About to explode!, originally uploaded by jasonmurk.

I don’t think I ever blogged about chess before, not sure I will again, but I love the chess font, and I found this textbook illustration to be one of maximum tension. Like a powder keg. There’s a (Borgesian) garden of forking paths from here, and it can go any and all ways, explode in all ways, and this is one of those chess games where there’s no correct analytic decision which can be made, no right move. This is actually one of those chess games where you knock all the pieces over and go for a run in the sun.

The Oscura Press is pleased to publish a new book by Jason Murk called The Dreambook of Skyler Dread. (Well, okay – for the full disclosure, the Oscura Press is mostly Jason Murk anyway.) This book is nine years in the making, although it had an eight year hiatus. It started during the author’s sojourn in the exotic land of Canada – aw, heck, here’s the introduction from the book:

Towards the end of 1999, somewhere between drafting chapters 9 and 10 of The Western, I came across a set of engravings at the University of New Mexico library. These were woodcut engravings of temple scenes, snake charmers and sadhoos from King Edward VII’s India. Around that same time, I was plundering hoardings of Astounding Stories magazine covers, looking for images to loot for chapter 10 of my novel. It was one of the most creative periods of my life, and since then, I’ve always somehow associated those woodcut engravings with science fictional starflight scenes.

Time passed, I finished writing The Western, I changed jobs a couple times, I scored a couple volumes of nineteenth-century engravings and a couple boxes of those 1970s comic books I had read as a kid, and I found myself stuck for a couple months in Toronto — in one of those former British Dominions beyond the Seas — stuck in Toronto while I could have been in India instead, and now look, look:

Imagine for a second that Rudyard Kipling once wrote a book of science fiction — jungle fiction, Vedic starship fiction. Imagine that he wrote it somewhere between chapters of Kim, around where he writes “The Lama looked forth, a hand on either side, with eyes that shone like two opals. From the enormous pit before him, white peaks lifted themselves yearning to the moonlight. The rest was as the darkness of interstellar space.” Imagine that Kipling just-now begins inter-alia a short science fiction book, imagine that he puts down his draft of Kim, picks up another pen, and stares off into interstellar space — most of the universe, after all, is unknown matter — dark matter, dark energy — and we’re only aware of that liminal amount which comprises our stars and galaxies, tiger skins and peacock plumes. But what about that unknown dark-known intuitionist madly perspiring neutrino congers-orrery of Tilt-A-Whirl galactic Ganesha intrigue? What about stone spacecraft flights to King Edward VII’s India on a summer’s night? Tiger-axioms, the night language of alien souls when they speak to themselves in the dark? This unknown dark-known dreaming, this is the night-star of Mitra and Varuna, this is the Dreambook of Skyler Dread. This then is that book that Kipling might have written, best beloved. And the book starts in…

… another time, another world. In the age of wonder!

The Dreambook of Skyler Dread is available from better book retailers worldwide – yes, it’s available in Canada too!