This is a story that’s especially fun because it’s set in the neighborhood where I live, featuring Wonmi-san (Wonmi Mountain) the small mountain where I have, several times in the last few years, gone hiking daily, and which was also the setting for a few stories by the inestimable Korean author Yang Kwi-Ja in her collection 원미동 사람들 (or, as the English translation by Kim So-Yong and Julie Pickering was titled, A Distant and Beautiful Place).

Of course, my story is set a little more than a hundred years before I ever arrived in Korea, during the Sino-Japanese War, when Japanese mapmakers really were tooling around the Korean countyside, doing land surveys and collecting data so they could have a tactical advantage over the Chinese if need be. The timing is crucial — only a year or two later, the train line linking Incheon to Seoul would begin operations and, I assume, the young monk sent to Seoul for help would have gotten there sooner–although who knows how things might have turned out in that case.

As for the primary supernatural element, well… I actually think of this story as SF in a way similar to how, say, Ted Chiang’s “Hell is the Absence of God” is: it takes a supernatural idea that, for a long time, was understood not as supernatural but as “scientific,” and runs with it, asking what follows if this “scientific” premise is true. (I don’t explore the question the way Chiang does his, but the starting principle is similar.) After all, even today a number of people take seriously notions of 풍수 (風水) — which sounds like “pung-su” and is the Korean derivation of Chinese feng shui.

Minsoo Kang’s article ,”Kyongbok Palace: History, Controvery, Geomancy” (1999; available online if you have access to Muse; if not, it is also available in his interesting book of (mostly) fiction, Of Tales and Enigmas) discusses the idea of the use of spikes as supernatural, geomantic weapons against Korea used by Japan during its colonial occupation of the country. Supposedly the spikes driven into the earth are understood (by believers in such things) as having an effect analogous to the needles inserted into one’s skin during the acupuncture treatment depicted in the story — to enable or block the flow of energy. So the spikes were believed to have been used as a means of sabotaging the Korean national “gi” (ie. “ch’i”, life energy, 氣, etc. Kang’s more recent thoughts on the subject appeared (via correspondence posted by a commenter) on The Marmot’s Hole, here.

Realistically, and no offense to Kang, but this sounds curiously like standard Korean revisionist historiography for a number of reasons, of course — one of which being that the Japanese occupied Korea in part as a place to send Japanese to live and work; why would they want to ruin geomantically the geographical resource (and source of many material resources, like rice and labour) that they’d just taken over? The division of “nation” (as a kind of spiritual essense) from the material content of a specific region — its agricultural capacity, its people, its viability as a landbase — seems a bit far-fetched, and I’m not so convinced that constructions of “nation” were even as abstracted then as they are now, or that the Japanese thought the Koreans had anything like a distinct “national spirit” to be broken — according to a number of writers, most recently B.R. Myers in his study of North Korean official culture, The Cleanest Race, but I think it’s also suggested by Gi Wook Shin (in this book) and Henry H. Em (in his essay in this anthology), that idea was primarily an import to Korea from Japan, in part from philosophical writing, but also, as Myers shows, in part as a component of Japanese propaganda in Korea). But it’s interesting to put aside those objections and ask the question… what if Japanese geomancers did think they could sabotage a potential colonial subject state using the “science” of geomancy? What then?

One more thing: while the Sanshin (mountain god) in my story — of whom, yes, you do get a glimpse — is male, plenty of mountain spirits were actually female; I’m told, actually, that originally they all were, and it was the influence of Chinese Taoism, Buddhism, and especially Confucianism that turned almost all of them into patriarchal figures.

This story was influenced by my attendance of two astronomy-focused workshops for creative writers (and other creators): The SOAO Workshop at Sobaek Mountain (South Korea) hosted by the Korea Astronomical and Space Science Institute in February 2009, and the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop in July 2009.

The original version of this story formed part of my MA Thesis, back in 2001, for a degree in English Literature (with a concentration in Creative Writing.) It was extremely different, though some of the characters appear in both stories. Those interested will have to pry the files from my cold, dead hands. I don’t have a hard copy of the thesis, though it does exist in the holdings of Concordia University Library in Montreal, Canada, and, maybe, some national archive where they collect Canadian grad theses. I don’t advise the search, though. It’s not worth it.

The original story was much closer to the inspiring source material, much of which appeared in the book Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, edited by Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft (Boston: Shambhala, 2000). In particular I drew upon “Guarding the Earth: A Conversation with Joanna Macy” by Wes Nisker and Barbara Gates (originally published in Inquiring Mind). A quotation from this interview with Macy, best-known as a Buddhist environmentalist activist (here’s her website), was the epigram for the original version of the story, which focused on a group of deep-future Buddhist monks (the last sentient beings on Earth) living on the site of an old nuclear waste site.

This is the quotation, from Macy’s answer to a question about future generations grappling with our creation of nuclear waste and nuclear weapons:

The challenge for beings of the future will be in accepting what their ancestors have done, and for that acceptance to occur, a measure of forgiveness will also be necessary.

It seems to me that even though I have removed the epigram, this observation has aged increasingly well: now, undeniably, our descendants will have to deal not only with whatever toxic waste we fail to find a way of processing into oblivion ourselves… but now, we have ocean levels rising at scary rates, a biosphere that’s crumbling, slowly but unmistakably, and only a small proportion of the public, and of our global leaders, are taking it seriously enough to keep alive any slim hope that we’ll avoid the ecological holocaust depicted in my story.

(An article by Macy on this basic theme, and with a line startlingly similar to this quote, is available via Google Books.)

Other bits of the book that also inspired the story include:

• The jataka tales (of the past lives of the Buddha) collected in part 1, which inspired my own version of a different jataka tale, though mine is based more on a jataka tale I found in a small collection of such stories which I bought in Dharamsala, India.
• The various Boddhisattva vows that appear in different sections of the book (and another book I no longer have in my possession), of which mine is a variant.
• Tangentially, the appearance of the “Dharma King” in Yana’s meditations is a riff on a part of the Lotus Sutra included in Dharma Rain, in a translation by Burton Watson, which begins with an invocation of that figure.

Finally, the text I relied upon most for my (weird, distorted) theories about a interbrane “biosphere” was Dr. Lisa Randall’s book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, which, if it treats a whole bunch of speculations, I found at least admits they’re speculative and is relatively even-handed about it. (From what I could understand. There are certain kinds of nonfiction books that feel like a physical workout. This is one of them. And for advice regarding the physics (and to some degree the Buddhist-related material) I am particularly indebted to my friend Mark Ancliff for comments and suggestions.

Yana’s religion, though it is clearly a form of Buddhism, is a loosely imagined future school descended from the traumatic collision of Mahayana Buddhism with climate disaster, ecological collapse, and the exodus of a significant proportion of humanity from our solar system (followed by the dieoff of the majority of the human species — specifically those who could not afford passage on the escaping starships). It is in no way intended as a depiction of a real-world, modern form of Buddhism.

While to my knowledge romantic coupling, marriage, and childbearing are not part of life on a normal Mahayana sangha in our world (though there is room for married people or parents to take monastic vows, for example, and some Buddhist traditions expect a degree of permeability in the line separating monk from layperson), the monks of Yana’s time have no other option to replenish their population, and have consciously decided that participating in the circle of life is a sacred and necessary part of their Buddhist practice. It’s not so far-fetched, if you buy that anyone would hang around stewarding the ruins of Mother Earth after The Collapse. The far-fetched part is the bit about mass exodus: the impracticability of such an escape for even a small portion of humanity means that the reality would be, I fear, much darker.

Edit: Oops, I forgot to note one thing: this story was written and edited in a repeating loop mostly of one song, Kenny Garrett’s (quite uncharacteristic, but very beautiful) “Tsunami Song,”from the album Beyond the Wall. Here’s the track:

I have been interviewed by Charles Tan in relation to this story. There’s lot’s of background on this story there, so check it out. However, I will list off some of the texts and media that influenced the story, at the end of this post.

Special thanks go to Charles La Shure and Mike Hartman for comments and feedback on the story, and to Jetse de Vries for helping me edit it into shape, as well as putting together the Shine anthology.

Reviews:

“Gord Sellar offers up a great title… and a great story about the use of the current creepy trend of Pick-Up Artistry, augmented by cyberstuff, to save the world and find a li’l love.” — Nick Mamatas (@ Sci-Fi Wire)

“… fuses pick-up artistrywith, of all things, environmental treaty negotiations – to amusing and surprisingly compelling effect. Both are notable for the efficiency of their world-building.” — Sumit-Paul Choudhry (@ NewScientist/CultureLab blog)

“Striking the balance between sense of wonder, hard science fiction (be it biological or sociological), and social relevance is “Sarging Rasmussen: A Report (by Organic)” by Gord Sellar. This one immediately catches your attention with the author’s style, and actually manages to sustain it until the very end. To me, this is optimistic science fiction done right, even surpassing de Vries’s own fiction. The conceit here is that the short story doesn’t read like it’s preaching an agenda to you, and Sellar’s enthusiasm for the story is conveyed in the text. There’s a Second Foundation vibe to it and reminiscent of Nicola Griffith’s “It Takes Two” from Eclipse Three but Sellar takes the concept into a different direction.” — Charles Tan (@ Bibliophile Stalker)

“Like [Alastair] Reynolds’ story, Sarging Rasmussen by Gord Sellar lifted my spirits through humour rather than lecturing, featuring a bunch of sleaze bags who use the language and persuasion techniques of the pickup artist scene (google it if you want to lose all faith in the male gender) to affect a positive result in political ecological negotiations. The idea of re-purposing social technology (which is what the vile PUA ‘rules’ is) for good is a brilliantly original idea that Sellar pursues with enormous wit and energy to produce something genuinely new and interesting.” — Patrick Hudson (@ The Zone)

“… uses the argot and philosophy of the pick-up artist movement to sneakily suggest that politics and activism aren’t perhaps as different as the two camps tend to think…” — Paul Raven (@ Futurismic)

“I absolutely loved [it]… a very smart story that, I suspect, may please more the male readers… It is very well written, humourous and full of excellent sarcasm…” Yagiz (@ Speculative Fiction Book Review)

Nobody seems to mind! Maybe the impression is given that the meeting that has gathered so many of the characters is a temporary one, that my globe-trotting characters aren’t living there but just passing through for the Nth time, or something else. I’m not sure. It’s an interesting example, either way, of how much what one can get away with, without explanation.

A few of the books and media sources helpful in writing this story include:

• How I Met Your Mother (TV series), a sitcom in which the character Charlie Stinson was my first brush with the Pickup Artist trend.
• The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, by Neil Strauss, which made me realize that there was a lot in common between Pickup Artist view of the world (and mode of self-presentation) and the cyberpunk aesthetic.
• Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, which I was “reading” (by MP3) at the time when I encountered Strauss’s book — and realized they had so much in common.
• The Pickup  Artist (TV series), a reality TV show featuring one of the leading figures in the Pickup Artist society (or “Seduction Community” as they call themselves), a very, er, distinctive (read that however you like) chap who calls himself “Mystery.”

Despite going from sale to print so quickly, my first attempt at the story was back in graduate school, sometime around 1999 or 2000. (In the dreadful original, a rural Indian named Gautam, working for his biotech-terrorist and nutball-Hindutvavādi uncle Prabinder, unwittingly unleashes a [fortunately quite unfeasible] biotech plague designed to emaciate cows and render them and their offspring permanently unfit for agricultural use; the plague ends up mutating and affecting humans too, and he and his young cousin flee across the border and make a futile attempt to take cover in Vancouver). Far-fetched it was, but hey, everything’s gotta start somewhere, right?

Other than the passing mention of this plague in the final story, the only element remaining from the original is the epigram, from Romesh C. Dutt’s (very) late-19th-century translation/abridgement of the Mahabharata; while condensed not as well-regarded as other translations, I find Mr. Dutt busted a hell of a rhyme for a man of that time.

Kate Baker’s commentary at the end of the Clarkesworld podcast of the tale is astute: the story feels among the most near-future of my published SF stories so far, simply because so much of what’s in it — an obesity epidemic, religious extremism, and the sickening state of the majority of the corporate world’s attitude towards nature — are all just slightly funhouse-mirror versions of things that are major concerns in North American (or maybe all of Western, or even, increasingly, world) culture right now.

And while Guru Deepak is a caricature, I shall have to hope that readers realize he’s not intended as a caricature of Indians in general (nor is his insane cult meant to be any sort of mockery of real Indian religion or religions); rather, I’m mocking the public persona (and New Age cult) of just one very famous Indian(-American?) who ranks among the biggest purveors of woo-based idiocy in the West. I’m sure readers aware of the fellow can easily guess whom it is I’m mocking.

(His use of the name Gandhari for the much-revered cow alludes to the Gandhari of the Mahabharata having borne a hundred sons, perhaps a dark omen of the kind of biotechnological response Deepak hopes to inflict upon bovine population of the Earth through the cow of the same name, and upon humankind as well. (This was the plot of an earlier version of the story.) Deepak apparently ignored the fact that the Kauravas failed… or maybe thinks this is their second chance, or is sarcastically using the name to highlight the ignorance of his followers.)

I was especially happy to have my work appear at Clarkesworld, as  it was one of the first professional magazines to which I submitted my work, and because I’d long hoped to write something of the right length to submit there! And having just met Neil Clarke at WorldCon a few months before its publication just adds to the pleasure.

Reviews:

“There is nothing here that one could really call a plot, but it’s not much missed. What we have is description of the places and cities that Melei sees, both waking and dreaming. Descriptions fantastic and wondrous.” — Lois Tilton @ The Internet Review of Science Fiction

“For all its dream-like, inverted complexities, the story is relatively straightforward: whispers of mystery, brutality, and warmth intertwined. The prose wanders from verbose and overwrought to more concrete as the decision sharpens within the protagonist, and the slow realization of the dream-world’s location – which could come off as overly trite or precious so very easily – is effective when wrapped in Melei’s breathtaken wonder at fierce survival in the face of overwhelming bleakness and apparent lack of the divine (or supernatural).” – Deborah J. Brannon @ She talks to wolves…

So I set out to write something in the Dreamlands… and failed. I set it aside for a few months, and then after a brief holiday on Jeju Island (a lovely island off the coast of Southern Korea) I was approached by someone who needed a story pronto. I didn’t have anything of the appropriate length, but said I could try finish this Lovecraftian story I had half-written. (Actually, not really half, more like 1300 words or so.) I sat down in the Sweet Buns coffee shop with a Korean study book and began writing, taking a two-hour break to have a Korean lesson. The final result wasn’t quite what got published, of course: I sent the story to the editor who’d solicited it and while he loved it (the rejection letter began with stunning praise), it didn’t quite fit his needs.

So I tweaked a little, fiddled a bit, trimmed and tickled and applied makeup, and send the story to Clarkesworld. End result? Yay!

There are a few Easter Eggs buried in the story for specific people to catch while reading it. I’m not telling what they are. But while bits of life are woven into this tale — life is all about decisions, is it not? — but the characters and situations are piecemeal assemblages, and I am pretty much a magpie gathering up shiny bits and lining my nest with them. Which is what every writer is, at bottom.

This story received an Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year 2009 (Vol. 2), and in Gardner Dozois Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection.

Reviews:

“This is a vivid, engrossing tale, told in wrenching detail. Its subject matter is brutal, but its heroine rises above her situation with a strength and grace that is apparent in her voice from the beginning.”
– Kimberly Lundstrom (@ The Fix)

The fact is, you cannot live in South Korea and not encounter, at some point, the “Comfort Women” issue. (The name is out of currency in Korea, where it is considered politically incorrect, but I use it here as it’s the best-known term in English for these women.) Hearing the most common Korean version of the story first–tales of evil Japanese kempeitai (military police) driving into towns and abducting girls, and recruiters tricking girls into thinking they’d be working as nurses or in factories (and then turning them over to the military to become sex slaves), you cannot help but feel a sense of horror that never really dissipates no matter how long you study the subject.

And then, when you look closer at the history, for example by reading books like Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military by Sangmie Choi Schellstede and Soon Mi Yu and The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War by George L. Hicks, you come to see plenty of blame to go around. Not only did Western troops end up using Asian girls in the same way, during the lingering military presence that followed the war in Japan, Korea, and elsewhere, but, worse is the complicity of  some Koreans in the enslavement of these women, and of many Koreans in these womens’ sufferings in the decades after their emancipation which many of these women spent as social pariahs and outcasts, until more than a small portion of Korean society decided to publicly acknowledge and protest the horror, long after many of the women had died and when the remaining ones all had white hair.

Even the contemporary political use of these women’s victimization–and the relationship, discussed in the Hicks especially, between contemporary Korean feminist groups and the surviving “Comfort Women”–is profoundly disquieting. Still more disquieting is the special status given to this particular form of exploitation of women, differentiating it profoundly from the larger pattern of misogyny and exploitation of women that prevailed in Asia both before and after World War II.

This is an era when at least some female children were so unappreciated as to be named things like “Hunam” (”After this, a boy!”) and “Seopseop” (”Disappointment”). Some women named these names are still alive today, though the preference for boys seems to be on the decline. The pattern of exploitation of women stretches quite far back, in Korean history, and it continued energetically after the war, not just in Japanese “kisaeng” (”geisha”) tourism (discussed briefly here) as a means of economic growth. (If you have access to JSTOR, ahem, there’s an interesting article from a critical Japanese woman’s point of view here which in part questions why the Korean government promoted postitution in this way, and also, interestingly in 1977, criticized the enslavement of Korean women, thirteen years before anything like a public movement arose in Korea regarding the issue).

In “villes” near military camps that were set up to “service” the American troops stationed in South Korea, women were also, according to men serving at the time, restrained against their will, sometimes by local police under the conceit of their being indebted to their “bosses.” Here’s a dated piece in Time about it. These days, it comes as little surprise that everyone is busily denying any involvement, but eyewitnesses tell a different story.

Not just in those forms did exploitation persist: a certain percentage of Korean women were always sexually exploited, and most heavily by their own countrymen, a fact that was always kept to the side, and which remains true even today;  in fact, it’s been claimed the trade escalated after widespread “crackdowns” on prostitution in recent years. And now, the exploitation has spread to that of women from other backgrounds: the trafficking of foreign women into Korea and of Korean and other women abroad, for example, is a growing problem, and as outgoing tourism explodes in Korea, Korean sex tourism is also on the rise in places such as Cambodia, Mongolia, and the Philippines. Meanwhile, the mail-order bride industry in Korea continues to grow at a stunning rate, with some — not all, but some — cases being depressingly exploitative. This is provoking interesting reactions abroad, including a sharp decline in Korea’s reputation in these places.

[I should note, however, that despite some occasional horror, a number of foreign wives, while finding life in Korea difficult, do not perceive themselves as exploited or as victims, even if there is a degree of "rational exchange" involved in their marriage. More here. Indeed, not all prostitutes see themselves as victims, or dream of liberation from their circumstances, either, else they would not have hit the streets and demonstrated against the crackdowns. (Photos and a brief discussion also here, in the context of other unusual protests in Korea.) It's a complex situation, is what I'm saying, and part of a larger context of systematic exploitation and disempowerment.]

To acknowledge this in a critical manner isn’t to excuse the terrible acts of Japan: nobody can or should ever try to excuse that. It’s just that those actions aren’t the whole story: they’re part of a bigger context which is often ignored in contemporary South Korean (and North Korean!) discussions of the subject.

But the discussion is rarely framed that way, in a historical context. To reframe it in discussions that way, if you are a Westerner, is sometimes to invite pretty harsh responses. Not always, mind you: I’ve had some really sensible discussions and debates, and learned a lot from those discussions, too. But some people just refuse to be–or are incapable of being–rational and resist reframing the “Comfort Women” in their larger historical context. Still, it leaves me leery of dealing with the subject too directly in a piece of fiction, although I have plans to do so at some point.

For this story, part of my solution for dealing with this is to having set in the future within a greater historical continuum of sexist exploitation, depicting it elsewhere (but not too far away), involving racial groups foreign to the debate in Korea, and linking it all to radical technological/social changes to show that show this is not just history, but a deep-seated issue that has persisted and mutated through radical cultural and social upheavals in Northeast Asia.

In any case, the story as it stands owes particular credit to Nick Mamatas, who knows who to write an instructive rejection letter; to feedback from several of my friends from Clarion West; and to help with Chinese terms (even if I ignored some good advice) from my long-lost friends Huang Xue (Faith) and 黄 绪 (Lisa).

If you missed the print edition, Interzone 219 is available as an eMagazine at Fictionwise.

This 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.

Reviews and Comments:

“… distinctly my favorite piece in the issue… Sellar has done a superb job on every count. The characters and setting feel alive, three-dimensional, and absolutely convincing. From these, the plot grows naturally—absorbing, meaningful, and free of contrivance. And detail is handled perfectly, showing real-life richness and complexity without ever getting bogged down, and without ever leaving the reader missing crucial information. Kudos, Mr. Sellar, for an excellent story.” — Ziv Wities @ The Fix.

“a sombre tale rich in detail, and a convincing look at how someone can be driven to the extremes of mass murder. Good stuff.” — Lawrence Conquest @ The Barking Dog

“A very realistic depiction of what a growing age difference would do to a marriage, set in a chillingly believable universe.” — Aliette de Bodard (!)

This is where "Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang" lives...

“Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang” is now available in Tesseracts Twelve, the 2008 edition of the annual Canadian speculative fiction anthology, which was edited by Claude Lalumière. This story also appeared on the Locus 2008 Recommended Reading List.

(You can get Tesseracts Twelve at Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, or, in Korea, at Whatthebook.com.)

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 the Korean Left (which is hardly like what Westerners think of as left- and right-wing, by the way) there is also 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, will miss this point: but I intend the criticism to be 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.

“New writer Gord Sellar’s first few stories have quickly attracted notice – and so should “Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang”, yet another modern day superhero story. Wonjjang is a much put upon South Korean superhero, trying to lead a multinational group of “shoopers” against such supervillains as the title North Korean madman. But politics is a problem – the South is trying to make nice with the North – and so is his crush on a Japanese superhero – all while his mother is trying to match him up with any convenient Korean country girl.” (Rich Horton, Locus, November 2008.)

“Gord Sellar’s “Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang” follows a well-trodden storytelling path, in this case a world where superheroes are omnipresent. While this has been the setting for a number of very good stories in recent years, Sellar takes a masterful leap by making his superheroes “shoopahs,” which is a Korean reworking of the English word. In the story, South Korean shoopah Wonjjang not only has to defeat Kim Noh Wang, the powerful evil villain of Pyongyang, he also has to manage his chaotic corporate group of international superheroes and deal with an overbearing mother who simply wants him to marry a nice girl from the North. This is a great story, and one which breaks out of its formulaic mold to become something very different. Highly recommended.” (Jason Sanford, The Fix, January 2009.)

the acclaimed Gord Sellar returns with “Dhuluma No More,” a counterpoint to Robert Reed’s novella from the perspective of a desperate African terrorist in an uncertain future

… which surely got me feeling wary: in a literary armwrestle between myself and Reed, I would not be betting on myself. It’s nice to share a ToC with him and Nancy Kress, though — and, neatest of all, Ian R. MacLeod, who was a teacher of mine at Clarion West in 2006. (And apparently carved out a piece of territory I was planning on visiting as well — he tells the Sepoy Rebellion as a tale of British uprising against Mughal rulers, where my alt-history reversal in that vein was a Chinese Opium War set in England. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with it!)

Interestingly, that quote above reflects what I had in mind as I originally wrote the story, but in fact, the story is told from the POV of the reporter who talks the desperate African terrorist down off his ecological ledge.

This is the first story I finished drafting after attending Clarion West, though the redraft took me over half a year (of halting attempts) to get right. I started the first draft of this story somewhere within the Arctic Circle, but high above it in a passenger plane that was carrying me home to Korea, and it had a very, very sad ending. (The protagonist died, drowning in frigid water, as Ngunu carried out his awful, doomed plan.) I got some useful feedback from my friends and classmates from Clarion West, Shawn Scarber about Ngunu’s portrayal, and Guy Immega on some scientific glitches.

Illingsford is a reference to my old friend (and gifted poet and photographer) Jack Illingworth. (Which is one reason I had a change of heart and decided that somehow, Illingsford would damned well survive the conclusion!)

Ngunu’s middle name sounds exactly like the Korean word for “fool” (바보) but that’s not my intended reference. If you didn’t catch it, by the way, there’s a story you’re just gonna love, here. (Or download it, it’s the third in this book.) If it’s your first time with that piece, I envy you: it’s probably the best novella I read in all of my university years.

The range of interpretations that Melville’s story has received got me wondering whether I could tell a story with similarly ambiguous loyalties. Is that a happy ending? Or is it a tragedy? Can it be both at once?

What do you think?

Reviews:

Val Grimm reviewed the story at The Fix.

“… crackles with righteous indignation… an excellent, furious story about the real cost of humanity’s efforts to combat Climate Change, particularly on the developing world.” (Colin Harvey, Suite101)

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!

Reviews:

“The story feels very much like a tale told by a fireside… The prose is sometimes stark, sometimes lyrical and filled with images of startling clarity…” (Carol Ryles, Writing Walking Whatever)

“…blurs together myth and history in his standout story, “Pahwakhe.” … Sellar’s skillful merging of European traders and visitors from Ghost Town makes this retribution as poignant and creepy as it is unjust… [and his] use of descriptive writing and visual imagery make his tale effective and haunting.” (Val Grimm, The Fix)

“A moody little story that carries you to a sorrowful land.” (Pam Phillips, Writing Every Day)

As of March 25, 2009, there is a wonderful podcast of this story at Starship Sofa, read by JJ Campanella, and illustrated by Skeet Scienski.

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Yes, this is a character in my story. Squee!

(I’m extra-pleased because it was — discounting one story I think got lost in the mail — my first submission to Asimov’s, and it ended up on the Locus 2008 Recommended Reading List!)

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, and will also be appearing as a podcast at Starship Sofa and has been honoured with being selected for including in The Year’s Best SF, Vol. 26, edited by Gardner Dozois.

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)

“… one of the most individual stories I’ve read for some time… a story that rings true…” (Mark Watson, Best SF Reviews)

“… a deliriously loopy tale, full of bizarre yet compelling imagery, and told in a decidedly different voice to the usual science fiction fare.” (Lawrence Conquest, The Barking Dog)

“Gord Sellar obviously knows and loves his jazz. I know a whole lot less but he does an excellent job of filling in the gaps for us newbies. The narrator’s voice, based on that of Miles Davis, adds enough authenticity to the tale to make up for the somehwat haphazard introduction of aliens into New York’s past. And it has to be said, they make an excellent metaphor for soulless music executives.” (uncredited review at Shortbits)

There’s a not-easily blurbable (though generally positive) review here that asks interesting questions about the impact of external references on reception of a piece like this.

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.

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.”

There was even wonderful artwork by Jason Jarsoslav Cook, a.k.a. Jacey, who thoughtfully provided me with a version of the graphic to post here:

The roots of the story were a debate between my friend/CW classmate Guy Immega, a brilliant guy. He and I were disputing whether junk DNA is really junk or not, in the wake of discussing a story of his in which it’s assumed to be nonfunctional and used in a really novel and interesting way. We decided that the truth is somewhere between our two positions, finally — at least some noncoding DNA likely has function, but knowing what it is might be beyond us for some time to come. He sold his story to Postscripts, so I guess all in all, it was a fruitful discussion!

(PDF | text)

Update (15 June 2007): A post on a breakthrough (though it’s not such a surprise, is it?) suggesting the premise of this story was correct; junk DNA isn’t junk, it’s just poorly understood.

A couple of years ago, she approached me to write a short short story for the Refugees & Exiles teaching materials packet. It was apparently a program designed for teaching kids about what it’s like to be a refugee or exile. I think the long term goal was to get people aware of how life is for millions of people around the world early, so that they’ll grow up to be conscientious and aware adults who actually “get it” and feel something when they hear about refugees in far-off lands on the news.

Anyway, my story spans pages 3-4 of the Introduction PDF. It’s written for kids, mainly aiming for a strong emotional response as well as to mobilize some themes about food scarcity, language barriers, and a sense of fear, so I think some things are a bit hit-you-over-the-head obvious about it. I also wince when reading it, just as I wince reading anything I wrote before, oh, a couple of months ago, but anyway, it’s something written by me, floating out there on the web, so I thought I should link to it.

And for those used to only reading SF by me, it’s something without any SFnal content at all.