Here’s Adam-Troy Castro, from his blog:

There’s recently been a flurry of posts about Undead Press, a small publishing house that a) doesn’t pay, b) allegedly humiliates its authors by inserting gratuitous rape scenes into their stories, without asking those authors if they want those rape scenes to be there, and c) has apparently published and continues to advertise a sequel to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, showing an absolute lack of respect for copyright or concern for the legal consequences… what I really want to address is that Dawn of the Dead sequel, an act of supreme arrogance… What Giangregorio has done is specifically, and deliberately, hijack the name of a better work and superior work to his sequel; he is specifically saying, “This is a sequel to Dawn of the Dead.” Which he has no right to do.

Alyn Day, another Undead Press contributor, relates how her story was also rewritten and retitled without permission.

My story was no longer my story. It had been butchered. I sat in my livingroom with one of the 6 copies I had purchased, flipping through the pages, eager to see my words in print… only they weren’t my words. It wasn’t even my TITLE. Parts of my story had been cut out, names and details had been changed, things I was never made aware of and had never agreed to… I bit my tongue and kept silent about my interactions with Anthony Giangregorio and Undead Press/Open Casket… I’m sorry for that, because the very same thing happened to a friend of mine just recently. Mandy DeGeit had a story published in Undead Press’s Cavalcade of Terror, which was similarly mistreated. I learned my lesson about being quiet.

Richard Salter explains why he recently pulled his shared world anthology, World’s Collider, from the same press:

This small press is a one-man show, run by Anthony Giangregorio. He also runs Living Dead Press and Undead Press… A few months ago I pulled World’s Collider from Open Casket Press’s roster. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a dreadful and misogynist book blurb for Women of the Living Dead. I called Tony out on it, said I didn’t trust him with World’s Collider (in an e-mail I agonized over for hours). His response, “Whatever”, and then he defriended me.

And finally Nick Mamatas, in a blog today titled Anthony Giangregorio — beware, for real!, shares a rather disturbing Facebook screencap from late yesterday, also featuring Alyn Day:

Alyn Day also came forward to describe a story she had placed with Giangregorio being substantially rewritten and retitled without her permission… And apparently, Giangregorio is upset enough about these revelations to invite himself over to Day’s house…. Is there a way to read this as something other than a threat against Day — especially as Giangregorio had previously told DeGeit that he would only communicate through lawyers? I tend to think not. Please spread the word.

In this case, it’s stuff you really, really want: the latest archival quality hardcover from Haffner Press, Thunder in the Void, a massive collection of 16 Space Opera tales by Henry Kuttner. It’s scarcely been on sale two weeks, and it’s already almost sold out, so act fast.

Thunder in the Void gathers classic pulp fiction from Planet Stories, Weird Tales, Super Science Stories, and even rarer sources, including “War-Gods of the Void,” “Raider of the Spaceways,” “We Guard the Black Planet,” “Crypt-City of the Deathless Ones,” and the previously unpublished “The Interplanetary Limited.”  Most appear here in book form for the first time.

How do you win? Now pay attention, this is the fun part. You must submit the title of an imaginary Space Opera story. The most compelling pulp title — as selected by a crack team of judges including Howard Andrew Jones, C.S.E. Cooney, and John O’Neill — will receive a free copy of Thunder in the Void in the mail, complements of Haffner Press and Black Gate magazine.

One submission per person, please. Submissions must be received by May 31st, 2012. Winner will be contacted by e-mail, so use a real e-mail address maybe. All submissions must be sent to john@blackgate.com, with the subject line Thunder in the Void, or something obvious like that so I don’t randomly delete it.

All entries become the property of New Epoch Press. No purchase necessary. Must be 12 or older. Decisions of the judges (capricious as they may be) are final. Employees of New Epoch Press are ineligible to enter (including the judges — sorry, Howard and C.S.E.) Not valid where prohibited by law. Or anywhere postage for a hefty hardcover is more than, like, 10 bucks. Seriously, this book is heavy and we’re on a budget.

Thunder in the Void is 612 pages in high-quality hardcover format, with an introduction by Mike Resnick and a cover price of $40. Cover art is by Norman Saunders. It is available directly from Haffner Press.

Ashes of Candesce is the concluding novel in Karl Schroeder’s Virga series, which began with an Analog serial called “Sun of Suns” (first part published in November 2005), and has continued through five novels. The first novel introduced Virga, a huge bubble in the Vega system in which a wide variety of human cultures live in low-tech freefall environments. It concerned young Hayden Griffin, a young man from the nation of Aerie, which has been conquered by another country, Slipstream. Griffin’s original mission is simply revenge against Slipstream, but by the end of that book he has learned a lot more about his world. There the series opens out – the initial setting is charming, and could have supported plenty of fine adventure stories, but Schroeder’s interests were much broader. In Sun of Suns we learn why Virga is a low tech environment, and in subsequent books we learn a fair amount about the much higher tech available outside Virga, and about that tech’s dangers.

The primary thematic thrust of the series is the nature of Artificial Intelligence, and the way humans can live with it, and the dangers of a life too separate from true nature, from true bodies. The conflict at the center is between Artificial Nature – essentially, purely virtual existence (though Schroeder’s take on this is more complex than that) and between intelligence that are fundamentally “embodied”, and thus responsive to what we might call “Natural Nature”. In each of the books we have learned more about Virga and especially about the world outside Virga – and about the importance of Virga and the paradoxically high-tech technology-suppression field that makes its low-tech existence possible.

In each of the books we have also focused on different main characters, including Chaison Fanning and his wife Venera, nominally the villains of the first book; and also the “winter wraith” (and Virga Home Guard member) Antaea Argyre, plus history teacher Leal Maspeth. Ashes of Candesce brings back all those people as major characters, plus a key individual from outside Virga, Keir Chen, who when we first meet him is a child who seems to be growing younger … but whose past life is vitally important to the battle between Virga and Artificial Nature.

Keir Chen is part of a group called Renaissance, one of the apparently few bastions of resistance to Artificial Nature outside Virga. He encounters Leal Maspeth and her expedition in Aethyr, another “bubble” attached to Virga. Leal has a message she needs to deliver to the authorities in Virga – but the representatives of Artificial Nature also have plans. Soon we are back in Virga, and Leal, Keir, and Leal’s old friend Antaea Argyre join with Chaison and Venera Fanning to try to put together an alliance among the many nations of Virga. Alas, there is opposition from the scheming Inshiri Ferance, who seems to think that joining with Artificial Nature will allow her to take over the world, as well as Ferance’s scheming cousin Jacoby Sarto, whose loyalties are unclear.

These novels have always been a well-mixed combination of thoughtful Sfnal speculation and colorful adventure, and this is no exception. There’s plenty of action, particularly in a climactic space battle sequence. And there’s a fair amount of intriguing as well. There is also a good bit of fascinating Sfnal description and argument; and at least a bit of ambiguity: after all, one of the results of Virga’s tech suppression field is shortened lives and stunted knowledge.

Ashes of Candesce comes to a satisfying and believable conclusion, and it’s a good capstone for one of the best Science Fiction series of recent years. That said, as a standalone novel it has its shortcomings. The main issue is that the need to resolve everything leads to a certain episodicity; and, more seriously, to a bit of shortchanging of character development. We get to spend a bit of time with numerous characters, most familiar from previous books in the series, but no characters really get time to be fully realized, not even Keir Chen, probably the most important character in this particular book. For instance, he and Leal Maspeth are portrayed as having a growing relationship – but no real feeling for this comes through. It may be that this is hard to avoid in a capstone book like this – similarly, a certain sense of rushing through things may be inevitable. At any rate, the Virga series as a whole is a excellent stuff, and this is a successful conclusion.

__________

Rich Horton is an Associate Technical Fellow in Software for a major aerospace company in St. Louis, MO. He writes a regular column and book reviews for Black Gate, as well as a monthly column on short fiction for Locus and reviews for many other publications. He also edits an annual anthology, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, for Prime Books. He maintains a website at www.sff.net/people/richard.horton, and can also be found on Live Journal.

Pokemon Study Hall by Hinoraito, and boy there are a bunch of characters in it!

Sure, I knew Pikachu as it’s pretty hard to be alive in this world without knowing the electric-type mouse Pokémon as well as his constant companion of Ash Ketchum. But truly, that’s as far as it went.

Then came 2006 when my son was born and I named him Ashur, which of course would get shortened to Ash at convenience as he grew. Did that name have anything to do with Pokémon? Nope, although there was a bit of Evil Dead in there to be honest, but for the most part it just fit. Three days before my Ash arrived, his cousin Iris was born. Again, nothing odd about that occurrence at the time, and yet these days I think about the event as I watch Pokémon: Black and White and scratch my head because the two main characters of that version… Ash and Iris.

Yes, I watch Pokémon with my son. It can be rather addicting, as any quest cartoon can, each adventure building on the next as Ash continues on his journey to be a Pokémon Master. My son loves it, collects plush Pokémon, and studies his Pokémon: Black and White handbook like it’s the gospel.

Heck, just writing about Pokémon: Black and White puts the theme song in my head and I can’t help but smile as I wonder what my sons favorite Pokémon will be tomorrow as I drive him to school. Certainly our conversation will run to all kinds of linguistically odd levels as we discuss the merits of a Ground-type versus a Ghost-type, what the exact qualities of a Hidden Power attack really is, and if Cofagrigus is hollow inside.

The various starter Pokemon from each animated series with Black and White at center.

First, you’ve got to understand the beginning. Of course Pokémon came from Japan, no surprise there, and the first series began with perhaps the most famous of Ash’s starter Pokémon, Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle. When we first meet Ash of Pallet Town, he’s given his Pikachu by Professor Oak and begins his journey to be a Pokémon Master.

This epic beginning started many a child on their Pokémon journey as well back in 1998, and I wanted to start my Ash there as well. Instead, Cartoon Network was running the newest series, Black and White, so we somehow got into that version and the rest is history. However, as I studied the history, I realized that it really didn’t matter if my son was a 1st Generation Pokémon aficionado or a Black and White child because all Pokémon animated series are nearly identical.

There is a basic formula. Create roughly 150 strange looking Pokémon animals, throw Ash into a new region of the world he needs to explore and collect Pokémon Master gym badges from fighting with this Pokémon, and finally give him a girl companion and a boy companion to travel with.

Yep, that’s basically it, no matter if you started your journey in Series One, travelled to the Orange Islands, were the offspring of Diamond and Pearl, or like me were immersed in the latest craze, Black and White.

The ability to 'real-up' Pokemon is always awesome to see, as shown in this Raichu.

It’s funny, because I can’t help, as an adult, wanting to see some romantic interest in the shows. Certainly, there isn’t any, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t imagine Ash ending up with Misty, just as I’m sure others have wondered if Ash will end his journey with any of his leading ladies.

That concept of romance sometimes plays out in the fan art you see for the series, and if you ever want to see just how big Pokémon is, you can go to DeviantArt and search ‘Pokémon’. There, you begin to understand not only what Pokémon means as an artistic catalyst, but also the wide array of animated style a populace raised on these series can bring to the table.

Certainly animated art is tough to hold up as an iconic artist talent, and yet the more you delve into it, the more you can see it as a truly inspired technical skill. I mean look at Miyazaki. Here is a man who has defined a specific style of animation and made it his own with classic films like Totoro, Spirited Away, Nausicaa and dozens of others. In its day Akira was one of the most incredibly rendered animated movies ever conceived and still lives up to that billing twenty years later.

Perhaps Pokémon isn’t on the same level of these classics, but it can inspire art that not only diverges from the standard cartoon animation but also begins to spin into something truly talented and emotional.

So, I guess the point of all this is to say ‘never say never’ about anything, and when you think you know all you need to know on a subject, you might be surprised if you dig a little deeper. For me, images coming from Pokémon are now much sweeter than I’d ever before imagined, and I have to wonder what other classic animated series might have the same type of fan artist portfolios drifting around out there…

The changes DeGeit describes include introducing an embarrassing error in the title (changing it to “She Make’s Me Smile”… what?) to re-writing whole sections, and altering several characters and plot points — all without informing her.

However the worst offense (in my professional opinion) was in how Undead Press treated DeGeit after she protested the changes.  Here’s an excerpt from the response she received from the publisher:

wow, i truly cant believe that e,mail. you go girl. this one one hell of a story about dealing with unstable writers… lets see. on the contract, it clearly says publisher has the right to EDIT work. you signed it. are you saying you are a dishonest and immoral person and will now try to deny you signed the contract? well i have a copy right here

and as for the story. the editor had a hard time with it, it was very rough and he did alot to make it readable. despite what you think, your writing has a long way to go before its worthy of being printed professionally. we did what we had to do to make the story printable. you should be thankful, not complaining. ah, the ungrateful writer, gotta love it. the contract also says any disagreements you have about the contract must be filed legally in Massachusetts and when you lose, you must pay all court costs.

so, we are done here. any more correspondences from you must be from your lawyer.

I’ve been a small press publisher and editor for over ten years and, if it’s reproduced accurately, that may just be the most thoroughly unprofessional piece of correspondence I’ve ever seen.

I want to be clear. Editors make mistakes. Lord knows I’ve made plenty. And there are certainly times when you need to change a story, often over the objections of the author. Judith Berman once called me “the most intrusive editor I’ve ever worked with,” and it was probably deserved. We worked on multiple revisions of her story “Awakening” before it appeared in Black Gate 10 and was nominated for a Nebula Award.

But I hope I’ve always been straightforward with my writers about changes I wanted, and why I wanted them. And far, far more important than that, I hope I’ve always treated my authors with dignity and respect. Because when you screw up (and you will), you’ll also need their understanding and forgiveness.

Any company that treats its writers the way Mandy DeGeit describes being treated does not deserve to survive.

Prometheus has landed.

Or at least the first official clip has.

Today Fox unleashed a never-before-seen bit of the upcoming Aliens prequel and we here at Goth Chick News are so excited we very nearly opened a Facebook account.

Well, not really. But you get the idea.

In the minute-long sequence featuring Idris Elba landing his impressive looking spaceship on a planet that definitely is not Earth, we’re treated to a few hints as to the origins of our species.

Less than 3 weeks to go… Can you stand the wait?

Goodman Games made a name for itself with an impressive line of role playing adventures, Dungeon Crawl Classics. 66 have been released so far — including the latest, The Vampire’s Vengeance. All have championed the virtues of early role-playing: fun, colorful, easily accessible and combat-heavy adventures with uncomplicated storylines and lots of action.

The industry has changed a lot since the first, Idylls of the Rat King, was released back in 2003 however. The most important change has been the rise of “retro clone” games inspired by the original versions of D&D and AD&D that use the Open Gaming license, such as Daniel Proctor’s Labyrinth Lord.

These games, with their focus on simpler, more streamlined rules, perfectly complement the Dungeon Crawl Classics line, and it was an obvious next step for Joseph Goodman and his merry band to turn their creative talents to publishing one of their own.

BG Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones recently received a review copy, and he tells me he’s very impressed. “It’s retro in feel, but it’s not a retro-clone,” he says. Among the many appealing innovations are spell backfire charts and simple mechanics for spell duels.

“You could never do spell duels in D&D,” Howard notes. “But you finally can here.”

I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on a copy. In the meantime, Howard has promised a more detailed report in a few days.

Goodman Games released a 16-page teaser adventure as part of Free RPG Day 2011. DCC RPG is also supported by an attractive line of third party products from Purple Sorcerer Games, Chapter 13 Press, and many others. You can order the 480-page hardcover of the finished game on their website for $39.99.

Dark Shadows

Contrary to the horrified reactions to the trailer, the state of Tim Burton’s creative career, and Warner Bros. willful promotional ignorance of the movie, Dark Shadows is not a massive disaster. It’s merely a dull flick that suffers from the most standard of bad-movie flaws: an uninteresting story. A few flashes of something better appear — although it is hard to determine what that something was — but this latest attempt to revive the 1966–71 Gothic daytime soap opera seems to drift in clouds of weed, lazily resorting to some broad yet humorless gags while forgetting that it has multiple plot strands that require attention. The film’s slogan really should’ve been: “We were going to make a compelling story for Dark Shadows, but instead we got high.”

Dark Shadows also isn’t much of a comedy; the reviled trailer sells the film as outrageous culture-clash humor, but these kind of jokes make up only about a third of the film. The rest of it consists of stilted scenes of characters sitting down and talking about what isn’t happening in the rest of the movie.

At least there’s a great soundtrack, a surprisingly smooth meld of one of Danny Elfman’s better scores in recent memory with pleasing early ‘70s pop and rock, plus a production design that feels more natural and sensuously subdued than what Tim Burton usually produces. If Burton was consciously experimenting with an understated Gothic décor and a more realistic vision of the 1970s than people expect of him, I applaud him for it. It works, and it’s one of the few aspects of Dark Shadows that does.

Another part that clicks is the first fifteen minutes, which cruelly sets up a subtle horror/comedy/drama that never happens and a storyline that vanishes as the purple haze of “oh, whatever” rises all around the movie. In late eighteenth-century Maine, Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp), scion of a wealthy Liverpool family that has built a successful fishery business in the colonies, reject the advances of Angelique (Eva Green), who also happens to be a witch. The jealous Angelique makes Barnabas’s love Josette (Bella Heathcote) throw herself from an ocean cliff. Angelique curses the whole family, transforms Barnabas into a vampire, and gets the townspeople to capture him and bury him alive.

Although this sequence in the past — the only remnant of the TV show’s frequent flashbacks and trips to earlier centuries — is done with the right gaudy Hammer horror flair, it isn’t what works best about the film’s opening. When time shifts two centuries later to 1972, we see young Victoria “Vicki” Winters (also played by Heathcote) riding a train to the town of Collinsport, where she has a job as a nanny for the Collins family. This was the original set-up for the soap opera, long before any supernatural elements entered the show, and Burton spends time giving this moment a luscious and sensually distant feel. The Moody Blues song “Nights in White Satin” flows beautifully with Vicki on the train as the credits appear. Vicki arrives at the drowsy down and continue on to the ancestral mansion of Collinwood, getting a ride with some pot-smoking hippies in a sequence that astonishingly isn’t a lame comedy sledgehammer.

Vicki meets the remnants of the moldy Collins family: matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer); her live-in psychiatrist and sloppy lush Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter); Elizabeth’s listless brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller); Roger’s ten-year-old son David (Gulliver McGrath), who believes his mother’s ghost haunts the mansion; and Elizabeth’s teenage daughter Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz), who is just way too cool for all these losers.

The establishing dinner scene between Vickie and the weird Collins clan weaves between dysfunctional family humor and setting up intriguing conflicts. The actors work well off each other, and the possibilities for that interesting “other Dark Shadows movie” are laid out for the audience on the dusty dining room table.

But nothing comes from all this establishing work. Victoria Winters is not the driving focus of Dark Shadows, despite all indications from this opening that she is. The movie criminally forgets about her for enormous stretches, but she has company: the movie forgets about all its plots, and the characters turn as listless as Roger Collins.

Barnabas returns to Collinwood after unlucky construction workers accidentally break him free. The “fish-out-of-water” humor starts and everything else stops. Thought some of these characters might turn out to be interesting? Too bad, they all have nothing to do. It is up to Depp and Eva Green as the immortal Angelique to try to drag Dark Shadows along, and even their conflict gets sidelined in the lazy juggling of the different plot strands.

The number of storylines in Dark Shadows work well for an ongoing soap opera or a drama with a better script; lazily arranged in round-robin format for across two hours, none of them go anywhere. Barnabas trying to resurrect the family’s fishery against a rival company under the control of the immortal Angelique. Victoria’s connection to Barnabas’s dead love Josette. Dr. Hoffman’s fascination with vampirism and her twisted interest in Barnabas. David’s visions of his dead mother. Roger Collins’s terrible parenting. Carolyn’s fuzzy secret. All these plots and less are not explored as the film lurches toward its conclusion! And that conclusion is the same “fight in a burning house” that Hammer turned into a cliché even before 1972.

“Barnabas Collins vs. The ‘70s” consists of easy gags, like having pot-smoking hippies (who must have swiped it from the film crew) really groove on the heaviness of Barnabas’s two hundred-year “trip.” Most of the big jokes appear in the trailer: they weren’t funny there, and they don’t improve with context. The smaller moments of comedy work better. When Barnabas makes understated reactions to the pieces of ‘70s culture that have infiltrated Collinwood, they’re good for a chuckle. Depp’s confusion over a troll doll, an Operation game, and badminton rackets are his best bits of acting in the movie. Again, there’s that hint of the “something else” that Dark Shadows might have been.

The cast has great people in it, but nobody is great in it. Eva Green makes the best impression, but she has more to play with than anybody else, and Angelique is the most active character. It’s bizarre that Jackie Earle Haley, playing the mentally deficient groundskeeper of Collinswood, can’t do much more than be serviceable. Chloë Grace Moretz slides out of the film after some promising vamping early on. And poor Jonny Lee Miller: I know he’s in the film, but he doesn’t seem to actually appear in it. I only remember him leaving it. “Nothing in his role became him like the leaving it.” Thanks Shakespeare!

Even Alice Cooper is a disappointment playing himself. Oh, Christopher Lee pops up for a thankless one-scene role, although it is conceptually amusing to have him playing opposite a Dracula stand-in. The originally Barnabas Collins, Jonathan Frid (who died in April) has a fast cameo in party scene, along with a few other original cast members.

I’m not familiar enough with the original TV edition of Dark Shadows to know how its hardcore fans will react to it. From what I’ve watched (it streams on Netflix), I don’t think that Burton’s movie is a horrible travesty or mockery of it. It’s just not interesting or alive. Maybe having the crew accidentally wander into the frame, or camera silhouettes constantly falling over things would have livened things up. But since the original Dark Shadows was a soap opera that was all about following through on a tapestry plot lines, I have a feeling fans will feel cheated that Burton decided no plot lines were important.

So ends another attempt to resurrect Dark Shadows. Toss the soil on the coffin, fellas, and we’ll try again in another ten years.

My Summer Movie Scorecard
The Avengers . . . . . . . . . A
Dark Shadows . . . . . . . . . . C-

Next week: Who is going to scream “You sunk my Battleship!”?

The first novel by Toronto writer Leah Bobet, Above is a remarkable and in some ways brilliant book. It’s a Young Adult novel that doesn’t condescend to its audience, and doesn’t shy away from complexity of diction or worldbuilding. It’s a considerable achievement stylistically and thematically, a strong debut that promises much for Bobet’s future. Not every aspect of the book is equally successful, perhaps, but the things that work are the important things.

The story follows Matthew, a young storyteller born and raised in a community of outcasts who live under the streets of Toronto (the city’s not named, but if you’re familiar with it you can identify it from street names and the like — to say nothing of the cover). This community, Safe, is home to people who have strange powers and deformities: Curses. Matthew has scales over part of his body. Jack flickers with lightning. Whisper talks to ghosts. Atticus, the leader of Safe, has crablike pincers instead of hands. In creating Safe and its inhabitants, Bobet’s acknowledged taking some inspiration from the Beauty and the Beast TV show; personally, I found it reminiscent of the Morlocks in Chris Claremont’s run of X-Men.

Matthew’s trying to convince a troubled, Cursed girl named Ariel to live with him in Safe. But Safe’s more and less than it appears; an old crime comes back to haunt it, and Matthew, Ariel, and a few other survivors have to flee up to the frightening world Above. There, they’ll try to understand what happened, and work out what to do next — if they can stay together. If they can survive.

Bobet works an incredible thematic density into this plot. The story’s about community, and about sanctuary. But also about storytelling, and the myths that a community shares. It’s an investigation of what a community really is, then, and what makes a home — what the difference is between a sanctuary and a home, and what really is Safe, and how we see all these things through the lens of stories. It’s also therefore about secrets and lies, and about hidden relationships; about what is said and unsaid. It is about the things that aren’t told to children, and how children come to learn those things as they grow, and how those secrets can shape their lives whether they know it or not. It’s about the ways of the world, I think, and how we learn them as we grow, as we find our place in the world or else make that place for ourselves. Which is to say that in the end it comes back again to community, and the interstices between communities; how ethnicity and class and gender identity, the stories we tell ourselves (or are told) about who we are, can subtly and not-so-subtly shape a group as it forms itself. So it’s about identities, guises, and how we choose to fit in, how we Pass, as the people of Safe call pretending to fit in with the world Above. The story is therefore again about communication, and it’s notable that many of the gifts of the people of Safe are for communication — with stories, with ghosts, with shadows or bees or lightning.

All of which is to say that the themes of the story are interrelated in a way that defies explanation or compartmentalisation. This thematic interrelation creates a density to the book, a truly multifaceted reading experience. It’s unobtrusive; Bobet doesn’t drown you with ideas. It all emerges naturally from events and description and character. And from imagery, from the way a flash of lightning or a flicker of a match can carry similar symbolic freight — light standing, iridescent and ambiguous, against shadows and darkness. Above all, though, this density emerges from the voice in which the story’s told.

Matthew narrates the story in the first person, and his use of language is one of the most intriguing parts of the novel. He has a natural gift with words, but comes out of an unusual background with no formal schooling. Bobet creates a rich style for him, heavy with slang and rhythmic cadence and unexpected images. It reads a bit like Huckleberry Finn; or, to use a more genre-oriented point of comparison, a bit like Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker books. Not too much like those books, but a bit.

Consider the following, part of a story that Matthew tells giving us the background of his friend Jack:

It started raining after a bit, and Jack thought they really did yell up a storm, shivering wet in his T-shirt along the roadside that nobody drove on ‘cause the town was so far from everything. It thundered like tractor engines over and over and he got scared, thought about finding somewhere to hide ‘til the storm got done. He never thought about turning back, though — he’s careful to say that every time: I never once thought to turn myself back.

But he hesitated, stopped for a minute on the flat roadway in the flat land, where he was the tallest thing for a little ways.

And the lightning kissed him bone to bone and he wasn’t there for a while.

Now given that this is a story Matthew tells us, you can see how effectively Bobet lets him use language; the way, for example, she lets him build a rhythm through repetition (“flat roadway in the flat land”) and then lets it fall away (“for a little ways”) in order to build to a punch line: “And the lightning kissed him bone to bone and he wasn’t there for a while.” You don’t know exactly what that line means, what it is to be kissed bone to bone by lightning. Does lightning have bones? Or does the kiss bind all Jack’s own bones with lightning? It’s the right kind of perplexing, a hinting at mystery — and whatever happened to Jack on that flatland road, surely it was mysterious. Bobet (or Matthew, whichever you prefer) brings the phrase back at least twice more in the course of the book, both times at very well-chosen points, recalling that mystery, that strange union of man and lightning. The diction and imagery isn’t just a stylistic affectation. It’s a deep structural quality, and one Bobet handles well.

It does seem to me that not everything in the book’s handled quite that capably. Notably, the plot’s a little weak. Specifically, the structure feels imbalanced. Once the characters find themselves Above, Matthew’s focus becomes divided between, on the one hand, being with Ariel, and on the other, working with the other survivors of Safe to find out what happened and what force they’re really up against. That’s not necessarily a problem, but I felt that Matthew’s love for Ariel came through much more clearly than his interest in returning to Safe. As a result, there was an emotional intensity in the scenes having to do with Ariel that was lacking in the other scenes — which tended to be more important to the narrative, as it’s in those scenes that we learn about secrets that go back to the founding of Safe. While they’re still interesting, Matthew seems more a dispassionate observer in these sections of the book, whereas you convincingly feel his drive as he searches for or interacts with Ariel.

This was odd to me; however important Ariel was to him, surely the destruction of the only home Matthew ever knew would be at least as important. But there’s an emotional charge that’s missing. Granted, he’s interacting at these points with familiar adult authority figures, which isn’t so much the case in his scenes with Ariel. Still, he seems to be merely on the edge of events in these more plot-centred portions of the story, accompanying other characters only because the narrative demands it. These passages feel aimless, even when things are happening and important secrets revealed; and they feel disconnected from the passages with Ariel, as though Matthew’s living two stories at the same time, but only really inhabiting one.

Overall, Matthew’s a fairly passive character. There is a point where he seems to shed that passivity, first extorting information by the threat of violence and then getting into a physical confrontation; I suppose you could see these scenes as points where Matthew turns a corner as a character, driven by his love for Ariel to grow up and be more self-assertive. But I found myself wondering how likely these scenes actually were. Matthew’s described as physically slight; how does he intimidate someone so simply? And then when violence does come … it seems very easy for him, psychologically and physically. (I wondered, in fact, if there was some aspect of his Curse that helped him in the fight, but I didn’t see any hint of that in the text; I wondered also if he was hiding the whole truth about these things, but found no hint of that either.)

It’s interesting that Matthew’s apparently asexual as well. He’s seventeen, but never clearly expresses a physical want for Ariel. It’s possible we’re meant to assume that he’s trying to get that desire across subtextually; if so, I can only say it wasn’t at all apparent to me. I found it simpler to read him as a heteroromantic asexual — romantically but not sexually attracted to the opposite gender (in fairness, that’s how I self-identify, so I may be biased). The point is that Ariel’s sexual desires aren’t explored much either; and the way the community around Matthew treats sex doesn’t come into the story that I can see. For a book largely driven by the passion of two teenagers, it adds up to a strange lack, especially when the story’s otherwise fairly perceptive about gender politics.

I think there’s probably a good argument to be made that Matthew’s character is the real weak point of the book; that the sense of imbalance in the plot comes from something not fully realised in the main character. In a sense, this is surprising, if not paradoxical. His voice, his perspective, is so strongly captured that you expect his character to be fully-worked. Maybe it is; maybe I’m not giving the book enough credit. But as I read I felt as though I was hearing a point of view, not a person. As though there were choices that were not being made, not being faced.

Could it be that Matthew was deliberately ducking away from his responsibilities to the remains of Safe? Or that he as a narrator was deliberately choosing to present things in this way, leading up to a conclusion that he could depict as one he was forced into rather than one he chose for himself? I suppose. The book seems complex enough that I can’t discount these possibilities out of hand. All I can say is that I couldn’t find compelling evidence in the text to support these ideas. Matthew, to cut it short, never came alive as anything more than a voice; and, as a result, the plot never quite cohered, never quite felt like a unity.

This may help explain a touch of predictability to the end of the book. Characters signposted as good, or worth trusting, come together when they have no real reason to. A return to Safe happens, it seems, less because the characters have learned something new driving them to take action than because it’s time for them to do this thing for the story to continue as it must. Matthew goes through a trial which you might expect, and makes a decision that seems, in his telling, to be a formality — though this abrogation of responsibility seems to me to be a function of how things are told by the storyteller, and possibly a hint that his maturation is still not complete, that there are things about himself that he still can’t look at closely.

On the other hand, the conclusion does resolve the themes of the book quite well, including an integration of Safe and Above that felt like a genuine resolution to the questions the story was posing. That’s important, I think, because it points up the fact that the themes develop over the course of the story; their exploration is in fact a vital part of the structure of the book. For all the beauty and flash of the language, it’s that thematic intelligence, that structural savvy, that really makes the book work.

You can see it in the shapes of the chapters. The story’s structured so that each chapter ends with the Tale of one of the characters, their background as told by Matthew. That’s a difficult structure to make work; handled even slightly wrongly, it could mean an interruption of the narrative at crucial points. Instead, it works beautifully, as the tales reflect on what came before, and show Matthew’s growing awareness of the inherent uncertainty of the world. If I’ve seemed to often reflect on the reliability of Matthew as a narrator, it’s in part because the stories he tells become more uncertain, more provisional, as the book goes along — we’re shown how untrustworthy stories are, how they have to be re-examined and revised when needed if we want to treat them as history. We’re taught to trust the tale, not the teller.

Overall, as I say, the book’s a success due to its structural and thematic intelligence, and due to Bobet’s facility with language. The style’s not only attractive in itself but also returns in an unforced and wholly natural way to the basic themes of the novel, moving them forward, developing them and interlacing them. Above is a strong and subtle book, and a promising start to a new writer’s career.

Upon further reflection, I don’t think it is correct to conclude that a work of fantasy will necessarily be improved by additional historical authenticity. Would The Chronicles of Narnia be improved by religious schism or removing the historically ludicrous notion of four siblings ruling simultaneously? No, I can’t honestly say it would. Would Abraham’s own The Long Price Quartet be improved by making the imperial Asian culture utilize a historically authentic kanji/hànzì system of writing that would likely be all but unintelligible to the various warlike Caucasian societies surrounding it? No, I don’t think so.

On the other hand, I still think Abraham goes too far in dismissing the importance of historical authenticity with regards to works that are billed on the basis of, as he says, their ability to “show medieval life the way that (we’re pretending for the sake of argument) it really was.” It is highly probable that George R.R. Martin wouldn’t have gone so far off the rails with his most recent two books in A Song of Ice and Fire had he stuck a little more closely to the historical Wars of the Roses and the violent struggle between York (Stark) and Lancaster (Lannister).

Historical authenticity does not require that every fantasy novel concern itself with the life and times of Peasant John and his epic battle to save his diarrhea-stricken pig, after all, only that the author make a reasonable attempt to either a) get things reasonably correct, or b) provide the reader with some modicum of a rationale for departing from the realm of historical fact and plausibility.

And plausibility is really what we’re talking about here. So it would probably have been more accurate, and more defensible, to argue on behalf of historical verisimilitude than historical authenticity, since we are talking about fantasy and not historical fiction. (I should hope that we can all agree upon the importance of historical authenticity in the case of historical fiction, but maybe I am too optimistic here.)

The first three novels of The Long Price Quartet

But not in this post; the subject is surely large enough to merit a post of its own in the future. Instead, I intend to respond to a few of the comments made by various people on the previous post. But first, I have to thank Elizabeth Cady, without whom I doubt I would have read Abraham’s very good quartet. Although I fail to see how Abraham’s four books are advancing fantasy in any way or providing any real creativity about characters, I quite enjoyed them and was impressed with Abraham’s writing as well as various aspects of his world-building.

Now, I have to confess that I was a little bit puzzled by Cady’s notion of “advancing the genre”. Towards what is the genre advancing and why is that desirable, much less necessary?

It seems to me this moves the conversation from a literary one toward an intrinsically ideological one wherein one might as legitimately deplore The Long Price Quartet for its miscegenation and failure to advocate the important goal of the elimination of the evil Esquimaux people who secretly rule the world from their igloos as criticize John Norman’s Gor series for its sex slavery and failure to advocate mandatory maternity leave. As it is created by intrinsically political creatures, all art may contain various political biases and perspectives, but that does not make politics an appropriate lens through which its artistic value is discerned. If that is the route the genre is going to go, Tor may as well simply place donkey or elephant stickers on its books and thus ensure that no one will accidentally read anything that offends their delicate political sensibilities.

I thought Soyka put it very well when he wrote:

What ultimately matters is whether it’s own internal logic is successful in suspending disbelief to advance a story and/or perhaps shed some light on the human condition. Even if the storyline is not necessarily sympathetic to our personal political/philosophical convictions. As long as it is interesting. All this stuff is less about literature than advancing a political/philosophical agenda which may or may not have anything to do with works of fantasy.

I also had to agree that Hooded Swan had a point when he wrote:

The historically “accurate” world view of a character can be a barrier to reader sympathy for the character. That doesn’t require a quasi-medieval setting should be populated with 21st century American personalities. It does require the writer to pick & choose between historical authenticity & deliberate anachronisms to create a world that’s both internally consistent & populated with characters that readers understand.

Now, I would argue that reader sympathy for a character is not necessarily desirable, and, in many cases, excessive authorial sympathy for a character significantly detracts from a work of fiction. But, he’s right, choices must be made and they’re not always going to be optimal.

I have too much respect for Black Gate’s best blogger, Matthew David Surridge, to fail to respond to each of his points in full. But given our mutual proclivity for extensive commentary and the very high probability that the discussion will be more detailed than most readers would find interesting, I will do so on my blog in the near future unless John and Matthew indicate that they’d prefer to keep it here. But I will note that it is impossible to disagree with his point that there are certain ways in which the modern Western world is different from the medieval world in terms of its ideals and philosophies. This is, in fact, central to certain of my criticisms of modern fantasy.

I am not, however, quite sure I understand CSE Cooney’s idea

that possibility, that exercise of the imagination, that thing that makes fantasy fun, doesn’t so much address the past as it yearns to the future. And everyone has a different vision of what they want the future to be.

It’s certainly true that everyone has a different vision of the future, but fantasy clearly seems to be much more oriented towards the past, otherwise we would not be discussing historical authenticity at all. It seems to me that the description better suits science fiction than fantasy.

And finally, I believe Barbara Barrett summed up the fundamental divide rather well when she observed:

It isn’t just a case of what authors can do – as stated, they pretty much have carte blanche but there’s more than one person involved. There’s also the reader. I may have misread the posts above but it seems to me that some are discussing the problem from the point of view of the author and others from that of the reader. The willingness of the reader to suspend belief is vital to every author. Anything is possible but is it probable — is there an explanation for it that the reader accepts.

I don’t know who would claim that the author can’t write whatever he wants or that the critic can’t criticize the author’s work on whatever basis he prefers. But I would claim that there is clearly room for legitimate literary criticism of authors who violate not only the willingness, but the ability, of the intelligent and educated reader to suspend his disbelief and immerse himself in the world that the author has created.

I apologize if I missed any substantive points that anyone felt merited addressing; please feel free to bring them to my attention and I shall attempt to rectify the situation.