Lucius Shepard n'est plus
Re: Lucius Shepard n'est plus
Merci Ubik.
Re: Lucius Shepard n'est plus
Lu dans Locus à propos du Locus awards week-end :
"The awards ceremony was followed that evening by a celebration of Lucius Shepard, with Terry Bisson presiding. Bisson’s flight to Seattle was supported by a contributor fund. A roster of public donors is available at <http://www.lsff.net/awards/luciusshepard/>. The remainder of the funds raised in honor of Shepard will go towards supporting a memorial website. Bisson, Karen Joy Fowler, Bob Kruger, Dave Boone, Marc Laidlaw, Christopher Barzak, and James Patrick Kelly spoke (Kelly wore a Goofy baseball hat with long floppy ears given to him by Shepard). Leslie Howle organized the event, and Tod McCoy provided technical support."
"The awards ceremony was followed that evening by a celebration of Lucius Shepard, with Terry Bisson presiding. Bisson’s flight to Seattle was supported by a contributor fund. A roster of public donors is available at <http://www.lsff.net/awards/luciusshepard/>. The remainder of the funds raised in honor of Shepard will go towards supporting a memorial website. Bisson, Karen Joy Fowler, Bob Kruger, Dave Boone, Marc Laidlaw, Christopher Barzak, and James Patrick Kelly spoke (Kelly wore a Goofy baseball hat with long floppy ears given to him by Shepard). Leslie Howle organized the event, and Tod McCoy provided technical support."
https://www.noosfere.org/
Re: Lucius Shepard n'est plus
rmd a écrit :Lu dans Locus à propos du Locus awards week-end :
"The awards ceremony was followed that evening by a celebration of Lucius Shepard, with Terry Bisson presiding. Bisson’s flight to Seattle was supported by a contributor fund. A roster of public donors is available at <http://www.lsff.net/awards/luciusshepard/>. The remainder of the funds raised in honor of Shepard will go towards supporting a memorial website. Bisson, Karen Joy Fowler, Bob Kruger, Dave Boone, Marc Laidlaw, Christopher Barzak, and James Patrick Kelly spoke (Kelly wore a Goofy baseball hat with long floppy ears given to him by Shepard). Leslie Howle organized the event, and Tod McCoy provided technical support."
Merci René-Marc. J'avais suivi ça via facebook.
Au fait, dans ce même numéro de Locus, il y a une critique de Beautiful Blood par Gary Wolfe que j'aimerais bien lire...
JDB
"Passablement rincé", qu'il dit.
Re: Lucius Shepard n'est plus
Beautiful Blood, Lucius Shepard (Subterranean 978-1-59606-652-6, $40.00, 292pp, hc) July 2014. Cover by J.K. Potter. [Order from Subterranean Press, PO Box 190106, Burton MI 48519; <www.subterraneanpress.com>.]
In his story notes for The Dragon Griaule, his compilation of stories about that famous mile-long sleeping dragon, Lucius Shepard said of his abortive attempts to kill it off, ‘‘Now I suspect that Griaule won’t be done until I am.’’ With the first Griaule novel, Beautiful Blood, appearing only months after Shepard’s untimely death in March, that offhand comment takes on a sadly prescient tone. He also mentions in those notes that each story seemed to contain the germ of yet another story, and indeed the basic outline of the story of Shepard’s narrator Richard Rossacher shows up in a footnote to the 2010 novella ‘‘The Taborin Scale’’, in which Rossacher is described as ‘‘a young medical doctor’’ who derived from the dragon blood ‘‘a potent narcotic that succeeded in addicting a goodly portion of the population of the Temalaguan littoral’’ and who later became a kind of evangelist of Griaule’s divinity. As it turns out, these events are only episodes in the remarkable decades-long tale of Rossacher, who emerges as one of Shepard’s more memorable characters in a tale that rivals ‘‘The Taborin Scale’’ as the best of the Griaule stories.
Beautiful Blood also links with the original Griaule story, ‘‘The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule’’, in that its timeline encompasses that story, and Meric Cattanay, the artist who proposes gradually killing the dragon with poisoned paint, shows up as a minor character here. But the stage is dominated by Rossacher, who begins as a poor but idealistic hematologist hoping that a derivative of the dragon’s blood might work as an anti-clotting agent, and soon discovers that it does far more than that – even giving him a kind of Dorian Gray-style extended youth after he’s injected himself with it – and eventually sets himself up as a wealthy drug lord controlling the supply of the addictive derivative called MAB (for ‘‘more and better’’). One of the apparent effects of Rossacher’s initial overdose, though, is that he occasionally loses years of memories. He’s surprised to wake up one morning and discover that he’s not only wealthy, but that the prostitute Ludie, who had been one of his few friends, is now the manager of his business empire, although she now seems strangely distant from him. Seeking to improve his relations with both civic and church authorities (who have attempted to assassinate him), Rossacher forms an uneasy alliance with a cynical councilman named Jean-Daniel Breque (interestingly, the name of the French translator of The Dragon Griaule). He also forms a relationship with Martita, a maid whom he had raped after she rescued him from the assassination attempt, and eventually with an investigator named Amelita, who proves to be the love of his life – though his effort to reward her with his own formula for eternal youth backfires in a bizarre way. He does indeed spend a period as a kind of evangelical philosopher of the dragon’s divinity, but through a series of misjudgments and betrayals ends up spending much of his life in exile from his home Carbonales Valley and the dragon itself, whose fate here is a bit different from that suggested in earlier tales.
There is more than enough material here for a novel three times the length of Beautiful Blood, but Shepard, for all his occasional flights of lyrical excess, was really a rather economical writer, and it may be that the novella was the most suitable arena for the kinds of stories he told, with enough space to intrigue us with characters and settings, and enough vacancies to leave us wanting more. Beautiful Blood, both fortunately and unfortunately, leaves us wanting more. For one thing, the geography and history of the tale seem to shift in unexpected ways, initially clearly related to Europe (Rossacher supposedly studied in Berlin and read von Humboldt and Alfred Russell Wallace), but when Rossacher finds himself in exile in a nearby kingdom, it seems closer to the Latin American setting of Shepard’s ‘‘The Skull’’ – it has a jungle which is in danger of being chopped down, and the king regrets the oppression that resulted ‘‘when the fruit companies moved in.’’ There are, rewardingly, several such allusions to a spectrum of Shepard’s prior work in this novel, and a strong suggestion that this imaginative world – which he told us in the very first story is ‘‘separated from our own by the thinnest margin of possibility’’ – may be as huge and enigmatic as that dragon itself, and possibly as long lasting.
Gary K. Wolfe
In his story notes for The Dragon Griaule, his compilation of stories about that famous mile-long sleeping dragon, Lucius Shepard said of his abortive attempts to kill it off, ‘‘Now I suspect that Griaule won’t be done until I am.’’ With the first Griaule novel, Beautiful Blood, appearing only months after Shepard’s untimely death in March, that offhand comment takes on a sadly prescient tone. He also mentions in those notes that each story seemed to contain the germ of yet another story, and indeed the basic outline of the story of Shepard’s narrator Richard Rossacher shows up in a footnote to the 2010 novella ‘‘The Taborin Scale’’, in which Rossacher is described as ‘‘a young medical doctor’’ who derived from the dragon blood ‘‘a potent narcotic that succeeded in addicting a goodly portion of the population of the Temalaguan littoral’’ and who later became a kind of evangelist of Griaule’s divinity. As it turns out, these events are only episodes in the remarkable decades-long tale of Rossacher, who emerges as one of Shepard’s more memorable characters in a tale that rivals ‘‘The Taborin Scale’’ as the best of the Griaule stories.
Beautiful Blood also links with the original Griaule story, ‘‘The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule’’, in that its timeline encompasses that story, and Meric Cattanay, the artist who proposes gradually killing the dragon with poisoned paint, shows up as a minor character here. But the stage is dominated by Rossacher, who begins as a poor but idealistic hematologist hoping that a derivative of the dragon’s blood might work as an anti-clotting agent, and soon discovers that it does far more than that – even giving him a kind of Dorian Gray-style extended youth after he’s injected himself with it – and eventually sets himself up as a wealthy drug lord controlling the supply of the addictive derivative called MAB (for ‘‘more and better’’). One of the apparent effects of Rossacher’s initial overdose, though, is that he occasionally loses years of memories. He’s surprised to wake up one morning and discover that he’s not only wealthy, but that the prostitute Ludie, who had been one of his few friends, is now the manager of his business empire, although she now seems strangely distant from him. Seeking to improve his relations with both civic and church authorities (who have attempted to assassinate him), Rossacher forms an uneasy alliance with a cynical councilman named Jean-Daniel Breque (interestingly, the name of the French translator of The Dragon Griaule). He also forms a relationship with Martita, a maid whom he had raped after she rescued him from the assassination attempt, and eventually with an investigator named Amelita, who proves to be the love of his life – though his effort to reward her with his own formula for eternal youth backfires in a bizarre way. He does indeed spend a period as a kind of evangelical philosopher of the dragon’s divinity, but through a series of misjudgments and betrayals ends up spending much of his life in exile from his home Carbonales Valley and the dragon itself, whose fate here is a bit different from that suggested in earlier tales.
There is more than enough material here for a novel three times the length of Beautiful Blood, but Shepard, for all his occasional flights of lyrical excess, was really a rather economical writer, and it may be that the novella was the most suitable arena for the kinds of stories he told, with enough space to intrigue us with characters and settings, and enough vacancies to leave us wanting more. Beautiful Blood, both fortunately and unfortunately, leaves us wanting more. For one thing, the geography and history of the tale seem to shift in unexpected ways, initially clearly related to Europe (Rossacher supposedly studied in Berlin and read von Humboldt and Alfred Russell Wallace), but when Rossacher finds himself in exile in a nearby kingdom, it seems closer to the Latin American setting of Shepard’s ‘‘The Skull’’ – it has a jungle which is in danger of being chopped down, and the king regrets the oppression that resulted ‘‘when the fruit companies moved in.’’ There are, rewardingly, several such allusions to a spectrum of Shepard’s prior work in this novel, and a strong suggestion that this imaginative world – which he told us in the very first story is ‘‘separated from our own by the thinnest margin of possibility’’ – may be as huge and enigmatic as that dragon itself, and possibly as long lasting.
Gary K. Wolfe
https://www.noosfere.org/
Re: Lucius Shepard n'est plus
Merci, René-Marc.
Pour l'anecdote, j'étais en contact avec Gary Wolfe à l'époque de Galaxies, où l'on publiait sa "Lettre d'Amérique" (une sélection des critiques qu'il rédigeait pour Locus). J'ai pu le rencontrer lorsqu'il a fait un bref séjour à Paris avec son épouse "Dede" Weil, hélas décédée peu après. Je crois qu'il a été surpris de me découvrir en personnage de Beautiful Blood.
Il est de nouveau passé à Paris avant la WorldCon, mais je ne pouvais pas aller faire un saut là-bas, dommage.
JDB
Pour l'anecdote, j'étais en contact avec Gary Wolfe à l'époque de Galaxies, où l'on publiait sa "Lettre d'Amérique" (une sélection des critiques qu'il rédigeait pour Locus). J'ai pu le rencontrer lorsqu'il a fait un bref séjour à Paris avec son épouse "Dede" Weil, hélas décédée peu après. Je crois qu'il a été surpris de me découvrir en personnage de Beautiful Blood.
Il est de nouveau passé à Paris avant la WorldCon, mais je ne pouvais pas aller faire un saut là-bas, dommage.
JDB
"Passablement rincé", qu'il dit.
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