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The Real Argo: The Lord of Light Film and the Lost Jack Kirby Sketches

The Real Argo: The Lord of Light Film and the Lost Jack Kirby Sketches

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Kirby-Lord-of-LightI was pleased to see Ben Affleck’s Argo win the Academy Award for Best Picture last night. It was the best film I saw last year, although I admit I didn’t see all the nominees.

But I was a little annoyed during parts — especially scenes which included dialog from the fake movie, Argo. It’s clear that Affleck (and his characters) have little respect for science fiction, as the script and its source material are portrayed as utterly terrible sci-fi at its pretentious worst.

Which was particuarly annoying because the source material in question — the script used by real-life CIA agent Tony Mendez, the man portrayed by Affleck — is based on my all-time favorite SF novel, Roger Zelazny’s brilliant Lord of Light. The man who wrote the original Wired article that inspired Argo, Joshua Bearman, explains it this way:

Argo was the name Tony gave to a script that was in turnaround and sitting in a pile at [makeup artist John] Chambers’ house. That script was called Lord of Light and had been adapted from a successful Roger Zelazny science-fantasy novel of the same name. A small-time self-starting dreamer… named Barry Geller had optioned Zelazny’s book himself and raised money to get the project started. He hired Jack Kirby to do concept art and Chambers to make the alien masks. But the whole project fell apart…

It was hard to see the script for Lord of Light merciliessly skewered for laughs in Argo. Still, something good has come out of it all. As a result of the recent spotlight on the film, Jack Kirby’s original sketches — thought lost for years — have come to light.

BuzzFeed has reproduced eleven of the sketches in an article by Richard Rushfield. If you’re a Kirby fan, or a fan of Zelazny’s SF masterpiece, they are well worth a look. Check them out here.

Who is the Daughter of Fu Manchu?

Who is the Daughter of Fu Manchu?

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the-destiny-of-fu-manchu2The Destiny of Fu Manchu
By William Patrick Maynard
Black Coat Press (264 pages, $20.95 in trade paperback, April 2012)
A review by Joe Bonadonna

So who is the daughter of the infamous, the mysterious, the brilliant Fu Manchu? Is it the exquisite Koreani? The exotic Fah lo Suee? The lovely Helga Graumann? Who or what is the destiny of Fu Manchu? And who is “Khunum-Khufu,” and why is he in control of the Si-Fan?

The clues are there, the disguises are many, and the deception is all part of the fun in William Patrick Maynard’s sequel to his wonderful, The Terror of Fu Manchu.

I’ve become a fan of Maynard’s Fu Manchu. More importantly, I’m a fan of William Patrick Maynard. (His short story, “Tulsa Blackie’s Last Dive,” is one of the highlights of The Ruby Files, published by Airship27 Productions.) Now, in The Destiny of Fu Manchu, Bill picks up the story years after the events of his first novel, and this time he ups the ante in a tale that is far more complex and insidious than the good doctor’s previous adventure. I’ll do my best to give you a rundown without, hopefully, spoiling any of the fun.

The story opens with a prologue written by good old Petrie himself, the hero/narrator of the aforementioned The Terror of Fu Manchu. This time, however, Petrie has been abducted by Khunum-Khufu and a new faction of the Si-Fan, which plays back to the theft of the Seal of Solomon and the events related in the previous novel.

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A Touch of Evil: Colonial Gothic Horror Board Gaming At Its Finest

A Touch of Evil: Colonial Gothic Horror Board Gaming At Its Finest

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TouchofEvilThe quiet colonial hamlet of Shadowbrook is cursed by evil and you are one of the small group of people who can investigate the growing danger, discover the evil’s source, and then collect together a group of Town Elders to destroy it!

That is the premise of Flying Frog Productions’ board game A Touch of Evil (Amazon). You move through the village, exploring various locations and getting clues and equipment. Your currency in the game are Investigation points, which you can spend to learn the secrets behind the Town Elders, or to buy new equipment from the town’s blacksmith. Each round, you uncover new mysteries … many of which result in a confrontation with the foul minions of the main villain tormenting the village and bringing it more under the sway of darkness.

The victory at the end comes from purchasing a Lair card (the price of which changes as evil gains control over Shadowbrook), gathering together a group of Town Elders, and going to confront the villain. However, the Town Elders all have secrets, and if you’re not careful, those secrets could cause them to turn on you, increasing the villain’s power during the confrontation. If you fail to defeat the villain, it escapes and play continues until another player is able to trigger a confrontation. This process continues until someone succeeds at actually defeating the villain.

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Heroic Fiction Quarterly 15

Heroic Fiction Quarterly 15

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logoOne of an editor’s greatest pleasures is coming upon a fine story, so Adrian Simmons, David Farney, and William Ledbetter must have felt pretty delighted when they came upon the most recent batch of fiction they’ve published in Heroic Fiction Quarterly.

I’m sad to say that I’m more familiar with Heroic Fiction Quarterly e-zine in theory rather than in practice. I’ve heard good things about it for some time and I’ve read a few tales now and then, but it’s been years since I sat down for a visit. I’ve tried two of the stories in the most recent issue, “Dusts of War” by Ben Godby and “Kingdom of Graves” by David Charlton and was tremendously impressed. This is stirring, polished adventure fiction and needs to be seen by more readers. I’m looking forward to finding out what the rest of the issue holds. I’m looking forward to seeing what PREVIOUS issues hold.

Just prior to joining the Black Gate staff, I was managing the Flashing Swords e-zine. I selected and edited the tales for the first six issues. It was a small market with a small budget, and as might be expected, some of what I pulled from the submissions pile were diamonds in the rough, work from promising amateurs. It was sort of a “market with training wheels”: a place where burgeoning writers could hone their craft and start their careers. But a lot of the stories proved very fine indeed, better than such a small market had any right to be, and I can recall my frustration that more attention wasn’t being paid to them, as well as the frustration when the wrong sort of attention was paid — a reviewer tearing apart a first-time writer’s first published story with the same claws that would be used on a veteran writer in a pro market, or a fine writer’s work being dismissed by something as foolish as the old saw “first person stories have no tension because you know the narrator will survive.”

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The Weird of Oz Locates Scooby-Doo

The Weird of Oz Locates Scooby-Doo

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scooby-doo“Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you?” is a question I’ve heard asked — or, rather, sung — ever since I was a child. For most of my life, I didn’t care where the hell he was. But things have changed.

Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Inc. gang have been unmasking criminal hoaxers longer than I’ve been around, having debuted three years before I was born. They belong to that collective mob of pop-culture figures that have just always been there and are still going strong performing their antics for new generations…Looney Tunes, Mickey Mouse and his club, the Muppets, the Peanuts Gang, Tom and Jerry. Others from my childhood have fallen by the wayside — Heckle and Jeckle, Woody Woodpecker — waiting to be re-launched or else forever consigned to the Old Toons Retirement Home.

As a boy, I followed all of them at one time or another. This was largely determined by which programs the networks happened to be running during the hours just before or just after school (and, of course, that golden block of children’s programming: Saturday morning). It may be almost unfathomable to some of my younger readers, but there was a time not all that long ago when a latchkey kid getting home from school only had three or four channels to choose from, perhaps only one of which would be playing cartoons — two channels if you were lucky, in which case you might actually have a choice between, say, Care Bears or He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (and you can guess which one I chose). For us, the idea of six or seven channels playing cartoons 24/7 would seem about as far off as some of the far-out gadgetry on Star Trek.

Scooby-Doo is one of the franchises that has had real staying power, obviously. Unlike, say, The Flintstones, the live-action movies did not kill the franchise, which has gone through numerous new incarnations of TV series as well as dozens of made-for-TV or direct-to-video animated films.

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Kickstarter Alert: Up Your Game with Realm Works

Kickstarter Alert: Up Your Game with Realm Works

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RealmWorksI’m in the midst of starting up a Pathfinder RPG, the first game that I’ve run in several years. As always, the planning and character creation is half the fun. The setting, especially as outlined in the Inner Sea World Guide, contains a lot of opportunities for diverse storylines, from traditional fantasy to sword and sorcery to pirate adventures to planetary romance.

But all of these opportunities also create difficulties. I have the backstories that my characters have come up with, the mysterious things about their past that I have come up with, the skeletons in their various family and friend’s closet, plot hooks and story arcs that I’ve got to seed which will likely take months to bear fruit, if they ever do.

Unfortunately, I’ve got enough demands on my time that I know I’m not as focused as I once was, and I’m concerned about keeping it all straight. I’m starting a binder and notebook to track the events in, and have typed some up in Google Docs so that I can share the background information they know with my players. I’m thinking of keeping a blog, so that we all can reference back to figure out what events have taken place, as I anticipate this will be a fairly long-lived campaign if all goes well. There’s a lot to potentially keep track of …

Which brings me to the Kickstarter for Realm Works, which has 49 hours to go as I write this. Realm Works is a RPG campaign management engine that is being designed by Lone Wolf Development, with the goal of streamlining exactly the sort of things that I’m currently in the process of meticulously tracking. I’ve heard good things about Lone Wolf’s Hero Lab software, though I’ve never used it, but Realm Works looks like it’ll really be useful.

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Echoes of the Goddess: Schweitzer’s Newest Classic

Echoes of the Goddess: Schweitzer’s Newest Classic

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Echoes of the GoddessImagine a golden treasure chest filled to overflowing with rare and sparkling jewels. Now imagine the literary equivalent of that bounty: The jewels are visions of a fantastic world filled with dark magic, dead gods, and exotic cultures.

The latest book from Darrell Schweitzer is a treasury of obscure tales woven into a single, epic tapestry of high fantasy. Echoes of the Goddess collects eleven stories set in the same weird world as Schweitzer’s second novel The Shattered Goddess (1982). However, Echoes is not a sequel to Shattered. Instead it serves as a prequel, and a fine introduction to both the world of Goddess and the superb fantasies of Darrell Schweitzer.

Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder From the End of Time was released by Wildside Press in February 2013, but it was literally decades in the making. All of these stories were written between the years 1979 and 1985. Wildside describes the book: “This is an Earth of the far future, when the planet has declined into chaos, and darkness looms at the end of human history. Here you’ll meet… a wizard’s shadow attempting to become a man; two sorcerers grotesquely transformed by their fratricidal hatred; a musician who becomes the lord of death; a boy-priest consumed by divine visions; and a witch who loves a god, and many others. Here’s strangeness, wonder, and terror in the tradition of Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique or Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth.”

Nobody works in the “story cycle” tradition quite as well as Schweitzer does. While most of today’s writers focus on cranking out novels, he prefers the short story form and is one of the widely acknowledged masters of the form. Some of his previous story cycles have been collected as the books We Are All Legends and The Book of Sekenre. Yet the stories in Echoes of the Goddess represent the author in the formative stages of his career, when his imagination was raw and unbounded. This was years before he would go on to win a World Fantasy Award for co-editing Weird Tales with the late George Scithers, and well in advance of his “To Become a Sorcerer” novella being nominated for that same prestigious award.

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Affair of the Bear: The Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Affair of the Bear: The Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Oakdale Affair frontspiece Jack BurroughsYes, this is the 3,000th post on Black Gate. Discovered after the fact, of course. Never thought I’d be writing about a murder mystery centered on a bear for the occasion, but what the hey.

In the spring of 1917, as he was completing the last of the “New Tarzan Adventures” that would eventually fill the volume Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a short novel (40,000 words) titled “Bridge and the Oskaloosa Kid.” A reader of the previous year’s The Return of the Mucker might recognize the name “Bridge” as belonging to that novel’s itinerant poet and co-hero. Burroughs liked the character so much that he spun him off into his own story: a crime drama/mystery, something different for the author.

Editor Bob Davis at All-Story found little to appreciate about ERB’s new tact when “Bridge and the Oskaloosa Kid” landed on his desk. He argued that its twist ending stretched credulity past what readers would tolerate: “Lord! Edgar, how do you expect people who love and worship you to stand up for anything like that? And the bear stuff, and the clanking of chains!” Davis may also have objected to mentions of one of the villains injecting morphine to feed an addiction. Although Davis remarked that Bridge was a “splendid character” in The Return of the Mucker and “well worth a great story,” the editor didn’t think this was it. He bounced the novel back to ERB.

Burroughs had his own doubts about “Bridge and the Oskaloosa Kid,” criticizing his performance as “rotten” even before he finished. But his name was still good for a sale in a magazine in 1917, and the novel ended up at Blue Book, printed in full in the March 1918 issue under the more economical title The Oakdale Affair. Editor Ray Long paid $600 for it, considerably less than ERB’s standard pay-rate at the time.

A year later, a movie titled The Oakdale Affair starring Evelyn Greeley premiered from World Film Company. It was the fourth film made from ERB’s work, and a rare non-Tarzan one. Somebody must have liked the book, the opinions of the author and his editor be damned!

What to make of this unofficial third novel of the “Mucker Trilogy,” a crime thriller/mystery with a vanished heiress, murderous drifters, gypsies, an enthusiastic child detective, a deadly bear, a lynch mob, a couple of dead bodies, and a chain-clanking ghost in a haunted house? Did ERB stray too far in looking for somewhere else for his poetry-loving Bridge to roam?

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Red Sonja 11

Red Sonja 11

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Red Sonja 11 coverThe story opens with Red Sonja and Suumaro in the talons of a giant peacock, being flown away from the ruins of the sorceress Apah Alah’s honeymoon suite. It was explained (though not very clearly) last issue, but to catch up with the story (and the series in general), all you have to know is that a lot of crazy things happen to Red Sonja and she usually ends up stabbing most of those crazy things. Oh, and she’s blind after being covered in the blood of a peacock-blowing man-stallion (seriously, not half as sick as you’re thinking).

If you’re honest with yourself, you know how you’d react to being blinded, then clutched in the talon of a giant peacock. I’d be terrified. Red Sonja’s first line this issue: “I’d hoped that when death arrived for me – I’d at least be able to see well enough to spit in its face!” And that’s really all you have to know about Red Sonja.

The giant bird drops them on the upper section of the palace, where they are greeted by a bald woman with a crossbow named Narca. It turns out Narca is angry at the bird for trying to take Sonja and Suumaro out of the palace (even though the bird wasn’t taking them out of the palace, just the crumbling part of it). So she shoots the giant peacock with her crossbow, then has her army of albino gorillas drag its corpse to a giant vat of blood, where it is dumped.

Why is she so mad about Sonja and Suumaro’s escape attempt? Because she’s trapped there too. In her own wing of the palace. With an army of gorillas. And a blood pit that she uses for demonic summoning. And this isn’t even the dumbest prison set-up I’ve seen in the series (see issue two).

Sonja can’t see Narca, but Suumaro tells her that she’s “purely evil,” which he seems to conclude from the fact that she’s bald and shot a big bird. Then she shoots a second giant peacock and has it tossed into the blood pit as well. Some demon is apparently very thirsty.

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Steampunk Spotlight: Society of Steam Trilogy

Steampunk Spotlight: Society of Steam Trilogy

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the society of steam the falling machineImagine the  gilded age… but with superheroes and steampunk technology.

That is the central premise of Andrew P. Mayer’s Society of Steam trilogy, which just published its final volume in January. The books portray a world in which the brilliant inventor Sir Dennis Darby has brought together heroes to form the Paragons, a New York City group of adventurers that fight menaces to decent society. Among the heroes is the Automaton, an intelligent steam-powered construct of Darby’s own invention.

This alone would be enough of a premise for a trilogy of novels, but the first book in the trilogy, The Falling Machine (Amazon, B&N), begins by throwing this fascinating world into turmoil… by killing off Darby himself in the first chapter, leaving his student Sarah Stanton – forbidden by gender to become a hero in society – to take a stand and see that his vision of the future has a possibility to come to pass. The trilogy therefore is not about the Paragons so much as it’s about the Paragons facing their darkest hour… with an outcome that is far from predictable.

To think about the challenge facing Mayer in writing this series, consider that this would sort of be like if the first issue of X-Men began with Professor Xavier dying. The series is trying to depict the status quo changing, but also has to — at the exact same time — depict what the status quo was. It’s a tough balancing act and Mayer does a good job with it, though there are times where it’s a little uneven, particularly in the first book, which ends with several characters dying and the ranks of the Paragons devastated by their greatest challenge: the villain Eschaton.

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