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Year: 2010

A Review of The Ladies of Mandrigyn, by Barbara Hambly

A Review of The Ladies of Mandrigyn, by Barbara Hambly

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ladiesThe Ladies of Mandrigyn, by Barbara Hambly
Del Rey (311 pages, $2.95, March 1984)

The first note I made on The Ladies of Mandrigyn was, “too many adjectives!” I also took an immediate dislike to the main character, a mercenary captain who routinely buys and keeps teenage concubines.

The second problem resolved itself nicely during the course of the story, but the adjectives never did let up. If you like spare prose, this is probably not a book for you.

Before I talk about the story, I should mention that I’ve only read this book once. For all my previous reviews, I chose books that I’d read before. If these reviews have a theme, after all, it’s “good books you probably don’t know about,” so I started with some stories I remembered fondly. With this one, I checked to make sure it was the first of a series (the other two are The Witches of Wenshar and The Dark Hand of Magic) and bought it.

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Jane Frank’s SF&F Artists of the 20th Century

Jane Frank’s SF&F Artists of the 20th Century

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frank2Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary, by Jane Frank
McFarland Publishing Co (534 pages, $148.00, February 2009)

My initial interest in amassing my collection of SF & Fantasy magazines began with the appeal of the cover art.

I jumped on Robert Weinberg’s Biographical Dictionary of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists when it was published in 1988. This work has been virtually alone since then as a definitive coverage of the lives and work of most all of those whose art graced the genre pulps and digests. As with Mike Ashley’s work on the history and accounting of the magazines themselves, Weinberg’s book took front and center on my shelf of core reference books which explain so well to me what I have in my collection.

Reference books of this sort are few, and a work of passion, and as such become updated only with supreme will and dedication, as in the current case of Mike A’s updating of his original 4-volume history of the science fiction magazine. I really hadn’t expected a similar effort to come out of the Art segment of the field. Fortuitously it has now appeared.

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Exploring Fantasy in Metal, Part III: Dangerous Side Effects

Exploring Fantasy in Metal, Part III: Dangerous Side Effects

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Or, How Metal Messed With Mike Allen’s Already Dark and Twisty Mind

Blue Oyster Cult's Cultösaurus Erectus, with lyrics by Michael Moorcock
Blue Oyster Cult's Cultösaurus Erectus, with lyrics by Michael Moorcock

For the last seven months, I have been (with great reluctance and an even greater determination to finish the thing or be consigned to a heretofore undiscovered circle of Dante’s Inferno) exploring some of the fantastical aspects of Heavy Metal.

Part One and Part Two of that adventure can be found here on the Black Gate blog.

I had lots of help. Because I knew next to nothing of this musical genre, I turned to those who did.

I had noticed, you see, some time ago, that some of my smartest guy-friends, all who liked reading the same books I do (and who led me by my snooty nose to such works as Beowulf and George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, which I’d avoided due to their being “boy books”), were all, well, Metalheads.

It got me curious. So I started asking questions. Among those men I interrogated was Mike Allen.

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The Pre-Raphaelite Barbarian

The Pre-Raphaelite Barbarian

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The first thing you notice about Barry Windsor-Smith’s Conan comics is their beauty.

Starting in 1970, Smith drew almost two dozen of the first issues of Marvel Comics’ translation of Conan into a monthly color comic book, and added a few more stories in the oversized black-and-white companion magazine Savage Tales. Scripts for those stories, often direct adaptations of Robert E. Howard tales, were by Marvel veteran Roy Thomas, but Smith has stated that he had a prominent role in the plotting of the comics, sometimes even providing dialogue.

barry-conanSmith’s work has an elegance and power to it unusual in comics, then or now. His line-work is detailed, expressive, and precise: the right marks in the right places. Compositionally, his work is always clear, always energetic.

And it’s alive, because his characters are alive; they move through three-dimensional space, they have realistic body language — more than that, their forms express what they feel and think.

Perhaps above all, Windsor-Smith’s design — of clothes, swords, balustrades, towers, armour, even ships and stone walls — is constantly inventive, deriving from the organic forms of art nouveau and the near-hallucinatory realism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

This has the crucial effect of building a world for Conan and his adventures, a setting with texture and, implictly, a history. We see the shining kingdoms and the jeweled thrones about to be trodden under sandalled feet, and we believe in them.

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Borderlands Press announces 8th Annual Writers Boot Camp

Borderlands Press announces 8th Annual Writers Boot Camp

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Borderlands Press, who’ve been publishing specialty books for collectors since 1989, announced their 8th Annual Writers Boot Camp, January 28th – 30th , 2011 in Towson, Maryland.

They call it “Boot Camp” for a reason. You won’t wandering through lonely forests, wondering what it means to be a writer for countless hours. This from the website:

You will be expected to log in many hours of intensive analysis and criticism from your peers and the four guest instructors who will be guiding you through all the major elements of writing fiction. You will be required to read (in advance) the submissions of your fellow workshop participants. (ALL OF THEM)

The weekend-long boot camp consists of lectures, round table critiques, readings of your work, Q&A panel discussion, and analysis of your work by the instructors. Instructors this year include Gary Braunbeck, Mort Castle, Ginjer Buchanan, Richard Chizmar, Douglas Clegg, Jack Ketchum, Elizabeth Massie, David Morrell, Thomas F. Monteleone, F. Paul Wilson, and Douglas E. Winter.

There will be two Sessions, Novel and Short Fiction, and each accepts only 16 to 20 participants, so be sure to get your application in early. Any and all genres are accepted; fee is $995.

Complete details are on the Borderlands Press website.

Norman Spinrad on The Publishing Death Spiral, Part One

Norman Spinrad on The Publishing Death Spiral, Part One

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void-captain2Science Fiction author Norman Spinrad, author of Bug Jack Barron, The Void Captain’s Tale, and the classic Star Trek episode that introduced the world to cigar-shaped starships of death, “The Doomsday Machine,” talks about the cruel math of “order to net:” 

Here’s how it works. Barnes and Noble and Borders, the major bookstore chains, control the lion’s share of retail book sales… Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120…. You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you? Sooner or later right down the willy-hole to an unpublishablity that has nothing at all to do with the literary quality of a writer’s work, or the loyalty of a reasonable body of would-be readers, or even the passionate support of an editor below the very top of the corporate pyramid. Voila, the Death Spiral. And I too am in it.

Read the complete article at his blog, Norman Spinrad At Large.

Short Fiction Roundup: The Year’s Best

Short Fiction Roundup: The Year’s Best

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ed-al906_bkrvsc_dv_20100722175927Over at The Wall Street Journal, Martin Wooster has reviewed this year’s annual of Gardner Dozois picks so I don’t have to. What’s particularly interesting about this review is the contention that while most short fiction today is the output of navel gazing MFA candidates (and could not be possibly of interest to normal folks, like those who read The Wall Street Journal), genre magazines still publish quality traditional plot-driven stories once characteristic of mass circulation magazines that have long ago succumbed to short-attention reader spans and market vicissitudes.

As it happens, I stopped reading Asimov’s, which Dozois formerly edited, because I was coming across too many traditional plot-driven hard SF tales that are okay once in awhile, but, for my tastes, make for a kind of bland diet.  For largely the same reason, as well as for lack of time, I’ve become less obsessed with studying every iteration of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, though Wooster’s review may make me reconsider (even the ones he doesn’t like sound intriguing too me).  But as for whether genre magazines are the only home of short fiction that isn’t willfully obtuse in focusing on obsessions that matter only to a self-conscious elite (a charge frequently made of genre’s pulp forebears, funnily enough), I don’t know.

It’s been awhile since I’ve read much from the so-called literary magazines, and I probably haven’t read enough of them to know if this is more canard than truism.  I did use to get Glimmer Magazine, which, if I recall correctly, was the first place where I read anything by Junot Diaz, who wrote The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Depending on what you thought of that book may either prove or disprove Wooster’s point.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula in Comics, Part One – The Novel Adaptations

Bram Stoker’s Dracula in Comics, Part One – The Novel Adaptations

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compdracWhile Bram Stoker’s infamous vampire count has been prevalent in comic books whenever the prevailing bluenoses of each generation have deigned to allow horror books to be printed, there have been surprisingly few attempts to faithfully adapt the classic novel in comic book form.

Classics Illustrated tackled the book shortly before Dr. Frederick Wertham got his dirty little hands on the comic business and did his best to keep the children of the world safe from twisted people just like himself. The Classics Illustrated adaptation was professionally produced, if somewhat anemic.

Marvel Comics would later reprint it in the 1970s with new cover art to make it appear consistent with Gene Colan’s magnificent portrayal of the character for Marvel’s long-running Tomb of Dracula title. Happily, a superior adaptation was brewing in Marvel’s companion magazine, Dracula Lives.

Roy Thomas and Dick Giordano teamed up to provide a faithful, elegant, and leisurely-paced adaptation of the Stoker novel as an ongoing feature in the black & white comic magazine.

Unfortunately, sales were not on their side and the title was cancelled. The one unpublished chapter they had completed turned up in the pages of another magazine title, Legion of Monsters, before it too was cancelled. Their masterful adaptation was left incomplete for nearly thirty years.

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Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Battles Inside and Out

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Battles Inside and Out

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I love writing.  I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
— James Michener

So you’re ready to embark on writing your new fantasy story, hopefully one that the folks at Black Gate will want to snatch up as soon as you type the words “The End” on it.

You’ve got your story idea, sitting there like a lump of Play-Doh that still conforms to the shape of the plastic container you just shook it out of.  You know, that perfect cylinder shape that is exciting to absolutely no one.

Time to start squishing and pulling and twisting. But where to begin, you ask? It all starts, of course, with your main character.

As we discussed earlier, most people tend to start a story with a person, in some sort of situation. But let’s just say you haven’t even gotten that far. You just have an average person, sitting in a white room. Nothing’s happening.

Let’s start by getting inside that character’s head. Which you can do most effectively by asking questions:

  • What is the one thing he or she (or it — this is speculative fiction, you know) wants the most out of life?
  • What’s the one thing your protagonist will do nearly anything for?
  • Is it an object? Another person? A goal? An idea?

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Exploring the WORLD WITHOUT END

Exploring the WORLD WITHOUT END

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wwe1Great stories never get old.

Back in 1990 DC Comics launched WORLD WITHOUT END, a “mature readers” miniseries by Jamie Delano and John Higgins. It was everything comics have the potential to achieve…a psychic thought-bomb of words and pictures that blew my mind to bloody smithereens. Twenty years later it still leaves me in awe.

Delano is a gifted British comics writer who at the time was known best for writing DC’s HELLBLAZER title. Artist Higgins had done a lot of work for England’s 2000 A.D. and worked as colorist on Alan Moore’s landmark WATCHMEN series. When Karen Berger and her assistant editor Tom Peyer put Delano and Higgins together, they were mixing gasoline with fire. Delano and Higgins make these pages glow with volatile brilliance. I’m not being hyperbolic…this book was (and is) THAT good.

The first thing that catches the eye is Higgin’s painted artwork. Every single panel is a fully painted masterpiece, in all six issues. Higgins also painted the spectacular covers himself. Handing a virtuoso painter/storyteller like Higgins to a literary madman like Delano was a stroke of genius. Did I mention already that Karen Berger is a genius? She went on to form the legendary VERTIGO imprint a few short years later.

Delano’s concept was epic, a vast story set millions of years in the future, in a world that literally grew over the old one. A world made not of earth, stone, but of LIVING FLESH. Instead of seven seas, the “chemotion” churns with typhoons of acidic corrosion. The global continent is a colossal organism, dead and rotting at its edges, ripe with gangrene swamps and jagged mountains of bone; yet its center pulses with sunken rivers of lifeblood and hordes of bizarre living beings.

wwe2At the center of this seething world-organism lies BEDLAM: “That proud city, whose taut towers have bountifully reared and nurtured the parasitic multitudes through scuttling millennia of zealous growth.” Bedlam is a grotesquely beautiful mass of bone-carved towers inhabited by a race of male beings called Gess.

Everything female in Bedlam is suppressed and dominated here…but the moon rises over Bedlam, shining with a dangerous glow of femininity upon this hive of masculinity. The rigid structure of this society is being threatened by mutates, abominations led by a mysterious female presence called Rumour. Here’s the back cover copy from issue #1, “The Moon Also Rises,” which says it all:

“IN A FUTURE WORLD GROWN ENTIRELY OUT OF FLESH, THE ULTIMATE MAN AND THE ULTIMATE WOMAN FIGHT THE FINAL BATTLES OF THE SEX WAR–AND PUSH GHASTLY VIOLENCE AND CORRUPT SEXUALITY TO THEIR RIDICULOUS EXTREMES.”

That “Ultimate Man” comes along in issue #2. He is Brother Bones, a “genetic supercommando” sheathed in an ebony metallic armor. He is masculinity personified, a destroyer of flesh, a brutish warlord of unstoppable means. Brother Bones leads armies of the Gess in a war against the female presence that has been “poisoning” Bedlam. When he speaks, his dialogue is a collection of symbols and strangely altered letters that slows the reader down just enough to evoke the character’s towering inhumanity.

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