Lauren, Gav, Kaaron, and Mike
ByThe Angry Robot plans for world domination continue apace. Over at Dark Fiction Review, as part of the Angry Robot Special, there’s a special guest blog by Mike Shevdon (author of Sixty-One Nails and The Road to Bedlam) in which Mike talks about the state of the genre, Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City is reviewed, and Kaaron Warren (Slights and Walking the Tree) is interviewed.
First up, Mike Shevdon, on why fantasy makes such great TV:
Because urban fantasy is set in current reality, it becomes possible to adapt it into current time. That’s why True Blood and The Dresden Files (and Buffy) could make TV, and consequently reach a whole new audience. After the show is over that audience naturally wants more, and the sudden explosion of vampire romances and supernatural detectives is the result.
Next up, the Zoo City is as fantastical or as ordinary as you want it to be… it’s exactly the kind of book that should get her on late night US chat shows as it is carried up the New York Times Bestseller list. Yes, it’s that good. Zoo City is major league writing. It is effortless, easy and, quite frankly, astonishing.
And, although Kaaron wrote the award-winning horror Slights, nothing will prepare you for the (frankly disturbing) image that accompanies her interview.
I love that moment of original spark and will often take pages of notes before even thinking about writing the story. It can be just a title, like Cage Life, used to describe the life of Mustafa 1, who was kept imprisoned for 14 years by his brother.
We’re having a pretty good time of it in the dead-tree magazine, too. As well as last week’s superb review of Zoo City in SFX, this week, SciFi Now tells us:
Lauren Beukes stuns with a richly textured venture into a pseudo-fantastical Johannesburg of the future… this is a fine novel that will wrap itself around your imagination like a sloth on your own shoulders.
4**** – Must Read Now
and SFX also covered Gav Thorpe’s epic The Crown of the Blood:
there’s plenty to keep you turning the pages… An intriguing ending promises something different for book two
And finally (for now) at Falcata Times, Mike Shevdon is interviewed.
FT: It is often said that if you can write a short story you can write anything. How true do you think this is and what have you written that either proves or disproves this POV?
MS: My first work of fiction was over 150,000 words and I really struggle to write anything under 5,000 words. I don’t know whether an accomplished short story writes can write everything, but I suspect not – the two forms are quite different. It’s a bit like saying a good pastry chef can cook anything, which is fine until you have to eat their mushroom and banana risotto.
