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Author: James Enge

James Enge lives in northwest Ohio with his wife and two crime-fighting, emotionally fragile dogs. He teaches Latin and mythology at a medium-sized public university. His stories (frequently featuring Morlock Ambrosius) have appeared in Black Gate, at Every Day Fiction, in the Stabby-Award-winning Blackguards and elsewhere. His first novel, Blood of Ambrose was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2010 and the Prix Imaginales in 2011. Look for more Morlock stories this year in Tales from the Magician's Skull . You can reach James Enge through Facebook (as james.enge) or on Twitter (as jamesenge) or, if all else fails, via his website (jamesenge.com).
Chilling with Miles: A Review of Cryoburn

Chilling with Miles: A Review of Cryoburn

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cryoburnCryoburn, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Baen (352 pages, $25, Oct 19, 2010)

Cryoburn shows signs of being the last Vorkosigan novel. At the very least, it marks the end of a very long multi-novel arc in the series. For that reason, among others, it’s not a good place for newcomers to sample the series. For the same reason, longtime readers of the Vorkosigan stories will want to read this book, even if it is less than Bujold’s best work. (It’s still better than most sf writers on their best day.)

Although there’s no reason why Bujold couldn’t write a sequel to Cryoburn, there is some material at the end of the book that harks back to the opening entry in the series, Shards of Honor, and in it we can also hear some darkly deliberate echoes of the first Miles novel, The Warrior’s Apprentice. It’s as if LMB is marking the end of the series with ring composition. If my description seems rather vague, that’s because I’m sparing the spoiler, here. All this stuff is a sort of codicil to the novel, anyway, having nothing to do with the main story– which makes it look that much more like a deliberate signal. (I hope I’m wrong about this.)

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Babble About Cabell: Domnei

Babble About Cabell: Domnei

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James Branch Cabell‘s often expressed ambition was to “write beautifully of perfect happenings.” He was born in 1879; one of his first jobs was reporting the society news in New York City; and his work frequently hinges on romantic love of a very old-fashioned sort. A reasonable person might conclude from all this that the man wrote slop but, as so often, the reasonable person would be wrong.

domneiWhere to start with Cabell? He didn’t go out of his way to make it easy. His major work is a 25-book eikosipentology ohmygodthatstoomanybooksology series titled The Biography of Dom Manuel. Only one of the books (Figures of Earth) actually deals with Dom Manuel, the legendary hero of a fictional French county Poictesme. The rest of the books supposedly deal with Dom Manuel’s life as it passes to his heirs, physical and otherwise, under three grand divisions: chivalry, poetry, and gallantry. If you think it is possible to be more old-fashioned than this, I’m afraid my seconds will have to call upon you for an explanation.

Not all of this stuff is equally readable, and some of it is not readable at all. Things like Beyond Life: The Dizain of the Demiurges is strictly for the Cabellian completist or the literary masochist. (There may be some overlap between those groups.)

But Cabell had complete control over his style, and he used it to hilarious and harrowing effect. He spun fantasies of heroes and damsels in a Middle Ages that never was but (in the words of one of Dashiell Hammett’s most cynical characters), “Cabell is a romantic in the same way the horse was Trojan.” He tells these tales, unrolls these dreams; he cherishes them; he deconstructs them; he mocks them–somehow all at the same time. Cabell’s spirit kills these dreams; his letters give them life.

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Black Gate Zeppelin to Dragon*Con Update 6: Collateral Damage

Black Gate Zeppelin to Dragon*Con Update 6: Collateral Damage

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Adrift over the Great Black Swamp, the wingless flying car Caeruleum probed earth water and the night-dark sky with the sightless fingers of sensor beams.

“The principle is simple enough,” explained Rapunzel McNally, the mad philologist’s beautiful daughter, her clear-cut features lit an eerie green from readouts on the air-car’s control panel. “The cicadas and crickets of the swamp, responding to ancient magnetic rhythms in the earth, spell out messages from the timeless times from before time. My father explained it to me.”

“I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you,” I said, “that your father is the one who’s simple?”

Her father, the mad philologist Gabriel McNally, was in the back seat of the aircar, wearing his most stylish straightjacket. After his denial of tenure by the University of Mackinac he had spent a month drinking absinthe, and had disappeared for another month into the swamp. He returned babbling about a convention of dragons and messages from the Old Ones.

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Sword and Solomon: The Beginning of Sword and Sorcery

Sword and Solomon: The Beginning of Sword and Sorcery

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The great Jeffrey Catherine Jones envisions Solomon Kane.

I haven’t been the most reliable blogger on the Blog Gate lately–something like the least reliable, in fact: my day job and nightly visits from werewolves have conspired to keep me out of the blogosphere almost entirely, these days. But I wanted to show my virtual face here and raise a virtual glass of something intoxicating in honor of Robert E. Howard’s birthday–and in honor of someone who never existed, and probably wouldn’t approve of me toasting him even in non-existent liquor.

Robert E. Howard wrote a lot of stuff worth reading, but for me his central importance lies in the invention of sword-and-sorcery (as the genre was later named by Fritz Leiber). Not in the Conan stories, though: I go along with those who argue that sword-and-sorcery actually begins with the Solomon Kane stories (some of which are online, having battled their way past Mickey Mouse into the public domain; all of them have been collected into a wonderful Ballantine volume, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane).

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Time Has Come Today

Time Has Come Today

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I’m short on time and words today, but I didn’t want to fall into a slack habit of not posting, so here’s something freakishly weird and wonderful that’s been around for well over a year, but I didn’t know about until a few jumps of the grasshopper ago: the Corpus Clock or Chronophage.

I guess this is in honor of those wrestling with NaNoWriMo… or any of us who are writing on deadlines these days.

[The grasshopper waits beyond the jump, or vice versa.]

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Where The Child Things Are

Where The Child Things Are

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I finally saw Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are a few days ago (because I’m never the first to see anything, as a matter of policy) and I thought it was pretty good. Some people have reacted with shock and horror to the violence and the scary bits, and maybe I’m over-reacting against them, but there wasn’t anything scarier in the movie than a regular kid might have to face in an average week. Which may, itself, be rather scary, but more so for adults and their illusions than for kids.

Naturally, a two-hour movie can’t be a faithful adaptation of a picture book that has less than twenty sentences in it. And this is often a sort of extended meditation on the book: variations on a theme by Sendak; a movie about being a child rather than a movie for children. If that sounds a little slow, it is a little slow at times; it’s a movie that isn’t afraid to spend a few minutes to make a certain kind of meditative impact. And it does generally end up hitting its target.

[Where the Wild Spoilers Are: beyond the jump.]

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Who Gods There?: “The Elder Gods” by Don A. Stuart

Who Gods There?: “The Elder Gods” by Don A. Stuart

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Unknown October 1939I’m guest-blogging this week at Babel Clash, along with fellow Pyr author Matt Sturges, and for the past couple days we’ve been kicking around the topic of our influences and anti-influences. It’s not always the biggest books or the best that are influences, though. For instance…

Don A. Stuart‘s “The Elder Gods” is a fantasy novella from the late 1930s that reads a lot like the science fiction being written around the same time. That’s no accident: the author behind the pseudonym is John W. Campbell, once a leading light in the “super science” stories of the 1930s, later a pioneer of a more sophisticated form of speculative fiction, and (by the time the work under review appeared) he was well into his third and longest career as the influential editor of Astounding Science Fiction–and the new fantasy magazine Unknown, in which “The Elder Gods” first appeared. (I reread it in a rather battered copy of the 1970s Ace reprint of The Moon is Hell; but there’s a NESFA edition of Campbell’s Stuart stories, including “The Elder Gods”. That’s what I’d recommend seeking out, if you’re interested, as there are some typographical glitches in the Ace edition; plus, it may be harder to find; plus, I’ve always thought “The Moon Is Hell” was a stupid title.)

In Unknown, Campbell didn’t want to create yet another knockoff of Weird Tales; the tagline for the paper-covered anthology From Unknown Worlds was “Fantasy Stories for Grown Ups”–by which he seems to have meant the serious grownups who were reading Astounding. Lots of his Astounding writers crossed over to write for Unknown, and “The Elder Gods” was apparently his how-to-do-it example, applying the Astounding method of speculative fiction to fantasy.

[ Spectacular Stories of Scientific Theology beyond the jump.]

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SF/F: Field, or Dangerfield?

SF/F: Field, or Dangerfield?

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“When I was a kid I got no respect. When my parents got divorced there was a custody fight over me… and no one showed up.”

–Rodney Dangerfield

Somewhere, even as I type, there is someone wearing a tuxedo who is looking at a piece of sf/f with an expession of scorn so intense that it hurts all genre readers everywhere. Isn’t there?

No. This person (variously called “the Establishment,” “the literati,” “English professors,” “the critics,” “your mom,” etc.) is largely imaginary and his power to hurt genre readers with his contempt is wholly imaginary. I’m not saying that no critic, no English professor, no mom has never expressed a hurtful opinion towards some genre or genre work. I am saying that markets for fiction are too diverse to be controlled by any centralized network of opinion.

But even if “the Establishment” (or whatever it’s called) actually existed, cries of outrage like this or this would still be pointless.

[Sail the whine-dark sea beyond the jump.]

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Metabloggery

Metabloggery

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For writers, blogging is almost certainly a mistake. (For “blogging” substitute almost any kind of social networking common nowadays.) Writers make worlds out of the stuff in their heads; they can’t be wasting it on blog-posts (at least, if they think they’re going to run out of words). Further, though it may be very amusing to describe the life-and-death battle that recently occurred between your cat and a shoelace, at least to you and your cat (and housecats are a significant portion of the audience for the average blog, a fact I can prove with science-based assertions upon presentation of a relevant court order), still: if you run your mouth endlessly in public, sooner or later you will say something you wish you hadn’t. In my case, it usually involves tangled parentheses of some kind, but with regular people it can sometimes be quite serious.

Plus, saying stupid stuff is relatively harmless compared to blogging stupid stuff. Suppose someone says something stupid in your presence. Later on, you’re talking to a mutual acquaintance, i.e. me, and you say, “You’ll never believe what Whatshisname said.” (You have better things to do with your time, certainly, but bear with me here; it’s just a thought experiment.) And I don’t believe you. I say something like, “Oh, I know Whatshisname and he’d never say that. Are you sure he wasn’t being ironic?” Maddening. Someone has to do something about this irony stuff. Anyway, that’s the way it might play out in conversation. But if what’s in question is an injudicious blog-post, a convenient link will slay the Ganondorf of disbelief. That’s tough on old Whatshisname, since we won’t be buying his stupid books anymore.

So: blogging. Bad for writers, possibly.

Good for readers, though. It’s a tremendous benefit to potential readers of a book to find out that its author is a porcinely gross, foul-mouthed, bloviating bag of toothless malice squirting flatulent saliva-streaked jets of verbal poison into the eyes of any innocent web-wanderer who happens upon his blog. If they like that sort of thing, then they can support it by buying Whatshisname’s books–and if not, then not.

So, in addition to the “Blog Against Blogging Week” to save writers from themselves (which has occasionally been proposed), I counter-propose a “Blog Against ‘Blog Against Blogging Week’ Week” to save readers from writers. Eventually, everyone will be saved from everybody else, and what a relief that will be.