pornokitsch

Cover Reveal and Interview: Charlie Human's Apocalypse Now Now & Joey Hi-Fi

Baxter Zevcenko is your average 16-year-old-boy. If by average you mean kingpin of a smut-peddling schoolyard syndicate, and a possible serial killer who suffers from weird historical dreams. He’s the first to admit that he’s not a nice guy, but then, in high school, where’s the percentage in being nice?

That is until his girlfriend, Esme, is kidnapped and all the clues point toward strange forces at work. Faced with navigating the increasingly bizarre landscape of Cape Town’s supernatural underworld to get her back, Baxter turns to the only person drunk enough to help: bearded, booze-soaked, supernatural bounty hunter, Jackson “Jackie” Ronin.

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I've been a fan of Charlie Human's bizarro-poignant (new word!) sense of humour since we first laid eyes on his work. His debut novel, Apocalypse Now Now, was picked up by Random House last May and I've been impatiently awaiting this novel for aaaaages. August can't come a day too soon...

As if Charlie's writing weren't already exciting enough, Apocalypse Now Now boasts not one, but two Joey Hi-Fi covers - one for the UK edition, one for South Africa. We caught up with the man himself to ask very serious questions about what goes into two extraordinarily apocodelicious covers... (another new word! I'm on a roll!)

Apocalypse Now Now (UK)

Pornokitsch: So - the contents of Apocalypse Now Now are a (frustratingly) closely guarded secret. As one of the few that have read it - what's the book like?!

Joey Hi-Fi: It's insane. The good insane tough. Although it did make me worry about Charlie Human's mental state. Lauren Beukes did a great shout for the book -“Mad, dark, irreverent and wonderfully twisted in all the right ways". I think that sums it up quite well.

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.)

Interview: Vincent Sammy and Something Wicked Volume 2

With Something Wicked Volume 2, the South African speculative fiction title has successfully completed its transformation from a magazine to an annual series (the new co-publication deal with eKhaya helps too). 

And what a series it is... while Volume 1 was an astounding "best of", Volume 2 features 25 completely new stories of "post-apocalyptic dystopias, alternate realities, far-future science fiction and good old-fashioned blood-chilling horror".

The anthology features South African writers Abi Godsell, Cat Hellisen, Martin Stokes and Nick Wood and twenty other writers from all over the world including Peter Damien, C.S. Fuqua, Nick Scorza, Thomas Sweterlitsch and Genevieve Taylor.

It will be available digitially via eKhaya from all the major global platforms from late April. Print-on-demand copies will also be available from Inkless Media. 

Something Wicked are also running a pre-order special on IndieGoGo until 25 March, where you can pick up both volumes and some interesting rarities - including the extremely limited hardcover edition. The bundle packs (including the complete run of the magazine) are particularly enticing...

Perhaps best of all, editors Joe Vaz and Vianne Venter have tapped one of their stalwart artists, the amazing Vincent Sammy, for this year's cover (shown right: trade above, eBook below). Vincent is one of our favourites as well (and, judging by his recent showing in the This is Horror awards, other folks like him too...)

We got in touch with Vincent and asked him to share what went into the cover-creating experience.

Pornokitsch: How'd you get involved with the anthology?

Vincent Sammy: Round about the beginning of this year, Joe contacted me and asked me whether I would be interested in illustrating the cover for Something Wicked, Volume 2. It has always been a great publication to work for - Joe and Vianne were among the first to give me an opportunity to break into the field. 

Interview: Joey Hi-Fi and Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls

The South African cover of Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls!

This edition (click it to embiggen) re-unites Lauren Beukes with award-winning artist, film critic and Twitter guru Joey Hi-Fi. But unlike his stunning illustrated covers for Zoo City and Chuck Wendig's Blackbirds, Mr. Hi-Fi has gone in a different direction with The Shining Girls. Curious about this (and many other matters of the heart), we pushed a few questions at him through the tubes of the Internet.

Pornokitsch: What were your first thoughts after reading The Shining Girls? Did an approach to the cover come immediately to mind?

Joey Hi-Fi: Once my heartbeat returned to normal and colour returned to my cheeks (I was thoroughly harrowed by this book) - a concept for the cover had already taken root. I thought that since events in the book spanned so many different time periods, this should be reflected on the cover. The book also follows the attempts of Kirby in trying to solve a labyrinthine mystery that goes across decades. I thought the cover should also subtly express that idea - someone trying to put together clues in order to solve a mystery. Thus the use of typography and images pulled from the various decades covered in the book.

While reading the book I also saw the covers for the UK and USA editions of The Shining Girls. Both covers feature a woman on the cover (although the woman on the UK one is quite small). So I decided that instead of using photos of the 'shining girls' from the novel, I would prefer to leave their appearance to the reader's imagination and only offer small clues to  their appearance and personality. In this way, it would set the cover apart from its American and British counterparts.

PK: Your illustrated covers are the stuff of legend. What prompted you to take a photography-based approached to this cover?

PK Interview: Starfarer's Despatch

WorldCon. Authors. Fans. Artists. The Hugos. The grumbling-about-the-Hugos. And, most of all? The dealer room. The best and brightest in geeky retail will be converging in one enormous den of commercial wonderment. 

One of our favourites? Starfarer's Despatch, run by Arin Komins and Rich Warren. We wanted to know a little more about the fun and games of the bookselling world, and they graciously let us fire a few questions at them. 

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Pornokitsch: What brought you to bookselling in the first place?

Rich: I have a Bachelors Degree in Library Science (my dissertation topic was 'Science Fiction and Fantasy, a History and Development of, with Relation to Public Libraries'). I then did an internship with Waterstones, way back in the early 90s. Later I spent four years working in a Barnes & Noble superstore, looking after their science fiction and fantasy section.

Arin: In college, I worked for a chain bookseller (Waldenbooks – remember those?) looking after their science fiction section…but I’ve been a book geek my entire life. I started collecting science fiction and fantasy as a tween, and have now been collecting for the last thirty years. I’m also an inveterate pimper-of-books to friends, relations, coworkers, unsuspecting bystanders, and anyone else I can get to hold still for long enough.

As dedicated haunters-of-many-a-dealer-room, a few years back, we attended a local con here in Chicago (WindyCon) and found very few used booksellers. This bothered us. We asked our local fan groups why this was the case. Local fan and author Steven H. Silver posted in response saying WindyCon had been unable to get used booksellers to come and sell. Well, that was a call to arms if ever we had heard one. We put our money where our mouth was and decided to do something about it. Starfarer’s Despatch was set up shortly thereafter. Chicago had just declared a WorldCon bid so it seemed like the right time.

Hindsight: Jon Courtenay Grimwood

In Hindsight, we ask our favourite authors a very nasty question: what would you change about one of your books? This week's guest is Jon Courtenay Grimwood, the award-winning author of End of the World Blues, the Arabesk trilogy, the Assassini trilogy and the upcoming The Last Banquet. In his response, Mr. Grimwood revisits his debut novel.

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My instinctive answer to what would I change about neoAddix is ever having written it. That's dishonest because neoA got me an agent and a publisher and a contract for the sequel, and if I hadn't written it and Lucifer's Dragon, then I wouldn’t have written reMix and redRobe, my breakthrough books, and if I hadn’t written those I'd never have written the Arabesk books and I'm stupidly proud of them. Plus there are a couple of neat bits in Lucifer's Dragon, and I quite like reMix and I'm very fond of redRobe, and one image from the end of that book will stay in my head forever. Added to which, each of my first four books taught me something I used in the next book.

So let's try again.

For writers, everything we do to others, everything others do to us finds its way into our fiction. That also applies to what life does to us and what we do to life. While I was writing neoAddix I lost my job and had a couple of bad blackouts that meant I spent more time than I liked wired up to medical machines, being injected with radiation and fed into CAT scan tubes. (Before that shit I had a pony tail and after it I was cropped. There's only so much washing electrode gel out of your hair one person can stand!)

Hindsight: Mark Charan Newton

Our latest blog feature continues. This week, we asked Mark Charan Newton what he'd change about his own work. Mr. Newton is always reflective about the creative process (often aided by a glass of whisky), so we're delighted he could take part.

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That’s a dangerous question to ask an author. Given enough time, I’m sure we’d like to change any work we’ve done, over and over again. Nothing ever seems perfect, but you can keep on tuning a book endlessly and still find things to tinker with. That said, I’ve been quite lucky - I have been able to make some changes to my first novel, Nights of Villjamur.

One of the issues I had with the original was the use of occasional esoteric language in order to reflect a disconnect with a culture of the far future. That, I suspect, failed - and instead created a disconnect with a few readers instead. So in the edition that comes out in a couple of months, I’ve managed to iron out well over a hundred of these instances, as well as making some other minor alterations - for example, I’ve toned down the swearing, and taken out the c-word. Loads of swearing isn't big and isn't clever. There.

As you’d expect, I would change more about it if I could. This is mainly based on reactions of a few negative (though constructive) reviews that have cropped up over the years.

For one, I’d not make as many contemporary references; while this is a culture of the far future, many readers simply wanted to immerse themselves in another world without sly references to our own. I understand that. I’d also rework the dialogue - I think the clash of modern parlance doesn’t always work with what the fantasy audience expects. I’d probably rework some of the prose too - I was reading a lot of trendy lit fic at the time and really admired the uncommon sentence structure, so ran with what inspired me. I suspect a lot of fantasy readers didn’t dig that. I’d also make it clear that I deliberately wrote a pretty useless detective character - I’m not sure everyone understood that he was intended to be that way.

But there are some things I’d keep, despite awkward reactions: I genuinely think that a few readers just felt really uncomfortable about a gay man being the lead character in a book. Some people moaned that I did nothing with his sexuality - you know, because gay men can’t just be gay. GAYNESS MUST MOVE THE PLOT ON.

Finally, I really do get the impression that some people didn’t appreciate having gay heroes in fantasy books without some sort of warning beforehand. But those people can just deal with it or f**k off.

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The new edition of Night of Villjamur is out in November. The other three books in the Legends of the Red Sun are out now (including the series conclusion: The Broken Isles). 

Hindsight: Sarah Lotz

Welcome to the first of a new blog feature. We've asked some of our favourite authors a particularly nasty question: what would you change about one of your books?* 

The first to respond was Sarah Lotz, who isn't just one of the most talented writers, but clearly one of the bravest.

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To really get into the nitty gritty of what I’d like to change in my books, I’d have to reread my own work. And because I’m a coward, I can’t. Even looking at proofs makes me feel like puking and the You Could Have Done Better demons start stabbing me with their hindsight pitchforks. So – from memory – here are the top five things I’d change (I can’t even bear to consider the short stories – seriously, the horror):

1) My second crime novel, Tooth and Nailed features a thinly fictionalised account of a lion attack that happened to me and my family while we were camping wild in Botswana. Bad idea. (Not camping wild and being attacked by lions, that was … interesting, I mean shoehorning personal experiences into books, especially when they don’t move the plot forward).

2) I loved writing the YA zombie series, Deadlands with my daughter, Savannah, especially as we let our characters dictate what would happen, but some of our readers feel that in the first book there are too many short chapters (like, short short), which were designed to appeal to reluctant readers, so we’d probably tweak that. I don’t regret the zombies. Or lesbian ninjas. You can never have too many.

3) If Louis Greenberg and I rewrote the S.L. Grey horror novels, I think I’d tone down the swearing a tad in The Mall. My character, Rhoda, can’t say anything at all without qualifying it with the word fuck – a direct reflection of how I think and speak. I deliberately chose to write a non-potty-mouthed character in the follow-up, The Ward, as a challenge. It was @#$%$#& difficult.

4) I’m too chicken to re-read my first novel Pompidou Posse to be sure of this, but I reckon it could do with losing 10,000 words (and I’m pretty sure it also suffers from serious F-word reliance).

5) With the exception of the S.L. Grey books (as Louis is the supreme sensei of the shag scene) all of my books need more sex in them. Sav and I tried our best to write one in our second Deadlands novel, Death of a Saint, but we just ended up going ewwwwwwwww. Pathetic. In the end, we bribed ace SA writer/poet/editor Helen Moffett to write it for us, as she has fewer qualms than E.L. James about getting down and dirty in print.

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The Mall is out now in paperback from Corvus, with The Ward coming this fall. Pompidou Posse and Tooth and Nailed aren't available in the UK (yet), but you can snaffle copies from your South African friends. The Deadlands series is currently available in South Africa and will be hitting the UK next year, from Corsair.

*We can't take credit for the idea. But since we've high hopes the person who gave it to us will participate [if you're reading this - hint, hint, nudge, puppy-dog eyes], we'll keep schtum for now.

PK Interview: KJ Parker

Having worked in the law, journalism and numismatics, K.J. Parker now writes and makes things out of wood and metal. Although we can't vouch for the wood and metal, the writing part seems to be going awfully well. Parker's books are simply spectacular: complex, clever, funny and dark. 

As long-time (and slightly lunatic) fans, we were delighted to have the opportunity to interview K.J. Parker. 

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Pornokitsch: Your new book, Sharps, has a lot of breath-taking fencing, but the most intimidating fights are those that involve the iconic 'messer'. How did you plan the fight scenes with this weapon? Is that move actually possible? Do you still have all your fingers?

K.J. Parker: I made a couple of messers (they were supposed to be something else, but that’s what they turned into – at the forge where I play at blacksmithing, we can’t harden and temper blades longer than 22”, which partly explains the preponderance of short swords in the works of K. J. Parker); and when I’d done striking them off and sharpening them, I looked at them and they looked at me, and there, more or less, was the idea for the book.

There’s actually quite a literature on messer combat, including a handbook by Albrecht Durer, and a quite terrifying section in Talhofer, so plotting the moves didn’t require much imagination. The move you have in mind isn’t recorded with the messer in any of the sources I’ve read; it’s well documented in 15th century longsword, where it’s shown as a standard business proposition (though it’s more common to catch the other guy’s blade single-handed; the forte of a longsword would be moving at something around 70mph, faster than a messer because the blade’s longer. Eeek.)

I still have my full complement of fingers; all twelve of them.

PK: In “The Life and Sad Times of the Western Sword” you describe that, as a “99% pacifist”, swords are your weapon of choice, for “the duellists who died on the points of rapiers... were at least willing participants in their own undoing.” In Sharps, the duellists are all distinctly unwilling, and the volunteers (e.g. Tzimisces) are the ones with dubious motivations. Why should we be suspicious of the un-reluctant?

KJP: I write a lot about conflict, violence and combat because people are more interesting, and usually more themselves, when they’re doing all that stuff. The fencers in Sharps have a conscious, cerebral objection to what they’re made to do, but none of them have motives that would stand too much scrutiny.

I take the view that glorifying violence is the worst kind of pornography. That said, I agree with Arthur Wise that violence is a form of communication; if we can’t or won’t understand what it’s trying to say, we’ll never be rid of it. By the same token, learning the enemy’s language doesn’t mean you start to think like him. A pacifist should be fluent in most major dialects of violence.

PK Interview: Jane Rogers

Jane Rogers has published eight novels - the most recent of which, The Testament of Jessie Lamb won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. It was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for The Kitschies, a rare feat of recognition from both genre and literary prize panels that places her amongst authors such as Kingsley Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood.

Her other writing awards include the Somerset Maugham Award, Writers' Guild Best Fiction Book, a BAFTA nomination for Best Drama Serial, Guardian Fiction Prize runner up and an Arts Council Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Jessie Lamb takes place in a world caught in the grip of an unknown virus – one that wipes out all pregnant mothers before they can bear their child to term. Although the doomsday scenario is fascinating, Jessie Lamb’s critical success stems from its compassionately written protagonist and realistic depiction of the dynamic between parents and children. 

We spoke to Ms. Rogers to gain some insight into how she approached her novel and its compelling heroine.

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Pornokitsch: What do you keep in mind when writing a teenaged protagonist? Do you approach them differently from adult characters?

Jane Rogers: To state the obvious, every character is different, and I think what I try to do is find the character’s voice (particularly for first person, like Jessie, but also for third person – the language reveals the character). So what mattered in writing Jessie was to find a teenage voice which I could hear in my head and which rang true. Once the character’s voice has come clear, I find it fairly straightforward to know what she would care about and understand, and what would be outside her ken. So no, the approach is not different from the way I approach other characters – each character is different, and age is only one difference. I guess I drew on many sources for Jessie: my own teenage years, my own children’s teenage years, the teenagers I have loved in novels and films, and so on.