Author Archives: Keith West

The Cloud Roads

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The Cloud Roads
Martha Wells
Night Shade Books
Trade paperback, 278 p., $14.95
Various e-book formats

What’s that, you say?  You haven’t read Martha Wells?

Shame on you.

You’ve been missing out.  And The Cloud Roads is the perfect place to find out what you’ve been missing.  It’s a stand-alone, at least so far, although I hope it doesn’t stay that way.

This is a dense, complexly layered novel.  And that’s a good thing.  The story concerns Moon, an orphan who doesn’t know who or what he is.  Moon is a shape-shifter, able to take either the winged form you see on the gorgeous cover, or a humanoid shape called a groundling  because it’s wingless.  In his wanderings since his family was killed, he’s never come across any others of his kind.  The closest he’s come is a race called the Fell, who look a lot like his winged form.  Only the Fell are feared and hated by everyone.  They have the nasty tendency to move in, destroy a city, and eat the inhabitants.  Not exactly the best of neighbors; when the Fell move in, there really does go the neighborhood.

Not wanting to be mistaken for a Fell, Moon usually masquerades as a groundling, only taking to his winged form when no one is around.  Unfortunately, someone is, and he’s nearly killed before being rescued by another of his kind who has been watching him.

The other is Stone, and he’s amazed that Moon is alone.  He tells Moon he’s a Raksura.  They live in a colonies, like ants or bees, and have queens, warriors, and several other castes.  Moon is one of the consort caste.  Stone is also a consort, albeit a much older one than Moon.  Stone’s colony is dying, and he’s been searching for more consorts to come and join it.  And Moon is the only one he’s found.

And that’s when the fun really starts.  Colony politics, at least in Stone’s colony, are multi-layered, and the role Moon is expected to play is not an easy one.

And that’s all I’m going to say.  Part of the enjoyment of this novel was seeing how Wells unwrapped the culture of the colony, as well as the world, like an onion.  The further I read, the more depth there was.  There are enough characters for a Fat Fantasy.  Martha Wells does more with character development in less than 300 pages than many other writers do in twice as many pages.  Or even a thousand pages.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how I thought fantasy these days has more sense of wonder than science fiction.  This book proves my point.  This is a fascinating world, and I want to see more of it.  (Please, Martha.)  Her next book is titled The Serpent Sea, and will be coming out from Night Shade sometime next year.  I hope it’s set in this same world.  There are a number of races, not all of them humanoid, but none of the ones that were could really be called humans.  They all had slightly different traits.  Some had scales, some horns or tusks, some tails or claws.  I couldn’t help but be reminded of Larry Niven’s Ringworld and it’s sequels, in which a number of different races inhabit a huge artificial world, with different races living in different areas.  At times The Cloud Roads had that feel to it.  A vast world waiting to be explored.  We don’t see details of all the cultures, but they’re there in the ones we see up close.  We get hints of an ancient history that seems to have been forgotten by much of the population.  This was a fascinating place to visit.

I would also love to see this book filmed.  With the technology used in Avatar, this would be spectacular.  And this time the movie would actually have a story, not a plot outline of something that has been done a thousand times.  The shape-shifting would be mind-blowing.  And the aerial combat scenes….the mind boggles.

Which brings me to another point.  There’s plenty of action in this book, the majority of it in the air.  Martha Wells does action and adventure oriented fantasy like few people do.  Her plots are complex, and so are her characters.  The action and fight scenes move things along quickly, and it’s never dull.

To sum up.  The Cloud Roads was one of the most enjoyable full-length novels I’ve read in a long time.  The only other one I’ve read recently that comes close is Twelve, and that was such a different book that it’s hard to compare the two.  So buy and read The Cloud Roads.  And Martha Wells’ others if you haven’t already.  You won’t be disappointed.

Blogging Kull: The Screaming Skull of Silence

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Kull:  Exile of Atlantis
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
trade paperback, $17.00, 317 p.

This is the first of four extremely short stories in the annals of Kull, or at least first in the order of arrangement in this volume.  This one is different from any of the Kull stories that have come before it. It was submitted to Weird Tales, but Farnsworth Wright obviously didn’t care for it since it wasn’t published until 1967 in the Lancer Books volume King Kull.

The tale opens with Kull listening to Brule, his chancellor Tu, Ka-nu the Pictish ambassador, and the slave and scholar Kathulos discussing philosophy (nothing new there).  Kathulos is saying that what we perceive as reality is an illusion.  To make his point, he gives an example of sound and silence, saying that sound is the absence of silence, while silence is the absence of sound.  Kathulos mentions that Raama, the greatest sorcerer who ever lived, thousands of years ago locked a primordial silence in a castle in order to save the universe.

When Brule mentions the castle is in Valusia and he’s seen it, the comment gets Kull’s attention.  He decides he wants to see the place.  Although the other try to dissuade him, he takes them and a hundred of the elite Red Slayers with him.  They find the castle on a hill after days of riding around looking for it.  How the kingdom continues to run or why Brule doesn’t remember the location of the castle is never explained.

As they approach the castle, Kull can sense waves of silence emanating from it.  The only door is sealed.  Next to the door is a gong, green in color and varying in its depths, sometimes seeming to be quite deep and at other times appearing shallow.  Despite the warnings carved on the castle, Kull breaks the bonds.

What rushes out is a palpable silence that knocks all but Kull to the ground.  The men are all screaming, but no sound proceeds from their mouths.  Sensing the silence wants to destroy all life, Kull tries to resist the silence but eventually staggers and falls.  As he does so, he strikes the gong.  Although he can’t hear it ring, Kull senses the silence draw back.  He takes the gong from its stand and begins to ring it, forcing the silence into the castle and eventually destroying it.  This is a pretty good trick since not even Raama was unable to destroy this silence.  The silence screams as it dies.

And that’s all there is to this one.  It has some unique points.  For starters, Kull finds his usual weapons, in this case his sword, useless against a malevolent silence.  He is forced to use his brains rather than his brawn.  For Kull that’s not too much of a stretch since he uses his brain on a regular basis.  It was nice to read that something other than a blade is needed every once in a while.

There’s nothing remarkable about the prose, at least by Howard’s standards.  It’s good, serviceable, and pulls the reader in.  It’s just not his best.  Even so, it’s still better than most of his imitators have done when they were hitting on all cylinders.

The appearance of Kathulos provided the right amount of philosophy needed as a framework to get the action moving.  Howard was reading a lot of philosophy during this period, as evidenced by his correspondence that has come down to us.  I may slow down this series of posts in order to research some of the philosophers who were influencing his work.  Or I might devote an entire post just to that.  We’ll see.  Time constraints will determine that.

This is the second and last story in which Kathulos will appear.  The sorcerer who manipulated him, Thulsa Doom, never appears again in the Kull stories, at least in none of the ones written by Howard.  (I’m not going to consider the comics here.)  For the Lancer Books edition of King Kull, Lin Carter “finished” an untitled draft, eliminated all references to Karon the Ferryman (!), had Felgar be Thulsa Doom in disguise, and called it “Riders Beyond the Sunrise”.  But the more we discuss Carter’s violations of Howard’s works, the more we legitimize them, so that’s the last we’ll  talk about Carter in this post.

Like I stated, this is one of the shortest of the Kull stories.  In some ways it’s one of the more interesting ones because of the nature of the villain Kull has to defeat.  It certainly adds variety to the series. 

Charles Saunders Guest Blogs at Home of Heroics

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Wednesdays at Home of Heroics is the day for guest blogs.  For the inaugural guest blog,  Charles Saunders, author of Imaro, has written a thought provoking piece on the role of fear in the heart of a hero.  He looks at three examples:  Robert E. Howard’s Conan, Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, and his own Imaro.  Check it out. 

The Noseless Horror

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Tales of Weird Menace
Robert E. Howard
The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press
473 p., $45 REHF members, $50 nonmembers

Tales of Weird Menace collects the, what else, weird menace stories of Robert E. Howard.  The centerpiece of the volume is Skull-Face.  Since I’ve written at length about that tale,we’ll go on to the second.

This is “The Noseless Horror”.  It’s a brief tale, and in the interest of fair warning, I should tell you I’m going to include spoilers in this discussion.  The plot is pretty simple.  The narrator, called only Slade, and John Gordon are spending the night at the isolated country manor of Sir Thomas Cameron, noted Egyptotologist.  Whether this is the same John Gordon who has such a prominent role in Skull-Face isn’t clear, but it’s highly  unlikely.  This Gordon is described as a wealthy sportsman, whereas the Gordon of Skull-Face is a government agent. The only other person at the house is the Sikh servant Ganra Singh, who lost his nose to an Afghan sword.  There’s also a Ganra Singh in Skull-Face, but he’s not the one here.  The descriptions and backgrounds are too different, plus the Ganra Singh in Skull-Face still has his nose intact.

Much of the conversation revolves around Sir Thomas tricking a rival, Gustavve von Honmann, with a phony map.  As a result of following the map, Von Honmann was killed by a tribe in central Africa.  According to the one porter who managed to escape, he vowed he would have revenge on Sir Thomas, from this side of the grave or the other.  Sir Thomas isn’t frightened, and moves the conversation to the real reason he had asked the men to his home.

 

Sir Thomas tells Gordon and Slade that he is about to announce a major find and wants their input on some details first.  The find concerns a mummy found in the hinterlands of Upper Egypt that was embalmed in an unusual way.  None of the internal organs were removed.  As Slade and Gordon are preparing for bed, they hear a scream from Sir Thomas’ study. 

They arrive in time to hear Sir Thomas’ final words, “Noseless–the noseless one”, before he falls over dead with a dagger in his heart.  Ganra Singh joins them minutes later.  Of course, Gordon immediately accuses Ganra Singh of the murder despite the fact that Ganra Singh’s clothes are not disheveled nor is there any blood on them.  Slade is not so sure of Ganra Singh’s guilt, and Gordon, after locking Ganra Singh in another room, agrees to consider other possibilities.

Slade searches the house while Gordon stays in the study to look for clues.  He actually says that.  Up until this point, the story reads like a combination gothic/English country house mystery.  It’s not until Slade is returning to the study after finding an empty mummy case in Sir Thomas’ private museum that he spies the shadow of Ganra Singh on the wall.  Slade is terrified and understands something of what could have driven Sir Thomas mad just before he died.  At this point, we’re back in familiar Howard territory, more of a horror story than a weird menace in my opinion. 

While Slade was searching the building, both men heard a crash and assumed it was caused by the other.  They investigate to find that Ganra Singh has escaped.  After searching the building, they see a light coming from under Ganra Singh’s room.  How they know this to be his room is not explained.  The light is caused by roaring fire in the fireplace.  Inside Gordon and Slade discover not Ganra Singh but the missing mummy, which, like Ganra Singh, has no nose.  The mummy attacks, shattering Slade’s shoulder, and is in the process of breaking Gordon’s back across a heave table when Ganra Singh shows up.  By his own brute force Ganra Singh is able to shove the mummy into the fire, destroying. Gordon responds by fainting.

While Ganra Singh is binding Slade’s wounds, we learn that Ganra Singh escaped in order to prove his innocence and find the true killer.  Gordon apologizes for doubting him and gives him one of the highest compliments possible in Howard’s fiction, calling him “a real man.”  Gordon tells the other two men that the mummy wasn’t found in the hinterlands of Egypt, but instead Sir Thomas brought it back from much closer to the center of the continent, on the edge of the territory where Von Honmann was killed.  As the mummy burned in the flames, Gordon saw its face change to Von Homann’s.

This story works, although it’s not one of Howard’s best, and it works primarily because of Howard’s ability to tell a tale.  It begins as an apparent attempt to be either a detective story or a traditional country house mystery.  The “mystery” is entirely too predictable.  About halfway through the tone changes and becomes one of creeping horror and then action, things Howard excelled at.  It’s at the end, when Gordon is explaining things, that Howard returns to the form of a traditional mystery, in which the detective explains to the remaining suspects how he deduced who dunnit.  Howard attempted some detective and mystery stories, but he never really felt comfortable with them.  Often he would introduce elements of the genre he was trying to write into a genre story he was comfortable with.  As an example, one of the early Conan stories, “The God in the Bowl” is a police procedural in a fantasy setting.  This looks like an attempt on his part to mix horror with mystery/detection.

A popular pastime, usually among the uninformed but occasionally among people who should know better, is to criticize Howard for his approach to race.  This story is a perfect example that such individuals don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.  The narrator refuses to accept  that the nonwhite character is automatically the killer, instead wanting to see proof, and tries to find evidence to clear him.  Furthermore, Howard makes him the real hero of the story, saving the lives of the white guys.  What’s racist about that?  Nothing; in fact it’s remarkably progressive for its time.  Gordon displays the typical racial attitudes for a man of his day.  He not only gets shown up for it, he’s also the only one who faints, and then later apologizes for his attitudes. 

One thing bears considering here, and that’s the similarities between “The Noseless Horror” and Skull-Face.  Both have strong heroic characters named John Gordon.  Both involved evil beings with grotesque appearances found in mummy cases.   Both have Sikh characters named Ganra Singh, although the two Sikhs are clearly not the same person.  I don’t know when “The Noseless Horror” was written nor have I had any luck in finding a probable composition date, but my guess, and this is only a guess, is that it precedes Skull-Face in composition.  It wasn’t unusual for Howard to play around with variations on different characters names.  He may have tried out the names in “The Noseless Horror” before going on to write Skull-Face. Certainly the latter is a more polished and ambitious work.  And it would make no sense to give characters in a later story the same names as characters in a published story when those characters aren’t the same individuals.

I don’t know if Howard submitted “The Noseless Horror” anywhere or not.  In a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith written sometime in February 1929, Howard provides a list of most of the stories he had submitted up to that time [Collected Letters, vol.1, 1923-1929, REH Foundation Press, pp. 306-312].  “The Noseless Horror” isn’t listed, although Skull-Face is.  In the letter Howard mentions that he left out “four or five stories” plus a number he didn’t finish or submit.  I suspect “The Noseless Horror” was among these.  That would certainly be consistent with the suggestion Howard wrote “The Noseless Horror” for prior to Skull-Face and never submitted it anywhere.  It wasn’t published until 1970 in the February issue of the Magazine of Horror.  If anyone does know when this story was written, I’d appreciate your letting me know.

“The Noseless Horror”, like I said, isn’t one of Howard’s best and may very well have been an unsuccessful experiment in writing in the vein of an English mystery.  Unsuccessful in terms of its being that type of mystery.  Still, it’s worth a read and no matter what it attempts to be, it succeeds as an entertaining yarn. 

Black Gate Back Issue Sale

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In honor of the new issue of Black Gate is going to press this week, and to be able to fit his car into his garage (really, I’m not making this up), Black Gate editor John O’Neill is having a back issue sale.  Both print and PDF copies are available.  If you haven’t read Black Gate, now is your chance to score a few copies and see what all the buzz is about and find out what you’ve been missing.  Check out the details here. 

Not Your Daughter’s Vampires

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Twelve
Jasper Kent
Pyr
446p., $17.00

I generally avoid new offerings in the vampire genre the way vampires avoid garlic.  Not that I don’t like vampires.  I kinda do.  I just don’t like what Stephanie Meyers and her imitators have made of them.  Call me a traditionalist, but I prefer my undead to be evil.  They can be alluring to some of the characters because that adds to the danger and suspense in the tale, but as long term or safe romantic interests, no thanks.

I picked this book up on the basis of the cover.  It’s eye catching, and the blurb about the story being set against Napoleon’s invasion of Russia piqued my interest.  I was not disappointed.  This is one of the best books I’ve read in a while, and one of the best vampire books I’ve read in years.  The vampires are vile, evil, not to be trusted, and for the most part, not romantic.  They don’t glitter in sunlight, they burst into flame, and they have no romantic appeal.  Just the opposite, in fact.  In other words, these are not your daughter’s vampires.  These are the real thing.  So to speak.


The story is told from the point of Alexsei Danilov, a captain in the Russian cavalry and a member of a quartet of officers who undertake a number of covert missions.  The story opens late in the summer of 1812, when the Russian army is in full retreat before the invading French.  In a desperate attempt to slow them down, one of the four, Dmitry has invited a group of men from Wallachia to work with them behind the French lines.  Dmitry met these while fighting the Turks, although he is somewhat reticent to share any details.

The leader of the group is called Zmyeevich, which literally means “son of the serpent.”   It’s also the name of a villain in a Russian folk tale, one carried on a bench by twelve men.  Zmyeevich introduces the men with the names of the Twelve Apostles.  Then he leaves for home.  Of the men left, Iuda is the one with the most personality.  The rest are rather withdrawn and taciturn.  The four Russians nickname them the Oprichiniki, after Ivan the Terrible’s personal guards and enforcers. 

The Russians each agree to take a group of three and slip behind the French lines to wreak what havoc they can.  It doesn’t take long for Maks, the youngest of the group, and Alexsei to figure out something is wrong, very wrong.  It also doesn’t take long for the Oprichniki to insist that they work alone.  And at night.

I’ll not spoil all of the surprises, and there are plenty.  Obviously the Oprichniki are vampires, come to feed at Dmitry’s invitation, protected by the general bloodshed and chaos of war.  This is a rich, complex novel, with suprising depth and philosophy in it.  Much is made of whether or not the end justifies the means, although Kent never has his characters state it in those terms.  There is a good deal of action and bloodshed, but at its core, this is a thinking man’s vampire hunt.  And the philosophy isn’t limited to just hunting and war.  It also extends to Alexsei’s growing love for Dmonikiia, a prostitute he began frequenting because she was said to resemble Napoleon’s wife.  Theirs is a complex relationship that deals with the fact that Alexsi has a wife and son in St. Petersburg that he still loves and doesn’t want to leave.

Also, I wrote in a previous post that I found books in which the author summarizes large blocks of time passing to be dull.  There are portions of the novel in which the characters, and consequently the readers, have to wait for things to happen, whether it’s someone showing up for a meeting or wounds healing or whatever.  Kent makes those passage interesting and gives the feel that things are happening, even when there isn’t much in the way of physical action taking place.  I’ve got to go back and study how he does that.  So should some writers I could (but won’t) name.

When we finally find out how Dmitry met the Oprichniki in Wallachia, I got the impression that Zmyeevich is really Dracula.  The fictional character Dracula is believed to to have been based on the Historical Vlad III, often called Vlad the Impaler in reference to his favorite means of execution.  It’s interesting that Zmyeevich (which is a Russian name) is said to mean “son of the serpent” because Dracula can either mean Son of the Dragon or Son of the Devil.  The Devil is called both a serpent and a dragon in the Bible (Rev. 12:9).

Once Aleksei realizes that the Oprichniki are voordalaki, and that there is some truth to the stories his grandmother used to scare him with, things really get interesting.  He and the Oprichniki, led by Iuda, begin a deadly game of cat and mouse in which each side tries to be the hunter rather than the prey.  It’s at this point that a lesser writer would let the book degenerate into a stake-fest.  Instead Kent pulls out all the stops in the area of creativity.  Just because the voordalaki are undead doesn’t mean they can’t scheme.  The scenes of vampire hunting, and being hunted by vampires, which often take place simultaneously, are some of the best I’ve ever read.  They’re certainly some of the most clever.

All I will say about the ending is that there is more than one kind of victory (physical, moral, psychological), and just because you have one doesn’t mean your opponent doesn’t have one of the others.  The sequel (Thirteen Years Later) is out, and I’ll be starting it as soon as I finish the novel I’m reading.  (Both of which I’ll write about here.)  If you haven’t read Twelve, you should. 

Announcing Rogue Blades Entertainment’s Home of Heroics

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Hey, everybody, just a quick word to let you know that Rogue Blades Entertainment is about to launch a new feature at their website.  Tomorrow morning, April 4, at 8:00 a.m., Home of Heroics makes its debut.  This will be a page focusing on heroics in any and all forms, fictional and historical, reviews and analysis, and general discussion.  There are 26 regular contributors, posting Monday and Friday, with guest contributors posting on Wednesdays.  My column, Dispatches From the Lone Star Front, will premiere on Monday, April 25, for those of you who are interested.  Jason Waltz has assembled an impressive lineup of writers and an aggressive schedule of new content, and I’m excited and humbled to be a part of it.  Also, he’s got some upgrades and changes to the RBE website that will be going live over the next week or so.  Check it all out.  You’ll be glad you did.  As much variety as Jason has planned, you’re sure to find a number of things that will appeal to you.

Phaenomena

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Phaenomena
Aratus
Johns Hopkins University Press
72 p., Hardcover $50, paperback $25

This is a fascinating little volume that may be of interest to some of you, especially if you like astronomy or have an interest in ancient science or poetry.  According to the cover copy, the Phaenomena was the most read poem in the ancient world after The Iliad and The Odyssey.  The purpose of the poem is instructive, giving information about the constellations and how to predict the weather.  In a more agrarian society, this type of information could at times be a matter of life and death.  Aratus lived during the period following the breakup of Alexander the Great’s empire.

This is a thin volume.  The actual poem itself only takes up 38 pages, a little over half the book.  Extensive annotations form the bulk of the rest of the text in an appendix and are fascinating in and of themselves. 

Fans of epic fantasy or historical adventure are well aware of the importance many ancient cultures placed on poetry, especially in societies in which writing and literacy were rare.  Here’s a sample:

The nearest guide
To the north Fish is on the left-hand side
Of Andromeda, on her shoulder.  Forever over
The shoulders of staunch Perseus, her lover
Her two feet circle.  As he marches forth,
Taller than the figures in the north,
His gallant right hand gestures to the seat
Of his love’s mother. Staring at his feet,
He walks his father Zeus’ property.  (p.10)

Some passages give detailed descriptions of certain constellations, especially those containing bright or prominent stars, and discuss the times those stars and constellations rise and set at different times of the year.

The price on this one is a little high, but that’s to be expected from an academic press.  I got my copy last year when the publisher was sending out free copies to faculty as part of a promotion.  I’ve enjoyed the poetry and learned a bit from the appendix.  While I haven’t read it cover to cover, it’s been nice to dip into here and there.  It’s one I’ll return to on a regular basis.

Dianna Wynne Jones (1934-2011)

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Diana Wynne Jones, British fantasy author, has died of lung cancer.  John O’Neill was written a eulogy on the Black Gate website.  Since I can’t improve on it, I suggest you read it here.  Jones wrote a variety of books, from YA to adult, but my favorite is still The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a tour guide of a generic land one might encounter in a fantasy novel.  It’s one of the best books on how (not) to write fantasy that I’ve ever read, and hilariously funny as well.