I use some surrealist techniques in the Literary Techniques for Genre Fiction class. Check it out if you're interested in adding more depth or texture to your writing.I’ve been carrying this book around since days in Baltimore, when my ex gave it to me as a Valentine. It came in a charming little boxed set complete with temporary tattoo. Nowadays I have several real tattoos but I still draw on this book, particularly for the Literary Techniques in Speculative Fiction class.
What:Surrealist Games, compiled and presented by Alastair Brotchie is a compedium of games played by members of the Surrealist movement along with illustrations and surrealist quotes. Games include echo poems, provocations, and oral description of objects perceived by touch.
Who: Any writer is the better for a little dose of surreality from time to time, and any forays into the book will yield a few interesting phrases at the least, or perhaps even a whole new mind.
Why: Read it to find some writing games that you can play solo or with similarly-verbally-minded friends. Read it for the equivalent of a poetic whack upside the head. Read it for the creative sparks flung out by its pages.
When: Read it at a time dictated by the roll of a die or the motions of a lizard on the wall.
Where and how: Graze through the pictures and see what inspiration leaps from the paper to your brain. Don’t treat it like a manual, working your way through game 1, game 2, game so on. Instead, let it fall open and see where chance takes you.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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An Armload of Fur and Leaves
In the last year or so, I found a genre that hadn’t previously been on my radar, but which I really enjoy: furry fiction. Kyell Gold had put up his novel Black Angel on the SFWA member forums, where members post their fiction so other members have access to it when reading for awards, and I enjoyed it tremendously. The novel, which is part of a trilogy about three friends, each haunted in their own way, showed me the emotional depth furry fiction is capable of and got me hooked. Accordingly, when I started reviewing for Green Man Review, I put out a Twitter call and have been working my way through the offerings from several presses.
Notable among the piles are the multiplicity by T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, and two appear in this armload. Clockwork Boys, Clocktaur War Book One (Argyll Productions, 2017) is the promising start to a fantasy trilogy featuring a lovely understated romance between a female forger and a paladin, while Summer in Orcus (Sofawolf Press, cover and interior art by Lauren Henderson) is aimed at younger readers and will undoubtedly become one of those magical books many kids will return to again and again, until Vernon is worshipped by generations and prepared to conquer the world. Honestly, I will read anything Kingfisher/Vernon writes, and highly recommend following her on Twitter, where she is @UrsulaV.
Huntress by Renee Carter Hall (Furplanet), which originally appeared in 2015, and whose title novella was nominated in the 2014 Ursa Major Awards and Cóyotl Awards, is a collection of novella plus several shorter stories. I’d love more in this fascinating and thought-provoking world, particularly following the novella’s heroine, the young lioness Leya, and the sisterhood of the huntresses, the karanja.
Always Gray in Winter by Mark J. Engels (Thurston Howell Publications, October, 2017) demonstrates one of the difficulties with furry fiction, which is the reader’s uncertainty where to site the fact of furry characters, primarily whether to take them as a given or have some underlying science to it, such as bio-modified creatures. Here Pawly is a were-cat, but the unfamiliar reader is forced to spend so much time figuring out whether this is something people take for normal or not that the story sometimes gets confusing, and with multiple POV shifts, the reader keeps having to re-orient themself. It’s tight, sparse military SF that readers familiar with the conventions of the genre will find compelling, entertaining, and quickly paced; newer readers may find themselves floundering a bit.
The Furry Future, edited by Fred Patten (Furplanet, 2015) is a solid and entertaining anthology that showcases how widely ranging the stories that use the rationale behind the existence of anthropomorphic beings as part of the narrative can be. Authors in the collection include Michael H. Payne, Watts Martin, J. F. R. Coates, Nathanael Gass, Samuel C. Conway, Bryan Feir, Yannarra Cheena, MikasiWolf, Tony Greyfox, Alice “Huskyteer” Dryden, NightEyes DaySpring, Ocean Tigrox, Mary E. Lowd, Dwale, M. C. A. Hogarth, T. S. McNally, Ronald W. Klemp, Fred Patten, and David Hopkins with illustrations by Roz Gibson and cover art by Teagan Gavet. This book is one that scholars writing about furry fiction will want to be including on their reading lists for reasons including its focus, its authors, the snapshot of the current furry fiction scene that it provides, and the variety of approaches to anthropomorphic body modification.
Along with the furry fiction, I wanted to point to an indie humorous horror collection that is one of the most specifically themed I have yet encountered, Ill Met by Moonlight by Gretchen Rix (Rix Cafe Texican, 2016), which features evil macadamia nut trees, including “Macadamias on the Move,” “Ill Met by Moonlight,” and “The Santa Tree” in a lovely sample of how idiosyncratic a sub-sub-niche can get. The production values of this slim little book show what a nice job an indie can do with a book and include a black and white illustration for each story.
Ammonite is beautifully real, and a good example of the heights speculative fiction can reach.Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith, is subtle and beautiful and a terrific piece of speculative fiction. An anthropologist, Marghe Taishan, arrives on the planet GP, there to test a vaccine against the deadly virus that has killed all but a few of the original colonists. She finds that the survivors, all women, have developed the ability to give birth without men.
The book won both a Lambda and Tiptree Award, and it’s easy to see why. A dynamite protagonist interacting with intriguing and beautifully three-dimensional characters. The world is fabulously drawn, evocative, and both the anthropological and physical science are accurate and carefully thought out.
Ammonite was Griffith’s debut novel. I’d also recommend her most recent, the absolutely amazing Hild, a retelling of the life of historical figure, Saint Hild of Whitby. Come to think of it, nothing I’ve read by her has been shabby, including Slow River, a near-future thriller that is also beautifully told and engaging.
I had the luck to sit in on a class Griffith taught for Clarion West a couple of years ago. She is a consummate, careful wordsmith. The word “luminous” keeps appearing in reviews of her work, and that’s because it’s so beautifully crafted that it seems to glow from within.
The first three paragraphs of a piece set up so much. Here’s the first three of Ammonite, to give you a taste:
Marghe’s suit was still open at neck and wrist, and the helmet rested in the crook of her left arm. An ID flash was sealed to her should” “Marguerite Angelica Taishan, SEC.” The suit was wrinkled and smelled of just-unrolled plastic, and she felt heavy and awkward, even in the two-thirds gravity of orbital station Estrade.
She stood by the airlock at the inside end of A Section. THe door was already open. Waiting. She rested the fingertips of her right hand on the smooth ceramic of the raised hatch frame; it was cool, shocking after two days of the close human heat of A Section.
The sill of the airlock reached her knees; easy enough to step over. No great barrier. The lock chamber itself was two strides across. THe dar door was still closed, sealed to another sill, like this one. Four steps from here to B Section. Four steps. She had recontracted with SEC, endured six months of retraining on Earth, traveled eighteen months aboard the Terragin, and spent the last two days on the Estrade bumping elbows with the three-member crew, all to take those four steps.
