fantasy

The Jewel in the Skull — Michael Moorcock

books and books review, fantasy
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Cover of The Jewel in the Skull


The Jewel in the Skull
Michael Moorcock
175 pages
published in 1967

The Jewel in the Skull is another of Michael Moorcock’s seemingly endless number of fantasy series, the first in the History of the Runestaff quartet. It’s also part of Moorcock’s overarching Eternal Champion mythos, with the hero, Dorian Hawkmoon, being yet another reincarnation of the Eternal Champion. Not that this is important in this book, which can easily be read as a standalone adventure. A such it fair zips along, having been published at the tail end of the era when fantasy and science fiction books were considered long if they managed 150 pages.

It’s also a very blokey book. There are only two female characters of note in it, one of which in the role of the hero’s reward, the other a damsel in distress for the hero to rescue. If you don’t notice or can live with that, the Jewel in the Skull is a clever, fun adventure story. It’s set in a far future Europe, some thousands of years after the Tragic Millennium ended our own civilisation. Much of Europe now is under occupation By Granbretan, a tyrranical empire ruled by an immortal corrupt emperor, a tightly controlled, cruel and strictly hierarchical society. Dorian Hawkmoon, the duke of Köln was the last hero to resist their advance, rising up in rebellion against them, and failed. Now he’s a prisoner in Londra, his fate to serve as entertainment for its rulers…

Read more…

Your happening world (24)

Art & Criticism, Comix, fantasy
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Cartoonist Tracey Butler provides a huge, insanely over-detailed quick reference guide on drawing facial expressions

Arthur B thinks we need to talk about Conan and whether or not Robert E. Howard’s works are worth reading:

But when it comes to more or less any other motivation for reading fantasy fiction – whether you’re angling for improving literature or trashy fun (or trashy literature or improving fun, for that matter), and assuming you are not someone who deliberately reads badly written and offensive fiction for the lulz, there is really no reason to expend time on Howard when there’s a whole world of authors out there who don’t have his grotesque issues and are simply better writers than he is.

In a discussion about Eastercon, a side remark about the offensiveness of complimenting non-native speakers on their English:

English isn’t an optional extra for a lot of people around the world. They are required to learn English to get by in the international world, because English is the lingua franca. Congratulating them like they’re great students, the way we are when we deign to learn other languages, is ignoring the part where we force them to be good at English by dominating the world with our language and treating people like lesser humans when they don’t speak it (or don’t speak it well, or don’t speak it with the “right” accents).

Daughters of SF Mistressworks

Art & Criticism, fantasy, science fiction
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So we all know about Ian Sales’ SF Mistressworks blog don’t we, and how it showcases classic pre-2000 science fiction books by female writers? Well, it has inspired two people to start up their own blogs, showcasing female sf and fantasy writers.

First up is the new Fantasy Mistressworks blog, which is run by Amanda Rutter and is still in the process of starting up. It aims to do exactly the same as the SF Mistressworks blog has been doing, but for fantasy.

Second, there’s Michaela Staton’s Daughters of Promotheus, which goes on where the other two leave off, by showcasing twentyfirst century female sf writers. It’s already blogging up a storm, with several reviews up.

Both are open for submission of reviews, whether new or previously published.

Balancing gender in reviews

books and books review, fantasy, Feminism, science fiction
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For the second year in a row Niall Harrison has looked at the gender balance in science fiction/fantasy reviewing, looking at both which books were reviewed and who reviewed them, for a range of sf and fantasy outlets. A month ago, Renay at Ladybusiness did the same for individual bloggers, which in turn inspired Martin Lewis to take a look at his own output, which prompted me to do the same.

As you know, last year I made an effort to read more female sf writers, both by picking a reading list at the start of the year as by in general paying more attention to female writers. As you may also know, I try and review everything I read, though I don’t always succeed; I’ve read some hundred books last year and wrote only fiftytwo reviews, not all of books finished that year. But of those fiftytwo reviews, it turns out twentyseven, or roughly fifty percent were by female authors. Slightly more than a third of those (twelve) were the books I’d put on my reading list; the rest are not just fantasy and science fiction, but also include a fair few history books.

Why is this important? Because obviously, if you agree that a rough gender balance in science fiction and fantasy is a good thing, just reading more female writers is not enough, you also need to talk more about them too. One of the perennial problems with female writers after all has been that their contributions to the genre have often been overlooked, ignored or minimised. Getting more people to review them is a first step to put this right.

Below is the complete list of reviews:

As for 2012, so far I’ve continued striking the right balance: of the twentyone reviews to date, eleven were of female writers.

Sensawunda

fantasy, posts interesting only to me, science fiction
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China Miéville on what weird fiction means to him:

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I’m teaching a course in Weird Fiction at the University of Warwick, so this has come up a lot. Obviously it’s kind of impossible to come to anything like a final answer, so I approach this in a Beckettian way – try to define/understand it, fail, try again, fail again, fail better…I think the whole “sense of cosmic awe” thing that we hear a lot about in the Weird tradition is to do with the sense of the numinous, whether in a horrific iteration (or, more occasionally, a kind of joyous one), as being completely embedded in the everyday, rather than an intrusion. To that extent the Weird to me is about the sense that reality is always Weird.

Sounds a lot like that old, much derided sfnal concept of sense of wonder, that moment of conceptual breakthrough you get when you’re shown what the universe is really like. In its most mundane form it’s achieved by plopping a Big Dumb Object in front of the reader (Ringworld frex), at its best it’s a literary thrill that no other genre can offer. Weird fiction is one of those genres that’s even less definable than science fiction, but it does have the same sensawunda, if in a more horrorific sense. The best example is H. P. Lovecraft with his dread and revulsion about the scale of the universe and the insignificance of mankind, the anti-science fiction writer.



Incidently, for a personal sort of horror, the opening sentence fragment, “China Miéville (1972 – )”, has it. Two years older than me and look how much more he has accomplished. Moments like that I appreciate where Michel Vuijlsteke is coming from when he talks about how much he had wanted to leave some sort of legacy behind. Work is alright but just work, at best an interesting and challenging way to make money, but not something people will remember you for or all that important in the scheme of things, while unlike Michel I also don’t see myself ever having kids and leaving my mark on the world in that way. There must be more to life than work and entertainment.