Browsed by
Category: Blog Entry

Goblin Fruit: Winter 2011

Goblin Fruit: Winter 2011

Comments 0 Comment
"Come buy, come buy!"
"Come buy, come buy!"

Do you remember Amal El-Mohtar? Poet, writer, Black Gate blogger?

Well! As I may have mentioned once or twice, she and Jessica P. Wick (who turns back into a mermaid when you spray her with a hose) co-edit a ‘zine called Goblin Fruit, which publishes “poetry of the fantastical.”

And… THE WINTER ISSUE IS LIVE!!! It’s ALIVE, I tell you! With (O my leaping lords of the great down under), soul-salivating art by Melbourne’s Omi Fam!

If we go by the art alone, this issue would be like a wolf pelt stuffed with sentient diamonds, or a lantern carved from a human skull. But I know the names of some of the poets (Rose Lemberg of Stone Telling, Leah Bobet of Ideomancer, Mari Ness of the Oz Blog at Tor.com, Loreen Heneghan, Christopher W. Clark, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Michelle Muenzler, and Neile Graham), therefore the possibilities for this issue are as endless as a winter’s night.

Go check it out! If you dare.

We last covered Goblin Fruit in our three-part review of the magazine.

Howard Andrew Jones Reviews HeroScape

Howard Andrew Jones Reviews HeroScape

Comments 0 Comment

Heroscape expansion packs

In 2004, I made my first trip to GenCon and was overwhelmed by the experience. I don’t remember much about the specific tables I visited, but I do remember coming across this new game, HeroScape, which applied a modular style to tactical war gaming – not just in the building of the army (which was usually modular in some sense), but in the design of the playing surface and terrain.

Just as Howard describes himself below, I was also the sort of person who always chose storytelling games over wargames. I had bought some Warhammer units, but had spent so much time painting them that I’d never actually gotten around to playing the game … and even if I had, the lack of terrain would have annoyed me.

With HeroScape, all of these elements came packaged together in a master set, and you could expand on the experience easily enough with various expansion packs. Six years later, Howard describes his experience with the current incarnation of the game.

…

Read More Read More

“And the Score at the Text Break Is…” My Favorite Soundtracks for Writing

“And the Score at the Text Break Is…” My Favorite Soundtracks for Writing

Comments 11 comments

jerry-goldsmith-conductsI always write with music playing. That’s not much of an admission. A few writers prefer to work in silence, but most that I have talked to say that they need to have music in the background while they work at their keyboards or notebooks. Some writers like to listen with headphones on as an extra seal against the rest of the world, but I only do that if I’m working in a public environment. Otherwise, I let my massively stuffed iPod play through the huge speakers in my apartment to surround me with music as I work.

Just as every writer has a different method of writing, so does every writer have difference musical preferences for underscoring his or her work. But “underscore” is the key word, since I have discovered that film music is perhaps the number one choice for music to write by. One reason for this is that film scores usually lack lyrics (at least in English; Latin chanting is a standby, Ave Satani!) that can distract from the author’s own words. Film music, regardless of its style, also inherently has a dramatic feel that parallels how writers often think.

The situation is a bit different for me. I do listen to film scores while writing, but that’s because film music is my favorite form of music. I have listened to film scores more than any other type of music since high school, when I turned into an avid collector of soundtrack albums. My collection is now somewhere in the thousands, and ranges in obscurity from John Williams’s Star Wars scores to films nobody remembers except film score collectors (The Cassandra Crossing). The chronological scope of my collection is just as wide, from silent movie scores to films released a few weeks ago. Film music is one of my deep passions.

…

Read More Read More

Cloning Mammoths — Will Neanderthals be Next? (We hope so)

Cloning Mammoths — Will Neanderthals be Next? (We hope so)

Comments 16 comments

hey-a-mammothCNN is reporting that a team of Japanese, Russian and American scientists are attempting to clone a mammoth, an extinct beast from the ice age. Apparently, they’ve achieved recent breakthroughs by combining the genetic code of an elephant with the DNA of a shag carpet. The researchers hope to produce their little cloned bundle of joy within six years, which is just about as long as it took my wife Alice and I to produce a baby (if you count the three years it took to convince her to go out with me).

Mammoths are big.  Big big big. Hence, the name “mammoth.” The word comes from the Russian mamont, meaning “humongous,” or something like that. Probably. Anyway, Wikipedia reports the largest known species reached heights of 16 feet at the shoulder, and may have exceeded 12 tons. That’s four times as much as my Uncle Phil’s Hummer. Wherever they’re doing the cloning, I hope it has vaulted ceilings.  And maybe a fenced yard, so the little tyke can go outside to do his business.

Incredibly, Wikipedia also reports an 11-foot long mammoth tusk was discovered north of Lincoln, Illinois in 2005, about three hours from where I live. Can you get enough DNA to clone something from a tusk? [Hey Alice — road trip!!]

Contrary to everything I learned in eighth grade, mammoths are not dinosaurs. They’re giant gorilla elephants. They’re also mammals, like that other famous extinct not-a-dinosaur, the saber-tooth tiger.  Scientists have chosen to clone the mammoth first, rather than the saber-tooth tiger or the Tyrannosaurus Rex, because they’re unimaginative losers.

As every well-read science fiction fan knows, cloning mammoths is just the first step on the slippery slope towards cloning people, cloning cats, Clone Wars, and the inevitable zombie apocalypse. I hope that in the interim, we get around to cloning Neanderthals. Because let’s face it — that’s what cloning is for.

The Book of Modred: An Excerpt

The Book of Modred: An Excerpt

Comments 2 comments

Last November, I blogged about my participation in NaNoWriMo. The following is an excerpt from what I wrote that month, for those who’d like to see how it turned out. Editing is minimal, principally for spelling. Although the story’s from the middle of the book, it should be fairly self-explanatory. It’s the story of Modred at the court of King Arthur, a young Modred who does not yet know the secret of his father’s identity, much less what’s coming for both of them in the future. As the excerpt begins, Modred’s about eighteen, possessed of a magical sword called Naught, and accompanied by his squire, who also happens to be the King’s bard, a somewhat older man named Taliesin …

…

Read More Read More

Steampunk Thoughts: The Novels of Felix Gilman

Steampunk Thoughts: The Novels of Felix Gilman

Comments 4 comments

ThundererI want to write about the novels of Felix Gilman, who I believe is one of the strongest new novelists in fantasy fiction today. He’s written three books, Thunderer, Gears of the City, and The Half-Made World, all of them accomplished and powerful, fusing imaginative range with a compelling style and real insight into character and voice. I’ve written about Thunderer on my own blog, and was able to interview Gilman at the 2009 Worldcon. I’d like consider now all three of his novels, and what makes them work. Before trying to describe the virtues of these books in detail, though, I think I first need to write a bit about steampunk.

I need to write about the genre because it’s a form that seems to me to be intrinsic to Gilman’s work; or, put another way, I think Gilman’s work illustrates something of what’s remarkable about steampunk. To explain that, I need to explain steampunk, and what it means to me. As it happens, I’ve seen a couple of essays lately which criticise steampunk on various grounds, so I want to consider these objections as a way of defining exactly what steampunk means, and where I think Gilman’s work fits in with it.

…

Read More Read More

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part Two: “The Cry of the Nighthawk”

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part Two: “The Cry of the Nighthawk”

Comments 0 Comment

nighthawk“The Cry of the Nighthawk“ was the second installment of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu and Company. The story made its debut in Collier’s on December 26, 1914 and was later edited to comprise Chapters 4-6 of the second Fu-Manchu novel, The Devil Doctor first published in 1916 in the UK by Cassell and in the US by McBride & Nast under the variant title, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu.returnolandnpad

Rohmer’s tale bears definite similarities to his first Fu-Manchu story, “The Zayat Kiss” (1912) in that the story opens with Dr. Petrie at work in his principal vocation caring for a patient called Forsyth who has turned up at his residence late that evening with a badly infected hand. Petrie, in true pulp fashion, fails to recognize that Forsyth is the spitting image of Nayland Smith with a moustache.
Finished with his patient, Petrie goes to his study to find Smith with the lights out staring frantically outside just as he had at the opening of “The Zayat Kiss.” Petrie joins him and they watch poor Forsyth walk to his doom under the elms. They hasten outside after hearing the cry of a nighthawk and retrieve Forsyth’s dead body with its mutilated face. Only then does Petrie realize that Forsyth is Smith’s doppelganger and the duo then deduce that the poor man shared the fate intended for Smith.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: We’re Bats About New DVD Releases!

Goth Chick News: We’re Bats About New DVD Releases!

Comments 3 comments

image0041The holidays are over and according to AccuWeather, approximately 70% of the United States has snow on the ground and for a whole lot of you, this may be just a rare enough occurrence that for the moment, you’re mildly amused. But trust me when I tell you the novelty of throwing it at each other, sliding down it, or for a select group of you, writing your name in it, is going to wear off. And that’s when the cabin fever sets in.

The reality is that 70% of otherwise (fairly) stable Americans are trapped like rats with family members, classmates or co-workers for another two months at minimum. We are all now horror-movie fodder, Steven King style, holed up without sunlight and fresh air; susceptible to maddeningly repetitive sounds like the British accent on that lizard in the insurance commercials, until the only remaining coherent thought is squishing him flat in your uninsured Hummer.

Or maybe that’s just me.

The point is, you’re in need of mind-diverting entertainment until the thaw comes; before you end up being the subject of an HBO special and some Dancing With the Stars contestant is playing you… badly.

…

Read More Read More

Art Evolution 18: Clyde Caldwell

Art Evolution 18: Clyde Caldwell

Comments 5 comments

The evolution of fantasy art finds another player this week, but if you’ve missed any past artist you can restart the journey here.

With the latest version in hand, I now had a ‘Nouveau Lyssa’, and my industry contacts were growing with seventeen artists down, the original total of ten far surpassed. Still, if I wanted twenty it was going to be difficult to do.

gamma-world-255I went back into my desires for the project, and over the course of the months involved there were still regrets about some artists who’d said ‘no thank you’. One of these was Clyde Caldwell. Surprisingly, although Clyde had refused an entry into the project, he was always gracious enough to reply to emails.

After a year of random emails we’d grown rather close, and I think that fact made his exclusion to the project all the more painful to me.

You see, there’s the very intriguing part of Clyde’s decision not to do the project. According to his own website, and I quote: “I generally don’t take on a private commission unless I like the subject matter (Hint: In case you haven’t noticed, I like to draw and paint scantily clad or nude, sexy female characters!)”. Now, I read that quote a hundred times, and each time I did so I kept saying to myself ‘what the hell?’ Lyssa IS his favorite subject matter! It’s something I still haven’t made sense of to this day.

…

Read More Read More

Another Reason to Love Netflix “Watch Instantly”: Vampire Circus

Another Reason to Love Netflix “Watch Instantly”: Vampire Circus

Comments 0 Comment

vampire-circus1Vampire Circus (1972)
Directed by Robert Young. Starring Adrienne Corri, Laurence Payne, Anthony Higgins, Thorley Walters, John Moulder-Brown, Lalla Ward, Robin Sachs, Lynne Frederick, Richard Owens, David Prowse, Robert Tayman.

It seems that any time I log into Netflix to manipulate my queue to get physical DVDs, I discover more treasures that I can watch with only a click of the mouse button. Sometimes films unavailable on DVD—or any home video format—for many years. Such as Vampire Circus. (It is available on Blu-Ray, but I don’t have that option.)

Vampire Circus is one of the small treasures of 1970s Hammer Horror, and unfortunately few people on this side of the pond have had the opportunity to see it; the movie has remained incredibly elusive in the U.S. When it was released theatrically in the States, the U.S. distributor de-sanguinized it to a PG rating. Netflix has oddly maintained the PG rating on their page for the film, even though the version they have is uncut and contains the copious amount blood and bare breasts that were the marks of Hammer in its latter days.

Hammer Film Productions knew they were losing the youth audience as the decade started. Their dominance in the Anglo-horror cycle through the late 1950s and the first half of the ‘60s weakened as more graphic and contemporary movies edged in on them, making the Gothic Victorian trappings seem quaint. Hammer also lost a number of its best stars, directors, and technical people, and quality slipped as the ‘70s started. After the excellent Taste the Blood of Dracula, the Dracula series never recovered, and the attempt to reboot the Frankenstein series with The Horror of Frankenstein (on my short list for the worst horror movie the studio ever put out) was a disaster.

…

Read More Read More