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Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews Gamer Fantastic

Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews Gamer Fantastic

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gamer-fantasticGamer Fantastic
Edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Kerrie Hughes
DAW Books (309 pp, $7.99, July 2009)
Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Gamer Fantastic contains thirteen stories about games and gamers, taken in unusual fantasy and science fiction directions. Seven concern classic roleplaying games, while five are about computer gaming. (The other story, “Mightier Than the Sword” by Jim C. Hines, is harder to classify, more about authors and conventions than about gaming itself. Despite this, it was one of my favorites.)

A couple of the stories have no real “fantastic” elements at all. For example, in “Roles We Play” by Jody Lynn Nye, we are exposed to a historical narrative about how roleplaying games could have been used to develop an effective form of psychotherapy. Though aspects of the story are surreal, the “fantasy” is more psychological than literal, and the parallels between fantasy gaming elements and psychological elements are precisely what lend the story believability.

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Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, A Review

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, A Review

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wastelandsJohn Joseph Adams has a well-earned reputation as The Man Who Delivers Anthologies. Barnes & Noble.com has dubbed him “the reigning king of the anthology world.” By my count he’s published at least nine of them. I own one, The Living Dead, which contained enough zombie goodness (along with a few stiffs) to prompt me to buy his Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse.

To be honest, I probably would have bought Wastelands regardless of its editor. I’m a big fan of the post-apocalyptic genre, from novels like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, to films like Escape from New York or Mad Max. Why? As an inhabitant of the northeastern seaboard of the United States I’m not often confronted with existential issues. I know that I’m going to die one day and suffer separation from all that I know and love, but because civilization affords me everything I need—and much of what I want, too—I tend not to think about these issues much. The panaceas of electricity and refrigeration, and healthcare and schools, and television and the internet and books, masks the skull beneath the skin. I’m effectively insulated from the hard life and death struggle that’s woven into so much of human history. But what if it was all stripped away, and life was reduced to its essentials? That’s the question post-apocalyptic fiction asks, and one I occasionally like to ponder. With my feet up on the couch of my air-conditioned living room, of course.

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Sue Granquist Reviews Drood

Sue Granquist Reviews Drood

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drood-coverDrood
Dan Simmons
Little Brown (976 pages, $9.99, January 2011 mmp (originally February 2009))
Reviewed by Sue Granquist

In National Lampoon’s Vacation, a family goes on a cross-country road trip, enduring hardship and danger, seeing cheesy landmarks and ultimately arriving at an amusement park that was closed for construction. In other words, a long and harrowing journey with no pay off, but still a lot of fun to watch.

Sort of how I feel about Dan Simmons’ latest suspense thriller, Drood. Weighing in at a hefty 784 pages in hardback (976 in mass market paperback!), I was somewhat reluctant to devote the time to this behemoth of a novel. However, enticed by the premise and my somewhat love / hate relationship with Simmons, I picked up a copy and got help from a stock guy with carrying it to the car. And I must say, the premise is genius.

The last, and unfinished work of Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was published in 1870 and became famous in its time, largely for being a mystery with no ending. The serialized work was intended to unfold over twelve installments, however Dickens died after completing only six. Now before you go having high-school-literature-class flash backs, hear me out. You don’t have to be at all familiar with The Mystery of Edwin Drood in order to read Simmons’ book; I sure wasn’t, though I did look into it out of curiosity.

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A Review of The Isle of Glass, by Judith Tarr

A Review of The Isle of Glass, by Judith Tarr

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isle-of-glass2The Isle of Glass, by Judith Tarr
The Hound and the Falcon Trilogy, Volume 1
St. Martins Press (276 pages, hardcover, February 1985)

Isle of Glass is the sort of book that will work excellently for some people and not for others, based both on the knowledge needed and the subject matter.

It’s fairly short, but dense and somewhat challenging. For instance, I think I have a fairly decent vocabulary, but I encountered a few words, like “crozier” or “thurifer,” that I didn’t know.

(According to my dictionary, both words are church terms. A crozier is an abbot’s staff; a thurifer is someone who carries a censer.)

The story centers around Alfred of St. Ruan’s Abbey, a monk who doesn’t seem to age. He was found in the snow, on the solstice, being warmed and protected by three white owls. Between his origin, his age, his inhuman beauty, and his ability to work magic, it’s quite clear to anyone who knows Alf that he is one of the Fair Folk, and the fact torments him.

Although Isle of Glass is technically an alternate history – this world contains at least one extra country, and the real countries seem to have somewhat alternate names – it’s still set in a version of medieval Europe, and not a sanitized or tolerant one. It’s widely accepted that sorcery is evil and elves have no souls.

Alf buries himself in the small world of the monastery so he doesn’t have to think about such things – he’s only somewhat successful – but his isolation is broken by the advent of an injured knight named Alun. Alun is a member of Alf’s species, the first he’s ever met, and he was trying to prevent a war before he was captured and brutalized.

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Rich Horton Reviews Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way

Rich Horton Reviews Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way

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World Fantasy Award Nominee

Blood of Ambrose
James Enge
Pyr (416 pp, $15.98, April 2009)

This Crooked Way
James Enge
Pyr (414 pp, $16.00, October 2009)
Reviewed by Rich Horton

A few years ago Black Gate featured the first published story from James Enge, “Turn Up This Crooked Way” (in BG 8). I admit I regard first stories with skepticism – but despite limited expectations I was entirely delighted, and at the end of the year it made my “Virtual Best of the Year” list. Enge continued to place stories in the pages of Black Gate, all featuring the main character from “Turn Up This Crooked Way,” a rather dour magician named Morlock Ambrosius. Morlock’s reputation is bad, but, perhaps predictably, he is actually on the side of good. There were some hints of a tortured history for him in those initial stories, but little real details about his past.

Now we have two novels from Enge, each also about Morlock. The first, Blood of Ambrose, is more conventionally a novel – though quite episodic in structure – and while Morlock is a major character, he shares the stage with another protagonist. But we are vouchsafed some revelations about Morlock’s back story. As for the second book, This Crooked Way, it is straightforwardly a fix-up of several of the Black Gate stories, as well as some new episodes and linking material. For all that, it does feature an overarching narrative arc, so it ends up working effectively enough as a novel.

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A Review of Warhammer: Curse of the Necrarch

A Review of Warhammer: Curse of the Necrarch

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curse-necrarchCurse of the Necrarch
Steven Savile
BL Publishing (410 pages, $7.99, 2008)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

The world of Warhammer Fantasy borrows heavily from many sources, everything from Tolkienesque dwarves and Da Vinci-inspired machines, to Moorcockian chaos creatures, a Renaissance-era Holy Roman Empire, and monsters straight out of Dungeons & Dragons. But, maybe because it’s been around for so long or because it’s been so successfully added to over the years, the Warhammer world blends all these outwardly derivative elements into a setting that works very well — both as the backdrop for their fantasy game and as a surprisingly rich source of sword & sorcery and heroic adventure style dark fantasy fiction.

Steven Savile is one of the most skilled writers working in the Warhammer stables, and showcases his abilities nicely. Savile is primarily a horror writer, and his Warhammer fiction is imbued with a healthy dose of the morbid and the dreadful without ever forsaking the golden rule of Warhammer fiction – namely, putting the action first. Curse of the Necrarch is a standalone novel, but it matches nicely with Savile’s other Warhammer books in that its all about vampires and their undead minions.

But these vampires are not Bela Lugosi in a tuxedo, nor are they the sexy-chic goths of today’s urban fantasy. Instead they are withered, rotting, monstrous things, more akin to Murnau’s Nosferatu than Rice’s Lestat. Curse of the Necrarch opens with a confrontation with one such powerful Necrarch vampire, as Felix Metzger, hereditary Lord of Kastell Metz, meets his doom while defending his lands from an invading force of undead.

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Art of the Genre: The Art of Gor

Art of the Genre: The Art of Gor

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Vallejo does Tarnsman of Gor in 1966, and the 'legend' begins...
Vallejo does Tarnsman of Gor in 1966, and the 'legend' begins...

Why the Art of Gor? Well, why not. I mean, I could title this piece ‘The Art of Boris Vallejo’, but that just isn’t as much fun. You could also go with ‘The Art of BDSM’ but I’m afraid of where Google would link me.

Anyway, The Art of Gor is apt because I’ve never read a book by John Norman, but as an avid reader and hardcore gamer, I can hum a few bars of what Gor is about, as anyone could if you’d ever seen one of these book’s covers.

The more famed covers of the first seven novels [in the original DelRey/Ballantine editions] were done by Boris Vallejo. Vallejo, in most circles considered the greatest of the Frazetta clones, hammered out resounding images of male dominance in a bleak world. These images rise out of the late 60s, and I see them as showing what I would consider the pinnacle of Vallejo’s raw talent before the artist’s mastery turns into something with less anima.

Each cover is so powerful, so primal, that as I look over them I’m moved to the world in which they take place. I feel the dread, the strength, and the dry heat of it all. That, for those of you scoring at home equates to Vallejo/FTW.

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E.E. Knight Reviews Flesh and Fire

E.E. Knight Reviews Flesh and Fire

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fleshandfire-vineart-war-lauraannegilmanFlesh and Fire
Laura Anne Gilman
Simon & Schuster Adult (496 pp, $9.99, September 2010 (originally October 2009))
Reviewed by E.E. Knight

Laura Anne Gilman is a fantasy author I not only read, but teach. The reason is simple: when I’m giving a class in the writing of science fiction and fantasy, I rarely know what to say about magic. I point the students toward authors who handle it better than I ever could, and try to explain why I think it works for an audience in those books.

Maybe I’m just reading the wrong fantasists, but I find only a few authors whose use of magic interests and pleases me. One of those is Gilman. In her urban fantasy Retrievers series, her heroine used something called “Current” – more or less the ability to manipulate electricity to get it to win items and influence people. But it was a quirky power and her heroine could accidentally get into difficulty if she wasn’t very careful with how she used it (blowing out airport x-ray scanners and such). Creative, intriguing, and just plausible enough for me to suspend disbelief, something that rarely happens when the hero just fires off a few latinesque magic words and points his finger.

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On Stranger Tides

On Stranger Tides

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Cover for the 1988 Ace MMPB.Extolling the virtues of Tim Powers to this audience is probably preaching to the choir, but if you haven’t yet read On Stranger Tides, get thee to Amazon. It was the first Powers I ever read. It’s still my favorite.

The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, neither based nor inspired but rather “suggested by the novel by Tim Powers,” is so-so. It has a clumsy first act, full of cameos and nudge-nudge references to the original film; and the leaden action and fighting choreography is wound into slow-motion by the editing. The biggest problem is POV: the story shouldn’t have had Jack as the main character but rather should have, like Curse of the Black Pearl, focused on the straight man (here, the missionary Philip) whose path intersects with Sparrow’s. That said, it’s not as bad as some of the reviews say. I found the mermaid sequence in Whitecap Bay delightful and I’ll gladly pay $9 to watch Geoffrey Rush channel Robert Newton (or to listen to Penelope Cruz’s accent) anytime. The film’s biggest stars are actually the percussive guitars of Rodrigo Y Gabriela who, along with Hans Zimmer, give the score a Spanish Main emotion missing from the previous installments.

If only the filmmakers had adapted Powers whole cloth! In the 1987 novel, 18th-century puppeteer John Chandagnac — or Jack Shandy, as he becomes known — accidentally falls in with pirates and thereby enters a heretofore unknown world of sorcery and West African animism. The buccaneers of the Caribbean, it turns out, are magicians who can manipulate spirits. Blackbeard himself is a master warlock, but having become infested with vodun loas, must seek out the Fountain of Youth to banish them; he keeps them at bay by drinking gunpowder and burning slow matches in his hair. And he’s not even the main antagonist. Shandy must meanwhile race to save his love from a horrific plot involving zombies and body swapping.

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Entering the Lists in Defense of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe

Entering the Lists in Defense of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe

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ivanhoe-coverThere’s a school of thought that views the Middle Ages as a dark gulf between the Classical Age and the rebirth of reason known as the Renaissance. The Middle Ages were, to paraphrase science fiction author David Brin, an unhappy time of small-mindedness and fear, marked by the squabbles of petty nobles, ignorance, superstition, and religious persecution.

Thus, any historical fiction that dares emit a whiff of romanticism of the age is viewed by some as anathema, a whitewashed but corrupted view of “reality”.

But as time marches on and new discoveries and scholarship come to light, we’ve realized that these times weren’t quite as dark and backwards as we once believed. And that allows us to revisit old works of art like Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe with a fresh perspective. My recent re-read of Scott’s 1819 classic of historical fiction reminded me of the following reasons why it’s still relevant and worth re-reading.

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