When I surveyed the inspirations for the original tabletop role-playing game, I was repeatedly astonished by the extent to which elves had been dumbed down, diluted, and de-awesomed over the past few decades. With each volume I covered, I took extensive notes on just precisely what it was that made old school elves so different from contemporary depictions of them. With Feast of the Elfs we don’t just get one or two of the things I identified as having been lost over the years. We get a look at what a novel would be like if it put them all together at once!
Just like Three Heasts and Three Lions, it has elfs having a physical reaction to the name of Christ:
“I cannot foretell the comings and goings of the Lords of the Night World. But I know this: he will be present at the great feast of the fairy kings, when he and Alberec meet in solemn court and celebrate the nativity of Him we do not name and squires are knighted, lands and honors granted, and challenges given and taken at that time. And the elf maindens dance, which is a rare wonder.”
Gil squinted. “If you are not Christians, why do you celebrate Christmas? It is the birth of Christ.”
Thornstab rolled on the floor, emitting a high-pitched keening comical yet horrible to hear, clutching his ears and banging his head against the concrete. Gil stared in disgust and astonishment.
Zebra paperback
Of any member of the Lovecraft Circle, Robert Bloch was arguably the most successful. As the author of Psycho and a couple of Star Trek (original series), just about anyone would have some vague knowledge of his work.
Bloch sold his first story (“The Secret in the Tomb”) in July 1934 right after graduating from high school to Weird Tales. He rapidly followed up with more having four stories in WT in 1935 and six in 1936. These early stories are all pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft. Bloch wrote the quintessential Lovecraft Lite. This was before August Derleth made the move to write in a pseudo-Lovecraftian style.
Some of these stories were collected in a Zebra paperback from 1981, Mysteries of the Worm. Lin Carter edited the book. In fact, this was supposed to be a start of a new series that was going to be like the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series but more pulp magazine in origin. For whatever reason, the series did not happen. Read More
Short Reviews – The Envoy, Her, by H.B. Fyfe
Friday , 18, November 2016 Uncategorized Leave a commentThe Envoy, Her by H.B. Fyfe appeared in the March 1951 issue of Planet Stories. It can be read here at Archive.org.
“His Illustrious Sublimity the Lord Vyrtl, Viceroy of Terra, Emperor of Pollux,” yadda yadda yadda, is on Klo, the moon of Jursa, awaiting the envoy from the planet where the imperial armada has just crushed a rebellion. All that’s left is the formality of the Jursan’s suing for peace in a groveling show of genuflection. When the envoy arrives, Lord Vyrtl is intrigued; no mere diplomat, Daphne Foster is the most beautiful and alluring woman the emperor has ever seen! He’s caught off guard, taken aback by her wit and enchanting beauty and ultimately grants a number of concessions that he otherwise likely would not to the defeated Jursans.
Folks want to know what’s up, why the emperor would give up all of that to some old crone. Old crone? Preposterous! Did they not see the envoy’s stunning beauty?! Nope, only the emperor had. Before she can get back to Jursa, Daphne’s summoned to the emperor’s presence. To soften the terms of the surrender, the Jursan used a psychic projection device that allowed someone to project someone’s ideal into their perception of an individual; she appeared to Vyrtl as the impossible ideal of a beautiful and enticing woman.
Scott Cole: From the Cirsova zine submission guidelines: “Original short stories between 2000-7500 words, specifically those in the vein of Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard” What other old school authors do you enjoy and hope influence the content?
P. Alexander: One of the reasons why I list so many is that it’s so hard to narrow it down to just a few. There are so many great writers from the pulps and on into the New Wave that even if I listed dozens, I’d certainly leave some out that I would’ve meant to include.
Otis Adelbert Kline, who’s better known these days as R.E. Howard’s executor, wrote a number of stories in the 20s and 30s in the same vein as Burroughs, but I’ve noticed his bent is on space princesses who are light-sabre-wielding, army-leading heads of states.
Up through the 50s, Ross Rocklynne was considered one of the ‘big names’ of sci-fi, though he’s largely forgotten today.
Probably my favorite story that I like to point to if someone asked “what are you looking for” is Raiders of the Second Moon by Basil Wells. In it, a Nazi-hunting astronaut has crash-landed on a jungle moon, becomes a Tarzan-style jungle man, and with the help of his talking ape friends, rescues a jungle princess from a skull temple of invisibility-cloak wearing death cultists. It crams all of that and a Shakespearean happy ending into about 8 pages.
WARGAME WEDNESDAY: The Scheldt Campaign by Hollandspiel Games
Wednesday , 16, November 2016 Wargames 3 Comments
Fans of World War II history, asymmetrical warfare, and microgames will rejoice: Brian Train’s The Scheldt Campaign is back!
The Player’s Aid has the full scoop; what I find so intriguing is the Staff Card system:
Each player has a C2 Level which represents the maximum number of Staff cards he may have in his hand at any one time. The current C2 Level also determines how many Tactical Units the player may have under command of a single Task Force HQ at one time. Also, the mix of Staff Cards differs between the German and Allied sides.
Each Player selects his hand of Staff Cards from those in his Available Pile during his Planning Phase at the end of his Player Turn. Cards remain in your hand until played or your ensuing Planning Phase, at which time you keep or discard any cards in your hand and then select back up to your current C2 Level (thus planning out your next turn).
There are never enough Staff Cards so you have to balance out the need to push on vs. the risk of burning out your front line units. I liked this aspect of forcing hard choices on players, and being able to at least partially script the turn coming… though your choices could be rendered bad ones by the enemy’s selected actions.
The way that these cards interact with the combat system is especially interesting. It sounds like it can produce a great deal of flavor and nuance for very little complexity. Check it out!
SUPERVERSIVE: Why “The Incredibles” is the greatest superhero movie ever made
Wednesday , 16, November 2016 Fiction, Superversive 13 Comments
I have a lot of respect for animation, and the highest respect for Pixar. Animation is the one genre where you’re allowed to take real risks since the critics are never going to give you the respect you deserve anyway, so why try to please them? Children’s animation especially tends to take more risks than any other type of media I can think of (it’s an easily verified fact that more people die in children’s films than any other media).
So I think it’s interesting that Pixar’s best film is from the most oversaturated genre in Hollywood (though not quite as much at the time): The superhero movie. That movie? “The Incredibles”.
I consider it less an opinion and more of a fact that “The Incredibles” is the best superhero film of all time. Yes, better than “The Dark Knight”. TDK is an overall decent film with one absolutely extraordinary performance. “The Incredibles” is a perfect film save one weirdly out of place poop joke.
It’s positively baffling how hard it’s become for anyone to make a straight ahead adventure story these days. First classic Westerns like Rio Bravo and El Dorado evaporated and the old school leading man with them. An echo of that sort of thing lived on with Luke Skywalker, Alex Rogan (The Last Starfighter), and Billy Peltzer (Gremlins), but it was never really the same. And before long even that seemed to be too much to ask for.
It got worse, though. At some point we lost the traditional “heavy” as well. Rather than establishing him as someone worthy of a comeuppance at the hands of a hero figure, he instead became a figure worthy of sympathy: someone that was merely mistreated as a child or somesuch. The yin and yang at the heart of millenia of storytelling was twisted even as it was muted.
Then came the strong female characters that seemed to follow an entirely different story arc altogether. Extended casts had to be reworked to accommodate a dozen ethnicities and “lifestyle” choices. Each of these changes seemed maybe reasonable on their own, but after a while… it was as if a new type of storytelling had emerged in which conformity to the narrative trumped the depiction of human beings with human motivations. In a world where heroism and romance were already unimaginable, this was just too much. There was nothing else to do except start over.
August Derleth was a member of the Lovecraft circle from the late 1920s until Lovecraft’s death. He was also one of the first to make use of the Cthulhu Mythos (with Lovecraft’s blessing). He remains controversial among Lovecraftians for his handling of Lovecraft’s legacy and especially for his Mythos fiction.
A review of Derleth’s Mythos fiction on the heels of rereading the core of the Lovecraft catalog put things in perspective for me.
I have been reading Derleth’s Mythos books and his “posthumous collaborations” with Lovecraft the past year. I also read some of this earliest Mythos fiction this week.
John Haefele had this to say in The Derleth Mythos:
“Derleth’s association with the renowned New York publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons, inaugurated in 1935, would last eleven years. He worked with celebrated American Editor Maxwell Perkins, who before Derleth had famously guided F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. Derleth was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship during this period–simply put, Derleth’s literary status was much greater than any other writer in the Weird Tales circle, exceeded today perhaps only by Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.”
August Derleth had three parallel writing paths going on in the 1930s: mainstream regional fiction, his Solar Pons series, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and weird fiction. Read More
Short Reviews – The Star Saint, by A.E. Van Vogt
Friday , 11, November 2016 Book Review, Uncategorized 2 CommentsThe Star Saint by A.E. Van Vogt appeared in the March 1951 issue of Planet Stories. It can be read here at Archive.org.
The Star Saint is the first story I’ve read by A.E. Van Vogt; it’s a deconstruction of the Raygun Romance, and I hated it.
A ship full of colonists is on its way to drop off a fresh batch of pioneer folk at a frontier outpost only to find that the outpost is destroyed and all of the colonists are dead. There were only enough supplies for a one-way trip, so the colonists are going to have to hold out against whatever alien threat awaits until something more can be done. Something like receiving aid from the Star Saint.
The Star Saint is something of a rogue space cop – he only shows up where and when he feels like it, but when he does show up, he has a reputation for saving the day. He’s strong, he’s brilliant, he’s reputed to be able to survive even in the vacuum of space, and the womenfolk all around the galaxy swoon at the thought of him. He practically craps rainbows. Except he’s not the main character. Some poor shlub named Leonard Hanley is.
SENSOR SWEEP: Political Agendas, Vapid Nonsense, Screen Misogyny, and Boring Things
Wednesday , 9, November 2016 Sensor Sweep 2 Comments
Traveller (Tales to Astound!) TRAVELLER: Out of the Box–“Giants of the Imagination” — “In particular, the tales that inspired early RPGs (books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack Vance, Robert E. Howard, and countless others) were never about one definitive setting, obsessed with the defining the top-down organization and structure like some obsessive compulsive gazetteer. Instead, the larger setting (if there was one) served to hold countless settings within it.”
Pulp Revolution (Wasteland and Sky) Magical Parrots and Power Suits! ~ Cirsova #3 Review — “Political agendas inform stories instead of concept or character ideas leading to alienating segments of the audience and morality plays with predictable endings where the group the author hates ends up suffering their wrath, often with a heavy handed moral message. In short, this is what the Horror and Weird Tales markets looks like now. Is it any wonder Cirsova is getting so many submissions in the Weird Tales format?”
Appendix N (Don’t Split the Party) Clark Ashton Smith, the Beast of Averoigne, Castle Amber, and Horror — “When I read Clark Ashton Smith I am reminded of Louis L’Amour, and vice-versa. Their pacing, framing, love of language, and evocative descriptions strike me as being from a similar outlook in many ways. Both men did a lot of different things, and both men had a wide range of talents. L’Amour wrote one science fiction/horror book, the Haunted Mesa; read it and compare it to some of Smith’s Hyperborea tales and I think you’ll see what I mean. Both men saw the fey, the faerie, the sidhe as not just different, but other, alien., inhuman in ways that are innately terrifying and hostile. They seem to share the outlook of the old tales of the Folk where they do incredibly horrible things for no reason comprehensible to humanity for they are not human.”
SUPERVERSIVE Review: The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin.
Tuesday , 8, November 2016 Superversive, Uncategorized 10 Comments
I don’t hate fantasy novels, I just generally prefer science fiction. I have my tastes, y’know? We all do. Mine usually run to things with spaceships and antimatter torpedoes and Ominous Dark Things from Beyond the Stars, but every now and then, it’s good to branch out. Get a change of pace. Get some elves in play instead of space elves. I’ll enjoy anything that’s done well enough– I enjoyed the Harry Potter films, for instance. Haven’t read the books, but the movies were enough fun that I jumped on a decently priced blu-ray set before the last two came out.
That having been said, YA fantasy isn’t usually my thing. Sure, there are exceptions. A Wrinkle in Time. Narnia. You know, the classics. And I’m willing to give most things a shot once in a while, particularly when the things are either A), free, or B), written by a friend of mine. And I suppose I might as well get the disclaimer out of the way: I was given an audiobook of The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin for review purposes by the author, L Jagi. Lamplighter, who is both a friend of mine and a colleague at SuperversiveSF.
Now that we got that out of the way, on to the review.
One of the surprising books of the late 1980s was a Robert E. Howard collection, Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors. This was a Baen paperback published in May 1987. David Drake edited the book. It sold for $2.95, was 247 pages, and had three printings. The cover by Steve Hickman is spectacular.
This book was a surprise to me when it came out. The 1980s sword and sorcery extinction event had happened a few years earlier. For a period of time from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, this was the most likely Robert E. Howard you would see at a bookstore.
It goes to show the slow but steady growth in H. P. Lovecraft awareness that this book came out. I joke that there should have been a companion collection of Lovecraft stories entitled Barbarians.
Robert E. Howard’s “Mythos” stories were probably for the most part written from 1930 to 1932. Howard had begun corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft in 1930. They discussed the concept of cosmic horror among other things. Howard had already used elements of cosmic horror in this fiction but his interaction with Lovecraft focused the idea. Read More