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| Hail to the King of Dreams, baby. |
My most recent essay for Tales from the Magician’s Skull is up, a piece on fantasy in the era of Lord Dunsany. You can read that here. I’ve recently been digging into a short, informal, but interesting quasi-biography by Hazel Littlefield (at right), who visited Dunsany in his home country and later hosted him late in his life during a trip to the United States. “Fantasy” was a different country back then, wilder and with almost no borders and boundaries, not the oft-discussed, greased publishing machine with its various subgenres and conventions that we have today. I get into a little bit of that in the essay, restrained a bit as TftMS has a hard-ish cap of around 1,000 words.
New Edge, a new S&S digital magazine headed up by Oliver Brackenbury of the “So I’m Writing a Novel” podcast, is now open for registration. The first issue (#0) is free and I believe the plan is to gauge interest for a paid ‘zine, supporting new authors and artists. Recently I agreed to write an essay on the outsider trope in S&S for this debut issue (got to get cracking on that).
Not “new” news, but new-ish to me, is the forthcoming Conan novel Blood of the Serpent, a prequel to “Red Nails” now available for pre-order. I have not read anything by author S.M. Stirling, but after a recent conversation with Deuce Richardson I feel confident that he’s a solid choice for this novel. Stirling has a reputation as a good writer with a big imagination and knows REH inside and out. Time will tell. I hope it’s better than the average novel in the TOR line.
Baen signs Howard Andrew Jones to a five-book deal. I’m glad to see a publisher with some budget and clout invest in S&S, and HAJ is a good author to get behind. I have enjoyed his The Desert of Souls and some of his short fiction in Tales from the Magician’s Skull, and these books will feature his exiled general Hanuvar. Let’s hope this is just the tip of the spear for a continued S&S revival.
I have yet to say anything on the new Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, of which we’ve now seen a couple trailers (or maybe “teaser trailers”?). I’ve been underwhelmed at the generic, CGI-heavy glop I’ve seen to date. The core problem is Amazon’s lack of rights to Tolkien’s actual material. A large, multi-interest conglomeration does not possess Tolkien’s soul and vision, his unique time-and-place honed brilliance with languages, and love and care for his creation. The odds are this will disappoint. The Jackson LOTR films worked because they largely stuck to the source material, and his Hobbit films flopped when they deviated from the book. Amazon has precious little rights to Tolkien’s source material. What we really need is Robert Eggers directing The Children of Hurin.
Finally, I wanted to point folks in the direction of this lengthy but fine post by Jason Ray Carney, rebutting a recent article which made the case that sword-and-sorcery needs to be updated for a modern audience (part of a natural process of discernment), and its old works discarded. We all engage in the process of discernment; it’s why we read Shakespeare instead of instruction manuals, and admire and preserve the Sistine Chapel instead of a child’s crayon drawings. Discernment helps explain why we might love the Chronicles of Narnia or the Chronicles of Prydain as a child, but choose not to read them as adults; though they might still be good books, we’ve developed a more refined palate for adult prose styles or complicated storylines and themes. Likewise, through a process of discernment, many readers have moved away from S&S over the years. But, personal discernment strikes me as very different than a general call to discard literature that someone, somewhere finds problematic. When reading old pulp or pulp-inspired S&S of the 60s-80s, my advice remains consistent: Detach and apply historical context, or as Carney suggests, adopt an egalitarian attitude of “chronopolitanism.” We can like old and new things, simultaneously. We can enjoy old barbaric works as entertainment without becoming barbarians ourselves.
In summary; If this “new edge” movement embraces the likes of Renegade Swords and Schuyler Hernstrom alongside the likes of the Whetstone crew and Howard Andrew Jones, etc., I’m in. If it draws lines based on adherence to certain political views, or places bounds on artistic freedoms, I’m out.
5 comments:
Eggers directing Children of Hurin would be fucking metal. Thanks for this post. I was not aware of those article or New Edge.
Dunsany was brilliant author. As you mentioned he was considered a major writer in his day. Even got quoted in Fitzgerald novel (F. Scott actually isn't one of my favorite novelist, but I digress...) Now he's mostly known by fans of fantasy if at all.
The problem I have with all these new literary movements is that no matter what their particular manifestos say, eventually it has to result in quality storytelling. There have been movements that talked a big game but never really gained any traction because the writers involved - nothing at all against them - just weren't quite good enough. I don't know what movements Schuyler Hernstrom subscribes to, if any, but I read his stories because he's really good.
Travis: Yeah, damn right that would be metal, and so dark light would be sucked into its vortex.
Matthew: It's amazing how that big a name (five plays at once in NY? Lauded by the likes of W.B. Yeats? Covered by all the major newspapers when he came to America in the early 50s?) is now clearly being lost to time. Doesn't bode well for general author survivability.
Andy: That's it, right there. Ultimately it comes down to the quality of the work, not the apparatus supporting the work. If someone's work is good enough you will seek it out. Unfortunately there are many obstacles to being found and read, one of which is just sheer volume. There is SO MUCH I could read, old and new, that being heard is a problem. If you like Hernstrom as I do, keep mentioning his name, and hopefully the echo will reach others' ears.
Well, Brad some writers tend to go in and out of favor. Hopefully, Dunsany is one of those and will make a combat. Now he's only known by fantasy fans and not every fantasy fan. I guess because he didn't write big fat trilogies. Which is a shame since he was such a good prose stylist.
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