Ambrose & Elsewhere

Scientists plan to create a supermouse.

The Onion AV Club has been running an interesting feature on its blog where one of the editors, Keith Phipps, reviews in turn each one of the 75 “vintage” (= damn old) paperbacks he bought in a big box from some thrift store. I myself am so vintage (= damn old) that I remember seeing some of these editions on the shelf when they were shiny and new, but I mostly passed them by for matter that was more obviously rewarding (e.g. Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids). It’s been interesting to watch Phipps sift through the dreck for an occasional glimmer of gold. It’s not quite the must-read feature that Nathan Rubin’s My Year of Flops has become, but it’s getting there.

There have been several genre titles so far: Wells’ The Food of the Gods, Delany’s Ballad of Beta-2 etc. This week he tackles The Mighty Swordsmen, a Lancer paperback anthology of heroic fantasy, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson.

Phipps is not especially knowledgeable about fantasy (he cops to not having read any Zelazny or Moorcock except for the stories in this volume), but he gives a not-unsympathetic reading to the REH story included (“Beyond the Black River”), and an unsympathetic reading to a Bjorn Nyberg knockoff, which sounds about right.

Apparently the book includes no Leiber, no C.L. Moore, and no Vance, so Phipps not unreasonably but wrongly concludes “I left The Mighty Swordsmen with more or less the same impression of its sub-genre as I had going in: There’s Howard and then there’s everyone else.”

On deck for future weeks: an Ed McBain “87th Precinct” mystery, Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse and a Lin Carter opus I’ve never heard of called The Valley Where Time Stood Still (a Lost World pastiche, I suspect).

Last weekend I was clearing out a long-neglected corner of our house when I found a letter addressed to me. “Weird,” I said to myself, looking at the envelope. “That looks like my own writing, too.” Then I realized: it was a rejection slip. The postmark was from three years ago. I had gotten it, instantly recognized what it was, and tucked it away in this corner without bothering to open it.

Now I opened it, and saw that it was a rejection for “The Lawless Hours,” the Morlock novella which is out this week in Black Gate 11.

So now I’m using the rejection slip as a bookmark while I read my way through the issue. It’s oddly satisfying, like drinking a toast from the skull of one’s slain enemy. Only not as, you know, morally problematic.

Also synchronicitiferous, I read this morning (courtesy of kythiaranos and “Pat’s Hotlist”) Jonathan McCalmont’s latest screed arguing that fantasy is inherently authoritarian. The synchronicity comes in because (I don’t think this is a spoiler), in “The Lawless Hours” Morlock acts as the catalyst in disrupting an authoritarian regime, though that’s not really what the story is about.

Part of the Politicization of Everything is the way that politics gets treated as the norm of meaningful human interaction. In fact, although politics is necessary for dealing with groups of individuals, it’s a pretty blunt instrument for dealing with the individual (or internal) human interactions that fiction is really about. I would say something like this on McCalmont’s blog, but he’s one of these “But, still…” guys: it doesn’t matter what wealth of contradictory evidence and argument you bring to him; his original position always turns out to be the Only Correct One.

More later, maybe: I’m running late for some human interactions.

In good news for readers of adventure fiction, the late lamented e-zine Flashing Swords, founded by the irreplaceable Howard A. Jones, is relaunching in Fall 2007 with a new slate of editors. Candidly, I don’t know the work of the guys at the top of the pyramid (the pseudonymous CrystalWizard and James Boone Dryden), but the associate editors (Jason M. Waltz a.k.a. “Howard von Darkmoor”, Michael D. Turner, SC Bryce, Steve Goble, TW Williams) make up a pretty damn impressive editorial board all by themselves.

The new front page is here. The discussion forum, for news and whatnot, is at the same address as it used to be. They’re not open to submissions until Nov. 1 (the first issue will be an in-house production), but their guidelines are here.

Funding is always a problem with small magazines, especially e-zines, but the recent and apparently temporary death of Flashing Swords was all the more depressing because it didn’t seem as if it had to be. The zine was a secondary casualty in the tempestuous collapse of the Pitch-Black publishing empire. Maybe this time, standing on its own two feet, Flashing Swords can go on cleaving any heads that need to be cleaved.

[The good news snaffled from Steve Goble’s Swords Against Boredom.]

This probably falls into that very large category of “Things Everybody Knows Except Me” but apparently a group of dedicated fans has been producing a series of webisodes that continue the original “Five Year Mission” of the Enterprise. This entails casting a set of nonprofessional actors as Kirk, Spock, McCoy etc., which I thought would be an intractable problem… But, after watching an episode, I think maybe it’s not, after all.

Spoilers and further base Trekkery behind a cut, to spare the innocent and the easily bored.

Captain’s log. Stardate: as unlikely as any other kind of date while I’m wearing this costume.

a.) “Sword and Planet” stories and Edgar Rice Burroughs have both come up in recent threads on the usually (too) quiet swordandsorcery community.

2.) The wise and the good tell us to “write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs.” Are they right? They are not.

III.) It may be the 21st century, but we will always need those 20th century voles.

And since I can’t reach any of the people I know back home, I’m posting pictures on my stupid blog.

Both morbid and lighthearted, here’s the paradigmatic Bergman parody De Düva by George Coe. (It’s also the first film of the unspeakably great Madeline Kahn, apparently.) If the embedded video below doesn’t work you might try Google video directly or this quicker and dirtier Quicktime video (the latter link copped from Timothy Noah at Slate).

John O’Neill has put up a preview of Black Gate 11 (which will include a Morlock novella, “The Lawless Hours”).

Things I never knew (or forgot about) until recently:

There are “Black Gates” all over the world: in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, in Trier, in Ypres, in Tokugawa, maybe even in Toki City. (I can’t quite tell whether “the black gate” in the text is merely descriptive or a proper noun there. Either way, it looks like an interesting place.) There is also a hentai movie with the English title Black Gate. (No, I’m not going to provide a link.)

For years I assumed the magazine’s title referred to the Morannon, the Black Gate of Mordor in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. But a while ago I saw an interview with John where he mentioned that it actually referred to the entrance to the underworld in classical mythology. (I’d link to the interview, but I’ve mislaid the URL and many minutes of fierce googling failed to unearth it. However, I did find the links in the paragraph above, so it wasn’t a total waste of time. Please don’t look like that while I’m rationalizing.)

I instantly thought of my favorite passage from Vergil, where the Sybil at Cumae explains the facts of death to Aeneas:

facilis descensus Auerno:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed reuocare gradum superasque euadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

—Vergil, Aeneid 6.126ff

“The descent into hell is easy.
The door of the dark city stands open night and day.
But to recall your steps, and escape into the upper air…
For that you’ll work. For that you’ll suffer.”

But that doesn’t fit, because in the Latin the adjective atri is applied to Ditis (Dis, the city of the underworld). Was it a transferred epithet? Were they thinking of some other passage or passages?

I could have written John about it, of course, but instead I chewed quietly on my elbow for awhile and gave it some thought. (I go through more elbows that way. Fortunately, I know a good wholesaler.)

Then recently I came across this bit in Propertius:

desine, Paulle, meum lacrimis urgere sepulcrum:
panditur ad nullas ianua nigra preces.

—Propertius, Elegies 11.1f

“Paullus, stop spilling tears on my tomb:
grieving prayers can’t pry open the black gate.”

And I realized I could stop chewing that elbow.

Hm. All this underworld stuff, and the Bergman notice I posted earlier, is giving the blog a rather funereal cast. I’ll put a cartoon or some dancing weasels from YouTube in my next post to brighten things up a bit.

Ingmar Bergman has died.

Fritz Leiber (one of the world’s great fantasists) considered him one of the world’s great fantasists.