Podcast interview with Claude Lalumière

Episode 120 of The SF Signal sits down with ChiZine's own Claude Lalumière, author of Objects of Worship and The Door to Lost Pages.


Listen to it here!

Learn more about Claude's books here and here!

Mosaic - The Claude Lalumière Interview

Popular opinion says you can’t make money out of writing short fiction yet your entire output seems to revolve around this form. Why? And do you intend to move into novels at a later stage?

Hoping to make meaningful money from writing fiction is like hoping to win the lottery. It might happen, but don’t count on it. Mostly, I want this to be fun. I want to explore where my imagination takes me. And I can’t predict where that will be. I very much like the idea of “mosaics” — books composed of linked stories to form a larger story. It’s an underexplored form, mostly because it lacks an officially recognized name. But there are great books written that way that would not have been better served as novels or if their stories had simply been included in catch-all collection. Think of THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES or CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN or THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION or ORSINIAN TALES or THE WORLD INSIDE…

Read this and more insights from Claude Lalumière. 

Learn more about Claude's books, Objects of Worship and The Door to Lost Pages. 

Locus interviews Claude Lalumière

Claude Lalumière, author of Objects of Worship and The Door to Lost Pages, gives his insights to Locus:
‘‘As a writer, I’m always interested in things I don’t understand. One of the worst pieces of advice ever given to writers is, ‘Write what you know.’ That’s terrible, awful! It’s very important for me to feel that I’m writing about something other. If I already understand things, why would I want to write about them? I try to write about characters who are very different from me – teenage girls, gay married men, forgotten Jews. And I just try to get into the mindset of somebody other than me. That’s where it becomes fiction, where it becomes something that is beyond self-expression, which I sneer at. Fiction is an attempt at communing with the world, trying to bridge some gap.”

Read the excerpt. The full interview can be found in the January 2012 issue of Locus.

Learn more about Objects of Worship or The Door to Lost Pages.

Shouts out to In the Mean Time and Objects of Worship

Spec-fic blog Bibliophile Stalker mentioned two ChiZine books in a recent post recommending short story collections. In the Mean Time and Objects of Worship are among the works suggested for people who want to get into writing short fiction.

"There's always room for subtlety and elegance, even in genres like horror, and Paul Tremblay understands this. What makes his fiction remarkable is that it creeps up on you, instead of being transparent and overt. "

"Claude Lalumière has the ability to combine two (or more) unrelated genres and craft this potent story that's greater than the sum of its parts. "

See the mention. (scroll down)

Find out more about Objects of Worship.

Or about In the Mean Time.

10 Questions with Claude Lalumière

Writing about Writing sat down with Claude Lalumière, author of The Door to Lost Pages and Objects of Worship. He offers a fascinating insight into his writing style, his position on sexuality in fiction, and his Lost Myths project.

Check out the interview here!

Buy Lost Pages or Objects of Worship!

Objects of Worship "absolutely enthralling"

"Every world is fully realized; they're rich and vibrant and disturbing all at the same time--real worlds full of impossible things. ...I found it absolutely enthralling, and it's rare anymore that I find something I put firmly into the 'couldn't put it down' category. I highly recommend this book; it's a truly imaginative and unique collection."

Read the review here!

Buy Objects of Worship here!

NYRSF likes Objects of Worship, Napier's Bones

The New York Review of Science Fiction calls Claude Lalumière's OBJECTS OF WORSHIP "potent, memorable stuff. His living dead and dead alive are quite full of soul."
They also call Derryl Murphy's NAPIER'S BONES "a clever lark full of free-wheeling adventure and odd intellectual borrowings; a sort of winking DaVinci Code for the math set bracketed in magic and uncertainty."

NYRSF is print-only, so no link here unfortunately.

Check out Objects of Worship!
And Napier's Bones!

"A Strong Collection": Objects of Worship

Objects of Worship got a mini review at Handee Books. They said, "Lalumiere's name is one I'll watch for."

Read it here.

More info about Objects of Worship here.

Free eBook Giveaway of Monstrous Affections and Objects of Worship for Valentine’s Day

Because we love our fans so much, in honour of Valentine's Day we're giving away free eBooks of Monstrous Affections and Objects of Worship. All you have to do is tell the world how much you love us on Facebook or Twitter.

But you have to act today.

On Facebook

If you post “I have monstrous affection for ChiZine Publications” as your status, we’ll give you the eBook version of David Nickle's Monstrous Affections for free! Prefer Claude Lalumière's Objects of Worship? Use “ChiZine Publications is my object of worship.” But--and this is important--you have to tag us in your status. (If you don’t know what tagging is, see below.)

Twitter

For Twitter lovers, we’ll give away the eBook of Objects of Worship as a free download for a limited time if we see 100 tweets of “@ChiZinePub is my object of worship” today. And if there’s 100 tweets of “I have monstrous affection for @ChiZinePub,” we’ll do the same for Monstrous Affections.

Details

When does this giveaway end?

You have until midnight, Toronto time (EST; UTC/GMT -5 hours)

How do I get a free eBook via Facebook?

In the coming days, we’ll send a Facebook message to everyone who posts “I have monstrous affection for ChiZine Publications” or “ChiZine Publications is my object of worship,” (provided you tagged us, which is how we’ll find you). If you don’t hear from us by February 21, send us a message through Facebook.

What’s Tagging on Facebook?

When entering your status, type @ and then start typing “ChiZine Publications”. If we’re friends (and I hope we are after all we’ve been through together) you’ll see our name show up below your post. Select it and keep typing. Facebook has a more descriptive article at http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=109765592130.

How will you give away the free eBook for Twitter?

We’ll post a link on Twitter.

Do retweets count in the 100 tweets?

Heck, yes. We want people to love us! So go ahead and add a “Pls RT” to your tweet if you want.

Can I tweet or post both messages to get both books?

Yup. Show us twice the love, you get twice the free stuff.

Any more questions?

Leave them in the comments.

CZP in the Wild

In a B&N bookstore at Union Square....



...our own little spot of paradise. And horror and such. Woohoo!

Podcast, featuring Claude Lalumière

Agony Column presents a podcast of Claude Lalumière reading at SF in SF. It starts with him reading from Lost Myths, and then his short story "The Ethical Treatment of Meat" from Objects of Worship.

Listen to it here!

More info about Objects of Worship here!

It's the Ice Age in Montreal!

On November 28th, Rover and Infinitheatre are teaming up to do dramatic readings of novels and short stories set in Montreal. Of course, Claude Lalumière's This is the Ice Age from Objects of Worship is one of the 24 readings selected!

Read more about it here.

Objects of Worship Review!

"Claude is a regular mythomaniac. He takes not only mythologies of the past, but the pop cultures of recent decades, and weaves them into something new, wonderful, dazzling."

Check out the great review from Ernest Hogan's blog, Mondo Ernesto of Objects of Worship!

Or, if you already know how awesome this book and you or the person you're sitting next to doesn't have a copy yet, maybe you should get one. Seriously.

To Dream the Impossible Dream: Opening Arguments against Realism

By Claude Lalumière 

"To Dream the Impossible Dream: Opening Arguments against Realism" is a primer for "Against Realism: Hard SF, Autobiography, and Other Questionable Strategies for Writing Fiction," a longer talk that Claude will present on Saturday, 23 October 2010, at the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium.

Genteel society loves realism. That alone should be enough of a call to arms for writers -- indeed, all artists, as iconoclasts by definition -- to strive against it. Here, I will briefly introduce why I mistrust realism, and why I believe it to be an insidious distorter of human expression and lived experience.

 
I use "realism" in its broadest sense, to encompass not only movements such as American Realism, Naturalism, Social Realism, their legacies, and their descendents -- such as Hard SF and one of its recent subsets, the Mundanes [i]--  but all artistic expression that values the comforting verisimilitude of consensus reality over the disquieting uncertainty of truth -- although few, if any, of realism's adherents and defenders would acknowledge that such is the consequence of a realist approach to art. And by "truth" I do not mean the sophistic illusion called "objective reality" but rather that utopian, romantic, and quintessentially quixotic quest not to understand but to intuit the complex, ever-changing, and fundamentally unknowable web of life and existence of which we are part, thus embracing a sense of wonder, awe, compassion, and even terror. In essence, "to dream the impossible dream." [ii]
 
The rise of realism in the nineteenth century was motivated partly by "a reaction against romanticism" and "an interest in scientific method." [iii] It will come as no surprise, then, that, as a vocal detractor of realism, I am an unabashed romantic and that my profound and unshakeable atheism encompasses a mistrust of science, its dogmas, and its societal project.
 
Furthermore, "Purporting to be undistorted by personal bias, Realism believed in the ideology of objective reality." [iv] Although I hope that few thinkers would now explicitly or knowingly adhere to such a naive proposition, it betrays a fundamental unease that still influences and holds sway over the decidedly anti-romantic biases of genteel institutions such as English departments, university writing programs, mainstream literary awards, and literary criticism.
 
Our individual and collective memories are formed by storytelling, by the stories we tell ourselves and each other. These narrative memories -- about our origins, our aspirations, our defeats, our victimizations, our victories, our kinships -- are the building blocks of our sense of identity, both as individuals and as societies. States, religions, and other forms of identity-based authority notoriously mistrust art, try to dictate what art should or should not express. Such authorities maintain dominance through narratives of collective identity.
 
Even when it purports to have a progressive agenda, realism, which is necessarily measured against consensus reality, reinforces dominant narratives and thus the institutions validated and empowered by these narratives. Non-realist art, by its very nature, transgresses the boundaries of consensus, identity, and social order, potentially threatening the hegemony of ruling ideologies and, at a personal level, putting into question identities constructed under its aegis.
 
Of course, I realize there are many shades between these extremes of realism and non-realism, of comforting and transgressive, and many permutations that complicate such a simplistic dichotomy. After all, yes, non-realist art can be used as a tool to validate regressive agendas, and realism can illustrate troubling inequities. Even in such a case, a non-dominant group, too, tends to form its own micro-hegemony and tightly control transgression from its proposed worldview -- and that can include controlling the art that purports to express that group's cultural identity by demanding that it conform to its brand of realism, to its realist narratives. 
 
Realism, then, being by its very nature rooted in the hegemonic worldview that defines it, remains a primarily reactionary and dominating force that gnaws at the romantic and transgressive roots of so-called "genre" fictions and, more broadly, impedes the potential of individuals and communities to transcend the limits imposed by normative narratives of identity.

In the opening paragraph, I equated "artist" with "iconoclast" -- and I fully recognize my own bias in this matter. I do not consider "art" the work of so-called "artists" whose creations serve to reiterate or reinforce without question the status quo, the dominant worldview, or an entrenched societal paradigm. Art should be the vehicle on our quixotic quest for the unattainable truth. It is by nature restless. It can never be satisfied with where we are. It must forever, at any cost, propel us elsewhere -- where there be dragons. In such dangerous waters, realism can only blind us and thus imperil our survival.

***

Claude Lalumière is the author of the collection Objects of Worship, the Fantastic Fiction columnist for The Montreal Gazette, and the editor of eight anthologies, including the Aurora Award nominee Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction. With Rupert Bottenberg, he is the co-creator of Lost Myths, which is both a live show and an online archive updated every Thursday. Claude's The Door to Lost Pages, a novella, will be released by CZP in spring 2011.
 
"To Dream the Impossible Dream: Opening Arguments against Realism" is a primer for "Against Realism: Hard SF, Autobiography, and Other Questionable Strategies for Writing Fiction," a longer talk that Claude will present on Saturday, 23 October 2010, at the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium. 

Objects of Worship
by Claude Lalumière

Twelve strange, eerie, sensual stories by a bold new voice in weird fiction. Capricious gods rule a world of women. Zombies breed human cattle. The son of a superhero must decide between his heritage and his religion. Young lovers worship a primordial spider god. The apocalyptic rebirth of the god of the elephants. Monstrous chimeras roam through a devastated future Earth. A retired fisherman caught in the middle of a conflict between gods and superheroes. Teenagers struggle to survive a surreal ice age . . .

---

[i] mundane-sf.blogspot.com.

[ii] "The Impossible Dream," from Man of La Mancha (1972), lyrics by Joe Darion, music by Mitch Leigh.

[iii] Donna M. Campbell,"Realism in American Literature, 1860-1890," www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/realism.htm.

[iv] "Realism (Arts)," en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(arts).

Awesome Review of Objects of Worship!

The Left Hand of Dorkness reviews Objects of Worship by Claude Lalumière.

He says: "Now, before I bought this book I hadn't read anything by Lalumiere. I was taken in by the sales pitch put forth by the publisher, Brett Alexander Savory of Chizine (real nice guy BTW), and picked this up at Ad Astra earlier this year. I think the phrase that sold me was "gay zombies raising a human child". Yes, there are zombies in this book, in more than one story..."

Click here to read the review!