Clarkesworld Issue 29 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, science fiction magazine, short story, fantasy, magazine, clarkesworld
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2009-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

You once said that Thomas Ligotti was involved in the genesis of Shriek? How so?

A while back, Ligotti and I had an email correspondence about the Ambergris work. I got the feeling it wasn’t all to his taste, but one thing he said to me about “Early History…” stuck with me. He said that the narrator of the story (which takes the form of a fake history essay), historian Duncan Shriek, had no stake in the story, unlike in Nabokov’s “Pale Fire”, where the narrator definitely has a stake. In narrow terms of influence and meta intent, I’d meant “Early History” more as a correction of Pavic’s flaccid “Dictionary Of The Khazars” than a gloss on “Pale Fire”, so I didn’t find the comment useful in the context of what I’d written. But I thought it would be interesting to develop a context in which Shriek would have a stake. At first, it was just an exercise of background writing for the character, but suddenly Duncan’s sister, Janice, came alive in my imagination. The first draft of the novel was, I kid you not, twelve single-spaced pages in the form of a Hoegbotton pamphlet written by Janice. As soon as I had written it, I realized that what I really had was a rough summary of a novel. I would not have come up with the idea without Ligotti’s comment to me.

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