Apparently enough fatheads were taken in by the chatbot hype this winter to flood electronic submission portals with chatbot-written fiction.
At last there’s an option for the person who’s too dumb or lazy to read but who thinks they can write. They’re living in their own personal heaven, i.e. our hell.
In summary: these two books collect the earliest stories Fritz Leiber published about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, ergo one or the other is essential reading for the sword-and-sorcery fan. Both are probably essential only to the Leiberian completist, so if you’re only going to read one I’d recommend Swords Against Death, a recommendation I’ll complicate below.
Today a post on Scott Edelman’s Facebook page got me thinking about short-lived TV shows I loved as a kid, a train of thought that led eventually to a bizarre discovery of a series of attempted murders.
In 1967 two nearly identical shows appeared on different networks on the same weeknight in the same hour: Mr. Terrific and Captain Nice. They were futile attempts to cash in on the short-lived Batman craze—the type of show that could only appeal to a six-year-old fan of Batman and Underdog. That’d be me.
In summary: Whose Body? (Fisher Unwin, 1923) is worth reading if you like Golden Age detective novels and/or Dorothy Sayers. But novices to both might be well-advised to start with the second novel in the series, Clouds of Witness, a much better book. Spoilers follow. (Whose Body? is now in the public domain and you can get the text from The Internet Archive and elsewhere.)
Summary: this is essential reading for the fan of sword-and-sorcery, written by the guy who coined the name of the genre. Some mild spoilers follow.
In terms of internal chronology, Swords and Deviltry (Ace, May 1970) is the first volume of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. However, it collects three origin stories that were written fairly late in the series, published after Leiber had been writing about the characters for more than 20 years.
There’s two schools of thought about long-running series: read the stories in order of internal chronology, or read them in publication order. Either way is fine with me, really, but (as it happened) this is the first volume of F&G stories that came into my hands, sometime in the early 1970s when I was 13 or 14, in a used copy of the 1st Ace edition with its gloriously pulpy cover by Jeffrey Catherine Jones.
Like the rest of the universal world, I loved episode 3 of The Last of Us, but (and this may be where the universal world and I part company) episode 4 reminded me of why I’m tepid about the show as a whole. (Some spoilers follow.)
We’ve seen this story before: a small band of heroes facing a postapocalyptic world. It reminds me of “Miri”, the old Star Trek episode; it reminds me of Night of the Living Dead and the shambling legions of its imitators; it reminds me of The Stand; it reminds me of too many stories that are too similar.
The difference between The Last of Us and those other stories, we are told, is the depth of the relationships, and to an extent I see that. But they’ve killed off what were, to me, the 3 most interesting characters in the series. What we’re left with is Joel Miller (played by Pedro Pascal) and Ellie Williams (played by Bella Ramsey).
Ellie’s character has yet to become interesting to me. Apart from her MacGuffinny importance in the plot, she’s a standard-issue smart-mouth teen. Kids like that exist, but the snarky persona is a mask; they’ve got other things going on behind the mask. Ellie, in particular, should have a lot of other things going on: she’s suffered loss, cruelty, trauma, loneliness. Her love of shitty puns (“That’s not a swear-word, Helen; it’s an adjective of quality”) could be a way of deflecting attention from all those various issues. But they’re going to have to show us more of what’s going on behind the mask or I’m never going to become invested in that character.
Pascal’s character is easier for me to connect with, partly because Pascal is the actor and I’m a fan, also because he’s an older male father-figure, which maps onto parts of my identity. We’ve also gotten more of his story, including his mixed feelings about some of it.
But much of episode 4 was about negotiating this post-apocalyptic landscape, not even in a way that makes sense. You’d necessarily want to avoid highways and other roads leading into cities; they’d be guaranteed to be blocked by wreckage and dead automobiles. But our heroes drive right into one of these traps, with predictable consequences. So, for me, there’s some frustration mixed in with the overfamiliarity.
I’m not ready to give up yet, but… almost halfway through the first season, I’m still not sure this show is worth the time I’m spending on it.
Typo of the day is soughtward (for an intended southward). Seems like it ought to mean something—“in the direction of seeking”, maybe.
“He never found what he was seeking soughtward; he only found it when he stopped looking.”
Or maybe a soughtward is one who guards the object of a quest.
“Before you can reach the Thing-Unreachable you must confront the Seven Soughtwards of the Questing Path.”
I was scrolling through an electronic edition of a venerable Latin dictionary, which is a totally normal thing to do, and I was brought up short by the entry for superstitio: “excessive fear of the goas; unreasonable religious belief.”
I was stunned. A lifetime of studying the ancient world had left me unfamiliar with the goas. I knew Goa as a place name from South Asia, but not at all in a Roman context. I imagined the goae as shadowy froglike beings, made of stone, dwelling in darkness, watching those that live with cruel crystalline eyes. It was hard to say how much fear of them would be unreasonable.
Then my philological skills kicked in and I realized: “Oh. It’s just a typo for gods.” These things happen.
Still, I like those goae that my own latent superstitio conjured up. Maybe they’ll appear in a Morlock story.
It’s probably time for me to reveal here that I was hospitalized last week for acute pancreatitis, cause not fully understood. The pangs started late on MLK jr Day and D hauled me to the hospital early the next morning.
I spent most of the week in the Wood County Hospital, narcotized to the eyebrows, receiving a steady fluid drip and antibiotics to treat the sepsis that became evident on the second day. I escaped from the den on ill-health on Saturday morning and am gradually resuming my human shape and readying myself to resume the pleasures and duties of life.
As scientific and historical proof of these events, I attach my major triumph from Wednesday: a popsicle, the first thing I’d eaten in days.
I try to fight my internal hype machine when I hear about my favorite books being adapted to the screen. But: this seems like incredibly good news.
