Lamb gets some notice in the Wall Street Journal
I just wanted to give a quick heads-up that our good friend Howard got some press for his Lamb anthologies in the Wall Street Journal!
Review Roundup
With summer waning, I wanted to take a moment to provide thumbnail reviews of things many of you should find of interest.
DVD
Rome – Pretty much a must-see for any fan of sword-and-sorcery or historical fiction. As far as I’m concerned, the two genres are closely related, and I’m sure a fan of either will be a fan of this.Not for the faint-of-heart due to sex and violence… but extremely well written and acted. The story arcs get more and more compelling the deeper into the series you watch. I haven’t been this caught up in a TV series since a friend loaned me the Firefly boxed set.
BOOKS
Blood of Ambrose – It should come as no small wonder that I enjoyed James Enge’s first Morlock novel. I’ve been a fan of his work since his first appearance in Black Gate. Good stuff, brimming with brilliant world building, witty characters, and swordplay and foul sorcery.
Bill Ward and I are planning an in-depth look at some of the fine work coming out from the Warhammer game publisher, and I wanted to provide a sneak peek of the goodness we found within.
Blackhearts Ominbus – I’m halfway through Nathan Long’s collection and have loved every minute of it. A dirty dozen type series in a fantasy land, with flawed but likable characters, fabulous pacing, and great action sequences. I have the suspicion that the rest of it will hold up just as well.
Eisenhorn Omnibus– Dan Abnett wasn’t satisfied with creating a fabulous lead character in an action-packed space opera; he sent him to fantastic places and provides a series of detective/investigative stories full of logical turns, surprises, and plenty of action.
Witch Hunter Omnibus – I finally got to read C. L. Werner’s first two Mathias Thulman books, full of Gothic menace and brooding castles. I would never have guessed that I would be rooting for a witch hunter, but Werner pulls it off, and delivers plenty of surprises along the way.
GAMING
Mongoose Games has a license for Traveller, and the core book and first supplements (High Guard and Traders and Gunboats) have been well-handled. I look forward to seeing what more they have planned.
Cortex System Role Playing Game, from Margaret Weis games, is the engine behind their Firefly game. It’s a slim, elegant-looking system, and will be reviewed in-depth in the next issue of Black Gate.
Goodman Games has a new magazine, Level Up, that seems at least partly inspired by the original Dragon. Adventures and articles on game play and character interaction are included within. We’ll be reviewing in-depth next issue, but my initial impression is one of delight.
Howard Andrew Jones
The “Other” Harryhausen: The 3 Worlds of Gulliver
The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960)
Directed by Jack Sher. Starring Kerwin Mathews, June Thorburn, Grégoire Aslan, Basil Sydney, Jo Morrow, Sherri Alberoni, Peter Bull.
First there was the Dynamation spectacle of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Then there was Mysterious Island. Then the miracle of Jason and the Argonauts, and… wait, I seem to have skipped one. Oh yes, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, made right after Sinbad. Now how did that one slip away?
Among the “Core Ten” Harryhausen films, the ten color fantasy and period science-fiction pictures he made between 1958 and his retirement in 1981 (all but one produced with Charles H. Schneer), The 3 Worlds of Gulliver gets the least amount of love now. For most of the 1980s, it was probably the unfortunate The Valley of Gwangi that suffered the most neglect, but that was because of its unavailability on video. (The weird name wasn’t helping it either; it certainly wasn’t the filmmakers’ first choice for the title.) Today, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver has turned into something of “the other movie” in the list of Harryhausen classics, even though it came out in 1960 fresh after the smash global success of The 7th Voyage Sinbad and featured that movie’s star, Kerwin Mathews, and its composer, Bernard Herrmann. In fact, Herrmann’s score is well-loved and appreciated among music fans through multiple re-recordings, but those same music lovers often haven’t watched the movie that inspired the music.
Regarding Two Earlier Posts
Regarding two earlier posts:
In reporting the demise of Jim Baen’s Universe, I started wondering about the habit in genre fiction to use a famous author as a brand or a subgenre. There’s a line of “Ray Bradbury Presents” paperbacks, and then, of course, there’s Asimov’s and Alfred Hitchcock magazines. This doesn’t happen in mainstream fiction. As far as I know, there’s no Hemingway’s or “Shakespeare Presents” or T. C. Boyle Digest.
And what’s with this “nines” thing? In addition to those nines I’ve already mentioned, along comes The Law of Nines from Terry Goodkind.
I guess the sequels will be called “18.”
An Interview with Midnight Syndicate mastermind Ed Douglas
Yes, my goth friends, there is a Santa! The highly creative people over at Midnight Syndicate are finally delivering on my personal wish list in the form a movie, The Dead Matter. Best known for creating amazing soundtracks to your worse nightmares, Ed Douglas and company are raising the stakes (or should I say “driving in the stakes”?) with this spine-tingler due out later this year. If their latest CD, The Dead Matter, Cemetery Gates is any indication, you won’t want to miss this cinematic horror extravaganza that mixes all the best elements of a classic, 1930’s monster movie, with your favorite bits from the 80’s. And if you’re listening to a Midnight Syndicate classic as you read this article, you’ve got something in common with Hugh Hefner! Read on to learn more as we clear the cob webs and sit down for a chat with the masterful music and movie creator, Ed Douglas. …
The Ham-Sized Fist Award
A while back I talked about The David Gemmell Legend Award, given this year for the first time to a fan favorite novel of heroic fantasy. Like most fans of adventure-oriented secondary world fantasy, I was used to seeing writers and books I liked pretty much ignored when it came to awards — so the Gemmell Legend Award came as a pleasant and welcome surprise. Well, seems another award for our fair sub-genre is also getting its start this year, one that specifically looks at sword & sorcery and heroic fantasy short fiction — The Ham-Sized Fist Award.
Boasting a (currently) 800 dollar prize split between author and publisher, and a name no one is likely to forget, The Ham-Sized Fist Award was founded by editor Jeff Crook with the intention of recognizing excellence in the rather neglected field of short form heroic fantasy. It’s open to any works published in 2009 in print or electronic venues that use an editorial process for selection. So far, works from Black Gate, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Flashing Swords, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Black Dragon, White Dragon, and Rage of the Behemoth, among others, have been nominated.
Short Fiction Beat: Tale of Two Magazines
Well, here we are in Web 2.0 (whatever that exactly means), print magazines are supposedly dying (even as they are being resuscitated, c.f., Realms of Fantasy) and people still aren’t quite sure how to make the on-line magazine model work. One problem is that, if you’re like me, you don’t like reading stories on a screen. You like to lay down on your favorite couch and turn pages. Of course, if you’re like my daughter, it’s not an issue — when she asks me if I’ve read an article that was in The New York Times, I know without asking that she’s referring to an on-line article.
So, here’s the bad news/goods news. First the bad news. A little while ago, Jim Baen’s Universe announced that after four years it was closing down. The short explanation was, not a surprise given the “information is free” mentality of the Internet, subscriptions couldn’t sustain a magazine that sought to maintain professional print standards (i.e., actually paying authors competitive rates for their work). Everyone, including The New York Times is trying to figure this one out, and one approach has been to not pay writers. Not surprisingly, frequently you get what you pay for.
As for the good news, Strange Horizons, which has had great success with a sort of public radio/tv fund drive donation model, has exceeded its 2009 Fund Drive goals way ahead of schedule (though you can still contribute, by the way).
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Thoughts Concerning Scurvy (De Scorbuto)
I come from a medical family. Of the five members of my immediate nuclear family, I’m the only one who lacks a background or job in medicine or health care. As a writer and historian growing up in a family that now consists of a pathologist, a nurse and lactation expert, a medical student on the cusp of graduation, and an occupational therapist, it was probably inevitable that I developed an interest in disease both in history and fiction. I would never get near the profession of medicine (the general public ought to thank me for this—I’d make a horrible doctor), but the dramatic role of disease in writing has always entranced me.
Among writers, bubonic plague is the leading favorite pestilence. It’s hard to resist the power of an illness that wiped out a third of Europe during the late Middle Ages and has a death toll exceeding two hundred million. The very title “The Black Death” instantly conjures up Hieronymous Bosch grotesques in most people’s minds. It’s a disease with an outstanding pedigree for fantasy and historical writers.
However, I’d like to shine an operating room light on another disease that I think is one of the most useful for a writer. At a cursory glance, it seems like it shouldn’t have any dramatic potential at all: not only is it easily preventable, it’s also easily cured. It isn’t even communicable. But a second glance reveals that this disease is a superb tool for fiction.
The disease is scurvy.
Gen Con 2009 Report #5 – The Free Blog Edition
I read a lot of geeky books. And I don’t just mean science fiction and fantasy, I mean books that make even many normal geeks raise an eyebrow at my choices, such as books on game theory, economics and business, philosophy, and so on … things that have nary a laser rifle or robot or sword or sorcerer in sight. Right now, I’m reading Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine. (An abridged audiobook version is available for free.)
It seems like when I read these books, the principles they espouse often show up all over the place, and that’s certainly happening at GenCon. In fact, the principles of “free” described by Anderson have always, in some form, been at the heart of every industry of sales. (Early on in the book, he explains how free cookbooks made the failing Jell-O company thrive.) And the gaming industry is no different.
For example, many roleplaying games have for years offered free little booklets that allow you to get started with a game, try it out in a limited way, and see if you enjoy it before you invest dollars and hours into playing it. But the problem is that these books were not actually free. There was a trade-off, because the publishers still had to actually print out the booklets and distribute them and so on. There was a cost to this, so it wasn’t just that they wanted to make money – if the gambit didn’t work, they were actually out money! Now, with the online world, PDF versions of books can be distributed (virtually) free of cost! That’s how Black Gate is able to offer reviews and commentary for free through these online blogs, for example.
Many of the gaming companies at GenCon have also embraced “free,” such as Hero Mages, an online board/strategy game that is completely free to play, but which allows players to pay a price to access certain premium characters and options (such as the ability to create and save your own map designs). (Anderson calls this business model a “freemium” model, where a portion of the users spend money for upgrades, which supports the site for everyone.)
Another company that is brilliantly using “free” as a means of promotion is Shard Studios, who have created the Shard RPG. This game is based on the Hindu mythology of India and allows you to play a number of animal-based races. The setting doesn’t have any metal, but their weapons and equipment are built from gems of various types that can be used to power magical items, such as flying airships, or forged into weapons (such as the swords in the pictures above) with different properties. The books are beautiful and the setting is truly enthralling … it is one of a handful of games that I left GenCon knowing I would definitely want to try out by running a full game with.
How is Shard using “free”? Well, on their website, if you go to “The Game” link you can choose to download a “Welcome Booklet.” This booklet contains the entire game mechanics of the system, setting information, some introductory character templates, and so on. It is essentially the bulk of the main core rulebook … except for character creation, for which you need to buy the actual book. But, by checking out the Welcome Booklet, you can be sure that you really want the game before you shell out the money for the entire set of rules. And, if you just want to play the game and never create a character, I suppose you could even do that (although, as most gamers know, character creation is one of the most fun aspects of any game).
Gen Con 2009 Report #4
I don’t know how many attendees are making it to GenCon this year, but the place is certainly packed. For example, here’s one of the game rooms. Not a dealer’s room, but just a room where people are playing board games.
The rooms that house the miniature war games – WarMachine, Hordes, HeroClix, Dark Ages, and the like – are typically even larger than this one. They’re spread throughout the building, in rooms both large and small. And, of course, some of the attendees choose more elaborate clothing.
Now, back to the games. This time I’m just going to focus on one – Colonial Gothic from Rogue Games. This is a secret history setting that takes place during the early days of the American Revolution. Among all of the historical events of the American Revolution, there also exist monsters, demons, and witches prowling the colonies. Your character is aware of their presence and fights against these forces.
One nice feature of the game is that it has three play styles: High Action Style, Occult & Mystery Style, and Supernatural Style. So, depending on how your GM and players prefer to play, you can run scenarios that fit the style of story that they’d all most like to be involved in. These styles are not firm – you can have an Occult & Mystery game that has High Action elements, of course. The overall design of Colonial Gothic is to provide the setting information and game mechanics, but to provide the player with a wide range of approaches for how to actually construct a storyline. The creator of the game is also extremely proud of the amount of research that went into the setting, so this might also be a good way to play with younger players who need to learn about this period in American history.