catliketread asked:

Some questions from a fan about TNC, if you're not sick of providing answers. 1. Was A Voyage to Arcturus in any way on your mind? 2. Some of Salby’s quainter locutions (“This sure is a doozy, sis”) sound more American than British -- can anything be read into this? 3. What can you recommend by other authors that imparts a comparable creeping feeling that all is not well with the world, even after you look up from the page?

(1) No, I’m not familiar with it.

(2) When thinking about Salby and writing “his” words, I took inspiration from a bunch of different real-world writers. Henry Darger was one of them.

The “gee-whiz American kids’ comics dialogue” derives from Darger, as does the gigantism of the in-story TNC, and various other things.

(3) I rarely if ever get that feeling from fiction. I guess I did get it from Infinite Jest, but it’s been over a decade since I read that book and I’m not sure I’d still recommend it.

But more generally, if you liked TNC, there’s a good chance you would like The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan. It’s really good, and similar in a lot of ways. (I hadn’t read it when I wrote TNC.)

mathamaniac asked:

I am a big fan of The Northern Caves,and I recently started reading Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun' Quartet. 'Shadow of the Torturer' plays with language by using obscure & archaic words to signal parts of the narrative that are meant to be alien or unfamiliar. Although BotNS predates TNC, I was reminded of the way that TNC talks about concepts that are only later defined, if ever. See: Mundum, Lorrums, etc. This is meant as a compliment, but I don't really have a punchline. I like your work!

Thanks!

I have read Book of the New Sun, but I read it a few years after writing TNC, so it wasn’t a direct influence. I did like that aspect of it, predictably enough.

minor-locrian asked:

on chapter 7 of almost nowhere and i have no clue why so many people are comparing it to homestuck but as with tnc i really enjoy how well you write weird mental states. i've also found myself wondering if chesscourt's "skycrash" and the "mooncrash" are connected

also you use the terms you introduce really well. this is one of the things that really makes me nostalgic for the weird people i used to meet on the internet (someone who used "canon" to mean "relevant", as in "this discussion is non-canon", and very specific jargon like giblangs, idk)

also also. i found it funny in chapter 4 when we take a moment to appraise a fairly comprehensible aspect of the ells' voice (agree vs agreed) after having struggled or skimmed our way through like 5 different voices which are at most a quarter as penetrable.

tl;dr good story thank for writing

Thanks!!

If you keep reading, the Homestuck comparisons will eventually make sense.

The Mooncrash goes back a long way. It randomly appeared into my head one day in summer 2008, fully formed: the idea of this perpetually moonlit “bubble world” meant for waiting/hiding, and the name “Mooncrash” for it. Then much later, when I was starting to write AN, I decided to give this old idea a home.

I don’t remember clearly how I came up with the term “Skycrash” in TNC/Chesscourt.

I think that I was planning to use “Mooncrash” there at first, but settled for something else that sounded similar, because I wanted to save “Mooncrash” for some later story where I’d also use the attached concept. But I could be making that up.

In any case, the resemblance is in name only – the “Skycrash” in Chesscourt was an event, a natural disaster, not a persistent world like AN’s crashes.

w0witsarlo asked:

I generated a Magic card called "The Northern Caves" using uzas.ai and its extremely true to the story

Nice!

konspiratsiia asked:

hi! i just read all of the northern caves and loved it. it matched my own experience of these kind of insular fandoms to like, a startling degree. based on the comments it seems like a lot of people from a number of different communities had a similar experience, but i was curious if you were familiar with the elder scrolls lore community when you wrote it? tnc resonated almost 1:1 on a lot of stuff like the mysterious cult author and the threatening core philosophical conceit for me.

I wasn’t. In fact, this is the first I’ve heard of it, in connection with TNC or otherwise.

Glad you liked TNC :)

ipsomaniac asked:

just dropping by to say i recently read TNC and it resonated with me more than any novel i've read in a long while. blown away by your ability to pastiche such diverse styles while retaining such strong stylistic coherence. probably the most absorbing story about textual obsession i've ever read - i actually prefer it to Pale Fire in that it depicts this on a group level, which is more interesting than a solo descent into madness. thanks for putting it up for free! cant wait to FN and AN :)

Thank you!!