That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (36 page)

BOOK: That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote

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‘
We the Enclosed’ was written for
Leviathan 4: Cities
(ed. Forrest Aguirre). I had done some touristing in Italy and Morocco, and later on in Egypt, and was struck by the contrast between the tangible presence of history in the very old cities in those countries and the historical flatness of Australia’s much newer cities. I had also been thinking about consumer activity as questing – the shopper armed with money rather than a sword, but still looking for that special treasure with magic powers, and susceptible to bewitchment.

‘
Maldoror Abroad’ is a love letter to the maddest of ancestors, the extraordinary proto-Surrealist poetic prose text
Les Chants de Maldoror
(1868-9) by the Comte de Lautréamont, pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse. After reading it for the first time I felt as though my brain had been rewired by a gloriously insane electrician, and Maldoror’s voice continues to echo in my head.

‘
Alsiso’ and ‘Last Drink Bird Head’ were written respectively for
The Alsiso Project
(ed. Andrew Hook) and
Last Drink Bird Head
(eds. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer). For the first, the game was to write a story titled ‘Alsiso’, a word originating in a typo; for the second, contributors wrote flash fiction answering the question ‘Who or what is Last Drink Bird Head?’ – great fun in both cases. My brain seems to like writing to strange prompts. The left side shrugs and passes the job onto the right side, I think.

‘
The Memorial Page’ was an attempt to write a Borgesian fable – so of course a tiger turned up. After Morocco we had gone to England, and my husband’s relatives talking about their childhoods on the outskirts of London (which had been more rural then) set off daydreams that bumped together with daydreams from places just visited.

‘
Between the Covers’ was written for
The Devil in Brisbane
(eds. Zoran Živković and Geoffrey Maloney), an anthology of stories about writers meeting the Devil. The difficulties I had with writing after completing a novel were real; the deal with the Devil wasn’t. At least, I don’t think it was. The Mario Vargas Llosa quotes are from
Letters to a Young Novelist
.

‘
The Heart of a Mouse’ was inspired by Jeff VanderMeer’s prompt of ‘Giant mouse-man moving through a post-apocalyptic setting, looking for a mate’ – upon receipt of which Mouse rocked up, with a different mission. It’s very much a personal story, though it owes something to Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
and Daniel Keyes’
Flowers for Algernon
, and of course the importance of pig shit to the post-apocalyptic economy comes from
Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome
.

‘
Saving the Gleeful Horse’ was prompted by Aaron Hunter: ‘A man cares for a wild animal that has been injured.’ Molimus leapt – or lumped – into my mind, and I remember him telling me the story and it not changing much from the first draft. The setting grew out of memories of six months I spent in England as a child, discovering the magic of places haunted by myth and folklore alongside an everyday modern world which in itself was a bit out-of-the-ordinary to me.

‘
Mother’s Curtains’ was written in response to a story, ‘Bounce’, that Alex Dally MacFarlane wrote to me in a card. Along with ‘Domestic Interior’ and ‘The Crone Meets Her Son’ it owes inspiration to the joyful experience of reading Penelope Rosemont’s
Surrealist Women: An International Anthology
.

I had always wanted to write a cyberpunk story, and figured it would be about hip and edgy young people, then the World Wide Web got going and I wrote
‘Beach Rubble’. The title is from a fragment of Sappho written as graffiti – ‘If you’re squeamish, don’t kick the beach rubble’ – at the start of Jonathan Littell’s cyberpunk first novel
Bad Voltage
, a book I loved to bits.

‘
Vision Splendid’ was written for Gillian Polack’s anthology
Baggage
, for whose theme of Australian cultural baggage I tried to address what I see as a wilful narrowness in Anglo-Australian culture.

The title
is taken from A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s poem ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ (1889), a romanticised portrait of a drover:

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him

In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,

And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,

And at night the wond
’rous glory of the everlasting stars.

I thought of ‘Clancy’ when I had written the story and considered the contrasts between Australia’s preferred self-portraits of national character and the reality of many people (especially women) who don’t resemble the favourite archetypes and whose experiences are left out of popular narratives.

T
he quote in ‘The Crone Meets Her Son’ is from Franklin Rosemont’s text ‘Freedom of the Marvelous’ (Catalogue of the World Surrealist Exhibition, 1976): ‘To overcome the contradiction between these marvelous moments and the everyday, to actualize the Marvelous in everyday life –
that
is the surrealist project.’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A great many thanks to my beta readers – Gillian Polack, Kirby Crow, Laurie Bland, Andrew van der Stock, and especially Nick Tramdack, to whose detailed critique I’m much indebted. Extra thanks to Gillian for her skilful editorial work on ‘Vision Splendid’ and to Michael Cisco for his valuable input on ‘When the Lamps are Lit’. My gratitude also to Jean-François Le Ruyet for correcting my French, to Mum and Dad for their patient answers to my many questions about Australian historical detail and for Dad’s help concerning the number Pi, and to all those who were generous with sundry assistance and advice. Last and most, huge thanks to my husband Stu for all of his support and critical feedback.

ALSO BY K.J. BISHOP

THE ETCHED CITY

IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award 2004

Ditmar Award for Best Novel
2004

World Fantasy Award for Best Novel
nominee 2004

‘Have you seen a split cranium, growing flowers like a window box? I saw that, a mere hour ago.’

Fleeing the ghosts of their past, a healer and a killer escape from the ruined Copper Country to the city of Ashamoil. But as they salvage new lives from the debris of the old, they will discover that the ghosts of the past are also the ghosts of the future
.

As comic and tragic destinies play out, art will infect life, dream and waking fuse, and splendid and frightening miracles will bloom
.

Editions in print:

Publisher: Spectra (November 23, 2004)

ISBN
-10: 0553382918

ISBN
-13: 978-0553382914

UK readers: Kindle e-book available on Amazon.co.uk

‘…nothing’s quite rocked my world like KJ Bishop’s
The Etched City
, a heartbreak of a fantasy novel.’

–
Junot Díaz

‘…fantasy as high literature, our world skewed to a hard right angle.’

–
James Sallis,
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

‘In
New Worlds
(1964) Ballard said that speculative fiction would never achieve maturity until it possessed the moral authority of a literature won from experience… Without doubt, Bishop’s fiction has earned that authority.’

–
Michael Moorcock,
The Guardian

‘This is a challenging novel, both in the themes and questions it subtly poses, and the metaphors it disguises indivisibly amidst beauty and monstrosity… An amazing first novel, not only for the skill of writing, complexity and richness of invention it displays, but also for the themes it is willing to confront.’

–
William Thompson,
Interzone

‘
The Etched City
… is thoroughly unpretentious but unafraid to delve deeply into all manner of mysteries. It features a cast of hard-bitten loners who, for all their bitterness and fatigue, are still passionately full of life.’

–
Gahan Wilson,
Realms of Fantasy

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organisations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

First edition 2012

ISBN 978-1-62590-203-0

Cover design by K.J. Bishop

For information please visit
www.kjbishop.net

‘The Art of Dying’ © K.J. Bishop 1997. First published in
Aurealis #19
, October 1997.