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Issue 17, Summer/Fall 2010 $8.99 U.S./$10.99 CAN1
Summer/Fall 2010
Issue Number 17
www.DarkDiscoveries.com
fiction
Publisher/Editor-in-Chief
James R. Beach Art Director/Managing Editor
Jason V Brock Design and Layout
JaSunni Productions, LLC (www.JaSunni.com) _________
Contributors
James R. Beach Ray Bradbury Jason V Brock Sunni K Brock (+Web Mistress) Lawrence French Bill Gauthier Blu Gilliand Jeremy Robert Johnson Ronald Malfi Nick Mamatas Karen L. Newman William F. Nolan John Shirley Bruce Taylor Jeffrey Thomas Brian Sammons
Contributing Artists/Photographers Jason V Brock (Interiors) Jay Broeck (Cover) Randy Broecker (pg. 57) Oscar Gonzales (pg. 32) Chris Ochs (pgs. 16; 31)
Special Thanks
Leslie Barany Joyce Beach H.R. Giger In Loving Memory of Marti Brock
Printing (with veg-based inks) _____________________
DARK DISCOVERIES
(ISSN 1548-6842) is published quarterly (Spring: April 30th, Summer: July 31st, Autumn: October 31st and Winter: January 31st) by James R. Beach and Dark Discoveries Publications, 142 Woodside Drive, Longview, WA 98632 Copyright ©2006 and beyond by Dark Discoveries Publications, and where specified elsewhere in the issue. All rights revert to the authors/artists upon publication. Nothing shown can be reproduced without obtaining written permission from the creators. All book/mag. cover images remain the copyrighted property of their respective owners. Direct all inquiries, address changes, submission queries,subscription orders and changes, etc. to: James R. Beach Dark Discoveries Publications 142 Woodside Drive Longview, WA 98632 U.S.A. e-mail: info@darkdiscoveries.com Please make check or money order payable to: James R. Beach or Dark Discoveries Publications. Advertising rates available. Discounts for bulk and standing retail orders.
The Shop of Mechanical Insects by Ray Bradbury A Semblance of Life by Jeffrey Thomas Closing In by Ronald Malfi Metamorphosis Blues by Bruce Taylor The Oarsman by Jeremy Robert Johnson Raise Your Hand If You’re Dead by John Shirley Pun’kin (DD Contest Winner) by Blu Gilliand
9 13 22 27 32 45 53
interviews David Cronenberg & Viggo Mortensen: Whispers from the East by Lawrence French John Shirley: The Tao of Identity by Jason V Brock
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non-fiction J.G. Ballard: Elective Psychopathy for the People by Nick Mamatas American Gauthic - Fear of Science by Bill Gauthier The Dark Side of Star Trek by James R. Beach Rod Serling: Articulating the American Nightmare (An Appreciation) by Jason V Brock Learning the Tricks of the Trade by Sunni K Brock Dark Matters - Philip K. Dick: The Irony of Success by William F. Nolan Riding the Dark Wave (Dark S-F in Culture) by Jason V Brock “Post-Crypts” - Haunted Legends; Little Things; Kelland (DD Reviews) by DD Staff 3
20 30 31 35 37 52 57 60
4
by Lawrence French Lawrence French: Have you lost any
an anomaly or a paradox, but people are very complex. There are very few people who think of themselves as evil monsters, yet people commit the most incredible atrocities that we now read about every day. For example, what is happening in the Muslim world. Yet they think they are totally justified. They feel righteous, they feel religious, they feel they are doing well for somebody, or their cause.
weight since you shot Eastern Promises?
Mortensen: No, I don’t think so… Cronenberg: It’s just that I enhance the way Viggo looks with my use of the camera. He’s actually very scrawny and ugly!
Mortensen: We also had to digitally
add my genitals because I had neglected to tone-up for the movie. We had to not just enhance them, but we actually had to add them, as I had nothing whatsoever there, so we needed to add something!
French: So what did you use as your
motivation for this hardened gangster who suddenly does something so good-hearted?
Mortensen: Well, that’s a puzzle. If you look at (Arthur)
Cronenberg: Well, that’s a real conversation killer!
Mortensen: No, none at all.
Schopenhauer, he talks about compassion and why does someone, when it does him no good whatsoever, go out and assist another person? Humans are unique in that way; they will go and maybe even risk their life to help someone they don’t know, and in doing so are not rewarded. It may not even be noted!
Cronenberg: Right -- just brain dead, we hope.
Cronenberg: It’s called altruism.
French: Okay… time to get serious!
Mortensen: Yes, and there’s a lot of focus on the brutality and the shock value of this movie in the trailer that makes you think it’s a certain kind of movie. Maybe it’s the savagery and the realism of a lot of the scenes in the movie that make you think that my character, Nikolai, or Naomi Watts’ character will go out and be capable of doing these extreme gestures. Doing the right thing, just because it is the right thing to do, not for any other reason. You can’t always explain it, other than they have that sort of moral compass. That’s what I like about the characters in David’s movies. You learn a lot more about them than you do in the characters of most other people’s movies. So there are many layers to the story, although you never fully get to know them. You don’t understand everything. I don’t think David is someone who answers everything for you. As he says, he’s not the kind of artist who wants to break it all down and analyze it, any more than I do, other than what will be useful in telling the story. So you don’t get all the answers. That is a way of respecting the audience. No one is ever exactly as they seem.
French: Indeed! So, where there any specific ideas you were trying
to express in Eastern Promises?
Cronenberg: Well, you have to understand… although at one point I thought I would become a literary academic, and I am certainly capable of analytic thought, creatively I just don’t think about that kind of thing. You don’t think about abstract things like that, because I can’t photograph an abstract concept and Viggo cannot act an abstract concept. He has to act a specific person, in this case a Russian named Nikolai Luzhin who I have to photograph physically. Now from that, obviously thoughts, ideas, responses and connections are generated. But creatively I don’t operate on that kind of abstract level. When I see a script that excites me like Eastern Promises did, I just want it to be provocative, multi-layered and very juicy. I have to have the feeling that it’s juicy, but I don’t really do the analytic thing. Frankly, it’s only afterwards when I start doing interviews like this, that I start to articulate things I was only intuitive about when I was making the movie. Also, I still don’t know what people’s responses to the movie are going to be. I hope that they may find it touching, moving, emotional or provocative. But I can’t get more specific than that… French: Eastern Promises is your second film together, correct? Cronenberg: Yes, after our experience working on A History of
Violence I wanted to make a film with Viggo again. In reading the script I immediately thought of him, because he is in fact halfDanish, so he has a kind of Russian or Slavic look to him. Viggo is a brilliant actor beyond what people realize and I believe that with Eastern Promises that is going to be even more evident (Ed.: It was, as Mortensen received his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor based on his performance in the film).
French: It’s very interesting how Viggo’s character changes. He starts out as a tough gangster, but we see him soften and his humanity begins to shine through.
Cronenberg: Yes, it’s a very complex character. Armin Mueller-
Stahl, who plays Semyon said to me when we were deciding how he would play the violin after he takes it from the little girl, “that all monsters are sentimental.” I think he’s right. It seems like it’s
10
French: In a tour-de-force scene, you appear completely naked in a steam bath, making yourself totally defenseless when you come under attack from the two assassins. Mortensen: The circumstances of setting that scene in a steam bath were done intentionally, so I would be both unprotected and unarmed. It wasn’t arbitrary or exploitive in any way, because it really furthers the plot. It was practical and it was logical. After that scene, if I can survive the physical consequences of the fight, I will have realized that things are very different now. I cannot even trust the few people I thought I could trust. It had to be done that way and thankfully it was David who was shooting it, and not a director who would have tried to make it into a very balletic scene. That term is thrown around all the time, but to me it’s not so much balletic as it is artificial. That’s fine if that’s the kind of movie you are making, but I think it would have stood out if suddenly all the camerawork had become very fancy and it was done with a lot of quick cuts. It wouldn’t have felt as direct as all of the rest of the movie is, just like the scenes of the fights we did for A History of Violence. They would also have seemed out of place if they had been shot and edited like directors usually do fight scenes. So it
Closing In By Ronald Malfi
The hotel room was small, colorless, nondescript. Collie Burgess entered in a huff, tossing his duffel bag on the ground, and immediately bolted the door. The place was dim, lit by a single table lamp, the only window obscured by a heavy curtain. The neatly made bed seemed incongruous in the center of the room. “Great.” Lifting up his shirt, reeking of sweat and caked in hardening mud, he pulled the Glock from his waistband, ejected the magazine, and popped the extra round from the chamber. Then he unzipped the duffel bag and retrieved fresh clothing: a folded pair of jeans, clean underwear and socks, a Miller Lite t-shirt, and a button-down chambray work shirt. He buried the Glock and the magazine in the duffel bag, covering the items up with a section of last week’s newspaper. Briefly, he stood in the center of the cramped room, his hands on his hips, his breath rattling his lungs. He could smell the grime on his filthy flesh — the smell of topsoil, of muddy trenches and human degradation. A shower. He could use a long, hot shower. There was a television remote on the rickety little table next to an ancient rotary phone. Collie scooped up the remote, aiming the device at the television set housed in a cheap-looking credenza facing the bed, and prodded the power button repeatedly. The TV did not turn on. “Piece of shit.” Setting the remote back on the table, Collie pulled the chair out from the table, banging it against the wall — the room was that small — and produced a slip of curled paper from the rear pocket of his dirt-caked jeans. Sitting down in the flimsy chair, Collie unfolded the paper and, picking up the telephone, dialed the number that had been scrawled in Maggio’s childish handwriting. The phone rang a dozen times before Dominic Maggio picked up. “Yeah?” Maggio growled in his typical disinterested tone. “It’s Collie.” “Where you at?” “A hotel.” He knew better than to give Maggio anything more specific. Not that Collie was afraid of Dominic Maggio, the fat little fuck… Still, he’d learned quickly in this business that the less anyone knew about you or your whereabouts the better. “How’d it go?” Maggio asked. He was eating something, his voice was garbled. “It’s done.” “Any difficulties?” “No.” “The car?” “Traded it in outside the county line. Switched the plates.” “Yeah?” Maggio seemed impressed by 22
Collie’s ingenuity. “Good deal, man. You need anything else?” “The money?” “It’s being delivered as we speak,” Maggio said. “As promised.” Collie glanced at his wristwatch. It was 4:52 p.m. “I’m gonna call Leo in ten minutes.” Maggio chuckled — a pathetic, wheezing sound that concluded in a series of sputtering coughs. “What’s the matter, Collie? You don’t trust me?” Collie laughed. His fingers were filthy, black crescents of dirt under each fingernail. “Nothing personal.” Collie hung up. He sat for several moments, drumming his dirty fingers on the tabletop, then picked up the telephone again and dialed zero. “Front desk.” A woman’s voice, annoyingly nasal. “Yeah,” Collie said, “this is Room 218. My TV ain’t working.” “Is it plugged in, sir?” The woman sounded distant and uninterested. From where he sat he could see the plug snaking out from behind the credenza where it fit into the wall socket. “Of course,” he said. “We’ll send someone up in a few minutes, sir.” He glanced at his watch. It would give him enough time to grab a shower and clean up, then call Leo to make sure Maggio kept his word about the money. Hanging up the phone, he scooted the chair away from the table, banging it against the wall again. He went to the bathroom, flipped on the light and discovered that it was so egregiously filthy and unattended that he wished he hadn’t. The shower head was angry with rust and it looked like someone had recently whipped up a chocolate cake in the toilet. Collie turned on the water, which came chugging through the pipes and resounded in the walls, and let the tub clean itself out before he stripped off his clothes and crawled beneath the lukewarm spray. While he washed, he thought about the man named Tom Browning, whom he’d murdered no more than two hours ago. Tom Browning, who’d cried like a baby near the end. The whole drive out beyond the city, bound by ropes in the backseat of the car, the bastard had insisted he knew nothing about Maggio’s money. It wasn’t until Collie pulled off onto a dirt roadway that cut first through a swath of trees then alongside a field of overgrown bluegrass did Browning start peppering him with questions. Trembling, his voice screechy like a poorly tuned violin, Tom Browning began talking too fast from the backseat… Where were they? What was going on? And for the love of God didn’t Collie believe him about the money? “We’re getting out,” was all Collie had replied.
26
Known throughout the world as the creator of the terrifying creatures and their otherworldly environment in the sci-fi film classic “ALIEN” (for which he received the Oscar for Best Achievement in Special Effects), H.R. Giger is, at once, one of our great visionaries and an artist whose imagination co-exists with the reality of his time. Often compared with Bosch and Dali, H.R. Giger’s aesthetic universe far transcends cinematic dreams and science fiction. Painter, sculptor, designer, interior architect, the pandemonium of Giger's vision into all domains. The HR Giger Museum in the medieval walled city of Gruyères, Switzerland, is the permanent home to many of the artist’s most prominent works, including the largest collection of the artist's paintings, sculptures, furniture and film designs, dating from the early 1960's until the present day. The new HR Giger Museum Bar, a permanent part of the museum complex, is open for business. Giger’s designs for the bar emphasizes the pre-existing Gothic architecture of the 400 year old space.The giant skeletal arches covering the vaulted ceiling, together with the bar’s fantastic stony furniture, evoke the building’s original medieval character and give the space a church-like feeling. Displayed on the museum's top floor is Giger's own private art collection, including the works of Armand, Burland, Brus, Coleman, Dado, Fuchs, Helwein, Lassen, Sandoz, Schwartz,Venosa and many others, as well as the HR Giger Museum Gallery where, on a rotating basis, Giger curates one-man shows for other artists.
November - March Thuesday - Fryday 13oo till 17oo Sat./ Sunday 10oo till 18oo Montags geschlossen April - October Daily open from 10oo till 18oo
MUSEUM HR GIGER Château St. Germain | CH -1663 GRUYÈRES, Switzerland 29 Tel. +41(0)26 921 22 00 | www.HRGigerMuseum.com
alf@koko.ch & Les Barany
Opening hours
because of their Internet habits, and the general short-attention-span culture that seems spawned by mass media. I don't 'tweet' or even read them--but I do indulge in Facebook, for now. We need to find a balance. Paper books won't go away completely but they're going to be a niche market. Might help writers in some ways, in terms of royalties...
Brock: What do you think of e-books and Rights Management for digital publications? Do you feel that there are enough protections for writers while balancing the realities of the current publishing landscape? By "niche market", are you referring to the small press? What do you feel about Facebook: is it good, bad, not sure? It can certainly be a way to share and connect‌ Shirley: It's in flux. It'll ultimately decided on a writer-by-
writer basis just as it is with print publishing: that is, if you have the following, you can negotiate a good deal with anyone. The new digital publishing does seem to open up the possibility of self-publishing, make it more viable. If one publishes one's own e-book imprint, one theoretically can take all the profits. Cut out the middleman. That seems to be a model more rock bands are using, for music download; it could work for books. But that means less editing and editing is quality control. I myself usually benefit from editors. Also, publishers have a staff for publicity and so on. There's also the possibility that self-published writers won't be taken as seriously by reviewers, e-format or not. Yes, the niche print market will be mostly small press, or special imprints of former large-press print publishers who've mostly gone e-book. I reconnected with people I'd lost track of on Facebook, and found out the fate of my first wife, whom I'd lost touch with, and those are good things. I have made one good writing deal through Facebook, so that a reward. It is a chance to directly connect with fans. It's a place to woodshed ideas. But it can also be a big time and energy drain, maybe even a drain on one's creativity, so if it seems to go too far that way for me, I'll let it go. It's not vital to me. What's vital to me are face to face friendships. In person. Facebook, while connecting people, can have the paradoxical effect of isolating some people-if they spend so much time in it that it keeps them from going out in the real, external world, meeting people in person.
Brock: What plans do you have for Bleak History? Is it the start of a series with the character? Shirley: If the book sells well enough, I'll do a sequel. There's
been interest in it as a movie and a TV series. We'll see if that pans out. It does feel like a good solid TV series idea. I've taken some basic urban fantasy ideas and given them an interesting twist--having to do with the secret device that till recently suppressed paranormal powers--and that's got lots of possibilities...
Brock: Much of your output has a mixture of the surreal, magic realism, science fiction, horror and "literary" writing - do you feel that you are free to genre-hop, or do you feel pressure to write in a particular voice, style or area to meet your audience's expectations? Shirley: I'm a survivor, so to some extent I write to the mar-
ket, but also it's a question of what underlying theme I'm working from--I usually have something to say and sometimes it's said more effectively in science fiction, other times in horror. Horror seems to lend itself more to spiritual themes;
43
science fiction to social and political themes. But again I'm always concerned to be entertaining. As for writing to expectations--probably would've been better for my career if I'd done that more. But I've tended to be rather idiosyncratic--often hyper intense, or telegraphically spare, looking for maximum impact. Maybe that's not the wisest commercial course. On the other hand, I've learned that my audience is out there--a lot of people are pretty excited that Wetbones is coming out in a new edition, with a short sequel included, so there was an audience for that intensely dark writing, after all...
Brock: What projects do
you currently have coming up? Also, whom would you number among your major influences?
Shirley: There's In Extre-
mis: The Most Extreme Stories of yours truly, there's a Bioshock novel, based on the videogame, which I wrote for Tor books, there's a new fusion of crime and disaster novel, called Welcome To Freedom -- I'm about to revise that one. It's very hardcore stuff. And there's a quite unusual dark fantasy novel--a sort of peculiar mystery novel in an extraordinary setting, called Nick Fogg, which I'll be completing later this year... Major influences-Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury -such as Something Wicked This Way Comes and October Country, CS Lewis, Wylie, Charles Beaumont, John Steinbeck, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, H.G. Wells, Patrick O'Brian... Bruce Sterling influenced me in some ways -- don't hold that against him... Alfred Bester... The great horror writers like Lovecraft probably influenced me... Filmmakers influence me too, like Fellini, Kubrick, Nicholas Roeg.
Brock: Is there anything that you are particularly excited about or discouraged by going on in the world today?
Shirley: Every time we make environmental progress, corporate greedheads drag us back a few steps. They manipulate people--the way Exxon's been funding propaganda against global warming initiatives--and they lie to the government. BP lied to government about its safety standardsand then eleven men died and the Gulf was poisoned (Ed.: The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe). Animal habitat across the world is being destroyed by human expansion. We're in the middle of an epidemic of extinctions as a result. Overpopulation is still an issue. We're toxifying the oceans with plastic-do a search on the Pacific's plastic vortex--and there's not that much to be encouraged about, environmentally. But we'll muddle through--the human race and the natural world will be scarred but we'll survive. We do have to have consistent population control for our stewardship of the world to be manageable.
Raise Your Hand If You’re Dead By John Shirley
S
ometimes I think I’m dead. Sometimes I think I’m not dead. So far, I can’t figure it out, not definitely. I should tell you who’s sending this message to you. It’s me, Mercedes’ older brother, Whim. At least I think it’s me. And I’m sending this to you, Syke, so maybe you can figure out if I’m dead, and you can do something about it. If you can fix that—you’re my hodey. If you can’t, you can’t, and you’re still my hodey. Maybe I can figure it all out. This message, if that’s what it is, will take a while to get to you, if it gets to you at all. I’m still working out what the rules are in here. If I think it all through, maybe I’ll work out if I’m dead or not. Mercedes was the one I was with you know, harvesting suicides, the night we looked the Empties in the eyes... I was nervous, on my knees in the padded prow of the twelve-foot aluminum boat, as Mercedes piloted us up under the big supports for the Golden Gate Bridge. Dangerous out there anytime, sure, even when the seas aren’t running rough, because you can get a black wind, that toxin-laden fog, just sweeps down on you quick, no time to get to shore—or you can ship too much water and you might dump over, find yourself thrashing in that cold, dirty water, with the bay leeches fastening on your ankles and the waves smacking you on jagged rocks around the support towers. But it was sheer superstition, really, making me nervous. I get superstitious about numbers. It has to do with my dad having been a gambler, between his subbing gigs; Dad rattling on about odds and numbers and how number patterns crop up in the cards. “You can feel that bad beat coming in the numbers,” he’d say. “If you pay attention. If you don’t feel the odds, the beat’ll smack you upside the head.” He was an old school guy, born in Atlanta in 1970; he said things like “smack you upside the head.” And “old school.” The thing is, Syke, as we ran the boat out there, the engine chugging in the moonlight, it just hit me that today was 3-5-35. March fifth, 2035. Now, three and five is eight plus three is eleven, plus five is sixteen. You write sixteen, 1 and 6; add them, it makes seven. My unlucky number. Nine’s my lucky number, seven’s unlucky. Maybe because my old man died when I was fourteen, twice seven, on the fourteenth of June. On then night of 3-5-35 I looked up at the bridge, and thought: Each cable is made of 27,572 strands of wire. 80,000 miles of wire in the main cables. The bridge has more than 1,200,000 rivets... Now if you add two and seven to five and seven and two... “We shouldn’t be out here,” I said to Mercedes. My sis was back by the little engine, working the tiller. I was out front with the grabbers and the sniffer. She wore her long brown leather jacket, gloves, boots; I had my oversized army jacket, without the insignia, army boots, waterproof pants. You’ve never seen me in physical person, Syke. In the social space I wear some nicer shit—seeing as how CG clothing is gratis with the access fee. I muttered once more, “Really shouldn’t be out here.” “What?” she called. “Why? You cold? Told you to put on a slicker.” “It’s not that,” I said, though I was shivering, scanning the gray water with the sniffer. “It’s the numbers...” I had the sniffer—that’s for picking up human DNA fragments in the air—in my left hand. The mechanical grabber in my right. I figure I gotta explain this stuff to you, Syke, since it’s way, way far from your thing. You were always so indoors— you were the indoors of the indoors. Wandering around like an out of body experience in the social space and the subworlds with the likes of Pizzly and creeps like Mr. Dead Eyes hounding about in the background. Remember Mr. Dead Eyes, hodey, he’ll come up again. You recall that perv, Mr. DE, dogging Mercedes in the subworlds? “There’s my future girl,” he’d say to my sister. “All good things come to them who wait.” That night under the bridge I was thinking about Mr. Dead Eyes, and not knowing why and that spooked me too. I was just about to explain to little sis about the numbers, the date, and how we should go back, but then the sniffer tripped and I saw the first floater. He was floating face up in a patch of light from the lamp on the bridge support. His eyes were colorless—looked just like cocktail onions. So that told me he’d been dead a while, but not long as all that. Longer, and the gulls, or some adventurous crab would have gotten his eyes out. He wasn’t very waterlogged or bloated either. Which was good. It sucks when you got to handle them, even with a grabber and rubber gloves, when they’re, you know, coming apart from being out there awhile. “Got one,” I called out to her. “At two o’clock. Not too soggy. But come up slow...” She cut the engine and we coasted toward the floater. He might’ve been about fifty when he took the plunge, with long brown hair like seaweed washing around his pudgy, onion-eyed face. We hadn’t found him soon enough to harvest his organs. A messy, nauseating job, anyhow, harvesting organs. I was always sort of relieved when I knew I wouldn’t have to do it. The guy in the suit might have some good pocket fruit. He had a decent suit on, and the one remaining shoe was pretty good quality leather. So maybe he had money, jewelry, stuff like that. The uneven light picked out a gold glint from a wristwatch; I hoped it was waterproof. (I remember when we found an elderly black guy one time had one of those old fashioned grills on his teeth, installed in the first decade of the century—diamonds and gold all over it. Nasty, prying that grill off him. Paid good though.) I used the grabber on onion-eyes, then got the watch off with a quick movement of my rubber-gloved hand. Always afraid the body’s going to grab my wrist as I do it. I saw too many zombie movies as a kid. But they never do move. It’s almost disappointing.
45
Riding the Dark Wave:
The Role of Dark S-F in Popular Culture by Jason V Brock I. Throughout the long history of recorded storytelling (and likely prior to that), horror, terror, the supernatural, fear and technological advancement have shared an uneasy alliance. Whether as a way of sub-textually underscoring ethical behavior (as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus), Man’s relationship with a higher power (envisioned as aliens in the case of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds), or even the Universe itself and Man’s place in it (the preoccupation of several H. P. Lovecraft stories, such as “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Colour Out of Space”; Poe was also an antecedent), technology has been used as either a saving grace or a force for the undoing of humanity (and, on occasion both, as in Boulle’s novel, La Planète des Singes, later made into the film Planet of the Apes), depending on who was wielding the power at the moment. Even today this tradition continues in films such as Inception, and novels from William Gibson to Greg Bear. The beginnings of this synergy have an ancient lineage; even the Greek myth of Icarus – with his defiance of the gods using mechanical wings in a bid to escape his fate – boasts elemental aspects of the fusion of technology, ingenuity, and human endeavor to overcome obstacles (and, ultimately, to be undone through hubris). These themes continue to be stark hallmarks of contemporary speculative fiction (in some cases right down to the metaphorical cautionary aspects of the story). Other examples abound both before and after this particular myth, but Icarus seems a particularly potent model for tales to follow, as humankind’s increasingly complex relationship with the physical world (in quantum mechanical terms) and its limitations (or opportunities, depending on one’s point of view), would come to inform the comprehension of humanity’s place in the Universe (reduced and removed from a central role in the intergalactic proceedings and redefined – by the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein – to a mere mote in God’s eye). As with all great mysteries, the answers would not be revealed all at one time, or by any one individual, but rather through a series of insights and collective introspection. As scientific discovery continued to accumulate overwhelming empirical data upon which the foundations of the modern world would be continually built and redefined, it is only through storytelling -- be it art, literature or film -- that concepts and judgments are eventually embroidered into the evolving tapestry of the human experience.
II.
After Icarus and before the present, the human hive would absorb and dispose of many theories, concepts and ideals. Be it the classic precepts of Utopia versus Dystopia in the social context (from writers as diverse as Jonathan Swift [“A Modest Proposal”], Aldous Huxley [Brave New World], William F. Nolan/George Clayton Johnson [Logan’s Run], and Charles Beaumont [“The Beautiful People”]), the anxieties of warfare, illness, and the atomic future (Wells again, but also Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein, Albert Camus and so on) or the follies of religion and what it means to be human (much of Philip K. Dick’s and Colin Wilson’s work), the umbrella of Dark Fantasy is wide enough to accommodate multiple perspectives, running a huge gamut from right-wing militarism (David Drake) to alternative histories (Harry Turtledove) to body horror (many works of J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs and David Cronenberg). Over time, stories (and storytelling) would shift in thrust: from cloaked metaphor to testimonial to social awareness, as the human animal increasingly utilized technology to facilitate mass communication, influencing the collective thoughts of 57
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