Audiobook Wednesday: The Maze of the Enchanter - Clark Ashton Smith

21st Century Thrilling Adventure

I did some volunteering reading and editing for this project, back before it found a publisher, so I am pleased to see that it is close to publication. I can't wait to see the final book.

But lets hear the official announcement from Extant! SF:

*****

I am excited to announce the launch of EXTANT! SF's first project!

 

21^st Century Thrilling Adventure is a collection of stories that aim for the passion and drive of Radium Age action and adventure, but drag that energy into the modern age.

For all they are maligned, the pulps of the 1920s and 1930s had life – they were exploding into an entirely new market and driving forward into brand new ideas. This collection features stories inspired by the action-adventure tales of the pulps, stories that range from hard boiled action, through tales of the weird to straight up fantasies of the modern world. The thing they all have in common is:energy.

These stories hit the ground running!

Featuring stories by:

• Misha Burnett
• Alexandru Constantin
• Nathan Dabney
• Tomas Diaz
• Schuyler Hernstrom
• Dave Higgins
• Jon Mollison
• Rawle Nyanzi 
• Butch Pearce
• Ben Rodriguez
• Louise Sorensen
• Dan Wolfgang

This is an amazing lineup of writers for a first issue, and I’m excited to be working with them. Be sure to check out their websites and to search out their other work online – this project is going to be a wild ride!

All stories are in and in editing - I'd like to say the hard part is done (and done well by this talented crew!) but the truth is we still have the nuts and bolts of getting to press to deal with.

Pulp Radio Wednesday: The Shadow - Death Gives An Encore

Review - The Living Shadow: Chapters 2-5

"Mr. Vincent?" the person said. "This is the jeweler. I have a message for you."

The word "message" made Vincent become suddenly alert. The voice was talking slowly now, and certain words came in a slight emphatic drawl.

"Your watch was sent to another man by mistake. We expect to have another in very soon; perhaps by next Tuesday. It will be delivered to your room."

The message was forming in Vincent's mind. He did not reply.

"Was my message clear?" came the question.

"Yes," Vincent replied.

He hung up the receiver and repeated the stressed words slowly and softly to himself:

"Watch − man − in − next − room."

Vincent chuckled. It was an order, and it was up to him to obey. 

*****

Harry Vincent is taken to a hotel where clothes, lodging, and spending money wait for him--along with a mission from his new benefactor.  "Watch the man in the next room."

Harry keeps an eye on his neighbor, one R. J. Scanlon. Despite his already skilled surveillance, he falls repeatedly for Scanlon's tradecraft yet still manages to compile a growing dossier on the man. 

Scanlon meets with Steve Cronin, who is playing a more sinister game than Harry. Later, at the hotel, Harry watches as Cronin tries to force his way into Scanlon's room to retrieve a Chinese disk. The man leaves, and Harry sneaks into Scanlon's room, only to find Scanlon dead--and Cronin's Chinese disk.

A Shadow follows Cronin as he meets with Croaker to double-cross a gang. Because Cronin revealed his name, he makes Croaker take over finishing the job: find the disk and take it to the fence, Wang Foo.

*****

Gibson follows the tendency of the period to include dialect in dialogue. Intended to provide verisimilitude, the purposeful misspellings to mimic an accent are eye-watering, especially with the black driver in the second chapter. Prose should not be a code to decipher, whether written by a pulpster or Mark Twain. Fortunately, this tendency has fallen out of favor. Oh, and to stave off cries of racism, Gibson writes each character with specific word choices and dialect to reflect their station, not just the black man.

We're just under 10,000 words into the story, and the Shadow has appeared only twice. Once to rescue Harry Vincent, stopping only to kill a carjacker or two, and a second time in quiet surveillance of Cronin and Croaker. At this moment, he doesn't even bear the moniker, although Harry has suggested it in his mind. Meanwhile, Harry has given himself wholly to the Shadow's cause and has proved himself to have some skill, but not the experience needed to avoid common pitfalls. 

The pulp fascination with chinoiserie appears here, with the Chinese disk and the Chinatown fence. Gibson will not indulge in the Yellow Peril of Fu Manchu, a trope already showing its age with the advent of Charlie Chan as a police hero. We will soon see what his particular twist on the trope.

The mystery is still developing, with the first twists already falling into place. Who knows what will happen when Harry makes his first report?

Ma, Zen, and Economy

Kevyn Winkless describes his editing style and keys in on an important realization:

Ma is the Japanese art of empty spaces. Most often encountered in interior decorating, architecture, and of course visual arts the concept of Ma is difficult to explain, easy to see - just look at Hasegawa Tohaku's famous 6 panel screen Pine Trees:
 

Black ink. White space. 

Hasegawa gives us as much with the space he leaves blank as with the lines he actually painted. He fills that entire canvas with nothing, and it's incredibly evocative. You can see an entire world here, even though he has merely depicted a few trees, and not whole trees at that. 

He doesn't fill the space. He outlines it. He draws us into it. He makes us fill it. 

So I learned the Ma of poetry on Twitter. 

And then I tried something more challenging: fiction. 

Fiction is a different beast, I hear you say. Fiction needs all those words. Words is how fiction works. 

You're not wrong. But when you start to grapple with Ma you learn something Zen masters have known for centuries: 

Words are liars.

Yes, the words are important: no words = no story. 

But the words aren't the story - not really. The words are the frame of the story. The story, such as it is, really exists in the reader's mind, just the same as with poetry. 

You have only a few thousand words with the readers. Don't try to force everything into their minds. You can't anyway, and the effort will leave you both frustrated and bereft. 

No: sketch the outline of the story, show the reader the glittering edges and the mysterious silhouettes of your world and let them fill in the blank space in their mind.

Creativity isn't always powered by possibilities, but by limitations.

The Chinoiserie Genre

Readers familiar with the Pulp Revolution have certainly by now heard that with the death of the pulps, many genres fell out of favor. Hero pulps, sword and sorcery, and planetary romance have all declined from the heyday of the 1930s, often replaced entirely by other expressions of fantasy and science fiction. Yet as we return to reading the pulps instead of what people say about the pulps, whispers of other genres appear. For instance, hidden among the three proud pillars of weird fiction – horror, science fiction, and fantasy – is a fourth genre, one as exotic as its name: chinoiserie.

Chinoiserie first started in the 18th century in the visual arts. European artists impressed by Chinese artistry began to imitate the Eastern designs, incorporating them into pottery, furniture, decor, gardening, and even music. The appetite for chinoiserie grew with the perception of China as a highly civilized culture, even beyond the European norms. The artistic movement continues to the present day, with many works of chinoiserie available online. As with many artistic movements, this fascination with exotic cultures made a jump into literature.

Literary chinoiserie began as an exploration of unfamiliar Oriental cultures as perceived by Western writers.  While the visual arts quickly distinguished between Chinese-influenced chinoiserie and Japanese-influenced japonisme, no such distinction was made in the literary world, with chinoiserie describing Persian, Byzantine, Japanese, Tibetan, and Chinese stories. (Despite convention, I will be using chinoiserie and japonisme to differentiate the two flavors of literary chinoiserie.) However, the term quickly narrowed to Pacific Asian cultures, with the Chinese association dominating. Literary chinoiserie expresses itself in three major forms; the exploration of Chinese lands, the exploration of Western ideas of Chinese culture in both its homeland and its diaspora settlements, and the exploration of an idealized China that never was. Occasionally, Western culture would dress up in chinoiserie robes for the purpose of satire, as in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. But common to all expressions is the idea of the outsider looking into another culture not his own, and not always understanding what is seen. One does not write chinoiserie of their own culture. The Chinese author of the Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu, writes Chinese science fiction, while Peter Grant writes chinoiserie science fiction dealing with Chinese triads in space in his Maxwell Saga.

Perhaps the most sensationalized version of chinoiserie, yellow peril is the tendency of pulp writers to use Chinese as villains, as popularized by the Lord of Strange Deaths himself, Fu Manchu. Hidden in every shadow were copycat secret societies led by cunning occult mentalists and sensuous deceitful dragon ladies. This was primarily a staple of weird menace, a sensationalist genre of lurid stories where a dreadful and mysterious terror, usually occult or supernatural, threatens to overtake the hero unless he acts. This Chinese threat was not the only staple of the genre, as fantastic, mythological, and scientific terrors would also loom in the pulps, however the trope was common enough to have its subversions and aversions, with the honorable and heroic detective Charlie Chan as the most famous antithesis to yellow peril villains.

Chinoiserie’s fascination with exotic China found a home in the pulps. The Shadow’s first adventure, The Living Shadow, found the Knight of Darkness playing master of disguise in Chinatown to root out a hidden killer. Counter to convention, this killer, Diamond Bert, only posed as a Chinese mastermind. Among the imitators of the Shadow, the Green Lama featured an American student of the Tibetan Lamas using Eastern secrets to defeat Western criminals. Sidney Herschel Small wrote adventures of Asia and American Chinatowns. E. Hoffman Price led the parade of writers of Weird Tales who would use chinoserie, many of which would claim that their stories had been discovered in the markets of China and Istanbul. Clark Aston Smith wrote a prose poem describing two lovers separated by centuries in his “Chinoiserie.” Manly Wade Wellman’s occult investigator, John Thunstone, would test his metal and that of a holy blade against a cursed Gurka honor sword in “The Dai Sword.”

As the pulp age faded, so did literary chinoiserie. But the fascination with China lived on. Robert van Gulik found a copy of The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee in a second-hand store and translated the fictional account of Tang dynasty judge Di Renjie into English. Van Gulik then wrote an entire series of new adventures for Judge Dee, starting with The Chinese Maze Murders. The adventures of the Sinanju master assassin Chuin and his worthless assistant Remo Williams filled book after book of the men’s adventure series The Destroyer. Andre Norton brought a taste of China to gothic romance in The White Jade Fox, where an antebellum governess must keep her charge’s Chinese treasures safe from her stepmother. E. Hoffman Price would return to chinoiserie in The Devil Wives of Li Fong with the tale of the serpent Mei Ling as she protects her family from Taoist magic. Finally, in perhaps the brightest gem of the chinoiserie crown, Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds chronicles the adventures of the sage Master Li and the villager Number Ten Ox as they face off against crooked peddlers, rabbity tax assessors, exalted lords, and the machinations of the gods themselves in search of a cure for the kuu poison affecting their village’s children.

Inspired by Bruce Lee’s fame and Hong Kong cinema, movies such as John Carpenter’s cult-classic Chinatown misadventure Big Trouble in Little China and Disney’s Mulan took the torch of chinoiserie from literature, created beloved classics of the silver screen in the process. Chinoiserie also moved to video games with the gory martial-arts fighting series Mortal Kombat and Bioware’s  Jade Empire, an RPG homage to the Shaw Brothers‘ kung-fu movies, while the short-lived Firefly television series added a Chinese voice to the strange conversation between Japanese samurai films, American westerns, and science fiction as a whole. More recently, the martial arts cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender explored a fantasy version of China, mixing Western alchemical elements with Chinese martial arts. The tradition continues into this decade, with Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA starring in The Man with the Iron Fists, a loving tribute to the grindhouse days of blacksploitation and the Shaw Brothers’ cinema.

As China moved from the written page into the theaters and small screens, Japan took over the written word. James Clavell’s Shogun and Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s fantasy adventures of female samurai Tomoe Gozen are among the first novels reflecting the shift from chinoiserie to japonisme. As Japan rose again to become an economic power and a media giant in the 1980s, American fascination with the Land of the Rising Sun grew, spilling over into its stories. Perceptions of present day Japan are explored in thrillers like Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, lost-in-translation misadventures like Isaac Adamson’s Tokyo Suckerpunch, and lost to reality gamer webcomics such as Megatokyo. Continuing the tradition created by Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan, the folklore and mythology of Japan are explored in novels such as Kij Johnson’s The Fox Woman and Lian Hearn’s Tale of Shikanoko series. Japanese history from the Heian court to the Warring States forms the backdrop for I. J. Parker’s Akitada mysteries, the Yamada Monogatari series of Richard Parks, and the classic Tales of the Otori. Japanese elements flavor John Wright’s Daughter of Danger, Neil Gaiman‘s Sandman and American Gods, and indie works such as Rawle Nyanzi’s Sword & Flower and countless others. And the thirst for all things Japanese (and japonisme) has yet to be quenched.

Perhaps the reason why chinoiserie and japonisme do not get the recognition that other genres do is because they combine so well with other genres. Chinoiserie rarely stands alone in a story, but crosses with action, with detective mystery, with noir, with fantasy, and even with science fiction to bring a exotic flavor to those genres. It has been easy to lose sight of the influence of chinoiserie as this weird fiction genre has drifted into the historical fiction and literature shelves. However, the influence of the East upon weird fiction is unmistakable, and chinoiserie is as much a founding genre as fantasy, science fiction, and horror.

Review - The Living Shadow: Chapter 1

Out of the darkness came a being of the night to give Harry Vincent another chance; a chance to live his life with enjoyment, danger and excitement; a chance to risk it for an honorable cause in the service of the mysterious character known only as The Shadow!

*****

Far be it to me to add one jot to the advertisement for the very first novel of The Shadow, 1931's The Living Shadow, especially when it sums up the events so well. Written by Walter Gibson under the house name of Maxwell Grant, this novel would create new genres, from the hero pulps to superhero comics, and usher in the media empire that was The Shadow.

Yet for how ubiquitous the Knight of Darkness would become, his first case begins not with the narrative eye on Kent Allard, Lamont Cranston, or whatever nom de guerre The Shadow claims as he fights his war against crime. Instead, we are introduced to Harry Vincent, a man who had just received a "Dear John" letter from the woman who used to be his girl back home. Overtaken by a pity party, he heads out to a bridge and jumps. But his suicide is not to be...

Something clamped upon his shoulder. An iron grip held him − balanced between life and death. Then, as though his body possessed no weight whatever, the man felt himself pulled around in a sweeping circle. He staggered as his feet struck the sidewalk of the bridge.

He turned to confront the person who had interfered. He swung his fist angrily, but a hand caught his wrist and twisted it behind his back with irresistible power.

It was as though the man's strength had been wrested from him when he faced a tall, black−cloaked figure that might have represented death itself. For he could not have sworn that he was looking at a human being. 

The stranger's face was entirely obscured by a broad−brimmed felt hat bent downward over his features; and the long, black cloak looked like part of the thickening fog.

This mysterious stranger demands a price for Harry's rescue:

"Your life," said the stranger's voice slowly, "is no longer your own. It belongs to me now. But you are still free to destroy it. Shall we return to the bridge?" 

"I don't know," blurted Vincent. "This is all like a dream; I don't understand it. Perhaps I did fall from the bridge, and this is death that I am now experiencing. Yet it seems real, after all. What good is my life to any one? What will you do with it?" 

"I shall improve it," replied the voice from the darkness. "I shall make it useful. But I shall risk it, too. Perhaps I shall lose it, for I have lost lives, just as I have saved them. This is my promise: life, with enjoyment, with danger, with excitement, and − with money. Life, above all, with honor. If I give it, I demand obedience. Absolute obedience. You may accept my terms, or you may refuse. I shall wait for you to choose."

Harry instantly agrees, and the man ushers him into a taxi which will take him to a hotel that will provide him food, lodging, and clothing--and a way to recieve this man's future orders. Along the way, though, some highwaymen force the cab off the road. They attempt to rob him, but get only lead from the mysterious man's pistol

***** 

So far, The Living Shadow is relatively straightforward, using Harry's plight to hook the reader on who this mysterious rescuer might be. It even ends with a quick action sequence, that, from Harry's perspective, is akin to a thriller movie where a person can hear fighting outside, but only occasionally sees the combatants when they crash against the glass. This fight is both suspenseful and economical, accomplishing its mission in four paragraphs. 

Already the difference in story telling fashion is apparent. With the success of Star Wars, the monomyth structure known as The Hero's Journey has become ubiquitous. Certain beats, like the Call to Adventure and Refusing the Call are now expected and expected to fill the first quarter of the adventure. The Living Shadow breezes through this phase in the first 1200 words, tossing the idea of Refusing the Call out the window in the process. Not only is The Shadow that convincing, his adventures were written in a time where writers were relatively unconcerned with delving into the motivations and reasoning of making a decision. Instead, they focused instead on exploring the consequences of a decision, as was expected in a morality play. Good intentions could lead to bad results, and bad results were the effect of a poor decision. Thus Harry leaped at the opportunity given to him. We will see if he made the right choice in the next 36 chapters.

But it is also important to remember that Harry Vincent is not the hero of The Shadow. He's just the protagonist and occasional viewpoint character. At the dawn of the hero pulp, Walter Gibson introduced the idea of a proxy hero. And while The Shadow's methods, agents, mysteries, and stories were copied by his imitators in both the hero pulps and superhero comics, few copied this device. Walter Gibson explains more in "A Million Words a Year For Ten Straight Years":

You must treat your character as a discovery, rather than your own creation. Treat him, not just seriously, but profoundly. Picture him as real, and beyond you, in mind as well as prowess. Feel that however much you have learned about him, you can never uncover all. This mental attitude gives you a deeper knowledge of the character than the story itself discloses. 

The plot induced by this process will normally require a lesser character who may be termed the "proxy hero." He is the person, along with others like him, who is matched against the villains of the piece, in a theme which is really the personal saga of that all-important lead character, who is developed through his influence and action towards the lesser figures. 

The proxy can be replaced by another, even from the wrong camp. The unity lies in the lead character's identity with the plot. When incidents and situation are fed to him, they are used or rejected, according to how they rebound to the writer.

Harry is but one of The Shadow's agents, and is here used to start filling in the mystery of just who The Shadow is. A similar demonstration can be seen in Tim Burton's Batman, where Vicki Vale is used to introduce and then explore who Bruce Wayne is--and who is the Batman. The Living Shadow keeps the focus tight on Harry Vincent, though. And when perspective jumps to The Shadow, he is just as reticent to reveal anything about himself as any other time.

***** 

Who had been wounded − the shadowy stranger or the assailant who had tried to enter the limousine? Vincent could not guess; he only knew that in the brief struggle the man who had found him on the bridge had left the automobile − unseen and unheard − and the door had closed behind him. 

The mysterious stranger had vanished − like a shadow!