May 15, 2013

Shepard, Lucius

Tagged: Author

(1943-    ) US writer about whose first appearances in print there has been some confusion; he is credited with four stories and four articles in Collins Magazine (variously retitled Collins, the Magazine to Grow Up With and Collins Young Elizabethan) between 1952 and 1955, the first actual piece of fiction being "Camp Greenville" (January 1953 Collins, the Magazine to Grow Up With), where the author is listed (accurately) as being nine years old. Confusion has been caused by the claim that a family member may have written and placed these stories under Shepard's name, even though their innate competence, and their clear prefigurations of Shepard's adult voice, make it perfectly plausible that they were in fact essentially written by a precocious child between the ages of nine and twelve. His first acknowledged work was Poetry, and his first book was a poem, Cantata of Death, Weakmind & Generation (1967 chap), whose rhetorical gumption tends to drown content.

Shepard began to publish adult prose fiction of genre interest only with "The Taylorsville Reconstruction" for Universe 13 (anth 1983) edited by Terry Carr. Between the mid-1960s and the beginning of the 1980s, he had lived in various parts of the world, travelled widely, became – according to his own testimony – marginally and incompetently involved in the fringes of the international drug trade, and in about 1972 started a rock band which went through various incarnations over the following years. Some of the experiences of this long apprenticeship are directly reflected in stories like "A Spanish Lesson" (December 1985 F&SF); but the abiding sense of authority generated by all his best work depends upon the born exile's passionate fixation on place. It is no accident that – aside from the Latin American Magic-Realist tradition whose influence upon him is often suggested – the writer whom Shepard seems at times most to resemble is Joseph Conrad, for both authors respond to the places of the world with imaginative avarice and a hallucinated intensity of portrayal (> Horror in SF); both create deeply alienated protagonists whose displacement from the venues in which they live generates constant ironies and regrets; and both tend to subordinate mundane resolutions of plot to moments of terminal, deathly Transcendence characteristic of Horror in SF.

Kalimantan (1990; exp as coll 1993) evokes, for instance, Conrad himself as well as Graham Greene (1904-1991) in a dark quest tale whose structure and pacing directly homage Heart of Darkness (February-April 1899 Blackwood's Magazine; in Youth [coll 1902]); the action is set this time in Borneo and incorporates at its centre a not altogether convincing transference to an sf Alternate History. Kalimantan is typical of Shepard's mature work, and overflows any normal or necessary description of an sf text. The Dragon Griaule sequence – comprising "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule" (December 1984 F&SF), The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter (September 1988 Asimov's; 1988), The Father of Stones (1988), Liar's House (2004 chap) and The Taborin Scale: A Novella of the Dragon Griaule (2010), all assembled, along with the novel-length "The Skull", as The Dragon Griaule (omni 2012) – similarly embeds an undeveloped sf premise, for it may be that the immense dragon Griaule is an Alien from another planet, though it just as closely resembles the eponymous City in Patterson (1946-1958 5vols) by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963); any sf implications are drowned out in a fantasy narrative whose claustrophobic intricacies are as entangling as those depicted in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez (1928-    ). In this land of darkness and fixity, using his storylines as material to massage into a thematic compost, Shepard creates a series of parables in which human Arts can reach fruition solely through a Transcendence that, like the dragon's itself, may be indistinguishable from death.

Shepard's first full-length novel, Green Eyes (1984), again embeds story in the clutches of a jungle-like world, the American Deep South where a research organization has successfully created Zombies by injecting cadavers with bacteria from a graveyard. As an sf premise, this is unconvincing; but Shepard presents the transformation of dead bodies into representative human archetypes, and the escape of one of them into bayou country, with a gripping closeness of touch; the almost synaesthesiacal epiphany at the end, already characteristic of his work, also tests true. His second novel, Life during Wartime (fixup 1987), similarly embeds sf elements – a Near Future setting, advanced forms of Drug manipulation – into a Latin American venue which, essentially, absorbs these elements in a horrified, dense presentation of a Vietnam War conducted, this time, in the Western Hemisphere. "R&R" (April 1986 Asimov's), which won a Nebula, shapes the first part of the book, and a hallucinated, obsessed journey into the heart of darkness in search of some underlying transformation dominates its last sections. A later novella, Aztechs (September 2001 Sci Fiction; 2003), is set in the same general universe: the US and Mexico are now separated by a laser fence; the AI that runs the mysterious AZTECH corporation seems to be laying the groundwork for its becoming a Messiah figure, perhaps as the head of something like a Cargo Cult; but as with many Shepard narratives, the ending is abrupt and inconclusive. His third novel, The Golden (1993), which won a Locus Award, is a Vampire tale, set in a vast edifice specifically modelled on the Carceri d'Invenzione ["Imaginary Prisons"] (1749) of Giovanni Piranesi (1720-1778) [for Edifice, and for Piranesi, see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]; the final pages of the story, set in sunlight as the surviving vampires head for Asia, is compellingly surreal.

Many of Shepard's works [see Checklist below under Novellas] fall short in length, though not intensity, of full-length novels; it is at points a difficult judgement call to distinguish one category from the other, but any attempt to so lends point to the argument that he is most comfortable with the shorter form; his later publishing career, in which several of these works have been given separate release, confirms the sense that the novella is central. Earlier long tales of interest are assembled with shorter work in The Jaguar Hunter (coll 1987; with one story cut and three added, rev 1988; exp 2001), The Ends of the Earth (coll 1991) and Barnacle Bill the Spacer and Other Stories (coll 1997; vt Beast of the Heartland and Other Stories 1999). Later major collections – including Trujillo and Other Stories (coll 2004; cut vt Eternity and Other Stories 2005) and Dagger Key and Other Stories (coll 2007) – also contain longer work, but most of Shepard's novellas were by now appearing on their own. They rank among the finest Fabulations composed by an American writer in recent years, and in addition to the awards mentioned above they have been variously honoured: a 1993 Hugo Best Novella Award for "Barnacle Bill the Spacer" (July 1992 Asimov's), a Locus Award for "Radiant Green Star" (August 2000 Asimov's) and a Shirley Jackson Award for Vacancy (2007 Subterranean Magazine, Issue # 7; 2009). Most of them are not sf, beyond Kalimantan and Aztechs, both discussed above, though Viator (2004; exp vt as coll Viator Plus 2010) is a study in Perception housed in a Pocket Universe-like stranded ship, told with an effect of driven Equipoise that marks almost all his best work. Shepard has clearly felt comfortable with sf; and the genre has benefited from the publication of a dozen tales which assimilate sf into a wider imaginative world; but certainly, despite his aesthetic influence on the genre in the years since his explosive debut (for which he received a John W Campbell Award in 1985), Shepard could best be described as a writer of Fantastika. There is some sense that his large oeuvre to date has gone relatively unrecognized; there is certainly no question that his work has received insufficient attention from academic critics, perhaps because its explosive ambiguousness of texture and narrative do not paraphrase well.

In recent decades, Shepard has begun to publish considerable nonfiction, most notably a regular column on sf Cinema for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, beginning with the December 2000 issue of that journal and continuing; his views about American cinema, and American culture in general, are conveyed there with jeremiad intensity. Much of this material, and other work, has been assembled as Weapons of Mass Seduction: Film Reviews and Other Ravings (coll 2005). [JC]

see also: Ace Books; Asimov's Science Fiction; Eschatology; Fantasy; Gothic SF; Reincarnation.

Lucius Taylor Shepard

born Lynchburg, Virginia: 21 August 1943

died

works

series

Dragon Griaule

individual titles

Shorter individually published texts are here listed under Novellas: for reasoning see text of entry above.

novellas

  • Kalimantansfgateway.com (London: Century, 1990) [novella: illus/hb/Jamel Akib]
    • Kalimantansfgateway.com (New York, Tor, 1993) [exp of the above as coll: pb/Richard Andri]
  • The Last Time (Royal Oak, Michigan/Mission Viejo, California: ASAP/Airtight Seels Allied Production, 1995) [novella: chap: hb/Phil Parks]
  • Valentine (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002) [novella: hb/Archie Ferguson]
  • Aztechs (Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2003) [novella: September 2001 Sci Fiction: hb/Jeffrey K Potter]
  • Colonel Rutherford's Colt (Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2003) [novella: hb/Jeffrey K Potter]
  • Floater (Harrogate, North Yorkshire: PS Publishing, 2003) [novella: hb/Les Edwards as Edward Miller]
  • Louisiana Breakdown (Urbana, Illinois: Golden Gryphon Press, 2003) [novella: illus/hb/Jeffrey K Potter]
  • A Handbook of American Prayer (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004) [novella: hb/Ann Weinstock]
  • Viator (San Francisco, California: Night Shade Books, 2004) [novella: hb/John Picacio]
    • Viator Plus (Hornsea, East Yorkshire: PS Publishing, 2010) [exp vt of the above to novel-length text plus other stories: hb/Jim Burns]
  • Softspoken (San Francisco, California: Night Shade Books, 2007) [novella: hb/Jeffrey K Potter]
  • Arielsfgateway.com (Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2009) [novella: dos: October-November 2003 Asimov's: hb/Jeffrey K Potter]
  • Vacancy (Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2009) [novella: dos: 2007 Subterranean Magazine, Issue # 7: hb/Jeffrey K Potter]

collections

poetry

nonfiction

about the author

links

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