“And now, as grapes are pressed into wine, we press this slave into something greater,” the Master said . . . . “You knew the grapes in the crush were weak. You sensed the difference between the pours, and were able to think it through to determine why. And you have not allowed servitude in the fields . . . to break your spirit. Magic, knowledge, and strength. Those are the three things that are needed . . . . Those are the three things a slave must show, in order to become my student.”

• Title: Flesh and Fire
• Author: Laura Anne Gilman
• Genre: Epic Fantasy
• Year: 2009

I didn’t really expect to like this book. In Flesh and Fire Laura Anne Gilman launches a fantasy series called The Vineart War in which wine — specifically the production, tasting, decanting, and drinking of wine — plays a central role. Not being a foodie myself, or someone much interested in wine, I did not expect to be very excited about a fantasy world where the magic system is based entirely on a beverage. However, whether by virtue of the inherently interesting process of wine-making itself or by Gilman’s considerable charms as a storyteller, I was quickly won over to the premise of Flesh and Fire. Wine can be interesting and, it seems, it can even be magical.

Vinearts are the makers of wine in Gilman’s world, and all wine produced in the Land’s Vin, whether magical or mundane, comes from a Vineart controlled vinyard. Part magician and part agriculturalist, the Vinearts guard their knowledge jealously from one another, and from outsiders. Each vineyard and Vineart tends to specialize in certain varieties of wine and, in the case of spellwine, this takes on political, military, and economic significance. Vintages for healing and for storm-calling, fire-charming and rapid growth are heavily in demand by the rich and the powerful. With such a bottle of wine, anyone can work a bit of magic — but only Vinearts have mastered the process of producing such vintages.

The fields of the Vinearts are worked by slave labor and one such young slave, Jerzy, is our primary protagonist. But Jerzy, it seems, has the ineffable quality that makes him valuable as an apprentice Vineart, and he is removed from his life of servitude to study the oenological arts beside his former owner, Master Malech. Vinearts, themselves childless, have established this system of slavery to create the right conditions to foster the development of young talent: “Like the grapes themselves, a Vineart must be stressed to produce the finest results, grown in poor soil and subjected to the elements in order to shine.” And to her credit, Gilman does not gloss over the dehumanizing and ugly aspects of a system based on slavery, and Jerzy himself only comes to an uncomfortable accommodation with it.

Interesting and complex systems characterize Gilman’s Land’s Vin, and much of the book — which takes its time maturing in much the same way as must a fine wine — is the exploration of spellwines and their making. Along with Jerzy, the reader learns the various rules of soil and weather, the differences in vintages, and the ways and means of wine production. It’s a detailed melding of the real-world process of viniculture with fantastical aspects of Gilman’s own devising, and one made all the more compelling by her rich descriptive language — language carefully deployed with a sensitivity to effect reminiscent of Ursula K. Le Guin.

It is perhaps accurate to say Jerzy’s story doesn’t really get started until the end of Flesh and Fire, but the unhurried pace suits the narrative just fine. There are early rumblings of war and disaster — the novel even starts with a prologue in which a Vineart is assassinated by foul magical means — interspersed with Jerzy’s tutelage. An incident with a sea monster, and a longer sequence in which Jerzy travels to another city to act as representative (and spy) for his master, are exciting milestones in his journey to adulthood — but it is really only at the end of the book, when Jerzy himself runs afoul of the mysterious forces that would throw the Land’s Vin into chaos — that we get a true inkling of the possible scope of Gilman’s epic. And while point of view shifted chapters to the goings on in a distant island kingdom feel somewhat less than integrated in this part of the story, one can only assume they will slot nicely into the greater whole. Because of these things, Flesh and Fire cannot really be considered a standalone — in fact it feels more like part of a mutli-volume novel than a discreet installment.

But it is also a deeply interesting, sensitively written, and impressively original take on the tropes of wizardry and political fantasy, surely the start of a series worth keeping an eye on. Flesh and Fire may even convince me to put down the beer and check out a wine-tasting sometime, and begrudgingly admit that maybe there is something to all this vin stuff after all . . .

• Flesh and Fire at Amazon
• Laura Anne Gilman’s homepage

Readers of this blog know that I often decry the lack of publications that feature secondary world fantasy — especially of the action-packed, fun sort that is called variously Sword & Sorcery, Heroic or Epic Fantasy, or just plain old pulp. Recently, we’ve been lucky to get two new online venues that cater to just this sort of thing, first Beneath Ceaseless Skies back in October and, as of last month, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. I’m pleased to report that I really liked what I saw in HFQ’s inaugural issue.

HFQ #1 features three stories and two poems — like BCS, it seems to focus on quality rather than quantity, something I’d like to see from more online venues regardless of theme. And HFQ’s three stories are each meaty, well-drawn tales of secondary fantasy worlds that contrast and compliment one another nicely.

The issue opens with James Lecky’s ‘Black Flowers of Sevan,’ a Near Eastern flavored story of in which roguish mercenary captain Tula becomes infatuated with his Prince’s consort. After winning the ruthless Prince’s favor, Tula pushes beyond the bounds of hospitality and discovers a dark secret about the woman he has become fascinated with. A nicely crafted setting and smooth style distinguish the piece (though I did find the use of the word ‘Nestorian’ to indicate an imaginary kingdom a little jarring).

Perhaps my favorite of the issue is the tale of an over-the-hill dragon-slayer’s last battle, ‘Man of Moldania.’ In it, Richard Marsden gives us a real-world Eastern European setting injected with a dose of the fantastic. Golorus, an itinerant killer of drakes, plies his trade in a small town and ends up stepping on the toes of the town’s local favored son. Facing a skeptical citizenry and hostile hetman, Golorus cleverly defeats threats both draconic and human. A very fun story.

The final story of the issue, ‘Beyond the Lizard Gate’ by Alex Marshall, is a gritty dark fantasy very reminiscent of Warhammer Fantasy fiction. It deals with a quest for revenge against an evil sorcerer by his siblings, a warrior and a blind sorceress. Verging at times into the horror spectrum, this action-packed tale revels in a dark aesthetic, and its often ornate prose, though at times straining the purple, compliments the theme well.

Three stories, all good reading. If HFQ can deliver the same four times a year, fans of adventure fantasy might just find short stories back on the menu. And if that happens, maybe we really will be able to say we are living at the dawn of an electronic pulp revolution.

Sometimes there are these markers of change that are unmistakable — for example, when I was a kid, people walking around talking to themselves were given a wide berth in the street, now they are just one more person jabbering into their hands-free cell phone headset — it’s the sort of thing that, if you even notice it, lets you know you’ve arrived in a new world without ever really being conscious of the journey that brought you there. I’ve just experienced another one of those moments, one of those ‘yes, it is definitely a new century’ epiphanies. Here we are at the end of the first decade of the 21 st century and I’ve just seen a film available on the web for free with a budget of £ 3,000 (!) that in many ways looks better than the multi-million dollar offerings of the last decade of the 20th. The times they are a changing.

The Hunt for Gollum (trailer below) is a great little film which clocks in at around 40 minutes, done on a shoestring budget by a group of dedicated volunteers. It deals with an episode alluded to in The Fellowship of the Ring, the quest to capture Gollum that Aragorn undertook prior to the events of The Lord of The Rings proper. The film is a direct homage to Peter Jackson’s vision of Middle Earth, with costumes, settings, and score all very consistently matching the Jackson trilogy.

Well-acted, directed, and designed, The Hunt for Gollum also boasts some impressive visual effects and make-up, definitely not the sort of thing you’d be expecting from a fan project, or something free on the web. It is of course very short, but that’s a bit less of a handicap than it could be, since we already know the characters involved. Overall it’s thoroughly enjoyable and tremendously impressive, even accounting for the inevitable rough edges of a movie of this kind, and once you’ve seen it be sure to watch the ‘Making Of’ special as well for a glimpse at how ingenuity and passion can elevate even the lowest budget film.

This little gem, along with the very cool choose-your-own-adventure style zombie movie The Outbreak, are really showing just what our age of new media is all about. Both the tools of film making, and the means to distribute them, are truly becoming democratic. While Hollywood continues to wield the bludgeon of its big budget approach in hit or miss fashion, I think we’ll be seeing more and more of these creative lindie films made to satisfy niche markets.

And it’s no surprise to me that, once again, it is genre storytelling that is leading the way, and inspiring something new.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm-GNKsFeIs

This week at Black Gate I was thrilled to step back into the lands of Nyumbani in my review of the third book in Charles R. Saunders’ superb Imaro saga. Imaro: The Trail of Bohu ramps up the action and increases the stakes over the previous two volumes (both of which I reviewed here), and includes quite a few unexpected surprises — which I was at pains not to spoil in my review.

Imaro: The Trail of Bohu continues the saga of the outcast warrior Imaro in the land of Nyumbani; a rich fantasy setting based on African history and myth. But, while the first two books in the series, Imaro and Imaro: The Quest for Cush, were essentially episodic in structure (constructed as they were of Saunders’ short stories), The Trail of Bohu, the first Imaro book written as a novel from start to finish, presents us with a bigger overall story — it is, in fact, the beginning of the arc that will carry the reader through books four and five and, let’s just say, things really start to get going in this installment of the Imaro saga.

And as I and many others have said many times — this series is the work of an overlooked master of the genre and to miss it would be to miss a modern day Howard or Leiber. Thankfully, Sword & Soul Media are making Imaro, and Charles R. Saunders’ other work like the equally fantastic Dossouye, available again, and you can find The Trail of Bohu by clicking this link.

Prolific online reviewer John Ottinger of Grasping for the Wind has just posted an early review of Rogue Blade’s forthcoming Rage of the Behemoth anthology, the follow up to 2008′s Return of the Sword. Behemoth has a more focused theme than Sword, as it deals specifically with the confrontation between man and large, powerful, fantastical beasts, with each story furthermore belonging to a section based on setting (desert, jungle, ocean, frozen wastes, mountains). From John’s review:

Although at first glance, it seems that with such a singular theme, the stories would simply be repetitious in content, the authors chosen have managed to broaden the man versus monster theme and give it more depth. Rage of the Behemoth takes the best of Robert E. Howard and revitalizes it for the twenty-first century.

Nice words indeed, paricularly that quaotable and sound-bite friendly closing line. But, of course, I’m not going to stop there, since my own story ‘The Wolf of Winter’ recieved a great review from John:

Bill Ward writes a tale in “Wolf in Winter” where the monster the protagonist faces is as much himself as it is a physical being. Ward’s story of death, renewal, and the beast inside each person is one of the best of the anthology, and turns an apparent sword and sorcery tale into something quite a bit deeper. Worthy reading.

Stuff like that just makes my day.

Courage can come from many places, and be made of many things, and yesterday’s coward can become tomorrow’s hero in an instant if the time is right. The giddy flood of bravery which Jezal experienced at that moment consisted largely of guilt and fear, and shame at his fear, swollen by a peevish frustration at nothing having turned out the way he had hoped, and a sudden vague awareness that being killed might solve a great number of irritating problems to which he saw no solution. Not noble ingredients, to be sure. But no one ever asks what the baker put in his pie as long as it tastes good.

• Title: Last Argument of Kings
• Author: Joe Abercrombie
• Genre: High Fantasy
• Year: 2008

Last Argument of Kings is book three of The First Law trilogy, and this review will contain spoilers of the first two books. For my review of book one, The Blade Itself, click here.

Reviewing the concluding book of a series is a bit different than doing the same for those that proceed it — what readers of the series want to know isn’t the basic premise of the book or what things the author does well, as they know those things already. What they want is to know if the author delivers on his promises, if, in short, the whole endeavor can be counted a success or rated on some variable scale of disappointment. The answer in the case of Joe Abercrombie’s Last Argument of Kings is a resounding ‘yes.’ Yes, he pulls it off, yes, he maintains and resolves what has come before and, yes, go get it if you haven’t already.

The book begins sometime after the conclusion of Before They Are Hanged, with the return to Adua of the group led by Bayaz in an unsuccessful quest for the Seed. War continues in the North, and Logen Nine Fingers goes to join it. Rebellion in the countryside and a succession crisis for the throne sweep up the other characters — Inquisitor Glokta, playing the political game now with two dangerous masters, a matured Jezal dan Luthar whose new and exaggerated celebrity status makes him an unexpectedly important player, and First of the Magi Bayaz who, with his allies, engages in a deep manipulation of events and himself harnesses a tremendous power.

Abercrombie’s characterization continues to be at once both solid and unexpected, as characters grow in interesting ways and events emerge seamlessly from their motivations. In particular the sharp-edged triangle formed by Glokta, Jezal, and Ardee West is an interesting and surprising dynamic, with each of these characters revealing new facets of themselves in the process. Revelations of Bayaz’s true nature, and of the bloody partnership between Bethold and Logen, also have the reader questioning just where exactly the truth lies.

Which is something of the point of Abercrombie’s skewing of genre tropes. Logen, reunited with his northern compatriots at last, is plunged back into his old role as The Bloody-Nine — at once a hero and villain to the North. Other roles, other archetypes, are assumed by the other players — most notably Jezal — and these too are and undermined and steered away from our expectations. Not for Abercrombie are noble wizards, confident kings, and heroic warriors — his characters are conflicted, powerless, misguided, political, ruthless.

As in the North, War engulfs Adua with the coming of the Gurkish, led by Bayaz’s great enemy Khalul the Prophet, and Bayaz, Ferro, and Jezal are caught squarely in the middle of things. Abercrombie gives us not a heroic clash of arms, but a sordid, bloody, confusing affair which crushes all those in it’s path. Here is the underlying logic of High Fantasy — a game of wizards and wars — taken to its logical, cynical conclusion. Even manifestations of virtue, such as Jezal’s dash of courage depicted in the quote at the top of this review, are revealed as having impure and imprecise motivations. And this, frankly, will not be to everyone’s tastes. There are times when the strong dose of cynicism and bleak depiction of human nature borders on the heavy-handed, but, in the end, I think Abercrombie pulls it off, and the whole works naturally with his themes. Just as a surfeit of virtue is par for the course in the traditional High Fantasy, here we have the negative image of such books, one in which characters are either powerless, psychotic, or tyrannical — but neither extreme reflects reality. But I don’t think realism is Abercrombie’s intent, and in at least acknowledging these faults of human nature as the province of hero and villain alike, he is injecting reality into a medium all-to-often dominated by archetypes and mary sues.

As for those traditional fantasies, Abercrombie offers this winking condemnation in a conversation between two of his most damaged, and least sentimental, characters:

“I’ve been trying to get through this damn book again.” Ardee slapped at a heavy volume lying open, face down, on a chair.

“The Fall of the Master Maker,” muttered Glokta. “That rubbish? All magic and valour, no? I couldn’t get through the first one.”

“I sympathise. I’m onto the third and it doesn’t get any easier. Too many damn wizards. I get them mixed up one with another. It’s all battles and endless bloody journeys, here to there and back again. If I so much as glimpse another map I swear I’ll kill myself.”

The First Law Trilogy has no map, not all that many journeys, only a handful of wizards, but a great deal of battles. It is not a radical departure from High Fantasy, but a High Fantasy skewed toward a different polarity — while the above conversation calls to mind some of the bland traditional fantasies we are all familiar with, I think Abercrombie also knows that Glokta and Ardee, with a bit of a stretch, could very well be talking about his own books. Last Argument of Kings is more honest about a great deal of human ugliness than most fantasy but, like most fantasy, it also exaggerates for effect. It is not to every taste, but nothing with a strong flavor ever is, and for those of us that prefer to risk burning our mouths to always being bored with our meals it’s a treat I can recommend with enthusiasm.

And, a final word about the end of the book, a coda entitled ‘The Beginning’ which mirrors the opening of the trilogy. Some readers have inexplicably complained about it for one reason or another. They are wrong. ‘The Beginning’ is probably the perfect finish for this series, and for the character that is the real heart of The First Law.

• Last Argument of Kings at Amazon
• My review of The Blade Itself
• My review of Before They Are Hanged
• Joe Abercrombie’s website