LAST OF THE DRAGONS

LAST OF THE DRAGONS

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last-of-the-dragons2I don’t think I’ve gone to see a children’s play since my youngest brother was in a community church production of Grease. I’ve certainly never attended one with an eye out for analysis.

What would be the point? It’s children’s theatre. It’s so easy to dismiss with contempt, unless you’ve got a sparkly-eyed niece accompanying you, all gung-ho to see sword-fighting Princesses and golden Dragon puppets singing and dancing – which I didn’t. I had to guard against any immediately snarky but-I-studied-acting-in-college reactions.

See, I’ve got this new gig reviewing shows. This means free theatre. I love theatre. I love it. And I’m not the kind of girl who can afford this particular jones regularly – only when very special friends are in very special productions. So – free ticket? The word “Dragons” in the title? And, oh, hey – fantasy! I write this stuff! I read this stuff. I’m totally game.

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Clash of the Titans: The Alan Dean Foster Novelization

Clash of the Titans: The Alan Dean Foster Novelization

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clash-of-titans-coverUpdate: Alan Dean Foster has generously provided some comments of his own about the novelization. Please see the comments section.

2010: The Year We Remake Clash of the Titans.

I have never thought that re-making Ray Harryhausen’s final movie, the 1981 telling of the Myth of Perseus and Medusa, was a smart idea. I don’t, in principle, oppose re-makes (what good would that stance do in these strange times anyway?), but the original Clash of the Titans is a 100% auteur film, a movie that exists because Ray Harryhausen did the stop-motion effects. Harryhausen defines the movie. Any re-make would simply tackle an old myth with new—and not necessarily more interesting—effects to cash-in on Generation X name recognition. And then when I actually read the plot description of the 2010 Clash, I shook my head in mystification . . . this Hades vs. The Other Gods concept is antithetical to Greek Mythology. The original Clash alters many elements of Perseus’s story, but it still feels similar to how the Archaic and Classical Greeks must have imagined their Heroic Age.

A deeper reason that I’m doubtful of the re-tooled Clash of the Titans is the enormous personal investment I have in the original film. No other movie from my childhood has had such a direct effect on my later interests as an adult. Unlike many childhood loves, Clash of the Titans holds up perfectly today; the magic remains, and many scenes still give me shivers. Nostalgia alone does not carry the film; it can carry itself quite proudly.

But . . . I’m not here today to review the original Clash of the Titans. I’m planning to do an extensive analysis of it later this month, but for the first post of 2010 I’ve decided to take a different tactic as a warm-up and approach Clash of the Titans from a side road; a road rarely taken in film or book critiques: the movie novelization.

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Last Night I Finished This Crooked Way

Last Night I Finished This Crooked Way

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thiscrookedway
Last night I finished This Crooked Way, by James Enge.

I was on the train, halfway home. There is very little more irritating than finishing a book when you’re just halfway to your destination. Luckily, I had George R.R. Martin’s Fevre Dream in my backpack, the first two chapters of which were quite good, so I didn’t suffer long. And anyway, good as it was, I kept being drawn back to thoughts of This Crooked Way, connecting dots, remembering the heights, the depths, the scaffolding of each story, and how it made me laugh – out loud – so often that I surprised myself.

There are some books that make me read them aloud – mostly their dialogue, but also certain killer phrases or descriptions. It’s my actor’s training, I suppose. Plays are not meant to be read on the page; you have to voice them lest they lose vibrancy and dimension. Some books, my favorite kind of books, leap into my throat and start declaiming themselves. And it doesn’t matter if I’m on a public train, or tromping to work in the snow with my fingers freezing, because I’ve left off my gloves, because it’s hard to turn pages with gloves on – none of that matters, because the words are just that important.

And This Crooked Way is like that.

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Heroscape Dungeoneering

Heroscape Dungeoneering

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Heroscape Master Set 3: Dungeons and Dragons Battle for the Underdark
Wizards of the Coast ($21.99, Jan 2010)
Reviewed by Howard Andrew Jones

Here at the Jones household we have the new Heroscape Master Set 3. Judging by the amount of Heroscape I’ve been playing with the kids, the game may have us.

The new master set is smaller than either of the first two, although its 50 interlocking terrain pieces can simulate a variety of battlefields — and can add in to any existing terrain sets a Heroscape gamer already owns. If you’re a relative newcomer to the concept of Heroscape, like I was until just recently, it’s a do-it-yourself game board of surprisingly sturdy interlocking hexagonal tiles. Some of the tiles are part of larger platforms, and some are merely a hexagon. Different colors suggest grass, or rock, or sand, or swamp — or even swamp water or regular water. They can be combined in an almost endless array of patterns, limited only by imagination and the amount of tiles.

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Short Fiction Beat: Looking Forward to 2010

Short Fiction Beat: Looking Forward to 2010

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212Well, entering the year (both in terms of typing the title and having lived to seeapexmag2_medium it) was a little weird to write. The first chapter of The Martian Chronicles is January 1999, which from the vantage point of the middle of the 20th century, when the German V-rockets had landed not on another planet, but London, that seemed about right for when humanity might be “reaching for the stars” as it was called.  The book ends in April 2026 which, with luck, proper diet and exercise, and health care reform I might actually still be alive to see. And which more than likely humankind, assuming it hasn’t blown itself up, will remain earthbound.

So much for the fantasies of the Golden Age of science fiction writers.

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Reading Goals in the New Year

Reading Goals in the New Year

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book_stackAs some of you may know, I’ve been talking and thinking and blogging (not necessarily in that order) about reading more, and reading better over the course of the last year. Today being New Year’s Day, the day of resolutions and goal-setting, I thought I’d link to some of the posts I’ve written on the subject for those interested in focusing on ratcheting up their reading in the coming year.

Firstly, something of a summary of my reading posts can be found in a three part article that has recently gone up at Grasping For the Wind called ‘Ramp Up Your Reading.’ In the first part, ‘More and Faster‘ I go over ways to try to get more reading hours shoehorned into the day. In ‘Do It Better‘ I focus more on the quality of one’s reading, and how slowing things down can often be a more efficient use of time than trying to skim through a lot of books. Finally, in ‘Expand Your Horizons,’ I talk a bit about challenging yourself to read outside your comfort zone or in a more focused way. That post grew out of starting my own experiment in the form of a Five Book Challenge, in which a friend of mine and I each assigned one another five books to read in the coming year.

Regular readers of the Black Gate blog will have read some of my posts on reading in the past that pertain to increasing one’s reading output. Both my post on keeping reading lists and “speed reading” focus on trying to get more read over time. I’ve also talked about reading ruts and obsession in Specialist and Generalist Readers. Beyond the practical, my paen On Bookmarks may be of interest, as might my celebration of browsing in a brick-and-mortar bookstore: Books Best Appreciated in Their Natural Habitat. Any way you slice it, a nice, fresh, new year is the perfect time to decide you are going to read that fat classic or epic series you always wanted to, or set some goal for yourself like reading a book a week or shooting for 100 books in a year. Whatever your personal goals, it’s always satisfying to to do something different and new — after all, it is a New Year, and I think it’s worth trying to keep it ‘new’ as long as we can.
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BILL WARD is a genre writer, editor, and blogger wanted across the Outer Colonies for crimes against the written word. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, as well as gaming supplements and websites. He is a Contributing Editor and reviewer for Black Gate Magazine, and 423rd in line for the throne of Lost Lemuria. Read more at BILL’s blog, DEEP DOWN GENRE HOUND.

GOTH CHICK NEWS: The End of 2009

GOTH CHICK NEWS: The End of 2009

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true-blood2As 2009 comes to an end I find the events of the last twelve months firing past my sub-conscious like the recap sequence before one of those lame “it was all a dream” mini-series endings. 

Unfortunately any list of highlights from 2009, besides proving that reality is far more frightening than fiction, would also be intensely boring.  I’ll leave that to CNN and NPR. 

Instead, here are a few random thoughts – on Dacre Stoker’s Dracula the Un-Dead,  the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures show, HBO’s True Blood and the new Sookie Stackhouse novel, the upcoming film version of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, the return of the Halloween, Costume and Party Show to Chicago, and more.

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IMARO: The Naama War by Charles Saunders

IMARO: The Naama War by Charles Saunders

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naama-warBack when Black Gate‘s editor John O’Neill lived in Ottawa in the early 80s, he was a member of a small SF fan club.  His first meeting featured a reading from the editor of an excellent local fanzine, Stardock, who had just completed his first novel.  The author was Charles Saunders, the novel was Imaro, and the reading he never forgot.

DAW released the first three Imaro novels between 1981 and 1985, then dropped the series for reasons arising from textbook bad marketing decisions, a lawsuit from the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate over a poorly chosen cover quote (“The Epic Novel of a Black Tarzan”), and publishing delays.

For the whole sordid tale, read Charles de Lint’s introduction to the Night Shade edition of the first novel.

Night Shade books released the first two books, Imaro and The Quest for Cush, in handsome new editions in 2006 & 2007, and Saunders self-published the third volume, The Trail of Bohu, through his Sword & Soul Media press last year.

The true tragedy of the saga of Imaro is that the fourth novel has never been published – until now.

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AVATAR flies high; SKULLS is on the way…

AVATAR flies high; SKULLS is on the way…

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SOARING ON THE WINGS OF MYTH:
James Cameron’s AVATAR revels in the grand traditions of fantasy

 The other day I slipped on a pair of 3-D glasses and was transported to a primordial world of alien beauty and high adventure. I was watching James Cameron’s new film AVATAR, which has become a full-fledged cultural phenomenon. Much has been made of the film’s absolute perfection of special effects because Cameron creates a fantasy world that is truly believable. Thanks to his breakthroughs in computer-generated imagery and sheer breadth of imagination, AVATAR is more than a mere film… it’s an EXPERIENCE.

SKULLS starts right here at blackgate.com on Jan. 6
SKULLS starts right here at blackgate.com on Jan. 6

Comparisons to other blockbuster fantasy/sci-fi films are inevitable. Everything George Lucas attempted to do in his three STAR WARS prequels, Cameron actually succeeds at, i.e. building a fully realized and eminently believable fantasy world that is breathtaking in scope and packed with sheer wonder. But that perfection of simulated reality, that ability to make the fantastical seem genuine was NOT what I enjoyed most about this movie.

All the visual flair would be meaningless if the film didn’t draw upon the classic power and inspiration of the great fantasy tales. AVATAR is a fantasy fan’s ultimate cinematic experience. The fact that this fantasy is wrapped in the guise of science fiction only makes it more appealing and marktable to the average moviegoing audience. Both sci-fi and fantasy fans will be enraptured by the AVATAR experience.

thorsflight Cameron’s inspirations for AVATAR span the gamut of everything from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ BARSOOM (John Carter of Mars) stories to Lucas’ STAR WARS (which were inspired by FLASH GORDON comic strips, among others), to the deep myths of the Old West, stone-age adventures, Jungle Tales comics, American Indian mythology, and wraps it all in a lush visual style worthy of the master Frank Frazetta himself.

One of the tropes Cameron plays with in this story–to great visual and emotional effect–is the riding of winged creatures by the Na’vi alien warriors.

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