Who's got time for that? I’ve been a mid-list author for close to 40 years, so I've got to get moving. Having published every way imaginable, from traditional to Amazon to my own imprint, and still not found the best-selling formula, I understand the temptation to find faster, easier ways to increase output. ‘New and Improved’ is always subjective, though, isn’t it? I see it on a cereal box with that burst and wonder. It’s nice that they have nutrition fact panels, too, so I know what went into the Franken Berries. Original paintings, a handmade Bugatti, artisanal ketchup – we tend to value the input whether we can see it, feel it, taste it or not.
If an author wants to use AI, fine. Just let us know.
Any book that can pull that off is worth your time.
Not that it’s easy. While the story is smooth, the realness is tough to swallow. Alberta at the turn of the last century was a difficult place to live. The section of the book in which William is fighting overseas is necessarily challenging; no-man’s land was also as the title suggests. The final section, in which ex-soldiers must return from a fight to fight some more, is heartbreaking.
And ultimately nutritious. I knew nothing about the general strikes that ran across Canada a century ago. I can’t speak for others, but I think if the world – not just Canadians – remembered the events, collective bargaining in first world counties would not have fallen by half in the last 60 years. The trenches of the middle class were dug and held with bone and blood.
Hard truths and food for thought.
The Tongue Trade is a finalist for a Next Generation Indepdendent Book Award.
Sorry to sew together so many metaphores. What with our divisions and all. Am I jjust making things worse?
My idea, up on the screen. It should swell my heart like the Grinch’s on Christmas day, but no. It’s . . . I’m not going to write ‘bittersweet’, because I like bittersweet. That never struck me as exactly the right metaphor. Beet pie is more like it – lovely to look at, quite good for you, and tastes like a fraud.
The new Disney show, Star Wars Skeleton Crew opens in a delightful suburb on the planet At Attin. The cars, trucks, and trams move through the neighborhood like slot cars, tillers in tracks. I use the same idea in my novel The Tongue Trade. In my future, the troughs supply vehicles with power, so they don’t have to cart stored energy around. They also help manage traffic, preventing accidents and ameliorating congestion. Slots are also a metaphor for the kind of ruts in which people become stuck, language being the deepest one in my book.
But that’s writerly stuff and not nearly as cool as seeing what I envisioned, from gifted artists, on my television. I was thrilled my concept looked amazing and sad that it was not at all MY personal concept. No one at Disney got the idea from my novel. They probably got it the same way I did, by growing up playing with toys.
It’s not the first time this has happened to me. In a way, I hope it’s not the last. It’s lovely knowing someone else liked the same idea you liked, it’s good for a writer to know your ideas have value, and it leaves a pasty taste in your mouth.
Interpreter William Kirst is trapped between a word and a hard place in Martineck’s unique and inventive science-fiction thriller. For William, language is his livelihood: as an Interpreter, he bridges the gap between parties whose languages have splintered into unique and often inscrutable dialects, based on their trade specializations. However, when William’s newest client, businessman Arthur Loam, admits to murdering a man after lying to the police, he’s held to a professional silence that would destroy his career if broken. Desperate, William finds himself spiraling down a dangerous rabbit hole as he searches for a way to bring the truth to light without landing himself in the unemployment line—or worse, at the wrong end of a gun.
Martineck’s construction and investigation of a world where language and its barriers are paramount results in a poignant, well-conceived slab of science fiction. From the witty prose, the individual argots and how they shape the dialogue (and characters), even down to William’s love of 50 Cent and other hip-hop acts—each nugget of detail is carefully considered and artfully executed. William is endlessly entertaining as a sunny inverse of the noir archetype: he stumbles through each escalating situation in a terribly vulnerable, human, and relatable way that harmonizes, rather than disrupts, the gravity driving the narrative.
Martineck (author of The Link Boy) flexes his experience in actualizing the high-concept world of The Tongue Trade, smartly written with crisp pacing, creative twists, and energetic characterizations backdropped against a sweltering semi-futuristic New York, where even those with William’s specialized training can be tripped up by semantics: “Interpreters who spend too much time with the same clients, conversing in the same language, can develop expectations” he acknowledges. Martineck has crafted a sunny noir, a charming spin on a storied genre that makes for an ecstatic journey readers will struggle to put down.
Takeaway: Words speak louder than actions in this sunny-noir sci-fi thriller.
Comparable Titles: Richard K. Morgan’s Thin Air, Matthew Farrer’s Enforcer.
This transportation of words from the old group to the new group has value. It’s also a pain in the ass, and I can’t do it anymore. I don’t now how Martin did it for a whole book – even a short one. I couldn’t do it for much more than a paragraph. It’s maddening. Trying to limit your ideas to the confines of 850 base words cramps your ideas. If you can’t express something, you drop it. Your ideas stay inside you and eventually die. Heart wrenching, frustrating, frightening.
Which makes Limited Verse challenging to love, but demanding of respect.
At first, I read this book the way one watches figure skating. Wow. That’s cool. The trick of writing within a highly limited lexicon is impressive. Martin translates, amongst others, Gertrude Stein, Carl Sandburg, or William Shakespear (who made words up ‘cuz there weren’t enough for him) with aplomb. Maintaining meanings, even as the rich imagery fades (to no fault of his own) billows out the breadth of the book. As the level of difficulty increases, and the greats begin to slip on the ice, you realize this silly, ill-mannered, hodgepodge, potluck old English language is a deep and wonderful gift.
We can think a lot and freely. I love this book for reminding me of that fact. Respect.
Check out my first post, on books with big ideas.
By birthyear exacerbates the effect. 1965 is the shadowy year between the baby boomers and generation x. A transition period. I feel – as I bet many of my graduating class does – affiliations to both groups. I am as likely to listen to Simon and Garfunkel as I am to Jay Z. Liminal time.
While I don’t think about it all the time, I can’t say it’s infrequent either. Dwelling in misty time/space gives you a different angle from which to view the other, fixed time/spaces. I have always felt more like an umpire than a player. An observer. It could be just me, but I don’t think so. Working with others in my cohort, I’ve noticed the subtle differences in values and temperaments. A small, alien effect. Mork reporting to Orsen. Alf calling Melmac. Trevor Noah or John Oliver commenting on what we too are seeing, but from farther back. It’s not that we tweeners are not invested, were just a little careful.
Kamala Harris was born within six months of me, Tim Walz a little more. They do not share my particular cuspiness, but they are from Sesame Street. Regardless of how you feel they feel about variety of issues, I am quite certain they bring measured perspective with them wherever they go. They are of the middle and that is a great place to start.
Sawyer brings several sciences together to create an entirely plausible future. Quantum physics, astrophysics, computer architecture, biology – the usual. The real gift of the book, however, is slow titration of soft sciences into the hard: sociology, phycology, political science (the one that pulls so far from the others we put ‘science’ in the name as a kind of dog chain.) This will not surprise long-time Sawyer fans. What might is the literary composition all this chemistry concocts. The Downloaded covers so much ground it grows into something full and rich. Sawyer attempts to show so many of the directions the main story’s roots can take that he succeeds in creating a very real world.
As an off-shoot, he also creates a hybrid rose of a novel. Fragrant, pretty, and robust. All the various literary conflicts are here: Person vs. others, person vs. environment, person vs. self. My students would be so happy if I assigned this book, because it would take the place of three. And they would enjoy the read, which in the end, is what we really want from whatever novel we pick from the big garden of books.
A new myth. The kind in which we’ve been so lacking that the gods need to poke us again. Perhaps Hera decided Trump took his gifts for granted and had to be punished. Zeus thinks Trump is doing a fine job of carrying on Zeus-like traditions. He waves his hand to counter each of Hera’s wars, laws, viruses, and projectiles. They will continue their spat until, per the legends, there is a moral for us. No idea what that could possibly look like.
The only thing I know for certainly is that the gods always win.
I'm already starting to miss my old God, inscrutability and all.
