Poor Mojo's Newswire

SF author Emma Bull told SCI FI Wire that her new collaborative Web fiction project, Shadow Unit, was inspired by her desire to write fan fiction for a television series that didn't exist.

"Elizabeth Bear has been urging her published writer friends to try writing fan fiction, because it's a great way to remind ourselves that, ultimately, writing is fun, that that's why we're doing it," Bull said in an interview. "I wrote a Criminal Minds novella [based on the CBS TV series] and had a great time. But it made me realize that what I really wanted was to write fan fiction about a show that was a little like Criminal Minds, a little like The X-Files, a little like Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Mission: Impossible and Millennium and various other shows I loved--plus a few comics series."

Bull decided to create the show herself--with the help of some of her writer friends--but as a Web site rather than a TV series or a novel. She co-wrote the "series" bible with her husband, author Will Shetterly, and then started recruiting other authors to take part in the project. First, she brought Elizabeth Bear on board, then Sarah Monette, and she selected some other support personnel to help with the Web site and art direction.

Canonical writers of popular fiction — Stevenson, Wells, Conan Doyle, Poe— are usually renowned for lucid prose, deft allegory, vivid description, and, most of all, a mastery of pacing. H.P. Lovecraft is a titanic — or as he would say, a Cyclopean — exception. His prose is a clotted, lumbering mush, as if a septuagenarian academician had decided to rewrite “The Fall of the House of Usher” as an anthropological treatise. His use of allegory and myth is so preposterously labored it makes Joseph Campbell look coherent and insightful. His descriptions have all the obfuscatory imprecision of a Hillary Clinton stump speech. His pacing is, um, inutterably amorphous. His plots grind out with audible squeals and protests — standard suspense tropes slowed down till they become first laughable, then abstract. Foreshadowings don’t so much slither up as they thump to earth like pratfalls; surprise twists leap out like barbituate-stunned glaciars; even climactic chase scenes are methodically borified with extraneous matter and irrelevant observations. Lovecraft makes the mystical mundane and the exciting dull — he is Golden Age pulps’master pedant.

He’s also one of my favorite writers. Lovecraft had an enormously individual imagination and a supergeek’s fascinated enthusiasm with the minutia of self-contained systems. Jammed into a popular framework, his somnolent ineptitude and undeniable creativity combined with a whole closet-full of neurosis to produce a body of work which is charmingly ludicrous, poetically prosaic, and shot through with a quivering, submerged anxiety. Despite the genre trappings that group him with Stephen King, or Poe, he’s really much closer to someone like Henry Darger — an outsider artist transforming Dungeons-and-Dragons-style world-building into art.

The principal alterations, necessary to render our orthography sufficiently regular and easy, are these:

1. The omission of all superfluous or silent letters; as a in bread. Thus bread, head, give, breast, built, meant, realm, friend, would be spelt, bred, hed, giv, brest, bilt, ment, relm, frend. Would this alteration produce any inconvenience, any embarrassment or expense? By no means. On the other hand, it would lessen the trouble of writing, and much more, of learning the language; it would reduce the true pronunciation to a certainty; and while it would assist foreigners and our own children in acquiring the language, it would render the pronunciation uniform, in different parts of the country, and almost prevent the possibility of changes.

2. A substitution of a character that has a certain definite sound, for one that is more vague and indeterminate. Thus by putting ee instead of ea or ie, the words mean, near, speak grieve, zeal, would become meen, neer, speek, greev, zeel. This alteration could not occasion a moments trouble; at the same time it would prevent a doubt respecting the pronunciation; whereas the ea and ie having different sounds, may give a learner much difficulty. Thus greef should be substituted for grief; kee for key; beleev for believe; laf for laugh; dawter for daughter; plow for plough; tuf for tough; proov for prove; blud for blood; and draft for draught. In this manner ch in Greek derivatives, should be changed into k; for the English ch has a soft sound, as in cherish; but k always a hard sound. Therefore character, chorus, cholic, architecture, should be written karacter, korus, kolic, arkitecture; and were they thus written, no person could mistake their true pronunciation.

3. Thus ch in French derivatives should be changed into sh; machine, chaise, chevalier, should be written masheen, shaze, shevaleer; and pique, tour, oblique, should be written peek, toor, obleek.