The Unholy Consult
by rsbakker
The cover is out as those of you who frequent Wertzone already know. The Unholy Consult, the penultimate book of The Aspect-Emperor, is set to be released this July, ending a story arc that has been my obsession for some thirty years now. I’m far from done with the Three Seas, of course: The Second Apocalypse possesses one final chapter. But this arc was the animating vision, the feverish sequence of glimpses I used to paint the whole.
The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog has it listed among their top twenty ‘can’t wait to read’ 2017 releases, but I find myself growing… not so much reluctant as coy, I think—you know that wariness you get when encountering circumstances you should know, but don’t for some reason. Ever since the catalogue with the cover arrived in the mail everything has felt marginally displaced, troubled by a mismatch between shadows and sources of light. It’ll be strange, for instance, being able to talk candidly about the story. What if I decide I want to remain entombed?
It would be nice if The Unholy Consult pushed the popularity of the series over some kind of threshold, but the entire project has been a slow fuse, so I’m not going to hold my breath. The Great Ordeal made the Fantasy Hotlist’s top ten of 2016, but I’ve found that the reviews take longer to trickle in the deeper I get into the series. Epic Fantasy has become an astonishingly crowded subgenre, blessing these crazy books, I hope, with the distinction belonging to landmarks, even while increasing the number of attractions in between. My guess is that it’ll take time.
By coincidence, I just sent out the final proofs “On Alien Philosophy” to The Journal of Consciousness Studies, so in sense this summer will see my two great artistic and theoretical aspirations simultaneously fulfilled. Cosmos and History, meanwhile, just accepted “From Scripture to Fantasy,” my critique of Continental philosophy a la Adrian Johnston, so you can even throw a little revenge fantasy into the mix! If I were in my early twenties, I would worry that I was developing schizophrenia, so many threads are twining together. Add Trump’s election to the mix, and the fear has to be that I’m actually a character in a L. Ron Hubbard novel…
Not Phillip K. Dick.
Three Pound Brain 
Congratulations! IMO is a masterpiece. Time will tell.
Thanks Feanor Camus. For the nonce let’s just call it a ‘piece.’
“The Unholy Consult, the penultimate book of The Aspect-Emperor, is set to be released this July,”
You mean the final book of TAE؟
My question precisely.
Congratulations! July seems so close and yet so far away!
Wow, so at first I had no idea what you guys were talking about. Then google saved me:
pe·nul·ti·mate
pəˈnəltəmət/
adjective
last but one in a series of things; second to the last.
synonyms: next-to-last, second-to-last, second-last
Seriously thought it was a synonym for ultimate/final/last.
Thanks litg. What a strange journey it has been!
Yes, the final book in TAE. My bad!
“I’m far from done with the Three Seas, of course: The Second Apocalypse possesses one final chapter.”
I sure hope TSTSNBN gets financed at some point. I’ve been talking about Dune with some people recently – please do your best to avoid dying if you end a book by introducing something completely new in the last few pages.
There really will be a pilgrimage to the coffers should that be the case…
Part of the problem with being a writer is that you never stop writing, so the rug HAS to be pulled out from under you at some point. I come from long-lived stock, though, so never fear…
I too am not happy with the lack of attention this series gets – it deserves so much more! But I hope you realize that many, like myself, who chance upon your books are instant converts.
Thank you, Foob. Be fruitful and multiply, my friend!
Exactly this.
I read the Great Ordeal in a fever over the the holidays, Scott. It’s an uncompromising portrayal of an inherently tragic world. The descriptive language seems to curl and crisp in the face of a reality too virulent, too tortured to be bearable, or thinkable. It’s also heart-breaking in places; so much that I kept thinking of one or another character “How can you go on, or hope, or even move. How can you live (or die) in this?” Existence has never seem more like a crime.
I can’t think of how it will end, because that prospect is terrifying too, but I know I have to 😉
“Existence has never seem more like a crime.”
Thank you, David. I might have to rip this quote for a tag-line!
Congrats on the two journal publications – looking forward to reading something by you that won’t leave me a quivering mess!
me too!
https://solarmovie.sc/movie/high-rise-11753/274223-8/watching.html
I just PVR’d that last night, so I’m not going to check it out, but I smell a metaphor…
heh, more about babel and pyramids (especially Aztec) I think, retelling Lord of Flies…
I got some pop up hell a few seconds after clicking that
try adblocker
Well, there’s scary, and then there’s unthinkable. 😉 I’m hopeful for the JCS piece, but I’m quite curious about the C&H. I’d forgotten how polemical it was!
I can be an asshole sometimes.
So how will it feel to have birthed that – hell of a long labor, let alone gestation? And I don’t know how you kept tight lipped on the whole thing for so long – spies would admire that capacity.
What if I decide I want to remain entombed?
That’s up to you. Even if it’s just to remain comfortable, you can.
But that’s grown up me talking. Childish me is all like “Go on, talk about it!!!”
Anyway, it’s hard to know how monumental the upcoming publication is from this side of the page – it can seem a bit Tardis like. And hard to know about fuses – the only way to really know would be to be outside of its literary effect. Like a Dunyain. But the perpetual Bakker threads at westeros, churning out their secondary versions of the books, show people taking the hot potatoes of the books and bouncing them around amongst themselves. Surely a reflection of a greater hot potato juggling and passing.
I’m reaching deep in a genre that’s built to be wide: that’s the experiment. Everywhere you turn you see people talking about bubbles–Obama even referenced them in his farewell speech! Succeed or fail, I’m sure there will be some important lessons to be drawn.
dem gamma wave osciallations
Dammit Jim! I’m a writer not a physicist!
Brain waves associated with default mode operation which are endophenotypic of social and generalized anxiety / self doubt 😉
I actually thought they were counter-indicators of anxiety/self-doubt (?). I’ve been telling people they’re the big reason why I wouldn’t touch meditation with a ten foot pole. Anxiety is my engine.
my bad, i meant theta. that’s hilarious about the meditation. i’ve always been somewhat aversive to it as well. i guess i only really use anything like when i need to fall asleep.
It’s the penultimate book in the Aspect Emperor?? Awesome, I thought it was going to be the last one in this series.
No – my bad in writing the post. I should have said ultimate.
sad face
Do you have any plans for the first series ? Would love to see a re-release or something like that. Maybe a 3 in 1 special “expanded” edition with aditional scenes. Cutting out stuff is tough to do because many fans love everything, even the “bad” parts, but adding a fee scenes, even if very sparsely cpuld be fun.
Anyway, unless an adaptation happens, its unlikely this will get popular, at least in the near future. Its simply to deep and fantasy doesnt sit well with “intelectuals” so even that niche is closed. The way the first book ends is also unsatisfying for some because these days people dont have patience…
Anyway, if possible i think a prince of nothing book will be the best thing that can realistically happen. U also need to step up your game with the publishers, channel your inner Kellhus and get a better deal. They have been really inept in dealing with you.
At the end of the day the greatest strenght of the series is unique aspect. U cant find anything like this. Malazan is unique because its size and scope, GOT has politics and everyone can die “realism”,sanderson is simple to understand with cool anime style battles, rotfuss is wish fulfilment 101…and so on.
You have a massive scope, dark/”ultra”realistic characters and world, philosophy and the same wildcard aspect as GOT. You have an amazing product but without competent marketing it will always be niche…thats how the world works afterall, you need to make us love!
Thanks, John. The idea was to write something so *monumental* on the borderline between pulp and philosophy that people from both solitudes would be forced to see what’s going on. TUC is the keystone, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens. It ain’t over until the skinniest skinny sings!
Besides, so long as people such as yourself keep thumping the tub, I think things will work out fine.
Yes, you did something amazing! Its a reflection of our world…things go to fast and your genius is overlooked. Shit books sell milions while thousands have debates over nothing…from twilight to 50 shades, from Sanderson to other hacks…such is the world, you know the series is amazing and many of us think the same 🙂
Anyway i will also ask this, are there any other plans for the first series ? I would also love that! …
+1
One of the big problem with the series is that the first book is too slow, its like a huge prologue.
Now…for the fans the first book is still amazing ! But you nead to like the series first to appreciate its beauty. A first time reader wont apreciate the trappers story, nor the the interactions between the two…there are so many things i missed the first time.
A 3 in 1 edition would solve that…anyway its just an idea. The first trilogy is already my favorite ever, so you dont have to convince me haha
I saw a new printing of the first book of the first series just show up at all the B&N stores in my area.
Would you mind describing them if you see them again? Price clipped, number line, hardcover or softcover… I’m wondering if they are reprints or leftover stock.
@Wilshire:
ISBN 978-1-59020-118-3
The number line is the centered numbers beneath the ISBN at the bottom of the page on the publication information page? if so, it’s 579864
Sofcover
$16.95
Yup. Thanks for the info. Looks like they’ve run several prints of the paperbacks – I’ve never checked. AFAIK all the hardcovers only got 1-2 printings, that numberline indicates the paperback is on like 4. Cool stuff.
“Its simply too deep and fantasy doesn’t sit well with “intellectuals” so even that niche is closed.”
I’ve often wondered about the resistance among the literati to reading ‘genre fiction’ seriously. You can make a pretty good case that many foundational literary texts from The Iliad and The Odyssey to The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost are fantasies. I get that some of the fantasies written to cash in on the market created by Lord of the Rings were junk, but any time an artist creates a work that creates a market less talented artists will create supply to fill the demand. If you’re a literary critic surely telling art from commerce is part of your job…
…Not to knock commerce. Whatever else we think about Shakespeare the artist he wrote to put butts in seats as much as anything else. I think there is something to be said for the person who can create works which are both great art and great entertainment. For me at least, Scott has achieved that.
I think the hurdle literary readers have to clear is most genre fiction is crap and it can be near impossible to find the diamonds amid the dross. Look at all the bad fantasy and sci-fi books out there that sell millions of copies and people rave about how wonderful they are. It’s easy to fall into the trap of reverse snobbery, but I don’t blame the learned for not taking fantasy lit seriously.
Its simply to deep and fantasy doesnt sit well with “intelectuals” so even that niche is closed.
Yet how many of them haven’t read the Hobbit?
I’ll try posting this again for the third time, not sure why it didn’t post the other two.
When you say you’re critiquing continental philosophy a la AJ, do you mean in the spirit of AJ, or continental philosophers like AJ? He’s a pretty outright Zizekian (although to his credit he makes Zizek far clearer than Zizek himself comes across). And Zizek’s philosophy is the most cloistered academic nonsense, wrapped around some decent gems of wisdom.
[Note: Just finished the first prince of nothing book, I’m a doctoral student in philosophy, love your critiques of academia and the liberal echo-chamber, and hope to start posting more and hanging out on this blog’s comments section]
And which philosopher / transcendental ontologist do you think is less bullshitty than Zizek?
Early Roy Bhaskar, but that ‘/’ doesn’t work.
Also Kant and Schopenhauer. But I don’t want to be accused of calling Zizek a Bullshitter, I think he believes what he says (AJ too), I just don’t think what he says is necessarily coherent.
Also, I find Zizek’s best friend Badiou at least comprehensible and compelling. There’s SERIOUS problems with his philosophy and his followers who proselytize his work and attempt to make it clear to laymen are quite guilty of making it even more incoherent, but it’s at least within the realm of comprehension and possibility.
Sorry for the triple posts VoidsIncision, I just hadn’t thought about this in a while.
Welcome CB! Things are wonky on the comments, for some reason–but I’m guessing it just bumped you to moderation.
Continental philosophy that takes refuge in ontology and/or transcendence, actually. People gotta get over the fact the apriori is dead. We don’t have time to fuck around anymore. It’s hard not to love the Zizekian aspiration and bombast, but I find his actual arguments fraught with theological commitment. I have a piece on him here on TPB somewhere…
Well he does say the only way to be a true atheist is to first be a christian (for the psychoanalytic reason that you need to kill the father/christ and be left alone and abandoned)…so yeah, the dudes theological alright! I’ve read like six of his books but I feel like I couldn’t even prepare a 5 minute cliff notes lecture on the dude, so could be he’s a genius and I’m dense.
I’ll look for the Zizek pieces, and I’m loving the anti liberal-academia blogs and posts I’m seeing (albeit Don Delillo is totally sublime and amazing), and the keen Trump analysis.
I still can’t get over how much those covers make it look like some guy staring out of a fantasy submarine. Really miss the scriptural old covers of the first series.
I think these are digitally altered photo’s. I liked these types of ones : https://mightythorjrs.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/13806.jpg
Which I assume are painted. I particularly like the one linked, because I think it’s Achamian and he looks angry, but if you look closely the artist has actually painted a look of concern on his face instead! To me that’s really clever! And it’s got a castle on it, drawn in an ancient way! And a tumultuous horde!
But a submarine – now I cannot unsee that! We all live on a Earwa submarine! An Earwa submarine…
Things could be better … or worse. Check out some of these covers that have been collected from various countries. (Sorry, pinterest makes you have an account to view…)
Oh, looks like you don’t need account. Nice.
I can’t wait! I just started my re-read of the Aspect-Emperor series to prepare for the release. It’s been quite the journey. The Second Apocalypse has been one of the most rewarding reading experiences I’ve had. Thank you, Scott.
You’re right to have misgivings about the growth curve, but it isn’t time to pack it in: one just needs to shift to another heuristic.
A Song Of Ice And Fire plateaued, and then landed an HBO deal. Its popularity got a shot in the arm, and its cultural omnipresence shot through the roof.
I sometimes speculate idly that Harry Potter would have died a slow death, not at the hands of Voldemort but of the reading public, if J.K. Rowling had not received her near perfect movie deal from Warner Brothers, and had refused to compromise on the dream of a natively British-centered blockbuster and walked away.
Second Apocalypse may be peaking indeed, but you know what to do. This is a healthy stage in the natural life-cycle of a modern multimedia franchise.
But only one or two butterflies out of a hundred survive the pupal phase to spread their wings . . .
The Great Ordeal gave me a book hang-over that lasted months! it totally delivered way beyond what I had expected and even hoped for and that is incredibly rare these days,
I literally cant wait for The Unholy Consult!
” As it turns out, we were all the deluded simpletons”
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/why-donald-trump-will-be-the-dunning-kruger-president.html
The World keeps turning man, live free.
http://homebrave.com/home-of-the-brave//listening-to-the-winners
Shadilay
http://hardcorezen.info/make-america-zen-again/5101
Beyond words….
I wish voting was compulsory in America. When the learned helplessness apathy non turn out gets turned around by someone like Trump, it’s just ugly. Might not have gotten either candidate if voting was compulsory. Neither ingrained fiscal (sociopath?) elite nor ingrained fiscal sociopath elite pretending to be change.
well if Australia is any example…
What, has Trump become our prime minister as well? Shit!
Anyway, it’d be interesting to do some small scale model science on. Set up two small communities, the control is forced voting, the other is voluntary. Figure some metric for measuring extremism in the candidates.
“Figure some metric for measuring extremism in the candidates.”
A genuinely non-ideological measure of extremism? I don’t know about that, but perhaps politically motivated acts of violence might be a good proxy. You’d probably have a hard time getting a research program that counts acts of violence past your average ethics committee, but it might be possible to get survey data comparing voter participation rates and acts of politically motivated violence in different countries. I can imagine a lot of issues with controlling for economic and social variables but none of them seem intractable.
Well, it sounds like I’m making a joke, but if the scientists could set the potential projects candidates could push for, as a measure of extremism you could have some sort of isolating wall project on offer and see how many push for it in each of the two groups, particularly after a few generations of candidates (yeah, the ‘generations’ would have to be compressed into a practical timeframe for the experiment). So you don’t have to use actual acts of violence as a metric.
The tragedies nationalism wrought during the first half of the 20th century have passed from living memory. We have forgotten the Somme, Iwo Jima and Stalingrad. We have forgotten Auschwitz and Belsen. The nationalism of the 21st century will no doubt give us new tragedies. Given how much more powerful we have become since 1945, whether humanity survives the 21st century seems to me to be just about a coin flip.
welcome to life in the ruins
Strange guy…
https://techgnosis.com/aeon-byte-the-exegesis-of-philip-k-dick/
I’ll be honest as I began reading the original trilogy… the massiveness of it all, the intricate display of cultural logics, the ruination of a not one but multitudes as they struggle within the course of this thing we are, the debates on religion, philosophy… the proto-scientific minds arousing even in the interstices of your epic fable, all this was for me a little overwhelming. Even now I dip lightly, taking my time, savoring the works like rare wine, rather than speed-plunking down the squandered shores of some throwaway epic SF Opera. Yours is the real McCoy, the blistering impulse that drives us toward annihilation and apocalypse. It may take me time, but I will someday finish and broadcast the span of your vision in its accomplishment.
Anxiety and surveillance: pillars of the new economy
As I see it the economic system (particularly of capitalist countries) is an anxiety system. The smart phone thing is just an anxiety system layered on top of a larger, already existing anxiety system. The anxiety the word ‘Mortgage’ evokes is easy enough to recognise. But ironically the very poverty provoking the anxiety seems to make it seem real rather than a staged event. Real negative consequences must make for real positive consequences, right? That’s a heuristic that, if we were up against a natural system, would be pretty accurate. But when it’s up against man made system, it treats that system as ‘just how it is and how you have to do things if you want a good result’ like it would a natural system.
And writing economic fantasy fiction is hard. For me, anyway.
Rewards now flow to the competitor that is best able to maximize consumer anxiety
Ironically those rewards reinforce the competitors own behavior, as the competitor is in a reward cycle themselves. So you can’t even quite say google is in charge of this process. Google just tends the fields – something else tells Google to burn them.
WzURhD
http://imgur.com/WzURhD4
He’s balancing those books on his head really well!
It just takes a little focused attention, something in the coffee seems to help!
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-universe-in-a-cup-of-coffee/
“A time machine.”
One thing that’s come up from time to time here is how the law will adapt to machine intelligence. The latest Conscious Entities has an interesting discussion.
http://www.ttbook.org/book/conspiracy-theories
One Sunda morn young Lambton went
A-fishing in the Wear…
I can not wait for this book your world building is second to none I love how it feels like a real place. I still think possibly akky will end up as a judas in the eyes of the world no matter what he does or I’d the one that starts up thr no god just how his plot line has been going terribly for him. Even though he’s super powerful magic man.
Penultimate means second to last, you know.
Love these books, character development taken to its deepest yet in fantasy genre.
Is the judging eye similar to the health sense in Thomas Covenant unbeliever series?
TWLW is a contender for the best epic fantasy book ever written. Must be hard to back a book that good up.
AGOT was a masterpiece but the rest of the series average. G Martin has never been the same since. Genius has a price it seems
So maybe it is good your books are on a slow burn, less pressure perhaps?
The Great Ordeal is good but not in the same league as JE and WLW.
Sorry for being an ingrate this is still the best fantasy since the Illearth War.
Finished the Unholy Consult today.
Wtf 1st series great and 2nd series started so well JE and WLW as good as anything i have read but Great ordeal and Unholy Consult just seemed like the author had lost interest.
Oh well 5 out of 7 books aint bad.
These books rekindled my interest in fantasy.
Thankyou
In the gaps between words and their sum expression constantly betrays the tongue.
Sorry for 5 posts in a row I have been trying to join the 2nd Apocalypse forum for some time but the 1st login to join is so fucking fucking frustrating I want to sacrifice the administrator to the mother of birth.
And into the void: I think TGO and TUC dropped in standard because they went away from the amazing character depth and study of human relationships in the earlier books and relied instead on ultra violence and spectacle. The rules changed to suddenly their were giant nonmen and nuclear bombs.
The 1st five books were utterly unique, violence was explored with emotional intelligence. Acha watching Zin tortured was far more moving than everyone getting raped and killed in the last 2 books
And yet the stuff you praise is the stuff others complain about! Readers who aren’t world-junkies pass judgment somewhere in TGO, I think, after which, interpretation obliges the way it always does. Either way, if the rules changed for you, then you weren’t playing the same game I was. From my standpoint, the most emotionally fraught scenes occur in the last two books, despite the accelerating breakdown in moral logic.
Hi, the TWLW is such a brilliant book congratulations on that.
I thought your best work was TJE and TWLW and i looked forward to TGO like you wouldn’t believe.
Yeah i just hated it that TGO wasn’t perfect like JE and WLW probably to high expectations on my part. I thought you didn’t nail the emotionally frought scenes in the last two books like you did in the first five and that just made me sad because these books deserve to be great.
I didn’t mean to hector you or anything thanks for reply.