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The Camera Can Lie: FairyTale: A True Story

The Camera Can Lie: FairyTale: A True Story

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Cottingley FairiesNews flash: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, having created literature’s greatest rationalist in the form of Sherlock Holmes, spent his later years heavily invested in the occult, the supernatural, and the possible existence of (yes) fairies.

Of course, people have always evinced a desire to believe — sometimes in this, sometimes in that — and so it is perhaps not so surprising that Conan Doyle played a large role in one of history’s great photographic deceptions, that of the so-called Cottingley Fairies.

In fact, he was one of those most willing to champion the trumped-up, cheap-looking fakes (black and white stills of young girls posing in shrubbery with paper cut-outs of highly Romanticized winged fairies) His role in this debacle (the girls only recanted decades later) is the subject of a FairyTale: A True Story (1997), a film well worth revisiting given our drone-happy, GPS-driven, target-rich world.

You see where I’m going with this, yes? Given our present era of photo manipulation and computer generated graphics, our collective ability to dupe the unwary has never been greater, and just like statistics, images lie.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Looking at The Bruce Partington Plans

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Looking at The Bruce Partington Plans

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BruceP_FDSSolar Pons is, of course, the next best thing to Sherlock Holmes (which you know because you read THIS post, right?). I’m a Pons fan and I run www.SolarPons.com, the only website dedicated to The Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street.

Along with my two free, electronic newsletters (The Solar Pons Gazette and Baker Street Essays), the heart of the site is a collection of (non-spoiler) case commentaries for August Derleth’s stories. Some day, it will also host commentaries for the Basil Copper pastiches.

One of the many projects on my ‘To Do’ list (which might as well be Wish list) is to write case commentaries for the sixty Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I’ve done one (woohoo!!!). First, if you haven’t done so, you really, really, really (I mean, really) need to read “The Bruce Partington Plans.” It’s a short story; won’t take long. And the rest of this post will actually mean something to you.

Each case commentary includes a non-spoiler preview of the story, some notable quotes, and a plethora of miscellaneous observations and comments. I’m probably in the minority, but I think there is some good stuff below and you’ll know a bit more about the story after you read it. So, come, the game is afoot!

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Self-published Book Review: The Age of Heroes by Scott Robinson

Self-published Book Review: The Age of Heroes by Scott Robinson

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The Age of Heroes Robinson-smallThis month I’m reviewing The Age of Heroes by Scott Robinson. I’ve reviewed one of Scott’s books before, The Brightest Light, a self-described crystal-punk story. This time around, Scott’s story is straight up sword and sorcery.

Rawk is the last of the great heroes.  Famed for his great deeds, everyone in the city of Katamood knows him, he has a crowd of fans following him everywhere he goes, and women decades younger throw themselves at him.  He could easily retire — his friend Weaver declared himself Prince and took charge of Katamood thirty years ago — but despite the fact that he’s well past his prime, he refuses to. It’s a matter of pride, of preserving his reputation: he’s a hero, not a former hero.  But there just isn’t a lot for a hero to do these days.  Since Weaver banned sorcery, and the nearby city-states started to do the same, there’s been a distinct lack of exots — the weird and horrible creatures that require a hero to deal with.  Anyone else who wants to get into the heroism business has to travel far and wide to do so, leaving Rawk as the last active hero whose deeds are still known in Katamood.  So when an oversized wolf shows up one day, he’s the person that everyone calls on.

Heroism is a young man’s game — not just in the Age of Heroes, but in heroic fantasy in general.  People complain about the man part, but you’re more likely to see a woman as the protagonist in heroic fantasy than anyone over forty.  I couldn’t find Rawk’s exact age, but he’s at least in his fifties. He gets aches and pains even when he’s not particularly active, and his first fight almost ends badly when his knee nearly gives out. He spends the rest of the novel in a perpetual state of pain, unwilling to back down and let the soldiers whose job it is to deal with such threats steal his glory. Rawk’s age is a significant factor, and is the main reason this book is such a change of pace from most books in the genre. His point of view feels like that of a mature, older man, but he doesn’t necessarily act like one.

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Blogging from the Nebulas Weekend

Blogging from the Nebulas Weekend

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I’m in Chicago, at the 50th Annual Nebula Awards Weekend, and so far, it’s all pretty amazing. For Annihilation_by_jeff_vandermeerthose who don’t know, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America hold an annual Nebula Awards weekend that feels kind of like a very small fan con, except most of the attendees are SFWA members and networking and casual business discussion dominates.

My first Nebulas Weekend was in San José two years ago. Chicago is pretty impressive and the hotel, the Palmer House in downtown Chicago, is even moreso. And like at World Fantasy, attendees got loot bags upon arrival, provided by publishers. A small selection of by book bag contains: Tobias Buckell’s Sly Mongoose, an advance proof of Aliette de Bodard’s House of Shattered Wings, Daryl Gregory’s Afterparty, Ken Liu’s Grace of Kings, Nick Cutter’s The Acolyte and many more.

I don’t tend to go to as much programming as I used to at cons; I go more to meet editors, agents, publishers, and other writers, because hey, common interests. This weekend is an exception because the speakers are pretty uniformly the people who are steering the field itself.

I checked out a panel with Sheila Williams (Asimov’s) and Jacob Wiesman (Tachyon Press) about what editors are looking for. This is a bit in the same theme as Neil Clarke’s recent and excellent and data-based post about what he’s looking for at Clarkesworld. Based on the conversation, it struck me how much building Asimov’s each month is like building an anthology, where tone and editorial vision and story offering have to balance.

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R.A. MacAvoy’s The Book of Kells

R.A. MacAvoy’s The Book of Kells

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MacAvoy KellsLately I’ve been exploring portal fantasies, and last time I talked about Charles de Lint’s The Little Country. This week I’d like to take a look at R.A. MacAvoy’s The Book of Kells.

John Thornburn is a Canadian artist living and teaching in Dublin. He’s a bit of a klutz socially and emotionally, and has a tendency to focus on his work to the exclusion of everything else. His friend and sometime lover Derval O’Keane is an academic historian. The story begins when a young, injured girl suddenly appears in  John’s bathroom, having come through a portal  he inadvertently opened while working on the tracing of an old Gaelic pattern. It takes a bit of doing, but John and Derval finally figure out that Ailesh is the survivor of a Viking attack on her village in the Ireland of 985, saved by her father’s throwing her through the portal.

John and Derval take Ailesh back to her own time, and find the injured poet Labres MacCullen among the dead. John doesn’t know how to open the portal from this side, or even if it can be opened, so they accompany Ailesh and Labres to Dublin, where they hope to get help and justice from the King. Though the King in Dublin is himself a Dane at this point in history, they also want to warn him that the Vikings seem to have come as invaders, not as mere raiders who, having struck, will now go away.

Unknown to them, however, these same Vikings offered the lives of all the villagers to Odin, and the fact that Ailesh and Labres escaped puts them in a bit of a quandary. The leader decides that they must find and kill those who escaped, or forfeit their own lives – and the success of their expedition – to Odin’s displeasure.

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Unknown, September 1939: A Retro-Review

Unknown, September 1939: A Retro-Review

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Unknown September 1939 None But Lucifer-smallMy last post was a review of Galaxy’s September 1952 issue. So I’m jumping back more than a decade to an issue of another magazine I’ve wanted to get into for a few years.

At last year’s World Fantasy Convention, while John O’Neill was trying to set a world record for the number of books carried in a single stack (seriously, if you had seen it, you would have been impressed), I came across a dealer selling old issues of Unknown. Actually, I told my wife I was trying to find some, and she actually found a bin of them. While not impossible to come by, collecting issues of Unknown is somewhat more cost prohibitive than collecting issues of Galaxy.

Unknown (later retitled Unknown Worlds) was a speculative fiction magazine that ran from 1939 to 1942. It was published by Street & Smith, who also published Astounding. It was edited by John W. Campbell, Jr., who also edited Astounding. The early issues have art on the cover, like the September 1952 issue. These are also the more expensive ones. But if you don’t care too much about quality because you’re just going to rip it while reading it, you can find some inexpensive copies. Mine was $15.

What I find perhaps most interesting about this particular issue is that it contains a novel written by H. L. Gold and L. Sprague de Camp. Not only that, but I think (prove me wrong or right, Rich Horton) that this may have been the first time Gold used this particular pseudonym. He’d had stories published as Horace L. Gold but not the familiar H. L. Gold that he continued to use as his soubriquet at Galaxy. Am I the only one geeking out about this? Please tell me I’m cool in a Galaxy/Unknown/pulp sort of way.

None But Lucifer by H. L. Gold and L. Sprague de Camp — William Hale has realized the truth about Earth. It isn’t Earth, at least not in the sense people think of it. Everyone on Earth is actually living in Hell.

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Faces of Iraq

Faces of Iraq

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Proud dad in Nasiriyah
Proud dad in Nasiriyah

The Iraqis we see in the news almost always fall into three types–The Evil Fundamentalist, The Useless Official, and The Wailing Victim. The media have a hard time dealing with a broad range of characters, so they tend to fall back on these types again and again.

Of course the reality is more complex. While there’s no shortage of bloodshed and corruption, most of Iraq’s 33 million people go about their day-to-day affairs trying to live a normal life.

Back in 2012 I traveled to Iraq to write about it for the now-moribund travel blog Gadling. Click the link to read the series. Sadly, the photo galleries have been taken offline, but you can still read the articles for the moment.

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A Gateway to Fantasy for Young Readers: Amulet by Kazu Kibuishi

A Gateway to Fantasy for Young Readers: Amulet by Kazu Kibuishi

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amulet coverWith the height of the “Harry Potter phenomenon” nearly a decade past, we now have a new generation of seven- and eight-year-olds who were born after the final book in that series came out. A perennial question comes up: What will be the next “gateway” work that ushers young readers into a lifelong love of fantasy and speculative fiction?

Well, some may rightly ask, why can’t it be Harry Potter? Or A Wrinkle in Time, or The Dark is Rising sequence, or The Chronicles of Prydain, or The Chronicles of Narnia, or The Hobbit, or The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or…?

Many do still find their first taste of enchantment in books that are decades or even a century old, but there is no denying that — at least in the publishing and bookselling world — there has to be a “latest model.” Librarians still push those beloved older books faithfully, but their sales pitch is a lot stronger when it comes as a follow-up to a young reader who, having just read something that is currently “all the rage,” asks, “What else out there is like this?”

I’m here today to suggest that if you want a contemporary work that will introduce 3rd to 7th graders to the pleasures of epic fantasy, steampunk, people with animal heads, and wise-cracking robots, you could do a lot worse than hand them the graphic novel Amulet Book One: The Stonekeeper (2008) by Kazu Kibuishi. But be prepared: odds are good that they will immediately be demanding books 2 through 6. And then they will be waiting with bated breath for book 7 and cursing that there is now a two-year interval between volumes (welcome, Young Reader, to the Pains of Following a Series that is Ongoing. To better understand what you are in for, see any conversations referencing George R.R. Martin or Patrick Rothfuss).

But I’m also here to recommend them to anyone who likes this sort of stuff, regardless your age. I mentioned “3rd to 7th graders” in the last paragraph because those are the perimeters the publisher, Scholastic, says they are written toward. As someone who does not fit that demographic, I can vouch for them being worthwhile reads even if you are middle-aged.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Magnifying Glass, Pipe and Deerstalker

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Magnifying Glass, Pipe and Deerstalker

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Pipe_RathboneThe curved pipe. The magnifying glass. The deerstalker cap. These three objects are intimately associated with the enduring image of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was quite astute to use these rather uncommon devices for his singularly uncommon detective.

Well, not quite. In addition to Doyle, we should also credit three other men for creating the picture we see of Sherlock Holmes, over a century later.

Along with Doyle, we must tip our deerstalker (and puff on our pipe in honor of) illustrators Sidney Paget and Frederic Dorr Steele, a well as the great stage performer, William Gillette.

It is the contributions of the latter three upon which Eille Norwood, Arthur Wontner, Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett and others based their portrayals. Of course, since Rathbone’s Universal films were set in the 1940’s, his wardrobe was contemporary to the times. But his two films for Twentieth-Century Fox fit the classic image.

Let’s take a look at three “props” that have been commonly associated with Holmes for over a century.

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Eight Barbarian Body Building (3B) Tips

Eight Barbarian Body Building (3B) Tips

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Luke would be more buff if he wasn't such a tauntaun riding wuss.
Luke would be more buff if he weren’t such a tauntaun riding wuss.

It’s beach season! In the frozen north where I live, we’re currently shedding our polar bear and Sasquatch skins to show off our tummies once again!  Except, after six months of trudging through snowdrifts and blizzards, our thighs may be tree trunks of victory, but our abs have lost that chainmail bikini flattering glory.

Fear not, there is hope. Here are some tips for fighting off that winter bulge!

Chase Down a Pack of Wild Wolves

Nothing will get you sweating faster than chasing down wild canines, especially when they turn on you and you have to fight them off with nothing but your wit and might. Make sure to pack your wit or, failing that, lots of sharp steeled might.

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