Burn it all!

As most everyone in the fantasy short fiction world has heard by now, Realms of Fantasy magazine is shutting down after their next issue.

Realms wasn’t perfect–in recent years their editorial tastes had migrated more toward the literary and farther away from the traditionally fantastical, and the business office sold subscribers’ names to commercial mailing lists. But they consistently published far more new authors than the only other top magazine interested in fantasy, and their editorial staff gave public updates that let slushpile submitters like me follow what was going on with our submissions. They were also the higest-profile fantasy magazine in the world, so they attracted famous authors and lots of attention.

Hopefully something new will come along to fill their role as the leading magazine of general fantasy. But they will be missed.

Today marks the release of a novel that I read large parts of years ago in manuscript form. This will be the first time I’ll get to see a manuscript that I read transformed into an actual, real, major-house published novel.

Maggie Ronald, who was a classmate of mine at the Viable Paradise workshop in 2004, has her urban fantasy novel Spiral Hunt coming out from Eos Books today. It’s set in Boston, Maggie’s hometown, and features lots of Celtic-inspired supernatural stuff.

It also includes references to the Red Sox, a topic dear to my own heart! When I first read parts of the novel in 2004, the Red Sox’s legendary curse of not winning the World Series since their star left-handed pitcher Mr. Ruth had been sold to the New York Highlanders was used in the novel. But of course, less than two weeks after our workshop session in New England, the Sox won the World Series, so Maggie had to rewrite that part!

Urban fantasy is not usually a favorite of mine, but I love the city of Boston and I really enjoyed Maggie’s character-centered approach. So if you like urban fantasy or Boston, definitely give Spiral Hunt a look.

Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection isn’t actually out yet officially, but I have had the great good fortune to read it in advance.

It’s one of those rare books that does everything I want a book to do. Normally I need to be reading at least three different things at once to satisfy my reading moods: something stylistically complex and challenging whose prose I can pore over like poetry in the morning over a cup of tea, something factual and obscure about the nature of belief or the evolution of consciousness that I can resort to in the middle of the day when I ought to be working and write off as “research”, and something with an engrossing story and lovable characters I can pick up and get lost in before falling alseep. The Manual of Detection provides all those things. The jacket copy seems satisfied referring to it as a surrealistic detective story, but to me it almost seems to be carrying secondary-world fantasy around, hovering just above its shoulders like an invisible umbrella. It is meticulously structured, ornate and beautiful and inexhaustibly inventive—a page-turner, mindfuck, and cozy all at the same time.

Miss Palsgrave looked down at him. In the dark he could see only the dull gleam of her eyes. “The sleeping king and the madman at the gates,” she said. “On the one side a kind of order, on the other a kind of disorder. We need them both. That’s how it’s always been.”

Blood red comet over Helsinki!

(via nosundays)

My colleague Jay Ridler, with the ink drying on his PhD in War Studies, has started writing a non-fiction column at Fearzone.com about horror outside the traditional definitions of that subgenre.  Jay knows a ton about horror, both in the genre and out, so this column should be great.

He also knows a ton about war. His innaugural column, the first of a two-parter, is about the influence that the horrors of 20th-century warfare in the two World Wars had on fiction. If you’re an armchair military historian like me, and you love gritty fiction about characters in horrible circumstances, definitely check it out.

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce I am now a columnist at Fearzone.com, writing the monthly feature "By Any Other Name", looking at horror outside of the traditional venues and authors.

You can read by premier article, "War of Horror: The Horror of War" here
http://www.fearzone.com/blog/by-any-other

It's the first of a two-parter on fiction written by veterans of the First and Second World War.

Go leave lots of comments so Greg doesn't fire me! On the main site, he stuck my column beneath a picture Eliza Dushku. How the hell am I going to compete with that???

Cheers,

JSR

Been reading some on the writing of Star Wars. I knew some of the history, but what is clear is that while Lucas had a general idea of a space epic in his head, he had precious little else until the mid 1970s.

So, according to one story, he crammed his head with stuff that gave him structure, visual iconography, and characters to riff off of. The influence are well known: Kurosawa's the Hidden Fortress, Flash Gordon serials, pulp SF and Jack Kirby comics of the 1970s (allegedly, the use of Campbell's work on myths came later), and Ralph McQuarie's drawings of the script in turn influenced the story (like Vader's outfit and all that jazz). Then draft after draft of the epic were made, finally winnowing down to what we know of as Star Wars.

I've batted around Lucas' approach with old Slow Train. He believes and I agree (up to a point) that there's a value in cramming yourself with your influences. That it can fuse things in wild ways. Maybe it's a key to innovation.

I think it's greatest value to me is recharging the batteries when you've been pounding the keys a lot and then feel like you're grinding gears.

Fast paced novels, comic books, and bad SF movies usually help when things are cramped.

How about you, amigos?

JSR
PS: Ok, Kaufmann, start with the geek comments . . .

Just did some updating of files and discovered that, so far, I have four stories slated to come out in 2009.


“Billy and the Mountain,” in Tesseracts Thirteen, Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell, eds., (Calgary: Edge Press, 2009). Forthcoming

“Salvation,” New Myths. Forthcoming

“The Last” Nossa Morte (2009) Forthcoming

“The Desert Island Fifty,” Fantastical Visions IV, William Horner, ed. (Wilmington: Fantasist Enterprises). Forthcoming

That means I am only one away from matching last year's record of five. And it is only January! Sweet!

Also, I am reading more comics. This does my brain a great deal of good. While I've ranted about Ed Brubaker and his great series Criminal and his fantastic run on Iron Fist, I've also become converted to the church of Mark Millar, Scottish scribe for Kick Ass and a bunch of other wonderful, two-fisted stuff. Also read a single issue of Green Arrow & Black Canary written by Judd Winnick that was terrific. Pure, enthusiastic superhero storytelling. Sure, enjoying such a ride won't earn you cred with Alan Moore or whatever, but there is an art to great, dynamic, action-driven storytelling. Winnick has the knack and the story just made me grin. Plus, it had Doctor Sivana from Captain Marvel as the villain. I mean, that's awesome! He was like a poor man's Hugo Strange and Lex Luthor in one! I also enjoyed Terry Moore's writing in Runaways, a series I may keep reading. And, yes, I loved the art for all this stuff, too.

Comics make for a happy day in Ridlerville.

So, if you collect, what the hell are YOU reading, true believer?

JSR

The Agony Column at bookotron.com recently podcasted an interview with Lou Anders, editor at Pyr Books, about the “New Fantasy” — recent epic fantasy that’s grittier and darker than the 80s/early 90s epic fantasy of authors like Raymond E. Feist and Robert Jordan. He mentions British authors Joe Abercrombie and Mark Chadbourne, who I’ve heard about but haven’t read yet.

I’ve seen bloggers musing if this “New” Fantasy is a reaction to the darker emotional tone of the post-9/11 era, but I’ve read too many examples of grittier epic fantasy predating that period (and predating the label “New Fantasy”) for that theory to hold water. George R. R. Martin’s Ice and Fire novels, beginning in the mid-90s, featured a whole new level of grit and brutality. I think their commercial success, more than anything else, is what has spawned this wave of grittier epic fantasy. Steven Erikson’s Malazan saga, first published in Europe also in the mid-90s, also featured more grit than most everything else at that time. And going back to that 80s era of “cleaner” 80s epic fantasy, Glen Cook’s Black Company novels, which Erikson cites as a major influence on his Malazan books, were the unheralded pioneers of grit and brutality in this subgenre.

I do like the trend toward realism and vividness in epic fantasy, and I agree that it’s the same grit that classic-style swords & sorcery had, now creeping into the epic novels. And it does perfectly fit the darker emotional mood of the current era. But I don’t think this New Fantasy is quite that new.