Guest Post: “Tower of Babel” by Aidan Harte

Masons, like writers, learn the hard way to choose their foundation carefully. The strength of that first stone defines the structure, sets the tone. Accordingly, Chapter One of Spira Mirabilis begins with blasphemy. The Last Apprentice of Concord whips up a Children’s Crusade and instead of sending them to fight the approaching coalition led by Contessa Scaligeri, he sets them to construct a new cathedral. This is a recreation of the Tower of Babel, that structure torn down by an outraged God who then “confounded the language of all the Earth,” for good measure.

Finishing The Wave Trilogy, I found myself toiling in Babel’s shadow. This influence can be partly ascribed to the setting – cathedral building was medieval society’s engine, the focus of mathematics, engineering, art and devotion – but what troubled me was what Nimrod’s Tower says about creation. It condemns all creation as a blasphemous encroachment. What more damning indictment of the hubris of storytelling than a tower reaching to heaven, swatted aside by the greatest creator of all? The Middle East’s attitude to idolaters has always swayed between hostility and ambivalence. No accident then that Scheherazade, like Babel, springs from the fertile soil between the Euphrates and the Tigres. The lovely slave girl forever spinning yarns to keep her head from tumbling is, I like to think, the patron saint of storytelling. Her story reveals the secret of all stories: once you get in the habit of it, it’s easier to keep going than to stop.

Guest Post: “Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, Tell Story” by Jonathan Wood

When videogames first appeared, they really were games. There were victory conditions to meet, puzzles to solve, opponents to outwit. You could win. But then somewhere along the way, story snuck in, and videogames changed. You were no longer simply trying to win, instead you were struggling to get to the end, to complete the narrative.

Back when I was in college, I watched my friend play Final Fantasy VII. There was a group of us. We’d make an evening of it, gather round as my friend loaded the disc, pour some drinks, and watch what happened next to Cloud, Yuna, Barrett, and the rest of the gang.

Final Fantasy was the first videogame story that really grabbed me. It was epic, operatic, sprawling through twists and turns, through a mythology that was utterly alien to me. The next two games in the franchise were stutter steps for me, but Final Fantasy X held me in its grip once more, as I hastily fumbled through sections of gameplay to get to the next installment of the story.

Guest Post: “And the World Turned Gray: Gritty vs. Classic Heroes” by Kameron Hurley

Kameron Hurley is an award-winning writer and freelance copywriter who grew up in Washington State. She is the author of the book God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture, and her short fiction has appeared in magazines such Lightspeed, EscapePod, and Strange Horizons, and anthologies such as The Lowest Heaven and Year’s Best SF.

Also on CR: Review of God’s War

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I’ll sometimes hear folks musing about where the “gritty” hero came from. And though you’ll get a lot of knee-jerk responses of the “Well, it’s a reaction to traditional goody-goody heroes,” I’d argue, in fact, that gritty, unlikeable heroes have been around a lot longer than you’d think. Gormenghast wasn’t exactly full of heroes. It was full of idiots and backstabbers. We just didn’t celebrate them. They were funny.

Oh, sure, what littered the shelves as I was growing up in the ’80s and ’90s were indeed mostly traditional sorts, I suppose. But there were notable exceptions – Jennifer Roberson’s Tiger, Mary Gentle’s Ash, and let’s face it, you know, Conan wasn’t a sweetheart fun dude.

Guest Post: “How Did I Come To Write ‘What Makes This Book So Great?’” by Jo Walton

Jo Walton is a prolific writer and reviewer of speculative fiction and more. One of her newest titles is a collection of essays, adapted from her work for Tor.com, What Makes This Book So Great? Here, Walton addresses how the book came about.

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The answer to the question “How did I come to write this book?” is that I didn’t. I never wrote it. I wrote a series of blog posts for Tor.com – hundreds and hundreds of them. In all of them I was burbling about books and the way people read. My brief on the blog is to say interesting things about books nobody else has thought about for ages. I read very fast, and I do re-read a lot. I read new things too, but I also enjoy re-reading – and the first thing I ever wrote for Tor.com was the first essay in the book about why I like to re-read. So I re-read old favourites and shared my enthusiasm about them, and along the way I examined some questions about what happens when you re-read a book and don’t enjoy it any more, and the question of why people love reading series. It was exciting to be able to draw people’s attention to books I love that seem neglected or under-rated, like Karl Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes and Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife. I had a lot of fun writing the posts and starting conversations.

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by Robert Bailey

Robert Bailey is the author of THE PROFESSOR, a legal thriller to be published by Exhibit A Books late January 2014.

I was born from a family of storytellers and teachers. My mother taught English and reading, and my grandmother, a math teacher, was never without a book to read. My father, though a builder by trade, can still hold a room captive with his stories and jokes, and, as a little boy, I was always on the edge of my chair when he would rasp on about Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant and the legends that played football for the Crimson Tide.

As far as writers, John Steinbeck was a major early influence. As a kid, I loved his shorter novels, The Red Pony and The Pearl. As a high school sophomore, we studied The Grapes of Wrath, and Tom Joad remains one of my favorite characters in all of literature. As a southerner and an Alabamian that grew up to be a lawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird holds a special place. I think every lawyer wants to grow up to be Atticus Finch, and the story just had everything. It was thrilling, historical, funny and tragic. Just a remarkable achievement.

Guest Post: “Confessions of a Four-Color, Benday-Dot, Super-Deformed, Ultra-Compressed Science Fiction Writer” by Paul di Filippo

Paul Di Filippo is the author of Wikiworld, a great science fiction short story collection, which was recently published by (now award-winning) ChiZine. To celebrate the release of his new book, he has written the following piece about comics and their relationship with literature, and his own experiences as a reader and writer…

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My first reading, beyond the typical picture books of my era, such as Harry the Dirty Dog and Hop on Pop, consisted of comic books. Lots and lots of comics. I recall the very first comic I ever read, in 1961, in the summer between first and second grades. It was Mighty Mouse in Outer Space, and it blew my primitive juvenile brain to flinders. (I recently tracked down a copy on eBay, and had lots of fun revisiting it.) I’ve never been the same since. You might very well say that this comic was my first introduction to the literature of fantastika, and set me on the course to becoming a writer of same.

After this soon came the hard stuff. Batman, Superman, and the strange new antiheroes from Marvel. Alas, though I read them fresh off the drugstore stands, I retain no issues of Fantastic Four #1 or Amazing Fantasy #15, or similar lucrative titles. I concentrated on buying DC, while my pal Stephen covered the Marvel stuff, and we shared issues for mutual reading pleasure. Stephen, wherever he may be these days, got rich, and I got Lois Lane #53.

Guest Post: “It’s the End of the World -- Bring Charmin” by Gail Z. Martin

In the post-apocalyptic TV show “Revolution,” one of the characters, a former Google executive, says, “80 million dollars in the bank and I would trade it all right now for a roll of Charmin.” Of all the things that society has lost, at that moment, he misses commercially-produced toilet paper. It’s the little things that count.

I write the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga, a post-apocalyptic medieval epic fantasy series, for Orbit Books. In Ice Forged, the first book in the series, my characters have to come to terms with what they’ve lost, both big and small. Oddly enough, sometimes it’s the small things that matter the most.

Epic fantasy usually deals with the sweeping repercussions of events and decisions — the wars, assassinations, dynastic conflicts and economic collapses that change the balance of power. Certainly anything worthy of being called an apocalypse affects the superstructure of society: government, commerce, economics, and technology. Add in plague and natural disaster and a nation, continent or kingdom loses a significant portion of its workforce, its intellectual capital, its history and its physical infrastructure. Those losses are guaranteed to change what daily life is like for the survivors, and to make just getting by much more difficult.

Guest Post: “The Delphi Room – Through the Looking-Glass” by Melia McClure

In my novel, The Delphi Room, two people watch the past of the other unfold in a mirror. Trapped next door to one another in rooms they believe to be Hell, Velvet and Brinkley are captive audience to the disturbing “home movies” that play in a mirror that hangs in each of their prisons.

Mirrors are compelling symbols and have appeared in various art forms and spiritual texts throughout the ages. The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, referenced in my book’s title, demanded of ancient Greeks “know thyself” – no small demand, and one which my characters grapple with mightily, in mightily eccentric fashion. Among other things, mirrors have historically symbolized self-knowledge and wisdom, and like the ancients who returned to Delphi again and again in search of answers to the riddles of life, countless numbers of people currently revisit a mirror as a daily reference point in the evolving construction of identity. The Delphic oracle answered seekers’ questions with riddles, and for mirror-gazers the riddles of the mind have a drastic impact on the perception of the confounding entity known as “self” that is reflected in the glass.

Guest Post: “The Magnificent Liar” by Tim Powers

Continuing Tim Powers’s blog tour, I present to you a guest post about the colourful ‘hero’ Edward John Trelawny.

The Magnificent Liar

Hide Me Among the Graves had a number of colorful characters in it – I can say that with all due modesty, since I cheated and took real people who really lived for characters: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a genius painter who lost his health and his mind to chloral hydrate addiction; Christina Rossetti, a devout celibate recluse who nevertheless worked face-to-face with London’s prostitutes to reform them and wrote reams of poetry about guilt and reproachful ghosts; and Algernon Swinburne, possibly the best English-language poet since Shelley, who furiously dissipated his gifts with alcohol and sado-masochistic obsessions – but the most fascinating of this circle was a man whose greatest accomplishment was telling lies about his own life.

Edward John Trelawny managed – largely by living a long time – to be a central character in the Italian circle that included Lord Byron and Percy Shelley in the 1820s, and also a prominent figure in the London of the 1860s, a close friend of many of the Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets. The only other figure I can think of right now who did the same kind of era-straddling is Neal Cassady, who was the friend and inspiration of Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg in the 1950s and then, after the Beat phenomenon had petered out, went on to be the same for Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters in the late ’60s.

Guest Post: “Confessions of a TV Series-aholic (Or, What Writers Can Learn From TV Series)” by Rowena Cory Daniells

Rowena Cory-Daniells discusses her addiction to certain TV series, and how they’ve inspired elements of her own fiction…

I’ve discovered I prefer TV series to movies, series like Boardwalk Empire, Deadwood, House of Cards and now from the UK the Peaky Blinders. (So named because according to some sources they sewed razor blades into the peak of their caps to slash across their enemies’ faces).

(Cillian Murphy plays gang leader Thomas Shelby)

If a movie is the equivalent of a short story (Minority Report was a story by the same title by Phillip K. Dick), then a TV series is the equivalent of a book in that a series has time to develop complex story arcs and in-depth characterisation.

(Breaking Bad: Walt and Jessie taking a break in between cooking crystal meth)

As someone who writes big fat fantasy books, I know the craft involved in creating interesting characters and interweaving narratives. When Walter White first found out he had lung cancer and needed money for his pregnant wife and disabled son, I could appreciate the way the audience were positioned to identify with Walt and sympathise even when he broke the law. We go on his journey with him as we see the roll-on effects of his decision to cook crystal meth. Breaking Bad raised the question: Would you break the law to protect your family?

Guest Post: “Don’t Build Worlds on Your Doorstep” by Geoff Gudgion

Every novelist, in every genre, builds worlds. Mine aren’t on a distant galaxy but close to home, perhaps a little too close to home. I like to ground the reader in a world that they’ll recognise, then tilt the board slightly so that as the menace emerges they think, “This could happen to me.” It seems, though, that not everyone is happy with this twisting of rules they hold dear.

In Saxon’s Bane, I started by creating an English village that could trace is foundation to a Saxon warlord, Aegl. Back then, there were deer and boar to hunt in the woods, fresh water in the stream, and the ground would be fertile. It was a place for Aegl to ground his spear and plant his generations. Allingley was founded.

“Where is Allingley?” I’m sometimes asked. Readers seem to finish the book knowing the place, and want to go there. They’re disappointed when I tell them it’s imaginary. World-building comes easier to me, you see, when I take elements that I know and blend them into something fresh. The scent of an otherness, for example, in the depths of an ancient wood. Even the old language is recognisable in the traces of Anglo-Saxon that linger in modern English. Allingley would have been Aegl-ingas-leah in Anglo-Saxon, the clearing of Aegl’s people. I can also borrow from established legend, in this case the warrior Aegl or Egil and his wife Olrun, the Swan Maiden. I brought their story to life in this sleepy village on the banks of the Swanbourne, where, nearly one and a half millennia later, the peat-preserved body of a ritually-slaughtered Saxon warrior is uncovered.

Guest Post: “The Shy Hero” by Steve Tem

I read my first critical work on short stories back in high school, around 1965 or ’66. It was The Lonely Voice by Frank O’Connor. To say it had a profound influence on me is an understatement. Starting with a discussion of Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” the story of a friendless nonentity, an absurd take on a little man, O’Connor develops his theory concerning the difference between short stories and novels. According to O’Connor, one of the key aspects of the novel form is that there is always a character the reader can identify with, and a context that includes the concept of a normal society. Short stories, on the other hand, involve characters who are outcasts, members of submerged populations, characters who readers cannot identify with.

Even that early in my thinking about writing I thought the idea had its limitations, but it still fascinated me, and I thought there were some strong hints in O’Connor’s theory that might help me understand the relative levels and kinds of reader participation that differentiated the novel experience from the short story experience. I eventually wrote my own horrific nod to “The Overcoat” — it appeared in my first collection, City Fishing.

Guest Post: “A Commix of Noir & Sequential Art” by Andrez Bergen

Author Andrez Bergen introduces us to his third novel, Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?, and talks about his influences and inspirations.

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The first time I saw the 1946 film version of The Big Sleep, I would’ve been about six or seven years of age. My parents were fans – Mum loved Lauren Bacall and my dad aspired to be Humphrey Bogart. With these familial pressures in the mix, at such an impressionable size, of course I was sucked in. Not long later I copped a viewing of the 1941 John Huston vision of The Maltese Falcon, and found myself enamoured with cinematic film-noir years before I even knew what it was.

This affection has been an ongoing affair.

I’ve seen both flicks at least a hundred times apiece, and it translated into the original novels by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. That led to poring over still more by these fellows, things like The Long Goodbye, The Thin Man and the Continental Op. I love these yarns, consistently won over – no matter how old I am – by the scathing dialogue, the sarcasm and the oddball characters as much as I am by the “detective mystery” plots involved.

On another level there’s always been science fiction, everything from kindergarten days terrified of the Daleks in Doctor Who, through to reruns of classic Star Trek and This Island Earth (1955) in primary school, Blade Runner (1982) in my teens, and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil three years after that. I was smitten with Episode IV when it was just plain Star Wars (1977).

Third cab off the rank is a life-long obsession involving comic books.

I’d say this started when I was learning how to read and my dad subscribed me to British comedy weekly Cor!!, while scouring the pictures gracing Hergé’s Tintin in the local library. Then, again around the age of seven, I was spending summer holidays at my grandparents place in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond. Since my Nan spent so much time cooking and my grandpa was in the living room multitasking with Aussie rules footy on the TV and horseracing on the radio, we were left to our own devices.

In a small shed out the back, covered in old cement sheeting, I uncovered a treasure-trove: silver age Marvel Comics from the 1960s, inside boxes half-eaten by snails and earwigs. These refugees had belonged to my older half-brother Peter, and included Marvel originals of The Fantastic Four, The X-Men and The Avengers – many without covers – along with black-and-white reprints published in British weekly Fantastic.

By the time I was ten, Melbourne had a mini-renaissance of Marvel reprints via the short-lived Newton Comics imprint, and in 1976-77 I subscribed first to British weekly comic Action (which had sensational, somewhat violent tales like “Hook Jaw” and “Death Race 1999”) and then a title called 2000 AD – the second issue of which introduced Judge Dredd.

And so it goes from there.

This over all mishmash of hardboiled noir, comic books, sci-fi, barely repressed violence, humour and eccentric characters always was going to affect (or should we say infect?) the imagination of an impressionable loner of a kid who wanted nothing more than to grow up to be (a) an astronaut (unlikely since I hated maths), (b) an author, (c) a comic artist, or (d) a film maker.

Funnily enough, despite haphazard attempts to the contrary, I didn't end up being any of these.

After uni I slipped instead into journalism, I started up a record label, and began producing techno and experimental electronic music under a silly alias named Little Nobody (I still use it occasionally). One of the reasons I moved to Tokyo in 2001 was to pursue this muzak and hack journalism. Oh, and the food too.

But the love of writing fiction, of losing myself in other worlds – and an affection for other people’s noir, sci-fi and comic books, regardless of nationality – has continued to hold steady sway.

No surprise, then, that my first published novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat (2011) was an amalgam of detective noir, dystopian sci-fi, and homage to the cinema of both genres and others as well.

Which brings us (more or less) up to speed, and the publication in September of novel number three: Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? It is a beast of a book that I hope brings the influences full circle. It’s my love-letter not just to noir, pulp and sci-fi, but also to American comic books of the golden and silver ages – basically, 1940-70.

We are taken into dystopian, near future Melbourne, Australia – the last city on Earth. But we visit this city only fleetingly; most of our time is spent hooked up to an IV drip and electrodes, with our consciousness in a virtual world called Heropa.

As the name of the book implies, this is a murder-mystery of the Sam Spade kind.

Someone is bumping off the Capes (heroes and villains both) for real. There’re leads and red herrings aplenty, undercut by the relationship between members of superhero team the Equalizers – a group that’s seen far better times, has lost its leader, the members squabble a lot, and they rarely trust one another.

Into this fray steps idealistic Jack, a.k.a. Jacob, a.k.a. Southern Cross, forced to come to grips with his oddball, egocentric teammates while tracking down their killer(s).

Within the context of the story lie nods and winks to the great creators.

Not only Chandler and Hammett or Arthur Conan Doyle and Truman Capote, but bigwigs of sequential art and its spiffy yarns, people at Marvel like Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, John Buscema, Jim Steranko, Steve Ditko and Barry Windsor-Smith. Other comic book geniuses such as Will Eisner, Jean-Claude Forest, Joe Kubert, Tarpé Mills, Joe Simon, Katsuhiro Otomo and Hergé. Anime gets a shoo-in, even Walt Disney.

And Little Nobody makes a cameo – as a corpse the same size as Ant-Man.

There’re dozens of other references, but I don’t want to give too much of the game away – in spite of the train-spotter’s refs, or perhaps because of them, the novel is my personal salute to these styles I continue to cherish.

And if it succeeds (on a deceptive sliding scale) of achieving a fraction of the nourishment these genres have imparted to me, then I’ll do a self-satisfied George W. Bush aircraft carrier jig wearing a home-made cape cut from a tablecloth, and sign off with “mission accomplished”.

Shhh.

Guest Post: And Now For Something a Little Different - James Lovegrove on AGE OF GODPUNK

My latest Pantheon book, Age Of Godpunk, is not like the others. For a start, it’s an omnibus of three novellas, not a novel. But it isn’t military-SF either. If anything, the three tales are urban fantasy. The themes are the same, though: gods and men and the interaction between them; the nature of belief; acceptance of and/or rebellion against divine authority.

I have to say that all three novellas are pretty personal, too.

They have a setting in common: the city of London. Now, London is a place about which I am more than a little ambivalent. On the one hand, I love to visit our capital and avail myself of the many cultural, culinary, retail and social amenities it has to offer. On the other hand, I’ve lived there at various periods of my life and never felt truly at home or comfortable. I’m from East Sussex. I belong near the south coast, in a county with hills and trees. After any trip up to the Big Smoke, I’m always happy – relieved, even – to return to fresh air and vistas.

So the Age Of Godpunk novellas reflect my mixed feelings about London. They also reflect my mixed feelings about belief, faith and religion. Each of them can be read on two levels. You can take the appearance of the various deities in them at face value, the metaphysical manifesting as real, literal beings. Or you can view them rationally and empirically, with the gods existing only in the minds of the protagonists, phantoms, fantasies, delusions.

Guest Post: “Caught in a Storm, Weather & Ancient Warfare” by William Napier

Just back from a week sailing round Corsica and Sardinia. Gorgeous weather first four days, swimming, snorkelling, and a lot of cheap rosé. I read Alison Weir’s book on the Wars of the Roses. Highly recommended. Then, on Thursday afternoon, the sky turned black and a huge wind got up. We headed fast for what should have been safe anchorage in a north-east-facing inlet at Spalmatore, having been told the usual stormy August westerly was on its way… Big mistake. The storm came straight out of the north east, and the boat started to buck around like a wild mustang with behavioural issues.

We’d tied up to two buoys for extra stability but now the waves were broadside on, the boat rolling terribly, and we had to stagger out in the big swell and loose off one of the buoys so the boat could at least swing round and pitch into the coming sea.

Guest Post: “Language and World-Building” by Emily Croy Barker

What sort of languages do they speak in other worlds? I gave some serious thought to this matter in writing my novel, The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic — and was intrigued and inspired to discover, in reading about the life of J.R.R. Tolkien, that the same question had helped spark the creation of Middle-earth itself.

Tolkien was 22 years old and a philology student at Oxford University when he encountered the eighth-century Old English poem Crist by Cynewulf. As Colin Duriez writes in J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend, the poem included a couple of lines that Tolkien found intensely evocative:

Eala Earendel engla beorhtast

Ofer middangeard monnum sended.

“Hail, Earendel, of angels the brightest,

Sent over middle-earth to mankind.”

Guest Post: “Post six. Sweet and Dandy: Toots and the Maytals (Chapter: Six days later - A conversation about Ska)” by Celine Kiernan

Into the Grey is a ghost story about twin brothers, Pat and Dom Finnerty, whose lives are turned upside down by the loss of their home and by a subsequent haunting. The book has quite a few chills, there’s quite a bit of political history in it, much exploration of death and loss – but there’s also a lot of love and kindness in it, a fair few laughs and a lot of bravery. I thought I’d have a bit of fun with that side of the book on this blog tour, so these posts will be all about music! Why certain songs feature in the story, what they mean to me, what memories are associated with them etc . Into the Grey is set in the Irish seaside town of Skerries in 1974, all the songs featured are evocative to me of both that time and that (very real) place. As you will see, they all speak very much to the story, too, and to the characters and the rather desperate situation with which they find themselves entwined.

Guest Post: “Nine books, Six Years, One Stenwold Maker” by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)

In this guest post, Adrian Tchaikovsky looks back on the nine books in his Shadows of the Apt series available to date (the tenth and final book in the series, Seal of the Worm, will be published next year, by Tor UK).

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“Nine books, Six Years, One Stenwold Maker”

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

It seems a lot longer ago than 2008 when the first of the Shadows of the Apt books came out. Maybe it’s that the actual setting and a lot of the characters, most definitely including War Master Maker, came from a role-playing campaign I ran back in the early 90’s, and have been rattling about in my head ever since. But mostly I think it’s just the very different pace my life has had ever since the first book got taken up by Tor UK. “Roller-coaster” is a fair description: highs and lows.

Guest Post: “History & Riyria” by Michael J. Sullivan

Long-time readers of Civilian Reader will know that I’m a big fan of Michael Sullivan’s Riyria Revelations series (re-issued by Orbit Books in 2011-12). To celebrate the release of a prequel duology – The Crown Tower and The Rose and the Thorn – the author has penned this piece on the historical influences on his series, and the decisions he made on how to approach and incorporate these influences into his fantasy world and narrative.

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HISTORY & RIYRIA

A good deal of invented-world fantasy is based on history. While much of this may be due to writers imitating other authors who came before them, there is a very practical reason for this: familiarity. When creating a world you’d rather not do it from scratch. Even the best chefs have used frozen pie crusts or stock broth. It just saves so much time and effort and allows you to focus on the more important aspects – the story.

In fantasy you could rework everything. You could do away with leaders or councils and run anarchy. People might not need to eat or drink, but instead soak up sunlight to survive. Of course you might not have a sun either. Instead you might have geysers that emit vapors that must be absorbed. People in the new world might not believe in trade, everyone could subsist entirely on what they alone find or make, hence no economy. There might be no day and night cycle, no seasons, no linear time at all as we know it. There might be no sexes, or there might be five different ones and reproduction could require the coupling of at least three different participants. Anyone of these would be a lot for an author to explain through all of its inevitable ramifications, but all of them and all the others one would need to invent to establish a completely alien world entirely disassociated from our own would both consume massive investment of words and likely bore even the most patient reader to tears.

Guest Post: “How a Cult Tried to Get Me” by Koethi Zan

Koethi Zan is the author of The Never List, which was published this week by Viking. To celebrate the release of the novel (and in advance of the review), here is a guest post from the author…

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When I was eighteen years old, my college roommate and I were lured into a cult. It isn’t what you might imagine. We didn’t move to a commune somewhere in Texas with some charismatic leader who had a cache of weapons and multiple wives. They were much too sophisticated for that. They drew us in slowly with very innocent “study sessions” that were part self-help, part group therapy, and part meditation class.

It started with my college boyfriend’s parents who had been involved with this “philosophy study group” for many years. They urged my boyfriend to go so my roommate Ann and I decided we’d tag along. We were up for anything and curious about what we’d heard.