Reading: Unbound Boxes Limping Gods: Samuel Merevija

Unbound Boxes
  Limping Gods:
Samuel Merevija


By Cheryl Moore

Time Line: 3996, India

Best to click over to Cheryl's blog for easy reading of the links...but come back for discussion!

My Thoughts:

I was first distracted by the Samuel personal info being as a grown man...so it set me off to see some more of his earlier pictures. I found the last one, entitled Motherhood, unbearably sad for some reason...

One thing Moore does is elicit emotions! You can find larger versions of the pics on Cheryl's blog by clicking the title of this article...pics are linked to the individual data sheet illustrated here in upper right-hand corner... Readers are indeed entering another world when we've accepted Cheryl's invitation!

This story of Samuel is heartbreaking, especially because his father doesn't have the strength to be patient with Sam and attempt to explain his own actions toward Sam's gestures of love and his trying to understand... On his data sheet, it shows Samuel later loses quite a bit of his memory...it certainly is a hard world in which this family has found itself! 

These shorter stories do indeed force the reader to this world...we crave to know more about the books!

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Question for Cheryl:

Your microstories do indeed solicit interest in your novels! How did you think, or decide, to create the short stories to merge with your art work? The stories are disconnected, but do they dwell only before your novels begin? Or do they sometimes supplement or complement what is covered in the books?

Starting to Read: The Guild Master's General by Cheryl Moore

Unbound Boxes 

  Limping Gods: 

 

The Guild Master’s General

Cheryl Moore

Best to click over to Cheryl's blog for easy reading!

Time Line: 3987, India

Unbound Boxes Limping Gods: Disconnected Stories. Issue # 9: The Guild Master’s General

February 20, 2011 by cherylmoore

The Guild Master’s General is a mysterious man, who appears throughout time and place. Not much is known about him, apart from the fact he has created a lot of chaos in the lives of many.

The Guild Master's General's back story, set in India (3987)

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Note that for each character, within her blog, Cheryl allows you to click to read about the spotlighted character (illustrated in the top right hand corner here at BRH. I'v added one of Alexand, acquired from Cheryl's collection, which seems to me to represent her being hurt..."crumbled" Is she alive?

My thoughts: The key issue is that the General is after our main character, Alexand Merek, and steals blueprints...

Apparently the General is a shape shifter (or worse since he does report to somebody and has supernatural skills)

The author has successfully pulled me in...I'm interested and wanting to know more. Already I hate the General and am worried about Alexand's being hurt... Will she live? Or...will we be left hanging with this story...will the next story take up where this one ends? I'm feeling a sense of anxiety...I'm one of those individuals who seeks closure...

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Cheryl lists her work as fantasy, feminist. science fiction and speculative fiction. I'm now quite sure I know about the last, so...out to Wikipedia (If you wish to read about this too, please click the link since I have not attempted to verify highlighted link uses here...the following helped me understand the term.

Following its coining, speculative fiction as a category sweeps from ancient works to both cutting edge, paradigm-changing and neotraditional new works of the 21st century which cite their stories and images from ancient to future times.... the creative design and generation of lore, regarding such works as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Such supernatural, alternate history and sexuality themes continue in works produced within the modern speculative fiction genre...

In its English language usage in arts and literature since 20th century, "speculative fiction" as a genre term is often attributed to Robert A. Heinlein. In his first known use of the term, in editorial material at the front of the 2/8/1947 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, Heinlein used it specifically as a synonym for "science fiction"; in a later piece, he explicitly stated that his use of the term did not include fantasy...

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database contains a broad list of different subtypes. In the 2000s, the term has come into wider use as a convenient collective term for a set of genres. Academic journals which publish essays on speculative fiction include Extrapolation, and Foundation.

Distinguishing speculative fiction from science fiction

"Speculative fiction" is sometimes abbreviated "spec-fic", "specfic" "S-F", "SF", or "sf"^[24] but these last three abbreviations are ambiguous as they have long been used to refer to science fiction, which lies within this general range of literature....

The term has been used to express dissatisfaction with what some people consider the limitations of science fiction, or otherwise to designate fiction that falls under readily stereotypical genres so that it can be pigeonholed within such categorical limits as "fantasy" or "mystery".For example, in Harlan Ellison's writing, the term may signal a wish not to be pigeonholed as a science fiction writer, and a desire to break out of science fiction's genre conventions in a literary and modernist direction; or to escape the prejudice with which science fiction is often met by mainstream critics.
                                                                             ~~~

Cheryl, you've chosen to consider your work speculative fiction...obviously setting the stories far into the future must be part of that. I note that this is sometimes used to "signal a wish not to be pigeonholed," could you tell us (1) did you decide to write "speculative fiction" or did you start writing and later find that your work could be considered that genre...and (2) what caused you to conceive of your world of speculative fiction as opposed to, say, the mystery/suspense genre?