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Month: September 2010

Birthdays and Funerals

Birthdays and Funerals

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sh_headStrange Horizons not only pioneered the notion of an on-line “magazine” devoted to speculative fiction, but is still around today to talk about it.  In fact, Strange Horizons is celebrating its tenth anniversary, which also happens to coincide to its annual fund drive. The magazine is somewhat unique in that it operates on a “PBS-like” donation model (without the nature and cooking shows coupled with pop concerts from performers whose better days date back to the 1970s that  your financial support of  somehow makes you a last bastion of “high culture”).  It seems to have worked.  Take a look at its very first issue.

On a more somber note, this just in on the continuing decline of the physical bookstore, albeit the big box model that a few years ago everyone was lamenting was killing off neighborhood independent bookstores.

Whatever the fate of the physical book, the future looks like it might be in the hands of the little guy who can figure out a niche to, if not thrive in, at least be comfortable in. Not such a bad thing,

Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages

Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages

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games-of-cagesThe most interesting title waiting for me when I returned from our adventures at Dragon*Con was Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages, the latest in his Twenty Palaces series and the sequel to his first novel, Child of Fire.

We’ve been big fans of Harry since his first story appeared in Black Gate 2, and his “Soldiers of a Dying God” (BG 10) is one of the finest short pieces we’ve ever published. It’s been great to finally see him get some well-deserved recognition.  Child of Fire received some excellent notices, and Jim Butcher said it contained “Excellent reading… delicious tension and suspense.” Here’s the cover copy to Game of Cages:

As a wealthy few gather to bid on a predator capable of destroying all life on earth, the sorcerers of the Twenty Palace Society mobilize to stop them. Caught up in the scramble is Ray Lilly, the lowest of the low in the society — an ex-­car thief and the expendable assistant of a powerful sorcerer. Ray possesses exactly one spell to his name, along with a strong left hook. But when he arrives in the small town in the North Cascades where the bidding is to take place, the predator has escaped and the society’s most powerful enemies are desperate to recapture it.

We tracked down Harry at the exclusive club where he now writes, between eating oysters and sipping Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Before we were thrown out by the bankers at the next table, Harry did say a few words about his new novel, which Howard Jones managed to transcribe in the hidden notebook he always carries in his pocket:

Ray Lilly is an ex-con, an ex-car-thief, and current minion in the Twenty Palace Society, a secret organization that protects our world from deadly, magical “predators.” Ray may only be a driver — and a decoy — but he’s the only operative close enough to deal with an emergency situation: An auction has gone terribly wrong releasing a predator into a small town, and the bidders — murderous, wealthy bastards all — tear the town apart looking for it. Ray just has to hold out until his sorcerer bosses arrive, but it may already be too late.

Howard had a few choice words of his own about “wealthy bastards” as we dusted ourselves off, but at least we got an exclusive quote.  After his third novel, we’ll probably have to bribe his bodyguards just to get close to Harry. Don’t be one of the last ones to catch on. Check out Game of Cages today — the first three chapters are available online, and the book can be found at better bookstores near you.

Blogging Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Part Two – “Monsters of Mongo”

Blogging Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Part Two – “Monsters of Mongo”

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200px-blbmonstersofmongo“Monsters of Mongo” was the second installment of Alex Raymond’s FLASH GORDON Sunday comic strip serial for King Features Syndicate. Originally printed between April 15 and November 18, 1934, “Monsters of Mongo” picked up the storyline where the first installment, “Flash Gordon on the Planet Mongo” left off with an unconscious Flash being rescued from Princess Aura by the Lion Men.

Alex Raymond really begins to hit his stride in portraying the diversity of life on Mongo in this second installment. Prince Thun and Dale Arden are prisoners of Ming’s soldiers. Thun’s father, King Jugrid has retaliated by destroying the kingdom of the Shark Men. Ming’s soldiers have, in turn, annihilated much of the Lion Men’s fleet.

monsters-of-mongoJugrid orders Aura’s execution. Flash fights to save her life and the two are rescued by Prince Barin. It is in Barin’s kingdom that Flash is at last reunited with Dr. Zarkov. Flash and Zarkov soon form an alliance with Barin and Aura as the unlikely quartet determine to overthrow Emperor Ming.

Of course, Aura being Ming’s daughter quickly betrays our heroes. The sequence culminates in one of the strip’s iconic images as Barin and Flash power the Electric Mole to burrow their way underground and crash through the floor of Ming’s palace just before he can wed Dale.

The influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ AT THE EARTH’S CORE is heavily felt in the Electric Mole sequence, but it is Burroughs’ JOHN CARTER stories that have the greater influence in Raymond’s sophisticated approach in revealing Mongo’s green god, Tao as a hoax.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Season One Recap

Supernatural Spotlight – Season One Recap

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supernatural-season1If you haven’t been watching Supernatural, then I can completely sympathize. I actually didn’t start watching the show until halfway through season two, mainly because I didn’t care to watch a series that was nothing more than a mindless monster hunting show.

What I didn’t realize was that this was actually one of the deepest monster hunting shows ever on television. (Yes, that includes Buffy and Angel.)

I imagine that the people involved with the show didn’t necessarily always know how deep the show was going to become. The series was probably fairly easy to pitch:

Two brothers, who are demon hunters, travel on a roadtrip, dropping into a different horror movie plot each week.

I wouldn’t think that it would be hard to sell that premise, do you?

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Finding Deliverance in a dearth of heroic fantasy

Finding Deliverance in a dearth of heroic fantasy

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dickey-deliveranceI lay with the flashlight still in one hand, and tried to shape the day. The river ran through it, but before we got back into the current other things were possible. What I thought about mainly was that I was in a place where none—or almost none—of my daily ways of living my life would work; there was not habit I could call on. Is this freedom? I wondered.

–James Dickey, Deliverance

So you’ve read yourself out of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, closed the cover on the latest Bernard Cornwell and Joe Abercrombie, and you’re looking for something new in heroic fiction. But you can’t seem to find what you’re looking for. Rather than slumming around in the dregs of the genre or reaching for The Sword of Shannara (with apologies to fans of Terry Brooks), my suggestion is to take a look at modern realistic adventure fiction and non-fiction.

I read heroic fiction for the action, the adventure, the storytelling, and the sense of palpable danger that real life (typically) doesn’t provide. Likewise, I find that works like The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf by Jack London, Alive by Piers Paul Read, and Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer satisfy the same primal needs as the stories of an Edgar Rice Burroughs or David Gemmell. The best modern adventure fiction/non-fiction stories are bedfellows with heroic fiction: While they may not contain magic or monstrous beasts, they allow us to experience savagery and survival in the wild and walk the line of life and death.

My favorite work in this genre is Deliverance by James Dickey, and it’s to this book that I’d like to devote the remainder of this post.

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Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sept/Oct issue

Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sept/Oct issue

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fsf-sept-oct10I love these big double issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction (and when did it drop “The Magazine of…” from its name on the cover?  A quick look through the back issues I have handy shows it was at least a decade ago, maybe longer. Wow. Thank God my job does not rely on razor-honed powers of observation.)

Why do I love them? For one thing, these big double issues are BIG.  This All-Star Anniversary Issue is 258 pages; including “Orfy,” a big new novella from Richard Chwedyk in his “saur” series about sentient dinosaur toys; four big novelets from Dale Bailey, Fred Chappell, and others; and a big selection of short stories from Michael Swanwick, Terry Bisson, Richard Matheson, and others — including the hilarious “F&SF Mailbag” by David Gerrold, crafted as a series of letters from Gerrold to editor Gordon van Gelder, which opens:

Dear Gordon,

Re: Your recent announcement that you will be outsourcing the jobs of domestic science fiction writers to cheaper-working authors in parallel dimensions.

I take pen in hand to object most strenuously.

Figures Gordon would scoop us — I only wish I’d thought of it first.  Speaking of Gordon, when we asked about the issue he told us:

I edited the Sept/Oct issue from the veranda of my palatial estate on Barsoom, where I was watching filming of a new movie. Tried to get Terry Bisson to come visit but he was busy with a political rally. Rich Chwedyk friended me on Facebook and I was surprised to learn that his “saur” stories are nonfiction, location of the real house is undisclosed. The letters cited in the intro to David Gerrold’s story are all real.

The only part I don’t believe is the bit about the letters.  You can buy copies at better bookstores for $7, or order a subscription to [The Magazine of] Fantasy & Science Fiction and experience some of the best our field has to offer here.

Thirteen Questions for Wyatt Weed – Writer and Director of Shadowland

Thirteen Questions for Wyatt Weed – Writer and Director of Shadowland

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poster3A few weeks back at the Chicago Comic Con, I had the pleasure of meeting the cast of Shadowland, a new indie horror movie written and directed by Wyatt Weed.

Forget the stars were beyond hot and that lead actress Caitlin McIntosh was a beauty queen. Forget my photographer Mr. Disney nearly put a perma-fog on his zoom lens trying to shoot through a crowd that was about six people deep; because in spite of the fact that all normal indicators point toward me having a thorough dislike for this whole crew, I couldn’t help it. I love indie film makers and the passion they have for making something different and “outside the system.”

And since being anti-establishment is part of the whole angst-y persona I’m trying hard to cultivate, I couldn’t wait to interview this lot and find out what drives such an all-consuming level of creativity.

So, since Wyatt soon realized I’d just keep stalking him until he relented (see past Goth Chick entries for proof), here it is.

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A Review of Robert Low’s The White Raven

A Review of Robert Low’s The White Raven

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whiteravenThe White Raven
Robert Low
Harper Collins UK (357 pp, $24.95, 2009)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

Robert Low’s Oathsworn books are hands down my favorite historical series of recent years. Starting with 2007’s The Whale Road and continuing with last year’s The Wolf Sea and Low’s newest release, The White Raven, these books offer a Viking adventure worthy of the sagas — and satisfying to both lovers of gritty action-adventure and those who insist on well-drawn historical narrative.

The White Raven begins some five years after the close of The Wolf Sea, a book that saw the Oathsworn, a darkly fated and Odin-oathed band of hard-bitten Norsemen, pursuing a mad monk, an ancient runesword, and rumors of enslaved brethren from the mazy streets of Constantinople to the sun-blasted heights of Masada. Returned from Serkland, as the Norse term the domain of Islam, the Oathsworn have settled in lands granted them by Jarl Brand, a powerful leader who served as mercenary in the Byzantine army. Orm Rurrikson, so-called Bear-Slayer and jarl of the Oathsworn, is still only twenty-one years old at the start of the book. A leader renowned for his deep-thinking and fair rule, Orm nevertheless finds the mostly peaceful existence the Oathsworn have settled into a troubling one. Troubling especially because rumors of a mountain of silver, the tomb treasure of Attila the Hun, cling to the Oathsworn like a curse — and there is not a band of rovers or petty king in all the North that has not cast a covetous eye upon Orm and his intrepid band.

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Art Evolution 1: Jeff Laubenstein

Art Evolution 1: Jeff Laubenstein

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a2-slavers2I’m a gamer, a lifer, someone who at the age of thirty-nine doesn’t get to roll dice like it did at nineteen, but I still take a week’s vacation every year to hang out with High School friends and revisit campaigns where characters have been on paper long enough to legally drink in the U.S.

My love for fantasy role-playing goes back to middle school. There, I was introduced to Dungeon’s & Dragons, but it wasn’t just the concept that inspired my love affair, it was the art. The first piece of fantasy role-playing art I ever saw was the module A2: Secrets of the Slavers Stockade.

I stared at it for a full hour in History class; flipped through the pages trying to figure out why the cover wasn’t stapled on, and went home convinced this was something I had to get involved in.

Enter the Sears Christmas catalogue and TSR’s D&D Basic Edition red boxed set. Once I saw Larry Elmore’s red dragon and seemingly endless treasure trove, I convinced my mother to order it and began a journey lasting nearly thirty years.

I still buy gaming supplements for art alone, collecting entire genres and systems knowing full well I will never have the time to play them. If you put a great cover on it there’s a good chance I’ll buy, and I devour new talent almost as fast as I’ll snap up a collector’s piece from the seventies or eighties on eBay.

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E.C. Tubb, October 19, 1919 – September 10, 2010

E.C. Tubb, October 19, 1919 – September 10, 2010

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zenya2British science fiction author Edwin Charles (“E.C.”) Tubb died on September 10, 2010, at his home in London, England. He was 90 years old.

Tubb published his first novel, Saturn Patrol, in 1951.  Thus began an extraordinary career spanning nearly half a century, and including over 130 novels and more than 230 short stories in magazines such as Astounding/Analog, Galaxy, Nebula, Science Fantasy, and many others. His short story “Little Girl Lost” (1955) was adapted for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery TV series in 1972.

While Tubb received acclaim for much of his early work, including his novel of Martian colonization Alien Dust (1955), and his generation-Starship novel The Space-Born (1956), he is remembered today chiefly for his Dumarest of Terra saga, which began with The Winds of Gath in 1967 .

DAW publisher Don Wollheim commissioned the series, featuring star-hopping adventurer Earl Dumarest and his relentless search for the legendary lost planet of his birth: Earth. The worldwide success of Dumarest of Terra led Tubb to switch almost exclusively to novel writing. Following Wollheim’s death in 1990, Dumarest came to a premature end after 31 novels with The Temple of Truth (1985).

The next novel, The Return, existed for years only in French translation, until it finally appeared in English in 1997 from Gryphon Books.  The ending of The Return was inconclusive however, and it was not until 2009 that Tubb,  at the urging of his agent (and at the age of 90!), wrote the volume that brought Dumarest of Terra to a true conclusion: Child of Earth  (Homeworld Press, 2009).

Later collections of Tubb’s short fiction include The Best Science Fiction of E.C. Tubb (Wildside, 2005) and Mirror of the Night (Sarob Press, 2003).  In recent years, and despite failing health, Tubb continued to write and publish, including the first two novels in his sword & sorcery Chronicle of Malkar series, Death God’s Doom (1999) and The Sleeping City (1999), both from Prime; the Space:1999 novel Earthbound (2003), and three novels in the Linford Mystery Library. His dystopian novel To Dream Again was accepted on the day he died, and is scheduled for publication by Ulverscroft in 2011. At least one other new novel, Fires of Satan, is rumored to be under consideration

I admit I’ve never read any E.C. Tubb — his heyday, the early 1970s, was a bit before my time.  But he was a fixture on science fiction bookshelves in virtually every bookstore I walked into for over twenty years, as ubiquitous as Asimov, Heinlein, and Frank Herbert. His passing feels like the end of an era.