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Ancient Worlds: Gods Make Terrible Parents

Ancient Worlds: Gods Make Terrible Parents

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Sebastiano_Ricci_-_Fall_of_Phaeton_-_WGA19423If there’s anything you learn quickly from Ovid, it’s that the gods are real jerks. They aren’t people you want anything to do with.

This is a consistent theme in the ancient world. The entire goal of existence with relation to the gods was to do what you had to do to stay in their good graces and to avoid them ever noticing you. Make your sacrifices, avoid outright blasphemy and sins that really anger them, and otherwise? Don’t ever be too.

Too rich. Too powerful. Too beautiful. Too lucky. Too happy. All of these things are potentially fatal, and that’s just if you’re a mere mortal. If you have the ill luck to be related to one of the gods, you’re all but guaranteed trouble.

So Phaeton is pretty well doomed. When he is taunted by a friend for being a bastard, he asks mother for proof of his parentage. She tells him where to find the palace of the sun, and off he goes. When he arrives, the Sun confirms that he is indeed Phaeton’s father and offers him one favor of his choosing to prove it.

Next rule: never accept a favor from a god. Or a nymph. Or a spirit of any kind. If you ever find yourself in a myth, turn down all favors. It will not end well.

Phaeton, being a young man, asks to borrow his dad’s car. The super cool one that burns with the heat of the sun. Pheobus immediately realizes that he has made a terrible mistake, but his son won’t be persuaded. Off Phaeton goes, with his father’s reins in hand.

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Muider Castle in The Netherlands

Muider Castle in The Netherlands

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Muiderslot on a typically cloudy Dutch day.
Muiderslot on a typically cloudy Dutch day. The castle measures only 105 by 115 feet (32 by 35 meters) yet is perfectly placed to control shipping on the river and along the coast.

While many people go to Amsterdam to get baked and stare at Van Gogh paintings, the area around the city has a lot to offer, including one of the most visited castles in The Netherlands.

A twenty-minute bus ride from Amstel station takes you to the little port of Muiden, and from there it’s a pleasant walk through a park and along the coast to Muiderslot, a picturesque little castle by the sea.

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Vintage Treasures: The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream by G.C. Edmondson

Vintage Treasures: The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream by G.C. Edmondson

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The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream 1965-small The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream 1970-small The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream-small

G.C. Edmondson was not a prolific fantasy author. He wrote barely half a dozen novels between 1965 and 1981. But at least one, The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream, became an acknowledged classic, kept in print by Ace Books for nearly two decades after it first appeared in 1965.

Edmondson wrote Westerns under at least three pseudonyms. The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream was his first fantasy novel; it first appeared as part of an Ace Double (cover by Jack Gaughan, above left), paired with Stranger Than You Think, a collection of Edmondson’s short stories.

The book, the tale of a military research ship cast back in time to the Bronze Age while testing experimental submarine detection gear, was an immediate critical success. It was nominated for the Nebula Award (it lost to Frank Herbert’s Dune), and Jerry Pournelle, co-author of The Mote in God’s Eye and Lucifer’s Hammer, called it “One of the best time travel novels I have ever read.”

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It’s Good to be Minding the Stars with The Early Jack Vance, Volume Four, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

It’s Good to be Minding the Stars with The Early Jack Vance, Volume Four, edited by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan

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Minding the Stars The Early Jack Vance Volume 4-smallI’ve been heartily enjoying The Early Jack Vance volumes from Subterranean Press, which collect the hard-to-find early pulp SF and fantasy from one of the greatest writers of the genre, Jack Vance.

The first two, Hard Luck Diggings (2010) and Dream Castles (2012), are now sold out and out of print — and rapidly raising in price. They collected fiction from the very start of Vance’s career, the late 40s through the late 60s.

Two more volumes are now in print, with one more due in March. Minding the Stars, the fourth volume, spans the years from 1952 to 1967, collecting four long novellas and four short stories, originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, Future Science Fiction, Fantastic Universe, Amazing Stories, and other fine publications. Here’s the complete table of contents:

Introduction by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan
“Nopalgarth” (Originally published as The Brains of Earth, Ace Double, 1966)
“Telek” (Astounding Science Fiction, January 1952)
“Four Hundred Blackbirds” (Future Science Fiction, July 1953)
“Alfred’s Ark” (New Worlds SF, May 1965)
“Meet Miss Universe” (Fantastic Universe, March 1955)
“The World Between” (Future Science Fiction, May 1953)
“Milton Hack from Zodiac” (Amazing Stories, August 1967)
“Parapsyche” (Amazing Science Fiction Stories, August 1958)

The opening story, “Nopalgarth,” was originally published as half of an Ace Double in 1966, under the title The Brains of Earth. Vance collectors may recognize it as one of three novellas published in a slender collection from DAW in September 1980, under the title Nopalgarth (see below).

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Swords & Sorcery edited by L. Sprague De Camp

Swords & Sorcery edited by L. Sprague De Camp

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oie_2763211ShPWYPH2The swords & sorcery that works best for me, the tales that get my heart pounding, come in short story form. It was Robert E. Howard’s “Beyond the Black River”, Fritz Leiber’s “Ill Met in Lankhmar”, and Karl Edward Wagner’s “Reflections for the Winter of My Soul” that made me love this genre. In those stories, the authors distilled everything down to forty or fifty pages of concentrated action, mayhem, and bloodshed. There are no wasted words, no longuers. While all three authors wrote decent enough S&S novels, it’s their short stories that roar down the tracks like a train, pulling me along. S&S is a fiction of action and plot. I want speed; economy of story-telling.

Even in 2015, thirty years after the end of swords & sorcery’s glory days, there are new short stories being written all the time. Each year, several anthologies’-worth of short fiction, once the lifeblood of S&S, still appear in various print and electronic magazines (read my most recent review here).

But you rarely see actual S&S anthologies published anymore. The only recent collections of original stories that spring to mind are the excellent Swords and Dark Magic, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders, and Jason M. Waltz’s equally cool Return of the Sword. David Hartwell and Jacob Weisman’s The Sword and Sorcery Anthology is a decent enough collection, though of mostly reprints reaching all the way back to S&S’s earliest days.

But once upon a time anthologies seemed to be coming out of the woodwork. Probably the most well known are Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords! series and Andrew J. Offut’s Swords Against Darkness series. Amanda Salmonson edited two collections about women warriors, called succinctly, Amazons and Amazons II. Robot-like, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Swords and Sorceress series continued for four years after she died in 1999.

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My Love/Hate Romance With Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit

My Love/Hate Romance With Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit

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GandalfLet me state for the record that I am a fan of the film adaptation of The Lord Of the Rings. Jack Nicholson can complain all he likes about “too many endings,” but that celluloid trilogy managed the impossible: it successfully imbued a made-up world not only with turmoil and action but with genuine emotional gravitas. The Lord Of the Rings (2001 – 2003), against all odds, mattered.

Having just seen the third of The Hobbit installments (2012 – 2014), I fear I cannot say the same for these sequel-prequels. I want to. At certain moments, I’m convinced. At others?

Yes, the task of adapting a book to the screen is arduous, full of perils, and the fact that Jackson’s scriptwriting team of Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and (for these films) Guillermo del Toro have had any success at all is remarkable. Tolkien, let’s face it, was not an efficient story-teller. Given characters like Tom Bombadil, it would not be unfair to crown him as King Of All Digressions.

So let’s take it as a given that adaptation involves violence toward the source material. Additions will be made, and subtractions, too. So be it. The goal, typically, is to preserve the spirit of the original.

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My Overly Conscious Love for Pathfinder

My Overly Conscious Love for Pathfinder

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Pathfinder Tales Stalking the BeastLately I’ve been reading a fair amount of Pathfinder novels. Partly this is because I want to play Pathfinder and have no one with whom to play it, because all of my adult friends who are so inclined live too far away, and my children and I just aren’t in the same frame of mind. (Roleplaying with a fourteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old is challenging, simply because logic, for all involved, works a little differently. For this audience, a straightforward dungeon crawl, like Fantasy Flight’s Descent, is a more viable option, but, with that, you don’t get enough freedom for story creation and character generation.)

Another reason I have been reading Pathfinder novels is because my oldest son has started reading them. If I read them as well, we can inhabit a shared text (and perhaps, in time, a satisfying Pathfinder gaming session).

And yet another reason why I have been reading Pathfinder novels is because they’re good.

This was announced not too long ago, at least in reference to Howard Andrew Jones’s Stalking the Beast, when Nick Ozment realized that that novel was “better than it needed to be.” I’ve read some Pathfinder novels by other writers as well, and I will say that most of them are quite good.

Nick made clear why he found Jones’s second novel for the franchise so good, but what do I mean when I say that, in general, I like the series? I will say that they are highly satisfying Sword and Sorcery novels. They are entertaining. They are escapist. They have cool things in them. And, above all, they are quite familiar. They are based on the 3.5 (or 3.75) edition of Dungeons & Dragons, after all.

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The Top 80 Black Gate Posts of 2014

The Top 80 Black Gate Posts of 2014

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Premium 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook-small2014 was a pretty good year for Black Gate. Our readership nearly doubled, and we published a record number of articles. I was going to do an exact count of all the posts we made in 2014 so I’d sound a little more together here, but I lost count after 1,200.

But trust me. It was a lot.

At the end of every month last year, I compiled a brief report itemizing our Top 50 articles for the month (here’s the list for December, for example). Mostly because the lists were fun and popular. But also because I couldn’t believe Scott Taylor’s Art of the Genre pieces kept beating my Vintage Treasures posts, month after month. Seriously, how does that happen?

Anyway, those of us who obsess over traffic stats every month (chiefly me and Scott) noticed a few surprises when we tabulated the results for all of 2014. Several of the overall most popular articles of last year rarely made the Top 20 every month. But they had steady traffic month after month, and those numbers added up. I guess it’s true what they say about slow and steady winning the race. That Aesop guy knew what he was talking about.

Below we’ve tabulated the 80 most popular articles on the Black Gate website for all of 2014 — starting with Andrew Zimmerman Jones’ report on the hit Dungeons and Dragons reprint series, “My Youth Was Delivered Yesterday: AD&D 2nd Edition Re-Released,” originally posted in 2013. It was read 26,380 times last year, making it our most read blog post in 2014, and one of the most popular pieces we’ve ever published.

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The Series Series: The Wide World’s End by James Enge

The Series Series: The Wide World’s End by James Enge

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The Wide World's End-smallYou have something wonderful to look forward to in February, and it’s sort of the opposite of Valentine’s Day.  The third volume of James Enge’s Tournament of Shadows trilogy, The Wide World’s End, is coming out, and it’s every bit as strange and glorious as Enge’s novels have all been so far, with an extra dimension of heartbreak.

Because it’s a tragedy. Not the schoolroom mountain-diagram tragedy plot here, not the victim-blaming hubris explanation, but a fresher, more original kind of tragedy. (Fortunately, the tragedy is leavened by Enge’s usual black humor, numerous inventively disturbing monsters, clever magical technologies, and crackling dialogue.)

What’s tragic about Morlock is that the very things that make him so genuinely excellent, so uniquely able to save his world, are the very things that make it impossible for him to go home again. And that includes the great love between him and his wife.

The author and publisher have been completely forthright about that. The cover copy tells us even the happiest available ending on the cosmic scale will be a disaster on the personal scale.

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Elemental Evil Attacks Dungeons & Dragons

Elemental Evil Attacks Dungeons & Dragons

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D&D Elemental EvilDungeons & Dragons has transformed itself lately, and that trend continues with the upcoming Elemental Evil storyline set to hit the Forgotten Realms in pen-and-paper, board, and digital formats starting in March and continuing through the summer. In the words of the press release:

Heroes are needed in the Forgotten Realms to discover and defeat secret cults that threaten to annihilate the Sword Coast by harnessing the powers of the elements of fire, water, air, and earth.

Certainly sounds impressive, but before diving into Elemental Evil, let’s quickly review the status of the world’s most iconic fantasy gaming line.

The Road to Now

Back in 2012, Dungeons & Dragons hosted the keynote event at GenCon.  Everyone knew that Dungeons & Dragons was in the process of releasing D&D Next (they were avoiding “5th edition” at that time). Among a lot of experienced gamers, their 4th edition was viewed as a step in the wrong direction. This 2012 keynote was the event where they were going to lay out their strategy for the gaming public. And, I am proud to say, I was there. Since then, I’ve been closely watching the evolution of this process and have been incredibly impressed with what I’ve seen coming out from Wizards of the Coast.

In addition to the fact that they were releasing a new core rule set (which we all knew already), they also announced at this time that Dungeons & Dragons was focusing their entire attention on the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, rather than splitting their attention among a myriad array of different worlds. As the start of this, they released a series of 6 novels from August 2013 through June 2014, each by a different author and depicting how the world-shaking event “The Sundering” (also the name of the book series) was impacting the Forgotten Realms world. The 2013 GenCon keynote coincided with Drizzt Do’Urden’s 25th birthday, and also with the release of the first The Sundering book.

Throughout fall of 2014, after the final Sundering book, Dungeons & Dragons finally began releasing their new set of 5th edition core books. These have been covered fairly extensively at Black Gate. Here are some of the highlights for those interested:

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