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A Fine and Private Place after almost 50 years

A Fine and Private Place after almost 50 years

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a-fine-and-private-place1A Fine and Private Place
Peter S. Beagle (Viking, 1960)

Peter S. Beagle wrote his first novel, A Fine and Private Place, fifty years ago at the age of nineteen. Which really annoys me because the book is so blasted good, making me aware that, although I was a skilled nineteen-year-old in my day, there was no conceivable way I could have crafted at that age a work as beautiful and knowledgeable about life, death, and love as A Fine and Private Place.

And Beagle’s greatest work, the traditional fantasy classic The Last Unicorn, still lay ahead of him.

I’ll try not to take this all personally and just feel glad we have A Fine and Private Place around… and still in-print, a minor miracle considering how fast our culture embraces new and tosses everything else into the dustbin.

A Fine and Private Place is one of the masterpieces of contemporary fantasy, and only the long shadow cast by The Last Unicorn keeps it from getting more notice. The tale occurs almost exclusively within an enormous graveyard, features ghosts and a talking raven, but it isn’t a horror story or even a dark fantasy, but a gentle and often sorrowful look at the difficulties of love and the realities of death, neither of which work out the way any person living or dead might expect.

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Rome (2005)

Rome (2005)

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I just watched about 25 hours of what I consider the best Sword and Sorcery I’ve seen in about the same number of years.

I’m speaking about HBO’s Rome, of course, the very expensive historical fiction epic that ran for two seasons 2005-2007. I’m sure many of you have seen it, but it was new to me (we don’t have cable). Apart from a few quibbles about some of the portrayals, specifically Cato the Younger and Octavian in the second season, I found it a fascinating peek into another age.

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Darkon

Darkon

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darkon_tstAs a follow-up to last week’s post on Escapism, I give you Darkon (2006), a low-budget documentary  by Andrew Neel and Luke Meyer that raises some of the same questions I did in my post as it looks at one particular group of LARPers (Live-Action Role-Players) involved in a game that has become its own little reality. Following the lives of a few key players in the drama, the documentary (which I watched free on Hulu after John Ottinger pointed it out, though it is also available from snag films) chronicles their in-game and out-of-game struggles, and how these facets of their lives intertwine.

If your initial reaction to adults pelting each other with foam swords is to roll your eyes, that’s probably even more reason to watch this documentary, which is a sympathetic and nuanced look at the lives of these players. Firstly, the film is presented as a real struggle for ‘in-game power’ between its two central characters, leaders of rival ‘countries.’ These competing factions of Darkon chart their progress in wars that allow them to expand across a map, and one faction, the nakedly imperialistic Mordom, has had more success at this than the rest. Feeling threatened, other countries lead by Laconia, band together to fight them.

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The People That Time Forgot: The Movie

The People That Time Forgot: The Movie

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The People That Time Forgot (1977)
Directed by Kevin Connor. Starring Patrick Wayne, Doug McClure, Sarah Douglas, Dana Gillespie, Thorley Walters, Shane Rimmer, David Prowse, Milton Reid.

Amicus Productions waited two years to release a sequel to their hit The Land That Time Forgot, stopping along the way to do another Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation, At the Earth’s Core. The People That Time Forgot marks the last gasp for its brand of low-budget fantasy/adventure film, since another film that came out that same summer of ‘77, set in a galaxy far, far away, caused a shift in genre-movie expectations when it turned into the highest-grossing film in history.

But The People That Time Forgot still brings handmade thrills and an old-fashioned attitude that adheres to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s style—if not to the letter of his writing. Unlike The Land That Time Forgot, which stays close to the first third of ERB’s novel in its script from Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn, the script for the sequel from Patrick Tilley charts its own direction rapidly and leaves the original plot of the middle novella of the collective novel behind. Since the third novella, “Out of Time’s Abyss,” was apparently never slated for film adaptation, Amicus had to create a sense of completion with The People That Time Forgot that required dumping much of Burroughs’s material.

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Risus: Rules-Lite to the Min

Risus: Rules-Lite to the Min

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rlogoRisus: The Anything RPG
By S. John Ross

I seem to have gotten into a Rules-Lite RPG series here at Black Gate. Not sure how that happened. I didn’t plan it, I know that for certain…

A few weeks ago, I reviewed one of the classics of “beer-and-pretzels” role-playing games, Kobolds Ate My Baby! Although a great game, KAMB! uses a specific (comically specific) setting with rigid character types. If you want to unleash a beer-and-pretzels RPG night without any limitations, you will want to turn to Risus, a generic system perfect for the slam-bang quick gag game.

Risus takes the term “rules-lite” and goes to the minimum with it: the whole system fits comfortably onto six PDF pages you can download here. I have to take caution with this review, because I might risk writing one that’s longer than the review subject. But those six pages provide only a blueprint for endless parody-RPG weirdness; I’m reviewing the experience you might get from putting Risus into practice.

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(Not so Short) Fiction Review #17: Epic Fantasy, Chick Lit Division: Justina Robson’s Quantum Gravity Series

(Not so Short) Fiction Review #17: Epic Fantasy, Chick Lit Division: Justina Robson’s Quantum Gravity Series

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Going Under by Justina RobsonThe notion of the female warrior, while rooted somewhat in factual history (e.g., Joan of Arc), is largely an idealized notion of mythology, science fiction and fantasy. I suppose there is doctoral dissertation potential in figuring out why patriarchal societies that at best otherwise relegate women to supportive roles away from the battlefield (and at worst and more typically brutally victimize women as spoils of war) generate these tales of powerful females who can lop off a head or two as well as the next guy. Speaking as a guy whose adolescent sexual fantasies were heavily influenced by Emma Peel, the black leather-clad consort of John Steed in saving the free world from various madmen bent on world domination by delivering a quick blow to the groin, I’m guessing it’s some kind of inversion of castration anxiety.

During science fiction’s New Wave movement in 1960s, a fecund period of feminist fiction in general, the mythos of the female warrior served as an apt metaphor. Joanna Russ’s renowned series of stories collected as The Adventures of Alyx depict the titular heroine as both sensual and tough, a thief and assassin who, in breaking with the stereotype, isn’t Amazonian beauteous. Also breaking the mold is that Alyx is not depicted consistently throughout the series, though the one constant is that she is a “real” person, as opposed to the cliché of the one dimensional fantasy hero, male or female. Alyx was an inspiration for many genre writers, in particular Mary Gentle, whose “realistic fantasies” typically feature a strong, but flawed (as is of course any human) warrior woman, most notably in Ash: A Secret History.
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The Future Is Now

The Future Is Now

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trekfinal2Star Trek (2009)
Directed by J. J. Abrams. Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy, Eric Bana, Bruce Greenwood, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Ben Cross, Winona Ryder.

I wrote a review of the new movie Star Trek for my own blog within a few hours of seeing the film on Friday morning. I have nothing against that review, but it’s definitely the sort of free-form exercise I do on my personal blog, and it goes deep into the story and specific details for general readers. I never intended to put such a review on my Black Gate blog.

But Star Trek deserves it’s own take on Black Gate, one geared toward the specific audience. This isn’t truly a review, but an essay analysis of a cultural phenomenon that takes into account the many other reviews I’ve now read of the movie since I saw it (I purposely avoided reading others reviews before seeing the film) and the reaction of people I know who have seen it so I can paint a canvas of the sort of zeitgeist we’re experiencing.

Although Black Gate takes heroic fantasy as its theme, while the Star Trek franchise is science fiction, the people who read this magazine and its website belong to a genre community of which Star Trek forms one of the cornerstones. It doesn’t matter if you like Star Trek or not… if you count yourself a fan of anything that is “genre,” Star Trek has a place in your universe. Star Trek is the personification of “fandom.”

A few days before the new movie hit theaters, I wrote a short essay examining my own relation to Trek fandom. You can read that if you want to know where on the “Trekker” scale I stand, if that’s of interest to you regarding reading the rest of this essay.

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Targetted Book Recommendations #2

Targetted Book Recommendations #2

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Part One of this enthralling series is here.

Finally, I shut my big mouth and show a few cards. Novels are what it’s all about, but not just any novels. We want something immediate. We want action and adventure. And although introspection and other, more literary qualities won’t be run out of town with the imprint of my boot on their buttocks, they must never, ever slow the story down. In short, we’re after books that embody the spirit of Black Gate.

Got it? Let’s see then… …

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Imaro: The Trail of Bohu

Imaro: The Trail of Bohu

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trail-of-bohuImaro: The Trail of Bohu
Charles R. Saunders
Sword & Soul Media (217 pages, $20.00, January 2009)

Fans of Sword & Sorcery and Heroic Fantasy had reason to rejoice as 2009 kicked-off with a big release from one of the genre’s master storytellers. No, it wasn’t a new Elric novel, nor a previously undiscovered Fafhrd and Gray Mouser short. And not a book by one of those other famous names, Howard, Vance, Gemmell, or Wagner, either. It was Imaro: The Trail of Bohu, the third in the Imaro series, by the best fantasy author you’ve never heard of.

Of course, many of Black Gate’s readers have heard of and are fans of Charles R. Saunders, but the world at large has been slow to catch up. The perilous journey of the Imaro series into and out of print has been related elsewhere, but finally it seems things have gotten on the right track and this previously unfinished series will at last be in the hands of fans everywhere, thanks to new imprint Sword & Soul media.

Imaro: The Trail of Bohu continues the saga of the outcast warrior Imaro in the land of Nyumbani; a rich fantasy setting based on African history and myth. But, while the first two books in the series, Imaro and Imaro: The Quest for Cush, were essentially episodic in structure (constructed as they were of Saunders’ short stories), The Trail of Bohu, the first Imaro book written as a novel from start to finish, presents us with a bigger overall story — it is, in fact, the beginning of the arc that will carry the reader through books four and five and, let’s just say, things really start to get going in this installment of the Imaro saga.

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Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition

Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition

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Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition
By Chris O’Neill and Dan Landis. Illustrated by John Kovalic. (Dork Storm Press, 2005; $14.99)

I’ve previously mentioned in a comment thread that when it comes to tabletop role-playing games, I lean toward the rules-lite side of the equation. I’d rather have a system that allows flexible play, with minimal die-rolls and looking up charts, and greater focus on the “role-playing” instead of the “game.” Given a good Game Master, rules-lite games can feel as close to realistic as any of the more simulationist systems. My favorite RPG of all time, Fudge, has managed to adapt and handle any other game system, setting, or style I’ve thrown at it. In fact, it’s almost the only system I use. Any RPG that comes out I translate into Fudge…

…with the exception of “Beer and Pretzels” RPGs, in which sheer simplicity and ludicrousness are the norm.

Most rules-lite systems are geared toward the Beer and Pretzels genre: RPGs that are played for comedy and speed and with minimum planning and plenty of bad bad bad beer. Risus is the Beer and Pretzels equivalent of Fudge, a complete generic system (six pages long!) usable for quick ‘n’ silly RPGs late at night. I might discuss Risus in another post—it’s interesting both as a rules-lite system and as a purposeful parody of all other early RPGs. Fudge also deserves a long review, because it’s so wonderful that it’s a shame it isn’t spread like a beautiful pandemic to every corner of the hobby.

But today I bring you the most popular setting-specific Beer and Pretzels game, a funny and witty spoof on the concept of “cannon fodder” in Dungeons & Dragons: Dork Storm Press’ Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition, written by Chris O’Neil and Dan Landis—and hereafter abbreviated KAMB! (The manual loves exclamation marks! With a passion! See!)

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