Browsed by
Category: Blog Entry

Musing on Villainy

Musing on Villainy

capI’m a writer, not a psychotherapist. As an adventure writer, though, I spend an awful lot of time thinking about heroism and villainy. I think that we forget too easily that real heroes exist as well as real villains. We remember the underwear bomber, but how many of us recall the name of the Dutch man who leapt from several rows back to take him down? In the aftermath of the attack on Congresswoman Giffords, we heard courageous tales of people throwing themselves in front of their friends and loved ones to protect them. Many of them died when they did so. As the events unfold after this most recent tragedy, we are certain to learn of people in the cinema who risked or even sacrificed their lives for their friends and loved ones. We know already that policemen risked their lives to advance into who knew what to find and stop the man (or men – they didn’t know) who had committed this horrible crime.

Yet it is the villain whose face we continue to see whenever these tragedies are discussed upon the news.

These days we seem constantly to be facing tales of an angry young man with a gun. Or eight guns, and plans that are inevitably more ambitious than the horror that catapults them into the limelight. Sometimes we hear that they were loners, and were quiet but pleasant enough. Former friends will be found by journalists, and they’ll speak in disbelief and tell us how they would never have thought it would happen… although sometimes we hear of an acquaintance who’d been afraid one day this particular individual would snap, and nobody did anything about it. I don’t know which is more frightening.

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: The Giant Anthology of Science Fiction, edited by Margulies and Friend

Vintage Treasures: The Giant Anthology of Science Fiction, edited by Margulies and Friend

the-giant-anthology-of-science-fiction2Those four boxes of books I purchased from the Martin H. Greenberg collection have been the gift that keeps on giving. In the third box I found about 30 hardcover anthologies, dating from the 40s to the 70s, including The Giant Anthology of Science Fiction: 10 Complete Short Novels, edited by Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend.

This book is a treasure trove of vintage novellas from the Golden Age of SF and fantasy. Despite the “Science Fiction” in the title, a great many of the delights on offer are fantasy, as the term was used pretty much interchangeably with science fiction at the time. Just check out this table of contents, with original dates of publication:

  • “Enchantress of Venus,” Leigh Brackett (1949)
  • “Gateway to Darkness,” Fredric Brown (1949)
  • “The Girl in the Golden Atom,” Ray Cummings (1919)
  • “Forgotten World,” Edmond Hamilton (1946)
  • “By His Bootstraps,” Robert A. Heinlein (1941)
  • “Sword of Tomorrow,” Henry Kuttner (1945)
  • “Things Pass By,” Murray Leinster (1945)
  • “Rogue Ship,” A. E. van Vogt (1950)
  • “Island in the Sky,” Manly Wade Wellman (1941)
  • “The Sun Maker,” Jack Williamson (1940)

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012

New Treasures: Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012

the-years-best-science-fiction-fantasy-2012-2We’re deep into Best of the Year anthology season now. Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection arrived on July 3 (29th volume!), Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012 on June 19, David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s Year’s Best SF 17 on May 29, and Night Shade Books published Volume 6 of Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (which we covered here) on March 6.

Naturally, my favorite Best of the Year anthology takes the longest to arrive: Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012. This is fourth volume in this format; prior to 2009 Rich published separate Best of the Year volumes from science fiction and fantasy, from 2006 to 2008. So all told this is his tenth Best volume (eleventh, if you count Unplugged: The Web’s Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy in 2008. Which we do.)

The highlight of theses books for me is frequently the introduction, customarily the place where the editors rattle off statistics and lament the imminent death of the short fiction market (traditional since the late 1970s), or even publishing in general.  Rich seems to be growing more self-assured in his intros, and they can be quite entertaining. This from the latest volume:

There are also a few writers appearing here for the first time who have been doing exciting work for several years — I’m a bit late to the party, perhaps, with Lavie Tidhar, certainly, and with Nina Allan… Alan de Niro, Gavin Grant, Chris Lawson, Vylar Kaftan, and Marissa Lingen are all also writers I’ve had my eye on for a few years. (Speaking of the perils of gender identification, I recall that I publicly listed Lavie Tidhar as a woman and Vylar Kaftan as a man… at least my aggregate totals were correct!)

And I should probably also mention that some of the writers I’ve already anthologized twice are quite young, or at any rate quite new to publishing, such as C.S.E. Cooney, Genevieve Valentine, and Alexandra Duncan. The field remains in good hands.

This volume includes much of the most highly acclaimed SF and Fantasy short fiction from last year, including “The Last Sophia,” by BG website editor C.S.E. Cooney, Catherynne M. Valente’s “The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland — For a Little While,” Kij Johnson’s “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” “Choose Your Own Adventure” by Kat Howard, and many more. There’s also a Recommended Reading list, which includes Rosamund’s superb tale from Black Gate 15, “Apotheosis.”

We covered last year’s volume here. The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012 is 575 pages. It is published by Prime Books for $19.99 (trade paperback) or $6.99 (Kindle). Highly recommended.

Some Reflections on The Castle Omnibus

Some Reflections on The Castle Omnibus

The Castle OmnibusAlmost exactly a year ago, reports suggested that novelist Steph Swainston had chosen to quit writing. This seemed surprising, as Swainston had written four highly-regarded books, all set in a fantasy world where immortals led armies against giant insects: the Castle series. In fact, to judge by the actual interview Swainston gave, her choice seems to have been more nuanced. She felt that the demand for producing “a book a year” was excessive, and also that writing as a full-time occupation was psychologically stressful due both to the isolation needed by the writer and to the need to self-publicise on the Internet. She wasn’t necessarily ceasing to write, but electing to write at her own pace: “I’ve never said I won’t write again, just that if I do write another book, I’ll do it on my terms.”

So would more books from her be a good thing? Sure; more books are always good. To rephrase the question: are her books in particular good enough that it would be worth hoping for more of her work to be published? I think so, yes. I’ve read a collection of her first three books — The Castle Omnibus, which includes The Year of Our War, No Present Like Time, and The Modern World; I gather the fourth book, Above the Snowline, is a prequel to the other three — and I was impressed. I think she’s trying to do some very ambitious things in her fiction, and I’d like to see more of it.

I will also say that I think some of the ambitions of the books may not be fully realised. I found myself somehow skeptical as I read them; it wasn’t that I had difficulty accepting the world or the story, but that I was in some way on the outside of the tale. I find it difficult to articulate why that is, though. Looking around the web, I notice that reaction to her writing mostly seems divided between outright praise and responses vaguely similar to my own — a recognition that this is strong work, but … in some way lacking. My problem is that I can’t quite establish to my own satisfaction what the lack is that I feel. What I want to do here, then, is try to work out what it might be. I want to emphasise that I think these are very good books, and I do recommend them; if I seem to be hunting for a flaw, it’s because the writing here is strong enough that the problems are difficult to isolate.

Read More Read More

The Coming of Dorgo the Dowser

The Coming of Dorgo the Dowser

mad-shadowfrank_frazetta_manapeGrowing up in the 1970s, the Ballantine editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan series and the Ace Conan series were part of my steady diet. Seminal pulp fiction graced with stunning cover art by the likes of Neal Adams, Boris Vallejo, and Frank Frazetta. The cover art for the Conan books perfectly captured a bygone savage world that never existed in mankind’s past, but should have. While most Robert E. Howard fans have long since rejected these editions because of the sometimes gratuitous changes made to the original text, the impact of the Conan paperback series on the proliferation of the fantasy subgenre cannot be underestimated.

My own passion for sword & sorcery waned somewhere around the time that Robert Jordan took up his pen to tell bolder and ever more sweeping tales of the Hyborian Age for Tor Books that dwarfed the originals without ever capturing the same sense of wonder. I closed the book on that chapter of my life not long after starting junior high and never expected to revisit it. Flash forward to 2012 when I discovered Mad Shadows: the Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser by Joe Bonadonna and found that sometimes you can go home again.

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Rachel Aaron’s The Spirit War

New Treasures: Rachel Aaron’s The Spirit War

the-spirit-warAlways nice to see a new fantasy series succeed. In particular, it’s nice to see a non-traditional series succeed — i.e. one that doesn’t feature vampires, werewolves, or a stake-wielding heroine with an all-leather wardrobe. And it’s especially nice to see a genuine sword & sorcery series succeed, one whose protagonist is not a swordsman, prince, or naive young hero… in fact, he may not be a hero at all.

Rachel Aaron’s first novel The Spirit Thief (October, 2010) kicked off The Legend of Eli Monpress, a series that has now run to four volumes. The most recent, The Spirit War, was just released last month.

Eli Monpress is vain. He’s cocky. And he’s a thief.

But he’s a thief who has just seen his bounty topped and he’s not happy about it. The bounty topper, as it turns out, is his best friend, bodyguard, and master swordsman, Josef. Who has been keeping secrets from Eli…

Family drama aside, Eli and Josef have their hands full. The Spirit Court has been usurped by the Council of Thrones and someone calling herself the Immortal Empress is staging a massive invasion. But it’s not just politics — the Immortal Empress has a specific target in mind: Eli Monpress, the greatest thief in the world.

Here’s what our buddy John Ottinger III at Grasping for the Wind said about the first novel:

The Spirit Thief is a work of sword and sorcery that will appeal to readers of Jim C. Hines, Karen Miller, Jon Sprunk, and Piers Anthony. It is a thrill ride of a novel, delightfully amusing, based on an original magic system… I loved it.

Missed out on the first volumes? No problem. Orbit has just released all three — The Spirit Thief, The Sprit Rebellion, and The Spirit Eater — in a single handsome omnibus edition for $15 ($9.99 for the digital version).

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Get the Lizard Guys on the Horn: We’ve Got Them a Gig!

Goth Chick News: Get the Lizard Guys on the Horn: We’ve Got Them a Gig!

image0021I only remember two things about the 1998 remake of the pop culture film Godzilla (and that’s saying quite a lot since most people don’t remember it at all).

The first is that it starred Ferris Bueller, I mean Matthew Broderick, in a role that was in no danger of making us forget his previous day off.

Second, I remember thinking how nice it was for Tri-Star Pictures to put the lizard effects guys from Jurassic Park back to work. Their unemployment benefits had very nearly run out since The Lost World wrapped in 1997.

Godzilla movies and their collective cheesiness have always been fun in an Ed Wood sort of way, but the 1998 version was cringe-worthy on a whole different scale: which is why I have always fantasized about ambushing Sarah Jessica Parker at a red carpet event to ask her how it feels to be married to the star of a cinematic pile of lizard poop.

And though such a statement might cause Ms. Parker to fall right off her $1200 pumps, it is clearly no such deterrent to the rest of Hollywood who apparently has never met a remake they didn’t like.

Get Industrial Light and Magic on the phone and let’s hope they haven’t chucked those velociraptor puppets…

Read More Read More

Art of the Genre: The Art of Miniatures

Art of the Genre: The Art of Miniatures

wm14_trollbloodstarterThere was a time back in the 1980s when I read Dragon magazine and pined over every ad of a game. It was during this time that I saw a picture of a mini-dungeon with some really cool miniatures included. I must have stared at it for hours and finally, when the Sears & Roebuck catalog came and I could pick out my Christmas present, imagine how happy I was to see the set featured in those pages.

My mother ordered if for me, and the day finally came when I opened my gifts and discovered the box I’d been waiting for. Now imagine my shock and disappointment when the incredible color version of the set was this dull grey plastic. It was in that moment that I was both duped by miniatures and also intrigued. Someone, somewhere, had managed to turn that grey plastic to Technicolor gold… but alas, I wasn’t to try myself and so I dumped it and forgot.

When I moved to Frederick, Maryland, back in late 1997, I ended up going into the downtown area to search out a gaming store. I found a good sized store called The Gaming Realm. Although the store would only last another year and a half after I found it, I still have many fond memories of my times there and all the people I met.

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Henry Kuttner’s “The Graveyard Rats”

Vintage Treasures: Henry Kuttner’s “The Graveyard Rats”

weird-tales-march-1936-coverThis is the latest of my short fiction reviews, following my recent reports on Howard Waldrop’s “The Ugly Chickens,” George R.R. Martin’s “Nightflyers,” and others.

In honor of the recent release of the massive Henry Kuttner collection, Thunder in the Void, I thought I’d talk about Kuttner’s first published story, “The Graveyard Rats,” which appeared in the March 1936 Weird Tales — alongside The Hour of the Dragon by Robert E. Howard, Edmond Hamilton’s “In the World’s Dusk,” Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Black Abbot of Puthuum,” and “The Crystal Curse” by Eando Binder.

Quite auspicious company! I found echoes of both Howard and Lovecraft in the opening paragraphs. Here, see what you think:

Masson… recalled certain vaguely disturbing legends he had heard since coming to ancient, witch-haunted Salem — tales of a moribund, inhuman life that was said to exist in forgotten burrows in the earth. The old days, when Cotton Mather had hunted down the evil cults that worshipped Hecate and the dark Magna Mater in frightful orgies, had passed; but dark gabled houses still leaned perilously towards each other over narrow cobbled streets, and blasphemous secrets and mysteries were said to be hidden in subterranean cellars and caverns, where forgotten pagan rites were still celebrated in defiance of law and sanity. Wagging their grey heads wisely, the elders declared that there were worse things than rats and maggots crawling in the unhallowed earth of the ancient Salem cemeteries.

And then, too, there was this curious dread of the rats. Masson… had heard vague rumours of ghoulish beings that dwelt far underground, and that had the power of commanding the rats, marshalling them like horrible armies. The rats, the old men whispered, were messengers between this world and the grim and ancient caverns far below Salem. Bodies had been stolen from graves for nocturnal subterranean feasts, they said.

What a great opening. I especially enjoyed the promise of a tale of eldritch and powerful subterranean evils… although truthfully, he had me at “frightful orgies.”

Read More Read More

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 7: A Fighting Man of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 7: A Fighting Man of Mars

fighting-man-of-mars-1st-editionBack on Mars already?

I’ve now crossed the equator of the eleven-book Martian series, and A Fighting Man of Mars is the first volume of “Phase #3” of Barsoom. Phase #1 is the original John Carter trilogy of the early ‘teens. Phase #2 comprises the three books where Burroughs tried new heroes. Phase #3, which covers the three books published in the 1930s, has John Carter return as the protagonist, and shows ERB spreading out the time between the books until he eventually quits writing them altogether. (Synthetic Men of Mars is the last actual novel of the series; the two following books are compilations of novellas.) Even though the first book of the new phase still features a hero other than John Carter, a new decade has arrived, and with this book it seems that ERB is seeking to re-capture the excitement of the first trilogy.

Our Saga: The adventures of Earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other natives and visitors, on the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. A dry and slowly dying world, Barsoom contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with nine novels, one volume of linked novellas, and two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: A Fighting Man of Mars (1930)

Previous Installments: A Princess of Mars (1912), The Gods of Mars (1913), The Warlord of Mars (1913–14), Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1916), The Chessmen of Mars (1922), The Master Mind of Mars (1927)

The Backstory

Burroughs started writing A Fighting Man of Mars in February 1929. Most of it he dictated onto Ediphone cylinders for his secretary to type later, a practice the author used for the rest of his career. The new book sold faster than The Master Mind of Mars, although All-Story still rejected it before Blue Book picked it up for $8,000 — seven times what Hugo Gernsback paid for Master Mind. The sale must have come as a great relief to ERB, since between writing the book and its appearance in six parts in Blue Book (April–September 1930), two major events occurred that shook up the author’s life.

Read More Read More