Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


by 2 Comments

Playing fast and loose in Younger Dryas

Back when I was still working as a researcher in university, I was asked once how I managed to “reconcile” my research papers with the science fiction, fantasy and horror stories I was publishing at the time. My reply being, of course, that I credited my readers with the modicum amount of intelligence needed to tell the difference between a paper on Miocene rocks and a story about a guy working part-time as a vampire hunter.

I also added that, if it is perfectly fine for a geologist to do research and then play piano in a jazz band or cook for his friends on the weekend, why should it be different were he a storyteller instead of a pianist or a barbecue maverick?

On the other hand, I guess some of the reading I’ve done recently for research purposes might really get me in trouble with my (now former) colleagues. It’s all about the Younger Dryas cold spell, and it makes for both fascinating science and great storytelling.

Continue reading →


by 4 Comments

Old Mars!

Color me happy. After literally ages I’ve been able to complete the trilogy of Martian adventures that Michael Moorcock wrote in the mid-60s using the pen-name Edward Powys Bradbury. I read the first book in the series, City of the Beast (also known as Warrior of Mars), back in the mid ’80s, having found a battered copy of the NEL edition on a bookshelf in a bookstore long gone now. I was just out of the Barsoom series, and I wanted more of the same, only different – yes, it’s a bit confused.
In the span of a short summer I read Leigh Bracket’s Martian novels, C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith stories, a sampling of Lin Carter’s Callisto books, a few Dray Prescott Skorpio novels, and then Michael Kane’s Martian adventures.

Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

Nuts & Bolts on Worldbuilding

My Patrons just received the second issue of Nuts & Bolts, an irregular series of pieces about writing – focusing on practicalities rather than theory. This is the second post of this kind I do this month – the first was successful enough to convince me it was a good idea to go on.

The topic of today’s post is world-building, and was inspired by a very stupid argument fueled by this image.

It is good, they say, being my Patrons.


by Leave a comment

Untethered

Back when I was a kid there was this poster, which read “All I needed to know in my life I learned from Star Trek”, and listed a series of life lessons from the old series, the one with Captain Kirk, that at the time was the only one. At the time it was considered a nerdy thing, and nothing to be proud – the poster was an in-joke for the members of the community.

A few days back I jokingly said to a friend that is a game designer that I’ve been using Shadowrun: Attitude as a lifestyle guide to navigate these strange years, and it works just fine. We had a laugh.
But then I took my copy out and started browsing it and realized that something must have been sitting at the back of my mind when I made that joke – because Attitude does in fact work as a good starting point to survive in this moment.

Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

Two types of adventurers

Pierre Mac Orlan was a Frenchman, his real name Pierre Dumarchey. He wrote novels of adventure and crime and, under a variety of aliases, pornography. Visitors of Karavansara might know him at least for one book, La Bandera, one of the early epics of the Foreign Legion, which was filmed in the ’30s starring Jean Gabin – and that tangentially influenced a a later movie called March or Die.

A surrealist and a satirist and not just a pornographer, Mac Orlan also wrote a tiny little book called Le petit manuel du parfait aventurier, or The Little Handbook of the Perfect Adventurer. It was published in 1920, and it’s a nasty little piece of work – as one might expect given the subject matter and the author. If you want, there is a copy of the French original in the Internet archive – me, I got me the Italian version, because it’s got a ribald photo of Gary Cooper on the cover, and because Amazon was having a sale with a 25% discount on the publisher’s catalog.

Continue reading →


by 3 Comments

Some other cavemen

Sometimes I say I’ll hung my keyboard to the wall and move to a career as a tarot reader in the pubs of the area. I mean this only half-jokingly, and for a series of reasons it’s becoming increasingly more attractive. And it turns out I wouldn’t even be the first – one of my favorite writers, back when I was a kid, apparently ditched a career as an award-winning novelist and journalist to become an astrologer.

Jane Gaskell was born in 1941 and wrote her first novel at 14, and published it at 16. It’s called Strange Evil and it’s a strange roller-coaster of magic, imagination and sexual suggestions. I read it in 1985 – give or take a few months – because of the Borius Vallejo cover, and because I had just been through Gaskell’s Atlan saga, again picked up because of Boris, and I was a fan.

Continue reading →