Author Guest Post with Mary Patterson Thornburg: Luke Blackmon’s Rose

To guard herself from the perils of her own sensuality, Rose married a man she didn’t love. Now, two years after his death, she’s not sure she can really love anyone. She’s not even sure she cares…

Welcome to the March 29th stop on the blog tour for Luke Blackmon’s Rose by Mary Patterson Thornburg with Goddess Fish Promotions. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, more author guest posts, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.

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Author Guest Post

When Ursula K. Le Guin was given the U.S. National Book Award in 2014, she accepted it with thanks and shared it, she said, with her “fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.”

I’ve watched her acceptance speech more than once, and it gladdens my heart each time. I don’t, of course, feel that I’m entitled to much of a share in it, although I am one of her fellow genre authors. I’m just happy that the stiff-necked literary establishment of the United States finally unbent enough to honor a woman who, over her long career, could run in the lead with all the usual contenders for (and winners of) that award and could write rings around many (perhaps most?) of them – but who, because she was a proud genre author and refused to be known by any other title, sat in the audience at all those awards ceremonies and applauded “the so-called realists.”

“Realists” indeed! What, pray tell, is “realism” when it’s at home with its slippers on and its feet up? Is it fiction? When you come right down to it, what makes “realist” fiction any more real than fiction “of the imagination”? Isn’t every fictional narrative a series of events its author imagined and wrote down? Aren’t fictional characters all imaginary – composites of real people, maybe, but not real people in any other sense? Face it – all of us fiction writers are liars, saying what Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms call “the thing that is not,” but in the service of truth. And what good fun it is!

Fantasy and science fiction, and all their relatives and friends, sub-genres and sub-sub-genres, do admittedly take fiction into territory where “realists” seldom venture. And what better way to express some themes, to address in fictive terms the very real ideas and issues writers and readers are interested in and concerned with?

How better, for instance, to explore the fluidity of gender, the crippling definitions of “feminine” and “masculine” some of us still impose on children, than by taking us in imagination to a world where everyone is potentially either male orfemale for an occasional few days every month or so, and the rest of the time is truly without gender? Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness started taking readers there, elegantly, fifty-four years ago. (Don’t tell the book-banning crowd!) How better to show today’s America so very accurately to itself than to be Stephen King, writing horror and fantasy and truth?  How better to warn capitalist-industrial-age culture that it ought to think about its inventions, and what they may be capable of, before it turns them loose on the world, than to imagine an ambitious university student who builds a living being out of spare parts, as in Mary Shelley’s first science fiction novel? And, speaking of Jonathan Swift, how better to make fun of the things and people one wants to make fun of than by sending an adventurous and gullible Gulliver out on voyages of discovery to strange lands indeed?

Are Mary Shelley and Jonathan Swift really genre writers? Of course they are. We just haven’t heard them called that since the scholarly and pompous gatekeepers of literature allowed them, and lucky others, to enter through those gates.

Are you a genre reader? My father, many, many years ago, accused me of reading cheap “dime novels,” worthless trash, because he noticed that my bookbag contained paperbacks. No use telling him that some of them were assigned by my teachers, that some of them were even textbooks. They were paperback books, which meant – to him and his long-gone-now generation – genre fiction, low-class stuff, while he was paying good money to send me to college, where I would rise to a higher plane of existence. (And some of those books, I confess, were genre novels.)

Some people, I believe, are still making “genre readers” feel guilty or inferior. You read romance? Silly woman! You read westerns? Thrillers? Mystery series? Well, okay, I guess. I mean, it’s your mind you’re wasting on cheap thrills and various kinds of junk. Some people probably believe that; I say, let’s stand up together for what we read, what we write. Come on now, repeat loudly after me:

Proud genre reader! Proud genre writer! Forever!

About the Book

Luke Blackmon’s Rose
by Mary Patterson Thornburg

Published 17 March 2023
Uncial Press

Genre: Romance
Page Count: 176
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

To guard herself from the perils of her own sensuality, Rose married a man she didn’t love. Now, two years after his death, she’s not sure she can really love anyone. She’s not even sure she cares…

To achieve what he’d always known was his birthright, Luke had to struggle against tremendous odds. But when science discovered a way to access the past, a powerful bureaucracy found a way to use Luke. Now, torn from his own time, everything and everyone he knew, he can see no reason to go on living…

An instant of attraction, uninvited but inescapable, brings Luke and Rose together. Together, they discover the strength to love, the will to trust and hope. But will these things be enough to carry them over walls of suspicion, guilt, bigotry, and hate?

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Excerpt

In 1930, he told her, he’d been in the midst of rehearsing a play in New York City. The play’s title, Dark Fancy, rang no bells for Rose. “Well,” Luke said, “it had a couple of wealthy backers, but the script was awkward. And the play wasn’t a good fit for the time. People were beginning to want something light, given the look of things. A lot of folks had money troubles that year. Maybe the play didn’t even open. They’d have had to find a new second lead, anyway… Or…” He frowned. “Or not, maybe. I don’t know.”

“You were the second lead?” she asked gently.

“Yes. Character called Tommy Carleton. His best friend was a man he’d known in college, a teammate, a white man, played by Roland Arnett… The actress playing the girl was colored, of course—quite light, but unmistakable. This was necessary, and that meant the Arnett character’s blindness was also necessary.” He laughed without much amusement.

“Oh, Luke. I’m sorry, but the whole play sounds terrible,” Rose said. “Melodramatic, big problems with logic, and a bad script on top of that? I’ll bet it didn’t open. I’ll look it up.” “I’ve described it… Not badly. Unfairly, perhaps. There was more to it, more to the Arnett role, and Arnett is—was—great. Deservedly famous. And problems with logic? Of course, but quite realistic, weren’t they? The subject of race in this country is riddled with logical fallacies, always has been. Anyway, the play was exciting and controversial. Daring. Two years earlier and it would’ve packed them in. Even now—I mean in 1930—it would have had a decent run. If it opened.”

About the Author

Mary Patterson Thornburg has lived in California, Washington State, Montana, Indiana, and again, finally, in Montana. She was educated at Holy Names College, Montana State University, and Ball State University, where she then taught for many years. She’s been reading science fiction and fantasy since she was five, and when she began to write fiction it seemed only natural to write in those genres. Her literary heroes are Mary Shelley, who gave us all a metaphor for technology alienated from its creators, and Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler, inventors of worlds that shine their powerful searchlights on this one. She writes what some people call “science fantasy” (aka “fake science fiction) within as wide a range as possible, but almost always with a bit (or a lot) of romance.

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Giveaway Alert!

Mary Patterson Thornburg will be awarding a $25 Amazon or B&N gift card to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

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