Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 37

Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for August 2021

Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of crime fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some July books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have hardboiled mysteries, cozy mysteries, historical mysteries, retro mysteries, Jazz Age mysteries, 1950s mysteries, 1960s mysteries, British mysteries, paranormal mysteries, crime thrillers, legal thrillers, psychological thrillers, occult thrillers, revenge thrillers, action thrillers, adventure thrillers, sea adventures, dystopian noir, police officers, private investigators, amateur sleuths, prosecutors, assassins, FBI agents, ex-CIA agents, ex-spies, organised crime, serial killers, con artists, terrorism, drug trafficking, human trafficking, satanic cults, crime-busting witches, crime-busting socialites, crime-busting surfers, crime-busting girl scout leaders, murder and mayhem in Los Angeles, London, New Orleans, Chicago, Southern California, Ohio, Iowa, Venezuela, Miami, Cornwall and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

The Fool on the Hill in a Convertible by Donna Amis Davis:

It’s 1967. Beatles’ songs are playing everywhere.

In the sleepy little beach community of Mission Cove in Southern California, surfers search for the perfect wave, while across the Pacific, a war grinds on.

Torrey helps her dad and brother in the family’s surf shop, but her heart is full of pain. Her camera captures the beauty of the ocean and the joy of the surf, as it helps to soothe her soul. But on this day her camera ensnares her in a mystery she’d rather escape.

The Fool on the Hill in a Convertible is a cozy mystery novella introducing Donna Amis Davis’s new ‘60s Surf Shop Mysteries which are set in the fictional community of Mission Cove, California.

Journey back to the ’60s and relive that groovy era when skirts were short, hair was long, and the music was good.

Murder on the Boardwalk by Beth Byers:

Vi and friends miss the sea and each other, so they gather up and head to the seaside. While there, they run into old friends and new troubles.

Once again, things turn sideways when a body is found by the boardwalk. All evidence points to the person they once knew almost as well as they know themselves. Is it possible their friend has turned to murder? Or is something else going on? Either way, they’re determined to find the truth. Even if it puts them into harm’s way.

 

The Grifter by Sean Campbell and Ali Gunn:

One will rise. The other will fall.

Kent Bancroft’s rise to fame and fortune was nothing short of meteoric. Once a simple teacher in London’s East End, he’s now on course to become Britain’s youngest billionaire.

But his success has come on the back of those he’s trodden upon to get there. Among them is a man whose fall was as swift as Kent’s rise. He used to be a sparky until a freak accident robbed him of one leg.

And then Kent Bancroft robbed him of everything else.

Forget forgiveness. Forget turning the other cheek. And forget waiting for karma.

This is a victim who won’t stand idly by.

He wants revenge.

And he’s going to get it.

Kent Bancroft will never see him coming.

Subtle Blood by K.J. Charles:

Will Darling is all right. His business is doing well, and so is his illicit relationship with Kim Secretan–disgraced aristocrat, ex-spy, amateur book-dealer. It’s starting to feel like he’s got his life under control.

And then a brutal murder in a gentleman’s club plunges them back into the shadow world of crime, deception, and the power of privilege. Worse, it brings them up against Kim’s noble, hostile family, and his upper-class life where Will can never belong.

With old and new enemies against them, and secrets on every side, Will and Kim have to fight for each other harder than ever—or be torn apart for good.

Left For Dead by Stacy Claflin and Nolon King:

What’s an innocent assassin to do?

Brad Morris was just cleared of murdering one annoying neighbor when another one turns up dead. Luckily, he was at a party with everyone on the block when the body was found, but that doesn’t stop fingers from pointing his way. Especially since the murder weapon was a BlueBlade, the knife company that Brad’s boss, Kurt, uses as a front for the real work that Brad and his fellow assassins do.

Kurt demands that Brad find the real killer — without blowing his cover or dragging BlueBlade into the investigation. If he can’t, he’ll be thrown to the wolves. Or worse, “retired.”

Does one of Brad’s suburban neighbors hate him enough to frame him for murder? Or does he have a much more dangerous enemy lurking within the fellowship of assassins?

Paperclip by Seb Doubinsky:

In New Babylon, leader of the Western alliance of the city-states, armament mogul Kurt Wagner has a secret dream: to build a space station to save mankind. Little does he know that he is the target of competing plots involving geopolitics and black magick. In the background, a film director with a political conscience, a bodyguard with a secret mission, a driver with an occult hobby and a talking bird are trying to make sense of their world, hoping to see their wishes come true – which they will, but not in the way they might have expected.

 

My Brew Heaven by Lily Harper Hart:

Ofelia Archer should be riding high after a blissful week spent with her boyfriend Zacharias “Zach” Sully. Sun, fun, and cocktails make for a great break … until she gets home. Then she realizes exactly how far things can fall apart in only a few days.

It seems in her absence Ofelia’s mother Marie Charles has been taken in by a cult, and Ofelia is convinced it’s not the sort of group who worship beignets over chaos and bloodshed. When Ofelia tries talking to her mother she finds a different woman waiting for her … and she’s beyond concerned.
The French Quarter attracts weird people but this time the strife is different. When she starts digging, she finds more than she bargained for … and yet the answers are less than she was hoping for.

Ofelia is a witch with a plan but even she’s at a loss. When her brother Felix is hurt in the pursuit of reclaiming Marie, the Quarter’s favorite magical maven swears revenge … and she’s going to need Sully to help her deliver it.

Their new enemy is powerful and he’s hiding behind a gaggle of innocent humans. Freeing the French Quarter from his grip leads Ofelia down a dark path. Only Sully can help her … and together they will bring their city back from the brink.

The question is: Will they both survive to enjoy the fruits of their labor once they make it to the other side?

Mark of Justice by Robin James:

What he did to her…

As Maumee County, Ohio’s top prosecutor, Mara Brent has faced down killers before. But the murder of Haley Chambers is different. The evidence left behind at the crime scene paints a horrifying picture of Haley’s last hours. Her killer took his time. Planned. Hunted. Executed.

No one will believe it…

When local mechanic and family man, Cal Emmons is charged with the crime, the town rallies to his defense. Everyone knows him. Everyone trusts him. His supporters bring their protests right to Mara’s front door. But they don’t know. They haven’t seen what Mara and the police found at his house.

But there is one more victim out there…

The police connect physical evidence in Haley’s murder to a cold case abduction. Only that victim lived. Her harrowing, firsthand account of what she endured haunts Mara and provides a Rosetta Stone for Haley’s murder. But Mara’s star witness never saw her attacker’s face. She has lied to the police before. Is she lying now?

If Mara loses this one…more will die.

To win, Mara must ultimately step inside the mind of a sadistic killer. But this time when evil touches her, it may not let her go.

Sons of Brutality by Daneil Jeudy:

A SATANIC SNUFF CLUB

A RUTHLESS VIGILANTE

AN INTRICATE WEB OF DECEPTION

WHO CAN YOU TRUST?

Los Angeles is a city under siege.

When Detective Addison Mowbray begins investigating the murders of two young women in the Hollywood Hills, he can’t imagine where the case will lead. He suspects the crimes were inspired by an occult fascination, due to some missing body parts and the inverted Christian cross branded on the victims’ breasts. But apart from Addison’s temperamental partner, Jed, the only other person keen on them pursuing that line of investigation is Lilly Coniglio, a medical examiner from the Coroner’s Department. The LAPD is already under immense public pressure due to all the bad press another killer – a vigilante – has brought to their door: it’s been over a year since the first organized-crime figure showed up full of holes, with a plastic police badge beside his body.

As Addison and Jed navigate a murky, disturbing occult landscape in search of answers, they uncover something even more terrifying than a killer hiding in the shadows: an organization so vile and powerful that it changes their lives forever. These two troubled detectives are all that stand between this organization and a spectacular season of carnage.

Set against a backdrop of urban bleakness and social inequality, Sons of Brutality combines deeply flawed protagonists with human monsters, integrating strong dialogue, violent action and gripping Suspense.

Mosquito Bite Murder by Leslie Langtry:

In her career as a spy, Merry Wrath had her share of camping trips—from glamping in a yurt at Oktoberfest with drug lord Carlos the Armadillo to an awkward team building campout in the backyard of a Yakuza mob boss who thought “trust falls” should have lethal consequences. So when the former CIA turned Girl Scout troop leader has the opportunity to take six girls from her troop into a vast, private nature preserve in search of an abandoned scout camp, she jumps at it. The fact that she can secretly use this as a chance to meet up with another spy who has asked for her help just seems to be an added bonus.

Of course she doesn’t expect to find a guy named Chad in a shallow grave. He’s still alive, at least for the moment, and he insists on accompanying them further into the woods. Merry’s contact is a no-show, but another, more dangerous colleague surprises them on the trail. And just when she thinks she might be able to handle things, the group find themselves confronted by a hostile group of senior citizen hermits.

From the strange noises in the night, to vampire ticks, and the constant fear of being invaded by Communists, everything in Merry’s world appears to be dangerously off kilter. When she’s accosted by a 200lb snapping turtle named Old Eisenhower, Merry realizes that not everything is what it appears to be. Can Merry figure it out who is behind the stranger occurrences before the camping trip ends up with a body count?

Freaky Gifts by Amanda M. Lee:

Winter break is upon Mystic Caravan, which is supposed to mean a full month of rest and relaxation. Upon arriving at their destination, however, Poet and company find that murder isn’t far behind.

Their off-season park is full of paranormals – something that normally makes Poet comfortable – but the death of a local girl points to one of their own being the culprit. Even though she’s supposed to be taking it easy, Poet can’t stop herself from digging … and it leads her on a wild ride.

Florida is hot, humid and bursting at the seams with supernatural friends. Unfortunately for Poet, it’s also home to an ex-boyfriend who can’t quite let go. Since he’s a police officer … and looking at Mystic Caravan’s cadre of weirdos as potential murder suspects … that only makes things all the more difficult.

It’s up to Poet to find the real culprit even as a shadowy and powerful figure stalks her. Kade’s magic is growing but he’s still learning, which makes for some hard battles. On top of that, he’s keeping a secret with Luke, which has Poet teetering on the edge of sanity.

It’s supposed to be a break, not a break from reality, but Poet is ready to fight for her future. It’s going to take everybody working together to figure out the truth … and give Poet the one thing she’s always wanted above all else.

Peace.

Filthy Rich by Duane Lindsay:

GUY WALKS INTO A STRIP CLUB…
AND COMES OUT FILTHY RICH

Down-and-out comedian “Filthy” Rich wasn’t always living on the edge– he was once famous. Now he tells viciously dirty jokes in the seediest possible strip clubs–his routine is so filthy that it’s actually illegal, since 1960’s Chicago has harsh blue laws.

Rich wasn’t always living on the edge, though– he was once famous for a clean routine, until his estranged wife ran off with Rich’s best jokes. With his act missing, he’s hellbent on tracking down the missing dame before he gets caught spewing the grossest jokes this side of Lake Michigan.

Enter Lou Fleener– expert streetfighter and ace private eye. Rich hires Lou to find the missing jokes– and the wayward wife. Which seems easy enough, right? But unfortunately, Lou’s clues lead him down a perilous rabbit hole of deceit, lies, and frame ups.

Plus, the irrepressible Cassidy, his wife turned partner-in-crime, and Monk, his improbably handsome yet socially awkward best friend, are knee deep in their own rollicking thrillers. The whole team is in imminent danger, each facing their own bad guy. And to top it all off, this team of witty Chicago sleuths is flat broke. Again.

Lou Fleener will be a treasured read for both cozy lovers and hard-boiled aficionados. And especially for readers looking for laughs. Lou and his team’s humorous yet action-packed adventures that will please fans of such diverse authors as Donald Westlake, Raymond Chandler, and Lawrence Block in his “burglar” mode.

Never Ever by Willow Rose:

Ex-agent Eva Rae Thomas is on the run. The past month she has done things she never knew she was capable of while hunting for her kidnapped daughter.

Eva Rae has risked everything,

-her career,

-her newfound love,

-her freedom.

She’s looking for the man they call the Iron Fist. The trail has led her to Miami.

Meanwhile, Miami is under attack. Hundreds of passengers in the Metrorail are exposed to a deathly nerve gas on a peaceful Monday morning. When Eva Rae Thomas sees her daughter on the surveillance footage from the attack, she knows it is no coincidence. But by the time she uncovers the chilling truth of how it is all connected, it might be too late.

The Cove by L.J. Ross:

THE PERFECT ESCAPE…

Gabrielle Adams has it all – brains, beauty, a handsome fiance?, and a dream job in publishing. Until, one day, everything changes.

‘The Tube Killer’ takes his victims when they least expect it: standing on the edge of a busy London Underground platform, as they wait for a train to arrive through the murky underground tunnels of London.

Gabrielle soon learns that being a survivor is harder than being a victim, and she struggles to return to her old life. Desperate to break free from the endless nightmares, she snatches up an opportunity to run a tiny bookshop in a picturesque cove in rural Cornwall.

She thinks she’s found the perfect escape, but has she swapped one nightmare for another?

Suspense and mystery are peppered with romance and humour in this fast-paced thriller, set amidst the spectacular Cornish landscape.

Steady As She Goes by Wayne Stinnett:

Jesse McDermitt is starting a new chapter in his life. As captain of the research vessel Ambrosia, his stated mission is to study the oceans and seafloor, searching for rich oil deposits. His unstated mission is to locate and eradicate the enemies of society on behalf of Armstrong Research, a secretive organization funded by some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

When word gets out about a massive drug and human trafficking cartel moving tons of illegal drugs, along with hundreds of slave laborers, out of Venezuela, Jesse is tasked with finding them at all cost.

But how can one man find the traffickers amid the thousands of ships coming and going from Venezuela’s ports, moving hundreds of thousands of containers every year?

Can Jesse close on and engage the traffickers in time to save dozens of innocent lives?

Murder in London by Lee Strauss:

Murder’s a trip!

It’s early 1957, and Rosa Reed and her new beau Detective Miguel Belmonte fly from California to London to follow up on the cold case: the murder of Rosa’s good friend Lady Vivien Everleigh.

The investigation is complicated, if not awkward, as the deceased is the sister of Rosa’s former fiancé. Thankfully, Rosa’s parents, Ginger (aka Ginger Gold of Lady Gold Investigations) and Basil Reed are there to help.

Rosa stumbles onto a dangerous truth. Can she find her friend’s killer and save her own life too?

If you love early rock & roll, poodle skirts, clever who-dun-its, a charming cat and an even more charming detective, you’re going to love this new series!

A Murderous Affair in Mayfair by Lynda Wilcox:

Private enquiry agent Lady Eleanor Bakewell returns in another tale of murder, intrigue, and romance set in 1920s London.

Who had the nerve to commit murder at an elegant high-society party in Mayfair?

Who among the other seven people playing cards that evening with Lord George Bancroft, notorious womaniser and gambler, pun a knife in his back?

Lady Eleanor Bakewell doesn’t know, but when a young parlourmaid ask for her help in proving her innocence, the socialite sleuth is soon on the case.

So, too, are Military Intelligence which puts a new and unwelcome angle on the case for Eleanor.

Mired in suspects and questions about the dead man’s background, Eleanor feels overwhelmed. She will need all her wits about her to find the killer before the parlourmaid is wrongly arrested for a crime she did not commit.

Retro Review: “The Green Huntsman” by Dorothea Gibbons

If this cover seems familiar, that’s because the artwork by Harold De Lay originally appeared on the cover of the January 1944 issue of Weird Tales.

“The Green Huntsman” is a gothic short story by Dorothea Gibbons, which was first published in the July 1954 issue of Weird Tales. The story may be found online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

I came across this story, while I was reviewing “More Than Shadow” by Dorothy Quick and was intrigued that there were two other new stories as well as one new poem and a reprint by women writers in the same issue of Weird Tales, proving once again that Weird Tales was the most woman-friendly SFF magazine of the pulp era.

The name Dorothea Gibbons will not mean anything to most people. However, Dorothea Gibbons is a very well known author, probably one of the most famous mainstream authors ever to publish in Weird Tales next to Tennessee Williams as a sixteen-year-old debut author (and I should really review his debut story some day). For Dorothea Gibbons was none other than British novelist, poet and journalist Stella Gibbons, author of Cold Comfort Farm (which is absolutely genre, even if most people don’t realise it). As Dorothea Gibbons (her full name was Stella Dorothea Gibbons), she published three stories in Weird Tales in 1953 and 1954. None have ever been reprinted.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

“The Green Huntsman” opens in the manor house of Scarth on a misty autumn morning dripping with gothic atmosphere. Here Richard Ayreton, lord of the manor, and his agent Nick Borrodale await the arrival of Ayreton’s niece Francesca Newtownly, a penniless war widow with a seven-year-old son.

So we have the classic gothic set-up of a young woman coming to a creepy manor, from which she will eventually run clad only in her nightgown, at least if the covers of gothic romances from the 1960s are to be believed. But first, Nick has to pick up Francesca from the train station. He’s instantly smitten with her, but also uneasy, because of something that haunts the nearby woods in autumn.

Nick warns Francesca and her son Paul not to go into the woods, so he won’t say why, because the truth would either terrify Francesca or worse, she wouldn’t believe it. So Nick males up a story about cutting down trees in the woods and that it’s too dangerous to go there. Francesca, however, isn’t having any of it. “If the men are felling trees, they’re very quiet,” she says.

Not long after, Nick gets a panicked message from Francesca that Paul and his dog Sebastian have gone missing and that Francesca fears they went into the woods. She also reveals that she knows that there was never any tree cutting work going on and begs Nick to tell her just what the matter is with those woods. Francesca also reveals that she’s been in the woods and saw something green watching her from between the trees.

Paul and Sebastian eventually reappear at the manor safe and sound. Paul confesses that he went into the woods, even though Sebastian with his canine instincts for the supernatural tried to stop him. Paul also sees something green among the dead trees. When he investigates, he realises that it’s a horseman clad all in green on a green horse. The horseman trains his hypnotic gaze on Paul and beckons him to come, but Sebastian, the heroic dog, intervenes and pulls Paul to the ground, saving the boy. When Paul looks up again, the green rider is gone.

Now Nick and Richard Ayreton finally share the story of the green huntsman with Francesca. It turns out that the huntsman was an evil man who hunted in those woods on a devilish horse hundreds of years ago and has been haunting the woods ever since, always appearing in autumn. According to legend, the only way to get rid of that evil spirit is when another four-legged creature will confront him to save a human life. And Sebastian, the faithful spaniel, saved Paul from the huntsman and thus exorcised the evil spirit for good.

This is a spooky gothic story that is dripping with atmosphere. The decaying manor and the misty, windswept woods are vividly described. The interior art by Virgil Finlay is also great.

I like that Francesca is not your average insipid gothic heroine who runs away from the spooky manor clad only in her nightgown. She never for a minute buys Nick’s weak excuse about men felling trees in the woods and also confronts him about it.

My main criticism about “The Green Huntsman” is that it’s way too short. After all the build-up, the confrontation with the evil huntsman is over in a few paragraphs. Furthermore, we don’t see it happening on the page, but hear it recounted by Paul after the fact.

Also, I would have liked more details about the history of the huntsman and why he does what he does. He was an evil man and now he and his evil horse haunt the woods after his death is a weak explanation. Surely, there must be more to the story. Did the huntsman develop a taste for hunting “the most dangerous game” or was he himself hunted by villagers with pitchforks and swore vengeance from beyond the grave? Inquiring minds would like to know.

That said, I did like the solution that what broke the curse was the heroic act of a cocker spaniel. After Dorothy Quick’s tale of an evil faery poodle, which appeared in the very same issue, this one makes a nice counterpoint.

The atmosphere and writing are great, but the story is flawed.

Fancast Spotlight: So I’m Writing a Novel

I initially started the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project to highlight Hugo-eligible fanzines, fansites and podcasts. For more about the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines and fancasts featured by clicking here.

The Hugo finalists for 2021 have long since been announced, but I want to keep the project going, because after the Hugo nominations is before the Hugo nominations. And besides, there are still a lot of great fanzines, blogs and podcasts out there that I haven’t covered.

So today, I’m pleased to feature the So I’m Writing a Novel podcast, in which the listeners can follow along as host Oliver Brackenbury writes a sword and sorcery novel.

And therefore, I’m happy to welcome Oliver to my blog today:

Tell us about your podcast or channel.

Well, as I like to say at the start of each episode:

“So I’m Writing a Novel is the show where you join me, Oliver Brackenbury, on the journey of writing my next novel, from first ideas all the way to publication & promotion.

In this one-man-reality show I’ll share with you my ever evolving thoughts and feelings on how I write, being a writer, and everything that entails at each stage of the process. I’ll also answer listener questions and, sometimes, interview people who write fiction.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to learn how things are made, and get to know the people making them, then this is the show for you.”

The novel is a sword & sorcery short story cycle, meaning it’s a bunch of short stories following a fifteen year period in my protagonist’s life. Each story can stand alone, but readers are rewarded for reading from first to last.

Similarly I do my best to make each podcast episode work in isolation, providing short recaps as necessary, but starting from the beginning and working your way up will yield greater rewards.

Who are the people behind your podcast or channel?

It’s all me, though I enjoy using a third person voice in posts and social media to suggest I control a vast multi-media empire. Maybe, if the Patreon really catches fire, one day I’d hire someone to edit this thing, but for now I like that I’m the only person I have to rely on to get it out into the world.

Why did you decide to start your podcast or channel?

Many reasons! The main thrust of the idea was figuring out a way to build an audience for a novel as I worked on it, so I could make myself more appealing to publishers and agents when I’m ready to start querying. But also…

I wanted to create a virtuous cycle where I need to work on the novel so I have something to talk about on the podcast, and talking about stuff on the podcast gets me excited to work on the novel. So far, it’s working well.A former Youtuber, I missed putting something out regularly online but really just wanted to talk with people…and boy is the workload lessened by not having to worry about visuals!I also missed regularly meeting and interacting with strangers through my work. Please holler at me on Twitter (@so_writing) or submit a listener question to soimwritinganovel@gmail.com, I love it! I’m also down with guesting, or guest hosting, on other people’s podcasts. I’m an extrovert living in a pandemic, help!I was frustrated at not having more money to invest in my writing, or in the work of other artists (boy do I want to commission original illustrations for the book). Thus, the Patreon I launched alongside the podcast (patreon.com/soimwritinganovel).I was starting to have a strong negative reaction to the never-ending glut of writing advice online. Basically I was fed up with overly positive and overly negative voices, listicles, absolutism, “this is what all writers must do in all circumstances, from now until the end of time” stuff…
This made me want to put something out that I would enjoy listening to. Thus my framing the podcast as a highly transparent sharing of my writing journey, my constantly evolving process and where I’m at in any given moment, being spoken from one peer to another, as opposed to a speaker standing on a stage or at a podium. I also do my best to keep the tone in a sweet spot of being positive, but not saccharine, honest and open, but not oversharing or maudlin.

I could easily add a few more reasons. This project really burst out of me!

What format do you use for your podcast or channel and why did you choose this format?

I’m lucky to have opening and closing music composed by the marvellous Gloria Guns (gloriaguns.bandcamp.com/). After the music, I run through my show intro about what the show is, briefly mention what the previous episode covered, then dive into that week’s subject. Discussing that makes up the bulk of the episode and then, if I have one, I’ll answer the listener question before going into an outro of sorts where I encourage people to submit questions, share the show, sign up with the Patreon etc. Then it’s the final music and we’re out! Regular episodes average 30-45 minutes in length, while interviews hew closer to the 60 min mark.

I choose subjects as they relate to my progress in working on the novel, so in the first episode I talk about the short story which bloomed into the novel project, in episode two I cover my protagonist, and so on. The order of episode subjects doesn’t perfectly match the order of what I worked on in my project notebooks, because often what made the most sense for my brain in working on the book would be a it of a mess for presentation to another human being.

I also strongly encourage those who submit questions to record their question on their phone and send the audio file to soimwritinganovel@gmail.com Then I can cut it into an episode just like a radio call in show, which I love.

I came to this format through recording three and a half different versions of the first episode, getting feedback from trusted pals at each stage, and then sticking with something that felt right.

Interviews happen semi-randomly, for now. I want to use them to break things up now and then, which serves a few purposes, including giving listeners a chance to hear a voice other than my own.

For my release schedule, I do a weekly release on Mondays, and Patreon supporters get to listen to new episodes a week early, as well as a second, bonus podcast called So I Wrote a Novel where I read a chapter at a time from past works, providing “DVD commentary” at the end. I chose this because it felt like a good balance between building momentum for the show and burning myself out. I also needed to balance making the show with writing the dang novel I’m discussing!

It’s probable the release schedule, maybe even the format, will change when I finish outlining the novel and move to writing the first draft. I expect there will be less to discuss for a stretch, then lots to say when the first draft is one, and again when I’m working with a story editor to polish it. So if I switch to bi-weekly or even “When it happens” for certain periods, then go back to regular, weekly updates when it makes sense to do so, that’s fine by me. One lesson I’ve learned both as a former Youtuber and a consumer of various regularly updating things online is that shackling yourself to a specific schedule or format is a great way to eventually produce pretty mediocre stuff, burning yourself out, just to keep the #content spice flowing. I think it’s better to be fully transparent with your audience and just say “Things are gonna change for a bit, here’s how.”, especially when it costs nothing to remain subscribed to a podcast, Youtube channel, or whatever.

Boy this answer is too long. Let’s make it longer! I’ll also say that technically I’m releasing this show in seasons, because if this experiment works out then I imagine I’d do a second season all about the creation of the next novel. But we’ll see!

The fan categories at the Hugos were there at the very beginning, but they are also the categories which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines, fancasts and other fan projects are important?

Well, where the heck are creators (and the multi-media conglomerates that feed off them) without fans? Going all the way back to things like Amra and beyond – wasn’t there a Sherlock Holmes fan group or fifty back in the Victorian age? They must have made some things. – fans have wanted to create works inspired by what they love, and connect with each other. Hell, I’m sure there were some papyrus fanzines going around Ancient Egypt.

Point being that I think fan culture can be unfairly tagged as being ephemeral, but really it’s not and it is important if only for the long history it has, as much as the vital role in supporting creative works and nurturing various social scenes for people to connect with one another.

It’s funny, I have a few friends that voraciously post about their fav bands. I am not into these bands, but I am into how into these bands they are, if that makes sense? As long as it’s expressed in a non-toxic way, passion is inspiring and life-affirming! Ultimately it’s that raw energy that makes fanzines, fancasts, and other fan projects important, I reckon.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online and fancasts have sprung up. What do you think the future of fan media looks like?

I’m the guy who thought Google wouldn’t take off as a search engine because “It’s such a dumb name.” and that bottled water wouldn’t take off because you can get water free from a tap. I might not be the best guy to ask about the future! I won’t say what will happen, but I do hope that we see further powerful strides forward in making fan culture even more inclusive. There’s still work to be done, for sure, but I’m amazed at how different it all feels compared to even just ten years ago.

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

I’m a big fan of the Turnip Lanterns newsletter by Angeline B. Adams and Remco Van Straten. It’s not dedicated to any one specific fandom, it’s more about what inspires and influences them as writers. However if you’re a fan of sword & sorcery, you can count on a good amount of content related to that genre on account of them having written the excellent The Red Man and Others (a new wave S&S novel, one I’d highly recommend). You can read about, and sign up for, it here: https://turniplanterns.wordpress.com/2021/03/22/newsletter/ It also comes in blog form, if you prefer – https://turniplanterns.wordpress.com

Where can people find you?

Search for “So I’m Writing a Novel” everywhere good podcasts are found and it should come up. There’s also the website at www.soimwritinganovel.com, @so_writing on Twitter, www.patreon.com/soimwritinganovel on Patreon, and there’s also a Ko-Fi at https://ko-fi.com/soimwritinganovel.

Finally, there’s a Twitch channel where I’ve done some early experiments with writing streams, found at https://www.twitch.tv/soimwritinganovel. I’m getting better at the technical side, and expect I’ll be doing a lot more there when I get to writing the first draft of the novel.

Thank you, Oliver, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out So I’m Writing a Novel, cause it’s a fine podcast.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine/-site or fancast and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

Retro Review: “More Than Shadow” by Dorothy Quick

If this cover seems familiar, that’s because the artwork by Harold De Lay originally appeared on the cover of the January 1944 issue of Weird Tales.

“More Than Shadow” is a horror short story by Dorothy Quick, which was first published in the July 1954 issue of Weird Tales. The story may be found online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

The protagonist of “More Than Shadow” is Mona, a wife and mother of three. Mona lives in a suburban house with her lawyer husband Hal, the children Carol, Meg and Harry Jr. and the housemaid Ellen.

At first glance, Mona would seem to have a pretty cushy postwar life. However, her 1950s domestic bliss is interrupted by strange occurrences that keep happening in her house. Cause whenever someone spills some kind of liquid – milk, tea, water – the liquid coalesces into a puddle shaped like a cuddly little dog. As hauntings go, this one is certainly creative.

The first two times it happens, Mona dismisses the dog-shaped puddles as a coincidence. By the third time, however, Mona realises that there is something very strange going on in her house.

Just to make sure that she isn’t imagining things, Mona calls over Ellen, the maid, and asks her what she sees in the puddle of spilled water. Ellen confirms that the puddle looks like a dog, but not just any old dog either, but the little dogs on which the leprechauns ride on moonlit nights. For Ellen just happens to be Irish and therefore a fount of Irish folklore.

Intrigued, Mona asks where the leprechauns go on those little dogs. A little spooked, Ellen, who – being Irish – of course believes in leprechauns, replies that no one really knows, but that according to legend the little dogs carry the leprechauns over the mountains to the land of youth.

The legend is familiar to Mona, because it reminds her of a quote about the land of faery from the 1894 play The Land of Heart’s Desire by William Butler Yeats, which is extensively quoted in the story, copyright apparently being no issue in 1954.

I’ve remarked before that for supposedly disposable trash fiction for the masses, the pulps were quite literary at times and are often full of literary references and allusions, many of which are not immediately recognisable to the modern day reader, even if they likely were to a golden age audience.

Unlike other authors of the era, Dorothy Quick does not assume that all readers will be familiar with the play (or have Google at hand to look it up), so she briefly has Mona sum up what the play is about, namely a newlywed bride being enticed by a faery child to come with her to the land of heart’s desire. The bride eventually succumbs and promptly dies in the real world.

Dorothy Quick also offers up a reason why Mona is familiar with the play, since she isn’t simply a fount of random Yeats quotations. For it turns out that Mona’s high school graduation class performed the play and that Mona played the doomed bride. More importantly, the night of the premiere of the play was also the night that Mona’s husband Hal, then still a young college freshman, proposed to her.

Seeing the dog-shaped puddle not only brings back memories of that long ago school play, it also reminds Mona that at the time, she wondered whether getting to live in the land of faery, forever young and carefree, wasn’t worth losing your life and soul for. Now, many years later, Mona feels the longing for the land of faery again, but she quickly dismisses it. After all, she’s happy, isn’t she? She’s got a great husband, three wonderful children, a beautiful home. She’s living the dream.

About a week after the incident with the dog-shaped puddle, a real dog comes into Mona’s life, when her kids find an adorable black poodle just sitting by the garden gate. Naturally, the kids want to keep it. Mona and Hal are quickly won over, though they caution the children that the dog probably already has an owner and just got lost. But until the legitimate owner shows up, the kids may keep it.

However, no previous owner appears and so the family keep the poodle, whom they name Jet, because he was jettisoned. The whole family loved Jet, only Ellen the maid is wary of the dog and insists that there is something strange about him. Being Irish, Ellen is apparently more sensitive towards the supernatural.

Whenever Mona cuddles with Jet, she has visions of Yeats’ land of heart’s desire, visions that are so vivid and realistic that she worries she might be going mad. When she confesses her worries to Hal, her husband admits that being with Jet makes him want to abandon his work and just go fishing all day long. However, Hal, being the rational type, believes that the presence of Jet simply loosens their inhibitions.

One day, while Mona is napping (Mona naps a lot), Jet cuddled up beside her, she hears strange music, as if in a dream. Jet suddenly starts talking and tells her that he can take her to the land of heart’s desire, where no one ever grows old and there’s only happiness, no pain. Jet also suddenly grows to the size of a small pony, big enough to ride upon. Jet tries to entice Mona to climb on his back and come with him to the land of heart’s desire. Mona is sorely tempted, but then she looks into Jet’s eyes and sees an ancient evil there. She also noticed that Jet has very sharp teeth, like fangs. But the temptation is stronger and Mona is just about to climb into Jet’s back and ride away, when her children burst into the bedroom, the otherworldly music stops and Jet shrinks to normal size.

Mona dismisses the whole incident as a nightmare. She tells Jet to play with the children and gets dressed – in a Dior taffeta gown – for a date night with Hal. Mona also realises that she has everything she ever wanted and that she would never give up Hal and her family, not even for eternal life and eternal bliss, even if it took her a nightmare to realise this.

When Mona and Hal return from their night on the town, they’re met by a panicked Ellen who tells them that their youngest daughter Carol and Jet the dog have both vanished. The two older children last saw Carol playing with Jet in a corner of the garden.

Hal wants to call the police, but Ellen – being Irish and therefore superstitious – insists that the police won’t be able to help, because the faeries have taken Carol and Jet was their emissary. After all, it is May Eve a.k.a. Walpurgis Night a.k.a. Beltane, when the little people have power. Ellen also tells Mona and Hal that some neighbours saw a happy and laughing Carol riding on a black poodle the size of a pony.

Hal, being the rational type, dismisses Ellen and her Irish superstitions, but Mona knows better. The nightmare she had was no dream after all. Jet really did grow to the size of a pony and when he couldn’t entice Mona to come away with him, he took her daughter Carol instead.

In 1988, “More Than Shadow” was reprinted in the anthology “Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies”.

“Away with the faeries” stories are dime a dozen, but Dorothy Quick manages to put a new spin on that old familiar tale. Indeed, my initial impression of “More Than Shadow” was, “This is atmospheric and well written, but also really predictable.” Because Mona is your stereotypical 1950s suburban housewife who seems to be suffering from what Betty Friedan would eventually term “the problem with no name”. Indeed, Mona’s frequent naps seem to point at depression. And it was clear to me with my twenty-first century expectations of what stories about suburban housewives in the 1950s were like that Mona would go away with the faeries in the end, leaving behind her husband and kids, just like Lucy Jordan from the eponymous song. It was also clear to me that “away with the faeries” was probably intended to be a metaphor for the many real life 1950s suburban housewives who descended into alcoholism and substance abuse.

However, that is not the story that Dorothy Quick wrote. For while Mona is sorely tempted by Jet and his promises of the land of eternal youth and joy, she resists the temptation in the end. And what brings her back from the brink are her three children. Furthermore, the incident with Jet helps Mona to realise that she is happy with her life. She loves her husband and she loves her children and does not want to give them up for vague promises of eternal youth in the land of heart’s desire. And so in the end it is her daughter Carol – who’s only three years old and not able to consent – who is taken away to the land of faerie.

Considering how many portrayals of unhappy suburban housewives in the postwar era there are – from Betty Friedan via Lucy Jordan to Betty Draper – it is refreshing to see a suburban housewife who is not unhappy. For while there were many unhappy marriages and depressed housewives in the 1950s, there also were many women who loved their husbands and children and were happy with their suburban existence, though these women are often forgotten today.

Besides, Mona really does not have any visible reasons to be unhappy. Her husband Hal is no philandering Don Draper nor a permanently absent workaholic in a grey flannel suit nor is he abusive. Indeed, Hal is portrayed as kind and supportive throughout. He does not yell or complain when the kids or Mona spill something on the carpet (and one of the dog-shaped puddles is caused by a cup of tea that Hal spills), he does not dismiss Mona as hysterical, when she confesses her dreams of the land of faerie to him and he’s clearly still in love with his wife after several years of marriage. Okay, so Hal does not believe that the faeries took his daughter, but I don’t think we can blame him for that. Indeed, one thing I’ve noticed in all of the Dorothy Quick stories I’ve read is that Quick always portrays supportive and loving relationships. Even if the central couple dies horribly, as in the two Patchwork Quilt stories I reviewed last year, the relationship is still supportive.

Another thing that sets Dorothy Quick apart from other writers of the pulp era is that her stories always pass the Bechdel Test, something that is extremely rare during the golden age, even in stories by female writers. “More Than Shadow” is no exception and passes due to a scene of Mona talking to Ellen about leprechauns as well as several moments of Mona talking to her daughters.

What also strikes me about Dorothy Quick’s stories are her detailed descriptions of clothes, fabrics and interiors. Again, this is most notable in the Patchwork Quilt stories, where pieces of fabric trigger a kind of mental time travel. But “More Than Shadow” is also rich with description, whether it is Mona’s blue satin bedspread, her Dior taffeta gown with a bell-shaped skirt or the lacy negligee Mona wears in the scene where she is almost tempted to go away with Jet.

A cute little black poodle as an agent of evil and temptation may be unexpected, but there is a precedent. For in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s take on the Doctor Faustus legend, Mephistopheles initially appears to Faust in the guise of a black poodle. Was Dorothy Quick familiar with Goethe’s Faust? I have no idea, but it is not unlikely.

“More Than Shadow” is a neat little spooky story with an unexpected twist. The story appeared in the penultimate issue of the original run of Weird Tales, proving that the quality remained high until the end, even if half of the July 1954 issue of Weird Tales consists of reprints from earlier years of the magazine. Recommended.

My Story “We need to talk…” is Now Available at the Simultaneous Times Podcast

If you’re in the mood for some audio fiction, you can now listen to my humorous science fiction story “We need to talk…” in episode 42 of the Simultaneous Times podcast along with “Absolution” by Douglas A. Blanc and “Control Voice Blues (with apologies to The Outer Limits)” by Jean-Paul L. Garnier.

Simultaneous Times is a fiction podcast produced by my friends of Space Cowboy Books, a science fiction bookstore in Joshua Tree, California. Space Cowboy Books recently reopened for in-person business after more than a year of pandemic enforced closure. So if you’re in the area, pay them a visit and pick up some books.

“We need to talk…” was first published in my collection Bug-Eyed Monsters and the Women Who Love Them and is about a young woman trying to explain to the bug-eyed monster who abducted her that this relationship has no future.

The story is read by Zara Kand – the narrator is a woman, so this one really needs a female voice – with music by Phog Masheen.

Anyway, give it a listen and also make sure to listen to Douglas A. Blanc’s and Jean-Paul Garnier’s stories as well. You can listen on podomatic or right here:

The 2021 Dragon Award Finalists Take Another Big Step Towards Mainstream Respectability

As always in August, when you’re busy with other things, the finalists for the 2021 Dragon Awards, have been announced. The Dragon Awards are a fan award given out by Dragon Con, a massive SFF media con in Atlanta, Georgia.

This is only the sixth year of the Dragon Awards, but they have gone through quite a bit of history since then, as recounted here by Camestros Felapton. You can also find my previous posts about the Dragon Awards and their tangled history here.

The finalists for the 2021 Dragon Awards were announced today and the ballot looks pretty good with hardly any WTF? finalists and a lot of popular and well regarded works. This confirms a trend that we’ve seen in the past two years, namely that the Dragon Awards are steadily moving towards the award for broadly popular SFF works that they were initially conceived to be, as the voter base broadens and more people become aware of the award, nominate and vote for their favourites. It’s a far cry from the early years of the Dragon Awards, where the finalists were dominated by Sad and Rabid Puppies, avid self-promoters and Kindle Unlimited content mills with a few broadly popular books mixed in.

So let’s take a look at the individual categories:

Best Science Fiction Novel

We have a range of broadly popular novels here, though they tilt more towards hard SF than the Hugos are Nebulas normally do. Machine by Elizabeth Bear is one of those good SF novels that made neither the Hugo nor the Nebula ballot, so I’m glad to see it recognised here. A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine is the sequel to the popular and Hugo winning (and excellent) A Memory Called Empire. Ernest Cline, Cory Doctorow, Andy Weir and Kim Stanley Robinson are all popular authors, so I’m not surprised to see them nominated, though personally I don’t care for their work (and no, it’s not because they’re male, but because I don’t care for their flavour of science fiction). The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is also a book whose absence from the Hugo ballot surprised many, so it’s good to see it recognised elsewhere. And the pop culture and gaming focus of Ernest Cline’s fiction seems ideally suited to the Dragon Con crowd. The only surprise in this category is Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. Not because it’s not a good or popular novel – it absolutely is (and also coincidentally the only finalist in this category that’s also on the Hugo ballot), but because it’s unambiguously fantasy. This is clearly a case of “The Ways of the Dragon are inscrutable”.

Diversity count: 2 women, 4 men, 1 writer of colour, 1 international writer*

Best Fantasy Novel including Paranormal

Here we have another selection of broadly popular books. Jim Butcher and Brandon Sanderson are both massively popular, so I’m not at all surprised to see the latest books in their respective series here (and in fact, I’m surprised that the Dresden Files didn’t get a Best Series nod at the Hugos this year). Butcher is also a Dragon Con regular. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is one of the most discussed fantasy novels of 2020 and has also been nominated for every award under the sun, so it’s no surprise to see it on the Dragon Ballot. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab and Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow are two more highly regarded and popular novels. Charles Stross is another one of those authors whose work is not to my taste, but he’s popular and has also been nominated for a Dragon Award before.

Diversity count: 3 women, 3 men, 2 international writers

Best Young Adult/Middle Grade Novel

This is another very good ballot. A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher, Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger and A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik are all popular YA novels (even though Naomi Novik’s novel was marketed as adult fantasy), which are also on this year’s Lodestar ballot. I also enjoyed both A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking and Elatsoe very much, A Deadly Education less so. The Scapegracers by Hannah Abigail Clarke got a lot of buzz, when it came out earlier this year. Jeff VanderMeer is better known for his adult SFF, but his foray into YA A Peculiar Peril got good reviews. The only real surprise in this category is he Tinderbox: Soldier of Indira by Lou Diamond Phillips. Of course, I know Lou Diamond Phillips as an actor, but until today I didn’t know that he also writes YA SFF.

Diversity count: 3 women, 2 men, 1 non-binary, 2 writers of colour

Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel

This is still the category which looks most like the early years of the Dragon Awards and is dominated by Baen Books and indie publishers. It’s also the only all male category. But then, military SFF is a rather conservative subgenre, which is heavily dominated by Baen and indie books. Marko Kloos, Christopher Ruocchio and Larry Correia are all popular authors, though I’d classify Christopher Ruocchio’s Sun Eaters series as space opera or science fantasy rather than military SF. Larry Correia’s co-author John D. Brown was unfamiliar to me. He appears to be mainly a thriller author, but has also written epic fantasy.  Walter Jon Williams is one of those great, but perpetually underappreciated authors. Plus, he writes military SF that I actually enjoy, so I’m thrilled to see Fleet Elements here. Rick Partlow, Jonathan Brazee and J.N. Cheney are all popular indie authors of military SF. Sentenced to War by Jonathan Brazee and J.N. Cheney also has a striking cover, which is a far cry from the usual exploding spaceships in space covers that dominate this subgenre.

Diversity count: 8 men, 1 writer of colour, 3 indie writers

Best Alternate History Novel

While the military SFF category still looks very much like the early days of the Dragon Awards, the alternate history category looks a lot more mainstreamy these days. S.M. Stirling and Eric Flint (plus co-author Charles Gannon) are highly popular alternate history authors and frequent Dragon finalists in this category, even if their work is not to my taste. Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Relentless Moon is the third novel in her popular Lady Astronaut series and also a double Hugo finalist (for Best Novel and Best Series) this year. Lindsay Ellis is a popular YouTuber and also a finalist for the Astounding Award this year. P. Djèlí Clark is one of the most exciting newer voices in our genre and I’m very happy to see his alternate history mystery novel Master of Djinn nominated here. Charlaine Harris, finally, is the sort of author for whom the Dragon Awards were made, hugely popular, but overlooked by the Hugos and Nebulas, because most of her works are in series and in subgenres like urban fantasy or here alternate history that don’t get a lot of attention elsewhere.

Diversity count: 3 women, 4 men, 1 author of colour

Best Media Tie-in Novel 

This category is a mixed bag this year and also demonstrates the broad spectrum of media tie-in novels these days. There are two Star Wars novel, including one by Timonthy Zahn, a Firefly novel, a World of Warcraft novel, a Warhammer 40000 novel and a tie-in novel for the new MacGuyver series. Fans of the latter apparently ran something of an online campaign to get it nominated (which is perfectly acceptable in the Dragon Awards), as Doris V. Sutherland found out. Interestingly, I couldn’t find out anything about Eric Kelley, one of the two co-authors of the MacGuyver novel (the other co-author is Lee Zlotoff, creator of MacGuyver) except that someone with the same name has written several cook books.

Diversity count: 1 woman, 6 men, 2 international writers

Best Horror Novel

The horror category at the Dragons has generally been very good (we will forget the first year, where a misclassified religious space opera novel won) and 2021 is no exception. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones has already won every horror award there is to win, so it’s only fair that Jones gets a crack at a Dragon as well. Paul Tremblay is another very popular horror author and a regular on horror awards ballots. T. Kingfisher makes her second appearance on this year’s Dragon ballot with her horror novel The Hollow Places.  T. Kingfisher a.k.a. Ursula Vernon is a perennial favourite of Hugo nominators, but it’s good to see her popularity extend to the Dragon Awards as well. Michaelbrent Collings is a popular indie horror author, though his nominated novel Synchronicity appears to be a science fiction thriller rather than horror. True Story by Kate Reed Perry received a lot of acclaim, when it came out last year. However, it appears to be a thriller rather than a horror novel. The Taxidermist’s Lover by Polly Hall is a modern gothic novel that also seems to have gotten a lot of acclaim.

Diversity count: 3 women, 3 men, 1 writer of colour, 1 international writer, 2 indie writers

Best Comic Book

Here we have another category full of popular finalists. Monstress, Invisible Kingdom and Once & Future are all Hugo finalists this year as well and very good. Meanwhile, X-Men, Immortal Hulk and Daredevil hold up the flag for traditional (Marvel) superhero comics. DC is not represented, which is interesting.

Diversity count: 3 women, 9 men, 5 creators of colour, 9 international creators

Best Graphic Novel

This category is a truly mixed bag, but looks very good overall. We have a traditional superhero collection with Green Lantern: Season Two, a comic tie-in to Lev Grossman’s popular Magicians series, Pulp, a great graphic novel about a pulp writer who gets drawn into his own stories, that was also on my Hugo ballot this year,  Dracula, Motherf**ker, a psychedelic horror comic about Dracula and his brides reappearing in 1970s California, which sounds actually awesome, The Magic Fish, a sweet story about a Vietnamese-American kid and his magic fish and The Book Tour, a surreal graphic novel.

Diversity count: 3 women, 9 men, 2 creators of colour, 5 international creators

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series

This category is full of popular TV and streaming series. WandaVision and Loki both made a big splash and were also hugely popular, though I’m a bit surprised that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is missing. The Expanse and Star Trek Discovery are both perennial favourites in this category. The Nevers got some bad press, largely because of various unsavoury revelations about showrunner Joss Whedon, though most people seem to have enjoyed the series itself (and Whedon is out as showrunner anyway). Resident Alien was somewhat under my radar and seems to be more of a cult hit. Shadow and Bone surprises me a little, because not a lot of people seem to have enjoyed this YA fantasy adaptation. But then, it might be popular with Dragon Con’s younger members. Notable by its absence is The Mandalorian, but then there are a lot more good SFF TV series than slots.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make TV series

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie

Considering that theatres were closed during much of the eligibility period, this is a surprisingly strong ballot. Better than the Best Dramatic Presentation Long ballot of the Hugos IMO. Due to the pandemic, there hardly were any superhero movies this year, but Wonder Woman 1984 and Zack Snyder’s director’s cut of Justice League hold up the superhero flag here. Regarding the nomination for Snyder’s take on Justice League, I wonder whether to treat director’s cuts as new movies or re-edits. The Dragons obviously went for option 1, while I would have gone with 2. I enjoyed The Old Guard, which is basically an updated take on Highlander with a bad arse Charlize Theron and the world’s sweetest and deadliest gay couple, a whole lot, so I’m very glad to see it here. Tenet was one of the few bigger movies to actually come out last year, so it’s no big surprise to see it here, even if Christopher Nolan has never made a movie that I like. Bill and Ted Face the Music is the belated sequel to a beloved series and also a very sweet movie. In fact, I’m surprised that the Hugos overlooked it. Godzilla versus Kong has two big monsters fighting each other, so what’s not to love? The South Korean space opera Space Sweepers is a bit of a surprise, since it’s a smaller film and subtitled, too. However, it’s also delightful, so I’m happy to see it here.

Diversity count: 2 women, 5 men, 3 directors of colour, 2 international directors

The Gaming Categories

I’m still not a gamer, so I can’t say much about these categories. I have heard of most of the PC/console games. I’ve seen ads for the Harry Potter: Puzzles and Spells mobile game, which were bloody annoying. I’m also fascinated that there apparently is a mobile game based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm. And Peer Sylvester, who’s a boardgame designer, points out that half the finalists in the board game category are not actually SFF.

All in all, the Dragon Awards continue to improve and are moving increasingly towards what they were supposed to be, namely an award for broadly popular SFF works. This is partly due to Dragon Con paying more attention to the awards and promoting them more to their audience as well as due to effforts such as the crowdsourced Dragon Awards eligibility spreadsheet created by the Red Panda Fraction.

The Dragons have also become a lot more diverse. There’s only one all male category and plenty of international writers and writers of colour are represented.

I still wish the Dragons were more transparent with regard to how many nominations and votes were cast and who the administrators are, but they’re on the right track.

Reactions

So let’s take a look to the reactions to this year’s Dragon Award finalists, especially among those quarters who used to consider the Dragons Awards their territory.

Camestros Felapton, who along with Doris V. Sutherland and myself, has probably written the most about the Dragon Awards without wanting to win one, shares his thoughts on the 2021 ballot here. There’s also some discussion going on in the comments.

Over in Puppyland, Larry Correia is happy to be nominated for a Dragon Award together with his co-author John D. Brown and also has some praise for the rest of the category. He has little to say about the other categories, except those where friends of his are nominated.

Declan Finn, who has been talking up his preferred works of SFF for the Dragon Awards for several years now, shares his thoughts on the 2021 Dragon Award finalists and mostly demonstrates his complete and utter ignorance about contemporary SFF.

A friend of this blog who shall remain unnamed (because he hates being named and mentioned, since that is somehow silencing him) shares his thoughts on the 2021 Dragon Awards finalists and also shares what he voted for. Like Declan Finn, he found nothing to vote for in multiple categories.

Doris V. Sutherland has also dug up a couple of reactions from puppy adjacent folks on Twitter.

The Choices on the Dragon Awards 2021 Setup.

Gonna be honest: I will be leaving picks blank. Too much Pop Cult in here as well. /1 pic.twitter.com/lK1KsMwxue

— Fiannawolf, Questing for the Superversive. (@Fiannawolf2) August 12, 2021

So are the Dragon Awards officially a joke yet?

— The Most Athletic Voice In Science Fiction???? (@YakovMerkin) August 12, 2021

I did get two of my choices, but in niche categories. The rest is just slush…even the Baen stuff. A couple decent choices, but the votes are for the least offensive in the category than the outright good.

— PulpArchivist (@ArchivistPulp) August 12, 2021

Of course, what’s really happening here is not that the Dragon Awards have become a joke – in fact, they’re much less of a joke now than they were when they started – but that the Dragons better reflect the broad spectrum of SFF fandom and its tastes. And it’s notable that even the puppy and puppy adjacent commenters still found works to vote for.

*International writer means “not from the US” in this context, so British and Canadian writers count as international.

Eternia Revisited – Some Reflections on Masters of the Universe: Revelation

Like everybody who was a kid in the early 1980s and had access to US cartoons, I watched the original He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series. Though I was lucky, because the “access to US cartoons” part was not a given in the three TV channel world of 1980s West Germany, where children’s programming had to be wholesome and the likes of He-Man or indeed anything that promised more thrills than Heidi or Maja the Bee (both of which ironically were Japanese takes on European children’s classics) was deemed “violent American trash” and not available, unless you were one of the lucky few to have cable and access to private TV.

Because I lived in a rural area, we did not have private TV at home until February 27, 1989 (and the fact that I can still tell you the exact date more than thirty years later should tell you what a momentous occasion that was). However, my Dad worked in the Netherlands from 1983 to 1989 and had a flat in the centre of Rotterdam (quite literally with a view of Rotterdam’s townhall). And that flat came with cable TV, which meant that during the holidays I could watch all the cartoons on Sky Channel courtesy of the DJ Kat Show  and Fun Factory. Those shows aired all the good stuff – M.A.S.K., Transformers, Jem, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Ulysses 31, The Care Bears, Bravestar, G.I. Joe, Inspector Gadget, Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs, The Galaxy Rangers, Blackstar, G.I. Joe, both versions of Ghostbusters and yes, the original He-Man and She-Ra. And I watched it all and loved that stuff – except for Roger Ramjet, whom I hated with a passion and fantasised about throwing into the canal outside the apartment.

At the time, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was not my favourite. I preferred his sister She-Ra and if you’d asked me for my favourite cartoon of them all, it would have been either Jem or M.A.S.K. (before M.A.S.K. fell from grace due to a character doing something that deeply disturbed me) as well as the Japanese Candy, Candy anime (which aired on Belgian TV at around the same time, so I always get it mixed up with the others) and Defenders of the Earth, the joy of which I could share with my parents who knew the characters from their newspaper comic adventures. That said, I remember He-Man fondly, because He-Man was very much ubiquitous, simply because there were so many more He-Man episodes than most of the others.

I never had any He-Man toys, nor any of the other cartoon toys, even though my parents would probably have bought them for me, if I’d asked (I did have a sizeable collection of Strawberry Shortcake figurines, after all). But I never asked, because by that point I had internalised that He-Man, She-Ra, Jem, Transformers, M.A.S.K. et al were violent American trash that nice kids were not supposed to enjoy. I don’t even know how I came to internalise this, since my parents never had any problems with me watching the cartoons. I did eventually acquire a Teela action figure as a flea market find in the late 1980s.

Those cartoons were basically 25-minute toy ads and I knew that even as a kid (especially since the commercial breaks helpfully ran ads for the very same toys). Nonetheless, I loved them. They also had a big influence on me – how big I wouldn’t realise until many years later. And I’m far from the only one. Look at how many reboots, reimaginations, live action versions, etc… of 1980s kid cartoons there have been in recent years. For example, right now Snake Eyes, a pretty neat looking movie based on the ninja character from G.I. Joe, is in the theatres. They may only have been glorified toy commercials, but those cartoons influenced a whole generation and have outlasted many of the more serious and wholesome media of the same era. At any rate, I don’t see a big screen Löwenzahn reboot anywhere. As for wholesome and educational cartoons, how wholesome and educational does Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids look now, knowing what we know about Bill Cosby?

The reason why those glorified toy commercials endured, while other media of the same era faded away is that – as comic creator Jerzy Drozd explains in this YouTube video – they did a lot of things very well. They also had some very talented people working on them, e.g. J. Michael Straczynski got his start writing scripts for He-Man, She-Ra, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors and others.

Another thing that those cartoons did was serve as a gateway to SFF and its subgenres for many kids of the era. Because a lot of the cartoons of the 1970s and 1980s were based either directly or indirectly on SFF of the pulp era. One of my formational science fiction influences, along with reruns of the original Star Trek and Raumpatrouille Orion as well as Time Tunnel and Space 1999, was the 1978 Captain Future anime, which blew my mind when it aired in West Germany in the early 1980s. Decades later, I found out that the show was a remarkably accurate adaptation of Edmond Hamilton’s Captain Future pulp stories from the 1940s.

For other cartoons, the inspiration was less overt, but still very notable to anybody who’s familiar with the pulp SFF of the 1930s and 1940s. In one episode of the excellent Rogues in the House sword and sorcery podcast, one of the hosts said that his introduction to sword and sorcery was He-Man, followed by Conan the Destroyer. My own experience was very similar. True, I had heard the name Conan by the time the original He-Man cartoon started in 1983, but all I knew about Conan was

a) that he was a barbarian
b) that he was played by Arnold Schwarzenegger who was from Austria originally, and
c) that he was violent American trash that nobody should watch or read

By the late 1980s, I had also picked up that Conan’s creator had committed suicide, based on a 1989 diary entry in which I muse about whether suicide is an occupational hazard for writers and list as examples Ernest Hemingway, “the guy who wrote Chess Novella” (Stefan Zweig) and “the guy who wrote Conan the Barbarian”.

However, my true introduction to sword and sorcery were the sword and sorcery influenced cartoons of the 1980s, followed by various Franco-Belgian-Dutch sword and sorcery comics of the same era. Not only did what eventually became Masters of the Universe originally start out as a Conan toyline, Eternia is also very much a grab bag of sword and sorcery influences. He-Man is basically a Frank Frazetta Conan cover come to animated life and given a dye job (or John Jakes’ Brak the Barbarian with a haircut), while Teela is C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry (a parallel that Masters of the Universe: Revelation makes very clear) with Red Sonja mixed in. Orko is the less capable relative of Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes from Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. Mer-Man and his mer-people are Lovecraft’s Deep Ones by another name, the Snake Men literally are the Serpent Men from Robert E. Howard’s Kull stories. There are also various Cthulhu inspired things with tentacles. Skeletor is certainly influenced by Howard villains such as Thoth-Amon and Thulsa Doom, who also affects the skull face look. Scareglow, a glow-in-the-dark Skeletor variant which does appear in Masters of the Universe: Revelation, is borrowed from the Floating Skull, a villain in the Conan story “Red Nails”. Though Eternia also borrows a lot from the related sword and planet genre, since the Eternians do have energy weapons and all sorts of impractical but cool vehicles.

When Masters of the Universe: Revelation was originally announced, I was initially wary, because a lot of the recent reboots and reimaginations of classic 1980s cartoons hadn’t really delivered what attracted me to the originals. The recent She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is a good example. By all accounts, it was a very good cartoon, but the animation style was so offputting to me that I just couldn’t watch it (not that the original animation was actually good). Which is okay, because I’m really not the target audience for those shows anymore and the ones which are the target audience apparently enjoyed the show. The Masters of the Universe: Revelation trailers, on the other hand, looked promising and actually like the He-Man and friends I remembered. And when the reactions to the show were largely positive – aside from the usual aggravated fanboys – I decided to give it a watch.

Warning: Spoilers below!

Masters of the Universe: Revelation is very much a continuation of the original show – 35 years after it went off the air – featuring all the familiar characters and cool but impractical vehicles and even the moral messages, silly humour and groanworthy puns and nonetheless manages to bring something new to the familiar story, including a couple of shocks and surprises.

The biggest surprise is probably that Masters of the Universe: Revelation is actually more Teela’s story than He-Man’s, which is perfectly fine by me, because Teela was always my favourite, though the usual suspects are of course aggravated, because Kevin Smith got girl cooties all over the Masters of the Universe.

The first half season starts out with Teela being finally granted the status of Man-at-Arms for her service to the kingdom of Eternia. Fun fact: When I first watched the original cartoon in the 1980s, I didn’t know what a man-at-arms was and assumed it was simply the name of the character. When I encountered the term in its original meaning some time later, I kept picturing the He-Man character. There’s a big celebration for Teela and everybody is there, including the original Man-at-Arms, who’s also Teela’s adopted Dad, Prince Adam, King Randor and Queen Marlena, Cringer, being terrified as always, and Orko, being inept as always.

But the forces of evil do not sleep and so Skeletor launches yet another attempt to conquer Castle Greyskull, using the fake robot double of He-Man (apparently, the character is called Faker) as well as Evil Lyn and her magic. Skeletor does manage to get into the Castle and hold the Sorceress at bay (though you wonder how she fell for the fake robo He-Man a second time) and inists that he wants something that is buried under Castle Greyskull, namely the orb from which all magic in Eternia flows. The editing is quite clever here, because we do not see Adam at Teela’s party (and indeed, people wonder where he is, suggesting that he’s off heroing), until the fake robo-He-Man is revealed. And since I had forgotten this particular plot point, I was genuinely surprised.

The Sorceress manages to call for help, the good guys show up and a massive battle ensues. In the course of this battle, Skeletor manages to trick He-Man into stabbing him (“You finally figured out how to use that sword”, Skeletor says, a reference to the fact that He-Man never actually used his sword to fight in the original cartoon, 1980s censors being nervous about fighting with sharp pointy things) and thus opening the vault wherein the orb rests. Once the energy in the orb is released, it will destroy all of Eternia and the rest of the universe, unless someone absorbs the energy. He-Man, being his usual heroic self, offers to absorb the energy, by drawing the sword of power and calling on the power of Greyskull, while already in He-Man. He is warned that this could kill him, but – being the hero that he is – does it anyway.

As a result, Eternia is saved for now, but at a terrible cost. The sword of power breaks in two halves and He-Man briefly reverts to Adam (in front of the eyes of Teela, who has no idea that Adam is He-Man) before he and Skeletor are disintegrated. Yes, Masters of the Universe: Revelation seemingly kills off both He-Man and Skeletor – the protagonist and antagonist – at the end of the first episode. This is a true shocker – also see Tor.com reviewer Leah Schnelbach’s reaction – and it’s not going to remain the only one.

The aftermath of this double (triple, if you count Adam and He-Man as two people) death is similarly shocking. King Randor finally learns that his son was He-Man and that he’s also dead in the worst possible way (Marlena, being smarter than her idiotic husband, knew all along). He has a freak out, blames Duncan a.k.a. Man-at-Arms, strips him of his rank, banishes him from the palace and forbids him to return at the threat of execution (because now that the main protector of your kingdom is dead, it’s a really smart move to kick out the other person capable of protecting the realm). Teela, who is both mourning her best friend and also furious that everybody she ever cared for lied to her, takes off her iconic headband and quits. And that, folks, is just the end of episode one.

Now Teela is absolutely justified in being furious. For starters, it never made any sense to me that she didn’t know Adam was He-Man. In the original cartoon, she’d have to be blind not to notice, because He-Man was literally Adam with his clothes off. Masters of the Universe: Revelation handles this better by making Adam the skinny and scrawny kid he’s supposed to be. But nonetheless, Teela was in every single episode of the original He-Man and accompanied He-Man, Orko, Cringer/Battlecat and Man-at-Arms on every single adventure. She’s capable and heroic (unlike Orko and Cringer) and should have been let in on the secret of He-Man’s identity and indeed, there is no reason why she wasn’t, except for the annoying cliché that the love interest never knows secret of the duel identity hero, causing dual identity heroes to be stuck in love triangles with themselves.

The fact that Lois Lane did not know that Clark Kent was Superman for decades is probably the best known example of that trope, but it’s not the only one or the earliest. The earliest example is probably The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy from 1905 (and for all that’s holy, don’t read the original book, because it’s terrible). Zorro, created by Johnston McCulley in 1919 (and here the original novel The Curse of Capistrano is well worth reading) is probably the best known example pre-Superman.

I’ve always hated that trope, even as a kid, because it made no sense to me. Cause why could those dual identity heroes not even trust the woman they supposedly love? Especially since telling the truth would solve so many problems. Sometime in the late 1980s, I came across Frank Miller’s Daredevil run, where Matt Murdock’s love interest Karen Page sells out his secret identity to his sworn enemy Kingpin in exchange for drugs (yes, this really happened and it’s not the worst thing that happened to poor Matt Murdock either) and thought, “Okay, so that’s why all of those superheroes never tell their significant others about their secret identity, because they all know what happened to Daredevil. But still, isn’t that a little far-fetched, cause how high is the likelihood of something like that happening again.”

So in short, there was absolutely no reason not to tell Teela that Adam was He-Man and therefore, her anger is completely understandable. Not to mention that Teela has just lost her best friend and learned that he’s been lying to her for years. So Teela is angry, grieving and traumatised. The rest of the series will follow her as she comes to terms with her trauma. In my Jirel of Joiry reviews, I argued that coming to terms with trauma was a common theme in sword and sorcery. However, it’s not a theme I expected a He-Man cartoon of all things to embrace.

The next episode is set several years later. Teela, now a hardened cynic and sporting a new haircut, is working as a mercenary with her friend, new character Andra. Mercenary is of course a time-honoured profession for any sword and sorcery hero, since sword and sorcery characters tend to be amoral drifters who will do the right thing eventually, but often only by accident. And so Teela and Andra mainly recover stolen magical artefacts. Because after the events at Castle Greyskull, magic is draining from Eternia and magical artefacts are now at a premium. Yes, Adam/He-Man not only got himself killed, he also failed to save Eternia, so his sacrifice was completely useless.

An old woman hires Teela and Andra to recover a magical goblet from Snake Mountain. Andra doesn’t want to go, but Teela has been there before (and promptly has a flashback of breaking into Snake Mountain with He-Man) and agrees to take the job. They find that with Skeletor dead, his old stronghold has been taken over by his former henchman Tri-Clops (the guy with the three rotating eyes), who has decided that magic is the root of all evil and must be eliminated and that technology is the future. Triclops has also founded a weird techno-cult that worships the Holy Motherboard (I bet Kevin Smith was proud of that pun) and turns it followers into cyborgs in a bit of very 1980s body horror. Tri-Clops and his techno-cult will become recurring antagonists for Teela and her friends. This whole magic versus technology subplot is reminiscent of the barbarism versus civilisation theme that runs through Robert E. Howard’s works from Kull via Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn to Conan and which also pops up in the correspondence between Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.

After some fighting (and a guest appearance by a Cthulhu-esque tentacle creature, because Cthulhu won’t be left out, if the rest of the gang is here), Teela and Andra manage to recover the magical goblet and are promptly enlisted by the old woman to deliver the goblet to Castle Greyskull, which is about the last place where Teela wants to go, since this is where her trauma occurred. Besides, King Randor has declared Castle Greyskull a forbidden zone, off limit to everybody on the pain of death (King Randor is not just a complete idiot, he’s also way too execution happy. Someone get rid of him and put Marlena in charge). But they’re mercenaries and mercenaries need to eat, so Teela finally agrees.

At Castle Greyskull, Teela and Andra find the Sorceress, aged and near death due to the loss of all magic. The old woman reveals herself to be Evil-Lyn in disguise (not a huge surprise, because Lena Headey’s voice is pretty distinctive). Surpise, Evil-Lyn and the Sorceress are now working together. Of yes, and Eternia and the whole universe is doomed, if the two halves of the sword of power aren’t combined again.

Cringer is there as well, to watch over the Sorceress (yeah, lots of help he’ll be). Cringer is also the one who persuades Teela, who still wants nothing to do with any of this, to take on the quest. Because just like Teela, Cringer is grieving – after all, he lost his best friend, too. Nonetheless, he tells Teela that life goes on and that she must go on the quest, lest Adam’s sacrifice be in vain.

Now a lot of 1980s toy tie-in cartoons had tagged on moral messages at the end, telling kids not to do drugs, skate on thin ice, run away from home or whatever. My kid self hated these messages, because they felt condescending and stupid. That said, He-Man’s moral messages were better than most, because they actually referred to the events in the episode you just watched. Kevin Smith chose to keep the moral messages, but integrates them into the actual plot instead.

The two halves of the sword of power have ended up in the realms of Subternia and Preternia, which are the Eternian equivalents of heaven and hell. So that’s where Teela and friends (i.e. Andra, Evil-Lyn and Beastman who is utterly devoted to Evil-Lyn and protects her) have to go. However, neither of them can reforge the sword of power. Luckily, Teela knows someone who can, so she goes to see her adopted Dad Duncan a.k.a. Man-at-Arms first.

Duncan is older and greyer than he used to be and tries to remain under the radar (after all, King Randor threatened him with execution, if he ever showed up again), though he still finds time to beat up street punks and tangle with Tri-Clops and his techno-cult. Duncan is happy enough to see his estranged daughter, though he doesn’t want to go with her, because he’s adopted more strays in the meantime, namely Roboto, a robot who has Duncan’s skills and memories, and Orko, who’s close to death due to the loss of magic in the world (and still mourning Adam as well).

Roboto is willing to accompany Teela and friends and since he has Duncan’s skills, he can reforge the sword, too. Orko also wants to come along and convinces Teela that he wants just one last adventure in a scene sure to make your eyes misty. Duncan finally agrees to come along as well (and in a nice bit of symbolism, dons his old helmet, which he’s been using as a fruit bowl), but Teela tells him to go to Castle Greyskull instead to protect the Sorceress, because Tri-Clops and his technocult are sure to attack Greyskull eventually and Cringer won’t be much of a help at all.

After some trouble with Mer-Man (whom Evil-Lyn calls a “treacherous trout”), Teela and friends finally reach the gates of Subternia, the land of the dead. The series turns into the Jirel of Joiry story “Black God’s Shadow” at this point with Subternia standing in for the basement of Castle Joiry with its portal to the underworld. The party is quickly separated and subjected to hallucinations which force them to deal with their fears. Roboto, Andra and Beastman fight zombies. Orko and Evil-Lyn end up in Orko’s home dimension of Trolla and bond, when Orko reveals that he was always a disappointment to his family, because he was so inept at using magic.

Meanwhile, Teela finds herself faced with Scareglow, an obscure toy from the original toy line that’s basically a glow-in-the-dark skeletor. George Daniel Lea has a great article about Scareglow and the horror tropes in Masters of the Universe: Revelation at Ginger Nuts of Horror. Scareglow is the ruler of Subternia and feeds on people’s fears. He also forces Teela to confront her fears. Yes, this is basically C.L. Moore’s “Black God’s Shadow” or Fritz Leiber’s “The Price of Pain-Ease” (which also has a magical artefact cut in half) only that the trauma Teela has to overcome is grief and the anger at being lied to and not sexual assault, as with Jirel.

So Teela finds herself fighting an evil version of He-Man, who mocks her and declares that he never cared about her, and then, her old self. Teela eventually taps into the magical powers she has inherited from her biological mother the Sorceress (another thing that everybody has lied to Teela about), powers that terrify her. She defeats Scareglow and recovers the sword.

However, Scareglow isn’t down for long and so he and his minions reappear, just as Teela and her friends are about to pass through the gate that leads from Subternia to Preternia. Orko uses the last of his magical powers to hold off Scareglow long enough so the others can escape and then expires. Yes, they killed Orko, too, the bastards. And yes, I cried, which surprised the heck out of me, because I didn’t particularly like Orko, the blatant comic relief.

In Preternia, they’re met by Adam who – since he was such a great hero in life – wound up in his world’s version of paradise after he died, together with all the other great heroes, where they all hang around and go on pretend hunts through the forest. The other heroes are basically Conan, Imaro (though he calls himself King Greyskull), a rare dark-haired He-Man prototype (explained by Marie Bilodeau at Black Gate) and a previous Sorceress.

Adam and Teela hug, though things are not at all okay between them, and build a gravestone for Orko, though there is no body left to bury. Adam also learns that his death was for nothing in the end, because they did not save the universeAdam also gives Teela the other half of the sword, though he has no idea if they can get back to Eternia.

Roboto reforges the sword, but is destroyed in the process and dies with the final words to Teela that she shall tell father that he made him better than expected, because Roboto is afraid of death and therefore truly human. And yeah, I cried some more – for a character I barely even remembered from the original.

Meanwhile, Imaro – pardon, King Greyskull – tells Adam and Teela that yes, there is a passage from his tower back to Eternia. He also warns Adam that once he goes through the passage, he can’t come back to Preternia. If he dies again, he’ll be just dead. Adam, of course, goes anyway.

And so the whole gang meets up at Castle Greyskull. Cringer is really, really happy to see Adam, as is Duncan. However, the castle is under attack by Tri-Clops and his techno-cult and the attacks are getting more frequent. In the vault under the castle, Adam draws the sword, speaks the magic words (and come on, we all said them out loud, just as we did as kids) and turns into He-Man. The magic begins to flow again and Castle Greyskull and the Sorceress are rejuvenated. All seems to end well, until…

…He-Man is stabbed from behind by Skeletor, who’s not dead but has been hiding in Evil-Lyn’s staff, apparently unbeknowst to her. He-Man reverts to Adam, Skeletor grabs the sword, says the magic words and turns into Super-Skeletor.

Yes, the first half season ends with the bad guy winning and gaining near absolute power, while the still grieving and traumatised Teela has to watch Adam die (or nearly die, since he’s not yet dead) for the second time.  As cliffhangers go, this one is a doozy.

I went into Masters of the Universe: Revelation expecting a bit of nostalgic fun. I got that, but I also got a lot more. For starters, I didn’t expect to get misty eyed watching a He-Man cartoon of all things, because US cartoons aren’t supposed to do that. And I even got misty-eyed for characters I didn’t particularly like as a kid.

Unlike the new She-Ra, Masters of the Universe: Revelation is still very recognisable the show we all remember from the 1980s. However, Kevin Smith also digs into the characters in a way that the original show never did nor could. Teela, Cringer, Orko, Duncan, Roboto, Evil-Lyn are all given more character development here than they got in three seasons of the original. And even the moral messages manage to be not annoying, but actually fit into the plot.

Furthermore, Kevin Smith draws on the sword and sorcery origins of Masters of the Universe: Revelation and injects some of the themes common in the genre into the series. We have the cynical hero broken down by life redeeming themselves, we have barbarism versus civilisation recast as technology versus magic and we have the quest to come to terms with one’s trauma, including the literal journey into the underworld that tends to come part and parcel with these sort of quests. In fact, recognising all the influences and motifs was one of the things I enjoyed most about Masters of the Universe: Revelation.

I’m not sure how Masters of the Universe: Revelation will play for the younger fans who never watched the original cartoons and who fell in love with the new She-Ra. I’m also not sure how it will play for the kids who are the actual target audience, since this show is pretty damn dark, darker than kids cartoons usually are, even in our modern era. And yeah, the aggrieved fan boys who can’t stand the fact that there are girl cooties in their favourite childhood cartoon (even though Teela, Evil-Lyn and the Sorceress always were prominent characters) will hate it like they hate everything. But Masters of the Universe: Revelation is a very good take on a beloved cartoon and one which is actually made for those who loved the original as kids. And it’s nice to be the target audience again for once.

Finally – we can hope, can we? – She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and Masters of the Universe: Revelation may well be the impetus the sword and sorcery genre needs for a large scale revival.

ETA: Also check out Arturo Serrano’s great review of Masters of the Universe: Revelation at nerds of a feather.

Eternia Revisited – Some Reflections on Master of the Universe: Revelation

Like everybody who was a kid in the early 1980s and had access to US cartoons, I watched the original He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series. Though I was lucky, because the “access to US cartoons” part was not a given in the three TV channel world of 1980s West Germany, where children’s programming had to be wholesome and the likes of He-Man or indeed anything that promised more thrills than Heidi or Maja the Bee (both of which ironically were Japanese takes on European children’s classics) was deemed “violent American trash” and not available, unless you were one of the lucky few to have cable and access to private TV.

Because I lived in a rural area, we did not have private TV at home until February 27, 1989 (and the fact that I can still tell you the exact date more than thirty years later should tell you what a momentous occasion that was). However, my Dad worked in the Netherlands from 1983 to 1989 and had a flat in the centre of Rotterdam (quite literally with a view of Rotterdam’s townhall). And that flat came with cable TV, which meant that during the holidays I could watch all the cartoons on Sky Channel courtesy of the DJ Kat Show  and Fun Factory. Those shows aired all the good stuff – M.A.S.K., Transformers, Jem, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Ulysses 31, The Care Bears, Bravestar, G.I. Joe, Inspector Gadget, Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs, The Galaxy Rangers, Blackstar, G.I. Joe, both versions of Ghostbusters and yes, the original He-Man and She-Ra. And I watched it all and loved that stuff – except for Roger Ramjet, whom I hated with a passion and phantasised about throwing into the canal outside the apartment.

At the time, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was not my favourite. I preferred his sister She-Ra and if you’d asked me for my favourite cartoon of them all, it would have been either Jem or M.A.S.K. (before M.A.S.K. fell from grace due to a character doing something that deeply disturbed me) as well as the Japanese Candy, Candy anime (which aired on Belgian TV at around the same time, so I always get it mixed up with the others) and Defenders of the Earth, the joy of which I could share with my parents who knew the characters from their newspaper comic adventures. That said, I remember He-Man fondly, because He-Man was very much ubiquitous, simply because there were so many more He-Man episodes than most of the others.

I never had any He-Man toys, nor any of the other cartoon toys, even though my parents would probably have bought them for me, if I’d asked (I did have a sizeable collection of Strawberry Shortcake figurines, after all). But I never asked, because by that point I had internalised that He-Man, She-Ra, Jem, Transformers, M.A.S.K. et al were violent American trash that nice kids were not supposed to enjoy. I don’t even know how I came to internalise this, since my parents never had any problems with me watching the cartoons. I did eventually acquire a Teela action figure as a flea market find in the late 1980s.

Those cartoons were basically 25-minute toy ads and I knew that even as a kid (especially since the commercial breaks helpfully ran ads for the very same toys). Nonetheless, I loved them. They also had a big influence on me – how big I wouldn’t realise until many years later. And I’m far from the only one. Look at how many reboots, reimaginationings, live action versions, etc… of 1980s kid cartoons there have been in recent years. For example, right now Snake Eyes, a pretty neat looking movie based on the ninja character from G.I. Joe, is in the theatres. They may only have been glorified toy commercials, but those cartoons influenced a whole generation and have outlasted many of the more serious and wholesome media of the same era. At any rate, I don’t see a big screen Löwenzahn reboot anywhere. As for wholesome and educational cartoons, how wholsome and educational does Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids look now, knowing what we know about Bill Cosby?

The reason why those glorified toy commercials endured, while other media of the same era faded away is that – as comic creator Jerzy Drozd explains in this YouTube video – they did a lot of things very well. They also had some very talented people working on them, e.g. J. Michael Straczynski got his start writing scripts for He-Man, She-Ra, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors and others.

Another thing that those cartoons did was serve as a gateway to SFF and its subgenres for many kids of the era. Because a lot of the cartoons of the 1970s and 1980s were based either directly or indirectly on SFF of the pulp era. One of my formational science fiction influences, along with reruns of the original Star Trek and Raumpatrouille Orion as well as Time Tunnel and Space 1999, was the 1978 Captain Future anime, which blew my mind when it aired in West Germany in the early 1980s. Decades later, I found out that the show was a remarkably accurate adaptation of Edmond Hamilton’s Captain Future pulp stories from the 1940s.

For other cartoons, the inspiration was less overt, but still very notable to anybody who’s familiar with the pulp SFF of the 1930s and 1940s. In one episode of the excellent Rogues in the House sword and sorcery podcast, one of the hosts said that his introduction to sword and sorcery was He-Man, followed by Conan the Destroyer. My own experience was very similar. True, I had heard the name Conan by the time the original He-Man cartoon started in 1983, but all I knew about Conan was

a) that he was a barbarian
b) that he was played by Arnold Schwarzenegger who was from Austria originally, and
c) that he was violent American trash that nobody should watch or read

By the late 1980s, I had also picked up that Conan’s creator had committed suicide, based on a 1989 diary entry in which I muse about whether suicide is an occupational hazard for writers and list as examples Ernest Hemingway, “the guy who wrote Chess Novella” (Stefan Zweig) and “the guy who wrote Conan the Barbarian”.

However, my true introduction to sword and sorcery were the sword and sorcery influenced cartoons of the 1980s, followed by various Franco-Belgian-Dutch sword and sorcery comics of the same era. Not only did what eventually became Masters of the Universe originally start out as a Conan toyline, Eternia is also very much a grab bag of sword and sorcery influences. He-Man is basically a Frank Frazetta Conan cover come to animated life and given a dye job (or John Jakes’ Brak the Barbarian with a haircut), while Teela is C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry (a parallel that Masters of the Universe: Revelation makes very clear). Orko is the less capable relative of Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes from Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. Mer-Man and his mer-people are Lovecraft’s Deep Ones by another name, the Snake Men literally are the Serpent Men from Robert E. Howard’s Kull stories. There are also various Cthulhu inspired things with tentacles. Skeletor is certainly influenced by Howard villains such as Thoth-Amon and Thulsa Doom, who also affects the skull face look. Scareglow, a glow-in-the-dark Skeletor variant which does appear in Masters of the Universe: Revelation, is borrowed from the Floating Skull, a villain in the Conan story “Red Nails”. Though Eternia also borrows a lot from the related sword and planet genre, since the Eternians do have energy weapons and all sorts of impractical but cool vehicles.

When Masters of the Universe: Revelation was originally announced, I was initially wary, because a lot of the recent reboots and reimaginations of classic 1980s cartoons hadn’t really delivered what attracted me to the originals. The recent She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is a good example. By all accounts, it was a very good cartoon, but the animation style was so offputting to me that I just couldn’t watch it (not that the original animation was actually good). Which is okay, because I’m really not the target audience for those shows anymore and the ones which are the target audience apparently enjoyed the show. The Masters of the Universe: Revelation trailers, on the other hand, looked promising and actually like the He-Man and friends I remembered. And when the reactions to the show were largely positive – aside from the usual aggravated fanboys – I decided to give it a watch.

Warning: Spoilers below!

Masters of the Universe: Revelation is very much a continuation of the original show – 35 years after it went off the air – featuring all the familiar characters and cool but impractical vehicles and even the moral messages, silly humour and groanworthy puns and nonetheless manages to bring something new to the familiar story, including a couple of shocks and surprises.

The biggest surprise is probably that Masters of the Universe: Revelation is actually more Teela’s story than He-Man’s, which is perfectly fine by me, because Teela was always my favourite, though the usual suspects are of course aggravated, because Kevin Smith got girl cooties all over the Masters of the Universe.

The first half season starts out with Teela being finally granted the status of Man-at-Arms for her service to the kingdom of Eternia. Fun fact: When I first watched the original cartoon in the 1980s, I didn’t know what a man-at-arms was and assumed it was simply the name of the character. When I encountered the term in its original meaning some time later, I kept picturing the He-Man character. There’s a big celebration for Teela and everybody is there, including the original Man-at-Arms, who’s also Teela’s adopted Dad, Prince Adam, King Randor and Queen Marlena, Cringer, being terrified as always, and Orko, being inept as always.

But the forces of evil do not sleep and so Skeletor launches yet another attempt to conquer Castle Greyskull, using the fake robot double of He-Man (apparently, the character is called Faker) as well as Evil Lyn and her magic. Skeletor does manage to get into the Castle and hold the Sorceress at bay (though you wonder how she fell for the fake robo He-Man a second time) and inists that he wants something that is buried under Castle Greyskull, namely the orb from which all magic in Eternia flows. The editing is quite clever here, because we do not see Adam at Teela’s party (and indeed, people wonder where he is, suggesting that he’s off heroing), until the fake robo-He-Man is revealed. And since I had forgotten this particular plot point, I was genuinely surprised.

The Sorceress manages to call for help, the good guys show up and a massive battle ensues. In the course of this battle, Skeletor manages to trick He-Man into stabbing him (“You finally figured out how to use that sword”, Skeletor says, a reference to the fact that He-Man never actually used his sword to fight in the original cartoon, 1980s censors being nervous about fighting with sharp pointy things) and thus opening the vault wherein the orb rests. Once the energy in the orb is released, it will destroy all of Eternia and the rest of the universe, unless someone absorbs the energy. He-Man, being his usual heroic self, offers to absorb the energy, by drawing the sword of power and calling on the power of Greyskull, while already in He-Man. He is warned that this could kill him, but – being the hero that he is – does it anyway.

As a result, Eternia is saved for now, but at a terrible cost. The sword of power breaks in two halves and He-Man briefly reverts to Adam (in front of the eyes of Teela, who has no idea that Adam is He-Man) before he and Skeletor are disintegrated. Yes, Masters of the Universe: Revelation seemingly kills off both He-Man and Skeletor – the protagonist and antagonist – at the end of the first episode. This is a true shocker – also see Tor.com reviewer Leah Schnelbach’s reaction – and it’s not going to remain the only one.

The aftermath of this double (triple, if you count Adam and He-Man as two people) death is similarly shocking. King Randor finally learns that his son was He-Man and that he’s also dead in the worst possible way (Marlena, being smarter than her idiotic husband, knew all along). He has a freak out, blames Duncan a.k.a. Man-at-Arms, strips him of his rank, banishes him from the palace and forbids him to return at the threat of execution (because now that the main protector of your kingdom is dead, it’s a really smart move to kick out the other person capable of protecting the realm). Teela, who is both mourning her best friend and also furious that everybody she ever cared for lied to her, takes off her iconic headband and quits. And that, folks, is just the end of episode one.

Now Teela is absolutely justified in being furious. For starters, it never made any sense to me that she didn’t know Adam was He-Man. In the original cartoon, she’d have to be blind not to notice, because He-Man was literally Adam with his clothes off. Masters of the Universe: Revelation handles this better by making Adam the skinny and scrawny kid he’s supposed to be. But nonetheless, Teela was in every single episode of the original He-Man and accompanied He-Man, Orko, Cringer/Battlecat and Man-at-Arms on every single adventure. She’s capable and heroic (unlike Orko and Cringer) and should have been let in on the secret of He-Man’s identity and indeed, there is no reason why she wasn’t, except for the annoying cliché that the love interest never knows secret of the duel identity hero, causing dual identity heroes to be stuck in love triangles with themselves.

The fact that Lois Lane did not know that Clark Kent was Superman for decades is probably the best known example of that trope, but it’s not the only one or the earliest. The earliest example is probably The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy from 1905 (and for all that’s holy, don’t read the original book, because it’s terrible). Zorro, created by Johnston McCulley in 1919 (and here the original novel The Curse of Capistrano is well worth reading) is probably the best known example pre-Superman.

I’ve always hated that trope, even as a kid, because it made no sense to me. Cause why could those dual identity heroes not even trust the woman they supposedly love? Especially since telling the truth would solve so many problems. Sometime in the late 1980s, I came across Frank Miller’s Daredevil run, where Matt Murdock’s love interest Karen Page sells out his secret identity to his sworn enemy Kingpin in exchange for drugs (yes, this really happened and it’s not the worst thing that happened to poor Matt Murdock either) and thought, “Okay, so that’s why all of those superheroes never tell their significant others about their secret identity, because they all know what happened to Daredevil. But still, isn’t that a little far-fetched, cause how high is the likelihood of something like that happening again.”

So in short, there was absolutely no reason not to tell Teela that Adam was He-Man and therefore, her anger is completely understandable. Not to mention that Teela has just lost her best friend and learned that he’s been lying to her for years. So Teela is angry, grieving and traumatised. The rest of the series will follow her as she comes to terms with her trauma. In my Jirel of Joiry reviews, I argued that coming to terms with trauma was a common theme in sword and sorcery. However, it’s not a theme I expected a He-Man cartoon of all things to embrace.

The next episode is set several years later. Teela, now a hardened cynic and sporting a new haircut, is working as a mercenary with her friend, new character Andra. Mercenary is of course a time-honoured profession for any sword and sorcery hero, since sword and sorcery characters tend to be amoral drifters who will do the right thing eventually, but often only by accident. And so Teela and Andra mainly recover stolen magical artefacts. Because after the events at Castle Greyskull, magic is draining from Eternia and magical artefacts are now at a premium. Yes, Adam/He-Man not only got himself killed, he also failed to save Eternia, so his sacrifice was completely useless.

An old woman hires Teela and Andra to recover a magical goblet from Snake Mountain. Andra doesn’t want to go, but Teela has been there before (and promptly has a flashback of breaking into Snake Mountain with He-Man) and agrees to take the job. They find that with Skeletor dead, his old stronghold has been taken over by his former henchman Tri-Clops (the guy with the three rotating eyes), who has decided that magic is the root of all evil and must be eliminated and that technology is the future. Triclops has also founded a weird techno-cult that worships the Holy Motherboard (I bet Kevin Smith was proud of that pun) and turns it followers into cyborgs in a bit of very 1980s body horror. Tri-Clops and his techno-cult will become recurring antagonists for Teela and her friends. This whole magic versus technology subplot is reminiscent of the barbarism versus civilisation theme that runs through Robert E. Howard’s works from Kull via Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn to Conan and which also pops up in the correspondence between Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.

After some fighting (and a guest appearance by a Cthulhu-esque tentacle creature, because Cthulhu won’t be left out, if the rest of the gang is here), Teela and Andra manage to recover the magical goblet and are promptly enlisted by the old woman to deliver the goblet to Castle Greyskull, which is about the last place where Teela wants to go, since this is where her trauma occurred. Besides, King Randor has declared Castle Greyskull a forbidden zone, off limit to everybody on the pain of death (King Randor is not just a complete idiot, he’s also way too execution happy. Someone get rid of him and put Marlena in charge). But they’re mercenaries and mercenaries need to eat, so Teela finally agrees.

At Castle Greyskull, Teela and Andra find the Sorceress, aged and near death due to the loss of all magic. The old woman reveals herself to be Evil-Lyn in disguise (not a huge surprise, because Lena Headey’s voice is pretty distinctive). Surpise, Evil-Lyn and the Sorceress are now working together. Of yes, and Eternia and the whole universe is doomed, if the two halves of the sword of power aren’t combined again.

Cringer is there as well, to watch over the Sorceress (yeah, lots of help he’ll be). Cringer is also the one who persuades Teela, who still wants nothing to do with any of this, to take on the quest. Because just like Teela, Cringer is grieving – after all, he lost his best friend, too. Nonetheless, he tells Teela that life goes on and that she must go on the quest, lest Adam’s sacrifice be in vain.

Now a lot of 1980s toy tie-in cartoons had tagged on moral messages at the end, telling kids not to do drugs, skate on thin ice, run away from home or whatever. My kid self hated these messages, because they felt condescending and stupid. That said, He-Man’s moral messages were better than most, because they actually referred to the events in the episode you just watched. Kevin Smith chose to keep the moral messages, but integrates them into the actual plot instead.

The two halves of the sword of power have ended up in the realms of Subternia and Preternia, which are the Eternian equivalents of heaven and hell. So that’s where Teela and friends (i.e. Andra, Evil-Lyn and Beastman who is utterly devoted to Evil-Lyn and protects her) have to go. However, neither of them can reforge the sword of power. Luckily, Teela knows someone who can, so she goes to see her adopted Dad Duncan a.k.a. Man-at-Arms first.

Duncan is older and greyer than he used to be and tries to remain under the radar (after all, King Randor threatened him with execution, if he ever showed up again), though he still finds time to beat up street punks and tangle with Tri-Clops and his techno-cult. Duncan is happy enough to see his estranged daughter, though he doesn’t want to go with her, because he’s adopted more strays in the meantime, namely Roboto, a robot who has Duncan’s skills and memories, and Orko, who’s close to death due to the loss of magic in the world (and still mourning Adam as well).

Roboto is willing to accompany Teela and friends and since he has Duncan’s skills, he can reforge the sword, too. Orko also wants to come along and convinces Teela that he wants just one last adventure in a scene sure to make your eyes misty. Duncan finally agrees to come along as well (and in a nice bit of symbolism, dons his old helmet, which he’s been using as a fruit bowl), but Teela tells him to go to Castle Greyskull instead to protect the Sorceress, because Tri-Clops and his technocult are sure to attack Greyskull eventually and Cringer won’t be much of a help at all.

After some trouble with Mer-Man (whom Evil-Lyn calls a “treacherous trout”), Teela and friends finally reach the gates of Subternia, the land of the dead. The series turns into the Jirel of Joiry story “Black God’s Shadow” at this point with Subternia standing in for the basement of Castle Joiry with its portal to the underworld. The party is quickly separated and subjected to hallucinations which force them to deal with their fears. Roboto, Andra and Beastman fight zombies. Orko and Evil-Lyn end up in Orko’s home dimension of Trolla and bond, when Orko reveals that he was always a disappointment to his family, because he was so inept at using magic.

Meanwhile, Teela finds herself faced with Scareglow, an obscure toy from the original toy line that’s basically a glow-in-the-dark skeletor. George Daniel Lea has a great article about Scareglow and the horror tropes in Masters of the Universe: Revelation at Ginger Nuts of Horror. Scareglow is the ruler of Subternia and feeds on people’s fears. He also forces Teela to confront her fears. Yes, this is basically C.L. Moore’s “Black God’s Shadow” or Fritz Leiber’s “The Price of Pain-Ease” (which also has a magical artefact cut in half) only that the trauma Teela has to overcome is grief and the anger at being lied to and not sexual assault, as with Jirel.

So Teela finds herself fighting an evil version of He-Man, who mocks her and declares that he never cared about her, and then, her old self. Teela eventually taps into the magical powers she has inherited from her biological mother the Sorceress (another thing that everybody has lied to Teela about), powers that terrify her. She defeats Scareglow and recovers the sword.

However, Scareglow isn’t down for long and so he and his minions reappear, just as Teela and her friends are about to pass through the gate that leads from Subternia to Preternia. Orko uses the last of his magical powers to hold off Scareglow long enough so the others can escape and then expires. Yes, they killed Orko, too, the bastards. And yes, I cried, which surprised the heck out of me, because I didn’t particularly like Orko, the blatant comic relief.

In Preternia, they’re met by Adam who – since he was such a great hero in life – wound up in his world’s version of paradise after he died, together with all the other great heroes, where they all hang around and go on pretend hunts through the forest. The other heroes are basically Conan, Imaro (though he calls himself King Greyskull), a rare dark-haired He-Man prototype (explained by Marie Bilodeau at Black Gate) and a previous Sorceress.

Adam and Teela hug, though things are not at all okay between them, and build a gravestone for Orko, though there is no body left to bury. Adam also learns that his death was for nothing in the end, because they did not save the universeAdam also gives Teela the other half of the sword, though he has no idea if they can get back to Eternia.

Roboto reforges the sword, but is destroyed in the process and dies with the final words to Teela that she shall tell father that he made him better than expected, because Roboto is afraid of death and therefore truly human. And yeah, I cried some more – for a character I barely even remembered from the original.

Meanwhile, Imaro – pardon, King Greyskull – tells Adam and Teela that yes, there is a passage from his tower back to Eternia. He also warns Adam that once he goes through the passage, he can’t come back to Preternia. If he dies again, he’ll be just dead. Adam, of course, goes anyway.

And so the whole gang meets up at Castle Greyskull. Cringer is really, really happy to see Adam, as is Duncan. However, the castle is under attack by Tri-Clops and his techno-cult and the attacks are getting more frequent. In the vault under the castle, Adam draws the sword, speaks the magic words (and come on, we all said them out loud, just as we did as kids) and turns into He-Man. The magic begins to flow again and Castle Greyskull and the Sorceress are rejuvenated. All seems to end well, until…

…He-Man is stabbed from behind by Skeletor, who’s not dead but has been hiding in Evil-Lyn’s staff, apparently unbeknowst to her. He-Man reverts to Adam, Skeletor grabs the sword, says the magic words and turns into Super-Skeletor.

Yes, the first half season ends with the bad guy winning and gaining near absolute power, while the still grieving and traumatised Teela has to watch Adam die (or nearly die, since he’s not yet dead) for the second time.  As cliffhangers go, this one is a doozy.

I went into Masters of the Universe: Revelation expecting a bit of nostalgic fun. I got that, but I also got a lot more. For starters, I didn’t expect to get misty eyed watching a He-Man cartoon of all things, because US cartoons aren’t supposed to do that. And I even got misty-eyed for characters I didn’t particularly like as a kid.

Unlike the new She-Ra, Masters of the Universe: Revelation is still very recognisable the show we all remember from the 1980s. However, Kevin Smith also digs into the characters in a way that the original show never did nor could. Teela, Cringer, Orko, Duncan, Roboto, Evil-Lyn are all given more character development here than they got in three seasons of the original. And even the moral messages manage to be not annoying, but actually fit into the plot.

Furthermore, Kevin Smith draws on the sword and sorcery origins of Masters of the Universe: Revelation and injects some of the themes common in the genre into the series. We have the cynical hero broken down by life redeeming themselves, we have barbarism versus civilisation recast as technology versus magic and we have the quest to come to terms with one’s trauma, including the literal journey into the underworld that tends to come part and parcel with these sort of quests. In fact, recognising all the influences and motifs was one of the things I enjoyed most about Masters of the Universe: Revelation.

I’m not sure how Masters of the Universe: Revelation will play for the younger fans who never watched the original cartoons and who fell in love with the new She-Ra. I’m also not sure how it will play for the kids who are the actual target audience, since this show is pretty damn dark, darker than kids cartoons usually are, even in our modern era. And yeah, the aggrieved fan boys who can’t stand the fact that there are girl cooties in their favourite childhood cartoon (even though Teela, Evil-Lyn and the Sorceress always were prominent characters) will hate it like they hate everything. But Masters of the Universe: Revelation is a very good take on a beloved cartoon and one which is actually made for those who loved the original as kids. And it’s nice to be the target audience again for once.

Finally – we cna hope, can we? – She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and Masters of the Universe: Revelation may well be the impetus the sword and sorcery genre needs for a large scale revival.

First Monday Free Fiction: Blasters of Forever

Welcome to the August 2021 edition of First Monday Free Fiction.

To recap, inspired by Kristine Kathryn Rusch who posts a free short story every week on her blog, I’ll post a free story on the first Monday of every month. At the end of the month, I’ll take the story down and post another.

I’ve been watching Master of the Universe: Revelation, which prompted me to think about those 1980s cartoons, which were basically just glorified toy commercials and yet had a huge impact on a whole generation of kids. So what better story to share today than Blasters of Forever, which takes the impact such a 1980s toy tie-in cartoon can have on future generations to its logical end.

So follow cartoon screenwriter Simon as he meets the…

Blasters of Forever

They burst out of the swirling time vortex to a fanfare of electronic music. The Blasters of Forever.

They were remarkable, sensational, awesome. More awesome than the Magnadragons, more awesome Dana Star and the Dynonoids, more awesome even than Ace Thunder and the Ultrasaurs and those had all been pretty damn awesome indeed. The Blasters of Forever, however, were the most awesome thing ever in the world of toy tie-in cartoons.

They were… plastic. Injection moulded ABS, painted in bright Day-Glo colours, studded with iridescent plastic gems and partly coated with metallic paint that was the latest nano-micro-whatever technology, semi-experimental and pretty damn expensive.

They were truly awesome. Or at least they were supposed to be. Because when Simon lifted them one by one out of the box, the big cardboard box labelled “Design Prototypes! No Unauthorized Handling!”, they looked considerably less than awesome. In fact, they looked like cheap junk. Cheap junk made by forced labour in a squalid factory somewhere in the Far East. And Simon was in charge of turning them into the most awesome thing ever, this year’s must-have Christmas toy.

Simon was good at this, good at turning cheap junk into the most fucking awesome thing ever. He’d started out with Billy Galactic and the Magicdogs, a line of stupid stuffed toy dogs that were, well, magic. All right, so they toy dogs weren’t magic at all, though they had voice chips that said things like “Abracadabra” and “Simsalabim” and broke down after roughly five hundred activations. A lively kid could go through those in two weeks.

Everybody had known that the Magicdogs were kind of naff, even the manufacturer. But Simon had come up with a story about magical dogs from outer space, stranded in an earthly dog pound and fighting crime, the sort of petty crime that didn’t freak out the censors, of course. The resulting cartoon, drawn somewhere in the Far East in an assembly line studio that was probably right next to the toy factory and offered only marginally better working conditions, had been a hit. It hadn’t quite catapulted the Magicdogs into the top 5 of Christmas toys, but it had sold more stuffed toy dogs with voice chips than anybody ever expected. Not bad for a toy everyone in the know had expected to tank.

From then on Simon played in the big leagues. The Magnadragons had been next. They were plastic dragons who changed colour when exposed to hot water. The colour-changing thing had been the hottest toy gimmick three years ago. Everyone had been doing it, even Barbie. The story that Simon had come up with was about prehistoric dragons living inside a volcano, trapped by hot magma (he’d initially misread “magna” as “magma” and by the time he realised his mistake, it was too late to change it), only to emerge in our time and fight crime.

Next came Dana Star And The Dynonoids, one of the rare action toy lines aimed at girls. They were cheap plastic dolls with garish neon-coloured hair and some kind of electric light-up action. Once Simon was done with them, Dana Star was a princess from outer space. When her evil twin Dee Dee Star usurped Dana’s throne, Dana fled to Earth with her girl pals the Dynonoids, who just happened to be cyborgs with special powers, since cyborgisation with a teen rite of passage in Dana’s world, just as a nose job for overprivileged girls was in ours. On Earth, they posed as a pop band. And fought crime, of course.

Dana Star And The Dynonoids had been a huge hit, even in the notoriously difficult girls’ action figure market. And Dana’s success had landed Simon his biggest job to date, Ace Thunder and the Ultrasaurs, last year’s must-have Christmas toy. The Ultrasaurs were dinosaurs that could transform into vehicles for reasons best known to themselves. A total Transformers rip-off, but the manufacturer had faith in the product. And they had hired Simon to come up with the story that would sell it to the public. And oh, what a story it was!

There was a palaeontologist (though Simon hadn’t been allowed to use that term — too difficult for the kiddies), the implausibly named Ace Thunder. He had a time machine — didn’t all palaeontologists? — and travelled back in time to study dinosaurs. But the evil Dr. Cyberpunk (Simon was still proud of that little in-joke) also travelled back in time to turn dinosaurs into ruthless cybernetic killing machines, because… well, that’s just what villains did, wasn’t it? Come up with really convoluted and idiotic plans to conquer the world. However, the heroic Ace Thunder saved some dinosaurs from Dr. Cyberpunk’s psychic enslavement and took them back with him to the future, where Ace Thunder and his Ultrasaurs battled Dr Cyberpunk and his Cybersaurs. It was all total bunk, of course, but no one cared about such little matters such as logic and scientific accuracy in what was in essence an extended toy commercial.

Ace Thunder was still selling well and in fact, he and Dr. Cyberpunk both had just returned to the Jurassic age to convert more dinosaurs into Ultra- and Cybersaurs, so the manufacturer could sell even more toys. But that was no longer Simon’s concern. Once the basic background story was in place, his job was done.

Now on to the Blasters of Forever, his mission for this year’s Christmas season. They were obviously time travellers, the silly name suggested as much. Of course, time travel has also featured prominently in Ace Thunder, which might be a problem. But on the other hand, cyborgisation had featured prominently in both Ace Thunder and Dana Star and no one had batted an eyelash at that. Dinosaurs and teen pop stars were sufficiently different, so no one cared that they both happened to be cyborgs.

Next question was, what did the Blasters of Forever actually do? The toys, that was, not the characters. Because whatever stupid feature the toys had — and they were almost all stupid — it had to be incorporated into the storyline. So Simon picked up the prototypes, began to play around with them a little, then thought the better of it. After all, the last thing he wanted to do was accidentally break one of the prototypes while trying to figure out what it could do. And the damn things were always so damn breakable. During his second assignment, he’d dumped one of the Magnadragons into a pot of scalding hot water and permanently messed up the colour changing mechanism into an ugly, mottled grey. And last year, he’d accidentally broken one of the Ultrasaurs halfway through the transformation into a Lamborghini. The manufacturer hadn’t been too angry, at least Simon’s clumsiness had pointed out a fatal design flaw, that might’ve led to lawsuits and kids swallowing things, if not corrected. But it had still been a costly mistake.

So he reached for the documentation that accompanied the prototypes instead. This wasn’t the sort of colourful booklets that accompanied the mass-produced toys. No this was a sheaf of loose papers, badly typed and badly xeroxed. There were design drawings, too, that might have depicted anything from a toy figure to the top secret plans for an underground nuclear facility. And finally patent applications, documenting in excruciating detail what exactly this particular piece of toy innovation could do.

It seemed they’d come up with something new for the Blasters of Forever. They were equipped with little lamps that lit up and a loudspeaker that emitted a ZAP sound. Nothing new there, Dana Star and her Dynanoids had been able to do that two years ago. But what was new about the Blasters of Forever was that the little lamp and the loudspeaker were activated by an infrared signal that was triggered when a kid hit the sensor on the figure’s chest with an infrared toy gun. The toy gun was helpfully included in the shipment as well, on the very bottom of the big cardboard box. It was a wicked looking thing of black and gold plastic that made wicked sounding noises when the trigger was pressed. The infrared mechanism that activated the tiny lamps on the figures was also surprisingly useful for switching the TV on and off — and so much cooler than the regular remote control.

When the toys went into serial production, the enclosed documentation said, every figure would also include a target disc the kids could pin to their closes to play tag with the infrared guns, should they ever get bored shooting at action figures. All of which, Simon had to admit, sounded like a really cool idea. And one that was sure to be controversial with parents, educators and the usual killjoys.

Okay. How to counter them and hopefully pre-empt any criticism they might possibly have? Hmm, shooting at action figures they would probably tolerate, after all they had tolerated it before. But shooting at other kids, even if it was just shooting with glorified remote controls at sensor discs pinned to their clothes? No way. That was glorifying violence, glorifying killing, glorifying war. Unless…

It wasn’t really killing, of course. No, the Blasters of Forever were pacifists. All toy tie-in cartoon characters were, even the bad guys. And when the Blasters of Forever zapped someone with their impressive looking blaster pistols, they didn’t kill them. No, they just… sent them back to the future, whence they all came, to stand trial for their crimes.

Yes, that was it! The Blasters of Forever were future cops, travelling through time to track down criminals hiding out in the distant past to evade the law. Of course, the criminals would be fairly non-violent folks, the sort that never did worse than robbing banks and maybe occasionally indulging in a little kidnapping and blackmail. Nothing so violent and gory that it would wake up the guardians of decency — and how tempted Simon was to at least once tag one of his supervillain groups with that name.

All right, so the basic concept was in place: The Blasters of Forever were a members of a futuristic police force created specifically to bring time travelling criminals to justice. And the criminals would time travel because… the evil Doctor Fate? — nope, DC Comics had dibs on that one — Time? — too boring — Chronos? — Yes, that one sounded good. Okay, so the evil Doctor Chronos, who was evil because he was evil, had built a time portal which allowed all sorts of criminal scum to flee into the past. But the Blasters of Forever had a time portal as well and travelled into the past to track down the minions of Doctor Chronos all over history.

Yes! This one had everything. Time travel, likable heroes on a mission, a dastardly villain who wasn’t too violent, plenty of opportunity for adventure in varied locals, a compelling storyline which incorporated the toys’ functionality and allowed for infinite expansion by adding new characters. Hell, there even was an opportunity for education — always a plus — by having the Blasters meet up with inspirational historical figures in the past. They could meet George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jesus, Elvis — okay, maybe not the last three. Jesus was taboo, Martin Luther King would upset the racist demographic and Elvis hadn’t been dead long enough yet. Still, the possibilities… they were limitless.

Simon was on fire now, alternately scribbling down notes and hacking away on his state of the art IBM AT compatible. He came up with a detailed background story, names and capsule biographies for the characters, skeleton plots for half a season worth of cartoon episodes and a suitably pompous opening narration. He even got out the MIDI keyboard that was all that remained from his never-was career as a pop star and began composing the theme song, complete with lyrics.

Blasters of Forever — fighting… fading never? Nope, fading made no sense in this context. Fighting, losing never? No, that didn’t scan properly. Fighting, fainting never? Now that was just silly. Fighting, failing never — yes, that was it.

Blasters of Forever — fighting, failing never…

He could see the title sequence in front of his mind’s eye now. A swirling, multicoloured time vortex. Tiny at first, just a ripple, a small eddy. Then getting bigger and bigger as the portal opened like a camera lens. Music, electronic of course, gradually swelling along with the portal. Until the vortex suddenly opened and the Blasters of Forever burst through, while the lyrics kicked in.

Simon could picture it so clearly that the air in the room seemed to ripple, as if the vortex was opening right here inside his office on his wall. It felt so real that the sudden change in pressure made his ears pop and the air rushing through the portal ruffled his hair and stung his skin. He could see it now, too, really see the vortex swirling and twirling in all the colours of an electric Technicolor rainbow. And it was fabulous.

And here they came, the Blasters of Forever, resplendent in their glittery armour, futuristic blaster weapons at their hips. They looked stunning, absolutely stunning. The kids would love them, the manufacturer would love them, everyone would love them and Simon would get filthy rich, so filthy rich that he might even get a proper screenwriting job, writing proper scripts for proper movies and not junk cartoons for kids.

Hell, maybe he’d even get People on a Bridge made, the screenplay he’d been working on these past three years and the best thing he’d ever written.

It was only when the portal popped close and the resulting blast of air hit Simon and hurled him against the far wall of his apartment that he realised there was something wrong. Something was very wrong here.

Sometimes, when he was in the zone, when his neurons were firing on all cylinders, he’d been able to see, really see, the story he was just creating in front of his mind’s eye. Sometimes he could even hear the music. It was just like watching the finished cartoon, only that in the cinema of his mind the animation was never jerky, the colours were never faded, the music was never warbly and tinny. No, in his mind everything always looked brilliant and bright and real. Like he’d been hired to create storylines and theme songs for full-length animated Disney films, not for glorified toy commercials.

But the films in his mind had never looked like this. They had never looked quite so real. He’d never been able to see the characters in three dimensions, had never been able to make out individual strands of stray hair blowing into their masked faces or slight chinks and scratches marring the perfection of their futuristic armour. And the swirling, rainbow coloured vortex effect had never been superimposed on the grey walls of his apartment before. No, this was all too real. Uncannily real.

“Greetings, Simon St. John,” the lead Blaster intoned in a baritone voice, “Greetings to you, one of the greatest artists of all time and inspiration for our exploits.”

That was new as well. Because before — whenever he’d been able to see his creations in his mind’s eye in glorious full Technicolor animation — they’d never spoken, at least not to him.

“Uhm, what?” Simon stammered, still backed against the wall.

“Our squad commander wishes to present his greetings to you, Simon St. John,” another Blaster said in a distinctly feminine voice. No real surprise there, after all her armour was pink and had boobs. “And explain what a great honour it is to meet the man who inspired us all right here and now, on the eve of your greatest creation.”

Simon said nothing. He just stared at the Blasters of Forever as they stood right there in his dingy apartment, their glorious futuristic armour gleaming in the wan light of his desk lamp.

“Matt Infinity,” he finally stammered, pointing at the rightmost Blaster in blue and gold armour, “Amy Extreme, Felicia Galaxy, Nathaniel Blast, Quentin Impossible, Freddy Forever and of course Captain Carl Chronos, brother of the villainous Doctor Chronos.”

He blinked as if that would make them go away. But it didn’t work, for when he opened his eyes, the Blasters were still there, staring at him from behind their infuriatingly impassive mirrored masks.

“You’re not real,” Simon declared, “You can’t be.”

He pressed his hand to his face, hoping that would help.

“It’s finally happened,” he stammered, “I’ve cracked. I’ve gone mad from writing too many shitty toy tie-in cartoons.”

In response, a hand was laid on his should, a hand encased in futuristic armoured gloves.

“I know that this must be a shock to you,” a female voice, soft like chocolate and honey, said, “But please, do not be afraid, Simon St. John. After all, we have come to honour you…”

Since this hallucination was determined not to go away, Simon decided he might as well open his eyes, only to find himself face to faceplate with Felicia Galaxy in her gold and purple armour who was currently in the process of getting all touchy-feely with him. Briefly and entirely inappropriately, Simon found himself wondering if under her mask, this Felicia looked like the one he’d imagined, a striking black woman with cornrows.

Bad, Simon, bad. Thou shalt not imagine getting hot and sweaty and frisky with what is in essence a kid’s toy, albeit a damned sexy one.

“Also, what is a toy tie-in cartoon?” Felicia asked, ruining the moment.

“You,” he said, “You are a toy tie-in cartoon. That is… no, of course you’re not a cartoon. You’re a hallucination.”

“He does seem somewhat confused,” Nathaniel Blast said with a deep baritone voice that was so much better than the cut rate voice actors they normally used.

“Not surprising, since time travel won’t actually be invented for one hundred and thirty-five years yet,” Quentin Impossible countered, “Right now, time travel is only the spark of an idea in the brilliant mind before us.”

“Actually, it was the spark of an idea in the much more brilliant mind of H.G. Wells long before mine, but thanks anyway.”

“I still can’t find any reference for ‘toy tie-in cartoon’ in the Galactopedia,” Matt Infinity mused, as he was punching the keys of his wrist communicator.

Simon threw up his hands. “Okay, okay. I’ll try to explain it to you.”

He picked up the Chronoblaster — the toy version of course and not one of the remarkably real looking weapons worn by the Blasters — and switched on the TV, halfway through an episode of The A-Team.

“Oh fuck, I’m talking to my hallucinations,” Simon mumbled to himself, “That’s got to be bad.”

The Blasters, meanwhile, seemed utterly fascinated by his TV set. “This is a classic twentieth century cathode ray television set,” Quentin Impossible mused, “I’ve only ever seen these in museums and never functional.”

“And that is the dramatisation of the exploits of the legendary A-Team,” Nathaniel Blast added, “I studied their missions and tactics at the Space Force Academy.”

Simon ignored them and popped a tape into the VCR. It contained five episodes worth of Dana Star and her Dynanoids.

“This cartridge contains a magnetic tape for recording audio and video signals,” Quentin Impossible continued, “Most fascinating. Such cartridges are occasionally excavated by landfill archaeologists, but the tape has always decayed so much that the signals cannot be replayed…”

“That’s what I get for making Quentin the professor type,” Simon thought, “Now he’s futuresplaining everyday technology to me.”

He tried to start the tape with the Chronoblaster, but it didn’t react, so he had to reach for the VCR remote instead.

“See? This is a toy tie-in cartoon,” he said and pressed “Play”. Immediately, the theme tune of Dana Star echoed through the apartment.

The Blasters froze and stared at the TV, utterly entranced, as if they had never seen anything like it before. And who knew, maybe they hadn’t?

“It’s Dana Star and her Dynanoids,” Amy Extreme exclaimed, “Oh my God, I love Dana Star. She inspired me to study singing and cybernetics.”

“So you’re a singer and a cyberneticist?” Simon asked her.

“And a fully trained kung fu master,” Amy added with a triumphant grin.

Simon sighed. “Of course you are.” He reached for the sheet with the character bios and scribbled “Too Mary Sue” in the margins next to Amy’s entry.

“This is amazing,” Matt Infinity said and plopped down on the sofa next to Simon, “It’s the original Dana Star series from the twentieth century.”

Felicia settled down on the other side of Simon and snuggled pleasantly close to him. “But I’ve never seen it so crisp and clear.”

“Did you know that those images were drawn by hand, all of them?” Quentin Impossible explained, “They made a separate drawing for every frame of film and then photographed them.”

“Infodumps too much,” Simon scribbled into the margins next to Quentin’s capsule bio.

“That…” Simon pointed at the screen, where Dana Star and the Dynanoids were launching into song. “…is a cartoon. But it’s not a quality cartoon like Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry or a Disney cartoon.”

“I have seen those,” Nathaniel Blast remarked in his baritone voice, “Stunning artwork, but very dated social attitudes.”

“Not so pompous,” Simon scribbled in the margins beside Nathaniel’s capsule bio.

“But these cartoons, well they’re just advertising, really. They’re supposed to sell toys, nothing more.”

“Toys?” Matt Infinity asked.

“Yes, toys like…” Simon got up and grabbed a Dana Star doll and a random Ultrasaur from a shelf. “…these. For kids.”

“That’s an Ultrasaur,” Matt Infinity exclaimed, “I love the Ultrasaurs. Ace Thunder inspired me to study palaeontology and because I loved Ferrarisaurus so much, I became a race car driver.”

“Too Gary Stu,” Simon scribbled into the margins next to Matt’s capsule bio.

“The condition of these figures is amazing,” Felicia said, “I have seen examples in the museum, of course, but never as well preserved as this.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an original Ultrasaur figurine that was still able to transform,” Quentin Impossible said, “The mechanism is extremely breakable.”

“And ain’t that the truth,” Simon mumbled.

“Guys, guys…” Freddy Forever, the joker of the group, had found the box with the prototypes and held up his plastic counterpart. “It’s us.”

He grabbed the Doctor Chronos figure from the box and began to re-enact a pitched battle between the two of them.

“Please…”

Somehow, Freddy managed to snap off the arm of his plastic counterpart. “Oops.”

“Freddy,” Captain Chronos said sternly.

“…put that down.” Simon sighed. “It’s a prototype and rather delicate.”

How to explain this to the toy company? Cause “Was visited by time travellers from the future, one of whom broke the toy” would look really bad on the damage report.

“That is a prototype figure?” Quentin exclaimed, clearly on the verge of geeking out completely, “Oh my goodness, that must be worth millions of dollars.”

“Not anymore,” Nathaniel said dryly, “Since Freddy just broke it.”

“Hey, don’t look at me”, Freddy exclaimed, “How the hell was I supposed to know they’re this delicate? The one I had as a kid was made of stronger stuff.”

“But how can there be prototypes already, when Simon here only just came up with the idea for the Blasters of Forever tonight?” Felicia wanted to know.

Simon sighed and plopped down between Matt and Felicia again.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” he said, “All this, the Blasters of Forever, Dana Star and her Dynonoids, Ace Thunder and his Ultrasaurs, the Magnadragons, Billy Galactic and the Magicdogs…”

“Generally considered one of your lesser creations,” Quentin remarked, “No offence.”

“None taken,” Simon said, “The Magicdogs were naff.”

“Though still better than People on a Bridge,” Quentin continued, “What the hell was that even supposed to be about?”

“You know about People on a Bridge?” Simon exclaimed, “You mean, it gets made? It really gets made?”

“Well, I like the Magicdogs”, Freddy piped in. He’d found a Magicdog toy on one of Simon’s shelf and pressed the voice button. “Abracadabra”, the Magicdog said.

“It’s functional,” Quentin Impossible exclaimed, “Amazing. I’ve never seen a functioning one before. The voice chip…”

“Please, Quentin,” Felicia interrupted, “No one cares. And anyway, I’d much rather hear what Simon has to say.”

She flipped up her visor and flashed Simon an encouraging smile. And yes, she looked exactly how he had envisioned her, only even more stunning.

“Anyway… ahem… what I was trying to say is that all the cartoons I created, they only exist to sell toys. The toy companies develop a new toy and then they hire me to come up with a story to go with it. That’s my job. I write glorified commercials to sell cheap plastic junk to kids.”

All around him, the Blasters fell silent. And if not for Dana Star and the Dynonoids still wailing away on the TV, you might have heard the proverbial pin drop.

“I’m sorry, okay. I know you think I’m someone special, but I’m not. I’m just a guy who writes crappy toy tie-in cartoons.”

“Inspiration is found in the strangest of places,” Captain Chronos said sagely.

“Pompous arse,” Simon scribbled into the margins of the character sheet, “Fewer platitudes.”

Felicia squeezed his shoulder in sympathy. “In our time, you are considered one of the greatest creative minds of this era.”

Simon flashed her a wry smile. “I guess that means I get a proper screenwriting gig after all.”

“You do, actually,” Captain Chronos confirmed, “Though your early television work is considered your greatest achievement.”

“So this is as good as I’ll get. Gee, thanks.” Simon emitted a heartfelt sigh.

“But the Blasters of Forever and your other works have inspired generations of people,” Felicia said.

“Sorry, but I’m pretty sure they’ll be forgotten two years from now.”

“After the initial five season run of the original series, the Blasters of Forever indeed entered a period of latency,” Quentin intoned, “But then, in 2010, maverick director Christopher Bailey acquired the film rights, because he was a huge fan of the series as a child. The Blasters of Forever movie was an enormous commercial and critical success and spawned three sequels as well as a new TV series…”

“The new series was a big hit with children worldwide,” Felicia continued, “Two of those children, Stella Reyes and Gong Wuying, eventually met during a nostalgia movie night at the MIT, while both were students there.”

“They bonded over their shared love for Blasters of Forever and began to conduct research into the theory of time travel,” Quentin continued, “Their research was continued by others at the Reyes-Gong Institute for Temporal Physics and eventually in 2120, a team led by Samuel Yetunde succeeded in building a functional prototype for a time portal.”

“Without the inspiration of your work, none of this would ever have happened,” Felicia said.

“And none of us would be here,” Nathaniel added.

“And did we mention that we brought back dinosaurs from the past and outfitted them with cyber-implants?” Matt said, “Just like in Ace Thunder and the Ultrasaurs.”

Felicia reached for his hand. “Your work is important, Simon. It’s an inspiration for us all. And that’s why we’re so honoured to meet you.”

Simon felt he ought to say something, anything. But before he could, alarms went off on the suits of all seven Blasters.

“Get ready, people,” Captain Chronos ordered, “Time to do our jobs. Matt and Freddy, guard the door. Nate and Quentin, prepare for extraction. Felicia, protect Simon. Amy with me.”

At once, the Blasters drew their various weapons and took up battle positions. Simon was about to object — after all, there was no telling what Chronoblaster fire might do to his apartment. But before he could, he found himself thrown to the floor with the lovely Felicia landing right on top of him. “Down,” she urged.

A split second later, the apartment door burst open. That is, it didn’t just burst open, it was kicked in by a fellow with a mohawk, an eyepatch and a long rivet-studded coat of black leather, who couldn’t have looked more villainous if the word “villain” had been tattooed on his forehead.

The intruder had a gun, some kind of huge futuristic rifle and he was aiming it right at the spot where Simon had been sitting until a second ago.

The intruder fired, hit the wall and cut a shelf clean in half, sending toy fragments flying in all directions. He reloaded, but before he could fire again, Amy Extreme was there and disarmed him with a well-aimed karate chop.

The intruder staggered backwards and stumbled into Freddy Forever, who grabbed him in a headlock. The intruder shook Freddy off, sending him flying against a filing cabinet. He went for his fallen rifle, but before he could get it, Amy was there again, kicking him in the face.

The intruder was thrown backwards and would have fallen, if Nathaniel and Matt hadn’t grabbed him. Matt twisted the man’s arm behind his back, while Nathaniel attached a disc-shaped device to his chest.

“Snake Cutter, you have been found guilty of countless violations of temporal law,” Captain Chronos intoned, “I herewith sentence you to life imprisonment inside the Deephold Maximum Security Prison.”

“No, no, you can’t,” the intruder — Snake Cutter — cried. He struggled against Matt, but it was to no avail.

Captain Chronos raised his Chronoblaster, which looked just like the one Simon used as a remote control, only that this one wasn’t made of cheap plastic.

“No, please, don’t,” Snake wailed.

Matt and Nathaniel suddenly let go off him and stepped aside. But before Snake had a chance to react, Captain Chronos fired and Snake Cutter just vanished in a puff of glittery light.

“What… what was that?” Simon exclaimed from the floor.

“A time travelling assassin,” Quentin explained.

“A time travelling what?” Simon wanted to know. Felicia rolled off him and helped him to his feet. “What’s going on here?”

“Snake Cutter was sent by Doctor Chronos to assassinate you and thus prevent the formation of the Blasters of Forever,” Quentin explained.

“He wanted to kill me?”

“Don’t worry, he won’t bother you again,” Felicia said.

“No one ever returns from the Deephold,” Nathaniel added.

“Wait a minute, Doctor Chronos is real, too?”

“As children, my twin brother Curt and I were great fans of your programme,” Captain Chronos explained, “Unfortunately, he did not take the same inspiration from it as I.”

“So I inspired a time travelling supervillain, who promptly sends assassins after me,” Simon exclaimed, “Just great. It’s like I’m Sarah Connor in bloody Terminator.”

“Your work has inspired both great courage and great evil,” Captain Chronos intoned, “For there can be no light without shadow.”

“And besides, we caught wind of Doctor Chronos’ dastardly plans and came here to stop Cutter before he could kill you,” Nathaniel said.

“But we came a little earlier, because we wanted to meet you, the man who inspired it all,” Amy added.

“But now we must take our leave,” Captain Chronos said, “Quentin, open the time portal.”

Quentin looked up from the floor, where he had been picking up the character sheets. “Amazing. I have seen this very document in a museum, though half of it was smeared with what appeared to be coffee stains.”

Amy looked over his shoulder. “What’s a Mary Sue?” she wanted to know.

“People,” Captain Chronos warned, “We have another mission and time waits for no man or woman.”

Quentin took something that looked very much like a remote control from a compartment of his suit and pressed a button. At once, a swirling Technicolor time portal opened.

“Farewell, Simon St. John,” Captain Chronos said and shook his hand, “It has been a great honour.”

He stepped through the portal, followed by Matt, Amy, Nathaniel and Freddy who managed to knock over a mug of cold coffee that had miraculously survived the battle earlier. The coffee spilled onto the character sheet.

“Oops, sorry,” Freddy said and jumped into the portal.

Felicia shook her head. “He always does that.” She bent forward to press a quick kiss onto Simon’s lips. “I’m so happy I got to meet you,” she said, “I love your work.”

Lips still tingling from her kiss, Simon watched as she stepped through the portal.

Quentin went last and then the portal closed as if it had never been.

And if not for the state of Simon’s apartment, it all might have been just a dream, a hallucination brought on by too much coffee and too little sleep.

Simon picked up the coffee stained character sheets to throw them away, but then he thought better of it.

“Greatest cartoon ever!” he scribbled in big red letters on top of the sheet.

The End

***

That’s it for this month’s edition of First Monday Free Fiction. Check back next month, when a new free story will be posted.

Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for July 2021

It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie and small press authors newly published this month, though some June books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have urban fantasy, dark fantasy, YA fantasy, science fantasy, paranormal mystery, science fiction mystery, science fiction romance, space opera, military science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, dystopian fiction, steampunk, horror, vampires, werewolves, demons, space marines, alien spies, alien parasites, crime-busting witches, crime-busting single moms, washed-up country singers and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

Ariadne, I Love You by J. Ashley-Smith:

Jude is dragged out of Alt Country obscurity, out of the dismal loop of booze and sadness baths and the boundless, insatiable loneliness, to scrub up and fly to Australia for a last, desperate comeback tour. Hardly worth getting out of bed for—and he wouldn’t, if it weren’t for Coreen.But Coreen is dead. And, worse than that, she’s married. Jude’s swan-song tour becomes instead a terminal descent, into the sordid past, into the meaning hidden in forgotten songs, into Coreen’s madness diary, there to waken something far worse than her ghost.

 

Forgotten Stars by Odette C. Bell:

A new realm has awoken. A new threat has emerged. So new warriors must take the helm.

Amber is an ordinary ensign whose only claim to fame is throwing toast on the most important soldier on the station. Then everything changes. When she’s lost on an alien world and her true powers awaken, she must keep them secret from the Coalition or pay the price.

But it’ll be hard to keep her secret around the ever-watchful Commander Starsmith. When she draws his eye, he can’t look away. For deep within him, something is arising. Let it sink, and the station might survive. Let it rise, and the Coalition will never be the same again.

An Uneasy Alliance by Jonathan P. Brazee and J.N. Cheney:

The war is over. Peace has at last descended over the humanity . . . or so it would appear.

The Centaurs may no longer pose a threat, but a new war is on the horizon, though it hides in the shadows of two empires.

Rumors of alien tech have set governments against each other, and with attention focused on defeating the Centaurs, criminal elements have gotten their tentacles firmly entrenched in the very fabric of civilization.

Staff Sergeant Rev Pelletier of the Perseus Union Marine Corps has now been assigned to the Home Guard, the elite unit made up of members from each military force in human space.

A new age is upon us. An age of exploration, treaties, and new enemies. But with tensions rising, can the Home Guard function as a viable, unified force to combat the growing lawlessness throughout the galaxy?

Vapor Trails by Joshua Dazelle:

Marine Lieutenant Jacob Brown was on borrowed time, and he knew it.

He was a rogue element, disobeying orders and pursuing mission goals of his own. His Scout Team had been burned, disavowed by his chain of command and the owner of the stolen ship he was flying was after them to get it back. To make matters even more complicated, the man Jacob had stolen the ship from is an infamous outlaw and mercenary named Jason Burke… his father.

Being hunted down by both the United Earth Navy and the mercenary group that called itself Omega Force, Jacob has only one chance to keep his team out of a military prison and bring down the head of the One World terrorist faction that always seemed to be three steps ahead of him… and that was only if his father didn’t catch him first.

Wicked Magic by Margot de Clerk:

Nathan is a vampire hunter on the cusp of graduation. He’s been training for this his entire life: the moment he qualifies and joins the rest of his family in their noble calling.

If only it were that simple.

His grades are a mess, his social life is a disaster, and what’s worse, his best friend is a witch! Add to that, his vampire uncle is back in town and his crush might just be supernatural too, and you have one big melting pot of potential parental disapproval. Nathan doesn’t think he can take much more, and then the dark mages come to town.

As bodies begin piling up in the streets, Nathan finds himself pulled deeper into political intrigue and a deadly plot that will pit him against his own family. When the girl he likes comes under threat, Nathan races against time to solve the mystery… well aware that with every step he takes, he comes closer to his father exposing all his secrets.

The Builders by Chris Fox:

All things must end. Welcome to the final Deathless novel.

The builder Yoggoth has arrived in our Solar System, but his goal is not to conquer our world. He has locked the sun in a Yoggothian Sphere designed to siphon our star of all power.

Earth is hurled into darkness, denied the lifegiving heat of our sun, even as Yoggoth’s fleets move upon our world. Our heroes, led by Blair, Liz, and Isis, must deal with the new winter before they can even hope to oppose them.

In Australia Jordan has used the intervening five years for one purpose. To become a Builder-slaying dino-enhanced death machine. Under Uluru’s tutelage he has mastered combat, and stands ready to face Yoggoth, whatever the cost.

Outnumbered and outmatched Liz leads a desperate assault on Yoggoth’s flagship, where Excalibur’s destiny will finally be realized. If the blade breaks our world will be annihilated. If it holds, then Liz will provide Blair one chance to save everyone.

One desperate gamble to rewrite history

Atmospheric Pressure 3: Last Breath by Aaron Frale:

Olson returns to the Union to discover he can breathe the noxious outside air. However, he soon finds out that he isn’t the only one involved in the sinister plan Erik is hatching. Both of the cities that weathered the apocalypse now depend on Olson unraveling what Erik has in store.

Meanwhile, a small community not too far from these cities sees the buildings burning from Erik’s coup of the government. They possess a nuclear warhead from the forgotten world and send a small team to see what is happening.

In the St. Paul Collective, Natalie is pregnant with Olson’s offspring. She finds out that her unborn child is wanted by the people in power for study because of Olson’s natural ability. She will do anything to protect her kid.

Find out how it all plays out in the third and final installment of the Atmospheric Pressure series.

Sibyl Sue Blue by Rosel George Brown:

Stop a murder, save two planets!

Who she is: Sibyl Sue Blue, single mom, undercover detective, and damn good at her job.

What she wants: to solve the mysterious benzale murders, prevent more teenage deaths, and maybe find her long-lost husband.

How she’ll get it: seduce a millionaire, catch a ride on his spaceship, and crack the case at the edge of the known galaxy.

A thrilling, ground breaking story of mystery, crime, action and romance!

Awakening the Gods by Kristin Gleeson:

A failed barista, a reclusive blacksmith. Can they avoid the call of the Irish Gods?

Saoirse knows playing traditional music once a week in a local Dublin pub won’t get her a career, but it’s all she’s got, especially after she’s fired from her barista job. But then her father dies and her life is set into a spin, especially when an unknown grandmother comes calling..

Music is Smithy’s one joy that is left to him that has a residue of the magic he lost long ago. Creating things in his forge, tucked away in rural Cork, increasingly reminds him of what he’s lost and why he must resist the requests of the Tuatha De Danann. They want him to join their efforts to battle their biggest nemesis,a powerful god who is threatening the destruction of Eire, the land they hold so dear. But events and gods conspire to bring Saoirse and Smithy to the path that was meant to be. It’s time for the gods to awake and answer the call to defend the land. But answering that call could mean risking death.

A music-filled romantic urban fantasy with a Celtic twist that will delight fans of Charles de Lint.

Wicked Whispers by Lily Harper Hart:

Jack Harker says the honeymoon will never be over, but it’s back to reality for him and his wife Ivy. Unfortunately for them, that means murder is on the menu … and this newest body is dropped in Ivy’s nursery parking lot.

Jack is a mess when he realizes a sniper took out a local woman. Ivy, although shocked because it happened right in front of her eyes, is also intrigued. When the duo starts digging, they find themselves drawn into an ugly underworld that’s happening right under their noses.

Shadow Lake might be a quiet town but it has an ugly side … and apparently there are a group of people looking to profit. The harder Jack and Ivy look, the more ugliness they uncover.

Ivy’s abilities are growing by leaps and bounds but even she can’t fight off a bullet. When her busybody nature makes her a target, it’s going to take everything she has in her arsenal to fight off the inevitable.

Jack loves his wife. Ivy will do whatever it takes to protect her husband. Will one of them have to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect the other in the end?

It’s a hot race to the finish, and Ivy’s magic will have a say in the outcome.

Galaxy Bound by Vidar Hokstad:

The Centauri Gate has opened, and humanity has taken its first steps into the unknown.

When an Earth freighter is destroyed in Centauri space, Zara Ortega and the crew of the Black Rain are sent to investigate, accompanied by an Earth military officer and a Centauri diplomat.

It’s apparent something is wrong, and when they chase down the leads, they end up facing off against heavily armed warships that should not be there.

Soon they are in another desperate race to survive. They seek shelter in a Centauri colony near Proxima. But those following them mount a brutal assault, and they pay a high price to flee.

They need to get word out, or it means war.

Absolute Unit by Nick Kolakowski:

Absolute Unit is a dark carnival ride through the underside of the American Dream, where hustlers and parasites fight to survive against gun-toting furries, sarcastic drug kingpins, old ladies who are startlingly good with knives, and angry ex-girlfriends. It’s a hardboiled slice of modern American horror that asks the deepest question of all: Is the human race worth saving?

Bill is a nobody, a health inspector who’s not above taking a few dollars to overlook a restaurant’s mouse problem, and hated by nearly everyone except his long-suffering girlfriend. His nephew, Trent, isn’t much better: sexually and morally confused, he’s probably the worst teenage con artist on the East Coast. But today, these two losers are going to become the most important people in the world.

That’s because Bill and Trent harbor a sentient parasite with a sarcastic sense of humor and a ravenous appetite. As the parasite figures out how to control its new human hosts, the focus of its desires grows from delicious cheeseburgers and beer to something much darker and more dangerous.

The apocalypse might come from within us…

Great Hexpectations by Amanda M. Lee:

Hadley Hunter thought she was getting a grip on the paranormal world she never knew existed until recently. She was wrong. In the shadow of a massive shifter retreat, she finds she knew absolutely nothing.

Her live-in love Galen Blackwood has his hands full with the conference. Not only is his mother pressuring him to make his presence known but it’s also up to him to keep the not-so-friendly factions from going to war. Things only get stickier when a member of the Michigan wolf contingent ends up dead on the docks.

Hadley wants to help Galen, as does his cousin Aric Winters, who has brought his magical mage wife Zoe and their daughter to the island at the behest of his father. Aric prefers distance when it comes to shifter politics but he’s happy to see his cousin, and be introduced to Hadley for the first time.

Because they’re not shifters, Hadley and Zoe are considered outsiders. That allows them to join together to track down a murderer.
Hadley is out of her element but she’s determined to help Galen by any means necessary. Unfortunately for her, the other wolves don’t like it … and decide to make it an issue worth dying for.

A wolf war is brewing and Hadley is at the center of it. Not only that but she’s a target. It’s going to take all of her witchy energy – plus a little help from a new friend – to make it through to the other side.

Somebody else has different plans … and they’re deadly. It might be the wolves warring, but Hadley is the one who might die on the battlefield.

The Sightless City by Noah Lemelson:

Kidnapping.
Enslavement.
Murder.

Those are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to actions some will take to protect their interests in æther-oil, the coveted substance that fuels the city of Huile.

As both veteran and private investigator, Marcel Talwar knows this firsthand, and he likes to think he’d never participate in such things. However, that naïve idea comes to a crashing end when he takes on a new case that quickly shatters his world view. A trail of evidence points to someone in Marcel’s inner circle who’s using him as a pawn to conduct grisly experiments-experiments that could lead to genocide.

Now, Marcel is more determined than ever to discover who’s pulling the strings to this sinister plot. But the further he gets, the larger the target on his back becomes, and it’s not long before Marcel has to ask himself how much and how many he’s willing to sacrifice to get to the truth.

Kingdom Come by Nazri Noor:

Hell hath no fury.

Mason Albrecht’s anger issues have finally come to a head, attracting another member of the Seven. The Prince of Wrath reveals his hand, striking at Mason where it hurts the most: his mother. Abaddon possesses Josephine Albrecht’s body, then disappears, taking her with him.

Plunged into despair, Mason and his allies rush to find Abaddon, and a way to stop the Prince of Wrath. How can he destroy the demon hiding inside his mother’s body? Mason must swallow his pride, bare his soul, and beseech old friends and enemies… one of the Seven among them.

Baswin by Aurora Springer:

An alien spy on the run.
Two human sisters chosen to train as astronavigators.
Their paths are destined to converge.

Psychic sensitives, Holly Moon and her sister Rosie, are chosen as candidates for Warrish training as hyperspace navigators. The sisters are eager to promote humanity’s advance into space. Will they succeed? They must pass a series of rigorous tests and adapt to the alien neuro-implants.
Alien merman, Baswin Kenton Tallis, Second of his Triad, lives on Earth disguised as a human. When Earth agents discover the secret identity of his older brother, Baswin must flee to the Warrish embassy in the Pacific Ocean.

Holly and Baswin are swept together on an island in the Pacific Ocean, but their destiny lies farther away and many forces threaten to drive them apart. Can they overcome the obstacles and find a haven?

Follow the adventures of the three brothers of the Flaming Comets Triad in Baswin, Book 5 in Taxyon Space.

Breaker Marine by James David Victor:

As a reaker, she was destined to live a hard life serving the whims of galactic corporations. As an Earth Alliance Marine, she has a chance to change the balance of power in the galaxy.

Holly Cropper grew up as a Breaker, mining the outer reaches of space. Now, she’s an up-and-coming lieutenant in the Earth Alliance Marines. Her mission: keep the peace and help humanity survive in the endless darkness of space. When a distress call comes in from a large mining vessel, her orderly world gets turned upside down. What starts with a simple pirate takeover turns into a hostile alien invasion. This Breaker Marine and her small team might be the only thing standing between humanity and annihilation at the hands of ancient aliens.

Breaker Marine is the first book in the Star Breaker series. If you like fast-paced space adventures with interesting characters who battle aliens, evil corporations, and space pirates, Holly Cropper and her team of Marines are ready to share their epic adventure with you.