Black Gate

All writers, whatever their stripe, accomplish the bulk of their labor through the incisive, judicious choice of words.  Authors prone to world-building fantasy find themselves shackled in ways that most writers are not, limited to a surprising degree in their available terminology.  Consider, if you will, the following wonderful words: renaissance, Stilton cheese, bonobo, perestroika, taco, Hollywood, dim sum, tribologist, Ecuadoran, and haiku.

The common element?  You guessed it.  Not one of the words in that list is likely to have a place in the literature we lovingly call fantasy fiction.

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Last week I discussed Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker as an example of a true literature of ideas: a work structured not as a traditional narrative, with plot and character development as we know them, but instead built around the ideas that the work’s presenting, so that the book’s material is defined not by narrative but by the ideas at the core of its theme. As it happens, I recently stumbled across another example of this sort of thing.

Published in 1907, Jack London’s The Iron Heel is an imaginative account of North America sliding into a totalitarian society. London, a socialist, wrote the book as a cautionary tale about the oligarchs of his era. It’s an odd thing, mixing journalism and (what we now call) dystopic science fiction with economic hectoring. It’s slow going, particularly in the first half, but the climax is exciting adventure writing. You can see why it didn’t catch on, but it’s still worth looking at.

(You can read the book here, here, or over here, or listen to an audio version over here. I note there was recently a piece about the book on Daily Kos; you can find that here.)

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When I first crawled to the surface to whisper of monsters in your ears — before pinching off those delectable auricles with my first layer of incisors — I said I’d be back in a month with a lowdown on the greatest monsters from the pages of heroic fantasy, maybe even with a Top 10.

Sure, three of your months have passed, but why would a creature of the abyss even give a damn about human timetables? As for a Top 10 — well, to be clear, I regard your arithmetic and integers in equal contempt. In truth there are only two ways in which you matter: either when you’re sustenance (i.e. lunch) or making a complete troublesome nuisance out of yourselves with your flaming swords, silver bullet-shooting AK-47s and your brandishings of various items of religious iconography for the sake of the futile postponement of your inevitable fate (as lunch).

As evidence of the innate inferiority of your puny mortal selves, I proffer the fact that your responses to my request to name the titans in the pantheon of monsters were, as your kind says, all over the map. I hypothesized that beyond Grendel and Tolkien the monsters that populate heroic fantasy haven’t been so shiver-some, and indeed most of you extended trembling hands into other subgenres to draw out the denizens that frighten you most. (With one major exception, which I will explain in detail when I’m good and ready.)

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It won’t be long now…

R. Scott Bakker’s THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR hits stores on April 14, and I for one am extremely excited. 

Bakker fans have been waiting for this since Feb 2009, when THE JUDGING EYE was published as the first volume of THE ASPECT-EMPEROR series. This new series is itself a sequel to Bakker’s amazing PRINCE OF NOTHING trilogy. Same world, many of the same characters, and a whole lot of epic fantasy excellence. It is a thinking man’s adventure, a cerebral approach to high fantasy, and a journey into metaphysical realms of sorcery and spirituality.

A preview of THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR has been posted right here at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist: http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2011/03/exclusive-extract-from-r-scott-bakkers.html

Bakker is one of the most original fantastists to come along in quite awhile, and his stylistic prose is amazing in its clarity, attention to detail, and sheer philosophical scope. Here’s a description of the new book:

As Anasûrimbor Kellhus and his Great Ordeal march ever farther into the perilous wastes of the Ancient North, Esmenet finds herself at war with not only the Gods, but her own family as well. Achamian, meanwhile, leads his own ragtag expedition to the legendary ruins of Sauglish, and to a truth he can scarce survive, let alone comprehend. Into this tumult walks the White-Luck Warrior, assassin and messiah both, executing a mission as old as the World’s making ….

The White-Luck Warrior is a story filled with heart-stopping action, devious treachery, grand passion and meticulous detail. It is both a classic quest tale and a high fantasy war story.

As soon as I finish Howard Jones’ THE DESERT OF SOULS, I am all over this! A new Bakker book is always cause for celebration. With these two novels and the impending release of the long-awaited A DANCE WITH DRAGONS from George R. R. Martin, this is one great year for epic fantasy…

Peace!
John

Reading The New York Times on-line (something I used to read about people doing in science fiction novels; I still prefer the actual paper version, though my resistance to eventually getting an e-book reader of some kind is slowly crumbling), I came across these two divergent items of interest to those who ponder the stability of our immediate universe:

Astronomer James Elliot gets a featured obit because he discovered the rings of Uranus (okay, wipe that smirk off your face). What’s also noteworthy is that he apparently did so in a kind of jury-rigged  fashion.  According to the Times obituary:

In 1977, using a telescope in an airplane, Dr. Elliot led a team of Cornell University scientists to observe the planet Uranus when it passed between Earth and a star. Flying at night over a patch of the Indian Ocean where Uranus’s shadow was to be cast, he had the foresight to turn on his equipment more than a half-hour early. This allowed him to record a series of slight dimmings that provided the first evidence of Uranus’s rings…“In the current culture of giant spacecraft missions and multibillion-dollar experiments,” Dr. [Michael] Person said, “he showed that someone dedicated to science with relatively small resources could still make very exciting discoveries.”

Also in the news is the tsunami and the largest earthquake in a century or more that hit Japan. Whatever our global technological progress (even while world politics continues to destabilize), we tend to forget just how fragile we are as a species even without our efforts to do ourselves in.  During the Cold War, the end of the world was nuclear.  Then it was terrorism and religious fanatacism.  But, maybe it will end up just being good old Mother Nature.  Time to go reread J.G. Ballard.