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Ancient Worlds: Callisto and Arcus

Ancient Worlds: Callisto and Arcus

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The name of the character Callisto on Xena: Warrior Princess was taken from this myth; like most things on the show the name is the only thing the two characters hve in common.

The problem with gods isn’t just that they’re terrible parents, or that they’re bad luck to be around. Greco-Roman gods were bad news because, well, they were people. Which sounds nice and relatable until you think about some of the people you know.

They’re intense, passionate beings who are untempered by immortality. Which means they feel everything we feel – love, joy, anger, jealousy – but with the powers of a god to back them up.

This is most apparent in the stories of Zeus (Jupiter in Ovid’s works) and his many…. Well, some older editors call them “loves”. Some others call them “conquests”, which is a little better. For the most part, they’re victims, either of Zeus when he kidnaps them or his wife when she finds out about them.

One such victim whose story Ovid tells is Callisto. She was a sworn virgin, a friend of Diana who wandered with her in the wilderness. She spent all her time with her fellow virgins, hunting, fishing, and generally avoiding men and the role usually allotted to young women in the ancient world. Until Jupiter saw her and raped her. As if that weren’t bad enough, when she was discovered to be pregnant, Diana threw her out of her company.

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Don’t Panic! It’s Nice to Know Douglas Adams Read Beyond Page 10!

Don’t Panic! It’s Nice to Know Douglas Adams Read Beyond Page 10!

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HHguide
Douglas Adams lived at a dark time…

So, Douglas Adams claimed: “I’ve started most science fiction books but only got to about page 10, I’m afraid, usually.”

Yet Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is not only squarely Space Opera, it’s also part of the Space Opera tradition. Without the 10-page statement we’d just assume Douglas Adams had read the likes of Edmond Hamilton and, given the resonances, it’s fairly obvious that he did at some point and perhaps forgot about it (read first entry in this series for details).

Does this matter?

Adams probably wasn’t dissembling. Memory is untrustworthy.

However, if he was dissembling — if you reread the statement, he hedges a little (“most…. usually”) — then he had every right to.

Douglas Adams lived at a dark time when the cultural establishment, and thus those who looked to it for guidance, had a patronising attitude to popular entertainment in general and SF in particular. My old High School English teacher — who in all other ways was fantastic — actually had a poster on the wall explaining that real literature was about character and… literary stuff… and thus Science Fiction wasn’t literature.

SF was skin to put over magical realism or fairy tales, or just “a bit of fun” (chortle). Meanwhile anything that was SF&F but had forced itself into mainstream educated culture was treated as “not really genre”. Tolkien was treated as a sort of modern fabulist, not a Fantasy writer. Writers like Vonnegut were “literary” and “satirical”. Books like 1984 were “political allegories” or something else clever… and so on.

The logic was that SF&F was rubbish, so anything good could not be SF&F. Small wonder then if Douglas Adams wasn’t rushing to flaunt his imaginative roots.

But, was he actually laughing at us?

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What Price Immortality? In Yana, the Touch of Undying by Michael Shea

What Price Immortality? In Yana, the Touch of Undying by Michael Shea

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oie_34161QIl911YLAs I was rushing to get out of the house the other morning I remembered that I had to pick a book to read and review for this week. Nothing in the front row of my swords & sorcery shelves caught my eye so I started going through the books stacked in the back and still, nothing called out to me (that was short enough to read in just a couple of days). Finally I snagged the late Michael Shea’s In Yana, the Touch of Undying (1985). I saw the print was big, so even though it’s just over three hundred pages I knew it would be a quick read. I can’t believe that such lame criteria led me to this dynamite book.

Last year John O’Neill wrote that a friend had told him this book would change his life, though I didn’t remember that when I took up In Yana last Thursday. What I knew, from the back cover, was that the book featured a student named Bramt Hex searching for the secret of immortality in a world filled with ogres, ghosts, vampires, and lots of magic. From reading Shea’s very good Nifft the Lean, I expected a similar work of Vancian fantasy — dark, bizarre imagery laced with humor.

For the first chapter or two, In Yana appears to be just that. At 28, Bramt Hex has been a student for much of his life. He’s fat, worried about failing his final examination, and coming to dread what he assumes will be a life of day-in day-out dreariness in academia. When a wealthy dowager, the Widow Poon, enters the inn where he’s dining, Bramt allows a wave of romantic dreaming to sweep over him.

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Dual Structures in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Stories and Robin Wayne Bailey’s Swords against the Shadowland

Dual Structures in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Stories and Robin Wayne Bailey’s Swords against the Shadowland

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BaileyShadowlandRecently I completed my reading of all of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. After I had put down the second or fourth collection (this depends on how you approach the editions from White Wolf, which collected the books doubly in single volumes, and these are the publications with which I began my survey), I made some faintly denigrating comment on Goodreads (if I remember it correctly), something about the quality of these stories being like flies caught in amber. This was a metaphor for Leiber’s soupy, languid, highly embellished prose style.

But a year or so later, as I got to the end of The Knight and Knave of Swords and then the termination of Swords and Ice Magic, I found that I had really begun enjoying these stories. I had even begun to admire the writing style. So I bought, without question, Robin Wayne Bailey’s Swords against the Shadowland out of interest to see who possibly could be so foolish as to try to meet Leiber on his own brilliant terms.

Before I get to a review of Leiber and then, specifically, to Bailey, I want to detail the kind of place I come from. As I become a regular contributor to Black Gate, I realize that there are quite a number of books that I really should have read while I was growing up. Now, I’ve read a lot of fantasy. That will be apparent. But sometimes I pick up a new volume, open the cover, begin reading, and ask myself, “Why didn’t I read this twenty-five years ago?” One of the answers might be because of my intense snobbishness, a youthful shortcoming that I slightly touched on last entry. Another reason is because, at the beginning of eleventh grade, I artificially arrested the sheer volume of my high fantasy reading by consciously “growing up” and turning my back on the genre in preference for established “literary” pursuits. But also, as I cast my memory back through the years, I’m coming to believe that I didn’t read a lot of these works then because a lot of these weren’t all that visible.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Massey’s ‘The Speckled Band’

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Massey’s ‘The Speckled Band’

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Massey_IntroI’ve posted about the stage play that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, based on his Holmes short story, “The Speckled Band.” In 1931, it was brought to the screen (though it had been filmed a few times before), with Canadian actor Raymond Massey in his first credited role.

Band was only the third Holmes “talkie,” following Clive Brook’s The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1929) and Arthur Wontner’s The Sleeping Cardinal (also 1931).

The film incorporates several of the play’s variations, including the name changes (Roylott to Rylott; Julia to Violet), the inquest, adding an Indian manservant, etc. One significant change from the original story is that Watson is a friend of the girl’s dead mother and is the one who brings the case to Holmes. This gives Athole (yep: that’s really his first name) Stewart’s Watson a meatier part in the story.

Stewart plays a more Doyle-like Watson, as compared to Ian Fleming, who played a doofus Doctor in Wontner’s Cardinal: the type of portrayal that, sadly, would be all to common in the coming decades. It’s nice to see a black and white era Watson who wasn’t there for comic relief.

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Hitchhiker’s Guide to Edmond Hamilton: Who did Douglas Adams Really Read?

Hitchhiker’s Guide to Edmond Hamilton: Who did Douglas Adams Really Read?

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Last-of-the-Star-Kings2-Copy
…how is it that Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reads like a rip-roaring Silver Age Space Opera with added humour and satire?

Douglas Adams famously wasn’t an SF fan — apparently he “only got to about page 10” of most SF books (source) .

How odd, then, that Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reads like a rip-roaring Silver Age Space Opera with added humour and satire.

Douglas Adams always told the same story about the birth of his magnum opus:

One night in 1971 a 19-year-old English hitchhiker named Douglas Adams lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria. He had with him a borrowed copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe by Ken Welsh.

No mention of reading widely in the genre.

Really?

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The World of New Publishing Models: Serialized Self-Published Novellas by Traditionally Published Authors: Nigh, by Marie Bilodeau

The World of New Publishing Models: Serialized Self-Published Novellas by Traditionally Published Authors: Nigh, by Marie Bilodeau

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Nigh Marie Bilodeau-smallI wanted to talk to Marie Bilodeau, a multi-Aurora-nominated Ottawa-area author about her new novel, Nigh. It is an apocalypse story, a magical one, which is an original twist, but it’s also taking an old-school/new-school leaf in that Marie decided to serialize the novel as several novellas and self-publish them. So I sat virtually with Marie and the disjointed conversation that follows is the best one out of twenty-six takes…

So what’s fun about Nigh?

FAERIEPOCALYPSE!

Stop! That’s not even a real word! God, let’s start again. Take twenty-five….

No! Keep typing! It is a word! That’s what fun. I’ve taken all the old scary faerie stories and thought about what would happen if the veil between our world and theirs suddenly collapsed. It’s not pretty. It’s definitely dark fantasy that could also be considered horror.

Plus, since I’m a professional storyteller, I’m also going to be performing a set of traditional faerie stories, woven in with some bits of Nigh, as bonus-can’t-read-this-on-the-page material. No, but seriously: FAERIEPOCALYPSE!

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Dave Duncan’s The Great Game

Dave Duncan’s The Great Game

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duncan past Connor Gormley wrote a post not long ago in which he discussed the seeming sameness of the current state of Fantasy. That the genre which should be most imaginative showed a singular lack of imagination, or flexibility might be a better word, in its choice of settings and characters. The comments give you a pretty good idea of how people agreed or disagreed with his thesis, and the whole post is well worth looking at. I think what it did for a lot of people, however, is remind them of books they’ve read that aren’t cloyed down with the sameness of things.

In my case, I was reminded specifically of Dave Duncan’s work. I’ve mentioned his Alchemist Novels in discussing fantasy mysteries, and one day I’d like discuss the brilliant West of January in more detail, but at the moment I want to introduce you to the trilogy The Great Game, made up of Past Imperative, Present Tense, and Future Indefinite.

At first glance it seems we’re being dealt a typical stranger-in-a-strange land trope, but as is so often the case with Duncan, the first glance is all you get for free. I think it’s safe to say that whatever you think Duncan’s up to, it’s very seldom what’s going on.

Part Imperative begin with two apparently unconnected storylines, or rather, we assume they are connected – not being entirely new to this game ourselves – but we aren’t shown how until much farther into the narrative than we’d expect. An epigraph does give us a broad hint, but honestly, it’s very easy to overlook. I have a theory that fewer than half of all readers actually read epigraphs, even the ones at the beginning of chapters, but that’s neither here nor there – which, come to think of it, pretty much describes the position of Duncan’s characters.

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Goth Chick News: Eli Roth Goes from Hemlock Grove to South of Hell and Makes Bank with Knock Knock

Goth Chick News: Eli Roth Goes from Hemlock Grove to South of Hell and Makes Bank with Knock Knock

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Eli Roth
Eli Roth

Goth Chick News fav, director Eli Roth, has been a very busy gent lately. And even if he didn’t look like that, we still wouldn’t be able to tear our eyes away from his latest lineup of projects.

First off, there the third and final season of the supernatural, hottie-monster-ridden joy ride that is Roth’s Netflix series Hemlock Grove. If you haven’t caught up with this yet, there is still time to binge watch Famke Janssen, Bill Skarsgard and Landon Liboiron tear through a small, New England town that is home to everything from vampires and werewolves to witches and mad doctors – and still have time to pine away that the next ten episodes will be the last.

Says the man himself:

We are so grateful to the fans of Hemlock Grove who have championed the series so intensely over two seasons. We are looking forward to taking the last and final season into some dark and unexpected places, and to giving viewers the killer finale.

Oh Eli, you know just what to say to a girl.  But when exactly?

Season 1 premiered in April and season two showed up in July.  A January 1st post on the HG Twitter feed said only that season three was “so close you could almost feel it” which means who-knows-what, but could indicate another full season landing in the early spring.

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Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1952: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1952: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952-smallThe June, 1952 issue of Galaxy is another good one. It included six pieces of fiction and a science article by Willy Ley.

“Gravy Planet” (Part 1) by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth — Mitch Courtenay works at Fowler Shocken, the top ad agency in the world. And now, the agency has its eyes on the possibility of colonizing Venus with governmental approval to exclusively profit from the venture. Fowler Shocken chooses Mitch as chairman of the Venus Section, leaving Mitch to all the details around drawing public interest to going to Venus and actually making it hospitable.

Besides his work duties, Mitch tries to revive his failing marriage. His wife is a talented surgeon, but she’s seen Mitch try to pull her away from her career to become a housewife. With the news of his advancement, she’s willing to date him again, albeit with boundaries.

As if the stress of the campaign and a sinking love life isn’t enough, Mitch becomes a target. He narrowly survives two attempts on his life, and the private sector detectives aren’t much help. He pursues the man likely responsible for the attempts (along with sabotages to the Venus campaign), tracking him to Antarctica. Unfortunately for Mitch, he’s heading straight into an ambush.

“Gravy Planet” was published as a novel under the title The Space Merchants in 1953. It moves very well, and the futuristic world the authors seems close to modern in 2015. It doesn’t try to turn Venus into an Earth-like planet, but it’s not quite as inhospitable to life as we know it presently. (The Mariner 2 probe sent to Venus in 1962 measured surface temperature among other data, so the authors didn’t have access to all of that information.) Letting the details about Venus go, this novel (so far) is a great ride.

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