Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 39

Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for June 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 May 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 cozy mysteries, historical mysteries, retro mysteries, Jazz Age mysteries, 1960s mysteries, paranormal mysteries, crime thrillers, action thrillers, adventure thrillers, spy thrillers, police procedurals, police officers, amateur sleuths, burglars, spies, FBI agents, ex Navy SEALs, drug dealers, cold cases, missing princess, crime-busting witches, crime-busting socialites, crime-busting ghosts, crime-busting cats, murder and mayhem in Washington DC, New Orleans, London, Northern England, the Bahamas, the Caymans, Brazil, Australia 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:

Murder at the Fair by Verity Bright:

Summer flowers, warm sunshine, a maypole dance and… is that another murder? A tricky case is afoot for Lady Swift!

Summer, 1921. Lady Eleanor Swift, the best amateur sleuth in the country, is delighted to be in charge of the prize-giving at her village summer fair. But the traditional homemade raft race takes a tragic turn when the local undertaker, Solemn Jon, turns up dead amongst the ducks. Jon was the life of any party and loved by the entire village. Surely this was simply an awful accident?

But when a spiteful obituary is printed in the local paper, Eleanor realises there may be more to Jon’s death than first thought. Despite handsome Detective Seldon giving her strict instructions not to interfere, Eleanor owes it to Jon’s good name to root out the truth. So with her partner in crime, Gladstone the bulldog, Eleanor starts digging for clues…

When another local dies in a riding accident, the police refuse to believe he was murdered. But a second vindictive death notice convinces Eleanor of foul play. Solemn Jon’s assistant, a bullish banker and a majestic marquess make her suspect list, but it isn’t until she finds a dusty old photograph that she knows the true culprit behind both crimes. Then another obituary appears – her own! Can Eleanor nail the killer before she too turns up dead among the ducks?

Stealing Murder by Beth Byers:

April 1961

Cat Clarke tends towards the naughty. You know…a little vengeful pickpocketing. A smidgeon of well-aimed fraud. A dabbling of burglary from the deserving.

She’s a woman with her eye on the prize, and with her unexpected team, she might have planned her greatest heist yet. Only while she’s in the act of cutting the painting from the frame, she hears a murder.

If Cat doesn’t catch the killer first, the feds may never stop chasing her. Time for her team to accomplish their greatest feat yet: find the killer, leave him gift-wrapped for the feds, and disappear into the night.

Book ONE in the Cat Clarke 1960s Adventures. It’s time for a new adventure, and you’re going to love Cat Clarke and her family.

One-time orphans turned family, Cat might be fiendish, but her mother, Louisa, is all-good. Then there is the pragmatic Albert and the loyal Thea. This family sticks together no matter what hijinks Cat drags them into. Prepare yourself for a series of mysteries and heists and grab onto something, because it isn’t just her family that Cat will charm.

Murder on a Yacht by Beth Byers:

August 1926

After a long slog of dark days, Vi and friends buy a yacht and go for some time on the sea. It’s what they need. Their nightmares come to an end along with the gray days too many of them have been fighting. They stop in at Monaco and, to their surprise, find old school friends. A few days of revelry, an evening party, and–of course—a body.

Once again, they’re pulled into another round of questions and investigations. This time, they’re the suspects. Forced into working to solve another murder, will they lose the peace they’ve found? Or will they find a way to navigate the murder and maintain a level of happiness?

Murder in England by Dianne Harman:

When an employee of the English pub where you’re staying during your vacation is murdered, and it happens on the first night you’re there, it’s definitely not the way to start a vacation!

A vacation in Northern England with three friends is a dream come true for Kat. Many famous authors lived and worked there, and Kat, who is an author, was looking forward to learning more about them. But the ugly hand of murder upset her plans when Sam, a popular employee at the pub, is murdered on his way home from work.

Kat’s been involved in several successful murder investigations at her home back in Kansas (her husband is the local District Attorney), and she feels she has to help investigate his murder. And even though she’d promised her husband she wouldn’t become involved in any more murder investigations, she can’t turn her back on Sam’s uncle, the owner of the pub, who has no idea what to do. She can see that he desperately needs her help.

Kat can’t get rid of the thought that Bailey, Sam’s Belgian Malinois dog, must have known who the murderer was because he didn’t try to protect Sam from the killer. After all, he’d come to Sam’s rescue before, so why didn’t he protect Sam on the night the murder took place? Had he recognized the murderer? Was it someone Sam knew and was on friendly terms with?

Join Kat and her friends as they explore the Northern England countryside while they help the local authorities solve a murder.

Bourbon Street Ghosts by Lily Harper Hart:

Harper Harlow-Monroe and Zander Pritchett have been excited for their upcoming ghost conference in New Orleans for years, since before they were involved with their significant others. What was once a trip for two has now become a trip for four … but that doesn’t make them any less excited.

Ofelia Archer has just found out that her bar Krewe is about to be inundated with ghost hunters … and she’s beyond excited. She’s looking forward to a good week, which means more money to funnel into her next business venture.

Two worlds collide when Harper and Ofelia meet in Jackson Square, a ghost catching their attention. Before they realize what’s happening, they’re embroiled in a huge mystery … one that involves New Orleans’ colorful past and worry for the future.

Harper and Ofelia have a lot in common and they bond quickly. That adds a colorful edge to their friendship. Add Zander to the mix and the Big Easy is in for big trouble.

Hang on because it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Between ghosts, Zander’s attitude, and Ofelia’s mother … it’s going to be a very strange trip. It could also be deadly.

Note: This is a crossover book between Harper Harlow and Ofelia Archer. It’s set after Ghostly Travels and Hex, Drugs & Rock and Roll.

Bloody Bay Rum Club by Nicholas Harvey:

An idyllic Caribbean island. An exclusive resort. A deceptive façade.

While on holiday in Little Cayman, dive boat operator AJ Bailey expects a peaceful getaway. Nothing sounds better than uniquely-aged rum, crystal-clear water, and world-class diving.

But, beneath the surface, the Bloody Bay Rum Club is hiding a dangerous secret, and when AJ uncovers the truth, things turn deadly.

Bloody Bay Rum Club keeps you on the edge of your seat in book 10 of this exciting series.

The Cold Light of Death by Scott Hunter:

July, 1976 – Thames Valley, UK. Long, scorching days of blue skies, water shortages, and record temperatures. A newly promoted Detective-Sergeant is tasked with investigating the murder of a local shop owner – an investigation that goes tragically wrong…

Fast-forward forty-five years to 2021, when a chance discovery exposes a grim secret that forces a reexamination of the circumstances surrounding the ill-fated murder inquiry.

DCI Brendan Moran is assigned this coldest of cases, and it soon becomes apparent that he is dealing with a cold and calculating criminal mind. Can Moran and his team piece together the events of that long forgotten summer and unmask the killer before history repeats itself?

Catastrophe in the Library by CeeCee James:

A mysterious mansion, a suspicious death, and a cat too smart for its own good…

Laura Lee and her secret book club, led by Hank the marmalade cat, find themselves in the heart of their deepest mystery yet! Laura Lee’s efforts to bring the beautiful but decrepit old manor back to life uncover even more secrets that the ancient house has been keeping from her.

Hank, hiding from the workmen, gets himself stuck under a broken board. Rescuing him, Laura Lee finds not only a small root cellar, but a nearly intact skeleton holding a sheaf of papers. How long has it been there? Who was it? And why were those papers so important?

It’s not just a lesson in history; someone who’s very much alive is trying to stop them from discovering the secret . It will take the entire book club’s help to discover the truth as every clue they find takes them in a different direction and puts them in unknown danger.

Extracted Asset by Ethan Jones:

The Storm they weren’t expecting…

Elite extractor Jack Storm is pulled into a sinister new operation in hopes that it will lead him to key information as to what happened to his missing family…

Information he would do anything for…

Jack’s operation is to find and retrieve a missing Saudi princess whose secret escape has greatly embarrassed her royal family.

A secret they will do anything to hide…

As Jack is thrust into a world of betrayal and deception, he searches the Caribbean for the princess and soon realizes he’s not the only one. Cold-blooded assassins are closing in. But they have no idea what’s raging towards them. Knowing the retrieval is now a rescue, how can Jack desperate for his own answers, save the princess with no place to run?

The Asylum Aberration by Amanda M. Lee:

Charlie Rhodes has spent her entire life wondering who she is, why she was abandoned as a child, and what’s behind the magical powers she can wield in the blink of an eye.

She’s finally getting her answers.

Now that she’s been reunited with her birth mother and brother, the search is on for her father. He’s supposed to be somewhere in Boston … but where? He’s fallen out of touch and finding him is virtually impossible.

Thankfully for Charlie, the Legacy Foundation’s next assignment is in a suburb of the very city where she lives, which means there’s plenty of time to find her father and solve the mystery of a haunted former hospital that’s apparently eating construction workers on a regular basis.

Heavenstone Asylum was considered the height of sophistication in psychiatric circles back in the day. In the years since the facility closed, the main doctor’s legacy has been tarnished by horror stories of treatments gone wrong and disappearing patients.

The second Charlie walks into the building, she recognizes that the past is hardly buried within the walls. There are tortured souls at every turn, and it’s her job to help them.

Heavenstone’s history makes for interesting reading but the harder Charlie digs, the more horrifying the story. Somehow she needs to uncover the truth … and survive the ghosts long enough to free them.

It’s going to take everything she’s got to see things through until the end.

All Charlie wants are answers. She’s going to get them. Surviving long enough to do anything with them is another story.

It’s about to be the Legacy Foundation’s finest hour … or is it?

White Heron by J.J. Marsh:

For Ann Sheldon, the past no longer exists. All she wants is a place to run and hide. Where better than a tiny shack between the Brazilian jungle and the Atlantic Ocean to appreciate the natural world and obliterate her memories?

Hermit-style living goes well until a local is murdered in shocking circumstances. Violence has followed her 5,000 miles to a remote fishing village? Against her will, Ann is drawn into a murder investigation, in close proximity to the last thing she needs: a smart cop.

Erasing history is a challenge but unlearning experience is impossible. Ann knows trouble when she sees it. Surfers are dealing drugs and the man in snakeskin boots is their supplier. She tells herself it’s not her problem. But when drug wars come to the beach, it’s everyone’s problem.

She knows it will end in blood and tears.

Must she take flight again?

Such a Good Girl by Willow Rose:

A girl falls from the penthouse floor of an apartment in Washington, D.C.

Media Mogul Richard Wanton owns the apartment and is seen standing on the balcony when the girl falls.

He is accused of killing her, but the FBI struggles to find enough solid evidence to convict him.

They have a witness, someone who was in the apartment when it happened, but she doesn’t want to talk to them.

She’ll only speak to one person, ex-FBI profiler Eva Rae Thomas. The problem is, Eva Rae Thomas has no interest in talking to her.

As a matter of fact, she’d rather see this woman dead than have to face her.

But Eva Rae Thomas isn’t someone who can leave a case alone, especially not when she starts to ask questions and things aren’t adding up.

As she digs in deeper—with the entire world watching—she soon finds herself in too deep and realizes she can’t trust anyone’s motives.

But by then, it is too late, and the killer is already tracking her down.

Goodbye Port Alma by Anne Shillolo:

A beautiful teen is killed on a glorious June afternoon, hidden in plain sight, and discovered by an anonymous caller.

Did her secrets die with her? Or are they still alive – with the power to seduce and destroy the lives of a select few?

DC Holly Towns is on the team that has to untangle a far-reaching web of sex, drugs, and money, and solve a crime that threatens to tear the city apart. Are the victim’s two best friends the next targets? With a suspect list of movers and shakers, even with all the hard work in the world, no one has more to lose than Holly herself if the killer strikes again.

As a new Detective Constable, Holly gets a second chance to prove herself in a job where even her friends wonder if she can succeed. She likes police work, but her future is a coin-toss. She’s either on the way out, courtesy of a vindictive former boss, or on the way up, thanks to her intuition and stubborn persistence. And some days are a struggle to tame her own demons and escape her past.

If you like complex characters, twisty plots, and a fast-paced story, the Port Alma Murder Mysteries series is for you.

Murder in Belgravia by Lee Strauss:

Murder’s a piece of cake!

Wedding bells are ringing in Belgravia, and Ginger couldn’t be happier to attend the nuptials of Felicia Gold and Lord Davenport-Witt. If only she could put her mind at ease about the things she knew about the groom’s past.

When a death occurs at the wedding party, Ginger is placed in a frightfully difficult position. Betray her vow of secrecy to the crown, or let a killer go free.

 

A Viable Threat by Ed Teja:

They want to kill a Senator

Stopping it calls for running a hair-brained, off-the-books abduction, grabbing a Dutch national from a private island in The Bahamas. It doesn’t help that the senator whose life is in danger is Martin’s ex-wife, Polly. And then there is the minor detail that the intelligence for the mission, the idea of running it, was arranged by a US Navy Admiral who just happens to be Polly’s current husband. The presence of a hard-nosed (and very sexy) DEA agent with her own agenda, one who forced her way into the center of a mission she shouldn’t have even known about… well, it’s complicated.

But hey, it’s all part of a normal day in the life of an ex-SEAL who only wants to be an average freighter captain in the Caribbean — at least Martin would like to think so.

The Girl Who Was Forgotten by Amy Vasant:

Life was supposed to start feeling like a permanent vacation.

After years on the run from a vengeful killer, Shee McQueen is home at her father’s beach hotel. The Loggerhead Inn doubles as a retreat for sunburned tourists and a haven for recovering ex-military — men and women who help right wrongs for people in need of their particular skills.

What could be more relaxing?

Unless…

…Shee’s estranged boyfriend — the only man she’s ever loved — has discovered her darkest secret and the reason she left him so many years ago…
…or her first job for her father has ended in a double homicide…
…or that her very presence is driving the hotel’s regulars to prove their worth by starting dangerous covert missions of their own…

Wait. It couldn’t be a botched kidnapping is started looking more like the work of a deranged serial killer?

Hm.

Maybe hold the tanning lotion.

This might take a minute.

New Kurval Sword and Sorcery Novella Available: The Black Knight

This June is turning out to be sword and sorcery month for me. Two weeks ago, I had a sword and sorcery story called “The Gate of Mist” come out in Whetstone Magazine – a story which got this nice response by my fellow Whetstone contributor J.T. Howard.

And today, I’m pleased to announce that The Black Knight, the next story in my Kurval sword and sorcery series, is now available wherever e-books are sold.

“The Black Knight” is longer than the previous Kurval stories, since it’s a full length novella. It is also darker, which is why it has a content warning.

The Kurval series is strongly influenced by Robert E. Howard, particularly the Kull stories and three King Conan stories (“The Phoenix on the Sword”, “The Scarlet Citadel” and “The Hour of the Dragon”), while my other sword and sorcery series, the Thurvok series, is more influenced by Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser.

“The Black Knight” brings in yet another influence, namely C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry. I revisited the first two Jirel of Joiry stories, “Black God’s Kiss” and “Black God’s Shadow”, last year, which also gave me some insight into the core themes of that particular branch of sword and sorcery. All of this eventually influenced “The Black Knight”.

Sword and sorcery protagonists are usually loners, but my own characters tend to acquire supporting casts. Thurvok was initially supposed to be a lone adventurer, but by the end of the first story, he picks up Meldom. Sharenna joins the team in the third story, Lysha in the fourth.

Kurval has also acquired a supporting cast of his own by now. There’s the vizier Izgomir, who basically serves as a foil to Kurval. Count Ragur Falgune and his wife Nelaira were originally intended as one-of characters, but they stuck around. We also learn a bit more about Ragur (and more about Kurval and his background, for that matter) in this story. Finally, there is Ungolf, the executioner who takes great pride in his work. Ungolf also appears in King’s Justice, the first Kurval story written, though he doesn’t acquire a name until this story. Finally, Kurval also picks up yet another supporting character in “The Black Knight”, a characters we will certainly see again.

So accompany Kurval, as he faces…

The Black Knight
The Lords of Angilbert have been a thorn in the side of the Kings of Azakoria for decades, refusing to pay taxes or to accept the authority of the throne.

King Kurval of Azakoria inherited the conflict with the Black Knight of Angilbert from his predecessor. Determined to bring the Black Knight to heel once and for all, Kurval besieges Castle Angilbert. But when he finally comes face to face with the mysterious Black Knight, he’s in for a shock.

The law demands that the Black Knight be executed for treason. However, Kurval does not want to sentence the Black Knight to death, especially once he learns that the Lords of Angilbert have a very good reason to hate the Kings of Azakoria.

But is it even possible to find a peaceful solution or can the feud with the Black Knight of Angilbert end only in bloodshed and death?

The new sword and sorcery adventure by two-time Hugo finalist Cora Buhlert and her occasional alter ego, 1930s pulp writer Richard Blakemore. This is a novella of 33400 words or approx. 112 print pages in the Kurval series but may be read as a standalone. Includes an introduction and afterword.

Warning: This is a dark story, which contains scenes of a violent and sexual nature.

More information.
Length: 33400 words
List price: 2.99 USD, EUR or GBP
Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks, Google Play, Scribd, Smashwords, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Buecher.de, DriveThruFiction, Casa del Libro, Vivlio and XinXii.

Loki Visits “Lamentis” and Talks to Herself

Another Wednesday, another episode of Loki. For my takes on previous episodes (well, just two so far), go here.

Warning! Spoilers behind the cut!

When we last met our favourite God of Mischief, he had just tracked down the dangerous variant of himself who has been taking out TVA agents. And yes, the pronouns in the title of the post are correct, because this Loki is a woman, played by Sophia di Martino. Only that she doesn’t like to be called Loki, but instead prefer to be called Sylvie, which suggests that she might not be an alternate Loki at all, but a completely different Marvel character, namely the latest version of the Enchantress. This theory is supported by the fact that Sylvia refers to her ability to take over other people as “enchanting”. And considering that either version of the Enchantress is closely linked to Thor and Loki, but has never yet been seen in the Marvel movies, the Enchantress popping up in Loki wouldn’t be a huge surprise.

On the other hand, the Marvel movies also have a history of taking names and abilities from characters in the comics and turning them into quite different characters. Agatha Harkness and Karli Morgenthau are very different characters in WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier respectively than in the comics. Sharon Carter is not the Power Broker and not a villainess in the comics, though she is in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Hawkeye is a family man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, while his comics counterpart is in a troubled relationship with Bobbi Morse a.k.a. Mockingbird, a character who exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and popped up in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D for a while, where her troubled relationship with Hawkeye was transferred to Lance Hunter, a character from the Captain Britain comics.

The previous episode ended with Sylvie bombing the sacred timeline with time reset cylinders and then vanishing through a time door, followed by our Loki. Sylvie is planning to use the chaos to infiltrate the TVA headquarters and attack and presumably take out the Time Keepers themselves. In a flashback, we also see Sylvie manipulating Hunter C-20 into revealing the whereabouts of the Time Keepers, via sharing a cocktail with C-20 in a tiki bar, posing as her best friend.

But just as Sylvie is about the storm the golden elevator that leads to the Time Keepers, Loki shows up to stop her or join her – Loki himself doesn’t seem to be quite sure what. Not that it matters, cause Sylvie doesn’t need a partner anyway. And so Sylvie and Loki fight – Sylvie with a shortsword and Loki with his signature daggers, which he liberated from B-15’s locker – when Ravonna Renslayer (another character who has nothing except the name in common with her comic counterpart) shows up. Sylvie takes Loki hostage and threatens to kill him, whereupon Ravonna says, “Go ahead. I don’t care.”

Loki is quite outraged by this and also decides that it’s time to get out of there. So he steals and activates Sylvie’s time portal generator (apparently, the device is called TemPad) and sends both himself and Sylvie somewhere else.

Somewhere else turns out to be Lamentis-1, a mining outpost and moon of the planet Lamentis, which showed up in a 2007 mega-crossover event. As we learned last episode, Sylvie likes to hide from the TVA in apocalypses where everybody dies, so nothing she does can affect the timeline. And Lamentis is about to experience such an apocalypse, because moon and planet are about to crash into each other.

Sylvie and Loki agree for once that Lamentis is not a good place to be and that they should get the hell out of there. However, Sylvie doesn’t want to take Loki along, so she snatches the TemPad (that sounds like a feminine hygiene product) from him and activates it, only to realise that the TemPad is out of power. Of course, the out of power TemPad makes no sense at all – what would a TVA agent do, if they got stranded in a pre-electricity era with a powerless TemPad? – but then it only exists to strand Loki and Sylvie on the about to be destroyed planet Lamentis with a convenient ticking clock that forces them to reluctantly cooperate.

The rest of this fairly short episode is given over to Loki and Sylvie dashing across Lamentis, trying to locate a power source big enough to recharge the TemPad, cause time travel requires a lot of power. Initially, they try a frontier town that looks as if it came straight out of an episode of The Mandalorian mixed with season 3 of Star Trek Discovery. The power is still on and neon signs are functioning, but the TemPad requires more power, so they move on.

Next, they reach a cabin, where a woman threatens them with a big gun. Sylvie tries to force her way in, which gets her blasted. Loki tries charm and diplomacy… which gets him blasted. Then he changes his appearance to look like the woman’s missing husband – and gets himself blasted again, because he tries to sweet-talk her and the woman’s real husband was never this nice. However, Loki and Slyvie do get the woman to tell them where everybody else is, namely hoping to board a train that will take them to “the Ark”, a giant spaceship that will take a chosen few off Lamentis, before it is destroyed. The Ark should have sufficient power to recharge the TemPad.

So Loki and Sylvie head for the train station and right into Snowpiercer (and the original Snowpiercer movie of course starred Chris Evans a.k.a. Captain America as well as Jamie Bell who played Ben Grimm in the very bad Fantastic Four movie a couple of years ago). Because true to form, only the rich are allowed to board the train, escorted by guards, while the regular populace is left to die.

Loki disguises himself as a guard to escort Sylvie aboard the train as a passenger. However, they are stopped by another guard who insists on seeing Sylvie’s ticket, before Sylvie uses her powers to take him over. Earlier in the episode, she also briefly uses those powers on Loki or at least tries, because he is immune to them. Though Loki is quite impressed that Sylvie can manipulate people with her own powers, while Loki needed an infinity stone to do the same.

Aboard the luxurious doomsday train (even the visuals recall Snowpiercer, both film and series, as Tor.com reviewer Emmett Asher-Perrin and AV-Club reviewer Caroline Siede remark), there is an interlude where Loki and Sylvie settle down in a booth in the bar car, drinking champagne and talking about family, love and themselves. Yes, the central scene in this episode is another scene of Loki sitting at a table with someone (Sylvie rather than Mobius) and talking, which makes three episodes with significant talking head scenes in a row.

As with the talking head scenes with Mobius in episodes 1 and 2, what makes this work is Tom Hiddleston’s natural charm as well as the way he gives us a few glimpses of the vulnerability Loki hides underneath his devil-may-care facade. And as with Owen Wilson, Hiddleston also has great chemistry with Sophia di Martino. Sparks are certainly flying between those two. And flirting with himself/herself is the most Loki thing ever.

The chemistry between Tom Hiddleston and Sophia di Martino is so great that you barely notice that we don’t learn a whole lot about Loki that we didn’t already know, e.g. that he was something of an outsider in Asgard and that his closest connection was to his adopted mother Frigga, and that we learn almost nothing about Sylvie. She does mention that her mother died early, that she taught herself magic and that she has always known she was adopted, deflating Loki who thinks he’s dropping a bombshell on her. Both Sylvie and Loki are loners who haven’t been very lucky in love and indeed, Loki compares love to an imaginary dagger in a truly tortured metaphor. Oh yes, and Loki also confirms that he’s bisexual, something which isn’t really a surprise, because Loki has always been pansexual, both in the comics and in mythology. In fact, I always found it disappointing that Loki in the movies was depicted as seemingly interested in no one, since both mythological and comic Loki would have been flirting with everybody left, right and center. But then, the Marvel movies have also dialed down the sexuality of most other characters, e.g. Black Widow or Nick Fury. Only Tony Stark gets to retain his playboy persona.

Of course, the fact that the Marvel movies dialed down the often quite raunchy sexual adventures of the characters is largely due to Disney’s “family friendly” image. And even if Loki is now officially confirmed to be bisexual, it’s notable that this bit of dialogue can easily be cut or dubbed over for distribution to ultra-conservative countries. Just as most other appearances of LGBTQ+ characters in Marvel, Star Wars and Disney properties were blink and you’ll miss it moments. This is even more disappointing, considering that both the comics as well as the TV shows of Marvel’s rival DC do so much better with regard to LGBTQ+ representation.

It’s infuriating that big corporations like Disney inevitably bow to the homophobic laws of certain countries, all because of the allmighty god Mammon. After all, on the same day that “Lamentis” dropped on Disney+, Germany played Hungary, a country whose reactionary government has just passed a homophobic law which basically makes it illegal to as much as mention that LGBTQ+ people exist “because of the children”, in the 2021 European football championship. The match took place in the Allianz Arena in Munich, one of Germany’s biggest and most modern stadiums. The city of Munich wanted to light up the stadium (its exterior can be lit up in different colours, depending on which team is playing) in rainbow colours to protest the Hungarian anti-LGBTQ+ law, but the UEFA forbade it, because they deemed lighting up the stadium in the colours of the rainbow an inacceptable political statement, mere days after the UEFA harrassed German team captain Manuel Neuer over wearing a rainbow armband. Meanwhile, the fact that a group of far right Hungerian football fans engaged in racist and homophobic chants against players of the opposing teams (and ignored covid restrictions as well) is apparently not political as far as the UEFA is concerned. And frankly, it infuriates that corporations like Disney or organisation like UEFA bow to reactionary governments, all because they hope to make a profit there.

The UEFA decision infuriated a lot of people and so many of the German fans wore rainbow colours, other football stadiums in Germany were lit up in rainbow colours, the Munich townhall flew the pride flag and plenty of companies changed their logos to rainbow colours for the day as well. Though there is a lot of of hypocrisy there, too, because football is still a very homophobic sport. There is a reason that the few football play who have come out as gay have all done so after the end of their careers. As for the corporations who displayed their logos in rainbow colours, I bet they have no problem doing in business in homophobic countries. However, they have apparently realised that LGBTQ+ people do have money, too, and are willing to spend it, so these solidiarity with LGBTQ+ people gestures feel like a marketing stunt. Finally, Munich is the capital of Bavaria, the German state whose then minister president Edmund Stoiber said in 2001 that legalising same-sex marriages would be the same as legalising devil worship. Of course, Stoiber was an idiot and apparently unaware that the German constitution guarantees freedom of religion for everybody, including Satanists, and that worshipping the Devil is perfectly legal.

So yes, Loki is canonically bisexual, but don’t expect to see him snogging Mobius or Thor or Heimdall anytime soon. Maybe we will eventually see Loki snogging Sylvie, but first of all, she falls asleep on the train, while Loki gets very drunk – he clearly doesn’t have Thor’s stamina – and sings Asgardians songs in what I think is Icelandic (Tom Hiddleston is apparently another of the brilliant linguists that Oxford and Cambridge keep losing to Hollywood, just like Richard Burton and Philip Madoc). This is also when Loki comes up with the tortured “love is an imaginary dagger” metaphor. Sylvie, meanwhile, is annoyed, because Loki is attracting attention to himself – and to her. And indeed, one of the snooty passenger rats him out to the guards, which leads to another fight. Loki and Sylvie are both good fighters, but nonetheless, Loki gets himself thrown off the train. Worse, the TemPad is destroyed. So now Loki and Sylvie are trapped on an exploding planet. Or are they?

“What about the Ark?” Loki asks. “It never takes off”, Sylvia replies, “It’s destroyed.”

“Well, it never had us on board”, Loki says and both of them set off to make it to the Ark.

The Ark is located in a city that’s a neon-drenched cyberpunk nightmare straight out of Blade Runner or Total Recall. I have praised Loki’s production design in every single review so far and this one is no exception, because the design is utterly gorgeous, whether it’s the Star Wars look of the mining town, the dieselpunk aesthetics of the train or the cyberpunk neon look of the city. Loki truly revels in retrofuturist aesthetics, which do evoke “science fiction” for many of us, because these are the aesthetics that the science fiction films we grew up with had. So far, the series has had visual callbacks to Star Wars, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Doctor Who, Logan’s Run, Brazil, Snowpiercer and the entire canon of early 1970s dytopian SF films.

The colour scheme of the episode is also noteworthy, because Lamentis is lit up in purple, pink and blue hues throughout, which – as Saloni Gajjar points out at The AV-Club – are also the colours of the bisexual flag. And yes, according to director Kate Herron, that’s deliberate. It’s also a visual cue that Disney cannot remove for broadcast in homophobic countries.

The city is in a state of anarchy and full of guards interested only in keeping the riffraff off the Ark, so Loki and Sylvie have to fight their way through. However, before they can reach the Ark, it is hit by a chunk of the disintegrating moon. Our two Lokis are doomed… or are they?

As cliffhangers go, this one isn’t all that thrilling, if only because we know that Loki and Sylvie will survive to do mischief another day. Most likely, Mobius and the TVA will pop up and rescue them at the beginning of next episode.

And talking of the TVA, Sylvie does drop an interesting tidbit, namely that the TVA agents were not created by the Time Keepers, as Mobius believes, but that they are variants themselves who were apparently brainwashed and pressed into service, which confirms that the Time Keepers are arseholes (Sylvie calls them “omniscient fascists” at one point). Loki is a little bothered by this, just as he is a bit troubled by the fact that all the people they meet on Lamentis will die. So we are gradually seeing the psychopathic Loki of Avengers turn into the more nuanced character of Thor: The Dark World and beyond.

Due to the time and space travel theme, Loki has drawn comparisons to Doctor Who from the start, but “Lamentis” feels even more Doctor Who-like than previous episodes. Camestros Felapton calls it the best Doctor Who episode in years and Guardian reviewer Andy Welch and Daily Dot reviewer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw also compare the episode to Doctor Who with a much bigger budget.

In fact, the Doctor Who vibes are so notable that I’m wondering whether Loki isn’t Tom Hiddleston auditioning for Doctor Who. IMO, he would be a better choice than the most of the people on the list of potential next Doctors that the Guardian recently published. The only actors on the Guardian list I would like to see playing the Doctor are Jo Martin (who has already played a version of the Doctor), Paterson Joseph and Riz Ahmed. And no, Michaela Coel or Phoebe Waller-Bridges do not have to play every part in every TV show.

Loki continues to look great and be a lot of fun. However, it is notable that for the third episode in a row, not a lot happens. And in fact, the only reason that Marvel can get away with this are Tom Hiddleston’s acting skills and the chemistry he has with his co-stars.

Next week’s review might be a bit delayed, because I will likely be engaged in the 2021 July short story challenge by then.

Loki Meets “The Variant”

Another Wednesday, another episode of Loki. For my takes on previous episodes (well, just one so far), go here.

Warning! Spoilers behind the cut!

Episode 2 starts as episode 1 ended, with the titular Variant (whom Agent Mobius believes is another version of Loki) attacking a team of TVA Minutemen at a Renaissance Fair in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 1985, which gave me a good laugh, because a friend of mine from school spent the summer in Oshkosh* around that time, though I have no idea if she attended a Renaissance Fair. The Variant takes over one of the agents, Hunter C-20, with powers which look very much like Loki’s abilities to take people over (though our Loki needed his staff and the Mind Stone) and kills the rest of them to the stains of Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero”. Then the Variant leaves through a time door, dragging along Hunter C-20.

Why Oshkosh? No one seems to know and Tor.com reviewer Emmet Asher-Perrin, who is from the area, points out that Oshkosh doesn’t even have a Renaissance Fair. However, Emmet Asher-Perrin also points out that Marvel writer and editor Mark Gruenwald, on whose likeness Agent Mobius is based, was born in Oshkosh, so this might be another reference to him. Or it might be an even more complictaed inside joke, because The Umbrella Academy also had an episode involving time travel and time keepers set in Oshkosh. Maybe Oshkosh, Wisconsin, is the secret hub of the multiverse?

The scene now shifts to the TVA headquarters, where Loki is sitting at Agent Mobius’ desk, reading Mobius’ jetski magazine, while doing his best to ignore the orientation holograms presented by the annoyingly chirpy Miss Minutes. He is rescued by Mobius, who tells Loki that the Variant has attacked again – in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, as we’ve seen in the opening scene. And so Loki, Mobius, Hunter B-15 and a team of Minutemen head to Oshkosh in 1985, where they stick out like a sore thumb. And indeed, why do the Minutemen not even make an effort to blend in, if preserving the timeline is so important? Of course, they inevitably reset the timeline, which – as Loki points out – is just a nicer way of saying disintegrating everything and everybody in the vicinity. And whatever you think of Renaissance Fairs, they don’t deserve to be disintegrated.

The team find the dead Minutemen as well as C-20’s helmet and baton, but C-20 herself is missing. The Minutemen are about to swarm out and search for her, when Loki stops them and points out that it’s very likely a trap. He also gives a speech about the ears and teeth of wolves and lays out his plan to trick the Variant, by pretending to side with them. But in exchange for helping the TVA, he wants to meet the Time Keepers. Of course, we’re talking about Loki here and Loki is only ever on one side, namely his own. And so he’s just stalling the TVA agents, which Mobius figures out, though not in time to do more than just reset the timeline and wipe out a whole Renaissance Fair full of innocent people. Maybe that is why there is no Renaissance Fair in Oshkosh in our universe, because the TVA wiped it out.

Back at the TVA headquarters, Mobius has a meeting with Ravonna Renslayer, whose office really dials up the “midcentury dictator’s lair” look up to eleven. This is as good a moment as any to praise the set design of Loki once again, because it is just that great. The TVA headquarters is outfitted with various midcentury modern design classics. The TVA apparently buys all its furniture at Knoll International – or maybe the Atlanta Marriott Marquis does and the TVA simply profits.  Though the photos on the official hotel website show blander furnishings (and why is interior design so terribly bland these days anyway?) than the midcentury coolness of Loki. We do get extensive shots of the Marriott Marquis‘ famous atrium and glass elevators, as Loki and Mobius ride one of them. Though the TVA version also has statues of the Time Keepers at the bottom of the lift, which the actual building doesn’t. Personally, I’d suggest adding some for Dragon Con.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw didn’t have much to do last episode, so I’m glad that we get to see more of her here. Her relationship with Mobius is also interesting. Mobius occasionally brings her gifts like snow globes (come to think of it, the schoolfriend I mentioned above, the one who visited Oshkosh, also collected snow globes) for her trophy shelf, though he’s not the only TVA analyst who does, which bothers Mobius quite a bit. Personally, the vibes I got from their interaction is that Mobius and Ravonna either used to be a couple or they’re colleagues with benefits and Mobius would like a more exclusive arrangement. And come on, Ravonna berating Mobius for never using a coaster (and Ravonna’s glasses are gorgeous. Whatever era she got them from, I want some) feels very much like a longterm couple arguing. Meanwhile, Guardian reviewer Andy Welch finds some sinister undertones in Ravonna’s and Mobius’ interaction and wonders whether Ravonna is not what she claims to be, probably based on the comics history of her character and her connection to Kang the Conqueror.

Ravonna tells Mobius that he’s wasting his time with Loki and should just “prune” (another euphemism for “disintegrate”) him, but Mobius still thinks that Loki can help. Mobius and Ravenna also have an interesting side conversation about the Time Keepers. Mobius, we learn, has never met the Time Keepers, even though he has absolute faith in them. Ravonna claims to see them on occasion. And it’s notable that whenever we see Ravonna, either in the courtroom or now in her office, she is always surrounded by gigantic statues of the Time Keepers. So do the Time Keepers even exist or at least, do they still exist? Or is Ravonna the one who’s really running the show?

That question will have to wait for an answer, because next Mobius makes Loki sit down with a stack of files about the Variant’s attacks and tells Loki to go through them to see if anything pops up. Mobius also tells Loki that this is his last chance or he will get disintegrated like so many other Loki variants before, because the God of Mischief has the tendency to go of script and violate the sacred time line.

The bit about the different Loki variants is quite amusing. One has muscles to rival Thor’s, another has apparently won the Tour de France. Personally, I vastly prefer Loki to Lance Armstrong or Jan Ullrich, since at least everybody expects Loki to cheat, whereas people didn’t expect it from Ullrich or Armstrong (and apparently, some Armstrong fans still can’t accept that he cheated).  Another neat moment is when Hunter B-15 sums up Loki’s powers and Loki corrects her in the tone of an overpedantic comic fan who will explain in great details that Spider-Man is a mutate, not a mutant.

Of course, Loki does not stay in the TVA’s reading room, reading paper files (and why does the TVA use paper files at all?) for long, before he wanders off to take a peak at more interesting files. However, all files are classified except for Loki’s personal files, from which he learns about Ragnarok and that Asgard was destroyed, which hasn’t happened to this Loki, plucked from the time line shortly after the events of Avengers, yet. Of course, Loki never really fit into Asgard, but its destruction and the death of almost ten thousand Asgardians still very clearly affects him. Of course, Loki has just lost both his adoptive parents and his home in the span of a day or so and he’s seen his own death, too, which must be tough on anybody and – as Mobius is pretty good at point out – Loki is not nearly as tough as he pretends to be. Not to mention that Loki did pose as King of Asgard for a while and didn’t even do too bad a job, questionable tastes in decoration and entertainment notwithstanding.

However, the report about the destruction of Asgard gives Loki an idea. Because apocalyptic events also make an ideal place for the Variant Loki to hide out, since nothing the Variant does will affect the sacred timeline, since everybody will die anyway. This is not a new idea – Captain Jack Harkness was using the exact same plan to execute his intertemporal cons, when we first met him way back in season 1 of the new Doctor Who. And indeed, when Mobius and Loki decide to put this theory to a test, they even choose the exact same disaster that Captain Jack used for his scams, namely the destruction of Pompeii in 79 AD. AV-Club reviewer Caroline Siede gives a shout-out to the Doctor Who episode “The Fires of Pompeii” from season 4, though no reviewer remarks on the Captain Jack Harkness link. But then, apparently every mention of Captain Jack Harkness must be scrubbed from the timeline (down to cancelling comics, which have nothing whatsoever to do with Barrowman) due to John Barrowman’s well known tendency to run around naked on set.

In Pompeii, Mobius wants to be cautious, but Loki draws maximum attention to himself by freeing some goats and then jumping onto a cart to declaim in Latin that Mount Vesuvius will errupt and everybody will die and that he should know, because he’s from the future, whereupon Loki pauses and asks Mobius, “We are from the future, aren’t we?” Personally, I suspect that the TVA exists outside time, just like Eternity in Isaac Asimov’s 1955 novel The End of Eternity.

The Latin is pretty good, by the way, which pleased me, because bad Latin in movies and TV shows is a pet peeve of mine. But then, Tom Hiddleston has a classical education and very likely knows Latin and can pronounce it correctly. Though Tor.com‘s Emmet Asher-Perrin wonders why Loki speaks Latin at all. Personally, I don’t find it surprising that Loki speaks Latin. After all, the Asgardians are very old and were worshipped as gods by the various Nordic and Germanic people at the same time that the Roman Empire was trying to conquer (and partly succeeded) the Germanic people. The Asgardians almost certainly got mixed up in the conflict with the Roman Empire, so of course Loki speaks Latin. Hell, he probably played some of his God of Mischief tricks on Varus and his legions during the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (which actually took place near Kalkriese and not in the Teutoburg Forest, though that wasn’t discovered until well into my lifetime).

Mount Vesuvius erupts on schedule and Mobius and Loki leg it out of Pompeii (while the poor locals get turned into museum exhibits) without causing any damage to the sacred timeline. So Loki was right. The Variant is using apocalyptic events to hide out.

However, there are a lot of apocalyptic events throughout time and the TVA has no idea where and when the Variant might be hiding. Luckily, the anachronistic chewing gum that Mobius got from the kid in 16th century Aix-en-Provence provides a vital clue. Cause that brand of chewing gum was only sold for a few years in the 2040s and 2050s, so that’s where the Variant is hiding. Loki and Mobius rattle of a disturbing list of climate change related disasters, before finding the right one. In 2050, a severe hurricane hit the Alabama Gulf Coast. The locals, who couldn’t evacuate in time, tried to ride out the storm in a Roxxcart superstore (so Roxxon, Marvel’s all purpose evil capitalists, are also running retail stores now?), only to all perish anyway. The Roxxcart store sells the chewing gum, so that’s where the Variant must be hiding.

So Mobius, Loki, B-15 and the rest of her team set off for the Alabama Gulf Coast in 2050. They enter the Roxxcart store and split up. Mobius and the rest of the Minutemen search the storm shelter, while Loki and B-15 check the nigh deserted store. There is an interesting scene where the Minutemen are rude to the people hiding out in the store, because what does it matter – they’ll all die anyway. Mobius tells them that even if the people are doomed, that’s no reason to terrify them. It’s notable that while most of the Minutemen are rude and unpleasant, harrassing and disintegrating everybody and everything who gets in their way, Mobius is actually kind to the people he meets on his missions. First the kid in France and now the hurricane victims in Alabama. Eventually, Mobius and the Minutemen find the missign Hunter C-20, who’s still alive, but in a bad way. She keeps mumbling over and over again that she told the Variant where to find the Time Keepers, which begets the question how C-20 knows where the Time Keepers are, when Mobius, who seems to outrank her, has never met them.

Meanwhile, Loki and B-15 find a lone civilian in the garden center, claiming to buy azaleas, which wouldn’t exactly be anybody’s priority in the middle of a deadly hurricane. B-15 is skeptical, but before she can do anything, the civilian touches her and promptly collapses. The Variant had taken over the civilian, as Loki is want to do, and has now jumped to B-15, giving Wunmi Mosaku the chance to play Loki. The Variant now jumps from person to person with a speed that would make Dr. Mabuse envious. Next, the Variant possesses a stereotypical redneck who proceeds to beat up Loki, which leads to a fight with vaccuum cleaners as weapons. Loki offers the Variant to team up, but the Variant has no interest. Nor do they want to be called Loki, instead the Variant prefers to use Randy, which is the name of their redneck host.

But finally, Loki comes face to face with the hooded Variant after all. And when the Variant lowers the hood, the person underneath does not look like Tom Hiddleston, but is a woman played by Sophie di Martino. Now Loki has always been genderfluid, both in Norse mythology (the mythological Loki is also pansexual, whereas the MCU version has so far been portrayed as largely asexual) and in the Marvel comics, where Loki spent about a year as a woman.

But even though genderfluidity has always been a part of the character, I’m nonetheless surprised to see this aspect pop up in the TV series, because Marvel is part of Disney now and Disney are extremely conservative with regard to portraying LGBTQIA+ people in their various movies and TV shows. If LGBTQIA+ characters show up at all, it’s mostly blink you’ll miss it moments like the two elderly lesbians hugging at the end of The Rise of Skywalker or the bereaved gay man in Steve Rogers’ post-blip support group. The reason for this is that those brief moments can be easily cut, when the films are shown in conservative countries, where any hint at LGBTQIA+ characters is not accepted. And yes, I understand the economic reasoning behind this, but it’s still disappointing, especially since the comics have been much more progressive on that front and have played with gender since the 1980s. Magical sex changes, an old narrative device to indirectly address trans issues, have been a thing in comics for at least thirty years now and both Hal Jordan’s girlfriend Carol Ferris and Alpha Flight member Sasquatch changed gender as far back as the 1980s, while open gay superheroes have been a thing since the early 1990s, when Alpha Flight‘s Northstar finally came out, though astute readers had known all along that he was gay. And yes, it’s telling that Marvel tested its more progressive storylines in the fairly obscure Alpha Flight rather than in its bigger titles. Meanwhile, Marvel’s rival DC has featured several gay, lesbian, bisexual and even a trans character in its TV shows.

At the Daily Dot, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw points out that it’s also possible that the Variant is not Loki after all, but the Enchantress, a long-time Thor villainess who hasn’t popped up in the movies until now. Personally, I would find this disappointing, because I’d love to see the genderfluid version of Loki in the MCU.

While Loki chats with him- or rather herself, the female Loki is executing her plan. She sends all of the time reset bombs she stole via time doors to what appears to be the location of the Time Keepers to blow them up and the sacred timeline along with it. The episode ends with the TVA panicking, as branching timelines appear all over the place. Lady Loki opens a time door and leaves Roxxcart. Loki briefly hesitates and then goes after her, before Mobius can stop him.

So it seems the Time Keepers are history and that only two episodes into the series. I can’t even say I’m sorry to see the old space lizards, as Loki calls them, blown up, because frankly they’re arseholes. Their enforcers disintegrate countless innocent people and they also let the doomed folks hiding out in the Roxxcart store die without batting an eyelash, even though they could have warned or saved them. The attitude of the Time Keepers and their defence of the sacred timeline (and who decides which timeline is sacred anyway?) reminds me of the Time Lords of Gallifrey and their non-intervention policy, which the Second Doctor so brilliantly denounces in “The War Games”. Not to mention that the Time Keepers either created (as Mobius seems to believe) or kidnapped hundreds, if not thousands of people, to do their dirty work with barely even a break. Poor Agent Mobius doesn’t even get to ride a jet ski, even though he wants to so very badly. In short, the Time Keepers are arseholes, so good riddance to them.

Loki recognises the Time Keepers for what they are, even if his aim at this point seems to be to take over the TVA. He also has an interesting conversation with Mobius, which contrast Loki as the personification of chaos with Mobius, the agent tasked with keeping order.

In fact, even though this episode has more action than the last, there are still extensive scenes of Loki and Mobius sitting around on midcentury designer furniture and talking. And thanks to the chemistry of Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson, these scenes, which could easily be deadly dull talking head stuff, sparkle. My favourite was probably Loki explaining his apocalypse theory while using Mobius’ salad, some salt and pepper shakers and desk clerk Casey’s juice as props, while thoroughly messing up Mobius’ lunch in the process. Camestros Felapton, The AV-Club‘s Caroline Siede and io9‘s James Whitbrook all note the buddy cop dynamic of Loki (or rather buddy cop and criminal).

So far, Loki is part White Collar, part Doctor Who and a lot of fun. Whether the show will have more to say than that or whether its main purpose will be to set up a Marvel Cinematic Multiverse (which we know is coming in the next Doctor Strange movie) remains to be seen.

Cora Talks About Old SFF Elsewhere

“But what’s new about that?” some of you will ask. She always talks about old SFF somewhere.

However, today I had not one but two items coming out elsewhere. The first is my latest post over at Galactic Journey, where I talk about the science fiction anthology Orbit 1, edited by Damon Knight (and also about a lost whale on the Rhine). Orbit 1 is not only a very good anthology, where even the weaker stories are worth reading, but it’s doubly remarkable, because the table of contents is fifty percent women – in 1966.

Of course, we know that the “Women did not write SFF before [insert date here]” claims are nonsense, but it’s still nice to find an anthology or a magazine with a fifty percent famel table of contents in the 1960s, when all-male table of contents were the norm rather than the exception.

In some ways, the stories in Orbit are works of their time – 1960s/70s concerns about overpopulation pop up a few times as do the even older obsessions about racial memory and “Oh my God, we might devolve!” which pop up in SFF all the way back to the 1930s – but in other way, the stories feel remarkably modern. The stories deal with how humans can relate to the Other (usually represented by aliens), how to communicate with beings of different cultures, whether violence is really the best solution (spoiler alert: It’s not) and the dark sides of colonialism and imperialism. The story that most clearly criticises colonialism and points out that even initially good intentions can lead to bad outcomes is by Poul Anderson of all people, i.e. not an author anybody would accuse of being a strident Social Justice Warrior. Though this was likely written before the rightwing libertarian brain eater virus that spread through the SFF community in the 1960s and 1970s and beyond got Anderson.

However, I’m not just at Galactic Journey today. I’m also the special guest in episode 97 of the Appendix N Book Club, a great podcast (which I featured as part of my fancast spotlight here) which discusses the inspirational works listed in the Appendix N of the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide.

In this episode, we discussed Xiccarph, a collection of Clark Ashton Smith’s interplanetary tales which came out in 1972 as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, even though the stories date from the 1920s and 1930s.

I have two Clark Ashton Smith collections on my book shelf, but the first time I tried to read him, I bounced off Clark Ashton Smith’s work. This is not Smith’s fault at all – I was basically challenged to read Smith by someone who was convinced I was too stupid to understand him, which obviously did not make me inclined to enjoy the experience. Though the stories and the haunting atmosphere Smith creates were clearly memorable, because I found that I could recall details of several Smith stories, even though it has been more than twenty years since I first read them.

So I was happy to be given a most excellent excuse to revisit Clark Ashton Smith’s work. I appreciated his work a lot more the second time around. Indeed, one thing I’ve found with many of the authors associated with Weird Tales is that I enjoy their work more upon rereading it – including things like the Conan, Jirel of Joiry or Northwest Smith stories I liked the first time around, too. Though I still think that Clark Ashton Smith is best savoured in smaller doses.

Anyway, just listen to the episode and then listen to the other 96 episodes of the Appendix N Book Club, because it is a really great podcast.

New Story “The Gate of Mist” available in Issue 3 of Whetstone Magazine of Sword and Sorcery

I have two links to share today. First of all, my friend and fellow Best Fan Writer Hugo finalist Paul Weimer has revived the popular Mind Meld feature, where several SFF authors and fans answer the same question, at nerds of a feather.

This edition of the Mind Meld asks the following following question:

Congratulations. You have been given a Star Trek style holodeck, fully capable otherwise, you can bring in anyone you want, hold a roomful of people but not an entire Worldcon in it,  but you can only program it to be fixed to one time and place or the verse of one fictional work or series.

Where/what do you program your holodeck for? (Star Wars and Star Trek are off the table!)

Visit nerds of a feather to read the answers of Fonda Lee, K.B. Wagers, Beverly Bambury, Arturo Serrano, Mikalea Lind, Camestros Felapton, H.M. Long, Claire O’Dell, Maurice Broaddus, Catherine Lundoff, Elizabeth Bear, Andrew Hiller, K.B. Spengler, Nancy Jane Moore, Shelley Parker-Chan and myself.

I have to admit that Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar and Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age were on my shortlist of possible places to program my holodeck for, before I decided on a setting with indoor plumbing and less chance of random and brutal death.

Therefore, it’s only fitting that my other announcement concerns new sword and sorcery fiction. Because issue 3 of Whetstone Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery just came out today on the 85th anniversary of the death of Robert E. Howard, founding father of the sword and sorcery genre and creator of Conan, Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, Dark Agnes and many others.

This issue includes my story “The Gate of Mist” as well as new sword and sorcery tales by N.A. Chaudhry, Michael Burke, Jace Phelps, Chuck E. Clark, Scott Schmidt, Luke E. Dodd, J. Thomas Howard, Ethan Sabatella, T.A. Markitan, L.D. Whitney, Rob Graham, George Jacobs, Richard Truong, B. Harlan Crawford and Dimitar Dakovski with an introduction by editor Jason Ray Carney and a great cover by Mustafa Bekir.

My story is called “The Gate of Mist”. It’s another story that originated during the 2020 July Short Story Challenge. At the time, I called it “Brokeback Mountain”, but with warrior monks and cloud monsters (and a happy for now ending), which is still an appropriate description. Come to think of it, the fact that “The Gate of Mist” is an LGBTQ+ story makes it doubly appropriate, because June is also Pride Month.

So what are you waiting for? Get issue 3 of Whetstone here.

Loki Finds His “Glorious Purpose”

“Glorious Purpose”, the first episode of Loki, Disney’s latest Marvel related TV offering, became available for streaming today. I’m not sure if I’ll do episode by episode reviews of this one, because it’s a lot of work, but here are my thoughts on the premiere.

Warning! Spoilers behind the cut!

The first scene of Loki takes us back to 2012 and the events of the first Avengers movie and Loki’s failed bid for world domination via siccing the Chitauri on Lower Manhattan as well as the events of Avengers: Endgame, where the Avengers meddle with those events to acquire the Infinity Stones and undo the Thanos snap, which accidentally leads to Loki picking up the Tesseract and absconding with it.

However, Loki doesn’t get far. He teleports to the Mongolian steppes, tries and fails to impress some local women and is interrupted when a portal opens and several people in riot gear emerge, led by Wunmi Mosaku, whose character is only credited as Hunter B-15. They quickly grab the Tesseract and arrest Loki. B-15 puts a time control collar on him, too, just before punching him and then slowing down the time.

Next, Loki finds himself taken to the Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare of the Time Variance Authority, TVA for short. The TVA does exist in the comics, though it’s one of the more obscure organisations in the Marvel universe. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw explains the comics background of the TVA and the characters associated with it at The Daily Dot.

Since the TVA is a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare, Loki is subjected to various humiliating treatments. He had his signature green and gold leather outfit disintegrated by a multi-pronged robot, giving us a glimpse of Tom Hiddleston naked with the not safe for Disney Plus parts hidden by strategically placed machinary and proving that while he’s no Thor, Loki is pretty well built himself. We don’t get to enjoy the view for long though, before Loki is stuffed into a shapeless prison overall. He’s then told to sign a stack of papers (that seems a lot smaller than it should be, considering that Loki is hundreds of years old and someone who loves to talk) recording everything he’s ever said. Next he’s asked to confirm that to the best of his knowledge he’s not a robot, before walking through some kind of metal detector-like device. “Are there people who do not know they’re robots?” an irritated Loki replies, before briefly wondering what would happen if he were a robot and did not know it. Finally, Loki and another TVA prisoner are told to take a ticket and stand in line in ridiculously oversized cordoned off waiting area. “There are only two of us here”, Loki points out, but then he witnesses the other prisoner (we never learn his name or crime, only that he is on the board of Goldman-Sachs, which is probably enough to convince us that this guy is guilty of whatever he’s been accused of) being disintegrated and shuts up.

At this point, everybody who has ever had to deal with senseless bureaucracy (and that’s literally everybody) will sympathise with Loki’s snarky replies and his barely veiled desire to just punch the whole TVA in the face. Particularly the “Are you, to the best of your knowledge, not a robot?” bit reminded me of when I went to the dentist to have a tooth extracted, which broke off, requiring surgery and three X-rays in a day. And every single time, the X-Ray technician dutifully asked me if I was pregnant (a question which so outraged me the first time I was asked it at about age 14 that I snapped at the technician, “No, of course not. What do you take me for? Do you think I’m a slut?”). By the third time, I was so exasperated that I snapped, “No, and I haven’t gotten pregnant in the forty-five minutes since someone last asked me that either.”

But there are still more humiliations in store for our favourite Asgardian/Forst Giant hybrid. Because during the waiting period, Loki – and the audience – are treated to an explanation of what the TVA is and does courtesy of a talking clock named Miss Minutes in a 1960s style cartoon public service announcement. The Miss Minutes clips captures the midcentury cartoon look with absolute perfection. I immediately was reminded of the “HB Männchen”, the beloved quick-tempered advertising mascot of the HB cigarette brand, which starred in many cartoon ad clips in from the late 1950s throughout the 1970s. And considering that the HB Männchen may well be the most prolific serial killer in postwar Germany (how many people started smoking in response to those cutesy ads, which portray cigarettes as the solution to all problems, and subsequently got ill?), I for one wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be a time criminal as well.

And so Miss Minutes sums up several decades of Marvel Comics lore in a brief cartoon by explaining  that once there was a massive multiverse war between different timelines and universes. In response, the Time-Keepers emerged and founded the TVA to maintain the sacred timeline and prevent the creation of Jonbar points (not that they use that term) and new parallel timelines by eliminating temporal variants like Loki and the unnamed Goldman-Sachs dude. The cartoon promises that the variants will be returned to their original timeline after their trial, though it quickly becomes apparent that they will simply be disintegrated.

Time agents and time cops charged with preserving and protecting the integrity of the timeline are an old concept in science fiction. Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time from 1938 is the earliest take on that particular subject I’m aware of. Isaac Asimov’s 1955 novel The End of Eternity was my first contact with the idea and literally blew my mind. It was my favourite novel as a teenager to the point that I pushed it into the hands of everybody I met and told them to read it, because it would change their life (most people were just annoyed). I still have a soft spot for The End of Eternity, though I no longer force random people to read it. Ever since then, time cops and time agents have popped up in various places from Star Trek and Doctor Who (Captain Jack Harkness was a time agent the first time we met him and ironically inspired by Marvel’s Agatha Harkness, so it’s been “Agatha All Along” once again) via DC’s Rip Hunter and the Time Masters and the Hazel and Cha Cha from The Umbrella Academy to last year’s Hugo-winning novella This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar. Do they all work for the Time Variance Authority? It’s possible.

This is as good a time as any to talk about the visual aesthetics of Loki, which are absolutely gorgeous. The look of the TVA headquarters is part Verner Panton’s 1969 furnishings for the Spiegel publishing house in Hamburg (both the TVA headquarters and the Spiegel cantina even use Harry Bertoia’s famous wire chair, which you can still buy from Knoll International), part Brazil , part Socialist realism and Soviet era propaganda art (the murals and the courtroom) and part every school or university built in the late 1960s/early 1970s ever. Guardian reviewer Andy Welch points out the Mad Men style 1960s aesthetics of the episode and invokes famous midcentury designer Dieter Rams (I didn’t spot any of his designs, though there are a lot of midcentury design classics in view, e.g. the above mentioned wire chair and a spherical Keracolor TV set). Andy Welch also notes that the TVA scenes were shot at the Marriott Marquis hotel in Atlanta (built in 1985), which is a popular filming location. AV Club reviewer Caroline Siede also draws the comparison with Brazil.

Loki doesn’t have much time to take everything in, though, before he taken to his trial presided over by Ravonna Renslayer, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw. It is notable that except for Owen Wilson, all main characters in this episode are played by British actors. Gugu Mbatha-Raw even gained some time travel experience in Doctor Who way back during the David Tennant era. When asked whether he pleads “guilty” or “not guilty”, Loki points out that he didn’t mess up the timeline, the Avengers did. And yes, he knows that they time-travelled, because Tony Stark’s aftershave is unmistakable and he smelled it twice. Ravonna points out that the Avengers did exactly what they were supposed to do (which begets the question why the TVA didn’t stop Thanos before he snapped half the universe out of existence). Loki, on the other hand, was not supposed to escape.

Just before Loki can be found guilty and sentenced to disintegration, he is granted a stay of execution by the intervention of a TVA agent named Mobius M. Mobius, played by Owen Wilson. Mobius M. Mobius is another established character from the comics,  whose appearance was modelled after Marvel writer and editor Mark Gruenwald, who sadly died 25 years ago, aged only 43, and so never got to see himself played by Owen Wilson.

Agent Mobius has a problem. For TVA agents are being attacked and killed throughout history by a particularly dangerous Time Variant and their time reset cannisters are being stolen. When we first meet Mobius, he is investigating the aftermath of such an attack in a cathedral in Aix-en-Provence in 16th century France.  The attack left several TVA agents dead. When Mobius questions the sole witness, a street urchin, who killed the TVA agents, the kid points at a stained glass window portraying the devil and a devil that looks remarkably like Marvel’s version of Mephisto at that. Mephisto was widely expected to pop up in WandaVision, which never happened, so maybe he’ll make his TV debut in Loki instead. Or maybe it’s all a misdirection.  Because the kid also shows Mobius a gift that the devil gave him, a very anachronistic pack of chewing gum. And Marvel’s Mephisto isn’t really the type to hand out candy.

Mobius now wants Loki’s help in apprehending the devilish time agent killer. But first he wants to see what makes Loki tick. Loki tells Mobius that he was born to rule Earth, Asgard and the universe and tries to give him a variation of the “free will makes people unhappy” speech from Avengers. But Mobius isn’t buying any of that, so he subjects Loki – and the viewer – to a replay of Loki’s greatest hits. We see Loki losing to the Avengers, we see Phil Coulson get killed yet again (nothing about his resurrection though), we see Loki in a cell in Asgard and we see Frigga getting killed (which was partly Loki’s fault, as Mobius helpfully points out), which does affect Loki, because we know that his adoptive mother is probably the person he cares most about in the universe.

The bulk of the episode is actually made up of Tom Hiddleston sitting in a room – with or without Owen Wilson – watching clips from old Marvel movies, probably to introduce new viewers to the character’s rather tangled history, since the Disney+ Marvel shows are also marketed to and aimed at people who’ve never seen a Marvel movie before. Especially WandaVision, not the easiest introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, had a high percentage of viewers who were new to Marvel.

Basically, “Glorious Purpose” is the Marvel equivalent to what we used to call a “cheapie episode” back in the day, but which is apparently called “clip show” now, an episode that largely consists of clips of other episodes with some kind of framing device thrown in. Of course, few clip shows ever look as good as “Glorious Purpose” – there is a reason we used to call them “cheapie episodes”. Still, it takes some balls to use one of the most disliked TV episode formats of all time as the premiere of a brand-new and very expensive streaming video show. It’s the sort of thing only Marvel and maybe Star Wars can do and get away with.

Of course, it helps that Tom Hiddleston is incredibly charismatic and one of those actors you would watch reading the phone book. It also helps that Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson have great chemistry with each other. This is not the first time they’ve appeared on screen together BTW. Ten years ago, shortly before the first Thor film came out and catapulted Tom Hiddleston to stardom, he played F. Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen’s time travel movie Midnight in Paris, which starred Owen Wilson.

And indeed, Guardian reviewer Lucy Mangan and Daily Dot reviewer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw note that even though “Glorious Purpose” looks – well – glorious, not a lot happens except that Mobius gives us a recap of Loki’s history. We do get a bit of new info, namely that the infamous hijacker D.B. Cooper, who hijacked a plane in 1971, demanded the then princely sum of 200000 USD ransom and parachuted out of the plane into the wilderness of Washington State never to be seen again, was none other than Loki (so it was not Mad Men‘s Don Draper, as was rumoured for a while). And why did he hijack a plane? Well, turns out that he lost a bet with Thor. We know that the FBI exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so I do think Thor and Loki should apologise to them for all the resources wasted in tracking D.B. Cooper.

Loki also escapes for a while and even regains the Tesseract, only to find that a) it doesn’t work at the TVA headquarters and b) Infinity Stones are nothing special for the TVA, they have lots of them lying around in a drawer and use them as paperweights. This more than anything humbles Loki, so that he voluntarily returns to the room to watch the end of the highlights of his life. He watches Odin die, which clearly affects him, and then watches himself die at the hand of Thanos. Considering that as far as Loki is concerned, he was working for Thanos only a few hours ago (though I don’t remember if Loki even knew that he was working for Thanos or whether he only met the Alexis Denisoff character who was his emissary) that’s got to sting.

Mobius also delivers the devastating news that Loki doesn’t actually have a glorious purpose of his own. He merely exists as a foil to help others (Thor, the Avengers) fulfill their glorious purpose. That line also sums up the way the Marvel movies often treat their villains, namely as disposable antagonists intended to initiate character development in the heroes. This is also why so many of the Marvel villains, even those played by top flight actors, are ultimately forgettable. Because they were never the point of the story. Loki is something of an exception here, because he was brought back again and again (he has supposedly died on screen three times by now, which is almost Jean Grey record), largely because Tom Hiddleston’s natural charisma made him a fan favourite. Whereas no one remembers Obadiah Stane, Whiplash, Ghost, Yellowjacket, Dormanu and a dozen other lesser Marvel villains.

Finally, Mobius gets Loki to admit why he does what he does. He doesn’t really like to hurt people (which will be a great consolation to Phil Coulson and Hawkeye, I’m sure), he just wants to make them fear him, because he feels powerless and weak. It’s the classic psychology of the bully, except that I’m not sure if it really applies to Loki. Because I’ve always viewed him as someone who is acts out, because he’s desperate for attention from Thor and Odin. Both Thor and Odin clearly care about Earth, so Earth often gets caught in the crossfire. Loki’s “I don’t want to play anymore, let’s have a drink” reaction at the end of Avengers confirms this. He really doesn’t get why everbody is so upset.

That said, I’m also not sure if it was a good idea to set Loki directly after the events in Avengers, undoing much of a character development he received in latter movies. Because Joss Whedon portrayed Loki far more as a one-dimensional psychopath than the writers of the various Thor movies.

Once he’s broken down Loki, Mobius also reveals why he wants Loki’s help. Because he believes that the dangerous temporal varient he’s been tracking, the one who’s been murdering TVA agents, is none other than another version of Loki. This is unexpected, though the devil imagery could also refer to Loki’s horned helmet. And handing candy to a random urchin is far more a Loki thing than a Mephisto thing.

The last scene shows the dangerous variant striking again, this time by luring some TVA agents to 19th century Oklahoma and setting them on fire. We even see the variant, though he or she is wearing a hooded cloak.

So far, Loki looks really stunning and is also a lot of fun, even though very little happened in the first episode. I guess the next episode gets into the meat of the story. So far, Loki is more offbeat than the fairly conventional Falcon and the Winter Soldier, though whether it will be as delightfully weird as WandaVision remains to be seen. If nothing else, Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson should ensure a fun ride through time.

Fanzine Spotlight: Ansible

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.

Today’s featured fanzine is a true classic. Ansible is a six-time Hugo winner in itself, while editor/writer David Langford has won a staggering twenty-one Hugo Awards for Best Fan Writer.

Therefore, I’m pleased to welcome David Langford to my blog:

Tell us about your site or zine.

My fanzine is the newsletter or newszine /Ansible/, which tries, maybe not always successfully, to cover highlights of the SF and fan scene from a British viewpoint while struggling to retain a sense of humour. Once upon a time /Ansible/ appeared only in printed form — mimeographed in the early years from 1979, just as in /The Enchanted Duplicator/. There was a gap in the continuity after the 1987 UK Worldcon where /Ansible/ won its first Hugo, but I started afresh in 1991 and have kept to a monthly schedule ever since. Charles Stross first posted the electronic text (sent to him on floppy disks) to Usenet, for several months in 1993 before I caught up with his cutting-edge technology; email and website distribution soon followed.

Who are the people behind your site or zine?

In theory it’s just me. In practice I couldn’t keep going without all the correspondents who send obituaries, interesting news snippets, more obituaries, convention news, too many obituaries, and contributions to such regular departments as As Others See Us and Thog’s Masterclass. The first collects notably patronizing or ignorant comments on the SF genre from the mainstream media, with special attention to authors who write science fiction but prefer to pretend they don’t (Margaret Atwood once explained that SF was “talking squids in outer space” and since she didn’t write /that/ she had to be innocent of SF contamination). Thog’s Masterclass is for embarrassingly or comically bad sentences in published fiction, not always SF — as well as the usual genre suspects, the Masterclass has showcased such luminaries as Agatha Christie, Vladimir Nabokov and Sean Penn.

Why did you decide to start your site or zine?

My unconvincing story is that It’s all the fault of Peter Roberts, the long-time UK fan who throughout the 1970s published what was then our national SF/fan newsletter, /Checkpoint/. By 1979 he’d grown weary of it and looked around for some gullible young lad to take over the subscription list, though not (he insisted) the title. That lad was myself, and the first issue of /Ansible/ appeared at the 1979 UK Worldcon. Peter’s words in /Checkpoint/ #97 — “/Checkpoint/ will be folding with the 100th issue, that being more than enough for any sane fan editor” — have regularly returned to haunt me, most recently when I published /Ansible/ #400.

What format do you use for your site or zine (blog, e-mail newsletter, PDF zine, paper zine) and why did you choose this format?

All of the above. I always do the printed /Ansible/ first, which since 1991 has been a single sheet of A4. The mailing envelopes are traditionally stuffed during a pub lunch, replaced since March 2020 by a simulated pub lunch at home. Each issue then hits the website as a two-page PDF identical to the print version, and as an HTML page with a few extras at the end. Next comes a plain-text version for the email list, the /other/ email list for people who are paranoid about Google Groups, Usenet and so on. There are a couple of blogs that don’t actually host /Ansible/ but announce and link to new issues, which I also do on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Thus, by madly embracing every format I can cope with, I can evade difficult questions like “why did you choose this format?”

The fanzine category at the Hugos is one of the oldest, but also the category which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines and sites are important?

Force of habit. After all, I’ve been reading fanzines for very nearly fifty years (gulp), writing for them since 1975 and publishing them since 1976. My wife says helpfully supportive things like, “Isn’t it time to retire?”

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online. What do you think the future of fanzines looks like?

Like today but more so? I privately regret the increasing move to podcasts and other audiovisual channels, because I love the printed word and also have serious long-standing hearing problems. Hence the tasteful UK fan catchphrase of the 1970s: “that deaf twit Langford”.

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?

Having grown up in primitive fannish times when it was considered rather ostentatious to type in a straight line or pay attention to page margins, I’ve been impressed by some of today’s high-class printed fanzines such as the recent memorial double issue of the late Bill Bowers’s /Outworlds/, William Breiding’s /Portable Storage/, Michael Dobson’s /Random Jottings/ and Bruce Gillespie’s long-running (since 1969!) but still amazing /SF Commentary/. Outside the realm of impressive production values, Fred Lerner’s quietly literate and erudite /Lofgeornost/ is also much appreciated here. I suppose I’m out of touch with the fannish Zeitgeist, since none of the above is a current Hugo finalist. All of them helped goad me to produce my own POD fanwriting collections /Beachcombings/ and /Don’t Try This at Home/, if only for something to send in trade.

As already indicated, I don’t have anything to say about fancasts… but must gratefully mention the fan artists who brighten up /Ansible/, currently Brad W. Foster, Sue Mason and Ulrika O’Brien in rotation. With occasional guest appearances by the late Arthur “Atom” Thomson, just for the nostalgia value.

Where can people find you?

The main /Ansible/ site, which archives all the back issues and supplements, plus Ansible’s predecessor /Checkpoint/:

https://news.ansible.uk/

Thog’s own site, explaining the origins of this barbarian critic and including the infamous Thog-o-Matic Random Selector with its “I Feel Unlucky” button:

http://thog.org/

Social media:

https://www.facebook.com/ansible

https://twitter.com/ansiblemag

Some Thoughts on the 2020 Nebula Award Winners

The winners of the 2020 Nebula Awards were announced last night. The full list of winners may be seen here. For my comments on the finalists, see here.

The virtual ceremony was livestreamed, but I didn’t watch, because I was busy with other things and so only noticed that the ceremony was already going, when I saw a winner announcement on Twitter.

So let’s take a look at the winners.

In a decision that will surprise no one, the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Novel goes to Network Effect by Martha Wells.  The Murderbot stories are widely beloved and also really great, so I’m not at all surprised to see it winning.

The winner of the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Novella is Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark. This is a most worthy winner and probably also my favourite of the three novellas on the Nebula ballot that I have read. Horror normally doesn’t do all that well in the Nebulas and Hugos, so it’s interesting that this year’s Nebula Award goes to an explicit horror novella.

The 2020 Nebula Award for Best Novelette is “Two Truths and a Lie” by Sarah Pinsker. It’s a great story and very worthy winner, though I like the “Shadow Prisons” triptych by Caroline M. Yoachim a little more.

The winner of the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Short Story is “Open House on Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell. It’s a fine story, which is also a Hugo finalist in this category. We also have another spooky story winning, though it’s not explicitly horror. And come to think of it, “Two Truths and a Lie” is a spooky story as well.

The 2020 Andre Norton Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction goes to A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher. This is a truly delightful book and I’m very happy that it won.

The winner of the 2020 Nebula Award for Game Writing is Hades. As I’ve said before, I’m not a gamer, so I can’t say much about this category (and I’m not sure if I will vote in the special videogame category of the Hugos this year). That said, I know that Hades is a very popular game. It is also a Hugo finalist.

Finally, the 2020 Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation goes once again to an episode of The Good Place. This is the only Nebula winner this year that I’m not happy with. Not just because I can’t stand The Good Place, even though it is a terrible show and its popularity is a complete mystery to me. But yes, apparently a lot of people really like The Good Place. This is also its first Nebula win, though it feels as if it has won more often, probably because Hugo voters keep voting for the blasted thing and the Hugo and Nebula ballots occasionally blur together in my memory.

And honestly, does The Good Place need to win a major SFF award every single year? We are currently living in a golden age of SFF TV and streaming shows with more great shows than any one person can watch, unless you never want to do anything except watch TV. So why on Earth does The Good Place keep getting nominated for (and winning, in the case of the Hugos) major genre awards, when there are so many other great genre shows out there?

There were a lot of good films and TV episodes on this year’s Nebula ballot. The Mandalorian, The Expanse and Lovecraft Country are all good TV shows*, which have never won a Nebula, though The Expanse won a Hugo once. Lovecraft Country also won’t be getting a second season and was ignored by the Hugos, so this was its only chance of winning anything. The Old Guard was a great fantasy action movie and updated the Highlander concept for the 21st century. I still haven’t seen the Birds of Prey movie, but I doubt that it’s worse than The Good Place.

At least, this will be the last year that The Good Place will win anything, because the show ended last year. Still, I feel sorry for all the good works that didn’t win because The Good Place keeps clogging up the genre awards.

A couple of special awards were given out as well. Nalo Hopkinson receives the 2020 Damon Knight Grand Master Award. The recipient of the 2020 Kevin J. O’Donnell Jr. Service to SFWA Award is Connie Willis. Finally, the 2020 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award goes to Jarvis Sheffield as well as posthumously to Ben Bova and Rachel Caine. All are excellent choices and I’m particularly glad to see Rachel Caine recognised, because her Weather Wardens books did not nearly get the attention they deserved.

All in all, the 2o20 Nebula Award winners are a good, if largely uncontroversial selection. Even the win for The Good Place is not really controversial, even though I find the show terrible, because it is a popular show. One trend that’s notable is that the three short fiction winners all either straddle to border to horror or – in the case of Ring Shout – are explicit horror stories.

Those who worry that women are taking over the major SFF awards will hopefully be pleased that this year, two of the five Nebula winners in the fiction categories are men. If you include the game writing and dramatic presentation awards, which were both won by men as well, you even get four male and three female winners. But I bet that the usual suspects who worry about the poor widdle men being shut out of SFF awards will complain that the wrong men won or something like that.

*Even if Lovecraft Country has a character quote a Lovecraft poem that was not published until the 1970s, twenty years after the show is set, it still was a good show.

Retro Review: “The God in the Bowl” by Robert E. Howard or Conan Does Agatha Christie

No, not that way. Get your mind out of the gutter!

Before I dig deeper into the science fiction and fantasy of 1946 (for more about Chicon’s 1946 Retrospective project, see here), I want to go back to the early 1930s to revisit one of the more unusual Conan sword and sorcery stories. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Reviews.

“The God in the Bowl” is one of the first batch of Conan stories that Robert E. Howard wrote. According to Patrice Louinet’s essay “Hyborian Genesis” in the back of the Del Rey edition of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, “The God in the Bowl” was written in March 1932 and was the third Conan story written, following “The Phoenix on the Sword” and “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”.

Unlike the two previous stories, “The God in the Bowl” remained unpublished during Howard’s lifetime and appeared for the first time in the September 1952 issue of the short-lived magazine Space Science Fiction. Why on Earth editor Lester del Rey decided that a Conan story was a good fit for a magazine that otherwise published such Astounding stalwarts as George O. Smith, Clifford D. Simak and Murray Leinster will probably forever remain a mystery.

As for why I decided to review this particular Conan story rather than some of the better known adventures of our favourite Cimmerian adventurer (which I may eventually do), part of the reason is that the story just came up in a conversation I had with Bobby Derie on Twitter. Besides, I have been reading my way through the Del Rey Robert E. Howard editions of late and realised that there are a lot of layers to those stories that I missed when I read them the first time around as a teenager.

I don’t think I read “The God in the Bowl” during my first go-around with Conan or at least I don’t remember the story. And I’m pretty sure I would have remembered it, simply because it is such an unusual story. Because “The God in the Bowl” is a locked room – pardon, locked museum – mystery set in the Hyborian Age and features Conan as the prime suspect.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

As was common during the so-called golden age of detective fiction (and once again, “golden age” is used not as a marker of quality but as a term to signify the traditional mystery fiction of the 1920s and 1930s), “The God in the Bowl” starts with the discovery of a body. In life, this body belonged to Kallian Publico, Nemedian aristocrat, collector of and dealer in antiquities, treasures and rare artefacts.

The body of Kallian Publico is found strangled in a corridor in the so-called Temple, the building in the city of Numalia where he keeps his treasures. The body is discovered not by Conan but Arus, who works as a night watchman at the Temple. Our favourite Cimmerian (though Conan’s identity is not revealed until later and would not have meant much to Weird Tales readers after only two stories anyway) makes his entrance shortly thereafter, stumbling upon Arus just as Arus has stumbled upon the body of Kallian Publico.

Upon finding first the dead body of his boss and then someone in the Temple who clearly has no business being there, Arus understandably assumes that Conan must be the killer. “Why did you kill him?” he asks.

Conan replies that he did not kill the man and that he doesn’t even know who the dead man is. However, when Arus informs him that the dead man is Kallian Publico, Conan recognises the name as the owner of the house. However, before Conan and Arus can engage in some more information exchange, Arus pulls a rope to sound the alarm.

“Why did you do that?” Conan asks, “It will fetch the watchman,” whereupon Arus informs Conan that he is the watchman. Turns out that Conan had assumed Arus was a fellow thief who was after the same object Conan was after and that he only emerged from hiding to team up with Arus.

Robert E. Howard wrote the Conan stories out of order and the internal chronology of the stories has been debated for a long time now. However, “The God in the Bowl” is not just one of the first Conan stories written, it is also chronologically one of the first, maybe the first, of Conan’s chronicled adventures. Personally, I think it is the first Conan adventure, though many people think that “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” takes place before this one.

At any rate, the Conan we meet in “The God in the Bowl” is young, probably seventeen or eighteen. Howard explicitly refers to him as a “youth”. For that matter, this is also one of the few stories where Conan wears the loincloth that is his signature garb in the comics and Frank Frazetta’s covers for the paperback editions of the 1960s. Cause in most of the stories, Conan actually wears clothes and we get more description of his armour than we ever get of his loincloth.

This version of Conan is also still very inexperienced, naïve and clearly new to civilisation (and it is notable that Nemedia, the kingdom where this story is set, lies directly to the southeast of Conan’s homeland of Cimmeria). And while he is a thief in this story, Conan clearly hasn’t been a thief for very long at this point in his life. After all, he mistakes a watchman for a fellow thief and naturally assumes that a fellow thief would want to team up with him. Furthermore, Conan also doesn’t grasp that being found in the same location as a dead body does not look good at all and assumes that if he says that he did not kill Kallian Publico, people will simply believe him.

This becomes a problem when the law shows up in the form of a squad of city guards led by an officer named Dionus. The guards are accompanied by a man in civilian clothes named Demetrio who turns out to be the chief inquisitor of Numalia. The names of the characters as well as the description of the city of Numalia all feel very Roman and indeed Patrice Louinet points out that Howard apparently borrowed a lot of the names in this story from Plutarch. That said, in the oft reproduced map where Howard traced the various countries of the Hyborian age over a map of Europe and Northern Africa, Nemedia corresponds roughly to what is now Germany, so the Roman feel is a bit jarring. But then Howard’s historical influences are all over the place anyway, ranging from Assyria, Babylonia and ancient Egypt via classical Greece and Rome via  medieval Europe to the American West of the pioneer days and the colonial wars in the Middle East of the 19th century. Besides, “The God in the Bowl” was written before Howard codified his worldbuilding in his essay “The Hyborian Age”.

Demetrio immediately takes over the investigation and begins by establishing the facts of the case and questioning the two still living people on the scene, Arus and Conan. The whole scene plays out very much like a standard murder mystery. Demetrio – and the reader – learns that Kallian Publico was not even supposed to be at the Temple, since he had already gone home for the night. Arus never saw Kallian Publico return and only noticed that something was amiss when he found the padlock which secures the door to that part of the temple open. Only Kallian Publico has the key to that padlock and it is still on his dead body. However, the door was still barred and Kallian Publico and Arus were the only ones who had keys to open the bar. So this story is indeed a locked room mystery in the best golden age tradition.

If the Temple was locked and only Kallian Publico and Arus had keys, this begets the question how Conan got in. And indeed, Arus is quick to point the finger at Conan and accuse him of killing Kallian Publico. Come to think of it, it’s interesting that Arus never once comes under suspicion – even though he has as much of a motive, maybe more so, as we learn later – to kill his boss.

So Demetrio begins to question Conan. He gets his name and that he is from Cimmeria, another clue that this story happens early in Conan’s career, because in later stories he stops introducing himself as a Cimmerian and instead becomes Conan or rather Amra of the black corsairs, Conan of the Barachan pirates, Conan, the Kozaki hetman, Conan, chief of the Afghuli hill tribes, or Conan, King of Aquilonia.

Demetrio also quite quickly gets Conan to admit that he broke into the Temple to steal something. Initially, Conan claims that he only wanted to steal food, but it quickly becomes clear that he was after something else, though he refuses to say what it is. On the other hand, Conan is quite open about how he got into the Temple, namely by scaling a wall (“Impossible”, Arus exclaims, whereupon Conan points out that the carved ornaments on the wall actually made it quite easy for his Cimmerian climbing skills) and climbing in through a window after hacking through the bolt with his sword. Conan also admits that he knows the interior layout of the Temple, something which only Kallian Publico’s servants or wealthy clients would know. Finally, Conan insists that he did not kill Kallian Publico, though he would have done it, if Kallian had interrupted him. Once again, Conan’s straightforwardness is quite refreshing, as is his assumption that Demetrio will just believe him and let him go.

But while the set-up of an impossible murder committed in a locked building is straight out of a golden age mystery, Demetrio and Dionus are no soft-boiled Hercule Poirot types. On the contrary, Dionus and the only other named police officer Posthumo are violent thugs who don’t even want to bother with investigating the murder, but simply want to beat a confession out of Conan. Conan informs them that if they try, they’ll soon greet their ancestors in hell.

Conan’s quick temper and the fact that he will kill anybody who offends him is another indicator that this story happens very early in his career. For while Conan’s temper flares up in later stories as well – in The Hour of the Dragon, widely assumed to be the last chronicled Conan adventure, Conan kills a ship captain and starts a slave revolt, because the captain was rude to him – the older Conan is less likely to kill people over a mere slight – also in The Hour of the Dragon, he spares the Nemedian king Tarascus, though he has every reason not to – whereas the young Conan absolutely will. Also see “The Tower of the Elephant”, another story which takes place during this period of Conan’s life, where Conan kills a man in a tavern, just because he was rude to him.

Demetrio is put off by Conan’s insolence, but he also recognises that Conan is dangerous, when provoked, and so tries not to provoke him. And while Dionus and Posthumo are merely thugs with badges, Demetrio is a detective who actually makes an attempt to solve the case. And so Demetrio does have some doubts about Conan’s guilt, because a lot of facts about the case simply don’t add up. For starters, Kallian Publico is still wearing his rings. But if a thief had killed him, he would certainly have taken the rings. Besides, Kallian Publico was strangled with a very thick rope. However, Conan has a sword, so why would he strangle Kallian Publico? Finally, the estimated time of Kallian’s murder doesn’t fit in with Conan’s account.

Just as Demetrio is about to hit a wall in his investigation, they hear the sound of a chariot in the street, a chariot that brings two more suspects, namely Promero, Kallian Publico’s chief clerk, and Enaro, his charioteer. Enaro is a black man – and indeed the only character other than Conan and the murder victim of whom we get a physical description. He is also a slave, the implications of which are problematic. However, the story makes it clear that Enaro is not a slave, because he’s black, but that he’s a debt slave. There are problematic racial stereotypes in Robert E. Howard’s work, including some of the Conan stories, but Enaro is not one of them.

Enaro resented Kallian Publico and does not mourn him. However, he also declares that he did not kill him, even though he wanted to. Unlike Conan, Demetrio actually believes Enaro, but then Enaro had no opportunity to commit the murder due to being nowhere near the Temple when Kallian Publico was killed.

Promero, meanwhile, clearly has something to hide, though he very emphatically declares that he knows nothing. However, Promero is no Conan and so he quickly spills the beans once Posthumo slaps him around a little. The whole thing is also intended as a demonstration for Conan, who is very much not impressed.

Turns out that Kallian Publico had an object in his custody, a gift that was sent from Stygia (the Hyborian age’s Egypt equivalent) to one Kalanthes of Hanumar, priest of Ibis. This object was a sarcophagus shaped like a giant bowl, which supposedly contained a priceless relic. Kallian was only supposed to keep the sarcophagus safe until Kalanthes could send someone to fetch it. However, the greedy Kallian snuck back into the Temple to examine the bowl, open it and steal the relic, which he believed to be the bejewelled diadem of a dead giant. Then, on the next day, Kallian planned to report that dastardly thieves had broken into the Temple and stolen the diadem.

“What of the watchman?” Demetrio asks. Promero explained that Kallian planned to sneak in, while the watchman was in another part of the building. He also planned to accuse Arus of being in league with the thieves and to have him crucified. Coincidentally, this gives Arus an excellent motive to kill Kallian Publico, but Demetrio never follows up on it.

Instead, Demetrio now wants to see the bowl, which just happens to be located in a nearby room, where signs of a struggle (torn drapes, a knocked over bust) indicate that that is the place where Kallian Publico was attacked, even if he was killed in the corridor.

So Demetrio, the guards, Arus, Promero, Enaro and Conan check out the murder room and find the bowl open and empty. Demetrio asks Conan if the bowl is what he came to steal, whereupon Conan points out that it is way too heavy for one man to carry.

Next to the bowl, there is a chisel and a hammer and there are chisel marks on the lid, suggesting that Kallian opened it in haste. There is also a curious design on the lid of the bowl, which Kallian took for a diadem, but which Promero insists is the sign of the Stygian snake god Set. And Kalanthes of Hanumar is an enemy of the cult of Set, just as Ibis, the god Kalanthes serves, is the sworn enemy of Set. So why would someone in Stygia sent Kalanthes a bowl with the sign of Set on the lid as a gift?

Promero turns out to be a fount of knowledge about ancient Stygian cults. And so he also insists that the bowl is old, older than the human world, and that it dates from the time when Set walked the Earth and mated with humans. His children were laid to rest in just such bowls. Just how Promero knows all this is never explained. He basically serves as a walking, quivering infodump.

Demetrio declares that all this is irrelevant anyway, since the mouldering bones of a child of Set hardly rose up, strangle Kallian and then walked away. Interestingly, Demetrio has not just almost cracked the case at this point, the scenario he paints is also the plot of another classic sword and sorcery story, “Thieves’ House” by Fritz Leiber. Though Leiber couldn’t have known “The God in the Bowl”, because while he did correspond with H.P. Lovecraft, Leiber never corresponded with Robert E. Howard. And “The God in the Bowl” did not see print until 1952, nine years after “Thieves’ House” was published in 1943.

Instead, Demetrio and Dionus decide to do something they should have done before, namely search the Temple to see if the real killer is still hiding out somewhere. Though Dionus is convinced that they already have the killer, namely Conan. And who cares if Conan really is guilty – he certainly looks the part.

We now also get a brief explanation of how justice works in the city of Numalia. Because it turns out that murder is not always murder in Numalia and some victims or more equal than others. Killing a commoner as well as breaking and entering carries a sentence of ten years of hard labour in the mines. Killing a merchant will get you hanged. And for killing an aristocrat or other prominent person, the murderer will get burned at the stake, which is the fate that awaits Conan, should he be found guilty..

This little offhand remark is not only a great bit of worldbuilding, it also explains why Aquilonia got lucky – or rather will get lucky – in getting Conan as a king who believes in equality before the law. And since Robert E. Howard wrote “The Phoenix on the Sword”, one of the three stories featuring Conan as King of Aquilonia, before this one, one can assume that he intended to show the discrepancy between the relatively fair and benign rule of Conan in Aquilonia and the outright corruption and inequality in its neighbouring kingdom Nemedia.

Demetrio, who is convinced at this point that Conan is innocent, uses the threat of being burnt at the stake to get Conan to tell him what he planned to steal. I strongly suspect that anybody who tried to burn Conan at the stake would swiftly regret it, but nonetheless Conan does admit that he was hired to steal a Zamorian diamond goblet by a man who gave him a floorplan of the Temple and explained where the goblet is hidden. Promero stops quivering long enough to confirm that yes, there is a diamond goblet hidden in that place, though he didn’t think anybody other than Kallian and himself knew about that. Promero is really great at incriminating himself.

Conan, meanwhile, steadfastly refuses to name the person who hired him to steal the goblet. And when Dionus insinuates that Conan was going to keep the goblet for himself, Conan replies that of course he was going to keep his word, because he is no dog.

The fact that Conan does not rat out accomplices and remains true to his word is a character trait that reoccurs throughout the stories. In “Rogues in the House”, another story which takes place during this period of Conan’s life, Conan finds himself in jail, awaiting execution, after murdering a duplicitous priest/fence for betraying his accomplice to the police. He is offered freedom in exchange for killing someone, manages to escape from prison on his own and still goes on to fulfil his mission, because he gave his word, even though escaping would be the smarter thing to do. And “Queen of the Black Coast” starts out with Conan on the run after another memorable brush with the law, where Conan refuses to betray a friend who is accused of killing an officer of the city watch. When the judge does not accept Conan’s explanation that he cannot possibly betray his friend and threatens to throw Conan into jail to make him talk, Conan kills the judge and bailiff “because they were all mad” and goes on the run. Given Conan’s experiences with the law, I’m surprised that Robert E. Howard left out the part about smashing outdated laws with a battle axe, when he rewrote the Kull story “By This Axe I Rule” as the first Conan story “The Phoenix on the Sword”.

In fact, Conan’s loyalty to people he considers friends or he considers himself responsible for is one of his most enduring traits. That’s also why German SFF writer Hans Joachim Alpers’ famous quote that “Conan has the mercenary mentality of Kongo Müller [a then infamous West German mercenary fighting in Africa]” infuriates me so much, because it’s simply not true. For while Conan may have been a mercenary for many years of his life, he cares about others and is utterly loyal to those he cares about, whether it’s a friend or accomplice, the soldiers under his command or later the Kingdom of Aquilonia. He does occasionally oust another man from a position of leadership, e.g. Olgerd Vladislav in “A Witch Shall Be Born” and the pirate captain in “Pool of the Black One”, but in both cases it is obvious from the start that Conan is not loyal to either Olgerd or the pirate captain. They’re also both awful people, so no one really cares what happens to them.

Demetrio’s interrogation of Conan is interrupted, when the guardsmen return from their search of the house. They did find the window through which Conan entered, but they found no killer. However, one guardsman claims to have found the murder weapon, a thick mottled cable tied around the top of a marble column, so high that no one except Conan could have reached it. However, when Demetrio, Dionus and the rest of the gang go to investigate, the supposed murder weapon is gone. Dionus accuses Conan of taking the cable, but Demetrio points out that Conan didn’t have the opportunity, because he was always with Demetrio and Dionus ever since his arrest.

But even though Demetrio is convinced that Conan is innocent, he’s still perfectly willing to pin the crime on Conan, because – so he says – justice must be satisfied. Never mind that convicting and executing an innocent man is very much the opposite of satisfying justice. As Bob Byrne points out in his review of “The God in the Bowl” at Black Gate, this is the point where Demetrio goes from decent person and competent investigator to just as bad as Dionus and Posthumo.

However, before Demetrio can officially arrest Conan, Promero shows up again to share another infodump about Stygia and the cult of Set. For while everybody else was either searching the house or trying to figure out how to blame Conan for the murder, Promero examined the bowl and found the sign of the Stygian sorcerer Thoth-Amon etched into the bottom of the bowl. And Thoth-Amon is the sworn enemy of Kalanthes of Hanumar, intended recipient of the bowl. Promero also explains that the children of Set do not die, but fall into a centuries long slumber. And Thoth-Amon sent such a sleeping child of Set to Kalanthes to kill him, only that Kallian intercepted the bowl and opened it first, getting himself killed in the process. Again, it’s not clear how Promero comes to know so much about Stygia and the cult of Set.

Thoth-Amon, meanwhile, is a name that readers of the Conan stories will recognise, because he is one of the comparatively few recurring characters and the only recurring villain, who appears also in “The Phoenix on the Sword”, the very first Conan story written before this one, and is mentioned in The Hour of the Dragon, a much later story. Thoth-Amon’s ring, the source of his power, also appears in a Solomon Kane story and “The Haunter of the Ring”, a contemporary set Cthulhu mythos story by Robert E. Howard, featuring an occult investigator named John Kirowan. Thoth-Amon’s ring certainly gets around. However, it’s notable that Thoth-Amon and Conan never directly interact and likely don’t even know of each other’s existence, even though their fates are interlinked. That said, Thoth-Amon strikes me as rather naïve when he believes that Kalanthes, a man who has devoted his life to fighting the cult of Set, would just open the bowl without taking precautions.

No sooner has Promero delivered his latest infodump – and solved the murder – that Conan calls out that he has seen something move across the floor in a room that was previously empty, which sets off a new round of hysterics from Promero. Dionus and Posthumo have no intention to search the room again – after all, they believe they have already found their man – so Posthumo tells Promero to search the room and thrusts him inside.

Conan’s impending arrest is interrupted once again, when a guardsman drags in a well-dressed young aristocrat he found lurking outside the Temple. Dionus quickly tells the guard to unhand the young man, for this is Aztrias Petanius, nephew of the city governor. Aztrias claims that he was on his way home from a night of wine and revels and just happened to pass by the Temple. However, he is also uncommonly interested in the murder investigation.

Dionus, who is suddenly very servile when faced with someone of influence, brings Aztrias up to speed. Yes, it was murder, but we’ve got the killer and we’ll burn him at the stake. Aztrias takes one look at Conan and declares that he’s never seen such a villainous countenance before.

This is the moment where Conan has had enough. “Yes, you have”, he tells Aztrias and reveals that Aztrias was the one who hired him to steal the diamond goblet and was waiting for Conan to reappear and give him the goblet, when the watch seized him. And now would Aztrias please tell Demetrio that he saw Conan climb the wall and that Conan didn’t have time to commit the murder. Conan’s faith the honesty of others, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is almost endearing.

Demetrio now asks Aztrias if this is true. He also points out that Conan will be executed, if Aztrias does not admit to arranging the theft, and that Demetrio is willing to overlook the theft – after all, he knows that young noblemen often find themselves in financial troubles – and will even let Conan escape to hush up the whole embarrassing affair, if Aztrias but says the word.

Conan clearly is still expecting his accomplice to exonerate him, but of course Aztrias is not willing to say the word. Instead, he insists that he doesn’t know Conan and even has the impunity to suggest that ten years of hard labour will do Conan good.

By now, Conan has well and truly had enough of the corruption and dishonesty of civilization. He draws his sword and chops off Aztrias’ head, before anybody can stop him. He then tries to stab Demetrio in the groin, but Demetrio manages to deflect the blow and gets stabbed in the thigh instead. Next Conan cuts off Dionus’ ear, rips out one of Posthumo’s eyes (poetic justice, since Posthumo had gouged out a woman’s eye for refusing to implicate her lover in a crime) and kicks Arus in the teeth. It is notable that he leaves Enaro, the black charioteer, alone.

Conan’s righteous fury is interrupted by the reappearance of Mr. Exposition, Promero himself. He blabbers something about a god with a long neck and drops dead. This as well as the very angry Cimmerian with the bloody sword in his hand freaks out the survivors so much that they run or crawl away (Posthumo gets trampled in the process, too), leaving Conan alone in the Temple with a bunch of bodies and the unknown killer.

Sword in hand, Conan ventures into the room, from which Promero had emerged before dying. Half hidden behind a gilded screen, he sees an inhumanly beautiful face that beckons to him in a language older than mankind. However, Conan is still smart enough to realise that this inhumanly beautiful face must be that of the murderer who already killed two people that night, so he chops off the beautiful head and realises that the thrashing body behind the screen is not human, but that of a snake. Conan has killed one of the children of Set, which – along with being blamed for two murders, one of which he actually did commit – is enough to send even the bravest Cimmerian running for the border.

The snake monster with a beautiful human face might well have seemed familiar to Weird Tales readers, for a very similar creature appeared in the 1925 Cthulhu mythos story “The Were-Snake” by Frank Belknap Long, which Bobby Derie reviewed here. And indeed, it was a discussion on Twitter about Bobby Derie’s post, which prompted me to tackle “The God in the Bowl” for my next Retro Review. It’s not known whether Robert E. Howard ever read “The Were-Snake”, but he likely was familiar with the artwork, since the ever thrifty Farnsworth Wright reused it a couple of times. And the similarities between the two snake creatures are certainly notable.

As for why Farnsworth Wright rejected “The God in the Bowl”, even though he had the perfect artwork to accompany the story lying around, that will likely forever remain a mystery. After all, Weird Tales published a lot of occult and supernatural detective stories, most notably Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin stories, so “The God in the Bowl” would not have seemed out of place. It’s certainly better than the few Jules de Grandin stories I’ve read.

“The God in the Bowl” is one of the lesser known Conan stories and opinions about it are mixed. Bob Byrne and The Cromcast seem to like the story, while Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward don’t particularly care for it. Personally, I find the story flawed, but I still like it, simply because it is such an atypical Conan story. Though at the point this story was written, there was no such thing as a typical Conan story, since the first few Conan stories are all wildly different from each other. The string of similar stories where Conan and a beautiful, scantily clad woman find themselves dealing with sinister going-ons in some kind of lost city all came later.

Sword and sorcery and mystery are two genres, which go well together, because both are in essence about figuring out what the hell is going on. The clearest example of sword and sorcery mysteries are Simon R. Green’s Hawk and Fisher stories from the 1990s. The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories occasionally veer into that direction as well. Last but not least, some of my own efforts are sword and sorcery mysteries, too. “The God in the Bowl”, however, is the only Conan story that is also very explicitly a murder mystery.

So how does “The God in the Bowl” hold up as a mystery? Not too badly. There is some decent detective work courtesy of Demetrio. The story also plays fair, because the reader is given all the clues they need to solve the mystery. That said, some of the clues are a bit contrived, e.g. the sheer amount of information about Stygia and the Set cult that Promero just happens to have. Promero’s involvement is also a bit contrived. Far better, if he had stumbled onto the scene, attracted by the alarm, then having the guards arrest him, because Kallian’s chariot stopped in front of his house. Finally, Demetrio completely neglects a likely suspect, namely Arus the watchman. The main weakness of the story, however, is that it is very wordy with lots of scenes of people standing around a dead body, while talking and gathering information. Furthermore, Conan is very much a supporting character in this story, whereas Demetrio is the true protagonist.

“The God in the Bowl” is also a curious mix of different crime fiction and mystery influences. The locked room murder and the clue based investigation are straight from the traditional mysteries of the so-called “golden age of mystery”, as is the talkiness. Meanwhile, the portrayal of the police as violent bullies and the general corruption that pervades the city of Numalia are straight out of hardboiled crime fiction, which was just taking off around the time Howard was creating Conan. And though Howard is on record as being not a great fan of detective fiction, we know that he was familiar with the genre both in its traditional (August Derleth, creator of Solar Pons, was one of his regular correspondents) and hardboiled forms thanks to this extensive list of books and authors that we know Howard read. Though according to that list, Howard never read Agatha Christie, though he did mention her American counterpart Mary Roberts Rinehart. He was not a fan apparently.

Finally, the “an animal did it” solution to the mystery goes all the way back to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (and thanks to the list above, we know that he did read Poe), though I guess we should be grateful that Howard chose to make his killer creature a snake with a humanoid face and not a giant ape. Though Conan would repeatedly tangle with giant apes throughout his career and in “Rogues in the House”, a giant ape actually does turn out to be the killer.

This mix of disparate mystery influences is probably also why the story feels a little off at times, because the fair play, present all the clues approach of the traditional mystery does not really mesh well with the more hardboiled and cynical attitude. Robert E. Howard did write a few hardboiled detective stories starring a character named Steve Harrison later in his career without much success, but “The God in the Bowl” seems to have been his first attempt at experimenting with the mystery genre and therefore he doesn’t quite have the form down yet.

Besides, Howard uses the form of the murder mystery less as an end to itself and more as a vehicle to discuss a topic that was near and dear to his heart, namely the conflict between barbarism and civilisation. This theme runs throughout the entire Conan series as well as the Kull stories, but it is very pronounced in “The God in the Bowl”, which contrasts the honest barbarian thief Conan with the corrupt representatives of the law. But even though “The God in the Bowl” takes place in the fictional kingdom of Nemedia many millennia ago, the rampant police brutality, inequality and corruption depicted in this story were something Howard borrowed from much closer to home.

Police brutality is still an issue in the US (and not only there either), as the events of the last year have shown. It was even more of an issue in the 1920s and 1930s, as were corruption and inequality before the law. Indeed, what happens to Conan in the story – getting accused of a crime he did not commit, police officers who don’t care about the truth, but just need to present a suitable culprit, being threatened with violence and facing either a lengthy sentence of hard labour or brutal execution – happened to many people in the US South during the time the story was written. The hard labour in the mines, which awaits Conan, if he’s lucky, recalls the chain gangs that were a common sight in the Southern US at the time (and indeed the prison memoir I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang by Robert Elliott Burns, upon which the eponymous movie was based, came out the year before, though there is no evidence that Howard was familiar with the text), while the burning at the stake, which awaits him, if he’s unlucky, recalls the electric chair. And the victims of police brutality and railroading were often outsiders, drifters and those perceived as other, just like Conan.

It is very likely that these issues were on Howard’s mind, when he wrote “The God in the Bowl”, especially since Howard was engaged in an exchange (quoted here) about police brutality with H.P. Lovecraft a few months after he wrote “The God in the Bowl”. I do think that Howard’s view of the lawmen of the Old West was a bit too rosy, but it’s notable that what he describes would happen if the bullying policeman of the 1930s were to try their tactics on an Old West outlaw is exactly what happens when the bullies of the Numalian city guard try those tactics on Conan.

By now, this review is almost longer than the story itself. But then, one thing that struck me upon rereading the Conan stories is that while they are kickass adventure stories on the surface, they have a lot of hidden layers, which only become apparent, when one rereads them as an adult.