Monthly Archives: September 2011

Year Two, Day One

Although it doesn’t seem like it, it’s been exactly one year since I started this blog. I’ve learned a lot, not least of which is how much I still have to learn.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who follows my posts, whether formally, with your picture there in the sidebar, or informally, checking in when you have a free moment. While I haven’t met most of you in the flesh, I still consider those of you who have commented, and at times corrected my errors, friends. If we find ourselves at a convention or Howard Days or some other venue together, let’s make sure we make time for a drink or two.

I’ve got some things planned for this next year in addition to the ongoing series such as the posts about Conan, to give one example.

At the moment, I’ve got six novels I’m committed to review, including the sequel to Wolfsangel. That one will be posted in late September/early October to coincide with the release of the book. It’s number three on the reading list. I’m hoping to add a Twitter feed within the next month. That is if family obligations and dayjobbery will let me find the time.

This calendar year also marked several anniversaries I want to acknowledge before December 31st if possible. One is the five year anniversary of Cross Plains Universe. This was the anthology released at the World Fantasy Convention in 2006 as part of the Howard Centennial. Another is the tenth anniversary of the US publication of the Australian anthology Dreaming Down Under.

I started a comprehensive post on some of the collections of Henry Kuttner’s short fiction, both solo and in collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore, that have been published in the last year or two. I’m still reading through the collections. Hopefully that post will appear sometime during the holidays.

I’ve also got some English translations of Kazakh historical novels I’ve been wanting to read. The typesetting is different than that used in US and British books, so I want to make sure I’ve got the time to read them without distractions.

Once again, I want to thank all of you who are regular, semi-regular, or occasional readers of Adventures Fantastic. If there’s anything you would like to see more (or less) of, please let me know.

Regarding a Movie About a Barbarian Seeking to Avenge the Murder of His Family

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I saw a movie over the Labor Day weekend. It might be of interest to some of you. The movie was filmed somewhere in Eastern Europe, and the scenery, particularly of the mountains, is gorgeous.

The storyline goes something like this. There’s this young boy in a tribal village and these raiders swoop down and kill everyone, except this boy, who is the only one to survive. He watches his friends and family killed. The leader of the raiders takes a sword that the boy’s father has made.

After he grows up, the boy, now a mighty fighter, goes looking for the man who killed his family. To pass the time until he finds him, he has a hobby of freeing slaves. Eventually he finds the man who killed his family. This man now has a grotesque mask and he’s seeking a particular young woman who is descended from a line of kings. He needs her blood perform this ritual in which he raises this dark sorceress or goddess or something. The barbarian is protecting her, but she gets kidnapped by the villain. There’s a final fight in a citadel and the villain has the princess chained in a spread eagle position to perform the ritual, and there’s this fight on this bridge over a chasm, and…

…and the name of this barbarian…just in case you were wondering,…it isn’t “Conan”.

The name of the movie isn’t Conan the Barbarian, either. The movie I’m talking about is Wolfhound, and in spite of the way I used the common plot elements to make it sound like the recent Conan movie, there’s not much similarity between the two. Wolfhound is a far superior film. Not perfect by any means, but far superior.

It’s a Russian film, and stars Aleksandr Bukharov in the title role. It also stars Oksana Akinshina as Princess Knesinka Helen. I didn’t catch all the names of the characters, and the credits aren’t in English on my copy, so I’ll not try to list the entire cast. They’re listed here and here if you’re interested.

And before we go any further, let me state that I am not, repeat, NOT saying that anyone associated with Conan the Barbarian (2011) plagiarized Wolfhound in any way, nor do I mean to imply such.

Rather, my point is what two different production companies can do with similar source material. I took the common plot elements from the two movies to use in the lead-in for this post. There are some major differences that bear mentioning. Wolfhound’s companions actually do something useful. (His name, which is the only one he has, comes from the fact that the man he’s hunting has a wolf’s head tattooed on the back of his hand.) The magic is often understated and subtle, and in contrast to the magic in Conan, used for healing. There are gods and godesses (as near as I could figure out) directly helping Wolfhound, with the primary goddess encouraging him in a path of love and forgiveness at one point. At least I think so. Not something you would see in a Conan story.

The movie, the version I have at any rate, had English dialogue overdubbed. It was perfectly understandable most of the time. Unfortunately, the sound track overpowered the dialogue in a few places. Since everyone else in the house was trying to sleep, there was a limit to how loud I could turn the sound up, and as a result I missed a few bits of dialogue here and there. I’m not sure who the woman (goddess perhaps?) who appears more than once to give Wolfhound aid and advice actually is. But like I said, this is a Russian movie, and her identity might have been obvious to the original audience. It wasn’t hard to figure out her part in the story, though.

The comparisons to Conan are pretty depressing. There is more action, more (and better) fighting, more philosophy, more romance, and more story in Wolfhound than in Conan. In fact, the only thing Conan had more of was bare breasts.

As I said, Wolfhound is not without a few flaws. Several of the fight scenes were choppy and poorly edited. Wolfhound has a pet bat which gets directly involved in the fighting at the end, something I found to be ridiculous. There’s scene when the princess’s party rescues a woman accused of witchcraft or something along those lines which was a bit over the top. The movie is based on a Russian novel, and from what little I’ve been able to discover, the film and the book don’t have a lot in common. Some things seem to be universal in the film world.

But even with the flaws, it’s a much better film than Conan. The special effects are good; not great, but good. The story hangs together better. The characters don’t, for the most part, act in illogical or inconsistent ways. They grow and change, but their motivations are understandable.

And it’s definitely a Russian movie. Sacrifice and fate are concepts that are addressed more than once. The outlook is bleaker and more fatalistic in places than even the darkest US film. For instance, the city of Galirad, home of Princess Knesinka Helen, lies under a curse and breaking the curse comes to play a large role in the story. The city is cold and overcast, even though it’s summer. As the Princess leaves for her wedding to a nobleman, the contrast between the city the meadow outside the walls is striking. It makes the motivation for what some of the characters do later understandable.

Wolfhound gives us a glimpse of what Conan could have been, what it should have been. Sadly, I doubt anyone in Hollywood is paying attention.

I’ve included a trailer from YouTube. There are several of them, and this was the best I could find.

Why I Decided not to Review the August 2011 Issue of Realms of Fantasy

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I was out of town on Monday for a job interview. Since I had some time between the interview and having to return to the very small airport I was flying out of, I decided to visit some of the local bookstores. Without adult supervision, of course. (My suitcase was noticeably heavier on the return flight.) One of the things I picked up was a copy of the August issue of Realms of Fantasy, which wasn’t yet on the stands where I live.

I read part of it on the plane, and then finished it after I got home. I was rather disappointed. Approximately half of the magazine was devoted to fiction. No huge surprise there. RoF is a publication dedicated to all aspects of the genre, so the columns and reviews don’t bother me. Not all of them interest me, but I don’t begrudge others the chance to read them. And the art feature is usually worth a look and frequently a second look. But these things alone are not why I pick up the magazine. I buy it for the fiction.

There were five stories. I have to admit by and large they were a let down. Only one of them completely worked for me, and it was really more science fiction than fantasy. (Any story that opens by trashing It’s a Wonderful Life is one I’m going to be predisposed to like.) W. R. Thompson, whose work I’ve enjoyed in Analog for years, had a deal-with-the-devil story that started out promising, with wit and humor, but ultimately left me unsatisfied. I found the mechanism by which the narrator got out of the deal to be a cop-out. The story following it, a retelling of the Biblical story of Lot, with Lilith thrown in for good measure, contained many of the ideas and themes the Thompson story did. Since these two pieces together constituted almost half the fiction, I thought this was a bit too much of the same thing, a feeling not dissimilar to the one I’ve gotten at the movies after I’ve gone back for the free refill on the large buttered popcorn. I should’ve stopped after the first.

So rather than give a breakdown of the contents and what I thought of each individual story, what worked and what didn’t, like in my two previous reviews, I’ll just pass this time. None the stories were poorly written. In fact, the way the words were put together in this issue constituted some of the best writing I’ve seen in the magazine, from a technical perspective. For the most part, there was better emphasis on characters and story rather than pretty words than in the previous issue. It’s just that most of the stories really weren’t the type of thing I’m interested in reading. Only the riff on Lot could really be considered adventure fantasy, and I didn’t care that much for some of the themes, in part because they were so similar to the previous story. And while I like other kinds of fantasy besides sword and sorcery and adventure fantasy, most of the selections in this issue really didn’t work for me. Well written pieces, but not my cup of tea. Which is why I decided not to review the issue. I don’t see any point in doing what would essentially be trashing the magazine because the stories weren’t to my taste. If they had been poorly written or had protagonists who weren’t believable as characters, I would have a different attitude.

I write these reviews in part to recommend things I think my readers will like. That’s tough to do when I didn’t care for most of the stories solely on the grounds of personal taste.

On the positive side, the price has come down without any decrease in production values, a move that is appreciated. I suspect this is a move to increase sales. I hope it works. Now if I could just get an electronic version in epub format. There was an ad saying it was available, but the website only shows pdf versions of the current issues.