Tag: fantasy

Sword and Sorceress, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: Variable

swordandsorceressIn the series of anthologies of original stories which began with this volume, the late editor Bradley mines similar territory, and deals with similar strong female protagonists, as does Esther Freisner in the later Chicks in Chainmail series. The quality of writing (at least in the initial volumes) is high in both; the main difference being that Bradley’s series tends to feature tales that are more serious in tone, with less humor. (Though that doesn’t mean that they all necessarily have none of the latter; and a couple would have been at home in the later series as well.) That doesn’t reduce their entertainment value, and often makes them more compelling.

The 15 stories in this volume come in great variety, as do the settings, and the heroines. Some of the latter can be rough-edged, and may sometimes do some things I wouldn’t do, or recommend; but all of them have good hearts at their core, and earn the reader’s goodwill and respect. (Some of them, like Charles de Lint’s bounty huntress Aynber, and Charles R. Saunders’ alternate-African warrior woman Dossouye, are series characters who appear in a number of stories elsewhere by these authors.) Some of my favorites here are “The Valley of the Troll,” “Gimmile’s Songs,” “Severed Heads” (which isn’t as grisly-gory as the title makes it sound), “Child of Orcus,” “Daton and the Dead Things” and “Sword of Yraine.” But virtually all of these are worth reading; the only one here that I felt was a little weak is “House in the Forest.”

Bradley’s substantial introduction is an added benefit of the book; she provides a good historical sketch of the role of female characters in sword-and-sorcery fantasy fiction, and some really insightful comments on the appeal and value of strong, three-dimensional heroines in this field. (Her meaty bio-critical notes on each story’s author are a very worthwhile feature, as well!) She very rightly outlines an equalitarian perspective that explicitly differentiates her purpose from “feminist propaganda” and Woman-uber alles male-bashing; the female perspective here is rightly seen as an essential part of the human perspective, that includes both genders as important, needed and responsible contributors to the world and the human story.

Even so, I would differ with her on one point. Though she dedicates this volume to C. L. Moore and to “all of us who grew up wanting to be Jirel,” she faults Moore here for Jirel’s realization in “Black God’s Kiss,” (which isn’t included here) after killing her adversary Guillaume, that she loved him; Bradley thinks this weakens the character, and sends the message that “woman’s pride only stood in the way of true happiness –interpreted as surrender to a man.” Personally, I didn’t take Moore’s story that way; I interpreted it as a true-to-life reflection of the fact that sometimes underneath anger and enmity there can be a bond between two people –just as a male, too, might feel attracted to a woman who can fight him tooth-and-nail, and even defeat him. (And it’s as much, or more, Guillaume’s pride as Jirel’s that separates them.) But that’s a quibble –and one that has nothing to do with the great stories in this collection!

Editor: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Publisher: DAW Books, available through Amazon, currently only as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Did You Say Chicks?, edited by Esther Friesner

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆

didyousaychicksPublished in 1998, this is the second of several installments in editor Friesner’s series of original-story anthologies featuring strong, mostly warrior women in (mostly) a sword-and-sorcery fantasy milieu. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s older, long-running Sword and Sorceress series is the closest counterpart, but the stories Friesner selects are much more often on the humorous side, and relatively lighter on actual violence –the protagonists here can handle themselves well in a fight, but tend in practice to triumph more by the use of intelligence, or to be able to find common ground with potential opponents where that’s possible. (Lethal violence is more apt to be mentioned, if at all, as an event that happened before the action in the particular story.) Many of my comments in my review of the first collection, Chicks in Chainmail, are relevant here, and my overall enjoyment was similar. (I rated both books at four stars.)

There are 19 stories here, written by 23 authors (three are two-person collaborations); as she did the first time, Friesner herself contributes a story, in addition to her role as editor. Eleven of these, including Harry Turtledove, Elizabeth Moon, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and Margaret Ball, also contributed to the 1995 first collection. Among the authors new to the series (and to me) here are Barbara Hambly, Sarah Zettel and S. M. Stirling. (Short biocritical endnotes are provided for all of the authors.) Besides her story, Friesner also prefaces the book with a dedicatory poem to Lucy Lawless, star of the then still-running Xena, Warrior Princess TV show. In keeping with the tone of most of the stories, her poetic style is more Ogden Nash than Dante, and she doesn’t take herself too seriously (after the poem, she appends a quote from Dr. Johnson, “Bad doggerel. No biscuit!”) –but there’s an underlying seriousness of equalitarian feminist message as well. (The final selection, Adam-Troy Castro’s “Yes, We Did Say Chicks!” is a similarly tongue-in-cheek flash fiction, but it’s cute!)

Not all of the stories are actual sword-and-sorcery, or fantasy. One of the two strictly serious ones, Turtledove’s “La Difference,” is a science-fiction yarn set on the Jovian moon Io, as a male-female pair of scientists trek across a dangerous and unforgiving alien terrain as they flee from enemy soldiers bent on slaughtering them. (This is also one where the female doesn’t singlehandedly save the day; she and her male partner work as a very good team.) Laura Anne Gilman’s “Don’t You Want to Be Beautiful?” is set in our own all-too-familiar world, where females are pressured by advertising and culture to fixate on their appearance and spend vast sums on products that supposedly enhance it; and it isn’t clear if the surreal aspects of the story are really happening or are the protagonist’s hallucinations. (This is one of a few stories that women readers will probably relate to more easily than men will.) Slue-Foot Sue, the heroine of Laura Frankos’ contribution, is the bride of Pecos Bill in the American tall-tale tradition, of which this story is definitely a continuation (though it’s also one of two stories that feature Baba Yaga, the witch figure from Russian folklore). And while the story is fantasy, the title character of Doranna Durgin’s “A Bitch in Time” isn’t a woman, but a female dog –albeit one who’s trained to detect and guard against magic.

My favorite story here is Hambly’s “A Night With the Girls,” the other strictly serious tale in the group. This features her female warrior series character, Starhawk, here on an adventure without her male companion Sun Wolf; I’d heard of these two before, but never read in that fictional corpus. (I’m definitely going to remedy that in the future!) Both Moon and Ball bring back their protagonists from their stories in the first book for another outing here, to good effect. The protagonist of Lawrence Watt-Evans’ “Keeping Up Appearances” is a professional hired assassin, who approaches her chosen line of work pretty matter-of-factly, without noticeable moral qualms. But she’s also capable of genuine love and loyalty, especially towards her business partner and common-law husband, with whom she hopes to one day settle down and retire.

So when she returns from a trip to find that he’s unilaterally accepted a contract on a powerful wizard and, while trying to scout the job by himself, gotten turned into a hamster, we can sympathize with her distress, and hope she can reverse the situation. (Can she? Sorry, no spoilers here!) If you’ve read Beowulf and want to know what really happened to Grendel, check out Friesner’s “A Big Hand for the Little Lady.” And Steven Piziks’ “A Quiet Knight’s Reading” is another tale that’s close to my heart (you’ll see why if you read it!). At the other end of the spectrum, two stories I didn’t especially care for were Scarborough’s “The Attack of the Avenging Virgins” and Mark Bourne’s “Like No Business I Know.” The former story, among other things, delivers an essentially sound message, but in a story so message driven that it’s more of a tract, and with an annoyingly “PC” vibe.

As with the original book, bad language is absent or minimal in most stories. Bourne’s is the exception, with quite a bit of it, including religious profanity and one use of the f-word. Sexual content is more noticeable in this volume, with unmarried sex acts (not explicit) in a couple of selections, rape of males by females in another, and a lesbian/bisexual theme thrown into another one as a surprise. “Oh Sweet Goodnight!” is the most frankly erotic story, with its focus on the heroine’s sex life; but the male-female author team treats sexual situations realistically rather than salaciously, and the ultimate message here isn’t as far from traditional morality as some might expect. (This is also a story where magic is absent; Fern’s a sword-toting guardswoman in a low-tech society, but she could just as easily be a divorced single mom in modern America, making a living as a cop or security guard –and modern readers will find her easy to relate to on that basis.)

Editor: Esther Friesner
Publisher: Baen, available through Amazon, currently only as a printed book

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Chicks in Chainmail, edited by Esther Friesner

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: Variable

chainmailWhile the stereotypical image of the warrior in our culture tends to be male, warrior women were not unknown in the world of antiquity; they left their mark on classical, Celtic, and Norse-Teutonic legend, and found a literary prototype in the “lady knight” Britomartis, who rides through the pages of Sir Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. The creators of the sword-and-sorcery fantasy tradition in the early pulps drew on this background to create a few sword-swinging heroines such as C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry and Conan’s comrade-in-arms Valeria in Robert E. Howard’s “Red Nails.”

With the rise of women’s liberation, their ranks have been considerably swelled in contemporary fantasy, and two anthology series of original short stories have appeared to showcase them: the Sword and Sorceress collections begun by Marion Zimmer Bradley, and the Chicks in Chainmail series begun with this volume. Having read the first volumes of both, I’d say they’re both quality work; to the extent that they have a difference, it would be that the tone of the stories in this collection tends to be more on the lighthearted and humorous side than that of the stories in the Bradley collection –though there are exceptions in both groups. (It should be noted that the term “chicks” in the title here isn’t used in any disrespectful sense, any more than “gal” is in the parlance of an older generation.)

Twenty authors are represented with stories in this volume, some of them well-known in speculative fiction circles, such as Roger Zelazny, Harry Turtledove, Josepha Sherman, George Alec Effinger (who contributes a story featuring his series heroine, Muffy Birnbaum, “barbarian swordsperson”) and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. The great majority of the stories are quite entertaining, and they not infrequently have good messages (like much of the fiction in this genre, they tend to extol heroic qualities of character). My personal favorite is “The New Britomart” by Eluki Bes Shahar (she also writes as Rosemary Edghill), set in England in 1819, where a country baronet, inspired by Ivanhoe, decides to stage a medieval-style tournament. (Toss in a powerful closeted sorceress with no scruples, a couple of visitors from Faerie, an Ivanhoe character brought to life by magic, a genuine dragon, a girl who wants to compete as a knight and a guy who wants to be a librarian, and anything may happen.)

Other especially good selections are Sherman’s “Teacher’s Pet,” Elizabeth Waters’ “Blood Calls to Blood” (I’d welcome seeing her heroine as a series character!), and David Vierling’s spoof of old-time pulp fantasies, “Armor/Amore.” Margaret Ball’s “Career Day,” despite its invidious portrayal of its only Christian character, manages to be a strong story about personal growth, where the heroine learns some worthwhile lessons. But almost all of the stories are well worth reading, not just these five. Any collection of 20 stories is likely to have one or two that not every reader cares for, and this one is no exception. IMO, Susan Schwartz’ bizarre “Exchange Program,” in which Hillary Clinton is killed in an Amtrak accident and winds up going to Valhalla (or a grotesque parody of Valhalla) is the weakest selection; it falls flat, in my estimation. But in the main, these tales are well worth a read.

Note: Bad language is absent or very rare in these stories, and there’s no explicit sex; most stories don’t have sexual content as such. The exception is Lawrence Watt- Evans’ “The Guardswoman,” whose heroine finally becomes “one of the boys” when she’s able to join her male colleagues in traipsing to the local brothel for sex (she falls into an affair with the male bouncer). But in general, the other sword-wielding ladies in this book display high morals — they respect themselves, and insist on being respected.

Editor: Esther Friesner
Publisher: Baen, available through Amazon, currently only as a print book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Avengers Grimm

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★★★
“Once Upon an Enchanted Time.”

Avengers-GrimmI don’t mind The Asylum studio at all. They are notorious for churning out their “mockbusters” – low-budget, similarly-titled movies intended to cash in on a bigger budget film’s publicity e.g. Transmorphers. And, let’s be honest, most of those do suck. However, they have achieved some renown for cheerfully silly creature features, the best-known of which is the Sharknado series. [Though in our house, we worship at a shrine to Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, starring those titans of 80’s bubblegum pop, Tiffany and Debbie Gibson.] Avengers Grimm occupies an odd middle territory: while its title is clearly intended to be riding the coat-tails of Avengers: Age of Ultron, yet a more accurate mockbuster title would be the one given above. The sole reference justifying the A word is when one character says, to no particular purpose, “We’re not heroes, we’re avengers.” Marvel’s legal department would probably beg to differ there.

For this is actually about the crossing over into the modern world of fairy-tale characters. The villain here is Rumpelstiltskin (Van Dien), who hijacks the magic mirror belonging to Snow White (Parkinson) since it can – an ability inexplicably omitted by the Brothers Grimm – act as a portal to our own, magic-free universe. He travels through dragging her with him, and by the time Snow’s princess posse catch up, he has become mayor of Los Angeles, because time flows at a different rate here. He is creating an army of “thralls,” mind-controlled minions that will do his bidding and allow him to expand his realm from a city to much further, and must be stopped. While Snow is trying to do just that, the arrival of her allies poses a problem, as they bring with them the last fragment of the mirror: it can be used to return to their world, or allow Rumpelstiltskin’s pals to join him. Making matters worse, he has enlisted the help of Iron John (Lou Ferrigno) and turned him into an unstoppable killing machine to hunt down the princesses.

This is as much an exercise in limiting expectations. Do not expect anything to do with Marvel, and instead something that’s an energetically low-budget riff on Once Upon a Time crossed with Enchanted, and you’ll be about there. There are probably a couple of princesses too many: outside of Snow, only Red Riding Hood (Peteron) and Rapunzel (Vanderbilt) made much impression, the latter swinging her weighted hair around like an offensively-coiffeured version of GoGo Yubari. There’s a nice subplot which has Red more or less going on her own mission, to take down the big, bad Wolf – one of Rumpel’s sidekicks – because he killed her parents. That’s the kind of inventive storytelling we could have used more of, or perhaps showing how the princesses adjust to modern life, which seems to happen with little more than a flick through a fashion magazine. However, Van Dien and Ferrigno make good foils for the ladies (many of whom come from Team Unicorn), and there are adequate quantities of princess ass-kicking. I was adequately entertained: and that’s more than can be said for my short-lived attempt to watch Once Upon a Time. This is a case where, as far as I’m concerned, the mockbuster tag probably does the film more harm than good.

Dir: Jeremy M. Inman
Star: Lauren Parkinson, Casper Van Dien, Elizabeth Peterson, Rileah Vanderbilt

Jirel of Joiry, by C. L. Moore

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

jirelOriginally published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in the late 1930s, Moore’s five stories featuring beautiful swordswoman Jirel, lady ruler of a feudal fiefdom in medieval France, were as germinal in the development of sword-and-sorcery fantasy as the work of her contemporary, Robert E. Howard. Jirel is a strong and complex character, the first in prose fantasy’s long and honorable list of butt-kicking heroines; tough but not brutal, proud and hot-tempered, but possessing a gentle side, too. Like most people in her time, she’s a loyal daughter of the Church –but she’s not especially religious and wouldn’t make any claims to sainthood! Though she’s a veteran fighter of conventional battles, these stories involve her mostly in adventures of another sort, confrontations with dark sorcery, usually in otherworldly, extra-dimensional realms.

Moore’s prose style here was influenced by Poe and Lovecraft (and she’s fully their equal); her plotting and her creation of vivid fantasy worlds, all significantly different from the others, are highly original, and she excels at evoking a mood of strangeness and menace –Jirel’s approach to Hellsgarde castle is a masterpiece of this sort. Some critics have found fault with Jirel’s having romantic feelings toward her enemy in the first story, Guillaume, considering this a betrayal of feminist orthodoxy; but I think her complex feelings are quite plausible psychologically, and lend the story a depth and tension that it wouldn’t have otherwise.

In the first story, “Black God’s Kiss,” searching for an instrument of vengeance and victory over an invader who’s conquered her domain, Jirel dares to explore a dark tunnel underneath Joiry Castle, that leads to what proves to be a dimensional portal. The sequel, “Black God’s Shadow, finds her undertaking the same path, ut with a very different mission. “Jirel Meets Magic” pits her against a malevolent wizard responsible for the deaths of ten of her men. Sinister sorcery brings her from what everybody expects to be her deathbed into a fantasy world beyond this one in “The Dark Land” –but the move may be from the frying pan to the fire. Finally, in “Hellesgarde,” she goes to seek a small leather casket in an ill-omened castle, demanded as the ransom for some of her soldiers held prisoner by a villainous warlord; but small packeges can contain very potent and dangerous things.

The late Marion Zimmer Bradley dedicated her first Sword and Sorceress anthology to “every girl who grew up wanting to be Jirel.” When all’s said and done, those girls didn’t pick a bad role model!

Note: Jirel (who’s single) remarks in passing at one point that she’s “no stranger to the ways of light loving,” and she can cuss a blue streak when circumstances provoke it. But there are no direct references to sexual activity in the stories, and no directly quoted bad language.

Author: C. L. Moore
Publisher: Ace Books, available through Amazon, only as a printed book at this time.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Heavenly Sword

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★★
“Not even deserving a console-ation prize.”

heavenlyswordI wasn’t aware this was based on a video-game, until I started watching it and saw a Sony Playstation credit. In fact, I wasn’t particularly aware that it was animated. Neither would necessarily have made much difference, I guess, but forewarned is forearmed. Maybe knowing the game would make this better? Or maybe not, since that wouldn’t address either of the two main problems here: a storyline crafted entirely from bad pulp fantasy, and animation that works very nicely for action scenes, but is useless at portraying any kind of emotion. To start with the former, there’s a drinking game to be played here: take a swig every time a clichéd story element shows up. On second thoughts, I like my readers unencumbered by alcohol poisoning.

There’s an all-powerful sword, which is guarded by a tribe. Evil king Bohan (Molina) wants the sword, because it, in the hands of the ‘Chosen One’, is prophesied to be the only thing that can destroy him. He attacks the tribe, scattering them to the winds: Noriko (Torv) is given the task of protecting the sword, and bringing it to her half-brother, Loki (Jane) who is the intended bearer. Except, of course, he isn’t where he’s supposed to be, having left his village to become – oh, the irony – a blacksmith in the massive fortress complex belonging to Bohan. So, Noriko, along with sister Kai (Ball), who refers to herself in an irritating third-person way like Gollum with cat-ears, have to head into the heart of enemy territory, with Bohan in hot lukewarm pursuit. However, the ‘Chosen One’ turns out not to be who we’ve been told at all.

This is my unsurprised face.

I don’t like the CGI style here: for too much of the time, this like watching a cut scene from a video game. There are occasional interludes of more-traditional animation and this works rather better: I’d prefer to have seen the whole thing done that way, to be honest. However, I will admit that, when in motion, the flaws are much less obvious, and the final battle, pitting Noriko against an army is impressive; it’s actually credible that she could kick their ass, more or less by herself. The ending does go in a different direction from what was expected, and has a certain poignancy, albeit spoiled by an unnecessary sequel-generating scene during the end titles. Torv and the other voice actors do what they can, but that isn’t much, given their characters’ faces express about as much emotion as an anaesthetized Shaolin monk. The late Roger Ebert once famously said that video games “can never be art.” While I disagree with him, for a number of reasons not relevant here, watching this, I can kinda see from where he was coming.

Dir: Gun Ho Jang
Star (voice): Anna Torv, Alfred Molina, Ashleigh Ball, Thomas Jane

The Sword Woman, by Robert E. Howard

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

swordwomanThis collection of five short pieces by pulp era master of rough-and-tough fiction Robert E. Howard includes two unfinished story or novel fragments dealing with barbarian heroes in the Conan mold. But the focus of this review is on the title story and two others, “Blades for France” and “Mistress of Death” (the latter completed by Gerald W. Page after REH’s death), which are the only Howard stories that feature one of his most striking and memorable characters, “Dark” Agnes de Chastillon, sometimes called, in medieval/early modern fashion, Agnes de la Ferre, after her home village. (There’s another collection that uses the same title story and also includes “Blades for France;” but it only includes one –or possibly both, I’m not sure– of the fragments later used by Page to complete the third story.) These tales are first-rank parts of the Howard canon, and my five-star rating above refers just to them. They’re violent, gritty tales of historical action-adventure, with a tone like that of the Conan and Kull stories but mostly without supernatural elements. (A wizard does appear as the villain in “Mistress of Death.”)

Howard was not as constrained by the sexist attitudes of his day as many of his contemporary pulp writers were. So some of his writings are trail-blazers in terms of female roles. Where women in pulp action yarns were usually passive, meek and needing rescue (or sinister and sneaky, wreaking their evil by stealth and treachery), Howard dared to actually portray some women who step out of the damsel-in-distress mode to pick up lethal weapons and use them;. But they don’t lose their moral compass as a result, so that they’re genuine heroic figures rather than villainesses.

Conan sidekicks Valeria in “Red Nails” and pirate queen Belit in “Queen of the Black Coast” come to mind (actually, since she’s Conan’s boss in the latter story, one could argue that he’s her sidekick there!), as does Red Sonya in “The Shadow of the Vulture.” Agnes is cut from similar cloth; but where these other women are all in stories with a male protagonist, Agnes is the protagonist and first-person narrator of her stories, and the only one of the four to appear in more than one tale. That allows her to take center stage much more obviously in the reader’s focus, and for Howard to develop her more as a character; in “Sword Woman,” he actually gives us her origin story, something he seldom if ever did for his other series characters.

Agnes was reared as a peasant in early 16th-century France, though her abusive father is the out-of-wedlock son of a duke (and uses his father’s name as a family name). In a vividly-sketched opening scene, that shows you exactly the kind of drudgery-filled bleakness her life up to then has been, when she’s about to be physically forced into an unwanted marriage to a youth she detests (and who knows that), her sister secretly hands her a dagger to commit suicide with. Instead, she uses it to knife her would-be groom/rapist, “with mad glee,” and takes to the woods. Circumstances soon give her the chance to get some combat training from a skilled mercenary, which she takes to like a fish to water, instinctively. With a tall physique strengthened by hard work, and quick reflexes, she’s a fighter to reckon with, and her embrace of that lifestyle is completely believable. She’s resolved to be no man’s sexual plaything; motherhood isn’t something she wants for herself; and the chance to be free, her own boss, and able to taste the world and its adventures is like a liberating new birth. (And she’ll have adventures in spades, with her share of dangerous enemies.)

Given her background, I could completely sympathize with the appeal this has for her, and understand her choices. I don’t think Howard intends to make an anti-marriage, anti-family statement through her, or to imply that her choice is the only legitimate one for a woman to make. But he does have the courage to portray her as the person she is, with legitimate reasons for feeling the way she does; and that he’s also questioning the kind of patriarchal, sexist perversions of marriage and family life that could turn those things into a prison (which they were never intended to be) for a woman, and make her willing to choose celibacy to escape it. And then too, he’s recognizing that the idea of “primitivism,” of escaping from society’s constraining rules, roles and routines, that leach every bit of freedom and spontaneity out of life, and being free to carve out your path in the world with your own courage and strength, is just as appealing to a woman as it is to a man, and for the same reasons.

If Howard had lived to write more about Agnes, and followed her for more of her life, who knows: she might someday have found a male who didn’t want to to imprison and dominate her, whom she might have wanted to be with as an equal, and might even have someday decided she was ready to have a child. (And if she had, I think she’d have been a doggone good mom!) But even if that had ever happened, you can bet she’d never have become any man’s slave or drudge.

All three stories exhibit the strengths Howard fans appreciate in his work: strong, exciting story-telling, full of adventure, suspense, and violent action, all of it well-drawn; excellent prose style; and good, vivid characterization. Agnes’ character, of course, dominates all three, and she’s one of Howard’s most memorable figures, round and nuanced. Like her sword-swinging soul-sisters mentioned above, she’s no choir girl, but she’s not evil in any sense. She doesn’t revel in killing (her “mad glee” near the beginning of the first story is an emotional reaction to the thrill of self-achieved deliverance and escape from hell on earth, not homicidal mania as such); on the contrary, she’s quite capable of showing mercy even when it’s not deserved, of genuine kindness to others, and of putting her life on the line even for an enemy. She’s a woman with principles; and while her early life has made her so emotionally repressed that she’s never been able to cry, she’s still got feelings, and can need comfort at times. (In other words, she’s a human being, not an animated stone statue of Superwoman.)

But several other characters are also developed with some moral complexity, especially Etienne Villiers. REH was also a serious student of history, and makes effective use of real historical persons and situations to flavor his historical fiction; these tales are no exception. In the third story, IMO, Page imitates Howard’s style and character conception quite well; I disagree strongly with critics like Jessica Salmonson who find the story inferior and see Agnes there as an unrecognizable, wimpy parody of herself. (If they weren’t dead by the time she’s done with them, there are a few male characters there who’d probably dispute the claim that she’s wimpy!

The editor of this collection isn’t named (Leigh Brackett contributes a worthwhile introduction, but I doubt if she was the editor), but whoever it was clearly just threw the last two selections in as filler to bulk up the book. They’d be better included in a collection of Howard fragments. The stories cited in the second paragraph above would have been better choices, IMO; then the collection would have been a genuinely thematic one showcasing all of Howard’s action heroines! Maybe some publisher will pick up on that idea?

Author: Robert E. Howard
Publisher: Zebra Books, available through Amazon, only in paperback.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Deed of Paksenarrion, by Elizabeth Moon

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

the deedThis is an omnibus volume containing an entire trilogy of novels: Sheepfarmers Daughter (1988), Divided Allegiance (1988), and Oath of Gold (1989). Together, they tell the story of Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter, a young woman in a fantasy world who, as a tall, strapping farm girl of eighteen years, runs away from home to escape an unwanted forced marriage, and joins a company of mercenary soldiers.

Moon’s literary vision here has both strengths and weaknesses (which are sometimes the converse of each other). Her world-building is very detailed; it brooks comparison with Tolkien’s or, at least, Paolini’s on that score. (I appreciate a fictional world where women can occupy positions of power, and can train and serve as soldiers in full equality with men.) She also brings a high level of realism to the fantasy genre; as a Marine veteran, she knows a great deal about what the experience of initiation and training into a military unit is like. Indeed, other than the fact that Paks trains with a sword rather than a rifle, her life as a recruit is probably much like that of real-life modern “grunts” going through boot camp; and Moon recounts it in great detail.

The realistic note continues through the trilogy. Though magic operates in this world, and magical species like elves, dwarves and orcs exist, this element doesn’t appear much in the first book. (It will come much more to the fore in the later ones.) Realistically as well, Moon is willing to suddenly kill off characters, including characters you’ll have come to like and care about — exactly the way that real-life humans may die suddenly in combat situations, whether everybody likes and cares about them or not. Characterizations here are, not surprisingly, very realistic and vivid, and this is true of many secondary and minor characters too.

Some fantasy fans may want a higher level of magical content in their reads than the first book offers, and find it too much on the “mundane” side, though I don’t have a problem with this myself. Some readers won’t be happy to have characters they like, and expect to play more prominent roles, killed off. A bigger problem, though, is pacing. Usually, I have a pretty high tolerance for a slow narrative pace. Even so, I found this one glacially slow. Moon takes us through every aspect of “boot camp” life, every stage of every journey, every part of a siege, etc. You learn a lot about the world and the characters this way, but some scenes don’t add anything along that line. There are exciting, action-filled scenes, too; but many readers would find this narrative draggy in quite a few places. But the pace picks up somewhat in the later books (or perhaps we just get more used to it). And while characters who model responsible sexual behavior are refreshing, Paks’ total disinterest in sex seems at odds with the author’s usual realism. However, that trait will fit in with the future the author has in mind for her heroine.

Paks’ character grows considerably over the course of the trilogy. At the beginning, she’s a good-natured but simple young girl, who’s likeable enough as a person, and who does have a moral code; but she doesn’t think about the ethics of taking human life on the battlefield in wars over things like trade or border disputes, where her company happens to be on whichever side hired them first. To her, that’s just what mercenary soldiers do; it’s simply a morally neutral job that she likes and is pretty good at –though, to her credit, it’s important to her that she’s part of an “honorable company” that doesn’t murder noncombatants or rob innocent peasants.

sheepfarmerBut the first book ends with a crisis of genuine moral decision, in the tradition of serious fiction that aspires to do more than just entertain; and our heroine’s ethical sensibilities are in for real growth and development in the succeeding books. And this comes about as believable personal maturation of who she’s always essentially been, not as an artificial change tacked on by the author. This is one of the great strengths of the trilogy. (For fans who don’t like the military-centric type of fantasy, Paks is taken out of the mercenary company context fairly soon in the second book.)

While the first novel introduces us to the seemingly polytheistic religions and cults of Moon’s fantasy world, the later volumes take us behind the scenes to see more of a unifying pattern in apparent diversity. The human cultures of Pak’s world recognize a righteous Creator, the High Lord; and it’s explicitly suggested that the elven and dwarven concepts of the Creator are the same God, just with a different name and different stressed aspects. Other, lesser “gods” are spiritual entities that either serve the Creator, or in the case of the evil ones (and some are radically evil) oppose him, much like Satan opposes God; while human saints like Gird and Falk are separately venerated by distinct groups of followers, but each are recognized as servants of the common High Lord. In other words, religion in that world is much more monotheistic in essence than it initially appears; and it’s a strongly moral monotheism. (And as in our world, believers have to struggle with challenges to faith and problems of theodicy.) These religious themes play a key part in the last two novels.

There’s plenty of sword-fighting and other action here, quests and intrigue, magical perils, hidden identity, and a plot that’s suspenseful right up almost to the last page. But it’s also a work of rare psychological and spiritual depth, with the kind of serious dimension that marks it as truly great fiction, fiction of lasting literary significance, not just entertainment value. It’s also fiction that will break your heart in places, because there are points where Paks practically goes through hell –and some scenes here are not for the squeamish. But light is only recognizable against darkness; and out of great darkness here comes great light. One of the most powerful scenes in English-language literature that I’ve ever read in a lifetime of reading occurs here (you’ll know it when you read it). It’s a real shame that this trilogy isn’t more widely known by fantasy fans; but more than that, it’s a shame that it’s not recognized as one of the crown jewels of the American literary canon from the late 20th century. I’d like to hope that someday it will be!

Author: Elizabeth Moon
Publisher: Baen Books. Available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Lady Ninja: Reflections of Darkness

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★★
“Weapons of mass seduction.”

ladyninjaThis has more than slight echoes of the Female Ninjas, Magic Chronicles series, sharing the feudal setting, along with similar… unconventional attack forms by the protagonists. That’s unsurprising, since both are apparently based on Ninja Tsukikagesho, by Yamada Futaro. And, just to confuse matters further, the IMDb states that part 6 of FMMC shares the title here. Whether this might be the IMDb getting confused, I can’t say. I wouldn’t blame them if so, because the entire plot here is more muddled than enlightening. It takes place in the 1730’s, when Shogun Yoshimune and his deputy, Muneharu, were struggling for control. As a way of fomenting dissent by embarrassing him, Muneharu drags out the Shogun’s former concubines; to stop this, Yoshimune sends a group of his top female ninjas, under Tsurugi (Abe), to kill the women before Munharu’s men can get to them, triggering a ninja war. Complicating matters, turns out one of the concubines may have had a bastard son by Yoshimune, and whoever gets proof of that lineage will really hold the whip hand.

However, the script gets bogged down in murky shenanigans, with poor differentiation between too similar characters – not helped by people pretending to be other people on more than one occasion. It might sound bad to say this, but when it seems 90% the men have the same hairstyle, and 90% of the women have the same hairstyle… Well, I could have done with a scorecard, shall we say. Instead, save perhaps for Tsurugi, who does get painted with a bit more depth, the only way you can tell them apart is by the special magical attacks, the names of which are conveniently yelled out as part of their execution, and which are certainly the most memorable aspect of the film. This starts with – and I wrote these down to be sure I got them right – the “Ninja Snake Penetrator,” then proceeds through “Ninja Milk of Death,” “Icicle Sword” and the “Echo-blade Weasel Attack,” before climaxing [and I use the word advisedly] with the “Memento of the Full-bloom Lotus” – not quite as innocent as it sounds. However, the action sequences are generally forgettable, even including the flurry of second-tier digital effects unleashed as a result of the special attacks.

The plot certainly has its share of twists and turns, but I can’t say I was enthralled by many of them, and the end result just doesn’t gel into anything more than very sporadically interesting. Just as with FNMC, fifteen years earlier, this proves that you need more than marginally inventive magic to make for an entertaining movie. Maybe it helps to have read the source novel, but I can’t say there’s enough here to make me put in any effort to that end.

Dir: Kôsuke Hishinuma
Star: Mari Abe, Shô Nishino, Yuri Morishita, Rika Miyama

Skinwalker, by Faith Hunter

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

skinwalkerSupernatural fiction is a favorite genre of mine, and I have a soft spot for strong heroines who can kick some butt when necessary; so naturally, I thought a book that appealed to both interests might be rewarding. But that didn’t begin to prepare me for how much I liked this one! In this opening volume of the Jane Yellowrock series, featuring a Cherokee Indian shape-shifter who makes her living hunting down and killing rogue vampires that prey on humans, Faith Hunter has created one of the most original and vividly-realized fictional protagonists to come down the pike in a long time, and established herself in my eyes as one of the genre’s outstanding contemporary voices.

The book trade classifies this as “urban fantasy.” Our setting is New Orleans, brought to life masterfully by Louisiana native Hunter, in one of the best evocations of place I’ve come across in fiction; but this isn’t quite the New Orleans we know. Here we’re in an alternate world similar to our own in most ways –but one in which the world has been aware of the existence of vampires (and witches –Hunter’s take on these is interesting) since 1962. “Civilized” (non-predatory) vampire clans, often with considerable wealth built up over the centuries, and their voluntary blood-servants and blood-slaves are a part of the urban ethnic mix. But shapeshifters aren’t generally known to exist, and that aspect of Jane’s life is one she keeps carefully under wraps.

Jane’s a supremely well-drawn, round character, with a personality and interior life that’s believable (and that’s some achievement, when you consider some of her characteristics!). She can shift into the form of any animal for which she has DNA handy, usually in the form of teeth or bones, etc. (Hunter handles the problem of differences in body mass in a really creative way!) Usually, though, she takes the form of the panther who’s bonded with her in an unusual way, even for shapeshifters, and which she doesn’t fully understand. There’s a lot about herself she doesn’t know (though some of those mysteries will be revealed in the course of this book); she remembers nothing before she stumbled out of the Appalachian wilderness some 18 years ago, at an age the authorities guessed to be about twelve, an apparently feral child.

For the next six years, she was raised in a Christian orphanage; and while she’s no plaster saint, she’s a practicing Christian. Her Christianity is of a low-key, not judging nor preachy sort, and not inconsistent with an openness to Cherokee spirituality. It also doesn’t come with the view held by some believers that women should be pacifistic doormats.  This woman’s trained in martial arts, knowledgeable about guns, packs a Benelli shotgun (as well as assorted stakes and knives) that sprays silver shot, rides a Harley, and doesn’t take garbage from anybody, human or vampire. She’s also a caring person with a tender heart, whom I’d be proud to have for a friend. (And she’s the kind of friend who comes through when the chips are down).

Jane isn’t the only round, lifelike character here; those qualities apply to the whole supporting cast (two-legged and four-legged; Beast is a masterpiece!). The plot is perfectly paced and constructed, IMO, with plenty of mystery to keep you guessing, not just the central mystery –who (and maybe what) is the rogue?– but the enigma of Jane’s buried memories, and the increasingly intriguing secrets of the vampires. Hunter’s treatment of the Undead is pretty traditional in most respects, and unlike many modern authors of vampire fiction, she doesn’t ignore or reject the idea that vampires fear Christian symbols (indeed, they’re burned by the touch of the cross), but not those of other faiths –why, Jane wants to know?

The author is a wonderfully descriptive prose stylist, one of the few writers (the late Ray Bradbury was another) who enables you to fully experience her world with all your senses: not just sight and hearing, but smell, taste and tactile sensations as well. And she does personal interactions wonderfully well, with insight, sympathy, and often real emotional power. Of course, since this is action-oriented fiction, you can expect some violence, and some of it’s gory; what the rogue does to victims isn’t pretty, and elementary school kids aren’t the intended audience for the book. But this won’t bother most tough-minded adults.

This is one series that I’m going to be following, and hoping to read in its entirety!

Note: There’s no explicit sex here, and very little implied sex, despite the fact that some of the minor characters are prostitutes. (Jane doesn’t engage in any sex.) Hunter is also relatively sparing in her use of bad language, though that doesn’t mean there’s none.

Publisher: Roc, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.