Browsed by
Category: Reviews

Robert Low’s The Wolf Sea

Robert Low’s The Wolf Sea

Comments 2 comments

wolf-seaThe Wolf Sea
Robert Low
Thomas Dunne Books — St. Martin’s Press (340 pages, Hardback, June 2008, First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins, $24.95)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

This follow-up to 2007’s The Whale Road, Robert Low’s debut novel of grim Viking adventurers questing for the lost horde of Attila the Hun, is a continuation of the story of the Oathsworn and their new and untested leader, Orm Rurisksson. Orm, still a teenager, earned a reputation as a ‘deep thinker’ amongst his Viking crew and was their choice for leader with the death of Einar the Black — the man who had led them on a doomed expedition to the very ends of the earth in the first book of this series.

The Wolf Sea begins in Miklagard — the Norse-termed ‘Great City’ of Constantinople — with the theft of the jeweled saber Orm rescued from the Volsung horde in The Whale Road.  Valuable in and of itself, perhaps even magical, the saber is also the key to finding Attila’s silver because Orm has carved its hilt with runes that will act as a guide should the Oathsworn ever return to the steppe. It turns out the saber has fallen into the hands of their old enemy, Starkad, who also seeks the fabulous treasure but has no idea that he possesses the key to finding it. Starkad is convinced that Martin, the venal priest that journeyed with the Oathsworn in their quest for Attila’s tomb, knows the way to the treasure and he sets off to the Holy Land to find him — with Orm and the Oathsworn in pursuit.
…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Fractured Fairytales – A Review of Isis by Douglas Clegg

Goth Chick News: Fractured Fairytales – A Review of Isis by Douglas Clegg

Comments 1 comment

isisDon’t talk to a wolf in your Grandma’s nighty, don’t take an apple from a creepy old lady and when in doubt, trust the house mice.

These are the very important lessons taught to us by fairytales, normally animated by Walt Disney and all with happy endings. However, when you read Isis, you’ll learn one more bit of indispensable wisdom: sometimes dead is better, and knowledge can come too late for a happy ending.

This seems to be the year for returning to old-fashioned scares, the kind that get into your head, and Douglas Clegg has done a masterful job at taking the horror story back to the campfire, or in this case, the Victorian mansion. Isis is the story of what appears to be, on the surface, a perfect and wealthy 19th century British family complete with doting mother, war-hero father, and precocious but loving children tended to by domestic servants. Belerion Hall is not a frightening but instead postcard-like stone manor house surrounded by lush gardens in which Iris and her beloved brother Harvey pass enchanted, summer afternoons.

However, things are never quite as they appear.

…

Read More Read More

The Ship of Ishtar

The Ship of Ishtar

Comments 5 comments

ship-of-ishtar-piazoThe Ship of Ishtar
A. Merritt (Paizo Publishing, 2009)

I first read The Ship of Ishtar in a 1960s Avon paperback I found in a used bookstore in Phoenix. This copy is so brittle that I have to specially brace the book each time I open it or else the spine will separate like the San Andreas fault and the pages flutter down in a yellow autumn fall.

What I’m saying is . . . I’m extremely glad that Paizo Publishing has brought my favorite A. Merritt novel back into print in an edition that doesn’t make me afraid of the physical act of reading it. (Go buy it here.)

It’s strange that Abraham Merritt, one the biggest sellers in the history of speculative fiction, should need an introduction at all today, but sadly he does. Merritt was a journalist by vocation, the editor of The American Weekly, but his forays into writing ornate “scientific romances” starting with The Moon Pool in 1918–19 made him one of the most popular authors of the first half of the twentieth century. Today, he’s the realm of specialists, collectors, and his work is found in volumes from university publishers and small presses. In his introduction to Merritt’s breakthrough novel, The Moon Pool, Robert Silverberg pondered this turn of events that made Merritt obscure. What happened?

Silverberg offers up his own wonderings, ultimately finding the author’s eclipse inexplicable; but I think Merritt’s unusual mixture of two-fisted stalwart heroes in epic action with grandiose, mind-bending worlds of wonder painted in prose arabesques (and millions of exclamation marks!) makes him an author who doesn’t speak to mainstream genre readers today, even if he invented the clichés of countless contemporary fantasy authors. Clark Ashton Smith started as a specialty author and has remained there. Abraham Merritt was a mainstream writer who managed to Clark Ashton Smith himself after his death, ending up as a specialty author as well. Unfortunately, such is often the way of unusual talents. At least The Ship of Ishtar is now only a few clicks away for you to purchase and enjoy.

…

Read More Read More

Short Fiction Review #23: McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Thirty Two

Short Fiction Review #23: McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Thirty Two

Comments 0 Comment

8fa88b703af59a7fb42bf6ab2c911549McSweeney’s is a quirky quarterly  that  breaks conventional publishing boundaries with each issue devoted to a unique theme, both in terms of editorial content and physical packaging. For McSweeney’s 32, its last issue of 2009, ten contributors were tasked with writing tales specifically set somewhere in the world that take place fifteen years hence in 2024. According to the editors:

…we wanted to hear about where we’d be — to see what the world could look like when things had shifted just a bit , as it seems like they’re starting to, heading into the second decade of the third millennium…and a semitangible future at last seeming imminent.

For the most part, this is a future defined by natural disaster, frequently involving water. Serendipitously, I read this during a record snowfall in which I was homebound for four days before my driveway could be cleared out. While the state declared an emergency disaster, and unlike a lot of Virginians who lost power as well, it didn’t much matter to me that I couldn’t go anywhere since I was comfortable with reading material, heat, food and Internet access. Not Katrina, by any means, but “normal life” did shut down for a short time. In some of these stories, normal becomes not a return following a disaster, but is defined by the disaster.

There was a time when futurist stories were about how humanity overcame its limitations, both in terms of earthbound existence and its evolutionary defects (remember that what was supposed to be so “innovative” about the original Star Trek was that it depicted various races working together in harmony, forgetting that women of any race were stuck in miniskirts and mostly served as subserviant love interest for the captain). It would seem that from the perspective of the oughts of the 21st century, the future does not look particularly bright.

…

Read More Read More

Clash of the Titans: The Alan Dean Foster Novelization

Clash of the Titans: The Alan Dean Foster Novelization

Comments 4 comments

clash-of-titans-coverUpdate: Alan Dean Foster has generously provided some comments of his own about the novelization. Please see the comments section.

2010: The Year We Remake Clash of the Titans.

I have never thought that re-making Ray Harryhausen’s final movie, the 1981 telling of the Myth of Perseus and Medusa, was a smart idea. I don’t, in principle, oppose re-makes (what good would that stance do in these strange times anyway?), but the original Clash of the Titans is a 100% auteur film, a movie that exists because Ray Harryhausen did the stop-motion effects. Harryhausen defines the movie. Any re-make would simply tackle an old myth with new—and not necessarily more interesting—effects to cash-in on Generation X name recognition. And then when I actually read the plot description of the 2010 Clash, I shook my head in mystification . . . this Hades vs. The Other Gods concept is antithetical to Greek Mythology. The original Clash alters many elements of Perseus’s story, but it still feels similar to how the Archaic and Classical Greeks must have imagined their Heroic Age.

A deeper reason that I’m doubtful of the re-tooled Clash of the Titans is the enormous personal investment I have in the original film. No other movie from my childhood has had such a direct effect on my later interests as an adult. Unlike many childhood loves, Clash of the Titans holds up perfectly today; the magic remains, and many scenes still give me shivers. Nostalgia alone does not carry the film; it can carry itself quite proudly.

But . . . I’m not here today to review the original Clash of the Titans. I’m planning to do an extensive analysis of it later this month, but for the first post of 2010 I’ve decided to take a different tactic as a warm-up and approach Clash of the Titans from a side road; a road rarely taken in film or book critiques: the movie novelization.

…

Read More Read More

Last Night I Finished This Crooked Way

Last Night I Finished This Crooked Way

Comments 3 comments

thiscrookedway
Last night I finished This Crooked Way, by James Enge.

I was on the train, halfway home. There is very little more irritating than finishing a book when you’re just halfway to your destination. Luckily, I had George R.R. Martin’s Fevre Dream in my backpack, the first two chapters of which were quite good, so I didn’t suffer long. And anyway, good as it was, I kept being drawn back to thoughts of This Crooked Way, connecting dots, remembering the heights, the depths, the scaffolding of each story, and how it made me laugh – out loud – so often that I surprised myself.

There are some books that make me read them aloud – mostly their dialogue, but also certain killer phrases or descriptions. It’s my actor’s training, I suppose. Plays are not meant to be read on the page; you have to voice them lest they lose vibrancy and dimension. Some books, my favorite kind of books, leap into my throat and start declaiming themselves. And it doesn’t matter if I’m on a public train, or tromping to work in the snow with my fingers freezing, because I’ve left off my gloves, because it’s hard to turn pages with gloves on – none of that matters, because the words are just that important.

And This Crooked Way is like that.

…

Read More Read More

Ken Rand’s Pax Dakota

Ken Rand’s Pax Dakota

Comments 0 Comment

pax-dakota-ken-randPax Dakota
Ken Rand
Five Star (265 pp, $25.95, May 2008)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

In 1899 the United States shares an uneasy peace with its western neighbor, the Dakota, a confederated nation of Native American peoples that had joined forces to defeat the US in a war almost three decades earlier. The Pax Dakota, the peace that governs these two competing powers, is ever in danger of breaking as racism, ambition, and old animosities on both sides threaten to plunge the US and Dakota nations back into a bloody war. Into this mix steps the Old Enemy, a malignant spirit that seeks enough souls to power its return trip back to heaven — back to the side of Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit that had exiled the Old Enemy to the Earth in the time of the First People.

In Pax Dakota Ken Rand gives us an immediately compelling alternate historical setting seasoned with a Native American flavor that gives it an exotic, unexpected quality. But primarily this is an action story, a Weird Western with horrific elements that quickly ratchets up the action and never lets up until the final scene.

The book opens with the death of Iron Shield in 1883, great war leader of the Dakota and architect of their new nation. Upon his death an entity known as the Watcher is released to find a new host — the benevolent Watcher is a guardian spirit of humanity, a being that imprinted Iron Shield with the idea for the Pax Dakota while still just a boy. The Watcher’s plan had always been to contain the prison housing the Old Enemy within Dakota territory so that the Dakota could maintain a vigil there. However, the prison of the Old Enemy, a region know as Devil’s Clay, remains in US territory after the peace, and the Watcher must quickly launch a plan that will bring about the final confrontation with the Old Enemy.

…

Read More Read More

Pastisches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Unconquered

Pastisches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Unconquered

Comments 0 Comment

conan-the-unconqueredConan the Unconquered
Robert Jordan (Tor, 1983)

Moving on with my Conan/Robert Jordan double-feature. . . .

With Conan the Unconquered, Robert Jordan’s third book in the series, the author seems settled with his style of writing the Hyborian Age. Some of the flaws in Conan the Defender are subdued, although the story is the average “meat ‘n’ potatoes” Conan pastiche material. The book has a feeling of comfort food: neither challenging nor surprising, but providing decent sword-and-sorcery entertainment.

The plot of Conan the Unconquered follows the Middle Eastern fantasy playbook, set around the Vilayet Sea in the Kingdom of Turan, with an excursion across the waters to Hyrkanian lands. Conan is not yet in his twenties, and has arrived in the Turanian city of Aghrapur. A compatriot from his thieving days, Emilio from Corinth, approaches Conan with the offer to join in stealing a necklace from a compound outside the city. The compound belongs to the Cult of Doom, whose members may be responsible for many assassinations occurring in the city. (The Cult of Doom sounds as if Jordan is swiping from the recent movie Conan the Barbarian.) Emilio’s lover, Davinia, is the one who wants the necklace stolen. Conan no longer wants to dabble in thievery, but after the astrologer Sharak casts a chart for the barbarian, he changes his mind and seeks out Emilio from the stewpots of Aghrapur.

As usual with pastiches, Conan has slender reason to stay in the story; the device of Sharak’s chart is a flimsy one (and Sharak as a plot device hangs around far longer than he’s needed) to keep Conan interested in the Cult of Doom and its necromancer leader Jhandar. Jordan manages to coax Conan into the story faster than in Conan the Defender with some sleight-of-hand that makes both Conan and Jhandar believe the other must die for them to live. Conan allies with a vengeance-minded Turanian sergeant, a group of Hyrkanians chasing after Jhandar for the desolation he brought to their land, and the beautiful Yasbet who keeps her parentage a secret.

…

Read More Read More

A review of the Cortex System Role Playing Game

A review of the Cortex System Role Playing Game

Comments 2 comments

Cortex System Role Playing Game
By Jamie Chambers
Margaret Weis Productions ( 160 pp, $29.99, April 2009)

cortext-systemThere are a lot of things to commend this book to an experienced gamer. The rules are fairly simple yet cover a lot of ground. I like how the abilities are not really tied into specific stats that are sometimes hard to justify -­ this system is much more fluid. It also is not conducive to rules lawyering ­ and if there is one thing I hate, it is rules-lawyering, so this is a positive for me. I can see where the OCD crowd who wants a rule for everything could be irritated with it, but I game by the principle that story precedes rules, and this rule set is made for that mindset.

Basically, after two or three hours of reading, a game master will feel comfortable enough to run the system. Layout is simple but functional ­ black-and-white and an easy to read font. It’s fairly thin for being the core rules of a game system, but I liked that. It made the book less intimidating than a lot of other systems I have looked at.

…

Read More Read More

Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Defender

Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Defender

Comments 2 comments

conan-the-defenderConan the Defender
Robert Jordan (Tor, 1982)

I’ve had some requests on the site and in emails to my own blog from people who have enjoyed previous installments of “Pastiches ‘R’ Us” to look at Robert Jordan’s novels. I’m here to serve. This week and next I’ll feature two of the famous fantasy author’s Conan novels.

Robert Jordan, the pen name of James Oliver Rigney Jr., is the best-known of the stable of writer on Tor’s long-running and now defunct Conan pastiche series. After writing six consecutive books (and the novelization of Conan the Destroyer), Jordan turned into one of the most popular authors of epic fantasy with his “Wheel of Time” series. Unfortunately, Jordan’s career ended early with his death in 2007 from cardiac amyloidosis, only a month before his fifty-ninth birthday.

How does Jordan’s work on Conan stack up? He’s not consistently the strongest of the Tor group—I think John Maddox Roberts deserves that title—but when Jordan first started writing Conan, he created some fresh and energetic material. His first Conan novel, Conan the Invincible (also the first of the Tor series), is pulpily exciting and one of the few pastiches from the Tor books that I recommend to people who normally avoid non-Howard Conan.

…

Read More Read More