Dan Hoy's chapbook THE TERRAFORMERS has been nominated for the Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Many times readers wonder how science-fiction and poetry could possibly work together. The answer in one word: "Imagination." In Dan's chapbook, a colony of people attempt to settle and terraform Mars. Imagine the metaphor and exploration regarding climate, ecology, personal isolation, relationships, and then the book's parallels with the "real world" start to become apparent. Like these lines:

Everybody here
has basically

offended
& slept

with everybody else.

That situation sound familiar to anyone? One more thing, a cornerstone of poetry is imagery, now think about the opening and final scenes of the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. To celebrate Dan's Elgin nomination, Third Man Books is offering a limited number of THE TERRAFORMERS (only $7) signed by the author. For a deeper peek behind the curtain, take a look at Dan's study guide ... and movie list!!!

Dan Hoy's Top Ten SF/F Movie List

Note from author: "I made a list of sci fi movies. It's less a list of my all-time favorites (e.g. it's missing Tron, Blade Runner, Dune) and more a list of my favorites that have themes relevant to The Terraformers. They are in chronological order.

I made a list of sci fi movies. It's less a list of my all-time favorites (e.g. it's missing Tron, Blade Runner, Dune) and more a list of my favorites that have themes relevant to The Terraformers and Deathbed. In chronological order:

The Black Hole (1979): Disney’s Ecclesiastes: Life as a vessel sailing through the vast emptiness of space toward the darkest hole imaginable, with only lifeless humanoids as companions.

Alien (1979): Case study of life under capitalism in which workers get paid time-and-a-half to be strategically isolated one-by-one as feedstock for a terrifying alien (capitalism).

Time Bandits (1981): Encounter with a glass firmament that depicts a seemingly endless desert but conceals a dark and dimensionless landscape. The glass is our lives; the skull that shatters it is poetic creation.

The Thing (1982): Case study of the disintegration of trust among an isolated group in an alien environment (Antarctica) in which the key insight is there’s no discernible distinction between human and alien.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984): The context of industrial life is ecocide, and the reckoning we struggle against is our salvation. Animated.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985): Starring the prophet Tina Turner: “We don’t need another hero. We don’t need to know the way home. All we want is life beyond the Thunderdome.”

Primer (2004) and The Prestige (2006): Technocratic ingenuity as the murderous golem it is.

Melancholia (2011): Extends the annihilating totality of depression to the entirety of Earth as it collides with another planet. The end.

Under the Skin (2013): Case study of the gendered, alien modes of human life that comprise western civilization, in which female subjectivity is depicted as a literal monster to be burned alive.

Ex Machina (2015): Case study of the gendered, mechanized modes of human life that comprise western civilization, in which the desire to be free of patriarchal control is depicted as nonhuman and villainous.

DAN HOY is the author of The Deathbed Editions (Octopus Books, 2016) and several poetry chapbooks, including The Terraformers, (Third Man Books, 2017) The Tree (Solar Luxuriance, 2016), Omegachurch (Solar Luxuriance, 2010) and Glory Hole (Mal-O-Mar Editions, 2009). His work has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Triple Canopy, Novembre, Elderly and other magazines and anthologies. He was a contributor to the collective blog Montevidayo (2010-2015), and was co-founder of the literary arts journal Soft Targets (2006-2007). He lives in Nashville.

---

THE TERRAFORMERS STUDY GUIDE By Dan Hoy

ABOUT THE BOOK

Origins

When I was in my late teens I wrote a short prose poem called “Flight of the Terraformers.” It was a single paragraph about a group of space colonists staring up at an unfamiliar night sky. There were no constellations, just an illegible mix of stars. This is both liberating and terrifying for the colonists, since the patterns overhead represent the larger structures that rule our lives, whether it’s explicit, state forms of governance or more pervasive, insidious modes of control such as cultural norms that favor some groups over others. So the poem is about that quiet, dark moment of uncertainty, when we are totally unmoored and the context for our lives has yet to be inscribed.

I was talking with my friend and poet Amy Lawless about a series of poems she was working on about Mars, and suddenly I thought of this long lost poem. I decided to pick up the idea of that poem and expand on it into a full collection.

Themes

Ecocide Technology Survivalism Team dynamics Intimacy Fatalism Politics

Craft & Form

One of the distinctive features of most of my poetry is its minimalism. Oftentimes an entire poem is just a single sentence broken into pieces and offset against a white page. I’m drawn to aphoristic sayings, and I find that breaking the lines apart slows them down, and the blank space then amplifies and draws out their textures and meanings – the words sit and reverberate in the mind of the reader with a kind of autonomy, needing no additional support, offering up potential futures before the reader moves on to the next page.

My book The Deathbed Editions includes several collections that consist of 33 poetic fragments/pages. Each fragment is designed to stand on its own as a “poem” while contributing to a larger whole. In other words, each collection is a poem of poems. The 33-fragment length, which is shorter than a typical full-length book of poems yet longer than a typical chapbook, seemed to give me enough breathing room to explore the arc I wanted to explore without having to overcommit. While the collections in The Deathbed Editions are more lyric explorations, I tried applying the 33-fragment form to a more linear narrative with The Terraformers.

Relevant Movies to Check Out

- Space Is the Place (1974): Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist science fiction film released in 1974. Featuring his poetry and music and visions, it enunciates one of the core concepts of Afrofuturism with its refrain “It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?” This reorients the apocalypse from a future event to something that has already occurred or is continually occurring, which is the actual experience of this world for many people. Much of my work, The Terraformers included, can be distilled down to a similar line from my book The Deathbed Editions: “The world is the end of the world.“

- The Survivalist (2015): British post-apocalyptic science fiction film directed by Stephen Fingleton. Its unflinching look at a demoralizing and literally hopeless survival situation is relevant here, along with its focus on the tedium and minutia of survival.

- The Shining (1980): Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick is known for his patient, laborious style, and for a certain tonal affectation with his actors. While his movies can be quite long, I feel this is a minimalist approach, and similar to breaking sentences down and stretching out their textures, letting us immerse ourselves in their reality. The mostly nonverbal 2001: A Space Odyssey is his most famous example of this, but I’ve selected The Shining because it’s also notable for his use of text. At times he will suddenly insert a black screen with the day of the week in all caps. It’s a simple, banal gesture, but takes on a disturbing menace as we stare at the word and think about its implications. In this example, he’s reduced everything he wants to say to a single word.

WRITING EXERCISES

- Pick a sentence that has stuck with you, whether from a song, TV commercial, social media post, book, movie or something overheard, and turn it into a minimalist poem: break the sentence into pieces, including stanza breaks. As you read the sentence/poem, think about how its meaning changes as it unfolds, how it seems like it might go one direction and then goes another.

- Pick your favorite pulp genre – horror, sci-fi, romance, western, spy thriller, etc – and write a poem that draws from your life, but uses the settings, language and tropes of the genre. Another option is to rewrite one of your previous poems within a genre. Think about what this introduces to the subject, how it changes your original intent, what it adds and what it takes away.

- Try writing a novel in 33 sentences, with each sentence given its own page. Don’t worry about explaining the world of the novel – focus on the subjective experience of traveling through it, what it feels like to be immersed in it.