m. c. de marco

Patrick Rothfuss and Nate Taylor’s wicked take on the children’s picture book The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle (from Subterranean Press) is about a princess, her teddy bear Mr. Whiffle, and the thing under the bed. Don’t worry, I haven’t told you anything you couldn’t figure out from the cover.

This is not a children’s book. I’ve had to distract my four-year-old daughter from this book several times as it looks like it should be a children’s book. Rest assured, it is not. Unless you think Edward Gorey writes children’s stories, then maybe it would be a children’s book for you.

All the same, I found the story delightful and darkly humorous. The drawings are well-done and expressive. There’s a lot of detail in the background of each page to enhance the story. And hey, while you’re waiting for The Wise Man’s Fear, pick a copy of this up to tide you over. Subterranean Press says that sales are brisk for this title and I hope that it becomes one of the rare titles that they decide to send to additional printings.

John Klima is the editor of the Hugo Award winning Electric Velocipede.

Families come in all shapes and sizes, but in the Hunter Kiss series, family takes on a whole different meaning for our heroine, Maxine, whose skin is covered with tattoos that peel off her body at night to form a small demonic army. Five demons, bound to her blood, destined to protect her life—and end it.

Over the course of the series, these demons—or, as Maxine calls them, “the Boys”—have proven themselves to be more than just otherworldly creatures bent on destruction. They are, in fact, little devils with hearts of gold, who eat teddy bears and listen to Bon Jovi, who play baseball and read Playboy, and who love Maxine and would do anything for her. And not just because they have to.

[Read more]

But these demons weren’t always forces for good. In A Wild Light, the third book in the Hunter Kiss series, readers learn not only the truth of Maxine’s ancestry, but that of the Boys, as well. A dark truth: full of war and mystery.

In the first two books, The Iron Hunt and Darkness Calls, readers learned that the Boys are capable of great compassion—and acts of terrible, incomprehensible violence. But what they are, and who they were before being bound to Maxine’s bloodline, has never been answered. Until now.

To celebrate the release of A Wild Light, I’ve commissioned some exclusive artwork that will serve as visual excerpts from the novel.  Illustrated by acclaimed comic book artist Kalman Andrasofszky (NYX: No Way Home, Dazzler, R.E.B.E.L.S.), these three pivotal scenes from the novel will hit the web over the next several weeks.

Here’s a glimpse of Kalman’s design sketches:

Marjorie M. Liu is an attorney and a New York Times bestselling author of short stories, novellas, and two ongoing series—the Dirk & Steele novels of paranormal romance and the Hunter Kiss urban fantasy series. She wrote NYX: No Way Home, X-23, and Black Widow for Marvel Comics, and is co-writing the bestselling Dark Wolverine series. Liu divides her time between the beautiful state of Indiana, and Beijing/Shanghai, China.

Look, we’ve been seeing each other for like a month now, and I think we have something really special going on. There’s so much I want to give you, you know? Love and trust and a good roll in the hay and OH YEAH BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS.  It’s grab bag giveaway time! Enter to win an assortment of tasty paranormal romance and urban fantasy books.

The Rules: To enter the giveaway, leave one comment—duplicates won’t count—on this post between now and noon EST, Tuesday, August 2. Six winners will be chosen randomly. The giveaway is open to everyone everywhere. Please check your email Tuesday or Wednesday; if we don’t hear back from you by noon on Thursday, your prize will go to someone else.

“There is no real perfection.”—Pete Ham

Neil Gaiman has stated that Alan Moore presented him with the notion of being his Miracleman successor in 1986. Moore recalled, “I think that I just handed it over to Neil. We might have had a few phone conversations, I don’t remember, but I think I knew he would have great ideas, ones that were completely fresh, ones that weren’t like mine. And indeed he did. He did the excellent Andy Warhol [story] (Miracleman #19), for example, which I think he took from a random line from one of my stories about there being a number of Warhols, but he expanded that into that incredible story. I can’t take any credit at all for Neil’s work, apart from having the good taste to choose him as a replacement, really.”

[Read more]

In spite of Gaiman and Buckingham’s first Miracleman being the short story/prelude “Screaming” in Total Eclipse #4, their “official” reign on the Miracleman series started with issue #17 (1990), the start of their “Golden Age” storyline—the new team also inherited Alan Moore’s one-third share of ownership in the character. “The Golden Age” (Miracleman issues #17 to #23) was an anthology of stories that explored the ramifications and effects of the citizens living within the utopia created by Moore and John Totleben. Each of these captivating issues featured a different protagonist, and each issue was beautifully executed and rendered in radically different art styles by Mark Buckingham, the first (and perhaps the most intense) of his many collaborations with Gaiman. The pair took a great chance by not putting Miracleman in the forefront of these issues, but each highly captivating tale has all the hallmarks of Gaiman and Buckingham’s finest work: beautiful and believable characterizations.

In regards to his approach on “The Golden Age,” Neil Gaiman commented, “I hadn’t even read it (“Olympus, Miracleman: Book Three”). But to me, immediately being told that you got a utopia and you can’t have any stories there… What I loved was the fact that you couldn’t do the stories that you read before—which was completely the delight of it. My own theory about utopia is that any utopia by definition is going to be fucked because it’s inhabited by people. You can change the world but you don’t change the nature of people. So immediately the idea for the very first story was the idea of people just going to pray. It’s like, okay, well, we’ve got God coming here. God is on Earth, he’s living on a giant pyramid on the top of somewhere taller than anything you can imagine—so let’s go and let’s pray. I loved the idea of someone getting all the way to top. And if you pray to God and he’s there, sometimes he’ll say no. That really was just the thrust of the very first’s premise.”

The follow-up books to “Golden Age” were to be “The Silver Age” and “The Dark Age.” “The Silver Age” would have dealt with the self-discovery and journey of the resurrected Young Miracleman. Only two issues (#23 and #24) were released, and a completely drawn and lettered issue #25 remains unpublished since the final days of Eclipse Comics. Gaiman and Buckingham’s final arc, “The Dark Age,” was a storyline set further into the future that would have seen the villainy of the ever-popular Johnny Bates return for the end of all days.

Unfortunately, these plans went unrealized as Eclipse Comics, financially struggling, closed its publishing door in 1993 (and ultimately filed for bankruptcy in 1995). The financial difficulties of the company had already hampered the release and creative production of the series in 1992 and 1993, since only a single Miracleman comic was released in each year.

Before Eclipse’s demise, the 1990s appeared to be a period of big expansion for Miracleman with the release of the Miracleman: Apocrypha mini-series and an impending brand new series named Miracleman Triumphant. A recent revelation to me was the fact that Eclipse had begun to work with Mick Anglo on straightening the Miracleman/Marvelman rights, once and for all, because Hollywood was expressing interest in Miracleman’s film rights.

In the upcoming new edition of Kimota!, Dean Mullaney discloses, “After Eclipse acquired the trademark ownership from Dez (Skinn), Garry Leach, and Alan Davis (Alan Moore retained his 30%), we starting pitching the character for movies and were getting lots of interest. The production companies, understandably, wanted clear title before they would do a deal. So, my brother Jan started negotiating with Mick Anglo’s attorneys. We had a handshake agreement, by which Anglo would license to Eclipse his ownership, and we, in turn, would pay him an advance against a percentage. But then the shit hit the fan when the Rupert Murdoch-run HarperCollins put Eclipse out of business (but that’s a whole different story). The upshot is that the deal was never signed. Where that leaves it now is up to everyone’s attorneys.”

On February 29th (leap year, no less) of 1996, Todd McFarlane purchased all of the creative properties and agreements held by Eclipse Comics in New York bankruptcy court for a mere $25,000. His admiration for Dean Mullaney and the possibility of mining Eclipse’s catalog of characters led to his purchase decision. Amongst those properties, McFarlane would technically assume the 2/3 ownership of the Miracleman character. In the years since the purchase, McFarlane and his company have done very little, comic book-wise, with the Eclipse properties. However, he did introduce Mike Moran in the pages of Hellspawn for a few issues, and would release his artistic interpretation of Miracleman as a statue, an action figure, and a limited edition print (with artist Ashley Wood). More recently, a redesigned and rebooted version (with the familiar MM logo) of the character as been renamed now as Man of Miracles; he’s appeared in Spawn #150 and Image Comics: Tenth Anniversary Hardcover, and, even, as an action figure of his very own.

Throughout the late nineties, Neil Gaiman tried to resolve his differences with Todd McFarlane over royalties that he felt entitled to for characters (Angela, Medieval Spawn and Cogliostro) that he co-created (with and for McFarlane). A 1997 attempt to trade the writer’s co-ownership in these Spawn-related characters for the infamous Eclipse two-thirds share of Miracleman never materialized.

At a 2001 press conference for Marvel Comics, a fund called Marvel and Miracles, LLC was announced—the fund would use all profits from Gaiman’s Marvel projects to legally procure the Marvelman rights from McFarlane. Ultimately, the Gaiman and McFarlane’s legal showdown took place in the verdict held on October, 3rd of 2002, a court proceeding in a United States District Court. The English writer won $45,000 from Image Comics (for the unauthorized use of his image and biography in Angela’s Hunt) in damages, $33,000 in attorney fees for the Angela’s Hunt portion of the case, his share of the copyright of his co-creations for McFarlane and, lastly, an accounting of the profits due to him for those three characters—the Miracleman rights were not resolved in this courtroom.

The legal case was always about creator rights, which is why Gaiman’s attorneys optioned for a decision on the monies owed as opposed to enforcing the botched 1997 trade for the uncertain Miracleman rights. During the trial, Gaiman’s attorneys were able to see all the old Eclipse documentation for Miracleman, and afterwards felt extremely confident that they had found ways to begin publishing Miracleman comics. Their only product, thus far, has been Randy Bowman’s 2005 Miracleman statue, a limited item of only 1,000 copies.

Sometime in 2005 and 2006, the name of Mick Anglo (now a nonagenarian) began to make waves. It was rumored that he was seeking to re-establish his Marvelman copyright in the British courts. In actuality a new player, a Scottish man named Jon Campbell and his Emotiv company, were doing their dandiest to establish Mick Anglo’s copyright on Marvelman under English copyright law. Within 2008’s Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman book, Gaiman stated, “I know they (Emotiv) bought the rights from Mick Anglo for four thousand pounds and have been working hard to establish his ownership of the property...” By buying the rights, they could do all the legwork in the English court system for the elderly Anglo. Since work-for-hire doesn’t exist in the U.K., it is possible for someone to commission work and take an assignment of rights many years later. It’s likely that this was the scenario which led to Anglo and Emotiv successfully proving their case—but very little information has been disclosed publicly about all the real drama behind this. By technically establishing Anglo’s copyright, the scenario would make any prior claim to the complex ownership of the character null…. at least in theory.

With the Anglo copyright to Marvelman in their hands, Emotiv looked at various scenarios to bring back the character before engaging in conversations with Marvel Comics in 2009, after Gaiman’s attorney put both parties together. After substantial due diligence, Marvel negotiated the rights from Emotiv and announced their ownership of the vintage Marvelman—the stories and art from Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman stories are owned by the writers and artists of these stories, and were not a part of Marvel’s purchase.

A year later, Marvel has just begun to reprint those old Marvelman strips from the Len Miller days. Although there isn’t a huge public outcry for these vintage stories, Marvel is doing their part to stake their claim on the character and enforce the copyright of their acquisition. The “House of Ideas” has made no solid announcement about the day when they’ll actually print the real deal—the books penned by Moore and Gaiman. The negotiation to bring the good stuff back to print continues to this day. Weep not, my friends, there’s always hope that Marvel will get the classic Miracleman stories done right; in a way that will hopefully treat the great artists of the classic material with a touch of class. Once in print, these stories will no doubt be a perennial seller, whether as books or films.

For the last creative team of Miracleman, there would be nothing more satisfying than wrapping up the stories that they spoke about when their careers were just in their infancies, more than twenty years ago. In 2000, Mark Buckingham said, “It remains the project I would drop everything to return to. Just because it’s the most obviously me of anything I’ve done. So many other projects I’ve worked on or things I’ve done have shown influences of other people or have been me tailoring material to fit what’s gone before or what I’m feeling the audience wants from me. Certainly with Miracleman it was very much my personality and Neil’s personality coming to the full and telling a story that we wanted to tell in a way we wanted to tell it. I don’t think I’ve ever had as much freedom creatively on anything else and would relish the chance to be pure again. [laughs]”

There you have it: the gist to most of the drama surrounding my favorite superhero character, on the page and behind-the-scenes. Hard to believe that when I started writing and interviewing for what eventually became Kimota!: The Miracleman Companion, back in 1998, all I wanted was for people to never forget the great stories penned by Moore and Gaiman, to always remember the awesomeness and beauty of the unforgettable artwork rendered by John Totleben, Garry Leach and Mark Buckingham. After the demise of Eclipse, it truly felt that the character of Miracleman and his classic works would be forever trapped in a black hole of litigation, destined to be lost as a silly urban legend of comics. Some day, hopefully very soon, all of you will be able to experience a legitimate presentation of this entire saga, in its entire splendor. Yeah, I’ve never stopped believing in miracles.

Kimota!

Read Part One. Part Two. Part Three.

George Khoury is the author of the upcoming brand-new edition of Kimota! The Miracleman Companion, The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore and more.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but the Wheel of Time Re-read lives on! Yay!

Today’s entry covers Chapters 7 and 8 of Winter’s Heart, in which we ask not what your damane can do for you, but what you can do for your damane! Or something like that!

Previous re-read entries are here. The Wheel of Time Master Index is here, in which you can find links to news, reviews, and all manner of information regarding the newest release, The Gathering Storm, and for WOT-related stuff in general.

This re-read post contains spoilers for all currently published Wheel of Time novels, up to and including Book 12, The Gathering Storm. If you haven’t read, read at your own risk.

And now, the post!

[Ich bin ein Caemlyner!]

Chapter 7: The Streets of Caemlyn

What Happens
Elayne rides slowly through the overcrowded city, conspicuously wearing the Daughter-Heir’s coronet. She wishes those cheering her were more numerous, but prefers the silence to outright jeering. She thinks that while the saying “Who holds Caemlyn holds Andor” is not quite true (as Rand proved), she will never be queen unless she can win over the city. She is accompanied by Sareitha and her Warder Ned Yarman, and eight of the newly-recreated Queen’s Guard, all women, which is drawing a lot of attention from the crowd. Sareitha opines that it is not safe for Elayne out here, reminding her of the ten sisters of unknown affiliation currently occupying an inn nearby. Elayne replies calmly that they are not necessarily Elaida’s; to herself, she thinks it more likely they are among those standing aside until the schism in the Tower is resolved, though she is having them watched anyway. She doesn’t understand why Elaida wants her, Elayne, so badly, but it’s a significant concern now that Elayne has declared her presence to the world. Sareitha further points out that Elaida is not the only one who wants her, and Elayne concedes mentally that kidnapping claimants to the throne is almost par for the course, but counters that that is why Sareitha is here too.

“If I don’t dare leave the Palace, Sareitha, I will never get the people behind me,” she said quietly. “I must be seen, out and about and unafraid.” That was why she had eight Guards instead of the fifty Birgitte had wanted. The woman refused to grasp the realities of politics.

She also wants to see the state of affairs in the city for herself; the large numbers of refugees are both burden and benefit to Caemlyn. Her musing is interrupted when she senses a furious Birgitte coming toward her quickly, and swiftly heads to meet her. Birgitte gallops up to tell her that news has come from Aringill: the men escorting Naean and Elenia out of the town were ambushed and murdered. Elayne replies, so they have a spy in the Palace, and then wishes she hadn’t said so in front of Sareitha. Both Sareitha and Birgitte agree, and immediately use this to argue for a bodyguard for Elayne within the Palace, which Elayne rejects angrily. She goes on bitterly that she should have overseen moving Naean and Elenia herself, or least sent the whole garrison at Aringill, but Birgitte snaps back that a queen isn’t supposed to run her own errands, any more than she is supposed to go wandering around the city at night in disguise and maybe get her skull cracked open by toughs. Elayne sits up, indignant, thinking she had only done that once, but Sareitha jumps in with details that make it clear she was following Elayne and Aviendha that night and knew exactly how close their call was. Birgitte doesn’t think sending the whole garrison would have helped either, and probably only would have ensured Aringill’s fall to boot. Sareitha asks who took them, and Elayne replies they’ll know soon enough.

“It is very simple, Sareitha,” she said in a carefully controlled voice. “If Jarid Sarand took them, Elenia will give Naean a choice. Declare Arawn for Elenia, with some sweetening of estates for Naean in return, or else have her throat slit in a quiet cell somewhere and her corpse buried behind a barn. Naean won’t give in easily, but her House is arguing over who is in charge until she returns, so they’ll dither, Elenia will threaten torture and maybe use it, and eventually Arawn will stand behind Sarand for Elenia. Soon to be joined by Anshar and Baryn; they will go where they see strength. If Naean’s people have them, she will offer the same choices to Elenia, but Jarid will go on a rampage against Arawn unless Elenia tells him not to, and she won’t if she thinks he has any hope of rescuing her. So we must hope to hear in the next few weeks that Arawn estates are being burned.” If not, she thought, I have four houses united to face, and I still don’t know whether I really have even two!

“That is… very nicely reasoned out,” Sareitha said, sounding faintly surprised.

“I’m sure you could have, too, with time,” Elayne said, too sweetly, and felt a stab of pleasure when the other sister blinked. Light, her mother would have expected her to see that much when she was ten!

They return to the Palace, meeting Careane and one of her Warders (Venr Kosaan) on their way out, and Elayne tries not to be overly paranoid in wondering which of the many servants might be the traitor in their midst. Sareitha and Yarman peel off for the library, and Birgitte immediately lights into Elayne for her stunt of sneaking out with Aviendha (and without Birgitte); Elayne deflects her diatribe by chastising her for language.

“My… language,” Birgitte murmured dangerously. Even her strides changed, to something like a pacing leopard. “You talk about my language? At least I always know what the words I use mean. At least I know what fits where, and what doesn’t.” Elayne colored, and her neck stiffened. She did know! Most of the time. Often enough, at least.

Birgitte tells her that Yarman may still be “goggle-eyed” over being a Warder, but Birgitte never was, and doesn’t jump for Elayne. She accuses Elayne again of ennobling her to “rein her in,” and storms off; Elayne stomps her foot and thinks she meant it as a reward, mostly, and also that Birgitte Silverbow had a lot of nerve accusing Elayne of taking unnecessary risks. She likes Birgitte as she is, but wishes their relationship were more Warder to Aes Sedai and less “knowing older sister to scampish younger.” She shakes herself and sends for Reene Harfor.

Commentary
I think I’ll call this the “convertible in Dallas” chapter. Sheesh.

Though I do get Elayne’s frustration about being hemmed in by bodyguards 24-7. After a year or so of getting to traipse all over the land practically by herself and have adventures and stuff, having to go back to everybody being all up in her Kool-Aid and treating her like spun glass would be unquestionably very galling. But that doesn’t mean she has to be stupid about it, does it?

Speaking of which, the new (and improved, heh) Secret Service Queen’s Guard is something I quite enjoyed when it was introduced. Mostly, of course, because I was pleased that Elayne was taking a cue from the Aiel (Aviendha, in other words) and creating a place for women to be in military service, which, finally, Randland, but also because their style of uniform (which I think gets described more fully later on) is a straight-up riff on the 17th century French musketeers’ uniforms—made famous, naturally, by Dumas’ The Three Musketeers.

Which is awesome. I’m not sure why, but it is. Something about those uniforms always just frickin’ kills me. It’s a thing, I have no idea.

(At the 2009 JordanCon, my absolute favorite costume there was this one girl who dressed as a Queen’s Guard, with the sash and plumed hat and everything. It was kickass.)

This almost certainly isn’t the first time it’s mentioned, but Elayne’s musings on the “unaffiliated” sisters in Caemlyn is probably the first time I really made the connection that up to a third of all the Aes Sedai out there had not actually chosen a side in the schism, but were instead just kind of hanging out and waiting to see who won before coming back. I really can’t decide if I think this is sharp political savvy or rather contemptible cowardice. Of course, it’s not like those two things are automatically mutually exclusive.

Complicated politics are complicated: I quoted that entire paragraph about who re-kidnapped Naean and Elenia for the sole reason that the idea of trying to summarize it made my eyes cross. Basically I’m like, sure, whatever you say, Elayne. This is one of many reasons why me deciding not to go for public office is a good thing.

Though at least I wouldn’t be subject to a government where abduction is standard procedure, because sheesh. That’s kind of hilarious and awful at the same time.

Birgitte: Her dig at Elayne for not knowing what her own curse words mean was funny (and accurate), but this is about where I kind of stopped liking Birgitte. I mean, I get that she’s under a ton of stress, and is additionally freaking out because she’s convinced Elayne jinxed her or something by putting her in actual charge of things, and that’s all understandable, but that doesn’t change the fact that it means awesome laidback Birgitte who hung out with (and stuck up for) Mat in Ebou Dar is now replaced by tense snappy Birgitte who takes her frustrations out on everyone around her, and all the sympathy in the world isn’t going to change how much not fun that is to be around.

It’s a damn shame, too. I really hope she gets re-awesomed before the end of the show. Come back, awesome Birgitte!

Chapter 8: Sea Folk and Kin

What Happens
Elayne meets up with Reene Harfor in the halls, where Reene tells her that she may have uncovered a pair of spies, but they fled before she could catch them. Elayne tells her that there may be more, and not just from Naean or Elenia. Reene says she will go on looking, and gives Elayne a rundown of her schedule with rather firm “suggestions” of how to handle various issues, including the news that most of their flour is full of weevils and moths, and the hams are spoiling, which Elayne thinks very odd, considering it is winter. As they walk, she catches sight of Solain Morgeillin and Keraille Surtovni hurrying along with a woman squeezed between them.

Flashes of silver showed at the neck of the sullen woman squeezed between them, though the Kinswomen had draped a long green scarf around her to hide the a’dam’s leash. That would cause talk, and it would be seen sooner or later. Better if she and the others did not have to be moved, but there was no way to avoid it. […] How did Rand always manage to do the wrong thing? Being male just was not excuse enough.

Reene carefully ignores all this and finishes by telling Elayne that Mistress Corly has asked to see her, saying she has good news “of a sort.” Elayne decides she could use even sort of good news, and heads off to see Reanne. She runs into Vandene in the corridor. Vandene has Zarya and Kirstian with her, both demure and meek in white. Elayne thinks their treatment is too harsh, but had been surprised to find that most of the Kin disagreed. Vandene momentarily stumbles over calling them “children” (which Elayne does not find surprising, considering that Kirstian is older than Vandene herself), but firms up and informs Elayne that these children have come up with a theory about the murders in Hanlon Bridge, and concluded that the killer must be either Merilille, Sareitha or Careane. Vandene is not happy that they were thinking about this at all, much less what they had concluded, even though she and Elayne had concluded from the start that the murderer must be Aes Sedai.

[Adeleas and Ispan] had been paralyzed with crimsonthorn before they were killed, and it was all but impossible that the Windfinders knew of an herb only found far from the sea. And even Vandene was sure the Kin numbered no Darkfriends among them.  

They base their reasoning for the latter on the fact that Ispan knew no more about the Kin than any other Aes Sedai, and if there were any Darkfriends among the Kin, the Black Ajah would have known all about them. Which means that one of the sisters with them was also Black, something Elayne et al are very anxious to keep quiet. Vandene opines that someone has to take Zarya and Kirstian in hand to keep them busy, which means Elayne or Nynaeve. Elayne replies that she hardly has a moment to herself as it is, so it will have to be Nynaeve. Nynaeve herself appears and joins them, asking cheerfully what they’re talking about.

The small red dot, the ki’sain, in the middle of her forehead did look quite strange. According to Malkieri custom, a red ki’sain marked a married woman, and she had insisted on wearing it as soon as she learned. Toying idly with the end of her braid, she looked… content… not an emotion anyone usually associated with Nynaeve al’Meara.

Elayne jumps when she realizes Lan is there too, and shivers at the look in his eyes. Nynaeve’s good mood vanishes when they explain, and she tells them that maybe Elayne can “loll around playing politics,” but Nynaeve has her hands full with the Kin. She’s particularly incensed that many of them now try to argue with her, but Elayne thinks Nynaeve brought that on herself.

“And those cursed Sea Folk! Wretched women! Wretched; wretched; wretched! If it wasn’t for that bloody bargain…! The last thing I need on my hands is a couple of whining, bleating novices!”

This doesn’t please Zarya and Kirstian, but Elayne is not inclined to be the peacemaker for once, since she’d like to slap both them and Nynaeve. She retorts to Nynaeve that she is not playing at anything, and points out to Nynaeve that left to their own devices Zarya and Kirstian will be running off to play detective in a second. Nynaeve, however, replies that maybe they should let them, and forthwith assigns them to Vandene. Vandene is not happy about this at all, but Nynaeve counters that maybe this will give Vandene time to sleep and eat, which she hasn’t been doing. She makes it an order, and Vandene is obligated to yield. As revenge, Vandene remarks that Sereille Bagand had once told her Vandene was too hard on her students, and Zarya and Kirstian go pale.

As Mistress of Novices and later Amyrlin Seat, Sereille was a legend. The sort of legend that made you wake in the middle of the night sweating. “I do eat,” Vandene said to Nynaeve. “But everything tastes like ashes.” With a curt gesture at the two novices, she led them away past Lan.

Nynaeve mutters about Vandene being stubborn, and Elayne wisely ignores this to ask if she knows what Reanne’s news is. Nynaeve replies she’s been in her rooms all morning, and frowns at Lan for some reason.

Nynaeve claimed her marriage was glorious—she could be shockingly frank about it with other women—but Elayne thought she must be lying to cover up disappointment. Very likely Lan was ready for an attack, ready to fight, even when asleep. It would be like lying down beside a hungry lion. Besides, that stone face was enough to chill any marriage bed. Luckily, Nynaeve had no idea what she thought. The woman actually smiled. An amused smile, oddly. Amused, and… could it be condescending? Of course not. Imagination.

They head off to find Reanne, Lan scaring servants as they go, and Elayne fills Nynaeve in on the events of the morning, declining to respond to Nynaeve’s obvious advice regarding spies. Nynaeve tells her they’ve sent eighteen of the Kin via gateways into Seanchan-controlled territory, mostly to try and smuggle out any Kinswomen who didn’t make it out before the invasion, but also because those eighteen would likely have run off if not given something to do. Nynaeve sighs that she can’t see how Egwene’s plan is going to work when most Kin will never earn the shawl, and she doesn’t see them consenting to be novices for the rest of their lives either. They find Reanne with Alise and one of the captured sul’dam, Marli. Nynaeve asks if this one’s “seen reason”; Alise replies that they still deny they can channel (and thinks they can’t really, they are more poised on the brink of it), but at least they have stopped trying to attack people. Reanne adds that they deny seeing the flows, too, claiming it’s a trick, but that sooner or later they will run out of lies to tell themselves.

Elayne sighed. What a gift Rand had sent her. A gift! Twenty-nine Seanchan sul’dam neatly held by a’dam, and five damane—she hated that word; it meant Leashed One, or simply Leashed; but that was what they were—five damane who could not be uncollared for the simple reason that they would try to free the Seanchan women who had held them prisoner. Leopards tied with string would have been a better gift. At least leopards could not channel.

She had decided to have the Kin convince the sul’dam that they could channel, and then send them back to the Seanchan, where their secret was bound to come out sooner or later and shake the Seanchan badly, perhaps even tear them apart, but so far it hadn’t been going well. She asks for the good news, if it isn’t Marli, and Reanne binds Marli to her chair with saidar before replying that three of the damane may be ready to be released from their collars. Elayne and Nynaeve are both surprised, especially since only two of the five captured damane are from this side of the ocean. Reanne continues with distaste that two of the three Seanchan-born damane (Marille and Jillari) still say they must be collared, but Alivia no longer agrees, or so she says.

[Reanne] shook her head slowly in doubt. “She was collared at thirteen or fourteen, Elayne, she’s not certain which, and she’s been damane for four hundred years! And aside from that, she is… she’s… Alivia is considerably stronger than Nynaeve,” she finished in a rush. Age, the Kin might discuss openly, but they had all the Aes Sedai reticence about speaking of strength in the Power. “Do we dare let her free? A Seanchan wilder who could tear the entire Palace apart?”

Nynaeve stares at Reanne, and Elayne keeps quiet; this is an Aes Sedai matter, and therefore Nynaeve’s decision. Lan suddenly speaks up, and tells Nynaeve that if she doesn’t then she might as well give her back to the Seanchan; collaring someone who wants to be free is no better than what they do. Alise tells him to be quiet, but Nynaeve says he is right. She remarks that at least they don’t have to worry about the other two, but Reanne isn’t so sure, pointing out that Kara (from Falme) is very fond of the sul’dam, and Lemore (from Tanchico) still answers to her damane name as easily as her real one; she doesn’t know if either of them would stand up to a sul’dam who ordered her to help them escape. Nynaeve struggles with herself, gripping her braid, and finally declares that the women will have to be watched closely, but nevertheless the a’dam will come off. Elayne smiles in approval.

Reanne merely nodded acceptance—after a moment—but a smiling Alise came around the table to pat Nynaeve’s shoulder, and Nynaeve actually blushed. She tried to hide it behind clearing her throat roughly and grimacing at the Seanchan woman in her cage of saidar, but her efforts were not very effectual, and Lan spoiled them in any case.

“Tai’shar Manetheren,” he said softly.

Nynaeve’s mouth fell open, then curled into a tremulous smile. Sudden tears glistened in her eyes as she spun to face him, her face joyous. He smiled back at her, and there was nothing cold in his eyes.

Elayne struggled not to gape. Light! Maybe he did not chill their marriage bed after all. The thought made her cheeks warm.

She notes that Marli is crying while staring straight at the weaves binding her, but Reanne says they always do that, and then convince themselves it was a trick later. She says it will take time to convince “the Mistress of the Hounds that she is really a hound herself.” She remarks her news wasn’t so good, was it, and Elayne agrees, hoping for some real good news soon.

Commentary
Now there’s a chapter name to strike fear into the heart. At least the Windfinders aren’t actually in this chapter.

While I can certainly sympathize with Elayne’s lack of appreciation for having yet another thing to worry about on top of all the other crap she’s already got on her plate, I don’t think she’s being quite fair to Rand re: his “gift.” Of course, this is partially Taim’s fault for bitchily phrasing it that way in the first place, which certainly wasn’t Rand’s idea, but still. However, she is keeping her grousing to herself, so you know, it’s fine.

I was actually very surprised that Rand decided to send his POWs from the Seanchan campaign to Elayne, but on reflection she really was the only logical choice. He had to send them to someone who could handle them (i.e. someone who could channel, or to be more accurate, someone with a group of people who could channel), but of the groups he has available, the Wise Ones have their hands full with the Aes Sedai prisoners, he can’t send them to Egwene for reasons that should be obvious, and he doesn’t trust either Taim or Cadsuane, period. That basically leaves Elayne and Nynaeve. So, sucks to be them, I guess.

Also, enter: Alivia. Dun!

I have to say I was very taken aback by Reanne’s revelation that Alivia was stronger than Nynaeve, which at a guess puts her somewhere at Mesaana or Graendal’s level of strength. (I have absolutely no basis for this ranking other than my own opinion, but in my head, the rough progression of female Forsaken from weakest to strongest in the Power has always been: Moghedien, Mesaana, Graendal, Semirhage, and Lanfear (pre-Cyndane-ing). Well, actually I think this is based more on a judgment of their personalities than anything else; whether this makes it more or less likely to be accurate, I leave as an exercise for the reader.)

Woo, tangent. To veer back on topic, I was rather highly annoyed that my girl Nynaeve was suddenly (and randomly, to my mind) no longer Most Badass Female Channeler (for the Light, anyway). In fact I kind of still am, since Alivia has continued to seem random and square-peg-in-round-hole-y to me ever since. Presumably this will no longer be the case once she finally fulfills Min’s prophecy about helping Rand die? I hope so, because she’s otherwise been nothing but a vague irritant to me ever since she was introduced.

Speaking of Nynaeve and strength issues, I found Elayne’s thoughts on that intriguing, since to my recollection this is the first time Elayne has thought of herself as subordinate to Nynaeve under the traditional Aes Sedai ranking rules. Not to continue with the JFK references, but I have to say this made me think of the paranoia when Kennedy was elected over the fact that he was Catholic, which made (stupid) people believe that the Pope would basically get to run the country through him.

This was a thoroughly idiotic chain of reasoning for JFK, but it occurs to me that it could be quite a bit more of a legitimate argument for Elayne, who as an “ordained” Aes Sedai, so to speak, has a much stronger obligation to obey the Amyrlin than a Catholic layperson does to obey the Pope. I can definitely see the potential for a possibly severe conflict of interest at some point.

Zarya and Kirstian: Sound like they should be a Russian pop duo, and man did I get tired of typing their names this post. Otherwise, whatever; this mystery’s been solved and I see no point in dwelling on it.

Well, except to observe that Vandene and Elayne’s “logic” for why it has to be one of the Aes Sedai who dunnit is rather appallingly flawed, no matter how right they turned out to be. The reasoning on the Windfinders is solid, but assuming that because Ispan knew nothing of the Kin means that none of the Black Ajah knows about them is a major logic fail. Even without knowing, as the reader does, of the extreme need-to-know-only structure of the Black Ajah, it’s still a giant honking assumption to make.

And you know what they say: when you make an assumption, you make an “ass” out of “u” and “mption”. (*waves to Lara*)

Lan: Is awesome. Again. Some more. I heart him. That is all.

And I is done with ye! Have a doughnut, and enjoy your weekend!

There’s a peculiar syndrome among artists that parallels the discussions of many a record store clerk, except amongst artists “have you heard” becomes “have you seen.” Depending on whose chin is wagging, you might come away with the names of a couple of Argentinian comic artists, a slew of nineteenth century naturalist painters, or someone’s favorite Japanese printmaker.

In no particular order, other than alphabetical, we present to you this weekly feature about artists who help power our pencils.

[Read more]

Massimo Carnevale
Massimo seemed to have gotten his start on the Italian horror comic Dylan Dog. His work can currently be found gracing the covers of Vertigo’s Northlanders series. His impetuous line work is a perfect compliment to his exquisite use of color. (An additional link to his gallery.)

Travis Charest
Travis started as an early Jim Lee imitator. Later he traveled to a Mississippi crossroad where at midnight he traded his soul for the devil’s right hand.

Joseph Clement Cole
Another king of Ink, where Franklin Booth was precise, elegant, and delicate, JC Cole was loose, expressive, and bold. What’s all the more infuriating is that most of his work was supposedly done strictly from imagination, with the aid of a Jacket over his head.

Dean Cornwell
The only thing that might be better than one of Cornwell’s beautiful chunky brush paintings are one of his incredibly precise and structurally exaggerated drawings. A student of the great Harvey Dunn and later of Frank Brangwyn.

Frank Craig
His medieval historical paintings are evocative of E.A. Abbey’s passionate use of red. He has a graphic, constructivist quality to his work.

Nicolas de Crécy
French comic book artist whose work served as the design inspiration for the quirky animated film, The Triplets of Belleville.

C O L O P H O N
Lydian, a calligraphic sans-serif by book designer Warren Chappell (1938, American Type Founders), and ITC Founders Caslon, based on punches cut in the early 18th century by William Caslon, one of the first great English type designers.

We are Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon. We live in a pocket-sized apartment in Brooklyn where we collect neat, weird things. Our home is abundant with books, old furniture, mismatching tea cups, and a cat named Cipher. We both illustrate stuff for money so we can continue to invent stories, buy shoelaces, watch puppet shows, and eat sandwiches.

Elizabeth Bear is a Hugo-winning author whose books regularly deal with questions of gender, sexuality and identity. Her first novel was published in 2005 and she has since received awards ranging from the John W. Campbell for Best New Writer to the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short fiction.  She’s joining us for Queering SFF to discuss her work and the contemporary field of queer speculative fiction.

BM: Hello and welcome; thanks for agreeing to talk with me. To start off, how would you introduce your body of writing to a fresh new reader—what should they know about the work of Elizabeth Bear, and where might be the best place to start reading?

EB: Boy, that’s a tricky question. I’m one of those writers who has a hard time repeating herself, so all of my work is quite different. When asked that question, I usually quiz the asker as to what sort of fiction they like. Ink & Steel is historical fantasy; Blood & Iron is contemporary; All the Windwracked Stars is periapocalyptic noir steampunk...sort of. My science fiction ranges from planetary romance (Undertow, which I often describe as “Little Fuzzy meets The Italian Job”) to space opera (The Jacob’s Ladder books) with detours through feminist sociological SF (Carnival) and the Jenny Casey books, which are sort of an overview of developments in SF from 1984-2004.

Most of what I write is pretty deconstructive, though. I seem to be all about the meta.

[Interview, onwards]

BM: One characteristic that seems to bridge all of your books is that they feature a broad spectrum of sexualities and genders. I’d say that they’re sterling examples of queer speculative fiction, but was that something you set out to do from the beginning? Or does that spectrum of sexualities present in your novels owe more to a desire to write a world populated with all different sorts of people?

EB: None of the above, really. It’s pretty simple: I grew up in a queer household, and what I write reflects the world I know. My friends and family are not exclusively white and straight, so it would seem peculiar to me for the world I wrote in to be.

I still remember how delighted I was as a kid when I read Diane Duane’s The Door Into Fire, which starts with Prince Herewiss setting off to rescue his beloved from a tower. That his beloved is Prince Freelorn was treated as entirely unexceptional, and I was dazzled at the idea that one could do that.

It saddens me that, thirty years later, this is still remarkable.

BM: It came up in a panel at Readercon that there seems to be an active shift in contemporary spec-fic towards greater diversity, with more people writing protagonists who aren’t straight white males. Have you noticed any significant change in the genre in recent years?

EB: I grew up in the wrong household, I’m afraid, to have a very good idea of the prevalence of straight white males in years past, as the books around the house had a heavy bias towards female and queer authors, and authors of color. One thing I do notice, however, is that there seems to be a welcome flowering of diversity in the writers, which can only suggest to me that we should be seeing more diversity in the characters as well.

BM: I’ve read elsewhere that you discovered Joanna Russ as a kid. Her influence seems to be reflected in Carnival, but are there other authors you grew up with who inspired or otherwise amazed you?

EB: Oh, sure. Roger Zelazny, Octavia Butler, Larry Niven, Robert L. Forward, Richard Adams, Peter Beagle, Ursula Le Guin—I read voraciously, catholicly, and with absolute disregard for the theoretical age-appropriateness of any given material.

BM: I admit I’m jealous of your childhood reading list. *g* A jump back to your work: the Promethean Age books are one of my favorite series, and they certainly have a diverse cast throughout history. Are there plans for the publication of the fifth book at the moment?

EB: Thank you! And no, unfortunately, they do not have a publisher.

BM: Well, I have my fingers crossed.

Something that comes up often in the Promethean Age books and also some of your other novels, like New Amsterdam, is the “non-traditional” relationship-shape—I personally am always looking for more stories featuring alternate family/love structures, so I think it’s great. Is this also thanks to your formative years, and/or is it something you like to explore in fiction?

EB: I suspect it’s a combination of things: having been raised by wild lesbians in the hills of Northeastern Connecticut; overexposure to Heinlein and Russ as a child; hanging out with fandom and SCAdians, who tend not to conform too closely to the nuclear family ideal; and training as an anthropologist, which made me question a lot of basic Western ethnocentric assumptions about what a family looks like.

Also, love and relationships seem to be an overriding concern of my art. Possibly because I suck at them in real life. And I cannot abide traditional romances, because so many of them seem to me unutterably false, and concerned with the least interesting part of the whole process. Anybody can fall in love—but maintaining close relationships over years? THAT interests me in a way that limerence cannot.

BM: Absolutely—that’s one of the reasons I enjoy your stories as much as I do; the focus on real relationship development, management and often failure strikes me as so grounded and so real. The attitude still lingering in SF that women write books with too many of those scary “relationships” and “emotions” (and hence that those sorts of books aren’t good) drives me crazy—have you had to deal much with that in your career, from reviewers or readers?

EB: A very few squeamish male reviewers get fussed—almost exclusively about male same-sex relationships. I have, a couple of times, seen some of my work characterized as yaoi or slash, which indicates to me two things: one, that the reviewer is ignorant as to the meaning of those terms (I will accept “slashy,” although I think if you have a cannon gay relationship it’s not so much slashy as a book in which there are gay people); and two, that the reviewer does not actually understand that there are real gay people in the world who might like to read books about themselves, and the only and sacred purpose of writing about gay men is not to titillate an audience of heterosexual women. (I realize that this is not the only purpose of actual slash; I suspect the reviewers who tend to throw around this kind of commentary do not.)

But you know, it’s fair: I get teh gay on them, and they get teh dumb on me.

...Yeah, I realize I’m not supposed to talk back to reviewers, but I draw the line at what seems to me a very refined kind of bigotry implied by this insistence that queerness remain a marked (and remarked-upon) state. I write books about people. Some people are queer. Life is like that, unless you choose to ignore it.

Other than that, well, if they think my books are too girly, it’s their loss. I have heard rumors that I’m pretty good at explosions, too.

Curiously, they never seem to get upset about the female same-sex relationships....

BM: On the note of reviewers failing to understand that there really are queer folk out there who would like to read books about people like themselves, is there anything you’d like to say about the idea of “queering sff” as a recognition/reclamation of relevant works of speculative fiction?

EB: ...I think you lost me in the jargon, there. Are you asking me what works of queer-friendly SF I’ve read and liked recently?

Malinda Lo’s Ash, which of course the whole world is talking about. Sarah Monette’s Doctrine of Labyrinths series. I haven’t yet read The Steel Remains—I respect Morgan and his work a lot, but it tends to be an emotional miss for me. Jim C. Hines’ The Stepsister Scheme and associated books.

...see, I suck at this kind of question. If I even understood the question. I don’t have a separate category in my head labeled “queer-friendly books.” Possibly because, due to the vagaries of my upbringing, “queer” is an unmarked category for me.

I’d like to suggest looking at the Lambda and Gaylactic Spectrum Awards longlists, as they specialize in finding this sort of thing.

BM: That was pretty much what I was going for—sorry, convoluted question. Before we sign off, would you like to tell us a bit about what you have in the works at the moment?

EB: Oh, sure. Take me out on a lousy answer!

I just handed in the final book of my Jacob’s Ladder trilogy to Spectra—unless they decide they’d like to extend the series, that is. It’s called Grail, and it should be out next spring. I also just went over the page proofs for the final book in the Edda of Burdens, The Sea Thy Mistress, which will be out from Tor in December. I’ve been working on some short stories, which are forthcoming in Asimov’s and two Ellen Datlow edited anthologies, and I have a few more in mind. There’s another New Amsterdam novella (The White City) coming out from Subterranean sometime in the not-too-distant future, and the second Iskryne book (written with Sarah Monette), which has a tentative title of A Reckoning of Men, goes in to Tor at the end of the month.

In addition, I am starting a new high fantasy series for Tor—the series is called The Eternal Sky; the first book is Range of Ghosts. That’s due in November. And I’m part of an ongoing hyperfiction adventure narrative—a kind of web serial—at www.shadowunit.org. Which I honestly think is the coolest thing ever. It’s basically a long, multi-threaded multi-author novel with interactive aspects, and we’re doing it on a crowdfunded model, so it’s totally reader-supported.

Phew.

I guess I’m kind of busy these days.

BM: *g* I don’t mind doing one more question. Are there any plans for collecting Shadow Unit into print, or is that going to be too difficult with all the interactive elements like the character’s journals, etc?

EB: There are plans. They are proceeding very slowly, however, and I don’t have current details as to what their status is. (That, thank cod, is not my department.)

BM: Interesting! And on that note—thanks so much for your time. It was great talking with you!

EB: Thank you for being interested in what I had to say!

Photo by S. Shipman

Brit Mandelo is a multi-fandom geek with a special love for comics and queer literature. She can be found on Twitter and Livejournal.

She’s one of fiction’s most famous enchantresses—capricious and charismatic, capable of breaking the heart and enriching the spirit. She demands her place as the center of attention, the axis around which a writer’s world spins, the protagonist in any web of fiction a writer might weave.

Spend all the time you like on goals, conflict and motivation. Build worlds and populate them with vivid characters doing heart-rending, world-saving things. But if you set your urban fantasy—or any other fiction—in New Orleans, prepare to welcome the Crescent City as a character in her own right. She will demand it.

[Read more]

With her history of voodoo and pirates, yellow fever and heat-fueled violence, insular populations and their perpetual juxtaposition of poverty and opulence, New Orleans has been home to a Who’s Who of classic Southern authors: William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellmann, Truman Capote—they’re only a few on this mind-boggling list. Long before Anne Rice laid one of the cornerstones of the modern vampire/urban fantasy empire, authors linked New Orleans with the paranormal, the vampire, the loup-garou, the ghost of the infamous Madame LaLaurie, the cities of the dead.

One of my favorite stories is of an early twentieth-century construction crew that went into an old New Orleans dowager of a mansion, planning to refurbish it for a new owner after years of neglect. In an upstairs bedroom, hidden in a cache beneath the floorboards, was a human skull placed atop two crossed human femurs—a “real” Jolly Roger, believed to protect one against vampires.

How can any writer of the paranormal resist New Orleans, I ask you?

Urban fantasies are, by definition, set in real locations, places where we live and work and, if we peer into the right corner, where we might come across some stranger-than-usual citizens or a portal into an alternate world. Yet, strangely, few make deep use of their settings. Jim Butcher drops in enough Chicago spots to ground his series, and Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series needs its setting in Washington State, with its rich Native American history and geography, to make us feel as if we’re in the middle of Mercy’s world.

Some of the biggest urban fantasy series, however, use location as more of a prop than a character. Would anything really change if one plucked Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake from St. Louis and moved her business to Toledo? Would Kim Harrison’s alternate version of Cincinnati work as well if Rachel Morgan were chasing demons through an alternate version of Louisville? Even Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse series, which feels well-placed in its imaginary town near Shreveport, Louisiana, is more generically Southern than uniquely Louisianan. (Not so the HBO adaptation True Blood, but that’s a subject for another day.) The settings provide a general feel, a subtle ambience that doesn’t appreciably affect the story or its direction. That’s not a bad thing, just a curious thing.

Which brings us back to New Orleans. Whether because writers fall in love with it or because some paranormal spirit implants pods in the brain of any author who wanders too close, New Orleans is never just a placeholder. There’s nothing subtle about her.

A journalist once wrote that only five cities in the United States were truly unique. Only five where, if you were dropped blindfolded into their midst, you’d automatically know your location. I don’t remember the order, but the list included New York, Boston, San Antonio and Washington, D.C.

And New Orleans. Which is the beauty and curse of using NOLA as a setting. People know New Orleans, or they think they do, and they feel strongly about it. It’s either the coolest, eeriest, most wonderful city in the world—or it’s a hotbed of evil and sin and stupidity (because who would build a city below sea level anyway?).

People who’ve lived in NOLA have heard it all. They are proprietary and weary of bad portrayals of silly accents, mangled vernacular, marginally sane characters, and bizarre clichés. (Locals still make merciless ridicule of the accents in “The Big Easy” a quarter-century after the Dennis Quaid movie hit the theaters.) New Orleanians, and fans of the City That Care Forgot, love their city with a passion usually reserved only for other people.

Which is why an urban fantasy set in New Orleans has to get it right because the city WILL be a character, like it or not. A story set in NOLA can’t be lifted and plopped down in Los Angeles. Bury your story in cliché and careless geography, and your story will be lost. But give New Orleans a starring role—well, at least a co-starring role—and she’ll love you forever.

Think about your own favorite urban fantasies (or other fiction)—who do you think makes good use of setting as character? And is using a distinctive setting like New Orleans effective or distracting?

Photo by And all that Malarkey

A longtime New Orleans resident and veteran journalist, Suzanne Johnson writes urban and rural fantasy and spends too much time on Facebook. Her book Royal Street, scheduled for release in April 2012 by Tor Books, has the gall to be set in New Orleans, which plays a starring role.

We conclude the first book of The Return of the King with Chapter 10, “The Black Gate Opens.” After the jump there are the usual spoilers for all of The Lord of the Rings, and comments on this chapter and on Book V generally.

[Read more...]

What Happens

The army leaves Minas Tirith (and Merry, who is not healed enough to go). The journey to the Black Gate is quiet but horrifying. The army leaves a number of men at the Cross-roads, where they have restored the statue of the old king, and sends more who are unable to go further to Cair Andros.

At the Black Gate, the Mouth of Sauron taunts Gandalf and the others by showing them Sam’s sword, an elven cloak, and Frodo’s mail. He demands their surrender for the return of the captured spy. Gandalf refuses and takes back the items. Mordor’s armies surround the army of the West. Pippin stabs a hill-troll to keep it from killing Beregond and is trapped under its body. He thinks he hears someone crying “The Eagles are coming!”, but “his thought fled far away and his eyes saw no more.”

Comments

...at least it wasn’t an across-volumes cliffhanger, like “Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy”?

Because I usually barrel through books without pausing at internal divisions, and because I know this story so well already, I hadn’t registered just how bleak this is. After all, we don’t know what happened to Frodo yet after his capture; I don’t know if anyone reading this for the first time thought that Sauron had actually regained possession of the Ring (and if so, what did you think the last half-volume would be about? The plucky resistance?), but the structure certainly leaves us desperate to find out.

But as far as cliffhangers go, I am very slightly cranky about the last line, describing how Pippin’s “thought fled far away and his eyes saw no more.” My instinctive reading of that admittedly-ambiguous line is that he saw no more ever, which is obviously not the case, and so feels like cheating. (“Vision went dark” would not bother me at all.) I have no idea how idiosyncratic my reaction to this is, however.

Getting back to the overall effect of the chapter, as I was reading the journey through Mordor I was surprised at how little landscape description we got, compared to Sam and Frodo’s journey. It’s not that I wanted redundancy, but the landscape felt much more remote to me here. After finishing the chapter, I think this remoteness was doing two things. First, the mood that’s been set for the confrontation at the Black Gate is hopelessness, not horror, for which a sort of grey, less-sensory experience seems appropriate. Second, Tolkien was saving the big guns, emotionally speaking, for the confrontation.

And the chapter really emphasizes the hopelessness of the situation. It starts in the third paragraph, when Aragorn says farewell to Merry with the happy thought that “Though it may be our part to find a bitter end before the Gate of Mordor, if we do so, then you will come also to a last stand, either here or wherever the black tide overtakes you.” (Okay, actually, he does think it relatively happy because Merry feels ashamed at not doing more, but still.) Poor Merry has “little hope at all” that he will see “(e)veryone that he cared for” return from the East. The arrival at the Black Gate is “the last end of their folly,” since “their army could not assault with hope” the fortifications. When the trap is sprung, they are outnumbered ten to one, “(a)nd out of the gathering mirk the Nazgûl came with their cold voices crying words of death; and then all hope was quenched.” Hopeless, hopeless, and hopeless. Also? Hopeless. Just in case you missed it.

* * *

Pippin’s reaction to all the hopelessness is quite interesting and not something I’d marked before. He deliberately places himself where the fighting will be first and hardest, “(f)or it seemed best to him to die soon and leave the bitter story of his life, since all was in ruin.” Indeed, he thinks:

Well, well, now at any rate I understand poor Denethor a little better. We might die together, Merry and I, and since die we must, why not? Well, as he is not here, I hope he’ll find an easier end. But now I must do my best.

I don’t believe this ever comes up again, which is why I hadn’t registered it before, but we’ve spent so much time talking about Denethor that now it made me sit up. Also it is not at all the kind of thing that I expect to see from Pippin, which only reinforces the hopeless.

It never comes up again (at least not in any way memorable to me) because it’s only a thought. Pippin turns his despair outward into heroics, saving Beregond’s life without regard to his own safety, not inward to suicide (well, murder-suicide, but that complicates my metaphor). It’s good to see that Pippin, too, gets his chance to do at least as well as—in this case, better than—a human.

* * *

The meeting at the Gate with the Mouth of Sauron. I literally cannot imagine forgetting my own name, so that is an excellent little detail. And he is not as old as I thought he was: “he entered the service of the Dark Tower when it first rose again,” putting it sometime around 2951 (when the rebuilding of Barad-dûr began, according to Appendix B). I’d always vaguely thought him to be centuries old, but that was only 68 years ago.

The Mouth addresses them with familiar pronouns (thou/thee/thy) and I was impressed just how clearly the contempt behind that choice came through. It made me think of how apparently Pippin was going around using familiar pronouns for everyone in Minas Tirith, which was only made clear to me by the Appendices. Besides the difficulty for modern readers of having the hobbits “thee” and “thou” everyone all throughout the story, it occurs to me that the impact of the drops into familiar pronouns—here and between Aragorn and Éowyn—would be far lessened if those pronouns were already common in the text. I just think it’s too bad that the nuance in the hobbits’ speech couldn’t have been made clearer before the Appendices.

Does the Mouth expect Gandalf to simply fold and take that ridiculous offer? (Seriously, why stop at the Misty Mountains?) That was my first impression, between his being taken aback when Gandalf attempts to bargain, and then his rage when Gandalf rejects it. If so, this seems to be a massive example of evil being unable to understand good: Sauron only understands the desire for power (per “The Council of Elrond”), he judges Gandalf and the rest of the leaders the West to not have enough of it, and so slides to thinking that they have none at all and will collapse immediately. Except that doesn’t fit with the idea that one of them might be the arrogant new wielder of the Ring. So maybe he never expected them to take it and was surprised that Gandalf seemed to be considering it, and then was angry at the manner of Gandalf’s refusal.

* * *

Finally for things specific to this chapter, I’d wondered last time what we could infer from this chapter about how the ordinary soldier felt about this mission. We get one indication when the army comes near the Black Gate:

So desolate were those places and so deep the horror that lay on them that some of the host were unmanned, and they could neither walk nor ride further north.

Aragorn looked at them, and there was pity in his eyes rather than wrath; for these were young men from Rohan, from Westfold far away, or husbandmen from Lossarnach, and to them Mordor had been from childhood a name of evil, and yet unreal, a legend that had no part in their simple life; and now they walked like men in a hideous dream made true, and they understood not this war nor why fate should lead them to such a pass.

The idea of war as a dream-like state cannot be original to WWI, and yet it immediately reminded me of WWI war poetry. I note that the breaking point here is not combat but landscape, which permits the straddling of the conflicting worldviews of epic heroism and psychological realism, and is also just very Tolkien.

* * *

My verdict on Book V as a whole: awesome. I’m not sure why I used to think of Book III as my favorite, because this was just full of amazing things: stirring high-fantasy moments, reversals and surprises, a very brisk overall pace, and the most nuanced and interesting characterization thus far, or possible at all. I would be very surprised if anything surpassed it in the rest of the book for me, because I always dread the walking-through-Mordor bits (I know they aren’t as long as I remember, but still). Even the chapters that felt a little slow to me at the time (the Rohirrim ones) were necessarily so for the overall structure; I was just cranky because I wanted to get to the good stuff and wasn’t reading it all together. However, I’d be very pleased to be proved wrong. What do you all think about Book V as a unit?

« Return of the King V.9 | IndexReturn of the King VI.1 »-->

Kate Nepveu was born in South Korea and grew up in New England. She now lives in upstate New York where she is practicing law, raising a family, and (in her copious free time) writing at her LiveJournal and booklog.

Because retro never gets old....

Check out these DC character posters from Michael Myers.

Back in the day, cave-folk drew messages on the walls of their abodes, leaving a living history and communication behind. As readers, we can appreciate the art and majesty of this important work, and we support our favorite artists and authors by supporting their creations and disseminating them further—to family, friends, colleagues, and beyond—with the use of Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Mankind’s fascination with and dedication to art and the sharing of messages has led us through the craft of storytelling in a rather remarkable fashion. Pictorial content has long been a part of our history as human beings, from the graphic depiction in caveman times to the remarkable tapestries and manuscripts from the Middle Ages.

[Read more]

There is evidence of artists drawing images to accompany stories for children as early as the mid-1600s, though I can imagine a father drawing a boat for his child and writing a story about it even before that time. Such imaginings makes me think of the Vikings. Or maybe the Japanese, who developed a brilliant storytelling art called e-maki in the 10th century, horizontal narrative scrolls (single page or bookform) that are mind-blowing in their beauty.

The English had Chaucer, Blake, and many more. Belgium has Hergé’s Tintin, which was credited with being a graphic novel back in the 1930s. The complete title in English is The Adventures of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. So you can see my skeptism when it comes to pointing to one or even three books and saying, “these are the first graphic novels ever.”

However, if you look at our timeline in the U.S. in terms of a wider acceptance, those titles did mark the beginning of a significant rise in the growth of the field of graphic novels.

Let’s start with the specific reference for the words “graphic novel.” The terminology or application of “graphic novel” or “graphic story” can be traced to three specific sources: George Metzger’s Beyond Time and Again, which was published by Kyle & Wheary and labeled a graphic novel by publisher Richard Kyle in the early 1960s; Bill Spicer, with his Graphic Story Magazine, published in 1967; and Richard Corben, with his adaptation of Robert Howard’s story Bloodstar in the mid-1970s. Though Oxford Press, Wikipedia, Chicago Review, and countless others may cite these three books as the origin of graphic novels, in my opinion the graphic novel has been around a lot longer. Throughout history, storytelling has been reinvented in as many ways as it’s been culturally or socially useable, so let’s take a look at a few highlights of what can be defined as a graphic novel.

First, so we are clear, graphic novels are popularly defined as 1) a compilation of several comics bound into one book; 2) a pictorial anthology or several stories by one author or many; 3) a full-length pictorial novel with a story arc that encompasses a beginning or opening, the body of the story, and a completion; 4) a collection of comic strips into one volume; 5) a pictorial story possibly dealing with a more mature theme or beyond the normal structure or themes of a comic book; and/or 6) an adaptation of a written story into graphic form.

By the early 1970’s novel-length or digest-length books exploded in the marketplace, presenting comics in a longer form. Some of my favorite titles continue to be Silver Surfer, Swamp Thing, Modesty Blaise, MAD Magazine, Archie & Veronica, and more.

In the last two decades, manga’s popularity has flourished in the US, leading to shelves upon shelves full of digest-length manga in specialty comics shops as well as mainstream bookstores. I’ve interviewed many authors over the years and read hundreds of manga and thousands of comics and graphic novels. Which do you like better: comics or manga? What is the lure that lifts one medium over another? That creates a preference in readers, writers, and artists and has us ordering titles from our favorite store?

I was weaned on Archie and Superman, the panels, the colors, and the method for communicating and a comic story feels different to me than reading a manga. It’s not just the back-to-front concept or the left-to-right, the stories focus on different techniques for communication. So, why do you reach for one over the other? Does our history have something to with it? The way we grew up? Or is the medium a means to end and more conducive to expressing who we are and what we want to say?

Anne Elizabeth writes a monthly column for RT Book Reviews on comics, manga, and graphic novels. She is the creator/writer of Pulse of Power, an original graphic novel coming out on August 10th.

The third and final web season of Atom.com’s The Legend of Neil online series debuted this week! For those unfamiliar, the web series is a funny take on the first Legend of Zelda game, casting a greasy slacker (the aforementioned Neil, played by Tony Janning) as a reluctant and unbelieving Link.

Mixing the game’s obsolence with modern day cynicism and very coarse NSFW humor (just witness how he arrives in Hyrule in the first place) somehow works really well. I’ve come to like it more than The Guild, which began its fourth season last week. Both series share crew and cast, Felicia Day and Sandeep Parikh (“Zaboo” in the The Guild and The Legend of Neil’s creator) most prominently amongst them. Odds are if you’re watching one of these web shows, then you’ll like the other.

Chris Greenland is expecting the Fourth Doctor to come through that door up there any minute now.

Who would’ve thought The Doctor would be so good at soccer?

Okay, okay, football. Football.

In “The Lodger,” we see a Doctor Who rarity. We get to see what would happen if The Doctor experienced life as a normal human being, though I suppose “normal” is relative when talking about The Doctor. As Amy says to him, “Have you seen you?”

[Football is the one with the sticks, right?]

The TARDIS attempts to materialize in modern-day Colchester, but only The Doctor manages to get out. Amy is stranded in the TARDIS, which remains trapped in the time vortex and cannot land. They trace the source of the temporal disturbance to the top floor of a house, and so, in an effort to find out what’s going on without giving away the fact that he’s a Time Lord, The Doctor answers an ad for a lodger in the first floor apartment and tries to blend in as a human. Craig, The Doctor’s new roomie, is an average guy who goes to the pub, plays in a football league, and is in love with his best friend, Sophie, who is a constant presence in the apartment.

The source of the disturbance turns out to be an alien ship that has crashed. Using a perception filter (those perception filters sure are handy when you don’t want to explain anything and would rather just make it appear!), the ship can look like the house’s non-existent second floor. The ship’s emergency holographic program has been luring passersby into the house to test potential pilots, but none prove suitable. Eventually, the hologram lures Sophie, and when Craig and The Doctor go up to save her, the ship tries to test The Doctor as well. The Doctor struggles against the ship, saying that if he touches the controls, he will destroy the ship and take the Earth along with it. The only one who can save the day is Craig, who because of his love of Sophie and his complete lack of desire to travel is the perfect anti-pilot for this ship. When he professes his love for Sophie out loud and kisses her as he touches the controls, The Doctor is released, and the three escape just in time to watch the ship implode. The power of love prevails.

And so it seems The Doctor had two missions in this episode: figure out what’s stopping the TARDIS, and hook up Craig and Sophie!

It’s a shame that this sweet, fun standalone had to come immediately on the heels of “Vincent and The Doctor,” another standalone that just happened to be one of the best episodes this year. I think that watching “The Lodger” after “Vincent” gave me a more negative impression of it than I would’ve gotten had they aired it after “The Beast Below” or something similar. Perhaps it was placed here for that reason, as a salve to all the big goings-on in the surrounding episodes. However, I think the placement does this episode, which is charming in its own right, a disservice. This isn’t to say writer Gareth Roberts’ story, which was based on his own comic strip from Doctor Who Magazine, wasn’t good, but compared to the episodes surrounding it, it seems too simple.

However, there is plenty of charm in the episode, not the least of which is due to James Corden as Craig. He is the perfect Everyman, and his comedic timing is flawless. His reaction to The Doctor appearing from behind the couch as he tries to confess his feelings to Sophie for the first time is priceless. Matt Smith also shines in this episode that allows The Doctor to have certain human experiences for the first time. His reactions to things like having a set of keys to a flat, paying rent, or playing team sports were wonderful. Smith and Corden had amazing chemistry, and it’s their rapport that held this episode together.

Also, I’d just like to point out that Matt Smith looks damn fine in a towel. However, I’d also like to point out that I’d totally go for James Corden, too. What this episode lacked in substance it made up for in man-candy.

And then there is the exciting, albeit tacked-on ending, where Amy stumbles onto Rory’s engagement ring. It’s just the tip of the iceberg for Amy, as we soon see in Doctor Who’s two-part finale!

Pandorica, what?!

Teresa Jusino was born on the same day that Skylab fell. Coincidence? She doesn’t think so. Her “feminist brown person” take on pop culture has been featured on websites like PinkRaygun.com, PopMatters.com, and CentralBooking.com (edited by Kevin Smokler). She is currently working on several fiction projects, including a web series for Pareidolia Films called The Pack, which she hopes to debut by the end of the year! Get Twitterpated with Teresa, Follow The Pack or visit her at The Teresa Jusino Experience.

My goal is to get paranormal romance fans to start playing video games.

Not likely, you think? Consider this: the fastest-growing gaming demographic is women 25 and up. These women have become rabid fans of a class of widely-accessible video games known as “casual games” (which include popular games such as Bejeweled, a match-3 puzzle game, and Mystery Case Files, a series in which you search for hidden objects within intricate scenes). Most of these women cite that they play casual games to unwind or escape. Sound familiar?  Yep, it’s the same demographic that reads romance novels!

[Read more]

I’ve worked as a producer in the casual gaming industry for almost six years now, and have seen the trend as more and more game developers target their games to a very female audience. Games were mostly gender-neutral six years ago; but now, if you visit a casual gaming site, you’ll notice that themes commonly revolve around princesses, weddings, chocolate, fashion, yoga, etc., and that the games’ protagonists are almost always female. For a couple years, I wondered, “Well then, why hasn’t anyone gone and taken the bold step of making the ultimate female-targeted entertainment? Why hasn’t anyone made a romance game?”

Then, suddenly, I had my chance to make such a game. The door opened for me because I was laid off. I had worked at a great game studio where I was the producer for a new casual game series based on the Nancy Drew series of novels. Despite the fact that our games had been met with critical acclaim (even winning Yahoo’s “hidden object game of the year” award), they were not a commercial success, so the company was forced to let go of my entire team—all ten of us.

Now, here was this great team that had created fantastic games together, all looking for new ventures at the same time. Why not do something crazy and start our own company, and make games in a currently untapped niche? The next thing I did was call up my high school friend, who happens to be bestselling author Marjorie M. Liu. Her exciting and fantastical paranormal romances were perfect for translating into game form, and I wanted to see what she thought of starting a company together. I was thrilled when she said yes, and immediately proposed the idea to my former team (on our last day with our former company, out on the lawn of our former office building, funnily enough). Fastforward another couple weeks, and our new company, PassionFruit Games, was born. We decided we were going to bring the first ever paranormal romance casual game to life, and it would be based on Marjorie’s debut novel, Tiger Eye.

Fastforward another seven months to April 2010 (during which our upcoming game received a ton of buzz including landing on the front page of major gaming site IGN and even getting a mention on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon), and we proudly released our first product, Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box. Our game is now enjoying great reception from review sites and users—and most importantly, my own mom, a complete non-gamer. And she actually likes it enough that she’s played it through five times!

So, if you’re a romance reader but not (yet) a gamer, why should YOU try gaming? For one thing, there have been a multitude of studies showing the benefits of playing casual games—not only are they relaxing but they also help exercise the brain. Casual games are also very accessible to brand new players in that they’re easy to learn (most only require the clicking of the left mouse button) and busy people can play them in short sessions. Many of the games provide users with fun puzzles and brainteasers, mixed with a storyline that is told through art and character dialogue (essential to our romance novel-based game). Our players cite that they love being immersed in beautiful artwork and lush music that bring the story to life.

Think you could be a gamer at heart? If you’d like to take a dip into the casual gaming world, I recommend visiting some great online gaming portals such as PopCapGames.com, BigFishGames.com, GameHouse.com and iWin.com—all of them offer free “try-before-you-buy” demos of their games (usually lasting a full hour). And of course, give our game, Tiger Eye, a spin at PassionFruitGames.com!

Melissa Heidrich didn’t realize she was a true casual gamer until 2004, when she by chance attended a gaming conference and fell in love with an incredibly addictive time-management game that was on display at a computer terminal, which she monopolized for several hours. Her relentless approach to beating the game led to her being recruited as a quality assurance lead at the game company Say Design, where she was quickly promoted to Producer. She went on to hold producer positions at Humongous Inc. and then Her Interactive Inc., where she helped launch their new casual series of Nancy Drew Dossier games. Now the studio director of PassionFruit Games (visit them on Facebook or Twitter), she is thrilled to be pioneering a “novel” approach to casual gaming, and hopes her company’s debut title Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box, based on bestselling author Marjorie M. Liu’s work, will serve as a bridge between the romance reader and romance gamer.

Perhaps dispirited by their experiences with generally unknown authors for their Oz series, publishers Reilly and Lee took a new approach for the 40th (and, as it would turn out, final) book of the series: hiring the Newberry Award winning novelist and children’s author Eloise Jarvis McGraw, who chose to co-write her book with her daughter Lauren McGraw. The choice turned out to be fortunate indeed: Merry Go Round in Oz is one of the very best of the Oz books, a fast paced, hilarious book worth seeking out by Oz fans and non-fans alike. My initial worries that this book might not live up to my fond childhood memories soon vanished: I still found myself laughing out loud as I turned its pages, and I was sorry when the book ended.

The book interweaves three tales: of young Robin Brown, an orphan from Oregon; of the three National Disasters that inflict the noble kingdom of Halidom; and, er, the quest of Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion for some awesome Easter Eggs. So, ok, not all the plots are equally riveting—although I did like the bunnies. And, surprisingly enough, all of these seemingly unconnected plots turn out to be very closely intertwined indeed. Even the bunnies.

[The dangers of allowing a manufacturing process to reach perfection. Also, a summary of Ozma fail!]

Of the characters, young Robin may be the worst off: shy and inarticulate, he’s not very good at making friends, explaining himself, or fitting in with his well-meaning, but noisy, foster family. He suspects the family doesn’t like him very much, and won’t miss him if he leaves. No wonder that he seizes the chance to ride a quite ordinary merry-go-round in quite ordinary Oregon, and reaches up to grab the brass ring for a chance at a free ride. The successful grab sends him and the little merry go round horse he is riding careening into Oz.

(Incidentally, this points up one real decline in contemporary society: I spent years looking for similar rings on merry go rounds, and never found one. I’m not even sure that they make ordinary grabbable rings anymore, let alone the magical sorts that send you to Oz. Sigh.)

This, and the discovery that the little merry go round horse, called, (hold your surprise), Merry, is now alive and can talk, rather confuses Robin, a situation not helped by the discovery that Merry can only ride round and round; straight lines confuse her. (We’ve all been there.)

Meanwhile, over in Halidom, things are going from rather bad to really worse. Halidom had been doing quite well as a supplier of luxury heraldry supplies to all of Oz’s tiny little kingdoms (our first indication, in 40 books, that any of these kingdoms perform any positive economic function whatsoever). But, alas, alas, Halidom’s prosperity was dependent on three little magical circlets (yet another lesson in the critical importance of diversifying your assets, even in a fairyland), which have all, gulp, disappeared. The circlets grant dexterity, intelligence, and strength; their disappearance leaves every Halidom native exhausted, clumsy, and unable to think. This is no way to start a quest.

And yet, the Prince decides to quest anyway (as I mentioned, thinking isn’t a strong suit with him at the moment) taking along his rather arrogant horse and a very cute Flittermouse, as well as two friends not from Halidom, and thus unaffected by this circlet: his page Fess and a Unique Unicorn.

Also, bunnies.

In a roundabout fashion (cough), all three plots end up centering (ahem) on the town of Roundelay, a town which has focused so hard on quality that they have inadvertently manufactured themselves right out of business: their products never break or decay, and thus never need to be replaced. The goods? Well, round things, of course.

So many things make this book a delight: the sly jokes, delightful dialogue, the Cowardly Lion’s horrified response upon meeting Genuinely Good Children (scarier than they might sound); Roundelay’s economic jokes and inept and delightfully absurd attempts at rebranding; the likeable villains; the way nearly everyone gets to help solve or contribute to the Halidom quest; and the decidedly satisfactory resolution, wherein all of our circling plots turn out to be linked together quite closely indeed. (Even the bunnies!)

And—don’t fall over in shock—almost no Ozma fail. Unless you count her decision to delegate her Easter Egg shopping to a friend. Okay, so maybe some minor Ozma fail. But after this, Ozma arrives with useful advice, a satisfactory action plan, ready to mete out appropriate justice. Maybe Queen Lurline replaced the old Ozma with this useful doppledanger. I guess we’ll never know.

To counter this surprising departure from Oz history, the book does return to an old L. Frank Baum motif: questioning traditional gender roles. Unusually for Oz, Halidom has very distinct ideas on what men should do, and what women should do, and Lady Annelet is not allowed to join the quest for the circlets. (This would have bothered me more had she not been hampered by the same clumsiness, weakness and inability to think that plagued the entire kingdom, and had Prince Gules and Fess not warmly welcomed the very feminine Unicorn and the always practical Dorothy on their quest.) A bit jarring in a series where girls had almost always (even in the notable exception of The Hungry Tiger of Oz the segregation by gender occurs outside of Oz) had an equal share of opportunity and adventure.

And yet, those assigned gender roles are, as it turns out, the partial cause of Halidom’s downfall (along with the bunnies): the book’s chief villain has been sneaking around and doing bad things because he—and it’s critical that he’s a he—is terrified that people will doubt his masculinity if they discover just how much he loves to cook and eat pie. (It’s apparently seriously excellent pie.) As Dorothy notes, if the poor man had just felt free to be himself, all might have been well. Or, at least better, since two of the circlets would still have been missing.

Overall, the book can be seen as an argument against holding to static roles and refusing change: not just Halidom, but Roundelay, the Good Children, and View Halloo all harm themselves or others by refusing change or any threats to the status quo. It’s a surprisingly subversive message, harking back to the Baum books, especially in a book that outwardly appears to celebrate aspects of the very traditional culture of the British aristocracy (hunting, heraldry and so on), however humorously. 

But the story that lingers is that of Robin, who in all his various foster homes has never found a place where he belongs. In Oz...well, I’ll just say that magical things can and do happen in Oz. Even in places where people are desperately chasing the world’s greatest dessert. (And if that isn’t justification for evil doings, I don’t know what is.)

(Although as an adult, it did occur to me to hope that Ozma sent some magical message over to Oregon to ensure that Robin’s well meaning foster parents didn’t end up in jail on charges related to his disappearance. This seems to be a more mature, thoughtful Ozma. Let us hope.)

Speaking of Ozma fail, the series summary:

• Total number of books: 40
• Number of books in which Ozma does not appear and is not mentioned: 1 (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)
• Number of books in which Ozma does not appear and manages to fail anyway: 1 (Captain Salt in Oz)
• Number of books in which Ozma appears but does not have time to fail because she only appears in the last few pages and is still recovering from that whole transformation thing: 1 (The Marvelous Land of Oz)
• Number of books with minor Ozma fail (i.e, not leading to gross injustice, kidnapping, an attack on the Emerald City, war or genocide): 15
• Number of books with major Ozma fail (i.e, leading to gross injustice, kidnapping, an attack on the Emerald City, war or genocide): 18
• Number of books with no Ozma fail, making me wonder exactly what series I was reading: 4 (The Tin Woodman of Oz, The Royal Book of Oz, The Shaggy Man of Oz, Merry Go Round in Oz)

Fail rate: 85%

I...don’t even know what to say.

Merry Go Round of Oz was the last of the “official” Oz books. (Some Oz fans also include six additional books written by the Royal Historians and later published by the International Wizard of Oz Club, Books of Wonder, and Hungry Tiger Press, in this “official” list, but I couldn’t find any consensus on this.) Oz publishers Reilly and Lee were bought out by the Henry Regnery Co, which in turn was bought out by McGraw Hill, which in turn jumped out of the Oz publishing business altogether to focus on textbooks.

But if its publishers abandoned Oz, fans and writers did not. Oz books proliferated (and continue to proliferate), both with books seeking to stay true to canon (however inconsistent that canon), and books that upended the series altogether, of which the best known is (arguably) Geoffrey Maguire’s Wicked series. A tribute, I think, to the zaniness, the inconsistencies, and wonders opened by L. Frank Baum and the Royal Historians of Oz, in a land always filled with adventure and the unexpected.

And, as if to offer proof of the continued power of Oz to inspire writers and artists, just over the weekend, Eric Shanower and Scottie Young brought home some well deserved Eisner Awards at Comic-Con for their adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  

I love knowing that I’ll never know what Oz will bring us next.

Making it through this entire series has been wildly entertaining, and I want to thank everyone that has read and commented on these posts along with me, particularly those that spoke up in Ozma’s defense, those that left insightful comments on Baum’s manuscripts and writing techniques, and those who passionately argued about the illustrations. (We should have a Denslow-Neill cage match!)

Mari Ness lives in central Florida near a large alligator-infested lake, not too far from the magical lands of a certain talking Mouse. Her fiction work has appeared in numerous publications, and she can be followed on Twitter or on the disorganized blog she keeps at mariness.livejournal.com. Her two adorable cats were of no assistance whatsoever in the writing of these posts.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was published in 2004. When I first read it in February 2005 I wrote a review on my Livejournal (full review here), which I shall quote from because it is still my substantive reaction:

It’s set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in an England that is the same but distorted by the operation of magic on history, and it concerns the bringing back of practical English magic.

What it’s about is the tension between the numinous and the known. The helical plot, which ascends slowly upwards, constantly circles a space in which the numinous and the known balance and shift and elements move between them. It’s a truly astonishing feat and I’ve never seen anything like it.

I’ve just read it again, and I could pretty much write that post again. In summary—this is terrific, it reads like something written in an alternate history in which Lud in the Mist was the significant book of twentieth century fantasy, and it goes directly at the the movement between magical and the mundane.

[Read more: questions, no answers]

I wasn’t the only person to think this book was brilliant. It won the World Fantasy Award, it won the Hugo and the Mythopoeic, it was Time Magazine’s number one book of the year, a New York Times notable book, it was in the top ten of almost every publication in Britain and the U.S. and it was a huge international mega-bestseller.  It did about as well as any book can do.

But five years later, it doesn’t seem to have had any impact. Sandcastle fantasy is being published all around as if Clarke had never put finger to keyboard. I wonder why that is?

It may be that it’s just too soon. Publishing is astonishingly slow. Books being published now were written several years ago. Influence does take time to permeate through. But wouldn’t you think that in five years you’d start to see some influence? But even without publishing speed, it could take longer than that for Clarke’s influence to be assimilated and reacted to. I shouldn’t be so impatient. Ten years might be a better measure.

Or maybe it will take a generation, maybe the people who read Clarke when they were teenagers will grow up to write fantasy influenced by her, but it’s not going to happen with people already grown up and publishing and set in their ways?

Perhaps it’s just sui generis, so wonderful and unique that it can’t really be an influence except as a spur to excellence?

Or maybe, in the same way it doesn’t appear to have a much in the way of immediate ancestors, it can’t produce descendants? It’s wonderful, but it’s not what fantasy is, it isn’t in dialogue with fantasy and it’s hard for fantasy to engage with it?

After all, what do I mean by influence? There’s plenty of fantasy set in Regency England—there’s Novik’s Temeraire for a start. I don’t think we should have a sudden rash of books about Napoleonic magic or books with charming footnotes containing short stories. I don’t even want more books directly using faerie magic. (We have had some of those too.)

What I would have thought I’d have seen by now is stories that acknowledge the shadow Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell cast across the possibilities, things that attempt to engage with the numinous in the way it does. Fantasy is all about ways of approaching the numinous—and everything I read is still using the traditional approaches. That’s what I keep hoping for and not seeing.

Perhaps it will happen, given time.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is there, it’s incredible, and one can always read it again.

Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.

Welcome to the Avatar: The Last Airbender MUSICAL EPISODE!

Many people think this episode is cheesy and a waste of time, but this episode has some major moments in it that resonate throughout the rest of the series. It also has an abundance of cute Appa moments, so I have a soft spot for this episode.

[YIP YIP!]

This episode follows the Aang gang as they journey through a secret mountain tunnel to Omashu with a group of singing travelers. We begin the episode with Aang and Katara practicing their waterbending. I think this is important simply because it reminds the viewer that they are still learning, even if they are becoming quite badass. Octopus Aang is pretty awesome.

When the Gaang meets up with the travelers led by the strumming Chung (voiced by Dee Bradley Baker…better known as the voice of Appa and Momo) and his gal, Lily, Sokka initially refuses their offer to walk through the SECRET TUNNEL. But after a quick mid-air altercation with the Fire Nation, Sokka accepts that he will have to walk through the “stupid love tunnel.”

When the Gaang reaches the tunnel, the Fire Nation barricades them inside the mountain, rather than follow them into the labyrinth of caves. The aftermath of this moment is important because it showcases Appa’s issues with being in tight spaces. Just something to think about for the future…

Over time, the Gaang ends up getting separated, leaving Aang and Katara on their own with Appa while poor Sokka gets stuck with the singing travelers. (“Don’t let the cave in get you down…SOKKKAAAA!”)

Aang and Katara’s journey through the caves takes them to the tomb of two lovers. Then, we are shown in lovely watercolor the legend of the two lovers. They were the first two Earthbenders, having learned from the badger moles in the caves. Katara awkwardly suggests that the two of them should kiss in the dark. Aang doesn’t quite know how to respond. Aang’s crush on Katara has always been clear, and in the fortuneteller episode in Book One Katara seemed to consider that she might end up with Aang. In this episode, Katara’s suggestion of the kiss comes from a place of logic. We kiss, we get out. Poor Aang would love to kiss her, but doesn’t want his true feelings known. Resulting in what I feel is such a middle school conversation about kissing. “What? I said I would rather kiss you than die? That’s a compliment!” Oh, Aang, you have zero game. Ultimately, the two of them do kiss and the way out of the cave is lit by crystals.

Sokka doesn’t have it so easy. His group is attacked by the badger moles, but lucky for them, badger moles appear to be fans of music. My favorite exchange of the whole episode is the Gaang’s discussion of the ways the escaped. Aang says love led the way. Sokka? “We let huge ferocious beasts lead our way!” Did anyone else notice that Appa and Momo had a tiny reunion of their own? It is moments like that when the details of the show really stand out to me.

A few thoughts on the Zuko/Iroh plot line. After Iroh’s pathetic boy scout skills result in rashes, the two of them end up in a Earth Kingdom village where Zuko meets a young girl who also has been burned by the Fire Nation, literally. This is the point in the Zuko/Iroh arc where Zuko finally begins to see the havoc the Fire Nation brings to the rest of the world. He will continue to make observations like this over the rest of the season. Despite having obviously been moved by his interactions with this Earth Kingdom family, in the end he still leaves and steals their ride! Oh, Zuko, when will you learn?

Another thing to consider is that this is a show that features a lot of combat and violence, but all of the conflict in this episode is resolved through love and music. Isn’t that nice?

This episode really sets us up for the world of season 2. Episode 1 gave us our villain, now we have the setting. I think season 2 is my favorite season because it is so green and because I think earthbending is the way to go. We leave the Gaang outside of a Fire Nation-occupied Omashu. Where is King Bumi? Will the singing on this show ever be in tune? (Hint: NO). Come back next week to find out.

Attention First-Time Avatar Watchers: Our posts will be spoiler-free (except for the episode we’re discussing), but be aware that spoilers for future episodes may abound in the comment thread below. We wanted to keep the comment threads future-spoiler-free as well, but it will likely prove impossible and it would impede our ability to analyze the series in retrospect.

Up next: Return to Omashu!

Jordan Hamessley is an assistant editor at Grosset & Dunlap/PSS at Penguin Books for Young Readers where she edits the Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Dinosaur Train publishing programs, as well as developing original series. She is also an assistant editor for Lightspeed Magazine. She can be found on Twitter as @thejordache.

The Hugo Awards voting deadline is fast approaching! The deadline to turn in your ballot for your science fiction favorites is this Saturday, July 31st.

Having trouble deciding? Tor.com has reviewed the nominees in several categories, including Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Graphic Story, and more. Need to re-familiarize yourself with those nominees? (A full list is here.) Click away!

[Links below the cut]

Best Novel

• Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)
• The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
• Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
• Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
• Wake, Robert J. Sawyer (Ace; Penguin; Gollancz; Analog)
• The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)

Best Novella

• “Act One,” Nancy Kress (Asimov’s 3/09)
• The God Engines, John Scalzi (Subterranean)
• “Palimpsest,” Charles Stross (Wireless; Ace, Orbit)
• Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow (Tachyon)
• “Vishnu at the Cat Circus,” Ian McDonald (Cyberabad Days; Pyr, Gollancz)
• The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker (Subterranean)

Best Novelette

• “Eros, Philia, Agape,” Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com 3/09)
• “The Island,” Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2; Eos)
• “It Takes Two,” Nicola Griffith (Eclipse Three; Night Shade Books)
• “One of Our Bastards is Missing,” Paul Cornell (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three; Solaris)
• “Overtime,” Charles Stross (Tor.com 12/09)
• “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast,” Eugie Foster (Interzone 2/09)

Best Short Story

• “The Bride of Frankenstein,” Mike Resnick (Asimov’s 12/09)
• “Bridesicle,” Will McIntosh (Asimov’s 1/09)
• “The Moment,” Lawrence M. Schoen (Footprints; Hadley Rille Books)
• “Non-Zero Probabilities,” N.K. Jemisin (Clarkesworld 9/09)
• “Spar,” Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld 10/09)

Best Graphic Story

• Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Written by Neil Gaiman; Pencilled by Andy Kubert; Inked by Scott Williams (DC Comics)
• Captain Britain And MI13. Volume 3: Vampire State Written by Paul Cornell; Pencilled by Leonard Kirk with Mike Collins, Adrian Alphona and Ardian Syaf (Marvel Comics)
• Fables Vol 12: The Dark Ages Written by Bill Willingham; Pencilled by Mark Buckingham; Art by Peter Gross & Andrew Pepoy, Michael Allred, David Hahn; Colour by Lee Loughridge & Laura Allred; Letters by Todd Klein (Vertigo Comics)
• Girl Genius, Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm Written by Kaja and Phil Foglio; Art by Phil Foglio; Colours by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
• Schlock Mercenary: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse Written and Illustrated by Howard Tayler

Best Professional Artist

• Bob Eggleton
• Stephan Martiniere
• John Picacio
• Daniel Dos Santos
• Shaun Tan

The Hugo novelette category is one of my favorites. It consistently features, in my opinion, the best fiction on the ballot. This year, the novellas might have a slight edge in consistent strength across all the nominees, but I feel the strongest stories from all the 2010 short fiction Hugo nominees come from the novelettes.

The six novelettes all deal with identity and what makes something sentient. It’s interesting to see these disparate stories and find a thread that pulls them all together. There’s no reason for a commonality among the nominees to exist, but I’m always pleased when I find one.

As it’s been noted on the other wrap-ups of the short fiction nominees, there are spoilers ahead. If you haven’t read these stories yet and intend to read them at some point, you should probably skip reading this until you get the chance to read them.

[Read on for the details]

“Eros, Philia, Agape,” Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com 3/09)

Rachel Swirsky is a new writer that I think people should be watching. Every piece I see from her is stronger than the last. “Eros, Philia, Agape” is definitely her best work to date. In this story, Swirsky gives us Adriana who is all alone after her father passes away. She and her father had a difficult relationship and she does not feel sad at his death but does feel empty. She decides to buy herself a companion.

Adriana goes to a store and has them build a robot, Lucian, that will be her companion/lover/friend. It causes quite the scandal when she begins to bring the robot around in public as if it were a real person. The two of them even go so far to adopt a young girl, Rose, to raise as their daughter. The three major players in this story all struggle with their identity and who they are. It’s very interesting to see how Swirsky handles how differently each character tackles the problem of identity.

Lucian abruptly leaves his family so that he can see if he can achieve sentience on his own. Neither Rose nor Adriana deal well with the loss. While Lucian felt like an object, like a thing that Adriana owned, it’s clear that he was much more than that.

I’ve taken Swirsky’s story and ironed it into a flat descriptive piece. Swirsky reveals bits and pieces of this story as the reader travels back and forth in the timeline of the piece. It’s not until the very end that you learn why Lucian decided to take himself away.

If not for the Watts story, I would place this as my favorite to win the Hugo.

“The Island,” Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2; Eos)

This is my favorite story of all the nominated short fiction. The narrator is part of a crew on a deep space journey to seed the universe. She wakes every now and again to see how the ship’s AI, nicknamed “chimp,” is handling the mission.

One time she awakes to the face of Dix, her offspring. Their ship has come upon a star and a potential contact with another lifeform. Neither Dix nor the chimp know what to do about it. The object they are racing towards is definitely sending out a signal, some sort of communication. The problem is, the ship is racing right at this lifeform and will likely destroy it if the flight path is not altered. The chimp does not want to alter the flight path and the narrator does.

As the story progresses, we learn that there was a conflict between the ship’s AI and the crew. The crew voluntarily removed their comm links with the AI so it wouldn’t be inside their heads. They also damaged pieces of the AI/ship so that there were areas of the ship that the AI couldn’t see into. The narrator is the last remaining crew member. The chimp is picking off the crew that rebeled against it and trying to raise a new crew that is more compliant, like Dix.

The genius of the story comes from the communication between Dix and the narrator. Dix was raised by the chimp and is therefore very smart, but has never learned intuition or imagination. The narrator can’t imagine not having these things so the two continually frustrate each other. The two have such different backgrounds and memories that they are almost unable to communicate.

I also like how Watts uses the narrow point of view of the narrator to limit what the reader knows. This lets Watts reveal the story to us more slowly. If the narrator doesn’t want to talk about it, the reader doesn’t learn anything about it. It also clearly biases the reader against the AI, but Dix serves as a great devil’s advocate to make the reader question the motives of the narrator. The chimp and the narrator are more alike than either would admit.

This is my clear pick as the winner of this category. It has everything I could want in a science fiction story.

“It Takes Two,” Nicola Griffith (Eclipse Three; Night Shade Books)

I enjoyed reading this story, but I don’t know how well it stacks up against the other nominees in this category. While many of the other stories deal with non-human characters trying to determine their identity and motives—trying to determine whether they are real—the characters in “It Takes Two” have their identities and motives determined through mood-altering drugs.

Richard and Cody are salespeople who see each other regularly on the trade show circuit. Richard, however, has gotten tired of the travel and has accepted a job that will allow him to work a regular schedule. Cody is annoyed, particularly as the next show involves trying to get a contract with Boone in Atlanta. Boone likes to take out the salespeople to a strip club, except that Cody, being a woman, is not comfortable with these trips. If Richard had been there she would have someone with which to pass the evening.

At the club, Cody is taken with a stripper named Cookie. They hit it off and leave the club together. Somehow this leads to Boone giving Cody the contract. But all Cody can think of is Cookie/Susanah. Richard tries unsuccessfully to get in touch with Cody and eventually has to go to her house to talk to her.

It appears that the attraction between Cody and Susanah was due to experimental drugs that Richard is developing at his new job. The story takes a radical turn at this point, but holds together very well. Griffith shows admirable skill in turning the story on its head so close to its end.

The story is well written, I just don’t see it appealing to the Hugo voters in the same way the Watts or Swirsky stories will.

“One of Our Bastards is Missing,” Paul Cornell (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three; Solaris)

I was disappointed with this story. I don’t feel that it showcases Cornell’s talents very well. The story itself is pretty straightforward and it doesn’t take a lot of guesswork to know where it’s going.

At the wedding of Princess Elizabeth, a guest literally vanishes in thin air. Jonathan Hamilton is charged with solving the mystery. In Hamilton’s world, people can create pockets and folds in space time and use that to hide objects—think concealed weapons—or even things as big as a person or people.

With these few pieces of data, I determined the outcome of the story without a lot of thought. I was expecting more from the story, and I just didn’t get it. I don’t think the Hugo voters will go for this story either, but I could be way off, too.

“Overtime,” Charles Stross (Tor.com 12/09)

If you haven’t read any of Stross’s novels concerning the secret British government agency the Laundry, this story might not work for you. And you should go out and read a few of the books. They are quite good.

“Overtime” offers nothing new to the Laundry line of stories and novels. It’s an entertaining Christmas-themed story, but everything progresses in a straightforward fashion. Perhaps it’s just a reaction after reading Stross’ novella nominee “Palimpsest” which makes this story feel lacking.

In this story, our intrepid agent Bob volunteers to work over the holidays and has to fit off a baddie on his own. There are some clever parts where Bob figures out what’s going on and how he can fix it. All the same, there are much stronger candidates in this category.

“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast,” Eugie Foster (Interzone 2/09)

I was quite impressed with Foster’s story. In her world, the population dons masks every morning. These masks provide personality, memory, and everything else that identifies a person. Each mask is a new set so that no one is the same from day to day. Everything seems to revolve around obtaining an aphrodisiac salve called Queen’s Honey. Characters can die trying to obtain it—you are healed overnight and ready to go again in the morning—and it often leads to wild copulation with no consequences.

In some ways, for the wearers of the mask, it is a utopia. The Queen leads them, and they get to be anything and everything they want to be. Of course, if it looks too good to be true… There is a rebel group trying to overthrow the Queen and her masks. Out story’s protagonist is recruited to join the rebellion.

Foster broke the story down into sections, with each section representing another mask that the protagonist wears. For example “Marigold is for Murder” or “Blue is for Madness.” The structure of the story is as important as what’s told. It sets the reader up for what’s to come next, but sometimes Foster deliberately doesn’t quite deliver on the section title’s promise and takes the reader somewhere else.

If not for the Watts and Swirsky pieces, this would be my clear front runner for the Hugo.

My final Hugo voting order:

1. “The Island” by Peter Watts
2. “Eros, Philia, Agape” by Rachel Swirsky
3. “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” by Eugie Foster
4. “It Takes Two” by Nicola Griffith
5. “Overtime” by Charles Stross
6. “One of Our Bastards is Missing” by Paul Cornell

Illustration by Sam Weber

John Klima is the editor of the Hugo Award winning Electric Velocipede.

When trying to figure out what to write for my Tor.com blog, I thought about my life a year ago. I was a bartender, writing on a dream and slinging drinks at night. I was also finishing my MA in fiction at Rhode Island College and completing a thesis. Most of my writing was minimalist short fiction and I never imagined I would write a novel, let alone a vampire novel.

But during a moment of free writing, I tapped into a character. She had a dark past, she was British, and most surprising, she was a very old magical creature. She was also extremely angry. I didn’t know it, but I had discovered my main character, Lenah Beaudonte, and Infinite Days came to light.

[Read more]

So why did I write a novel about a vampire becoming human? Well...because that’s how Lenah’s voice came to me. I wanted to write about this person, this dangerous person who wanted nothing more than to atone for her horrible behavior. In my world, in my vampire lore, everything about the vampire body is dead—quite literally. The heart, the nerve endings, even the sense of smell is limited. It’s not dead, it’s limited to flesh and death. The vampire is constantly reminded that they are death givers, death seekers and night wanderers. What remains then? The mind. And even the mind goes to waste after too long. So when my novel opens, Lenah has gone crazy. Her immortality has taken her to a place where she cannot come back to reality. So what does she do? She attempts a very ancient ritual, which turns her back into a human.

But all magic comes with a price—in this case, a sacrifice—and Lenah loses her lover and soul mate, Rhode.

So how I did I come up with the vampire lore? Well, I knew Lenah had a clear conflict: she had a history of violence coupled with extreme power and now she had to re-enter the human world. I think I was also fascinated with irreversible choice—we’ve all done things in our lives we regret and the human condition means we can’t change what we’ve done in the past—we are forced to move on. This fueled the world-building in Infinite Days.

So I gave Lenah a second chance in a way that most people in the world don’t get—she gets to try to live again, but she has to mentally deal with all of the things she’s ever done. When I was writing, I wanted to make sure Lenah’s motivation for becoming human again earned its place in the novel. It wasn’t like a scientific problem; I just knew I had to raise the stakes. So, the longer a person is a vampire in Infinite Days, the more they lose their mind. The only respite from this misery is falling in love, but even THAT is a curse. The vampire is forced to love that person forever.

Humans are complex enough but when you add magic and paranormal romance to the mix, then things really get complicated.

Back to the ritual…the magical world I’ve created within Infinite Days is made even more convoluted and frightening when the ritual to become human again works. This is no spoiler, the entire book revolves around this one magical event: the ritual is a success. The events that are set in motion after the ritual is performed are irreversible and the ripple effect continues through the trilogy.

Lenah is set free by this ritual, but it only opens her up to the next trauma in her life: how do you re-learn what it means to be human? I think this question works outside of magical world building. We’ve all done something in our lives that we regret. We’ve come out of our own personal hells and moments of darkness and had a rebirth of sorts. We ask (maybe not aloud): how can we pick up the pieces of our lives, the darkest moments of our lives, and become better people?

I know Lenah asks herself this—and finds it in a young man who likes to feel. What a relief when you haven’t been able to connect your emotions to your physical being for 500 years. Justin, Lenah’s love interest, likes to make his heart beat fast and feel the adrenaline pumping through his veins. Lenah learns what it means to feel your emotions with your body with Justin. And that is just one way.

I hope I wrote much much more than a vampire story. I hope my characters shone through the magic to tell a story not only of magic but also of humanity. Because it’s all about us humans anyway, no matter what kind of wings, fur, or fangs you want to put on it.

Except, I suppose when you are a 592 year old recovering murderer…it could, just maybe, mean a little more.

Rebecca Maizel graduated from Boston University and the Rhode Island College master’s program. She teaches community college in Rhode Island and is studying to receive her MFA from Vermont College. The first book in her Vampire Queen series, Infinite Days, will be available on August 3rd.