Encountering Howard

Encountering Howard

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sowers-thunderTo write something on the occasion of Robert E. Howard’s birthday is a bit, well, intimidating. As imposing a presence as the Texan was in life, his reputation a century on has approached the status of myth. Not only that, but his work is the subject of formidable scholarship of the sort seen over at The Cimmerian and at the Robert E. Howard forums — and I’ll admit that the breadth of knowledge and insight displayed in even the most casual thread or post at either of those sites leaves me in the dust. Then too there are my fellow BGers who plan to post something today, many of whom have a deep and abiding passion for Howard and a long familiarity with his work. But in my case, on the subject of Howard, I’m a rank amateur.

But I’m an enthusiastic amateur, and if I can’t write from a position of deep learning, than I can at least offer my own personal appreciation for his work, which I was a long time in coming to. I met him first through Conan, naturally, a character more famous than his creator. It was as a wee lad sitting in front of the television and watching a behind-the-scenes special on an R-rated movie that I was not yet allowed to watch that I first encountered the iron-thewed Cimmerian . . . and a future governor of California. When I finally did get to see Conan the Barbarian, it immediately became one of my favorite films, cementing nicely with the melange of fantasy loves such as Dragonslayer and the old Robin Hood BBC series,  The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and Dragonlance, and, of course, Dungeons & Dragons.

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“The Fire of Asshurbanipal”: The First Time I Met Robert E. Howard

“The Fire of Asshurbanipal”: The First Time I Met Robert E. Howard

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Today’s is Robert E. Howard’s birthday—I’ve always felt pleased that it lies so close to mine, as January is a lonely month in which to have your birthday—and for my gesture to commemorate the Great Lord of Blood, Thunder, and Thick Mountain Accents, I’m going to take a short glance back at my first encounter with him, in the story “The Fire of Asshurbanipal.”

Okay, I lied. It’s not short . . .

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Bloody Brilliance: Why I Love Robert E. Howard

Bloody Brilliance: Why I Love Robert E. Howard

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Why do I love the works of Robert E. Howard?kull

Emerald jungles filled with scalp-hungry picts. The primordial perfection of axe and spear. The clang of steel on steel beneath tattered banners, and the dying howls of winged terrors. Lost temples and fantastic jewels, mounds of gold steeped in the glow of eldritch flames…

The thunderous cadence of tribal drums and clouds rushing grey as death. Ruby-eyed witches and bloody claws trailing torn flesh. The primal rush of muscle and bone…battle cries like phantom bats above the field of honor. The stench of Stygian darkness where serpents gleam and glide, as terrible gods demand red sacrifices…

 The sorcerer who peers beyond and calls up fiends from Hell…the clash of iron and the defiance of tyranny. The triumph of the noble savage against the cruelty of opulent empires. Colossal spiders and spitting vipers. The turn of a supple leg, the heaving of breasts and swirling of gossamer veils. The crushing embrace of bronze arms, the blazing passion of life against the black gloom of death…

The galloping hosts of antique nations, the cry of a night-beast wailing at the moon. The precarious dance of flesh and metal, the arcs of flying crimson. Spilling viscera. The brutal grace of prehistoric combat, the strength of arm and gnashing of teeth. The sparkling visions of a misted age, the mysteries of old worlds heavy as dreams…

The Cimmerian snow and glaciers, the breath of northern myth…the sweltering desert where vultures stalk parched prey…the rise of Slave to King…the simplicity of might making right in a world tossed on seas of blood. The damsels in distress and the avenging hero…the lantern jaws and sapphire eyes. The glittering towers collapsing in shards…

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The ancient world transmogrified, embroidered with the brilliants of legend, steeped in the wine of epic storms. The blood and thunder. The broad-shouldered lug and the skull-faced horror…the sting of a whisper in darkness. The dripping dagger and the broken blade…

Crumbling continents and rushing seas, the cataclysm of evolution…Atlantis and the descendents of Valusia. Tiger totems. Solemn kings brooding on golden thrones…the serpents that walk on two legs…the wizards haunting graveyards and the bones that rattle and walk in moonlight…the Valley of the Worm.

The mystic spell of language…the well-turned phrase and the phantasm of imagery. The tales of obsession, the obsession with tales. The poetry of doom and the marching specters…the man, the legend, the visionary…

The spectacular stories, the gripping yarns, the wonderfully weird tales…

Immortality wrought in ink and parchment.

All this and more…that’s why I love REH.

Happy Birthday, Bob.

— John R. Fultz

Goth Chick News – Cool Stuff to Warm Up Your January

Goth Chick News – Cool Stuff to Warm Up Your January

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chicago-winterA year ago I would have said that if you didn’t live in the Midwest (and basically that means Chicago to me) you really don’t understand the true meaning of the word “cold.” 

Nothing turns you blue faster than that already chill Canadian air barreling its way south over a frozen Lake Michigan.  I mean, where else can you hear the term “freezing fog” as part of the normal forecast?

So why would any sane human being choose to live somewhere the temperature is at or below freezing more than half the year? 

In the immortal words of Chris Farley, who kept a condo in Chicago until his death in 1997, “The cold weather keeps out the riff-raff.”

shiningThanks to The Shining, we all know what happens if you don’t have meaningful mental stimulation during the dark months of winter.  Therefore, as we hunker down by the fire with our favorite form of entertainment, we scavenge for cool and unusual things to get our sluggish blood moving. 

Here are some interesting tidbits that may entice me to get out of my Nightmare Before Christmas fuzzy slippers and venture forth.

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Heroscape Wave 10: Valkrill’s Gambit

Heroscape Wave 10: Valkrill’s Gambit

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heroscape-wave-101One of the things I most enjoy about Heroscape is the great variety of figures in the expansions. Because I was introduced to the game years after it first debuted, I’ve missed out on a number of the earlier sets. I’ve been trying out all of the recent expansion sets, though. What I didn’t know when Wave 10 arrived was that half of it was a reprint from Wave 5t — now very hard to find — that another quarter of it reprinted some hard-to-find special release figures, and that the final quarter recast earlier molds with different colors and rules. I don’t mean that to sound like a complaint, because 3/4 of those figures are nearly impossible to lay hands on and the other quarter, those recasts, are now among my favorite squads.

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Regrets for the Vanished John Carter

Regrets for the Vanished John Carter

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Right now, as I type this and most likely as you read it, a movie titled John Carter of Mars, based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel A Princess of Mars, is in production. Not in development. Not in pre-production. Not in meetings. It is in front of cameras. Andrew Stanton, director of the brilliant CGI Pixar films Finding Nemo and WALL·E, is shooting John Carter of Mars from a script by Stanton, Michael Chabon, and Mark Andrews, in London this very minute, in this dimension, and it will reach theaters in 2012, in time for the novel’s one hundreth birthday.

Really. Honest and for true. It is actually happening.

This is both the perfect and imperfect (although not the pluperfect or future perfect) time for an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Martian novels. It is perfect because the level of special effect visualization has finally caught up to the wild genius of Burroughs’s Barsoom, and the current mania for fantasy and and science-fantasy spectacle has climbed to a level where a wide audience will open up its arms to embrace the wonder of John Carter slashing his way across the dreamworld of Mars. And in Andrew Stanton, we may very well have the perfect director to achieve it. (He has never done a live-action film, but I’ll give the person who directed the new science-fiction classic WALL·E the benefit of the doubt any time). It’s the imperfect time because many viewers will believe that a John Carter of Mars project is some kind of Avatar clone. James Cameron’s mega-blockbuster borrows heavily from Edgar Rice Burroughs—to the point that I almost could think of nothing else but ERB while I was watching it—but general audiences probably won’t know that not only does John Carter date back to 1912, but a film project has been going through constant development hell since the 1980s. For years, I’ve had my hopes raised with each announcement in the trades that made it seem that a Barsoomian adventure was finally about to make it to theaters: the close-call with John McTiernan (I own a copy of that Rossio-Elliott script; not bad), the almost with Robert Rodriguez from a Mark Protosevich script, the near-miss with Kerry Conran, and the so-close brush with John Favreau before Iron Man called.

But the story of the development Purgatorio of John Carter goes back even farther into history. Farther even then the discussion of Ray Harryhausen adapting the property in the 1950s. To see what might have been, during the only other time that John Carter could have been properly imagined for theaters, we must look back to the Great Decade of the 1930s.

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Rich Horton reviews Black Gate 13

Rich Horton reviews Black Gate 13

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black-gateissue-13-coverEvery year, uberreviewer Rich Horton sets out to summarize the year in genre short fiction at his newsgroup on SFFNet.

Note I didn’t say “survey,” or “overview.”  Rich reads every story in every single magazine in the field — and more than a few outside it — and discusses each publication in detail.  It’s a process that takes months (not including reading time). As he put it in his final post last year:

I read various issues of 36 print magazines, 29 electronic sources, 50 original anthologies, 14 story collections with original pieces, 12 single story chapbooks, and a few other miscellaneous spots. I read a total of 2325 stories: 69 novellas, 434 novelettes, and 1823 short stories… word count total, a bit over 13.5 million.

Is he crazy? (That’s not a rhetorical question. The answer is probably yes.) But until he’s institutionalized, the rest of us benefit greatly from both his stamina and his superior taste.

How do we know his taste is superb? Because he likes Black Gate, for one thing.

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Short Fiction Review #24: Realms of Fantasy February 2010

Short Fiction Review #24: Realms of Fantasy February 2010

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currentissue-feb2010The new Realms of Fantasy coincides with the relaunch (as of December 11, 2009) of an actually informative website since Warren Lapine took over as publisher beginning with the August 2009 issue (and perhaps the fact that  the website of previous owner Sovereign Media was essentially just a placeholder was indicative of the company’s general lack of interest in the magazine that eventually led to its sale). There was a free PDF version of this bimonthly available for a time, but the link seems to have been taken down. Fans of Black Gate magazine in particular will no doubt appreciate the largely sword and sorcery, high fantasy type fiction, as well as the related non-fiction gaming, illustration and book genre reviews. Black Gate fans may also appreciate that their favorite magazine dispenses with high gloss interior color; for some reason the graphic designer(s) of the current RoF think that red and yellow headlines and callouts on a white background  make the magazine more visually interesting; I find it not only ugly, but in certain lighting, difficult to read.

Of interest to the broader science fiction and fantasy audience, however, is a Harlan Ellision® short story  featuring a curmudgeonly character undoubtedly intended to remind you of the copyrighted author. This is another in the genre’s seemingly endless fascination with the Frankenstein trope of the responsibilities between the creator and the created.  Ellison’s spin is to introduce the notion of the stupidity and bigotry of political correctness while tacking on two alternate endings reminiscent of classic Golden Age treatments of this theme from the 1950s/1960s. Actually, I thought the story worked well enough if it ended with “But I had been ignorant of the laws of human nature, and we both knew it was all my responsibility. The beginning,the term of the adventure, and now, the ending” (31) before it branches off to present conclusions from two different perspectives. The second has deeper philosophical implications, but for whatever visceral reasons I prefer the first one. No spoilers here — decide and discuss among  yourselves.

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Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith

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cascabin1

I would hope by now that regular visitors to this site are aware of the fine work going on over at The Cimmerian. I try to visit the web site several times a week, as there’s always something of interest for the fantasy fan — particularly the heroic fiction fantasy fan, but frequently for any fan of fantasy.

This week The Cimmerian has really pulled out all the stops and launched a series of articles on Clark Ashton Smith.  He’s one of the big Weird Tales three (the other two being Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft) but he’s less frequently discussed and, until recently, has been harder to find in print. Fortunately Night Shade Books has been taking good care of Smith recently.

Why was Smith important? Well, you should probably bop over to The Cimmerian and read the excellent essays that prompted this post.  The posts start with this Wednesday’s entry. And if you’re not familiar with the site, please look deeply at a wealth of fine articles and essays, and make it a regular stop.