Could anyone go to "Forbidden Planet" in London and get some of those? (Check UK or US distribution on the website)

Start grubbing for small change, worms - Sanctuary is back on the map... Lynn Abbey (lots of girlie fantasy, some D&D novelizations – whatever makes you happy) was one of the co-creators, with then-husband Robert Asprin (the M.Y.T.H. series, among others) of Thieves’ World, the groundbreaking, addictive, magnificent shared-world anthology series which gave us the most vibrant city in fantasy, spawned spinoff novels by Jan Morris, Andrew J Offutt, C J Cherryh et al, a roleplaying game supplement (take my word for it, one of the best of its kind), comics, a board game, countless imitations and now, finally, the Next Generation. The new stuff started last year with Lynn Abbey (now solo) writing Sanctuary, a novel that returned the reader to the city some twenty odd years after the events of the original series. This was closely followed by Turning Points, a new anthology. There were some old hands in there – Diana Paxson (popular in Germany with her Arthurian series) and Andrew Offutt (he’s kind of annoying, a snot-nosed kid who happens to have all the coolest comics, so you have to slime to him a little), Lynn Abbey herself, and some newcomers. The most, err, I was about to say illustrious, but I’ll stick with famous, is certainly Raymond Feist. Getting him must have been something of a coup for Abbey, and he turns out a surprisingly modest piece. The other pseudo Big Name is the bizarre Dennis McKiernan, for whom the word modesty is a defilement of the English language and who, predictably, screws up horribly - those who know his Collected Works (the Mithgar series and a couple of standalones) will not be at all surprised by the unfounded arrogance and cloying nature of his writing. We just have to hope he doesn’t get invited back for the next anthology. This December, Tor Books will be re-releasing the original 2 anthologies (Thieves’ World & Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn) in a trade paperback omnibus edition called, oddly, First Blood. By then, both Sanctuary and Turning Points should be out in mass market paperback editions. Considering the turbocapitalism and recycling madness practised by Wizards of the Coast (the current home of D&D), there may even be reason to hope for a D20 repackaging of the original RPG supplement, as well. But the heart of the matter is the city of Sanctuary itself, that unsightly carbuncle nestled in the nether regions of the Rankene Empire’s butt cheeks. This is the seediest and sleaziest of all fantasy cities, with the possible exception of Nadsokor, City of Beggars from Moorcock’s Elric tales. For those who haven’t yet read the originals, you can look forward to a many-coloured series with an atmosphere coming straight out of one of the great eras in fantasy literature, both commercially and artistically, the late 70s - early 80s. This was a time when the fusion of different media (novels and short stories, comics like Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated, and the first fantasy role playing games) was an alchemical marriage between the morally ambivalent Howard-Leiber-Vance classics, the residual hallucinatory fantasy of the 60s and 70s, and the technical possibilities of a new fantasy literature interested in social and historical systems. The format of Thieves’ World, with individual writers concentrating on individual characters within a consensual framework, created a rich and entertaining world that by its very nature defied stasis or stagnation. With two pantheons of the most choleric and irritatingly human gods you’ll meet outside of Leon Garfield’s God Beneath the Sea (go on, try and find a copy, I dare you), with some of the coolest characters not from the works of Steven Erikson or Fritz Leiber, and a deep atmosphere of pain, perversion and shifting loyalties, Thieves’ World remains every bit as readable and relevant as the classic tradition it grew out of and the modern forms it influenced. . Oh, just go and read the damn books, you’ll thank me for it some day.

PS. The original series of anthologies, most volumes of which can be found in Another Country, is much better than this new generation could ever hope to become. But that’s one of the immutable laws of this world, isn’t it?

Lynn Abbey (& others), paperback editions all published by Tor in the US Sanctuary (ISBN 0812561759) Turning Points (076534517X) First Blood (031287488X) (December 2003)

Nice that someone should ask me about Steven Erikson, because his Malazan Tales of the Fallen series is getting better and betterer. Book five, Midnight Tides, is coming out next March, and judging by the incredible leaps forward he’s making from book to book so far, it should be a corker. Now this is absolutely not to say that the series started off weak, because it most emphatically did not. Gardens of the Moon was thrilling and dense and wildly colourful (see elsewhere on the AC website for a short burst of enthusiasm on my part for Erikson’s work), and Deadhouse Gates was a sprawling, insane wonder of a book. The third, Memories of Ice, sinks you yet deeper into an example of world-building that quite simply has no equal in fantasy literature. This immersion gets more hallucinatory, more intense, and more demanding of your intellectual and emotional attention in book four, House of Chains, which begins with a 265 page „novella“ that really slaps the competition down. Because no-one does what Erikson can do with the materials to hand. His interest in and aptitude for creative anthropology is evident in myriad realistically drawn and yet utterly alien cultures, the magic system is visceral and visual, the violence and boredom-traumata of warfare are suggestive of what Glen Cook (Black Company series) could do if he weren’t so defiantly pulp-oriented, and Erikson masters the art of summoning tidal waves of thick black monolithic PLOT in the background like no one else, in any genre. The man’s a master of his trade and, frankly, the only other writer worth reading in the genre of multi-volume epic fantasy these days would be George Martin – everything else is strictly kids’ stuff. That’ll do, now go fill out your Christmas wishlists.

Steven Erikson, paperback editions published by Transworld in the UK: Gardens of the Moon (0553812173) Deadhouse Gates (0553813110) Memories of Ice (0553813129) House of Chains (0553813137)

Unfortunately this is still an age in which Terry Brooks’ every last transcribed orgasmic grunt gets onto someone’s bestseller list, with the expected result that any number of infinitely more gifted writers don’t get a look-in. Whatever, we love digging for raw ore all by ouselves, don’t we? So take the time and pester Alan about getting some Martha Wells, especially the ineptly-titled gaslight fantasy Death of the Necromancer; for those of you who like the ladies, especially when they’re published by Tor, DAW or Roc, there’s also the deliciously naughty Jacqueline Carey, and the solid Carol Berg; and one oddity which may be worth looking into is Lois McMaster Bujold’s Curse of Chalion – yes, an epic fantasy. On the one hand, you’re saying, „Well, DUH, as if there weren’t enough fat fantasy novels around,“ and then you’re thinking, „But all the other SF writers who tried to do fantasy because they thought it would be easy slumming (David Drake springs alarmingly to mind) really sucked, didn’t they?“ And you’d not be wrong on either count. But let’s not forget that Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan stories are, at the heart of it all, warm, exciting character-driven romps. And what better genre than epic fantasy for a little bit of thrilling romping, I ask you?

Good Lord, a 4-column article in the Guardian Weekly (2nd-8th October edition) about the Multiverse and not a mention of any SF or Fantasy writer? Didn't William Gibson make SF "salonfähig" a few years back, robbing the mainstream media of a favoured scapegoat, the literary pendant to heavy metal music and comic books? Isn't Michael Moorcock, probably the source of most SF readers' first contact with the concept of the Multiverse, deserving of a little more acknowledgement? And don't quantum mechanics and string theory make the whole Multiverse idea look a little... dated?

Whatever. Those of us who've known since we were 12 that the physical universe is a sham can gloat in private or like company over our foreknowledge. Let the scientists jump up and down and wave their arms in the air about it all - at least every now and again one of them will come out with a gem of an idea, like the gravity that "waxes and wanes in a paisley pattern" (paraphrased by the article's author from Max Tegmark, cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania.) But they do go and screw things up for themselves by getting terribly excited about stuff like this:

"It gets worse. Mathematicians have proved that a universal computing machine can create an artificial world that is itself capable of creating or simulating its own world, and so on ad infinitum. (...) Because fake worlds can outnumber real ones without restriction,  the "real" multiverse would inevitably spawn a vastly greater number of virtual multiverses. Indeed, there would be a limitless tower of virtual multiverses, leaving the "real" one swamped in a sea of fakes." 

Now, don't correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that ring a small bell to anyone who's read, oh, say, the Amber Chronicles by Roger Zelazny? But unfortunately the only literary precedent to get name dropped is ...yawn... The Matrix. As if it hadn't gotten around yet that the Matrix creators are scavengers, um, I mean, adept and skillful plagiarists? As if it wasn't the case that every reviewer worth his or her salt, and steeped in the Black Arts of namedropping and oneupmanship, had mentioned Philip Dick, at least, in writing about the Matrix? It seems that the Matrix films served to concentrate a certain number of concepts from SF literature in a palatable form, enabling a large number of people to get hip to the protointracephalicvirtualmultiverseparanoidcyberthingy we call call reality. It's a shame, as is so often the case, that the original (and often more gifted) proponents of a particular idea get not only ignored but almost actively buried under a supermarket of derivations. And note that we haven't even begun talking about the "new ideas" in both SF and state-of-the-art experimental scientific theory actually being Platonic shadows of knowledge embedded in myriad myth cycles and belief systems...

All in all the article sucked. The inane attempt to enliven things towards the end by extrapolating "multiverse theory" into the rather disturbing notion that a bad joke will always work somewhere, simply because existence and therefore people are limitless in their variety, merely made of a scientific article the same mockey that the front page made of political reporting. Schwarzenegger for Governor? Please.

Personally I'm more concerned about whether Roy is going to pull through. Because poor Siegfried looked very unhappy on Larry King, and apparently, Montecore was trying to protect Roy, dragging him away from what the tiger perceived to be a threat in traditional cat manner, ie. grabbing the youngling by the scruff of the neck. I felt tears spring to my eyes. Las Vegas is supposedly going to crawl back into its primeval slimehole of sex and gambling, and two nice-mannered Bavarian gay boys are going to while away their twilight years in alternating ridicule and obscurity. In an infinity of Multiverses there will be no lack of such sad endings.

Patrick Charles

“All writers are visitors in another land: they can “take only photographs and leave only footprints³, as the Yanks wisely put it, or they can come with prefab condos and multinational media empires and flat rate DSL and terraform the landscape.³

The whole thing unfortunately has to start with the premise that nobody s innocent. No writer can be excused her part in the machinations of an industry that places the essence of what is being offered, the writing, at a lower footing than the attractiveness of the author (see Beryl Bainbridge¹s complaints back in 2001 about the UK scene, specifically re: Zadie Smith). The book industry is a sick place, its rivers clogged with the dull and degenerate droolings of the Hornbys and Selfs and its continental spine broken by the abysmal weight of its Tolkiens and Jane Austens. No sun can penetrate the global smog of market-driven publishing decisions, and no growing cycle ­ that process which, in the past, enabled difficult, demanding works such as Paradise Lost and Tristram Shandy to grow in appreciation and popularity over many, many years, thus surviving oblivion ­ has a chance of establishing itself against the hyper-accelerated appetite of a readership increasingly trained to accept rather than demand. Because every level of the book industry is helplessly mutating; from the writer, through the publishing houses (gaudy colonial outposts of savage media empires) via the outlets (hardly an area which could still be described as “bookselling³) to the Pavlovian readers, conditioned by Harry Potter to behave towards books ­cultural items with which one needs to spend more than 3 and a half minutes to become acquainted ­ as they do towards pop singles (which aren¹t quite what they once were, either). None of which is to say that things used to be better: it¹s indeed unfortunate that Harry Potter, having allegedly (re-)introduced millions of children to the joys of reading and thereby using their minds in a truly interactive fashion, should be rooted in such conservative and, well, old-fashioned traditions of children¹s books (structure based around the school terms, good vs evil, Terminator-like unslayable Dark Lord of Ultimate Evil, etc etc etc). A few modern ideas are precisely what are missing in this whole messed-up landscape.

• New ideas in writing: and the unforgivable Will Self “reinterpreting³

Wilde into drug and porn fantasies does NOT count as “new ideas³, neither do the uncountable, and equally unforgivable Tolkien clones who flood the Fantasy genre. But this is an enormous topic.

• New ideas in marketing books, which must be done, just better than it¹s being done now, perpertated as it is by inarticulate (ever read a press release from Faber & Faber?) Zeitgeist-enslaved intellectual pygmies with the attention span of a 7 year old on a chocolate high and the discerning eyes of a Daily Mail reader.

• New ideas in manufacturing books, as the quality of paperbacks is insanely uneven and the production quality of hardback editions is a bad, expensive joke; but this is a minor quibble.

• New ideas in distributing books; because the stationary bookseller, quaint old beast, is no longer relevant in this new world.

It is a new world; books and the book trade are the victims of a teleportation prank, awakening on a new world, and what is needed now is a colonial science, an exploratory science, rather than the inhuman pragmatism of market forces, to help literature in general and the book form in particular survive in this new environment.

(End of entry no.) 49

by Patrick