Read This: The Fireman

Posted on June 30, 2016

Joe Hill's The Fireman — Joe Hill’s The Fireman

The Fireman, Joe Hill’s latest opus, is a big, rambling, post-apocalyptic horror novel that is fast-moving and entertaining but, for me, ultimately unsatisfying. I was never engaged enough to suspend my disbelief or to be even remotely scared by the goings-on. This was a distinct impediment to my full enjoyment of a promising feast. So while I found the novel action-packed, reasonably fun to plow through, and a good enough way to spend a couple of days, I could not in the end take it seriously.

The Fireman begins with the world in the throes of a new plague known as Dragonscale—a highly contagious fungus that causes most infected people to burn alive, and to burn the world down with them as they go. A lucky few, however, have learned to make a chemical peace with the infection. Some can even use their fire as a tool, or a weapon. These fire-users become the novel’s main characters, fighting to get to a safe place rumored to be off the Maine coast.

This, for me, is where The Fireman’s problems start. I didn’t find these characters believable as real people, and so it didn’t matter to me if they succeeded.

Hill’s POV character is Harper Willowes, a twenty-six year old nurse infected with Dragonscale, pregnant, and fleeing what she has just now discovered is an abusive marriage. To me, she comes across as both trite and cutesy. Her main character traits seem to be her weirdly optimistic affect, unlikely medical knowledge, and obsession with Mary Poppins. The last highlights the inconsistencies in her personal frame of reference. Harper is supposed to be in her twenties, but Hill’s timeline of her experiences and life events (as well as her taste in music and children’s films) all skew at least a decade older. She is a collection of quirks that never quite gel into a convincing person.

The main male character is John Rockwood—exhibitionist British mycologist, romantic lead, Dragonscale master, possessor of a 1935 hook and ladder rig, and so the Fireman of the title. He also suffers from an abundance of odd traits. He is somewhat more realistic than Harper, but he still ends up being presented as an assemblage of eccentric details rather than a fully-developed character.

I also found the secondary characters weak in The Fireman. Hill uses a lot of stereotypes in the peopling of his novel, from the calm, wise black woman to the grandfatherly old man and from the evil conspiracy theorists to the pseudo-religious cultists gone bad. Profanity and lascivious chatter are thrown in at random and attributed to various characters without regard for who they are supposed to be, giving the racy dialogue a toneless quality and a distinct lack of impact. Teens are largely portrayed as Lord of the Flies-style savages. The bad guys are single-dimensional at best, cartoonish at worst, and consequently not particularly frightening. None are truly individuals—they are tropes and plot devices which act without personality. I couldn’t find anything about them to genuinely care about.

The Fireman may be intended as homage or at least a pastiche, but the literary and cultural references are so in-your-face it is hard to take them as other than too-clever name-dropping. We get the direct naming of Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, and Harper Lee. We get obvious allusions to Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, King’s The Stand, Pet Semetary, Firestarter, and more. At one point Hill uses his father’s technique of detailing a sudden disaster’s effects on minor characters. But the trick falls flat when there is no relationship with or between the people he suddenly throws into the story.

As with the references, so many of the details feel disconnected, as if Hill were focused more on moving the plot along (which he does, extremely effectively) than building a convincing end-of-the-world scenario. I was distracted by too many technical questions that stood out more clearly than the characters themselves. For example: Where do all the big trucks and construction vehicles gas up when they are driven for hundreds of miles? How do the overweight characters stay that way for months on end if the survivors are on short rations and skipping meals? And why are there always canned peaches?

So, to sum it up: despite the undeniably compelling pacing I found the characters poorly drawn, the cultural and literary references overdone, and the post-apocalypse details unconvincing. I can’t recommend The Fireman as more than a lightweight beach book. It is a glossy, compelling, in-joke of a novel with unlikely nonstop action, deus ex machina plotting at every turn, and an additional scene dropped off after the credits that teases a sequel. It will fall apart if you look too deeply. But if you don’t look, and don’t really expect too much, The Fireman can still be fun.

E.A. Ruppert contributes book and media reviews for NerdGoblin.com. Thanks for checking this out. To keep up with the latest NerdGoblin developments, please like us on Facebook , follow us on Twitter, and sign up for the NerdGoblin Newsletter.

And as always, please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section!

Read This: The Loney

Posted on June 21, 2016

E.A. Ruppert

The Loney is Andrew Michael Hurley’s first novel, and it is a wonder. As literary horror it is gothic and gorgeous, not so much frightening as vastly uneasy. It has been a long time since I’ve read a book in one long gulp, and I am tempted to open it and start again. Hurley’s use of language is hypnotic, and he is relentless in setting and keeping the dim, wet mood of the novel.

“If it had another name I never knew, but the locals called it the Loney—that strange nowhere between the Wyre and Lune where Hanny and I went every Easter time…and look[ed] for God in the emerging springtime, that, when it came, was hardly a spring at all; nothing so vibrant and effusive. It was more the soggy afterbirth of winter” (3)

First published in Great Britain by Tartarus Press in 2014, The Loney’s first American edition came in May 2016 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In between those dates, the novel collected a number of awards and recognitions, with Britain’s Sunday Telegraph already declaring it “a modern classic”.

They may be on to something.

The unnamed narrator is almost absent from the story, even though it is told in first person as his own experience. His reactions and feelings are left mostly a blank, described but not dwelt on. This creates an emptiness at the heart of the story, rendering it as an almost clinical, if poetic, observation that results in very few answers.

Set primarily during a religious retreat in 1975, The Loney recalls the trend in sixties and seventies horror toward pagan witchcraft and Satanism as the root cause of terror. In many ways the novel shares the same thematic landscape as The Great God Pan, The Wicker Man, and assorted Hammer films like The Devil Rides Out. Here, though, Hurley uses the familiar horror tropes of witches, demonic infants, hostile locals, and ancient, secret religions as background rather than primary plot devices.

The Loney is filled with many portentous allusions and subtle misdirections. There are random, muddy hints that the narrator’s rigidly Catholic mother may be quite familiar with the undefined old ways. The storyunfolds during Easter, a Christian holiday with particularly strong ties to pagan rites. There are frequent mentions of yew trees, with their ancient connection to rebirth and immortality and astounding longevity, and ubiquitous place in churchyards. A troupe of Pace Eggers makes an appearance, whose performance varies from the norm and suggests uglier, older customs. There is a church chained shut, a decayed shrine, the mystery of a priest’s death. A nearby estate called Coldbarrow is said to be haunted by a witch, and its manor house, Thessaly, seems named after the battlefield where Greece’s old gods fought the new. The references are enough to bury a reader in history both real and mythological.

“I often thought there was too much time there. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. Time didn’t leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along, It collected as the black water did on the marshes and remained and stagnated in the same way” (31)

Details and characters are introduced but not resolved, left hanging to intrude at intervals without confirming explanation. Striking and suggestive imagery is used but not integrated. Any sense of understanding is necessarily incomplete, because the fear The Loney generates is not from monstrousness but from uncertainty.

The Loney's uncertain terrain — The Loney’s uncertain terrain

And uncertainty becomes a moral and a mortal danger. Hurley’s real theme, as I understood it, is faith—its blindness, its loss, and its absence. The oppressive religiosity of the characters adds to the joyless proceedings, reinforcing the bleakness and alienation of the setting and the mood.

The narrator’s mother demonstrates a slavish, near fanatical adherence to ritual, to the point that ritual seems all that gives her faith. There are slippery narrative whispers that she and the other characters have lost their way, with their stubborn adherence to a faith that is not so pure as they would have it.

“The shrine seemed much further than everyone remembered, but eventually we arrived at a small gravel car park, deserted apart from a matress and some old car tyres. The little booth where an elderly attendant had once sold penny information leaflets was gone and there was only the wind and the sound of sheep far away on the hills” (209)

They do not want to admit the syncretic merging of a newer religion with an older, or that a religion changes at all. And that refusal to accept the uncertainty of changes–that God or no God is not so cut and dried, that there may also be a matter of God or Other Gods–makes the possibility of a loss of faith truly devastating.

Hurley does a compelling job at weaving all his many threads into a story that retains its mystery even after it ends. The Loney is convoluted, but without any coherent resolution—a puzzle with too many pieces gone. Yet it is so gorgeous, so evocative, that the incompleteness of it acts as a spur rather than a disappointment. I was left sated but wanting just one more bite. Time will tell if The Loney is truly a modern classic. But judging by the effect it has on me, I think it will be.

And as always, please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section!

Read This: Hugh Howey’s Wool

Posted on April 19, 2016

E.A. Ruppert

In my experience, the bigger the hype, the bigger the disappointment. And so it is with Hugh Howey’s Wool, the first of his Silo saga. Wool began its climb to fame as a self-published series of short stories. Then those various pieces were collected into a novel when Simon & Schuster picked up the property. But despite the attention of a mainstream publishing house, its amateur origins show. While the novel gained considerable word of mouth buzz (including rumors that a film version might be directed by Ridley Scott), I think its literary shortcomings dim the luster and make the glowing cover blurbs seem completely overblown. Wool is reasonably entertaining, and may be in the vanguard of the new way of publishing, but it is a long way from great.

The basic idea is intriguing—a society contained entirely inside a deep, underground silo, the descendants of the last human survivors of a world-killing war. And the plot itself is plain and solid, with secrets, factions, civil war, and plenty of action. But the execution is blunt and unpolished, with several main narrative components suffering from it.

The first issue I have is with Howey’s character development. Wool presents as a typical teen dystopia—except it has a cast of adult characters who do not seem to have grown emotionally since their adolescence. The stubborn behaviors, the angst, the absolutism, the weepiness, would all make more sense if the characters weren’t mostly in their thirties. Overall, Howey’s silo inhabitants are not particularly well-drawn or differentiated, with even the main protagonists being plot-driven rather than drivers. The few who do stand out, though, demonstrate a profound lack of realism.

As a surprise survivor in another underground silo, Solo (Solo? Really?) is written like a mentally challenged child, not as a fifty-ish man who has spent most of his life in isolation. He jumps around like a preadolescent, although he was supposed to have been sixteen when he was left alone.

And as the chief antagonist, IT head Bernard is an almost comically hackneyed villain with his mustache, pot belly, and Napoleonesque habit of putting his hand inside the front of his overalls. He is grandiose and megalomaniacal and every bit the cartoon tyrant.

At intervals, Howey tries to add some flavor to his cast. “I just don’t figure he was happy up there. That weren’t his home” (184) is his repeated attempt at differentiating characters—the ones he would have us identify as older, good men. Unfortunately, inserting a few random country twangs into a limited, otherwise homogeneous (if stratified) population doesn’t ring true and does nothing to make those characters into individuals.

Howey seems to have done only cursory research on the physical aspects of the novel’s world, relying instead on his imagination to flesh it out. This makes many of his constructions come across as unlikely and conceptually flawed. Too many details are seemingly thrown in only to make the situation seem futuristic, and they do not bear much scrutiny before they fall apart—the giant spiral staircase as a highway for the entire population, the inefficient reliance on human porters, the ubiquitous, color-coded overalls, pig’s milk as a beverage, corn growing in underground farms, mining and oil drilling directly below the silo, rotten soup and intact bodies still existing after thirty four years. It all goes back to the old saw of “write what you know”—which doesn’t mean write what you have experienced, but what you have studied and understood. Howey didn’t.

In addition to the awkward and unlikely details, there are some really excruciating descriptions to be found here: “His husband eyes swam behind tears while he allowed his dutiful sheriff-self to intervene” (24); “The clouds…loomed like worried parents over these smaller darting eddies of windswept soil, which tumbled like laughing children, twirling and spilling, following the dips and valleys as they flowed toward a great crease where two hills collided to become one” (44); “Here was where silicon chips released their tangy scent as they heated under the strain of crunching data” (204). The messy attempts to build atmosphere only serve to show how rough this Wool really is.

As an extension of the weak characterization and the bad prose, Wool is riddled with pervasive fifties-style sexism and gender-roles that seem an odd social trait to retain, post-apocalypse. For example: “The deputy possessed that distinctly male quality of pretending to know where he was, even when he didn’t” (90); “There’s this ritual, a man asks a girl’s father for permission” (152); in reference to a twenty-seven year old man, “She smoothed the front of her red overalls and allowed Lukas to help her to her feet. She puckered her lips, and he presented his cheek. “My little boy,” she said, kissing him noisily and squeezing his arm” (410); and the hyper-traditional “Young children lumbered reluctantly off to school; husbands and wives kissed in doorways while toddlers tugged at their overalls and dropped toys and plastic cups” (146). Howey evokes a social structure that harkens back to an idealized mid-century rather than putting the energy into something organic. I found it off-putting and a little weird, unless Wool’s world ended in 1960.

The story picks up considerable momentum in the last hundred pages and becomes a reasonably compelling read, but the damage is already done. The improvements in the home stretch can’t disguise that Wool is overall rather artless, and the weak characterization, ungainly descriptions, and ill-conceived mechanics all combine to make this novel a prime example of the pitfalls of big hype. It’s an interesting story idea, passably told, and an amusing enough read. Not much more.

And as always, please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section!

Children of Men: Two Sides to the Story

Posted on April 12, 2016

E.A. Ruppert

When it comes to adaptations, I am normally a stickler for the purity of the source material (I’m looking at you, Peter Jackson). I realize there will always be exceptions like The Princess Bride, when a book’s narrative structure makes it difficult to film but it still has a viable story to be told, or adaptations which tell the core story in a way that is distinctly their own—inspired, rather than adapted, different yet equal—like Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. And last there are those adaptations where the movie is far better than the book ever was, tapping into the story’s potential in a way the words on the page have failed to do. That, I think, is the case with P.D. James’s The Children of Men and the film made of it.

The Children of Men--the end of the world according to P.D. James — The Children of Men–the end of the world according to P.D. James

Since I thought the movie version of P.D. James’s foray into bleak speculative fiction was excellent, I figured I would check out the source novel. I was intrigued by the idea of James writing dystopian fiction, since she was well known for her literary mysteries and not for her near-future world’s ends. But dystopia is not something strictly relegated to multivolume science fiction epics. Dystopia is a concept that rears its head among the literary set with some regularity. Think 1984. Think Brave New World. James is respected. What could go wrong?

A lot, actually. While the novel was undeniably well-written, I expected much more than I got. The Children of Men is a fairly dry story about not particularly nice middle-aged to elderly people, many of whom are Oxford University professors, all of whom are jockeying (openly or in secret) for control in a dying world. It is a slow-moving work, spending more than half its pages in setting the stage before anything actually happens. Told alternately as first-person diary entries and third-person narrative, the plotting is solid and polite and the characters’ evolutions not truly believable.

The end of the world has already happened when the story begins, and the novel unfolds in the long, slow decline that comes in its wake. Human fertility petered out twenty five years before. Society is crumbling at the edges, but the aging population can still go about a fairly normal routine that becomes more limited as the days pass. Their suicide is encouraged by the newly-totalitarian government as a means to preserve resources as long as possible.

The last-born generation, the Omegas, have become dangerous and uncivilized as their elders come to grips with the end of the world. James dwells on the collapse of society, and the re-embrace of the brutal pagan past: “that even the frozen sperm stored for experiment and artificial insemination had lost its potency was a peculiar horror casting over Omega the pall of superstitious awe, of witchcraft, of divine intervention. The old gods reappeared, terrible in their power” (8). She imagines a different kind of lost generation, one that has gone feral because they no longer represent hope for the future.

But James’s characters seem brittle and not especially likeable. Theo, the keeper of the diary, is a middle-aged professor of history whose conversion to the rebel cause is less than convincing. His falling in love with the blank slate of Julian, the first pregnant woman in a generation, seems built on nothing in particular, as does her mutual attachment to him. Theo’s main value seems to lie in his family connection to the head of the ruling council, a man so entrenched in his power that he can throw out grim philosophies like, “We plan for the sake of planning, pretending that man has a future” (102). There is little warmth to be found in the novel, and even with an eventual birth James leaves her readers with very little to hope for. But she does leave us with an intriguingly sharp observation about the lure of power.

And yet something more passionate came from it.

Police-state brutality in Children of Men — Police-state brutality in the film version of Children of Men

Despite its emotionally chilly source, Children of Men was a well-received 2006 movie that took a large number of action-oriented liberties with the plot, transforming The Children of Men from a mannered, upper-class dystopian novel into a deeply touching film about the fight to preserve human worth in the face of societal collapse, whatever the personal cost. The film shows the effect of the gradual loss of hope much more vividly than the book does, through younger eyes and by more violent means. But it also shows that while hope exists, there will always be people willing to sacrifice themselves to make it bloom. Resilience, kindness, and an unquenchable willingness to help underlie the grim, dehumanizing world of this Children of Men.

The story begins with the same triggering event as the novel. But it also begins in a crowded London with the populace soaked in government-sponsored nationalism and fear of illegal immigrants. The characters have considerably more emotional depth than in the book, and the actors have a lot to do with the humanity of the tale. Clive Owen especially brings a nonacademic fullness to Theo that is lacking on the page. And the script sees fit to give them all more realistic motives, with some tie to either current or past radicalism and a deep well of sympathy to draw from.

In this version, the British government’s Homeland Security rounds up its immigrants for transport to a city converted to a brutal internment camp. Everyone is armed and willing to kill, with rebel groups fighting a guerrilla war against the government repression. Julian is reimagined as a radical involved with a terrorist gang to protect a young, miraculously pregnant immigrant woman from government interference. Trading on old relationships, she draws Theo into their plot. Theo’s ties to power, so vital in the book, are no longer central—they exist, but he becomes truly valuable because of his own qualities and his commitment to saving the pregnant woman.

Hope exists in Children of Men — Hope exists in the film of Children of Men

While I normally enjoy a film less than its inspiration, this is a case where the original material left me cold. I found The Children of Men to be beautifully written but so full of unpleasant people that I can’t honestly say I cared what happened to them. The movie, though…if you are looking for an adult dystopia, Children of Men will serve well. Despite the terrible imagery that fills it, this Children of Men still ends with fragile optimism. Same characters as the book has. Same events. In some cases scenes transcribed verbatim. But by shifting the perspective from the machinations of power to the power of hope, the effect on film is something wholly different than the original material can produce.

And as always, please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section!

Read This: Cuckoo’s Egg

Posted on March 29, 2016

E.A. Ruppert

Cuckoo's Egg's best known cover, by Michael Whelan — Cuckoo’s Egg

The cuckoo is a bird best known for laying a single egg among the clutch of another species, in order that its chick be raised by the other parents. Cuckoo’s Egg, C.J. Cherryh’s short stand-alone 1985 novel, is about a very similar occurrence. It is a closely-told tale of human and alien interaction set in a vividly imagined—if thinly described–world that is revealed mainly through suggestion and reference instead of direct depiction.

The prolific author of a number of sweeping science fiction series, C.J. Cherryh’s storytelling technique is distinctive. She is known for using a third person subjective point of view so limited it is essentially internal. Cuckoo’s Egg is a striking example of the technique. The text is loaded with parentheticals that transcribe the main characters’ in-the-moment thoughts and reactions as they occur inside the third person POV. Consequently, we experience the narrative not just through their perspectives, but as their private understandings of their world and circumstances.

It’s easy to forget just how much of our own everyday environment we ignore, taking its familiarity for granted. We know what everything is and do not pause to think why it is, or what it looks like. We do not describe to ourselves the chairs we sit in every day. We just sit in them. We do not explain to ourselves the different forms of formal and informal address we use socially. We just use the right one for the situation. We learned all the rules and no longer dwell on them. Cherryh’s writing is like that. Her characters inhabit a familiar world. They are not going to mull over the layout of their own bedrooms for our benefit.

And ultimately, that stripping away of extraneous detail allows us to be fully inside the characters’ minds.

Cuckoo’s Egg is told almost entirely through the two primary characters of Duun and Thorn, alternating only as the explicit needs of the narrative demand. Cherryh does not waste words with lengthy exposition for the audience. She opts for immersion.

The set-up is straightforward, and the story begins without preamble. Duun, by description an alien adult, has just become the caretaker of Thorn, by description a human infant. Except that in Cuckoo’s Egg, it is Thorn who is the alien being. “Shonunin were naked when they were born, but downed in silver that quickly went to dapples and last of all to gray body coat and black on limbs and ears and crest. Duun held the creature on its discarded wrappings, on his knees, and its downless skin was naked and pink as something lately skinned, except for a thatch of nondescript hair atop its skull” (1-2).

The details are fine and intimate, and in their intimacy give an intuitively coherent picture of the race and culture involved: “He held it as if it were a shonun child and washed its eyes with his tongue (they tasted salt and musty). There was nothing he spared himself, no last repugnance he did not overcome. Such was his patience” (9).

Cuckoo's Egg limited edition from Phantasia Press — Cuckoo’s Egg limited edition from Phantasia Press

The Shonunin are a neatly-imagined alien race, although I hesitate to use the word ‘alien’ to describe them. The story told is ultimately theirs, the world it happens on is theirs, and as the sole human character, Thorn is theirs as well, having never known another world or another people. Physiologically and psychologically, the Shonunin are reasonably compatible with humans. They are distinctly humanoid. The environment of their planet is comfortable for human life. Their family structures are not dramatically different. They are a technologically advanced species who have not yet conquered space. While the familiar details of the Shonunin form and culture are the plot device that makes the whole story possible, they also serve to blur the line between human and alien from a reader’s perspective.

Duun raises Thorn in isolation as closely as possible to how he would raise a Shonun child, training him as a hatani (perhaps best explained as a warrior-judge) and protecting him. Although Thorn is aware that he is different from Duun, he is not entirely aware he is another species. That is forced upon him when he accidently bursts into a Shonun settlement: “He spun on his heel and ran. He heard doors slam, more than once. Heard running come towards the fence, heard voices at his back. ‘Gods, it’s him!’ one yelled, and others took it up. ‘It’s that thing—that thing!’” (41).

At times the effect is a little disorienting, to see a member of our own species described by another species in the terms we would use for some strange, half-legendary creature: “(“When you get used to him he’s beautiful,” Sagot said. “Frightening, like some big animal you’ve gotten closer to than you wanted. But you want to watch him move. There’s a fascination to such things, isn’t there?”)” (107). Viewed both as monster and as beast by most of the Shonunin, and a threat to their way of life, Thorn is dehumanized and depersonalized in ways those words don’t quite adequately encompass. It is a slightly unnerving position from which to experience the story, and a slightly uncomfortable way of looking at what we take for granted as humanity and personhood. It is like reading history from another nation’s point of view.

The political, scientific, and cultural landscape in which Thorn is raised is complicated and for the vast bulk of the novel only obliquely explained. The backstory and its influence on Shonun civilization is not revealed until the last twenty-odd pages, when Cherryh at last foregoes her usual reserve in an enormous, finally detailed explanation that allows the novel’s conclusion to be both satisfying and loaded with a heady ‘What if?’.

So my conclusion is this: Densely detailed, occasionally inscrutable, emotionally sensitive yet action-packed, Cuckoo’s Egg is, I think, a solid starting point for anyone wishing to sample C.J. Cherryh’s work, and an excellent point to revisit if you already know how good an author she is.

And as always, please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section!

Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex: Superman Up Close

Posted on March 15, 2016

E.A. Ruppert

Superman may be the Man of Steel, but a Man of Steel does not live by heroism alone. In 1971, before the famous Christopher Reeve movies and the romantic getaway at his Fortress of Solitude, the inimitable Larry Niven (Ringworld, The Man-Kzin Wars, and many productive collaborations) decided to address that crucial facet of Superman’s existence—his sex life, the possible lack thereof, and the implications for his species and for humanity of him having one. The result is the short story “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex”, a snidely hilarious pseudo-clinical discussion of the carnal possibilities that is part speculative lab report, part contemplative essay, and wholly TMI.

Now, I’m not terribly familiar with the minutia of Superman’s legend, but I know that with his current grittier reimagining this might become more relevant than when he was the idealized all-American alien boy. Still. There’s a lot of skin peeled back here. Niven takes the question of interspecies humanoid sex to its neatly argued, logical conclusion in a charming display of reducto ad absurdum. It’s clear he’s having fun playing the little game he’s come up with. And it’s a good game. Let’s start with some of Niven’s ground rules:

Superman, the Man of Steel, showing off.

“Superman’s sex problems are strictly physiological, and quite real. The purpose of this article is to point out some medical drawbacks to being a kryptonian among human beings, and to suggest possible solutions. The kryptonian humanoid must not be allowed to go the way of the pterodactyl and the passenger pigeon.”

Niven begins with the simple premise that Superman, at the time of his writing thirty-one years old and strappingly healthy, must be lonely for Kryptonian female companionship and a family of his own. His only option is terrestrial. He’s going to go for it. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, on a basic sociological level, there’s this: “A mating between Superman and Lois Lane would feel like sodomy-and would be, of course, by church and common law.”

From there the speculations become a bit more…graphic, as Niven theorizes on the actual physical effects of Kryptonian/Earthling love. The descriptive title Man of Steel takes on some interesting nuances within that context, and Niven deftly illustrates and then rules out the possibility of successful interspecies in-the-flesh romance.

But what of Kal El’s responsibility for carrying on his species? Why not assisted reproduction? That should work!

“All known forms of kryptonian life have superpowers. The same must hold true of living kryptonian sperm…They scatter without regard to what is in their path. They leave curved channels, microscopically small. Presently all will have found their way to the open air.That leaves LL with several million microscopic perforations all leading deep into her abdomen. Most of the channels will intersect one or more loops of intestine.”

Or not.

These superpowers. — A frustrated Man of Steel

The potential damage such potent cells could do is expounded on at some length. And the damage would not be limited to the innards of a human female. These little suckers would shoot through Metropolis like rockets, destabilizing infrastructure and causing war-like devastation as they escape, looking for love: “Metropolis is shaken by tiny sonic booms. Wormholes, charred by meteoric heat, sprout magically in all kinds of things: plate glass, masonry, antique ceramics, electric mixers, wood, household pets, and citizens. Some of the sperm will crack lightspeed. The Metropolis night comes alive with a network of narrow, eerie blue lines of Cherenkov radiation.”

With those difficulties in mind, Niven asks another pertinent question: “Can human breed with kryptonian? Do we even use the same genetic code? On the face of it, LL could more easily breed with an ear of corn than with Kal-El.” Let’s face it, if it is biologically (not just physically) impossible, why go through all the trouble in the first place? But Niven allows the random workings of chance to come into play, here, because after all, life will out. What impediment could utterly separate evolutions pose in the face of that?

So, after a number of broad leaps of logic, and going through a laundry list of bad outcomes and the extreme measures that would be needed to prevent them, Niven finally finds a way for a bouncing baby Kryptonian/human-hybrid to gestate and enter the world. A happy ending, as it were, to a very difficult problem.

“Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” may be best described as an exercise in over-thinking a purely speculative line of reasoning, a letter to Penthouse gone horribly wrong, or an extraordinarily maladapted love story to a comic-book legend. Heck, it could even be described as “Larry Niven vs. Superman”. Whatever you wish to call it, it is laugh-out-loud funny. By all means, read it. But maybe not as a way to get in the mood.

And as always, please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section!

Read This: The Art of Language Invention

Posted on March 8, 2016

E.A. Ruppert

The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson is a short, information-packed guide to creating imaginary languages for fun and profit. Peterson is the linguist responsible for multiple alien languages for various television shows, not the least of which is Game of Thrones, with its Dothraki, High Valyrian and other derived languages. Peterson loves what he does, and has a fantastic time in breaking language down into its component parts. Unlike the little-too-cutsey humor of the neuroscientists we encountered in Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep, Peterson leaves any affectations at the door. But that does not prevent him from being very, very funny while trying to explain precise terminology to interested laymen: “Discussing allophony is really the first step toward understanding the systematicity of language. To explain it, let me take a fun topic like werewolves and ruin it by turning it into math” (58). And, as any reader will learn, he really dislikes onions.

Language invention, or conlanging as it is known among its practitioners, requires more than simply making up new words for common ones. That way lies Star Wars. And by that I mean Peterson almost immediately identifies something about Star Wars that has irked me for years: the examples of language there are complete gibberish, a random assortment of sounds with no meaningful relation to each other or to the subtitles. I was inordinately happy, nay, validated, to see Peterson’s criticism of the awkward alien dialogue bits in Return of the Jedi: “How on earth does Leia say the same thing twice and have it mean something different the second time?” (4). Lucas had a number of flaws, and lack of attention to linguistic details was a large one. As Peterson points out, there is always a certain percentage of fans who want to learn the language you have invented, and who will notice sloppy linguistics and let you know, loudly, that they know.

Tolkien's Sindarin language — Tolkien’s Sindarin language

Now, I have also tried my hand at creating languages for my own unrealized epics. Has anyone who has read Tolkien not? There’s something very satisfying about his languages and alphabets that encourages imitation. I had taken it for granted that because Tolkien was a professor of languages, his languages would be good. But I had given no thought to how much work goes into making a language with any depth when it is not something that has evolved organically over thousands of years of interaction. So when Peterson brought up the minor detail that “Tolkien was a language creator before he penned his major works…He understood that language itself is inseparable from the culture that produces it” (10), I knew that this would be more than a simplified approach to conlanging—it would truly be about the art. I was not disappointed.

The Art of Language Invention uses an assortment of both actual and invented languages to demonstrate how that intersection of language and culture actually works. Peterson introduces the idea of language invention with real-world constructed languages—the historical Lingua Ignota and the more recent Esperanto and Volapük—and evaluates the reasons for their success or failure. He provides examples of how he developed certain invented languages—High Valyrian and Dothraki, in particular—based on a few words in the original text and influenced by existing natural languages. He discusses the difficulties in translating from the English-language scripts because of the different linguistic rules that had evolved in the conlangs. He diagrams a few sentences, conjugates a bunch of verbs, shows how parts of speech develop as the need to express certain concepts arises, and how pronunciations change. “English speakers have an unfair advantage when it comes to explaining sound changes since our gloriously appalling spelling system preserves, in many cases, an older state of the language” (163).

Through his lessons Peterson points out a surprising number of nuances and variations in natural language that we take for granted. And it’s not just the grammar and vocabulary—it’s the grammarization and cases, the affixes and inflections. If we stop to think about the elaborate construct that is a natural language, we would go down a deep and wonderful rabbit hole that would let us fall thousands of years into the past.

“Creating a language at any point is an attempt to take a slice out of an eras-long progression” (151). Linguistics and evolutionary biology often use similar terminology, because the mechanisms for both are comparable. New words are normally variations or adaptations of existing words and forms, not inventions from whole cloth. “Grammatical evolution is the most difficult, least described, and most exciting aspect of linguistic evolution…When it comes to historical linguistics and language modeling, this is the final frontier” (184).

The Art of Language Invention is a dense and passionate introduction to the architecture and mechanics of language. The book contains only four chapters: Sounds, Words, Evolution, and The Written Word. Each chapter is a distilled lesson in the basics of linguistics, with heady terminology and a case study to demonstrate. A collection of phrase books at the end feature common pleasantries (from ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ to ‘will you marry me?’) in Dothraki, High Valyrian, Shiväisith, and four other languages Peterson created. There is also a brief glossary of the linguistic terms used in the book.

Alas, The Art of Language Invention is too short to do more than whet the appetite of anyone who loves language in all its complicated and mysterious versions. It provides enough technical detail to give a rough familiarity with the subject, and offers extremely stripped-down examples of how the concepts work together to produce specific and nuanced meaning. As David Peterson makes clear, even invented languages are not just a bunch of words: “There are processes we have evidence of, and then there are processes that seem plausible, but for which we have no direct evidence. A conlang itself is an argument for its own plausibility” (197). They are living things that are at their best and most convincing when allowed to develop according to their own strengths and quirks. Kind of like their creators.

And as always, please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section!

Rats in the Walls and Rat God: Variations on a Theme

Posted on March 1, 2016

E.A. Ruppert

‘The Rats in the Walls”, published in Weird Tales in March, 1924, is one of H.P. Lovecraft’s essentially non-mythos tales (he injects a deity into the proceedings at nearly the last minute), a bit of grim narrative that manages its cosmic horrors without relying on the normal godly oppression. It is short and tightly written, yet still manages to appear deeper and more convoluted than it is due to some very well-placed classical name-dropping. Lovecraft’s racism is in full bloom, here, with frequent references to degenerate early races and an unfortunately named black cat who had to be renamed in subsequent reprints. But Lovecraft, for all his sins, is an inspiration to other artists. One of those is the legendary illustrator Richard Corben (Neverwhere), who was stirred to retell the story as Rat God, a five-issue series from Dark Horse Comics released in 2015 as a single volume.

Let’s compare.

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Staid and traditional, “The Rats in the Walls” is a fine example of Lovecraft’s style. Lovecraft makes frequent mention of a different set of old gods than he is usually known for, referring to degenerate Roman cults devoted to Cybele, the mother goddess Magna Mater, and to her consort Atys (otherwise known as Attis), an ancient diety of resurrection and rebirth. Their combined worship entailed sacred castration and a priesthood of eunuchs. He attributes the cults to the Romanization of much older worship: “I deduced that Exham Priory stood on the site of a prehistoric temple; a Druidical or ante-Druidical thing which must have been contemporary with Stonehenge. That indescribable rites had been celebrated there, few doubted… there were unpleasant tales of the transference of these rites into the Cybele-worship which the Romans had introduced.” There is only a single late mention of Nylarthotep, but the spell of cosmic dread has been cast.

The description of the above-mentioned Exham Priory, the setting for “The Rats in the Walls”, reads like an inspiration for From Dusk ‘til Dawn’s evil brothel. It had “Gothic towers resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure, whose foundation in turn was of a still earlier order or blend of orders—Roman, and even Druidic or native Cymric, if legends speak truly. This foundation was a very singular thing, being merged on one side with the solid limestone of the precipice from whose brink the priory overlooked a desolate valley”. The architecture is fantastic, and physically allows the plunging descent into madness that will come.

Lovecraft’s fondness for cats is on full display here, with Mr. de la Poer bringing nine of them with him to the accursed priory. The cats are the only other creatures besides his tragic hero who can detect the phantom rats, “those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors”, that haunt the priory, and also the only creatures instinctively equipped to fight them, phantom or not.

“The Rats in the Walls” is also full of hints, none too subtle, of cannibalism. As he descends into the unknown, Mr. de la Poer finds carvings that describe “the most shocking ritual I have ever known; and told of the diet of the antediluvian cult which the priests of Cybele found and mingled with their own… but it was too much to see familiar English implements in such a place, and to read familiar English graffiti there, some as recent as 1610”. Eventually it becomes blatant (and the renamed cat becomes elevated to hero status) as de la Poer is repossessed by the ancestral madness: “they… found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat”. From the first hint of horror to the final grip of madness is a brief, unimpeded drop, simple and deeply effective.

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Rat God--a little different then Rats in the Walls — Rat God–a little different then Rats in the Walls

Rat God is a different creation. Where H.P. Lovecraft created a short, pointed, and frightening tale in “The Rats in the Walls”, the Richard Corben used the bones of it to construct his own fast-paced, inspired graphic version.

Both written and drawn by Corben, Rat God is a twisted and at times playful reimagining of Lovecraft’s original, streamlined tale. Corben uses some of the original iconography of the story while adding more overt and traditional Lovecraftian references as well as an overlay of Native American folklore. The heroic black cat of “Rats in the Walls” appears as a fortuitous black panther in Rat God. The main character, one Clark Elwood, swears to Cthulhu and the Old Ones at frequent intervals. Corben models his protagonist after Lovecraft himself, making the young man a tall, gaunt, prissy academic, deeply bigoted and holding himself up as New England aristocracy. But he is still quick to start (and end) a fistfight with the local riff-raff.

In contrast to the haunted pile of the original, Corben sets his version in Lovecraft’s familiar Arkham and its Miskatonic University, and in a town of his own invention, Lame Dog. In typical horror-movie fashion, the town has cut itself off from outsiders, is ruled by an inbred family, harbors a weird, dangerous cult, and is full of warnings about not going into the cemetery. There is a pervasive mood of good-natured teasing as the reconfigured plot winds its way through and around its source material.

Rat God--horror with humour — Rat God–horror with humour

Corben sprinkles in his usual flashes of jokey humor, some of it verging on slapstick. While hardly the norm for a Lovecraftian tale, it is natural to something from Corben. He infuses sex, miscegenation, mutant rats, and deus ex machina walking corpses into Lovecraft’s classic mix of persistent ancient religion, human sacrifice, and decayed family lines. The result is that Corben’s story is livelier, with plenty of highly stylized nudity and highly imaginative ritual. The panels are full of thick black lines and strong, earthy colours. The overall effect of Corben’s style is one of sweaty physicality, a solid, stolid meatiness where Lovecraft favours suggestion. It brings a far more carnal resolution that Lovecraft would have ever entertained.

It is still unmistakably an affectionate homage.

***

Lovecraft’s themes and tropes have long provided fuel for other authors’ work. He encouraged it, after all. The essential elements of “The Rats in the Walls” are recognizable in Rat God, as much as the stories go their different ways with them. Corben’s tale has a vibrancy, an irrepressible energy, that much Lovecraftian-styled fiction avoids. Reading the two works back-to-back, though, it is impossible to miss the dark, measured energy of the original story. That, I think, is what inspires our affection for the old master, and keeps so many of us writing in his image.

Read This: The Elric Saga

Posted on February 16, 2016

E.A. Ruppert

Elric of Melniboné and his terrible sword Stormbringer made their first appearance in Michael Moorcock’s elaborate and fluid multiverse in 1961. Elric is rather a popular figure in popular culture, with the legendary albino prince showing up in comics and RPGs, songs, TV episodes, and tribute stories. Michael Moorcock’s own Elric tales are still being written, and are still being collected in various configurations with his older works. The character has always had a quality that seizes and inspires the imagination, and makes him a keystone of fantasy literature.

With so much Elric material to work with, I will only concern this overview with the original six novels of The Elric Saga as they were presented in 1984’s The Elric Saga Omnibus Part One (Elric of Melniboné, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, The Weird of the White Wolf) and Part Two (The Vanishing Tower, The Bane of the Black Sword, Stormbringer). The omnibus editions are based on the canonical DAW editions of 1977, which gathered the existing stories into six volumes in roughly internal chronological order. The first book of the saga, 1972’s Elric of Melniboné, is a full novel in itself, while the last book, Stormbringer, actually collects several novellas first serialized in 1965.

Although Elric of Melniboné first began adventuring in novellas over a decade earlier, in the first novel of the series Moorcock introduces Elric anew, and with much drama: “It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone” (7, I). His melancholy and discontent are quickly established, as well as his initial main adversary. Within a few pages the stage is set for adventure, although we are made to wait for the appearance of Elric’s fabled sword: “’Stormbringer,’ he said. And then he felt afraid. It was suddenly as if he had been born again and that this runesword had been born with him. It was as if they had never been separate” (120, I).

Elric of Melniboné stands as one of the great antiheroes of epic fantasy, a cursed emperor who destroys his own kingdom and wanders the world on a fate-driven quest even he is unable to clearly define. From the first, Moorcock placed Elric in the midst of the unending struggle for Cosmic Balance between the Lords of Law and the Lords of Chaos, burdening him with the particular doom of being something more than mortal. Elric is also probably the most widely-known incarnation of the multidimensional Eternal Champion, whose mythology provides Moorcock a unifying theme for most of his work. But Elric is also in many ways the ultimate murder hobo, leaping from adventure to adventure as the opportunities present themselves, with his uneven allegiance to Chaos and his battle cry of, “Blood and souls for my lord Arioch!”

That devil-may-care, full-steam-ahead quality to the stories may explain why The Elric Saga has been an inspiration to uncounted other authors, including Gary Gygax as he developed Dungeons and Dragons. The settings and set-ups from the Elric novels all seem terribly familiar to anyone who has ever played D&D. For example, there is the classic location for parties to form–“Elric was looking for news and he knew that if he found it anywhere it would be in the taverns” (29, II), and the equally classic call to adventure, spoken by a magical damsel in distress–“Theleb K’aarna has joined forces with Prince Umbda, Lord of the Kelmain Hosts. Their plan is to conquer Lormyr and, ultimately, the entire Southern world!” (32, II). And with their clearly defined alignments of Law and Chaos, Moorcock’s gods were even incorporated into the early Dungeons and Dragons pantheon in the first edition of Dieties and Demigods.

Since Moorcock famously despises all things Tolkien, it is no shock that Elric is the antithesis of any of Tolkien’s most noble heroes. At heart, Elric is still a self-absorbed Melnibonéan, although he is slightly less selfish than the rest of his kind. Elric is motivated first and foremost by his own desires, despite his brooding over the damage they cause: “’My own instincts war against the traditions of my race.’ Elric drew a deep, melancholy breath. ‘I go where danger is because I think that an answer might lie there—some reason for all this tragedy and paradox. Yet I know I shall never find it’” (229, I). Although his fated role in keeping a cosmic balance is referenced often by his patron god, Lord Arioch, that purpose runs in the background of Elric’s own amorphous quest for meaning for the earlier part of the saga: ‘The Lords of Law and Chaos now govern our lives. But is there some being greater than them?” (315, I). However, the purpose fate has for Elric slowly overtakes his self-absorption and forces him slowly into a tragic, tainted heroism.

With Moorcock one of the founders of New Wave science fiction, The Elric Saga has the movement’s unmistakable flavour. The language is studiedly formal, a little stilted, and with much of the same style of descriptive repetition Lord Dunsanay used with great success. Moorcock creates a sly, dreamy effect that hints at humor without actually crossing the line. He is also wildly inventive, the imagery almost psychedelic with clouds and swirling colors and multidimensional awarenesses that anchor the stories in their swinging-sixties origins. But while the prose is often purple and melodramatic, it is never parody:

“Elric had been for skirting Old Hrolmar and riding on towards Tanelorn, where they had decided to go, but Moonglum had argued reasonably that they would need better horses and more food and equipment for the long ride across the Vilmirian and Ilmiorian plains to the edge of the Sighing Desert, where mysterious Tanelorn was situated. So Elric had at last agreed, though, after his encounter with Myshella and his witnessing the destruction of the Noose of Flesh, he had become weary and craved for the peace which Tanelorn offered.” (60, II)

While the writing is often playful and always clever, it is never smug. For all the fantastic characters and unlikely, whirlwind action, Moorcock takes his work seriously and crafts an artful and compelling epic that lures the reader into a world far deeper than first seems. Moorcock used his famous method for writing a book in three days for his Elric novels, and the fingerprints of it are all over it. Moorcock keeps the action constantly moving forward with a new event occurring every few pages. He drops references and mysteries in the novels that may or may not be answered but keep things rolling on. And he always has extraordinary images and outrageously named characters, objects, and places to throw into the action as the occasion arises–the Marsh of Mists, Orunlu the Keeper, the City of Screaming Statues, Rackhir the Red Archer, Dyvim Tvar, and other similar creations are littered throughout, building up a strange, vivid world to adventure in. But somehow the reliance on structure and plot devices results in something much greater than the sum of its many moving parts.

So, gaudy and action-driven with its own peculiar grandeur, The Elric Saga fits together in a surprisingly smooth clockwork of a tale. Moorcock may work with deep themes, but he doesn’t go for the studied gravitas of his nemesis, Tolkien, or the ponderous self-importance found in any number of fantasy sagas. Elric is serious, Elric is cursed, but Elric is also very, very interesting. It draws you in. It makes you care. If you haven’t read it from the source, yet, you need to go on that adventure.

And as always, please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section!

Meet the Author: Fritz Leiber

Posted on February 2, 2016

E.A. Ruppert

The fantasy, science fiction, and horror author Fritz Leiber is a man whose creations inspired generations of RPGs and their players. Even if you don’t know his name, you know his work. He was close enough to Gary Gygax and company to contribute an article to the very first issue of The Dragon magazine. If you play any D&D-style RPG at all, you’ve brushed up against his creations. I highly recommend experiencing them in their original form.

***

Fritz Leiber was born to a pair of Shakespearean actors, and studied philosophy and theology before trying his hand as a college professor for a while. He worked in aircraft production during World War II. After the war he became a staff writer for an encyclopedia and then served on the staff of Science Digest before launching his fiction career in earnest. Although he produced a substantial number of works considered “science fiction,” Leiber himself admitted that much of that body was rewritten fantasy, repackaged to escape the post-war contraction of the fantasy market.

Leiber’s strongest early influences were Lovecraft (particularly the Cthulhu Mythos, which inspired a novella and multiple stories) and his close friend, Harry Otto Fischer. Beginning in 1934, Leiber and Fischer began imagining a loosely-connected saga centered on the barbarian Fafhrd (modelled on Leiber) and the thief, the Gray Mouser (after Fischer).

In 1937, well before Leiber had written the first story, Leiber and Fischer also developed a wargame for themselves set within the world they had created. In 1976 they turned their personal game into a board game called Lankhmar for TSR. TSR also licensed Leiber’s mythos for use in its Dieties and Demigods supplement for Dungeons and Dragons. The tropes developed within the canon of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories were a huge influence on the game.

Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser star in Swords and Deviltry — Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser star in Swords and Deviltry

Leiber is credited with coining the term “sword and sorcery” to describe his richly imagined Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series and other works in its style. The characters were introduced in 1939 in Unkown magazine, a title edited by the influential John W. Campbell. This also marked Leiber’s first professional sale. Campbell also bought Leiber’s first two novels, serializing Conjure Wife in Unknown and Gather, Darkness in Astounding.

Although Leiber wrote many significant stories and novellas over his long career (some of which are listed below), his most enduring contributions are Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and their adventures in Lankhmar and beyond. Leiber’s writing could be weighty, but he injected his stories with dark humor and originated many of the conventions now commonly recognized as the sword and sorcery subgenre.

While Leiber’s characters did not become as instantly recognized by name as Conan or Cthulhu, they could not be ignored, either. Robin Wayne Bailey (founder of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame) continued their legend by writing an additional Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novel in 1998, with the promise of another. Joanna Russ (producer of brawny feminist fantasy and science fiction) was inspired by Leiber’s characters and saw her own adventurer, Alyx, appear in two of their stories. The late Terry Pratchett cheerfully modeled his city Ankh-Morpork and characters the Weasel and Bravd on Leiber’s creations.

As an aside to his fiction Leiber also wrote a small amount of literary criticism, most of which was collected in Fafhrd and Me (1990). This work includes a number of essays on Lovecraft, who was hugely influential on Leiber’s writing and who inspired several stories set within the general Lovecraft Mythos. Unlike many other authors working in the Golden Age of science fiction, Leiber wrote very little by way of nonfiction, with his interests and talents better aligned with the philosophy-inflected fantasy he favored. The vast majority of Leiber’s body of work was short fiction, with some of his modern-day horror stories inspiring, according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the emerging sub-genre of “urban fantasy.”

Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, again, in Swords and Ice Magic — Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, again, in Swords and Ice Magic

While Leiber would occasionally drop out of sight for varying lengths of time, he did not labor in obscurity. He was a founding member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerer’s Guild of America with such notables as Lin Carter, C.L. Moore, L. Sprague de Camp and Andre Norton, among others. Leiber won six Hugo Awards, four Nebulas, three World Fantasy Awards, and two British Fantasy Awards. Even in the years he did not win, Leiber was a frequent, sometimes multiple, nominee. Leiber was also named Gandalf Grand Master and SFWA Grand Master, and received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Horror Writers Association and at the World Fantasy Convention. He was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2001. His work was of such influence that he continued to receive nominations for his story collections a decade after his death.

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If you have made it this far, you probably would like to read more. To get you started, the following is an extremely abbreviated bibliography of Leiber’s collections, novels, and stand-alone short stories:

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Collections:

Swords and Deviltry (1970).

Swords Against Death (1970)

Swords in the Mist (1968)

The Swords of Lankhmar (1968)

Swords and Ice Magic (1977)

The Knight and Knave of Swords (1988)

Novels/ Collections

Gather, Darkness! (1943), a post-apocalypse theocracy where science is witchcraft

The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich (1997), a rediscovered Lovecraftian novella from 1936

The Best of Fritz Leiber (1974), which collects twenty-two of his many short stories

Short stories

“Smoke Ghost”, where urban pollution is the monster

“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” is a creepy reimagining of the vampire

“Space-Time for Springers” features a genius kitten as its hero, and is one of my favorite stories, ever

“To Arkham and the Stars”, a Cthulhu Mythos story

“Gonna Roll the Bones”, a winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards

“Ill Met in Lankhmar”, a classic Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story

If you want to dive into Leiber’s works, many of them are available here and here. Sometimes, we have to look behind us to see how we got to where we are—and looking back at Fritz Leiber gives us a very good idea.

And as always, please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section!

Erica Ruppert's NerdGoblin.com

Writing and Other Oddities

Category: Books

Read This: The Fireman

Read This: The Loney

Read This: Hugh Howey’s Wool

Children of Men: Two Sides to the Story

Read This: Cuckoo’s Egg

Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex: Superman Up Close

Read This: The Art of Language Invention

Rats in the Walls and Rat God: Variations on a Theme

Read This: The Elric Saga

Meet the Author: Fritz Leiber