Reader vs. Reader

Reader vs. Reader

Comments 7 comments

Reading the old guys can be tricky sometimes. After I reviewed Robert E. Howard’s Almuric last week, I got some correspondence accusing me of being “politically correct” (that terrible thing it is so incorrect to be nowadays) because I had suggested, in the mildest possible way, that REH’s depiction of the black-skinned, sexually predatory and cannibalistic Yagas has racist overtones. Well, in my view, it has, and I didn’t draw that opinion from a bank of statements pre-approved by some central committee. If we entertain, for the sake of argument, the idea that I am right about this, what does it mean about how we read REH?

It means we read REH the same way we read anyone else: in two different ways, simultaneously. Umberto Eco famously dubbed these two readers the naive reader and the sophisticated reader. The naive reader wants the hero to kill the bad guy and marry the space-princess (or space-prince, or what have you). The sophisticated reader is muttering, “Yes, this is much like the plot Burroughs used, with overtones of Hamlet and the occasional oblique reference to postmodernism which is de rigueur for self-consciously retrogenerical pastiche, n’est-ce pas?” The naive reader just wants to sit back and enjoy the movie. The sophisticated reader is the guy sitting in the row behind who won’t STFU. More beyond the jump, in which JE does not STFU

The Spider Revival Part 2: City of Doom

The Spider Revival Part 2: City of Doom

Comments 4 comments

Spider-CityOfDoomLast week, I reviewed the first volume in Baen’s trade paperback reprints of the adventures of Norvell Page’s grisly pulp hero, The Spider. Now, I plunge into the violent maelstrom of … The Spider: City of Doom!

The three novels reprinted in this volume are The City Destroyer, The Faceless One, and The Council of Evil. The City Destroyer, which Page submitted under the title Crumbling Doom, is the earliest of Baen’s reprinted Spider stories, published originally in the January 1935 issue of The Spider. It also appeared in Pocket Books’ reformatted (with pointless modernizing) series in the ‘70s. It ranks as one of the Norvell Page’s best-written works, but it has an ugly timeliness that dulls the edge of the absurdist fantasy and may unsettle some readers. In the opening chapter the villain, decked out with the bland handle “The Master,” steals the secret for a metal-corroding dust. Richard Wentworth thinks the Master plans to use the chemical invention to break into bank vaults, but he should know that his adversaries don’t think that small. Instead of wasting time with piddling safes, the Master uses the chemical to knock down entire New York skyscrapers, killing thousands of people. His first target is New York’s newest, tallest building, and the writing dwells for a few pages on a gruesome depiction of the skyscraper’s collapse and the gory aftermath, complete with fleeing crowds, a dust cloud pluming over the Manhattan skyline, and trapped people trying to escape certain death in a crumbling tower.

Uhm … not a pleasant memory. At times, our world and that of the pulps share tragic similarities. Amidst the Great Depression and staring toward an oncoming second world war, pulp authors occasionally tapped into an insecurity not far removed from our own. The City Destroyer delivers more fear and tension than any thriller you’ll find on the recent bestseller lists, but new readers should be prepared for moments of queasy familiarity. It isn’t much of a nostalgia trip, and even the Spider’s heroics can’t halt an obscene death toll. I would conservatively estimate that seven thousand people perish during this story.

…

Read More Read More

Life in a kingdom

Life in a kingdom

Comments 4 comments

I currently live in a kingdom–not a modern constitutional monarchy like Great Britain, but a genuine old-fashioned kingdom. It is not very much like those portrayed in a great deal of fantasy fiction. Of course, I don’t live at court, whether as a palace servant or a knight-in-training or an apprentice to a royal wizard. I live nowhere near the palace, though I have once or twice gotten lost and turned onto roads that have taken me nearby. There is no road sign stating that the large and ornate building is the palace and I only know because someone told me. Someone also told me that the little neighborhood of low-rise houses near the palace, which look newer and cleaner than the housing for most Dubai non-professional workers, is where the palace servants live.

Crown Prince Hamdan

…

Read More Read More

The Prisoner

The Prisoner

Comments 6 comments

I just became aware that there is a 40th anniversary edition of the cult classic television series The Prisoner. I don’t know what this edition offers that wasn’t available in the previous DVD release a few years ago, though I am certain there will eventually be 45th and 50th edition versions to continually repackage the same content. I’m actually old enough to remember when the series first appeared on American television in the summer of 1968. If you aren’t, you might not appreciate what it was like to not only have original programming in a realm of reruns, but programming that was actually truly original. While the program definitely reflects the counter culturalism of the period, in both garb and attitude, this doesn’t distract from it (as it does with say, the original Star Trek). Like The Twilight Zone, The Prisoner deals with themes that are as relevant to the Internet culture today, maybe more so, even while some of its visual references may be at times painfully archaic.

For more of my own observations on this one-of-a-kind (so much so that efforts to “re-imagine” the program as either a movie or a television series have failed; one reason why a remake like Battlestar Gallactica is so good is because the original was so bad, which is not an advantage you’d have here) you can visit here and here and here and here.

‘On Thud and Blunder’ — Thirty Years Later

‘On Thud and Blunder’ — Thirty Years Later

Comments 6 comments

. . . writers who’ve had no personal experience with horses tend to think of them as a kind of sports car.

Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson

It’s been thirty years since Poul Anderson wrote his essay on the need for realism in heroic fantasy, ‘On Thud and Blunder,’ which you can read in its entirety at the SFWA site, and I think it holds up well even though the genre — and the perception of it — has changed greatly. ‘On Thud and Blunder’ originally appeared in the third installment of Andrew Offutt’s classic anthology series Swords Against Darkness; though it was in the excellent, if unimaginatively named, collection of Anderson’s called Fantasy that I first encountered it. But already at the time of my reading a whole generation of writers had made a name for themselves by following the dictates of realism and common sense in designing their fantasy worlds.

The essay begins with a satire of the genre that features a barbarian cleaving through armor with a fifty-pound sword and riding a horse as if it were a motorbike, among other ridiculous things. It’s the kind of thing that gave heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery a bad name, and perhaps the sort of thing that meant it would soon be eclipsed by a rising tide of ‘high fantasy’ in the eighties and nineties. But, in 1978, hf — as Anderson terms heroic fantasy in an abbreviation that seems to have never caught on — was an emerging star:

Today’s rising popularity of heroic fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery as it is also called, is certainly a Good Thing for those of us who enjoy it. Probably this is part of a larger movement back toward old-fashioned storytelling, with colorful backgrounds, events, and characters, tales wherein people do take arms against a sea of troubles and usually win. Such literature is not inherently superior to the introspective or symbolic kinds, but neither is it inherently inferior; Homer and James Joyce were both great artists.

…

Read More Read More

Forgive Me, Steven, For I Have Sinned . . .

Forgive Me, Steven, For I Have Sinned . . .

Comments 3 comments

“Man, you have got to read this book!”  The words came in a breathless rush, from a friend whose opinion I trusted.  “It’s better than Gates of Fire!” he said, thrusting a rather thick volume into my hands.

Now, most everyone who knows me understands that I have two literary idols, one dead and one living: Robert E. Howard and Steven Pressfield.  They are the prophets of my personal pantheon; their words, their stories, have no equal.  Thus, for him to come up to me and say he’d found a book better than Pressfield’s Gates of Fire was pure heresy, like taking a tinkle on the Bible.  “Impossible!” I replied, holding the book away from my body as though its touch was enough to cause spiritual pollution.

“Read it! You’ll see!”

Color me skeptical . . . and more than a little eager to prove my friend wrong. I accepted his challenge and dug into it that very afternoon, expecting I’d call him up in an hour or so and curse him for taking Pressfield’s name in vain. But I couldn’t. That book had sucked me in.

…

Read More Read More

Sword Against Slug: Robert E. Howard’s Almuric

Sword Against Slug: Robert E. Howard’s Almuric

Comments 12 comments

In the old days, when sheep were sheep and ewes were embraceable, genres tended to ossify pretty fast. But no genre-formula became so formulaic so fast as sword-and-planet. Burroughs set the pattern with A Princess of Mars: a lone American (not a Canadian–not a Ugandan–not a Lithuanian–an American) is mysteriously plunged into an exotic other world which is both more advanced and more primitive than the earth he knows. He conquers all by virtue of his heroism and marries the space princess. In the inevitable sequel the pitiless author will somehow compel him do it all again, sometimes under another name. This sounds like mere mockery, and of all subgenres sword-and-planet may be the most mockable (one has but to mention the magic syllable “Gor” to banish all useful thought), but when well-done it can be a blast. Burroughs’ Barsoom books are still being read, are still being filmed and name-checked in other media, and not because of his melodious prose style or his thoughts on the eternal verities; somehow the pattern he hit on (and partly appropriated) rang people’s bell, and continues to ring it. Figuring out why wouldn’t be a waste of anyone’s time, even if the books are not a matter of high seriousness.

In this genre or subgenre, Almuric is of special interest, because it is by one of the greatest fantasists of the pulp era, Robert E. Howard. It’s also interesting as one of REH’s few booklength works and, it seems, his only experiment at building an entire secondary world. Although the story (like much of REH’s work) is now in the public domain and available online, I read the novel in Planet Stories’ new edition and I recommend that anyone really interested in the book do the same. I say this not because the publisher has paid me an enormous illicit bribe (although I will accept one if offered). The online texts are mostly poor transcriptions littered with many obvious proofreading slips (e.g. “forward” and “foreward” for “foreword”; “premediatated” for “premeditated”, etc.–and that’s on the first two screens of this one). In contrast, Planet’s text is clean and readable; there’s an interesting introduction by Joe Lansdale and a great cover in the Jeff Jones tradition by Andrew Hou.

…

Read More Read More

The Spider Revival, Part 1: Robot Titans of Gotham

The Spider Revival, Part 1: Robot Titans of Gotham

Comments 8 comments

spider-robot-titans-of-gothamIf you have never met the most notorious of all pulp magazine heroes — The Spider, Master of Men! — then Baen Books has a deal for you. After a long absence from mass market paperbacks, the Spider returns in two Baen collections The Spider: Robot Titans of Gotham and The Spider: City of Doom. The two volumes pack together five of Norvell Page’s best Spider novels, plus a bonus yarn from his madcap typewriter.

(Update: Now there’s a third volume, The Spider vs. The Empire State.)

If you’ve previously met the Spider, you might have read some of these adventures from reprints in the Carroll & Graf series. Buy these new books anyway; I want Baen to feed us more.

As for you newcomers, I feel obliged to give you fair warning about the Spider. Otherwise you might wonder after reading one of these stories, “Was Norvell Page completely insane?” No, he was a professional pulp writer. Which may come down to the same thing, when you consider the deadlines. But even for the crazy world of the cheap paper story magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, the zenith years of this lost world of fiction, Page’s tales of the Spider are so overloaded with outrageous violence and fear, and so under-stocked with logic and elementary structuring, that it seems the author wrote them after shooting more heroin than Popeye Doyle confiscated in The French Connection.

…

Read More Read More

Just complicated enough

Just complicated enough

Comments 3 comments

I am trying to write a synopsis and outline of a novel I have been picking up and putting down any number of times over the last however many years, a space-opera-ish sf piece called Invisible House. Putting to paper the important essentials when my head is utterly tangled in the details of individual scenes is really hard work. When I take too much out, it starts to seem very pedestrian and boring; when I put too much in, I’m not distilling the story adequately for this particular form.

“On being just complicated enough” is the title of a famous article by Tony Wallace, a grand old man of my graduate department. It is about the complexity of cultural taxonomies, not writing, but too much of my graduate-school education involved the wrong things sticking in memory, and in this case the title adhered while the content has sublimated away.

“Being just complicated enough” is emblematic for me as the goal of a writer. In my own case the problem is a persistent tendency to make things too complicated. At Clarion, Damon Knight (in his last year of teaching there) told me, “You have a fertile mind,” and he did not mean it particularly as a compliment. William Blake has some line about every bird being an entire world if you look at it properly, and that, alas, is what too often starts to happen when I write.

Regarding the synopsis, I picked it up again a few weeks ago after a long dormant period and was surprised to discover I’d worked out a whole bunch of details about the last quarter of the book that had been extremely nebulous in my mind. But when I started working on it those paragraphs started to expand… turned into chapter outlines…chapter treatments… Not a bad thing! But I still need the synopsis to market the book. Must turn the world back into a bird…

Son of Rambow

Son of Rambow

Comments 0 Comment

I recently rented Son of Rambow, a coming of age tale in which two British schoolboy outcasts — one, Lee Carter, a bully and troublemaker, the other, Will, a shy kid raised by his widowed mother who belongs to a strict religious fundamentalist sect — develop a common ground on which to become friends. Lee’s one interest, besides causing mayhem, is filmmaking, particularly action movies such as Rambo. Will has a highly developed imagination and has secretly written a fantastical book in which the hero rescues his father from the forces of evil (and you can figure out where that idea comes from even without ever having read Freud). The two partner to realize Will’s fantasy as a movie to be submitted to a young filmmakers contest. Complications ensue when Will casts a visiting French exchange student, who everyone in school worships as the ultimate in coolness, in a lead role; the move results in Will gaining in popularity himself while Lee becomes marginalized. Meanwhile, the religious sect is beginning to suspect that Will is violating its precepts and Will has to be more inventive in accounting for his whereabouts when he sneaks off for filming.

The English film had a limited release in the U.S. and is perhaps under the radar for the average Netflixer. It is of note to BlackGaters not only because of the fantastical theme of the boys’ movie, as well as the archtypical nerdish attraction to find comfort in fantasy escapism, but because the director is Garth Jennings, who previously directed the celluloid version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which I haven’t seen, though I’ve heard fans are less than enamored of). Based in part upon his own childhood experiences, the movie is all the more remarkable because with one exception (Jules Sitruk who plays the French student), all of the child actors were neophytes (one of the minor characters is played by the grandson of Stanley Kubrick), though you’d never know it. If you’ve had your fill of the trite and true variations of this theme that are always playing at your local megaplex, check this one out. It restores your faith in the idea of film as a thoughtful medium, as opposed to the usual appeals to the lowest common denominator.