Shiny Aliens, Atlanteans and Serendipitous Exiles from Space

Most of my reading lately has been taken up with George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire as I try to catch up with the TV series and avoid spoilers (I'm into A Dance of Dragons), but a couple of events recently saw me in need of my e-reader as opposed to thick epic paperbacks. As a result I read two short stories from old pulps.

One was pretty dreadful if vaguely amusing. It was Hal K Wells' Cavern of the Shining Ones which appeared in Astounding back in 1932. The Shining Ones turn out to be a highly advanced alien race which came to Earth 10,000 years ago and went to war with the Atlanteans. They destroyed Atlantis but not before the Atlanteans had made the planet uninhabitable for them for 10,000 years. They went into suspended animation except for a small number who fled home so someone could come back one day and wake up the rest.

It has some moments of suspense early on, not highly effective but they're there. It also has a quite blood-thirsty battle, but it doesn't really fire and the plot is pretty weak.

The other story was more interesting; Judith Merril's Exile from Space. It was published in 1956 in Universe as a 'short novel' but I'm not sure it would even qualify as a novella these days. Regardless it was a well told story of the 'other' with some nice satire and social commentary. The exile of the title is the main character, a woman who comes to Earth for unknown reasons, sent by unknown others she just refers to as 'them'.

Much of the plot is taken up with rather mundane human experiences, most prominently a romance, but the exile's approach and insights are handled really well and make the piece a fun read. Merril also keeps a good level of intrigue as to who the woman is and neatly plants the suggestion that the whole story is true with some direct from the author narration.

I admit I also found reading this one slightly serendipitous as the observational style in some of the early passages reminded me of my City Sketches (shameless plug and link to the published copy of Sketch No 1 here). I find serendipity encouraging, so the City Sketches idea is certainly continuing. Eventually I'm hoping to put out a collection of them, interspersed with some photos and maybe some longer stories. The beauty of them is they're so short they don't take away from my bigger projects, particularly Hierophants' Fall which reached another milestone recently so progress continues.

Meanwhile, don't trust rude enigmatic scientists who wear goggles - they're probably shiny alien slugs hellbent on conquest - and keep your eyes open as you go about life, you never know what or who you're really looking at.

Keep dreaming!

ERB - Master of Adventure

One thing I did during the period I wasn't blogging was go to Hobart to see some of Dark MoFo, which I hope to blog about soon. While there we (my family and I) of course went to the Salamanca Markets, and, of course, I looked at a lot of second-hand books. I managed to resist many temptations but there was one old paperback that caught my eye. I tried to resist - I told my wife I'd leave it and if no-one had bought it before we came back that way, then I would buy it.

The book, which you have guessed I bought, is Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure by Richard A Lupoff. It caught my eye because of the cover illustration which was clearly a Frank Frazetta painting and I can't resist any work by that man. If it was just a Burroughs' novel I could have resisted but this is much more.

It's a scholarly look at the collected works of ERB considering them individually and as series and as a whole in terms of their success both on their own terms and in terms of their influence on the genre.

Burroughs seems almost forgotten now, although his major creations are remembered. Tarzan is of course the most famous and Lupoff does a good job pointing out how the Tarzan most of us are familiar with is not the one Burroughs wrote. For one thing he never spoke in the "Me Tarzan, you Jane" style, it was more a "My name is Tarzan, pleased to meet you Jane." Although, he had to learn English from a Frenchman, since he spoke French first. Yes, Tarzan was trilingual if you include 'beast', bilingual if you don't.

His second most famous series were his Barsoom novels, Barsoom being the name Martians have for Mars. These have recently suffered through the horrible Disney film John Carter, which I can see no justification for. There are scenes in it which prove the people behind the film had read the book so why they proceeded to ignore its heart, rip out its soul and mutilate its corpse is beyond me.

But, once you get to what the real Tarzan and Barsoom stories are you still don't come away with literary brilliance. These are unapologetic adventure stories written primarily to entertain. ERB himself said he didn't write because he wanted to be a novelist or create great art. He was poor, he had a family, so in the evenings he wrote on the back of envelopes and managed to sell the result for a few hundred dollars to one of the pulps of the day - a big sum in 1912.

As such ERB wrote slavishly, but didn't spend hours and hours poring over his work refining it. This led to a high output, most of his books took him a couple of months to write, but also many flaws. There is no contention that Burroughs was a particularly skilled writer. His stories are full of plot holes and rely heavily on coincidence to turn out. But, for the most part, they are exciting adventure stories filled with outlandish beings and lost civilisations.

And where his plots may be full of holes, his civilisations are full of detail with rich histories and cultures. Outlandish yes, but rich.

Lupoff also places ERB in a chronology, looking at some of his sources and considering some of the influences he had - suggesting that even sword and sorcery is deeply indebted to Tarzan, despite it not being the genre of Lord Greystoke. I think there could be debate on how strong the influences Lupoff discusses were but it's always interesting to consider the development of genres over time.

Lupoff finishes by pondering the longevity of ERB's works and suggests that, as a character, Tarzan had a good chance to outlive the other modern 'supermen' of literature - Superman and Sherlock Holmes. Back in the 60s maybe that was possible, but clearly it hasn't come true. Maybe if his film incarnations hadn't been such pale reflections of their source material he'd have done better. And the abovementioned disgrace to John Carter certainly won't help ERB's reputation.

But Lupoff has encouraged me to read more of these adventures, and I hope the adaptations can be forgotten without us losing the source material completely. There are fantastic vistas to visit within those pages, let's do some travelling.

Keep dreaming!

Catching Up

So it's been half a year since I wrote anything in here. That's deplorable. Anyway, it also leaves a lot of things uncovered. I don't think I'll ever be able to fully catch up in any detail so I'll try to put some things in here.

In terms of my writing the past six months have been pretty good. I've had two very short works published by Grouch - an online literary journal that aims to promote new writing/writers. The first actually came out in December last year, and I'd written it a few years before that. The second came out last week. The newer piece is very different for me, it's real life for one thing. It can be found here.

I've also been working slowly but surely on Hierophants' Fall, but in the meantime I entered Chapter One Blitz through Freshly Squeezed. This was a sort of competition where the first chapter of a YA novel was submitted and read by teens, peers and professionals. All of whom then gave feedback - so winning was a bonus, not one I got but I won through the feedback.

I submitted part of the first chapter of The Scarlet Ring, although I left the prologue out which I had to take into account when I got some of the feedback about how books open. Overall the feedback was positive and the criticism all agreed so it gave me a clear direction to go in. So that was a great experience and one that deserved a blog entry or two on its own.

There's been a lot of reading I haven't mentioned as well. Too much for this blog but I will mention two books: Last House Burning by Katy Scott and Unwanted by Amanda Holohan. Disclaimer - Katy and Amanda are friends and former co-workers. Amanda was a fellow subeditor and Katy was one of the writers who happily didn't need much work done subediting wise.

Amanda was already a published author when I met her; her first book was The King's Fool, which she nicely gave me a copy of when she left work. It's a great fantasy novel with some amazing characters and a vivid world. The sad part is, it's book one of a trilogy and books two and three are not published, so I remain hanging on that one.

Unwanted similarly left me hanging but thankfully in this case the publisher is running with the series. It's a dystopia with a teenage heroine, which may sound familiar to fans of the Hunger Games and Divergent series, but it's very much its own world and story so don't get any silly notions of bandwagons or anything like that. For one thing, there's a rich vein of alien invasion in it as well. The world is very detailed and has a strong mythology and history, which runs counter to truth so the world of our heroine is turned on its head.

Katy is self-published, for which she has my strong admiration. Last House Burning is also YA but in the urban fantasy genre. It's actually a mix of comedy and drama with some delicious satire. It has an Australian setting which I loved, and most of the action takes place in a fictional suburb of the Blue Mountains - where I grew up, so it had a nice homey feel for me. Not that I've met one of the Sentenced, St Peter or any employees of the devil. It's a fun ride with characters you can genuinely feel for and invest in. You can buy it here.

Hope to hear more on these pages more often!

Keep dreaming!