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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Master Plot Formula (per Lester Dent)

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Master Plot Formula (per Lester Dent)

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Dent1Lester Dent was a prolific pulp author, best remembered for creating the adventure hero, Doc Savage.

And speaking of Doc Savage, there is currently a Shane Black film project to star Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as The Man of Bronze. Hopefully it will introduce Savage and Dent to a new generation.

The Doc Savage stories were published under the house name of Kenneth Robeson, which is a reason Dent’s name isn’t as well-remembered as it should be.

Dent cranked out 159 Doc Savage novels, but he also wrote hundreds of short stories for the pulps across several genres, including war, westerns and mysteries. The John D. MacDonald fan (which should be everyone!) might want to check out his two Oscar Sail stories for a little hint of Travis McGee. “Sail” is included in the massive (over a thousand pages!) anthology from Otto Penzler, The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories.

Will Murray (whose name you’re going to be seeing again here at Black Mask very soon) compiled a thorough bibliography, and it includes a very nice intro about Dent.

Dent, who died in 1959, a few weeks after suffering a heart attack, left behind a master plot formula for generating 6,000 word short stories. I’m going to let you read it below, in full, then give you some comments related to it from one of the top fantasy authors of all time.

This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words. No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell. The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else.

Here’s how it starts:

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Self-published Book Review: Valley of Embers by Steven Kelliher

Self-published Book Review: Valley of Embers by Steven Kelliher

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If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see this post for instructions to submit. I’ve received very few submissions recently, and I’d like to get more.

Valley of Embers by Steven KelliherValley of Embers by Steven Kelliher is primarily the story of Kole Reyna and Linn Ve’Ran. Although Linn Ve’Ran is a skilled and dedicated hunter and warrior, she is not an Ember like Kole, a Landkist given power to control flame by the land. But the land from which Kole’s power comes is not the titular valley where Kole’s and Linn’s people live, but the desert from which their ancestors fled from the war between the Sages. Before he fell in battle, the King of Ember struck a bargain with the Sage White Crest to shelter his people in the valley. Separated from the desert for decades, those born as Embers are fewer and weaker each generation. Instead, some are gifted with the native Landkist power of the valley, the healing and dreaming of the Faeykin. But it is the Embers who are especially valued, to fight the Dark Kind who have returned, bearing the corruption of the Eastern Dark from whom the Emberkin fled years before.

Everyone wonders what had become of the White Crest, who was to be their protector. Some think that he fell shortly after the King of Ember, when he shattered the land to turn back the Eastern Dark. Others think that in his isolation, he is unaware of their plight, or thinks that they can handle things themselves, or is too busy fighting the far greater threat of the Eastern Dark. Since the night of his mother’s death while seeking out the White Crest and the dream he had of her fall, Kole has believed that the White Crest has turned against them, and it is he who sends the Dark Kind.

But while Kole is given permission to seek out the White Crest and get some answers, he is delayed when he suffers a grievous injury by a Sentinel, one of the Dark Kind’s lieutenants, who can convert humans to their cause. While he fights the darkness that seeks to turn him, Linn Ve’Ran gathers some friends and strikes out without him. Her party quickly runs into trouble when they encounter an army of Dark Kind besieging the Valley’s largest city, Hearth, and only half of them make it to the mountains where the White Crest dwells.

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Blogging Marvel’s Master of Kung-Fu, Part Three

Blogging Marvel’s Master of Kung-Fu, Part Three

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Master_of_Kung_Fu_Vol_1_22Giant-Size_Master_of_Kung_Fu_Vol_1_2Master of Kung Fu #22 sees the welcome return of artist Paul Gulacy who came and went a bit in these early issues. The first half of the story sees Shang-Chi set upon by Si-Fan assassins at a Chinese restaurant in New York before infiltrating his father’s skyscraper base of operations. Fu Manchu has captured both Sir Denis Nayland Smith and Black Jack Tarr. Shang-Chi stows away aboard Fu Manchu’s private jet unaware of their destination. Once on the ground, he follows as his father’s minions lead their captives to a cave in the side of a mountain which has been filled with dynamite. Shang-Chi rescues the two Englishmen and prevents the detonation which would have seen Fu Manchu kill his archenemy in the same instant he destroyed Mount Rushmore. Doug Moench, like Steve Englehart before him, has an embarrassment of riches that are largely squandered with insufficient page count to fully develop his narrative. This would soon change, however, and make the series one of the finest published in the 1970s.

Most of Marvel’s Giant-Size quarterly titles were throwaways, much like too many of their special Annual editions, but Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #2 was a 40-page epic designed to showcase both the character of Shang-Chi and the talents of the series’ writer and artist, respectively. Doug Moench had been harboring a desire to address racism and bigotry directly and a series with an Asian protagonist gave him the perfect forum to do so. Paul Gulacy now had the freedom to display martial arts fighting as well as moving displays of romance and longing relying solely on the power of his images in a string of panels that conveyed storytelling free of words. Even more significant is the fact that Gulacy’s depictions of lust and attraction never pandered to titillation as the artist evinced a mature understanding of the art form’s possibility. The fact that he was strongly influenced by cinema and Steranko’s pop art work of the 1960s take nothing away from the fact that Gulacy was coming into his own as an artist with this title.

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Andre Norton: Are Her Men Really Women?

Andre Norton: Are Her Men Really Women?

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Norton Star RangersIt’s been my experience that Andre Norton is extremely popular among women of my generation, those who grew up reading SF when there were few women writing, and even fewer female protagonists. When I was looking at Norton’s Witch World last time, I found myself wondering whether this popularity was due to how Norton feminized her male protagonists, making them easier for female readers to relate to.

By feminizing, I mean that Norton gives her male protagonists the same kind of “otherness” that is normally associated with the female. Women have long been defined by how they aren’t men, and similarly Norton’s male protagonists are almost always defined by how they’re not the standard socially/politically accepted norm.

Even the positive qualities they may have are somehow the very things that set them apart, and define them as “other.” These are invariably qualities that the standard norm don’t wish to have, even though they’re demonstrably useful.

In Star Rangers Kartr, although a member of the Patrol, is a second class citizen, as are all of the Ranger class of combatants. In fact, he’s excluded from the class of regular Patrol in a number of ways. Even though he’s human, he’s from a frontier world, and is therefore a “barbarian”; he’s a “sensitive” in that he has certain mental abilities which can include telepathy – and it’s significant that this valuable ability is either distrusted by those who believe in its existence, or simply denied by those who don’t. Lastly, he’s a “bemmy lover”* in that he doesn’t join in excluding his nonhuman comrades from social or political status.

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Heavy Metal Lyrics, Sword & Sorcery Fantasy and Video Games: A Cultural Synergy by Dr. Fred Adams

Heavy Metal Lyrics, Sword & Sorcery Fantasy and Video Games: A Cultural Synergy by Dr. Fred Adams

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Fred_SpaceInvadersLast year, Dr Fred C. Adams, Ph.D., joined our parade of writers in the Discovering Robert E. Howard series with an entry on Esau Cairn, REH’s classic science fiction character. Dr. Adams is back for another guest post here at Black Gate. Put on your headphones and go!

The parallel (and almost simultaneous) ascensions of heavy metal music, video game technology (which later migrated to personal computers), and sword and sorcery fantasy to mass popularity from the early 1970s forward are not coincidental. Rather, they are synergistic. All three draw from the late 20th century youth culture’s fatalism and nihilism, honed to a fine edge in the fin de siècle era of the 1990s.

Consider the aesthetic of the Ur-arcade-video game of the 1980s, Space Invaders: ranks of grotesque aliens march across the screen as space ships fly overhead firing missiles. You, represented by a screen icon, scuttle back and forth, trapped in a small area firing and dodging missiles while trying to destroy the oncoming ranks of invaders before they reach you and symbolically stomp you into the earth.

The more you destroy, the more ranks appear, starting closer and advancing more quickly. You can forestall death for a time, but the denouement is inevitable. You will lose; the programming foreordains that you will die no matter how well or how long you fight. Other games of the era, like Missile Command, and Asteroids followed suit.

An occasional arcade game like Dragonquest allowed victory, but most reduced play to a life-and-death struggle the player will never win. The kill tally represents the only satisfaction—how many of them do I take with me? As the Time Traveler of Wells’ famous novel says of fighting an impossible number of Morlocks in the darkened forest, “I will make them pay for their meat.”

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What No Man’s Sky Can Learn from SFF Worldbuilding

What No Man’s Sky Can Learn from SFF Worldbuilding

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If you follow video games, you likely have heard the hype surrounding No Man’s Sky, the space exploration game with a decided pulp science fiction aesthetic that promises a universe with a whopping 18 quintillion procedurally generated planets to discover.

Beautiful planetary vista number 976,234,501--but then, there are billions just as beautiful.

If there’s one thing in this game you’ll never be short of, it’s alien, picturesque vistas

Years of anticipation culminated in the game’s release on August 9, and on that day I, along with legions of frothing gamers, lit up my Playstation, grabbed the nearest 3-liter of Mountain Dew, slid my buttcheeks into the grooves of my favorite easy chair and settled in, happily anticipating a few hundred hours of wonder-stuffed fun.

Only. Well. The game. I mean. It’s. Well.

This video sums up what millions of gamers suddenly felt at once, and were suddenly silenced.

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Fantasia 2016, Day 8: Animated Critiques (Psychonauts, the Forgotten Children and Harmony)

Fantasia 2016, Day 8: Animated Critiques (Psychonauts, the Forgotten Children and Harmony)

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PsychonautsThere was one movie scheduled at Fantasia on Thursday, July 21 that I was determined to see: a science-fiction anime called Harmony (Hamoni). Since I had time free beforehand, I decided I’d first head to the festival’s screening room to watch something I’d missed or would be unable to see later. There, I looked over the selection available and settled on Psychonauts, the Forgotten Children (Psiconautas, los niños olvidados), an animated film from Spain. I liked the idea of a double feature of two very different cartoons.

Psychonauts is an engagingly complex movie that takes place on an unknown island, in the ruins of an industrial-age civilisation: many children go to schools, there’s a police force and a sort-of-functioning economy, but also any number of scavengers living in vast tracts of trash shaped by hills of garbage. This story isn’t to be understood as science-fiction, though, since on this island there are also monsters, separable souls, and demonic shadows. Birdboy, a mute child with the power of flight (more or less), seems to know some of the secrets of this strange place. A girl, Dinky, knew Birdboy once and still loves him. She hopes to leave the island, but won’t go without Birdboy — even though the authorities are out to get him, blaming him for selling drugs to children. The movie follows both Birdboy and Dinky as they go about their separate ways, encountering the strange societies of the island and exploring its mysteries.

Psychonauts is technically the sequel to an earlier short film, “Birdboy,” which I have not seen (and does not seem necessary to understanding Psychonauts). Both movies were co-written and co-directed by Alberto Vazquez and Pedro Rivero, based on a graphic novel by Vazquez. Psychonauts has something of the look of an indie comic, in the primitivist-yet-engaging design of its characters and the odd details of its backgrounds. If I had to point to a work in any medium which felt most like Psychonauts, I’d probably select Jim Woodring’s comic Frank, with its dreamlike, occasionally violent, and oddly complex stories. Psychonauts is an equally individual work, but has the same knack for creating oneiric symbols out of its settings and imagery.

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#rurallife or Can You Hear Me Now?

#rurallife or Can You Hear Me Now?

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This guest post by Julie Czerneda is part of the #futurespasttour, taking place from Aug 22nd to Sept 6th. Enter for a chance to win one of two sets of Julie Czerneda’s books: a mass market paperback edition of A Gulf of Time and Stars plus a hardcover edition of The Gates of Futures Past. US/Canada residents only, please. Enter here for the Rafflecopter giveaway.

The Gate to Futures Past Julie Czerneda-smallAt Fantasy Café earlier in this blog tour, I regaled you with the story of how we came to move to the country in the midst of my writing The Gate to Futures Past. If you haven’t read that post yet, by all means nip over and do so, because this one?

Is about what happened next.

Pretty much immediately next, in fact. While we waited for the moving truck, next. We stood inside our new, for-the-time, home, tired but triumphant, and reached for our cell phones to let the family know we’d arrived because we’d promised.

No signal.

Many houses have low-signal spots. In our previous domicile it had been, appropriately enough, beside the shelves with the Pratchetts. Walk a step away, and you were reconnected. L-Space.

Here? In short order we discovered every room and hallway, both floors, of our new house to be a dead zone. No signal at all, anywhere.

How… odd.

Outside we went, phones held high — a little giddy, truth be told, to be doing our own LARP of Mulder and Scully. Were we not, when said and done, in the middle of no-one-knew-where? (Literally. No one else knew exactly where we were, hence the promise to call. Not even a mailing address. More on that later.)

We followed our rising little bars as ardently as if chasing a Pokémon. Up the hill. Finally!

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in July

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in July

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Xanth Piers Anthony-small

Black Gate had 1.26 million page views last month, very nearly a record. Much of that bump in traffic was due to a series of very popular posts. Derek Kunsken has long been one of our most popular bloggers — his interview with Christopher Golden was our third most popular article in October, and last month his piece on Rebirth: DC’s corrective reboot was #5. But he thoroughly dominated the charts in July, claiming both the #2 slot, with his look back at Marvel’s Star-Lord, and the top spot, with his examination of the soaked-in misogyny of Piers Anthony’s famed Xanth series. Remember to leave room for the rest of us, Derek!

Bob Byrne was #3 on the list, with the second half of his two-part history of Necromancer and Frog God Games. Nick Ozment had our second most popular comic article in July, claiming the fourth spot on the list with his retrospective of Kurt Busiek’s Astro City. Rounding out the Top Five was our look at Chaosium’s classic Runequest campaign Borderlands.

Also in the Top Ten were Adrian Simmons’ belated review of Hudson Hawk, M Harold Page’s review of The Trojan War: A New History, some comments on James Wallace Harris’ popular post “Who Still Reads 1950s Science Fiction?”, Bob Byrne’s examination of a century of John D. MacDonald, and our look at the 2016 David Gemmell Award Nominees.

The complete list of Top Articles for July follows. Below that, I’ve also broken out the most popular overall articles, online fiction, and blog categories for the month.

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The Flaw in Everything: Warren Ellis’ Karnak the Shatterer

The Flaw in Everything: Warren Ellis’ Karnak the Shatterer

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karnak2cov-e50d0It’s the best part of the reading experience to run across a story with a new voice. Warren Ellis, of The Authority and Transmetropolitan fame, has assumed various voices, but I love his newest one: the narrative perspective of Marvel’s Karnak the Shatterer, a character associated with the Inhumans.

The Inhumans, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, have been around since The Fantastic Four was in double-digits. Some of you may recall that Karnak is the one with the big head and the super-effective karate chops because his special talent is finding the structural flaws in things.

(Although, to be accurate, Karnak isn’t technically an Inhuman because was never exposed to the Terrigen mists — bring that up at a dinner party for a No-Prize!)

Over the years, Karnak’s powers and perceptions have expanded to include seeing the flaws in arguments, concepts, and people. His greatest achievement is finding the flaw in death, thereby returning from the dead.

It may sound a bit blithe to say it that way, but Karnak’s philosophical viewpoint has been strengthened over the years and bears some thematic resemblances to people like Iron Fist’s warriors of K’un-Lun or the Ancient One (of Dr. Strange fame).

The Inhumans of course, have been increasing in their importance in the Marvel Universe. I’ve seen internet theories that Marvel is downplaying the X-Men while up-playing the Inhumans, because Marvel doesn’t hold the X-Men movie rights.

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