Gods and Monsters

Gods and Monsters

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nammahs-kissJacqueline Carey’s third Terre d’Ange trilogy, the Moirin books, seem to be in general better liked than the books about Imriel. I can’t agree with this opinion. It might be because I read them first, and therefore had gone pretty far into Naamah’s Kiss before I got a satisfactory translation of “diadh-anam“. From context, I was forced to conclude that “”diadh-anam” was Cruithne for “plot”. As in “Jehanne, I adore you, but I find that the plot is telling me I must go to China.”

Of course all the main characters in the Terre d’Ange books have been a singularly god-ridden bunch. However, Phèdre and Imriel and their cohorts had to deal more with powers and inclinations that they received from their gods in much the same way that other heroes have received them from radioactive spiders. The actions they take are to help friends, or make bargains with enemies, or act for their country, or earn a living, or do stupid things because of lust or youth or stupidity.

Moirin, on the other hand, has a goddess that micromanages her every action. Go to Terre d’Ange. Date a hot magician. Learn tai chi. Etc., etc. The Maghuin Dhonn winds up being a character as present in the book as poor, sexy, silly Moirin herself, only a lot less interesting. It’s the Q problem. How do you use a god among mortals as a character? Alan Moore did it with Dr. Manhattan, but that worked because he let us into Dr. Manhattan’s brain, showed us what the world looked like to him. But all you ever see of the Maghuin Dhonn is just her moving her favorite character around like a chess piece; and why would you ever want to read a book about the adventures of a chess piece, when you could read about the mind behind the chess game?

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Short Fiction Round Up: Bull-Spec

Short Fiction Round Up: Bull-Spec

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bullspec-03-page001-25pctWhile other magazines are dying (and then, a la Realms of Fantasy, being  resurrected) or publishing irregularly, editor Samuel Montgomery-Blinn is making good on his promise to deliver four issues this year of his newly launched Bull-Spec.  Fiction for issue #3 includes the always interesting Lave Tidhar, as well as Katherine Sparrow in addition to  Melinda Thielbar and the first professional sales for Denali Hyatt and David Steffen.

My review of the previous issue is here.

You shouldn’t take any bull, just subscribe to it.

Is The Bookish Owl the Worst Web Site Ever?

Is The Bookish Owl the Worst Web Site Ever?

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Well, no. Probably not. But it is currently the most personally irritating.

I recently discovered that the site’s admin is reprinting Black Gate material without our permission, and frequently without byline. The site isn’t merely quoting from us, or summarizing, or pointing interested readers here, which we appreciate and encourage, they are copying and pasting our complete articles onto their own web site. We’re not alone — they’re apparently doing this with a lot of other fantasy and science fiction web sites as well.

My first hope was that this plagiarism was some sort of amateurish mistake, and it may still be. Some people, even some literate, intelligent people, might not understand what’s wrong about taking someone else’s work without credit.

Upon digging further,  I realized that there is NO WAY to contact anyone involved in the site. No contact information for the administrator is listed anywhere on the pages of The Bookish Owl. I filled out a comments page and submitted it, but my comments were ignored. I tracked down to whom the site was registered (a company) only to discover that the company’s web site has not been updated since 2008 and that their voice mailbox is full. Their e-mail address bounces.

I can only conclude that theirs is a deliberate attempt to steal the work of others to boost traffic to their own site. As their admin seems to regularly cut and paste material from this site, perhaps he or she will read this note and realize their error, and correct it with an apology, in which case all will be well. Or perhaps it will simply reappear automatically at The Bookish Owl with the headline above and I’ll have a chuckle before I track down all the others from whom The Bookish Owl is stealing material and together we will contemplate appropriate action.

Fantomas: An Introduction

Fantomas: An Introduction

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fantomasFantomas is criminally unknown in the United States. Only seven of the original 43 classic French pulp novels are currently in print in English. The series is unique in its successful blend of black comedy and absurdist humor within the traditional murder mystery genre.

Fantomas himself is a criminal anarchist who robs and murders for the sheer joy of creating chaos. While the murders are frequently described in surprisingly grisly detail for their day, they are quickly followed by delightfully sublime escapes or revelations handled with such a deftly light touch that it is impossible not to find the villainous character fun in spite of his many crimes.

Fantomas made his debut in the 1911 novel, Fantomas. The book was an instant sensation whose appeal transcended all barriers of French society. The avant-garde adopted the character as one of their own. Inspired by Gino Sterace’s lurid cover art for the first book, surrealists such as Rene Magritte and Juan Gris, composer Kurt Weil, and poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob soon incorporated the character in their work.

Fantomas’ appeal to the art world was as strong as the popularity of the books among the working class. The character’s centennial next year will be marked with celebrations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia in an effort to bring greater recognition to the character and its impact on 20th Century art.

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“Worms of the Earth”: Bending the rules of swords and sorcery

“Worms of the Earth”: Bending the rules of swords and sorcery

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worms-of-the-earth“Worms of the earth, back into your holes and burrows! Ye foul the air and leave on the clean earth the slime of the serpents ye have become! Gonar was right—there are shapes too foul to use even against Rome!”

–Robert E. Howard, “Worms of the Earth”

Robert E. Howard has received his fair share of criticism over the years, including the accusation that he wrote shallow, muscle-bound characters that cut their way out of every situation. Violence by strong, self-sufficient swordsmen is the end game for solving all problems in REH’s stories, his detractors argue, not wits or guile or diplomacy. For example, in his audio book survey of fantasy literature Rings, Swords, and Monsters, author Michael Drout declares Conan an uninteresting character who simply “smashes everything in his path.” L. Sprague De Camp, who penned the introductions to the famous (infamous?) Lancer Conan reprints of the 1960s and 70s, wrote that Howard’s heroes are “men of mighty thews, hot passions, and indomitable will, who easily dominate the stories through which they stride.” Howard wrote escape fiction, De Camp continued, wherein “all men are strong…” and “all problems simple.”

These generalizations lead casual readers to conclude that Howard considered violence to be the answer to all of life’s problems. They reduce Howard’s stories to brutish pulp escapism and denude them of subtlety or complexity. Sword and sorcery and its fans are painted with the same broad, clumsy brush by association. “Sword and sorcery novels and stories are tales of power for the powerless,” wrote Stephen King in his overview of horror and fantasy Danse Macabre (1981). “The fellow who is afraid of being rousted by those young punks who hang around his bus stop can go home at night and imagine himself wielding a sword, his pot belly miraculously gone.”

These criticisms aren’t entirely groundless. It’s rather easy to find examples of Howardian heroes hacking their way through a problem. Kull of Valusia butchering a horde of Serpent Men in an orgiastic, cathartic red fury in “The Shadow Kingdom” springs immediately to mind, for instance. Howard was in many ways bound by the conventions of the pulps in which he made his living as a writer. But there are an equal number of examples of Conan using his wits to extricate himself from situations when brute force won’t suffice, his reaver’s instinct restrained by sovereign responsibility. And of course, Howard penned many more characters than his famous Cimmerian.

Howard’s 1932 story “Worms of the Earth” features the Pictish king Bran Mak Morn on an ill-advised mission to enlist supernatural aid to defeat an invading force of Romans. In it Howard substitutes complexity and compromise for crashing swordplay and victory in arms. While “Worms” is a tale of vengeance, it’s of a rather hollow, unfulfilling sort.

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Today is Veterans Day

Today is Veterans Day

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veteransToday is Veterans Day. For our readers and contributors in the United States, today is a federal holiday (no mail!).

Known around the world as Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, Veterans Day commemorates the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. Major hostilities of that war were formally ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

In 1953, a shoe store owner named Alfred King lobbied residents of his small town of Emporia, Kansas, to expand Armistice Day to celebrate all veterans, rather than just those who’d served in World War I. The local Chamber of Commerce agreed, and Representative Ed Rees (also from Emporia) helped push a bill for the holiday through Congress. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill into law on May 26, 1954.

The Black Gate staff is an international group of writers who celebrate fantasy in all its forms. We’re particularly fond of tales of warriors, men and women of valor who struggle heroically against great odds, and we honor the writers who’ve paid tribute to those who fight the good fight, real and imagined, every day here on the Black Gate blog.

But today there are men and women around the world who have left their homes and families behind to take up arms and stand on guard for something they believe in. As most of us are painfully aware, often they pay for that dedication with their lives.

Today we’d like to take a moment to honor them. And we hope that all of you who enjoy fantastic tales of selfless heroism, as we do, will remember that our communities are filled with veterans who have made sacrifices on our behalf, and perhaps make the time to reach out to them. To let them know we honor the heroes in our midst just as much as — if not more than — the Aragorns, Arthurs, and Amazons who fire our imagination.

Goth Chick News: Vampire Zombies on a Plane, Snakes Not Included

Goth Chick News: Vampire Zombies on a Plane, Snakes Not Included

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image004I believe everyone has something that unnerves them, which is not in your typical things-that-are-scary category. We’ve already agreed that clowns and little kids with blank stares rank high on the creepy index, but there are other more benign items that cause the hair on the back of our necks to stand up, mainly because they exist on the outside of the everyday.

Allow me to provide an example.

A few years ago I had an opportunity to visit Cape Canaveral in Florida for a night-time launch of the space shuttle. Though the event was scuttled by technical difficulties, there was something strangely frightening about the massiveness of the shuttle (and “massive” hardly does it justice).

This monolithic structure, sitting in the middle of an otherwise vacant launch pad and lit the way it was, seemed strangely terrifying. It didn’t belong there on what looked like a normal airport runway. It was gigantic and alien and out of place. I can’t explain it sufficiently, but I had nightmares about standing near it for several weeks after. Maybe because it was in a place my mind just couldn’t agree it should be, and that turned “normal” upside down.

It was because of the chill that comes from everyday things being displaced that I picked up Guillermo Del Toro’s latest paperback release The Strain to sustain me on a recent, long plane ride. In case you aren’t familiar with Del Toro, he is the owner of the incredible imagination that brought us Pan’s Labyrinth, which was turned into an Oscar-winning film in 2007.

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Art Evolution 9: Jim Holloway

Art Evolution 9: Jim Holloway

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Art Evolution, the collection of role-playing artists spanning thirty years and genres creating a single character, begins here and continues with this week’s ninth representative.

cranston-snords-irregulars-254Okay, now I had a ‘Pathfinder Iconic Lyssa‘, and life was good, but the more I went over what I wanted from this project the more it became clear I couldn’t just do ten artists. There was no way ten artists justified the true landscape and epic scope of RPG art during the past thirty years.

I was at the tipping point, and it was then, in the depth of winter that I decided I’d include everyone who’d not only impacted my life, but the life of gamers all over the world.

If I somehow had the power to collect those already in the project, then asking was no longer an issue, and the sting of a rebuke wasn’t a deterrent against the joy I already felt at the process.

Taking a lead from Dragon Magazine reading, I starting rolling out every name I could think of. Instead of thinking about two representatives from each Era, I’d go for four, and I looked deeper into all the art I’d seen since my youth.

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Realms of Fantasy Returns — Again

Realms of Fantasy Returns — Again

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rofLess than three weeks ago we reported that Realms of Fantasy magazine was being closed by Tir Na Nog Press and publisher Warren Lapine. (And Brian Murphy asked if the end of Realms of Fantasy begs the question: Too much fantasy on the market?)

At the time, Warren offered to sell the magazine for $1 to a responsible party who could continue publication. Now SF Scope is reporting that the magazine has been sold to Damnation Books.

Who the heck is Damnation Books? I admit I never heard of them either. According to their website, they’ve published electronic novels, novellas and short stories by Joshua Martyr, S. A. Bolich, Matthew S. Rotundo, and many others. Their CEO is Kim Richards, and their staff includes William Gilchrist, Tim Marquitz, and Lisa J. Jackson.

Damnation Books plans to release the December 2010 issue (previously only available electronically) in print form, and continue virtually immediately with the February 2011 issue, meaning the magazine’s bi-monthly schedule will suffer no gaps.

All subscriptions will be honored, and Damnation has announced plans for an extra-sized June 2011 volume, to coincide with the magazine’s 100th issue. The website remains at www.rofmag.com, and effective immediately the magazine has reopened to submissions.  No official word yet on whether any of the magazine’s current staff will remain.

This is great news for fantasy fans — and kudos to Warren and Damnation Books for orchestrating what looks like a smooth transition.  Here’s hoping Damnation finds the right formula to keep this grand lady of fantasy alive and thriving.

“Hey Look, It’s Joe Haldeman!”: A First-Time Convention-Goer Looks at World Fantasy 2010

“Hey Look, It’s Joe Haldeman!”: A First-Time Convention-Goer Looks at World Fantasy 2010

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black-gate-booth
Howard A. Jones, John O'Neill, et Ego

I had never attended a major speculative fiction convention until this year. And the World Fantasy Convention is a huge one for a first-timer to go diving into. It’s an especially scary dive if you’re someone like me, who is only starting to emerge from the years of amateur writing into some level of the professional. I’ve won a major writing award, have some stories that will soon be published, and even have an agent and a novel making the rounds at publishing houses, but I felt like a Lilliputian among Brobdingnagians when I entered the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Columbus, OH on 29 October 2010 with the Thirty-Sixth World Fantasy Convention already in motion. There I was, lugging my heavy suitcases from the taxi from the airport, and already around me was a throng of people with their convention badges swinging from their necks and deep in the business of “convening.”

The main reason I had never gone to conventions before (aside from some swing dancing confabs — a different world entirely) was because I didn’t have any people to go with or meet there; most of my close Los Angeles friends are not involved in SF fandom to any degree. I didn’t want to go solo and feel lost in the huge ocean of a major convention. I know my personality — I’d likely leave the convention in a few hours in a sort of junior-high-school-dance-wallflower fear.

But this time, I had the best network and support team possible, the Black Gate folks. This was not only a chance to go to a huge convention, but a chance to meet the people who had formed an important part of life during the past four years, and who until then were known to me as emails and voices on the phone. I finally got to meet John O’Neill, Bill Ward, John Fultz, Jason M. Waltz, and the man responsible for getting me involved in all this in the first place, Howard Andrew Jones, but for whom . . . well, you know the rest. Without Howard’s encouragement, I don’t think I would have pushed myself to be a better writer the way I have over the last few years.

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