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Month: August 2014

Writing a Fantasy Series

Writing a Fantasy Series

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Shadows Son Jon Sprunk-smallThe fantasy genre loves series (especially trilogies.) As a fantasy reader, I love them, too.

However, my first published novel, Shadow’s Son, was originally written as a stand-alone. I suppose I had an idea that publishers would be more inclined to take a chance on a single book from an unknown writer, so I was shocked when my agent came back with a deal for a three-book series that would become the Shadow Saga. I’m not ashamed to admit I was also a wee bit terrified.

How in the seven hells was I going to write a trilogy? I had never written anything longer than a single book before.

And each of the sequels has a contractually-agreed deadline? AND they want outlines for books two and three right away? Gulp.

Despite my trepidations, the adventure of reaching out into unknown territory was also thrilling, so I dove in head-first. What was the big deal, right? Writing a series is probably just like writing three separate books, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no.

My personal philosophy is that every novel must contain a complete story. That means my books each have their own plot that begins and ends within those pages. However, with a series there is also a series arc in play, another plot (super plot?) that starts in the first book and continues to develop through each subsequent novel to the very end.

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My Fantasia Festival, Day 11 (part 2): To Be Takei and The Creeping Garden

My Fantasia Festival, Day 11 (part 2): To Be Takei and The Creeping Garden

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To Be TakeiI saw two movies in the late afternoon and evening of the Sunday before last (the 27th). Both were documentaries. You’d think that the first one would have had the more obvious science-fiction content, being a biography of an actor who rose to fame playing a character on perhaps the best-known science-fiction TV show of all time — while the second film was an in-depth examination of what sounds like the most mundane substance in the world. This did not turn out to be the case. The old saying about truth, fiction, and strangeness applies.

At 5:20 I saw To Be Takei in a packed, and fairly raucous, De Sève Theatre. It’s much as it sounds: the story of George Takei, the original Star Trek’s Mister Sulu. But Trek is only a part of his life and of the movie, which ranges from Takei’s childhood in a World War Two internment camp to his experience as a gay man growing up and forming a career to his later political experiences to his current status as a social media celebrity.

Then at 9:45, I saw the world premiere of The Creeping Garden, a documentary about slime mould. Which, it turns out, is a deeply strange thing, not plant nor animal nor fungi, a creature that occasionally demonstrates something a lot like intelligence. There’s an almost Lovecraftian air to the movie, which ends up exploring odd byways of cinema history, art projects, and ‘alternative computing.’ There’s cutting-edge science in this documentary, if not actual mad scientists.

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Norman and Pagan Traces near Oxford

Norman and Pagan Traces near Oxford

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Iffley Church from the southwest, showing hte main west entrance. The yew is to the right.
Iffley Church from the southwest, showing the main west entrance. The yew is to the right.

Oxford is a popular destination in England thanks to its famous university and fine architecture, which includes a rare Saxon tower. What’s less well-known is the pleasant stroll along the River Isis two miles down to Iffley village. The walk will take you past the university boathouses, a pasture, an excellent pub, and some fine river views. Just past the pub, you’ll come across a lock and bridge taking you to a small village that contains one of the best-preserved Norman churches anywhere.

St. Mary’s Iffley Church was built c.1170-80 in the High Romanesque style. Early in its history, ownership passed from the local lord to an absentee lord. This distant owner continued to maintain the church, but did little to “improve” it, thus leaving it in much its original state.

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The Scorpion Revealed: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Twelve: Captain Marvel’s Secret

The Scorpion Revealed: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Twelve: Captain Marvel’s Secret

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The Adventures of Captain Marvel tom_tyler-smallHurry up and get in here! Be careful you don’t trip walking down the aisle — the lights have already gone down and they’ll be ready to start any minute. You’re late, but still in luck, because there’s one last seat left, over there on the right — see it? Now that we’re all in our places with bright shining faces, we’re ready for our story’s finale. Sit tight because here it comes — The Adventures of Captain Marvel, last chapter: “Captain Marvel’s Secret.”

Three title cards semi-coherently sum up last week’s action. “Captain Marvel — Rescues the Malcolm Expedition from a trap set by the Scorpion.” “Billy Batson — Refuses to enter the tomb to get Dr. Lang’s lens.” “Rahman Bar — Plans to arouse the natives against the expedition.” And now, for the final time, let’s shout together the mystic syllables that will bring down the magic lightning bolt and transform you into one of the greatest of all superheroes, Captain Marvel — Shazam!

Returning to the conclusion of last week’s chapter, Malcolm and Bentley, having recovered the hidden lens, stand outside the tomb chamber where Betty and Whitey are trapped, while Billy and Tal Chotali dither outside the tomb itself. The whole place is being shaken to pieces due to the eruption of the volcanic mountain Scorpio. “Scorpio is angry because unbelievers have entered the tomb,” Tal Chotali tells Billy. Actually, we know that Rahman Bar has caused the eruption by diverting a river into the crater, which, as everyone knows, acts as a volcano emetic.

As the shaking increases in intensity, Billy tries to run into the tomb to help his friends inside, but is held back by Tal Chotali. Everyone in the tomb — Malcolm, Bentley, Betty, Whitey — is doomed, hopelessly doomed!

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New Treasures: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection

New Treasures: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection

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The Year's Best Science Fiction 31-smallIt’s that time of year again. I’ve been reporting here on the annual crop of Year’s Best SF and Fantasy anthologies as they’ve arrived over the summer — including Rich Horton’s sixth (published in June), the eighth volume from Jonathan Strahan (May), and David Hartwell’s eighteenth volume (December 2013).

And now at last the great granddaddy of them all arrives: Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection. Arguably the most essential of the lot, it is certainly the most comprehensive and the most irreplaceable. Gardner, the Hugo Award-winning editor of Asimov’s SF for two decades, has been compiling and editing this volume every year without fail since 1984, and his richly detailed annual summation is required reading for anyone who expects to really understand science fiction.

In the new millennium, what secrets lay beyond the far reaches of the universe? What mysteries belie the truths we once held to be self evident? The world of science fiction has long been a porthole into the realities of tomorrow, blurring the line between life and art. Now, in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection the very best SF authors explore ideas of a new world in the year’s best short stories.

This venerable collection brings together award winning authors and masters of the field such as Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Damien Broderick, Elizabeth Bear, Paul McAuley and John Barnes. And with an extensive recommended reading guide and a summation of the year in science fiction, this annual compilation has become the definitive must-read anthology for all science fiction fans and readers interested in breaking into the genre.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection was published by St. Martin’s Press on July 15. It is 750 pages, priced at $40 in hardcover, $22.99 in trade paperback, and $10.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Jim Burns.

My Fantasia Festival, Day 11 (part 1): Hal and Giovanni’s Island

My Fantasia Festival, Day 11 (part 1): Hal and Giovanni’s Island

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HalThere are a couple of things I’ve noticed in my Fantastia experience so far which I haven’t yet mentioned. The first is the general friendliness of people: the ease I’ve had in getting into conversations while in line for a film, or in the theatre waiting for a movie to start. I’ve met other writers, a programming director for a Mexican horror film festival (check it out), and, on the Sunday before last (July 27), a DJ with Concordia University’s radio station, CJLO.

Fantasia’s hosted on Concordia’s downtown campus, and DJ Saturn de Los Angeles is one of a number of CJLO DJs who play music before the start of films in the Hall Theater, while the audience is filing in and finding their seats. And this is the other element of the festival I’ve not yet written about, the pre-film music. As selected by the DJs up at the back of the Hall to fit with the movie about to play, it sets the tone and prepares you for what you’re about to watch. I’ve found the selections appropriate and inventive, adding a little extra style to the Fantasia experience. The music raises your excitement level just a bit, like hearing the pre-show music at a rock concert. You know something’s coming, and when the music stops, your attention focuses on the screen that much more.

Saturn plays Japanese pop and indie rock in their weekly show, so it’s appropriate I met them before the first of two anime films I’d see on the day. We were waiting for the North American premiere of Hal, a character-oriented science-fiction anime that’d be preceded by a short film called Sonny Boy and Dewdrop Girl. After Hal, which was shown in the mid-sized D.B. Clarke Theater, I’d head upstairs to the Hall to see the Canadian premiere of another anime, Giovanni’s Island. I’d then go on to see two more films that Sunday, both documentaries (and coincidentally met more CJLO folks in line at the later one), but I’ll be discussing those in another post. Here, I want to consider the two animated films.

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The Series Series: Sword of the Bright Lady by M.C. Planck

The Series Series: Sword of the Bright Lady by M.C. Planck

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sword-of-the-bright-lady-mc-planck-smallIf you liked Eric Flint’s 1634 books, if you liked The Chronicles of Narnia, if you liked… Well let’s just start with those two, because Sword of the Bright Lady deals in surprising juxtapositions of familiar tropes.

At times I wondered whether it dealt in anything deeper. I’ve concluded that it does. This is a fun book and it feels like it was fun to write. The author’s acknowledgments note that it took three months to write and ten years to revise. Am I churlish to wish the revision had gone one step further?

What works here works beautifully. Less than a day after I finished reading, I had to go back and prove to myself that the narration was in the third person, because I remembered Christopher’s adventures with first-person clarity, as if they had happened to me.

Christopher went out to walk his dogs one Arizona night and woke up in the snowy hinterlands of another world. His rescuers, an earthy old churchman and his orphaned servant girl, nurse him back to health, though they have no common language with him. When he’s well enough to pick up some of the household work, he tries practicing kata from his martial arts practice back home. Before he knows it, he’s challenged to a duel by a local nobleman, blessed by a language spell that allows him to understand exactly how much danger he’s in, and claimed by the local war god.

At first, Christopher insists that he’s an everyman, not famous back home nor expected to be famous by anyone who knew him there. But as he begins to see how he can help the people who have saved him, he accepts the identity the villagers thrust on him: “Crazy Pater Christopher, who never means what everyone else means.” He sets about industrializing his feudal neighbors — who all have lively personalities and complex lives — preparing them for the spring’s military campaign, because the war god Marcius has promised to return Christopher home to his beloved wife… um… what was her name again?

And that brings us to a sticking point I have to talk about. It’s not that M.C. Planck has done anything uncommonly wrong here, but rather that he’s fallen into a classic blunder that I see committed all over the place, but that nobody seems to talk about.

Let’s call it the Precious Ming Vase Problem.

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Film Review: Guardians of the Galaxy is Space Opera at its Best

Film Review: Guardians of the Galaxy is Space Opera at its Best

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guardians of the galaxyI somehow missed the Guardians of the Galaxy comics when I was growing up, but I was steeped in that whole “milieu” — ragtag crews of strange and quirky characters of mixed planets of origin on interstellar quests and cosmic adventures, from Star Wars to Atari Force. On the fantasy side, you had ragtag crews of strange and quirky characters of mixed realms of origin on mystical quests and quasi-medieval adventures. Collectively, that pretty much sums up my pop-cultural background during those formative years in the late ‘70s and ‘80s.

That stuff was put down as escapism, then and now.

And, yep, it was.

When life got crappy, disappointing, or just boring, there was always the promise of derring-do on Barsoom, which we could pine for along with John Carter staring wistfully at the red beacon of Mars. The next wardrobe could be a gateway to Narnia, but in the meantime we could roll up characters and get down to an all-night session of Dungeons and Dragons with friends who had imaginations similarly primed for a little bit of escape. Safer than drugs, anyway.

Guardians of the Galaxy, the new Marvel/Disney film from director and co-writer James Gunn, is a love letter to us — to anyone who grew up with that wild-eyed longing to escape into other worlds, to spend some time with characters who were larger than life and carried the fate of worlds on their shoulders (and yet could still crack a good joke about it all), to boldly go where no man had gone before and discover that, once there, you had to fight a dragon-headed man to win the affections of the green lady. Or whatever. This movie was made for us by people who obviously are “one of us.” Gooble gobble we accept you…

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Take Advantage of a 40% Off Sale at Haffner Press

Take Advantage of a 40% Off Sale at Haffner Press

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Haffner Press Sale

Haffner Press, as we’ve mentioned once or twice before, produces top-notch archival press hardcovers collecting hard-to-find work by some of the most acclaimed writers in the genre, including Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, and many more. On Sunday, Stephen Haffner, Grand Poopah at Haffner Press, announced a sale on several of his most popular titles.

This is an unusual occurrence. In fact, in all the years I’ve been collecting Haffner Press books, I’ve never seen them conduct a sale. If you’re interested in adding a few Haffner volumes to your collection, now is definitely the time! The books on sale — including Tales From Super-Science Fiction, edited by Robert Silverberg, Leigh Brackett’s Shannach – The Last: Farewell to Mars, Henry Kuttner’s Thunder in the Void, the massive Detour to Otherness, and the four others shown above — are all 40% off.

To get the discount, you must order at least four books. But hurry — the sale runs only three days and expires on August 6th. Get complete details at the Haffner Press website.

My Fantasia Festival, Day 10: Once Upon a Time in Shanghai and Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

My Fantasia Festival, Day 10: Once Upon a Time in Shanghai and Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

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Once Upon a Time in ShanghaiI’m going to do something a little different in this instalment of my diary of the Fantasia film festival: I’m going to write about two movies in the reverse order from which I saw them. I watched both on Saturday, July 26, and it so happened that the second one struck me as a perfectly fine movie of the sort of movie that it was, while the first seemed a little bit more.

The second movie was the Canadian premiere of Once Upon a Time in Shanghai (original title: E Zhan), a martial-arts film set in 1930, featuring warring gangsters, a humble youth from the countryside, and sinister Japanese agents trying to gain control of the Shanghai underworld. It was directed by Wong Ching-Po, written by Wong Jing, boasted fight choreography by Yuen Wo-Ping, and starred Philip Ng as the heroic rustic Ma Yongzhen, Andy On as a charismatic gangster alternately Ma’s enemy and friend, and veteran actor Sammo Hung in a major supporting role as Ma’s mentor. The first movie was an animated musical from France called Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (Jack et la mécanique du coeur), co-directed by Mathias Malzieu and Stéphane Berla; Malzieu also wrote the film and performed the voice of the main character. It’s not a perfect movie, but it had a blend of style and imagination I found quite powerful.

But let’s start with Shanghai (a remake of 1972’s Boxer From Shantung [Ma Yong Zhen]). As I said, it’s a perfectly fine movie that does just what it says on the tin: provides for lots of distinctive martial-arts fight scenes against a 1930s period setting, with a distinct patriotic subtext — even the gangsters are opposed to the Japanese or Westerners controlling Shanghai or China. A broad mix of action, comedy, and melodrama, it played in the big Hall Theater and the audience cheered the fights and laughed when they were supposed to and generally had a good time.

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