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Month: March 2013

Weird of Oz: Scooby Meets Buffy (a Postscript)

Weird of Oz: Scooby Meets Buffy (a Postscript)

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scooby-dooLast week’s post was prompted by a term I used fleetingly in my review of the new Scooby-Doo series two weeks ago: “post-Buffy.” Rather than go off on a tangent explaining what I meant by that in the midst of discussing Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, I promised any interested readers that I would devote a whole column to this concept of “post-Buffy” in my next installment.

So last Sunday I posted “Weird of Oz Considers Postbuffyism,” primarily to reflect on how Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) influenced later television.

Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer_CoverartWhat caught me off guard was the pushback I got to my assessment of Buffy and its significance in television history. Of course, one or two people questioned the merits of the series itself — that’s okay; some people just don’t dig Buffy. Others asserted there were earlier series already using narrative innovations to weave multiple plot threads over several seasons, which I did acknowledge — my premise was not that Buffy was the first, only that it generally has been one of the most influential.

But then one commenter brought up a series that gave me pause: The X-Files. Here was a series to which much of what I said regarding Buffy could also apply, and which has arguably been as influential on genre television. This prompted me to formulate a response that itself grew into a post-script or a sequel to the original post, but before I get to that I’d like to take a moment to tie the last two posts more closely together: to explain why the new Scooby-Doo series got me to thinking about Buffy in the first place.

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Vintage Treasures: Shadows of Yog-Sothoth

Vintage Treasures: Shadows of Yog-Sothoth

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Shadows of Yog SothothLast week I wrote about the death of Lynn Willis, the legendary editor at Chaosium, who gradually became the mastermind behind Call of Cthulhu, one of the finest RPGs ever made. While at Chaosium Lynn helped write and edit no less than 54 Call of Cthulhu books and supplements like Cthulhu by Gaslight, as well as a host of other board games and products, including Arkham Horror, RuneQuest, Thieves’ World, King Arthur Companion, Stormbringer Companion, Carse, Tulan of the Isles, Atlas of the Young Kingdoms, and dozens more.

In honor of Lynn, I dug around this week to find those products that first captured my attention all those years ago. They weren’t hard to find, as they still occupy a place of pride in my collection.

When Sandy Peterson’s Call of Cthulhu was first released as a boxed set in 1981, the entire industry took notice. Here was the first truly appealing contemporary (or, at least, semi-contemporary) role playing game, which drew on the horrifying cosmic milieu and fabulous bestiary of none other than H.P. Lovecraft. It was an instant hit. But by itself, Call of Cthulhu was just a fascinating oddity. It wasn’t until Chaosium released Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, A Global Campaign to Save Mankind a year later that we realized what the game was truly capable of.

Shadows of Yog-Sothoth is an epic, self-contained campaign which first introduced role players to the kind of play demanded by CoC. Players who treated Cthulhu and his minions as simply big D&D monsters, chubby creatures ready to be harvested for their experience point value, were in for a rude awakening.

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New Treasures: The Merriest Knight, The Collected Arthurian Tales of Theodore Goodridge Roberts

New Treasures: The Merriest Knight, The Collected Arthurian Tales of Theodore Goodridge Roberts

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AppleMarkYesterday, I spent the day at the Spring Auction at Games Plus, which I’ve taken to calling the Paris Fashion Week of Games. It was a very successful outing — so successful that I knew I had some explaining to do to Alice, who balances the family finances.

While I was waiting to settle up with the cashier, my eyes fell on a curious artifact in the tiny books section at Games Plus: The Merriest Knight, The Collected Arthurian Tales of Theodore Goodridge Roberts. Roberts was a Canadian pulp author whose tales of Sir Dinadan, whom Mallory called “the merriest knight,” appeared in the pulp magazine Blue Book in the 50s. Sir Dinadan was known as the most practical of the Knights of the Round Table, and Roberts’s stories differed from many of the Arthurian tales of the era in their warmth and wit.

Late in his career, Roberts wrote a final entry in the Dinadan saga, “Quest’s End,” which remained unpublished in his lifetime. Rumor had it he’d also begun collecting all the tales with an eye towards publishing a book, but the project remained unfinished when he died.

Now the peerless Mike Ashley, who’s edited countless anthologies — including 32 books in The Mammoth Book Of... series, and five other Arthurian Anthologies, such as The Pendragon Chronicles and Chronicles of the Holy Grail — has finished what Roberts began with The Merriest Knight, a beautiful collection of the complete tales of Sir Dinadan:

Under the guidance of editor Mike Ashley, The Merriest Knight gathers for the first time all of Roberts’ tales of Sir Dinadan — including the previously unpublished “Quest’s End” — and several other long lost Arthurian works by this master of the stylish adventure yarn and the historical romance. Within these pages, readers will find a collection of Arthurian tales that are sometimes poignant, often humorous, and always ingenious, as well as a Camelot made fresh by the wry and often scathing eye of Sir Dinadan, who never rushes into battle without first being certain of the need to fight at all.

Why is The Merriest Knight for sale in a games store? Ah, that’s an entirely different tale.

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Caitlin R. Kiernan and Kiini Ibura Salaam, Joint Recipients of the 2012 Tiptree Award

Caitlin R. Kiernan and Kiini Ibura Salaam, Joint Recipients of the 2012 Tiptree Award

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Kiini Ibura Salaam

It’s with a nod to the many diverse readers of Black Gate that I begin with some explanation of who James Tiptree, Jr. was. Science fiction and fantasy veterans will know her well, but many avid readers do not know this important figure in the history of speculative fiction. My referring to Tiptree as a “her” is not a slip; Tiptree was the pen name for Alice Bradley Sheldon, a prominent speculative fiction writer who took on a masculine pseudonym because:

A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.

(That quote is from her profile in the April, 1983 issue of Asimov’s.) She also had a female pseudonym, Raccoona Sheldon, and even won one of her Nebulas with that name.

Caitlyn R. Keirnan
Caitlyn R. Keirnan

Her choice to write under pen names in the first place stemmed from the fact that as Alice Sheldon, she had built up a respectable reputation for herself in academia. She was a military veteran (the U.S. Army Air Forces) and had a doctorate in experimental psychology.

She chose the name Tiptree off a marmalade label and added the “Jr.” at her husband’s suggestion, then with this moniker blazed new trails in the genre, challenging concepts of gender, gender roles, stereotypes, and gender and gendered identity.

I could go on at length about this, but will refer readers interested in more on to Tiptree.org at this point while I move on to the prize she inspired.

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The Battle of the Three Kings, 1578, in Miniature

The Battle of the Three Kings, 1578, in Miniature

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On a recent trip to Tangier, I visited the old American Legation, now a museum. In a dusty back room, I discovered two remarkable dioramas of Moroccan battles — the Battle of the Three Kings and the Battle of Tondibi. Today I’m presenting some images of the diorama of the Battle of the Three Kings.

In 1578, the 24 year-old king of Portugal, Don Sebastian, decided to prove himself. His predecessors had lost most of the Portuguese possessions in Morocco to the Saadians, who untied the various North African tribes against them. Don Sebastian burned with desire to reconquer the region. He got his chance when a dynastic struggle led to the Sultan Abu Abdallah Mohammad II being deposed by his uncle Abd Al-Malik. Sebastian agreed to help Mohammad II regain his throne in exchange for territorial concessions. Sebastian gathered an army of 17,000 men, including Portuguese, volunteers from Castile, Flemish and German mercenaries, and Moroccans loyal to Mohammad II.

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Oz Fluxx – A Great and Powerful Card Game

Oz Fluxx – A Great and Powerful Card Game

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ozfluxxA while back, the classic card game Fluxx got a makeover in an edition that merges the game with a classic film. This certainly isn’t its first makeover for Fluxx, nor even the first time it’s merged with a classic film (there is a Monty Python Fluxx, for example), but given that Oz: The Great and Powerful is hitting theaters today, the version of Fluxx I’m going to talk about is Oz Fluxx (Amazon).

If you’ve never played Fluxx, here are the basics:

  • The game continually changes, as players use Rule and Goal cards to modify every aspect of the game.
  • Rule cards can modify the number of cards drawn, number of cards played in a turn, overall hand size, and pretty much any other asp
  • Goal cards redefine the objectives needed to win.
  • Keepers are cards you keep in front of you. Most Goals involve getting a certain combination of Keepers in play to win. Examples from this game include “The Artificial Heart” and “The Cowardly Lion.”
  • Creepers (which are a type of card not in the original edition of Fluxx) are sort of negative Keepers, which get stuck in front of you and prevent you from winning … unless the Goal in play requires the Creeper as a condition of victory. Examples include “The Wicked Witch of the East” and “Angry Trees.”
  • Action cards allow other actions, such as drawing extra cards, getting cards out of the discard pile, stealing or trading Keepers and Creepers, and so on.
  • Surprise cards can be played either during your turn or on your opponents’ turn, to throw an even bigger wrench in your opponents’ expectations.

Probably the best way to get a feel for the game play is to watch this episode of Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop game on the YouTube channel Geek and Sundry, in which Wheaton and his friends play Star Fluxx. This edition of the game is based upon science fiction classics, most notably (and unofficially) Star Trek, although I believe there are some non-copyright-infringing shout-outs to Doctor Who and other classics as well.

But, back to Oz Fluxx …

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The Paris Fashion Week of Games, Spring Edition

The Paris Fashion Week of Games, Spring Edition

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Cyclades by AsmodeeYou know what happens tomorrow? Think hard.

That’s right! The Spring Auction at Games Plus here in Chicago — only the best auction in the entire country for dedicated game collectors of all stripes. I reported on the Fall Auction here, and confessed to a painful bout of auction fever at last year’s Spring Auction here.

I used to attend these as part of a constant quest for rare science fiction and fantasy collectibles — things like Judge’s Guilds epic Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Task Force Games’ colorful Swordquest, SSI’s wonderous Swords & Sorcery, and of course the most eagerly sought artifiact in Western Civilization, an intact copy of Barbarian Prince.

These days, my interests have changed. It’s not that I’m not constantly on the lookout for Barbarian Prince — who isn’t? — but I gradually realized that an obsession with older games was blinding me to the golden age of adventure gaming we’re living Right Now.

So my trip to Mount Prospect, Illinois tomorrow to take part in the auction will be with an open mind. And a lengthy list of recently-published games I’m seeking — including Cyclades by Asmodee, Mansions of Madness by Fantasy Flight, the second edition of Descent: Journeys in The Dark, Alien Frontiers from Clever Mojo Games, Mice and Mystics by Plaid Hat, Cosmic Patrol by Catalyst, and many others.

Wish me luck. I’ll report back here with all my treasures next week.

Sorry, Can You Repeat That?

Sorry, Can You Repeat That?

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PathLast week I talked about how Fantasy and SF writers deal with the idea that our characters aren’t speaking English, and I focused for the most part on primary world fantasies (by which I mean fantasies with an obvious connection to our world as we live in it) and on SF works of the near and far future.

I wanted to deal with secondary world fantasies separately, partly because that’s what I primarily write myself and partly because I think that use of language might be even more important here, where language becomes most clearly part of the world-building process. Think about it: you don’t have to be half Spanish and half Polish like me to know that how we express ourselves is all about our cultural backgrounds.

So whether we call them secondary world fantasies, heroic or epic fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery, it’s how our characters express themselves – and even how the narrative voice expresses itself – that gives our readers their primary entry into the worlds of our novels and stories. Language has to make these places strange enough that readers understand they’re dealing with a complex imaginary world, while at the same time making those worlds enjoyably accessible.

Some of the same tools we use when trying to add an element of strangeness or “Other” to the primary world (playing around with syntax, avoiding contractions) can make the jump to how we express language in secondary world fantasies as well – but there are some problems that might be unique to those complex imaginary worlds.  And therefore some tools that might be unique as well.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Trail of Fu Manchu, Part One

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Trail of Fu Manchu, Part One

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Trail ColliersTrail frontispieceSax Rohmer’s The Trail of Fu Manchu was originally serialized in Collier’s from April 28 to July 14, 1934. It was published in book form later that year by Cassell in the UK and Doubleday in the US. The book marked the first time Rohmer employed third person narrative in the series and dispensed with the first person narrative voice modeled on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. The results dilute what would otherwise have been a stronger novel that saw the series return to its roots.

The book gets off to an atmospheric start on a foggy night in London, where a lone constable is standing guard outside Professor Pietro Ambroso’s art studio. He catches a glimpse of a shambling figure approaching the studio several times, but the crouching man eludes capture. A woman’s cries for help send the constable away from his post to investigate, but he finds no one. When he returns to his post, he finds the front door to Professor Ambroso’s studio open and upon investigating finds the studio deserted.

The scene shifts to Scotland Yard, where Sir Denis Nayland Smith is in conference with Chief Inspector Gallaho, who succeeded Inspector Weymouth after the latter became Police Superintendant in Cairo. The reader is somewhat surprised to learn that Professor Ambroso is also the focus of their concern. The Professor has attained fame as an artist and sculptor. His latest work is The Sleeping Venus, a stunningly beautiful porcelain nude. Ambroso had requested police protection upon his arrival in London.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Taking the SAT? Montag to the Rescue!

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Taking the SAT? Montag to the Rescue!

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When I was my students’ age, the SAT had two sections, not three. The verbal section was heavy on analogies, which the College Board has long since purged from the test. They added an essay in 2005, which to me feels like last week, but to my students, that’s a time when their ages were in single digits.

Read too many SAT essay prompts in a row, and you begin to think your head will explode, even if you’re not taking the test yourself: Can success be a catastrophe? Which is the stronger motivator–conscience or the will to power? Has technology outpaced our ability to put it to good use? Do ends justify all means? What is the good? How shall we construct our civilization? How must we live? There’s a slight tendency toward the grandiose, which I quietly remedy by imagining Scarlett O’Hara working for the College Board on essay prompts–Where shall I go? What shall I do? All the real essay prompts are more entertaining in Scarlett O’Hara’s voice. My students, however, claim never to have heard of Scarlett O’Hara. Imagine being that young. Now imagine that you have 25 minutes to bluff your way through a response in five-paragraph essay form with specific examples, and that your parents have half-convinced you that your entire future depends on how you answer. Twenty-five minutes to put your civilization right, with unfailingly correct use of commas and with diction in the formal academic style.

One way to arrive at the starting line for that sprint is to have a handful of versatile works of literature in your head from which to draw examples. I’ve lost count of how many students I’ve worked with who found ways to use Macbeth, The Catcher in the Rye, and Fahrenheit 451 for every single practice essay, no matter what the prompt was about.

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