Stratofanatic's Emporium

So, last week, I described my purist-impressionist scale as a 1–10 spectrum of historical metrical fidelity. See my entry for "Purists vs. Impressionists" here . Yet I know some people will naturally (and automatically) discount certain impressionists solely on the suspicion that they don’t know much, if anything, about genuine medieval alliterative poetics. And, granted, some revivalists do not, but even if true, I suggested this doesn’t necessarily impact a text’s literary merit one way or another. Proof is always in the pudding, though, so let’s prepare to be slathered in pudding. We’ll be turning to three exciting revivalists whose deviations from the historical meters are, bluntly, less than fully intentional, yet their texts are both fascinating and critically interesting. Without further ado, our first poet is ….. PATRICK ROTHFUSS Call me biased (and I probably am), but the honor of most metrically bonkers revivalist goes to Patrick Rothfuss. He included two poe...

 One of the stranger outcomes of doing research for the anthology is that you find relevant poetry in the craziest  places. For instance, I now know more about Asatru -- a modern religion of Odin worship -- then I ever thought possible. This is thanks to the website Odin's Gift run by a modern pagan woman and poet from Germany, Michaela Macha. The website's a massive collection of pagan-related works and verse that I just stumbled upon a few weeks ago -- I forget how specifically. Well, I emailed Michaela to ask if her site had any specifically alliterative poetry, and she directed me to the following page:  Alliterative Poetry in Old Norse verse meters . Looking through it, I quickly discovered something astounding: a link (broken) to a poem called "Invocation" by Paul Edwin Zimmer. Now, I've found "lost" poetry by Paul before ... namely, the stuff he wrote as "Master Edwin Bersark" for the Society for Creative Anachronism. And I previously k...

Sometimes, you want to write academic articles brimming with social justice issues, critiques of capitalism, and trenchant analyses of our current culture situation. Other times, you just really want to write about evil possessed vampire demon swords. The idea for my latest publication in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , "A Brief History of EPVIDS," began as something of a joke idea. You see, not long before, while doing some work on Paul Edwin Zimmer, on the last day of 2018, I'd read  Blood of the Colyn Muir, the novel that Zimmer co-wrote with Jon DeCles. This novel is cheesy pulp sword-and-sorcery fiction, but I enjoyed it, and the the battle scenes are hardcore. Anyway, not long after, I'm walking to the gym, and this idea just sorta pops into my head: the all-powerful sword in Sword of the Colyn Muir sure had an uncanny resemblance to Michael Moorcock's Stormbringer from his Elric of Melniboné stories. (I really don't like the Elric tales, but any ...

A bit of good news! Just heard word that I've won a R. D. Mullen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from Science Fiction Studies .  It's small, only up to $3,000, but it'll fund a 10-day research trip to the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy at UC Riverside. There, I'll be delving into the archives to uncover anything I can about the "pulp" alliterative revival. I discovered that this was a thing when I was looking at Paul Edwin Zimmer's alliterative poetry (published last November in Mythlore ). Zimmer explicitly credited Poul Anderson as well as Tolkien for being his alliterative poetry guru . . . which is interesting cuz I've never heard anyone else mention Anderson as a part of the 20th-century alliterative revival. C. S. Lewis, Auden, and Seamus Heaney are always the people mentioned alongside Tolkien. Even more interestingly, Zimmer also says that he knows (but leaves unnamed) a number of other poets trying to follow in the allitera...

So, there's been a "reading challenge" on facebook these last few weeks. You're supposed to post your top 10 most personally influential books with a cover photo. Well, I'm not going to spend space posting covers here, but here goes nothing. . .. (Books presented in the order in which I read them.) The Ten-Speed Babysitter , by Allison Cragin Herzig and Jane Lawrence Mali . This following one shouldn't be considered a "favorite," but it's the first novel I ever read. 3rd grade, maybe early 4th grade, I'm thinking. Previously, I had read non-fiction books about dogs and dinosaurs, but no fiction. Honorable mention: Where the Red Fern Grows , by Wilson Rawls. The Little Eddie series by Carolyn Haywood (4th grade). The Black Stallion series by Walter Farley (5th grade). I didn't read my first fantasy novel, Piers Anthony's A Spell for Chameleon , until maybe the summer between 5th grade & 6th, although now I'm less-than-pr...

Back in January, I wrote a blog entry wondering why Marion Zimmer Bradley wasn't a bigger dealing of academic critics -- she was a feminist, a combo SF&F writer, an analyst of male and female sexuality, a massively influential editor, and several other awesome things. She wrote a lot of forgettable novels, as any pulp-writer does, but I wrote that entry after finishing The Heritage of Hastur and being blown away by it. After recently finishing the follow-up, Sharra's Exile , the question occurred to me again, so I did some digging, and found something that I'd originally glossed over: the fact that Moira Greyland has accused her mother, MZB, and her father Walter Breen of raping her as a child. Greyland's blog post is here . The Guardian covering this story. I had known that Walter Breen, to whom MZB had dedicated several of her novels, died in prison on multiple accounts of child abuse (and he had even written publicly on the legitimacy of man-boy relations...

Well, I'm having the loveliest day today. Just got the peer review back for an article I had submitted, and it begins: "This paper is an enjoyable and effective discussion of Zimmer’s work against the background of the alliterative poetry. . . . " Mind you, that's the exactly the sort response that I expect to receive every time I submit a paper for publication, but alas, the vast majority of the ice-cold hearts of cold-blooded reviewers remain unmelted. . . .  :) Still, what's extra nice is that I greatly admire Zimmer's work, and this will be the first peer-reviewed article on his fiction.*** The subject matter -- alliterative poetry -- is also an entirely new field for me. Literally everything I know about the topic was learned in the process of researching Zimmer for an entirely different article on his work (which I submitted for publication a few weeks ago, btw). In fact, prior to that researching process, I had never even encountered Zimmer...

So, a while back, I realized that the U of A had the papers of Evangeline Walton , who spend the last 2/3 of her life in Tucson, and I thought, rather randomly, that someday I might use them for an article or some such. Well, the other day, I discovered the existence of a journal known as the  The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction , so I decided to take the plunge and see if anything interested me in those papers. Alas, not muchthat I could find. There's a pretty lengthy correspondence from John Cowper Powys, with whom EW shared a strong interest in Celtic material, and a few letters from August Derleth of Arkham House (and publishing H. P. Lovecraft) fame. The rest of the materials were manuscripts for several of EW's novels. I was really hoping that I could somehow tie EW to a writer whom I knew -- Tolkien after the 1950s, perhaps, or even the Greyhaven writers, a possibility I realized once I discovered that EW wrote the forward to Paul Edwin Zimmer...

Of all the Zimmer stories and poems I've had to track down, "The Border Women" excited me most -- women don't often make a large appearance in his fiction. Unfortunately, I've had the damnest time finding the darn thing. First, I interlibrary loan'd it. Took forever and, when I got tired of waiting, I purchased it from two different sellers on Amazon. The first seller cancelled on me. The second, after missing his first Amazon-imposed delivery deadline, also missed the second self-imposed one after I contacted him. So I just cancelled that one as well.  But the book has arrived at the U of A, and I pretty quickly saw why it was relegated to Special Collections (meaning that I couldn't check it out of the library). The book itself was in good shape, but apparently it was part of a limited 300-edition volume. That limited edition business explains why I had such a tough time finding it on Amazon itself. Anyway, what do I think about the story itself? ...

So, I just double-checked Marion's introduction to her brother in the Greyhaven anthology -- the place where she gives him credit for helping with The Spell Sword . (The detailed blog post on Paul Edwin Zimmer's author credits can be found here .) On one hand, she says Paul wrote completed "chapters" of text and that she splits royalties from the book evenly with him. That seems to suggest that PEZ deserves a (secondary) author credit for the book.  That "chapters" bit, though, seems like an exaggeration. At best, though only about 10-15 pages of The Spell Sword  (out of 160 total) are devoted to fight scenes that would have required PEZ's expertise. And we also have the fact that, whereas Marion explicitly states that PEZ deserves an author credit for  Hunters of the Red Moon , she's silent about The Spell Sword. Surely, if she felt he deserved credit on the Darkover novel, she would have said so? Especially as Marion isn't the sort of begru...

So, one of the research questions I've been pondering is, "Why isn't Marion Zimmer Bradley a bigger academic deal?"   On one hand, her career ticks off many of the major "canon" points that commonly help the reputation of speculative fiction writers: Signature series ? Darkover -- check. Signature best-selling book ? The Mists of Avalon --  check. Part of a literary circle ? The Greyhaven writers (Diana L. Paxson, Paul Edwin Zimmer, Jon Decles, and a few more) -- check. Significant influence on other writers ? Check. Bradley initiated the Swords and Sorceress anthology series, now in its 32nd volume (!!), and she lent her name to an important publishing venue for fantasy writers, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine . In fact, you can tell just how proud MZB was to have provided the first publication to many important fantasy writers. Cornerstone themes ? Check -- tons of feminism, a fair engagement (post-Stonewall) with homosexual themes and...

This shouldn't be a tough question, one would think, but it is. For this problem we have his many collaborations and the demands of the publishing industry to thank. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database clearly lists eight novels in total. But PEZ's brother, Marion Zimmer Bradley, also says that Zimmer wrote nine novels in her introduction to his story in Sword and Sorceress XV , and she would know, right?  Problem is, I'm having a hard time getting my math to add up. So here goes . . . .  The novels that unquestionably belong to PEZ are, of course, those books with his name on the cover. But even these aren't that simple. Let's start with his solo works: #1 & #2 :   The Dark Border , vol. 1 & vol. 2 The Lost Prince (1982) King Chondos' Ride   (1982) #3 :  A Gathering of Heroes   (1987) #4 :  Ingulf the Mad   (1989) These are all PEZ's Dark Border novels, and technically we got 4 books here. The tricky part is that T...

As part of my research on Paul Edwin Zimmer, whose Dark Border was my favorite book as a teenager before encountering  The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant , I've been tracking down all his published writings. Much of this isn't easy. Decades have lapsed since much of it last saw print, but Amazon is brilliant for finding out-of-the-way short stories collections and novels. This entry, though, is about the miracles of interlibrary loan. Zimmer's first published solo prose work was a chapbook called Woman of the Elfmounds (1979). After an unusual several week delay, the U of A library got it for me just the other day, and I quickly saw what took so long. Basically, they had to import it from Canada -- the University of Alberta, to be precise). Well, Elfmounds was published by Triskell Press in a series edited by the Canadian paragon of urban fantasy, Charles de Lint. According to the front matter, Woman was actually Triskell's first book in that series. Nice little volu...

As a kid, few fantasy book made as much of an impact on me as Paul Edwin Zimmer's two 1983 Dark Border books, The Dark Border  and King Chondos's Ride . It was the first series of book that I "got" for the themes it was invoking, rather than just its plot. I started thinking about Zimmer recently when a trip to the bookstore uncovered  A Gathering of Heroes,  a clear sword and sorcery novel that I'd  heard  of but could never find. All Zimmer's works are decades out of print, sadly enough. He seems like one of those writers whose good novels have gotten lost in the bulk of fantasy bestsellers in the 1980s, the fate of many mainstream "literary" novelists At the very least, I've never seen Zimmer discussed in any literary or academic context. There's no academic work on him (although he himself once wrote an article on Tolkien's verse for Mythlore ). He has quite a decent wikipedia page, though, apparently both for his contributions to...