February 8, 2008

Everything that never ended

Posted on by Patrick

So I’ve been hav­ing kind of mixed feel­ings about my online ser­i­al nov­el, Every­thing that nev­er hap­pened, which has been stalled since, oh, August or so. June, if I’m hon­est with myself. This week I decid­ed to push it to the back burn­er, and work instead on Salyx, which is my 2006 Nano nov­el. I’ve had some good ideas recent­ly for that sto­ry, and it’s been more and more in the fore­front of my writ­ing brain, so it only seemed nat­ur­al I’d get to it.

But in the last two days, two of my friends (both named John, coin­ci­den­tal­ly) have inquired about the sta­tus of Every­thing etc. One has read to the first inter­lude; the oth­er has made it to chap­ter 8 or so. And so I’ve start­ed to think that maybe I should push through, and get a first draft com­plet­ed (which, hon­est­ly, is what this par­tic­u­lar online nov­el is).

So in the next lit­tle while I’m going to try and do both. I’ve decid­ed to try using Space­jock­’s yWriter soft­ware to work on Salyx; I may try using it for Every­thing as well. We’ll see how this goes.

If I find I real­ly can’t han­dle two writ­ing projects at once, I guess I’ll have to choose. At this point the choice looks like it would fall to Salyx’s favour, but who knows? Maybe get­ting in there, get­ting my hands dirty with those char­ac­ters from the spooky, zom­bie-infest­ed 17th cen­tu­ry will rekin­dle my fer­vor for Every­thing.

I hope this post is of inter­est to some­one oth­er than me… but even if it ain’t, it’s some­thing I want­ed to say. Well, write. Well, type.

Dragons of Babel, by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Patrick

AwesomeThis nov­el arrived in the mail about a day before I head­ed west, after I’d wait­ed the bet­ter part of two weeks for it (and even longer, if you fac­tor in the fact that I pre-ordered it, but that’s a whole ‘nother sto­ry, as they say).

I start­ed read­ing it on the train, and I fin­ished it in the base­ment liv­ing room of my sis­ter-in-law’s house. It’s an engross­ing read; as I neared the end, I had to force myself to slow down, to not miss any of the fan­tas­tic* details hid­den in very near­ly every sin­gle sentence.

The nov­el­’s set in the same indus­tri­al-faerie uni­verse as The Iron Drag­on’s Daugh­ter, but it’s by no means a sequel. The sto­ry starts off with Will le Fey watch­ing war drag­ons arc across the sky over his small vil­lage, bound for con­flict in some unimag­in­able war. One is shot down, and drags itself, flight­less, to Will’s vil­lage, where it declares itself ruler. It makes Will its lieu­tenant, in part because Will, unlike any­one else in town, is half-human.

Will par­takes in the priv­i­leges and the awful respon­si­bil­i­ties of his role, and in short order the entire vil­lage is set against him. When the drag­on’s grip on the vil­lage is final­ly bro­ken, Will is sent into exile.

He makes his way across a Faërie beset by the rav­ages of war, and winds up in a refugee camp. From there he trav­els to Babel itself, the great tow­er that stands high as Heav­en, and joins in a con­fi­dence game that trades on the iden­ti­ty of the absen­tee King of Babel to make a lot of mon­ey. But there’s a twist; there’s always a twist…

This book is dense with infor­ma­tion, and every sen­tence serves to nudge the plot for­ward. There’s a depth and a human­i­ty to the char­ac­ters, and we see peo­ple at their best and at their very worst, some­times on the same page. Noth­ing is irrel­e­vant; every detail has its place and its pur­pose. The world of Babel is rife with betray­als, dis­ap­point­ments, tri­umphs, and tragedies.

Michael Swan­wick very much needs to be more well-known than he is. It’s a shame that hard­ly any­one will have heard of this book, much less read it.

______

* In every sense of the word.