Tales From The Computerbank

John Christopher 1922 - 2012

2012-02-09T14:50:00.002Z

News from the British Fantasy Society that the British author Samuel Youd, who wrote under the pen-name of John Christopher, has died.

Best know as the author of the Tripods series of young adult novels (which was dramatised by the BBC in the 1980's) and, perhaps more importantly, as the author of the bleak eco-disaster novel The Death of Grass (retitled No Blade of Grass in the USA).

Seen by some as a response to the 'cosy catastrophe' novels of John Wyndham, The Death of Grass is a powerful and relentlessly downbeat novel, that in many ways prefigures the early work of J.G Ballard and is without question one of the high water marks of British sf in the 1959's.

The novel was filmed by Cornel Wilde as No Blade of Grass in 1970 and is a fine example of Wilde's more esoteric work; staying relatively faithful to its source material while embroidering it with Wilde's trademark surrealistic touches (something that can also be seen in other Cornel Wilde films such as The Naked Prey and Beach Red).

As well as Samuel Youd and John Christopher, the author wrote under a number of other pen-names (including Stanley Winchester, Hilary Ford, William Godfrey, William Vine, Peter Graaf, Peter Nichols, and Anthony Rye) but it is for his sf that he is probably best known and admired.

His other novels included The Year of the Comet and The Caves of Night.

The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph by Jack Vance

2012-02-08T00:56:00.004Z

It's amazing how easily things can get derailed. It was my fullest intention to start reading Lin Carter's The Wizard of Lemuria - the first in his Conanesque Thongor series - but while searching for the book in question I stumbled across my copy of The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph by Jack Vance.

I have to confess that I haven't read much Jack Vance recently, and The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph has the advantage of being a short story collection. So, I thought, a quick bit of Jack Vance and then on to Lin Carter. However, I'd reckoned without the rather seductive power of both Jack Vance and Magnus Ridolph and quickly found myself lost in his many worlds.

The Magnus Ridolph stories are early Vance (the lead story, The Kokod Warriors first appeared in 1948) but still display the light touch and wild inventiveness that characterises his best work. The prose is nowhere near as jewelled as, say, The Dying Earth, but the stories are flamboyant and Ridolph himself an engaging central character.

In some ways Magnus Ridolph could be a second cousin of C.L Moore's Northwest Smith, inasmuch as both men are interplanetary adventurers, but where Smith was a hard-bitten, wanderer with a quick gunhand, Magnus Ridolph is a much more urbane figure - older, for a start, part consulting detective, part businessman, a character who solves problems with his intellect rather than his fists.(To get Hollywood about it, think Sherlock Holmes meets Indiana Jones... in Space!).

In The Kokod Warriors, Magnus attempts to solve an age old problem on the planet Kokod, where the inhabitants indulge in ritual and very bloody warfare as a very basic survival method and, at the same time, he seeks to get some revenge on couple of double-crossing former business partners.

Double crossers also feature in The King of Thieves, in which Magnus briefly finds himself as king of the Men-men, and in The Howling Bounders where a business opportunity that is too good to be true turns out to be just that... except the tables are turned by some clever thinking on the part of Magnus Ridolph (and some wonderfully comic support from an alien cook who's idea of breakfast, dinner, lunch and supper all boil down to the same dish - stew!)

Coup de Grace (my personal favourite) is a who-and-why-dunnit in space where a murder and a murderer are not all they seem, and shows Vance at his dazzling best, piling idea upon idea to create an engaging little mystery and, at rarest of things, a genuinely funny sf story that doesn't rely upon subverting genre conventions but rather actively embraces them.

Of course, what's so good about these stories is the sly humour in them and the deft ways in which Jack Vance creates the various alien worlds and environments which Magnus Ridolph passes through. Sure, there's an occasional info-dump here and there (and Magnus always seems to find just the information he's looking for when he's looking for it) but it doesn't take the shine off the stories.

Colourful, inventive and hugely entertaining, the Magnus Ridolph stories (six of which are collected in The Many Worlds... ) are a refreshing change from some of the more blaster-happy Earthmen who have roamed through science fiction over the years and a reminder that sf can be great fun sometimes.

Bill Hinzman RIP

2012-02-07T23:53:00.003Z

The actor Bill Hinzman - best known as the first zombie seen in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead - has passed away at the age of 75.

He also appeared in the Romero movies There's Always Vanilla and The Crazies as well as directing a number of feature films, perhaps most notably Zombie Nosh aka Flesheater (1988) which capitalized upon his most famous role.

Lemuria, Here We Come...

2012-02-04T21:54:00.003Z

I'm going back to my roots, reading wise, this month. In practical terms this means reading a heapin' helpin' of sword and sorcery. I've had Lin Carter's Thongor and Brian Lumley's Primal Land series sitting on the shelves for a few months now, and the time has come to get stuck into them.
I know that for some critics/aficionados of the fantasy, Lin Carter is practically He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, but I recently read Imaginary Worlds, his excellent (although somewhat dated now) history of fantasy/sword and sorcery. If nothing else, it's clear that Carter genuinely loved fantasy, even if his own work within the genre was often perceived as 'second hand' (if not downright derivative and heavily influenced by writers such as Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jack Vance).
However, he seems as good a place as any, Thongor was, so to speak, one of the first direct descendants of Conan (a lineage that also includes John Jakes Brak the Barbarian and Gardner Fox's Kothar Barbarian Swordsman, both of whom I've intended to read for a while now)
As a genre (or rather as a sub-genre) sword and sorcery has been somewhat maligned, sidelined even, by the growth of epic fantasy, although epic fantasy tends to use some of the tropes of s&s, especially in some of its more down 'n' dirty incarnations (Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy and subsequent novels or Peter Brett's Demon series, for instance). However, and to paraphrase Lin Carter, sometimes there's nothing quite so enjoyable as a bit of s&s for pure fun.
I read a lot of Michael Moorcock in my early teens, particularly the Elric stories, and it was only after these that I started to explore other writers like Howard and Clark Ashton Smith (both of whom I have 'rediscovered' in the last few years) and then later again, Fritz Lieber. Charles Saunders and Karl Edward Wagner.
Sword and Sorcery has been described by wiser heads than I as 'the genre that wouldn't die' and even now there are writers producing colourful tales of warriors, wizards and magical lands. In some cases the writers are moving the genre on, moving it away from the Eurocentric, quasi-Medieval settings and such other trappings that have defined sword and sorcery for so long, happy to explore new ways of telling a story.. Others are embracing the traditions of the genre, favouring action over characterisation, straightforward prose as opposed to a more experimental approach.
Still, the fact is that the genre that refused to die has, quite simply, still refused to die. Hence my delve back into its history..
Lemuria, here we come.

Angry Robot Open Door

2012-01-30T16:25:00.002Z

Some interesting news from the UK publisher Angry Robot

Following a successful Open Door period in 2011 (we signed 3 debut authors from it!), we’ve decided to do it again! This time around, we’re looking for classic fantasy (for Angry Robot) and all sf/fantasy flavours of YA (for Strange Chemistry).

If you have completed a novel, and are unagented, between April 16th and 30th this year, we’ll happily read it for possible publication. If you are agented, this isn’t for you – submit via the usual route.

What we’re not looking for:
• Anything other than classic fantasy – swords, magic, kingdoms, castles. You might describe it as high fantasy, epic, magical, low, classic, medieval, or whatever. If you’ve written an urban fantasy or supernatural modern day chiller, that’s great, but not what we’re wanting this time around.
• Book 2 or later in an existing series.
• Books that have already been published elsewhere (including podcast, self-published as eBooks or print-on-demand).
• Books that have not yet been completed.
• Children’s books.
• Anything shorter than novel length (approx 95,000 to 140,000 words, but there is some flexibility in this).
• Books submitted in last year’s Open Door Month (even those that have been redrafted).

You can find out more here: http://angryrobotbooks.com/opendoor/

Nicol Williamson 1938 - 2011

2012-01-26T23:16:00.003Z

Some news from the BBC reporting that the Scottish born actor Nicol Williamson passed away last month.

Regarded by many as one of the finest actors of his generation, his varied and award-winning career encompassed both film and theatre, from the the powerful war drama, The Bofors Gun (1968) to the anti-apartheid thriller The Wilby Conspiracy (1975) and, both on stage and screen, title roles in Macbeth and Hamlet.

However, for genre fans, his most notable role was probably that of Merlin in John Boorman's Excalibur (1981) a mesmeric performance that gives the film its heart and soul as well as its primary focus. A bold retelling of the Arthurian myths, Excalibur remains one of the few examples of intelligent fantasy on screen, mixing its more fantastical elements with gritty realism and superb cinematography.

Other genre roles included Little John in Richard Lester's Robin and Marian (1976), Sherlock Holmes in The Seven Per Cent Solution (1976) Badger in Terry Jones' The Wind in the Willows (1996) and Father Morning in the much underrated Exorcist 3 (1989).

TITUS ALONE by MERVYN PEAKE

2012-01-20T16:28:00.002Z

Mervyn Peake was a man of many, many talents – painter, illustrator, playwright, novelist, poet – but it is as a writer, more specifically as the author of the Gormenghast novels that he is best remembered.

Set in the sprawling, ritual-ridden castle of Gormenghast, the first two novels in the cycle – Titus Groan and Gormenghast - deal with the birth and coming-of-age of the new Earl, Titus Groan and the rise and fall of Steerpike, a would-be usurper. The novels are lush and richly decorated – not only in terms of their language but also in terms of the illustrations that Peake provided for them – filled with Dickensian grotesques (characters such as the obscenely obese cook, Swelter, or the dusty and gangling Mr Flay, the foppish Dr Prunesqualor or the doomed Lord Sepulchrave) and a painter's eye for detail they are among some of the finest fantasies ever written (although, in all truth, it is perhaps a matter of reader perspective as to whether or not the novels could be considered fantasy in the commercial sense).

Remarkable as both Titus Groan and Gormenghast are, the third novel in the cycle – Titus Alone – is an equally remarkable book and one which is, sadly, often overshadowed by it predecessors.

When Titus finally leaves the confines of Gormenghast castle, he is plunged into a world equally as strange and dangerous as the one he has just left, populated by characters every bit as grotesque as those of his abandoned realm. Whereas the first two novels in the cycle could be considered to have a Dickensian feel, or to have a skewed Ruritanian aspect to them, Titus Alone is set in a world not too far removed from the mid 20th century, almost as if Titus has stepped forward in time to an age of aircraft, automobiles, secret policemen, and stark, foreboding architecture.

Befriended, albeit reluctantly at first, by the gaunt giant Muzzlehatch, imprisoned for ill-defined crimes and set free by the good graces of the ageing but still beautiful Juno, who briefly becomes his lover, Titus finds this new world no more to his liking than the old. But his further wanderings – firstly to the Under-River and then to the sinister environs of The Factory – offer little or no purpose and the loss of Gormenghast itself – although his exile is entirely self-imposed – leads Titus to the verge of insanity as he beings to question his own memories.

A picaresque novel which casts Titus as a latter-day Candide, Titus Alone is a dark and sometimes nightmarish read, often obeying its own narrative rules (a technique that Peake had explored in his novella Boy In Darkness). Yet it is also a novel that shows Peake's delicate touch as a writer, with gleeful, sometimes morbid, slapstick thrown into the mix – Titus's impromptu arrival at Lady Cusp-Canine's over-crowed and mirthless party, the failed writer Crabcalf who carries the unsold copies of his novel everywhere with him or the horrific, almost cartoonish, death of Mr Veil (“Crushed and prostrate, he rose again, and to Titus's horror it seemed as though the features of his face had all changed places.”)

The extended climax of the novel – where Cheeta, daughter of the scientist who owns the Belsenesque Factory, tries to drive Titus past the point of madness by recreating Gormenghast in the crumbling Black House – is by turns thrilling and terrifying and demonstrates Peake's mastery of the written word. (“Under a light to strangle infants by, the great and horrible flower opened its bulbous petals one by one...Out of his fear and apprehension something green and incredibly young took hold of Titus and sidled across his entrails... Something was emerging from the forgotten room. Something of great bulk and swathing. It moved with exaggerated grandeur, trailing a length of dusty, moth eaten fustian...)

A critical and commercial failure upon its publication in 1959 (due in large part to editorial tampering which Peake - by then firmly in the grip of the Parkinson's Disease which would end his life tragically short – was unable to correct) Titus Alone was subsequently re-edited by the British author Langdon Jones in the early 1970's to emerge as a truer version of the text and one which is as close to Mervyn Peake's original vision as possible.

Sometimes and unfairly regarded as a bizarre postscript to the Gormenghast cycle, Titus Alone is a novel which defies expectation – and, to a certain extent, category – never content simply to be 'the third book', taking the story of Titus Groan into strange new places, a unique and unsettling novel from a writer who's imagination was boundless and who's legacy should be treasured.

(By way of addendum: Mervyn Peake's intention was to continue the story of Titus Groan beyond Titus Alone and he had planned a fourth novel – Titus Awakes – for which only a few fragmentary notes existed.. The novel was taken up by his widow Maeve Gilmore and retitled Search Without End. In 2011 it was finally published as Titus Awakes – The Lost Book of Gormenghast. A review should be forthcoming on The Computerbank soon)

Arcane

2012-01-15T20:18:00.002Z

I have to admit that 2011 was a bit of an artistic wasteland for me, I didn't write a lot of short stories and published very little. However, one tale that did see the light of day was "Beneath the Arch Of Knives", another story in my Shining Cities Sequence, which appeared in the anthology Arcane at the tail end of last year.

The anthology gets a decent review at Leslianne Wilder's blog Skull Honey, and Beneath The Arch of Knives gets a sort of honourable mention, being described as: 'whimsical and playfully cruel'. (heh, heh).

You can read the full review here: http://lesliannewilder.blogspot.com/2012/01/review-arcane-edited-by-nate-shumate.html or find out how to order a copy of Arcane here: http://www.coldfusionmedia.us/2011/12/22/arcane-is-now-on-sale/

Is Anyone Out There?

2012-01-15T03:15:00.002Z

It has been a while, I must confess, since I last blogged - the reasons for this are many, varied, personal, professional and, quite frankly, too dull to go into in any detail.

However... the various grey skies have cleared up and I am ready to get back into the saddle.

Therefore, and if anyone is still out there, I am declaring the return of Tales From the Computerbank and, simultaneously, my return to being an active (rather than passive, as I have been for a while) writer.

So, if you would care to, please join me once again for some random book and movie reviews, combined with some equally random thoughts on the business of writing and anything else that might take my fancy.

Coming Soon.... Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake.

Cliff Robertson RIP

2011-09-11T18:32:00.004+01:00

The US actor Cliff Robertson passed away on 10th September.

In a long and varied career he made a number of apperances of interest to genre fans - including the Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits as well as appearing as Uncle Ben Parker in Spiderman 1 & 2. But it was his Oscar winning performance in Charly - based upon Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon - in 1968 that he will probably be best remembered in sf/fantasy circles.

Other notable appearances included Robert Aldrich's powerful anti-war film, Too Late the Hero in which he co-starred with Michael Caine and Cliff Robertson.

News in Brief

2011-08-27T12:59:00.002+01:00

Matters both personal and professional have kept me away from the Computerbank for the last while (and from most other things, come to think of it). But rest assured that normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

But here is the news in brief:

I have a few short stories slated for publication later on this year - Beneath the Arch of Knives is due in Arcane at some stage, Forged in Heaven, Tempered in Hell should be appearing in the Ricasso Press anthology Through Blood and Iron and And Other Such Delights will be included in the upcoming best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

The Great Writing Experiment is continuing on, albeit at a somewhat reduced pace, and I'm learning a lot about how to construct a long story (I hesitate to use the word novel just yet) by making a lot of mistakes and doing a lot - and I mean a lot - of rewriting.

And that's all the news that's fit to print for now.

RIP Fiction Blog

2011-06-27T22:04:00.003+01:00

After debating the pro and cons of it, I've decided to get rid of my fiction blog. The reasons for this are fairly straightforward - firstly, it's been a while since I've had any new material to put onto the blog and, secondly, I've decided to publish a small e-collection of my work and am going to include some of these older stories.

The collection is more by way of an experiment in e-publishing than anything else, just to see if I can do it. Links to my other online fiction can still be found to the right.

And Other Such Delights for Best of BSC

2011-06-22T17:20:00.002+01:00

Just recieved word from Scott Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies that And Other Such Delights, which appeared in BSC last year, has been selected for inclusion in The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies: Year Two.

The e-anthology should be available in the autumn.

To say that I am rather pleased would be an understatement of sorts.

Getting Unlocked

2011-06-19T23:13:00.002+01:00

The Great(ish) Fiction Experiment continues on apace, with my still as yet unnamed story up to 15,000 words, making it the longest piece of fiction that I have written so far (there's an unfinished novella that comes close though).

The mission statement for this has been fairly straightforward - to write 1,000 words of fiction every day regardless of its quality - and although real-life work sort of got in the way this week I've managed to stick fairly closely to the rules.
One of the things it has taught me - or rather retaught me - is how much fun writing can be when you just let yourself go. It's also helped to get my creativity flowing again, and I've been making loads of notes for new stories as well as thinking very strongly about how I can make the current untitled piece actually work as a decent piece of fiction (a lot of editing and rewriting is the relatively straight-forward answer).

But its also helped to focus a few thoughts that had hitherto been rather scattered if not downright fragmentary, mostly to do with the setting of the story which, currently, tales place in Thule Before The Ice - and will continue to do so - that until now was just a phrase in a notebook that kept coming back to haunt me.

I'm not entirely sure that I've completely gotten over my bout of writers' block, but I at least feel that I'm getting there.

Roll on the next 1,000 words.

The Great(ish) Fiction Experiment: Week 2

2011-06-06T19:10:00.004+01:00

The second week of my attempt to write my way out of my recent bout of writers' block has begun.

So far I've managed to stick to the self-imposed rules of my Great(ish) Writing Experiment, producing no less than 1,000 words a day (except Sunday, when I decided I needed a break). In truth, I have written some terrible rubbish in the last week, but the rules dictate quantity over quality and hopefully some odd phrases have managed to glitter among the dreck.

For those who want to keep count I have written just over seven and a half thousand words of this still-as-yet unnamed tale about the warrior Xlaxas Duv and his quest to find Death.

One of the strange things about it is that the story started off as one thing and has morphed itself into another. Initially, the whole thing was vaguely patterned after Clark Ashton Smith's The Seven Geases but has started to become a little more Moorcockian as it has progressed (Xlaxas Duv has acquired a piratical sidekick who is a sort of Moonglum to his Elric, for instance) possibly because I've just finished reading Stormbringer once again.

It's also become clear that what I thought was going to be a short story has begun to change itself into something much longer if not necessarily more complex.

Thankfully, this is not intended for publication of any sort but rather is to help me get to grips once again with the mechanics of writing and - maybe more importantly - the habit of writing.

I've found myself actually looking forward to sitting down at the keyboard again and even starting to connect with the characters (cardboard cutouts though they are) in a way that hasn't happened for a while.

I still don't know what will happen next, or even if this literary experiment will help to get my creative flow back on course, but so far its been a blast.

And I can't wait to find out what happens next.

The Great(ish) Fiction Experiment: Day 3

2011-06-02T17:00:00.005+01:00

On Monday I decided to try and cure my writer's block by employing the relatively straightforward method of writing any old crap that came into my head for the next week. The only rule for this experiment is that I have to write 1,000 words a day - I can write more if the mood and muse take me, but certainly no less.

On Tuesday morning I sat down and wrote the following words:

"Alvannah is gone, and with her any reason I may have left for remaining in Salmu Alu, the Black City. Gone, too, is any reason for continuing to live - for what is life without her? - but I am determined to sell my life as dearly as poss ible, among the abominations of the Flint Wastes and Rippling Mountains and in the embrace of death I may know peace and in oblivion may find once again my beloved Alvannah"
So wrote the warrior Xlaxas Duv, champion of Salmu Alu, before his departure from that great city."

So far I have written nearly 3,900 words of this nameless and somewhat rambling tale, making stuff up as I go along and doing my level headed best not to worry too much about literary quality, strained metaphors or overly complex character motivation.

I have been having a ball doing it.

So far, Xlaxas Duv has faced three sorcerors (one good, one bad and the other fairly indifferent) a group of shape-shifting warbeasts and is currently on his way to the First City of Calgorum in order to confront the Golden Breed. He has discovered that Alvannah awaits him on the other side of the Veil of Life but that if he dies before fulfilling certain mystical criteria then he will be doomed to wander through limbo forever and never find her again.

Oh, and he has also broken two of his weapons and gained the magical heart of an Atlantean sorceror named Keritos.

What will happen next? Who or what are the Golden Breed and why is someone or something trying to prevent Xlaxas Duv from joining his beloved in the afterlife?

Damned if I know but I'm going to enjoy finding out.

My Plan to Get Going

2011-05-30T22:52:00.005+01:00

I've been going through one of my periodic creative droughts of late. They come along every once in a while and cause me no end of tribulation.

But, for once, I've decided to take the bull by the horns this. I recently read a good piece of advice about writers' block and how to eliminate it... and that piece of advice was simply this 'don't be afraid to write crap'.

Very often, writers have the expectation that every word they write needs to be golden - I suffer from this delusion all too often and when it turns out that not every word I write is perfect it causes me to slow down and sometimes come to a grinding halt.

So I have made the decision to spend the next seven days writing anything that comes into my head - or to the tips of my fingers - as long as I write no less than 1,000 words per day.

I don't expect any of it to be usable (and fully expect most of it to be derivative at best), but hopefully it might help to pull me out of this latest creative mire.

Here goes....

Some Days... But Then

2011-05-17T14:35:00.005+01:00

There are some days, beyond the shadow of a doubt, when you wonder why you bother to write. You have crafted and chosen, played with form and structure, created (hopefully) believable characters and placed them in an imaginary world that has a good internal logic and a sense of wonder all its own.

You send the story out... wait a bit... and it comes winging back to you with a 'thanks but no thanks' attached to it.

Rejection is, unfortunately, part and parcel of any writer's life and I have experienced my fair share of rejection letters over the years and been crushed by every single one. It never really seems to get any easier and I think I know why.

Regardless of its actual worth, I am always of the belief that the story (or stories) that I am working on are the best that I can do at that particular point. I send them off with a metaphorical kiss on the forehead and am crushed when others do not seem to realize exactly how wonderful my work is (of course this is not to say that I haven't written some stinkers in my time, but that only really comes with hindsight).

In some ways, though, that sinking feeling you get when reading a rejection letter is a good thing because it means that you actually care about your own work.

As they say about horse riding, the only thing to do is to get back on again or, if you're a writer, to dust the story down (bearing in mind that some editorial comment are useful) wipe that look of shame off its face and send it out into the world again certain in the knowledge that next time the editor will love your story just as much as you do.

Some days are difficult... But then there's always tomorrow.

Joanna Russ

2011-05-02T15:00:00.003+01:00

The noted American sf author Joanna Russ passed away on 29 April 2011.

Influential not only as one of the most pre-eminent writers of science fiction with a feminist slant, her contribution to science fiction criticism helped to shape modern sf and fantasy, and her best known work, The Female Man, broke down many of the pre-concieved barriers with regard to gender in speculative writing.

On The Other Side of the Mirror at An Electric Tragedy

2011-05-01T14:27:00.005+01:00

My short story On The Other Side of the Mirror is currently online at An Electric Tragedy (a new ezine of speculative fiction).

The story is something of a variant on an old theme... to say more might give the game away entirely (but let me point out that I've been reading a lot of Angela Carter and the Brothers Grimm of late, so there may be an influence or two there).

You can find it here:

http://anelectrictragedy.com/stories.html

Update at With Many Shades

2011-04-21T20:51:00.002+01:00

My other blog, With Many Shades, has had a bit of an update with new listings for Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Absent Willow Review, Hub and Lacuna.

Some good readin' there, I reckon.

Elizabeth Sladen 1946 - 2011

2011-04-21T14:19:00.003+01:00

The British actor Elizabeth Sladen passed away on 19 April.

Best known for her role as Sarah Jane Smith in Dr Who, she appeared alongside numerous incarnations of the Doctor including Matt Smith's Doctor in The Sarah Jane Adventures,.

Her other Dr Who related work included the aforemention Sarah Jane Adventures, K-9 and Company and numerous audio productions set in the Dr Who universe. Other appearances included the film Silver Dream Racer and the television series Peak Practise.

Acceptance at An Electric Tragedy

2011-04-19T12:58:00.002+01:00

I've just received word from An Electric Tragedy that they want to use my short story On The Other Side of the Mirror for their June issue (wheeee!)

The story is a direct result of having read a whole load of fairy tales recently and is a take on a certain well known tale involving magic mirrors, ghosts, iron shoes and a (hopefully) dark and somewhat gothic outlook.

You can find the magazine here:

http://www.anelectrictragedy.com/

Accepted at Arcane

2011-04-16T00:30:00.003+01:00

Just got news from Nathan Shumate at Arcane that he's accepted my short story Beneath the Arch of Knives for an upcoming issue.

It's another in my Shining Cities sequence, taking place in the city of PameMurias, and concerns the rivalry between two gentlemen of that particular place - Ossoro Volonte and Churel Lobishomen.

I'm particularly pleased about this not least of all because of Arcane's wonderful subtitle of 'penny dreadfuls for the 21st century' and the fact that the team of Nathan Shumate and publisher Sandy Petersen (he of Call of Cthulhu fame) have a real love of and respect for the old pulp tales.

You can find out more about Arcane here: http://www.arcanemagazine.com/

Bride of the Water at Lacuna

2011-04-15T20:09:00.002+01:00

Breaking something of a dry season, my short story Bride of the Water, is currently online at Megan Arkenberg's splendid e-zine of historical fiction, Lacuna.

Set in Renaissance Venice, it's the latest of the Lovecraftain style tales I've been working on recently. More than that I may not say.

You can find it here: http://lacunajournal.blogspot.com/2011/04/bride-of-water.html

Gettin' all 21st Century

2011-03-29T12:51:00.004+01:00

Those who know me are probably aware that I am something of a confirmed and committed bibliophile. Reading is, quite simply, one of my favourite things and I regard books as almost sacred objects.

However, last week I finally cracked - gave in to the pressures of the modern world, if you will - and bought myself a Kindle. Yes, you read that correctly, I bought a Kindle.

And I have to say that it is a wonderful toy.

My reasons were rather pragmatic, truth to tell. I've never been happy reading books on a computer screen, (short stories are fine although I've always had a tendancy to print them out and read them at my leisure) but over the past few years I have amassed a rather large collection of ebooks, gleaned from various places (God Bless You, Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, and Black Mask, among others).

Now, thanks to the Kindle I can read them in comfort, take them with me wherever I go and generally enjoy them without the hassle of the computer, eye-strain and things of that nature.

I was sceptical at first and still believe that the ebook reader will never fully replace the printed word, but given the vast amout of books available in electronic format, it's been a good investment so far.

It has even got me thinking about producing an e-collection of my own - it's relatively easy to do given the right software (Calibre is a good 'un) and has helped bring me out of one of my occasional periods of creative lethargy.

So, stay tuned - the plan is to put a collection together in the next couple of months (probably of my Shining Cities stories as soon as the rights of a couple of them revert to me) and see where things go from there.

Will this stop me from buying printed books? Er, no (see the whole bibliophile comment above)

And, besides, I reckon it's about time I joined the 21st century (albeit in a small way).

Valhalla Rising (2009)

2011-03-23T08:49:00.005Z

Directed by Nicholas Winding Refn. Starring Mads Mikkelsen.

Gritty sword and sorcery with an historical veil, Valhalla Rising is something of a divisive film. Depending on your point of view it is either carefully composed, enigmatic, elegantly paced with bouts of balletic yet brutal violence or simply extremely dull and pretentious.

I rather incline towards the first rather than the second.

In Valhalla Rising Mads Mikkelsen plays One-Eye, a mute and practically unstoppable killing machine of a man, whose one mode of expression is violence. When first we meet him he is being used as an attack dog/gladiator by a group of Norse raiders. Tethered to a post, One-Eye is forced to fight other warriors to the death, the fact that he is unarmed every time makes little or no difference. Only a young boy, Ave, treats him with any degree of humanity, his 'Masters' being more interested in the money he can make them than in treating their 'dog' well.

One-Eye, however, has another, more arcane ability to see into the future and in doing so finds the weapon he needs to free himself from captivity, which he does with chilling brutality slaughtering everyone except Ave.

Later they joins with a band of Scottish en route to Jerusalem and instead of the Holy Land ends up in strange and savage land that some of them believe to be Hell itself. Thereafter follows journey into a heart of darkness that is as compelling as it is sometimes brutal.

A literal and metaphysical journey for its main protagonist, Valhalla Rising is a beautifully shot film, making brilliant use of its Scottish locations and in Mads Mikkelsen it has a central character who is every bit as enigmatic as the film itself. Mute and with a masklike expression throughout, One-Eye is nevertheless a compelling character, echoing rage, hatred, frustration and even compassion in that blank, fathomless face. It is One-Eye who is the focus of much of the violence throughout, although rarely as instigator.

In terms of style and pacing Valhalla Rising could be compared to Herzog's Aguirre – Wrath of God – the same atmosphere of grim fatalism permeates both films – or Jim Jarmush's Dead Man with its slow build up and sudden, albeit brief, bursts of action. What all three certainly share is a charismatic central performance, and here Mads Mikkelsen is quite simply extraordinary as One-Eye doing more with that one, fixed, expression than most actors can do with their entire bodies.

As with Bronson, Nicholas Winding Refn's other study of violence and violent men, the self-conscious and studied art house sensibilities of Valhalla Rising may not be to everyone's taste but for those with a taste for the less travelled cinematic roads it is a treat.
　
Released in the UK in the wake of 300, the film was promoted as an action adventure, a Viking version of Thermopylae if you will, and doubtless to the chagrin of many who were expecting a repeat of 300's high octane visuals and Hollywood gloss. But Valhalla Rising is a much more challenging film less concerned with the spectacle of violence and more about its effects on the soul.

Not an easy watch, but a rewarding one.

SIX STRING SAMURAI (1998)

2011-03-20T19:14:00.004Z

Directed by Lance Mungia. Starring Jeffrey Falcon, Justin McGuire.

It's movie week on the Computerbank, and what better film to start with than this?

A potent blend of Max Mad, Lone Wolf and Cub, 'fifties rock n roll and general surrealism, Six String Samurai is one of those movies so outrageous in both concept and execution that the only proper response is to cry Hallelujah!

In an alternative America, nuked and conquered by the Russians in 1957, the only bastion of freedom is the city of Lost Vegas, ruled for the past 40 years by King Elvis But now the King is dead and the throne needs a new occupant, bringing every sword swingin', guitar pickin' opportunist across the Nevada badlands eager to get their hands on the kingdom.

Among them is Buddy (Jeffrey Falcon), a bespectacled musician/latterday ronin, and even Death himself (Stephane Gauger although voiced by Lex Lang) manifested as nothing less than an avatar of Slash, complete with top hat, guitar and heavy metal sidekicks. Essentially a picaresque tale of swordfights and freaks as Buddy finds himself saddled with a young orphan boy (Justin McGuire), trailed by Death and hunted by all and sundry for his 1957 cherry-red Gibson guitar. Unfortunately for both all and sundry – including the Red Elvises, the Windmill People and the Pin Pals (three psycho bowlers, in case you were wondering) – Buddy is equally adept with a sword as he is with a guitar.

Shamelessly borrowing from any number westerns and Samurai movies (although most notably from the aforementioned Lone Wolf and Cub series even down to the every popular 'one man takes on an army sequence) as well as a cheeky nod to the cantina sequence in Star Wars, Six String Samurai is a movie that very much wears its influences on it sleeve.

Belying its low budget limitations with verve, wit and imagination, making good use of its desert locations, (something it has in common with Ryuhei Kitamura's equally demented Versus) Six String Samurai is most definitely one of those 'love it or loathe it' kind of films (for the record, I loved it).

Of particular note is the soundtrack by Brian Tyler (who performed similar duties on the alt-Elvis classic Bubba Ho-Tep) and the previously mentioned Red Elvises, creating a future-retro rock n roll that gives the movie a jaunty energy even in its darkest moments. Added to this is the wise approach of director Lance Mungia who's 'what you don't see won't disappoint you' attitude pays dividends more often than not (most notably in the scenes featuring the God of the Windmill People and, later, the disappearance of Death's henchmen/ backing band)

Although the ending of Six String Samurai falls into something of a metaphysical muddle (or to put it another way, it doesn't really make all that much sense) the film itself is a fun ride as long as you keep an open mind. A bigger budget might have been nice, of course, but sometimes you just have to work with what you've got – something that Six String Samurai does with aplomb.

MICHAEL GOUGH 1916 - 2011

2011-03-18T22:53:00.004Z

Recent news reports the passing of the British actor Michael Gough. A stalwart of British horror in its glory days, Michael Gough appeared in a number of movies from both Hammer and Amicus including Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera, Dr Terror's House of Horrors and The Skull, as well as notable appearances in such other films as Trog, Curse of the Crimson Altar, The Legend of Hell House and the truly bonkers Horror Hospital (where his performance as Dr Storm has to be seen to be believed). Later in his career he became part of Tim Burton's 'stock company' appearing as Alfred Pennyworth in the Batman films (continuing the role even after Burton's departure from the series) in the magnificent Sleepy Hollow - surely the biggest budget film that Hammer never made - and adding his voice to Corpse Bride and Alice in Wonderland.

Like Peter Cushing, Michael Gough always brought a certain dignity to even the most improbable of roles (Dr Storm springs to mind again) and although his career encompassed a wide range of television, film and theatre it is probably for his contribution to fantasy cinema that he will be rightly remembered.

MY FAVOURITE SHORT STORIES: THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT BY RUDYARD KIPLING

2011-03-04T23:24:00.003Z

(It's been a while since I did one of these so I thought 'Why not?')

First published in 1887, Rudyard Kipling's The City of Dreadful Night is as nightmarish a little tale as you could wish to read, a macabre journey through the nocturnal city of Lahore that in some ways prefigures Magic Realism in its darkly poetic transformation of the realistic into the utterly fantastic.

Racked by sleeplessness on a stiflingly hot night, the unnamed narrator (presumably Kipling himself) choses a random direction that takes him into the walled city itself, along a highway flanked with sleeping men, to climb the Mosque of Wazir Khan in search of a cool breeze.

In terms of narrative, that's your lot, similarly character development, obstacles to be overcome or any other of the accepted ingredients in the modern short story stew, and its precisely this freedom from narrative convention that allows Kipling to paint his vivid nightmare and that gives The City of Dreadful Night its power. It is, if you like, a fantastical piece of reportage, although very firmly anchored in the reality of 19th century Lahore, taken from the skewed perspective of the chronic insomniac.

The description of a 'disused Mahomedan burial-ground', sets the tone 'where the jawless skulls and rough-butted shank-bones, heartlessly exposed by the July rains, glimmered like mother o' pearl on the rain-channelled soil. The heated air and the heavy earth had driven the very dead upward for coolness' sake.' but is only the beginning of a brief but intense phantasmagoria where sleeping men lie like 'sheeted corpses... some face downwards, arms folded, in the dust; some with clasped hands flung up above their heads; some curled up dog-wise; some thrown like limp gunny-bags over the side of the grain carts; and some bowed with their brows on their knees in the full glare of the Moon.'

Taking both its title and tone from James Thomas' poem (which itself presented a nightmarish vision of Victorian London in all its polluted, industrial glory) The City of Dreadful Night is Kipling at his most powerful, macabre image piled upon macabre image where even the simple act of a man throwing 'a jar of water over his fevered body' becomes something much more siniister - 'the tinkle of the falling water strikes faintly on the ear. Two or three other men, in far-off corners of the City of Dreadful Night, follow his example, and the water flashes like heliographic signals' and the disappearance of the moon behind a cloud heralds an even deeper sense of horror than the 'sickly warm flood of light' which had pervaded both city and story before.

While his Imperial outlook tends not to sit well with modern audiences, Kipling was nevertheless a master of mood and, like Robert Louis Stephenson before him, had the uncanny knack of being able to pick exactly the right word at the right time. You can feel the heat of the Indian night, smell the 'evil savours, animal and vegetable, that a walled city can brew in a day and a night' and feel the sense of fragmenting reality that the narrator experiences as he walks through the nocturnal streets.

As the evocation of a waking nightmare The City of Dreadful Night has few equals and its influence can be felt in such works as M. John Harrison's Viriconium, Tanith Lee's Paradys and in the more baroque elements of C.J Cherryh's Sunfall sequence. If you've never read Kipling before, or thought him merely a writer of stirring adventure stories, The City of Dreadful Night may give you a new perspective on this fascinating and often brilliant writer.

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/2429/

NICHOLAS COURTNEY 1929 - 2011

2011-02-23T16:01:00.002Z

Recent news reports the death of the actor Nicholas Courtney, probably best known to genre fans for his portrayal of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in Dr Who.

A regular in the series during the 1970's and 1980's he also made appearances in such fantasy television shows as The Avengers, The Champions and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) as well as playing many other roles in a variety of television, radio and film.

The very epitome of the unflappable English officer, his portrayal of The Brigadier was, for me, one of the highlights of the Jon Pertwee years and I still shudder ever so slightly whenever I pass a shop window filled with mannequins, half expecting them to come to life a la the Autons.

WITH MANY SHADES UPDATED

2011-02-18T16:19:00.004Z

For those of you who are interested in such things, I've just updated by other blog, With Many Shades. The updates include new issues of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Absent Willow Review, Ray Gun Revival, EDF & Daily Science Fiction.

http://withmanyshades.blogspot.com/

The Unsinkable HPL

2011-02-02T23:08:00.003Z

News of a new online zine of Lovecraftian fiction - The Lovecraft Ezine.

Issue one is currently available online and features new fiction from Bruce L. Priddy, William Meikle, John Prescott and Bruce Durham.

With both this and the excellent Innsmouth Free Press (new issue available soon), it seems that the influence of H.P Lovecraft and appetite for Mythos fiction is continuing on apace. From pulpster to literary giant... not bad going.

As HPL himself wrote: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, yet with stranger aeons, even Death may die.”

You can find out more about The Lovecraft Ezine here http://lovecraftzine.wordpress.com/ and Innsmouth Free Press here: http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/

HOORAY FOR HOK

2011-01-21T22:45:00.002Z

Next month sees the release of Battle In The Dawn: The Complete Hok the Mighty by Manly Wade Wellman.

Published by the very wonderful Planet Stories imprint of Piazo, this represents the first time that Wellman's prehistoric hero appears in a complete and authorized edition.

I've only read a couple of the Hok stories in the past and they are wonderful - stone age sword and sorcery (so to speak) stories that first appeared in the 1930's and which Wellman added to even up to the time of his death. In fact, one of the last incomplete fragments that Wellman left behind was the start of a new Hok story.

I'm really excited about this new edition, Planet Stories have done a great job of keeping pulp fiction alive, publishing collections and novels by such authors as CL Moore, Henry Kuttner, Michael Moorcock, Leigh Brackett and Robert E. Howard, most of which have been sadly out of print for many years (such as Kuttner's Elak of Atlantis stories which deserve a place on the shelves of any self-respecting sword and sorcery fanatic).

You can find out more about Hok, Battle In the Dawn and Planet Stories here:

http://paizo.com/store/paizo/planetStories

TUSSAGAROTH REVISITED

2011-01-16T15:42:00.003Z

Some more nice words about my S&S Mythos tale The Song of Tussagaroth, which appeared in the October issue of Innsmouth Free Press, this time from Angela Spencer in the pages of Rise Reviews.

“The Song of Tussagaroth” by James Lecky proved to be an unexpected piece to find in the magazine. This lovely piece of dark fantasy was more closely related to Howard’s Hyborian Age or Lovecraft’s Dreamlands than the usual nods to Lovecraft’s work. As best I can tell it is the author’s own setting as well, as is the old god Tussagaroth that lends the story its name. It was a fun piece to read and an interesting break from the other stories."

Angela has good things to say about the magazine, too. You can read the full thing here:

http://risereviews.com/2011/01/15/innsmouth-free-press-issue-5-october-2010/

WITH MANY SHADES

2011-01-15T04:29:00.002Z

A quick plug for my other blog, With Many Shades. As regular readers might know. With Many Shades is a listing of various online, and occasionally print, publications that fall into the category of science fiction and fantasy.

It's a hopefully decent enough resource for both reader and writers. if you haven't checked it out yet then please do (and maybe consider following the blog, too, it needs all the followers it can get)

And that's all I have to say about that.

http://withmanyshades.blogspot.com/

THIN BLOOD AT AURORA WOLF

2011-01-04T19:26:00.005Z

My Celtic flavoured fantasy Thin Blood is currently available to read at Aurora Wolf.

It's the first of what I hope will be a new series of tales set in Orialla, which is my fantasy version of Ireland.

The stories (there are currently two of them) have a slightly more upbeat tempo than most of my other pieces - at least, I think they do, it's hard to tell sometimes.

This issue also contains a new story, Masks, by the excellent Megan Arkenberg.

You can find Thin Blood here: http://aurorawolf.com/2011/01/thin-blood/

GETTING INTO 2011

2011-01-03T20:58:00.003Z

Well, the New Year has begun and I think a lot of resolutions have already been broken. Not by me, though, since I didn't make any.

One thing I did make my mind up to do, however, was to revisit a few of those stories that remain unfinished and see if the passing of time has helped with those tricky little plot turns that effectively painted them into corners.

What struck me first and foremost was exactly how many of these stories I have: two unfinished Tulun stories (one of which is currently hovering at the 8,000 word mark), Three that fall into my Shining Cities sequence and at least half a dozen others ranging from a new Mythos sword and sorcery story to a steampunkesque 'multiverse' tale to the odd foray in 'straightforward' sf.

Most of all, I realised that I have 14,000 words of a novella that I've been working at on-and-off for the last while (it's a sort of alternative world thing where the sorce of magic is dragon's blood and the dragons - or dreki - are hunted for them in much the same way that whales were hunted during the 19th century).

With no false modesty, most of these stories aren't bad (although a couple are right stinkers and I know why I gave up on them) and certainly deserve to be finished. After all, no one is going to read a story that still sitting on my hard drive or in my notebooks (this, by the way, applies to every writer and not just me).

So I have made up my mind to get these particular stories finished. Not a resolution, you understand, more of a duty to those characters who have remained in literary limbo for too long. Hopefully they'll forgive me for leaving them.

HEROIC FANTASY QUARTERLY ISSUE 7

2011-01-02T21:49:00.003Z

The newest issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is live and unleashed for your reading pleasure.

Fiction Contents

LORD OF THE BRASS HOST, by Dariel Quiogue

Dare we call this beauty a tale of S&S steampunk upon the steppes? We dare!

THE LAST FREE BEAR, by J. S. Bangs

Hope drives them across the tundra, and revenge into a world of legend!

SHATTERING THE SPEAR, by P. Djeli Clark

When the forces of the Witch Priest threaten the Southlands, only the mighty Zhusa and their allies stand in the way. But are unbreakable spears enough to stop this ancient evil . . .

Poetry Contents

LAMENT FOR THE FATHERS, by Joshua Hampton

A poem seemingly straight from the middle ages! With this his second poem to grace our electronic pages, Mr. Hampton currently reigns as HFQ’s Poet Laureate. (You can check out the prior here, from the halcyon days of ’09.)

METTLE, by Scott Matthews

We couldn’t have asked for a better winter poem. Short but powerful, certain lines of this piece are sure to warm the hearts of heroic fans everywhere — you’ll know ‘em when you see ‘em!

Art

This quarter’s artwork is “Wizard’s Fire” by Simon Cowell. Mr Cowell is a freelance concept artist, Illustrator, and painter living in Sydney Australia.

http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/

Happy New Year

2010-12-31T15:29:00.004Z

And so we bid farewell to 2010.

Here's hoping that the year treated you well and that 2011 will bring only good things in both your personal and professional life.

DAILY SCIENCE FICTION

2010-12-30T13:20:00.002Z

A quick plug for the excellent sf webzine Daily Science Fiction.

Doing exactly what it says on the tin, DFS provides subscribers with new sf and fantasy every weekday, spanning the length and breadth of the genre(s) from traditional fantasy to hard sf and everything else in between.

It's free and only takes a couple of clicks to subscribe.

Go on, you know you want to.

http://dailysciencefiction.com/

THIN BLOOD AT AURORA WOLF

2010-12-29T00:35:00.003Z

I've just received word that my short story Thin Blood has been accepted by Aurora Wolf and should be online this weekend. It's a Celtic fantasy and one of my first attempts to use elements of Irish mytholgy in my writing.

It'll be a good start to 2011 and hopefully a good omen for the coming year.

You can find Aurora Wolf here: http://aurorawolf.com/

BOOKTRUST IN DANGER

2010-12-26T23:12:00.006Z

In an act which is probably best described as cultural barbarism, the UK government has cut the subsidy to the UK based book charity Booktrust, taking away some £13 million pounds.

The charity's national book-gifting programmes are well-known and wide-reaching. Bookstart gives a free pack of books to every baby in the UK, Booktime donates a book pack to children shortly after they start school, and Booked Up enables each child starting secondary school to choose a book for themselves. The charity's aim is to give everyone the chance to experience what it calls "the delight and power of books and the written word" regardless of income, literacy skills, disability or culture.

The government's £13m was used to generate a further £56m-worth of sponsorship for the bookgifting schemes from publishing partners and corporate sponsors.

In an age when concerns about literacy levels are increasing every day, and the cost of higher education is becoming prohibitive for all but the well off (or those prepared to start their working lives with debts of more than £30,000) it is nothing short of madness to add to this trend rather than attempt to solve it.

If I was a writer of speculative fiction (and I am) I would see this as the first step towards creating a drone underclass, incapable of anything other than taking orders from those who have set themselves up as their social superiors. Eugenics, anyone? There is a chilling Orwellian taint to this whole thing, mixed liberally with a touch of Aldous Huxley, and a whole helping of Thatcherism.

To my mind it is only common sense to help create a literate, educated population, particularly in a time when traditional industry has all but vanished from the United Kingdom and when we need to look more and more to non-traditional and creative industry but without an educated population we cannot do this.

Our government is a sham, to say the least, caring little or nothing about the working classes, or indeed the middle classes.

Many writers, teacher and librarians have already expressed their dismay and disgust at the withdrawal of the Booktrust's funding, (leading to a partial about-face by the Liberal/Conservative government.) I am adding my voice to this, if you care about the future of literacy in this country, please add yours.

Locus Online: And Other Such Delights

2010-12-24T03:04:00.003Z

Some late breaking news:

My short story "And Other Such Delights", which appeared in the excellent Beneath Ceaseless Skies earlier this year, has been mentioned in Lois Tilton's Short Fiction Reviews in Review at Locus Online as part of her summary of the best fiction from 2010.

I am rather delighted!

THROUGH BLOOD AND IRON

2010-12-23T18:31:00.003Z

Today I recieved the final edits for my short story, Forged in Heaven, Tempered in Hell, which features in the new Ricasso Press anthology Through Blood and Iron, due in 2011.

Edited by Rob Santa and showcasing heroic fantasy and sword & sorcery in all its action-packed glory, the anthology features a whole bunch of excellent writers including Christopher Heath, Bruce Durham, Nathan Meyer, TW Williams, Steve Goble and many more.

I am, to say the least, delighted to be in such august company.

On Writin' and Readin'

2010-12-16T23:12:00.007Z

"I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from [John] Bunyan to [A.S.] Byatt." Michael Moorcock

"I hate those writers who have been terribly influenced by Lord Kafka or Franz Dunsany -big show offs. Personally I was influenced by guys like Clifford Simak and John W. Campbell Jr... A fellow with science fiction writing ambitions should read science fiction." Isaac Asimov.

I recently re-read the above quotes and it got me thinking about my own reading habits. First of all, as I have said many, many times before, I am an unashamed and unabashed lover of science fiction and fantasy literature (quite a lot of movies and TV stuff too, but let's just stick to books for the moment, shall we?) and it makes up a large part of my literary diet. In the last year I have read (or re-read) books and stories by Joe Abercrombie, Robert Silverberg, M. John Harrison, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Tanith Lee, Scott Lynch, Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, Karl Edward Wagner, Jack Vance, Peter Brett, Mark Charan Newton, Michael Moorcock, Andrzej Sapkowski, Brian Aldiss and JG Ballard (to mention quite a few) and thoroughly enjoyed them.

Equally I have read (or re-read) works by Joseph Conrad, Voltaire, Malcolm Lowry, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William Shakespeare, T.S Elliot, William Blake, Jean Paul Satre, Virginia Wolff, May Sinclair, Martin Amis, Wells Tower, Dante, Graham Greene, Charles Bukowski, Daniel Defoe and Christopher Isherwood (to name virtually all of them) and gained a huge amount of pleasure from those as well.

As if that wasn't enough I've also read histories of the Crusades, the Greek and Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars and the fanciful studies of Atlantis and Lemuria by William Scott-Elliot (which are a hoot and a half).

I've also read a fair bit of Kafka and Dunsany over the years, too, so I guess you could say that I read a lot and like to keep it varied.

For me, reading science fiction and fantasy is and always has been a pleasure, but I fully understand that a writer can get stymied by following such a path and runs the risk of disappearing up a literary cul de sac. Michael Moorcock makes a good point, particularly if you are more interested in literary growth than straightforward adventure stories, and is a good warning against simply recycling well-worn tropes and plots. But by the same token, though, I agree with the words of Isaac Asimov in that too much of the overtly literary can alienate a reader (or a writer) who is simply looking for entertainment and, of course, if you are not familiar with the tropes and plots of sf there is always the chance that you will recycle them unwittingly (working for weeks or months on that Grandfather Paradox story only to discover that Robert Heinlein did it years ago).

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, I feel. Opinions on what constitutes good science fiction and fantasy vary wildly, even within one person's own judgement - I hugely admire M. John Harrison's Viriconium sequence, for example, but also absolutely adore the work of Philip K. Dick although he was never a literary stylist in that same way that Harrison is. Is one necessarily better than the other? No, of course not.

As readers we take away different things from different writers, regardless of the genre in which they work (given that we can refer to 'literary' fiction as a genre), something that is doubly so as a writer: lessons about structure, point of view, handling the narrative, characterisation etc. I

It's healthy, I feel, for a writer to read both within and outside of his or her chosen genre, adapting techniques to suit their own writing, using literary experimentation when it suits or fits. After all, the world of books is a huge one... why limit yourself?

SKULL SALAD REVIEWS: THE SONG OF TUSSAGAROTH

2010-12-04T14:16:00.005Z

Some very kind words about The Song of Tussagaroth and Innsmouth Free Press from Deborah Walker at Skull Salad Reviews where she describes the story as "reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith". (Wheeeee!)

To say that I am delighted would be the understatement of the season, particularly since The Song of Tussagaroth was/is my attempt to do a story with a Hyperborea vibe to it and is the first of a series of sword and sorcery mythos tales that I've been tinkering with over the past while.

You can read the review here:

http://skullsaladreviews.blogspot.com/2010/12/innsmouth-free-press.html

MY FAVOURITE SHORT STORIES: THE SEA WAS WET AS WET CAN BE BY GAHAN WILSON

2010-11-30T19:17:00.004Z

I must confess that I haven't read much by Gahan Wilson, which considering the quality of his writing is a terrible admission, but in my opinion The Sea Was Wet As Wet Can Be - first published in 1967 - is an almost perfect short story.

Chilling, clever, poignant and touching, it is as story about how we can sometimes lose ourselves, merely existing rather than living, about how the fear of being alone can lead us to make wrong decisions, about how the incongruously inane can suddenly become terrifying.

And it's about vampires. Sort of.

Taking his inspiration from Lewis Carroll's 'The Walrus and the Carpenter' Gahan Wilson paints a remarkable picture of a group of people who's fractured lives are as expertly portrayed as anything in say, The Great Gatsby or The Beautiful and the Damned. In fact, most of these characters and their cruel hedonism would not have been out of place in the Jazz Age or cavorting around as Bright Young Things with an undercurrent of self-loathing never far from the surface.

“I felt we made an embarrassing contrast to the open serenity of the scene around us. The pure blue of the sky was unmarked by a single cloud or bird, and nothing stirred on the vast stretch of beach except ourselves. The sea, sparkling under the freshness of the early morning sun, looked invitingly clean. I wanted to wade into it and wash myself, but I was afraid I would contaminate it. We are a contamination here, I thought. We're like a group of sticky bugs crawling in an ugly little crowd over polished marble. If I were God and looked down and saw us, lugging our baskets and our silly, bright blankets, I would step on us and squash us with my foot.”

Not-so-fresh from an all night party, Phil and his companions decide to extend the revels and propose a beach picnic, urged on – or ordered to – by “Good old, mean old Carl.” the “greatest little drink pourer in the world. He used drinks like other types of sadists used whips. He kept beating you with them until you dropped or sobbed or went mad.”

Oddly and ironically, if any of the characters here most resemble the common view of the vampire it would be Carl. Leader, employer and chief torturer of the group “On the surface, with his eyes, with his face, with the handling of his entire body, Carl was a master of animation and expression. From sympathetic, heartfelt warmth, all the way to icy rage, and on every stop in-between, Carl was completely convincing. But only on the surface. Once you got to know Carl, and it took a while, you realized that none of it was really happening. That was because Carl had died, or been killed, long ago. Possibly in childhood. Possibly he had been born dead. So, under the actor's warmth and rage, the eyes were always the eyes of a corpse.”

Such is the accuracy and vividness of Gahan Wilson's writing that he creates living, breathing characters with a few sentences - “ Irene was particularly sensitive about seeing people alone because being alone had several times nearly produced fatal results for her. Being alone and taking pills to end the being alone.” “He was tall and bald and he had a huge Adam's apple and, like myself, he worked for Carl. I would have felt sorrier for Horace than I did if I hadn't had a sneaky suspicion that he was really happier when grovelling.” - and a large part of the fascination of “The Sea Was Wet...” comes from watching these poor, damaged creatures flail around.

But a simple examination of damaged lives, no matter how expertly done, isn't the be all and end all of this particular story.

“They were far away, barely bigger than two dots, but you could tell there was something odd about them even then...I watched the two approaching figures. The one was tall and bulky, and he moved with a peculiar, swaying gait. The other was short and hunched into himself, and he walked in a fretful, zigzag line beside his towering companion...
We sat quietly and watched them coming closer. The nearer they got, the odder they looked. "For heaven's sake!" said Irene. "The little one's wearing a square hat!"

"I think it's made of paper," said Mandie, squinting, "folded newspaper."

"Will you look at the moustache on the big bastard?" asked Carl. "I don't think I've ever seen a bigger bush in my life."

"They remind me of something," I said. The others turned to look at me.

The Walrus and the Carpenter …
"They remind me of the Walrus and the Carpenter," I said.”

And it is with this bravura twist that “The Sea Was Wet As Wet Can Be” becomes something utterly different, fascinating and frightening. For you see, the resemblance of the two newcomers to Lewis Carroll's oyster-hunting philosophers may not be entirely coincidental.

Weaving the text of Carroll's poem throughout the rest of the narrative, what begins as a friendly chat and drink on the beach soon changes into something darker despite (or rather precisely because of) the words on the page.

"Be that as it may," said the Walrus, patting the Carpenter on the flat top of his paper hat, "this is Edward Farr, and I am George Tweedy, both at your service. We are, uhm, both a trifle drunk, I'm afraid."
“Then the big one smiled, and everything was changed.... The smile of the Walrus did what a smile hasn't done for me in years—it melted my heart. I use the cornball phrase very much on purpose. When I saw his smile, I knew I could trust him; I felt in my marrow that he was gentle and sweet and had nothing but the best intentions. His resemblance to the Walrus in the poem ceased being vaguely chilling and became warmly comical. I loved him as I had loved the teddy bear of my childhood.”

Even a passing familiarity with the original poem will probably hint at the ending of “The Sea Was Wet...”

"I would have sworn you were looking for oysters," said Carl.

Again, Tweedy appeared startled.

"O Oysters, come and walk with us!" The Walrus did beseech …
"Oysters?" he asked. "Oh, no, we've got the oysters. All we lack is the means to cook 'em."

" 'Course we could always use a few more," said Farr, looking at his companion.

"I suppose we could, at that," said Tweedy thoughtfully.

I won't give the game away any more than I already have other than to say that the denouement of “The Sea Was Wet...” is as perfectly formed as every other aspect of the story and that the sense of desolation that Gahan Wilson creates, both in his characters and the landscape that surrounds them, is almost palpable. Not a pleasant read, perhaps, but a memorable one nevertheless,

Do yourself a kindness and read this brilliant short story, which you can find here (as long as this link is still working)

http://lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/wilson/index.html

Irvin Kershner (1923 - 2010)

2010-11-30T14:57:00.003Z

Yet more sad news as the director Irvin Kershner passed away on 27 November aged 87.

Probably best known to genre fans as the director of The Empire Strikes Back, Kershner also directed Robocop 2 and the James Bond film Never Say Never Again, which marked Sean Connery's return to the role. Other films of genre note included the psychological thriller The Eyes of Laura Mars the Eliot Gould/Donald Sutherland comedy S*P*Y*S and the revisionist western The Return of A Man Called Horse.

Ingrid Pitt (1937 - 2010)

2010-11-23T20:26:00.004Z

Best known for her appearances in a number of British horror films in the 1970's, Ingrid Pitt has passed away at the age of 73.

Although she only stared in a few films for Hammer and Amicus (most notably Countess Dracula where she played a thinly veiled (and somewhat 'vamped up') version of the infamous Elizabeth Bathory, Ingrid Pitt was nonetheless closely identified with the horror genre for most of her career.

Apart from Countess Dracula she also appeared in Hammer's The Vampire Lovers – based loosely upon Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla – The House That Dripped Blood for Amicus (more or less playing a version of herself this time) and, briefly, in The Wicker Man.

DINO DE LAURENTIIS (1919 - 2010)

2010-11-13T09:53:00.002Z

The legendary film producer Dino De Laurentiis has passed away aged 91.

In a career which saw him produce almost 150 movies since 1940, his output contained many things of interest to genre fans including Barbarella, King Kong, Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, The Dead Zone, Dune, Evil Dead 2 & 3 and, perhaps his finest (certainly campest) contribution to sf/fantasy cinema, Flash Gordon.

To say that they don't make 'em like Dino anymore would be an understatement of sorts.

Good News This Week

2010-11-06T19:44:00.005Z

Some good news this week, my short story Bride of the Waters has been accepted for the April 2011 issue of Lacuna, Megan Arkenberg's very fine ezine of historical fiction. A Lovecraftain tale set in renaissance Venice, it's part of a series of fantasy/ s&s tales I've been dabbling with for the past little while. Lacuna can be found here: http://lacunajournal.blogspot.com/

Also this week, the short interview I did for Innsmouth Free Press a while back is now up. It relates fairly directly to my short story in IFP, The Song of Tussagaroth, and do I do get to namecheck some of my favourite writers in it. http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/?p=9045

A NEW MARKET: WILD STACKS

2010-10-31T22:11:00.003Z

Any new market that welcomes Sword and Sorcery is always welcome, even if - as in this case - it's a non-paying one.

"Almost all types of fantasy will be considered, from horror to heroic fiction, sword & sorcery, urban fantasy, steam-punk, supernatural, surreal, weird fiction, and noir crime. No hard science fiction, erotica or stories designed to gross out."

Welcome to Wild Stacks: the Library of the Imagination, the online magazine that is home for stories that explore and expand the imagination. Wild Stacks is published quarterly by The Alchemy Press. Issue 1 is due shortly. Meanwhile, for Issue 0 we're proud to present stories from Allen Ashley, Mike Chinn and Anne Gay.

FLAT TOP By ALLEN ASHLEY

BY RIGHT OF THE STARS By ANNE GAY

LOCO MORTIS By MIKE CHINN

http://www.wildstacks.co.uk/

MORE SWINGS THAN ROUNDABOUTS

2010-10-27T17:33:00.003+01:00

In writing terms it's not been a great week with a bunch more rejections landing in my inbox - one a day so far, and it's only Wednesday.

Still, I have a relatively thick skin these days and always do my best to remain sanguine about such things and have already started to think about other markets to submit the stories to. I rarely think of a rejection as being a damning indictment of my writing or story-telling skills - good stories get rejected as well as bad ones, after all, and there are many reasons why a particular tale doesn't fit a particular market.

It has prompted me to get serious about novel writing, though, bolstered by a great piece of advice in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction by Cory Doctorow and Karl Schroder (which is a witty and rather handy book) "one way to write a novel is to commit to producing one page a day, every day". Three days in and I have three pages, no more and no less, but I have found myself itching to get back to the keyboard and continue on where I left off. I've taken it to the extreme of letting half finished sentences hang so that when I come back to the story I have somewhere definite to begin. Will this method work? Ask me in 365 days (or approximately 90,000 words) and I'll tell you (though to be fair, I have plotted the first third of the story and am adding to that as I go along with many notes and some ideas that didn't have a home elsewhere).

So, yes, there have been more swings than roundabouts this week, but at least the roundabout I'm currently on is a fun ride.

REALMS OF FANTASY TO CLOSE

2010-10-18T19:43:00.002+01:00

Posted on the RoF website is the sad news that Realms of Fantasy is to close once again.

"Realms of Fantasy has ceased operations as of 10/18/10. Please do not send your manuscripts to us. We would love to consider them but can no longer offer them a home. We wish you luck finding a home for your stories elsewhere. Thanks so much for your support over the years."

For more details, see the following link:

http://www.rofmag.com/2010/10/18/a-note-from-the-publisher/

The Joys of Technology

2010-10-14T16:26:00.004+01:00

Last week my old laptop - affectionately refered to round these parts as Vincent - made a grinding noise and breathed its last. It was a pain rather than a problem as I am constantly backing up my files, emailing story drafts to myself and am generally rather paranoid about losing my work (- lost maybe a day's work which would be about 1,000 odd words of various things. And thankfully, Vincent chose to expire at a time when I had enough 'disposable' cash to afford a cheap-n-cheerful replacement. So on to E Bay it was.

I struggled on manfully for a few days, writing by hand and using the other computer in the house, but my productivity has slowed rather substantially due to the lack of technology.

Let joy be unbounded, however. since Vincent's replacement - Boris - arrived today (and this little piece of pointless prose is his first official act).

It did get me thinking about my own working practices. Most advice to writers tells you that you should set aside a particular portion of the day to work, sticking as closely as possible to your schedule. This is, of course, extremely good advice and something that I try to stick to (my writing hours tend to be first thing in the morning (my work schedule permitting) and, more often, quite late at night.

There are those writers who only write when the muse strikes them but I've never been able to do that, most of my writing is dragged kicking and screaming from the ether - at least initially - and only really when the process has begun (say, the first two or three pages) do I start to let the muse dictate things. By that I mean I start to wonder why the characters have found themselves in this particular situation, how they can extracate themselves from it and what might happen to complicate things.

With a computer to hand this isn't a bad way of doing things for me - I'm always moving back and forth in a story changing things to suit narrative and/or character shifts - but when the process involves constant crossing out, tiny additions in my already difficult-to-read scrawl and sometimes wholesale changes in tone and perspective, it can become a chore.

But since Boris appears to be a friendly and efficient helper I can hopefully get back up to speed in the next few days.

Ah, the joys of technology (and may all those dieties who may nor may not exist bless E-Bay where Boris was purchased at a very reasonable price).

Roy Ward Baker (1916 - 2010)

2010-10-08T14:15:00.004+01:00

The British film director Roy Ward Baker has passed away at the age of 93. Probably best known for his 1958 film A Night To Remember, which recreated the sinking of Titanic, he also directed many fine horror movies for Hammer and Amicus.

His Hammer output included Scars of Dracula, The Vampire Lovers, The Anniversary, the slightly bonkers Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, the even more bonkers Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires and the brilliant Quatermass and the Pit.

For Amicus he directed the portmanteau films Asylum, The Vault of Horror and The Monster Club as well as And Now The Screaming Starts, a rare attempt by Amicus to take on Hammer’s gothic horror mantle.

Once described as 'the grand old man of British horror', Baker was never a stylist in the same way as, say, Terence Fisher or Freddie Francis but his horror output was never less than entertaining - particularly given the budgetary restrictions imposed by Hammer and Amicus - and he always took the material seriously, even something as downright strange as The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, a Kung Fu/Hammer crossover that really has to be seen to be believed.

James Lecky: Fiction

2010-10-07T01:55:00.003+01:00

The world being what it is and the internet being what it is, things sometimes get lost - links get broken, copyright expires and other such things.

That being the case, I have put together a companion blog to Tales From the Computerbank to rescue some of my older (and not so older) fiction from limbo, for anyone who cares to read them.

There are a few stories on there at the moment and I hope to add to it as time passes, mostly with stories published in the UK small press in the 1990's: as and when I can find them and retype (possibly even re-write!) them.

In the meantime, if you're interested, here it is:

http://jamesleckyfiction.blogspot.com/

The Song of Tussagaroth at Innsmouth Free Press

2010-10-04T21:45:00.002+01:00

Issue five of the very fine Lovecraftian e-zine Innsmouth Free Press is currently online for your reading pleasure and contains my short story The Song of Tussagaroth.

The story itself is, at least in part, my homage to the great Clark Ashton Smith and forms part of a series of mythos sword and sorcery tales that I'm dabbling with. The others, mostly at the notebook and/or half baked stage at the moment, currently rejoice under the umbrella title of Thule Before The Ice and, again, are my attempt to follow in the footsteps of CAS (but never to try and fill his shoes).

The new issue also includes fiction from Kenneth Yu, Paul Jessup, Tom Hamilton, Martin Hayes, Jarrid Deaton, Julio Toro San Martin and Cheryl McCreary.

Check it out for Dagon's sake (It's even got my name on the front cover!)

http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/

Jupiter reviewed at SFRevu

2010-10-01T13:53:00.002+01:00

A decent review of the new issue of Jupiter is currently up at SFRevu, calling The Earth Beneath My Feet 'a nice little tale'. Reviewer Sam Tomaino also has good things to say about Rosie Oliver, Emma Knight and Nigel Fisher.

You can read the whole thing here:

http://www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=11323

HEROIC FANTASY QUARTERLY ISSUE 6

2010-10-01T10:32:00.003+01:00

A new issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is always a cause for celebration and issue 6 has just been released. For those who don't know (and if not, why not?) HFQ is one of the best venues for sword and sorcery/ heroic fantasy fiction out there.

The new issue contains fiction from David Pilling (Heart of Man) and Robert Rhodes (The Sea Wasp), as well as poetry from Charles Saplak (Ambition, Purpose, Outcome) Shennandoah Diaz (The Dance) and stunning artwork from Mariusz Gandzel.

As if all that wasn't enough, HFQ also has a new addition to the editorial team as I will be helping out over the next few months to ease the burden on the already overworked editors ("At my signal, unleash hell!")

You can find it all here: http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/

IRON BOUND

2010-10-01T10:24:00.003+01:00

The first issue of editor Jesse Dedman's new sword and sorcery ezine, Iron Bound, has gone live and unleashed.

It contains stories by Ty Johnston (Behold Now the Behemoth), A.D Dawson (The White Rabbit/ The Mole Hole/ Rose's Baby), Jesse Dedman (Moranet's Rebirth), David J. West (Sailing to Valhalla) and, ahem, James Lecky (The Cold Legions).

You can find and download it here: http://ironboundmag.wordpress.com/

SWINGS AND ROUNDABOUTS

2010-09-28T01:58:00.004+01:00

All writers go though troughs, I reckon, and I've been going through another one of mine recently, with a few rejections in my inbox over the past couple of days. Mustn't grumble too much, though, as at least one acceptance has also landed in and I've also done a mini-interview for Innsmouth Free Press, chatting briefly about my upcoming story The Song of Tussugaroth which is due to appear there early next month.

Also next month, the first issue of a new sword and sorcery ezine, Iron Bound, is due to go live and will contain my short story The Cold Legions (which explains the wintery landscape on the right).

Swings and roundabouts, as they say.

You can find Innsmouth Free Press here:

http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/

And Iron Bound here:

http://ironboundmag.wordpress.com/

A BIT OF PROMOTION....

2010-09-27T00:37:00.004+01:00

... on behalf of Nathan Meyer, whose new novel is currently available from Mirrorstone.

Aldwyn's Academy: A Companion Novel to A Practical Guide to Wizardry

Enter a school for magic where even the first day can be (un)deadly...On the very first day of school at the world-famous Aldwyns Academy for Wizardry, fledgling wizard Dorian Ravensmith finds himself immersed in a mystery. White wolves have been attacking incoming students. Ghosts are haunting the Snapping Dragon Gardens. And the professors lurk in the halls, whispering about a shadowy wizard who seems to be behind it all.That night, Dorian spies a figure creeping into the Snapping Dragon Gardens and and he follows, certain that with the help of a few magic items and simple potions, he can catch the culprit by daybreak and return a hero. But as hobgoblins, banshees, and a terrifying dragon try to stop him at every turn, Dorian discovers that he's stepped into an (un)deadly trap that could not only destroy his future as a wizard but also the beloved wizardry school.

You can find out more here: http://www.amazon.com/Aldwyns-Academy-Companion-Practical-Wizardry/dp/078695504X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1285431712&sr=1-1

DAILY SCIENCE FICTION

2010-09-20T13:32:00.002+01:00

Edited by Jonathan Laden and Michele Barasso, Daily Science Fiction does exactly what it says on the tin - delivering sf and fantasy stories to your inbox every weekday.

Recent authors have included Colin Harvey, Cat Rambo, Melissa Mead, Ree Young and Debs Walker.

It'll only cost you a little time to subscribe and any new market for short fiction is always worth supporting.

You can find out more here: http://dailysciencefiction.com/

ONIRISMES

2010-09-15T23:08:00.002+01:00

Courtesy of the SF Reader Forum comes news of a new bi-lingual webzine, Onirismes. Published in both English and French, Onirismes is ‘dedicated to publishing short fiction and poetry that belong in the fields of speculative and fantastic literature (Fantasy, Science fiction, and all kinds of interstitial experiments).’

It all sounds rather good to me.

You can find out more here: http://onirismes.com/

Jupiter/ The Earth Beneath My Feet

2010-09-07T16:31:00.004+01:00

SFCrowsnest has a good review of the current issue of Jupiter currently online. Reviewer Rod McDonald singles out Nigel Fisher's debut story 'Oil on Canvas' for particular praise (and quite right, too, it's an excellent story) but also has nice things to say about my own contribution to the issue The Earth Beneath My Feet.

You can read the full review here:

http://www.sfcrowsnest.com/articles/books/2010/Jupiter-XXIX-Thyone-15309.php

MY FAVOURITE SHORT STORIES: SURVIVOR TYPE BY STEPHEN KING

2010-09-03T23:38:00.003+01:00

Without doubt the greatest popular novelist of our time, Stephen King is also one of the biggest champions and finest exponents of the short story. In an age when we are constantly being told that the short story is dead as the dodo or that short story collection simply don’t sell (but then, I’m fairly certain they never did in any real quantities) Stephen King constantly bucks the trend.

More importantly, the man has a real love for the short form, which is evident in both the introductions to his collections and the story notes which appear in them. His 1978 collection Night Shift is probably one of the best single-author collections out there (and contains such stories as Children of the Corn, The Mangler, Sometimes They Come Back, Quitters Inc and the wonderfully Lovecraftian Jerusalem’s Lot (a prequel to ‘Salem’s Lot).

1985’s Skeleton Crew doesn’t have quite the same ratio of instantly brilliant stories but does contain his wonderful novella The Mist and a clutch of SF shorts such as The Jaunt and Beachworld that are perhaps atypical of King’s work but are nonetheless entertaining reads. The real jewel in the crown however is Survivor Type, one of the finest gross-out tales ever written. Not that the story is particularly graphic or bloody (certainly not when compared to the ‘splatterpunk’ of Clive Barker or the early novels of James Herbert) but its central question – how much of himself can a man actually eat? - is a nicely shuddersome one.

Written as the diary of Richard Pine (aka Richard Pinzetti), a skilled surgeon although less than wholesome individual who finds himself marooned on a coral island with no food and only, “four gallons of water. A sewing kit. This book I’m writing in… two knives, one dull and one fairly sharp, one combination fork and spoon… two kilos of pure heroin, worth about $350,000, New York street value.”

Dr Pine, you see, has never had any qualms about selling blank prescriptions, or diet pills. Or Librium. Or in this case transporting two kilos of heroin from Thailand to the USA, a last-gasp business transaction when he finds the authorities on his trail.

But with the sinking of the liner that was taking him home and a hasty, selfish escape, Pine finds himself on a barren island “190 paces wide at its thickest point, and some 267 paces long from tip to tip.”

Starving, but savagely determined to survive, Pine kills and eats a seagull (raw) but his second attempt to catch a bird results in a broken ankle: “a compound fracture. It went like a gunshot. The pain was unbelievable.”

Unable to move and with the risk of infection setting in, Pine decides that the only course of action open to him is to amputate his own foot, using a generous amount of heroin as anesthetic. “And as wretched as I am I still want to live. I remember what Mockridge used to say in Basic Anatomy… Sooner or later, he’d say, the question comes up in every medical student’s career: How much shock trauma can the patient stand?... Cut to its base level, gentlemen, he’d say, the answer is always another question: How badly does the patient want to survive.
I think I can bring it off.
I really do.
What follows thereafter is as gruesome as it is inevitable:
“I was very careful.
I washed it thoroughly before I ate it.”

As hunger and regular snots of heroin begin to take their toll, Pine comes to accept that “…that the only help I could look to in the matter of replenishing my sapped vitality was my own body.”

Systematically, like a mechanic stripping an engine, Pine begins to literally devour himself from the feet upwards. And as the nature of the narrator changes so too does the nature of the narrative.

Initially lucid and straightforward, the diary begins to change tone as Pine records his thoughts, mixing hallucination, fever dream, pain and the rush and withdrawal of heroin addiction. “Took the other leg at the knee. Sleepy all day. “Doctor was this operation necessary?” Haha. Shaky hands, like an old man. Hate them. Blood under the fingernails. Scabs.”

“Am I insane yet? I must be. I’m a monster now, a freak. Nothing left below the groin. Just a freak. A head attached to a torso dragging itself along the sand by the elbows. A crab. A stoned crab… Hey man I’m just a poor stoned crab can you spare me a dime.
Hahaha.”

There are a number of factors that make Survivor Type a great short story. First is the sheer audacity of its central idea – that of self-cannibalism – second is the character of Richard Pine himself; despite the fact that he is utterly unlikeable, King manages to inject a certain sympathy into the character so that rather than hate we come to grudgingly admire Pine (for a while anyway). Third is King’s writing, which shifts Pine’s voice effortlessly from clarity to near-madness, to self-pity to bullish thug, to, well, the survivor type.

“Who cares, this hand or that, good food good meat good God let’s eat.”

With Stephen King as its protector the short story is in good hands.

NURTURE YOUR DARLINGS

2010-08-28T18:14:00.002+01:00

One of the most common pieces of writing advice is, ‘murder your darlings’ (or ‘kill your darlings’ depending upon which version suits you best). First ascribed to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and later to William Faulkner, it is a solid and dependable piece of advise which more or less means, don’t be afraid to be ruthless with either your prose or characters, or, to quote Strunk and White, ‘Omit Needless Words’ (and, by extension, needless characters, scenes or plot lines).

Of course, the definition of ‘needless’ in any given situation can vary but in a sentence like: “He roughly, savagely, violently grabbed at her”, its fairly obvious where the needless words are. But when it comes to something like:

“Zobal the archer and Cushara the pikebearer had poured many a libation to their friendship in the sanguine liquors of Yoros and the blood of the kingdom's enemies.” (The Black Abbot of Puthuum – Clark Ashton Smith)

or

“Liane merged himself with the shadow of a wall, and stood watching like a wolf, alert for any flicker of motion.” (Liane the Wayfarer – Jack Vance)

It becomes much less obvious where the needless words might be, short of rewriting both sentences to make them much less elegant. On the other hand the lean and efficient prose of a writer like Hemmingway

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.” (A Farewell to Arms)

has a rhythm all of its own. Most distinctive writers have a recognizable cadence to their prose, that way of putting one word after another to create a particular mood or atmosphere (some are more extreme than others, of course, and a writer like Clark Ashton Smith can quickly lose a modern reader with its twists and turns).

Now, taken to its most extreme conclusion, the notion of murdering one’s darlings and omitting those needless words can rob any piece of prose of its freshness, its originality and, of course, of its individual style.

So perhaps its time that we learned to nurture our darlings, to be proud of that particularly fine turn of phrase that we’ve just written, to give a little leeway to those characters of whom we have grown overly fond – after all, if Ian Fleming had chosen to murder his particular darling early on then James Bond would be nothing more than a footnote in the history of espionage fiction rather than the global brand that he is today.

I should point out that this is in no way a clarion call for self indulgence, (there are and always will be certain darlings that need to be clubbed over the head and left to rot in a shallow ditch) but rather the suggestion that its okay to trust yourself as a writer, to actually be proud of what you have written and the characters you have created.

After all, no one writes quite like you.

MY FAVOURITE SHORT STORIES: TALENT BY ROBERT BLOCH

2010-08-19T23:11:00.003+01:00

Robert Bloch (1917 – 94) was, quite simply, one of the giants of fantasy fiction. Probably most famous as the author of Psycho, he also wrote many other novels, screenplays and some of the finest short stories ever committed to paper: Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper, That Hellbound Train, The Opener of the Way, Edifice Complex, The Man Who Collected Poe, The Cloak and many, many others.

Ranging from Lovecraftian cosmic horror to clever and thoughtful SF to urban horror and, on occasion, the downright bizarre (particularly with his Runyanesque Lefty Feep stories) Bloch’s work was frequently underpinned with a deadpan and genuinely funny sense of humour (check out the carnivorous huts of Edifice Complex for evidence of that).

Talent, first published in 1960, shows Bloch at his dark and playful best. The story of a foundling child, Andrew Benson, who has an unnerving knack of mimicry, Talent takes Andrew from his discovery on the steps of St Andrew’s Orphanage to the moment when… well, to the moment when Robert Bloch delivers a killer of a final line and suddenly the enormity of the preceding tale becomes apparent.

Mute and withdrawn until the age of six, Andrew only emerged from his self-imposed cocoon after seeing a screen of the Marx Brothers’ Love Happy at the orphanage:

“And it was then that he talked.

He talked immediately, he talked perfectly, he talked fluently – but not in the manner of a six-year-old child. The voice that issued from his lips was that of a middle-aged man. It was a nasal, rasping voice, and even without the accompanying grimaces and facial expressions it was instantaneously recognizable as the voice of Groucho Marx.”

Thereafter, Andrew continues to expand his repertoire depending upon which movie he has just seen - Jack Palance, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre – with a particular fondness for horror films and for playing the bad guys. Naturally, his talent takes him onto the stage where he is nothing short of a sensation.

More sinisterly, it seems that tragedy and death follow Andrew wherever he goes, particularly for people who get in his way. His adoptive parents die in a boating accident – ‘you’ve probably seen something just like it in the movies a dozen times’ – his attorney is the victim of a hit and run accident after making certain allegations about young Andrew, a number of school friends suffer bizarre if non-fatal accidents, all of which have a distinct cinematic theme and five young women die in a brutal way after a reissue of the Universal Wolf Man movies.

Still, Andrew’s reputation as an actor and performer continue to grow, to the extent where movie stardom begins to beckon. But not everyone is particularly pleased about his meteoric rise or, indeed, the sinister import behind it.

“I don’t think the kid is even human, for that matter. Just because he turned up on those orphanage steps, you call him a foundling. Changeling might be a better word for it… it’s probably a more accurate term than the narrow meaning implies. I’m talking about the way he changes when he sees those movies… Yes, I mean he undergoes an actual physical transformation. Chameleon. Or some other form of life. Who can say?”

Related as a report rather than a more conventional ‘scene by scene’ narrative, Talent has a chilling distance to it, one that leads inexorably to its brilliant climax when Andrew is introduced to the joys of science fiction ‘creature features’ and suddenly realizes what he has been searching for all his life.

“Max Shick sat there in his chair and watched Andrew Benson change.

He watched him grow. He watched him put forth the eyes, the stalks, the writhing tentacles. He watched him twist and tower, filling the room and then overflowing until the flimsy stucco walls collapsed and there was nothing but the green, gigantic horror, the sixty-feet high monstrosity that may have been born in a screenwriter’s brain or may have been spawned beyond the stars, but certainly existed and drew nourishment from realms far from a three-dimensional world or three-dimensional concepts of sanity.

Max Shick will never forget that night and neither, of course, will anybody else.

That was the night the monster destroyed Los Angeles…”

A wonderful story from a writer whose imagination was a boundless as the many worlds he wrote about.

ANCIENT SHADES/ HFQ 5

2010-08-16T12:42:00.005+01:00

Some more nice words about Ancient Shades (which you can read in the current issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly) from the Philippine Online Chronicle which has described it as 'a fun, action-filled read' and (thankfully) has completely understood the various fantasy tropes that I utilized in the story ("the story does take advantage of the plot devices we know so well... the language used is beautiful.")

The reviewer also has good things to say about Aldrom by Matthew Wuertz, Christopher Wood's No Two Stones, Vonnie Winslow Crist's Before the Battle and Megan Arkenberg's What Sieglinde Serpentsayer Said To The King.

A good review all round and proving once again why HFQ is essential reading for anyone who enjoys S&S and Heroic Fantasy

http://www.thepoc.net/thepoc-features/pinoy-pop/reviews/9303-heroic-fantasy-review.html

Rather Pleased Again

2010-08-08T20:59:00.002+01:00

Some nice words from Jonathan Moeller, posted on his site (http://www.jonathanmoeller.com/writer/) about my new Tulun story in HFQ:

"I thought Ancient Shades, by James Lecky, was an altogether excellent story. Alexander the Great, Crusaders, forgotten tombs, sorcery, and ample swordfighting – what more does any story need?"

To say that I'm rather pleased would be an understatement.

THE EARTH BENEATH MY FEET

2010-07-31T01:09:00.003+01:00

I don't write a lot of science fiction these days, most of my output falls very broadly into the heroic fantasy or sword and sorcery mould. But one of my rare ventures into SF appears in the current issue of the rather splendid magazine Jupiter, edited by Ian Redman.

The story in question is called The Earth Beneath My Feet and it's a love story of sorts.

Jupiter issue 29 also features new fiction from Rosie Oliver, Emma Knight, Mike Wood and Nigel Fisher, with excellent cover art by Greg Hughes.

You can find out more about the magazine here:

http://www.jupitersf.co.uk/

My Favourite Short Stories: The Graveyard Reader by Theodore Sturgeon

2010-07-26T00:14:00.003+01:00

Some writers can stun you with the brilliance of their prose, others with the brilliance of their idea and some – a precious few – can do both. Theodore Sturgeon could do both.

Stories like Microcosmic God, The Hurkle is a Happy Beast, Yesterday Was Monday and The World Well Lost are wonderful pieces from what could be called the Time When Science Fiction Grew Up, that period when SF was doing its best to shake off the lingering smell of the pulps and evolve into something new, something literate, something relevant rather than merely escapist. Theodore Sturgeon was one of the writers in the very forefront of this movement.

The Graveyard Reader (1958) is probably a minor addition to the Sturgeon canon (although it was one of Boris Karloff’s favourite short stories and, indeed, I first read it in a tattered copy of The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology) but, to my mind, is a dazzling display of writing by a virtuoso.

Like some of the best stories in the world, the set up is deceptively simple: the unnamed narrator has recently been widowed, his unfaithful wife dying in a car crash with her latest lover. Distraught by her death and furious at her infidelity he has elected to leave her grave blank, refusing even to have an inscription on the headstone that was ‘included in the price of the plot’.

While visiting the grave he meets a mysterious, bland man – the Graveyard Reader of the title:

All I got out of him (just then) was a pleasant smile. He had a sort of anybody’s face, the like of which you might encounter anywhere, which is to say he had the kind of face you wouldn’t be surprised to see visiting a cemetery. I’ll say this for him; he was harmonious; his voice and clothing exactly suited his face, and though he wasn’t an old man, the things he said were hard to figure, coming from a man like that. You could tell he was experienced.

More than simply experienced, the man has a strange and unique talent… the ability to read graves:

“… what you’re trying to tell me is that a person who can read graves can stand in front of one and read it like a book.”
“A biography.” He nodded.
“And get out of it everything that person ever did.”
“Or said, or thought,” he agreed.

Initially sceptical, the narrator comes to accept the truth of this and, more than that, want to learn to read graves himself – if only to understand how and why his wife lived and died as she did.

I guess at that point I stopped talking out loud, because it all turned into a series of swift pictures, one after the other, inside my head, too fast for words, and too detailed. What’s the matter? I’d be saying, and her, kissing my hands, looking up at me with tears in her eyes: Can’t you see? And again, me yelling at her, Well if what I do makes you unhappy, why don’t you tell me what you want? Go ahead, write the script, I’ll play it. And the way she’d turn her back when I talked like that, and I’d hear her voice softly: If you’d only and I’d just – and then she’d stall, inarticulate, shake her head. She never talked enough. She never said the things that… that… world of feeling, spectrum of sensitivity, and no words, no dammit, dammit words. Picture of her smiling, looking off, out, a little up: I say, What are you so happy about?

After studying for a year, beginning with the graves of infants (“You don’t use Dostoyevsky as a first reader.”), the narrator learns this macabre new skill. In the end, though, he elects not to use it and allow his dead wife to rest in peace.

As a literary meditation on grief, The Graveyard Reader has rarely been surpassed in speculative fiction and the narrator’s inarticulate rage fairly leaps out at the reader. But it is Sturgeon’s writing that really lingers in the mind.

Controlled, precise, its cadence and rhythmic structure is nothing short of remarkable for what is ostensibly just another macabre story.

My hands got all knotted up and then seemed to get too heavy, pulling my shoulders down into a slump. I sat down on the edge of an iron pipe railing at the edge of the next grave and let the heavy hands dangle down between my thighs. I hung my head down so I could watch them while I talked. Watching them didn’t tell me anything.

A superb and chilling little tale from the man that Kurt Vonnegut called "a master storyteller."

REACHING CRITICAL MASS

2010-07-14T16:08:00.001+01:00

I have a theory (one of my many theories when it comes to writing) that all stories, regardless of length, will eventually reach a point of no return. What I mean by that is that there is a place in any story where the writer simply has to keep on going. It works for readers, too, but since this particular ramble is about writing, let’s just focus on that.

In part it analogous to the old Louis L’amour ‘I want to see what happens next’ aspect of storytelling, but equally it’s to do with how a writer can become wrapped up in his own work to the point of near-obsession.

It happens regardless of how much you plan or don’t plan the stories you write. Preparation is important of course, but equally there is a joy in just setting off on a particular fictional path and seeing where it leads you.

Regardless of this I think there is a tipping point in any narrative that pulls you along, further and deeper into the tale you are writing. It’s not to be confused with narrative climaxes, plot twists or any of those other aspects of the writing process, nor is it simply that desire to write which exists (or should exist) in every writer regardless of how or what he/she writes. Nor, indeed, is it to do with any snow-balling aspects of the narrative or a tipping point in the story.

So, now that we know what I’m not talking about, the question remains ‘what exactly am I talking about?’

It’s difficult to explain, but it’s to do with that feeling that the story has reached critical mass, that everything that will happen from this point onward is a result of that moment. Again, it’s not necessarily a narrative convention – it could be something as simple as a phrase, a description, a word, the way a character reacts to a given situation within the narrative. It’s the moment when things start to flow.

For me that moment can come at almost any time – and not necessarily when I’m sitting at the keyboard – linked with that whole notion of forebrain and backbrain thinking. Sometimes I’m lucky and the critical mass of a story happens close to the start of a story, more often, though, it requires slogging my way through the story to a point where suddenly everything I’ve written up to then suddenly becomes clear (and, often as not, requires a certain amount of re-writing in order to make everything fit with the new narrative or character concepts).

As a writer I think it’s to do with whether or not you think the journey is worth the destination – personally I think that it is – or whether you are determined to keep your characters and narratives on a tight reign and pre-determine every step of the journey.

Characters, particularly those characters in whom you have invested something (the protagonist or antagonist rather than the unnamed guard who exist solely for the purpose of dispatch) have a way of heading towards that point of critical mass under their own power and there is nothing quite like that moment when a character makes exactly the right decision without your conscious help.

All stories have a point of critical mass. It’s up to you to find it. Or let it find you.

The Return of Flashing Swords

2010-07-07T15:26:00.003+01:00

A little bit of good news in these otherwise uncertain times...

The late and lamented Flashing Swords is set for a comeback. The magazine was at the forefront of the Sword and Sorcery revival of a few years ago - publishing a wide range of S & S writers including Steve Goble, SC Bryce, John C. Hocking, Nathan Meyer and TW Williams - but suffered from a number of problems that ultimately resulted in its cancellation.

But thanks to print on demand (and, hopefully, reader demand) it looks like FS is coming back from limbo.

You can find out a little more here:

http://forums.sfreader.com/showthread.php/17923-The-zine-is-back

MY FAVOURITE SHORT STORIES: THE NEW PREHISTORY BY RENE REBETEZ-CORTES

2010-07-06T16:40:00.002+01:00

There are rules when it comes to writing short fiction, particularly genre fiction. Or so perceived wisdom would have it.

There must be characters, obstacles for them to overcome, quite possibly a sub-plot or two and a goal – either physical or emotional – for them to achieve. By the end, the protagonist should have learned something, if only not to play with dragons. To use the old three-act maxim, it’s exposition, complication, resolution, and many, many fine stories have been written using some or all (or indeed more than) the above.

But then again there are certain stories that simply throw such preconceived notions out of the window and concentrate instead on mood, form or comment. Such a story is Rene Rebetez-Cortes 1971 tale The New Prehistory.

In an unnamed (presumably South American) city the inhabitants suddenly begin to physically bond together, forming either serpentine creatures or vast, amoeba-like masses. Gradually all but a few individuals remain and the new mass of humanity, rapidly adapted to deal with the new state of things, go about the process of evolution ushering in a new age of monstrous creatures or, more accurately, the new prehistory of the title.

Told in a rather matter-of-fact style by an anonymous narrator, The New Prehistory breaks many of the ‘rules’ of short fiction, particularly the ‘rules’ of science fiction and fantasy. The cause of the catastrophe is never discussed or discovered, the protagonist of the tale is an observer rather than an active participant, there is no struggle, no obstacle and no grand revelation at the end.

Yet despite – or indeed because of – all this, The New Prehistory is a powerful and shocking piece of fiction. On one level it could be taken as a comment on consumer society, that ability we have as a society to blindly follow trends, or on another level it could be regarded as a warning against political conformity, with the serpents and amoebas representing extremes such as communism or fascism.

Whatever the individual response, it’s hard to ignore the often visceral power of the story:

“A restlessness came over the line. Like a huge centipede waking up, the monster slowly began to move down the street, hundreds of arms waving desperately. At the head of the column was a red-eyed man whose mouth was awry in a painful rictus. He was followed by a girl who had been proud of her beauty, her makeup dissolved by tears, she moved like a sleepwalker. Then came a boy, his face pale with terror, the Metropoulos, my old friend, one more vertebra of the monstrous reptile… Gradually the movement grew faster, more erratic and frenzied. The long queue was like a string of carnival dancers, twisting and turning, performing a demonic conga in the street.”

Yet despite the utter destruction of human society – “they have renounced forever the old way of life. It is impossible for them to live in rooms as they did before, to use elevators, sit in chairs, sleep in beds, travel in planes or cars” – there is a palpable sense of evolution by the end of the story, that whole notion that, regardless of circumstance, life will find a way and intelligence re-emerge at some point in the future.

“I suspect the day is not far off when they will build their own airplanes and limousines, as long as railway cars, or rounded and flat like flying saucers. The time will come, too, I have no doubt, when they will play golf.”

However much things change, at least according to The New Prehistory, they will always stay the same. Like HG Wells’ The Country of the Blind, it is those who cannot or will not adapt who suddenly discover that they are the freaks, hunted and either absorbed or killed and in the end, the narrator is alone, sitting in the ruins of the city while in the distance the new prehistory continues apace.

I must confess that I know very little about Rene Rebetez-Cortes other than the fact that he was a Colombian writer, part of the magic realism tradition of South America that boasted such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Jorge Luis Borges, writers who made the mundane fantastic and the fantastic commonplace, with The New Prehistory Rebetez-Cortes achieved both with deceptive ease.

Where Will It End?

2010-07-05T17:39:00.008+01:00

This may be the old fogey in me coming to the fore, but I suspect it's probably the (mildly tortured) artist in me wanting to blow off a little steam.

My opinion of the recent mash-up trend in fiction has been previous documented - I'm against it - and I cannot wait until the day when those poor, innocent public domain novels are left alone and we see the end of those opportunists who insist on cramming zombies, werewolves, sea monsters and vampires into Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, H.G Wells, Louisa May Alcott and anyone else too out of copyright to do anything about it.

But things are getting worse, I think. An alarming new trend is the 'gender switch' whereby an old tale is given a 'new' twist by simply changing the gender of the protagonist. So we have Norawest Smith, Conyn the Cimmerian and Erica Joan Stark to name but three (trampling all over the legacy of C.L Moore, Robert E. Howard and Leigh Brackett).

When - or worse, where - will it end? Erica of Melnibone? Jerry of Joiry? Samantha Spade? The Continental Post-Op?

We're through the looking glass here people. (Alistair in Wonderland)

HEROIC FANTASY QUARTERLY ISSUE 5

2010-07-01T00:41:00.003+01:00

The new issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is up and live and features new fiction and poetry from Matthew Wuertz, Christopher Wood, Vonnie Winslow Crist, Megan Arkenberg and me (a new Tulun of Birjand story called Ancient Shades).

This not only marks my second appearance in HFQ but also the magazine's first birthday. Long may it run!

http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/

COMING SOON

2010-06-30T15:50:00.005+01:00

For those who might be interested, I have a few new short stories due to be unleashed upon the world shortly.

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, the new issue of which should be online in a day or so, features Ancient Shades and the return of my middle-eastern sword and sorcery hero Tulun of Birjand. The story is a companion piece to The Black Flowers of Sevan which appeared in the first issue of HFQ.

The July issue of Jupiter SF will contain The Earth Beneath My Feet, one of my increasingly rare forays into science fiction and is a love story (of a kind) centred upon the idea of psychic travel.

Later in the year Innsmouth Free Press will feature The Song of Tsuggaroth, my homage to Clark Ashton Smith and the first of a projected series of 'Mythos Sword and Sorcery' tales which I am currently working on (the most current of these, The Dreamer in the Abyss, is tantilisingly close to having its first draft completed and is mentioned here primarily for the purposes of giving both myself and my muse a metaphorical and much needed kick-start).

After that, Forged in Heaven, Tempered in Hell will be part of the Ricasso Press anthology Through Blood and Iron also due later in the year. A tale of swords, redemption of a kind and blind-savant gods, it comes replete with lashings of the old ultraviolence and red, red kroovy.

Something for the whole family, then (depending on what your family is like).

The Literary Impulse

2010-06-20T23:12:00.003+01:00

I’ve been going through something of a literary phase of late – by which I mean that I’ve been reading outside of my usual genre preoccupations – reading things like Camus The Plague, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (for the umpteenth time), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Patrick Suskind’s magnificent novel Perfume.

Apart from anything else, I think it’s important to have a varied literary diet. My usual reading consists of lots of heroic fantasy/ sword and sorcery, hard boiled crime (with Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and, always, Jim Thompson being particular favourites) the odd western (particularly H.A DeRossa and the westerns of Elmore Leonard) and such gothic novels as Melmoth the Wanderer, The Castle of Otranto and Vathek. But every once in a while I like to take a stroll to the more upmarket side of the avenue and spend some time in the company of the literati.

One of the principal differences I’ve noted between ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ fiction has to do with notions of style, form and content.

A currently fashionable dictum for writers is the notion that everything needs to be couched in scenes, with the attendant preoccupation for description. Thus, for some writers, it’s impossible for a character to do something as mundane as drink a cup of coffee: we are told that the reader must know exactly what the coffee is like – too strong, too bitter, just right, have him/her swill the cup before tasting, only to discover that said beverage is too hot, too cold or, indeed, just right - in order to create the illusion on the page that coffee is being consumed.

To an extent, of course, this is perfectly correct… but only if said cup o’ java has any real significance, otherwise you run the risk of bogging the narrative down with extraneous detail that serves no real purpose other than to bulk out the word content of the story (and given the current proclivity for doorstep-size novels, it’s sometimes an easy option when your searching for those extra five or six thousand words in order to reach the publisher’s required word count). Similarly, the oft-trumpeted rule of ‘show, don’t tell’ seems to me to apply most strongly to genre writing. In Suskind’s Perfume, for instance, we are told right at the very start and in no uncertain terms that the principal character is an evil and murderous man, a statement which subsequent events and his subsequent actions bear out. Similarly, huge chunks of dialogue are rendered quickly by narrative jumps of the ‘they spoke for hours before X was finally persuaded’ variety.

And therein, to my mind, is one of the main differences between the literary and the generic – in a genre story, particularly a contemporary one, that licence to merely say ‘this is so and here’s why’, has been somewhat lost to us. Not only that, but there is a movement posited by certain writing gurus that the word ‘was’ has become somewhat redundant. So no longer is it possible to use the well worn – if bland – opener of ‘It was a dark and stormy night’, now we have to fill every line with hyperbolic description: under the same rules it’s no longer possible to write ‘He was a tall man’, but rather now the writer must find a way of bringing the character through a low door-frame. Not so with the literary novel, where very often efficient rather than layered description is the order of the day.

In part, I think it’s to do with the need for continual action that pervades much genre fiction – the snake men must appear in chapter two, the man with the gun must come through the door every time the plot flags, the cattle need to stampede, or the aliens found to be hostile – something that is not necessarily the case in its mainstream counterpart.

Equally though, it has much to do with the intention of the novel or story in question. Literary fiction is often inward looking, concerned more with the internal rather than external life of the character, whereas genre fiction is outward looking, hence the need for action, for something to be happening in the story to propel it along.

This is not to say that genre fiction cannot or does not aspire to and on occasion succeeds in its own right as literature - after all, good writing is good writing regardless of the marketplace – but we, as genre writers, are very often hidebound by the rules that we impose upon ourselves.

There are exceptions, of course. Writers like Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Lucius Shepard, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson and others of their ilk have deftly fused both the literary and genre traditions – simultaneously looking both inward and outward – to create their own singular styles.

Thankfully, writing fads come and go, but the bottom line of fiction, any fiction, is that of a good story well told. And when it comes to that tricky business of show vs. tell it’s perhaps important to remember that the word is ‘storyteller’ not ‘storyshower’.

UPDATES AT WITH MANY SHADES

2010-06-12T17:39:00.004+01:00

With Many Shades, the listings blog which I post as frequently as my schedule and sanity will allow, has just been updated with new details for Innsmouth Free Press, Ideomancer, Niteblade and a few others.

You can find it here:

http://withmanyshades.blogspot.com

MY FAVOURITE SHORT STORIES: THE SWORD OF WELLERAN BY LORD DUNSANY

2010-06-11T23:26:00.002+01:00

“Where the great plain of Tarphet runs up, as the sea in estuaries, among the Cyresian mountains, there stood long since the city of Merimna well-nigh among the shadows of the crags.”

Lord Dunsany – or Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett as he was also known – was one of the great Irish fantasists and, arguably, one of the greatest fantasy writers that the world has ever seen.

His stories, lush and stylish, were an influence on, amongst others, H.P Lovecraft Robert E. Howard and J.R.R Tolkien. There is even an argument to be made that his short story ‘The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth’ represents one of the earliest recognisable examples of heroic fantasy or sword and sorcery. The title story of his 1908 collection, The Sword of Welleran also contains many elements which might be familiar to fans of heroic fantasy – a once powerful kingdom reduced to indolence, an invading horde bent on revenge, the return of long-dead heroes and, of course, the titular sword.

The great city of Merimna, once the hub of a far-reaching empire, sits in its sedentary old age – a shrine to past glories where Art has replaced War as the central preoccupation of its people.

But in the plains and mountains, hostile tribes are stirring against Merimna, still smarting from centuries old defeats. Merimna’s only defense is the legacy of her legendary heroes – men who died many years before but who’s memory is still strong in the minds of Merimna’s enemies. So strong, in fact, that many refuse to believe that the heroes are dead (a belief reinforced by the statues of them that stand on the city walls of Merimna). The truth, of course, is that heroes though they may have been – capable of great feats of arms and cunning – they were simply men and, as each one received his final, mortal wound, he rode to ‘a certain deep ravine and cast his body in’.

During this time, a young man named Rold grows up in Merimna, worshipping both the memory and the magnificent statue of Welleran, the greatest hero of the Merimnian Empire.

When the tribes finally dare to send two condemned prisoners to Merimna to find out the truth, they discover that the heroes are nothing more than marble and that Merimna lies open to the revenge of her enemies.

But when the soldiers of four armies converge on Merimna, the ghost of her long-dead heroes stir once again, urging the men of Merimna to take up arms to defend her. Welleran himself goes to Rold and urges him to pick up his legendary sword and a great battle ensues whereby the men of Merimna rediscover their brutal heritage and the enemy tribes discover that legends sometimes have physical power.

Merimna is saved at a terrible cost in blood and the souls of her dead heroes return to paradise, their names and legends both reinforced and sullied by one more battle.

It is in the final passages of The Sword of Welleran where Dunsany’s power really shows through. For other writers, writers merely content to tell a fantastic and stirring adventure tale, the final battle would have been enough; but for Dunsany it is the chance to twist the narrative knife and to show the true cost of war.

…the sun arising to give new life to the world, shone instead upon the hideous things that the sword of Welleran had done. And Rold said: 'O sword, sword! How horrible thou art! Thou art a terrible thing to have come among men. How many eyes shall look upon gardens no more because of thee? How many fields must go empty that might have been fair with cottages, white cottages with children all about them? How many valleys must go desolate that might have nursed warm hamlets, because thou hast slain long since the men that might have built them? I hear the wind crying against thee, thou sword! It comes from the empty valleys. It comes over the bare fields. There are children's voices in it. They were never born. Death brings an end to crying for those that had life once, but these must cry for ever. O sword! sword! why did the gods send thee among men?'

And the tears of Rold fell down upon the proud sword but could not wash it clean.

Although his writing can be something of a challenge to modern readers – Dunsany’s prose style is dense and sometimes difficult to follow (particularly when compared to, say, H.G Wells who was a model of word economy by comparison – his work nonetheless rewards reading. The Sword of Welleran is a short tale – less than six thousand words – but packs a lot into its pages (enough, perhaps, for some more modern writers to spin an entire Big Fat Trilogy out of its concepts and characters).

Modern writers are always being given the advice ‘show, don’t tell’, whereas Lord Dunsany was an expert at telling, choosing his words so carefully that even the gaps between them are important, allowing the reader’s imagination to flow into those gaps, creating the additional details rather than having the author bombard them.

A master of the fantastic, Lord Dunsany created some of the most glittering short fiction to ever grace the genre. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, The Sword of Welleran (easily available on Project Gutenberg) is a great place to start.

The Phantom Queen Awakes

2010-06-09T14:44:00.002+01:00

My contributor's copy of The Phantom Queen Awakes arrived today, brightening up what might otherwise have been a dull and rainy Wednesday.

It is, to say the least, a rather handsome object, beautifully put together with a wonderful cover by Reece Notley and equally wonderful interior art by Cecily Webster.

A themed anthology based around the Morrigan - one of the most powerful Celtic gods - the writers involved include Katharine Kerr, Anya Bast, Elaine Cunningham, C.E Murphy and... well, me (with the story The Children of Badb Catha which is set in an alternate time line where the Romans invaded Ireland).

It's both humbling and energising to appear alongside these writers, particularly in such a quality product. And it was a delight to work with the editors - Mark Deniz and Amanda Pillar - who were thoughtful, insightful and utterly professional every step of the way.

Trust me, your life will not be complete until you own a copy of this book.

http://www.morriganbooks.com/?page_id=186

HPL & S&S

2010-06-07T00:59:00.003+01:00

I’ve been working on a couple of stories recently that I’ve been, in my own mind anyway, referring to as Mythos Sword and Sorcery. Basically it’s my attempt to fuse a bit of Lovecraft with the tradition of S&S and heroic fantasy.

Mind you, it’s nothing new: Clark Ashton Smith did it with his Hyperborea stories (although Smith was adding to the Mythos rather than taking from it), Brian Lumley did it with his Primal Lands stories, Conan in his original, Robert E. Howard, incarnation often encountered creatures that Lovecraft would have known, and sword-wielding heroes have always battled against dark and mysterious forces.

It did get me thinking, though, about how these tales might differ from my other stories (and from the stories of those that have trod this particular ground before me). Hopefully, it’s mood and tone that will set them apart.

In a sense the difference between Lovecraft and his contemporary Robert E. Howard was mostly one of tone. In general, Howard’s work is more up tempo, more optimistic than Lovecraft’s – this is not to say that Howard didn’t write downbeat, pessimistic stories, but as a rule of thumb if you were the hero (particular a series character like Conan) there was a good chance you would make it through to the end and beyond.

With Lovecraft, though, it’s rare that his characters escaped unscathed – either physically or, more usual, psychologically – and the worlds he created are darker than Howard’s, a purgatory rather than a playground.

Now I’m fully aware that some of my own work tends to look on the darker rather than the lighter side of things but, as a rule of thumb, I rarely try to push a story in any one direction, preferring to let it unfold naturally.

But in the Mythos S&S stories I’m taking a leaf out of HPL’s book: for the characters, doom is not only inevitable but unavoidable and the universe cares little for the affairs of human beings. It’s not so much a sense of inbuilt pessimism rather than an acknowledgement that the heroes cannot win.

In a way, I suppose that is one of the fundamental differences between horror and fantasy – in horror the protagonist is almost always doomed to fail (or to die or be tortured or discover that he is the heir to a terrible secret), whereas in (heroic) fantasy the hero is almost always doomed to succeed (or marry the princess or defeat the dark lord or have his destiny fulfilled).

It’s interesting to start a story knowing that the hero can’t win, since the normal way in S&S is for the hero to cut his way (often literally) through any obstacle; he may have the occasional setback, if only to add to the dramatic tension, but there is literally nothing that his wits and sword cannot overcome. But for the hero of a Mythos S&S story every setback is just another step along the path to his own destruction, every obstacle serves to obscure the truth of his situation until that final moment of terrible realization.

Of course theory and practice don’t always coalesce but in the few stories that I’ve been working on (one of which, The Song of Tussugaroth, will appear in an addition of Innsmouth Free Press later this year) have fitted the concept extremely well so far.

So Nameless Horror is just a state of mind after all.

MY FAVOURITE SHORT STORIES: THE STREETS OF ASHKELON BY HARRY HARRISON

2010-06-01T17:46:00.005+01:00

I can’t remember when I first read Harry Harrison’s The Streets of Ashkelon, but it was a long time ago – possibly in the Brian Aldiss edited Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus under the story’s variant title An Alien Agony – but it is a story which has stayed with me ever since and one to which I return time and time again.

For me, it’s one of those stories that does what SF does so very well, shining a light into those murky places where mundane fiction either will not or can not go: asking difficult questions about the nature of faith, belief and pride (and taking a few well aimed and accurate shots at the nature of colonialism along the way).

On the backwater planet of Wesker’s World, trader John Garth has found what he believes to be an idyllic place where the native inhabitants – furry little amphibians known as Weskers – live a primative life in a state of primal innocence with neither belief in nor need for religion. As Garth says ‘They have ugly little gods, taboos or spells to hag-ride and limit their lives. They are the only primitive people I have ever encountered that are completely free of superstition and appear much happier and sane because of it.’

This idyll is shattered, however, by the arrival of a Christian missionary, Father Mark, who has come to bring the Weskers to God (or indeed to bring God to the Weskers). The clash between the two men forms the theological spine of the story – faith versus humanism – but also leads to its ultimate tragedy.

Whereas Garth has been teaching the Weskers about the material world – bring knowledge in exchange for their exquisite art – Mark seeks to teach them about the unseen and the power of faith. In their own way, each man seeks to exploit the highly intelligent and inquisitive Weskers, each believing this is way is the Right Way. But for the Weskers the clash is a more personal one, and they are creatures for whom Blind Faith alone is not enough.

Requiring nothing less than a miracle to bring them to God – and reasoning that one miracle is not so much to ask in order to bring an entire planet to worship at God’s Throne – the Weskers set their mind to the ultimate miracle, the miracle that brought humanity to God in the first place.

‘… everything had been constructed down to the last detail, following the illustrations in the bible. There was the cross, planted firmly on top of a small hill, the gleaming metal spikes, the hammer. Father Mark was stripped and draped in a carefully pleated loincloth. They led him out of the church.’

In crucifying the missionary, the Weskers believe implicitly that God will bring him back to life and thus provide the necessary miracle they so desperately seek, but have in fact brought about a state of sin from which they will never be released.

“He will rise, won’t he, Garth?”

“No,” Garth said. “he is going to stay buried right where you put him. Nothing is going to happen because he is dead and he is going to stay dead.”

The rain runnelled through Itin’s fur and his mouth was opened so wide that he seemed to be screaming into the night. Only with effort could he talk, squeezing out the aliens thoughts in an alien tongue.

“Then we will not be saved? We will not become pure?”

“You were pure,” Garth said in a voice somewhere between a sob and a laugh. “That’s the horrible, ugly dirty part of it. You were pure. Now you are…”

“Murderers,” Itin said, and the water ran down from his lowered head and streamed away into the darkness.”

Beautifully crafted, The Streets of Ashkelon is a perfect example of what SF at its best can do: its theology and its human characters in particular fully rounded and realized.

Bizarrely, though, it remained unpublished for a number of years in the USA - although it appeared in New Worlds the UK in 1962 – its themes and questions proving themselves too difficult for editors at the time.

Since then, the story has gone on to appear in many anthologies and is rightly held up as a classic of the genre. Simply wonderful.

AND OTHER SUCH DELIGHTS REVIEWED AT LOCUS ONLINE

2010-05-28T18:50:00.002+01:00

Lois Tilton has given And Other Such Delights - which appeared in issue 42 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies earlier this month - a lovely review at Locus Online, describing the story as "a wonderfully inventive tale, full of fantastic and cruel delights".

I am, to say the least, rather pleased.

http://www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2010/05/lois-tilton-reviews-short-fiction-late-may-2010/#bcs201005

THE DEATHLESS ONES AT FANTASTIC HORROR

2010-05-27T16:30:00.003+01:00

It's been a bit of a wait, but well worth it, as my short story The Deathless Ones is up and live at Fantastic Horror.

Yet another installment in my ongoing Shining Cities sequence, this is a look at the epicurian delights of the Latter Days.

http://www.fantastichorror.com/15/lecky-thedeathlessones.html

MY FAVOURITE SHORT STORIES: WAILING WELL BY M.R JAMES

2010-05-24T15:39:00.003+01:00

An undoubted master of the weird tale, Montague Rhodes James (1862 - 1936) produced some of the finest macabre fiction of the early 20th century. Stories like Casting the Runes (later filmed as the magnificent Night of the Demon by Jacques Tournier in 1957), O Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad (the Jonathan Miller helmed version of which filmed for the BBC in 1968 has the most frightening ghost never seen on television) or Canon Alberic's Scrapbook, are masterclasses in mood and atmosphere, existing in that shadowy region where the known meets the unknown and the natural and supernatural rub shoulders.

In addition, though, M.R James had a wickedly funny sense of humour which he sometimes used to great effect, particular in the 1927 short story Wailing Well. The story of two schoolboys – Arthur Wilcox and Stanley Judkins – Wailing Well tells a portion of their respective careers, one which ends in ‘giddy eminence’ and another which ends in pure terror.

Arthur Wilcox, who provides the initial lead in to the story, is a high achiever, an athlete, scholar and boy scout of exemplary pedigree and bearing who’s only failing is that he pushes himself too hard, leading to something of a minor breakdown which takes him out of the story. Stanley Judkins, on the other hand, is his polar opposite in everything but physical appearance, slovenly, ink-stained and generally rebellious.

When a boy scout outing leads the school’s troop close to the infamous wailing well ‘in the beautiful district of W (or X) in the county of D (or Y)’ Stanley becomes determined to investigate this strange place despite being told that it is an evil place haunted by murderous spirits, three women and a man:

"I've seen 'em, young gentleman!" said the shepherd, "seen 'em from near by on that bit of down: and my old dog, if he could speak, he'd tell you he've seen 'em, same time. About four o'clock of the day it was, much such a day as this. I see 'em, each one of 'em, come peerin' out of the bushes and stand up, and work their way slow by them tracks towards the trees in the middle where the well is."

"And what were they like? Do tell us!" said Algernon and Wilfred eagerly.

"Rags and bones, young gentlemen: all four of 'em: flutterin' rags and whity bones. It seemed to me as if I could hear 'em clackin' as they got along. Very slow they went, and lookin' from side to side."

"What were their faces like? Could you see?"

"They hadn't much to call faces," said the shepherd, "but I could seem to see as they had teeth."

And it is here that the story takes a shift from light-hearted school tale (very much in an Anthony Buckeridge style) into something much more sinister, for when Judkins approaches the wailing well, something terrible is waiting for him.

At this moment Algernon, who had been staring with all his might, broke into a scream.

"What's that on the track? On all fours — O, it's the woman. O, don't let me look at her! Don't let it happen!" And he rolled over, clutching at the grass and trying to bury his head in it.

With inevitable and nicely restrained horror, M.R James paints a picture of a supernatural murder made all the more horrible for the light touch with which he has previously used.

“a cry was heard more piercing and dreadful than any that the boys on the hill could raise. It was too late. The crouched figure behind Stanley sprang at him and caught him about the waist. The dreadful one that was standing waving her arms waved them again, but in exultation. The one that was lurking among the trees shuffled forward, and she too stretched out her arms as if to clutch at something coming her way; and the other, farthest off, quickened her pace and came on, nodding gleefully. The boys took it all in in an instant of terrible silence, and hardly could they breathe as they watched the horrid struggle between the man and his victim. Stanley struck with his can, the only weapon he had. The rim of a broken black hat fell off the creature's head and showed a white skull with stains that might be wisps of hair. By this time one of the women had reached the pair, and was pulling at the rope that was coiled about Stanley's neck. Between them they overpowered him in a moment: the awful screaming ceased, and then the three passed within the circle of the clump of firs.”

All too often, the great ghost and horror stories of the Victorian and Edwardian era seem a little quaint to us now, but Wailing Well has lost none of its power, either to raise a wry smile or a spine tingling moment. Best read late at night while the wind howls outside your window (or better yet in broad daylight when you can be assured that the dark things can come nowhere near you) it is a minor but nonetheless brilliant work from a master of the genre.

I have heard that the present population of the Wailing Well field consists of three women, a man, and a boy.

The Joy of Rewriting

2010-05-23T21:21:00.004+01:00

It sounds like an ironic title for a post, I know, but I’m actually very serious about the joys of the rewrite.

It’s a very rare thing for any writer to produce a perfect first draft and even if, like me, you redraft and correct things as you go along (which probably explains why it takes me so long to produce even a short story) chances are that something will need fixing after you have breathed that satisfied sigh and placed the words ‘The End’ at the end of the story.

In general, too, most editors will ask for some sort of re-write even after they have accepted a story – in fact sometimes as a condition of acceptance. I’ve usually found that the suggestions they make are spot on - or maybe I’ve been lucky in working with editors who understand what exactly it is I’m trying to do with a particular tale and are anxious to make it as good as it can possibly be.

Over the last year or so I’ve been asked by editors to rewrite stories for length, to reduce the overall level of violence (and, in one case, to actually increase it), to swap scenes to increase the pace of the story and even to change some of the character names and some minor story concepts. All of which I have done with great pleasure since, in most cases, the points made by the editors in question were absolutely right.

But, over and above the re-write to editorial demand, I think it’s important for writers to look back over their work and self-edit it. Rewrites can happen at a structural, conceptual, paragraph, sentence and even word level. It doesn’t necessary mean tearing down the story and starting from scratch, but rather it can often mean re-honing certain aspects of a story in order to make them clear (clear in this sense being a relative term, since I also firmly believe that there’s nothing wrong with making a reader work a little from time to time).

The amount of rewriting necessary will, of course, depend upon the story in question – sometimes a rewrite can be something as simple as taking out unnecessary repetition (I myself have the terrible habit of using the phrase ‘as if’ a little too often in first drafts) or even finding a better word to express exactly what you mean.

Some writers are afraid of the rewrite, worrying that it somehow might dilute the power of their original thoughts or visions, but as far as I’m concerned it is a necessary and, yes, joyful task.

Happy rewriting.

Sword and Sorcery

2010-05-19T22:31:00.007+01:00

For all those with an interst in sword and sorcery, a new market - Iron Bound - is seeking new s&s and heroic fantasy fiction. Worth checking out, I reckon. It's non-paying, I'm afraid to say, but any market for s&s is to be welcomed.

"Iron Bound Magazine is an online magazine focusing strictly on everything and anything fantasy. Tales of sword and sorcery, tales of wizards, tales of elves and orcs, tales of thieves and kings, and such are all welcomed. We are open for submissions."

http://ironboundmag.wordpress.com/submission-guidelines/

FRANK FRAZETTA PASSES AWAY

2010-05-11T16:50:00.002+01:00

Probably the best known artist working in fantasy, Frank Frazetta has died at the age of 82.

His depiction of Robert E. Howard's Conan, particularly on the covers of the old Lancer paperbacks, more or less defined the popular view of sword and sorcery - mighty barbarians, beautiful scantily clad women and horrific monsters to be slain - and had much to do with the popularity of the Conan reprints.

His other work on covers for as diverse a range of characters as Tarzan, John Carter and Karl Edward Wagner's Kane further helped to create the visual language of s & s, to the extent where a series of his paintings were turned into short-lived but much sought after series of novels written by James Silke featuring the Death Dealer.

Bold, colourful and unashamedly fantastic, Frank Frazetta was the giant of fantasy art. He died of a stroke on May 10, 2010, in a hospital near his home in Florida.

ASYLUM (1972)

2010-05-10T00:26:00.003+01:00

Starring: Robert Powell, Peter Cushing, Charlotte Rampling, Herbert Lom. Directed by Roy Ward Baker.

The landscape of British fantasy cinema from the late 1950’s to the mid 1970’s was largely dominated by Hammer Film and only Amicus Productions, founded by Max Rosenberg and Milton Subosky, offered them any serious competition. Often using the same writers, directors and stars, their output was more self-consciously ‘modern’ than Hammer’s – rarely straying into the Mittle Europa settings that were Hammer’s trademark.

Although Amicus made a number of fine features – And Now The Screaming Starts, Horror Hotel, The Skull and two Dr Who movies starring Peter Cushing – it was their portmanteau films for which the company became best known. Offering a Four-For-The-Price-Of-One (sometimes Five) approach, the films featured a number of different stories linked by a single character or setting.

In Dr Terror’s House of Horrors it was Cushing’s eponymous Dr Schreck, in Torture Garden Burgess Meredith japed as the Carny from (literally) Hell, The House That Dripped Blood featured, well, a house, Tales From the Crypt had Sir Ralph Richardson slumming it as a mysterious monk and Asylum had Robert Powell and the titular Looney Bin.

When Dr Martin (Powell) arrives at an asylum for incurably insane he is presented with a strange conundrum. It appears that Dr Starr, the asylum’s chief psychiatrist has also gone ‘incurably insane’ and is housed in one of the cells upstairs. Challenged by Dr Rutherford (Patrick Magee in fine scenery-chewing form) to identify Starr, the scene is set for a veritable who’s who of British actors in a series of tightly written little chillers from the pen of the great Robert Bloch.

Taking their inspiration (as many of the Amicus portmanteau films did) from the old EC horror comics, each separate tale has a real sting in it.

Richard Todd and Sylvia Sims star in a story of voodoo, chest freezers and revenge from beyond the grave in Frozen Fear. Peter Cushing and Barry Morse try to resurrect the dead but end up giving a mannequin murderous life in The Weird Tailor. Charlotte Rampling and Britt Ekland appear in a story of split-personalities and murder in Lucy Comes To Stay, while Herbert Lom, Powell and Magee give toy robots a bad name in Mannequins of Horror.

Usually in an Amicus film there was usually at least one tale that didn’t work (the haunted piano in Torture Garden, or the horror at the end of the Indian Rope Trick in Vault of Horror) and Asylum is no exception. For all charms of Ms Rampling and Ms Ekland, Lucy Comes to Stay is easily the weakest of the stories on offer here) but fortunately Frozen Fear, Mannequins of Horror and, particularly, The Weird Tailor more than make up for this.

Cushing is, of course, excellent as a man tortured by the dead of his son. Richard Todd looks slightly uncomfortable as wife-murdering Walter, Herbert Lom does a very fine turn as Herbert Lom, all moody stares and quick little gestures, and both Patrick Magee and Robert Powell provide a solid anchor for the whole thing. Of particular note here is Geoffrey Bayldon as hospital orderly Max, who gives the film its creepy heart and who’s unsettling performance is both intense and restrained – you’ll never think of Catweazel the same way again.

Cheap and cheerful (or fearful) stuff, efficiently shot by Roy Ward Baker (Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, Vault of Horror) Asylum is another of those little gems from the tail-end of the British horror boom.

AND OTHER SUCH DELIGHTS

2010-05-06T13:59:00.004+01:00

"Out of the shattered glory of PameMorturas, came Wolfram Morringun the mennisinger, his Nothing Box filled with the tortured sounds of that splendidly ruined city. Across the Silent Plains and Fading Forests he came, his step and mood both light."

A return once again to the Shining Cities of Old Earth, And Other Such Delights is currently online at the very wonderful Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

You can read it here:

http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/story.php?s=89

On a separate note, it now means that I'm closer than ever to getting together a collection of my Shining Cities tales since And Other Such Delights is the eigth story in the sequence to see the light of day (and there are four 'orphan' stories that sort of fit into the sequence if you look at 'em slantindicular).

MY FAVOURITE SHORT STORIES # 6: EASTWARD HO! BY WILLIAM TENN

2010-04-26T02:39:00.003+01:00

To quote Bruce Sterling, “If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters… we can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless.”

One of science fictions greatest court jesters was William Tenn (the pen name of Philip Klass) who’s work had a finely honed satirical edge, so finely honed that it was, indeed, sometimes not immediately apparent that he was playing with Big Ideas.

Eastward Ho! is one of the cases in point, a witty and clever story of nuclear war and reconstruction that sees a devastated America where the shoe is very firmly on the other foot and the native tribes have taken control of the reins of power, pushing white society aside and undoing the injustices of the past.

In Tenn’s imagined future the United States of America is a struggling, backward and mostly agrarian society, while the Arapaho, Seminole, Cheyenne and, most importantly, the Sioux, dominate much of continental America in the aftermath of a disastrous nuclear war been the USA and USSR.

When Jerry Franklin, eldest son of the Senator from Idaho, is sent on a diplomatic mission to Osceola VII, Ruler of All the Seminoles he discovers that the fierce and highly organized Sioux nations have already displaced the Seminoles and are preparing to annex the USA. As Chief Three Hydrogen Bombs explains “…we have an expanding population. You don't have an expanding population. We need more land. You don't use most of the land you have. Should we sit by and see the land go to waste…” If that isn’t Manifest Destiny in action then I don’t know what is.

Realizing that things are only going to get worse and that the USA has already been overrun by the Sioux, Jerry makes a momentous decision… to travel sail across the Atlantic: "Due east all the way. To the fabled lands of Europe. To a place where a white man can stand at last on his own two legs. Where he need not fear persecution. Where he need not fear slavery. Sail east, Admiral, until we discover a new and hopeful world—a world of freedom!"

A short and joyous story, Eastward Ho! not only plays with the conventions of SF but also with those of the (then) popular western. There is a gleeful delight in character names – characters such Makes Much Radiation and Three Hydrogen Bombs, weapons such as the Crazy House .45 and the Geronimo .32 – seemingly throw-away jokes that convey a huge amount of information in a very short space of time, and fills in a hell of a lot of back-story in very few words:

"Tell me," Jerry asked, bending down. "Have you heard any other news? Anything about the rest of the world? How has it been with those people—the Russkies, the Sovietskis, whatever they were called—the ones the United States had so much to do with years and years ago?"

"According to several of the Chief's councilors, the Soviet Russians were having a good deal of difficulty with people called Tatars. I think they were called Tatars.”

A writer of great subtlety who, at first glance, appeared to be working in broad strokes, (his short story The Liberation of Earth is another small masterpiece) William Tenn deals with racism, the march of history, politics and the nature of national and personal pride (“After all, he was the son—and the oldest son, at that—of the Senator from Idaho; Sam Rutherford's father was a mere Undersecretary of State and Sam's mother's family was pure post-office clerk all the way back.”) in an incredibly entertaining and economical narrative.

Rarely has a jester capered to such good effect.

UP DATING THE WEBSITE

2010-04-24T04:01:00.003+01:00

I am currently in the business of updating my website - it ain't much, but it's mine.

Within you can find more or less the same things that you can find on this blog but with some slightly fancier backgrounds and a list of my previously published and upcoming fiction.

It's far from finished but I like it - the virtual version of a pied-à-terre.

http://sites.google.com/site/jameslecky/

UPDATES AT WITH MANY SHADES

2010-04-21T00:21:00.003+01:00

The other hat which I sometimes wear is as the sole lunatic in charge of With Many Shades - a guide to science fiction and fantasy on the net.

In what can only be described as a flurry of activity, I have posted a whole load of new links to such magazines as Strange Horizons, GUD, Mindflights, Lacuna, Jupiter, Ideomancer, Clarkesworld, Chizine, Black Gate and a few more.

Drop by, why not.

http://withmanyshades.blogspot.com/

The Sorcerers Guild/ Harper's Pen Award

2010-04-19T17:51:00.004+01:00

The Sorcerer's Guild

The Sorcerer's Guild, a blog dedicated to the appreciation and promotion of sword and sorcery and heroic fantasy fiction, especially short fiction. The Sorcerer's Guild draws its inspiration from the original Sorcerer's Guild. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA) is the name of a literary group of American fantasy authors active from the 1960s through the 1980s, noted for their contributions to the fantasy subgenre of heroic fantasy or "Sword and Sorcery." The group served as a vehicle for popularizing and promoting the respectability of the subgenre.The original members of SAGA were Poul Anderson, Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, John Jakes, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Andre Norton, and Jack Vance. Later, other members joined, and from 1973 - 1981, the group produced five anthologies of stories written by the members (published under the Flashing Swords title) and handed out the Gandalf Award for lifetime achievement.

The new Sorcerer's Guild is open to fans and authors. We will not produce an anthology, but we will award a prize for the best Sword and Sorcery or Heroic Fantasy short fiction for a given year - The Harper's Pen Award. Soon, we'll begin posting review, interviews, and news about Sword and Sorcery in all its forms.

If you have any news to share, please feel free to contact me with press releases, promotion material, and review copies. Feel free to join in, become a friend, and follow the Guild on Twitter.

The Harper's Pen Award

In days of yore, a Harper was a bard who sang of the deeds of heroes and gods, demons and monsters, but these days we bards use the Pen (or the laptop) to tell our tales of the heroic exploits of mighty warriors and cunning wizards.

Thus, the Harper's Pen.The Harper's Pen Award (formerly the Ham-Sized Fist Award) is given in honor of the best Heroic Fantasy or Sword and Sorcery short fiction published during a given year. The award is sponsored by The Sorcerer's Guild.

Each year, nominations for The Harper's Pen Award are collected and finalists chosen for recognition by The Sorcerer's Guild. From the finalists a winner is then selected and the award is given to both the author and the publisher of the story. By establishing this award, we hope to encourage authors to continue to explore heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery fiction, as well as to reward those who continue to publish it.

The rules are simple. Any heroic fantasy or sword and sorcery short fiction story published through an established editorial process - that is, not self-published - is eligible. Any subgenre of heroic fantasy or sword and sorcery is eligible, including but not limited to: historical, modern, sword-and-planet, etc. The nominated story must have been published between January 1 and December 31 of the contest year. Final determinination of story eligibility is at the sole discretion of the judge or judges.

http://sorcerersguild.blogspot.com/p/sorcerers-guild.html

What Archetypes Can Do For You

2010-04-18T16:49:00.003+01:00

I am, as I have stated before, a rather shameless and unabashed writer of science fiction and fantasy. The reasons for this are many and multifold but can basically be traced back to the stories that I read when I was young. In particular things like Richard Adams’ Watership Down and the Narnia books of C.S Lewis. As a teenager I moved on to books like The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus, the novels of Philip K. Dick, the early Elric stories of Michael Moorcock and J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

All this was, I hasten to add, part of a varied literary diet: I have long adored the work of Len Deighton, Eric Ambler, Walter Wager, Ian Flemming, Trevanian and a host of other thriller writers. I also devoured westerns by writers such as by Jack Shaffaer, Will Henry, Louis L’amour and the pulp westerns of George G. Gilman, Joe Millard and Charles R. Pike. When it came to horror I loved James Herbert, Stephen King, Guy N. Smith, Robert McCammon and, always, the Pan Book of Horror Stories.

Don’t get me wrong, I was also reading people like Joseph Conrad, John Braine, Grahame Greene, Anthony Burgess and John Fowles but only ever really appreciated their literary worth much later on since, to my 14 year old self, the psychological horror of something like The Collector could never compete with the visceral violence of The Fog.

However, if given the choice, I would always choose a good SF or horror novel over the delights of a western or thriller: something which has stayed with me until this very day.

Although genre writing can be something of a trap for writers (Philip K. Dick, for instance, wrote brilliant realist novels but was forever seen by both his publishers and readership as a science fiction writer) it does offer a certain comfort for readers, and the old axiom of ‘never judge a book by its cover’ doesn’t always apply when it comes to genre writing.

However, if genre is a trap then it is certainly the most elastic trap of all. Even within a simple boundary definition such as ‘fantasy’ there is huge scope for writers: everything from the comic novels of Terry Pratchett to the gritty neo-sword and sorcery of Joe Abercrombie or the dark childhood nightmares of Neil Gaiman.

One of the things that genre offers a writer is the notion of archetypes: warriors, scientists, bold explorers, detectives, secret agents, wizards, starship pilots et al, archetypes who can be shaped into something more distinctive.

In terms of heroic/epic/ s & s fantasy, the most enduring archetypes of them all is Robert E. Howard’s Conan, who’s seed can be seen fairly directly in characters such as John Jakes’ Brak the barbarian or Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis, reflected in characters as diverse as Moorcock’s Elric, C.L Moore’s Jirel of Joiry or Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane and who’s more recent descendants are surely David Gemmell’s Druss or Joe Abercrombie’s Logen Ninefingers.

Similarly, the greatest detective of them all – Sherlock Holmes – spawned a host of imitators but equally was the progenitor for characters as diverse as Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Hammet’s Continental Op, Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse and many, many more. Now none of these characters could be mistaken for Holmes but, somewhere deep inside, they have the same DNA (and there is an argument to be made that Holmes himself was an avatar of Poe’s Auguste Dupin.)

The point of all this slightly disjointed rambling is to celebrate the archetypes of imaginative fiction and to see them as useful springboards or templates to use in your own fiction – not copies, mind you, but rather as a literary ‘chip off the old block’.

My Favourite Short Stories # 5: The Haunter of the Dark by HP Lovecraft

2010-04-13T01:50:00.003+01:00

“Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge. It is true that the window he faced was unbroken, but nature has shown herself capable of many freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily have arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw, while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain old matters he had uncovered.”

Having waxed lyrical about the joys of Clark Ashton Smith, it only seems fair that I now mention the great H.P Lovecraft. As with CAS, it’s downright difficult to pick just one Lovecraft tale but, for me, The Haunter of the Dark has just the right mix of otherworldly horror and gothic SF sensibilities that HPL did so very, very well.

First published in Weird Tales (where else) in 1936, The Haunter of the Dark is something of a Lovecraftian in-joke, being a sequel and/or reply to Robert Bloch’s mythos tale "The Shambler from the Stars", while its protagonist – Robert Blake – is almost certainly a literary avatar of Bloch himself (with a little bit of Lovecraft and a generous dollop of Clark Ashton Smith thrown in for good measure) and the structure of the story mirrors H.H Ewers’ horror tale The Spider.

Add in Lovecraft’s consumate ability to create an ethereal, alien atmosphere in even the most seemingly ordinary of settings (in this case Providence, Rhode Island, a familiar enough stamping ground for HPL and his tales) and cosmic horror is almost inevitable.

When author and painter Robert Blake moves Providence he becomes obsessed with a deserted church on Federal Hill – “a certain huge, dark church most fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky.” – obsession leads to investigation and he discovers that “There had been a bad sect there in the old days- an outlaw sect that called up awful things from some unknown gulf of night.”

And when Blake decides to enter the church he discovers a notebook, “a metal box of peculiarly asymmetrical form”, a ‘Shining Trapezohedron’ and the “vaguely charred” corpse of the last person to enter the eldritch sanctum of the church.

Upon deciphering the notebook he discovers “references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the black gulfs of chaos from which it was called.“

Finally, on a stormy and lightning flashed night, something comes for the unfortunate Blake, his terror and inevitable doom recorded in his “final frenzied jottings”:

“... The thing is taking hold of my mind... I see things I never knew before. Other worlds and other galaxies... Dark... The lightning seems dark and the darkness seems light... What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets... Azathoth have mercy!- the lightning no longer flashes- horrible- I can see everything with a monstrous sense that is not sight- light is dark and dark is light... those people on the hill... guard... candles and charms... their priests... I am it and it is I - I want to get out... must get out and unify the forces... it knows where I am... I see it - coming here - hell-wind - titan blue - black wing - Yog Sothoth save me - the three-lobed burning eye...”

It is in these last few passages in particular where Lovecraft’s gift for horror really shines: the notion of great, unknowable, Things in the void and the sheer insignificance of human kind by comparison to them. When he was on form, no one could write quite like Lovecraft or conjure quite the same sense of creeping dread and approaching doom.

Azathoth have mercy, indeed.

http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thehaunterofthedark.htm