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Alyx Among the Dandelions: Exploring Joanna Russ and Ray Bradbury

Alyx Among the Dandelions: Exploring Joanna Russ and Ray Bradbury

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My copy looked like this. A far cry from John's vintage original.
My copy looked like this. A far cry from John's vintage original.

I think our book club should have a name. It’s that cool. It consists of our Mighty Robot Overlord John O’Neill, awesomely chill Chicago author Geoff Hyatt, our own Dread Patty Templeton and myself. Four people make for a nicely balanced book club, in my opinion.

Now, we may not meet in the most consistent fashion ever (our two meetings had a wee gap of four months between them), but we do read SPIFFY BOOKS. Or at least… discussable ones.

I mean, we started out with The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, which was written up by Mr. Hyatt back in May. Then we decided to get our claws into some Joanna Russ and vintage Bradbury. Next we’re going to do Fritz Leiber’s Swords against Death and China Mieville’s Iron Council.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 5: “The Wizard of Venus”

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 5: “The Wizard of Venus”

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wizard-of-venus-roy-krenkel-frontpieceThe Venus series ends not with a novel, but a novella. Consequently, this will be the shortest entry in my survey of Burroughs’s last series, but I have appended a wrap-up with my final thoughts on the Venus books as a whole.

Our Saga: The adventures of one Mr. Carson Napier, former stuntman and amateur rocketeer, who tries to get to Mars and ends up on Venus, a.k.a Amtor, instead. There he discovers a lush jungle planet of bizarre creatures and humanoids who have uncovered the secret of longevity. The planet is caught in a battle between the country of Vepaja and the tyrannical Thorists. Carson finds time during his adventuring to fall for Duare, forbidden daughter of a Vepajan king. Carson’s story covers three novels, a volume of connected novellas, and an orphaned novella.

Previous Installments: Pirates of Venus (1932), Lost on Venus (1933), Carson of Venus (1938), Escape on Venus (1941).

Today’s Installment: “The Wizard of Venus” (1964)

The Backstory

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s experiment of writing the previous Venus book as four linked novellas succeeded — commercially, at least — so he forged ahead with a new story in 1941 to start a second quartet. But no magazine purchased “The Wizard of Venus.” ERB moved on to the second story, which he started on 2 December 1941 in his home in Hawaii.

You can see where this is headed.

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Dream a Dream: The Chronicles of Everness by John C. Wright

Dream a Dream: The Chronicles of Everness by John C. Wright

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everness1The Last Guardian of Everness
Tor (336 pages, Sept 2004, $25.95)
Mists of Everness
Tor (352 pages, Feb 2005, $25.95)
By John C. Wright

The Everness of the title is simply a house, a sprawling mansion built on the northern Maine coast.  Everness is a memory palace made real, a house whose features and layout are identical in both the waking and dream worlds, and one of the few gateways where dreams can cross over into manifest reality.  It is a conduit for all the normal dreams that come to humans in their sleep, but it is also a border to be defended.  The run-down seawall of the manifest world is a towering battlement in the Dreaming.

John C. Wright’s Chronicles of  Everness is an epic in two moderately sized volumes dealing with an assault upon our world (the waking world) and a horde of unspeakable evils from our nightmares.  Literally.  The world of the fantastic exists, but only in a vast dream-world composed of a vast population of gods, demons, monsters, fairies, selkies, angels, and supernatural princes.

It’s a difficult pair of books to encapsulate in any reasonable number of words, simply because of the sheer number of ideas, fantastic settings, plot threads, and scenarios Wright manages to stuff between his covers.  On the most basic level, they’re a tale of good versus evil, but that battle is fought in locations ranging from a suburban living room to the towers of an undersea Hell.  The books bite off a lot, and manage to chew through most of it with style.

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Eat Flaming Laser Death: An Evening of RoboRally

Eat Flaming Laser Death: An Evening of RoboRally

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roborallyThese are good times for board gamers.

After the death of Avalon Hill as an independent game publisher (its remnants were purchased by Hasbro in 1998), it sure seemed like the era of the board game was over.  SPI, FASA, Task Force Games, GDW, Yaquinto, West End Games, Fantasy Games Unlimited, Mayfair Games, TSR, and finally Avalon Hill… the leading lights of board game design in the 20th Century had all perished by the end of the 90s. It looked like those of us who loved to move cardboard counters around abstract hex grids were relegated to paying ridiculous prices for out-of-print copies on eBay.

But that was before Fantasy Flight proved there was still life in board games yet, with a stellar line up of beautifully produced — and profitable — titles. Mayfair Games returned from the dead, phoenix-like, with the English language rights to the blockbuster Settlers of Catan. Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR and built on their rich tradition with D&D-inspired board games like The Conquest of Nerath (read Scott Taylor’s terrific review here). And, surprise of surprises, Hasbro has kept the Avalon Hill name alive, putting out high quality games like Battle Cry and Axis and Allies.

So on a Sunday night when I’ve managed to pull Tim and Drew, my two teenage sons, away from Gears of War 3 and sit them down at the gaming table, I find I actually have a choice of intriguing modern games to offer them. Should we go for complex and fascinating, like Axis and Allies? Colorful and fun, like Descent: Journeys in the Dark? Quick and light, like Cheapass Games’ Kill Doctor Lucky?

Rhetorical question, of course. When one of the choices involves lasers, killer robots, and blowing each other up in a frenetic race for mechanized glory, the answer is pretty much a foregone conclusion. It was RoboRally in a landslide.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 4: Escape on Venus

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 4: Escape on Venus

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escape-on-venus-1st-edition-coverI love Edgar Rice Burroughs. His novels have had an enormous influence on me as a writer and as a pulp fan. But, I must admit, sometimes he wrote … this kind of thing….

Oh, let’s just leap into this and get it over with.

Our Saga: The adventures of one Mr. Carson Napier, former stuntman and amateur rocketeer, who tries to get to Mars and ends up on Venus, a.k.a. Amtor, instead. There he discovers a lush jungle planet of bizarre creatures and humanoids who have uncovered the secret of longevity. The planet is caught in a battle between the country of Vepaja and the tyrannical Thorists. Carson finds time during his adventuring to fall for Duare, forbidden daughter of a Vepajan king. Carson’s story covers three novels, a volume of connected novellas, and an orphaned novella.

Previous Installments: Pirates of Venus (1932), Lost on Venus (1933), Carson of Venus (1938).

Today’s Installment: Escape on Venus (1942)

The Backstory

At the start of the 1940s, Edgar Rice Burroughs decided to try an experiment with three of his properties, all of which had sailed into creative doldrums: Mars/Barsoom, Pellucidar, and Venus/Amtor. The previous Barsoom novel, Synthetic Men of Mars (1939), is one of the few stains on that otherwise superlative series. The Pellucidar novels went into a decline with 1937’s Back to the Stone Age and hit bottom with Land of Terror, which Burroughs failed to sell to any magazine when he wrote it in 1938 and waited to publish it on his own in 1944. Carson of Venus has some positives, but the Venus novels are already much lower on the quality scale of Burroughs’s work. Something wasn’t going right, and the failure to sell Land of Terror must have worried ERB.

It wasn’t just that Burroughs’s writing was in a slump — although it was — that was causing problems, but also the economic realities that were starting to kill the pulp magazines. Comic books exploded at the end of the 1930s and competed for the same young male audience that read the pulps. The magazine companies started cutting back their titles and publishing schedules; this led to reducing the number of serials they ran. Serials work well for a weekly magazine; for a monthly, not so much. Readers wanted their stories complete in each issue, and the publishers couldn’t afford to argue.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 7.1 “Meet the New Boss”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 7.1 “Meet the New Boss”

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God-Castiel faces off against Death, with Dean Winchester looking on.
God-powered Castiel faces off against Death, with Dean Winchester looking on.

The last season ended with Castiel pulling all the souls out of Purgatory. Sam tried to stab him with an angel blade, but the new souls made Castiel so powerful that it didn’t kill him. The sixth season ended with him saying to Sam, Dean, and Bobby:

… the angel blade won’t work, because I’m not an angel anymore. I’m your new God. A better one. So you will bow down and profess your love unto me, your Lord, or I shall destroy you.

Bobby – being the most common sense-having of the trio – begins this episode by bowing down before him. Dean and Sam are about to follow suit when Castiel tells them not to bother, since it means nothing if they’re doing it out of fear. He makes it clear, though, that he has no particular affection left for them anymore. He’s not going to kill them, because there’s no point to it. As long as they do not move against him, he sees no need to kill them.

The status is definitely not quo this season.

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The Seven Greyhawk Classics of the Ancient World

The Seven Greyhawk Classics of the Ancient World

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against-the-giants1I’ve been pretty hard on Greyhawk novels. They’ve been the butt of more than a few jokes — both mine and others — from those of us who enjoy reviewing and talking about the fantasy genre.

I’m generally pretty forgiving, especially with novels of adventure fantasy. What can I tell you — I’m a fan.  But when books can’t be bothered to clamber over the very low bar of my expectations, I’m as capable of a harsh review as anyone.

The novels of Gary Gygax — and in particular his Greyhawk books — routinely limboed under that bar with room to spar, and I’ve said as much in print several times over the years.

Now, I’m second to none in my admiration of Gygax. I consider the man one of the great creative minds of the 20th Century, full stop.

I believe his work with D&D and Advanced D&D — especially the original hardback rules, and the incredibly inventive adventure modules that accompanied them, such as Descent into the Depths of the Earth and The Temple of Elemental Evil — was directly responsible for the mainstream acceptance of fantasy, as manifested in modern role playing obsessions like World of Warcraft and Warhammer.

But his novels?  Poo poo.

tomb-of-horrorsHowever, Gygax wasn’t the only one to pen Greyhawk novels.

Some of them — especially the so-called Greyhawk Classics published in honor of TSR’s 25th anniversary — are remembed quite fondly.

Written by Paul Kidd, Ru Emerson, Keith Francis Strohm, and Thomas M. Reid, and based on some of TSR’s most famous adventure modules, including Against the Giants, Tomb of Horrors, and Keep on the Borderlands, the seven Greyhawk Classic novels formed a nostalgic return to some of the most fondly-remembered adventure settings in gaming.

They were published in mass market paperback by TSR (later Wizards of the Coast) between July 1999 and February 2002, beginning with Against the Giants and ending with Tomb of Horrors.

Here’s the other thing you need to know about the Greyhawk Classic novels: you can’t have them.

They’re among the most collectible D&D novels ever published, and that’s saying something.

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Art of the Genre: Concepts of a Fallen Vanguard

Art of the Genre: Concepts of a Fallen Vanguard

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Brom makes beauty out of death like only he can
Brom makes beauty out of death like only he can
Last week I wrote about art direction in a film, primarily a film that failed, but that certainly isn’t the only such place where an unfortunate failure can happen. I recently had the opportunity to go to Oceanside California and share a lunch with Nick Parkinson a former developer on the Sony Online Entertainment MMORPG Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.

Now I’d had some limited experience with Vanguard back in about 2008. In a former life I took part in Sony’s Star Wars Galaxies circa 2003, and a friend of mine convinced me to come over to Vanguard and say hello many years later. Since it was only eight months after Vanguard’s release, I figured I’d oblige, so I went to a local Gamestop and asked the clerk where I could find the game. He actually laughed in my face.

Come to find out Vanguard had been a colossal bomb, so much so that you couldn’t even find a retail copy less than a year after it hit the shelves. In fact, Wikipedia lists Vanguard’s awards as: Gamespy awarded Vanguard the “Biggest Disappointment” award for 2007. Vanguard also won the awards in the categories for “Least Fun”, “Most Desolate” and “Lamest Launch” in the MMORPG.com MMOWTF Awards for the worst games of 2007

[Note: As bad as this game may or may not have been, there is absolutely no way it could have been a complete failure in every way like Final Fantasy XIV. That is hands down the worst MMORPG ever released on the mass market.]

Still, even after being thrown out of the store, I eventually I found a version and loaded it up. Thinking I’d meet up with my uber experienced friend, I purchased a full-blown max level character from a clearing house site and was ready to roll! What happened? I promptly fell off a pier in the city my avatar originated, drowned, and lost all my items….

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Little Lulu Volume 25: The Burglar-Proof Clubhouse and Other Stories

Little Lulu Volume 25: The Burglar-Proof Clubhouse and Other Stories

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little-luluDuring my heyday as a young comic collector — from maybe 1973-1977 — I primarily chased Marvel titles, with the occasional DC offering like Legion of Super-Heroes, and a smattering of Charlton comics such as Blue Beetle. Like most ten-year-old collectors I scorned kid’s comics, of course.

At least in public. Behind closed doors, I loved virtually all comics, and read whatever I could get my hands on: Archie, Uncle Scrooge, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and even Little Lulu, which featured the comparatively tame adventures of Lulu Moppet and her neighborhood friends as they hunt for wild turkeys in the local woods, solve the mystery of a missing tea cup, and go to school.

I only recently discovered that Dark Horse Comics has reprinted over a decade’s worth of Little Lulu in 29 volumes (!!), many of them in full color. A pretty staggering feat of cultural scholarship, sure, but I have to admit my initial reaction was “Who the hell wants to read that much Little Lulu?”

Me, as it turns out.

Just as I did roughly 40 years ago, I slipped a copy of Little Lulu into a stack of larger comics when I thought no one was looking.  Back then it would go between Amazing Spider-man and Grimm’s Ghost Stories, just before I marched up to the drug store counter with my stack of quarters.  Last week, I quietly added it to my Amazon cart between Hellboy, Volume 1 and Marvel’s collected Son of Hulk, when my kids were in the other room. Listen — no matter how old you are, the scorn of children is a terrible thing.

As soon as that package arrived, it wasn’t Hellboy or Son of Hulk I opened first. It wasn’t even Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic, Volume 7, and that baby had storm troopers on the cover. No. It was Little Lulu.

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Art of the Genre: Magic Kingdom for Sale — Sold

Art of the Genre: Magic Kingdom for Sale — Sold

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Uh... can I see inside that fortress please?
Uh... can I see inside that fortress please?

First off, no, this has nothing to do with Terry Brooks…

So I recently saw Conan 3D 2011… and yeah I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not going to go into that because it’s been beaten to death elsewhere, and certainly here on Black Gate. Still, I had to wonder after seeing it, what did the world of Hyboria get for its 2011 dollar?

Considering the movie reviews and box office receipts, whatever the cost for art direction it was far too much. As I watched, I contemplated the words of John Fultz and his thoughts concerning the imagery of the movie when he said… wait, I’m going to go look this up so John can’t complain I misquoted him… Ok, here we go…

The Hyborian Age has never looked so wondrous, splendid, and believable on screen. From the virgin wilderness and Cimmerian villages to the decadent, sprawling cities, the vast monasteries, and the ancient citadels with skull-shaped caves, the movie simply looks fantastic. The costuming too is spot-on and suitably grimy, evocative, and well-designed. Same goes for the props: swords, spears, armor, ships, etc.

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