Browsed by
Author: Matthew David Surridge

Ruminations on Ice and Fire

Ruminations on Ice and Fire

Comments 3 comments

A Dance With DragonsI recently had the chance to review George R.R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons for my hometown newspaper, The Montreal Gazette. Looking at both the new volume and the previous four installments in his Song of Ice and Fire series, I found myself wondering what it is that makes the books work so well both with critics and a mass audience.

A Dance With Dragons reached the top of the best-seller lists in its first week of release, and had the highest first-day sales of any fiction book this year. The initial wave of reviews were widely positive, with glowing praise from Jeff VanderMeer and Lev Grossman among others (I liked it, too). There have been some dissenting opinions, though, one example of which is Theo’s post from earlier today. Oddly, it seems many of the people most disenchanted with the book have been (some) long-standing fans.

Perhaps it’s not so odd. It’s been six years since the last book in the series came out, and another five years since the book before that. Because of the way Martin structured these books, that means fans have been waiting to read about some of their favourite characters for eleven years. That’s quite a while; longer than the gap between the cancellation of the original Star Trek TV series and the premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, for example. Expectations had to have been running high. But this only brings me back to what I was wondering before: why have people been waiting so fervently for the book?

…

Read More Read More

The Asgardian Adventures of Zelenetz and Vess: The Raven Banner and The Warriors Three Saga

The Asgardian Adventures of Zelenetz and Vess: The Raven Banner and The Warriors Three Saga

Comments 3 comments

The Raven BannerMarvel Comics has published some great works over the nearly fifty years since the company took its modern form with Fantastic Four #1. One thinks of the suberb superhero comics of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, but there’s a lot more than that in Marvel’s vaults. William Patrick Maynard’s done some strong work on this web site looking back at some excellent series, and I encourage everyone to take a look at his current posts on Tomb of Dracula, perhaps my own favourite Marvel book of the last forty years.

You can find Tomb of Dracula, like most Marvel books, in several reprint collections. But at least one of the best things ever published by Marvel isn’t currently available in any form. First printed in 1985, as part of Marvel’s early “Graphic Novel” line — actually a series of softcover graphic albums, about sixty pages each — The Raven Banner, written by Alan Zelenetz, with art, colouring, and design by Charles Vess, is a brilliant work of fantasy. The book unites a strong sense of myth, a deft touch in plotting, and highly impressive visuals to tell “A Tale of Asgard” (as its subtitle proclaims); and a powerful tale it is, filled with wonder and sorrow.

The Raven Banner is the story of Greyval Grimson, heir to a family entrusted with one of the greatest magical items possessed by the gods of Asgard, the Raven Banner of the title. When unfurled during a battle, the banner will grant victory to the army which holds it — at the cost of the life of the banner’s holder. The book opens with one such battle, in which Greyval’s father dies; but Greyval, we find, has been enticed under the earth by trolls, mischievous masters of illusion allied to the giants. Greyval feasts and drinks among the trolls while the battle plays out above, at which point the trolls let Greyval go, believing a prophet who says that Greyval will kneel before them till the end of time. Above ground, Greyval marries his love, a valkyrie named Sygnet; but when he finds that the banner’s been lost, he realises it is his duty to retrieve it. Only, as an Asgardian, Greyval need never die. So will he give up his immortality for the sake of the banner? What is the value of duty? What is more important: the joys of life, or a glorious destiny?

…

Read More Read More

American Fabulation, Literary Fantasy, and The Kingdom of Ohio

American Fabulation, Literary Fantasy, and The Kingdom of Ohio

Comments 2 comments

The Kingdom of OhioHow to describe Matthew Flaming’s book The Kingdom of Ohio?

Well, at least it’s a good story. (Of course I’d have to say that, wouldn’t I? But really: it is.) It’s a story about conspiracies and struggles to reshape the world; about secret wars between men like J.P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla. It is about one of the strangest and least-known mysteries of American history: the existence and disappearance of the Lost Kingdom of Ohio. It is about science and faith, and the distance between the two. Most of all, it’s a story about a man and a woman, and about love.

That’s from an early page of the novel. To this description one might also add: It’s about time, and memory, and the distance between those things as well. It’s about machines, and trains, and the secrets beneath our feet. It’s about the different worlds we live in without noticing. And it is about the way in which these worlds touch.

In terms of plot, the novel follows two strands; one a framing narrative of an old antiques dealer in contemporary Los Angeles, and the other the meat of the book, the story of a young man named Peter Force who was a miner in Idaho in 1899, comes to New York following the death of his father, finds work building the new subway system, and then meets a strange young woman who claims to have travelled in time. We learn that the woman, Cheri-Anne Toledo, is the only daughter of the last King of Ohio, and has collaborated with Nikola Tesla; but Tesla himself seems not to remember her.

Published in 2009, The Kingdom of Ohio is a stunningly assured book, outstanding in its skillful prose and consistent intelligence. The style of the book is powerful, evocative; it builds dreamlike worlds both in Ohio and New York, making a kind of fairy-tale of America, where inventors replace wizards and businessmen stand in for kings (sometimes). Its language is rich and perfect, reflecting a richness of conception — a richness in the way it imagines its setting, in the way it imagines its characters.

…

Read More Read More

The Centenary of Mervyn Peake

The Centenary of Mervyn Peake

Comments 4 comments

Titus GroanJuly 9, 2011 will be the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Mervyn Peake, the author of three remarkable fantasy novels: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone. The books — published in 1946, 1950, and 1959 — form a series (along with the novella “Boy in Darkness,” which I have not read) following the early life of Titus Groan, Seventy-Seventh Earl of the immense castle called Gormenghast. Peake had intended to write a longer sequence of novels about Titus; he planned two more books, but the advent of Parkinson`s Disease made that impossible. A number of activities are being planned to commemorate Peake’s centenary, including the publication of a fourth Titus volume, Titus Awakes, written by Peake’s wife after his death in 1968.

The Titus novels are excellent books. Each seems to have a slightly different style, a different approach to Titus and his world. All of them are stylistically and imaginatively rich; although the explicitly fantastic is rare in the books, arguably nonexistent, there is in each of them an approach to world-building, a readiness to leave behind the rational, that I think makes them fantasy more than anything else — so long as you use “fantasy” in its broadest sense, agreeing that contemporary genre expectations have nothing to do with the variety implicit in the word.

Put it this way: Peake wrote before fantasy fiction had been defined as a form, but from where we stand now, his work is more easily assimilable to fantasy than to anything else. He’s been a strong influence on fantasists like Michael Moorcock; Lin Carter published his books as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. But like a lot of early fantasists, Peake is somewhat apart from the conventions of fantasy we now know. His books have little to do with medievalism or any historical culture, but neither do they seem to reflect the modern world (except in the last of them, and that’s a world as strange and distorted as a Terry Gilliam movie, a setting that, it has been said, prefigures the fantasy of steampunk). As an illustrator, Peake was working on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Grimms’ Household Tales while writing Titus Groan; those may be useful places to start.

…

Read More Read More

The Dream-World of Lud-in-the-Mist

The Dream-World of Lud-in-the-Mist

Comments 6 comments

Lud-in-the-MistHope Mirrlees’ stunning 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist begins with the following epigraph:

The Sirens stand, as it would seem, to the ancient and the modern, for the impulses in life as yet immoralised, imperious longings, ecstasies, whether of love or art, or philosophy, magical voices calling to a man from his “Land of Heart’s Desire,” and to which if he hearken it may be that he will return no more — voices, too, which, whether a man sail by or stay to hearken, still sing on.

It’s a quote from the classical scholar Jane Harrison, who was Mirrlees’ close companion at the time Mirrlees was working on Lud-in-the-Mist. It’s a perfectly chosen introduction to the book. It sets out the themes, and to an extent the method, which Mirrlees used: the conflict between instinctive desires and the conscious will, that tries to repress those desires and establish a social harmony — all symbolically realised through the imagery of myth and fantasy.

The sirens sang to Odysseus, who had himself lashed to his mast to hear their song while his crew went about their duties with their ears stopped up with wax. Apollonius of Rhodes says that they also sang to the Argonauts, but that their song was overcome by Orpheus, and the sirens threw themselves into the sea and became rocks. And I will note here, for reasons that should become clear later, that Apollonius also says that only a little later the Argonauts came to the garden of the Hesperides, in the far west, where the golden apples of Gaea had been kept, a marriage gift for Hera, until Hercules had took them as part of his labours.

…

Read More Read More

Thor and the Fear of Fantasy

Thor and the Fear of Fantasy

Comments 7 comments

Thor, the MovieAs a good Shakespearean, Kenneth Branagh understands fantasy. I think the movie Thor succeeds mostly because of what he as a director brings to the film, and what he’s able to get out of his cast. What’s missing seems to be what the script doesn’t give him — a larger world, memorable supporting characters, and a willingness to engage with the matter of fantasy.

The tale’s simple enough. Following an incursion of evil frost giants into the realm of Asgard, Thor, son of Asgard’s ruler Odin, leads a retaliatory raid against the giants; because this endangers a fragile peace between the realms, Odin exiles Thor to earth, stripping him of his power. Thor and his magic warhammer Mjolnir materialise in New Mexico, where he’s befriended by rogue cosmologists, deals with agents of the superspy organisation S.H.I.E.L.D., and struggles against the plots of his brother Loki. Thor ultimately has to regain his power to return to Asgard to save all the worlds from Loki’s schemes.

It’s an enjoyable adventure movie. The set-pieces are well staged, the design of the visuals are distinctive, and the actors sell the material by consistently hitting the right balance between the grounded and the larger-than-life. But the script of the movie struggles to fit the mythic material at the core of the story into standard superhero movie structures.

…

Read More Read More

Some Thoughts on the Nature of a Serial

Some Thoughts on the Nature of a Serial

Comments 7 comments

The Adventures of Captain MarvelSerial storytelling is something of a mystery; even more so, perhaps, than most storytelling. When done right, it seems to hook an audience, to get them to invest heavily in the story being serialised. But for whatever reason, most serial forms have been pigeonholed as strictly popular arts; serial storytellers have generally been assumed to have a low amount of literary ambition. These presumptions about serials, and the way the form works, have always intrigued me — the more so since I’ve set out to write a serial prose fantasy of my own.

Let me try to define what I mean by ‘serial.’ The OED has “(of publication) appearing in successive parts published usually at regular intervals, periodical,” which is a start. More precisely, I’m talking about a narrative told across many installments, usually on a regular schedule, with each installment except the first and last expected by the audience to be incomplete, but usually containing some element of a genre or other story convention which will satisfy the audience.

Every installment of The Adventures of Captain Marvel movie serial made sure at some point to have the titular super-hero in costume, using his powers, and usually also included fight scenes, detective work, plot twists, and exotic locales — because that was the sort of story it was, and that was what audiences were looking for. Individual chapters (or issues) of a serial may play about with these conventions — like an issue of the Steve Ditko Amazing Spider-Man, in which scripter Stan Lee apologised for not having the hero fight a villain in that particular issue, something unusual in the mid-60s. But go too far, too often, and you just end up telling a different kind of story — like, say, Scott McCloud’s Zot!, which started as a retro-adventure-hero story, and ended up becoming an examination of adventure fantasy and how it contrasts with realism.

…

Read More Read More

A New and Digital DC Universe

A New and Digital DC Universe

Comments 9 comments

The Justice LeagueI admit I’d been planning to write another post this week about my new fantasy web serial, The Fell Gard Codices, and why I was using the serial form, and how I thought it worked for this particular story. Then DC Comics dropped a bombshell, and since I know some of the readers here are interested in comics, it seemed worth trying to explain what happened and what it could mean.

DC has announced that they’ll be relaunching their entire line of DC Universe comics in September with new first issues. That includes all their big superhero titles — Superman, Batman, Justice League of America (to be renamed Justice League) — but excludes books from the Vertigo imprint, such as Fables. It seems that these relaunches will include some revisions to the character histories; Superman, apparently, will not only have a new costume, but some rumours suggest he’ll no longer be married to Lois Lane.

But DC announced something else as well. Starting with the September relaunch, digital copies of all DC’s books will be available online (legally) the same day they go on sale in stores. This is potentially far more important than the line-wide relaunch, and in fact the two things seem designed to play off each other.

…

Read More Read More

Self-Publishing: What I’m Doing, and Why

Self-Publishing: What I’m Doing, and Why

Comments 8 comments

The Fell Gard CodicesThere’s been a lot of talk around the blogosphere lately about self-publishing, and its merits relative to traditional publishing. I’m not going to say anything about that, as such. But it seems obvious to me that self-publishing has a value if you have a story that could not, due to the nature of its form, be published traditionally.

Which brings me to an announcement: I’m beginning a self-publishing venture of my own, The Fell Gard Codices. It’s an ongoing fantasy serial, and the first chapter goes live Wednesday, June 1. The web site’s already up, at Fellgard.com. I’ll be posting chapters every day for six days, and after that putting up three chapters a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The serial is free through the web site, though readers can donate through PayPal, if they’re so inclined; and once I have enough material, I’ll be selling collections as ebooks.

So, given how I started this post, the questions become: why am I doing this? What is it about this story that makes this approach seem like a good idea?

…

Read More Read More

The Lord of the Rings: A Personal Reading, Part Three

The Lord of the Rings: A Personal Reading, Part Three

Comments 8 comments

The Return of the KingThis is the third of three posts on The Lord of the Rings, prompted by a recent re-reading of the book. You can find the first post, looking at Tolkien’s sense of character, here; the second post, about Tolkien’s use of landscape, is here. This week I’m going to write about structure, irony, and postmodernism.

Which means that I need to start with some definitions. I’ll get to what I mean by ‘postmodernism’ later. I want to start with ‘irony,’ a vexed word that means a number of things which aren’t really much like each other. The general description of irony I have in mind is ‘what happens when a text says the opposite of what is meant.’ On perhaps the simplest level, that’s sarcasm. But there are other ironies. ‘Dramatic irony,’ for example, is what happens when, without realising it, a character acts in a way opposite to his wishes, or unintentionally foreshadows some future event; the sort of thing that happens, for example, when an oracle gives a misleading answer to a question. Supposedly Croesus appealed to the Delphic oracle before leading his army against the Persians, and was told that if he went to war he would destroy a great empire — so he did, and the empire he destroyed was his own.

…

Read More Read More