I have never been a big reader of fantasy stories. Sure, I read and had read to me, many fairy tales as a child, but the first "fantasy" I read was The Hobbit and that was in 1964 when I was thirteen.
The school I was attending was 7th through 12th grade, and this was the first large library to which I had ever had easy access, and I had been haunting it for a couple of years. I got to school an hour before it started...I'd go to the library...I'd finish lunch and have 15 minutes before my next class...I'd go to the library...I'd have a study hall...I'd go to the library. Well, I'd try to go to the library anyway. You see the school had a policy that you had to have a teacher's note to get into the library at any time (why they wanted to keep kids out, I have never figured out, but they did), and it got harder and harder to get a teacher to sign a note for me. So, I took to cheating, forgery and deceit...all to get through those guarded doors!
Once inside, I would find a book to read, sit on the floor in the stacks so as not to be noticed and read until I had to go. I worked my way through a plethora of sports fiction (football, baseball, basketball...didn't matter), biographies of everyone from Ty Cobb to Ben Franklin to Gail Borden, and discovered SF through Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein. That's when I "came to the attention" of one of the librarians. Mrs. Locklin may have known what I was doing all along, I don't know, but at was at about this point where she called me to her desk and made a deal with me. If I would read this book, write a report on it, and show me my report card to make sure my grades weren't slipping she would give me a "standing pass" to come to the library at any time I wanted. Bless her heart!
The book was The Hobbit. Turns out she was a pusher...a pusher of fantasy and science fiction and when ever she got a chance she would "corrupt" another yout. Over the rest of that school year I devoured them all. I could name off a dozen kids I "turned on" to LoTR's that year and during the rest of my years at that school. But the school library really only had the four Tolkien books in fantasy, some Andre Norton (sort of a fantasy/SF cross) and Lewis Carroll's Alice books, of course. Mrs. Locklin liked SF a lot more than fantasy ,as it turned out, so that what she mostly stocked for kids like me, and so my fantasy education basically ended at that point. From then on it was Science Fiction, ho! I never really looked back.
And then there was Dungons & Dragons. I discovered D&D in a game store in late 1974-early 1975. I was 23, a middle school teacher, and a weekend war gamer (Avalon Hill, SPI, GDW, etc), and went to that game store about once a month to browse the war games and...when they had things that interested me buy The General and Strategy & Tactics magazines. The little wood grained box wasn't shrink wrapped, it looked interesting...a fantasy war game (I thought)...and I had seen nothing else I wanted to buy that day, so... I was running a game for 3 high school buddies the next weekend, and have been DMing or playing for the last 35 years. :) But still, I didn't rush out to read fantasy, instead, I went on a quest to find or create the SF version of D&D. Yeah, I just loved Traveller when it came out in 1977...my friends liked D&D better, I've been pushing CT at them ever since, but when I can get a FTF game going it's much more likely to be fantasy than SF...shrug.
So, I didn't collect D&D like a lot of role players did in the 70's and 80's. I ran games and made things up, never needing the modules, never really buying any Dragon magazines, never reading any of the fantasy literature that was burgeoning at the time. Oh, sure! I read some semi-fantasy over the years...an old ERB or two, some Science Fantasy (Norton was always top notch at that), but Poul Anderson wasn't a fantasy writer to me...he wrote hard SF, so did Fritz Leiber, etc.
That brings us to now. I found a cd collection of the first 250 Dragon magazines, and I've decided to read through them, and having read the first few issues...have discovered that there was some interesting fiction in them. Specifically, I discovered Gardner F. Fox! I've only skimmed issues 1 through 5 so far, and only read two of Fox's "Niall of the Far Travels" stories, but I really did enjoy them! :) Now I have to go find out just who this Gardner F. Fox is and read more of his work...
Final take...if you like sword and sorcery, fantasy, even adventure stories, and you get a chance to read the "Niall of the Far Travels" stories, do it you won't be sorry!
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Phoenix, by HG Stratmann
The October 1998 Analog certainly has a mixed bag of stories. "Phoenix", by HG Stratmann, was certainly not to my liking. The short story was one long extended string of puns, all related to tobacco in general and cigarettes in particular. The main character, an expectant mother with a 2 pack a day habit is visited by a "man from the future" who begs her to not quit, but to increase her smoking, because her unborn baby's dna was changed by her habit and that leads him to become the inventer of...oh, let's see...faster than light travel, gravity control, etc, etc, etc. So, she hides her habit from her husband, has her baby, and dies of cancer 9 years later.
The baby, toddler, young boy is constantly pushed and prodded by his mother to show his genius...and then berated when he doesn't live up to her expectations. She dies thinking he, and she, was a failure. The boy, on the other hand, carrying a massive load of guilt from having his wished that his mother would just die and having it come true, does go on to become the inventor of all the above. Story ends...and what was the point? Er, that smoking can cause genetic mutations in fetuses, that smoking leads to cancer and early death, that pushing a child, any child, is often counter productive, or that guilt is a wonderful motivator? Or perhaps the point was just that Mr. Stratmann wanted to impress us with the clever way he was able to insert his many tobacco puns into a time travel story?
This was the second "time-travel" story I read from this issue, O'Carolan's Revenge was the first. This one was several steps down, and I count it as an hour wasted. Sorry, oh so clever, Mr. Stratmann.
The baby, toddler, young boy is constantly pushed and prodded by his mother to show his genius...and then berated when he doesn't live up to her expectations. She dies thinking he, and she, was a failure. The boy, on the other hand, carrying a massive load of guilt from having his wished that his mother would just die and having it come true, does go on to become the inventor of all the above. Story ends...and what was the point? Er, that smoking can cause genetic mutations in fetuses, that smoking leads to cancer and early death, that pushing a child, any child, is often counter productive, or that guilt is a wonderful motivator? Or perhaps the point was just that Mr. Stratmann wanted to impress us with the clever way he was able to insert his many tobacco puns into a time travel story?
This was the second "time-travel" story I read from this issue, O'Carolan's Revenge was the first. This one was several steps down, and I count it as an hour wasted. Sorry, oh so clever, Mr. Stratmann.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Return of the Fanzine
I've been looking around, and it appears that the RPG fanzine scene is hopping! Okay, maybe fanzines never went completely away, but in the last year, or so, seems to have seen several very good ones have burst on the scene.
On the Traveller front, we have 3 (and 1/2) that have caught my eye. Stellar Reaches has been around for a few years, but it was last year when I started reading them...so it's new to me. Freelance Traveller, the longtime repository on the web for Traveller related content, is now putting out monthly e-zines. A new fanzine I just found recently, coming from Austrailia, is Into The Deep, a fanzine that focuses directly on the Reavers' Deep sector of the official Traveller universe. Then there is the Mongoose house organ, Signs & Portents, although not completely Traveller focused it has articles in almost every monthly issue. I find it interesting that all of the Traveller fanzines are e-zines, pdfs specifically, and free for download. The quality of the content varies from very good to only fair, but I haven't run across a real stinker article in any of these e-zines yet. Anyone interested in Science Fiction generally, space opera in particular...in other words, Traveller role playing should check out all of these e-zines.
Over on the fantasy role playing side, a plethora of print and e-zine magazines are available. Of course, Wizards of the Coast has Dragon and Dungeon as paid subscription e-zines with printed collections occasionally available. Both of these e'zines focus exclusively on 4th edition Dungeon & Dragons, and provide a great deal of content every month. Wolfgang Baur publishes Kobold Quarterly, which also focuses on 4th edition, but not exclusively. You can buy KQ as a pdf or in a print edition. Paizo Publishing publishes Pathfinder, which is the *real* successor to the old Dragon & Dungeon magazines. Troll Lords has a house organ for Castles & Crusades that publishes somewhat infrequently. The "old school" community has Fight On! and Knockspell, both of which publish, more or less, quarterly. Dragonsfoot.org even puts out an e-zine at intervals, too. I'm sure I've missed several!
The fanzines on the fantasy side are mostly commercial ventures that charge for both pdf downloads and print copies of their magazines. Being the cheap skate I am, that limits which ones I "invest" in. I've bought (or in some other way sampled) one each of all the ones I've listed above and have only gone back for multiple issues of Fight On! and Knockspell. I don't know if I would say those two are the cream of the crop, but I can say they match up with what I want from a fantasy gaming magazine. I suggest checking several out and finding which work for you.
On the Traveller front, we have 3 (and 1/2) that have caught my eye. Stellar Reaches has been around for a few years, but it was last year when I started reading them...so it's new to me. Freelance Traveller, the longtime repository on the web for Traveller related content, is now putting out monthly e-zines. A new fanzine I just found recently, coming from Austrailia, is Into The Deep, a fanzine that focuses directly on the Reavers' Deep sector of the official Traveller universe. Then there is the Mongoose house organ, Signs & Portents, although not completely Traveller focused it has articles in almost every monthly issue. I find it interesting that all of the Traveller fanzines are e-zines, pdfs specifically, and free for download. The quality of the content varies from very good to only fair, but I haven't run across a real stinker article in any of these e-zines yet. Anyone interested in Science Fiction generally, space opera in particular...in other words, Traveller role playing should check out all of these e-zines.
Over on the fantasy role playing side, a plethora of print and e-zine magazines are available. Of course, Wizards of the Coast has Dragon and Dungeon as paid subscription e-zines with printed collections occasionally available. Both of these e'zines focus exclusively on 4th edition Dungeon & Dragons, and provide a great deal of content every month. Wolfgang Baur publishes Kobold Quarterly, which also focuses on 4th edition, but not exclusively. You can buy KQ as a pdf or in a print edition. Paizo Publishing publishes Pathfinder, which is the *real* successor to the old Dragon & Dungeon magazines. Troll Lords has a house organ for Castles & Crusades that publishes somewhat infrequently. The "old school" community has Fight On! and Knockspell, both of which publish, more or less, quarterly. Dragonsfoot.org even puts out an e-zine at intervals, too. I'm sure I've missed several!
The fanzines on the fantasy side are mostly commercial ventures that charge for both pdf downloads and print copies of their magazines. Being the cheap skate I am, that limits which ones I "invest" in. I've bought (or in some other way sampled) one each of all the ones I've listed above and have only gone back for multiple issues of Fight On! and Knockspell. I don't know if I would say those two are the cream of the crop, but I can say they match up with what I want from a fantasy gaming magazine. I suggest checking several out and finding which work for you.
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