Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman
A lot has been said about Patty Jenkins’ movie Wonder Woman, pretty much all of it by people smarter and more qualified than I.
But given that I do a lot of comic books musing for Black Gate, and that I also reviewed Rogue One and Dr. Strange, I wanted to give Wonder Woman the attention it deserves.
Superhero movies are what they are.
On Thursday I was carefully stacking books in the vast subterranean treasure vault known locally as the Cave of Wonders (and which my wife calls, much more prosaically, our basement), when I found something unusual: a stack of unopened boxes. That’s a mystery worth investigating. I carted them back through winding tunnels and secret passageways until I reached our library, and pried them open with a crow bar.
Wonder of wonders! They were packed with vintage paperback and strange magazines. It’s like Christmas!
They were doubtless eBay booty that got hastily stashed in the basement because company was coming over five years ago, or something similar. Who knows. I have no recollection of them, so it’s like getting a surprise package from my former self. And, man. What great taste that guy has! There was an odd assortment of magic magazines from the early 1970s (chiefly The Linking Ring, which is packed with the most fabulous ads for trick cards, books, and neato magic books), a set of DAW volumes by Neal Barrett, Jr., and the collection of 80s Ace paperbacks by Patricia C. Wrede pictured above.
A new Mummy is in theaters this weekend from Universal. How is it? I’m not sure, since as of this writing I haven’t watched it yet, although I’ll attend a screening on the morning this posts. But one of my favorite movie critics, David Ehrlich, said of it: “It’s an irredeemable disaster from start to finish, an adventure that entertains only via glimpses of the adventure it should have been.” You know you’ve got problems when people start talking of their fond memories of the Brendan Fraser Mummy from the Summer of ‘99. (I have a genuine affection for that silly movie. The Jerry Goldsmith score is killer.)
If you want to know more about why plenty of folks who love the classic Universal Monsters are a bit, well, concerned about this new Tom Cruise-starring Mummy and the studio’s plans for an entire “Dark Universe” franchise, our own Sue Granquist has you covered. As for me, I have no plans to write a post about Nu-Mummy. Instead, I’m going to hang out here in the 1940s, maybe work on my victory garden, listen to some 78s of Artie Shaw and the Gramercy Five, purchase War Bonds, and watch a couple of mummy flicks.
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R.S. Belcher’s last novel, The Brotherhood of the Wheel, was selected as one of the best horror novels of the year by the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog. For his next novel, he returns to Golgotha, the Weird Western setting of The Six-Gun Tarot (which RT Book Reviews called “Fascinating… like a mashup of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Deadwood,”) and The Shotgun Arcana (“Golgotha is the wildest of the Wild West, attracting mystics, minor deities, alchemists, seers, and fanatics in a fantastical romp” — Publishers Weekly). It arrives in hardcover from Tor later this month.
1870. Maude Stapleton, late of Golgotha, Nevada, is a respectable widow raising a daughter on her own. Few know that Maude belongs to an ancient order of assassins, the Daughters of Lilith, and is as well the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Anne Bonney, the legendary female pirate.
Leaving Golgotha in search of her daughter Constance, who has been taken from her, Maude travels to Charleston, South Carolina, only to find herself caught in the middle of a secret war between the Daughters of Lilith and their ancestral enemies, the monstrous Sons of Typhon. To save Constance, whose prophetic gifts are sought by both cults, Maude must follow in the footsteps of Anne Bonney as she embarks on a perilous voyage that will ultimately lead her to a lost city of bones in the heart of Africa ― and the Father of All Monsters.
One of the most popular characters from The Six-Gun Tarot and The Shotgun Arcana ventures beyond Golgotha on a boldly imaginative, globe-spanning adventure of her own.
When you’re writing that first draft, standard advice is: Don’t go back to edit!
Make like Omar Khayyám:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Or if you prefer, Guderian:
Ticket to the last station.
Yes, the ideal first draft is a blitzkrieg: rampage onward with the story, ignore pockets of resistance, you can catch them on the second draft.
However, you are neither a medieval Persian ruminating on life, nor a Panzer general. For all we like to skin it with the aesthetic or the macho, writing is its own activity. The truth, so I’ve learned, is more complex.
Here at Black Gate we often have posts on films and TV shows as they connect with or pertain to our favorite genre(s). If we don’t talk as much (or at all) about live drama, it’s probably because there’s not as much SF or Fantasy happening on the stage as there is on the screen. I’d think we’d all agree that with a very few exceptions stage effects are simply not equal to the kind of special effects SF and Fantasy often need.
But if we don’t see our favourite novels and stories on the stage, we certainly do see the opposite: we see the stage in our novels and stories.
We’re all familiar with the “play within a play” concept since we had to read Hamlet in high school. After all, practically every Fred Astaire movie musical is about a musical production, and there can’t be anyone alive who doesn’t know that Singing in the Rain is about making a movie musical. But again, what I’m looking at here is play-within-the-story. We should note that if we follow in Shakespeare’s footsteps, the device has to have purpose. In Hamlet, the play was “the thing to catch the conscience of the king,” that is, it played an integral part of the plot. The same should be true if we see the device in a short story or novel.
Back in October I reported on the travesty that Universal Studios was perpetuating on its own iconic catalog of classic movie monster films. Though I was sincerely hoping the early rumors were not true, it has recently been confirmed that Universal is indeed committing this violent crime which they are entitling their “Dark Universe,” the umbrella under which it is planning at least five films including The Invisible Man (with Johnny Depp), Dr. Jekyll (Russell Crowe), Frankenstein’s Monster (Javier Bardem) and Bride of Frankenstein (not yet cast but Angelina Jolie is rumored).
So what’s the problem you ask?
These films have already been remade multiple times, you say.
True enough.
I love adventure science fiction, but I’m a little shy of all these open ended series. I want to fall in love with a series, sure… but do I want to fall for a publishing endeavor with an uncertain future, one that could easily be derailed by an author illness, a fickle market, publishing setbacks or other unexpected tragedy? Who needs that anxiety and potential heartache? Not me; I have three teenagers.
Which leaves me in a bit of a quandary, since most of the adventure SF I like tends to be part of series. But there are a few completed story arcs, out there — not many, but a few. Successful series that have wrapped up with a beginning, middle, and an end. And one of those is Ann Aquirre’s 6-volume Sirantha Jax cycle, a far-ranging space opera in a well-realized universe that left fans happy with a satisfying concluding volume.
My friend Sharon Shinn was one of the first to alert me to these books, with her review of the opening volume Grimspace: “Sirantha Jax doesn’t just leap off the page — she storms out, kicking, cursing, and mouthing off. No wonder her pilot falls in love with her; readers will too.”
The May/June F&SF features the second appearance of Matthew Hughes’s new series character Baldemar, in the issue’s cover story “The Prognosticant.” Matt had an interview with Stephen Mazur on the Fantasy & Science Fiction blog in which he discusses the series.
It’s a continuation of the career of young Baldemar, who was introduced in the last issue in “Ten Half-Pennies” as a budding wizard’s henchman working for a thaumaturge who calls himself Thelerion the Incomparable (though his fellow wizards would likely change that to “Incompetent”).
In “The Prognosticant,” Baldemar and his supervisor, Oldo, are sent out to a ruined ancient city in the desert to bring back a magical object known as the Helm of Sagacity. But the Helm, it turns out, is not just an object: it’s an entity, and a powerful one. And it has its own agenda…
I’m writing the life of a character in a Jack Vance-inspired, Dying Earth fantasy world. Like most of my characters, Baldemar is an outlier, as becomes evident as he deals with what the world hands him. He’s not your average henchman.
The cover is by Maurizio Manzieri. The issue also includes fiction by Richard Bowes, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Leah Cypess, Shannon Connor Winward, and others.
Victoria Silverwolf has a fine review of the issue at Tangent Online, with particular praise for the stories by Brian Trent, Kelly Jennings, Zach Shepard, and R. S. Benedict. Here’s a snippet.
Now here’s an interesting idea — a collection of horror stories showcasing the work of a single publisher.
How appealing is that? Depends on the publisher. In the case of Valancourt Books, an independent small press specializing in the rediscovery of rare, neglected, and out-of-print Gothic, Romantic and Horror fiction, it’s very appealing indeed. Here’s a snippet from the Editor’s Forward to give you a taste.
Since 2005, Valancourt Books has made available almost 40 neglected classics by dozens of authors, most of them out of print for decades, sometimes even for a century or two. Our catalogue includes Gothic novels from the late 1700s and early 1800s, Victorian ‘penny dreadfuls’ and ‘sensation’ novels, vintage mystery and horror fiction from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, rediscovered gay interest fiction from the mid-20th century, and more recent horror and science fiction from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. The idea behind this anthology was, “What if we distilled the best of each part of our catalogue into a single volume? What would a horror anthology spanning two centuries, and featuring only Valancourt authors, look like?”
This book has something for fans of each section of our catalogue. Those who have enjoyed our Gothic Classics series will surely find Matthew Gregory Lewis’s rare ghost story in verse, “The Grim White Woman,” to their liking. If, like us, you love a good, old-fashioned Victorian horror story, you’ll relish the creepy tales we’ve included by authors hugely popular in the day but now little known, like Florence Marryat, Richard Marsh and Mary Cholmondeley. Readers who have appreciated our efforts to rediscover lost gay fiction will be pleased to find contributions from authors such as Forrest Reid, Hugh Walpole and Francis King in this volume. Of course, no horror anthology would be complete without stories from some of the great contemporary masters of horror like Michael McDowell, Bernard Taylor and Stephen Gregory. But perhaps the biggest surprise for some readers will be the excellent tales by writers not normally thought of as “horror authors,” like Christopher Priest, Michael Blumlein and Francis King.
Here’s the complete Table of Contents.