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The Anti-Tolkien: Michael Moorcock in The New Yorker

The Anti-Tolkien: Michael Moorcock in The New Yorker

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Michael Moorcock-smallI was surprised and pleased to see a lengthy feature on Michael Moorcock in that bastion of American literature, The New Yorker.

Peter Bebergal, author of Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll, wrote the piece, which was published online on December 31, 2014. It’s a well-informed article which celebrates Moorcock’s substantial contribution to fantasy, but doesn’t gloss over his years as a young muckraking editor at the helm of the New Wave:

It was fifty years ago this year that Moorcock, then twenty-four years old, was offered the editorial helm of the British magazine New Worlds… Moorcock and his peers had become tired of the dominant science-fiction landscape: vast fields of time travel, machismo, and spaceships, as well as the beefcake heroes of the fantasy subgenre “Sword and Sorcery.” The Golden Age of Science Fiction, held aloft by authors like Frederik Pohl, John W. Campbell, and Robert Heinlein had, by the nineteen-sixties, sputtered out into a recycling of the same ideas. Within the pages of New Worlds, Moorcock created a literary revolution, one that would have science-fiction fans calling for his head.

The focus of the piece, titled “The Anti-Tolkien,” is on Moorcock’s criticism of the “troublesome infantilism inherent in Tolkien’s work,” and his response to it in his own work.

Read the complete article online here.

Bird People, Evil Clowns, and the Crooked One: Bone Swans by C.S.E. Cooney

Bird People, Evil Clowns, and the Crooked One: Bone Swans by C.S.E. Cooney

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Bone Swans CSE Cooney-smallC.S.E. Cooney reports that she has signed a contract with Mythic Delirium Press for her newest collection Bone Swans, coming this summer.

Bone Swans will contain several of her most popular novellas, including The Big Bah-Ha, which Gene Wolfe called “Deep and wise and fabulous… [it] will leave you shuddering and strangely at peace. You could found a religion on it — or it may found a religion without you.” It also includes “The Bone Swans of Amandale,” the first installment of Silver and Bone: The Pied Piper Tales, and “Life on the Sun,” originally published here at Black Gate. Here’s the complete table of contents, with links to online versions where available:

Life on the Sun
The Bone Swans of Amandale
Martyr’s Gem
How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain with the Crooked One
The Big Bah-Ha

C.S.E. Cooney is a podcast reader for Uncanny Magazine; Amal El-Mohtar recently reviewed her short story “Witch, Beast, Saint” at Tor.com, and Mark Rigney interviewed her in late October. The two C.S.E. Cooney short stories we presented here, “Godmother Lizard” and “Life on the Sun,” consistently rank among the most popular pieces we’ve ever published. She is a past website editor of Black Gate, and the author of How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes and Jack o’ the Hills.

Bone Swans will be published by Mythic Delirium Press on July 7th, 2015. Get more details on their website.

Art of the Genre: Kickstarter from Opening to Close

Art of the Genre: Kickstarter from Opening to Close

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High Res CompressSarah Avery asked me recently if she could pick my brain on Kickstarters, and although once I replied she never took me up on the offer, I still enjoy talking about certain details of campaigns. Today, as I face the final leg of my current and 9th Kickstarter for AotG, I’m going to talk a bit about the ebb and flow of a campaign.

All Kickstarters share at least two universal facts: that you will have your greatest pledges at the campaign’s opening and closing, as well as a dead zone in the middle where pledges are hard to come by.

Today, The Folio is in its final 24 hours, a time period that is nearly as important as the first 24 hours after launch. It is the ‘now or never’ moment for backers, especially those you’ve managed to reach through the campaign but they hedged with the old ‘I’ll get back to it closer to the end.’ This thought process is two-fold, the first being that backers tend to have a better understanding of what they can spend closer to the date in which money will be withdrawn from their accounts, and second, that they often like to see what kind of success (and stretch goals) a project achieves before they jump in.

For me, The Folio is fully funded, which is the good news, and for those backers of the project, we are all pushing for that first stretch goal that will help create a second module in The Folio series. Thus, the final 24 hours become paramount to seeing just how ‘good’ the project really did over the course of its life.

However, most projects are made or fail in the first 24 hours after launch. It is in these first hours that the true barometer of just how many backers you have is seen. Most folks like to see at least 50% of your backing come in the first 24 hours, which can be a daunting sum. For The Folio, I hit 25% in the first day, and added another 5% on day two, so the road was much longer and harder than many successful projects you see out there. That said, 30% in two days is still a great way to begin and I had confidence that with those numbers we’d survive the lull, which we did.

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Revising and Editing II: The Nitty Gritty

Revising and Editing II: The Nitty Gritty

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Strunk & WhiteI had occasion to read the first 3 chapters of a friend’s manuscript the other day. This is his first completed manuscript, and he wanted a second pair of eyes on what he was sending out to agents. I started off my critique by saying: “There’s good news. All your sentences are sentences, and all the words you use mean what you think they mean.”

Obviously, my friend wasn’t immediately gratified by this response,* at least, not until I explained how very often this isn’t the case. I had another friend (please note the past tense) who, when I suggested a word he used didn’t mean what he thought it meant, told me loftily that he knew that, but he was just trying it out to see if it would fit. He had, he explained, dashed it all down when he was drunk.

Which brings us to a piece of advice attributed to Ernest Hemingway. Write drunk. Edit Sober. Please note the order. Given Hemingway’s reputation, the assumption has always been that his advice was to be taken literally, but I’m not so sure. I know that people have achieved marvels while drinking/drunk, but I don’t think these were cases of cause and effect. Alcohol or its cultural equivalent can smooth the path of genius (at least for a while), but it doesn’t create the genius in the first place.

I choose to believe that what Hemingway meant was, write while inspired, edit with a clear head. All kinds of things might inspire you to write, and I often find that when the juices are flowing (creativity’s, not the bottle’s) I’m not even so much as aware of the passage of time, let alone the exact nature of every sentence and punctuation point.

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Donald Westlake’s Famous Complaint

Donald Westlake’s Famous Complaint

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Xero 5 fanzine-smallThree-time Edgar Award winning mystery author Donald Westlake famously dissed virtually every editor in the field in an article in fan magazine Xero in 1960, saying in part:

Campbell is an egomaniac. Mills of F&SF is a journeyman incompetent. Cele Goldsmith is a third-grade teacher and I think she wonders what in the world she’s doing at Amazing. (Know I do.) As for Pohl, who can tell? Galaxy is still laden with Gold’s inventory, and when Pohl edited Star he had the advantage of no deadline and a better pay rate than anyone else in the field, so it’s difficult to say what Galaxy will be like next year, except Kingsley Amis will probably like it.

In the years since, many have asked how much of Westlake’s famous complaint was true. In retrospect, I think we know. Not a lot.

Campbell was indeed an egomaniac and a science crank fully as credulous as Ray Palmer had ever been. But he still had an eye for a story and when not forcing (or being tricked by) regurgitations of his own editorials, he could still develop new writers and inspire occasional greatness.

The 1960s was a dull period for Analog... but it did serialize Dune, which says quite a lot. I think Campbell was well past his prime by this point, but he still had occasional flashes of what made him so important in the ’40s.

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Vintage Treasures: The House in the High Wood by Jeffrey E. Barlough

Vintage Treasures: The House in the High Wood by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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The House in the High Wood-smallJeffrey E. Barlough’s first three Western Lights novels were published in trade paperback by Ace over a decade ago, beginning with Dark Sleeper (2000), and followed by The House in the High Wood (2001) and Strange Cargo (2004). All three are highly prized today. Barlough began to publish them though his own Gresham & Doyle press beginning with the fourth volume, Bertram of Butter Cross (2007). I recently acquired the second book. Back when I was running SF Site, I recruited the author Victoria Strauss to write for us; here’s what she said about it the year it was published:

Framed in good Gothic style by ante and post scriptums in which a nameless narrator encounters the teller of the main tale (a somber, haunted Oliver Langley, 11 years later), The House in the High Wood is a homage to such classics of the Gothic genre as The Monk and Woman in White, replete with mystery, madness, illegitimacy, ghostly visitations, ancient ruins, brooding forests, sinister dwellings, and supernatural terror. Like the first in the series, Dark Sleeper, it’s a neo-Victorian pastiche, with an agreeably verbose 19th-century prose style and a large cast of eccentric characters. But where the previous book was as much digression as story, devoting entire chapters to character study and whole pages to the description of the contents of a single room, this novel is much more a straight-ahead narrative of suspense, proceeding grippingly from plot turn to plot turn, with moments that are genuinely bone-chilling.

The Western Lights novels have steadily been gathering acclaim (and readers) over the last few years. Jackson Kuhl reviewed the fifth volume Anchorwick for us in 2011, calling it “A Victorian Dying Earth —- gothic and claustrophobic yet confronted by its inhabitants with upper lips held stiff… It’s P.G. Wodehouse with woolly mammoths.” More recently, we covered What I Found at Hoole (2012) and the eighth volume, The Cobbler of Ridingham. We published an interview with him in 2013.

The House in the High Wood was published by Ace Books on August 1, 2001. It is 336 pages, originally priced at $14.95. The digital version is $17.99. The cover art is by Aleta Jenks.

Ancient Worlds: An Unlikely Epic

Ancient Worlds: An Unlikely Epic

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Statuia_lui_Ovidiu  We’re kicking off the year (wrapping it up, technically, but since this is an introduction, we’ll elide the difference) with a return to form. I’m also giving myself a holiday present, because this? This is a work by one of my favorite authors of all time.

And when a Classicist says that, it really means something.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses were written under the reign of the Emperor Augustus. If we didn’t have solid dating on Ovidius Naso’s life (he was born on March 20, 43 BC and died sometime in 17/17 CE) we’d have this detail, because he and the first emperor of the Romans did not get on. Ovid ended his life in exile, in part because of his poetry (including the Metamorphoses) and in part because of…something. That something is one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the Augustan era. We know that Ovid did something that offended Augustus so deeply that he was sent to the very end of the empire and left there to rot. He writes in the Tristia (his book of poems written from that exile) that he was sent away for “carmen et error”: a “poem and a mistake”, but never reveals more.

Did he have an affair with Augustus’s daughter Julia, who was exiled for promiscuity? Did he have a part in a revolutionary plot, a role that was too vague for execution but too solid to be ignored? Did he make one joke too many? We don’t know, and it keeps me up at night. In all seriousness, if I ever wake up in the dead of night to hear that telltale whoosh-rattle-whoosh and a blue phone box appears in my garden, you will see me running outside in my nightie waving a copy of the Oxford Classical Dictionary and screaming “TAKE ME TO OVID!”

It would be for history, on my honor as a matron.

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A Review of John Masefield’s Christmas Book The Box of Delights

A Review of John Masefield’s Christmas Book The Box of Delights

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The cover of the edition from the New York Review of Books Children's Collection
The cover of the edition from the New York Review of Books Children’s Collection

Lately I’ve become interested in what may be termed “seasonal” books — stories or novels that are perennially suited for a particular time of year. I long have considered Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist a spring book. Natalie Babbit’s Tuck Everlasting is a summer book. The fall season has any number of offerings: Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, the anthology October Dreams, Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and this last fall I discovered John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk.

Perhaps in due time I will look at this last in more detail, but for now I want to examine Masefield’s “Christmas Book,” The Box of Delights, something that sits well alongside Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

The Box of Delights was published in 1935 and, like The Midnight Folk, contains many delightful period terms. I choose as just one example the word “scrobble,” which means to kidnap. In this book, all sorts of people get scrobbled. The antagonist of this book, Abner Brown, who also is the antagonist of The Midnight Folk, is attempting to steal the Box of Delights from “Punch and Judy man” Cole Hawlings, who has entrusted the Box to Kay Harker, the protagonist both of this book and of The Midnight Folk. Brown scrobbles Hawlings and, unable to get any information out of that magician, scrobbles anyone who was in the vicinity of Hawlings: two of Kay’s friends and all of the clergymen and servants attached to the Tatchester Cathedral. By the end of the book, the crisis of the tale becomes in equal measure one of keeping the Box from Brown’s villainous clutches and one of returning all of the religious to the Cathedral in time to hold the Christmas services at midnight.

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A World without Tolkien

A World without Tolkien

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NPG x88898; John Ronald Reuel Tolkien by Pamela ChandlerI like to commemorate the birthdays of authors whose works I’ve enjoyed or that have exercised an influence over me in some way. Unfortunately, I only write one day a week here at Black Gate. Consequently, the odds that an anniversary of one of the handful of writers I hold in high esteem should fall on a Tuesday aren’t high enough that I can consistently write commemoration posts on the day in question. Sometimes, like last week’s post about Fritz Leiber (which proved surprisingly popular, if the comments it generated are any indication – thank you), the calendar cooperates somewhat and my post can appear a day before or a day after the intended date. It’s a bit of a cheat, but not one so egregious that my over-developed sense of propriety feels it’s “wrong.”

January is the birth month of multiple writers I esteem highly. As fate would have it, the birthdays of two of them happen to fall on Tuesdays in 2015, which makes my job a lot easier next month. In a couple of other cases, though, the birthdays fall on days of the week far enough away from my regular slot that I really do feel as if I’d be acting out of turn by devoting a post to them. Yet, in both of these cases, the author is such a colossal figure in the field of fantasy – never mind in my own personal pantheon of fantasists – that it would seem wrong to let his birthday pass without comment.

This long-winded preface is my way of saying that, while J.R.R. Tolkien’s 123rd birthday isn’t until this coming Saturday (January 3), this post is nevertheless about him and the incredibly long shadow he has cast over the field of fantasy fiction. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that, for good or for ill, the contemporary popular understanding of what fantasy is derives almost entirely from his novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I can scarcely think of another author whose idiosyncratic vision has so transformed the commonplace conception of the genre in which he wrote that it is now seen as not merely normative but exhaustive.

Which is why I’m now going to spend a few hundred words considering just a few of the things fantasy (and fantasy gaming) owe largely, if not necessarily exclusively, to Tolkien.

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The Series Series: American Craftsmen by Tom Doyle

The Series Series: American Craftsmen by Tom Doyle

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American Craftsmen Tom Doyle-smallOh, best and most delicious of conspiracy-theory secret histories! From the first moment I heard the premise of American Craftsmen, I knew I would love this book. I am glad to report that it was even better than I imagined — smarter, funnier, more multi-layered and suspenseful, with even more kickass action.

Tom Doyle’s craftsmen are mages whose lineages have served in defense of our nation since George Washington bound them in a secret Compact. As the novel opens, with a craft op gone wrong in Iraq, old feuds between the Fighting Families and classic turf wars among occult branches of government bureaucracies threaten the United States from within.

Our hero Dale Morton gets hit with the triple-whammy of a dying foe’s curse, a case of straight-up PTSD, and subtle undermining by a mole who has infiltrated America’s supernatural defense forces. Whoever wants Morton out of the way is up to no good, so Morton leaves the Army to save it. His inner life is painstakingly honorable, but his environment is so full of intrigue that he has needed to cultivate his own devious tendencies and sufficient gallows humor to get himself through the day. He cunningly gives every appearance of going home to lick his wounds. Meanwhile, he works out how he’ll get a crack at the traitor hiding among his former comrades-at-arms.

The House of Morton itself is a House divided. Dale is the only living member of the household, and his numerous resident ghosts form rival camps around the sorcerous styles of Hawthorne and Poe. He knows how to recognize the cruel magics of the Left-Hand Path, because he grew up literally haunted by its most famous practitioners. Like every virtuous member of the Morton family for a century and a half, Dale has dedicated himself to the line of protective ancestors and pitted himself against the wicked ancestors his peers in the service will never let him live down.

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