Of M.I.C.E. And Memory

Many moons ago, tt seemed to me that too many fiction book blurbs began with a "When..." clause. I found it rather boring and formulaic.

Recently, I understand why a blurb might start with "When". Most works of fiction are expected to begin with a life-altering event for one of the protagonists. Some would say that conflict must leap of the page in the first sentence.  Here's an excellent craft article by Benjamin McEvoy.

https://benjaminmcevoy.com/7-questions-fiction-writers-can-answer-improve-writing/

Is there another starter-word in the "How/What/When/Where/Why/How/Who/Which..." set of questions? Some would say "Is" and "Does".

As I mused on "When" as the most important (first) word of a blurb, I remembered Orson Scott Card's use of the "M. I. C. E." quotient as a mnemonic.

"When...." would have to come under the "E." of the  "M. I. C. E." acronym.

"M." is for "Milieu."

"I." is for "Idea."

"C." is for "Character."

"E." is for "Event."

https://fantasy-faction.com/2018/taming-mice-the-mice-quotient-and-storytelling

My preference is to write Character-Driven novels, so perhaps subliminally, I recoil at "When" and its suggestion of an Event-Driven story. Of course, one must have Milieu, Ideas, Characters, and Events.

No doubt, a Regency romance, or an inter-galactic warfare series would be novels of Milieu, but Fantasy Fiction dot com has a fine explanation. However, while poking around, I stirred up a veritable of plague of mice acronyms.

There is M.I.C.E. in marketing, and also in hospitality: Meetings Incentives Conferences Exhibitions.
https://www.cvent.com/uk/blog/hospitality/what-is-mice

Spookdom has M.I.C.E, to remind secret agents what they need to remember when recruiting assets and prospective colleagues: Money Ideology Coercion Ego
https://spyauthor.medium.com/mice-the-4-pillars-of-cia-spy-recruitment-61d3f5cf9d3c

Cyber secutity has M.IC.E..:Money ideology compromise ego
https://thecyberwire.com/glossary/mice

Civl Engineers -- and aren't all Engineers civil? -- can be M.I.C.E. also.

For further entertainment, there is a handy acronym finder.  https://www.acronymfinder.com/MICE.html

All the best,

Rowena Cherry

SPACE SNARK™ 

https://www.spacesnark.com/  

https://www.rowenacherry.com

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Reviews of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Part 1 by Karen S. Wiesner

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Reviews of George R. R. Martin's

A Song of Ice and Fire and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,

Part 1

by Karen S. Wiesner 

 

I can't help it, I feel bad for George R. R. Martin. He takes a lot of flak I don't believe he deserves. He had an idea for a phenomenal, epic fantasy story a la Tolkien (and yes, he, like the father of modern fantasy literature, considers A Song of Ice and Fire one very, very, very long story published in several volumes) and it became larger than life, to the point where he couldn't keep up with it and was quickly finding that each installment was growing and spiraling wildly in a way that undoubtedly felt out of control by the time HBO got involved and began producing the television series. 

Add to that stress, Martin isn't just an award-winning author and editor for many, many success anthologies featuring other authors--he's also a successful TV and feature film writer. When he begins to feel writing for TV compromises "the size of his imagination", he, in frustration, returns to book writing. In 1991, after having a vivid idea of a boy seeing a beheading and finding direwolves in the snow, he wrote the first scene of A Game of Thrones. In this fictional world, seasons last for years and can come to an unpredictable halt. Violent political machinations with several family dynasties vying for control of Westeros--including the daughter of the deposed Westerosi king attempting to return from exile and assume the throne she believes belongs to her--are at the heart of the tale with the growing threat of powerful supernatural creatures returning to the civilized world forming an intriguing backdrop I found irresistible from the first time I heard about these "White Walkers". 

Before long, Martin was researching, making maps and genealogies, and writing a few more chapters, which were interrupted for a TV series he worked on for years that ultimately never aired. In 1994, he returned to novel writing and A Game of Thrones. 1,400 manuscript pages in, he started to realize this was going to be a much larger endeavor than he'd originally thought. It was published in August 1996 with 1,088 pages, not including the appendices. At that time, it was touted the first in a trilogy, but, by the time the second book was published, "trilogy" was dropped. A Clash of Kings was released February 1999, coming in at 1,184 (sans appendices) pages. 

In 1999, after Book 2 reached #13 on The New York Times Best Seller list, producers and filmmakers started showing an interest in the film rights to the series. A Storm of Swords, the third book, was turned in several months late, published in November 2000, with well over 1,500 pages. A Feast of Crows, Book 4, came out five years after the previous (November 2005) with events set up to directly follow where Book 3 had left off, and focused on characters from King's Landing, the Riverlands, Dorne, and the Iron Islands. Book 5, A Dance with Dragons (with a whopping 1,600 pages) was set in the same time period but focused on characters in Essos, Winterfell, and the Wall. Only Arya, Jon Snow, Tyrion, and Daenerys had chapters in both parallel-running volumes. It came out in July 2011. With this story, the series had caught up with what had happened in the previous installment around the two-thirds mark of the novel, and then went further. However, it covered much less than the author intended and left several agonizing tenterhooks that fans have been hanging on all this time. While rude critics claimed Martin had lost interest in the series or, devilishly, was looking to make more money and so held off on finishing the book for publication, he says he just spent too much time rewriting and perfecting it, which I heartily believe. 

In the meantime, in 2007, HBO had acquired the rights to turn A Song of Ice and Fire into a TV series, Game of Thrones. The first 10-episode season aired in April 2011. The series was officially a hit. Though the book series debuted without any mass market publicity or buzz of any kind in the genre, forcing the author to earn his audience the hard way--by writing damn good books that his fans were avidly talking about with other readers--Game of Thrones practically came out of the gate with a cannon explosion. Soon, Martin was carried along by the blitz with a seemingly endless succession of book tours and conventions, though he was trying admirably to juggle all that while writing one script per season of the TV series, writing the sixth book in the series, along with his The World of Ice & Fire companion guide and the Dunk and Egg novellas. 

In March 2012, Martin said that he expects the final two installments to be 1500 pages each but later talked about not being "firm about ending the series with a seventh novel". Book 6, The Winds of Winter, is supposed to resolve the cliffhangers from A Dance with Dragons early on, opening with two big battles that were built up in the previous installment. The viewpoint of Sansa and Arya Stark is supposed to be covered, as well as Arianne Martell's and Aeron Greyjoy's within this title. As for the ending to the series, the author says he wants a satisfying depth and resonance but plans to avoid disappointing fans "by deviating too far from their own theories and desires". 

By October 2012, 400 pages of the sixth novel had reportedly been written, half of which needed revising. HBO was churning out the popular series by mainly following the books already published to a fanatical increase in viewers, and Martin was working hard to deliver in hopes of Book 6 being published before the sixth season of Game of Thrones. By early 2016, he announced he wouldn't be able to catch up with the books in time for the last season of the show. As of this writing, July 2024 (13 years later), we still haven't seen the sixth installment (though in October 2022, he said it was approximately three quarters done), let alone the final (probably) book, A Dream of Spring. 

Martin is said to have told the TV show producers the "major plot points" of what may be in the final two installments. One presumes he told them enough so that the show and its stellar actors (some of whom received a million dollars per episode toward the end) went on to earn countless awards. That said, the final season's ending responses from fans and critics were a pretty mixed bag, with a lot of people unhappy with it. 

For my part, I didn't appreciate the very abrupt end of the supernatural angle of the series. It was almost like the producers came up with a checklist out of nowhere and this vital subplot was checked off summarily within an episode or two. I can't really think of how else it might have been done, so I survived that. That said, for the ultimate end of the series, I had three requirements or I would have been absolutely wroth: Arya, Tyrion, and Jon Snow had to survive and Dany had to die by Jon's hand. So I was pretty pleased with the series conclusion. I don't expect to be quite as pleased with the author's own ending, should we get it, given his own words to the effect of killing off major players so readers don't rely on the hero coming through unscathed and instead experience the tension those characters go through page by page. 

You can almost hear the exhaustion in his voice in a 2003 interview when Martin talked about never again writing anything on this scale, of returning to his fictional universe only in standalone novels, and of writing about characters from other time periods within the setting, such as his Dunk and Egg stories. Disaffected fans in this thirteen year interval between book have been abusive and downright merciless, judging the writing process by their own woefully ignorant prejudices, adding to the stress this author is no doubt feeling to the extreme since the Game of Thrones TV series ended in 2019. 

Martin has also been involved in HBO's follow-up attempts to cash in on more success in this fictional universe, not only with writing the massive two-volume, complete history of House Targaryen that--along with novellas "The Princess and the Queen" (published in the 2013 anthology Dangerous Women), "The Rogue Prince" (2014 Rogues anthology), "The Songs of the Dragon" (2017 The Book of Swords anthology) and the Asimov's Science Fiction and Dragon compilations "Blood of the Dragon" (taken from Dany's chapters in A Game of Thrones), "Path of the Dragon" (Dany's chapters in A Storm of Swords), and "Arms of the Kraken" (based on Iron Island chapters from A Feast for Crows)--spawned the House of the Dragon HBO series currently (as of this writing) in its second season as well as the upcoming one for the Dunk and Egg adventures, and several others which seem to have failed to move forward (the Jon Snow one was what I personally was most looking forward to) or are still being discussed. 

I, for one, devoured every installment of the book series when they were first published and continue to read them every couple years in hopes that a new volume will come out soon and I'll be ready to read it the very instant it's released. I also watch the HBO series at least once a year. My only complaint with it is that it's very hard to watch the over-the-top gratuitousness that goes far beyond the "honest necessity" to reflect real people Martin deliberately includes for "an immersive experience" in the novels because sexuality is "an important driving force in human life". I tend to fast-forward through the worst of it. Other than that, over the course of three or four intense days, I binge-watch the entire series every time I get started with it because I'm tortured with the situations the characters are going through and I can't leave long before I have to return to find out what will happen (though, at this point, I obviously already know). 

I love that the characters are so complex and well-fleshed out, it's sometimes hard not to believe they're just fictional imaginings. Not surprisingly, Ned Stark, Jon Snow, Tyrion, Arya, and Davos are my favorites. The settings are lush and vivid while the events are so authentic and suspenseful, I would love to live in the time period--in theory anyway…okay, so maybe just LARPing there. According to Martin at some point since 2012, he definitely doesn't plan to allow another writer to finish his book series for him if he's unable to complete it himself (he is 76 years old, after all). 

In the meantime, I'm avidly, anxiously, agonizingly waiting for the series to be finished, but I'm also understanding of the author's need to do it in his own time, to the very best of his ability, while also trying to juggle so many other things in the process. The less stress his disgruntled fans put on him, the more likely we'll see the next installments, which hopefully come out with satisfactory conclusions instead of the series exponentially growing and growing and growing with each new volume. So practice patience and enjoy what else the author has to offer, as I am, including non-Song of Ice and Fire offerings, as well as Ice and Fire connected House of the Dragon and the Egg and Dunk adventures, which I'll review next week and hopefully provide something to tide you over for The Winds of Winter. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Brain Cell Computers

Human brain cells are being used in experimental "biological computers":

Biological Computer Made of Human Brain Cells

A company in Melbourne called Cortical Labs has constructed a prototype of a biological AI composed of tiny human neurons (too small to see with the naked eye). Brain cells in a box are shown "responding to inputs from a nearby computer. Put simply, the neurons were learning."

This system learns faster than a non-biological AI. As a plus, it draws much less power. An early version, called DishBrain, learned to play Pong. Not on a pro level, its creator admits -- "it hit only slightly more balls than it missed." But it performed measurably better than an untrained system.

I'm reminded of a SESAME STREET skit in which Ernie watches Bert play checkers with his pet pigeon. Ernie's excited by the amazing accomplishment of a pigeon's learning to play checkers. She must be very smart. Bert counters that she isn't really that smart; in all the games they've played, she's beaten him only twice.

The chief science officer of Cortical Labs, Dr. Brett Kagan, remarks, "The only thing that has 'generalised intelligence' ... are biological brains." Therefore, his team doesn't aim to produce biological computers to "replace the things that the current AI methods do well." Rather, they hope to grow neuron networks able to "infer from very small amounts of data and then make complex decisions" in ways non-biological networks can't.

A related article expands on possible research the brains-in-a-box might be used for. For one, the researchers plan to study the effects of ethanol on their learning abilities -- "to see how alcohol and medicines affect the cells, with Dr Kagan saying they will use ethanol to get them 'drunk' and see whether they play Pong more poorly."

Brain Cells in a Dish

The first article above compares these experiments to "brain organoids" -- lentil-size, 3D lab-grown "brains" -- being produced and studied at the University of Queensland. In both cases, scientists make a point of the fact that brains-in-boxes (or dishes) don't have the complexity to possess awareness or emotions. Suppose "eventually, larger networks could experience consciousness or an understanding of their condition," even on a human level? The Frankensteinian ethical implications would be mind-boggling. The morality of turning artificially grown brains into alcoholics, for instance. :)

Of course, present-day neurons on chips capable of simple learning and problem-solving have a long way to go before they might achieve self-awareness and free will. But in the future?

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

"Best Spinach Ever"

While reviewing the gustatory delights of the day, yesterday, between the final episodes of Everwood on Amazon TV, my husband told me that the spinach I gave him for lunch was "the best ever".

There was no spinach in it, but it was leafy greens.

Beetroot leaves (however many are crisp and green on your bunch of organic beets)
Baby Arugula (two grabs with a clawed hand... which is no different from a handful)

Leafy fronds of carrot tops, snipped from the petiole.

Two curly kale leaves, freed from the stalk.

Spicy chicken stock (Swansons in the cardboard box).

Shake of garlic powder (not garlic salt) according to one's taste.

Dash of extra virgin olive oil.

Wash everything leafy, of course.

Dump it all into a saucepan.

Snip everything roughly but carefully.

Pour in enough chicken stock to lubricate the pan. (Maybe a cupful).

Add dash of olive oil.

Bring to the boil, then turn off the heat.

Stir in a shake of garlic powder

Leave on residual heat until it looks like a dark green mass.

Reheat portions as needed in ovenproof dish. This recipe will serve at least 4.

The secret is probably to substitute a good quality, tasty, spicy chicken stock for cooking water.

The humor is that many recipes say "add.... to taste". You can taste whatever the dish is perfectly well without adding that spicy ingredient. "To taste" means "according to your taste for the stuff" rather than "in order to taste".

During Covid, and for some post-Covid, some senses may be lost including the sense of smell or taste, so "to taste" may take on new meaning.

I apologize if this recipe is a little repetitive. I serve real beetroot every day. It really does help with an invalid's blood pressure.

If one is trying to get away from sugar and overly processed --or artificially colored-- commercial cereal, a variation on muesli can be delicious;

Original rolled raw Quaker Oats (or the Minute variety, which is just more finely minced).

One banana, sliced.

Blueberries, (about a cupful), washed

A cupful of boiling water

A cupful of Fage strained Greek yogurt.

Warm bowl.

Add fruit and yoghurt

Stir in the boiling water until yoghurt is a sauce-like consistency,

Shake in the oats and stir again until stew-like.  

Set aside at room temperature or in a Bain Marie for about an hour,

The oats will continue to take up liquid, so it will thicken.

This is quite delicious, and easy on digestion and sensitive teeth. Raw oats has more benefits for heart, cholesterol, weight loss, bowel movement, blood sugar control.

If you do not have a nut allergy, or sensitive teeth or sensitive gums, this recipe is improved with the addition of walnuts or flaked almonds, or sesame seeds or pine nuts, pecans .. even cashews.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review Legends and Legends II: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy Edited by Robert Silverberg Part 2 by Karen S. Wiesner

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review

Legends and Legends II: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy

Edited by Robert Silverberg

Part 2

by Karen S. Wiesner 

 

Be aware that there may be spoilers in these reviews. 

Last week, I reviewed the first installment of Legends. This week I'm reviewing Legends II. 

The two Legends short fantasy novel collections, edited by Robert Silverberg, have an intriguing concept. In the introduction, Silverberg says that these masters of the genre became famous through the series their particular stories are set in. Seemed like a great initiation into already popular series from the crème de la crème of fantasy writing. I'll say upfront that all 11 stories in each collection, even the ones I couldn't really get into, were well written and engaging. I have no trouble believing that those who are fans of the individual series represented here will love these bonus offerings. That said, having not read any of them previously, or recently, I found myself mainly feeling helplessly lost. 

Originally, both collections came out as massive volumes with eleven short novels each. 

Legends II (hardcover published in 2003; trade paperback in 2004 with 784 pages) contains:

1.   Robin Hobb: "Homecoming" (The Realm of the Elderlings)          

2. George R. R. Martin: "The Sworn Sword" (A Song of Ice and Fire)             

3. Orson Scott Card: "The Yazoo Queen" (The Tales of Alvin Maker)            

4.    Diana Gabaldon: "Lord John and the Succubus" (Outlander)        

5.    Robert Silverberg: "The Book of Changes" (Majipoor)      

6. Tad Williams: "The Happiest Dead Boy in the World" (Otherland)           

7.     Anne McCaffrey: "Beyond Between" (Dragonriders of Pern)        

8.     Raymond E. Feist: "The Messenger" (The Riftwar Saga)  

9.     Elizabeth Haydon: "Threshold" (Symphony of Ages)        

10.  Neil Gaiman: "The Monarch of the Glen" (American Gods)            

11.  Terry Brooks: "Indomitable" (Shannara)   

The order above is how the stories are featured in the full collection. 

In 2004, the stories were divided up across two volumes with new subtitles:

·       Volume 1: Shadows, Gods, and Demons with Gaiman, McCaffrey, Williams, Hobb, Silverberg, and Feist.

·       Volume 2: Dragon, Sword, and King with Brooks, Martin, Gabaldon, Card, and Haydon.

 

Let's get to the reviews. As I've said before in my Rogues Anthology review, rather than insult some perfectly good writers and stories I just didn't happen to connect with--though I'm certain others will, I'll mainly go in-depth with reviews of the particular stories I actually liked in the second collection. 

From Legends II: 

1)   1) The first story in this full collection, "Homecoming" by Robin Hobb is part of her Realm of the Elderlings Series. The short description of this tale is that a group of exiles are forced to learn survival in a ghost-inhabited hellscape--or perish. Within the story, the narrator effectively summed up the intrigue that ran all through the tale--that some of those involved had started out as lords and ladies, others pickpockets and whores; being stranded and unable to leave this place, they begin to recognize they're equals in their desperation and dependency on one another just to get by day by day. The introduction of an elaborate city built beneath the bog provides striking evidence of a culture long dead but nowhere near gone. I enjoyed this story so much, I was very sorry when it came to an end. I wanted to know more about the lost civilization buried beneath the "Rain Wilds" swamp as well as more about the main character and her family who begin to build a new life for themselves in this harsh landscape. While I'm not a hundred percent sure how this particular offering fits in the three related trilogies the author has written (maybe, hopefully, telling the story of the lost civilization?), I do know I want to dive into them as soon as I possibly can. "Homecoming" is brilliantly unique, to say the least. I will mention that several scenes that described the buried city reminded me of the setting in Susanna's Clarke's extraordinary Piranesi novel (published in 2020), a favorite of mine. 

2    2) The second story in the Legends II collection, "The Sworn Sword" by George R. R. Martin, is the second in his "Dunk and Egg" series, grounded within the setting of A Song of Ice and Fire about a hundred years before the events of that series. I started reading this within the anthology but my copy of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms containing all the currently available stories in the series came, so I jumped over to that trilogy collection, reading "The Sworn Sword" in almost no time and unable to keep myself from going on to the third story instead of returning to Legends II. I plan to fully review this trilogy in a separate blog post, but I will say I absolutely loved this story in which, a year or so after the events of "The Hedge Knight", Dunk and Egg find themselves sworn to the service of an aging, has-been lord with secrets the old man hasn't bothered to reveal to his "employees". When the water on the land of this lord is stolen with a dam built by a neighboring house, Dunk and Egg go to the thief who's been painted as black as night by their lord. But things aren't at all what they seem. This series is absolute must-read, as is the one it's set in is. 

3    3) "The Happiest Dead Boy in the World" by Tad Williams is the sixth story included in Legends II featuring characters from his Otherland series. This tale started out as a hoot with the protagonist Orlando kicking back in style in Tolkien's Rivendell while inside an artificial universe on the worldwide computer network Otherland. For those who haven't read that series, this place is kind of like The Matrix in reverse. In that series, the real world isn't the one we all know and sometimes love--that's just a construct of the actual, frighteningly barren world taken over by a superior species. In Otherland, there's a lot of vicarious fun with simulations of fictional fantasylands we'd all kill to visit. Unfortunately, Orlando is trapped in this place. His former, real world, disabled body is gone, though he can visit his parents virtually. In the novels in this series, Orlando and his friend Sam apparently saved Otherland from an evil "program", the Grail Brotherhood, within the system. This tale takes place after that and highlights the bizarre consequences of those events, in which some unexpected developments plague Otherland. While, as I said, this story started out as a lark, quite promising, it quickly turned dark and somber, maybe a little too much. I will say it was well-written, enjoyable, and the author obviously knows a lot of about computers, technology and literature. Unfortunately, I left the novella feeling like 1) I wasn't really sure I enjoyed it after it turned dark and 2) that I'd gotten as much out of the premise as I cared to. 

4     4) The eleventh and final story in the Legends II collection, "Indomitable" by Terry Brooks is, as I said, the story I bought the anthology for and it's the direct sequel to his novel The Wishsong of Shannara, Book 3 of his Shannara Series. Brooks was one of the first fantasy authors I came to love and Wishsong was a favorite of mine (and my son's) with Brin and Jair Ohmsford as the protagonists. Jair is just a kid, excited with the potential of his magical gift, in Wishsong. Together, the siblings have to destroy the Ildatch, a book of dark magic. Only Jair finds out later, in "Indomitable", that one page was missing and it has to be found and obliterated. Familiar characters Kimber Boh and her grandfather Cogline also play starring roles in the novella, which is the perfect bonus to the series, in which Jair is the hero, a young man who never anticipated having to use his power again. I highly recommend the Shannara series and its many off-shoots, as well as Brooks' wonderfully creative Magic Kingdom of Landover series. 

Concerning the arrangement of the stories in Legends II, I would have had these stories interspersed in this way with the other stories: 1st story: "Homecomings"; 3rd: "Happiness"; 9th "Indomitable", and "Sworn" last so the two strongest are at the beginning and end and the two other strong ones are straddling the central areas of the beginning and end. I wish there'd been another I thought was an incredibly strong story positioned at #6. Given that I can't say I overwhelmingly loved "Happiness", I probably would have put "Indomitable" at #6. But certainly those who know and love the other series and authors would possess more of a connection with those stories I haven't reviewed here than I did. 

While I wanted to like all the other selections in the first Legends (after all, I usually like Stephen King's writing and several other stories mentioned possible dragon appearances--dragons!!!) and Legends II collections, I just couldn't get into them. One story I was really looking forward to in the first collection was the final story there, an off-shoot of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series, which has been on my radar since I saw Amazon Prime was adapting it into a TV series. That looks seriously good. However, I initially found Jordan's writing style in "New Spring" plodding. Far too often he used words and phrases that meant nothing to me--obviously things that fit into his series, things I couldn't understand, having never read any of the novels, and things which he didn't bother trying to clarify here. Sigh. Despite this, the story was fairly compelling and definitely something fans would thoroughly enjoy. I spent too much of it lost to get there myself. 

I think sometimes there's no getting past the fact that few people can "unknow" or forget things, even authors. Once a writer has established something in a series, he or she can't write about a time before the events of those books as if they didn't happen yet. While writing, details are backfilled by the author without, barely, thinking about them and he or she neglects, either ignorantly or arrogantly (I don't need to explain--who hasn't read my series?), to explain them. Fans appreciate those "series lore" factors--I know I do. They need to be there because new readers to the series can quickly find themselves lost and unable to catch or keep up if the writers refuse to "backtrack" elucidations for the readers who need them. (I'll inject here that sometimes impatient and sparse publishers don't want to include them either, so it's not just authors at fault here.) If a reader has never read anything else in a series, they need to know what series specific details mean--concisely. Part of a writer's skill is in conveying those special elements in an intriguing way without overwhelming the reader with too much that may not be needed in this particular story. Some of the short novels I read in both of these collections simply assumed I knew much more about the series they're associated with, and I didn't or, alternately, they assumed I knew nothing and engulfed me. Therefore, I was underwhelmed and those tales fell short of the mark for me. While I wouldn't say this has definitely ruled out the possibility of me trying to read the series the stories are associated with, these may not have been the best representations of their series to me, at least at this time.

There's a lot for fans of the genre and of the excellent writers and their popular series to love with the 22 stories included in the two Legends collections. You may even find something new, as I have, to further broaden your fantasy reading horizons. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor 

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Ghost Hunting

In case you want to write fiction about ghosts and hauntings or just read intriguing material about supposedly real cases of those phenomena, I ran across a website with lots of relevant resources:

The Shadowlands: Ghosts and Hauntings

There's a page with dozens of links to articles about ghosts, hauntings, and hunting for ghosts. Another page, on "Famous Hauntings," lists over sixty entries, some familiar, others more obscure. "True Stories," by contrast, comprises hundreds of personal accounts of encounters with the spirit world. Most interesting to me is the extensive list of "Haunted Places," with separate pages for each state and many foreign countries. Although the creator of the website believes in supernatural occurrences and claims to have experienced them, the "Haunted Places" section acknowledges that some of these stories of allegedly haunted locations may consist of local legends and urban folklore rather than reflections of actual events.

The articles on ghost hunting include tips on "How to conduct a safe ghost hunt" and warnings against trespassing on private property without permission. The site owner also deconstructs the concept of "debunking" from the angle that absence of evidence doesn't equal evidence of absence. To disprove a haunting, it's not enough to visit the place several times and conclude it harbors no ghosts because you didn't witness any. A valid "debunking" would involve discovering a plausible natural explanation for the witnessed and reported phenomena. That specific approach hadn't occurred to me before, and it does make a certain amount of sense.

On the other hand, the "debunking" side is robustly represented by SKEPTICAL INQUIRER magazine, which deconstructs not only ghosts and hauntings but other paranormal phenomena, as well as urban legends, cryptids, fraudulent cures, UFOs, and a wide variety of other dubious beliefs:

Skeptical Inquirer

Their website includes links to recent articles from the magazine that can be read for free. From this kind of material, a writer adapting a "real" ghost story for fictional purposes could find tips on how a skeptical investigator might try to disprove the haunting.

In fiction, we can make room for both Mulder and Scully.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review Legends and Legends II: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy Edited by Robert Silverberg, Part 1 by Karen S. Wiesner

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review

Legends and Legends II: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy

Edited by Robert Silverberg,

Part 1

by Karen S. Wiesner 

 

Be aware that there may be spoilers in these reviews. 

The two Legends short fantasy novel collections, edited by Robert Silverberg, first came to my attention when I was reading Terry Brooks' Shannara Chronicles to my elementary-school-aged son. I'd read that an epilogue to The Wishsong of Shannara (a particular favorite of ours) called "Indomitable" had been included in Legends II, and if there was a second installment, there also must be first, in this case, logically called Legends. Naturally, I bought the book and became interested in both volumes of these all-star collections. The concept is intriguing. In the introduction, Silverberg says that these masters of the genre became famous through the series their particular stories are set in. In my mind, that made for a great initiation into already popular series from the crème de la crème of fantasy writing. 

Unfortunately, I failed to take into account that most of these series are well established with multiple entries. Stepping into them, even with a prologue or offshoot--in other words, an installment that presumably comes before the beginning of the official series, or merely runs parallel with it but doesn't necessarily share the same storyline--proved to be intimidating, to say the least. 

I'll say upfront that all 11 stories in each collection, even the ones I couldn't really get into, were well written and engaging. I have no trouble believing that those who are fans of the individual series represented here will love these bonus offerings. However, having little or no previous reading experience with the majority of the writers and their series from both collections, I didn't have the same impression as readers familiar with their worlds. I can't say for sure whether the contributing authors were the types who deliberately refused to explain previous events (some writers are like that--I'll discuss that assessment more next week) or if they made every effort to adequately establish their worlds and characters and it simply didn't work in my case--in part because it's easy to become overwhelmed if there are already several works available in a particular sequence that haven't been read previously (or at least read recently). 

These two collections require a bit of explanation because they've been republished and repackaged (by more than one publisher) so many times. The list of stories and series contained within the first collection are as follows: 

Legends (hardcover published in 1998; trade paperback in 1999 with 715 pages)

1.     Stephen King: "The Little Sisters of Eluria" (The Dark Tower)

2.     Terry Pratchett: "The Sea and Little Fishes" (Discworld)

3.     Terry Goodkind: "Debt of Bones" (The Sword of Truth)

4.     Orson Scott Card: "Grinning Man" (The Tales of Alvin Maker)

5.     Robert Silverberg: "The Seventh Shrine" (Majipoor)

6.     Ursula K. Le Guin: "Dragonfly" (Earthsea)

7.     Tad Williams: "The Burning Man" (Memory, Sorrow and Thorn)

8.     George R. R. Martin: "The Hedge Knight" (A Song of Ice and Fire)

9.     Raymond E. Feist: "The Wood Boy" (The Riftwar Cycle)

10.  Anne McCaffrey: "Runner of Pern" (Dragonriders of Pern)

11.  Robert Jordan: "New Spring" (The Wheel of Time)

Note (because I'll bring this up again later): This is the order in which the stories are featured in the full collection. 

In 1999 and 2000, Legends was split between two volumes:

·       Volume One contained the stories by Pratchett, McCaffrey, Martin, Williams, and Jordan.

·       Volume Two contained the stories by King, Goodkind, Card, Silverberg, Le Guin, and Feist.

 

 

Additionally, a three volume set was published, the first two released in 1999 and the final in 2000, separating the stories this way:

·       Volume 1 with King, Silverberg, Card, and Feist.

·       Volume 2 with Goodkind, Martin, and McCaffrey.

·       Volume 3 with Jordan, Le Guin, Williams, and Pratchett.

If you can believe it, there was another four volume set published after that, as reported by isfdb.org, but the page for it on that website is confusing, at best, about which stories were included in which volumes. 

Tracking down any of these, whether sold in one volume or over several, was a bit of a nightmare for me. Eventually, I frustratingly ended up with both Legends and Legends II as single volumes as well as all the individual ones--in some cases, more than one (because listings were confusing when I was purchasing them). Regardless, the stories I enjoyed in them did at least make the effort worthwhile and, hey, the gently used duplicates will make good gifts. 

All right, let's get to the reviews. As I said before in my Rogues Anthology review,  rather than insult some perfectly good writers and stories I just didn't happen to connect with--though I'm certain others will, I'll mainly go in-depth with reviews of the particular stories I actually liked in the first collection. 

From Legends: 

1)    1) The third story featured in this collection, "Debt of Bones" by Terry Goodkind, tells the origin of the Border between the realms in his fantasy world from The Sword of Truth. At the time of this publication, there were four novels available in this series. According to the introduction to the series included before the story, this tale takes place years before the first book, Wizard's First Rule. In "Debt of Bones", a woman comes to see the wizard Zorander (or Zedd) in "Debt of Bones" to beg him to save her young daughter from invaders to the land she hails from who have kidnapped her child. Her only means of persuasion is a debt owed (or so Abby believes) to her mother by the sorcerer. She goes into this endeavor certain it's the only way to save her daughter. But is it? I've never read anything else by this author, nor do I fully understand how this particular story fits in with the series it's associated with (I think Zedd may be the First Wizard, a mentor and friend to the two protagonists in the novels but, without reading them, I can't be sure). I can't say exactly why "Debt of Bones" gripped me the way it did when the previous two stories in the collection failed to impact me. For a good two dozen pages or so, I believed the main character Abby was a little girl. Then I found out she was actually the mother of the little kidnapped girl. I guess I had compassion for her desperate plight regardless of her age. The wizard Zedd and his ability to hold countless conversations simultaneously intrigued me, as did the impossible decisions he was forced to make--invariably either saving the many or the few, never all. I loved the final words in the story: "Enemies," the wizard said, "are the price of honor." In the future, I may see what The Sword of Truth series has to offer, on the basis of this compelling story.

2    2) The seventh story in this collection, "The Burning Man", by Tad Williams includes a haunted castle and events in the age before his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Series. Oddly enough, I found that I own all four books in this series and I'd read them maybe a decade or more ago. The only real memory I have of this is that I wanted to and felt that I should have liked this series more than I ultimately did. But, because this author's name was familiar, I gave "The Burning Man" more of a chance to make an impression on me than I usually would an unknown (to me) writer. It took a while for the story to grow on me, and there was some confusion in the first several pages before the plot began to coalesce and work itself into something intriguing. I believe the hindrance before that point was due to the style the story was written in, namely the one Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft seemed to prefer. Both were enamored of telling stories by starting at the end of the story, when the main character is past the actual events. The protagonist in "The Burning Man" has come through the ordeal and decided to divulge all, and proceeds to retell that story from the start. In my mind, this removes any chance at all of the story being suspenseful since the reader is told upfront the main character has survived and, one way or another, things have worked out after a fashion. In general, I despise this manner of writing, but I will point out that it rarely stops me from reading a story I think I'll like. I'm particularly glad I gave this one a chance since I enjoyed it very much. In particular, the aspect that the heroine's stepfather is searching for something--the answer to what's beyond death, if anything, in order to give his life meaning. The path to finding what he seeks to the exclusion of all saps his happiness while his stepdaughter physically follows behind him in a blind sort of manner, always keeping to the dark so she isn't caught. What happens as a result teaches her that "love does not do sums, but instead makes choices, and then gives its all". Despite what I considered a limited way of presenting the story, the characters were well drawn, their quests intriguing and convincing. "The Burning Man" has made me consider re-reading the original series again, to evaluate whether I'll have a better reaction to it now. 

3    3) The eighth story in the Legends collection, "The Hedge Knight" is associated with George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, though it isn't actually part of that particular series per se, nor would I call it a prequel. Spinoff series is the best description for this. The three currently available stories in the A Knight of the Seven Kingdom series (which is what it was called in the trilogy compilation of it as well as will be called for the forthcoming HBO series) are set ninety years before A Song of Ice and Fire events, while the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne, and it does include characters from that series--Aegon Targaryen (known here as Egg, the future King Aegon V) and Ser Duncan the Tall (Dunk, the future Lord Commander of the Kingsguard). Hoping to gain employment as a knight for hire by participating in a tourney, Dunk instead finds himself fighting for his life when he crosses the wrong Targaryen in order to save a young, pretty puppeteer artist. I first read this story after getting the Legends II: Dragon, Sword, and King volume in order to read Terry Brooks' "Indomitable". At that time, I'd just started getting into the "Game of Thrones" world. I had no idea how these characters fit in. The Dunk and Egg (as in, "dunk an egg") aspect seemed silly to me. So I can't say I appreciated the story the first time I read it. However, when I reread it recently in association with Legends, it was with a much clearer comprehension of the primary series. I really liked and rooted for Dunk and Egg. As soon as I finished this story, I ordered the trilogy of novellas, published together in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, complete with illustrations by the fabulous Gary Gianni. I intend to review that series in a separate article soon. 

Incidentally, if anyone's interested, in my article "Of Proper Short Story Collection Assemblage" (you can find it here: https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2024/06/of-proper-short-story-collection.html), I talked about how stories should be arranged in an anthology, with the strongest as the first, last and middle, with other good ones sprinkled throughout the middle portions of the collection evenly, so as to maximize reader enjoyment and prevent walking away before finishing the entire volume. Based on my reasoning in that article, I ended up liking the third, seventh, and eighth stories most in Legends. I believe it would have been much more effective to have Martin's story first, "Debt of Bones" last, and "The Burning Man" smack-dab in the middle as the sixth story in the collection. 

Next week I'll review Legends II. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

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