Victor Gischler’s Next Book
Oh baby!!!
Victor Gischler is a raving, badass genius.
This is what I wrote of him earlier:
Gischler does breathtaking, breakneck plotting of the kind that I don’t think has been done since the heyday of Cornell Woolrich. It’s truly amazing shit that will make you go dizzy! But while Woolrich’s work was always tinged with a sensitive melancholia, Gischler shares Bill Bryson’s knack for going at things with all-out flat-out floor-the-pedal two-fisted gusto. It’s like taking a ride on a roller coaster designed by someone who’s totally and gleefully insane and wants you to share his crackpot state of mind. That Gischler is apparently sober and sane makes his work all the more remarkable!
With this book, Gischler is veering out of the mystery/ crime fiction/ strange noir vein and into what his publisher says is science-fiction. Whatever. After people read this book, I’m certain science-fiction will undergo another redefinition. Gischler cannot be constrained by foolish marketing categories.
The publishing world will shake on its release date: July 8th.
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Mike Cane 2008 
January 26, 2008 at 1:27 pm
The Rollins blurb is worrisome, since I think he’s one of the worst prose writers in the universe. Is Gischler a technically sound writer or just a fun read? Great ideas are one thing but if the execution is deftless and clumsy, I’ll look elsewhere for my fiction…
January 26, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Gischler’s stuff is great, really. You can ignore that blurb if you don’t like who gave it (I haven’t read Rollins myself). It was Ken Bruen who turned me onto Gischler. Bruen also turned me onto Goodis, John Straley, and others. Go get Gischler’s latest book — Shotgun Opera. You’ll be amazed. You’ll go on to read all of his other books too.
January 26, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Right, Gischler’s on my list. You’re a smart bugger, Mike, so if you think this is something that’s gonna oil my mental crankcase, I’ll take your word for it. I enjoy your posts and I think we are simpatico on many things–is that a super-marionation puppet you use for your icon? I’m an old Gerry Anderson fan, high and low culture vying for my attentions.
Always a pleasure, mon…
January 26, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Hmmmm… reading deeper into your blog, I see you like Colson Whitehead and Cormac McCarthy. I loved The Intuitionist too. But Whitehead’s style is not his own. It’s Thomas Pynchon’s. Whitehead mentioned he loved Pynchon, so I immediately went to a Pynchon book right after Whitehead’s. A deadly mistake. It destroyed what I’d admired about Whitehead. Cormac McCarthy I do not like at all. I tried to read his post-collapse novel right after reading “Earth Abides” by George Stewart. I gave up on McCarthy’s book maybe 70 pages in. So many words and a story going nowhere.
So based on those two things, you might not like Gischler at all. I would not say he is “literary” like those other two. But for that I say thank God!
I agree with a lot of what’s in this essay:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/myers
These “literary” writers who think they are branches in the tree of the “literature” of Dickens, Balzac, Baudelaire, etc, are self-delusional. Those writers could tell *stories*. These “literary” guys wank with words.
January 26, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Ouch. Although my comment appears right after your second one, I was apparently writing it at the same time you were doing yours. Now it looks like I was replying directly, when I actually wasn’t.
Yeah, I’m using Mike Mercury as my avatar. But that’s only because WordPress initiated a rule that only blogs with avatars could appear as front page items like this:
https://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/i-have-todays-hawt-post/
I explain the avatar here:
http://mikecane.wordpress.com/2007/09/02/blog-notes-stupid-freakin-avatar/
If it wasn’t for that rule, I wouldn’t be using it.
January 26, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Mike: we can differ amicably on any number of subjects and I have no problem so worry not about ever causing offense. I like strong, well-defended views. I love both Whitehead and Pynchon and, in terms of McCarthy, have you read BLOOD MERIDIAN? That’s the one William Gibson insisted I HAD to read when I met him at a writing convention years ago. Thanks, Bill!
Literary authors demand focus and patience their “commercial” (don’t like that word) counterparts don’t. I think the mind is a muscle and unless I continue to challenge myself with works outside my comfort zone, that muscle atrophies. That’s how I’ve developed an appreciation for writers like Celine, Beckett, Joyce and, yup, the aforementioned Whitehead et all. I love great writing…but I can also appreciate pure story-telling (and Gerry Anderson, “Tom & Jerry” cartoons, dopy ol’ 50’s SF flicks). If it was just one or the other, I’d either become an insufferable bore or a twit who insists that “Cloverfield” was every much a work of genius as “Citizen Kane”…
January 26, 2008 at 7:02 pm
>>>Literary authors demand focus and patience their “commercial” (don’t like that word) counterparts don’t.
Well, see, there’s a point of difference right there. I disagree strongly with that position. It implies that “non-literary” writers can be given as little attention as an advertisement. I also strongly disagree with the entire concept of “literary” as it is used these days because “literary” writers of today have — in my opinion — just about zero connection with the true literature of writers such as Dickens, Hugo, Baudelaire, etc, etc — the canon, as it were. These “literary” writers would, in fact, be better off writing ads — so they could be ignored.
I do not read any writer carelessly. I abandoned McCarthy because he wasn’t going anywhere. And even the nowhere he was at was irritating as hell.
Ah, Gibson. I’ve read most of him. Just finished Spook Country a few months ago. He’s always pointed to by some SF writers as an example of how SF can indeed be “literature.” Ugh. My bile is hard to hold back as I type this because I uniformly find Gibson’s characters to be absolute morons — even the ones who are intended as brilliant (the locative artist in Spook, the guy in Pattern Recognition). Something about all of his work just rubs me the wrong way, even if I have to admit some of it sticks because it’s unlike most other SF. But I’m not sure that that sticking isn’t anything other than a recalled trauma. Sorry, but using Gibson to recommend McCarthy to me is like herpes recommending his pal syphilis! I read Gibson with gritted teeth.
If you haven’t, read that Atlantic essay. I’m re-reading it myself and have been restraining myself from grabbing passages to post here. The entire thing is there for everyone to read as a whole and I don’t want to post excerpts and have people labor under the misconception that those posts are a substitute for the whole.
See also the Bukowski post I did here:
https://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/01/26/bukowski-also-said-it/
Dear God, I tried to read the stuff in The New Yorker years ago. Honestly I did. I think it’s designed to punish people with IQs by trying to make them accept nothing as something.
You can also see my ripping post about The Time Traveler’s Wife here:
http://mikecane.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/this-manuscript-should-have-never-been-published-it-should-have-been-shot-to-death/
I hope you’ve never used “frivol!”
January 27, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Have to admit, except for some of his poetry, Bukowski ain’t my kind of guy. Just not disciplined enough, under-edited, his syntax too mangled–maybe what happens when you write drunk. William Burroughs would be more to my tastes, a fierce intellect combined with a need to break with convention…which, come to think of it, sums up much of the literary writing I love. You’re right, some of it can be pretentious and irrelevant so we have no quarrel there. Plus I love Baudelaire, Rimbaud (from the classical canon). I’ve seen the ATLANTIC piece and it is, after all, one person’s opinion, hardly carved in tablets and carried down from Mount Sinai. Intelligent readers can agree to disagree…and here we’ve done so with nary a name being called. A big improvement over other sites where I’ve posted. And I thank you for that. Now I gotta git back to the final edits of this nasty, bloody novel, 3+ years in creation and still I’m second-guessing myself…grrrr…
January 27, 2008 at 5:43 pm
>>>I’ve seen the ATLANTIC piece and it is, after all, one person’s opinion, hardly carved in tablets and carried down from Mount Sinai.
But what he rails against *is* perceived as the Tablets. Harlan Ellison made that point decades ago when it was made clear to him that his work would *never* be reviewed in the New York Times because it wasn’t deemed “literary.” That, in fact, anything with the SF tag was automatically beneath serious consideration. See here (which I now also intend to post!):
Bah, I’m not about to call you names because we disagree. At least not yet. (I trust I don’t need one of those dumb emoticons after that!)
April 1, 2009 at 5:13 pm
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