Tag Archives: Ken scholes

2012 Reads (Lunch discussion 1 of 3)

What are you looking forward to being published in 2012?

2012 is a big year for my TBR towerS (multiple).

My list, in the order of anticipated publications, near as I can tell (never mind, they’re just listed in scrambled-marbles order):

Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (February) SQUEE!

A Turn of Light, Julie Czerneda (April 3) a fantasy from veteran SF writer

Caliban’s War, James S. A. Corey (June) a continuation of Leviathan Wakes

The Black Bottle, Anthony Huso (July) a continuation of The Last Page

Requiem, Ken Scholes (no date yet) More of the Psalms of Isaac

The General’s Mistress, Jo Graham historical fantasy set in Napoleonic Europe. (no date yet.) I loved her previous historical fantasies.

War-Lord of the Gods, Barbara Friend-Ish (no date yet) Book two of the Shadow of the Sun

Thoughts about the Hugo Awards

The Hugo Awards are the annual reader-nominated and awarded selections for the best in the previous year’s SF and F. It’s intended to award science fiction works, but fantasy schlops over frequently, and we’re all OK with that. Works include videos and movies, novels, short stories and art.

The way it works is that anyone can vote. Basically, if you are upset that your fave wasn’t nominated or didn’t win, you need to make sure that you partake in the process. It is accessible, and it is meaningful. You must buy a voter membership to the current year’s WorldCon. This year it cost $50. I feel that the charge is both necessary and appropriate for a couple of reasons. First, it puts your money where your mouth is, and second, it costs money to organize such a massive annual event.

It turns out to be such a prestigious thing that even to be nominated is to effectively win an award.

I watched the live feed last night. Duncan voted in the Hugos, I didn’t. Neither of us were part of the nominations.

The most significant thing I learned is that the numbers involved in the awarding are pretty small. The awarded pieces won by handfuls of votes. My vote next year will make a difference. It seems as though people kind of pass over the nomination stage and really get down to work at the voting stage. And finally, there is so much recognition after the awarding that people really only start to explore the nominees and awardees after the ceremony is said and done. Absolutely it is a popularity contest, with all of a popularity contest’s pros and cons. The most aggressive downside of award by popularity is that the more complex, literate, lengthy works have a smaller readership.  The best pro is that it *is* a fan-given-award–thus it is meaningful to folks like me–and the guidelines for nomination and winning ensure that it remains a fan award.

It was cool of RenoVation to live feed the ceremony. I expected it to be an Academy Awards style event with all that pomp, but people were dressed in costumes and t-shirts, and the Ken Scholes’ & Jay Lake “comedy” team kept the tone friendly and approachable. I appreciate that. I felt that I was allowed to be part of this in fandom. I expected to watch the event and feel like an outsider, outclassed and out-moneyed (like the Academy awards), but the whole ceremony was very down to earth.

The Hugo Ceremony, being a part of WorldCon, is an international event. That was evident in that there were folks from Australia, Britain and France on stage, as well as a video from Japan concerning the earthquake there in March and their carrying on with their SciFi conventions.

The ceremony opened with a thanks to the folks who run the damn thing. That was really cool. It’s such a huge undertaking. You can get an inkling of this just from the list of people involved.

I loved the bit at the beginning about the artwork that went into the designing of the base for the rocket that is the trophy. Marina Gelineau designed and made the bases for the trophies, and her introduction to the work was really neat. She does stained glass, especially the fine painting on the glass. For the trophy base, she made each one a unique representation of the microfauna possible in extreme environments.

The next interesting bit was the reception by Chris Garcia of his Hugo for the Best Fanzine Award for The Drink Tank. You have to watch the video to see what I mean.

Girl Genius won the graphic novel award. Kaja Foglio, in a gracious move that will immortalize her I’m sure, bowed GG out of further consideration for Hugo nomination in order to allow other great and awesome works to take the spotlight. Now that’s class.

Of course, Dr. Who won the short form dramatic work. Additionally, they were nominated for three of the five spots. It might be time to break this award down into “lots of funding and decades of fan followers” vs “The New Guys with a home video camera”.  The other two works were utterly different from Dr. Who and from eachother. You can read more about them here.

Lou Anders finally won his well-deserved Hugo. Plus I liked his outfit. Again, its interesting that the nominees for this category were in the same category. Anders is the publisher and editor and art director at PYR books. He does all those things for that small press. In large publishing houses, the editor is the editor. There is another department for marketing, for cover art, etc.

Overall, I learned a lot about the categories other than Novel and about the process. XKCD was nominated, but kind of passed over because it was nominated under the artist’s name rather than the name of the comic strip. Best related work has a lot of potential as a category. Is Dragon Age II eligible, I wonder?

What will happen next year? Well, first of all, I am going to be part of the nominations process. We’re going to see a lot of exciting stuff come out of the Hugo process next year. As FantasyLiterature.com says, it’s been a big year for fantasy. I would like to see the wider scope of really fantastic works better represented in the novels category. I would have liked to have seen Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings nominated for the 2011 awards, for example. BullSpec and The Quantum Thief both need to be on that ballot, for starters. Who’s in this with me?

Re-read

What’s worth re-reading?

The largest cost for me in reading is not the dollar cost of the book but the time cost of the commitment. With so many great reads out there, both new and old titles, it’s pure exquisite agony to me to choose which book to next commit myself to. The knife? What books am I excluding to by committing to this one?

So, to re-read a book is double-torture. Not only am I not reading some other, great new story, but I am not reading something else in order to read something I’ve already read!

With that, re-reading is the biggest compliment that I can give to a book.

Sometimes listening to the audio after reading the print can serve as an excellent complimentary re-read of a story.

I have re-read Kristen Britain’s Green Rider series, Julie Czerneda’s Species Imperative series. I have read and listened to Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files several times now.  I am currently listening to/re-reading Karl Schroeder’s Sun of Suns series. And of course, I am re-reading Juliet McKenna’s Tales of Einarinn series. I will re-read Ken Scholes’ Psalms of Isaak series, and Anthony Huso’s The Last Page.

Is re-reading something a big deal to you? What’s worth a re-read?

Ken Scholes Interview

Ken Scholes is the author of the Psalms of Isaac series, comprised thus far of Lamentation, Canticle, and Antiphon, published by TOR. He has short stories set in this world, plus excerpts of the novels available to read at TOR.com: link here. These books are also available in audio, read by multiple voice actors.

The covers are hyperlinks to Better World Books.

1) Winters is probably the most true character I’ve met. She is absolutely a shy, adolescent girl going through puberty, dealing simultaneously with both the Destiny of her Peoples and despairing loneliness. I get the sense that a lot of readers resonate with this character. We’ve all been, and some days still are, Winters. (Us gals, anyway.) How does a writer hit a character so spot on?

I’m glad you enjoy Winters.  She’s a result of me having a good partner.  Jen was reading along as I wrote Lamentation and about halfway in, she noted that I really didn’t have much in the way of strong female characters apart from Jin Li Tam.  Of course, she was right.  I’d always been a bit nervous writing female characters, fearing I’d get them all wrong.  But I think the trick is to put yourself in that person’s shoes and imagine what they love, what they fear, what they long for and then stay true to that…and use empathy to extrapolate how they might feel or think in the areas where you’re different from your character.

I was so smitten when I created Winters in Lamentation that I just had to make her part of the ensemble for the rest of the series.  And I tried within my ensemble to have at least one character that would resonate with every reader — largely from me bending the archetypal characters of the epic fantasy genre — the dashing pope, the secret king, the destined orphan, the deadly courtesan. 

Over the last two years, I’ve had similar comments made about Petronus, about Jin, about Rudolfo — that they were characters who found deep resonance with a particular reader.  So it sounds like my fiendish plot is working.  [Insert maniacal laughter here.] 

2) You mix engineering and magic in a delightful way, incorporating steam mechanisms without going over the Steampunk Deep Edge. Do you have a background in engineering, machining or similar works?

Nope.  Zip, zilch, zero background.  I’m intentionally not going into a lot of detail around those elements of the story – along with other bits of setting and worldbuilding detail – because I really just want enough of that “feel” to give the world a sense of being real.  I want the inner lives of my characters — juxtaposed against the external conflicts they face — to be the focus of the story.

3) And of course, there are the prevalent Catholic themes that are drawn upon (and turned inside out!) in the books: “psalms”, the Pope and Antipope, the names of some of the characters, and so forth. How were you able to make these stories taste of Orthodoxy while still making the political and religious structures in The Psalms of Isaac unique?

I spent a great deal of my early years as a practicing Christian, including a period of time as a fundamentalist minister (I got better).  I studied a lot of church history along with the impact (both positive and negative) of religion.  The Pope and Antipope are definitely drawn from that study of history and much of the Androfrancines came about by my pondering the notion of a group of secular humanists establishing a religious hierarchy that made the light of human knowledge and accomplishment sacred as a means of protecting the survivors of repeated cataclysms.

4) Dreaming plays a huge part in the Psalms of Isaac. The characters meet, warn, prophesize, and give one another instructions in dream-land. It lends a sense of mysticism to some of the characters, but is handled in a way that it doesn’t get goofy. Additionally, only some of the characters have prophetic or conversational dreams, while others just have plain old dreams. How does this mechanism help you to tell the story?

Well, I set out to tell an otherworldly biblical epic…with a postapocalyptic twist.  Prophesies, speaking in tongues, the dead speaking in dreams, dreams of a promised land, the birth of a promised child.  These are all components of that epic, only instead of a monotheistic religion based on the blood sacrifice rituals of desert nomads, I have Wizard Kings from the moon who rule humanity as gods based on the mythos of that world.   From there, I just try to stay true to the perspective of the characters, who are all convinced that what they’re experiencing is metaphysical.     

5) We’ve talked about romance a little on Darkcargo before. What’s your take on all that kissy stuff in a novel with tough, post-apocalyptic scenes?

I’m a hopeless romantic and like a bit of that kissy stuff in my fiction.  That said, there’s some romance in the series but not really a lot due to the characters all being separated for long periods of time.  And I think that the dynamics of human romance and sexuality and relationship are pretty constant and important bits of our species that should be celebrated…even in a tough post-apocalyptic setting.  Because I think we gravitate towards love even in the darkest of places.

6) Neb doesn’t talk for a long, long time after his traumatic experience. Is this an example of PTSD?

Well, I suppose it could’ve been.  But more than that, it was his brain being overloaded and effected by the blood magicks unleashed on Windwir.  We learn a bit more about his exposure to the blood magicks later in Antiphon.

7) Why is the throne wicker?

It seemed like a cool notion.  Something temporary just as the Marshfolk saw their time in the Named Lands as temporary.  Oh, and it’s a bit easier to haul wicker up the mountain. 

8) When I first opened Lamentation, I thought about all the scrolls and papyrus that were lost in the Alexandria Library…the burning of the Mayan Codices, multiple sackings of Bablylon…. If you could visit a library of the past, where would you stop off for a library card?

If I had a working time machine, I’d hit them all.  But Windwir’s fall and its library was definitely inspired by the library at Alexandria and the notion of everything lost there, mixed in with the greater sense of loss one might feel if it were the last gathered knowledge on a world made largely desolate by repeated cataclysms.

9) Books one through three of the Psalms of Isaac series have been published. When are books four and five coming around? Are you working on anything else besides this series right now?

I’m working on Requiem now and should be finished in a handful of months.  I’ve had some big setbacks — I lost both of my parents and my nephew while working on Canticle and Antiphon and just as I finished the third volume, my twin daughters were born.  Mix in some health struggles (I got better) and a need to re-learn how to write with toddlers in the house and it’s been quite a challenge.

But volume four should be out roughly a year after I finish the draft.  And I’ll read the first four volumes with a notebook handy, then ideally start Hymn — the final volume — in late 2011 or early 2012.

10) What are you reading now?

Well, I don’t get to read much…when I do, it’s outside the genre.  I recently finished Greg Iles’s Spandeau Phoenix and I’ve started Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer.

Boat Gankage Redeux

(This turned out to be a recommendation for Ken Scholes’ Psalms of Isaac series)

Took a quick break between Canticle (book 2) and Antiphon (book3) to stop in and check on my pal StarDoc, with Plague of Memory.

She’s doing alright, had to perform battlefield surgery on her hubby again, making new genetically-impossible friends, finding antidotes for inter-galactic chemical weapons, coming to terms with her multiple-personality issues… You know.

Anyway, just started Antiphon: Rafe Merrique’s boat was ganked out from under him! How rude!

I had to look this up, too. Antiphon is the response from the, uh, audience, I guess, in a ritual, most familiarly as done in a Catholic or Orthodox Mass. Head Priest Guy says “blah blah something” and we dutiful Catholic school kids would say “blessed is the fruit of the loom Jesus.”

This makes sense to me in relation to the story. *thinks, eyes wander* There are five books to the series: Lamentation (grief over a tragedy), Canticle (a hymn), Antiphon (or “response”), Requiem (a mass for the dead), and I don’t know what the fifth will be titled.

I’m NOT giving you any spoilers because the surprises in the stories were so delightful to me. They cover fantastical archaeology, I guess you could say, with a Medici-like family pulling political strings, he’s got the Great Schism complete with Pope and Antipope thing goin’ on, a Mighty Weapon, a pee-and-see pregnancy test… The world and its history keep getting bigger and deeper with every chapter. The characters grow and change, become People in my mind, not just characters. The old people are old with cricks in their bones, and the adolescents are adolescent with their shyness and impulsively dumb ideas.

I’m trying to think which is my favorite character, but they’re all so unique and interesting. In Lamentation I wanted to make cookies for Neb but now in Antiphon he scares me a little. Winters is utterly real. And if I ever meet that Ria chick I’m going to bust her face open. Characters that were in the “good guy” column are in the “bad guy” column later, and then back again. They’re all just folks, with conflicting motives.

So. I’m going to return to Rafe and see how he’s doing, and what gives with those dudes stealing his boat. How rude.

Romance Snobtules

I get irritated when people get all uppity about romance. Puttin’ on airs about how any book that brushes romance is-you know- ikcy, or junky. To each his own, I say. Read what you enjoy reading and keep your Snobtules to yourself.

Romance enters all kinds of stories in all kinds of ways, serving different purposes. Just like any element of a good story, the romantic elements must make as much sense and be as true to character as any other story component.

Most of the books I love have some romantic element. Romance and affairs of the heart are so much a part of being human that I question a story’s validity if the characters are not somehow, someway, thinking about, if not engaging in, romance.

There is so much more to the human heart than the act of sex. Romance is not sex. Romance is falling in love, being in love, falling out of love, finding that you’re still in love, choosing to not commit to a relationship for whatever reason, growing old and contented together, never finding The One, unreciprocated, heartbreak, strong and empowering partnerships.

This snippet from Lamentation by Ken Scholes made me cry:
(the character is trying to fall asleep)
“Windwir’s destruction found that grief and worried it, creating inside of him a longing for home and rest that he could not remember ever knowing before.

“He jumped when she slid alongside of him into the narrow bedrolls. She moved as silently as a Gypsy Scout, perhaps more so. And when she had entwined her arms and legs with his, she pinned him down and kissed him on the mouth. ‘For a great and mighty general,’ she whispered, ‘you are not so very bold.’

“Rudolfo returned her kiss, amazed at how in the moment he finally longed for home, home appeared and welcomed him.”

**persniffle!**