Black Gate

Over at Tor.com, the intrepid Mordicai Knode and Tim Callahan have been conducting dangerous psychoreality experiments, just like William Hurt in Altered States.

I don’t expect you to get that reference, because Altered States came out, like, a billion years ago. But trust me, it was wild. William Hurt locks himself in a sensory deprivation tank until he turns into some kind of glowing protoplasm. And Blair Brown got naked. A lot. Drew Barrymore played their 4-year old daughter, if that helps you understand how old this movie is.

Anyway, Mordicai and Tim have convinced the brain trust at Tor.com to let them attempt the same thing, in the name of science. Tor doesn’t have the budget for an awesome sensory deprivation tank (or to pay anyone to get naked), but they’ve got the essentials down. For the last month or so, Mordicai and Tim have been refusing all outside stimulus except the work of those authors listed in Appendix N of the Dungeon Masters Guide.

They’re consuming nothing but Mountain Dew and Doritos Locos Tacos from Taco Bell, and electrodes attached to their brains will capture the exact moment they transform into Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. Hasn’t happened yet but, believe me, the stars are right and the time grows nigh.

In the meantime, teams of diligent scribes have been scribbling down every word Mordicai and Tim speak as they grow closer and closer to ultimate enlightenment. We’re here to share some of the best with you. Take them in small doses, this is potent stuff.

They start with L. Sprague de Camp, author of the early alternate history novel Lest Darkness Fall (1939), The Wheels of If (1948), Rogue Queen (1951), and, with Robert E. Howard, Tales of Conan (1955), one of the very first Conan collections.

Here’s Tim on L. Sprague de Camp, who left him underwhelmed.

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I’ve been spending a lot of time with Gary Gygax’s Dungeon Masters Guide recently, as I guide my young players through a wilderness campaign using Outdoor Survival. The DMG is a treasure trove of handy tables, excellent advice, and fascinating tangents — atrociously organized, of course, but that’s part of its charm. Like the most useful book in all fantasy, the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook (seriously — I’d kill for a copy of that book), you can flip pages at random and never know what indispensable tidbit you’ll find.

Appendix N, which lists the great fantasy writers whose collective contributions laid the groundwork for Dungeons and Dragons, is just one of those finds; but it’s one which has received a great deal of attention. Mordicai Knode and Tim Callahan at Tor.com are sampling the work of every author in Appendix N; so far they’ve covered Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, Sterling E. Lanier, Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Jack Vance.

Last week, Tim turned his attention to Roger Zelazny and The Chronicles of Amber. He wasn’t impressed:

I merely sampled the first book in the series, Nine Princes in Amber, originally published in 1970, and that was more than enough… if the first book in Roger Zelazny’s Amber series is considered any kind of classic, then it must be because the novel is graded on a curve. A curve called “pretty good for an opening novel in a series that gets a whole lot better,” or maybe a curve called, “better than a lot of other, trashier fantasy novels released in 1970, when there was nothing on television but episodes of Marcus Welby and the Flip Wilson Show…”

It’s not that I found Nine Princes in Amber uninteresting; it’s just that I found the novel shockingly discordant and unsatisfying to actually read all the way through. It’s a novel that slams together jokey Hamlet references in the narration with pop psychoanalysis and superhuman beings and shadow realms and dungeons and swords and pistols and Mercedes-Benzes.

Actually, that last sentence is almost exactly how I remember Nine Princes in Amber. Shadow realms and dungeons and swords and pistols and Mercedes-Benzes. Yeah, that pretty much covers it.

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