Black Gate – Page 414 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

By Crom: Arthurian Elements in the Conan Canon

Saturday, April 7, 2018 Bob Byrne Comments 10 comments

John Teehan, in The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy: Volume One, challenges the reader to think of their favorite contemporary fantasy novels. And we’re talking Tolkien-onwards here, not just the past few years. Then he gives a list and says it would be difficult to think of a book that didn’t have any of the five themes on the list. He is making the point that the Arthurian legend, largely brought to popular culture by Thomas Malory, was an interweaving of those five themes. High fantasy epics like David Eddings’ Belgariad still follow this path.

I immediately thought about Robert E. Howard’s Conan tales and how they didn’t really emulate this pattern. Or so it seemed to me. My friend Deuce Richardson immediately pointed out two stories that did significantly incorporate these elements. So, I decided to go back to the very beginning and take a good look at “The Phoenix on the Sword”: then, do a less detailed survey of the following stories.

So, here we go!

Characteristic One – Commoner who is Really a King

Well…we’re definitely 0 for 1 right out of the gate. I think of Shea Ohmsford, who is a descendant of Jerle Shannara (Terry Brook’s Sword of Shannara) or Belgarion in Eddings’ previously mentioned Belgariad). They have the lineage of kings (or great sorcerers) in their blood. And they rise up to perform great deeds or rule kingdoms.

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Too Wide Sargasso Sea: Hammer’s The Lost Continent (1968)

Saturday, April 7, 2018 Ryan Harvey Comments 6 comments

Hammer Film Productions’ fantasy-adventure The Lost Continent is an adaptation of the works of William Hope Hodgson. Or it is to me, anyway. The credits say it’s based on the 1938 novel Uncharted Seas by Dennis Wheatley, but my eyes don’t lie: what Hammer put on screen is the nearest any movie has come to capturing the aura of Hodgson’s weird tales of the slimy terrors of the deep and the unknown horrors lurking in the Sargasso Sea.*

The Lost Continent arrived during the final phase of Hammer’s golden age. The company had moved out of its original studio at Bray and was now shooting at Pinewood and Elstree Studios. The feel of a unified family was starting to fray, and Hammer’s best in-house producers would soon depart. But producer Michael Carreras, son of studio head James Carreras, was still around and pushing Hammer to make larger-scale adventure films. Although Carreras was one of Hammer’s most prolific producers of horror movies — he produced Terence Fisher-directed classics like The Mummy, Dracula, and The Curse of the Werewolf — he never had any personal fondness for the Gothics. He saw lavish adventure and fantasy films like She (1965) and One Million Years B.C. (1966) as Hammer’s future. The Lost Continent was meant as an extension of the success of those movies, although it sometimes veered into horror.

Carreras was also an occasional director, and when The Lost Continent’s original director Leslie Norman (X the Unknown) fell sick early in production, Carreras stepped into the director’s chair. Carreras also wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym Michael Nash, the name of his gardener.

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Birthday Reviews: Henry Kuttner’s “Ghost”

Saturday, April 7, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

Henry Kuttner was born on April 7, 1914 and died on February 4, 1958. From 1940 until his death in 1958, he was married to science fiction author C.L. Moore. The two had their own careers and also collaborated, although they claimed that they each worked on all of the other one’s stories, sitting down and continuing whatever was in the typewriter at the time. Kuttner (or Moore/Kuttner) also used the pseudonyms Lawrence O’Donnell, C.H. Liddell, and Lewis Padgett.

In 1956, their collaboration “Home There’s No Returning” was nominated for the Hugo for Best Novelette and Kuttner was nominated for two Retro Hugos in 2014 for his novelette “Hollywood on the Moon” and the novella “The Time Trap.” In 2004, he and Moore were named the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award recipients.

“Ghost” was first published in Astounding Science Fiction in May 1943, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. and credited only to Kuttner. Kuttner reprinted it a decade later in his collection Ahead of Time. In 2005, it appeared in the Centipede Press collection Two-Handed Engine. The story has been translated into French, where it was credited to Kuttner and Moore, as well as Italian, where it was only credited to Kuttner.

In “Ghost,” Kuttner attempts to do quite a bit, which means that he only succeeds at some of it. The story is about a modern ghost, perhaps the first real ghost in history, haunting a research facility in Antarctica. Elton Ford has been sent down to investigate what is causing the men assigned to the base to go insane. Ford arrives to find the base’s sole caretaker Larry Crockett. The main lesson of the story, given the set up, is that perhaps having a single man in an isolated research base might not be the best idea, although we see it even in the present day in films such as Moon. That, however, is not where Kuttner takes his story.

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New Treasures: The Hollow Tree by James Brogden

Friday, April 6, 2018 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

James Brogden’s Hekla’s Children was one of the breakout horror novels of 2017. Tim Lebbon called it “Brilliant… full of great twists, beautifully drawn characters, exceptional writing, and some really startling ideas,” and Steven Savile said “There’s some dark, sinister magic going on in these pages. Brogdan’s… one of the most compelling new voices out there.” Here’s Mark Morris:

Hekla’s Children marks the emergence on to a vibrant horror scene of an exciting new talent. James Brogden offers us a compulsive and unpredictable page-turner in which the ancient and modern world clash with devastating effect. Engaging characters, mind-bending concepts and enthralling set pieces propel the reader through a story in which the stakes are high and nothing can be taken for granted. Terrific stuff!

His new novel The Hollow Tree is something very different, the tale of a woman pulled into our world from…. somewhere else.

After her hand is amputated following a tragic accident, Rachel Cooper suffers vivid nightmares of a woman imprisoned in the trunk of a hollow tree, screaming for help. When she begins to experience phantom sensations of leaves and earth with her missing limb, Rachel is terrified she is going mad… but then another hand takes hers, and the trapped woman is pulled into our world.

This woman has no idea who she is, but Rachel can’t help but think of the mystery of Oak Mary, a female corpse found in a hollow tree, and who was never identified. Three urban legends have grown up around the case; was Mary a Nazi spy, a prostitute or a gypsy witch? Rachel is desperate to learn the truth, but darker forces are at work. For a rule has been broken, and Mary is in a world where she doesn’t belong…

The Hollow Tree was published by Titan Books on March 13, 2018. It is 483 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $8.99 for the digital edition. Read an excerpt at Dread Central.

Birthday Review: Sonya Dorman’s “When I Was Miss Dow”

Friday, April 6, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

Sonya Dorman was born on April 6, 1924 and died on February 14, 2005. She occasionally published as Sonya Dorman Hess or Sonya Hess and had a career as a poet independent of her career in science fiction.

Dorman received a Rhysling Award in 1978 for her poem “Corruption of Metals.” Her story “When I Was Miss Dow” was nominated for a retrospective James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 1995.

“When I Was Miss Dow” was first published by Frederik Pohl in the June 1966 issue of Galaxy Magazine and it made the initial Nebula ballot the next year. Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison included the story in Nebula Award Stories 1967. It was also reprinted in the British edition of Galaxy in January 1967. Judith Merril included it in SF 12 and Pamela Sargent reprinted it in Women of Wonder. The story appears in The Norton Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery. Ellen Datlow published it on-line in Sci Fiction on May 21, 2003. Many of the volumes that reprinted the story have gone by multiple titles.

Martha Dow is serving as a research assistant to Dr. Arnold Proctor on a colony planet. Although Martha looks and acts like a human woman, she is actually one of the indigenous species, a protean, who can change its shape at will. The proteans have adopted human form to better interact with the colonizers. While most of them take on the form for short periods of time, Martha has been forced to retain her human shape indefinitely, causing her to blur the distinctions between her natural self and the persona she has adopted.

As with many high concept stories, “When I Was Miss Dow” could benefit from being fleshed out more and giving an examination of the culture and world Dorman has created, but the focus of the piece, on how form impacts psychology and the male-female interaction, is strong. The humans have brought only men to the planet and the Proteans, who do not have gender the way humans think of it, fill the gap, although it would have been nice to see the humans have more curiosity about the situation.

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Dead and Looking Great: Night of the Living Dead Gets the Criterion Treatment

Thursday, April 5, 2018 Thomas Parker Comments 0 Comment

Kyra Schon as Karen Cooper in Night of the Living Dead

When George Romero, the Don Corleone of zombie movies, died last year, I did what I’m sure countless others did: I turned off the lights, boarded up the windows, laid in a supply of popcorn and Molotov cocktails, and settled down to watch Night of the Living Dead.

I first heard about the movie in the early seventies, when I came across an outraged condemnation of it in a Reader’s Digest I was flipping through while waiting to get my hair cut. When the flabbergasted critic said that the film’s monsters actually ate their victims — right there on the screen, I thought, “Oh, man — I have got to see this!” I caught it very soon thereafter on late night TV; it did not disappoint. It left an indelible mark on my psyche, and as a result I spent the next few years ignoring the teachers I was supposed to be listening to because I was too busy sketching out ways to defend my high school from a zombie attack. A typical American adolescence.

I have always considered Night of the Living Dead to be the most frightening of all horror films, and this most recent viewing revealed the movie to be as great as it ever was. In the years since 1968, other movies have certainly gone farther, but no movie has ever had as much impact; Romero’s nightmare vision can make your skin crawl in all the right places even now, and the hopeless, downbeat ending still packs quite a wallop. I watched with the same mounting dread and finished with the same feeling of lingering unease that I always experience after spending a claustrophobic evening with this soulless, hungry crew.

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Modular: Walk the Streets of Ancient Rome in Mythic Rome by Pete Nash

Thursday, April 5, 2018 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Almost exactly a year ago Chaosium announced a brand new edition of RuneQuest, one of the oldest and most acclaimed RPGs on the planet. While that was great news for many gamers, it did leave the folks at The Design Mechanism in the lurch — their lovingly crafted RuneQuest sixth edition, written by Pete Nash and Lawrence Whitaker, was the best version of the game in decades, and now they’d lost the license.

The Design Mechanism folks had also supported their version with some of the most exciting releases we’d seen in years, including the Book of Quests, Shores of Korantia, and especially the brilliant Monster Island. While I was curious to see what Chaosium would do with the property, I was chiefly concerned with how the announcement would impact them.

Of course, I needn’t have worried. You can’t keep an outfit as creative as The Design Mechanism down for long. Without missing a beat they released their own full-fledged RPG system, Mythras, which picked up and elaborated on the work they’d done with sixth edition RuneQuest, while simultaneously expanding the rules to accommodate more diverse game settings, from Sword & Sorcery to Science Fiction and Urban Fantasy Horror. They also revamped all of their existing back catalog — including the irreplaceable Monster Island — to bring it up to date with the new system. And best of all, they’ve continued to release top notch new products, like Pete Nash’s fabulous Mythic Rome.

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Birthday Reviews: Robert Bloch’s “The Fane of the Black Pharoah”

Thursday, April 5, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 9 comments

Cover by Virgil Finlay

Robert Bloch was born on April 5, 1917 and died on September 23, 1994.

His short story “That Hell-Bound Train” won the Hugo Award in 1959, and he won the Bram Stoker Award for his non-fiction book Once Around the Bloch: An Unauthorized Autobiography, for his collection The Early Fears, and his novelette “The Scent of Vinegar.” His screenplay for the film Psycho, based on his novel, received the Edgar Allan Poe Award.

Bloch was the Guest of Honor for each of the three Toronto Worldcons, Torcon I in 1948, Torcon II in 1973, and posthumously for Torcon 3 in 2003. He also received a Special Worldcon Committee Award in 1984. Bloch was named a Grandmaster by the World Horror Con and received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Fantasy Convention. He has also received the Big Heart Award, the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award, and a Forry Award.

“The Fane of the Black Pharoah” was first published in Weird Tales in the December 1937 issue, edited by Farnsworth Wright. Donald Wollheim reprinted it a decade later in the Avon Fantasy Reader, No. 5, 1947 and Bloch included it in his Lovecraftian collection Mysteries of the Worm. Robert M. Price included it in two Lovecraft anthologies: Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, from Fedogan & Bremer, and The Nyarlathotep Cycle: The God of a Thousand Forms, from Chaosium. In 1983 it was translated into French.

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Video Game Review: Tunnels & Trolls Adventures

Wednesday, April 4, 2018 Sean McLachlan Comments 1 comment

Iphone+6+plus

I’ve been hankering for some old school pen and paper adventuring lately, but not having a gaming group here in Madrid (or indeed any gaming group for a few decades now), I did what old school gamers always used to do when they found themselves all on their lonesome — I played some solo Tunnels & Trolls adventures.

But I did it with a modern twist. I played Tunnels & Trolls Adventures, a free app by MetaArcade. The app takes you through various classic adventures such as Sewers of Oblivion and Buffalo Castle and runs very smoothly. It’s been decades since I’ve played T&T, so I read all the intro material, which explained the game quickly and concisely and had me playing within minutes.

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Vintage Treasures: Study War No More, edited by Joe Haldeman

Wednesday, April 4, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

By 1977 Joe Haldeman had already won three Hugo Awards, for his novella “Hero” (1972), his debut SF novel The Forever War, and his short story “Tricentennial” (1976), and one Nebula, also for The Forever War. He was a fast-rising star, and in November of that year he added the anthology Study War No More to his fast-growing SF catalog. It contained stories by some of the greatest SF writers of the time — including Poul Anderson, Harry Harrison, Isaac Asimov, George Alec Effinger, Damon Knight, and Mack Reynolds — that addressed the problem of war. Here a snippet from his introduction:

Fear of the atom was such an effective deterrent that it was over two weeks before war broke out again. A fellow with a wispy beard seized control of Hanoi. The editor of this anthology was in diapers when that happened; it lasted long enough to give him his first white hairs, and then five years more…

But why this anthology? The absurdity and outrage of war may be quite obvious, but trying to find a solution to it has occupied the energies of the race’s finest philosophers and poets for thousands of years, to no conspicious success.

Science fiction writers are generally renowned neither for the depth of their philosophy nor the fineness of their poetry, so isn’t it presumptuous of them to take on so formidable, yet subtle, an opponent? The answer is a duet: a soft “no,” and a loud “Hell, no!”

Haldeman was intimately familiar with war; he was a combat engineer in Vietnam who was wounded and received a Purple Heart. The inside cover of Study War No More addressed his experience, and how it had influenced his writing. Here it is.

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