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Justifying Swords in Sci-Fi: The 21 Foot Rule

5/12/2021

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Last week's post on Mishima and his sword-meditations reminded me of this question, which popped across my Twitter feed about a month ago. 
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There were plenty of answers offered, most of which dealt with things like speculative tech and world-building. 

My own answer is a little more pragmatic: because real life can occasionally justify them. Combat isn't a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, and "gun" doesn't automatically beat "knife" (or "sword," in this hypothetical case). In a deadly encounter, there are plenty of factors that can skew the odds in favor of the guy with the blade.

One is distance. Or rather, lack of distance. 

Studies have shown that at ranges under 21 feet, unless a defender has his gun already in hand, it's incredibly unlikely he's getting a shot off at a committed, knife-wielding attacker. This basic principle is behind the "21 Foot Rule," which has played a major part in both Law Enforcement and Defensive Firearms training for decades. This short excerpt from the police training film, Surviving Edged Weapons, gives an excellent crash course and overview. I also recommend tracking down and watching the entire film. It's an hour and a half well-spent for students of the subject.
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Just to underscore the point, long before I ever saw Surviving Edged Weapons, an old cop in my hometown told he'd rather face a gun than a knife at arm's length. His reasoning was that with the gun, all you had to do was control the direction of the muzzle. The gun, he said, is only dangerous from one angle. But the knife—especially one in the hands of a violently struggling suspect—can come at you from any angle. And it's deadly from all of them.   

Bottom line, combat is a messy, chaotic affair. Even in the age of firearms, it can end up at the eye-gouging, hair-pulling, throat-ripping range. Once there, a blade can be a more ideal weapon than a gun.

Don't believe me? Just ask the US troops who were hacked down after emptying their revolvers into barong-armed Moros in the Philippines. Ask the 40 bandits who tried to fight the lone Gurkha on a train a few years back. Or ask the men who tried to shoot and kill Jim Bowie during the famous Sandbar Fight.

And sure, those incidents are rare* and extraordinary exceptions in a world where the gun usually dominates. But remember, we're talking about fiction, and justifications for bladed weapons in a Science Fictional setting. 

Rare and extraordinary exceptions are what those kinds stories—what stories in general—are about. 

Nobody remembers Shane because he was the most average gunfighter in the West. Nobody still reads Conan of Cimmeria because he made himself a Local Alderman by his own hand. And we certainly don't thrill to stories of John Carter of Mars more than one hundred years later because Burroughs made him the most adequate swordsman on two worlds. 

We love them because they're the best of the best. The one in a million. 

Sure, your fictional universe may have tech that makes a melee fight unlikely. But real-world tech doesn't work 100% of the time, and combat is always going to be a brutal and chaotic affair as long as humans are involved in it. 

So go ahead and keep your swords and knives. I can promise you, the fighting men of the future certainly will. 
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* The Moro incidents actually weren't rare at all. Thanks to repeated battlefield reports of poor stopping power, the US stopped issuing the .38 Long Colt M1892 revolvers, and replaced them with a heavier .45. Once they did, incidents of the amok tribesmen reaching US lines with their fanatical charges began to drop off.
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Golden Age Military SF: The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears

3/12/2021

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"Some day, there will be a legend like this. Some day from steamy Venus or arid Mars, the shaking, awe-struck words will come whispering back to us, building the picture of a glory so great that our throats will choke with pride—the pride in the men of Terra!"

That's the introduction Leigh Brackett wrote for Keith Bennett's "The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears," a short she personally selected for inclusion in The Best of Planet Stories #1. The latter was a reprint paperback anthology she edited in 1975 for Random House, paying tribute to the all-stars of the magazine that earned her the nickname, "The Queen of Space Opera." Under Brackett's editorial eye, Bennett's tale joined stories by such Golden Age heavy hitters as Poul Anderson, Frederick Brown and a young Ray Bradbury, not to mention Brackett herself. 

I'd first heard of Bennett's story thanks to a glowing review from Morgan Holmes over at the Castalia House blog, when he did a write up on the Planet Stories anthology. So glowing, in fact, that I shelled out $25 for a used copy just so I could read it myself. 

As usual, Morgan didn't steer me wrong. 

Folks, this novella is one of the very best MilSF tales ever written, and thanks to the fine folks over at Project Gutenberg, it's finally available in a free e-book edition. If you're even a casual fan of the genre, you owe it to yourselves to experience this wonderful, mostly forgotten classic.
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The Spring 1950 issue of Planet Stories, where Bennett's novella originally appeared

​I'm not the only one who thinks highly of this story. No less an authority than David Drake has expressed his admiration for this obscure tale, as outlined in this brilliant essay at Tor.com. Fair warning, Drake's essay does have a few spoilers. I'd recommend reading the story first, both so you can experience it "cold," and so you'll have a greater appreciation for Drake's insights. And make no mistake, Drake's observations about Bennett and what he successfully manages to convey in his classic short are well worth a read. Among other things, Drake makes some razor sharp points about the gallows humor of the combat soldier.

As for the story itself, it's an amazingly simple one, about a platoon of marooned Rocketeers who must fight their way back to a friendly base through hostile territory on a savage Venus. It's basically an SF-nal take on Xenophon's Anabasis, right down to the main action being relayed through the eyes of a junior officer. 

For that reason, fans of Nick Cole and Jason Anspach's Legionnaire--the first book in the wonderful Galaxy's Edge series—will arguably find the most to enjoy here. It's a Golden Age SF take on the same themes they explored, with surprisingly little ground lost in the 67 years between each story's publication. "The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears" is the olive drab fatigues and steel pot to Legionnaire's Marpat and Kevlar. Sure, there's some differences in terminology and tech. But it's still recognizably a grunt's eye view of war in the future, told by someone who knows what that hell looks like right now.

And like Legionnaire, it isn't sugar-coated. 

You can read and download "The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears" from project Gutenberg.
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Apocalyptic Book Review: The Penultimate Men

6/23/2020

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It's not every day that I get a cold call from a publisher asking me to review an upcoming collection. It's even rarer that said collection contains work from several of my favorite writers. 

Folks, I can't tell you just how fast I jumped at the chance to be among the first to lay eyes on The Penultimate Men, scheduled to be published the first week in July by Pilum Press.


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​Longtime readers of the blog will know I'm a fan of post-apocalyptic stories. But truth be told, with lockdowns, global pandemics, riots, and other such pleasant subjects saturating the daily news cycle for the last several months, I haven't been turning to the genre as much.

It's not that I've lost my taste for it. 
Not exactly. 

What I've lost my taste for is the way most authors—and filmmakers—present it. The apocalyptic genre is one that easily lends itself to nihilism and misery. Think back to some of the most foundational works of the genre, and you'll see I'm right: Max Rockatansky being double crossed and used as bait, after finally agreeing to help the survivors in The Road Warrior. Charlton Heston's helpless, maddened scream on the beach at the end of Planet of the Apes. The trigger-happy posse executing Duane Jones at the end of Night of the Living Dead.

Sorry, but I've been getting plenty of doom and gloom on the news lately. I definitely don't want any more of it in my entertainment.  

But folks, that nihilism and misery is not intrinsic to the genre. As proof, you need look no further than the stories contained in The Penultimate Men. If a collection of post-apocalyptic fiction could ever be called a breath of fresh air, this is surely it. 

Authors Jon Mollison, Neal Durando, and Schuyler Hernstrom give the reader tales of heroism, brotherhood, and community. These are hopeful stories, full of wonder, awe, and struggle. Yes, the apocalyptic world presented here is dark. But the light of humanity burns as brightly as ever against that darkness. So what if those humans are sporting a few extra arms or eyes? 

The collection opens with a thoughtful introduction by Misha Burnett, in which he discusses genre, tropes, and the loosely-shared universe concept behind the collection: to use the setting of a post-apocalyptic RPG as a starting point (Gamma World, by inference), and for each of the authors imagine a sort of "retro-apocalyptic" future, expanding on it with their own unique, fresh takes. 

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You heard that right, folks. What we have here is basically an unauthorized Gamma World anthology, written by some of the strongest indie voices working in the #PulpRev. 

Jon Mollison offers up two stories, and the range he shows between them illustrates why he's quickly becoming my favorite writer of the apocalypse. The first, "Fire and Folly," is a short, simple coming of age tale a that packs a deceptively powerful emotional punch in its final lines.  

The second, "Wind on the Water," is much more action oriented. Opening with an unexpected sighting of strange sails on the horizon and a call of alarm, the story follows mutant hero Wind and the rest of the odd inhabitants of his lakeside village as they try to discern if the strange fleet is attacking, or fleeing from some even greater threat. What follows is a tale of a desperate stand against impossible odds, featuring everyday protagonists—or as close as you're likely to find in this book—wretched monsters, and high stakes. This is the stuff pure adventure fiction is made of. And quite frankly, Mollison's short came closer to capturing the peculiar magic of the late David Gemmell's work than just about anything I've read since the Big Man's passing. 

Neal Durando is a writer whose work I was entirely unfamiliar with prior to reading this collection, so his "Root Hog or Die" was my first exposure to his work. This beautifully written short brings the reader into the mind of the mutant in a way that few stories ever do. Its opening lines are delightfully, deliberately off-balancing. The characters, particularly the two-headed narrator Walbur/Wilbar, don't "think" entirely human, and Durando does an excellent job putting us there. But the tribe leader, Gordo, clearly does think in somewhat human terms. He suspects there's more to life than rooting for scraps and hunting, and wants to lead the tribe to the strange lights on the horizon. Definitely a story that will reward multiple reads.

"The Judgement of Daganha" by Schuyler Hernstrom is a sequel to his acclaimed novella, "Mortu and Kyrus in the White City." In that story, Hernstrom used his barbarian and monkey duo to take on one of the sacred cows of science fiction, to wide critical praise. This time around, Hernstrom uses the pair to pay tribute to classic Sword & Sandal films of the 1960's, like Jason and the Argonauts or The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Tightly plotted, with plenty of intrigue, action, and humor, "The Judgement of Daganha" manages the difficult task of improving on its predecessor, already an acknowledged classic among #PulpRev fans. Featuring scorching deserts, scheming cults, and giant scorpions, it's like the best Ray Harryhausen film you never saw, the one that only ever existed in your wildest imagination. 

Take my word for it. If you're a Hernstrom fan, you need to buy The Penultimate Men for this story alone.  

Rounding the book out are two essays by Jeffro Johnson, who brings the same level of analysis and lucid commentary that earned him fame for his landmark book, Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons. "Starship" is a retrospective look at the game Metamorphasis Alpha, and how it relates to the mega-dungeon and Old School play. The other, "Symbiot," is a look at the literary (and film) inspirations for Gamma World. This essay serves as a sort of coda to Appendix N, and if you found yourself wishing you could get just one more taste of Jeffro's gaming/fiction commentary, you'll at least find it here, as he tackles Gamma World's unofficial "Appendix G."  

The final verdict?

A new Mortu and Kyrus novella would be reason enough to buy this collection. The fact that the other characters you'll meet here are more than worthy of sharing their company is just an unexpected and added bonus. Once you meet them, I can promise you'll never forget Spearshaker, Ironmane, Wind, Gordo, or Wilbar/Walbur. Jon Mollison, Sky Hernstrom, and Neal Durando have given us heroes for the end times. What's more, they're heroes worth rooting for, with virtues we'd recognize in ourselves. Men who fight for family,  home, and one another, rather than the usual parade of nihilistic survivors, selfish loners, and emotionally broken scavengers. 

This is the apocalypse we deserve, genre fans. And it's been too long in coming.
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The Penultimate Men will be available to purchase on Lulu.com. You can get it here.
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Short Story Book Club: Mortu and Kyrus in the White City

5/19/2020

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Say one thing for Alexandru Constantin: you can't accuse him of being a man who complains without taking action.

Case in point: when he felt there weren't enough conservative voices in the critical sphere--an opinion he is far from alone in sharing, by the way—he decided to organize the Short Story Book Club. His stated goal is two-fold: create a body of conservative, countercultural criticism, and draw more attention to indie writers overlooked by mainstream media outlets.

I believe both of these ideals are 100% worthwhile, so I'm throwing my hat into the ring to help out.

The fact that the first story Constantin selected for this project is Schuyler Hernstrom's awesome novella, "Mortu and Kyrus in the White City?" 

Man, that's just gravy.

I first reviewed Hernstrom's story two years ago, when he released it as a standalone e-book on Amazon. You can find that spoiler-filled review here, and it still sums up my overall feelings on this story: It's a balls-to-the-wall awesome piece of science fantasy, the likes of which no one outside the #PulpRev community is writing anymore. It's also a brutally sincere and final rebuttal of Ursula K. Le Guin's Hugo-award winning parable, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."

I'm not going to rehash my old review here. Rather, I'm going to expand on it with a couple of details I noticed during last night's reread of both Le Guin's "Omelas," and of Hernstrom's vastly superior "Mortu and Kyrus." It's also probably going to be just as spoiler-filled as my first review, so be forewarned.

That said, a brief aside before continuing with the analysis:

In terms of pure entertainment, I can't recommend Hernstrom's story enough. And if all you're craving is a dose of pure, adrenaline-filled awesomeness with alien ruins, axe-wielding barbarians, motorcycles, and talking monkeys, then stop reading this review NOW. Buy Hernstrom's new collection, The Eye of Sounnu from DMR Books, which is where you can read this slice of pure heavy-metal havoc. 

I promise, you won't be disappointed.

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​New Observations

Reader, time has not been kind to my opinion of Le Guin's piece. I've never been much of a fan, mostly because the moral premise it presents is shoddy at best, but certain passages that I overlooked on previous readings jumped out at me last night.

In a nutshell, Le Guin's parable envisions a "perfect society," a perfectly happy city called Omelas, where that happiness is somehow maintained solely via the horrible abuse and neglect of a single child locked in a basement. The parable then talks about the "ones who walk away" upon learning of this suffering. They leave the city, never to return, and this is presented as "remarkable."

In previous readings, I guess I focused mostly on the "stinger" of the horribly abused kid sitting in his or her own filth, because I didn't really remember much of Le Guin's description of her vision of what Omelas' "perfect" society must look like—she repeatedly reminds the reader that they can picture Omelas however they like, as the details don't matter, just as long as the reader believes what he or she pictures.

Anyway, this short excerpt is rather telling, but the emphasis at the end is mine:

But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, and horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas—at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were not drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.


Apparently, utopia is a place of guilt-free orgies in the streets, cheap drugs, and no soldiers. Not to mention no organized religion or temples. In other words, the perfect society—or at least the outward veneer of one—is a hippie Utopia. 

Color me shocked.

At any rate, what's especially fascinating to me is that last part in Le Guin's excerpt, the part about no soldiers. 

To casually dismiss "the sense of victory and the celebration of courage" felt by soldiers as "the joy built upon successful slaughter" is—at best—a remarkably narrow-minded view of what fighting men actually do, and why they do it. Soldiers fight for many reasons, not least of which is to preserve life from hideous vultures like the ones in Omelas. 

Incidentally, the word she's looking for to describe that odd, swelling-in-the-chest feeling about victory and courage? It's "honor."

And no, I won't presume the unnamed narrator of Le Guin's piece is acting as a mouthpiece for her personal beliefs. However, I will say that it's no wonder her narrator—who only sees a soldier's honor as a celebration of killing for killing's sake—can't imagine of any response to evil other than meek compliance or running away. 

A coward's worldview can only conceive of coward's solutions, after all, and Le Guin wrote a damnably convincing one. 

Compare this to Schuyler Hernstrom's characters, when they encounter a more fleshed out version of Omelas in his White City. 

When they learn this near-perfect utopia is maintained through stealing the life-force of orphaned children, Christian monk Kyrus wants to go get reinforcements from the nearby city of Zantyum. He wants to raise an expedition to bring the evil denizens of the White City to justice. Barbarian Mortu, however, refuses to wait that long. His response is destined to become one of the classic lines in Sword & Sorcery fiction:

"You may talk of cities and justice all you wish. Tonight, the pagan wins. My anger will be sated and these wicked people brought to ruin." 


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​He then stalks out into the night to deliver bloody justice on the end of a blade. 

Fortunately for lovers of action and adventure, Hernstrom's White City isn't quite as peaceful or devoid of soldiers as Le Guin's vision of Omelas. There's enough violence on display at the climax to be satisfying without being the least bit gratuitous, especially Mortu's final duel with rival Tomas. 
  
Their exchange during the climactic fight is another one that escaped me last reading, among all the other great lines Hernstrom delivers in this tale. Again, the emphasis is mine:

...Mortu smiled down at him and spoke. "The souls of the children cry out for vengeance."

"You and your friend will die. You should not have come. You could have simply walked away."

They pushed each other apart.

Mortu scowled as he stalked in a circle. "It is better to die than to live out your years knowing you did nothing when confronted with such evil." 
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That exchange might as well be a thesis statement for this tale, and for why I love these two characters so much. In Mortu and Kyrus, Hernstrom gave us a pair of heroes who couldn't just walk away from Omelas. He gave us heroes who not only had to do something, but who had both the courage and strength to tear the whole rotten thing down to its foundation. 

Of course, that's a solution requiring a less cowardly worldview than the one presented in Le Guin's story. For one thing, it requires such "fearful" and "trivial" things as honor, a subject about which her narrator apparently knows nothing. 

Fortunately, the same can't be said for Mortu and Kyrus. Nor could it be said, one would suppose, for Schuyler Hernstrom. 

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RIP Mike Resnick

1/11/2020

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Two days ago, the news broke that sci-fi legend Mike Resnick passed away. 

I had a brief, passing acquaintance with him. Back in 2015, I was a quarterly winner in the Writers of the Future Contest, which Resnick helped judge. As part of the prize package, winners were flown out to California for a weeklong writing workshop, with the judges as the instructors.

I honestly can't say I remember much from Mike's lecture. I still have the notes I took somewhere around here, but they're a jumbled mess. More than with any of the other instructors, I found myself trying to copy down everything Mike said verbatim. But each time I did, I'd have to abandon it halfway through, because Mike would be in the middle of spouting off something else I wanted to urgently copy down word-for-word. At last I just gave up and listened, hoping I could absorb and remember as much as possible.

Mike spent each night down at the hotel bar, spouting off even more of his hard-won wisdom among us newbie writers. It's there that I got my most lasting impressions of the man. Again, I can't say I really knew Mike, but from what I saw of him in that short week, he seemed to be a decent guy. One who was genuinely eager to help up and coming young writers.

It was during one of those "Bar Con" nights that Mike dropped a bit of wisdom that I'll always remember him for. He gave the most perfect definition of Science Fiction that I've ever heard.

"Science Fiction is the literature of warning: This BAD THING will happen IF..."

Reader, all of the storytelling possibilities in the world are encapsulated in that sentence. Every time I've sat down to write a sci-fi story since then, that phrase has been in the back of my mind. 

Mike had one other personal impact on me, one that originated from the same night at the bar.

We were discussing the movie Avatar, which Mike said he hated. He said he didn't make it more than ten minutes into the film. I thought he was going to talk about the acting, the effects, or the cliches, but he took me off guard when he gave his reason. 

He said it was the fact that the main character—a disabled veteran—rolled around in a non-motorized wheelchair at the beginning of the movie.    

"They expect me to believe humans have mastered interstellar travel, but they don't have a motorized wheelchair? We have motorized wheelchairs at this hotel right now!"

Me being a young smart-ass, I said there was a perfectly logical reason for that in-universe. "He's obviously dealing with the department of Interstellar Veteran's Affairs."

Mike laughed. And I knew, right then, that I had something. 

I realized that I had just made one of the most famous humorists in the entire sci-fi field laugh. And I also realized that a few hours earlier, he had invited the entire cohort of winners to submit stories to his magazine, Galaxy's Edge. 

I realized that if I could build an entire story around this, I might just sell it to him. 

Here's the thing about imposter syndrome, folks. Even if you do something right—say, winning an international writing contest—you might still feel like it's just a fluke. A one-off. You might feel like the only fraud in a room full of talented artists.

That's what I felt like in the back of my mind during Writers of the Future. It wasn't rational, and the instructors—including Mike—told us time and again we all deserved to be there. But that inner critic never listens to praise. 

When I went home, I wrote that story. I sent it to Mike. And he bought it immediately.

Mike Resnick sat on a panel of judges, and selected my first story for publication. That validation made me believe I could write.

A few weeks later, Mike bought my second story. That made me believe I could do it again.

The story itself didn't see publication for a while. But I kept plugging on after that acceptance, knowing damned well that I had the chops. Thanks for that, Mike.

RIP, Mr. Resnick. You will be missed. 
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