Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Golden Scorpion, Part One – “The Cowled Man”

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Golden Scorpion, Part One – “The Cowled Man”

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golden-scorpion-2golden-scorpion-1Sax Rohmer’s The Golden Scorpion was first printed in its entirety in The Illustrated London News Christmas Number in December 1918. It was published in book form in the UK the following year by Methuen and in the US in 1920 by McBride & Nast. Rohmer divided the novel into four sections which is how we shall examine the book over the next four weeks. “The Cowled Man” is the title Rohmer selected for the first part of the book and comprises the first eleven chapters.

Despite featuring several characters from Rohmer’s 1915 novel, The Yellow Claw, The Golden Scorpion marked a return to the style and feel of Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu thrillers which had concluded the previous year with the publication of The Si-Fan Mysteries (1917). Rohmer maintained the more realistic Limehouse crime novel approach of The Yellow Claw for his contemporaneous Red Kerry detective series which started with Dope (1919), but chose to fashion The Golden Scorpion from the same Yellow Peril weird menace cloth that made his reputation as an author. The key difference from the Fu-Manchu thrillers is that Rohmer maintains a third person narrative voice (as he had in The Yellow Claw) rather than recreating the frantic paranoia that marked Dr. Petrie’s first person narratives.

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Gary Gygax’s Hall of Many Panes

Gary Gygax’s Hall of Many Panes

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hall-of-many-panes-gygaxWhew. What a week. I bought a collection of 240 new SF & fantasy paperbacks on Monday, and trying to squeeze them into already-crowded bookshelves in my library is taking some determination. Tomorrow morning I’m throwing some clothes in a bag for a trip to Madison with Patty Templeton and Katie Redding for Wiscon, one of the best conventions in the Midwest.

But tonight, I relaxed and dusted off some of the goodies waiting patiently for my attention. The most intriguing one in the pile is Gary Gygax’s Hall of Many Panes, a boxed mega-adventure from Troll Lord Games, which I purchased on eBay back in March.

Panes was released in 2005, so don’t get too excited if you haven’t heard of it. It’s not a recently-discovered manuscript by the creator of D&D, or anything like that. It was originally written for Gygax’s latter day RPG Lejendary Adventures, but has also been statted for d20 systems, which makes it usable with virtually any of the popular retro-clones on the market like OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord.

Gygax was a master of the mega-adventure, and I’m not sure why he didn’t write more of them, especially at the end of his career when he was experiencing a resurgence.

But then again, I wonder at the fact that the ones he did write — like Necropolis and the massive Castle Zagyg — weren’t more popular, and perhaps that helps explain it.

Anyway, we’re here to talk about Hall of Many Panes. Troll Lord has done a great job assembling a package clearly modeled after the classic TSR boxed sets: inside are three sizable books (76, 96, and 102 pages) and a pamphlet of maps and gaming handouts. The books are a little light on art, but sturdy and highly readable.

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Of Red Moon and Black Mountain and the Anxiety of Tolkien’s Influence

Of Red Moon and Black Mountain and the Anxiety of Tolkien’s Influence

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red-moonRed Moon and Black Mountain
Joy Chant
Ballantine Books (268 pages, $0.95, 1971)

The shadow of The Lord of the Rings is long, indeed. In the 1960s Frodo lived and the reading public was hungry for more, and derivative works like The Sword of Shannara met that demand. This pattern continued into the 1980s with the publication of works like Dennis McKiernan’s Iron Tower trilogy, the series showing the clearest Tolkien “influence” of them all and one that literally provided more of the same. Now, this stuff wasn’t all bad; it filled a need and offered a safe, enjoyable formula. I willingly read many of these works back in the day and occasionally still do. But decades later many of the Tolkien clones haven’t aged all that well. I seem to have a lot less patience for them these days, even though I understand the environment in which they were written, and can appreciate that avoiding the influence of The Lord of the Rings 30-40 years ago must have been very difficult, if not impossible.

Take Joy Chant’s Red Moon and Black Mountain (1970). It’s well-written, not hackwork by any stretch. In 1972 the Mythopoeic Society bestowed its Fantasy Award upon the novel, denoting it as a work that best exemplified “the spirit of the Inklings.” Red Moon and Black Mountain has an unquestionable Tolkien-Lewis quality about it, if by spirit one means rewriting The Lord of the Rings with the framing device of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe tacked on. After a solid start it descends into full-on Tolkien-clone, which probably explains why it’s largely forgotten today.

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Goth Chick News: Joss Whedon’s Other Summer Movie

Goth Chick News: Joss Whedon’s Other Summer Movie

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cabin-in-the-woodsJohn O’Neill here, on behalf of Goth Chick. Goth got a callback for the part of Morticia in the upcoming production of The Addams Family at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, and she was outta our offices like a comet.  I found a scrawled note in my chair reading, “Gone all week — cover for me, and there free tickets for opening night in it for you.  Ta!”

So I’m currently sitting at her desk, hoping to tell you about the week’s best goth entertainment, hottest new trailers, and overlooked 80’s horror films. Man, how does she find anything? Her desk is covered in morgue photos, news clippings and — I swear to God — a voodoo doll collection. I’m scared to touch anything, and every one of her interns jumps at least a foot when I try to speak to them.

The heck with it. Stick with what you know. And what I know is that all my friends refuse to talk to me about The Cabin in the Woods.

The Cabin in the Woods, in case you haven’t heard, is Avenger‘s director Joss Whedon’s other summer movie. He was the producer and co-writer of the film, which was directed by Drew Goddard, staff writer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the writer of Cloverfield. I ‘d tell you more about the movie, but I don’t know anything. All I can find is this sparse description on IMDB:

Five friends go for a break at a remote cabin in the woods, where they get more than they bargained for. Together, they must discover the truth behind the cabin in the woods.

Seriously, the hush level on this film is amazing. No one will talk about it. It’s like everyone who’s left the theater has been sworn to secrecy. My friends say things like, “Dude, what did you think of that moment, about 30 minutes in?” I tell them I haven’t seen it yet and they mutter under their breath, and say “Go see it.  Immediately.”

Which isn’t going to be easy. While The Avengers is well on the way to becoming, like, the most profitable film in the history of the world, The Cabin in the Woods is more closely following the trajectory of Joss Whedon’s earlier films: it was released on April 13 and has nearly vanished from theaters. Those penetrating and silent stares from my friends are becoming more urgent.

I’m here to pass that urgency along to you. It’s too late for me, but maybe it’s not for you. Somewhere in your town there’s a theater still showing this movie. Don’t be left out. Catch it before it’s gone.

Save yourselves.

Art of the Genre: The Art of the DM

Art of the Genre: The Art of the DM

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Me at right, Murph in middle, and my personal DM Mark to left, circa 1990 as we prepare for a Shadowrun adventure.
Me at right, Murph in middle, and my personal DM Mark to left, circa 1990 as we prepare for a Shadowrun adventure.

Yes, it’s true, I’m posting a day late on my Art of the Genre blog, but hey, when you’ve been the Gamemaster for six straight days of 14 hour gaming, I think even the great John O’Neill can cut me a little slack. I’m mean, this is my vacation after all, so I think having anything, even this odd article, to post should show how much I love my readers!

Still, it was kind of tough, amid all the chaos of gaming, to settle in on a subject for this week’s AtoG. However, the more I sat around the gaming table, the more I began to understand the Art of being a Gamemaster and how that translates into something cool.

I mean, I’ve been doing this since I was a tween… well actually before the word tween even existed. Even early on I would sit at a table, screens before me, and paint pictures with words that are vivid enough to keep my friends coming back for more. And when I say coming back for more, I mean really, truly, coming back, no matter from where, for more story spinning than I’ve the right to foist on you here.

I’ve gamed with the same group of friends since middle school, and it’s not like we all live three minutes from one another. Nope, we are now stretched from Maryland to California, but one week a year, we make a sojourn back to the Midwest to roll dice like we did when we were twelve.
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The Sword & Sorcery Anthology Now on Sale

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology Now on Sale

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sword-and-sorcery-anthologyOne of the year’s most anticipated books has arrived — a few days ahead of its official June 1 publication date.

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, edited by David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman, is now on sale. This massive 480-page tome contains classic S&S tales from the writers who created the genre — including C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, Karl Edward Wagner and Michael Moorcock — as well as modern masters such as Charles R. Saunders, Glen Cook, George R. R. Martin, Jeffrey Ford, and Caitlín R. Kiernan.

It also includes “Epistle from Lebanoi,” an original tale by Michael Shea, author of the classic Nifft the Lean, and “The Year of the Three Monarchs,” a new story by Michael Swanwick.

The early reviews have already been filled with praise, including this one from Publishers Weekly:

Hartwell and Weisman have selected some of the best short-form work in the genre… This is an unbeatable selection from classic to modern, and each story brings its A game.

With an introduction by David Drake, “Storytellers: A Guided Ramble into Sword and Sorcery Fiction” and a tantalizing assortment of stories I’m unfamiliar with — including “Gimmile’s Song” by Charles R. Saunders, “Soldier of an Empire Unacquainted with Defeat” by Glen Cook, “Six from Atlantis” by Gene Wolfe, and “Path of the Dragon” by George R. R. Martin — this ones leaps right to the top of my want list.

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology is published by Tachyon Publications, and priced at $15.95 for the print version and $10.95 in digital format. More complete details are here, and the complete Tables of Contents is here.

Jaym Gates Reviews Mind Storm

Jaym Gates Reviews Mind Storm

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mind-stormMind Storm
K.M. Ruiz
Thomas Dunne Books (304 pp, $24.99, Hardcover May 2011)
Reviewed by Jaym Gates

Science fiction is inundated with post-apocalyptic and dystopian settings, super-powers and corrupt governments, with varied results. Mind Storm is a nice blend of the familiar and the new, packed with action, and it introduces some pretty fun new characters. It is the first book of a series of unspecified length.

Mind Storm opens with psions Threnody and Quenton traveling to the slums of Los Angeles. It is the year 2379. Humans have stripped the Earth of nearly all resources. Crowded and afraid, nuclear war was unleashed…everywhere. By the time the war was over, most of the populated areas were dead zones, unfit for human life. The majority of the human race had been wiped out. But a small percentage of the human population finds their DNA altered, leaving them incredibly powerful and unique. They are called psions, and brainwashed and put in service to the world government as soldier-slaves.

Their power comes at a cost, burning out more of their bodies with every use. Only the fortunate make it to the age of thirty five. They are feared and hated by the humans, who regard them as dangerous vermin. Most of them are found early and pulled into the Stryker Syndicate, fitted with kill-switches controlled by the World Court. The ones who escape the Strykers are found and enslaved by the Warhounds, a rogue group of powerful psions serving a shadowy figure.

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Catherynne M. Valente parts ways with Night Shade Books

Catherynne M. Valente parts ways with Night Shade Books

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the-habitation-of-the-blessed2Catherynne M. Valente has announced her third Prester John novel, following The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World, will not be published by Night Shade Books. In a statement on her blog last week she said:

I continue to think that Night Shade puts out wonderful books and I hope for their success. I did not take this step lightly. But their recent troubles have made our business relationship difficult, and I could not in good conscience proceed with a third book given the circumstances. Obviously I’m being a bit vague – there’s no point in airing laundry in public… What this means is that at the moment, The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World are for the most part unavailable. Some copies will float around for awhile yet, but most of the e-versions are gone. I hope to fix this in the next week – I have relicensed the covers from the excellent Rebecca Guay and Night Shade has been very kind and accommodating with regards to physical copies and digital files…

As for the third and final book in the series, The Spindle of Necessity, I am committed to finding a way to make sure you get to see it. I owe you a finish. Oddly enough, Prester John is my longest series to date, and I want to bring it all to a close the way I planned to from the beginning… Given the market realities, the most likely avenue for this is a Kickstarter campaign to fund a self-published version.

At press time, both The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World are available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, in both print and Kindle versions. But if you’re interested in getting copies, you want want to move quickly.

Rio Youers’ Westlake Soul: A Review

Rio Youers’ Westlake Soul: A Review

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Westlake SoulWestlake Soul is twenty-three, a good-natured surfing champion with a loving family, loving girlfriend, and loving dog. Then a terrible fall leaves him in a vegetative state, unresponsive to the outside world — but, locked in his own mind, he’s a superintelligent superhero, astrally projecting to the moon and battling the mysterious villain named Doctor Quietus. Westlake can’t affect the outside world; can’t even twitch a finger, can only sit and be cared for by his mother and father and little sister, and the nurses they hire. But he can see what goes on around him, and react, if only internally.

Rio Youers’ novel Westlake Soul is Westlake’s account of his life and opinions, and of his fights against Doctor Quietus. Youers pulls off a tricky proposition; Westlake’s completely incapable of actually doing anything, of changing anything in his physical environment. He can only view the world, describing what he sees and how he feels. That ought to make him too passive to work as the centre of a story — and make no mistake, more than simply a narrator, Westlake is the heart of his own story, speaking as he does with the unselfconscious egocentrism of youth — but it is precisely his struggle to make a change, to accomplish even the smallest of actions, that becomes involving.

In fact, the book succeeds due to its directness of affect. Westlake Soul’s had no choice but to become thoughtul and empathic, and those qualities, along with a certain precision of diction, make his voice endearing and highly readable. The book doesn’t hesitate to tug at the heartstrings, but the writing’s effective: it feels like a kind young man’s voice. And Youers deploys that voice nicely, giving us Westlake’s observations of both his exterior and interior worlds, keeping things moving briskly.

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Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: Battleship

Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: Battleship

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battleship-teaser-posterYou sunk my interest.

And so The Avengers gets another week at #1. Welcome to the Billion Dollar Club. Have a seat next to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and watch that The Dark Knight doesn’t try to steal your popcorn.

The question burning my mind as I left the theater after watching Battleship was: “Why ‘Fortunate Son’?” At the close of two hours of a rah-rah, fist pumping, pro-military glamor parade, why play one of most famous and angriest protest songs ever over a montage of alien ships getting smithereen’d? Did no one involved in the movie listen to the lyrics? “Some folks are born made to wave the flag / Oh, they’re Red, White and Blue. / And when the band plays ‘Hail to Chief’ / Oh, they point the cannon at you.” Maybe the music supervisor thought, “Oh, hell ya! People love Creedence Clearwater Revival. Let’s crank it up!” Perhaps director Peter Berg was trying to allay blame for the film, screaming “It ain’t me! It ain’t me!” Or maybe Berg filled his Navy vs. Aliens blow-em-up flick with a subversive anti-military/industrial complex message that I failed to find on my radar.

However, I will never know for certain, because there’s no way I will ever watch Battleship a second time. This is the essential Stupid Summer Movie, a Michael Bay film without Michael Bay’s obsession with disaster porn that at least gives his junk a crazy edge. If you thought the idea of adapting a strategy guessing game was a poor choice for a blockbuster movie, you were right: stick a red peg on your upper tactical screen.

Maybe the “Fortunate Sons” are the film’s heroes, who have the luck of going up against an expeditionary force of the stupidest extraterrestrials since Mac and Me. These heavily armed dreadnoughts fly twenty light years to reach Earth, but immediately smash their most crucial vessel into a satellite (they were drinking, I assume). Later, the aliens suffer defeat from the insurmountable force of senior citizens, a tourist attraction, a paraplegic, a supermodel driving a Jeep, and a tech-geek with heavy luggage.

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