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Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Ten – “The Spores of Death”

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Ten – “The Spores of Death”

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mystryfu1“The Spores of Death” was the penultimate installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu.

First published in The Story-Teller in June 1913, it later comprised Chapters 24-26 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for U. S. publication).

The story starts off appropriately with our narrator, Dr. Petrie, acknowledging the storyline is drawing to a close and apologizing (very nearly breaking the literary equivalent of the Fourth Wall in so doing) for his haste in not better detailing characters and incidents as he was forced to maintain the breakneck pace of the events as they transpired.

Dr. Petrie then spends some much welcome time discussing the mysterious origins of Dr. Fu-Manchu. Petrie suggests the name (ridiculous to modern, informed readers) is an assumed one and disassociates him with the Young China movement (the Republicans who came to power after the fall of the Manchu Dynasty) as he had speculated early on.

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The Return of the Sorcerer: Falling under Clark Ashton Smith’s potent spell for the first time

The Return of the Sorcerer: Falling under Clark Ashton Smith’s potent spell for the first time

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the-return-of-the-sorcerer-casConfession: I am a fan of pulp fantasy who has, until recently, read very little Clark Ashton Smith. Yes, the man who comprises one of the equilateral sides of the immortal Weird Tales triangle has largely eluded me, save for a few scattered tales and poems I’ve encountered in sundry anthologies and websites.

This past week that all I changed when I cracked the cover of The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith (2009, Prime Books). As I read the introduction by legendary fantasy author Gene Wolfe I knew I was in for something special: Not only was Wolfe singing Clarke’s praises (“No one imitates Smith: There could be only one writer of Clark Ashton Smith stories, and we have had him”), but he ended with this declaration:

“Earlier I wrote that Smith had come—and gone. That he had been ours only briefly, and now was ours no longer. That is so for me and for many others. If you have yet to read him, it is not so for you. For you solely he is about to live again, whispering of the road between the atoms and the path into far stars.”

The stories that followed did just that. Smith came alive for me, and I find myself a changed man. I have trekked on distant planets, seen alien beings beyond my conception, and peered wide-eyed over the shoulders of reckless sorcerers reading from musty tomes of lore that should not be opened. I have witnessed wonders and horrors beyond the knowledge of mankind. It was a wonderful experience. Though they comprise only a small part of his body of work, the stories of The Return of the Sorcerer reveal Smith as a man of staggering imagination, considerable poetic skill, and surprising literary depth.

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An epic re-read: Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen

An epic re-read: Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen

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gardens-of-the-moonOver at Tor.com, bloggers Bill Capossere and Amanda Rutter have commenced an epic re-read of all ten volumes of The Malazan Book of the Fallen, starting with the first novel, Gardens of the Moon.

What’s a “re-read?”  Modeled after Leigh Butler’s monumental Wheel of Time re-read, also at Tor.com, the authors will read and examine the series, one volume at a time. After each book is completed, authors Steven Erikson and Ian C. Esslemont promise to swing by the blog to share their reactions to the posts and discussions from fans and bloggers.

Naturally, this is all leading up to publication of the final installment in the bestselling series, The Crippled God, coming from Tor Books on February 15, 2011.

How time flies.  When my friend Neil Walsh and I were just getting started in Internet publishing at SF Site over a decade ago, one of the first books Neil drew attention to — with a rave feature review in 1999 — was the UK edition of Gardens of the Moon.

That review (and a few others like it) got a lot of press in the early days of online marketing, and we were cited in a New York Times article as a component in the negotiations leading to Erikson’s 6-figure deal to complete the series. Erikson even called Neil to thank him, gentleman that he is.

Here’s Amanda’s commentary on the Prologue:

I’d been warned. Anyone who has read the Malazan books — and even the author himself — states that these books are a challenge. You have to pay attention. No skimming merrily over blocks of descriptive passage. No glossing over the dialogue between characters. Concentration is the name of the game here, people!
        So I paid attention through the mere six pages of the prologue, and I’m a little stunned as to what was packed into so short a space.

You can jump on here.

Grey Maiden: The Story of a Sword Through the Ages

Grey Maiden: The Story of a Sword Through the Ages

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grey-maiden4I have a habit of buying books — a compulsion, really. Older books, mostly, from book fairs and small used bookstores. Things that look unusual, and which, in the absence of an immediate reason on my part to read them immediately, often sit on my shelves for some time before I get around to them.

So I don’t remember now exactly when and where I picked up a collection of Arthur D. Howden Smith’s Grey Maiden stories, only that it was some time ago. I wish I knew now, because I’d like to go back for more, if there are any.

Arthur D. Howden Smith (1887-1945) was an early pulp writer; the collection Grey Maiden (Centaur Press, 1974) has four out of seven — or nine, depending on what reference you look at — of his stories about the Grey Maiden, the first sword ever forged from iron.

Each tale follows a different wielder, each in a different time and place, as the blade’s won and lost among battles and wars and the rise and fall of empires. All were originally published in the pulp magazine Adventure.

The four tales in the collection I have (there was at least one other collection, with more of them) include a story of betrayal and revenge among the soldiers of Alexander the Great, an account of a group of Phoenicians retreating across Italy, a story of the ebbing of Roman power in Britain, and an imagining of the first collision between the Byzantine Empire and the followers of Islam.

The stories are bleak, violent, and possessed of a dark energy that makes them utterly compelling. The history perhaps couldn’t always stand up to intense scrutiny, but is used in such a way as to make the most exciting and brutal tale possible.

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Time Magazine selects Swords & Dark Magic as a Summer Page-Turner

Time Magazine selects Swords & Dark Magic as a Summer Page-Turner

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swordssorcery1Lou Anders reports that Time columnist Lev Grossman has selected his new anthology Swords & Dark Magic as one of two recommended “Summer Page Turners” in the July 12th issue.

The article, appearing on the stands this week, is “Page Turners: The Summer’s Hot Writers on What’s on their Nightstand, Kindle or Beach Chair.” Lev Grossman, Time magazine columnist and author of the fantasy novel The Magician, selected Swords & Dark Magic as one of two recommendations, saying:

Fantasy is going through an explosion of creativity.  Two new anthologies showcase the best of it: Stories: All-New Tales, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, and Swords & Dark Magic, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders.

Swords & Dark Magic was published by Eos on June 22, and is edited by Anders and Jonathan Strahan. Jason Waltz reviewed it for Black Gate here.

Congratulations to Lou and Jonathan on the great press.  Good to see the new breed of sword & sorcery getting some national attention.

Dracula: From Script to Screen

Dracula: From Script to Screen

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dracula_1931aDracula by Bram Stoker frequently vies with The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett as my favorite book.

Both stories are archetypes of their genres and despite endless imitations, almost every attempt to emulate the originals falls wide of the margin.

The current vogue for Twilight and its many imitations may be the worst misinterpretation of Stoker’s classic yet, despite its enviable success among pre-pubescent girls (and their emotional equals). The ignorance of most Twilight fans as to how their heroine earned her first name led me to revisit the seminal Universal Horror, Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi in an iconic performance that did much to secure Stoker’s novel its hard-won place of acceptance as a literary classic.

The resulting film owed much to the stage plays which took the West End and Broadway by storm during the Roaring Twenties.

Film historian David Skal has gifted the world with several excellent books and DVD bonus features and commentaries chronicling this once untapped goldmine’s transition from page to stage to screen.

Film buff Philip J. Riley has done one better (actually twice better) by sharing with film lovers not one, but two volumes collecting the various story treatments and screenplay drafts that were languishing in Universal’s files for decades.

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Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Three Paths To a Story

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Three Paths To a Story

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“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right.”
— Rudyard Kipling

Get out the map...Okay, writers. Let’s say you have a short story idea or two, but you don’t know the best way to write it. Some sage writers with some sales under their belts tell you that you Must Outline. Other wisened authors tell you to just, “Go where the story takes you,” that you shouldn’t outline at all.

So what’s a new writer to do? Who’s right?

Well, they all are, of course. They’re right about what works for them.

You have to figure out what works best for you.

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James Bond vs. the Giant Squid: Pulp 007 in Doctor No

James Bond vs. the Giant Squid: Pulp 007 in Doctor No

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giant-squidMania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius.

Some time ago in the earlier days of the Black Gate blog, E. E. Knight wrote a post about the James Bond movies as classic fantasies. No argument here—especially when I consider things like The Spy Who Loved Me and Bond-drives-an-invisible-car Die Another Day.

However, the conventional wisdom about the divide between the long-running movie franchise and the series of novels and short stories that Ian Fleming wrote in the fifties and sixties is that Fleming is the realistic, grim, down-to-earth Bond, where the movies are outrageous action-filled rides.

I’m a hardcore Bond fan, but unlike most Bondians my age (born into the ‘70s and Roger Moore’s tenure) I grew up on Fleming’s Bond, not cinema’s. I read all the novels for the first time in junior high school, and at that point had only watched perhaps three of the movies. I ended up approaching the film series from the perspective of a Fleming Purist. This doesn’t mean I flip out when anything un-Fleming occurs in the movies—for Apollo’s sake, I actually get a kick out of the Space Opera/Chuck Jones cartoon called Moonraker—but it does mean I have a very different lens on than film series than even most serious Bond fans.

And here’s something I’ve learned over the years from watching the films series develop and tracing the history of the earlier movies (Goldfinger is my favorite of the movies, in case you’re interested): Fleming ain’t realistic. His novels are extremely romanticized views of espionage life, and were thought so at the time. Read John le Carré’s extraordinary The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, meant as an answer to Fleming’s spy-romances, and you’ll immediately see what flights of fantasy Fleming really took with his super-spy. Compared to many of the movies, the novels Casino Royale and From Russia, With Love seem relatively believable, but they are still escapist romances.

Here’s the key difference between the escapism of the films and the books: The movies are fantasies. The novels are pulp adventure—almost literally so.

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A review of Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

A review of Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

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underheaven2

Under Heaven, by Guy Gavriel Kay
Roc (592 pages, $26.95, April 2010)

We don’t have that many rituals in our home. One is the creeping countdown to Guy Gavriel Kay’s newest novel. I am always a little sad when it finally comes, though, because it means years before I will see his next one.

If you liked Tigana or The Sarantine Mosaic, you will like Under Heaven. If you have not read Kay before, then do. But don’t start with Under Heaven. It’s one of his best, but you’ll want to save it for last.

Start with Tigana, then maybe A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of Al-Rassan. Jump to The Last Light of the Sun (or skip it entirely) and then go back for the two volume The Sarantine Mosaic (his second best). Then, and only then, should you read Under Heaven*.

Kay’s efforts have definitely improved with time.  A big part of that is no two stories are  in the same place, or use the same characters. I recently whipped through Jim Butchers’ twelfth Dresden installment, and am eager to read the upcoming sixth Temeraire dragon novel by Naomi Novik. Both series are fun, likely lucrative, and the authors pump out new adventures every year or two. But I sometimes wonder if they and other fantasy series novelists are a little jealous of GGK’s apparent freedom to always work on new ideas.

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Judgment Night: Space Opera and More From One of the Female Pioneers of the Genre

Judgment Night: Space Opera and More From One of the Female Pioneers of the Genre

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judgFamed with her husband Henry Kuttner for turning out superlatively compelling and complex stories for the pulps, both jointly and singly, Catherine Moore began writing in 1933.

But she had to wait nearly twenty years for any of her fine tales to achieve single-author book form, and the volume under discussion today is the long-awaited result. It contains five stories — one actually a short novel — from the pages of John W. Campbell’s Golden Age and Silver Age  Astounding.

The title piece is the novel, from 1943. A primal space opera, it concerns the star empire of the Lyonese, whose central world is Ericon, where ancient patron gods live, remote from day-to-day affairs of the empire.

But now the vast holdings of the Lyonese are crumbling under the assault of a younger race, the H’vani. The Emperor’s heir is Juille, a daughter, and she’s determined her dynasty will continue. She wages a one-woman campaign against the wishes of her doddering father to save all that her ancestors built.

But she doesn’t count on falling in love with the H’vani ruler — or the machinations of Ericon’s living deities.

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