The Mumpsimus

The marvelous Weird Fiction Review  website has now posted a conversation that Eric Schaller and I had about our books, our magazine The Revelator , the weirdness of New Hampshire, and other topics. Along with this, WFR  has posted Eric's story "Voices Carry"  (originally in Shadows & Tall Trees ) and my story "The Lake" (originally in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet ). So if you're curious about us or our writings (or just utterly bored), Weird Fiction Review  is a great place to start.

Once again, chaos and luck have conspired to release another issue of the venerable Revelator magazine into the world! In this issue, you can read new fiction by Sofia Samatar and John Chu; an excursion into musical history by Brian Francis Slattery; surreal prose poems by Peter Dubé; an essay by Minsoo Kang; revelatory, rare, and historical Wizard of Oz comics; art by Chad Woody; and, among other esoterica, shotgunned books! Go forth now, my friends, and revel in The Truth ... and All!

The latest issue of that venerable, mercurial, deeply occasional magazine THE REVELATOR is now available online for your perusal. It is filled with nothing but THE TRUTH AND ALL! The contents of this issue are so vast, variable, and vivacious that I can't even begin to summarize them here. There are excursions into history, into imagery, and into liquor. We attend the tale of a young man reading science fiction in Kenya. We discover the secret life of Elo­dia Har­win­ton, about whom I am sure you have heard much (but never this much!). For those of you who do not like words, there are not only some videos, but a wordless book(let) by the great Frans Masereel. And do not forget the Revelations , in which many secrets, some of them clearly obscene and pornographic, revealed! Resist not, o mortal! Surrender yourself to the siren call of The Revelator today!

Recently, Locus published an online discussion of the work of Samuel R. Delany with a bunch of different writers and critics, primarily aimed at discussing Delany’s status as the newly-crowned Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America . Plenty of interesting things are said there, and the participants include a number of people I’m very fond of (both as writers and people), but the particular focus ended up, I thought, creating a certain narrowness to the discussion, especially regarding the post- Dhalgren works, and I thought it might be nice to gather a different group of people together to discuss Delany … differently. So here we are. I put out the call to a wide variety of folks, and this is the group that responded. We used a Google Doc , and the discussion grew rhizomatically more than linearly, so you'll see that we sometimes refer to things said later in the roundtable. (This makes for a richer discussion, I think, but it may be a little jarring ...

The latest issue of The Revelator  is now online. Eric Schaller and I put this one together with love and craft . It includes new short stories by Meghan McCarron and Laird Barron, poems by Sonya Taaffe, comix by Chad Woody, a column on music by Brian Francis Slattery, art by Adam Blue, miniatures used in the movie The Whisperer in Darkness , a previously-unpublished interview with H.P. Lovecraft that Nick Mamatas discovered, etc. Once again, we have, we believe, fully embodied our motto: The Truth ... And All. The easiest way to keep apprised of the always-unpredictable, regularly irregular schedule of The Revelator  is via our Facebook page .

After my own previous contribution to the burgeoning academic field of VanderMeer Studies, I am happy to christen yet another field: Schaller-VanderMeer Studies, a discipline inaugurated in ivy-covered halls with the Illustrating VanderMeer exhibit. True (Schaller-)VanderMeer Studies scholars do not limit themselves to the study of half a VanderMeer, however, and so I am happy to present here a monograph by Eric Schaller about the woman who was described by Xaver Daffed as "the better half of VanderMeer" (325). This monograph was originally published in the  Fogcon program book, March 2011. ANN VANDERMEER by Eric Schaller Something was happening back there at the tail end of the last millennium. And I’m not talking about The Gulf War, McDonald’s opening a franchise in Moscow, the cloning of Dolly the sheep, the Spice Girls, or even Bill Clinton demonstrating new uses for a cigar. Although all these probably figure in there somewhere. What I am talking about a...

Eric Schaller and I have been working on creating an online version of a magazine some of our ancestors  were involved with in 1876, and after a long period of work, with the brilliant and invaluable help of Luís Rodrigues, THE REVELATOR can now be revealed. In it you will find two new short stories, "Gaslight" by Jeffrey Ford and "Nick Kaufmann, Last of the Red-Hot Superwhores" by Nick Mamatas; an essay about the relationship between Salem, Massachusetts and witches by Robin DeRosa, poetry by Lillian Aujo and Beverly Nambozo, an interview with and comix by Edward Bolman, an account of The Spleen Brothers by Brian Francis Slattery, paintings by Michaela D'Angelo, and an eyewitness account of the James/Younger gang's raid on the bank in Northfield, Minnesota -- an account unlike any others, and till now lost in the archives of The Revelator ! A theme of twins, doubles, and doppelgangers runs lightly through this issue of the magazine. It's presen...

Eric Schaller has been writing occasional SpecTech columns for the Clarion blog for a while now, and his most recent is about "mutations that involve homeotic genes and the monstrous results that can arise" . And the results are, indeed, monstrous! Meanwhile, occasional Schaller collaborator Jeff VanderMeer has released a new book called Monstrous Creatures , full of monstrosities you really don't want to live without. It's been getting monstrously great reviews  (including one from Charles Tan that, rather embarrassingly for me when linking to it, starts with my name). I have, through much effort, managed to secure an interview with VanderMeer about his new book. It was cut a little short, so I can't publish it anywhere other than here, but purely for archiving, here it is:

The Third Bear Carnival will come to an end later this week, and in honor of that, here's a contest.  I have a copy of Jeff VanderMeer's Third Bear collection that includes a unique cartoon by Eric Schaller, drawn on 24 July 2010.  This is the only copy of this cartoon that exists, at least as far as I know (most of Eric's cartoons are reproduced in bulk by the many small, innocent children he has imprisoned in a sweatshop deep beneath Dartmouth College).  It is drawn on the title page of the book, which in all other editions is unillustrated. Here's how you can win this unique copy of The Third Bear : In the comments to this post, write a description/explanation of 100 words or less about The Fourth Bear.   (Yes, we know all about the Third Bear now, but what is the Fourth Bear?)  The deadline is this Friday, August 27, at 12pm Eastern Standard Time.  Eric and I will then consult, and the entry that we agree is most interesting will be the winne...

by Eric Schaller [This post is part of  an on-going series  of explorations through, investigations with, and inspirations from  Jeff VanderMeer's  new short story collection,  The Third Bear .]

by Eric Schaller [This post is part of  an on-going series  of explorations through, investigations with, and inspirations from  Jeff VanderMeer's  new short story collection,  The Third Bear .]

Eric Schaller continues his guest blogging duties at the Clarion Blog, now contributing a fascinating essay on the myth of the lone scientist .  Adding to the fun, he includes a wonderful cover from a vintage paperback.

The Clarion Blog has an ongoing feature, Spec Tech , where real, live scientist people write about science in a way that might inspire aspiring science fiction writers.  This week, Eric Schaller , who has written here at The Mumpsimus about Stanislaw Lem , contributes a post about zombies the "bleeding edge" of science .  Bloody good stuff!

New Hampshire is a small state, so we only have a few daily newspapers. We're most notorious for the Union Leader , but the state paper that's won a Pulitzer (among other awards) is the Concord Monitor . And today the Illustrating VanderMeer exhibit that I helped put together at Plymouth State University got a big feature story in the Monitor , with a particular focus on New Hampshire's own Eric Schaller. The web version has the full text, but I was blown away when I opened up the paper and saw it was almost the entire front page of the arts section: And just a reminder that Jeff and Eric will both be in Plymouth on the evening of November 23 for a reading and discussion. Huge thanks to David Beronä and Jennifer Green at Plymouth State for their work in putting the exhibit together, and special thanks to the Public Relations department at the University as well for helping it continue to get great coverage. And if you haven't yet bought Booklife or Finch , the only ...

Jeff VanderMeer has posted a picture of copies of the actual Booklife , which excites me very much, because it's a neat book (yes, I still say "neat"; deal with it) and includes a little essay-thing I wrote at the end (alongside various essay-things by more interesting and less conflicted writers than I). Full contents here. I'm planning to keep a stock of extra copies of Booklife always on hand to give to the various aspiring and aspired writers I encounter, because it really does get at some stuff that I haven't seen elsewhere, and, well, I kind of had an addiction to writers' guides for a decade or so, which makes me oddly and a bit ashamedly qualified to make a statement like that. (The thing is, most writing guides are really terrible. Really. But not all .) Booklife is one of the few books I've seen to really address the life part of it all, rather than just the craft, and it does so in a way that is generous and suggestive rather than pr...

I was there at the beginning. Yes, soon after Dr. Schaller (my favorite mad scientist) captured the bird , I blindly selected one of my favorite tommy guns and slaughtered the creature with panache.  I gutted it with my teeth.  I deconstructed it with a gulletful of Derrida.  I chugged a shot of ennui and belched sentences of purple bile into the airspace of downed jetliners.  I wouldn't call it a beautiful sight, but it was what I had. Jeff VanderMeer called me a "smart ass", but I was used to that.  He'd called me worse ("cretinous wombat", "illiterate dirigible", "barbaric yawp", "Dick Cheney"). It all led to a chain reaction of words, words, words. And now those words have been packaged and frozen with flash, waiting for you to take them out of the freezer and stick them in the microwave of your soul. All for charity. Go now, my minions.  Pre your order.  Feed the Wyrm and its whimsical Ministry .  Bring back s...

When Stanislaw Lem died last week, I wanted to note it, but didn't know quite what to say, as of Lem's novels I had only read Solaris , and that so long ago that my memory of it was vague. I thought about gathering up various obituaries, but other sites were doing a pretty good job of that, and I was too busy at the time to roam far and wide searching for more obscure obits. (I should note here, though, that one of the best appreciations I've seen is from Mr. Waggish .) I quickly thought to ask Eric Schaller to write something about Lem, because visiting with Eric recently I'd seen a bunch of Lem books on his shelves. Eric graciously obliged. I do hope eventually to write something about Lem's essay collection Microworlds , a book that strongly influenced my view of SF when I first read it years ago, but I may not be able to do so for a little while. For those of you who don't know him, Eric Schaller is an associate professor of biology at Dartmouth ...