The Silver Key

Rest in Peace, Nicol Williamson

2012-01-25T20:52:00.001-05:00

The actor who gave us the best wizard ever put to screen has died: Rest in Peace, Nicol Williamson, age 75. His son has a few moving words to say about him here.

In honor of Williamson, In The Land of Dreams:

And When a Man Lies:

Why The Lord of the Rings films work: How I learned to stop worrying and appreciate Peter Jackson (or, a review of Tolkien on Film)

2012-01-23T21:45:00.002-05:00

It’s easy to pick apart The Lord of the Rings films on the basis of textual fidelity. Anyone can watch Peter Jackson’s movies with a copy of LOTR in their lap and mine for differences. Why did they cut Glorfindel and Bombadil? Why did Aragorn say “let’s hunt some orc” instead of “I will follow the Orcs … My heart speaks clearly at last: the fate of the Bearer is in my hands no longer?” Why did they change the character of Faramir? Why the detour to Osgiliath?

I hear these questions asked all the time and sympathize with a good many of them. But in the end they strike me as complaints about details, the classic purist argument. While the films' deviations are at times annoying and/or pandering (shield surfing, and the overextended bridge collapse sequence in Khazad-dum), and occasionally cloying and seemingly unnecessary (Aragorn over the cliff), the more important question for me is: Do they materially alter the spirit and themes of the book? Which are, as I see them: Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The importance of mercy and pity. Fate vs. free will. Exalting the meek and the small over the mighty. Not succumbing to despair or losing hope, but grimly pressing on in the face of adversity. The passing of an Age of Elves and magic into the modern Age of man. Did Jackson get those right?

I would argue that yes, he did. Faithfulness to the spirit and themes of the original work are by far and away the most important part of any adaptation, and Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films succeed in this regard. I believe they retain the core of the original, even though they diverge in many of the details.

I credit Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings for helping to crystallize my thoughts and feelings about the films. First published in 2004 by The Mythopoeic Press (I recently purchased the second edition reissued in 2010), Tolkien on Film checks in at 323 pages and contains 14 essays from a number of academics and scholarly types. The focus of the book is on the film’s fidelity to the source material and their success or failure as adaptations. It also offers analysis of the broader societal impact of the films and ways in which they reflect our changing views on femininity. I found it to be a very enjoyable and in places thought-provoking read, but with a few shortcomings and puzzling inclusions that resulted in a mixed review.

I need to start my review of Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings with a statement that in no way can be misinterpreted: The book is better. In fact, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is in my opinion the best fantasy work of all time and will likely never be surpassed by any other book, film, videogame, or other artistic endeavor in the genre. I say that because I don’t wish to be pilloried as someone who thinks Jackson out-Tolkien-ed Tolkien. He did not, but the introduction to Tolkien on Film seems to imply that, because I like the films, I must think so. In the very first sentence editor Janet Croft implies that two camps exist: Those who love the films as much as or even more than the book, and those who think they did a profound disserve to The Lord of the Rings. “Very few readers of Tolkien are entirely neutral about Jackson’s epic undertaking and its effect on public perceptions of Tolkien’s work,” Croft says. This makes for a nice sound bite, but I recognize the movies as a thing apart from the book, with necessary alterations; different and not as great, but great in their own right as films (again, as a disclaimer, I like the films very much, though not unreservedly). I’d like to think others feel the same way.

Unfortunately some of the essays in Tolkien on Film take an antagonistic tone and are rather merciless in their pillorying of the films. David Bratman’s “Summa Jacksonia” claims that Jackson “has a nine year-olds understanding of Tolkien,” calls the script “90% travesty start to finish,” and portrays the director as a moustache-twirling caricature. Other criticisms are more reasonable. Croft’s “Mithril Coats and Tin Ears” claims that Jackson altered some of the characters beyond recognition, including Faramir and Denethor, and argues that Jackson’s tampering with the characters muddies Tolkien’s themes. I see things differently. Certainly Faramir is not the Faramir of the books. He hesitates, he waffles, he is not possessed of unshakeable conviction. But I would argue that the Faramir of the screen is highly moral with a clearer vision than his brother Boromir. While Jackson’s Faramir vacillates, and starts to take Frodo to Gondor, he ultimately sees the error of his ways and chooses the right path. Does this differ from Tolkien? Obviously yes, but in the end Jackson’s Faramir arrives in the same place as Tolkien’s Faramir. Other characters like Aragorn are also afflicted with self-doubt, and in that respect are not “true” to Tolkien. But unlike Bratman and Croft I’m not troubled by this, because ultimately they overcome their hesitation and behave as Tolkien wrote them. The film may be a modern interpretation of Tolkien’s characters, but I believe that it adequately and often powerfully reflects Tolkien’s intent. Likewise Tolkien’s Denethor is a noble man doing his duty as Steward, and only later does he succumb to despair and madness. In the films he’s diminished, “flattened” as Croft says, a jerk from the get-go, and we don’t get to see his honorable side and fall from grace, which is disappointing. But I would argue that Tolkien included Denethor to demonstrate the dangers of despair. Jackson’s Denethor succeeds in conveying this theme; given unlimited time Jackson may have been able to show his whole character arc, as Tolkien does. But the time constraints of film do not allow him this luxury. It’s simply impossible to give due treatment to dozens of characters in a feature film.

Croft scores some points for the films’ detractors by demonstrating how Jackson makes Tolkien’s world seem smaller and flatter by “anticipating scenes or devices used later, thereby flattening the tale out.” For example, the films do not conceal the fact that Dernhelm=Eowyn, thus lessening the impact when she removes her helm in her duel with the Witch King. Croft also wonders why Jackson had to rely on intercutting the divergent strands of war and quest. She argues that Jackson should have presented Sam and Frodo’s journey from Book Four as a single narrative, apart from the events of Aragorn/Gimli/Legolas and their journey to Rohan in book 3, just like Tolkien did, to preserve our sense of dramatic irony of already knowing what happened to the rest of the Company every time Frodo and Sam worry about them. To me Jackson’s intercutting technique has a simple explanation: Each of these storylines are too long and would have required an hour and half or more of film time to tell. Removing the intercutting would have run a real danger of losing the audience. Unlike a book you can’t flip back and forth during a film.

The far more interesting questions for me than merely pointing out where or how the films differ from the text is, why were these changes necessary from book to film, and what challenges do film adaptations of books present? As I see it the list is long. Money is the big one; Jackson’s films were financed with huge advances in the hundreds of millions, and had to have a return on investment, thus he made some concessions to the masses. Unlike the way Tolkien wrote his books—as solitary works of art—there were hundreds or even thousands of people involved in the making of the Jackson films, each exerting a bit of their own creative differences into the final product, which can dilute a single artistic vision. There’s the visual component, that showing and not telling is an imperative in a film. There’s the time element, and the accompanying need for plot and character compression. And so on. Most of the essays in the book don’t do an adequate job of acknowledging the inherent differences between book and screen. I think Tolkien on Film would have been much strengthened with an essay from an expert versed in the intricacies of filmmaking explaining why certain changes were made, what wouldn’t work from the book, and so on. Many of the essays don’t properly acknowledge these fundamental differences. For example, Daniel Timmons’ “Frodo on Film: Peter Jackson’s Problematic Portrayal” raises a lot of fuss about Frodo’s inability in the film to resist the One Ring, which diminishes his character and makes him a less worthy Ringbearer. While this is certainly a legitimate criticism and a divergence from the text, might it not be because Jackson had to show in a limited time how dangerous the Ring was? Even with their relative length the films are a much compressed version of the book; Jackson is therefore afforded far fewer opportunities to show us the Ring’s maliciousness. Making it even more of a corruptive influence when it is shown is one way to do that. The film is a compressed dramatization, and so the Ring is naturally going to seem more insidious, Frodo and Faramir less resistant to its pull, and so on. I too would have preferred one or two more scenes of Frodo’s heroism—I missed him shouting “Go back to the Land of Mordor, and follow me no more!” at the Ford of Bruinen—but in the end, Frodo does get the Ring to Mount Doom, and Faramir does “show his quality.”

In her essay “Tolkien’s Women (and Men): The Films and the Book,” Jane Chance says that Jackson “subordinates and devalues Tolkien’s key theme of the ennoblement of the ordinary;” I didn’t get that impression of all, and certainly the “You bow to no one” sequence in which a literal king and all his retainers bow to the common man is this very theme writ large. In short, Jackson’s differences in characterization and theme are a matter of degree, not kind, and thus retain the spirit of the book.

Some of the other essayists do a better job showing how films and books are intrinsically different, resulting in necessary changes from page to screen. Diana Paxson’s “Re-Vision: The Lord of the Rings in Print and on Screen” acknowledges that Jackson’s film is different and perhaps shallower version of Tolkien’s story, but still succeeds as a different version, its own act of sub-creation. Writes Paxson, “But is it valid to have more than one version, or vision, of a tale? I would say yes—if the most important thing about the book is in fact not the style, but the story.” In her essay “Elisions and Ellipses: Counsel and Council in Tolkien’s and Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings” Judith Kollman shows how Jackson’s Aragorn every inch becomes a mighty king and assumes the mantle of responsibility, even though he took a different path to get there than did Tolkien’s Aragorn. The most incisive comment on judging Jackson’s films as films comes from Victoria Gaydosik, who in her essay “Crimes Against the Book? The Transformation of Tolkien’s Arwen from Page to Screen and the Abandonment of the Psyche Archetype” writes, “In my opinion, when we evaluate the success of the film with reference to the book, a judgment that focuses more fully on how well the final cinematic work turned out is closer to capturing their real relative merits than one that emphasizes the discrepancies between them to the disadvantage of either.” Even oft-reviled scriptwriter Fran Walsh notes in a commentary on the Two Towers DVD that the films couldn’t be as good, but have to be judged in a different light, as films. “All cinema story telling, to a degree, is shallow—I mean, that’s the nature of the medium. You’ve got two or three hours to present a world and a dense story with a hundred themes…you really can’t have anything that comes close to the depth of the books or the experience of the books,” Walsh says. “We really wanted to give the fans of the books something that they would love and a story that—that would reflect the book in a truthful way.”

Tolkien on Film also includes two essays on fan fiction, a phenomenon that’s always existed on the periphery of Tolkien fandom but took off after the Jackson films. I found their inclusion here to be a bit of a head-scratcher. Even though fan fiction is in large part inspired by the films (and it can be argued, loosely, that Jackson’s interpretation is a form of “fan fiction”), there’s no actual film critique or analysis in the essays, equal weight is given to fan fiction that’s derivative of the books only, and in all honesty my interest in fan fiction is less than zero. Again, I would have preferred to see this space given over to other aspects of film analysis.

The best critical review of the Jackson films that I’ve read is not in Tolkien on Film; to no surprise it comes from the pen of Tom Shippey in his collection Roots and Branches. Shippey identifies problems with the films, but says Jackson and his screenwriters were well-versed in the material and gives them credit for taking bits of Tolkien and using them in different places than they appear in the book to great effect (for example, moving parts of “The Shadow of the Past” and “The Council of Elrond” into the arresting prologue). He also thinks the film gets much of the broader themes and narrative core of the book right, including “the differing styles of heroism, the need for pity as well as courage, the vulnerability of the good, [and] the true cost of evil. It was brave of [Jackson] to stay with the sad, muted, ambiguous ending of the original, with all that it leaves unsaid.” I agree with Shippey.

Real vs. the Unreal, Worlds Other Than Our Own, and the Starting Line of Fantasy

2012-01-19T22:33:00.000-05:00

Whenever discussions of fantasy fiction arise, the question of “which came first?” inevitably follows. Newbies mistakenly think that J.R.R. Tolkien started the genre, overlooking authors like William Morris and E.R. Eddison who had already begun a rich tradition of secondary world fantasy. The same arguments swirl over the many sub-genres of fantasy, too. For example, most believe that Robert E. Howard is the proper father of swords and sorcery, beginning with his 1929 short story “The Shadow Kingdom.” But others have pled the case for Lord Dunsany’s “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” (1908), and so on.

Once begun, these arguments inevitably reach further and further back in time. George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858) was published before Morris’s The Well at the World’s End (1896), didn’t you know? Oh yeah, what about Malory’s LeMorte D’Arthur (1485)? I’ve got that beat: The Odyssey (8th Century BC). I see your Odyssey and raise you The Epic of Gilgamesh (1300 BC, or thereabouts). And so on. Until it seems that fantasy has always been with us.

But perhaps that isn’t the case. In an introduction to the 1988 anthology Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, editor David Hartwell draws one of the most neatly defined starting lines for fantasy I’ve encountered. Hartwell describes fantasy as a story written deliberately as unreal, and one which does not take place in the real world.

To read the rest of this post, visit the Black Gate website.

The Name of the Wind: The Emperor may have clothes, but they don’t fit me

2012-01-13T19:58:00.001-05:00

What do you want out of your fantasy? Exotic places? People different than the ones you know? High language? The clangor of battle? Wonders cold and distant and magnificent? The calling of silver trumpets? You don’t get any of this in Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind. It feels very … pedestrian, and common. Rothfuss’ created world is very much like our own, and is altogether too much with us. Worst of all, its protagonist is annoying as hell. In my opinion.

I was fully prepared to love The Name of the Wind. I knew about the overwhelmingly positive reviews on Amazon, and the rave reviews from bloggers whose tastes and opinions frequently mirror my own. I was excited to see fantasy/SF luminaries like Robin Hobb, Ursula LeGuin, and Orson Scott Card (“He's the great new fantasy writer we've been waiting for,” the latter wrote) singing its praises, and was fully prepared to do the same.

But the long and short of it is this: I didn’t love this book, and for long stretches, I didn’t even like it. Which makes me a bit sad, as I too was anticipating the arrival of a new great hope to emerge from (or rescue, depending on your point of view) the current crop of fantasy writers. As it turns out, I’m still waiting.

All that said, I recognize The Name of the Wind as a pretty solid artistic endeavor. In no way would I describe it as objectively bad, and the more I thought about it, I realized that it’s just not to my tastes. So I thought I would detail in this review why I didn’t like it, and then speculate on a few of the reasons why so many others have found it appealing. Of course, since I didn’t like The Name of the Wind very much, this review will spend much more time on the former, so be prepared.

The Name of the Wind is the first in a planned trilogy called The Kingkiller Chronicles. It details the life and times of a young man named Kvothe, a brilliant and talented magician doing his best to stay out of the limelight by posing as a simple innkeeper. When we meet Kvothe he’s in his early to mid 20s and is already a legend, though the events of his life have been exaggerated and mythologized. The Name of the Wind is essentially about a single day in which Kvothe sets the record straight for the loremaster Chronicler by giving the latter the full and true account of his youth and his subsequent rise to fame. We learn about Kvothe’s upbringing with a traveling group of minstrels and performers, to his days as a homeless street urchin, up through his first year at a University for wizards.

The Name of the Wind is epic fantasy length-wise (approximately 700 pages, and 23 discs in the audio version), but has nothing to do with J.R.R. Tolkien. It has everything to do with Harry Potter—Potter with a harder edge, yes, but Potter, unmistakably. When I read the description of the book and some of the reviews on Amazon I was expecting something closer to Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea series—mythic, serious, a book with lessons to teach us about human nature and our place in the world. Instead I got a harmless, overlong soap opera.

I think we need a new name for this type of fantasy. This “positive” review (“Lovely and Undemanding” by Jo Walton or Tor.com) expresses one of my problems with the novel: its lightweight nature. Writes Walton, “It’s not very demanding—and I wonder if that’s precisely part of its wide appeal and success... I wonder if “undemanding” is something we actually seek in fantasy, if it’s part of the star quality that DAW instantly recognised in Rothfuss? … The Name of the Wind is a lovely read, but at the end there isn’t much to say about it.”

There is something to say about The Name of the Wind, of course, but the word that comes to mind is ordinary. I don’t mind applicability to the real world in my fantasy fiction, but what I don’t want is 1:1 equivalency. Aside from some sprinkled anachronisms (calling a week “a span,” or invoking the name of “Tehlu” instead of God) Rothfuss’ world is too much like our own. Half or more of the book is about Kvothe’s struggles with … student loans. Most of the problems Kvothe encounters are pedestrian: Young love, separation from his parents, completion of school projects on time, teachers who just don’t understand him. His college days also suffer from what I would call 90210 syndrome—despite the heavy workload we’re assured he’s suffering under, Kvothe seems to have endless time for hanging out with friends and sipping wine at the bar, or saving the town from marauding dragons. Which is much cooler than schoolwork, of course, but not entirely realistic. This is a problem, given that one of the conceits Rothfuss employs in The Name of The Wind is that he’s telling us a “real” story as opposed to a cliché fantasy. He uses the construction, “Now if this were a book, then X would have happened, but this is not a fantasy, and so here’s the real truth,” time and time again. But the problem is we never once feel like we’re in something other than a well planned, well coordinated, safe fantasy. Rothfuss does not have the maturity as a writer to pull off this conceit, in my opinion. Despite its claims to the contrary The Name of the Wind is a genre novel in every sense of the word. Again, that’s not a bad thing, and many readers have enjoyed it and will continue to do so. But let’s not pretend it’s anything more than another Belgariad.

This brings me to my first major problem with The Name of The Wind: I don’t like Kvothe. I don’t need to identify with the main character to enjoy a story, but I have to at least enjoy residing in their head space. I come up just short of actively despising the dude (Rothfuss does deserve praise for evoking that reaction in me, but I would bet it wasn’t his intent). The only way to explain Kvothe is that he is some avatar of the Gods. It’s utterly impossible for a boy his age to know what he knows. A precocious human child does not even come close to explaining his impossible adroitness and encyclopedic knowledge. Even after spending three years as a homeless street urchin, during which he did little but beg for coins and bread, Kvothe can rattle off every historical and anatomic question thrown at him by a brilliant panel of instructors to gain admission to the university. At one point he finds a dead man with a crossbow and knows how long the man has been dead, the type of crossbow he’s using, its cost, its usage, the fact that it’s illegal, etc. This is supposedly a medieval setting and yet what we have in Kvothe is a medieval McGyver, a walking Wikipedia page, applying scientific rigor and clear-headed rationality to every situation he encounters (another thing that irks me: The medieval tech level of Rothfuss’ world makes no sense. We have a college of brilliant teachers who have mastered anatomy and physics and every natural science known to man, yet are stuck reading rare books over candlelight and riding on horses).

One Amazon reviewer said that “Kvothe's cockiness, arrogance, and impatience are constantly and quite believably landing him in trouble.” Except that they really don’t. Kvothe is not cocky and arrogant, save on a very superficial level. Impatient, yes. But his impatience lands him in minor scrapes from which he emerges undamaged or perhaps lightly scathed. He is, basically, perfect in every way, able to overcome every challenge with ease. For example, Kvothe takes the stage at a prestigious tavern to “earn his pipes,” a challenge which requires him to play before a tough, knowledgeable crowd to earn the distinction of master musician (yes, he’s an incredibly gifted lute player too. I didn’t mention that yet?). A jealous student sabotages Kvothe’s lute string so that it breaks at the height of his performance. But Kvothe is unflappable. It’s not even a real crisis, just a chance for Kvothe to again prove that he is that much better than we could have even thought. He finishes the most difficult song in the land with five strings and doesn’t miss a beat. Afterwards the audience weeps uncontrollably. There always seems to be a crowd around to applaud his every word. Hordes of faceless onlookers cheer his every act, applaud his every song, laugh at his every joke.

Kvothe’s only reported “fault” is his awkwardness with women and his inability to understand them, yet during one scene he compares his love Denna to a half dozen flowers with practiced, poetic ease, wooing her as no suitor before ever could. Denna returns the favor, spending paragraphs describing how Kvothe’s eyes change color when his emotions are aroused and how beautiful his red hair is. Kvothe flatters her back, telling her that only one other person has ever noticed that his eyes change color… this is bad romance novel stuff.

As for its originality? Sorry, I’m not seeing that either. The magic system seems very much cribbed from Ursula LeGuin, the conceit that knowing the true name of something grants you power over it.

So after all that grousing what is there to recommend about The Name of the Wind? At the sentence level Rothfuss is a pretty good writer. I think he’s better than Terry Brooks, and better than Stephen Donaldson. The Name of the Wind is compulsively readable, which is no mean feat. Stephen King has been labeled by a number of critics as pedestrian or lightweight, yet most of these guys can cite chapter and verse of his books and have apparently read all of them straight through. That’s because he’s so darned readable. So is Rothfuss. The story is easy to follow and carries you along to the end.

Second: Rothfuss gives you a lot of cool stuff to gawk at. Teachers engaged in a decades long war over the proper way to shelve books. A room where papers are cast to the wind and land on tiles labeled with “yes,” “no” and “maybe,” answering your questions unerringly like a medieval magic eight ball. And so on. Again, very Harry Potter-esque with its fine imaginative touches. Rothfuss also embeds lots of “Easter Eggs” and bits that prove significant later on, or lead the reader to speculate about their importance in the story. There’s lots of chatter by fans about why the evil Chandrian are so secretive, what the Underthing (mysterious passages and rooms beneath the school) are all about, and so on.

Yet a third reason: The Name of the Wind is a nice change of pace from the “GrimDark” fantasies of Joe Abercrombie, George RR Martin, and Richard Morgan, where everyone is a bastard and ends up raped, or dead, or both. We can cheer for Kvothe, and enjoy his scrapes, and perhaps remember what it was like to love our first girl with an unrequited love, or when we could barely scrape together six bucks on a Thursday night for a pizza.

In summary, The Name of the Wind is the product of a good writer with a lot of potential but did not deliver what I was looking for. Your mileage will vary, of course.

This post also appears on SFFaudio.com.

Some new books received: Styrbiorn the Strong, Tolkien on Film, and more

2012-01-10T19:42:00.001-05:00

Purchased with an Amazon giftcard I received for Christmas, here are some new books that I'm really looking forward to reading and reviewing.

Vikings and E.R. Eddison ... how can this fail to be awesome? Also, how many authors would pay to have their cover blurbed by Tolkien?

I've seen better covers, but contents look great, a mix of positive and negative critical reviews by scholar-types. Good food for thought pre- The Hobbit.

Now that's a cover... you can never go wrong with Harlan Ellison. I bought it used and so didn't "pay the writer." Don't kill me Harlan.

Tolkien’s Nobel Snub

2012-01-05T21:54:00.000-05:00

The 1961 nominations for the Nobel prize in literature apparently included The Lord of the Rings, and it seems Tolkien was dismissed rather out of hand for the award, according to an article in the online edition of The Guardian today.

I’m not here to argue whether The Lord of the Rings deserved a Nobel that year. Not having read any of its competition (save for a fair bit of Robert Frost), it would be rather presumptive of me to do so. But I can’t help but notice that the reason for its rejection seems rather flimsy. Nobel jury member Anders Österling wrote in a brief commentary that “The prose of Tolkien – who was nominated by his friend and fellow fantasy author CS Lewis – ‘has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality’, according to The Guardian.

Tolkien’s prose—which ranged from the colloquial speech of the Hobbits to the high medieval style—is not to everyone’s liking, certainly. Obviously it was not up to par for the Nobel voting panel nor in particular to Österling (who comes across in the article as the Simon Cowell of 1960s literary academics with his scathing comments about Frost and Lawrence Durrell). But we now know that, as a master philologist, Tolkien chose his words with great care and alternated between prose styles for deliberate effect. As Tom Shippey demonstrated in J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tolkien incorporated a modern prose style into Middle-Earth when he chose to do so (for the speech of Saruman and Smaug, for example) as a critique of modernism and the doublespeak of modern politicians. These are contrasted against archaic constructions Tolkien employed to convey deep age and timelessness and a high seriousness to his tale, as in the speech of an Elrond or a crowned Aragorn.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

A Texan tale-spinner in J.R.R. Tolkien's court

2012-01-03T21:05:00.000-05:00

I had my first book review published in Mythprint, the journal of the Mythopoeic Society. The Mythopoeic Society is an international organization dedicated to promoting the study of fantastic literature with an emphasis on Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. My review however was not on one of the works of the Inklings but of Robert E. Howard's Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures.

This is not exactly a barbaric coup of the Mythopoeic Society as Mythprint publishes reviews of a wide range of fantasy and historical fiction. But I am proud to have played perhaps some small part in bringing Howard, and in particular Howard's lesser-known characters like Cormac FitzGeoffrey and Agnes de Chastillon, to (potentially) a new audience.

The review initially appeared in the October 2011 issue of Mythprint but you can also read it in its entirety here on the Mythopeic Society website: http://www.mythsoc.org/reviews/howard-sword-woman/.

Sword Woman is the last in the Del Rey line and is highly recommended, by the way. In addition to wonderful stories and some fine scholarly essays it features a handful of excellent Howard poems, too. This was my first time reading “The Outgoing of Sigurd the Jerusalem-Farer," and I found it, well, positively Tolkien-ian. In it Sigurd seeks some "doom beyond the dooms" across an expanse of sea, rather like the Númenórean prince Aldarion of Unfinished Tales whose heart may have belonged to Erendis, but whose passion lay with the sea:

The fires roared in the skalli-hall,
And a woman begged me stay—
But the bitter night was falling
And the cold wind calling
Across the moaning spray.

How could I stay in the feasting-hall
When the wild wind walked the sea?
The feet of the winds drew out my soul
To the grey waves and the cloud’s scroll
Where the gulls wheel and the whales roll,
And the abyss roars to me.

Man the sweeps and bend the sail—
We need no oars tonight
For the sharp sleet drives before the gale
That dashes the spray across the rail
To freeze on helmet and corselet scale,
And the waves are running white.

I could not bide in the feasting-hall
Where the great fires light the rooms—
For the winds are walking the night for me
And I must follow where gaunt lands be,
Seeking, beyond some nameless sea,
The dooms beyond the dooms.

Godspeed, Glenn Lord

2012-01-02T16:07:00.000-05:00

I'm late to the game on this one, but I wanted to add my condolences to the family of Glenn Lord, father of Robert E. Howard studies, who passed away on Dec. 31 at the age of 80. I never met nor corresponded with Lord but like every other REH fan in existence I'm deeply in his debt.

Mark Finn, author of Blood & Thunder, posted a nice remembrance over on his blog about Lord's incalcuable work as a collector, preserver, and publisher of Howard's life works. There's also a wonderful co-post by John O'Neill and Barbara Barrett over at Black Gate that's worth checking out. Al Harron did a nice job over on the Conan Movie Blog with his post, Glenn Lord, the Greatest Howard Fan.

Rest in peace, Mr. Lord.

Let's hope 2012 is a better year for Howard fans; 2011 was pretty tough all around.

Closing out 2011 with a glimpse of Heroic Visions

2011-12-28T10:33:00.000-05:00

So I had given Jessica Amanda Salmonson some hard ink a while back for her less than stellar appraisal of Robert E. Howard in the introduction to her 1983 anthology Heroic Visions. I stand by my previous statements that a breezy thumbnail sketch of the heroic fantasy/swords and sorcery genre is not the best spot for criticizing the modern founder of the genre. That said, and having now read the whole thing, I will add that Salmonson put together a fairly enjoyable anthology. Not great, but a fun year-end read.

A couple of these tales really push the boundaries of heroic fantasy but that was Salmonson’s expressed purpose: to prove that heroic fantasy/swords and sorcery is about more than just muscled warriors wielding swords. Heroic Visions is heavy on women writers and depicts several strong female protagonists and powerful visions of femininity. Says Salmonson:

Without denying Howard’s genius or even qualifying it, it must be recognized that glorifying his rudimentary sword and sorcery as “ideal” heroic fantasy is akin to assuming Doc Smith’s old-fashioned space opera is “ideal” science fiction. No area of fantasy should be so stagnant and devoid of stylistic and conceptual growth or variety.

Placed in the context of the times I have some sympathy for Salmonson’s introduction. Heroic Visions was produced at the tail end of a flood of bad S&S that would ultimately hurt the genre, similar to what happened with the collapse of the horror fiction market in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Robert Jordan was writing Conan pastiches in the early 1980s. The 1970s was a time of carbon-copy barbarians named Brak and Kothar and Thongor. Michael Moorcock was pumping out his most hackneyed creations around this time, too. To be frank, the quality of such stories was all over the map. Heroic Visions was Salmonson’s attempt to stem the tide of crap and steer the genre back to respectability.

Heroic Visions leads off with a Fritz Leiber Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story that had never before seen print. “The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars” is not at the same level as Leiber’s earlier material and takes a while to get going, but is fun enough with a satisfying ending. Its strength is in its style and panache.

“Sister Light, Sister Dark” by Jane Yolen is in my opinion the best story in the collection. My only previous exposure to Yolen was reading her illustrated children’s book Owl Moon to my daughters. I won’t be reading them the bloody, violent, and lusty tale “Sister Light, Sister Dark” but I enjoyed the heck out of it, and it demonstrates Yolen’s versatility as a writer.

After those two we start to get to the genre benders. “Dancers in the Time-Flux” by Robert Silverberg is a borderline heroic fantasy story that I thought belonged here; Michael Bishop’s “The Monkey’s Bride,” though a decent enough story, does not. In the former a Dutch ship commander from the late 16th century is whisked away to an impossibly alien-appearing earth untold millennia in the future. He quickly falls in with a metallic, bug-like, multi-legged/armed human life form called Bhengarn the Traveler. Though they seemingly share nothing in common the two are both travelers in a spiritual and physical sense, and forge a friendship in a trial of endurance and strength by climbing a mighty ice wall. “The Monkey’s Bride” is a similarly odd tale about a young woman whose father against her will promises her hand in marriage to the monkey-man Don Ignacio. Fighting bitterly against her unfair fate, in the end she comes to love Ignacio for his great heart and patience. Though it’s a decent enough story and certainly of a fantasy bent, I would argue that it’s very much out of place in an anthology of heroic fantasy (the conflict is largely internal to the protganist and is resolved mainly through slow acceptance of her circumstances, not heroic action)

Heroic Visions contains a couple other stories worth mentioning. Phyllis Ann Karr’s “Tales Told to a Toymaker” features an outsider’s look at the heroic life by someone who could have been a hero, but opted to spend his days working in a toymaker’s shop. “Each of us climbs his own mountain,” the adventurer tells the toymaker. I also very much enjoyed Gordon Derevanchuk’s “Vovko,” which draws upon little-tapped Slavic lore and includes hodgepodge appearances by a vodyanyk, or a sea-demon, a warrior who wears the pelt and can assume the form of a vovkulaka, or werewolf, the witch Baba-Yaga, and a venture into the shadowed realm of the dark, accursed Slavic deity Chernobog.

***

And with Heroic Visions I was able to complete my modest goal of 52 books in 52 weeks in 2011. Other recent reads included Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. I’m hoping to better this total in 2012 and am already deep into two books to kick off the new year: Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind and Unfinished Tales by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Updated Blood and Thunder Portends Good Start to 2012 for Robert E. Howard Fans

2011-12-22T21:57:00.000-05:00

2011 hasn’t been the kindest year for fans of Robert E. Howard. January saw the end of the fine Del Rey series of Howard originals with the publication of the 11th and final volume Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures (sigh). In August we got a crummy new film purporting to be REH’s Conan that resembles no story the Texan ever wrote, and is currently sporting a woeful 22% “rotten” rating over at Rotten Tomatoes (still think you can tell a better story than REH, Marcus Nispel?)

But the waning days of 2011 have brought a bit of good cheer to brighten the day of Howard fans everywhere: News of the publication of a new and improved second edition of the REH biography Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard by Mark Finn.

Monkeybrain books published the first edition of the Blood and Thunder in 2006 in paperback; the second edition is being published in a limited run of 150 hardcover copies by the Robert E. Howard Foundation at a cost of $50 ($45 for members of the foundation). You can pre-order it now and it’s expected to ship by the end of January 2012. Here’s a description from the REH Foundation webpage:

Alongside the success of “Conan the Barbarian” was a neatly packaged, sound byte biography of a tortured young man, full of volcanic rages, playing at war inside his head, while the citizens in the small town of Cross Plains laughed at him behind his back—a man so undone by his circumstances and so strangely devoted to his mother that, on her deathbed, he pre-empted seeing her die by committing suicide.

In Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, author Mark Finn dispels many of those old, outdated myths that have grown up around Howard and his fictional creations. Armed with twenty-five years of research and a wealth of historical documents, Finn paints a very different picture from the one that millions of fans of Conan have been sold throughout the years.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

The Hobbit trailer

2011-12-21T14:19:00.002-05:00

Joining the chorus weighing in on the new The Hobbit trailer…

Despite the lukewarm reception it’s getting by James at Grognardia and Al over on The Blog that Time Forgot, I’m rather encouraged. Is it too nerdy to admit to daydreaming of a day spent watching all five movies consecutively (extended versions, of course)? How many hours would it require? How much food and other supplies would I need to complete such an adventure? Would I return the same?

First, what I like. Thorin is bad ass—as he should be. I’ve heard some claim that The Hobbit should be a whimsical children’s fantasy complete with bumbling dwarves. There is some of that in the book, particularly early on (and we see that in the trailer with dwarves tossing crockery in Bag End—I hope we also get a rousing rendition of “Chip the glasses, crack the plates!”). But remember that this too is the Thorin of Tolkien’s novel:

Thorin wielded his axe with mighty strokes, and nothing seemed to harm him. “To me! To me! Elves and Men! To me! O my kinsfolk!” he cried, and his voice shook like a horn in the valley.

Everything I’ve seen of Martin Freeman makes me happy. Based on the trailer and the previously released “making of” clips, he seems perfectly suited to the part. The casting of Bilbo and his performance is by far and away the most important ingredient in the success of this film, in my opinion, and so far, so good on that front.

Of course, I love the singing. I’m a little bit disappointed in the criticism coming from Pat from Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist who asks, “Why must they sing???” Really? Have you read the books, Pat? You do know that the scene of the dwarves singing at Bag-End is probably the most iconic scene in the entire book, or at least on par with “Riddles in the Dark”, and that there would have been open revolt without it? That the song establishes the mood and the atmosphere and the stage for the “why” behind the entire quest?

Sure, I’ve got a few reservations. I’m not quite sure what’s going on with Galadriel brushing away Gandalf’s hair from his face. I’m more concerned to see so much heavy foreshadowing of the portentous events of The Lord of the Rings. Thorin’s “Nor will I be responsible for his fate” comment in reference to Bilbo implies that he knows that the latter will play a critical part in much larger events to come. I hope the emphasis is on telling a fine story that stands on its own and not in developing a LOTR prequel. We’ll see around this time next year. But overall, I’m pleased.

Tolkien porn

2011-12-16T21:04:00.000-05:00

This could be the most beautiful book shelf I've ever laid eyes upon, at least this side of Middle-Earth.

Photo is from the blog of Tolkien scholars Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, co-authors of the indespensable reference The J.R.R Tolkien Companion and Guide.

2001: A Space Odyssey, a review

2011-12-13T21:59:00.001-05:00

Warning: Spoilers

Our species has come a long way in what amounts to a relative eyeblink of history. From apes quarreling in the dirt over scraps of food we’ve progressed to feudal monarchies to our present democracies. From bone tools we invented firearms and the printing press, and now enjoy incredible computing power and life-saving drugs and surgical equipment.

But some things haven’t changed a lot. Humanity continues to remain stagnant physically. Our houses of flesh still chain us to the earth. Although our life spans have increased and we’ve eradicated many diseases, bright minds old and young are snuffed out every day by untimely heart attacks and strokes. We’re also limited by many of our old prejudices and warlike tendencies. While the threat of the cold war and mutual nuclear annihilation has passed, national security is still a grave concern, as the threat of international terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons and dirty bombs into the hands of volatile countries are existential threats to our survival.

Dystopias like Blade Runner and 1984 argue that things may get much worse, not better, for humanity. But not according to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick’s film expresses the hope that one day we will evolve beyond our physical and societal handicaps, and will either come face to face with God or achieve a form of technological singularity (depending on your beliefs).

While I’m a huge fan of the film 2001 until recently I had never read Arthur C. Clarke’s companion novel (1968). I’m glad I did, as it’s not a mere 1:1 translation. Written concurrently with Kubrick's movie, it deviates in a few places and also serves to explain some of the more vexing sequences of the film. For example, the movie does not explain why HAL-9000, a seemingly perfect computer incapable of error, goes off-kilter and murders the ship’s occupants. The book offers a credible explanation: HAL knows the real purpose of the starship Discovery’s mission (to investigate a likely second alien monolith on one of the moons of Saturn) and is asked to keep it a secret from the two pilots. This constant deception drives HAL crazy. Writes Clarke, “For like his makers, Hal had been created innocent; but, all too soon, a snake had entered his electronic Eden. For the last hundred million miles, he had been brooding over a secret he could not share…he had been living a lie; and the time was fast approaching when his colleagues must learn that he had helped to deceive them.”

The book also offers a clearer picture of how aliens influenced our evolution by providing the rough operation and purpose of the mysterious monoliths. While Clarke’s writing does not surpass the amazing images of space that made the film so famous, his descriptions instill the same awe. I say with complete honesty that I did not understand the massive scale of Jupiter and Saturn and the true vastness of space until I read Clarke’s novel. I also learned much about the incredible danger of operating in a vacuum millions of miles from earth.

There are a few things I thought the film did better. Hal is much more menacing with his omnipresent glowing red eye in the movie, and Kubrick does a better job than Clarke making him/it feel like another member of the crew. I was sad to see the book omit the scene where he reads the crewmen’s lips.

2001 is a rich mine of ideas and offers many interpretations, but one of the things that most interests me is its idea of evolution post-Darwin. 2001 postulates that we will continue to evolve and overcome physical matter. It’s not even a question in Clarke’s universe: Our species will outgrow physical limitations and its awful tendency to kill one another, and eventually reach a new level of consciousness/conscience. It’s only a matter of time. The most moving scene in the novel is when this is revealed to astronaut David Bowman, shown to him by the aliens on a guided tour through a star gate. Bowman cries as the secrets of universe are laid bare. Even time will one day lose its sway. We will see all those whom we have loved once again. This is what the mysterious Starchild at the end of the film/book represents: A being that has transcended its physical form and evolved into a new level of being and consciousness, master of the universe, and at peace.

Although Clarke was an atheist to the end 2001 is nevertheless profoundly hopeful. We may have overshot Clarke’s prediction by 10 years (and counting) and at times seem like we’re making no progress as a species, but we can’t lose hope. We must continue to grow and evolve if we’re to survive. This is a planet of finite resources and finite space. We need to point ourselves towards the stars. Our space program may seem wasteful or extravagant when immediate issues like poverty and hunger are continued scourges, but we have to move onwards and upwards.

There’s way more going in 2001 than a brief review here can cover. It’s also a meditation on our tools, the things we rely on every day that aren’t part of our bodies but are nevertheless inseparable from who we are as a species. Because our first tools were used for destruction (hunting prey, and killing our own species) they’ve conditioned us to violence and to a lack of empathy, even more so now that weapons can kill from long range at the push of a button. Despite our love for computers and gadgets, tools are just in the end physical objects, and they alone will not our save our species. 2001 also introduces a fascinating conceit that a remote race of aliens influenced our evolution 3,000,000 years ago, and is still watching from afar, waiting for the day that we will take our place with them among the stars. Most depictions of aliens (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Independence Day, War of the Worlds) reduce them to hostile invaders, but 2001 postulates that any race of significantly advanced beings must be benevolent, as a warlike race with the capacity for inter-galaxy travel would have surely annihilated itself with its advanced weaponry were it not equally advanced morally and ethically.

2001: A Space Odyssey is (like a lot of SF) a book of ideas, and does not spend much effort on character development (we barely know who Bowman is; HAL is as much of a human as any of the characters). But if you like fiction that makes you think, and values substance over style, or if you enjoyed the film and want to learn more about its meaning, Clarke's work is certainly worth reading.

Enjoying the Unique Character of Karl Edward Wagner’s Dark Crusade

2011-12-08T21:15:00.000-05:00

Why has swords and sorcery languished while epic fantasy enjoys a wide readership? In an age of diminished attention spans and the proliferation of Twitter and video games, it’s hard to explain why ponderous five and seven and 12 book series dominate fantasy fiction while lean and mean swords and sorcery short stories and novels struggle to find markets (Black Gate and a few other outlets excepted).

During a recent reading of the late Karl Edward Wagner’s Dark Crusade (1976) a potential answer coalesced: Many readers want and expect deep characterization in their fiction, and it’s simply not a particularly strong suit of the swords and sorcery genre (or at least of classic swords and sorcery, circa 1930 through the early 1980s). Wagner is one of a handful of classic swords and sorcery authors to whom history has not been particularly kind*. His dark, God-accursed hero-villain Kane deserves a place alongside Conan or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in the roll of great genre heroes, but is sadly left off many “best of” swords and sorcery lists. Relegated to the status of cult figure, Kane is the darling of heroic fantasy connoisseurs but unread of by many casual genre fans, and unheard of by most of the larger fantasy fan base.

Kane and many of his swords and sorcery ilk are not what most modern readers would consider fully realized characters. You just don’t get anything close to the same level of introspection and cradle to the grave development of Kane in Dark Crusade as you do of, say, Kvothe in Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

What I've read so far this year

2011-12-04T20:10:00.000-05:00

As I stated before I set out to read a book a week in 2011. It's a pretty modest goal, but I'm not the fastest reader ever and have many competing interests for my time. But I'm happy to say that I'm on pace to meet that goal, with 49 titles read through 48 weeks. Here's the list (including my ratings):

1. Roots and Branches, Tom Shippey, 4 stars

2. Legend, David Gemmell, 4 stars

3. The Sword of Rhiannon, Leigh Brackett, 3.5 stars

4. Grails: Quests of the Dawn, Richard Gilliam, Mercedes Lackey, Andre Norton editors, 3 stars

5. God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens, 3.5 stars

6. The Burning Land, Bernard Cornwell 3.5 stars

7. No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy, 4.5 stars

8. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, J.R.R. Tolkien, 3.5 stars

9. Resolute Determination: Napoleon and the French Empire (The Modern Scholar), 3.5 stars

10. The Company They Keep, Diana Glyer, 4 stars

11. The Desert of Souls, Howard Andrew Jones, 3.5 stars

12. The Brothers Bulger, Howie Carr, 3 stars

13. Phantastes, George MacDonald, 3.5 stars

14. Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, Jane Chance editor, 3.5 stars

15. One Who Walked Alone, Novalyne Price Ellis, 4 stars

16. Damnation Alley, Roger Zelazny, 3 stars

17. Walden, Henry David Thoreau, 4 stars

18. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott, 4 stars

19. Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, John Joseph Adams editor, 3.5 stars

20. Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson, 3.5 stars

21. The Broken Sword, Poul Anderson, 4.5 stars

22. The Dirt, Motley Crue, 3 stars

23. Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 4 stars

24. Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings, Lin Carter, 3.5 stars

25. The Dark Tide, Dennis McKiernan, 3 stars

26. Watership Down, Richard Adams, 5 stars

27. Shadows of Doom, Dennis McKiernan, 2.5 stars

28. The Darkest Day, Dennis McKiernan, 3 stars

29. The Allegory of Love, C.S. Lewis, 4 stars

30. Imaro, Charles Saunders, 3.5 stars

31. Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures, Robert E. Howard, 4 stars

32. The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman, 4 stars

33. The Subtle Knife, Philip Pullman, 3.5 stars

34. The Fantastic Swordsmen, L. Sprague de Camp ed., 4 stars

35. Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis, 3.5 stars

36. Warriors, George R.R. Martin, Gardner Dozois eds., 4 stars

37. The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch, 3.5 stars

38. The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman, 3.5 stars

39. The Case for God, Karen Armstrong, 4 stars

40. The Golden Apples of the Sun, Ray Bradbury, 4 stars

41. Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison ed., 4 stars

42. The Rising, Brian Keene, 3.5 stars

43. The Undiscovered Self, C.G. Jung, 4.5 stars

44. Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead, John Skipp editor, 4 stars

45. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny, 4 stars

46. The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien, 5 stars

47. The Demon of Scattery, Poul Anderson and Mildred Downey Broxon, 3.5 stars

48. Bringing Down the House, Ben Mezrich, 3 stars

49. Dark Crusade, Karl Edward Wagner, 4 stars

My eclectic tastes are on full display here. There's a lot of swords and sorcery (Dark Crusade, Imaro, The Fantastic Swordsmen, Legend) mixed with epic fantasy (FOTR, His Dark Materials trilogy, Iron Tower trilogy). I've been picking off some of the SF/fantasy classics (Lord of Light, Phantastes, Golden Apples of the Sun) while showing my weakness for zombie stories (The Rising, Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead). I've got a fair bit of non-fiction mixed in too: Everything from both sides of the God debate (Hitchens vs. Armstrong), to an MIT card-counting ring (Bringing Down the House), to autobiographical material (Howard, C.S. Lewis) to Jung. If I'm interested in it, I'll read it.

This exercise has again underscored the need to increase my reading speed. I frankly have no idea how anyone can read 300 or 400 books in a year, but I've seen people claiming those totals. I am giving some serious thought to setting aside a future slot to a speed-reading title.

The Demon of Scattery, a review

2011-12-01T21:58:00.003-05:00

I’ve had the Poul Anderson/Mildred Downey Broxon collaboration The Demon of Scattery (1979) sitting on my bookshelf for ages, and this past weekend I was finally able to take it down, dust it off, and breeze through its lushly illustrated 207 pages in a few hours. It wasn’t really what I was expecting, both in a good and a not so good way.

I think I hesitated reading it all these years because of its cover. It features a sorceress summoning up a snake-demon, though not the kind of sorceress I prefer—there’s far too much Marion Zimmer Bradley and not enough Weird Tales in her attire (yeah, I’m kind of shallow like that. And I have been known to judge a book by its cover).

I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge the book, of course, as the tale does not contain the scene depicted at right. Instead, what you get is a historical fiction-infused fantasy tale set on Scattery Island, a real place off the coast of Ireland. Uninhabited today, it once was home to a monastery that was subject to a few Viking raids in the ninth and 10th century. According to historical notes at the back of the book, the Vikings raided the monastery in 816 and 835 AD but then did not return to it for more than 100 years, despite the fact that Scattery Island was a strategic location for launching raids on the mainland. Scattery was also said to be home to a monster named Cata that once prowled its coastline, which may have been the reason the Vikings later gave it a wide berth. In short, the historical record contains plenty of raw elements for the makings of a fine tale.

The story is pretty grim. It features an Irish nun, Brigit, who is captured in a raid by the Dane Halldor, who commands three longships on a voyage of plunder along the coast of Ireland. Despite very rough treatment at the hands of the Vikings Brigit is a good Christian and nurses Halldor’s son Ranulf back to health after a monk staves in his head with a rock. Later, and despite her growing feelings for Halldor (who is more at home on the deck of a merchant ship and longs to leave the Viking life and take Brigit home as his mistress to live peacefully ever after), Brigit invokes a powerful curse on the raiders and summons Cata from the deeps to exact revenge. In between are some bloody raids and the clash of pagan vs. Christian beliefs.

The book features a framing device lifted from a minor scene in Anderson’s fine novel The Broken Sword. Skafloc, hero of that novel, and Irish demigod Mananaan MacLir relay the events of The Demon of Scattery to pass the time during a long sea-voyage. After encountering the pair on the opening pages of The Demon of Scattery I was hopeful that I might have stumbled upon another The Broken Sword, but unfortunately, The Demon of Scattery is not at that level. The prose is decent but not up the caliber of Anderson’s best Viking works, including Hrolf Kraki’s Saga and War of the Gods. Not knowing who wrote which sections, or whether it was a true collaboration, I can only infer that The Demon of Scattery must have been written largely by Broxon, a relatively obscure author who published mostly short fiction and a few essays in the 1970s and 80s (though she apparently also wrote a sequel to the wonderful H. Rider Haggard novel Eric Brighteyes under the pseudonym Sigfriour Skaldaspillir. Who knew?)

My copy features over 50 pages of interior black and white line art by Alicia Austin. To be honest, much of it is rather uninspiring, though it’s somewhat medieval in feel and has a dated charm.

If you like Viking inspired historical fiction and are looking for something quick to pass an afternoon, I’d recommend The Demon of Scattery. But you’ll do much better with any of Anderson’s solo works.

The Walking Dead Season 2: Stop and Smell the Dessicated Roses

2011-11-24T23:13:00.000-05:00

Warning: Some spoilers follow

Season 2 of AMC’s The Walking Dead is nearing its midseason point, and apparently it sucks, at least according to a vocal minority of viewers. Why? Too much talking and not enough action. With a name like The Walking Dead, each episode should be wall-to-wall flesh munching zombies and humans gunning down undead with head shots on the wing. Or so the detractors say.

Me? I’ve been enjoying the heck out of the series, and think it’s pretty darned perfect as far as serialized television goes. The Walking Dead isn’t just about zombies. It’s also a human drama, and I’m hooked.

But I guess characterization and engagement with philosophical and moral questions aren’t what the zombie diehards want. Here’s a real sampling of some of the comments I’ve found:

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website .

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, a review

2011-11-19T11:57:00.004-05:00

My reading selection is mainly the product of my personal (and admittedly diverse, and quirky) preferences. Which is why you see a mixture of epic fantasy, swords and sorcery, horror, military and/or historical non-fiction, and a smattering of science fiction reviewed on this website. I also branch out into books that are acknowledged classics of their genre, titles which I wouldn’t normally read were it not for their place on “top 100 polls” and the like. Some might argue that life is too short to read uninteresting books, or to conform to public opinion, but I’ve come to realize that consensus on some issues does matter, especially after finding that several of my forays into the classics have been well worth the trip. Watership Down is among the top 20 books I’ve ever read, for example. Ditto Slaughterhouse Five and 1984. Other titles have been duds and left me wondering “what’s the hype all about?”, but at least I can say I made the effort.

This helps explain my recent foray into Roger Zelazny’s 1967 Hugo Award winning novel Lord of Light. If you take a look at any of the top 100 SF lists, you’ll see this book frequently mentioned. That’s why I picked it up. Now that I’ve read it, I’d put Lord of Light into the category of a Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, which I found to be a mixed bag. It’s a very good book, and I get why it’s accorded its classic status. But just like Matheson’s tale, I would describe Lord of Light as a book of great ideas, marred a bit by its execution.

First the good: I love the concept of this book, and the ideas advanced therein.

Earth is gone, rumored to be annihilated in war or perhaps drained of its resources (it’s not clear which). Colonizers have settled on an unnamed planet and started a new society. To increase their chances of survival on the alien planet, the crew of the ship has used chemical treatments and electronics to become godlike beings. They take on the names of Hindu gods and position themselves as such. In this future world technology has advanced such that it allows for the transfer of an individuals’ soul/mind to a new body. Thus, the peoples of this new earth are effectively immortal. However, the gods don’t wish to share equally in their power and so have developed a rigid caste system that forces the populace to slowly advance to “Godhood” (if at all) through a system of Karma. You earn your next station in life by the actions you take in the here and now, and are judged by the Gods when you die. They tell you what new body you will inhabit, king or pauper or something in between.

Meanwhile, in order to keep people from jumping ahead with technological advancements and assuming godhood and usurping their place at the top of the pyramid, the “Gods” keep the tech level at an artificially low level, approximately medieval. Attempts to progress towards scientific enlightenment are brutally squashed (I note the gods' intentions are not entirely bad: Man already screwed it up on earth once, and the fear is that history will repeat itself). But one of the ship’s original crewmembers, Sam, objects to this system, and although he is a God he strives to bring equality to the masses and allow science to run its course. He does so by a mixture of scheming, military intervention, and introducing Buddhism as an alternative religion that does not require abjection to the Hindu gods.

As you can see, Lord of Light addresses the debate of science vs. religion. With all the public debate on the subject still brewing today, it remains relevant and prescient. I’m simultaneously fascinated/repulsed by the possibility of technology allowing eternal life, aka., the “singularity,” and the consequences thereof. Lord of Light provides an interesting treatment of this scenario.

Where I have problems is in its execution. Lord of Light is a tough read in places, and I’d describe some sections as a slog. Zelazny just doesn’t seem concerned with making it easy on his readers. It takes many pages before a semblance of a story begins to unfold. Zelazny conveys important plot points as minor background details. He introduces way too many minor characters and Hindu gods, with too few anchors providing a basis as to who they are, for what is a relatively brief novel (319 pp.). My biggest complaint is the sketchiness of the character development: Even Sam is not given sufficient motivation as to why he’s such an adamant advocate of Accelerationism, otherwise known as scientific rationalism. In short, Lord of Light is long on ideas and short on plot and character (a problem I’ve encountered with a lot of science fiction).

But in the end I recommend Lord of Light. There are some absolutely beautiful poetic passages. There’s great wisdom conferred in its pages, for example the notion that guilt is both a blessing and a curse, and is what makes us uniquely mankind. Although I have no immediate desire to read it again, it's one of the books that you find yourself thinking back on, puzzling through what it says and what it means.

Lord of Light is comprised of seven chapters, a few of which were originally published as standalone stories for period SF magazines. It’s like reading seven novellas, some of which are better than others. My favorite was chapter 3, which relays the story of the assassin Rild who is sent to kill Sam and instead becomes a disciple of Buddhism. Zelazy’s handling of Rild’s evolution from cold-blooded killer to his spiritual awakening into peace and serenity, then giving it all up to try and save Sam/the Buddha from death (the Hindu god Yama, metaphorically death itself), is a marvel and in and of itself worth slogging though some of the other sections of Lord of Light. The battle of Rild and Yama—ultimate assassin vs. death god in an epic sword duel interspersed with the cut and thrust of ontological/metaphysical dialogue—is worth the price of admission:

“Keep your maidens, horses, dances and songs for yourself. No boon will I accept but the one which I have asked—tell me, oh Death, of that which lies beyond life, of which men and the gods have their doubts.”

Yama stood very still and he did not continue the poem. “Very well Rild,” he said, his eyes locking with the other’s, “but it is not a kingdom subject to words. I must show you."

Black Sabbath reuniting—blech

2011-11-12T20:53:00.001-05:00

My love for heavy metal is well documented here. So is my love for Black Sabbath, a band which I consider among the best heavy metal bands of all time (this is hardly a controversial statement, though perhaps some would quarrel with my placing them behind Judas Priest and Iron Maiden). Their first few albums—Black Sabbath, Sabotage, Paranoid, and Master of Reality—are among the greatest the genre has produced. In my mind they are the first heavy metal band (sorry Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple), and so are responsible for launching my favorite genre of music. For that reason alone, Black Sabbath will have my eternal gratitude.

Given those facts, you would think that I’d be doing proverbial backflips over the news that the original Ozzy-fronted Black Sabbath has reunited yet again.

But then, you’d be wrong. I am decidedly less than enthusiastic. The reason is that Ozzy is completely and utterly shot.

I don’t gloat in saying this, it’s just a simple observation. I’ve seen Ozzy in concert many times. I used to go to the Ozzfest every year, until it began drifting from its metal roots into alternative and nu-metal. Once he was great, with a distinctive and wickedly evil voice that puts him in my top 10 greatest metal vocalists ever. No More Tears (1991) was his last decent album, and that was 20 years ago, but when he put his mind to it he could still summon good performances throughout the 1990s. I saw him with Black Sabbath on their 1999 reunion tour and as a unit they were excellent. Tony Iommi played like a metal god, and Geezer Butler and Bill Ward were great as well. They were tight and heavy, and hearing the old familiar riffs of songs like “Children of the Grave” and “Into the Void” was a thrill. Ozzy buckled down and gave a solid performance, if not at the level of the rest of the band.

Much time has passed since then, during which Ozzy has morphed into a full-blown clown. As I continued to go to Ozzfests I witnessed his steady deterioration. He let the crowd sing (without exaggeration) roughly 50% of the material. He forgot the lyrics. When he did sing, he sounded terrible. He became a statue on stage, except when he was turning a water cannon on the crowd, or bobbing up and down in place like a burned-out marionette.

Added to my deep reservations with Ozzy is my general annoyance with the news releases of the event, which have all but erased Ronnie James Dio from memory (this crappy Reuters article seems to imply Black Sabbath disbanded entirely back in 1978). I’m still pissed that Ozzy and wife Sharon forbade the Dio-fronted Heaven and Hell (which included Butler and Iommi) from using the Black Sabbath name in a widely-publicized legal dispute. The last I checked Dio collaborated with the band on three Black Sabbath studio albums, two of which were spectacular, and one of which (Heaven and Hell) I would argue is better than anything the classic Ozzy lineup ever produced. Heaven and Hell (the band) was a vital, creative force, too: Their The Devil You Know is a very underrated album. Sabbath's attempts to record an album with Ozzy in 2001 were a bitter failure.

Now, I will guarantee that the musicianship of the reunited Black Sabbath will be excellent. The guitars, bass, and drums will sound very, very good. Perhaps even great. Iommi is perhaps my favorite all time metal guitarist and seems to have lost nothing off his fast ball. Butler and Ward will slip into their old routines and do just fine.

But Ozzy won’t be able to hold up his end of the bargain.

Who knows? Maybe their forthcoming studio album will rock, they’ll sound great on tour, the old energy and darkness will be back, and I’ll be proven dead wrong. But my heart tells me that it’s time for these guys to let it go.

Latest The Hobbit Production Video: A Deep Delve Into 3D

2011-11-10T22:24:00.000-05:00

I still haven’t quite come to grips with The Hobbit in 3D. I’ve got a few 3D films under my belt—Avatar, Captain America, Green Lantern, and Jaws 3—and to be honest, the added dimension hasn’t done much for me. Avatar made the most of it with its rich images of Pandora; the other films felt like they were trying to capitalize on a fad (hey, look, there’s a shield coming at me!) in order to take in a few extra bucks at the gate.

In short, I still prefer good old fashioned 2D, even after watching the latest The Hobbit production video on Peter Jackson’s Facebook page. Judging by the mixed feelings in the comments, others prefer 2D, too. “Love your work Peter, the technology is fascinating, and I can’t wait for 2012. But this 3d stuff is an absolutely horrid and wretched fad which adds zero value to any movie which incorporates it,” writes one commenter. But there were many more positives than negatives amongst the comments, and having viewed the video I’m a bit more optimistic with the thought of donning a pair of uncomfortable plastic glasses and settling in to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in 3D next December.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

I’m an Elvis man when it comes to zombies

2011-11-03T23:17:00.003-04:00

It’s often been said—I believe the saying originated with the film Pulp Fiction—that you’re either an Elvis man or a Beatles man. You can’t be equal parts fan of the larger than life King of Rock and Roll and his bombastic, hip-shaking style, and love the cerebral, trippy sounds of the Fab Four with equal fervor (though apparently the Beatles were themselves big Elvis fans—go figure).

Whether or not you buy into the theory I think it can be profitably applied to the dual nature of zombie fiction.

Zombies are certainly malleable monsters and can represent concepts like out of control consumerism, or the dangers of conformity, as well as mortality, cancer, and other real-life issues. Zombie literature can be "literary," in short. But in the end when I pick up a zombie anthology I want mostly stories about flesh-eating undead overrunning the world, and humans stubbornly fighting back. World War Z by Max Brooks is still the high water mark for this type of zombie fiction. If you’re going to publish an anthology about zombies, the stories ought to have a lot of red meat and apocalypse to them. Deep literary and/or philosophical subtlety? Yeah, zombie fiction can do that too, but I prefer a little less conversation and a little more action in my zombie stories. Literary is okay in smaller doses.

Fortunately Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead (edited by John Skipp) contains enough Elvis to scratch my rock-and-roll itch. It doesn’t warp the term “zombie” beyond all recognition, as does the John Joseph Adams anthology The Living Dead, which features a few stories with no zombies at all and lots of ham-handed political commentary. There’s a little of that here (Lisa Morton’s cartoonish “Sparks Fly Upwards”) but not enough to be a deal-breaker. Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead contains 32 short stories by such luminaries as Stephen King, Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury, as well an introduction by Skipp and two concluding essays on the history of the zombie genre and the reasons for its enduring popularity. Checking in at 700 pages, the book is so thick it “can also be used for staving in heads,” proclaims a back cover blurb. I believe it.

Some of the best stories include “The Great Wall: A story from the Zombie War,” by Brooks. Left on the World War Z editing floor, it’s a fine little story about China’s struggles with the zombie outbreak and its efforts to contain the undead hordes by successfully rebuilding the country’s great wall, albeit at great human cost. Good stuff. Joe Lansdale’s “On the Far Side of Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks” is an absolute gonzo page turner. Lansdale almost never lets me down; the guy is just a great storyteller (I will keep saying that until someone listens). This story has it all, including a religious cult that sanctifies promiscuous sex, headed up by a whacked-out priest who flays men alive in an attempt to discover the secret of eternal life. “God Save the Queen” is another favorite, a ferocious condemnation of the British monarchy and a warning about the decay of morality and respect for human life in the modern age.

Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead contains a few stories that stray a little too far into Beatle territory for my tastes. “Bitter Grounds” by Neil Gaiman was such a one. I like Gaiman (I adore American Gods, and The Sandman is pretty cool) but “Bitter Grounds,” while well-written, did nothing for me. Apparently it’s making the rounds in just about every zombie anthology published these days but I'm not getting the love: it reads like a tiring, over-extended metaphor about a man who is dead inside/dead to the world/just plain dead, and shuffles along rather than soars. “The Quarantine Act” was another story that was well-written but wasn’t what I was looking for here; too much commentary on personal freedoms vs. the greater good of society and not enough zombies, which are relegated almost entirely to the background.

“Lazarus” by Leonid Andreyev (written in 1906 and translated from the Russian) is a great example of how a quiet zombie story can work. Just like his biblical counterpart the Lazarus of the story returns from the dead, silent and a little bit ripe under the collar. But he returns not as a Romero style flesh-eating zombie, but as a man who has seen the other side, the dark empty void of death. Though he’s sought out by the curious and the brave, no one, no matter how mighty or self-assured, can stand the gaze of Lazarus for long. It’s quite sobering, disturbing, and well-done.

I was glad to see a half-dozen stories from Skipps’ seminal but out of print Book of the Dead reprinted here. I once held a used copy of the Book of the Dead in my hand as a youth and foolishly decided to put it back on shelf. It disappeared soon after. Zombies gave me a second chance at the best stories from that collection. One of these, Robert McCammon’s “Eat Me” (by far the best title in the book) attempts something I thought I would never see in print: zombie sex, and a love scene that manages to be both poignant and an utter gross-out. McCammon gets my praise for artfully pulling it off. There’s plenty here for gore fans, the best (or worst of which, depending on your perspective) is Carlton Mellick’s “Lemon Knives ‘n’ Cockroaches,” which is so graphic I don’t dare describe it here. The lines between human and zombie are completely erased in Mellick’s tale.

Overall this is a must for zombie fans.

The Conqueror Worm

2011-10-31T20:18:00.000-04:00

Lo! t’is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly—
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!

That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Out—out are the lights—out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

--Edgar Allan Poe

Swords from the East, Swords from the Sea by Harold Lamb, a review

2011-10-27T21:10:00.001-04:00

Swords from the Sea
Harold Lamb
Howard Andrew Jones, ed.
Bison Books (552 pp, $24.95, 2010)

Swords from the East
Harold Lamb
Howard Andrew Jones, ed.
Bison Books (476 pp, $24.95, 2010)

It must have been something, the pre-television age when pulp magazines were a widely consumed form of entertainment. I can only imagine the anticipation of opening up one’s mailbox, finding inside the latest copy of Adventure magazine, and settling in to an evening of rousing tales by the likes of Talbot Mundy, H. Rider Haggard, and Harold Lamb. It was a time of pulse-pounding action and tales of distant historic epochs on the printed page.

Those days are now gone, and for many years the contents of those now-yellowed pulps were largely inaccessible, save through the efforts of patient and often deep-pocketed enthusiasts. But fortunately some of these works are now being collected in anthologies. Editor Howard Andrew Jones has done the Herculean task of assembling Lamb’s stories in the eight volume “Harold Lamb Library” series by Bison Books. These include Swords from the Desert and Swords from the West, and recently concluded with Swords from the Sea and Swords from the East.

To read the rest of this review, visit The Black Gate website .

The Rising by Brian Keene, a review

2011-10-20T20:07:00.001-04:00

If there’s one comforting aspect to zombies, it’s the fact that they’re brainless, depicted in most mediums as well below the level of primates. While some of the undead maintain vestigial memories of the person they once were, and might be able to work a door handle or remember the location of a concealed room, they don’t organize or coordinate their attacks. A man with a gun and a lot of ammunition situated on high ground can hold out against them for a long while. Spread out a group of zombies thin enough and a desperate survivor can run right through them, if he’s lucky enough to avoid being snagged by a grasping hand. At worst they might use a tree limb to batter down a door or break a window. They’re deadly in big clusters, but one-on-one they’re manageable. They don’t set ambushes. They can’t operate heavy machinery. They don’t use weapons.

But in author Brian Keene’s universe of The Rising (2004), slow, stupid, Romero-style zombies have undergone a paradigm shift. You thought you were safe behind boarded-up windows, confident they would hold up against the pounding fists of the living dead? Now add a high-speed zombie-driven van into the equation. The man shooting zombies from a roof in The Rising will find the creatures shooting back, or coming around from behind while creatures in front draw his fire. Keene’s zombies can plan, and calculate, and employ tactics. We’re all screwed in this type of scenario, more or less meat for the hungry dead. And that’s before you add in the fact that dead animals are reanimating as well; some of the most dangerous creatures in The Rising are swarms of undead rats and birds, largely resistant to gunfire as they make such small targets.

This all makes The Rising a bleak novel, indeed. But there's a bit more to it than meets the eye.

The basic plot is this: A group of scientists working in a high security, clandestine U.S. government research facility accidently open a rift to another dimension, a cold, dark void in which a seemingly infinite number of demons, banished millennia ago by God, lie in wait. They enter through the rift and inhabit the bodies of the dead, causing the equivalent of a zombie outbreak. The demons are malicious and intent on destroying all life. They hunger for human flesh and happily munch on humans, but leave enough intact corpse for their demon “brothers” to come through the void and occupy.

Jim Thurmond is among the survivors, living in an underground shelter built during the fear and paranoia leading up Y2K. The Rising opens with Jim in his bunker, slowly drifting into depression from his extreme isolation and grief. But a call on his dying cell phone from his son, Danny (whom Jim assumed was dead) awakes him from his torpor and starts him on a hell-bent journey across the gore-soaked wastelands of the Eastern seaboard to save his son. Along the way he falls in with a pair of oddly matched companions, including an old devout preacher Martin and a bad-ass prostitute/recovering drug addict named Frankie.

The Rising does not approach the same level of excellence as Max Brooks’ stellar World War Z but I nevertheless found it highly readable and entertaining, which is really all I’m looking for in a zombie novel. There’s lots of black humor, with many of the zombies cracking jokes in the midst of the mayhem (example: a zombie is hit by a speeding car and thrown through the windshield into the front seat. “Say folks, I appreciate the ride, but don’t you know it’s not smart to pick up hitchhikers?” it says to the horrified driver). Think of a gorier Army of Darkness and you'll arrive at the approximate tone of the book. The Rising is definitely not for the squeamish, with graphic violence galore and other assorted atrocities strewn across its gore-strewn pages. And some of the human survivors are worse than the zombies. An isolated military unit in Gettysburg crucifies insubordinates, uses civilians for slave labor, and operates a trailor called the Meat Wagon, into which women are taken in raped in regular shifts, for example.

In addition to its irreverent spin on Romero style zombies, The Rising and its followup City of the Dead are unique in that they aren’t afraid to mingle in frank discussions of God and the afterlife. In The Rising our world is a fallen one, and God watches (if at all) from afar, without intervention. That means the earth is doomed, along with all its inhabitants. But there is also an afterlife.

Thankfully we’re unlikely to ever experience a demon possessed zombie outbreak. But for those who struggle to reconcile the existence of God with a capricious, callous world in which sun death or a stray comet or a nuclear exchange could end it all for us at any moment, Keene’s view makes sense, and offers consolation. What makes The Rising unrelentingly bleak paradoxically offers an indescribably beautiful vision, for along with murderous demons intent on our destruction, God also exists. You just have to squint really hard to see him through the gore.

Zombies on the brain

2011-10-17T20:02:00.000-04:00

I've got zombies on the brain. Watched The Walking Dead season two premiere last night (good stuff) and I'm about to start reading Brian Keene's The Rising. With two weeks to Halloween I'm going full-bore horror.

Did anyone else catch The Walking Dead last night? If so, I'd like to know your thoughts on it and/or the series thus far. Discussion/spoilers follow after the break (now that Blogger has added the "insert jump break" button, I might as well start using it).

The quality of the show is very high. Now, I'm not the best person to render this judgement. I don't watch any TV shows, just occasional news, movies, History or Discovery one-offs, and sporting events. In general I'm really impressed with the quality of The Walking Dead, which is far better than the TV shows I recall from my younger days. In particular I loved the scene when the zombie horde shows up and the survivors have to take quick shelter underneath cars on the jammed-up highway, praying that they won't be detected. I was on the edge of my seat.

The gore level is surprising. When Rick and Daryl cut open a zombie to check for a little girl's remains (yug) I knew the camera was going to cut away (no pun intended), but then it came back and gave us a full look at rotting innards and the stomach and its meaty contents. Wasn't expecting that. The screwdriver in the zombie's eyes scene was another shocker. The corpse in the tent was ... disturbing.

Some of the characters' actions are stupid, which is annyoing. Rick and Lori letting their kid wander around a highway strewn with abandoned vehicles full of corpses, any of which might be animated and waiting for someone to open a door, was a bit ridiculous. Driving an RV with a cranky radiator and an unreliable engine when the planet is full of abandoned vehicles strains credibility. Rick taking his son into the woods to find a missing girl instead of leaving him in a car with the possibility of a quick getaway is a pretty stupid decision, particularly for a cop.

Zombies really make no sense, except to explain them as magic. What makes them hungry for flesh (and only for living/freshly killed tissue, as they don't eat rotting corpses)? Their organs don't work so they can't digest flesh, so can a zombie stuff its entire intestine full and be sated? Why is a zombie's bite so fatal, when you can otherwise butcher them like cattle and handle their intestines and innards and even cover yourself in their gore to disguise yourself, as happened in season one? If zombies are just dead tissue, why not just hole up for a year with a lot of water and canned food and let nature take its course and let them all rot away?

I guess I'm overthinking this aspect too much. 'Cuz in the end zombies make for good drama. And the show is very entertaining and gripping because of its unpredictability. Great stuff. I'm looking forward to episode 2.

Are we becoming "The Happy Breed"?

2011-10-15T09:50:00.000-04:00

Still working my way through the Harlan Ellison edited anthology Dangerous Visions (highly recommended reading, by the way), and I’ve come across a story that stopped me cold in my tracks, because it concerns a subject about which I’ve given a lot of thought and worry. Namely, the problem of pain.

“The Happy Breed” by John Sladek tells of a theoretical future (amusingly, 1989—Dangerous Visions was written in 1967, and many of its entries err on the side of overestimating the proliferation of technology) in which machines will take away all our pain. It’s a world in which machines constantly analyze our bodies and minds and offer tranquilizers to still our troubling thoughts, and painless surgical intervention for every physical ailment. So what’s left for humanity in this future?

Sladek posits that with every machine we come to depend on, we surrender a bit of our freedom. What would happen to us if we no longer had any of life’s ailments to worry about? What would it do to our psyche, our creativity? What if we were theoretically able to conquer death itself? Would we be recognizably human any longer? Would we need God in this future?
Says Sladek:

…without evil or pain, preference and choice are meaningless; personality blurs; figures merge with their backgrounds, and thinking becomes superfluous and disappears. I believe these are the inevitable results of achieving Utopia, if we make the mistake of assuming the Utopia equals perfect happiness. There is, after all, a pleasure center in everyone’s head. Plant an electrode there, and presumably we could be constantly, perfectly happy on a dime’s worth of electricity a day.

Are we destined to become “The Happy Breed?” What do you think?

Barbarism meets academia at College of St. Joseph in Vermont

2011-10-13T21:04:00.000-04:00

Cross posted with the permission of Rob Roehm of the Robert E. Howard Foundation website, I thought the following too interesting not to share with readers of Black Gate and The Silver Key:

Enduring Barbarism: Heroic Fantasy from the Bronze Age to the Internet

College of St. Joseph Popular Culture Conference
Contact email:
Dr. Jonas Prida
jprida@csj.edu

The inaugural popular culture conference will be held at the College of St. Joseph, located in Rutland, Vermont, April 13th-14th, 2012.

Proposal deadline: Dec 15th, 2011.

We are looking for a wide range of topics, figures, panels and cultural studies methodologies to explore the enduring figure of the barbarian in Western popular culture. Graduate students, established faculty, and independent scholars are encouraged to submit ideas. Possible paper topics:

The multi-faceted use of the barbarian in popular culture

Rise and fall of heroic fantasy in the 1970s

Comic book barbarism

Heroic fantasy as a heavy metal trope

The gendered barbarian

Explorations of lesser-known sword and sorcery texts

Italian sword and sandal movies

The barbarian’s future

We are actively interested in innovative panel ideas as well.

Please send 250 word paper proposals, 400-500 word panel ideas, or general questions to Dr. Jonas Prida at jprida@csj.edu

If it only had Eric Adams as the keynote, this would be pitch-perfect.

But seriously, it does my heart good to see serious treatment of swords and sorcery. Now there’s a conference I’d love to attend. Get those proposals in!

There has never been a craps table described quite like this

2011-10-11T20:44:00.001-04:00

I'm at the halfway mark of a book I've long had on my "to be read" list--the Harlan Ellison-edited anthology Dangerous Visions (1967). I'm enjoying it immensely so far. Even when I don't quite understand everything I'm reading the sheer artistry of the stories makes up for the opaqueness. You can lose yourself in these tales.

I just finished Fritz Leiber's Hugo and Nebula Award-winning short story "Gonna Roll the Bones," about a beaten-down lowlife miner named Joe Slattermill who likes to blow off steam by gambling, getting drunk, and picking up cheap hookers. On this particular evening's excursion he enters a ghostly casino named The Boneyard and finds himself seated across the pool table from either death, or perhaps the devil.

It's freaking awesome. The way Leiber describes Slattermill's opponent--a skeletal, hollow-eyed, black-hatted figure known as The Big Gambler--reminded me of Iron Maiden mascot Eddie from my favorite Somewhere in Time tapestry, only with more menace.

I've never read anything quite like this story. It's a marvel of style. Here's how Leiber describes the crap table, for instance:

Joe lowered his gaze to the crap table. It was almost as wide as a man is tall, at least twice as long, unusually deep, and lined with black, not green, felt, so that it looked like a giant's coffin. There was something familiar about its shape which he couldn't place. Its bottom, though not its sides or ends, had a twinkling iridescence, as if it had been lightly sprinkled with very tiny diamonds. As Joe lowered his gaze all the way and looked directly down, his eyes barely over the table, he got the crazy notion that it went down all the way through the world, so that the diamonds were the stars on the other side, visible despite the sunlight there, just as Joe was always able to see the stars by day up the shaft of the mine he worked in, and so that if a cleaned-out gambler, dizzy with defeat, toppled forward into it, he'd fall forever, toward the innermost bottom, be it Hell or some black galaxy. Joe's thoughts swirled and he felt the cold, hard-fingered clutch of fear at his crotch. Someone was crooning beside him, "Come on, Big Dick."

I don't always agree with Hugo selections and other award winners, but "Gonna Roll the Bones" deserves whatever accolodates were thrown at it for that paragraph alone. The menace and alien nature of the table and its association with death, the reference to Slattermill's job and the accompanying insight into his character, the depiction of the soul of the inveterate gambler, the fear mixed with sex... wow.

The Golden Apples of the Sun

2011-10-07T22:06:00.000-04:00

Just finished this one, a collection of 22 stories ranging from science fiction to fantasy to mainstream and everything in between. Like all Bradbury it's hard to categorize, with fun little shockers in the tradition of EC Comics alongside stories like deep pools that leave you gasping at their magnificence when you rise back to the surface.

"Well," said the captain, sitting, eyes shut, sighing. "Well, where do we go now, eh, we are we all going?" He felt his men sitting or standing all about him, the terror dead in them, their breathing quiet. "When you've gone a long, long way down to the sun and touched it and lingered and jumped around and streaked away from it, where are you going then? When you go away from the heat and the noonday light and the laziness, where do you go?"

His men waited for him to say it out. They waited for him to gather all of the coolness and the whiteness and the welcome and refreshing climate of the word in his mind, and they saw him settle the word, like a bit of ice cream, in his mouth, rolling it gently.

"There's only one direction in space from here on out," he said at last.

They waited. They waited as the ship moved swiftly into cold darkness away from the light.

"North," murmured the captain. "North."

And they all smiled, as if a wind had come up suddenly in the middle of a hot afternoon.

Where are we all going? Hard to say for sure, but in Bradbury's capable hands, always to good places.

Is The Lord of the Rings literature?

2011-09-29T23:11:00.004-04:00

Part 2 of a 2-part series

Part 1 of this article set the stage for the question, Is The Lord of the Rings literature? Part II examines six criteria commonly used to define works of high literary quality and applies them to The Lord of the Rings.

1. Popular appeal

The argument against: The Lord of the Rings might be popular, but that doesn’t make it literature.

The counterargument: There’s popular, and then there’s an omnipresent, mammoth, overshadowing level of popularity.

How popular is The Lord of the Rings? At last count, it has been translated into 57 languages and is the second best-selling novel ever written, with over 150 million copies sold. Its also a repeat winner of multiple international contests for favorite novel (note the broad term novel, not just fantasy novel). For example:

In 1997 it topped a Waterstone’s poll for Top 100 Books of the Century.

In 2003 a survey (The Big Read) was conducted in the United Kingdom to determine the nation’s best-loved novel of all time. More than three quarters of a million votes were received, and the winner was The Lord of the Rings.

A 1999 Amazon poll administered to its customers yielded the same result.

In short, readers of all stripes, from all around the world, adore this book more than just about any other.

All that said, I will fully admit that this is the least convincing argument, because mass appeal is not necessarily a good indicator of quality. See Justin Bieber. So let’s look at some other criteria.

To view the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website .

His Dark Materials: Good, but don’t expect any miracles

2011-09-25T14:49:00.008-04:00

As you may recall I wrote about Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, book one of the His Dark Materials trilogy, back in August. Recently I read The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass to complete the series.

The results were decidedly mixed. Some of His Dark Materials is excellent, bordering on brilliant, other aspects not so much.

There are a million and one summaries of these books floating around the internet so I won’t waste time writing another. That said, I have several thoughts on the series I’d like to share here. So in lieu of a traditional spoiler-free review, I’m weighing in with specific details on what I liked and did not like about the series.

A strong warning: Many spoilers follow after the book cover, as well as religious discussion.

First of all, do these books truly endorse atheism? Perhaps, but not what I would consider classic atheism, which argues against the existence of deities and the supernatural and posits that the universe is entirely explainable by science. While there apparently is no God in the universe of His Dark Materials, intelligent species like humans are inhabited by a substance called Dust, which apparently functions the same way as original sin in the Christian religion (it bestows knowledge of good and evil, etc). His Dark Materials includes elements beyond any physical explanation, such as angels, an compass-like item called an alethiometer that performs functions that can only be explained by magic, flying witches, incorporeal specters, and other monsters. Committed atheists believe that everything is physical and there is nothing beyond the grave; in The Amber Spyglass Lyra and Will travel to the underworld to visit spirits of the dead, and there are hints of some atomized afterlife of the spirit. In short, it’s is not a work of scientific rationalism. I’ve heard it described as gnosticism, which seems a far more apt comparison.

What Pullman’s books are is a rather damning indictment of organized religion, particularly the Catholic church. Now, I’m not a Catholic so I have no skin in the fire, but I found Pullman’s treatment rather unfair. He portrays the church as a caricature of evil, a uniformly monstrous, insidious, intolerant organization that mercilessly persecutes non-believers. So we get dialogue like this by one of the characters: “That's what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.”

Given that His Dark Materials is ostensibly set in a world with a timeline roughly equivalent to our own (not a time of 14-century witch-hunts and the like when some of this behavior was sadly practiced), it’s all faintly ridiculous. To describe the church as an evil comparable to Sauron is, well, childish in the extreme.

Pullman posits that there is no God as believers traditionally understand him, but only powerful angels. God is actually a decrepit old angelic figure called the Authority. Pullman inverts the story of Adam and Eve, making the Authority the bad guy and Satan the good. Original sin is all backwards; our bodies are wonderful and natural and the fruit of knowledge to be fully enjoyed. The heroine and hero of the story, Lyra and Will, become ciphers for the new Adam and Eve, ushering in a world free of the Christian God in exchange for a world of solid reality.

So what does the world of His Dark Materials offer for consolation? Perhaps that there are other worlds, parallel to our own, that science or the mind of mankind can open. Pullman’s constructed world is not amoral or about living only for life’s sake. It also includes a strong component of responsibility. When the armored bear Iorek tells Lyra not to put herself in harm’s way (“While you are alive, your business is with life”) she lectures him otherwise: “No, Iorek,” she said gently, “our business is to keep promises, no matter how difficult they are.” This is a fine lesson.

There are some great scenes in the books that alone make it worth reading for fantasy fans. Perhaps most memorable was Will and Lyra’s journey into the land of the dead, complete with an implacable boatman and foul harpies right out of Greek mythology. It’s terrifying and wonderful at once.

Will and Lyra’s journey into the land of the dead demonstrates what happens to the “souls” of the dead in a godless world. Freed from a purgatory-like underworld, they are atomized, entirely gone. Death itself (and all our fears and superstitions built up around it) dies too. In Pullman’s world, at death a person becomes a part of everything. “You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.” Life is fine and good, and death is simply the End. Pullman portrays death as tranquil, for example when the explorer Lee Scoresby dies. Unfortunately this explanation provides no solace for those left behind, as there is seemingly no possibility of reuniting in an afterlife. Heaven is a lie. Explains an ex-nun: “That’s what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew.”

The Amber Spyglass packs an emotional and satisfying ending that I found quite moving and well-done. Some of the best writing in the series can be found here.

All that said…

There are problems with the series, both plot-wise and in its execution, and some are major. Not the least of which is the series’ tendency to tell rather than show as it progresses, and delivering its underlying messages with an iron-booted didacticism. The best book of the series is without question The Golden Compass, which is refreshingly agenda-free and so tells a pretty good imaginative story. I’ve read a lot of complaints over the years about C.S. Lewis’ Narnia, detractors of which point out (not unreasonably) that it’s too dogmatic, or black and white in its conclusions. The same can certainly be said for His Dark Materials, and then some.

There are other problems with the series, too. Some of these include:

Characters that float in and out without adequate ends, or explanation. For example Ama, a serving girl that Pullman spends considerable time introducing at the outset of The Amber Spyglass, simply drops out of the story without explanation. I never figured out the purpose of the scientist Mary and her encounters on another planet with a sentient race of elephant-like creatures called the mulefa. This entire sub-plot could have been safely excised, in my opinion, and any point that Pullman was attempting to convey here (perhaps showing the mulefa as an ideal natural race, without the interference of organized religion) woven into the main story.
Lyra’s mother and father fight a angel enforcer named Metatron, whose name sounds suspiciously like a transformer and acts like the worst of the Decepticons. Lame.
The great and powerful Church, with centuries of experience of scheming and corruption and power wielded behind the scenes, decides to send one man with a rifle to kill Lyra and end the biggest threat it has ever known. Really?
Dust is mumbo-jumbo and a wholly unsatisfying explanation for what invests us with our humanity. Pullman’s explanation for homo sapiens’ divergence from our ape ancestors some 30,000 years ago is an invisible, floating, sentient, substance from the cosmos. Got that? I don’t either. Pullman tries to invest Dust (in our fleeting, occasional glimpses of it) with a holiness or mystery, but I found it all rather uninspired.

Again, if intended as atheism, His Dark Materials fails because it offers an easy out. Who wouldn’t accept a world(s) with angels and witches and alethiometers as a consolation prize for godlessness? And its treatment of organized religion is grossly unfair, utterly without thought or complexity. If I were a member of the Catholic church I’d be pretty pissed, too.

In short, His Dark Materials is certainly worth reading, though you (literally and figuratively) shouldn’t expect a miracle. It doesn’t live up to the hype.

Urge to scream... rising

2011-09-19T19:41:00.004-04:00

What is it with the annoying Tolkien posts this week? Here's the latest, an interview with actress Evangeline Lilly on her role in The Hobbit, courtesy of SFX :

Tauriel is a new character in the mythology so as a book purist yourself that must be frightening to ponder how fans will react to your part?

“Yeah! I am very concerned to this day that people will watch the film and I’ll be the black mark on the film. I know how adamant the purists are and I’m one of them! That said, upon reading The Hobbit again, as an adult, I can see why additional characters were needed to round out the story as an adaptation – especially female characters! The Hobbit didn’t include female characters at all and was a very linear story, a book for children, really. What Peter, Fran (Walsh) and Philippa (Boyens) have done is all in perfect keeping with Tolkien’s world, while adding a third dimension to an otherwise very two-dimensional story.”

I'm glad to know that after 75 years of near universal acclaim, adding a female character has dramatically improved The Hobbit (which is after all just a flawed, silly book for children ).

Middle-Earth has always felt so flat and two dimensional in The Hobbit, but I guess I never realized it ... until now. I frankly don't know how I've been enjoying it all these years. Thanks for setting the record straight, Lilly!

Why Tolkien needs defending: A classic Camp 3-er at work

2011-09-18T21:05:00.004-04:00

Is The Lord of the Rings any good? I just came across this provocatively-titled article by Martin Turner, and felt compelled to comment, as it dovetails with the two-part article I’m currently writing about whether The Lord of the Rings qualifies as literature.

Harkening back to Part I of my article, it’s apparent that Turner falls squarely into Camp 3, with a dash of Camp 1. He seems to like Tolkien quite a bit and his article begins with some compelling reasons why The Lord of the Rings deserves a place among the very great works of this or any age. But as it progresses Turner hedges his bets, and seems to conclude that LOTR, while a terrific read, isn’t literature, or at best is a deeply flawed example.

Turner starts out strong. He pleads the case that critics should treat imaginative literature just like realistic novels. He takes some stuffing out of the literary elite and the notion that literature must meet certain, pre-defined criteria:

Like Ruskin’s ‘pathetic fallacy’, which appears to account for a large number of the visits to this website, this critical perspective grows from the supremely arrogant position that there is just one true purpose of literature, and this, despite the evidence of preceding centuries, has been discovered by the critic and his cadre.

This is a great point, and quite correct. Literature has many functions and purposes. But from here on out, the article quickly goes downhill in its evaluation of Tolkien.

First, Martin (half-heartedly) criticizes Tolkien for not meeting with his own particular definition of literature:

I promised to deal with the first group of criticisms second. These are to do with the technical literary merits of the books. At this point we must recognise that, as a novel, the Lord of the Rings has substantial flaws … Essentially a novel is not so much an adventure story as a story about how character grows and changes as it responds to events and the world around it. Robinson Crusoe is not a foundational novel because of the desert island, but because of the exploration of Crusoe’s character and how it changes. War and Peace is not a great novel because of its sweep of history, which is merely the backdrop, but because of its profound analysis of the character of Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Bolkonsky. We need to recognise that there is no real character development in the Lord of the Rings.

So immediately after telling us that it’s “supremely arrogant” to posit that there is just one true purpose of literature, Turner says that all the great novels are great because of their character development. And with its lack of character development, The Lord of the Rings is therefore substantially flawed.

I won’t argue that LOTR has a deep, sweeping character arc to any of its characters; it does not (though Gollum/Smeagol arguably does, and Frodo is certainly substantially changed from his journey). But I’d also argue that its entire cast and crew of characters adds up to the sum of the human condition. Aragorn is nobility of the spirit, Sam is loyalty, Frodo dogged determination, Gollum lust, Denethor despair, Boromir pride, etc. Taken together as a whole, this panoply of characters depicts us, and offers a profound picture of what it means to be human.

And deep characterization is not the only function of literature. It’s a function, no more or less. Martin doesn’t seem convinced by his argument, either:

This, of course, is only a flaw if we assume that the Lord of the Rings is supposed to be a novel. It almost certainly is not, at least, not in the sense of the evolution of the novel as but forward by Leavis and others. Tolkien described it as a ‘tale’. In medieval terms we would describe it as a Romance.

So is The Lord of the Rings’ lack of characterization a flaw, or not? It's quite unclear. Either way, the argument is full of holes and equivocation and is entirely unconvincing.

Next he goes on to criticize the structure of LOTR:

The structure unravels rapidly in The Two Towers, though. The first part, the adventures of the majority of the company in Rohan, is compelling and magical adventure fiction. In its own terms, it is as good as or better than anything in the Fellowship of the Ring. However, as we read, we are aware that this is merely a side-show. The main story, the overriding need to destroy the ring, is taking place at the same time but elsewhere. This is the subject of the second part of the Two Towers. However, this part is unremittingly bitter, grim and unpleasant. It has none of the bright adventure of books I-III, and even its moral dilemma is painful and uncomfortable. It could be argued that this is essential to the overall conception of the cycle, but the choice to write book IV at the same length as book III simply does not work as fiction. Under close questioning, most re-readers admit that they tend to ‘hurry through’ (ie, skip-read) book IV, in order to get on to the Return of the King as quickly as possible.…Nonetheless, in terms of the conscious structural strait-jacket thrust on it, the Lord of the Rings must be regarded as flawed.

This is … just wrong. The structure of LOTR works just fine. When the gates slam shut on Sam with a clang at the end of book IV, we don’t know what happened to Frodo (it’s hard to imagine what readers must have felt back in 1954 when The Two Towers was first published). Though much maligned by Martin, this obviously creates tension in the reader. On top of which, Martin uses anecdotal evidence to support his claim. His statement that Most re-readers admit that they tend to ‘hurry through’ (ie, skip-read) book IV, in order to get on to the Return of the King as quickly as possible is obviously flimsy, to say the least. I don’t ‘hurry through’ book IV, and have never heard anyone admit to doing the same, so I guess my unsubstantiated counter-argument is just as valid.

Also, and at the risk of nit-picking, the action in Rohan is most definitely not a “side-show.” The Lord of the Rings is about war and quest. The actions of the small hobbits are critical, but so are the ramifications of the larger conflict. If Rohan didn’t come to the aid of Minas Tirith, and if Minas Tirith failed to hold, than the destruction of the One Ring is a moot point. What would it accomplish, if all the peoples of the free worlds were already annihilated by Sauron’s hordes? Secondly, one of the book’s central tenets is that different cultures and peoples must set aside their differences and work together to confront evil. This is demonstrated in Book III with Rohan and Gondor, two former allies grown cold with suspicion and grievances large and small. Finally, as a plot-point it’s critical that Sauron’s forces are defeated at the Pelennor Fields so that a later sally may be made to the Black Gate, a feint that allows Sam and Frodo to pass through the otherwise orc infested plains of Gorgoroth to Mount Doom. Sauron’s attention must be drawn elsewhere and his forces vacated from the interior. This couldn’t happen without Helm’s Deep and the critical events begun in Book III. So Turner is wrong on several levels, thematic and plot-wise.

As far as the length of book IV being an issue, or its “unremittingly bitter, grim and unpleasant” nature; again, there’s nothing to substantiate his argument. It’s supposed to get more bitter, and grim, as our heroes press into the heart of Mordor.

Finally, Turner offers an entirely unconvincing argument that the plot of The Lord of the Rings is flawed. In so doing he completely misreads the Scouring of the Shire, which is one of the most important (some would say the central lesson—I don’t know if I’d go that far) of the novel. Martin complains that the Scouring of the Shire is not as “adventurous” compared to what came before and so seems anticlimactic. That’s the point, of course. The long arm of war reaches all the way back into our own farms and fields homes. The enemy is us, if we let our guard down and engage in closed-minded parochialism. This point would have been lost with Balrogs and wizards running around the Shire, as Turner seems to want.

Turner doesn’t like the last line of the book and calls it “trite and unsatisfying”; others like Tom Shippey and Peter Beagle in Meditations on Middle-earth argue with far more conviction that “Well, I’m back” is brilliant, laden with multiple levels of meaning. Turner says there’s no end to The Lord of the Rings, to which I counter, Huh? When Frodo sails into the west on full ship and magic leaves the world, ushering in an entirely new age, that’s not end enough? When the Hobbits finally grow up and become men, and are able to save the Shire without the help of the Maiar Gandalf, this isn’t a satisfying end for him? He implies that there should be some big death at the end to wrap it all up, like all the real sagas:

There is a reason why most sagas end with the death of the hero, or, as in Brennu Njallssaga, with the consequences of his death: it is a logical and satisfying place to stop.

This criticism is an utter head-scratcher: Frodo is dying, he has for all intents and purposes gone off to die. Sam has gone back and now must cope with the consequences of losing his best friend and master. Did Turner somehow miss this? And for that matter, in what way is Chapter 2 “The Shadow of the Past,” in which Tolkien deftly sums up the history of the One Ring and what is at stake with its destruction—laying out both the inherent danger of the Ring and the broad strokes of the quest—not a “real beginning?” This is incredibly silly.

He concludes with a final patronizing jab:

Tolkien fans may consider this to be heresy, but it seems to me there is little point in defending the Lord of the Rings by denying the self-evident flaws.

Self-evident to whom? To Turner, yes. To readers with more familiarity with the novel—not so much.

I will say that the article ends with a far more interesting observation:

On the other hand, the Lord of the Rings is not a novel, in the technical sense, at all. It is a tale, a romance, a cycle, a work of major creation, perhaps something unique. It is the inspiration for a generation of video games, a cultural phenomenon, the beginning, and perhaps the end, of a literary genre.

I completely agree: The Lord of the Rings is not a traditional novel. It’s very difficult to classify, perhaps because it is (despite its many imitations) a one of a kind work. But that is a completely different argument than whether succeeds or fails as literature.

Is The Lord of the Rings literature?

2011-09-15T21:34:00.002-04:00

Part 1 of a 2-part series

And whether or not Tolkien’s works will stand the test of time is not within our lot to know, so that the Tolkien enthusiast’s need to defend Tolkien’s title of “author of the century,” as a result of the recent Waterstone’s poll of 25,000 readers in Great Britain in 1997, may be unnecessary and even gratuitous. A work like The Hobbit that has already been translated into thirty languages or one like The Lord of the Rings, into more than twenty, has already demonstrated the virtues of both accessibility and elasticity, if not endurance. An author who has sold fifty million copies of his works requires no justification of literary merit.

Jane Chance, Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England

Is The Lord of the Rings literature? The answer depends on who you ask. As I see it, four camps exist, each with a different take on the question.

Camp 1, Devoted Tolkien fans. Ask one of these folks and you’re likely to hear, “A Elbereth Gilthoniel! Of course. Need this question even be asked?” For members of Camp 1 the evidence is plain, the case long made for Tolkien’s literary greatness—even if they don’t always offer clear and/or compelling supporting evidence.

Camp 2, Ardent Tolkien haters. An answer by a member of Camp 2 is typically something along the lines of [Sarcasm mode on] “Tolkien’s books had literary merit?” [/Sarcasm mode off] No awful children’s story about Elves and Hobbits and Dark Lords could possibly qualify as literature. At least The Sword of Shannara wasn’t boring.

To read the rest of this post, visit the Black Gate website.

Stretching the boundaries of genre: A review of the Martin-Dozois anthology Warriors

2011-09-08T21:00:00.004-04:00

“People have been telling stories about warriors for as long as they have been telling stories. Since Homer first sang the wrath of Achilles and the ancient Sumerians set down their tales of Gilgamesh, warriors, soldiers, and fighters have fascinated us; they are a part of every culture, every literary tradition, every genre.”

--George R.R. Martin, Warriors

There are two ways to approach the George R.R. Martin-Gardner Dozois edited anthology Warriors, one which is guaranteed to induce disappointment. If you expect a collection of swords and sorcery stories or medieval-based historical fiction, the clatter of steel on shield and heroic feats of arms, you will be disappointed. But if you keep an open mind and read it for what it is—a group of disparate genre stories all loosely connected by a warrior theme—you’ll enjoy it, and maybe more.

To be fair, the packaging on the label (a sword blade and an old gothic style script) is slightly misleading, and I admit that I was initially disappointed by the collection, my expectations placed elsewhere. But that feeling faded quickly, and by the end I was very pleased with Warriors.

In Warriors you’ll find horror, a western, and a mystery, as well as historical fiction, fantasy, and science fiction, from all ages of history including ancient Rome, the Viking Age, the medieval era, the world wars, the present, and the future. It’s hard to call this entirely a collection of genre fiction: How does one classify “The Girls from Avenger” by Carrie Vaughn, a moving story about a pilot from an all-female unit in WWII who investigates a mysterious death of a friend during a training accident? Historical fiction? Mainstream (is that a genre)? The same classification problem could be said of many other stories in here, like Peter Beagle’s “Dirae,” which follows the soul of a hospitalized woman that transcends its mortal coil by leaving her body and materializing as a kick-ass vigilante, allowing her to fight battles for the disadvantaged and the bullied.

But that’s really the entire point of Warriors. In the introduction, Martin states he was inspired to commission the anthology based on his experiences combing through the old drugstore wire spinner racks of his youth, in which you could science fiction sandwiched alongside westerns, or a bodice-ripping romance next to an Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter sword-and-planet novel.

There is nothing in Warriors that’s badly written, and in fact everything is well-done. It’s an antidote to those who think genre writing is shallow and formulaic; this collection is anything but. It’s also worth noting that every story in here is new, commissioned for the volume, so there’s no danger in reading something you’ve encountered before.

All that said, I have yet to encounter the anthology in which I liked every story. Unfortunately one of the weaker entries kicks off the volume. Even as a fan of Vikings, “The King of Norway” by Cecelia Holland did nothing for me. It features a bloody ship-to-ship engagement with no real investment in the characters involved, and the flow of battle is hard to follow, to boot. Warriors contains a couple other stories that I didn’t much care for: “The Custom of the Army” by Diana Gabaldon was too involved and seemed a thinly-veiled attempt to get readers interested in her Lord John novels. I don’t like when authors do this. “Defenders of the Frontier” was ambitious and well-done but lacked a decisive punch. War is often described as endless stretches of tedium followed by brief moments of terror. “Defenders’ explores this aspect of war, but unfortunately my overwhelming feeling upon finishing it was the same, sans terror.

Other stories are partial successes. “Out of the Dark” was shaping up as one of the most engaging and well-executed stories in the collection, but the ending (which was telegraphed enough so that it didn’t take me wholly by surprise) is too jarring, and renders the hard-fought sacrifices void. But even so I’d recommend it. I’m not so sure I could say the same for “Seven Years from Home” by Naomi Novik, which was well-done but a little to close to Avatar for me to completely enjoy.

The rest of Warriors was almost uniformly good, and some of the stories are absolute gems.

“The Pit” by James Rollins is written from the point of view of a domesticated dog stolen by a ruthless trainer of pit fighters, and it works. It’s a great little story that tugs at the heartstrings.

“The Eagle and the Rabbit” by Steven Saylor is another fine tale. The characterization carries the story as everyone from the sympathetic protagonist to the chief bad guy—a cruel Roman slave-driver—is memorably portrayed.

The best stories in my opinion were Joe Lansdale’s “Soldierin,” “My Name is Legion” by David Morrell, “The Scroll” by David Ball, and “The Mystery Knight” by George R.R. Martin. The only writer of this foursome with whom I had no previous acquaintance was Ball, and after reading “The Scroll” I’d certainly be interested in picking up more of his stuff. It’s about a French military engineer taken captive by the sultan of Morocco and forced to oversee the construction of a mighty city. The sultan is an absolute bastard who cruelly toys with the fates of his captives (the lucky are killed outright). At the outset of the story the sultan writes down the engineer’s fortune on a scroll, and every twist and turn in the tale seems fated by what has already been written. The execution is superb.

Morrell and Lansdale are similar writers: Both are highly competent, professional storytellers with the ability to spin compelling yarns with a very high batting average. They don’t disappoint here. “My Name is Legion” features a soldier who seeks to repent for his troubled past by entering the crucible known as the French Foreign Legion. It’s a great little story about discipline and honor and the strange fortunes of war. Lansdale is one of the best tale spinners of this or any era, as far as I’m concerned. His stuff is always gripping and visceral but suffused with humor, which certainly describes “Soldierin,” a story about an all-black unit of buffalo soldiers and a savage encounter with Apaches in the old west.

Warriors saves the best for last with “The Mystery Knight.” Martin’s story is set in his A Song of Ice and Fire world of Westeros, which is ostensibly fantasy but is deeply medieval. Heraldry, jousting, dark ages cuisine, and the knight-squire relationship are examined here in detail. The story includes a few too many characters to keep them all straight, particularly in an audio format (this is my one criticism of audio—I find it tedious to bookmark and/or flip back and forth, which is a requirement when reading a typical byzantine Martin story). But the quality of the writing is superb and stands out even in this collection of heavyweights.

Current or former Martin readerswho are turned off by A) The sheer length of A Song of Ice and Fire, or B) Its unrelenting brutality (I’ve had issues with both, though I do plan to finish the series) should nevertheless enjoy “The Mystery Knight.” My first thought upon finishing it was that I wish that A Song of Ice and Fire was more like this: A little more light-hearted, with a sharper, tighter focus on the characters I care about. The hedge knight Dunk and his squire Egg are a memorable pair, and “The Mystery Knight” whet my appetite for the two previously published Dunk and Egg stories.

One final note on the audio version: Listening to Warriors was a freaking epic experience. It’s 26 discs and checks in at 31 hours, 13 minutes. It almost wore me down a few times. Warriors does feature two narrators—Patrick Lawlor, who narrates the stories with male protagonists, and Christina Traister, who reads those featuring women. This does help to break things up. It took a while for Lawlor to grow on me, as I found his voice much more suited to the lightheartedness of “The Mystery Knight” than some of the other, harder-edged stories. Traister was very good, particularly in her reading of “The Girls from Avenger” and the hard-edged horror/thriller “Clean Slate.”

Note: This review also appears on SFFaudio.com.

Swords and Sorcery at its Pinnacle: A Look Back at The Fantastic Swordsmen

2011-09-01T22:24:00.004-04:00

For those who put entertainment first, heroic fantasy offers it in its purest form.

—L. Sprague de Camp, The Fantastic Swordsmen

Although many of its foundational writers had already sailed into the west, swords and sorcery reached a Weird peak in the 1960s. In 1961 Fritz Leiber coined the term “swords and sorcery” in the journal Ancalagon. The Swordsmen and Sorcerer’s Guild of America (can I get a membership, please?) began the first of its secretive meetings. And the Lancer published, L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter-edited Conan series with its splendid Frank Frazetta covers was everywhere. These were heady times for the genre. Although the mass-produced works of the era can still be readily found and enjoyed today, I can only imagine when books like The Swords of Lankhmar could be found in drugstore wire spinner racks and the like.

In that strange time of tie-dye and Tolkien, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the pages of paperback books, Pyramid Books published four swords and sorcery anthologies. Edited by fantasy/science fiction author L. Sprague de Camp, the series began with Swords and Sorcery (1963) and concluded with 1970’s Warlocks and Warriors.

To view the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Current reading: A cultural clash in fantasy

2011-08-28T18:46:00.005-04:00

So I just finished reading The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman, the middle book of the His Dark Materials trilogy. I'm waiting until I read the concluding volume, The Amber Spyglass, before I write a review of the series, so more to come on that later.

I finished The Subtle Knife on Friday and my local library is unfortunately closed on the weekends until September ("summer hours"--when most people have more free time and opportunity to read--go figure), so I pulled the L. Sprague de Camp edited The Fantastic Swordsmen off my shelf and read it in the interim.

Holy cow, what a contrast.

I know some people have no use for genre labels, let alone puzzling out the various sub-genres of fantasy, but if you can't tell the difference between these books beyond the fact that one is a collection of short stories, and the other the middle novel of a trilogy, you must have a tin ear. There's a gulf of difference. Reading these books back-to-back emphasized the stark contrast of epic/high fantasy vs. swords-and-sorcery at its most extreme. Children with mysterious origins and complex destinies involved in a world-spanning conflict against God himself, vs. muscular, wolfish heroes battling Cthulhu-eseque horrors and mad sorcerers... yeah. Describing both with nothing more definitive than "fantasy" is like using the term "sports" to delineate football and golf.

I enjoyed both, though in general The Subtle Knife was a bit of a letdown after the high bar set by The Golden Compass. The Fantastic Swordsmen was almost uniformly excellent, marred by one rather grating flaw. More to come on that book in a review which will appear Thursday on Black Gate.

The Golden Compass, a review

2011-08-22T23:00:00.005-04:00

I began reading The Golden Compass (1995), Book One of the His Dark Materials trilogy, with a fair bit of reserve—and, to be honest, a slight bit of ill-will. Anyone who trashes Tolkien as Philip Pullman has done automatically starts with one strike against him, in my book.

Then there’s the religious angle. But more on that in a bit.

Despite my inherent biases I greatly enjoyed The Golden Compass, both as a well-written story and as a marvelous work of imagination. Armored polar bears with their own culture? Awesome. Zeppelins armed with machine guns? Very cool. I found 11-year-old protagonist Lyra quite likeable, precocious and resourceful but not amped up with unbelievable girl power or smarts belying her age. The story takes place in a world both like and unlike our own, a parallel universe earth with some familiar geography, flora and fauna, but a different technology level coupled with science-defying magic. Perhaps the most alien feature of this world is that each person is born with a daemon, shape-shifting creatures that seem to be a physical manifestation of the soul. The trouble starts when a shady organization begins to steal children, whisking them away to a laboratory in the north where they are forcibly separated from their daemons, a dreadful process called “intercision.”

If for nothing else, the great bear Iorek Byrnison makes The Golden Compass worth reading. Iorek has a regal past but has fallen on very hard times after violating a taboo. His path back to redemption was one of the most rewarding parts of the novel. Polar bears in Pullman’s universe aren’t just men in bear form but have minds utterly alien to ours. Pullman manages to convey this difference with conviction. Here’s a description of Lyra’s first encounter with Iorek, which also provides a glimpse of Pullman’s style:

A pitted alley beside it led to a sheet-metal gate into a rear yard, where a lean-to shed stood crazily over a floor of frozen mud. Dim yellow light through the rear window of the bar showed a vast pale form crouching upright and gnawing at a haunch of meat which it held in both hands. Lyra had an impression of bloodstained muzzle and face, small malevolent black eyes, and an immensity of dirty matted yellowish fur. As it gnawed, hideous growling, crunching, sucking noises came from it.

Farder Coram stood by the gate and called:

“Iorek Byrnison!”

The bear stopped eating. As far as they could tell, he was looking at them directly, but it was impossible to read any expression on his face.

“Iorek Byrnison,” said Farder Coram again. “May I speak to you?”

Lyra’s heart was thumping hard, because something in the bear’s presence made her feel close to coldness, danger, brutal power, but a power controlled by intelligence; and not a human intelligence, nothing like a human, because of course bears had no daemons. This strange hulking presence gnawing its meat was like nothing she had ever imagined, and she felt a profound admiration and pity for the lonely creature.

I will add that The Golden Compass isn’t perfect. It contains a few too many Deus ex machina escapes. The main baddy Mrs. Coulter at this point is hardly the stuff of nightmares. She reminds me of (no pun intended) a pale imitation of the White Witch, far less diabolic and far less interesting than C.S. Lewis' creation. But overall this is well-written, inspired fantasy.

So the big question is: what about the anti-religious bias? At least in The Golden Compass, I didn’t think it was laid on very thick. At least, not yet. Pullman seems to be setting up the Church (again, not our Church, but the organized religion of this “other” universe) as an arch-conservative, unnatural influence. I’ve read that the first book is the least anti-Christian, but that this element is gradually amped up in the second book, The Subtle Knife, while the third volume is the most overtly atheistic and anti-Christian of them all.

As others have I’ve struggled mightily with the God question. As such, I see no harm in examining both sides of the issue. It’s healthy to do so, in fact. Yet as much as my own faith has waxed and waned over the years, to say that “religion poisons everything” as Christopher Hitchens did is intellectually dishonest, and it remains to be seen if Pullman espouses the same viewpoint. The Catholic Church has stated in no uncertain terms that Pullman’s real agenda is using a fantasy to sell atheism to kids. I’m not sure how I feel about that, to be honest. I certainly can’t comment on whether I agree with this statement until I read the whole trilogy.

I will say this: I don’t think it’s hypocritical to give Lewis a pass for selling children on Christianity while condemning Pullman for selling them on atheism. Why? If Pullman were only showing a view of the world without God, that would be one thing; attacking an existing institution is quite another. Lewis emphasized the positive, Pullman has shown some signs of emphasizing the negative, which I’m not sure is entirely appropriate for a book ostensibly aimed at children. I’m not sure if I’m on firm ground here, but that’s my initial reaction. I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts as I get deeper into the series.

I guess it comes down to how much of “the real world” you want in your fantasy fiction. C.S. Lewis has a legion of fans who love his work (me included) and an equal body of critics who actively despise Narnia for its allegorical treatment of Christianity. His Dark Materials is no less polarizing. That to me makes it worth reading, if not necessarily for children then certainly for adults.

Part of me does wonder if this tempest isn’t in the end a moot point. To be honest, I can’t imagine my kids reading these books, and not because of any complaints I might have for the religious angle, but for the simple fact that they’re too bloody complicated. Young teens, perhaps, are the right age to grasp the story and keep track of the plotting factions and the real-world parallels. Not kids. This is far more difficult reading than Harry Potter, for example. Will kids be “corrupted” by His Dark Materials? I suppose it's possible, though I find it unlikely.

Some thoughts on the eve of Conan the Barbarian

2011-08-18T22:00:00.002-04:00

I’ve refrained from talking about Conan the Barbarian (2011) until now, despite my love for Robert E. Howard’s works. But now that we’re poised on the eve of its U.S. release, I thought I’d weigh in with my personal hopes—and fears—regarding the film.

The bottom line for me is this: I’m going to do what the studio execs want, which is opening my wallet and seeing the movie. And I might even consider it money well spent. That said, the updates I’ve followed up to this point (your ultimate source is Al Harron’s Conan the Movie Blog) don’t leave me with great expectations.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website .

NPR releases survey results for Top 100 Science Fiction, Fantasy Books

2011-08-11T20:41:00.003-04:00

The results are in for NPR's Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books survey. You can view the complete list over on the NPR website, but here are the top 10 as selected by 60,000 readers:

The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
The Dune Chronicles, Frank Herbert
A Song of Ice and Fire series, George RR Martin
1984, George Orwell
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
American Gods, Neil Gaiman

I've read all the books in the top 10, though with one caveat--I've only read the first Dune book, as I've heard the sequels aren't very good. (I've got to think that most of the votes were for Dune itself). All in all it's a pretty good list, although I think it's very premature to put A Song of Ice and Fire--which isn't even finished yet--on such a list.

Here's my personal top 10 and where they ended up:

The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien (no. 1)
The Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien (no. 46, a surprise as I didn't think it would make the cut)
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut (no. 19)
1984, George Orwell (no. 6)
The Once and Future King, T.H. White (no. 47)
Watership Down, Richard Adams (no. 32)
The Conan series, Robert E. Howard (no. 68)
The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury (no. 27)
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (no. 20)
The Worm Ouroboros, E.R. Eddison (did not make the cut)

Imaro by Charles Saunders, a review

2011-08-08T22:27:00.004-04:00

Charles Saunders once stated that the impetus behind Imaro (the eponymous protagonist of his 1980 novel Imaro) was a simple urge to create a character who could kick Tarzan’s ass.

I’m not so sure he succeeded.

First, I’m not entirely convinced Imaro could kick Tarzan’s ass. Second (and more to the point), this bout isn't fought with the same rules and doesn't share a common ring. Imaro is a very different type of work than Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tales of the jungle hero, or Robert E. Howard’s Conan, the other character with whom he is frequently compared. While Imaro is a collection of short stories originally published in magazines like Night Voyages and Dragonbane, Saunders attempts something quite different than Howard’s picaresque tales of Conan, or the unending Tarzan sequels Burroughs would go on to write. Imaro provides a clear origin story that Howard never penned for Conan. It also contains the first rumbles of a coming clash of ancient gods, and drops hints that Imaro will be a key player in a world-shaking series of future events. As a result, Imaro straddles the two opposing camps of swords and sorcery and epic fantasy. While it clearly has more in common with the former, in Imaro you can see the beginnings of a mythic tale spanning several books. Saunders continues Imaro’s story in works like Imaro II: The Quest for Cush and Imaro III: The Trail of Bohu, and in 2009 he wrote the concluding volume The Naama War.

By combining swords and sorcery with epic fantasy and placing in the action in the relatively unexplored territory of (an alternate) Africa, with Imaro Saunders created something unique, fun, and well-worth reading. In the rarefied air at the top of the swords and sorcery genre you’ll find writers like Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber. These guys were so good they spawned legions of barbaric imitators—your Braks and your Thongors, and Amalric the Mangod. Based on my early exposure to the series I would say that Imaro falls somewhere in the middle or upper-third of this pack. Imaro is certainly better written and far more original than Carter’s Amalric and a lot of other short S&S works I’ve read over the years. Though it’s not at the level of a Howard or a Leiber, how many other works are, frankly? If you like swords and sorcery, you’ll like Imaro. I did.

Imaro is a collection of five short stories including “Turkhana Knives,” “The Place of Stones,” “Slaves of the Giant Kings,” “Horror in the Black Hills,” and “The City of Madness.” Saunders borrows a Hyborian Age conceit and sets the action in an alternate Africa named Nyumbani. By placing the stories on a fictitious yet familiar continent Saunders can indulge his fantastic side and do some culture building, introducing us to peoples and landscapes at once familiar and alien (as Saunders says on his blog, Nyumbani was constructed in the appropriate Howardian manner: take the best and most interesting of a variety of cultures and civilizations, mix ‘em together, full speed ahead, and damn the chronological contractions!)

Saunders does a fine job building Nyumbani and its cultures, including the proud warrior tribe of Ilyassai among which Imaro is raised. Saunders provides a glossary at the back so we can reference terms like arem, a six to seven foot spear of half wood, half edged iron, and olmaiyo, the ritual lion hunt that marks the final test of manhood for Ilyassai youth. Imaro mostly mixes it up with human warriors and wild animals but also encounters magic, battling sorcerers and a handful of monsters.

My copy of Imaro is marred by a rather unfortunate cover which de-emphasizes Imaro as black (the guy on the cover could pass as a tan Tarzan) and depicts him fighting some ridiculous hippo-man. I’d like to point out to my buddy Scott (who spent most of last weekend ribbing me with ridiculous questions about the breeding habits of hippo-men, and so on) as well as any other potential readers who might be turned off by the cover that Imaro is entirely hippo-man free. Imaro does fight a creature described as having vaguely hippo-like jaws, but that’s it.

It’s impossible not to get behind Imaro. He’s the offspring of his mother, Katisa, and a unknown stranger from the outside the tribe, a mating which the Ilyassai consider taboo. Katisa accepts exile for breaking tribal law in exchange for the promise that the rest of the Ilyassai will raise Imaro as one of their own. They renege. From his earliest days Imaro is labeled an outcast, an “other” who is bullied and betrayed at every turn. As a result he rarely laughs or expresses affection, even as he matures into a muscled warrior and the mightiest man among the Ilyassai. Fueled by hate and suspicion of his fellow man, Imaro is like a volcano, apt to erupt into violence at the slightest provocation.

But there is more to Imaro than just a bloodthirsty warrior. I was deeply moved by a scene at the end of book two (“The Place of Stones”) in which Imaro rejects a sincere offer to rejoin his old tribe. Saunders skillfully walks a tightrope with Imaro: Will he tread the path of isolation and darkness, forever looking over his shoulder at the awful events of his childhood, or will he accept friendship and companionship and overcome his dark past to become a man? I won’t reveal the answer here, though I will say that Imaro does not have a clear resolution to the question, although it can be enjoyed as a standalone novel.

So back to the most important question: Could Imaro kick Tarzan (and Conan’s) asses? From what I’ve read he’s certainly their equal physically and perhaps is even their superior. Imaro has prodigious strength and speed. He also has an iron constitution and is capable of calling on an inner reserve that allows him to fight when bloodied and exhausted. The Navy Seals complete hell week to allow them to push their bodies equal or beyond any stresses they’ll see in the field; Imaro is able to draw upon mafundishu-ya-muran, a period of warrior training lasting from age five to late adolescence in which Ilyassai boys are taken from their families to undergo a course of brutal Spartan-like training that transforms them into warriors.

So yeah, Imaro is badass, though not invincible. While he’d probably whip up on Tarzan, Conan armed with a sword would cut Saunders’ hero to ribbons, in my opinion (Imaro's fighting style is savage, but rather unskilled). But that said, Imaro is pretty kick ass and I’m looking forward to tracking down a copy of The Quest for Cush.

Get out the vote: NPR poll on top 100 SF/F titles of all time

2011-08-05T16:20:00.005-04:00

If you haven't already heard, NPR has an open poll on the top 100 science fiction/fantasy titles of all time. To participate in the poll (you get to pick your top 1o, from which they'll compile the top 100), click here: http://www.npr.org/2011/08/02/138894873/vote-for-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-titles. The results will be announced August 11.

NPR is getting a lot of flack for co-mingling fantasy and SF, not including children's literature (so no Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Hobbit, or Narnia) as well as including a few too many modern authors to the exclusion of some classic titles. I don't mind the first two criticisms so much, but I agree with the latter (four China Mieville titles? Give me a break. And no Poul Anderson--WTF?)

But regardless, what's there is pretty good. Here are the ten I voted for:

The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
The Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
1984, George Orwell
The Once and Future King, T.H. White
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Conan series, Robert E. Howard
The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The Worm Ouroboros, E.R. Eddison

Breathing Life Into Dead Gods: The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis

2011-08-04T22:38:00.003-04:00

The old gods, when they ceased to be taken as gods, might so easily have been suppressed as devils: that, we know, is what happened to our incalculable loss in the history of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Only their allegorical use, prepared by slow developments within paganism itself, saved them, as in a temporary tomb, for the day when they could wake again in the beauty of acknowledged myth and thus provide modern Europe with its “third world” of romantic imagining.

–C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love

Tracing the roots of fantasy is a fascinating exercise. From whence did works of pure fancy spring? How far back do we go to find their source? Are its origins to be found in works like The Epic of Gilgamesh, or The Iliad and The Odyssey (for a great series of posts on the subject, look no further than Matthew David Surridge’s four part series Worlds Within Worlds ).

In his landmark study The Allegory of Love (1936), C.S. Lewis implies that fantasy’s roots lie not in the classical period, but the Medieval Age. Medieval poets infused “extinct” pagan gods with new life by employing them as allegory. Venus and Mars, Minerva and Jupiter, died and awoke again as concepts, sewing seeds that would eventually give rise to works like Phantastes or The Well at the World’s End.

Go back to the beginnings of any literature and you will not find works of myth and fancy, Lewis claims. Ancient writers wrote stories based on the probable, or events that they believed actually happened. Or they took the marvellous as fact, writing without irony about hippogriffs and sea-monsters. Purely fantastic fiction was unknown (classical poets employed allegory, but not in this manner). Pagan gods as allegory, and the acknowledgement of myth by medieval poets, marked a cosmic shift in artistic technique, paving the paths for writers like Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton and transitioning us to works of pure fantasy. “It is difficult for the modern man of letters to value this quiet revolution as it deserves,” writes Lewis. “Allegory may seem, at first, to have killed them; but it killed only as the sower kills, for gods, like other creatures, must die to live.”

Revelations and gorgeously turned bits of wisdom like these are only a few of the treasures to be found in The Allegory of Love.

To read the rest of this post, visit the Black Gate website.

My 2011 reading list to date

2011-08-02T21:48:00.003-04:00

Here's what I've read so far this year and my ratings for each:

Roots and Branches, Tom Shippey, 4 stars
Legend, David Gemmell, 4 stars
The Sword of Rhiannon, Leigh Brackett, 3.5 stars
Grails: Quests of the Dawn, Richard Gilliam, Mercedes Lackey, Andre Norton editors, 3 stars
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens 3.5 stars
The Burning Land, Bernard Cornwell, 3.5 stars
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy 4.5 stars
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, J.R.R. Tolkien, 3.5 stars
Resolute Determination: Napoleon and the French Empire (The Modern Scholar), 3.5 stars
The Company They Keep, Diana Glyer, 4 stars
The Desert of Souls, Howard Andrew Jones, 3.5 stars
The Brothers Bulger, Howie Carr, 3 stars
Phantastes, George MacDonald, 3.5 stars
Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, Jane Chance editor, 3.5 stars
One Who Walked Alone, Novalyne Price Ellis, 4 stars
Damnation Alley, Roger Zelazny, 3 stars
Walden, Henry David Thoreau, 4 stars
Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott, 4 stars
Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, John Joseph Adams editor, 3.5 stars
Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson, 3.5 stars
The Broken Sword, Poul Anderson, 4.5 stars
The Dirt, Motley Crue, 3 stars
Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 4 stars
Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings, Lin Carter, 3.5 stars
The Dark Tide, Dennis McKiernan, 3 stars
Watership Down, Richard Adams, 5 stars
Shadows of Doom, Dennis McKiernan, 2.5 stars
The Darkest Day, Dennis McKiernan, 3 stars
The Allegory of Love, C.S. Lewis, 4 stars

I set a goal to read at least one book a week in 2011; I'm slightly behind, with 29 titles read through 31 weeks. Still, I'm currently halfway through Imaro and the George R.R. Martin/Gardner Dozois anthology Warriors (I'm listening to the latter on audio), so I hope to regain some lost ground. As I've said before I'm not a particularly fast reader and I also waste too much time idly surfing the internet. Ah well.

If there's anything you want to know about any of the above titles, feel free to ask. The best so far is Watership Down, a re-read. It's a book everyone should read at least once in their lifetime, in my opinion. The worst was Shadows of Doom, the middle third of Dennis McKiernan's Iron Tower trilogy.

Four part Conan movie history on Youtube

2011-07-25T20:50:00.003-04:00

Fans (and detractors) of the two 1980s Conan films should find these interesting: A four part history of the movies recently posted to Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pmf3_FXM-M&feature=related (Part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybT91J73HZU&feature=related (Part 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNhDvkpJaqI&feature=related (Part 3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9ez-g8UQ9w&feature=related (Part 4)

The presenter is Paul Sammon, author of Conan the Phenomenon, who worked on the sets of both Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer (for the record I love the former and despise the latter. Sammon holds roughly the same views, it appears).

I don't own Phenomenon, but I have Sammon's Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, which is a fantastic work and a must-own for fans of BR. Sammon is a smart guy and a good presenter, and coupled with his insider's view these are well worth watching.

There's a lot of good (and fun) information: Who knew that the vulture on the Tree of Woe was the real thing, albeit dead and stuffed, and reeking? Or that the beheading of Conan's mom was originally shown on screen, but was so bloody it earned the film an X rating and had to be removed? Sammon also reveals that Wilt Chamberlain was a Howard fan.

These clips also include some really cool behind the scenes pics (see the hydraulic fully articulated giant snake, sans skin. Ride the snake!). Sammon presented this at the recent Howard Days in Cross Plains, TX. Wish I could have made it.

Hat tip to the Yahoo group REH Innercircle for posting these links.

Encouraging production video of The Hobbit released

2011-07-21T21:30:00.003-04:00

I’m officially Much More Encouraged about The Hobbit now that I’ve seen the latest production video released today. You can view it here on Peter Jackson’s Facebook page.

I’ve long believed that The Hobbit is (or was) a risker film to make than The Lord of the Rings. Not now of course—The Hobbit is all but a guaranteed hit, as most LOTR fans would lap up a Jackson-directed four hour Tom Bombadil Lifetime special. But I think it was a smart move to make The Lord of the Rings first. Even though Rings is five times the length of The Hobbit, features far costlier set pieces, and has a much more complex, sprawling narrative, The Hobbit has its own unique movie-making handicap: Namely, that it’s about a hobbit and 13 dwarves. Hunks like Orlando Bloom and Viggo Mortensen and chicks like Cate Blanchett and Liv Tyler are nowhere to be found (though most of these guys are getting cameos, it seems. And Kili is the token heartthrob). A troupe of short, bearded, rotund men is a tougher sell for mass audiences used to handsome stars and starlets.

In perhaps the only serious moment of an otherwise fun, lighthearted clip, Jackson admits as much. “Thirteen dwarves is one of the reasons why I dreaded The Hobbit, and why I really didn’t think I was going to make it for such a long time. But the irony is, it turns out to be one of the joys.”

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Some recent book finds

2011-07-18T18:34:00.005-04:00

Courtesy of a recent town fair, I now have in my possession the following books, each purchased for the princely sum of $1:

Bulfinch's Mythology, a modern abridgment by Edmund Fuller (covers mythology from classical Greece and Rome, as well as Northern Mythology, Arthuriana, and legends of Charlemane and the Middle Ages)

The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, as retold by Joseph Bedier (a retelling of the famous story, free of anachronisms)

The Well of the Unicorn, Fletcher Pratt (I've never read anything by Pratt, though I've read much good written about him).

Imaro, Charles Saunders (I've somehow managed to avoid reading Saunder's epic jungle hero novel, despite all the praise heaped on it by my former Cimmerian comrades. I hope to rectify that soon).

Brak vs. the Sorceress, John Jakes (it will probably suck, but I couldn't resist)

At the Earth's Core, Edgar Rice Burroughs (a recent read of Tarzan fueled this purchase)

Conan the Rebel, Poul Anderson (I'm not much for Conan pastiches, but "woot" because it's Anderson!)

The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman (now I get to see what all the fuss is about...)

The Works of Sir Walter Scott, Vol. IX, Ivanhoe (I have a tattered paperback copy of Ivanhoe; this is a nice hardcover, old but date unknown)

Sir Thomas Malory, Tales of King Arthur Illustrated, edited and abridged with an introduction by Michael Senior (I've got the real deal already, but this has some great B&W and full color illustrations).

Now all I need is time...

The day I went a-viking

2011-07-11T20:54:00.006-04:00

How many people can say they sailed in a viking ship of their own making?

So what if the mast was made of PVC pipe, and the planking and shields of cardboard. The end product looks pretty good, and it netted us another First Place entry in the Highland Lake Boat Parade in Andover, NH, this past 4th of July weekend.

This was probably our most ambitious project yet. The mast and sail were a pain in the ass. That's a 10 foot piece of 3-inch diameter PVC pipe, seated in a toilet flange, screwed to a piece of thick wood, and spray painted brown. We drilled a hole at the top to accommodate an eight-foot long crossbeam made of 1 1/2 inch PVC. A few guy wires gave it stability. The sail is an old bedsheet. Red spraypaint for the vertical stripes.

I set the wife and kids to work making shields--a total of 13, including 6 per side and one for the mast. They did some awesome work. The shield bosses are tinfoil. They probably wouldn't stop a longsword or spear thrust, but they look the part.

The coup-de-grace came courtesy of my uncle. My original plan was to have the cardboard at the front taper to a whimpy point; he suggested constructing a huge prow to give the craft more of a sweeping longship appearance. We nailed together a few pieces of wood to frame the prow, ran a rope from the sail to the point to give it a little more lift, and voila! My uncle is a (literal) engineer, I couldn't have done it myself.

For those wondering (I know you are), the dragon head/tail are built using two pieces of styrofoam packing from an empty TV box. The head is an empty 18-pack of Coors Light. We spray painted the whole thing green. A styrofoam ball cut in half serves as the eyes and a pair of styrofoam cones are the horns.

At the conclusion of the parade we gave our ship a proper viking funeral: All but the styrofoam was burned in a pyre on the beach as the fireworks burst overhead. Much beer was consumed.

All in all it was an awesome event. My plastic axe was hungry and I was sorely tempted to pillage and plunder a few shoreside cottages but my wife had her hand on the tiller. And my 86-year-old grandmother would have none of it.

Those dwarf pictures…

2011-07-09T13:40:00.003-04:00

…I must say my reaction is a mixed bag, a fair bit of “meh,” to be honest.

First what I like.

The proportions seem great. The faces, excellent. The hair and beards, well done (if a little too neat and/or wind-swept).

Now what I don’t like.

The 3E D&D straps and buckles/black leathery appearance of their gauntlets and armor. This is radically different from what we see in the books, which are cloaks and brightly colored belts and hoods. And later, coats of fine, shining mail studded with bright gems from Smaug’s horde. Also, their weapons are rather too bulky and built for style and appearance, not war.

A (very) guilty pleasure: Dennis McKiernan’s The Iron Tower Trilogy

2011-07-07T22:06:00.003-04:00

The publication of Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara in 1977 was a watershed moment in fantasy literature. The success of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings left fans clamoring for more epic, secondary world fantasy with maps, and with The Sword of Shannara Brooks delivered. Its publication began a trend of Tolkien-inspired fantasy that deeply marked (marred, others might say) the genre thereafter.

But the ensuing years haven’t been kind to Brooks. Lin Carter, editor of the acclaimed Ballantine Adult fantasy series, said of The Sword of Shannara ,” [it’s]the single most cold-blooded, complete rip-off of another book that I have ever read”. Despite the commercial success of Shannara and its sequels, its now widely considered to be the poster child for Biggest Tolkien Ripoff.

But, prevailing claims to the contrary, The Sword of Shannara is not even close to that moniker. The championship belt for most slavish LOTR imitation (that I have read, at least) hangs proudly about the waist of Dennis McKiernan’s The Iron Tower Trilogy. In comparison to The Dark Tide, Shadows of Doom, and The Darkest Day, Shannara is a veritable bastion of originality sprung whole and entire from the forehead of Zeus. The Iron Tower Trilogy is, in fact, The Lord of the Rings with the serial numbers filed off. Crudely. Anyone who possesses even a passing familiarity with Tolkien’s masterwork should stand aghast at the “similarities.”

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Johann Hari—hypocrite

2011-07-06T23:03:00.005-04:00

The same brilliant award-winning young journalist who once demonized J.R.R. Tolkien for daring to oppose unbridled modernity has since turned his attention to writing pieces like these:

How to survive the age of distraction

Has the internet brought us together or driven us apart

The deal we dare not turn down

2010--The year zombies came for our brains

In these pieces you’ll find him railing against internet culture and the accompanying rise of pornography and short attention spans in the age of Facebook and Twitter; bemoaning the decline and impending death of paper books and sustained, deep reading; expressing bitterness at omnipresent advertising and consumer culture, and lecturing us soberly on the decay of the environment.

Symptoms of unbridled modernity.

Which Tolkien warned us about.

In The Lord of the Rings.

I guess the message here is that the progress wrought by modernity is all good--when it’s Hari’s kind of progress, like the cosmopolitan city. But when it results in consequences with which he doesn’t align himself--like teh evil internets--it’s bad.

Rich, isn’t it?

What a fucking hypocrite. Not to mention a slack-jawed reader of Tolkien.

---

Yes, I'm back from vacation! More light-hearted stuff to come soon.

A Short Rest

2011-06-26T07:52:00.003-04:00

For anyone following The Silver Key, I'll be heading to our family's equivalent of Rivendell (a place that's internet free) and won't be posting here until after July 4. Cheers!

(Closing in on) 100 years of Tarzan of the Apes

2011-06-25T07:02:00.006-04:00

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes was first published in All-Story Magazine in 1912, which means that we’re closing in on 100 years of the iconic jungle hero (wow!). Tarzan of the Apes proved so popular among All-Story’s readers that it spawned two dozen sequels, several movies, and stacks of comic books.

Yet somehow I’ve managed to avoid reading the original story that started it all—until now.

Shame on me, because was I missing out. Tarzan of the Apes is a lot of fun and I highly recommend it. It’s a lean novel but packs a big story into its 245 pages (paperback—I own the Ballantine Books authorized edition, pictured here). It’s chock-full of action and violence, the clash of animal vs. animal, man vs. animal, and man vs. man in the savage jungles of darkest Africa. There’s some really manly, barbaric stuff going on in here, like Tarzan’s battle with the great ape Kerchak for possession of Jane in a clash with prehistoric echoes:

Jane—her lithe, young form flattened against the trunk of a great tree, her hands tight pressed against her rising and falling bosom, and her eyes wide with mingled horror, fascination, fear, and admiration—watched the primordial ape battle with the primeval man for possession of a woman—for her.

As the great muscles of the man’s back and shoulders knotted beneath the tension of his efforts, and the huge biceps and forearm held at bay those mighty tusks, the veil of centuries of civilization and culture was swept from the blurred vision of the Baltimore girl.

Although I hadn’t read Tarzan of the Apes previously I knew the story well enough through exposure to movies and the comics. Aristocratic English couple John and Alice Clayton, the Lord and Lady Greystoke, are marooned in western Africa following a violent mutiny aboard their ship. Alice’s delicate constitution can’t handle the shock of the jungle and its terrible denizens and she dies after giving birth to a son. Her husband is mauled to death by a great ape shortly thereafter. A female member of the ape tribe, Kala, takes the then six-month old infant John to her breast and raises him as a member of the tribe.

Named Tarzan (which means “White Skin” in the language of the apes), the young Lord Greystoke attains near-superhuman levels of agility and strength through his rough upbringing among the great apes. Though he never attains the full strength the bull males possess, Tarzan is more agile, smarter, and equipped with a hunting knife and rope which he uses as an accurately thrown noose from the treetops. Soon he becomes the fiercest beast in the jungle, rising to the top of his tribe. Eventually Tarzan finds his parents’ abandoned cottage and manages to teach himself to read. Through the printed word and encounters with civilized visitors he discovers his humanity and his ancestry and finally returns to England.

Like A Princess of Mars which I recently re-read after a span of many years Tarzan of the Apes is not without its flaws. Edgar Rice Burroughs has been described as a great writer of ideas, but not necessarily great in the execution of said ideas. I tend to agree. A more patient, careful writer than Burroughs might have turned the transformation of savage into man into something even more powerful and beautiful than we see in Tarzan of the Apes, and ultimately, in a more believable fashion (in the novel Tarzan transforms from savage ape-man to courteous, timid love interest in a span of a few pages, which I found hard to swallow). Burroughs is a writer of boundless imagination and energy but I think he suffered from turning out his stories at a white-hot pace.

But these criticisms are ultimately minor. As I said before I enjoyed Tarzan of the Apes a lot, even more than A Princess of Mars. More than just action, Tarzan of the Apes offers a thoughtful, multi-faceted view on the nature of civilization. In general it’s roughly equivalent though slightly more positive than we find in Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. Howard wrote in “Beyond the Black River” that “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” Likewise, in Burroughs’ universe being raised among the animals in the wild seems to trump city life. Tarzan is not only far physically superior to civilized men, but he’s morally and spiritually superior as well. Tarzan views black cannibals and white murdering pirates with an equal degree of disgust. Back in England he’s able to see through the schemes of the gentleman Robert Canler, who is little more than a finely mannered animal. He judges with clarity man’s capacity for not just sub-human, but sub-animal behavior (“for it has remained for man alone among all creatures to kill senselessly and wantonly for the pleasure of inflicting suffering and death.”)

But again the novel is not that black and white. Too much city life may make us weak and dissolute, but living in the jungle isn’t fit for a man. Education and civility are a good thing and man (or more accurately, cultured, aristocratic man) is more than animal, a superior creation. Though he’s lived among brutes and feasted on raw flesh, Tarzan still treats Jane with a natural sense of chivalry. But unlike a gentleman his attitude is unfeigned and not a scheme to maneuver her into bed.

Yet Jane, though attracted to Tarzan’s vitality and stunningly good looks, is simultaneously repelled by this man-ape. She’s reluctant to marry him and risk severing her place in the social order. I found the Tarzan-Jane dynamic to be one of the book’s chief strengths.

“Could she find anything in common with a husband whose life had been spent in the treetops of an African wilderness, frolicking and fighting with fierce anthropoids; tearing food from the quivering flank of fresh-killed prey, sinking his strong teeth into raw flesh, and tearing away his portion while his mates growled and fought about him for their share?

Could he ever rise to her social sphere? Could she bear to think of sinking to his? Would either be happy in such a horrible misalliance?

Read Tarzan of the Apes to find out.

First official photos of The Hobbit released

2011-06-23T20:51:00.002-04:00

From Entertainment Weekly.

So far so good, though I can’t say I’m surprised, given the precedent set by the wonderful scenery and set-pieces of The Lord of the Rings films. Martin Freeman couldn’t have been a better casting choice, visually, for the part of Bilbo (though I picture Mr. Baggins as slightly more rotund).

As I’m sure it was for many others The Hobbit was my gateway to fantasy and, largely, to reading in general. As such I have very high expectations for this film (or more accurately, films). I have little doubt The Hobbit is going to look great, but my hopes and fears are pinned to the faithfulness of the script. And the amount of screen time allotted to Beorn kicking ass at the Battle of Five Armies.

Cross-posted from Black Gate.

The Broken Sword, an (audio) review

2011-06-17T18:23:00.008-04:00

Note: This post also appears on SFFaudio.com.

The Viking Age of England offers fertile ground for storytelling. It was a time of strong men, beautiful fair-haired women, and bloody raids for plunder. Christianity was the new religion on the block, striving to make inroads on the old pagan beliefs—and often at the point of a sword. Gods were said to mingle with men and the world lay poised on the edge of Ragnarok, a final battle and fiery conflagration that would end the world.

Poul Anderson drew on the best of this wild and poetic age, stirred it up with myth and fantasy, and the result was his 1954 novel The Broken Sword. Its like has rarely been matched in the annals of fantasy literature.

I’ve read The Broken Sword previously and knew what a wonderful book it was, but TV and film actor Bronson Pinchot’s narration in this new Blackstone Audio, Inc. production added a new dimension to the novel. I had first heard Pinchot in a reading of Stephen King’s Eyes of the Dragon. While he was wonderful there he ups his game in The Broken Sword, reading with a spite and fury in his voice that perfectly matches the book’s unrelenting grimness and battle fury. Pinchot breathes life into beautiful maidens and proud warriors, deep-throated trolls, and ancient elven warrior-kings whose voices are like winds sighing through treeless leaves.

Oddly enough there is exactly one sound effect in the entire recording—an echo effect used to convey the cold, cruel laughter of Odin—and it’s on the final disc. It was cool but rather jarring, considering it’s on the last disc and there’s no precursor. But on to the tale.

In The Broken Sword the land of Faerie exists alongside the lands of men, invisible save to those with the witch sight. Faerie is a land of bright castles and achingly lovely elves, of the gods of Odin and Tyr, the giants of Jotunheim, black-eyed trolls, and other, fouler monsters.

Pride and ambition touches off the events of The Broken Sword. Orm the Strong is the fifth son of Ketil Asmundsson and thus low in the totem pole of inheritance. Rather than accept a smaller share of wealth Orm seeks his own fortune by going a–viking. On one of his raids he kills a husband and his sons, burning their hall to the ground. The man’s mother, a witch, escapes and swears revenge: She bestows a curse that Orm’s eldest son will be fostered beyond the world of men, while he in turn will foster a wolf that will one day rend him.

The elf-earl Imric travels to the lands of men and sets the witch’s curse in motion. Imric takes Orm’s unbaptized infant son Skafloc and replaces him with Valgard, a changeling, whom Imric himself has fathered by raping a captive troll woman. Valgard’s dark ancestry is evident when he bites his unknowing mother’s breast and grows restless and violent in Orm’s care. Skafloc, raised among the elves, is fair haired and fair of spirit, though equally mighty and otherwise a mirror image of his dark changeling “brother.”

After he discovers his true half troll, half-elf heritage, Valgard embarks on a mission of revenge, killing several members of his foster family. Aided with an army of trolls he then launches a war of annihilation on the elven lands of Alfheim. Skafloc and the elves are beaten back by the initial assaults and all seems lost. Only by going on a quest to reforge a powerful ancient weapon—the eponymous broken sword, a weapon of terrible demonic power that demands blood each time it is drawn and ultimately turns on its wielder—can Skafloc save Alfheim and avenge his family.

Though The Broken Sword seems largely forgotten these days it remains influential. The elf Imric for example reveals the clear stylistic (and thematic) influence The Broken Sword had on subsequent authors like Michael Moorcock. Moorcock (a big fan of the book, who once wrote that The Broken Sword “knocked The Lord of the Rings into a cocked hat”) based his Melniboneans heavily on Anderson’s elves. Imric is (largely) Elric of Melnibone, not only in similarity of name, but in appearance and even character. Anderson’s Elves are darker than those in The Lord of the Rings (though I would point out that Tolkien’s elves closely resembled Anderson’s in his source material; see the prideful warrior Feanor from The Silmarillion). They are haughty, prideful, shun the sunlight, and if not malicious are certainly mischievous. These traits have their roots in Norse myth, which both Tolkien and Anderson drew upon.

Everything about the book is wonderfully northern. Characters mingle soaring verse with common speech in conversation. Anderson weaves old northern vocabulary into the tale, evocative words like “Fetch,” “Fey,” and “Weird” (the latter is a fate from which no man escapes), which lend The Broken Sword a hard northern ethos to match its flavor. In this pagan hierarchy the Norns are higher than the towering Jotuns or even the Aesir. Even the gods will die in the fires of Ragnarok at their appointed time. That grimness bleeds through into The Broken Sword as its protagonists are slowly crushed beneath the merciless wheel of fate.

"Throw not your life away for a lost love," pleaded Mananaan. "You are young yet."

"All men are born fey," said Skafloc, and there the matter stood.

This is hard stuff and an unforgiving outlook on life, though not incompatible with that other somewhat famous work that debuted in 1954—Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. No matter what Moorcock—he of the tin ear when it comes to Tolkien analysis—may tell you.

The writing in The Broken Sword is top-notch, really and truly great stuff. A small sample of dialogue uttered by the troll-woman Gora:

“The world is flesh dissolving off a dead skull,” mumbled the troll-woman. She clanked her chain and lay back, shuddering. “Birth is but the breeding of maggots in the crumbling flesh. Already the skull’s teeth leer forth and black crows have left its eye sockets empty. Soon a barren wind will blow through its bare white bones.”

One final, important note about the Blackstone recording: The text is Anderson’s original from the 1954 version of the book, which Anderson updated in 1971 for republication in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line. This is not immediately apparent from the description on the Blackstone website. I’ve only read the 1971 version, so for those who haven’t had the chance to experience The Broken Sword in its earliest and rawest incarnation you now have another chance.

Any other Edguy fans out there?

2011-06-11T18:56:00.012-04:00

German power metal band Edguy is hard to pin down. On one album you're likely to hear medieval fantasy flavored songs in the vein of Iron Maiden or Blind Guardian alongside hair metal inspired hits like "Lavoratory Love Machine" and "King of Fools." They've been known to branch out into loud and proud power ballad material. Their material ranges from soaring bombast that sends chills down your spine, to goofy head-scratching attempts at humor that generally don't come off too well.

A common thread (if there is one) is that Edguy really, really seems to be enjoying themselves and doing whatever the hell they want.

I've gotta give credit to my friend Falze for turning me on to these guys. If you haven't heard of Edguy before (and most people in the States haven't, it seems), they're definitely worth checking out. Though their first full studio album is 1997's Kingdom of Madness, they sound like they picked up where 1988 left off and kept on playing. Their sound on songs like "Theatre of Salvation" (which incorporates an all-male church choir to great effect) is borderline divine. They're not afraid to do it big and epic, which is what I want when I listen to metal.

Some of their lyrics are ... puzzling, though I might chalk that up to a translation issue (Edguy is German but their songs are written in English). Others are grinningly good, like they've been taken from the pages of a purple swords and sorcery tale:

Prayers have been spoken
May the gods be on my side
May they join my way to bring me victory
seven at one stroke
my triumph and my pride
will be history

As I've stated on numerous occasions what draws me to certain metal acts is the singing, and Edguy shines in this regard. Tobias Sammet is a pretty awe-inspiring lead singer. He's got tremendous range and a great sound, which is why I have him in my top 10 metal vocalists of all time.

Some of my favorite Edguy songs include:

Jerusalem

Theater of Salvation

Vain Glory Opera

The Piper Never Dies

Babylon

Rise of the Morning Glory

Hallowed

If I had to pick a favorite album, it would probably be Hellfire Club by a hair, though Mandrake and Theater of Salvation are in the running, too. Their last couple albums have been a letdown but I'm hoping they return to form with Age of the Joker, due out in August.

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, a review

2011-06-09T21:33:00.003-04:00

John Joseph Adams has a well-earned reputation as The Man Who Delivers Anthologies. Barnes & Noble.com has dubbed him “the reigning king of the anthology world.” By my count he’s published at least nine of them. I own one, The Living Dead, which contained enough zombie goodness (along with a few stiffs) to prompt me to buy his Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse.

To be honest, I probably would have bought Wastelands regardless of its editor. I’m a big fan of the post-apocalyptic genre, from novels like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, to films like Escape from New York or Mad Max. Why? As an inhabitant of the northeastern seaboard of the United States I’m not often confronted with existential issues. I know that I’m going to die one day and suffer separation from all that I know and love, but because civilization affords me everything I need—and much of what I want, too—I tend not to think about these issues much. The panaceas of electricity and refrigeration, and healthcare and schools, and television and the internet and books, masks the skull beneath the skin. I’m effectively insulated from the hard life and death struggle that’s woven into so much of human history. But what if it was all stripped away, and life was reduced to its essentials? That’s the question post-apocalyptic fiction asks, and one I occasionally like to ponder. With my feet up on the couch of my air-conditioned living room, of course.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Books: This is Exactly How They Work

2011-06-06T20:10:00.003-04:00

An arresting image making the rounds: http://a.yfrog.com/img13/8364/21063920857041414761211.jpg

I'm not sure who the credit for this piece of art goes to so I'm including the link rather than posting the image.

Some might argue with the squalid depiction of life, but I like the sentiment that books can elevate our worldview and take us out of the mundane crap of day-to-day living. True, that.

On a less serious note: It's a reminder of another reason why physical books still beat e-readers.

Shamelessly lifted news items: Agincourt, The Hobbit, and Styrbiorn

2011-05-31T20:48:00.004-04:00

A few news items of interest, lifted shamelessly from other blogs and/or newsgroups I subscribe to:

Bernard Cornwell's Agincourt headed to the big screen. I enjoyed Cornwell's take on this legendary battle from the Hundred Years' War a lot (if you're interested, my full review can be found here at The Cimmerian), if not as much as The Warlord Trilogy or The Saxon Stories. I'm already giddy with the thought of seeing French knights charging English longbowmen and the ensuing slaughter in the mud. And Henry's pre-battle speech, of course.

E.R. Eddison's Styrbiorn the Strong to be reissued. I plucked this bit of news off a new blog I recently added to my roll, Tolkien and Fantasy. Styrbiorn the Strong is a book I've long had on my "to be read list" but haven't yet obtained, as it's been long out of print. This new edition by the author of the incomparable The Worm Ouroboros is due out in August and I'll be purchasing it with glee. How can you go wrong with Eddison's style combined with a rousing viking tale?

Hobbit titles, dates revealed. So we've got the dates--December 14, 2012, and December 13, 2013--and the respective names of the two-part film: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and The Hobbit: There and Back Again. Sounds promising! The associated news that Orlando Bloom is reprising his role as Legolas is decidedly less so. I actually don't mind this deviation, provided that it's a minor role and doesn't involve Bloom single-handedly slaying Mumakil (or wargs, or the entire Bodyguard of Bolg) at the Battle of Five Armies. This is Beorn's turn to shine, and he had better not be upstaged by an uber-elf.

Entering the Lists in Defense of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe

2011-05-26T19:22:00.002-04:00

There’s a school of thought that views the Middle Ages as a dark gulf between the Classical Age and the rebirth of reason known as the Renaissance. The Middle Ages were, to paraphrase science fiction author David Brin, an unhappy time of small-mindedness and fear, marked by the squabbles of petty nobles, ignorance, superstition, and religious persecution.

Thus, any historical fiction that dares emit a whiff of romanticism of the age is viewed by some as anathema, a whitewashed but corrupted view of “reality”.

But as time marches on and new discoveries and scholarship come to light, we’ve realized that these times weren’t quite as dark and backwards as we once believed. And that allows us to revisit old works of art like Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe with a fresh perspective. My recent re-read of Scott’s 1819 classic of historical fiction reminded me of the following reasons why it’s still relevant and worth re-reading.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Celebrating ten years of slaying dragons

2011-05-24T20:27:00.007-04:00

This past weekend we celebrated the tenth anniversary of our current D&D group. As anticipated we did something really crazy on our 10th anniversary and ... played a game of D&D!

The hostess prepared an awesome diorama: A green dragon cake on top of a hoard of golden (candy) treasure, surrounded by crumbling columns. You can't see them in this photo but a horde of treasure-hungry heroes advance on the monster. Other nasty creatures stand lurking on the perimeter. There's another dragon in the foreground whose mouth contains the party's halfling thief, Shem.

In the photo below, I strike the killing below, beheading the beast with one swipe of a +3 butter knife. That's me on the left, with Chris, our DM, at right.

Here's to 10 more years of slaying dragons.

Thor kicks ass!

2011-05-22T12:50:00.006-04:00

I rarely get to see “big person” movies these days. Thanks to my two young daughters, my most recent movie experiences include Tangled, Yogi Bear, and Toy Story 3 (the first and last are recommended. Yogi Bear... not so much). So naturally when the chance to see a grown up movie with a friend of mine finally rolled around, we saw … Thor.

…okay, so Thor is suitable for most kids, too. But let’s face it—these recent Marvel movies are geared just as much for current/former comic book fans in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who want to see spectacle and experience nostalgia for the heroes of their youth. That described my anticipation for this film. And Thor delivers!

I’ve always liked the character of Thor. I was never a big collector of the comic back in the day (Captain America and Savage Sword of Conan were my favorites), but for a time I did collect The Avengers, and next to Cap, Thor was always a favorite. I was (and still am) interested in Vikings and Norse mythology so I felt a natural attraction. I also liked the fact that Thor provided some much needed muscle on the Avengers and could fight guys like Goliath and Ultron in toe-to-toe battles that tore up city streets and knocked over buildings.

Overall, Thor was a very good film and I enjoyed myself immensely. I haven’t seen all the super hero films, but I enjoyed this one more than Spiderman and Batman. It felt bigger and more otherworldly and suffused with glorious comic-book eye candy (Asgard, and in particular the Bifrost Bridge, looked great). I liked the big, bold, dramatic acting, which plainly had a Kenneth Branagh influence. Heimdall was very cool character.

Given that Thor is a God of Thunder from another plane there are naturally going to be cultural clashes when he comes to earth. These made for some of the funniest and best scenes in the movie. My favorite bit was a scene in which Thor is eating in a diner and has his first cup of coffee. Enjoying it, he slams the empty mug down on the floor, shattering it into a thousand pieces as he shouts, “Another!”, as if he were in some great mead hall in Asgard. I laughed out loud. I also loved the scenes in which Thor loses his powers and is a mortal man but doesn’t realize it until he’s overpowered by a group of scientists, or finds himself at the wrong end of a stun-gun.

The best thing about the movie is the actors, which I wasn’t expecting. Chris Hemsworth was very charismatic and played an entirely convincing Thor. I had never heard of him previously but can see him blossoming into a big time action star. Anthony Hopkins was good as Odin, bringing the gravitas to the role one would expect. The guy who played Loki was great (though not quite as buff as the Loki I remember from the comics), both scheming and sympathetic. And the love interest between Natalie Portman’s character and Thor worked for me. It was done simply and sincerely and left you feeling the pang of separation.

I thought Thor had some problems. S.H.I.E.L.D. struck me as far too inept/gullible. There was a fight between Thor and a steel-encased guardian that ended in anti-climactic fashion, given the big build-up of the guardian’s powers. Thor is exiled to earth and loses his powers, and when they are restored I wanted to see more of him in action, flying and exhibiting great feats of strength and skill with Mjolnir. Alas, he was whisked off far too quickly to Asgard at film’s end for the final climactic show-down with Loki.

Also, I never really understood (or cared) what Portman’s character was trying to do with her pseudo-scientific project. And I would have liked to have seen a little more of the culture shock that would naturally result when you get an alien God walking the streets of earth. By film’s end Thor seems pretty comfortable in jeans and a flannel shirt, which seemed entirely too quick and convenient.

But in the end Thor left me both saying “wow” and wanting more of this character—which is probably exactly what the film makers intended, given that Thor, Iron Man, and the forthcoming Captain America are all coordinated build ups to 2012’s The Avengers, which is now pretty much a must-see for me.

ST Joshi on Lovecraft

2011-05-18T20:52:00.003-04:00

Courtesy of The Lovecraft Ezine, a fascinating audio interview with H.P. Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi. One of the many interesting bits:

My belief is that what Lovecraft was doing here was what one Lovecraft scholar David E. Schultz has called an "anti-mythology." By that I mean this: The purpose of most mythologies and religions is, as it were, to reconcile humanity with the universe. That is, to say, to explain the place of humanity within the confines of space and time. Lovecraft reverses that, by saying, whereas religion says, "yes, human beings are at the center of the universe, and are the special product of the benevolence of an all-powerful god," Lovecraft says, "no, human beings are completely insignificant. They are at the mercy of these titanic forces that really care nothing about them, and that can brush them aside and destroy them without a moment's thought."

That reminds me: One of these days I need to buy a copy of the massive I Am Providence. If it wasn't so darned expensive...

The Top 100 Fantasy Books of all time … or not

2011-05-13T13:13:00.003-04:00

Confession: I’m a top 10/top 100/top whatever list addict. If I find an article on a subject about which I’m even remotely interested, and written in the form of a numbered list, I’ll generally stop to read it. That chance increases when said list is arranged in ascending or descending order of quality.

I fully admit that many top 10/ top 100/top whatever lists are contrived hit count fodder (slugging something a “top 10” anything is guaranteed to increase the number of visits to your web site–you’re welcome Black Gate editors!), but occasionally these lists serve a worthy function. For example, if I’ve just finished The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or Flags of Our Fathers and am looking for another good World War II title, I’ll Google “top 10 world war 2 histories.” This practice typically generates a good suggestion or two–and another “top 10″ article to read.

Top 10/top 100 lists are also flashpoints for debate, often stirring up vigorous agreement or righteous anger and indignity. I generated an angry response with my Top 10 Fantasy Fiction Battles of All-Time, in which former Cimmerian blogger Al Harron took me to task for excluding Robert E. Howard, and also for including some borderline “fantasy” choices. Hey Al, let’s still be friends, okay?

Which leads me to the point of this post. Have you ever typed “top 100 fantasy novels,” or “top 10 fantasy books,” into your search bar? If not, I’ll save you the work. You get this site, the “Top 100 Fantasy Books”.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny, a review

2011-05-07T08:43:00.006-04:00

I count the first two Mad Max films among my all-time favorites. I’m a sucker for anything post-apocalyptic, but more importantly, they’re tense, well-made, well-plotted, and reasonably well-acted films. (I liked the premise and some of the ideas in Beyond Thunderdome, but it falls short of the first two). In addition, the car chase/crash sequences are among the best ever put to celluloid, even since the advent of CGI.

So it was with great anticipation that I began Roger Zelazny’s 1969 novel Damnation Alley, which combines post-apocalypse, and tricked-out battlecars, and a tough ex-biker with nothing to lose.

A brief synopsis of Damnation Alley is as follows: Ex biker gang leader Hell Tanner (yes, that is his name) is offered a full pardon from L.A. officials if he agrees to deliver a vaccine to plague-stricken Boston. Sounds easy enough, but this is a North America post-nuclear war, and the heartland of America is now known as Damnation Alley, a vast wasteland of mutated monsters, roving biker gangs, lethal hail and lightning storms, and pockets of deadly radiation. Flying is impossible as the sky is torn by hurricane-force winds and deadly storms, and full of swarms of oversized bats and other monstrosities. They only way to cross this stretch is by car. Armored, eight-wheeled vehicles armed with rocket launchers, machine guns, and flame throwers are used for this purpose.

This is all cool stuff, and Damnation Alley isn’t bad, but based on the premise it should have been better. It reads like a short story artificially stretched to novel length (192 pages, paperback), and it wasn’t until after I read it that I found out that’s actually the case. Damnation Alley was published as a short story in 1967 and expanded into a novel two years later. It felt padded to me, like Zelazny tacked on a repetitive series of encounters with various monsters to increase the page count. I wanted to learn more about the collapse of society, the problems faced by the survivors in a massively depopulated country, more about the gangs and their motivation, etc, but was disappointed with its lack of depth. Zelazny also introduces a couple of bizarre nouveau writing sequences that jar with the rest of the novel (for example, he describes a radiation-driven storm with a three-page run-on sentence. Odd).

But there is much to like about Damnation Alley. Hell Tanner is the best thing about the book. If you’ve ever seen Escape from New York, think Snake Plissken, mix with Max Rockatansky, and you’re 95% there. In fact, I’d be surprised if Escape director John Carpenter and Mad Max writer/director George Miller hadn’t read Damnation Alley at some point. Like Rockatansky in The Road Warrior, Tanner starts Damnation Alley as 100% hard-bitten mercenary, seemingly caring for no one but himself. But as the story progresses he comes to realize the innocent suffering and catastrophic waste of the plague and the mission becomes personal.

Zelazny keeps the action moving with some fun sequences, a few memorable minor characters (including a tough biker chick and a mad scientist) and bits of unexpected, brutal violence. If you can get past some of the head-scratching bits (why does nuclear war cause gila monsters and snakes to grow to 20 times their normal size? Why would a nuclear exchange target mid-America, and leave the big coastal cities unscathed?) it’s a fast, enjoyable read.

Digging Battle Beast

2011-05-02T21:22:00.006-04:00

Heavy metal has always been my favorite genre of music. My listening tastes do include other genres, from country to the oldies to mainstream pop/rock, but in the end I always find myself circling back to metal (at one time I wondered if the psychologists/ sociologists who view metal as a symptom of adolescent rebellion were right and that I’d “grow out of” it, but at the ripe old age of 37 I’m proud to say I don’t ever see that happening. Rock on, whimps and posers leave the hall!)

And yet there are times when my enthusiasm for metal wanes. It usually involves events around the aging and mortality of the metal legends that I grew up with. For example, Judas Priest announcing their farewell tour and KK Downing hanging up his axe, Iron Maiden sounding tired on their new album, and of course, the worst news of all, Ronnie James Dio dying from stomach cancer. On my worst days, I think metal will go the way of grunge, leaving fans like me with naught but memories of leather-clad lead singers and a lingering case of tinnitus.

New metal acts are hitting the scene every day of course, particularly out of Europe, but I don’t like most of them. I actively despise nu metal acts like Korn and Limp Bizkit (I had to force myself to actually type “nu metal”), while black metal/death metal and its growling, cookie-monster style vocals just don’t cut it for me. That’s why for all the praise I’ve seen heaped on them I can’t get into Children of Bodom, for example.

But once in a while a new band emerges that gives me hope, bringing new blood into the genre while preserving the old “classic metal” or “power metal” sound that I enjoy. Bands like Blind Guardian and Edguy. The latest is a band called Battle Beast, a group of young Finns who just put out their first album, Steel. I also found out that they’ll be at the Wacken Open Air festival in August, a major event which not just any old metal band gets invited to play.

Here’s my favorite Battle Beast track, "Armageddon Clan". The lyrics are straight out of The Terminator.

"Show Me How to Die" is pretty awesome, too.

One of the things that attracts me to metal is the soaring vocals, which is why Maiden, Priest, and the Dio-fronted Black Sabbath are my favorite bands, and why I’m partial to Blind Guardian and Edguy. That’s also why Battle Beast has grabbed my attention. Should one hear a blood-drenched Valkyrie singing on the fields of some ancient northern battlefield, I would imagine it would sound a lot like Battle Beast’s frontwoman Nitte Valo. She can really belt it out.

I’m not saying these guys are the next coming or anything, but they’ve got a sound I enjoy and an old-school vibe pleasing to the ear. Plus a cool album cover.

Looking for the real Robert E. Howard in One Who Walked Alone

2011-04-28T22:30:00.002-04:00

It couldn’t have been easy for Novalyne Price Ellis to write One Who Walked Alone: Robert E. Howard the Final Years (Donald M. Grant Publisher, Inc., 1986). Price Ellis’ memoir of her relationship with Howard (roughly 1934-36) is illuminating in its raw honesty. It’s also painful, at turns disappointing and downright frustrating. We might find escape in Howard’s sword and sorcery tales but there is none to be found here.

But above all, One Who Walked Alone is brave. Price Ellis never sacrifices accuracy to save face. Howard was a successful writer and a free spirit, and told wild, vivid stories, traits that Price Ellis found irresistible. But she was also painfully embarrassed with the Texan, unable to accept his occasionally odd public behavior. She was disappointed that he didn’t conform to her own conception of manliness and began to date other men, including one of his best friends, Truett Vinson, which cut Howard to the quick. While her reactions were understandable, at times I found her to be rather shallow and unlikeable. And yet rather than off-putting I find that uncompromising truthfulness highly admirable.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Books I've read in 2011

2011-04-20T19:17:00.006-04:00

One of my new year's resolutions was to read more in 2011. I've got an incredible backlog of titles to get through, and more stuff is being published that I have my eye on (like the forthcoming The Art of the Hobbit by Tolkien scholars Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, authors of the highly recommended J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator and The J.R.R Tolkien Companion and Guide) that I despair of ever making any real progress. As I've said before, there's too much to read in the world and not enough time to do it.

I started out averaging a book a week this year, but have fallen off a bit, in part due to a week-long business trip in which I had almost no time to read (See? I'm already making excuses). In truth I'm a slow reader. I'm also prone to fits of stopping and jotting down notes that I later use in my reviews (this creates a very real problem when I'm driving in the car and listening to a book on tape when I'm hit with a flash of inspiration). I also surf the web too damn much, reading everyone else's interesting blogs when I could be reading books.

So here's the meagre list:

Roots and Branches, Tom Shippey
Legend, David Gemmell
The Sword of Rhiannon, Leigh Brackett
Grails: Quests of the Dawn, Richard Gilliam, Mercedes Lackey, Andre Norton (editors)
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher Hitchens
The Burning Land, Bernard Cornwell
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, J.R.R. Tolkien
Resolute Determination: Napoleon and the French Empire (The Modern Scholar)
The Company They Keep, Diana Glyer
The Desert of Souls, Howard Andrew Jones
The Brothers Bulger, Howie Carr
Phantastes, George MacDonald
Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, Jane Chance (editor)

The best one of the bunch so far? No Country for Old Men.

The irony of it all is...

2011-04-18T19:51:00.002-04:00

... I don't even have a subscription to HBO, so if you're looking for episode-by-episode reviews of A Game of Thrones, you've come to the wrong place. I have read the books though and I'll be picking up A Dance With Dragons when it's published.

GRRM, Salon respond to negative GOT reviews

2011-04-16T20:03:00.005-04:00

Go George!

It seems George R.R. Martin himself has responded to the critical New York Times review referenced in my last post. Cool to see. From his livejournal post:

I am not going to get into it myself, except to say(1) if I am writing "boy fiction," who are all those boys with breasts who keep turning up by the hundreds at my signings and readings?

and(2) thank you, geek girls! I love you all.

And Salon's firing back too. From that piece:

Patterson's Slate review, titled "Quasi-Medieval, Dragon-Ridden Fantasy Crap: Art Thou Prepared to Watch 'Game of Thrones'?" is less a review than a creative writing exercise, penned in the style of....well, it's hard to say what, exactly. It's not a parody of George R.R. Martin's prose, which tends to avoid the turgid, translated-from-the-ancient-Hobbitesese diction that marks inferior sword-and-sorcery novels. It seems more like a goof on what Patterson imagines fantasy fiction to be.

Fantasy fans of the world, unite! Fight the power! Etc. etc. Now if we could only get Tolkien to respond to the likes of David Brin and Michael Moorcock from the great beyond...

Media disgracing itself with A Game of Thrones coverage

2011-04-15T22:46:00.005-04:00

When the network ventures away from its instincts for real-world sociology, as it has with the vampire saga “True Blood,” things start to feel cheap, and we feel as though we have been placed in the hands of cheaters. “Game of Thrones” serves up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant idea beyond sketchily fleshed-out notions that war is ugly, families are insidious and power is hot. If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort. If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary.

-- From “A Fantasy World of Strange Feuding Kingdoms,” Ginia Bellafante, New York Times

I’m probably not the best candidate to come to the defense of A Game of Thrones. Despite the praise heaped on it in some quarters I don’t place George R.R. Martin’s series at the level of The Lord of the Rings, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Once and Future King, The Broken Sword, or any of Robert E. Howard’s best short fiction. I do like it well enough. It’s gripping, unpredictable, gritty fantasy, and pulls together complex plotlines and multiple point of view characters in an impressive feat of sustained storytelling. I give author George R.R. Martin plenty of props for doing something different with the genre and for spinning a well-told tale. But I’ve read better.

But you know what? Martin doesn’t deserve the level of abuse he’s getting in some quarters. If you’re a fan of the fantasy genre you ought to feel insulted by what’s going on. I’m frankly appalled at the “open minded” media outlets that have savaged the series and/or fantasy by association at every turn. I’ve already mentioned one review from The LA Times, riddled with snark and anti-fantasy bias.

The next, courtesy of Slate (hat tip to Dweomera Lagomorpha), ups the vitriol. The title of the article says it all: “Quasi-Medieval, Dragon-Ridden Fantasy Crap.” This particular piece (of shite) is probably the worst of I’ve read (or I should say tried to read—it’s scarcely readable). A rambling, self-referential, near-incoherent opening morphs to a cliché-laden rant about fantasy as a whole. Its quite difficult to even determine the subject of the reviewer's scorn. Overall it’s an all-around poor job by Slate.

This piece from The Atlantic means well, but I think it reveals a problem with traditional media outlets whose reporters are expected to be jack of all trades (but wind up being master of none). When they attempt a deep analysis of a subject they know only on the periphery, it shows. Alyssa Rosenberg posits that fantasy always has a happy ending; this is typical of someone who doesn’t really get the ending of The Lord of the Rings, and hasn’t heard of works like The Broken Sword or Eric Brighteyes. And WTF is up with calling Tolkien “a religious skeptic?” (Having been a former writer for a newspaper, the safe bet in these instances is to just report the facts, and stop trying to pass yourself off as an expert).

Next is The Guardian, which engages in yet more patronizing. It’s not as terrible as the others, but it condemns most fantasy released prior to ASOIAF as for children. Someone better tell Tom Shippey he’s been wasting his time on a children’s book. Here's a cringeworthy statement from this piece:

Fantasy is not a genre you would ever expect to describe as having "grown up", but let's at least say it's moved on since Tolkien's day. If The Lord Of The Rings is like the gateway drug of high fantasy, then today's fans crave something harder.

The latest is from the New York Times, supposedly a bastion of open-minded thought. “A Fantasy World of Strange Feuding Kingdoms” by Ginia Bellafante contains all the standard anti-fantasy bias (escapist, for children, etc.), but ups the criticism by introducing misogyny into the discussion: A Game of Thrones is “boys adventure” with gratuitous sex scenes added in solely to attract a female readership, Bellafante says. Huh?

The Times piece prompted an angry response from Amy Ratcliffe over on Tor.com, who comes to the defense on behalf of female fantasy fans everywhere. Says Ratcliffe: How dare anyone say that Game of Thrones is “boy fiction.” What a crude and useless phrase. I am proof that it is not the case, and I am not alone. Also? I love The Hobbit.

Amen, Amy.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Despite its immense readership and passionate fan base, fantasy continues to be treated like a turd in the punchbowl by most mainstream media. They don’t get it, great swathes of them actively hate it, and many of our “enlightened” 21st century media outlets refuse to treat it as a serious form of art. Martin must be wondering how he’s ever going to get an honest review under these circumstances.

On a side note, is anyone else tired of the ironic, cynical tone of these reviews? I guess this is what passes for hip, young, journalism these days.

A Review of George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women

2011-04-14T22:07:00.007-04:00

Warning: Some spoilers ahead

Advancing a claim that something is the “first” anything is daring a slippery slope, but saying a book is the “first fantasy” is rather like taking a leap onto a Slip and Slide greased with the gelatin exudate of Cthulhu. George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858) could be the first fantasy story … but then, what about Shakespeare’s The Tempest, or Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, or … you get the picture. I happen to agree with Black Gate's Matthew David Surridge that Phantastes is likely not the first pure fantasy novel, for the fact that, although it involves another world, it “never quite [leaves] the real world behind.” It’s the stuff of dreams, with a clear path back to earth.

Regardless, Phantastes is without question one of the cornerstones of the genre, and stands poised at the cusp of early works containing fantastic elements, to those that feature fully developed, independent secondary worlds.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Sale offers proof that J.R.R. Tolkien likely read Robert E. Howard

2011-04-11T21:10:00.004-04:00

L. Sprague de Camp is not exactly known as a bastion of credibility among readers of Robert E. Howard. In his 1983 biography Dark Valley Destiny, de Camp combines research and first-person interviews with exaggeration and embellishment, speculation and psychological conjecture, and at times outright fancy to paint what is at best a suspect portrait of the man who brought us Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane and others.

Unfortunately de Camp is the only source (that I know of, at least) linking Howard with J.R.R. Tolkien. This comes via a recount of de Camp hanging out with JRRT in a memorably described encounter, as detailed in his non-fiction review Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy:

"We sat in the garage for a couple of hours, smoking pipes, drinking beer, and talking about a variety of things. Practically anything in English literature, from Beowulf down, Tolkien had read and could talk intelligently about. He indicated that he 'rather liked' Howard's Conan stories."

In J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment by Michael Drout, de Camp adds the following explanation/equivocation of the above quote:

"During our conversation, I said something casual to Tolkien about my involvement with Howard's Conan stories, and he said he 'rather liked them'. That was all: we went on to other subjects. I know he had read Swords and Sorcery because I had sent him a copy. I don't know if he had read any other Conan besides 'Shadows in the Moonlight', but I rather doubt it."

I know I’ve always been hopeful but rather skeptical of the claim that Tolkien actually said he “rather liked” the Conan stories, given that the quote’s source is, well, de Camp.

But this sale which I recently found during a web search seems to provide proof that Tolkien at least read “Shadows in the Moonlight,” aka., “Iron Shadows in the Moon.” At the very least it provides concrete evidence that he owned the book, and that de Camp sent him the copy. Cool stuff. I can't help but wonder what Tolkien thought of this bit:

With a gusty laugh he lifted her to his fierce lips.

"I'll make you Queen of the Blue Sea! Cast off there, dogs! We'll scorch King Yildiz's pantaloons yet, by Crom!"

LA Times brings the snark to A Game of Thrones preview

2011-03-31T20:14:00.003-04:00

Every time I think I’ve moved on from the fantasy/realism debate, someone drops the gauntlet and I find myself back in the thick of the fray, giving and receiving hard blows in turn. The latest exchange stems from this preview of the upcoming HBO miniseries A Game of Thrones, courtesy of the LA Times:

Based on George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels, the 10-episode saga is a high-stakes move for HBO — an expensive leap into spectacular fantasy for a network whose reputation was built on nuanced, character-driven dramas geared toward adults.

So … ASOIAF is a risky move for HBO because it’s fantasy, and therefore cannot be possibly be nuanced, or character-driven, or geared toward adults. Good to know.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website .

Steve Tompkins, still missed

2011-03-23T20:59:00.004-04:00

Today marks the second anniversary of the death of Steve Tompkins.

Every so often I catch myself wondering "what would Steve have thought of X?" With X being, The Hobbit filming finally begun, A Dance with Dragons publication date finally announced, the latest ridiculous essay criticizing REH on the web ... and on and on.

His voluminous and always interesting and enlightening essays are missed. And so is he. As always though you can find a treasure-trove of his work here.

“Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!”

--J.R.R. Tolkien

Falling for the allegory trap: Why J.R.R. Tolkien was not a technophobe

2011-03-18T21:10:00.006-04:00

It’s a curious but real phenomenon that the very mention of J.R.R. Tolkien causes the Black Gate to open and the critics to issue forth, wielding blunt instruments against a black and white facsimile of The Lord of the Rings that must exist in some alternative universe from the one I inhabit. Scenting a whiff of something they don’t like, these axe-grinders turn the waters of measured Tolkien criticism into a bloody feeding frenzy where the victim, sadly, is nuance.

A few examples of these blunt criticisms include:

Aragorn on the throne: Tolkien is a monarchist!
Orcs are evil: Tolkien is a racist!

Here’s the latest: Tolkien criticized the factories of Saruman and Sauron? He’s a technophobe, and an enemy of progress!

Tolkien is often accused of having a black and white view of the world in his fiction. The irony is that his critics are quite often screamingly guilty of the real McCoy, taking up the argument that you have to be either “for” unbridled progress or “against” it. This line of reasoning was crystallized by David Brin in his 2002 essay “J.R.R Tolkien: Enemy of Progress” and recently given second life in a poorly-written fan fiction treatment: Kirill Yeskov’s The Last Ringbearer. Because Tolkien is not 100% behind modernism—that he actually dared to evince an equivocal view of “progress”— in the minds of Brin and Yeskov he’s a full-blown Luddite worthy of dismissal by the adult reader.

There’s a grain of truth here, of course. But like much of the other Tolkien criticism you encounter on the web it’s a grossly allegorized reading and a rather despicable simplification of the truth of the matter. By truth, I mean the facts of Tolkien’s life, and, more apropos to the discussion, the text of Tolkien’s fictions.

Tolkien was not anti-industry. He didn’t particularly like it, he thought industrialization and urbanization wrought as much harm as good, but he did not advocate that the world remain in some quasi-medieval stasis. He recognized progress as inevitable, but he thought it was as much cause for weeping as joy (see pollution, and urban decay, and global warming). He evinced nostalgia for his home and its mill by a steam, swept aside by progress. He expressed a calm, mature, adult dislike of some forms of progress, but not a blanket reactionary dismissal of it. That certainly does not make him an enemy of progress, like Brin famously and wrong-headedly declared.

There are plenty of examples of Tolkien’s nuanced, lukewarm views of technology. For example, he actually welcomed the idea of a movie made out of LOTR (imagine that—he liked moving pictures on a screen as a medium for stories, not just ancient scrolls read by the light of a candle!) He wanted to see his books published and distributed (not locked up in monasteries and preserved by monks for a privileged minority ruling class—wow! I didn’t know that! He saw the value of publishing companies and publishing and distribution technology! Shocking!) He was in many ways an enlightened thinker: a college professor whose prime years were spent as a philologist, seeking out the objective truths of words, their derivations and meanings, in a hard, lonely search for truth and objective meaning that the great figures of the enlightenment (perhaps even Brin) would have appreciated.

This viewpoint is also to be found in the books. The Rings of Power, if you consider them a form of “technology,” had their good and useful purposes--until corrupted by the One Ring, which you might call absolute power/unbridled technology (whose altars right-thinkers like Brin and Yeskov prostrate themselves before). The creations of the Noldor Elves in The Silmarillion were wonderful and beautiful, an elevation of civilization. Tolkien himself believed that sub-creation was an exalted right of mankind. But his beliefs were tempered with the apparently audacious notion that innovation should be coupled with restraint.

At the end of The Lord of the Rings the Third Age draws to an end. A time of magic and wonder passes from the world, and the Fourth Age is heralded in. Middle-earth passes to a time of men, and systematized education, and modern conveniences, and beneficial science. Tolkien, even in his fantasy world of Middle-Earth, knew that life went on, and must go on, for better or worse. But just like life, he also believed that change is not always for the better. In Tolkien’s time mechanized warfare, industrial pollution, and the threat of atomic annihilation offered compelling proof.

But apparently this nuanced view is not enough for some of his critics. A sad glance over his shoulder at the receding past? Reactionary! His mates and best friends mowed down by machine guns and choking on mustard gas and blown up by high explosive and shrapnel? That’s reality, deal with it! A dislike for mechanized warfare and the minds and factories that think up and churn out infernal weapons? How dare he! A preference for horses instead of the belching smoke and noise and stink of motor cars? Technophobe!

I’d like to ask Brin and Yeskov: Is this viewpoint really so hard to understand? Is nuanced discussion dead? Must we throw wide our arms and unequivocally embrace every aspect of technology and urbanization? Must we kneel before the altar of progress instead of expressing a simple preference for fields instead of parking lots, or trees instead of skyscrapers? Do we have to “pick a side,” or can a middle ground exist, like we find in Tolkien?

Apparently not. History is “written by the victors” (what a tired, galling cliché) says Laura Miller in her fawning "review" of The Last Ringbearer on Salon.com, and so Tolkien’s mistaken views apparently require “correction” for a modern audience.

The Desert of Souls, a review

2011-03-17T20:14:00.004-04:00

“We should talk more, you and I,” he said, “about storytelling.”

–Howard Andrew Jones, The Desert of Souls

The Desert of Souls is the debut novel of Black Gate magazine managing editor Howard Andrew Jones. About ¼ of the way into it, I thought aloud: You’ve got to be kidding me. A debut novel? Jones’ Arabian Nights-style adventure has the polish of a cut diamond, and the finish of a veteran author.

The Desert of Souls is a proper fantasy, albeit placed in a historical setting, so there’s magic, undead monsters, god-like snakes, and more. I haven’t encountered a djinn on the printed page since my old AD&D days, and was pleasantly flooded with memories of Oasis of the White Palm as I read. The Desert of Souls features two heroes, Dabir and Asim, who spend large part of the book in near-death situations in pursuit of the wizard Fifouz, who plots to visit an ancient curse on a modern city.

Jones has an excellent sense of pace and an affinity for a tale properly told. Not rushed, but told as a story should be told, as though novelist and the reader were drawn up around a campfire with the whole night ahead for stories. A lot happens in The Desert of Souls but it’s not told breathlessly; the pace is languid at times, quick at others in Asim’s first person narrative. It’s also unabashedly optimistic, a welcome relief in these often dark times of current fantasy offerings.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Ten years of Dungeons and Dragons, Mach II

2011-03-12T20:50:00.007-05:00

This May will mark the 10th anniversary of my return to Dungeons and Dragons, all with the same group. I’m not sure how we’ll celebrate the occasion, though we were joking at our last session that we might do something crazy and … play a game of Dungeons and Dragons or something. Maybe we’ll show up in hooded cloaks or armor.

I haven’t posted about RPGs in a long time here on The Silver Key, mainly because I haven’t had a whole lot to say. I never got embroiled in the 4E controversy because our group never made the shift. These days I’m a player, not a DM, and I generally just go with the flow. But this recent article on Salon.com and our impending 10 year anniversary has prompted a few thoughts on why I continue to play and enjoy this uncommon pastime.

This is my second go-round with D&D and the longest unbroken stretch I’ve ever played. Like most folks of my age (37) I started with the Tom Moldvay Basic boxed set, which in 1982 I begged as a gift from my parents. I would have been nine or 10 years old at the time. While the cardboard box is long-gone I still have the tattered red rulebook and my original copy of B2 Keep on the Borderlands, from which I will not be parted even unto death.

Back in those grade school days I played a heavy rotation of games, peaking in middle school. I played mostly D&D with a group of friends but we also occasionally branched out into games like Car Wars, Runequest, Middle Earth Role Playing, Star Frontiers, and Top Secret. Our gaming wasn’t limited to after school sessions and late nights on the weekend, either. My middle school offered Dungeons and Dragons as a Friday afternoon seventh-period elective, for which I eagerly signed up. Yes, we got to play D&D in school! I was typically the DM, refereeing up to 10 rambunctious players at a time. We ran through modules like Pharaoh and In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords and White Plume Mountain with gusto. I remember another group next to us in which everyone was an assassin and they spent the whole game rolling on the assassination tables and killing each other off. It was glorious.

I continued playing into high school but my gaming soon tailed off. Sports, drinking beer, heavy metal concerts, etc. took priority, and I shelved my books. I can recall another aborted 2E session later in high school that didn’t last long.

I dabbled in D&D a little bit in college, playing a few sessions with a gaming club and attending my first con, Total Confusion in Worcester, MA. That would have been 1993 or so. But when I graduated college and got married I shelved my books, possibly for good.

But around 2000 or so my interest in the game was rekindled by the issuance of 3.0, which promised a “back to the dungeon” approach. Around that time I also discovered EnWorld and its “Gamers Seeking Gamers” webpage. Via messageboard and e-mail I arranged to meet with my future DM and another eventual co-player on neutral turf, an interview over beer to ensure we had compatible interests and were not complete lunatic freaks (aside from the fact that we played D&D, of course). When I told my wife I was going off to a smoky local bar to meet up with a strange man to talk D&D she thrust her cell phone into my coat pocket (at the time I didn’t own one) in the event I got abducted. I wasn’t.

With our mutual fears allayed we arranged and played our first game in May of 2001. We’ve been gaming ever since. We’re happily plugging away with 3.5 edition, three book core with a few house rules thrown in, in a long-term home-brew campaign in which our characters recently reached eighth level. We also have another 3.5 game going in the Forgotten Realms, though it’s been a couple years since our last session in the FR. In between we’ve had few one-shots of D20 modern, a couple boardgaming sessions, and even a romp through a 3.5 version of The Tomb of Horrors (which I had to miss, sadly). In general I prefer the older versions of the game because they have far more flavor and are better reads, as I spend more time reading rule books than actually playing. But 3.5 works fine.

I’ve had a lot of fun these past 10 years. Our original plan was to game every other Saturday, but commitments and life in general got in the way. Now we’re good for maybe one Sunday a month.

Like most other role players I’ve given a lot of consideration to the question: why play? If you can get the same experience reading, watching movies, or playing computer games, why play D&D and other tabletop RPGs? What’s the appeal? Why am I still interested in the hobby after all these years?

Here’s my take: What makes RPGs unique is the aspect of collaborative storytelling, entering into a shared space of the unscripted unknown. You’re not reading a novel, you’re creating a story as you play. The tale you spin can run the gamut from brilliant to low brow, from serious to the comically ridiculous. The vagaries of the DM, player decision, and random die-rolls make every game unpredictable.

D&D is rarely boring. I don’t take it too seriously—some prefer earnest, immersive characterization and shrewd tactical play. Me, I like laughing and poking a little fun at fantasy tropes. I enjoy rolling critical hits and also failing saving throws at the worst possible time.

Some of my favorite times are those in which we had to extricate ourselves from our own messes. Carelessly walking into ambushes. Getting swallowed by a purple worm and having to cut myself free. Getting shoved off a bridge by a hill giant and falling onto a rock outcropping surrounded by lava. And so on. At other times we’ve smashed the DM’s big bad evil guy in a round or two and laid waste to his plans, too. Again, you never know what will happen, only that it’s rare to have anything go according to plan.

The other appeal of playing D&D is the out of game camaraderie. Getting together for a session gets me out of the house and among the company of like-minded individuals. We drink a few cold ones, eat good food, talk about books or films, and laugh a lot.

So yeah, once a month I play an Elf. But it’s been a lot of fun.

Happy anniversary guys (and gals).

Forth now, and fear no darkness! Tolkien in his own words

2011-03-12T08:22:00.005-05:00

Courtesy of Miguel, former co-blogger on The Cimmerian, this amazing find from HarperAudio: Four audio clips of J.R.R. Tolkien reading selections from The Lord of the Rings.

I've never heard these before, and did not expect I'd ever have the opportunity to listen to Tolkien thundering out Theoden's speech before the charge on the Pelennor Fields.

Arise, arise, Riders of Theoden!
Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!
spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

Awesome stuff. Thanks Miguel.

Drinking in the demonic energy of Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

2011-03-03T21:42:00.004-05:00

If you like the sound and rhythm of words — and if you’re a hopeless J.R.R. Tolkien junkie — you’ll like The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (2009, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Lacking either of these prerequisites, you probably won’t. And there’s not much more to say than that.

Casual Tolkien fans likely won’t buy The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, and even semi-serious fans who have tackled The Silmarillion may lack the appetite for it. It consists of two long poems, around which are sandwiched an exhaustive introduction and a pair of lengthy explications/footnotes, the latter written by Tolkien’s son Christopher. Added together, this additional material is longer than the poems themselves.

The real reward of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun is its wonderful language. The poems—“The Lay of the Volsungs” and “The Lay of Gudrun”—are composed in eight line alliterative stanzaic metre. Reading them makes me wish I knew the native Old Norse Tolkien of which Tolkien spoke so admiringly; the modern English is pretty darned powerful already.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Tor.com releases poll results for best SFF novels of the decade

2011-03-02T21:08:00.004-05:00

Tor.com recently polled its readers on the best SFF novels of the decade. The results are in (analysis here) and the top ten include:

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Blindsight by Peter Watts
Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey
A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

I’ve only read three of these, two of which I liked (A Storm of Swords, American Gods), and one I’m rather indifferent about (Perdido Street Station). I’ve heard a lot of good things about Anathem and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and intend to read them one day. But unfortunately as I’ve said before there’s so much fantasy on the market, both new and old titles, and not enough time to read them all. I know I’ll never get to all these titles, sadly enough.

Tor.com is featuring essays about the novels on their blog. The first is up: An appreciation of American Gods by novelist Patrick Rothfuss. Rothfuss had the same reaction to American Gods as I did: He can’t quite explain why it works, only that it does, and it’s pretty brilliant. A couple recent commenters on The Silver Key expressed their dislike for AG but I’m glad to see it get some love over on Tor.com. I enjoyed it a lot.

George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords is a bloodbath of a book with perhaps the most painful scene I’ve read in a fantasy novel. It made me not want to continue (though I did manage to finish it). It’s extremely well-done gritty fantasy, if you like that sort of thing.

I freely admit that I don’t get the appeal of Perdido Street Station. It’s dark and byzantine … and, well, dark and byzantine. I found the characters unappealing and the plot meandering. The slake-moths were kind of cool and New Crobuzon was well-done, though.

What are your thoughts? Have you read any of these? Any you’d recommend? Any head scratchers/notable absentees that didn't make the list?

Me want

2011-02-26T08:47:00.003-05:00

Here's some ultimate nerdity that I would nevertheless gladly wear (look closely/zoom in on thumbnails below): http://www.threadless.com/product/2293/There_and_Back_Again.

I wonder if the Tolkien Estate will be putting the smack down on this, though.

Chewing over realism in fantasy: A few morsels more

2011-02-20T14:44:00.004-05:00

Fantasy literature is rife with pour souls being fed to hungry beasts. A hungry crowd watches as weaponless prisoners are forced into the Arena of Tokalet where the monstrous, half-intelligent ape Nji awaits (L. Sprague de Camp’s The Tritonian Ring). In George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords the unarmored female warrior Brienne is thrown into a bear pit for the sport of onlookers. The tentacled demon-god Thog devours drugged, defenseless denizens of an ancient city in Robert E. Howard’s “Xuthal of the Dusk.”

It’s all pretty awful (albeit suspenseful, and gruesomely entertaining) stuff, but the way in which one author handles this familiar scenario vs. another I think sheds a little more light on my discussions of realism in fantasy literature.

Here’s how J.R.R. Tolkien handles anthropomorphs as monster food in The Two Towers (Chapter 7: “Shelob’s Lair”):

And sometimes as a man may cast a dainty to his cat (his cat he calls her, but she owns him not) Sauron would send her prisoners that he had no better uses for: he would have them driven to her hole, and report brought back to him of the play she made.

That to me is a great piece of writing. It tells you plenty about the cruelty and maliciousness of Sauron and his relationship with the giant she-spider (which he half-hates and half-fears, but tolerates as a valuable guardian into Mordor).

As for the gory details, it allows my mind to fill in the rest. Tolkien goes on to explain that Shelob cares not for wealth or power, but spends all her time brooding on her next feast. "For all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness," he writes. That's about as nasty and explicit as Tolkien gets.

Now compare that passage with this preview of Richard Morgan’s forthcoming novel The Cold Commands:

In the wild, a Hanliagh black octopus would have wrapped tentacles around surface prey this large and dragged it deep, where it could be drowned and dealt with at leisure. Defeated by the bobbing wood and the manacles, the creatures settled for swarming the boards, tearing at the chained bodies with frenzied, suckered force, biting awkwardly with their beaks. So skin came off wholesale, gobbets and chunks of flesh came with it, finally down to the bone. Blood vessels tore – in the case of a lucky few, fatally. And occasionally, a victim might smother to death with tentacles or body mass across the face. But for most, it was a long, slow death by haphazard flaying and flensing – none of the creatures was bigger than a court-bred hound, they could not otherwise have squeezed in through the chamber’s vents, and even their combined efforts were rarely enough to make a merciful end of things.

Jhiral was watching her.

She forced herself not to look away – the spray of blood, the up-and-down flail of tentacles like thick black whips, the soft, mobbing purple-black shapes hanging off the wood and flesh, crawling across it. Her gaze snagged on a wild, wide-open human eye and a screaming mouth, briefly blocked by a thick crawling tentacle, then uncovered again to shriek to shriek, to shriek……

As for that passage, man, it’s brutal. It’s effective, and horrifying, and well-done. But it’s not why I read fantasy. It jerked me back into reality with its clinical descriptions of flensing and tearing blood vessels. Perhaps Morgan intended this scene as a condemnation of torture. It vaguely reminded me of the real-life practice of waterboarding, albeit turned up to 11. I don’t know. I read it and it just felt — too much.

Perhaps what I object to in some modern fantasy literature is the degree to which it emphasizes violence—graphic carnage is shown in vivid, sometimes nauseating color, vs. implied in the older forms. Because in the end, being the plaything of a monstrous, reeking, millennia old spider, paralyzed with poison, and eaten alive, isn’t any more comforting than being consumed piece by piece by a swarm of ravenous octopi. But I know which one I’d rather read. And it does not involve cephalopods.

I’ve said my piece on this a few times and have little else to add; I happened to see that Morgan posted that excerpt at his website and thought it provided a timely example of what I was trying to convey in my couple of previous posts on the subject.

Just more food for thought (no pun intended) and a rather lighthearted example in the ongoing realism debate.

Internal, external conflict ignite Cornwell’s The Burning Land

2011-02-17T21:15:00.003-05:00

“Our gods prefer feasting. They live, Uhtred. They live and laugh and enjoy, and what does their god do? He broods, he’s vengeful, he scowls, he plots. He’s a dark and lonely god, Uhtred, and our gods ignore him. They’re wrong.”

–Bernard Cornwell, The Burning Land

Conflict — internal to fictional protagonist Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and external to blood-soaked, fire-ravaged Britain — burns brightly in The Burning Land, the fifth and latest entry in Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories, a partially fictionalized chronicle of the real-life Viking invasions that swept Dark Ages Britain.

A Saxon-raised-Dane, Uhtred is a microcosm of the rough mixing of Christianity and pagan culture that occurred in war-torn ninth century Britain. Uhtred is a Saxon whose father was killed in a Danish raid. Taken prisoner as a thrall to the Dane Earl Ragnar and raised hard, he nevertheless grows to love the Danes. Although they’re ferocious raiders, the Danes drink deep of life, scorn Christian virtues of humility and pity, and worship the pagan gods of Thor and Odin (they expect less of their followers than the one God, and leave more leeway for fun).

But Uhtred’s loyalties are torn. His hereditary home is the Northern kingdom of Bebbanburg and his peoples are Saxon. Over the course of the series he comes to respect the coldly pious and serious, but brilliant and fair King Alfred of Wessex (Alfred the Great) and at times reject the occasionally murderous habits of the Danish warlords.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

A few thoughts on The Bankrupt Nihilism of our Fallen Fantasists

2011-02-16T23:17:00.004-05:00

In joining with it seems everyone else on the internet I thought I would weigh in on Leo Grin’s The Bankrupt Nihilism of our Fallen Fantasists . I felt reluctant to do so at first and I still feel that way to some degree, since I respect Grin and the wonderful work he’s done at The Cimmerian, and I much prefer to comment on art and not the man (or woman) behind the works. But that’s what I’m doing here, commenting on the essay itself. So here goes.

Leo seems to be drawing most of his flak for the political commentary in his post. He would have been better served (in my opinion) to keep his post to a critique of art. But in his defense Big Hollywood is a political website and he feels passionately about that stuff. He's a big man and been at this for a long time; like it or hate it he said his piece.

I am not as adamantly opposed to grimly realistic fantasy literature as Grin, even if its terminus is “nihilism.” I’m on record as liking A Song of Ice and Fire. I have had Joe Abercrombie on my to be read list for quite some time. I enjoy some of this stuff as a palate cleanser.

That said, I don’t prefer a steady diet of realism in my fantasy (one Red Wedding is enough, thanks). As I’ve said before the new wave of shock and awe/ grim and dark/whatever you want to call it fantasy literature is not inherently better or more adult than stuff like Tolkien and Howard. In fact, I think it’s the work of an adult to try to make something of this life, not revel and roll about in the muck. Fantasy literature can shock, surprise, and provide edge-of-your-seat storytelling. It can strive to present an accurate depiction of the squalor of Medieval life and the terrible carnage of the battlefields of the era. That’s all fine. But it can also aspire to something more, and at its best it does.

I often ask myself: Why do I like fantasy? I like swords and armor and medieval settings. I like wizards, as long as their magic is dark and mysterious and unpredictable. Monsters are cool. In other words, I like the trappings of the genre. Although, like Grin, I also don’t have the patience anymore for multi-tome epic fantasy, which is why I studiously avoid series like The Wheel of Time. Tolkien gets some flak for starting this trend, but the hardbound The Lord of the Rings I have sitting on my bookshelf checks in at a slim 1,008 pages--all three "books" (Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King) combined. To put that in perspective, Martin’s A Storm of Swords, alone, is nearly as long as LOTR.

I also like books that have something to say about the human condition. Tolkien does, and Howard and Poul Anderson do to some degree. I just finished listening to the audio book of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men: While not fantasy, that book certainly does. While it has many other fine qualities, I’m not so sure I can say the same (yet) about A Song of Ice and Fire. Then again maybe I'm being too hard on Martin; I think what he's doing with the character of Jaime Lannister for example is pretty amazing.

I also like fantasy works that are mythic. This is much harder to explain or quantify. It’s what draws me to Anderson, to E.R. Eddison, to Tolkien, and also to newer works like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Perhaps a better question to ask is, why do I like myths? Maybe because they provide a framework for how the world works, other than everything is crap. I already know that politicians are corrupt and war is hell; what else do you got?

In the end I have a hard time explaining this stuff, but I do know that works like The Steel Remains don't feel particularly mythic to me. They feel ordinary and de-mythologized, and not very, well, fantas-tic.

We've got singing dwarves...

2011-02-11T21:43:00.003-05:00

So Peter Jackson's The Hobbit is retaining a part of Tolkien's novel that I thought would surely be left on the cutting room floor: The singing. Courtesy of The One Ring.net: "Thirteen Singing Dwarves and a Very Funny Hobbit".

From the article:

Many fans have been wondering whether 13 dwarves would become a generic mass in the film, or whether they would be fleshed out in the script to have individual personalities.

Dwarf actors William Kirchner and Peter Hambleton spoke on that: “We are thirteen distinct and strong personalities – but we are an ensemble as well”.

Speaking of ensemble, the dwarves confirmed they’d be doing their own singing. “It’s all staying very close to the book – yes, there WILL be singing.”

I've got to say that this is rather heartening after the less than stellar news I'd heard about this "Itaril" character. Although it morphs into a rather serious tale by the end, The Hobbit is much more lighthearted and whimsical than The Lord of the Rings. As such I'm glad they're keeping the singing, even if it's just "Far over the misty mountains cold; To dungeons deep and caverns cold." The deep-throated dwarven song in the dark of Bag End is one of my favorite scenes in the novel.

As I've said before I’ll be there on the opening night of The Hobbit, hoping that everyone involved in its making has the sense to hew closely to Tolkien’s story. It’s a simple formula, and therein lies success.

Grails: Quests of the Dawn: Or, where’s my knights, dude?

2011-02-09T21:08:00.004-05:00

In John Boorman’s Excalibur there’s a scene in which an ailing, aging King Arthur prepares to send his knights on the quest for the holy grail. With his warriors assembled about him, faces grim at his pain-wracked appearance (or perhaps the prospect of not returning from said quest), Arthur whispers a final, cryptic order: "Only the grail can restore leaf and flower. Search the land, the labyrinths of the forest, to the edge of … within.”

The holy grail is as much a concept as a cup. We assume the knights are looking for an actual, physical vessel, but Arthur’s hint suggests that the quest is a search within the individual—the voyage of a soul seeking spiritual perfection. Excalibur is a film steeped in Arthurian lore and it practically demands at least some cursory knowledge of the myths in order to make complete sense of it. That’s one reason why I like it so much. The other is that it’s got knights riding around in armor fighting, jousting, and in general causing a ruckus. It’s smart and delivers on the battle scenes, too.

It was with images of armor-plated knights riding out on a great quest that I eagerly dug into Grails: Quests for the Dawn (Roc, 1994), a collection of 25 short stories and a handful of poems by such greats as Orson Scott Card, Gene Wolfe, Mercedes Lackey, and Neil Gaiman, as well as many other lesser literary lights. Alas, my anticipation did not live up to reality. Grails: Quests of the Dawn gets it half right, delivering stories about broken characters in search of healing. But it comes at the expense of, well, knights. There are precious few in the book and as I recall only a single sword is drawn in anger (Brad Strickland’s “The Gift of Gilthaliad”). Most of the stories in fact don’t even take place during the Middle Ages but instead opt for modern or in some cases pre-medieval settings.

Now, lest I be accused of being a literary lowbrow, as I said previously I get the symbolism of the Grail Quest. But couldn’t we get the literary bits after Launcelot whips up on a half-dozen would-be robbers in the Forest Sauvage? Too much to ask, I guess. You won’t find the clash of sword and lance or the quickening heartbeat that betokens impending battle in Grails: Quests of the Dawn.

Despite my complaints about its lack of blood and thunder there are a few worthy stories in this collection. Neil Gaiman’s “Chivalry”, a story about a kindly old woman who finds the grail in a second-hand shop but doesn’t want to relinquish her prize so quickly to a handsome young knight, is very good. So is “Atlantis” by Orson Scott Card. The latter does not feature the grail, though it does include a famous (waterborne) vessel. It’s a clever retelling of the Noah’s Ark/flood story and how that begat the myth of Atlantis. There are a few other decent entries too. “Greggie’s Cup,” though a bit telegraphed, is a heartwarming story about a child with special needs who befriends a ghostly Launcelot in the ruins of an old castle, as the latter rejoices to find a trusting, non-judgmental spirit in whom he can confide. Alan Dean Foster’s “What You See … ” would fit nicely into a Year’s Best Horror anthology with its E.C. Comics’ “you reap what you sew” harsh morality tale of an ending.

Unfortunately there are an equal number of stinkers, too. “The Awful Truth in Arthur’s Barrow” is 25 pages of mildly interesting buildup to a bad punchline, the world’s worst pun. A few other stories felt like cloying Hallmark Channel fare.

I was eagerly looking forward to Gene Wolfe’s entry “The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun” but I must admit I was left scratching my head at this (symbolic? lunatic?) story about a farm boy who leaves his drab home life to seek adventure on a whaling ship out of New Bedford. When the crew lands on an uninhabited island he decides to remain and a talking ape named Jacko (not making this up) takes his place among the crew. Wolfe is a great writer but has a tendency to veer off into rather strange territory at times. If anyone has read “The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun” and has a theory of what it’s supposed to mean, drop me a line.

Grails: Quests of the Dawn has a companion volume that I have sitting on my shelf: Grails: Visitations of the Night, though I’ll admit after volume one I’m not so keen on starting. Karl Edward Wagner (author of the savage Kane stories) is one of the contributors, so I may take up the quest yet, hopeful that it may satisfy my less than noble spirit, which yearns for a little action in its fantastic tales, too.

Final verdict: Three out of five stars.

Realism does not equal adult: A followup

2011-02-06T08:58:00.005-05:00

My Thursday post generated a lot of comments here and on Black Gate and some personal e-mails, which was great, but at least one person didn’t seem to understand my argument or feel I made it clearly. I’ve also had a few additional thoughts on the subject. So here goes.

My main point was (and remains) that realistic fiction does not equal adult fiction. If someone writes a story about elves and dragons in which violence is de-emphasized, and another writes about humans killing each other graphically with swords in a faux-medieval/historical setting, the latter is not inherently more adult. I define adult in this context as a work that appeals to mature, adult sensibilities. As I stated in the article The Lord of the Rings grapples with very adult issues, as does The Once and Future King and Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea series. In contrast, The Steel Remains struck me as rather shallow and without any insights on the human condition. In fact it seemed purely reactionary, written as a grimy, alternative viewpoint to traditional stories of heroism. It certainly features a much higher degree of graphic violence and sex and shades of gray morality, but these elements alone do not make it a superior book for adults.

Some enjoy this style of fantasy fiction, obviously. Others don’t like to have their noses mashed in suffering, to be immersed in cities that resemble the worst of our own urban decay, and stories where (almost) everyone dies. This type of writing is certainly realistic, but is it more adult, is it a more serous form of literature? What do these works seek to accomplish? Unlike the three works of traditional fantasy I mentioned above, reading The Steel Remains did not cause me rethink my life, the nature of my humanity (providing examples of what it could be, instead of the depths life frequently descends into), or my place in the universe. It merely reminded me of the worst life has to offer. There are no heroes: A hero is just someone who is stronger or better with a sword than another. Concepts like honor and principled stands are meaningless. Materialism is king and all else is relativism.

To reiterate, I’m not opposed to realism. As I said in my first post I like A Song of Ice and Fire quite a bit. I plan to finish it (if and when Martin gets around to it). Although I will add that I found A Feast for Crows to be a marked drop in quality, in part due to page bloat and a weakened narrative thrust, but perhaps also because many of the characters I cared about were killed off. I lost interest in reading POV chapters of characters with whom I did not identify and in whose fates I was indifferent (we all know what happened to the lone principled hero of ASOIAF).

It’s also worth noting that my argument is partly a matter of taste. I’m not fond of extremely graphic sex and violence in my casual reading. I’m certainly not a prude; I love reading about historical combat and my interest is piqued by weaponry and armor and tactics and the like. But I have a problem with books that revel in gore, either for shock value, as deliberate reaction against traditional fantasy, or as some ham-fisted metaphor for how the world “really works.” I wrote a post a while back for The Cimmerian about my disturbing venture into the dark recesses of horror films, and while I’m not equating The Steel Remains with Cannibal Holocaust the theory is the same.

Right now I’m reading Bernard Cornwell’s The Burning Land and there’s a scene in which the Dane Harald tries to force Uhtred to give back his captured wife Skade. When Uhtred refuses, Harald orders a line of Saxon women and children out of the forest and nods to one of his men, who splits the first woman’s head in half with a war-axe. Blood gouts like a fountain and soaks her screaming daughter. The killer moves to the next in line. Uhtred gives up Skade, and the Saxons are whisked offscreen.

Yes, events like these really happened (and still occur in some parts of the world, sadly). This is the ugliness of the Dark Ages and Cornwell doesn’t whitewash it, which is a good thing. Reading Cornwell wakes you up to reality circa 800 A.D. Of course, Cornwell is writing historical fiction, and as such has some obligation to historical accuracy. In another example I rated Flags of our Fathers as a five-star (highest rated) book and that includes first-hand accounts of soldiers who witnessed real atrocities, graphically recounted. I have no problem reading this stuff. I don’t agree with whitewashing history.

But I think fantasy can aspire to something different than historical realism. That’s why I ended my essay with an examination of fantasy and the element of escape, which I think is part of the appeal of fantasy and a quality to be embraced, not shunned. I happen to like this aspect of fantasy. I know realism has been around since the days of REH and Clark Ashton Smith and Glen Cook, but while these earlier authors may be of kind with George R.R. Martin or Richard Morgan, they are often very far apart in degree. I wonder at what point grim, brutal, realistic fantasy ceases to become fantastic, and becomes something else altogether.

Am I off-base here? Do people understand my argument? I’m interested in your thoughts and comments, pro and con.

Why realism does not equate to adult (or even good) fantasy

2011-02-03T22:16:00.002-05:00

That foul smell in the air? There’s something rotten in the realm of fantasy fiction, and its name is realism.

Two of the blogs I frequent and another one I’ve recently stumbled across have all recently commented on (and lamented about) a new trend gripping fantasy these days: Realism, and the corresponding claim that it somehow makes fantasy more adult and serious.

Lagomorph Rex of Dweomera Lagomorpha says that the new trend leaves him cold: It’s no secret that I dislike the current trend in Fantasy. It’s almost as if every author has decided they will up the misery and muck quotient and see who can make the nastiest world in which to force their characters to try and survive in.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett—a review

2011-01-26T19:34:00.004-05:00

The Sword of Rhiannon (1949) was my first experience reading Leigh Brackett, one of the grand dames of science fiction along with C.L. Moore, and I must say I was quite impressed. Although it may sound like heresy to the Edgar Rice Burroughs fans Brackett’s depiction of Mars might be the best I’ve read. While not as action-packed, I thought it created a more convincing alien atmosphere than A Princess of Mars, although it certainly owes a huge debt in terms of form and genre elements to Burroughs' earlier work.

The Sword of Rhiannon tells the story of Matthew Carse, an archeologist from Earth who’s spent 30 of his 35 years on the red planet, an arid, dying world that at one time was home to a vibrant environment and an advanced alien culture. One day a wealth-seeking Martian leads Carse to the tomb of Rhiannon, in which a cursed, godlike figure from Mars’ ancient past is rumored to lie in deathless sleep. Carse enters the tomb and is swept back via some form of wormhole into Mars’ ancient past, before its seas dried up and when all was green and beautiful. Carse takes with him the jeweled-hilted sword of Rhiannon as well as a dark sentience from the tomb. He soon finds himself emeshed in an ancient conflict between the militaristic nation of Sark and their evil serpent-like allies, the Caer Dhu, who are at war with the Martian free peoples under the Sea Kings.

Despite its fantasy trappings, The Sword of Rhiannon is firmly in the sword and planet genre. While the protagonist wields a sword and ancient Mars is decidedly low-tech (transportation is by sail or rowed ships; combat is with medieval-style weapons), Mars was once home to a race of advanced beings called the Quiru. The Quiru abandoned the planet but left behind relics of their advanced civilization, incredibly powerful technology that includes time-travel devices. There is no overt magic in the story, save perhaps for a form of telepathy. The Quiru’s artifacts are sufficiently advanced to seem like magic though Brackett does describe them as working according to scientific laws.

More than its fun story (which rigorously follows Burroughs’ sword and planet formula), The Sword of Rhiannon succeeds due to its style and atmosphere. Bracketts’ writing makes Mars feel, well, otherwordly. She succeeds in creating a vivid contrast between the arid waste of the new Mars and the beauty of the old, and we as the reader feel the pang of loss of a great civilization that once was. Here’s an example, a scene in which Carse, chained to the oars of a Sark ship, awakes at his post and looks upon a sunrise on the sea that makes him momentarily forget his enslavement, so different is it from the dry wastes of Mars that he previously knew:

Through the oar port he watched the sea change color with the sunrise. He had never seen anything so ironically beautiful. The water caught the pale tints of the first light and warmed them with its own phosphorescent fire—amethyst and pearl and rose and saffron. Then, as the sun rose higher, the sea changed to one sheet of burning gold.

Whenever I finish a book I typically scour the web to see what others think about it. In my travels I was pleased to find a nice essay on Brackett by Michael Moorcock, “Queen of the Martian Mysteries: An Appreciation of Leigh Brackett."

As readers of this blog may know I don’t have a lot of love for Mr. Moorcock for his harsh and rather personal criticisms of J.R.R. Tolkien. But I freely admit that Moorcock’s piece was a nice read, informative and infused with some illuminating personal anecdotes about Brackett the person and the writer. It also manages to steer entirely clear of the spite-filled tangents into which Moorcock’s criticisms frequently seem to veer. I was surprised to find that many of his observations of Brackett were the same as mine, formed during my limited exposure to Brackett (which consist of The Sword of Rhiannon only).

I must say however that some of Moorcock’s commentary caused me to do a positive double-take. In particular I was flummoxed to find that some of the very characteristics he finds most admirable in Brackett’s romanticism-infused science fiction are the selfsame qualities that imbue his most hated of books, The Lord of the Rings. From his essay:

Yet Brackett has less in common with Mervyn Peake than she has with Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler and other superior writers of popular fiction. Yet common to all these writers is the sense of yearning loss, as of innocence, a nobler, irredeemable past and an uncertain future. Her heroes are often deeply aware of some moral transgression which everyone forgives them for except themselves. At the time these stories were written we had seen our sense of our history, of our progress towards real civilisation, blasted to bits before our eyes. By the time these stories were appearing in the pulps, Germany’s Nazi armies seemed unchallenged in their conquest of Europe. All those idealistic aspirations for world peace and the rule of civil law had collapsed before the cheap rhetoric of a bad journalist like Mussolini or a mediocre painter of postcards like Hitler.

Wow, where to start…at last check The Lord of the Rings is infused with a sense of “yearning loss, as of innocence.” It certainly draws the readers’ attention (even without benefit of The Silmarillion) to a “nobler, irredeemable past,” and transitions the reader with its heartbreaking, equivocal ending, to an “uncertain future.” When LOTR was written progress was being “blasted to bits” before Tolkien’s eyes, which he witnessed first-hand in the trenches of WWI and later in the rise of Nazi Germany. Yet Moorcock somehow finds these traits admirable in Brackett and execrable (no exaggeration on my part) in Tolkien. Is it because Tolkien’s hobbits are too British and countrified for his tastes, or perhaps because Tolkien offers the possibility (not the guarantee) of consolation/salvation?

Moorcock even comments that the hard science fiction in vogue during Brackett’s time (her stuff shares more in common with science fantasy) fails as lasting literature because of its lack of humanism and inability to portray technology as anything less than progressive. Writes Moorcock, "We were beginning to realise that controlling [the world] might not produce the effects we desired."

Hmm, sounds conspicuously like the point Tolkien made with that whole One Ring bit.

But enough Tolkien digression. In short, The Sword of Rhiannon=highly recommended.

Robert E. Howard in his own words

2011-01-22T16:30:00.004-05:00

In honor of what would be his 105th birthday, I thought I’d let Robert E. Howard’s own words do the talking.

Here’s a few of my favorites culled from his Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane stories. There’s so many to pull from but I chose these because they capture the ferocity, humor, and poetic qualities of Howard’s writing.

If you got any favorite passages to share, post ‘em here.

There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness. Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem and upon the fingers of the women sparkle drearily like the ice of the white seas; the speech of men is as the empty rattle of a jester’s bell and the feel comes of things unreal; even the sun is copper in the sky and the breath of the green ocean is no longer fresh.

–"The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune”

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Gemmell’s Legend remains a rousing call to arms

2011-01-20T20:12:00.002-05:00

I love pre-battle speeches. Arnold’s “Than to hell with you!” prayer to Crom before the battle of the mounds, and Theoden’s exhortation to the Rohirrim just before their charge on the Pelennor Fields (“spears shall be shaken, shields shall be splintered!”), to name two, make me want to pick up spear and shield and wade into the fray (of course Kenneth Branagh’s Band of Brothers/St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V remains the best). Even though I’d never want to fight in a real shield wall, the power of these speeches admittedly give me second thoughts.

That’s probably why I loved reading David Gemmell’s Legend (1984) so much. Gemmell’s debut novel is more or less a buildup to (and execution of) a monumental battle scene, and its rousing, inspirational speeches don’t disappoint. In terms of the printed page Legend ranks right up alongside Steven Pressfield’s spectacular Gates of Fire for galvanizing battle-speeches.

Here’s one sample as delivered by Druss, the eponymous “legend” from whom the novel derives its name. Druss is an aging warrior and a veteran of innumerable battles who dusts off his axe Snaga and treks to the defense of the fortress Dros Delnoch, like an aging athlete coming out of retirement to prove he can still play. On the eve of the final battle, he rouses the outnumbered Drenai to stand with him, one last time:

“Some of you are probably thinking that you may panic and run. You won’t! Others are worried about dying. Some of you will. But all men die. No ever gets out of this life alive.

I fought at Skeln Pass when everyone said we were finished. They said the odds were too great, but I said be damned to them! For I am Druss, and I have never been beaten, not by Nadir, Sathuli, Ventrian, Vagrian, or Drenai.

By all the gods and demons of this world, I will tell you now—I do not intend to be beaten here, either!” Druss was bellowing at the top of his voice as he dragged Snaga into the air. The ax blade caught the sun and the chant began.

“Druss the Legend! Druss the Legend!”

If you like the above monologue, you’ll probably love Legend. If not, well, there’s always Magic Kingdom for Sale: Sold.

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