Black Gate #15

Black Gate 15 - Spring 2011 by John O'Neill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I spoke with editor John O'Neill about this issue of Black Gate at Wiscon this Spring (incidentally, John may be one of the nicest people you'll meet in the industry - a real gentleman and scholar and nerd, which is meant in only the most complimentary of ways). He told me that his intention for this issue was to compile as many stories written by women that he could. That failing, he wanted to present as many stories that featured female characters, both protagonists and supporting cast-members, as possible. What? Women in Sword and Sorcery that serve some role other than modelling chainmail bikinis and wrapping dragon tails around their hips in suggestive poses?

You betcha!

The opening story, "A River Through Darkness and Light," by John C. Hocking, was a great, if predictable story about the Archivist and his friend Lucella. I absolutely loved both characters, Lucella for her non-chalance and matronly patience with the Archivist, and the Archivist himself for his vulnerability and likeability.

I was also impressed by "The Lions of Karthagar," by Chris Willrich. The main characters in this tale, the Weatherworkers Blim the Damp and Miy Who Sing Storms, whose friendship develops against the background of an invasion of an incredibly rich country by their armies, each of which seeks to take possession of the golden land. Poetic and even touching, this story tugged at my emotions like most Sword and Sorcery does not.

My favorite piece of fiction in the volume was "The Shuttered Temple," by Jonathan L. Howard (author of Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, among others). Kyth the Taker, a brilliant and rather glib thief, is the heroine here. This was a very clever story whose strongest point is less the adventure than the philosophical underpinnings that drive Kyth and Tonsett, her foil. Witty, funny, and thought provoking, I found this the best of this excellent volume.

I have to admit, though, that a piece of non-fiction overshadowed all the fiction in the volume. "Art Evolution," by Scott Taylor, is an epic article that touched a soft spot in my heart and made me wax nostalgic for role-playing days of old. This was as thoroughly-researched an article on the subject of fantasy-art in role-playing as I've ever seen. Of course, I'm hard pressed to think of other articles that have even endeavored such an undertaking. From Jeff Dee to Matthew D. Wilson, Taylor traces the history of art in role-playing. It's an incredible journey that is worth the price of the issue alone.

If you like your Sword and Sorcery in short, smart doses, look no further than Black Gate.

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Lost and Found: Three by Shaun Tan

Lost and Found: Three by Shaun Tan: Three by Shaun Tan by Shaun Tan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a beautiful book, full of wonder, but not completely wonderful. The artwork is spectacular and the stories are better-than-adequate. But I see this as a bittersweet collection. The stories end on a hopeful note, but if you're on meds, you may want to dose up before diving in. Not that the stories are depressing, just a bit gray, ironically. The vibrant artwork contrasts pretty sharply with the subdued voice of the stories, making the read a bit of a push-pull. Try this: have someone read the words aloud to you, but don't look at the pictures while they are reading. Then let yourself soak in the pictures, really dig in and try to read the texts used in the collages, look for fine details, find the red leaf on every page of "The Red Tree". It's easy to get lost in the magic of the visuals, which make all the difference in the world. A clear case of a book-as-artifact being stronger than the stories therein. I give the art a five, the stories a four. I have to wonder what it might have been like had Tan decided to go wordless with this one. It might have pushed this from full of wonder to completely wonderful. Still, this is one that any discerning reader of graphic novels or comics should have on their shelves.

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Fight Club

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I haven't seen the movie. I read the book.

I don't understand all the hype.

This is two stories: one about a dysfunctional relationship between flat characters and another an intriguing history of a movement that starts out as a drunken fight between acquaintances and ends up as a highly-regimented, carefully controlled cult of anarchy.

I liked the second story. Hated the first.

I've heard that this novel was an expansion of an earlier short story. Frankly, I can tell. Chapter 1 is promising, but chapters 2-5 are tedious, a real slog. Chapter 6 is where the real story begins. There violence, anti-commercialism, philosophy, and psychology all meld into a mind-bending maelstrom. Good stuff, if you can stomach the gore.

Of course, having finished the novel, one realizes that the two stories are intertwined and interdependent. I get this. But do the "relationship" sections have to be so bloody boring? Really? It's analogous to filling half of a pleasure-cruise ship with lead. At best, it's going to slow things down a lot. And it might just sink the ship. I feel like Fight Club barely lurched into the harbor, though it could have been a hydrofoil.

Oh, and repeating the same thing several times doesn't make you a compelling author or avant-garde or anything but dull and repetitive.

Maybe it's time I saw the movie.

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Regaining the Explorer's Edge in Madtown

As a young man (it wasn't so long ago), I prided myself on being an explorer. No doubt, this had to do with my being an Air Force Brat living overseas for much of my childhood. For example, when I lived in the Philippines, I was always very excited to get off-base to explore beyond the barbed wire. Alas, because I was so young, I was most often confined to exploring around the base.

As a result, I got to know the area very well. So well, in fact, that I made friends and was decorated from time to time.

This need to explore continued on through my teenage years which, I must admit, sometimes got me in trouble, especially when I lived in England, where my friends and I had a penchant for breaking into this 12th-Century priory and doing some primitive form of LARPing. 

But that was long ago. The eighties, I mean, not the 12th-Century, though . . . nevermind.

Fast-forward to a week ago, when I set off to buy my youngest son his birthday present. So he tells me about a gaming store downtown that I had never heard of: Netherworld Games. I thought I knew all the gaming stores in town: Pegasus, The Last Square, and Misty Mountain. How Netherworld escaped me, I can't fathom. I'm not hip-deep in roleplaying like I once was, but I try to keep in touch and occasionally go dungeon-delving with friends. It keeps me from getting in trouble like I used to!

As I spoke with one of the staff, I was impressed: Nice selection, an open area for gaming (at which one group was playing Magic and another, Pathfinder),friendly, knowledgeable staff. You know, everything you hope for in a gaming store. So I asked myself, “Self, how long do you think these guys have been in business?” Since Self didn't know the answer, I asked the guy who was special ordering my son's gift.

“Eight years.”

“Seriously? At this location?”

“Yeah.”

“I had no idea.”

“A lot of people don't.”

As I left, I looked back on the shop from the outside. Like a dive-bar, they had done a horrible job of advertising themselves. Besides the dragons and bikini-clad warrioress-types in the windows, there really was nothing that made the place stand out. It's on a side-street (but then again, so are many other gaming stores I've been to) and it simply melts in with the architecture, which is great if your the local assassin's guild, not so great if you're a merchant.

The funny thing is, it very much felt Madison. I don't know quite how to describe how Madison feels, but anyone who's lived here for any length of time probably knows what I mean. I pride myself on knowing the places that “feel” Madison. So how did I miss it?

I walked on, musing over my ignorance of the place, disappointed in myself for having lost the explorer's edge I had enjoyed so much as a child and young man, but quite happy that I had discovered this place that had been here for half the time I've lived in Madison. Everything looked just a bit different because I was looking at everything a bit differently. As I wandered, I walked past The Orpheum, an old theater in which I had first watched The Phantom Menace (take a look at the inside architecture and you'll know why this added a great deal to the experience. I noted, to my shock, that The Orpheum Restaurant, a favorite of mine and my wife, was closed. We exchanged sad-faces via text and I stared at the outside, probably looking like a homeless person longing for some glorious past in which I was a famous silent-movie actor.

Since I had my explorer's eyes on, I spotted, and will leave you with this, a shattered window, which looked like it had been struck by a bullet (there was a shooting downtown recently – makes me wonder if this is an artifact from that, though I think it was a couple of blocks away). Over the point of impact was a bizarre sticker. It was only after I took the picture that I realized that my reflection showed in the shattered glass, with the sticker superimposed over the spot where my head should be, like some ghost-turned-demon, haunting the old Orpheum. I'm still puzzling over the meaning of it all.

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At the Mountains of Madness

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is as close as one will get to an epic adventure quest by H.P. Lovecraft. If you're an old role-playing game geek like me, this will appeal to the dungeoneer in you. Plenty of delving and mystery in this one!

If you're a fan of the movie Prometheus, you'd do well to hark back to the origin of many of the movie's tropes. They are similar, at least on the surface: An impossibly old alien race creates life on earth for the purpose of enslaving it, yadda, yadda. If you hated the movie Prometheus, you'd do well to hark back to the origin of many of the movie's tropes . . . need I go on?

The story begins with that rarefied sense of heroic antarctic exploration that permeated the accounts of Scott, Amundsen, and Shackleton's expeditions. At that time, such an expedition was fraught with danger, due to drifting ice, unforeseen logistical shortcomings, and, of course, the weather. Since the Antarctic was relatively unknown when Lovecraft wrote the story, it's easy to see why he would set his story in what appeared in that day to be an utterly alien place, though it was right here at home on planet earth.

Or was it "home," really? Whose home? And for how long?

Now, I'm a big Lovecraft fan. But there was one thing, stylistically, that drove me absolutely nuts about this story. It's a minor thing, but it prevents me from giving an unbridled five-star rating to the story. Frankly, I really disliked the use of shortwave reports between the narrator, William Dyer, and Lake's remote base. The choppiness of the language seemed correct and historically accurate to me, since shortwave radio had been in use for only a decade or so before Lovecraft wrote the story. The characters would, like Lovecraft, have been habituated to using short, choppy phrases because of the telegraph system that preceded the explosion of shortwave radio in the 1920s. But what didn't seem correct, and what threw me out of the rhythm of the story, was the use of flowery words and complex phraseology in the messages themselves. They aren't as blatantly ugly on paper as they are when read aloud. Try it sometime. It feels overwrought and contrived. Not to mention that these info-dumps could have been spread out and integrated into the story itself a little better.

But this is a minor complaint. All-in-all, I loved the slow escalation of the horror in the story. It begins with a lot of hyperbole and, indeed, engages in it throughout. Still, Lovecraft manages to build the sense of dread to a fitting crescendo. In several instances, I was surprised by a plot twist that I should have seen coming. Ah, Lovecraft, you trickster! You fooled me again!

One thing I really enjoyed was the narrator's ambiguous feelings regarding the Old Ones. Though his primary emotional reaction toward these beings are fear and revulsion, there is also a moment of pity and near-empathy that I found endearing.

This is not my favorite Lovecraft story. But it's not one of his lesser works, either. If you haven't had a crack at Lovecraft, it's not a bad place to start. And if you're a Lovecraft fan, as I am, you'll recognize many of the elements, though you'll be surprised by others, such as the narrator's conflicting feelings that I've outlined above. I'm no expert on Lovecraft's evolution as a storyteller, but I have to wonder if these surprises are indicative of a certain maturation in his writing. Someone smarter than me with more resources and time will have to determine that. For my own reading enjoyment, though, At the Mountains of Madness, though flawed, still reflects the writer's genius. Ia, Ia Lovecraft!

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Michael Moorcock: Death Is No Obstacle

Michael Moorcock: Death Is No Obstacle by Michael Moorcock
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hands-down the best book on writing I have read. You'll want to be familiar with Moorcock's work before jumping in, however. That doesn't mean you need to have read all of his work (good luck on that one!) but some familiarity with the Elric series and at least one or two others does help one to synthesize all the information. Read carefully, though, and you'll find that this is really a writer's manual cleverly disguised as a series of entertaining interviews. You won't find this one cheap,but if you can get a copy, it's worth the price.

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Elric at the End of Time

Elric at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm a big fan of Michael Moorcock, but not a big fan of this book. Most of the pieces in here are immature, either in terms of when they were written in Moorcock's career, or in terms of tone. The title story is written as a mockery of the character Elric, and is interesting in terms of bringing together several of Moorcock's characters (Werther de Goethe, Duke of Queens, Una Persson, etc). This sort of cross-polination of characters works quite well in Moorcock's later works, but this one is silly to the point of distraction. I don't hate it, but I'd rather not re-read it, either. "The Last Enchantment" is my favorite piece in this volume. It uses a transitional style moving from the more traditional Elric story toward the playfulness and experimentalism of the Second Ether trilogy (which is some of my favorite writing from Moorcock). The Sojan the Swordsman section, begun early on in Moorcock's career, is downright banal and actually a bit clumsy. A couple of essays of interest to Moorcock aficionados round out the bulk of the book. But it's at the very end, with the purple-prose pastiche "The Stone Thing," that the collection hits it's stride. Unfortunately, it's a little too late to make the book anything better than average overall.

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