Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Books


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Weird book delivery

indexMore weirdness from the depths of Astigianistan.
Today I received a copy of Jean-Christophe Grangé latest thriller, Lontano.
The mailman handed it to me without any package or envelope or nothing. The naked book, just like it was off the shelf of a bookstore.
I must have looked at him weirdly, because he justified himself.

“I’m keeping the package because I need the label.”

If you say so, I thought…

Sometimes I think Neil Young was thinking about this place when he wrote This is Nowhere.

On the other hand, Grangé’s book looks promising.


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Sheri Tepper’s Beauty

1001098I’m saddened to learn of the passing away of writer Sheri S. Tepper.
Her novel Beauty was one of the most striking fantasy novels I ever read, and her talent was absolutely wonderful, as was her commitment to telling important stories.
She will be missed.

Beauty is a strange mix of science fiction and fantasy1, that speaks about the human need for beauty, and humanity’s loss of the sense of beauty through time.
And a lot of other things.
A revisionist fantasy that is both chilling and inspiring, it is highly recommended.

  1. it is not science-fantasy… it is a fantasy novel that includes a time machine and a vision of the end of humanity in a technological meltdown. ↩


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The Shanghai Bund

Today I gave a good shake at The Mother of Lightning, the story I’m writing for Pro Se Press’ The New Adventure of Ned Land – hoping I’ll be able to finish it, and they’ll like it.
The deadline looms closer, it is time to check the details and nail the box shut for delivery.

The story is set in Shanghai in 1871, and that’s the tricky part, because this is exactly the moment in which the British and the French, aka The Most Favoured Nations, were redesigning the former fishermen’s village in their own image.
The Bund was there but it was not yet the wonder it would be in the 1920s, and a lot of the city was very different from the Shaghai we usually get from movies or novels – the Paris of the East.

1775939So I went through my collection of old maps and books,a nd finally fell back on Peter Hibbard’s The Bund, Shanghai: China Faces West, a wonderful historical and architectural guidebook to the waterfront of Shanghai.
The book, published by Odyssey, is beautifully illustrated, with both old and new photos.
Some complain that it is not up to date (it was published in 2007) and so it does not work – or so they say – as a proper guidebook when you are out in the field, but for an armchair traveler or a writer looking for details about the Shanghai Club, it is an absolute treasure trove.

I was a little surprised in finding out that some of the details I had put down on the fly while writing were actually correct. But I’ve spent so much time reading (and sometimes writing) about Old Shanghai, that apparently I know the ins and outs of it better than I remember the streets and bus stops of my hometown.


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#PoweredByIndie : I should be writing porn instead

This is the month of the indies, and this is an indie-related post in more ways than one.
I was having a talk with some friends, yesterday, about self-publishing, indie publishing and such, and as it usually happens, recently, we ended up repeating a mantra, a meme of sort that is growing popular by the day in our select circle:

I should start writing porn under an alias

hardatworkWhich, in all likelihood (or at least according to some persistent legend), would be an easier way to pay the bills than writing fantasy, or science fiction, or horror, or westerns, or whatever.

At that point, usually, the party splits in two fields: on one side, there’s the ones that list the technical problems of such a line of action, such as establishing an alias and market the new books; on the other side, there’s the guys that simply say they couldn’t do it because they find porn repulsive, they’d be ashamed of themselves, or the sole idea of writing smut makes them start laughing.

I’m a “I’d start laughing and end up writing a farce” sort of guy, and yet I normally side with the technicalities-minded. Continue reading →


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A second serving of Enoch…

It is with a mix of excitement and dread that I wait for the coming of October the 11th.
…
Nice little Lovecraftian start, innit?
Let me go back to the beginning.
A few days back, answering the call of Amazon, I announced I will devote some space to independent books through the month of October.
Because indies are important – they are where the exciting stuff happens1

the-king-of-nightspores-crownAs luck would have it, on the same day I received a fat Amazon gift card from one of my readers.
And therefore I burned a fair chunk of it in ordering a paper copy of Raphael Ordonez’ second book in the Enoch Series, which is called The King of Nightspore’s Crown, and that does fully qualify as an indie book.

The first book in the series, Dragonfly, I reviewed here and it was one of the best fantasy stories I happened to read in a long time.
So I’m very excited about the fact that the courier service will drop my copy in my mailbox on Tuesday the 11th of October.
I explicitly chose the paper book over the ebook because I consider myself a fan, and I want the whole series on my shelf. I love the way these books look and feel like those old Ballantine Adult Fantasy titles from my misspent youth.

The dread I mentioned comes from the fact that, knowing myself, as soon as the package gets to me I’ll stop everything I’m doing and I’ll spend the following days reading the book. And then writing a review.
And then maybe going back to Dragonfly and read the two of them back to back.
You get the idea. I’ll have to exercise all my (less than abundant) discipline, to try and do some work next week.

I’ll keep you posted.

  1. and mind you, in the field of imaginative fiction, there’s always a lot of exciting stuff happening, but indie authors are those that are often trying to do something new. ↩


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Weekend on Titan

Next up on my reading list is Michael Carroll’s On the Shores of Titan’s Farthest Sea.
This science fiction mystery was published by Springer, in their line of science fiction by real scientists books, Carroll is a well respected scientific artist and science popularizer, and I’ve been intrigued by the description ever since I first read it.

Titan is practically a planet in its own right, with a diameter similar to that of Mercury, methane rainstorms, organic soot and ethane seas. All of the most detailed knowledge on the moon’s geology, volcanology, meteorology, marine sciences and chemistry are gathered together here to paint a factually accurate hypothetical future of early human colonization on this strange world.

The views from Titan’s Mayda Outpost are spectacular, but all is not well at the moon’s remote science base. On the shore of a methane sea beneath glowering skies, atmospherics researcher Abigail Marco finds herself in the middle of murder, piracy and colleagues who seem to be seeing sea monsters and dead people from the past. On the Shores of Titan’s Farthest Sea provides thrills, excitement and mystery – couched in the latest science – on one of the Solar System’s most bizarre worlds, Saturn’s huge moon Titan.

titanNow, curiously enough – or maybe not – two years ago I had pitched a very similar plot for a novel set on Titan to my Italian publisher, Acheron Books.
The pitch was rejected – but do not cry, dear readers: another plot idea I had pitched at the same time was picked up and the resulting novel will be published in 2017.
And yet I still long for the methane seas of old Titan.
And as luck would have it, two days ago another publisher contacted me and offered a slot in their forthcoming anthology.
It would be for the Italian market, but why not jump at the opportunity of finally writing a Titan-based story for them?
I was thinking about something along the lines of Methane Pirate Queen of Titan – or something.
So yes, reading Michael Carroll’s book will be both leisure and research.
I’ll keep you posted.


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Back to Lemuria with Varla of Valkarth

51ys2qfwzqlSometimes words are complicated.
For instance, I had a hoot reading Varla of Valkarth by Glen M. Usher and Steve Lines, published by Rainfall Books.
It’s a fun story – the first in a series – set in Lemuria, and directly referencing, from the cover on, the old stories about Thongor, Lin carter’s barbarian swordsman.
The old Thongor stories were not highly sophisticated, but were fast, furious and fun, and Varla of Valkarth follows in Thongor’s footsteps: it’s good unsophisticated fun.
And I realize that unsophisticated sounds like a negative word, but really it is not – not in this case, at least Continue reading →