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Author: Ryan Harvey

You got your Zombies in my Pride and Prejudice!

You got your Zombies in my Pride and Prejudice!

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ppzombiesPride and Prejudice and Zombies
By Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (Quirk Classics, 2009)

I love the genre of “re-contextualizing,” taking a work of art, regardless of its qualities, and slamming it into a new setting to see what happens. This can come from a Warholian perspective, or it can be done with the humorous ocean of pop-culture parody in Mystery Science Theater 3000 (which I have no hesitation in naming my favorite television show ever). Re-contextualization can be as simple as re-writing the captions for The Family Circus and printing Garfield cartoons with Garfield’s thought-balloons removed to create a surreal world. It can also create a new work of art, such as taking Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s aria “The Song of the Indian Guest” from the opera Sadko and making it a jazz classic like “Song of India,” perhaps one of the greatest dance-pieces ever charted.

Although re-contextualizing often implies satire or parody, it can simply involve experiment. “What would such-and-such feel like if it were altered in a certain way? I think it would go something like this. . . .”

And that’s where the new volume Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comes in. Author Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote The Big Book of Porn, a look into the oddest entertainment industry, and How to Survive a Horror Movie, takes the text of Jane Austen’s 1813 comedy of manners and tweaks it to include a zombie plague overrunning the English countryside at the same time that busybody Mrs. Bennet maneuvers to get her daughters married to eligible bachelors.

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A Letter to Dave Arneson

A Letter to Dave Arneson

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As Theo already posted yesterday, Dave Arneson, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, and therefore one of the founders of the RPG hobby and responsible for suckering a lot of kids like me into the genre of heroic fantasy, died at age 61 on 7 April 2009 from cancer.

Gary Gygax, the man who co-wrote the original D&D, received much more fame for his work on the famous RPG, mostly because Arneson left the company in 1976. Arneson later filed a series of five lawsuits against TSR over royalties for D&D and later settled out-of-court with Gygax—but some things never quite heal.

I gained a greater respect for Arneson the more I found about his part in developing gaming theory. I also read some of Gary Gygax’s novels and thought they were terrible, which suddenly made me think much more about Arneson’s contribution to D&D.

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Concerning Interactive Fiction

Concerning Interactive Fiction

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You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building . . .

My interest in computer interactive fiction, a.k.a. “adventure games,” dates from before I could read chapter books. I belong to the first generation to grow up with the personal computer. When I entered elementary school, computers had just made their first forays into classrooms, and I remember vividly my first encounter with a Commodore PET, the most popular educational computer during those formative years. Soon after, I met the Apple ][ . . . and Adventure. (Perhaps I met Hunt the Wumpus before Adventure, but I’m no longer sure.)

Adventure, also known as Colossal Cave, Colossal Cave Adventure, and its original file name ADVENT, started life as a simulation of an actual location in Kentucky, the Bedquilt section of the Flint-Mammoth Cave System. Programmer and caving enthusiast Will Crowther created the textual simulation in FORTRAN. But instead of simply writing descriptions of cave locations the user can visit through a series of movement commands, Crowther merged the real world with elements of Tolkien-esque fantasy and puzzle-solving. The result: interactive fiction, or IF. Most of the conventions of the genre that still exist today debuted in Adventure: the “VERB NOUN” parser, moving using compass directions, locations referred to as “rooms,” logic puzzles, treasure-hunting, locked doors and keys, mazes, monsters.

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Monsters vs Aliens

Monsters vs Aliens

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Monsters vs Aliens: An IMAX 3D Experience (2009)
Directed by Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman. Featuring the voices of Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen, Hugh Laurie, Will Arnett, Rainn Wilson, Kiefer Sutherland, Paul Rudd, Stephen Colbert.

Monsters vs Aliens disappointed me. “Disappointed” isn’t a term I normally use regarding a DreamWorks CGI-animated film. Or any CGI-animated film that doesn’t start with the Pixar logo. I’ve come to expect that computer-animated fare from anyone aside from Pixar means overused celebrity voice-acting and tiresome, unrelenting pop-culture references placed over the needs of story and character. So why would I feel disappointed when Monsters vs Aliens ended up in the same DreamWorks ballpark of the mediocre?

Because the trailers looked good. Because it was going to play theaters in IMAX 3D (not actual IMAX, but a blow-up for the larger format). Because it was an homage to one of my favorite genres, the 1950s science-fiction ‘B’-movie. Because it has giant monsters and robots.

For all its possibility, Monsters vs Aliens still ends up a stale non-Pixar ‘yuk-yuk’ festival. The filmmakers could have striven for something higher. They could have gone for Coraline—or even Monster House. Instead, they ended up with a movie somewhat superior to Shrek 2, Shrek 3, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, and Shark Tale. That’s a victory, of sorts. And the 3D in the IMAX enlargement is, at the very least, breathtaking.

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Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan and the Treasure of Python

Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan and the Treasure of Python

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Conan and the Treasure of Python

By John Maddox Roberts (Tor, 1992)

My first post on Black Gate’s blog was a review of a Conan pastiche. I would feel untrue to myself if I didn’t return to this rich vein of material from time to time. This go-round, I’m paying a visit to one of the most interesting of the Tor novels from the most consistently successful of its stable of authors, John Maddox Roberts. Even if you’re not a fan of Conan novels that don’t come from the pen of Robert E. Howard, Conan and the Treasure of the Python has something to offer you: a take on one of the classic adventure novels of all time.

The editors should have renamed this book Conan and the Treasure of King Solomon’s Mines. This isn’t a case of borrowing or inspiration the way that, for example, Forbidden Planet borrows from The Tempest, or The Warriors draws inspiration from Xenophon’s Anabasis. No, this novel is literally King Solomon’s Mines: John Maddox Roberts copies the exact plot of the classic H. Rider Haggard 1885 adventure novel and recasts it as a Conan story, with the legendary barbarian starring in the Allan Quatermain role. The story similarities are striking, pervasive, and go far beyond coincidence or subconscious borrowing. The overall structure of both books is beat-for-beat identical.

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“I have become Death, Destroyer of First Chapters”

“I have become Death, Destroyer of First Chapters”

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Having written five novels beyond at least the first draft stage, I’ve noticed a trend. In each of them, with a single exception, the original first chapter either got cut, moved to another berth in the novel, or got re-tooled so extensively that it was no longer recognizable.

I didn’t set out in any of these cases to follow the adage about “cutting the first three chapters.” I find most writing maxims and sayings cute slices of wit, occasionally instructive, but disposable on a case-by-case basis. But I seem to have followed this one with lock-step dedication without even thinking about it. Most other writers I’ve talked to have noticed a similar machete-wielding brutality toward their early chapters when the time comes to dig into the second draft.

Why does this seem to happen so often? After all, first chapters usually are the section of the book that writers have the most solidly defined in their heads before they sit down to pound out that first draft. Even if the writer doesn’t work from an outline (I do, but that’s a subject for another post) he or she often has the full “move clip” version of that awesome opening all queued up and ready to play. “I’ve got this terrific opening,” the writer likes to say to friends. “I’ve even composed the perfect first line.” Some people hatch an entire novel from thinking of one single eye-grabbing opening sentence.

And yet, this first chapter often ends up scrapped, re-located, refurbished, or replaced with a Winnie-the-Pooh ride.

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Who Watches the Watchmen? I Watches!

Who Watches the Watchmen? I Watches!

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Watchmen (2009)
Directed by Zack Snyder. Starring Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup, Malin Akerman, Matthew Goode, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Carla Gugino.

In the 1980s, two graphic novels (ah, I remember when I first heard that term in junior high) changed forever the perception of serial art as a form of literature: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, and Watchmen by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons.

Appropriately enough, less than a year after a film called The Dark Knight (not based on the graphic novel, but showing its influence) helped shift viewer’s perceptions of what sort of movie a comic book hero can appear in, a long-awaited adaptation of Watchmen also hit the screen. We have entered a new era in the comics-to-film genre, and this double-punch will raise the bar for all future movie versions of graphic novels and superhero tales.

A significant difference between The Dark Knight and Watchmen, however, is their relation to the source material. The Dark Knight draws off a character with an enormous history and multiple interpretations, and it uses this variety to create an original story. With Watchmen, the movie has a singular source which fans hold with the same reverence as other people—depending on their orientation—hold the Torah, the New Testament, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Qur’an, Hamlet, The Lord of the Rings, or Atlas Shrugged. (If your name is Rorschach and you wear a constantly shifting inkblot mask, I guarantee it’s Atlas Shrugged.) A Batman film can do many different interpretations, while Watchmen has to adhere to one… with variations for the new medium.

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Tarzan Swing-By: Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion”

Tarzan Swing-By: Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion”

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Tarzan and Foreign Legion 1st edI would like to step forward at this moment to address the audience before the curtain rises on our feature book review presentation so that I may make a personal observation about Edgar Rice Burroughs. Specifically, I would like to explain why I’ve written so many posts about his work in the last few weeks.

Burroughs needs no excuse for discussion in a magazine dedicated to heroic fantasy and planetary romance. Adventure literature as we know it springs from the influence of Burroughs in the early twentieth century. Although pulp magazines existed before Burroughs published Under the Moons of Mars (later titled A Princess of Mars) and Tarzan of the Apes, this double-punch in 1912 changed the style of this publishing medium for the remainder of its lifetime, and the influence continued into the paperback revolution and on into our era. Burroughs looms as one of the Titans of genre literature. But the true question is: Why am I re-reading so much of his work right now, in concentrated doses that I usually reserve for no author?

One answer is that I enjoy writing about Burroughs almost as much as I enjoy reading him. For an author who supposedly crafted straightforward entertainment, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels contain a remarkable breadth of ideas for debate and consideration. But a deeper reason for such current copious reading of Burroughs is that his work always gives me a unique uplift. In times of uncertainty and concern, I find that no author can temporarily re-energize me than ERB. Even a violent and embittered book, such as the one I’m about to discuss, provides an energy boost like a literary vodka with Red Bull. Burroughs knows how to make life seem wild, colorful, and far removed from the petty concerns of the everyday. It isn’t strictly “escapism,” a word I dislike, but a form of romantic empowerment. Burroughs’s daydreams on paper enhance our yearning for that which is beyond what we have to struggle with in day-to-day life.

End of psychological exegesis. The curtain now rises on today’s Tuesday Topic: one of Burroughs’s most unusual books, one that few people have read because — let’s face facts — how many but the most dedicated fans manage to reach Book #22 in any long-running series?

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The Land That Time Forgot: The Movie

The Land That Time Forgot: The Movie

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Land That Time Forgot PosterThe Land That Time Forgot (1975)
Directed by Kevin Connor. Starring Doug McClure, John McEnery, Susan Penhaligon, Keith Baron, Anthony Ainley, Bobby Parr.

In A.D. (Anno Dinosauriae) 1975, the old era of low-budget fantasy and science-fiction filmmaking neared its close — although nobody knew it. In 1977, an under-marketed flick called Star Wars forever changed the way studios approached genre movies, elevating them to A-budget, blockbuster, mega-studio super-entertainment with emphasis on attaining photo-realistic effects.

Progress? In a way. But when I look at a movie like 1975’s The Land That Time Forgot, a British adaptation from Amicus Productions (famed for their horror anthologies) of the first third of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic “Lost World” novel, I feel a tug of regret that such handmade, analog epics, crafted on tight budgets with intense imagination and invention, have largely suffered extinction. There’s a beautiful innocence to The Land That Time Forgot that makes it an ideal approach to Burroughs’s style. If its effects aren’t “realistic,” they certainly are thrilling and wonders to behold. We shall never see such marvels again.

It’s easy for the general public and the old-guard movie critics who still lumber around major magazines and paperback video guides to dismiss this “rubber dinosaurs and cavemen” film as campy, but The Land That Time Forgot plays it straight — it isn’t camp unless you choose to approach it that way. That’s acceptable, of course; the film belongs to the viewer. But taken as a serious adventure-fantasy, The Land That Time Forgot provides remarkable entertainment, far better than a campy romp. And it’s smart.

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Remember to Punch In: Writing “On-the-Clock”

Remember to Punch In: Writing “On-the-Clock”

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I originally planned to make today’s post a review of the film version of The Land That Time Forgot. But I decided that 1) I didn’t want to pack in too much Burroughs back-to-back, and my upcoming plans would start changing my Black Gate blogging into an “All-Burroughs, All-the-Time” radio station; 2) You probably don’t want yet another post from me that requires approximately three hours to read; and 3) …well, look, I just got too busy this week and ran out of time to craft the proper tribute to that movie.

And I ran out of time because I’ve gotten productive with my revision work these last two weeks. I’ve started to write “on the clock” and “punch in” whenever I start. The technique has worked so well for me that I’ve decided I can make a blog post out of it. And have it come in under a thousand words.

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