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Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, Part 3 of 4

Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, Part 3 of 4

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Tales of the Wold Newton Universe-smallLast month marked the release of Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, a new anthology from Titan Books that collects, for the first time ever in one volume, Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton short fiction, as well as tales set in the mythos by other Farmerian authors.

The Wold Newton Family is a group of heroic and villainous literary figures that science fiction author Philip José Farmer postulated belonged to the same genetic family. Some of these characters are adventurers, some are detectives, some explorers and scientists, some espionage agents, and some are evil geniuses. According to Mr. Farmer, the Wold Newton Family originated when a radioactive meteor landed in Wold Newton, England, in the year 1795. The radiation caused a genetic mutation in those present, which endowed many of their descendants with extremely high intelligence and strength, as well as an exceptional capacity and drive to perform good, or, as the case may be, evil deeds. The Wold Newton Universe is the larger world in which the Wold Newton Family exists and interacts with other characters from popular literature.

To celebrate the release of the new anthology, we’ve asked the contributors to discuss their interest in Philip José Farmer’s work and to tell us something about how their stories in the book specifically fit into the Wold Newton mythos.

For today’s installment, please welcome author and co-editor of Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, Christopher Paul Carey.

Win Scott Eckert,
Co-editor, Tales of the Wold Newton Universe

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New Treasures: The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers

New Treasures: The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers

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The City of Dreaming BooksWalter Moers got my attention with his first novel in English, The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear, which relates adventures of human-sized bear with blue fur on the fictional continent of Zamonia.

Okay, I know how that sounds. But Moers, who’s also a cartoonist and painter, brings cartoon sensibilities to the page with consummate skill, and his whimsical tales of Zamonia have captured hearts and minds around the world. The 13½ Lives was followed by Rumo, A Wild Ride Through the Night, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

The City of Dreaming Books sounds like his most intriguing title yet, featuring a city-sized library filled with secrets, haunted by the mysterious Shadow King…

Optimus Yarnspinner has inherited from his godfather an unpublished manuscript by an unknown writer. He sets off to track down the mysterious author, who disappeared into Bookholm — the so-called “City of Dreaming Books.” Yarnspinner falls under the spell of this book-obsessed metropolis, where an avid reader and budding author can find any number of charming attractions — priceless signed first editions, salivating literary agents, and for-hire critics. But as Yarnspinner pursues the trail of the missing author, the darker side of Bookholm begins to unveil itself — cold-blooded book hunters, fearsome cyclopean booklings, sharp-toothed animotomes, and of course, the Shadow King, whose howls rise from deep beneath the city at night. Will Yarnspinner survive his quest into this world where reading is a genuine adventure?

Like most of his books, this one features a cover by Moers, and numerous black & white illusrations throughout. Moers’ art is as charming as it is unique, equal parts Virgil Finlay and Dr. Seuss.

I found the brand new sequel, The Labyrinth of Dreaming Book, in the Dealer’s room at Windycon last week for the first time. That means it’s time for me to stop dithering and finally read this one.

The City of Dreaming Books was published by Overlook Press in 2008. It is 462 pages, priced at $17.95 in trade paperback at $11.99 for the digital edition. It was translated from the German by John Brownjohn.

The Plot Thickens. Or Maybe Stretches.

The Plot Thickens. Or Maybe Stretches.

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NovelistI had occasion to look into John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist for something totally unrelated to the posts I’ve been doing lately on plotting and plot devices. While I was checking through the book for the quote I needed, however, I found a few things he had to say about plot that I thought you might find interesting.

For those of you wondering, this is not the British John Gardner who was tapped to write the 007 pastiches in the 1980’s, but the American one who wrote all that Old English literary criticism, who’s one of the best known teachers of creative writing, with his book The Art of Fiction considered one of the seminal works in the field for students and teachers alike. For those of us in the Fantasy and SF community, however, he’s likely best known as the author of novels like Grendel, and Freddy’s Book, and October Light.

I’m going to share these observations in the order in which they appear, for the most part without regard to context. I won’t apologize for all the male-centric pronouns, I’ll just  point out that the book was published after Gardner’s unexpected death (so no changes could be made in later editions) and that male-centric was the default back then (pre-1982), even for most female writers. Here we go:

The wise writer counts on the characters and plot for his story’s power, not on tricks of withheld information, including withheld information at the end . . .

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Goth Chick News – NYT Best Seller Dark Places in Post Production

Goth Chick News – NYT Best Seller Dark Places in Post Production

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image006This time next year, fellow Chicagoan Gillian Flynn is going to have one heck of a fall season with two of her best-selling novels headed for the big screen.

David Fincher’s high-profile thriller Gone Girl, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, releases October 3, 2014 but this week it was announced that Flynn’s earlier cult thriller Dark Places is nearly in the can, with Frenchman Gilles Paquet-Brenner behind the camera and Charlize Theron in front of it.

Dark Places is set to hit theaters September 1, 2014.

Dark Places was published in 2009 and at the time was listed on the New York Times Best Seller List for hardcover fiction for two consecutive weeks. The book was also shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and won the Dark Scribe Magazine Black Quill Award for Dark Genre Novel of the Year.

Flynn’s more recent novel, Gone Girl, spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the hardcover fiction best-seller list of The New York Times, and has sold more than two million copies in print and digital formats.

In addition to Oscar-winner actress Charlize Theron, Dark Places will also star Nicholas Hoult (Warm Bodies), Chloë Grace Moretz (Carrie), Corey Stoll (House of Cards) and Emmy Award nominated actresses Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) and Drea de Matteo (Sons of Anarchy).

The plot sees the seven year-old Libby Day witness the murder of her family, seemingly the work of a Satanic cult, and testify against her own brother (Stoll) as the murderer.

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New Treasures: The Tilting House by Tom Llewellyn

New Treasures: The Tilting House by Tom Llewellyn

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The Tilting House-smallI love kid’s books. It was kid’s books like Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators and The Case of the Marble Monster that first taught me to love reading, and I’ve never really lost my appreciation for straight-up adventure tales, or a good spooky mystery.

So I still buy them from time to time. And overall, the same story elements appeal to me today that did in 1974, when I was 10 years old:  treasure maps, strange inventions, haunted houses, and rats with hidden agendas. All the building blocks of drama, really.

Which explains why Tom Llewellyn’s The Tilting House appealed to me the moment I laid eyes on it, and left me unable to put it down until I had purchased it:

Talking rats. Growth potions. Buried treasure.

Brothers Josh and Aaron Peshik are about to discover that their new home with the tilting floors hides many mysteries. When the boys and their neighbor Lola discover the hidden diary of F.T. Tilton, the brilliant but deranged inventor who built the house, they learn a dark secret that may mean disaster for the Peshik family. Can the kids solve the riddles of the tilting house before time runs out?

Mad science, mischief, and mishaps combine in the suspenseful and imaginative tale of The Tilting House.

The Tilting House was Tom Llewellyn’s first novel; he followed it with A Matter of Life and Seth: Life is a battle. High School is Murder in 2013.

The Tilting House was published by Trigygle Press, a division of Random House, in April 2011. It is 152 pages, priced at $15.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition. It is illustrated by Sarah Watts, who also did the colorful cover.

Vintage Treasures: Prince of Foxes by Samuel Shellabarger

Vintage Treasures: Prince of Foxes by Samuel Shellabarger

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Prince of Foxes-smallIf you’ve been reading my Vintage Treasures posts for any length of time, you’re probably aware I have a weakness for buying small collections. Especially vintage paperback collections.

There are a few ways to find interesting lots on online auctions sites like eBay, but I’ve had the most success recently searching for Bantam Giants, a line which repackaged a lot of popular historical adventure fiction in paperback with terrific covers — and without chopping it up first to fit the smaller format, a common practice in the early days of paperbacks.

Bantam Giants are a great way to learn about new writers (okay, old writers, but new to me), and they’re ridiculously cheap. They sold — by the tens of thousands — on newsstands for 35 cents in the early 1950s. Generally speaking, copies in fine condition are still fairly common, and don’t cost much more than that now.

Last year I talked about discovering the works of Lawrence Schoonover, especially his 13th Century adventure novels The Golden Exile and The Burnished Blade. Tucked into the same collection that contained those volumes was a gorgeous book titled The King’s Cavalier, by someone named Samuel Shellabarger.

My guides through the world of 40s and 50s historical adventures, the Honorable Howard Andrew Jones and John C. Hocking, have been telling me about Shellabarger for years. So I was delighted to find another of his novels in the latest collection of Permabooks and Bantam Giants I acquired last month: Prince of Foxes, a tale of adventure and intrigue in Renaissance Italy.

It follows the exploits of Andrea Orsini, a talented and resourceful peasant who rises through the ranks to become a political agent for the sinister Cesare Borgia. It was filmed in 1949, with Orson Welles as Borgia and Tyrone Power as Orsini.

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Deepest, Darkest Eden edited by Cody Goodfellow

Deepest, Darkest Eden edited by Cody Goodfellow

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oie_11233710dfgxIM2cClark Ashton Smith, one third of the Weird Tales triumvirate along with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, has been a favorite of mine ever since I bought a copy of the Lin Carter-edited collection Hyperborea. I was thirteen or fourteen and Smith’s archly told stories of the titular prehistoric land and its impending doom before an encroaching wall of ice, stunned me. I was long familiar with Lovecraft’s purple prose, yet nothing had really prepared me for Smith’s cynical, lush, and utterly weird writing. The stories were stunning and I was a fan.

I was pretty excited when John R. Fultz announced that he had a story in soon-to-be-published Deepest, Darkest Eden,  a collection of new stories edited by Cody Goodfellow and set in Smith’s Hyperborea. As soon as I finished reading Fultz’ post (and letting my brain drink in the gloriously pulpy cover by Mark E. Rogers) I headed over to publisher Miskatonic River Press’ site and ordered my copy. I couldn’t wait to get the return to Clark Ashton Smith’s decadent, dying land into my hands.

For me, stories set in someone else’s created world, or using their characters, need to center on what makes the original special. They don’t need to replicate it exactly, and with Clark Ashton Smith’s idiosyncratic prose it would be a mistake to try, but they should aim for similar artistic goals. Ryan Harvey, in his long article about Smith’s Hyperborean Cycle, concluded that it’s an “unusual medley of elements, with Lovecraftian themes rubbing against satiric jabs, elevated mocking language, black jokes, and a sense of a slow, chilly annihilation that cannot be escaped”. That gives any author setting out to play in Smith’s imaginary Hyperborea a wide array of ideas to pursue.

Many of the stories in Deepest, Darkest, Eden — and there are eighteen plus two poems — are very successful at meeting my test for success. Several of the authors have clearly subsumed the alternately funny and despairing world view of Smith and mixed it with their own talents to create worthwhile additions to the Hyperborean Cycle.

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The Nightmare of History: Chang Hsi-Kuo’s City Trilogy

The Nightmare of History: Chang Hsi-Kuo’s City Trilogy

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The City TrilogyLast week I noted that Tor’s promising that they’ll be publishing an English translation of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy, a highly successful work of Chinese science fiction. Tor says that this will be the first publication of a science fiction novel from mainland China. But, as the statement implies, it won’t be the first Chinese-language sf novel translated into English. You can take a look in the comments of the linked article at Tor for examples; as it happens, I’ve got one of those exceptions to hand, Chang Hsi-Kuo’s City Trilogy, translated by John Balcom and published in one volume in 2003. (Chang, a Taiwanese, has had his name romanised in a number of different ways; I’m using here the name given him on my copy of the English translation of his book.)

According to Balcom’s introduction, the first book of the series, Five Jade Disks, was published in Taiwan in 1984. The next, Defenders of the Dragon City, came in 1986. Tale of a Feather completed the series in 1991. But before the novels, Chang had written a short story called “City of the Bronze Statue,” published in 1980; written in the style of a history or guidebook, it told the story of a bronze statue built at the centre of a colony city on an alien world, and how the statue was broken down and reforged as different rulers took control of the city and systems of government rose and fell. The story’s now the prologue to the trilogy, which itself tells of desperate wars in and around the same city, Sunlon City.

The short story and the trilogy both grapple with history, though in different ways. You can see elements of China’s and Taiwan’s past in the background of the trilogy’s alien setting, in the cycle of dynasties and factions. What comes through clearly, even to someone like me whose understanding of Chinese history is basic at best, is a sense of fatalism. This is science fiction that deals with the big questions, with the sweep of time and the nature of destiny. It’s sometimes a struggle to work through, due to the way that it presents these themes, but I think in the end it’s a convincing success.

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New Treasures: Magic and Loss by Nancy A. Collins

New Treasures: Magic and Loss by Nancy A. Collins

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Magic and Loss-smallNancy A. Collins has had a long and distinguished career in dark fantasy. Her first novel, Sunglasses After Dark (1989), became an immediate classic of vampire fiction, and her character Sonja Blue went on to appear in two additional novels: In The Blood (1992), and Paint It Black (1995). Her three-volume Vamps series from HarperTeen began in 2008, and her brand new adult series Golgotham began in 2010 with Right Hand Magic, followed a year later by Left Hand Magic.

The third volume, Magic and Loss, arrived last week, and it continues the tale of Tate Eresby, an artist who moves to Golgotham, Manhattan’s centuries-old supernatural district. The neighborhood is populated by creatures from myth and legend, but its most prominent citizens are the Kymera, a race of witches who maintain an uneasy truce with New York’s human population.

It has been several months since Tate Eresby developed her new magical ability to bring whatever she creates to life, but she is still learning to control her power. Struggling to make a living as an artist, she and Hexe can barely make ends meet, but they are happy.

That is until Golgotham’s criminal overlord Boss Marz is released from prison, bent on revenge against the couple responsible for putting him there. Hexe’s right hand is destroyed, leaving him unable to conjure his benign magic. Attempts to repair the hand only succeed in plunging Hexe into a darkness that can’t be lifted — even by news that Tate is carrying his child.

Now, with her pregnancy seeming to progress at an astonishing rate, Tate realizes that carrying a possible heir to the Kymeran throne will attract danger from all corners, even beyond the grave…

Nancy Collins has been writing dark urban fantasy since before it existed as a sub-genre, and she still does it far better than most. Magic and Loss was published November 5th by Roc; it is 290 pages, priced at $7.99 for both paperback and digital versions.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

Watch the First Trailer for Winter’s Tale

Watch the First Trailer for Winter’s Tale

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Winter's Tale Mark Halprin-smallMark Helprin’s 1983 novel Winter’s Tale was perhaps the prototype for modern urban fantasy. No, it didn’t have vampires or werewolves, but it was a star-crossed love story set in a mythic New York City, with a great villain — and a magical horse.

Mark Helprin isn’t really known as a fantasy writer; he’s chiefly known for his literary novels A Soldier of the Great War, Memoir From Antproof Case, and others. His three books for children — Swan Lake, A City in Winter, and The Veil of Snows — are certainly magical, and not just due to Chris Van Allsburg’s superb illustrations, but Winter’s Tale is his only adult work that crossed over into genre territory.

But Winter’s Tale was joyfully embraced by fantasy fans, and not simply because the main character is a thief. It is a epic tale of love, loss, and the mysteries of death.

The story opens in an imaginary 19th Century Manhattan, an industrial Edwardian-era metropolis that shares some characteristics with the city we know. It centers on Peter Lake, the son of two immigrants denied admission at Ellis Island.

Desperate, Peter’s parents set him adrift in a tiny ship in New York Harbor, where he is eventually found among the reeds and adopted by the rough-and-tumble Baymen of the Bayonne Marsh. Peter grows up to be a mechanic — and a skilled cat burglar. He who stakes out a fortresslike mansion in the Upper West Side and, when he’s certain it’s unoccupied, he breaks in.

But the home isn’t empty. Inside is Beverly  Penn, a shut-in heiress dying of consumption, and the most beautiful woman Peter has ever seen. What begins as a robbery becomes a love story — and a driving quest that spans nearly a century.

Winter’s Tale was adapted for the screen by Akiva Goldsman, who is also directing. It stars Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe, and Jennifer Connelly, and is scheduled for release on Valentine’s Day of next year. Warner Bros. has released the first trailer for the film, and it’s shaping up to be one of the most promising big-budget fantasies of 2014. Check it out below.

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