Words Dungeons & Dragons Taught Me

Words Dungeons & Dragons Taught Me

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I belong to the first generation of tabletop roleplayers. In fact, I’m probably among the youngest of that generation, since Dungeons & Dragons first started to reach popular culture when I was about seven, and my friends and I were playing it regularly by the time we were eight. We didn’t really know what we were doing—the rules for the game at the time, spread over various manuals and sets, could often be confounding to adults—but rolling the funny dice and fighting monsters was what our imaginations craved, and for us it became the equivalent of a previous generation’s “Cowboys n’ Indians.”

None of our parents understood what we were doing, and when the anti-D&D campaign hit the magazine circuit with its fundamental misunderstanding of roleplaying, we got some grief. Most older people thought that Dungeons & Dragons was a big waste of time, even if they didn’t think it was outright dangerous or unhealthy.

I don’t play Dungeons & Dragons any more. When I do play RPGs, which is rare these days, I only use Fudge, which is simply the greatest roleplaying system I’ve ever encountered . . . simple, flexible, and brings out great storytelling skills. And any game adapts to it. But I don’t regret one moment of my youth with D&D. Because I believe Dungeons & Dragons helped prepare me to become a fantasy and science-fiction reader, and eventually a writer as well.

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A review of The Door Into Fire by Diane Duane

A review of The Door Into Fire by Diane Duane

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door-into-fire2aThe Door Into Fire, by Diane Duane
Dell Fantasy (304 pages, $1.95, 1979)

Prince Herewiss of the Brightwood has two major problems.

First, he’s the first man in generations to have the Flame, a form of energy that’s much more potent than ordinary sorcery — but he can’t use it at all if he can’t make a physical focus with which to channel it.

His other problem is his lover Freelorn, exiled Prince of Arlen and trouble magnet. The summary on the back of The Door Into Fire refers to Freelorn as Herewiss’s “dearest friend” — which, in my opinion, does the book a disservice.

The Door Into Fire is about magic power, overcoming old tragedies, and the beginning of an epic kingdom-changing quest. It’s about a very hands-on Goddess and how she deals with her creation.

But it’s also about sex. Sex and love, sex and jealousy, sex in a culture where bisexuality and polyamory seem to be the default — sex that starts from a different set of assumptions than the average American reader carries around.

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Robert Silverberg on “Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?”

Robert Silverberg on “Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?”

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silverbergIn a post on his blog last week, Canadian science fiction author Robert Sawyer asked “Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?”

When I broke into the business 55 years ago you could count the number of full-time science fiction writers who could pay the rent and eat regular meals on the fingers of one oddly proportioned hand. Poul Anderson, Gordy Dickson, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Robert Sheckley, maybe Jack Vance, and….well, who else? Jack Williamson? Perhaps he had begun teaching by then. Asimov was still a college professor who wrote s-f on the side. Ted Cogswell was a professor also. So was James Gunn. Phil Dick was a full-timer, but lived at the poverty level. Sturgeon didn’t do much better. Del Rey dabbled in editing and occasional agenting. Harry Harrison did editing work, wrote comics, whatnot. Leiber was an editor for Science Digest. Jim Blish wrote p-r stuff for the tobacco institute. Cyril Kornbluth worked for a wire service. Fred Pohl edited and agented. Alfred Bester wrote for the slicks and TV. I’m not sure what Phil Klass did for a living — he wasn’t teaching yet — but he couldn’t have lived on the proceeds of what he wrote. Kuttner and Moore — I don’t know; they did venture somewhat into television and mystery novels.Leigh Brackett was a part-time Hollywood writer and her husband Edmond Hamilton earned most of his living writing comic books. Mack Reynolds and Fred Brown had fled to Mexico, where a dime went as far as a dollar did here.

It just wasn’t a field for full-timers. I didn’t really know that, so I plunged right in and made a good living, but I did it by dint of writing and selling a couple of short stories a week, and even then the field vanished from under me by 1958 and I had to turn to all sorts of non-sf writing until things began to revive in the mid-1960s. The same happened to Harlan, and then he got drafted, and when he came out he went to Chicago to edit and on from there to Hollywood.

Now we are back to the same situation that obtained in the golden era of the Fifties — s-f is mainly a field for hobbyist writers, with just a few able to earn a living writing just the real stuff and nothing but. (It is different, of course, for those who write pseudo-Tolkien trilogies, vampire novels, zombie books, and other sorts of highly commercial fantasy.) For a while, in the late 70s and early 80s, the money flowed freely and all sorts of people set up in business as s-f writers full time. I remember Greg Bear, president of SFWA somewhere back in the mid-80s, warning the writers at the SFWA business session not to quit their day jobs, because the good times were just about over; and was he ever right!

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Ten – “The Spores of Death”

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Ten – “The Spores of Death”

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mystryfu1“The Spores of Death” was the penultimate installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu.

First published in The Story-Teller in June 1913, it later comprised Chapters 24-26 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for U. S. publication).

The story starts off appropriately with our narrator, Dr. Petrie, acknowledging the storyline is drawing to a close and apologizing (very nearly breaking the literary equivalent of the Fourth Wall in so doing) for his haste in not better detailing characters and incidents as he was forced to maintain the breakneck pace of the events as they transpired.

Dr. Petrie then spends some much welcome time discussing the mysterious origins of Dr. Fu-Manchu. Petrie suggests the name (ridiculous to modern, informed readers) is an assumed one and disassociates him with the Young China movement (the Republicans who came to power after the fall of the Manchu Dynasty) as he had speculated early on.

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The Return of the Sorcerer: Falling under Clark Ashton Smith’s potent spell for the first time

The Return of the Sorcerer: Falling under Clark Ashton Smith’s potent spell for the first time

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the-return-of-the-sorcerer-casConfession: I am a fan of pulp fantasy who has, until recently, read very little Clark Ashton Smith. Yes, the man who comprises one of the equilateral sides of the immortal Weird Tales triangle has largely eluded me, save for a few scattered tales and poems I’ve encountered in sundry anthologies and websites.

This past week that all I changed when I cracked the cover of The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith (2009, Prime Books). As I read the introduction by legendary fantasy author Gene Wolfe I knew I was in for something special: Not only was Wolfe singing Clarke’s praises (“No one imitates Smith: There could be only one writer of Clark Ashton Smith stories, and we have had him”), but he ended with this declaration:

“Earlier I wrote that Smith had come—and gone. That he had been ours only briefly, and now was ours no longer. That is so for me and for many others. If you have yet to read him, it is not so for you. For you solely he is about to live again, whispering of the road between the atoms and the path into far stars.”

The stories that followed did just that. Smith came alive for me, and I find myself a changed man. I have trekked on distant planets, seen alien beings beyond my conception, and peered wide-eyed over the shoulders of reckless sorcerers reading from musty tomes of lore that should not be opened. I have witnessed wonders and horrors beyond the knowledge of mankind. It was a wonderful experience. Though they comprise only a small part of his body of work, the stories of The Return of the Sorcerer reveal Smith as a man of staggering imagination, considerable poetic skill, and surprising literary depth.

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ON WRITING FANTASY: The Quest for Originality

ON WRITING FANTASY: The Quest for Originality

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silmarillion“Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.”
 –Ezra Pound

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
 –Herman Melville

“Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.”
 –Voltaire

How does one go about writing a great piece of fantasy? Everybody seems to have his or her own answer. A lot of that depends on what you (personally) consider to BE “great fantasy.” In my view, the fantasist must be, first and foremost, original. That’s easier said than done.

We all know that fantasy tropes, plots, and devices are recycled endlessly, and that’s as it should be, since fantasy fiction is simply the modern equivalent of the myth cycles of early humanity. The heroes, conflicts, and adventures touch on the timeless themes that run through all literature, from BEOWULF to THE ODYSSEY to LORD OF THE RINGS to our modern fantasy epics. It’s been said before that “There are no new stories, just new ways to tell them.” And that’s the job of the modern fantasy writer: to tell a mythic story in an entirely new way. 

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Goth Chick News: Do You Like Fish? Well He Likes You Too…

Goth Chick News: Do You Like Fish? Well He Likes You Too…

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jaws“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

Back in March I wrote about quotable movie lines and at least in my circles, Chief Brody’s ironic statement to Captain Sam Quint ranks near the top. If you’re under the age of twenty-five you truly may not recognize it, but if you’ve made it through life this far without having seen most of Jaws, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to step away from your computer screen and go out for some fresh air.

And once you’ve done that, immediately put Jaws in the number one spot in your Netflix queue.

Thirty-five years ago, on fourth-of-July weekend, movies and the movie-going public were changed forever by a hot-shot young director and his mechanical shark.

That’s right kids, no CGI, no green-screen magic, not even a little forced-perspective puppetry. The shark was a life-sized monster, tooling around in the ocean instead of a water tank, and the actors really got wet.

Back in 1975 no one had really heard of Steven Spielberg. Besides a string of television episodes, he had only one movie under his belt: Sugarland Express, which he both wrote and directed.

However, that movie did well enough for him to be taken seriously when he asked to direct the movie adaptation of Peter Benchley’s number one best seller, Jaws.

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An epic re-read: Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen

An epic re-read: Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen

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gardens-of-the-moonOver at Tor.com, bloggers Bill Capossere and Amanda Rutter have commenced an epic re-read of all ten volumes of The Malazan Book of the Fallen, starting with the first novel, Gardens of the Moon.

What’s a “re-read?”  Modeled after Leigh Butler’s monumental Wheel of Time re-read, also at Tor.com, the authors will read and examine the series, one volume at a time. After each book is completed, authors Steven Erikson and Ian C. Esslemont promise to swing by the blog to share their reactions to the posts and discussions from fans and bloggers.

Naturally, this is all leading up to publication of the final installment in the bestselling series, The Crippled God, coming from Tor Books on February 15, 2011.

How time flies.  When my friend Neil Walsh and I were just getting started in Internet publishing at SF Site over a decade ago, one of the first books Neil drew attention to — with a rave feature review in 1999 — was the UK edition of Gardens of the Moon.

That review (and a few others like it) got a lot of press in the early days of online marketing, and we were cited in a New York Times article as a component in the negotiations leading to Erikson’s 6-figure deal to complete the series. Erikson even called Neil to thank him, gentleman that he is.

Here’s Amanda’s commentary on the Prologue:

I’d been warned. Anyone who has read the Malazan books — and even the author himself — states that these books are a challenge. You have to pay attention. No skimming merrily over blocks of descriptive passage. No glossing over the dialogue between characters. Concentration is the name of the game here, people!
        So I paid attention through the mere six pages of the prologue, and I’m a little stunned as to what was packed into so short a space.

You can jump on here.

The Real “Twilight”: John W. Campbell’s

The Real “Twilight”: John W. Campbell’s

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best-of-john-w-campbellI’ve discovered that once you start writing about 1930s magazine science fiction — a field small enough for thorough analysis, but bursting with enough wonders to fill the galaxy — it becomes difficult to stop. Pondering the marvels of Stanley G. Weinbaum’s 1935 classic “Parasite Planet” urged me to sift through my pile of Del Rey “Best of…” paperbacks, which are crammed with the stories that helped me reach a kind of SF maturation when I was a young reader.

The first of the Del Rey anthologies I purchased, long enough ago that it was new and sitting on the shelf of a chain bookstore, was The Best of John W. Campbell. The reason I bought this title was simple: it contained “Who Goes There?”, the basis for two movies I loved, The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Thing (1982). I already knew Campbell’s reputation as an editor, but hadn’t experienced his earlier career as two different authors, John W. Campbell and Don A. Stuart.

If Stanley G. Weinbaum was “a Campbell author before Campbell,” so too was Campbell — or at least, Don A. Stuart was. The proof is in “Twilight,” a story under the Stuart name that appeared in the November 1934 issue of Astounding Stories during the tenure of editor F. Orlin Tremaine. I may have bought The Best of John W. Campbell for “Who Goes There?,” but it was “Twilight” that entranced me and became one of my favorite short stories of any genre.

(And yes, as the heading of this post indicates, to me the title “Twilight” always means this story. It had too potent an effect on me to ever allow anything else, no matter how much popular culture it devours, to steal the word “twilight” for other use.)

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