Browsed by
Category: Blog Entry

Visiting a Holy Well in Oxfordshire, England

Visiting a Holy Well in Oxfordshire, England

Comments 4 comments
St. Margaret's church.
St. Margaret’s church.

Oxford is one of the most popular day trips for visitors to London thanks to its beautiful university and world-class museums such as the Ashmolean and Pitt-Rivers. It’s also worth staying overnight so that you can take advantage to the surrounding area, which offers some pleasant country walks.

One of the more enjoyable is a two-mile stroll along the Thames (locally called the Isis) that takes you to the hamlet of Binsey and the medieval church of St. Margaret’s. Set amid trees in the peaceful English countryside, the church makes for a relaxing stop and you can visit an Anglo-Saxon holy well that’s been an object of pilgrimage for centuries.

…

Read More Read More

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Pigeons From Hell From Lovecraft by Don Herron

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Pigeons From Hell From Lovecraft by Don Herron

Comments 4 comments

Herron_DarkBarbarianBefore the Cumberbunnies took over and flooded the internet with “I heart Sherlock” memes, the term ‘Sherlockian’ referred to those who studied (and often wrote about) Arthur Conan Doyle’s sixty stories of Sherlock Holmes. Some  of it was dead serious, some was tongue in cheek and much was in between. Monsignor Ronald Knox’s 1921 “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” is the cornerstone of Holmes studies.

With that, I tell you that that Don Herron is THE Ronald Knox of Robert E. Howard. “Conan vs. Conantics” and the ensuing “The Dark Barbarian” showed that Howard could be analyzed and treated as literature. As well as something to stir up debate! If you haven’t read the over-600 page essay collection, “The Dark Barbarian That Towers Over All,” you need to pony up $4.99 and get the kindle version now.

And with that, Herron, who is also a noted expert on Dashiell Hammett (this man knows good writing) is going to treat you to a little Howardiana regarding REH’s most chilling horror story, “Pigeons From Hell.”

Recently I did a reread on H. P. Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet cycle and had a Hey, Wait a Minute moment. . .

Deep into his follow-up book to A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos, John D. Haefele had asked me to look the poems over. Haefele is surveying Lovecraft’s Great Tales — not just the top achievements, but how the fiction developed as it went along, leading to the break-out stories — not just Lovecraft’s own writing, but how his discoveries of authors such as Robert W. Chambers and Arthur Machen and the ongoing cross-influences of his fellow pulpsters such as Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard display in the ongoing saga that would become known as the Cthulhu Mythos.

…

Read More Read More

The Speed Of Dark: Paksennarion vs. Autism

The Speed Of Dark: Paksennarion vs. Autism

Comments 4 comments

A Dark coverWhile wandering the aisles of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon – the kind of store that first leaves my jaw on the floor, then leaves my irises doing swirls straight out of an animated Warner Brothers short – I found myself in the Fantasy & Sci-Fi aisle.

Can’t imagine how that happened. Especially when my shopping list could also have led me to Photography, Sports (Tennis), Literature, Horror (Anthologies), and “Unisex Apparel.” Suffice it to say that I wound up face to face with my old buddy, Elizabeth Moon. Plenty of space opera on those shelves, sure, but also the various editions of the trilogy that made her name, her Deed Of Paksennarion series, together with the two less popular follow-ups, Surrender None and Liar’s Oath.

Then came the surprises. Turns out, Ms. Moon has resurrected Paks’s world, and some few of the characters from the various Paksennarion books in Oath Of Fealty, Kings Of the North, etc.

I was sorely tempted. I was. But in the end, I decided to let my fond memories remain exactly that: fond memories. As books with second-world settings go, and especially of the sword-swinging variety, I rate the Paksennarion trilogy very highly indeed, and as for Surrender None, well, I flat out love it.

The risk of spoiling all those warm recollections was just too great.

Even so, I would have picked up one of those newer titles – risk be damned, you only live once – but then I chanced upon a Moon title that didn’t seem to fit with her other work. The cover was different, for one thing. Not illustrative. Conceptual. No high fantasy or space opera here. No, indeed. But it had to be speculative fiction of some sort, since this unlikely loner of a book, The Speed Of Dark, had won the 2004 Nebula Award.

…

Read More Read More

Fantasia Diary 2015, Day 6: The Arti: The Adventure Begins, Director’s Commentary: Terror of Frankenstein, (T)ERROR, and I Am Thor

Fantasia Diary 2015, Day 6: The Arti: The Adventure Begins, Director’s Commentary: Terror of Frankenstein, (T)ERROR, and I Am Thor

Comments 2 comments

The Arti Some days at the Fantasia Festival I find a common theme among the movies I see. And some days I don’t. Sometimes the day’s movies are simply a wonderfully strange mix of things each wonderfully strange in themselves. Bearing that in mind, let’s jump into what I saw on Sunday, July 19.

I started at the Hall Theatre with the Chinese puppet wuxia film The Arti. After that, I had lunch and went to the De Sève Theatre to watch Director’s Commentary: Terror of Frankenstein, which took a real movie from the 1970s and gave it a new audio track in the form of a fictional “director’s commentary” that slowly revealed the “truth” of what had happened behind the scenes of the film. After that I stuck around to watch (T)ERROR, a documentary about FBI informants in the United States. Then went back to the Hall to watch a completely different documentary, I Am Thor, about Canadian bodybuilder and veteran rock’n’roller Jon Mikl Thor. It made for a full but wildly varied day.

The Arti: The Adventure Begins is a fantasy adventure set in the time of the Han dynasty (I can’t find voice credits, or a version of the original title transliterated into Roman; this source gives it as 奇人密碼, or “eccentric person secret.” Here’s the film’s web site, if you’re interested). Years ago, an inventor created a wooden robot, Arti-C, powered by a mysterious force called The Origin. As the film opens, he’s dead and Arti-C’s energy’s running down — but the inventor’s son and daughter, Mo and Tong, are trying to fix him. They travel to a legendary city on the Silk Road, where they sign Arti-C up for a martial arts tournament, join forces with a thief and an idealistic prince, and find themselves involved with a war against the mysterious desert-dwelling Lop people and their strange magic.

…

Read More Read More

The Great Serialization Experiment: The Lay of the Land

The Great Serialization Experiment: The Lay of the Land

Comments 6 comments

Nigh Marie Bilodeau-smallSerializing stories is an old art form, from the penny dreadfuls to Charles Dickens. Even Robert E. Howard serialized a few stories in Weird Tales. I recently decided to serialize a novel and, over the next few posts, I’ll share lessons learned. As I tend to leap without looking and landing on thistles, I typically learn a lot of lessons (woo?)

My first serialization, composed of one storyline over five short releases (15-20,000 words each), did well. Released from January to June 2015, it hit bestselling status in Canada, U.S.A., and a few other spots like Italy. It grew my fan base dramatically, which I assume is good for future sales (either that, or they’re waiting to warn people off my next book. Well played, Internet. Well played.) Am I living off this book? Um, no. But I’ve bought many a fine meal with it. And I still have plans to continue growing the series.

But first, the beginning.

Basic Economics (or, Eating is Fun and Good)

A year ago, when I left my full time job to focus on my storytelling (think bard) and writing careers, I wanted to look at different ways of maximizing sales. Because, dear friends, money buys food and every time I try to organize a raid on the supermarket or on my neighbor’s vegetable garden, I’m rather quickly reminded that those activities are not only illegal, they are even frowned upon. Since that societal penchant spoiled my plans for eating, an activity I’ve grown quite fond of, I had to come up with alternative methods. I’m lucky because storytelling offers me a scalable means of making money (tell story, make money. Tell more stories, make more money. Tell no story, get arrested for raiding neighbor’s garden). But writing has a longer term potential of continuous revenue, which is extremely appealing to those of us who eat every day.

…

Read More Read More

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Ramblings on REH

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Ramblings on REH

Comments 14 comments

Ramblings_KullAxeIn a way, Robert E. Howard’s career is similar to that of Dashiell Hammett. Both men had huge impacts on their genres (Howard wrote many styles, but he’s best known for his sword and sorcery tales). Both were early practitioners in said genres. Both men wrote excellent stories for about a decade. And both men ended their careers on their own.

Hammett, who seemed more interested in a dissolute lifestyle than in writing, effectively walked away from his typewriter. He wrote his last novel in 1934 (The Thin Man) but produced literally nothing for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. He could have gone back to writing the hard-boiled stories that made his career, but he voluntarily ended his writing life.

In 1936, Howard’s mother was failing in a coma. He walked outside to his car, pulled out a gun and killed himself. His writing career was more effectively finished than Hammett’s would be.

Both were supremely skilled writers who chose to deprive the world of their talent and left decades of stories unwritten. But there was a key difference between the two. From the beginning, Hammett was acclaimed and recognized as the leader in his field. Though Carroll John Daly came first (barely), there is no comparison between the two in critical view.

Howard was not critically lauded. His first Conan tale, “The Phoenix on the Sword” (a rewriting of the Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule!”), appeared in Weird Tales in December of 1932. The next two Conan tales were outright rejected!

…

Read More Read More

Victor Milan Talks Planet Paradise, His Many Pen Names, and a Plastic Dinosaur with Metallic Paint on It

Victor Milan Talks Planet Paradise, His Many Pen Names, and a Plastic Dinosaur with Metallic Paint on It

Comments 2 comments

DinoLordsCoverSmall 74250_126262914098950_3697860_nI had the opportunity to sit down with Victor Milan last month to discuss his current release, The Dinosaur Lords. As a member of his writers group, I’ve read the early drafts of this novel and am very excited to see it in print. George RR Martin refers to it as “Game of Thrones meets Jurassic Park,” and that’s a pretty good synopsis.

Set on the lost Earth colony of Paradise, feudal society humans live among dinosaurs of all epochs – wild dinosaurs, tame dinosaurs, and even war-mount dinosaurs. Hence the awesome knight on dino-back image that graces the cover of the book. Combine this with the sudden manifestation of a mythical angel of doom, and you’ve got the kickoff event of the story.

While Victor Milan is a well-known, prolific author, many people don’t know how prolific. On top of the dozen novels out under his own name, he’s also written many, many more under pen names. His career so far spans thirty-one years of publishing history, including the infamous midlist apocalypse of the 1980’s. Together, he and I discuss the ups and downs of the business and his journey so far.

…

Read More Read More

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Jeffrey Shanks on The Worldbuilding of REH

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Jeffrey Shanks on The Worldbuilding of REH

Comments 5 comments

Conan_WBHyboriaWe are trying to look at as broad a range of topics related to Robert E. Howard as we can in this series. Characters, genres, events, themes: Black Gate really wants to showcase the many facets of the man and his works.

Today’s guest post is such an example. Jeff Shanks wrote the introduction to the just published facsimile edition of Howard’s essay, The Hyborian Age and is the REH consultant on Modiphius’ upcoming Conan RPG  (we’re gonna have a post for that, too!). I can’t think of anyone better to write about one of my favorite subjects,  world-building.

While Robert E. Howard is known as the creator of a number of memorable heroic protagonists, such as Kull of Atlantis, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and, of course, Conan the Cimmerian, his efforts as a pioneer in fantasy world-building are often overlooked. When it is remarked upon at all, Howard’s creation of the Hyborian Age of Conan is generally described as a fairly impromptu effort — a hodge-podge of fictitious kingdoms based on thinly-disguised real world historical analogues, thrown together hastily in early 1932 after the first Conan story was accepted by Weird Tales.

…

Read More Read More

The Petrie Museum, London’s Overlooked Egyptology Treasure Trove

The Petrie Museum, London’s Overlooked Egyptology Treasure Trove

Comments 3 comments
DSC_1924
Stone bottle with the names of Rameses II and Queen Neferari, Dynasty XIX, 1295-1186 BC.

London is full of museums. While visitors swarm to the Big Three of the British Museum, the Tate Modern, and the National Gallery, there are dozens more that are worth visiting. One that’s of interest to anyone with a taste for history is the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London.

Most international visitors have never heard of this place and head on over to the British Museum to see its stunning collection of mummies and statues. While that experience is hard to beat, I actually prefer the Petrie Museum. The British Museum is a bit of a victim of its own success, and it’s difficult to stand and enjoy the artwork without being trampled by hordes of visitors.

The two museums also have different purposes. The British Museum focuses on Egypt’s Greatest Hits, with lots of gold, fine artwork and, of course, the ever-popular preserved people. The Petrie Museum is a study museum, where Egyptology students come to compare large numbers of objects packed into the cases and see how they changed over time. Cases have drawers underneath that can be pulled out to view more examples. The collection includes some 80,000 items from both Egypt and Nubia, two of Africa’s greatest ancient civilizations.

…

Read More Read More

Ancient Worlds: The First Fantasy World

Ancient Worlds: The First Fantasy World

Comments 1 comment

aristo2When we talk about great dates in literary history, 414 BCE doesn’t really make the cut. But if you’re a sci-fi or fantasy reader (and if you’re reading this page, you probably are) it should probably be one of the foremost you know of. Why?

Because prior to the fifth century BCE, we had never seen a fantasy setting in Western literature. People may have doubted whether Humbaba really existed or if Odysseus ever visited the Island of the Lotus Eaters. But the idea of pure poetic invention hadn’t come to full realization. This is partly because in the Ancient World, the idea of a strict delineation between fact and fiction was a bit strange. Myths didn’t have a strict canonical version, and people were comfortable with a lot of variations on the truth flying around. It wasn’t relativism, not as we understand it, it was… well, a sense that the truth should never get in the way of a good story, or that whether or not something was true wasn’t necessarily tied to whether all the facts happened just that way.

So you could play with storytelling, and storytellers played a lot. But Aristophanes’ The Birds is the first time that we are aware of that we see a fully fleshed out, completely invented country.

It is even peopled by talking animals.

…

Read More Read More