Search Results for: New Edge Sword

The Lord of the Rings: A Personal Reading, Part Three

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This is the third of three posts on The Lord of the Rings, prompted by a recent re-reading of the book. You can find the first post, looking at Tolkien’s sense of character, here; the second post, about Tolkien’s use of landscape, is here. This week I’m going to write about structure, irony, and postmodernism. Which means that I need to start with some definitions. I’ll get to what I mean by ‘postmodernism’ later. I want to start with ‘irony,’…

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Art of the Genre: The DM Screen

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When it comes to RPG art, there’re certainly a good number of pieces that will stick out in player’s minds for any number of reasons. Some of us remember images we based characters off of, some fell in love with representations of beautiful women, and others used specific books so much that the cover images turned into old friends. Still, I believe that there is one particular set of RPG images that wedge themselves heavily in the mind of ALL…

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How I Spoiled My Own Bad Guys with Unexpected Success

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. . . not that I mind, really. I’m getting prepared to go on vacation in my own hometown, staying in a hotel a mere five miles from my current apartment. That’s what you get when you win a free trip to Hollywood . . . and you live in Century City (a.k.a. “Beverly Hills Adjacent”). I am getting good mileage out of that joke, believe me. For this year’s Writers of the Future and Illustrators of the Future workshop…

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Conan Notes

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A few days ago, the comics site Bleeding Cool put up a link to some press notes for the new Conan the Barbarian film, which had appeared on the web site for Lionsgate Entertainment. I read through them; they seemed pretty standard. Like most press notes, they’re relentlessly upbeat, and give strong lip service to the importance of fidelity to the source material for the production. Who knows? Maybe it’s honestly meant. But the more closely I looked at the…

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Looking for the real Robert E. Howard in One Who Walked Alone

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It couldn’t have been easy for Novalyne Price Ellis to write One Who Walked Alone: Robert E. Howard the Final Years (Donald M. Grant Publisher, Inc., 1986). Price Ellis’ memoir of her relationship with Howard (roughly 1934-36) is illuminating in its raw honesty. It’s also painful, at turns disappointing and downright frustrating. We might find escape in Howard’s sword and sorcery tales but there is none to be found here. But above all, One Who Walked Alone is brave. Price…

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. . . (ellipsis)

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Moving on from the em dash (—), my series on punctuation continues with a post guaranteed to leave you hanging. The ellipsis, a.k.a. “those dots in a row,” are perhaps the most mysterious of the common forms of punctuation. The mystery begins in childhood, probably during a viewing of one of the Star Wars films, where a strange line of periods give the feeling of floating off into the story as the opening prologue crawl comes to an end. ….

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Art of the Genre: D&D Basic Boxed Sets

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‘Basic’, it’s a term I always took as a kind of derogatory statement regarding the type of D&D that I was first introduced to. I mean, why wouldn’t someone think that since there was an ‘Advanced’ version of D&D out there with all those wonderful hardcover books? Well, that might have been the case, and eventually I would convert to those lofty hardcovers, but in my fundamental and formative years I played from a ‘box’ that provided everything I needed…

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Art of the Genre: Star Frontiers

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It’s summer intern time here at Black Gate L.A., John having flown in Sue ‘Goth Chick’ Granquist to help break them in. She’s not in love with the beach and the sun, but I must say seeing her in a black one-piece, Jackie-O glasses, and a hat right out of Vampire Hunter D, I had to take a shot with my iPhone because Ryan Harvey [who was struggling with a deadline instead of taking in some sun] would have never…

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I Still Don’t Understand the Amulet, But I Love The Secret of NIMH

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The Secret of NIMH (1982) Directed by Don Bluth. Featuring the Voices of Elizabeth Hartman, Peter Strauss, Dom DeLuise, Derek Jacobi, Hermione Baddeley, David Carradine, Arthur Malet, Paul Shenar, Wil Wheaton, Shannon Doherty. Hello, my name is Ryan Harvey, and apparently all I do here at Black Gate is review animated fantasy films. With 1982’s The Secret of NIMH now out on a fresh new Blu-ray Disc. . . . Wait a minute. Seriously, MGM Home Video? (Or Fox, or…

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Lord Dunsany and “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth”

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Lord Dunsany’s short story “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” has been called the first sword-and-sorcery story ever written. That attribution has been contested elsewhere, though. I don’t particularly intend to grapple with the question — it seems to me that genres are defined by conventions, which is to say by expectations held by a reader; whether a story fits a genre therefore depends on whether the conventions it uses are the ones that the individual reader expects, and while…

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