A Tale of Two Conans

When Conan of Cimmeria, Robert E. Howard's iconic sword-and-sorcery hero, was first being adapted to American comic books in the 1970s, the publisher - Marvel Comics, home of Spider-man, the Avengers, and a bright destiny in the movie industry - gave him a starring role in two separate magazines. The first, Conan the Barbarian, was the mainstream, all-ages title while Savage Sword of Conan was meant to be a more adult, sophisticated title. Nearly fifty years later, the Wheel of Copyright has once again brought Conan to Marvel, and while they seem to have a fairly aggressive schedule planned, the central focus is again those two titles.

Conan the Barbarian: The Life and Death of Conan Book One is the first trade collection of the former, although its family-friendliness seems suspect when practically the first time we see Conan he's in a fighting pit in the Maul decapitating his two opponents. Readers familiar with Conan may remember the Maul as being a district in the city The Tower of the Elephant took place in, and indeed the stories that make up this collection have something of a "Conan's Greatest Hits" feel to them. The stories that follow, although there's a continuing story-line with an undead witch and her creepy child minions, jump around to some of the most well-known episodes of Conan's life - one takes place immediately following Beyond the Black River, one while Conan is a pirate, another while he's king, and so on. While the stories are mostly well done, a couple of places (such as the appearance of a sharktopus) get a bit campy - the idea of King Conan and his pet lion becoming a masked vigilante in the Aquilonian capital was so ridiculous it had to have come from corporate meddling. There were some nice shout-outs to the greater Conan continuity, although this was matched by at least one timeline flub (the chapter that takes place after Beyond the Black River ends with Conan going back across the river to civilization, while in the original stories he fights his way through the wilderness to the coast and gets caught up in the plot of The Black Stranger). I also noticed a general trend, common in Conan pastiche, of giving Conan's life an air of Destiny, with everything bending towards his becoming a king. This was something that Howard managed to avoid, even though Conan was already king in his first appearance, and all the earlier stories were technically prequels.

Far less epic in scope, Savage Sword of Conan: The Cult of Koga Thun manages to seem much more complete as a story, although this is probably an unfair comparison to make with something explicitly labeled Book One. Following the well-trodden formula of Conan escaping from dire circumstances that would kill a lessor man, getting mixed up in a struggle over a fabulous treasure, and escaping into the night as everything collapses into chaos; it still manages to insert a few interesting wrinkles, such as the nature of the treasure and the involvement of the mysterious serpent-men, who are usually a Kull thing but always fun to see show up (indeed, of the various scheduled appearance of Conan tying him to the greater Marvel universe, the one I'm most interested in has the intriguing title of Conan: Serpent War). The use of magic in the story seemed heavy compared to the original Howard, what with the undead hordes and the poison that turns humans into serpent-men and the map that imprints itself onto Conan's mind, but the Cimmerian was at least properly suspicious of all of it.

In the end, although they were trying to do quite different things with the pulp-era character, both of these comics presented reasonably enjoyable takes on Conan the Barbarian. It goes without saying that the prose originals by Robert E. Howard were the best, but  once you've read all those, these make as good a continuation as you're likely to find. I did hear that the original single issues that these editions collect had a prose Conan serial in them too, and was a bit disappointed that they weren't also collected. Hopefully they'll turn up in a collection of their own at some point.

Heavy Metal History

Pictured - a sabaton.

Over the years, I've enjoyed music from a wide variety of genres and styles. Lately, I've been really into Sabaton, a metal band out of Sweden. Taking their name from the technical term for a piece of armor covering the foot, their songs, for the most part, have a historical focus to them, mostly (as you might imagine) memorializing various wars and battles.

This focus has enabled the band to engage in some interesting and unusual promotional collaborations. One such is Sabaton History, a YouTube channel hosted by popular Internet-based historian Indy Neidell that examines the background of a given songs' subjects. For example, one of my favorite Sabaton songs is "Blood of Bannockburn", about the Scottish wars for independence:

Much to my delight, the second ever episode of Sabaton History covered the song; explaining the greater historical context, the immediate tactical byplay, and even the writing of the song:

While an excellent example of the format of the show, it is a bit atypical in that subject isn't from one of the World Wars of the early 20th Century. If I have one criticism of the show, it's that it does tend to focus on that era - and to be fair, not only does it appear to be Neidell's historical specialty, but Sabaton just this summer released The Great War, an entire album of songs about that conflict.

While metal often has something of a dark reputation, and indeed neither Sabaton's songs nor their history videos shy away from the realities of war and bloodshed, they never fall into a meaningless, nihilistic glorification of violence. Much to the contrary, the subjects they choose primarily exemplify virtues like courage and faithfulness, even in the face of overwhelming odds, and ensure that the stories of these heroes - individuals and armies - are remembered for another generation.

Warriors of the Space Crusade

Picture, if you will, a crusading knight. Struck by a sudden war-weariness, he abandons the fight against the infidel and wanders into the desert, finding himself in an enemy-controlled city. There he wrestles with his newfound pacifistic desire while at the same time freeing and converting enough of the enslaved populace to kick off a full-blown revolt.

A mid-20th-century Technicolor epic? A serial novel from some long-lost historical pulp magazine? In fact, this is the general plot of Justified: The Saga of the Nano Templar, the latest novel from the most electrifying Hispanic in science fiction, Jon Del Arroz. Mixing the rather obvious historical allegory with familiar Mil-SF tropes like power armor and space navies, what comes out is a satisfying tale of equal parts derring-do and Christian philosophizing.

Yes, Christian, for despite the book seeming to take place in a galaxy far, far away with no humans whatsoever in it (although as far as I could tell Templar Drin's enemies, the Sekarans, receive no physical description that differentiates them from humans), the religion of the Elorians is basically Christianity. There are, naturally, some altered details - it's oddly Narnian in that respect - but close enough that the tension between "loving your enemy" and "protecting the innocent" echoes all too strongly with the sympathetic reader.

That tension being the main internal conflict for our Nano Templar means that he remains a very static character throughout. This provides an interesting contrast with the book's other viewpoint character, Anais, who goes from leporine party brat to defiant harem slave to revolutionary guerrilla. The nascent romance between her and Drin was, I thought, one of the book's few weak points, as it bounced hard against the Templar's vows of chastity and generally got lost in the more general swirl of Drin's search for meaning and divine goodwill. As for whether he finds it, well, I think the title of the book is a big clue here.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for this honest review.

Read Old Stories

A wizard's tower with a captured extra-terrestrial. A murder-by-arson with a shocking twist. A robotic policeman. A mountain from which no-one has returned. An eerie painting that menaces its owner. A swashbuckling stagecoach robber. An underground boxing match in an exotic port.

What do all these elements have in common? They're all from classic stories from a bunch of different genres that I've recently read thanks to the Pulp Classics Reading Club. Brainchild of author David Eyk, this free weekly email delivers stories from some of the best authors of the early 20th century - the likes of Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammett, Harry Harrison, Manly Wade Wellman, Max Brand, and Lord Dunsany. What inspired Eyk to such a project? In his own words:

In the erudite and cultured Wisdom of the Current Year, it is an accepted posture to scoff at “escapist literature”: it’s alright to read it if you’re twelve.

But the Wisdom of the Ages tells us something different: a certain form of story nourishes and nurtures our psyches. Especially in hard times, we fall back on the stories closest to our hearts for encouragement and, yes, escape.

If this sounds like something you'd like to get in on, I encourage you to sign up for the Pulp Classics Reading Club here. And if you want to read the stories I alluded to above? Check below the jump.

Three Hearts, Three Lions, Two Wizards

Recently I've been reading Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson, which is about a man fighting in World War II who discovers he has another life as a famous knight in a world that resembles the chivalric romances of King Arthur and similar tales.

It's an enjoyable read, and a fascinating work for any number of reasons - the both implicit and explicit Christianity, the clear antecedents for some elements of fantasy role-playing games (I believe Jeffro addressed this in Appendix N), the way the main character uses his modern knowledge to survive some of the more fantastic elements - although this last, I thought, was somewhat overused and undercut my belief in the setting, to an extent. The rationalization of the giant's cursed gold as being irradiated by the process of turning to stone was an especially bad example.

But the one element that really made me take notice was in Chapter 15, when the knight and his companions visit a wizard to see about getting the knight back to his home world. Said wizard has a sign on his house that reads:

MARTINUS TRISMEGISTUS

Master Magici

Spells, Charms, Prophecies, Healing, Love Potions

Blessings, Curses, Ever-Filled Purses

Special rates for parties

It's not, I think, intended to be entirely serious, and indeed the wizard in question admits that some of the services are for advertising only. However, it brought to mind another advertisement by a wizard some half a century later:

HARRY DRESDEN-WIZARD

Lost Items Found, Paranormal Investigations

Consulting, Advice, Reasonable Rates

No Love Potions, Endless Purses, Parties, or Other
Entertainment

Now, I've checked the Word of Jim website and have seen no definitive proof of this, but I cannot believe that Harry's ad isn't a response to Martinus'. Not just the format, but especially that last line seems to set up a deliberate dichotomy between the two.

 Whether this specific influence is intended, unconscious, or imagined, I would say that both The Dresden Files and Three Hearts and Three Lions are worth reading. Indeed, as a standalone work the latter is in some ways, despite being originally published in 1953, more accessible.

Meet the New Doc, Same as the Old Doc

Most of the time, out there in the wilds of the Internetz, coming across something completely flabbergasting is a negative experience. About a week ago, however, I came across something that was definitely positive, if still flabbergasting.

Over at the Castalia House blog, one of their periodic posts highlighting recent releases in Indie and small-press adventure fiction caught my eye with a header mentioning the Man of Bronze, a pseudonym of the classic adventure pulp science-hero and superhero precursor Doc Savage. Now, on previous occasions Castalia House has highlighted the release of the new Doc Savage stories being produced by Will Murray and Altus Press, but this case turned out to be far more interesting.

Except for this one, which is replaced with
the Dynamite comic adaptation cover.

In fact, somebody has released about a dozen of the original Doc Savage pulp stories as Kindle e-books, for about $3.50 a pop. The publisher is listed only as "Amazon Digital Services", and the text appears to be taken from the original 1930s - '40s magazines (complete with introductory illustrations), though the covers are the classic James Bama pieces from the Bantam paperback editions of the '60s - '70s.

With the sole exception of Doc's introductory adventure seen here, none of the specific titles are ones that I'm familiar with. On the strength of The Man of Bronze, however, I'm perfectly willing to recommend them to anyone interested in stories of adventure and heroics.

However, I'm still curious as to how exactly this cornucopia came to be. I'm pretty sure that Doc is not yet in the U.S. public domain (Steamboat Willie is older), yet besides the Castalia House piece I can't find any other references to them. They're not from Altus or the Radio Archives people, as far as I can tell, and I'm not sure who would own the copyright on them anyway. Conde Nast? The price seems way too reasonable to have been set by any major publisher. Maybe it's a stealth marketing campaign for the rumored upcoming Doc Savage movie starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

CAN YOU SMELL WHAT THE DOC IS COOKING?!

In any event, whether the rest of the 100+ Doc Savage stories are going to be hitting Amazon shortly, or whether these are actually pirated editions that will shortly be yanked, this is a great low-investment way to check out the original tales of a key figure in the history of pop culture.

So What Is This #PulpRevolution, Anyway?

By now, regular readers of this blog will have noticed several posts using the #pulprevolution tag, and might be wondering what I mean by that descriptor. Happily, author J. D. Cowen has just made an excellent blog post that recaps the last several years of rediscovery of what pulp fiction really means.

"Of course, pulp fiction has never fully gone away. But that isn't without lack of trying. It has been used as little more than an insult or a cheesy aesthetic for those who hated them. It has been used as an insult by those who never bothered to read the original works. Pulp became a synonym for trash, and nothing else. The Tarantino movie didn't help. The tradition of genre fiction actually goes back through the pulps and the penny dreadfuls all the way to at least Poe. By ignoring the pulps you are cutting the line of tradition and thumbing your nose at it. Those who trash it have no idea what they are actually doing."

The post compiles a lot of the discussions, videos, and controversies of this movement to date (including one of the most objective takes on the whole Sad/Rabid Puppies Hugo Awards thing I've ever seen), making it a valuable resource for those interested in improving their writing craft.

And though it's only been a few years in the making, there's already been progress made. Jeffro Johnson recently had cause to give a quick sketch of some of the standout authors in the movement, a few of which have been mentioned here before.

If we can take it for granted that the past forty years has been a veritable Dark Age for science fiction and fantasy, then having P. Alexander’s Cirsova magazine has been an absolute godsend. Has it come close to the very best of the Weird Tales era? No one that I know of has argued that. But I believe he can go toe to toe with some of the better works in Andrew J. Offutt’s Swords Against Darkness series. More recently he has managed to go further and acquire stories that are on par with the better efforts you could find in Planet Stories.

You’d rather have the next H. P. Lovecraft? Well maybe he hasn’t arrive yet. But Misha Burnett‘s New Wave style handling of the Great Old One’s oeuvre  sure did manage to raise the bar on what I expect today’s short fiction authors.

Who has managed to capture some of the more thrilling qualities of Jack Vance and Robert E. Howard? Schuyler Hernstrom, hands down. Who has succeeded in imbuing his stories with the more compelling aspects of Lord Dunsany, C. S. Lewis, and 1930s space opera? John C. Wright. Who has diligently applied himself to reclaiming pulp era heroism and romance? Jon Mollison. Who has gone from making a work comparable to a short Andre Norton novel to recapitulating the fire of an early 1940’s Leigh Brackett? Dominka Lein!

While I haven't read everything by every author on that list, Cirsova magazine, John C. Wright, and Jon Mollison have all made appearances, to much-deserved praise. And Jeffro modestly neglects to mention his own Appendix N, which as J. D. Cowen noted above deserves a great deal of credit as a catalyst for the movement. But you don't have to take our word for it - lots of these author have free works available on their websites (many of which are in my blogroll) or for their newsletter subscribers. And speaking of Cirsova, this week the fifth issue is free on Amazon Kindle - it's a great example of some of the ideas being thrown around in the Pulp Revolution (especially considering it has a story by Schuyler Hernstrom taking place in Misha Burnett's Eldritch Earth setting, and it's one of the highlights of the issue, too!).

Possibly the most astounding thing about the Pulp Revolution is the way it's expanded over only a few short years. If you're a fan of science fiction and fantasy and have felt that recent mainstream offerings lacked something, now's the time to dig in and try something new - the only place to go from here is up!

The Pulp Revolutionary Sci-Fi of Jon Mollison

OK, now that I've given author Jon Mollison grief a couple of times over the cover of his novel Sudden Rescue, I probably ought to mention that it's really a pretty good book. In fact, last summer was something of a breakout season for Jon, and so far I've picked up three of his novels and thought them all great reads.

I still say he looks like Luigi.

Sudden Rescue, released just under a year ago, starts with an archetype we're all very familiar with, the independent space hauler who's not afraid to shade the finer points of smuggling law. Captain E. Z. Sudden would be right at home with the likes of Han Solo and Malcolm Reynolds, dodging space pirates and overbearing AI empires until he is suddenly thrust into galactic politics with the recovery of some lost cargo containers, one of which contains a member of the local space nobility named Karenina. When it is revealed that she was on her way to a wedding that could make or break the human alliance against the aforementioned AI, she and Sudden must embark on a journey through treacherous peril and exotic, imaginative locations to stop a terrible war.

The next novel, and probably my favorite of the three, is Adventure Constant. This one uses travel to parallel dimensions rather than space, postulating a world where the physical laws of the universe encourage swashbuckling and derring-do. I suspect Jon especially enjoyed the world-building on this one, what with the Panama Canal becoming a lizardman-infested suicide run, Hawaii still an independent kingdom, and the US equivalent run by an office called the Autocrat of Liberty, the current holder of which is described as a "bombastic business tycoon who had rallied the common man to his cause and was even now attempting to roust the cancerous elitists and their foot soldiers from the country." OK, that last one probably didn't take much imagination.

As a crossover enthusiast, I also need to mention the couple of times that Jack Dashing, the hero from our world transported via crashing rocket to this new one, makes a literary reference only to discover that he's accidentally talking about real people. When this happens to the Three Musketeers it's kind of understandable, since half the characters in that work were real people anyway, but when Jack mouths off to a British spy about his 00 number, he barely manages to get the words "secret agent named James -" out before the spy is question goes from demanding where he heard that to ranting about fraudulent poster boys.

With his next release, Jon Mollison returns to the stars with the aptly named Space Princess. In this case, however, the princess is an infant, rescued by a fairly standard American Catholic family and caught up in the political intrigue and space combat that naturally follows. Jon does a neat trick here by making a setting that shares some broad similarities with that of Sudden Rescue - both are interstellar monarchies - but is quite individual at the same time. In fact it reminds me a bit of a lighter and softer Warhammer 40,000, what with all the cathedral- and chapel-shaped ships being used by the Space Catholics (the red crescent fighters and minaret-bedecked capital ships of the Holy Terra-threatening enemy weren't terribly subtle, either). But the best part is the way in which the ordinary family rises to their very un-ordinary circumstances.

In a way, (and given a flexible definition of "ordinary") that's something that all three of these works have in common. In addition, of course, to being fun, adventure-filled works that rest on sound Christian principles without being preachy. The heroes are all heroic, in every sense of the world, and their sense of optimism makes a fine alternative to the too often nihilistic spirit present in many SF works today.

Deuterocanonical Dresden

One of my blogging goals for 2018 is to revisit and hopefully cap off some of the series of posts that have been left hanging in previous years. Of these, the most egregious is my planned re-read of the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher, which spluttered out before I even got to the first novel. There are now fifteen novels in the series, along with the various short prose and comic-book stories, and while the release date for the sixteenth has not yet been announced, this summer will see the release of the second short story collection, Brief Cases. Whatever the real-life circumstances that have delayed Harry's adventures, at least we know Jim hasn't lost his touch in coming up with snappy titles.

But all of that is in the future - today, I'd like to highlight a neat resource for Dresden fans that has recently come online. This website is called Word of Jim, and is a compilation of forum postings, live interview responses, comments left on Amazon reviews, and other such ephemera made by Jim Butcher himself that drop hints at future books and explain or undercut various explanations for ongoing mysteries, or just wacky fan ideas. It's great fun to browse through, although I have yet to locate the place where he says that Ronald Reuel, the titular Summer Knight of Summer Knight, is not the same guy as J. R. R. Tolkien. However, another tidbit seems to support my theory that he is:

I’m sure it’s just one of those freaky coincidences. Tweed-clad old smiling ‘creator of worlds of imagination’ Ronald Reuel, Summer Knight of the Seelie Court does not look a thing like Tolkein.

Or, uh. Well he does, yeah.

On advice of legal council, I claim the right of the fifth amendment not to testify against myself…

On the other hand his statements that Justin DuMorne, Harry's guardian, was absolutely, no-questions, "D-E-D dead" (which I take as evidence that Harry's mentor is still alive*) are available, although I had a bit of trouble finding them since I was initially using "DuMorne" as my search term. Truth be told, some of the pages could use a bit of subdivision.

As we mostly-patiently wait for Brief Cases, as well as the next two novels, Peace Talks and Mirror, Mirror (which will be about exactly what you're thinking), I anticipate that Word of Jim will become a well-used resource by the Dresden fan community, and I thank the compiler "Serack the WoJ Guru" for his efforts.


*OK, here goes. Some years before gaining guardianship of the young Harry Dresden, Justin DuMorne was, by all accounts, an exemplary Warden (The Dresden Files' version of a wizardly police officer), who was involved in the takedown of a dangerous necromancer named Kemmler. Immediately after Kemmler's seemingly final demise, however, he absconded with a dangerous artifact (the yet-unnamed Bob the Skull) and, later, trained Harry as a wizard without any of the usual ethical instruction. Later Harry encounters a bunch of Kemmler's old hangers-on, including one with the charming nickname "Corpsetaker", who specializes in tactical body-swapping.

My theory, then, is that during that last battle Justin DuMorne was the victim of a similar body-swap initiated by Kemmler, and thus was killed in the necromancer's body while his own identity was stolen by Kemmler. Thus, DuMorne is, as Jim points out, as dead as Kemmler, in that they both half are and half aren't. Of course, if Jim never brings Kemmler back to face Harry again they might just as well be all dead, but at this point in Harry's career a legendary necromancer with the face of his hated guardian is just the sort of enemy he might encounter. And I have my suspicions about the mysterious figure called Cowl . . .

Kickstart Your New Year With Card Games and Adventure Fiction!

Happy 2018 to all my readers! As I do from time to time, I'd like to start this year of blogging off by highlighting a couple of crowd-funded projects I'm following.

The first is a card game called "The College Experience", put together by some folks in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Now, I have to admit a little bias, here - the artwork for this game is done by a very dear friend of mine, through whom I was able to get access to a play-testing copy. While not particularly complex, as a pickup game for a spare half-hour or so it does it's job well, especially in the endgame when the players are getting a little more desperate to fill one of the two victory conditions (either holding the "Diploma" card when the draw pile runs out or, in one of the games more elaborate jokes, getting all three of the other highest value cards at any one time. These three cards, of course, represent Good Grades, Enough Sleep, and your Social Life). With just a single day left in the campaign, the game has raised nearly 30% more than its original goal, which is a victory condition in itself.

Also crowd-funding this month - although it's really more of a subscription drive, the goal-meeting aspect is something of a formality, given the circumstances -  are the next two issues of the excellent pulp fantasy and science fiction adventure magazine Cirsova. The magazine has apparently been doing quite well for itself, since the two-issue digital subscription is a whopping $1. With the back issues going on Amazon for about $3 each (for Kindle Readers, of course, the physical copies are more costly no matter which way you buy them), the magazine is practically being given away - and, if you still need convincing, most of the first three issues are literal giveaways at the magazine's website. But don't delay too long, the subscription is only open until the end of the month!

No matter if you're a reader, a gamer, or both, there's nothing quite like helping someone else fulfill a creative dream. Although the technology is only a few years old, it's amazing the kind of things that can be produced by crowd-funding. Both of the projects I've mentioned here have met and exceeded their initial goals, and I hope the successes of these projects inspire their creators for a long time to come.

Christmas Cheer!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all my readers - may they be filled with the love of Christ and the joy of family (and of mashup art)!

Bright Sunshiny Days

Once upon a time, there was a BBC car show called Top Gear. It was a fun little show that eventually became popular even outside England, due in large part to the three hosts - Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond - whose camaraderie, automotive knowledge, and general attitude of amateurish enthusiasm made what could have been a boring news show into an award-winning phenomenon.

Unfortunately, even the most popular TV programs have the detractors, and over the years Top Gear received many complaints, not an insignificant number of which involved Jeremy's humor not being appreciated by humorless scolds. Even more unfortunately, some of these scolds were executives at the BBC, and eventually an excuse was found (a fistfight with a producer, or something) to kick Jeremy off the show. James and Richard resigned in protest, the BBC hired a carefully diverse array of forgettable replacements (the only one who sticks in the memory being Joey from Friends), and it looked like the spirit of Top Gear would be gone forever.

But then, Clarkson, May, and Hammond got together with one of the producers whom Jeremy didn't punch, got in contact with Amazon, and we all got to go on the Internet and find this:


The Grand Tour [opening sequence] from Daniel Siegling on Vimeo.

I really like this whole opening sequence, not just because it marks the beginning of a terrific show (The Grand Tour is basically Top Gear with everything the BBC could legally block removed or altered), but as a piece of art in its own right. The choice of the Hothouse Flowers' cover of "I Can See Clearly Now" works really well as the mood swings from dour to triumphant, and is perfectly timed to little moments like Jeremy's face lighting up when James and Richard's muscle cars catch up with his. Best of all is the moment when the saxophone solo revs up, and the hosts are joined by a magnificent escort of cars from across automotive history. From modern supercars to pulp-era touring models, standard-issue daily drivers to outrageous art cars . . . now there's a diversity worth celebrating!

The Answer Should be Obvious

While I don't particularly consider myself a "Gamer" in the way the term is normally used these days, I have over the years enjoyed many video games, especially ones from the Super Mario Brothers series. It was therefore with great interest that I read this article last week on Tor.com, "Super Mario Brothers: Fantasy or Science Fiction?".

Now, while Tor.com (much like its paper-book-publishing big brother) is often (usually) ground zero for much that is wrong-headed or actively malicious about today's speculative fiction culture, this particular article is fairly decent, with some interesting thoughts about the interconnectedness of the Super Mario franchise. However, I couldn't help but notice that, aside from a brief invocation of "science fantasy" towards the end, the article is pretty set on its binary SF-or-Fantasy question, when a different way of looking at the genre question comes up with a completely different, but much better-fitting answer.

Super Mario Brothers is a Planetary Romance.

World History According to Back to the Future

The other day I was browsing YouTube and happened across this highly amusing (if slightly-mis-titled) video:



What it lacks in not having the whole six-hour movie saga, of course, it makes up for by including snippets from the Animated Series, the Telltale video game, and even screen-shots from the tie-in comics, both the current IDW series and the old Harvey Comics stories. The inclusion of the former, by the way (not to mention the 30th anniversary short from a couple years back), makes this technically more up-to-date, if far less comprehensive, than the excellent Back in Time by Greg Mitchell.

In a way, it illustrates both the positives and negatives of opening up such a well-crafted story into an Expanded Universe. Some consistency of tone and quality is lost, a well as opening up many more opportunities for continuity errors to creep in (already a particular peril for time-travel stories). At the same time, however, the scope is greatly increased - as we see in the video, Back to the Future: The Animated Series hit many of the most popular eras of historical fiction, with pirates and dinosaurs and knights and Romans, among others. The ongoing IDW comics do the same thing for the characters, giving us such gems as Griff Tannen's 2035 employment as a police officer (!) and Doc's mid-1960s attempt to get government funding for his experiments (which somehow resulted in Marty coming back from the future only speaking Russian).

If nothing else, an active EU shows that a story like Back to the Future still resonates with the listeners, even after over 30 years. Fan projects, like this video, are another encouraging sign, and I'm glad to be able to share it.

The Age of the Orc

. . . is often coming, but never quite seems to get here. Scott Oden's new historical fantasy novel A Gathering of Ravens, however, brings it as close as it's ever been.

While this is not the first time that Oden has tackled writing from the orcish point of view - the short story "Amarante" in Skelos II is another example - it's certainly the most ambitious. The story follows Grimnir, who is definitely an orc even if the word is never used (the neologism kaunr is used for Grimnir to describe himself, while other cultures use skraelingr, orcneas, or fomoraig) - murderous, crude, and bloodthirsty. After kidnapping an incredulous Christian traveler as a guide, he sets off from his lair in 10th-Century Denmark in search of the Dane that killed his brother, Grendel.

Well, almost. The brother's name is actually Hrungnir and his killer's Bjarki (a name that, like Beowulf, means bear), but the parallels are undeniable - Hrungnir's arm being displayed along with his head is just one of the more obvious. I was delighted to note there were even shout-outs to more modern versions of the story - at one a Dane begins reciting the famous poem from the film The Thirteenth Warrior ("Lo, there do I see my father . . . "), and certain spoilery facts of Bjarki Half-Dane's backstory are somewhat reminiscent of the 2007 Beowulf film.

Another appearance of the White Tree.

But Beowulf isn't the only piece of meat in this literary stew. There's some Tolkien, of course - a tale about an orc could hardly avoid him - but it's surprisingly superficial. There's a scene with some dwarves (taller than Grimnir!), one of whom is named Nori; and there's a section with a willow-spirit who, in addition to acting like close kin of Old Man Willow, uses heraldry described similar to Gondor's.

In terms of overall style and theme, though, A Gathering of Ravens owes much more to Robert E. Howard than to J. R. R. Tolkien - not just little things like the dog named Conan and the Viking that swears by Crom, but the way the cosmic conflict between paganism and Christianity (not for nothing, I think, is the Battle of Clontarf the climax of the book) forms the background of a personal revenge story, in which the actors shake out in some surprising directions. Not to mention the action and combat scenes, which richly evokes the hard-scrabble life-or-death struggles such events would have been.

Overall, as someone with both an interest in fantasy fiction and medieval history this book was a joy to read - it's obvious the author is well-read on both the historical and mythical background of Viking-age Europe. I have heard that Scott Oden intends to pen more adventures of Grimnir the Last Orc, and can only say the sooner the better.

Favorite line: "This was no game of thrones where generals sacrificed and maneuvered on the backs of their soldiers; this was the most primal sort of conflict - Odin's weather, the red chaos of slaughter - where men stood breast-to-breast and shield-to-shield, and dealt the same blows they took in kind."

I see what you did there!

This is Gonna Be a Good One, I Can Tell . . .

Somehow I missed the initial announcement since he's already up to Chapter 2, but after what I can only assume was a rousing success with his pulpy gonzo space-opera web serial, science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright has announced his latest effort, Lost on the Last Continent:

Colonel Preston Lost, a big game hunter, is catapulted into the far, remote future of AD Two Hundred Fifty Million. The single remaining landmass above the waves is the supercontinent of Pangaea Ultima.

Mankind is nigh extinct, barbarism is rampant, and science is magic.

Dwarfish posthumans called Grays maintain an oasis of cruel and tyrannical civilization, its decadence upheld on the backs of slaves.

Among these slaves are true humans abducted from all the lost cities of man, thought drowned, abandoned, or buried: the populations of Ys,  Togenkyo, Catalhoyuk, Aztlan, Atlantis.

Preston Lost must fight his way from slave pits to sky pirates, past dinosaurs and dervishes, samurai and six-fingered giants to destroy the Time Tesseract and preserve every eon from the evil at the end of time!

Probably not the author.

And he wastes no time in getting to the stuff adventure literature is made of: UFO/space-plane chases, dogfights with dinosaurs, gunfights* with dinosaurs, treacherous landscapes, pithy inner dialogue - "He had two hands, after all. But only one Holland & Holland", - the works. And given that this is John C. Wright, I have no doubt that beneath all the spectacle will be a spiritual foundation both solid and thought-provoking.

Read Lost on the Last Continent here.

Subscribe to John C. Wright's Patreon account here.

*Because Colonel Preston Lost is exactly the sort of person to take a big-game rifle and an antique sidearm to test an experimental rocket-plane.

Is S.M.Stirling's Emberverse Inspired By John Norman's Gor Series?

A few months back I talked about a podcast called Geek Gab, mentioning that I wasn't a regular listener, but was interested because they were interviewing Jeffro Johnson about his "Appendix N" book. Since then, however, I've been tuning in more often than not, even as they've grown from a single weekly show to a veritable online network.

In one recent episode of the spinoff show Geek Gab Game Night, the guest, game designer Jim Desborough, was talking about his adaption to tabletop gaming of the Gor novels by John Norman. Now, I'm only familiar with this series through it's rather dubious reputation, but the podcast covered most of the non-dubious basics - Gor is a planet in Earth's orbit (only on the opposite side of the sun so it can't be detected from Earth), which has been seeded by inscrutable aliens with small populations of various Earth cultures spirited away and kept from progressing to far down certain areas of technological development, notably firearms.

In the course of the discussion, a brief mention was made of S. M. Stirling's time-traveling Nantucket trilogy that began with Island in the Sea of Time, which got me thinking about the spin-off series that Stirling started with Dies the Fire. That book begins with a catastrophe similar to a worldwide EMP pulse that also depowers gunpowder, somehow. As the books go on, there's a recurring theme - calling it a subplot would be giving it too much credit - of people studying what they call the Change and concluding that, scientifically, it makes absolutely no sense. Eventually it is revealed that, like on Gor, humanity is being artificially kept in its Medieval Stasis by inscrutable aliens*, albeit ones considerably less flashy than the ones on Gor.

Even more intriguingly, the setting has gone through a number of time-skips and is now a couple of generations from the Change. One of the more interesting aspects, as the character's horizons expand, is that they keep meeting different groups of people who've survived psychologically by taking a shared element - say, the RCMP or the Boy Scouts - and making it the foundation of a new culture. This tends to give the map, at least in North America, a sort of anachronistic crazy-quilt feel, much like the descriptions of Gor with its chronologically diverse groups of alien-abducted Earth people.

So was Stirling intentionally riffing on these elements of the Gor setting? I don't know of any concrete evidence one way or another, but I do suspect it to be an unconscious influence. Of course, it could also be a coincidence** that the main villain of the first few books is named Norman, and has a bit of the, shall we say, Gorean philosopher about him . . .

*Actually an inscrutable far-future human gestalt super-mind, or something.

**More certainly a coincidence, and certainly more of a stretch, is the appearance of an ersatz Tarzan in one of the stories in the universe-opening short story collection Stirling edited a few years back. Tarzan, of course, was an invention of Edgar Rice Burroughs along with John Carter, whose Barsoomian adventures the first few Gor books are said to be a New Wave-ish pastiche of.

Magazine Rack Revolutionary

Earlier this week the nominees for the 2017 Hugo Awards were announced, and while for the most part I can't really gin up much of a reaction I was quite gratified to see that Cirsova Heroic Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine has won a nomination (which, these days, is almost more prestigious than actually winning) for Best Semiprozine. Now, I've been an eager reader of Cirsova since it premiered on Kickstarter in January 2016, but have inexplicably failed to talk about it here.

Time to fix that.

 Inspired by what he called "older, weirder, and pulpier" fiction and seeking to provide an outlet for the same, editor P. Alexander really hit the ground running with Issue #1. Basically every story, from the alternate-history Spanish-Armada-with magic story by Kat Otis to the pure undiluted sword-and-planet tale by Abraham Strongjohn to the first part of James Hutchings's poetic adaption of Edgar Rice Burrough's "Princess of Mars" has something to recommend it. My personal favorite, I must say, is "A Hill of Stars" by Misha Burnett, which has a great take on the Howardian pre-historic civilization idea, mainly by using the Old Ones from H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" as the just-fallen empire which the dinosaur-riding human barbarians are in the process of looting. The main character is a former slave of the Old Ones who uses their knowledge to win life, love, and liberty in a terrific example of what the "Pulp Revolution" literary movement is about.

And I'm not the only one who thinks so - shortly after the issue was published, Misha Burnett opened up the "Eldritch Earth" setting for other writers to use, and the just-released Issue #5 of Cirsova is reported to have several of the resulting stories. Alas, while I have downloaded the issue I haven't yet found time to read it, but I'm definitely looking forward to it.

Certainly the middle three issues have consistently met the expectations set by #1. While there's certainly an emphasis on science-fantasy stories of one sort or another, there's really something for everyone here. Just to give a quick idea, some of the other stories that impressed me the most included -

• "Hoskins' War" by Brian K. Lowe, from Issue #2, a Weird American Revolution story.
• "The Lion's Share" by J. D. Brink, from Issue #3, featuring a space pirate operating in the classic piratical mode.
• "Blood and Bones: Caribbean 1645" by Jim Breyfogle, also from Issue #3, in which a young wizard pulls a fast one on both the colonial government and a pirate crew.
• "The Lady of the Amorous City" by Edward Ermelac, from Issue #4, in which a not-yet-King Arthur fights a really weird knight.

And that's just a few of the dozens of stories that I found the most memorable - I haven't even mentioned the essays by Jeffro Johnson and others analyzing the older pulp stories, or the fact that Issue #3 was designated the "Pirate Issue", or hardly anything other than the surface of this fine magazine. And to top it all off, all the content from the first two issues is available free at the links above!

Even if, like me, you're a fan of science fiction or fantasy but don't consider yourself a short fiction reader, if anything would change your mind, Cirsova would. I really don't know of anything else (except maybe Skelos) like it.

SF&F History Month - From Amber to Avalon

Well, we've had some schedule slippage, which I apologize for, but I have a semi - decent excuse in that some personal life changes meant I was without ready Internet access for some of the last month. On the plus side, I was able to finish both Nine Princes in Amber and its first sequel, The Guns of Avalon. Before I get to my thoughts on them, however, I wanted to highlight a bit of (less than hot-off-the-presses) relevant news - The Chronicles of Amber appears to be in production as a television series.

As neat as it would be to see, the most interesting thing about the press release is the many comparisons to Game of Thrones, especially the ones that claim the Amber was an inspiration for Westros. Now, I have yet to read any of the books and have only seen a little of the show, but I can definitely understand where such comparisons come from, given all that happens in Amber in these relatively short books.

(Spoilers Ahead:)

Gabbing Geeks on Appendix N

Alright, so the last 2016 Science Fiction and Fantasy History Month post is . . . quite late, and I apologize for that (I'll make my excuses when I'm finally done with it). In the meanwhile, yesterday the podcast Geek Gab released their 84th episode, "Super Secrets of Appendix N"*. Now, I'm not a regular listener to Geek Gab, but I was especially interested because the guest this week was none other than Jeffro Johnson, who, as I've mentioned, inspired last month's blogging topic (he even gave it a nice shoutout at the Castalia House blog).

So I was interested to hear what he'd have to say on the topic:



Wow. That turned into quite the manifesto, at the end. If you're at all interested in the history and current state of science fiction and fantasy literature, you should definitely give this a listen.


*Defined most poetically in the episode as "a list of the stuff Gary Gygax ripped off to make Dungeons & Dragons.