Follow
Books by D.J. Butler
Bookshelf: Verisimilitude
Deren Hansen’s Verisimilitude: How Illusions, Confidence Games, and Skillful Lying can Improve Your Fiction is a pithy and readable guide to improving your writing. It’s ostensibly about writing fiction, but in fact I think a lot of the advice is applicable to writing of other kinds, including legal and academic writing.
Starting with two sets of writing commandments (one by Mark Twain and the other by Kurt Vonnegut), Hansen focuses less on issues like plot construction, character, and worldbuilding (though those come up), and more on issues like economy of prose, readability, maintaining the illusion, and making sense. He intersperses his instruction with relevant quotes from contemporary authors (Scott Westerfeld, Howard Tayler, Brandon Sanderson, Anne Gallagher) as well as classic names. Most of my favorite lines in the book, though, are Hansen’s own, such as this one:
Story is about cause and effect. We love good stories because we learn something about solving our own problems by going along with the characters as they try to solve theirs.
This book like, like Hansen’s other Dunlith Hill Writing Guides, is well worth the small expense of money and time. My only gripe is that I’d like more of it.
Posted in Bookshelf
Tagged Anne Gallagher, Brandon Sanderson, Deren Hansen, How to Write, Howard Tayler, Scott Westerfeld
Leave a comment
Bookshelf: Partials
The backstory of Dan Wells’ biopunk epic is that America genetically engineers a bunch of semi-human “Partials” as supersoldiers — tough, unfeeling, regenerating killing machines. Who turn around and overthrow civilization. At the same time, a plague, called the RM virus, causes the surviving humans to suffer systematic reproductive failure… all human babies die, within days of birth.
Kira is a medical intern in the surviving human outpost of 36,000 people on Long Island. She struggles emotionally with the plague to begin with, but it becomes very real and urgent for her when her friend gets pregnant. Fortunately, Kira has a plan… since the Partials seem immune to the plague, why not capture one of them and study it?
When the proper channels turn down her proposal, Kira and several friends cross into Manhattan and capture a Partial. This puts Kira on a collision course with the human Senate, which may be manipulating her for their own ends, as well as Mkele, the mysterious and ruthless head of the humans’ intelligence service, and the Partial itself, who had its own high-stakes mission when Kira and her friends snared it.
This is cerebral stuff in today’s YA market: lots of science, a modest amount of kissing, and really terrific.
Bookshelf: Spirit Walker
The Serpent Catch series is Jurassic Planet: in a far future, homo sapiens has terra-formed a world and filled it with neanderthals and dinosaurs (as well as sea serpents and dragons).
Thousands of years later, our hero is Tull, half-human and half-neanderthal. Not quite belonging to either race, Tull seeks acceptance by choosing adoption into the family of a neanderthal spirit walker.
That same spirit walker sees a heroic, and also tragic, future for his foster son. The sea serpents that protect Tull’s backwater homeland from incursions by “civilized” slavers are disappearing. Tull joins an expedition led by Phylomon, an ancient terraforming human whose life is extended and protected by the symbiotic blue life form he wears as a skin, to replenish the sea serpent population from their breeding grounds. His spirit walker foster father has seen in a vision that Tull will defeat the slaver forces… but in his adoption rite, he also gave Tull the neanderthal name Path of the Crushed Heart.
Spirit Walker feels like a classic “planetary romance.” It’s technically science fiction, feels like fantasy, and is one hundred percent adventure.
Bookshelf: Bieber’s Finger / Funk Toast and the Pan-Galactic Prom Show
Twana Burch is a lucky girl. Yeah, her brother is involved with a black-market cloning racketeer, and her mom is a junkie declining rapidly towards death. But Twana, who is the HUGEST FAN EVER of the mononymic pop star Bieber, happens to be present when the car carrying her musical idol explodes.
Now, I realize it might not seem like good luck to see your musical hero blasted into bits, but here’s the key piece you’re missing: Twana catches one of the bits. Specifically, she catches Bieber’s Finger.
What results is a madcap plan: Twana makes a deal with her brother’s mobster boss that, in exchange for a chrome-plated rehab plan for their mom, Twana will hand over the finger and will also train the resulting Bieber clone how to be Bieber: she knows all the key information, because, after all, she’s his biggest fan. This will allow the mobster to spin Bieber’s death as a publicity stunt and return under new management, just in time to win the Pan-Galactic Prom Show.
Intercut with the story of Twana’s and New Bieber’s adventures, we also follow a platoon of ice beetles from planet Hull. Their home destroyed by their species enemy, the Voles, these elite beetles 
are tasked with finding a new home for the entire race. Resuscitating a wrecked earth-origin exploration ship, the USS Arlington, and head into deep space.
The adventure continues in Funk Toast and the Pan-Galactic Prom Show. The ice beetle explorers have become a band called Poison Nickels, and by a bit of aggressive management and some musical piracy, they get themselves on to the program. Along with the resurrected Bieber and the Funk Toast band (a real life band here transmogrified into a science fiction analog, complete with band member biographies and portraits baked into the narrative of both books), the Poison Nickels get a slot on the Pan-Galactic Prom Show.
Will the popstar-cloning scam work? Will Bieber’s boybandmate and murderer finish the job he started? Will Poison Nickels succeed in using the Prom Show has a platform for bringing attention to the plight of their species, and get a new home for the ice beetles? Will anybody find love?
Craig Nybo’s previous books have been small-town monster-injected Americana. Here, the Wizard of Kaysville takes his love of gonzo storytelling, injects it with his rock and roll savoir faire, shoots it into outer space, and amps the volume to 11.
Well worth it.
Sasquan, Here We Come!
Space Balrogs are pleased to announced that we’re going to Sasquan (this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, in Spokane)… as part of the show!
Look for us as part of the First Night Show, presenting Choose Your Own Apocalypse. We’ll be on at 6:00 pm, in the Park… special competing guest(s) to be announced.
Posted in Conventions
Tagged Choose Your Own Apocalypse, Sasquan, Space Balrogs, WorldCon
Leave a comment
Bookshelf: The Crown and the Dragon
This is the story of a princess whose people have been subjugated by a foreign power and the outlaw who is her unlikely companion. Elenn is fated to be a paladin, and bears a magical artifact of tremendous destiny, but she can’t fulfill her destiny if the occupying Vitalion get her first. Aedin is a robber who escaped Vitalion gallows by pretending he had secrets of occupied Deira, and whose path of redemption now is to protect the last of Deira’s royal family.
This is fast-paced epic fantasy with a Romans vs. Barbarians kind of feel in its naming conventions, its technology, and some of the pseudo-medieval Christianity of its institutions (e.g., monastic orders). If you’re looking for the action and adventure of the Game of Thrones and don’t want the blood and the nihilism, The Crown and the Dragon may be just the book for you.
Bookshelf: James Owen
James Owen is a storyteller of a particular kind. In the same way that Bob Dylan is a troubadour / balladist wielding an ancient tradition of lines, tropes, structures, and concerns, Owen walks as a sort of guide to, shuffler, reinventor, and reimaginer of the the world’s inventory of great stories.
I spent a leisurely day this past weekend reading through his 20th Anniversary Nearly Complete Essential StarChild. This is a reprint in a single volume of all the issues of StarChild, Owen’s independent black and white comic masterpiece, as well as the similar and related Mythopolis.
StarChild includes a long story arc relating to the mantle of the consort of the fairy queen Titania, which when worn on a certain All Hallow’s Eve, gives the wearer the power to remake the world by his storytelling. The right to wear the mantle is contested by descendants of different consorts of Titania, as well as assorted friends, and various other major figures of lore and legend — including Oberon, Wayland Smith, and Rip Van Winkle. Numerous storytellers (Shakespeare, Wilde, Neil Gaiman) make cameo or repeating appearances.
In feel, StarChild most resembles an Indie version of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, though it also has resonance with Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. Owen manages to complete the long arc and also tell several satisfying shorts without yet giving the impression that he has exhausted the material, and indeed, I understand that more is to come, possibly under the title Fool’s Hollow (announcement pending).
Owen’s Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica are a sort of adventure-in-all-fantasy-worlds tale. Book one, Here There Be Dragons, begins with a professor’s murder in London, which quickly segues through the appearance of a mysterious book into three Englishman sailing a sentient boat across the Archipelago of Dream, the vast sea of all stories, trying to prevent the mysterious Winter King from erasing magical lands entirely or seizing control of them by taking the throne of King Arthur.
These are delightful tales. StarChild is an Indie comic, aimed at adult readers who can handle a consciously literary, black and white comic book with very little traditional comic action. Here, There Be Dragons is a middle reader fantasy and the first of a seven-book series, but like all really good middle reader fantasy it can be enjoyed by a reader of any age. Indeed, many of the literary in-jokes will be best appreciated by the adult reading the story out loud to children.
Bookshelf: Million Dollar Outlines
I occasionally remind myself of craft principles by going back to the well and reading a book about writing. This week, I read David Farland’s Million Dollar Outlines. If you’re trying to write your first novel (or your nth novel) and you don’t already own this book, you should buy it now.
Million Dollar Outlines is part of WordFire Press’s Million Dollar Writing series (the hook is that the author of the book on each subject has actually made at least a million dollars by implementing the skills described in the book). It’s relatively short, and its tone is pithy and conversational. Dave uses accessible examples from literature and film. And though one of the last chapters specifically addresses the components of a good outline, most of the book builds the foundation for that chapter by walking the reader-writer through fiction, from the ground up.
Dave starts by comparing plot arc maps with endorphin biofeedback diagrams to try to answer the basic question why on earth would anybody want to read a novel, anyway? Having touched bedrock with that analysis, he builds up by digging into audience needs, identification with character, and the structure of plot, until the student-author is ready to sit down and outline her next novel from start to finish.
Essential.
Bookshelf: Bloodletting
The Affinities Cycle is an epic fantasy saga in a Farlandesque or Sandersonian vein… 5/5 stars, and bring on the sequels! As in Sanderson’s and Farland’s most famous books, magic here is schematic, tied to an ordering of the world, its cosmology and myth. Specifically, the Heart of the World is an ur-gem with twelve aspects that sometimes seem like principles and sometimes seem like deities: the four Material aspects of air, earth, fire, and water, the four Energy aspects of density, force, magnetism, and time, and the four Conscience aspects of will, emotion, perception, and spirit. Some races in this fantasy world have magical powers tied to specific aspects; the advantage and also the weakness of humanity is that it is tied to none of them specifically, but has people talented in all the aspects.
(Having said this, the very setup of the tale in its “Chapter 0” prolog suggests that the scheme only incompletely describes reality.)
Bloodletting opens with a pair of human siblings. Tetra is a Graviton, with a great natural gift for manipulating the density of objects. His twin sister Halli is a Geist, with a gift for manipulating spirit. They are both chosen to have their talents further groomed at the Academy, only before they can go, their home village is ravaged by the Orocs, an orcish / entish species of tribalistic earth manipulators. Halli is kidnapped, and Tetra is maimed.
So Tetra determines to rescue his sister. In the meantime, the military commander who intervened to save Tetra’s life in the massacre tries to understand why Tetra seems to be able to do unique things with his powers. And in the background, all the races move closer to a world-engulfing war over the missing Heart of the World.
Posted in Bookshelf
Tagged Brandon Sanderson, David Farland, Epic Fantasy, Mark Ryan, Peter J. Wacks, Wordfire Press
Leave a comment
