"Inside a titanic hollow tree we approached a solitary grave & a badass ghost showed up to sing us a mad rhyme."
- The Scythian
Well, it's been a while since the last few updates. In that time I have crammed a great deal of books and media down my throat, as ever is tradition. I am flipping through Tides of War, another Pressfield narrative, whilst simultaneously rereading my beloved Afghan Campaign. Pressfield has this wacky ability to step into antiquity with a pair of Nikes - his prose and dialogue reverberate with the elegance of their respective eras but is chopped up and mucked down with slang and vulgarities to make it accessible to the modern reader. When Pressfield writes about a Macedonian phalanx it takes everything in your power not to reach up and make sure your not wearing a konos yourself. It gives me a taste of the verbiage I want to use if I write my own dusty memoirs.
The benefits of being an English student usually reside in the exposure you get to new, exotic, experimental, or even classical literature you might have overlooked. This year isn't the case for me, as I'm currently swamped with compulsory-credit courses suffocating me with pre-1700 Western literature and have been forced to look elsewhere for inspiration. I do, mercifully, have a Modern Brit course, so for every Kubla Kahn I get to read The Waste Land or a In A Station of the Metro. Tanith Lee's Red As Blood, a collection of grim fairy-tale re-writes, ticks back and forth between the marginally interesting and the creatively profound (although none come close to Gaiman's Snow, Glass, Apples). Picked up Hadleman's The Forever War, finally - finally - a book I've been after for years, a book I confused with The Last Starfighter because I suppose on some subconscious level I'm retarded and should be writing on a circle of paper. It is as spectacular as Starship Troopers was on first reading, ahead of its time and still relevant today as a metaphor for post-war blues. The time dilation and relativistic physics and hard sci-fi are all bells and whistles for the depth of the themes, and they mesh together stupendously.
Moving away from the military and historical fiction to fantasy, I finally got together the rest of Marvel's The Gunslinger, and it was a great experience. Maybe I'm the only one who's noticed the significant difference between contemporary King and the coke-addled, alcoholic wreck who first penned 'The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.' on sheefs of green paper, but the graphic novels illustrated by Jae Lee have brought new life to the fantasy series I fell in love with and that had since gone yellowed around the edges like an old photograph. King's weird "if it please ya" way of scripting is still prominent (so much less economic than "Life for yer crop"), but Lee brings visually to the Dark Tower universe what King's blistering prose did in the first four volumes - when he was discovering as much about his world as we all were. I also finished Lankhmar Vol. 2, Swords Against Death, a collection of Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. Nothing like a little High Adventure to set one's literary perspectives straight. I spend night hours hammering away at the worlds of men and magic I've drummed up, stoking the details like metal in a forge. It's nice to read and put a book down thinking "I should just write a fucking story man, talking books and kingdoms of clouds, whatever man". Another break of fresh air with Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away, a dark fantasy yarn about a fellowship of dying warlocks (and one dead, but somehow still living mage who only exists as a talking skull where magic is plentiful) trying to restore magic to the world by bringing the moon down from the sky. In a world where magic is as finite as fossil fuel, and when the wells dry up - castles start falling from the sky, dragons start disappearing, and the sword-wielding hordes start howling at gates unopposed. An almost unimaginative depiction of magic which becomes charming and fresh in its simplicity. Drawing the natural magic out from cloud formations to fly over mountain-ranges... excellent stuff. Actually, going back to simplicity's sake - watched The Neverending Story in all of its 1980s goodness for the first time since I was capable of critical thought. What a bleak, Scandinavian child's fantasy, where the world of Fantasia is being broken up by the Nothing and dying from the inside out, where characters go off on nihilistic tangents and heroes drown in bogs brought low by their own sorrow... somehow the idea of a horse dying of sadness is upsetting. A colourful cast of characters beset by horrors, the rock giant so tormented by guilt at his own weakness in face of global catastrophe he sits on his hands and lets the Nothing take him... and the Gmork, the Wolf, the avatar of a child's fear, who exists only as a foil to the forces of good and who takes on a fitting lupine form as man's oldest adversary.
Robert E. Howard's Conan, a book in leather-binding and gold-lettering and heavy and ponderous as a Catholic bible still sits on my shelf. To read through it all will be an undertaking, but at some point I will make that journey. Speaking of journeys (and the sword and sorcery genre), I finally ended my woeful errand at the climax of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, whisking the rainbow-loathing Scythian through the mountain land of the Caucausus to the lofty heights of Mingi Taw. What a fucking experience this game is; audio-visual, tongue-in-cheek, genre-crossing beauty. Jim Guthrie's soundtrack does for the RPG what Heavy Metal did for animated films, a prog-rock dark fantasy adventure game that is becoming a social-networking obsession and keeps playing you even after you've finished playing it. The moving back and forth between waking and dream, guided by the compass of the moon cycle and your sworcerous songs has does quite a bit for my own imagination. I talked (in other blogs) about navigation Night by Winter into the Fae, while nurturing the growth of my own cosmos. The waking world and the world of magic severed from each other, not neatly either but like two pieces of buttered toast being forcibly pulled apart - taking clots of the other's dimensional fabric with it in places, birthing some twisted landscapes. The death throes of a slain god digging out subterranean underworlds stained and warped with the stink of its magic. A party of rogues stepping up a mystic mountain path to the clouds, to Olympus, abandoned. Some grim imagery there, bro. Grim and fantastic.
"Scythia, Cimmeria, Assyria & Persia - these are all kingdoms of men. Mingi Taw is The Kingdom of the Cloud."
The issue I currently face with my own writing (at least in terms of my fantasy stories), is that I have a world and characters but quite a bit of the latter. Too many to reasonably mash together. And I just need to accept this and start decided which stories I want which characters to star in. Which chain of short stories. The rogues gallery of the Black & Green Jackets, the intrepid highlanders of the Winged-Isles, a mercenary band of fortune-seekers left adrift after a decade of warfare trying to make their own in a dark country. Robin Hood's merry men meet Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, flintlock pistols and magic crystals, monsters hunters for the buck. I sympathize with the characters on a personal level and their world comes alive to me - Tuck, the amputee alchemist and physick; Alain-a-dayle, songwriter and swordsman (these two tend to foil each other); Black Tom, a ponderous rifleman and wizard; Robb Scarlett, a savage bowman and fusilier; Tam Two-Trees, a blue-bearded lusty strongman; and Six-Penny John, a rogue favored by the gods of chance and game. Their stories at war and at home, midst political turmoil and outlawry in trying economic times. And where to? Hired by a dragon to slay another, perhaps - the worm eating through the apple of the world perched over the frozen god-graveyard of Non.
And the other cast; the mute swordsman who wields a wooden cane, who knows the name of steel and can break and bend it with a word; the dauntless half-fae girl whose voices brings heroes together; the bawling sailor whose songs bring storms; the boy who paints spells into being out of thin air; the Methuselah whose word is God; the red-haired Lleu walking between two worlds...
These who would climb a mountain floating over the earth and walk the shattered streets of city, built for gods, and slay their ghosts.
I can bind this shit together, yo.
Below are enclosed the words of Yoda - because Empire is one of the greatest examples of storytelling in humanity's history and it should be consulted if one is seriously expected to write stories. On that note, I'm reading Fraser's The Golden Bough, Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces and his Occidental and Oriental Mythology. I will let you know what I think. Out.
“Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.”
- Yoda
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