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Short Fiction Roundup

Short Fiction Roundup

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cover002-150Salon Futura is a recently launched online non-fiction magazine for essays and reviews about science fiction and fantasy. Therehugo-12 have been several attempts to do this sort of thing, most of which have had short life spans (anyone remember the Internet Review of Science Fiction?), but with Cheryl Morgan on the masthead, whose Emerald City book review blog was up for 12 years, this perhaps might have more staying power. On the other hand, this is a paying market, so if you’re interested in critical discussions of SF/F genre, you might want to consider hitting the donate button. Here’s the short fiction review for the October issue by Karen Burham.

Morgan, by the way, is also the non-fiction editor of 2010 Hugo award winner Clarkesworld magazine. Publisher Neil Clarke (oh, that’s why the magazine is called that) writes about winning the Hugo and other developments here.

A Peek at The Way of the Wizard

A Peek at The Way of the Wizard

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WAY OF THE WIZARD hits stores on Nov. 16.
The Wizard hits stores on Nov. 16.

It’s almost here! Next month Prime Books releases its new fantasy anthology paperback, THE WAY OF THE WIZARD. It features 32 stories of sorcerers, wizards, magicians and the like. In addition to luminaries like Neil Gaiman,  George R. R. Martin, Robert Silverberg, and Peter S. Beagle (among others) it features my own story, “The Thirteen Texts of Arthyria.”

Editor extraordinaire John Joseph Adams just announced the book’s complete table of contents:

WAY OF THE WIZARD

– Table of Contents –

-Introduction by John Joseph Adams
–In the Lost Lands — George R.R. Martin
–Family Tree — David Barr Kirtley
–John Uskglass and the Cambrian Charcoal Burner — Susanna Clarke
–Wizard’s Apprentice — Delia Sherman
–The Sorcerer Minus — Jeffrey Ford
–Life So Dear Or Peace So Sweet — C. C. Finlay
–Card Sharp — Rajan Khanna
–So Deep That the Bottom Could Not Be Seen —  Genevieve Valentine
–The Go-Slow — Nnedi Okorafor
–Too Fatal a Poison — Krista Hoeppner Leahy
–Jamaica — Orson Scott Card
–The Sorcerer’s Apprentice — Robert Silverberg
–The Secret of Calling Rabbits — Wendy N. Wagner
–The Wizards of Perfil — Kelly Link
–How to Sell the Ponti Bridge — Neil Gaiman
–The Magician and the Maid and Other Stories — Christie Yant
–Winter Solstice — Mike Resnick
–The Trader and the Slave — Cinda Williams Chima
–Cerile and the Journeyer — Adam-Troy Castro
–Counting the Shapes — Yoon Ha Lee
–Endgame — Lev Grossman
–Street Wizard — Simon R. Green
–Mommy Issues of the Dead — T. A. Pratt
–One Click Banishment — Jeremiah Tolbert
–The Ereshkigal Working — Jonathan L. Howard
–Feeding the Feral Children — David Farland
–The Orange-Tree Sacrifice — Vylar Kaftan
–Love is the Spell That Casts Out Fear — Desirina Boskovich
–El Regalo — Peter S. Beagle
–The Word of Unbinding — Ursula K. Le Guin
–The Thirteen Texts of Arthyria — John R. Fultz
–The Secret of the Blue Star — Marion Zimmer Bradley

So I’m sandwiched in between Ursula K. LeGuin and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Not a bad place to be!

You can pre-order WAY OF THE WIZARD at Amazon.com

Cheers!
John

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Power of Myth-Making

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Power of Myth-Making

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wrightson-frankensteinMary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus is a remarkable work. The book had its origin as a ghost story concocted during a weekend gathering of the literati on Lake Geneva. It became the modern myth best reflecting the ethical and moral issues that arise when technology consistently outpaces its maker’s ability to reconcile progress with the established strictures of society. It remains a classic cautionary tale that has lost none of its relevance nearly 200 years since its publication. Despite this fact, it is an intensely personal story with strong autobiographical touches.

frankenstein2Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in the late eighteenth century to outspoken liberal political theorist William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Her mother died of complications giving birth to Mary. She grew up revering her parents’ work and was encouraged by it to ceaselessly question authority in any form. At age 16, Mary began an affair with one of her father’s most ardent followers, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who was five years her senior and married with small children.

Percy left his wife and family to travel the continent with Mary and her stepsister, Claire. He enjoyed affairs with both young women. Their unconventional living arrangement engendered much public outrage and ostracism wherever they went. Mary became pregnant with Percy’s child, but the little girl died shortly after birth. Mary’s father, who had criticized the institution of marriage in his writings, inexplicably turned his back on his unwed daughter for her licentious behavior.

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Goth Chick News: Let the Screaming Commence

Goth Chick News: Let the Screaming Commence

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image004It’s the first of October and that means the countdown has started.

For the next thirty days there will a lineup of great stuff on TV, a schedule full of movie festivals and new theater releases, a litany of themed events and a virtual plethora of options for combining adult beverages and questionable behavior.

In short, it’s thirty days until my favorite date on the calendar: Halloween.

For the next month I will average approximately four hours of sleep per night in a manic attempt to juggle my intrusive day job with all the after-dark activities available only this time of year. Soon I will begin to resemble the pale and sallow creatures of my Midnight Movies and bug-eyed demons of the local haunted attraction, but it matters not. I will sleep on November the first.

You don’t have to be utterly obsessed with All Hallow’s Eve to enjoy October. With an internet connection and a little tenacity, you can expend as much or a little cash as you wish and still have a ripping good time.

Here are my top three suggestions for ways to enjoy the only time of year when adults can act like juvenile delinquents in public, and no one cares.

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Art Evolution 4: David Deitrick

Art Evolution 4: David Deitrick

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In my ongoing Art Evolution series, I explained my plan to collect ten of the greatest fantasy role-playing artists of all time for a shared project. They were to illustrate a single character in their most recognizable style. So far, the list has included Jeff Laubenstein, Eric Vedder, and Jeff Dee, with this week adding again to that prestigious list.

a-doomsday-254Three down, and I now had a “1st Edition D&D Lyssa”, but I’d only scratched the surface of my goal and all the artists I’d collected so far weren’t cold calls. These were people I’d already worked with, friends and partners, and the list that remained loomed much larger than this current success. I kept asking myself, ‘do you want this for you, or do you want it for something greater?’

I chewed on that as I read through an old Dragon magazine one afternoon in late August [a pastime I strongly suggest doing once a month to anyone still role-playing]. While reading, I stumbled on a beautiful advertisement for the Traveller RPG.

I recognized the art as something I’d loved in my teens, but had no idea who drew it. Going to my bookshelves I pulled down a copy of FASA’s House Davion supplement for Battletech and managed to put a name to a style… David Deitrick.

I remembered him from a hundred different pictures that had shaped my role-playing life in the late eighties. Everything about his work screamed military, and that style lent so well to the science-fiction bent of the companies he helped characterize.

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Seventy-Eight Cards to a Better October: The Halloween Tarot

Seventy-Eight Cards to a Better October: The Halloween Tarot

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halloween-the-worldhalloween-back-of-cards1October has come, my favorite time of the year. I have my special rituals during this season, such as reading classic weird tales (Algernon Blackwood and M. R. James are among my top picks for seasonal fun) and evenings watching Universal and Hammer Horror films.

Another tradition I have is dragging out of the sock draw my Essential October Totem: Kipling West’s The Halloween Tarot, published by U.S. Game Systems, Inc. If I ever needed to describe to someone all the wonders of my favorite holiday, all of its joys and sensations and beauties and cross-cultural marvels, I would simply hand them this deck of seventy-eight colorful cards with their black-and-orange silhouetted backs and say, “Look through that. Then you’re ready for October. Now, where’s the candy? You got Pixy Stix? Okay, then I’ll take a Baby Ruth.”

Collecting tarot decks is a minor hobby of mine, one I don’t indulge in that often, but over a decade has brought into my hands about forty different decks, ranging from historical reproductions of the original tarocchi decks of fifteenth-century Italy (back when tarot was simply a game, the origin of the modern playing deck) to utter modern weirdness like The Tarot of Baseball, where The Devil has become The Manager. Tarot, for me, is strictly an art hobby with some historical interest and potential for creating stories from the images. I know the meanings of the archetypal symbols on the cards and the history of how these meanings got invested into a deck of playing cards (there’s some fascinating Renaissance history and 18th and 19th-century occult revival stuff behind it), but have zero belief in the New Age “fortune-telling” aspect of tarot. I just love seeing how different artists interpret the symbolism.

The Halloween Tarot deck is an idealized nostalgic childhood look into Halloween traditions—which include fortune-telling games at parties. Kipling West’s artwork is simple, sturdy, and extremely autumnal and affecting. She based the images on the most famous of modern tarot decks, the Waite-Smith—sometimes called Rider-Waite, after the Rider Card Company that first published it in 1910—that was developed by Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by Pamela Coleman Smith. This is the deck that almost everyone thinks of when they imagine tarot; Smith’s images, especially for the numbered cards (which were rarely fully illustrated in older decks) have become the standard template for most modern deck interpretations.

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A Review of The Witches of Karres, by James H. Schmitz

A Review of The Witches of Karres, by James H. Schmitz

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witches-karres-aI decided to review The Witches of Karres mostly because I remember seeing some sequels, written by different authors, as James H. Schmitz died in 1981.

I’m not surprised; The Witches of Karres feels like it should have been a series all along. The setting seems designed for multiple adventures. The book itself is less a space opera than a space operetta — it never takes itself too seriously — but it’s still distinctly an adventure story, not a straight-up comedy.

Captain Pausert is a decent and friendly man, perhaps a touch too in love with his notion of himself as a square-jawed space adventurer. For instance, we find out quite early in the book that he faked a log entry about a desperate fight against pirates when he actually just spent a few hours blowing up asteroids — partly to test his ship’s guns, partly for the fun of it.

Still, he can’t resist helping someone in trouble, especially when that someone is an apparently helpless teenage slave girl. Despite the anti-slavery laws of his native planet, he’s quickly maneuvered into buying her, then her two younger sisters.

Pausert may be a bit bumbling at this point in the story, but he’s not quite stupid; he notices that the slave-owners are extremely eager to sell, and that there’s something slightly off about the three girls.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.2 “Two and a Half Men”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.2 “Two and a Half Men”

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Since having children, I’ve found that anything hinting at children in danger is a lot more emotional than it was before. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button would have probably had no real impact on me a few years back, but watching it now those last few minutes, where Button is aging younger and younger, undergoing dementia as his toddler body gets smaller and smaller, forgetting even how to walk … it still haunts my dreams. (I probably should have put a spoiler space there, but if you haven’t seen it by now, you probably aren’t going to.)

Dean and a cute little kid. Grab the tissues, this is going to get ugly.
Dean and a cute little kid. Grab the tissues, this is going to get ugly.

So the promos for this week’s episode tell me that it’s going to be a rough one, emotionally. There’s a baby and, from what I can tell, he is either a monster or eaten by one … or possibly both.

The first moments of the episode, as is often the case, are action packed. Camera zooms in on a family photo which is then smacked by a blood soaked hand and falls to the ground. A woman runs through the house, clutching her baby in bloody arms. She hides in the bedroom. The phone gives a busy signal. Someone’s forcing the door open, so she hides under the bed with a baby. There is absolutely no way that this plan will work, and to her credit you get the idea that she knows it, but this is a horror series after all and it’s not like she had a lot of options.

Holy crap, Dad’s bloody corpse is under the bed with them!

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Art of the Genre: The real ‘L’ word

Art of the Genre: The real ‘L’ word

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chainmail_3rd_editionI’m an old TSR module fan, and as such I’ve always been intrigued by how the concept of such media came into existence. For the most part they fall in series, kind of like writers follow Tolkien with the concept of connected books and characters in a trilogy. It makes perfect sense, especially if you’re trying to create an extended campaign with a gaming group that meets on a regular basis. Series modules facilitate that, and recently I had the opportunity to chat with one of the original designers of a TSR foundation adventure path, the L Series ‘Lendore Isles.’

The author, Lenard ‘Len’ Lakofka is probably so ‘old school’ he’s beyond the term. His inclusion into the realm of RPGs predates the genre entirely, as he was a member of the International Federation of Wargaming. This institution came about in the sixties before the creation of Gygax’s Chainmail and was the original organizer of the first Lake Geneva Convention, i.e. GenCon in 1968.

At that first convention, people were playing Avalon Hill board games and Diplomacy during the Saturday only gathering, but that first year a chosen few were invited by Gygax to try Chainmail on the following Sunday after the convention was over. Lakofka was one of these founding fathers of the game.

From those humble beginnings, Chainmail would evolve into Dungeons & Dragons and Lakofka would continue to play the game with verve for the next forty years.

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War, Peace, and Fantasy

War, Peace, and Fantasy

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War and PeaceIn one of my first posts here, I mentioned that I was hoping to figure out what it is, exactly, that I like about fantasy fiction; what it is I get from fantasy that I get nowhere else.

I found myself thinking about that question a fair bit over the past couple of weeks. I was reading a 1500-page novel about a world-shaking clash of armies, a prose epic whose subjects ranged from the politics of high society to battles shaped by cavalry charges, and which presented a struggle against a would-be world conqueror viewed by some as divinely gifted and by others as a Satanic force of utter chaos.

It wasn’t a fantasy, though. It was War and Peace.

I found myself fascinated by how much Tolstoy’s great novel (Tolstoy claimed the book wasn’t a novel, in a formal sense, but the term fits better than any other) looks like an epic fantasy — even while feeling like nothing of the sort. Why is that? Why is something that seems so close to fantasy in form so different in actuality?

Obviously it’s a different kind of book. Obviously Tolstoy was aiming at something — many things — quite different from an epic fantasist. But what sort of things? How do they determine the feel of the novel?

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