Tagged: literature

The P. Craig Russell Library of Opera Adaptations, Vol. 2

I love idiosyncrasy. Even if I’m not as into Idea X as a creator is, the fact that creator is so into it is appealing – I like to see the things creators are passionate about, the things they have to do, even if it doesn’t make commercial sense.

P. Craig Russell adapts operas into comics. He’s been doing it since nearly the beginning of his career, and I see from his bibliography list on Wikipedia that he has a few adaptations of songs from this past decade, though they’re still unpublished.

And what I have today is the second book collecting that work, the grandly titled The P. Craig Russell Library of Opera Adapations, Vol. 2 . (It followed a full-volume version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and was followed by a third miscellaneous book; with those songs from the past few years, there may be enough material for a Vol. 4 at this point.) It’s a 2003 book, collecting four adaptations spanning the late ’70s to the late ’90s, and Russell worked with different collaborators on each of them, some more involved than others. I’ll take them each separately: Parsifal, Songs by Mahler, Ariane & Bluebeard, and I Pagliacci.

Parsifal is the oldest piece here, originally published as a single-issue comic by Star*Reach in 1978. Patrick C. Mason adapted the Wagner opera and wrote the script; Russell drew it. It only adapts the second act of the opera, but that’s enough drama and then some: Mason also adds in a lot of narration in that ’70s comics style, some of which may transmute lyrics or stage directions. It’s a very wordy piece as well as being super-dramatic, with an amnesiac young knight being tempted by an immortal witch while searching for a holy relic (the spear that wounded Jesus during the crucifixion), and all those words do constrain Russell’s visual inventiveness here – it’s a weird ’70s comic, but still a sequence of pages of people explaining their emotions to each other at great length, and so not a million miles away from a contemporary Chris Claremont joint.

Songs by Mahler is the shortest section, with two songs, three pages each, from 1984. The first is credited as translated by Mason; the second has no credits other than Russell. These are more imagistic, less narrative, and much more successful as comics, even if they’re not stories.

Ariane & Bluebeard is from 1988, and doesn’t credit anyone other than Russell; so I guess he translated Paul Dukas’s French opera and scripted this forty-page version. This showcases Russell’s design sense, his use of color, and his eye for high drama – there are great, striking pages here, including a few wordless ones, showing he’d gotten to a point of confidence in his art to reproduce the feeling of the music of an opera without needing to explain. This is even more dramatic than Parsifal, largely because Russell is in better control of the material, and opera is super-dramatic – at least, the ones Russell is most drawn to adapt; I don’t think he’ll do Einstein on the Beach anytime soon – to begin with. The opera is the old Bluebeard folktale: young woman is married to an older man with a secret, who has been married several times before (and the fate of those brides is the secret), and she learns the secret, amid a lot of loud singing.

Last up is the black-and-white The Clowns (I Pagliacci), from 1997. This one was translated by Marc Andreyko from Leoncavallo’s opera, laid out by Russell, penciled and lettered by Galen Showman, and inked by Russell. The art is striking, the adaption is swift and assured, and the story is presented well – a traveling troupe arrives in a town, and art imitates life as both the character of the leading lady and the woman herself have an affair, which ends in death at the hands of the title clown. This is less visually inventive than Ariane, but tighter and clearly focused – I’d say it’s the best piece in the book, but that may be partly individual taste. (I like Russell’s vibrant colors and big layouts, but find them a bit too much some of the time, and Ariane is full of that stuff.)

Again, if you want comics adaptations of operas, Russell is not only your go-to, but pretty much your only choice. Luckily, he’s good at it and chooses works that adapt well.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Blood of the Virgin by Sammy Harkham

Literary fiction is identifiable in any format: the story of unhappy people told with care and grace and close attention, from outside.

It’s not necessary that it be set in the recent past, but that helps: sometime just long ago to be before the working lives of the audience, but still familiar – say, fifty years or so.
It’s not required that the main characters be married, but they probably are. They probably have young children – a baby, preferably, to have someone they need to care for, to care about, who is not old enough to be another character. If they’re married, they fight. They probably separate, at least temporarily, at least physically. At least one of them sleeps with someone else during the story. And there are conflicts between their married lives and the work of at least one of them – probably the one whose work life is closest to the creator, the one who does something vaguely artistic.

Sammy Harkham’s Blood of the Virgin  is a major literary graphic novel: it does all of the things expected of the genre, and does them well. It has a novelistic heft and scope, even including very loosely related flashbacks to earlier people and times. There may be something slightly obvious about it: it does hew really closely to the conventions of its genre. But it’s a strong entry in that genre, a book that has a good version of the core story to tell and that tells its story with energy, passion, and a precise eye. More importantly, it’s not a genre that comes up all that often in comics to begin with, so it looks fresher and more exciting as it is that it would have as a movie or a prose novel.

Seymour edits movie trailers for a cheapie horror-movie production company; it’s the fall of 1971. He’s twenty-seven; he’s had this job three years; he’s ambitious in the sense that he loves movies – unabashedly loves horror movies – and that he wants to keep doing them, to get closer to the core of filmmaking. I don’t know if he has grandiose artistic visions that he wants to see on screen; I get the sense that, at this point, he has changes he wants to ring on established ideas and that his ideas will keep iterating, keep developing, as he works and learns and gets better.

Assuming he gets those opportunities. Assuming he takes them and does well.

He’s written a script – “Blood of the Virgin” is his title, of course. There’s a hole in the company’s schedule that script can slot into. As usual with a business like that, the hole is right now. Seymour has to finish the script immediately, and then dive into being one of the on-set producers for that movie, during the hectic three weeks it films. All of that is a big opportunity, a chance to move up in the business, to get public credits and be part of something real. But it’s also a hell of a lot of frantic, demanding work, right now.

Time is money. Nowhere more so than the movie business. Nowhere more so than in marginal, low-budget businesses.

Harkham gives a great view of the contingent, improvisational, scrambling nature of low-budget filmmaking: Blood of the Virgin is about a lot of things, but central to most of them is what it’s like to make a movie. To be in a location for that day, chasing shots, wrangling actors, fighting with effects, tracking time as the sun inexorably chases across the sky. Planning and strategizing, directors and producers and moguls and assistants, figuring out what they need and what they can get done and what might need to be abandoned. (And “what” always includes “who.”) The big parties afterward, where everyone goes a little crazy, where they all mix more freely. We see all of those scenes, different times during the course of the creation of this movie, as Seymour tries to handle his new responsibilities and to do them the ways he thinks movies should be made.

Meanwhile, his marriage is…well, I don’t want to overstate it. In the annals of literary-fiction marriages, Seymour and Ida are pretty good. They snap at each other angrily only some of the time; they talk past each other only as much as any couple does. They have real affection for each other, when there’s time around hectic movie shoots and a demanding baby. They fuck other people for the usual literary-story reasons, but not often, and pretty far into the book. They are not “doomed” in any way: they can get through this if they want to.

Harkham here is putting it all on the page; this is a big story stuffed with ideas and characters and insights and ideas. There are pages jammed with panels, filled with dialogue, and pages of long quiet late-night drives – it’s set in LA, so freeways are at least a minor character. It’s a hugely ambitious book that largely lives up to its ambitions: there are probably a half-dozen themes I haven’t even touched on here. It’s a big book, a rich one, that tells its story well and has a big, compelling story to tell. It is literary fiction, and we can use more of that in comics: the ambition, the depth, the scope.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by Peter Kuper

I’m not crazy about adaptations , by disposition. I’d generally rather see new stuff in Creative Format X, rather than a Format X version of a story that worked well in Format Q.

I seem to be in a pretty small minority in that, though. The world demands movies from their comic books, TV shows from their novels, opera from their stories about historical figures, stage musicals assembled from random songs. And vice versa: look at the deeply incestuous “casting thread,” in which random observers squee over which actors in TV-shows-based-on-books should be their favorite characters in a potential movie-based-on-a-comic-book.

On the other hand, I don’t mind as much with old stuff. A new movie based on a Shakespeare play? Yeah, OK – that’s closer to the point to begin with. A graphic novel based on that hundred-year-old book everyone has heard of? Well, I suspect it’s because the publishers want to get in on that sweet, sweet adopted-by-a-million-school-systems money, but it’s closer to the original format, and might bring in new readers and…OK, why not?

That’s how I came to Peter Kuper’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s short novel Heart of Darkness , which has the usual quirkiness in its title common to adapted GNs. (It always reminds me of “Rod Torfulson’s Armada! Featuring Herman Menderchuck!” for a reference none of you will get.)

Kuper has a detailed, inky art style and goes in for fleshy, unpleasant faces a lot of the time, which are all strengths with this material. He also is adapting the story basically straight: it’s not transposed to the modern world and moved to another continent or “reversed” or anything like that. He even maintains the fussy frame-story element, though I’m unclear whether the benefits (believability, collegiality) of that ever outweighed the vast lost of immediacy.

Kuper’s introduction is about one-half process description and one half responding to Chinua Achebe’s mid-70s declaration that Heart is inherently racist and colonialist. Kuper disagrees with “inherently,” and emphasizes Conrad’s anti-colonialist credentials, but responding to that kind of criticism in his frontmatter tends to undermine the book. Remember: if you’re explaining, you’re losing. Kuper starts explaining, and explaining something he didn’t have to bring up in the first place, before the reader gets a chance to see the story itself. Afterwords, says Andy who is not actually the King of the World of Books despite his grandiose visions, is the place for material like that if you absolutely must include it.

Otherwise: this is Heart of Darkness. Marlowe goes upstream on a river the text does not name (but is clearly the Congo , and Kuper shows it as such on a map) in a continent equally unnamed (also put into clearer images by Kuper), first to be captain of a boat on that river but eventually to find the mysterious and central Mr. Kurtz. He tells this story to a group of others, including one who is officially our narrator, lounging on a boat in the estuary of another big river (the Thames) on another continent (Europe) that the text also pointedly does not name.

Kuper does his best to give the (entirely unnamed, mostly background) Black characters more stage business, agency, and importance here than exists in the raw text – this is their world , and the various fat, stupid, and greedy white people are invaders – but they’re not really part of Conrad’s story, so this is not always successful. They’re still scenery, even in Kuper’s version: there to make changes on white men, the ones worth telling stories about.

Achebe’s criticism is still valid: that’s what I’m saying. Kuper does what he can, and the story is not in favor of colonialism, but it’s still a hundred-year-old story by a white guy about another white guy going crazy from the jungle atmosphere.

But that’s Heart of Darkness. That’s the story. Kuper does a good job of retelling it , of moving all those Black people at least closer to the center of the story, but it’s still about one relatively good white man thrown into a milieu of horrible white men and going through a transformative journey to find the one iconic white man who embodies the place.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Book Tour by Andi Watson

Any author would agree that a book tour has the potential for horror. It could be wonderful, of course — but what in human life is ever purely wonderful? There’s going to be something that goes bad. And there’s always the chance it could all go bad.

Which brings us to Andi Watson’s graphic novel The Book Tour , in which things go wrong, first very quietly and subtly then more and more obviously, for journeyman author G.H. Fretwell as he sets off on a tour for his new novel Without K [1] of what seem to be minor cities in some unnamed European country. It could be today, it could be the late 19th century. Fretwell takes steam trains, he stays in hotels – shabbier and shabbier, dodgier and dodgier as the tour goes on. And the tour does go on – that’s  one of the things that goes wrong, from Fretwell’s point of view.

He sets off with high hopes, a nice suit, and a suitcase full of books. He comes to the first stop on his tour, a cozy and quaint bookshop, sets up at a table in a corner with a stack of books and a good pen, and waits for readers.

It’s only the first of many bad experiences when he doesn’t sell a single book that day, or interact with a single person who cares about his work. The hotel that night is good, but things don’t go as well as he hopes. This is as good as its going to get for Fretwell.

There are shocking stories in the newspaper, which Fretwell does not read: he focuses only on the literary pages. There are dangers and surprises and troubles which he barely notices, even as they get closer and closer to him.

He meets with an editor: not his editor, who is unavoidably detained somewhere else. He is invited to a literary event verbally, but is unable to enter without a printed invitation. He finds the shops and hotels getting less appealing, and his itinerary getting longer and more onerous.

And then it gets much worse.

This is a different kind of book for Andi Watson: he’s spent most of the past decade and a half making fun, light adventure stories for younger readers, and close to a decade before that making resonant stories for adults that were not necessarily romances but centered on personal and family relationships. This is a more literary book, a book of quiet depths, where he implies much more than he shows, and shows vastly more than he tells.

The art is quicker-looking as well, with rough panel borders and lines that have a feeling of speed. Watson’s mid-century character designs – I always see a lot of UPA in his people’s faces – are precise and expressive while still being deeply caricatured, always in a style that fits the look of the book. The panels are tight, mostly in a grid – he does open up, here and there, but the overall feeling is tightness, closeness, with a lot of vertical lines for looming buildings and rain and grim functionaries and towering stacks of books and other ominous things.

The Book Tour can read quickly, but there’s a lot that happens in the gutters between panels and a lot that is implied by what people mention to Fretwell. So don’t read it quickly: this is a book to linger over, to think about, to enjoy the drawings and think about what may really be happening while poor Fretwell is distracted with his ever-worsening book tour.

[1] In-universe , this is a reference to Fretwell’s wife’s name, Rebecca (without a ‘k’). Doylistically, it could also be a subtle Kafka reference.

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Slaughterhouse-Five: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Ryan North and Albert Monteys from Kurt Vonnegut

So this is how it goes: two years ago I had the urge to re-read Slaughterhouse-Five, possibly Kurt Vonnegut’s best novel [1]. And I did . It was still a great novel; it was still deeply sad about humanity. 

About a year later, a graphic novel adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five came out. It was adapted by Ryan North, creator of Dinosaur Comics and longtime writer of the current, popular version of Squirrel Girl. It was illustrated by Albert Monteys, a Spanish cartoonist who has worked mostly in satire. And now I’ve read that version, too.

So, this time, I need to talk about the pictures, and the transformation of Vonnegut’s words on a page into a visual format. I’ve already said what I had to say about the story itself, about poor Billy Pilgrim’s fate – many of the things I wrote here two years ago I thought again while reading this version; I still agree with all of that. My favorite line is still “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.”

I have the sense that North has fiddled a bit with the structure and timeline, but that’s a dangerous assumption to make: Vonnegut told the story sideways to begin with. Remember: Billy is unstuck in time. Slaughterhouse-Five, in any version, follows him that way, skipping from moment to moment across decades. It may well be that this is exactly the same structure as Vonnegut’s original. But I don’t think so.

I think North has tweaked things a bit to make better visual transitions: to turn Slaughterhouse-Five into something more purely comics, and not just prose poured into a new form and illustrated. He has to do that just to make Kurt Vonnegut a character in this version. Well, Vonnegut was a character in the novel: his voice was omnipresent, his viewpoint was consistent, his actions were mentioned more than once. But he was the omniscient authorial voice, without a name, mostly not taking human form. North isn’t pretending to be Vonnegut to tell this story – that’s another choice he could have made, or Vonnegut might have made if he’d adapted it himself  – but he wants to tell the same story, and include the Vonnegut bits. So we see Kurt on a plan flying back to German years later with an old buddy. We see him in the distance at the POW camp, at least twice. We see the famous scene where he admits all of the soldiers were babies and agrees to the subtitle of “The Children’s Crusade.” He’s there throughout.

He’s just not our point of view, the way he is in the novel. The graphic novel is less personal to Vonnegut, and maybe more for us: we are the ones watching Bill Pilgrim, directly. We’re not watching Vonnegut put him through his paces. He’s front and center, blinking, confused, trapped in amber. Unstuck.

Monteys has a lightly caricatured style: Pilgrim is probably the least “realistic” looking character, with a very long face and a gigantic nose. It’s an open face, one for showing details of emotion: it was a good choice. It works well. Monteys also varies his panel layouts a lot, dropping into a grid only rarely and breaking out splash pages and huge expanses of white multiple times. He and North have thoroughly turned Slaughterhouse-Five into a visual representation; this is not some Classic Comics template with all of the words shoehorned in.

Listen: I can’t tell you this is just as good as the original. I don’t know how to compare art works across formats like that. The original is a towering masterpiece of 20th century literature. It’s one of the great anti-war novels of all time. That’s a lot to live up to. But this version of Slaughterhouse-Five is beautiful and heartbreaking and sad and true and wonderful and magnificent and engrossing. There is no part of it that I can imagine changing to be better. It’s worth reading if you know the original. It’s maybe even more worth reading if you don’t. That’s what I can tell you.

[1] I haven’t re-read them in decades; my opinion is outdated. I want to read him again; maybe I will.

And I say I had the urge. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I always was going to re-read it in 2019, and just got to that moment in my own personal mountain-range. Who can say?

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Is This How You See Me? by Jaime Hernandez

Two years later, here’s a one-shot I Love (And Rockets) Monday — because the Brothers Hernandez have kept making comics, and those comics do make their way into books eventually, and even more eventually I will read them.

Is This How You See Me?  collects a Jaime story that ran from the end of the book-size annual New Stories into the beginning of the current magazine-sized Vol. IV comic. And I covered it, more or less, in the last post of the main run of I Love (And Rockets) Mondays.

The story? Maggie and Hopey, now pushing fifty (possibly from the other side) head back to Hoppers together for a punk reunion that neither one of them is all that enthusiastic about.

Well, Hopey is never enthusiastic in a positive way about anything: she was a ball of chaos in her youth, and has settled into a cynical sour middle age. Maggie is more mercurial, as usual, wanting to believe that things will be wonderful but continually remembering all of the other times she believed that things would be wonderful and they weren’t.

So they both know that you can’t go home again. And they don’t live that far from home to begin with: they didn’t get that far or do that much, all of their dreams of rock ‘n’ roll or prosolar mechanicdom to the contrary. We don’t know what their old friends do for a living, exactly, but we suspect they’re more successful: Terry has been making music all this time, at least successfully enough to have a career as a leader of various bands. And Daffy was never as punky as the rest, a girl from the nicer side of town who went off to college and seems to be solidly in the professional/managerial class. (Remembering that Maggie manages an apartment building and Hopey is a teacher’s aide — both jobs they fell into in mid-life when other things fell apart.)

None of that is text, but it’s definitely subtext. Punk was one of the regular youth-fueled screams of rage and rebellion, giving voice to people who felt like their lives had no good options. And they were not wrong.

But we all have to live our lives, not just protest them. Punk bravado burns out, or starts looking silly. Maggie and Hopey are long past the point where punk attitude was relevant to their lives, so this is like any other reunion: wondering who will be there, whether any of it will be worth it, whether it can provide any of those moments of clarity we live for.

This reunion is scripted by Jaime Hernandez. So there will be moment of clarity, for us as readers if not for his characters. I’m afraid Jaime’s central characters are cursed to never have clarity: that may the most central thing about Maggie and Hopey. They will never really understand themselves, or each other.

Well, I may be wrong. They’re getting older, and they’re getting better at seeing clearly.

This is the story of one weekend in about 2016, with flashbacks to 1979, when the two girls were young and fearless and something that passed for innocent and damaged in different ways than their middle-aged selves. I can’t say if it will be as heartbreaking for people who can’t remember 1979 — who haven’t lived fifty or so years themselves. I think so: I think Jaime is that good. But it has more punch the more of this connects with you personally, like any good art.

The more any of us live, the more regrets and what-ifs we accumulate. They can overwhelm us, I guess, if we let them. Is This How You See Me? is about wandering through those piles of regrets and what-ifs without actually talking about them, about seeing where you are this year and looking back in wonder and surprise and awe at who you were forty years ago.

It does not have the electric shock of The Love Bunglers. It’s a quieter book, a middle-aged book. But it’s just as strong, just as true, just as real. And Jaime Hernandez is still one of our best storytellers, working fearlessly in a form he’s made his own.

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Book-A-Day 2016 #6: Baking With Kafka by Tom Gauld

Is Tom Gauld our most erudite cartoonist? From the evidence of his work, he well could be — there’s a parade of authors both classic (Shakespeare, Austen) and genre (Ballard, Gaiman) and modern literary (Franzen, Mantel), and a dazzling awareness of tropes and ideas and genre furniture in his work, and it’s hard to think of any other cartoonist who has worked so much with this material.

Naysayers might point out that all of this material originally appeared in the book section of the British newspaper The Guardian, and so one could thus expect that bookishness would be baked into the premise. That’s true, but, still Teh Grauniad asked Gauld to be their cartoonist in the first place for a reason, and it’s not because of his amazing facility at drawing likenesses of famous writers.

(Just in case: Gauld does not have an amazing facility for drawing likenesses of famous writers. At least, I’ve never seen such from him, and his minimalist style would tend to go in the opposite direction. But there I go explaining the jokes again.)

Baking With Kafka is a collection of Guardian cartoons. Some of them may have appeared elsewhere, before or instead of or also, because this book, like so many others, doesn’t explain where it’s contents appeared previously. (Cue my standard if-I-ruled-the-world complaint.) They are all about books, in some way or another, or, at least, about the kinds of things that bookish people care about.

It contains such awesome works as “The Four Undramatic Plot Structures” and “My Library” (with books color-coded as to whether or not they have or will be read), “The Nine Archetypal Heroines” and “How to Submit Your Spy Novel for Publication,” “Jonathan Franzen Says No” and “Niccolo Machiavelli’s Plans for the Summer.” All of those are a single page in size; no one must keep a thing in memory from page to page — except, perhaps, a sense of object permanence and the ability to read the English language.

Some people will hate this book. Perhaps they hate it because they hate literature, or books in general. Perhaps they hate it because Gauld’s style is too simple and illustrative for them. Perhaps they hate it because they are hateful people full of hate who live only to hate. There are many reasons, none of them, I insist, good ones.

All of the smart readers will love it. And you consider yourself a smart reader, don’t you? There you go.

(For those unsure as to how smart they are: the cartoons here are much like those in You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack . You might also want to consider Gauld’s recent full-length graphic novel Mooncop .)

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

“Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes” wins Costa Book Awards biography of 2012

  • News
  • January 3, 2013

18967-8169137Mary and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes has won the Costa Book Awards biography of the year. They won the £5,000 biography prize for a book that interweaves the true and tragic story of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia with Mary’s own troubled relationship with her father, the eminent Joycean scholar James S. Atherton.

The Talbots have known of the win for several weeks. “It has been really hard keeping quiet about it,” said Mary. “We were astonished. Just being shortlisted was amazing and hearing we’d won the category was stunning. We’re delighted of course, both personally – it’s the first story I’ve had published – but also for the medium, I can’t believe a graphic novel has won.”

It is not the first graphic work to win a major literary prize – Art Spiegelman’s Maus won a Pulitzer in 1992 and Chris Ware won the Guardian first book prize in 2001 for Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth – but the Costa award is still a significant moment for the graphic medium.

“It is a good thing for graphic novels as a whole,” said Bryan Talbot whose prodigious output includes The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Alice in Sunderland as well as strips for Judge Dredd and Batman. “Graphic novels are becoming increasingly accepted as a legitimate art form.”

The last graphic novel spike came about 25 years ago with the popularity of books such as The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and Maus. The problem then, said Talbot, was that there were not enough books to feed this. “By the time you’d read a dozen or so of the best titles, there wasn’t enough left to keep this nascent interest going. Since then, there has been an increasing number of graphic novels published and now we have this whole canon of quality work.

“We are living in the golden age of graphic novels. There are more and better comics being drawn today than ever in the history of the medium and there’s such a range of styles of artwork, of genre and of subject matter.”

Judges called Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes “a beautifully crafted” work “which crosses the boundaries between literature and the graphic genre with extraordinary effect”.

via Costa awards 2012: graphic biography wins category prize | Books | The Guardian.

Congratulations to Mary and Bryan!

FORTIER TAKES ON ‘ONCE UPON A TIME IN AFRIKA’!

  • News
  • November 2, 2012

ALL PULP REVIEWS- Reviews by Ron Fortier
ONCE UPON A TIME IN AFRIKA
By Balogun Ojetade
Meji Books
MV Media LLC
145 pages
Since the advent of Sword & Soul, a subgenre focusing primarily on African mythology, we’ve seen many wonderful anthologies and novels come along that are breathing new life and welcomed vigor into fantasy literature.  The two biggest proponents, creators if you will, of this new classification are authors Charles Saunders and Milton Davis.  Saunders is known for his lifelong achievements in authoring some of the finest black fantasy fiction ever put to paper to include his marvelous heroes, Imaro and Dossouye.  Whereas Davis, beside his own amazing fiction, has been the driving force behind MV media, LLC, a publishing brand devoted to Sword & Soul.
Now, from that house, we have ONCE UPON A TIME IN AFRICA by Balgum Ojetade; a sprawling, colorful and fast moving adventure that defines the best of Sword & Soul.  It is a tale of whimsy, love, magic and war told with such comfortable ease as to pull the reader along effortlessly.  Now in all fairness, this reviewer was challenged to keep the many characters separate due to their exotic foreign names that twists one’s mental tongue in a variety of unique vowels and consonants.  Thankfully Ojetade does provide a glossary of names at the book’s conclusion which was most helpful.  Despite this minor annoyance, he does distinguish each figure in unique ways that did allow us to enjoy the action without getting overly concerned about proper pronunciations along the way.
Alaafin, the Emperor of the Empire of Oyo wishes to marry off his beautiful but mischievous daughter, Princess Esuseeke.  Seeke, as she is referred to, is very much a “tomboy” who prefers studying martial arts rather than learning sewing or poetry in the royal palace.  It is Alaafin’s prime minister, Temileke who suggest Alaafin sponsor a Grand Tournament to feature the best fighters in all the land brought together to battle for the hand of the princess.  The emperor approves of the idea and dispatches Temileke to the furthest corners of Oyo to recruit only the greatest warriors in the kingdom to participate.
Meanwhile, Seeke, frustrated by her role as the prize in such a contest, accidently encounters her father’s chief general, Aare Ona Kakanfo.  Or so she believes. In reality the person she meets wearing the general’s combat mask is actually Akinkugbe; a young warrior wishing to enter the contest disguised as the general.  When Akin manages to win Seeke’s heart, things start to get complicated.  All the while the real Kakanfo is commanding the forces of Oyo in the south against their enemies the Urabi, desert people whose singular goal is to conquer Oyo.
As the day of the tournament fast approaches, Akin is trapped having to maintain his disguise and somehow figure a way to defeat the other fighters to win the hand of the woman he loves.  While at the same time, the Urabi, unable to defeat Kakanfo’s troops, desperately recruit the services of a brutal demon and a deadly female assassin to help turn the tide of battle in their favor.
All these various plot elements converge dramatically at the book’s conclusion wherein Akin and Seeke not only must overcome overwhelming odds to be together but at the same time rally their people to withstand the calamitous assault of their fiendish enemies and save the empire.  ONCE UPON A TIME IN AFRIKA is a rousing, old fashion adventure tale that had me wishing Hollywood would pick it up and film it; it is that captivating an epic.  Ojetade is a writer worth taking note of, he delivers on all fronts and this reviewer has become an instant fan. 

Awards! Awards! Awards!

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The lingering memory of my year of blogging for the SFBC — which ended five years ago, so I really should be over it by this point — still compels me to post SFnal awards, even when I do so far too late to benefit anyone. What can I say? I’m a flawed person.

Anyway, here’s some recent awards that you probably already know about:

2011 Aurealis Awards

The Australian national awards for SF and other imaginative literature were given out three weeks ago (I know, I know!), and the full list has been available since then.

Here’s the novel-length awards, just because:

  • YOUNG ADULT NOVEL: Only Ever Always, by Penni Russon
  • FANTASY NOVEL: Ember and Ash, by Pamela Freeman
  • SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL: The Courier’s New Bicycle, by Kim Westwood

(via SF Signal)

Analog and Asimov’s Reader’s Awards

The same weekend as the Nebulas (suddenly suspicious — did I blog about the Nebulas? Yes, I did!), the editors of Asimov’s and Analog announced the winners of their respective reader polls for the most popular features of the past year:

Analog’s Analytical Laboratory (AnLab) Awards:

  • Best Novella: “With Unclean Hands” by Adam-Troy Castro (11/11)
  • Best Novelette (Tie):
    • “Jak and the Beanstalk” by Richard A. Lovett (7-8/11)
    • “Betty Knox and Dictionary Jones in the Mystery of the Missing Teenage Anachronisms” by John G. Hemry (3/11)
  • Best Short Story: “Julie is Three” by Craig DeLancey (3/11)
  • Best Fact: “Smart SETI” by Gregory and James Benford (4/11)
  • Best Cover: December 2011 (for “Ray of Light”) by Bob Eggleton

Asimov’s Readers’ Awards are:

  • Best Novella: “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” by Kij Johnson (10-11/11)
  • Best Novelette: “All About Emily” by Connie Willis (12/11)
  • Best Short Story: “Movement” by Nancy Fulda (3/11)
  • Best Poem: “Five Pounds of Sunlight” by Geoffrey A. Landis (1/11)
  • Best Cover Artist: October/November, by Paul Youll (for “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”)

Note that Analog readers are scientists, carefully weighing the validity of each piece in their “Analytical Laboratory,” while Asimov’s  readers just vote for stuff they like.

(also via SF Signal — you really should read them, and get this stuff quicker)

Sturgeon and Campbell Finalists

Finalists for the Theodore Sturgeon and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards were also announced around Nebula time. These are juried awards for the best SF (generally interpreted broadly) story and novel of the prior year, and this year’s nominees are:

Sturgeon:

  • Charlie Jane Anders, “Six Months, Three Days,” Tor.com, June
  • Paul Cornell, “The Copenhagen Interpretation,” Asimov’s, July
  • Yoon Ha Lee, “Ghostweight,” Clarkesworld, January
  • Kij Johnson, “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” Asimov’s, Oct / Nov (Note: removed from consideration because Johnson is a Sturgeon juror, though it still appears on the official list of nominees.)
  • Jake Kerr, “The Old Equations,” Lightspeed, July
  • Ken Liu, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” Panverse Three
  • Ken Liu, “The Paper Menagerie,” F&SF, March / April
  • Paul McAuley, “The Choice,” Asimov’s, Dec / Jan
  • Catherynne M. Valente, “Silently and Very Fast,” Clarkesworld, October

Sixteen (named) people nominated for the Sturgeon, many of them the editors of the short-fiction venues of the field. My eyebrow is cocked as I type this, but I really don’t know the process. I’m also surprised to see a story by a juror appear on the shortlist, even though it has a note saying it was removed from consideration.


Campbell:

Both awards will be given out during the Campbell Conference in early July.

Compton Crook Award

This award goes to the new SF author of the best novel of the prior year — not to the book itself, but to the author. (It’s also not quite clear if it has to be a first novel, or if newness persists in a writer for some extended period.)

This year’s winner is T.C. McCarthy, for Germline.

(via SF Scope, for variety)

Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees, and thanks to all of the various nominators, judges, voters, and other functionaries that make these various awards run.

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