Paleontologist Anthony Martin

I want to share the music I wrote this story to, because both songs are generally excellent – both have particular “moments” where I hear them in the story, but that’s just me:

• Part 1 (Sections 1, 2, 3): “New World In My View” by King Britt & Sister Gertrude Morgan

I got the new world in my view
On my journey I pursue
I said I’m running, running for the city
I got the new world in my view

• Part 2 (Sections 4, 5): “Yawny At The Apocalypse” by Andrew Bird

photo by Roy Toft

I was born in the Warren, and the Warren was all I knew. Both my mother and father were Meers. We go back to the founders. My father was very proud of our ancestry, but he was also very ill. He talked about forging tunnels and building walls and digging rooms for more families, more, when of course the Warren was already finished, and there was no more concrete to dig a new space out of. The rooms had been split as small as they could go without forcing adults to stoop, without making stretching out to sleep completely impossible. Babies were being suffocated, usually under older children, sometimes under their parents. The tunnels had become so narrow that we could only pass through one by one, and even then we had to dodge laundry from the overhead apartments, and falling garbage bags, and other things that people decided they just didn’t have room for. I guess before Warrens get finished – get carved up into this Swiss cheese honeycomb as far and as dense as they can go – people have high expectations of how it will turn out. I’ve seen my father’s sketches. There is an order there that is inhuman, it is so exacting. My mother used to say that in a Warren, you eventually lose control. I don’t just mean the jealous lovers that beat each other’s heads against the floor, or the men we kids used to call trenchcoat nasties. I mean you lose control of the Warren.

What ended up tying it together was the concept of the Kowloon Walled City.

My story, “Pugelbone,” was based on a dream I had while I was on a train to Chengdu in China earlier this year.  Not sure if any of that has come out in the story, but perhaps.  Like my other ChiZine story, “Intertropical Convergence Zone,” this is kind of sociopolitico-horror.  ChiZine will publish it in the October-December issue.

It had to be a ghost. Maybe she’d been a babysitter like Kris, some hundred years ago. Maybe she’d been Dutch. A prison nurse. Someone cruel. And maybe something horrible had happened to her, something that earned her such a nasty name. Maybe she lost her legs in an accident. Maybe they had to sew on a pair of goat legs as rudimentary prosthetics….

Entire issue here (PDF).

Just my story, “Red Goat, Black Goat,” online.

FYI: “Black Goat” translated into Indonesian is “Kambing Hitam,” which also means “scapegoat.”  It’s a variation on “Black Sheep.”

Title is from the Death in June song “Red Dog Black Dog,” which obviously served as some inspiration here.

“Everything Dies Baby” is now live at Strange Horizons.

Besides the Bruce Springsteen song “Atlantic City,” I’d also like to point to “Behind Closed Doors,” the brilliant episode of Air Crash Investigation that spawned this story.

Put your makeup on

Fix your hair up pretty

And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

Here are some sample titles from Mr. Hely’s version of the New York Times best-seller list, which is mimicked with particular glee: “Cumin: The Spice That Changed the World,” “Indict to Unnerve,” “The Jane Austen Women’s Investigators Club” and “Sageknights of Darkhorn.” The list also includes a sci-fi novel with the following synopsis: “In a post-nuclear future inhabited by intelligent cockroaches, Lieutenant Cccyxx discovers there was once a race of sentient humans.”

At the risk of shamelessly cannibalizing Mr. Hely’s humor, here are a few more. Sample military adventure title: ‘Talon of the Warshrike.” Sample writerly process: the author of “Warshrike” explains that he got a plot idea while in Venice with his ex-wife; while on a night cruise he looked back at the city and thought, ‘What if somebody blew this place up?’” Finally and most lovably, there is this suspenseful moment from a brisk novel in which a president of the United States is warned about a national security crisis: “Sir, how much do you know about outer space?”

That novel of Pete’s is “The Tornado Ashes Club.” It involves a grandson who fulfills his grandmother’s wish to find a tornado into which she can throw the ashes of her long-lost lover, Luke, who appears in a young, handsome incarnation during the book’s picturesquely European World War II flashbacks. “Use words to describe old ladies that make them sound beautiful (graceful, regal, etc.),” Pete tells himself about pitching his story to a book-buying audience. He also concocts many other rules, like a dictum to dream up highway scenes “making driving seem poetic and magical” in order to tap into the audiobooks market. (Most audiobooks are listened to in cars.)

He crosses paths with a businessman who has been inspired by a self-help book called “Caesar, CEO: Business Secrets of the Ancient Romans” and thus refers to a rival company as Carthage; a drab, well-known literary figure who teaches a writing class (“For ease and accuracy I’ll call her SpaghettiHair HamsterFace,” Pete says) and an editor who makes sadly apt notes about Pete’s manuscript. “Does a dying deer really smell faintly of cinnamon?” she inquires. “You use the word sallow four times, and I’m not sure you ever use it right.”

“Lake Tahoe’s Lover” is now up at Fantasy Magazine!  It’s been waiting there for a year, but I still love this story.  A little more romantic/whimsical than most of what I write, but blame it on the Hudson River and my best friend’s old lake house that I used to spend summer weekends at growing up.  I love the picture they chose to accompany it.  Exactly how I pictured the lake (except with a few less trees).

Actually, I’ve never been to Lake Tahoe.  But I think it’s a lovely name for a lake.

Little fish. Big fish. Swimming in the water.
Come back here, man. Gimme my daughter.

- PJ Harvey

I’m not sure he’s getting the point – at least as I understand it – of magical realism.  For me, magical realism (and a lot of spec fic in general) has always been about acknowledging the reality of the unexplained.  It creeps into so much (read: everything) of what I write because I feel like I’ve felt angker, or creeped out, by things that I can’t explain – especially when I lived in Indonesia.  Which is why I prefer the term speculative to fantasy – fantasy implies that it’s not real.

Still, it’s a cute little interview.