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Joe M. McDermott

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Fiction and Excerpts [1]

The Fortress at the End of Time

Tue Jan 17, 2017 2:00pm
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|| Connected by ansible, humanity has spread across galaxies and fought a war against an enemy that remains a mystery. At the edge of human space sits the Citadel—a relic of the war and a listening station for the enemy's return. For a young Ensign Aldo, fresh from the academy and newly cloned across the ansible line, it's a prison from which he may never escape.

Worldbuilding and the Labor of Food

Tue Nov 23, 2021 12:00pm 6 comments 6 Favorites [+]
"Two women on the heath" by Vincent van Gogh (1883)

I have a lot of fruit trees on my little, suburban lot. It’s a postage stamp lot, and packed in as tight as can be are six citrus trees, two pomegranates, two pears, two plums, two peaches, a jujube, three grapevines, a barbados cherry, two olive trees, a loquat, an elderberry, passionfruit vines, blackberries, raspberry… Let me think. I think that’s most of them. Papayas come and go, as well as other annual fruits and vegetables, and I love to draw bees and butterflies with flowers and herbs, but when I think of my garden, the first thing I think about is the lemon tree next to my front door that blooms in the spring and hands me hundreds of golden jewels in the dark days of winter.

I think about the astonishing bloom of the passion vines, which have yet to produce edible fruit but should, and the bird nest hidden deep in my orange tree. I think about the fig tree, that rambling beast eager to consume all available landspace, and beating her back into her corner. I think about the season of the fruit trees, where I prune in the spring, where I watch the flowers and leaves break through the bark in a burst of life right when I am most thoroughly weary of even our mild winter, down in south Texas, to the long season of fruiting, and then harvest, and then sleep.

I think about how every day I go into my yard and without much effort encounter a butterfly or wild bee, there. I think about how many fantasy novels are written and read by people who don’t take even a moment to think about what the weather and landscape mean to available food. In some ways, the conspicuous absence when I read fantasy is found in the way food is grown, harvested, prepared.

[Read more]

Five Architecture Documentaries to Inspire Science Fiction Writers

Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:00am 6 comments 8 Favorites [+]
Screenshot: Netflix

One of the things I tell students in composition courses is this: everything begins as an idea in someone’s head. Every piece of furniture, or article of clothing, or road, or game, or book, all the things we touch and covet and take for granted in our home and community—all of them began first as a dream in someone’s head.

Our human environment is completely imaginary. It’s this shared dream where people who wish to pull ideas out of their head find ways to convince others to make something real. Architecture is a very pure form of that impulse, that makes monumental things and also very quotidian ones. It paints the background of our lives and impacts the environment and community in ways obvious and subtle. As writers and/or readers of the literature that imagines the future, the bedrock of any future human state is going to be written in the walls and floors.

[Architecture is also an important reflection of historical times and places.]

Young Einstein is Serious Alternate History for Serious Scientists

Fri Jan 4, 2019 10:00am 7 comments 1 Favorite [+]

“It hit me like a ton of bricks one day. I remember having a cup of coffee and I went, ‘Well, look, there is a giant canvas in every little town everywhere around the world. And on this giant canvas there are 24 frames of image on that screen every second and it’s the most wonderful living art form.’” –Yahoo Serious, The New York Times, 1989

Okay, so, taking Young Einstein—ahem—seriously may, initially, seem like taking Plan 9 from Outer Space seriously. Roger Ebert gave this film one star, and seemed to begrudge it even this tiny reward. The movie is ridiculous: a fictive debut out of Australia from an art school reject; made on a shoestring budget; produced, starring, and directed by this same art school reject; and no script doctors or test audiences were employed in the making of this film as far as I can tell. It is, at best, a B-movie.

However, the auteur definitely took his subject matter seriously, and saw comedy and his film persona as a way of communicating something deep and powerful through what is a fundamentally goofy and campy lens. Yahoo Serious sold his car and gave up his profits to his investors to bring his vision to life. He constructed a whole mythos and worldview celebrating pacifism, a cheerful outlook on life, fantastic music, and an individualistic spirit in the face of adversity. The special effects are terrible. The pace of the film does not follow the traditional Hollywood beats.

[If this sounds bad, let me assure you: it is a great film!]

5 Video Games With Sudden But Inevitable Betrayals

Thu Jul 26, 2018 3:00pm 14 comments 1 Favorite [+]

My novel, The Fortress at the End of Time, is about a betrayal. It is not a secret or a twist or a surprise. In fact, it is revealed within the first few paragraphs. I am in the habit of writing betrayals or twists in this fashion because I feel that, too often, books are not an ideal form for a sudden or unexpected twist. The format does not, to me, create an ideal space for a sudden reversal similar to what we see on screen. Even on screen, twists are generally more about the big reveal, itself, than whatever that thing revealed may or may not symbolize or indicate to the larger purpose of the narrative. The momentum of the story, and the meaning of the story, is moving in a direction, after all. A sudden shift in the flow is jarring, and breaks the wall of narrative expectations. Attention span is so fragile, and books are so easy to put down. They require a level of concentration that no other artistic medium I know demands.

The jarring aspect is why, I feel, video games are a better place for this technique (when used sparingly!). Some of my favorite dusty, musty old video games contain a sudden twist that breaks the narrative flow just so. The hypnosis of gaming, the repetitive acts and actions, leads gamers into a sort of haze of muscle memory. When betrayal comes, a twist of the plot—again, only if well done—breaks the momentum of the narrative and forces the player to think about events in the game, and the actions they’ve been virtually doing. It works because the player is part of the narrative, not distant from it.

[Read more]

Five Mythical Monsters From the Edges of the Map

Thu Oct 26, 2017 2:00pm 3 comments 2 Favorites [+]

The season of ghouls and goblins upon us, and the monsters that show up often reflect our fear of the unknown. Across the street, my neighbors drape orange lights around tattered black clothes that stream from ghoulish skeletal masks. Pumpkins appear carved to reflect a kind of hunger that speaks to nature: We will all be devoured by the plants. The monsters in our culture that are most common, I think, involve ideas like “undeath” (which sounds like it isn’t such a bad deal if you can stomach a little murder) and afterlife entities like ghosts. Frankenstein’s monster and his bride are reconstituted dead bodies. Many of our modern monsters and monstrous frights involve the unknown, and for us, that means death.

But in other eras and other times, the unknown meant something more than just death. The unknown began a few miles from home, at the edge of the villages where the forests became dark, or the sea might drop off into an abyss at the edge of the world. On the maps of the world, scholars and learned men drew pictures of sea dragons and wrote Here there be Monsters. Stories and myths and legends filled the night with tales of the distant journeys and the bones of dinosaurs emerged occasionally to warn of dragons. The horrors of the world were close, and the unknown surrounded everything beyond them. There are monsters that used to be as common as vampires and mummies, but they have faded as maps have gotten smaller and the idea of the unknown has shifted out of the physical world, into a metaphysical one.

[Read more]

Village of the Dead: Five Ways of Reading An American Cemetery

Thu Apr 6, 2017 10:00am 3 comments Favorite This
"All Saints Day in New Orleans" wood engraving by John Durkin (1885)

The big literary book of the season, it seems, is the much-acclaimed Lincoln on the Bardo, by the much-acclaimed literary SF-nalist George Saunders. In this text, all of the action happens among the dead that accumulate around the cemetery where they are buried. These stubborn ghosts often refuse to acknowledge that they are even dead, referring to their coffins as their “sick-box” and await the time they heal and emerge from their “illness.”

This text has been widely reviewed (including at Tor.com) and the most striking element to me, when I read the text, was this seemingly unique way of approaching the narrative of life through the cemetery, and the ghosts, therein. The dead place resembles a neighborhood, and the ghosts who may not have known each other in life form friendships, talk to each other, tell each other the stories of their lives. The dead are more alive than when they were alive, for they are closer to their sense of self, separated from the realities of the world that bound them up into cages of pain and suffering and injustice. Their madness, if they are truly, deeply unhinged, is able to be more purely present in death than was permitted in life. Their love, if they are truly, deeply loving, is exacerbated by the absence of their beloveds—either friends or family. I was reminded, deeply, of a classic of American poetry, The Spoon River Anthology.

The way cultures imagine death says a great deal about the culture in life. There exists a consistent narrative that pops up in American media of a “little village of the dead” that allows individuals to continue conscious existence inside the walls of their cemetery, unable to impact the world at large directly, but speaking to the truth of their self, honed down to an essence, regardless. This conception has appeared over and over again in our books and stories. Here are just five examples, beginning at the edges of the idea, up to and including the ubiquitous midwestern bardo of the Spoon River.

[Read more]

Small Lives, Epic Scope: Alan Moore’s Jerusalem

Mon Feb 6, 2017 3:00pm 1 comment 2 Favorites [+]

Compress 1200 pages into 1200 words at your own peril; I shall do my best to explicate the joys and occasional frustrations of reading Jerusalem, Alan Moore’s symphony to Northampton.

Imagine an exhibition about a single place, a hundred artists walking and painting in Monet’s garden, selecting portraits for an exhibition. And, after that exhibition a story is told about each painting, connected by the shared narrative fest of the space. Now, scatter these painters through time, and after death. The stir of a single life’s impetus becomes entwined with the movement of wind and grass and architecture.

This is not Monet’s garden, though.

[Read more]

Never Discount the Farmboy: The Labor of Food

Thu Jan 26, 2017 11:00am 6 comments 1 Favorite [+]
"Two women on the heath" by Vincent van Gogh (1883)

In this ongoing series, we ask SF/F authors to describe a specialty in their lives that has nothing (or very little) to do with writing. Join us as we discover what draws authors to their various hobbies, how they fit into their daily lives, and how and they inform the author’s literary identity!

I have a lot of fruit trees on my little, suburban lot. It’s a postage stamp lot, and packed in as tight as can be are six citrus trees, two pomegranates, two pears, two plums, two peaches, a jujube, three grapevines, a barbados cherry, two olive trees, a loquat, an elderberry, passionfruit vines, blackberries, raspberry… Let me think. I think that’s most of them. Papayas come and go, as well as other annual fruits and vegetables, and I love to draw bees and butterflies with flowers and herbs, but when I think of my garden, the first thing I think about is the lemon tree next to my front door that blooms in the spring and hands me hundreds of golden jewels in the dark days of winter.

[Read more]

Five Video Games With Sudden But Inevitable Betrayals

Wed Jan 18, 2017 3:00pm 11 comments Favorite This

My novel, The Fortress at the End of Time, is about a betrayal. It is not a secret or a twist or a surprise. In fact, it is revealed within the first few paragraphs. I am in the habit of writing betrayals or twists in this fashion because I feel that, too often, books are not an ideal form for a sudden or unexpected twist. The format does not, to me, create an ideal space for a sudden reversal similar to what we see on screen. Even on screen, twists are generally more about the big reveal, itself, than whatever that thing revealed may or may not symbolize or indicate to the larger purpose of the narrative. The momentum of the story, and the meaning of the story, is moving in a direction, after all. A sudden shift in the flow is jarring, and breaks the wall of narrative expectations. Attention span is so fragile, and books are so easy to put down. They require a level of concentration that no other artistic medium I know demands.

The jarring aspect is why, I feel, video games are a better place for this technique (when used sparingly!). Some of my favorite dusty, musty old video games contain a sudden twist that breaks the narrative flow just so. The hypnosis of gaming, the repetitive acts and actions, leads gamers into a sort of haze of muscle memory. When betrayal comes, a twist of the plot—again, only if well done—breaks the momentum of the narrative and forces the player to think about events in the game, and the actions they’ve been virtually doing. It works because the player is part of the narrative, not distant from it.

[Read more]

Series: Five Books About…

The Fortress at the End of Time

Tue Jan 17, 2017 2:00pm Post a comment Favorite This

Captain Ronaldo Aldo has committed an unforgivable crime. He will ask for forgiveness all the same: from you, from God, even from himself.

Connected by ansible, humanity has spread across galaxies and fought a war against an enemy that remains a mystery. At the edge of human space sits the Citadel—a relic of the war and a listening station for the enemy’s return. For a young Ensign Aldo, fresh from the academy and newly cloned across the ansible line, it’s a prison from which he may never escape.

Deplorable work conditions and deafening silence from the blackness of space have left morale on the station low and tensions high. Aldo’s only hope of transcending his station, and cloning a piece of his soul somewhere new is both his triumph and his terrible crime.

The Fortress at the End of Time is a new science fiction novel from Joe M. McDermott, available now from Tor.com Publishing.

[Read an Excerpt]

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