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Roger Zelazny, August Derleth and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

Roger Zelazny, August Derleth and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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The Great Book of Amber-smallI’ve been spending a lot of time with Gary Gygax’s Dungeon Masters Guide recently, as I guide my young players through a wilderness campaign using Outdoor Survival. The DMG is a treasure trove of handy tables, excellent advice, and fascinating tangents — atrociously organized, of course, but that’s part of its charm. Like the most useful book in all fantasy, the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook (seriously — I’d kill for a copy of that book), you can flip pages at random and never know what indispensable tidbit you’ll find.

Appendix N, which lists the great fantasy writers whose collective contributions laid the groundwork for Dungeons and Dragons, is just one of those finds; but it’s one which has received a great deal of attention. Mordicai Knode and Tim Callahan at Tor.com are sampling the work of every author in Appendix N; so far they’ve covered Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, Sterling E. Lanier, Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Jack Vance.

Last week, Tim turned his attention to Roger Zelazny and The Chronicles of Amber. He wasn’t impressed:

I merely sampled the first book in the series, Nine Princes in Amber, originally published in 1970, and that was more than enough… if the first book in Roger Zelazny’s Amber series is considered any kind of classic, then it must be because the novel is graded on a curve. A curve called “pretty good for an opening novel in a series that gets a whole lot better,” or maybe a curve called, “better than a lot of other, trashier fantasy novels released in 1970, when there was nothing on television but episodes of Marcus Welby and the Flip Wilson Show…”

It’s not that I found Nine Princes in Amber uninteresting; it’s just that I found the novel shockingly discordant and unsatisfying to actually read all the way through. It’s a novel that slams together jokey Hamlet references in the narration with pop psychoanalysis and superhuman beings and shadow realms and dungeons and swords and pistols and Mercedes-Benzes.

Actually, that last sentence is almost exactly how I remember Nine Princes in Amber. Shadow realms and dungeons and swords and pistols and Mercedes-Benzes. Yeah, that pretty much covers it.

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The Game is Afoot: Watch the Sherlock Season 3 Trailer

The Game is Afoot: Watch the Sherlock Season 3 Trailer

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When I was a young blogger, I swore I wouldn’t write predictable headlines like “The Game is Afoot: Watch the Sherlock Season 3 Trailer!” Now I’m a middle-aged blogger with deadline pressures and nothing is as satisfying and as reassuring as a predictable headline. Thank you for your indulgence.

Do you watch Sherlock? Of course you do. The BBC One crime drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, which places Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective and his trusted companion Watson in contemporary London and is one of the best things on television. It’s one of the very few shows on television my entire family watches together (the other was Firefly). Famously conceived by Doctor Who writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat while they were commuting back and forth from Cardiff by train, Sherlock has had only two brief seasons so far, in 2010 and 2012, with one episode each season being written by Gatiss, Moffat, and Stephen Thompson.

The worst thing about Sherlock has been that there’s so very little of it, with only three 90-minute episodes per season, and a long drought between seasons. First time I watched Season One on Blu-ray, in fact, I kept checking the box to make sure I hadn’t missed a disk.

Season Two ended — naturally — on a killer cliffhanger, with Sherlock faking his suicide while Watson looked on. American fans in particular have been waiting impatiently for Season Three, which is slowly wrapping production in the UK. Two of the three episodes have been completed and on August 2 the brief Season Three teaser below was finally released by the BBC. No air date has been given, so for now it’s all we have. Enjoy.

New Treasures: Terminated by Rachel Caine

New Treasures: Terminated by Rachel Caine

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Terminated Rachel CaineI first discovered Rachel Caine a decade ago with her intriguing first novel, Ill Wind, which followed the adventures of Joanne Baldwin, a Weather Warden, part of an international organization that tracked and confronted natural disasters head-on. Kind of an intriguing premise and I was impressed to see it become the first installment in a nine (nine!) volume series, the most recent being 2010’s Total Eclipse.

Now, if I had written nine novels in seven years, first thing I would do is find a soft couch and lie down for, I dunno, maybe the rest of my life. Not so with Rachel Caine, however. No, she elected to start another series, The Morganville Vampires (fifteen volumes in seven years) in 2006. Followed by another one, Outcast Season (four volumes in three years) in 2009, and then another, Revivalist (three volumes in two years) in 2011. For those keeping score at home, that’s 31 novels in the last decade, during most of which she also had a full-time job as a Communications Director (writing, in other words).

I could go on — there are four more novel series, and several standalone books itemized on her Wikipedia page — but, man. I’m exhausted just trying to keep up. How does she do it?

Her most recent release is the third in her Revivalist series. The opening novels, Working Stiff and Two Weeks’ Notice, introduced us to Bryn Davis, killed on the job after she discovered her employers were designing a drug to resurrect the dead. Brought back to life by the same drug, she became a soldier in a nasty corporate war against her previous employer.

Already addicted to the pharmaceutical drug that keeps her body from decomposing, Bryn has to stop a secretive group of rich and powerful investors from eliminating the existing Returné addicts altogether. To ensure their plan to launch a new, military-grade strain of nanotech, the investors’ undead assassin — who just happens to be the ex-wife of Bryn’s lover Patrick — is on the hunt for anyone that stands in their way.

And while Bryn’s allies aren’t about to go down without a fight, the secret she’s been keeping threatens to put those closest to her in even more danger. Poised to become a monster that her own side — and her own lover — will have to trap and kill, Bryn needs to find the cure to have any hope of preserving the lives of her friends, and her own dwindling humanity…

Terminated was published today by Roc Books. It is 320 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and the digital edition.

The Tales of Gemen the Antiques Dealer: From Idea to Publication

The Tales of Gemen the Antiques Dealer: From Idea to Publication

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free-standing-dry-stone-archAs of Sunday, August fourth, the last installment of my Gemen trilogy is up and published right here on the Black Gate site.

It’s a curious feeling to have these three closely linked tales “on display” at last. I wrote the first entirely on a whim back in 2004, but the storyline itself had actually evolved decades before, in 1986. How Gemen got to where he is today — that is to say, fictionalized, and available for public scrutiny — is a tale that will perhaps be instructive to rising writers, and hopefully of some interest also to those readers who’ve kept pace with my hero’s travails.

Yes, Gemen is the love child of Dungeons & Dragons (possibly too much Dungeons & Dragons, although that, I hope, will be left to the eye of the beholder), but consider this: in all the literally thousands of hours of role-playing in which I immersed myself from approximately 1980 until 1989, only one idea, one small glimmer of a scenario, presented itself later as worthy of being translated to fiction. Lucky Gemen: alone among my endless sword & sorcery imaginings, he has stumbled into a literary afterlife.

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Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Black Opera

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Black Opera

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the-black-operaThe Black Opera
By Mary Gentle
Night Shade Books ($15.99, trade paperback, 531 pages, May 2012)

I bought a copy of The Black Opera based on the sheer strength of its premise. A fat fantasy novel set in the baroque world of opera, centered around a production engineered to call Satan himself up from Hell? Sign me up for a first class ticket. If there’s anything that Andrew Lloyd Weber has taught us, it’s that opera is the perfect setting for burning passion, dark secrets, and adventure in the shadows. Adding a diabolical scheme into the mix seems like a perfect way to roll the awesome dial up past 11.

However, the first thing I noticed about The Black Opera is that it wasn’t anything close to the lurid, swash-buckling, cult-fighting novel I wanted. It is, in fact, a rather restrained and stately affair, more concerned with the enlightened intellectual climate of the early 19th century than with blood, romance, and action.

Our hero is Conrad Scalese, an opera librettist living in Naples in the third decade of the 18th century. His first great success, a heretical opera entitled Il Terrore di Parigi, has earned him the malicious regard of the iron-handed Inquisition. Only the intervention of the King Ferdinand saves him from imprisonment, but in return for the king’s protection, Conrad must accept a difficult task.

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Weird of Oz Conjures Up Some Other Horrors

Weird of Oz Conjures Up Some Other Horrors

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the-conjuring-poster-1This week, I’m going to take a break from the summer heat and my blogging of Arak, Son of Thunder to get all spooky on you. This is a topic I’d normally tackle in the autumn, closer to Hallowe’en, but it turns out that one of the surprise summer hits is a supernatural horror film called The Conjuring. If you enjoyed that film and are looking for some home-viewing follow-ups, here are a few to consider…

The Messengers (2007)

As the movie poster for The Messengers tells us, “There is evidence to suggest that children are highly susceptible to paranormal phenomena.”

One thing’s for certain: the children in this film certainly are.

A few years ago, I saw a subtitled edition of The Eye, the movie that put Hong Kong co-directors (and twin brothers) Danny and Oxide Pang on the American map, and it did induce chills. Here, as in that earlier film, the Pangs demonstrate their skill at evoking the dread of The Thing You Must Not See: you know something is behind you, but you can’t turn and look because what you’d see might make your heart freeze.

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Experience the Best Science Fiction of 1926 with The Gernsback Awards, Volume One

Experience the Best Science Fiction of 1926 with The Gernsback Awards, Volume One

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The Gernsback Awards-smallThe Hugo Award, science fiction’s most famous prize, was first dreamed up in 1953 for the 11th World Science Fiction Convention, and they’ve been given out every year since 1955. The prestigious Nebula, awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), was first given out in 1966.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But wait! What about all the marvelous science fiction and fantasy published between 1926, the year that marks the birth of Amazing Stories and hence science fiction as a genre, and 1953? With no prestigious award to draw the attention of future generations, is all that pulp fiction doomed to obscurity? Can nothing be done?!?”

Admit it — that’s exactly what you thought, over-punctuation and all. You should think about switching to decaffeinated.

Well, calm down. As usual, there’s no thought that we have that Forrest J. Ackerman hasn’t thunk before. In fact, Forry sprang into action to rectify this serious crime against science fiction way back in 1982.

His ingenious idea was The Gernsback Awards, a series of awards given retroactively to early science fiction. Each year, the ten nominees for the award would be collected in a handsome volume that would allow modern audiences to read and judge for themselves the best of the year.

At least, it was meant to be a series of awards. For unknown reasons, only one volume ever appeared: The Gernsback Awards, Volume One: 1926. Still, that one volume is packed full of terrific fiction from Edmond Hamilton, Curt Siodmak, Murray Leinster, A. Hyatt Verrill, H. G. Wells, and others — not to mention great art by Frank R. Paul.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Keystone,” Part III of The Tales of Gemen, by Mark Rigney

Black Gate Online Fiction: “The Keystone,” Part III of The Tales of Gemen, by Mark Rigney

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AppleMarkGemen the Antiques Dealer puts the plan he’s been preparing for decades in motion, in the conclusion to the epic fantasy series that began with “The Trade” and “The Find.”

Five more times did Gemen, Tetch, and Velori delay or misdirect their pursuers. They destroyed a bridge over a high gorge, they broke open an upstream beaver dam and flooded the road, they laid caltrops and netting, they set tripwires and, once, right in the heart of the vast Samandwan forests, in a natural amphitheatre of towering duskwood trees, Tetch spent the best part of a day laying an enchantment on the roadway that would, or so he assured Gemen, cause the Corvaenish riders to ride in a tight circle and return by the way they’d come, none the wiser for hours.

“It’s a guarantee!” said Tetch, more than a little defensively.

“When I do a thing,” said Velori, “I simply do it, and leave off the guarantees.”

“Come now, girl!” said Tetch. “All this time spent with Gemen, and you’ve yet to develop a belief in magicks?”

“What I believe,” said Velori, “is that we’ve set obstacles aplenty, and we’re still being followed.”

Mark Rigney is the author of the plays Acts of God (Playscripts, Inc.) and Bears, winner of the 2012 Panowski Playwriting Competition. His short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appears in Black Static, The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, Not One Of Us, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and many more. A haunted novella, “The Skates,” is now available from Samhain Publishing, with a follow-up due in early 2014, and his contemporary fantasy novel, A Most Unruly Gnome, won the 2009 First Coast Novel Contest.

Mark’s previous stories in The Tales of Gemen the Antiques Dealer were “The Trade,” which Tangent Online called a “Marvelous tale. Can’t wait for the next part.” — and “The Find,” which Tangent called “Reminiscent of the old sword & sorcery classics. I can’t wait to see what fate awaits Gemen. A must read.”

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by Aaron Bradford Starr, Jamie McEwan, Martha Wells, Mary Catelli, Michael Penkas, Ryan Harvey, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, E.E. Knight, C.S.E. Cooney, Howard Andrew Jones, Harry Connolly, and many others, is here.

“The Keystone” is a complete 15,000-word novelette of weird fantasy offered at no cost.

Read the complete story here.

New Treasures: Night Pilgrims: A Saint-Germain Novel by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

New Treasures: Night Pilgrims: A Saint-Germain Novel by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

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Night Pilgrims A Saint-Germain Novel-smallLast April, we reported on the special Bram Stoker Award given out to the Vampire Novel of the Century (the Century in question being the 20th, for you confused millennials in the crowd.)

Hotel Transylvania (1978), the very first Count Saint-Germain novel, was a heavy contender for that special award, and in the 35 years since it appeared Yarbro has built up a loyal following with over two dozen novels featuring the immortal Count. Last week the 26th, Night Pilgrims, arrived in stores.

Even setting aside her popular Saint-Germain series, Yarbro is a heavy-hitter in fantasy circles. Two of her earliest novels, The Palace (1979) and Ariosto (1980), were nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and she was named a Grand Master at the World Horror Convention in 2003. The last Yarbo title we discussed here was her 1985 paperback To the High Redoubt.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s first Saint-Germain novel, Hotel Transylvania, was recently nominated as Vampire Novel of the Century. Her Saint-Germain cycle, now comprised of more than twenty-five books, is a masterwork of historical horror fiction. The vampire Count Saint-Germain has crisscrossed the world many times, seeking love and the blood of life and seeing humanity at its best and worst.

In Night Pilgrims, Saint-Germain is living in a monastery in Egypt when he is hired to guide a group of pilgrims to underground churches in southern Egypt. The vampire finds a companion in a lovely widow who later fears that her dalliance with the Count will prevent her from reaching Heaven.

The pilgrims begin to fall prey to the trials of travel in the Holy Lands; some see visions and hear the word of God; others are seduced by desires for riches and power. A visit to the Chapel of the Holy Grail brings many quarrels to a head; Saint-Germain must use all his diplomacy and a good deal of his strength to keep the pilgrims from slaughtering one another.

Night Pilgrims was published by Tor Books on July 30. It is 426 pages in hardcover, priced at $29.99 ($14.99 for the digital edition).

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The Genesis of The Fall of the First World

The Genesis of The Fall of the First World

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the-fall-of-the-first-world-smallI began work on The Fall of the First World in 1979, when I was twenty-six years old, at the suggestion of my agent at the time, who told me that, because of the tremendous popular success of the Thomas Covenant trilogy and of Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, publishers were eager to buy epic fantasy novels, particularly fantasy trilogies. I began to outline my own trilogy and compose the opening section. I started by incorporating story ideas already in my files. These included notes for a novel about the sinking of an ancient island-continent, perhaps Atlantis itself, to be called The Passing of the Gods. At the same time, I had long entertained the idea of writing a novel about the Third Crusade, so I included characters that borrowed from the historic figures of Richard Coeur de Lion and Saladin, who more or less wound up becoming King Elad of Athadia and Agors ko-Ghen of Salukadia.

Part of the original idea of my writing the Atlantis novel was to include characters that would suggest actual historical or legendary figures of Western culture — Helen of Troy, for instance; and the Wandering Jew or Flying Dutchman; the noble and arrogant Miltonian Lucifer; and the divinely inspired seer of truth, a Christ figure, a Siddhartha, a Black Elk. I found no way to include another culturally iconic figure, a dragon slayer from the mists of early time, be he St. George or Siegfried, but I had no desire, anyway, to populate such a novel with a mélange of stale operatic cardboard figures.

These were to be real people from a lost age, the echoes of whose lives persist into our own time, and who became personified in our myths and stories or who were to be incarnated endlessly in our culture as figures of universal fascination, notoriety, or wisdom. Their singular qualities immortalize them as remarkable representatives of humanity — their heroism and beauty, for example, or their spiritual insight or existential aloneness.

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