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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 pontoon boat 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 our very square pontoon boat 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.