This interview originally appeared at Black Gate Online.

The great thing about interviewing Howard Andrew Jones is that it is impossible to run out of interesting things to talk about. That’s because Howard has been busy. Busy writing stories, busy preserving the legacy of an unsung founder of historical adventure, busy editing Black Gate Magazine. And, oh yeah, busy writing and selling novels — his first two, the Dabir and Asim origin story The Desert of Souls, and Plague of Shadows for Paizo’s new Pathfinder fiction line, are both out now!

A Conversation with Howard Andrew Jones

Your Dabir and Asim stories are some of the most popular to be featured in Black Gate Magazine. For those readers perhaps still unfamiliar with them, what can one expect from a Dabir and Asim tale? More specifically, what is in store for readers that pick up Dabir’s and Asim’s first novel-length adventure, The Desert of Souls?

Mystery, adventure, swashbuckling swordplay, two brave friends standing against things man was not meant to know… to further sound like a radio announcer, there’s all this and more! I think my two favorite descriptions about their exploits come from John O’Neill and Kevin J. Anderson. O’Neill described their tales as “something like Sherlock Holmes crossed with the Arabian Nights, except Watson has a sword,” and Kevin J. Anderson wrote that the novel read “like a cross between Sindbad and Indiana Jones.” There’s a strong sense of the exotic, because I like to take readers to strange and colorful places, be it a haunted tower in the Baghdad night, or ancient ruins. I had a lot more room to spread out in the novel, so the readers are introduced to more figures from Dabir and Asim’s world, including the brilliant Sabirah, Dabir’s one true love, and the caliph himself.

What were origins of Dabir and Asim? Would you say developing them first as short story characters was an asset when it came time for the novel? Did you at all find yourself having to unlearn certain approaches to storytelling or characterization when it came to adapting them to a longer form?

I don’t know exactly where they came from, but I’m pretty sure they developed because I’d immersed myself in the historical fiction of Harold Lamb and Robert E. Howard. One day Asim was just… there, ready to start talking about his adventures with his friend Dabir. I could hear the tone of his voice long before I knew his full background. I wish I was always so fortunate with a character. As for the short stories, you bet those were helpful. With them I got to think about my characters and their interactions for years. I was effectively getting years of practice and background research out of the way, though I didn’t know it at the time. The novel was a new story, but it was about people I knew well because of the groundwork I’d already laid. There were a few things to unlearn, most notably Asim’s precise role. Earlier on he had always referred to Dabir as “master,” for I had first imagined Asim as Dabir’s servant, even though they relied upon one another to succeed. By the time I started work on their real origin story I realized that they saw each other as partners, not as employer and employee. If I should be so lucky as to have the earlier stories collected, I’ll have to make a few dialogue changes! Early on, too, I had set tales in a mythical corner of the caliphate, much like Clark Ashton Smith and others had done when inventing imaginary provinces of countries in historic times. When I wrote the novel I decided to dispense with that idea entirely and just keep the story in the real world. A real world with evil sorcerers and djinn, of course.

I’m glad you mentioned that, because I thought I noticed a shift towards a more specifically historical context with The Desert of Souls — you always did have the great texture of pre-Medieval Near Eastern culture in the Dabir and Asim stories, and a fair touch of the legendary and mythic traditions of those times, but the novel really roots them in a time and place. Did you do much in the way of deliberate research for the period? Would you say the ‘historical fantasy’ approach is more difficult to pull off than one unattached to real world chronology or geography?

If you’re serious about what you’re doing, both approaches have real challenges. I find that inventing details that feel realistic is similar to researching to learn what the historic details were, although you’ll be called out on different kind of mistakes — internal inconsistency or lack of creativity, amongst other issues, when you’re inventing, and failure to adequately research when you’re working with real history. I do my best, but I would like to do better, which will entail the study of Arabic and Persian so I can get to original sources. I got serious about researching once my characters started talking to me, but even with some great texts on hand it took me years to feel comfortable with the era, and I’m still uncovering information I didn’t know, or that I missed the first time. I suppose that when you create it yourself you are automatically connected to the setting, but fashioning a rich invented world can take just as long as knowing an unfamiliar part of the real one.

Do you think that you’ll always see your fiction through the lens of fantasy? Many historical writers tend to specialize only in historical fiction, whereas it seems a lot of fantasy writers feel free to move between pure secondary world creation and stories that take place in the real world to a greater or lesser degree. Would you try your hand at straight historical fiction one day?

I wouldn’t rule it out, but the only straight-up historicals I’ve ever contemplated were some Cossack stories that could be inserted into one of Harold Lamb’s historical fiction cycles. They would be pure pastiche, and mostly just to amuse and challenge myself. I doubt that I’ll ever get to them, because I haven’t yet found enough time to get to all of my own stories.

I’m a big student of ancient history and know far more than I should about certain periods, for instance, the Second Punic War, but I think of myself as a fantasy writer. Almost all of the other story cycles and novel series ideas on my back burner are 2nd world fantasies. One of them is informed by the life of Hannibal of Carthage, and others are influenced by other periods, but the worlds are imaginary.

It does seem as if a love of, and familiarity with, history is something most fantasy writers share — especially those renowned for their world-building skills. What would you say is the effect history has on the imagination that makes it such a potent influence on fantasy fiction and those who write it?

When you come right down to it, history is the story of people and societies, and as such can serve as a great source of inspiration and information. If you’re writing a fantasy novel and are looking for tips on how a society could be constructed, I think a wise first stop is to read some good history books. Too often, history is presented to young people as dull lists and worksheets and watered down paragraphs so bereft of detail that nothing interesting really seems to have taken place. I credit a lot of my own interest in history to two great history teachers, William Johnston in my 7th and 8th grade year and Herman Fanning my sophomore year in high school. They both brought history to life for me by going beyond the text books to talk about the stories behind the scenes, and providing more details about the people involved. I came very close to majoring in history in college because of those two men. I think if more teachers were like them, I would run into more people who loved history.

All this talk about historical fiction naturally brings us around to Harold Lamb. When and where did you first encounter his work?

I first found him as a high school sophomore. I had to write a short history paper on a famous historical figure, and I happened to find Lamb’s biography of Hannibal on the library shelves. I loved that book. I had reread books in the past, but they were always novels or short story collections. Hannibal was the first non-fiction text I revisited again and again. Lamb presented what was almost a Shakespearean drama about a man blessed by the gods with brilliance and charisma, doomed never to achieve the one thing he truly fought for, which was the preservation of his homeland, the citystate of Carthage. A military genius, Hannibal won battles employing tactics that are still studied today, but no matter how clever he was, he could not win the war. He had luck in abundance, but it was almost a curse, for while he continued to survive, all those closest to him fell. When he returned home to Carthage after the war, he turned his intellect to reforming the state. He eliminated graft and corruption, and overhauled the elective system so that senators, appointed to lifetime power, had to be elected every two years by the people. Though beloved by the commoners, his sweeping changes drew only ire from the ruling elite, who lied to Rome, saying Hannibal was still plotting against them. He had to flee his city and wander for the rest of his life, taking employment with more and more distant places as a military adviser while the Romans expanded their holdings. Hunted to the end by Rome, he finally died by his own hand rather than permitting them to capture him alive.

It certainly wasn’t an uplifting tale, but it was a story about a man of integrity and honor who strove the whole of his life for what he believed in, and I deeply admired him for that, as well as his inspiring leadership and military brilliance. Those few surviving personal anecdotes about him revealed a dry, modern sense of humor. Lamb’s presentation of the information made a lifelong Hannibal fan of me (I don’t mention this in casual conversation anymore, as I have grown tired of having to say NOT Hannibal Lecter). I was old enough to understand part of the reason I loved the book was because of the writing, so I looked up other books by Harold Lamb and discovered the first collection of Khlit the Cossack stories. That was the most exciting fiction I’d read since Fritz Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and I recognized that I’d found a gifted author.

From fan to editor — how did you make the transition from admiring Lamb to actively working to preserve his legacy? The eight volumes of collected shorts from Bison Books must have been a great deal of work — did you realize what a huge undertaking it would be when you started?

When I started I had no idea that there would even be an undertaking. I was just curious about all the stories he’d written that hadn’t ever been reprinted. There were a lot of them. One day while hunting used book search sites I saw two titles offered by the same seller. At that point I knew what all the names of Lamb’s published books were, yet these were unknown to me. I looked into the matter and discovered that these were some complete stories removed from pulp magazines and sewn into hardback covers by the late Dr. John Drury Clark for his personal reading. He had a box full of additional unreprinted Lamb stories, unbound, that Dr. Clark’s widow hadn’t put on the market because, she said, they were in pretty bad shape, though intact. I bought them, and as a result soon owned the bulk of Lamb’s uncollected fiction. It truly was like a treasure trove to me.

What a joy reading those stories proved to be; I savored every moment. I’ve talked elsewhere about the expectation that uncollected works are usually lesser stories — forgettable or early stuff — and how these grand novels, novellas, and short stories within defied that common wisdom. Unfortunately, they were all on dry, flaking pulp paper, and I decided that if I really wanted to preserve these, I’d best scan them, because some were disintegrating every time I turned a page. Those in the worst shape had letters and entire words dropping off from the margins.

That’s how it started. I bought a scanner and optical character recognition software and started preparing the manuscripts in worst shape first. What can I say? It took years, for the OCR process was time consuming, though far faster than typing the texts. I continued to track down other rare stories, assisted by family and friends in my search, and eventually found all of Lamb’s work for Adventure, where he did almost all of his best work. I got to exchanging notes with other Lamb fans, and we daydreamed about how great it would be to have these old texts between covers, and to have the serial stories collected in order, and by and by I started approaching publishers about reprinting the work. Because I’d been a professional editor for many years at that point, it wasn’t that intimidating to talk to another editor on the other end of the phone. What I didn’t know was that even though I’d already put in years and years of work that it would take years more! But the result was worth it, and a lot of good people helped me make it happen. Lamb’s work is too good to be forgotten, and it is my fondest wish that it not only stays in print, but that it will be rediscovered and enjoyed by a widening circle of readers.

It was most definitely worth it, and I share your hope that Lamb’s fiction will enjoy a justly-deserved renaissance. For anyone unfamiliar with Lamb’s extraordinary output, where would you recommend they start?

Readers who don’t know his work seem most responsive when they start with Swords from the West. It’s a fantastic collection of Crusader stories, showing the fall of kingdoms and the dooms of men, desperate battles and brave comrades, shrewd maids and scheming nobles. If you’re already a fan of the Conan stories and Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar cycle, or love heroic fiction short stories in general, you might start with Wolf of the Steppes, the first of four books collecting the ongoing stories of Lamb’s Cossack adventurers. They’re from earlier in Lamb’s career, but Lamb was so accomplished that after the first short tales in Wolf, Lamb hit his stride and drafted some truly fantastic adventures, sending his character into lost cities, forbidden temples, and some of the most desolate and fascinating places on earth. I fell in love with his fiction because of these tales, and I love them still.

What would you say are the things you’ve learned from Lamb, as an author?

I’m still learning! I certainly try to emulate a command of the historical period I’m writing about, as he did, but I can’t help feeling that I’m building with smoke and mirrors while he was fashioning real structures. The man spoke at least a half dozen languages! I love how he never bothered taking you anywhere that wasn’t interesting to see, and the way he would place his characters in situations that required great cleverness to survive. I have to say that, much as I love rogues and “gray” characters like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, I also love the honor of Lamb’s heroes, most of whom would rather die than break their word or betray their convictions. I think those kind of protagonists have become unseasonably out of favor, and their outlooks mocked for being naïve or unrealistic, but I honestly wish that we saw more characters like them. Lamb was ahead of his time in understanding that good or evil didn’t reside only with people across the border, or folk with different religion. In Lamb’s writing, your most loyal friend might be someone who would have been a natural enemy. He wrote with, as John Miller said, “an honest multiculturalism.” Lamb’s women might not usually have been warriors, but they were vitally intelligent and shapers of events very different from female characters in the work of his contemporaries. I could go on and on about what’s great about Lamb. I guess you could say that I strive to follow his lead on all of these things. Most certainly I admire his skill at plotting. Things click together like puzzle pieces assembled by a master craftsman, but his plots aren’t usually predictable; events in the stories rise from the collision of motivations between characters. That’s certainly something I strive to achieve with my own fiction.

We’ve talked about historical fiction and historical fantasy, but you also have a history with gaming. Tell us a bit about your new Pathfinder novel, Plague of Shadows.

James Sutter, the editor of the Pathfinder line, is pretty selective about what he buys, so when I was invited to submit ideas I had to throw several his way before one finally took. I think the line in the pitch that hooked him was “Jirel of Joiry crossed with Unforgiven.” I made it clear that I wasn’t going to lift the plot or character, but that I was going to strive for a similar feel. As for the subject matter, I think that James described it pretty well in a blurb he posted recently: “It revolves around the exploits of not one but two bands of adventurers journeying in eastern Avistan, two decades apart. The parties are connected by Elyana, an elf seeking to cure her former adventuring partner (and former lover) Stelan from a curse that’s connected to events — and people — from their shadowy past. Elyana’s journey will take her and her companions from Taldor to Galt, into Kyonin and to the Vale of Shadows, where the consequences of events decades before will affect Stelan’s future.”

I wanted a story that started out with a linear feel so that it could move forward with momentum, then added complications as the adventure got under way. I think there are some nice character moments and well-motivated, though unexpected, plot turns. Personality wise Elyana didn’t end up being a Jirel of Joiry knock-off, although she’s definitely a kick butt protagonist, so she has that in common with the famous character. She’s also seasoned and clever, and she’s relentless — she simply never gives up. I had a lot of fun writing her.

How much did you know about the Pathfinder world before you began work on the novel? What would you say are the differences between developing a fantasy completely on your own, versus working in a world with a great deal of background already filled in.

I’d been doing some reading about Golarion for a review I was working on for Black Gate, and I’d been reading Paizo products for other reviews for years, so it wasn’t completely unfamiliar territory. But reading to get a sense of the place and reading to FIND a place to set the scenes proved to be two different things.

Working in a setting devised by someone else is a little like researching for historical fiction except that you can consult the creators yourself. There was also a great deal of freedom to improvise, with the caveat that everything still had to be approved by said creators. While there were certainly a lot of detailed spaces, there were empty spots on the map, and I was allowed a great deal of freedom to drop things in there and add information to the cultures in question.

And not just writing in another world, but writing in a world that is actually used by thousands of people to experience their own adventures. How do you make sure you’ve satisfied the demands and expectations of this very specific audience? Were there things you had to do differently for your Pathfinder story versus your Dabir and Asim novel?

On some levels writing adventure fiction is the same, whether it is for a game or not. You have to tell a compelling story that features interesting characters. Writing deals in a lot of archetypes, and fantasy gaming fiction tends to wear those archetypes proudly on its sleeves — the elven archer, the surly half-orc, the mysterious wizard. I embraced those archetypes and tweaked them, as any gamer would when designing a character for play. I thought about who the characters were and planned out scenes that would put them in conflict with each other so I could get a better handle on who they were and what was important to them.

Where the creation process began to differ from preparing for a Dabir and Asim novel was when I statted out my main characters. I’ve never done that for my fiction before. I didn’t use any kind of point buy system to create the characters for Plague of Shadows; I just figured this character would be at about this level with these attributes so that she could do these kinds of things, and this magic user would have to be at THIS level to throw THAT spell. I kept the rule book handy so that my spell descriptions would match, as closely as possible, what the Paizo maestros had created (and I have to say that a lot of those spell write-ups in the core rulebook are pretty spiffy).

I tried to keep all that background stuff incidental to telling the tale, though. There’s a great story about Gene Roddenberry explaining to the Star Trek writers in the original series that when a policeman picks up a gun he doesn’t stop to lecture about chambering a round or the chemicals or the speed of propulsion — he just uses it. In the original Star Trek, that was the approach to the use of technology — it’s virtually info dump free. If Kirk needs to use a communicator or a phaser, he just uses it, and the viewer infers what the item is for. That’s how I wanted the system specific stuff to turn out in Plague of Shadows. The story worked with the rules, but the rules wouldn’t be forefront. I didn’t refer to any spells by name, and people certainly didn’t talk about levels or hit points, but the actions matched up with what was possible with the rules if anyone wanted to peer behind the curtain. I tried keeping to existing monsters, too, although Paizo didn’t mind me slipping in a few critters of my own invention. They were also a big help in coming up with a few fixes and suggesting alternatives when what I’d described was too powerful, or not powerful enough.

I suppose the final important difference is one of tone. The stories of Dabir and Asim are first person and are meant to evoke an older storytelling tradition. Asim’s narration is formal and sometimes ornate (which, hopefully, is different than wordy — so far no one’s ever complained that my pacing is slow). Plague of Shadows is third person limited, and is written mostly from the viewpoint of Elyana, who tends to speak succinctly. She might be an elf with a bow, but she’s sort of a haunted, damaged noir heroine. I think she sounds quite different from the stalwart Asim.

Actual experience as a gamer is clearly a huge asset when trying to connect to a game-playing audience. But looking at your gaming history in a broader sense, how would you say that it has influenced the writer you’ve become?

It’s been a huge influence. I hope soon to sit down with some fantasy writers online at Black Gate for a round table on just how much so many of us were influenced by gaming. I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons by my friend Sean Connelly back when I was 8 or 9. I’ve been gaming with one system or another pretty much ever since. That was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the early/mid 70s. Later I moved on to play systems with skills — like Star Trek and Traveller, and The Morrow Project, and Dragonquest. I’ve played a wide number of games over the years, usually, but not always, as the game master. Most recently my own group has played using the diceless Amber system, the Talislanta 4th edition, a homebrew percentile system, and in the last year, Pathfinder.

I’ve played some games where a good game master is really just a referee overseeing that the tactical combat goes well, which can be a lot of fun, but I’ve always preferred the games I’m playing to have a story. For all intents and purposes the game master becomes the story master and the rest of the players improvisational verbal actors who have the power to change the course of scene and plot. For those sorts of sessions to work properly, the game master needs to have a feel for story structure and a notion of character, or to develop such things. I am absolutely certain that game mastering has been great for honing my own storytelling skills.

I credit much more to my role-playing experience — sometimes while running a game I’ve developed ideas on the fly that I later used in my fiction, or tried out a story concept on my players before working it into my writing. One of the key conceits of The Desert of Souls was first tested out in a role-playing campaign I ran. And then the importance of role-playing as a gateway to imagination cannot be overlooked. Paizo’s Erik Mona has written at length about the list of recommended reading at the back of the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide. This was Gary Gygax’s famous Appendix N, and for me and a whole slew of kids my age, it was one of the first codified lists of fantasy genre books we’d ever seen. I remember taking that list to the library and using it to search for books by Jack Vance and Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny and Leigh Brackett — it was a great introduction to heroic fiction.

I remember that appendix! It was my introduction as well to so many of the great names of classic adventure fantasy. Now here we are some thirty years after that reading list was made, and fantasy fiction has absolutely exploded. Since it’s such a broad topic, and since Black Gate focuses on shorter works, I’d like to know in particular your thoughts on the trends in today’s world of sword & sorcery and heroic fantasy short fiction.

Just a few short years ago I had my finger on the pulse of sword-and-sorcery short fiction but I’ve been so busy lately that I’m not as in touch any more. I’m hearing good things about authors in anthologies from Rogue Blades Entertainment, as well as authors who’ve been printed in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, but I’ve only been able to peek in occasionally. So I’m no expert on current trends. I certainly like what I’m seeing in Black Gate. Many signs seem to be pointing toward a sword-and-sorcery renaissance, and I’m delighted that my fiction is seeing print while its getting underway.

It does indeed seem like an exciting time for sword & sorcery. To close out our interview, could you tell us a bit about what you are working on now? What’s next for Howard Andrew Jones?

I’m hard at work on the sequel to The Desert of Souls, currently titled The Bones of the Old Ones. Like Desert, it’s a standalone. I hope to turn in a draft to Thomas Dunne Books in just a few more weeks and then the revision process will begin in earnest. I’ve been jotting notes down for a third Dabir and Asim novel, and I’m looking forward to outlining it in full and throwing myself at some research. This week the first of four parts of a prequel story to Plague of Shadows is appearing on the Paizo Pathfinder web site, and I’m slated to turn over an essay to the indefatigable Jason Waltz for a new heroic fiction writing anthology.

Aside from these projects, I haven’t decided what’s next. I do have some short stories coming up in Black Gate, and I have a number of additional series ideas. I’m not sure if I want to move toward writing a book a year, or try to write two, each one in a different series, as my good friend E.E. Knight has managed. It will all depend, of course, on whether these first books sell.

I feel like we could continue this conversation indefinitely, but maybe I should let you get back to work! Thanks for the fantastic interview, Howard.

Thank you, Bill.

Recently I wrote an essay about the dangers of too much ‘realistic thinking’ in fantasy fiction — When Realism Isn’t Real — Conan the Jazzerciser. In that article I used an example from Poul Anderson’s Conan pastiche Conan the Rebel to illustrate my point. The following post, which originally appeared at Black Gate, is a brief look at Anderson’s ‘On Thud and Blunder’ essay and his realistic approach, and tells the other side of the ‘realistic thinking’ dichotomy in fantasy fiction. In particular I look at how fantasy fiction as a whole has moved on from the time of Anderson’s original writing, and now features a new set of pit-falls and follies.

. . . writers who’ve had no personal experience with horses tend to think of them as a kind of sports car.

It’s been thirty years since Poul Anderson wrote his essay on the need for realism in heroic fantasy, ‘On Thud and Blunder,’ which you can read in its entirety at the SFWA site, and I think it holds up well even though the genre — and the perception of it — has changed greatly. ‘On Thud and Blunder’ originally appeared in the third installment of Andrew Offutt’s classic anthology series Swords Against Darkness; though it was in the excellent, if unimaginatively named, collection of Anderson’s called Fantasy that I first encountered it. But already at the time of my reading a whole generation of writers had made a name for themselves by following the dictates of realism and common sense in designing their fantasy worlds.

The essay begins with a satire of the genre that features a barbarian cleaving through armor with a fifty-pound sword and riding a horse as if it were a motorbike, among other ridiculous things. It’s the kind of thing that gave heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery a bad name, and perhaps the sort of thing that meant it would soon be eclipsed by a rising tide of ‘high fantasy’ in the eighties and nineties. But, in 1978, hf — as Anderson terms heroic fantasy in an abbreviation that seems to have never caught on — was an emerging star:

Today’s rising popularity of heroic fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery as it is also called, is certainly a Good Thing for those of us who enjoy it. Probably this is part of a larger movement back toward old-fashioned storytelling, with colorful backgrounds, events, and characters, tales wherein people do take arms against a sea of troubles and usually win. Such literature is not inherently superior to the introspective or symbolic kinds, but neither is it inherently inferior; Homer and James Joyce were both great artists.

A wonderfully concise statement in defense of the genre, something I could easily see being forwarded today on some blog in support of the much-hoped-for internet revolution in pulpish storytelling. However, on today’s bookstore shelves, it isn’t sword and sorcery but high fantasy books that are all the rage — a genre possessing a set of conventions that do tend to nicely address the concerns Anderson raises in ‘On Thud and Blunder,’ but one that itself brings a whole host of new excesses to the table. Perhaps a contemporary writer of Anderson’s perspicacity could produce a follow-up article aimed at high fantasy’s faults, which I propose be titled ‘On Bloat and Blather.’

But that is not to say I dislike high fantasy, far from it. I no more dislike it than Anderson does hf when he lampoons it. Nor is that the focus of this post, I merely wanted to suggest how the background of fantasy publishing has shifted dramatically — so dramatically, in fact, that many of the virtues Anderson enumerates have themselves been used to excess by certain authors in the quest for better fantasy worlds.

Another thing that Anderson decries that has changed for the better, though perhaps not to the extent that it should, is the development of fantasy worlds based on histories and mythologies outside of the European and Near Eastern tradition. Already in the seventies the shift could be seen, and on today’s shelves, too, an increased variety of influences are in evidence. While many veins of culture remained to be tapped, there are at least Asian, African, and Native American inspired fantasies available — even if the generic brand of fantasy remains overwhelmingly a bland distillation of Medieval Europe.

Though all of that is incidental to the purpose of Anderson’s essay, which is a call for greater realism in fantasy — and not merely realism, but logic and common sense, too. Anderson does a wonderful job of skewering so many of the misconceptions and lazy assumptions of the genre, bringing his historical knowledge to bear on such things as the day-to-day realities of a pre-industrial society, the likely workings of politics and religion, and, of course, some of the practical aspects of fighting and combat. ‘On Thud and Blunder’ does more to get the reader thinking in these terms, and inspired to go out and do some research, than a great many of today’s shallow, cynical books written on the subject of world building and aimed at the would-be fantasy writer.

And, while this essay is targeted at writers, ‘On Thud and Blunder’ will be appreciated by anyone interested in both fantasy and history. Anderson throws off interesting historical anecdotes like sparks off a grinding wheel, from the pervasiveness of disease and the development of cities, to the social underpinnings of a nation’s army and the fragility of a horse’s health. It is fascinating stuff — and for a writer looking for ideas, it’s a goldmine.

It has sometimes been said that we are now witnessing the Golden Age of fantasy — and, with so many series out there varying from the extremely sophisticated to the utterly banal, it’s hard to disagree with the statement at least from the standpoint of quantity. It seems to me fantasy has had to change from it’s sword and sorcery roots in order to generate the mass appeal that it now holds; it had to get away from many of the flaws Anderson is drawing attention to. In some ways it’s a shame that the pendulum has swung so far away from the rollicking good action tale, but it does show signs of swinging back and, perhaps, ushering in a new crop of tales at once sophisticated and viscerally paced. I don’t know if this really is the Golden Age, and I can’t claim that I like all the changes I see in the genre, but I do believe fantasy has improved with time — and I fully expect it to get even better.

I’ve been in reviewer overload lately, reading, taking notes, and penning reviews for the next issue of Black Gate. But, more than that, I’ve also been coordinating our crop of reviewers this time out, and thinking in terms of what exactly it is that ought to be in the review section of the magazine, not just in the reviews I put up on my own website. Having done over 50 reviews in the last year and a half or so, I think I’ve learned a few things, and I’d like to share my thoughts on what a good review should consist of. And at the end of this essay I’ll also offer some practical advice to anyone that wants to become a web reviewer themselves and share the reasons behind just why someone would want to take the time to review a book in the first place.

The first distinction we need to make is between a book review and a book report. Reviews are critiques that take a lot of factors into consideration and demand a certain level of knowledge and discernment from the reviewer. Book reports are those bland plot summaries you used to have to write in school to prove to the teacher you actually did your assigned reading. I’ve seen so-called reviewers whose work falls squarely into the later category but, aside from generating web content for google, such work holds little real value.

What makes a review valuable? Broadly speaking there are two types of readers for a book review — those who want to know if the book being reviewed is something they want to read, and those who may or may not have read the book but wish to primarily be entertained and informed by the review. In the later category are readers who want to know if someone shares their opinion of a book, and those simply curious as to how the book fits into the larger world of fiction and ideas. Reviews need to satisfy both sets of readers.

It is in satisfying the first group of readers, those who want to know if the reviewed book is for them, that a book review distinguishes itself from a critical essay. A critical essay assumes familiarity with the work in question — a book review assumes the opposite. Here is where the elements of the book report find their way in the review, for some measure of plot, character, and setting must be described in the review itself. Such reportage is not, however, the primary purpose of the review — rather they are the foundation for what is really being communicated, which in the reviewer’s opinion about the book.

In reporting the basic elements of the plot, the reviewer must take care to avoid spoilers. Anything beyond about a quarter or third of the book should really be considered off-limits to anything but the most general sketching-in — and even big surprises on page one should be handled carefully. Report only those items that convey enough about the story to support the critical elements of the review and whet the reader’s appetite — remember, a book review is not about proving you read the book, as it’s assumed that you have (you have, right?).

The primary element of a book review, then, comes down to the reviewer’s opinion of the book itself. Sometimes this opinion is expressed in neutral terms, and sometimes in personal terms, and it is important to distinguish which is which. The difference arises when one is referring to an absolute standard of judgment versus a subjective one — and this is perhaps the biggest gray area, and perhaps the most reliant on instinct, in any sort of critical endeavor. Is the novel’s uneven pace an example of a failure in pacing for this kind of story, or your own impatience with the book? Is the author’s baroque style purple prose, or just something you aren’t in the mood for? Does the novel fail on points of characterization, setting, or theme — or is it just not the novel you thought you were getting when you looked at the cover?

There are elements of story that fall squarely in the ‘absolute standard’ category, namely failures of logic and other inconsistencies in the narrative structure of the book. However, such failings themselves require a certain subjective handling — does Chandler’s forgetting the chauffeur really ruin The Big Sleep? Whenever evaluating failures and success in a book it is important to keep foremost in mind the totality of the book itself — if it is successful despite its flaws, if it creates a sense of immersion and believability despite errors or mistakes or uneven execution, be sure that the overall tenor of the review reflects that. At base, it always needs to be clear from the reviewer’s tone and focus if the book falls on the plus or minus side of the scale.

A further notion is the idea of author intent. Does the author intend his hilarious book to be a sober and serious drama? Is this ponderous doorstop billed as light reading? Not only must a book’s success or failure be weighed against intentions, but the reviewer must engage with the book differently depending upon its purpose. The reviewer that opens a media-tie-novel with the expectation of encountering deep philosophies and then slams the book as ‘mere entertainment’, or comments on how boring a literary novel is because it lacks the breathless action he was inexplicably hoping for, makes the mistake of projecting their own unrealistic expectations upon the novel. Books must be evaluated on their own terms, and determining just what one is reading before the book is opened is an important skill for any reviewer.

And just as books should be judged on the terms they set for themselves, they must also be evaluated in the context of other related works. If the book is part of a series, the reviewer needs to judge its place in the series, and its relative success or failure in comparison to preceding volumes. So too should its relationship to the larger genre it finds itself in be considered — though with the caveat that a good, concise review is not an exercise in comparative criticism. A book’s place within the genre is perhaps more of a background thing — useful for shorthand (ie. ‘in a story reminiscent of George R. R. Martin’), criticism (‘derivative of Robert E. Howard, but without the intensity’), and in noting an overall phenomenon or trend (‘yet another cynical, gritty fantasy in the vein of recent offering by authors such as Abercrombie and Morgan’).

Above all, reviews are entertainment. For every person sincerely interested in advice on whether or not to read the book being reviewed, there are many others who will read the review for entertainment and curiosity about the book and its place in the genre. Writing to satisfy both sets of readers, and working to keep both the content and style of one’s reviews compelling, is the primary ingredient to reviewer success.

Finally, a brief word on becoming a reviewer, at least online. For the complete beginner, someone without a single review to their name, there are many websites and online magazines that need reviews of material — books, movies, games, etc. Without some sort of writing sample these may be difficult gigs to land, so the simplest thing to do is to start a review blog (like mine!), which can be done on free blogsites such a blogger or wordpress.com. Review the books that interest you — preferably some that are new as well — and do the best job that you can on them. Create a directory on your page and link to each review, and think of the whole thing as a kind of online resume for yourself as reviewer. If you write well enough you can openly solicit other review sites, ezines, and even print magazines for review material, and link to an example of your reviews as proof of your skill. If you grow your website and keep adding to your review content, you may even be contacted by authors, publicists, and representatives of the publishers themselves and offered review copies. While some sites and magazines will pay for reviews, the vast majority offer nothing more than a free book — so, if you are interested in reviewing as a way to make extra money, you may want to think again.

So, why review? For professional reasons, reviewing is another way to get your name in front of readers. Reviews can drive traffic to your website, and also be the content at the heart of an author site that gives readers a reason to visit in the first place (or had you thought they really cared about how many words you wrote today?). Reviews can give you contacts, whether with editors, fans, or the authors themselves. But, above all, reviewing is a way to engage with books in a more alert, more critical, and more substantial way. When I think over the last few years, the books I remember best are the ones I reviewed — and not only have I retained more from those books, but I’ve understood them better as well. The act of taking notes, of thinking and evaluating, and of then actively writing about a book, is a way to take one’s reading to another level — and for book lovers, what could be a greater joy than that?

This post originally appeared at Black Gate Online .

An entry over at Joe Abercrombie’s blog about his encounter with a neighbor boy who hadn’t even heard of D&D got me reflecting on many of the things Abercrombie himself covers in his post. He and I are about the same age, and belong to a pre-internet, pre-500 cable channels, pre-iPhone generation that entertained ourselves around the wood stoves of our drafty log cabins with shadow puppets and recitations of railway time tables. But something happened to transform our sepia-toned youth into an exciting time of monster-slaying, dungeon-crawling, infinite gold-carrying, NPC-bullying, and rules-lawyring adventure — and that something was Dungeons & Dragons.

Of course, let’s get something straight, there was Dungeons & Dragons, and there was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and my activities were limited solely to the later. And, hey, I was a snob about it. I mean, in D&D elves and dwarves were considered a class? All the cool kids where into AD&D — though for the purposes of this entry, and since the distinction no longer has any meaning, anyway, I’ll just lump them both together as D&D.

I say ‘cool kids,’ but that wasn’t the case. Cool kids played flag football in their spare time, rebuilt carburetors, and rode their Schwinns to rendezvous with married women in their thirties whose husbands were out of town. Actually, I have no idea what the cool kids did, preferring as I did the company of dorks, misfits, and other geekly types such as myself, and I suppose if I ever imagined what they were up to it would veer widely between the poles of pathetically banal and enviably adult. Me, I drew dungeons on graph paper.

What other activity could get kids excited about school supplies? I went from viewing the stationary aisle at the grocery store with utter dread — for it was forever the herald of the coming school year — to acquisitive joy. Graph paper, mechanical pencils, note cards, spiral note books, drawing pads, three-ring binders with dividers — a rich array of office supplies to feed the D&D beast. Since I was usually the Dungeon Master (the guy that sets up and runs the game, for those of you who, like Abercrombie’s neighbor, have no idea what I’m going on about) I needed (or ‘needed’) a whole bunch of material to record monsters and rewards, draw maps, and write-out scripted descriptive passages to be read later to the players:

“You enter a natural cavern about sixty feet by thirty feet, and twenty high. An underground river runs through it from East to West, and green slime clings to the stalactites overhead. Near the river is the body of a goblin, torn to shreds as if by a large beast. Flickering light can be seen coming from an opening on the south side of the cavern.

With kids doing this sort of thing willingly and for fun, it’s no wonder so many of today’s new crop of fantasy writers (and an even greater number of wannabes, such as myself) got their imaginations primed through just such an activity. You could even say running one of these games as a kid is the perfect way to develop the skills needed to write fantasy fiction.

But it’s much more than that or, I should say, this isn’t about D&D as a boot camp for writers, but as a fun activity for kids that flexes their creative muscles, gets them hanging out with their friends, provides the thrill of problem-solving and decision-making, and has them reading and memorizing things that often require a high-degree of comprehension. It’s the perfect past time for smart kids, and it’s been replaced by the x-box.

Oh, I have no statistics. And I’m not going to dig for proof. But pen-and-paper RPGs aren’t as popular with kids today as they were in my day, having been replaced largely by computer games for those children sufficiently geek-oriented enough to have a real need to explore dungeons. But video games only satisfy part of the thrill of p-n-p play, and almost none of the creative experience of such a hobby. The way I see it is it comes down to the difference between two forms of media, the old ‘analog’ world of printed books, complete sentences, and sustained thought, and the new digital one of instant gratification, diminished attention spans, and leetspeak. In our brave new world, AD&D has been replaced with ADD.

If I sound like and old curmudgeon it’s because I am — and if I use the word ‘curmudgeon’ in the first place, it’s because I learned it pouring over the Dungeon Master’s Guide in the wee hours of a Friday night while my peers were off starting fires in trashcans and impregnating cheerleaders. So much of my vocabulary, love of history, and interest in fantasy goes straight back to this game, and for that I will be forever grateful to D&D. It got me to read — and, believe me, I read and reread those books until I could recite the material components for a magic mouth spell or the hit dice for a beholder from memory — but, perhaps even more importantly, it got me to think creatively. Actual thinking, as opposed to the twitch of muscle reflex, in a totally free form environment is not something video games are going to offer any time soon. But, more than any of this, I feel lucky for playing D&D, and having some like-minded friends to share it with, and being able to discover the sublime satisfaction of exploring worlds other than my own.

This post originally appeared at Black Gate Online.

There are some interesting discussions going on around the web about which direction publishing — specifically the publishing of genre short fiction — may be headed. It’s no secret that many of the smaller print magazines are closing down, something I wrote about in Vanishing Print Zines, and that the ‘big three’ have been limping along with ever-declining circulation numbers for over a decade now, facts which leave readers and writers of short fiction asking the obvious question of ‘what’s next?’

A recent article in the Baltimore City Paper, Neverending Stories, takes a snapshot of SF short fiction then and now, noting that the business end of things has been in decline for quite some time, but that writers are drawn to the form nevertheless. A few writers comment that the short story magazines are the equivalent of the club scene in music, a proving ground, a place where new talent is seen for the first time — and Robert Charles Wilson memorably draws a comparison between short SF and garage bands.

But the writing is on the wall, and the article can’t help but note the declining number of readers for the SF short story magazines, and off-offhandedly concludes that maybe one day when we are all reading stories online (the article specifically mentions ‘Twitter,’ which doesn’t make any sense to me) the short form may return to its former glory. But that conjecture has of course been at the forefront of a lot of people’s thinking about the future of short fiction, though with the recent closing of Jim Baen’s Universe there seems a lessening of some of the surety with which some declared the internet would usher in a short fiction renaissance.

The problem, of course, is how does anyone make money with online short fiction? Jay Garmon’s idea for a web 2.0 SF magazine seems a step in the right direction. Simply stated, this type of magazine would allow the online audience to essentially commission the stories they wanted to read by voting with their cash on story pitches vetted by an editorial staff. It’s an elegant solution, though not without its own problems as Garmon is well-aware — for one thing it would depend on already having a sizable audience, and for another it would heavily favor known writers (but, really, so does every form of publishing).

Addressing the first concern of growing an audience is something Cory Doctorow knows a hell of a lot about. Doctorow is, of course, a famous champion for the creative commons copyright and has enjoyed a lot of success energizing and expanding his audience by offering his work for free online. A recent Locus column from Doctorow, Special Pleading, examines the marketing potential of ‘giving it away for free’ in some detail, and offers an overview of his own career. He also hints at his planned ‘With a Little Help’ project, which will be a “short story collection that tries every imaginable income-generating technique for open publishing in order to get some data about which avenues hold the most promise.”

One means of generating support that worked in spades was John Scalzi’s recent call for donations for e-zine Strange Horizons‘ fund drive. In a little over a day Scalzi’s readers donated more than 7,000 dollars to Strange Horizons, which more than exceeded their goal. At a time when the average fiction e-zine is hard pressed to raise a couple of hundred dollars, this sort of thing is extraordinary, and suggests further avenues of potential fund-raising for online venues. Namely, patronage.

So, Is Patronage the Answer?, asks Futurismic in its look at ‘profitable post-web publishing.’ The article notes the Doctorow and Scalzi material I’ve linked to above, but concludes that, so far, there is no clear path to success — only indicators of potential. But on the issue of patronage (whether it be endorsement or actual underwriting) the question is not about its existence or potential, but how best to harness it:

. . . what is becoming obvious is that patronage is crucial to supporting niche publishing – be it direct financial patronage from readers, or the patronage of a vocally supportive figurehead (the patronage of publicity, if you will), or the patronage of an animal further up the publishing foodchain. Underpinning all these is the need to cultivate a supportive audience – turning a percentage of your free readers into donors or buyers, in other words.

The article then returns to ask the very basic questions that web publishers have been chewing on since the experiment began — distribution of ads, premium pricing, perception of readers, etc. It all comes back to the big question on everybody’s mind : just how the hell do we get people to spend money on online fiction?

Jay Garmon responds with a modification of his web 2.0 magazine idea — and, perhaps, with the only real practical answer in a sea of questions, questions, questions — something he’s calling distributed patronage. In Distributed Patronage: How to Save Sci-Fi Short Fiction, Garmon sees his ideal model as “fifty or a hundred John Scalzis bolstering a couple dozen magazines every month.” It’s an interesting idea, one that proposes an almost viral ‘reprinting’ option that would have a big-name author’s story appearing on multiple sites with links and donation buttons all leading back to the central magazine. It’s a mix of publicity and fund raising that would allow a patron-level writer to promote the magazine simply by being famous enough for the rest of the web to want to link to the non-exclusive content originally published by the web 2.o magazine. It’s an amalgam of Doctorow’s distribution, Scalzi’s energized fanbase, and Garmon’s original ‘ransom’ idea of getting the audience to bid on the stories they wanted. This ‘crowdsourced marketplace’ would, in fact, be a ‘meta-magazine’:

. . . one that houses all the stories it has unlocked for perpetual online consumption and reprint. It is also a platform for enabling other online venues to acquire short fiction (or, conceivably, any) content, and one that co-opts the audience of each venue and contributor as an ever-shifting, distributed donor base.

Another little essay of mine on flash fiction was just posted over at Flash Fiction Chronicles today, ‘Frame Your Flash, Don’t Fence It In.’ It’s about the world outside the story, the world beyond the ‘frame’ of the piece — and in the case of flash fiction that is a very small frame indeed, under 1,000 words. This world outside — sometimes existing in a writer’s notes, sometimes the object of pure, spontaneous bluffing on the part of the writer, is one of the things that gives fiction a sense of believability and verisimilitude:

But think of flash fiction — indeed, all fiction — as being surrounded not by a fence, but a window frame. When we look out the window from a fixed position we see only a slice of the world itself. Prior experience tells us there is more to the world than meets the eye, but so too do various clues in the scene itself — perhaps we only see a part of a road, or the shadow of a tree, or, indeed, neighbors moving in and out of frame. Good, evocative fiction should do this too, it should hint at a larger world.

This is even more important for speculative fiction — since the worlds of spec fic are not the world that readers themselves live in and, by extension, believe in. I go on to talk about the various tricks one uses to achieve this, not the least of which is getting yourself into a mindset where you, the author, believe the truth of what you are writing. When you believe in the world outside of the frame, it’s much easier to hint at, and much easier to get your audience to harness their own imaginations in service of your story. For, when the audience starts conjuring their own conception of the world beyond the frame — perhaps even betraying some disappointment that more of this world was not given to them! — then the writer knows they have achieved the great feat of illusion that is central to storytelling.