Classic Alternatives: Keith Roberts’ Pavane

Classic Alternatives: Keith Roberts’ Pavane

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PavaneI’ve always been fascinated by history, which is one reason why I write about it. So by extension one of the kinds of speculative fiction which has always fascinated me is the alternate history tale. Whether as a ‘pure’ alternate history tale, describing a world where things just happened to go a different way than we knew, or as a ‘warped’ history in which deliberate meddling has created some new reality, the rethinking of historical assumptions is challenging and invigorating — at least, up to a point. The changes have to make sense.

I think a lot of science fiction and fantasy requires careful attention to setting; attention in constructing a setting, attention in how the setting is communicated to the reader, and attention in working the setting and its communication smoothly into the narrative. Along, of course, with attention to how the setting affects character, and, ultimately, the language a character uses and the language in which the story is told. The alternate-history story is an extreme example of all these things. It’s the setting that makes it the story it is. And in changing history, the writer makes decisions about character, style, and — implicitly — theme and structure; as in any kind of sf, what kind of fictional world the writer creates is intimately connected with what the story’s about and how it’s told.

Which brings me around to Keith Roberts’ novel Pavane. It’s a set of linked short stories, describing a world in which Queen Elizabeth I of England was assassinated, the Spanish Armada conquered England, and Europe remained wholly Catholic. The book, first published in 1966, takes place in the late twentieth century of this other world, in which technological and social progress has been slowed by the authoritatian hand of the Church. It moves from character to character, showing developments over the course of generations as some things change and some things do not.

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Some Little Infamy

Some Little Infamy

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johannes-cabalI have been asked to write a few words on how the Johannes Cabal novels came to be published with a particular view to explaining some of the intricacies of the publishing trade. Because I am nothing if not didactic (“Didactic” means, among other things, to speak in a lecturely manner. I hope you’re taking notes – there will be a test afterwards), I have also added a few notes of advice at the end for folk who want to get into the professional novel writing gig.

There is no precise moment when Johannes Cabal leapt from my brow, side, or any other part of my anatomy. He was, as is often the way, formed by a slow aggregation of assorted ideas over quite a lengthy period that probably starts sometime in the mid to late 1980s. I had and, I must admit, still have a habit of inventing stories for my own amusement with no intention of writing them down. Usually the reason for not taking it too seriously is because I’m playing with other people’s characters, and the copyright situation discourages me from making the stories concrete; virtual fanfic, if you like.

Back in 1985 I saw a film that, as a Lovecraft fan, I was all set to hate. Instead, having seen Re-Animator I came out of the cinema enthused and excited by such a gonzo approach to Lovecraft’s work. Inevitably, I started playing around with ideas for a sequel. There used to be an old vicarage in Kearsley, southwest of Bolton on the road to Manchester, that caught my eye whenever I went by. It was a tall, severe, Victorian building with a large, circular window on its attic floor, glaring out from beneath the eaves. The window made me think of a Lovecraftian tale, and I imagined a rival to Herbert West living there. Unlike West, however, he used magic upon which he had imposed a scientific rigour. Herbert West comes to him to collaborate with predictably gory results.

I never got very far with this particular story because I found myself becoming more interested in the unnamed magic-using re-animator.

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Coming Soon — Black Gate 15!

Coming Soon — Black Gate 15!

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bg15_320aTeam Black Gate has been putting in a lot of overtime, and we’re just about ready to pull back the veil on our latest production. Black Gate 15 is another massive issue, with over 350 pages of fiction, reviews, and articles.  It contains 22 stories — more than any issue in our history — totaling over 150,000 words of adventure fantasy.

Jonathan L. Howard returns to our pages with “The Shuttered Temple,” the sequel to “The Beautiful Corridor” from Black Gate 13, in which the resourceful thief Kyth must penetrate the secrets of a mysterious and very lethal temple.  Howard Andrew Jones bring us another swashbucking tale of Arabian fantasy featuring Dabir & Asim, this time a lengthy excerpt from his blockbuster novel The Desert of Souls.

Harry Connolly returns after too long an absence with “Eating Venom,” in which a desperate soldier faces a basilisk’s poison — and the treachery it brings. John C. Hocking kicks off a terrific  new sword & sorcery series with “A River Through Darkness & Light,” featuring a dedicated Archivist who leads a small band into a deadly desert tomb, and John Fultz shares the twisted fate of a thief who dares fantastic dangers to steal rare spirits indeed in “The Vintages of Dream.”

Plus fiction from Vaughn Heppner, Darrell Schweitzer, Jamie McEwan, Michael Livingston, Frederic S. Durbin, Chris Willrich, Fraser Ronald, Maria Snyder, Brian Dolton, and many others.

In our generous non-fiction section, Mike Resnick educates us on the best in black & white fantasy cinema, Bud Webster turns his attention to the brilliant Tom Reamy in his Who? column on 20th Century fantasy authors, Scott Taylor challenges ten famous fantasy artists to share their vision of a single character in Art Evolution, and Rich Horton looks at the finest fantasy anthologies of the last 25 years. Plus over 30 pages of book, game, and DVD reviews, edited by Bill Ward, Howard Andrew Jones, and Andrew Zimmerman Jones — and a brand new Knights of the Dinner Table strip.

Black Gate 15 will be on sale next month. We’ll have a detailed sneak peek, with tantalizing story excerpts and artwork, right here in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

Cover art by Donato Giancola.

Short Fiction Roundup: This Just In

Short Fiction Roundup: This Just In

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interzone-286a1The new Interzone has a refreshing look after last year’s garish series of yellow and redish installments. Haven’t had a chance to more than glance at the contents, but any story called “Noam Chomsky and the Time Box” sounds like my sort of fare.  Here’s a synopsis:

If anyone needed more proof that the gadget driven marketing scam that was the American Empire is now completely dead, the utter failure to adequately create demand for the world’s first personal time machine should suffice as proof. Nintendo, Time Warner, and Apple computers have all backed off their various offers to buy out Time Box incorporated, and while last year it seemed impossible that the product might suffer the same fate as Betamax and electric cars, a year later it’s becoming obvious that people without a history or a future are uninterested in the kind of time travel the Box offers. The public seems content to leave history to the necrophiliacs and Civil War Buffs.

apex-21a1In addition to this Douglas Lain penned tale, there are stories by Michael R. Fletcher, Sue Burke and Sarah L. Edwards, as well as the 2010 James White Award winning “Flock, Shoal, Herd” by James Bloomer.

The latest issue of Apex Magazine features fiction from Cat Rambo, Forrest Aguirre and Nalo Hopkinson.  According to the publisher,

“This issue marks the second issue following our new distribution model. In short, we wanted to give a premium to those who subscribe digitally and/or purchase each issue by making the content available to them one month prior to its release on our website. This means that full text of the stories and poetry will be available the first Monday of March right here, along with sneak peeks of this issue’s contents.”

Hello Jetpacks! And About Time

Hello Jetpacks! And About Time

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jetlevIt’s 2011.  As far as I’m concerned, personal jetpacks have been overdue for about a decade.

Fortunately, CNN is reporting that a new commercial jetpack is getting set for a release in a few short months:

This summer you could be whizzing around on a Jetlev, a new water-powered jetpack. It’s taken over 10 years for its Canadian inventor, Raymond Li, to realize his dream and see his jetpack go on sale, but judging by the pictures it looks well worth the wait. The Jetlev has three main components — a lightweight carbon fiber backpack, a 10-meter hose and an engine unit which floats on the water. The engine sucks water up through the hose and forces it through two adjustable nozzles on the backpack, creating up to 500 pounds of thrust.

At the age of 12, when I first imagined buying one, a jetpack wasn’t something advertised as a recreational water accessory. But after thirty years of waiting, I’ll take what I can get.

I bet it makes the inevitable crash landings during the “student driver” phase a little less painful, though. So I suppose it’s got that going for it.

jetlev2The Jetlev has a reported top speed of 22 mph, and max achievable altitude of 10 meters.  So I can’t realistically use it to get to the moon, which I swore would be my first jetpack destination (at the age of 12). 

Not without a few modifications, anyway. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the 10-meter max altitude has something to do with that 10-meter hose attachment. So my first modification would be to lengthen it to, oh I don’t know, something that can reach the moon.  

It also retails for $136,000. That’s a bigger obstacle than I thought it would be (at the age of 12).  Back then I figured I’d just get in line and pay whatever the guy at the counter wanted.  I mean, come on.  Jetpack.

So for various mundane reasons, I won’t be rushing out to buy the first JETLEV-FLYER — breaking a promise I made to myself all those decades ago. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.

You know what your inner 12-year-old would do.  And when has he (or she) ever been wrong?

We Are Gods, We Are Wolves: A Review of Shadow of the Torturer

We Are Gods, We Are Wolves: A Review of Shadow of the Torturer

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shadow1The Shadow of the Torturer
Gene Wolfe
Simon and Schuster (303 pages, 1980)

In the business of reading, which is as industrious and thankless a hobby as ever there was, there are opening lines and then there are melodies, words that ring like bells and stick in your mind, forever.

It was my fortune that a creature of the second sort happened on me one extremely lucky day, in a used bookstore on the last shelf of science fiction. First, it lured me out with its eerie title.

“Shadow of the Torturer?” said I, to myself, plucking the book off of the shelf. It is the first of four books by Gene Wolfe, and the cover of the little novel I held in my hand depicted a hooded man with a bare chest and a sword.

I thought, “What an odd profession, torturing. I mean. Can you even BE a torturer by profession?”

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part Three – “The Avenue Mystery”

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Part Three – “The Avenue Mystery”

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lyonsfu1“The Avenue Mystery” was the third installment of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu and Company. The story was first published in Collier’s on February 6, 1915 and was later expanded to comprise Chapters 7-10 of the second Fu-Manchu novel, The Devil Doctor first published in the UK in 1916 by Cassell and in the US by McBride & Nast under the variant title, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

mysteriousfu2While I hold political correctness in contempt recognizing it to be censorship under a different guise, it is inevitable that in revisiting books or films of the past one encounters racial or sexist stereotypes that are now offensive. I do not support banning a work or editing for content anymore than I support minimalizing the issues raised by their inclusion. A simple disclaimer noting offensive content is contained that reflects acceptable attitudes at the time of the work’s creation should suffice to address the matter.

Readers of pulp adventure or mystery fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are accustomed to offensive stereotypes of Asian, African, Italian, Greek, and Jewish characters among others. While Rohmer’s early Fu-Manchu stories contain a good deal less racial stereotyping of Asians than film adaptations or illustrations of the character would suggest; a lamentable streak of anti-Semitism runs through “The Avenue Mystery.” This fact is all the more regrettable because the Jewish character in question, Mr. Abel Slattin ranks among Rohmer’s finest bit players.
 

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Why realism does not equate to adult (or even good) fantasy

Why realism does not equate to adult (or even good) fantasy

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the-steel-remainsThat foul smell in the air? There’s something rotten in the realm of fantasy fiction, and its name is realism.

Two of the blogs I frequent and another one I’ve recently stumbled across have all recently commented on (and lamented about) a new trend gripping fantasy these days: Realism, and the corresponding claim that it somehow makes fantasy more adult and serious.

Lagomorph Rex of Dweomera Lagomorpha says that the new trend leaves him cold: It’s no secret that I dislike the current trend in Fantasy. It’s almost as if every author has decided they will up the misery and muck quotient and see who can make the nastiest world in which to force their characters to try and survive in.

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… Not to mention Matthew David Surridge and C.S.E. Cooney

… Not to mention Matthew David Surridge and C.S.E. Cooney

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bg-14-cover3Congratulations to James Enge on the inclusion of his latest novel The Wolf Age in the Locus 2010 Recommended Reading List!

This is the second time on the list for James — his first novel, Blood of Ambrose, made the list in 2009.

Both novels feature Morlock the Maker, who appeared in Black Gate 8 in James’ first published story, “Turn Up This Crooked Way.”

Since that first appearance Morlock has been in our pages a half-dozen times. We’re practically his second home — he doesn’t even knock when he drops by anymore.

But that’s not the only reason we’re celebrating the Locus list. Also on the list is Matthew David Surridge’s “The Word of Azrael“, from Black Gate 14, which was recently selected for the upcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Richard Horton.

And although she was too modest to mention it in her post below, C.S.E. Cooney’s own story “Braiding the Ghosts“, from the anthology Clockwork Phoenix 3, made the list as well.

[While we’re on the topic, C.S.E. made the list last year too, with “Three Fancies from the Infernal Garden“, from Subterranean magazine, Winter ’09. “Braiding the Ghosts” will also be in Rich’s Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy volume, coming this summer.]

Congratulations to all!

Locus Magazine Recommends The Wolf Age

Locus Magazine Recommends The Wolf Age

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thewolfageAs a growing number of people rightly come to the conclusion that reading James Enge’s The Wolf Age will probably be the most fun they’ll have since the invention of soul-sucking swords and the new Olympian-approved “rubber grip” thunderbolts, Black Gate has been pelting to keep up with the praise.

Now, panting from the effort but grinning widely withal, we call your attention to the Locus 2010 Recommended Reading List, under the sub-heading “Novels.” See anything familiar? Yup! That’s our man James, and we’re so dang proud of him we could bust.

Congratulations!