Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts

Thursday, January 11, 2024

Season of Science Fiction

 Over the past few months, I've been on a science fiction reading kick. Here's most of what I read, leaving out only a few classic short stories from pulp magazines:

The Demon Princes. I listened to the first 2 of Vance's Demon Princes series as audiobooks: The Star King and The Killing Machine. They concern Kirth Gersen and his efforts to bring justice one by one, to the cadre of infamous criminals (The Demon Princes) that massacred his people. These are probably not Vance's best, but middling Vance is still very good. They would have made a very good late 60s-70s sci-fi TV series, I think.

The Sun Eater. This is a multivolume space opera by Christopher Ruocchio. The conceit of the series is a fallen hero, who caused the deaths of billions in destroying a sun to genocide an implacable alien species is relating his life story and how he came to the decision he made. The setting is Dune-esque for the most part but updated to include some more modern post-cyberpunk and transhuman elements. The first novel, Empire of Silence, details Hadrian Marlowe's escape from the future his father has planned and his various travails until he winds up being sent on a mission to find the homeworld of the Cielcin species in hopes of ending their war with humankind.

Howling Dark, the second book in the series, takes Marlowe and his companions out of the worlds of the Empire and into the posthuman societies of the Extrasolarians beyond on a searched for the fabled world of Vorgossos. There they encounter an undying, posthuman king, a character out of their legends, and even greater mysteries.

After that, I checked out some of the short stories he's written in the same setting in the collection Tales of the Sun Eater, Vol. 1, and the novella Queen Amid Ashes from the Sword & Planet. More on that one below.

Sword & Planet. A collection edited by Ruocchio. I haven't read all of it, but most of the stories I have read don't particularly strike me as Sword & Planet--either they are Space Opera and/or Science Fantasy, but I guess they do have swords and planets. Anyway, there is a prequel to Simon Green's Deathstalker series that reminded me of the sometimes goofy but breakneck paced thrills of those books, but DJ Butler's "Power and Prestige" is my favorite. It's a humorous, sort of Vancian Dying Earthish, short dungeoncrawl starring mercenaries Indrajit and Fix.

The Pride of Chanur. I read at least part of this as a kid, but I don't recall if I completed it. In any case, I'm glad I checked it out again. This is the first of group of related novels by Cherryh set in a multi-species Compact and is reportedly part of her large Alliance-Union universe. It concerns the disruption to the political balance of the Compact and to the planetary society of leonine hani after a hani captain, Pyanfar Chanur rescues a member of an unknown species: a human. Cherryh's xenospecies may veer a bit to the anthropomorphic and perhaps monocultural, but their psychologies and cultures are well thought out and interesting and their precarious, barter-based Compact feels much more realistic than any number of feudal kingdoms in space or single galactic governments.

Tar-Aiym Krang. I listened to this as an audiobook and it has the same narrator as the Demon Princes books I listened to, Stefan Rudnicki. It's billed as the second of Alan Dean Foster's novels of Flinx (a young man with psychic abilities) and pet Pip (a poisonous, winged serpent), but it was the 1st actually published. It's part of his larger Humanx Commonwealth universe. Flinx and Pip wind up part of an expedition that takes them off their homeworld of Moth to the ruined world of a long-dead alien species on a search for an ancient artifact. It's short by modern standards, ending pretty much might where a modern novel would be getting started, but there is a sort of naive charm to Foster's world and characters I found appealing.

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Oz and the Dying Earth


Driving over the Thanksgiving holiday my family listened to the audiobook of The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and I was struck by how similar Baum's Oz stories are and some of Vance's work, particularly the Dying Earth related material. Some of it, of course, would be resemblances shared with other works of fantasy, but I think there is much more homology of Baum with Vance than say Howard, Smith, or Martin.

I've mentioned before the list of the elements of Vance's Dying Earth stories as outlined in Pelgrane Press' Dying Earth rpg:

  • Odd Customs
  • Crafty Swindles
  • Heated Protests and Presumptuous Claims
  • Casual Cruelty
  • Weird Magic
  • Strange Vistas
  • Ruined Wonders
  • Exotic Food
  • Foppish Apparel

Some of those I think are present in Baum's Oz books, but there are others that have analogs. These are the ones that I think are most prominent:

Odd Customs. In the Dying Earth this relegated to cultural practices. In Oz, the people themselves may be odd not unlike the mythological peoples seem in Medieval or ancient travel tales. Still, the central aspect of using a culture taken to the absurd as an object of satire is present.

Weird Magic. This is all over the place in Oz, with many of the protagonists being products of it. The powder of life made by the Crooked Magician or the "Square Meal Tablets" certainly count.

Strange Vistas. Exploration is as important part of Oz as the Dying Earth. The weird underground world of the vegetable Mangaboos lit by glowing glass orbs in the sky would count, as would the the Land of Naught where the wooden gargoyles dwell.

Ruined Wonders. Oz doesn't have many ruins, but they do have Hidden Wonders, like the city of the China Dolls or the radium decorated city of the subterranean Horners.

Foppish Apparel. It isn't emphasized as much in the text, but it goes through in the illustration...

The other elements are less present in Oz, but Heated Protests/Presumptuous Claims has its analog in humorous exchanges and bickering. Oz isn't as cruel a place as the Dying earth--it shows up in children's stories after all--but it isn't without cruelty. It's a cruelty of the fairytale sort really where axes enchanted by witches might chop off a woodsman's limbs and an evil queen might desire a little girl's head enough to have it cut off.

There are other similarities not really accounted for here. Outlandish, unnatural monsters haunt the wilderness in both (and in both they are often capable of speech). Habitations are separated by wilderness and isolated cultures seem to exist along well-travelled roads. For the most part the societies of both settings seem fairly static (Oz a bit less so than the Dying Earth), in contrast to epic fantasies where world-changing events are part of the narrative. Overall, I think these could be summed up is that both settings seem perhaps descended from fairy stories, Oz more directly, and the Dying Earth through the fantasies of Smith, Cabell, and (maybe) Dunsany.

Friday, November 24, 2023

Some Observations on Science Fiction Names


I think there is a lineage of science fiction name coining that whose progenitor is Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars stories but that passes through early to mid-20th Century pulpier sci-fi like the works of Edmond Hamilton and Jack Vance to the galaxy far, far away of the Star Wars Universe.

In his Mars stories Burroughs went for relatively short (mostly 1-2 syllable), two part, phonetically simple names. Though they don't mostly sound that way to modern ears, I suspect Burroughs was after what he thought of as an "Oriental" feel. They also wind up being very simple for English speaking readers to pronounce. Examples: Kantos Kan, Gan Had, Ras Thuvas, Sab Than, Sojat Yam.

Burroughs uses a not hugely different style in many of his Planetary Romances.

Edmond Hamilton was clearly influenced by Burroughs in a number of ways and the naming practices in several of his works are similar, though they are a bit more phoentically diverse and have more consonant blends. Here are some names from his Captain Future series:  Sus Urgal, Re Elam, Thuro Thuun, Rok Olor, Si Twih, Brai Balt

Typically, he doesn't always try to be so "exotic." Sometimes he seems to be trying to convey future developments of English names. This tact he shares with other writers of the 1940s-1960s, including the various creators of the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes in DC Comics: Irma Ardeen, Rok Krinn, Garth Ranzz, Tinya Wazzo.

Jack Vance tends to take this latter approach in some of his science fiction, too, though his names are more often multisyllabic and have a first-name last name pattern with each name sometimes made up of more than one element. Still, they have a similar vibe I think to the Hamilton and Legion names. These are from the first two Demon Princes novels:  Miro Hetzel, Conwit Clent, Lens Larque, Sion Trumble, Kokor Hekkus, Kirth Gersen.

Star Wars names aren't the product of one individual, though later writers have obviously tried to fit the standards of the original trilogy. There are more straight up English names in Star Wars and of course some pseudo-Japanese ones, but a number could easily have been characters in Captain Future stories, like these: Ric Ole, Sio Bibble, Pondo Baba, Plo Kloon, Nien Nunb, Mace Windu, Sy Snootles.

Thursday, September 21, 2023

A Taxonomy of Fantastic Lands


Thinking about the phylogenetic connection between the Lost Worlds of Victorian adventure fiction and the planetary romances of last century led me to an overall classification scheme for all sorts of unusual/fantastic lands or country within large settings (whether that larger setting be an approximation of the real world or a secondary, fantasy world). This was quickly done, so it might bear further though. 

The Strange Country: The Strange Country probably is an outgrowth of The Odyssey and Medieval travelogues. It is a place definitely situated in the wider world and generally not differing in its physical laws but possessed of its least one unusual feature whether than be a geographic anomaly, cultural eccentricity, or weird animal. Most of the various city-states of Barsoom, and the countries of Vance's Tschai or Raymond's Mongo fall into this category. The "Planet of Hats" TV trope is the Strange Country on a planetary scale. The Strange Country differs from the more mundane foreign land by the degree of exaggeration in its unique thing and by the fact that beyond that thing, it isn't usual that foreign in terms of culture, language, etc.

The Lost World: The Lost World is more remote and more divergent from the outside world that the Strange Country. Most often it's an isolated pocket of one or more elements of the world's past, but it could be completely alien. Perhaps its most defining feature is that it is typically a hidden place and is much harder to reach than the strange country. Maple White Land of Doyle's The Lost World is the prototypical example, but Tarzan encounters a lot of these "lost valleys" from Crusader to remnants to lost Atlantean cities. The dividing line between the weirder Strange Countries and Lost Worlds isn't entirely clear, but if the place is widely known to scholars just seldom visited, it's a Strange Country. If no one knew it existed or it was believed to be mythical, it's a Lost World.

Fairyland: The Fairyland is a region defined by its fantasticalness. Physical laws may be very different from the surrounding world. If it has contact with the wider world if is limited and geographical conscribed. Often though, it will be as remote as the Lost World--even more so, perhaps, because it may not strictly be placeable on a map, existing in an extradimensional space. Literal Fairy lands are generally Fairylands, but so is the demonic subworlds of a number of Michael Shea's fantasy novels, Hades in Greek Myth, or Wackyland in Warner Bros. cartoons featuring the Dodo.

Monday, August 7, 2023

Lord of the Rings and the Beginning of "Serious" Fantasy


Hear me out!

I'm aware, course, that there are many works that we would now call fantasy that predate Lord of the Rings, but the conception of fantasy as a specific genre post-dates those works. The conception of fantasy as a genre grew out of fairy stories, and so what I mean here is a work distinct from fairy tale that nevertheless contains the elements of fairy tales: elves, dwarves, dragons, etc. The works of Howard, Smith, and others would be been thought of as adventure stories, weird tales, and the like when first published.

Even still, there are older works that that meet that criteria: MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin, some of Baum's works, and Dunsany's. But all the works I can think of that do they aren't obviously children's works have strong elements of whimsy, irony, and often outright humor. Even Tolkien's own The Hobbit could be so characterized. Lord of the Rings, while not humorless, is much more serious business, though perhaps not as much as Anderson's The Broken Sword, which closely follows it.

Did this seriousness play a role in it's centrality to the emerging genre? I think a bit, though it might be easy to overstate the importance of that one factor. I do think that with Howard and Tolkien sort of being the prevailing template for fantasy has served to influence the tone of a lot of works that followed and the games that inspired them.

Friday, August 4, 2023

Things to Read If the Spirit Moves You

 I've gotten into 2 good fantasy novels with connections to British esoteric spiritual belief at the turn of the 20th Century which are both good reads and good gaming inspiration.

Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi

I've praised Rajaniemi's science fiction work before. Here he goes for an alt-history and alternate physics in a spy-fi story set in 1938 were Summerland (the 4-dimensional space where the dead go) s being exploited with etheric technology and Britain and the Soviet Union are involved in an escalating proxy war in the Spanish Revolution. Behind all that are mysteries regarding the afterlife: where do souls come from? And why isn't Summerland full of ghostly civilizations? (Not all these questions are answered!) The spy stuff reminds me of a couple of novels by Tim Powers (particularly Declare) but the very science fictional rigor applied to the mechanics of afterlife physics is all Rajaniemi's own.

The Revolutions by Felix Gilman

Gilman is another author I've praised previously. In this one, a young couple in Victorian London gets involved in an attempt by a occult cabal's ambitious attempt to visit Mars by means of astral projection, but in doing so they make themselves targets in a magical war being waged between occult societies. One of the highlights here for me is how magic is portrayed in a way that is powerful, but somewhat subtle. A duel between magicians involves bystanders controlled or charmed into hurling insults or punches rather than mages hurling bolts of glowing energy.

Thursday, March 2, 2023

Imagining the Hyborian Age

 The map of Conan's world by Katrin Dirim I shared the other day was interesting not just because her her artistic style (though that's great), but because of the way she chose to depict the Hyborian Age costume and material culture. The prevailing style, since the Frazetta covers have been a vague "barbaric fantasy," which each artist working their own variation on the theme.

Howard's stories, by contrast, tend to be much more "historical" in their depiction of these things--though they aren't really consistent in their historical era. Different locales in Conan's world seem to come from different points in history: there are High Medieval tales ("Hour of the Dragon", "A Witch Shall Be Born"), Golden Age of Piracy stories ("Black Stranger"), stories that seem to be set in the ancient world ("God in the Bowl"), and even stories that like ahistorical periods of a Medieval version of the 18th Century ("Beyond the Black River").

I think Dirm's idea to narrow this range a bit to make it make more sense is a good one. On Reddit, she says she capped the level of armor at roughly the early middle ages, and mixed in elements from as far back as the Bronze Age to keep the atmosphere.

I think this fits well with the more "ancient world" interpretation Mark Schultz does in volume 1 of the Wandering Star/Del Rey collection:

Some of the slight re-shifts of the names would be fairly simple. Iranistan becomes the Persian Empire (take you pick which one), and Turan instead of being a stand-in for the Ottoman Turks, are maybe the Parthians? Aquilonia and Nemedian could be recast as somewhat Carolingian Frank:

Though I have seen portrayals (and there is some support for it) that Aquilonia could be Roman!

The Age of Sail stuff in Zingara and the Barachan Isles would require the most change, but there have been pirates as long as there have been boats, so it's possible.

Monday, December 26, 2022

[Book Club] A Dungeon Hiding in Blindsight (part 1)


This is the second in a series of chats between Anne of DIY & Dragons and me about dungeoncrawling (or dungeoncrawling inspiring) science fiction. This installment's topic: Blindsight by Peter Watts.

Trey: So, obviously (like Roadside Picnic) Blindsight isn't strictly a "dungeoncrawl" novel--but I think it has some interesting things that might inform dungeoncrawls.

Anne: It certainly has a section of dungeon-like exploration. And one that's kind of consistent with a scifi mini-tradition of people using clones or backups to explore an alien space so deadly that it requires multiple "lives" to traverse.

Trey: Yes. It's a "killer dungeon" as many sci-fi ones are.

Anne: I'm thinking of Aldis Budrys's Rogue Moon and Robert Silverburg's The Man in the Maze as the earliest examples I'm aware of. But Alistair Reynolds's "Diamond Dogs" novella would be another more recent example. I think I've jumped the gun a bit here though. We should probably say a little more about Blindsight generally before getting into the details.

Trey: Good point! Blindsight concerns what happens after Earth receives an alien visitation (not unlike Roadside Picnic in that regard!), but technology is advanced enough that humans can pinpoint where the visit came from in the edge of our solar system and sends first probes and then a (trans)human team to intercept. What they find isn't some more and fuzzy first contact, but a vast and alien intellect with which no communication is really possible. An intellect that wants humanity dead. It takes a while for the team to piece this together though, but all the while the alien is trying to kill them.

Anne: It's been a few years since I read it, so forgive me if I'm remembering wrong, but the near-lethal dungeon is a kind of trap, isn't it? The alien made something that was almost too dangerous, but just safe enough that the team would give in to the temptation to explore it. And while they're focused on the threat of the environment, the alien intellect is up stuff in the background.

Trey: The alien lives in a high radiation environment so some things are hostile because they just are, but it is effectively experimenting on the explorers. This is killer dungeon where the dungeon and the monsters are inseparable.

Anne: "Inseparable" is a good way of putting it! The amount of connection between the intelligence (which calls itself "Rorschach"), the space the human team is exploring, and the monsters that live inside that space is one of the few things the team successfully learns.

Trey: Yes, it's an interesting concept we haven't quite gotten in dungeon ecology (I don't think). The living dungeon where the monsters aren't just local fauna/flora but essentially cells in a great body. I'm sure someone has suggested that, but I've never seen it actually carried through.

Anne: The dungeon as body of giant monster is more of a scifi concept than a fantasy one, and it does lend itself to drawing on real-world biology as a starting point. The film Fantastic Voyage (with the shrink ray and submarine going inside a human body) is one approach, but it focuses on the sense of wonder, and maybe the didactic opportunity, more than the unsettling or horrific feeling you could get from realizing that the dungeon itself is alive.

Trey: I think it's perhaps rpgs have tended to be rather conservative in their approach to fantasy. From a practical standpoint that presents a low bar to entry, perhaps. There are rpgs with living dungeons though, 13th Age, for instance. Mostly nonbiological but I think there have been a couple of those.

Anne: The Borg Cubes in Star Trek are kind of like living dungeons. I mean, the ships themselves are entirely mechanical, although they function more like bodies than like starships. The Borg themselves are cyborgs, but their bodies seem to be mostly robotic, with only a vestige of biology remaining. In that case, the individual Borg are kind of like cells within the body. 

Trey: Very true! It strikes me that the Rorschach and its cells introduce a way to deal with the problem of the typical, distasteful narrative of dungeoneer in D&D. If dungeons arrive unbidden and spew forth creatures that you can't communicate with and want to kill you, well clearing them out is a bit easier to justify.

It's kind of the premise of my "Apocalypse Underground" series of posts from years back.

Anne: I wonder if that's something that living dungeons often have in common? They represent a threat that almost has to be explored because of the danger it poses. Roadside Picnic's like that too - the Zone appears one night, and everything inside it is contaminated and ruined by its appearance. At least some of the people going in are the ones who were displaced by it showing up.

Trey: That's a good thought. People who are displaced and lose their homes and livelihoods may need what valuables can be wrested from the dungeons.

to be continued

Monday, May 2, 2022

Mothership Adventure Inspiration from the Pulps


The varied worlds appearing in the short fiction of science fiction magazines in the 30s through the 50s have a lot to offer any of the recent sci-fi horror games. Few of these stories are actually horror, but elements of them can easily be viewed through a horror lens. Here are few examples:

"Immortals of Mercury" (1932) by Clark Ashton Smith. Explorers on a tidally locked Mercury have to deal with resentful indigenous people, one a known, primitive, group, and another an advanced subterranean species that would like to wipe humanity off the planet. In many ways, this story is in large part of dungeon-crawl, but the basic set-up could be played all kinds of ways.

"Salvage in Space" (1933) by Jack Williamson. This one is reminiscent of Alien. A down-on-his-luck asteroid prospector finds a derelict ship floating in the Belt and attempts to salvage it. The ship is loaded with jewels, but also taxidermied alien monsters. The crew have all apparently been killed by violence, but the bodies are gone. It turns out the ship had carried an expedition to the Titania, the moon of Uranus, which is covered with "unearthly forests sheltering strange and monstrous life." The miner must discover what happened and find a way to survive the danger still stalking the ship. 

"Parasite Planet" (1935) by Stanley Weinbaum. Weinbaum's Venus is probably the most "ready to be used for horror" setting that isn't already already a horror setting in science fiction. This is how it's described in this story:

A thousand different species, but all the same in one respect; each of them was all appetite. In common with most Venusian beings, they had a multiplicity of both legs and mouths; in fact some of them were little more than blobs of skin split into dozens of hungry mouths, and crawling on a hundred spidery legs. 

All life on Venus is more or less parasitic. Even the plants that draw their nourishment directly from soil and air have also the ability to absorb and digest—and, often enough, to trap—animal food. So fierce is the competition on that humid strip of land between the fire and the ice that one who has never seen it must fail even to imagine it.

Humans have to wear full body suits with respirators least mold spores get into their bodies. And if all that isn't enough it's terrifically hot and humid. "Prospectors" come to Venus to get rich acquiring native plant life with pharmaceutical value.

"Love Among the Robots" (1946) by Emmett McDowell. As the title suggests, this story is light in the way it plays out, but absent the "meet cute" there's an isolated asteroid mining operations with a small human crew testing learning and adapting robots, where the robots begin to gain a bit too much freewill. If it can't be gotten under control, the company will nuke the asteroid.

Thursday, April 21, 2022

Pulp Inspirations: Uranus from Captain Future


Uranus figures prominently in the Captain Future story The Magician of Mars published in 1941. Here are some details on Hamilton's version of Uranus, which is not at all scientifically accurate, but very useful for gaming inspiration. Quotes are provided from the issue of the pulp magazine.

Geography
  • Mountains are Uranus's best known feature.
  • Mystery Mountains: "And there is one colossal range in the northern hemisphere, called the Mystery Mountains, which have an altitude of at least twenty miles and possibly much more."
    • "The Mystery Mountains’ eternally cloud-wrapped upper heights have never been explored. It is believed that strange creatures inhabit those lofty hidden heights, since occasionally men have found grotesque bodies floating down the North River that flows from those mountains toward the Polar Sea."
  • Meteor Peak: "In the wilds south of Losor is the remarkable mountain called Meteor Peak. It is not a natural mountain like the other peaks of Uranus, but is in fact a huge meteor which fell there in times past and half -buried itself in the ground. Because of its unique metallic nature the meteor did not shatter, and still rises from the wilds as a great, dome-like mass of metal. It has sometimes been used as a quarry for certain metals, but that has now been prohibited."
  • Valley of Voices: "...in the Valley of Voices, sheets of a talc-like material exuded from the cliffs seem to have the power of recording in some way any sound vibrations which fall upon them. These queer talc-sheets, whenever the wind strikes them, give forth all the sounds they have “recorded.” The result is that in the Valley of Voices one can still clearly hear sounds and human voices which are echoing after thousands of years."
  • Endless River: "It was a foaming river that roared ceaselessly around the planet in the titanic canyon it had eroded for itself, its current being the result of tidal pull of the four moons."
  • Shining Sea: "It is a sea whose waters are so impregnated with radioactive material from deposits in its bed that it glows at night like a great lake of light. The Uranian city of Lulanee is built on the shores of the Shining Sea, and is considered by inter- planetary travelers to possess one of the most beautiful settings of any city in the System."
  • The Great Caves: "Beneath the surface of the planet is a natural wonder almost as great as the mountains, the great caves of Uranus. The interior of the planet is honeycombed by a labyrinth of caverns unmatched anywhere else in the System...Men have explored some of the upper caverns. There is a tiny amount of light in them, emitted from the radioactive minerals in which Uranus is rich. And there is a whole range of life-forms that exist in the caverns and never emerge into the sunlight."
Lifeforms
  • Floating Flowers: "Perhaps the most distinctive plant-life of Uranus are its Floating Flowers — flowers that drift in the air by means of sacs into which pure hydrogen is exuded, and whose trailing air-roots supply them with water and nutrition from the air."
  • "The animal life of Uranus is abundant, and comprises many of the most ferocious carnivores in the System."
  • Cliff Apes: "are the most dreaded, being not really apes but huge bear-like animals whose six limbs are adapted for clambering over the sheer precipices."
  • Cloud Cats: "haunt the cloud-wrapped up- per heights of the peaks, and stalk their prey in the eternal mists."
  • Thunder-hawk: "has vast wings which can shadow a whole village and can carry off huge beasts in its claws."
  • Harpies: "Their human-like appearance is mere accident, and they are in no way as intelligent as the Qualus, the famous winged men of north Saturn."
  • Uranians: "have yellow skins, dark hair, and small, dark eyes." 
    • "they are perhaps the most conservative and tradition-ridden people in all the nine worlds. They revere custom, and practice a suave courtesy that most people find rather wearying."
    • "they are perhaps the most skilled miners in the System, due to their long acquairitance with the underground labyrinth of their world."
  • People of Darkness: "humans of a primitive kind who dwell in the caves and are known as the People of Darkness. They are presumed to be descendants of Uranian stock who ages ago went down into the caves and developed eyesight capable of seeing well there. These People of Dark- ness never appear on the surface. Intense light dazzles them."

Monday, March 21, 2022

Pulp Inspirations

A few passages from science fiction of the pulp era to get the creative juices flowing.


"Carse walked beside the still black waters in their ancient channel, cut in the dead sea-bottom.  He watched the dry wind shake the torches that never went out and listened to the broken music of the harps that were never stilled.  Lean lithe men and women passed him in the shadowy streets, silent as cats except for the chime and the whisper of the tiny bells the women wear, a sound as delicate as rain, distillate of all the sweet wickedness of the world.

They paid no attention to Carse, though despite his Martian dress he was obviously an Earthman and though an Earthman's life is usually less than the light of a snuffed candle along the Low Canals, Carse was one of them.  The men of Jekkara and Valkis and Barrakesh are the aristocracy of thieves and they admire skill and respect knowledge and know a gentleman when they meet one."

- The Sword of Rhiannon, Leigh Brackett


"At the corner gleamed a luminous red sign, “THE CLUB OF WEARY SPACEMEN.” In and out of the vibration-joint, thus benevolently named, were streaming dozens of the motley throng that jammed the blue-lit street. Reedy-looking red Martians, squat and surly Jovians, hard-bitten Earthmen-sailors from all the eight inhabited worlds, spewed up by the great spaceport nearby. There were many naval officers and men, too—a few in the crimson of Mars, the green of Venus and blue of Mercury, but most of them in the gray uniform of the Earth Navy."

- The Three Planeteers, Edmond Hamilton


"Graff Dingle stolidly watched yellow mold form around the stiletto hole in his arm. He smelled the first faint jasmine odor of the disease and glanced up to where the sun glowed unhappily behind a mass of dirty clouds and wind-driven rain.

Dingle kicked morosely at the Heatwave thug left behind to ambush him, and the charred body turned soughingly in the mud. 'Be seeing you, bully-boy, in about five and a half hours. Your electroblast may have missed me, but it cooked my antiseptic pouch into soup. It made that last knife-thrust really rate.'

There was a dumb dryhorn blunder, Graff reflected, sneering at himself out of a face that was dark from life-long exposure to a huge sun. Bending over an enemy before making certain he was burned to a crisp.

But he'd had to search the man's clothing for a clue to the disappearance of Greta and Dr. Bergenson and—even above Greta—the unspeakably precious cargo of lobodin they'd been flying in from Earth.

So I'll pay for my hurry, he thought. Like one always does in the Venusian jungle."

- "Ricardo's Virus," William Tenn


"The small, round metal platform rocked uneasily under his feet. Beyond the railing, as far as MacVickers could see to the short curve of Io's horizon, there was mud. Thin, slimy blue-green mud.

The shaft went down under the mud. MacVickers looked at it. He licked dry lips, and his grey-green eyes, narrow and hot in his gaunt dark face, flashed a desperate look at the small flyer from which he had just been taken.

It bobbed on the heaving mud, mocking him. The eight-foot Europan guard standing between it and MacVickers made a slow weaving motion with his tentacles."

- "Outpost on Io," Leigh Brackett

Thursday, February 24, 2022

The Books of Babel


I recently finished reading The Books of Babel tetralogy by Josiah Bancroft. The series was so engaging I plowed through them all, only taking a brief intermission between books two and three to read Watts' Blindsight. The Books of Babel are Steampunkish fantasy, set in the titular Tower, which is something of Big Dumb Object in science fiction parlance.

The series starts with Senlin Ascends where the schoolmaster of a small seaside town and his new bride get separated on a visit to the Tower. I hesitate to say too much regarding the arc of the series for fear of spoiling it, but suffice to say there are multiple ringdoms of almost Vancian cultural eccentricity, Steampunk technology including "cyberware" supplied by a mystery inventor high up in the Tower, air ship pirates, and secrets to uncover aplenty, including the mystery of what the Brick Layer, the head of the Tower's construction, actually intended as its function.

The series has a fair amount bit of humor and the chapter epigraphs from in-world works are often wry, but the Tower is also a rather cruel and violent place at times. Bancroft's narrative doesn't flinch from this or keep the events at an ironic distance. Besides Tom Senlin, the headmaster, there are a number of other viewpoints characters, most of whom are capable women--though there's also a fastidious stag whose brain has been transplanted to a robotic body. But I said I didn't want to give too much away, didn't I? 

Anyway, the series is well-worth checking out, and I think would give a lot of inspiration for rpgs in addition to being a fine read.

Thursday, October 21, 2021

Hearing the Owls Hoot in the Day Time

 


Owls Hoot in the Day Time & Other Omens was the title of the 2003 collection of Manly Wade Wellman's John the Balladeer/Silver John stories from Night Shade Books. I have long been a fine of these Appalachian-centered fantasy stories (they were an influence on Weird Adventures). Recently I bought the audiobook of this collection for a work trip. I probably have read these stories in nearly 20 years so it was fun to revisit them and the narrator is just right for the material.

Saturday, October 16, 2021

The Sword & Sorcery Paperback Renaissance

 Likely touched off by the success of the Lancer (and Ace) Conan paperbacks, the '70s was a Golden Age of Sword & Sorcery paperback fiction. Okay, most weren't that good, admittedly--but there was stuff like Karl Edward Wagner's Kane, Charles Saunders' Imaro, and a number of works by Tanith Lee that were good, just to name a few. Also, even books that weren't all that great were often graced with Frazetta covers.

These gradually disappeared in the 80s. Sword & Sorcery was a genre born in short fiction, and while perhaps workable in slimmer novels, the multi-volume, thick fantasy series was ill-suited to telling tales of wandering swordsmen or rogues. The small press magazines that published this sort of fiction were already rare and soon disappeared entirely.

Amazon and ebooks have provided an avenue for the genre's return in something resembling its 70s glory. A number of small presses (and self-publishers) put out this sort of material with suitable, throwback covers. I confess to not having read many (well, any) of these volumes yet, though I do have a couple on my list. What's more exciting, though, is some new collections of stuff I already like.

Sorcery Against Caesar: The Complete Simon of Gitta Short Stories collects all of Richard Tierney's Sword & Sorcery tales of his version of Simon Magus of New Testament fame. He mostly fights Lovecraftian menaces cloaked in pseudo-historic references. Chaosium had a collection a couple of decades ago, but there's wasn't complete.

Charles Saunders has passed on, but his Imaro novels are back in print, and then there's Nyumbani Tales, a collection of non-Imaro stories in the same setting.



Thursday, September 2, 2021

A Different West

 Being in sort of a Old West/Frontier mood of late, I got around the checking out a couple of things that had been on my list for a while, but I just kept never getting to.

The Nightingale (2019) is an Australian revisionist Western from the director of The Babadook. In it's basic plot, it's a tale of revenge, not unlike Hannie Caulder (1971), but the resemblance to traditional revenge Westerns, even revenge Westerns based around women, really ends at the plot synopsis. It's more interested (like many revisionist Westerns) in examining the plight of indigenous peoples, but it takes the particular angle of the allowing its oppressed Irish woman protagonist to develop empathy, through recognizes the points of similarity between her experience and that of her Aboriginal guide. While perhaps not as brutal the last Australian Western I watched, The Proposition (2006), it is tough viewing in places, particularly the assault on the protagonist and her family. Still, it's a good film on its own terms, and it's always interesting to see Western film tropes and themes played out in places besides North America.

The Wind Through the Keyhole is the last book (to date) written by Stephen King set in the Dark Tower universe. It's outside the main story of that series proper, but includes those characters in framing device. While sheltering from fantastical storm, part tornado and part polar vortex, Roland relates a tale of his youthful days as a gunslinger to his friends. Embedded in that story is another story, a Mid-World "fairytale," that his mother had read to him as a boy, "The Wind Through the Keyhole." This story within a story tells the tale of a young boy living on the edge of the Endless Wood who must contend with a malign fairy, a swamp (complete with a dragon), and his own encounter with that same sort of storm, in a trek across a dangerous wilderness to get a cure for his mother's blindness from the wizard, Maerlyn. 

King's feel for his fantasy world keeps getting stronger. While there are clear points of intersection with our history, he relies less on characters or incursions from our reality (or realities like ours). The Dark Tower novels that were mostly about Mid-World (Wizard and the Glass, Wolves of Calla) were my favorites of the series, and I think this short novel does what they do even better. I wish King would write a collection of other Mid-World tales.

Monday, February 1, 2021

Appendix X Minus 1: Pulp Uranus & Its Moons

 

This continues my pulp DIY anthology of the solar system I first mentioned in this post on the Jovian moons. This time, another cold, distance spot less glamorous than Mars or Venus: Uranus.

"Planet of Doubt" (1935) by Stanley Weinbaum - "Something moved! Up! Up!" Pat screamed.
"Code of the Spaceways" (1936) by Clifton B. Kruse - A tale of far places, of men who are not afraid, of life on the star trail.
"Derelicts of Uranus" (1941) by J. Harvey Haggard - Here is Adventure and Danger. Mud-fishers, and a girl, — and a quasi-human looking for trouble.


And its moons, which don't see as much action as Jupiter's, have some stories, as well:

Titania
"Salvage in Space" (1933) by Jack Williamson - To Thad Allen, meteor miner, comes the dangerous bonanza of a derelict rocket-flier manned by death invisible.
"Shadrach" (1941) by Nelson S. Bond - Once, in Bible times, three men were cast into a fiery furnace—and lived! Now, on far-off, frozen Titania, three space-bitten Shadrachs faced the same awful test of godship.

Oberon
"Treasure of the Thunder Moon" (1942) by Edmond Hamilton - It's hell to be told 37 is too old to fly the
void when yon know where a great treasure lies.

Sunday, January 17, 2021

Cowboy Bebop and the Pulp Solar System


The anime series Cowboy Bebop may not seem to have much in common with the sort of stuff you'd find in the pulp magazine Planet Stories in the period around World War II, but I feel like there are more similarities than one might think:
  • The action occurs in version of the solar system where a number of bodies are habitable. Sure, Cowboy Bebop says that were terraformed, but the story takes place in the 21st Century and the terraformed versions of the Galilean moons and the like are as fanciful as anything from Planet Stories.
  • Jet is a former cop and Spike and ex-gangster. These sort of hard-boiled backgrounds certainly wouldn't be out of place in pulp fiction of the 40s, and not unheard of in science fiction.
  • Both draw on influences like Noir and Westerns.
Sure, there are also a lot of differences, as are bond to happen when two works are the products of two different cultures and half a century. But it does some to me you could do something resembling Cowboy Bebop that fight squarely in the pulp context (in the era where bebop originated), or say pull Eric John Stark into a world more like Cowboy Bebop.

Sunday, November 29, 2020

The Three Planeteers


In my short Thanksgiving travels, I managed to complete the audiobook of Edmond Hamilton's The Three Planeteers, originally published in the January 1940 issue of Startling Stories. Other than providing the inspiration for the name, Dumas' novel has little bearing on Hamilton's work.

In a future (Sometime in the 28th Century, I believe. An exact date isn't given.) where humanity has settled all the worlds in the solar system and gradually adapted to them. The fascist dictatorship of Haskell Trask has spread from Saturn and its moons, to all the outer planets, forming the League of Cold Worlds, which now menaces the Alliance of the inner worlds.

The titular trio are the most famous outlaws in the solar system: John Thorne of Earth, Sual Av of Venus, and Gunner Welk of Mercury. It turns out they aren't really outlaws at all, but special agents for the Alliance, pretending to be criminals so the Alliance has plausible deniability regarding their actions against the League. 

With war looming, the only hope of the Alliance to defeat the massive League war fleet is an experimental new weapon which requires the ultra-rare substance radite to work. Good news is there sufficient radite on the trans-Plutonian world of Erebus. Bad news is no one has ever returned from Erebus alive. Well, no one except, it's rumored, a former renegade turned space pirate. Said pirate is now dead, but his daughter reigns as pirate queen in the Asteroid Belt.

Besides the classic space war plotline, Hamilton gives a lot of space opera color: "joy-vibration" addicts, hunters in the fungal forests of Saturn, and the deadly secret of Erebus. It could be easily shorn of some it's old-fashionedness and moved outside of the solar system. Pieces would be easy to drop into Star Wars or any other space opera game.

Thursday, December 5, 2019

Cool Stuff I Read Recently

Well, technically I listened to these as audiobooks while doing a lot of drving for work. All three of these fantasy novels have pretty interesting settings.


The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht. In a cold, decaying city besides a bay that births horrors thanks to an ancient, magical cataclysm, a monster from streets falls into the thrall of a practitioner of forbidden magic bent on revenge against his city's occupiers. An interesting setting (something like a late 18th Century Lankhmar crossed with Halifax) with immoral protagonists hatching a diabolical plot.


The Ingenious by Darius Hinks. The flying city of Athanor travels between worlds (I assume, it's a bit unclear), guided by the priest-alchemists known as the Curious Men. The Curious Men care little from for the teeming masses of the underclass who inhabit their city, many unwilling refugees from Athanor's conquest of their homelands. The Exiles are political dissidents from some distant land, forced to become a criminal gang to survive. The young woman who they look to to lead them back home and to victory is now a drug addict. When she becomes embroiled in the forbidden experiments of a Curious Man she gets a taste of something even more addictive: the forces wielded by the alchemists.


The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang. An ancient China-like empire owes its power to  "slackcraft," the ability to manipulate the elemental "natures" flowing through all things. The most able practitioners of slackcraft are trained in the order known as the Tensorate. Twins born to the Empress are destined to play a role in the growing Machinist rebellion, which wants to use technology to free common folk from dependence on the Tensors. Another interesting facet of the world is that children are genderless and sexual maturity is staved off until an individual "confirms" their adult gender and undergoes a ceremony.

Friday, October 5, 2018

Deep Pulp

Currently, I'm alternating my reading time between two pulp science fiction novels from the 1960s: Lin Carter's Tower of the Medusa and Gardner Fox's Warrior of Llarn. Neither writer is hailed for their great literary accomplishments, though Gardner Fox made substantial contributions to Silver Age comic book history. Both write in a style that harkens back to the days of the actual pulp magazines (which, in Fox's case is where he got his start) and whatever their deficiencies can occasionally turn out a serviceable yarn.

originally published in an Ace Double
Carter has a flare for world-building, if occasionally done in too formulaic and always pretty derivative sort of way. He has a "genius" of combining subgenres that no one had put together before: His Lemuria stories, for instance are basically Conan in a Edgar Rice Burroughs yarn. His Gondwane tales are a faux Vancian mix Oz, Flash Gordon, and the Dying Earth. Tower of Medusa here feels a bit like a C.L. Moore riff in conception: In a future interstellar civilization where less of old knowledge makes ancient tech seem as magic (or maybe it was a fusion of the two?) a tough guy thief and his side kick are coerced into a difficult job: the theft of a jewel called Heart of Kom Yazoth. The story reads more like Moore's husband Henry Kuttner in his early pulp stuff. It has none of Moore's atmosphere. Still, it's an above average Carter effort, I feel like.


Warrior of Llarn is a Sword & Planet yarn. Earthman Alan Morgan gets transport to a distant world by means as yet mysterious. He saves a princess and gets involved with a war between two civilizations. The level of technology of the world is a bit higher than Barsoom, and Fox provides a Dune-esque (a year before Dune) explanation for why people with energy weapons might still use swords. Like Fox's earlier Adam Strange stories for DC, the planet has suffered a nuclear war in the past, which is the cause of it's strange creatures and current lower level of civilization. Fox's story is old fashion, even quaint in many ways, but he's accomplished at delivering the goods. It is not boring.