Appendix ن

Yr Hmbl Satrap's Personal Appendix N  ن

Blogspot's sans serif Arabic nun is just killing me 

This has been going around the OSRsphere — confer Vodka Gobalsky's. Many of my entries will be familiar to anyone reading this; rather than introduce them to some alien or time traveller who never heard of Jack Vance or Moebius, i've put a few words about the meaning of these works in my imaginarium.

fantasy & fantasy adjacent sf/horror  

Elric series, Michael Moorcock. I read a fair bit of lowbrow fantasy as a teen. Dragonlance, David Eddings. Elric was an antidote to all that: more than a role model to me and countless boys who thought a black trenchcoat made us more interesting (and we were right), Moorcock showed me that a an awesome dude with a badass sword can be a vehicle for serious literature. The lost boys and I came for gothdom without wedgies, but if we wanted to stay, the point is to break all the high fantasy tropes: betrayed, defeated, revealed in their shallowness. The redemptive love of a hottie, the esoteric book with the answers, Spenglerian young empires taking back the world from decadent eldritch jerkfaces, and magic swords to solve all your problems — Moorcock is not having any of it. It was good foundation for my later exposure to deconstruction and reappropriation, as I learned literary theory and genre history: these are Moorcock's love song to the sword & sorcery genre, while systematically attacking the machismo and naïve violence, and throwing Vs to the ponderous pretension of Tolkien. After finishing the books extant in the early 90s, i was done with fantasy for many years, just fuckin done, what else was there to say? Magic swords, just, c'mon.

Fafhrd & Gray Mouser series, Fritz Leiber. Speaking of Fafhrd! I actually read these after coming across Appendix N podcasts and Dungeon Crawl Classics eulogies. Magic is weird, being clever is much more important than bashing with swords, also this is where the demi-lich comes from.

Gormeghast, Mervyn Peakes. I have a thing for megastructures; buildings and cities are exteriorizations of our lives and needs, our view of our inner natures, and perhaps our demiurgic ambitions. Gormeghast is an enormous castle full of weird shut-ins who never leave, served by hordes of menials, servants, retainers, proletarian enablers. The family in Gormenghast and their minions are real characters in themselves, and also a reflection on the British power and class structure that is both cutting and affectionate. What would Blighty be without the ruling class and ridiculous ritual and pretty things? A rock in the north sea, that's what.

Imajica, Weaveworld, The Great and Secret Show, Clive Barker. The horror i like is fantasy horror, magic and monsters and invasive worlds and the like. 

Dying Earth, Jack Vance. The punctilio for which I am reproved by the inhabitants of this demense must, in this case, be the instrument i wield against the natural superiority of my very perspicacity! You shall perceive my self-control as an adamantine dam against a pressure latent in my brain, that being the mass of thoughts regarding this book and its creator, the prolific John Holbrook "Jack" Vance. These thoughts susurrate with incomparable puissance. Were I to attempt the merest adumbration of their content and significance, this pastiche would annihilate my readers' faculties and render them as dull and mopish as a juvenile pelgrane.

The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe. Oh that I had the tongues of men and angels to say anything about this book you have to read it for your damn self to properly understand. One of the greatest literary works ever.

Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin. Worldbuilding can be pretty spare. There are islands with kings and trading and some wizards; there doesn't have to be big lore-ponderous histories.

The Last Unicorn, Peter Beagle. If you only know the movie, you're ok, because it's a fine film and an excellent adaptation. Beagle's book takes you more deeply into the mental and emotional world of the unicorn, the show biz witch, the miserable delusional band of robbers, and did you know Shmendrick is not just incompetent but many centuries old? He is so bad at magic, it may be the universe is protecting itself from the power Shmendrick would wield if he gets his shit together; his old master thought the universe has it coming, and charms his apprentice to stay young until he comes into himself. That is a hell of a high concept.

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips — i delved deep some years back: close readings of many of the stories, works of criticism, quality podcasts, and the big honkin biography, I Am Providence, by gadabout non-academic scholar S.T. "Don't have to play nice with the salaryman professors, or read any "french disease" theory that would allow me to talk to them" Joshi. HPL gets the only sub-categories by story here in Appendix Nun, probably:

The Weird in Weird-Fiction

Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (Lovecraft did so have an erotic drive, read his descriptions of architectures), Shadow over Innsmouth (down here it's better, down where it's wetter; race mixing is a red herring for the deeper fear that humans are not separate from any other species), The Rats in the Walls (best horror story ever in my book; i have goosebumps), The Call of Cthulhu obviously (powerful aliens out of scale in every way), The Whisperer in Darkness (excellent spooky aliens who are very alien but comprehensible; take a ride in a brain cylinder).

Magic, a.k.a. alien technology: The Terrible Old Man (necromantic weights in bottles), Strange High House in the Mist (meeting astral gods), Case of Charles Dexter Ward (straight up sorcery and coercive necromancy), Beyond the Wall of Sleep (mind reading via colander with vacuum tubes), The Dunwich Horror (summoning & banishing things from tangent dimensions), Dreams in the Witch-House (hyperspace travel), The Thing on the Doorstep (mind transference, weird 4d objects; also the Deep Ones can do magic apparently), The Haunter in the Dark (artifacts that are portals or two-way screens).

The Crystal Cave & sequels, Mary Stewart. Low, low fantasy historical fiction; Merlin's power is mostly literacy and ability to construct siege engines and the like, but there is a kernel of mystical force that, after some decades of Sufi weirdness, is not so much a fantasy element as the apparent reality of stuff that happens in liminal spaces with great discipline of consciousness... This was probably my first 'secret history', or reimagining of historical events with a paranormal angle.

Borges. Is it really quarter to 4, I am about done with this draft and really cannot even with Borges right now.

In small doses

Clark Ashton Smith — amazing language, intense visuals and settings, not very interesting as stories by and large

Lord Dunsány — similar. I always write it with the acute accent these days by way of marking the stressed syllable in his name. Dun Saney.

Le Morte d'Arthur, but actually through Jeffrey Wikstrom's version Arthur Dies at the End. Wikstrom retells Mallory's... turgid fanfic, let's call it, in an extremely funny and genre-aware way. 

Art, artbooks:

• The City in the Image of Man, Paolo Soleri — where the arcology is espoused
• Codex Seraphinianus
• Dinotopia
• Bruce Pennington
• Richard Powers
• Moebius
• World of the Dark Crystal (design sketches for the movie, worldbuilding lore not in the film; when i was 7 i had a comic of the movie as well, which i read to flinders)
• Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials, Expedition, Barlowe's Inferno — All Wayne Barlowe. Never had a copy of his guide to Fantasy, and it is dashed hard to come by in pdf!
• After Man & Man After Man, Dougal Dixon
• Parallel Botany, Leo Lionni

TTRPG and other gaming material

Muhammad Abd al-Rahman Barker: the world of Tékumel via the books Empire of the Petal Throne and The Tékumel Sourcebook.

Film

La Cité des enfants perdus
Miyazaki: Nausicaä, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke

Comics

Sandman

The Books of Magic

Hellblazer

The Invisibles

Planetary

The Rat Queens

The Order of the Stick

& that's enough for tonight.