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Art of the Genre: The Humor of Will McLean

Art of the Genre: The Humor of Will McLean

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I’ve managed to do a couple of posts in a row on serious topics, and although there is certainly a place for serious things in fantasy [ask Joe Abecrombie as he is the current villain of all things serious in fantasy] I like the fact that fantasy can, and should be, funny.

false-move-254Now I’m not talking Terry Pratchett funny, who I don’t really find to be that funny, and I’m also not talking Robert Asprin funny, but more along the lines of visually funny. To me, the art of gaming and fantasy began in a time when people like Gary Gygax were struggling to define what it meant to be a fantasy role-player and just was that should ‘look like’.

By the late 1970s RPG art was pretty comic book inspired, and although it went to realism with Elmore, Easley, and Parkinson, that didn’t mean that the people actually playing the games were losing hours of sleep wondering how the socio-economic events of returning to their player-character villages with massive amounts of gold would actually negatively impact the lives of the citizenry from an inflationary standpoint.

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Dark Humor and False Floors: A Review of Runebound

Dark Humor and False Floors: A Review of Runebound

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Runebound-smallA couple of years ago I was really jonesing for some good old-fashioned tabletop fantasy role playing, but I was without a group and didn’t have the time to run a solo game for my wife. Then, like a beam from heaven, we received Runebound 2nd Edition for Christmas 2009. For the next few months, pretty much any time we had a couple hours of free time, my wife would ask, “Runebound?”

Oh, yeah.

Runebound is a board game of fantasy adventure. Each player takes on the role of one from a dozen (mostly unsavory) heroes, travels the map, faces challenges of ever-increasing difficulty, gains skill and treasure, and visits cities to heal, buy items and hire allies. The goal is to be the hero who defeats the great dragon Lord Margath before he can once again rise to power. (And if he can’t be found, snuffing three other dragons will do.)

The game board is a map that would catch Bilbo’s interest, with regional names (Howling Giant Hills, Moonglow Marsh) scattered liberally about that have zero effect on game play. Each hex has one of five terrain types. To move you roll five (when healthy) movement dice. A movement die is six-sided, with each face containing two or three terrain symbols. Spending a die with the appropriate terrain symbol showing allows you to move into a hex of that type. The odds of rolling each type vary, and on many turns a player is left weighing where she eventually wants to go against where she can get right now.

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Robert Rowe Reviews the Judge Dredd RPG

Robert Rowe Reviews the Judge Dredd RPG

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Mock.indd

In this gaming review from Black Gate 14, Robert Rowe explores the world of Mega-city, the home of “the law,” Judge Dredd. I admit that I personally have never read the comic and am one of those sorry souls who only know of Judge Dredd through the Stallone film, but this review makes me want to explore the world in a bit more depth.

Judge Dredd

Lawrence Whitaker
Mongoose Publishing (268 pages, $49.95, 2009)
Reviewed by Robert Rowe

Judge Dredd is an iconic comic book character – a marvelous piece of fascist certainty in the absurdly dystopic future of Mega-City One. This new book from Mongoose Publishing is the third attempt to recreate Dredd’s world for role-players. The first was a stand-alone game, the second an RPG based on the d20 system, and this installment is a meaty tome based on the Traveller rules. Take note: you will need the Traveller Core Rulebook to play this version of Judge Dredd. As such, this game will benefit and/or suffer from the strengths and shortcomings of Traveller according to your own personal feelings about that system.

Onto the book itself. The production values are outstanding, treating the reader to full-color artwork from the inside cover’s world map of 2131 to the panorama of Mega-city one sprawled across the last page and back cover. The layout is clear and clean and after a very brief introduction jumps right into Judge creation.

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Desert of Souls: A Review

Desert of Souls: A Review

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bgdesertDesert of Souls, by Howard Andrew Jones.
Thomas Dunne Books (320 pages, $24.99, February 15, 2011)

As I write this, I’m listening to Silk Road Journeys: Beyond the Horizon, because sometimes Yo-Yo Ma’s cello just does things to a girl, you know? Anyway, it seems appropriate, so I thought I’d share.

First of all: Spoiler Alert. Probably minor ones, but you never can tell with me, so if you don’t want to know a few plot points, some specifics of the characters, interesting quotes and structural ramblings, please do not read further.

Second of all: I met the author once four years ago and have corresponded with him a few times, so there’s that. I am not an unbiased reader. But this is a blogicle for Black Gate Magazine, after all, and as we’re having a month-long celebration of Howard Andrew Jones over here, I don’t really think anyone expects me to be neutral!

…Hurray!

Third of all: I confess that I’d never read a Dabir and Asim story – in Black Gate or elsewhere – before this debut novel, so I came to it with no thought more profound than, “What pretty colors the cover has!” and “ Oh, great, now I want a scimitar too!”

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semicolonNo, the title of this post is not a typo.

I have recently spent some quality time pondering the most misunderstood of all punctuation marks: the semicolon. Specifically, what role should the semicolon play in fiction? If any?

If you cruise around Google a bit, you will find that most fiction writers come down hard on this strange Moreau of colon and comma. The post on this site is one example, and the writer quotes Kurt Vonnegut’s screed against the typographical mark: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

This shows that Mr. Vonnegut had very little faith in high school. You should know how to use a semicolon before you get to college, or else your English teachers have really been taking standing naps at the podium. (This colorful site does a nice rundown on usage.)

Okay, so I get the gist of it from the majority of fiction advisers: semicolon is sorta strange looking, works better in academic and nonfiction work, and writers can get the same grammatical effect by turning those independent clauses into two separate sentences. And there’s always the em dash (which could start up another debate.)

Except, right as I was reading over this advice, I immediately came across two books from major writers with the semicolon putting in a great amount of time — and doing amazing things.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.16 “And Then There Were None”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.16 “And Then There Were None”

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SUPERNATURAL

This week starts out with a cute girl being picked up by a trucker, attempting to seduce him. But, fortunately, he loves Jesus and tries to save her, telling her that the void inside is searching for him. She laughs, talking about how God created him and abandoned him. Then she whispers a secret into his ear …

and he goes home and smashes in his family’s heads with a hammer.

Sam, Dean, and Bobby are on the case. Turns out there have been a series of hunters running into massive monster populations, with many hunter deaths. Dean observes that it’s a “straight kickline down I-80…. Looks to me like it’s a Sherman march monster mash.” The march seems to be heading straight to the town where a man bashed his family’s head in with a hammer.

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Literature and Ideas: Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker

Literature and Ideas: Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker

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Star MakerIt’s often said that science fiction (or speculative fiction, whatever term you prefer) is a ‘literature of ideas’. I’ve never been able to agree with that statement. In part, I feel much the same way this writer does, though perhaps not as strongly; that is, to say that sf is a literature of ideas is to overlook the fact that the best mainstream literature is every bit as engaged with ideas, if not more so. Consider, say, Iris Murdoch’s use of Wittgenstein’s imagery and philosophy. Is that not writing engaged with ideas?

But I think also that there’s another difficulty with considering sf as a literature of ideas. That being: it seems to me sf very often fails to realise the promise contained in that phrase. What I mean is that ‘a literature of ideas’ would seem to imply a literature with a different structure than traditional literature; a literature with a different sense of how to shape a narrative, or how to use language. A literature actually shaped and structured by ideas, not plot or even character. I feel Murdoch goes some distance toward that sort of thing in a book like Under the Net, playing about with forms like farce and bildungsroman, and tying them together with the Wittgensteinian ideas about the representation of reality — with which, as somebody writing a basically mimetic work, she’s already engaged. What’s the science fiction equivalent of that?

It seems to me that an example of the true literature of ideas in sf is something like Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. Stapledon was a novelist, but a philosopher perhaps more so; and Star Maker seems often less like a traditional narrative than an extended philosophical meditation or anthropological field report. The whole book is essentially one big infodump. But a fascinating infodump.

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Goth Chick Crypt Notes: Hollywood Goes Grimm

Goth Chick Crypt Notes: Hollywood Goes Grimm

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image0023Anyone who has ever read Grimm’s fairy tales knows that they are not the stuff that Disney has made of them. Shorter on happy endings than you may think ,and often fraught with enough violence to garner an “R” rating, it’s a wonder it’s taken Hollywood this long to discover them and mark them for a darker, CGI-laden treatment.

Being a huge fan of Grimm’s fairy tales, as any self-respecting goth chick would be, I’m following several interesting offerings en route to the big screen in the coming months.

Red Riding Hood, set for release in theaters this weekend (and called Little Red Cap in the Brothers Grimm tale) puts a werewolf spin on the original tale of young girl-meets-carnivorous-canine-who-consumes-her-relatives.

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Charles R. Saunders Reviews A Desert of Souls

Charles R. Saunders Reviews A Desert of Souls

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desertofsoulsCharles R. Saunders, author of the legendary Imaro books, has weighed in on Howard Andrew Jones’s first novel:

What, then, is so special about The Desert of Souls? Well, just about everything.

Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the Middle East during the initial bloom of Islam’s ascendance, Howard brings to life the storied past of places such as Baghdad, Basra, Mosul… To this tapestry of history, Howard adds several threads of sorcery…

The protagonists and the patron become involved in a fatal encounter in a local bazaar. Events swiftly escalate into a maelstrom of murder, theft, escape, pursuit, magic, mayhem, romance, rejection and redemption, The characters — and the reader — whirl along in a breakneck journey through a Middle East that is ancient, yet well beyond the cusp of irreversible change…

Yet for all this homage to the past, Howard also breaks new ground with this novel, which places him firmly among the ranks of such new-wave sword-and-sorcery writers as Joe Abercrombie, James Enge and Steven Erikson, to name just a few. Remember Howard Andrew Jonses’ name. You will be hearing — and reading — more from him.

Charles’ review joins the recent rave coverage from BookPage, Bush League Critic, and SF Revu.

You can read Charles’ complete review here.

These Just In…

These Just In…

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feb-2011-cover-web2 The first Realms of Fantasy resurrected under new publishers, Damnation Books, for February 2011 features the fiction of Desirina Bokovich, Richard Parks, Mark Rigney, Pauline J. Alms and Scott William Carter.  The last has a story entitled “The Time of His Life” which is described as:

It’s so difficult to find time for yourself amid the demands of family and work.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could just carve some out?  Maybe, maybe not.

Realms of Fantasy tends to favor a wee bit too much of fairy land for my tastes  (an unfair criticism, since that is, after all, a large part of its niche), but this sounded different and intriguing enough to get my immediate attention. Who after, all, hasn’t fantasized about having some private place to get away from it all?

In this case, the narrator discovers a room in which he can spend as much time as he wants on creative pursuits, but only minutes have gone by when he returns to the real life of kids and bitchy wife and work.  A Twilight Zone kind of tale that’s ultimately about resisting the allures of temptation and self-gratification.  The wife’s transformation from bitch to loving partner isn’t quite believable, though perhaps Williams is suggesting this has less to do with the wife’s actual attitude than the husband’s perception. And he does get right the marital tension between two equally tired (but for different reasons) partners with young children.  

black-static-291However, I have to wonder what the editors do here at this magazine.  Okay, maybe you can make an argument that intense cold could actually scorch, though I tend to associate it with extreme heat. But racing minds, chills going up a spine, the mere mention of a shudder should send off alarm bells to break out the red pencils and clean up clumsy phrasing that mars an otherwise decent story.

Horror magazine Black Static for February-March 2011 has new tales from V. H. Leslie, Ray Cluley, Maura McHugh, Ed Grabianowski and James Cooper.  In the “first lines that hook you into the story” department, here’s the opening to McHugh’s “Water”:

“The pot lids hopped and fizzed when Mark’s mother laid the wooden spoon down calmly, opened the back door of the kitchen, disappeared into the overgrown garden, and drowned herself in the river that flowed past their house.”

True horror lies not in the stuff of sexy vampires or ghost stories or chainsaw massacres, but within the mundane context of ordinary existence.