Robert Silverberg: Gilgamesh the King

I seem to have some difficulties with my reading. The two earlier books (and some others I haven't mentioned here in the blog) I almost slogged through. This one was more fascinating, but it didn't grab me the way I hoped it would. No way I would call Gilgamesh the King a bad book, though.

Even though I have only admiration for Robert Silverberg (and have published his works in Finnish!), I have read only few novels or short stories by him. I bought the Finnish translation of Gilgamesh the King when it came out some ten years ago (and I also have the English paperback version of it, with Silverbob's signature!), but I got to read it only now. I didn't really know what goes on in the original epic, but I believe Silverberg has it nailed. This is a realistic version of Gilgamesh's story, told in an archaic, but believable manner. There are some great adventures along the way, but I found that I couldn't really concentrate, and it took my over a week to finish the book. Maybe it's the stress, the feeling I should be reading something totally different, or at least something work-related. The book got more interesting in the end, when Gilgamesh goes on a journey to find out how he could keep himself alive as long as he wants to, only to find himself. The ending has misogynous undertones, which I felt were a bit distracting. 

Nevertheless, highly recommended, not only because it's by one of the great masters of his generation. It's too bad I missed seeing him during the last year's WorldCon in Helsinki, Finland.

P.S. I can't but laugh at the joke someone (I think Denny Lien at the Fictionmags discussion group) that Gilgamesh the King beats the contest where you have to find the longest time between the original work and the sequel. (Gilgamesh the King isn't actually a sequel, though, it's more like a retelling of the original epic, but the joke is too funny not to use.)

Oh, my new novel just came out

You think I'm productive? Not all the books that were supposed to come out this Fall didn't work out as planned, but I'm still putting out some seven books. One of these was the Lovecraft novel I mentioned earlier, another one is a sword and sorcery novel that came out roughly the same time Haamu/Ghost came out.

Sword and sorcery novel? Yeah, Viimeinen bjarmialainen/The Last Bjarmian (Bjarmia is a mythical place in the north-east region of Finland) is something I've always wanted to do and now here it is. This story came out first in five installments in the Seikkailukertomuksia/Adventure Stories mag I edited and published some years back. I wrote my serial set in ancient Finland almost from a scratch and later on I realized the story resembles westerns a lot: a lone swordsman comes into a small town, finds the town people corrupt, but still has to fight some bad guys that threaten the town from outside. But these bad guys are weird gigantic white monsters, not your basic Injuns or robbers. And they have a mysterious leader, living in a cave no one has ever seen... It's a bit like Hammett's Red Harvest coupled with Lovecraft.

The serial went through quite many edits before it hit the print, and I still think there remained lots to be done. The main problem was that the battle scenes resemble each other too much, but last week I figured out how it could've been avoided - two weeks after the book had come out. I guess this happens a lot.

There's also my foreword telling how the story got into print. (I posted the foreword here - in Finnish, of course.) The cover illo is another one by Aapo Kukko, who's really good at these things. He said he wanted to draw my hero, a guy called Pesäri, with Alain Delon in his mind. And I think he got it exactly right.

Writing these things - this and my collection of Joe Novak private eye stories and the one novel about Joe Novak - is more like a hobby to me, though it takes a considerable amount of time. Writing this kind of stuff is practicing my craft, practicing how to narrate a story, construct the dialogue, keep the story moving. In the gone days of pulp and paperback publishing you could do this for money, now you have to self-publish or rely on your friends' micropublishing outfits, like in this case. Tuomas Saloranta does a good work with his Kuoriaiskirjat, and I've already agreed on doing another book - a small anthology - for him. Here's hoping someone finds reading Viimeinen bjarmialainen as much fun as I had writing the story!

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Dragonslayer

Saw Dragonslayer for the first time in my life last Saturday, after seeing its poster 30 years ago and being mesmerized. Fairly entertaining, fairly well made dragon film set in a world that looks like our Middle Ages, but differs from it in many aspects. All in all, a nice fantasy. The only thing I have actually something to complain about is that I didn't buy Peter MacNicol as a sorcerer's apprentice. The climax is a bit blown out as well. Check it out on Wikipedia and IMDb.

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog.

Wild fantasy from yesteryear, but by whom?

"Thousands of flaming torches, reflected from countless carbuncles, filled the king’s palace with marvellous iridescent light. Along the white marble walls, on benches covered in purple, the warriors languished, beautiful young boys kneeling before them to offer them succulent fruits, foaming wines. Boisterous and merry, the men greeted with a roar of laughter anybody who ventured to amuse the company with ribaldry and antics.
In the centre of the hall, dark-eyed handmaidens swayed in lustful dance, like fl owers floating in the spring breeze.
Other maidens stood around the dancers, accompanying their graceful movements with clashing cymbals and wailing flutes. More fiery than the torches were the handmaidens’ eyes - more than wines they stirred the men."

Any guesses where this citation is from?

Old Finnish fantasy and science fiction

More on the books I read during our vacation trip:

We carried Aili Somersalo's Mestaritontun seikkailut with us to read it to kids before bedtime. It didn't go very well (Kauto especially got bored with it) and the book is still unread. I was reading it also to myself, because I've been interested in the book for quite a while: it was originally published in 1919 and is a classic piece of Finnish fantasy. Well, it's a fairy tale and not fantasy by strict genre standards, but there is still a good touch of high adventure and romance in the book. The book tells about Mestaritonttu (Master Tomte or something to that effect), who decides to take a leave from the Fairyland where he's been serving as the king's master. He wanders around, ends up in a strange place and gets mixed up in a fight between some witches and the king of the sea. There's also a maiden who's under a spell and locked up in a stone.

If there were a tradition of publishing reprints old Finnish fantasy, this should go high up in the list. It's been reprinted many times, but as it's a bit slow, young kids won't necessarily like it nowadays, and the reprint should be targeted at mature readers who are interested in the history of the genre. And one could hope the text for the reprint would be taken from the first edition of the book, published under the pseudonym Aili Tarvas. The cover shown above is by Onni Mansnerus, who did the illos for the 1940's reprint. They are very nice.

There were fantasy elements also in the short stories of the author who's best known as Larin-Kyösti. [The article behind the link is actually in English, take a look!] I had an old collection of his short stories with me and I read some of the ones that were more genre-oriented. I don't think Larin-Kyösti had any particular genre in mind, but there were elements of fantasy and fairy tale in many of the stories, and I got to thinking one could do a collection of fairy tales and fantasy stories of old Finnish writers, of those who were are not normally linked to either genre. Of Larin-Kyösti's stories, particularly "Metsän henki / The Spirit of the Forest" would work perfectly in this kind of a book. Of the other stories, "Paholaisen soitto / The Devil's Music" is a fast-paced fantasy of the Devil visiting a church.

Into Jyläskoski was a pretty obscure Finnish writer who worked casually from the 1950's to the 1970's (publishing then one non-fiction book about booze smuggling in Finland). I've seen one or two of his short stories in various old Finnish fictionmags, but he was never a full-time writer. He published two novels in his lifetime, and one of them was a science fiction novel, called Marsion radiolentäjät / The Radio Pilots of Mars. It was published in 1955 with good illustrations by Olli Ålander. It's a pretty boring YA book, but it has a storyline one could use in a writing project and set a story of a set of stories in the same universe: the Martians have come to Earth in the early 20th century and have decided to reside in the Himalaya mountains. From there they abduct people to help them with their further attacks.

In Jyläskoski's book three young kids are abducted in the beginning of the novel and as they are all radio amateurs, the Martians put them to work as radists. There's not much sense in the book (it's never really shown what actual threat the Martians pose to people on Earth) and as it's also slow-paced, it was pretty tasking to read it to the end, but I struggled.

I also had Jalmari Vaula's fairy tale Udina from the late 1940's with me, but I never got around to reading it. Last winter I read Vaula's paleofiction novel, Kuolemanlaakson kurimuksessa / The Death Valley Maze (1952) and despite its silliness I enjoyed its fast pace and no-nonsense story telling. Now I'll have to get back to reading work-related stuff, which, unfortunately, means Robert Harris and Arturo Perez-Reverte. Hopefully Isabel Allende's novels are better.

Sorry, no pictures from Into Jyläskoski's Martian novel - the Photoshop program won't open anymore in our computer! I'll try to get something worked out, and I'll write a longer piece on the book later on (in Finnish).

I Am Legend in Finnish!

I heard some good news during the Turku Book Fair that was held the last weekend: Richard Matheson's vampire/zombie classic, I Am Legend, will be translated in Finnish and it will be out in November! More power to Vaskikirjat! [They are a new publishing house and their first book, a Lankhmar book by Fritz Leiber, is just out. With Matheson there will also be a translation of Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter.]

Tolkien's Túrin

I finished the Finnish translation of Tolkien's "new" book late last night. The Children of Húrin was quite gripping and the fleshing out of the short story that was originally published in Silmarillion was quite successful, minus some clumsy shifts ("Now the story goes back to Túrin"). If you like Tolkien, don't hesitate to grab this.

Reading the book reminded me of the fact that I've last read Silmarillion 20 years ago (appr.), even though I've read The Lord of the Rings six or seven times, and it could be the time to reread it. I should also tackle The Unfinished Tales, which I found boring during my intellectual days. I just don't know whether I'll have the time even during this Summer.