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Month: December 2008

Life in a kingdom

Life in a kingdom

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I currently live in a kingdom–not a modern constitutional monarchy like Great Britain, but a genuine old-fashioned kingdom. It is not very much like those portrayed in a great deal of fantasy fiction. Of course, I don’t live at court, whether as a palace servant or a knight-in-training or an apprentice to a royal wizard. I live nowhere near the palace, though I have once or twice gotten lost and turned onto roads that have taken me nearby. There is no road sign stating that the large and ornate building is the palace and I only know because someone told me. Someone also told me that the little neighborhood of low-rise houses near the palace, which look newer and cleaner than the housing for most Dubai non-professional workers, is where the palace servants live.

Crown Prince Hamdan

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The Prisoner

The Prisoner

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I just became aware that there is a 40th anniversary edition of the cult classic television series The Prisoner. I don’t know what this edition offers that wasn’t available in the previous DVD release a few years ago, though I am certain there will eventually be 45th and 50th edition versions to continually repackage the same content. I’m actually old enough to remember when the series first appeared on American television in the summer of 1968. If you aren’t, you might not appreciate what it was like to not only have original programming in a realm of reruns, but programming that was actually truly original. While the program definitely reflects the counter culturalism of the period, in both garb and attitude, this doesn’t distract from it (as it does with say, the original Star Trek). Like The Twilight Zone, The Prisoner deals with themes that are as relevant to the Internet culture today, maybe more so, even while some of its visual references may be at times painfully archaic.

For more of my own observations on this one-of-a-kind (so much so that efforts to “re-imagine” the program as either a movie or a television series have failed; one reason why a remake like Battlestar Gallactica is so good is because the original was so bad, which is not an advantage you’d have here) you can visit here and here and here and here.

‘On Thud and Blunder’ — Thirty Years Later

‘On Thud and Blunder’ — Thirty Years Later

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. . . writers who’ve had no personal experience with horses tend to think of them as a kind of sports car.

Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson

It’s been thirty years since Poul Anderson wrote his essay on the need for realism in heroic fantasy, ‘On Thud and Blunder,’ which you can read in its entirety at the SFWA site, and I think it holds up well even though the genre — and the perception of it — has changed greatly. ‘On Thud and Blunder’ originally appeared in the third installment of Andrew Offutt’s classic anthology series Swords Against Darkness; though it was in the excellent, if unimaginatively named, collection of Anderson’s called Fantasy that I first encountered it. But already at the time of my reading a whole generation of writers had made a name for themselves by following the dictates of realism and common sense in designing their fantasy worlds.

The essay begins with a satire of the genre that features a barbarian cleaving through armor with a fifty-pound sword and riding a horse as if it were a motorbike, among other ridiculous things. It’s the kind of thing that gave heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery a bad name, and perhaps the sort of thing that meant it would soon be eclipsed by a rising tide of ‘high fantasy’ in the eighties and nineties. But, in 1978, hf — as Anderson terms heroic fantasy in an abbreviation that seems to have never caught on — was an emerging star:

Today’s rising popularity of heroic fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery as it is also called, is certainly a Good Thing for those of us who enjoy it. Probably this is part of a larger movement back toward old-fashioned storytelling, with colorful backgrounds, events, and characters, tales wherein people do take arms against a sea of troubles and usually win. Such literature is not inherently superior to the introspective or symbolic kinds, but neither is it inherently inferior; Homer and James Joyce were both great artists.

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Forgive Me, Steven, For I Have Sinned . . .

Forgive Me, Steven, For I Have Sinned . . .

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“Man, you have got to read this book!”  The words came in a breathless rush, from a friend whose opinion I trusted.  “It’s better than Gates of Fire!” he said, thrusting a rather thick volume into my hands.

Now, most everyone who knows me understands that I have two literary idols, one dead and one living: Robert E. Howard and Steven Pressfield.  They are the prophets of my personal pantheon; their words, their stories, have no equal.  Thus, for him to come up to me and say he’d found a book better than Pressfield’s Gates of Fire was pure heresy, like taking a tinkle on the Bible.  “Impossible!” I replied, holding the book away from my body as though its touch was enough to cause spiritual pollution.

“Read it! You’ll see!”

Color me skeptical . . . and more than a little eager to prove my friend wrong. I accepted his challenge and dug into it that very afternoon, expecting I’d call him up in an hour or so and curse him for taking Pressfield’s name in vain. But I couldn’t. That book had sucked me in.

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Sword Against Slug: Robert E. Howard’s Almuric

Sword Against Slug: Robert E. Howard’s Almuric

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In the old days, when sheep were sheep and ewes were embraceable, genres tended to ossify pretty fast. But no genre-formula became so formulaic so fast as sword-and-planet. Burroughs set the pattern with A Princess of Mars: a lone American (not a Canadian–not a Ugandan–not a Lithuanian–an American) is mysteriously plunged into an exotic other world which is both more advanced and more primitive than the earth he knows. He conquers all by virtue of his heroism and marries the space princess. In the inevitable sequel the pitiless author will somehow compel him do it all again, sometimes under another name. This sounds like mere mockery, and of all subgenres sword-and-planet may be the most mockable (one has but to mention the magic syllable “Gor” to banish all useful thought), but when well-done it can be a blast. Burroughs’ Barsoom books are still being read, are still being filmed and name-checked in other media, and not because of his melodious prose style or his thoughts on the eternal verities; somehow the pattern he hit on (and partly appropriated) rang people’s bell, and continues to ring it. Figuring out why wouldn’t be a waste of anyone’s time, even if the books are not a matter of high seriousness.

In this genre or subgenre, Almuric is of special interest, because it is by one of the greatest fantasists of the pulp era, Robert E. Howard. It’s also interesting as one of REH’s few booklength works and, it seems, his only experiment at building an entire secondary world. Although the story (like much of REH’s work) is now in the public domain and available online, I read the novel in Planet Stories’ new edition and I recommend that anyone really interested in the book do the same. I say this not because the publisher has paid me an enormous illicit bribe (although I will accept one if offered). The online texts are mostly poor transcriptions littered with many obvious proofreading slips (e.g. “forward” and “foreward” for “foreword”; “premediatated” for “premeditated”, etc.–and that’s on the first two screens of this one). In contrast, Planet’s text is clean and readable; there’s an interesting introduction by Joe Lansdale and a great cover in the Jeff Jones tradition by Andrew Hou.

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The Spider Revival, Part 1: Robot Titans of Gotham

The Spider Revival, Part 1: Robot Titans of Gotham

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spider-robot-titans-of-gothamIf you have never met the most notorious of all pulp magazine heroes — The Spider, Master of Men! — then Baen Books has a deal for you. After a long absence from mass market paperbacks, the Spider returns in two Baen collections The Spider: Robot Titans of Gotham and The Spider: City of Doom. The two volumes pack together five of Norvell Page’s best Spider novels, plus a bonus yarn from his madcap typewriter.

(Update: Now there’s a third volume, The Spider vs. The Empire State.)

If you’ve previously met the Spider, you might have read some of these adventures from reprints in the Carroll & Graf series. Buy these new books anyway; I want Baen to feed us more.

As for you newcomers, I feel obliged to give you fair warning about the Spider. Otherwise you might wonder after reading one of these stories, “Was Norvell Page completely insane?” No, he was a professional pulp writer. Which may come down to the same thing, when you consider the deadlines. But even for the crazy world of the cheap paper story magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, the zenith years of this lost world of fiction, Page’s tales of the Spider are so overloaded with outrageous violence and fear, and so under-stocked with logic and elementary structuring, that it seems the author wrote them after shooting more heroin than Popeye Doyle confiscated in The French Connection.

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Just complicated enough

Just complicated enough

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I am trying to write a synopsis and outline of a novel I have been picking up and putting down any number of times over the last however many years, a space-opera-ish sf piece called Invisible House. Putting to paper the important essentials when my head is utterly tangled in the details of individual scenes is really hard work. When I take too much out, it starts to seem very pedestrian and boring; when I put too much in, I’m not distilling the story adequately for this particular form.

“On being just complicated enough” is the title of a famous article by Tony Wallace, a grand old man of my graduate department. It is about the complexity of cultural taxonomies, not writing, but too much of my graduate-school education involved the wrong things sticking in memory, and in this case the title adhered while the content has sublimated away.

“Being just complicated enough” is emblematic for me as the goal of a writer. In my own case the problem is a persistent tendency to make things too complicated. At Clarion, Damon Knight (in his last year of teaching there) told me, “You have a fertile mind,” and he did not mean it particularly as a compliment. William Blake has some line about every bird being an entire world if you look at it properly, and that, alas, is what too often starts to happen when I write.

Regarding the synopsis, I picked it up again a few weeks ago after a long dormant period and was surprised to discover I’d worked out a whole bunch of details about the last quarter of the book that had been extremely nebulous in my mind. But when I started working on it those paragraphs started to expand… turned into chapter outlines…chapter treatments… Not a bad thing! But I still need the synopsis to market the book. Must turn the world back into a bird…