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Short Fiction Review #14: Interzone #220/February 2009

Short Fiction Review #14: Interzone #220/February 2009

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Back in June, Interzone published an edition dedicated to “Mundane SF,” which essentially means the story’s future speculative setting must be based on plausible science. So, no FTL, which virtually eliminates space opera, or telepaths or pointy eared aliens who speak English and act more or less like human beings except that they have pointy ears even though they live on planets light years away from Earth.  I guess. It all sounds to me like Hard SF in a girdle, and I don’t quite get it. You could, for example, group fiction that takes place only in New York City, or must involve farm implements, or that is first person narration by a transsexual. I mean, it might be interesting to read a collection of stories that take place in New York City, if only to say, “Oh, I recognize that restaurant where the characters are eating, I go there all the time,” but, beyond that, I’m not really sure how the categorization serves to help the reader to appreciate the author’s technique or critical perspective. Geoff Ryman’s introduction seems to say that one purpose of mundanity is to provide hope (and, indeed, his own contribution, “Talk is Cheap,” seeks to show how hope springs eternal in even direst circumstances). But, I’m not so sure why that should be the case. After all, On the Beach takes the mundane approach to the possibility of nuclear holocaust that is plausible, but certainly not hopeful.

I was thinking about this in reading the latest Interzone, which, with one exception, could be a mundane issue.  Not only in the sense of plausible scientific extrapolation, but also in the sense of, well, being mundane in trodding  familiar ground.  Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; the better stories here manage to unearth some disturbing ideas that are certainly relevant to our mundane existences.
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Tarzan Swing-By: Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion”

Tarzan Swing-By: Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion”

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Tarzan and Foreign Legion 1st edI would like to step forward at this moment to address the audience before the curtain rises on our feature book review presentation so that I may make a personal observation about Edgar Rice Burroughs. Specifically, I would like to explain why I’ve written so many posts about his work in the last few weeks.

Burroughs needs no excuse for discussion in a magazine dedicated to heroic fantasy and planetary romance. Adventure literature as we know it springs from the influence of Burroughs in the early twentieth century. Although pulp magazines existed before Burroughs published Under the Moons of Mars (later titled A Princess of Mars) and Tarzan of the Apes, this double-punch in 1912 changed the style of this publishing medium for the remainder of its lifetime, and the influence continued into the paperback revolution and on into our era. Burroughs looms as one of the Titans of genre literature. But the true question is: Why am I re-reading so much of his work right now, in concentrated doses that I usually reserve for no author?

One answer is that I enjoy writing about Burroughs almost as much as I enjoy reading him. For an author who supposedly crafted straightforward entertainment, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels contain a remarkable breadth of ideas for debate and consideration. But a deeper reason for such current copious reading of Burroughs is that his work always gives me a unique uplift. In times of uncertainty and concern, I find that no author can temporarily re-energize me than ERB. Even a violent and embittered book, such as the one I’m about to discuss, provides an energy boost like a literary vodka with Red Bull. Burroughs knows how to make life seem wild, colorful, and far removed from the petty concerns of the everyday. It isn’t strictly “escapism,” a word I dislike, but a form of romantic empowerment. Burroughs’s daydreams on paper enhance our yearning for that which is beyond what we have to struggle with in day-to-day life.

End of psychological exegesis. The curtain now rises on today’s Tuesday Topic: one of Burroughs’s most unusual books, one that few people have read because — let’s face facts — how many but the most dedicated fans manage to reach Book #22 in any long-running series?

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The Land That Time Forgot: The Movie

The Land That Time Forgot: The Movie

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Land That Time Forgot PosterThe Land That Time Forgot (1975)
Directed by Kevin Connor. Starring Doug McClure, John McEnery, Susan Penhaligon, Keith Baron, Anthony Ainley, Bobby Parr.

In A.D. (Anno Dinosauriae) 1975, the old era of low-budget fantasy and science-fiction filmmaking neared its close — although nobody knew it. In 1977, an under-marketed flick called Star Wars forever changed the way studios approached genre movies, elevating them to A-budget, blockbuster, mega-studio super-entertainment with emphasis on attaining photo-realistic effects.

Progress? In a way. But when I look at a movie like 1975’s The Land That Time Forgot, a British adaptation from Amicus Productions (famed for their horror anthologies) of the first third of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic “Lost World” novel, I feel a tug of regret that such handmade, analog epics, crafted on tight budgets with intense imagination and invention, have largely suffered extinction. There’s a beautiful innocence to The Land That Time Forgot that makes it an ideal approach to Burroughs’s style. If its effects aren’t “realistic,” they certainly are thrilling and wonders to behold. We shall never see such marvels again.

It’s easy for the general public and the old-guard movie critics who still lumber around major magazines and paperback video guides to dismiss this “rubber dinosaurs and cavemen” film as campy, but The Land That Time Forgot plays it straight — it isn’t camp unless you choose to approach it that way. That’s acceptable, of course; the film belongs to the viewer. But taken as a serious adventure-fantasy, The Land That Time Forgot provides remarkable entertainment, far better than a campy romp. And it’s smart.

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Caspak Victorious: The Land That Time Forgot

Caspak Victorious: The Land That Time Forgot

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First Edition Cover“You have read the opening paragraph, and if you are an imaginative idiot like myself, you will want to read the rest of it; so I shall give it to you here…”

I often refer to Edgar Rice Burroughs as an “excuse” author. It seems readers or critics can’t discuss him without qualifiers to excuse reading him. A typical statement: “Edgar Rice Burroughs wasn’t a good writer but he had a vast imagination.”

I not-so-respectfully object to the assessment of Burroughs as a poor writer. In his best works, he pulls me along and engrosses me far more than most bestselling “thriller” authors published today. I can pick apart objective deficiencies in his style, criticize his dips into awkward phrasing, but this ultimately doesn’t matter in his overall style, which reads fast, involving, and exciting. His prose style matches the types and tones of the stories he wants to tell, fits them so well that I can’t imagine another style that would work with them. That, in my reader’s eyes, makes Edgar Rice Burroughs a great writer.

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Hundra

Hundra

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Sword and Sorcery enjoyed a brief, mostly-unhappy revival in the 1980s.  Much of it came in the wake of John Milius’s Conan The Barbarian (1982).  Some were downright awful (Ator the Invincible 2), some had their moments (the disappointing Conan the Destroyer), some I really like despite their flaws (The Sword and the Sorcerer).

While I was of an age and inclination to see pretty much anything S&S related in the early 80s, somehow I missed Hundra (1983).  Thanks to DVD I came across this cubic zirconium-in-the-rough by accident. What I said “in the wake of Conan” above goes doubly for this — Hundra isn’t so much in the wake as it is being towed by Milius’s epic.  The plot arc follow’s Conan’s sandaled footsteps, it was filmed in Spain not only using similar locations but Conan’s leftover sets and what I suspect are bits of the costumes as well.

That being said, it’s a well-done picture.  Usually low-budget movies look low-budget, but this one manages to rise above the dollars spent into something bigger-and-better looking.

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On DVD: Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008)

On DVD: Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008)

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Theatrical PosterJourney to the Center of the Earth (2008)
Directed by Eric Brevig. Starring Brendan Fraser, Josh Hutcherson, Anita Briem

Arguing whether Jules Verne is the Father of Science Fiction seems useless now. Regardless of who may deserve the title more—Cyrano de Bergerac, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, etc.—Verne’s effect on literature of the imagination is so enormous and continually influential that he’s clearly the Father of Something Really Big. However, in the U.S. he still suffers from poor, outdated translations (often with cuts that remove almost a fourth of the originals) and the perception that he’s only an author for children. Better translations are now available, but the awful ones still remain in print, perching on bookshelves like croaking ravens to scare new readers away. New translations of his non-scientific-themed novels have started to broaden the author’s reputation (see my reviews of Michael Strogoff and The Lighthouse at the End of the World to get a sense of the other sort of novels that the distinguished Frenchman wrote), but Verne still remains “that guy we read in fifth grade” for many adults.

I’m a Verne fanatic, unabashedly, and I love him even more now than I did when I was an eager “young adult” reader. Discovering new books and new versions of books I thought I knew—the recent translations and restorations of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea are nothing short of revelatory—makes each Verne read a thrilling exploration. My favorite of his novels is Voyage au centre de la Terre, published in 1864 as the author’s career was starting to ascend. It was translated into English as Journey to the Center of the Earth, and sometimes Journey to the Interior of the Earth. On a deep personal level, I respond to the romance of a subterranean sojourn and discovering the mysteries hiding in the great caverns beneath a volcano in Iceland. Verne’s sense of wonder here is simply breathtaking.

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The Return of the King (1980)

The Return of the King (1980)

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Barad-dûrThe Return of the King (ABC TV, 1980)

Directed by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr. Featuring the Voices of John Huston, Roddy McDowall, Orson Bean, William Conrad, Casey Casem, Theodore Gottlieb, Theodore Bikel, Glenn Yarbrough, Paul Frees

“Listen as we speak of the fall of the Lord of Darkness, and the return of a King of Light.”

The novel The Lord of the Rings has had an important place in my life even before I actually read it in ninth grade. As a young child, I already loved monsters and tales of fantasy, and my parents were glad to feed my monster obsession. They both knew about the books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (although neither had read them) and told me their pages were filled with dragons and trolls and all sorts of wonderful beasties; they showed me the Greg and Tim Hildebrandt calendars to whet my appetite. At age five, I had my first “Tolkien” experience with the television broadcast of the animated movie The Hobbit from Rankin/Bass. My mother then read the book to me. The moment I was old enough, I read it for myself. The enormity of The Lord of the Rings was still too far off, but there were movie versions to fill the gap. I was confused but somewhat dazzled by the odd, unfinished The Lord of the Rings film by Ralph Bakshi when it premiered on cable, but it was the 1980 animated television movie The Return of the King that really gave me a sense of what the epic novel was about.

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A Look at Planet Hulk

A Look at Planet Hulk

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I’m not what you’d call a comics guy — I don’t have a set of first editions in acid-free bags in the closet, I couldn’t tell you who the Fantastic Four are, or even distinguish between Marvel and DC (though I’m pretty sure Spiderman is in one camp, and Batman in the other). But I’ve always liked and respected the medium, and the rise of the graphic novel has made sampling the best of what comics has to offer convenient for casual fans like me. So, when I spotted a recommendation in an online forum for Planet Hulk, a graphic novel in which the big green superhero takes on the role of John Carter in a sword and planet epic, I was intrigued, and made an impulse purchase. I’m glad I did.

Planet Hulk is a compilation of Hulk #92-105, with further material from other special releases, and a wealth of supplemental art and background info rounding out a hefty hardcover. Lifted straight from the comic, Planet Hulk is clearly a slice of the ongoing story of the Hulk; a story of which I was wholly ignorant before jumping into this graphic novel. But that didn’t prove to be a problem.

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On DVD: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

On DVD: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

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First things first: Happy Birthday, Clark Ashton Smith!

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008)
Directed by Rob Cohen
Starring Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, John Hannah, Michelle Yeoh, Luke Ford, Isabella Leong, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang

On my own blog, I’ve done a set of weekly reviews surveying all the movies in Universal’s classic Mummy franchise. Just as I finished up this lengthy project, the most recent entry in the second Universal Mummy franchise, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, arrived on DVD, so it seemed an ideal time to take a look at it.

Except… no mummies appear in this “Mummy movie.” The film earns the first part of its title because it features ongoing characters from the two legitimate Mummy flicks that proceeded it, The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001). But there’s no Egypt aside from a bar called “Imhotep’s,” and no mummified anything. We instead have an immortal Chinese Emperor/Wizard who breaks free from a terracotta shell, but that isn’t a mummy in my definition. The visual effects try to give him a mummified appearance when he’s still in his clay-like form, but sorry, still not a mummy.

But then, the second series of Universal mummy movies were never about the particulars of the classic horror-movie undead Egyptian, but about copying Indiana Jones, old adventure serials, pulp magazines, and adding wiseacre humor to attract the widest audience possible. Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is perhaps the most pulpish of the four films in the series (I’m including the 2002 sword-and-sorcery spin-off The Scorpion King), and fans of pulp fantasy will find it interesting.

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Short Fiction Review: Fast Forward 2 edited by Lou Anders

Short Fiction Review: Fast Forward 2 edited by Lou Anders

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Fast Forward 2 cover“So just what is science fiction?” asks editor Lou Anders in the preamble to his second and latest volume of Fast Forward, an annual collection of original genre stories (you can find my review of the first edition here). Theodore Sturgeon, whose definition Anders includes in the epigraph, used to seem to say it best: “…a story about human beings with a human problem, and a human solution, that would not have happened at all without its science content.” Maybe back when Sturgeon was writing, that covered all the bases. What, then, would you call this anthology’s “True Names” by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctrow, in which nary a human can be discerned in a computer generated simulacrum? And while Paul McCauley’s “Adventure” does take place off-world, this would be an example of where you could take the science out of it and still have a story in which the protagonist attempts to confront his illusions, with disappointing results.

Another reason for continually posing the question is to distinguish science fiction even while mainstream literature adopts conventions of the genre that dare not be named by publicists and marketing programs. Another, related, part of the challenge is that we live in science fictional times. Used to be, a character accessing a globally connected computer network to get directions to the nearest sushi bar could only be taken seriously in the funny pages of Dick Tracy wrist communicators. These days, it’s merely another mundane background detail.

Anders’s definition has multiple aspects, but the one notable criterion is that, “To my mind, science fiction is first and foremost entertainment and must be entertainment if it is to function effectively…” (15). While he goes on to say that it should be more than just entertainment, I think the reason most people start reading science fiction in the first place is that it is great fun, something that frequently gets overlooked in the sometimes ponderous discussions about what is, or is not, science fictional. If Fast Forward 2 has an overriding theme, it is that the fourteen stories here are highly entertaining (though, as it happens, the stories I found the most intriguing were actually the least purely escapist).
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