New Year's Resolution, Redux

I've been busy preparing for a presentation I'm giving at a conference next week, so the previous post on Kull took me longer to get up than I had anticipated.  It was less than a week ago I posted a list of New Year's resolutions relating to this blog, One was to post here at least twice a week.  I have a couple of things to write about, and thought I could get at least one of them posted before I leave for the conference on Sunday.  Then my wife experienced a little unexpected employment ... hiccup this afternoon.  Depending on how long it takes to find her other employment, I may have to spend less time on this blog and devote myself to finding other sources of income.  I'm not going away.  Adventures Fantastic is here for the long haul, but it's possible that for a (hopefully) brief season, I may only post once a week or so, and shorter posts more often than longer posts.

Blogging Kull: The Shadow Kingdom

Kull:  Exile of Atlantis
Robert E. Howard
Illustrations by Justin Sweet
Del Rey
Trade Paperback, 319 p., $15.95

Just so you know, this post will contain  spoilers.

"The Shadow Kingdom" was the first of the Kull stories to see print, and it appeared in the August 1929 issue of Weird Tales.  In this story Kull has, with the help of some dissatisfied nobles, seized the throne of Valusia from the tyrant who's sat on it for a while. Apparently he's been on the throne long enough for the luster to have faded, for Kull makes it very clear he prefers the straightforward manner of his barbarian kinsmen.  You know, the ones who've exiled him.

After a parade in his honor, Kull is holding court when an emissary from the Pictish ambassador requests a private council with him.  Kull grants it and takes advantage of the opportunity to bait the man, the Picts being ancient enemies of the Atlanteans.  The emissary, a warrior, requests that Kull come alone that night to a banquet with the Pictish ambassador, Ka'nu.

Kull's suspicious, but goes.  Ka'nu informs Kull that only Kull can usher in an era of "peace and goowill", of "man loving his fellow man", to Valusia and the Seven Kingdoms.  This is somewhat ironic seeing as how Kull is a warrior king who carries deep hatreds.  It's also not what you would normally expect in a Robert E. Howard story.  In order to do this, Kull has to live.  The next in line to the throne is a figurehead controlled by a race of serpent men, if not actually a serpent man himself.  Ka-nu will send proof of this through Brule the Spearslayer.  Kull will recognize Brule by the armlet he'll be wearing.  To show he can be trusted, Ka-nu reveals to Kull that he has a jewel stolen from the Temple of the Serpent.  If the priests of the Serpent knew its location, Ka-nu would have a very short life expectancy.

The next night, Brule appears.  He's the Pictish warrior who brought the message from Kan-nu in the first place.  He reveals to Kull a secret society of serpent people who have the bodies of men but the heads of snakes.  Through some type of sorcery they are able to assume the faces of any person they wish. When they die (read are killed by Kull or Brule), their heads revert to their natural forms.

You can probably figure out that there will be a lot of people who turn out to be other than who they appeared.  It turns out the serpent men are an ancient, mongrel race who have a long history in Valusia, although it's a history that most of Valusia's citizens are ignorant of. 

Naturally, Kull triumphs, but not easily.  Brule and Ka-nu are afraid he dies from his wounds, although he only loses consciousness.  The intriguing part of the story, for me at least, is the depth at which Howard shows us Kull's thoughts.  Kull wonders which is the real Kull, the monarch "who sat on the throne or was it the real Kull who had scaled the hills of Atlantis, harried the far isles of the sunset, and laughed upon the green roaring tides of the Atlentean sea."  This brooding is provoked of course by Kull's discovery of the Serpent Men and the masks they don to deceive people for evil means, something he had already encountered in his courtiers, albeit in a less literal sense. 

 Evidence indicates "The Shadow Kingdom" was written, or at least begun, in 1926, the year Howard turned 20.  It's a common occurrence to many men and women around that time in life to discover that people aren't always what they seem, but don masks to further their own ends.  I think it's safe to speculate that perhaps some of that discovery of the realities of life was making it's way into Howard's fiction.  Many a child and teenager is dismayed to discover that becoming an adult isn't all the fun and privilege it seems when you're young.  I know my eight year old certainly has the illusion that being an adult is more fun than being a child because it means getting to stay up late and eat and drink close to bedtime.  Would that it were that simple.

Another thing common to young adults and teens is the fear that they can't cut it as an adult.  This is a fear that can return later in life when a person experiences a major upset, often but not always the loss of a job or business.  Affirmation that a person can function as an accepted member of adult society is one of the purposes of a rite of passage.  Entire books have been written on this topic.  I have to wonder if Howard was feeling some of that uncertainty about this time in his life.  I know he made a deal with his father to give writing a try for one year and if at the end of that year he wasn't making a living, he would find a regular job.  Kull has thoughts along these lines more than once in the story.

The first incident occurs during the brooding quoted in the paragraph above when Kull thinks of himself as "the futile king who sat upon the throne - himself a shadow."  The second occurs at the climax of the story when Kull and Brule have escaped a trap in which the serpent men have disguised themselves as his council in order to assassinate him.  Hurrying back to the council chamber, they find the real council in session with a serpent man disguised as Kull himself.  For a moment Kull wonders "Do I stand here or is that Kull yonder in very truth and am I but a shadow, a figment of thought?"  Maybe I'm reading too much into the text, but it sounds to me as though Kull is experiencing a little insecurity.  Not something you would expect from a Howard hero.

After all the serpent men in the palace have been dispatched, Kull swears an oath to destroy all the remaining ones.  He swears this oath on his own identity as Kull, king of Valusia.  While I may be stretching things a bit to interpret this ending as a metaphor for Howard striving to make his way in the world as a writer, I don't think I'm too far off the mark.

"The Shadow Kingdom" has been called the first true sword and sorcery story, a statement that is not without some controversy.  I'm willing to go along with that premise, at least for the sake of this post, because it points out something that I think can't be understated.  Sword and sorcery has been dismissed by its critics as shallow and cliched, without depth, power fantasies of social misfits and closet homosexuals, and mind candy or softcore porn for adolescent boys.  What "The Shadow Kingdom" is, at least as I read the story, is a reflection on identity.  While this is certainly an issue of adolescence, it's also an issue that concerns everyone at most stages of life, to a lesser or greater degree. Furthermore, I see it as a meditation on the meaning of life, especially the role one will play in that life.  Until he sets out to eradicate the serpent men, Kull is lost, searching for meaning after achieving his goal of becoming king and finding it unfulfilling. I'm fairly sure Howard didn't consciously set out to create a new form of literature when he wrote "The Shadow Kingdom", but on some level was dealing with the issues in his life in the best way he knew how: by fictionalizing them.  Creating sword and sorcery was to some degree incidental.  That's a pretty impressive legacy, to create a new genre with those themes at its core.  Not bad for "escapism", huh?  So the next time you hear someone dissing sword and sorcery as not being real literature or worthy of serious consideration, give them a copy of "The Shadow Kingdom."

New Year's Resolutions

I've never been much for New Year's Resolutions, but I thought I'd try a few this year.  Goal setting being a key to success and all that.

In addition to the usual things like lose all the weight I've put on in the last year, get more sleep and exercise, lower my caffiene intake, laugh more, save more, spend less, here are some dealing with this blog and related matters.

1.  Post here at least twice a week.

2.  Finish at least one short story per month and send it to an editor who might buy it.  Repeat until it sells.

3.  Finish at least two novels this year and send them to editors until they sell.

4.  Promote historical adventure, fantasy, and science fiction as opportunities to do so arise.

Happy New Year everyone!

Sins of the Pioneers

Sins of the Pioneers
James Pylant
Jacobus Books
Trade paperback, 234 p., $15.95

Since my father-in-law is in both the San Angelo Community Band and a member of the Twin Mountain Tonesmen, the local barbershop group, and since both were performing in the Community Christmas Tree lighting a few weeks ago, it was only natural that I and the Adventures Fantastic Support Staff (Spousal Unit and Offspring) would be in attendance.  We arrived early in order to get seats at the front, and since the Cactus Bookshop was in the middle of the next block, I wandered down to kill some time and see what I could find.

The Cactus Bookshop specializes in Texas and western writing and carries just about everything ever written by Elmer Kelton.  That's not too surprising since Kelton lives in San Angelo.  It's well worth a visit if you happen to be in the area, even if the owner doesn't have any Robert E. Howard in stock.  (I need to discuss that problem with him next time I'm in.)

What I found was Sins of the Pioneers, a history of crime and scandal in Stephenville, Texas.  In addition to being home to one of the Texas A&M University System schools as well as science fiction writer Taylor Anderson, Stephenville seems to have been home to a number of murderers, thieves, scoundrels, grifters, bigamists, and at least one ghost.  Not the sort of folks you would necessarily want to have over for dinner, but probably more interesting after-dinner-conversation companions than the ones who would probably be your dinner guests.  I haven't had much time to do more than peruse the book, but since many of the events are short, it's great reading for those times when you only have a few minutes.

Over at the REH:  Two Gun Raconteur site, Damon C. Sasser has been doing a series of posts about Robert E. Howard's Texas, in which he describes in some detail the events Howard was interested in or places that had an impact on Howard's life and work.  They're great reading.  While I don't want to try to duplicate that here, only one county, Eastland County, separates Cross Plains (in Callahan County) from Stephenville (in Erath County).  I can't help but wonder if Howard was aware of some of the incidents in the book.  Stephenville was, and is, one of the larger population centers in that part of the state.  Given the interest he developed in the history of the area, I find it hard to believe he wasn't aware of at least some of the things in the book.  I'm slowly working my way through Howard's collected correspondence, and if I come across anything in the correspondence relating to Sins of the Pioneers that Damon hasn't already written about, I'll let you know.

The Last Kingdom

The Last Kingdom
Bernard Cornwell
Harper, 333 p., $14.99

I loved this book.  It had it all.  Shield walls, battles, invasions, treachery, betrayal, individual combat, naval battles, storms at sea.  This is the first of the Saxon Novels, and the first book by Cornwell I've read.  It won't be the last. 

The story revolves around a boy named Uhtred, who is the son of an earl on the northern coast of England in the ninth century.  Shortly after his tenth birthday, the Danes decided to settle in England.  All of England.  And they are not invited, nor are they welcome.  After his older brother is killed on a scouting mission, Uhtred becomes the heir, and his father begins to take an interest in him, which means taking him along on military campaigns as part of his education in his noble responsibilities.  After his father is killed in a battle, Uhtred is captured by one of the Danish chieftains, Ragnar.  Ragnar adopts Uhtred as a son.  Meanwhile his uncle, who was left watching the castle, has decided to become the earl and tries to have Uhtred killed. 

Over half the book is devoted to Uhtred's growing up, and in comparison to the latter part of the book, when Uhtred is a grown warrior, this part is slow.  That's not to say it isn't interesting, but a lot of what's happening here is character development and setting up a blood feud that will carry over into the next book and maybe the ones following.  As one character says, and I'm paraphrasing here, feuds go on forever. It's definitely worth investing time in. We get an education along with Uhtred in both English ways and Danish culture.  This makes the book richer and more complex.

There were times when I was reminded of Robert Low's The Whale Road, although the books are quite different in focus and tone.  Both concern a boy growing to manhood in a warrior culture that is at odds with Christianity, who by the end of the book is a respected leader.  But that's about where the similarities end.  The Whale Road read more like a fantasy quest novel than, well, much of the fantasy I've read.  The gods, dragons, Valkyries and  such were all real to the characters in both books, and Low does a masterful job of making that worldview seem real to the reader.  Cornwell on the other hand, while not ignoring the religious differences between the cultures and even stressing them at times, fails to make the gods as real as they are in The Whale Road.  Instead, reading The Last Kingdom made me feel like I was reading history by a witness, which was the intent.

Not only did I feel like I was reading history, I wanted to go and read history before I was done.  In my mind, this is one of the characteristics of a successful historical novel.  This is a time period I don't know much about.  There were no films for my high school history football coach teacher to show, so we didn't really cover it.

The last kingdom of the title is the kingdom of Alfred the Great, who is the sole English king left long before he appears on stage.  Well, the sole English king who isn't a lackey for the Danes at any rate.  Uhtred ends up in his service after having to leave Danish lands under really bad circumstances.  And I mean really, really bad circumstances.  As in an escalation of that blood feud I mentioned.  The latter part of the book concerns Uhtred becoming a trusted leader in Alfred's army.  You can probably guess that the Danes are still hanging around causing trouble at the end of the book.  Cornwell is taking his time and not rushing through the events that helped shape English history.

I may not know as much as I'd like about this time period, but I'm going to address that before I read the next book.  Which will be soon.

Blogging Kull: Exile of Atlantis

Kull:  Exile of Atlantis
Robert E. Howard
Illustrated by Justin Sweet
Del Rey
Trade Paperback, 319 p., $15.95

It's been a while since I read any of the Kull stories.  I think the last time I read one was when I was an undergraduate, but I may have been in graduate school.  (We've talked about that memory and age thing before.  At least I think we have.  I seem to recall we did.)  Why it's taken me so long to get back to these stories, I'm not entirely sure.  Other demands on my reading time, mostly, including other Robert E. Howard works I hadn't read.

Anyhoo, in the intervening years since I last read Kull, I've grown and (hopefully) matured.  So I thought I'd take a fresh look at these tales.  In some circles, Kull is often thought of as a prototype Conan, an opinion that's only reinforced by the fact that the first Conan story was a rewrite of an unsold Kull tale.  But is that really so?  Howard, in spite of his critics, was quite adept at characterization.  I'm not sure I buy that idea, even though I have to admit that when I was much younger, I did pick up on the similarities between the two characters more than their differences.  It's time to take a fresh look.  Over the next half year or so, I'll be examining them in some detail.  I'm using the Del Rey edition with the story fragments and synopses, even though I own a copy of the Subterranean slipcased edition.  That edition is out of print and probably beyond the budget of many people.  The stories are the same in both volumes.

Oh, and these posts about Kull will contain spoilers.  So if you haven't read the story (or stories) under discussion, you might want to keep that in mind.  You have been notified.

Howard began thirteen Kull stories between 1926 and 1930, and he completed ten of them before moving on to other characters.  Of those ten, only three saw publication in his lifetime, and one of those is a Bran Mak Morn story in which Kull is brought forward in time to play a major role.  The first story in the book is an untitled story that was published under the title "Exile of Atlantis" in 1967 in the Lancer paperback King Kull.  Not counting the full page illustration facing the first page of text, it's only seven pages long, and that includes the illustrations on six pages.

The storyline is simple.  Kull, Gor-na, and his son Am-ra are talking over dinner at their wilderness camp.  What they're doing in the wilderness, we're never told.  The whole discussion centers around Kull's disdain for some of the tribal traditions.  It seems he's been adopted into Gor-na's tribe, which is the Sea Mountain tribe.  Kull doesn't know who his tribe is.  Rather he "was a hairless ape roaming in the woods" who "could not speak the language of men."  If that sounds a little like Mowgli from Kipling's Jungle Books, it shouldn't surprise you that Kipling was one of the writers who influenced Howard.  We aren't given any details of how Kull came to live with the Sea Mountain tribe or how he learned to speak.

The talk then turns to the troubles Atlantis has had with Valusia and the Seven Empires.  Kull isn't as impressed with them as Gor-na is.  He even expresses a desire to one day see Valusia.  Gor-na tells him if he does, it will be as a slave.  There is also mention made of Lemurian pirates causing trouble.  After some further discussion, the men get some sleep.  During the night, Kull has a dream in which he is hailed as a king by a large crowd.

The next morning the men return to the tribe's caves to discover a young woman is to be burned at the stake for the crime of marrying a Lemurian pirate.  The only person who seems to show some sympathy is Am-ra, whose "strange blue eyes were sad and compassionate."  Even the  girl's mother screams for her death.  Kull thinks this punishment is a bit much, but he isn't in a position to rescue her.  The best he can do is offer her a quick death rather than a slow painful one.  He catches her eye and touches the hilt of his flint dagger.  She gives him a small nod, and he throws the dagger, piercing her heart.

The enraged mob, cheated of their vengeance, turns on Kull, who has already begun to climb the cliff next to the village and escape.  He is saved from being hit by an arrow when Am-ra bumps the archer's arm.

And that's all there is to this story.  It might not look like a lot, but it seems to me the point here is to establish a little bit of Kull's backstory and define his character.  In this Howard is successful.  Kull is a man who is not afraid, either of battle or of asking unpopular questions.  He does the right thing as he sees it, even when he's the only one willing to take a stand.  In this story, doing so costs him his home.  We know from the foreshadowing in the dream that Kull will one day see Valusia, not as a traveler but as its king.

While the action in the story is not at the level of what many readers expect from Howard, the noble barbarian is there.  Remember, this was years before a certain Cimmerian made his way through the kingdoms of the Hyborian Age.  Howard was beginning to develop the themes he would return to again and which would occupy a great deal of his thoughts.  To return to certain themes over a period of time, developing and perfecting them, is not an uncommon thing for an author to do.

I don't know when this story was written.  I seem to recall someone (I want to say Rusty Burke) had put together a timeline of the known composition dates and best estimates of the rest of Howard's work, but I can't find it online.  Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.  In his afterward "Atlantean Genesis", Patrice Louinet states it was either between July 1925 and January 1926 or between August and September 1926.  Whether the story was ever submitted for publication is unknown. This would make it one of the earliest stories Howard wrote in his career.

What I did find interesting is that Kull seems to have grown out of an abortive series of stories and poems about Am-ra of the Ta-an.  These consist of two poems (one only five lines long) plus three fragments.  All are included in this book.  In a letter now lost, but quoted by Alvin Earl Perry in A Biographical Sketch of Robert E. Howard (1935), Howard talks about a story in which a minor character takes over.  "Exile of Atlantis" is the only story we know of that fits this description.

None of these things should be surprising.  It has been well documented that Howard would sometimes reuse names from earlier stories, sometimes altering them slightly, sometimes not.  Even a certain Cimmerian was known as Amra for a while in his wanderings.  An interesting side note to this point, Amra of Akbitana appears in "The Frost King's Daughter", which was published in the March 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan under the title "Gods of the North" and later rewritten as the Conan story "The Frost-Giant's Daughter", the second in the Conan series. 

Or to put it this way, what we are seeing with "Exile of Atlantis" is Howard stretching himself as a writer.  The events of the story may be dismissed as minor by the casual reader, but to do so would be a mistake.  I maintain that this is an important tale, especially if it was the first Kull story written, which it seems to be.  "Exile of Atlantis"  is an example of Howard beginning to stretch himself and warm up, to use an track analogy, before beginning to sprint and hit his stride with his later works.

Electronic Markets 2

 The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 5
Jonathan Strahan, ed.
Night Shade Books
Trade Paperback, 500 p., $19.99
Publication scheduled for March 2011

A few weeks ago, I looked at the table of contents in Rich Horton's forthcoming Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2011.  At the time, I commented on the proportion of selections published in electronic venues as opposed to print venues and speculated as to what the percentage would be in the other annual "Bests".  Since Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year is due out in March, I particularly wondered about that one.  Night Shade Books had posted a page for the anthology but had not (and still hasn't) listed the contents. Oldcharliebrown posted a comment (thank you) informing me Strahan had listed his ToC on his website.  Why I didn't think to look there, I don't know.  Anyway, Strahan, unlike Horton, didn't list the publications for his selections.  Rather than reproduce the list myself, you can find it here.  I spent a little time last night looking them up, and here's what I found.

Strahan selected 29 stories, with 6 duplicating Rich Horton's selections.  Those stories are the ones by Broderick, Hand, Landis, Parker, Swirsky, and Watts.  This isn't surprising, since each year there are a handful of stories that make all, or nearly all, the annual "Best" lists.  The good thing is that there are so few duplicates.  I think that shows a healthy variety in the science fiction and fantasy fields.  What is a little surprising is that four of those were published electronically, with three coming from Subterranean. 

Anyway, of these 29, 13 were published in electronic format, or 44.5 %.  That's slightly lower than Horton's53.5%, but still a respectable portion from electronic media.  Of those 13, Subterranean was the big winner, with five selections.  Strange Horizons was next with three, and Apex followed with two.  Strahan selected one each from Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and shareable.net.  The electronic venues not represented that were most surprising were Fantasy magazine and Tor.com. Horton chose four stories from Fantasy and one from Tor.  Clearly the editors have different tastes.

Where Strahan's selections really get interesting to me is the print sources for his selections.  He picked one story each from eight different anthologies, plus two from Stories edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio.  One story was published as a chap book, and the remaining five came from magazines, with four from Asimov's and one from F&SF.  As in the Horton anthology, no stories were selected from Analog, nor were any from Interzone, Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, or Postscripts, although Postscripts is now an anthology rather than a print magazine.  I don't remember if they made the change this past year or the previous one; probably the previous.  Time slips away when you start getting older.  And given the problems RoF had this past year, it's not surprising to see that publication's absence.

It seems to me that the print magazines haven't done too well this year in terms of getting tapped for Year's Best anthologies.  While Asimov's appears to be something of an exception, on the whole they seem to be taking a pounding from the electronic and anthology markets.  At least Analog certainly is.  Being a hard science kind of guy, that disturbs me a little, but that's a topic too large for this post.  I'm not sure that's an entirely bad thing from the standpoint of good markets and good fiction being published, whatever the format.  Of course, the Hartwell/Cramer and Dozois volumes are still to come, and I'm sure there will be one or two others that will pop up.  It will be interesting to see where these volumes draw their choices.

This is the first year I've looked closely at the publication sources for any of the Year's Best collections, at least from a pseudo-statistical standpoint.  I have both the Horton and Strahan titles going back to their inceptions, so I could take a closer look (if I can find the time).  It would be fun to look at just when the electronic venues began to make such inroads on the print media.

And for those you haven't seen it but might be interested, Lois Tilton summarized the short fiction markets at Locus Online recently.  I'll not comment on what she says because she reads far more widely than I have time to, and I don't see the point in potentially starting an argument that I'm not well enough informed on.  I'll just say she brings up some good points about the same venues producing the best quality.