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Month: July 2012

Donald J Sobol, October 4, 1924 – July 11, 2012

Donald J Sobol, October 4, 1924 – July 11, 2012

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encyclopedia-brown-finds-the-clues2Donald J Sobol, the man who created greatly under-rated detective Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown, died last week of natural causes at the age of 87.

Sobol, a clerk at the New York Public Library, published Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective in 1963. It was the first of what eventually became 28 volumes featuring the genius boy detective.

While the book was an instant hit, and the adventures of Encyclopedia Brown entertained generations of young readers, it took dogged persistence for Sobol to get his creation in print. According to later interviews, it was rejected no less than twenty-four times before Penguin Books bought it.

Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown books, really collections of short stories, follow the boy detective and his friends as he solved mysteries in his hometown of Idaville for “25¢ per day plus expenses.” Occasionally Encyclopedia would assist his father, the chief of police, solve more serious crimes, but usually he was matching wits with a local gang of bullies led by Bugs Meany.

Sobol continued writing Encyclopedia Brown books his entire career, publishing five new volumes between 2000 and 2010. The most recent, Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Carnival Crime, was released in 2011. A twenty-ninth book, Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Soccer Scheme, is scheduled for release this October, in advance of the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective next year. HBO aired 10 half-hour episodes of Encyclopedia Brown, a live action version of the books with Scott Bremner in the title role, in 1989.

Sobol wrote 50 additional books in his lifetime, including the popular Two-Minute Mysteries and Secret Agents Four. He was born in New York City in 1924 and served in World War II before becoming a clerk at the New York Public Library. The success of the Encyclopedia Brown books allowed him to move to Florida to become a full time writer.

He will be missed.

Mage: The Hero Defined

Mage: The Hero Defined

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mage-iiMatt Wagner began writing and illustrating the first Mage series in 1984 at the age of twenty-two.  At the time, he was a relatively unknown creator struggling both to find his voice and make a place for himself in the comics industry.  His subsequent work on Grendel and Sandman Mystery Theatre had garnered many awards and critical acclaim; but in interviews there was always the obligatory question of “When are you going back to Mage?”

When the second volume of Mage began in 1997, Mr. Wagner had earned a (deserved) reputation as both an illustrator and storyteller.  The main character of the series, Kevin Matchstick, had also been working hard in the intervening years, earning his own reputation.  The similarities between Wagner and Matchstick are both obvious and entirely intentional, to the point where Wagner has referred to Mage as a sort of mythologized autobiography.  So we can read this volume as both an examination on how mythic tropes exist in our everyday lives and as a fantasy-dressed account of Wagner’s ups and downs in the comic industry.

When I originally read this book, I was twenty-three (essentially the author’s age when the first book was published) and a lot of it was lost on me.  I identified a lot more with the jaded young man of the first volume than with the more practical and down-to-earth middle-aged man in volume two.  Fifteen years later (oops, guess I just gave away my age there), the second volume seems much richer to me.  This is the story of a hero growing up, learning that being good involves more than simply opposing evil.  It also carries some veiled criticism of the superhero genre (specifically, why most superheroes are perpetually locked in their mid- to late twenties).  The series ends with Kevin Matchstick committing an act of maturity that most superheroes would never dare (unless it was a dream or an imaginary story or eventually ret-conned).

The first book concerned Kevin refusing to acknowledge his own potential to change the world.  His friends were mostly there to inspire him (sometimes by dragging him kicking and screaming to his destiny).  In some ways, it was a young man’s fantasy, with everyone around Kevin telling him about his greatness and obligation.

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Self Sabotage is Easier than Writing

Self Sabotage is Easier than Writing

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snoopyA lot of writers I know are pretty good at self-sabotage. It’s not that writing is hard, exactly, except that it is. Physical labor and exercise isn’t required, and it sure doesn’t look like you’re doing much when you’re staring at that screen and pecking away at a keyboard. But getting good work, consistently, means constant effort. And constant effort = work. I’d like to have those moments where an entire chapter writes itself and stays virtually unchanged through every draft because I can hear, see, and picture it so clearly the first time; but it just doesn’t happen very often. The trick is sticking with the process so that the reader can’t tell which chapters you labored over and which chapters flowed naturally the first time. And that takes time, and effort, and sometimes it’s easier to do nothing.

I’ve learned different ways to practice self sabotage over the years, and different ways to fight my tendencies. Never keeping computer games on my computer, no matter how great they look, for instance. I won that battle. But there are two others that cropped up this last month. One is an old enemy. The other one is new.

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Vintage Treasures: The Pan Book of Horror Stories

Vintage Treasures: The Pan Book of Horror Stories

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the-third-pan-book-of-horror-storiesI talk a lot about book collecting here on the blog. People sometimes tell me, “It’s interesting to hear about all the books you’ve been able to find… sort of. But you know what would really be interesting? To hear about the books you haven’t been able to find.”

Okay, but this is a painful subject. Just ask any serious book collector to tell you about the titles that have eluded them for decades. It’s like asking a guy to enumerate all the women who’ve turned him down. We carry those memories for a long time, but that don’t mean we wanna talk about ’em.

“Oh come on,” people say. “Like you’ve ever turned down a chance to talk about books. Give it up.” Well, since you put it that way.

Let’s talk about The Pan Book of Horror Stories.

The Pan Book of Horror Stories was a British paperback series of horror anthologies. Published by Pan Books, it lasted for an amazing thirty volumes, from 1959 to 1989. The series creator — and editor for the first 25 volumes — was the renowned editor Herbert van Thal (Told in the Dark, Tales to Make the Flesh Creep, Lie Ten Nights Awake, and many others classic horror anthologies). Clarence Paget took over in 1985 after Van Thal’s death and edited the last five volumes, until the series came to an end with number thirty in 1989.

The Pan Book of Horror Stories has a legendary reputation. Van Thal is a highly regarded editor, and with these books his vision was nothing less than to create a complete library of the finest short horror stories ever written. With the early volumes he relied heavily on classic tales from Bram Stoker, C. S. Forester, Ray Bradbury, Lord Dunsany, Edgar Allan Poe, William Hope Hodgson, William Faulkner, Frank Belknap Long, and many others, but with later installments he branched out to include newer authors (such as Stephen King), which helped launch a lot of new talent.

After several decades of collecting I have managed to lay my hands on exactly one volume: The Third Pan Book of Horror Stories, published in 1962 (shown above).

That probably overemphasizes the rarity of these books — they’re not that hard to find. But they are expensive, especially in the original British editions (the US editions were dramatically pared down, including fewer stories), and the older volumes in particular are difficult to find in good condition. I’ve been trying to locate a reasonably-priced collection of Pan Book of Horror Stories for years, with absolutely no success.

But that’s okay. As most collectors know, the real joy is in the search. I’m looking forward to a lot of joy in the next few years, as I gradually accumulate the other 29 volumes. Wish me luck.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP

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superbrothers-sword-and-sworcery2We find Swords and Sorcery in unusual places these days. When I was a kid you had to dig around in the 50-cent bin at the used book store until you unearthed a battered Lancer paperback, or a worn copy of Fantastic magazine. Sometimes it would show up at the supermarket in one of those spinning paperback islands, but good luck getting your mother to buy it for you. Too many lurid colors on the cover, too much nudity. Sword and Sorcery was something underground, forbidden, even dangerous, like pornography and posters of Weird Al Yankovic.

Not today. You can’t walk into a movie theater or game store without tripping over Sword and Sorcery. It shows up in Disney movies, in role playing games, and virtually every online multiplayer game ever made. It has permeated our culture, become strangely mainsteam. Just like Weird Al Yankovic. God help us.

But that doesn’t mean that the soul of Sword & Sorcery has been wholly compromised. It just means that if want to find the truly original, the weird and different, you need to wander a little farther afield. Look beyond the big budget titles, to those Indie games that are the modern equivalent of Lancer paperbacks and Fantastic magazine. Games like the amazing Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP.

On the surface Sword & Sworcery looks like a point-and-click adventure game, circa 1995. But the artistic design and innovative touches make this unlike any game you’ve ever seen. You play as a warrior woman named Scythian, on a mysterious mission that’s not entirely explained up front. The retro graphics look crude at first, until you notice the incredible details — bushes that shift in the wind, the small forest animals that dart out of your way. Like most point-and-click adventures there’s a lot of text to read, but here the text is charming and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Early in the game you encounter a girl (named Girl), a woodcutter (Logfella) and their dog Dogfella. Clicking on the dog rewards players with this message:

Logfella knew all about our woeful errand & he agreed to lead us up the old road. Still we definitely got the feeling that he wasn’t super jazzed about this.

No review of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (what does the EP mean?) would be complete without mentioning the music of Jim Guthrie, a crucial component of the whole experience. The first time you face a monster in combat, you’ll know what I mean.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery was developed by Capybara Games, and released on April 16, 2012, for both the PC (via Steam) and iOS platforms (Mac, iPhone and iPad) for $4.99. Learn more at their website.

Black Static 29

Black Static 29

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491

The latest Black Static has new look, with a gloss laminated cover and spine in a new size that expands to 96 pages. Same high quality horror  fiction.  This month features the work of Nina Allan, Ray Cluley, Renee Carter Hall, Tim Lees, and Baph Tripp.

Nonfiction by the usual suspects, Peter Tennant, Christopher Fowler, Tony Lee, and Mike O’Driscoll. The editor is Andy Cox.

Black Static alternates monthly publication with sister SF and fantasy focused Interzone.

Here’s how Allan’s “Sunshine” gets started:

You asked me where I came from. I was born in Paris, in the shadow of Montmartre, but my mother soon moved me first to Brighton, on England’s south coast, and then to London. I have no memories of Paris from when I was a baby, though I have visited that city more than a dozen times since. My mother’s name is Michaela Olsen, and I am Daniel Clement Olsen. I don’t know my father’s name, and nor do I wish to.

I am a shade under six feet tall, light of build and with a knock-kneed, somewhat stooping deportment. I have been called scrawny, though my victims seem to find me good looking. I have wide, slightly flaring nostrils, fine shoulder-length hair the colour of barley water. My eyes are a watery blue.

I am a student of philosophy, though I am unlikely to ever gain my degree. If anyone asks me my age, I say twenty-six.

New Treasures: Alif the Unseen, by G. Willow Wilson

New Treasures: Alif the Unseen, by G. Willow Wilson

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alif-the-unseenI’ve been sitting impatiently on this one for months. I got an advance review copy in March, and it looked great.

But publicists get a little grumpy if you spill the beans on a new release too soon before the official on-sale date, and since it’s publicists — the finest people in the world — who send Black Gate fantasy books by the crateload every year, we like to keep them happy. So I kept my mouth shut.

The book in question is Alif the Unseen, the first novel by acclaimed comics writer  G. Willow Wilson (Cairo, Air). It officially went on sale July 3rd, and I am here to tell you about it. Let’s start with the flap copy:

In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients — dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups — from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif — the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the State’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the “Hand of God,” the head of State security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen.

Intrepid Black Gate investigative journalist Emily Mah has been writing a multi-part series on The Best of Modern Arabian Fantasy (in our Interview section), and this would fit right in. Alif the Unseen has received rave blurbs from some of America’s most respected fantasy writers, including Neil Gaiman, Matt Ruff, Jack Womack, and Gregoor Maguire. Here’s what Janet Maslin at The New York Times called it:

A Harry Potter-ish action adventure romance [that] unfolds against the backdrop of the Arab Spring… A bookload of wizardry and glee.

Alif the Unseen is 433 pages in hardcover from Grove Press. The cover price is $25 ($11.99 for the Kindle version), and you can read the first chapter online here.

The Steel Seraglio: a Review

The Steel Seraglio: a Review

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The Steel SeraglioThe Steel Seraglio
Mike, Linda, and Louise Carey
ChiZine Publications (424 pp, $15.95 US/$17.95 CAD, trade paperback)
Reviewed by Matthew Surridge

The Steel Seraglio is a fantasy novel by husband/wife/daughter trio Mike, Linda, and Louise Carey, put out by ChiZine Publications. There’s also a chapbook set in the same world (which you might be able to get if you order the book directly from ChiZine). It’s a story set in a pseudo-historical Arabia, in a desert of city-states ruled by sultans. When religious zealots stage a revolution in the city of Bessa, a chain of events is set in motion that results in the former Sultan’s former harem of 365 women banding together to take the city back, and installing their own enlightened rule. The book tells the story of the women, and the rise and fall of the city they make.

I thought it was a decent adventure novel with some nice touches; good enough, and the touches nice enough, that I wished it had been better — either a better adventure, or a better novel. I think the book narrowly fails to achieve all the grand effects that it aims for, mostly due to staging and logic that don’t feel entirely thought-through. And I think that what is most interesting about the book, specifically its narrative structure and use of narrative to establish character, is not particularly well-served by the epic adventure format. I also found I had some qualms about the setting, or at least how the setting was developed in the course of the story.

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Blogging Charlton Comics’ Adventures of the Man-God, Hercules – Part Two

Blogging Charlton Comics’ Adventures of the Man-God, Hercules – Part Two

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hercules-8Joe Gill modified Denny O’Neil’s take on the Labors of Hercules when he succeeded him as scriptwriter on Charlton Comics’ Adventures of the Man-God, Hercules in 1968. Gill took the character of Eurystheus that O’Neil referred to as a judiciary member of the pantheon of gods on Mount Olympus and developed the character as a mortal king who is Hercules’ cousin on his mother’s side (Gill actually referred to him as Hercules’ uncle in his first appearance). By Issue #8, it was established that Hercules turns to King Eurystheus to receive each assignment in the remaining five labors he must complete before he is accepted among the gods of Olympus. Eurystheus is portrayed as a mortal puppet of Hercules’ vindictive stepmother Hera, the queen of the gods.

Issue #8, “The Boar” sees Eurystheus set Hercules the seemingly impossible task of capturing the Great Boar of Eurymanthus without injuring the beast. Upon scaling Mount Eurymanthus, Hercules is set upon by yet another pteranodon (a favorite of artist Sam Glanzman, apparently). Perhaps cognizant of the winged reptile’s repetition, Joe Gill provides the explanation that the pteranodons are conjured up from Earth’s prehistoric past by Hera. Zeus berates his wife for this unnecessary persecution of his son. Hercules is warned off his quest by the nearby villagers, but ignores their caution and scales to the top of the mountain and encounters the great boar itself. The man-god tames the beast with relative ease and rides it down the mountain (admittedly, a great visual) to present it to King Eurystheus. The storyline is very slight compared to the previous labors (clocking in at only 12 pages).

The rest of the issue is taken up with a supporting feature, “The Legend of Hercules,” which depicts the man-god’s childhood in the home of his mortal mother, Alcmena. The story opens on the domestic life of the infant Hercules and his mortal half-brother, Iphicles. The child Hercules first shows his incredible strength when he slays a pair of serpents that crawl into the toddlers’ crib one night. The script reveals that the serpents were sent by Hera in her jealousy. While closer to the mythological depiction of Hercules’ origin, the incident contradicts the code-approved storyline from previous issues that Alcmena and Zeus were married before Zeus and Hera wed. This was not, of course, Denny O’Neil’s original intent, but Dick Giordano enforced the Charlton Comics editorial policy which prevented dealing with out of wedlock pregnancy as much as it limited any sexual suggestion. This certainly made the faithful depiction of a series inspired by Greek mythology capitalizing on the booming sword & sorcery market challenging to say the least.

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Howard Waldrop’s “The Ugly Chickens”

Howard Waldrop’s “The Ugly Chickens”

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universe-10I’ve been reading a lot of short fiction recently. It started as I was putting away a collection of Worlds of IF magazines and dawdled over the April 1970 issue, with Ron Goulart’s tale of casual wife-swapping, “Swap,” which I talked about here. The same thing happened with Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild” (in the June 1984 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine), and then George R.R. Martin’s “Nightflyers” (Analog, April 1980). And my wife wonders why it takes me two hours to put away a dozen magazines.

It happened again today, this time with Howard Waldrop’s “The Ugly Chickens,” which also originally appeared in 1980, in the tenth volume of Terry Carr’s long-running Universe anthology series. I read it in Donald A. Wollheim’s The 1981 Annual World’s Best SF, where it had this introduction:

Science Fiction is subject to many definitions and there are some that are so specific that they might exclude this unusual story. But if science fiction deals with the probable that is just beyond the newspapers or with things that might have happened — even though they did not shake the world — then this is truly science fiction.

“The Ugly Chickens” won the Nebula Award for best novelette, and the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. There are times when I look around at my collection of science fiction and fantasy, and wonder if I’ve wasted my time gathering such a concentration of work in relatively few genres. Then I read something like Howard Waldrop’s “The Ugly Chickens.” If even a fraction of the unread books in my collection have the charm and wonder of this story, then I’m certain I’ll never grow tired of it.

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