The Worms of Heaven

Misha Burnette's "Book of Lost Doors" series has become my dessert reading.

A large chunk of the reading that I do these days is dedicated towards a purpose.  I'm beta-reading as many novels as possible.  I read to help the Castalia House Blog readers find the good and avoid the bad.  I read one book a month for the PotMB Club in order to get fresh perspectives and bond over a common title.  With all of that reading, it's rare that I can sit down and enjoy the pleasure  of a good read for its own sake.

And a good read doesn't get much better than this series.  Supermutants powered by extradimensional elder gods running around the unseen corners of Saint Louis and engaging in the sort of political chicanery that made Vampire: The Masquerade LARPing so popular for so many years?  What's not to love?

It's that rare sort of series that starts off with glimpses of the weird, and then the more Misha pulls back the veil, and the more sense you can make of what's going on, the weirder it gets.  Most urban fantasy stories become more mundane the deeper into the eldritch corners of the world you go.  That's true to a limited extent in the "Book of Lost Doors", but only because even supermutants need a day job if they want to keep food on the table.  Which leads to an odd contrast between the regular joe mutants - like the superdense Blue Metal Boys who run a machine shop - and the high-powered executives that engage in corporate espionage and all of the petty and not-so-petty crimes associated with it.

And all of that - the action, intrigue, mystery, and adventure - all of it carries a weight far beyond those of most stories of this nature.  You care more about all of it because Misha deftly conveys the characters and the relationships with masterstrokes that don't just breath life into his characters, they make you care about them.  Even the really, really weird ones.  It's a shame more of the New Wave writers couldn't balance the character studies with action with the same skill as Misha, because if the guys in the 1970s could do what Misha does, I'd probably be heading up the NuWaveRev right now!

Cirsova Four, Part Four

With the release of the fifth issue of Cirsova looming on the horizon, I'd really better start moving on these story reviews.  My reading backlog isn't getting any smaller!

Lost Men

P. Alexander really doesn't care for your genre distinctions, and just to prove it (again), he follows a weird fantasy epic up with a curious retelling of the story of Peter Pan and Captain Hook.  Eugene L. Morgulis plays with the notion of a grown-up Peter Pan in a way that makes the film Hook look even worse by comparison than it does on its own.  This story is one of those curious cases of deconstruction done in a loving manner that takes nothing away from the original.  It is as much an homage as it is a deconstruction, and that's a neat trick.  This whimsical version of the classic might be one of my favorites from this issue.

...Where There Is No Sanctuary

Superficially, the plot of this story shares much with the earlier Cirsova tale, A Suit of Haidrah Skin.  Both feature a villainous wizard-astronaut(?) in a high tower-rocket(?) that needs to die to end his reign of terror.  Where Rob Lang went with a weird tales vibe and a far-flung, perhaps post-apocalyptic setting, here Howie K. Bentley uses a dark-age setting and feel to give it a much more mythic feel.  There are a couple of other parallels that are best left as an exercise for the reader, the better not to spoil any surprises.  The real take away here - the one well worth remembering - is that these two themes on the "assault the wizard's tower" plot demonstrate there are countless ways to tell the same story.  The real question is not whether a writer has re-used an old plot, but whether or not he has infused new life into that old plot, and this issue of Cirsova features two such instances. 

Dust of Truth

Joyce Frohn takes a 'barbarians raid the civilized lands to secure plunder' tale, rolls in a romantic angle that gives the plundering a more personal motivation, sprinkles it with a bit of first-use-of-gunpowder spice, then botches the story with a completely pointless gender swap.  The women in this tale act like men, and the men act like women.  That sort of swap can work, if there's a reason for it, and this story offers none.  Note that the complaint here isn't that 'girls can't be heroes'; this is the fifth such story in Cirsova, but it's the first instance of female protagonists that felt forced.  It's also the first in which the men act like cowering simps or stupid degenerates, and the first in which that message was delivered with all the subtlety of a hammer to the face.  It's a shame, really, the story itself had a lot of potential, but the awkward gender swap and expectation of an explanation for this world's role-reversals pulls the reader's attention away from the narrative.

Cirsova Four, Part Two

My continuing quest to review every story in Cirsova’s fourth issue has me feeling a little nervous.  I fell in love with the first two issues, and enjoyed the third, but this one is off to a rocky start.  The first story was so-so, the second one pretty darn good, and now the next two have me wondering where the magic went.

The Unfolding of the World, by Harold R. Thompson

This is a short story that felt like a small story.  The basic premise, a soldier of fortune exploring the buffer-state hinterlands, is solid.  Somehow, despite the large scale of the tale, it just felt too darn small.  Exploring a poorly mapped area at the edges of an empire, and clashing with the great civilization beyond should evoke a much greater scale and drama than this story manages to achieve.  A one paragraph side trek or two, or maybe a short passage stretching out the journey there or back again, would have gone a long ways towards establishing higher stakes in the story.  Had the fantasy nation been fleshed out as well as the characters, this would have been a real gem of a story.  As it is, it feels more like a lone wanderer finding a strange small town, and escaping from it to no real purpose.  Harold’s characterizations are great. His writing is solid, and it isn’t a bad story.  It just felt small and inconsequential. 

The Sands of Rubal-Khali, by Donald Uitvlugt

A woman captured by slavers who escapes into the hands of a bounty hunter and then clashes with an ancient sorcerer in his tower fastness hits all the right notes, but this story has the opposite problem of the previous.  There’s just too much going on.  Our heroine is on a fantasy world, but she is a spacer from another planet, and there are references to historical cultures as well.  Throw in at least one alien/fantasy species that isn’t given quite enough description, and you wind up with a lot of extraneous detail that interferes with the story itself.  This reads like a short story written for people who are already familiar with the setting and its background.  It feels like there’s this big, beautiful setting out there, but we get the barest hints of it, few of which are particularly germane to the story before us. Combine that with the constant uncertainty of where the heroine is going and why, and you get a tale that feels far more disjointed on first reading than it really is.  While writing this review, I went back and re-read it, and that second reading – when I knew why everyone was behaving as they did – was an improvement.  Unfortunately, saying the story needs to be read twice to be enjoyable just shifts the criticism to a new angle, leaving this story not quite up to Cirsova’s typical high standards.

Review: Sword and Flower by Rawle Nyanzi

Sword and Flower, by Rawle Nyanzi, represents a huge load off of my mind. Rawle is one of the earliest adopters of the Pulp Revolution, and for me he represents a chance to get a good, solid assessment of whether this is really the early days of something special or a group of internet blowhards and posers mistaking meaningless trolling for honest analysis and workmanship. Granted, you’ve got successful authors like Brian Niemeier, Karl Gallagher, and Brian K. Lowe, all of whom were doing their thing before the term Pulp Revolution had even been coined. You’ve got magazines like Cirsova pumping out great stuff, too. It’s gratifying to stand side by side with proven quantities like that. But what about the fresh, new blood? Are these really the kinds of people one wants to associate with? Or are they just about of second-raters clinging to a thematic hook to cover their shoddy workmanship?

Enter Sword and Flower, by Rawle Nyanzi.

It’s not perfect. The stakes are unclear, partly due to the manner in which its protagonist finds herself thrust into a strange and alien world where a Puritan village struggles to fight off a demonic army. The near immediate introduction of miraculous healing drains the impact of wounds that might add to the tension and drama as well.

There’s a little too much telling and not showing, and sometimes at awkward moments. In the first chapter a young girl uses magic to heal a wounded warrior, and we’re immediately told, heavy handedly at that, that she has a romantic interest in the warrior which he does not reciprocate. Later, this becomes clear through her actions and words. By front loading the exposition, Nyanzi denies the reader the mystery of why the girl risked everything to save that particular warrior at that particular time.

Some of the emotional moments slide past with little impact on the action. When one of the biggest heroes of the piece dies, no one bats an eye. That hero gets an appropriate epilogue, but the death doesn’t faze the two heroes during the final confrontation. If the characters in the story don’t feel anything over the death of a major character, that’s a sign that the reader shouldn’t either.

Part of the issue here may be cultural. The Sword and the Flower wears its anime influences on its sleeve. It may be that the lack of emotional beats and light and airy combat sequences are considered a feature of the genre and not a bug. Speaking as somebody with little experience of the genre, I can only judge it based on how well it resonates as a piece of narrative fiction. My mind’s eye did not see anime characters posed against garish backdrops, but flesh and blood people. That they failed to act as flesh and blood people, but instead acted as animated ones set in a universe full of very different assumptions, could very well be true.

Bear in mind, that this is an enjoyable read. You don’t have to be well versed in anime tropes to appreciate the story. It works well even for those of us who don’t appreciate the anime aesthetic or assumptions. The story has drama, the story has emotional beats, and the story has plenty of, “show don’t tell”. The above criticisms are not meant to suggest what’s missing altogether, but rather what the story could use more of. 

That said, let’s look at what it does have.

It’s certainly creative. You’ve got Japanese sorcery, Christian soldiers, Valkyries, clerics, and bizarre extra-dimensional living fortresses. That’s a heck of a recipe, and yet all of those disparate myths and legends are sewn together to make a seamless whole. Not a single one of those items feels out of place or shoved in at random – a common failure of ‘kitchen sink’ style tales.

The action sequences are stellar. The action rides along at a fast clip, and within each sequence, we know why the combatants are fighting. The fortunes of each fight ebb and flow, and although the outcome is never within doubt, each combat features a surprise or two along the way, keeping things from feeling predictable.

The characterizations are great. Each of the major characters is distinct from the next, and they each have plausible and believable motivations. Even the Puritan villagers’ frustrating hostility towards the sorcerous girl that saves them, are presented in a sympathetic light. Over the course of the story, thanks to the compassion shown by the protagonist, one begins to understand them, even if that understanding doesn’t make them any less frustrating.

The take-away here is that Sword and Flower is a great story. It’s easily on par with anything the major publishing houses are producing these days. It would have fit right in on the pages of a pulp magazine of old. It’s well worth the price of admission on Amazon.

But it’s not just a fun read that hews to my favored aesthetic. It’s a vindication that the people driving the Pulp Revolution forward really know what they are doing. It’s validation that Rawle Nyanzi isn’t just talking the Pulp Revolution talk, but he’s also walking the Pulp Revolution walk. It’s verification that the judgement of the people within the movement isn’t clouded by friendship or nostalgia.

This is one reader that’s looking forward to watching Nyanzi improve as a writer. He’s already pretty damn good at it.

Tough Love

A few weeks back I had the misfortune of writing an honest review for a book that I really wanted to like.  The author is a great guy, and his book hit a lot of the right notes, but just didn't work.  I was concerned that my rationalizing the need for a negative review was just that - rationalizing.  

This past weekend, Rawle Nyanzi reviewed Forbidden Thoughts, and the results were messy.  Like me, he loves the authors, but couldn't in good conscience recommend the book.  When he mentioned it on social media, it sparked a bit of conversation that's worth highlighting:

That's a critical point.  Many of us involved in the fight to make sci-fi and fantasy great again are relative neophytes at adventure fiction.  Our early works shouldn't be our best works.  As Rawle says, we've got to do better, and keep pushing each other to get better.  Unearned positive reviews provide a brief spark of satisfaction, but honest negative reviews that push us all to improve provide a long-term benefit not just to the author, but to the readers who deserve the best we have to offer.

So let this be an open call for negative reviews.  They might be harder to write, but decent writers who can take one on the chin and keep coming back for more, appreciate them just as much.  I know I do, and if you don't believe me - just try me:

You can review my latest novella, The Sorceror's Serpent, right here on Amazon.

The Yanthus Prime Job

It looks like this blog may just be turning into a book review blog.  Things are pretty crazy right now what with the audio book recording, trying to finish "Five Dragons" before the end of the year - a long shot, to be honest - cranking away on a couple of sooper seekrit projects that will be revealed in the new year or forever hidden...oh, and family and overtime in the salt mines. 

Those are all excuses.  To be honest, in the last few months I've just been thrilled to discover great writer after great writer.  Reading Cirsova, and finding a couple of great social nodes on Twitter, have introduced me to a number of great writers.  It's an embarrassment of riches.  Combine that with technology that allows me to sneak in a chapter or two at lunch or in quiet moments at work, and it's almost embarrassing how much reading I've been able to accomplish over the last few month.

Eventually things change, as they are wont to do, and you may find things in these spaces other than reviews.  You know, things like politics, film, writing, wargaming...I do miss wargaming...and philosophy.  But for now, it's books, Books, BOOKS!
 

 Why, lookee here!  It's another book.  Not just another book, but another @RobKroese book.  Remember when I said, "[Starship Grifter is] just not my cuppa joe."?

Yeah...about that.

The Yanthus Prime Job is a novella for a dollar.  It's short.  It's fun.  It's protagonist has the standard, "one last job" motivation, but we all know that for characters like this, there's always another job waiting just around the corner.  A writer's gotta eat, after all.

This title is set in the same universe as Starship Grifters, and it features the same sorts of characters - grifters, conmen, and thieves.  The protagonist of this work is a bartender trying to go straight after a career working for the Ursa Minor Mafia*.  Deep in debt, she hatches a plot to steal a valuable thing and use the proceeds to buy her way out of debt to the mafia and escape Yanthus Prime for parts unknown. 

The story is half standard heist, half science-fiction.  The heist is easily recognizable from movies ranging from the 1940s to today - break into a secure museum and steal a valuable macGuffin - but includes several clever science-fiction nods.  Her (sort of?) low tech solution to defeat the standard high-tech security measures is the sort of plan that could only work in science-fiction or fantasy.  Otherwise, most of her gear (grapple guns, chameleon suits, and plasma glass cutters, for example) is the standard thief kit.  Aside from the key plot-point used to defeat the security cameras, the break-in and escape could be plunked into any setting.  That's actually a compliment.  Rather than succumb to the temptation to make everything whiz-bang gee-whillickers new SF you've never seen before, Kroese wisely stops while the stopping is good.  The hook is all you need.

If you've watched a lot of heist movies, you'll see a few of the double and triple crosses coming a mile away, but there are enough surprises left in Kroese's pockets to make it worth reading through to the end.


  *  Get it?  Ursa Minor Mafia?  Ursa means "bear".  It's the Russians.  Kroese has a gift for nomenclature that is downright Futuramaian.  I mean, the man has a book out called Shrodingers Gat, for crying out loud.  How can you not love that?

 

Let's Get This Over With, or, Two Reviews

Writing difficult reviews isn’t a lot of fun, so this post features two.  Let’s get them out of the way so we can get back to the good stuff.  I’ve got a hard copy of Cirsova burning a hole in my queue.

First up, Castalia House’s Loki’s Child, by Fenris Wulf - one of the all time great names.  This came highly recommended, but it just didn’t float my boat.  It’s a modern day comedy about the music industry, what the film types call a slapstick caper?  I guess?

The set-ups, the characters, the plot, everything about it is extremely well done, but it all rests on an understanding of the music culture that I lack.  Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the music industry, I’m talking about the music culture.  This isn’t one of those books that would only be funny to people working inside the music industry, but to should be appealing to anyone who loves music and follows music culture (or one of the subcultures).  They would catch a lot of references and see the loving tribute to the culture that this book represents.

For me, it just felt like watching a Bollywood movie.  It’s very well done, and it’s understandable why somebody else would like it, but it just isn’t for me.

Why was that so hard?  Well, I love Castalia House.  This is the first book they’ve published that didn’t grab me by the lapels and force me to sit up and take notice.  I wish them all the best, and not just because they pay me to record audio books for them.  I don’t love their works because I do voice work for them, I do voice work for them because I love their works. 

So it goes with JD Cowan’s “Knights of the End”.  Cowan is one of my favorite book bloggers.  His posts are well thought out, appeal to my sense of righteous anger at a culture that was drifted too far from its roots, and force me to think hard about aspects of the culture in ways that would never have occurred to me.  But don’t take my word for that – he made Castalia House’s list of Top Book Bloggers of 2016.

I had high hopes for this book.  Cowan is a smart man who understands the deeper connotations of publishing and storytelling, and I was eager to see how he used his insights and understandings.  This was a prime opportunity to forget about theory for a bit and look at implementation.  Theory is easy, it’s where the rubber meets the road that things get hard.

“Knights of the End” has its heart and its mind in the right place, but it didn’t work for me.  This may be because I am not the target audience.  Cowan has explicitly said that this book is written for younger teens, and as a modern day juvenile adventure it could be that it works like magic.  Everything from the bullied protagonist being granted terrific powers, an exploration of a world beyond the mundane, and a supporting cast that just doesn’t understand the hero of the story seems calculated to appeal to younger readers.

My chief complaints – that the Chekov’s guns are broadcast to heavily, that the mentor’s alternate between acting wise and childish, that the descriptions lack subtlety and nuance – likely result from Cowan’s desire to match the text to the target audience.  If so, this is the one area where we disagree.  He has a great position on heroism, responsibility, and fighting back not just against alien invaders but against a culture that feels wrong.  But these are all conveyed by older works written for more adult tastes and still enjoyed by pre-teens to this day.  The pulp authors beloved by so many of us as youths ( Howard, Burroughs, and I’d argue even Rowling) didn’t scale back the grade-level readability in order to appeal to younger readers, nor should Cowan.

“Knights of the End” has a great super-heroic plot, and a number of high points.  It has the right beats and the right twists and turns in the right places.  I particularly enjoyed the an early switcheroo Cowan plays on the reader with the protagonist’s best friend.  But in the end, it’s really written for younger tastes than mine.  If you have a younger teen in your life that you’d like to introduce to a more modern take on the fantastic, and one where you can feel comfortable that the plot serves traditional values more than those foisted on us by the maintstream culture, then you can be comfortable giving this to him or her.  But I wouldn’t recommend it for more mature tastes.

Perhaps it mitigates my review when I say that I’m looking forward to Cowan’s next work.  He’s doing the right things, his head is in the right place, and my hopes remain high that when writing for more mature audiences, the problems that kept me from enjoying this book will vanish.

Don't Read Anything Written After 1980

The adventures of King Conas returns, and we learn why the three sorcerers attempted to kill him in Issue 13.  The January Issue of Marvel's King Conan sees the barbarian explore a demon haunted volcano home to an artifact that contains the soul of the first King of Aquilonia.  Written by Doug Moench, it includes this scene where-in Conan's bride, Zenobia, insists of accompanying the King on his quest:

 

Check the date - yep, 1983.  You can tell.  She doesn't just prove her mettle.  She doesn't surprise Conan with a cheap shot.  She completely bests him in open combat.  Because of course she does.

And not for any real reason, either.  Through the rest of the issue she never really does anything but stand back and give Conan somebody to talk to other than his chief advisor.  She never faces any real danger, never provides any aid, and never provides any solid advice.

Disappointing, but not entirely unexpected.

Dipping a Toe in the #NewPulp Waters

You may have noticed that I talk a big game.  Well, over on twitter, Barry Reese called me out. 

When I opined in 140 characters or less that the New Pulp writers trade on the term pulp by slapping on the chrome while the Pulp Revolution focusses on the horsepower under the engine Reese wanted to know what New Pulp stories I was talking about, because he could name check two authors that he considered to be the best of the New Pulp writers working today.

Challenge accepted!

Within minutes I had bought a copy of Four Bullets for Dillon, by Derrick Ferguson.

Just to be clear, the conversation was civil, and even if Mr. Reese and I have different tastes, he’s a good guy that I’d gladly sit down  with and talk books for hours.  We’re going to bypass the subject of which modern pulp writers soured me on ‘pulp’ as a term any more indicative of quality than ‘punk’.  Instead, we're going to look at a pair of modern action stories from Derrick Ferguson.

This review was difficult to write.  Reviews in the one star and five star range are easy.  These middle-of-the-road reviews of works that show so much potential but just miss the mark mean that I can’t just rant or rave, but have to really analyze and understand where the problems lie.  And Four Bullets for Dillon has a few problems.  It’s not a bad work, but it's go issues.

The first story in the book, Dillon and the Bad-Ass Belt Buckle, features the eponymous hero and his sidekick Eli rescuing an Oscar winning actress from the jungles of Cambodia.  It starts with the duo having already rescued the actress from the clutches of the kidnappers and – wait, what?  Go back, Derrick, that sounds like a great story.  How did they get her out?  The dynamic duo mention lots of bullets and action…can I read that?  Perhaps that is another story in the Dillon-verse, but if so, the reader is given no indication – even editorially – of that. 

For my money, in cinema res serves as the gold standard for opening up action heavy stories. In any media.  This story opens at least twenty minutes after the cinema is done res-ing.  Which forces an early-story pause in the already limited action to provide the reader with an awkward information dump.  “Here’s what you missed out on,” paired with a blunt recitation of the damsel in distress’s resume, and a dry explanation that our hero is a soldier of fortune hired by outside agents to save her.  The whole opening section of this purported action story chooses exposition over action.

Compare that to my own ‘rescuing the damsel’ story.  In Bring Back Our Girls, the action starts just as the hero is on the cusp of breaking into the compound of the bad guys.  The first line of the story features the hero slitting the throat of one of the sentries.  The backstory leading up to that point is only slowly introduced over the first half of the story.  Thatset-up is wedged into the spaces between action, with only the goal, save kidnapped girls from vaguely Boko Haram-esque terrorists, mentioned in the first few parargraphs.  And that was crammed in just to ensure that the reader knew where their sympathies should lie – that the guy they just saw commit murder was the good guy killing a modern day slaver.

Speaking of opening, the introduction to Derrick features him climbing out from under the shot-up getaway Jeep and beating it with a wrench, frustrated that he cannot repair it.  He explicitly says if it was a horse, he’d shoot it.  Even granting that as the hyperbole it clearly is, following the “show, don’t tell” pattern, Ferguson shows us the hero is a petulant man-child for whom violence isn’t a last resort, but a means of expressing himself.  That doesn’t sound very heroic.  You might get away with that scene if Dillon has already been established as a hero in other ways, or if this was the last of a dozen bad breaks, but it’s a strange choice for setting up reader expectations.

Then you have the damsel in distress.  She is a fierce and independent successful modern woman who doesn’t need no man…except when it comes to being rescued.  Even that can be forgiven.  A high value hero needs a high value damsel, and although this seems to be the only kind of woman we see in media these days, they exist, they add drama, and my weariness of the trope amounts to mere personal preference.  What cannot be forgiven is that for all that we are told how great she is, we are shown a rather stupid woman.  Stupid or unbelievable.  Neither is flattering.

Let me explain.  The trio leaves their broken Jeep and sets out through the jungle on foot.  They come upon a new asphalt road and follow it to a small bandit settlement surrounded by log walls topped by sharp wire and broken glass.  With little choice, they decide to enter the settlement.  This provides an excuse for an important character moment.  The hero must explain to the damsel, Jenise, that this is serious.  There is danger here.  If she doesn’t listen to him, she could get badly hurt.  She resists at first, not understanding that she is out of her element, and that his words are not patronizing, but are driven by legitimate concern.  Did you notice what just happened there?  Having been kidnapped by a gang of violent men seeking to ransom her back to her benefactors, and rescued by a pair of violent men in a manner we are reliably informed was most violent, she doesn’t understand how high the stakes are at this moment. 

I can’t stress how damaging this is to the narrative of the story.  We’ve been told how smart and fierce she is.  Now we’re being told that getting kidnapped, shot at, and stranded in a jungle miles from civilization wasn’t enough evidence for her to understand.  We are expected to believe in a contradiction.  That sucks all the wind out of the sails.

Finally, about a third of the way into the story we have some real tension as Jenise is essentially kidnapped by the leader of the bandit camp.  We have a threat and some tension and we're starting to get invested when...it turns out Jenise has seduced the bandit leader and is going to be fine without the hero after all.  So the ensuing action is driven entirely by Dillon's ego with a touch of greed and envy on his part for a minor MacGuffin.  That's it.  There are no outside stakes involved at all.  It's just action for the sake of pew-pew-pew. 

I’m going to stop here.  These are all problems, and they get repeated throughout the book.  Rather than list them off in great detail, let’s look at the positives for a bit.

But before we do, I’m going to throw in one last complaint.  The book has for stories… and no Table of Contents.  That’s an editorial comment, but a valid complaint.  Self-publishers, you’ve got to do the little things to make your reader’s lives easier.  If you don’t take care of the little things, readers have no reason to think you’ll take care of the big ones.

I'm done, seriously this time.  Back to the positives.

Ferguson's descriptions are great, and his writing just plain works.  His prose is solid without un-necessary touches or flash.  Some of his descriptions are tight from a word count, but really fire the imagination in ways that I found impressive.

Ferguson's action is ferocious.  The man knows how to write fast and fun action scenes.  He knows how to ratchet up the physical tension.  He knows how to pace the action with those all-important breaks to catch your breath, and he throws in enough twists and turns to keep the reader just off-kilter enough that they can't possibly guess what's around the next bend.  Dillon's skills at swinging away from bad guys Tarzan-style was a nice nod to the old pulps and much appreciated by this reader.

The twists in the plot are well executed.  The good guy and bad guy are forced to work together, and the way that happens is...if not believable, at least understandable.  This is a pulp story we're talking about here.

Ferguson himself is fearless in the settings of his stories.  He pays just enough attention to the real world to keep them grounded, but doesn't let overly complex rationales interfere with a good story.  The lost bandit camp city in the heart of Cambodia was a brilliant setting.  It's preposterous and over the top from a real world standpoint, but that shouldn't stop an action writer from using it anyway. It's just the sort of setting that you should expect - nay, demand! - in a pulp story.  That goes double for the characters who are without exception distinct and personable.  Even the bit players are provided with enough character to draw the reader in.

In the final analysis, I can't recommend this book.  Ferguson's writing is solid, his descriptions great, but it's all surface detail.  There's no depth to this work.  There's nothing to hook the reader into the protagonist except for the protagonist himself.  Everything he does is for him, and we don't have any real reason to care what happens to him outside of the fact that he is the central character in the story.  Dillon could have walked away from any of these stories at multiple moments with no affect on anyone in the world but himself.  An arrogant narcissist can make for a fine protagonist, but the pulps that excite me don't just have protagonists - they have heroes.

You might like this book.  You might like empty action, and you don't need actual heroics done by a hero.  In which case, go crazy.  Enjoy.  Who am I to judge your tastes.  I just need more that that.  I need a reason to root for the good guy other than that he is really handsome and cool.  I need him to struggle and take risks and sacrifice himself for others.  I need him to fight for something bigger than himself, and Four Bullets for Dillon just doesn't meet that need.

Reading these stories just confirmed my complaint about so much of the new pulp fiction on the market today.  There's a lot of flash and chrome, but there's no heart and soul to it.

 

Grown Up Book Report: Starship Grifters

Most of what you'll find reviewed here at Seagull Rising are works that really blow my skirt up or that really grind my gears.  Starship Grifters, by Rob Kroese, is neither.  Instead, it's a very funny book with, that is really well written, and just isn't for me. 

The basic plot of the story follows the adventures of Rex Nihilo as he desperately tries to rid himself of a massive debt.  (The details of how he assumed that debt are left vague here for the purposes of saving potential readers the fun of discovery.)  Rex is a narcissistic, back stabbing, lying, no-good, dirty, double dealing swindler, but like all the best grifters he has a fearless arrogance and under-dog appeal that soften him up.  To make him an easier character to swallow, he is the best of a lot of bad actors - the people he swindles and who swindle him right back are so much worse that you can't help but root for Rex.

The book is narrated by his faux-femme robot sidekick, Sasha.  Sasha is a one of a kind, almost-sentient robot prevented from achieving true sentience by forced reboots every time she gets too clever.  This gives Kroese an excuse to deliberately set-up mysteries that Sasha just barely solves - only to blank her mind and deny readers the resolution until events can unfold for themselves.  It's one weird trick that that is as effective and funny as it is transparent. 

The leads in this book remind me of a gender-swapped Bender and Fry, of Futurama infamy.  You've got a lovable rogue - this time a human - and a dim-witted assistant - this time a female robot.  It's a classic pairing, and for good reason.  Making the straight man a largely emotionless robot results in a lot of very dry wit being tossed around right alongside some humdinger one liners like these:

• The name of the evil imperial government is the Malarchy.
• It takes a massive, well-funded bureaucracy to solve problems caused by a massive, well-funded bureaucracy
• The Strong Misanthropic Principle, which asserts that the universe exists in order to screw with us.

Then there's the Douglas Adams-esque rationalization for faster-than-light travel:

It was actually well known by the twentieth century that Euclidean geometry is arbitrary, being only one possible way of describing the relations of objects in space.  There are a theoretically infinite number of other geometries that all employ their own set of rules.  The trick is to find a geometry in which the distance you want to traverse is significantly shorter than in Euclidean geometry.  Essentially you reverse-engineer a an entirely new set of geometric rules based on the trip you want to take, and then employ those rules for only as long as the trip lasts.

This is literally called rationalizing a hypergeometric course.  Talk about hanging a lampshade on something.

So far I've name checked two of the best humor sci-fi franchises around, and you can throw the Stainless Steel Rat onto that pile.  This is a book can stand shoulder to shoulder with any of those franchises.  It is that funny and well written.

Here's where this review gets a little trickier to write.  Although everything I've said up to this point has been glowing, and while I'll certainly add Kroese to my stable of authors to look for, this isn't a book that appeals to me these days.

I'm just not a big fan of stories about con-jobs and heists.  At this point in my life, I've consumed enough moral ambiguity and anti-heroism.  My tastes run towards moral reinforcement and true heroism.  Rex Nihilo is just a grafter looking out for number one, and that leaves me cold.  Bear in mind, I finished this book on the strength of Kroese's humor and writing, but as pretty as its chrome sparkles it just doesn't have much under the hood. 

To understand where it fails, let's take a look at how well it meets Misha Burnett's Five Pillars of Pulp:

1. Action Oriented Storytelling:  Starship Grifters passes this with flying colors.  Those flying colors are typically those of lazer blasts, but it also features space chases and fistfights as well. 
2. Protagonists with a clear moral compass:  Pure fail.  Rex's moral compass always points straight towards himself.  His sidekick, Sasha, does what she can to help him, but is constrained by her programming.
3. An element of romance in the classical sense of decisive action:  None worth mentioning.
4. As well as the modern sense of interpersonal passion:  This one is a mixed bag. Rex is passionate about money and his own skin, but see number 2.  We'll score a half-point for the passion, but no more because the passion is not in service to anything greater than Rex himself.
5. An unapologetic view of violence as the proper tool for overcoming evil:  Rex, like all good grifters, believes violence is a tool best used on his behalf by others.

That's 1.5 out of 5 pillars.  That's a C level effort on the Pulp-O-Meter.  This is not to say that Starshp Grifters is a bad book.  It's a lot of fun, and those who enjoy madcap hijinks featuring as many as five separate groups bounce around the galaxy in a constant effort to outlie, out-cheat, and out-swindle each other would be hard pressed to find a book that does it better than Starship Grifters.

That's just not my cuppa joe.

And really, that may be the highest compliment one could pay an author:  I liked this book, even though it's not the sort of book I typically enjoy.

Quick Hits: Woke Kids

This is going to sound like one of those fake "my woke eight year old asked me," things that has littered the twit box of late.  It's really not.  I take full credit for raising my daughter right.  My twelve year old daughter has my genes and she has my memes.

This weekend the older kids asked to watch the latest Star Trek horse whipping.  The twelve-year old is wise beyond my years, because she learned her lesson after the last two movies.  We asked her why she didn't want to see the latest movie, and my hand to god, she said, "It's just going to be about a hundred year old guy with a bomb trying to blow up the Federation, and then there'll be a fistfight over the bomb at the end."

A single tear of pride is rolling down my cheek as I type this.

Now look, my kids know to watch for the signs.  They know all about The Narrative, and we all point and laugh every time a movie makes a point to pause and linger in a long steady shot expressly designed to show everybody how current year the movie really is.  They ask questions about the antagonist's motivations.  They will be effective soldiers for the next generation's fight in the war on noticing things.



Take that, flyover country!

They pointed out to me that two out of the three vengeance thirsting Big Bad Guys seeking in this franchise are soldiers.  They had no answers for why that would be the case, so Dad filled them in, Jeffro like, on what their brain noticed, even if they did not.  As with most messaging designed around empty promises, stating out loud the sales pitch in plain bold terms makes the pitch sound ridiculous:

• If you wear Axe body spray dozens of supermodels will follow in your wake.
• Your cats will love you more if you feed them food from a can.
• Soldiers are very bad, dangerous things who do very bad things, and you can't have peace while they are around.

They notice these things, even if they don't have the words to explain them.  Better yet, they have the confidence to identify when something doesn't pass the smell test, and ask questions about it.  Why is that so hollow?  Why don't I care about the people on the space station?  Why does this fight feel so fake?  Why is the central node for the entire ventilation system a glass box in 'the sky'?  Why do the spaceships fly under rivers to dock in the middle of the space globe?

In some cases the answer is as simple as, "Because it makes it more dramatic.  Because it looks better.  Because we have three teams of people to keep track of, and this lets the director show us where they all are in relation to each other."  These are the easy ones.  The relationship questions that are the hard ones to answer.  You have to really break down all the ways that films like this fail on the relationship front, and then figure out better ways to present what the film-makers were trying to show.  Teaching kids how adult relationships work is hard enough as it is, doing it while trying to shore up the foundations of a film like Beyond is playing the "Dad Game" on  B Mode.

You know what I'm talking about.

I should have listened to the 12 year old.

Cirsova, The Cover Art

Four covers by Jabari Weather

As warned previously, the covers of Cirsova magazine are worth a look. 

We're going to punt on the special edition cover featuring a pair of GamerGate heroes in a classic Frazetta pose.  That was a nice nod to the troops on the front lines of the Great Meme War of 2016, but it's worth it's own discussion.  Also, it doesn't really fit my thesis, so like any good climate scientist worth his grant money, I'm going to just ignore that pesky little data point.

What you're looking at to the right there are the first four covers of Cirsova Magazine.  Initially, I was little disappointed to learn that the same artist would be preparing the cover for the fourth installation of the magazine.  Then I saw the cover he did and realized I didn't know what I was talking about and maybe I should keep my damn fool mouth shut.

That never stopped me before and it's not going to stop me now. 

Purely from a branding perspective, this is a clever move.  Cirsova magazine has a distinct look to it.  The bold colors and the stark impressionistic style all serve to distance this magazine from its more staid competitors.  You've got conflict occurring in each one as well.  Only in the case of the magic thief sneaking through a wall do you have a cool character looking cool, and even he is in the process of doing something.

Now take a look at the more recent covers of the sort of magazines you're likely to find in the box chains:

At least they warned you what to expect inside.

Let's just take a moment to enjoy the fact that F&SF over on the left features a lonely person surrounded by multiple cats.  Give them credit, they know what their audience likes and they are going to give those spinster cat ladies what they want good and hard.

Those three covers are all dull and muted.  Only the woman fleeing through the woods features any action of any kind.  The middle one is nothing but three pensive faces looking pensively off into the distance.  This is the sorry state of the mainstream fantasy and science-fiction world today.  Cirsova is right to do everything different that it can.

Of course, this being November, maybe the October issues of each magazine are just naturally muted and dark.  October is the spooky month of Halloween after all, so let's look at a survey of Asimov's covers, to get a better overview of what to expect from them.  Here is the top row of results from a Googel Image Search for "Asimov's Magazine Previous Issues":

There are nine people shown. Five of them are sitting down.  Of the fours people standing, only one is actually moving, and that figure is tucked way off into the back.  One of the covers is nothing but a landscape. Thrilling tales of adventure more certainly do not await.  This is a sedate magazine filled with people doing the same things they do in our world, only against a backdrop of stars and castles.  There's no last minute changes to the hyper-drive coils.  There's no fight against a scaly natural disaster in lizard form that breathes fire.  There's just a whole lot of people sitting around talking about life and love and stuff, you know?

You can't even give them credit for using a variety of artists.  Cirsova, with one artist shows just as much variety as Asimov's does with (presumably) eight of them.  All eight covers of Asimov's could be done by the same artist.  They have the same technical quality and evoke the same listless acceptance of the same old stories set in the same old new worlds. 

I'd argue Cirsova has more variety given that its four issues feature three different figure perspectives.  Two feature full body characters painted from overhead, one a three quarter figure from below, and the most recent features a head and shoulder shot of a woman.  This is a great way of subtly reminding readers that Cirsova includes stories written from different perspectives.

The only thing I see that is consistent across the first four covers of Cirsova is that all four are fantasy.  They have yet to feature a sci-fi cover.  That seems like a glaring omission for a magazine that features plenty of adventure off-planet.

So mark me down as a suitably chastened fan of Jabari Weathers.  The Cirsova covers have continued to grow on me over time, and I'm eager to see what the fifth issue of Cirsova brings to my mailbox.

[Edit to add:  After writing this post, my thesis was independently confirmed by the Barbarian Book Club.]

People Are Talking

The first independent review of my writing was recently published at the Castalia House blog, and glowing isn't too hyperbolic of a word for it.

It’s got likable characters that read as if they are actual human beings. It’s got protagonists that could maybe stand to see things a little differently and antagonists that maybe have a point. It’s got unvarnished heroism, believable emotional beats, and the exact epic showdown that is promised on the cover.

Most importantly, it is a story that can be enjoyed by fathers and their daughters. And as I write that line, I have to say I am both shocked and angered by how little there is to fill that niche. Nobody, at any rate, consulted with us for what we might have wanted that way in the most recent Star Wars film. I think all of that’s changing now, though. And not a moment too soon.

These would be kind words coming from anyone, but to read this from Jeffro Johnson lends them additional weight.  From a strictly professional standpoint, Jeffro has a keen eye for prose, and he pulls no punches when work doesn't live up to his high standards.  If he enjoyed this novella, then I'm not wasting my time here.  From a personal standpoint, Jeffro has been instrumental in lifting the scales from my eyes when it comes to modern literature.  He has been a tireless advocate for the Pulp Revolution and making sci-fi great again, and a huge inspiration to me.  His approval of my work doesn't just validate my decision to throw my hat in the ring, it motivates me to elevate my game.

Feels good, man.

Cirsova, Issue Three

It's long past time we talked about Cirsova.  The third issue dropped, and I backed at a high enough level to receive a hard copy.  I could talk about the high quality of the physical copy, but I won't. Because I'm not autistic.  That particular train may be fine, but it's only one means by which Cirsova is sounding the death bell for traditional publishing.

We'll do a more in-depth look at a few of the stories from this issue later, but for now, let's just look at the issue from a bird's eye view.  After all, this magazine is almost assured of a spot on the short list for a Hugo. 

As usual, this is some of the best bang for your buck that fans of short fantasy and science-fiction can find these days.  As a big fan of this style of reading, I've long been an advocate for increased production and sale by authors of their short form fiction on Amazon.  (I'm following that model myself with the steady release of novellas such as Wyrm's Bane.)  As things stand, the production rate of stand-alone short fiction is low, and no one has developed a central review and recommendation list that one could use to select "the good stuff" (hint, hint).

That leaves us at the tender mercies of a man like P. Alexander, the editor of Cirsova, and to date those mercies have been tender indeed.  In each of the previous issues of Cirsova, I have yet to be disappointed by a story.  As expected, they range in quality.  They haven't all blown my socks off, but I have yet to get half-way through a story and think, "Why am I wasting time on this garbage?"  Even the worst story in Crisova is worth reading through to the end.  That streak continues in the third issue.

This go 'round we get nine stories largely centered around the theme of pirates.  One glaring omission that jumps out is the third installment of the epic poetic retelling of the John Carter tale by James Hutchings.  That has been promised for the next issue, and it frees up space for stories from new authors, so it's a small loss.  The mix of stories tends toward the fantasy end of the spectrum, but there's enough science-fiction to satisfy.  The fantasy itself is a solid mix as well with a pair of stories set in historical fantasy worlds rather than the de rigeuer Tolkein pastiches that are all too common.  This issue even includes a modern world where fantasy slips past the normies on the regular, and while it wasn't one that appealed to my tastes, it was nice to see that setting included as well.

One thing you can say for Cirsova is that its mix of new and old, and of safe and daring, hits all the sweet spots for variety that you'd want.  Even if you don't like everything in this issue, it's a safe bet you'll like something.  And if you don't like something in this issue, maybe fantasy and science-fiction just aren't your thing.

As with the first two issues, the cover art here is provided by Jabari Weather.  My initial thought on seeing that he is the cover artist for the fourth issue was that they needed some fresh blood in the cover art department.  After thinking about it for ten seconds, and looking at the covers all lined up side-by-side, I realized how clever this choice really is.  But that's a post for another day...

Pulp Romance

My last post touched on the deft touch Manly Wade Wellman used when writing romance in Who Fears the Devil.  Today, I'd like to talk about it in a little more depth.

First, let's introduce the contenders.

In the pink slime corner, the massively popular Magic Girl genre which features a bad-ass magic girl in a modern setting beset by monsters.  She doesn't need no stinking man.  She may be conventionally or unconventionally attractive, but romance is hard for her.  She is shy or awkward or hasn't got time for a man what with all the monster fighting she has to do.  Also, most guys just don't understand or can't handle a badass chick like her. 

In the blue corner, the wonderfully regressive writing of Manly Wade Wellman in which women actually look forward to finding a man to settle down with.  The would-be lovers in these tales are generally young, and generally awkward, and generally that's because they are kind and decent people who just need a little subtle nudging from their elders to seal the deal they both want to make.

Here's a great example of how Wellman describes a young couple in the making early in the story:

He jumped up and went out like as if he expected to see angles.  I followed him out, and I reckon it was an angel he figured he saw.

She was a slim girl, but not right small.  In her straight blue dress and canvas shoes, with her yellow curls waterfalled down her back, she was pretty to see.  In one hand she toted a two-gallon bucket.  She smiled, and that smile made Zeb's knees buck.

Simple, home-spun, and fun.  That's how it's done, folks.  Here's another great example of a feuding couple that reconciles:

Back he turned, and bent down, and she rose up on her toetips so their faces came together.

The rain stopped, the way you'd think that stopped it.  But they never seemed to know it, and I picked up my guitar and went out toward the lip of the cliff.

Tasteful.  Evocative.  Heart warming.  This is how people who aren't broken on the inside write about love and romance.  This is how people who understand that love is a coming together and not a constant battle for the upper hand write about love and romance.  This is how people who accept the difference between men and women write about love and romance. 

We don't get a lot of this in our sf/f literature these days, because most sf/f writers are broken people writing about broken people.  They either don't understand love in the charitable or romantic or chivalrous sense, or they deny the very existence of those three possibilities.  And that shines through in their work - to the detriment of their stories, the genre, literature, and the world.

Let's try to do better.  Let's learn a lesson from writers like Manly Wade Wellman.  After all, when you're lost or at a dead-end, you have to take a step back to where you were before you can forge a new path ahead.

Space Pirates Are In My Wheelhouse

It turns out spending time on social media poking around the fringes of modern publishing has blown up my reading queue.  I haven't had this much great stuff rain down on me since Matt moved to town my sophomore year of high school and brought his father's full basement of sf/f with him.  Forget the local library, his dad's collection would have kept me busy for a lifetime if college hadn't gotten in the way.  As a result of this recent embarrassment of riches, you're probably going to see a few short story reviews thrown on the blog as short filler, as it looks like the bulk of my long fiction reading will be dedicated to the Puppy of the Month Book Club.  Filler like this post.

 

The Fourth Fleet, by Russell Newquist, is a short science-fiction story that appears in the collection, Make Death Proud to Take Us.  I had hoped to review this entire collection of short stories as a whole, but it's been a few weeks now, and it's better to get one short review out while the reading is still fresh in my mind. 

 

Full disclosure:  Russell is a good guy.  Well...his online persona strikes me as a good guy, and that's the only way I've ever encountered him.  In fact, I bought this book because I like what he brings to the schoolyard bull session.  This review might be colored by the fact that I like him and want to see him do well.  Whether that makes this more of an impartial review or more of a naked shill is up to you.

 

With all that pre-amble out of the way, let's get to the good stuff, and The Fourth Fleet definitely ranks among the good stuff.

 

The Fourth Fleet is exactly the sort of throwback adventure story that churns my butter.  It starts out the tale of three brothers clinging to life and scrambling to return to civilization after having been intercepted by a fleet of space pirates, having had their cargo of planetary gas and all their food stolen, and then left for dead.  The blue collar guys are hampered by real world physics and the need to account for things like mass v. thrust, planetary orbits, and other real-world technical challenges.  Somehow, they manage to cobble together a solution, and limp back towards the inner planets of the solar system, and with them they bring information critical to stopping the recent plague of space piracy.

 

Somehow, the pirate fleet in question has developed a revolutionary method of transport that allows them to pretty much ignore the physics of space travel.  Every time the space cops get a lock on the raiders and set an intercept course, they arrive at the calculated rendezvous only to have the buccaneers actually show up on the far side of sol raiding yet another fleet of colony ships or gas miners.  Solving the mystery of how the pirates manage to defy the laws of physics as currently understood places this story in the hardest of hard sci-fi, and actually drives the action as well.

 

This is one of those stories that is just long enough.  It gets in, tells its story, and gets out.  A less skilled writer, or one with a contract to fill, could have inflated the story here to fill out a smallish paperback, but that would have required numerous subplots and threads, pointless politicking, and a lot of wasted time.  This is exactly the sort of story that fits well within the short story dynamic, and it is nice to see that people are still doing just that. 

 

For my part, this story came about at just the right time.  One of the audio-books I have in post-production right now is a collection of short stories edited by Tom Kratman and Vox Day, Riding the Red Horse. That collection contains a short non-fiction piece you may remember called, The Hot Equations, by Ken Burnside, in which he explains the realities of thermodynamics, demonstrates how hard sci-fi should operate within those realities, and then suggests ways that they can be used to drive conflict.  It's as much a polemic against the ubiquity of soft sci-fi as it is a challenge to writers to step up to the hard sci-fi plate and do better.

 

Reading The Fourth Fleet provides a clinic on how a writer can step up to that plate and hit a solid home run.  If this post doesn't have enough asides for you yet, check out Russell's own blog where he confirms that I didn't luck into some grand connection - he admits to writing this story as a direct response to that challenge.  At the end of his post, he states:

I leave it to the readers to decide if the story honors the science of “The Hot Equations” – or if it’s any good.

 This reader decided that it does, and it is.

Stranger Things, It's Decent

We’re almost living in golden age of television production.  The production costs are lower, the transmission methods varied, and the consumer market fractured to the point that it is easier than ever to allow for quality production of niche programming.  Producers are free to be daring, take risks, and make whatever sorts of shows interest them without the worry that it might not attract a majority share of the all-important 18 to 35 demographic.  If it wasn’t for the hamfisted agitprop crammed into most shows, we might just reach that golden age. 

For the first time in a long time, I’ve watched a show from start to finish and not felt to bad about it.  Based on a review found at somebody’s blog, I took the Netflix Original series, “Stranger Things”, for a test drive and just kept right on watching.  It’s an old school thriller set in small town Indiana during the 1980s.  A young boy and a teen girl go missing and three different teams of investigators slowly uncover the truth of the matter.  Their stories weave in and out as each discovers their own trail of clues leading up to the final confrontation. 

It’s not great, but it’s pretty darn good.  The acting ranges from stiff to overblown – Winona Ryder plays a mother with only two emotions, raving hysterics and mumbling sorrow.  We’re given no real reason at the outset to particularly like any of the characters, other than because they are the ones whose stories we are following.  My favorite characters in the show are all supporting roles – they often show more character than the stars, who take a lot more effort to like than they should given that we are supposed to be rooting for them.  I spent most of the show making excuses for their behavior towards other people, and you really shouldn't have to do that for your protagonists. 

Still and all, it’s a nice slow burn mystery that clocks in at six hours of entertainment.  It has an internal consistency to its mythos and cosmology that is refreshing to see.  None of the main characters acts in a particularly stupid manner just to serve the needs of the plot.  Yes, some do act in stupid ways, but for understandable reasons, he’s twelve years old, she’s a grieving mother, that sort of thing.  And the show spends just enough time showing their normal routine, their normal crises, and how the pressure of the situation affects those day to day pressures.  It’s very Stephen Kingesque in that regard.

The suspense ratchets up well over time.  Six hours is a long time to sustain the mystery and keep the viewers interest, while simultaneously keeping the body count low and the plot moving forward at a reasonable pace, but “Stranger Things” manages that trick.  Interestingly, much of the suspense occurs when two people discuss the crisis and the search of the missing boy, they each hold a piece of the puzzle, and if they could only share those pieces they’d be a lot better off.  At the same time, neither one thinks the other will believe him or her, and so they talk around the subject while the viewer knows both that they should just blurt out the information, and at the same time knows why they don’t.  That’s some solid writing.

The little nods to the era were nice, too.  The 40+ crowd might want to check it out if only for the nostalgic factor of synth music and opening title sequence that could have been sucked through a wormhole straight from the 1980s. Pull tab Schlitz beer, an actual A/V club, a close-enough-for-government-work soundtrack and posters for John Carpenter’s “The Thing” are a few other fun examples.

All in all, “Stranger Things” gets a tepid recommendation.  Despite its flaws, it’s well worth a watch. 

Adventure Game Inspiration: The Cassock and the Sword

The retro movement that has been elevating the RPG scene for the last decade owes much to people looking back to the fantasy and sci-fi scene of days gone by.  Whether it’s the OSRmovement, the various diggings into the Appendix N list, or P. Alexander’sbroader look at fantasy and sci-fi short story magazines from the 1940s, the investigations into the roots of the stories that inspired adventure gaming has been both informative and inspirational.

Despite all the discussion of magazines and stories dedicated to explicitly fantasy and sci-fi stories, one important area that hasn’t seen quite as much activity is the historical non-fiction adventure market.  That’s not to say that it has gone completely undiscussed; everyone knows that D&D owes a considerable debt to juggernauts of the genre like Zorro, The Three Musketeers, and the stories of Robin Hood.  But if the lesser known works of the pulp sff magazines contributed to the genre and are worth a look, then it’s entirely possible that the lesser known works of other fictional adventurers contributed to the genre and are worth a look as well.  After all, the line between historical fiction and fantasy fiction is often as blurry as the line between fantasy and science fiction.

To that end, I looked through the archive of freely available pulp magazines from PulpMags.Org and downloaded the November 1946 issue of Mammoth Adventure specifically because the cover art and story featured a man swashbuckling his way through New Spain.  You can’t get much more inspirational than a story featuring a fighting holy man and a swashbuckler fighting against a corrupt city government.

A monk climbing a wall
while sword fighting? Can't
get much pulpier than that.

In Tom W. Blackburn’s “The Cassock and the Sword”, that’s exactly what you get when Juan Espadin, impoverished noble from the Old Country, crosses a member of the powerful local ruling family.  His first day in town he rescues an older woman being abused by an old man, only to find that he has inadvertently spoiled an attempt by the underground resistance to capture a member of that corrupt ruling family by killing the man.   Desperate to escape the city, he follows the old woman, revealed to be a sultry young woman named Pepita, to a jungle camp that serves as the headquarters for the resistance.  There he crosses swords with the titular sword-fighting fighting monk, Paco, and his support is bought by Paco and Pepita with promises to aid him in his journey to Panama if he firsts helps free the city from the grip of the despicable Lozan family.

What follows is a fast tale featuring traps, counter-ambushes, captures, and escapes, all featuring the flashing steel, faceless minions, and dastardly villains you expect from a swashbuckling story.  Is it fantasy?  Beyond the fictional setting and characters, no.  Is it inspirational for fantasy adventure gaming?  You better believe it. 

This story gives a classic example of a corrupt city government and the way in which one powerful family can use the power of the purse and city guard to cause all sorts of mayhem for player characters.  It does so in a simple enough manner for any DM to implement at his table.  It shows how death is not the only fate to follow poor dice rolls – a good capturing, tossing in the castle dungeon, and villainesque, “I’ll give you the night to think on how I’ll kill you in the morning,” can lead to thrilling escapes, more sword fighting, and everything you want from a tabletop adventure game.

It even includes a less-than-holy cleric whose service to god has more to do with a well handled blade than with a sacramental delivery service.  He may not be terribly pious, technically he may not even be a member of the clergy whose robes he stole, but the stout Brother Paco serves God in his own way, and it’s a way in which any cleric PC should be proud to serve.

The moral this story is that the Prophet Gygax, upon whose writings all others are built, used adventure fiction of all sorts as inspiration for his game.  Although historical fiction gets barely a nod in the sacramental books, it can serve as a catalyst for any game of adventure from the shores of Middle Earth to the stars of the Polity.  Go thou forth and do likewise.