BOOK REVIEW
Stealing God And Other Stories, is about a young woman in an abandoned house that brings ruin to every man she meets. A wise-cracking hitman is recruited by an angel of God to kill the oldest vampire on Earth. A son travels into the past to find the mother he lost.
In the tales of, Stealing Gods and Other Stories, by science fiction prodigy Bruce McAllister, he invites readers into a universe where nothing is more important than what it means to be human; even if the answer to that question isn’t what they expect.
This collection of stories by Bruce McAllister combines his best work in genres of fantasy, fiction, and horror. The book has an introduction by novelist and critic Paul di Filippo, cover art by award-winning illustrator Dominic Harman and endorsements by luminaries in the field.
Bruce McAllister’s stories of longing in these gripping tales leave a tingling feeling, fluttering the reader's heart for more. Story by story diving into the book, he leads the reader into different parts of life, questioning things that may never exist, with his uniqueness of lingering hope through each story. It’s a worthy read, with something for everyone - especially those who like to divulge into this genre and work of art.
Over the course of the eighteen stories, Bruce McAllister’s storytelling is a fantastic and engaging read and page turner. In the wide-ranging tales, the reader is undoubtedly going to lose themselves in this pursuit from beginning to the end of, Stealing Gods and Other Stories.
The storytelling is poetic, heartfelt, and insightful to keep the reader entertained. This isn’t just a book that the reader will read - this is a book you will feel and experience.
Stealing Gods and Other Stories, is a thrilling collection embedded with Bruce McAllister’s intriguing imagination that will make this read a strenuous book to put down.
Science fiction and fantasy writer Bruce McAllister began his national career at age 16 and has been publishing for over five decades. His other books include Kin, Dream Baby and The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic. The same year he published his first science fiction story he reached out to 150 famous writers about whether they used symbolism in their fiction; half of them were generous to respond; and, decades later, their responses went viral thanks to THE OPARIS REVIEW. That same year in high school he also co-directed a sleep deprivation experiment that with the help of the Navy and Stanford University changed the way sleep researchers viewed deprivation and became the third most written about story in the world. When he isn’t writing fiction and poetry, he serves as a writing coach to new and established writers of all kinds of fiction, nonfiction and screenwriting, and as a publishing consultant. He works regularly with middle school and high school students one-on-one, has taught the Youth Writing Workshop at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts in Southern California, and established the creative writing program at the University of Redlands. He is currently working with three production-company partners on a TV series adaptation of his classic “ESP in war” novel Dream Baby and has two novels in the works. During the Cold War he attended middle school in Italy, where his fiction has a following. He lives in Orange, California, with his wife, choreographer and medical Qigong instructor Amelie Hunter, and has three grown children — Liz, Ben and Annie.
Words by Danielle Holian
INTERVIEW
Tell us a bit about your writing background.
I was a reader as a kid, but, son of a Navy marine-sciences father and a cultural-anthropologist mother (who was probably part Cherokee or Chickasaw—you could see it in her eyes, and her father was called “chief” in the oil fields of Long Beach, California) just as much a lover of nature and the natural sciences. I was fearless with animals as a toddler, and at ten had a shell collection of nearly a thousand, all neatly labeled with their Latin names. (One of the stories in the collection is about a shell-collecting boy not unlike the one I was.) In middle school I looked down at the purse of the girl sitting in front of me in class and saw, peeking out of it, the most amazing thing: the cover of a magazine with a man, a lumberjack, about to step through a portal into an alien world. I was introverted, more comfortable with animals than with people, and instead of starting up a conversation with the girl, I went out and bought a copy of the magazine. IT was the first science fiction magazine I’d ever read, and it all began there. I read science fiction voraciously from that point on and when our father was stationed in Italy during the rest of my middle school years, I read it there as well, and started writing it then. (Imagine a 14-year-old’s first novel, covering all of human history from the past to the future. What ambition!) When we returned to the US, I kept writing and my first published story was written at 16 and reprinted in the “years’ best” science and later praised by Isaac Asimov. I’ve been writing and publishing science fiction and fantasy ever since—almost sixty years. Science fiction and fantasy have been important to me not just professionally—as publication credentials for university teaching and membership in the community of SFF writers, but personally, as a way of ordering the chaos of the world through ideas, stories, characters and even autobiography.
What, or who, inspired you to start writing?
I cover this in the above, but I suppose I should add that when one loves the writing others do—their published writing—as I did when I first started reading, it’s hard not to want to wield the same magic that published writing does, and that means learning the craft of that writing, which I did. I was very committed to becoming a magician, so to speak.
And what influenced your latest book, STEALING GOD AND OTHER STORIES?
Though I’ve published three novels—my first as a very young man, HUMANITY PRIME (a stream-of-consciousness tale about a merpeople on a distant planet in the future); DREAM BABY, my “ESP in war" novel that has received quite a bit of attention over the years; and the gentle linked-stories "magical realism” novel, THE VILLAGE SANG TO THE SEA: A MEMOIR OF MAGIC—I’m a short story writer at heart, will always love the form (as any American writer should, given what we’re told are the roots of the short story as a published form), and am too much of a stylist and too slow a writer, or so they tell me, to produce as frequently as I should, the novels a career novelist needs. That’s fine. The short story and the science fiction and fantasy community have been kind to me, and I am grateful. STEALING GOD AND OTHER STORIES collects my best short stories—a mix of science fiction, fantasy and horror—from the new millennium. It’s that simple. It was time for another collection, fellow writers and editors and fans were telling me, especially if I’m a short story “specialist." My last—THE GIRL WHO LOVED ANIMALS AND OTHER STORIES—appeared in 2007, and was exclusively science fiction.
How has your life in general influenced your work?
My fiction has become in the new millennium more autobiographical than people know. That’s a strange thing for a science fiction and fantasy writer to say, I realize, but as one of my mentors early on once said: “Ask any writer of starships and unicorns and, if they’ve looked closely at their work they’ll say, ‘What I write is more autobiographical than readers know.'” In my case, in recent years, it’s become even more that way. In great part that’s because for whatever reason I live a sense-of-wonder life and always have. That village in Italy was magical—truly magical—so finding a dividing line between 'reality’ and “speculative elements” is impossible, which is good for writing. It means that the three "witches” who lived in the olive groves of that village by our little house, can become the witches a short story needs, and our saintly hunchback middle-school teacher with a lisp who loved us so needs simply to move from memory, from where he lives within me still over half a century later, to a story, where he will also live. In that sense, I also write to “memorialize” life, to memorialize the people I have known and loved (even if they were frightening), and the places of wonder and magic and miracle that is, in my view, always around us if we'll only see it. This cosmological view of things—of life and the universe--inform STEALING GOD AND OTHER STORIES, of course. It is, if anything does, what distinguishes the writing in it from other science fiction, fantasy and horror. Yes, “what it means to be human even if being human is often surprising and disturbing” is a theme that runs through the stories, but that’s another matter.
Can you describe what your writing process is like?
I think I’ve spoken to this in the above, but I might add: I star with intense feeling (many writers would say you can’t write fiction except by feeling love or its opposite, fear (which in yin/yang fashion depends on love)—but whatever you feel, it has to be intense”) and that feeling launches a story whether it’s science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, or "literary fiction," and whether it’s set in our world or another.
What do you want the readers to take away from your work?
I’ve covered this in the above monologues, I’m sure. (*I do go on, don’t I?) Humanity, a sense of wonder, the power of story to make meaning by its shape, the importance of feeling, character in its “central importance” to the universe. I’m a romantic, yes, and do not believe in nihilism of any kind, though I did once when I didn’t feel more clearly the difference between the void and meaning. I am the kind of writer—and human being—who sees a movie like LOST IN TRANSLATION not as “sentimental,” as one critic put it, but as the story of a man who does the right thing, out of the kind of values that give his own life meaning, that give anything meaning. That’s the nature of a romantic perhaps.
Tell us one fun fact about yourself.
This is more difficult than you might imagine. Why? Because writing and nature tend to be my passions, my way of sustaining that sense of wonder and faith in the meaning of things. The “fun” of my life tends to come from those passions. “”Fun”? I’ll give it a try: My office is full of books—some I’ve read and some I hope to, others (many) that are the publications from forty years of my writing-coaching clients (ongoing)—but also of rocks. That says more about me and the nature of fun than almost anything else might. There is nothing more fun than finding a fossil no one has yet recorded and knowing from that early shell collection of a thousand what it is (shells haven’t changed much in 100 million years) and knowing it better than others who didn’t live and breathe the mud and marine life of half a dozen Navy stations our father was assigned to. But this isn’t “fun” for a reader, I realize. Perhaps this? I’m a hunt-and-peck typist (DREAM BABY was 120k words, seven drafts), so probably the fastest of this kind in the world, but with an awful lot of mistakes (and autocorrect does NOT solve the problem—as science fiction colleagues constantly say, “The future isn’t here yet!”)
And finally what advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Any successful writer tends to reduce it to just a couple of words: “Read, read, read—write, write, write - and write daily.” They won’t explain the reasons for these admonitions, but there are profound reasons. That’s the advice I’d give. But in addition to "reading”: re-reading and more than once, exercises of “craft embrace” like Hemingway’s mind-blowing favorite exercise and the "double outline” and the copying out of favorite writing.” None of these things are mentioned in books and articles really, but 90% of all successful writers have done them or a version of them at some point in their craft-apprenticeship careers. Writer’s mantra #3: “I must read voraciously what I wish to write. It is a foreign language and I must go to that country, breathe it, live it, become it.
Grab your copy of Stealing Gods and Other Stories: Amazon UK, Amazon USA, Amazon Canada.