For years I had neglected these novels because, perversely, I had tried to ignore or forget the fact that I had even written them. This state of mind was as odd as it sounds. But the fact is that, after having published 18 paperback novels and pretty much having reached a dead end in trying to become a successful popular writer, I dropped out of writing in 1984. In retrospect, I can see that this was a foolish decision and an immature overreaction to the pressure I was under, but there it is. I had been working very hard at my craft for about 12 years, had seen a small measure of success in the fanzines of the time and then with the sales of those paperback novels, but otherwise had not one blessed clue about what I was doing or how the business worked. I saw no foreign sales of my own work and no nibbles from TV or film production companies. I relied on agents to promote my work and regarded them as business partners when, in fact, as I have learned over the years, literary agents are in business for themselves, and writers are useful to agents only insofar as they help increase the bottom line. Which makes sense. But in my desire to become a writer, my appreciation of such a practical fact was on par with my desire to become, when I was 10 years old, a Mercury space program astronaut. That is, I had about the same level of unsophisticated understanding of both professional milieus. In determining to succeed at writing, I thought it best to put my head down and go as fast as I could so that somehow something would happen.

My mind is turning in this direction right now because I have been working again in earnest at the writing craft. Starting a few years ago, I have been trying to get the fires going again, and I am beginning to see some success on the page—that is, the work I’m doing now reads well to my friends and to me. So the coals that were going dead and turning cold have been stoked and are blooming again with heat. What a good feeling it is. I spent the winter and spring revising my old fantasy trilogy, The Fall of the First World, and recently turned it in to John Betancourt at Wildside Press. I was able, in revising it, to make some changes or corrections I’ve wanted to make since Pinnacle Books first published the trilogy in 1983—improve some word choices, tighten sentences, round out some ideas—things of that nature. I’m enormously pleased that this trilogy and the other 7 of my 10 books will be reprinted by Wildside. (I’m sending John the two David Trevisan books next, as soon as I have scanned them in. Then Oron and the other Attluman novels.)

Also, I’ve placed my novel Call of Shadows with Ron Fortier’s Airship 27 Production. I’m very happy about this, as well.

And sooner or later, I suspect that Magicians will be produced, once we can get the modest $5 million needed to do the movie the way it should be done.

So I’m getting back into print after a long hiatus and, in surveying the radical changes in publishing that have occurred since the rise of the Internet, the collapse of the midlist, and the total corporatization of New York fiction publishing, I came across an article that appeared recently online in Prospect, the British periodical.
The article, by Edward Docx, is “Postmodernism is dead” (http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/07/postmodernism-is-dead-va-exhibition-age-of-authenticism/) and reviews a comprehensive retrospective, currently on display in a London gallery, of the postmodernist movement. Docx provides a very nice definition of this social, philosophical, and artistic movement: “In the beginning, postmodernism was not merely ironical, merely gesture, some kind of clever sham, a hotchpotch for the sake of it. . . . Postmodernism was a high-energy revolt, an attack, a strategy for destruction. It was a set of critical and rhetorical practices that sought to destabilize the modernist touchstones of identity, historical progress and epistemic certainty.”

Postmodernism quickly descended into the confusing, foolish parody of itself that we know today, although Docx makes it clear that postmodernism made critically important contributions to society. It has cleared away the paranoid concept of one dominant “narrative” (such a postmodern word, that) and provided alternatives to the conceit that that dominant narrative was western. It has provided parallel avenues of expression and acceptance of “difference” perspectives, thereby offering a horizontal appreciation of history, experience, and identity rather than a vertical, hierarchical one. And it has exposed the fiction of identity as a solid entity rather than as an aggregate of shifting coordinates of gender, religion, class, and so on; as Docx says, “We are entirely constructed. There is nothing else.” Postmodernism changed “the great banquet of human ideas” from “one of self-determination (Kant et al) to other-determination. I am constructed, therefore I am.”

The fly in the ointment, however, is clearly this: the unease that most of us feel in regard to this radical awareness or sensibility. Do you really think that you are “constructed”? Do you really sense that you are a kind of postmodern, fluid force field of almost arbitrary labels—this religion, that gender—and not a real person or a real human being? My answer to this is that we are what we think we are. If we are able to make choices, then we will do so, but we won’t make them because we surmise that we are “an aggregate of shifting coordinates.” We know this intuitively, and most of us recoil from the idea of being an aggregated force field (my term, not Docx’s!). It is very similar to the ancient notion—surely there is nothing new under the sun—that life is an illusion and that we, too, are no more than an illusion. And this creates a paradox that may very well lie at the heart of human experience.

Call it what you will. Such thinking led to the floor’s being pulled away beneath our feet as tedious, pompous, circular arguments took all of the air out of the room. Docx refers to it as the postmodern paradox: “because postmodernism attacks everything, a mood of confusion and uncertainty began to grow and flourish until, in recent years, it became ubiquitous. A lack of confidence in the tenets, skills and aesthetics of literature permeated the culture and few felt secure or able or skilled enough or politically permitted to distinguish or recognize the schlock from the not.” The professors, in other words (in an irony that Mencken, for one, would have relished) had created a Frankenstein monster and could not control it. The result? “In the absence of any aesthetic criteria, it became more and more useful to assess the value of works according to the profits they yielded. Capital, as has been said many times, accommodates all needs.”

Capital accommodates all needs. This puts into perspective what has occurred over the past several decades regarding publishing, writers, fiction, storytellers, New York corporate entities, print-on-demand, the young writer just getting started, the old dogs left on the sidelines, and the constructed auteurs promoted by New York that are our rock stars of the moment. The paradox is that “by removing all criteria, we are left with nothing but the market. The opposite of what postmodernism originally intended…. In other words,” as Doxc says, “increasingly, artistic success has become about nothing except money; and, increasingly, artists have come to judge their own success that way, too. This is the reason that we feel the genre writer’s cry ‘I sold millions’ so powerfully, even though in truth it can say little about the art form other than that ‘it sold millions.’”

And so here we are. I have not made millions as a writer and the odds are that neither have you. I’d sure like to. I like money. Everyone likes money. Who doesn’t like money? I’d like to have lots of money. But my desire for all of that money, as a reward for the stories I write, must confront the modern (or postmodern!) reality that market success right now is bestowed upon writers who, more than ever before, fit into the postmodern zeitgeist, which is one of surface and not depth, acceptance and not challenges, sensation and not thought. It is immaterial whether James Patterson writes well (he doesn’t), just as it is immaterial whether Madonna has any talent (she doesn’t) or whether Fox News really provides news (it doesn’t); they are what they are—exclusive postmodern constructions that weirdly feed upon themselves and do not include us but allow us to observe them—and that is sufficient. Same for Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian and other manufactured entities that I tend to regard as foolish but which others reward simply because they are the flavor of the moment.

Where does leave those of us who don’t feel that we are constructions or illusions, those of us who are not of the moment, those of us who feel there is more to artistic creativity than simply defining it in terms of money? Well, we are starting to get past the notion that the only yardstick by which to measure worth is the yardstick of earnings. Artistically, as Docx says, what is happening now, as postmodernism recedes into the past and becomes just one more –ism, is that we are free to use whatever we like of postmodern conceits without pretending that it is the last word in human expression or social relevance. It provides options for us, nothing more and nothing less. I recall discussing with Donald Sidney-Fryer years ago, What will come after postmodernism? There had been an article in the Chicago Tribune that I had shared with him, and we kicked this back and forth for a while. My sense was that we will gravitate back toward some sense of the classic or the formal because we inherently need that, we human beings. I could discern no other options. It is deeply part of us to require such a foundation in our storytelling, our arts, our societies, our lives. My notion of a new classicism or formalism Docx calls the need for, and a resurgence of, authenticity: “Values are important once more: the values that the artist puts into the making of an object as well as the values that the consumer takes out of the object. And these striven-for values are separate to the naked commercial value.”

These values are separate to the naked commercial value! A commercially successful author may actually be good, but not necessarily so. And writers who have not gained commercial success may indeed be worth your time and attention despite the fact that the marketplace hasn’t lauded them. These facts are truer now than ever before. (As though an absolute term such as true could be truer, in any event!)

So there is hope for me. A former agent once suggested that I am a “cult author.” I may wear that declamation as a badge of pride, but what he meant was that my commercial appeal is limited. No doubt! I still hope to earn all of the money I mentioned a few paragraphs earlier. Give me millions! But if my hope is to be fulfilled, then it must come about as we go through a transition of social awareness: if Docx is right (and Donald Sidney-Fryer and I, as well), then we are moving toward a new appreciation of formal construction, authentic intent, and artistic sincerity. If such be the case (and doesn’t that sound formal, using the conditional subjunctive mood there!), then perhaps my semi-commercial but authentic, cult-figure fiction may yet earn me some more dollars. In a postmodern world, I can earn money and still be authentic; it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

As for what is coming in our post-pomo world of popular fiction—which is where I make my home—I can give you some recent examples that most of my readers will be familiar with. Take Howard Andrew Jones’s The Desert of Souls—a wonderful new novel that many are comparing to Robert E. Howard’s stories first published in Flying Carpet and Oriental Tales magazines during the Great Depression. The comparison holds up, but there is more than that going on here: Jones has gone back to the modern period of adventure storytelling and, fully aware of what he is doing (as are we), has made excellent use of the storytelling methods of that period. But he is doing it in our postmodern or post-postmodern world, and by doing so allows us to experience the world of Haroun al-Raschid, not as an exotic other place that requires taming by the West, but as a land unto itself that requires no one else’s permission to exist and needs to offer no explanations for itself. Jones can create women characters that are not one-dimensional but many dimensional. Yet he writes in a style that is not shallow and clever and self-referential but is clearly modeled on the strong, objective style of popular writing of nearly a century ago, the popular fiction of the early pulps. And if Jones’s doing such things seems acceptable to us and not extraordinary, that is precisely the point: he is doing these things on this side of postmodernism, making use of postmodern tools while providing an authentic story that continues the trajectory of the mid-twentieth fiction that itself was so authentic and modern that readers return to it still for that voice of the authentic it provides us. What a joy. (As the literary executor for Harold Lamb’s estate, Jones has had the rare opportunity to steep himself in the work of one of the best writers of the first half of the twentieth century, and clearly he has learned from that master, for the tone and pace of The Desert of Souls echoes the best work of Lamb, who, in his own time, the modern era, approached writing historical fiction with an authenticity that we can now see was ahead of its time, was indeed an early marker of our time.)

Another example: Ron Fortier’s Airship 27 Productions, which I mentioned earlier—“pulp fiction for a new generation.” Having now made our way through the swamp of arbitrariness, of the foolish contrivances of imperialism, and of force-fed narratives of exceptionalism, we now have Charles Saunders revisiting the racist 1930s with a pulp hero, Damballa, who (brilliantly!) is the product of a biracial union and serves as a hero-of-the-night to right wrongs in late-Depression Harlem. Don’t we wish we had had a story like this in 1938? Well, now we do. Is there a more authentic voice in our community of writers than Charles Saunders? I don’t know of one. And we are here with him, in post-pomo America, living in 1938, just as we always knew we could.

Ron will also be bringing out my new novel, Call of Shadows, early next year—formally structured, based on the classic form of mid-twentieth-century popular storytelling, but infused also with sufficient post-po-mo self-awareness that it takes is itself—not nonseriously—but very seriously indeed. We used to have to suspend our disbelief. Then we went through a period where we knew everything; the artist had no secrets, or the filmmaker, or the writer; we’re all in on the gag as Michael Bay pummels us with another Transformers movie. Now we are moving past that, and we really actually seriously choose to go back to suspending our disbelief, because by doing that, we are coming home and trusting the artist to do something for us, not party with us. Invite us, but be an artist first of all, not a gag master.

I like it.

It means that the old dogs have another tool in the tool kit to do what we do best: tell a good yarn.

And be appreciated for it.

And perhaps make a few bob for it, too, whether or not any us make some of the millions currently going to the far more commercially successful writers.

Hey, we’re the authentic ones. Give us a try after you finish that James Patterson novel. The flavor is a bit different—and maybe a little new and improved, as well.

Additional Note: A quick epilogue regarding the time in my life when I tried to squash the part of myself that hungered to succeed—on my own terms—as a writer. How weird was it, trying to negate or subordinate part of myself that I had spent years cultivating and strengthening? Weird enough that I offer it as a cautionary tale and suggest you not do it. Take life as it comes, is my new motto.

Once I had decided, once and for all, I thought, at the age of 31, that my ambitious hard work had been done under a bad sign and that I had been chasing a star and had now better grow up and determine how to make my way in the world, I felt alternately depressed and ecstatic. Depressed because I had put all of my eggs into one basket and nothing had come of it. Ecstatic because, after having worked so long and hard at that one thing and having failed at it, as I thought, I truly felt as though a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. All clichés have their element of truth, and I truly did feel that I had been unburdened. I clearly recall, in the summer of 1985, looking back at that poor naïve dope who had worked so hard at writing and feeling sorry for him while also being excited for myself because, perhaps, opportunities were still available, and doors still could open where other doors had been closed to me. It was an absolutely wonderful feeling. I am not kidding.

Nevertheless, as I tried to subordinate the part of me that had been predominant for so long, I came to realize that I had developed my own version of muscle memory, as it were. Imagine a musician practicing for hours every day, or an athlete, and then stopping abruptly. The muscle memory, the neural patterns that have become part of one are still there. Perhaps they recede slightly, or the muscles weaken, but the body remembers everything. I quickly became aware that I was missing part of myself, and this was particularly true in quiet moments. My mind, for example, had become used to working on a couple of different levels at once. Typically there was always a deeper layer of imagination or thought, a place where I was working out story ideas or staying alert to story possibilities even while I was doing other things and attending to what I considered my mundane life. Without this background noise of alertness, listening for story clues, working out ideas, I was always in the present. I became unsure what to do next with my time, and I had nothing to look forward to. I wondered if this were how other people spend their time, floating from one moment to the next, simply moving through the hours waiting for things to occur or to happen to them, rather than planning on what to do next. I found myself looking for things to do. My interest in reading fiction disappeared nearly completely. I recall picking up a James Ellory novel that Fred Adams had lent me, sitting down to thumb through it one rainy afternoon, and becoming completely absorbed in it for the next thirty pages. Then, when I realized what I was doing, I set the book aside with the sense that I had betrayed myself. What business was it of mine any longer to be interested in reading and writing and novels? Joe Bonadonna lent me a collection of short stories; I perused one of them and wondered at how the author could achieve such fine effects. I told myself that once I had tried to do such things, but that had been another Dave Smith. Was I depressed? Was I simply putting up a defensive wall to protect myself from very deep feelings of failure?

After a while, hating the silence at the back of my head and very much disliking the floating feeling of waiting for something to happen, of each day going by with me peripheral to it, I began to try putting stories together once more. These attempts typically went in circles, whereby I would rework the same thousand words over and over again for months at a time until the scene became utterly dull and pointless. I revised Engor’s Sword Arm, a novelette from 1978, for Morgan Holmes; it was an interesting exercise, but the storytelling spark did not catch fire. I wrote “The Man Who Would Be King,” a very odd story with no structure to it at all, as a kind of lament or eulogy. When my father died in the fall of 1997, I felt moved to try to write again as a way of handling the emotions of that event, focusing on something that would steer my feelings in some positive direction. I wrote about 16,000 words of a literary adventure-fantasy novel called Sometime Lofty Towers. I still intend to finish it. But it has sat there for nearly a decade and a half, waiting for me to come back to it.

I had come to doubt every word I put down. The storytelling instinct I had developed and mastered over many years was still present, apparently, but the practical, mechanical aspects of getting the job done seemed to be gone. I know that this happened because, after a few years of trying to write novels again, and completing pages of manuscript, I petitioned agents to read what I had done and take me on as a client. These efforts came to nothing. I blame myself. The storytelling instincts were there, yes, but the means whereby one writes plausible, potentially saleable fiction—gone.

I believe I am now past that point. I have persisted in relearning how to write fiction, and I have become comfortable with myself again, identifying myself as a writer once more. The work habits have changed, however. Where previously I required long stretches of private time in which to develop material at the keyboard, now most of that development happens mentally. I can write a sentence or two and then walk away and come back to it in a week to see where I was; it doesn’t matter. The urgency to write is gone; the desire to rework my words until they feel polished and right to me remains, but it is slow going. And where previously I used to save and file every note or jotting that I scribbled as though they were precious, now I write things down and forget about them or throw them away. The act of creating and immersing myself in the process of writing is more vivid than ever, and I like doing it while I am in the moment; what to do with a piece afterwards is problematic.

I never really had a plan, after all, only a great hope and a strong work ethic, and the results of that effort are quite interesting indeed, a series of novels and short stories that, I now realize, have given hours of pleasure and entertainment to thousands of people. Previously, that element was something of an abstraction, but I’ve met many people who appreciate what I’ve written, and I am getting past this delusional or grandiose desire to do more than I was able to do.

My friend Mike James, the artist who lives in Warren, Ohio, has helped put this in perspective for me. Over the years, he has educated me in the baffling world of contemporary art. He has explained to me the importance of getting past the canvas as window frame; the necessary freedom of the action painting and of “the painted word,” as Thomas Wolfe titled it, of the 1940s; and the direction artists have taken since then in a corporate, comodified, commercial world in which what most of us in the mainstream consider to be art is a hopelessly bourgeois and antiquated perspective. When artists canning their own feces or erecting narcissistic monuments to themselves qualify as important art, we are at the end of the line and are in the same postmodern world of conceited intellectual shabbiness that has depleted the intellectual vigor of our postsecondary English and cultural studies departments. Either we get the bad joke, or we don’t. Either way, however, it is really of no consequence.

Anyhow, I read recently that some current artist or other in New York—it doesn’t matter who; they are all interchangeable now—had sold something or other for millions of dollars ($9 million, I think) to some rich man who fancies himself an art collector. What does it mean, I asked Mike James, when a self-proclaimed artist can indulge himself in this way, and then a millionaire can indulge himself by paying $9 million for that piece of art?

Mike said to me, It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a game rich people play.

It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a game rich people play.

I don’t have rich people paying me $9 million dollars for one of my stories. I have friends who write, and I write, and we have managed to skirt the swamp of postmodern chicanery to keep alive the old-fashioned, sensible style of storytelling that takes itself just seriously enough to entertain and inform, not posture and . . . play games.

I hope to continue contributing more stories written in this manner, too. And when I can make use of whatever tools are available to me in the tool box, I’ll do that, too.

But I’ll also take $9 million from the next person who decides that some story of mine is worth it.

Any of you rich guys out there want to share the wealth with me, I’m your man.

Doing that would be so . . . post-postmodern of me!

Here’s the thing: Jason Momoa is great as Conan. And the movie captures the heart and drive of Howard more often than it does not. When it does not, it’s because it slacks off into unoriginal, derivative sword-and-sorcery material that undercuts the movie’s own strengths.

But it does get more things right than not. Jason Momoa, I say again, is excellent. And not just him. Ron Perlman, Leo Howard (already catching high fives for his work here), and Rachel Nichols are fine, as well. There is real chemistry between Momoa and Nichols that adds an undercurrent to their scenes together. And Stephen Lang and Rose McGowan do well with what they’re given, too. I ached to have more about all of these characters, to have dialogue that was not on the nose, and that hinted at more inside these people. These are characters wanting to do more in this story.

It’s certain that the young men who wrote this script tried their best to bring Robert E. Howard to the screen; I lost count, for example, of the allusions made in the dialogue to this or that bit of trivia in the Conan canon. The problem, I surmise, is that we have sincere young men who have grown up in an environment in which derivative, mundane, mainstreamed sword-and-sorcery is commonplace, and so what sets Howard and Conan apart has been buried under tons of baloney barbarianism. Conan by this time, as a character, as a concept, is nearly as generic as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan. The problem, though, is that the character, as created by Robert E. Howard, isn’t sufficiently familiar to the public, which time and again has been presented with a one-dimensional cartoon version of Conan. Jason Momoa goes back to the source material; his Conan is a tough, shrewd, pantherish, intelligent young man born to fight. This is Conan. It is the young Conan of Robert E. Howard, and it works. What critics don’t get—and this is what I mean by Conan’s not being sufficiently familiar to the public—is evident in the complaint made by many that Conan in this movie is so tough and brutal that he can’t be distinguished from the bad guys. Think of it: Howard was making precisely that point in his stories, that Conan is not a conventionally good character, that he is a fighter and a survivor in a brutal world. Howard was writing in the Depression, when popular fiction was full of many such unconventional protagonists, characters that succeeded with audiences precisely because they were not conventionally good. Conventionally good people had been kicked to the curb by the stock market crash, and popular fiction characters who were tough, morally ambiguous, thought for themselves, and stayed barely inside the lines meant a lot to a certain audience of readers. These types are no longer a novelty; we have had so many Dirty Harry pictures and spaghetti Westerns and cable series such as The Sopranos and Deadwood that you would think that the bright critics, at least, would get it.

I think the reason they don’t, or one of the reasons they don’t, is because Conan the Barbarian is honest about its primitivism, its deep emotions and ambitions, and doesn’t pretend otherwise. This movie is about people who wear swords and armor, when they wear any clothes at all, in an ancient world, doing what needs to be done without the pretense of their being noble Romans or proud Spartans, let alone being complexly motivated sheriffs or morally ambiguous detectives. (The lack of clothes has something to do with it; nakedness equals naked emotions and honesty—that is, the character can’t hide beneath a suit and tie or under a ten-gallon hat. This nakedness, in all aspects, makes many audiences and critics uncomfortable, I think.) In any event, this honesty is apparently still too much for early 21st century Americans, who prefer to react to this movie the way Howard biographer and Conan completist L. Sprague de Camp did to the original stories: de Camp regarded Conan as a juvenile delinquent—comparable, in the 1950s, to, say, a gangsta or thug today. You could take some of de Camp’s “Oh, horrors! I get the vapors when I regard this barbarian juvenile delinquent!” sentiments and place them neatly into most of the current reviews of Marcus Nispel’s picture, and the insertions would be seamless. “Oh, horrors! There is blood and there are many grunts in this movie! I am getting the vapors!”

The baggage of generic sword-and-sorcery intrudes time and again in this picture, and it weighs the movie down. Many of the one-liners are lame. The thief character is a direct lift of the Tracey Walter Malak character in Conan the Destroyer: this was a weak character then, and it remains weak in this movie. A couple of times characters look up at the sky and, in despair or heartache, roar. This bit worked well the first time, when Christopher Reeve did it in Superman in 1978; it hasn’t worked since. Let’s everyone agree to drop it. Also, the conceit that the world is a battleground for good versus evil is trotted out without any necessity for it at all: why not just have two antagonists fighting each other? We don’t talk about good and evil when we make movies about the Spartans or about the Picts fighting the Romans. We do it with derivative sword-and-sorcery pictures, however, because we have been trained by the success of the Tolkein books, and its commercial inheritors, to regard fantasy melodramas as exercises in good versus evil. Howard was smarter than that; however, simultaneous interest in, and the subsequent popularity and success of, The Lord of the Rings and the Conan paperback book collections, beginning in the late 1960s, yoked these two entities together in the public mind under the banner Fantasy, and joined at the neck they remain. Look: Howard wrote men’s adventure stories with touches of true weirdness, which was sometimes very unsettling indeed, and thereby created a new type of fiction. Tolkein, a scholar and linguist, fabricated a fantasy milieu that drew upon Northern mythology. So his wizards and elves and munchkins are very much borrowed from the realm of fantasy and cultural mythology.

That element of weirdness is lacking in this movie, but it wasn’t in the Schwarzenegger pictures, either, although the Milius movie wanted to go there in a few places. Too bad. On the page, such a leap into the abyss, such a hint of cosmic unease or supernatural menace, distinguishes some of the best sword-and-sorcery fiction from unoriginal or less imaginative stories because this element has its roots in a philosophy and is not simply a stylistic exercise.

To be honest, this movie felt to me as though there were two drafts of the script in contention with each other, and someone mooshed them together. The hypothetical stronger script has the opening about the Cimmerian village; this stronger script also would explain why the Stephen Lang character has a giant octopus monster under his castle—clearly, there is some connection between it and the monstrous mask he brings back to life and puts on his face. The stronger script would also be the one that slows down occasionally and lets the actors do what they want to do, which is to spend a quarter of a page or half a page once in a while talking to each other. The weaker script has the leaden one-liners (including the embarrassing “No man should live in chains,” which could have come directly from that goofy syndicated TV show of ten years ago or whenever it was), and it rushes things along. Still—as much as I like the opening, that wonderful sequence set in Cimmeria, it does feel as though it is from a different movie. If it were cut out, we could spend more time on the story proper, which is where this movie wants to be, with Conan as a young man adventuring in the world.

The special effects are fine, although by the time we get to the ending, we are given another physically impossible, video game-derived set piece in which things fall and twist and crumble in blinding speed, reducing the characters to puppets acting out an adolescent fantasy. Conan deserves better than this. Remember the ending of Rob Roy? Nobody was jumping around trying to do fifteen things at once while dancing above a giant fiery cavern. Next time, resist the temptation to indulge the fanboys and instead give us a climax that adds to the characters and doesn’t reduce them to one-dimensional, reckless damned fools.

One final gripe: the actors all pronounce Cimmeria as “Simmeria.” Damn it, I’m sure that it should be “Kimmeria.” And they pronounce Acheron as “Asheron.” Surely (or Churely) that “ch” is a “k” sound.

So with all of these complaints and nits being picked, is there anything good about the movie at all? There is—and it is the performances of Jason Momoa and Rachel Nichols, as well as some of those scenes that must have been written in my hypothetical stronger draft of the script. The pirate ship scene is pure Howard and as enjoyable as anything he himself might have seen on the screen when he was a kid—in the silent movie version of The Sea Hawk, say, or Douglas Fairbanks’s The Black Pirate. Some of the background matte paintings, too, of glorious incandescent cities, have that misty throwback feel to earlier periods of filmmaking. The tug of war between Momoa and Nichols really transcends the barbarian bully versus spunky girl cliché: these two have chemistry together. Stephen Lang and even Rose McGowan, given the superficial material they have to work with, do well with it. We need to know more about Khalar Zym’s wife and why his feelings run so deep—these are not pleasant people, after all, and we need to understand them, particularly because he is a very powerful warlord of some sort, and how did he get that status?—but Lang does what he can with what he is given. It is another instance of my wanting the characters to have been able really to come to life, and the script held them back. And, of course, if the whole movie had been about Leo Howard and Ron Perlman and the Cimmerians, I would have been content with that. Their performances are wonderful. They do have stuff to work with, and they bring it home.

And I keep coming back to Jason Momoa, who now owns this character. He nails it, he gets it, he is Conan. I say, lose the derivative, LOTR-inspired high-fantasy trappings and the imitative Hercules superficialities and, next time, we will get a stronger movie. You know how a lot of people liked the original X-Men but some critics thought it weak in spots? The sequel topped it, and then some. Please let’s see that happen with the second Conan movie.

A passage early in the short story “Mad Shadows,” the first of the six included in this new collection by Joe Bonadonna, illustrates why I like these stories so much and why Dorgo the Dowser is a sword-and-sorcery character who deserves your time and attention.

The Dowser is investigating why the mad shadows of the title are up to no good in the city of Valdar, and he crosses paths with an acquaintance and sometimes-informant, a satyr named Praxus. We get this:

In his youth, Praxus Odetti had been Valdar’s most celebrated pugilist, equally proficient with hooves and fists; he retired undefeated from the arena shortly after I came to Valdar, but I did get to see his last few bouts. He lived in a run-down tenement, yet he was far from poor. In fact, under an assumed name, he owned a massive country estate and private club outside the city. The Hoof and Horn Club, it was called. This villa provided a home and medical care for aging and disabled centaurs, minotaurs, satyrs, and unicorns who had retired from racing and fighting in the Crimson Sand arena. Most of the money he earned from begging went to his fellow K’Tothians. I’d met him through a mutual friend who managed a few minotaur wrestlers.

Here is what we get: lives. Characters who have lived lives.

Here is what else we get: a voice, a trustworthy voice, the voice of authority that comes from an author through believable characters. As readers, we know that, from the first word, first sentence, first page of a story, we are in the company either of a writer whom we can trust or of a writer whom we cannot trust. That is the voice of authority. And it is present in the Dorgo stories.

Of course, these are fantasy stories, so we get the requisite funny names (although it must be noted that Joe B. is better than most of the rest of us at concocting fantastic-sounding names that have the lilt to them of verisimilitude). We get centaurs and satyrs, which is cool, and witches and sorcerers. And we get to everything else we want to have in such genre stories, including really weird stuff. You know how in the stories in the original Weird Tales magazine we got really weird twists? Here’s an example. I do not now remember the author or the title, but I believe there was a story in the old Weird Tales in which people were splattered to death, as though had fallen fifty stories to their deaths, when all they had done was miss a step on a stairwell. In their brains, they assumed that, by missing a step, they were falling into eternity, and so they wound up squashing themselves like bugs. You read that story and you say to yourself, Jesus Christ, really? Did the writer actually get away with that? The writer did, and it works. Before fantasy and horror became mainstreamed, corporate, and predictable, the better to serve the shareholders of profit centers, fantasy and horror stories really were weird (and, incredibly, written for adults).

I mention this because you will find twists of this type in the Dorgo stories. The mad shadows, for instance, appear in the city of Valdar to eat gold.  And it works. The weird elements in all of these stories succeed in the same way. They are not the corporate progeny born of a focus group or a meeting of the marketing department, but really oddball, imaginative things dreamed up by a writer who is doing his or her job. So some of this stuff is twisted, cruel, and peculiar.

Which is as it should be.

But for me, the most appealing aspect of the Dorgo stories is that we get characters who are as real as you want them to be, characters who have lived lives, characters with histories, characters who truly have something to share with us and who are not simply puppets going through the motions of being in a story for the sake of some mechanical contrivance. (Although Joe does introduce some weird puppets in one of these stories, too . . . and even they have stories to tell. I am not kidding.)

Full disclosure: I am a friend of Joe Bonadonna’s and have been for more than thirty years. At his request, I critiqued these short stories as he was writing them. If you write, you know that this is par for the course. Back in the day—the day being the early 1970s—friends of mine and I frequently circulated stories and poems by mail as a way of learning our trade and improving our skills. It was rather in the nature of how the so-called Lovecraft circle did the same thing during the Depression, circulating copies of short stories long before they appeared in print in Weird Tales. I recall that Mike Fantina, the poet, and Fred Adams and I did this a lot, along with Dick Tierney and Ted Rypel and Randall Larson and G. Sutton Breiding. A small group of us. And Joe and I discussed stories, too, through the mail back then. The members of this group of ours used to send carbon copies of stories back and forth. Occasionally photocopies, because photocopiers were becoming available at libraries and in some business offices, but just as often, we shared carbon copies. (Come to think of it, the technology available to us in the early 1970s was a lot closer to the technology available to writers in the 1930s than it was to anything we have today.)

So Joe Bonadonna started out writing sword-and-sorcery fiction back in the early 1970s when a number of his contemporaries, including me, were also breaking into the fanzines and publishing in the semi-prozines. Joe had worse luck that most of the rest of us did, in this sense: I believe he holds the record for the number of short stories accepted by a fanzine editor but then left unpublished when the fanzine went out of business, a common occurrence in those days.

Which is too bad, because it has delayed the introduction of Dorgo by at least a generation and a half to a readership that will get what Joe Bonadonna is doing. Like most of us, Joe absorbed the postwar popular culture in big gulps: the Burroughs boom, the Conan paperbacks with the Frank Frazetta covers, the Tolkein trilogy, Creepy and Eerie magazines, the endless parade of war movies and Westerns and film noir pictures from the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties that played constantly on local television stations, the hardboiled fiction of Hammett and Chandler and Cain. In addition, Joe grew up on the mean streets of the west side of Chicago, and that is no exaggeration: at a time when I, as a boy, was walking around the woods and open fields in Trumbull County with my dad’s old .22, eating blackberries off the bush and wading shoeless in the stream down by Indian Lookout, as we boys called it, Joe was getting practice with his fists alongside some of his mates on the streets and also becoming acquainted with informal invitations from some of Chicago’s boys in blue to cool his temper overnight in the lock-up. That he did not wind up running the numbers for the local rackets and eventually work his way further up the food chain of bad boys with real heat to them is our good fortune as well as his. Instead, he wrote stories and songs and played in a number of rock bands.

But the street stuff from his youth is a big part of what informs the Dorgo character and the Dorgo milieu. Joe is wise enough to understand that the scabby side of life is palatable to readers only when mixed in proper proportion with insight and humor, wisecracks and even the occasional touch of—dare we say it?—human tenderness. So Dorgo, very much a complete, layered character and as three-dimensional a one as you are going to find in fantasy fiction, is really Joey from the West Side by way of the language and images we all recognize from film noir, dark fantasy, John Ford Westerns, and classical mythology. It is adventure fiction or suspense fiction or mystery fiction—the Dorgo stories borrow tones and shades from all of these genres and subgenres—that is smart, clever, masculine . . . and wise to itself. Which is exactly what good genre fiction of this order should be.

You will find, then, as you read these stories, that you are in the hands of a writer who has lived a life and who has brought elements of that colorful life to these twisted nightmares, adventures, and back-alley Chandleresque investigations into the dark side. I feel sure that you’ll enjoy them. There is really nothing else quite like them out there, so far as I know. And I hope Joe will write more of them. Surely Dorgo, too, has lived far too much life to leave us only these six stories.

As he himself says, early in “Mad Shadows,” “My present occupation lay in discreet investigations, such as recovering stolen goods, runaway husbands, and missing heiresses. But I have a certain knack for running afoul of anyone having anything to do with witchcraft, necromancy, or any other form of magic.”

Good, I say.

And the Dowser part of his name?

“The special dowsing rod I use in my work had been a gift from a Yongarloo shaman.”

The special dowsing rod does nothing but get Dorgo into one scrape after another—but that’s exactly how I like my stories, and I suspect you will, too.

Enjoy.

Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser

by Joe Bonadonna

iUniverse, 332 pages

29.95 hardcover, 19.95 paperback, 9.95 Kindle

Purchase from Amazon…

Purchase from iUniverse…

This is really good news. Well, for me it is. Wildside Press will publish these titles as print-on-demand (POD) volumes, available in both paperback and hardcover, and soon will offer them as e-books, as well. Wildside Books has been around since 1989. Founded and operated by John Gregory and Kim Betancourt, winner of awards as well as of gratitude and thanks on the part of readers everywhere, Wildside publishes the revived Weird Tales and lots of reprints (Leigh Brackett, Robert E. Howard, Clifford D. Simak, S. Fowler Wright . . . on and on the list goes), as well as original titles under a couple of different imprints.

One of my hopes is that we can publish under their original manuscript titles the books of mine whose titles were changed by the publishers. Most of my manuscript titles were better, or at least more evocative, than the titles under which the novels first saw light of day—Reign, Sorcery! for example, rather than Mosutha’s Magic, and Deathwolf rather than The Valley of Ogrum, and The West Is Dying rather than The Master of Evil. I suppose Magicians is a bit lame compared with The Fair Rules of Evil, but Magicians is how I have always thought of this story, and it’s the title of the screenplay based on the novel, and the book is divided into the stages of a magician’s spiritual and mystical progress. Besides, MAGICIANS as a title can be made into a logo with pentagrams replacing the A’s, which is a look I kind of like.

Anyhow, new editions are coming. I’ll finally be able to clean up the typos that crept into the original Zebra volumes, and I can finally add the division that marks Part III in Oron, and delete the tone-deaf spartan I used as an adjective in one of the books of The Fall of the First World, as well as modify the direct lifts I took from the Christian Gospels. (Lao Tze is closer to my own sensibilities, anyhow.) I’m looking forward to being back in print.

* Ted’s nom de petit déjuner. A couple of years back, when my daughter Lily was about 2 years old (or was “a small Lily kid,” as she would now say), Joe Bonadonna came by for breakfast one Sunday morning. “Uncle Joey’s coming for pancakes,” I told Lily, and she responded, full of delight, “Joey Pancakes!” The name stuck. Joe and Ted then decided that Ted needed to have a breakfast moniker—hence, Teddy Waffles. Fred Adams is Freddy Fritters. I myself am known in our Breakfast Club circle as the estimable Davey Scones, or Sconesy. The Old Fart Fantasy Writers Breakfast Club and Dyspeptic Association of Grouches meets only occasionally to gobble and digest scrambled eggs, scones, Mickey Mouse pancakes, and hot biscuits and to wash down the same with hearty horns of unleaded coffee, but when we do pull our chairs to the table, why, the harrumphing and declarations of “a pox on their house!” and the earth-shattering burps would shame a Cimmerian alehouse. We are still open for sausage patty, bagel, and English muffin members, so feel free to join in the harrumphing and grousing some Sunday morning. Typically we plant ourselves at the Café 14 in Palatine, Illinois, but it’s a movable feast. Only do not forget the Mickey Mouse pancakes, or Lily will call you a name that may not be so delightful…

I found this to be fascinating, but I was mystified by exactly what the “1/f fluctuation” is. I’m not a physicist; I’ve read one book on chaos theory and a few other titles that tried their best to explain Einstein’s universe to me, but I’m not about to be able to explain what the 1/f fluctuation has to do with the attention spans of movie audiences or engineers or economists. The paper itself, “Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Films” (http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~jec7/pubs/cuttingetalpsychsci10.pdf) is sufficiently technical to have me feeling out of my depth as I read it trying to find a clear answer to my simple question.

A wonderful article on the PhysOrg website, however, clarified it for me (http://www.physorg.com/news185781475.html): Cutting and coauthors “found that the magnitude of the waves increased as their frequency decreased, a pattern known as pink noise, or 1/f fluctuation, which means that attention spans of the same lengths recurred at regular intervals. The same pattern has been found by Benoit Mandelbrot (the chaos theorist) in the annual flood levels of the Nile, and has been seen by others in air turbulence, and also in music.” Furthermore, “Cutting said the significant thing is that shots of similar lengths recur in a regular pattern through the film.”

Okay. Got it. Same lengths recurring at regular intervals. That sounds (ho ho) like a noise pattern to me, as well as Nile flooding and, interestingly, also hints at what many of us find to be appealing about some landscapes and naturescapes, as one of these articles points out. It is a kind of “sweet spot” that we all appreciate, as Stuart Fox says in an article on popsci.com: “Cutting doesn’t believe that this increasing conformity to the 1/f fluctuation resulted from a conscious decision on the part of the directors. Rather, he theorizes that films which fall into people’s viewing sweet spot better hold their attention, and thus seem more gripping, and make more money. Then the other directors naturally copy the pace of the more exciting, more profitable movies, and the 1/f fluctuation trend spreads. However, this formula seems a better predictor of box office than quality. For instance, Cutting found that the Star Wars prequels all conformed nearly perfectly to the 1/f fluctuation. Sure, all three of those movies made a ton of money, but man, did they suck” (http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-02/mathematician-cracks-box-office-gold-code).

It sounds to me as though what Cutting and his coauthors established was a formula for how successful montage is in films. If I recall my film theory correctly, montage (a term introduced and widely used by Russian filmmakers and film theorists in the 1920s) is how a movie’s separate shots are put together in a certain rhythm in order to gain maximum effect from an audience. The Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin is perhaps the best-known example. So what is going on appears to be a style of montage or film editing in modern movies that, through the random (chaos theory) repetition of sequences of shots of a certain length, matches our natural human heartbeat as well as our natural human attention span. A pulse beat, a rhythm.

None of these authors talks about language in this regard, or poetry. This is a mathematical model, so the discussion in the formal science papers had to do with sine waves and fractals. These are not the elements that I typically get involved with during my work day, although talk of fractals led to me another fine website (http://www.miqel.com/fractals_math_patterns/visual-math-natural-fractals.html) that contains this sentence: “Fractals are unpredictable in specific details yet deterministic when viewed as a total pattern—in many ways this reflects what we observe in the small details and total pattern of life in all its physical and mental varieties, too.”

Whoa. The first part of that sentence is as good a definition as any for what occurs during the process of editing a movie: “Shots are unpredictable in specific details yet deterministic when viewed as a total pattern”—that is, a sequence in a movie. You put the shots together into a sequence such as the Odessa steps slaughter or the chase through the marsh in The 39 Steps, and what do you have? Pulse beat racing and pure, undivided attention.

Back to language and poetry. Doesn’t it make sense that language itself, the popular rhythm of sounds, syllables, and words, would also lend itself to the attention-grabbing rule of the 1/f fluctuation? I wouldn’t know how to design such a study, but it makes sense to me that the meter and beat of great verse and appealing prose really must, in some way, approximate this fluctuation. Is it possible that at the root of some fiction that critics find intellectually unsatisfying but which audiences love is this 1/f fluctuation? Is this same pulse beat at work in comedy, in the timing of comics’ and great actors’ delivery? I really want to know. If I could figure this out, why, I would start writing my stories with this in mind; perhaps it would make my fiction more appealing to a wide, general audience!

This isn’t the whole story, of course. As Cutting himself noted in his paper, his favorite type of movies are film noirs, and few of them accommodate this 1/f fluctuation pattern. Still, they are satisfying. So it really does come down to attention span in the moment, the undistracted attention of an audience glued to the screen—and, perhaps, to the un-put-downableness of some stories? If this is part of the appeal of the Harry Potter books or the Twilight series, whatever their flaws, I’d like to determine this and bottle it and sell it at writers’ conventions. Little glass bottles of Honest Dave’s 1/f Storytelling Formula and Writers’ Block Cure: Guaranteed to Win You Lots of Sales and Audience Devotion.

Hmmm…. Wait a minute. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and 1/f! I’m onto something….

This has actually happened! Purely by chance, I came across a link on the Web that led me to an excellent heavy-metal band named Blacksword. Blacksword is Alex Avdeev (guitar), Serge Konev (singer), Ivan “the Viking” (bass and acoustic guitar), Artyom Omelenchuk (guitar), and Vyacheslav Aparin (drums). Alex in particular is a big fan of dark fantasy and sword-and-sorcery fiction, one result being that the Blacksword track “Sword Arm” is based on my novelette Engor’s Sword Arm, which Morgan Holmes published back in the mid 1990s.

Man, this makes me happy!

Go read the interview with Alex. He discusses the influence of American heavy metal on Blacksword, the state of metal in the world today, life in Siberia (cold), and the release of their upcoming CD (soon!), The Sword Accurst, which will be available from Echoes of Crom Records.

Echoes of Crom is the label begun by Howie Bentley, the mastermind behind the band Briton Rites, who is himself a big fan of dark fantasy and s&s, particularly Michael Moorcock, Clark Ashton Smith, and, I proudly note, The Sorcerer’s Shadow.

Folks, go to Blacksword’s site, listen to the tracks available there (including “Sword Arm”), and order their CD. This is the real stuff.

In fact, given the state of affairs of the past seven thousand years or so, the question actually is this: Shall we turn the world over to women this afternoon, or shall we give ourselves until sometime next week?

I have a couple of good reasons for bringing up this topic, and, frankly, I think that getting on with it is absolutely necessary. That is, if women actually would take us up on the deal. Women are pretty smart, and they may not accept any such offer. They have a pretty clear understanding of human behavior, mainly because they give birth to humans and raise these human children more or less by themselves. So they immediately gain that firsthand experience into human behavior, which by and large is not a pretty picture. You know, the whiny baby stuff, the me-first stuff. It can’t be easy turning such raw material into a halfway sensible, reasonably competent, socialized member of our species. I have known men in their sixties who are still pretty much in the diaper stage of human social interaction. Maybe you know them, too.

The other reason is that, no matter how you look at it, women are still pretty much regarded as second-class citizens in this world (where they even are citizens), and so they gain insight from that, as well. It’s my old rule: if you really want to know how things are going, don’t ask the manager or the boss: he or she will simply cover his or her ass and say everything is going fine. This is how it’s done in a kick-down, kiss-up hierarchy or bureaucracy. If you really want to know how things are going, ask the workers on the assembly line or the ones digging the ditch. And get ready for an earful. However, given the fact that most women are the ones basically working on the assembly line every day and therefore know the facts about how things have been run so far, maybe the world is more trouble than it is worth as far as many women are concerned.

Still, this line of thinking brings me to my first reason why women should be running things: they give birth to us. Therefore, they have dibs. The hand that rocks the cradle and so forth. If only we could have this situation take place in an environment that really nurtured and supported moms (rather than nurturing and supporting, say, pathologic Wall Street dickheads), we would be better in the long run.

Another good reason: Women are more intelligent than men. This is true, although I’d have to do some research to back it up. And maybe the studies aren’t there. Yet. Anecdotally, however, many of the brightest guys I know, and I mean doctors and surgeons and people like that, men who themselves are really bright, all sigh and nod and say that it is so.

Maybe it’s because women have two x chromosomes and we all start out as girls, or as protofemales, in the womb. Then some of us receive this huge dose of testosterone and, voila, we get a gimpy y chromosome instead of continuing with a second strong x chromosome. And it really is gimpy. Look at any biology book or go online and you’ll see that it’s so. I attended a lecture years ago by Ashley Montagu, the British biologist, who made this point and showed us slides corroborating the evidence. By gum, there is was, the odd y chromosome. So Mother Nature has already made up her mind. We evolved so that, as is the situation with all higher order animals, we have two sexes in order to get a lot more work done during the day. Division of labor. Dads evolved to help moms, though, not the other way around. It’s not a science fiction or fantasy story like the book of Genesis, where women come in second and are told that they’re here to help men. It’s science: logically, guys are here to assist the first sex, which would be women.

Science, in fact, is coming up with lots of reasons to revisit the assumptions most of us have about men and women. There’s a very important article in the current (May-June 2010) issue of Miller-McCune magazine titled “Make Birth Control, Not War” (available at http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/make-birth-control-not-war-11399/). The authors, Thomas Hayden and Malcolm Potts, make the point that war is in our genes, that “humans—human males, really—are not peaceful animals,” but that birth control measures and family planning decisions could alleviate much of the testosterone-driven bloodshed that has defined our species for so long. Putting women in charge, in other words, to make the decisions about when to have children and how many to have, could be the key to our survival. These authors report that, like chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, humans lived “for the vast majority of evolutionary time . . . in male-dominated social groups in which the males are all blood-relatives and only females move between troops. The dominant males largely monopolize mating opportunities and take the best food and other resources. Younger males are left either to work their way up the in-group hierarchy or attempt surreptitious matings with females of their troop or others—high-stakes strategies that often end in a beating or worse. But, in a unique evolutionary innovation, these young males can also band together and launch attacks on isolated members of neighboring out-groups, ultimately eliminating their ‘enemies’ and securing territory, resources and females they require to survive and pass on their genes.” Sounds like the old neighborhood, right? And like the Iliad.

Passing on the genes is what it’s all about, as anyone knows who has kept up with current developments in the biological sciences. What’s good for the species is out; what the selfish gene desires for itself is in. “We are all descended,” Hayden and Potts continue, “ . . . from particularly successful rapists, murderers and brigands. Human males today bear the marks of this legacy in the behaviors and impulses that still spur us on to lethal conflict—including the widespread and devastating association between war and rape—even when other solutions are both available and preferable.”

At the same time, though, they point out, “there is no doubt that other apes, like people, can be empathetic.” This biological behavior is emphasized in long-term observations made by Ernst Fehr, a professor of macroeconomics and experimental economics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. In the article “Ernst Fehr: How I found what’s wrong with economics,” in the May 4, 2010, issue of New Scientist (available at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627581.300-ernst-fehr-how-i-found-whats-wrong-with-economics.html), writer Marc Buchanan states that, 20 years ago, “Fehr had a seemingly sensible idea—that a deep-seated human preference for fairness might play an important role in economics.” Fehr had an uphill battle against the received wisdom that economic activity in the real world, like all other activities, is basically a winner-takes-all battlefield where evolved chimpanzees with flags and shooting irons—us, in other words—fight each other over the biggest slices of the never-expanding pie. Such “hard-headed thinking,” however, “has turned out to be profoundly naïve” and, in fact, “played a fundamental role in the recent economic crisis . . . the worst financial crisis in nearly a century.” Fehr has been concentrating on the field of neuroeconomics, helping to establish that “our precious moral values may ultimately be biologically based.” The idea that people are strictly self-interested, Fehr says, “has been the dominant mindset for decades . . . . It’s a biased way of perceiving the world.” (Certainly it is the mindset of pathologic, pseudorational, selfish Ayn Rand-style “positivists,” with their positively self-deluded sense of entitlement as alpha-male and -female go-getters who cleverly leave the rest of us in the dust as they charge in, Achilles-like, to prove their social dominance.)

Interestingly, when it comes to testosterone, literally the bad boy of the sex hormones, Fehr and colleagues, in a recent paper in Nature, “showed that testosterone, despite its reputation as a promoter of aggressive behavior, actually made people more cooperative when playing economic games. They used female volunteers since previous studies have indicated that women are more likely than men to show behavioural changes if given very low doses of the hormone.” (Eisenegger C, Naef M, Snozzi R, Heinrichs M, Fehr E: Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behavior, available at Eisenegger C, Naef M, Snozzi R, Heinrichs M, Fehr E: Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behavior.) Naturally, however, as Hayden and Potts state, many people are resistant “to the idea that something as apparently complex and unique to humans as our social instincts could find a relatively simple basis in chemical changes in brain activity.”

Well, we had better get used to the idea that we humans fundamentally serve as responders to selfish genes and chemical changes in brain activity because that is where advances in scientific inquiry are taking us. And study results such as these make the argument for women running the world all the more self-evident. Midway through their article, Hayden and Potts list the factors that “interact in one way or another with the warlike biology of the human male, and each is influenced quite directly by population growth rate”:

- Environmental stress and/or resource limitation

- Extreme economic disparity within or between groups and lack of opportunities, especially for young men

- Subjugation of women and a culture of male dominance

- A high proportion of young males relative to older males

I was certainly familiar with the first two items in their catalogue: stressing local resources intuitively seems to lead to attacking the people over the next hill in order to take their stuff, and the age-old question of what to do with the young men has bedeviled every culture since we came down from the trees. For years I’ve been saying that, if we really want to help out in Afghanistan and other hot spots in the world, what you do is give all of the hormone-driven young men the following: a wife and a family; a steady job; and one night a week out with the boys so that they can bond with their peer group by playing poker or going down to the local to throw back a few. It is not complex. That we haven’t done so tells me that, ultimately, the characters who make the decisions that shape the world have more profits to make by keeping things stirred up than by keeping them sensibly within domestic limits. As a matter of fact, Hayden and Potts point out that the crafty Yasser Arafat, when he needed to score points with the United Nations following the attacks in 1972 by the terrorist group Black September on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games, “flew eligible young female volunteers to Beirut and offered militant members of Black September $3,000, an apartment with a TV, long-term employment and $5,000 if they married and had a child. The offer was overwhelmingly accepted, and Black September as a terrorist movement collapsed almost overnight.” My point is made. Case closed. No mention of whether these formerly deadly young bucks got to spend one evening out a week with the boys, but that’s beside the point. Given the choice between being losers or winners, they went with being winners.

Female subjugation is a topic of endless discussion, of course. Suffice it to say that it is based, so far as I can tell, on fear of the feminine, most often, literally, fear of women. That’s what it comes down to, pure and simple. It is what is behind every fundamentalist religious sect and thought in the world. I know what I personally would like to do to jerks like the extremists who attack young Muslim girls on their way to school, but my reaction would be purely testosterone driven. I’d prefer to wait until next week when women are running the world and leave it to the mothers of these cretinous slobs, and the mothers of the hurt girls, to deliver whatever punishment the moms feel would be a fair and balanced response.

And speaking of fair and balanced, I am troubled by women who make themselves available to the alpha males of such conservative, testosterone-driven, He-Man Woman-Hater Clubs as Fox News as well as every other place of business or enterprise in America, if not the world. It makes sense, no doubt, biologically, as it has for thousands of years, to catch the eye of the alpha males, but as a matter of self-respect, I can’t help but recognize that these women are exactly what they appear to be: prizes available to the highest bidder in the chimpanzee troop. Conservative women are basically holes. They can tart themselves up as much as possible, they can bottle-blond themselves no end and undergo plastic surgery, but essentially all they are doing is what is required to be done in a conservative chimpanzee troop, which is to serve as highly visible pieces of candy. We all recognize that the owners of the shapely stems on Fox News are not equal partners. They are holes. Conservative women are holes. Of course, many so-called liberal males also regard women basically as holes. That’s a fact. But we need to try to get to a point where, selfishly-gened and sex-hormoned as we are, we all keep in mind most of the time that women got here first and that they are the mothers of our species. This will happen faster once we start, later today, letting women run things.

The fourth point in the Hayden and Potts article, about a high proportion of young males relative to older males leading to trouble, really makes sense. When you have a suitable number of dads, older brothers, uncles, and granddads around to guide the next generation of young men, you have at least a halfway decent chance of providing some decent guidance to these up-and-comers. It might be a code of conduct, it might be a direction for intellectual inquiry, it might simply be warning the young bucks to treat girls the way they want their sisters treated. Whatever. Trouble comes when you have too many young guys leading each other around in circles and causing trouble for themselves and others, whether because they broke into dad’s store of alcohol, or some religious nut gave them marching orders, or any of the million-and-one other ways young men have found since the Stone Age to get themselves thrown into buzz saws.

Any type of revealed religion is potentially poisonous, as far as I’m concerned. And fundamentalists, whether inspired by revealed or secular religion, are always trouble for the clear-thinking and the truth-seeking among us. They are all the same, these true believers. Same animal, different color of fur. But we can save that conversation for another blog.

Anyhow, Hayden and Potts conclude their essay by stating the obvious: if we made family planning available worldwide and let women take charge of their own wombs, we would be well on the way to having fewer hostilities and instead having more nights out with the boys that wouldn’t lead to mass destruction. We would all sleep better knowing that the four factors that contribute to war and rapine are being addressed sensibly. By women. For the good of our species and our genes.

A final point to follow up on where I started, many paragraphs back up there, and then I’ll save further ruminations, assertions, and rants for future blogs. Let’s be frank about this: Women are more inclusive and more tolerant than men. However, having said this, I must remind you that, bearing in mind many things I’ve provided in this essay, all generalizations essentially are false. Make a sweeping statement and immediately some clever person in the back raises a hand and gives you an example that disproves the statement. We all know this. I’m sure you have your own list of mothers from hell; bridezillas; dominatrices in business attire; subversive in-laws of the feminine gender; suburban blonds and similarly toxic, high-maintenance narcissists; shoe fetishists and Humvee drivers and other take-no-prisoners women consumers who are essentially slaves conditioned to respond to the marketplace; painfully embarrassing parvenus, social climbers, and divas; foolishly drunk girls gone wild; soiled doves; and further examples of womanhood whom no one, male or female, wants to see in positions of authority. Understood. Nevertheless, you know as well as I do that guys are exclusive and women are inclusive. It’s built-in, it’s hardwired, and it’s a good thing. Most guys want to beat up the neighboring troop of chimps in order to get to some of those hot chimp girls. But it serves us all better, I say, to allow the chimp girls to have some say in the matter in order to have as much variety and diversity as possible in the social make-up. That variety and diversity is where the innovators come from. It’s where the artists come from. And it’s where the next batch of cool moms, women scientists, and smart writers will come from.

Consider this a Mother’s Day blog in honor of women and moms. I will continue ranting about this because it is one of my favorite topics about which to rant. But to anticipate one possible objection: You want to ask, Dave, if them womens ran the world, could we still have mixed-martial arts contests and boxing matches and hunting and stuff? The answer is yes. Most women love sports, and they really understand and are attuned to the physicality of being alive. They may not get into blood sports; that’s my impression. Not most women, anyhow. But in a world run by women, we’d have at least as much vibrant activity on the playing field as we do now. However, women might also go for stuff that has a little more finesse, like your figure skating, as opposed to head-crunching cage matches. But there would be room for everyone. I don’t want to live in a world—and I don’t think many women do, either—where we wouldn’t have sports and athletics. Besides, I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a world in which my mom would not have been able to root for the Cleveland ball clubs. If you’re not going to let my mom root for the Browns every fall, well, then, why have a world at all?

Jill’s agent in Manhattan is energetic and very proactive, and she knows her business. Talking with Jill this past Sunday, then, gave me a good perspective about where genre fiction is these days. And pretty much it’s in the situation I surmised in my previous blog.

Eight-five percent of fiction readers in this country are now women, says Jill’s agent. Eighty-five percent. Women agents, women editors, women writers, women readers . . . chicks rule. It is pretty much completely upside-down, I suppose, from the situation—I don’t know, 50 years ago? 60?—when publishing in all of its aspects was run by men. Women weren’t entirely excluded—dames and other just-one-of-the-boys sassy types were more than welcome—but sexist it definitely was.

In terms of social progress, then, times are better now. In terms of lowered levels of literacy, however, things are not better. And publishing’s following the zero-sum mentality that has long been a hallmark of the music industry and Hollywood, the all-or-nothing mentality, is definitely not good, in my estimation. But whether good or not, it was inevitable that publishing would move in this direction. Whatever else American-style late capitalism is, it’s a juggernaut; it is a large mouth, an appetite that constantly wants to be fed; and the larger the chunks of food you can give it, the better the juggernaut likes it. Rock-star authors, huge opening weekends for movies, break-out tweener singers and performers—the devouring gullet adores them, loves ’em, swallows them whole, and in return, coughs up gold.

That all-or-nothing attitude, though, is the problem when it comes to what coyly used to be regarded as the midlist. Got a book that 50,000 readers might like? Well, too bad. We’re not interested because it’s not a big enough chunk of food for the juggernaut. So what do we do with the bite-sized morsels that appeal to the tastes of everyone other than those of the juggernaut?

It appears, to no one’s surprise, that the new Yellow Brick Road is e-publishing. Jill confirmed this as she and Joe and I sat around her kitchen table last Sunday. My daughter, Lily, and Jill’s son, Elliott, played in the other room, chasing each other around in circles, and we three adults drank root beer and ate carrot sticks, and it was made clear, as Jill’s canny agent told her, that within five years, publishing will mean electronic publishing. Paper won’t go away; books of cardboard and paper won’t even become antiques or nostalgia because, as implements or tools, they are pret’ near perfect in their design, in filling the need that they serve.

But America is all about technologic advances, and the arts in America proceed according to the latest technology. (God help us, this means that a tidal wave of contrived 3D movies is now heading toward us, without doubt mostly overgrown-adolescent fare spawned by the likes of James Cameron, just as, a decade or more ago, it seemed as though George Lucas and his remarkably awful, post-adolescent sense of storytelling and character development stole our sensibilities with his ghastly Star Wars prequels. We should all start planning right now to get in line for the 3D reissues of the Harry Potter pictures, let alone the 3D re-release of The Lord of the Rings. I am fairly certain, though, that no one, absolutely no one, will go back and try to reformat 7 Men from Now in Cameronian 3D, or The 300 Spartans, or Maniac Cop III, or any of the other peculiar cinematic fossils so dear to my heart. So my Saturday afternoons on the couch are safe from James Cameron.)

Jill’s agent also pointed out something else that is very interesting: that even the final two fiction genres pretty much dominated by men—horror and science fiction, the last holdouts, as it were—are now becoming secured by women writers. We are living through the greatest commercial expression of weirdness and horror in popular storytelling since the early 1930s, and this time, it’s “just us girls.” In one sense, I don’t mind: everyone should have her or his chance to get into print. In a second sense, I even like it, because I am really looking forward to introducing my three-and-half-year-old daughter to the delights of reading such girl-centric fiction when she gets to be older. (It’s hard to believe right now that anything will displace Pablo and Uniqua of The Backyardigans in her interest, but one of these days, surely, it will be resourceful young women who ride dragons or learn to become sorceresses or something or other.)

What has happened, simply, is this: that as technology and expression and the arts and business have become postmodern, genres and even methods of storytelling that were merely modern have been left behind or been allowed to manage the situation as best they can. I wrote sword-and-sorcery fiction; there is no home for that sort of fiction now in the commercial publishing business; so that fiction and its writers are now marginalized in the way that, say, gay and lesbian writers were in the 1940s, or that science fiction writers were in the 1950s. Right now, the modern type of sword-and-sorcery mentality that was more or less prevalent in the genre in the 1960s and 1970s has not had to move forward or develop very much; it has found a home in video games and in a resurgence of theatrical movies that—no surprise—take advantage of improved technology. So now we have the grunts of 300 and a remake of The Clash of the Titans, for example. We will probably see one or two of these sorts of movies every year from now on, at least for a while. If it can be done, it will be done, and technology makes these efforts acceptable, even enjoyable, compared with the lumpenprole embarrassments made in the 1980s, the awful beefcake-fests with Southern California bodybuilders pretending to be generic “barbarians” on a quest.

I still think that sword-and-sorcery is best on the page. Even though these stories are basically Westerns, they require a greater suspension of disbelief on the screen than Westerns do. Sword-and-sorcery stories are radio shows, or campfire stories, or yarns on the printed page: they work best when you fill in some of the story yourself, in your own imagination. Show it and you kill it. How many effing dragons have we seen flying around by now since the 1980s? Are any of them as good as the ones you imagine? They’re like the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movies, so technically perfect that you don’t have to do any work at all to appreciate them or meet them half way. They might as well be cocker spaniels. And they’re about as scary as cocker spaniels, too. We’re on to their tricks.

Joe and I have been talking lately about just what sword-and-sorcery stories are. He is about done reworking his Dorgo the Dowser stories from the 1970s. In a broad sense, they’re like film noir in a fantasy setting but featuring a character who is partly tough, partly good-hearted and honest. Dorgo is a strong character around whom good stories can be fashioned. Myself, I have been reworking my fantasy short stories from the 1970s and am almost half way through the lot of them. There are 18 in all; they’ll form a collection called Tales of Attluma or something similar. Tales of Attluma is how Morgan Holmes has referred to them, and that was the title under which the late, deeply lamented Steve Tompkins was reading them in preparation for writing his introduction. I deeply regret that the collection will not have an introduction by Steve; that’s how selfish I am. I was looking forward to his wit and insight and erudition. But the collection will still come out in one form or another. And, of course, I continue to poke along on Sometime Lofty Towers.

The point raised by Joe, and it is a point well made, is that the fantasy fiction that has been published since the commercial demise of sword-and-sorcery in the 1980s is all about world-building. And sword-and-sorcery isn’t about world building. Sword-and-sorcery is intimate. Go back to the very beginning, to Howard’s Conan stories, and you have intimate stories: one guy in a heap of trouble, either getting into it or trying to get out of it. The stories are not about some long-term fascination with exotic cultures and building fake worlds to impress middle-class suburban kids: they’re about dire peril and staying alive. The scale is intimate; life screws you; fight back. Even when the backdrop is something epic, the scale is still intimate and about characters, not about spelling out the minutiae of some Never-Never Land.

In a word: these old sword-and-sorcery stories, up through the 1980s, are modern. That’s what I wrote, and what Joe wrote, and what Robert E. Howard wrote, and what the rest of us wrote through the eighties. Not Tolkeinesque world-building and not dragon-riding and not empires. We wrote Old Testament stuff, Homeric stuff, The Song of Roland, and Njal’s Saga. Westerns. War stories. Intriguing, small-scale mysteries or thrillers. But with the added dimension or depth that sword-and-sorcery brings to its readers of what I always come back to calling the abyss, the breath of the eternal darkness, the silence from which we come and the silence to which we go, the existential frisson of meaninglessness and nothingness, that none of this matters although I am alive and, being alive, I will do everything I can to stay alive, despite the meaninglessness.

Howard’s fiction is Darwinian; I’m going to write a blog about that fact pretty soon. Basically his stuff is about the organism fighting to stay alive, hell or high water. That’s what sword-and-sorcery is about. That’s why this other stuff, going on and on with its world-building and BBC-style characters, is not sword-and-sorcery. I’ve written world-building, epic fantasy with BBC-style characters: The Fall of the First World. Sometimes I want to read about these characters who use their brains and their abilities to try to exist rationally in an irrational world. That’s most fiction. But sometimes we want to be reminded that, essentially, before all of that or underneath all of that, we exist on an animal level. We don’t have to like it; we may prefer to deny it; we may be disingenuous about it. But when a terrorist sets off a bomb in a subway, or some lowlife kills a child in gang warfare on the south side of Chicago, or a soldier has to go door to door to secure a neighborhood in Iraq or Afghanistan, we are standing side by side with the elemental thrill and awareness that is related to sword-and-sorcery fiction. There are monsters; they make no sense; life is a wound that throbs and is alive; we are the wound, and we will do whatever we can to stay alive for one more moment, and then one more, and then one more . . . or we will kill, kill it, lash out and fight back before life finally takes us.

That’s the intimacy of modern old-fashioned sword-and-sorcery. So what shall we do about it, those of us who write and want to read this sort of fiction? A couple of things, I’m convinced.

First, write sword-and-sorcery, not an imitation thereof. Don’t wimp out and do juvenile or domesticated writing. Go for the heart; go for the throat; write with blood. Push it to the limit. Scare yourself by how deeply you go.

Second, write as well as you can. The commercially available models of what is now acceptable or passable prose are not good enough. Go back and read writers from fifty years ago. Read for style, for grammar, for character development, for story. They were better at it than writers are now. And don’t create a commercial product; write a damned yarn. Agents tell you to write what you love and what you like to read, not what you think the market wants. Correct.

Third, let’s develop the genre. Joe wonders whether his Dorgo stories are sword-and-sorcery. They are, but they’re sword-and-sorcery-plus, in the sense that women detective stories are hard-boiled-plus. Those stories broke new ground and were initially a hard sell to agents and publishers. Now they’re mainstream.

Fourth, we need a venue, and e-publishing seems to be it. What the pulps were in the 1930s and the fanzines were in the 1970s, e-publishing is to the 2010s, the technology by which plebe fiction can be experimented with and made available. Let’s face it: do you really think that Tor, a big, mainstream commercial house, is going to want to publish Tales of Attluma? What’s in it for them?

I promise to do my part. I will finish revising those old fantasy stories so that anyone who wants to read them will have them available. There are at least six or seven of you. And I will finish Sometime Lofty Towers. Let’s see where those projects take me. Let me see if I can put my money where my mouth is, or be as good as my word. We already have four of the five Imaro novels available again from Charles Saunders via print-on-demand. So this little knot of us who began writing this material 40 years ago or more is still at it. I am thinking that e-publishing is how I should approach this. Let me know your thoughts.

And at some point, what was modern and new and then was forgotten or set aside will come back around full circle, and the best of it—the Imaro stories, maybe some of my short stories and possibly Sometime Lofty Towers, likely the Dorgo stories, any of the superb Kane stories of Karl Edward Wagner—will surprise readers with what was in there all along, good writing, strong characters, and a level of quality that makes it worth keeping them around and that makes them worthwhile to use as models for new writers to adapt.

For the past year, I have been actively trying to land an agent to represent one or all three of the novel-length manuscripts I’ve completed in the past few years. I am not having much luck. Part of the problem may be me. Perhaps I’ve lost my edge. In the mid-1980s, I dropped out of writing fiction; despite a few forays into popular fiction since then, I’ve largely stayed out of it. So perhaps I am not up to speed.

But that’s not the whole story. Publishing has changed dramatically during the past twenty years, while I was effectively sitting on the sidelines or being Rip Van Winkle. The stories I’ve written in the past couple of years are what you’d expect to see from me: a thriller about a killer-novelist; a supernatural story about a sorcerer and his enemies. The best of them is atypical in that it is literary—Seasons of the Moon, a story about a boy coming of age in a rural community that worships women and lives in harmony with nature. I published it myself in 2005 through iUniverse and occasionally still see royalty checks for it. It is not a very commercial book, but it is deeply appreciated by those who’ve read it.

I warrant that if I had tried to attract an agent with one of my manuscripts, or an editor, four or five years ago, I would have managed to get into print again for the first time since 1991. I say this because, before the economy crashed, there was a boom in publishing throughout most of the aughts and, despite a general trend among publishers to shrink the midlist, there were, as author Victoria Strauss said in a blog in December 2008, far too many titles being released, with publishers tossing out books “like spaghetti, hoping that at least some will stick to the wall” (http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2008/12/victoria-strauss-publishings-week-of_07.html). So the manuscripts I’ve been pitching lately would likely have had an easier time finding someone to champion them back when the spaghetti-throwing was going on. Which is all it comes down to, an agent or an editor becoming your new best friend because she or he is excited about the chance to make money with your manuscript as well as push forward her or his career as well as yours.

As to the midlist. When my first novel was published in 1977, I became, although I was not then familiar with the term, a midlist writer. This is the midlist, as described on the website for Mid-List Press (http://www.midlist.org/about.cfm): “quality titles of general interest that are rarely bestsellers, but, in the words of noted media critic Ben H. Bagdikian, ‘nonetheless account for the most lasting works in both fiction and nonfiction. . . .’ In the past, publishers built their reputations on midlist books. In recent years, however, such factors as the enormous prices paid for high-profile ‘frontlist’ books and the growing domination of mass merchandisers have eaten away at the traditional support for the midlist. The most disturbing aspect of this decline has been a corresponding decline in writers’ access to publication and, hence, to their audiences.”

I like the fact that the authors of this web page include the word “quality” in their estimation of the midlist. By and large, I think it is true that these novels reflect a certain level of quality, or at least used to. Myself, I have always thought of the midlist as being the paperbacks that filled the racks at the old Gray’s Drugstore at the Liberty Plaza that I went to as a kid, the same kinds of books that were sold at train and bus stations. The midlist thus includes genre titles (Westerns, detective stories, thrillers, and science fiction, as well as, since the 1980s, fantasy and horror titles), along with the well-crafted books of litterateurs and excellent wordsmiths, such as, for example, the admirable Robert Stone. Perhaps quality is in the eye of the beholder, and perhaps it is a stretch to include Stone in the same broad midlist as science fiction and detective story writers, but who can say? Some of the pulp writers of the 1920s and 1930s are now in the Library of America. For God’s sake, H. P. Lovecraft is in the Library of America. The work of these writers, removed from the context of those times, now reveals qualities not so apparent back then. This aspect of gold hidden in the rough is particularly true of genre fiction, which, like jazz and the blues, draws readers to it rather than proactively going after an audience—a siren’s song, rather than a carnival barker’s pitch. Popular writing was technically or grammatically better in the 1920s and 1930s; as a society, we were more literate then than we are now. But the powerfully human tendency to ask, What next? and to keep us turning the pages predominates in this proletarian literature. Rather than being fine cuisine, it is steaks on the grill. Popular storytellers drive us along, or drive along and take us with them. This is what strong storytelling has done from the dawn of human self-exploration—gestes, poems, myths, tales of the ancestors and of culture heroes. (I heard Clive Barker on a radio interview ’long about 1989 or thereabouts say something to warm the hearts of all of us who appreciate the wonderful peculiarities and advantages of genre fiction: History, he said, is very kind to genre fiction. And it is. This is where the “lasting works” part of the Mid-List Press quotation comes in.)

So here I am, in my middle twenties, in the middle 1970s, writing for the midlist. My good fortune in becoming published occurred by a mixture of pluck and luck as well as timing. I thought then that the world generously welcomes talent and that there is always an extra chair at the table for someone good of heart, hard of work, and shining with talent. On some other world, perhaps. I was lucky, however, to have met people early on who steered me toward some book contracts that allowed me to write the kind of stuff I loved to write at that time. Perhaps I was really no more than a useful idiot, naïve and eager and easy to take advantage of. Still, I was hired to write sword-and-sorcery novels, a genre I like but, as it turns out, not a long-lived genre in publishing. Sword-and-sorcery had great success in the pulps in the 1930s and 1940s and moderate success during a paperback revival in the 1970s. It made publicly available for the first time some of the talented writers of the 1970s—Charles Saunders, Richard L. Tierney, and Karl Wagner, as well as myself. However, popular publication of this genre was soon superseded, by design as much as by exigency, by juvenile and young adult fantasy fiction and Tolkeinesque adventures. Sword-and-sorcery stories, which are basically Westerns, continued to exist in low-budget movies and, particularly, video games.

This is probably as it should be because publishing, beginning in the 1980s, became dominated by many bright and energetic women who championed peppy, adolescent fantasy novels geared to young readers and the young at heart. The exuberant, overwhelming presence of this juvenilia coincided with the rise of publishing conglomerates and rock-star authors. As agent Andy Ross said in a blog in August 2009:

“You read about these high profile deals in the newspaper: Sarah Palin (or Tina Fay [sic]), Dr. Phil, Stephen King. These deals are actually pretty simple affairs and mostly revolve around the concept of a lot of money changing hands. But the vast amount of publishing deals are something entirely different.

“Most of my projects are what is referred to in the trade as ‘midlist.’ The midlist books are the ones that aren’t lead titles. The midlist is most of the books that are getting published. The midlist appears to be what publishers are most shy about acquiring in bad economic times.

“Even though advances for the midlist are pretty modest (often less than $10,000), publishers see these books as a risk. Like every other business in America, publishing is having a hard time. The lead titles seem to be holding pretty well, but the midlist is struggling. There are other factors involved in the decline of the midlist as well. Concentration of retail bookselling in the hands of chain stores and mass merchants, the cult of celebrity, a reading public that has developed internet-inflicted ATD, irrational exuberance over all things media-driven. All of this works against good books with smaller audiences. . . .

“When you read about the big deals, the word ‘auction’ usually comes up. But with most midlist books, you might find only one publisher who really falls in love with the book. Or no publisher.” (http://andyrossagency.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/deconstructing-publisher-rejection-letters/#comment-273)

So what I’m trying to do is to find the one agent or the one editor or publisher who will fall in love with one of my manuscripts. This, I realize, is precisely the situation I was in during the 1970s. I lucked out then in that my timing was right for the sort of fiction I was crafting. Today, finding that one agent or editor or publisher is likely just as difficult as it was then, only I’m no longer writing fiction right for the times. I have no plans to write Jane Austen zombie novels, for example, or adolescent vampire stories. World-weary sorcerers filled with guilt, on the other hand . . . that I can do.

(The older I get, the more I want to infuse some sense of maturity into my fiction, or depth, or insight, whatever comes from years of living thoughtfully, and more than ever, after all of the time I have spent teaching English and doing editorial work, I want my use of the language to be as good and clean as I can make it. Genre stories for grown-ups, written as well as one can attempt it, are not the first thing that agents are requesting. I am aware of that, yet I continue to pitch my projects.)

I never wrote bestsellers, and likely I never will. My talent is not sufficiently facile. Most of the books I wrote sold a minimum of 50,000 copies, a perfectly respectable number, but to a reading public that is now largely gone. (I am still annoyed that Avon screwed up the promotion and distribution of The Fair Rules of Evil in 1989. This is a book that I think could have become a “profit center” for them, or a “franchise,” or whatever the kids call it these days. Doubleday, in fact, wanted to look at the manuscript, but the clever agent I had at the time claimed that he could do better than to show my story to the publisher that had first put Stephen King between hard covers. I’m still angry. I think that Fair Rules and its sequel, The Eyes of Night, would have been popular back then if they’d gotten decent distribution. But maybe they were both ahead of their time, like the fantasy trilogy I wrote in 1983, The Fall of the First World—completely forgotten now. Pinnacle published it and then went out of business. I am jinxed. Timing is everything, and I had my moment. Timing and the right connections, let’s say. Still, a young director in California wants to film Magicians, the script Joe Bonadonna and I wrote based on The Fair Rules of Evil, so who knows?)

So much for the old dogs part of this essay. As for the new paradigm? This is still an open question. I’ll continue to write, whether for five readers or 50,000 or 500,000, but what’s the best way for me to reach the audience for my stories? The old paradigm—commercial paperback publishing—clearly seems out of reach, and least so far in my attempts, largely because of that shrinking midlist and the emphasis on frontlist authors, celebrities, and juvenilia. Still, there are avenues to be explored. Ted Rypel, interestingly, has found a publisher in Germany that has not only translated and reprinted his Gonji novels but also has requested six new novels from him. Incredible: Ted is getting contracts for original sword-and-sorcery novels, which is how things used to be here in America; now the offer comes from Germany. Still, in America, Ted has just seen the first of the original Gonji titles released as an audiobook; the whole series will follow. Are these examples of a new paradigm? I have a friend in Germany who’s sold some of my short stories there. Perhaps Germany or Europe generally is more accommodating to stories or genres not seen as worth bothering with here in the States?

The publisher that a few years ago brought back Charles Saunders’ Imaro books pulled out after the first two, so now Charles is taking control of the matter and publishing the Imaro saga via Lulu. The third volume, like the first two a recasting of the books originally published by DAW in the 1980s, came out last year, and the fourth—the first new Imaro title in thirty years—has just been released. Charles will be bringing out the fifth and final Imaro title soon. Is self-publishing in this way the new paradigm? It’s not unlike the small press, the fanzines and the semi-pro zines, in which Charles and Ted and Joe Bonadonna and I first saw print. Joe, in fact, is now polishing the manuscripts for his planned collection of stories centering on Dorgo the Dowser. These yarns are a throwback to forties pulp fiction and also were ahead of their time when Joe started writing them in the 1970s—sword-and-sorcery modeled on noir detective fiction. The combination works; the stories are good. In the same way, I’m slowly but surely going through my old fantasy short stories from the 1970s—“Descales’ Skull,” “The Passing of the Sorcerer,” all eighteen of them—to put together in a collection. It’s not even worth trying to interest a commercial publisher in this project, so my only avenue probably is to publish it myself. Should I offer it by subscription, another old model that may be part of the new paradigm? Let me know if you’d buy a copy; if I get enough potential readers, I’ll go ahead and publish it.

What do we do, we writers who used to fill a niche for 50,000 readers but are now no longer regarded as worth the effort to put between paper covers? I ask myself this question: What does any artist do who is basically small potatoes? Small potatoes with oodles of talent and drive, of course, but . . . small potatoes. Well, that artist does local theater, or plays small blues clubs, or shows in small galleries. In other words, such artists pay their own way in hopes of reaching the limited audience that appreciates their work. For me, does this mean Lulu, or iUniverse? Web publishing or e-books? Self-made audio books?

I am still undecided. Still writing, but still undecided.

Note: I apologize to those of you who follow this blog regularly for being silent since early January. Tough winter. But I expect I’ll be posting more stuff at a reasonable pace for the foreseeable future. Thanks for your support. And I’ll start answering the comments on my blog postings, too! I will, I will!

Maybe my fondness for these kinds of catalogs goes back to when I was in junior high school and used to send away for lists of old comic books for sale. I don’t remember paying for these. Did I? Maybe they were a buck, but that seems high. A dollar was a lot of money back then for a kid in junior high school. Maybe you just requested one. A first-class stamp was about eight cents then, so maybe these were free. Anyhow, I’d spend an entire period in study hall reading these dumb lists that offered such items for sale as the first issue of Detective Comics with a Batman story in it—Batman when there was no Robin and he was more like the Shadow and he killed guys with a .38 revolver. Or the first Superman comic for sale, or the first issue of other old comics from the 1940s and 1950s. It was the same romantic thrill I got from looking at Johnson Smith catalog, the one with the infamous X-ray specs and whoopee cushions. So the lesson is: you get a catalog in the mail with lots of small print and tiny pictures, well, the amount of cool stuff you could add to your life is pretty much endless.

This is absolutely true when it comes to remaindered-book catalogs. I’m looking at the new Edward R. Hamilton catalog right now; it came in the mail yesterday. It categorizes all of the titles in a table of contents on the inside front cover, and the result is that this makes me feel like I have the encyclopedic interests of a Renaissance man or an intellectual titan. I can’t do higher math to save my life—lower math itself is a daily challenge—but, as I browse through the titles listed on page 60, why, I come to understand that there is hope even for me. My latent or nascent fascination with higher math, which did not exist until I turned to page 60, comes to life. Algebra Demystified by Rhonda Huettenmueller! Calculus Demystified by Steven G. Krantz! Come on, if these people can write a book about it, I can read the book and master calculus. It’s like being in a candy shop, the list of books in these catalogs. Like the library was when I was a kid. The whole world is here, the whole freaking world, and so, by extension, I am capable of anything. It’s kind of like watching the cooking shows or the woodworking shows on PBS on Saturday afternoon. You have these people who cook moose ribs with a red wine reduction over campfires and produce five-star meals and they make it look so nonthreatening that I feel I’ve already done it. Come on, I want to say, give me a challenge. Moose ribs? For babies.

I feel that I want to split off part of my soul or something so that that part of me could indulge endlessly in all of the really interesting stuff offered in a remaindered-book catalog. Am I really going to order and read The Immortal Game: A History of Chess? Unlikely. But just seeing a book on the immortal game offered for sale, simply considering that someone—David Shenk, in this case, Mr. and Mrs. Shenk’s kid—so loves chess or has so much time on his hands to devote to chess, that he is such a chessophile that he wrote this book, and that some outfit spent a lot of effort and time to publish it—at the very least, this means that I should consider, if only briefly, the existence of chess, the reality of chess, the very chessness of chess. My intellect feels expanded merely by considering this.

Public libraries are the living repositories of the wisdom as well as the crap of the ages. In libraries, we can join the parade of multitudes of those who, since at least the days of the Roman Empire’s public libraries, partook in the great thoughts and great diversions of those who came before us. Books are living things. A good library is like visiting the home of an intelligent relative or a curious, probably eccentric, person, maybe the old-timer in the neighborhood.

Used-book stores can feel like museums; sadly, some of the stuff there is dead and is interesting to us precisely because it is dead. However, some among the dead can be revived, and that is the wonder of used-book stores: think of the material there that, ten or twenty years ago, people discarded as worthless. Crime novels you could pick up for a dime. Issues of magazines you could pick up for a nickel. A generation later, someone takes a serious look at this stuff, puts it in a context, tells us that it is important Americana, and then you have to pay top dollar for redesigned trade paperbacks or coffee-table books of those throwaway crime novels or the cheap magazines. It’s the Joshua Bell effect all over again, isn’t it? H. P. Lovecraft in old paperbacks from the early 1970s is somebody’s weird habit; H. P. Lovecraft in the Library of America volume is now safe and clean.

But the best part of a remaindered-book catalog is that you can order this material and have your own library or museum and indulge your own weird habits. I still have on my shelves plenty of those books I ordered in the 1970s. Books on cinema, mainly, now long out of print. Some volumes on this or that aspect of erotica in antiquity. (Did you know that people in the ancient world had sex? I know! I didn’t either until I got one of these remaindered books!) The 1970s was a ripe time for books on sexuality; times were freer, everybody likes sex, and, in retrospect, we can see that these books likely served a role as a precursor to gender studies in the 1980s and 1990s. I have a lot of books on philosophy and thought and general humanities that I ordered back then from Edward R. Hamilton and other catalogs. And lots of fiction, particularly the reprints in hardcover of writers then considered oddball but who, in a generation, would become mainstream or contribute to the mainstream. The 70s was also a rich period for reprinting gaslight science fiction and fantasy, for example, and Edwardian and late Victorian era curiosities.

So…. There are new categories in the recent Hamilton catalog to allow for things that didn’t exist in the late 1970s or were merely in their infancy. Computer books, for example. Books on the Vietnam War, which no one wanted to talk about back then, or only very few people; it was the “late embarrassment,” I suppose. DVDs of movies and documentaries and TV shows. I see that there are books here about Princess Diana; she has become the Elvis of Great Britain, hasn’t she? These humans who become living, present gods for some people exercise their own fascination for me, not the people so much as the fact that people willfully bend their imaginations in that way, that their hearts move so as to keep fires lit for Elvis and James Dean and Princess Diana. In the classical world, yes, these our departed would have thereby been elevated to the status of gods. Or perhaps genius loci, at the least. Or imps of the hearth or the fields or children of the Muses.

Here we go: Viking Wars—The Norse Terror. That’s for me. The True History of Troy. I have my own small library of books about the Trojan War and the late Bronze Age. The older I get, the more it fascinates me. And I have a growing shelf of books about Appalachia and hillbillies; I am not finding too many books on that topic, but I hope to find more. Neither do I order many books on gardening or cook books, but here’s stuff on the Old West. And if I can get the collected writings of Tom Paine in a Library of America volume, I may do that and replace the battered old paperbacks I bought one time in a used-book store. And which have been living in my own library since then. I think these remaindered-book catalogs open a window into our times that in some ways is more insightful than what’s on talk shows and in news broadcasts. They’re snapshots, really. Time capsules, maybe. And far more enjoyable to browse through than a mimeographed list of comic books for sale.