Caitlín R. Kiernan

Today, I have to number:

1. Two Worlds and In Between has been chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of 2011's one hundred best books, and also as one of the six best fantasy and science-fiction books of 2011. Spooky gave me the news yesterday. I'm still sort of stunned. So, to review:

a) The book has SOLD OUT.
b) It was a Publisher's Weekly "pick of the week" (appearing on the ToC page).
c) The book got a great write up in The New York Times.
d) Gary Wolfe at Locus loved it.
e) And PW has named it one of the six best spec-fic titles of 2011.

Can I please get a "That'll do, Beast. That'll do."?

2. Tomorrow, the BIG DARK HORSE TEASE will become the BIG DARK HORSE REVEAL. I will be occupied with preparations for this a good bit of today.

3. If you have not yet already voted, please go the poll. Another 26* votes (I asked for 100 "yes" votes), and you just might get another studio project from me, the first since 1999. And yeah, the idea is that the songs would be available via as many services as possible, but definitely iTunes and Bandcamp. This would NOT be a Kickstarter project. All songs WOULD be covers, no originals.

4. Yesterday, I stared down the iMac screen, and the words finally began to flow. I wrote 1,127 words on a new short story, or novelette, or short novella called "Ex Libris." This is for the chapbook to accompany the limited edition of Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart. I hope to be finished on or near the 16th of the month. Then there's the next Dark Horse script to begin.

5. Last night, Kathryn and I began watching Series Four of Torchwood, and...wow. I, for one, am very pleased.

6. Subterrean Press says to me, "We've been down to only one full-time shipper in the warehouse for the past month -- our usual complement is three -- so copies of TWO WORLDS are still shipping. Please advise folks not to despair. Our second full-timer started yesterday, and should be able to quicken the shipping on the BEST OF YOU. (We also have a third shipper on board in December, thank goodness.)" So, sit tight, those who do not yet have their copies.

I think that's all for now. I have email, phone calls, an annoying Siamese cat, and a story to deal with. When do I get a full-time "oh shit!" girl?

Rather pleased,
Aunt Beast

Update: *8 votes

As a high priestess of the Immaculate Order of the Falling Sky, my thanks to seph_ski for passing along this link: Earth avoids disaster as asteroid comes as close as moon. It's a shame about 2004 XP14. She could have gotten the party started with a proper bang. Still, our psychokinetic tractor beam is being perfected for April 13, 2029 (I'll be -25, presumably) and Apophis. All hail the Neozoic. We will be ready. Anything twixt now and then is icing on the cake.

Meanwhile...

Lately, mevennen seems to have all the best memes (behind the cut):

( The 39 Questions Meme )

I've been so preoccupied, with one thing and another, that this rather spectacular news item entirely slipped by me, unnoticed:

OSLO, Norway, June 9 (UPI) — A large meteorite struck in northern Norway this week, landing with an impact an astronomer compared to the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima.

Of course, it would be rather premature to allow the Immaculate Order of the Falling Sky to take credit for any of this. Our telekinetic "magnet" is still little more than a thought experiment. Still...

Here'a story at physorg.com: Large meteorite hits northern Norway. There's not much detail just yet.

So, yesterday was an amazingly productive day. We did a read-through on "Highway 97," and then I wrote an afterword for the chapbook (1,206 words). I talked to my agent and caught up on e-mail. We read the prologue of Daughter of Hounds, and I discovered it takes about nine hours on my cranky old Epson inkjet jalopy to print a 691 pp. ms. (continuously, no breaks). This morning, the Zokutou page meter looks like this:

68 / 691 (9.8%)

Which is an improvement. Today, it's Chapter One ("Emmie"). Tomorrow, we may try to do two chapters, as the earlier chapters are shorter than the later ones, and it would be nice to have the safety net of an extra day. Today, I also need to do the last little bit of tweaking on "Highway 97" and its chapbook. But, mostly, the day will go to proofing Daughter of Hounds. This evening, we may see a movie with Byron.

When we got home from Birmingham on Wednesday, the new Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology was waiting for me (somewhat mutilated somewhere between the Sheridan Press in Hanover, Pennsylvania and my mailbox, but still...). I've been eagerly awaiting this issue, as it includes a description of a juvenile Triceratops skull from the Hell Creek Formation of Montana. However, I was distracted almost at once by an article on plesiosaur remains from freshwater deposits in Australia. The deposits in question are not only non-marine, they're high latitude, 60-80 degrees S., dating back to a time when Australia and Antarctica were beginning to drift apart. Indeed, the fossils were found in rocks deposited in the old rift valley. I love the idea of plesiosaurs swimming about in icy sub-polar waters. There's an echo of Lock Ness here, which got me to thinking about "paleo-cryptids," how it's often not so much that the beasts the cryptozoologists and monster hunters seek so fervently have never existed, just that they no longer exist. Gigantopithecus blacki, for example, makes a marvelous yeti/sasquatch, but all the evidence points to its having become extinct at least 100,000 years ago. Anyway, I should also note that the cold-loving, freshwater plesiosaurs all appear to have been short-necked pliosaurs, not the long-necked sort of plesiosaurs popularly fancied to persist in lakes like Loch Ness. Still, it's a marvelous image.

I wanted to link to Cliff Bostock's column in this week's Creative Loafing, sensibly titled "To Ruth Malhotra: Kiss my ass, I'm a fag." So follow the link. Ruth Malhotra, a student at Georgia Tech, has filed a lawsuit seeking to revoke GT's "'tolerance policy', which forbids harassment of gays, including the use of intolerant speech." Ms. Lahorta is a repeat offender. She's played the hate card before. Anyway, read the article. How do you convince someone whose religion fosters and encourages prejudicial attitudes that the consitutional protection of religious liberties does not also protect her "right" to treat fellow students like shit? The child has a website, of sorts, including her e-mail addy, though looking at it will only give her the attention she craves. Velour. That figures.

Meanwhile, the bad news is that NASA has officially declared that Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann-3 won't be raining fiery death upon the Earth anytime soon, and therefore isn't the one the IOFS is waiting for. The good news is, a) they've been wrong lots of times, and b) the sky is filled to bursting with earth-crossing comets and asteroids. Personally, I think NASA's just spreading around a little anti-IOFS propaganda, hoping to avoid a panic. Oh, and I found this bit yesterday from The Book of the Damned:

That there was never a moment when there is not some comet in the sky. Virtually there is no year in which several new comets are not discovered, so plentiful are they. Luminous fleas on a vast black dog—in popular impressions, there is no realization of the extent to which this solar system is flea-bitten.

So buck up, kiddos. Hope springs more or less eternal.


Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann-3 and all her forty fragments.

Perhaps even we atheistic pagans are subject to divine revelation. I'm more than willing to entertain the possibility. For example, it has occurred to me that, perhaps, mankind has a higher purpose after all. Perhaps all this seemingly senseless destruction and slaughter and torture so often referred to as "human history" truly is progressive in nature. Maybe the goddess occasionally grows weary of the way things are going down here on Earth. Heck. It happens to me with SimEarth all the frelling time. Out of nowhere, some species or another rises suddenly to dominance, develops technology, and inevitably ages of dullness follow. So. Maybe sometime back in the Miocene, the Cosmos grew finally weary of all the damned silly mammals. All the nipples and placenta and fur and endothermic metabolisms, surely it has to get tiresome sooner or later. And so forces beyond our comprehension set in motion a grand solution. An eloquent solution. A reliable solution — mass extinction. The evolution of a species so virulent it would, in only a few million year's time, wipe the board clean again, and the Cosmos could begin anew with Earth. Maybe cephalopods or crustaceans deserve an era or two of global domination. So along comes the australopithicines and the various species of Homo and, finally, H. sapiens sapiens.

Bingo!

Patience yields bountiful harvest, indeed. The perfect killing machine. Man. Indiscriminate, thoughtless, short-sighted, selfish, and more or less immune to reason. In no time at all (in a geological sense), the world has been raped and pillaged and a choice of poisons has been offered up by the clever apes: nuclear, biological, chemical, global warming, and etc. Take you pick. Mix and match. Just sit back and wait for the dying to begin.

But, alas, the fickle, impatient Cosmos grows tired of waiting. Humanity, it realizes somewhat belatedly, was too inefficient a solution to the problem at hand. In the past, asteroids and comets have proven a perfectly effective reset button, especially when combined with widespread vulcanism. It worked at the end of the Permian. It worked on the non-avian dinosaurs. If you want results, stick with the tried and true. Sure, the human race was an interesting new twist, destroy the biosphere with the biosphere! But it's taking too damn long. The end of the world is centuries overdue. Instead of performing the task it was placed here to perform, incapable of just getting it the hell over with, humanity struggles on, destroying far too slowly, failing, ultimately, to satisfy the cosmic desire for carnage and cleansing fire and the new and less monotonous beginning.

Moral: The simplest solutions are usually the best.

Anyway...here's where the revelation part comes in. Maybe my destiny was never meant to be palaeontology or writing. Maybe, all along, I was only meant to found a new quasi-religious sect — the Immaculate Order of the Falling Sky (IOFS). Maybe it's time to be done with this gradualist travesty and start looking for that great space rock with our name on it. Maybe it's been time for decades. The Cosmos (call her what ever you please) has a fine sense of irony, possibly, and having decided to end the slow scourge of the human race with a quick and fiery impact, she desires that her failed executioners ask for it. Sure, by my own admission I'm not exactly human, but I'll do. The message is simple, simple enough it can be trusted even to a lowly freak like me.

Yo! Mankind! The jig is up. The show's over. You're taking too damn long. Sure, you'll get there sooner or later, but the Cosmos, she grows weary of the game. She's ready for the sentient octopods. Enough with war and genocide, pollution and overpopulation. Forget greenhouse gases and holes in the ozone layer. They were good ideas in their turn, true. They merely failed to take things far enough. Time's a'wasting. You guys have to keep in mind, this damn star's set to go nova in only a few billion more years. You were created to murder a world and then finish the job by murdering yourselves, and you've had your moments, I'm not denying that, some delicious moments of waste and cruelty and massacre, but there's also no denying that you're taking too goddamn long to get the job done. Your minds wander. You get distracted. You get greedy. You fool yourselves with irrelevent ideas and half-hearted endeavors like goodwill and salvation and peace. Enough is enough. You had your chance. It's pink-slip time.

Here's where the Immaculate Order of the Falling Sky comes in. There should be a bit a theatre here at the conclusion. And, to that singular end, it's time to aim the collective wills of 6.5 billion hairless apes heavenward. Oh, I know you've never been very good at the whole telekinesis thing, but trust me, this will work. It's only show, anyway. The Cosmos is perfectly capable of hurling an asteroid where ever she chooses. But she wants a cheering section, see, or so I've been led to believe. Nothing too fancy, mind you. Let's say something in the ten-kilometre range. Iron and nickel composition should do nicely. It worked just fine 65 million years ago. And it's best if we place it in the ocean somewhere, for maximum effect. The Pacific Basin should do nicely. It won't be hard to find what we're looking for. There are thousands of giant space rocks out there in the solar system from which to choose. It will be the primary duty of the IOFS to choose the earth-crossing asteroid best suited for the task, then focus our collective thought-waves in such a way as to give the Cenozoic Era the desired coup de grâce.

There's work to be done.

Of course, there will be a Cafe Press shop. No doomsday religion is ever complete without T-shirts, mugs, and bumper-stickers to help get the word out, and, since this will be the last doomsday religion, we need to do it up right.