A Forgotten Realm: Robert E. Howard
Posted by mcummings
It's hard to believe it is the end of the month and I still haven't posted a Forgotten Realm yet. Perhaps even more damning is the fact that this particular Forgotten Realm has been on my mind since June, when I realized how perfect it was.
Throughout the northern hemisphere, summer is at its mid stride, at least in terms of high temperatures. When it gets so hot outside that all you want to do is find a shady corner to crawl into and sip on something cold, I tend to find that I don't want to tax my mind too much either. Probably from all of that excess heat the brain generates when thinking or something. At any rate, as the movie industry has long since noted, summer time is ripe for the mind candy gluttony of cheap thrills.
Which, in some ways, makes Howard's works a step away from the norm in that regard, despite the fact that derivatives of his work are the fodder for such mindless entertainment. I won't sit here and tell you that Howard's works are mentally challenging masterpieces, but to the uninitiated, I think you'll find yourself pleasantly surprised.
When I say the name "Conan the Barbarian," what immediately springs to mind? More than likely you will immediately think of Governor Schwarzenegger in his early film role playing the character. From this memorable example, you will assume you know the shallow character of Conan quite well. A barbarian, more interested in fighting than thinking, more than likely not full of any great or deep insights. To be fair, as an early role in Schwarzenegger's career, when his English fluency was still at its infancy, he was going to be able to give great monologues. That, and let's face it, Hollywood was more interested in making a brawny action film than they were of of necessarily being true to Howard's writings.
Forget everything you think you know about Conan (the Barbarian, not the O'Brien)(Long live Coco!).
I recommend reading these stories in the order in which they were published/written, versus an arbitrary arrangement made by later anthology editors. The first story you will read, then, is The Phoenix on the Sword, a story that actually takes place near the end of Conan's adventures, when he is enjoying life as a King in retirement. Reading this story, its easy to see two things: first, that the argument that Howard, a friend of that other genre trendsetter H.P.Lovecraft, may very well have invented the pulp genre of sword and sorcery stories (at least of the second world variety); secondly, that the Conan you grew up watching on cable late night is a mere caricature of the real thing.
It isn't just the drastically different physical description from what you've come to know. Its the fact that this man is as much a thinker as a brute, that he isn't someone that stabs mindlessly and asks questions later but someone that really is a well thought out protagonist. Yes, his later exploits are sometimes extreme, and the writing of the women in the stories will never earn Howard a mention as a feminist, but for pulp it is well beyond the standards I've come to expect from the 1930's.
Which is why I've included Howard in this review of Forgotten Realms. Not because his characters are forgotten, but because the characters as he originally wrote them have been forgotten. These aren't the shallow brutes that the small and big screen have portrayed them to be. There's something more to them that I think is worthy of you all taking the time and reading through a few. Just be sure its an original Howard before you start - while he too became repetitive in later stories, when licensing let others write Conan stories in the 70's and 80's they tended to focus on the mindless action and womanizing and less on the depth of the original character.
Go on, read. Enjoy. Its summer time.
Give me an eReader I can use!
Posted by mcummings
Today Borders customers (who haven't opted out of the email chain) got a reminder that Borders has released their new ebook reader, the Kobo (which I understand is just a rebranded eReader from another manufacturer, but what isn't these days?). While not having the spare cash to just buy it, I did play around with the desktop app/iPhone app today to see if broke the barrier that the Kindle has.
Alas, no.
While the new Kobo certainly supports many more common formats, it still has in my opinion a big hangup - it's too tied to the purchasing of books, even if you already own them. Granted, this is the pitfall of using an eReader sold by a bookstore, I know, but what I would love is an eReader that not only supported multiple formats, that not only worked on a stand alone device, that not only had a phone app, desktop app, etc., but that let you easily add books to the reader that you had acquired from other venues, and then kept them in sync between devices. How cool would that be? To be able to grab a book off of Gutenberg or manybooks.net or wherever, put it in your floating library in the sky, and then no matter which reader you were using (dedicated device, computer, phone app, whatever) kept your progress in sync?? That, my friends, would be a bibliophiles wet dream and no doubt make a lot of techno savy readers salivate and crawl over glass to get one. (Working with Calibre would be nice, but baby steps, baby steps).
So it looks like for now I'm just going to stick with my Calibre+kindle and Calibre+stanza solution. Its not perfect by a long shot, but at least it almost sort of works. Just not in sync.
“No plot? No problem?” No depth? Not till the end.
Posted by mcummings
So, one of the books I got at the library yesterday was Chris Baty's "No plot? No problem!" Its not a terribly long book (I think it might be over 50,000 words, a joke that will never grow old), just under 200 pages, so it was a quick read. If you don't know who Baty is, he's the founder of the original NaNoWriMo, and the book (though it doesn't exactly mention it on the cover) is geared specifically at participants in the contest.
So much so, in fact, that the first half of the book is completely anecdotal stories about participating in the contest, where the contest came from, what the contest means in your life, etc., and it isn't until the last half of the book that it gets to the business of writing.
Only, its the business of writing mechanics geared at writing a "novel" in 30 days, with very little guidance on the art of writing. There were a few helpful hints, to be sure, but this book doesn't really attack the titular problem of feeling like you have no plot.
I would still recommend this book to folks interested in participating in Baty's contest. The (somewhat brief) guide on how to tackle each of the four weeks of November would be helpful, and the post mortem of what to do after you hit 50k is definitely worth reading before you set out on the contest. Why? Because it retroactively points out the contest's own flaws in perception, and that's good to know before you head into it. There's some good advice, and some reminders to the starry eyed participant that thinks come December 1, their novel will be complete and ready to go out into the world.
A Forgotten Realm: James P. Blaylock
Posted by mcummings
These days, "urban fantasy" is all the rage. From Anita Blake and Carrie Vaugn, to (yes) Stephanie Meyer and local Maggie Steifvater, writing modern fantasy, set in the here and now, usually in our own world complete with internet porn and fossil fuel eating cars. But what folks often forget is that urban fantasy isn't new, and I intend to showcase two authors that exemplify that. This month, I'll be covering the forgotten realms of James P. Blaylock.
My first introduction to Blaylock was with his 1991 novel, The Paper Grail. I was working at the North Stafford library at the time, and the title intrigued me. In reflection, it probably isn't the ground breaking work that I remember - everything new when you're in high school will seem like its a ground breaking, never before appreciated work. The grail in question is, of course, The Grail, but this one is an origami cup who, depending on how its folded, gives its owner fantastical powers.
Blaylock's appeal is that he start with such an ordinary version of our world, and so quickly devolves into a story where the magic can - and does - happen. Perhaps not the best known of his contemporaries (I'll touch on another of the original urban fantasy authors another month), I would still say he's worth the read if you can find a copy at your local library or used bookstore. Other books that I recall leaving a good impression with me were The Last Coin, a story about the dangers surrounding the collection of all 30 of Judas' coins; Winter Tides, a haunting ghost story; and All The Bells on Earth, my favorite, which starts out with a pickled bluebird of happiness and just dives into the fantastical from there.
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As it turns out, Blaylock appears to still be publishing as of 2008, but take my word for it and check out some of his older works. The magic is there even if it isn't cast by incantation or read from a grimoire. Of course, it's only in recalling the plots of each of these books that I realize the heavy Christian element (Holy Grail, coins of Judas, demons, etc.), but I hope you'll still take these from an open perspective (and believe me, I hardly qualify as a religious zealot). While some of his novels stem from this source material, the stories they tell are still fun to read.
A Forgotten Realm: Dennis McKiernan
Posted by mcummings
I ran into an old friend at Wegman's yesterday (hey Scott!), and of all the things to talk about in the middle of the canned goods aisle, we ended our brief talk on blogging and trying to do themed days. So, in a nutshell, I bring to you A Forgotten Realms (let's hope this isn't the only one, in which case it will be really forgotten). It is my hope to bring you, once a month, a forgotten realm in fantasy and science fiction that is due more attention than it has received with the passage of time. I'm hoping by starting off monthly, I'll have the time to read and draft these better. That's the hope anyway.
This month's Forgotten Realm is...Mithgar! Writer Dennis L. McKiernan created the lands and people of Mithgar for us back in the 80's, putting out a dozen or so novels over the course of the next few decades, including his most recent release just a few years ago, City of Jade: A Novel of Mithgar
Which is when I realized that I was no stranger to Mithgar.
In fact, I had traveled this land before, and rather extensively. It was the cover art that led me back, bringing back memories of cold nights and tales of forgotten legends fighting it out. What McKiernan did that was so nice was that he took the common elements of the 80's fantasy novel - elves, quests, dwarves, all of the trappings Uncle Tolkien left us - and told them like with a rich depth most ignored.
The same is true in fantasy books. In your soft fantasy, elves are just people with pointy ears and dwarves are just short guys, and the story is more focussed on the adventure they have than in paying attention to any particular details. Hard fantasy, as it were, keeps those lines well defined and drawn, and there is no doubt that an elf is nothing like a man, or anything else for that matter. McKiernan's stories tend toward the hard side, with each species having more than a cosmetic distinction from the others.
So if you're looking for some fantasy that is reminiscent of epic quests in a well thought out world, you can't go wrong by trying out some of McKiernan's works. Happy reading!