(Repost) Surviving the Wolfhound Century, Part I

Over the last few months, I’ve been reading Peter Higgins’ Wolfhound Empire trilogy (Wolfhound Century, Truth and Fear, and Radiant State), a New Weird-styled fantasy trilogy that takes most of the inspiration for its setting from tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. I agree with Adam Roberts that the trilogy is one of the best fantasy works of the 2010s, but there has been very little attention given to it in most genre circles, online or otherwise. To remedy this, I browbeat persuaded my friend Michal Wojcik over at One Last Sketch to give the trilogy a try, and we’ve put together a series of collaborative reviews of each book. The following two posts will cover our discussion of Wolfhound Century (2013), the first book in the trilogy. Enjoy!

(Edit: Forgive the weird bolding in this post. There’s something screwy with the code somewhere.)

One Last Sketch

Lost in Leningrad

I read Peter Higgins’s Wolfhound Century after a strong recommendation from fellow blogger Alasdair Czyrnyj. He’ll join me in the next series of posts as we air our thoughts on the Wolfhound Empire trilogy one book at a time.

First, some background. Wolfhound Century takes place in the Vlast, a country bearing the heavy mark of the Soviet Union, manifested particularly in the city of Mirgorod, a swampy cement-covered place that evokes St. Petersburg back when it was called Leningrad. Vissarion Lom comes to Mirgorod to investigate the activities of erstwhile revolutionary Josef Kantor. This thriller-esque procedural plot largely takes a back seat to the cosmology and fantastic weirdness of the Vlast, caught in a struggle between stone angels and an endless forest, industrialized but in a way that incorporates the preternatural. Giants and golems wander the streets as labourers, unremarked but haunting in their normalcy.

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Yinglet Like Me: The Out-of-Placers

I must admit that webcomics are something of an undiscovered country for me. I used to read a fair amount back when I was in university, but that was back in the early 2000s, when the medium was new and taking many of its cues from newspaper comics. Since then, of course, the medium has blossomed in every conceivable way, with the only limits being the imaginations of the creators and the technology available. As for me, I drifted away from the medium after university and have only begun dipping my toes back in again rather recently. Indeed, at the moment there are only two comics I read regularly: Drugs and Wires, Cryoclaire and Black Io’s pessimistic comedy about post-Soviet life in the dystopian cyberpunk future of 1995, and the subject of today’s review.

The Out-of-Placers is a fantasy webcomic written and drawn by Sal Valia (or Valsalia…I’m not quite sure myself). The comic started sometime around late 2013 and over the past few years has developed a small but loyal following. While the subject matter it handles is perhaps a little unorthodox, there is a charm and humor to the comic that just makes me want to ramble on about it for several paragraphs.

A Private Language of Modernist Mayhem: An Appreciation of Marcel Dzama

Marcel Dzama, Grand presentiments of what must come, 2012

I haven’t talked about art as much as I’ve wanted to on this blog. Art is something I have a great appreciation for, but it’s an appreciation that I have found particularly difficult to translate into words. Most of my knowledge of art comes from the handful of art history classes I took as an undergrad, and that was almost a decade ago. As a result I often find I don’t have the proper vocabulary to discuss painting or sculpture the way I can write about novels and film. In fact, if I may let a private embarrassment come to light, when I visit an art gallery I will spend more time reading the placard explaining the meaning of the work than I will taking in and appreciating the work on an aesthetic level.

Still, there are some artists whose work manage to penetrate this barrier and hit me directly on an emotional level, to engage me in ways words can’t entirely explain. As part of my new “forget your insecurities and just write whatever you want on your blog,” I thought I would share my appreciation for one of these artists, the Winnepeg-born multimedia artist Marcel Dzama.

If I Wrote Book 4 of The Legend of Korra…

(Fair warning before we begin: this is going to be an intensely nerdy post talking about The Legend of Korra, so if you haven’t watched the show, not much of it is going to make a lick of sense.)

Today’s post is one inspired by an essay Robert Jackson Bennett wrote on his blog back in January about how he would rework the Star Wars prequels. In the introduction to his piece, Bennett mentioned that most everyone has a “hobby story” in their minds, some fanfiction version of a story you liked but just had some flaws that you’d like to see ironed out. I’ve certainly tinkered with a few over the years; one of these days I should write about my dumb Star Trek reboot idea that involves time-travelling Cardassians, the destruction of the Klingon Empire, and Kirk sacrificing himself in the third act and being replaced with an Andorian lady as captain.

However, there is one story that has exercised my imagination the most for the past two-odd years: the final book of The Legend of Korra. It’s a season of television for which I have such a frustrated affection. The basic premise, that the decadent, fractious Earth Kingdom has collapsed and is being reunified by an modernizing autocrat, is fantastic, and the autocrat in question, Kuvira, is my favorite character in the entire Avatar franchise. There’s a wonderful buildup in the first half of the season, as Kuvira begins to push back against international opinion as she establishes her new state, culminating in a showdown with Korra at the gates of Zaofu that both women narrowly survive. And then…

Well, then it all becomes a bit rubbish, which is where I step in.

The USSR: A Personal Exploration

The cover to Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the Stalin Period, one of my favorite art books.

I have always deeply insecure about my writing. This is not unusual in the world of writers, but it has always been a particular source of frustration for me. Whenever I flip open a empty notebook or see the white screen of a blank Word document flash in front of me, there is always this reluctance to commit myself, my ideas to paper. Depression, that plague of the postmodern era, has certainly had a hand in it that, despite months of medication, still refuses to completely unclench. Maybe it has to do with issues that burrow all the way back from childhood. Perhaps it is just a fear of being judged, of being called unworthy or of being attacked that keeps me from pushing forward. However, for any progress to be made, for anything new to be created, a single step must be taken, otherwise you just stay rooted to your spot, silent and immobile.

Speaking as someone who has spent decades silent and immobile, I can tell you that it is no way to live. Therefore, I am going to start coming out of my shell over the next few months, to talk openly and freely about things that interest and concern me, my anxieties be damned. To inaugurate this new direction, I would like to spend this post talking about something that much of my life has revolved around: the forgotten nation that was once known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Secondhand Manifestos: Quick Thoughts on Bruce Sterling’s Pirate Utopia

In case you’re wondering, the Constructivist cover was the publisher’s idea. Not a surprise, really.

It appears to have accidentally turned into Jackboot Month here in the Dolmen. Today’s subject, Bruce Sterling’s 2016 novella Pirate Utopia, is something I literally found out about yesterday and spent a few hours reading cover to cover. I’ve never been a big fan of Sterling,  so I half-expected the story to set my teeth on edge. Much to my surprise, however, I actually found it to be a rather amusing little romp.

The Bard in Jackboots: Richard III (1995)

Like everyone in the English-speaking world, I had to read my share of Shakespeare during my formative years. I spent three years in high school with the Bard, making my way through Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. I didn’t hate the time I spent with those plays, but it was like so much of school. You memorize something long enough to do the final exam, then it just washes away. Lately, however, I’ve been developing an appreciation for Shakespearian adaptations that modernize the settings but keep the original language. Hardly an original concept, true, but there’s something to be said about keeping the poetry of Shakespeare’s original work, but putting it into a twentieth-century frame of reference that lets the work throw off the weight of centuries and connect with the audience, perhaps letting them see a glimmer of what the plays meant when they were new. As most of these adaptations I’ve watched are film adaptations of stage plays, some of the slipperiness of setting common to the theater remains in the film, often turning these stories into immortal fables whose lessons can apply to every era.

Now, I personally have a taste for Shakespeare’s tragedies and history plays, so my list of favorite adaptations includes such lights as Ralph Fiennes’ Balkanized Coriolanus (2011), Julie Taymor’s gonzo Titus (1999), and Rupert Goold’s Stalinist Macbeth (2010), about which more later. However, my favorite one of these adaptations has to be Richard Loncraine’s Richard III from 1995, with Sir Ian McKellen in the title role.