HT: Sarah Hoyt via Karen L. Myers.

Design You Trust has a feature on Polish artist Jakub Rozalski who specializes in images of supernatural creatures, werewolves, and particularly invading giant Mecha robots encountering Eastern European or Japanese peasants.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Thomas Hobbes has a little fun imagining a future very different from the present.

The triumph of the Recovery was marked most clearly by the burning of the Episcopal bishop of Maine.

She was not a particularly bad bishop. She was in fact typical of Episcopal bishops of the first quarter of the 21st century: agnostic, compulsively political and radical, and given to placing a small idol of Isis on the altar when she said the Communion service. By 2055, when she was tried for heresy, convicted, and burned, she had outlived her era. By that time only a handful of Episcopalians still recognized female clergy, it would have been easy enough to let the old fool rant out her final years in obscurity.

The fact that the easy road was not taken, that Episcopalians turned to their difficult duty of trying and convicting, and the state upheld its unpleasant responsibility of setting torch to faggots, was what marked this as an act of Recovery. I well remember the crowd that gathered for the execution, solemn but not sad, relieved rather that at last, after so many years of humiliation, of having to swallow every absurdity and pretend we liked it, the majority had taken back the culture. No more apologies for the truth. No more “Yes, buts” on upholding standards. Civilization had recovered its nerve. The flames that soared above the lawn before the Maine State House were, as the bishopess herself might have said, liberating.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Via My[Confined]Space.

My wife Karen Myers recently started writing fantasy novels. Karen is a technical early-adopter, so, typically, she has opted for Independent Publishing, and is an active reader and correspondent these days in Indie Publication forums.

One of her Indie correspondents recommended to Karen the hot new Indie-published book these days. Its title is The Girl Who Would Be King.

Taxonomically, GWWBK is a Young Adult fantasy, but I think it is really a comic book/graphic novel, which (at the moment) is lacking its illustrations. GWWBK is the story of two orphaned girls, one good, one bad, who both discover that they possess superhuman strength and healing abilities.

The good redhead, Bonnie Braverman, devotes her newly discovered talents to fighting crime and helping people in distress. The bad blonde, Lola Lefever, becomes a serial killer, equips herself with a gang of criminals, and has a go at making herself King of Los Angeles.

The two girls share a mysterious link and are inevitably destined to fight.

Another review is here.

Highly recommended light fiction.

The late James Oliver Rigney, Jr. aka Robert Jordan

Zach Baron, in Believer magazine, commemorates the impending publication of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series’s penultimate, and second posthumous, installment, Towers of Midnight with an appreciative essay.

Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, in my own view, is the only fantasy series that could sensibly be described as a worthy successor to Tolkien’s LOTR. Jordan produced an epic tale, astonishingly entertaining and rewarding and filled with persuasive invention, aptly grounded in traditional myth and story, that became simultaneously also a colossal literary train wreck which somehow spun completely out of control, while remaining compelling reading.

Readers who followed along were happy but thoroughly frustrated by the author’s refusal to wind up plot line arcs that had readers perched on the edge of their chairs within the succeeding volume arriving after an interval of years. Jordan’s readers suffered terribly from Epic interruptus.

Blood, salvation, eternal life in posterity. Though he couldn’t have known it at the time, Jordan had written his own mortal predicament into the Wheel of Time. The series’s most poignant paradoxes—the taxing wear of responsibility on those who influence the weaving of the world, death as precondition for redemption—seeped into Jordan’s real life at its end, as he belatedly faced a mockingly close approximation of the same ambivalently grim fate as the characters he wrote about. …

[I]t’s Rand’s path that Jordan ultimately walked. Both men labored to succeed in spite of bearing an affliction that would presumably kill them; both faced an uphill battle to the finish—Rand, to unite the Wheel of Time’s various nations and peoples against the forces of evil, and Jordan, in his last eighteen months, to get Rand’s story on paper before it was too late.

Most heartbreakingly, Jordan slowed the pace of his novels down to a crawl toward the end, as if keeping his imaginary world alive might keep him alive, too.

Weaving the ever more complex strands of plot and characters was a task that increasingly defeated the Wheel of Time’s author. Simultaneously, his fictional proxy’s early triumphs (pulling an Excalibur-like sword from a fortress called the Stone, killing about one bad guy per book) shaded, in time, toward the ambivalent, the incomplete, and the downright disastrous. As the series wore on, the pace of the installments became sluggish as Jordan’s attention divided. His main characters, Rand foremost among them, began disappearing from the books in which they were ostensibly the heroes.

This moment—roughly, books seven through ten (A Crown of Swords, The Path of Daggers, Winter’s Heart, and Crossroads of Twilight), plus the prequel—is arguably one of the most bizarrely boring stretches in any kind of contemporary fiction. Rand dallies with a lover, and deals with various tepid rebellions, humdrum political complications, and distant foreign incursions. Mat, a lothario and gambler who at this point has emerged as the books’ most entertaining character, gets stranded in a city and hangs out there. Perrin, whose wife is captured by an unfriendly army in the eighth book, spends the next 1,600 pages or so trying to get her back. Together, the four books are a study in inertia, and they prompted many to suggest that Jordan was intentionally drawing out the series for cash or, worse, that he had absolutely no idea how to end what he’d begun.

But though it is absolutely true that these two-thousand-plus pages could’ve been compressed by an editor less kind than his own wife into a single book, it would be wrong to suggest Jordan dilated out of avarice, or lack of preparation. The problem was that Jordan’s strengths as a writer were also his weaknesses. He abhorred instrumental characters, the stock pawns of the genre, there to be set up and knocked down to move the plot along. And he hated being obvious, choosing instead to subtly foreshadow plot developments whole books in advance (then ridiculing readers who couldn’t quite put the pieces together). Most of all, Jordan loved his own creations, good and evil alike, and wrote circles around them, developing their respective psychologies and romantic entanglements at what became a laughably immersive, infinitesimal pace. The rest of the world, he seemed to be saying, would just have to wait.

In fact, it ended up outlasting Jordan himself.

Karen has forwarded to me a link to an article by Michael Weingrad undertaking a nerdworthy analysis of the lack of significant Jewish contribution to the Tolkienian fantasy genre.

[I]f Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion. If the former is individualistic, magical, and salvationist, the latter is collective, technical, and this-worldly. Judaism’s divine drama is connected with a specific people in a specific place within a specific history. Its halakhic core is not, I think, convincingly represented in fantasy allegory. In its rabbinic elaboration, even the messianic idea is shorn of its mythic and apocalyptic potential. Whereas fantasy grows naturally out of Christian soil, Judaism’s more adamant separation from myth and magic render classic elements of the fantasy genre undeveloped or suspect in the Jewish imaginative tradition. Let us take two central examples: the magical world and the idea of evil.

Christianity has a much more vivid memory and even appreciation of the pagan worlds which preceded it than does Judaism. Neither Canaanite nor Egyptian civilizations exercise much fascination for the Jewish imagination, and certainly not as a place of enchantment or escape.

I’m not sure that his thesis is actually all that correct. If so, he would have to have to have a very specific kind of fantasy fiction in mind. Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale is a fantasy. Roger Zelazny’s Amber series ought to serve as a very successful example of Jewish-written fantasy. Neil Gaiman is Jewish. And so on.

Amazing Stories cover — May 1926

The Cornell University Library has built an interesting web-site based on its own collection titled: The Fantastic in Art and Fiction. Sample images above and below. Well worth a visit.

Diable, woodblock, J.A.S. Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal, Paris : E. Plon, 1863.

Hat tip to Amy Crehore.