80s Fantasy and Master of the Five Magics

80s Fantasy and Master of the Five Magics

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Master of the Five MagicsI’ve been thinking lately about fantasy in the 1980s. More specifically, about the wave of fantasy fiction that began to be published in the late 70s, in the wake of The Sword of Shannara and the first Thomas Covenant books, and which over the following years developed into fantasy as we know it now. So far as I can learn, it seems that this was when fantasy really took root as a novel category — that is, when fantasy novels stopped being relatively rare events and began to flourish as a genre. As a result, I think, it was a time when the idea of fantasy broadened; new ideas and forms and voices were tried, even if certain assumptions (like a quasi-medieval-European setting) were often unquestioned. What I wonder is whether certain things tried then and since almost forgotten are in fact worth revisiting.

It sometimes seems like that generation of books is either ignored, or remembered only for its most popular examples — the big sellers, or the series which started then and are still going. I can’t find much thoughtful criticism of 80s fantasy fiction as a whole, or even much discussion about the relevance of the books of that time to contemporary fantasy writing. This is annoying, as I think it increases the possibility of good work slipping through the cracks. I don’t mean to suggest that there’s a mass of neglected masterpieces, but I do suspect that some of those 80s fantasies have elements to them which might be worth re-examining, or which might speak to contemporary ideas in fantasy.

Take, for example, Lyndon Hardy’s three-book sequence Master of the Five Magics, Secret of the Sixth Magic, and Riddle of the Seven Realms.

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Jackson Kuhl Reviews The Birthing House

Jackson Kuhl Reviews The Birthing House

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birthing-house-tpbThe Birthing House
Christopher Ransom
St. Martin’s Press (320 pp, $14.99, August 2009 – August 2010 paperback edition)
Reviewed by Jackson Kuhl

Conrad Harrison is driving through rural Wisconsin when, on a whim, he buys a nineteenth-century house with insurance money received after the death of his estranged father. The building was, Conrad learns, The Birthing House – a hospice where expectant women could deliver their babies. Conrad returns to Los Angeles to pack up his things, his dogs, his wife — the house for him a chance to save his troubled marriage and begin over after a series of career failures. But upon moving to the house, Conrad becomes aware of a lurking presence within and soon discovers…

Well, he doesn’t discover much. His wife departs to attend job training and remains offstage for much of the book, leaving Conrad home alone to be harassed by apparitions and occurrences. There is never a sense of menace; the previous owner lived there some twenty years and while aware of the weirdness, is indifferent to it. That fact by itself results in a haunting minus any mystery or apprehension.

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“Jirel, Ma Joie!” (In Which I Encounter My First C.L. Moore)

“Jirel, Ma Joie!” (In Which I Encounter My First C.L. Moore)

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jirel21Due to an unfortunate (or perhaps I should say, “fortuitous”) comment I let slip in an email, Howard Andrew Jones discovered I had no idea who C.L. Moore was.

My comment was something to the effect of, “C.L. Moore? What did he write?”

I met Howard in person once, about a billion years ago at World Fantasy in Saratoga Springs. I retain no clear picture of him in my head, except from images I’ve gleaned off of his Facebook profile page, but from his quick reply, I could so clearly see the bare patches on his skull where he had just torn out huge clumps of hair in rage and frustration.

But he was quite polite about it all.

In his email, he linked me right to Ryan Harvey’s thorough and passionate overview of Herself, Catherine Lucille Moore, Mighty Sorceress of the Pen, Queen Mother of the First Female Sword-Swinging Spit-Fire Protagonist in Fantasy and Science Fiction. This article I happily read, promising myself I would devour some C.L. Moore books the first chance I got!

And then I promptly forgot all about it.

But Howard Andrew Jones and John O’Neill, undaunted by my insouciance, both earnestly strove to further my education in this, our beloved genre. By hook, crook and conspiracy, they contrived to smuggle me a copy (through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered) of C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry for my birthday.

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Speculate! The Podcast for Writers, Readers, and Fans

Speculate! The Podcast for Writers, Readers, and Fans

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speculateSpeculate! is a podcast for writers, readers, and fans, run by Gregory A. Wilson and Bradley P. Beaulieu, two writers of speculative fiction. Speculate! will be sharing podcasts of several different types, including:

  • Fiction Reviews – discussions of novels or short fiction.
  • Author Interviews – interviews or roundtables with some of the great and new voices in speculative fiction.
  • Writing Technique – nuts and bolts discussions of writing technique that stem from the works we’ve reviewed.
  • Artist Interviews – just to shake things up, we thought we’d include some interviews with various artists in the speculative fiction arena.

In general, though we may not always stick to this formula, we’ll be discussing a particular set of short stories or a novel, then we’ll interview the author(s) in the following episode, and will finish up with a show where we get into the more nitty gritty details of writing technique. This allows us to dig deeper into the fiction we’re discussing, and it hopefully allows you, the listener, to be both entertained and informed. We’re always looking for suggestions for improvement, though, so if you have any thoughts on new topics or even authors we might interview, please feel free to discuss in our posts or send us an email through the contact page.

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New Year Short Fiction Roundup

New Year Short Fiction Roundup

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2011-snI’ve contributed book reviews to the SF Site since 1998 (wow, that’s a long time); in fact, it was the first on-line “publication” I wrote for (and, yes, you can end a sentence with a proposition, though, technically, I haven’t).  That’s where I “met” John O’Neill, which explains how I wound up here (for those of you wondering how that could possibly have happened).  You can see a list of all my SF Site reviews here.

My latest review in the January 2010 issue is about a short story collection entitled “She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror. ” Worth checking out for the title alone.

sh_head
In other short fiction news,  Strange Horizons now has a regular blog, as well as a slight shift in editorial scheduling, as outlined by new editor-in-chief Niall Harrison.
Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part One: “The Wire Jacket”

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part One: “The Wire Jacket”

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devildoctorcassell“The Wire Jacket“ was the first installment of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu and Company. The story made its debut in Collier’s on November 21, 1914 and was later edited to comprise Chapters 1-3 of the second Fu-Manchu novel, The Devil Doctor first published in the UK by Cassell and in the US by McBride & Nast under the variant title, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu.returnfumanchumcbridenast

Rohmer displays an admirable economy of writing with this first sequel to Fu-Manchu. The story opens two years after the events of the original serial with our narrator, Dr. Petrie (his first name is never revealed) enjoying the company of his house guest, Reverend Eltham, the soft-spoken English cleric who 15 years earlier did much to provoke the Boxer Uprising as an intolerant missionary in China.

The two men chat amiably about Nayland Smith, who has returned to his post as Police Commissioner in the British colony of Burma. Petrie hasn’t received a letter from Smith in over two months and attributes it to a love affair gone sour that Smith hinted at in his last letter.

Modern readers may be intrigued by Petrie’s refusal to confirm whether the affair was with a woman or not when asked directly and Eltham’s subsequent remark that Burma makes a mess of a man. Add to it Petrie stating that Smith is never likely to marry now and most readers today will almost certainly conclude that Smith has had a homosexual encounter.

However, it should be noted that Petrie reflects the Edwardian reticence to discuss anything remotely intimate even among friends and his discomfort likely has more to do with Eltham’s probing than any dark secret of Smith’s that he is hiding. Petrie makes mention that Eltham is not at all common for a clergyman and his directness is certainly atypical of English social etiquette then as well as now.

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Tolkien and Howard still The Two Towers of fantasy

Tolkien and Howard still The Two Towers of fantasy

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jrr_tolkienNot to beat the subject, like Fingon, to death, but neither writer is trod into the mire by a comparison to the other. The shortest distance between these two towers is the straight line they draw and defend against the dulling of our sense of wonder, the deadening of our sense of loss, and the slow death of imagination denied.

–Steve Tompkins, “The Shortest Distance Between Two Towers”

With my first Black Gate post of 2011 I thought I’d kick off the New Year with one of those big, bold, declarative, prediction type posts. So here it is: J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard are firmly ensconced as the two towers of fantasy, and as the years pass they will not only remain such, but perhaps will never be dethroned.

Although they arguably did not blaze the trail, Tolkien and Howard set the standard for two sub-genres of fantasy — high fantasy and swords and sorcery, respectively — and no one has done either better before or since.

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Goth Chick News: Unwrapping the 80’s… Again

Goth Chick News: Unwrapping the 80’s… Again

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last-starfighter“The 25th anniversary edition of The Last Starfighter.”

This is the response I got when I asked a friend about the holiday gift he was most excited about. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I heard him right the first time so I asked for a repeat and sure enough, I had heard correctly.

This confusing bit of trivia caused several questions to spring up in my holiday-addled brain.

First, was The Last Starfighter really twenty-five years old? Not possible.

Was there really a marketing department somewhere in the world that actually believed there was an audience desperately waiting for a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this movie?

Apparently. Was THIS the gift that a friend of MINE was actually the most thrilled to unwrap on Christmas morning? Who knew?

Obviously not me, because it actually took some time before I could conjure up the movie plot line and a few vague faces of the actors who starred in it. If a twenty-fifth anniversary tribute was actually on the market, then The Last Starfighter hit the mall movie theaters right smack in the middle of gravity-defying AquaNet hairdos and skinny, neon leather ties worn with white linen blazers.

In other words, the 80’s.

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Portals: A Writer Blogs About Process

Portals: A Writer Blogs About Process

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Dangerous Doorways
Dangerous Doorways

According to the powers that be, Black Gate will be publishing a trilogy of mine starting in the fall of this year (2011). Please note that I do not say “fantasy” stories, or “high fantasy” or “heroic fantasy” or “sword and sorcery,” although all apply, and accurately enough.

Indeed, precisely because those identifiers fit, my three stories, “The Trade,” “The Find,” and “The Keystone,” would find a poor welcome in almost any current venue except for Black Gate.

Why, then, do I chafe at these terms, and why do they cause me such angst as I dash toward the finish line of the novel, The Portal, that succeeds the stories?

If I must answer at all, let it be to say that I am, like Arlecchino in traditional commedia, the servant of two masters, and that these two masters are at war, they truly are. If I had to reduce them to their simplest, most essential forms, I would call the first Story and the second Style. The first is simple, direct, goal-oriented; the second is impulsive and flighty, the filigree on story’s solid cake. Both have value. Both, indeed, are essential for creating solid, timeless fiction.

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Chris Braak Reviews Julian Comstock

Chris Braak Reviews Julian Comstock

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julian-comstock-mmpJulian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America
Robert Charles Wilson
Tor Books (624 pp, $8.99, June 2009 – May 2010 mass market edition)
Reviewed by Chris Braak

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America is not your typical story of a futuristic dystopian United States. There are no mutant cannibals, no hidden super-technologies, no weird psychics or alien visitations. Even “dystopian” isn’t quite right; Robert Charles Wilson’s 22nd century America has its problems, yes, but it is arguably not any more dystopian than any other civilization that crawled its way to the top of the heap in the last two thousand years. The story takes place after the End of Oil, a hotly-debated potential real-world crisis that, in this case, has caused America to revert to a feudal nation with Victorian values and technology.

In his imagining of this future America, Wilson has created a beautiful, brilliant narrative that smoothly carries its characters through the trials and tribulations of the eponymous Julian Comstock, heir to the Presidency of the United States — an office that has, since the End of Oil, become a position of dynastic, imperial privilege. The topsy-turvy, almost-apocalyptic future is a ripe breeding ground for social satire, casting clever barbs at our own past presidents who insisted on being referred to as Commanders-in-Chief by those Americans who were not actually in the army, at the religiously-motivated political institutions that seek to recast the American government as a branch of the celestial kingdom, or the industrialists and captains of industry that tacitly support an economic system so unbalanced that it almost couldn’t help but lead to a return to slavery.

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