I know some of you are familiar with the Lord Yamada series, my stories about a minor aristocrat in Heian Japan who makes his living as a “nobleman’s proxy,” basically a private investigator who handles situations, mostly of a paranormal nature, that his social betters either can’t handle or would be too embarrassed to try. (For anyone who isn’t familiar and wants to know what I’m talking about, The Mansion of Bones in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #19 wouldn’t be a bad place to start. It’s online and free). Now then–I’m bringing this up because of a misunderstanding that cropped up at this week’s writer’s group. Someone referred to Yamada as a samurai. Continue reading
Category Archives: Reading
SF vs Fantasy, or “Do I Really Care How Many Angels Can Dance on a Bar?”
Every so often, you know it’s going to happen. Like a dormant virus, it waits until conditions are right and then there’s the sudden outbreak, often triggered by a particular novel or story—“Is Deadbeat Downbelow really sf? I mean, its tone is very sfnal, but where’s the speculation?” or “Magic Wind Fairies reads like sf, I mean, everything’s very logical and thought out.” I follow the conversations with interest (it’s nearly always interesting when intelligent people discuss matters near and dear to them) but I don’t really have much to contribute. Maybe there really is a line, maybe there isn’t. Yet even those who agree that you can draw a line and say, “This side fantasy, this side sf” are never going to agree on where that line is going to be drawn. Continue reading
It Ain’t Official Yet, But It’s Real
“When a man carelessly steps in front of a speeding garbage truck, that’s usually the end of his story. For Jake Hallman, that’s just the beginning. He awakens on a metaphorical stretch of the Afterlife called the Golden Road, where the angel Brendan comes to escort him to Heaven. But Jake isn’t having any:
“Heaven sounds like a good thing in theory, but what is it really? What will I do there? Can I leave if I don’t like it? Under what circumstances? Can you force me to go?”
Brendan scratched his head. “I don’t think this has come up before.”
Continue readingTale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari)
Tale of the Heike (translated by Hellen Craig McCullough)
Published May 1st 1988 by Stanford University Press(first published March 1st 1988)
Ask any reasonably well-read person outside Japan to name a literary work from that country and odds are they’ll first say “The Tale of Genji,” by Lady Murasaki Shikibu (not her “real” name, and a story unto itself) an account of one prince’s life at Court in the Heian Period (794-1185 AD). The second has to be “The Tale of the Heike.” The main difference between the two is that “Genji” is a work of fiction, while the Heike Monogatari at least attempts to be a chronicle of actual events, the Genpei Wars that marked the end of the Heian period, Japan’s Golden Age. Continue reading
New “Story Time”
The next “Story Time” is now live. “Judgment Day.” Happy reading!
Richard Parks 