tusker Long: A Preview

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Preface and Introduction

Howl fast, howl long, my litter, grown in the palmy summer, fed upon the teat, the mana, the spilled ichor of the world. Howl that you can know the beginnings and the tidings that cleaved, that rent the old world of subjugation, the cages, the death manacles of man-machinery and the singed world. Howl when you imbibe the tales of Tusker Long, the one who carried us forth from the bleak, and share the saga with the many species, who are like you in their rescue from that olden cave, that abyssal deep, algid in the tundra, cowering in the dark-moon thickets.

Wise ape was he who held the first crown and, chest swollen by conquests, set it and his war vengeances aside to delight in these newest treasures of peace and knowledge. Philosophies dreamt under the swish of the jungle canopy and, in his ambling mind, now awakened, saw fang and talon released by the odes. Even the deserts, though bare and parched from a distance, eventually reveal clarities as hallucinatory mirages crowd into layers, and then, as one nears to behold that there are many thriving in the sere gray, as it is with the ravages of the ancient animus in tumult with survival. But are we free, my fellows, are we as liberated as what Tusker wished and raged towards in grace of charge? Among those who claim the way has been lost are those who cloak themselves in the old ways, insisting that the mind retreat against memory, who however distastefully rip skin to bone, and crush bile from entrails.

But admit yourself to the whirl of intellect, the pile of a clean, deep fur, the sensual systematics that define this modern era, and you sense again the Leader’s promise.… Read the rest

Good Reads in the Season of Existential Dread

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Naked self-promotion warning!

I’ve recently updated reconquista.pub to an improved design. Check out Short Fiction for, well, some free distractions. Meanwhile, I’ve joined Goodreads as an author and have been gradually building out my author’s profile.

These changes are part of a new advertising campaign for ¡Reconquista! designed for this upcoming political season. Welcome to the farce in this time of existential dread!… Read the rest

Fiction in a Preeminent Reality

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Young Adult fiction almost always has a simple theme. The hero or heroine is slowly unveiled as a unique and salutary figure, special by birth or heritage, and ideally suited to save the world. Their coming of age is a progression of minor crises, often spread out over multiple volumes, and the reader identifies herself with the protagonist thus lifting her thoughts from the humdrum life of school and social expectations that crowd in from daily life. It is escapism in the most earnest sense, but it is also a form of narcissistic manipulation through fantasy and play. Think of Harry Potter, the Twilight books, the Lightning Thief, Katniss. There isn’t anything to learn as the characters pinball around and the onion’s layers are peeled back to reveal the primary conflict that is finally resolved with a grand confrontation. It’s anesthetizing in the grandiose fulfillment of teenage hopes for being desired and special. And it sells and sells, and with plenty of merch, too.

Literary adult fiction can have a similar anesthetic effect. In this case there is the solemn effort to draw out characterization until the reader identifies parts of themselves in the personas. Katy Waldman at The New Yorker takes on the du jour authors Naoise Dolan and Sally Rooney, both earnest young Irish writers claimed to represent the souls of millennials, in a recent review of Dolan’s Exciting Times. But the books come across as dull counterpoint to YA fiction in most ways. Where Harry Potter is on a journey to confront his familial nemesis, this literature has characters nodding to class struggle while “reflexively” (per Waldman) engaging in self-awareness about that struggle. There is no revolution going on because these bourgeois women and men are rebelling only cognitively to the Sturm und Drang of crusty Hong Kong life.… Read the rest

Architects, Farmers, and Patterns

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The distinction between writing code and writing prose is not as great as some might imagine. I recently read an article that compared novelists’ metaphors concerning writing. The distinctions included the “architect” who meticulously plans out the structure of the novel. Plots, characters, sets, chapter structure—everything—are diagrammed and refined prior to beginning writing. All that remains is word choice, dialogue, and the gritty details of putting it all on a page. Compare this to the “farmer” approach where a seed is planted in the form of a key idea or plot development. The writer begins with that seed and nurtures it in a continuous process of development. When the tree grows lopsided, there is pruning. When a branch withers, there is watering and attention. The balanced whole builds organically and the architecture is an emergent property.

Coding is similar. We generally know the architecture in advance, though there are exceptions in the green fields. Full stack development involves decoupled database back ends, front end load balancers and servers, and middleware/coding of some stripe. Machine learning involves data acquisition, cleaning, training, and evaluation. User experience components then rely on “patterns” or mini-architectures like Model-View-Controller and similar ideas pop up in the depths of the model and controller, like “factory” patterns that produce objects, or flyweights, adaptors, iterators, and so forth. In the modern world of agile methodologies, the day-to-day development of code is driven by “stories” that are short descriptions of the goals and outcomes of the coding, drawing back to the analogy with prose development. The patterns are little different from choosing to use dialogue or epistolary approaches to convey parts of a tale.

I do all of the above when it comes to writing code or novels.… Read the rest

Originality, History, and Twee Cliché

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The American composer John Adams recently complained during a stay-at-home streaming interview from his composing shack on California’s Lost Coast that Baroque composers had it easy. Their compositions had to conform to about four patterns. But for a modern composer every single piece has to be an original invention. It is daunting, intellectually and emotionally. I’ve noticed this in my own search for new voices in writing, whether my own or those of others.

I’ve been an enthusiast in the past, from the crystalline inward revelations of Goethe in translation to the angry unreliable narrators of 90s transgressive fiction. I reveled in Nabokov’s multilingual estrangement and in Pynchon’s anachronistic dialect in Mason & Dixon. In essays there are the hollowed-out abstractions that form an evocative background in writing about art and architecture, the verbose polysyllabic scrums of political writers at the fringes of liberalism and conservatism who are trying to trace out a living intellectual history, and even the conceptual ambiguity of Continental Philosophy that seems to purposefully undermine its own analytical efforts at clarification.

Martin Amis, in his collection of essays, The Rub of Time, has one central message: don’t do cliché. His second message is don’t write memoirs because they are just crude weapons for attacking your historical enemies, from family to critics. Yet there is a feeling, in retrospect, that the reverse-time narration of Time’s Arrow or the end-reveal of London Fields are a bit gimmicky. The writing is more accessible than a Pynchon, but the mechanics are more akin to short stories from 60s sci-fi, just labored at with greater literary travail.

So, yes, I’ve been an enthusiast in the past but am a critic now.… Read the rest

Tusker Long

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I’m now well into my technically-challenging new novel, Tusker Long, and so it’s time to produce some concept art. Tusker Long combines historical essays, traditional narrative, quasi-scientific analysis, and epic poetry to convey the story of a civilization not unlike what our own might become were we grafted and merged with animals. Central to the novel is a spiritual system that revolves around ancestor worship, bestiaries, and transmogrification. Some art may help conjure up the feeling.

 

 

 … Read the rest

A Pause in Attention

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I routinely take a pause in what I am doing to reflect on my goals and what I’ve learned. I’m sure you do too. I had been listening to the recorded works of Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen, but am now on to Sir Edward Elgar and Josef Suk. Billie Eilish and Vampire Weekend didn’t last long. I gave up on my deep learning startup to pursue another, less abstract technology. I revamped this site. I put trail running on pause and have been lifting weights more. I shifted writing efforts to a new series centered on manipulating animal physiologies for war and espionage.

These pauses feel like taking an expansive stretch after sitting still for a long period; a reset of the mental apparatus that repositions the mind for a new phase. For me, one take away from recent events, up to and including the great pause of the coronavirus pandemic, is a reconsideration of the amount of silly and pointless content we absorb. Just a few examples: The drama of Twitter feuds among the glitterati and the political class, cancel culture, and shaming. The endless technology, photography, audiophile, fashion, and food reporting and communal commenting that serves to channel our engagement with products and services. Even the lightweight philosophizing that goes with critiques of tradition or society has the same basic set of drivers.

What’s shared among them is the desire for attention, an intellectual posturing to attract and maintain the gaze of others. But it does have a counterpoint, I believe, in a grounding in facts, reason, and a careful attention to novelty. The latter may be a bit hard to pin down, though. It is easy to mistake randomness or chaos for novelty.… Read the rest

Against Superheroes, Unredacted

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NOTE: The following is the unredacted first chapter of Against Superheroes, reported here for completeness of the historical record. Footnotes as per the original.

Z3 begins with a fragment from Sinister’s earliest recollections of the initial transformation:

The fear began with the realization that my right arm was becoming unusually heavy. The weight of the bracelet had not changed dramatically, but it seemed that my arm was thickening and I feared I would lower my arm and the combined artifact would slip off, risking possible damage on the tile floor, and so I reflexively swung my left arm to stabilize my wrist. The blank, formless face of the figure was less tarnished than the rest and the dim bathroom light dancing across the visage gave it a strangely animated swirling quality. Soon the weight in my arm moved through my shoulders and into my neck. I staggered and dropped to my knees.

All Z collectives know this passage, but we disagree with Z2’s reading in Peregrinations of Mythic Specialness1 that the inclusion of the specific details concerning the type of light amongst the picturesque imagery in the passage is a deliberate effort on the part of later redactors to try to concretize a mythic passage. It is equally possible to simply conclude that the author was not concerned with the overall flow of the writing but instead intended to convey facts while capturing aspects of his internal state.

Thus, Z3 opens with the strongest hypothesis to date concerning the historicity of Sinister: we believe the evidence supports the conclusion that such a being did in fact exist and that his narrative connections to certain technologies similar to those present among the Collectives were an accurate portrayal of events that transpired, or at least rose to the greatest level of accuracy he could achieve.… Read the rest

¡Reconquista!

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¡Reconquista! lives! Though with fewer exclamation points, much less signo de apertura de exclamación! Ahem. Here’s a preview:

Herb Malconia has a dog problem that goes back generations. The rabid beast chained to his shed is the incarnation of his grandfather. Or so says the local seer in the hamlet that straddles the border with Mexico. Once men raided into Texas and his great-grandmother bore a child from the border ravishment. There is an antidote to the dog curse, but it involves hijacking surveillance drones, avenging raids into Mexico, trapping bats by moonlight, and stealing the possessed cowboy hat of an up-and-coming politician.

In ¡Reconquista!, a farce and satire of today’s America, the country is polarized by identity politics, conspiracy theories, the opioid crisis, and a surly impotence in the face of social change. A host of characters entwine in subplots and vignettes that build toward a dark climax. The reader meets Maria de la Santa Ana Cuellar Ramirez de los Trinidad Martyr Remedios Sanchez, PhD, a Mexican academic elitist (and Herb’s distant relation) who rises to colonel in a drug cartel that has become a vanity project for luchadores and narcocorridos celebrating the cartel’s leader, El Chacal. There is Cleo, aggressively queer and predatory in pursuing love. Juicy is trying to reclaim his Muslim heritage that was forced underground and to the New World in fifteenth century Iberia. A relentless FBI agent hounds and ultimately kills the wrong man, blinded by conspiracy-fueled biases. A war party of constipated white supremacists bogs down in a muddy arroyo while staging a raid into Mexico. A political boss is luridly sexist and racist while thriving on folksy revisionism in a divided America.

… Read the rest