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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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A Review of Deep Secret

A Review of Deep Secret

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deeep-secretDeep Secret, by Diana Wynne Jones
Tor Books (383 pages, hardcover, March 1999)

Diana Wynne Jones was born August 16, 1934 and died on March 26, 2011. Various writers who knew her have made some excellent biographical posts; I especially recommend stopping by Neil Gaiman’s blog. I never met Ms. Jones myself, but I’ve been a fan of her work since I stumbled upon Howl’s Moving Castle as a teenager. Because of that, I thought perhaps I should review one of her novels this week; preferably something other than Howl’s Moving Castle, which is quite well-known.

Deep Secret is a typical Jones book: it’s complicated. Rupert Venables, junior Magid for Earth, has a number of problems which all seem to converge on him at once. The empire at the center of the multiverse is falling. The late emperor was a paranoid, unpleasant man who hid his heirs and executed them if they discovered their own identities. He also worshipped an evil thornbush goddess. Rupert’s mentor has died, and he has to find a replacement Magid and he hates the most likely candidate on sight. When he decides to simplify matters by gathering all the candidates at a speculative fiction convention, his very odd neighbor wanders through his spell and becomes wrapped up in it. Also, his mentor is now haunting his car and won’t stop playing baroque music.

Maree Mallory, most likely candidate for Magid, has her own set of troubles, albeit more mundane ones. She’s had a bad breakup, she’s broke and living with relatives who dislike her — all except her younger cousin Nick, who she finds charming but slightly amoral. She keeps having dreams about a horrible and insulting old lady who is somehow also a thornbush. And she keeps encountering a person she thinks of as The Prat, also known as Rupert Venables.

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An Interview with Author Bradley Beaulieu

An Interview with Author Bradley Beaulieu

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bradleybeaulieuI’m pleased to interview my great friend and writer buddy, Brad Beaulieu. We’ll be discussing his new novel, The Winds of Khalakovo, Book One of The Lays of Anuskaya, which comes out the first of April 2011 from Nightshade Books as a trade paperback and as an eBook. Winds is a sweeping epic fantasy with a Czarist Russian and Persian feel, a unique combination to be sure. I’m so proud of Brad’s accomplishment with the world building and the story. I’ve been involved with this novel for several years now, and have had a part in the revisions, so I’ve seen it go from an awesome book with an amazing concept to a truly exceptional one with a fully fleshed-out world.

Brad has had his short stories published in the most prestigious speculative fiction publications including Realms of Fantasy, The Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future, and several anthologies from DAW Books. He’s also the father of two and the husband to a wonderful woman, Joanne. They live in Wisconsin and besides being an excellent writer, Brad is an amazing cook.

Now on to the interview…

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Pathfinder Tales: “The Walkers from the Crypt” by Howard Andrew Jones

Pathfinder Tales: “The Walkers from the Crypt” by Howard Andrew Jones

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pathfindertales_360Howard Andrew Jones’ four-part story “The Walkers from the Crypt” has now been posted in its entirety at The Pathfinder Tales site at Paizo.com:

Elyana had no time to waste educating the young bard. There were but a few minutes left before the hounds would reach them.

She’d caught sight of the animals almost a half hour ago as she and her four companions fled across the grasslands of southern Galt. The seemingly inexhaustible hounds had slowly gained on their horses, and the party had finally picked out a rise from which to make a stand.

Vallyn gazed apprehensively out at the wedge-shaped formation of hounds sprinting forward through the high grass. “How can they keep running like that?”

“They’re dead,” Arcil said in his low, smooth voice. “They need neither breath nor rest.”

Pathfinder Tales are complete short stories set in the detailed world of Golarion, home to the Pathfinder role playing game. Novels released under the Pathfinder Tales brand include Prince of Wolves by Dave Gross, Winter Witch by Elaine Cunningham, and Plague of Shadows by our own Howard Andrew Jones. Pazio has also begun presenting complete tales set in the same setting on their website — including pieces from Monte Cook, Ed Greenwood, Dave Gross, Richard Lee Byers, and others.

“The Walkers from the Crypt” features the continuing adventures of Elyana, Vallyn, Stelan, and other characters from Howard’s new novel Plague of Shadows, in a complete standalone adventure. Read more about Plague of Shadows here.

You can read Part One of “The Walkers from the Crypt” here, and all four parts are now available at Paizo.com.

I Am Number Four: Why Movies Are Rarely As Good As Books

I Am Number Four: Why Movies Are Rarely As Good As Books

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i-am-number-fourI am in my mid-thirties and my wife is in her mid-twenties. The eight-year difference between us can be jarring at times, especially because I am a pop culture junkie and she grew up without cable television (and rarely watched the network television she did have access to, as I learned when I discovered she’d never seen an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard, even in rerun).

Recently, this generation gap has became particularly evident. A close friend of hers has formed a book club, of which I am the only male attendee and also about the only thirty-something. As such, the books that we’re reading tend to track toward chick lit, much of it in the Twilight-like realm of paranormal, horror, or fantasy-related romance novels, many targeted toward young adults.

Some of the books that fall into this category these days are truly outstanding, such as The Hunger Games, but many of them have serious issues … which brings us to last month’s book, chosen in part to coincide with the release of its film version: I Am Number Four.

I Am Number Four: The Premise

As the planet Lorien was being destroyed by a race known as the Mogadorians, a group of Loriens came up with a plan that would have put Jor-El to shame. They cram 9 of their young on a spaceship to Earth, along with 9 mentors. The Lorien youth are of a class known as the Garde, who will eventually develop powers, called Legacies, intended to defend Lorien. The mentors are part of the class known as Cepan, who help train the Garde.

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