Metal Friday: "Light Comes Out Of Black" by Rob Halford and Pantera

Today's edition of Metal Friday features "Light Comes Out of Black," sung by Rob Halford with music/backing vocals provided by Pantera.

Gotta credit my friend Falze for tipping me off to this lesser-known metal gem. I've never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer, nor have I any real desire to do so, but had I known it contained this headbanging masterpiece I would have watched it long ago.

Halford recorded "Light Comes Out of Black" in his Fight/solo years, after leaving Judas Priest in 1992 and before rejoining the band in 2003. It's such a pleasant surprise because it sounds so different than anything we're used to hearing from Priest era Halford. I love the heavy, raw crunch of the guitar and bass, so unlike the heavily synthesized Glenn Tipton/K.K. Downing sound. When Phil Anselmo starts backing Halford's vocals around 4:00 in some sort of hellish harmony, and then the pace picks up around 4:22, man, it's a treat. As is the classic Halford scream at the end.

The beat just makes you want to pound a heavy bag, or something. Very visceral. Turn it up loud and enjoy your weekend.

Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson, a review

Themistocles, Alexander the Great, Cortes, and the British and American officers of the last two centuries enjoyed innate advantages that over the long duration could offset the terrible effects of imbecilic generalship, flawed tactics, strained supply lines, difficult terrain, and inferior numbers—or a simple “bad day.” These advantages were immediate and entirely cultural, and they were not the product of the genes, germs, or geography of a distant past.

--Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture

Carnage and Culture (2001) serves as a corrective in some ways to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Military success is not just about east-west vs. north-south axes and favorable climates for growing crops, Hanson argues, but about cultures that value individual initiative in conjunction with discipline, and whose armies and soldiers take to the battlefield because of personal choice or the decision of an elected official. As units comprised of free individuals Western armies are invested in conflicts differently than their eastern counterparts.

Hanson says that Western armies discuss and vote on strategy before battle, have the initiative and flexibility to make changes during the heat of the fighting, and audit the performance of their military and non-military leadership afterwards. This cultural mindset makes for a better individual soldier and a more cohesive unit, one that fights in close ranks (the Macedonian Phalanx, British squares, and so on) and prefers open, head-on combat of annihilation (“shock battle” is one of Hanson’s favorite terms). The historical result is a track record of victories over lesser-motivated, more inflexible, and lighter-armored foes, even when outnumbered, such as Alexanders's rout of the Persians at the battle of Gaugamela, for example. In nearly all the major engagements in which west triumphed over east, “the same paradigms of freedom, decisive shock battle, civic militarism, technology, capitalism, individualism, and civilian audit and open dissent loom large,” Hansen writes.

Technology has certainly played a role in the military supremacy of western forces, too. Because free inquiry and rationalism are Western trademarks, European armies have been traditionally been equipped with better arms and armor, Hanson adds. But technology alone cannot account for this long track record of victory: “Themistocles’ triremes at Salamis were no better than Xerxes’, and Admiral Nagumo’s carriers at Midway had better planes than the American’s did,” Hanson explains.

Les Miserables--wow

It's funny how you can reach a point in your life when you think you can no longer be surprised by art, that you've experienced the depth and breath of music, painting, or literature, and art begins to seem a series of minor disappointments, a recombination of existing works, or pale imitation.

While I never quite reached those depths, I flirted with the feeling. I'm glad to report that Les Miserables woke me up out of my doldrums and made me feel a fool.

This past Christmas I got my wife and I a pair of tickets to a March 31 showing at the Opera House in Boston. I had not listened to any of the music of Les Miserables previously and I scarcely knew the storyline, save for the barest outline. I had planned to listen to some of the songs beforehand but never got around to it, and by the time Saturday rolled around I thought, "screw it, too late. I'm sure it will be a good show anyway."

I was wrong. It was great. I was not prepared for the emotion of the show, the soaring voices, nor the frank depiction of religious material. Not knowing what to expect--a rare experience in this age of the internet and instant communication and gratification--and having my expectations greatly surpassed made it all the better.

"Stars" was when I knew this show was something special. It was not sung by this gentleman, Philip Quast, but the actor who played Javert at the Opera House on Saturday looked and sounded much like him.

All in all a memorable night out on the town. Les Miserables is art at its peak. I am so glad I got to see it.

I guess one can like heavy metal and show tunes. Go figure.

Metal Friday: "Valkyries" by Blind Guardian

In an effort to get more heavy metal on this blog--because why would anyone possibly want less metal--I'm hereby starting a "Metal Friday" feature. This will consist of Youtube clips of some of my favorite songs, sometimes with commentary when the Muse strikes me.

Today, "Valkyries" by Blind Guardian, from the album At the Edge of Time. It's a magnificent lyrical/aural evocation of  those mythical choosers of the slain, bearing the bravest with them on their ride to Valhalla. Turn it up loud:

    

Rain
Red blood keeps pouring down
Come Valkyries, join me on that final ride

Here I lie bleeding
Odin, I await thee

The battle rages on

Seven Princes by John R. Fultz, a Review

What do you want out of your fantasy? Mythmaking in the mold of JRR Tolkien’s The Silmarillion? Freebooting adventure, decaying civilizations, and heroic swordplay a-la Robert E. Howard? Weird, extraplanar demonic horrors like those encountered in the fiction of HP Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith? You get all of this stuff in John Fultz’ gonzo debut novel Seven Princes, both to our benefit and occasionally our detriment.

Seven Princes is bold, brash, and big. This is a novel written with bright strokes of character and setting, bursting with world-shaking adventure, intrigue, and conflict. It reads big, and feels big, and it’s unrepentantly so. In a “Meet the Author” Q&A at the back of the book Fultz describes the influences and raw materials that underlie Seven Princes. These are legion—Lord Dunsany, Howard, Lovecraft, Smith, Tolkien, Tanith Lee, Darrell Schweitzer, and others—so it’s no surprise Seven Princes contains multitudes. But underneath it all is a strong epic fantasy undercurrent, shot through with swords and sorcery. Says Fultz:

A writer’s sensibility is, I think, determined largely by his or her influences… what you’ve read most and where your passions lie. You write what you love. That said, writers like to stretch themselves too. For me, the whole epic/heroic fantasy realm is where I’ve been heading since I began reading fantasy as a kid in the late 1970s. Some have also called my work “sword and sorcery” but nobody can give a solid definition of what that actually is. For me, the bottom line is that I just Do My Thing and let my passion for storytelling lead me where I need to go.

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

A dalliance in murder ... Donald Westlake's The Hook

I recently agreed to review the audio book of Donald Westlake's The Hook for SFFaudio.com. It's a mystery/suspense novel, I believe the first I've ever read. The Hook was fun and Westlake is a good writer, though my opinion of it was not enough to prompt a rash of mystery titles reviewed here. But it's good to read outside your preferred genre and see how the other half lives from time to time.

Some thoughts upon reading John Gardner’s Grendel

I’m troubled, deeply troubled, by the extremes of existentialist, postmodern thought. The kind that gets put under the microscope in John Gardner’s fine little 1971 novel Grendel.

If the Dragon is right, Grendel cannot be morally condemned, and his actions are no better or worse than Beowulf’s, or anyone else’s. They are, like everything else, absolutely meaningless. The Dragon is the real horror of Grendel—a beast that adheres to hard, cold materialism. “It’s all the same in the end, matter and motion, simple or complex. No difference, finally. Death, transfiguration. Ashes to ashes and slime to slime, amen,” says the Dragon to Grendel. Nothingness awaits us at the end. The dragon’s speech is like Morgoth’s to Hurin; negating meaning, negating the possibility of a benevolent God, negating even an uncaring but eternal creative force in the universe. Certainly negating an afterlife or any possibility of escape.

Compare the conversation of Hurin/Morgoth in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Children of Hurin:

“Beyond the Circles of the World you shall not pursue those who refuse you.”

“Beyond the Circles of the World I will not pursue them,” said Morgoth. “For beyond the Circles of the World there is Nothing. But within them they shall not escape me, until they enter into Nothing.”

…to Grendel/the Dragon:

“Nevertheless, something will come of all this,” I said.

“Nothing,” he said. “A brief pulsation in the black hole of eternity.”

We are just a cog in the wheel, part of the mindless machine. The Dragon recommends coping with this state by hoarding wealth and sitting upon it.

Postmodern thought of this sort has no clothes; we need a moral compass.

25 years of Evil Dead 2? Groovy.

Wow, has it really been 25 years since Evil Dead 2 came out? Guess it's time to break out the VCR (yes, I still own one. And lots of VCR tapes. Get offa my lawn) and do a rewatch.

If you're a fan of the film I recommend reading the linked article above. Evil Dead 2 is much better than the original, and I think it's better than Army of Darkness. The latter is a great film, too, and perhaps a bigger cult favorite with its higher memorable quote quotient, but this bit from the article sums up why I prefer Dead by Dawn over AoD (by a hair):

Army of Darkness has more than its share of fanatics, given that it provided many with their access point to the Evil Dead universe, but for me it’s never quite measured up to its predecessors. By taking the action out of the cabin and into a much larger-scale, higher-production value setting, it lacks that DIY charm, and the oddball humour sits awkwardly with the concessions made to a fairly standard studio blockbuster format; it doesn’t help that the horror elements are significantly pared back. Worse still is how Ash’s characterisation changes between the films. Far from the witless but well-meaning would-be tough guy of Evil Dead 2, in Army of Darkness he’s a mean-spirited, arrogant bastard with whom it’s very hard to empathise. Sure, Army of Darkness provides Ash with many of his most celebrated one-liners – the immortal “Gimme some sugar, baby,” and “This is my boom-stick!” amongst others – but none of them quite measure up to that single, immortal word that is evoked for the first time in Evil Dead 2… “Groovy.” 

For further reading, my own take on how I discovered the greatness of Evil Dead 2. Just like the writer of the article above I was hooked after the possessed hand sequence. My favorite part: When Ash slams a bucket over his sawed off appendage, then weights it down with a copy of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Just indescribably awesome.

The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie, a review

“Who cares who’s buried where?” muttered Craw, thinking about all the men he’d seen buried. “Once a man’s in the ground he’s just mud. Mud and stories. And the stories and the men don’t often have much in common.”

—Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes

Although it’s classified as fantasy, don’t be fooled: Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes is every inch a war story, knee deep in mud and blood, with the term “heroes” used in a rather ironic fashion. You won’t find any heroes here, just a bunch of men trying to live through another day on the battlefield.

It’s also bloody good. While it’s not at the level of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Killer Angels, and perhaps doesn’t quite stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the same shieldwall as Steven Pressfield’s brilliant Gates of Fire, The Heroes is certainly one of the best books of its kind. Chock full of vivid combat and the incredible stress and strain of war, with a cast of memorable if not particularly deep characters and enough twists to keep you guessing to the end, it’s a terrific read for those who enjoy the sights and sounds of combat on the printed page.

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

Getting a good chuckle—while feeling annoyed/confused—about The Walking Dead nerdrage

Returning to a bit of familiar turf for me...(ranting ahead)

You gotta laugh—or maybe weep—at hardcore nerds in frothing nerdrage with an over-inflated sense of their own creative abilities. The types who swear with a solemn face that Tolkien should have dropped books 2 and 4 of The Lord of the Rings, tightened up all those boring travel-y bits in book 6, leavened it with a liberal dose of combat carnage, and viola! The Lord of the Rings is 10x better than that crappy book sitting on your shelf.

The latest example comes courtesy of message board discussions of The Walking Dead. I’m not naming the board(s) in question to protect the guilty parties (e-mail me if you want the hard evidence), but really, when you’ve got (according to their avatar pictures) middle-aged men stating in non-ironic fashion that they could out-write the writers of The Walking Dead, no problem and for sure, then you follow their blog link back and find grade-school caliber fiction so bad it makes your eyes water … yeah. Hard to take these critics seriously. But it doesn’t stop them from wanting the rest of us to hear the truth about why this show sucks so bad.

Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison, a review

More than 30 years ago in the introduction to Strange Wine (1978) Harlan Ellison railed against television, declaring it the death knell of books and reading. In his usual blunt style:

I now believe that television itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mind crushing. It is soul deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing. It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing.

It’s hard to say whether Ellison’s fears were misplaced or have come to fruition. I’ve seen reports from the National Endowment for the Arts declaring that reading is in crisis and Americans are reading both less, and less well; opposing reports state that books like Harry Potter have revived reading in old and young alike, and that e-readers have made reading cool again, opening up an old pastime with new technology.

Perhaps Ellison’s essay is showing a little age. Television sets—the glass teat, as he once famously described them—are now competing with computer screens for our national attention, and computers of course allow us to both passively consume entertainment like TV while granting us more access to information and an enormous variety of reading material, albeit of variable quality. Worth noting too is the fact that Ellison was writing in an age of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Bewitched; perhaps TV has gotten better since then (then I think of The Bachelor and Fear Factor and wonder if gladiatorial combats aren’t coming next). But I think there’s a kernel of truth to Ellison’s rant about television: I wonder if there isn’t something being lost with the decline of paper books, which promote the act of sustained reading without ready access to an internet browser.

The Well of the Unicorn by Fletcher Pratt, a review

I’ve had pretty good results in my ongoing quest to track down and read those acknowledged fantasy classics that I’ve considered holes in my repertoire. George MacDonald’s Phantastes was worth the effort, a curious but powerful and interesting tale. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny I found to be a book of great ideas, if lacking slightly in execution. The Worm Ouroboros proved to be one of my all-time favorites. And so on.

Alas, that streak came to a halt with Fletcher Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn. I was turned on to this 1948 novel by L. Sprague de Camp, who devoted a chapter to Pratt in his heroic fantasy assessment Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers. I got through The Well, but I found it to be a very hard slog. Pratt’s writing style is, to be honest, awkward and artless. I often found myself reading a page with my eyes glazed over and realized that nothing had sunk in. Sometimes I would go back and re-read but other times I couldn’t be bothered and plowed on, hoping to pick up the lost thread of the story.

What are some of the problems? Bizarre shifts in tenses. Dialogue introduced with either traditional quotation marks, or en-dashes. Run-on sentences. Multiple dialects that require effort to parse through what is being said. In general, dense, heavy writing. Paragraphs like this are very typical:

“To the central square!” said Rogai, and “Where do you think I go?” Airar. There stands the statue of King Argimenes with the old sword lifted from under the plough. At this place lights and people began to flow in, half unbelieving that Dalecarle revolters were in the town, curious that this might be some trick of the red triangle. A fire was lighted; when men saw by the banners that trick there was none, they began to come out in earnest, some with hidden, forbidden weapons, to caper around the blaze, handshaking with strangers, singing warsongs almost forgot:

Note the bizarre attribution (I believe Airar was the one who said “Where do you think I go,” but I’m still not sure). Add to that dozens upon dozens of minor characters that fail to distinguish themselves and a lack of a dramatis personae reference to aid the reader, and the Well of the Unicorn is just a really, really hard read.

My Black Gate post this week...

... is more about Iron Maiden, mostly just an expansion of what I wrote below, with a few more anecdotes and some recycled material thrown in. You can read it here in its entirety if you're so interested.

Iron Maiden Maiden England tour--who's going?

I recently found out that Iron Maiden is touring this summer. The title of the tour is Maiden England and it is an homage to a live video released after their 7th Tour of a 7th Tour, featuring a heavy rotation of their awesome Seventh Son of a Seventh Son album.

I'm going to see Maiden on June 26 at the Comcast Center in Mansfield, MA. I can't even tell you excited I am for this show. I started listening to Maiden right around 1988 when Seventh Son was their newest album. I was blown away (still am) by songs like "The Clairvoyant," "Can I Play With Madness," "Infinite Dreams" and my favorite on the album "The Evil That Men Do."

A bit too young (15) at the time to score tickets and transportation, I had to wait until 1991's No Prayer for the Dying before I was able to see them in concert on the No Prayer on the Road tour. By then they had begun a downhill decline and Adrian Smith had left the band, though it was still an excellent show. I've seen them many times since, but this particular show looks particularly great with its heavy rotation of old material and apparently their old stage set from 7th Tour, featuring faux glaciers and other cool stuff.

Anyone else planning on seeing the greatest heavy metal band that ever was?

A few closing thoughts on Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers

I promised a few closing thoughts on Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers, which I’ve since finished, so here goes.

 De Camp has an annoying habit of throwing around unsupported opinions in almost everything he writes and I think that’s why he has such a poor reputation as a biographer in some quarters. Prime example: He calls T.H. White—author of The Once and Future King—a “second-rate intellect” in Chapter 10, “Architect of Camelot.” Which is rather humorous (except that it’s not … ). To whit: White writes a book that absolutely dwarfs anything de Camp has ever done—in influence, art, and profundity—name the category—and somehow said work sprang from the mind of a “second-rate intellect.” Maddening. He also describes White’s homosexuality as “an abnormality” and “a deviation.” Yeah, he doesn’t exactly cover himself in glory in this chapter. That said, I did not know until I read Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers that White made some significant revisions to the four individual books that comprise The Once and Future King when it was released as a standalone novel in 1958, some of which lessened their original force. That much was interesting, at least.

Given the recent brouhaha over on Ferretbrain, I thought de Camp’s observations on the matter of REH and race were worth sharing:

Many of Howard’s views would today be called “racist.” In presenting such views, Howard merely followed most popular fiction writers of the time, to whom ethnic stereotypes were stock in trade. If a racist, Howard was, by the standards of his time, a comparatively mild one. He agreed with Lovecraft’s rhapsodies on the “Aryan race” and his rantings against non-Nordic immigrants. But then he noted the superior qualities of the intelligent, industrious, orderly Bohemian settlers in Texas. He admitted that every ethos has its share of saints and scoundrels. 

De Camp’s opinions here largely jibe with my own. I acknowledge that REH’s writings contain elements of racism that are highly problematic today. I just don’t think Howard’s views on race exhibit nearly the kind of taint over all his stories that the author of the Ferretbrain piece does. Almost no one, save for perhaps a fanatic fringe of fandom, claims that REH was not racist to some degree. The much harder case to make—and one that Arthur B fails to even attempt—is whether REH was a racist by the standards of 1920s Texas. As biographers and scholars of Howard have pointed out, again and again using historical evidence, he was not. This doesn’t make one an “apologist” for Howard’s racism, it’s called having a developed sense of history, and a notion of the concept of contextualizing an author based on the time and place in which he or she wrote. Most readers also understand that the good in Howard—his wonderful plotting, pacing, style, vivid imagination, ability to convey action, his fine poetry and effortless prose—overwhelms the bad, which is why he continues to be read today while most of his pulp fiction contemporaries have been forgotten. And that’s why I continue to recommend him as a cornerstone of fantasy.

I enjoyed reading de Camp’s account of his meeting with Tolkien in the latter’s garage over pipes and beer, but found his evaluation of The Lord of the Rings a bit lacking. For example, he criticizes Tolkien for assuming that good and evil are absolute values, not subjective or relative. I think Tolkien did feel that way, but more interesting is that characters in his universe operate with free will and can exhibit good and evil behaviors (see Denethor, Boromir, Gollum, Saruman, etc.). He also criticizes Tolkien for having an all-powerful God that “will save the characters” if the situation is grim enough. De Camp did not have the luxury of reading The Silmarillion in which it becomes apparent that the world of Middle-earth does not operate by benevolent divine intervention alone: See Turin, and Feanor, for counter-examples. Long periods of blackness and despair, there. Also Tolkien’s universe was a combination of Christianity and paganism; the Valar are taken from Old Norse and Greek mythology and they too influence the affairs of Middle-earth. Relying on Eru to come in and save the day is likely to get you killed.

A chapter on Fletcher Pratt was scant but has inspired me to begin The Well of the Unicorn. 

So overall, Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers is a fun read, featuring an opinionated de Camp at his best and his worst, and worth picking up if you can find a copy.

Styrbiorn the Strong, a review

“There is but one way for a man, and that is to remember that none may avoid his fate. This is to a man as the due ballast to the ship, which maketh the vessel indeed loom somewhat deeper, but keepeth it from tossing too lightly upon the uncertain waters.”

–E.R. Eddison, Styrbiorn the Strong

As a youth, E.R. Eddison (1882-1945) so loved William Morris’ translations of the Old Norse sagas that he taught himself Old Icelandic, desiring the pure injection of North Sea ice water into his veins that the stories in their original tongue delivered. He carried that love of the Sagas with him as a writer of fantasy fiction. Their echoes can be felt in Eddison’s best known work, The Worm Ouroboros (1922), but four years after the Worm Eddison set to work on the real thing, trying his hand at his own saga Styrbiorn the Strong (1926).

Styrbiorn the Strong tells the story of Styrbiorn Olaffson, teenage heir to the throne of Sweden. Denied his birthright and exiled from Sweden, Styrbiorn spends three years a-viking, during which his power and influence waxes mightily. Three years later he returns to claim his share of the kingdom. Except for a few minor characters everyone in the story is an historical figure. The main facts of the tale are also historical, including the concluding bloody Battle of Fýrisvellir, but the details and characterizations are of Eddison’s own making.

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

Falling under the spell of the sword: de Camp’s Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers

I just received a book in the mail that I’ve had my eyes on for quite a while, and am now very pleased to own: L. Sprague de Camp’s Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy (1976).

If there was a book made for me, this is it. It’s an out of print hardcover from Sauk City Wisconsin-based Arkham House Publishers, Inc, whose very name awakes fond thoughts of Cthulhu and other tentacled horrors. The book is a handsome little volume with great black and white cover art by Tim Kirk that would be right at home as interior art of a Moldvay/Cook Dungeons and Dragons manual.

The back of the dust-jacket features a list of books available from Arkham House, complete with prices and ordering information. Does anyone else love to read these old lists and wonder if you could still write to the specified address and receive a “catalog available on request” straight from the 1970s, folded up and shipped off by a geeky clerk with a tweed jacket and horn-rimmed spectacles? The interior features some great full-page black and white photographs of all the authors covered. There’s also a nice picture of Sprague himself on the inside back dust-jacket, complete with dated sports coat, ready to pontificate on some SFF subject.

Excalibur remake dead? Good

I came across this old story while surfing the web after the recent news of Nicol Williamson’s passing: Bryan Singer Excalibur Remake Is Dead (file this one under news to me, and therefore new).

In a word: Good. Excalibur does not need to be remade. There’s no way a remake would take the same risks as the original, which practically demanded that its viewers understood at least the basic myths of the Fisher King and the symbolic nature of the grail. I’m sure the new version would look great, but even then, would it surpass the falling petals with “O Fortuna” from the Carmina Burana playing in the background, or would it merely ape what has gone before?

The King Arthur story has been told again and again over the generations, and that mythic dimension—version upon version, each different than the one that came before but with the same broadly depicted characters and themes—is part of its allure and appeal. If Alfred Lord Tennyson didn’t have the courage to retell Malory’s LeMorte D’Arthur we wouldn’t have Idylls of the King; if T.H. White didn’t pick up where Tennyson left off we wouldn’t have The Once and Future King, and so on. The world would be a much poorer place.

But the difference of course is that Tennyson,White, Bernard Cornwell’s The Warlord Trilogy, et al., are retellings, not remakes. There’s a big difference. While I welcome new Arthurian retellings, we don’t need a remake of Excalibur. I couldn’t agree more with this paragraph from the linked article (bold emphasis mine):

Directed by John Boorman and starring Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, and Nicol Williamson, Excalibur is the definitive version of Arthurian legend for many of us who grew up in the '80s, a dark and bloody affair that has often been imitated but never equaled in the years since. Maybe this is a good thing. At this point, we've seen the story of King Arthur told just about every way it can be. If we're going to sit through yet another retelling, let's wait until somebody comes up with a brilliant new spin on the legend rather than just remaking the already-good ones.

Transcendent fantasy, or politics as usual?

My Black Gate post this week is not a review, nor an essay proper, but a question: Is it possible for fantasy to move beyond the political? Or because it is written by authors of a particular time and place, must fantasy—however fantastic its subject matter—forever remain trapped within the circles of our own world?

China Mieville and others say that no, you cannot read fantasy except through the lens of politics, and that there is no escape. In this interview from 2000, Mieville says:

The problem with escapism is that when you read or write a book society is in the chair with you. You can’t escape your history or your culture. So the idea that because fantasy books aren’t about the real world they therefore ‘escape’ is ridiculous. Fantasy is still written and read through the filters of social reality. That’s why some fantasies (like Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) are so directly allegorical–but even the most surreal and bizarre fantasy can’t help but reverberate around the reader’s awareness of their own reality, even if in a confusing and unclear way.

I think that as we’ve grown more secular and rational fantasy is following suit. Led by writers like George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie, fantasy has become less whimsical and more historical, less hopeful and more gritty and pessimistic. Many “fantasies” now actively grapple with issues like racism and misogyny, or conservatism vs. liberalism, which lurk beneath the veneer of strange secondary worlds that in other fundamental ways closely resemble our own.

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

Rest in Peace, Nicol Williamson

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)

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.