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Month: February 2014

Spotlight on Interactive Fiction: More Superheroes!

Spotlight on Interactive Fiction: More Superheroes!

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Cover image from Heroes Rise by Zachary Sergi; art by Jason Wiser
Cover image from Heroes Rise by Zachary Sergi; art by Jason Wiser

Last week, I talked about superhero webcomics, and there was some fun discussion in the comments about superheroes and fantasy and where those genres meet. Fritz Freiheit also pointed me in the direction of his slightly out of date “A Brief Overview of Superhero Fiction,” which means I’m going to have a bunch of novels to add to my TBR pile. But prose and comics aren’t the only homes of superheroes: there are a handful of interactive fiction games that let you become a super yourself. Lest you think I play a vast majority of my interactive fiction games from Choice of Games (disclosure: actually, that’s true, but I do try to diversify for this column), in this spotlight, we have two superhero games to compare and only one is from Choice of Games.

Heroes Rise: The Prodigy is the first Heroes Rise game by Zachary Sergei. (The second, Heroes Rise: The Hero Project, I have yet to play.) In it, you are a beginning hero, just on the verge of getting your license to be an official hero in Millennia City. You live with your grandmother, who has a Power with plants, because your superhero parents were arrested for the accidental killing (the court said “murder”) of a supervillain. Your family relationships are fraught, but you’re getting ready to take Millennia City by storm.

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As Tartary Burns

As Tartary Burns

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As-Tartary-Burns-smalltumblr_makahwr3RL1rs6hqwo1_500-smallAs Tartary Burns is the debut novel by Riley Hogan and is newly published by Airship 27. Calling the novel pulp fiction isn’t completely accurate. Hogan finds himself in the same position as the standout talents of the pulp world of the 1920s and 1930s who were published in the pulps, but whose prose was more polished and literate than most of their peers to the degree that it seems an oversight they were passed up by the slicks. Many of those talents today are recognized as having lasting literary value. So it is with As Tartary Burns, an ambitious fast-paced historical adventure that presents an alternate history of the Cossacks, Ottomans, and Crimeans.

Hogan’s book has been likened to Robert E. Howard and Harold Lamb. One reviewer suggests comparison to the film Braveheart. I felt it read like a stream-lined Game of Thrones with the explicit sex and language excised. Hogan is possessed not only of an obvious passion for history, but a pride in the culture, folklore, and religion of these people to the degree that one wonders if it is his own heritage. His reshaping of world events makes one curious if he plans not so much a conventional follow-up, but rather an expanding alternate history of the world set in different epochs.

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Apocalypse Then, and Now

Apocalypse Then, and Now

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Robert Heinlein Farnham’s Freehold-smallLast week, I was talking about Paul O. Williams’s The Pelbar Cycle,  which generated a comment about the changing nature of the apocalypse. After all, nowadays we hardly ever see that word without “zombie” in front of it. As my commentator noted, the idea of a nuclear apocalypse largely disappeared after the 1980s. Perhaps this is a natural outcome of the ending of the Cold War – with the two big nuclear powers no longer at odds with one another, the threat of nuclear war effectively disappeared.

Or did it? It’s not a plot point for any of the books, so it’s not a spoiler for me to tell you that the events of The Pelbar Cycle follow both a natural and a nuclear disaster. The (then) big two nuclear powers knew that an impending meteor strike would look like nuclear events and agreed not to react, but other, smaller nuclear nations either weren’t aware, or didn’t believe, and they did react, bringing about the world that Williams describes.

That didn’t happen in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s phenomenal Lucifer’s Hammer (1977). In their case (again, no real spoilers here), the apocalyptic event is a comet strike and the nuclear powers refrain from “mistaking” it for an attack. There’s plenty of politics in the story, but it’s the politics of survival and not so much the politics of war.

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Goth Chick News: The Kids Who Put You Off Kids – Where Are They Now?

Goth Chick News: The Kids Who Put You Off Kids – Where Are They Now?

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Danny Torrance and the twins back then
Danny Torrance and the twins back then

By this time, it’s no surprise to any of you that The Shining is one film I just can’t get enough of. I like the source material of course, but the movie version never gets old and I can say that with some authority, having seen it about a gazillion times (and written about it here a fair amount as well).

Back in 2010, inspired by a then-recent documentary on the Stanley Hotel (the real Overlook) I did some of my best ever cyber-stalking on a quest to find little Danny Torrance; or really the 38 year-old Danny Lloyd he is today.

Back then, I did manage to track down “Professor Lloyd” at the university in Kentucky where he now teaches, only to be entirely ignored. Not surprising, considering his students posted comments about the verbal smack down you’re likely to receive if you ever brought up the good professor’s past life.

But you know what? A little taste of fame, no matter how brief or how long ago, will inevitably leave you craving more at some point in the future. And apparently that future for Danny Lloyd was the publishing of King’s Shining sequel Doctor Sleep.

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Four History Books for Heroic Fantasy Readers (and Writers)

Four History Books for Heroic Fantasy Readers (and Writers)

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BabylonI can never be sure whether I like History because it’s Fantasy, but real, or whether I like Fantasy because it’s History in a different sandbox. Or maybe I like travel, adventure, battles, and sword fights…

Whatever the truth, in my reading, I pretty much alternate mostly-historical non-fiction with SF&F.

In no particular order, here’s some of my favorite History books, the ones that strike a fantasy chord.

1. The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced – Stephanie Dalley

Well-written, but probably for the enthusiastic amateur or somebody inoculated by academia, this book digs into the reality behind the Hanging Garden of Babylon, and in doing so plunges into the slow-motion brawl that is Babylonian, Assyrian, and Persian history.

We glimpse the lost Indiana Jones era of Middle Eastern Archaeology, scrabble through the roots of Western Civilization, and get a sense of a world of ancient kings, their empires, and the massive structures they created.

It just needs Conan to wander in from the desert…

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The Series Series: Marshal Versus the Assassins by M. Harold Page

The Series Series: Marshal Versus the Assassins by M. Harold Page

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Marshall Versus the Assassins-smallOf the many excellences in Marshal Versus the Assassins, M. Harold Page’s story of a real historical crusader trying to avert a crusade, the most remarkable is Page’s rendering of physical combat. There are so many reasons this stand-alone adventure in the Foreworld Saga could be subtitled Don’t Try This at Home.

Since you’re here reading Black Gate, odds are you’re a fight scene connoisseur. You’ll have read some classic set-pieces, and some classic blunders. You may even have read this post, which discusses the biggest pitfall most writers face when they set out to learn how to write a fight scene: the counterintuitive way a blow-by-blow approach to even the most exciting events can turn tedious. Writers who overcome that problem generally do it by intertwining the physical blow-by-blow fight choreography with the things fiction can render and film can’t — most of them aspects of the viewpoint character’s inner life.

What Page does more and better than any other fantasy writer I know is intertwine the viewpoint character’s complete sensory experience during combat. As a practitioner and historian of Europe’s lost martial arts traditions, Page knows in muscle memory how each weapon his crusader characters use feels in the hand, in the heft, and in the mailed body it strikes. All of us who write fantasy that includes fight scenes try to convey this kind of sensory vividness and immediacy. The difference in results between a writer who’s relying on research or imagination and a writer who has dedicated years to mastering the things his characters have mastered is immediately apparent.

I was about to say the difference was apparent on the page, but for much of the time I spent reading the fight scenes, I wasn’t really paying attention to the existence of a page. It would be more accurate to say the difference is apparent in the reader’s mirror neurons.

I love reading a book that I couldn’t have written, one that displays writerly chops totally different from mine. Of course, the thing Page makes look easy that I struggle with as a writer is not the only virtue of this book.

For instance, there’s the delightful blank spot in history that Page imagines his way into.

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Take a Trip to Haven — The Free City

Take a Trip to Haven — The Free City

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Haven the Free City-smallIn the early days of role playing, rule systems were plentiful. Really, you couldn’t set foot in a game shop without tripping over a new RPG system. Every game company on the planet was trying to grab a piece of the rapidly-exploding market with a new game focused on pirates,  science fiction, the Bronze Age, the Wild West, King Arthur, horror movies, the fall of Moria, the Federation, Middle Earth, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One, the Marvel Universe… heck, there were even role playing games about high school, fer cryin’ out  loud.

Supplements? They were a dime a dozen. Virtually every one of the systems above had at least half a dozen. Want the complete scoop on Midgard? Wolfgang Baur has you covered. Desperately need advice on how to survive in a dungeon? Check. Or how about a trip to the mysterious lost Empire of the Aztecs?

Adventures? Lordy, yes. Countless fabulously detailed adventures, from Gygax’s classic The Temple of Elemental Evil; to the home of King Kong, Monster Island; to the ruins of Parlainth, an ancient capital that vanished from the face of the Earth; to Call of Cthulhu scenarios based on actual tales by H.P. Lovecraft. You couldn’t throw a stick without bouncing off half a dozen epic adventures.

Was there anything an avid gamer couldn’t find, in the first heady decades of our hobby?

Yes, there was. If there was anything as scarce as hen’s teeth, it was a thriving, living city setting.

And no wonder. Ruined cities, they were a cinch. Pretty map and an encounter key. But an inhabited city? With a functioning economy, logically consistent government, sinister underworld, bustling marketplaces, and larger-than-life heroes, villains, and just plain folk going about their business? That took a level of imagination — and commitment to design — on a whole new scale.

There were a few attempts at city settings, some better than others. But for my money, the most successful, and easily one of the most ambitious, was Gamelord’s marvelous Haven — The Free City.

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Robin Hobb on What’s Wrong with Epic Fantasy

Robin Hobb on What’s Wrong with Epic Fantasy

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Robin Hobb Ship of Destiny-smallOver at SF Signal, Andrea Johnson has put together one of the more interesting round-robin interviews I’ve read in a some time. As part of their Mind Meld series, she asked eight well known fantasy authors — including Martha Wells, Melanie Rawn, Sam Sykes, and Robin Hobb — to answer the question “What’s Wrong with Epic Fantasy?”

Many of the answers are both fascinating and insightful. Martha critiques the current trend towards multiple viewpoint characters (“A perfectly valid style, but… when it’s done wrong, it’s tedious”), Marc Alpin comments on the necessity to switch gears between books (“Some readers, especially those who wanted more of book one, freak out and think they’ve been cheated”), and Patrick Tomlinson discusses inevitable book bloat (“The longer an author writes inside a world, the longer the books tend to become.”) But it was Megan Lindholm, aka Robin Hobb, who I thought had the most salient comment, pointing out that the rise of independent publishers has also unleashed a host of amateur marketeers, whose newbie mistakes have left us with countless books that are misrepresenting themselves on the shelves:

I’m going to commit heresy here. I think that old time publishers are actually better at targeting the audience and showing readers the books they want than our current climate of ‘Everyone quick, promote a book you like’ is. Authors see their own books differently from how their publishers see them, and some of the author promotions I’ve seen led me to expect one sort of book and then [they] delivered another… I think that some (not all) of the people who are hired to create the book trailers don’t really know much about marketing… They make terrific trailers, and I get so excited to read the book, I buy it, and then think, ‘Well, this is a pretty good book, but it’s not at all what I thought it was going to be…’

To find a book that you really want to read, I recommend going to a bookstore (a big building sometimes made out of brick and mortar where they sell books made out of paper), and talk to the book seller (a person who knows all about what she or he is selling)… If you do not have a bookseller who can do this, then I am very sorry for you. Try your librarian.

Read the complete article here.

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany

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King of Elflands Daughter Front HiResThe King of Elfland’s Daughter
Lord Dunsany
Ballantine Books (242 pages, June 1969, $0.95)
Cover art by Bob Pepper

The second volume Lin Carter chose for the Adult Fantasy line was Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter. In my opinion, it is it far superior to Fletcher Pratt’s The Blue Star.

The “Lord” in the author’s byline isn’t an affectation. Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett was the 18th Baron Dunsany (1878-1957). He was a tall, lean man. His accomplishments could put most people to shame. Soldier, Member of Parliament, author, poet, playwright, chess champion, hunter, and sportsman.

Dunsany began his writing career with short fiction, set mostly in imaginary lands and much of it slight in terms of plot and character. These tales greatly influenced H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote in this vein until moving on to develop the Cthulhu mythos.

Dunsany’s later series about Jorkens concerns a man who tells tall tales in a bar for drinks. These stories were the precursors of and influences on Arthur C. Clarke’s White Hart, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s Gavagan’s Bar, and Sterling E. Lanier’s Brigadier Ffellowes. A further discussion of Dunsany’s influence can be found here.

Dunsany turned to writing novels after publishing a number of short fiction collections. Among his novels, many consider The King of Elfland’s Daughter to be his finest. Lin Carter gives a brief introduction, not only discussing this particular work,but Dunsany’s work in general.

Set in the kingdom of Erl, the story opens with a parliament of craftsmen making an unusual request of the king. They want to be ruled over by a monarch who is “a magic lord.” He grants their request, but tells his son Alveric that it is not from wisdom that they make this request. And indeed, the parliament will come to deeply regret their request before the book’s final page is turned.

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An Empire Unacquainted with Defeat by Glen Cook

An Empire Unacquainted with Defeat by Glen Cook

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oie_32154116Ox9HKeIGlen Cook is the author of some of my hands-down favorite books. I hold out his Black Company series as arguably the best military fantasy ever written. The early Garrett books set a standard for the blending of fantasy and hardboiled fiction. But what introduced me to Cook and made me a fan for life was his earlier work, the Dread Empire series, starting with the short story “Filed Teeth.”

The first time I ever saw the name Glen Cook was on the first three Dread Empire books, bound together with a rubber band on the bottom shelf in my local used book store. I didn’t like the cover illustrations (I still don’t) and I thought the whole “Dread Empire” thing seemed a little too dopey.

Then my dad tossed me Orson Scott Card’s Dragons of Darkness anthology. The first story in it, “Filed Teeth,” was set in the aftermath of a great war involving the Dread Empire and it blew me away! I had to have those books I had casually dismissed only a few weeks before.

The next day I took the bus to the book store and bought all three. I devoured them. They’re not as polished as many of his later books, but there are episodes of genius that range from vast fantastic battles to tender moments of pathos. The series introduces us to Cook’s likable trio of rogues, Bragi Ragnarson, Mocker and Haroun bin Yousif. The books begin with the trio scheming to make themselves wealthy beyond compare, and culminates in a war between huge armies and unbelievably powerful sorcery. If you like his other books, I highly recommend them.

Since then I’ve bought most of Cook’s books as soon as they hit the shelves. The six years I had to wait between the sixth and seventh Black Company books were among the worst I’ve encountered as a reader. The news that a new Black Company book is in the wings has me twitching.

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