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Confessions of a Guilty Reviewer

Confessions of a Guilty Reviewer

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Howard Andrew Jones with his Review Rooster.
Howard Andrew Jones with his Review Rooster.

I used to write occasional reviews for Tangent Online, and once I wrote one that I still regret. I’ve rarely found a slice-of-life story or flash fiction that I enjoyed, so I probably had no business evaluating a piece of short fiction that was both. Yet I read it, and I slammed it. Not because it was bad flash fiction, or because it was a bad slice-of-life story (I had no kind of qualifications for adequately judging either) but because I didn’t like flash fiction or slice-of-life stories. It was the epitome of ill-informed reviewing, where the writer is arrogant enough to know better than fans of an entire genre. Or two.

I didn’t understand my mistake for a while, and when I met the author of the story at a convention years later he was kind enough not to mention my idiocy, or, more likely, hadn’t remembered the name of the idiot who’d written the review.

You’d think that my epiphany about having written such a bad review would have arrived when I started to get my own fiction published more regularly, but it actually hit me faster, probably because it took a loooong time for my fiction to get published regularly.

I began to evaluate game products for Black Gate and it finally dawned on me that I had to consider both a work’s intended function and its intended audience. For instance, if I was looking at a role-playing product, I couldn’t evaluate a retro dungeon crawl by the same standards I looked at a modern story-based adventure with plot arcs.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 6: The Master Mind of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 6: The Master Mind of Mars

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master-mind-of-mars-1st-editionI maxed out on Barsoom back in March. After reviewing the first five Martian novels over a span of two and a half months, I switched over to writing about the movie John Carter of Mars. (That is what I’m calling it, dammit, because that’s what the end title card says.) I love the movie, but the box-office and the box-office pundits did not, and although I struggled to keep a positive view, I realized after all of this that I needed a break from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s red planet.

But during a brief pause between my summer movie reviews, the opportunity to zap my Earthly body back to Mars offered itself. So my overview of ERB’s Martian epic resumes at Book #6, with a new Earthman hero, a return to first-person, and the Barsoomian equivalent of The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Our Saga: The adventures of Earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other natives and visitors, on the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. A dry and slowly dying world, Barsoom contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with nine novels, one volume of linked novellas, and two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: The Master Mind of Mars (1927)

Previous Installments: A Princess of Mars (1912), The Gods of Mars (1913), The Warlord of Mars (1913-14), Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1916), The Chessmen of Mars (1922)

The Backstory

Burroughs wrote The Master Mind of Mars (originally under the less thrilling titles “A Weird Adventure on Mars” and “Vad Varo of Barsoom”) in mid-1925, but his usual markets didn’t pick it up. (Wikipedia, in a [citation needed] moment, speculates this may have something to do with “its satirical treatment of religious fundamentalists.” That seems unlikely, as the book is light on the religious criticism compared to the instant-selling The Gods of Mars, where searing attacks on religion are the center of the plot.) ERB finally sold the book to Hugo Gernsback, inventor of the term “science fiction,” pioneer of magazine SF, and notorious cheapskate, who paid $1,250 for the novel — much less than what the author got from his usual markets. Gernsback made Burroughs’s newest Martian adventure the lead story for his Amazing Stories Annual, an extension of what was at the time the only science-fiction pulp. Burroughs made sense as a circulation-booster, since he helped create magazine SF fourteen years before the first pulp dedicated to it appeared on the stands. …

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Beth Dawkins Reviews Honeyed Words

Beth Dawkins Reviews Honeyed Words

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honeyed-wordsHoneyed Words
J.A.Pitts
TOR (416pp, $14.99, Paperback, July2011)
Reviewed by Beth Dawkins

Honeyed Words is the second book in the Sarah Beauhall series. Sarah decides to take her girlfriend Katie to a concert in Vancouver for her birthday. When it is over Sarah snags passes for the after-party. There Sarah tries to stop the singer, Ari, from being abducted by what they believe to be dwarves. Afterwards Sarah and Katie run into two trouble-making elves, Gletts and Skella, who only make the couple’s stay in Vancouver even more confusing. There are also some issues back home when Sarah is asked to help Anezka the blacksmith out. The moment Sarah steps onto Anezka’s property she knows something is wrong. Soon Anezka starts acting crazy, and Sarah must ask for help from an unlikely source. While these events don’t seem connected, they come together to unleash a hell storm Sarah and Katie must clean up.

Sarah, the heroine for Honeyed Words, is a strong female lead. She has grown as a character since the first installment, Black Blade Blues, and it shows. She is working past her issues with her sexuality, and shows much more attention to her girlfriend, Katie. There is even a steamy shower scene between the couple. While she has worked things out with Katie, she isn’t carrying around the magic sword she reforged, Gram. She mentions a great deal of how the sword calls to her, how it is dreaming of blood, but we don’t see the sword blazing a path of destruction until the very end.

The story is told mostly in first person — Sarah’s POV, but some chapters switch to third person, and followed the perspective of a scheming character. These chapters were by far not as interesting. They felt jarring in the over-all flow, and the characters themselves were less fun to read.

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Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: Brave

Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: Brave

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brave-posterWho would think at the start of the summer that Brave was concealing more of its plot and themes than Prometheus? Strange days, my friends.

Ninety percent of the trailer for Brave comes from the first twenty-five percent of the movie. And to continue with percentages, fifty percent of Brave is a great film, and worthy to stand beside earlier Pixar classics. But except for a few flashes in the trailer, Disney and Pixar have revealed nothing of this later-running time greatness to you. The marketing department and directors Andrew Jones and Brenda Chapman have even specifically asked reviewers to hide what the center of the movie is about.

This is not a case of concealing a twist ending or a mid-movie shocker, but disguising the core of the film. Imagine a trailer for Pinocchio that never reveals that the puppet comes to life: it’s the story of a sad woodcarver and his pets who meet a blue fairy, and later on an enormous whale may peep into the plot. Or a trailer for King Kong that not only never shows the eighteen-foot gorilla, it never hints that there might be a giant monster of any sort in the film. According to this trailer, King Kong looks like the tale of a young woman who goes on a voyage with a film crew, possibly to find (dinosaur- and gorilla-free) adventure and romance away from dreary Depression Era New York.

Brave is the story of Merida (voice of Kelly Macdonald), a Scottish princess who hates that her parents King Fergus (Billy Connolly) and Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) are trying to marry her off to a dullard in a political alliance when all she wants is her freedom — like any good Disney Princess™ — and the chance to choose her own destiny. While exploring, Merida discovers magic in the forest after following a trail of Will-‘o-the-Wisps. The rest of the story follows the standard princess adventure: she’ll go out on her own, fight some monsters, discover a handsome and roguish fellow who likes her for who she is, and her parents will finally let their daughter be herself and marry the man she loves.

Except, after the words “The rest of the story…” that is not actually the plot of the film. At all. It isn’t the main character conflict or the thematic center. I made it up. Don’t expect some sort of Sixth Sense twist, such as Merida discovering she’s actually trapped inside a giant video game or Mars invading medieval Scotland, but the story does pick a different and better way than the second half of my Disney-influenced outline. A very average opening gives way to a film that has much more to say, in the vaunted Pixar fashion.

I will reveal at least this: expect a helluva a lot more “bear” than you’ve seen in the trailers. This is a good thing. I like Big Bears and I cannot lie!

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Vintage Treasures: George R.R. Martin’s “Nightflyers”

Vintage Treasures: George R.R. Martin’s “Nightflyers”

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analog-april-1980-smallOver the weekend I put away a collection of 80s magazines I purchased a few months ago. In the process I discovered the April 1980 issue of Analog, which I read as a junior in high school in Ottawa, Canada.

There’s a lot to like about this issue, from the gorgeous cover by Paul Lehr — perhaps my favorite SF artist — to a famous short story by one of my all-time favorite SF writers: “Grotto of the Dancing Deer,” by Clifford D. Simak, which won both the 1980 Nebula Award and 1981 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. Even the ads reflect those things I personally found most exciting and fresh about SF and fantasy at the time: a full page ad from TSR for D&D, “The Ultimate in Adventure Games;” an ad for six microgames from Metagaming (the company that introduced me to role playing games), including the classic Ogre; and a subscription form for Ares, the short-lived SF gaming magazine from SPI.

This issue is an intriguing cultural artifact for other reasons. There’s an editorial from Stanley Schmidt in response to the recent kidnapping of 50 Americans at the US embassy in Iran, both a fascinating snapshot of a critical moment in American history, and a typical science fiction response:

What the Iranian crisis really demonstrates, at least as dramatically as any incident so far, is that if we want real freedom, we must produce our own energy… Technologies which can do this are possible, and we should not willingly settle for less. Readers of this magazine are well acquainted with the role space can play, but many people are not — and we need to get the action under way now.

If you read Analog in the 20th Century, you got used to this. Exploring space was pretty much the answer to everything — the energy crisis, the hole in the ozone, foreign policy crises, and crappy network television programming — and the magazine’s self-congratulatory tone clearly told its readership (including 15-year-old readers in Ottawa) that they were smarter and more informed than everyone else, especially on science and technology, topics far more important than cars, sports, and other things kids our age obsessed about. Analog told its readers they were destined for success. The future was ours.

But the real reason this issue is remembered is its cover story, George R.R. Martin’s novella of horror in deep space, the chilling classic “Nightflyers.”

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Brave: Pixar Improves Disney’s Fantasy Princess

Brave: Pixar Improves Disney’s Fantasy Princess

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295px-brave-apple-posterThe Disney/Pixar partnership has always been willing to take some risks. Let’s face it, these are the people who turned a lost fish, talking cars, and Ed Asner in a floating house into deeply rich character-driven stories about the human condition. It’s really a wonder if there’s anything they can’t do well!

But one thing that they have avoided, until now, is even trying to dip their toes into the genre that Disney has mastered: the fairy tale.

From my perspective, with Brave they’ve blown pretty much every Disney fairy-tale-themed film out of the water. I won’t get much into the plotline, because Pixar’s done a really good job of not spoiling it too much. (I had a guess about what was going to happen, based largely on the Subway restaurant promotional campaign materials, and that guess was pretty much on the mark.)

But, even with no idea what happens in the film, there are a lot of things that the film is about which I can discuss…

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Sung in Blood by Glen Cook

Sung in Blood by Glen Cook

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Sung in Bloodcookg-sung-in-blood
Glen Cook
Night Shade Books (190 pp, $23.95, 2006)
Reviewed by Jason M. Waltz

A high fantasy Fu Manchu meets Doc Savage in this formerly long out-of-print and impossible to find short novel from Glen Cook.

So says the Night Shade Books bookstore page. It’s more than accurate. And for any fan of Doc Savage, it’s a pleasant must-read. Sparse and pulpy, with evil sorcerers and demons, swords- and shadow-men, this less-than-200-page-novel is a fun romp amid the glorious romance of a former era.

My thanks to John O’Neill who, as always, guides my purchasing choices at the Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention every April in Chicago. While I found the book this year, tucked on the lower shelf beneath a vendor’s table, it was he who convinced me to buy it.

In truth, it is not reminiscent of Cook’s other better-known writings. This is nothing like his Black Company or Dread Empire tales — consider that both recommendation and caution.

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Frank Chadwick’s A Prince of Mars

Frank Chadwick’s A Prince of Mars

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A Prince of Mars by Frank ChadwickA Prince of Mars (Amazon | B&N)
Frank Chadwick
Untreed Reads Publishing (137 pages, $2.51, February 2012)

For me the greatest benefit of the e-book revolution is low expectations coupled with low prices. For 99¢ or $4.99 or anyplace in-between, I can take a chance on an unfamiliar author and download a novel or collection onto my Android, then read a few pages whenever I have a lost moment — usually while waiting somewhere for somebody. I’ve pulled a few stinkers, but then again I’ve also spent more on bad cups of coffee too. And, occasionally, there’s that casino-win kick when I unexpectedly discover a polished thrill-ride like A Prince of Mars.

Space: 1889, first published in 1988 as an RPG/miniatures wargame, is a mash-up of H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon and Burroughs’ Barsoom and Amtor novels. The setting is an alternate history in which space flight was pioneered in the late nineteenth century. With its emphasis on Her Majesty’s presence on Mars, the result is the British Raj transplanted to the canals and deserts of a dying world, alongside flying ships made from Martian liftwood, the setting’s answer to cavorite. I suspect the focus on Great Game political machinations and aerial skirmishes appealed more to the wargamer than the hack-and-loot dungeon delver, allowing Space: 1889 to persevere to the modern day through its small but dedicated audience. Well — that and the fact Frank Chadwick, as both writer and publisher, maintained the rights to his creation and therefore didn’t allow it to drown in the industry quicksands of neglect, copyrights, and petty feuding, which is so often the case.

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John Ottinger Reviews Bury Elminster Deep

John Ottinger Reviews Bury Elminster Deep

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bury-elminster-deep-by-ed-greenwoodBury Elminster Deep
Ed Greenwood
Wizards of the Coast (340pp, $25.95, 1st edition August 2011)
Reviewed by John Ottinger III

Sometimes an author can write a little too much about a character. Like a child who loves a stuffed animal, the repeated play can wear the fabric and loosen the stuffing so much that the very toy that was once so loved is rendered unrecognizable. Sentimentality keeps the stuffed animal by the child’s side, but to outside observers, the toy has lost all value.

So it is, I think, with Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood’s latest story of Elminster of Shadowdale. In Bury Elminster Deep the story opens where Elminster Must Die ended. The spellplague that has ravaged the realms has killed Mystra and killed, scattered, or rendered powerless her Chosen, including Elminster. Storm, one of the seven Chosen sisters and Elminster’s constant companion, has lost all magical power other than a head of living hair. Elminster, the most ancient and powerful of Mystra’s Chosen, who has lived through not one, but two incarnations of the goddess, is bodiless, riding the mind of his granddaughter, the dancer Rune, and is unable to perform magic without also enduring bouts of madness.

But then Mystra reappears and asks her favored Chosen to re-enter the kingdom of Cormyr to save it from yet another takeover by Lord Manshoon, the vampire archmage nemesis of Elminster. Manshoon thinks Elminster’s seeming disappearance is an opportunity to seize power in one of the Realms’ oldest human kingdoms. Though severely hobbled by his lack of magic, Storm’s normality and the jealousy of Rune’s boyfriend, Lord Arclath Delcastle, Elminster and company must stop Manshoon before his coup succeeds.

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Drinking Atlantis, No Chaser: Conan the Barbarian (2011) Blow-by-Blow & Play-by-Play

Drinking Atlantis, No Chaser: Conan the Barbarian (2011) Blow-by-Blow & Play-by-Play

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conan-poster-1I have a week-long break between summer movie reviews, the gap between Prometheus and Brave, so I have chosen to return to Ghosts of Summer Pasts. Not long past. Just last year. Ladies and gentlemen, Hyborians and Hyrkanians, the 2011 Conan the Barbarian! [Insert tepid Monty Python and the Holy Grail “yeah!” here.]

Many movie websites do play-by-play reviews, essentially a one-post blog-thru of a film, providing comments along with time stamps. I’ve wanted to try my hand at this for years, and this short summer break opened up the opportunity to exercise this review format on an awful film that sword-and-sorcery fans don’t want to talk about. But if I can find a way to wrench some entertainment from the Blu-ray of this movie (yes, I bought it — but used at a bargain price), then let it be so.

It was August of ’11 that saw the release and immediate flop of the Marcus Nispel-directed Conan the Barbarian. Critics savaged the movie, but most fans of Robert E. Howard saw the dire writing in the ancient language of Acheron on the wall long before the release. I gave up hope for the movie when I heard that Nispel was attached to it. Nothing I had seen of the man’s previous work indicated he had any notion of theme or subtlety — or even how to stitch together a comprehensible action scene. The guy came across as a refugee from an awful ’80s metal band who decided to get into directing so he could show “awesome!” stuff on screen. In other words, he was picked for the job because of a superficial resemblance to sword-and-sorcery, not because the man has any affinity for filmmaking or Robert E. Howard.

The casting of Jason Momoa met skepticism when first announced, but among all else that went awry with Conan the Barbarian, Momoa was one thing that went right. More about that on the play-by-play.

I enjoyed the movie more this second time viewing it, but that isn’t because I found any new appreciation for it. Conan ’11 works simply better on home video, where its limited scope and poor VFX feel more appropriate. Also, watching at home meant I could take breaks to go get a drink or read Shakespeare or call my sister in Munich. I could live my life around the film, and the film benefits from my ability to ignore it whenever I want to. The only downside to home video is that the 3D in the theater, terrible as it was, did hide some of visual flaws and clunky special effects.

Okay, queue up your disc or streaming or whatever, and let’s drink Atlantis….

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