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Month: July 2012

Leigh Brackett: American Writer

Leigh Brackett: American Writer

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shannach
The 4th and final Leigh Brackett hardback from Haffner Press, a set collecting all her short fiction.

This 4th of July I thought I’d take a look at one of my very favorite writers, the late, great Leigh Brackett, queen of planetary adventure.

Only a few generations ago planetary adventure fiction had a few givens. First, it usually took place in our own solar system.  Second, our own solar system was stuffed with inhabitable planets. Everyone knew that Mercury baked on one side and froze on the other, but a narrow twilight band existed between the two extremes where life might thrive. Venus was hot and swampy, like prehistoric Earth had been, and Mars was a faded and dying world kept alive by the extensive canals that brought water down from the ice caps.

To enjoy Brackett, you have to get over the fact that none of this is real — which really shouldn’t be hard if you enjoy reading about vampires, telepaths, and dragons, but hey, there you go. Yeah, Mars doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere, or canals, or ancient races. If you don’t read her because you can’t get past that, you’re a fuddy duddy and probably don’t like ice cream.

A few of Brackett’s finest stories were set on Venus, but it was Mars that she made her own, with vivid, crackling prose.

Here. Try this, the opening of one of her best, “The Last Days of Shandakor.” You can find it in two of the three books featured as illustrations in this article, Shannach — the Last: Farwell to Mars, and Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories.

Anyway. On to Brackett.

He came alone into the wineshop, wrapped in a dark red cloak, with the cowl drawn over his head. He stood for a moment by the doorway and one of the slim dark predatory women who live in those places went to him, with a silvery chiming from the little bells that were almost all she wore.

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Art of the Genre: The Art of an inspired Fake…

Art of the Genre: The Art of an inspired Fake…

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418510_207020362733063_100002753026293_274477_1896356296_nHave you ever heard the phrase, ‘This is going to be the next INSERT ICONIC FRANCHISE HERE’? I’m pretty sure we all have, but the one that sticks out most starkly in my memory was from 1997.

I’d recently moved to Maryland and I well remember seeing the trailers for the Bruce Willis science fiction vehicle The Fifth Element. The billing indicated it to be, ‘The next Star Wars’. I was so excited, I dragged my then twenty-five year old wife to the theater in hopes the billing might have some kind of thread of truth.

I well remember her reaction to the film, and most appreciably the movie’s use of the word ‘perfect’. It was truly a painful experience, one that is as fresh today as it was then, and yet over the next couple of years I not only forgave The Fifth Element for not being the next Star Wars, but learned to appreciate it on a level I never thought possible.

I mean, when you get down to it, the next Star Wars wasn’t even ‘The next Star Wars’, Phantom Menace was a complete debacle that somehow manages to look like a Academy Award winner next to The Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.

Fifth Element isn’t Star Wars, it’s anything but, and yet if you don’t make that connection and simply try to view the movie as a solo performance it’s truly a fun piece of science fiction. Willis renders a great Die Hard-like role, and Milla Jovovich is indeed ‘perfect’, much to my wife’s volcanic fury at the assessment.

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Confessions of a Guilty Reviewer

Confessions of a Guilty Reviewer

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Howard Andrew Jones with his Review Rooster.
Howard Andrew Jones with his Review Rooster.

I used to write occasional reviews for Tangent Online, and once I wrote one that I still regret. I’ve rarely found a slice-of-life story or flash fiction that I enjoyed, so I probably had no business evaluating a piece of short fiction that was both. Yet I read it, and I slammed it. Not because it was bad flash fiction, or because it was a bad slice-of-life story (I had no kind of qualifications for adequately judging either) but because I didn’t like flash fiction or slice-of-life stories. It was the epitome of ill-informed reviewing, where the writer is arrogant enough to know better than fans of an entire genre. Or two.

I didn’t understand my mistake for a while, and when I met the author of the story at a convention years later he was kind enough not to mention my idiocy, or, more likely, hadn’t remembered the name of the idiot who’d written the review.

You’d think that my epiphany about having written such a bad review would have arrived when I started to get my own fiction published more regularly, but it actually hit me faster, probably because it took a loooong time for my fiction to get published regularly.

I began to evaluate game products for Black Gate and it finally dawned on me that I had to consider both a work’s intended function and its intended audience. For instance, if I was looking at a role-playing product, I couldn’t evaluate a retro dungeon crawl by the same standards I looked at a modern story-based adventure with plot arcs.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 6: The Master Mind of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 6: The Master Mind of Mars

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master-mind-of-mars-1st-editionI maxed out on Barsoom back in March. After reviewing the first five Martian novels over a span of two and a half months, I switched over to writing about the movie John Carter of Mars. (That is what I’m calling it, dammit, because that’s what the end title card says.) I love the movie, but the box-office and the box-office pundits did not, and although I struggled to keep a positive view, I realized after all of this that I needed a break from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s red planet.

But during a brief pause between my summer movie reviews, the opportunity to zap my Earthly body back to Mars offered itself. So my overview of ERB’s Martian epic resumes at Book #6, with a new Earthman hero, a return to first-person, and the Barsoomian equivalent of The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Our Saga: The adventures of Earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other natives and visitors, on the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. A dry and slowly dying world, Barsoom contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with nine novels, one volume of linked novellas, and two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: The Master Mind of Mars (1927)

Previous Installments: A Princess of Mars (1912), The Gods of Mars (1913), The Warlord of Mars (1913-14), Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1916), The Chessmen of Mars (1922)

The Backstory

Burroughs wrote The Master Mind of Mars (originally under the less thrilling titles “A Weird Adventure on Mars” and “Vad Varo of Barsoom”) in mid-1925, but his usual markets didn’t pick it up. (Wikipedia, in a [citation needed] moment, speculates this may have something to do with “its satirical treatment of religious fundamentalists.” That seems unlikely, as the book is light on the religious criticism compared to the instant-selling The Gods of Mars, where searing attacks on religion are the center of the plot.) ERB finally sold the book to Hugo Gernsback, inventor of the term “science fiction,” pioneer of magazine SF, and notorious cheapskate, who paid $1,250 for the novel — much less than what the author got from his usual markets. Gernsback made Burroughs’s newest Martian adventure the lead story for his Amazing Stories Annual, an extension of what was at the time the only science-fiction pulp. Burroughs made sense as a circulation-booster, since he helped create magazine SF fourteen years before the first pulp dedicated to it appeared on the stands. …

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Dungeon Crawl Classics – Growing Fresh from Old Roots

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Growing Fresh from Old Roots

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dcc1Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game
Joseph Goodman
Goodman Games (480 pp, $39.99, Hardback; $24.99, Download)
Reviewed by Howard Andrew Jones

I’m afraid that the Dungeon Crawl Classics role-playing game will hit the modern game audience the way a hard rocking band with great guitar hooks hits teenagers who think greatness is held by those auto-tuned voices and dancing lip-syncers. It might be that they’ll have the sense to understand something good, done right, even if it is artistically out of style, but I can’t help thinking they’ll be too hypnotized by flash and swagger to see the beauty.

Well, I use the term beauty loosely, because the plethora of art in DCC is old-school, in your face, evocative, bloody, and dynamic. It has some of the same aesthetics as counter-culture comics from the 60s, but it’s waaay cooler. Where else can you randomly flip through pages and come first to a wizard riding through a harbor on a giant marauding tentacled thing while being assaulted by an elf riding a hawk? Another quick flip takes you to an armored warrior pointing the way to a sinister cavern carved like the open maw of a monster, and a charismatic spell-caster launching a spray of firebolts.

But the book isn’t just the art – though the art sure aids in suggesting the atmosphere of the game itself. This isn’t your brother’s role-playing game. For that matter, it isn’t your dad’s AD&D, either. Primary creator Joseph Goodman is on record as saying that it’s the first game based on a thorough reading of Appendix N from the original Dungeon Master’s Guide. If you’re not in the know, Appendix N was a list of recommended reading featuring the likes of Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, and all kinds of other creators of literary fantasy goodies, most of which my local library didn’t have back when I was in junior high, or I would have been swept away into some realms of adventure a lot earlier.

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Black Gate’s Closet: Crisiswear

Black Gate’s Closet: Crisiswear

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What the heck does one wear at the end of the world? Sure, yes, most people would answer, whatever you can find, but…why not be prepared, and why wait till disaster strikes? Don’t you want to look like a post-apocalyptic hardass? I mean, come on, who doesn’t want to get their Mad Max and Alice on? Nobody wants to be the tarp-toga guy who ties guns to his belt with bootlaces. It’s unwieldy.

Enter, Crisiswear.

Crisiswear is a Chicago-based clothing company. They specialize in future-forward fashion with industrial elements. All of their clothing is custom made, double stitched and built to last. This is survival gear that you can blow up evil, mutant villains in and then dance around their charred lairs.

Stock up on versatile, hedonistic, cyberpunk apparel at their website, or check out Crisiswear on Etsy.

MedTech Dress by CrisisWear
MedTech Dress by Crisiswear
Kensen by Crisiswear
Kensen by Crisiswear
Vigilante vest by Crisiswear
Vigilante vest by Crisiswear
Solo Leg Holster by Crisiswear
Solo Leg Holster by Crisiswear
Clockwork Angels III. Hope is What Remains to be Seen

Clockwork Angels III. Hope is What Remains to be Seen

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Clockwork AngelsToday, July 1, is the one-hundred-and-forty-fifth anniversary of the date the British North America Act came into effect, which effectively established the modern country of Canada. We still celebrate that as our national holiday: Canada Day. So it’s only appropriate that I’m posting now about three men who have together been named as official Ambassadors of Music by the Canadian government, who have been made Officers of the Order of Canada, and who have as a group won the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award. I’m talking about Rush, and after two posts recapping their career (the first here, the second here), I’ll finally be writing about their new album, Clockwork Angels.

It’s a long album, over 66 minutes, and tells a single story. Although reminiscent of some of their older songs, not least due to lyricist Neil Peart’s use of themes and images that’ve clearly fascinated him for years, it’s also new ground for the band, who have never before created a fully-fledged concept album. Clockwork Angels is a steampunk epic in 12 songs, with accompanying passages of narrative prose that help to tie the story together. A novelization’s forthcoming in September by author Kevin J. Anderson, in collaboration with Peart.

To reiterate something I said in the first of these posts: this is a brilliant album. It’s lyrically and musically complex, constantly challenging, a treasure trove of ideas that’s impossible to assimilate in a single listen. The conceptual and narrative structure works, and lends the album a distinct feel — literally, a novelistic (and novel) sensibility. The relation of the songs, the recurrence of symbols that both resonate with the album’s story and derive from earlier in Peart’s career, gives Clockwork Angels significant thematic depth.

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