Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Armchair adventuring


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Dark Schneider is back: Netflix’s Bastard!!

I admit I was worried.
Bastard!! was one of the anime/manga series that I remembered from the ’90s – over the top, seriously silly, filled with bouncing breasts and juvenile humor, together with a setting straight out of AD&D and a plot that was basically an excuse to show more violence and, yes, more toned thighs and bouncy breasts. The brainchild of a guy that was a self-admitted fan of heavy metal music and roleplaying games, it was the quintessential late ’80s/early ’90s … thing.
And it was all right.

But now?
We are in 2022, and Bastard!! is back, and on Netflix.
And I heard a few people worrying about the dread effects of political correctness and “wokeness” (I heard grown men cry because in one snippet of preview they caught sight of two women kissing), but I was much more worried about the fad for “grimdark” – after all, with a main character that’s called Dark Schneider, and a tagline that reads “Heavy Metal Dark Fantasy”, Bastard!! is the sort of anime that could easily get the grimdark treatment, for the viewing pleasure of all the sociopaths out there.

So yes, I was worried.
And I was not happy at all with the Italian dubbing, so I dropped the series after about 5 minutes.

But I was able to finally get an English dub (not my first choice, I prefer subs myself), and while Dark Schneider still sounds too damn youthful for my tastes – and the dub fails to capture the surprisingly and hilarious vulgar Japanese of the original – I finally sat down and watched the series.

For the uninitiated, Bastard!! (the two exclamation points are required) is a sword & sorcery series set in a post-apocalyptic world that’s regressed to medieval level. The four kingdoms are being menaced by a dark army hell bent on resurrecting an ancient goddess, and the only hope for humanity is Dark Schneider, a centuries old evil wizard that was once the leader of the dark army – but has been trapped inside a kid’s body these last 15 years.

The series follows Dark Schneider’s exploits after he’s been brought back – and he has to face his former allies to protect the few people he’s come to care for.

And I am happy to report that the new incarnation of Bastard!! is still a lot of fun, it is still incredibly silly, and nicely padded with bouncy breasts and juvenile humor. It is violent, stupid and inappropriate, but it is happily free of angsty grimdark trappings. Bastard!! winks and laughs out loud too much to be grimdark. It does indeed look like something that reached us from, say 1991 via some rip in space-time.
It is also pretty close to the original comics as I remember them from thirty years ago.
The character design is very ’90s, but the animation’s better – and we get new music on the soundtrack.

All in all, silly entertainment – not the sort that shakes the pillars of civilization or changes the life of the viewer, but in this time, in which TV is trying to feed us fake memories of how it was to play AD&D in the ’80s, it is good to find a show that actually captures with surprising accuracy the mix of cliché, silliness, wanton destruction, inappropriate jokes and loud music that characterized those saturday afternoons, so many years ago.


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A big summer reads bundle

Humble Bundle teamed up with Aconyte Books (my publisher!) to offer a big bundle of gaming-related fiction – horror from the Arkham Horror universe, fantasy from both The Descent and Legend of Five Rings, science fiction from Twilight Imperium and many others.

22 books for less than 20 bucks, and part of the money goes to Worldreader, a charity helping children getting into reading.
The books are in pdf and epub format, DRM-free.
It’s an excellent value for money offer, and you do some good too.

The bundle includes The Devourer Below, the Arkham Horror collection that features my short story All my friends are monster, currently a finalist in the Scribe Awards.

Check it out, if you feel like. The offer is open for 20 days starting today.


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On the couch with Grace

When I flew out of New York City in 1951 for Karachi, Kabul, and Delhi, I planned to write a
book about the famous mountains that stretch across northern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The Himalayas, the Karakorams, and the Hindu Kush-all geologically one-had long fascinated me.

William O. Douglas – Beyond the High Himalayas

A new, 70-years old book for my collection – I just got me a digital copy of William O. Douglas’ Beyond the High Himalayas. That sounds quite promising.

Douglas (1898-1980), that was a SCOTUS judge since 1939 and a prominent proponent of environmental justice, spent the 1950s traveling in the Middle and Far East, and he wrote a lot of books about his experiences. Beyond the High Himalayas was his second book, published in 1952.

I knew nothing about Douglas and his book, but today during lunch time I re-watched for the umpteenth time Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and there, right at the end, I caught a brief shot of Grace Kelly, sitting on a couch and reading a book.

I always try and spot the titles of books that appear in movies – especially movies I love – and I was quite surprised when I realized the book Kelly’s reading is somewhat connected with my general interests.
A freeze-frame allowed me to get the title, and then I did a quick search – and found out the book’s available for real cheap as an ebook on Amazon.
And I know I said I would not spend more money on books in 2022, but I’ve just got a gift card for my forthcoming birthday and… well, I did it.

One more for the to-be-read book pile.


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The Spine of Night (2021)

Maybe not the ideal Easter movie, but The Spine of Night popped up on my radar (it is currently running on Shudder), and being in a dark fantasy/sword & sorcery mood (big news), I decided to take a look. I was duly impressed and highly entertained, and that’s all I was asking for.

On the technical side, The Spine of Night is a rotoscope animated feature, in the style of Ralph Bakshi’s Fire & Ice or Heavy Metal. With Fire & Ice shares a certain old school fantasy feeling, and like Fire & Ice it is an anthology movie, the single episodes tying in together into a larger overarching narrative.

In the movie, we witness the rise of a god-emperor thanks to the powers of a mysterious blue flower that is somehow connected with the deeper fabric of the universe. As the god-emperor extends his dominion over the world, we catch snippets of other stories, and get a good look at the underlying mythology of this world.

A good solid movie with a somewhat Lovecraftian twist, The Spine of Night is a very dark fantasy, with a nihilistic edge, and does not shy away from violence, gore and nudity – so if anyone tells you “animation is for children”, here you have your counter-argument.

The movie backgrounds are completely stunning, and while it takes a moment to get used to the style in which the characters are drawn and animated, once we get past that uncanny valley thing that rotoscoping causes, it’s all fine.

The voice cast includes Richard E. Grant, Lucy Lawless, Patton Oswalt, Betty Gabriel, and Joe Manganiello, and they all do an excellent job. The music is fine, and the direction – by Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King (who also wrote the script) is quite interesting.

Probably not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s good to see that this sort of movies still get made.


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Here we go again

What a weird start of this new year.
I was working on two major projects (and a few minor ones) and then my PC died, had to get a new one, set it up, recover my stuff…
I went through a bout of bad health, and then the war began – reasonably far from my country, but still we are feeling the aftershocks: friends who lost everything, people who live in feat, and people being killed.
Nothing new in human history, but still something that caused a moment of complete disconnect.

And in all honesty it feels extremely selfish and superficial, in a moment like this, to update one’s blog, writing about stories and personal projects, and all that.
Does anybody care?

But still, both the big projects were delivered with a minimum of fuss, and I am starting to work on a new story as I wait for the contract to be finalized.
And so I was doing a bit or research, and found this thing, and thought I’d share it here.
As a token to my intention of picking up posting again.

And yes, I am about to write a new story set in Shanghai…


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52 Books, #3 – Queens Walk in the Dusk

Queens walk in the dusk
Thomas Burnett Swann, 1977

What an unusual book!

Thomas Burnett Swann was a critic, a poet and a writer of fantasy. He used classic mythology and history in his stories, and Queen walks in the dusk, while the first of the Latium Trilogy dealing with the origin of Rome, was in fact is last book, published posthumously – Swann died in 1976.

Swann’s name had been on my radar for ages – mentioned in articles and essays, sometimes compared to Jack Vance for his prose. That’s high praise indeed, and reason enough to check this guy out. It was a while now I wanted to read his books, and I decided to start from this one. And I was impressed, baffled, and utterly fascinated.

Queens walk in the dusk is a retelling of the story of Dido and Aeneas. I understand that to English-speaking readers, the story is familiar, if at all, through Henry Purcell’s opera, but to us in Italy, it is part of the school curriculum, and as such we know it well, and hate it (because we often hate what is imposed on us by school programs).
So there is this sense of deja-vu, in the story Swann is telling us.
But the strangeness and the charm of this book is not in the story itself – that is good, mind you – but in the style.

The world in which the story is set is the one of the ancient Greeks and Romans – a world peopled with monsters and gods that enter the everyday lives of the inhabitants, a world in which you can hold a conversation with a ship’s spirit. The sense of wonder of this state of affairs lays not in the extraordinary, but in its commonplace status. This is a wonderful world because everywhere is magic, and power. It is also quite cosmopolitan, the characters being aware not only of the various kingdoms and peoples of the Mediterranean, but also of far-away India (we visit an elephant town in Africa in which Ganesha is worshiped by the elephant population).
And the story is told in such a world in a way that reminds one of the ancient epics – not for its bombast, but for its straightforward manner in which wonders and magic are presented, and for its economy.
Dido loves Glaucus. He is killed by her brother Pygmalion.
She flees Thyre, stealing half the fleet, and builds Carthage.
Aeneas flees the burning Troy and seven years later lands on the coast of Carthage.
All this, in thirty, forty pages. Not a word is wasted, and yet at the same time the language is rich, with a tempo that recalls a ballad or an oral tradition more than a book, a modern novel.
The thoughts and the actions of the characters are thoughts and actions from the ancient world, guided and informed by different mores, and a different morality. This makes some situations particularly grating – Ascanius, Aeneas’ ten-years-old son is appalling in his role as a sex-obsessed smartass who tries in the bluntest of ways to get his dad a woman to replace his dead mother. But the character is historically realistic and true to the version in the Aeneid – and let’s admit it, we hated the little runt even in Virgil’s original, back in high school.

And yet, for all of these classically-derived elements, Queens walk in the dusk is a thoroughly modern tale, and one that gives us characters with complex and fully-developed psychologies.

The final result is strange, but highly entertaining and quite good.
I will read more of Thomas Burnett Swann’s novels, and I fully understand why, while many seem to have forgotten him, those that remember his work cherish it and consider it a classic.

(WAIT! What happened to Book #2?!
Apparently, WordPress decided to lose the programmed post – I will reload it in a few days. Sorry for the inconvenience)


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52 books, #1 – Still LIfe with Woodpecker

First title in my 2022 challenge, and a much needed re-read.
Enjoy!

Still Life with Woodpecker
By Tom Robbins, 1980

When I got out of high school I was not very happy. The fact is, for a fair chunk of the duration of my high school years, certainly for the last three years I had been – or I had thought I was being – very popular.
Everybody was studying on copies of my class notes, everybody wanted a hand when tests were drawing near. There were afternoons I spent hours on the phone – these were the ‘80s, remember, we had landlines then. A lot of my school mates wanted to read my stories – that I churned out on my mother’s old Olivetti Lettera 32.
Then high school ended, and I was alone.
Turns out I had not been popular, I had just been useful.
I still had my stories, and I kept writing, but I no longer had anyone willing to read my stuff. My university colleagues were supremely dismissive. They were not interested in stories, most certainly not in science fiction and fantasy and adventure stories.
I was alone.
And my writing stopped working.
Mind you, I was 19 and I was very bad, but now I was bad and completely stuck.
It was at this point that I found a paperback copy of Still LIfe with Woodpecker, on the shelves of the Libreria Luxemburg, in Turin.

The e third novel of the man that Italian writer and translator Fernanda Pivano had called “the most dangerous writer in the world”, Still Life with Woodpecker is a book you need before you hit twenty.
At least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
After twenty, most of us are too fucking cynical to really enjoy this book, and, say, before 17, we are not mature enough.
So I was lucky, and I hit the Woodpecker just at the right time.

This is a novel, of course.
A fantasy of sorts, a love story that takes place in a pack of Camels, and deals with issues like what is the purpose of the moon, and how to make love stay. It features an outlaw (not a criminal, the difference thereof is discussed in the text) and a princess.
It features UFOs and drug smugglers, the CIA and terrorism. It deals with environmentalism, and social justice.
It also features extensive dialogs between the author and his typewriter – it even mentions Olivetti, saying it’s a juggler’s name – and it also includes a lot of lists: the most famous redheads, the main character’s favorite home-made explosives recipes…

When I found it, and read it twice, it was exactly the book that I needed. It helped me with my sudden sense of isolation and also it helped with my writing.
Because this, THIS was what I wanted to do when I wrote my stories – Robbins’ language is absolutely dazzling, his wit and his intelligence are as sharp as a razor, and he’s telling you “you think language is not fluid enough to give off sparks, kid? Well, hold my beer…”
Still life with woodpecker is a novel by an author that has complete control over his language, one that can make his words do what he needs.
THIS is what I was looking for at 19, and I am still looking for now.

So it feels like a good idea to start this series of posts, and this new year, with a book that, quite simply, saved my life. I have read almost everything that Robbins wrote before and after, and I am … no, not a fan.
I am a grateful reader.
The woodpecker, I read it every once in a while, when I want to remember that it can be done, and how beautiful it is when it works.

So maybe you might want to check it out.
Maybe you’re alone, and a little lost.
Maybe you no longer have faith in your ability to write.
Maybe you are between 17 and 20, somewhere inside of you.
If any of this applies, this is a book you might enjoy.