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Escape to the Jungle

Escape to the Jungle

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jungle-stories-spring-1945-smallI’d planned a post about the business of writing today, but when we returned home from a family reunion and I learned about another massacre of innocents by another angry man with a gun, I just couldn’t muster the energy to talk seriously about the trials and tribulations of being a writer. Those trials and tribulations pale before what anyone in the assault was facing.

I couldn’t find much more to add to what I’d already said the last time this happened… what, two weeks ago? My God, people. Surely we can do better than this, somehow.

As a result, today I’m keeping things very light. In graduate school, one of my guilty pleasures was reading some pretty mindless escapist adventure. From the middle to the end of semesters, things could get more than a little hectic, what with all the projects and research papers, and it was nice to be able to just pick up a story and be entertained for a while by my old friend Ki-Gor.

Some years back, at Pulpcon, I missed the chance to become acquainted with the works of the gifted Ben Haas, about a decade before his writing finally hooked me. I didn’t discuss Haas here because most of his best work is western, but I took a long post live on my own site. At the same convention, though, I was wandering around the dealer room with writer John C. Hocking and sword-and-sorcery scholar Morgan Holmes. I stopped to chuckle at a ridiculous-looking pulp cover on display at one of the booths. Jungle Stories was emblazoned upon the masthead. Below, a beautiful and clearly evil dark-haired woman loomed over a bronzed jungle-man bound to an altar. Morgan said, “That’s actually a pretty good story.”

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All Eyes on Mars as Curiosity Prepares to Land

All Eyes on Mars as Curiosity Prepares to Land

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marsAs I type this, the one-ton Curiosity, the largest rover ever sent to another planet, is nearing an historic landing on Mars. It is scheduled to land at 1:31 a.m. Eastern Standard Time tomorrow morning, in slightly more than two hours.

Curiosity is already famous for several reasons. The $2.6 billion atomic-powered robot carries perhaps the most sophisticated mobile lab ever built — including 17 cameras, a laser, instruments that can analyze soil and rock samples, and a telecommunications system that can beam the results hundreds of millions of miles back to Earth.

It’s also famous for a series of videos depicting the “Seven Minutes of Terror,” the almost impossibly complex landing sequence — involving the world’s largest supersonic parachute, a sky crane, and no less than 76 precisely timed explosive charges — that will decelerate the rover from 13,000 miles an hour to zero in just seven minutes, delicately depositing it on the Martian surface. At 1,986 pounds, Curiosity is much too large for any previously-designed landing sequence to work.

I cannot do justice to the amazing scheme JPL has cooked up to slow the rover. I leave that to William Shatner, who narrates a 4-minute summary of the planned landing here. No, he’s not kidding. It really is that crazy.

I am very, very excited about this landing tonight. But like the entire staff of NASA, and much of the rest of the world, I’m also very concerned about all the things that could go wrong. I will spend much of the next two hours with my fingers crossed. CNN will be broadcasting live coverage of the landing, starting at 11:30 p.m. Eastern tonight.

I’m rooting for you Curiosity. Make it down in one piece, buddy.

Update: NASA reports that the SUV-sized Curiosity touched down safely on Mars, transmitting black and white images back to Earth. Higher resolution color images are expected later in the week. Way to go, Curiosity!

Vintage Treasures: The Prince of Morning Bells by Nancy Kress

Vintage Treasures: The Prince of Morning Bells by Nancy Kress

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prince-of-morning-bellsI first discovered Nancy Kress through her brilliant SF short stories, like the Hugo- and Nebula-Award winning  “Beggars in Spain.” But she has an impressive fantasy resume as well, including her early novels, The Golden Grove (1984) and The White Pipes (1985) — which we cover here.

The Prince of Morning Bells (1981) was her first novel, and I’m embarrassed to say I’d never heard of it. Until I found a copy in Martin Harry Greenberg’s vast paperback collection.

Only yesterday, when marvels and mystery blessed the Universe…

Lovely Princess Kirila rejected royal traditions to seek wisdom and truth at the Tents of Omnium at the Heart of the World. With her protector and savior, the enchanted purple dog, Chessie, she reaches the kingdom of the Quirks — but their rational society cannot help in her hazardous quest. Nor can the people of Ruor, whose mystic religion threatens to enslave her. It is only at the Castle of Reyndak that a handsome young prince succeeds in interrupting her journey…

But years later, Kirila will again take up her quest with faithful Chessie, to reach the fabled tents, and discover the amazing secret at the heart of every woman’s world.

You’ve got to hand it to any book summary that includes the words “enchanted purple dog.” That’s some serious book blurbing chutzpah right there.

The original Timescape paperback is pretty hard to find (and no, you can’t have mine.) But we live in the era of digital books, and if you’ve got an e-reader, then The Prince of Morning Bells can be all yours for just $5.99 in a revised edition with a new afterword by the author.

The Prince of Morning Bells is 236 pages. It was originally published by Pocket Books, as part of their Timescape line, and released in a revised edition in trade paperback by FoxAcre Press in 2000 (still in print). It is currently available in digital format for the Nook and Kindle.

New Treasures: The Black Opera by Mary Gentle

New Treasures: The Black Opera by Mary Gentle

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the-black-operaI don’t know if British fantasy author Mary Gentle is all that well known here in the US. But in my native Canada — and especially among the fantasy fans I circulated among in Ottawa — she is highly respected indeed.

Her first novel was Hawk in Silver, published in 1977 when she was only eighteen. But it was her two linked science fiction novels Golden Witchbreed (1983) and Ancient Light (1987) that really put her in the map. Her first major fantasy novel was Rats and Gargoyles (1990), the first volume of the White Crow sequence; perhaps her most acclaimed recent work has been Ash: A Secret History (2000, published in four volumes in the US) and Ilario (2007).

She’s also well known for Grunts! (1992), an action-packed send-up of epic fantasy, which follows Orc Captain Ashnak and his war-band as they take arms against the insufferable forces of Light — including murderous halflings and racist elves — who slaughter his orc brothers by the thousands in their path to inevitable victory.

Her newest novel is The Black Opera, and it has all the hallmarks of Gentle’s original and thought-provoking fantasy:

Naples, the 19th Century. In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, holy music has power. Under the auspices of the Church, the Sung Mass can bring about actual miracles like healing the sick or raising the dead. But some believe that the musicodramma of grand opera can also work magic by channeling powerful emotions into something sublime. Now the Prince’s Men, a secret society, hope to stage their own black opera to empower the Devil himself – and change Creation for the better! Conrad Scalese is a struggling librettist whose latest opera has landed him in trouble with the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Rescued by King Ferdinand II, Conrad finds himself recruited to write and stage a counter opera that will, hopefully, cancel out the apocalyptic threat of the black opera, provided the Prince’s Men, and their spies and saboteurs, don’t get to him first. And he only has six weeks to do it…

The Black Opera was published in May by Night Shade Press. It is 515 pages (including a one-page appendix, “Rude Italian for Beginners,”) and is available for $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 in various digital formats.

Vintage Treasures: The Barbarians Anthology Series

Vintage Treasures: The Barbarians Anthology Series

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barbariansThere’s been some good discussion of Sword & Sorcery on the BG blog of late, from Brian Murphy’s excellent list of “A Half-Dozen Swords And Sorcery Short Stories Worth Your Summer Reading Time, and Howard Andrew Jones’s skillful examination of the writing technique of the genre’s patriarch, “Under the Hood with Robert E. Howard,” to Joe Bonadonna’s warm reminiscence of the very best S&S of his youth, “How I Met Your Cimmerian (and other Barbarian Swordsmen).”

I thought I was pretty well educated in Sword & Sorcery; but it’s the sign of a rich and vibrant genre that it can still surprise you after decades of collecting.

That’s exactly what happened when I found the artifact at left, buried deep in a paperback science fiction collection I recently purchased.

Barbarians was a major S&S retrospective anthology published by Signet in 1986. It was edited by Robert Adams, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles Waugh, and contained stories by Fritz Leiber, Fred Saberhagen, Andre Norton, Karl Edward Wagner, and many more. It’s a thick paperback original with 13 short stories.

And no, I’d never seen a copy before — or its sequel. Here’s the back cover copy:

From a beautiful huntress with glittering eyes and a killing kiss to mighty Conan’s struggle in a deadly place beyond magic… from a distant planet fated to do battle with the forgotten past to primeval swordsmen pledged to protect a besieged land — here are tales of titanic strength and unearthly courage, of savage warriors facing incredible challenges in the far-flung realms of the imagination.

Sounds pretty good. Not entirely sure how this one escaped me for all these years, but I’m glad I’ve stumbled across it now.

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Re-Discovering Sax Rohmer

Re-Discovering Sax Rohmer

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rohmer-the-green-spiderrohmer-the-leopard-couchRegular readers of my articles will be aware of my fascination with the works of British thriller writer, Sax Rohmer. Along with penning several series of articles, I was fortunate enough to be authorized by Rohmer’s estate to write two new Fu Manchu thrillers for Black Coat Press in an effort to bring new readers to the originals. For several decades, Rohmer’s work has been largely out of print and much of it has fallen into obscurity. Happily, this has recently started to change.

Last year, Titan Books licensed Rohmer’s catalog and began an ambitious reprint series at the start of this year, beginning with Rohmer’s fourteen Fu Manchu titles. All of the books are being printed in affordable trade paperback editions. The first three titles are available at present and the next two may be pre-ordered from Amazon. These attractive uniform editions recall the lurid retro cover art on Penguin’s recent trade paperback editions of Ian Fleming’s fourteen James Bond thrillers.

Of course, while the Devil Doctor may have been Rohmer’s most famous work, it doesn’t even come close to scraping the surface of this prolific author’s voluminous output. While Titan is committed to bringing his many novels back into print, Rohmer has several dozen uncollected stories that were published exclusively in magazines and newspapers in the first half of the last century. Tom Roberts’ Black Dog Books have made an indelible mark by launching their Sax Rohmer Library series. Rohmer scholar Gene Christie has begun compiling several collections of rare early material, much of which is otherwise unavailable and would have likely remained lost without his efforts.

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Three Hobbit Films for the LOTR Fans = Trouble

Three Hobbit Films for the LOTR Fans = Trouble

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ew-hobbit-bilboFans of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings should be thrilled that The Hobbit, originally planned as two feature films, is now slated for three.  More Tolkien on screen is a good thing, right?

Surely yes, if what we are getting is indeed more Tolkien. But Jackson’s “bridge” film is not going to be more Tolkien, but more Jackson. And that is not necessarily an encouraging thought.

Due to contractual issues with the Tolkien estate — Jackson is unable to use material from The Silmarillion, The History of Middle-Earth, or Unfinished Tales — this “bridge” film will come from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. Jackson wrote on his Facebook page:

“We know how much of the story of Bilbo Baggins, the Wizard Gandalf, the Dwarves of Erebor, the rise of the Necromancer, and the Battle of Dol Guldur will remain untold if we do not take this chance. The richness of the story of The Hobbit, as well as some of the related material in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, allows us to tell the full story of the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the part he played in the sometimes dangerous, but at all times exciting, history of Middle-earth.”

The appendices are certainly a mine of information, but the stories they tell are scattered, patchy in places, and not written as straightforward narrative. To bridge the events of The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings in a film that neatly connects a series of disparate dots, Jackson must fill in gaps, construct dialogue from scratch, and so on. And that could spell trouble.

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The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll

The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll

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the-land-of-laughs-by-jonathan-carrollTo start, this is the debut novel from my favorite author, Jonathan Carroll.  First published in 1980, The Land of Laughs has enjoyed a sporadic publication history (like most of Carroll’s books), going in and out of print.  Unlike a lot of debut novels, the themes and voice found in his later books is already present and strong, making this an excellent place to start if you’ve never read anything by him.

The story opens with a disillusioned high school teacher, Thomas Abbey, taking a year off to write a biography of his favorite children’s author, Marshall France.  Joining him is another Marshall France fan and brilliant researcher, Saxony Gardner.  After some early chapters spent doing basic background research, the two of them go to France’s hometown of Galen, Missouri.  They are immediately greeted warmly by the townspeople and the author’s daughter, but soon discover that the many secrets surrounding Marshall France’s life, death, and work are being doled out slowly.  Eventually, Thomas realizes that they’re too far in to the web of conspiracies to ever leave the town alive.

As with most of Jonathan Carroll’s work, this falls into the uneasy genre of magic realism (which is not really the same as fantasy).  What makes him such an effective author is that he’s able to infuse the more mundane elements (a budding romance, living in the shadow of a famous father, the obsessiveness of fans) with so much depth and power that they seem equally important compared to the more fantastic elements.  Reading his books, I am always left with the impression of a world in which everything is significant.  Perhaps it’s because even the bit characters (the mortuary owners or Marshall France’s agent or even the English bull terrier) are described so vividly.

The subject matter, how art influences the world, is obviously helped by this style of writing.  We see the obsession of both Thomas and Saxony’s interest in Marshall France.  We see the almost religious devotion that France’s daughter, Anna, has in protecting her father’s legacy.  We see the excitement laced with disappointment as Thomas sees where his idol got his ideas, finding so much of it to be terribly mundane.  By the time the supernatural elements are introduced (and they’re introduced in a delightfully off-hand, out-of-left-field manner), we’ve already become accustomed to strangeness.

By the novel’s end, we’ve come to know the world of Jonathan Carroll’s work, where the everyday and the supernatural exist side-by-side, complementing eachother.  Thomas Abbey’s internal struggle with living up to his father’s legacy is highlighted by his external struggle to survive his encounter with the deceptively idyllic town of Galen.  Not a word is wasted and the final lines of the novel provide the perfect sort of surprise ending, one in which all the clues have been laid out in previous chapters.  Absolutely worth your time.

New Treasures: Laird Barron’s The Croning

New Treasures: Laird Barron’s The Croning

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croningHoward and I first met the talented Laird Barron at the World Fantasy Convention in Austin, Texas in 2006. At the time he’d published only a handful of short stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCI FICTION and a few other markets — but what great stories they were, including”Hallucigenia,” “The Imago Sequence,” and “Shiva, Open Your Eye.”

Laird turned out to be a fascinating and entertaining guy. Seriously, next time you’re at a convention, hang with this guy. He has a pure, unabashed love of Lovecraft, pulp and crime fiction, and westerns, and his fiction combines these elements in marvelous new ways. And if you get a chance, ask him to explain his famous comment that the Bible is “the greatest horror story ever told.”

Laird’s first collection was The Imago Sequence & Other Stories, released in trade paperback by Night Shade Books in 2007; it was followed by Occultation in 2010 (also from Night Shade). He won the 2007 and 2010 Shirley Jackson Award for his collections, and has been nominated for numerous other awards, including the Crawford, Sturgeon, International Horror Guild, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker and Locus Awards. These two books helped cement his reputation, and transform him from a rising young star to one of the most respected dark fantasy and horror writers working today.

His long-awaited first novel, The Croning, arrived in May, and true to form it combines cosmic horror and noir fiction in Barron’s signature style:

Strange things exist on the periphery of our existence, haunting us from the darkness looming beyond our firelight. Black magic, weird cults and worse things loom in the shadows. The Children of Old Leech have been with us from time immemorial. And they love us. Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly eighty years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge. Donald will discover the dark secrets along the edges, unearthing savage truths about his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and all he knows and trusts. For Donald is about to stumble on the secret…of The Croning.

The Croning is 245 pages; it is available in hardcover (for $24.99) and digital ($8.99) format from Night Shade Books.

Art of the Genre: When Music and Gaming Mix

Art of the Genre: When Music and Gaming Mix

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329302-rotk_2_3242_mouth_sauron_superI’m still far away from home, four weeks into a seven week stint that takes me all over the U.S. During the trip, I’ve had my fair share of adventures, but something I’ve truly enjoyed during the vacation is time spent sharing memories of my life with my son.

Many of these came in the form of gaming memories during my stay in my home town last week. For some reason, an old fantasy song got into my head as my son was jumping with my DM’s, Mark’s, niece on a trampoline. The song, ‘Towers of the Teeth’ is one of the two greatest Orc lyrical masterpieces ever. It comes from the Rankin/Bass version of The Return of the King.

Now in my mind, especially this version today, this is a very weak film, but the music is another story entirely. For those of you that don’t remember, or haven’t checked the link above, the song goes:

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