On Getting Current in Heroic Fantasy, Part I
I read an interesting post the other day by a thoughtful blogster whose name I cannot now remember and whose post I cannot locate again, who professed his surprise at all the fans of Conan (and Sword & Sorcery in general) who were returning to the fold now, after falling away in the 1980s, after the last Big S&S Boom.
I confess myself one of those folk. I don’t know what happened. Life, I guess. There weren’t any more new books – or if there were, I didn’t see them – and so I drifted on to other things. (I should add that I got my degree in English Lit after that time, and those bastards had no use for genre fiction of any kind, much less the kind of stuff I’d been cutting my teeth on since I learned how to read – e.g. Zelazny, Howard, Fritz Leiber, et. al. Plus I tumbled onto so many other writers — e.g. the Beats, Bukowski, Henry Miller, and *then* Poetry, in which I immersed myself for several years. But I digress…)
I’ve been delighted though in the past month or so to see all the new material being produced along sword & sorcery lines (new to me at least). A whole slew of beautiful anthologies: LORDS OF SWORDS, SAGES & SWORDS, RETURN OF THE SWORD, RAGE OF THE BEHEMOTH. It is a wonderful thing. I am reading them all simultaneously and will discuss them here, and at my blog.
I’m a sucker for retrospective anthologies. And F&SF is one of my favorite magazines — and has been since I first discovered tattered copies in the tiny library of Rockcliffe Air Force base in Ottawa, Canada, in the late 70s. Editor Gordon van Gelder has assembled an imposing, 470-page collection spanning more than five decades, starting with Alfred Bester’s “Of Time and Third Avenue” (1951) and ending with Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (2007).
I don’t often get the opportunity to encounter true works of ancient artwork, those anonymous pieces of bronze and stone and gold that appear reproduced in textbooks, volumes of history, and museum brochures. Living on the western edge of the New World means I have a lack of local access to them, and when I’m in the Old World, I’m usually among the artworks of the early modern masters, who painted onto canvas their dreams of the ancients. Not that such art isn’t wonderful, but I’m a classicist deep down in my cerebellum, and I don’t get to engage with the genuinely ancient as often I would like.
The much anticipated — and feared — “reimagining” of Patrick McGoohan’s classic cult TV series The Prisoner is scheduled for release on AMC in November. One good sign is that Ian McKellen is cast as Number Two (a role which, unlike the original series, will not revolve among multiple actors) and is (like the original) of fixed duration. James Caviezal is Number 6 and there are some interesting parallels here. Caviezal played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s (who was rumored to be a candidate for Number 6 in the various movie proposals over the year) The Passion of the Christ, controversial for its brutal, some would say sado-masochistic, portrayal of the Gospel stories. Like McGoohan, Caviezal is an observant Cathloic. Caviezal has made public stands on such issues as stem cell research and it is not inconceivable this might have affected his career in an industry that for the most part tilts left; McGoohan reportedly turned down the role of James Bond for moral reasons and insisted in his contract that he would not kiss women on-screen, particularly ironic given that The Prisoner was embraced by the sexual liberation advocates of the Sixties counter-culture for the program’s non-conformist ethos.
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974)
Intriguing premise — and something quite different from his previous work, which is always good to see in a favorite novelist — where two presumably East European cities somehow physically co-exist, with the inhabitants following strict protocols to avoid one another whenever their separate realities intersect. Grossman would be happy that it has compelling plotting; however, as a “police procedural,” Miéville doesn’t quite play fair. Part of the game in these kind of things is to at least give the reader a chance of figuring out the mystery of “whodunnit,” which I doubt anyone would be able to, although I’m guessing this isn’t Miéville’s concern here. I think he’s aiming at something more metaphorical along the lines of the existential spaces we all tread among the various realms of social interaction. Nonetheless, the unfolding of the mystery struck me as a little forced. Potentially, this could be the start of a series.