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A Review of The Lion of Cairo, by Scott Oden

A Review of The Lion of Cairo, by Scott Oden

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lion-of-cairo1The Lion of Cairo, by Scott Oden
Thomas Dunne Books (384 pages, $25.99, December 7, 2010)

I think it’s totally cool that the dedication page of Scott Oden’s forthcoming novel The Lion of Cairo (U.S. publication date Dec. 7) pays homage to a sword and sorcery legend:

To Robert E. Howard
whose tales of swordplay and sorcery
gave inspiration to a kid from Alabama
and caused him to take up the pen
in his own time

After the Howard name-drop you pretty much know what you’re in for: Pulse-pounding sword play, leagues of warring assassins, political intrigue, a hint of evil sorcery, and the clash of armies on a grand stage. On all these elements Oden delivers.

Though inspired by the man from Cross Plains, The Lion of Cairo is no slavish imitation of Howard. The work — book one of the Emir of the Knife trilogy — shares just as much or more in common with Harold Lamb’s Swords from the East or Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction than REH’s tales of the Hyborian Age. Cairo’s main character, the assassin Assad, is more Pale Rider than muscular Cimmerian. He’s a dude you don’t want to tangle with: Deadly with a blade instead of a six-gun; not cocky but quietly confident in his abilities; single-minded of purpose; a stone-cold killer. Though he’s an assassin Oden successfully manages to portray him as sympathetic, a killer we can get behind. It’s a pretty nifty bit of characterization.

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Great Gift Ideas For Geeks and Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans

Great Gift Ideas For Geeks and Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans

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honey-monthI love being interviewed.  Especially on weeks when Jack Nicholson isn’t talking to the press.  I tell my wife, “I was interviewed more often than Jack Nicholson this week.”

Alice is rarely impressed. “I don’t like Jack Nicholson,” she tells me. But I keep it up, in the hopes that it will win me some lovin’.

I was interviewed by SF Signal for their regular Mind Meld column, along with people less famous than me, like Jeff VanderMeer, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Mike Resnick, Martha Wells, David B. Coe, Jaym Gates, Brenda Cooper, Mike Brotherton, A. Lee Martinez, and other international celebrities and rock stars like that.  The topic was Great Gift Ideas For Geeks and Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans, and here’s what that VanderMeer guy said about some book about honey by Amal El-Mohtar:

The Honey Month – This beautifully illustrated volume of short fictions and poems takes as its inspiration the author’s tasting of 28 different kinds of honey, one per day. Each tasting leads to a different literary creation, but she begins each entry by describing the honey in terms that will be familiar to wine connoisseurs. To top it all off, Oliver Hunter’s finely rendered color illustrations make encountering such rich, heady prose even more delightful…. The book’s a slim 73 pages for a reason: like the honey described, any more and it would be too rich for most readers. As it stands, however, The Honey Month is the perfect length, and the perfect gift.

I tried to buy a copy of The Honey Month from Amal at Wiscon, but she wouldn’t sell it to me (I think because I was more famous than her). Now that she’s had a book blurbed by VanderMeer and done, like, the most popular interview in the history of Black Gate, I expect all that to change. And maybe a brother can buy a simple book, know what I’m sayin’?

You can read the complete SF Signal article here.

A Review of The Outlaws of Sherwood, by Robin McKinley

A Review of The Outlaws of Sherwood, by Robin McKinley

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outlaws-of-sherwoodThe Outlaws of Sherwood, by Robin McKinley
Greenwillow Books (282 pages, $12.95, 1988)
Cover by Alan Lee

“I am no historian,” Robin McKinley writes in the author’s note to The Outlaws of Sherwood, “and never flattered myself that I would write a story that was historically accurate. I did, however, wish to write something that was, let us say, historically unembarrassing.” I’m no historian either, but I’d say she succeeded.

The Outlaws of Sherwood is, of course, a retelling of the Robin Hood legend. It also feels extremely real, despite the historical issues mentioned in the author’s note. This is a good story for people who like a touch of logistics in their fiction. In between adventures — the book has a somewhat episodic feel, although it’s building up to a definite climax — there are plenty off details that highlight the problems and solutions to maintaining a covert community in a tangled forest.

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Who’d have thunk it?

Who’d have thunk it?

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On the heels of John’s report about Mark Twain’s autobiography comes the news that the $35 760 page first volume of a massive, somewhat disjointed, work is a bestseller.

twain-articleinlineSo in this Kindelized, iPadded and Nooked age of reading trivialized by celebrity tell-it-alls, self-help elevation and political numbwits (though excerpts from the book demonstrate that things were just as bad in Twain’s era as ours, except ours is perhaps a little worse thanks to the Internet and cable TV), Mark Twain’s physical opus is this season’s Christmas holiday hit, surpassing even that of Keith Richards.

Of course, cynic that I am (a cynicism inspired by youthful exposure to Mark Twain), I wonder how many copies will go unread, mere ornaments on a bookshelf, a hip gift idea, especially if that gift has a certain cache as something hard to get.

Somewhere, Twain is finding this immensely amusing.

The Autobiography of Mark Twain

The Autobiography of Mark Twain

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mark-twainMark Twain, the legendary American author and humorist, left behind perhaps the most famous unpublished autobiography in history.  Claiming the opinions and stories within were too strong to be received by his public, Twain left instructions that the book was not to be published until 100 years after his death.

Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”) died on April 21, 1910. Accordingly, the University of California Press published Volume One of the Autobiography of Mark Twain this week, releasing the 760-page first installment of what will be a 3-book series on Monday, November 15.

Twain dictated his autobiography in 1906, four years before he died.  The text of those dictations, with explanatory editorial notes, have been gathered into these volumes.  While unpublished, the autobiography has not been secret — in fact, biographers have had access to it for the last century, so there are no bombshells waiting for us in its pages.

What there is is a stream-of-consciousness self-portrait created from anecdotes, stories, and portraits of America as it existed over a century ago, captured by one of this nation’s keenest writers and social critics.  Written with little regard for chronological order, Twain tells of his encounters with the fabulously wealthy (but “grotesque”) Rockefeller family, his troubles with bankruptcy, the tragic death of his daughter Susy, who died at 24 of meningitis, and much more. Over at Ambrose & Elsewhere, our main man James Enge has done a full review, saying in part:

Standout sections of this book include Twain’s discussion of his brother Orion, who seems to have been bipolar, and Twain’s account of how he patiently and gently corrected an overzealous editor… there is a lot else here, including a sort of 19th century Paris Hilton – a woman who was famous simply for being famous. That story made me feel better about our crappy media culture – apparently it’s always been crappy, ever since the invention of mass media.

Twain, author of The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and The Mysterious Stranger, was one of America’s finest fantasists.   The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume One, includes 66 photographs and is priced at $34.95.  More information is at the Amazon.com listing.

Fantasy, The Middle-East, and a Conversation with Saladin Ahmed

Fantasy, The Middle-East, and a Conversation with Saladin Ahmed

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blackgateamal1Hi! My name’s Amal! We’ve never met. Well, unless we have. But most likely we haven’t, because I’ve never blogged here before, even though Ms. Claire Rides-the-Lightning Cooney has mentioned me in my capacity as one of the Editors of Goblin Fruit in her ever-so-mighty three-part article extravaganza about mine humble ‘zine.

Anyway, towards summer’s end, Claire Too-Sexy-For-Trousers Cooney told me about a conversation our very own scurrilous blarneyful dear John O’Neill had with some friends, in which they were trying to think of Muslim SF writers, and coming up blank. Then someone thought of me! My vanity, it was flattered!

Except, I am not Muslim.

I am, however, a first-generation Lebanese-Canadian, and that may as well be the same thing.

Over the last nine years, I’ve had occasion to be startled, and then to cease to be startled, by the extent to which my Middle-Eastern-ness gets conflated with Muslim-ness as a matter of course, as well as the extent to which people feel entitled to learning my religion along with my name. This is not the space in which I want to think about why precisely that is – I have a blog too, after all – but it is the space which Ms. Awesomesauce Cooney offered me to talk about the ways in which we might see the Middle-East positively represented in fantasy, as well as showcase a writer of fantasy literature who does in fact happen to be Muslim.

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The “Saw-the-Story-in-Half” Trick

The “Saw-the-Story-in-Half” Trick

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stratton_robberbride1(I passed the 50,000-word mark in National Novel Writing Month yesterday, at Day 14. Last year I achieved this at Day 13—I must be getting slow.)

I have started to view Frederick Faust as something of my writing mentor. He wasn’t a public figure, instead disguised behind “Max Brand” and his many other pseudonyms, but his excellent storytelling skill is a good teacher all on its own. However, in his letters he left behind some excellent advice about how he developed his ideas. Considering his productivity, which shames about every author in history through its sheer volume, he must have got his ideas fast.

It is easy to call Frederick Faust and other writers with enormous bibliographies to their credit (Andre Norton comes to mind immediately within speculative fiction) as “natural storytellers.” But I wonder how much that takes away from their efforts. Faust’s own notes about his writing indicate a man always on the search for “story,” and not simply plunking down in front of the typewriter and trusting to luck. Early in his career, Faust was constantly worried that each idea he had would be the last one he would ever find—and I think most writers would admit to a similar fear. But Faust discovered, “You spot stories in the air, flying out of conversations, out of books.”

Here’s a remarkable piece of advice I discovered in one of Faust’s letters, which offers an interesting writing exercise: “When you read a story, pause halfway through; finish the story in detail in your imagination; write it down in brief notes. Then read the story through to the end. Often you find that you have a totally new final half of a story. Fit in a new beginning and there you are.”

That so simple it’s beautiful. I’ve tried it a number of times, usually on modern works, and always come up with a sketch of something completely new. So far, I’ve never used one of these outlines to complete a full story, but a few other ideas have come out of this brainstorming.

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Chilling with Miles: A Review of Cryoburn

Chilling with Miles: A Review of Cryoburn

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cryoburnCryoburn, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Baen (352 pages, $25, Oct 19, 2010)

Cryoburn shows signs of being the last Vorkosigan novel. At the very least, it marks the end of a very long multi-novel arc in the series. For that reason, among others, it’s not a good place for newcomers to sample the series. For the same reason, longtime readers of the Vorkosigan stories will want to read this book, even if it is less than Bujold’s best work. (It’s still better than most sf writers on their best day.)

Although there’s no reason why Bujold couldn’t write a sequel to Cryoburn, there is some material at the end of the book that harks back to the opening entry in the series, Shards of Honor, and in it we can also hear some darkly deliberate echoes of the first Miles novel, The Warrior’s Apprentice. It’s as if LMB is marking the end of the series with ring composition. If my description seems rather vague, that’s because I’m sparing the spoiler, here. All this stuff is a sort of codicil to the novel, anyway, having nothing to do with the main story– which makes it look that much more like a deliberate signal. (I hope I’m wrong about this.)

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Gods and Monsters

Gods and Monsters

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nammahs-kissJacqueline Carey’s third Terre d’Ange trilogy, the Moirin books, seem to be in general better liked than the books about Imriel. I can’t agree with this opinion. It might be because I read them first, and therefore had gone pretty far into Naamah’s Kiss before I got a satisfactory translation of “diadh-anam“. From context, I was forced to conclude that “”diadh-anam” was Cruithne for “plot”. As in “Jehanne, I adore you, but I find that the plot is telling me I must go to China.”

Of course all the main characters in the Terre d’Ange books have been a singularly god-ridden bunch. However, Phèdre and Imriel and their cohorts had to deal more with powers and inclinations that they received from their gods in much the same way that other heroes have received them from radioactive spiders. The actions they take are to help friends, or make bargains with enemies, or act for their country, or earn a living, or do stupid things because of lust or youth or stupidity.

Moirin, on the other hand, has a goddess that micromanages her every action. Go to Terre d’Ange. Date a hot magician. Learn tai chi. Etc., etc. The Maghuin Dhonn winds up being a character as present in the book as poor, sexy, silly Moirin herself, only a lot less interesting. It’s the Q problem. How do you use a god among mortals as a character? Alan Moore did it with Dr. Manhattan, but that worked because he let us into Dr. Manhattan’s brain, showed us what the world looked like to him. But all you ever see of the Maghuin Dhonn is just her moving her favorite character around like a chess piece; and why would you ever want to read a book about the adventures of a chess piece, when you could read about the mind behind the chess game?

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Goth Chick News: Vampire Zombies on a Plane, Snakes Not Included

Goth Chick News: Vampire Zombies on a Plane, Snakes Not Included

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image004I believe everyone has something that unnerves them, which is not in your typical things-that-are-scary category. We’ve already agreed that clowns and little kids with blank stares rank high on the creepy index, but there are other more benign items that cause the hair on the back of our necks to stand up, mainly because they exist on the outside of the everyday.

Allow me to provide an example.

A few years ago I had an opportunity to visit Cape Canaveral in Florida for a night-time launch of the space shuttle. Though the event was scuttled by technical difficulties, there was something strangely frightening about the massiveness of the shuttle (and “massive” hardly does it justice).

This monolithic structure, sitting in the middle of an otherwise vacant launch pad and lit the way it was, seemed strangely terrifying. It didn’t belong there on what looked like a normal airport runway. It was gigantic and alien and out of place. I can’t explain it sufficiently, but I had nightmares about standing near it for several weeks after. Maybe because it was in a place my mind just couldn’t agree it should be, and that turned “normal” upside down.

It was because of the chill that comes from everyday things being displaced that I picked up Guillermo Del Toro’s latest paperback release The Strain to sustain me on a recent, long plane ride. In case you aren’t familiar with Del Toro, he is the owner of the incredible imagination that brought us Pan’s Labyrinth, which was turned into an Oscar-winning film in 2007.

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