Long white clouds in the sky above the southernmost tip of the North Island. Photo by Mer.
Greetings, comrades, from the Motu-Kairangi valley of Aotearoa. New Zealand’s north island is spectacularly sun-drenched at the moment– an unseasonably serene autumnal week, by Land o’ Long White Cloud standards.
Perfect timing, too, ‘cos Nadya‘s here! Squee! We’ve been talkin’ some SRZ COILBIZ (“Brainstorrrrm! Maaaaagic!”) and have decided to give ourselves a few days off from blogging and cat-herding to take a much-needed Coil-free road trip together. Coilhouse.net will probably be a bit sleepy for the next leetle beet. Consider this post our GONE FISHIN’ sign.
Speaking of fish, check out this jaw-dropping photograph of an immaculately preserved, exquisitely beautiful/fantastical Mola Mola skeleton:
A specimen housed in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Austria. (Via Paul Komoda.)
Oh, our marvelous world. It is full of such fantastical things, both natural and unnatural. We hope you’re all reveling in the weirdness as much as we are right now!
O frabjous day! (Callooh! Callay!) It is March 20th, 2012– the official US release date of UK-based author Nick Harkaway‘s second novel, Angelmaker.
Comrades, if you appreciate joyful and highly original storytelling, you need to pick up this book. Immediately. Trust me when I tell you that Angelmaker is easily one of the most endearing works of fiction that will be published this year… or next, for that matter.
Better yet, trust William Gibson: “You are in for a treat, sort of like Dickens meets Mervyn Peake in a modern Mother London. The very best sort of odd.” Or Tim Martin: “this is as far as it could be from the wearied tropes that dominate so much of fantasy and SF.” Or Glen Weldon: “A big, gleefully absurd, huggable bear of a novel.” Or Charles Yu: “Nick Harkaway’s novel is like a fractal: when examined at any scale, it reveals itself to be complex, fine-structured and ornately beautiful. And just like a fractal, all of this complexity and beauty derives from a powerful and elegant underlying idea.”
(Yes. YES! THIS. What they said. All of it, plus tax, and with great interest.)
Who among you has read Harkaway’s debut novel, The Gone-Away World? Those who have know what a big-hearted and ferociously intelligent storyteller he is– how he crafts narratives that defy categorization (and sometimes gravity), shunting his intricate, multi-pronged prose along at breakneck speeds. TGAW is a sprawling, surprisingly poignant hero’s epic that unfurls like a Lichtenberg figure against an unlikely backdrop of pirates, mimes, ninjas, horrific super-weapons and devastating post-apocalypse. It’s equal parts meticulous, silly, sincere, impassioned, hilarious.
The yarn of Angelmaker is made of similarly electric stuff, only spun even more finely, and woven so intricately that many passages play out like a kind of multi-layered literary sleight-of-hand: How did he do that? Within his wordplay, Harkaway ensconces acts of commensurately deft swordplay, espionage, gangbuster hijinks, and even higher fantasy. Intricate family bonds are explored and philosophical quagmires grappled with. There are trains, planes, automobiles, and submersibles. Sex! Monks! Murder! Mechanical bees! We are introduced to tragic elephants and a heroic pug. Harkaway dares us not to fall in hopelessly in love with each and every character and object and exotic locale he braids into the microcirculatory tapestry. (Bear in mind, there are thousands of distinct and lavishly described elements.)
At the golden hammering heart of the story we find Joe Spork, a lonely/adorable identity-crisis-having horologist, and Edie Banister, a ninety-year-old former superspy whose badassery transcends time and easy pigeonholing. Together –with the help of their magnificent friends/lovers/family, and thwarted by an assortment of deliciously loathsome villains– Joe and Edie must rescue the world from an antiquated doomsday device unlike anything anyone ever imagined… save for the tormented genius Frenchwoman who haplessly invented it.
It all sounds utterly absurd, doesn’t it? Well, it is. Ravishingly so.
Now. That being said, I’m delighted to present the following Coilhouse interview with Nick Harkaway, author of Angelmaker and The Gone-Away World. Huge thanks to Qais Fulton for supplying several of these questions, and downright humongous thanks to Mister Harkaway for taking the time to answer them all so thoughtfully.
Nick Harkaway. Photo by Rory Lindsay.
COILHOUSE: You were a professional screenwriter before becoming a novelist. Both The Gone Away World and Angelmaker –while infinitely more complex, dense, and multi-layered than the medium of film could ever allow for– have decidedly cinematic qualities: panoramic descriptions of places and scenes, well-paced bursts of action, crackling dialogue. Do you often find yourself pushing or pulling against that previous construct, or have you compartmentalized the two mediums? What (if any) are some of the most important tools you’ve brought with you from your screenwriting career? NICK HARKAWAY: Mostly for me the sense of the story leads the writing, so I know where I’m going and I come up with how to say it as I go. (I don’t mean that character doesn’t drive, rather than I have an overarching sense of what character and plot will do in combination, and I then have to write a line through that using the right scenes and the right language to express it. There’s a constant battle to find words and events which properly capture the concept in my head. And sometimes it turns out that the concept has conveniently ignored some logical realities and I have to bridge a gap…)
But screenwriting is a terrific base to work from. There are two gifts it gives which are obvious: if you’ve written a movie script, you know that you can finish a story. (I swear, more people get hung up on sheer terror of the long form than anything else.) And you know about concision. Every good writer I know has at one time or another worked in a field which required them to be able to express a lot in a short space, with minimal linguistic flourish. Whether that’s journalism, the civil service, the law, or something else, it’s a great discipline. I, obviously, have sort of abandoned that kind of sparse writing, at least for the moment, but that doesn’t mean I don’t benefit from it.
What pushed you to write your first novel? Was there a specific catalyst?
Yes. I was heartily sick of pitch meetings. I couldn’t stand taking another great story to someone who was fried on Starbucks’ coffee and not really paying attention and have them object to everything which was interesting about it and then complain that what was left wasn’t original enough. Or some variation on that theme. The final straw was a musketeer-ish story I wanted to write which was about a women who had, in her youth, dressed as a kind of D’Artagnan figure. She’s in middle age, her kid gets kidnapped, and she has to go back to being an adventurer – but she’s no longer a waif. She’s a farmer. She’s strong, heavy, and very obviously female. So she puts on a fake beard and decides essentially to be Porthos instead. There was all kinds of fun stuff in that story – just talking about it I want to get it out of the drawer again. Anyway, my panel of (female) execs sit through this, and at the end they say “well, it’s kinda hard to place stories with a middle-aged female lead”. And that is their entire critique apart from a nice extra kiss-off about transvestitism being hard to sell, too. And I just thought “screw this”.
Joy and surprise! Recently, we unearthed a long-lost box of Issue 05s we didn’t even know we had. We’ve put them up for sale in our online shop. To promote the sale, we’ve also thrown together this HTML page with an assortment of free “Making Of” goodies that everyone is welcome to check out. Enjoy!
It’s been a lot of fun, taking a trip back to 2010. From the Coilhouse vaults:
This is a paper proof of an alternate cover concept for Issue 05, featuring all-holographic foil. We worked with two companies and logged many hours in conference calls to try and make this happen, but ultimately decided to go with a holographic effect that was more subtle in order to preserve the original photo’s vibrant background. Ah, well! One of those “live and learn” scenarios, and a fun experiment in the evolution of Issue 05.
There were many such experiments. These Dorian Gray images, for example, went through tons of iterations: different backgrounds, multiple stages of Photoshop, etc. And photographer Allan Amato’s simultaneous Dorian Gray/Amanda Palmer & Neil Gaiman shoot was, itself, a pretty boisterous experiment! From beginning to end, the process of putting those two features together involved, quite literally, thousands of emails and phone calls between roughly two dozen collaborators. The ”Issue 05 Making Of” page includes behind-the-scenes Dorian Gray snapshots, as well as several gorgeous photos of Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman that we didn’t have room for in the magazine. There’s also a zip file of a high resolution file of Mildred Von’s paper doll, so you can print out and embellish your very own giant Dick Cheney! (Oh boy! Just what you’ve always wanted!)
So, to reiterate: there’s an unexpected windfall of Issue 05s briefly available in our shop. There are 43 copies available. Buy ‘em now before they’re gone forever. Also, this seems like a good time to remind everyone that we still have Issue 06s available in the shop. GET SOME.
Did you miss out on Coilhouse Issue 05: Let All the Children Boogie? (It’s not surprising… the print version of Issue 05 sold out in a record time of three weeks.) If so, we’ve got great news for you!
Starting tomorrow, we’ll be selling the last remaining batch of Issue 05′s in our shop. We have a very limited quantity of mint-condition copies from the original print run, and we’re putting them on sale to make room for more boxes of Issue 06 and other upcoming goodies.
The brightest, most colorful issue of them all! Featuring a gorgeous tribute to Grace Jones on the cover, holographic gold foil, two prints from the issue’s Dorian Gray-themed shoot, and a giant fold-out poster, it included interviews with Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer, Clive Barker, Chet Zar, Zoe Keating, Jo “Boobs” Weldon, and Chris Conn Askew. There was a tribute to fashion designer Tiffa Novoa, a richly-researched article on Chinese pulp fiction by Jess Nevins, a charming memoir of adolescent geekhood by Wil Wheaton, striking photography by Ali Mahdavi, paper dolls drawn by Mother of London creator Mildred Von, and much more. Check out a full preview of the issue.
Effective immediately, we’ll be shutting down until midnight tomorrow to protest two pieces of blacklist legislation - PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House.
Over the weekend, we saw several victories against the bills. The Obama administration came out against the DNS blocking in response to the anti-SOPA petition. SOPA author and notorious copyright infringer Rep. Lamar Smith stated on Friday that DNS blocking would be struck from the bill. The Internet may have won these battles, but the war is far from over. Despite earlier reports that SOPA was “shelved” (or, assome might say ”indefinitely detained”) over the weekend, Lamar Smith announced today that SOPA markup would resume next month.
SOPA has not gone away. PIPA is still up for a vote on January 24th. It’s time to make our voices heard. Coilhouse will be standing with Wikipedia, the EFF, BoingBoing, Reddit, and sites all over the world.
Coilhouse (and countless other publishers, businesses, and activists) could never thrive in a world where SOPA and PIPA were considered reasonable. We oppose the concept of the MPAA (or any corporate sponsor, for that matter) actually writing legislation. We oppose a room full of politicians who don’t understand how the Internet works making vital judgements about its future.
Some relevant quotes:
“If the ████ SOPA [and PIPA] bill passes, ████████████ we’re all kind of ████ed.” – Marina Galperina
“I’m not by any means an enemy of intellectual property, and in fact keep a roof over my head because the conceptexists. But I think that SOPA as it stands now, or as it stood beforethey paused to think about it, is extremely ill thought out, and abasically crazily Draconian piece of legislation.” – William Gibson
“Our freedom is more important than your dying industry. Period.” – @mikeestee
“It doesn’t get much better than working from a war room dedicated to shutting down Wikipedia.” – overheard by @sfslim at the offices of Wikipedia
“These bills were written by the content industry without any input from the technology industry. And they are trying to fast track them through Congress and into law without any negotiation with the technology industry.” - Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures)
“When ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled and people constrained in their choices, the Internet is diminished for all of us. There isn’t an economic Internet and a social Internet and a political Internet. There’s just the Internet.” – Hillary Clinton
“The potential for abuse of power through digital networks – upon which we as citizens now depend for nearly everything, including our politics – is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age … This is no time for politicians and industry lobbyists in Washington to be devising new Internet censorship mechanisms, adding new opportunities for abuse of corporate and government power over online speech.” - Rebecca MacKinnon (New York Times)
“We’re furthering our corporate interest by taking down our website + ads, to stop a law that the MPAA says can’t harm us.” - Rob Beschizza in response to MPAA butthurt
When was the last time you saw “The Internet” agree about something? It’s beautiful. Thanks, #SOPA! - @raindrift
Intellectual property theft is a problem for artists, and additional safeguards may be needed. As avant-cellist Zoe Keating tweeted earlier today, “I’m against #SOPA, but meanwhile I’m issuing a 7th, ineffective & useless DMCA against @grooveshark. #devilinthedetails” (Grooveshark is notorious among music streaming sites for refusing to pay artists their fair share.) There are no easy solutions. Whether it’s collaboratively fine-tuning the OPEN Act (and it turns out that Rep. Zoe Lofgren, one of the act’s sponsors and SOPA’s biggest opponents, actually listens to feedback) or working out some other method of protest (perhaps a huge internet campaign to educate fans on which sites most fairly compensate the artists they love?), we can work together to construct an Internet where innovation can thrive and artists can fairly profit their work.
SOPA and PIPA cannot pass. The stats are scary: we currently have only 6 Senators opposing PIPA, and we need 40. Only 12 House Members oppose SOPA, and we need 214.
Get involved. Some tips from Congressman Jared Polis and the EFF:
Show up at a town hall or talk to them in person, check their schedule with their office.
Call your Senators and Representative and tell them to oppose Protect-IP and SOPA, respectively. Click here for some suggested talking points. Then tell your friends about the call on social media sites.
Contact Congress through EFF’s action center. Customize your letter to explain who you are and why you are worried about this bill. If you’re outside the United States, try this petition from Fight for the Future instead.
Are you an artist? Showcase the dangers of censorship through art and music, and use your art as a way of reaching people who might otherwise not know about this issue. You can make stickers, posters or patches, create a YouTube video, or hold an open-mic night around censorship.
Write a blog post about the blacklist bills. Whether it’s a candid explanation of why you oppose the legislation, a discussion of the effect on human rights, or a call to filmmakersto protest the blacklist, there are plenty of things to say about this scary legislation. Help us get the word out by writing articles on your own blog, your school blog, or on blogs that take guest contributors.
If you work for a tech company, approach the leadership at your company and explain to them your concerns. Urge them to join you in speaking out. These companies (PDF) already took a stand.
It’s been a fun-filled, illuminating, topsy-turvy rocket ride, but over four incredible years since we launched Coilhouse, the time has come for me to move on. The need to focus on creating versus curating has been nagging at me for the duration of this endeavor, first softly and then louder, until it grew into a din which could no longer be ignored. And why should it? It’s been an amazing four years and six issues – years and issues I’ll always be proud of, especially now that our fated Constructivist installment is out in the world. Listing all my fond Coil-memories would take ages, but here are a few that immediately stand out:
The fateful meeting of The Three at SDCC 2007, while I was posing for Dr. Sketchy’s
Sticking home-made Coilhouse labels to bottles of two-buck-chuck at our launch party after taking a dive from my roof onto my balcony to make it there in time
Climbing over the velvet rope at The Edison with Nadya to assail Ron Moore for an interview
Wandering through Clive Barker’s home studio with my husband and Coilhouse contributor, Ales Kot, and plopping into his canopy bed overlooking a blooming hillside
Over-caffeinated red-penning of massive Kinko’s printouts before going to print
Merch design marathons
Three-hour conference calls devolving into fits of cackling and fart jokes
Receiving LA’s Best Design Aesthetic award with Courtney Riot
Grant and Kristan Morrison’s photo shoot with Allan Amato for Issue 04, which resulted in a beautiful friendship
Tea and Cookies with Coilhouse over at Whitechapel
At the risk of death by pigeon poop, exploring a beautiful crumbling Downtown building with Andrew Yoon for our Issue 05 Shoes shoot
Carpal tunnel-y signing of I-don’t-know-how-many issues of #05 on our Circulation Director’s floor
Hours upon hours of fevered Googlemancery, always
In addition to being an immensely emotionally rewarding experience, the Coilventure was an invaluable learning experience of everything from the thorny path of publishing to the intricacies of collaboration. I’m leaving a different person than when we began, with vastly expanded horizons, vocabulary and skill-set, for which I’m grateful. And while we’re on the topic of appreciation, I want to extend a heartfelt Thank You to the entire Coilhouse family – my co-editors, our brilliant design team, our steadfast interns, our dedicated ad manager, our circulation director, our numerous, generous friends and the entire Coilhouse readership for their encouragement, insight, contributions and when need be, honest critique. Your support through this experience means more than I can express.
As for The Future, it’s open wide. I recently returned from the Amazon jungle, where I taught an art workshop and created a mural at a school. Now I’m weighing options, regrouping, and, much to my heart’s relief and gratitude, finally working on a new series of paintings dedicated to beastly flora.
So that, as they say, is that. I wish Mer and Nadya the best of luck in keeping the Coilship a-chuggin’ while I board a rocket of my own and zoom into uncharted worlds. See you all in space and/or the future!
I cherish this photo of Nadya. It was taken a couple of months ago, waaaaay out in the middle of Bumblefuck Nowhere, by Coilhouse’s dear friend (and Ball emcee!) Aaron “Slim” Muszalski. It’s an incredible image: mysterious and lovely and strong, melancholy and elegant and battle-worn and full of promise, all at the same time. When I look at it, it’s easy for me to imagine that Nadya is gazing resolutely forward, beyond her immediate obstacles, into a great, wide open future. She is 29 today.
Happy birthday, my dear friend and comrade! We all hope you’ll enjoy the amazing virtual mixtapes listed below. These were made by several readers and friends of Coilhouse Magazine + Blog in honor of your special day, and to express gratitude to you, because this wonderful space, this publication, and this community, would not exist without you.
Guys, thank you so much to all of you who have ordered Coilhouse Issue 06 in the past day. It has been an emotional day for us, watching this issue sail out into the world. It’s been great to watch the list of orders and recognize the names of friends and long-time readers. You guys are awesome.
A few of points of order:
1) Make sure the shipping name and address is valid and dependable and let us know immediately if it needs to be corrected.
2) Kindly keep in mind – due to high volume orders, delivery time can be 1-3 weeks (or up to 4 weeks for international) from date of purchase so there may be a delay. We normally get them out much faster, but during that first wave of sales, things can get a little backed-up. If you do not receive your order within the aforementioned time slot for your location, PLEASE contact uswith your PayPal confirmation email right away. We’ll sort you out!
3) Everyone who ordered a copy of Issue 06 will shortly be receiving some electronic goodies: a beautiful video of Rachel Brice dancing (to be blogged-about shortly!), a custom origami folding pattern crafted by Robert Lang, and artistic photos from the Kathleen Hanna archive at the Fales Library. Those will come through to your inbox tonight (tomorow morning – sorry technical difficulties!). Apologies for the delay! Starting tomorrow, all new customers will get a link to these items automatically. [EDIT, Nov 6th, 2011: We're still working out those automation kinks! Meanwhile, rest assured you will receive an emailed link to your bonus content shortly. Sorry for the delay, and thanks so much for your patience.]
[EDIT, Nov 6th, 2011: It works now! Yay! Everyone should have gotten a link to their bonus content, and new customers will get their link instantaneously from now on. Let us know if you have any issues. Thanks again for your patience!]
