Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, Part 1 of 4

Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, Part 1 of 4

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Tales of the Wold Newton Universe-smallThis month marks the release of Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, a new anthology from Titan Books that collects, for the first time ever in one volume, Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton short fiction, as well as tales set in the mythos by other Farmerian authors.

The Wold Newton Family is a group of heroic and villainous literary figures that science fiction author Philip José Farmer postulated belonged to the same genetic family. Some of these characters are adventurers, some are detectives, some explorers and scientists, some espionage agents, and some are evil geniuses.

According to Mr. Farmer, the Wold Newton Family originated when a radioactive meteor landed in Wold Newton, England, in the year 1795. The radiation caused a genetic mutation in those present, which endowed many of their descendants with extremely high intelligence and strength, as well as an exceptional capacity and drive to perform good, or, as the case may be, evil deeds. The Wold Newton Universe is the larger world in which the Wold Newton Family exists and interacts with other characters from popular literature.

To celebrate the release of the new anthology, we’ve asked the contributors to discuss their interest in Philip José Farmer’s work and to tell us something about how their stories in the book specifically fit into the Wold Newton mythos.

For today’s installment, please join us in welcoming author John Small.

Win Scott Eckert and Christopher Paul Carey,
Editors, Tales of the Wold Newton Universe

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New Treasures: Dying is My Business by Nicholas Kaufmann

New Treasures: Dying is My Business by Nicholas Kaufmann

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Dying is my Business-smallI love these Chris McGrath covers. He does terrific character portraits and unique things with light. His characters perpetually seem spotlighted by a fog-drenched glow and no artist today makes his heroes more stylish. Just check out his gorgeous covers for Ken Scholes’s Canticle or Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead (or see a more complete gallery at his website.)

Art directors choose artists primarily for two reasons: to create an eye-catching cover and to subconsciously remind buyers of other successful series they’ve enjoyed. McGrath is the cover artist for Jim Butcher’s bestselling Dresden Files, as well as Seanan McGuire’s October Daye novels, Kelly Gay’s Charlie Madigan books, Warren Hammond’s KOP novels, D. B. Jackson’s Thieftaker Chronicles, and many other well-loved series.

I think McGrath was an excellent choice for Nicholas Kaufmann’s dark urban fantasy, Dying Is My Business, the tale of a badass hero facing down the forces of darkness in modern-day Brooklyn.

Given his line of work in the employ of a psychotic Brooklyn crime boss, Trent finds himself on the wrong end of too many bullets. Yet each time he’s killed, he wakes a few minutes later completely healed of his wounds but with no memory of his past identity. What’s worse, each time he cheats death someone else dies in his place.

Sent to steal an antique box from some squatters in an abandoned warehouse near the West Side Highway, Trent soon finds himself stumbling into an age-old struggle between the forces of good and evil, revealing a secret world where dangerous magic turns people into inhuman monstrosities, where impossible creatures hide in plain sight, and where the line between the living and the dead is never quite clear. And when the mysterious box is opened, he discovers he has only twenty-four hours to save New York City from certain destruction.

Nicholas Kaufmann is the Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of General Slocum’s Gold and Chasing the Dragon. This is his second novel.

Dying is my Business was published by St. Martin’s Griffin on October 8. It is 369 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

Look Over There, See the Pretty Castle?

Look Over There, See the Pretty Castle?

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pretty blue castle-smallI have very little visual memory for places and possibly even less visual imagination. One time, I needed to know the type of paving in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor – you know, the stuff you walk on? Keep in mind that I’ve been walking on this stuff regularly since I was six. I drew a complete blank (no pun intended) and had to ask my husband, who, at the time, had been there exactly once. He was able to tell me that it’s cobblestones, by the way. Unless you’re under the arcade, where it’s flagstones.

Last week, I talked about describing characters and particularly the difficulties of describing point-of-view characters. But as writers, we’re far more often required to describe places and spaces, both interior and exterior. For fantasy writers, this often means versions of places that exist (or existed) historically in our own world. If you’re the kind of person who, like my husband, can call to mind the descriptive details of things you’ve seen, this will mean a certain degree of ease in your life as a writer.

If you’re my kind of person, alas, you’re not going to be able to tell your friends what colour their living room is painted, no matter how many times you’ve been to their house, let alone describe the halls of a castle or the streets of a town.

So, what do you do? Since that Plaza Mayor episode, I’ve tried to remedy my poor visual memory by taking and collecting photographs. Lots and lots of photographs. While I’m travelling, I take photos of anything and everything that I think might be useful in terms of exteriors or interiors. In The Sleeping God, I use the interior of a restaurant in Trujillo in western Spain, in The Soldier King, the punishment square and prison in Elvas, in Portugal, and the cistern system from another Portuguese town, Monserrat, in The Storm Witch. I also used the map of Elvas to lay out my characters’ escape route, but that’s not really the type of description I’m talking about here.

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The Blob: the Making of a Classic B-Movie

The Blob: the Making of a Classic B-Movie

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bk3153The_Blob_posterThe nostalgia for the 1950s has been with us for over forty years now. Blame George Lucas and American Graffiti (actually set during the Kennedy administration, but responsible for engendering nostalgia for the previous decade) for making us so fondly recall the birth of rock ‘n’ roll and the popularity of sock hops, drive-in movies, and the introduction of a fad for 3-D movies that is currently enjoying its third vogue, appropriately enough.

The popular mindset tends to ignore the influential role played by be-bop jazz, the beat poets, film noir’s move to television, and the introduction of Cinemascope in the same decade. Beneath the artificially clean post-war American dream, where everyone on the big screen and small screen appeared to be white, upper middle class, and enjoying cocktails and cigarettes with no ill effects, while watching Rock Hudson pursuing a virginal Doris Day, there were the McCarthy witch hunts, the Red Scare, atomic fears, juvenile delinquency, and shell-shocked WWII veterans unable to readjust to civilian life.

It was in this world that the third wave of the horror film took hold. The steadily growing move from splitting the atom to racing to the moon saw science fiction take a steady hold on the genre that took it far from the space fantasy of decades past into an allegorical means of confronting the dark fears behind the baby boomers’ dream world. One of the most potent and influential b-movies to fill drive-ins during the late 1950s was The Blob.

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Goth Chick News: Kick Starting a Live Horror Show

Goth Chick News: Kick Starting a Live Horror Show

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image002Crowdsourcing, microcrediting, and clickworking have all become buzz words in mainstream corporate America in recent years, but I honestly did not imagine I would use “kickstart” and “live horror show” in the same sentence.

Ever.

And yet here we are, in a place even Dr. Frankenstein couldn’t have anticipated.

After seventeen studio albums, including three horror movie scores and a motion picture of their own, Gothic Halloween Horror music composers and my personal fan girl crushes, Midnight Syndicate have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a multimedia concert extravaganza.

And what is a “Kickstarter campaign” you ask?

As has been mentioned here once or twice, Kickstarter is the world’s largest crowdfunding platform. The company’s mission is to help bring creative projects to life and since its launch, nearly 5 million people have funded more than 50,000 creative projects such as films, music, stage shows, comics, journalism, and video games.

People who back Kickstarter projects are offered tangible rewards and one-of-kind experiences in exchange for their pledges and Midnight Syndicate is offering some serious bootie in exchange for your bucks (want to be the show’s Executive Producer for instance?)

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The Series Series: Mage’s Blood by David Hair

The Series Series: Mage’s Blood by David Hair

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Sprawl is my favorite virtue of the novel. Not just this novel, Mage’s Blood, but novels generally, in all their varied glories. I may be the only person on Earth who is not at all perturbed by the ever-increasing length of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books and I was probably the only reader of Harry Potter who wished J.K. Rowling had made her last volume about fifty pages longer, though this is not the time to say why. Sprawl may be a virtue in novels, but in blog posts, not so much. I picked up David Hair’s first volume of the new Moontide Quartet series because it promised a large ensemble cast arrayed in a family saga big enough to keep all those characters busy for years. The word “Quartet” in the title helps, too, with its suggestion that the author knows where he is going with the series. And if the first volume is anything to go by, I think he probably does.

The world of Mage’s Blood is a sort of fever dream of Europe and its Near East, if the Mediterranean and Black Seas were impassably vast and the Bosphorus were hundreds of miles wide. East is east and west is west, and the twain meet only for two years out of twelve, when the moon–which in this world is close enough to Earth to fill a third of the sky–causes a localized low tide. The greatest feat of magic and engineering in history, the Leviathan Bridge, rises from the waves during the Moontide. For centuries, the Moontide was a time of trade, cultural exchange, and celebration, but the last two cycles of the Leviathan Bridge’s rise have brought catastrophic war to the southern continent. Depending on whose mind the story inhabits, the war is about religious struggle between continents or class struggle within the aggressing empire or secret conspiracies among mage lineages for control of the world.

For the main characters, clustered into three main plotlines, the stakes are of course far more intimate than that.

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In Defense of Fantasy Heroes

In Defense of Fantasy Heroes

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Osprey Bosworth
                 People really did this stuff.

It’s often said that Fantasy abounds with unrealistically heroic heroes and that it overstates the capacity for the individual to shape History.

If that were true, I’m not sure it would be a Bad Thing, as long as victory is properly earned, since you can read the stories as allegory for more mundane real life and since the main function of most speculative fiction is escapism, anyway.

However, I would argue that the Fantasy heroes are in fact realistic, both in their powers and their influence, as long as we bear in mind that the protagonists of Fiction, like Biography, do not have to be statistically representative and that narrative favors the survivors.

For a start, it is very easy to underestimate the disproportionate capacity for violence shared by some individuals.

Studies suggest that something like 95% of pre-modern combatants have a sort of safety catch preventing them from specifically setting out to kill an individual. Something biological seems to translate war into primal dominance displays. We feel happy blazing away in the general direction of the enemy, or shouting and shoving in a phalanx fight — the equivalent of monkeys throwing poo — but not walking up to a person and putting a blade through their face.

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Religion in Fantasy Lit

Religion in Fantasy Lit

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Linus Peanuts

“There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people… religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.”
– Linus, Peanuts

Linus may have been right, but I’ve never been one to follow sensible advice. So today, I’m going to talk about religion in fantasy.

Religion is a touchy subject for some people, but it’s long been a tradition in the genre to create fictional deities and use them in a variety of ways. From Tolkien’s Silmarillion to the extensive pantheon of Stephen Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen series, fantasy is rich with mythology.

Whenever I begin to brainstorm ideas for a new novel or series, one step of my world-building is to imagine what sorts of religions will be present and how they shaped their societies. I have to ask myself questions such as: do the gods actually exist? If so, do they personally intervene in the lives of the characters? Does prayer possess temporal power? What is the role of religion in the daily lives of the common people?

These questions have vast ramifications for the story world. Even if the deities are unable or unwilling to directly intervene in the lives of mortals, the mere presence of belief will shape (or appear to shape) events. And if the deities actually answer the prayers of their adherents, that opens up all kinds of possibilities, which in turn should alter the structure of faith organizations. Just look to the history of Europe during the Middle Ages, when religion affected the politics and practices of great nations, and then imagine how powerful those priesthoods would have been if they could perform regular miracles, like ensuring bountiful harvests for the faithful or restoring the dead to life.

And what if the gods can physically manifest in the story world? How does that alter humanity’s relationship to the supernatural?

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Vintage Treasures: The Pirates of Zan by Murray Leinster

Vintage Treasures: The Pirates of Zan by Murray Leinster

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Astounding Science Fiction February 1959-small The Pirates of Zan Ace Double-small The Pirates of Zan Ace Double2-small The Pirates of Zan-small

[Click on any of the images above for bigger versions.]

Murray Leinster is one of my favorite pulp writers. I reprinted one of his earliest tales, “The Fifth-Dimension Catapult,” which first appeared in the January 1931 Astounding Stories of Super-Science, way back in Black Gate 9. Fittingly enough, when I kicked off my investigation of the Classics of Science Fiction line, I started with one of the finest volumes, The Best of Murray Leinster. More recently, I looked at his creepy pulp SF tale “Proxima Centauri” on August 15th.

But none of those is nearly as well known as his classic space fantasy The Pirates of Zan. Because, hello, space pirates. Also, it was blessed with a terrific series of covers over the three decades it was in print. So here we are with another fond look at the work of Murray Leinster.

(While we’re on the topic, why aren’t there more novels of space pirates? The only other ones I can think of are H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking, CJ Cherryh’s Merchanter’s Luck, Piers Anthony’s Bio of a Space Tyrant, and maybe A. Bertram Chandler’s John Grimes novels, at least the ones featuring his recurring adversary Drongo Kane. That’s pretty sad. Seriously, if there are two things that go great together, it’s unexplored space and pirates. Get with it, science fiction.)

The Pirates of Zan was originally serialized (as “The Pirates of Ersatz”) in three parts in Astounding Science Fiction, starting with the February 1959 issue. The famous Kelly Freas cover, featuring a pirate with a slide rule between his teeth, is one of the most beloved Astounding covers of the era. It’s shown at left above.

Don’t ask what a slide rule is, you damn punk kids.

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Ancient Worlds: The Ghosts of the Past

Ancient Worlds: The Ghosts of the Past

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haunted
This moaic is actually of a monkey skull, which somehow makes it a WHOLE LOT SPOOKIER.

I love a good ghost story.

And who doesn’t? Especially when the nights grow long, the trees grow bare, and the wind howls high up in the treetops. Like most people my age, I have cherished memories of huddling under the covers and reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark until I was too terrified to sleep.

(Anyone else vividly remember those drawings? The one with the girl and the spider bite? Just me? I’ll be over in the corner with my nightmare fuel…)

This is nothing new, of course. The Greeks and Romans loved a good ghost story as well. What’s amazing is just how astonishingly familiar they are.

Pliny the Elder famously tells this story about a haunted house:

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