Courage

Courage

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“Take Courage– now there’s a sport / An invitation to a state of rigor mort.”

-sang Mordred in Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot.

The virtue of courage is the one commonality all the great heroes share. They persevere, even to a bad end, as Sam Gamgee said to Frodo as strength and hope flagged. Whether it’s Conan throwing himself into a ring of enemies, determined to break free or die:

With his back to the wall he faced the closing ring for a flashing instant, then leaped into the thick of them. He was no defensive fighter; even in the teeth of overwhelming odds he always carried the war to the enemy. Any other man would have already died there, and Conan himself did not hope to survive, but he did ferociously wish to inflict as much damage as he could before he fell. His barbaric soul was ablaze, and the chants of old heroes were singing in his ears. (Howard, The Phoenix on the Sword, 1932)

or Han Solo’s “Never tell me the odds” a hero’s first and foremost virtue, from the classics to the anti-heroes of today, is courage. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield, as Tennyson put it in his tribute to Ulysses.

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In Defense of the Industry

In Defense of the Industry

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A common refrain about the publishing industry – heard clearest of all in those places where writers gather online – is that editors and agents are more interested in making a fast buck than in finding a solid author, that they’d rather have cookie-cutter fiction instead of something that breaks new ground, that they just don’t get it.  While I naturally cannot speak for every writer, my own experiences have led me to believe that the opposite is true.

To be sure, publishing changed when the conglomerates took over.  What was once a gentleman’s enterprise became instead a ruthless business, one replete with attorneys and accountants for whom books are merely a curiosity, a commodity.  There is an apocryphal tale from the late 80’s about a financial analyst who crunched the numbers and came to the conclusion that, since only a small fraction of books were destined for bestsellerdom, the editor-in-chief would do well to focus the company’s resources just on those few books.  Wearily, the editor explained that no one could predict which books might outperform the others until after they were released.  It’s frightening to think that the people who are ultimately in charge of our creative destines might not have the first clue what they’re doing.

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Read Planet: Kline’s The Swordsman of Mars

Read Planet: Kline’s The Swordsman of Mars

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I read The Swordsman of Mars out of a sense of obligation, which is probably the worst way to read anything, and with the firm conviction that it would suck. That’s the word on the virtual street about Otis Adelbert Kline: he’s a poor man’s Edgar Rice Burroughs. So I was thinking: ERB, without that mellifluous prose style and brilliant plotting. Urk.

Well, I was completely wrong. I enjoyed the book enormously, but that’s not all. You can enjoy almost any piece of writing if you approach it with the lowest possible expectations (and, yes, I am thinking of Lin Carter‘s multifarious pastiches here). I came away from it with considerable respect for Otis Adelbert Kline as a writer of fantastic fiction. …

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Hi-Tech Lo-Tech: WriteRoom

Hi-Tech Lo-Tech: WriteRoom

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I was originally intending to write a post about my experience during this year’s National Novel Writing Month. But I have the tendency to over-write everything I do — my novel for NaNoWriMo included — and the essay has already gotten out-of-control and will require more than just hashing out the kinks late on Monday night while The Horror of Party Beach plays on the TV. The previous sentence is an example of over-writing.

So while I get that essay restrained and re-done, I instead offer the first installment in a multi-part series about the hi-tech lo-tech devices that have emerged to help writers make themselves more productive in a society that finds more and more gizmos to distract them when they should just be plunking down words onto a page. You writers all know of what I speak: how can you effectively turn out three thousand words of your new novel on a word processor that offers you twenty different awesome ways to format your footnotes? And which lets your web brower peak out around the sides, tempting you to check out the newest posting on The Onion? You might fix the window to block out all that, but wow, look at all the ways you can manipulate the screen!

Face it… writers will create distractions out of anything. So finding a way to get those pesky annoyances down to a minimum is worth checking out. (As long as it isn’t distracting you…)

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Adventure Fantasy in the Children’s Section

Adventure Fantasy in the Children’s Section

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My just-turned-nine-year-old son is a voracious reader, and in searching for books that would interest him I’ve become aware of the explosion of quality sf/f books written for the so-called middle reader and young adult audience. More or less at the time we started reading these books together, I also became bored and impatient with a lot of what passed for adult f and sf. As a consequence, over the past three or four years, a lot of what I’ve read recreationally has been fantasy that you will rarely if ever find in the regular genre sections of bookstores. A good deal of it, however, I’ve enjoyed very much, and the reasons are not arcane.

Successful fantasy for kids–meaning books my son loves, which includes but is not limited to books that sell a lot of copies–generally shares several characteristics. First and foremost, Things Happen. Middle reader/young adult fantasy is almost by definition adventure fantasy. Also, Things usually start Happening right away. Kids won’t read past the first page or two if they aren’t drawn into the story right off; this doesn’t necessarily mean that things blow up on page 1, but that the characters and their situation are immediately involving.

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The Reason for the Season…

The Reason for the Season…

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The title of the Bruce Holland Rogers lead story in the latest Black Static of course makes you think it’s about Christmas. The “reason for the season” has become a rallying cry for those who want to emphasize the “Christ” part of the holiday (notwithstanding that the contemporary celebration has more to do with that literary fantasist Charles Dickens and his three ghosts, not to mention origins in German pagan worship rather than the birth of the historical Jesus, which scholarship tends to put at around April), and seeing how this issue shows up at this time of year, well, I was looking forward to some kind of horrific holiday story. Maybe a Wal-Mart employee getting crushed by holiday shoppers, or something. (Oh, sorry, real life got there first.)

It is a horrific holiday story, only it’s tangentially about Christmas. Actually, it’s about Halloween. Even more actually, it’s about real life. And real death. The beauty of the story is how it sets you up to expect certain things, beginning with the title, but leads you somewhere entirely different. And even more disturbing than initial expectations.
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Fantasy’s New Award — David Gemmell’s Legend

Fantasy’s New Award — David Gemmell’s Legend

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I’ll admit to not being able to keep up with science fiction and fantasy awards, but I think the newly announced David Gemmell Legend Award has the potential to be something of a milestone. Why should that be, in the midst of swirl of awards for fantasy novels ranging from those the genre shares with science fiction, to the World Fantasy Awards and various regional awards, as well as the more specialist awards such as the Mythopoeic and Sideways Awards? Well, because this award actually takes its cue from heroic fantasy.

For those of you who may not know much about the late David Gemmell, he was a prolific and best-selling British author of some of the purest examples of heroic fantasy seen in the last thirty years. His first novel, Legend, was an instant hit in the UK and has never gone out of print since 1984. Gemmell went on to write some thirty more novels, nearly all of which are heroic fantasy. His style is fast-paced and concise, and he packs a huge amount into his books. Some of his novels contain more action than an entire trilogy of high fantasy, and this at a time when this later sub-genre dominates the market. Gemmell’s books, one of the big exceptions to the heroic fantasy glut, continue to sell like hotcakes.

The first David Gemmell Award will be given in the Spring of 2009 to the fantasy novel of 2008 that best exemplifies the spirit of David Gemmell’s fiction. This is where things get interesting, in my opinion; this is the point upon which the whole thing balances. Looking over the nominees for the award, and the rules for the selection process, leaves me speculating about a how these awards might take shape.

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Reader vs. Reader

Reader vs. Reader

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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

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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.

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Life in a kingdom

Life in a kingdom

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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

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