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Weird of Oz Considers Postbuffyism

Weird of Oz Considers Postbuffyism

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old battlestarBattlestar_Galactica_poster-HBObuffy

When discussing television series, especially genre shows (particularly horror, science fiction, and fantasy), my friends and I sometimes use a couple of adjectives that are pretty relevant and meaningful to us and may be of interest to readers of this blog: “pre-Buffy” and “post-Buffy.”

Most visitors to the Black Gate website will need no introduction to writer/director Joss Whedon and the “Whedonverse,” a term that encompasses all he has contributed to fantasy media over the past two decades in virtually every medium: television shows, comic books, webcasts, movies. Ranging from seminal shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly to comic-book continuations of those series as well as runs on other properties like The X-Men; from the hip web series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog to a cult horror film like Cabin in the Woods to the third-highest-grossing film of all time (2012’s The Avengers): trust me, you’ve seen his work.

In this week’s informal musing, I’ll focus in on his first television show, Buffy, which ran seven seasons from 1997-2003 — not to discuss the series per se, but to explain what I mean when I use it as a benchmark in describing a television show as being “post-Buffy.”

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Self-published Book Review: Chains of Loss by Robert Sier

Self-published Book Review: Chains of Loss by Robert Sier

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Chains Of Loss CoverCyborgs versus Orcs.

That’s what I tell my wife that this book is about whenever she asks. Nanites, power suits, superhuman strength and intelligence versus hordes of raging orcs armed with crude weapons and dark magic. Okay, that’s not completely accurate. There’s only one cyborg, at least until the assimilating begins, and while there are plenty of orcs, most of the fights are against the same one. So, maybe “cyborg versus orc” would be more accurate.

Still, with a premise like that, there’s a lot of fodder for great stories, once you consider what else would be in a world that produces orcs and cyborgs: AIs and computers and starships, vampires and wizards and necromancy. And what happens when you combine them: orcs who can sense radio signals, flying humans created by technology? Robert Sier has managed to find a place for all of these things in his book, and the only question is with so much material, where do you begin.

So he starts with the hero. The cyborg, Derek Kazenushi, isn’t exactly military-grade: he just has the standard upgrades that any citizen of New Athens would, including enhanced speed and strength and healing, a few augments in matter fabrication, and the help of his built-in AI, Shadow. What he’s really specialized in, piloting, isn’t much help once his ship inexplicably crashes on Earth. That shouldn’t be possible, as Earth is light-years from New Athens, and faster-than-light travel doesn’t exist. New Athens lost all contact with Earth seven centuries ago, and Derek quickly learns that things have changed. There’s been a cataclysm, a merging of Earth with other worlds, bringing strange peoples and even stranger magic. Come to think of it, Earth merged with another world in the last novel I reviewed at Black Gate, too. Why doesn’t that sort of thing ever happen on this Earth?

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Red Sonja 12

Red Sonja 12

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Red Sonja 12 coverWhere were we? Red Sonja and the polygamist exile prince Suumaro were trying to break free of a prison palace, which was built on top of a tree by Suumaro’s sorceress mother Apah Alah shortly after her husband left her. They’d met a horned centaur who used a glass-blowing pipe to create leather eggs that hatched into thumb-sized peacocks that grew to thousands of times their original size in a matter of minutes. The centaur died. The giant peacocks died. Sonja went blind for a while. And after she got her sight back, she was approached by a demon who wanted her to steal something called the Emblem. The demon’s name is Kthonn and he offers both Sonja and Suumaro great wealth if they retrieve this issue’s mystic doodad. That’s page one.

Sonja stabs him on page two. Basically, she knows he’s going to betray her, so why not cut out a lot of useless effort and kill him now? Her logic is sound, but her blade has no effect on the demon. So instead she agrees to find the Emblem. Apparently, among other things, the Emblem has the power to free them all from the prison palace.

Suumaro uses his magic to get a general fix on the talisman’s location. Turns out it’s in yet another tower of the increasingly large prison complex. So the two of them go off in search of the thing and, as soon as they’re out of earshot, Kthonn reveals that (spoiler) he’s planning to sacrifice them as soon as they return with the Emblem. Who’s he going to sacrifice them to? We’re never told. An even bigger demon, probably.

So, Sonja, Suumaro, and Kthonn all know this is a bad deal. But everyone’s going along with it anyway, presumably because seventeen pages aren’t going to fill themselves. And when they reach the (unguarded) chamber where the Emblem is kept, they find four items on a table: a wand, a sword, a coin, and a cup.

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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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