Ken Hite's Suppressed Transmission: The First Broadcast is a compilation of Mr. Hite's excellent column from the Steve Jackson Game's Pyramid site. It is high weirdness done right. In this slender tome you will find a wealth of details on The Philadelphia Experiment, Ancient Astronauts, Space Nazis, Occult Shakespearean Secrets potentially worth killing over, the Great Pole shift and more. Originally written for use with GURPs, these articles are densely packed with tons of information that could easily be ported over to any game system. What's more, Mr. Hite makes all this weird stuff accessible, reasonably understandable, and he provides bibliographical sources for you to carry on the good fight in the event of his mysterious disappearance.
In Suppressed Transmission2: The Second Broadcast, Mr. Hite continues down the rabbit hole on the trail of conspiracies, esoteric secrets, and all manner of truly weird stuff. Any one of the columns collected in this book could easily serve to spawn a complete role-playing game campaign that could run for years. It really is that damn good.
Previously, we thought that these incredible books were long out of print, but as luck or some dread conspiracy would have it, they are both still available for sale. These books should have sold out long ago, but it is still better late than never. We'd very much like to see a third follow-up tome in the series...
Gladiator is a pulp novel first published in 1930 by Philip Wylie. Yeah, that Philip Wylie -- the guy who also wrote When Worlds Collide. Gladiator was Wylie's third novel (a drastic revision of his first, Titan, actually) and came out nearly eight years before Siegel & Shuster invented Ubermensch Superman for National/DC. In 1940 Wylie threatened to sue DC & Siegel for infringing/plagiarizing Gladiator, and even though Siegel had reviewed Gladiator in 1932 for his own fanzine, he claimed to not have been influenced or inspired by Wylie's character in developing Superman. Siegel even signed an affidavit to that effect. Whatever the truth of the matter, the case never went anywhere and Wylie seems to have dropped the matter. Speculation is that he did so because both Siegel & Schuster were in the midst of other lawsuits and in financial straits. Maybe that is so. The whole mess faded from public view fairly quickly. Most people forgot all about the brouhaha. But others haven't. Many believe Wylie's novel to have been the original impetus for Siegel & Schuster's very popular (and very litigious) character. This entry over at the Superman Story site is a quick example of someone still carrying the banner of the Gladiator's lost cause forwards into the modern day. They also have a very quick description of Gladiator's Hugo Danner that'll make it fairly obvious that Superman had a predecessor in print eight years his senior. Just saying...
So who is Hugo Danner? Good question. Philip Wylie was quite a bit ahead of the curve in 1930 (or 1926 when he later claimed to have first written the manuscript for Gladiator...). He had Hugo's papa, the not so mad scientist Professor Abednego Danner of Colorado invent a serum that he then injects into his pregnant wife. Really. It's another bit of science fictional spousal abuse just like in The Inmost Light all over again.
The serum doesn't kill the unborn child, nor the wife. Which is probably a darn good thing as it would have led to an investigation and some serious questions regarding Professor Abednego Danner's sanity and highly unethical methods, to say the least. Fortunately for little Hugo Danner, he is born with the proportional strength of an ant and the leaping ability of a grasshopper. Oh and he's bulletproof the way that Achilles was invulnerable to blades, etc., and that's without getting dipped in any smelly old river, and without the whole vulnerable heel thing either.
At first he seems like a lucky, lucky bastard...
...but in truth Hugo Danner is one morose, depressed and frustrated guy. He lacks confidence, has no real direction in life and to be quite frank, he's a real waste of superpowers. But then that was Wylie's intention. He wasn't interested in the colorful tights nor the super competent crime-fighters like The Shadow, Doc Savage, etc. He was looking at things from a more humanistic angle--how possessing such powers would remove a person from the commonplace in a way that might make it difficult for them to adapt, or to find their place in the world.
When some costumed schmuck starts prattling on and on about how they'd like to lead a normal life--it's partly Wylie's fault, and more importantly unrealistic bullshit bad writing, but it's what the unwashed masses expect, so the same old slop gets tossed out to them by the bucket-full.
Hugo Danner has a few modest adventures, most of which you see revised and made a bit more colorful and exciting or at least interesting in the early run of Superman.
In the end Hugo goes up on a mountain top and asks God in a weirdly snivelly manner for some advice and gets struck dead by a lightning bolt.
Boom.
Dead.
Wow.
What a harsh bit of feedback indeed.
But Gladiator's Hugo Danner hasn't quite gone quietly into the good night. There is a very good website at the Hugodanner.com domain, devoted to Gladiator essays and seems to be one of the best possible resources for all things Gladiator out there. You can read Wylie's Original Introduction, read Will Murray's thought provoking essay on Gladiator, check out a very cryptic inscription in Wylie's own hand, or view a gallery of Book Covers for Gladiator's various editions. There's an amusing Q&A page as well, but we're not sure if the site is still offering $5 for Gladiator essays. But if you're really interested in doing something along those lines, please do contact them--might as well get a $5 check than not...
You can acquire a free copy of the full text of Gladiator at Many Books or Archive(dot)Org -- it isn't old enough to show up on Gutenberg just yet.
You could pay a lot for the University of Nebraska reprint of the Knopf edition of Gladiator, but since they fail to include anything remarkable in terms of some much needed scholarship regarding the origins and influence and impact of Gladiator on the Pulps, comics, and so forth, why not just get the cheaper version sans academic pretensions?
Perhaps more ignominious than just being ignored, plagiarized paid uncredited homage to, would be having the text converted into a B-grade comedy. This actually happened to Gladiator. They made a comedy out of the Gladiator novel starring Joe E. Brown in 1938. IMDb can give you some more details, if you're interested. You just can't make this stuff up.
In 1976 Roy Thomas adapted Gladiator for Marvel Comics in Marvel Preview #9 as 'Man God.' Then Thomas developed "Iron Munro" for DC as a Retcon-doppleganger for the editorially-erased Golden Age Superman. Iron Munro was one part the classic Street & Smith character and another part Wylie's Gladiator, but went on to become fairly well ignored as his own character. It turns out that Hugo Danner (Wylies' Gladiator) was Iron Munro's estranged father. Which was a very nice little precedent to be setting...
It was also very cool of Roy Thomas to have Iron Munro encounter Georgia Challenger in the course of his efforts to locate and learn what happened to his father, the ill-fated, whiny and supposedly lightning-blasted Gladiator, Hugo Danner. That's right. Arn, Iron Munro, meets a living, breathing, beautiful and butt-kicking grand-daughter of Professor Edward Challenger while investigating a secret government project (like one of those other projects all those scientists might have been working on in the secret underground complex featured in The Time Tunnel perhaps?)
Roy Thomas is so much fun.
Howard Chaykin and Russ Heath teamed-up to revise/adapt Wylie's Gladiator in the Wildstorm comics 4-part miniseries which might still be available at eBay for around $10. There isn't much available on this series, even with Chaykin & Heath having been attached to it. The mini-series just seemed to drain away into obscurity, which is very strange given the major talent involved in its creation.
Hugo Danner, the Gladiator, is a flawed, bungled and botched mess of a guy who just happens to have gained superpowers because his daddy was an unethical prick who injected his mother with an untested, experimental serum while he was still in the womb. The guy is a walking victim and a real sob sack, despite being invulnerable. He joined the French Foreign Legion and didn't really gain much in the way of honors or recognition, despite serving in WWI. You'd think that a guy who is bullet-proof, super strong and able to outrun a train just might have found himself making an impact on the battlefields of Europe in 1917. At least you'd think he might. But not this guy. Nope. He's conflicted, emotionally constipated and totally at a loss for what to do with himself.
It's a good thing that he gets blasted with a lightning bolt at the end of the novel.
But then maybe he survives the thunderbolt and goes off to reinvent himself. He was part of the whole Lost Generation, which really, really begs the question, at least for me, why the hell didn't a guy like Wylie who was one of the founders of The New Yorker write a more Upton Sinclair or F. Scott Fitzgerald sort of novel out of this stuff? Hugo Danner could have been a cross between Odd John and The Great Gatsby--and that would have been infinitely cooler than what we were given...
Maybe someone needs to really go back over this stuff and write a sort of pseudo-Regencypunk revision of Gladiator that merges it with Stapledon and Fitzgerald. That would be very, very cool...with or without flying monkeys...or vampires...
Zothique. Xiccarph. Hyperborea. Averoigne. Clark Ashton Smith is one of my all-time favorite authors and artists. He was a real outsider, not in the HPL sense, but in the artistic sense, in terms of his sculptures, paintings, etc. Though his poetry did achieve quite a bit of notoriety and critical acclaim early-on in his career. To this day Smith's poetry from Weird Tales remains lush, vivid, effective...the feverish phantasmal remnants of a timeless genius who stood toe-to-toe with pulp giants and literary leviathans and out-did them all, often beating them at their own game.
While I originally intended to compile an Autho Profile on Clark Ashton Smith, much as I did for E. A. Poe and Leigh Brackett, it appears that the notes for that piece have been lost and will have to be re-compiled, which will take time that just isn't available right now...so a full Profile on CAS will have to wait for later in our schedule, possibly in the Spring. In the meantime, one of the better Bios for Smith is at Alan Gullette's site, and the single most important and useful site out there for all things related to Clark Ashton Smith remains The Eldritch Dark. The absolute best place to start in terms of finding out who Clark Ashton Smith was, and to sample his incredible Weird Fiction (including some examples of his unpublished story fragments!) is The Eldritch Dark. If only someone would build such a wonderful online archive/shrine for Leigh Brackett as well...
You can see a nice selection of cover art from Clark Ashton Smith's various books over at the Lord of the Green Dragons blog. There are a few in that selection that I hadn't seen before, so I know it's well worth checking out.
Recently I discovered a site that makes a number of Clark Ashton Smith stories available as downloadable audiobooks. For example The Maze of Maal Dweb, which I've embedded below. Just click and it ought to play right there:
Speaking of fellow Smithophiles, the Mad Man of Carcosa Geofferey McKinney is hard at work developing a Fresh New Clark Ashton Smith-inspired RPG supplement titled Isle of the Unknown, which the one and only Mr. Raggi's Lamentation of the Flame Princess will be bringing out --alongside a slightly revamped Carcosa. You can expect the new Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown in Spring of 2011. Those two maniac-brainiacs working together on an old school CAS-inspired project is very promising news indeed, no matter which or whatever cliquecult school you choose to affiliate with or flag-wave on behalf of...if you check out McKinney's blog, you can get details on his creative process this time around and determine for yourself if it sounds like your cup o' tea. Personally, I think that it sounds absolutely fascinating...
We'll have an author profile on Clark Ashton Smith, and a closer look at some of his more over-looked stories, eventually.
OMG--now no one will ever have to read the actual story--maybe that's a good thing...
(Insert maniacal laughter here)
This is a wonderful re-telling of the classic tale--I can't wait to show it to my daughter. She'll probably roll her eyes in disdain/disgust. Fifteen is like that.
Running a little bit late on the current crop of posts, but since they've taken a while to put together, there's no sense in rushing things now. One or two more days won't hurt anything. Unless the stars suddenly go all right and all R'Lyeh breaks loose.
Weird. I'll not waste time defining the word. Nor do I intend to waste time further debating or definingWeird Fiction versus the New Weird, (which are really more Market Categories than any sort of distinct genres in and of themselves) since I prefer to simply pursue my own take on the matter and listen to my particular Muse in this regard and leave such fiddly-farting polemics and debates to people too busy to actually write (or draw, or paint, etc.) Weird stuff. As a genre, it seems to be slippery, ambiguous and quite mercurial, often appearing very differently to each author, editor, fan or connoisseur. That's just how it ought to be. Below are a few handy dandy Weird resources. Make of them what you will...
The Weird Review is a rather nice e-zine/website devoted to Vintage Victorian Weird Fiction , to quote from the Home Page: "The focus is on vintage weird fiction, especially Victorian give or take a couple decades, with a little extra focus toward the Short Story. Reviews of anthologies, single-author collections, & even on individual short stories of merit are just the thing, but also of course old weird novels of ghosts & the supernatural." If you are at all interested in Weird fiction, then this site is a truly wonderful resource. There are some nice essays and the like on Lost Race tales and novels, vintage Swashbuckler tales, and H. Rider Haggard is well represented. The essay on Dennis Wheatley was particularly excellent. You don't necessarily have to be a vetted and papered scholar to contribute, though it could help, probably, especially if you can babble blasphemously, yet prettily, in print. The Gallery sections will also prove to be of some interest to the usual suspects engaged in vulgar gaming endeavors. The Weird Review grew out of the Alt.Fiction.Ghost-Fiction UseNet group, the archives of their postings are available here. Overall this is part of the excellent Aunt Violet's Book Museum site, one of those treasure troves of Weirdness online that can steal hours from your day and leave you wondering just where you ran into a Shambleau...oh and they are open to contributions/submissions pertaining to the Weird, and anything else pertinent to the editor's various special interests, including swashbuckling/pirate romance tales, juvenile series (Tom Swift), and Lost Race novels, etc. Very Highly Recommended and with a very high Rabbit Hole Index...
Grim Reviews is a blog that provides thought-provoking reviews, essays and articles on various and sundry aspects of Weird fiction, both vintage/classical and modern, with an emphasis on scholarship and definite opinions, which makes it a lot of fun to read--and often inspirational as well.
Weird Fiction is a blog/site that is ... well ... pretty Weird, and it's another online venue that could drain away some precious moments from your schedule if you're not ultra-careful.
Skulls in the Stars is the blog of an Associate Professor of Physics...and he likes Weird Fiction, which he blogs about off-and-on. Anyone who mentions Henry Kuttner, Manly Wade Wellman and Marie Corelli in the course of their posts is well worth giving a few minutes of your attention to in order to hear what they have to say, or at least write/post.
The obligatory link to H. P. Lovecraft on How To Write Weird Fiction...if only to make sure that it's handy for later. You can alternate versions of this essay here, here, here, here, here, and here, as well as several other venues. There's also the Supernatural Horror in Literature essay (Public Domain version), which is also available in a variety of versions/formats here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Whew. Yes, there are other locations where you can find this essay, but that ought to be enough to at least get you started...
A decent essay on Horror Fiction that crosses-over into the Weird quite a bit, which is super-easy to have happen as horror is a major component to the weird, be it vintage or modern.
Another blogger examines what Weird Fiction means to them, and still manages to self-promote her new book...which might interest some of you folks, either in terms of the opinions expressed, the overall subject matter, or the mechanics of marketing one's work online.
Creative Fluff has a page where they started to work out just what Weird Fiction is/was, but it hasn't progressed very far as yet, perhaps they just need encouragement, feed-back or a few dozen hits to show that anyone cares? In the meantime, the main Creative Fluff blog itself hosts a lot of resources worth taking a look at, especially for designers, artists, etc.
Supernatural Fiction Resources courtesy of Alan Gullette (another excellent resource that'll potentially send you off on wild tangents into the dark recesses of the internet...)
Since returning from our trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior more than a month ago, I've been side-lined with a shoulder injury and offline far more than has been the norm. In that time several of the blogs that I used to look forward to like Sean's Bite the Bullette and the very promising Tremulous Antennae have evaporated or been deleted for whatever reason. I know that I'm not the only one who'll miss those blogs.
G. Benedicto's very cool, ulta-weird blog Quantique was also one of the recent withdrawals from the blogosphere. All three of G. Benedicto's wonderful blogs have gone missing. Suddenly and with no warning, so I hope that he's okay, and whatever the reasons, it was and is, his decision to make and I respect that, and wish him all the best of luck in all future endeavors. I'll miss Quantique. It was the absolutely right kind of Weirdness, and it's starting to feel a bit lonlier without it's company. But all is not necessarily lost. Cyclopeatron is hosting PDF archives of G. Benedicto's posts (minus reader comments) that were compiled by blog-reader Restless. You can download the PDF Archives of Eiglophian Press and Quantique at Cyclopetaron's blog. Thank you for doing this Restless and Cyclopeatron!
So, I'm regretfully deleting the links to these defunct blogs from the list of Blogs We Read. I had no idea that by missing so much time that I'd also miss-out on the last moments of these fun and much-appreciated blogs. But this does seem to be a natural part of the overall blogging process. People come and people go, blogs surge and fade and life can sometimes intervene. I just wanted to say Thank You to each of these wonderfully creative people who shared their imagination, ideas and enthusiasm with us all. I, for one, feel lucky to have crossed their respective paths, if only out on that there internet-thing. Good luck and Gods Bless. Maybe we'll meet again. Weirder things have happened...
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
H. P. Lovecraft
Weird Fiction can be weird in several ways that have nothing to do with the actual content of the story. If you consult the Wikipedia entry, you'll get a definition of Weird Fiction that is okay, as far as it goes, but really M. R. James was mostly a writer of ghost stories more than Weird stuff, but that's a quibble.
If you consult H. P. Lovecraft's extensive essay on Supernatural Horror in Literature, either via the online version here, or here or here, or if you are ambitious and willing to fork over money for dead tree printing of this essay then go here. However you decide to access the essay, if you read what the old dead dude from back East had to say on such stuff, you'll come away with an even keener sense of despair, alienation and a growing sense of cosmic horror in the pit of your stomach as you realize nothing he wrote on teh subject, no matter how often cited, has anything to do with how stuff is handled in the marketplace today. And if you want to buy your books away from the computer, that's a big deal.
You could try to sort out what the folks at Weird Tales are up to in this regard, but the last couple of issues I sampled just didn't really suit me. I'm old fashioned in some respects. I am a big fan of Clark Ashton Smith and prefer weird stories to have some actual weirdness in them, not just weird-like subsitute and definitely not any of that weirdLite stuff.
There is also a 'New Weird,' kind of like when a certain cola company switched its recipe, sort of. I have re-read that entry at Wikipedia a couple of times now to make sure that I got it right, but I'm not so sure that it really explains what exactly Weird is, new or otherwise. Not all Weird stories are necessarily urban, though they can take place in cities. Otherwise, using realworld stuff to leap boldly into the slavering maw of the unknown, reading stuff by dead French Decadents like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Novalis, etc. is cool by me, though Valery Briusov needs to be mentioned as well--The Fiery Angel is awesome stuff. This guy is so cool that his portrait is on stamps. Not all that many other writers of the weird are so honored, and yet so overlooked and mostly forgotten. Part of it is that no one can spell the guy's name right, or at least that's my theory.
When I was a kid, back when I was reading Blavatsky and suffering from recurring fevers and pneumonia every fall and winter, I made my first sale of an illustration to a small press magazine called Weirdbook. It was a wonderful publication produced by W. Paul Ganley. The weirdness in Weirdbook was palpable, a very real thing. I remember reading my first Brian Lumley story in Weirdbook. It was through Ganley & Weirdbook that Titus Crow first entered the American weird/horror/dark fantasy scene. Back then weird was used as a perjorative, it had an almost Fifties-esque connotation of non-conformity bordering on the perverse or nasty. To be called weird back then was a major put-down, an insult. But I never saw it as such. Not after getting published in Weirdbook. After that weird was just fine by me.
To me, weird fiction combines any and every element that the writer wants to, incorporates any technique, and can encompass any situation both conceivable and inconceivable--it is weird after all--and it is something that partakes of just about all other genres the way a painter like Jackson Pollock uses colors or Van Gogh used texture. It's an approach that turns expectations arund, inverts the known and goes places that sanitized and approved commercial stuff rarely goes for fear of losing its audience. It can be rude, vulgar, challenging and uncomfortable like an insane cat-lady riding the bus at midnight with all her cats in a tattered cardboard box leaking urine onto the seat next to her. It can be purple prose that evokes conundrums, enigmas and paradox all in one sentence with or without a plot. It is a way of taking the old forms of mythology, especially the once popular stuff too low-brow for academia to concern itself with it, and convert it from a sow's ear of rubbish to the gold of something special and deeply, philosophically potent.
At least that's what it could be, might be, or used to be, but I'm not sure any one definition will ever really do the job as it shifts and changes in response to people's impressions, reactions and so one. You can't always tell the same joke a second time and get very many laughs. You have to move on. Grow. Adapt. Subvert the expectations and so forth and so on.
