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Looking for the real Robert E. Howard in One Who Walked Alone

Looking for the real Robert E. Howard in One Who Walked Alone

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one-who-walked-aloneIt couldn’t have been easy for Novalyne Price Ellis to write One Who Walked Alone: Robert E. Howard the Final Years (Donald M. Grant Publisher, Inc., 1986). Price Ellis’ memoir of her relationship with Howard (roughly 1934-36) is illuminating in its raw honesty. It’s also painful, at turns disappointing and downright frustrating. We might find escape in Howard’s sword and sorcery tales but there is none to be found here.

But above all, One Who Walked Alone is brave. Price Ellis never sacrifices accuracy to save face. Howard was a successful writer and a free spirit, and told wild, vivid stories, traits that Price Ellis found irresistible. But she was also painfully embarrassed with the Texan, unable to accept his occasionally odd public behavior. She was disappointed that he didn’t conform to her own conception of manliness and began to date other men, including one of his best friends, Truett Vinson, which cut Howard to the quick. While her reactions were understandable, at times I found her to be rather shallow and unlikeable. And yet rather than off-putting I find that uncompromising truthfulness highly admirable.

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Goth Chick News: Mad Madame LaLaurie

Goth Chick News: Mad Madame LaLaurie

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image005There are some ghost stories that leave an indelible impression.

I fancy myself somewhat of a connoisseur of the paranormal, and over the past couple of years I’ve told you about some personal experiences (both real and imagined), some that others have experienced and a few that are little more than unsubstantiated folk tales.

And as you may have noticed, reality television has become somewhat obsessed of late, with night vision broadcasts documenting ghostly activity in every episode. If it were really that easy, there would be no question that spirits, or at the very least residual haunts, are a matter of record and I’d have interviewed a few of them for you.

But every once in awhile there comes a time and place where something so disturbing has occurred that the stories of hauntings associated with it morph into anecdotes that even a hardened skeptic could make room for.

I’ve told you about a few of these as well, such as Gettysburg, the Tower of London and the Edinburgh catacombs. However, due to their historical notoriety, these locations have been swarmed by professional ghost hunters over the years and investigated to death (if you pardon the expression); resulting in a magnitude of evidence for your consideration, whichever side of the belief scale you happen to come down on.

Then there’s the LaLaurie Mansion located in New Orleans’ French Quarter. It ranks near the very top of the “give me nightmares” scale.

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The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack wins Philip K. Dick Award

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack wins Philip K. Dick Award

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strange-affair-of-spring-heeled-jackNotch up another win for Pyr Books excellent 2010 line up. The Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust announced on Friday that the winner of the 2011 Philip K. Dick Award is The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder, published by Pyr in September of last year.

We reported the complete list of nominees in January.

The Philip K. Dick Award is presented each year to “the distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States.” Previous winners have included C. L. Anderson, James P. Blaylock, Pat Murphy, Stephen Baxter, Carol Emshwiller and Richard Morgan. The judges for 2010 were William Barton, Andy Duncan (chair), Bruce McAllister, Melinda Snodgrass, and David Walton.

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack is Mark Hodder’s first novel. The sequel, The Clockwork Man Of Trafalgar Square, also featuring Burton and Swinburne, is the second installment of a three-volume story arc and was published by Pyr on March 22.

The PKD Trust also awarded a special citation this year to the novel Harmony, by Project Itoh, translated by Alexander O. Smith and published by Haikasoru.

Congratulations to the winners!

The Monks Are Coming: MONK PUNK

The Monks Are Coming: MONK PUNK

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Static Movement Press’s new anthology of multi-genre monk tales, MONK PUNK, is finally available from Pill Hill Press Book Shoppe. It will be available from Amazon within the week.

The book features my story “Where the White Lotus Grows,” which was inspired partly by my love of the ’70s KUNG FU television show (starring David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine).

Caine remains one of the most iconic characters in television, and for good reason. KUNG FU, which was co-developed by the great Bruce Lee, contrasted Zen and Taoist philosophy with the savage violence of the Old West. As a child, I spent hours absorbing the lessons of Caine and his venerable mentors, Master Kahn and Master Po, watching this peaceful soul wander through world of brutal conflict in search of peace. There has never been a television show with this much soul-deep wisdom at the very core of its concept.

 “Where the White Lotus Grows” reimagines this idea of the “peaceful warrior” in a dark fantasy setting. It stars Kantoh, a Disciple of the Empty Hand. Imperial soldiers and demonic forces dog his steps as he walks a dangerous path whose destination even he does not know. But the greatest threat to his cryptic mission may be his own human compassion.

TOC and other cool stuff after the jump…

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James Schmitz’s The Demon Breed: SF as a Test-bed for Living (With Women who Kick Alien Butt)

James Schmitz’s The Demon Breed: SF as a Test-bed for Living (With Women who Kick Alien Butt)

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demon-breed1I’d like to take some time to talk about the impact of simple truths and how perceptions long thought changed need regular revisits so we don’t forget. We become comfortable after tectonic changes occur that alter the landscape, so comfortable we sometimes get caught by surprise when an example of what we believed was long gone springs up before us, not nearly as banished as we’d thought. We forget, most of us.

And yes, this is about science fiction and fantasy. Really.

I collected the original run of Terry Carr’s groundbreaking Ace Specials back when they first appeared in the late Sixties. Some truly phenomenal work came out under that imprint, work still published and read today.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, Alexi Panshin’s Rite of Passage, Keith Roberts’ Pavane, The Black Corridor and Warlord of the Air by Michael Moorcock. A number of others that were influential but you have to search for them today, work by Wilson Tucker, Bob Shaw, and Joanna Russ.

Among them was a little novel by a writer not much talked about today except in certain “knowing” circles — James Schmitz. The novel was The Demon Breed and it featured a character that just riveted me.

Tough, smart, capable, a role model for anyone who wanted to grow up competent and self-assured and substantial. Nile Etland.

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The Ones We Love

The Ones We Love

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conan-of-cimmeriaWe’re all guilty of it. Yeah, we mean well, but our need to see our literary heroes in just one more adventure is tragically unfair to them. As readers, our fantasies of characters navigating awful situations and hair-raising exploits are harmless enough. But what of us as writers? How can we excuse the need we feel to put our beloved characters through just one more physical and emotional wringer?

Because let’s be clear. For the characters, adventures are painful, scary experiences they feel lucky to put behind themselves. Those sword fights could, at any moment, end tragically. And gunplay? Don’t get me started.

I know, I hear all of the diehard fanboys of this or that series clamoring for a more balanced viewpoint. They will mention how brave and skilled this or that protagonist is, and are always ready to give some example of stoic adventuring and daring-do. And I suppose there are those of the adventurati that really are stone-cold warriors and flinty-eyed sorcerors to whom deadly danger is like mother’s milk. But would you want to have a drink with any of them? No, the characters we love the best, who really get to us, are those we can empathize with, to who we can relate.

If you can relate to the hardened killer type, you have one type of problem, while the rest of us have another: we long to visit very trying times on characters we feel deeply about. Robert E. Howard’s tales of Conan of Cimmeria are typical examples of a hero set upon by a troubling world, who is forced time and again to use his battle prowess and wits to see his way clear.

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A Review of Mairelon the Magician, by Patricia C. Wrede

A Review of Mairelon the Magician, by Patricia C. Wrede

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mairelonMairelon the Magician, by Patricia C. Wrede
Tor Books (280 pages, hardcover, May 1991)

Mairelon the Magician is a little bit mystery, a little bit comedy, but mostly a mixture of alternate history and fantasy.  It’s a light, fun sort of book; no world-altering plots or pitched battles, but a fair amount of sneaking around, spying, and working out who’s plotting what against whom.  (It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the majority of the incidental characters are plotting something.) 

I think it works better in concert with its sequel, Magician’s Ward, which adds a bit of romance to the already eclectic mix, but the first book is enjoyable on its own. 

I really have only two reservations.  First, I found the pacing of the climax to be slightly off, although this may be because I was looking at it with the wrong set of genre lenses; it may fit better into mystery than fantasy. 

The second reservation is more of a warning than a complaint: if you’re American, do not watch British shows or movies, and know you have a hard time with dialect, avoid this book — or at least hunt down a period drama to watch first, just to get into the rhythm of the language.  Otherwise the amount of thieves’ cant will make the story nearly unintelligible.

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Welcome to Bordertown: What Would Eilonwy Do?

Welcome to Bordertown: What Would Eilonwy Do?

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gnomesThis morning on my walk to work, I spotted a man crossing a lawn. His arms were very full. Of garden gnomes.

You know, gnomes? With the blue coats and the red hats? The Rien Poortvliet kind?

“Morning!” I said.

“Morning,” he said. “I got a delivery. Gnome delivery.”

After we’d passed each other, and I’d spent a good while grinning, I thought to myself, “I know why that just happened. That happened because I started reading Welcome to Bordertown on the train today.”

(Hey! Heads up! If  you follow the above link to the Bordertown website, then click through the fancy links there to Amazon to purchase any of the new books on that page, then Terri Windling’s Endicott Studio gets a small kick-back from Amazon.com. And all of that money is donated to a shelter for homeless kids. More info here.)

Now, I’m only half a story in — the first one. But half a story in means I’ve already read the two introductions, by Terri Windling and Holly Black respectively, and also the “Bordertown Basics” which is sort of like a mix of the Not for Tourists Guide to Chicago, and Wolfe and Gaiman’s wicked little chapbook, A Walking Tour of the Shambles. It includes a weekly advisory about gang movement, monster sightings, pickpockets and missing gargoyles.

This bit made me chortle:

“The Mock Avenue street association would like to apologize to everyone for fixing the church tower clock last week, which caused widespread confusion. It has now been restored to its usual wrong time.”

But let me back up a little. Reading the introductions, I started to get a strange feeling. Gene Wolfe described a poem once as giving him “that fairy tale feeling.” He may have been quoting someone famous, like Dunsany or something. He does that. This was like that feeling, but it was also another feeling mixed in. …

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A Review of George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women

A Review of George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women

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phantastes-carterWarning: Some spoilers ahead

Advancing a claim that something is the “first” anything is daring a slippery slope, but saying a book is the “first fantasy” is rather like taking a leap onto a Slip and Slide greased with the gelatin exudate of Cthulhu. George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858) could be the first fantasy story … but then, what about Shakespeare’s The Tempest, or Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, or … you get the picture. I happen to agree with our own Matthew David Surridge that Phantastes is likely not the first pure fantasy novel, for the fact that, although it involves another world, it “never quite [leaves] the real world behind.” It’s the stuff of dreams, with a clear path back to earth.

Regardless, Phantastes is without question one of the cornerstones of the genre, and stands poised at the cusp of early works containing fantastic elements, to those that feature fully developed, independent secondary worlds.

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Lord Dunsany and “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth”

Lord Dunsany and “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth”

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Lord DunsanyLord Dunsany’s short story “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” has been called the first sword-and-sorcery story ever written. That attribution has been contested elsewhere, though. I don’t particularly intend to grapple with the question — it seems to me that genres are defined by conventions, which is to say by expectations held by a reader; whether a story fits a genre therefore depends on whether the conventions it uses are the ones that the individual reader expects, and while many stories use conventions in such standard ways that there’s broad agreement about sort of tale they are, some, like ‘Sacnoth,’ will vary in definition from person to person. But as a story, I think “Sacnoth” is worth discussing. Like most of Dunsany’s early short stories, it’s really quite brilliant.

(You can find it online here, and if you’ve not read it before I strongly urge you to give it a try.)

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