uskglass

By accident, I've read three metafictional books this year inspired by Jorge Luis Borges: Paul Auster's City of Glass and Ghosts, both from the 80s, and last year's The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang. I love Borges' stories and I wish there were more things like them, so I was hopeful; alas, all of them disappointed me to greater or lesser degree, though in different ways between Auster and Kang. Re. Kang and Melancholy, I think I had my first sinking feeling when I saw that Cloud Atlas was one of its jacket comp titles. I also love Cloud Atlas, but unlike with Borges, I'm automatically wary when I see something comped to it: it has somehow produced a rash of really uninteresting multi-time-period literary sci-fi in its wake.

I read Auster a month or two ago and mostly forgot about him until I picked up Melancholy, read it, got increasingly annoyed, and was like "huh, this is like with those Auster books... why does this keep happening to me?" No more postmodern metafiction this year. Maybe. Admittedly I do have a book out from the library I haven't tried yet called Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, but, uh, maybe it is something different. (I've also read some good slipstream stuff I liked a lot this year, including Theodora Goss' collection In the Forest of Forgetting, but this whole postmodern Borges curse thing is haunting me now.)

Anyway, the books:

( City of Glass & Ghosts; The Melancholy of Untold History )

One longer-time entry on my TBR scratched off - I finally read Till We Have Faces, and I liked it, even, although I have little respect for Lewis and this didn't change my mind otherwise. Mere Christianity made a strong impression on me years ago, negatively. It's not that I went in intending to hateread; at the time I thought of Lewis as didactic, but not dishonest, exactly, and I was curious about his reasoning. But I was disappointed all the same: Mere Christianity is a profoundly disingenuous work, intellectually and emotionally--and arrogant also, yes, but in that hollow, defensive way that bespeaks doubt rather than concealing it.

So my impression of Lewis was as a sophist, and a pretty unpleasant one at that. Add that to my indifference to Narnia (didn't love or hate it as a kid, thought it was a little precious--also had no idea it was about Jesus, knowing very little about Jesus at the time) and I'd had no love to lose.

( On Lewis, and on Till We Have Faces )

I've been sporadically reading Tanith Lee over the past year or so. She's one of those SFF greats whose name I'd heard tossed around for the couple of decades I've been reading the genre, but never had a clear sense of what she wrote; actually, the first person who mentioned to her to me, when I was like, 12 or 13, had her mixed up with Peter S. Beagle and thought she'd written The Last Unicorn.

--This became really funny when I started reading her last year--I like The Last Unicorn and I like Beagle, and I'd still describe his style overall as sort of precious and nostalgic and sentimental. Lee's is... not that. Beagle rarely writes something that would be rated over PG in movie form. Lee is a hard R on most days with the frequent NC-17. But I also kind of understand the subconscious associative chain of association, even though the comparison is, still, really funny; they're both very fairytaley, imagistic, ornate writers who have a bigger eclectic body of work they've built up over time than a single masterwork per se, although I guess The Last Unicorn is more famous than any one Lee work, partly thanks to Rankin-Bass and one weird (charming, very 80s) animated film. But that's what's fun about backreading Lee: there's so much to backread, and because she was so prolific and eclectic, it's more about getting to know her sensibility than following one continuity.

Anyway, enough about what Tanith Lee isn't. Here are a few works of hers I've read semi-recently -

Night's Master & Death's Master: these are the first two books in her Tales from the Flat Earth series, which is unrelated to any unfortunate persistent conspiracy theories about our actual world's shape. They're more like a folktale or myth cycle than a conventional novel series per se, following the gods and monsters and dynasties of an imaginary world which is, indeed, flat, but more in the sense of a layered, Yggdrasil-esque creation than anything else.

They were fun and weird; I recently saw someone recommending her as some sort of unproblematic, untarnished alternative to Neil Gaiman and The Sandman in light of the truly horrific stuff that's come to light about him as a person, which drove me a little insane for multiple reasons, mainly because a. they are very much their own thing and b. nothing Tanith Lee writes is going to satisfy anyone looking for an unproblematic alternative to something! Her stuff is extremely gothic and laced through with violence, incest, and taboo and exploitation of many kinds, and it's very often eroticized--and not in the kind of careful, "the author is making sure you understand their moral compass Very Clearly even if The People Contained Within Do not Follow It" fashion that is common in 21st-century horror / stuff published through Tordotcom. I just don't think this is a good recommendation angle.

... But I also understand their point. There's some of the same satisfaction, and remove, of following a semi-unrelated series of tales through centuries and ages, and watching the gods' effect on mortals; oftentimes there's this shaggy dog appeal of wondering how it will all come together structurally. I think Sandman is a little more on-the-ground and also has more deliberate pretensions (good or bad) to metanarrative and commentary about Belief and Story and all that; that's not really Tanith Lee's style, which is something I enjoy about her - she writes in a pretty immersed and immersive way about whatever it is she's writing about, and doesn't do a lot of postmodern winking. It's not a story about gods because gods signify something obvious and great about the human experience; it's a story about gods, take it or leave it. That being said, I have only read two of these, though I intend to go through the rest.

Tanith Lee A to Z: This, as the title suggests, is an anthologized collection of her work themed after titles of stories. The fact this could work at all suggests how prolific she was! And also, I love this book - it has great pieces, it has okay pieces, it has WTF pieces, and it really does show her range. I own it now in case it goes out of print (a big reason for me buying a particular book now, alas) and also because there's a story, "God and the Pig," I hope to make some kind of comic adaptation of sooner or later. Don't @ me. Anyway, off the top of my head, a few pieces of hers I enjoyed -

• "All the Birds of Hell" - short post-apocalyptic nuclear winter vignette with a weird dreamlike sequence with a nuclear sub breaking out of the ice
• "God and the Pig" - involves a dialogue between God and a pig. Five stars
• "The Hill" - strange, shaggy-dog, Sherlock Holmes-like Victorianish piece with a fun and earnest and incredibly weird humanist thesis
• "Jedella Ghost" - bittersweet historical fantasy, hard not to spoil otherwise
• "A Madonna of the Machine" - Matrix-y cubiclefarm dystopia + hallucinatory numinous experience
• "Rherlotte" - full-on, luxury-dripping, ornate, novella-length French lesbian revenge gothic, is what it is 100%
• "Xoanon" - strange hopeful little numinous tale about an island and a divine phenomenon

There are other good ones; there are also some genuinely bad ones, including pieces whose treatment of race and culture both aged badly and probably weren't great at the time, and also just classic Lee-ish sexually explicit and transgressive to the point of silliness (there's a whole sexy twin brother haunting thing which is very... well, it's funny), but that's part of the charm I think - it seems like Tanith Lee was never too afraid of something being stupid to make it, well, itself. There's a shyness I abhor in present-day fantasy that certainly doesn't seem to have afflicted her - it makes the reading experience fun. Even if it sometimes means paging through another grimdark-with-a-moral.

"Crying in the Rain": I'm listing this short story separately because I didn't read it in a Tanith Lee collection, but in another anthology (The Big Book of Science Fiction) for a class I was taking for fun. It's good, it's sad, it's dark, it didn't leave as much of an impression on me as some of her other stuff, but it did get me to thinking about hallmarks of hers - a certain frankness about horror and the body and vulnerability and rot that is sometimes exploitative, often compassionate, often at the same time. Bodies get destroyed a lot in Tanith Lee stories, not in a symbolic Hannibal or True Detective crime drama or New Weird kind of way, but often while you're living in them: in this case, through radiation poisoning and cancer. There's always something sensual about it, but it's an inside-out kind of sensual, rather than an outside-in. Also, mothers. Your mother tends to fuck you up; Lee is probably 200% more interested in the mother as a gothic figure than the father, which I enjoy.

More on her overall sensibility - Tanith Lee's writing is very gothic, often pretty extravagant (but at other times more restrained and introspective: she's also got a secondary bittersweet religious-doubt sensibility I honestly tend to like even more), and eroticized-and-also-problematized violence plays a big part: it doesn't always have a feminist message, but it has a very consistent feminist sensibility in an Angela Carter kind of way. Her worldview is queer, consistently and generally so, and specifically pretty bisexual: I don't know a ton about her biographically, but I could probably surmise. I've got a few other things of hers on the shelf from a used bookstore, I will continue my readthrough and not just cryptically referencing her here and there! Gotta love a crazy, hard-to-track-down oeuvre. (Specifically I've learned that "Rherlotte" wasn't just one French lesbian gothic, but one story from a whole dedicated pseudonym & collection of French lesbian gothics she wrote? This is so extra and I have to find it.)

In the past month or so, I played in two different one-hour Paracelsus Games LARPs. One of them was insane and hilarious. The other was brutal and intense (in a good way) and brought us both to tears by the end (in a good way, genuinely). These two games were Drink Me and Debrief.

Drink Me was played with my partner gogollescent and two friends in one friend's home, with the aid of a darkened room, several cups, some paper inscriptions, and a bunch of food coloring. And a lot of water. A bunch of water. We will talk about the quantity of water.

Debrief was played with just my partner, over a video call between two different rooms, as instructed.

You can check out her own writeup of our experience with Debrief too (along with her side of the game ECH0 from early 2022). Both games involve picking up pre-written character profiles--especially Debrief, where the backstories are lengthy and immersive. It's a fun challenge akin to learning a role for the theater: especially for Debrief, I found myself a tad nervous that I would remember it all, and ended up with a handwritten note on the desk in front of me while I played that contained the name of my character's kids. (He had three kids. I'm not all that confident in the names and birth order of my more distant extended family, never mind the offscreen children of an imaginary person I just became. But I managed.)

Drink Me involves 4 people and is kind of a Victoriana gothic monster mash like the TV Show Penny Dreadful or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but less shooting, more squabbling. Debrief involves 2 and is an angsty Cold War interpersonal drama--think George Smiley or The Americans, but with a ghost.

If it sounds like I'm really into comp titles, I'm not, actually, but these games are: very much by design, I should think. They're games that expect the players to step into an unfamiliar milieu, historical or pseudohistorical, and learn a backstory and a set of motivations right off--it makes plenty of sense to draw on trope at least as a starting point, give players something to work with. They definitely encourage you to go beyond that, but when I was studying up on my Debrief role, I found myself going "oh I'm Bill Haydon, basically! Great, I can do a Bill Haydon" and then getting to examine how my character differed from John le Carré's actual Bill Haydon, or Kim Philby for that matter, and think about what I wanted to extemporize on. I'm pretty ambivalent on the popularity of trope as a widely known fandom thing, but I think this kind of activity is a great use of it.

Because they both rely on secrets and ask that the players read only their own role in full and not the others before playing, I'm going to put my descriptions behind two spoiler cuts. Just in case anyone's interested in setting up a game of either of these: they're both really fun, and I'm not sure they're replayable.

( DRINK ME )

( DEBRIEF )

ECH0 is a short storytelling TTRPG by Role Over Play Dead originally created for the 2019 Emotional Mecha Jam - and now I've played it! It's melancholy, bittersweet, encourages gesture- and detail-based worldbuilding on the fly, and is ultimately all about getting invested in the particulars of a story with an already-fated ending: all things I love in a story and in a game.

We ended up playing out a sad, lonely set of vignettes about a dead soldier who comes face to face with some harsh things about death, war, and fragile existence through her brief connection to a living child—and a living child who learns something about the past, and also about the value of his own one human life. The story spanned just a few nights in-game, and about six hours of play out of it: taking Carlo and the Gorgon/Alice between a construction site, a gorge and underground stream, and a city choked with barbed wire and civil unrest.

( ECH0 Postmortem )

Goodness gracious me! I am behind on logging these, shockingly: we've now had sessions 3 and 4. However, I'm determined to catch up before session 5.

My players take tremendously good, thorough notes, which is honestly a joy and preserves the flow and mood of narrative for rereading both as a GM doing preparation and planning for further sessions and just when trying to convey it later in recap form. One thing I'll say here is as might have come through in the last session's recap, this is a highly scope-limited score--they have to survive a few days holed up in a single location. This has led to a very conversation-heavy narrative with the tense feeling of a siege. It's honestly great, and also makes me glad I can verbatim blockquote the notes taken on that when I need to.

( Session 3: Earworm )

Our first Blades in the Dark session was... sometime at the end of May. Two weeks ago. I write this on the eve of our second, which is set for Monday June 8 - has this lit a fire under me to finish setting up this journal and do these writeups? You bet your ass it's lit a fire under me to finish setting up this journal and do these writeups. There are two modes in which I complete anything, singular obsessive zeal about a vision only I care about (niche fanfiction, bitchy reviews) or fires under me (anything else); I'm still working on synthesizing those.

I have to cut in here to say that as much as I really want to give GM DVD commentary on the following, I cannot do that, because this is not the end of this campaign and my players are going to be reading this. It would be "spoilers" or "whatever" and I have to show "restraint."

So our first session covers the first part of the Turtle crew's first score: free play, engagement, and ended at a pivotal point within the score itself.

( Session 1: The Dolores Job )