My April 1st piece, detailing Margaret Atwood’s new science fiction magazine, is up over at Locus Online.
My many previous April 1 offerings include:
My April 1st Piece for 2012 is Up at Locus Online
April 1st, 2012Shogazer Sunday: Alison’s Halo’s “Leech”
April 1st, 2012Alsion’s Halo was evidently among the first American band to respond to the first wave of Manchester-base Shoegazer, forming in Arizona in 1992.
Evidently the stopped recording for a while, then reformed as a band called Lochheed (sic), which sounds more ambient.
Serial Killer Followup
March 30th, 2012You may remember my mention of Robert Ben Rhodes (the truck driver accused of torturing, killing and raping as many as 50 women) who was awaiting trial in the same Big Spring, Texas jail that also housed child-abusing polygamist Warren Jeffs.
Rhodes has been sentenced to life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. This is disappointing, since he was already serving a life sentence for murders committed in Illinois and if any U.S. criminal currently behind bars in the U.S. deserves the death penalty, it’s Rhodes. But he’d been awaiting trial since 2009, which suggests there was some problem with prosecution evidence. And since he’s already 66, there was a good chance Rhodes would have died behind bars before the sentence was carried out anyway…
Happy Birthday Tony Banks and Quentin Tarantino!
March 27th, 2012Two names that are not otherwise paired together.
Tony Banks, the keyboardist for Genesis (and, with Mike Rutherford, the only member through all the band’s lineups) is 62 today. In celebration, here’s a live version of “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”:
Director Tarantino turns 49 today, which gives me a chance to talk about his film Django Unchained, an antebellum slave revenge fantasy that looks like looks like a cross between Mandingo and, well, Kill Bill. No trailer yet, but since it’s Tarantino, we know won’t be screwed up by any of that annoying political correctness. Also, damn, look at that cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Kurt Russell, Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx, James Remar (Dexter’s dad), Don Johnson (in the “Designated John Travolta Career Resurrection Role”), Sacha Baron Cohen, and Leonardo DiCaprio as the bad guy.
I fully expect it to rock.
The Wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes
March 26th, 2012Shoegazer Sunday: The Joy Formidable’s “The Greatest Light the Greatest Shade”
March 25th, 2012Welsh trio The Joy Formidable offers up dense shoegaze textures with poppy hooks, sort of like a cross between between Siouxie and the Banshees and Adorable.
Since they’re been on Letterman, I guess they’re hardly a secret…
Another Emanation of the Giant Weirdness Magnet
March 23rd, 2012Call me cynical, but I think the appearance of a 30-foot high golem trudging along a freeway would attract plenty more attention than a single letter to a website serving the Weirdo American community.
Even in Florida.
March Death Anniversaries I Missed
March 23rd, 2012John Belushi’s 30th on March 5.
H. P. Lovecraft’s 75th on March 15.
I think it’s safe to say that the names of those two have seldom been linked together…
Books Read: Henry Kuttner’s The Dark World
March 21st, 2012Henry Kuttner’s The Dark World
Ace, 1965.
At his best, Henry Kuttner was one of top SF/F writers of the Golden Age.
The Dark World is not Henry Kuttner at his best.
Essentially I only picked this up because it had been a while since I read any Kuttner, and this paperback original fit nicely in my bag on my trip to Stavanger. Even though this shows up on the Cawthorn and Moorcock Fantasy 100 list, and Roger Zelazny cites it as an influence on the Amber books, it’s a very uneven (and sometimes overwritten) parallel world fantasy. Protagonist Edward Bond has returned home after a plane crash and long period of jungle convalescence in World War II. He finds himself drawn from his house to a “need fire” by people claiming to need his help in another world. Traveling to the world with them, he discovers he’s actually Ganelon, one of the leaders of The Coven, who ruled the dark world of the title, and who has been bonded to Llyr, a powerful being who demands sacrifice. Ganelon had been exchanged for Bond (his doppelganger on earth) by the magic of his enemies, but whose memories of the dark world are still incomplete. After his fellow Coven members secretly dress him in the robes of sacrifice, he decides that some adjustment of loyalties is in order…
Despite it’s brevity (The Dark World clocks in at 126 pages), modern readers are likely to have problems with this. For one thing, the prose occasionally takes florid flights that betray its pulp-era origins. (“Medea and Edeyrn and Matholoch! The names of the three beat like muffled drums in my brain.”) Exclamation points are freely dispensed, frequently in one-word sentences. (“Llyr! the though of it-of him-crystallized that decision in my mind.”) In the world of post-Lord of the Rings fantasy, the Dark World seems both underdeveloped and under-populated, and the semi-scientific mutant explanation is unconvincing.
It’s not awful; the story moves along at a steady clip. There are also a few points of formal novelty. It was probably rare to have a novel told from the viewpoint of the bad guy, and who remained the bad guy, pretty much all of the novel. Also, the scene where Edward Bond and Ganelon face off against each other in some sort of nether corridor between the worlds makes you wonder if Don Ingalls, the screenwriter for the Star Trek episode “The Alternative Factor,” read The Dark World, given the obvious parallels.
if you haven’t read any Kuttner, this is not the one to start with.