Toward Ecosophy

I mentioned here a month and a half ago that the seven volumes of The Weird of Hali, my epic fantasy with tentacles, are on their way to a new publisher, and asked for help correcting the typos and editing mistakes in the first edition. Plenty of rugose, squamous proofreaders promptly slithered up out of the saurian ooze to assist -- thank you all for your help! 

Now I'm moving on to the next phase. 

As of now, the remainder of my Founders House fiction is now also on its way to a new publisher. As of September 30, all the following books will be out of print for a little while: 

• The Fires of Shalsha
• Star's Reach
• Retrotopia
• The Shoggoth Concerto
• The Nyogtha Variations
• A Voyage to Hyperborea
• The Seal of Yueh Lao
• Journey Star

If you want to have them any time in the next year, now's your chance; they're all still for sale via my Bookshop store, or any other online venue you like to patronize. When they come back into print, they (and The Weird of Hali) will all be available by one of the major US distributors and thus have a fair chance of finding their way into brick and mortar bookstores as well. 

In the meantime, I will again be grateful for help catching typos and editing mistakes that slipped through in the first editions. Thank you for your assistance with this, and your patience with the vagaries of publishing...

Shortages and product delays have become a fact of life in the industrial world these days, but even so, luck sometimes breaks your way. I'm delighted to announce that The Weird of Hali Cookbook, Brecken Kendall's guide to the recipes in my tentacle fiction, is now available in print and e-book formats. Those who preordered copies should have them in a few days, and the rest of you -- well, what are you waiting for? From basic recipes such as cheese polenta (always the best thing to feed to shoggoths) up to more complicated treats such as Innsmouth fish chowder and an authentic pirate salmagundi recipe contributed by Toby Gilman, this volume has plenty of recipes you can use to stay well fed while you wait for Great Cthulhu to rise from the sea. 

I should probably mention again that all the recipes in this book are real, and none calls for ingredients you can't get this side of the plateau of Leng. Since Brecken and I share the conviction that food should be cheap, tasty, filling, and not especially complicated to make, this is also not the kind of cookbook that's meant to permit members of the overprivileged classes to show off how much money and leisure they have by wasting a lot of both turning out desperately precious yuppie chow. It's geared toward people (like Brecken, and in my younger days, me) who don't have a lot of money or a lot of time to spare, and still want to eat well. 

Interested? Print and e-book copies can be ordered direct from the publisher here and from other retailers here.  Bon appetit and Cthulhu fhtagn!

Now and again, writers have the odd experience of seeing the world imitate their fictional creations in some unexpected way. I've worried from time to time that my novels Twilight's Last Gleaming and Retrotopia, with their portrayals (one on the scene, one retrospective) of the collapse of the United States, might fall into that category.  The thought that any of my tentacle novels would do so, on the other hand, was never something I considered. 

Guess what. 

In the fictive world of my tentacle novels, the latest thing in the arts is a Neoclassical revival -- a movement back toward traditional forms and traditional standards of craftsmanship, and away from the deliberage ugliness and pointlessness of the last century or so of modern art and music.  That surfaced in a minor way in The Weird of Hali: Kingsport -- I needed to make it plausible that Jenny Parrish would know her way around the Chaudronnier family art collection, and so had the Neoclassical movement reach Miskatonic University a few years previously, and spark new interest in the old masters. It moved to center stage in The Shoggoth Concerto and The Nyogtha Variations, where I took the hackneyed old trope of a young creative talent embracing the avant-garde and rebelling against the pressure to conform to the dead weight of fossilized tradition, and made my protagonist Brecken Kendall a young creative talent embracing tradition and rebelling against the pressure to conform to the dead weight of a fossilized avant-garde. 

And so what should a reader forward me but a good lively article about Jacob Collins, a New York painter who has rejected the standards of avant-garde art. He's painting beautiful, technically capable portraits, nudes, still lifes, and landscapes, and teaching scores of students how to do the same thing, using the methods of instruction that were standard a century and a half ago. Of course the art establishment has stonewalled him; as Morley Safer of Sixty Minutes fame, one of Collins' fans, pointed out cogently, "The current art establishment, the so-called gatekeepers, hate the kind of skill and craft and vision that an artist like Collins has." 

Another echo of the tentacular, even closer to my fictive creation, is the career of English musical prodigy Alma Deutscher, currently fifteen years old, a violinist, pianist, and composer who is already setting the musical world on edge by composing beautiful classical music using the traditional toolkit of harmony and tonality. Inevitably, she has been attacked for this by the gatekeepers of the musical establishment, and her response is much the same as Collins': "I think that these people just got a little bit confused. If the world is so ugly, then what's the point of making it even uglier with ugly music?" Yes, she's composed operas -- a short opera, The Sweeper of Dreams, based on a Neil Gaiman short story, and a full-length opera, Cinderella, which opened in Vienna to rave reviews and a standing ovation from the audience. While she hasn't yet composed any operas based on Lovecraftian themes, here's hoping.  ;-)

One way or another, though, if Great Cthulhu rises from the sea sometime soon, you know, I'll be a little less surprised...