Fictional Frontiers Interviews Howard Andrew Jones
Sohaib Awan at Fictional Frontiers interviews Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones on his first novel The Desert of Souls, non-Western fantasy, juggling modern expectations in historical fiction, and much more:
Fictional Frontiers: I’m spouting hyperbole here, but I think it’s so well earned…. give us an overview of The Desert of Souls.
Howard: Like a lot of adventure fiction, it starts with the discovery of a body. Of course, it’s the body of a dead parrot. The parrot’s beloved by Jaffar — I guess it’s a little Disney joke, because you know, Jaffar and the parrot. But of course Jaffar was a real character… arguably the most famous vizier in Arabian history. Anyway… his guard captain Asim suggests an adventure into the market. So he and Jaffar and the scholar Dabir go out into the city in disguise, and a dying man presents them with a strange and beautiful artifact, a golden door pull, and he asks them to keep it safe. And that’s where things really take off. Dabir and Asim are tasked by Jaffar with learning the pull’s origin and purpose. Naturally they’re not the only ones after the thing, and they soon learn it may open a gateway to an unearthly realm, accessed in the ruins of the lost city of Ubar, which is sort of like an Atlantis of the sands.
The complete podcast runs 22 minutes, and is available here.
I’ve refrained from talking about Conan the Barbarian (2011) until now, despite my love for Robert E. Howard’s works. But now that we’re poised on the eve of its U.S. release, I thought I’d weigh in with my personal hopes—and fears—regarding the film.
Sunday was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Clark Ashton Smith. We morbid fans of a writer with a delectable taste for morbidity love to celebrate death anniversaries as much as birth ones, and the seduction of the half-century mark is too great to dismiss.
Fantasy fiction is very often set either in the European Middle Ages, or in lands that are intentionally highly reminiscent of the Middle Ages in terms of technology and social structure. It is true that the use of European medieval settings is less common now than it has been, and also true that there have always been counter-examples. But it seems that much fantasy still relies on the European Middle Ages to define itself, one way or another. Sadly, one often has a sense that these backgrounds are not wholly thought-through; not realised as completely as they might be. The setting in a lot of fantasy, particularly I think in commercial fantasy fiction, seems to be a very generic Middle Ages in which medieval stereotypes mix with unexamined modern assumptions.
NPR has posted its 