Draft of my Appendix N, With Notes

Every game blogger has to give up their own Appendix N. Right. Here's a first stab at my N. This is a short shortlist of the books that have most directly influenced my referee style. It's all stuff worth multiple readings to me. For each entry I also provide a brief description of its import and/or influence. You can probably tell that I value style and atmosphere more than world building or narrative arc. Much of this list probably isn't very surprising, but perhaps my notes will add some interest to this exercise.

David Lindsay - Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
Deliciously weird atmosphere. Episodic format. Radical plasticity of character. Characters emerge from the environment and merge into each other. Imaginative.

Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities (1972)
Relentless imagination. Language and visual aesthetics. A model for the intersection of weirdness and meaning. Institutions and materials emerge from the dreams and psychoses of groups.

William Hope Hodgson - The Night Land (1912)
Style can be substance. How far can you push the limits of weird? Every world must have at least some pocket like the Night Land, and inscrutably old threat with boundaries beyond observation. Someone has a better imagination than you - you need to work harder. Among the best atmospheres.

Clark Ashton Smith - Zothique, Hyperborea, and planetary stories. (1926-1935)
Firehose of imagination. Style, space wizards, novelty, quality. One of the best prototypes of what 20th century fantasy could have been like. There's a lot to say about C.A. Smith - you probably already know the appeal.

Stanislew Lem - Solaris (1961)
A finest vintage for connoisseurs of weird planets and alien interactions. Sinking feeling of lovely horror. Look here for the limits of your species, human.


H.P. Lovecraft - all weird fiction (1919-1937)
At his best, a model for peeking at the elephant of otherworld threat. Wilbur Whateley, the hillbilly wizard in Dunwich Horror, is a fabulous example of how we have yet to exhaust the magician concept. Placing the cosmic in a familiar setting.

R.E. Howard - Conan stories (1932-1936)
A perfect blend of weird imagination, momentum, and mode of adventure. Violence and lust with alien gods and grimacing wizards.

M. John Harrison - The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings (1971, 1980)
Maybe not an outstanding literary achievement, but overall this is a great model of how a successful Vance-inspired gaming campaign would look. An ideal blend of imagination, pacing, characters, accessibility, and mode of adventure. Digging through the scraps of mankind's spectacular failures. Fast, fun reading.

Jack Vance - Durdane, Dying Earth, Demon Princes, Tschai, Dragonmasters (1950-1984)
Where to start? Perfect characters. Style. Language. Imagination. The Dying Earth series provides one of the first and best templates for an old planet, and it is one of my favorite models for the culture of magicians. Durdane and Tschai are just incredible settings. The alien colonization and evolutionary themes in Tschai and Dragonmasters in particular have been very inspirational to me. The Demon Princes series is the greatest guide for the construction of villainy.


George Macdonald - The Princess and the Goblin (1872)
I love goblins, and they are at their best here. Goblins are all over my games so I have to credit this source. This book also has a nice early imagining of a dungeon adventure. Tasty, dreamy quality.


Lord Dunsany - all fantasy work, especially Book of Wonder (1905-1926)
Style and language. Where fairy tales and dreams intersect. I want stars, moss, and woodsmoke at my table. Dunsany is peerless when it comes to fantasy imagery.

A.E. van Vogt - World of Null-A (1948)
Nice, compact model for weird psychological interplanetary intrigue. The best elements of P.K. Dick long before P.K. Dick. I like the mix of ingredients in this weird, fast-moving bit of sci-fi.

Stefan Grabinski - Dark Domain, Motion Demon (1918-1930)
Atmosphere. Darkness and snow. Haunted machines. Demons. Witches. You probably haven't read Grabinski, but you should.

1903 Alice in Wonderland Movie

Like peeping into another dimension. The Cheshire Cat part is very weird...

George R. R. Martin Article in New Yorker

The New Yorker today has a lengthy article about George R. R. Martin. It presents Martin, who has sold over 15 million books, as an ideal model of how authors who actively interact with their audiences through blogs and extensive signing tours can foster huge cult-like fan bases to sell lots and lots of books.

The dark side of this model, of course, is the insane level of pestering and taunting Martin has to deal with from hecklers who feel entitled to a more rapid production of words. As most of you probably know, Martin hasn't published an installment to Song of Ice and Fire since 2005...

The online attacks on Martin suggest that some readers have a new idea about what an author owes them. They see themselves as customers, not devotees, and they expect prompt, consistent service. Martin, who is sixty-two, told me that Franck calls the disaffected readers the Entitlement Generation: “He thinks they’re all younger people, teens and twenties. And that their generation just wants what they want, and they want it now. If you don’t give it to them, they’re pissed off.”

To be honest with you, this slow output is exactly the reason I haven't dug into The Song of Ice and Fire. I don't want to read thousands of pages to be stuck with a cliffhanger for five years. I'm not angry with Martin, though. I have plenty of other stuff to read in the mean time...

The Best Magic Sword Description Ever Written

"Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic, and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came.

Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it."

- Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924)

I Just Read The Hobbit. Aloud. The Entire Thing.

Before the holidays I started reading The Hobbit aloud to my little boy as part of our bed time ritual. Sure, at just under six months old he's too young to understand English, but I'm keen to start early in helping him to develop a decent vocabulary, attention span, and taste for storytelling. Before The Hobbit he got a good taste of Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, and Jack Vance too. Bed time has been a good excuse for me to re-re-read some of my favorite short stories.

Shortly after the new year we finished The Hobbit and now we're reading Wind in the Willows. I must say that finishing The Hobbit felt like somewhat of an accomplishment. I've never read an entire novel aloud before, and I feel like it improved me in some way. It was certainly good practice for DMing; if  anything, it was consistent, repeated study in using my voice to control pacing and evoke atmosphere. And, yes, it was fine practice for speaking in character, which I do as a DM fairly regularly (my family is saturated with thespians, I can't help it). By the end of The Hobbit I had developed a different voice for each dwarf. I was kind of proud of myself, actually!

The experience also intensified my visualization of the The Hobbit quite a bit. I usually read pretty fast, but slowing down and giving every word a chance to breath resulted in my practically memorizing the story - all the characters, the plot, the chapters, everything. In this sense it's also been great reading aloud a lot of my favorite C.A.S. and Vance stories as well. I'd love to re-read Vance's Planet of Adventure series aloud some time, although the prospect of reading a whole series of novels still seems a little daunting. After we're done with Wind in the Willows we are going to do Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong, which is a very sweet little book, and one of a sadly small number of fantasies with a compelling female protagonist.

People tell me I have a pretty good reading voice. I've been toying with the idea of reading some classic short stories for podcasts. Maybe I'll give it a try!

The 10 Greatest Works of Fantasy Fiction: An Annotated Reading List

Here’s my first attempt at generating a short reading list of the greatest fantasy literature in English. The specific purpose of this exercise was to identify the ten most fundamental books and story cycles that define our current conception of fantasy as a genre. I selected ten items in order to make reading these books a simple endeavor over a one-year time span. If you aim to slip one of these books per month into your reading queue, by the end of 2011 you should have a good foundation in fantasy fiction.

I should also say that this list is as much for me as it is for you. I have read much, but not all, of this material. Many of these works were chosen because they were repeatedly cited as being influential by acclaimed 20th century fantasy authors. I also included my own judgments in terms of what works I saw as being truly fundamental – that is, which works played a major role in defining motifs, clichés, and themes that have persisted and now define the fantasy genre. I provide brief justifications for my choices after the list.

Another thing I’ve included is a brief discussion of honorable mentions that didn’t make the list. Comments arising from reading lists almost always focus on why certain stuff was omitted. I welcome this discussion, and will kick it off myself! Feedback is invited!

NOTE: Many of the comments on this post concern the fact that Lord of the Rings isn't included. Please recall that the purpose of this list is to highlight works that established the fantasy genre as we know it today. Fellowship of the Ring was published in 1954 - 30 years after King of Elfland's Daughter, and almost 100 years after Phantastes - and was primarily influential on writers of the late 20th century. By the time Fellowship was published adult fantasy was already a fully mature genre, and while LotR may arguably be one of the best works of fantasy fiction, it was also highly derivative and offered very little that was new to the field.

The List (in chronological order):

1. George MacDonald – Phantastes

2. Andrew Lang – The Blue Fairy Book

3. H. Rider Haggard – Eric Brighteyes

4. William Morris – The Well at the World’s End

5. William Hope Hodgson – The Night Land

6. Lord Dunsany – The King of Elfland’s Daughter

7. E.R. Eddison – The Worm Ouroborus

8. Robert E. Howard – Conan (story cycle)

9. Clark Ashton Smith – Zothique and Hyperborea (story cycles)

10. Fritz Leiber - Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (story cycle)

The Justifications:

1. George MacDoanld – Phantastes (1858)

MacDonald was one of the first British authors to write fairy tale fiction for adults, and his book Phantastes arguably represents the beginning of "fantasy" as a genre. MacDonald was a major direct influence on virtually all Victorian-era fantasy writers, as well as later popular authors like Tolkien. His fiction was heavy with symbolism and metaphor. The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and Lilith (1895) were also major groundbreaking works, but I recommend Phantastes because of its early date.

2. Andrew Lang – The Blue Fairy Book (1889)

Lang was an academic who specialized in hunting down and translating fairy tales and rewriting them for modern audiences. His series of colored Fairy Books (e.g. Blue Fairy Book, Red Fairy Book, Green Fairy Book, etc.) were hugely popular and were drawn upon by contemporaries (Morris, Haggard, etc.) who integrated fantastic themes into their own adult fiction.

3. H. Rider Haggard – Eric Brighteyes (1889)

Haggard was a victorian adventure novelist who primarily wrote fiction set in colonial Africa. Eric Brighteyes is a powerful and gritty viking fantasy that was influential in terms of establishing strong nordic flavor in much subsequent English fantasy. Haggard was a friend and correspondent with British academic fantasists such as Lang.

4. William Morris – The Well at the World’s End (1896)

After George MacDonald, one of the first writers to treat fairy tale themes in the format of adult literature. Morris was a prolific writer and produced many fantasy novels. I selected The Well at the World’s End following Lin Carter’s editorial recommendation for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.

5. William Hope Hodgson – The Night Land (1912)

I would call this the single most important work of weird fantasy. The Night Land is set on a future Earth millions of years in the future after the sun has expired. All remaining humans are confined to a gigantic pyramid located in a pitch-black wasteland surrounded by weird supernatural aliens, giants, night hounds, and other monsters. The Night Land was unprecedented for its time and was heavily borrowed from by C.A. Smith and H.P. Lovecraft. While it might be too weird and genre-defying to be labeled as genre fantasy, I credit The Night Land for being a major trailblazer in terms of presenting fantasy (1) in a post-civilized setting (i.e. dying earth genre), (2) dripping with cosmic horror, and (3) incorporating scientific themes.

6. Lord Dunsany – The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924)

This is the one book that is probably most responsible for the motifs we take for granted in what we now call high fantasy. Nations of human-like elves, magic swords, etc.

7. E.R. Eddison – The Worm Ouroborus (1925)

This is the first fantasy epic set in a complex fully-imagined world with a substantial historical timeline. Interestingly, this work used the term “Middle Earth” long before Tolkien did.

8. Robert E. Howard – Conan (story cycle, 1932-1936)

The Conan story cycle is the best work by this undisputed innovator of the gritty "swords & sorcery" approach to fantasy. These American pulp stories are famous for their lurid violence, sex, weirdness, and evil wizardry.

9. Clark Ashton Smith – Zothique and Hyperborea (story cycles, c. 1930s)

These story cycles, by a poet-turned-writer, were notable and influential for how they incorporated weird, creepy, and cosmic themes, ala Hodgson, into fantasy settings. Smith wrote in a beautiful prose style that presaged major late 20^th century writers like Jack Vance.

10. Fritz Leiber - Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (story cycle, beginning 1939)

I argue that Leiber’s story cycle represents the ultimate culmination of the previously listed nine works in terms of representing what most people consider to be modern genre fantasy. It is remarkable how these stories from the 30s and 40s feel completely modern in terms of pacing, themes, and characterization.

Honorable Mentions:

Edgar Rice Burroughs – A Princess of Mars (1912): Burroughs popular swashbuckling planetary romances were generally influential on American pulp writers of the early 20^th century. Science fiction writers tend to cite Burroughs as a major influence more than genre fantasy writers, however.

H.P. Lovecraft – Short Stories (1917-1935): Lovecraft is one of the undisputed masters of supernatural weird horror fiction. Many stories features wizards and witches in modern settings, although his writings typically aren’t considered fantasy. Lovecraft’s approach to cosmic horror and atmospherics influenced many subsequent fantasy writers, but I believe that the most important innovations in this respect came from Hodgson.

David Lindsay – Voyage to Arcturus (1920): This bizarre supernatural interplanetary fantasy was far ahead of its time, but received little recognition when it was originally published.

Hope Mirrlees – Lud-in-the-Mist (1926): Although this book is considered a classic by modern readers, I’ve seen little indiciation that it was influential or well-known when first published. Mirrlees is also interesting for being the only woman on the reading list, sadly.

J.R.R. Tolkien – The Hobbit (1937): This book, while not particularly innovative, was a huge critical and commercial success when it was released. Most of The Hobbit's importance is derived from how it popularized fantasy among younger audiences.

T.H. White – The Sword in the Stone (1938): White’s literary realist interpretations of the Arthurian legends set the tone for most subsequent work in this major fantasy subgenre.

Jack Vance – The Dying Earth (1950): A masterwork by one of the greatest stylists in fantasy. Vance set the standard in creativity, prose quality, and conceptual content for fantasy writers of the late 20^th century.

Free to a Good Ho-ho-home: Vance, Dunsany Books

I need to thin out my paperbax stax a bit. I'm emulating Scott Driver here by trying to increase coolness in the world by giving out cool books to cool people. I have a big old stack of books to get rid of, including some Epic Illustrated and Heavy Metal magazines. I will be giving stuff away in small batches over time. Here's the first batch! Ho ho ho!

I will send any of these books to you free via U.S. Media Mail. Here are the rules:

1. The first person to leave a comment claiming a book gets it.
2. I will only ship to U.S. addresses (due to postage fees).
3. On your honor you do not already own the book and you are seriously interested in reading it.
4. One book per person per giveaway.
5. You must email me your delivery address (via my blogger profile) the same day you claim the book, or else the next person in line gets it.

Today's offerings:

 Jack Vance - To Live Forever

Jack Vance - Galactic Effectuator

Jack Vance - Emphyrio

Lord Dunsay - The King of Elfland's Daughter

Is the Nebula Best Short Story Even Really Sci-Fi?

Something that really bugs me, but that I've never ranted about on my blog before, is the basic mundanity that's creeping into a lot of modern fantasy and science fiction these days. In my fairly traditional opinion, quality F/SF should have some fantastic aspect that is absolutely fundamental to the story. For instance, if you can replace the weird setting, futuristic objects, or strange aliens with mundane settings, objects, or characters, and the core theme of the story is preserved, then it's not really F/SF.

This is the reason I'm painfully disappointed by this year's Nebula Best Short Story selection: Spar by Kij Johnson. It's a very short and purposely unpleasant story that describes a woman trapped in a small spaceship with an uncommunicative alien blob that rapes her relentlessly. The descriptions of alien sex are interspersed with the woman's memories of an uncommunicative husband. Okay... so the story is a paper thin allegory for the breakdown of communication in a romantic relationship. And, as far as mainstream literature goes, I guess it's a fine little tale. I feel very strongly, however, that the exact same story could have been told without the alien blob and without the spaceship. In this story the sci-fi setting is just window dressing on a generic human interest story. The woman could just as easily have been stuck on a life raft in the Atlantic getting humped by an albatross.

I'm frankly pissed off that stories like this are being chosen as the finest examples of what our genre has to offer. It's a sad betrayal of the F/SF tradition.

Watch Philip K. Dick Going Crazy on YouTube

This morning I was surfing YouTube for interviews with f/sf authors. In so doing I ran across this bizarre 1977 footage of Philip K. Dick giving a speech at a science fiction convention in France. Actually, this is not as much a speech as it is PKD earnestly reading a written statement about how he recently discovered that reality is a computer program. All fans of PKD should be familiar with this authors' famously tenuous hold on reality, but to see this manifested on film is quite moving and also, for me at least, quite sad. This clip is painfully reminiscent of a close high school friend of mine who has been fighting problems with schizophrenia and paranoia for much of his adult life. Interestingly, this friend of mine (wisely) refused to read VALIS out of fear it would make matters worse.

In this video you can hear PKD saying things like "Some of my fictional works were, in a literal sense, true", "We are living in a computer programmed reality", and describing how books like Man in the High Castle and Flow My Tears the Policeman Said were based on true realities he had seen in visions. "I claim to remember a very different present life," he says.

China Mieville and D&D

We talk a lot about literary influences on D&D, yet we talk very little about D&D's influence on literature. This is why I find it very interesting that the celebrated fantasy writer China Mieville talks frequently and candidly about how playing D&D (and Call of Cthulhu) has influenced his fiction. For those of you who aren't familiar with Mieville, he is one of the leading authors of the "New Weird" movement in fantastic fiction. Many of his books have received major f/sf awards, with one of his latest books, "The City and The City", receiving this year's Hugo for best novel. Whether you like his work or not, it cannot be denied that Mieville is one of the highest profile fantasy authors of the past decade. Because of this, I think Mieville's embracing of his roleplaying roots is a very positive thing that reflects well on our generally disreputable little hobby.

Although Mieville says he hasn't played an RPG in years, and is unlikely to play again, he still enjoys reading RPG supplements - especially bestiaries.  Not only this, but Mieville was even a guest author on the 2010 Pathfinder supplement Guide to the River Kingdoms. In terms of D&D's influence on Mieville's writing, the theme that keeps popping up in interviews (see below) is systemization. Mieville cites the Monster Manual as being a huge influence because of the way it catalogs and numerically describes horrifying and mysterious creatures. Indeed, one of the things I've noticed about Mieville's writing is that once you crack the surface weirdness - all the fabulous settings and creatures - his worlds are largely mundane and operate in a very systematic and naturalistic fashion. Like Gygaxian D&D, you can get a grasp on how things work and "learn the rules", and those rules don't change. Ironically, this is one of the things I like least about the Mieville I've read (i.e. Perdido Street Station). One of my favorite buzzes from fantastic fiction is the creepy disorientation resulting from small events that imply major and possibly horrific problems with the state of natural world as previously understood - namely, when you think you know the rules, but then realize you don't really. Mieville's fiction is creative and fun and I enjoy it, but I definitely don't get this kind of ecstatic Lovecraftian vibe from it. Maybe this literary preference of mine is related to why I almost never use the Monster Manual for my games - I love unique monsters and the dampening effect they have on metagaming... and systemization.

Mieville is much more eloquent and thoughtful than me, so I'll let him speak for himself. Here are some excerpts from two Mieville interviews that deal with RPGs specifically. A third highly relevant interview, for which there is no web link, was published in Dragon Magazine #352 (along with an amazing 40-page RPG treatment of Mieville's world Bas-Lag). If there's reader interest I could post something about this issue of Dragon...

A 2005 interview from Believer Magazine:

BLVR: Judah Low is a golemist. Golems are only ever clay. The only place I’m aware of them being comprised of other substances is in the old AD&D Monster Manual. The original Monster Manual. They had a picture of a flesh golem with bolts in his neck—

CM: I know the picture very well.

BLVR: It’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. That implied subtext—that Frankenstein was a type of golem—made my pre-teen mind vibrate with a promise of special insight.

CM: You are absolutely right. I use AD&D-type fascination with teratology in a lot of my books, and I have the original Monster Manual, and the Monster Manual 2, and the Fiend Folio. I still collect role-playing game bestiaries, because I find that kind of fascination with the creation of the monstrous tremendously inspiring, basically. And the golem that you’re talking about in AD&D, it’s very perspicacious of you, because that is directly an influence. There is a scene in Iron Council where Judah creates a golem of corpses. He shoves his hand into a pile of corpses and makes them into this huge, lumbering golem of dead people, and that is a riff on the flesh golem. One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden. I get very frustrated when I read certain types of magical realism and you end up saying, “Okay, I understand this figure of this golden elf is symbolizing such and such.” The thing about genre fantasy is that it is its own end, but it also does that job of symbolizing. I think about something like Gulliver’s Travels. The figures of the Lilliputians are partly a way for Gulliver to overlook society from a godlike height and to make satirical, symbolic comments, but it’s also, “Hey look, little tiny people! How cool!” I love the idea of golems. It strikes me as a very powerful, imaginative, weird idea. But it’s also an idea that is symbolically fraught and laden, and particularly in a book which is partially about people, politically speaking, people taking control of the fruits of their own labor. So, the golems are both just really cool monsters but also something that functions as part of the political texture of the book.

A 2003 interview with Joan Gordon:

JG: What cultural influences shaped your writing?
…

Probably one of the most enduring influences on me was a childhood playing RPGs: Dungeons and Dragons [D&D] and others. I’ve not played for sixteen years and have absolutely no intention of starting again, but I still buy and read the manuals occasionally. There were two things about them that particularly influenced me. One was the mania for cataloguing the fantastic: if you play them for any length of time, you get to know pretty much all the mythological beasts of all pantheons out there, along with a fair bit of the theology. I still love all that—I collect fantastic bestiaries, and one of the main spurs to write a secondary-world fantasy was to invent a bunch of monsters, half of which I’m sure I’ll never be able to fit into any books.

The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to “game stats.” If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu’s “strength,” “dexterity,” and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There’s something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic. On one level it misses the point entirely, but I must admit it appeals to me in its application of some weirdly misplaced rigor onto the fantastic: it’s a kind of exaggeratedly precise approach to secondary world creation.

I’m conscious of the problems with that: probably my favorite piece of fantastic-world creation ever is the VIRICONIUM series by M. John Harrison [The Pastel City (1971), A Storm of Wings (1980), In Viriconium (1982), and Viriconium Nights (1984; rev. 1985)], which is carefully constructed to avoid any domestication, and which thereby brilliantly achieves the kind of alienating atmosphere I’m constantly striving for, so it’s not as if I think that quantification is the “correct” way to construct a world. But it’s one that appeals to the anal kid in me. To that extent, though I wouldn’t compare myself to Harrison in terms of quality, I sometimes feel as if, formally, my stuff is a cross between Viriconium and D&D.

JG: You mentioned being drawn to the systematization in RPGs. How do you see that in your writing?

CM: I start with maps, histories, time lines, things like that. I spend a lot of time working on stuff that may or may not actually find its way into the novel, but I know a lot more about the world than makes it into the stories. That’s the “RPG” factor: it’s about systematizing the world.

But though that’s my method, I don’t start with it. I don’t start with a bunch of graph papers and rulers. When I’m writing a book, generally I start with the mood and setting, along with a couple of specific images—things that have come into my head, totally abstracted from any narrative, that I’ve fixated on. After that, I construct a world, or an area, into which that general setting, that atmosphere, and the specific images I’ve focused on can fit. It’s at that stage that the systematization begins for me.

I hope this doesn’t sound pompous, but that’s how I see the best weird fiction as the intersection of the traditions of Surrealism with those of pulp. I don’t start with the graph paper and the calculators like a particular kind of D&D dungeonmaster: I start with an image, as unreal and affecting as possible, just like the Surrealists. But then I systematize it, and move into a different kind of tradition.

Realms of Fantasy Dies. Again. Why?

So, it was making the rounds of the fiction blogs yesterday that Realms of Fantasy is going under. Again.

This is very sad news because, to my knowledge, RoF was the last professional fantasy fiction magazine that actually sold print copies. The two remaining professional fantasy digests I know of - Fantasy Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies (my current favorite) - are purely online affairs. Luckily, the classic print digest Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which presents a f/sf mix, still survives. For now.

Those of you who follow fantasy fiction probably already know that RoF failed in 2009 and was rescued at the last minute by investor / publisher Warren Lapine. Lapine has had success running other much larger magazines, and he pumped a lot of time and money into trying to turn RoF around. But it seems he could not fix the core problem – nobody would subscribe. In his farewell note Lapine blamed only one thing for the failure of RoF: the economy.

I suspect this supposition is not accurate.

While I believe the economy may have had some minor influence over the situation, it is painfully true that all the f/sf digests have been struggling with dwindling subscriptions rates for a long time now. And, as with newspapers and many print magazines, this has been a problem since long before the Great Recession hit in 2008. There’s a lot of discussion as to why this is, with competition from the internet being a favorite bogeyman. Indeed, the entire publishing world is still struggling to find a profitable model for internet publishing.

But… I’m still skeptical. I’d venture to say that most f/sf readers are fairly well educated, gainfully employed, and can afford a few magazine subscriptions without a second thought. Heck, I can. But I never subscribed to RoF. And I love fantasy fiction. Assuming people like me represent much of the lost market for RoF, I thought it might be relevant to consider my own reading and purchasing habits when thinking about why RoF died.

My favorite hypothesis for the failure of the f/sf short fiction market is that the whole nature of reading fantastic fiction now, in 2010, is fundamentally different from the way it was in 1930, 1960, or even 1980, because readers now are completely saturated with cheap excellent fiction. Up until the 1960s or 1970s it was conceivable that a serious fan of fantasy fiction could have read all or most of the professional output up until that point – all of the fantasy novels and all of the short stories. In an atmosphere like this is makes sense to subscribe to fiction digests because you would often be hungry for more stories. During the big f/sf boom of the 1970s, with breakthrough movies like Star Wars and bestselling books like Lucifer’s Hammer, I imagine it became much more difficult to keep up with f/sf because of greater output from publishers as well as the growing backlogs of classics.

So, think about someone like me. I was born in 1974. I started reading fantasy in the mid-80s as a kid. From the point I started reading seriously, I had a body of fantasy genre literature stretching back to William Morris to catch up on.  I mean, seriously, for the last 20 years I’ve been struggling to get caught up with just the 1920s-1970s. I am still sadly ignorant of the 1980s-present, except for some of the major Hugo and Nebula winners I felt obliged to check out. I’m saturated with great stuff, which is a wonderful thing. I have stacks and stacks of used paperbacks, pulps, and digests representing over a half century of remarkable fiction. I bought all this stuff at used bookstores and on eBay for next to nothing and I know a lot of it will be very good if not great.

So here is the problem - with a fiction digest like RoF I don't know if an issue is going to be good. Actually, it’s probably going to be mostly not good. This might be cruel to say, but it’s true. I try to sample issues of the modern f/sf mags on a regular basis, but I find the experience is much like buying a booster pack of Magic: The Gathering cards – except that I’m never guaranteed of getting a Rare. Occasionally there’s something great, which is a uniquely exciting rush, but most of the stories are stylistically formulaic, painfully trendy (e.g. steampunk or emo vampires, argh!), boring, and/or gimmicky. Why would I pay for this when (1) I already have stacks of unread cheap amazing classic fiction, and (2) I can wait for an annual anthology to come out, where hopefully the gem:junk ratio will be higher.

So, as I see it there are two sides to this problem.

The first is that there is a huge backlog of excellent f/sf which all modern authors must directly compete with. Yes, if you are a writer now you have the toughest job in the history of the genre – you are competing with stacks of cheap paperbacks by the best authors who ever lived.

The second is that either the editors or the slush piles are not capable of producing short stories that are fit for this difficult competition. This is not a matter of my taste or opinion. RoF died because not enough people wanted to subscribe. The brutal brutal truth is that many of these digests aren’t publishing fiction that people will pay for.

By the way, if you want to give publishing a shot, Lapine will sell you RoF for $1.

The Epicenter of 1930s Pulp Sci-Fi: Clifton's Cafeteria

If there is a single city that must be associated with the Golden Age of Science Fiction it has to be Los Angeles. While Chicago and New York were centers for pulp publishing and illustration in the early 20^th century, a disproportionate number of the actual writers lived, wrote, and socialized in L.A. One of the suburbs North of L.A. is even named Tarzana in honor of past resident Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Most destinations for literary tourists are either authors’ houses or localities featured in books. Because of the solitary nature of authors’ labors there are few places I can think of that really represent actual literary scenes – especially for sci-fi and fantasy. 15 or 20 years ago I would have cited Forrest Ackerman’s house in the Hollywood Hills as one of these nexus points, as it was a pilgrimage destination for all stripes of sci-fi fans and professionals and housed one of the greatest historical collections in the history of the genre. I actually had the amazing experience of visiting the “Ackermansion” when I was a teenager, and it was there I saw my first original pulp art, Harryhausen animation models, etc.

Since Ackerman passed away and the Ackermansion is now only a memory, I would currently promote Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles as one of the best places to feel the ghostly presence of early American science fiction. Although I love Clifton’s super creamy heart-stopping mac and cheese, I don’t go for the food - this place is all about history and atmosphere (and observation of eccentric old vine Angelinos, if you care).

Clifton’s is important in sci-fi history because it was the original meeting place for the Los Angeles Science Fiction League (LASFL), which was founded in 1934. The Brown Room in the back of Clifton’s was virtually an imperial court of the masters, where gathered on Thursday nights many of the formative minds of science fiction and fantasy. A partial list includes: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, Ray Harryhausen, Leigh Brackett, Forrest Ackerman, Henry Kuttner, Fredric Brown, Hannes Bok, and Jack Williamson, among many others. Many of these folks lived in L.A. full time while others lived there for a short time or were just passing through. The conversations in this court of imagination must have been wonderful – perhaps more so than the chicken fried steak.

The modern facade ain't as cool as the original.

I stop to eat at Clifton’s whenever I can. Even outside of its significance to sci-fi history, it is a bizarre and outrageous place to be. Opened in the mid-30s, most of the restaurant is decorated like a surreal artificial redwood forest, with log cabins, taxidermy animals, and two story-tall fake trees:

 Margie and Banjo Chris dining. 

In the back on the top right you can see the little door to the Redwood Chapel.

One of my favorite features of Clifton’s is a mystical redwood tree bearing a blue neon cross. After eating your mashed potatoes you can sit inside this tree on a little bench, look at a model of a miniature redwood forest behind a piece of glass (mind blowing – a forest within a tree within a forest, I love it!), and listen to a pre-recorded monologue about transcendental redwood spirituality:

 Margie contemplates the nature of trees and the universe inside Clifton's Redwood Chapel.

The Brown Room on the second level of Clifton’s, where the LASFL used to meet, is dark and wood paneled and evocative of a log cabin. Unlike most cabins, however, there are large backlit glass panels showing nature scenes from around California. Most of these images are quite faded out after many decades of service, which makes everything even more surreal. There are also cozy little cabin/rooms on this level that I didn't get pictures of because it was near closing time when I last brought my camera:

 Closing time on the Brown Room level. Apologies for the poor photo.

The third level of Clifton’s is decorated in red velvet Victorian theme. Weird. I always peek at this level, but I’ve never seen anyone up there:

 Level 3 of Clifton's Cafeteria.

On top of everything, the clientele of Clifton’s always offers a spectacular ethnographic profile of old school Los Angeles. Mexican cowboys, preachers with electric hats, pimps with chains, guys with bandaged heads, hipsters and losers and loners and families. I could sit there all day, watching people, eating custard pie with the ghost of Leigh Brackett.

 The entry tunnel!

Margie and Banjo Chris grab some chow.

Why Can't I Enjoy Plush Cthulhus?

First of all, I’d like to apologize to my plush Cthulhu-owning and Miskatonic University shirt-wearing friends for this grumpy and curmudgeonly post. I admit I have an unfair and unhealthy psychological hang-up - my inability to relax and enjoy the recent campy commercialization of H.P. Lovecraft. Instead of resenting me, I hope that you will instead choose to pity me.

I’m a very easy-going fellow when it comes to the never-ending cycle of pop-cultural appropriation, re-interpretation, and commercialization. Mostly I just don’t care. I know what I like, seek it out, and tune out the noise. For instance, I’m okay with the Lord of the Rings movies - even though I think they are a pale shadow of the books, I enjoy them for what they are. I see no benefit in being a snobby purist about these kinds of things. Given this general disposition of mine, I have a hard time understanding why this thriving subculture of campy H.P. Lovecraft knick-knacks drives me crazy. You know, items like “Cthulhu for President” bumper stickers, “I Escaped Arkham Asylum” t-shirts, Munchkin Cthulhu card games, and, of course, the ubiquitous plush Cthulhus. This stuff should all be really fun and wink-wink, but I just can’t…  can’t… enjoy it.

I have been reading and rereading Lovecraft regularly for over half my life now. I know all of his stories like relatives of mine; their personalities, atmospheres, characters. I don’t really know if this is good or bad. Does it mean my literary tastes haven’t evolved since I was 12? Or does it mean I was lucky to find the good stuff early on? At this point it’s hard to untangle how much of my aesthetic fancy is simply attracted to Lovecraft vs. defined by Lovecraft. Whatever the case may be, it all boils down to the fact that some portion of my creative identity is quite intertwined with Lovecraft’s work.

I think this must be the root of my problem. Maybe when I see campy t-shirts having a little fun with Lovecraft it’s akin to strangers making fun of one of my family members. This is particularly stinging because I suspect that the whole Lovecraftian campfest probably began as a late-20th century tendency to mock Lovecraft’s writing style – especially his use of odd and extravagant adjectives (which I love). Read this 2005 New York Times “review” of Lovecraft where the enlightened literary scholar Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket – awesome credential, huh?) mocks Lovecraft’s style with precious little mercy! I find that this critical view of Lovecraft’s writing style is more widely known than the content of his fiction, a state of affairs which has frustrated me endlessly.

On top of everything, it turns out that many of the plush-Cthulhu type people I’ve chatted up have never actually read Lovecraft (or maybe they read a little and forgot – I don’t know what’s worse). Five or ten years ago I would become excited by seeing Cthulhu bumper stickers. I’d think, “Wow, here is one of those rare folks who appreciates the Golden Era of Weird Tales Magazine! I can’t wait to have a conversation about what Brown Jenkin looks like or what Wilbur Whatley’s ancestors were like!!” (Pathetic, I know.) No longer. In my experience most of these folks know of “Cthulhu” primarily as a pop culture franchise. Maybe they saw one of the movies (Re-Animator? Argh!) or maybe they played one of the licensed boardgames. Luckily, they all seem know that there is, in fact, a “Cthulhu Book” by H.P. Lovecraft, but I guess that book, whatever it is, is not worth reading for most of them. Easier to wait for the movie...

But, you know, I bear no ill will towards the people who love to cuddle with their plush Cthulhus yet have never taken even a few minutes to read The Music of Erich Zann. There’s no real reason any of these people should know or care about H.P. Lovecraft, really.  I recognize Lovecraft is very weird fiction written in an unusually baroque style that was self consciously archaic even for the 1920s. I also recognize that most people don’t really read fiction anymore anyway. There’s nothing wrong with having a cute little stuffed demon, it’s fun and funny, after all. I should just be thrilled that some aspects of Lovecraft’s fiction have wiggled down fairly deeply into the slime pit of pop culture... And I suppose I am to a degree.

Yes, this problem I have is all my own – a minor twisted tragedy in my life where my obscure literary hero has been mercilessly mocked and ultimately commercialized as a camp icon. I will now cringe in my isolated corner of the blogosphere, with tears streaming down my face, my sweaty hands clutching a small stack of sticky old paperbacks, while the smiling people move on around me cuddling their plush Cthulhu dolls.

On second thought… Maybe if they came out with a plush Yog Sothoth I’d have to get one.

CLICK HERE TO READ H.P. LOVECRAFT FOR FREE

The End of the Professional Fantasist

There has been an interesting discussion going on in the fantasy & sci-fi fiction blogs over last couple of weeks. Sparked by Robert J. Sawyers post Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?, SF heavyweights Robert Silverberg and Jerry Pournelle have made blog posts (!) over at Black Gate offering some interesting historical perspective on the topic.

Silverberg recalls a time in the 50s and 60s when there were probably fewer than ten people making a living off of writing fantastic fiction: "Poul Anderson, Gordy Dickson, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Robert Sheckley, maybe Jack Vance..." At the time Isaac Asimov was still working as a college professor. There were also a few writers like Philip K. Dick who wrote fiction full time but weren’t really making a living – they were basically living in poverty. (Jack Vance might actually fit in this latter category.) Silverberg goes on to describe a high point in the 70s and 80s where there was a lot of money to be made in the field. However, as of 2010, as Sawyers discusses in some depth, we are at a point reminiscent the 50s and 60s where only a handful of writers actually make a living writing sci-fi and fantastic fiction. This does not include the writers who make ends meet by writing commercially oriented vampire, zombie, or Tolkienesque hack serials.

The decline in fiction readership combined with new modes of information exchange (i.e. the internet) will only make things more difficult for professional writers of the fantastic. In essence, sci-fi and fantasy writing is returning to its roots as a hobby. As Sawyers points out, writers can't adopt the business model of modern musicians who make their real money as traveling performers and t-shirt salesmen (not by selling music, in case you didn’t know). Writers have to sell stories and books, and nobody is buying anymore

There are two brief ponderings I want to make here:

1. This peak of commercial interest in fantastic fiction in the 70s and 80s, followed by its decline and subsequent evolution into a hobbyist enterprise, is a lot like what we’ve seen with role playing games. I wonder what it was about the late 70s and early 80s that made so many millions of people interested in reading books and playing D&D (and painting van murals). And, more importantly, why did this spirit of the fantastic die in our culture…?

It’s very easy to demonize video games and cable TV, and maybe it’s appropriate. A lot (most?) of my friends who are interested in imagination don’t bother to read books anymore. They spend hours and hours and hours playing World of Warcraft and various console games and watching Buffy and Battlestar Galactica. I’ve checked this stuff out and it’s okay, but in my grumpy and curmudgeonly opinion it all rapidly becomes deeply boring (and depressing) and sucks compared to reading a great story or sitting around the table with friends, dice, and character sheets. Obviously I’m in the minority. Why?

2. I wonder what the fallout of the end of professional writers of the fantastic will be in terms of the quality of fiction. I have a lot to rant about concerning the quality and style of fiction appearing in the digests these days. Frankly, I don’t think much of it is as good as it used to be. I don’t know if this has more to do with the taste of the editors or the preferences or abilities of current writers. If the market can’t support professionals outside of vampire hack writing and television, I am worried the situation will get worse. We need new people who, like Arthur C. Clark or Robert Heinlein before them, have time to lavish on developing their skills to become master writers. It’s sad we have to constantly rely on visionaries like Philip K. Dick, Jack Vance, or H.P. Lovecraft to live in poverty while we let them expand the boundaries of our cultural imagination.

Van Vogtian and Poulandersonian Talking Animals

Gamma World’s reputation as a totally zany game comes partly from its rampant anthropomorphism – namely, animals walking on two feet and speaking English. The official storyline given in the early editions of Gamma World – nuclear holocaust – doesn’t do a great job of explaining how radioactive fallout can result in badgers becoming bipedal, donning medieval armor, and acting like gnolls. While leaving the causation a mystery is fine, it’s certainly fun to think more deeply about specific scientifiction scenarios that might result in hop-scotching, jive talking rabbit people.

Two classic paperbacks I read recently provide some appropriately cyclopeatronic explanations for rapid language acquisition amongst our dear animal friends…

BRAIN WAVE – Poul Anderson

I was living at a tropical field station in Panama for a little while last year and luxuriated in some extra time to read a pile of paperbacks. In the pile was a great little read by Poul Anderson called Brain Wave. This story, one of Anderson’s earliest, was originally serialized in Space Science Fiction in 1953. The basic premise is that all life on earth had evolved while earth was being bathed in a strange type of space radiation that retarded neuronal activity. As the book opens, earth abruptly moves out of the radiation field and the intelligence of all living creatures increases by orders of magnitude. The results of this is that many animals gain a human-level of intelligence (resulting in an awesome scene where African Gorillas go bananas and rebel against the humans!), mentally deficient humans gain “normal” intelligence, and all normal humans become hyper-geniuses. Without going into too much detail, the end product of this could very well be an alternate Gamma World. The cover art for this Ballantine edition is beautiful and eerie; it's by someone named Phil Kirkland, whom I know very little about.

THE BATTLE OF FOREVER – A.E. Van Vogt

I love Van Vogt and I don’t know why he doesn’t get more attention these days. World of Null-A is one of my favorite 1940s sci-fi classics, and spectacularly presages everything Philip K. Dick became a superstar for. The Battle of Forever, from 1971, is one of Van Vogt’s more far out novels. It is set in the far future after the 1000 remaining humans separated themselves from the rest of the planet and evolved into large floating heads with small limp bodies. These 1000 individuals lived for 3500 years in an isolated hyper-intellectual society and had almost completely forgotten about the earth and the physical lives humans used to lead. The book opens with one of these future-humans emerging to explore the earth, finding a plant populated by talking humanoid animals whose ancestors were genetically engineered by the pre-isolation humans. Ahhhh, I love this kind of stuff! Please admire the wondrous Ace paperback cover art by master illustrator John Schoenherr.

The Fungus Caverns of Etidorhpa (Lloyd 1895)

It's probably safe to say that we all love the idea of subterranean caverns filled with strange oversized fungi. I certainly do. Because fungi survive by decomposing decaying organic matter, however, it actually makes very little biological sense for a deep cavern system to support forests of gigantic mushrooms, unless, of course, some ultramundane forces are at play. For me, this hint of magic actually makes the vision all the more appealing. Eventually, I hope to compose several substantial posts on the supernatural history of fungus caverns. For now though, I would like to point out an early and lesser known bit of fantastic fiction describing a fungus forest: Etidorhpa by John Uri Lloyd, published in 1895.

Lloyd was a pharmaceutical chemist who had never published fiction before the release of Etidorhpa (which is Aphrodite spelled backwards, by the way). This book is a weirdly charming yarn and an early landmark in the hollow earth genre. Lloyd was heavily involved in freemasonary, which is a prominent theme in the book. Etidorhpa has excited the sensibilities of some folks in much the same way that the Amazing Stories Shaver Mystery did 50 years later - both having lead especially sensitive readers to believe that some elements of mystical truth might underlie the fiction.

From a mycological perspective, the more entertaining parts of Etidorhpa are this illustration and text describing a great fungus cavern (yes, that is a nude hairless humanoid with no eyes):

"Along the chamber through which we now passed I saw by the mellow light great pillars, capped with umbrella-like covers, some of them reminding me of the common toadstool of upper Earth, on a magnificent scale. Instead, however, of the grey and somber shades to which I had been accustomed, these objects were of various hues and combined the brilliancy of the primary prismatic colors, with the purity of clean snow. Now they would stand solitary, like sentinels; again they would be arranged in rows, the alignment as true as if established by the hair of a transit, forming columnar avenues, and in other situations they were wedged together so as to produce masses, acres in extent, in which the stems became hexagonal by compression. The columnar stems, larger than my body, were often spiral; again they were marked by diamond-shaped figures, or other geometrical forms in relief, beautifully exact, drawn as by a master’s hand in rich and delicately blended colors, on pillars of pure alabaster. Not a few of the stems showed deep crimson, blue or green, together with other rich colors combined; over which, as delicate as the rarest of lace, would be thrown, in white, an enamel-like intricate tracery, far surpassing in beauty of execution the most exquisite needle-work I had ever seen. There could be no doubt I was in a forest of collossal fungi, the species of which are more numerous than those of upper earth, cryptomatic vegetation."

In the book it turns out that these titanic mushroom forests are a perfect food source for the humans who eventually forsake the surface of the earth to exult in a new immaculate existence in the inner sphere. If so inclined, you may read the full text of Etidorhpa here. Enjoy.

Jack Vance's Durdane: Illustrations by Paul Lehr

Here is a match made in cyclopeatronic heaven: Paul Lehr doing cover art for Jack Vance. In this case we have Lehr gracing the first print covers of the all three books of Vance's Durdane trilogy. The first book, The Anome, first saw the light of day as the very Dell paperback edition shown below. The next two books, The Brave Free Men (originally entitled The Roguskhoi) and The Asutra, were initially published as serials in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but were quickly reprinted as the Dell paperbacks pictured.

In my highly biased opinion these books are a great read. The setting is classic Vancian "medieval sci-fi": a planet that has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years, but where the cultures have largely forgotten their earthly origins and have lost much of their capacity for technology. In the case of Durdane, there is a severe limitation on technology due to a lack of metal ore on the planet.

This series particularly appeals to me because there is a strong musical theme running throughout. The main protagonist is a stringed instrument player who enjoys a weird style of complex improvisational music that draws much of its aesthetic from early jazz and old-time string band music. Even the names of the wandering minstrel troupes of Durdane sound a lot like what you might find on 78rpm jug band records, but flavoured with the chromatic psychedelia of Vancian sci-fi. I collect and play 1920s string band music myself (here's a shameless plug for my band: Sausage Grinder), and, as I wrote about previously, Jack Vance is a fellow enthusiast of this now obscure music.

THE ANOME (1971) - First book edition: Dell 1973. The best book of the bunch, in my opinion. Amazing fiction! Look at the gorgeous cover art. That thing around the man's neck is a "torc". Upon reaching a certain age, everyone living on the continent of Shant receives one of these devices. If that person breaks any of the laws of their canton - POP - their head explodes. Who enforces this? THE FACELESS MAN of course. In this book we follow the exploits of a boy who runs away from home to join a string band, travels across Shant, and eventually seeks out The Faceless Man himself. Check out the nice glass city on the cover of the book - you can visit there yourself by reading The Anome.

THE BRAVE FREE MEN (1972) - First book edition: Dell 1973. Originally called The Roguskhoi and published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The paperback has a classic Paul Lehr cover: saturated colors, rushing crowds of faceless people, and that Meltzoff-inspired spaceship just to the right of the roghuskoi's shoulder. This book is about the struggle against the roguskhoi - a mysterious race of naked male barbarian clones who enslave and impregnate the innocent women of Shant. Once impregnated by a roguskhoi, a women will give birth to more roguskhoi clones. A dangerous situation, yes.

THE ASUTRA (1973) - First book edition: Dell 1974. The weirdest book of the three. The protagonists explore distant and wild shores of Durdane and we also get a glimpse of another planet and learn about the bizarre parasitic aliens known as The Asutra... all awesome stuff that makes me drool. This book has amazingly great cover art of a strange landscape with star ships and a serious looking alien head. I could never imagine a book looking like this being published today.

Banjos and Decaying Civilizations

I've been burning through Jack Vance books lately. I was greatly entertained by the Tschai series and now I am just finishing up the Durdane trilogy. Next up are Demon Princes books. I love Vance's variations on the theme of civilizations evolving in isolation, usually in various states of drift, decay, and decadence. The character dialogue in his books is amazing, often hitting a chill-inducing sweet spot between hilarity and beauty.

Actually the main reason I like Vance is because he plays jugband music on his banjo, much like myself. I love the space jazz musician protagonist of the Durdane books.

I was surprised a few months back when the NY Times published a laudatory article on Vance.