Best 41 quotes of Hal Duncan on MyQuotes

A 3K word story might well be done in some caffeine-and-nicotine-fuelled 36 hour session, and at the end of it, there'll be a few passes of editing required, but I basically have a polished draft.

Destiny can sometimes be history coming back to bite you in the arse.

Homophobia's just one form of abjection, and wherever you have a marker of deviance - skin colour, gender, gender identity, disability - you get the same mechanisms of prejudice.

I'm sort of exploring where pacifism and socialism come into conflict. How do you reconcile a passionate rejection of might and violence with an attitude of "nil paseran" - "none shall pass" - in the face of fascism?

I started thinking about the endless bullshit about quotas, and how certain types of character are fine "as long as it's important to the story," and so on, started thinking about the absence of the abject.

I've got a number of stories written so far in that mythos, more lined up to be written, and a narrative arc taking shape between them. I was experimenting with releasing the stories online for Paypal donations, so the existing ones are currently available via the blog for free download, but the ball didn't keep rolling in terms of meeting the targets I was setting.

I wanted to do justice to texts that are in verse in their original, so I tried to invest my version with a comparable poetic power; hence even more literary fireworks there.

Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.

Movies, novels, TV shows - these are the water fountains of today. We thirst for stories which speak to us by representing us, but we go to the water fountains in the centre of town looking for that, and we're turned away, sent to the ghetto.

Prejudice validates itself as righteous abhorrence of the criminally deviant. So Christian homophobia is just a metonym of that abjection in general.

The conflict between pacifism and socialism ultimately reflects a greater quandary of how one engages with such a system.

With undead armies, psychotic angels and exploding airships, Scar Night is a gripping, ripping yarn which rattles along at a great pace. Tether all that to the knock-out image at the heart of the novel-Deepgate, a Gothic city built on a network of chains over a great abyss-and you have urban fantasy at its best.

Words command us. Names define us. Definitions bind us. Words are where we keep our sacred secrets.

All prejudice presents itself as piety, propriety.

All worlds of fiction are alternative realities.

But functional was not an aesthetic criterion that Flashjack, as a faery, had terribly high on his list of priorities; it was well below shiny and nowhere near weird.

Civility and etiquette, gentlemen, are all important.

Essentially, in the model of strange fiction based in shifts in narrative modality, we are reversing the polarity, treating those ‘contents’ (errata, nova and chimera) as the end results of a literary technique of estrangement, the effects of strangeness rather than the cause. These quirks – dragons, spaceships, magic, FTL – are not things which, in and of themselves, make fiction strange. Rather they are the epiphenomena of an underlying process of semiosis, figurae generated and combined to create meaning, gaining their symbolic power by their application. Genre is not a question of which trove of tropes one uses, of a characteristic set of quirks; rather it is a quality emergent from the underlying dynamics of modalities, the nature of the impossibilities and our affective responses to them – the uncertainties and ethical imperatives too, if we include epistemic and deontic quirks in our scope along with the alethic and boilomaic.

For some the label sci-fi is just a shortand for science fiction, an alternative to sf gesturing at ... you know, that stuff we like.

Fuck, if only ‘aesthetic idiom’ didn’t sound so damn poncy.

Fuck the epistemic modality; this is alethic modality we’re talking now, not factuality but possibility.

I’d take you home with me, see, but two of us in the same Behold? Just wouldn’t work, ends up in all sorts of squabbles over interior design; and the human, well, one faery in the Behold of the Eye, that just gives them a little twinkle of imagination, but more than one and it’s like a bloody fireworks display. They get all unstable and artistic, blinded by the glamour of everything, real or imagined, concrete or abstract. They get confused between beauty and truth and meaning, you see, start thinking every butterfly-brained idea must be true; before you know it they’ve gone schizo on you and you’re in a three-way firefight with all the angels and the demons, them and their bloody ideologies.

I kissed the boys and made them cry ... in ecstasy.

I likes me some ‘Shit Blows Up’ fiction, don’t get me wrong.

In that time while he was still aware, which was the worse, I wonder: the agony of his physical torture or the horror of their utter hatred, of their moral certainty that he was so beyond the bounds of what they could accept that he deserved not just a death but one of such brutality, such inhumanity, as would make the seraphs who burned Sodom bow their heads in cold respect? What is it like, I wonder, to learn the full capacity of hatred in a lesson hammered home with bone broken on wood and skin ripped on barbed wire?

In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn’t matter if you’re filthy. In theory anyway.

–It’s not Sci-Fi, we insist, It’s SF. Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know.

Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing.

Man, that’s a killer strategy, that is, an awesome way to persuade the incognoscenti that we’re not crazed hokum junkies, high on hackwork, trying to pimp our addled euphoria to anyone who passes. Yeah, vehement denial that we’ve got anything to do with the crack-whore pump-daddy beast of a thousand cocks locked in the closet. Bitter accusations of snootcocking snipewankery when they point out that crack-whore pimp-daddy beast of a thousand cocks in the closet. Offended outrage when they assume the mindfuck we’re touting is a cheap handjob, just because we’re, like, standing on a street corner dressed to sell our arses. And because our first words to a prospective customer just happens to be, ‘Hey, big boy.

– No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café. The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw the Booker, she thinks. She’d rather have a hookah.

Personally, I’d like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it’s going to be so overloaded with meanings it’s just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink.

Slipstream – sorry, infernokrusher - takes a cut-throat razor to the hackneyed clichés of both strange and mundane genres. It cannibalises them, retrofits them, treats them the way Godzilla treats Tokyo, the Burroughs treats Interzone. Smash and grab. Cut up and fold in.

So, fuck ’em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We’re GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker’s jackets.

So they watch over us like gods of old. Our patron sinners.

Soylent Brown? It ain’t people, but it comes from them.

the crescent sun is high, the moon low; life is not for the faint-hearted; so why the fuck should art be?

The pleasures of the flesh are sweet. – Mmm, flesh, said Puck.

The spelunkers of speculative fiction mining phosphorescent filth from the bowels of the city of New Sodom, the Sci-Fi freaks scraping kipple and back from the bins of decades-old shit sandwiches out back, composting it to grow shrooms, we have built this thing to take its place. This is the legacy of generations of writers who’d rather tackle adult themes than pander to puerile power-fantasies, whose interests lay with the soft sciences and humanities as much as with the hard sciences and technology, for whom the fiction was always more important than either the fantasia or the futurology. It is also the legacy of those who simply don’t give a fuck about anything other than either fantasia or futurology. This is fiction in which the envelope has been pushed so far out, from ambition or expedience, that all descriptions and definitions – SCIENCE FICTION, SCIENCE FANTASY, SCI-FI, even speculative fiction – can only be, at best, nominal labels for it. It is the fiction that abandons those labels for a negation of description, an indefinition – the acronym SF, which might mean any or all of those things.

This is the fiction that I’m referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative.

We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper science fiction and then there’s that SCI-FI shit.

Well, I myself, while sometimes unkempt by nights of drunkenness and debauchery, am quite convinced a man’s good character is marked by his impeccable attire.