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The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven

The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven

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The Magic Goes Away-small

A swordsman battled a sorcerer once upon a time. In that age such battles were frequent. A natural antipathy exists between swordsmen and sorcerers, as between cats and small birds, or between rats and men. Usually the swordsman lost, and humanity’s average intelligence rose some trifling fraction. Sometimes the swordsman won, and again the species was improved; for a sorcerer who cannot kill one miserable swordsman is a poor excuse for a sorcerer.

So begins “Not Long Before the End” (1969), the first story in Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away series. His approach to swords & sorcery is the same as the one he brought to the hard science fiction he’s best known for: extravagant and colorful yet built on a framework of logic.

As you might infer from the tone of the quote, he also has a bias against the warrior hero typical of the genre and in favor of the sorcerer. In the short story above, its sequel “What Good Is a Glass Dagger?”, and the short novel The Magic Goes Away, he chronicled the adventures of a sorcerer called Warlock in a pre-historic Earth located somewhere to the right of Robert E. Howard’s Hyboria.

Niven’s starting point was to theorize how magic might work in a rational way. In his model, sorcery is powered by mana, a finite source. Instead of telling stories of the glory days when wizards built flying castles, and dragons and gods walked the earth, these tales are set in the magical world’s fading days. It’s a clever setup and one that drew me in enough to read the whole trilogy this past week.

“Not Long Before the End” is an inversion of the too-common S&S story of barbarian swordsman rescues girl from wicked sorcerer. Here Warlock discovers the nature of mana and realizes it’s running out.

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CONAN: “Caveman Battle Doom”

CONAN: “Caveman Battle Doom”

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Conan-SnailriderCLR
Cover to CONAN’s split release “Conan Vs. Slomatics” (2011)

What is the sound of Sword and Sorcery?

It probably sounds a lot like CONAN. This U.K.-based power trio gives a whole new meaning to the word heavy. But these guys aren’t hampered by “Cookie Monster” vocals or the demonic noise-worship that often plagues today’s heaviest acts.

CONAN have coined their own genre, calling themselves “caveman battle doom.” For hardcore fans, this is simply a new sub-category of the “Doom Rock” scene. For the rest of us, it’s an amusingly accurate description of CONAN’s unique sound.

As the band’s own bio puts it: “CONAN are as heavy as interplanetary thunder amplified through the roaring black hole anus of Azathoth.” TheObelisk.net christened them “Europe’s heaviest battle-sloths…” It doesn’t get much cooler than that.

After releasing an indie debut EP in 2010 entitled “Horseback Battle Hammer,” the trio signed to Burning World Records and released their critically acclaimed magnum opus, “Monnos.”

Both albums are perfect for headbanging, slow-grooving, couch-tripping, or simply cranking up loud enough to vibrate the walls of your apartment. And your skull. They are super sludgy brilliance in the vein of early BLACK SABBATH, KYUSS, MELVINS, and TOOL. Call it “stoner rock” if you will, but absolutely no drugs are necessary.

Fantasy and sword-and-sorcery themes are essential to CONAN’s lyrical cosmology, which makes perfect sense for a band named after Robert E. Howard’s famous barbarian. 

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New Treasures: The Harsh Suns by Jason E. Thummel

New Treasures: The Harsh Suns by Jason E. Thummel

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The Harsh SunsThere I was, minding my own business, peacefully editing Connor Gormley’s Robert E. Howard tribute “Who Took the Flowers Out of my Prose?” and listening to him grouse about modern prose, when suddenly Conner took an abrupt right turn and started praising Black Gate author Jason E. Thummel.

Unfortunately, modern fantasy seems, for the most part, to neglect prose. And that’s a shame, because it means all those distinct literary personalities — the whimsy of Leiber, the melancholy of Moorcock, and the fury of Howard — are a thing of the past. Everyone seems to have adopted the same bland, middle ground style that isn’t really anything above functional…

Don’t get me wrong — there are a few standouts. I love Jason E. Thummel’s prose…

Well, that was a pleasant surprise. We’ve published three tales from Jason E. Thummel in the past 12 months — including the debut story in the Black Gate online fiction line, ”The Duelist,” which Adventures Fantastic said “Set a high standard,” and two stories of Gunnerman Clap, “The Gunnerman” and “Assault and Battery.”

Apparently it takes more than that to stay on top of Jason, however. Looking for an image to accompany Conner’s comments, I stumbled on the cover of Jason’s new book: The Harsh Suns, a handsome collection of three sword & sorcery tales published earlier this year.

I immediately ordered a copy and it arrived just in time to accompany me on my plane ride to San Francisco last Wednesday.

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Vintage Treasures: The Karma Corps by Neal Barrett, Jr.

Vintage Treasures: The Karma Corps by Neal Barrett, Jr.

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The Karma Corps-smallLast month, I bought a small collection of fantasy novels that included Mark Frost’s The List of 7, a terrific Clark Ashton Smith paperback, some vintage Lovecraft — and four early fantasy novels by Texas author Neal Barrett, Jr. I was especially curious about the Barrett, all four volumes in his Aldair series, published between 1976 and 1982. I first encountered Barrett in the late 80s with his post-apocalyptic novel, Through Darkest America (1987), and then his gonzo magic realist offering from Ziesing Books, The Hereafter Gang (1991). Those were more than enough to win my respect for Barrett’s gifted imagination, but I wasn’t familiar with his earlier work.

The four Aldair books rekindled my interest and I set off in search of what else I might find. The first title I found was The Karma Corps, an unusual science fantasy of demons, holy warriors, and a distant space colony with a very serious problem.

Captain Lars Haggart was a soul waiting to be reborn… but before that blessed event he has been inducted into the Arm of God Regiment fighting for the beleaguered Churchers on a newly colonized planet. Their foe — demons who could pop into existence, slay and pop out of existence the next instant. The demons were winning that war, sending their Unborn opponents back to limbo, driving the living colonists toward extermination.

But this was no fantasy, no business of the religious imagination. The fight was real, blood was blood, and swords cut sharp, for the Unborn were very much alive. Haggart was aware that this was frighteningly contradictory but first he had to fight the demons on their own terms — learn how to appear behind their lines and do to them what they were doing to the humans.

An unusual science fiction novel of a space colony in deepest trouble and of aliens who knew planetary secrets that were never in anyone’s Holy Book.

Given what I know of Neal Barrett, Jr. already, I didn’t really expect to find his name on a novel of space colonization. Throw in a strange religion and demons who defy our notion of reality, however, and now you’re talking.

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Oz and Frederic S. Durbin Discuss Hallowe’en Monsters

Oz and Frederic S. Durbin Discuss Hallowe’en Monsters

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Dragonfly_durbinIn response to my “Five Weeks of Frights” Hallowe’en post “Oz Meets the Scarecrow,” novelist and short-story writer extraordinaire Frederic S. Durbin sent me a thoughtful email, furthering an ongoing discussion of iconic Hallowe’en monsters. With his kind permission, I am reprinting it here.

Consider it a guest post from the writer of the wonderful Arkham House novel Dragonfly (a quintessential Hallowe’en read) and — one of my favorite Hallowe’en short stories — “The Bone Man,” which ran in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2007. Of course, he will also be familiar to regular Black Gate readers; his story “World’s End” was, according to John ONeill, “one of the most acclaimed stories in Black Gate 15.” Here’s Fred:

Fantastic post on the Scarecrow! That’s insightful — I’d been wondering what the next center-stage monster would be, and I would trust your impressions as one poised to see into various oncoming and now-arriving streams of the pop culture.

It’s interesting to ponder what about the classic monsters is at the center of the terror they hold for us.

1. The vampire is essentially Death. He comes from the graves. He feasts on the living. He gathers us unto himself.

2. The werewolf is the beast within us, the monster at the core of man. He is our fear of ourselves.

3. Frankenstein’s monster is our fear of our gifts, our behavior — what we might do when nothing is beyond our reach. We might steal fire from the sun. We might reanimate the dead. And the fire and the dead will bite us in the butts.

4. The zombie is our fear of illness. Alzheimer’s . . . global pandemic viruses . . . irreversible illness; it looks like our loved one, but it no longer is, and there’s no cure.

So what is the scarecrow? I think you’ve answered that question eloquently. Essentially, he’s the daddy of them all, the Last Boss, the overlord — because he is our fear of the unknown. I italicized that as an homage to Lovecraft, who told us what our greatest and strongest and oldest fear is.

Durbin went on to add a more personal note…

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The Roots of Early Love Go Deep: Five Stories Which Affected Me Deeply in My Early Teens

The Roots of Early Love Go Deep: Five Stories Which Affected Me Deeply in My Early Teens

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Sinner Sara Douglass-smallOne of the many minor consequences of having a child – in my case, anyway – is the extent to which you suddenly become nostalgic for the stories of your youth.

As such, and even though my shelves are overflowing with new and as-yet unread books, my thoughts keep straying to stories I loved in my early teens. And not just novels, but games, films, and TV shows, too. Revisiting these narratives as an adult, however, can be something of a mixed blessing: for every thrill experienced on finding that a particular story touches me just as deeply now as then, there’s often a corresponding moment of disappointment on identifying a hitherto unnoticed, winceworthy problem.

Even so, there’s an important difference between acknowledging that the things we love – and particularly the things we first loved as teens and children – are flawed, and throwing them out entirely. We cannot wholly excise our passions without removing something vital of ourselves; instead, we must learn to live with them.

What follows here, then, in no particular order, is a slightly different list to the sort of thing I might usually compile: five stories which affected me deeply in my early teens and which continue to influence me now, sometimes without my even consciously realizing it. The roots of our early loves go deep and even though I haven’t explored some of these stories in years, as I go about revisiting them, I’m consistently amazed to find echoes of them, not only in my own work, but in my expectations for the works of others.

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Miracles Happen

Miracles Happen

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Miracleman 23A little while ago, I put up a post here about Miracleman, or, as it was originally known, Marvelman.

One of the great ‘lost’ works of the comics medium, written first by Alan Moore and then by Neil Gaiman, for twenty years a confused copyright situation has kept old Miracleman material from being reprinted and kept publishers leery of the legal mess from taking a chance on publishing new material. This, even though Gaiman had plotted out a conclusion to the saga and one further issue had actually been fully drawn.

A bit more than a week ago, that all changed. Marvel Comics, who had been working with Gaiman to unriddle the complexities of the case, announced that in January of 2014, they’d begin reprinting Miracleman as a monthly comics series.

These issues will reprint all the material previously published in the United States as Miracleman and will also include new supplementary material, as well as some work previously only published in England. After the old issues are all reprinted, the series will continue with new work by Gaiman and artist Mark Buckingham.

This is big news.

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John Bellairs, Fred Saberhagen and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

John Bellairs, Fred Saberhagen and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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The House With a Clock in its Walls-smallI know John Bellairs mostly as the author of a host of YA fantasy mysteries — rather dark fantasy mysteries, actually, with a twinge of horror. The first one I purchased was The House With a Clock in its Walls, back when my kids were very young, but I imagined they’d thank me as they grew older and started devouring the fantasy library I’d diligently built for them.

Never happened. Instead, they did the exact same thing I did at their age: found their own books and steadfastly ignored the stuff their boring parents kept recommending.

They read Christopher Paolini’s Eragon series, and Suzanne Collins’s Gregor books, John A. Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice, and Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games. I ended up with stacks of unread John Bellairs titles like The Eyes of the Killer Robot and The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull. At least they looked good on the shelves.

John Bellairs also wrote at least one adult fantasy, The Face in the Frost. And that was apparently enough to win him a space in Gary Gygax’s Appendix N in the back of the Dungeon Masters Guide, which is why we’re talking about him today.

Mordicai Knode and Tim Callahan are examining one Appendix N writer per week at Tor.com, in their Advanced Readings in D&D series. They’ve done 15 installments so far, and for number 16 Tim turns to John Bellairs.

But first, he briefly returns to subject #15, Lin Carter, to say a few words about his exceptional treatise on adult fantasy, Imaginary Worlds.

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“High Fantasy Adventure at its Best”: Tangent Online on “The Gentle Sleeper”

“High Fantasy Adventure at its Best”: Tangent Online on “The Gentle Sleeper”

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"The Mudslinger” by David Evan Harris. Art by Mark Evans
“The Mudslinger” by David Evan Harris. Art by Mark Evans

Over at Tangent Online, reviewer Chuck Rothman shares his opinion of David Evan Harris’s adventure fantasy tale, “The Gentle Sleeper,” published here October 14:

Arland is “The Gentle Sleeper,” an assassin who has what seems to be a very weak power, but who wields it skillfully. He’d gone to the castle of the tyrant Baron Weller who has taken his lover Marraine in order to torture her to give up plans for an attack. Weller is a smart and very cruel villain and seems to remain several steps ahead of Arland. David Evan Harris has written a masterful adventure, which manages to work some science into the plot, something unusual in pure fantasy. This is high fantasy adventure at its best.

David Evan Harris is the author of the acclaimed stories “The Mudslinger” and “Seeker of Fortune,” both published in Black Gate. Grasping For the Wind praised “The Mudslinger” as “An epic fantasy… I look forward to more” and Tangent Online called “Seeker of Fortune” “Exceptional. A must read.”

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Janet Morris and Chris Morris, John C. Hocking, Michael Shea, Peadar Ó Guilín, Vaughn Heppner, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, and many others, is here.

“The Gentle Sleeper” is a complete 5,000-word short story of adventure fantasy. Read the complete story here.

Crowdfunding Kaleidoscope: An Interview with Julia Rios

Crowdfunding Kaleidoscope: An Interview with Julia Rios

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Herein we have Black Gate (or at least MOI, in my guise as doughty avatar) interviewing the inimitable Julia Rios, one of the editors for an upcoming YA fantasy anthology called Kaleidoscope.

Julia is straight-up The Right Stuff, in the humble opinion of this blogger, and everything she touches has a tendency to turn to rainbows.

I’m a product of the early eighties.

I like rainbows.

I am very excited for this anthology.

JuliaRiosBG: What is Kaleidoscope and how did the project come about?

Kaleidoscope is an anthology of diverse YA contemporary fantasy stories. I’m co-editing it with Alisa Krasnostein, the publisher at Twelfth Planet Press in Australia. Right now, we’re having a fundraiser on Pozible so we can afford to make the book and pay our authors the SFWA professional rate of $0.05 per word.

As for how this started, Kaleidoscope is a project born of podcasts! I host the Outer Alliance Podcast, which celebrates QUILTBAG content in SF/F. Alisa, my co-editor, is one of the members of Galactic Suburbia, which is an Australian feminist SF podcast. I love Galactic Suburbia, and apparently I’m not the only one, because they’ve racked up *two* Hugo nominations.

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