Fantastic essay and other updates

Failed to mention that my post on Fantastic, that digest-size magazine that ran from 1952-1980 and published a fair bit of sword-and-sorcery, is up on the blog of DMR Books. The link is here.

Can you believe Fantastic had Fritz Leiber writing a regular book reviews column? Can you imagine Fritz F-ing Leiber reviewing your stuff? 

I found one column from 1975 where he reviews Poul Anderson's Hrolf Kraki's Saga. This is the sword-and-sorcery equivalent of Mike Tyson breaking down fight film of Muhammad Ali. 

What else am I working on? Bill Ward over at Tales from the Magician's Skull/Goodman Games is keeping me busy. I have a post on Michael Moorcock in his hands, and then will be turning my attention to a couple other pieces he wants me to write in October/November. Won't spoil any of them now.

Speaking of Tales from the Magician's Skull I'm supposed to be getting my hard copy of issue no. 8 in the mail any day now, along with a TftMS beer coaster. Will post pics when they arrive.

"Rockin' Again," Saxon

What? Saxon has yet to make an appearance on Metal Friday?

Consider that corrected. I could have thrown up something from Denim and Leather but instead went with this straightforward rocker off Innocence is No Excuse.

Love the slow atmospheric build on this. The drums are perfect, as is the guitar tone. Everything I love about mid-80s metal.

It's Friday, we'll be rocking again.

Blood Tears, Blind Guardian

Today's Metal Friday is a cut off Nightfall in Middle-Earth by the great Blind Guardian.

"Blood Tears" is typical of the work on this album... fucking awesome. The tempo changes in this one...wow. At 1:33 the song transforms from an atmospheric and melodic medieval feel, to full-on mosh-pit. Then returns. There and back again.

Tolkien is on my brain a bit more than usual (JRRT never leaves this cranium) due to the recent Rings of Power, which I still haven't watched. Will I? I don't know, I'm feeling very apathetic about it all. I’m not a big TV watcher, but mainly I have no faith Amazon can recreate Tolkien's genius.

But I can say Blind Guardian channeled a bit of it, with Nightfall in Middle-Earth. Enjoy this bit of First Age storytelling. “Captured” and “Blood Tears” are about the capture of Maedhros, Morgoth’s chaining of the Elven hero by his wrist to a sheer cliff in the mountains of Thangorodrim, and his deliverance when Fingon hacks off his hand. Blind Guardian offers a moving look into the mind of Maedhros and the torment and pain he must have experienced:

And blood tears I cry

You've searched and you've found

Cut off your old friends hand

 

A shout-out to five S&S voices on the interwebs

We don’t always stop to praise others whose stuff we read, or who are doing general good work in the spaces we enjoy. So here’s a shout-out to a few folks who deserve it for their work as S&S champions/commentators/historians/publishers/etc *:

Dave Ritzlin: DMR Books is the premiere publisher of all things S&S/S&P/heroic fantasy, which makes Dave, well, the premiere publisher of all things S&S/S&P/heroic fantasy. For that alone he deserves our praise. But on top of that he curates a must-read website and is a good S&S writer in his own right. Recently he’s been running a series of interviews with contemporary S&S authors, “Independent Author Spotlight,” to champion their work. So I thought I’d champion his.

Deuce Richardson: Deuce is an interesting dude. I have never met him in person but have corresponded with him a bit over the years and had a couple phone calls. I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone with a memory like his, or quite as well-read (except for the late Steve Tompkins). His stuff at DMR Books is always worth reading. He never fails to recognize important anniversaries. Strong historian and champion of pre-S&S adventure writers. I love his posts unearthing artwork from artists I know well but whose full catalog I have not seen. 

Jason Ray Carney: The hardest working person in this space? I would say, yes, without question. I don’t know how Jason manages to do it, but he’s pulled off a small conference, established awards, edits several amateur magazines (Whetstone, Witch House), started up the Whetstone discord group, writes fiction and non-fiction books and academic essays, edits The Dark Man journal, creates Youtube videos, speaks at conferences, organizes online panel sessions, on and on. Boundless energy and erudition.

Oliver Brackenbury: Oliver has been hard at work bringing new voices to S&S. I’ve enjoyed several episodes of his So I’m Writing a Novel podcast, which has morphed into interviews with a diverse range of writers old and new. He is also the host of Unknown Worlds of the Merril Collection podcast, a moderator on the Whetstone server, and more.

G.W. Thomas: A bit of an unsung hero in this space but deserves greater recognition. Every time I go to Google something S&S related, it turns up something with his name on it. I recently wrote a piece for DMR on S&S in Fantastic magazine and halfway through realized Thomas had already done something similar. He provides encyclopedic coverage of the genre in a fun way for Dark Worlds Quarterly and elsewhere. I’m indebted to his comprehensive, thorough, tireless work.

*There are many others of course but that’s for another post, another day.

Fantastic! And thoughts on pastiches

More witches! Art by Jones.

Recently I picked up seven issues of Fantastic. This former digest-sized magazine ran from 1952-1980 before folding. During that time it published many fine stories and authors, covering a wide, eclectic swath of fantasy, science fiction, and horror—including sword-and-sorcery. A lot of the history I covered in Flame and Crimson appeared in the pages of this now defunct publication.

Anyway, I got to reading these old back issues and that led me where my reading inevitably does—to thinking, and writing. I sent a lengthy article about S&S in Fantastic, including the four L. Sprague de Camp/Lin Carter Conan pastiches that appeared between 1972-75, over to Dave Ritzlin at DMR Books the other day. I expect that to appear on his website next week.

Speaking of pastiches, I recently started reading The Goddess of Ganymede (excellent thus far) and author Michael D. Resnick leads off the volume with this:

To Edgar Rice Burroughs Fans Everywhere

I hope you enjoy reading this Burroughs pastiche as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Finally, I see that we now have a cover of the new Conan novel by S.M. Stirling, Blood of the Serpent. I join a chorus of others in wishing the cover was more classic S&S, a Frazetta-esque painting of the Cimmerian perhaps, but hey, it’s clean, it works, there is a sword on it, and a snake. Two S’s, now that I think of it (too clever by half)? But now this new and latest Conan pastiche feels a lot more tangible.

I tie all of these experiences with pastiches into Deuce Richardson’s recent piece over at DMR Books and it’s got me thinking about this practice as well. 

I have mixed feelings on pastiches, and likewise think we need some better-defined terms. Resnick is here using “pastiche” in its original definition, as Deuce lays out “A literary, artistic, musical, or architectural work that imitates the style of previous work.” The Goddess of Ganymede is the story of American soldier of fortune, Adam Thane, on a mission to Jupiter. His spacecraft loses contact with earth and is forced to land on its satellite moon, Ganymede, where Thane is embroiled in swashbuckling adventure. Thane finds he can take huge jumps due to the weaker gravitational pull of the planet, encounters red-skinned inhabitants of the planet, etc. In other words, a transparent Burroughs homage/imitation/pastiche.

De Camp meanwhile used “pastiche” as the continued stories of an established literary character by a new author. That term became synonymous with what he and Carter did with the likes of the Conan story “The Witch of the Mists” (August 1972 Fantastic). This is sort of how we all think of “pastiche” today.

My current stance on (De Campian-style) pastiche is: I enjoy them (when done well) and have no problem with others continuing to write new stories of beloved characters. I do think fidelity to the original character/world/lore should be a very high priority. And I’m also of the belief that pastiches should contain a short introduction to the original series or other clear indicator that these are imitations, not the real McCoy, to prevent any confusion with new readers and point them in the direction of the source material. But if you want to write them (and have the rights), have at it. If it's good, I might read it.

Ace Frehley lead guitar!

One of my fondest heavy metal memories is seeing Ace Frehley at the now-defunct Underground, a former rock club in Lowell, MA, back in March 1994. 

At the time my friend Wayne and I were a few months shy of our 21st birthdays. But we liked to drink (still do), and outside in the parking lot we pre-gamed in good Ace fashion, splitting a 12 pack of Zima. 

Yes, we split a 12-pack of that now-infamous malt liquor that (to quote David Letterman) “tasted like Zhit.” It did, but we weren’t picky. As I recall it was introduced that year and everyone was drinking it. It was “Zomething different.” Don’t judge me too harshly. 

Putrid, but fun.

Inside they were handing out wristbands to anyone 21 and older to ease the sale of liquor (it was dark, and crappy inside, hard to check IDs). But they weren’t checking these too close, and Wayne and I discovered that we could freely buy Bud from the young waitresses working the crowd.

All was going great until Wayne caught the eye of a bouncer with 3-4 songs to go. With a beer in his hand and no wristband, Wayne got tossed. And I had a decision to make.

Shit man, I said to myself. Ace hasn’t played Do Ya yet. Fuck it, I’m staying. And so I did. While Wayne cooled off outside, I rocked out to the encore. 

He still gives me shit about it to this day. No regrets from me though.

Anyway, tomorrow night Wayne and I will be seeing 71-year-old Ace again, this time at the Cabot Theater in Beverly. Can’t wait. The Spaceman oozes style, and always puts on a good show.

Ace was always the coolest member of KISS. Never a good singer by anyone’s imagination but he wrote and performed some good material. “Rock Soldiers.” “Shock Me.” “Strange Ways.” “Fractured Mirror.” “Snowblind.” “Rip It Out.” Covers of “Do Ya,” “New York Groove” and “2000 Man.” Live he plays a lot of old classic KISS songs, including “Gold Gin,” a stone-cold classic which he wrote, and “Parasite,” which he co-wrote with Paul Stanley. I think he was a talented guitar player, with a unique sound and style, even though he squandered a lot of that native ability beneath a flood of booze and drugs in the 70s and 80s.

His 1978 self-titled album is duly accorded as the best of the four solo efforts by KISS. 

Here's his cool guitar work from “Fractured Mirror,” off that same album.

A bookish nostalgia

Humans are on a path of upward progress. This is a good thing. We enjoy material comfort and personal levels of wealth unimaginable 200 years ago. We’re living longer, in less pain and with less physical suffering, than any generation prior. I’m not denying the looming potential catastrophes of China saber-rattling and the deteriorating climate. But I’m hopeful that cooler, economic heads will prevail, and the latter will be solved through emerging tech and greater corporate responsibility.

But, we lose things along this path of progress, too.

As a kid growing up in Reading, Massachusetts I had access to a bookstore that was so much more than just a place to plunk down your nickels. My memories are wreathed in a blanket of nostalgia so thick and cloying that they are likely unreliable, but for me and a few friends this bookstore was a place of wonder. 

I remember the smell, musty but not foul, the one you get when you thumb the pages of an old book near your face and let the breeze riff your hair. I remember the creaking floorboards under my feet. And the sprawling, semi-disorganized riot of it all, old and new titles and wild and fantastic covers colliding in color.

This bookstore carried tons of comics, all the new stuff on display, but reams of back issues, boxed and bagged, ripe to explore. Its book inventory was mostly second-hand, and I was eventually able to buy most of the Lancer Conans and many other old paperbacks too. Dungeons and Dragons and other assorted role playing games could be had. It carried Dragon and White Dwarf, which allowed us to keep up on the RPG news of the day. This was a place to learn.

Money was a limiting factor so we’d spend a lot of time looking through the massive collection of books and comics, reading, observing. I would eventually buy 3-4 issues of Savage Sword of Conan, perhaps, as many as I could afford, and trek home, barely able to contain my excitement at the reading I had ahead. I would stop for a can of soda at the firestation. This had a side door, open to the public, and the soda machine was programmed I think for 40 cents a can, 15 cents less than the corner drugstore. That’s a big difference when you’re living off an allowance or lawn mowing wages.

I’d go home, put my feet up on my desk, and get lost in the Hyborian Age, or the Avengers mansion, or the weird stories told in Heavy Metal or Epic illustrated magazine.

Life was moving slowly, but it was great.

You probably know what is going to happen next. That old bookstore succumbed to soaring real estate values. The owners probably couldn’t afford the rent anymore, or it might have been that the book traffic was getting sucked to the malls of a couple neighboring towns. I don’t know. But one day it closed, and eventually the building in which it stood along with a few other businesses was razed, and replaced with a … bank. Commerce won the day. 

This was near the time that the likes of Barnes and Noble and later Borders were eating up all the book traffic. But soon even those far more standardized, safe, generic bookstores that ate up the little guys would themselves suffer the same fate, succumbing to the grinding wheels of Amazon and online efficiency and convenience.

Maybe I’m just romanticizing a time that I’ll never get back to, or I'm becoming an old fart. Probably both. But I feel like I’m not just reliving lost and fond memories of childhood, but rather remembering a real time that was markedly different. One where I could just be. Before the Great Distraction.

The internet and its subsequent rapid adoption and proliferation has changed the nature of human interaction in ways we really don’t understand. Life was moving slower then. We learned differently, through books and word of mouth, inherited wisdom, or a once daily newspaper or evening newscast. Not an iphone. I know others feel like I do, that sustained reading is much harder today than it used to be.

We were also seemingly much less angry. Yes, humans fought a lot, in terrible wars. But the long spaces between were not filled with what they are now, unending nastiness and pettiness and virtue-signaling and screaming about injustices and offenses, 24-7.

We’ve lost something that we will never recover. 

J.R.R. Tolkien understood this. We move from magic to modernity, from superstition and myth to reason and science, and lose something beautiful. It’s inevitable, and many new things are beautiful, but during this process we discard the old. And it’s sad. 

It’s OK to mourn and honor the past, even as it slips through your fingers.