Far From The Light of Heaven (Tade Thompson)

I picked this up after reading Rosewater, and I think I’m in a position to say that I generally expect I will like Tade Thompson’s writing, but that Rosewater was more my thing than Far From the Light of Heaven wound up being. 

The characters got slightly shorter shrift here, and there was less conveyance of the world-building than I would have liked (I suspect that the world is thoroughly built, from Thompson’s end, I just wanted to have better breadcrumbs of, say, what the lambers were, and the intergalactic politics, etc.). The story is simultaneously trying to be a locked room mystery on this space ship, and paint the world of intergalactic politics where there are wormhole bridges and a couple of nascent colonies, and it can't serve both masters at the same time.

Thompson apparently really likes to bounce around perspectives when writing (in Rosewater it was jumping back and forth in time, here it is switching who we are focused on) and I think it would serve the story well to ratchet that tendency back a bit. I noted in my review of The Loop that I don’t particularly value gore; it is good that I am not bothered by it, though, as Thompson does not shy away from gore in his writing.

I liked the character Shell, I liked the character Fin. I liked Servo from what we met of him, but would have appreciated more depth. I wasn’t a huge fan of Joké, who was written a bit too much as a sort of manic pixie dream girl (imo).

Overall, though, I found it a pretty engaging book and found myself eager to finish it. 

This Year 365 songs: January 9th

 January 9th's song is Solomon Revisited Revisited (a song whose title was apparently wrong on the tape sleeve, per the annotations, and thus also on the youtube video):

Watch on YouTube

The annotations for this song include a poem by a polish poet (Miron Białoszewski) which Darnielle explains as informing the poetics of Mountain Goats writing. This song really dovetails perfectly with him relating the influence of this poem, which I will reproduce here (Darnielle includes the full text, but I found it online here):

And Even, Even If They Take My Stove Away…

My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy

I have a stove
similar to a triumphal arch!

They take away my stove
similar to a triumphal arch!!

Give me back my stove
similar to a triumphal arch!!!

They took it away.
What remains is

a grey
 naked
   hole.

And this is enough for me;
grey naked hole
grey naked hole.
greynakedhole.

I don't know that too much needs to be said, listening to even just this one song, and looking at this poem, you can see how there was clear influence. 

The other thing that is striking about this song is the thematic element of music as refuge.  Two different tracks on Sunset Tree have this as an explicit element:

Dance Music
alright I'm on johnson avenue in san luis obispo
and I'm five years old or six maybe.
and indications there's something wrong with our new house
trip down the wire twice daily
I'm in the living room watching the watergate hearings
while my step father yells at my mother.
launches a glass across the room, straight at her head
and I dash upstairs to take cover.
lean in close to my little record player on the floor.
so this is what the volume knob's for.

I listen to dance music.
dance music

[song continues]

Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod

you are sleeping off your demons
when I come home.
spittle bubbling on your lips,
fine white foam

I am young and I am good.
it's a hot southern california day.
if I wake you up, there will be hell to pay.

and alone in my room,
I am the last of a lost civilization.
and I vanish into the dark
and rise above my station. rise above my station.

but I do wake you up, and when I do
you blaze down the hall and you scream.
I'm in my room with the headphones on
deep in the dream chamber.
and then I'm awake and I'm guarding my face,
hoping you don't break my stereo.
because it's the one thing that I couldn't live without
and so I think about that and then I sorta black out.

held under these smothering waves
by your strong and thick veined hand,
but one of these days I'm going to wriggle up on dry land.

 

I am sure if I went through I could find less explicit references as well (or other equally clear references that aren't just the first two that jump to my head). Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton, for example, also falls under this thematic umbrella (I'll stop reproducing lyrics here, but you get the idea). So, this song (which is perfectly good as far as this stretch of early Goats goes), is both structurally and thematically, a sort of interesting keystone sort of piece.

An idea I had (probably needs workshopping)

In one of the anthologies we read for the book club, there was a story that came from a shared fantasy world (if I understood correctly, multiple writers wrote stories in the same setting).

I find lots of different versions of collaborative creative projects interesting, and having a shared setting that lots of people are free to write in is no exception. The idea I've been turning over in my head is a sort of two-stage process where stage one is for a small group of folks to collaboratively do some structured world-building on a discord server.  

For example, if it is a sci fi world, with multiple alien races, each person is figuring out some stuff about one species of alien and how things went for them at some major interstellar summit in the setting's history, etc.  Something less rule-driven than an RPG but with a bit of structure to it.  And then after some history and major figures and what not of this setting are set down, we write up some stuff that reflects the "core" of the world/setting and lay that out, and then stage two is for people (the same people or new people) to write stories set in this world (probably later than the events that were established, but who knows).

This is the current state of development of this idea, and I basically am wondering if anyone has suggestions/advice/desire to participate in something this.