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Wrath-Bearing Tree by James Enge

Wrath-Bearing Tree by James Enge

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The first time I saw a James Enge novel on the shelf of my local bookstore, I broke into a little dance of jubilation. I’d been reading Enge’s short stories about Morlock the Maker in the pages of Black Gate — this was when BG had literal paper pages — and it was news to me that Enge had made the leap from short fiction to novels.

The blurbs on Enge’s books all say some variation on this theme: you will find no other character in fantasy literature, or maybe in literature generally, who is like Morlock the Maker. He’s a traumatized combat veteran who’s still one of his world’s great ass-kickers, yet he’s also an enthusiastically geeky mad scientist. He’s a cynic who will risk all he has to protect innocence where he finds it. He’s wickedly funny, in fewer words of dialogue than should really be possible. Read around in Morlock’s world a while, and you feel pretty soon like you know him, but you can never guess what he’ll do next. A Morlock novel! Could anything be better?

Over the next few years, Enge followed Blood of Ambrose with This Crooked Way and The Wolf Age, and it turned out the one thing better than a Morlock novel was a whole trilogy of Morlock novels.

I loved the cranky old Morlock, the character whose curmudgeonliness sometimes verged on becoming a superpower, so I am still getting used to Enge’s new Tournament of Shadows trilogy about Morlock’s origin story, which began with A Guile of Dragons and now continues with Wrath-Bearing Tree. As a young man, our hero is every bit as odd, unpredictable, noble, hilarious, tragic, clear-eyed, and difficult as his future self, but he hasn’t yet put the damage on and become the ugly old man we loved in the short stories that became This Crooked Way.

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Who Took the Flowers Out of my Prose?

Who Took the Flowers Out of my Prose?

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Conan Red Nails-smallOver here in England, we have a shop called ‘Poundland,’ which is pretty much what it says on the tin: a shop where everything costs a single pound, and for a boy of about ten, it was a dream come true. All the flimsy toys, dodgy sweets and budget DVDs my little mind could conjure — there was a book section as well, but it mostly consisted of either absolute rubbish or books about Simon Cowell.

But one particular day, when I was about ten, I happened to spot a diamond hidden amongst the rubbish: an anthology of stories by Robert E Howard. I’d never heard of him at the time, but the book had Conan in the title.

I had heard of Conan. My brief experience with the two movies told me I liked big swords, big monsters, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as much as the next ten-year-old, so I decided to buy it. On the train ride home, I found myself introduced to a new, vivid, and lively world, one of blood and savagery, of death and shadow, of lurking devils and skulking gods. I was exposed to a land of witchcraft, sorcerers, devils and demons, nations torn apart by brooding crusaders kings and swashbuckling puritans. It was the best train ride of my life.

“That’s all well and good, Connor,” you might say, “but what’s this got to do with prose?” Show a little patience; I’m getting to that.

What enchanted me most throughout these adventures was the prose; it just had its own nature and flavor, its own distinguished way of presenting things. I’d never encountered anything like it before; it was poetic, haunting, powerful. It lent every blow a sort of impact, made every monster tangible. Even the heroes — too powerful, too fast, too smart to ever be real — it made them come alive.

And in fantasy, where a key aspect is immersion, this is an impressive achievement. I touched upon this not too long ago with my Fantasy Face-off article; noting that prose dictates the way we see the world on the page and, therefore, how vivid and real it is. Prose overshadows flaws when it’s successful and highlights them when it’s not.

But what I didn’t mention was how prose can amplify the tone of the book. Fritz Leiber’s prose is rather light, reflecting the comic, satirical feel of his books. Howard’s is fast, rip-roaring and powerful, much like the pacing of his books and the characters within them. Tolkien’s prose, though it can sometimes be lacking, feels reminiscent of a fairy tale.

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The Other Appendix N

The Other Appendix N

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runequest2coverThe death of Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and one of the fathers of the roleplaying game, provided added impetus to the already-extant (in 2008) re-evaluation and appreciation of what have come to be popularly known as “old school” roleplaying games. An important part of that re-evaluation centers on the literary origins of RPGs, particularly the books that fired the imaginations of their designers. Gygax helpfully provided us with a list of the authors who were, in his words, “of particular inspiration” to him. This list is now known quite widely simply as “Appendix N,” since it first appeared as just that, a lettered appendix at the back of his Dungeon Masters Guide (1979).

Appendix N has been much discussed over the last half-decade, becoming a significant talking point for those interested in the origins of the hobby of roleplaying. For example, there is much debate regarding the extent to which D&D truly captures the spirit of the books Gygax presented as being “the most immediate influences.” So energetic has the discussion of Appendix N become that it has not only spilled over into the wider world of fantasy (including this very site), but it has led to a mini-revival in pulp fantasy, with authors such as Abraham Merritt, Fletcher Pratt, and Margaret St. Clair (to cite but three on Gygax’s list) receiving more attention in recent years than they probably have in decades. Within the roleplaying hobby itself, Appendix N is well on its way to becoming a “brand,” with at least one RPG, Goodman Games’s Dungeon Crawl Classics, heavily promoting its own adherence to Gygax’s canon as one of its major selling points.

The creators of other early roleplaying games were usually not as forthcoming in acknowledging their literary inspirations, though there are, of course, exceptions, such as Steve Perrin and Ray Turney’s RuneQuest. First published in 1978, RuneQuest is, in its own words, “a departure from most FRP (as they are abbreviated) games” in that it is “tied to a particular world, Glorantha.” The brainchild of Greg Stafford, Glorantha is a fantasy world evocative of ancient history and myth and one of the most enduring settings in the hobby. For that reason, Glorantha is also frequently described as being both complex and idiosyncratic to the point of being inaccessible to newcomers.

I do not share this judgment of Glorantha, but I understand why some might make this claim. Fortunately, its designers offered some insight into their own inspirations in a bibliography that they coincidentally also labeled “Appendix N,” a full year before Gygax would use the same designation. Like Gygax’s own list, it is not exhaustive, but only “contains those [books] we felt exemplary or exceptional.” RuneQuest‘s Appendix N one-ups Gygax, in my opinion, by being an annotated bibliography, which provides additional insight into not just what books and authors were inspirational, but why.

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Night Winds by Karl Edward Wagner

Night Winds by Karl Edward Wagner

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Night Winds-small

“He’s evil incarnate! Stay away from him!”
— from Darkness Weaves

Long before the coiners of the term grimdark were born, Karl Edward Wagner was creating some of the most aggressively unheroic fantasy. There had always been a dark current to swords & sorcery from the genre’s beginnings in the 1930s with Robert E. Howard. But not even Michael Moorcock’s 1960s antiheroes prepared S&S fans for Wagner’s 1971 novel Darkness Weaves and its amoral mystic swordsman, Kane.

Six feet tall and “three hundred pounds of bone, sinew, and muscle,” Kane is cursed to live forever for rebelling against the god who created him. Peering out from his fiery red hair and beard, his blues eyes blaze with a killer’s fury — a warning to all who cross his path. Though a violent death can free him from his accursed immortality, he is determined to survive.

Over the course of three novels and seventeen stories, Kane plots and murders his way across continents and centuries. He is by turns a mighty sorcerer, a bandit lord and a lone wanderer. While it’s explicitly stated in one story that Kane is “seldom needlessly cruel,” he’s seldom sympathetic.

It’s in the two collections of short stories, Death Angel’s Shadow (which I reviewed last year at my site) and Night Winds, that Wagner crafted his greatest swords & sorcery. His novels, Bloodstone, Dark Crusade, and Darkness Weaves, all have their moments, but they don’t have the short, sharp, shock of the stories. While the books are memorably epic, the stories are fast-paced nightmares.

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New Treasures: She Returns From War by Lee Collins

New Treasures: She Returns From War by Lee Collins

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She Returns from War-smallI love Angry Robot books. I don’t pay much attention to publishers when I’m at the bookstore. But when I’m home, and my purchases are stacked by my big green chair, it’s hard not to notice that half of them have the Angry Robot logo on the spine.

I think they’re just in tune with the kind of books I’m most interested in. Which is weird, because I’m not exactly sure what they are myself. But I know they involve great cover art, intriguing settings, and women in cowboy hats. This week, anyway.

She Returns From War is the sequel to the supernatural western The Dead of Winter, released last October. The tag line is True Grit Meets True Blood, which is clever. Have you noticed this burgeoning mini-trend of western-horror-fantasies, including Guy Adams’s The Good The Bad and the Infernal, Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill’s Dead Reckoning, and the Bloodlands novels of Christine Cody? Apparently it’s a thing. See? We’re paying attention.

Four years after the horrific events in Leadville, a young woman from England, Victoria Dawes, sets into motion a series of events that will lead Cora and herself out into the New Mexico desert in pursuit of Anaba, a Navajo witch bent on taking revenge for the atrocities committed against her people.

She Returns From War was published by Angry Robot on January 29, 2013. It is 361 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition.

The recent coverage Angry Robot titles we’ve covered were The Crown of the Blood by Gav Thorpe, The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu, The Bookman Histories by Lavie Tidhar, and The Corpse-Rat King, by Lee Battersby.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

Shock of the New: Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang, and Metropolis

Shock of the New: Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang, and Metropolis

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MetropolisI’ve always had a fascination with Frtiz Lang’s Metropolis that I’ve never been able to explain. Obviously, it’s a visually powerful film and a tremendous influence on later films and later sf. But that imaginative magnificence seemed almost disconnected from the actual story of the movie. To a large extent, that’s because the Metropolis I knew for most of my life was a greatly-reduced version of Lang’s film. On its premiere in 1927, the movie was 4189 metres (13,823 feet) long, and ran 153 minutes; it was subsequently edited heavily, down to about 3100 to 3200 metres, without the input of husband-and-wife team of director Fritz Lang and scriptwriter Thea von Harbou. For decades, only short versions of Metropolis were believed to have survived, with major subplots and characters missing from the movie. A 2002 re-edit from rediscovered footage recreated something close to the original 1927 film and a 2010 version, based on a newly-recovered negative of the film, finally returned Metropolis to Lang and von Harbou’s original vision. Still, even seeing the whole thing, I have that sense of a kind of gap between the literal content of the film and what might be called its latent content — the mythic feel of the world it imagines.

I didn’t entirely understand that gap until I read Thea von Harbou’s novel of the story. Published in 1925, the book clarifies a number of things: elements of the plot, the character motivation, and the symbolism. The use of the pentacle, the presence of a cathedral, the imagery of Babel and Apocalypse, the vision of Moloch superimposed over Metropolis’s machines, and especially the seemingly self-destructive urge of Joh Frederson, “the Master of Metropolis,” all become clearer. At the same time, I was conscious that I was reading the book with memory of the film always present. It seems to me that the two things, book and movie, work together to make a rich and full experience out of a distinctive fusing of science fiction and the gothic.

It has to be said that there’s been some difference of opinions about the book. Critic Holger Bachmann describes the novel as “a disparate, trivialized collection of motifs from various literary sources,” and refers to its “trivial romanticism.” John Clute, in the entry on von Harbou in the SF Encyclopedia, states that novel doesn’t have much of the film’s “symbolic force.” Personally, I tend to agree with Gary Westfahl, who stated that “von Harbou excelled in the one aspect of literary craftsmanship that critics tend to ignore because it is utterly beyond their ability to comprehend: the power of myth-making.” The sense of latent power I felt in the film of Metropolis has to do with its evocation of myth, both old and new, and I think that’s more clearly present in the book. It’s not a technical triumph like the film, but it’s not to be overlooked.

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Vintage Treasures: The Best of John W. Campbell

Vintage Treasures: The Best of John W. Campbell

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The Best of John W Campbell-smallJohn W. Campbell is one of the most important figures in 20th Century science fiction and fantasy.

If Campbell’s name seems familiar, it’s no accident. He’s come up multiple times in this series so far. In my last article, The Best of Hal Clement, I noted that Clement’s heroes frequently quoted Campbell’s pulp heroes Morey and Wade, and that Clement had been discovered by Campbell in June 1942, when Campbell was editing Astounding Science-Fiction.

In my previous piece, on The Best of Jack Williamson, I also observed that Williamson had “survived the coming of Campbell,” by which I meant that he was one of the few authors talented enough to continue writing SF in the pulps after about 1939, when Campbell had re-made the entire field in his image.

I could go back through all the other articles in this series and see just how often Campbell comes up, but I think you get the point. In the first half of the 20th Century, science fiction existed almost solely in the magazines and Campbell dominated the field so thoroughly that the start of the “Golden Age of Science Fiction” is usually marked by the year he began editing Astounding — the year he discovered writers like Robert Heinlein, A.E. Van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Lester del Rey, and many others.

In his memoir, I, Asimov, Asimov called Campbell “the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely.”

But we’re not here to talk about Campbell the editor. We’re here to talk about Campbell the writer. And specifically, the eleven short stories he wrote between 1932 and 1939 collected in The Best of John W. Campbell.

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Musical Mayhem and The Black Fire Concerto

Musical Mayhem and The Black Fire Concerto

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Black Fire HarpMy first post about my novel, The Black Fire Concerto, discussed the monsters. (It’s only fitting, I think, that the first library filing I’ve seen for the book categorized it under “Monsters – fiction.”)

Yet obviously music’s important to the story too and Black Gate overlord John O’Neill has asked me to share my musical inspirations. Once again, I’m grateful to him for allowing me a platform.

If you asked me to hum the concerto that’s central to the book, I couldn’t do it; though I like to think I’d know it if I heard it.

My heroine Olyssa plays a magical pipe that doubles as a rifle that never misses (and if you’re wondering how that works, this excerpt at the Haunted Stars Publishing website will tell you everything you need to know.)

Her sidekick Erzelle plays a harp formed of magical energy that manifests as black fire. I can at least share an illustration my wife Anita and I created to approximate what the harp looks like.

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J.K. Rowling Green Lights New Films in Harry Potter Universe

J.K. Rowling Green Lights New Films in Harry Potter Universe

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Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them-smallWord is bouncing around literary and media circles that the most popular franchise of the 21st Century — indeed, perhaps the most popular book series of all time — will be extended with new films.

Warner Bros. announced Thursday that the Harry Potter media franchise will expand with a series of spin-off films, inspired by Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Written by (fictional) author Newt Scamander, Fantastic Beasts was the textbook  introduced by Hagrid in his Care of Magical Creatures class in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban — and later written and published by Rowling in a slender 42-page edition in 2001, shortly after Prisoner of Azkaban was released.

CEO of Warner Bros. Entertainment  Kevin Tsujihara elaborated in a statement:

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them will be an original story. It is planned as the first picture in a new film series. Set in the wizarding world, the story will feature magical creatures and characters, some of which will be familiar to devoted Harry Potter fans.

I have to be honest and admit that I didn’t even know Rowling had written a real version of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and I had to look it up to make sure it was real (it is). It’s available in a combo-pack with Quidditch Through the Ages from Scholastic Books.

The movie is unusual in another respect — it will be the first one with a screenplay written by Rowling. The films will focus on the adventures of Newt Scamander and be set long before Harry’s birth. Here’s part of Rowling’s statement:

I already knew a lot about Newt. As hard-core Harry Potter fans will know, I liked him so much that I even married his grandson, Rolf, to one of my favourite characters from the Harry Potter series, Luna Lovegood… Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the Harry Potter series, but an extension of the wizarding world… Newt’s story will start in New York, 70 years before Harry’s gets underway.

The release date for the first film has not been announced.

New Treasures: The Grim Company by Luke Scull

New Treasures: The Grim Company by Luke Scull

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The Grim Company-smallI admit I can be a little lazy when putting together these New Treasures articles. For one thing, my scanner gave up the ghost months ago and I can’t be bothered to walk aallll the way down the hall to use Alice’s. It’s usually easier to search for an image online. I’ll spend 20 minutes searching every nook and cranny of the web, trying to save the six minutes it takes to do a scan. Go figure.

Sometimes, though, the search is fruitless — as was the case with The Grim Company, the first novel from Bioware game designer Luke Scull. There were versions of the cover out there — lots of them. But most appeared to be early versions of the final cover I was holding in my hot little hands, courtesy of the publicity department of Roc Books.  Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, Goodreads — all of them were showing the same cover. Sure, it’s very similar to the final cover, but there were subtle differences (the actual final cover is here — see if you can spot them all).

Well, I don’t have a whole lot of scruples as an entertainment blogger, but that’s one of them. At Black Gate, we try to show you the real cover. Hurray for us. So I had to troop all the way down to Alice’s office, interrupt her game of solitaire, and take six minutes to scan the cover. It’s shown at right, in all its glory (click for a bigger version). You’re welcome.

The Gods are dead. The Magelord Salazar and his magically enhanced troops, the Augmentors, crush any dissent they find in the minds of the populace. On the other side of the Broken Sea, the White Lady plots the liberation of Dorminia, with her spymistresses, the Pale Women. Demons and abominations plague the Highlands.

The world is desperately in need of heroes. But what they get instead are a ragtag band of old warriors, a crippled Halfmage, two orphans and an oddly capable manservant: the Grim Company.

The Grim Company (the opening volume in a series also titled The Grim Company) was released by Roc Books on September 3. It is 389 pages, priced at $26.95 for the hardcover, and $12.99 for the digital version.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.