The Damned Lies Project

Generations ago, settlers colonized a new planet. Of the technology they brought to the planet is the ability to create a new body to transfer consciousness to, giving them a functional version of reincarnation. Over the generations as the population has increased, technology was withheld from the people. The world entered a dark age, and the ever-reincarnating First members of the original crew have hoarded the technology and set themselves up as gods, named and modeled after the Hindu pantheon. They have reintroduced that religion to the world, using mind probes to “judge” people at their 60th birthday to determine what kind of body they should reincarnate into. They say they will slowly reintroduce technology “as people are ready”, but instead, they have consolidated their power, destroying new technologies such as the printing press as soon as they are invented. They have also manipulated the reincarnation system, so that those who are dissidents find themselves in an unfavorable body or prevented from reincarnation at all.
Enter Sam, one of the original crew, who has ruled as a prince in a far off kingdom after leaving the world’s counsel in disgust after the first talk of godhood. He is appalled by what he sees of the new system, calling it a fascist oligarchy. He starts a movement to oppose the gods, taking on the name and persona of the Buddha to set the wheels turning on revolution. What follows is a war among “gods” and men, bringing in “demons” bound generations ago: the original energy-based inhabitants of the planet.

Overall this is a great read and it has many interesting ideas. It plays fast and loose with Buddhism and Hinduism, so those with strict conceptions of those might find this a little blasphemous. It is also very related in the “60s scifi” tone and writing style. In addition, it feels anachronistic at times, when both gods in men both in heavenly palaces or in dark age villages just light up cigarettes and begin smoking in the middle of the conversation. In the 60s, when smoking was much more accepted, this may have seemed normal, but reading it today it’s very jarring.

What if the Pied Piper of Hamelin was a homicidal madman with magic powers that had long ago swore to kill Peter Piper? What if long ago when they last met, the Pied Piper was responsible for crippling Peter Piper’s wife, Bo Peep?  These are the sort of questions answered in Peter and Max: A Fables Novel.
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Mr. Chesney operates a yearly tour where he takes tourists from our world into a magical world where they embark on the full hero experience: a wizard guide, monster attacks, thwarting an evil army, and finally defeating the Dark Lord.  The problem is the residents of that magical world hate these tours; the tours deplete food, ruin farmland, kill locals, destroy towns, , and otherwise disrupt the world.  Unfortunately, Mr. Chesney has a very powerful demon he is more than willing to unleash on any of the world’s inhabitants who try to disobey him.  This year, the most powerful wizards, thieves, priests, and nobility have called a meeting to do something about it.  They consult with the Oracles, who give them one instruction: if they want the tours to stop, they need to appoint the first person they see as Dark Lord this year.  That person ends up to be Derk, a middling mage who would rather be creating new creatures than pretending to be a Dark Lord.

Thus begins The Dark Lord of Derkholm, Diana Wynne Jones’s satire of fantasy novels.  While a fully featured story in its own right, it pokes a great deal of fun at the fantasy novel genre.  The popular clichés of the genre are taken on: prideful dragons, aloof elves, greedy dwarves, bard colleges, and of course wizards.  Showing them as fully fleshed out people rather than one-sidedcharacters shows their strengths and flaws.  Seeing them stumble over themselves to make sure planning for well-staged and totally faked tours across their realms shows more of the lunacy of some of the more common fantasy tropes.  What Jones does effectively is give a certain loveable humanity to the characters, even while poking holes on our favorite cliches and illusions. Read the rest of this entry »

Most apocalyptic novels deal either with the apocalypse itself, the survivors just after, or the skeletons of society centuries after – scavengers, bandits, and backwards tribes.  A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller is different.  This book tells the story of the dark age of mankind after the apocalypse and humanity’s slow movement back towards knowledge, civilization, and society.  It is not surprising that the message is also much about humanity’s resistance to knowledge and its tendency to repeat its ignorance and war over and over again. Read the rest of this entry »

The titular world in The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman is similar in many ways to the United States in the eighteenth century.  The East is a place of cities, universities, learning, and clearly defined things.  But the West is a frontier of lawlessness, small towns, philosophical movements, gunslingers and railroads.  But it is not our world.  Towns have different names and it has been in this state for centuries.  The West is more than just lawless; at the farthest frontier reality itself is ill-defined and strange.  The Folk roam the land, strange and mysterious, unable to die.  But by far, the main difference is the centuries old war between the Gun and the Line. Read the rest of this entry »

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are two iconic characters in the history of fantasy.  Before Lord of the Rings, before Elric, before Jordan, Eddings, Goodkind, Martin or the others there were these two rogues and the dirty city of Lankhmar.  Fafhrd is a tall blond barbarian from the North.  The Grey Mouser is a shorter, slimmer man, skilled with his rapier and a minor amount of magic.  They are rogues, thieves, swashbucklers and adventurers.  Rather than being the larger-than-life of Conan, they are closer to real men.  They banter back and forth as they steal, slay monsters, drink, and flirt with women.  Created by author Fritz Leiber, they are the most notable characters of fantasy that modern readers may have never heard of. Read the rest of this entry »

A secret international conspiracy of anarchists is threatening the world.  To combat that, a new intellectual force of British police is created to infiltrate the anarchist conspiracy.  Gabriel Syme, a poet, is recruited for this police force.  Through a strange course of events, he is able to infiltrate the local anarchist group and is elected to the post of Thursday.  With his new title, he is sent to the top-level anarchist gathering.  There he meets five other anarchists, each under the names of the days of the week.  The group is led by a massive and mysterious man known only as Sunday.  They plan an atrocious act of anarchism for the following weekend, then disperse, leaving Syme to somehow stop this plot before it happens.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesteron is a strange surrealist novel of identities.  All the anarchists are told that the most perfect way to disguise themselves is to disguise themselves as anarchists.  Most people who call themselves anarchists are full of bluster but no bite, and the world at large accepts them with a mocking smile when out of sight.  Those that try to hide themselves, find that their secretive ways and plans tend to attract the most notice.  People are worried about a secret anarchist but not a public one.  So to hide as the most perfect anarchist is to discuss it openly, as Sunday’s group does on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking a busy square under full observation of waiters.  But this starts the almost schizophrenic chain of identities.  Syme is a poet who is a police man who is disguised as an anarchist who is pretending to be an anarchist among other anarchists.  Things get even more confusing when he hunts down one of his fellow members of the week to find out he is also a police agent pretending to be an anarchist… Read the rest of this entry »

You know the old story.  Boy meets girl.  Boy hooks up with girl.  Girl vanishes into thin air the next morning.  Boy finds out girl died weeks earlier.  Girl is trapped in a purgatory like Limbo where she can only visit the land of the living twice a year.  Yet the love story persists. Read the rest of this entry »

A series of bizarre murders have struck Victorian London, prompting panic and sensational newspaper headlines.  The police call on stage-magician and sometimes-detective Edward Moon: past his prime, near-disgraced and terminally bored.  Together with his ever-present companion The Somnambulist, a giant who only drinks milk and is unharmed by stab wounds, they return to the life of detective work.  What follows is the unmarking of a strange plot, intersected by carnival performers, freakshow prostitutes, London’s secret service, a man who lives backwards in time, and the work of the Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1942, in a small seaside town in occupied France, the Nazis plotted to form an alliance with the Deep Ones, an ancient race of aquatic beings who served dark gods.  With this alliance, the Nazis would push back the Allies in a war that had turned against them.  On the night when the alliance would be finally sealed, US guns shelled the entire site from the nearby mountain range, destroying the operation.  In the wreckage were found documents and confession of a would-be Nazi traitor.  Though the man died, his guilty explanation of the occult arm of the Nazi SS made it into the US’s intelligence organization, the OSS and their Delta Green offshoot.  The Nazi backup plan would be to find the lost city of Thule, and unleash something that would put all other doomsday weapons to shame.

Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy by Dennis Detwiller is a strange mix of themes and influences.  If you ever wanted to combine Lovecraftian horrors with WWII and Nazi occultism, you’ll find it here.  At the same time, it focuses particularly on the politics of US and British intelligence agencies that deal with the supernatural, bringing up similarities to novels like The Atrocity Archive or Declare. Read the rest of this entry »