Category Archives: Folklore

Excerpt – The Heavenly Fox

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I’m trying something new for the blog–snippets. Today’s post is an excerpt from The Heavenly Fox (PS Publishing 2011). To frame this bit,  the fox vixen Springshadow has successfully brewed and and imbibed (how often do I get to use that word?) the Golden Elixir of Immortality, and now she’s awaiting the results with her friend, a Taoist immortal named Wildeye and the goddess/bodhisattva Kuan Yin who showed up unannounced for reasons of her own:

     Springshadow stood up. Her form was somewhere between fully human and fully vulpine; a transitional form that gave her human hands and other aspects of humans that were useful, without fully surrendering her fox senses, and she’d used it often. Only now there seemed to be more to it. Several “mores,” actually.

     “My tail feels funny.”

     “Say rather your tails, girl,” Wildeye said, and started counting.

     “You’re a Heavenly Fox now, Springshadow. Look up,” said the goddess.

     Springshadow looked up. There, in the distant sky far beyond the clouds, far beyond the mortal world yet clearly visible, clearly reachable, was a magnificent floating city with towers of gold and walls of the finest jade.

     Wildeye gave a grunt of triumph as he finished his count. “Nine! And each as magnificent as the last.”

     “What are you babbling about? Nine what?” Springshadow said, unable for the moment to take her eyes off of Heaven and the floating city.

     “Tails, of course,” he said.  “Yours.”

     That finally got Springshadow’s attention. She quickly glanced behind her like a courtesan checking her appearance. It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing, but she finally saw what Wildeye saw–fox tails.

     Nine in all, and all, as Wildeye said, belonging to her. Attached.

     “Nine?!”

     “Nine.” Wildeye nodded in grudging respect.  “You have to admit,” he said, turning to the goddess, “that’s pretty damn impressive.”

The Devil Has His Due

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Sorry to bore you guys with this, but sometimes I get yelled at if I don’t mention these things, so this is just to point out that I have a new mini-collection out on the Kindle today, The Devil Has His Due. It contains a group of four stories about our least favorite place, a sort I sometimes do for fun because there’s no real market for them outside rolling your own, attested to by the fact that, of the four, three are original to the volume. There will be a Nook version too, it just takes longer.

When we try to be good, that’s plan A, but that route is harder than it looks. And when virtue just isn’t working for you, there’s always plan B—like it or not. The Devil Has His Due contains four stories about dealing with the consequences when plan A doesn’t quite come together.

“Closing Time” – Maybe the worst part of Hell isn’t being there. It’s remembering why.

“One Blissful Night at the Inferno Lounge” – The night life in Hell. Care to dance?

“Boiling the Frog” – Appearances can deceive, the Devil does deceive, but neither as well as we can do ourselves.

“Subversion Clause” – Down through the ages there have been mortals who thought they could beat the Devil at his own game. So. Doesn’t the Law of Averages suggest that at least one of them might be right?

Four stories for $.99, it just doesn’t get any better than that. At least, not when I’m doing it.

Edited to add: The Nook version is now live.

Review – The Devil Wives of Li Fong by E. Hoffman Price

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The Devil Wives of Li Fong by E. Hoffman Price, Del Rey(Ballantine Books), 1979.

 E. Hoffman Price (1898-1988) was an old-school pulp fiction writer (“fictioneer” was his term for it) who, long after the pulp era ended, renewed his career by becoming a novelist in the emerging sf/fantasy field of the 1970’s and remained active right up until his death. He had a great and abiding interest in Asian mythology and religion, and both sides of that coin are evident in The Devil Wives of Li Fong.

The premise is that two female snake-spirits take on mortal form in a quest to become fully human. Why they do this and why they would want to be human in the first place is closely tied to Buddhist beliefs. In short, being human is a step or two above spirit/devil-serpent on the great wheel of Death and Rebirth, a sort of spiritual boost on the way to eventual Transcendence. The two snake-women, Mei Ling and Meilan, become wealthy by discovering an abandoned villa with a buried treasure, and soon after meet an apothecary’s apprentice named Li Fong, who they think is an agreeable young man and they decide to marry him, again as a further step in their quest to become fully human. Li Fong, charmed by their beauty and not exactly reluctant to part ways with his current master, agrees. Things are going swimmingly, until… Continue reading →

It’s Better Than That

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Late last night I was watching a rather obscure Japanese movie (though filmed in Hong Kong in 2007)  called Dororo. It’s based on a manga series by Ozamu Tezuko (he of Astro Boy fame). Here’s the pitch/teaser: “A female warrior who was raised as a man joins a young samurai’s quest to recover 48 of his body parts from 48 demons and to avenge her parents death.”  There’s a longer version, but it’s still a variation on this basic premise, and as the movie played I realized that I had a problem with the way it was pitched. It’s not that the pitch was inaccurate—as a capsule summary it covers the basics of what they movie’s about fairly well. The premise is, of course, ridiculous. No one’s going to lose 48 body parts (some fairly important like, say, the heart) and still survive long enough to be discovered by just the right magic shaman who knows how to replace body parts. Even in a pure fantasy like this one it stretched credibility past the breaking point.

Regardless, I didn’t come here to review the movie, as such. I am here to make the point that, despite the nonsense premise, despite the rather gruesome imagery of the pitch, I liked the movie quite a bit. Which was when I realized that I had a problem with the movie’s pitch itself. It wasn’t that, as I said, it was inaccurate. No, I think it’s mostly that it managed to be both accurate and very misleading. Why? Because the movie was so much better than that. The hero’s plight manages to be both grotesque and sympathetic at the same time. The heroine in her own way is as much damaged as the hero, and yet is just as heroic, plus by turns poignant, amoral, and laugh out loud funny. The cgi is a bit lacking at times, but it captures the esthetic of the Japanese monster tradition beautifully—the group soul ghost baby is almost worth the price of admission itself. And yet the pitch, brief as it has to be, conveys absolutely none of this. Pitches tell you what a movie/story is about and simultaneously tell you almost nothing.

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Word of Podcast

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If you’re interested in the sf/f field in general, the SF Signal web site is probably already familiar to you. This week they’ve put up one of their regular podcasts, this time a panel discussion on the state of the Swords & Sorcery (S&S)subgenre and where the genre is at the moment, (Episode 108): 2012 Sword & Sorcery Mega Panel Part 1
.    Panelists were:

Lou Anders is the editor of Pyr Books, Scott Andrews is the editor of  Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Violette Malan and James Sutter are authors, Jaym Gates and Patrick Hester are the SF Signal podcast moderators. Besides being an interesting discussion in itself for anyone even remotely interested in the subject (and I’m looking forward to part 2), it was interesting to me personally because my name came up several times as a modern S&S author in connection with the Lord Yamada stories.

I can see it. For one thing, as subgenres go, S&S is pretty mecurial. Any subgenre that can encompass at various times Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Joanna Russ, G.R.R. Martin, and Michael Moorcock, has to be a bit of a moving target. For another, at various times in my development I was very deliberately writing S&S. For one thing, I went through an early phase where I didn’t read much else. For another, when I was first trying to break into the fantasy magazines (all maybe three of them at the time), S&S was in the ascendant, as hot or hotter than Steampunk is now. I wrote a fair bit of it, and apparently I still am.

I’ll grant you, I wasn’t thinking of Yamada as S&S when the series first came to me. I had him envisioned more as a Heian-era noire detective, sort of Sam Spade with a tachi. He quickly grew past that limited conception, and thank heavens for that, but the tone remained that of a generalist fantasy with mystery overtones. And yet the stories still easily fit under the S&S umbrella. I hadn’t thought of them that way, but it’s true, and perfectly fine with me.

Categories aside, I think this is the first time that my name and work has come up in a podcast that wasn’t a podcast of one of my own stories. Getting a reminder now and then that other people do read and like what you do doesn’t entirely suck.