pornokitsch

PK Interview: Frances Hardinge interviewed by Tom Pollock

Two great authors (and Kitschies finalists!) for the price of one.

Tom Pollock, of The City's Son and The Glass Republic, exchanged a few questions with Frances Hardinge, author of A Face Like Glass, Fly By Night and a handful of other amazing, beautiful books. Two of our favourite authors - young adult or otherwise - having a chat about world-building, rebellion, character development and cheese. 

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Tom Pollock: In A Face Like Glass's Caverna, you create a delightfully bonkers subterranean world: hallucinatory dairy products and amnesia inducing winery and bifurcated rulers and daring master thieves. It's a raucous, vivid and very broad mix. What made you pull in such a load of different fantastic elements into one novel?

Frances Hardinge: When I step out through my front door, I see a world that's raucous, vivid and a very broad mix. An imaginary world lacking those qualities would feel 'thin' and unrealistic to me. I'd find it hard to believe in it enough to write about it.

I do have my flaws as a writer, but 'lack of ideas' doesn't tend to be one of them. On the contrary, my world-creation tends to get out of hand unless I'm really strict with myself. There are always aspects of my worlds that the reader never sees because there simply wasn't room for them in the books (which are already a little on the tubby side).

Also, a part of my mind is a deranged alchemist, addicted to combining disparate things to see what happens. I like juxtaposing 'incompatible' ideas the way dreams do, then following through the results logically. I enjoy throwing together unlikely word combinations - words are sometimes at their most interesting when they're slightly surprised. I even have a long and exciting history of cooking disasters brought about by the same experimental impulse. (Don't ever try bacon and banana bolognese. It turns out that alliteration does not guarantee culinary success.)

Friday Five: Gateway Smut

With one notable exception, we've never actually written about porn on Pornokitsch. Or erotica. Or any other sort of sexually-charged literature. And, all joking aside, this is a huge and diverse genre, and, to an outsider, more than a little intimidating. What's it about? What's good? What are the classics? Where do we start?

Fortunately, we've got Tiffani Angus, here to explain where smut begins...

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I read erotica. I write erotica. But as a young reader, I didn’t jump right in and start with Anais Nin. I built up to it, reading things that didn’t seem like smut. Gateway smut, if you will, where the sex scenes weren’t the most important parts of the book … but those few pages were always the most handled.

The summer I turned thirteen, my best friend and I spent hours lounging around on the couch, scanning through her mom’s stacks of Harlequin paperbacks to find the dirty goods. This was the early ’80s, when the Harlequin status quo of virginal heroine gave way to new imprints that allowed the girl to have ‘done it’ already. Sadly, my friend’s mom didn’t read those, so we were left with vague (and much too short) sex scenes. Still, it was a start, albeit a disappointing one.

No Fifty Shades of Grey back then, being read openly on the bus. Your smut was either out there, in the form of Playboy, or it was buried beneath glossy dust jackets of ‘women’s lit’. But life finds a way, and the smut got found.

Here are five novels that that taught me about smut, and will probably continue to teach others as well...

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews: Children hidden away in the attic of a mansion, two generations of incest, and filicide. The spawn of several sequels (the final one finished by a ghostwriter after Andrews’ death), Flowers was popular among my young teenage friends and me because the narrator is a teenage girl like us... only trapped in an attic with her handsome, sensitive, strong older brother. Hey, he wasn’t our brother, so we could understand the attraction. With each page the adult characters’ actions became more reprehensible — and unrealistic — but we couldn’t look away. We knew the incest was taboo, but that’s part of what made it so hot  since the scenes weren’t terribly explicit.

Friday Five: Winning with Webcomics

Last Friday, Jenni and Stefan swung by to inspire us with some of the hottest new and ongoing comic books... this week we're going digital. This whole Internet thing, not just a passing phase. The tubes are busier than ever with creators making brilliant webcomics. But... there are so many! 

Fortunately, Laura "Lor" Graham and Sara Westrop are some ideas where new webcomics readers can start. Lor is a writer, brassist (I made up that term) and provides an extremely soothing Twitter presence at @LorGraham. [Also, we published her first, so ha! Wait for 1853.]

Sara writes and edits comics for a living with Markosia. Her new webcomic, FANGIRLS, is out now (and whole-heartedly recommended). You can hassle her for updates at @sarawezzie. This is Sara's second Friday Five. If she does three, she wins a toaster.

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Lor:

1. The Darwin Faeries

This got pitched to me by a friend with the following: “there’s a loud, brash, ginger Scottish faerie in this. I didn’t know you had wings.” Charming friends I have. The story follows a group of tartan-wearing faeries punishing a male human who has spilled the blood of one of their own. It is in its second issue at the moment, and as a Scot I find it entertaining.

2. Supernormal Step

This probably my favourite webcomic at the moment, the tattoo of one of the featured “Tiny Fairy” on my left forearm will testify to that. Drawn and written by the very talented Mike Lunsford, and follows the story of Fiona Dae, sucked out of our world into one that is one above normal step to the left. She discovers magic, creepy security guards, and teams up with a reformed dark mage and a guy who turns into a bunny every time he does something wrong. Highly entertaining.

Kevin Lynn Helmick on What is Southern Gothic?

Earlier this year, we (Jared, in this case) got to blurb a novella for Blank Slate Press, Driving Alone by Kevin Lynn Helmick.

Blank Slate are doing consistently brilliant work, quietly turning out great stories from Midwestern authors (woohoo!). Now Driving Alone is out, so we asked Kevin to swing by and share a few words about what it means to write "Southern Gothic".

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Jared requested that I explain to some of you there across the pond, just what is a Southern Gothic, I had to take a breath. You see I’m not from the American South. I grew up in the Mississippi River Valley true enough, but on the borders of Iowa, Missouri and Illinois, and that’s not South.

I now live, and have for many years, just north of Chicago, which a Louisiana bartender in South Padre Island, Texas was once quick to point out, “Oh, hell yer a god damn Canadian.” I laughed at that, even though there was an insult somewhere in her tone when she said it. That should give you some idea how most American Southerners feel about the rest of America, and how some might even feel about me introducing or describing Southern Gothic.

That’s alright, just the way it is.

Friday Five: Comic Books You Should Be Reading

Comics. Where to start, right? There's always a cross-over multi-crisis on infinite shelves and, honestly, if you aren't up on the adventures of ultimate secret santa, there's no point in starting now anyway, you have to go back to the spin-off series that... etc. etc. And, hey, that just got cancelled. Oops.

Here to help are Stefan of Civilian Reader and Jenni of, well, many, many things (not the least of is her series of urban fantasy vignettes for Pandemonium). They're both people that capital-k-Know their comics so we've asked them to recommend five series that they're "following compulsively". How else would we know which bandwagon upon which to leap?

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Stefan: Jared and Anne gave me the brief – “5 comics I’m following compulsively” – and… I completely blanked.

Not because there aren’t series I am addicted to, but I don’t actually follow many on an issue-by-issue basis. Instead, I’m mostly addicted to collected editions.

So, here are five series that I am either still following and collecting, or obsessively read while it was ongoing.

1. Fables (Vertigo) - Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham

I only tried Fables after I read the first couple of issues of Fairest, its latest spin-off series. Since then, and in very quick order, I read the first five Deluxe Editions, and I’m absolutely hooked. Willingham has drawn together some of literature’s and fairy tales’ best-loved characters, brought them into a contemporary setting, and made them wholly his own. He has created his own modern mythology for these characters – everyone from Big Bad Wolf, Cinderella, the Frog Prince and so many more. This is, without a doubt, one of the best comic series ever published. The wonderful thing? It’s still running, and has thus-far not lost any steam in the story-telling.

Hindsight: James Smythe

Hindsight is one of our favourite blog features: we ask our favourite authors to confess what they'd change about their first book. James Smythe goes under the gun for this instalment. Although you might know him from The Explorer or The Testimony, before those books, there was Hereditation...

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I had a conversation with a bookseller recently about debut novels. We were surrounded by piles of Nick Harkaway’s second (amazing) novel, Angelmaker, and talking about how different it is to The Gone-Away World, his (amazing) debut. The bookseller likened TGAW to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: a sense that the book was all-encompassing, wide-reaching, so full of things, of knowledge, of stuff that the authors were desperate to say. He asked about my first novel, Hereditation: whether it shared similar ideas. I hung my head in shame. It tried to, but nobody should read it, I said. It’s just not very good.

Hereditation (and really, what a godawful title) was born out of my doing a PhD. In a story far too long (and potentially litigious) for here and now, I had to come up with a new creative component for my Critical & Creative Writing doctorate when my first supervisor left the university. I had been working on a post-apocalyptic novel about religion (two things I’d revisit when I wrote The Testimony), and when she went, I needed something different. My new supervisor asked if I had anything else, anything fresh that would work. I was going to, essentially, start the PhD again.

I’d been toying with something that was, then, called The Sloane Brothers. It was initially inspired by Frasier – as all good art should be – specifically, an episode where Niles compares his relationship with Frasier to being like the Collyer Brothers.

David Bryher on Why "Genre" is Poison

A few years ago, shortly after I had jacked in a low-flying job in magazine publishing to go freelance, a friend asked me what I planned to write. “I have an idea for a novel or two,” I replied.

“Oh, yes? What kind of thing?”

“Fantasy,” I replied, and he frowned.

He wondered why I’d wanted to write in that genre – not because he thought it was bad, simply because it was a genre that didn’t appeal to him. As a genre, fantasy never chimed with him.

Oh, did I mention this friend writes Doctor Who? (Not all of it, just a few choice episodes.) So it might seem odd that he doesn’t like fantasy, yes? Ah, but. What do you think of when I say “fantasy”?

My friend and I didn’t talk much more about that idea. (Although I did mention a second idea, which he liked a lot: a woman falling in love with a man half her age via the medium of an online fantasy roleplaying game.) But I got the sense from what he said that he didn’t like things like elves and dwarves and magic swords – which is certainly what many people probably do think when I say “fantasy”. And (and I say this with the utmost respect to my friend) when many people start to picture elves and dwarves and magic swords, the gates of their mind shut tight and that is that is that. My fantasy idea didn’t have any of those things. Doctor Who doesn’t have any of those things. Ironically, the online gaming story idea was full of elves and dwarves and magic swords – and yet my friend liked that one more because he could see it was about a woman falling for the wrong man.

Sam Wilson's Personal Apocalypses

Rather than going for a broad, cracked.com-style top five list for my Pandemonium guest post, I’m going to do something a little smaller and more philosophical. I’m not enough of an Armageddon expert to be able to proclaim a top five with square-jawed authority, but there’s something about apocalyptic fiction that drives it straight into the territory of the Big Questions.

Of course, just because a story can get there, it doesn’t mean it’ll have convincing answers. Some of the books and films on this list get right to the edge of significance and then fuck it up, like a tourist at the Grand Canyon taking blurry photos of the tour bus. But even these disasters can be educational. So the apocalypses below aren’t necessarily my favourites. They’re just the ones that, intentionally or unintentionally, have made me wonder what’s really going on with post-apocalyptic fiction.

WORLD WAR Z

I might as well start with something I can recommend pretty much without reservation.

Max Brooks’ World War Z tells the story of a global zombie apocalypse through interviews with survivors over a decade later. What makes it particularly interesting is the detailed way it depicts the zombie infection spreading and society collapsing, aided by profiteering corporations, inept military strategy, bureaucratic bungling and short-sighted self-interest. It also speculates on the ways that different countries might deal with an extreme threat, recognising the plurality of human cultures. Rather than just saying “the world ends” it takes it apart piece by piece, laying out the parts like a technical diagram. It’s a thoughtful and engaging strategy, and reading the book made me realise something important about apocalyptic fiction: It’s almost impossible to create a story of the world falling apart without revealing, on a fairly deep level, how you see it right now.

Science fiction is mostly about the present to begin with, but apocalyptic fiction takes it a step further. It removes a fundamental part of our lives – civilisation – and then asks what’s left. It’s a great opportunity to reveal the world in a fresh way, and it’s pretty obvious when a post-apocalyptic writer is unable or unwilling to do that.

Contrast the clear-eyed detail of World War Z with…

The End of the World by Den Patrick

“I smell regret,” boomed Bumblefuck, taking a sip from my pint. So loudly, in fact, that a hen party across the street stopped giggling and retreated. One or two of them started crying. If you’d asked them why they wouldn’t have been able to tell you.”

– "The End of the World"

Regret is a strange thing. It’s the burnt psychological fingers, the psychic pain of playing fire. You swear you won’t make that mistake again, and often you don’t, unless complacency slips in. People who routinely play with fire are either in denial or have behavioral problems. These are not mutually exclusive states.

Regret can also take the form of missed opportunities, a constant questioning of ‘what if things had better’. Nowhere would this feeling be more pronounced than at the end of the world, I imagine. The brink of destruction.

Without really intending to, I wrote a story about regret, which sounds intensely lofty, po-faced and Not Fun. Hopefully the reverse is true. The tale centers on a demon, who for the purposes of the story is called Speight. Demons are a fairly irredeemable lot, and everyone secretly loves the bad guy more that the hero (except for James Bond movies, perhaps). So what if our resident, irredeemable demon develops regrets? And what if there’s a very narrow window of time to set things right, if they can be set right at all?

On the Trail of the Black Dove by Lou Morgan

"At the Sign of the Black Dove" was, technically, the first short story I ever had commissioned. It wasn't the first I'd written, but it was certainly the first time anyone had ever asked me to come up with something to a brief.

Inspired by the paintings of John Martin, they said.

Apocalypse, they said.

Sure, I said.

And then I went and hid under my desk and rocked backwards and forwards for a bit, chewing on my fist, because… apocalypse, y'know? Where the hell do you start?

You start with a pub. Obviously.