I always love finding a good critical book about fantasy. I love reading fantasy and I love reading about it. I love hearing what authors and established critics have to say about the genre and its craft. That said, how could I not read Michael Moorcock’s WIZARDRY AND WILD ROMANCE: A STUDY OF EPIC FANTASY? I really had to read this. And I did.

Originally released in 1977, Monkeybrain Books re-released an updated version in 2004. This book did not go on about the forgotten greats of the genre, it commented on the best Epic Fantasy of then and now. It focused on what makes them great, and noted that the things that make books and authors great changes over time. This is a true study of Epic Fantasy.

Moorcock begins explicitly with a warning in his foreword. He is only writing these collected essays from his own opinion and observations of currently available romantic epic fantasy, he is discussing it and not defining it. He was wise to do so. I always get a little leery when anyone, even experts, start spouting about what they think is great without explaining themselves. As much as I want to take their well-learned word for diamonds, sometimes I only see dust.

Moorcock’s discussion is separated into six different categories: origins, landscape, heroes/heroines, humor, children’s books and genre deviations. Perhaps these are the most important craft elements of epic fantasy? In each section, Moorcock highlights the authors and books that represent the best work in each.

Despite being discussed in separate essays, his opinion is the same throughout. He asks for more. More attention to the landscape of a story, more attention to the characters, more consideration of humor. He lauds the authors who do it well, frequently the same people across the categories. And what is more, he provides excerpts! I wish more critical work about fantasy would do this. Moorcock says something is great and then says look at it for yourself so you can see how he formed his opinion of it. Nothing explains the quality of the words better than the words themselves.

While he mostly focuses on the strongest examples of the literature, he frequently reminds that there are hoards of imitators out there, looking to get rich from an easy, formulaic story and diluting the good reads. These are the authors who pay little or no attention to the above categories. He occasionally provides excerpts of these as well, for contrast.

By the end of the book, Moorcock has shown a timeline of the life of the genre within this book. Beginning as riffs on the gothic novels and chivalric romances, squalling through Sword and Sorcery, finding a firm foothold on the Tolkienian other-world stories, and coming into maturity within the walls of urban settings. At each point, Moorcock describes the genre’s historic connection to humanity, be it reactionary to a war or a specific artistic movement.

Where will epic fantasy go after the city? Out to space? Or even further back, to the dinosaurs? One thing is for sure, literary forms frequently change, but good craft will always hold a book together.

this review is cross posted at Greater Portland Scribists

Currently Reading
Fantasy:
Scholarly: Wizardry & Wild Romance, A Study of Epic Fantasy – Michael Moorcock
Writing:

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Workshoping:
Beyond the Cemetery

I am still reveling in the afterglow of Sandra Kasturi’s collection of poems, The Animal Bridegroom.

I have forgotten how much I enjoy poetry, and I think, my roots in poetry along with that. When I was working on my BFA in writing I took a lot of poetry workshops and really developed a likening of the compressed meaning, the careful arrangement of words, and particularly enjambment in good poems. I mostly love the short lined poems with lots of punch. In fact my favorite poems have been but a few lines, poignantly spaced with masterful diction, like The Primer by Christina Davis (which can be found here).

Most of my exposure to poems came when I worked as an Editorial Assistant at Alice James Books. For two years, I was constantly exposed to tons of award winning poetry. But… But, almost none of it focused on the mythology that I loved, the fantastical visions and traditions that were firmly lodged in my mind. When I left that job, I found very little poetry that even caught my interest (I was also in grad school, which might have had something to do with it).

Then, one day when I was checking out ChiZine news I found it pimping The Animal Bridegroom (Sandra is on their staff). So, I like a lot of stuff this magazine/publisher puts out. The cover was intriguing to me. Two colors, sepia with white text and image: a frame of wild flowers and woodland creatures around a bride and groom. The Bride in traditional/folk garb and the groom a wolfman or foxman with a nice tailed-coat. So I clicked on the link to amazon and read some of the poems. I thought they were fantastic. But it cost about $13 so I put it in my favorites list for when I got a gift card or someone looked there for my birthday.

I didn’t have to wait that long. Short after my discovery and longing for these poems, my eyes spied that gorgeous cover at the ChiZine table at Readercon. I made a beeline for it. I was so focused on it; I almost missed the fact that Sandra herself was manning the table at the time.

So to get the embarrassment over quickly, I gushed in fannish glee for about two minutes while she signed my book (which was not $13 bucks at the table).

I kept the book in my to-read stack, which was on my desk and rather close at hand. So, for the last six months or so, I’d periodically thumb through and read a poem or a few lines. I enjoyed that, some quick hits of a good thing. I’d like to note here that it’s not so easy to do that with a novel.

But towards the end of 2010 I thought I should read it cover to cover, net it into my year. So I did.

The Animal Bridegroom is full of everything I love about poetry with all the mythological and folkloric references I could hope for. Short lines pried meaning out of folk archetypes applied to modern day. Old characters exemplified the harsh qualities of modern life. Fantastic images asked questions about humanity. There was even a poem about the gemstone amber, one of my favorite “stones.” One even asked some serious questions about what happened to Hansel and Gretel after they grew up. And others, well, I’d like to be friends with some of those characters.

I am still reveling in the afterglow of Sandra Kasturi’s collection of poems, The Animal Bridegroom.

Currently Reading
Fantasy:
Scholarly: Wizardry & Wild Romance, A Study of Epic Fantasy – Michael Moorcock
Writing:

Submissions out
Flash: 0
Short: 0
Agent: 0

Workshoping:
The Tribe that Laughed

One fantastic book after another! Whatever I read next has some tough shoes to fill…

I finished reading K. J. Bishop’s The Etched City at quarter past eleven on New Year’s Eve. I captured the whole experience in 2010. Truth is I wanted to finish this book and add it to my list for 2010, but in the end, I just couldn’t put it down!

I loved being a fly on the wall in this dark, hungry city–watching the ugly world do its worst and the people do what they could to survive. This is no tale of good versus bad. In fact the good get nothing, and the bad only get worse. The language itself was beautiful; the prose carefully written to fully expose the dark underbelly of a city that I don’t think had a lighter side. Instead of racing through this volume, I read it slow (when I could) to enjoy the images and emotions evoked by the story.

Survival, redemption, faith, ethics, biological experimentation, conscience, the extremes of artistic expression are all explored in a city of corruption. This city is Ashamoil (the word reminds me of toil, which is what its inhabitants do). Yet the city is many worlds between which only few people seem to travel. It is an industrialized factory-driven place with thriving remnants of the old ways. We rarely see the factories, what we do see is a surreal, wonderfully disturbing, yet rich tapestry of life and walking myth and only enough magic used to make it that much more hopeless. The place is what the characters made it, and what they made of it.

Bishop spins this tale from characters who are under a shadow, and who may have never known light: they murder, indulge in all the vices (whores, opium, booze, drugs), steal, slave, etc. For this, the story reveals things of darkness in many shades of gray. There seems to be nothing a “good” person could do in Ashaoil to improve their lives. The few who seek to improve their lot do so by dying or by leaving Ashamoil.

I found an interesting use of Point of View characters in The Etched City. Different main characters were prominent in different parts of the book. Raule, the good-doctor-to-the-poor, was most prominent at the beginning. But, later, Gwynn, the remorseless mobster and gunslinger bore more attention. Going between these two, we got the whole view of the city, gold to gutter. And periodically, we got snippets of the tale through the eyes of others in the middle, who knew some things we needed to know. This is not something I see very much in fiction. Bishop does it well, we knew who all the characters were before we jumped into their heads. Bishop used this method of switching POV to evoke a maximum of suspense, and it worked on me.

The art, and the hunger of this corrupted city charmed me. To put it in perspective, I’ll say that a friend loaned it to me, and I’m going to go out and buy it for myself, in paper format.

Currently Reading
Fantasy:
Scholarly: Wizardry & Wild Romance, A Study of Epic Fantasy – Michael Moorcock
Writing:

Submissions out
Flash: 0
Short: 0
Agent: 0

Workshoping:
The Tribe that Laughed

Below is the list of books that I read in 2010. I’m fairly certain it’s accurate, as I was pretty good about updating this log when I finished a book. I also put links to the reading journal posts where applicable. The last two reviews are coming soon as I just finished them.

The Chronicles of the Black Company – Glenn Cook
The Mabinogi – Patrick K. Ford
Little, Big – John Crowley
The Runelords – David Farland
Spellwright – Blake Charlton
The Magicians – Lev Grossman
Brotherhood of the Wolf – David Farland
Moonwise – Greer Gilman
The Etched City – K.J. Bishop
The Animal Bridegroom, Poems – Sandra Kasturi

So, I only read 10 books in 2010. 10 books in a year is just shameful! Well, I’m not going to shoot for 11 books read in 2011. I’m going to have to aim higher than that.

This is going to be more of a description of my reading experience with Greer Gilman’s Moonwise. The basic story is simple, but experiencing the text is utterly magical. This is why fantasy is my chosen genre. Reading it transports you, the prose effects a wonder that strikes at my heart. And this book did that so well that I am going to talk more about that than anything else. If you want a book review go find one at Amazon. If you want to find out what it’s like to read Greer Gilman, read on.

Moonwise is Greer Gilman’s first book, originally published in 1991. It won the Crawford award in 1992, and was nominated for the Tiptree and Mythopoeic awards. It was released in hardcover by Prime books in 2005 and reissued by Wildside books in 2006.

I know she wrote this book over the course of 10 years on a typewriter with no outline, and no plan for it. For this, the work was well edited (though I did find a few line errors). I know going back through this much text and making sure everything is in the right place is difficult to say the least, and the business-savvy side of me screams of inefficiency, but I only have the most respect for a mind that can successfully wrangle with that.

I’d heard so many great things about Gilman, and I’d seen her participate in various panels at Readercon and Boskone. She is a brilliant folklorist and wildly creative woman. But after hearing her read, or more accurately perform (from another of her stories), I just had to read her books. But it was hard to find through my normal channels (used). So I was thrilled when I found it at Readercon last July and was able to have it signed.

So, with great anticipation I finally picked it up, appropriately, in September (the story takes place in fall and winter). But it’s December now. Yes, it took me a long time to read. The prose was just as dense and challenging as the literature I studied in college. I took my time with it, savoring the lines, references and double meanings like I savored those of Dickens. Even though I read it cover to cover and followed the arc of the story, I can’t help but think I’ve missed a lot of…something in the writing.

Suffice it to say, I wasn’t instantly in love with the book. It had a slow, kind of boring start with a few dead ends and little hope of clews. And I didn’t expect the story to be what Farah Mendlesohn describes in her book, Rhetorics of Fantasy, as a “portal quest” story, in which the characters go through a portal from the normal world to another. Moonwise started in contemporary times with two girls, Sylvie and Ariane, who see the same world I see.

I prefer my fantasy untouched by the modern world. I usually don’t like contemporary fantasy stories as much because the main characters are my filter to the world, and I’d rather see it through the eyes of a native than someone like me.

Yet, I can hardly say Sylvie and Ariane are like me. Although they are denizens of the 20th century, if I met one of them in person, I might describe them as otherworldly. They were a promise of what was to come: enchantment, folkloric references and skillful world creation. These things charmed me and kept me examining page after page.

After the story got going, Gilman always keeps the suspense and tension up. One way she did this was by making the world never comfortable. I’d pity the characters and wonder at their survival. They were always freezing and wet and sleeping on rocks, or even when they found a welcoming home, it was bad news and holding out the suspense and dread of what is to come.

I’ve finished this story once, but I know I’ll come back to it and go find her other books. With its wonder, it has wakened sleepy and tired spots in my brain that I had forgotten, it has opened up new parts of my brain, and it has filled them with possibilities–nature abhors a vacuum.

This blog entry is cross posted at Wandering Around the Words.

This blog entry is cross posted at Greater Portland Scribists.

Currently Reading
Fantasy: The Etched City – K. J. Bishop
Scholarly: Wizardry & Wild Romance, A Study of Epic Fantasy – Michael Moorcock
Writing:(I’m slacking here)

Submissions out
Flash: 0
Short: On Fate’s Waiting List
Agent: 0

Workshoping:
Beyond the Graveyard