Kull of Atlantis – Conan of Cimmeria with an Idiot Ball

I read the collection of Robert E. Howard’s “Kull of Atlantis” stories this week. Kull, a barbarian of Atlantis, flees from his homeland, and is at various times a slave, a gladiator, a mercenary, a general, and finally seizes the throne of the ancient kingdom of Valusia for himself. Once sitting on the throne, he brings new prosperity and order to the tottering Valusian kingdom, but the Valusian nobility decides that they miss their good old incompetent native-born tyrants after all, and busy themselves trying to depose Kull.

Kull is very obviously an earlier, less-developed version of Howard’s Conan of Cimmeria; in fact, one of the Kull stories, “By This Axe I Rule!” gets transmuted directly into “Phoenix on the Sword”, the first Conan story. Howard obviously improved his skills as a writer by the time he got to Conan, especially with stories like “The Hour of the Dragon” and “Red Nails”.

Despite that, Kull is his own man. Unlike Conan, who has a strong practical intelligence, Kull is more abstract, more cerebral. Like Conan (and Howard himself), Kull suffers from paralyzing bouts of melancholia. Unlike Conan, who deals with his difficulties with frenetic activity, Kull has a tendency to brood, and so in some ways is a more realistic character.

On the other hand, Kull tends to overthink things, which gets him into trouble. In other words, he occasionally picks up the Idiot Ball for the sake of the plot. Conan rarely did so. Part of this was the fact that Howard had progressed as a writer by the time he got to Conan. But a big part of this was Kull’s own habit of overthinking. In “The Cat and the Skull”, he is taken in by an incredible obvious ruse simply by his own tendency to philosophize. In “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune”, he is enspelled by a wizard’s enchanted mirror, unable to decide if he is real or an illusion. Conan’s response to a wizard threatening him with an enchanted mirror would have been to sensibly smash the mirror, kill the wizard, and then to loot the wizard’s home.

You can see the difference in Kull’s and Conan’s philosophical outlooks quite readily. In “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune”, Kull says while gazing into the wizard’s mirror:

“He is I, a shadow of myself, part of myself – I can bring him into being or slay him at my will; yet” – he halted, strange thoughts whispering through the vast dim recesses of his mind like shadowy bats flying through a great cavern – “yet where is he when I stand not in front of a mirror? May it be in man’s power thus lightly to form and destroy a shadow of life and existence? How do I know that when I setup back from the mirror he vanished into the void of Naught?

“Nay, by Valka, am I the man or is he? Which of us is the ghost of the other? Mayhap these mirrors are but windows through which we look into another world. Does he think the same of me? Am I no more than a shadow, a reflection of himself – to him, as he to me?”

Conan discusses the same sort of philosophical conundrum to his lover Belit in “Queen of the Black Coast” – and his attitude is quite different:

“I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”

That may explain why Howard experienced more success with Conan than with Kull, and why Conan remains fairly well-known to this day – vigorous action makes for more engaging reading than philosophical brooding. The protagonist has to take action, after all, and it’s easier to write epic operatic soundtracks* for characters who take action.

Though you might recall a few weeks ago I looked over the Conan stories to see just how often Conan did, in fact, get the girl. In the Kull stories, Kull doesn’t get the girl even once – no wonder he has a tendency to think too much!

-JM

*Incidentally, I highly recommend the “Age of Conan” soundtrack, even if – like me – you have no desire to play the game whatsoever.



Changes, by Jim Butcher

I stayed up all night reading “Changes”, the new Harry Dresden book. I’m getting too old for this kind of thing, but I did it anyway.

Excellent book, though. But y’all remember that thing I wrote a few weeks back, about how parents completely abandon all trace of rationality and sanity when it comes to their children? This book is made of that idea.

Harry Dresden, you fool, fool, fool.

-JM

tomorrow, gluttony

Tonight I will do some editing.

Tomorrow, I will not write, nor will I edit.

Tomorrow, the new Harry Dresden book comes out. I could say that I’m not going to read the entire thing in one sitting, in much the same way that a man says he will not eat the last slice of pepperoni pizza, or argue with his mother-in-law, or start hitting on his ex.

But we all know that at the end of the night, the pepperoni pizza will be eaten, the mother-in-law will weep crocodile tears and speak fondly of that one man her daughter should have married (you know, the doctor), and inappropriate comments about what is cooking, good looking, will have been made to the ex.

And I will have stayed up until 2 in the morning reading the latest Harry Dresden book in one single gluttonous, brain-gorging sitting.

I’m looking forward to it.

-JM

Do not fall asleep. Your very life may depend upon it.

For my birthday, I got the DVDs of the BBC’s “Sherlock Holmes”, with the late Jeremy Brett playing the part of Sherlock Holmes. These are superb; Jeremy Brett is by far the best actor to have tackled the part of Holmes so far. Brett captures all of Holmes’s brilliance and social ineptness, while David Burke plays a Dr. Watson who Holmes relies upon to smooth things over with the rest of the world.

But my favorite Holmes story has been “The Speckled Band”, and tonight I saw the Brett episode.

It was excellent. It had all the right elements. The terrified woman. The mysterious death. The crumbling, ruined mansion. The sinister doctor. And a villain with a subtle and brilliant plan.

Unfortunately for him, Holmes turned out to be just a bit more subtle.

-JM

Minas Tirith vs. Constantinople

superversive has a fascinating essay about the parallels between the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor in “The Lord of the Rings” and the Western and Eastern Roman Empire.

“Lord of the Rings” and ancient/medieval history, two of my favorite topics. All it needs is a reference to Linux, and it’d be the most epic essay ever!

-JM

don’t let in the darkness outside the world

John C. Wright as an interesting essay on the nature of fantasy as a genre, arguing that the overriding theme of fantasy literature is the idea of longing for a world of magic beyond the mortal world, something beyond the mundane realm of death, taxes, and the daily grind.

What’s interesting is that in the stuff I’ve written, and what little I’ve published, has invariably taken the opposite approach. Like, there is magic, but it is almost always an evil force. The magicians are cruel and arrogant, and use their power for selfish ends. Or they regard their magic as something akin to science, and want to use their power to reshape and remold the world into something more rational and ordered, and never mind the opinions of those being reordered. Materialist Magicians ala Screwtape, I suppose.

The book I’m currently writing has a magician as one of the protagonists, since I haven’t done that for a while and I wanted a change. But even in this book, the World Outside is something nasty. The magicians themselves are often cruel and arrogant, but regard their primary responsibility as keeping the creatures of Outside from going on rampages in the real world. (Which they view as justifying their cruelty and arrogance, of course, but that’s a whole different dynamic.)

This must be what happens when you read Lovecraft in college.

But! This has given me food for thought. Perhaps the next thing I write will be about a World Beyond our own that isn’t completely filled with horrors.

-JM

The Wheel of Time Book #0 – New Spring

As part of my grand plan to re-read “The Wheel of Time” over the next, oh, three years or so*, I finally read the prequel the late Robert Jordan wrote, “New Spring”, detailing how Moiraine Damodred and Lan Mandragoran met.

I had forgotten that whatever else one might think of “Wheel of Time”, Jordan was really a very good writer. He built a vivid world, and his characters are sharp. Thousands of megabytes have been written upon male-female interaction in Jordan’s books, but he seems to have been one of those rare SF/F writers who grokked that men and women are actually different from each other, and those differences are not merely the result of cultural conditioning. Refreshingly un-PC, really.

Though Jordan’s writing has every virtue except that of brevity. But since the series is going to have sixteen books or whatever, we already knew that.

-JM

*I’m not going to read them back to back. Good heavens, no. I want to keep my sanity, such of it that remains.

The Wheel of Time and me

I haven’t thought about Robert Jordan’s “The Wheel of Time” in years.

I think I first started reading it eleven, twelve years ago. The summer of 98 or 99, I forget which. I was looking for fresh reading material at the time, and I picked up “The Eye of the World” (number 1) at the local bookstore. That bookstore went out of business years ago, but every Thursday or so I used to walk down there and pick up my reading material for the week.

But, anyway. “The Eye of the World”. I read the first hundred pages, and thought “Wow! This is really boring.”

By the end of the book I thought “Wow! This was really not boring!” It was an amazing experience. Jordan had created a world of richness and detail, populated with vivid characters and a plotline of epic scale and grandeur. I hastened to the local bookstore and got the next one. And the next one. And then the next one.

I blasted through the rest of the series in fairly short order – I think up to “Crown of Swords” (number 7). And I got the next two books faithfully as they came out. And then…I just gradually lost interest. The plot didn’t move forward very much. The books came out farther and farther apart. And I was busy, and I had lots of other things to fill my time. So I forgot about it, and when “Knife of Dreams” (number 11) came out, I thought about getting it, but never actually got around to it. It had been so long I couldn’t remember all the plot details, and I didn’t want to restart this enormous series from the beginning once again.

And then Robert Jordan died, which was sad. Since he left detailed notes, I figured they would hire someone to finish, but I didn’t really plan to read it. It’s never the same after the original author has died, after all.

Then I read Brandon Sanderson’s “Mistborn”, and I realized that he definitely has the chops to finish off “The Wheel of Time” in a satisfactory manner. And “Wheel” is such a huge epic tale that I want to read the ending. Besides, I’ve been reading it for twelve freaking years, you know? When I first started reading those books, I’d never used a laptop, I didn’t have my own Internet connection, didn’t have a car, had never written a book of my own, never been published. The Wheel’s turned over quite a bit since then, but the series is still there. I want to see how it ends.

So, I’ve decided. I’m going to read “The Wheel of Time” again. I’m going to start with the prequel book “New Spring” that I never actually read, and I’m going to read all the way to the end. Not all at once; I’ll read other stuff in between the “Wheel” books. So by the time I actually get to the end, Sanderson might well have finished.

I look forward to it.

-JM

“Mistborn”, by Brandon Sanderson

This is the first epic fantasy I’ve liked in quite some time.

There’s the usual elements. A Dark Lord ruling over an empire of groaning slaves and corrupt aristocrats. A band of plucky heroes dedicated to the Dark Lord’s overthrow. But they’re not planning to seek out the one sword that can slay the Dark Lord, or the one ring that is the source of the Dark Lord’s power.

No, they’re planning to swindle the Dark Lord out of his dark throne.

See, the Dark Lord’s economic power is based upon control of a single rare mineral, and if our plucky heroes can snatch away his stockpile of the aforementioned rare mineral, the Dark Lord loses the ability to pay his soldiers, who will then seek gainful employment elsewhere, and his empire collapses.

It’s as if Gandalf and Frodo decided to defeat Sauron not by destroying the One Ring, but by manipulating the Minas Tirith Stock Exchange until Mordor’s economy collapses, driving Sauron to bankruptcy and causing the uncounted legions of orcs to quit when Sauron can’t make payroll that month. Mordor collapses into insolvency, and to cover his debts Sauron has to sell the Dark Tower to the Chinese, who rename it the Spire of Harmonious Prosperity and hang a giant portrait of Mao from the Window of the Eye.

It’s a very interesting twist on the usual fantasy epic, and I enjoyed it a great deal. Economics don’t often turn up in fantasy books. When economics do turn up in fantasy books, it tend to be the usual Marxist horsecrap (specifically, I’m thinking of China Mieville), so it was refreshing to see economics based even loosely upon actual reality.

I’ll definitely be picking up the other two books in the series. Though since they’re published through TOR, I’ll have to get them through Barnes & Noble, since Amazon is currently attempting to crush TOR’s parent corporation Macmillian.

Ironically, it’s a plot right out of “Mistborn”.

-JM

Books I Have Read Of LAte

“Devil in the White City”, by Erik Larson.

“Devil” is a popular history that juxtaposes two concurrent events; the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and the murderous rampage of Dr. H.H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer. Or, at least, the first serial killer to get caught. I knew a little bit about the World’s Fair, but I had no idea what an impact it had on American technology and modes of thought. After all, the Ferris Wheel originated at the Fair, along with a host of other devices.

Of course, at the same time, Holmes built his notorious “murder castle”, a hotel specifically built as a giant prison and torture chamber for Holmes’s mostly female victims. It was rather chilling to read how easily Holmes seduced his victims again and again and again, and they never suspected a thing until they found themselves in Holmes’s gas chamber or kiln or basement torture chamber. Beware a smiling face; it might conceal a grinning skull!

“Princeps’ Fury” and “First Lord’s Fury”, by Jim Butcher.

The final two books of Butcher’s “Codex Alera” six-book sequence. Which I suppose would make it a sextology, though that sounds like one of those semi-obscene infomercials that play at 2 in the morning.

Anyway, the hero Tavi, having overcome every foe in the previous four books, now faces something worse: the insectile Vord, who are a combination of the Borg from “Star Trek” and the Zerg from “Starcraft”. The net effect of this is that Butcher has spent four books carefully constructing an elaborate and complex world…

…and in book five he takes a sledgehammer and starts smashing things right and left.

I quite enjoyed it. I still think the “Dresden Files” books are better, but “Codex Alera” was enjoyable in its own right.

“Chronicles of Chaos” trilogy, by John C. Wright

These books center around five teenagers at a deeply disturbed boarding school. For one thing, the school only has five students. To make matters stranger, each of the teenagers have supernatural powers that they interpret according to a different mental paradigm. Amelia can see into hyperspace, Victor can manipulate matter at the atomic level, Quentin can speak to spirits, Colin can make himself faster and stronger by simply believing it is so, and Vanity can create secret passages where none existed before.

(mild spoilers follow)

The kids realize that their school is actually a prison, and that their teachers and captors are in fact the ancient Greek gods of Olympus. You’d think the Greek gods would have gone out of style, but as Hermes points out, Sex and Violence are worshipped in America, so Aphrodite and Ares do quite well for themselves.

These are formidably erudite books. I know a bit more about Greek mythology than most people, but I had to fetch my reference books several times. It was still enjoyable to figure out who Lady Cyprian and Lord Mulciber were, for instance, before the teenagers did. The books are classified as fantasy, but I think they’re much closer to science fiction, since the Greek gods are more like trans-dimensional energy beings with reality altering powers than actual gods. Plus, the various characters fight with nanobots and directed energy weapons.

But that’s a quibble. Good books, and intellectually heavy ones. It was enjoyable to see how Mr. Wright wove together the awkwardness of the teenagers with hyperspatial travel and armies of nanomachines.

“Going Postal” by Terry Prachett.

I never thought a book about a man going to work for the Post Office would be both entertaining and insightful, but, well. There you go. Of course, I suppose it helps that the post office is in Ankh-Morpork, and that the man is Moist von Lipzig, con artist extraordinaire.

-JM