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Year: 2021

“We Don’t See Pure Sword and Sorcery Anymore, So I Wanted to Try to Revive It” – An Interview with John Shirley

“We Don’t See Pure Sword and Sorcery Anymore, So I Wanted to Try to Revive It” – An Interview with John Shirley

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A Sorcerer of Atlantis (Hippocampus Press, 2021). Cover by Daniel V. Sauer

John Shirley is a true renaissance man. He won the Bram Stoker Award for his horror tales, has written over 40 books, and has been a lyricist for the legendary Blue Öyster Cult. Mr. Shirley is also a successful screenwriter who has scripted such various Television shows and films as The Real Ghostbusters, Deep Space Nine, and many others. John co-scripted, with David J. Schow, the Brandon Lee film The Crow.

Mr. Shirley was one of the original cyberpunk writers, and  penned the classics City Come A-Walkin‘ and the Song Called Youth trilogy. John has also written horror, historical, and men’s adventure novels under a pen name.

John’s latest novel is titled A Sorcerer of Atlantis: with A Prince in the Kingdom of Ghosts. It came out in June from Hippocampus Press. Sorcerer is a 306-page heroic fantasy/Swords & Sorcery novel.

I’ve read it and enjoyed it immensely. If I wanted to give a quick thumbnail blurb I would say that instead of your typical “thud and blunder,” Sorcerers is reminiscent of the type of novels that John Jakes and Fritz Leiber used to pen. But please don’t think that this is simply a pastiche novel. Sorcerers is its own animal, completely modern, and highly original.

Now enough background, let’s get to the good stuff!

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Raiders of the Lost Ark in Traveller: The Sky Raiders

Raiders of the Lost Ark in Traveller: The Sky Raiders

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The is the first of two articles covering FASA’s published adventures in the Sky Raiders trilogy for Traveller.

The Keith Brothers, J. Andrew and William, were prolific and significant contributors to Traveller in the 1980s, often writing under pen names to avoid entire products being obviously written by the two. They wrote the classic Murder on Arcturus Station (you can see my review here). In 1981, they published via FASA (a notable RPG published with licenses to produce Traveller RPG supplement and adventure material), the first in a trilogy of adventures: The Legend of the Sky Raiders. This was followed in 1982 by The Trail of the Sky Raiders and The Fate of the Sky Raiders.

The trilogy is a planet hopping adventure focusing on hunting down the mysteries of the Sky Raiders, a lost civilization. The Legend of the Sky Raiders minces no words in the tone and type of adventure they are going for:

“Dedication: To Indiana Jones, who would feel right at home here.”

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Fantasia 2021, Part III: Radical Spirits

Fantasia 2021, Part III: Radical Spirits

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A Sip of WaterAmong the pleasures of the Fantasia Film Festival are the showcases of short films. Some of these feature-length collections get a new iteration every year, while some come and go depending on what’s submitted to the festival. Fantasia’s programmers have a great sense of how to group shorts together, meaning not only are the annual showcases reliably strong work, but new themes are bound to present work of major interest as well. So one of the things that intrigued me the most when I first saw Fantasia’s 2021 schedule was Radical Spirits, a collection of six short films about (broadly speaking) traditional ways of being and traditional spiritual paths. I decided to make it my second viewing of the festival.

The first piece came from Korea: Chu Hyun-a wrote, directed, edited, and animated “A Sip of Water,” a fine 7-minute animated film about the role of shamans in the modern world (like many of these shorts, it’s not on IMDB.com at this writing, so I can’t find the original Korean title). The 2D animation flows from one image into another, with lovely colours and linework. A Korean shaman discussing her perspective on her profession is fascinating — “I am unusual,” she says, “because gods are in me, and I deliver the gods’ message” — but the visual experience is a fitting complement. Recurring water imagery gives the short a rhythm, while it also develops the idea of shamanism in the modern world. Overall it’s a powerful representation of the spiritual experience of shamanism.

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To Boldly Go – Star Trekking

To Boldly Go – Star Trekking

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I like Star Trek well enough, but I’ve never really been a Trekkie. I watched reruns of The Original Series, growing up; Then the movies (that first one was terrible). I liked The Next Generation and it has remained a favorite, including the movies. John deLancie’s Q is my favorite character across the entire franchise (even making up for Whoopi Goldberg). Deep Space Nine was okay, though I gave up on it before the end. I doubt I’ve seen half of Voyager – Kate Mulgrew (Mrs. Columbo) didn’t work for me at all. And I haven’t even seen the pilot of Enterprise. I like Scott Bakula, but it just didn’t appeal. I haven’t read any of the books, though my buddy David Marcum loves them (I read a ton of fantasy, but not much scifi).

The past month-plus, I’ve been on quite a Star Trek binge. I find myself watching episodes of Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, ST Continues, and The Original Series. And overall, it’s been great!

I got CBS All Access last summer to watch season one of Lower Decks. I liked it. I didn’t bother with Picard, or Discovery. Just wasn’t interested in live-action Star Trek. I preferred Galaxy Quest, and the TERRIFIC documentary (streaming on Prime), Never Surrender.

Rewatching the beginning of Twin Peaks on Paramount+ (CBS All Access was rebranded), I kept seeing the icons for Picard and Discovery. Late one night, I decided, ‘Why not?’ and I watched the first ten minutes of Picard, with as much interest as watching paint dry. It was dull: Battlestar Galactica-pacing dull (I gave up on season one of that show. I don’t know how it could have moved any slower). Clicked over to Discovery.

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Fantasia 2021, Part II: Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes

Fantasia 2021, Part II: Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes

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Beyond The Infinite Two MinutesThe 2021 Fantasia International Film Festival presented most of its hundred-plus feature films over the internet, some of them streaming at scheduled times, others available across the duration of the festival. (Which ended on the 25th; I ended up watching so many movies during the three weeks the festival ran I didn’t have time to write about them.) Looking at the schedule for August 5th, the first day, I didn’t see anything scheduled that I wanted to cover, and decided to watch some of the on-demand titles. Which raised the question of which film would be the best way to start my Fantasia 2021 experience. After some havering, I made my pick.

But before describing it, I’ll note that many of the features at Fantasia came bundled with a short film, and that was the case here. “Viewers:1” is a five-minute film written and directed by Daigo Hariya and Yosuke Kobayashi, starring Yuki Hashiguchi as the last man on Earth, desperately trying to present a smiling, optimistic take on the end of the world as he live-streams his wanderings. The world’s haunted by vast mechanical forms but deserted by humanity — and then comes a twist. It’s a well-made piece, carried by Hashiguchi’s ability to convey a sense of profound despair under a facade of crazed buoyancy. Strong special effects support the story and add to the menace.

Then the feature: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (ドロステのはてで僕ら, Droste no hate de bokura), a time-twisting one-take comedy from Japan. Kato (Kazunori Tosa) owns a café in Kyoto. He has an apartment above the café, and a crush on a young lady, Megumi (Aki Asakura), who works in the neighbouring barbershop. And one day after work he goes upstairs to find that there’s a delay between the computer monitor in his apartment and the screen it’s linked to downstairs — the café screen communicates to his monitor from two minutes in the future. The downbeat Kato is at first distinctly unimpressed, but his friends and his employee Aya (Riko Fujitani) are excited and start figuring out ways to take advantage of the two-minute glimpse of the future. Their future selves speak to them — but can they be trusted? And what happens if some actions have consequences that extend beyond two minutes?

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Vintage Treasures: Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home by James Tiptree, Jr.

Vintage Treasures: Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home by James Tiptree, Jr.

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Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home (Ace Books, 1973). Cover by Chris Foss

Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home was the debut collection from one of the most important science fiction writers of the 20th Century, James Tiptree, Jr (the well known pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon). Tiptree published half a dozen additional collections during her lifetime, and several very important volumes gathering her best short fiction have been assembled since her death, most notably Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Arkham House, 1990), one of the seminal SF books of the century.

But it probably won’t surprise any of you to learn that I still prefer the original paperbacks, flawed and poorly edited as they were. Thomas Parker called Ten Thousand Light Years from Home “the worst-proofread book I’ve ever read,” and let’s just say he’s not the only one to notice.

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Goth Chick News: Jack, London’s Most Famous Unsolved Mystery, Is Still a Thing

Goth Chick News: Jack, London’s Most Famous Unsolved Mystery, Is Still a Thing

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A search for “Jack the Ripper” in Amazon books results in over 2,000 titles, 77 of which were released in the last 90 days — and 19  “coming soon.” London’s most famous unsolved serial-killings are still a draw 132 years after the last victim was found on November 7, 1888. The story of five horrific murders in the Whitechapel neighborhood first appeared in sensationalized newspaper articles, eventually moving to Victorian “penny dreadfuls” before being chronicled in every medium imaginable. From poems to plays, music to movies and board games to video games, the world never seems to tire of “Gentleman Jack,” the faceless slasher who lurked in the foggy alleyways of bygone London.

The history of the “Jack the Ripper,” a name which the killer gave himself in one of the taunting letters delivered to the police, reads like fiction. In Victorian England, London’s East End was a teeming slum occupied by nearly a million of the city’s poorest citizens. Many women were forced to resort to prostitution, and in 1888 there were estimated to be more than 1,000 prostitutes in Whitechapel.

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Treading Carefully

Treading Carefully

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As soon as the bag was swept off of my head, I knew that I hadn’t been taken to Black Gate‘s legal department for a refresher in corporate espionage. Rather, I was in a clean, well-lit room, circular in shape and towering in height. Wide windows let in shafts of morning light, filtered through the vines and flowers that hung in streamers from planters at intervals, and trellises rising up the walls. I hadn’t suspected a place like this existed outside of the Editorial Spa, and found it to be a pleasant surprise.

The man who had removed my hood, however, shoved me backward as I got my bearings, and I fell unceremoniously into a massive beanbag just behind me. As I struggled to sit upright once more, a woman took a position across from me before a plush divan, and while her dusky Mediterranean skin contrasted with the sharp white of her suit, her cool gaze contrasted with literally every other emotional cue in the room. She sat.

“You’re not with Black Gate, are you?” I ventured.

“No, Mr. Starr. I’m with the Office of Regionally Generated Attitudes.”

The crew of the Starship Diversity is ready for adventure!

“Am I in some sort of trouble?” I was suddenly a lot less comfortable sprawled out in the beanbag, but all efforts to sit straight and match her bearing failed. I slumped back.

“Oh, no. Not yet. We are simply here to review the situation, before it gets out of hand.”

“The… situation?”

“Your current project. It’s a diversity issue, you see.”
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Future Treasures: My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

Future Treasures: My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

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My Heart is a Chainsaw (Saga Press, August 2021)

It’s frequently very satisfying to get advance proofs of major titles long before they hit bookstores. If you’re lucky, you can get a heads up on the year’s most important releases before virtually anyone else, and you can enjoy watching the buzz steadily build.

I was lucky enough to get a copy of My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones back in March — hot on the heels of his 2020 breakout novel The Only Good Indians, which James McGlothlin said was “packed with wallops of horrific fright… a top-notch horror novel.” And I just fell in love with the premise: a disaffected teen and lover of slasher films sees a chillingly familiar pattern in a series of horrific local deaths, and tries in vain to warn her home town what is coming. Kirkus calls it “Extraordinary… an essential purchase,” and Polygon proclaims it “An intense homage to the classic horror films of yore.” Here’s a snippet from the starred review at Publisher’s Weekly.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Shogunate’s End

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Shogunate’s End

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Red Lion (Japan, 1969)

The Tokugawa Shogunate of the samurai military caste ruled Japan for over 300 years, keeping the island nation in a sort of stasis enforced by rigid regulation and an entrenched hierarchy. But outside, the rest of the world was changing, as the western powers of Europe and America developed economies based on global trade on terms backed up by military might. In 1853, when the United States came knocking on Japan’s door, insisting on trade concessions, the Shogunate had only swords and matchlock muskets with which to oppose armored warships, and had to comply with the American demands. Other western nations followed suit, and Japan began to open its borders, resulting in economic and political instability that the Shogunate was too weak and hidebound to manage successfully.

This period before the imperial restoration of 1868, known as Bakumatsu, was a sort of slow-burning civil war in which a number of factions struggled for ascendancy, all sides resorting to death squads and assassinations. The time of the sword, which had ruled Japan for almost a thousand years, was coming to an end.

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