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Category: Vintage Treasures

Books and Craft: The Power of Point of View

Books and Craft: The Power of Point of View

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Today, I begin a new column here at Black Gate. I’ve been toying with the idea for “Books and Craft” for some time now. As an avid reader, a professional author, a writing mentor and instructor, and a lifelong student of craft, I have long been interested in what it is about certain books that capture our imaginations and elicit our passions. Why do we return again and again to certain stories? What qualities define “classic” novels and “must-read” new ones?

In this column, I hope to address those questions. I plan to look at a variety of fantasy novels, and science fiction as well, with an eye toward identifying an element of craft that contributes to their success. Sometimes the books will be familiar — those classics of the genre we know so well. Sometimes they’ll be more obscure titles — hidden gems that you might not know, but ought to. And sometimes they’ll be new works that demand our attention.

Let me be clear: I am not so presumptuous as to suggest that the specific craft element I identify is necessarily THE single factor in a given book’s success. Just because I might focus on, say, world building in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, that doesn’t mean his character work (or his prose, or his pacing) isn’t spectacular as well. My articles are intended to be illustrative and even instructive, but certainly not definitive. Whether as readers or as writers, we have something to learn from the work of successful artists. My hope is that these articles will help you see aspects of storytelling that you might not have noticed previously.

And so…

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Vintage and New Treasures: Oz’s Bag of Holding: John Sandford’s Prey Series; Stephen King’s Bill Hodges Trilogy

Vintage and New Treasures: Oz’s Bag of Holding: John Sandford’s Prey Series; Stephen King’s Bill Hodges Trilogy

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I have here a bag of holding. I am now going to pull some things out of it…

This past fall, since I do a lot of commuting to work and had become too depressed to follow my daily routine of news radio, I began listening to books on CD.

I’ve now digested 5 books in John Sandford’s popular Prey series (following detective Lucas Davenport), read by Richard Ferrone, and the first two of Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy (following retired detective Bill Hodges and his friends Jerome Robinson and Holly Gibney), read by Will Patton.

Sandford, a retired Minneapolis journalist, began writing the Prey books back in the ‘80s. The series now has 27 installments, with an additional 13 spin-off books! Looks like I’ll be spending time with Lucas Davenport in my minivan for a long time to come.

Having brought these out of the bag, I’d like to discuss two specific areas of appeal of a series like Prey. First is place. Second is chronological progression (following characters as they age). Then I have an afterthought about genre “classification.” I’ll also  address “audio” vs. “printed page.” And I’ll have a few things to say about King’s foray into hardboiled detective fiction along the way.

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Modular: Oz’s Bag of Holding: Breaking Out Basic D&D for the Next Generation

Modular: Oz’s Bag of Holding: Breaking Out Basic D&D for the Next Generation

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D&D_Basic_Rules_1981I have here a bag of holding. I am going to pull some things out of it now…

Well, I’ve gone and done it. I’ve broken open the floodgates and moved my children on from Dungeon! The Board Game to the real deal.

This is fortuitous timing, as M Harold Page has launched a new series of posts (READ HERE) on Black Gate about introducing kids to tabletop role playing (which I have been reading with newly-relevant interest).

My daughter and son will soon be turning 8 and 6 respectively. Bringing the son in on things might have been a bit premature — he’s more apt to grab the miniatures and fight with them like action figures than to sit and patiently listen to a Dungeon Master try to paint a scenario in his mind’s eye.

To introduce these acolytes, I dug out my 1981 D&D Basic set (1981 edition). After decades of d20, revisiting this chestnut three decades later is kinda hilarious. D20 is so elegantly simple in concept: Hit a monster with AC 18? Roll a d20, add modifiers, and get an 18 or better. But with old-school D&D, no! You look at the monster’s AC and then have to consult a chart (I confess I’d forgotten what THAC0 even stood for). Cross-reference monster’s AC with character’s level to see what you have to roll. Basic? No, not really. Pretty damn cumbersome!

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Jack Kirby’s Fourth World: 45 Years Later

Jack Kirby’s Fourth World: 45 Years Later

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I’ve been discussing comic books with a friend of mine who moved to Ottawa. Based on a stray comment of his, I committed to tracking down and reading Jack Kirby’s 4th World comics.

I obviously know about Darkseid and the New Gods, but from later works at DC, like the classic Great Darkness Saga in The Legion of Super-Heroes (check it out!).

And I’d read lots of 1960s Marvel Kirby as well as Machine Man and The Eternals at Marvel in the 1970s (I even blogged about The Eternals here).

Kirby was *huge* in the 1960s, having been a major creator of the current Marvel Universe. But by 1970, he was looking for a change and DC signed him to a 5-year exclusive deal.

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The Classic You Never Heard of: The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear

The Classic You Never Heard of: The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear

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Think “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy does Adventure Time with a dash of Moomins”
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Zamonia, a fantasy continent replete with baroque perils and wild adventure

The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers is… nuts.

Think “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy does Adventure Time with a dash of Moomins” and you would be on the way there.

It’s definitely a book for all ages. I read it in my 30s, before I became a dad. More than a decade later I’m reading it to my 9-year-old daughter.

It’s one of those rich works of the imagination that is somehow both compelling and a comfort read. Fairy story and fantasy adventure. Satire and parable. Tall tale and… met tall tale — there’s even a duel of lies!

It’s the autobiography of one Bluebear — a sentient blue bear (duh) and perhaps last of his kind. It recounts his wanderings in Zamonia, a fantasy continent replete with baroque perils and wild adventure — capital Atlantis (naturally) — that seems have a loose place and not entirely linear relationship to the history of our world.

Enlivening and illuminating his adventures are bonkers excerpts from Professor Abdullah Nightingale’s  “The Encyclopedia of Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs.”

The story kicks off with Bluebear’s first memory: floating in a walnut shell and then being rescued by Minipirates —

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A Detective With the Mind of a Criminal: The Casefiles of Mr. J G Reeder, by Edgar Wallace

A Detective With the Mind of a Criminal: The Casefiles of Mr. J G Reeder, by Edgar Wallace

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The Casefiles of Mr JG Reeder-smallWordsworth Editions published dozens of titles in their Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural imprint (or, as we like to call them, TOMAToS), featuring classic tales of detection, horror and ghostly doings from Robert E. Howard, Rudyard Kipling, Sheridan Le Fanu, William Hope Hodgson, W.F. Harvey, Edith Nesbit, Oliver Onions, E.F. Benson, and many others.

Wordsworth has revamped the entire series (see their website for the dramatic redesign), and they’re letting all the older titles gradually go out of print… which means it’s definitely time to snatch up those I still don’t have. Like The Casefiles of Mr. J G Reeder, an omnibus collection of three pulp-era books by popular British thriller writer Edgar Wallace.

How on earth did you piece together all this? he asked in wonder. Mr Reeder shook his head sadly. I have that perversion, he said. It is a terrible misfortune. I see evil in everything. I have the mind of a criminal.

Let us introduce you to the enigmatic J. G. Reeder, a timid, gentle middle-aged man who carries a furled up umbrella and wears an old-fashioned flat-topped bowler hat. He is one of the great unsung sleuths of mystery fiction, created by the prolific Edgar Wallace, the King of Thrillers. Despite his insignificant appearance, Reeder is a cold and ruthless detective who credits his success to his criminal mind which allows him to solve a series of complex and audacious crimes and outwit the most cunning of villainous masterminds.

This volume is a rich feast for crime fiction fans, containing the first three volumes in the Reeder canon: two novels, Room 13 and Terror Keep; and the classic collection of short stories, The Mind of J. G. Reeder.

Edgar Wallace was an enormously popular mystery and thriller writer of the 20s and 30s. More than 160 films have been based on his work, and The Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine was a popular digest magazine in the mid-60s. But perhaps his most famous creation was the script for King Kong (1933); he died of complications of diabetes while working on revisions with director Merian C. Cooper.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Pellucidar

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Pellucidar

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Pellucidar-1st-Edition-Cover-smallWelcome back to the concave world of Pellucidar and the second novel in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s series of adventures within the globe: the eponymous Pellucidar. ERB left readers in suspense about the fate of hero David Innes at the close of At the Earth’s Core, but only a year later delivered audiences from the tension and closed out a duology about the Imperial Conquest of the Pellucidar. (And we still have five more volumes to go after this.)

Our Saga: Beneath our feet lies a realm beyond the most vivid daydreams of the fantastic… Pellucidar. A subterranean world formed along the concave curve inside the earth’s crust, surrounding an eternally stationary sun that eliminates the concept of time. A land of savage humanoids, fierce beasts, and reptilian overlords, Pellucidar is the weird stage for adventurers from the topside layer — including a certain Lord Greystoke. The series consists of six novels, one which crosses over with the Tarzan series, plus a volume of linked novellas, published between 1914 and 1963.

Today’s Installment: Pellucidar (1915)

Previous Installments: At the Earth’s Core (1914)

The Backstory

During the mid-teens, Edgar Rice Burroughs frequently wrote with the aim of creating two-part novels. The books we know today as The Mad King, The Cave Girl, and The Eternal Lover are combinations of an original novel and its closely connected sequel. The Pellucidar series might have gone the same way. The sequel to At the Earth’s Core was written at this time and serves as an immediate follow-up that brings the story of its first novel to a conclusion. If Burroughs hadn’t returned to the setting fourteen years later and continued writing more about Pellucidar, it’s possible that At the Earth’s Core and Pellucidar would be considered a single novel today — probably simply titled At the Earth’s Core. (My title choice would be Conquest of the Earth’s Core.)

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Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton

Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton

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oie_8192953ghlqmqv0-1In 921 AD, Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān ibn al-ʿAbbās ibn Rāšid ibn Ḥammād was sent from Baghdad as ambassador to the Volga Bulgars (who lived in the boundaries of modern Russia) to help establish Islamic law for the newly converted nation. The short journal he kept of his travels is famous for its descriptions of the Volga Vikings, in particular the death rites of one of their chietains.

In Eaters of the Dead (1976), the fourth novel published under his own name (he’d previously released ten under pseudonyms), Michael Crichton asked two important questions: What if ibn Fadlan, during his sojourn among the Vikings, met a certain hero named Buliwyf? And what if there was a historical basis for the legend of Beowulf? His answer is a fun mix of travelogue and bloody adventure tale. Years later, it went on to serve as the basis for the The 13th Warrior, starring Antonio Banderas.

The first three chapters of Eaters of the Dead are mostly lifted straight from ibn Fadlan’s manuscript. Instead of a trusted and willing diplomat, though, Crichton recasts ibn Fadlan as reluctant traveler, forced to join the mission as punishment for his dalliance with the wife of a merchant friendly with the Caliph.

The greatest change to ibn Fadlan’s story is, of course, his fateful meeting with Buliwyf. In Crichton’s story, the Geatish Viking is present at the funeral for the chieftain. Before he can reach the Bulgars, ibn Fadlan is forced to join Buliwyf and his band. King Rothgar’s realm has been attacked by an ancient horror and he has sent one of his sons to ask the great hero for aid. Terror has come out of the mist — something so evil that the name can’t be mentioned lest it be summoned up. Later, ibn Fadlan learns they are called the wendol.

At this the old man said that I was a foreigner, and he would consent to enlighten me, and he told me this: the name of “wendol,” or “windon,” is a very ancient name, as old as any of the peoples of the North country, and it means “the black mist.” To the Northmen, this means a mist that brings, under cover of night, black fiends who murder and kill and eat the flesh of human beings.* The fiends are hairy and loathsome to touch and smell; they are fierce and cunning; they speak no language of any man and yet converse among themselves; they come with the night fog, and disappear by day — to where, no man durst follow.

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A Doctor in a Torture State: Susan R. Matthews’ Under Jurisdiction Novels

A Doctor in a Torture State: Susan R. Matthews’ Under Jurisdiction Novels

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Baen Books continues its fine tradition of attractive, inexpensive omnibus editions of top-notch science fiction. Most recently they’ve turned their attention to the Under Jurisdiction novels of Susan R. Matthews, the tales of a doctor of conscience who is a faithful servant of the Bench, where institutionalized torture is an instrument of State. This is a grim (and often controversial) series, as Lisa DuMond noted in her SF Site review of the first two novels:

Andrej Koscuisko wants nothing more than to be a doctor: a surgeon. His father wants him to carry on the family honour by enlisting with the Fleet in its glorious fight to basically control everything. Andrej manages to resist his father’s will for a time, finally giving in only with grudging obedience and quiet resistance. Because, in his position with Fleet, he will indeed be a ship’s chief medical officer — and, incidentally, Ship’s Inquisitor… How can a person dedicated to preserving life and obliterating suffering combine the two functions of the position?

With relish. Amid the blood and screams and seared flesh of the workroom, Andrej Koscuisko will meet his personal monster. A man of honour, compassion, and empathy will find a sexual passion such as he has never known in the agony of his helpless captives. Even as he uses his wits and the amazing skills he has developed to save the lives of others.

Facing this chilling dichotomy is the first step in a life that will tear away at his sanity and self-worth… Throughout the two books, the greatest miracles are pulled off by Matthews herself… More miraculous is the sleight of hand Matthews manages with the character of Andrej. Time and again he enters the workroom to become something we can’t even let ourselves dream about. He emerges, blood-stained and aroused, only to crash into self-loathing.

The opening novel, An Exchange of Hostages, was published by Avon Books in 1997 and nominated for both the Philip K. Dick Award and the John W. Campbell Award, and came in fourth in the poll for the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

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Generation Ships and Martian Rebels: Rich Horton on 200 Years to Christmas by J. T. McIntosh and Rebels of the Red Planet by Charles L. Fontenay

Generation Ships and Martian Rebels: Rich Horton on 200 Years to Christmas by J. T. McIntosh and Rebels of the Red Planet by Charles L. Fontenay

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In its 26-year history (1952-1978) the Ace Double series published over 520 SF novels and collections, including original work by some of the greatest SF writers of the 20th Century, such as Philip K. Dick, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, Samuel R. Delany, Fritz Leiber, Clifford D. Simak, John Brunner, Brian Aldiss, and many others.

Of course, it also published writers who aren’t nearly as well remembered today, like Margaret St. Clair, Kenneth Bulmer, Robert Moore Williams, Charles de Vet, William F. Temple, Robert Lowndes, Jack Sharkey, Jerry Sohl, and others. As you probably suspect, not all of those books are winners, but there’s plenty of interesting stuff buried in the dusty nooks and crannies of the Ace library.

And Rich Horton is the guy to find it. He has an ongoing series of reviews of Ace Doubles at his website, Strange at Ecbatan. Recently he talked about a forgotten Ace Double from 1961 by two writers I’m unfamiliar with: the generation-ship tale 200 Years to Christmas by J. T. McIntosh, and a novel of forbidden genetic experiments and rebellion on Mars, Rebels of the Red Planet by Charles L. Fontenay.

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