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Month: January 2014

Universal Labels 47 Ronin a Flop less than 24 Hours After Release

Universal Labels 47 Ronin a Flop less than 24 Hours After Release

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47 Ronin poster-smallUniversal Pictures announced it would take a writedown on its $175 million fantasy epic 47 Ronin on December 26th, the day after the film entered wide release on Christmas Day.

While it’s routine for studios to write off projected losses for underperforming films, it’s highly unusual for one to announce that such a major project is a bomb so early in the film’s run, virtually killing what little hope it had to defy expectations and turn things around.

My teenage sons, oblivious to wider industry news, saw the trailer — packed with gorgeous fantasy landscapes; pirates; dark dungeons; and life-and-death swordfights against samurai, monsters, and flying dragons — and were sold immediately.

For myself, I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece, but I was astounded that Universal had dismissed the film so cavalierly, and my curmudgeonly nature immediately made me assume they were idiots. So we caught a matinee showing yesterday, in a nearly empty theater.

And you know what? It wasn’t bad. Rinko Kikuchi does a marvelous job as the (literally) scenery-chewing, shape-shifting witch and veteran actor Hiroyuki Sanada (most recently seen in The Wolverine and the TV shows Lost and Revenge) carries the film as the leader of the legendary band of 47 disgraced samurai who avenges the death of their noble lord, against the direct orders of the Shogun.

Even Keanu Reeves delivers an entirely serviceable performance as Kai, the half-breed who leads the weaponless ronin into a demon-infested forest and wins them some cool samurai ordnance. The marketing has portrayed Reeves as the lead, but it’s really Sanada who has the most screen time.

The tale of the original 47 ronin, whose 18th century graves still stand today at Sengaku-ji in Japan, is perhaps the most famous example of bushidō, the samurai code of honor, in Japanese history, and is considered by some the country’s “national legend.”

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January/February Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

January/February Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

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F&SF Jan-Feb 2014-smallJust how excited I am by the arrival of F&SF every two months is probably unfairly influenced by the cover.

I can’t help it — I’m just a sucker for good cover art. Some of my favorite recent covers have been Max Bertolini’s marvelous down-in-the-dungeon piece for May/June 2012, Maurizio Manzieri’s enigmatic alien egg for July/August 2011, and our own Mark Evan’s first cover for F&SF, the 2012 Jan/Feb issue.

Of course, all the best magazine covers feature space ships, intrepid humans exploring foreboding alien landscapes and — especially! — robots. Which is why I was especially taken with the cover for the January/February 2014 issue, by the great Ed Valigursky.

Valigursky, who painted covers for IF, Amazing, Fantastic, and many others (not to mention many of my all-time favorite vintage paperback covers, like Space Viking and The Cosmic Computer), died in 2009, so I’m not sure how editor Gordon van Gelder managed to get his hands on a cover I’ve never seen before, but he did. Valigursky’s piece pays tribute to the classic look of F&SF from the 50s and 60s, and still somehow manages to look modern and fresh. That’s no small feat.

Chuck Rothman reviews the issue for Tangent Online, including Oliver Buckram’s novelette “The Museum of Error.”

Sometimes a wonderful conceit is more than enough to hold a story together. “The Museum of Error” is one of these: a museum that features various scientific mistakes –- the “Rounding Errors Through the Ages” exhibit, robots who insist they’re human, the Never-Right Clock, and Pete the Petrified Cat. Herbert Linden is the Assistant Curator for Military History, and is called to find out what happened to Pete, who may have been stolen by their competitors, the Science Institute. Oliver Buckram’s story is filled with imagination, and is very cleverly constructed, with a mishmash of what seem to be one-liners [that] all come together in the end.

This issue contains stories from C.C. Finlay (whose novella “The Nursemaid’s Suitor” appeared in Black Gate 8), Albert E. Cowdrey, Robert Reed, Alex Irvine, and others.

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New Treasures: Old Mars, Edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

New Treasures: Old Mars, Edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

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Old Mars-smallI heard George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois were doing a new science fiction anthology about Mars and I thought, “Eh, Mars. It’s just no fun anymore. Too bad they don’t write stories about Mars the way they used to — like Clark Ashton Smith’s brilliant “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” or Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore’s fabulous tales of decadent civilizations and inscrutable alien mysteries. No one has that much imagination any more. Bah! I think I’ll go yell at the kids to get off the lawn.”

Then Old Mars finally arrived and it thawed my mean old heart. Martin and Dozois have rallied some of the finest writers in the industry — like Michael Moorcock, Joe R. Lansdale, Ian Mcdonald, Howard Waldrop, Matthew Hughes, Phyllis Eisenstein, and many others — to write brand new tales of Mars in the classic pulp tradition. Here’s the marvelous book description:

Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars. Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. Heinlein’s Red Planet. These and so many more inspired generations of readers with a sense that science fiction’s greatest wonders did not necessarily lie far in the future or light-years across the galaxy but were to be found right now on a nearby world tantalizingly similar to our own — a red planet that burned like an ember in our night sky… and in our imaginations.

This new anthology of fifteen all-original science fiction stories, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, celebrates the Golden Age of Science Fiction, an era filled with tales of interplanetary colonization and derring-do. Before the advent of powerful telescopes and space probes, our solar system could be imagined as teeming with strange life-forms and ancient civilizations — by no means always friendly to the dominant species of Earth. And of all the planets orbiting that G-class star we call the Sun, none was so steeped in an aura of romantic decadence, thrilling mystery, and gung-ho adventure as Mars.

Join such seminal contributors as Michael Moorcock, Mike Resnick, Joe R. Lansdale, S. M. Stirling, Mary Rosenblum, Ian McDonald, Liz Williams, James S. A. Corey, and others in this brilliant retro anthology that turns its back on the cold, all-but-airless Mars of the Mariner probes and instead embraces an older, more welcoming, more exotic Mars: a planet of ancient canals cutting through red deserts studded with the ruined cities of dying races.

Martin and Dozois may well have produced my dream anthology. You don’t know how thrilled I am to see this kind of open-hearted embrace of the genre’s pulp roots from a major publisher.

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Vintage Treasures: Sorcerer’s World by Damien Broderick

Vintage Treasures: Sorcerer’s World by Damien Broderick

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Sorcerer's World Damien Broderic-smallI think of Australian science fiction author Damien Broderick chiefly as a modern writer. He got a Locus Award nomination back in May for his non-fiction book Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (edited with Paul Di Filippo), just as an example, and Rich Horton reported on his brand new three-volume survey of the vintage UK SF magazines Science Fantasy, New Worlds, and Science Fiction Adventures (all written with John Boston) for us in March.

So I admit I was a little surprised to find one of his books tucked away in a collection of vintage 50s and 60s paperbacks I purchased online a few weeks ago. Sure, it was published right at the tail end of those decades (1970) and it was his first novel. But Sorcerer’s World made me realize that Broderick has been contributing steadily to the field for well over four decades — and shows no signs of stopping.

Through the Time Barrier

Klim Xaraf, son of a nomadic chief, awoke from his monumental fall to find himself the prisoner of time — trapped a thousand years in the future. Around him was a dying world. Its incredible power sucked by necromancers through a hole to the past… its cities preserved in stasis, awaiting his liberation, or their final doom.

Yet Klim could neither meet this world’s challenge, nor conquer the wizards of his own, until the powers primed him for the battle. For with their knowledge, they would erase his memory and plunge him in a nightmare training ground… where all the wonders of tomorrow were the forgotten souvenirs of an ancient yesterday.

Ah, for the days when fantasy novels had characters named “Klim Xaraf.” These days, everyone sounds like a D&D character, rather than an extra from Krull. Broderick wrote a few other fantasy novels, including The Dreaming Dragons (1980), The Black Grail (1986), and The White Abacus (1997), but nowadays he’s chiefly known for his science fiction, especially Striped Holes (1988), Godplayers (2005), K-Machines (2006), and Transcension (2007).

Sorcerer’s World was published in October, 1970 by Signet. It is 144 pages, originally priced at 60 cents. It has never been reprinted, and there is no digital edition. See all of our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Read Isaac Asimov’s Predictions for 2014… from 1964

Read Isaac Asimov’s Predictions for 2014… from 1964

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Isaac Asimov 3Several sites around the Internet are making a big deal of Isaac Asimov’s predictions for 2014, originally written as an Op Ed piece for The New York Times fifty years ago.

Inspired by his visit to the New York World’s Fair of 1964, Asimov’s original piece wasn’t a science fiction story, but simply his predictions for what the World’s Fair of 2014 would be like.

Alexis Kleinman’s article at The Huffington Post is titled “Isaac Asimov’s Predictions For 2014 From 50 Years Ago Are Eerily Accurate,” and carefully categorizes the Good Doctor’s predictions as Correct (“Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence”), Close, But Not Exact (“World population will be 6,500,000,000”), and Incorrect (“The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords”).

Dylan Love at Business Insider takes a similar angle, with his post “In 1964, The Brilliant Isaac Asimov Wrote Some Predictions For 2014 — Wait Until You See How Right He Was.” Love grades Asimov much higher than HuffPo, noting that several predictions (“Men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better,” which clearly forecasts World of Warcraft, and “Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with ‘robot-brains,'” an obvious reference to Google’s self-driving cars) just need the right interpretation to be true.

Rebecca J. Rosen at The Atlantic takes Asimov to task for predicting an insufficiently grim future (“But he couldn’t have known the consequences of the development he predicted —- a planet whose climate is badly destabilized, whose inhabitants face mass extinctions in the years ahead”), and David Wogan at Scientific American clearly enjoyed the article, though he points out Asimov entirely missed the boat in at least one regard (“What we know as the internet is missing in these predictions, which is how we are all able to read this article and his thoughts decades later.”)

Good to see Asimov getting so much attention two decades after his death. You can read his original article here.

You Can’t Go Home Again . . .

You Can’t Go Home Again . . .

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A princess of mars-smallLast week I talked about my Window Theory of Emotional Response and I got some responses from people telling me about some books and films they’d encountered after the window had closed for them – and one or two who talked about works they’d loved once, but no more. Works where the window had once been open and was now closed.

It was pretty clear that I wasn’t talking about stuff we merely liked, or thought well of, but rather stuff that changed the world for us. Where the earth moved, the stars realigned and our understanding of the world was either fundamentally reordered or fundamentally approved.

We all know you can’t go home again. You’re not going to be able to relive that feeling of shock and awe, that feeling that the world just re-oriented itself, by rereading the book that did it for you or re-watching the movie or the TV series. Sometimes it happens that revisiting Parnassus leads us to feel it’s just a hill in Greece.

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Blogging Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon, Part Nine

Blogging Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon, Part Nine

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kurtzman_flash_gordon_cvr110892184892961“The Martian Baby” by Dan Barry was serialized by King Features Syndicate from November 15, 1954 to February 5, 1955.

The story gets underway in another tranquil setting with Flash and Dale enjoying a picnic in the country (Dale is supporting a very short, but stylish new haircut) only to have their peaceful interlude disturbed by a flying saucer that buzzes them so closely they are forced to run for cover. The saucer lands and reveals its occupant is a Martian baby crying for its mother.

The baby is far heavier than it appears, absorbs all moisture (staying dry during rain), and munches away happily on flowers. Apart from that, the little tyke with the Mohawk seems human. While Dale’s maternal instincts quickly come to the fore, another saucer appears and obliterates the baby’s ship with a death ray beam. Flash, Dale, and the baby seek shelter in the woods. Dan Barry gives readers a glimpse of the exotic and beautiful alien female piloting the saucer and immediately diffuses the threat in accordance with the gender politics of the 1950s.

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Goth Chick News: I, Frankenstein… You, Potentially Disappointed

Goth Chick News: I, Frankenstein… You, Potentially Disappointed

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I Frankenstein Poster-smallI am just not sure how to feel about this one.

On January 24, I, Frankenstein the film will finally come to life in theaters nationwide. This after the U.S. release was originally set for February 22, 2013. Then five months prior to release, in the fall of 2012, it was abruptly moved to September 13, 2013; then in April 2013, the date was moved again to January 24, 2014.

In February 2013, Lions Gate said they would release the film in 3D and then in September 2013, they came back to tell us the film would be digitally re-mastered and released in the IMAX format – in 3D.

I, Frankenstein’s release strategy has been retooled more than the old guy himself.

There are a lot of reasons for a studio to postpone a movie release: like problems with the script/ talent/ director, the test audiences didn’t react well and new footage needs to be shot, the studio doesn’t want the release to be diluted by a competitive release in a similar genre…

Or the film just isn’t good and the studio needs time to add some additional razzle-dazzle — like 3D and IMAX.

As a fan of the graphic novel and after seeing the movie trailer, I tend to believe this case might be a combination of all of the above.

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New Treasures: Spectrum 20, edited by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner

New Treasures: Spectrum 20, edited by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner

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Spectrum 20-smallChristmas is pretty hectic at our house, and has been for about 18 years. Ever since we started sharing it with children.

Our kids try to sit still and open their presents. They do. But after they’ve torn open a few, they can’t sit around in a calm circle in the living room any longer. Nope, nope. They tear off to shoot each other with their new Nerf guns or play Arkham Origins on the Xbox or read Atomic Robo or otherwise enjoy their gifts. Leaving my wife and I to sit and stare at each other, in the middle of a big pile of wrapping paper.

Which is a long-winded explanation for why it takes anywhere from a week to ten days to open gifts in the O’Neill-Dechene household. Which is why I didn’t get around to opening Alice’s gift, a copy of the hardcover edition of Spectrum 20, until last night.

If the cover (at left) looks familiar to Black Gate readers, it should. The piece, “The Lover’s Quarrel,” by Donato Giancola, is another view of the warrior woman featured on the cover of Black Gate 15. She’s even wearing the same outfit and belt, and has the same hair beads. Her sword is no longer broken, but I think we can be reasonably confident that she has just wrapped up business satisfactorily.

Alice gave me a copy of the first volume of Spectrum in 1994 and I’ve gotten one every Christmas, on and off, for the past twenty years. Every holiday season, I spend a leisurely hour or two in my big green chair, enjoying the best science fiction and fantasy art of the year.

The Spectrum Annual, as it’s known, is a showcase for the Spectrum Awards, which celebrate the best fantastic art from around the globe. Every year, a five-member jury team selects the winners of the Gold and Silver awards and the artwork that will be included in the next volume. The Spectrum Awards are perhaps the most prestigious artistic accolade our industry has to offer and the annual volume is without doubt the best annual collection of genre art on the market.

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Fantasy New Year’s Musings

Fantasy New Year’s Musings

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Blood and Iron Jon Sprunk-smallHello, friends. As 2013 comes to a close and the New Year dawns, I’m taking a few moments to consider what 2014 will bring to the realm of fantasy.

Personally, I’m proud to announce the beginning of a new fantasy tetralogy next year, starting in March with Blood and Iron. I’ll be finishing the sequel in 2014, as well as writing at least one short story for a friend who invited me to be a part of his fantasy shared-world. (More details on that next year.)

I also have a few conventions and a writing conference scheduled in 2014. These are often the highlights of my professional life, as I get to reconnect with old friends and make some new ones. Meeting readers and other writers is one of the awesome perks of this field.

The big one will be a return to DragonCon. I’d gone three years in a row before taking 2013 off, but I’ve missed it so much I have to go back. It’s a four-day fantasy/scifi geekfest with all the trimmings. Great costumes, wonderful guests, and some of the best partiers on the planet.

Beyond my professional goals, I will make an effort to read more books next year. It’s a funny thing. I had so much more time to read before I started writing full-time. Alas, that’s what happens when you embrace your passion.

Yet I’m going to make more time to read in 2014. There are so many freaking amazing books out there and I want to devour as many as possible. My problem is that I like to go back and re-read my favorite books/series, so I’m forever trying to catch up with the new crop.

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