Read A Scattering of Jades for Free

It's been out of print for a while now, but I like this book a lot. It was my first try at writing a novel, and all things considered I think it turned out pretty well. I'd like more people to read it, so I PDFed it and I'm making it available to anyone who cares to click this link or the image at left.

If you're unfamiliar with A Scattering of Jades, it won the Locus, Crawford, and International Horror Guild first-novel awards when it came out in 2002. Here's the flap copy:

The great fire of 1835 burned most of New York City's wooden downtown. Like many people, Archie Prescott thought he had lost everything. His home was a smoldering ruin, his dead wife's body at his feet. And next to her is a child's corpse he assumes was his daughter. It seems like the end of everything.

But it is only the beginning.

Goaded into action by New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett, Archie runs afoul of one of P. T. Barnum's former sideshow workers, Riley Steen. With the help of an ancient book translated by Aaron Burr, Steen has resurrected a chacmool. This ageless Mesoamerican avatar plans to use the blood of Archie's still-living daughter to bring about the end of humanity.

At the same time, Stephen Bishop guides tourists through the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Stephen, a slave, wants nothing more than a world where the color of his skin doesn't deny his humanity. His fateful first meeting with the chacmool leads him to believe that the promise it offers may bring him to such a world.

In the midst of ancient magic and murderous conspiracies, Archie finds himself with the power to save the world or drown it in sacrificial blood . . . but first he has to stop mourning his daughter and undertake a grim cross-country journey to save her.

Read or download it here. (There's a Kindle edition too, but I've never seen a dime from it, so you might as well read for free!)

And if you like it, of course, there's One King and The Narrows and Buyout...

Review Copies of Mare Ultima

If you are a reviewer and/or blogger and want a PDF of my novella Mare Ultima, drop me a line at alexirvine at alexanderirvine dot net (or through FB, or Twitter, or however). The book comes out this month from PS Publishing.

Buyout in the World

Yesterday a friend (thanks, Johnny Rog!) alerted me to this story from Ohio, where last fall the state sold one of its prisons to a private operator and turned over the operations of two more prisons to private contractors. This, of course, is one of the processes in the backstory of my novel Buyout, and it's a weird feeling to write a novel set 30ish years in the future and then see some of its elements beginning to appear in the real world. Not that I can claim any particular prescience; I wrote the book wanting to explore the consequences of what I saw as troubling cultural trends toward relating justice and profit, as well as to figure out what I thought about capital punishment. Science fiction, as everyone knows, is lousy at actually predicting things in any sort of rigorous way.

Anyway, I thought this was Ohio story was of interest because of the way it fits together with other events I became aware of after writing Buyout, including:

• A petition from Italian life-term inmates requesting that they be executed rather than serving their sentences
• A kickback scheme between judges and cronies running private youth facilities (turned into an episode of Law & Order: SVU)
• The private prison industry helping to write immigration policy and new laws in Arizona
• A moving and complicated NYT op-ed by a death-row inmate who wants to donate his organs

Taken together, these stories make for a worrying trend, and all of them in one way or another fit right in with the imagined backstory of Buyout. (News of the kickback scheme in Pennsylvania, in fact, broke right around the time the book came out. The judge in question got 17 years.)

I've had an interest in prison-related issues for a long time, all the way back to when I was an undergrad researching recidivism for a criminology class. The seeds of Buyout started to germinate then, while I was touring Jackson Prison in Michigan with an assistant warden named Ernie, but it took 20 years for the book to come together...not least because I hadn't started to think of myself as a writer yet, and wouldn't for several years.


Now that I do think of myself that way, I would be remiss if I didn't suggest that you go read the book and see for yourself what you think...

Dear Newt Gingrich

Here are two children created through in-vitro fertilization. Their names are Emma and Ian. Are you going to look them in the eye and tell them it should have been harder for them to exist? Is this what you mean by pro-life?

 

Mare Ultima

My novella Mare Ultima is now listed on the PS Publishing web site. It started with the stories "Wizard's Six" and "Dragon's Teeth," both from F&SF, but even if you've read both of those, you don't have the whole story yet...

And while you're browsing the PS catalog, don't forget about Mystery Hill...not to mention all of the other great stuff there. (Including that Bag of Books sale!)

Cover illo by Ben Baldwin.

Like Daredevil? Read French?

Then you should have this book:

Captain Insano State Legislator Hall of Fame

Today, this guy made it on the CISL HoF ballot on his first try, introducing a bill to prevent the use of aborted fetuses in food or food additives.

Really. Read the story. Ralph Shortey, I salute your utter lunacy.

The CISL HoF does not yet exist, but with your help it will. Add your own loony state legislators in the comments. Please! In these dark times, we could all use the laugh. But only add true kooks. We must set the bar very high. 

The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature

Those of you with any kind of scholarly interest in the literatures of the fantastic should grab this book as soon as possible. It's out next month, and as you can see from the TOC below, it's got a terrific lineup of essays. I can't wait to get my copies. My own contribution is on urban fantasy. Among other things, it's a quiet attempt to reclaim that term from its unfortunate diffusion to include every book with a tough woman in leather pants on the cover, but it's also an exploration of the relationship between ideas of the urban and ideas of the fantastic.

Here's the full listing on the Cambridge University Press web site. If you're an academic, encourage your library to order this book. Or get one yourself! This is the Amazon link, but of course you should buy local if you can.


Introduction
Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
Part I. Histories:
1. Fantasy from Dryden to Dunsany Gary K. Wolfe
2. Gothic and horror fiction Adam Roberts
3. American fantasy, 1820–1950 Paul Kincaid
4. The development of children's fantasy Maria Nikolajeva
5. Tolkien, Lewis, and the explosion of genre fantasy Edward James
Part II. Ways of Reading:
6. Structuralism Brian Attebery
7. Psychoanalysis Andrew M. Butler
8. Political readings Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint
9. Modernism and postmodernism Jim Casey
10. Thematic criticism Farah Mendlesohn
11. The languages of the fantastic Greer Gilman
12. Reading the fantasy series Kari Maund
13. Reading the slipstream Gregory Frost
Part III. Clusters:
14. Magical realism Sharon Sieber
15. Writers of colour Nnedi Okorafor
16. Quest fantasies W. A. Senior
17. Urban fantasy Alexander C. Irvine
18. Dark fantasy and paranormal romance Roz Kaveney
19. Modern children's fantasy Charlie Butler
20. Historical fantasy Veronica Schanoes
21. Fantasies of history and religion Graham Sleight

Talking Avengers Alliance with Mediabistro

Follow this link to an audio interview I did with Mediabistro's Jason Boog for their Morning Media Menu podcast feature. We talk Avengers Alliance, and speculate a little on what new spaces are emerging in the borders between social and RPG-style gaming. (There is much more to be said on that latter topic, by the way. It's a pretty exciting time to be looking at the evolution of gaming.)

The interview is excerpted here, along with links to the Alliance trailer and a recent GalleyCat story on video-game writing.

An Open Letter to the Fathers of Cub Scouts

Yesterday I got up at 3:45am and drove from Maine down to Massachusetts for the fifth and final Pinewood Derby of my older son Ian's Cub Scout career. I have been saving these sentiments up since Ian's first Derby, and this last one--combined with the irritation of having to drive back through a snowstorm--really set me off.

Here's why. There were three cars in Ian's Webelos heats at yesterday's Pinewood Derby that looked like they had come out of a concept lab at GM (or, more accurately representing their style, Ferrari). It was absolutely clear to everyone in the school cafeteria where the race was taking place that the kids whose names were on those cars had hardly ever touched them. I'm not talking about cases where the kid and dad collaborated; more about that in a minute. I'm talking about cars clearly shaped (and shaped perfectly) using saws that no 10-year-old kid in the developed world is allowed to use. I'm talking about millimeter-perfect engineering in all kinds of shapes that 10-year-olds can often envision but rarely create so symmetrically. I'm talking about paint jobs that looked like they came out of a professional garage.

Now, I am aware that the experience of building a Pinewood Derby car is shared. This year, for example, my dad and Ian roughed out the shape of his car. Ian sanded it for days and painted it. He and I glued on weights and made sure the wheels were even. Ian lubricated the wheels. My wife painted the flourishes on the car and gave it the personality Ian wanted. This all happened over the course of a month or so. Then, yesterday morning, Ian got the car to weight by prying off some of the little lead pieces we'd glued to the bottom. Before weighing it in, he ran off to show his car to his friends. It was a cool-looking car, deep red, with the legend The Mad Monster across the top and cartoony bared teeth painted across its conical front.

But when the races started, there was never any doubt who was going to win.

*

It was ever thus, or words to that effect, said a friend of mine when I was ranting at him about this last night. Maybe so. But I've got a real problem with it, and the Cub Scouts need to do something.

DO YOUR BEST

That's the Cub Scout motto, right? Not

TURN YOUR SON INTO A VEHICLE FOR YOUR OWN HYPERCOMPETITIVE IDIOCY

or

DO AS MUCH AS YOU WANT TO UNTIL YOUR DAD GETS SICK OF YOUR CRAP AND FINISHES THE JOB HIMSELF

or

WIN

No. The motto is DO YOUR BEST.

I mean, yesterday I saw a father repeatedly pushing his son away while he worked on the son's car.

*

Those three cars I mentioned finished 1-2-3 in their division, well ahead of the rest. Ian's car won one heat, finished last in his other three heats, and didn't make the next round. Sour grapes? No. Twice in five years, Ian's car went on to the elimination rounds. We've done all right before, and I'm proud of how he learned a bit more each year about how to put the car together.

You know what else I'm proud of? That I can honestly look at each of those cars, from Green Lightning to Mad Monster, and say that he made them and he did his best.

And that's what brings me to the open-letter part of this screed:

Fathers of Cub Scouts.

When you bring a car to the Pinewood Derby and it's obvious that you made it with only minimal input from your son, the basic unfairness is reprehensible, but that's not even the worst of it. The worst of it is the message your actions transmit to your kids and everyone else in the pack.

You are teaching your son that it's okay to take credit for things he didn't do, and you are teaching my son that his honest effort will always be trumped by the people who are willing to cheat. And on top of that, you are teaching every kid there that the whole Cub Scout motto is, like so many other mottos adults teach to children, lip service to an ideal that adults don't really believe in. You might as well hold up two fingers and cross the fingers of your other hand behind your back.

The Pinewood Derby isn't about you, dads. It's about your sons and their fellow Scouts. It's about them doing their best, not you making sure they win. My son deserves better, and so does yours.

Cut it out. Give the Pinewood Derby back.

Sincerely,

A Proud and Angry Father of a Son Who Did His Best