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Fantasy New Year’s Musings

Fantasy New Year’s Musings

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Blood and Iron Jon Sprunk-smallHello, friends. As 2013 comes to a close and the New Year dawns, I’m taking a few moments to consider what 2014 will bring to the realm of fantasy.

Personally, I’m proud to announce the beginning of a new fantasy tetralogy next year, starting in March with Blood and Iron. I’ll be finishing the sequel in 2014, as well as writing at least one short story for a friend who invited me to be a part of his fantasy shared-world. (More details on that next year.)

I also have a few conventions and a writing conference scheduled in 2014. These are often the highlights of my professional life, as I get to reconnect with old friends and make some new ones. Meeting readers and other writers is one of the awesome perks of this field.

The big one will be a return to DragonCon. I’d gone three years in a row before taking 2013 off, but I’ve missed it so much I have to go back. It’s a four-day fantasy/scifi geekfest with all the trimmings. Great costumes, wonderful guests, and some of the best partiers on the planet.

Beyond my professional goals, I will make an effort to read more books next year. It’s a funny thing. I had so much more time to read before I started writing full-time. Alas, that’s what happens when you embrace your passion.

Yet I’m going to make more time to read in 2014. There are so many freaking amazing books out there and I want to devour as many as possible. My problem is that I like to go back and re-read my favorite books/series, so I’m forever trying to catch up with the new crop.

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Sherlock Holmes Tiptoes into the Public Domain

Sherlock Holmes Tiptoes into the Public Domain

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Sherlock Holmes dang itAn American judge has ruled that Sherlock Holmes is in the Public Domain.

Say what? If you’re like me, you’ve had some trouble wrapping your head around the fact that Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective wasn’t already in the public domain. His first appearance, in the short novel A Study in Scarlet, was in 1887, and he appeared in a total of four novels and 56 short stories between then and 1927. To my mind that’s the pre-pulp era, roughly contemporary with the Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Let’s review. If most of Robert E. Howard Conan tales, published between 1932 -1936, are in the public domain — and in fact, virtually all literary works published before January 1, 1923 are no longer covered by United States copyright law — what’s the deal with Sherlock Holmes?

Well. Near as I understand it, the Conan Doyle Estate bases their claim on the fact that the last Holmes story was published in 1927, and the characters of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Irene Adler, etc. were not truly completed until then. The Estate has challenged any production that tried to make use of the characters — and indeed, popular TV series like the BBC’s Sherlock, and CBS’s Elementary, have paid a license.

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Ancient Worlds: Athena Symmachos

Ancient Worlds: Athena Symmachos

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K8.3AthenaEven among the gods, Athena is an extraordinary figure. She is born fully formed and fully armed out of her father’s head. As one of the virgin goddesses she is almost completely independent of masculine control, which is always astonishing in the Greek world.

She reflects a fascinating series of attitudes. As the goddess of wisdom, she and Aphrodite are completely foreign to each other, so much so that in one poem, when Athena is Aphrodite’s house she is literally unable to speak. (Wisdom and desire are completely incompatible with each other, you see.)

As the goddess of war, she is contrasted with Ares. Where Ares is the god of the warrior, the rage and chaos of war, Athena is the goddess of strategy and tactics.

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Vintage Treasures: Parlainth: The Forgotten City, an Earthdawn Campaign

Vintage Treasures: Parlainth: The Forgotten City, an Earthdawn Campaign

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parlainth-smallMany years ago, when I was unemployed and trying to get a new website off the ground, I made a lot of calls to publishers large and small. I’d introduce myself, talk fast about how many readers there were on the web, and try and sound a lot bigger than I was.

Didn’t usually work. This was the mid-90s, and there were lots of publishers who didn’t even have a website. But occasionally one would take a chance, and agree to send me some sweet review copies.

One such publisher was FASA, one of the leading RPG game makers of the day. I’ll always remember opening the first box they sent me, and gaping in surprise at the contents: every single Battletech supplement in print — nearly 1,000 bucks worth of premiere product. A treasure trove far beyond my expectations.

And a textbook bittersweet moment, because what I was really hoping for was material for Earthdawn.

Earthdawn was a fantasy role-playing game designed by Greg Gorden and first released by FASA in 1993. Over the next few years they produced 20+ supplements, all with gorgeous cover art by folks like Janet Aulisio, Brom, Les Edwards, and many others. Set on the same world as Shadowrun, but thousands of years earlier, the key theaters were where the nations of Russia and Ukraine exist today, in the gorgeously detailed land of Barsaive.

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Lay Down Your Weary Year

Lay Down Your Weary Year

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time-enough-at-last-350x263“It… is… later… than… you… think.” — Arch Oboler, Lights Out radio program

10…

There’s that classic Twilight Zone episode about the bookwormish little gentleman who has a list long as his arm of books he’s always wanted to read, but who is constantly thwarted by the day-to-day demands of society and pressures of life. He happens to be down in the basement library stacks when a nuclear war breaks out. He emerges to find every other human being gone. After this revelation sinks in, he heads back to the library. Cut to hours or days later: he has amassed piles of books in the order he plans to — finally — read them all.

And then…the unexpected happens. The ol’ TZ twist. In this case, his glasses fall off, and he accidentally steps on them. In the closing shot, he stands there, blind as a bat without his reading glasses, with a look of utter despair on his face that dwarfs any emotions he may have felt on realizing that the rest of his fellow creatures were gone. With the books, even authors long dead were still with him. Now even they have been wrested away, leaving him truly alone.

Rod Serling provides his usual wry commentary in the coda of the closing narration, but everyone who’s seen that episode (“Time Enough at Last”, 1959, starring Burgess Meredith) remembers that final scene — within the context of the story’s simple little narrative, that pair of broken glasses is somehow, improbably, more devastating than the destruction of the human race.

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New Treasures: Night of Demons by Tony Richards

New Treasures: Night of Demons by Tony Richards

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Night of Demons Tony Richards-smallI don’t tend to report much on horror in my New Treasures column. Not that I haven’t anything against horror, but I have enough trouble just keeping up with all the intriguing new fantasy crossing my desk.

But there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in modern horror, and you deserve to know about it. So I try to sneak one in from time to time. Like Tony Richards’s intriguing Night of Demons, his latest novel set in a Massachusetts town that can’t be located on any map… and which people forget as soon as they leave.

Centuries ago, the Salem witches founded the village of Raine’s Landing, then cloaked it in magic to hide it from sight. Many of their descendants still practice the supernatural arts — and no one who lives here can ever leave. Now evil has breached its boundaries once again…

A serial killer with a corrupt and twisted soul, Cornelius Hanlon has freely entered Raine’s Landing, undeterred by the ancient magical safeguards. And when he chooses the town’s oldest adept as his first victim, the maniac inadvertently gains possession of a powerful “gift” more terrible than anything he could have sadistically dreamed.

Ex-town cop Ross Devries and his Harley-riding sometime-partner, Cassandra Mallory, have no supernatural abilities. But they are the last line of defense in this village of secrets and shadows — facing a psychopath who now wields the power to bend the living and the dead to his will.

Night of Demons is the sequel to Dark Rain, published in 2008. A third Raine’s Landing novel, Speak of the Devil, was just released this month. Richards is also the author of Our Lady of The Shadows (2011) and the collection Shadows And Other Tales (2010).

Night of Demons was published by Avon EOS in October, 2009. It is 390 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the print and digital editions. I bought my paperback on Amazon, on sale for just $3.20 — copies are still available at the discount price.

See all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

Lord Dunsany, Philip José Farmer, and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

Lord Dunsany, Philip José Farmer, and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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Over the Hills and Far Away-smallI’m still enjoying the Appendix N surveys by Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode at Tor.com, as they read through every author Gary Gygax cited as an influence on Dungeons and Dragons, even though I’ve found lots to disagree with in their recent columns.

So I’m happy to continue with these re-caps here. Especially since I don’t have a lot emotionally invested in their next two subjects: Lord Dunsany and Philip José Farmer.

I have a lot of respect for Lord Dunsany, but that chiefly stems from the many fine writers who have cited him as an influence. I’ve read only a handful of his shorter works and, while I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read, he’s mostly an untapped natural resource for me.

It’s much the opposite with Philip José Farmer. I was a huge fan of his Riverworld books when I first read them decades ago. But they didn’t really hold up on re-reading 15 years later, for me.

So Farmer is a writer I largely lost interest in years ago, although I have to admit I haven’t really given fair attention to his many fantasy novels. I know his work is highly regarded, and in fact both Cynthia Ward and Christopher Paul Carey made excellent cases here for why I should pay a lot more attention to his Gods of Opar and Tales of the Wold Newton Universe series, for example.

So let’s say I have more of an open mind with both Lord Dunsany and Philip José Farmer, and I’m willing to be influenced.

With that out of the way, let’s see what Tim and Mordicai have to say.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in November

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in November

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The Best of Fredric Brown-smallThe top article on the Black Gate blog last month was the 13th installment in our ongoing examination of Lester Del Rey’s Classics of Science Fiction line, a look at the 1977 paperback The Best of Fredric Brown. (Brown also showed up a little further down the list, in our take on the Brown and Weinbaum chapters of the Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D series over at Tor.com).

Second on the list was Alex Bledsoe’s appreciation of one of my favorite films of the summer, Pacific Rim, and his thoughts on where it fit on the sliding scale between rip-off and homage.

Third was our review of a surprisingly effective, 81-year-old pulp tale by Clark Ashton Smith, “The Vaults of Yoh Vombis.” Fourth was M Harold Page’s report on his trip to the Gemmell Award ceremonies at the World Fantasy Convention. Rounding out the Top Five was Keith West’s opening chapter in his ambitious attempt to review the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.

The complete Top 50 Black Gate posts in November were:

  1. Vintage Treasures: The Best of Fredric Brown
  2. Pacific Rim and the Culture of Rip-off vs Homage
  3. Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Vaults of Yoh Vombis”
  4. The Sword Folk are Coming
  5. Lin Carter and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series
  6. Goodbye, Blockbuster
  7. Revisiting the Scene of the Crash: John Carpenters Ghosts of Mars
  8. Magic: Let’s Ditch Clarke’s 3rd law
  9. Thank Politically Correct Parents for Sword and Sorcery
  10. Nobody Gets Out Alive: Writing Advice from the Cheap Seats

    11. …

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Space 1999: The Fantasy in Your Mirror May Be Closer Than It Appears

Space 1999: The Fantasy in Your Mirror May Be Closer Than It Appears

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Space 1999When I was a kid, hurling rocks at dinosaurs and running away, there were not many otherworldly shows on TV. Battlestar Galactica ran for two years and then Buck Rogers for about the same, with some incomprehensible Land of the Lost or Dr. Who thrown in at seeming random. Saturday mornings were a rich source of imagination, with Tarzan, Space Academy, Jason of Star Command and Flash Gordon, but unfortunately, in my day, Saturday mornings were only on Saturdays.

Every so often though, I’d find Space 1999 in the TV Guide; it was pretty cool. The sets and ships were pretty different from the sleek models in every other scifi show, and the space suits and the Moon seemed so alien. Twenty-five years later, armed with a couple of science degrees, I ordered a season for nostalgia’s sake.

O. M. G.

It was awful. Aside from the terrible writing and passive characters, and the apparent scattering of Caucasian British humans throughout the cosmos, I could do nothing but choke on the science and toss this drivel into a corner (actually, I think I left the boxed set in Havana, but that’s a story for another time…).

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New Treasures: Weird Fiction Review 3

New Treasures: Weird Fiction Review 3

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Weird Fiction Review 3-smallTwo years ago I reported on the first issue of S. T. Joshi’s new magazine devoted to the study of weird and supernatural fiction, Weird Fiction Review (not to be confused with Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s new online journal, also called Weird Fiction Review. Go figure.)

I recently stumbled across a pic of the third issue of Joshi’s WFR (at left), and it made me laugh out loud. I had to order a copy, and it arrived this week.

There’s lots to enjoy with the massive, 232-page issue. The front and back covers (see both here) are tributes to Mad magazine and the timeless artwork of Don Martin. Inside there are seven original stories from Michael Cisco, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr, and others.

There’s also a host of intriguing articles. Darrell Schweitzer looks at Lovecraft’s influence on one of the most important pulp SF stories ever written, “Who Goes There?”, in “John W. Campbell’s Lovecraftian Tale,” and Bradley H. Sinor presents a previously-unpublished interview from 1994, in “Excellence Demanded, Whiners Piss Off: The Last Interview of Karl Edward Wagner” (which picks up several of the themes in Wagner’s letter to editor Robert A. Collins published in Fantasy 55.)

There’s also a 16-page gallery of art by Jason Zerrillo, the latest installment of John Pelan’s column Forgotten Masters of the Weird Tale, a survey of the year in horror and gothic novels from Daniel Olson, a look at the classic 1966 kaiju film War of the Gargantuas (which author Stuart Galbraith IV calls “kind of a monster movie Nirvana, a film that delivers on the promise of its ingenious title in an orgy of gargantua vs gargantua action” — pic here), and lots more.

Weird Fiction Review 3 was edited by S.T. Joshi and published by Centipede Press on March 19, 2013. The issue contains fiction, poetry, and reviews on high quality paper with lots of color. It is 232 pages, priced at $25 for the sewn trade paperback. It’s a high quality package throughout. It’s limited to 500 copies, and is currently on sale for $20 from the publisher. Get more detail and order copies at Centipede Press.