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Steampunk Spotlight: Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan Trilogy

Steampunk Spotlight: Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan Trilogy

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leviathan

Leviathan (Amazon, B&N)
Scott Westerfeld
Simon Pulse (440 pp, $9.99, Oct. 2009)

Behemoth (Amazon, B&N)
Scott Westerfeld
Simon Pulse (5112 pp, $9.99, Oct. 2010)

Goliath (Amazon, B&N)
Scott Westerfeld
Simon Pulse (543 pp, $19.99, Sept. 2011)

Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy is an epic about an alternate-history version of World War I … and a great example of how steampunk can really work well when it’s firing on all cylinders (both literally and figuratively). In this, the military conflict isn’t just political, but also centers around an ideological difference about technology. The British and Russians have embraced Charles Darwin’s biological insights to breed massive war beasts, while the German alliance put their faith in mechanical (frequently multi-legged) battle machines.

In addition to the global conflict, the major tension in the story centers around two young characters – one from each side of the battle – who are living with their own secrets in the midst of the war. One is a girl disguised as a boy so that she can serve in the British military upon the living zeppelin Leviathan. The other is a prince (and secret heir to the Austrian Empire) on the run from his own people.

On top of all of that, there’s also a romance … even though one of the participants doesn’t realize it for quite some time.

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Charlene Brusso Reviews Conspirator (Foreigner #10)

Charlene Brusso Reviews Conspirator (Foreigner #10)

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conspiratorConspirator
C. J. Cherryh
DAW (416pp, $25.95, May 2010)
Reviewed by Charlene Brusso

There is more to communication than mere words. Sure, words have meanings, but they are also, thanks to evolution, tied intimately to the way we think and feel, and the world we live in. Language doesn’t just describe culture or psychology, it is culture and psychology, it’s how we are wired, and assuming that a word can be translated exactly from one culture to another – or, worse yet, from one species to another – is a rookie linguist’s mistake. That is why xenolinguistics is such a challenge. And that is why “first contact” stories are so fascinating – and so difficult to do well.

Nobody does them better than C.J. Cherryh. In novels like Serpent’s Reach and Hunter of Worlds, and series like the Charnur and the Faded Sun books, she has delved deep into the tricky psychological aspects of communication between different, sometimes very alien, species. That challenge to understand lies at the very heart of the Foreigner series, of which Conspirator is the lucky thirteenth volume. Technically, it is the first book of the fourth trilogy in the arc, but don’t be intimidated by that. Cherryh slips in just enough backstory to get you grounded before taking off at full speed into the current situation.

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Matthew David Surridge Reviews Shadow Prowler

Matthew David Surridge Reviews Shadow Prowler

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shadowprowler-coverShadow Prowler
Alexey Pehov, translated by Andrew Bromfield
Tor (412 pp, $7.99, mass market edition February 2011)
Reviewed by Matthew David Surridge

Translation enriches a language, bringing in new styles, new influences, new approaches. The phrasing, the way of thinking, native to a given language can often still be found in a text translated into another tongue. Sometimes, even an ordinary story can gain a touch of originality in translation, a kick from unexpected turns of expression.

I don’t know for sure that this is the case with Alexy Pehov’s Shadow Prowler, not speaking Russian myself, but I wouldn’t be much surprised if it were. Pehov has written a fantasy trilogy, with elves and orcs and dwarves and wizards and a quest. Despite a few self-conscious deviations from the norm – elves have fangs, dwarves don’t grow beards – this first book, at least, feels fundamentally like a game of Dungeons & Dragons. The story is even structured around the exploration of an ancient burial ground, Hrad Spein, the Palaces of Bone, filled with traps, magic, and the undead; a quest, naturally, better undertaken by a small party of highly-skilled adventurers rather than a large army.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 1: A Princess of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 1: A Princess of Mars

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princess-of-mars-a-c-mcclurgThe year 2012 C.E. is the centenary of the Reader Revolution. Two novels published in pulp magazines that year, A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, re-shaped popular fiction, helped change the United States into a nation of readers, and created the professional fiction writer. One man wrote both books: Edgar Rice Burroughs.

In celebration of this anniversary, and in anticipation of the upcoming Andrew Stanton film John Carter based on A Princess of Mars, I will tackle all eleven of ERB’s Martian/Barsoom novels in reviews for Black Gate. I also have something special in store for Tarzan of the Apes. This endeavor sounds a touch insane, but come on, but this is the centennial of the series! When else am I going to do it?

Let us turn back the calendar a hundred years to the beginning of all things…

Our Saga: The adventures of Earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other natives and visitors, on the planet Mars. A dry and slowly dying world, the planet known to its inhabitants as “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 eleven books: nine novels, a book of linked novellas, and a volume collecting two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: A Princess of Mars (1912)

The Backstory

In 1911, Edgar Rice Burroughs was thirty-five years old and selling pencil sharpeners out of an office in Chicago. His post-military service career was so far a series of undistinguished jobs that kept him and his family barely above poverty: an associate in a mining company in Idaho, a railroad policeman in Salt Lake City, a manager of a stenography department, an owner of a stationery store, and a partner in an advertising agency. No position lasted longer than two years.

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Chris Braak Reviews Cthulhu’s Reign

Chris Braak Reviews Cthulhu’s Reign

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cthulhus-reignCthulhu’s Reign
Darrell Schweitzer, ed.
DAW (308 pp, $7.99, 2010)
Reviewed by Chris Braak

It is unquestionably a challenge to create a sense of drama in a set of stories that all share the premise of “human civilization has been destroyed by invincible monster-gods from space.” Cthulhu’s Reign is an anthology that sets out to do just that, using the theme of H. P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones – most often Cthulhu and his star-spawn, but not always – returning to prominence on earth after countless millennia of death/sleep. All of the book’s fifteen authors are to be commended for their imaginative takes on just what that return might look like, but there are some problems with the anthology as a whole.

The first and primary issue is that it’s just unrelentingly depressing. One story about the end of humanity out of a collection of fifteen is one thing; but a book in which every single story ends on a note of complete and utter hopelessness is exhausting. There is no reason to blame the authors; they are each separately and privately fulfilling their mandate. The problem is with the idea of the theme itself, which might be charitably described as “too much of a good thing.”

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Art of the Genre: Game Review, Paizo Bestiary Collection

Art of the Genre: Game Review, Paizo Bestiary Collection

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pzo1120_500

One day, long ago, I went to a Waldenbooks and picked up a copy of TSR’s Monster Manual II. It was my first monster compendium, the only other I’d seen was a borrowed copy of Monster Manual I with the rather mundane David C. Sutherland III cover. It was this book, covered by Jeff Easley, that taught me just what it was to hold the power in your hand over a world of fabled monsters.

Still, the journey into the realm of the enemy, the monster, was on well its way with that purchase, as was my apprenticeship in the profession of Dungeon Master. That trip has taken a long and twisting road through more realms of imagination that could be spoken of this day, but nonetheless, it’s been a truly special one.

Monsters, you see, are the key to everything that truly IS a role-playing game. Sure, you could make the argument that it’s about the players, the story, the social interaction, but at the core it all revolves around the conflict. This conflict, and the experience points born from it, is inherently tied to the realm of monsters.

Simply put, to be an effective Game Master [as the term Dungeon Master has become antiquated over the decades, I guess, although I still use it…] you need to have a plethora of monsters at your disposal.

This is true of any system, but even more so in a fantasy setting, and as I started playing Paizo’s Pathfinder upon its release, I’ve had the pleasure of filling my shelves with some of their rather incredible monster supplements.

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Art of the Genre: I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Roleplaying Part Two, Angus McBride [1931-2007]

Art of the Genre: I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Roleplaying Part Two, Angus McBride [1931-2007]

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merp_rivendell

It’s the day after Christmas here in L.A. as I write this, the office quiet, but I felt like going in anyway and getting some work done. Perhaps it was because yesterday, after a wonderful feast of turkey, potatoes, and all the fixings, I took a walk with the family three miles from my home out onto the Palos Verdes peninsula. This walk, in seventy degree temperatures with a slight easterly breeze and done in shorts and a T-shirt, held an immense amount of physical beauty.

With a cloudless azure sky, and a tranquil ocean all the way to the mountainous shadows of Catalina Island, the channel is was an epic vista. Still, what strikes a writer’s soul is often the movement of it all, the flights of pelicans looking like pteranodons sailing at eye level as you walk atop the hundred foot bluffs that drop into the whitewater curls of water churning below. If you look down into the kelp fields further out from the breakers you can spy the blazing orange Garibaldi, the state fish of California, as they shine under the waves amid the deep green strands, and further out into the endless blue go the whales.

Gray’s this time of year, majestic and high breaching, they spew mist into the air in pods traveling south, their monstrous tales fully lifted from the waves before plunging down once more into the depths.

It’s a stirring event, these migrations, and as I went home I couldn’t help but think about my next article and how the artist I’d be featuring had first seen and been moved by similar events, this time humpbacks, off the western cape of South Africa.

This gift of nature, and having shared his life between England and Africa, helped shape an artist who transitioned from full-time historical military drawer to the role of visionary painter in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

So, today I bring you the next part of my argument as to why the Middle-Earth Role Playing game is the most beautiful RPG ever made.

PART TWO:

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The Natural History of Unicorns

The Natural History of Unicorns

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natural-history-of-unicornsThe Natural History of Unicorns (2009)
By Chris Lavers

Some book titles can grab you across a room and demand your money. Such was the case with The Natural History of Unicorns, which I discovered not in a bookstore, but in a curio shop in San Francisco specializing in . . . actually, I have no idea what the store was really selling, except that it was next to the Pirate Supply Store (no joke, this exists, although principally to fund a writing workshop in the back) and the excellent science-fiction and fantasy bookstore Borderlands. A bit of both stores rubbed off onto this one, and so in the midst of taxidermy snakes was this book promising to tell me the Natural History of a fantasy animal. Immediate sell.

Well, almost immediate. I did check to see that the book was not crazy pseudo-science making the claim that the fantasy version of the unicorn was real and scientists were refusing to admit the truth. But the book appeared to be exactly what I wanted: a multi-discipline exploration of the development and evolution of the unicorn legend.

On the surface, the unicorn is the simplest of fantastic creatures: a horse with a single horn jutting from its forehead. Of course something like that might exist! There are plenty of horned hoofed animals, a unicorn isn’t much of a stretch.

But the unicorn carries a trainload of baggage behind it: a symbol of spirituality and Christianity, emblem of British royalty, symbol of virgin purity, a creature in roleplaying games, icon of New Age thinking, and decoration on a third-grade girl’s wall. The unicorn is indeed, as legend has often claimed, tough to hunt and harder catch.

Chris Lavers, a lecturer in natural history at the University of Nottingham, writes in a friendly, humorous style that feels like an Oxford professor during the off-hours entertaining guests around the fire with brandy in ample supply. In places, Lavers seems to channel Avram Davidson and his Adventures in Unhistory, although not quite as obtusely or wittily. (Davidson’s book has a chapter on unicorns, by the by.) The book makes for fast nonfiction reading, although Lavers does go off on a dull detour from his topic in the center of the book, occasionally relies too heavily on long quotations, and fails to explore an important avenue of unicorn history that I hoped to learn more about.

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Art of the Genre Review: Jeff Dee’s new Kickstarter

Art of the Genre Review: Jeff Dee’s new Kickstarter

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set__god_of_evil_and_the_night_by_jeffdee-d4if4wn

Last month I was intrigued to see that former TSR artist Jeff Dee had started a project on Kickstarter to recreate his classic images from the Egyptian pantheon in Deities & Demigods. Now, first, I didn’t really know anything about Kickstarter, but the more I looked at it the more interested I became.

If you don’t know about it, I’ll give you the Cliff’s notes version. Kickstarter is a site that provides creative people an outlet to connect with fans and take contributions for projects they might otherwise not get to do.

In this fashion Jeff, who hadn’t seen work from TSR in nearly 30 years, got to go back and recapture some of AD&D’s faded glory.

You see, in those early days of TSR things were changing fast, money was coming in like water into a sinking ship, and nobody really had any idea what they had. That being said, all of Jeff’s original works for the company were unceremoniously tossed in a dumpster to make room in the files for newer artwork, so original copies of his stuff no longer exits.

Jeff decided that it was high time he remedy that fact, and so he went out to recreate the images he did for Deities & Demigods, one pantheon at a time, with an added caveat that he’d also create several new images of Egyptian gods that the former TSR deadlines didn’t allow time for.

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Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island on Blu-ray

Harryhausen’s Mysterious Island on Blu-ray

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mysterious-island-title-cardMysterious Island (1961)

Directed by Cy Enfield. Starring Michael Craig, Herbert Lom, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan, Gary Merrill, Percy Herbert, Dan Jackson, Beth Rogan.

I have no qualms admitting that I enjoyed the 2007 Walden Media adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth. It surprised me how much of Verne’s novel made it onto the screen in a contemporary setting. However, the prospect of a sequel, riffing slightly (at least from what I can detect from the first trailer) on Verne’s 1874 classic The Mysterious Island, does nothing for me other than as a reminder to read that recent translation of the novel from the Modern Library that has stared at me from my “to read” stack for over a year. The new film is called Journey 2: Mysterious Island, which explains exactly what the filmmakers intend: the same thing as the last film. Maybe some younger viewers will go find the book after watching the movie, although the novel is less child-appealing than some of Verne’s other works, such as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, which children should read first anyway because Mysterious Island is a sequel to it. Will Captain Nemo show up in the new film? Who cares.

However, the marketing for Journey 2 coincides with the Blu-ray release of an earlier adaptation, the Ray Harryhausen-Charles H. Schneer Mysterious Island released in 1961. A number of Harryhausen’s classics have reached Blu-ray already, but Mysterious Island makes its high definition debut in a limited edition from a small direct distributor, Twilight Time, that specializes in film soundtrack albums. This concerns me for the release of other of Harryhausen titles. Mysterious Island is a Columbia film, and Sony Home Video released The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts on Blu-ray. Apparently, they preferred to farm out Mysterious Island to an independent—and on the film’s fiftieth anniversary! I may never have learned about the Mysterious Island Blu-ray if I wasn’t a soundtrack collector on mailing lists for small labels. (If you want to buy the Mysterious Island Blu-ray, go here. It’s limited to 3,000 unit, and I have no idea how fast they will sell.) …

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