Browsed by
Category: Blog Entry

A review of The Door Into Fire by Diane Duane

A review of The Door Into Fire by Diane Duane

Comments 0 Comment

door-into-fire2aThe Door Into Fire, by Diane Duane
Dell Fantasy (304 pages, $1.95, 1979)

Prince Herewiss of the Brightwood has two major problems.

First, he’s the first man in generations to have the Flame, a form of energy that’s much more potent than ordinary sorcery — but he can’t use it at all if he can’t make a physical focus with which to channel it.

His other problem is his lover Freelorn, exiled Prince of Arlen and trouble magnet. The summary on the back of The Door Into Fire refers to Freelorn as Herewiss’s “dearest friend” — which, in my opinion, does the book a disservice.

The Door Into Fire is about magic power, overcoming old tragedies, and the beginning of an epic kingdom-changing quest. It’s about a very hands-on Goddess and how she deals with her creation.

But it’s also about sex. Sex and love, sex and jealousy, sex in a culture where bisexuality and polyamory seem to be the default — sex that starts from a different set of assumptions than the average American reader carries around.

…

Read More Read More

Robert Silverberg on “Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?”

Robert Silverberg on “Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?”

Comments 14 comments

silverbergIn a post on his blog last week, Canadian science fiction author Robert Sawyer asked “Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?”

When I broke into the business 55 years ago you could count the number of full-time science fiction writers who could pay the rent and eat regular meals on the fingers of one oddly proportioned hand. Poul Anderson, Gordy Dickson, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Robert Sheckley, maybe Jack Vance, and….well, who else? Jack Williamson? Perhaps he had begun teaching by then. Asimov was still a college professor who wrote s-f on the side. Ted Cogswell was a professor also. So was James Gunn. Phil Dick was a full-timer, but lived at the poverty level. Sturgeon didn’t do much better. Del Rey dabbled in editing and occasional agenting. Harry Harrison did editing work, wrote comics, whatnot. Leiber was an editor for Science Digest. Jim Blish wrote p-r stuff for the tobacco institute. Cyril Kornbluth worked for a wire service. Fred Pohl edited and agented. Alfred Bester wrote for the slicks and TV. I’m not sure what Phil Klass did for a living — he wasn’t teaching yet — but he couldn’t have lived on the proceeds of what he wrote. Kuttner and Moore — I don’t know; they did venture somewhat into television and mystery novels.Leigh Brackett was a part-time Hollywood writer and her husband Edmond Hamilton earned most of his living writing comic books. Mack Reynolds and Fred Brown had fled to Mexico, where a dime went as far as a dollar did here.

It just wasn’t a field for full-timers. I didn’t really know that, so I plunged right in and made a good living, but I did it by dint of writing and selling a couple of short stories a week, and even then the field vanished from under me by 1958 and I had to turn to all sorts of non-sf writing until things began to revive in the mid-1960s. The same happened to Harlan, and then he got drafted, and when he came out he went to Chicago to edit and on from there to Hollywood.

Now we are back to the same situation that obtained in the golden era of the Fifties — s-f is mainly a field for hobbyist writers, with just a few able to earn a living writing just the real stuff and nothing but. (It is different, of course, for those who write pseudo-Tolkien trilogies, vampire novels, zombie books, and other sorts of highly commercial fantasy.) For a while, in the late 70s and early 80s, the money flowed freely and all sorts of people set up in business as s-f writers full time. I remember Greg Bear, president of SFWA somewhere back in the mid-80s, warning the writers at the SFWA business session not to quit their day jobs, because the good times were just about over; and was he ever right!

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Ten – “The Spores of Death”

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Ten – “The Spores of Death”

Comments 0 Comment

mystryfu1“The Spores of Death” was the penultimate installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu.

First published in The Story-Teller in June 1913, it later comprised Chapters 24-26 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for U. S. publication).

The story starts off appropriately with our narrator, Dr. Petrie, acknowledging the storyline is drawing to a close and apologizing (very nearly breaking the literary equivalent of the Fourth Wall in so doing) for his haste in not better detailing characters and incidents as he was forced to maintain the breakneck pace of the events as they transpired.

Dr. Petrie then spends some much welcome time discussing the mysterious origins of Dr. Fu-Manchu. Petrie suggests the name (ridiculous to modern, informed readers) is an assumed one and disassociates him with the Young China movement (the Republicans who came to power after the fall of the Manchu Dynasty) as he had speculated early on.

…

Read More Read More

ON WRITING FANTASY: The Quest for Originality

ON WRITING FANTASY: The Quest for Originality

Comments 9 comments

silmarillion“Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.”
 –Ezra Pound

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
 –Herman Melville

“Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.”
 –Voltaire

How does one go about writing a great piece of fantasy? Everybody seems to have his or her own answer. A lot of that depends on what you (personally) consider to BE “great fantasy.” In my view, the fantasist must be, first and foremost, original. That’s easier said than done.

We all know that fantasy tropes, plots, and devices are recycled endlessly, and that’s as it should be, since fantasy fiction is simply the modern equivalent of the myth cycles of early humanity. The heroes, conflicts, and adventures touch on the timeless themes that run through all literature, from BEOWULF to THE ODYSSEY to LORD OF THE RINGS to our modern fantasy epics. It’s been said before that “There are no new stories, just new ways to tell them.” And that’s the job of the modern fantasy writer: to tell a mythic story in an entirely new way. 

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Do You Like Fish? Well He Likes You Too…

Goth Chick News: Do You Like Fish? Well He Likes You Too…

Comments 5 comments

jaws“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

Back in March I wrote about quotable movie lines and at least in my circles, Chief Brody’s ironic statement to Captain Sam Quint ranks near the top. If you’re under the age of twenty-five you truly may not recognize it, but if you’ve made it through life this far without having seen most of Jaws, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to step away from your computer screen and go out for some fresh air.

And once you’ve done that, immediately put Jaws in the number one spot in your Netflix queue.

Thirty-five years ago, on fourth-of-July weekend, movies and the movie-going public were changed forever by a hot-shot young director and his mechanical shark.

That’s right kids, no CGI, no green-screen magic, not even a little forced-perspective puppetry. The shark was a life-sized monster, tooling around in the ocean instead of a water tank, and the actors really got wet.

Back in 1975 no one had really heard of Steven Spielberg. Besides a string of television episodes, he had only one movie under his belt: Sugarland Express, which he both wrote and directed.

However, that movie did well enough for him to be taken seriously when he asked to direct the movie adaptation of Peter Benchley’s number one best seller, Jaws.

…

Read More Read More

The Real “Twilight”: John W. Campbell’s

The Real “Twilight”: John W. Campbell’s

Comments 5 comments

best-of-john-w-campbellI’ve discovered that once you start writing about 1930s magazine science fiction — a field small enough for thorough analysis, but bursting with enough wonders to fill the galaxy — it becomes difficult to stop. Pondering the marvels of Stanley G. Weinbaum’s 1935 classic “Parasite Planet” urged me to sift through my pile of Del Rey “Best of…” paperbacks, which are crammed with the stories that helped me reach a kind of SF maturation when I was a young reader.

The first of the Del Rey anthologies I purchased, long enough ago that it was new and sitting on the shelf of a chain bookstore, was The Best of John W. Campbell. The reason I bought this title was simple: it contained “Who Goes There?”, the basis for two movies I loved, The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Thing (1982). I already knew Campbell’s reputation as an editor, but hadn’t experienced his earlier career as two different authors, John W. Campbell and Don A. Stuart.

If Stanley G. Weinbaum was “a Campbell author before Campbell,” so too was Campbell — or at least, Don A. Stuart was. The proof is in “Twilight,” a story under the Stuart name that appeared in the November 1934 issue of Astounding Stories during the tenure of editor F. Orlin Tremaine. I may have bought The Best of John W. Campbell for “Who Goes There?,” but it was “Twilight” that entranced me and became one of my favorite short stories of any genre.

(And yes, as the heading of this post indicates, to me the title “Twilight” always means this story. It had too potent an effect on me to ever allow anything else, no matter how much popular culture it devours, to steal the word “twilight” for other use.)

…

Read More Read More

Grey Maiden: The Story of a Sword Through the Ages

Grey Maiden: The Story of a Sword Through the Ages

Comments 5 comments

grey-maiden4I have a habit of buying books — a compulsion, really. Older books, mostly, from book fairs and small used bookstores. Things that look unusual, and which, in the absence of an immediate reason on my part to read them immediately, often sit on my shelves for some time before I get around to them.

So I don’t remember now exactly when and where I picked up a collection of Arthur D. Howden Smith’s Grey Maiden stories, only that it was some time ago. I wish I knew now, because I’d like to go back for more, if there are any.

Arthur D. Howden Smith (1887-1945) was an early pulp writer; the collection Grey Maiden (Centaur Press, 1974) has four out of seven — or nine, depending on what reference you look at — of his stories about the Grey Maiden, the first sword ever forged from iron.

Each tale follows a different wielder, each in a different time and place, as the blade’s won and lost among battles and wars and the rise and fall of empires. All were originally published in the pulp magazine Adventure.

The four tales in the collection I have (there was at least one other collection, with more of them) include a story of betrayal and revenge among the soldiers of Alexander the Great, an account of a group of Phoenicians retreating across Italy, a story of the ebbing of Roman power in Britain, and an imagining of the first collision between the Byzantine Empire and the followers of Islam.

The stories are bleak, violent, and possessed of a dark energy that makes them utterly compelling. The history perhaps couldn’t always stand up to intense scrutiny, but is used in such a way as to make the most exciting and brutal tale possible.

…

Read More Read More

SF writers as (or around) criminals: Homer Eon Flint

SF writers as (or around) criminals: Homer Eon Flint

Comments 0 Comment

blind-spot1Last night at dinner we were discussing (as one does) Homer Eon Flint.

Since my guests were working on ideas for the 2011 Potlatch convention, we can be forgiven this. Flint was a local author, having grown up in San Jose, and there was talk of doing a panel on him.

I had not known that Flint was working in a shoe repair shop in SJ, or that he was killed in a car crash (perhaps after stealing it from a local gangster, perhaps instead murdered by that local gangster).

It’s covered on his Wikipedia page, and in the article by his granddaughter Vella Munn, “Homer Eon Flint: A Legacy,” available on the Strange Horizons site.

Munn’s piece talks with great respect of the work of one Mike Ashley in ferreting out facts without disturbing the family’s peace. Munn mentions that there were other writers in the area, with whom Flint (actually, Flindt) used to hang out when he lived here in the teens and early 20’s.

Forry Ackerman talks about Austin Hall meeting Flint in his shoe shop, in his introduction to The Blind Spot, the 1921 novel the two wrote together.

…

Read More Read More

Letters to Black Gate: iPads and Submission Windows

Letters to Black Gate: iPads and Submission Windows

Comments 12 comments

cover_issue2Matthew Maestri writes:

I’m a new writer looking for open markets, especially in the fantasy/science fiction genre. I’m very impressed and intrigued by Black Gate, which I stumbled upon a couple months ago. I will be the first to admit that I tend to hover near the longer side of fiction, and it was very appealing to me that your magazine is one of the few remaining that actually prefers to publish longer stories. I have some brewing and I was just wondering when you might be accepting submissions again? Thanks for your time.

Glad to hear you’re interested in Black Gate, Matthew. Unfortunately, we’re still digging through the pile of submissions we received during the brief period we opened last year. 

We were deluged with submissions, far more than we expected, and just as we were making progress, I was waylaid by an 8-month project that demanded all my time (my company was bought by Microsoft).

…

Read More Read More