I arrived in the late morning, and stalled my car going into the hotel’s parking garage (it’s a steep climb, and my car was in third gear, not first as I had thought). Once I parked, I found my way to the eleventh floor, where I signed in, paid up, and got a badge with PAT J. written on it.

I ran into Craig almost immediately. He was easy to pick out: of all the gents wearing suits there, his was the one without goggles or gears or brass accoutrements. Glancing at the con programme, I noticed that there was a panel discussion underway on the state of SF/F literature. The two of us snuck in to the back row, and caught 75% of the discussion. It was a good chat; apparently high fantasy is outselling SF by a considerable margin, and at least one author is apparently being asked to provide three fantasy novels for every SF manuscript that he turns in. This might be partly because fantasy seems to lend itself far better to long, sprawling epics, multi-novel series, and the like. Consider The Wheel of Time, or George R. R. Martin’s series (A Song of Ice and Fire, IIRC), or even the Dark Tower saga that I love so much. Now try to name a science fiction series that lasted more than four novels. (Other than L. Ron Hubbard’s dekalogy, which I’m pretty sure he wrote just so he could say he had written a dekalogy.)

One of the panelists was a gent named Chadwick, who orders in the SF at McNally-Robinson‘s Winnipeg store.  I’d met him at Words Alive.  He told me that there were copies of Tesseracts in the dealers’ room, and I should go sign them when I got a chance.  “Sure,” said I.

The next session featured Craig Russell reading from his novel Black Bottle Man. He read for a solid hour — basically he just started at Chapter 1 and went till sixty minutes had passed, which took us neatly to the end of Chapter 5.  It was a good reading — Craig’s background is in the theatre, and he recommended that, if you’re going to do readings, and you’re nervous about it, take some acting lessons.  Good advice.  Reading in church probably helps quite a bit too.

After that I had about an hour till the next event, so I wandered into the dealers’ room. Sure enough, the McNally-Robinson table had a couple copies of Tesseracts, so I signed them.  As I was putting them back in place, I thought, Gee, that guy looks familiar.  So, long story short, I introduced myself to Robert J. Sawyer.  I even remembered to give him a card.  (All in all, I took 16 cards with me to Keycon, and only came home with one.  Great success.)

After that, I returned to the panel room for a talk on the state of Manitoba fiction.  It was called a panel discussion, but really, with three panelists and five attendees, it became more of a chat.  Craig (who was one of the panelists) introduced me to Chris Rutkowski, local UFO and ghost author, who said, “Yeah, I’ve seen your site.”  So I guess I better keep this site up to date, eh?

Next time:  My meeting with the On Spec editors.

Congratulations, Craig, and best of luck!

Published, woo hoo!

Black Bottle Man

Rembrandt is ten years old when his life is turned upside-down.

It’s 1928, and the Great Depression has yet to begin. Rembrandt’s entire world is his extended family, three households of farmers who live very close to each other, as farm houses go. He’s the only child in three families, and his aunts both want a child very badly.

So badly, in fact, that they’ll cut a deal with the Devil to get what they want.

To save his aunts’ souls, Rembrandt, his pa, and his uncle Thompson have to take to the road, never staying in any one place longer than twelve days. Because on the thirteenth day, the Black Bottle Man will come for them…

* * *

This one took me by surprise; it built so steadily, and so quietly, skipping from Rembrandt’s youth to his 90-year-old dotage, that I didn’t realize until the end just how much I had invested in it. The climax caught me off guard with just how much emotion it wrung from me. Not many books have made me tear up. This one didn’t, either, but man it was a near thing.

My only complaint would be that I found a few grammatical quibbles, here and there, but on the whole this book is highly recommended.

Written by Craig Russell, based on his radio play of the same name, Black Bottle Man is published by Great Plains Teen Fiction, an imprint of Great Plains Publications. My copy is signed because I went to the book launch at Pennywise Books here in Brandon.

Get it…
from the publisher
from Chapters/Indigo
from Amazon.com

Me: “3:30.”
Her: “Yeah. I woke up at 2:30, and you weren’t in yet. I thought, Those idiots*, and went back to sleep.”

Those idiots were me and my cow-orker Craig, and the reason we got in at 3:30 AM was that we went to the city to see Neil Gaiman last night.

A couple photos:

I’ll probaby have more to say later. Right now I have to get back to work.

____

* My wife would like it pointed out that she called us dummies, not idiots.

1. Images of galaxies — I love the great whorls of stars that make up the visible mass of the Universe
2. The history of science, especially physics and astronomy
3. A clever title

So it was probably inevitable that I’d check this book out of the library today:

I’ll let you know what I think when I’m done reading it.

When I was in University, there was a girl I knew that had a book called 10,000 Dreams Interpreted*. She pointed one out to me, and it became my favourite dream ever:

To see a horse in human flesh, descending on a hammock through the air, and as it nears your house is metamorphosed into a man, and he approaches your door and throws something at you which seems to be rubber but turns into great bees, denotes miscarriage of hopes and useless endeavors to regain lost valuables. To see animals in human flesh, signifies great advancement to the dreamer, and new friends will be made by modest wearing of well-earned honors. If the human flesh appears diseased or freckled, the miscarriage of well-laid plans is denoted.

– source

Little did I know — until today — that that book was first published in 1901, and that dream’s been haunting peoples’ minds ever since then.

____

* Or something to that effect. Come on, this was 15+ years ago. Sometimes I have a hard time remembering where I put the cordless phone ten minutes ago.**

** Until it rings.

1. The road to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door salesmen, and no one knows why.
2. Forcing grunts to swear at their superior officers is a stupid way to build morale.
3. If everything is infinitely improbable, then everything is equally probable.
4. If the Fast Burn is itself transcendent, and unhappy with the direction of the channedring, it may attempt to hide the jumpoff birthinghel. Also: Hexapodia is the key insight.
5. Grey-green alien skin requires a lot of soap.
6. Even missing the index and middle fingers of his right hand, Roland is a hell of a shot.
7. Give praise to the day at evening, to a blade when tried, and to ice when over it.
8. “Anathema” looks like a girl’s name if you’ve never read a dictionary.
9. If your full name has twelve words in it, most people will forgive you if you go by “Phaethon”.
10. If your full name is “Hiro Protagonist”, you can bet your parents had some kind of weird relationship.
11. One does not outrun a substance that explodes at 15,000 feet per second. Also, if you’re counting on the police to save you, best not to antagonize them while you’re sitting on a bomb.
12. “Chuck” and “toss” are perfectly valid instructions in a cookbook.
13. No matter how interesting the many-universes-bridged-by-jump-gates premise may be, I can only read a book with that many near-rape scenes once. And it was a rough slog at that.

These are all off the top of my head, by the way. And yes, some are repeats.

Not pictured: The last Bartimaeus novel; Rainbows End by Vinge; a graphic novel about Louis Riel; an epic poem; The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily; and a bunch I can’t even remember right now.

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.