Time to move on!

Well, it’s time to shift to my own hosting.

As much as I love the free hosting on WordPress, there was too much that I wanted to play around with and tweak. I’ve been wanting for a long time to have the option of creating a more professional blog, with better accessibility to my short stories, book reviews, etc. So I asked the incomparable Andy to help me out.

This blog has now been exported to http://www.ruzkin.com. http://www.christopher-ruz.com also redirects to the new site – I’d been thinking about possible pseudonyms for quite a while (because Hayes-Kossmann is such a huge, galumphing surname) and Christopher Ruz seemed to fit.

As of writing this post there’s still a lot of work to do on www.ruzkin.com – I need to fix/tweak the banner, copy over my blogroll manually, and repair all the internal links. If you’re browsing and you see anything that’s broken or links back here instead, please point it out!

Thanks for the good time, all. Hopefully I’ll catch you over at the new site too. If you’ve linked to this site, it’d be totally rad if you adjusted your links.

Cheers!

Ruz

Book Review: Brasyl, by Ian McDonald

DAAAAANG.

I was feeling really down after reviewing Spook Country, like I’d somehow slipped sideways into a parallel universe of science fiction where I’d managed to read a totally different version of Spook Country to everyone else. Then a box of Brasyl landed in the bookshop and even though the cover reminded me of clown vomit I found folk all over the net saying it was magnificent. So I took a copy home and gave it a go.

I’m so, so glad.

Ian McDonald essentially writes like William Gibson raised in a third world country. They have similar flashes of imagery, the same almost stream-of-consciousness style of narration, similarly flawed characters, driven by prior mistakes or desires they don’t want to acknowledge. But while Gibson revels in the neon glamour of Chiba and Harajuku and downtown Manhattan, Ian McDonald rolls in the slums. His 2004 novel River of Gods revolved around the Ganges of the mid twenty-first century, while Brasyl is (predictably) set in Rio De Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

Not just the rich, upper-class compounds, though. McDonald spends as much time exploring the trash-heap favelas as he does the high-speed life of Brazilian reality TV. Sometimes his descriptions are so pure and crisp that you can smell the filth in the air.

The burned skeletons of construction machines still smoked, the orange paint blackened and bleached down to bare metal… The police barely glanced at Marcelina Hoffman as she joined the throng moving up towards the street market. Anyone could go in… the walls were only there to protect passing drivers from ricochets and stray bullets. Anyone could leave, anytime, during working hours. Surf boys with great muscles strolled, boards under arms, down to the beach at the Barra Da Tijuaca. Their Havaianas crunched broken glass and empty cartridge cases…

So, what’s it all about?

Brasyl follows three distinct storylines of roughly equal importance. In 2006, Marcelina Hoffman works for a reality TV channel, trying her hardest to think up the Next Big Thing and win her commission. Her latest idea – leaving easy-to-steal sports cars in slum areas and then filming the ensuing police chase – doesn’t go nearly as well as hoped. But there’s a bigger problem – somebody masquerading as her is trying to systematically destroy her career and relationships from the inside. Jealous rival? Evil twin? Who knows?

In 2032, Edson is in similar trouble. In between petty theft and identity-swapping with friends, he’s fallen in love with a girl who works in the highly illegal field of quantum computing. It’s all fun-on-the-run, until his friends start dying… and other supposedly dead folk start turning up again.

Finally, in 1732, Father Quinn is on a mission. He’s been sent from Ireland to the wilderness of Brazil to locate a renegade priest who has hidden in the jungle and started his own flock of converts. Quinn has asked God many times for a task most difficult, and this one fits the description. There are a lot of nasty things hiding in the Brazilian jungle…

When I started Brasyl I had no idea how these three stories would tie together. As it turns out, the links are only momentary, but still vital to the overall story. You won’t see Father Quinn’s ancestors teaming up with Edson, for example, but there are threads binding everybody together over the centuries. Sometimes these links aren’t as elegant as I’d hoped, but they all worked, in the end.

What’s also impressive is that these three parallel stories run at full pace from beginning to end. Father Quinn sailing into the darkness of unexplored jungle in 1732 is no less exciting than Edson running from the police in 2032. If anything, the only story to drag is Marcelina’s, and even then it’s only for a few chapters before everything explodes.

Is Brasyl fast? Hell yes, it’s fast. This is a sci-fi thriller at heart, wrapped up in a delicious layer of social commentary. All three characters are constantly hopping from crisis to crisis without ever seeming too lucky or too deus-ex-machina’d (is that even a word?) But, unlike many other sci-fi thrillers, I never felt like the story had left me behind. I love Neuromancer to death, but there were a lot of times when I felt I’d missed vital information. Never so in Brasyl. Everything is balanced and well explained without being patronising.

Does Brasyl have any flaws? A few, although you might not find them as jarring as I. The constant stream of Portugese is bewildering, although by the end of the novel most of the slang has been put in context at least once. But if words like futebol, pichadores and capoeria confuse you, then you might want to bring a dictionary.

My second major complaint would be the level of coincidence. There are some very large, far reaching conspiracies at play in Brasyl, even if they don’t seem apparent until the halfway point. Now, maybe I’m just a whiner, but it’s frustrating as hell when side-characters that have nothing at all to do with these conspiracies are suddenly revealed to either be in-the-know, or to be the grand arbiter of the Brazilian Illuminati equivalent.

Even so, you know what? I didn’t care. I hit the coincidence point, noted it down with a frown, and kept on reading. Because I cared. Because Edson was real to me, and Marcelina was an enigma I needed to solve, and because I was desperate for Father Quinn to survive his task most difficult.

Even when Brasyl stumbles, it gets up fast. The remaining 95% is excellent. I don’t care if the language is sometimes awkward, or if a few of the twists are outright silly. I blew through Brasyl at a rocketing pace and when I put it down I wanted to start again.

Motorcycle chases, reality-altering drugs, gang war, reality TV, graffiti, sex, quantum computing, murder, religious indoctrination, futebol. It’s rad, guys. Pick it up.

Meet the new jacket, not the same as the old jacket.

In the late 1800’s, a Scot called Edward Le Roy was working around the docks in the new, wild land of Australia. There were a lot of sailors there freezing their various genitalia off because the seas out those parts were fucking harsh, and no matter how many woolly jumpers you stack on your nipples still turned into little black diamond-hard lumps the first time you sailed into the wind. Edward needed a solution.

“What,” he asked, “would make the wind my bitch?” Then he looked up at the sails of the ships passing through the dock and had his answer.

Sailcloth back then was thick cotton canvas treated with oil, which made a material so fucking manly that it turned gale winds – an elemental force of destruction – into your personal servant. Edward Le Roy took this material and made it into a set of rather smart casual jackets. Sailors all around the Australian coast were able to head into the piss-thick sleet of a coastal storm with their middle fingers up. Stockmen out on the northern plains watched over their flocks through freezing night and rain heavy enough to drown in.

In 1933, Edward finally registered a trademark for his beautiful, manly jackets, and a legend was born.

Driza-bone.

I’ve been looking for a jacket like this a long time. Bomber cut, nice fit, warm as hell, built to last the apocalypse. If anyone ever nukes Melbourne I’ll just curl into a ball and throw this jacket over my head and then wait till the asphalt cools.

Jackets are for life, people. Not just for Christmas.

70k… approaching the endgame.

Well, in all the excitement of getting close to the end of Alpha Slip, I totally forgot to mark my 100th post! My first How-To article, Plot vs Story, capped off the centenary. Congratulations, Plot vs Story!

I really wanted to have another short ready to post here before the end of the month, but I haven’t even stopped to look at anything but Alpha Slip since May. This isn’t the quickest I’ve ever written a novel, but it’s the quickest I’ve ever written a novel that I liked. I’m thinking this draft will probably end up at the 80k mark. Then the second draft (which will be the first I release out to close friends for opinions) will be about the same – I can see at least 10-15k worth of rubbish that needs cutting, but there’s also a TON of secondary characterisation I completely forgot to include in this draft, leaving most of the characters as thin as a sneeze. If you missed my chatting about Alpha Slip entirely, I posted the first three chapters here.

Also, my Why We Fight article usurped my Mx Sucks Plebian Balls article as most popular post on the blog, which just goes to show all you folk are suckers for blood and nudity.

I just finished reading Brasyl, so I’ll have a (very positive) review of that up soon. In the meantime, keep writing, keep dancing, keep loving.

RIP Steven Wells, Philadelphia Weekly journalist

I read Steven Wells’ article The English Patient many months ago and found it both hilarious and exceptionally depressing at the same time. It was a very personal tale of the complete inadequacies of the Philadelphia hospital system, and instantly convinced me to never, ever, get sick in the USA.

I had pretty much forgotten about that article until I saw on Warren Ellis’s blog today that Steven Wells had passed away, finally succumbing to the cancer that had made his last years so hellish. I went back to the Philadelphia Weekly site and re-read the article – and the two follow-ups – once again shocked by Steven’s honesty, candidness, and ability to admit his fears and failings in the face of death.

Then on Thurs., Jan. 29, 2009, I got a phone call from my gastroenterologist. He told me I’ve got a cancer called enteropathy-associated T-cell lymphoma— which only afflicts a small percentage of the small percentage of people who develop celiac disease. And as cancers go, it’s a bastard.

Anyhoo. I put the phone down and let out a huge, self-pitying “Why me?” The answer, of course, is the same as the answer to Travis’ shit-awful 1999 international breakthrough hit, “Why Does It Always Rain on Me?” Because you’re a fucking dick. Now shut the fuck up and grow a pair.

Linked for your convenience: Steven Wells’ final articles on cancer, health care, and accepting the end. RIP Steven Wells – the world will miss you.

The English Patient

Cell Out

His Final Column

Some clarification (it’s not goddamn Fight Club)

My last post got me a lot of reactions from people who don’t usually read this blog. Some were good, even encouraging. Others were extremely disparaging, or simply assumed that this combat training is nothing more than a try-hard fight club.

I’ll put down a few points and hope everyone absorbs them.

Why We Fight (Fight Training June 2009)

There is purity in a fistfight.

Ruzkin on Writing – Plot vs Story

Plot and story. What’s the difference? Is there a difference? Some would argue there is no real distinction between the two. Others, myself included, believe there’s a world of difference between a plot and a story.

Now, what I’m going to discuss here isn’t that much different from the same opinions put forward by Stephen King, David Morrell and Sol Stein, although I’m might be a little blunter in my explanation. I’m blunt because I feel I have to be to get the point across. Recognising the difference between plot and story is a fundamental skill for writers, especially when writing extended pieces (novels or novellas) and yet I keep seeing aspiring writers churning out hundreds of thousands of words of plot with very little story. Not just aspiring writers, but highly paid professionals as well (William Gibson, I’m looking at YOU).

A book with a well-crafted story will keep a reader’s attention even if afterwards they put it down and say “Man, that was shallow.” Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code is a good example. A book with a good plot but no story might sometimes keep us going until the end… but something will always feel intrinsically wrong, or lacking. Plot-heavy books are often the ones we give up on halfway through.

So what’s the difference?

This is just beautiful – Israeli newspaper Haaretz lets the authors take over

For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.

How can you beat poet Roni Somek’s brief, lyrical weather report?

Summer is the pencil
that is least sharp
in the seasons’ pencil case.

Not much else from me lately. Alpha Slip passed the 50,000 word mark, and I finished university for the semester. My first how-to-write article will be finished soon. More at 11.

Best of luck to all those Aussie authors stuck in the winter doldrums!

Book Review – Spook Country, by William Gibson

If you’ve never heard of William Gibson, or read any of his stuff, shame on you. He is the premier bad-ass of sci-fi. You ever heard the term “cyber-space?”

Out in the malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to death against the neon, but in Bobby’s loft the only light came from a monitor screen and the green and red LED’s on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every chip in Bobby’s simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the “Cyberspace Seven,” but I’d rebuilt it so many times that you’d have had a hard time finding a square millimetre of factory circuitry in all that silicon.

William Gibson, Burning Chrome

That’s right. Gibson invented a term so awesome it became a buzzword for an entire generation. Then it became uncool, the sort of things politicians use when making arguments about banning game-violence, and that just goes to show how far he’s permeated tech culture.

His first novel, Neuromancer, is widely considered the birthplace of the cyber-punk movement. What’s more, it’s all about hacking, and Gibson wrote it without knowing anything about hacking at all. He just read about it and thought it was awesome. That’s like Jackie Chan, the cornerstone of modern cinematic martial arts, just turning up on the set of his first film saying “What, me fight? No, never tried it. Never practiced. But I read a book about it, how hard can it be?”

So if Gibson is such a bad-ass, why is his most recent novel such a let-down?