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March Short Story Roundup

March Short Story Roundup

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oie_2535049EywGcOBUIt’s roundup time again, folks. This past March we were treated to two stories from Curtis Ellett’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine and a trio from Adrian Collins’ Grimdark Magazine. Some I liked, some not so much. Without further jib jab, I’ll start the reviews.

Swords and Sorcery #62 opens with “The Sword Over the River Thar” by Bryan Dyke. It’s a thoughtful and introspective tale of a reluctant soldier looking back over his childhood and his own wartime experiences. There are many fine moments in the story, some quite moving. Unfortunately, the story suffers from moments of weak prose, including an overreliance on the word portal. References to such disparate elements as hoplites, barons, elves, and the distinctly Anglo-Saxon-sounding placename Norwich, make the setting feel ramshackle. I hope to be of service by pointing these things out. This is Dyke’s first published story and there is far more than the germ of a good story on display here. I hope to read more by him in future.

In the past, most recently in December’s roundup, I have been harsh towards the stories of Jeffrey Scott Sims. I have found them to be in possession of solid plots wrapped in clunky, faux-archaic prose. So I was surprised when I found myself quite enjoying his new story, “A Sojurn in Crost.” Bereft of supplies, stranded in enemy territory, “Lord Morca, wizard and warrior of ancient Dyrezan” and his battle-tiger, Treenya, are making their way to the coast and safety when they come across the town of Crost. There’s little mystery to what’s going on in this quite familiar story, but Sims spins his yarn with enough conviction to overcome any staleness. Sims’ style remains similar to that of his previous tales of Dyrezan but is deployed with more control and concision.

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Space Pirates, Ancient Ruins, and Supercarriers: A Look at Endless Space 2 Early Access

Space Pirates, Ancient Ruins, and Supercarriers: A Look at Endless Space 2 Early Access

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Aight. 14 hours in, 4 campaigns played/started, it’s the wee hours of the morning, going on afternoon. I think I’ll take a stab at writing a few words on the Early Access release of Endless Space 2.

First up, Bad Things! I Wish These Weren’t in the Game, But They Are

#1: Soft turn limits.

This is a bug. Every campaign that’s made it to turn 67-ish so far (Craver, Sophon, Voydani) suffers a fatal error. Suggested options include A) loading an autosave from a couple turns ago, and B) ignoring it. Autosaves did nothing. Same turn rolls around, yellow/red screen of death on my monitor. Ignoring it, amusingly enough, was more effective. I made it to turn 69 (thanks, game) before Terrible Things happened to my computer. I strongly suspect this bug exists due to issues in how the game covers faction deaths, because as the Cravers I had murdered the last Voydani Ark and was cleaning up stragglers.

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Where the Time Goes by Jeffrey E. Barlough

Where the Time Goes by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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Where-the-Time-Goes-smallerWhere the Time Goes
by Jeffrey E. Barlough
Gresham & Doyle (337 pages, $14.95 trade paperback, October 2016)

If you’ve been looking to jump into Jeffrey Barlough’s Western Lights series, his ninth and latest installment makes a good diving board. The books are set in a post-apocalyptic alternate history where woolly mammoths and monsters from Greek and Etruscan legend rub elbows with ghosts, spirits, and worse, but Where the Time Goes adds a third genre to the cake batter: time travel.

Philip Earnscliff, a junior partner in the firm Bagwash and Bladdergowl, has been summoned to the country estate of the elderly Hugh Calendar to put Calendar’s affairs in order; Calendar has been in a coma for some weeks and appears unlikely to recover. The lawyer spends his hours paging through Calendar’s papers, gazing out the window at a neighboring estate called the Moorings — abandoned and ruined following an accident during Calendar’s youth — and taking nightmare-plagued naps. Earnscliff has no reason to think anything is amiss, at least not until he walks in upon Miss Carswell, Calendar’s young and attractive acquaintance, with a syringe full of sleeping elixir stuck between Calendar’s lips. Soon enough Earnscliff finds himself back in time, trying to repair the tragedies of the past while, as a side quest, solving the mystery of a local serial killer that strikes every six years.

It’s been a long strange trip for Barlough’s Western Lights since their 2000 debut, Dark Sleeper. The early books with Ace were sinister and Gothic, yet since moving to Gresham & Doyle they’ve generally trended toward cozy mysteries with supernatural elements. 2011’s A Tangle in Slops was more Midsummer Night’s comedy than horror; and the last two installments — What I Found at Hoole and The Cobbler of Ridingham — could have been written by the lovechild of Agatha Christie and M.R. James.

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Peplum Populist: Hercules, Samson & Ulysses

Peplum Populist: Hercules, Samson & Ulysses

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hercules-samson-ulysses-posterThe “versus film” has been with us for decades, even if “vs.” didn’t show up in early movie titles like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Audiences crave watching cinematic legends smash into each other in duels to the death — or duels to the mutual understanding. Alien vs. Predator, Freddy vs. Jason, Batman v[s]. Superman, King Kong vs. Godzilla (soon ready for a rematch), Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (this really happened), Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper (a number of occasions), and Dollman vs. The Demonic Toys. Bring up anything involving the SyFy Channel and sharks and you get hurt.

Italian sword-and-sandal (peplum) films couldn’t resist putting titans of the ancient world into the ring together, and there’s no finer example than 1963’s Hercules, Samson & Ulysses. The Italian title translates as “Hercules Challenges Samson,” in case you needed to know who goes up against whom and who is hanging around as the sidekick.

When it comes to peplum-as-pulp, Hercules, Samson & Ulysses is the real deal. Appearing at the point in the genre’s evolution when sword-and-sandal films either went stale or went silly, HS&U falls solidly on the positive silly side. It’s an outrageous actioner that knows exactly what its audience wants to see and delivers 100% on the promise of watching two legendary supermen batter each other in muscular absurdity. It may not be the best sword-and-sandal film, but it’s one of the most entertaining. This is the peplum film to watch if most of the genre’s other offerings don’t grab you.

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In 500 Words or Less: Icon by Genevieve Valentine

In 500 Words or Less: Icon by Genevieve Valentine

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Icon Genevieve Valentine-smallIcon
By Genevieve Valentine
Saga Press (336 pages, $24.99 hardcover/$16.99 paperback, June 2016)

On my Top Ten Books from 2016, I mentioned Genevieve Valentine’s novel Persona, a near-future ecofiction novel set in a world where the UN has been replaced by the International Assembly, a body where each country has a Face to represent their interests and those Faces are regarded like Hollywood celebrities. The sequel to that novel, Icon, continues to follow Suyana Sapaki, representative of the United Amazon Rainforest Collective, as she navigates the dangerous politics of the IA, which almost claimed her life in the previous novel. (You may have spotted this one in a Future Treasures post by John O’Neill last June.)

I mentioned the last time I discussed Valentine’s work that her storytelling has a very unique feel to it. A lot of the plot is left to the reader’s interpretation, to the point that even though I had read Persona and recognized most of the returning characters, I spent a few chapters with my head cocked like some confused golden retriever, trying to figure out exactly what was going on. The subtleties that Suyana and her allies are forced to deal with in their world translates exactly onto the page, so if you prefer direct storytelling and obvious clarity, you might not enjoy this series.

What drew me in and kept me reading, like with Persona, was the character work; once again we see paparazzi Daniel Park shadowing Suyana, for example, never admitting to himself that he’s in love with her and pained by the distance between them. My personal favorite was Magnus, Suyana’s personal handler, since once again we don’t know if we can trust him, even though we desperately want to because, like with Daniel, there’s a tragedy to the way Suyana keeps him at a distance, when apparently all he wants to do is protect her.

There are some big reveals with these characters, and intriguing twists that make Icon a great political thriller. However, I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed it as much as Persona. That first novel opens with an assassination attempt, and then follows Suyana and Daniel as they lay low through the streets of Paris, trying to figure out who wants Suyana dead and how to get the upper hand on them. That sense of urgency is missing here, and so I found this novel a lot less tense, even as the characters were discussing and dealing with things that carried a fair bit of weight. There is a pickup as the novel concludes, but it doesn’t really balance the more sedate nature of the rest of the novel.

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Modular: The New Mongoose Traveller #2 — More Than Just a Science Fiction Midlife Crisis Simulator?

Modular: The New Mongoose Traveller #2 — More Than Just a Science Fiction Midlife Crisis Simulator?

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Seen from one angle, the Traveller RPG has always been a Science Fiction midlife crisis simulator, “40-somethings Innnnn Spaaaacccce.”

Seriously!

The character generation system is a mini-game that lets you play through your character’s career all the way into middle-age, a career that most of the time ends in disaster, and always ends with you mustering out to go “travelling.”

Kurtzhau (13) and I rolled up a party and ended up with:

  • A scientist, feeling the bite of age, who’d made a big discovery in his youth, but had been stuck in admin ever since and now craved adventure.
  • A senior NCO soldier forced by job cuts to muster out and now very much adrift in search of a purpose.
  • A pilot who’d unwillingly ended up in the Scouts and spent most of his time as a courier and now belatedly wanted to do something less boring.
  • A veteran of the Merchant Marine who really wanted to be a Free Trader.

You could put them all in a shared apartment and make a quirky sitcom about them. (We put them in a ship and sent them to our Dacre Sector.)

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Wired: The Fiction Issue

Wired: The Fiction Issue

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Wired The Fiction Issue-smallI used to read Wired magazine back in the days when it was actually cool to have an email address (you had to be in academia or some tech savvy business). This was in the dark ages before web browsers and the Internet wasn’t just a place to buy stuff, host porn, post cute cat videos and spread fake news. The only people who used Apple computers were in advertising and not everyone had a cellphone; the ones who did liked to showoff by appending their email with “Sent from my Blackberry” — remember Blackberry?

It was when I was just getting into cyberpunk, which was the magazine’s patron saint of sorts. Bruce Sterling was on Wired‘s inaugural cover and William Gibson (see below) was featured on the fourth issue (1.4 in Wired parlance). Wired was for the cultural technoliterati, the folks “wired in” (hence the title in the days well before Wi-Fi) to how computer technology was going to change the world. And, boy, did it ever.

It was also hard to read, because graphic designers thought they were making some sort of statement using odd and multiple fonts along with disorienting colors and just stuff that gave you a headache to look at but had the appearance of cutting-edge style. Fortunately, someone finally realized that jettisoning the visual clutter made it possible for people to actually read the articles instead of just being bedazzled to gaze at them. Though certain tics remain even today, like sticking a 0 in front of double digit page numbers — pagination doesn’t actually being until page 21, or as Wired likes it, 021 — in a vertical position that isn’t easy to see and mostly only on the left hand even pages. C’mon.

Somewhere about the time when the Internet stopped being an interesting forum of discussion and innovation and turned into a wasteland of constant connection and commerce, I let my subscription lapse. But this past January, Wired published its first ever all-fiction “sci-fi issue.” Despite the unfortunate terminology (which has connotations of bad adventure flicks in futuristic settings, although perhaps the disdain is just insider snobbery — do people nowadays still care and argue about such things?), I thought I’d check out the issue’s idea to, according to editor Scott Dadich, “Think about what is possible, what is plausible, what is terrifying, what is hopeful.”

Lot of plausible here with not much hopeful. Which might be terrifying were it not so close to actual experience (both psychological and technological) that today is, alas, more mundane than profound.

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The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh

The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh

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oie_172136AgOgCew8My first encounter with C.J. Cherryh was in Merchanter’s Luck, a short, action-packed story set in Cherryh’s super-dense Alliance-Union Universe. While the plot could have been drafted by any number of skilled space opera purveyors, I’d never before encountered one who wrote with Cherryh’s level of near contempt for explaining things to the reader. She writes in what she’s variably called  “very tight limited third person” and “intense internal voice.” This means characters only think or talk about what actually interests them. Descriptions will not be forthcoming when a character is observing what is commonplace to him. Exposition, well, don’t count on her books having much.

While Merchanter’s Luck, with its thrilling races through hyperspace and deadly mysteries, is quite good, what made me a lifelong fan of Cherryh is a slim volume from 1982, The Pride of Chanur. The title refers to the merchant ship of the same name, one of several operated by the Chanur clan. The Chanur are hani: an alien, leonine race of which only females travel into space, the males being considered too violent and psychologically unstable. The title takes on a second, humorous meaning when the crew of the Pride find themselves harboring and protecting a lone human male.

Since then, I’ve read Pride and its sequels three or four times. They are among the very best space opera stories I have ever read. Cherryh’s writing demands you keep up and are as willing as her heroes to leap into the dark of the cosmos at times. The payoff is a tale of incredible thrills in a highly complex and believably detailed universe.

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Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster: The Godzilla Movie to Rise Again in 2019

Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster: The Godzilla Movie to Rise Again in 2019

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It’s been a month since Kong: Skull Island came out and grossed over half a billion dollars globally, so I feel safe in 1) discussing the post-credits stinger without a spoiler freak-out, and 2) predicting we’ll indeed see Legendary Picture’s planned Godzilla vs. King Kong film in a few years. Warner Bros. isn’t leaving franchise money on the table, especially with their DC pictures in a shaky place.

But the movie arriving before the Radioactive Terror and the Eighth Wonder smash heads is promised in Skull Island’s post-credits stinger. Godzilla: King of the Monsters, to be directed by Michael Dougherty and slated for release in March 2019, is the third installment in the Legendary Pictures Kaijuverse. Kong: Skull Island contains numerous references that it occurs in the same universe as the 2014 Godzilla, such as the presence of the monster-researching Monarch Organization and mention of the Pacific atomic test originally targeted at killing Godzilla.

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There’s Something Magic About a House: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

There’s Something Magic About a House: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

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Howl's Moving Castle-big Howl's Moving Castle Greenwillow-smaller Howl's Moving Castle Eos-smaller

There is something magic about a house, or there should be. There are hints of this in James Stoddard’s The High House, in which the house is a universe unto itself, or in the Professor’s home in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which the house is a gateway to universes. We realize in some way that every house holds secrets, that every house is in some sense a castle, and that the portals of every house open either into a wider world without or an inner world within.

This ineffable something about houses motivates Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, which despite the title isn’t really about a castle but rather a house and the family that gets collected inside it. My kids and I are big fans of Studio Ghibli, so the 2004 animated film adaptation by Hayao Miyazaki was our first exposure to the work. Before seeing the film, I had not heard of the late British fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones. Howl’s Moving Castle remains the only work by her I’ve read, though she wrote at least two other novels in which these characters also appear.

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