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Month: June 2011

Art of the Genre: Art Road Trip

Art of the Genre: Art Road Trip

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John O'Neill, Jeff Easley, and me before the waitress kicked us out.
John O'Neill, Jeff Easley, and me before the waitress kicked us out.

Ok, so here’s the deal, I like art. Yeah, I know, that’s hard to believe and all, but it’s true. This passion of all things visually marketed in oil, acrylic, water-color, and the like brought me to Art Evolution, and from that platform I’ve fostered many great relationships with artists.

In November I posted the Art Evolution piece on artist Jeff Easley, and when I asked him if he enjoyed it he responded, ‘Yeah, if I ever do an art book, you can do the intro.’

Ok, I’m going to give you a second to let that sink in…

As absolutely insane as it sounds, Jeff Easley, icon of TSR and modern fantasy art has never, ever, done an art book. Well, if you know me at all you know my response, which went something like this, ‘Uh… Do the intro? Heck, I’ll do the whole book!’

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Writers of the Future: The 24-Hour Story Experiment

Writers of the Future: The 24-Hour Story Experiment

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Tim Powers decides to teach geometry instead

Numerous memorable exchanges occurred during the week I attended the Writers and Illustrators of the Future workshop as one of the winning authors. Many of the more outrageous I can’t quote here (the Workshop is a “safe” environment for people to express opinions they wouldn’t in public, such as conventions), but here’s one my favorites that I feel is quite safe out in the open:

Me: [To Eric Flint] I’m interested to know the sources you used to research the Thirty Years’ War. Because, I’m also a Thirty Years’ War buff —

Eric Flint: For God’s sake, why?

Yes, being a scholar of the Thirty Years’ War does cause people to look at you askance, even another person who has done extensive research into this most anarchic of Early Modern wars. Suffice it to say, I simply cannot help my attraction to the madness of that long, gory, indecisive war. Magnificent madness.

At his acceptance speech during the awards ceremony, writer Brennan Harvey (who is no relation to me except now as a good friend) stated that “K. D. Wentworth and Tim Powers filled my head up to here,” making a motion far above his forehead. “I don’t even know what I learned yet.” That’s the best way to put it. In that week, the experience of listening to advice from a who’s-who of the best in speculative fiction made it sometimes feel as if I were getting machine-gunned with data. I wrote as fast as my hand could go over my notepad, and eventually I’ll sort it all out and see what sticks the most. However, the sheer mass of it made me realize that I can’t do a single blog post to cover what happened during the week. So I will focus on one item at a time.

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Scott Taylor at Game Knight Reviews

Scott Taylor at Game Knight Reviews

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game-knight-reviewsBlack Gate‘s Scott Taylor, our esteemed Wednesday blogger and author of the Art Evolution series, is the first ever guest blogger at Game Knight Reviews this week. GKR is a terrific source of roleplaying game reviews, interviews and news, run by Brian Fitzpatrick.

Scott talks about how he first discovered Black Gate:

Sometime in 2008 I was shopping short story markets and someone on a blogging site indicated that the Swords & Sorcery magazine Black Gate was an option for a story I was writing. As a person always dedicated to wanting to know my market, and being a huge fan of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, I ordered three of the most recent copies of the magazine as ‘research material.’

When they arrived at my home I was intrigued to find that they were included with a two page letter of thanks that was actually a ‘choose your own adventure’ concerning a haunted house and the spirits of half a dozen literary fantasy greats. I laughed and laughed as I went through it, died probably three times, and in my minds-eye was whisked away to the junior high library where I first picked up a copy of The Cave of Time.

That, my friends, is what Black Gate is about, pure nostalgia, humor, and of course some of the most outstanding fantasy fiction one can find on today’s market.

Thanks for the plug, Scott! Glad to hear you enjoyed the mini solo-RPG we included as a subscriber letter with Black Gate 12. It’s still available with every copy shipped.

You can read the complete guest blog here, and check out the excellent Game Knight Reviews here.

Some Thoughts on the Nature of a Serial

Some Thoughts on the Nature of a Serial

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The Adventures of Captain MarvelSerial storytelling is something of a mystery; even more so, perhaps, than most storytelling. When done right, it seems to hook an audience, to get them to invest heavily in the story being serialised. But for whatever reason, most serial forms have been pigeonholed as strictly popular arts; serial storytellers have generally been assumed to have a low amount of literary ambition. These presumptions about serials, and the way the form works, have always intrigued me — the more so since I’ve set out to write a serial prose fantasy of my own.

Let me try to define what I mean by ‘serial.’ The OED has “(of publication) appearing in successive parts published usually at regular intervals, periodical,” which is a start. More precisely, I’m talking about a narrative told across many installments, usually on a regular schedule, with each installment except the first and last expected by the audience to be incomplete, but usually containing some element of a genre or other story convention which will satisfy the audience.

Every installment of The Adventures of Captain Marvel movie serial made sure at some point to have the titular super-hero in costume, using his powers, and usually also included fight scenes, detective work, plot twists, and exotic locales — because that was the sort of story it was, and that was what audiences were looking for. Individual chapters (or issues) of a serial may play about with these conventions — like an issue of the Steve Ditko Amazing Spider-Man, in which scripter Stan Lee apologised for not having the hero fight a villain in that particular issue, something unusual in the mid-60s. But go too far, too often, and you just end up telling a different kind of story — like, say, Scott McCloud’s Zot!, which started as a retro-adventure-hero story, and ended up becoming an examination of adventure fantasy and how it contrasts with realism.

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If, October 1957: A Retro-Review

If, October 1957: A Retro-Review

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if-oct-57This is the fourth installment in Rich Horton’s retro-reviews of science fiction and fantasy digest magazines from the mid-20th Century. The first three were the February 1966 Analog, the December 1965 Galaxy, and the January 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Click the images for larger versions.

Back to the ’50s for this one. If is a magazine I remember with affection, even though I never saw a precisely new copy — the last issue, except for an abortive one issue 1986 revival, appeared in December 1974, just a couple of months after I started buying magazines, but my source (Alton Drugs in Naperville, IL) didn’t carry it. But its evident sense of playfulness, at least in the Pohl years, has always appealed to me.

At any rate, this issue appeared at a portentous time – its issue date is October 1957, the same month that Sputnik I was launched. So this magazine is from the very cusp of the Space Age.

Indeed, I have a few magazines on hand from roughly the same time (1957, or up to January 1958 – which certainly went to press before the news of Sputnik), and I propose to cover them in the next few old magazine reviews.

The title is one odd aspect. Is it If: Worlds of Science Fiction? Or is it Worlds of If? Apparently the original title was officially If: Worlds of Science Fiction, but it wobbled early on, at least as to its display. In 1972 the then publishers, UPD, officially changed it to Worlds of If. (All this from Phil Stephenson-Payne’s wonderful Galactic Central site.)

At any rate this issue appears fairly unambiguously to be If: Worlds of Science Fiction. The editor (and publisher, and indeed founder) was James L. Quinn. (Confusing because a later publisher was named Guinn.) (And I should note that though Quinn was publisher from the start, the first editor was Paul Fairman.)

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Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews Gamer Fantastic

Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews Gamer Fantastic

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gamer-fantasticGamer Fantastic
Edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Kerrie Hughes
DAW Books (309 pp, $7.99, July 2009)
Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Gamer Fantastic contains thirteen stories about games and gamers, taken in unusual fantasy and science fiction directions. Seven concern classic roleplaying games, while five are about computer gaming. (The other story, “Mightier Than the Sword” by Jim C. Hines, is harder to classify, more about authors and conventions than about gaming itself. Despite this, it was one of my favorites.)

A couple of the stories have no real “fantastic” elements at all. For example, in “Roles We Play” by Jody Lynn Nye, we are exposed to a historical narrative about how roleplaying games could have been used to develop an effective form of psychotherapy. Though aspects of the story are surreal, the “fantasy” is more psychological than literal, and the parallels between fantasy gaming elements and psychological elements are precisely what lend the story believability.

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Interzone #234 May-June 2011

Interzone #234 May-June 2011

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329I’m beginning to wonder when Interzone will be retitled Jason Sanford’s Interzone; the guy seems to snag the magazine’s featured author slot more times than most. Case in point is the May/June issue  in which Sanford’s “Her Scientification, Far Future, Medieval Fantasy” gets top billing, “plus other new stories” by Suzanne Palmer, Lavie Tidhar, Will McIntosh and Jon Ingold.  I normally find Sanford intriguing, but this is one of those “I’m in an artificial reality, and I find out that I’m not as real (or more than real) as I thought” stories that is okay but doesn’t add much to the trope that hasn’t already been done before. The first paragraph is a real hoot, though, which I felt the rest of the story didn’t really hold up to:

Princess Krisja Jerome stood before her tower’s lone window, listening to the sounds of battle in the courtyard below. Metal clashed on ceramic. rifle shots zinged off the castle’s stone abutments. Lasers buzzed the moat to steam. From Krisja’s viewpoint, it looked like her father’s knights fought valiantly against the invaders from, well, from somewhere outside the kingdom. Where exactly, Kris couldn’t say. But then so few invaders announced their origins. It simply killed the romance, claiming to be a Sir Lancelot hero when you really hailed from a Scranton or Sheboygan nowhere.

Blogging Marvel’s The Tomb of Dracula, Part Five

Blogging Marvel’s The Tomb of Dracula, Part Five

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tod-25tod-24The Tomb of Dracula # 24, “A Night for the Living, a Morning for the Dead” sees the series make a quantum leap forward in terms of the sophistication of Marv Wolfman’s script. The story begins with Frank Drake and Rachel Van Helsing on the same bridge Frank nearly jumped off when he was rescued by Taj Nital two years before. Believing Dracula dead, Frank has come to both a physical and symbolic bridge in his life and feels lost. The promise of a blossoming romance with the equally damaged, but far more capable Rachel Van Helsing is the only thing that pulls him from the depths of despair. Of course, Dracula is alive and preying on innocent women on the streets of London at night while his mortal lover, Sheila Whittier sits at home alone awaiting his return and doing her best to deny the reality that the man she loves is a ruthless killer.

The complexities of Wolfman’s script only grow as the story shifts to Blade who returns to his and Safron’s apartment to find her being menaced by a vampire. While Blade quickly dispatches the vampire in particularly bloody fashion for a 1974 mainstream comic, the bigger shock is the more adult turn the book takes in content. After fading out on Blade and Safron kissing, the scene picks up later that night and we see Blade dressed only in pajama bottoms with Safron dressed only in his matching pajama tops. If this wasn’t going far enough, they are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Trudy, a fellow exotic dancer who works at the same club as Safron. She tells of her near-miss encounter with Dracula which Gene Colan illustrates via flashback. The sequence alternates between sexy and terrifying as Dracula is portrayed at his most predatory yet by having him attack a character who readers find both desirable and sympathetic. The fact that Trudy is saved from her attack by wielding a cross is nothing for Wolfman has Dracula continue to pursue her as she runs through the streets of London clad only in bra and panties and an open overcoat while Dracula savagely taunts her until she wields the cross a second time and finally drives him off. Wolfman and Colan clearly enjoyed making the series more adult in terms of story structure and certainly content.

Blade subsequently sets out to hunt for the vampire lord he believed dead and his rematch with Dracula on the streets of London is quickly underway. Their skirmish is intercut with Taj Nital’s anguished reunion with his estranged wife in India. This time we learn the conflict between them involves their son who Taj learns is dying. The battle between Dracula and Blade concludes uneventfully, but Blade is injured both physically and psychologically by how easily Dracula defeated him. This remarkable issue concludes with Dracula returning home exhausted and paying scant attention to Sheila while Frank makes a tearful break with Rachel determined that he must find himself before he can commit to a relationship with her. The entire issue is a marvelous example of strong characterization and demonstrates how to best achieve dramatic scope in a story. Nearly four decades later, comic standards have loosened considerably, but the quality of writing does not compare with the level achieved by this title in its prime.

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Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, A Review

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, A Review

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wastelandsJohn Joseph Adams has a well-earned reputation as The Man Who Delivers Anthologies. Barnes & Noble.com has dubbed him “the reigning king of the anthology world.” By my count he’s published at least nine of them. I own one, The Living Dead, which contained enough zombie goodness (along with a few stiffs) to prompt me to buy his Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse.

To be honest, I probably would have bought Wastelands regardless of its editor. I’m a big fan of the post-apocalyptic genre, from novels like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, to films like Escape from New York or Mad Max. Why? As an inhabitant of the northeastern seaboard of the United States I’m not often confronted with existential issues. I know that I’m going to die one day and suffer separation from all that I know and love, but because civilization affords me everything I need—and much of what I want, too—I tend not to think about these issues much. The panaceas of electricity and refrigeration, and healthcare and schools, and television and the internet and books, masks the skull beneath the skin. I’m effectively insulated from the hard life and death struggle that’s woven into so much of human history. But what if it was all stripped away, and life was reduced to its essentials? That’s the question post-apocalyptic fiction asks, and one I occasionally like to ponder. With my feet up on the couch of my air-conditioned living room, of course.

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Goth Chick (International) News: Iranian Ghost Stories For Real

Goth Chick (International) News: Iranian Ghost Stories For Real

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image003As I mention whenever given the opportunity, I have some exceedingly cool friends. I don’t tell you this to brag, but rather to ensure I am able to soak up some of their residual coolness in the telling.

As you are well aware, I am a total movie-quoting, comic-reading, gamer geek who was often taken in by hoopy froods** (<– Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference. See? Can’t help myself) for their entertainment and social balancing. Still, the result has been pretty consistent. I get to hang out with people who really know where their towels are.

That being said, let me tell you about my friend “M.”

“M” is Iranian and I met him at my small, mid-Western alma mater where his very affluent, liberal but politically active family had tucked him away due to credible kidnapping threats. And yes, if you’re doing the math, I was an undergrad in a school that was the last ever place for the son of an affluent, liberal, politically active Iranian family to ever be located. In fact, it was so off the map that only those of us who went there could consistently point it out on one.

Following the standard number of years of undergraduate shenanigans, “M” went into public service in Canada of all places, eventually landing a highly visible gig in a Canadian embassy in a country I have sworn not to name. As you can see, I’ve sworn not to say a lot about “M,” for reasons that would make very interesting posts some time in the future when “M” is no longer in public life.

But that time is not now.

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