A guest post by Sarah Bartsch.

A few weeks ago I was invited to write for this blog, told it’s the best-books-you’ve-never-heard-of theme, and one title immediately pops into my mind: Heroes Die by Matthew Woodring Stover, book one of the Acts of Caine. As always. Seriously, I’ve been recommending this book to people since 1998.

I checked Librarything numbers to make sure it was still relatively “unknown”, and with only 491 people owning copies compared to 1169 of Runelords, 7,276 people having The Name of the Wind and (unsurprisingly) 76,945 copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone, I figured that was good enough.

So a couple weeks pass, life is life-y, and I get an email from Tor.com (as you do) all about their new article: “Reddit Fantasy Lists Under-Rated and Under-Read Fantasy.”

The Acts of Caine series is number one.

Great minds and all that, right? I’m glad even more people will go check out this great series, but it gets me wondering, and I go plug words into Google. Apparently the Acts of Caine is getting love all over the place. A lazy search revealed John Scalzi is a fan and did an interview with Stover in 2013 to coincide with the UK Orbit release. Scott Lynch gave Heroes Die a glowing review back in 2003, and that’s in addition to the Reddit survey I already mentioned and another lengthy recommendation for “The best damned fantasy you’ve never read” on the Penny Arcade forums.

So… my great idea for this post got stolen years before I even had it.

I’m okay with that.

Now a warning: This story isn’t for everyone. It’s violent, though not as gratuitous as it seems at first. It’s intense and may push some buttons or just irritate a reader in the wrong mood. It’s grimdark ten years before that term was coined. None of the characters are Good or Bad, but there are the people you’re clearly rooting for and then… there’s everybody else.

The story spans two worlds. On Arkhana, magic is real and warlords and kings fight for dominance, hiring women and men like Caine to do their dirty work. Caine is renowned as the best at what he does… while back on Earth, Caine’s adventures are experienced by an audience in the billions. Because Caine is actually superstar Hari Michaelson, who travels to Arkhana to kill for the sake of the profitable entertainment industry. Check out the links below for much better synopses if this grabs your attention at all.

But the most important thing I noticed about this book? A lot of people hate it. There are tons of bad reviews. Just scroll through the comments on the Penny Arcade post and you’ll notice negativity as often–if not more often–than praise. There’s even the occasional valid point I can’t argue away about the characterization or the style or whatever… Which just doesn’t matter because loving a book isn’t subject to logic. It’s about experience. Story. Visceral reaction.

As a writer, here’s my takeaway: Someone will always hate what I write. No matter what. I can follow all the rules (and practice) and attend workshops (and practice) and try to absorb greatness from my mentors (and practice), and even if scores of readers someday find my work brilliant, there will still be people who hate it. Worse, some will be completely unaffected either way, no matter what I do.

How… liberating.

So I’m going to swing for the fences with every story and hope, someday, something I write makes a fraction of the impact–both love and hate–as has the Acts of Caine.

If you want a proper recommendations, see below:

Scott Lynch’s review (yes, That Scott Lynch, the author of The Lies of Locke Lamora): http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/9/9825.phtml

John Scalzi interview with Stover: http://www.orbitbooks.net/2013/05/29/john-scalzi-interviews-matthew-stover-about-the-acts-of-caine/

Guest Writer Bio:

Sarah Bartsch lives in Albuquerque, holds degrees in anthropology and history and has a passion for all genres of fiction. She earned a black belt in Shotokan karate and has fond memories of doing archaeology in Wales and Ireland, but she’s most happy at the moment making the final touches on an urban fantasy novel and celebrating her first short story sale. “Substituting Fluffy” will soon be published by Daily Science Fiction.

A Story Within a Story

May 23, 2014

Tristan Brand

The Writing Life 3 Comments

S comes in a sparsely adorned slipcover, the kind you sometimes see when purchasing limited editions. Within the slipcover is a novel that that looks like it was pulled straight from a dusty old library, bound in brown leather and titled Ship of Theseus by V. M. Straka, and stuffed with insets ranging from ticket stubs to letters. Open the pages and beside the typed prose you’ll find the margins covered in hand-written notes.

Not what you’d call your common novel.

S was conceived by film and television producer J. J. Abrams and written by Doug Dorst. As any viewer of Lost knows, Abrams likes puzzles, and that is exactly what S presents. V. M Straka is a fictional author but Ship of Theseus is a novel that stands on it’s own. In the world of S, the novel is found in a library by two university students, Jen and Eric, who pass the book back and forth, having a conversation via notes in the margins. Eric is a graduate student working with a renowned Straka expert whose certain the secret to Straka’s true identity is hidden within the pages of Ship of Theseus, and Jen ends up being his accomplice.

There are two stories here. The first is Ship of Theseus, which is a novel that stands on its own. Dorst mimics old-fashioned prose brilliantly, while still weaving together an engaging story. Ship of Theseus follows a man (referred to simply as ‘S’), who wakes without his memory. A chance encounter with a strange woman drives him and he sets out after her. His journey takes him aboard an eerie, otherworldly ship, has him joining a radial group, and eventually turns him into an assassin. S’s tale is surreal and sometimes ambiguous, but always compelling.

The central theme is that of identity, hinted at by the title which refers to a well known thought-experiment generally credited to Plutarch, where he asks whether a ship that is restored by replacing all of its parts remains the same ship. It’s a question that haunts S as he finds his identity stripped away at the start and then rebuilt, piece by piece.

The novel is itself the set piece for the second story, Jen and Eric’s hunt for Straka’s true identity. Ship of Theseus is rife with Straka’s supposed eccentricities, most interesting of which are codes hidden within the prose. An ambitious reader might even try to ignore the margin notes and decipher them themselves, though Jen and Eric do the work for us.

Adding to the intrigue are footnotes written by V. M. Straka’s supposed translator, F. X. Caldeira. F. X. becomes the key to the second storyline as Eric believes she holds the key to Straka’s true identity, and that she hid a way to find her through her footnotes.

Jen and Eric are more than literary detectives. Their lives intrude onto the edges of Ship of Theseus. Both are lonely for different reasons, and eventually they meet in person. It’s astonishing how real their relationship, gleaned only from scribbled notes, becomes.

S occupies many genres. Ship of Theseus has the trappings of literary fiction, touches of fantasy, and a lot of mystery. Jen and Eric’s story is as much romance as mystery. To me, the way S defies genre only makes it all the more interesting. It’s a puzzle begging to be unwrapped, analyzed, studied.

Most importantly, it works as a story. I cared about S. I cared about Jen and Eric. I finished the novel months ago and I can still feel them rattling around my head. This is a novel I’ll recommend to anyone, though I warn you I found it takes more focus than most. Still, it’s the most memorable novel I’ve read in the past few years and I believe that effort will be worthwhile.

They Do Things Differently There

May 22, 2014

fictorians

A guest post by Amy Groening.

My family unearthed They Do Things Differently There (Jan Mark, 1994) at a library book sale when I was twelve years old. We had been consuming Jan Mark books for years and were very excited to discover a relatively new book of his shoved in amongst the clutter of salable discards. Every Jan Mark book I have read has endowed me with some new discovery of how to both play with the English language and appreciate life in general, but They Do Things Differently There was a crown jewel when I was young, and now, thirteen years later, I appreciate it all the more.

The account of a beautiful yet fleeting friendship between two dizzyingly creative teenaged girls, They Do Things Differently There offers clever descriptions of the realities of growing up in small-town Britain, a sardonic criticism of insincere aestheticism, and, most importantly, periodic vignettes of the deeper and much more bizarre episodes of an alternate reality, showing through in patches where the veneer of clean living has worn through.

I’m not talking about Blue Velvet, severed-ears-in-the-backwoods-type double lives; I’m quite sure Elaine and Charlotte would have balked at a crime so underwhelmingly average. Beneath the flowery, scrubbed-clean town of Compton Rosehay lurks Stalemate, a half-forgotten city that boasts a mermaid factory, a corpse-collecting manor lord and the respectable bunch of blackmailers keeping him in check, missionaries from Mars, and the Nobel Prize-winning creation of the Auger Scale of Tedium.

As ridiculous as the world of Stalemate sounds, Jan Mark uses these elements to create an effortlessly bizarre, unapologetically irreverent, and thoroughly enjoyable reading experience. It wasn’t until this year that I noticed the underlying references to pop culture and highbrow art that riddled the work. When I was twelve, mentions of Daleks flew right over my head, and I was under the impression that Mark’s cheeky rewriting of Wordsworth’s verse—Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be a fish was very heaven—was, in fact, just a clever bit of writing she had come up with herself. Even the book’s title is pulled straight from The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley. When Charlotte breaks the fourth wall and admits they’ve missed half a story because two pages of the book got stuck together, I was practically in convulsions of wonder. While I have now become accustomed to viewing this as a favourite trick of postmodern writing, back then it was the most mind-bogglingly clever writing twist I had come across.

This is one of the many things I love about Jan Mark: she created stories that I could enjoy as an uncultured preteen, and yet she didn’t seem to concern herself with the idea that a twelve-year-old might not catch references to high-brow literature (or British sci-fi shows from the 1960s). She didn’t pander to the lowest common denominator of undereducated schoolchildren, and yet she wrote books that said schoolchildren could still enjoy. I truly believe she wrote for a juvenile audience not because it was easier, as many people seem to think, but because it allowed her to freely exercise her complex, zany, and joyful yet melancholy writing style.

That being said, her novels do address serious matters—They Do Things Differently There is chock-full of loneliness, desperation, and the pain of being a social outcast. The stress of growing up, the terrifying powerlessness of childhood, the cruelty of adolescent alliances, and the dangers of depression come up in many of her stories.

Jan Mark was a prolific and well-respected British writer. When she passed away in 2006, she had published over fifty novels, plays, and short story anthologies, and had won the Carnegie medal twice, and yet the majority of her books are tragically difficult to come by.

When my family discovered They Do Things Differently There, it was out of print, as were Nothing to Be Afraid Of, a book of short stories we seemed to check out of the library several times a year, and Hairs in the Palm of the Hand, a book we finally procured a battered old copy of, which my sister still does dramatic readings of every Christmas. I have often wondered how a collection of books could be so principle in shaping my adolescence and my own writing aspirations, and yet so underappreciated, at least by a North American public.

For the longest time, I was under the impression we were the only Canadians who knew about these books. I was almost disappointed when They Do Things Differently There went back into print, assuming it meant Jan Mark was going to sweep North America and become a household name instead of a much-loved secret.

However, I still haven’t met any Mark fans who were not blood relations of mine; a quick visit to Amazon reveals not a single comment has been left on the They Do Things Differently There page, few ratings have been given, and while she does have a loyal fan base and blog articles devoted to singing the praises of her writing, her books are clearly still not being given the attention they so richly deserve.

Guest Writer Bio:

Amy Groening is a publishing assistant at Word Alive Press. She is a passionate storyteller with experience in blogging, newspaper reportage, and creative writing. She holds an Honours degree in English Literature and is happy to be working in an industry where she can see other writers’ dreams come to life. She enjoys many creative pursuits, including sewing, sculpture, and painting, and spends an embarrassingly large amount of time at home taking photos of her cats committing random acts of feline crime.

A Swordsman Unmatched

May 21, 2014

fictorians

The Writing Life No Comments

A guest post by Gama Martinez.

Many years ago, when I thirteen or so, I was in a Walden Books. I decided I wanted to start reading big thick books. I also knew that I liked books about wizards. With no other criteria in mind, I went to the fantasy section and used my allowance to pick up two books. The first was Wizard’s First Rule, which you may have heard of. The second was The Western Wizard by Mickey Zucker Reichert, which you probably haven’t. The Western Wizard was about Colby, a swordsman who survived the destruction of his people, the Renashai, a tribe of warriors whose skill with the sword was unmatched. Even among them, Colby was the best. He finds himself at the center of plots by wizards, kings, and gods. Even though parts of the book didn’t make sense to me, I really enjoyed it. Eventually I realized that it didn’t make sense because it was actually the second book in the Renshai Trilogy which, as far as I can tell, I’m the only one to have read ever.

The first book in the series, The Last Renshai, starts off with the destruction of the Renshai. One boy, Rache, survives the destruction of his people and eventually finds a home in the house of a city lord. Impressed by his skill, even as a boy, the lord promises him a position as a soldier when he gets older. He begins to build a life for himself, eventually becoming a soldier and later the captain, though he never reveals his origins. The Renshai were universally feared and hated even to the point that the word “Renshai” was a foul curse, and in some places, it was a serious crime to speak it. Due to his beliefe that everyone should be able to defend themselves, he begins to teach the city lord’s daughter how to use a sword, but he teaches her the Renshai style. By Renshai tradition, it is not blood that makes one a Renshai, but training. Meanwhile, the world is heading for a great war prophesied in the distant past. Rache begins to hear rumors of another survivor of his people while the four wizards who are the stewards of the world worry about the ever looming Ragnarok.

Now, at this point, you’ve probably noticed something. This trilogy does something I haven’t seen before or since. It’s a second world fantasy that overtly uses a real world pantheon and mythology, Norse. It even includes some lesser known gods. The Renshai’s patron god is Modi, one of the sons of Thor. Thor himself shows up as does Odin, Loki, and Freya. The trilogy eventually weaves together the plots of various powers to either stop or survive Rangarok. There is a follow-up series as well, The Renshai Chronicles, which starts with Rangarok as a prologue, with the rest taking place 300 years later. The wizards have been replaced by an immortal guardian who maintains the balance between good, evil, law and chaos. It deals with the return of Odin and stopping him from conquering everything.

The Renshai books were, among other things, my introduction to Norse mythology which in turn led me to look into other mythologies and get inspiration from them. I looked for commonalities throur different mythologies. Essentially, it was my introduction to what Joseph Campbell calls the monomyth, that timeless story that has been told over and over again yet retains its magic.

These books take advantage of cultural conflicts (for example, in some cultures, it’s a sign of trust to turn your back on an armed person, and others, it’s an insult as if saying that even with your back turned, they’re no threat). The city lord’s daughter must find the balance between her family and the Renshai. There are also an interesting mix of personal conflicts (the boy trying to make a life for himself after his home is destroyed) to epic scale ones (Ragnarok). It also deals with different concepts of honor and how these differences clash with each other, even to one point, where two warriors who respect each other are forced to fight to the death. It is ultimately, a fascinating series, and one that I read through several times.

Guest Writer Bio:

Gama Martinez lives near Dallas and collects weapons in case he ever needs to supply a medieval battalion. He greatly resents when work or other real life things get in the way of writing. Other than writing, he does normal things like run from bulls and attempt to leave the Earth to be a Martian colonist. His first book, Delphi, based on Greek Mythology, will be released Tuesday, May 27.http://www.GamaRayBurst.com