Sam Butler is a former Wall Street bond trader who writes fantasy and SF.
May 1st is the day when my latest story, Kremlin Necropolis, is posted on the ZNB presents Patreon page. The story is set in the same world as The Risen, where saints can become vampires and vice versa. Not a free site, but I think it only costs a couple of bucks to read if you’re interested. I wrote it a while ago, but it’s probably more apropos than ever today.
And yes, the Kremlin Necropolis is a real place.
An early Christmas present just arrived – I sold a story to ZNB Presents! Set in the world of The Risen, it’s called Kremlin Necropolis and takes place about thirty years ago. In the Kremlin, of course, featuring Mikhail Gorbachev and Joseph from The Risen. Given the cast, it’s a bit of a secret history, similar to the other Risen stories I’ve posted, Let Them Eat Cake and The Three Marys, and will be available at the ZNB Presents Patreon page next May.
Which means I might actually have to post more often than once a year to remind folks when the story comes out.
Happy New Year! It’s been a while since I posted anything here, and this is one of the reasons why – I don’t have time to write because I’m too busy watching K-dramas! (Not really. I’m just too lazy.) At any rate, Susan and I have been watching K-dramas for five years now, driving people crazy with our proselytizing, and enjoying every minute of it. Nerd that I am, I keep a spreadsheet that rates every show (I used to do this for my favorite movies too), so I figured what better way to share the joy than to post my spreadsheet! With ratings, brief comments, and everything! How could this not generate a million pageviews, right? Anyway, the spreadsheet is simple. Shows are listed in the order we watched them, from Strong Woman Do Bong-Soon to Love in Contract (gotta love the titles), with a few extra columns showing whether or not the show’s on Netflix, or is SFF, and comments at the end. The shows are often too long, often start better than they end (they’re frequently written on the fly), and almost always without any of the irony or cynicism of so much American entertainment these days. Which is one of the main reasons we love them. And if you like fantasy, especially ghost stories, no one does it better. Enjoy!
(Sadly the formatting doesn’t quite work on the phone. Maybe someday I’ll figure WordPress out. )
The latest anthologies from Zombies Need Brains are now available as both ebooks and in trade paperback. I co-edited BRAVE NEW WORLDS with Joshua Palmatier, so of course it’s the best of the three, but the other two, SHATTERING THE GLASS SLIPPER and NOIR, are also terrific. SHATTERING THE GLASS SLIPPER is already shaping up as one of ZNB’s most popular books ever. So you should buy all three!
Meanwhile stay tuned for some surprises later in the month with the next ZNB Kickstarter.
The latest ZNB Kickstarter is up. Three great new anthologies, with half great stories from anchor authors and half (possibly) great stories from new writers. I will be co-editing Brave New Worlds with Joshua Palmatier – as you can clearly see our antho has the best cover art.
The new books are out from the latest Zombies-Need Brains Kickstarter. My own small contributions are in WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, which I co-edited with that god-among-men (and editors) Joshua Palmatier, and contributed a story to as well. You can buy your own sparkly new copy here!
WHERE AND WHEN is an odd story. There are no people in it, for one thing. George Lucas supposedly wanted Star Wars to have no people in it either, only robots, but WHERE AND WHEN doesn’t even have robots. The idea came to me from a book I tried to write after finishing AVENDER IN AMERICA a decade ago, and which I only wrote one draft of before moving on to THE RISEN. (I thought THE RISEN would be much more commercial. (Ha!)) The idea is that first contact between species in a non-FTL universe would have to be by radio signal. Kind of like CONTACT, right? Unlike Sagan’s book, however, the aliens aren’t actually trying to contact us. Instead they’re trying to infect our computer systems for their own particular reasons.
WHERE AND WHEN is a story of how that might happen.
I had high hopes for In the Fall after the first few chapters. A long, multi-generational tale of a Vermont Yankee who marries a former slave after the Civil War, the book basically falls into three parts. The first is a family saga about the principal couple’s first twenty-five years together and is the best part of the book. The second is a literary noir about small town bootlegging pre-WWI and is well done but nothing special. The final third is a ridiculous attempt at southern gothic, ruining for me what had been more good than bad up to that point. Much of the book was overwritten, with characters engaging in long monologs that sounded a bit too close to the author’s own voice, but the ideas were interesting and the characters beautifully drawn, at least until the end. That’s when the sixteen year old protag of the final section heads south to find out why his grandmother committed suicide, loses his virginity to a distant cousin within four hours of meeting her, and learns just how horrible the south can be.
Faulkner it ain’t. And after seventy years or so of reading this crap, I’m so done with 20th c. male literary writers making no attempt whatsoever to explain why their female characters jump into bed with their male protags the minute they meet them.
So done.
Why do I watch K-Dramas? Sky Castle, which my wife and I just finished, is an excellent example. It’s too long (twenty episodes rather than the usual sixteen), is an over-the-top soap opera, and has a central plot about high school students. (Boys Over Flowers? Blecch.) If Sky Castle were an American show we wouldn’t even pick up the remote. So why did we watch it? And like it?
Because K-dramas frequently leaven their histrionics with humor, something I can’t remember ever seeing in an American soap opera unless the show is also a parody. (Dallas, anyone?) But Sky Castle is no parody. Sky Castle takes its characters as seriously as any four-hankie weepfest. Even as it skewers those characters and the insanely competitive Korean educational system that is its ultimately satirical focus, the show demonstrates as much sympathy and understanding for its villains and buffoons as it does for their tortured victims.
I can’t imagine any American show combining straight-up melodrama and biting satire in the same way. In Korea, the two meet up in surprisingly sweet and horribly funny combinations all the time.
Or maybe I just need to watch Big Little Lies.