Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang
“Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang” is forthcoming in Tesseracts Twelve, the 2008 edition of the annual Canadian speculative fiction anthology, which in 2008 is being edited by Claude Lalumière.
I’m really happy that this story has found a home. I have to confess, the idea was originally inspired by Cory Doctorow’s short story “The Super-Man and the Bugout,” which is a distinctly (Eastern-) Canadian remix of the Superman story. I thought it over, and realized that while superheroes have often stood as emblems of national power — especially in American comic books — I’ve never seen them used as such in an Asian setting. (Though I’m told there was a great superhero story published a few years ago that did this, I still haven’t tracked it down.) I started drafting it at Clarion West, realized it would be a long work, and quickly set it aside, to continue work for the remainder of 2006 and into early-to-mid-2007.
I found that it was just a few short hops and skips to the idea of writing about international relations in East Asia in an allegorical mode, with each nation represented by one or more superheroes… which led to it being about a team of international superheroes working in Seoul, in a privatized super-hero branch of one of the megacorps here, since, after all, every niche in Korea seems to be dominated by the same few big corporations.
While I was writing the first draft of this story, North Korea conducted nuclear weapons tests, which lit a fire under my backside and drove me to really hammer this tale home. Along the way, I also managed to work in a few specific things from my vague gleanings of Korean literature, and the ending is, indeed, intended as an echo of the allegorical ending found in so many of the Korean short stories I’ve read, but with a few unique twists.
A disclaimer is worth making: some readers will suggest this story is too critical of the Korean left and its Sunshine Policy. While I am critical of both the Korean Left (which is hardly like what Westerners think of as left- and right-wing, by the way) there is unbridled criticism aimed at the Korean right and its fearmongering, of the whole political establishment’s desire to put off North Korea for some faraway future time, of corporate and bureaucratic power and irresponsibility (moral, economic, and environmental), and more. The story is a satire, and I don’t doubt that some readers, especially Koreans of a certain hyper-nationalist persuasion, will fail to grasp that as such, the criticism is so wide-ranging as to approach being universal.
This story benefited from many useful comments from various friends who served as critics and readers, but especially to Lime, who helped me nail the Korean speech and details (and get Wonjjang’s name right), and to my friend and Clarion West classmate Ben Burgis, who suggested a much better title than I originally came up with.
Pahwakhe
Here’s Pahwakhe online at Fantasy magazine, along with the Author Spotlight (me being interviewed by K. Tempest Bradford) that went up around the same time.
My first real fiction sale to a real fiction market, Pahwakhe was the first of my two Clarion West Week 6 stories, and received a thorough critique by Vernor Vinge and my classmates. Fantasy magazine bought it shortly after I sent it to them, and it’s currently forthcoming sometime in 2007 early 2008.
What was really amazing was that I wasn’t the first to know. News of the acceptance was posted after I was emailed but before I woke, so I discovered, that morning, some email from Clarion West classmates congratulating me.
Update (11 Dec. 2007): This story is supposed to appear online in a few months, but Podcastle — the fantasy podcast-sibling of Escape Pod — has gone ahead and purchased reprint rights for the story. I’ll put a link up when the story goes live.
Update (2 May 2008): The PodCastle podcast is live! Listen to it here!
Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues
This story was the second story I wrote for Week Six of my stay at Clarion West — the week when Vernor Vinge was instructing us — and I was incredibly excited to see it accepted by Sheila Williams at Asimov’s SF for publication in July 2008. The issue is no longer on newsstands, but you can still buy a downloadable copy of the Fictionwise eMagazine edition here.
(I’m extra-pleased because it was — discounting one story I think got lost in the mail — my first submission to Asimov’s.)
Week Six was a very productive week for me - my first fiction sale ever also was written for this week. But this story benefitted from incredibly useful feedback not only by my classmates and instructor, Vernor Vinge, but also from suggestions and comments provided by editor Ellen Datlow and fellow writer Stephanie Denise Brown.
I should note that the language has been cleaned up for Asimov’s publication of the story. The narrator’s voice was pretty explicitly modeled on the voice of Miles Davis as captured in his autobiography, Miles (edited, I imagine extensively, by Quincy Troupe), which my best friend in high school, Mike, gave to me for my birthday in 1991, the same year Davis died. Miles Davis was the musician responsible for my early interest in jazz, and while I now favor his older work, it was Tutu, Amandla, and an old double-LP collection from the 70s, including many tracks involving Davis, most of them originating, I think, from the 1950s. It was titled Tallest Trees (loaned to me, dubbed onto tape from the local library’s scratched-up LP copy, by my then-saxophone teacher, Rick Harris) and it was this tape that made me sit up and listen to the older music Davis had played very, very seriously.
And yeah, I took saxophone lessons for years, and thereafter actively played jazz for many years. No recordings of any of those gigs now remain, but jazz was and remains an important part of my life (as a search through my Listal database of CDs owned will show), even if Seoul is a bit of a desert for the kinds of jazz I like — the less tonal, the less traditional, the better.
In any case, I should let this story speak for itself, but I will note that it combines many of the major issues and threads that interest me: from jazz music and the brilliance of black American musical creativity in in the first half of the 20th century, the treatment of black artists and art by a white establishment, and the effect of drugs on that artistic community, to the voice of Miles Davis, to alternate history (an abiding interest since I first read The Man in the High Castle many years ago) and QM (goofily applied here, but an interest for more than a decade now), this story pulls together many of the things I care passionately about.
During his critique of “Lester Young…”, Venor Vinge said something about this story being to jazz music what hard SF is to science, and I think that’s about the best way to describe it: it’s as much a love poem to jazz and SF as it is to anything else.
“Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues” is in the July 2008 issue of Asimov’s SF .
Reviews:
“Especially good is ‘‘Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues’’ by Gord Sellar, a new writer of enormous promise on the strength of the tour de force he accomplishes here. Writing in a style drawing on the hip autobiographical voice of Miles Davis, Sellar reimagines the late 1940s East Coast jazz scene as it might have evolved had aliens visited Earth during and after WWII…” (Nick Gevers in Locus)
“Think about the first time you discovered science fiction you enjoyed; remember the wonder and joy you felt, the sort of sensation that makes you twelve years old again. Sellar conjures up that Ray Bradbury-esque golden-hour bliss with a piece which has a traditional feel but glimmers with freshness, originality, and craft…sort of like a good rendition of a jazz standard.” (Val Grimm at The Fix)
“… the oddest setting of any story this year… It’s a terrific story, and should deservedly bring Sellar wider exposure.” (Colin Harvey at Suite 101.com)
“… atmospheric, way cool story.” (Sam Tomaino at SFRevu)
“This is an absolutely wonderful mix of 1940s jazz & black culture, plus sort of an alien invasion; the voice of the character is dead-on. Why isn’t more SF written like this? That is to say, with characters clearly of color and willing to explore issues of race. This story will stick with me for a long, long time.” (Kyle Maxwell at Chrome Bits)
“It’s got a nice atmosphere, and the fact that many of the musicians are Muslim is an interesting touch.” (Gabriel McKee at SF Gospel)
The Country of the Young
“The Country of the Young” was the third full story I drafted at Clarion West, for the week when Nalo Hopkinson was our instructor.
(And both Nalo’s and the class’s comments, and some discussion of the biology of aging with my classmate Guy Immega, were a great help to me.)
I’d long been thinking of writing a story set in a post-reunification, corporate-annexed North Korea. A theme I’d intended to work with earlier ended up being set aside, in advance, for the next story I planned to write at the workshop, but that worked out well because it gave me a chance to explore themes in the corporatized North: politics and class, immigration, the glitchiness of life-extension technology and its effect on future immigration, intercultural relationships, and more.
Also, I decided to work very literally with a comment made by Maureen McHugh a few weeks earlier, but I won’t say more as it’s a spoiler for the story.
“The Country of the Young” is forthcoming at Interzone, which blows me away. I’m a huge fan of the magazine.
The Egan Thief
“The Egan Thief” is a funny little (~2100 word) story that appeared in issue #4 (Fall-Winter 2007) issue of Rudy Rucker’s online sf zine Flurb.
The story is here.
There’s a funny story behind it, too. While at Clarion West in 2006, one of the writing-related anecdotes I shared with my classmates was my ill-fated second attempt at a novel, a draft called “Irreducible,” which I started working on in 1998 in Montreal, and didn’t give up on until after my trip to India in early 2004. It was a tale of frustrating discoveries of unknowingly rewriting stories already published by a certain famous SF author, and my mother’s (really rather uncharacteristic) SFnal explanation of how it could be more than just coincidence. My classmates pointed out that this would make for some amusing reading, and succeeded in bugging me enough that I finally got around to writing it.
Also of note: it was originally drafted using Bruce Holland Rogers’s experimental prose form known as the “symmetrina,” thanks to discussions with, and writerly challenges by, my classmates Tina Connolly and Tristan Davenport. A little editing later, it was no longer anything close to a symmetrina, but it did become a stronger story, and if one has to discard the form to get there, that’s what one’s gotta do.
Improperly Prepared Blowfish
I was waiting for the lineup to be announced on the website, typically timid, but hey, a little hype can’t hurt, and since a few others have announced their stories’ acceptances, I figure maybe it’s kosher, especially since I’m excited!
I am happy to have sold a story to the very unique and bizarrely wonderful anthology Machine of Death, which is based on about the weirdest anthology concept I’ve come across in a while:
The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words “DROWNED” or “CANCER” or “OLD AGE” or “CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN”. It let people know how they were going to die.
I got several really exciting story ideas when I read the call for submissions, and the credit for that goes to the guys who thought up this idea. However, I only got around to writing up one: a nasty little tale about what happens when a small group of yakuza get their hands on one of these machines. Happily, Machine of Death has accepted the story.
Apparently, there’s going to be a Creative Commons PDF in the works, as well as an audiobook version. There’s some publisher interest, so we’ll see what happens with the hard-copy version of this exciting project!
Other authors announcing accepted work so far: Camille Alexa and “radtea.”
Dyscrasia
“Dyscrasia” is a little medical-horror zombie story I wrote explicitly for Postcards from Hell, a unique and cool fiction publisher experimenting with postcard stories, actually send on postcards. Shortly after the end of the submission period, Postcards from Hell bought my story. The postcard went out in Fall 2007 (arriving in my mailbox in Korea on the 5th of September), and as a bonus, it was illustrated by my multitalented Clarion West classmate and friend, Tina Connolly!
keep looking »-
The Clarion West Write-a-Thon is On!
The Clarion West Writer's Workshop has been responsible for starting many people on the road to publication and careers in writing. It has been an unstinting supporter of creativity and of the next generation of writers for decades.
But it doesn't run itself. It takes time, energy, and even with volunteers, it takes money. The write-a-thon is one way to raise the funds that keep the workshop going.
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