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Max Gladstone

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Fiction and Excerpts [9]
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Fiction and Excerpts [9]

Read Chapters 1-4 of Two Serpents Rise

Wed Jul 22, 2015 2:30pm
|| Shadow demons plague the city reservoir, and Red King Consolidated has sent in Caleb Altemoc—casual gambler and professional risk manager—to cleanse the water for the sixteen million people of Dresediel Lex. At the scene of the crime, Caleb finds an alluring and clever cliff runner, Crazy Mal, who easily outpaces him.

The Dragon Ponders Its Paper Hoard

Mon Jul 13, 2015 12:00pm
|| Read "The Dragon Ponders Its Paper Hoard," an excerpt from Last First Snow, the newest book in the fantasy Craft Sequence series by Max Gladstone. The novel arrives in stores on July 14 from Tor Books.

How Do We Categorize The Nightmare Before Christmas?

Wed Dec 23, 2015 2:00pm 3 comments

Is The Nightmare Before Christmas a Halloween movie, or a Christmas movie? In terms of worldbuilding, it’s obviously both—it’s about a bunch of Halloween-town residents taking over Christmas from Santa Claus.

But worldbuilding elements don’t suffice as genre classifiers, or else black comedies wouldn’t exist. Creators deliberately apply worldbuilding elements from one genre to another for pure frission’s sake. Consider Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (speaking of Christmas movies), which takes a New York noir character, a down-on-his-luck con, and drops him into an LA noir scenario of movie glitz and private eyes; or Rian Johnson’s amazing Brick, a noir story engine driving high school characters. Fantasy literature is rife with this sort of behavior—consider Steven Brust’s use of crime drama story in the Vlad Taltos books, or for that matter the tug of war between detective fiction and fantasy that propels considerable swaths of urban fantasy. If we classify stories solely by the worldbuilding elements they contain, we’re engaging in the same fallacy as the Certain Kind of Book Review that blithely dismisses all science fiction as “those books with rockets.”

[Read more]

I Think Die Hard Might be a Fairy Tale

Mon Dec 21, 2015 1:00pm 3 comments

I think Die Hard might be a fairy tale.

Let me back up and offer context. At Boskone this weekend—which was amazing by the way, had a great time and thanks to everyone who came out and said hello—I participated in a panel about fairy tales with Theodora Goss, Miriam Weinberg, and Craig Shaw Gardener, and was thrillingly outclassed in academic knowledge and depth of study. My brain’s been firing in unaccustomed directions in the aftermath.

[Read more]

Reactivity and Narrative Consequence in Video Games

Fri Oct 23, 2015 12:30pm 3 comments

My wife is a Super Mario wizard. She can thread that potbellied mustachioed plumber through the eye of a needle. She mentioned this, in passing, when we started dating—“oh yeah, I used to play a lot of Mario”—but back then neither of us had a console, so I didn’t have a basis for comparison. I mean, lots of people our age played Mario, right?

Not like this.

[You can do that?]

Collaborative Storytelling with Serial Box and Bookburners

Wed Sep 16, 2015 12:30pm Post a comment

If you’ve ever played a tabletop RPG, you’ve felt that golden moment—you’ve just made a quip or a clever move, you’ve turned the tables on a cunning adversary, you’ve committed the most hilarious mistake, and the room lights up. Friends laugh, or stare in horror. You’ve compelled.

This isn’t just a gamer thing, either. We—humans, I mean—started telling stories long before we committed them to so crude a medium as paper. That instant audience feedback is built into the rhythms of our conversation. This makes writing novels (which I spend most of my time doing) a little awkward, since for the most part the writer’s deprived of that experience. Yes, there are compensations—but you don’t get that great moment when you can swerve in a weird direction and double down on awesome precisely because you feel how much the audience is into your jam.

[And it gets even better!]

Read Chapters 1-4 of Two Serpents Rise

Wed Jul 22, 2015 2:30pm Post a comment

Shadow demons plague the city reservoir, and Red King Consolidated has sent in Caleb Altemoc—casual gambler and professional risk manager—to cleanse the water for the sixteen million people of Dresediel Lex. At the scene of the crime, Caleb finds an alluring and clever cliff runner, Crazy Mal, who easily outpaces him.

But Caleb has more than the demon infestation, Mal, or job security to worry about when he discovers that his father—the last priest of the old gods and leader of the True Quechal terrorists—has broken into his home and is wanted in connection to the attacks on the water supply. From the beginning, Caleb and Mal are bound by lust, Craft, and chance, as both play a dangerous game where gods and people are pawns. They sleep on water, they dance in fire…and all the while the Twin Serpents slumbering beneath the earth are stirring, and they are hungry.

We’re pleased to present an extended excerpt from Two Serpents Rise, chronologically the second book in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence. Set about 20 years after the events of Last First Snow, the novel begins with a goddess, and a card game…

[Read more]

Haves and Have Nots in Epic Fantasy

and
Mon Jul 20, 2015 10:00am 8 comments

In Last First Snow, Max Gladstone writes about Craft, a code of law powerful enough to shape reality. A Craftsperson can throw fire and live forever as a kick-ass skeleton, but, more vitally, they can work with invisible power, people power, as tangibly as flame or stone. They can make contracts between the will of the people and the power of the elite.

In The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson introduces us to the Masquerade. They’re a thalassocracy, an empire whose power comes from sea strength and trade,. They don’t have much history, or much territory, or much of an army. But they’re good at navigation, chemistry, bureaucracy, sanitation, and building schools. They’re like an octopus—soft, dependent on camouflage and cunning.

In some ways, these novels couldn’t be more different. The truth is, they share a common foundation: they’re books about power and change; about the Haves and the Have-nots; about uprisings and revolutions; and about the struggle between those wishing to preserve the status quo, and those desperate to make a better world.

Naturally, we had to lock the brains behind these books in a room together, just to see what would happen.

[Begin Transmission]

Last First Snow

Wed Jun 24, 2015 11:00am 5 comments

Forty years after the God Wars, Dresediel Lex bears the scars of liberation-especially in the Skittersill, a poor district still bound by the fallen gods’ decaying edicts. As long as the gods’ wards last, they strangle development; when they fail, demons will be loosed upon the city. The King in Red hires Elayne Kevarian of the Craft firm Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao to fix the wards, but the Skittersill’s people have their own ideas. A protest rises against Elayne’s work, led by Temoc, a warrior-priest turned community organizer who wants to build a peaceful future for his city, his wife, and his young son.

As Elayne drags Temoc and the King in Red to the bargaining table, old wounds reopen, old gods stir in their graves, civil blood breaks to new mutiny, and profiteers circle in the desert sky. Elayne and Temoc must fight conspiracy, dark magic, and their own demons to save the peace-or failing that, to save as many people as they can.

Last First Snow—available July 14th from Tor Books—is the fourth novel set in Max Gladstone’s compellingly modern fantasy world of the Craft Sequence.

[Read more]

What the F*ck, Iago?

Thu May 7, 2015 9:00am 24 comments
Kenneth Branagh and Laurence Fishburne in Oliver Parker's Othello (1995)

No unanswered question in all Shakespeare beats that one. And before you point to Hamlet, he actually resolves to be or not to be, though in a sneaky and backhanded way three acts after the question’s first posed. (“If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be.” Hamlet V, ii, 168-170) We know whether that’s a dagger Macbeth sees before his hand. (It’s not, though that opens a dialogue about the reality of images and fantasy beyond the scope of this parenthetical.) We know what Rosalind and Celia think of falling in love. (They’re for it.) We know that if they prick us we do bleed, and if they wrong us we do revenge.

But this question haunts the canon: What the fuck, Iago?

[Read More]

Series: Shakespeare on Tor.com

Let Me Tell Y’all A Little Bit About the Mohists…

Mon Feb 9, 2015 3:00pm 17 comments

Sit down, because I’m going to tell you about, objectively speaking, the best philosophical movement in history.

If you’re saying “what gives, Max, this is a little looser than your usual style,” well, I delivered two books last month, and this month I have a game to write and page proofs to approve and two short stories due, so y’all get Philosophy Story Time.

[Read More]

Birdman is Actually Just a Muppet Movie

Fri Jan 16, 2015 11:00am 4 comments

Some people have told me they never want to see another movie about an aging white dude trying to find himself, repair his marriage, and confront the prospect of his own death. Those people may not like Birdman.

Everyone else: if you have room for even one more of those movies in your heart—if you are ever going to watch another guy try to figure his life out on screen again—let this be that film. It’s a wonderful hilarious kinetic tale of a dysfunctional writer-director trying to pull a theater crew of misfits, losers, and closet cases together for a killer opening-night performance without going crazy. The special effects are beautiful and low-tech, I laughed so loud I almost made the people in front of us move, and the soundtrack’s excellent.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, Birdman is the grown-up Muppet movie you never knew you wanted.

[Here’s how it breaks down]

I Think Die Hard Might be a Fairy Tale

Tue Dec 30, 2014 1:00pm 12 comments

I think Die Hard might be a fairy tale.

Let me back up and offer context. At Boskone this weekend—which was amazing by the way, had a great time and thanks to everyone who came out and said hello—I participated in a panel about fairy tales with Theodora Goss, Miriam Weinberg, and Craig Shaw Gardener, and was thrillingly outclassed in academic knowledge and depth of study. My brain’s been firing in unaccustomed directions in the aftermath.

[Read More]

How Do We Categorize The Nightmare Before Christmas?

Tue Dec 16, 2014 1:00pm 19 comments

Is The Nightmare Before Christmas a Halloween movie, or a Christmas movie? In terms of worldbuilding, it’s obviously both—it’s about a bunch of Halloween-town residents taking over Christmas from Santa Claus.

But worldbuilding elements don’t suffice as genre classifiers, or else black comedies wouldn’t exist. Creators deliberately apply worldbuilding elements from one genre to another for pure frission’s sake. Consider Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (speaking of Christmas movies), which takes a New York noir character, a down-on-his-luck con, and drops him into an LA noir scenario of movie glitz and private eyes; or Rian Johnson’s amazing Brick, a noir story engine driving high school characters. Fantasy literature is rife with this sort of behavior—consider Steven Brust’s use of crime drama story in the Vlad Taltos books, or for that matter the tug of war between detective fiction and fantasy that propels considerable swaths of urban fantasy. If we classify stories solely by the worldbuilding elements they contain, we’re engaging in the same fallacy as the Certain Kind of Book Review that blithely dismisses all science fiction as “those books with rockets.”

[Read More]

Naked Singularities and the Art of Science Writing: A Love Letter to Kip Thorne

Tue Dec 2, 2014 11:00am 5 comments

You don’t need to read another review of Interstellar, so thank god this isn’t one!

Okay, so, as the guy from True Detective escaped the dust bowl, went into outer space with Fantine, two redshirts, and some not-killer robots, skipped through a wormhole, had a fistfight with Somewhat Moist Jason Bourne, the whole time excitable fourteen-year-old-Max was in the back of my head shouting:

10 I AM WATCHING A MOVIE EXECUTIVE-PRODUCED BY KIP THORNE

20 WHAT IS THIS WEIRD WONDERFUL FUTURE I INHABIT

30 GOTO 10

[Read more]

In Defense of Indiana Jones, Archaeologist

Mon Nov 17, 2014 10:00am 64 comments

Indiana Jones isn’t that bad of an archaeologist.

I mean, okay, the low relative quality of his archaeological expeditions is so notorious it’s become a bit of a truism. There’s a great McSweeney’s list of the reasons Herr Doktor Jones was denied tenure. Even as I make this argument, I can hear friends of mine who spent their summers on digs cringe inside, across the continent. (Hi, Celia!) But hear me out. This won’t take long.

(Looks at rest of essay)

Um. Maybe it will. Keep reading anyway.

[Read More]

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