Hey, have you heard? Archie Andrews is going to marry Veronica Lodge. Good for him; I always had this thing for Veronica. I hope Archie isn’t in this only for the Lodges’ money. In celebration of this momentous moments of moments, I’m going to write about the Hittites.
I do not believe in transitions.
I come from a medical family. Of the five members of my immediate nuclear family, I’m the only one who lacks a background or job in medicine or health care. As a writer and historian growing up in a family that now consists of a pathologist, a nurse and lactation expert, a medical student on the cusp of graduation, and an occupational therapist, it was probably inevitable that I developed an interest in disease both in history and fiction. I would never get near the profession of medicine (the general public ought to thank me for this—I’d make a horrible doctor), but the dramatic role of disease in writing has always entranced me.
Among writers, bubonic plague is the leading favorite pestilence. It’s hard to resist the power of an illness that wiped out a third of Europe during the late Middle Ages and has a death toll exceeding two hundred million. The very title “The Black Death” instantly conjures up Hieronymous Bosch grotesques in most people’s minds. It’s a disease with an outstanding pedigree for fantasy and historical writers.
However, I’d like to shine an operating room light on another disease that I think is one of the most useful for a writer. At a cursory glance, it seems like it shouldn’t have any dramatic potential at all: not only is it easily preventable, it’s also easily cured. It isn’t even communicable. But a second glance reveals that this disease is a superb tool for fiction.
The disease is scurvy.
Recently I received a bit of a surprise when I went to a local library that has long been one of my ambush zones for the acquisition of unsuspecting books. All those lovely 25 cent mass market paperbacks with the stickers on the spine, all those nicely broken-in trades, all those hardbacks with the covers mylared over and glued down, were gone. Vanished. Whisked away on an electron breeze to inhabit the alternate world of the internet.
That’s a world I’ve hunted in a lot; in fact, the internet may indeed be my own Happy Hunting Grounds, the place where all those impossible to find treasures I’d only ever heard about as a kid grew like ripe fruit within easy reach. Not only was it simple and cheap, but it’s a world where anything is possible.
Of course, it’s also online cheapskates like me that are killing book stores.
I’ve blogged about my library shock in full over at my site, and talked about how important library sales were to me as a kid. How owning books, having a collection, taught a different sort of relationship and fostered a deeper respect for the world of books, fiction, and education than did borrowing them. I truly do think having these books available for purchase furthered the library’s mission of instilling a respect for the written word in the populace — especially in us kids who could buy a handful of SF novels with our lunch money after school — but, I suppose, it may have also reinforced other less desirable traits in me.
This, alas, is not going to be one of those highly informative posts by a knowledgeable person possessing vast information on the subject. Instead, it’s a partial response to several different topics that have crossed my consciousness lately. One is an ongoing issue–the role of the Other (exotic, evil, dangerous, wild, etc.) in our culture and our storytelling, and what it is like living in a country of one of our current primary Others (Arabs) for the last year. Another is an article I read recently on the current state of Arab cinema (burdened by censorship, unwieldy bureaucracy, and funding problems–see also here and here). Finally there was a conversation last night on the future of the Arab world in which the subject turned to education. As in the US, discussions about the role of education tend to focus on job readiness and the economy, but it’s art and storytelling that are crucial for cultural health, and growth.
“Arab Fantasy” could mean fantasy by outsiders using elements of Arab tradition, or fantasy by Arabs using traditional or other source materials. The best-known source in the west is, of course, One Thousand and One Nights in its numerous versions, although (quoting from wikipedia, that utterly reliable source), “Some of the best-known stories of The Nights, particularly “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp”, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor”, while most likely genuine Arabic folk tales, were not part of the The Nights in its Arabic versions, but were interpolated into the collection by its early European translators.” Actually the article is a pretty interesting overview, and I learned a bunch of stuff. Genre works influenced by Nights are many; titles I’ve read recently enough that they float to the surface include Tim Powers’ World War II espionage-with-djinns novel Declare, Diana Wynne-Jones’ Aladdin sendup, Castle in the Air, and P.B. Kerr’s Children of the Lamp series, aimed primarily at middle-grade readers, but entertaining enough for undemanding adults, and, it seems, forthcoming as a movie from Dreamworks. …
Star Trek (2009)
Directed by J. J. Abrams. Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy, Eric Bana, Bruce Greenwood, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Ben Cross, Winona Ryder.
I wrote a review of the new movie Star Trek for my own blog within a few hours of seeing the film on Friday morning. I have nothing against that review, but it’s definitely the sort of free-form exercise I do on my personal blog, and it goes deep into the story and specific details for general readers. I never intended to put such a review on my Black Gate blog.
But Star Trek deserves it’s own take on Black Gate, one geared toward the specific audience. This isn’t truly a review, but an essay analysis of a cultural phenomenon that takes into account the many other reviews I’ve now read of the movie since I saw it (I purposely avoided reading others reviews before seeing the film) and the reaction of people I know who have seen it so I can paint a canvas of the sort of zeitgeist we’re experiencing.
Although Black Gate takes heroic fantasy as its theme, while the Star Trek franchise is science fiction, the people who read this magazine and its website belong to a genre community of which Star Trek forms one of the cornerstones. It doesn’t matter if you like Star Trek or not… if you count yourself a fan of anything that is “genre,” Star Trek has a place in your universe. Star Trek is the personification of “fandom.”
A few days before the new movie hit theaters, I wrote a short essay examining my own relation to Trek fandom. You can read that if you want to know where on the “Trekker” scale I stand, if that’s of interest to you regarding reading the rest of this essay.
In brainstorming topics for my ‘getting back on the horse’ return post here at Black Gate after my absence of a few months — I’ve come up with a few mildly interesting ideas. Firstly, I thought about looking at the nature of escapism, how it shouldn’t have the unfair pejorative connotation it does, and how it certainly isn’t limited to works of prose or film or video games designed solely to entertain. Then too I was considering a weird phenomenon I’ve only really just been made conscious of, that of how utterly mainstream fantasy, or, let’s say ‘the fantastic,’ has become just in the last few decades — and I mean aside from the obvious stuff like the popularity of fantasy and science fiction books and movies, but everything from television commercials and product packaging to childrens’ toys and popular expressions bear out the reality that the once distant worlds of speculative fiction are now familiar place names in the cultural atlas of modern life.
But then it struck me that what I was doing, actively ransacking my mind for ideas, has to be a fairly unusual practice, all things considered. And one worthy of a blog post, at least.
“Take Courage– now there’s a sport / An invitation to a state of rigor mort.”
-sang Mordred in Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot.
The virtue of courage is the one commonality all the great heroes share. They persevere, even to a bad end, as Sam Gamgee said to Frodo as strength and hope flagged. Whether it’s Conan throwing himself into a ring of enemies, determined to break free or die:
With his back to the wall he faced the closing ring for a flashing instant, then leaped into the thick of them. He was no defensive fighter; even in the teeth of overwhelming odds he always carried the war to the enemy. Any other man would have already died there, and Conan himself did not hope to survive, but he did ferociously wish to inflict as much damage as he could before he fell. His barbaric soul was ablaze, and the chants of old heroes were singing in his ears. (Howard, The Phoenix on the Sword, 1932)
or Han Solo’s “Never tell me the odds” a hero’s first and foremost virtue, from the classics to the anti-heroes of today, is courage. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield, as Tennyson put it in his tribute to Ulysses.
By E. E. Knight
We’re used to thinking of the monsters in horror movies, whether it be Dracula, The Blob, or Freddy. But E.E. Knight rides in to remind us that some horror movies are centered upon the characters fighting against the evil. He defines and then explores an entire sub-genre of survival horror pictures, providing us with in-depth examinations of its classic offerings, and probes the reasons its everyman heroes resonate so strongly with viewers..
This week we lower the drawbridge at Black Gate headquarters and invite you to head out to Clarkesworld magazine for your weekly genre fix. Clarkesworld has just published a lengthy article on the profound effect that fantasy gaming has had on fantasy writing. Written by Justin Howe and Jason S. Ridler, the piece is titled “Of Dice and Men: Modern Fantasists and the Influence of Role-Playing Games.”
Black Gate Publisher John O’Neill and Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones are both quoted in the essay, as are such luminaries as Jeff VanderMeer, Paul Witcover, Tim Pratt, Catherynne M. Valente, Jay Lake, Tim Waggoner, and China Miéville. Pretty cool company!
When we think of Ian Fleming’s iconic superspy, our thoughts turn to action, sleuthing, womanizing, and of course hi-tech gadgets. But how many of us has ever considered James “007” Bond primarily a fantasy hero? E. E. Knight does, and at Black Gate this week he takes a long, thoughtful look at one of the greatest literary and filmic creations of all time, showing us how Bond’s appeal is not just as a cold war soldier oozing cool, but as the memorable hero of “fairy tales with Aston Martins, fables with Walthers, swashbucklers with assault helicopters.”