Black Gate – Page 1337 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Dragon*Con Report Part 1

Wednesday, September 8, 2010 Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones Comments 5 comments

john-and-the-hobbits — John O'Neill mingling with celebrities.

Those of you who’ve never attended a convention, let alone Dragon*Con, might wonder what the purpose of one is, and what they are like. I used to wonder what all the fuss was over myself, so I thought I’d provide a quick primer for the uninitiated. Attending a fantasy or science fiction convention is an excellent opportunity to mingle with other people who enjoy the same things you do, to interact with the creators of the kinds of work you love, and to meet with the people who edit and publish that work. Sometimes it’s a chance to obtain reproductions of that work, or images from it, or objects based on props from said work. Conventions are also a fabulous chance to network with peers and publishers who might or might not know your own work, although I never advise cornering an editor for twenty minutes of unbroken narrative to pitch any novel, especially one that you haven’t written yet.

But as to what a convention is like, they’re all different. World Fantasy Con, which Black Gate will be attending in force near the end of October, tends to be somewhat intimate, and fairly sober – at least during the day. Dragon*Con, well… I think Lou Anders of Pyr described it quite well in a post earlier today when he said it was like Mardi Gras on Middle-Earth. There are so many different lines of programming that Dragon*Con requires five immense hotels to provide space for them all, and so many attendees that they can’t fit into even those – there are at least five overflow hotels in addition to those with events. There seem to have been something in the area of 68,000 people attending this year. You could field a whole lot of Roman legions with all of those people, though you probably wouldn’t want to.

When I say “Lines of Programming” I mean different kinds of panels and events. There are so many special guests and panels to attend you can go to Dragon*Con with ten of your friends and each have entirely different, and interesting, experiences. If you want, you can go to nothing but writing panels and learn publishing secrets. You can go to media panels where movie, TV, or comic stars discuss what it was/is like working on their show. You can go to the art show and peruse the graphic arts, or maybe buy some, or go on the gaming track, or see a huge selection of independent films. There were two halls of exhibitors and one dealer room and even though I toured through all three I’m sure I didn’t see every product. Strolling through all of it are folk in costume. Some of those costumes are simple affairs, or store bought. Some are hand-crafted works of exquisite art. Some of them will sear your mind in wonder, although not always the good kind.

Into this we of Black Gate wandered, and I’ll provide a detailed account of what we saw and who we met before the end of the week.

The Weird of Cornell Woolrich: “Kiss of the Cobra”

Tuesday, September 7, 2010 Ryan Harvey Comments 0 Comment

lair_of_the_white_worm No, this isn’t a review of the Ken Russell film The Lair of the White Worm. The poster just fits so well with Cornell Woolrich’s 1935 story “Kiss of the Cobra” that I had to use it. You would almost think Russell was adapting Woolrich, not Bram Stoker.

My three previous installments exploring the fantasy and horror tales of suspense author Cornell Woolrich have all looked at classic works from his typewriter: “Jane Brown’s Body,” “Dark Melody of Madness,” and “Speak to Me of Death.” However, Woolrich was a prolific pulpster, and sometimes he pounded out sub-par work because the hotel room bill had to be paid. Any Woolrich fan can whip out a list of the writer’s suspense stories that simply made him or her cringe—and not positively. I’m as hardcore a Woolrich aficionado as you will likely find, and even I have to admit that some of his lesser stories are dreadful. His exploration of vampires, one of his potentially intriguing side trips into the supernatural, “Vampire’s Honeymoon” (later revised and retitled “My Lips Destroy” so Woolrich could sell it as a “new” piece), is the single most clichéd work about vampires I’ve ever read. Only the staking of a vampire using a broken hockey stick makes it remotely interesting. I can’t imagine Woolrich spent more than two hours cranking it out and then sending it off. It’s an indication of the power of Cornell Woolrich’s name on the front of pulp magazines of the time that it sold on its first try.

But some of Woolrich’s mid-level work deserves attention, and “Kiss of the Cobra” falls solidly into his opus of “weird stories.” It examines the concept of “foreign other” with fantasy displays that hint at black magic, contains richly sensual prose, and has a liminal sense of a were-creature. The suspense and hard-boiled crime aspects are also well executed, even if the mesh of the two sides isn’t that smooth. Much greater work was to come, but with all its flaws (such as the standard pulp era’s Euro-centric view of India and a protagonist given to generic wise-crack dialogue) the story remains worth visiting for horror and suspense enthusiasts.

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Dare We Dream? – The Sandman Coming to Television?

Sunday, September 5, 2010 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 0 Comment

morpheus Many of my contemporaries believed that one of the most amazing comic book series ever was Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, which ran from 1989 through 1996 – formative teenage years for me and my peers – originally by DC Comics and (from issue #47) under their Vertigo imprint. Now it looks like The Sandman has been re-optioned for consideration as a television series. Though the series creator isn’t associated with the show, there’s still reason to be hopeful.

A Current Dearth of Viewing Pleasures

The last few years haven’t been great for science fiction and fantasy on television. Heroes started out great, but quickly collapsed for a variety of reasons. The quirky series Pushing Daisies – about a man who could re-animate dead people for 60 seconds – never quite found its audience, despite critical acclaim. Legend of the Seeker was pushing out some impressive storylines toward the end, but was ultimately canceled with its season 2 finale.

Among harder science fiction, great concept shows like Dollhouse and FlashForward suffered from some awkward initial storytelling and were ultimately cancelled, while the lackluster V will return for a second season.

In fact, going into this season there isn’t much in the way of science fiction or fantasy on television.

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Mortals, Meet Goblins: A Review of Goblin Fruit Magazine (Part I)

Sunday, September 5, 2010 C.S.E. Cooney Comments 9 comments

gobspr08crop It was a cool November night in 2007. It was, in fact, All Souls Night.

Two friends and I had driven all day from Chicago, Illinois to Saratoga Springs, New York for the World Fantasy Convention. The Open Mic Poetry Reading I wanted to attend started at 10 PM, so there was barely enough time to dump our things in our room and slide into Broadway 1, all bedraggled and a bit unnerved.

The room was crowded, the poets plenteous and eager. I’d planned to recite “Sedna,” which is one doozy of a story-poem, but as the moderator was looking slightly harassed at her list of readers, I assured her I’d go at the end, and only if there was time. The mood I was in, I’d probably have been happy just to tuck tail and run.

Then the poetry began.

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Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part II)

Sunday, September 5, 2010 Matthew David Surridge Comments 3 comments

William Morris This is the second post in a series trying to answer what looks like a simple question: who wrote the first fantasy set entirely in another world? As I found in my first post, to answer that question you first have to decide how to define a fantasy otherworld. I came up with a list of four characteristics: whether the world has a distinct logic to it, such as the use of magic; whether the people in the world are meant to be perceived as residents of this world; whether the world has its own history; and whether it has its own geography. It seems to me most otherworlds have all four characteristics, with a few interesting cases getting by with three. Any less than three, and you don’t have an otherworld.

Now, traditionally, William Morris has been considered to be the first writer to have set a story entirely in a fantastic otherworld; that is, to write a story in which the real world as we know it never appeared. His was the name suggested by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp, it was accepted by John Clute and John Grant in their 1997 Encyclopedia of Fantasy, and it’s found a place in the repository of all human knowledge, Wikipedia. I, however, am disagreeing; I’ve found an a writer from a few decades before Morris who wrote something that seems to me to be an otherworld fantasy.

Before naming that writer, though, I’d like to tackle a related question. And that is: why did it take so long for somebody to come up with the idea?

Consider: Morris’ The Wood Beyond the World was published in 1894. Even if the first otherworld fantasy was in fact a few decades earlier, then people were still telling tales for thousands of years before coming up with the idea of an independent world (it would be interesting to see when the term ‘world’ began being used in criticism, as in ‘the world of Dickens’ or ‘Shakespeare’s green world’). Why the long delay?

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Almuric – Howardian Sword & Planet

Saturday, September 4, 2010 Tom Doolan Comments 1 comment

Planet Stories - Almuric

A few years back I became more enamored of Robert E. Howard’s writing than I already was (which is saying something), and made it a personal quest to read as much of his work as I could find. El Borak, Solomon Kane, Bran Mac Morn… I tried to locate copies of everything I could. (This was before the Del Rey editions came along, and made the quest easier).

Among the many treasures I gathered was a copy of Almuric, Howard’s first and only foray into the Sword & Planet sub-genre, and one of only a handful of book-length works he completed — although Robert E. Howard scholars now seem fairly certain that someone else completed the novel. Some believe that this posthumous collaborator may have been Howard’s agent Otis Adelbert Kline, himself a successful author of Burroughs pastiches such as Planet of Peril, but Howard scholar Morgan Holmes has argued convincingly that it might well have been pulp author Otto Binder. The late, lamented The Cimmerian posted a fine article by Al Harron describing the history or Almuric’s composition and scholarship about its origins.

Be that as it may, Almuric is a classic adventure tale in the Burroughs tradition, but written in Howard’s muscular prose. The narrator, Esau Cairn, is cut from the same familiar cloth as many of Howard’s protagonists. Thick with muscle, a bit of a social outcast, Esau is a true Howardian hero, and provides a relatable figure for the reader to experience the alien world of Almuric.

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Short Fiction Review #32: Bull Spec #2 Summer 2010

Saturday, September 4, 2010 Soyka Comments 1 comment

The unfortunately named Bull Spec (I’m assuming this is a reference to Bull Durham tobacco and/or the Kevin Costner movie that takes place in Durham, N.C. where the magazine is based and its intent to feature local writers of “speculative fiction”) has published its second issue as part of an ambitious plan in an age when print is on the decline to put out two more in 2010 and qualify as a quarterly magazine. Editor Samuel Montgomery-Blinn responded to my complaint that the website looks like something from the 1990s that it was in fact built using software tools of that era because, for now, he’s more concerned about the look and quality of the print publication (also available as a pdf download).

In that, he’s succeeded in producing a full-size, glossy, thick stock, some color magazine that has a look and feel comparable to Interzone, featuring interviews, a serial graphic story, reviews. poetry and short fiction. While the magazine looks fresh and contemporary, like the website the short fiction is from another era, i.e., a pulp magazine of the 1940s. All five stories hinge on the main character coming to some realization about his/her plight in life due to some science fictional contrivance or fantastical occurrence. In every case, you see the O’Henry twist long before it is supposed to surprise you.

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Dracula: Five Not-So-Easy Pieces

Friday, September 3, 2010 William Patrick Maynard Comments 2 comments

In November and December 2009, my jaw was wired shut for eight weeks. During that time I read voraciously being able to accomplish little else. Among the many books I devoured were five Dracula-related titles.

DRACULA THE UN-DEAD (2009/Dutton) by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt achieves what it set out to do: bring income from Dracula back to the Stoker family and re-establish Dracula as the literary “property” of Stoker’s heirs by creating a new franchise from the public domain characters.

I wanted to love this book. I wanted to view it as the authorized sequel to DRACULA, the true heir to Bram Stoker’s literary classic. The trouble is one cannot make that claim when the sequel tries so hard to undo everything in the original.

Rather than pay homage to Bram Stoker’s work, the authors spend nearly 400 pages proving to us that everything Stoker wrote was wrong. Prince Dracula (Stoker was even wrong about his title, it seems he wasn’t a Count) was a “good” vampire working for God (a bizarre interpretation of the historical Vlad Dracula’s papal honor – later rescinded – of Defender of the Faith) and the real villain of DRACULA was the historical Countess Elizabeth Bathory who, it turns out, was a vampire and was also Jack the Ripper.

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In the Grip of “The Northern Thing:” My Top 10 Northern Inspired Stories

Thursday, September 2, 2010 Brian Murphy Comments 13 comments

Let us die in the doing of deeds for his sake;
let fright itself run afraid from our shouts;
let weapons measure the warrior’s worth.
Though life is lost, one thing will outlive us:
memory sinks not beneath the mould.
Till the Weird of the World stands unforgotten,
high under heaven, the hero’s name.

–from Hrolf Kraki’s Saga, Poul Anderson

If I had to choose a favorite sub-genre of fantasy literature it would be those writings showing the clear influence of ancient Northern mythology. Fantasy critic Lin Carter once described a group of writers including the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien, Poul Anderson, and William Morris as being possessed by “The Northern Thing”; I too am firmly in that Icelandic grip of iron. There’s just something about tales of pagan heroes possessed of grim northern courage, set against a backdrop of bleak fjords and smoldering mountain peaks and gray lowering skies, that make me want to hop on the nearest dragon-headed longship and go a-viking.

Following in no particular order are my top 10 favorite northern stories. These are stories inspired by northern myth (the Prose and Poetic Eddas), legend (the Icelandic Sagas), or history (the Danish invasions of England), and sometimes all three at once.

1. The Broken Sword, Poul Anderson. Arguably the greatest fantasy novel without the name J.R.R. Tolkien on its cover, The Broken Sword combines Norse mythology, inexorable tragic fate, faerie races vs. encroaching humanity, and Christianity vs. Paganism in a bloodthirsty, unforgettable saga.

2. Hrolf Kraki’s Saga, Poul Anderson. Anderson makes his second appearance on this list, the only author to do so. Hrolf Kraki’s Saga is a terrific, too little known novel that moves with the speed of lightning (just 260 pages) and hits with the impact of Thor’s hammer. It’s also a retelling of the life and times of an actual Danish king of the same name, and is rendered even more powerful and mythic with its tragic Arthurian overtones.

3. The Saxon Stories, Bernard Cornwell. Uhtred of Bebbanburg is a Saxon youth captured and raised among the Danes, who then proceeds to spend the next several books in this yet-unfinished series fighting alternately for both sides in war-torn 9th century England. The Saxon Stories features Cornwell, a brilliant historical fiction writer, at his near-best (though I still prefer his Warlord Trilogy) with Viking raids, shield walls, axes, dark ages combat, hall-burnings, and general mayhem galore. Great stuff.

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Black Gate Zeppelin to Dragon*Con Update 6: Collateral Damage

Thursday, September 2, 2010 James Enge Comments 2 comments

Adrift over the Great Black Swamp, the wingless flying car Caeruleum probed earth water and the night-dark sky with the sightless fingers of sensor beams.

“The principle is simple enough,” explained Rapunzel McNally, the mad philologist’s beautiful daughter, her clear-cut features lit an eerie green from readouts on the air-car’s control panel. “The cicadas and crickets of the swamp, responding to ancient magnetic rhythms in the earth, spell out messages from the timeless times from before time. My father explained it to me.”

“I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you,” I said, “that your father is the one who’s simple?”

Her father, the mad philologist Gabriel McNally, was in the back seat of the aircar, wearing his most stylish straightjacket. After his denial of tenure by the University of Mackinac he had spent a month drinking absinthe, and had disappeared for another month into the swamp. He returned babbling about a convention of dragons and messages from the Old Ones.

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