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Tag Archives: Lucius Shepard

Reprint: The End

27 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Alfred Bester, Brian Aldiss, Carolyn See, Clifford D. Simak, Douglas Adams, Edgar Pangborn, Elizabeth Hand, George R. Stewart, Greg Bear, H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, Jack London, James Morrow, John Wyndham, Keith Roberts, Lucius Shepard, Mary Shelley, Nevil Shute, Octavia Butler, Peter George, Philip Latham, Piers Anthony, Raymond Briggs, Richard Jefferies, Ronald Wright, Russell Hoban, Stephen Baxter, Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I had great plans for my Cognitive Mapping series that ran in Vector between 1995 and 2001. At one point I envisaged producing 100 of the columns, which could then be gathered together as a decent-sized book. But at some point the project ran out of steam. I had maybe another half-dozen columns started but never completed. Apart from a parody piece (written by another hand, not naming names Mr B****r), the column was over. But at the end of 2005 I produced one last hurrah, appropriately enough on how science fiction deals with the end of things. This last column was published in Vector 244, November-December 2005. Continue reading →

Reprint: Scientists

02 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Angela Carter, C.P. Snow, Carter Scholz, Charles Dickens, Charles Harness, Clifford D. Simak, Connie Willis, Don DeLillo, Frank Herbert, Gregory Benford, Iain Pears, Ian McEwan, Ian Watson, John Banville, Jonathan Swift, Lucius Shepard, Michael Crichton, Nancy Kress, Pamela Zoline, Piers Anthony, Rafael Carter, Roger Zelazny, Russell McCormmach, Thomas More, William Boyd

Another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. This one first appeared in Vector 211, May-June 2000.

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Reprint: Magic Realism

03 Saturday May 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Adolpho Bioy Casares, Alejo Carpentier, Angela Carter, Carlos Fuentes, Franz Roh, Gabriel Garcia Marques, H.G. Wells, Isabel Allende, John Campbell, John Crowley, John M. Ford, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Lucius Shepard, m john harrison, Mircea Eliade, Neil Gaiman, Peter Carey, Robert Graves, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Salvadore Allende

The recent death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez reminded me of this Cognitive Mapping piece I wrote for Vector 191 (January-February 1997). I’d probably view magic realism somewhat differently if I were to write this column now. But then, I’d probably do all of these columns very differently. Continue reading →

Lucius Shepard

21 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in reviews, science fiction

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Lucius Shepard

I cannot now remember what was the first story by Lucius Shepard that I read, though there is a fair chance that it was ‘R&R’. Certainly that story has stuck in my mind with a clarity that few stories can match. So as soon as the story was incorporated into a novel, Life During Wartime, I bought it. Around that time, a new fanzine asked me to write a couple of book reviews for them, so naturally I reviewed Life During Wartime (the other book, as I recall, was by Gene Wolfe). It was a longish, but not overlong, review of around 1,000 words, and I was really rather pleased with it. Then the fanzine came out, and I found they had, without consulting me, cut the reviews down to one short paragraph apiece. It made a nonsense of what I’d said. So, in a fit of hubris, I sent the two original reviews to the Times Literary Supplement; and they used them both. It was the start of quite a nice gig reviewing for the TLS, until a new editor decreed that only people who had written books were qualified to write reviews. But because those two reviews had previously appeared, even in a butchered and unrecogniseable form, they had to be published under a pseudonym. I called myself John Peake for the occasion.  Continue reading →

Reprint: Gormenghast

25 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Brian Aldiss, Carter Scholz, Cordwainer Smith, Daniel Defoe, Elizabeth Hand, Greg Egan, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Isaac Asimov, J.G. Ballard, James Lovegrove, Jorge Luis Borges, Lucius Shepard, Mervyn Peake, Michael Marshall Smith, Robert Silverberg, Steven Millhauser

It is, I promise you, pure coincidence that today’s reprint begins with the same writer featured in the last one, Steven Millhauser. But then, it is time to come to another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one was first published in Vector 213 (September-October 2000). Continue reading →

Reprint: Death

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction

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Alasdair Gray, Bob Shaw, Bram Stoker, Brian Stableford, Colin Greenland, Dante, Greg Egan, Iain Banks, Ian Watson, Jeff Noon, John Bunyan, Lucius Shepard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, M.R. James, Michael Swanwick, Philip Jose Farmer, Rudy Rucker, Russell Hoban, Sheridan Le Fanu, T.S. Eliot, William Gibson

More and more, as I read science fiction, I have become aware that death is the most consistent theme. You could almost say that science fiction is a literature about death. I wrote this Cognitive Mapping piece back in 1997 (it appeared in Vector 195, September-October 1997), I could write a similar column now just using works published since that date. In fact I could write it several times over, so pervasive is the theme. So this is just one aspect of a very much bigger conversation. Continue reading →

Infinity Plus Two

10 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Brian Stableford, Charles Stross, Eric Brown, John Clute, Keith Brooke, Lucius Shepard, Michael Moorcock, Nick Gevers, Paul J. McAuley, Paul Park, Stephen Baxter, Terry Bisson, Vonda McIntyre

And we start with Infinity Plus Two edited by Keith Brooke and Nick Gevers with a (somewhat perfunctory) introduction by John Clute (PS Publishing 2003).

There are many arcane reasons for the particular selection of stories that appear in a reprint anthology. They might represent some measure of ‘best’, they might represent some specific theme, they might be stories rescued from obscurity, they might simply display the individual taste of the editor(s). What they usually do not do is represent the taste of the contributors. But that is the premise of the Infinity Plus anthologies. A bunch of regular contributors to the infinity plus website have been asked to choose one of their stories for the anthology. The result is decidedly curious. There are stories here that are clearly long-time favourites – Vonda McIntyre’s ‘The Genius Freaks’ was first published 30 years ago, in the glory days of Damon Knight’s Orbit series, while Lucius Shepard’s ‘The Arcevoalo’ is nearly 20 years old and I refuse to believe it hasn’t been collected before now. Other contributors, however, seem to have gone pretty much for their most recent story, or for something from relatively small circulation sources. The variation in quality, therefore, is marked.

Paul Park’s ‘Untitled 4’, for instance (first published in Fence in 2000), is a confused and confusing mishmash of ideas in which a writer imprisoned by a peculiar form of totalitarian state edits a couple of stories by the student who betrayed him, and in them finds an account of the real crime he committed. If this is what he has chosen to represent him, one can only assume he hasn’t been producing much of real rigour lately. Adam Roberts, on the other hand, probably doesn’t have that much in the way of short fiction, but this still feels like a poor representation of his work. In an alternate Victorian England where the lands discovered by Lemuel Gulliver were real and Liliputians are used as slaves, a story that starts off being about slavery and industrial exploitation, turns into a story about guilt and betrayal, and ends up as a straightforward tale of invasion, without satisfactorily tying together or concluding any of these strands. Michael Moorcock probably does think that ‘Cheering for the Rockets’ is a good representation of his work, since it brings back Jerry Cornelius and others from the familiar repertory company, though what they do doesn’t actually make much sense and Moorcock seems to believe that using the name Jerry is all that is required in the way of characterisation.

But if these are the weaker stories, there are others which are much stronger. Stephen Baxter, indulging yet again his recent obsession with the mammoth, is not quite at his best with ‘Behold Now Behemoth’: the story of the possible survival of a mammoth as a family pet in Cornwall really needs a better resolution than it is given, but it deals interestingly with a subject that is actually becoming a little too familiar. Much the same can be said of Brian Stableford’s ‘Emptiness’, which takes him back to the theme of vampirism. This is a small-scale piece about a poor, poorly-educated woman in a run-down inner city who, for a few weeks, adopts a vampire baby. It is beautifully observed, but again feels like the story simply ends rather than being resolved.

Both Charles Stross, in ‘Bear Trap’, and Eric Brown, in ‘Dark Calvary’, offer stories that are bursting with ideas and with life. Perhaps too much so, it is hard to keep track of all the novelties that fizz and sparkle in the Stross story, so that in the end you’re not entirely sure whether everything ties together or not. While Brown’s tale of fevered religiosity in a fevered jungle setting builds to an horrific climax that still feels rather a let-down after all the invention that has gone before.

It also does Brown’s stories no favours to place it immediately before Terry Bisson’s ‘The Old Rugged Cross’, which takes the same idea of crucifiction and makes it both funnier and crueller, and more politically telling; and only two stories after ‘Dark Calvary’ is ‘The Arcevoalo’, written by Lucius Shepard when he was capturing the sweaty, foetid, garish romance of the jungle with almost ridiculous ease. These two stories together bring the collection to a powerful, vibrant conclusion.

Though I have to say that perhaps the best story gathered here is ‘The Rift’ by Paul J. McAuley, which is also set in the Amazon jungle, where a disparate (not to say disfunctional) group of climbers are descending a strange canyon where, in an inversion of Conan Doyle’s Lost World, they meet their ancestors. Here is one story that really does know how to resolve itself, even if it does so, appropriately enough, with a cliffhanger.

First published at Livejournal, 30 July 2003.

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