Babel Clash

Paul’s posted links to the videos he took from our Borders event in Boston, but here’s the actual embed of the discussion section. Morgan, thanks again for having us, and I’ll hopefully have the podcast of the NYC event by tomorrow.

(My little moment of ego-bo after a long, hard day and a lecture at MIT. Paul and David have been awfully patient with this, given that any one of us could be featured on that poster.)

Tomorrow night at the Borders on Boylston Street, David Anthony Durham, Paul Tremblay, and I will be reading and discussing fantasy, as well as signing our books. As I usually do if I am in a city a day early, I stopped by the store and talked to the manager. There’s a nice poster in the window and a lovely display of the books inside. A tough act to follow, in that Ken Burns spoke there recently, but as I told the manager I think we’ll have a good crowd. One thing about social media–tools like Facebook really help writers identify fans and keep them up-to-date on readings and signings.

We’re going to read in a kind of interesting order, going from strange noir to noir-fantasy, to pure fantasy–so Paul, me, and then David. It should be an interesting progression, and we’ll then talk about weird fiction, open it up to questions, and sign. So if you’re in the area, come on out and lend your support. It’s always a privilege to get a signing like this one, and it’s important to support bookstores willing to host events.

And don’t forget: Geoff Manaugh, Jeffrey Ford, and I will be reading at the Columbus Circle Borders in New York City around 5pm on Saturday, Nov. 21st–as well as talking about cities real and unreal with Beatrice.com’s Ron Hogan. Jon Armstrong will be there to podcast, and hopefully we’ll be able to post that audio on Babel Clash.

So…while we count down the hours until our reading in Boston, here’s a question: what’s the best reading you’ve ever seen?

So I’ve finally made it to New York City, to start the East Coast part of my book tour. I’ve done about 11 events so far, and have seen highs of 75 in attendance and 15 in attendance, averaging about 40 to 50, which is excellent. More importantly, people seem to be responding both to Finch and my writing book, Booklife. At the 15 person event, every single attendee bought at least one book, some of them two. It’s been great.

This week, I’m reading with David and Paul at Borders in Boston on Friday, November 20 at 7:00, something I’m really looking forward to, and then at the Borders at Columbus Circle in New York City at 5:00 on Saturday, November 21, with Geoff Manaugh and Jeffrey Ford, moderated by Beatrice.com’s Ron Hogan.

The New York event will mostly focus on cities real and unreal, given that Manaugh is the author of the exploration of real cities, BLDGBLOG Book, from Chronicle. But we’ll also discuss the topic at the Boston event.

Where does the imagination take over? How dependent is a fantastical place on a real place? Which real cities have been overused as the basis for fantasy fiction, and which might prove to be a rich source of inspiration but haven’t been used as much? And, in a truly large and ancient metropolis, isn’t it just possible that we find a kind of fantastical element lurking beneath the surface anyway? (I’m thinking of Prague, for example.)

More on these events in the coming days.

I just spent today driving up from Los Angeles to Monterey, along the coastal CA-1 North route. In the morning, the light was thin and wane. By mid-day, clouds had occluded the sun and made the light murky. Early afternoon brought a sunshine that illuminated everything like a painting by Turner, making each landscape around each bend stand out in sharp relief. By late afternoon, a richness had invaded those same landscapes as the sun began to set.

Just driving through these amazing coastal settings, let alone stopping alone the way, has already inspired all kinds of thoughts for future stories. The texture, the way the scrub and earth pick up richness and lose it, the verdigris of undergrowth racing down the side of mountains, the stark boldness of the blue sea, the fireworks explosions of golden reeds appearing between tufts of dull green grass and stunted trees–all of this combined with the variety of sea smells, the kelp and shells and sand black and light on the beaches almost overwhelms the mind, but also fortifies it.

Whether it’s characters or settings or something else entirely, I know this drive through unfamiliar territory will crop up in my fiction. It brings to mind as well something the writer Jon Courtney Grimwood said on a panel once, about having to visit a place in order to write about it. This may be true of novels set in real locations, but it’s also true of fantasy novels. Today, I picked up a hundred different entry points to story.

For anyone reading who creates things, whether stories or something more physical–what kinds of catalysts spark your imagination?

So, I’m in the middle of this five-week book tour—actually typing this in a Starbucks in Murrietta CA before heading back to Los Angeles—and one thing I’ve been talking about at the readings is the relationship between fantasy and reality.

Like, there is one. Like, it’s often autobiographical. And much of the time, reviewers and readers seem to pass over that element. Sometimes it’s so obvious you can’t help but remark on it–see Glen Cook’s Black Company series, which is clearly based on Vietnam experiences. And, on a panel at World Fantasy last week, David Drake talked about how his fiction was actually therapy for his war-time experiences, on one level.

Most of the time it’s not that clear-cut, though. China Mieville might express Marxist philosophy in his novels, but autobiography? Hard to tell.

But the subject resonates with me for a few reasons. First, I don’t think fantasy unconnected to the real world, and thus real people to some degree, is worth a darn. It becomes insular, self-referential, and dead on the page.

Second, when I wrote City of Saints and Madmen, I used a lot of details about the real world that were repurposed, from events in Byzantine history. What I found is that readers tended to think the real stuff was made up–proving, to some degree, that the real world is as absurd and fantastical in its way as anything we writers can dream up.

Third, my last two novels, including now Finch, have been pretty autobiographical. Shriek: An Afterword, my bold foray into territory most core genre readers looked at with a kind of “WTF” gaze, used events from my life and my family’s life as the catalyst for a story rife with unreliable narrators and harbingers of coming apocalyptic mushroom doom.

Finch, on the other hand, re-imagines my city of Ambergris as half Paris during the Nazi occupation and part Iraq under our own. It allows me to express some depth of emotion or feeling about events in the real world. At the same time, it includes autobiography: a scene in which the detective John Finch must crawl through the passageways of many lashed together boats is evocative of a similar thing that happened to me while on tour in Romania.

Does it matter if the reader sees that? No. But it’s because it’s taken from the real world, has the texture of the real world, that the scene has some deeper resonance.

I think reclaiming autobiography and real world events for fantasy is important, because it puts the lie to the claims of naysayers who think of fantasy as something frivolous, something purely whimsical–the make-believe of children who haven’t grown up. Well, sometimes that make-believe comes with SCUD missiles and a war-torn city. Sometimes it comes with deep human connection and mis-connection. Sometimes it’s coming at you from right around the corner.