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Month: May 2014

Ancient Worlds: The Real Housewives of Mount Olympus

Ancient Worlds: The Real Housewives of Mount Olympus

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K4_8Hera-smallAfter the invocation of the Muse of Love that I discussed two weeks ago, the Argonautica launches into what is, quite honestly, one of my favorite scenes in all of ancient literature.

Apollonius gives us a conference among the gods to discuss our heroes’ fates. Homer has done the same on multiple occasions, but here, the conference is between two of Olympus’s leading goddesses, Hera and Athena.

Much as in the Odyssey, Athena is here fulfilling her role as the tutor of young heroes. She supports Jason in his quest much as she did (will) Odysseus. Hera also now stakes her interest in the outcome of the Argonaut’s quest: She really doesn’t like Pelias and wants to see him destroyed.

Together they decide that the best way for everyone to get what they want out of this is for Medea, the daughter of Aeetes, to fall in love with Jason. Not a little schoolgirl crush, either. No, this has to be a big whammy of a love, so much so that she is willing to betray her father and her people in order to assist Jason in his quest .

There’s just one problem: Athena’s a virgin and Hera is married. They know nothing about falling in love.

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Little Blue Squares

Little Blue Squares

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zenopus-smallAs a kid, Dungeons & Dragons introduced me to a lot of things, from fantasy books and authors I might otherwise not have encountered to obscure medieval weapons (like the voulge-guisarme) to equally obscure vocabulary (such as dweomer or weal). Reading my D&D books and modules was literally an educational experience and I am not ashamed to admit that many of my adult interests have their origins in things I first discovered through the game.

D&D also introduced me to the idea of using graph paper to make dungeon maps. Pictured to the left is the first dungeon map I ever saw (unless one counts the board to Dungeon!, which I don’t). The map appeared near the end of the blue rulebook included in my Basic Set and depicts one level beneath the ruined tower of the sorcerer Zenopus. As you can see, the map includes a square grid, with each square representing a 10 × 10 area, as was traditional in all the TSR Hobbies versions of the game. My Basic Set also included an adventure module, In Search of the Unknown, about which I talked before and its two-level dungeon exercised an equally strong influence over my young imagination.

I was, of course, familiar with graph paper, having used it in school during math classes, but I’d never seen it used for any other purpose. Consequently, I was a bit surprised to discover that D&D players bought it in large quantities, both referees in creating their own dungeons and players to keep track of their characters’ explorations of said labyrinths, lest they become lost and unable to find their way out again. I may have thought it odd at first, but I dutifully paid a visit to the local office supply store and bought myself a pad of paper so that I could get down to the business of laying out subterranean mazes of peril to inflict on my friends (or their characters at any rate).

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Godzilla (2014) Is a True Godzilla Film and a Unique Blockbuster

Godzilla (2014) Is a True Godzilla Film and a Unique Blockbuster

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IMAX-poster-for-Godzilla-smallNew to Godzilla? Read my 5-part history series.

To all of those who saw the new Godzilla this last weekend who have never before fully understood the obsession fans have for this monster … now you will get it. Welcome to our weird world!

Godzilla isn’t just a massive monster that stomps stuff, confronts the military, and grapples with other monsters. Any giant beast can do that without much thought put into it. Godzilla is a character and a legacy. Even when playing the straight-up villain in films like 1964’s Mothra vs. Godzilla, the Big G is beyond larger than life and something you cannot help but gape at in awe and then salute. What a piece of work is a giant radioactive reptile! In apprehension how like a god(zilla)!

Director Gareth Edwards’s 2014 take on Godzilla, only the second film from a U.S. studio featuring the monster (or, if you ask most fans, the first), is a genuine Godzilla movie. Edwards’s creature isn’t the greatest incarnation to grace the silver screen, something I’m sure he would admit, as nothing could re-capture the cultural magic and hands-on effects work of director Ishiro Honda and special effects creator Eiji Tsubaraya from the classic series. But the Edwards Godzilla is a legitimate and superb version that achieves the gravity of the 1954 orignal Godzilla and the thrilling monster-vs.-monster mayhem of the films that followed it through three eras and six decades. For Godzilla fans, this movie contains the sheer ecstasy of a dream realized that brings spontaneous cheers, gasps of admiration, and watery-eyed moments of recognition. I could not imagine a better way to craft a U.S.-made Godzilla film, and it is to the immense credit of Edwards and everyone involved that, until now, I could not have foreseen how such a feat was even possible.

Even for those with scant knowledge of the great monster except what comes from the pop culture mill, Godzilla ‘14 is as an unusual Hollywood blockbuster. Gareth Edwards and Co. crafted a movie that stands apart from the stateside summer thrill machines as much as the Japanese films of 1960s did from their U.S. counterparts. Godzilla plays at the slow build, purposely restraining the sprawling spectacle until unleashing the finale. During the first two thirds, the suspense centers around scenes where the monsters remain glimpsed, their masses emphasized to drive the action without making them the centerpieces. Godzilla doesn’t receive a full reveal until an hour in, and the movie immediately leaps away after the unveiling. Instead of signaling the opening of the mayhem, the moment switches into the next step of the gradual climb to the plateau. Where many blockbusters pummel audiences with as much noise and pixels as they can afford until viewers feel only numbness for the finale, Godzilla wants to make them breathless in anticipation for the climax so that when it arrives, it means something.

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One of the Best Serials Ever Made: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter One: Curse of the Scorpion

One of the Best Serials Ever Made: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter One: Curse of the Scorpion

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Adventures of Captain Marvel poster-smallPop quiz. Who was the first superhero to make it into film?

Yes — you in the back…what? Spawn?! Sit down! Okay… you there, in the Marvel Zombie tee-shirt… no, it was not Wolverine, though there may never be another superhero movie made without him. Yes, I see you… Superman? Good guess, but nope. Batman? Warmer, but still no.

The first superhero to make it into the movies was Captain Marvel (or as his four-color arch-nemesis, Dr. Thaddeus Bodog Sivana, contemptuously dubbed him, “That Big Red Cheese”), in the 1941 serial, The Adventures of Captain Marvel.

Captain Marvel and his alter ego, young radio reporter Billy Batson, made their first appearance in Fawcett’s Whiz Comics #2, in February of 1940. The character, the creation of writer Bill Parker and artist C.C. Beck, quickly became extremely popular, and for the remainder of the 1940’s, comics featuring him and the other members of the “Marvel Family” often outsold those featuring Superman.

National Periodical Publications (commonly known to comics fans as DC) tried to nip the rivalry in the bud by suing Captain Marvel out of existence in a legal wrangle that wouldn’t be decisively resolved until 1954. Well before that, though, Republic Pictures hopped on the bandwagon with The Adventures of Captain Marvel, a twelve-chapter serial that aficionados of the form regard as one of the best ever made.

The serial was directed by John English and William Whitney and written by the team of Ronald Davidson, Norman Hall, Arch Heath, Joseph Poland, and Sol Shor. They all keep the pot bubbling with action, peril, suspense, red herrings, and the crackling, popping energy that seems to be a unique feature of the best cliffhanger serials.

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D&D Announces A Tyranny of Dragons

D&D Announces A Tyranny of Dragons

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D&D Next core books-smallSetting the stage for the release of the newest set of Dungeons & Dragons rules, Wizards of the Coast today announced that August 2014 would mark the start of their Tyranny of Dragons campaign. In addition to the core manuals for the Dungeons & Dragons game system, the campaign will feature adventures within the Dungeons & Dragons setting, both in printed books for tabletop play and also as a new game module released for their Neverwinter game. The adventure begins on August 14 and winds its way through a number of key releases that are looking to modernize the game.

The D&D Player’s Handbook is slated for release on August 19, 2014. The revised D&D Monster Manual will be available in September. The D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide releases on November 18, 2014. All three books will have a retail price of $49.95 ($57 Canadian).

Tabletop fans will be able to join in on the Tyranny of Dragons adventuring action (also released on Aug. 19) with the adventure supplement Hoard of the Dragon Queen, for $29.95 ($35 Canadian):

In an audacious bid for power the Cult of the Dragon, along with its dragon allies and the Red Wizards of Thay, seek to bring Tiamat from her prison in the Nine Hells to Faerun. To this end, they are sweeping from town to town, laying waste to all those who oppose them and gathering a hoard of riches for their dread queen. The threat of annihilation has become so dire that groups as disparate as the Harpers and Zhentarim are banding together in the fight against the cult. Never before has the need for heroes been so desperate.

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Loaded!

Loaded!

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dice Of all the mysteries and temptations packed inside that wondrous cardboard sarcophagus known as the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, none was more hypnotic than that lumpy, ill-made set of five polyhedron dice.

Six-sided diced I knew, of course, but twelve? Eight? To say nothing of that canary-yellow four-sider. How did one even use it? What seemed perfectly obvious by the age of thirteen was a serious stumper at twelve.

And then there was the twenty-sider, a multi-faceted orb the color of sun-bleached PVC pipe (and not all pink, like the one depicted here), its numerical sequence uselessly repeated, 1-10, 1-10. Or, depending on how one read it, 0-9. Either way, how did it function as a twenty?

I believe it was a friend, and not the Basic Set rules, that told me how to solve this twenty-sided conundrum. “Color the die,” that was the advice I got. So I chose red — red for blood, I suppose — and I swiped my mother’s biggest, fattest felt-tip El Marko, and I colored that die, carefully, thoroughly, beginning with the zero that happened to be facing the top at the time. Voila! My first twenty-sided die.

My choice of which side to color proved unexpectedly fortuitous. My die, you see, was loaded.

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New Treasures: Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg

New Treasures: Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg

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Motherless Child Glen Hirshberg-smallIf you used to enjoy vampire novels, but have become increasingly disgruntled by the crushing weight of vampire-lover, vampire-teammate, and vampire-sidekick novels in the Urban Fantasy section of your local bookstore, then I think I have just the book for you. Glen Hirshberg, author of American Morons and The Two Sams, knows how to spin a creepy tale, and Motherless Child looks like his creepiest yet.

In the American South, the heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll beats hard and strong in honky-tonks and roadside bars, and “trailer trash” doesn’t begin to reflect the strength of the women who live in those thin-walled “mobile” homes. Sophie and Natalie are young mothers, barely out of their teens, each raising a toddler. Their daily lives are full of dull routine, so they are thrilled to discover a mysterious musician, “the Whistler,” performing at a dive bar near Charlotte.

What happens next is beyond their wildest dreams… at least they think it is, because when they wake up in the morning, their memories are hazy, their clothes are shredded, and they’re covered in dried blood.

They’re also no longer human.

Sophie and Natalie flee: from their children; from Natalie’s mom, who vows to protect the babies but can’t stop worrying about her daughter; from the Whistler and his eerie Mother. But the women’s wild ride through the heart of the South can’t stop them from changing, can’t hide them from their Destinies. The Whistler is on their trail, as bound to them as they are to him, driven by a passion so intense it threatens to unhinge him.

The final confrontation is unavoidable and unpredictable. Motherless Child is a moving and eloquent tale of the depth and breadth of motherly love, and how that love can heal and hurt, save and destroy, sometimes all at the same time. It’s a stellar work by a great American writer. It’s also scary as s–t.

Motherless Child was published on May 13 by Tor Books. It is 269 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $11.99 for the digital edition. See all of our recent New Treasures here.

The Series Series: Cursed by S.J. Harper

The Series Series: Cursed by S.J. Harper

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Cursed S.J. Harper-smallOnce in a while, I check in with the paranormal romance subgenre. Most times, I conclude I’m the wrong reader and move on. What makes the check-in worthwhile is that there are books out there like Laura Anne Gilman’s Heart of Briar (which I reviewed here), books that use the conventions of paranormal romance to do something surprising, something stranger or more complex than the usual spectacle of exogamy-as-extreme-sport.

Cursed, the first volume in S.J. Harper’s Fallen Siren series, promises a bit more strangeness and depth than the average paranormal romance does. Harper’s heroine is a Siren, and it turns out there’s more to the Sirens’ myth than we all remember from reading Homer in high school. According to several actual ancient sources, the Sirens were Persephone’s companions and for their failure to save Persephone from Hades, Demeter cursed them. The Ancient Greek and Roman versions of the story disagree about the precise nature of the curse, which is just the sort of wiggle room modern writers love.

Since S. J. Harper is the pen name for a team of established romance writers, their version of the Sirens’ curse is that, until the Sirens have rescued enough innocents from abduction to satisfy Demeter for the loss of her daughter, they cannot die no matter what they suffer and they can never know love without losing the beloved. Losing in the worst possible ways. Harper’s interpretation of Demeter is the winter goddess of the barren Earth, all wrath and vengeance. As when the mythic Demeter would have allowed all humanity to starve while she went on strike, this Demeter has no qualms about destroying innocent men to torment the fallen goddesses who love them.

Do you sense that it’s a problem when the villainous dea ex machina in reverse is more interesting than the protagonists who get most of the time on stage? Yes, that would be the mismatch between book and reader showing. Or it might be an actual weakness of the book, but I don’t have the right readerly dopamine receptors to get romance novels, so I can’t be sure how its merits would look to a reader who does.

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An Age of Alternate Worlds Where Vampires and Zombies Prowl: Salman Rushdie on Fantasy

An Age of Alternate Worlds Where Vampires and Zombies Prowl: Salman Rushdie on Fantasy

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One Hundred Year of Solitude-smallI was reading Salman Rushdie’s cover article in the Sunday issue of The New York Times Book Review yesterday when I stumbled on a fascinating quote.

Rushdie’s article, “Magic in Service of Truth,” isn’t really about fantasy — not directly, anyway. It’s a tribute to the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, and especially the setting of his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Márquez, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, died on April 17th, and Rushdie’s article is a thoughtful look back at the career of the man whom the President of Colombia recently called “the greatest Colombian who ever lived.”

But Rushdie’s article is fascinating for other reasons as well. He is one of the most respected writers of the 21st Century — indeed, for several months after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, and the fatwā issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, he was perhaps the most famous author on the planet — and in the midst of his tribute to Márquez, he casually admits we are living in a literary Age of Fantasy.

We live in an age of invented, alternate worlds. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Rowling’s Hogwarts, the dystopic universe of The Hunger Games, the places where vampires and zombies prowl: These places are having their day. Yet in spite of the vogue for fantasy fiction, in the finest of literature’s fictional microcosms there is more truth than fantasy. In William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi and, yes, the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez, imagination is used to enrich reality, not to escape from it.

Rushdie has written a fantasy or two of his own, including his first novel Grimus (1975) and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). He was knighted in 2007.

I read the article in in the newsprint edition, but you can read it online here.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock (Doctor) Who?

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock (Doctor) Who?

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Baker_PipeThe BBC recently held a ‘Best of Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Poll’ and Tom Baker came out number one. This is a bit surprising, as he roamed in the Tardis from 1974 to 1981, which was over three decades ago. And less relevant but still of note is that the Doctor never really broke big in America until David Tenant took on the role.

Baker_Moore
Roger Moore starred in the TV movie Sherlock Holmes in New York. It’s not quite as bad as it might appear, though John Huston was woefully miscast as Moriarty.

After Baker gave the Doctor up for regeneration, the BBC approached him and asked what project he would like to do next with his popularity still soaring. Baker immediately replied, “Sherlock Holmes,” and traded his scarf for a deerstalker.

With England’s most iconic actor (sorry, Roger Moore) to play England’s most iconic character (sorry, James Bond), only the biggest Holmes story would do. Though that’s not the smartest choice to showcase Holmes.

The BBC hadn’t tackled The Hound of the Baskervilles since Peter Cushing’s second attempt at it for his 1968 television series (a role he secured after failed attempts to land Robert Stephens and Eric Porter). There had been an American TV version in 1972 starring a dull Stewart Granger with Bernard Fox as yet another doofus Watson who mumbled his lines.

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