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Author: Bill Ward

Making a List, Checking it Twice

Making a List, Checking it Twice

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Naughty or nice? Well, the holidays being my favorite excuse to procrastinate, I’ll have to reluctantly admit to ‘naughty.’ Being naughty, I’ve left my blog entry to the last minute. I’ve had a few New Yearsie ideas I thought I might advance, the kinds of things having to do with resolutions — mostly of the writing variety. But writing has been well enough covered at Black Gate of late and, while I know we have a lot of writers in our audience, I can’t help but think the thing that really pulls us all together, and sets us apart from, well, from a great many people who would never pick up a work of fiction let alone investigate the website of a fantasy magazine, is that we are all readers. First and foremost, that defines us.

But I’ll leave the meditation on what it is to be a reader, and how it changes the way we relate to the world, for another time — or perhaps I’ll just leave it for James Enge as he has been on a philosophical roll lately. Thinking about reading, and my relationship to (or obsession with) books, and thinking about the New Year and the sort of goals and promises we make for ourselves, got me thinking about my reading list.

Maybe you have one, too? Well, if you don’t, now would be the time of year to start. My own list is very simple, a small notebook in which I make note of the title and author(s) of every book I read, as I finish them. I have some rules governing what goes in — for example magazines don’t — and a few other simple notations that let me know if it is a book I am rereading, or a graphic novel, etc. I started keeping it when I turned twenty-one — nine years later I started a second notebook that shows every sign of running out of pages before I’m forty.

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Put Up Your Dukes, It’s Boxing Day

Put Up Your Dukes, It’s Boxing Day

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So today is Boxing Day, the day when families all over the Commonwealth test their strength, agility, endurance, and familial ties in ceremonial pugilistic displays of bare-knuckle boxing. I had occasion to observe such festivities first hand a few years ago in Canada, where the natives made great sport of punishing one another with fist, elbow, and knee. Though, as a foreigner, I was myself forbidden to participate in the actual act of fighting, I was allowed a rather intimate view of the proceedings. Everything from the breakfast of cold meats and shellfish left over from the Christmas feast of the night before, the rubdown and calisthenics and practice sparing that lasted much of the afternoon, to the brutal bouts themselves and the post fight ablutions and apologetic bandaging. I witnessed brother against brother, father against son, mother against daughter, and not a fair share of grandparents against other elders evaluated as their equals in size and strength. I’ll admit now to my jealousy of the fine display, for the enviable traditions of Boxing Day make for a vigorous, manly holiday; one affirming not only the essential bonds of family, but also the importance of deep tissue massage.

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Happy Birthday Michael Moorcock

Happy Birthday Michael Moorcock

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Michael Moorcock turned sixty-nine yesterday, and it’s hard to believe that this prolific, vocal, daring, and sometimes vociferous (see Wizardry & Wild Romance for an idea of what I’m talking about) Grand Master of SF is a senior citizen. Best known, of course, for the brooding albino prince Elric and his soul-hungry sword Stormbringer, Moorcock’s restless energy hasn’t confined itself to one hero, genre, or way of telling a story. So whether it’s the other aspects of the Eternal Champion such as Corum, Hawkmoon, or Von Bek adventuring through his shared worlds of the multiverse, his alternate histories like the Pyat Quartet and Nomad of the Time Streams, his experimental novels like Breakfast in the Ruins and Behold the Man, or a whole hosts of other complex and enduring novels such as Mother London and Gloriana, Moorcock has written something for everyone.

For his wide-ranging talent, refusal to play it safe with his writing, and enormous energy and imagination, Moorcock is truly one of the field’s most inspiring figures. Naturally, at Black Gate our focus is primarily on Sword & Sorcery and Heroic Fantasy, and in that field especially Moorcock stands as a giant — perhaps the last giant still among us — for his blend of old-school storytelling muscle, fertile mind, and New Wave edge. While the other aspects of the Eternal Champion may stand in the shadow of the forever-iconic Melnibonean, the entirity of Moorcock’s Sword and Sorcery oeuvre has to be seen as one of the field’s finest and most epic creations.

So happy birthday Michael Moorcock — and many happy returns!

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BILL WARD is a genre writer, editor, and blogger wanted across the Outer Colonies for crimes against the written word. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, as well as gaming supplements and websites. He is a Contributing Editor and reviewer for Black Gate Magazine, and 423rd in line for the throne of Lost Lemuria. Read more at BILL’s blog, DEEP DOWN GENRE HOUND.

Fantasy’s New Award — David Gemmell’s Legend

Fantasy’s New Award — David Gemmell’s Legend

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I’ll admit to not being able to keep up with science fiction and fantasy awards, but I think the newly announced David Gemmell Legend Award has the potential to be something of a milestone. Why should that be, in the midst of swirl of awards for fantasy novels ranging from those the genre shares with science fiction, to the World Fantasy Awards and various regional awards, as well as the more specialist awards such as the Mythopoeic and Sideways Awards? Well, because this award actually takes its cue from heroic fantasy.

For those of you who may not know much about the late David Gemmell, he was a prolific and best-selling British author of some of the purest examples of heroic fantasy seen in the last thirty years. His first novel, Legend, was an instant hit in the UK and has never gone out of print since 1984. Gemmell went on to write some thirty more novels, nearly all of which are heroic fantasy. His style is fast-paced and concise, and he packs a huge amount into his books. Some of his novels contain more action than an entire trilogy of high fantasy, and this at a time when this later sub-genre dominates the market. Gemmell’s books, one of the big exceptions to the heroic fantasy glut, continue to sell like hotcakes.

The first David Gemmell Award will be given in the Spring of 2009 to the fantasy novel of 2008 that best exemplifies the spirit of David Gemmell’s fiction. This is where things get interesting, in my opinion; this is the point upon which the whole thing balances. Looking over the nominees for the award, and the rules for the selection process, leaves me speculating about a how these awards might take shape.

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‘On Thud and Blunder’ — Thirty Years Later

‘On Thud and Blunder’ — Thirty Years Later

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. . . writers who’ve had no personal experience with horses tend to think of them as a kind of sports car.

Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson

It’s been thirty years since Poul Anderson wrote his essay on the need for realism in heroic fantasy, ‘On Thud and Blunder,’ which you can read in its entirety at the SFWA site, and I think it holds up well even though the genre — and the perception of it — has changed greatly. ‘On Thud and Blunder’ originally appeared in the third installment of Andrew Offutt’s classic anthology series Swords Against Darkness; though it was in the excellent, if unimaginatively named, collection of Anderson’s called Fantasy that I first encountered it. But already at the time of my reading a whole generation of writers had made a name for themselves by following the dictates of realism and common sense in designing their fantasy worlds.

The essay begins with a satire of the genre that features a barbarian cleaving through armor with a fifty-pound sword and riding a horse as if it were a motorbike, among other ridiculous things. It’s the kind of thing that gave heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery a bad name, and perhaps the sort of thing that meant it would soon be eclipsed by a rising tide of ‘high fantasy’ in the eighties and nineties. But, in 1978, hf — as Anderson terms heroic fantasy in an abbreviation that seems to have never caught on — was an emerging star:

Today’s rising popularity of heroic fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery as it is also called, is certainly a Good Thing for those of us who enjoy it. Probably this is part of a larger movement back toward old-fashioned storytelling, with colorful backgrounds, events, and characters, tales wherein people do take arms against a sea of troubles and usually win. Such literature is not inherently superior to the introspective or symbolic kinds, but neither is it inherently inferior; Homer and James Joyce were both great artists.

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Late to the Party, as Always

Late to the Party, as Always

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Gathered as we are around the virtual fireplace this week on the Black Gate site, with each of us blogger-types introducing ourselves and sharing some of our insights or opinions or our unique perspective based on how far along we are with our own writing projects, or what sort of specialist knowledge we can impart on the Black Gate community, I am confronted again with a problem I’ve had to deal with on my own blog. Namely, trying to appear interesting.

Being a writer of fiction, I could of course just lie and tell you about my experiences as a test pilot, or the time I spent as a plumber in Ulan Bator. But that, as the man said, is practically dishonest. So I tried to think instead about the sorts of things I’d be blogging about here, and what kind of qualifications I might have that meant that what I had to say was worth the time you’ll take to read it. It was then that I hit upon an interesting bit of self-knowledge, namely, that I came rather late to the kind of fiction you’ll see us talking most about on the site, the sort that appears most often in Black Gate.

So, my bona fides in this area show me to be a bit of a johnny-come-lately. I did scarf down The Hobbit in elementary school, it being the first book I remember buying with my own money, but I never got around to finishing The Lord of the Rings until I was nineteen. And, while Dungeons & Dragons and the Dragonlance books acquainted me with every fantasy trope from elvish tree-hugging to mace-swinging holy men, I doubt if I could have told you what a Sidhe was, or how the clerical prohibition against edged weapons actually had historical antecedents. Apart from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, I wasn’t versed in any epic fantasy, for all my heroes dwelled in the world of science fiction.

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