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Books for Writers: A Guide to Improvised Weaponry

Books for Writers: A Guide to Improvised Weaponry

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A Guide to Improvised Weaponry-smallThere are a lot of how-to manuals for writers out there–books about world building, books about grammar, books about finding markets, books about almost every aspect of the writing life. Sadly, there’s no book telling writers how to defend themselves if an axe murderer invades their home office.

Until now.

A Guide to Improvised Weaponry is the perfect self-defense manual for any writer. It tells you just how to defend yourself when ISIS terrorists decided your work in progress makes you a candidate for their next YouTube video. It’s written by Terry Schappert, a Green Beret and Master sergeant in the U.S. Army Special Forces. This guy knows how to kill you with a pencil. It’s co-written by Adam Slutsky, a professional writer who probably had to explain to Terry that a disappointing advance, low royalties, and non-compete clauses are not valid reasons for killing an acquisitions editor with a pencil.

Each chapter focuses on a common object that you probably have in your home. I was especially interested in objects that are in my home office, ready to be picked up the moment one of my many anonymous online haters kicks in my door.

First, my coffee cup, strategically located to the left of my computer, ready to protect me and mine. Schappert makes the obvious suggestions, like flinging my hot Ethiopian brew into my attacker’s face or using it as a knuckle duster, with the caveat that there’s a good chance of hurting your hand with that second method. He also explains how you can use it to catch the tip of your attacker’s knife and deflect the blow.

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Building a World in a Vacant Lot: The Circus of Dr. Lao

Building a World in a Vacant Lot: The Circus of Dr. Lao

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The Circus of Dr Lao Bison 2nd Edition-smallFantasy, like all life-consuming obsessions (fly fishing, stamp collecting, running for public office) has a language all its own, one that can seem arcane and incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Polder, thinning, underlier, Dark Lord, secondary world, Hidden Monarch, threshold, time abyss, mythago – each of these names a vital fantasy concept or device, and of all such terms, none is more important to the modern genre than worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is, according to Wikipedia, (the greatest repository of fantasy on the internet) the process of “developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology,” and it “often involves the creation of maps, a backstory, and people for the world.”

In worldbuilding as in so many other things, it was J.R.R. Tolkien who set the standard for all who followed. His Middle Earth, with its immensely deep and detailed history, cosmogony, and geography, was worldbuilding on an unprecedented scale, even to the creation of complete languages for the various races that inhabit this invented milieu.

Post-Tolkien fantasy is largely the story of the primacy of this kind of worldbuilding, as the maps, glossaries, and genealogies that pad the backs of so many fat paperbacks attest, and almost all epic fantasies published since The Lord of the Rings owe a large debt to Tolkien and his example. But all writers are worldbuilders, Hemingway and Updike as much as Jordan and Martin, and perfect as the Tolkien method is for a particular kind of tale, there are many ways to create a believable world — even a fantasy one.

The kind of construction exemplified in The Lord of the Rings is largely external, which is well suited to Tolkien’s rather formal purposes. There is another kind of worldbuilding, however, one less concerned with royal lines and the names of rivers than with what might be called the mythic geography of ordinary life. A superb example of this kind of work is Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao. Published in 1935, it is one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written; indeed, in some moods I’m inclined to think that it is the greatest of them all.

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June Short Story Roundup

June Short Story Roundup

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oie_733452qBKy8XQAIt’s that time again, folks: the short story roundup! June was a pretty good month, with some nice work from lesser-known (to me, at least) authors as well as some bigger names. A good sample of work from the spectrum of heroic fiction.

While there’s not a lot of action in either of Swords and Sorcery Magazine Issue 41‘s two stories, there is some very good writing.

The first, “Wind Song” by Kevin Cockle, is my favorite story this month. The narrator is a member of a class that possesses the special talent to control djinns, which are then used to power flying ships. His nation has fought great wars against the Kyberi, a people who fly dragons into battle. In the past the dragon-riders were often victorious, but now their enemies have developed weapons and stratagems to defeat them.

When the ship he directs is pursued by a dragon, the narrator finds he is able to make a psychic connection with its rider. From her he gains insights into the enemy he has never had before.

It’s a simple story with not much plot, but Cockle writes wonderfully.

The waters in the Bay of Nandorin are freakish clear – like stained blue glass – and one can see clearly the sunken hulks of long-ago warships littering the sea-floor like scattered toys. Though a man grown, I became a boy again whenever we made Nandorin, peering down into the pristine depths at the haphazard city of ghost-ships beneath. On the surface, stone towers stood like widely spaced square teeth across the mouth of the bay: their anxious sentinels craning their necks skyward to track our dragon-shadow.

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Adventures In Cards: Munchkin!

Adventures In Cards: Munchkin!

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Munchkin coverHow was my day, you asked? Well, I’ll tell you. My Halfling wizard and I spent the last hour fleeing from a Gazebo, leveling up by way of a Drooling Slime, and staying alive by means of the Kneepads Of Allure and a (basic but useful) Huge Rock.

What on earth could cause such havoc and silliness? Surely not Dungeons & Dragons?

Nope. It’s D&D’s hell-spawn little brat of a brother, the card game Munchkin. Now possibly I’m late to the table on this (I often am), but Munchkin has to be the geekiest, most asinine, not to mention juvenile, card game going. It’s also a diverting homage to AD&D, and better yet, it makes both kids and grown-ups laugh.

Consider Munchkin’s very own press: “…the mega-hit card game about dungeon adventure… with none of that stupid role-playing stuff.”

Of course D&D remains a clear progenitor, and possibly Munchkin owes something to Magic: the Gathering, but it strikes me that Munchkin’s most direct sire is a horse of a very different color, the irreverent and insouciant Killer Bunnies, which, if you’ve never played it, is a must for any gaming fan’s bucket list.

That said, you’ll need a lot of patience (or a sensai) to figure out how to play Killer Bunnies. But. Once you’ve “mastered” this obscenely complicated, impossible-to-predict killing spree of a game, enjoyment and strategy abound. I’d even be willing to state in a court of law, no less, that killing rabbits has never been so pleasurable, or so downright wicked neat. After all, who wouldn’t want to do in a (purple) Congenial Bunny while wielding a piece of flying burnt toast?

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Self-published Book Review: Nightmares by Peter Nealen

Self-published Book Review: Nightmares by Peter Nealen

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The self-published book review will be going on hiatus for the next few months while I start on a new project. Feel free to continue sending me submissions, but don’t expect to see many reviews posted before 2016.

Pageflex Persona [document: PRS0000039_00017]Peter Nealen’s Nightmares is this month’s self-published novel. As a marine serving in Iraq, Jed Horn had a nasty encounter with an ifrit, a creature of fire and darkness. Returning to the states, he tried to forget, but no matter how much he drank, it wasn’t enough. So he started looking into the matter, hooking up with ghost hunters and amateur occultists. That turned out to be an even worse mistake. Dabbling, with no real knowledge of what you’re up against, is a quick way to attract the attention of some very dark, very evil things. One of them is following Jed now, killing those he’s interacted with. When he meets up with a priest, Father O’Neal, and Dan, who claims to be a Hunter of the dark things, they give him an ultimatum: either join up and fight back against the things hunting him, or keep running, and probably die in short order. You can probably guess which one Jed chooses.

The hunt takes Jed back to a small college in Colorado, where he first met Professor Ashton, whose studies into the occult have unearthed something real. From a stone tablet that only the professor can read, to ancient books and artifacts imbued with a sense of wrongness, Ashton has begun to glimpse what lies beyond, and has developed a mad obsession with summoning the chthonic spirit buried beneath Powell Hill. Much of the book is about Jed’s interactions with Ashton, trying to determine whether the professor is the source of the things hunting him, or merely a tool of larger forces. There’s something Lovecraftian about the horror here, manifest in wrongness and madness and alien spirits, hidden in ancient tablets and underground vaults and art and sculpture that change when you’re not looking. But Nealen turns away from Lovecraft’s nihilistic existential horror, and filters the same imagery through the lens of Catholicism.

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The Series Series: Knight’s Shadow by Sebastien de Castell

The Series Series: Knight’s Shadow by Sebastien de Castell

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Knight's Shadow-smallWhen I reviewed the first book in the Greatcoats series, this was my conclusion:

Is Traitor’s Blade destined to be a classic? Well, that’s a kind of question I ask myself about books I can get some distance from. I don’t want any distance from this book. What I want, just as soon as I finish writing this review, is to read Traitor’s Blade again, immediately. And maybe once more right after that.

Now that I’ve read the second book in this planned series of four, I’m pretty sure de Castell is carving himself an enduring place in the fantasy canon.

Usually when a new author stumbles after a stellar debut, it’s on the second book. I wondered whether I’d see that play out here… right until I read the first page. Then I forgot I was wondering or worrying or writing a review, because the stalwart, somewhat cracked hero Falcio Val Mond was tugging me back into his story. I’d follow Falcio anywhere. Okay, so he’s an idealist in a world that despaired of those ideals years ago, and he’s slowly dying from a little poisoning incident in the last book, but his berserker episodes are much improved, and he hardly ever froths at the mouth anymore.

And he makes us laugh, raucously, especially in the bleak moments when he and we need it most. Yes, I’d definitely still follow him anywhere. In the spirit of lively and surprising storytelling, though, in this volume, some of Falcio’s friends and allies stop being so sure they can do the same.

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More Than Just an Inventive Cyberpunk Romp: Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One

More Than Just an Inventive Cyberpunk Romp: Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One

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Ready Player One-smallI’m nostalgic for most things that belong to the age of my childhood and teenage years (i.e. the 70s and 80s), especially for things we now mostly think of as geek-ish (though that label was hardly admirable when I was a kid).

In this spirit, I recently watched a very interesting documentary on Netflix called Atari: Game Over, about one man’s quest to find the (now legendary) dumping ground of Atari’s fabled mass of unsold game cartridges based upon the Steven Spielberg movie E. T. (And by the way, I highly recommend watching that very short documentary.)

Atari: Game Over includes footage of author Ernest Cline, who is about my age and seems to have similar 80s interests. Case in point: the man owns a DeLorean sports car like Marty McFly’s from Back to the Future.

Cline made his 2011 novel debut with Ready Player One. I’d heard nothing but great buzz about this book since it was first released. But since I’m not a gigantic fan of science fiction literature — I tend to read more fantasy and horror — I hadn’t really bothered to pick it up. After seeing the documentary I became more intrigued, and so I bought and read it.

Oh my goodness!

I can definitely say that I am now a huge Ernest Cline fan. What a great book! This was one of those books that I could not put down. I blazed through its nearly 400 pages in just two days — I would’ve done it in one if I hadn’t had real-life responsibilities. It was definitely something of an 80s nostalgia-fest, but that’s merely surface, and not integral to enjoying this book.

What’s Ready Player One about?

It starts in a dystopian near future — though not dystopian because of nukes or zombies. Rather, in Cline’s book our current fears are extrapolated to a world feeling the effects of increasing  overpopulation, in terms of climate and economics. Many people are unemployed, and where once cushioned bastions were unaffected by such, like most of the United States, they are now populated with flimsy towers of RVs and trailer-homes (Jim Massey’s paperback cover presents this in awesome detail).

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Jakes’ Progress: On Wheels

Jakes’ Progress: On Wheels

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On Wheels-smallJohn Jakes is a publishing phenomenon. That is always the first thing mentioned whenever he is written about and will doubtless be the first line of his obituary (not that I’m trying to hurry him). From 1974 through 1979 he produced the eight volumes of The Kent Family Chronicles, which follow the fortunes of an American family from revolutionary times through the end of the nineteenth century. The series has sold over 50 million copies and is still in print, and Jakes followed it with the even more successful North and South trilogy. Appearing from 1982 to 1987 and set in the Civil War era, it tells the story of two closely connected families, the Hazards and the Mains, one from Pennsylvania and the other from South Carolina, as they live through the country’s greatest conflict.

In the succeeding years Jakes has written other books of the same stripe, and while none have generated the huge numbers that either earlier series did, he is still one of America’s most popular authors. He is the reigning master of the American historical blockbuster; his historicals are straightforward, thoroughly researched, expansive in scope (and in page count), and unashamedly, old-fashionedly melodramatic. They are the sort of  stories that used to be called “lusty.” Tolstoy they ain’t (and Jakes has never claimed that they are), but they are solid, well-constructed entertainments that deserve their wide success.

But before he became the writer of a New York Times number one bestseller (a distinction earned by North and South, the first volume of the trilogy that bears its name), John Jakes spent his time cranking out yarns about a Conan clone named Brak the Barbarian, and one-off heroic fantasies like The Last Magicians and the humorous Mention My Name in Atlantis, as well as science fiction novels such as the Westworld-flavored Six-Gun Planet (three years before Westworld). None of these books ever made the New York Times bestseller list. Once he glimpsed those green (and I mean green) pastures, Jakes understandably left such low-paying, low-prestige science fiction and fantasy work behind, seemingly forever — he wrote his last fantastic fiction in 1973.

Was his exit from the ranks of the genre any loss? Is there anything to be found in the pre-respectability John Jakes but slapdash schlock? Is any of it still worth reading? Well, brothers and sisters, that’s what I’m here to tell you! And yes, that means that there are spoilers galore in the following review of a forty two year old book. Sue me.

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Space Orks, Space Elves, and Tough Space Men: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Ghostmaker

Space Orks, Space Elves, and Tough Space Men: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Ghostmaker

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GhostmakerGhostmaker
A Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 2 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (288 pages, $6.95, July 2000)

In the inaugural series installment, Warhammer 40K: First and Only, Dan Abnett introduced us to the Tanith First regiment of Imperial Guardsmen and their iron-willed commander, Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt. That novel had Gaunt as its clear protagonist. A series of flashback chapters sketched out his past: Losing his father to Ork hordes in boyhood, growing up a ward of the Imperium, beginning a military career, and finally avenging his loss in a chainsword duel with the man who left his father to die.

We also got an introduction to the Tanith, a thousand men who together represent the only survivors of their homeworld. In First and Only, we saw them largely through Gaunt’s eyes, and received a comparatively cursory introduction to the various personalities among them. In Ghostmaker, Abnett establishes the men of the Tanith in greater depth, laying out a cast of battle brothers as rich and intriguing as any created by Bernard Cornwell or C. S. Forrester.

Ghostmaker is a fix-up novel. The brief “present-day” chapters are connective tissue for a series of short stories from the regiment’s past, each of which centers around an individual soldier of the Tanith and gives him a moment to shine. Along the way we learn more about what the Ghosts lost on their homeworld and how each of them lives with the horrors they confront on 41st millennium battlefields.

I’m normally ambivalent about fix-up novels. I’ve read good ones (see Tears of Ishtar by Michael Ehart for a great example), but in general I feel they end up too fragmented to be read as a novel and too connected to read piecemeal, the way I would normally approach a short story collection. Ghostmaker is a stand-out in the field, and ranks as my favorite of the first trio of Ghosts novels.

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White Supremacist Science Fiction: Reading The Turner Diaries

White Supremacist Science Fiction: Reading The Turner Diaries

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The Turner Diaries-smallThe recent attack by a white supremacist on a black church in Charleston reminded everyone that radical Muslims aren’t the only terrorists out there. In fact, an FBI report studying terrorism in the U.S. between 1980 and 2005 shows there were more attacks by far-right groups than Muslim groups, even in the most recent years of that period. A study of terror attacks in the European Union reveals that less than two percent were religiously motivated. Most were either by separatist or far-right organizations.

So what motivates radical right-wing terror groups? What’s their equivalent of ISIS beheading videos? While there is a large body of white supremacist videos and literature, the undisputed classic is The Turner Diaries.

This novel, written in 1978 by white supremacist activist William Luther Pierce under the pen name Andrew MacDonald, tells of a race war in the 1990s in which a group of whites called The Order overthrow the Zionist-controlled U.S. government and kill all Jews and racial minorities. The book became famous because a scene depicting the blowing up of an FBI building was eerily similar to the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh. Later investigation showed he had been inspired by the book, as had a short-lived racist group called The Order that committed a string of robberies and killed a Jewish radio personality. Several other white supremacist criminals have also been inspired by the novel.

While it’s not proven that the Charleston shooter, Dylann Roof, had read the book, it’s so well-known in the circles in which he circulated he surely must have heard of it. Curious, I decided to track it down.

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