Monday Story: Outside

Good Mondays, all! Come in, come in.

I’ve made a pledge to myself to get my blog updated on a far more regular basis, so I’m going to try and place something on the site every weekday. Normally that will be some interesting scrap from my journalistic history, but every so often, always on a Monday, I’ve decided to post short stories until I run out of them, and then I might write some more. As I go along, I’ll also be adding them to the  “short story” section of the “fiction” menu up the top there also, so they are easy to find. If you like them, there are some more by me for sale at the Robot Trading Company, for your ebook of choice.

First is “Outside”, a horror tale.  Originally written for our short story group in 2009, “Outside” was eventually rewritten and published in the late, great Colin Harvey’s Wessex-themed anthology Dark Spires in 2010. I very much enjoyed our back and forth email conversation that shepherded this story to its current form, and I was very shocked to hear of his early death in 2011.

Dark Spires is still available from Wizard’s Tower publications as an ebook, for £2.99.

Outside

A man sits in a dark room. He is wearing a heavy coat and two sweaters and fingerless gloves. His hair is lank. His beard is into its second week of growth. His clothes are dirty. The slow whir of a ballpoint pen across paper is the only sound in the room. A bottle of whisky stands, half empty and open, close to hand, its glass is smeared and greasy. The occasional bang from outside or a scrape across the roof makes him look up once or twice. His breath plumes a little quicker in the candlelight, but he does not reach for his gun. Instead, he waits then continues to write, stopping from time to time to rub the biro between his palms, or to blow upon his naked fingertips. Otherwise he is absorbed in his task. This is what he has to say:

“This is hard for me. But I have to do something. Sitting around in the dark, it makes being alone worse. I’ve been here ten days now since it happened. I don’t know what to call it. There’s a lot I don’t know. I doubt anyone will ever read this, but it might help me get things straight if I get it down. If you’re out there, if there’s anyone left after this, perhaps it will help you. If not, it will help me, talking to myself is better than talking to no one at all.

“This is my day. The first thing I do, every day, is to check the seals: the doors, the windows, the chimney, round the soil pipe leading from the toilet in Maisie‘s bathroom into the outside. I found a gap there a week ago. One of the hagfish was trying to get in. I spotted it wriggling about on the floor, but I was lucky. It had not got all the way through. I was able to beat it to death with the shotgun butt. Saving ammunition – that and I did not want a hole in the bathroom floor. I still have standards.” He swigs directly from the bottle, bares his teeth at the burn.

“I think I get ahead of myself. I am not used to writing in longhand. I forget the basics of my trade. Important detail first, then the who, the what, the where. I might redraft this, I might not. I only have two pens, and precious little paper, and I will not find more. I do not want to go outside.

“First: me. I am, or was Joe Stevens. I was a journalist, nothing fancy – the Swinhill Examiner, a local paper, one of the last of a dying breed. In fact, nearly dead. Two months before all this happened it cut its staff and went from daily to weekly; if you know the business, you know what that means. Not enough ads for carpets and second hand caravans to make it pay. Not enough readers interested in school quizzes and bakers making novelty biscuits. We were the last in Wiltshire, but the internet got us in the end, just like it got everyone else, the way the computers got the printers and the layout men before. One man doing ten men’s jobs. Too much, too much.” He stops, he is digressing. He must be concise.

“Secondly, the hagfish are not hagfish. I pray to God they are gone from your world, whoever you might be, as quickly as they came into mine.

“Dead whales. They fall into the ocean and lie there in the deep blackness, slowly rotting, whalefall they call it, fed on by things that never see the light. Hagfish are the most revolting of all; long slimy bodies, rudimentary eyes.

“These things, the things that are eating the world, they look like hagfish so I call them that. Except for the fins… not fins, too primitive.” He pauses to think, waiting for a word. “Cilia, I think, that is the name, near the front, though they do not use these to move, at least, not in the air. Perhaps in their native environment? They are horrible, horrible creatures. They make me shudder to look at them. That one I saw in the bathroom, it must have found a crack in the mortar outside. Maybe the plumber had been a cowboy,” a scratch, a scribble, his sentence is destroyed, unfair, he thinks, unfair. At least he was working. At least he wasn’t on the scrounge. “They only need a tiny hole. The sun and rain on cement will eventually give you that. They have no bones, not any that I have seen, and can flatten themselves out. The ridiculous thing is, tape stops them, it does not have to be strong, it is unfeasibly flimsy, if you think about it.

“I do not like to think about it.

“I plugged the gap with paper and glue and tape after I killed it.

“I can hear them now, wriggling all over the building. I have blocked out the windows with cardboard. I do not think they are aware that I am here, and I want it to remain that way. I cannot abide to look at their black bodies pressing on the glass, the teeth-ringed holes they have for mouths working against the window fittings.

“Most of the windows here are uPVC, with rubber seals, plastic yellow with age. Ten years, that’s how long they last. You’ll get a century from wood. Nothing lasts these days, nothing. If you lock off the vent at the top of the window there are no gaps for them to get in. This place has a flat roof. Nowhere for them to creep between the slates or up under the eaves. It is sealed with tar. It is insane how many holes there are in most houses. Just boxes to hide the dirt we squat on. I know that now.

“It is not a house. Here, where I am now. It is a flat over a shop, strictly three flats over three shops. Maisie, Beryl and Enid I call them, names of aunts, long dead. I’ve knocked holes through into the other two. The flats, I mean, not the shops. I will try and be clear. You would not know I had worked on a paper for all my life before it happened. But my nerves are shot, I am tired and cold and alone and I have not slept for four days. For all I know I am the last man alive. Forgive me.

“I will tell you about the shop. I planned this for a while, from the moment I first saw the hagfish. That’s when I started thinking about it. These places have been empty for months, condemned to make way for the new development, a new development on top of a new development that swept away the town I knew. Nothing lasts, concrete boxes stained with rain and piss. It was brick before, part of the railway workers’ village, torn down on a whim after Beeching did for the railways.  Lonely, empty, vandalised. Only kids came up here before the end, to destroy. They are almost as bad as the hagfish, they deserve each other. You could dig out my reports in the library. I have been writing about it for years, before ASBOs and victimhood for hooligans; when there was work, when there were houses, it wasn’t so bad. It would have only got worse, if it weren’t for them. It makes me so mad, but it really is quite boring. I defy you to read through a whole article without feeling your eyelids droop. Imagine how I felt, then, sitting in council chambers either too hot or too cold, listening to pompous old men waste their breath. Droning on, debating nothing, rubber stamping. But still I wrote about them, for twenty years I did.” He stops, and stares at the paper for a long time. When he starts again, he writes more slowly, his anger filling the pages with mechanical efficiency.

“I thought I would cover Beirut or Africa, but the big break never came. My whole professional life was factory closures, shopping developments, planning meetings, on piss all pay. I wanted to bring the news to the people. I should have done something else. For all that, now I have lived through these interesting times,” he smiles at this employment of his small stock of knowledge. “I am not sure I would have wanted to report on such a story as the end of the world.” He laughs again. It seems ludicrous to him. He bites it back.

“All the buildings round here are empty, and where there are few people, there are fewer of the hagfish. The flat roofs helped me choose, they’re safe, they can’t get in, but the end shop was the deciding factor. It was a food shop, one of those little places, a Happy Shopper type affair, but less grand, if you can believe it. They left all the fridges behind, big things. I snuck in a generator, a quiet one so the hagfish would not notice, and filled them, all while the things came in greater numbers. Until, last week, there were so many, I brought Tara and Michelle here. I had to trick them, they were blind, they insisted to the end that they could not see them. But now…”

He stops, and closes his eyes, and rubs at them, tears threaten. He abandons the sentence, turns a page, and starts again.

“I could live here for a very long time, and never need to go outside. I do not want to go outside. I have broken a hole into the shop from the end flat. I do not go down there often. Not unless I need supplies.

“The other two, a Post Office and a launderette, I go in rarely, then only to make sure the seals are good.

“I have lost my train of thought again. uPVC – all of it except the door at the bottom of the stairs, to the outside, which is wooden. I am almost sure they cannot get round that, but I am taking no chances. All it takes is tape. Michelle did not believe me, neither did Tara, she always agrees with her mother. But it works, none got in, not…”

Another pause. Another page.

“Gaps under the eaves, the airbricks – that took a while to work out, I had to watch the hagfish for three weeks. I think most people would not have taken these things into account, but I did. Builders and surveyors and DIY enthusiasts might know this. Maybe they are alive too. Good luck to them.

“My secret: I saw the things first, three months ago; one or two, drifting through the air, wriggling as if they were swimming in it. Not long after they turned on the Atacama particle accelerator. Maybe that has something to do with it? Sub-atomic particles, gluons and quarks, spinning out so fast. Maybe this shrapnel made a hole between here and where they come from? They can squeeze in through the smallest of holes. Maybe it’s sunspots, or global warming, or a fucking supernova blasting holes in space and time,” he stops. He won’t let his fingers run the pen over the words. They try. He wins, this time. He breathes hard, shuddering, at war with himself. He thinks about a drink. He takes one. “I don’t know. There is a lot I don’t know.” He underlines ‘don’t’.

“What I do know was there was the smell in the air, dry and dusty, a cast to the light, like the green before a storm, only this was different, a bruised purple like old blood. That was after my job went, the day the suits told us, before I saw them, I thought nothing of that light, that smell, until I did. When they came, I thought: Ribbons drifting in the sky. Then I saw what they really were. Like hagfish in the water, tying knots in themselves, tumbling to the ground. I watched them drift toward houses, toward offices. I saw them squirm across the walls then slip inside. They can squeeze in through the smallest of holes.” He realizes he is repeating himself. He re-reads, but does not scratch anything out. “I am sorry. I am tired.

“I did not say anything. No-one else seemed to notice. I did not want them to think me mad. I was a coward, and now it is too late.”

There are sounds, then, outside. Slapping, like rubber soles on concrete. The creatures, he is sure, against the building. Thumping on glass; then something breaking. The man, Joe, lays his pen down. He has another pull of the whisky. He takes up the shotgun leaning against the table. He goes from room to room in Maisie, checking the windows. He climbs through the holes he has smashed through plasterboard and brittle concrete blocks into Beryl and Enid either side. He curses quietly as he bashes his head on the ragged gap to Enid. Each room he enters he finds clear, but this works against him, for each room eliminated increases the chances that the next has been compromised. His hands are sweating by the time he gets to the room where Michelle and Tara lie. It doesn’t feel right to go in, feels like he is trespassing. He does not like what is inside. He does not like to think about it.

There is a lock on the door. He regrets that.

A memory chases itself across his mind when he touches the key: his wife Michelle shouting, her fingers plucking at tape, her hands on the window handle. The gun. A circle of ruin.

He has to be sure. He squeezes his eyes shut before turning the doorknob. There is nothing there, the windows are as he left them, plywood taped over broken panes. He ignores the shapes under the duvet and walks out. The cold keeps the smell to a minimum.

He goes out of Enid’s front door, down the communal stairway, to check the street entrance. Then from room to room in every flat again to check the seals, running his finger round the tape and pressing it down hard. He does this four times, wipes his fingers upon his coat, up, down, up, down, then does it four more times again. He swears as he does so, cursing his hands, they refuse to obey his commands.

Reluctantly he heads to the living room in Beryl. He unpicks the duct tape pinning a square of carpet over the hole he has cut through the floor. He snatches up a torch and shines a weak circle of light into the store below. It picks out no movement. He sits back and sucks in a long breath. He will have to go downstairs. He does not like to think about downstairs. It takes a while for him to be ready.

Later, it might be night, he does not know, he writes again.

“It is the noise. That is what I cannot stand. The endless rustling, I can hear them against the roof, the scrape of their fixed teeth against the tarpaper. But it is not the worst. Today I had to go downstairs. Today I had to go into Michelle and Tara’s room.” He writes over ‘worst’, over and over in the same spot, boring a hole through the paper. It is hard for him to stop. He manages, eventually.

“Today, I had to go downstairs. There were noises outside, then a bang, I had to see. I do not like it.  There is no way to block out the big window. I tried carpet, but it is too heavy and the tape will not hold it. There is nothing between me and them but a sheet of glass. They press against it, writhing like worms. They are so thick it is hard to tell if it is night or day, or if there is still a difference. Seeing them makes the noise worse. It gets into your head and makes your skin crawl. They had damaged the window, there was a spider web of cracks. I do not know how they did it. They are so weak tape stops them!” He underlines tape repeatedly.  “I think they suspect someone is in here. I was careful, I do not think they saw me. Their sight is poor, and they cannot smell me through the glass. But they have a new trick. Through the window, I could hear people, swearing, high-pitched and laughing like boys, then shouting as I began my repairs, then many, many voices, jumbled up into one.” He does not write that Tara’s scream underpinned it all. Thinking of it brings the noise back. He slaps at his temple with the heel of his hand until it goes away. After a time, he writes again. “They did not trick me, and it soon stopped. It cannot be people. Nothing could live out there, nothing but them. They have learned to use our voices. I had better be more vigilant.

“Thankfully, the glass had held. I patched it up with tape, lots of tape, and left quickly. I am not sure it is safe to go back in there. I got all the food I could. The generator is nearly out of petrol in any case. Tonight I will have a little feast. Better be careful I do not gas myself; I blocked the chimney; nowhere for the carbon monoxide to go as I cook. I am not a fool.”

The days pass, he writes little more. His frozen food, cooked on a small camping stove, takes a while to dwindle in the cold, but it goes. All he has left are his cans – canned soup, canned fish, canned fruit. When he eats, he eats them cold. When he does not eat, he drinks. He does not eat often. Every so often he checks the carpet over Enid’s hole leading into the shop. He does not lift it, unsure if the window will have held, unsure if they have got in. He moves slowly, but hurries past the room where Michelle and Tara lie. He keeps his eyes fixed firmly on the carpet. He hates the pattern. He hates the carpets in all three flats. They are all different, but all the same. Old lady carpets of blocky acanthus. Each flat has a spot where an electric fire has discoloured the artificial fibres a sorry yellow. They are flats that in happy times smelt of Sara Lee and pink wafers and grandchildren and shopworn joy, but always underneath it was the stench of piss and lavender and loneliness. He can smell it now.

He rouses himself when he thinks this. He has a theory.

“The door and widows have become numbing to the touch, ice has started to form in the corners of the glass. Whether that is the hagfish or what has happened to the world I do not know. I do not know much, do I? But I do know this: These things are attracted by emotion. I became sure of it the day I saw four wriggling round a crying woman. They looped over one another, like they were fighting. They sniffed around her, over her hair, up her skirt. Disgusting. Then one fixed itself to her face and hung there, pulsing. She did not seem to notice, did not even look like she felt it at all, even as it sucked the life out of her. But I could clearly see her eyes sink, her flesh wither, and she did not know,” he underlines this repeatedly, again wearing the paper thin. “She was a corpse, but she kept on going, brown and creaking, for twenty yards, as if nothing had happened. I could not stop watching, I had to keep looking. I could not do anything. Such power they have, to kill and move the dead! Then she collapsed, only then did others notice she was not breathing.

“There was the man that was angry. Flabby. He had seven on him. His trousers fell off with his fat, and he still he walked. The creatures drifted away. The paramedic said heart attack. He could not see the brown husk they left behind, he could not see what had truly happened. How do they stop people seeing what I see?

“The window, dirty. I counted forty there or so. There was a bear in the window. A child’s room? God knows what they wanted there. I do not like to think about it.

“Perhaps I made a mistake. These are sad flats, death flats. I think the creatures can smell it, that is why they cluster round the windows. Idiot, Joe, fucking idiot.

“Staying warm is getting hard. I had to stuff up the chimneys. They are all gas flues, anyway, and there is no gas now. I did think about ripping one of the fires out and lighting some of the furniture that was left behind. The hagfish do not like fire, but I would have to keep it going all the time, and I would soon run out of wood to burn, and then I would be in danger. So I wear more clothes. There are blankets in the room where Michelle and Tara are, but I do not go in there. I do not like to. My hands are so cold it is hard to grip the pen, and I stink. I would kill for a hot shower, I would. I mean it. I would use my gun.

“It is funny. Look at me, complaining. But maybe my life would have been like this often if I had have got that job in ‘88. My big chance, but I blew it. Too sharp, too pushy. I wanted it once, the adventure. That is what they all say, bringing the news to the people, seeing new places, but I think we can all be honest now,” he laughs at the irony of his statement, “and say that what they really want is the acclaim. All you fucking budding John Simpsons and Orla Guerrins. You just want someone to notice you and kiss your arse, you do not give a fuck about the news. I did. I did. Well, let me tell you, perhaps this will penetrate your thick skulls, blast the celebrity lust from your minds: for most it is going to be £9,000 a year reporting on retarded groundskeepers having a new mower bought for them by the rotary club. For twenty years, and then they fire you and your wife will despise you. How could they do that? Seven days of news. Twenty years of work. All gone, like the engine shops  I remember when you could leave your door unlocked, when the smell of hot oil and steam and unwashed men made ripe with proper labour hung in the air. All gone, all the industry and the hope and the happiness, swept up and thrown out with the rubbish, internet and crummy shopping arcades in its place, selling cheap shit to fat morons hooked on bad TV. Bread and circuses! How could you? They always think they know best, men with fancy degrees and big ideas. Tear down the streets, throw up some flats, shut the factories then fuck off to your Georgian mansions while the rest of us burst with burger fat and despair.” He stops, lest he break his pen. He waits until his fingers unclench themselves.

“My dad, he lived and worked and laughed and died here. What’s there now, where I sat at his knee? A fucking roundabout on a roundabout on a roundabout, a Next squats on our old allotment. And then my job went too, cut along with six days worth of news. Go look for fame, I hope you fucking enjoy it.”

He is angry. His theory begins to dog him. He thinks of how he feels. He does not feel good. He feels guilt. He worries they will smell it. He worries they will guess he is inside. He stops writing, and sleeps.

Later.

“Things have become worse. The voices come more often. They are out there now. They call me to come out. They pretend to be my friends, they pretend to be police, they pretend they want to help me. They are my mother and my father and my poor dear Tara. That nearly had me. I was going to go outside, but I lifted a corner of card and there was nothing out there but them, black on the window. There are more of them now, and they move the faster. They know I am in here. They are excited. I tried to hide, but they have found me. They will not trick me. I will not go outside. I will die in here, but they will not get me.

“Yesterday was Christmas. I set up a few decorations, lit more candles. I tried to sing but it sounded intrusive, wrong, so I stopped. I said a prayer instead, for Michelle and Tara. It would have been Tara’s tenth Christmas. She was looking forward to it so much. I love you. I am sorry.”

“Merry Christmas,” he writes, then writes no more.

The voices call and call again. He screws up his eyes, underneath the babble of voices known and unknown projected by the hagfish, underneath the rising-falling-rising of Tara’s scream, someone shouts, voice amplified. They tell him it will be all right, they tell him to come outside.

He sits, shaking, unsure of what to do. He drains a third-bottle of whisky in three mouthfuls, sets it down amid the other empties cluttering the desk. It was always a problem for him, the drink. Too many long lunches, too many late nights.

The voice comes again, beseeching him.

He makes a decision, picks up his gun, and leaves the room. He goes out of the flat, out of its front door, and down the stairs. The stairwell is dark, the windows, thin glass in steel frames thick with paint, are blocked with tape. Tape on tape on tape. Try as he might, he cannot wipe away the memory of the things outside, no matter what he lays over the glass. He looks at the windows. Like the town, like the developers, like time, he thinks, they can’t wipe away entirely what was there before. The shells of the engine sheds still stand. The street names are the same, will always be the same. There will always be traces. It comforts him, briefly, it comforts him.

He reaches the door. He runs his hand down it, just the once. Today, his hands are his own.

Outside, the door muffled voices cry. He can barely understand them. The other voices have become a roar. The hagfish are agitated. He strains to hear. The new voices call for him to come out, slowly, to leave his gun behind.

Outside, there is a banging on the door.

He reaches out for the handle, his other arm moving without volition, taking the gun away from him to the speckled composite floor.

He stops. It is what they want. Them. Without the gun, without the door, he will be defenceless, nothing to keep their rings of hooked teeth from rasping the flesh from his bones, sucking him dry.

There is a hissing noise, something cracks into the window, it breaks the glass but cannot penetrate the tape.

The tape always stops them.

He steps back, shaking his head, feet tapping one on the other: heel to toe, heel to toe, four times. Four times is the magic number.

The door vibrates to the impact of something against it. Again. The planks he has nailed over it judder. Tape springs free round the edges, letting in small draughts.

They are trying to get in.

He raises the gun, sets the stock to his shoulder, points it at the door.

Outside, they are waiting for him.

Outside, they say, come outside.

He does not want to go outside.

Four Tolkien stories that would make great movies

I wrote this piece for SFX last year, where I picked out four stories by JRR Tolkien that could make good films. Do you agree or disagree with my selection? Let me know!

Middle-earth at the Movies

With the Hobbit on the way, it’s high time to look at other tales from Tolkien’s legendarium that might make top filmic fun.

Within the broader sweep of Middle-earth there are dozens of stories, and there’s some cracking potential films in there. The juicy stuff comes from The Silmarillion, released posthumously by JRR’s son Christopher, with a little bit of help from Guy Gavriel Kay. This mythic cycle covers the first Dark Lord Morgoth’s endless attempts to seize control of creation, his eventual downfall, and Sauron taking up his reins. It might seem like a good idea to film the lot, but The Silmarillion covers thousands of years, has hundreds of characters, and the movie would be like, well, decades long. Better to be picky, eh?

Beren and Luthien

The pitch: Middle-earth’s greatest love story

Time: The First Age

Location: Doriath and Angband

Hooks: Love! Big dogs! Fatherly disapproval! Amputation by wolf bite!

The plot: Remember that bit in The Fellowship of the Ring, where sad-eyed Aragorn sings a song in the marshes? This is that ballad.  Beren the man falls in love with elf Lúthien. Her father Thingol is having none of this and says they can only marry if Beren accomplishes the impossible and steals back one of the Silmarils, holy jewels taken by the Dark Lord.

What’s in it for Weta: Beren and Lúthien’s journey to Angband has echoes of Frodo and Sam creeping into Mordor, only Angband is scarier. Morgoth himself puts in an appearance, while the hunt for Carcharoth the giant wolf at the climax would be thrilling.

What’s in it for us: A big dose of lurve, and there’s a happy ending as Beren and Lúthien are resurrected to live together. Aww.

The Children of Húrin

The pitch: Romeo and Juliet, with dragons. And incest.

Time: The First Age

Location: All over Beleriand

Hooks: Amnesia! Curses! Brotherly loving! Dragons! Petty Dwarves!

The plot: Morgoth catches the human hero Hurin. The Dark Lord curses his children, Túrin and Níniel, and forces Húrin to watch them suffer.

What’s in it for Weta: Battles with hordes of Orcs, before Túrin meets Glaurung the dragon in single combat, besting the beastie with cunning and trickery.

What’s in it for us: As this fragmentary story was finessed into a brilliant novel by Christopher Tolkien in 2007, it’s probably the most screen-ready. It’s truly tragic, with Túrin’s curse dooming all who aid him, and him unknowingly marrying his amnesiac sister. Then it’s suicides all round. Sad.

The War of Wrath

The pitch: The greatest war of all time

Time: The very end of the First Age

Location: Beleriand

Hooks: Demons! Gods! War! Apocalypse!

The plot: Elves and men band up to finish off the evil Morgoth once and for all.

What’s in it for Weta: This apocalyptic smackdown at the climax of the First Age makes that spat over the One Ring look like a children’s squabble. Think Smaug will be cool? What about Ancalagon the Black, the father of all winged dragons, who is so huge that when he’s downed he flattens a mountain? He leads an entire squadron of winged fire drakes into battle with hero Eärendil’s magical flying ship. The land battles dwarf anything in The Lord of the Rings, as the Valar (Tolkien’s angels) themselves stride the land and fight dozens of Balrogs.

What’s in it for us: An awesome spectacle, and a bittersweet victory. All of Beleriand is laid waste and sunk under the sea. Look at the map in The Lord of The Rings. See those mountains by the coast past The Shire? There used to be a whole lot more west of that. Then there’s Morgoth’s defeat. His feet are cut off, his iron crown hammered into a collar, he’s bound by a magical chain and shut out of creation for all time. Satisfying.

The Fall of Numenor

The pitch: The drowning of Atlantis, plus Elves

Time: The Second Age

Location: Númenor

Hooks: Envy! Betrayal! Human Sacrifice! The world remade! God gets angry!

The plot: The greatest human civilisation of all is brought low by the lies of Sauron.

What’s in it for Weta: There’s a titanic struggle at the beginning, where the lords of Numenor sail to Middle-earth to capture Sauron. Later, there’s evil king Ar-pharazon’s massive invasion fleet, and the biggest tsunami in fiction.

What’s in it for us: A fantastic tale as the island nation of Númenor descends into evil, all because they envy the immortality of the Elves. Watch as a noble people turn their back on creator god Ilúvatar and his Valar to worship the outcast Morgoth. Sauron in this is Grima Wormtongue on divine steroids, while the anger of Ilúvatar when Ar-pharazôn attempts to invade the holy Undying Lands is cinematic wrath-of-god at its most terrifying. It also sets us up for the The Lord of The Rings, with survivors like Isildur and Elendil establishing the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor. They play their part in the first downfall of Sauron, bits of which we’ve already seen on the screen. Neat.

An Audience with Mr Rankin

I wrote this piece for SFX 134, (I think). By 2005, I had known Robert for several years. I first met him at Euroctocon in Dublin in October, 1997. He and I got on very well and have remained good friends ever since. Rankin is one of life’s singular gentlemen. I have never met anyone quite like him. He is, if anything, even more bizarre than his characters., while the stories he tells in person are all the more astounding for being (mostly) true. I treasure the rare occasions we get to sit down, drink beer and, as he puts it in his Londony way, “talk toot”.

Robert Rankin

Rankin is a teller of tall tales who comes from a long line of tall tale tellers. Few could be taller than his latest book, The Brightonomicon. It takes a cue from New Age movements who saw a zodiac engraved into the earth about Glastonbury and applies the idea to a streetmap of Brighton. Not just any old Zodiac has the author discovered, but one of truly Rankin-esque proportions. Armed with a felt tip Rankin set to, tracing out his new cosmology on B-roads; no Gemini or Taurus here, but the Nazca-like lines of the Hound of the Hangletons and the Woodingdeane Chameleon. There are twelve in all, and each has a story, a case, attached to it which must be solved by old favourite Hugo Rune and his new teenage sidekick, Rizla.

“I wanted a reason for each of them to be there, you also wonder where these names come from – why is Hangletons called Hangletons? We have these dangerous areas, like Whitehawk and Moulsecoomb. So, in the book, Moulsecoomb is inhabited by a pirate captain called Moulsecoomb, who stills comes out and attack the pier from time to time.”

Of course, these dangers of the genteel town, jewel of the south coast and home of the exotic pavilion are imagined…

“Er, no,” interrupts  Rankin, “You don’t want to go to those areas with anything less than a tank.”

And that is his power. Rankin so effortlessly mocks our world that it’s difficult to see which parts are pure fiction and which are not. Indeed, sometimes you suspect he makes none of it up, and is privy to a portal to some alternate reality where backchat is the highest of arts. You get the feeling of reverse dramatic irony – here it is not we the audience who know more, but that his character Hugo Rune knows everything.

Rankin is fascinated by magic, so it is no surprise that Rune owes much to that infamous wizard, Aleister Crowley, whose self-portrait hangs in Rankin’s hall. But, when you look closer, there’s a lot of Rankin in there too. Rune is the master of the scam, a man who pronounces, “I offer the world my genius, all I expect is that it cover my expenses.” Rankin himself is as much raconteur as writer. We could discuss some of his escapades here, would it not bring certain agencies of the crown upon his head. His true, if no less astounding, tales include that of the Blue Peter badge, or the strange case of the cash machines, a story he regaled many an audience with until a kindly policeman took him to one side and asked, gently, that he desist.

“Rune’s not based on me,” counters Rankin. “He is a mix of my father and Crowley. He knew Crowley, actually,” he says. “He met him in the war. My father didn’t fight – using the famed Rankin common sense he thought to himself: ‘I’ll get myself a nice reserved occupation – fireman should do it.’ Which meant standing in the middle of the blitz holding a hosepipe!” he laughs. “Anyway, he met Crowley in a pub in 1943 or ’44. My father didn’t believe in the magic, but he did think Crowley was the greatest poet of the 20^th century. So he cultivated him by buying him lots of drinks. I remember my dad pointing out Crowley on the Sergeant Pepper’s album cover and saying ‘I know him.’ Then he told me he had a couple of first editions signed by the man himself. I was amazed. Of course, my mum, the fundamentalist Christian, had burnt them as Crowley was, after all, the Great Beast. I was gutted.”

Maybe there is more of Rankin Jnr in Rune than he suspects. Or perhaps there have been a long line of Rankins behaving like Runes. He is the fourth Robert Fleming Rankin – a connection to Alexander Fleming now lost to history and, like his father, his life has been full of cameos of unusual people (he went to art college with Freddie Mercury, for example). He’s done many bizarre things, such as convincing the inhabitants of Brentford a Griffin lived there, but he seems as oblivious to how unusual this track is as he is of the genuine reverence with which his fans hold him, fans whose numbers are growing. Rankin was ecstatic to see his previous book, The Witches of Chiswick, advertised in a railway station and, and has begun to force open the American market. Full of tall tales he may be, but you could never accuse him of boastfulness, however, you don’t get posters in Paddington if you’re small fry, old chap.

In true generous style, Rankin has one last thing to say. “That’s the best picture of me that I have ever had taken” he says of his portrait to the left [not included here, sorry folks]. “And I’d like to say thank you to the man who let us use his carousel. Beautiful it was, built in 1888. He even stopped it for us, whereas the pier wanted to charge us £150 to take our shot there. So thank you, and sod the pier.”

The Early History of D&D

I wrote this piece in 2006. It appeared in SFX 146‘s Time Machine. Like most people of my rapidly aging generation, I began my gaming career playing D&D.

I interviewed Gygax once. Like a lot of Americans involved in fantasy, Gygax was bearded, large and voluble, but possessed a level of interest in others that made his bluffness charming rather than irksome. A very nice man.

Time Machine – Dungeons & Dragons

You enter a rough stone corridor. It looks unsafe, and the wall runs with moisture. Ahead of you is poorly made, if stout, wooden door. Approaching warily, you hear a series of muffled scraping noises and a low growl. What do you do?

If you’re one those who has played Dungeons & Dragons then this kind of statement will be familiar to you. If it isn’t then that’s exactly the kind of dilemma those odd spods with the funny shaped dice used to face, usually weekly, while you were off partying.

Actually, the perception of RPG’s as the domain of the uber-nerd is just one of several misconceptions about the game ­– in reality D&D is no special interest, saddo passtime, but the vanguard of a great gaming revolution that ushered in an age of mass-market wargames, collectible card games and computer gaming – all of which are now multi-million pound industries. Not so nerdy now, eh?

But despite this legacy, D&D the game has had a rocky history. At the height of its popularity, every school had a D&D group (as did many other institutions. “At one time every nuclear submarine had a D&D group,” co-creator David Arneson said in one interview), but then it virtually disappeared off the cultural map. Lawsuits and debt litter its history, and it came to find itself almost destroyed by the industry it created. The story of D&D is almost as hair-raising as an encounter with a Level 19 Gold Dragon in a bad mood.

Dungeons & Dragons was the brainchild of gaming buddies Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Gygax had long been associated with various groups and magazines, including Guidon, a wargames mail-order company. Gygax published various games through Guidon, including 1969’s Chainmail. Written in concert with Jeff Perren, Chainmail allowed players to stage small-scale battles in the Dark Ages. It was not an RPG, but a traditional wargame. However, when Gygax started to add magic and monsters, and Arneson ran a Chainmail game involving a castle sewer (underground adventures are a D&D signature) Dungeons & Dragons slowly began to come to life…

In 1971, Arneson and Gygax completed the first true incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons. But they had difficulty finding a distributor – their earlier publishers thought that the game’s referee or “Dungeon Master” would be so busy running the game he would never have any fun, so it wouldn’t work. Gygax, however, had more faith in their creation, and he and set up Tactical Studies Rules (TSR), with childhood gaming chum Don Kaye. In 1974, with funding from Brian Blume, another old-gaming buddy, they launched D&D’s first edition. The 1000 hand-assembled copies sold out in under a year.

The game was a curious grab bag of ideas. Chainmail and its child were heavily influenced by the models that were available to Gygax and his friends. Back then, there were no large firms making fantasy models, so Gygax and co relied on plastic historical figures. Fine for one’s warriors, but for the monsters the gamers turned to cheap Chinese toys – poly-bagged selections of badly executed dinosaurs and weird flights of fancy. This magpie nature had serious repercussions, as the eager proto-roleplayers also included rules for monsters and creatures from the likes of Michael Moorcock, HP Lovecraft and JRR Tolkien’s works. Lawsuits and quiet words inevitably followed, with the result that various beasties, deities and demons were struck from later editions of the game.

Kaye passed away in 1975, leading to the dissolution of TSR. Gygax then set up TSR Hobbies, Inc, to continue the publication of the game. This was initially on his own, but by the mid-seventies Brian Blume and his son Kevin had a two-thirds controlling interest, something that was to eventually lead to Gygax losing control over his creation…

But for the next few years, D&D was to go from strength to strengh. A more complicated version of the game, named Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, was released in 1978. This was a huge hit, and became the model for the many copycat games that were to follow. But it was not without its problems. It was beast of a gaming system, requiring multiple books and a maths degree to play. It also unwisely split D&D into two streams, upping production costs and dividing its audience, a problem that was not to be rectified until years later. Finally, AD&D also precipitated a falling out between Gygax and Arneson in 1979. The two went to court over who owned what of their joint creation. Though the dispute was settled by 1981, it was but the first of many business disputes to hit TSR.

And if arguments over Mammon weren’t bad enough, God soon got in on the act. A series of suicides, murders and a missing persons case were all erroneously blamed on the game, and the powerful Christian far tight roundly condemned it as, well, here’s what Christian Life Ministries had to say about Dungeons & Dragons: “Instead of a game [it] is a teaching on demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, Satan worship, gambling, Jungian psychology, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and many more teachings, brought to you in living colour direct from the pit of hell!!!” Hallelujah.

Gygax appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss the charges, only to have his answers edited and rearranged, or so he maintains. His complaints to the show after his interview was aired went unanswered.

“There here wasn’t a shred of evidence or veracity in any of those claims,” Gygax said recently. “One of the mothers of the children who had committed suicide said the only reason that her son didn’t kill himself sooner was because he enjoyed playing Dungeons & Dragons and that this was all just a cock-and-bull story.”

D&D was demonised. At the height of the hysteria, the TV movie Mazes and Monsters (1982) came out. This told the story of one youth (played by a very young Tom Hanks) driven mad by gaming. The game in the film may have been called Mazes and Monsters, but everyone knew what they were really talking about. The controversy rumbled on for years, leading TSR to excise references to many of the more dread powers of hell from the second edition of the game, published in 1989.

Despite all this, nothing seemed to dent TSR’s armour, and it began to explore other opportunities for D&D, with Gygax heading off to Hollywood to tout the property. It was a hard slog. Mineral-water quaffing entertainment execs were not easily won over by the mid-western hobbyist. But he persevered, and in 1983 the cartoon Dungeons & Dragons was broadcast on CBS. The Dragonlance novels followed in 1984. These too, were a massive success and transformed TSR into a major player in the booming fantasy publishing market.

However, back at base trouble was brewing. TSR had accrued debts in excess of $15 million, and Gygax discovered his partners had tried to put the firm up for sale. He forced one partner, Kevin Blume, from office, but the problems didn’t stop there. Another court battle ensued as Gygax struggled to retain control, but the law found against him, and he sold his controlling interest in 1985.

After Gygax’s departure, a number of proprietory worlds were developed, and licenses acquired – Marvel Superheroes, Conan and Indiana Jones amongst them; and new gaming avenues, such as card-based play, explored.

But the company’s fortunes could not last. As the decade began to wind down, dozens of games jostled for custom in a crowded market. Worse, RPGs were getting more and more complicated, fewer kids were getting involved, and the average age of gamers increased. With no new blood coming in, revenues dropped, and many companies went under or sold off their RPG properties.

TSR survived, albeit with a smaller, increasingly niche audience, soldiering on through the 90s, until, stuck deep in debt, it was bought out by Magic: The Gathering creators Wizards of the Coast in 1997. WoC was in turn purchased by Hasbro, who consolidated it with other gaming properties to create a gaming division operating under the Wizards tradename.

This marked something of a new start for D&D. A new edition – version 3 – of the rules was created in 2000. This scrapped the division between AD&D and D&D, creating one game. It dispensed with many the different dice the game used, settling upon the 20-sided variety. Gygax, who has undergone a change in thinking over the years, maintains the system is too complicated and damages group co-operation by focussing too much on power-play. Nevertheless, it has proven to be popular, and Wizards have wisely decided to make the system free for all games publishers to use, breaking down walls in the RPG community and generating fat loads of advertising for D&D.

Now, though the game will never be as big as it once was, Wizards estimate that around three million people a month play the game in the US alone. It appears the adventure of D&D will run for some time to come…

A D12 of D&D

Roll your twelve-sided dice to generate a random Wandering D&D Fact!

1. The game was penned under the uninspiring title of “The Fantasy Game”.
2. Gary’s surname (his parents were German) is pronounced “Guy-gax”, not “Guy-jax”, as many a poorly informed wannabe wizard would have it.
3. The name “Dungeons & Dragons” was, according to popular legend, suggested by Gygax’s wife.
4. Gary Gygax also created GenCon, now the world’s largest gaming convention, and launched Dragon magazine.
5. Fantasy movie  Krull (1983) went under the name Dungeons & Dragons for part of its developmental cycle, despite having nothing to do with the game.
6. Though Gygax originally started to put fantasy elements into Chainmail, it was D&D co-creator David Arneson who first restricted players to one model each in his games, establishing the link between player and character.
7. The game has a magic system where the wizard must memorise spells. Once he has spoken them and set them off, he forgets them. This was directly inspired by the Dying Earth novels of Jack Vance.
8. Although the term “Hobbit” was removed from the game to stop infringing on JRR Tolkien’s rights, the term “Halfling” remains.
9. D&D had no setting when originally launched, instead it provided gamers with hundreds of monsters, demons and beasts with which one could create one’s own world. Many of these were drawn from mythology. Tiamat, the multi-headed dragon in the cartoon and game, for example, is a Babylonian deity which represented the salt ocean, symbolic of chaos.
10. D&D has sold more than 20 million copies, and generated more than $1 billion in revenue.
11. Many potential RPGers now play online Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying games. The biggest, World of Warcraft, has six million gamers. A D&D MMPORG was launched last year.
12. Gygax is not a big fan of Tolkien, finding his books dull. The works of Jack Vance, Robert E Howard and Fritz Leiber have had far more influence on the game.

D&D on the screen

Not so well done, cavalier

 D&D has had many brushes with the silver and small screens. Not all of them positive. There of course was the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show, which ran for three years and 27 episodes, but we had to wait until 2000 for a real Dungeons & Dragons movie, and then wished we hadn’t. A diabolical mess that featured a bored looking Jeremy Irons (paying for renovations of his Irish castle), that forgettable dude who played Jimmy Olsen in Lois and Clark, Thora Birch, Richard O’Brien and hod-loads of crap CGI, it was closer to the game but further from quality than the cartoon. This is a crying shame, as it was director Courtney Solomon’s life-long ambition to make a D&D movie. He acquired the rights to make the film in 1990 aged just 19 and spent 10 years putting together the money. All for nothing, because it really is awful.

There was a sequel in 2005. Don’t ever see it if you have even one iota of self-respect.

Buck Rogers in the 20th Century

This post represents the continuation of my never-ending quest to get as much of my old journalism online as I can. Unfortunately, that means nothing before 2004, as I was denied permission for that, but there is still so much to come yet! This feature was originally published in SFX 140, in that magazine’s regular “Time Machine” slot, in 2005.

Time Machine: Buck Rogers

Buck Rogers – all white teeth, innuendo-laden badinage, fey robots and tight jumpsuits. That’s what the name means to most of us, remembering as we do the low-brow, high-camp 1980s series from the vast stables of Glen A Larson, whence many a wonky nag and almost thoroughbred SF TV show came trotting onto our screens. The show followed Larson’s “fire and forget” approach to producing, appearing with much fanfare and running for a mere one and a half seasons before sinking into a quagmire of high mediocrity, becoming a something that today seems laughably bad. But Buck Rogers was once much more than this, entrancing several generations of Americans in magazines, comic books, radio and screen, and the sad whimper that his last hurrah endured does a great disservice to his legend.

Anthony Rogers first appeared in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories magazine. Penned by Philip Francis Nowlan, the tale was entitled “Armageddon – 2149″. It was a clever piece of science fiction that had the forces of the future waging war on one another with a variety of military inventions that have since become commonplace – infrared ray guns for night fighting, jet planes, bazookas, paralysis rays and more, though Buck’s flight-endowing jumping belt is still sadly unavailable. The famed Hugo Gernsback, at the time editor of Amazing Stories, firmly stated of the tale: “We have rarely printed a story in this magazine that for scientific interest as well as suspense could hold its own with this particular story. We prophesy that this story will become more valuable as the years go by. It certainly holds a number of interesting prophecies, many of which, no doubt, will come true.”

Buster Crabbe plays it straight.

His prophesy was a good one. Soon after the story’s publication, newspaper mogul John Flint Dille commissioned Nowlan to create a comic strip featuring the adventures of the hero. Entitled Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century, the strip began its run on January 7th 1929. It was to be a phenomenal success, running in over 400 newspapers simultaneously at the height of its success.

Many of the Buck staples are present in the original stories. Buck Rogers, an ex-WWI American fighter pilot, is a surveyor in Pennsylvania who gets trapped in a cave-in and is put into suspended animation by a strange radioactive gas. When he awakes 500 years in the future, the heroic Buck becomes a pilot once more, a secret agent and head of the Rocket Rangers. He lives in a futuristic city of “metalloglass” full of marvellous devices. His enemy is Killer Kane, an evil Mongol who is trying to dominate the world, and his ally Ardala. Buck’s cohorts are the genius Dr Huer, Wilma and her younger brother, Buddy.

By 1932, when the spin-off radio serial was launched, Buck memorabilia crammed the bedrooms of American boys. Hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to listen to the adventures of the space hero four times a week, whose gadgets and gizmos were simulated on the airwaves by the clever use of power tools (his psychic disintegration ray was an electric razor, for example). Buck Rogers was, in all ways, a household name.

In 1939 Buster Crabbe, who had played Buck’s imitator Flash Gordon, donned the robe of the time-displaced adventurer for a cinema serial. This Buck’s origin stepped up the science fiction wow-factor – he­ is flying a dirigible with his colleague Buddy (changed from his earlier role as Wilma’s brother) when they go down over the Artic. The ship is carrying an experimental gas, Nirvano (a shameless piece of McGuffin pinched by ITV’s poor 1999 drama The Last Train). The pair are instructed to inhale the gas in order to preserve their lives. Of course, when they wake up, they’re not in early 20^th century Kansas any more, so to speak. This serial – of the kind that ran before the main feature in the days before televison – had Buck and Buddy revived in 2440. Killer Kane is again the villain, this time at the head of a band of super-gangsters which rule the Earth. Buck joins the freedom fighters, and, in a complicated plot, seeks aid from the planet Saturn. The 12-parter was recycled endlessly, being cut together for a 1953 film release, Planet Outlaws and edited again for television in 1953 in the shape of Destination Saturn. It even ran in the ’70s and ’80s on British TV. Though virtually indistinguishable from the Flash Gordon serial, it was far more polished than other SF offerings of the time, and had a kind of muscular vitality the ’80s version lacked. The wiry Buster Crabbe, an athelete, was a world away from the toothy avuncularity of Gerard.

The TV show that followed in 1950 was, by all accounts, a disappointment, though it is difficult to gauge as there are reputedly no copies of this long-forgotten piece of TV history. It was only the second ever TV SF show after all (the first being Captain Video and His Video Rangers), and the signature elements of Buck Roger’s universe, the constant action and clever gadgets, were severely hampered by the static, live nature of television.

The TV show finished in 1951, and Buck went into a slow decline. Nowlan had long left the comic strip behind, and it lost much of its power. Though it ran until 1967, it was confined to but a few newspapers. “Buck Rogers”, once a commonplace synonym for all that was futuristic in the speech of Americans, became a derogatory phrase applied with the same level of disdain as someone might have said “Doctor Who monster” ten years ago.

There was no Buck for 12 years, until maverick producer Glen A Larson got his hands on the property, launching a new

What science fiction needs is more comedy robots.

Buck onto an unsuspecting public in 1979. Many of the main elements of the story remained wholly intact, but the concept was retooled for the age of disco. “The original space man! The ultimate trip! Buck Rogers swings back to earth and lays it on the 25th Century!” screamed the jive-talking tagline. But disco was not the only innovation since Buck had last entertained the masses – feminism had come along in the meantime and grabbed the world by the proverbials. In response to this, Deering was promoted to Colonel, (though the character was always in need of rescuing and actress Erin Grey had to a) Dye her hair blonde and b) prance about in a shiny catsuit – feminism was yet to be fully integrated into the popular consciousness) and had an arch relationship with Buck with more than a hint of “mother knows best” to it. Ardala too was given preminence over Killler Kane, who was reduced from emperor of the world to henchman. She was now a sexually bored yet ultimately dangerous Princess, daughter of King Draco, evil overlord of one of Earth’s antagonistic ex-colonies. Again, empowered as actress Pamela Hensly was, Ardala was required to prance around in a whole range of adolescent-bothering outfits. Not that this upset Gerard, who had the pair of these lovely, self-determining chicks fighting over him in the show.

“All those beautiful women were one of the reasons I had such a good time doing it! It was in my contract ‘scantily women only’. We were kind of kinky, a little ahead of our time,” He told SFX in a 1999 interview.

Originally intended as a pilot for a TV show, Buck Rogers went on general theatrical release in the US where it tapped into the public’s fondness for the character, grossing vast amounts of cash.

“The figures are burned into my mind,” Gerard told us, figures tripping off his tongue as he recounted his glory hour. “It took 35 million in one month, before being removed from screens because it had been pre-sold to cable. It was one of Top 5 grossing pictures in 1979. In the opening weekend alone it took 12 million dollars, and this was three dollars a ticket at the time.”

(These big figures, predictably, prompted the third re-release of the old Universal Buster Crabbe serial).

Feminism's advent had a minimal impact on the new Buck Rogers. The last Wilma might have been a capable colonel, but men were encouraged to look at her tightly clad backside.

Unsubtle flirting aside, this Buck was a different man. Though he was known to floor the odd Tigerman with a well-aimed punch, he was also a caring, sharing gentleman. The series writer’s bible said of him “As a character Buck Rogers outwardly presents a flip, sardonic, devil-may-care guy, and an adventurous spirit. Beneath this facade is a serious and caring man who is alone. For all of the marvels of the 25th century, Buck Rogers is cut off from everyone he loved or cared about.”

And what marvels! Actually, no. The keyword with Buck Rogers’ 80s incarnation is ‘fun’, and that in the lightest sense. Behind the recycled, unused Battlestar Galactica concepts (another Larson show) and Ralph McQuarrie spaceships, the stories suffered from the curse of syndication – the need for the series to be shown in any order at all cut out any character development or story progression, with many narrative inconsistencies between episodes. The future looked like a bad nightclub furnished by early Ikea, so soulless and plastic that when Buck paints faces on his furniture many viewers must have empathised. But the show illustrated one important social shift – the idea of relentless social progress through science had taken a beating, and it was often Buck’s knowledge of the old ways that got him out of scrapes. This aside, the show relied heavily on comedy, particularly from Twiki, Buck’s mentally deficient midget robot sidekick, and this did not make for the gut-wrenching tale of one man lost across the centuries. Even when the film tried to capture this aspect of Buck’s character, when he sneaks out of New Chicago to his ex-girlfriend’s grave, it slips into pathos.

Worse was to come. Glen A Larson had become little more than a name in the credits once the film had aired, and, as much of a magpie as he was when it came to other’s ideas (Gerard affectionately called him a “bandit”)  the TV series lacked his screwball creative energy, and Gerard allegedly argued with the chief writers on the project. Then came the second series…

Where the first series was goofy but fun, the second was risible. Buck joins the crew of the Searcher, a spaceship commissioned to search out “the lost tribes of man”. The first series’ bible made much of Earth’s relationships with her former colonies, though these were never satisfactorily explored, but this level of plagiarism from Battlestar Galactica, was too much. The second season retrod old western and Star Trek plots. Mel Blanc, the cartoon genius who had voiced Twiki in the first series, was replaced by Bob Elyea for much of the second series, to fans’ mystification and outrage, and the little bot’s limelight was stolen by Krichton, an awful robot who owed much of its ancestry to a standard lamp. Buck wasn’t the only anachronistic throwback on board either, a bemused Wilfred Hyde White was wheeled onto the show to stammer and dither his way through awful lines, in a cardigan! Not very sci-fi. Gerard rages against this new direction.

“Our new producer John Mantley had no idea, one of his ideas was to replace Mel. A complete rip off of Star Trek was another. We ditched all those classic characters – Ardala, Killer Kane, the Tigermen. I was saying ‘Look, I’d really like Buck to stay on Earth. Why would he want to leave? He’s been gone for 500 years. The man needs to look around for a while, not go flying off again. John Mantley did not know what he was doing. He did the last part of Gunsmoke. To hear him tell it he reigned during the headier days of Gunsmoke, but he simply presided over the demise of that and the demise of Buck Rogers. He actually bragged about the fact he ripped off one of his Gunsmoke scripts for the Hawk episode. He actually bragged about it, he thought it was really funny that he cast Barbara Luna in both roles – she was the Indian princess and she was Hawk’s wife. The thing is, to actually laugh about it, to have so little respect for the audience, as to say, fuck ‘em”

The audience got the message, and deserted the show in droves. It was canned. Buck disappeared from the popular awareness, only an RPG, published in the late eighties, keeping his memory alive.

But his tale is perennial one, that of a man out of place, in a new world that presents many opportunities as much as it makes him yearn for that which he has lost. With TV SF reaching new levels of sophistication, perhaps it is time for some enterprising producer to take up the torch of Buck Rogers, and carry it once more to light the darkness of the future for us all.

Buck Facts

• Buck has been played by Matt Crowley, Curtis Arnall, Carl Frank and John Larkin (radio series); Buster Crabbe (cinema serial); Kem Dibbs and Robert Pasteme (’50s TV show) and Gil Gerard (’80s TV show)
•  Buck is a nickname, the character’s real is Anthony Rogers
•  Buck has been put into suspended animation by radioactive gas in a cave, experimental gas in an airship, and by being frozen in deep space when his probe is lost
• In the ’80s version, Buck’s Deep Space Probe, Ranger 3, was modelled on the space shuttle. The series introductory narrative explains it was launched in 1987. In reality, there were no shuttle launches in that year because of the prior year’s Challenger disaster
• Gil Gerard worked with Glen A Larson once before. Larson’s band, “The Four Preps”, played at Gerard’s college. Gerard’s band supported them
•  Gerard was originally going to be a teacher before deciding to take up acting
•  Buster Crabbe appeared in the 80s episode “Planet of the Slave Girls”.
•  The first Buck story, Armageddon-2143, appeared in the same issue of Amazing Stories as the first part of EE Doc’ Smith’s “The Skylark of Space”.
•  Though they are often seen as contemporaries, Buck Rogers came before, and inspired, Flash Gordon
•  At his peak, Buck commanded the loyalty of thousands of fans. The Radio serial had several giveaways with it. The first of which, a map of the planets, had 125,000 requests. A later offering of a space helmet could only be gained by sending in seals from Cocomalt cans, the show’s sponsor, even so 140,000 of these pieces of tin were sent in, and this was during the Great Depression.

Find out everything there is to know about Buck Rogers at the excellent www.buck-rogers.com

Champions, and knees

Today Champion of Mars is out in the US! Hooray! Americans can buy it here. We Brits and other assorted Euro-types have to wait until May 10th. Oh well. Whet your appetites with the free sample, or head over to Solaris Books for more information.

There are two interviews with me online about it now, one at the Solaris Editor’s Blog, the other at SFX. They’re about the same book, so I do repeat myself a little, but about halfway through they diverge and I talk about Richards and Klein, writing spin-off fiction and other highly captivating subjects. Really, you’ll be captivated.

I’m not doing much at the moment. I had a flappy piece of cartilage removed from my knee last week and so will be out of action for some time. I can’t walk or move about at all. It’s very frustrating, and it’s made me think on how people with real mobility problems must feel. Worst of all, I have had to send Doctor Magnus away to the kennels until I recover enough to walk him. He’s a teenage pain in the backside at the moment, but I was welling up as I booked him in.

So, to take my mind off it, I submitted a short story today (expect to see it here when it is inevitably rejected) and  I’ve put a whole load of reviews up, including one of Lavie Tidhar’s early novella, An Occupation of Angels, where I make some comments on the perils of reviewing books of colleagues and friends. There are many others too, head on up to the drop down menus at the top. All these reviews date from my slightly angrier period (I’m always frigging angry, but I used to be more angry), so you may notice a change in tone to the later ones.

Until later.

Feeling Feisty

Greetings. It’s been a while, because I’ve been pigging ill! Laid low by a pernicious rhinovirus. That’s a cold, to the non-medically informed, not a disease that will turn you into a giant, ninja were-rhino. That sounds awesome, but would be very unfortunate and annoying. How would one get through the door for a start? Then there would be all those “feeling horny” jokes. I can live without that.

I must clear my head of such nonsense. In order to do so, I’ve put up this interview I did with Raymond E Feist back in 2008 for Death Ray. It’s the second or third time I’ve interviewed Feist, who remains one of the most successful writers of fantasy on the planet. In common with a lot of American fantasy authors I’ve met, the man is a giant force of natural confidence – with a beard. Like a tornado with a solid sense of self-esteem. Or something. Nice, anyway. I get the feeling he likes ribs.

Mr Feist missed out on the “Death Ray Interview” slot in issue 11 as we had Gerry Anderson in for that. Here’s a little insight into magazine production; I gave a selection of headlines for this piece (it not being “The Death Ray Interview”), ranging from the dire to the actually quite good. “A Kind of Magic” was applied instead of any of my suggestions, a title that is overused, and campy. I feel compelled to tell you this, as I’ve reused it below in the interests of faithfulness to the original.  But there you are. The perils of collaborative effort. Hang on, I like collaborative effort, and so does Feist, and he’s very rich. What have I done? I work alone! I can sit here and write what I like and hate the world on my own, can’t I? Serves me right.

A Kind of Magic

He’s one of the top-selling fantasy authors on the planet, a powerhouse of prose whose 24-book (and growing) Riftwar cycle dwarfs those of even the most prolific author. A real magician of words, He’s Raymond E Feist, and he likes to talk.

At twenty-four books long, the Riftwar saga is one of the most extensive of all the grand fantasy epics. Written by Californian Raymond E. Feist over a period of more than 30 years, Riftwar began with the smash hit Magician, first published in 1982. Magician is typical of the genre, a huge fat wedge of a book. Beginning with the story of an orphaned boy, Pug, before opening up to cover a decade of interplanetary war. Feist’s books are not art with a capital ‘A’ (his own words), they’re derived from a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting he and his friends created while they were at university in San Diego, and contain the full Tolkien menagerie of Elves, Dwarves and so forth. So far, so familiar.

Where they are not typical is in their expert artifice. Feist is a master of fast-paced epic storytelling, his characters are heroic but mortal, struggling through massive wars with enemies both human and monstrous who gain access to his the world of Midkemia via magical ‘rifts’ (we’re talking a wizardly stargate here). Magician is a masterclass in storytelling, a sweeping epic which sees Midkemia plunged into chaos as men from the world of Kelewan invade without warning. Caught up in the decade-long conflict are the boy Pug and his adopted brother Tomas, both of whom, by different paths, become powerful men. Feist’s books are set against an intricate backdrop which, though drawn from the usual catalogue of fantasylands, is a superior example of the type. On the cover of his latest Wrath of a Mad God, a quote describes his work as ‘A guilty pleasure’. That this grudging praise comes from The Guardian newspaper says it all – this guy is good at what he does.

Feist’s own quest began while he was at college, and he overheard someone say: “I’m going to hit him from behind with my sword.” Naturally intrigued, he went to investigate and discovered a friend of his involved in a game of Dungeons & Dragons.

“I joined in after a little while, and found it very addictive for a variety of reasons,” says the author. He’s moved literally just that week, and is talking to us from his new home, his voice echoing in an empty room. “It’s a nice fantasy tour de force, you can imagine and actively portray what would be pretty anti-social behaviour in the real world and not be condemned for it. It was an inexpensive way to socialise. We were all starving college students, and you could buy a half case of beer for ten bucks and spend the evening having a lot of fun.”

A big part of the D&D experience is creating adventures for your buddies to play through, and Feist started to do this, adding to their shared world the continent of Novindus, which he was later to use, years later, as the setting of his Serpentwar trilogy. Later, the gaming group opened Midkemia press, and it in writing modules for the company Feist got his first experience of authorship. Midkemia Press was ostensibly producing generic supplements for all RPGs, though really they were trying to avoid avoid paying license fees to TSR for D&D, which lacked a coherent gaming setting, Feist admits.

“I was pretty active with those guys throughout college, it was the underpinning of my social life. And so when I got the writing bug, I thought, why am I inventing this whole new world of Crydee when there’s this huge world that I’ve been playing games in for four years? I asked the guys about writing a story set in the world, and they said it sounded cool. So I dropped the Duchy of Crydee out on the west coast of the Kingdom of the Isles.

I’m writing historical novels about a place that doesn’t exist.

“Midkemia was always somebody else’s objective world, it wasn’t something that I had created for my own convenience, I was confronted with story issues arising from somebody else’s geography,  it was real estate that I didn’t have a part in building. All the politics, all the social conventions, all the background infrastructure were created for me. So in a lot of ways, and I’ve said this many times, I’m writing historical novels about a place that doesn’t exist.”

But despite Midkemia’s detailed history, Feist initially struggled with what to write about. Feist’s friend Steve Abrams suggested he tell the story of how the more powerful Greater Path of magic came to Midkemia, that which came to be practised by Pug, the eponymous Magician. Feist set Magician 500 years before the games he and his friends were playing, creating the world of Kelewan, whose mysterious Tsurani inhabitants were hellbent on adding Midkemia to their empire.

“Kelewan was predicated on three other gaming systems that were out there, and there were a couple that were very classically non-western European. One I liked a great deal was Bushido, but the problem with Bushido was that it was clearly historically Japanese, so I decided to make a pastiche world where I borrowed from Aztec, a little bit from Zulu and fair amount from Chinese history. And a little bit from Korean, though the Korean influence became much more pronounced later when I hooked up with Janny Wurts to do the Empire series because Janny had actually spent some time in Korea. Kelewan is a movie-set world. I only created what I needed. But Midkemia’s pretty vast, we put a lot of time and energy in to creating it. There are parts of Midkemia that the reader never even heard about, in fact there’s some stuff hapenning in the next book in an area of Great Kesh called the Peaks of the Quor, and that’s been around since 1974, but I’ve never written written about it before. Midkemia’s been a gold mine for me, in terms of story ideas.”

Feist is not the only author currently writing to have become engrossed in fantasy through roleplaying games. RPGs were very much part and parcel in of the fantasy boom that began in the late 70s. But today the gaming landscape has changed beyond recognition. Pen and paper RPGs have dwindled to a minority interest, and though online RPGs have become even more popular than their analogue precursors, they present a very different kind of gaming experience. They do not offer the possibility for collective storytelling that D&D and their ilk did. With this sort of narrative pre-school for writers gone, will it affect the future of the genre? Feist, who has played many of these online games, does not think so.

“No matter what the foundation of your own personal experience, once you step across the line into the theatre of literature, to mix a metaphor, you are subject to the same requirements as every writer – you have to tell an entertaining story that other people want to read.”

For Feist, who’s a big fan of Bernard Cornwell and Clive Cussler, this means pacey prose.

“There are writers out there who do wonderful jobs with description, but one person’s colourful is another person’s tedious. I don’t need someone who thinks their job in life is channeling James Fenimore Cooper. I don’t need a 30 page description of a four-wall cabin. I don’t need to know the history of that rifle hanging over the fireplace back to when the grandfather of the character, who’s not in the cabin right now, by the way, bought it. But that was different writing for a different time for a different audience. I’m reading Sir Walter Scott’s Castle Dangerous, which I haven’t read since I was about 14, and while the story is still as I remember it, I’m sitting here 48 years later going ‘My god this is ponderous prose!’ But the guy wrote it in 1830, his readership really expected very detailed images because they had never been on the borderlands between Scotland and England at the time of William Wallace and Edward Longshanks. People even in fairly cosmopolitan times such as early Victorian England, didn’t travel that much. For most people, the writer was their cable television. It’s an entirely different set of tasks to what we do today. Reader expectation differs, though we all have the same job to do. Ask any writer who’s out there with the public you’ll hear the same thing ‘I have this really great idea for a story, if I could just somehow find somebody to help write it down.’ And the answer is, it’s the help me write it down part which is the reason I get paid, because everybody’s got an idea, ideas are absolutely, absolutely cheap and easy.”

If ideas are so easy to come by, why do fantasy authors tend to stick to the same universe? Feist, to date, has only written one novel set outside the Riftwar series, the contemporary fantasy Faerie Tale (1988).

“I think it is an appetite for the familiar on the part of the reader, but I think it’s an odd question. No-one ever asks Stephen King why he’s written 40 books set on Earth, or more to the point why he’s written 40 books set in New England. But the setting’s not the point, the writer’s working on the essence of the human experience. The Shawshank Redemption could have been set in South Carolina, it didn’t have to be a prison in Maine, but Stephen lives in Maine and he know the environment like the back of his hand. You don’t have to struggle with settings. John Grisham is writing mostly about the south, it’s the reason why Hogwarts is a British public school rather than an eastern American prep school.”

Fantasy also tends to revisit a lineage of characters, like Feist does, picking up the story with the descendants of his characters, but he points out that this is not the sole preserve of fantasy, either.

“I remember reading science fiction as a kid. Heinlein certainly did a lot of that with Methusalah’s children, and when he got into the Lazarus Long stuff, he brought that character back several times. I think part of it is simply is what a storyteller feels best serves his needs.”

Unlike some writers, however, Feist doesn’t shy away from killing off popular characters. Something he insists is necessary in telling stories.

“I don’t like killing off fun characters any more than the next guy, but if you’re dealing with human frailty and human vulnerability, there has to be a price attached to certain choices, also people get old. The only writer I knew who had a cavalier disregard for that was Marion Zimmer Bradley. In her Darkover series she would have a character who was the grandson of character A and character A’s best buddy is character B, who is now the grandson’s best buddy, and he hasn’t aged significantly. When Marianne was asked about that once she basically said ‘I just don’t care, and if it’s a good character and a good story you really shouldn’t care either’. Marianne would occasionally bring up a kind of damn your eyes arrogance to her choices, and her readership loved it.

“It was very very clear to me that if it was going to annoy the hell out of me, it was going to annoy the hell out of my reader. My first task in making those decisions was not to do things to annoy myself. Because If I’m annoyed, god help my reader.”

Though Feist is obviously assured of his own ability and status as one of the world’s best-selling fantasists, he is remarkably unegotistical. His collaborative instincts are still in evidence to this day, and he does a lot of co-authoring. It’s only a select band of authors who are willing to come out of their garrets and share.

“I get a couple of things out of it,” he says. “First of all, Midkemia’s other voices, I didn’t create the world so it’s always been in my mind to a very large degree a collaborative undertaking in terms of the creative side of things; the storytelling side of things is mine, I’m sitting alone there most of the time. What collaboration does for me is that it allows me to look inside the creative processes of another a writer. This has been different with every writer I’ve collaborated with. I’ll be going, ‘I never would have thought of that, that’s cool.’”

So far he’s collaborated with four other writers. The first was Janny Wurts, with whom he wrote the Empire series, an entire trilogy. “The most work, because we did three together and they were big concept books, but it was also the richest experience because it was adding weight and heft to Kelewan, which had been a two dimensional pocket universe,” he says.

He proceeds to be charmingly frank about the other three authors he’s worked with. These were more guest writers, who lent a hand on one book each in his Legends of the Riftwar series – Steve Stirling, who worked on Jimmy the Hand, about Feist’s popular boy thief. “He was the most annoying because he went off on a tangent and did nothing that we’d agreed on, handed me a book that wasn’t the one we’d talked about but it had its interesting stuff in it, and created some challenges for me.” Joel Rosenburg co-wrote Murder in Lamut “When I asked him to clone three characters I didn’t think that he was going to literally yank them out of his book and drop them in my universe, but I’m kind of glad he did.” And William Forstchen, who helped on Honoured Enemy, where a Midkemian patrol are forced to team up with a band of Tsurani when they are attacked by Dark Elves. “The most fun. I wanted to do Sharpe’s rifles, and he wanted to do Xenophon, so we did.”

As you might have gathered, most of Feist’s work is rooted in war, another core concept of fantasy. It is arguable that if SF is the literature of ideas, that fantasy is that of emotion. Bitter partings, treacherous friends, heroic deaths, hidden pasts, trials of character, these are the engines of fantasy.

“In one way or another, the essence of drama is conflict and suffering,” says Feist. “It’s sort of hard to write a story about a bunch of well-adjusted people who are having a great time. It’s like The Adventures of Ozzy and Harriet, one of the great iconic television shows of my childhood, it’s a comedy for a reason, the biggest conflict is which girl Ricky is asking to the prom. We should all be blessed with lives that uneventful. War’s a great lush background, and it provides you with the opportunity to deal with choices that have very direct one-to-one consequences. If Doctor Who,” Feist is a fan of the Doctor, by the way, “warps into a battlefield, it’s a completely different story experience if he drops the TARDIS in Picadilly and Queen Victoria’s riding by.”

Is he, then then a cruel god to his creations? Having them constantly in a state of armed turmoil?

“Well, I have to be. There’s a line in the last book, where Pug is talking to one of the gods and the god is being an asshole, absolutely just being arbritary and capricious, and then does something that is comparatively speaking, relatively nice. He says to Pug, ‘I’m a force of nature, but nature sometimes is clement.’ If my people always were bulletproof, if I was 24 books later still writing about Arutha, and Jimmy, and Pug and Liam and Jimmy, and Martin, okay fine, but we’re doing James Bond now.”

It’s this talent for creating compelling characters, and knowing what to pit them against and, crucially, when to let the axe fall that make Feist’s books so compelling. Past the D&D roots and trappings of the world of Midkemia, which are very evident, there’s a mastery of characterisation that puts his work right at the forefront of modern fantasy.

“For my purposes, I think that if I’m to try to break down my own stuff, which is a really risky thing to do, because I believe that you write intuitively. But I give my reader different characters, the big expansive powerful guys like Tomas, and the really insanely gifted people like Jimmy and Arutha. But I get interesting letters about the smaller characters, people like Nakor, and Roo. Roo was a profoundly flawed character who was eventually redeemed, but he was very clever. He may be the most clever character I created, in fact I got a letter from a guy who was a broker on the Chicago board of trade. He said at last somebody’s written a fantasy for commodities brokers, because he just loved the way I had described Roo’s little plots with the wheat futures, and moving cargo around and things like that.

“I asked Julie Schwarz once, the long time editor at DC comics,” Feist is also well connected, we should add here, “who his favourite character to edit was, and he said Batman. Bruce Wayne is a very driven, dark character, with a lot of flaws, who strives to overcome those flaws through rigour and discipline. His least favourite was the Justice League. He said the problem with Justice League is that Superman had to be weaker and dumber in the Justice League than he was in his own book, because if he wasn’t, you’d be watching Batman and Wonder Woman and Flash and the Green Lantern and Aquaman stand around watching Superman solve the problem.”

Feist ran into the same issues early on with Pug. The criminal gangs and bands of marauding goblins some of the other characters have to deal with would present a very small problem to this Feistian Superman, for Pug is awesomely powerful. Despite his affection for the magician, he’s often absent from the events of the later books, or his powers are in some way curtailed.

“I had to resolve that question. So, I don’t care how powerful he is, in a real world, and let’s say for the moment Midkemia is a real world populated by several million people, there is a ripple effect, and like a ripple in a pond, the further away you get from him the less impact his presence has on the environment. He could walk in maybe and take over a country, because he is the big bad magician, he could fry the king and all that, assuming that was his wont, but the reality is beyond a certain point he has to have an army that listens to him and does what he wants them to do. At the end of the day he can only be in so many places at one time.’

Pug, Feist’s first character, comes up a lot as we talk. Though many of Pug’s contemporaries from the earlier books are dead, Pug lives on. And there’s a good reason for this, he was Feist’s first creation and there are undeniable parallels between author and character. Like Feist, Pug was adopted. A lot of the same ethical issues dog Pug that dog Feist, for despite Feist’s avowed laissez faire attitude, love of much younger women and let-the-good-times-roll rhetoric, he is a deeply ethical man. His characters strive to do the right thing, most of them are in happy relationships, most are devoted to their children. Self-sacrifice is high on the agenda for the heroes of Midkemia. Nevertheless Feist insists that Pug is not him.

“I think there’s a common fallacy that there’s a character in the book that represents the writer if you just go look hard enough, though it maybe true in some cases,” he says. “I think that there elements of my life experience expressed in every character – the interaction when Jimmy meets Gamina is directly related to when I met my wife. And there’s a lot of aspiration, you know, I wish I was as talented as Pug, I wish I was as competent as Arutha, I wish I was as steadfast as Martin, I wish as gifted and as much fun as Jimmy. So in the sense that I can look into an aspect of my own personality and then extend it, and use it as a jumping off point. Pug reflects my own life the most directly, in which I will still observe as being really indirectly, but only because he’s my first character, he’s still with me, and a lot of what I’ve gone through I’ve reflected in his life experience.

“In my own life, you know I’m 62 now, I find myself facing some interesting questions when I was 62 that had I faced them at 30 I would have thought you were absolutely mad. I’m divorced, I’m dating a much younger woman, so suddenly at 62, look, most guys my age are thinking about retirement and playing a lot of golf, and I’m standing here looking at the possiblilty of maybe starting a second family. Do I want to? I’m confronting questions that I didn’t anticipate. So I’m taking my own life experience to the fictional realm. Pug and Miranda are over 100 years old now, but they’re still figuring out a lot of stuff, like me. Actually, I was joking wth somebody, saying I have to believe in reincarnation because I hate to the idea that I finally learn this crap and I can’t get to use it!”

It’s a tough question to ask, but the last 12 months have not been a happy time in the world of fantasy. James Rigney [Robert Jordan] passed away, Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the publication of Gemmell’s final book, finished by his widow, reminds us he is no longer with us. Feist, as he said, is 62. Gemmell was 57, Rigney 58, Pratchett is 60. As with Gemmell, Rigney’s final book will be finished by someone else, Brandon Sanderson. But there’s been a trend over the last few years for authors to pick up the torch of other writers and really run with it. We asked Feist “would you be happy for Midkemia and Kelewan to continue on into the future in 30 or 40 years time without you behind it?”

“Nah,” he says dismissively. “I look at this way, it’s not where the books are set, or not even where the characters are, it’s my voice that is the thing. Yeah, I realise people still buy VC Andrews books, you know, silly as that is. And like many people I mourn Jim’s passing. And I am glad Harriet found someone she’s comfortable with to finish the book, and you know, I feel two ways about that. I realise that Jim probably had enough of the story down and enough of the original writing in place, it’s basically someone going in and fleshing out some things and wrapping it up, so it’s basically Jim’s project. If Harriet decides she wants to franchise out that world, then more power to her, it’s her legacy and it’s her estate. For me, if my son  became a writer and he wanted to play in the same sandbox  that I did, then I wouldn’t have any objection to that. Brian Herbert was smart enough to recognise his own shortcomings as a writer and hook up with Kevin Anderson, who’s a very good writer, and that close collaboration has been very successful, because Kevin’s got a huge opportunity and branding, and Brian gets a really good writer to work with, it’s a really good combination.”

But would Feist be comfortable becoming Raymond E Feist™?

“Probably not. I don’t know. There’s so many variables involved. For one thing I’m making a decent living now, and I’m able to afford most of the things in life that I enjoy, and yeah it would be fun to have the executive jet waiting on the tarmac to fly me to Vegas at whim where the Venetian has the highroller suite set aside for me and I’ve got Hugh Hefner’s rejects flocking around me to accompany me to the best restaurants and all that. Yeah, you can go chase stuff, but why? Look, I got my season tickets to my football team, I got a good wine collection, I got a pretty girlfriend, I live in a very nice place with great weather, I got two amazing kids who I adore even when I want to kill them. Life is good. So you know, I have no ambitions about creating any legacy beyond whatever legacy arises from some kid a hundred years from now wandering into a library someplace and finding a musty old volume of Magician and being captivated by it. If the opportunity arises where Spielberg or Lucas want to create a franchise, and there’s a theme park out there someplace, where next to the Indiana Jones ride is the Ride of the Dragon Lords, fine, I’m always open to business, but you know my business decisions tend to be not ego-driven. I, and say this with all humility. I don’t like the idea that I’m going to end up being the number one fantasy writer in the world because Jim died and Terry’s got Alzheimers. I would be very happy to be number three or number five or number whatever, provided these guys are still around. I liked Jim, Robert Jordan was a character he played, and he played it very well, he was full of bombast and he looked like he was channeling Victor Bruno from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? I mean he got fussy about silly shit on the road all the time, but that’s not Jim, that was the character. Jim was a nice guy, a good guy, and Jesus the guy loved history. Terry can be a bite in the ass, anyone who’s partied with him knows, but he can also be the most delightful and charming person around, he’s a bit of a madman, but for that brain… you know my mum is 91 years old, and I’m dealing with that. I kind of expect it in someone who’s 91, I don’t expect it in someone who’s two years younger than me. I love Terry’s optimism, I love it that he’s approaching it with the ‘parties not over yet, and don’t cry for me Argentina’ attitude, but I still hate the thought of losing that madman to the ‘long goodbye’…”

Feist intends to write five more books set in Midkemia, after that, who knows? No even he’s sure.

“That’s going to be the end of the entire Riftwar cycle. I sat down to write the damn thing in 1977, so I’ve been working on this stuff for 31 years now. There’ll be thirty books in the cycle. Not to sound immodest, but that’s a heroic undertaking. If you’d told me 30 at the beginning I would have said ‘Are you daft?’ That covers the five Riftwars, and tells the entire cycle that I wanted to tell. And after that I’ll figure it out. I’ve already talked to talk to Jane Johnson over at HarperCollins about what I might do on the next series, and I thought it might be fun to dabble for a little while in alternate history.”

At this juncture it’s possibly wise to point out that Feist is garrulous, in fact, he’s a talking machine, his conversation unstoppable and damn near unsteerable. We were on the phone for over an hour, during which time he did most of the talking. These little old paragraphs here, that’s just me making sure we’re all aboard the Ray express and know where it’s going. In reality, he just keeps going, seguing from topic to topic, and he’s keen to share concepts as yet unpenned.

“It will be alternate history where magic works, so I might write a story about Elizabethan colonisation of America, and have one of the protagonists be a puritan witch hunter, and there are real witches out there, so the entire experience is different. The Spanish don’t get over because Montezuma has better magicians. I had a idea that there was this kind of situation where we would arrive at around 1810, where the British have enclaves in places like Manhattan and Pittsburgh, that are on lease deals, like Clive did in India or China did with Macau and Hong Kong. But it’s like the only reason the Kiowa put up with the Europeans is that the Comanches are kicking their ass and they want white allies. That sort of thing. What one has to do first is to set out and delineate the political infrastructure at that time and place, and to do that you’ve got to go back and start saying ‘Okay, how different do I want the world?’ If you go back to Babylon or Sumeria, and say magic works, well at that point, Earth would not be recognisable in 2008. You have to make certain arbitary decisions about what kind of flavour you want, and part of that is just how powerful is magic? Just how important is magic in terms of its change on the ebb and flow of history? One example that springs to mind is that when the soothsayer warns Caesar, ‘Beware of the Ides of March’, Caesar pays attention, because that guy’s got a 90% betting average. Or, he wouldn’t have been so cryptic – ’There are 31 guys waiting to kill you!’. A big part of that will find itself, but I’ve got five other books to write before I get to that decision.”

There’s a big spoiler coming up in this final paragraph, by the way.

“And I might go in a different direction. I may hear a clamouring, as much as fans clamour, for post-apocalyptic Midkemia – what happened next? After everything we knew for 30 books went ‘pouff!’ I don’t know, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”

Did you know?

Midkemia has appeared in both comic and computer game formats. Two adventure games were released by Sierra On-Line, the critically acclaimed Betrayal at Krondor in 1993, and Return to Krondor, in 1998. Feist wrote three books based on these games, two further books were never published due to copyright wrangles. There’s an old-style text MUD under development from Iron Realms too, and Feist says he’s had a few conversations over the years about a MMORPG. A comic version of the first part of Magician has also been released by Dabel Brothers Publishing in co-operation with Marvel. However, the two companies have since ceased working together.

Cosmic horrors versus stiff upper lips

Spring is packed this year. Omega Point was out last week (in the US, UK edition out on 6th April), and Champion of Mars is out on the 26th of this month in the US, on the 10th of May in the UK. I’m not attending Eastercon, mostly because it’s Easter and I’m off back up north, but I will be at The Discover Festival on 18th-19 May at Snibston near Leicester.

There are a couple of interviews about Champion of Mars due soon, one at Solaris the other at I Will Read Books. In anticipation of that, I thought I’d post this article I wrote for Death Ray on William Hope Hodgson, as his work was a big influence on Champion of Mars. This piece appeared way back in 2007 (sheesh, time flies). I haven’t put it up until now as I had no copy on file and had to TYPE IT IN, so I hope you enjoy it. If you’ve not read Hodgson before, I seriously recommend him. I read the Gollancz collected novels of Hodgson whilst travelling around India on honeymoon, which was interesting. Nice bit of romantic, light reading.

Terrors of the Sea

Some of the all-time greats of SF are all but forgotten. Guy Haley puts the case for William Hope Hodgson, whose tales of the occult paint a powerful picture of a wolrd threatened by unseen horrors…

On occasion, at ist very best, science fiction is a genre of truly impressive  wonders. But only infrequently  are the heights of imaginative excellence scaled, and all too often the writers who accomplish the feat soon languish forgotten.

One of those rare visionaries was William Hope Hodgson, an early 20^th century author, sailor, photographer and bodybuilder whose work deals with big stuff – no less than the spiritual perils of the outermost darks, and the fate of humankind.

Hodgson’s stories crackle with muscular energy, and his prose can –at its best – attain a stunning majesty. His work bears comparison with the later HP Lovecraft, and shares similar themes; notably that there are powerful alien creatures out there, and that their very existence is inimical to human life. As Lovecraft himself said, “The work of William Hope Hodgson is of vast power in its suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life.” But unlike Lovecraft, Hodgson’s books brim with the indomitability of the human spirit, and his heroes are men of action who often survive their adventures to tell the tale.

Hodgson was born into the family of an Essex clergyman in 1877. At the age of 13 he attempted to run away to sea, and though initially unsuccessful, by 1891 he was allowed to become a cabin boy. He remained a sailor for eight years, and this career had great impact upon his character.

The sea appears in much of Hodgson’s fiction, although he professed to hate it. He wrote many nautical poems and stories, but it is in two of his better known novels, The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907) and The Ghost Pirates (1909), that his interest in sailing and what he termed the “ab-natural” collided. The first is the more haunting (if harder going) of the two; a dark tale of shipwreck survivors who find themselves tormented by pallid creatures on an island swathed by entrapping seaweed.

Despite this recurrent theme, his finest creations actually have little to do with the sea. The House on the Borderland (1908) is a short novel that tells of a mansion built upon a metaphysical faultline, a liminal building that is neither of this world nor truly of the present. A diary reveals that the last occupant experienced an out-of-body experience there, which led to terrifying  encounters with “swine-things”, finally culminating in an almost psychedelically described trip to the end of time (a trip reminscent of that in HG Wells The Time Machine) and the house’s destruction.

It is the far meatier The Night Land (1912), however, that is generally reckoned to be his finest work, and should be read by all who enjoy weird fiction.

The Night Landis set millions of years in the future, a time when the sun has died. The ancient Earth is shrouded in blackness haunted by monsters, granted ingress to our own realm by the meddlings of aeons-dead science. Against all the odds, mankind survives in a vast pyramid known as the Great Redoubt, living in peace with one another, even as time marches on toward their unavoidable extinction. The story concerns a man who receives a message from a woman he believes to be his reincarnated wife, and he sets out to fetch her from the long-lost Lesser Redoubt.

True, The Night Land is written in appalling cod-archaic English and includes a great deal of what China Mieville – in his introduction to The House on The Borderland, the Gollancz Fantasy Masterwork collected works of Hodgson – calls “egregious romance”, but it triumphs over its self-imposed limitations to give us a quest story of breathtaking power. This is truly one instance where a writer can be seen to triumph in spite of himself, and Hodgson’s vision of this alien, inimical Earth remains in the mind long afterwards.

Other creations of note by Hodgson include Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, a collection of short stories which detail the adventures of a paranormal sleuth. Carnacki is a tough customer. While a Lovecraftian protagonist often ends a story with his sanity is tatters after an encounter with some horrifying monster, Carnacki chases after it with his revolver.

William Hope Hodgson was killed, aged 40, in The Great War by a German shell. With characteristic bravado, he died executing perilous, voluntary duty. He left behind only a relatively small body of work, but one which has had a lasting impact.

Here’s a couple of elderly websites with more on Hodgson. For general information go here, while The Night Land is devoted to, you got it, The Night Land and has stories penned by other authors. Gollancz’ collected edition of Hodgson’s novels, mentioned above, is a bargain and a great place to start.