Guest Post | "Om-Nom-Omnigenre" by Tom Pollock

"Oh really, how cool, you wrote a book?"

"Yes. Well, a trilogy actually."

"Oh cool, what genre is it?"

"YA. YA Urban Fantasy. YA Urban Fantasy Dystopia. YA Urban Fantasy Dystopia Post-Apocalypse."

"YA Urban...?"

"YA Urban Fantasy Dystopia Post-Apocalypse?"

"More or less."

At that point the conversation usually dries up. My interlocutor necks the rest of their wine, and suddenly remembers they have somewhere else important to be, but I swear it’s true. The Skyscraper Throne trilogy, my series about a teenaged graffiti artist and her poet best friend pulled into a world of runaway train ghosts, living reflections and crane fingered demolition gods, really is of all these genres, and maybe more.

Genre, you see, is a taxonomy, a periodic table for literature, but the truth is, almost all books are compounds, not individual elements. But while which genres to file a particular story under is ultimately up to the reader, it’s the writer who gets to choose the tropes they’ll use to judge it.

But how to choose? Tropes are just story elements—all that marks them out as special is the frequency with which we use them. For me, the first element in any story is the theme. Theme is just a fancy word for ‘what the story’s about,’ and my themes... they kind of snowballed.

The first thing I knew about the trilogy, you see, was that I wanted to tell a story about growing up, so YA made sense. The City’s Son was about two girls pulled into a magical world hidden beneath the skin of everyday London. This is an Urban Fantasy trope so tropey that it barely even registers—it’s practically definitional of the genre—but it’s also as neat a metaphor for one’s first, faltering steps into adulthood as I can think of: a world at once strange and familiar, exciting and frightening, that you’ve lived in every day of your life but never really seen until now.

In the second novel—The Glass Republic—our scarred protagonist is pulled into an aesthetic dictatorship, a parallel city inside reflections where the full measure of your worth is judged by your face, and the standards of beauty are set by a proud and ruthless Mirrorstocracy. Again, the core idea of a repressive regime is hardly original, but the resonance of a teen testing themselves against the rules and limits of their new world, and deciding how much they will shape those limits and how far they’ll allow them to shape them... for me that was the perfect second act.

And the final apocalyptic act? Bringing the world-that-is-London to the brink of destruction by an urban plague: streets running at 1000 degree fevers, windows and doors vanishing to leave citizens sealed up in brick, solid roads turning in an instant to a liquid so thin you can’t swim in it, just sink and let it fill your nostrils? 

All that is because when you’ve grown up—really grown up—you can never go home again.

Maybe that’s why I think of being grown-up (past tense) as a synonym for death.

Anyway, that’s how one series gets to be in (at least) four sub genres. So I’ll throw it over to you, dear internet friend, what’s your favourite genre: horror? Police procedural? Romance? And much more importantly—what do those genres say to you?

***

Inventor of monsters and hugger of bears, Tom Pollock writes fantasy, and writes about fantasy. Say hey to him on twitter @tomhpollock or by way of his website.

Guest Post | "The Inverted Image" by Tom Pollock

So... The Glass Republic. I loved it.

One of the things that fascinated me most about the book was its preoccupation with perfection and reflection, so when the opportunity arose to have the author blog about something for The Speculative Scotsman, it didn't take long to for me to come up with a potential topic for Tom.

Alas, the blasted Book Smugglers had already booked the author for a post about beauty, but Tom, ever the gentleman, was willing to approach the idea of the images from another angle. And in the end, I think it worked out well. Fittingly, in fact, you could consider the guest blog below the mirror image of Tom's contribution to SFF In Conversation.

***

As a child I was pathologically drawn to things that looked like doors but weren’t: picture frames, fire places, bookcases, a rectangular pattern of cracks in a brick wall, or in the bark of a tree trunk. When I was eight, the first thing I used to do when I went into any room was try and discover the piece of furniture that was hiding the secret passage.

The thing that fascinated me most, though, was mirrors (which wasn’t, I hope wholly narcissism). A mirror was more than a potential hidden door, it was a doorway, a hermetically sealed world, teasing my delusional childish mind with the space sealed behind the glass.

Mirrors as portals onto fantasy worlds are nothing new. Lewis Carroll nailed it so hard that going "through the looking glass" has entered the lexicon as a euphemism for any strange situation.

So, when the time came to create London-Under-Glass, the city of the Mirrorstocracy, the inverted doppelganger of the fantastical London of The City’s Son, I knew I wanted the mirror to be more than a doorway. I wanted it to be founding principle of the entire world.

In London-Under-Glass, everything is built on reflections. The citizens are living reflections, laminates of the images of their doppelgangers in our London, built up layer after layer, day after day, until they become conscious. The buildings are warped and distended the way we see sometimes see them in our mirrors, swollen in odd places by clots of the precipitecture than falls from the sky.

In London-Under-Glass it snows brick dust, and hails slate. It literally rains cats and dogs because all of these things are caught in the river’s reflection, churned and broken by the tide and eventually evaporated and rained back down on the city. The citizens of the mirror city are used to this, but even they are occasionally unnerved when the droplets coalesce into whole faces in the puddles who try in vain to whisper secrets to them before the tyre of a passing car dashes them away.

All of that was fun, worldbuilding-wise. But the thing that really helped me with the story was the trial that such a world presented to my lead character, Pen.

In the first book, Pen was possessed by a parasitic creature made of barbed wire (work with me). She’s still bearing the scars of that attack, on both her face and her heart. Now she has to enter a city where how you look is everything, where image is substance. "Into that world inverted" she goes, and to survive she has to turn her scars into tools, her wounds into weapons. In a book about mirrors, it had some symmetry.  

***

Thank you a thousand times, Tom, for stopping off at The Speculative Scotsman to share a bit about how the Mirrorstocracy came to be.

Now get back to work on Our Lady of the Streets! :)

Book Review | The City's Son by Tom Pollock

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Running from her traitorous best friend and her estranged father, graffiti artist Beth Bradley is looking for sanctuary. What she finds is Filius, the ragged and cocky crown prince of London’s mystical underworld. Filius opens Beth’s eyes to the city she’s never truly seen — where vast spiders crawl telephone wires seeking voices to steal, railwraiths escape their tethers, and statues conceal an ancient priesthood robed in bronze.

But it all teeters on the brink of destruction. Amid rumors that Filius’s goddess mother will soon return from her 15-year exile, Reach, a malign god of urban decay, wants the young prince dead. Helping Filius raise an alleyway army to reclaim his skyscraper throne, Beth soon forgets her old life. But when her best friend is captured, Beth must choose between this wondrous existence and the life she left behind.

***

"Thrum-clatter-clatter, thrum-clatter-clatter," (p.5) comes the sound of The City's Son: a syncopated siren song that I found positively impossible to resist.

The City's Son is a tour-de-force in sophisticated urban fantasy—beautifully wrought, tightly plotted and fantastically finessed. Shockingly, it's also Tom Pollock's first novel.

I had, however, read this fellow before, by way of a very memorable short in Stories of the Apocalypse, which is to say the first Pandemonium anthology edited by the peerless pair behind Pornokitsch. However, as impressed as I was with "Evacuation," it took The City's Son to properly sell me on Pollock's potential... which is to say world, meet the spiritual successor to early China Mieville.

A reductive recommendation, admittedly, but better to make it now and move on than dwell on the many and various ways in which The City's Son put me in mind of King Rat, Perdido Street Station and Kraken. Anyway, let's face it: before now there was no-one quite like Mr Mieville out there, and more of a good thing is good, surely.

But getting back to the matter at hand, note that the plot of The City's Son is not what makes it awesome. In fact, you'll have heard the broad strokes of it before, very probably over and over - in Neverwhere, Un Lun Dun and the books of The Folly by Ben Aaronovitch, to name but a few - but though the concept of a magical secret city under, above or amongst our London is fairly far from inspired, Pollock's execution of the premise is pitch-perfect. His city, his setting, seems so alive that it practically writhes. There's an army of living stone statues, a Mirrorstocracy of impermanent reflections, a gaggle of girls with glass skin, and a man, who is as often a woman, made out of rats and rubbish.

And that's just the good guys!

On the other side of the divide, beyond the glimmering limits of the light cast by the city's grey-skinned crown prince Filius: the forces of darkness. The gathering forces, I should say, for they are rising in name and number with the return of Reach, the Crane King. Amongst the hellish highlights, keep your eyes peeled for the scaffwolves - dog-monsters made of scaffolding poles -  and listen, listen, for the phantom rhythm of a railwraith, plowing past St Paul's, leaving only death and devastation in its wake.

Pollock's imagination is in its prime, then. And though the premise is pallid, the author enlivens it, invigorates it, with a cast of I dare say daring characters. There's Filius, for starters: an orphan in the care of the undercity itself, who wields a railway spike like a sacred spear yet knows next to nothing about London and life as we understand it. More relatable in that respect is our protagonist, Beth Bradley: a graffiti artist who takes to the streets after the death of her mother, the dazed abandonment of her father, and the devastating blow left by her best friend Pen's betrayal.

Speaking of which, with respect to Pen in particular, The City's Son takes some truly gruesome turns, so don't be dissuaded on account of all the young uns. This is bleak, black urban fantasy... some of the very best in the business, by a mile of city mice.

It comes complete with all the trimmings, too - some of which I grant are more surprising than others - including a sense of wonder-struck discovery, a light touch at times, and bona fide feeling. So ignore the superficial similarities we spoke about before, because in they end, their reach is only skin-deep. In a better world, this book would have The Hunger Games' great legacy ahead of it. Certainly, as of this first installment, the series deserves such success, but as Tom Pollock teaches, appearances can be deeply, darkly deceiving.

Come what may, The City's Son is stonking stuff. A year's best contender which marks the arrival of an unmissable new talent. Go on: get in on the ground floor of The Skyscraper Throne.

***

The City's Son
by Tom Pollock

UK Publication: August 2012, Jo Fletcher
US Publication: September 2012, Flux

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition 

Recommended and Related Reading

About the Author | Meet Tom Pollock

I don't often talk about what's coming up on The Speculative Scotsman.

To do so is to make a promise to you fine folks that there's every chance I'll break, and obviously, that's not on. But today I'm going to make an exception, because tomorrow's content is, as they say, in the can. I know not what can. Or why one would can content in the first place — but there you go.

Anyway, tomorrow on TSS, I'm going to post my review of a speculative debut that impressed me tremendously: The City's Son by Tom Pollock. Not to toot the horn, but I've had a galley for many months, and keeping this piece under wraps for so long has been a matter of some consternation to yours truly, because this book... this book is something else. 

It's coming out a week from today here in the UK, and I'd urge anyone with a passing interest in urban fantasy to get their pre-orders in immediately. If there's any justice in our bookish corner of the blogosphere, you'll be hearing a whole lot more about The City's Son in the months to come.

Tomorrow, then, the review. So why I am blithering about it today?

That's because it was my immense pleasure to sit down with Tom Pollock, figuratively if alas not literally, to have a chat about who he is, how he got here, what his first book's all about, and various other subjects — all for the inaugural edition of About the Author. Which is to say a new feature here on TSS, which differs from the other interviews I've conducted on the blog because of its specific subject: namely new writers I really like the look of.

Also, it's intended to be a series both short and sweet — by my standards, at least.

Enough introduction. Let's get to this thing!

***

Good day to you, Tom Pollock.

And a very good day to you, Niall Alexander.

So, first things first: tell us a little bit about yourself, sir. For those folks not yet in the know, who are you, and what are you doing on The Speculative Scotsman? 

I’m an urban fantasy novelist, a book hoover and a dispenser of what I’m told are excellent hugs from a man of my size.

How would you describe your debut?

Probably the most urban fantasy you’ve ever read.

First novels are obviously ten-a-penny. Now don’t get me wrong: I’ve read yours, and I tend to think it’s something special — hence the questions. But what do you think makes your debut distinct?

Not sure I agree with the ten-a-penny assertion — there’s a wave of debuts now for sure, but I’ve read a lot of them and they mostly had something interesting going on.

As for The City’s Son, I’d say it’s the slantwise look it takes at London, the way it restores the sense of the weird (and The Weird) under the brick and concrete. I’ve had a couple of early readers tell me it’s made them afraid of cranes.

As far as advance reaction goes, I’ll take that.

How did it come about, anyway? What was the initial spark behind The City’s Son?

The initial spark was a feeling more than an idea. The City’s Son is supposed to be a dark ‘just-so’ story for the city, so you can look at ordinary things: streetlamps coming on at dusk, trains stopping and waiting mid-journey, and there’s this whole creation mythology for why that happens. I think I made this stuff up because I felt an emotional connection to London that went beyond what you think you’d feel for a collection of streets and buildings. I wanted to cast it in terms of a metaphor that made sense of that.

Going back a bit farther: have you always been a fan of speculative fiction?

Always. I think my Mum must’ve watched the Ralf Bakshi Lord of The Rings when she was pregnant. My passion for non-existent things started early and continues unabated, especially monsters, magic doors and anything to do with dark mirror-images. As a kid I was crazy for Jekyll and Hyde, or the thing Sparrowhawk lets loose in A Wizard of Earthsea. (I still am).

What would you say to people who think “genre” is a dirty word?

I suppose I’d say you either have a genre taxonomy to help you understand literature or you don’t, and either way is fine, but if you do think in genre terms then surely every book should be in at least one genre? Genres are continents on a map, and at the moment the cartographers are telling us that a bunch of countries don’t have a continent because they’re special. I think the map just needs redrawing.

Are there any particular authors who have been an inspiration to you and/or your work?

Tons. Dozens. The acknowledgements to The City’s Son lists Alan Garner, China Mieville, David Almond, Neil Gaiman and Patrick Ness, but that’s just the tip of the Star Destroyer. Ursula Le Guin’s an inspiration, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Garth Nix, Tolkein, Frank Herbert. If I hadn’t read any one of these authors, the books I write would be worse for it.

I know it’s an impossible question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. What’s your favourite book, and why?

Oh… Christ. Um. Ok, tempting as it is to go for something clever and obscure, I’m going to say The Lord of The Rings.

Why? Because it’s got a conviction to it I’ve never seen matched. The effect of the language and maps and the density of the thought in Middle Earth combine to make a story I found it impossible not to believe in. I think World Building’s become a bit of a dirty word in fantasy recently. I’d like it back please.

Moving on, where are you from, and how do you think that’s factored into your fiction.

London. Every way and every how.

And what do you do for a living, Tom, when you’re not making stuff up? Has your past or present employment in any sense shaped the way you work?

Right now I help build very big ships. I don’t know if that’s impacted the writing overly much to be honest. Although I wouldn’t rule out a tankerpunk story in the future.

Have you always thought of yourself as an author? Was that the end goal from the beginning, I wonder, or was there something else you wanted to be when you were little?

Oh when I was little enough I wanted to be a beetle, then a superhero, then a ghost, then for a brief period I wanted to be all three. When I decided I wanted to be a writer I felt I’d taken a step forward in my ambitions, that this was a grown up thing to want. My Dad didn’t agree so much.

Now that your book’s very nearly here, the long, hard road to publication is a fearfully easy thing to gloss over, but before my point’s entirely moot, might I ask how you went about breaking in? Was it as long and as hard as all that?

Not for me, but I got very lucky. I wrote a book, polished it up and started querying. The agent and then the editors who happened to deeply connect with my work happened to see it early. It could have taken much longer.

One thing I would say though, it never hurts to come to cons and meet people. If nothing else it’s a good way to make friends who like the same stuff as you, and good things often come of that.

How about when you realised your dream was about to be realised. Tell me about that moment.

My new editor took me out for lunch. I’m a clutz and when surprised I have a tendency to fumble whatever I’m holding - in this case a bowl of steaming miso soup. There were tears, tears of joy, yes, but also of scalding.

So how are you holding up in the run-up to release week? What are you most looking forward to, and is there anything you’re particularly dreading?

I’m doing okay, I’m looking forward to the launch (I’m reading, and it’s always fun to simulate the sound of a train-wreck with the back of my throat). I’m mostly dreading the launch. In case no-one comes :)

Do you maintain a social media presence? If so, how has that affected your work ethic?

I mess around on Twitter quite a bit, and update my blog with alarming irregularity. Mostly whenever I have something vaguely theory-driven or academic to say. My work ethic is close to indestructible, owing to the fact that it’s so small and ephemeral it’s virtually at the quantum level anyway so you can’t break it down any further.

How important do you think blogs are in terms of getting the good word about your book and the work of other new authors out there?

I have no idea. My best guess is it’s a big component of word of mouth in the bookish world, but their influence will be indirect and not always obvious.

So what’s next for you, Tom? Where do you see yourself in a year?

Next up is the sequel. The Glass Republic is due in October and should be out this time next year. I’m about halfway through writing it and it’s a very weird book. The main character’s one of the supporting ones from The City’s Son, and she’s been a blast to write.

I first came across your name in the fantastic Pandemonium anthology, edited by the wonderful pair behind Pornokitsch, but besides that and The City’s Son, have you had any other work published? If so, where might the good folks find it?

Nope, that’s it for me! I’m not a prolific short story writer. I love and admire them when I read them, and every now and then I get an idea for one, but by and large I’m a long-form kinda guy.

Alas, this inaugural edition of About the Author is drawing to a close, but before I let you off the hook, how can people keep up to speed with all things Tom Pollock?

Best way is probably on my twitter @tomhpollock (what the H stands for is a state secret in eighteen countries). If you’ve got an RSS feed you could add my blog www.tompollock.com, especially if you like random musing essays and Polar Bears.

Last but not least: tell me something about yourself that no-one knows.

Oh, go on! I don’t know about these guys, but I can keep a secret. :)

It’s not something no-one knows, but I spend every eighth week on 24 call out notice in case of pirate attack.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions, Tom. I’m sure we can all agree, getting to know you a little bit better has been an absolute pleasure.

Cheers dude!

***

So how did everyone like that?

Do pop on over to Tom's blog, or follow the fellow on Twitter, if you want to hear more from this extraordinarily promising up-and-coming author.

Meanwhile, if you fancy a few more of these features... say so!

Last but not least, remember to stay tuned to The Speculative Scotsman for my review of The City's Son tomorrow. Spoiler alert: I think it's pretty brilliant.

Quoth the Scotsman | Tom Pollock on The City & The City

A couple of caveats to bear in mind before we start. Unless otherwise indicated, none of the quotes quoted in the following post are representative of the beliefs of the person in question quoted nor those of the person quoting the person in question. Additionally, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

In short, Quoth the Scotsman is just a space here on TSS for me to post neat quotes as and when I come across them. Simple. As. That.

***

I'm a country mouse, I suppose.

(As opposed to a city mouse, I mean.)

I certainly haven't lived long-term in a city, though oddly - or perhaps not - I've holidayed in a great many, across the UK, Europe and North America. Most always, I've enjoyed the experience. Sometimes, I've even wished I could stay a little longer. But I've never wanted that to be the new norm. To be able to come home, to the peace and the quiet, to the flora and the fauna, to the sizable apartment I can only afford because frankly, it's a bit out there... that means the world to me.

Maybe it's indoctrination. Maybe I'm a country mouse in my old age because that's the way and the where I was raised. Truth be told, I don't know, but it's perfectly possible. There are certain perks to a life in the cityside that I'm desperately envious of, mostly involving food: namely the nearness of vegetarian restaurants and takeaways.

But I bet you city mice feel the exact same way: that you wouldn't trade your day-to-day for anything... though perhaps there are a few things you wish you could change? A few sacrifices that must, alas, be made.

Apropos of which, last week I was reading The City's Son by Tom Pollock, and quite aside from its awesome monsters and pretty prose, a short section specifically struck me. 

The following excerpt, then, forms part of one of the most convincing arguments I've heard in favour of city living.

"Our memories are like a city: we tear some structures down, and we use rubble of the old to raise up new ones. Some memories are bright glass, blindingly beautiful when they catch the sun, but then there are the darker days, when they reflect only the crumbling walls of their derelict neighbours. Some memories are buried under years of patient construction; their echoing halls may never again be seen or walked down, but still they are the foundations for everything that stands above them.

"Glas told me once that that's what people are, mostly: memories, the memories in their own heads, and the memories of them in other people's. And if memories are like a city, and we are our memories, then we are like cities too. I've always taken comfort in that." (p.276)

Isn't that a lovely idea? And I would wager there's some real truth to it, too.

Tom Pollock's tremendous debut is still a fair ways off from its publication date, I'm afraid. You won't be able to buy it in the UK until August, or September in the States, so I'm going to hold off on posting my full review till it's rather more relevant.

But do stayed tuned. I assure you, The City's Son will be worth the wait. Plus, I'll be blogging about the book at least once more in advance of my review and its release ...