This Will Be On The Test

This Will Be On The Test

Comments 6 comments

Treasure IslandI don’t know whether it’s the controversy over the character Turiel in the upcoming The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, but there’s been a big swell of interest lately in the Bechdel Test. You know what that is, right? Generally applied to movies and TV shows, it determines whether women are represented equitably. In order to pass the test,  there must be two female characters who have names; they must at some point speak to each other; they must speak about something other than men. Seems simple.

I remember my father once telling me that Treasure Island had no women in it. He seemed to think this was a good thing. He was wrong, of course, except that he was also right. What he didn’t realize was that the film he was familiar with had no women, but that wasn’t also true of the book. Jim Hawkins does have a mother.  We could argue, however, that the film guys got it right, since Mrs. Hawkins does little or nothing to forward the plot.

So Treasure Island, whether print or celluloid, fails the Bechdel Test.

Most films/shows don’t pass the test, even the ones we fantasy and SF lovers love the most. Big Bang Theory doesn’t pass, even though there are three named female characters (and not because Penny, as my friend Jim Hines has pointed out, has no last name). Stargate passes, at least SG1 – they were smart to make the doctor a woman, since that gives plenty of room for non-guy related conversation. It’s been a while, but I believe that Star Trek: Voyager passes (between Captain Janeway, B’lanna Torres, and Seven-of-Nine) and TNG as well – remember, the doctor’s a woman.

…

Read More Read More

The Resurrection of Dr. Mabuse

The Resurrection of Dr. Mabuse

Comments 0 Comment

DRMABUSEDVDDRMABUSEONESHEETNorbert Jacques’s Weimar Republic criminal mastermind, Dr. Mabuse has proven a potent allegorical figure for communicating the chaos of socio-economic collapse.

From the original Roaring Twenties figure of Jacques’s fiction and Fritz Lang’s epic two-part silent film and its Depression-era sequel to the character’s rebirth, which book-ended the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the modern police state with its intricate and intrusive surveillance systems, Mabuse’s long cinematic history incorporates Expressionism, film noir, krimi, Euro-trash, and now modern independent film.

Ansel Faraj is the ambitious young man who has brought Dr. Mabuse into the twenty-first century. A mere twenty-one years old, Faraj has already written and directed twenty-five independent films for his Hollinsworth Productions over the past seven years. Dr. Mabuse, newly released on DVD, shows a surprising polish and sense of artistry rarely found in the work of young filmmakers.

Most surprising is how well Faraj makes use of his modest budget to the film’s overall advantage, instead of its detriment. The Spartan production values assist in creating the dreamlike quality of the film. This can best be appreciated by watching the film in its entirety. Judging the results by the trailer fails to do justice to the neo-Expressionistic mood Faraj has managed to capture here.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Why Japanese Tire Commercials Are Cooler Than US Tire Commercials

Goth Chick News: Why Japanese Tire Commercials Are Cooler Than US Tire Commercials

Comments 7 comments

Kuchisake-onnaYou’re going to love this…

Autoway Loop, one of Japan’s largest wholesalers of tires, has recently employed the image of Kuchisake-onna (the “Slit-Mouthed Woman”) as its new “it” girl.

According to Japanese urban legend, Kuchisake-onna is a woman who is mutilated by a jealous husband and returns as a malicious spirit. When rumors of alleged sightings began in 1979 around Nagasaki, it spread throughout Japan and caused panic in many towns. There are even reports of schools allowing children to go home only in groups escorted by teachers for safety, and of police increasing their patrols.

Flash forward to 2013, to an ad agency somewhere in Japan who are tasked with making snow tires interesting.

The results are awesome (especially the guy with the high-pitched scream toward the end), though I’m not sure afterwards I’d remember someone is trying to get me to buy tires.

Take that, Michelin Tire marshmallow man…

Post a comment or drop a line to sue@blackgate.com.

So What’s Wrong With (Some) Modern Fantasy?

So What’s Wrong With (Some) Modern Fantasy?

Comments 11 comments

“Ooo, Neil! You’re so creative! How do you get your ideas? All that magic and mysticism and darkness. OOoooo…”

Neil Gaiman
“Ooo, Neil! You’re so creative! How do you get your ideas? All that magic and mysticism and darkness. OOoooo…”

And repeat.

Yes, I was at a Neil Gaiman reading. And Gaiman, of course, rocks.

He doesn’t write about talking squids, but much of his output falls squarely in the Fantasy and Science Fiction category. Judging from the beer bellies and black T-shirts at the event, we geeks know this — hard to miss when he’s written Batman, Babylon 5, and Dr Who. And of course, a good whack of his prose fiction counts as Fantasy.

What’s interesting is that the non-geeks don’t seem to get this. To them he’s this wonderful, off the wall, creative genius, the sole acceptable purveyor of vampires and werewolves and Old Gods. If they are aware of the wider genre(s), they dismiss them as “sweaty handed nerd stuff.” Rayguns and space rockets are fine in Dr Who, but not elsewhere.

You see the same thing with Tolkien and also our local hero, JK Rowling. People who are snotty about anything with magic on the cover, go crazy over the Potterverse and Middle Earth; “It’s not Fantasy, it’s Children’s Fiction/Literature.”

This is maddening. Geeks are people too. How unfair to be sneered at, put down, for one’s tastes by the same people who are embracing them. It’s like being beaten up for “being a Paddy” by a party of drunks on their way home from Riverdance.

…

Read More Read More

The Hobbit: The Long-Awaited Movie, Part One

The Hobbit: The Long-Awaited Movie, Part One

Comments 5 comments

The Hobbit the Desolation of Smaug poster2-smallLet me begin with a confession: I’m an unabashed Tolkien fan. Since the first time I read The Hobbit as a wee lad, I’ve been hooked. When The Lord of the Rings movies came out a few years back (which I loved), my next question was, “When is Peter Jackson going to make The Hobbit?”

Finally, after legal battles and years of waiting, we got the first installment, The Unexpected Journey.

While I’m in the confessional mood, I’ll add that I wasn’t completely sure about the decision to split the book into three movies. After all, Mr. Jackson & Company did a pretty good job capturing the entire LoTR trilogy in three films. Why do they need the same amount of time to cover a single book? However, I had faith that the films’ creators knew what they were doing. Now, with the second movie about to be released, I’ve been ruminating about what I’ve seen so far.

What I desired most from The Hobbit movie(s) was to be transported back to the lush, mythic realm that had been created in the LoTR movies. And I got it in spades. Jackson even includes some scenes with Frodo and “old” Bilbo that serve as both a framing device and an introduction to the LoTR movies.

The movie also adds a bit of background to the story, showing how Smaug came to the mountain and evicted the dwarves. Usually, these kinds of pre-story narratives don’t interest me, but this one was so well-done that I didn’t mind. It actually gives us a brief glimpse of the dragon upfront and, in a stroke of genius, introduces the Arkenstone, which plays a big part at the end of the story, but which the book doesn’t explain much.

Once the actual story begins, I was locked in. (*cue tractor-beam sound*) The first thing that struck me was how cool and different the dwarves were. In the novel, the dwarves are portrayed as… well… buffoons. The movie included plenty of comic-relief, but it also gave us dwarves with more diverse personalities. The dinner party scene was just as fun and raucous as it is in my head when I read the book. It was also a nice touch how Gandalf attempts to convince Bilbo to go on the quest at the same time Balin is trying to talk Thorin out of it.

…

Read More Read More

Rejecting the Golden Age: Gareth L. Powell on Escaping Science Fiction’s Pulp Roots

Rejecting the Golden Age: Gareth L. Powell on Escaping Science Fiction’s Pulp Roots

Comments 31 comments

The Recollection Garath Powell-smallOver at SF Signal, author Gareth L. Powell has issued a call to stop recommending classic SF and fantasy, and start putting newer works in the hands of readers curious about our genres. His comments apparently arise from his experiences talking to a reading group who hadn’t read any SF written in the last 50 years.

The only way we’ll escape the legacy of our pulp roots is to promote the innovation, literary merit, and relevance of the best modern genre writing. Some fans will always cling to the ‘golden age’ works of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and I can understand why. They provide a magic door back to the simple pleasures of a simpler world – a world before global warming, oil shortages, terrorism, and economic uncertainty; relics of a world where the future was easily understood, and (largely) American, middle class and white in outlook, origin and ethnicity.

Part of me understands and sympathizes with that need for security. I still draw comfort and enjoyment from those old books. Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Philip K. Dick… These writers are the elder gods in my personal pantheon; but they are neither the beginning nor the end… being a fan’s a bit like being in a marriage. You have to accept that the person you’re with will mature and change, and you have to embrace that, and change with them in order to keep things fresh…

So, the next time a non-SF reader asks you what they should read, resist the temptation to throw them a copy of Foundation or Slan, and point them instead at something published in the last five years… Give them something modern, and they’re more likely to find characters, ideas and attitudes with which they can relate.

Powell is the author of Silversands, The Recollection, Ack-Ack Macaque and its new sequel, Hive Monkey — which he freely notes employs “the furniture of 1930s pulp literature – Zeppelins, Spitfires, cigar-smoking monkey pilots, evil android armies.”

Read the complete article at SF Signal here.

New Treasures: Dark Melody of Madness by Cornell Woolrich

New Treasures: Dark Melody of Madness by Cornell Woolrich

Comments 4 comments

Dark Melody of Madness-smallI wish a knew more about Cornell Woolrich.

From what I understand, this is a common state of affairs, even for some of his most devoted fans. Woolrich was something of a recluse, especially in the last few years of his life, and there are only a handful of people alive today who had any real dealings with him. Barry N. Malzberg, Woolrich’s agent for much of the 1960s, is one of the few, and he’s provided a fascinating reminisce in his introduction to Phantom Lady, one of the handsome new Woolrich editions from Centipede Press.

Woolrich is revered by mystery and noir fans — and rightly so. Some three dozen films have been made of his taut thrillers, including Rear Window, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, The Bride Wore Black, and many others. But on occasion, he also wrote supernatural fiction and Dark Melody of Madness, one of the new Centipede Press volumes, collects four of his novellas for the first time: “Graves For The Living,” “Jane Brown’s Body,” “Dark Melody of Madness,” and “I’m Dangerous Tonight,” all originally published between 1935 and 1938.

Holding on to a loved one can be difficult, but certainly not as weird and treacherous as in this quartet of Cornell Woolrich novellas set in the mid-1930s. It’s a time of great incongruities — physical anguish of the Great Depression, lighthearted dancing to the rhythms of swing; near-legendary bank robbers, daredevil long-distance airplane pilots; head bashing of union members, air-conditioned comfort for movie goers.

Woolrich takes this milieu, adds an overlay of the supernatural, and places his protagonists in grotesque, untenable situations involving their lives and souls. Here is the eerie world of voodoo, Frankenstein-style reincarnation, live burial, and macabre garments — a mixture of cold sweat-producing dilemmas, where the characters find it near-impossible to separate the real from the unreal.

Dark Melody of Madness was published by Centipede Press on August 6, 2013. The introduction is by Bill Pronzini, and the cover and color interiors are by Matt Mahurin. The trade paperback is 296 pages, priced at $18; there’s also a limited edition, out-of-print hardcover. The hardcover edition lists an additional novella, “Mannequin,” on the TOC. For mystery and noir fans, Centipede Press offers three additional volumes in the series: Deadline at Dawn, I Married a Dead Man, and Speak to Me of Death (see the complete set here.)

The Whole Northern Thing: Hrolf Kraki’s Saga by Poul Anderson

The Whole Northern Thing: Hrolf Kraki’s Saga by Poul Anderson

Comments 7 comments

oie_Ballantine Edition

Doom: Old English dom “law, judgment, condemnation,” from Proto-Germanic *domaz (cf. Old Saxon and Old Frisian dom, Old Norse domr

For a crime committed by King Frodhi the Peace-Good against the giantesses Fenja and Menja, a great doom is laid on the royal family of Denmark, the Skjöldungs.

How that doom works its murderous effects on the Skjöldungs is the core of Hrolf Kraki’s Saga (1973), Poul Anderson’s gripping retelling of the sagas (read the original here) of the ancient Danish king, Hrolf. The book brings together the extant stories of the Skjöldungs (which, almost as an aside, include the tale of Beowulf) and welds them into a coherent novel of great potency.

According to legend, Hrolf was the greatest king of Denmark and the most outstanding member of the semi-divine Skjöldung family. With his canny intelligence, he thwarted most of his kingdom’s enemies and built up its wealth. His great nobility drew the North’s mightiest warriors to his court.

Whether real or mythical, Hrolf and his reign are remembered in Denmark as fondly as Arthur’s in Britain. And like Arthur, all Hrolf’s great works were destroyed and chaos ruled in his wake.

From a people whose myths foretold the annihilation of the gods themselves in the end times of Ragnarok, the bleakness that runs through so many of their stories isn’t surprising. Perhaps it’s traceable to the violence of the Great Migratory period when the Germanic people spread out from their ancient homelands in Scandinavia and northern Germany and came into conflict with the Roman Empire and Celtic tribes in Gaul and Britain. Maybe it was just the cold and diminished winter sunlight in Norway and Sweden that bred their melancholy. Whatever the causes, doom in its modern sense runs through almost every chapter of Hrolf Kraki’s Saga.

…

Read More Read More

Christmas in the Dungeon

Christmas in the Dungeon

Comments 5 comments

dungeongame1975Whenever Christmas looms, my thoughts turn not to decorations, carols, and presents; but to dungeons. Actually, that’s not entirely true. My thoughts do turn to presents – or, rather, a single, very specific present, albeit one received not by myself, but by a good friend of mine in 1979.

Among my childhood friends, it was traditional that, during the Christmas break from school, we’d all take turns visiting one another’s homes to marvel at our respective holiday hauls. Together, we’d then play with whatever we deemed the most interesting presents. In the dying days of the 1970s, that typically meant Star Wars action figures (or perhaps Micronauts) and so it was that year. I believe that was the year that I received the much-coveted Imperial Troop Transport vehicle and so became the envy of my friends. But, cool as it was to be able to push a button on the Troop Transport and hear sound effects from my favorite movie, that wasn’t the Christmas gift that most interested me.

That honor fell instead to a strange little board game my friend Mike received. I say “strange,” because the “board” wasn’t really a board at all, but rather a folded up piece of thick paper that didn’t lay very flat on the table unless you held down the corners with books or other heavy objects. This board depicted a bunch of colored boxes connected by meandering yellow spaces, with a few larger spaces here and there. These larger spaces were all given rather evocative names like “King’s Library” and “Queen’s Treasure Room” and “Torture Chamber.” Flimsy though it might have been, the board nevertheless caught our attentions – and fired our imaginations.

The game, of course, was David R. Megarry’s Dungeon!, which was first published in 1975 by TSR Hobbies.

…

Read More Read More

Deck-Building Battles with Warmachine: High Command

Deck-Building Battles with Warmachine: High Command

Comments 1 comment

WM High Command_3DFor me, a good game is really a window into another world. It’s like a miniature story that is told with a set of pre-defined rules. The war games I play are rarely just games, like tic-tac-toe or chess, but instead a single battle in a larger war, which in turn is part of the story of the rise and fall of nations and the struggles of the people within them.

It was this perspective on gaming that first drew me to Privateer Press’s Warmachine line of miniature games. Though I loved the physical look of the figures, the fact is that I’m not an artist or a visually-compelled person as a rule, so it was really the setting that drew me in, the possibility to, in some small part, take part in the stories set in this world. And the giant warjacks didn’t hurt.

In fact, the first article I wrote for Black Gate was a review of Privateer Press’s Iron Kingdom roleplaying supplements, exploring their magically infused steampunk-style world of giant mechanical behemoths. Soon after, though, my involvement in Warmachine died off. I got married, became a father, and the disposable income to buy metal miniatures and disposable time to sit painting them went by the wayside (and there was a vast increase in anxiety, as little two-year-old fingers would inevitably seek to play with “Daddy’s dolls,” as they became known in my house).

Fast forward to the present, and it’s as if Privateer Press has found a solution to getting me back involved in one of my favorite gaming worlds. In addition to a whole new Iron Kingdoms line of RPG supplements (Amazon, Privateer Press) and digital fiction set in the Iron Kingdoms (Amazon), they have released a new deck-building game, Warmachine High Command (Amazon).

…

Read More Read More