Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #3

by Iulian Ionescu

  Iulian: I have to ask this: your bio says you own nine guitars. I own three, a drum set, and a piano, and I play neither one of them. Do you play and if so, what?

  Scott: I do play, yes! Electric guitar. I gigged originals in several small bands for years, but that dried up a while ago. I now appear to have come full circle; my neighbor is a drummer and we bang out the same classic rock covers as graybeards that I used to play in high school. I've built many of my guitars myself, so that's one excuse for why I have so many—I keep building new ones.

  Iulian: What's next for BCS and for yourself? What is your vision for the future?

  Scott: BCS will continue to march relentlessly forward in publishing great literary adventure fantasy. Our new ebook anthology The Best of BCS Year Five just came out. We did a steampunk theme reprint anthology, Ceaseless Steam, a few years ago, and I'm planning another one next spring of Weird Western stories from the magazine. We recently launched a second audio fiction podcast called The BCS Audio Vault, which features past BCS Audio Fiction Podcast episodes with a new introduction by a guest author or editor. October 2014 will be our sixth anniversary; our Sixth Anniversary Double-Issue will include stories by Richard Parks, K.J. Parker, and Aliette de Bodard, and later in October we will have a new story by Gregory Norman Bossert, whose previous BCS story "The Telling" won the World Fantasy Award in 2013. My vision for the future is to keep publishing great literary adventure fantasy by neo-pro writers and veterans alike, online, as ebooks, and as podcasts; to keep doing what has made people call BCS a premiere venue for fantastic fiction.

  Dear Scott, thank you very much your detailed answers. I wish you good luck with BCS and any other projects that will surely come along.

  Links:

  http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  https://www.facebook.com/pages/_Beneath-Ceaseless-Skies_-Online-Magazine/110083031133

  https://twitter.com/BCSmagazine

  http://www.Scotthandrews.com/

  Artist Spotlight: Suebsin Pulsiri

  Suebsin Pulsiri is a graphic artist and illustrator from Thailand.

  Iulian: Tell us a little bit about yourself: where did you grow up and how did your early life influence your future as an artist?

  Suebsin: I was born and raised in Bangkok, Thailand. I don't know if I can say exactly what had a big influence on my work, but I think I became interested in drawing because I loved watching animation when I was a kid.

  Iulian: What are your favorite design tools and how did you get to learn them?

  Suebsin: Of course, I use Photoshop; I think it's the best software for drawing. I started learning it in the office and became better in time. Before that I used to draw on paper and canvas only.

  Iulian: Are there any other artists out there that you admire and whose work has helped shape your work?

  Suebsin: I have a lot of favorite artists. Among my idols I can mention: Frank Frazetta, Justin Sweet, and Craig Mullin. I am also a big fan of Studio Ghibli, an animation studio that produces great work.

  Iulian: Where do you find inspiration?

  Suebsin: I get ideas from everything in my life, such as cartoons, movies, games. I also study and get inspired by the works of other artists.

  Iulian: How would you break down your workflow in steps?

  Suebsin: Normally, I start creating a rough sketch directly in Photoshop (not scan). That becomes my guide. From there, I gradually paint, adding different layers until completion.

  Iulian: Your work is very fantasy-driven. What drives you to that subject?

  Suebsin: I think that freedom of thought comes with fantasy. I absolutely prefer to draw a man riding a dragon more than driving a Ferrari in real life.

  Iulian: If there was one piece of advice you could give other beginning artists, what would that be?

  Suebsin: Never stop training and improving your skills. Study other artists and always try to work outside of your comfort zone.

  Iulian: We selected one of your pieces for the cover of our magazine. Tell us a few words about how that piece came to be.

  Suebsin: It started from my desire to study the muscles of human and beast. Eventually that study turned into this picture. In my head, I created a story that turned into some sort of barbarian warrior riding a monster.

  Iulian: Where can we find you on the web?

  http://www.facebook.com/choicepage

  http://www.facebook.com/friendhaircut

  http://drawcrowd.com/friendhaircut

  http://www.choice01.com

  Book Review: Upgraded (edited by Neil Clarke)

  Our Cyborg Future

  Julie Novakova

  Upgraded (anthology)

  Edited by Neil Clarke

  Wyrm Publishing (September, 2014)

  Better. Stronger. Faster. Do these words really describe what becoming a cyborg means? Authors in Neil Clarke's new anthology UPGRADED contemplated this idea and each had a different take on human cyborgification. In the twenty-six futures offered there, humans are remade into living weapons, mining equipment, half-alien chimeras, fully cybernetic individuals, demigods, angels, and much more.

  Few anthologies have an origin story as unusual as this one. In 2012, Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, suffered a severe heart attack and had to have a pacemaker installed afterwards. He became a cyborg, which prompted him to focus his first themed anthology on this topic. Part of the stories was solicited, part came from the slush. The final selection of stories is quite diverse and able to fit various tastes in fiction. In the space of this review, I cannot mention all of the stories in such a length they would deserve, therefore I'm going to focus more on those that have stuck in my head more stubbornly than the others.

  Tongtong's Summer by Xia Jia is by far the most optimistic, joyful story of the anthology and yet one that also contains great depths of grief, worry and sadness. Truly heartfelt, very realistically depicting what our very near future might look like and what effects might new technologies have on ordinary human lives. It was the most moving story to me and one of the highlights of the entire anthology.

  Ken Liu's The Regular captured me almost instantly by a surprising twist and continued to draw me deeper and deeper into the story. Its portrayal of augmentation was very realistic and Liu also incorporated some highly interesting small extensions of currently existing technologies. Both main characters—that of a private investigator Ruth Law and a murderer she's chasing—were depicted in great detail and depth and their development was most interesting. Liu has a talent for describing the worlds in which his stories are set in a way that can make the reader imagine them better than their own. This one is very close to our own world today but Liu takes us places we might not really see unless we knew where to look for them. The Regular was, along with Tongtong's Summer, my favorite of the anthology.

  Coastlines of the Stars by Alex Dally MacFarlane is set in a world that reminded me of classic space opera: brave pilots mapping the universe in their own starships, space containing dangers in the form of scavengers, debris fields filled with traps, and human rather than computer-controlled navigation. Its captivating voice, interesting premise, and space opera nostalgia worked together very well and brought forth a piece worth recommendation.

  Honeycomb Girls by Erin Cashier managed to stick in my mind due to the unusual voice of the storytelling and a strangely post-catastrophic but still not negatively portrayed world. However, this story's take on cyborgs is very loose, since the closest element to this topic is replacement of humans in some roles by robots.

  Seventh Sight by Greg Egan is one of the most "realistic" stories of the pack and one that made me imagine a brave new world of differently perceived colors. Elegantly simple, both in premise and implementation, it had a great effect and it's one of the works that had stuck in my head.

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew offers one of the most distant depictions of humanity in her Synecdoche Oracles. It follows several of her earlier stories but their knowledge
is needless for the reader to enjoy this image of far future where the possibilities of augmentation are nearly endless, but human beings also stay deeply human.

  What I've Seen With Your Eyes by Jason K. Chapman has by far the weirdest first sentence in the anthology, one that really catches the reader's attention. While you may raise your eyebrows after reading it and wonder what on earth you've started on, the story soon takes you into a world not that far from ours and introduces a couple of sympathetic characters and interesting ideas, and is sure to make you both think and smile.

  Collateral by Peter Watts deals with moral and ethical dilemmas and the way technological enhancements and interventions might change who we are. As is usual for the author, it offers a great deal of questions to ponder.

  No Place to Dream, but A Place to Die by Elizabeth Bear is a tale of two cyborg miners working for different sides and forced by situation to solve a great problem together. Both main characters were believable and sympathetic and the tale itself very gripping and fast moving.

  E. Lily Yu's Musée de l'me Seule began as a story of rejection of deformed, injured or otherwise "ugly" perceived people and ended with the most justified use of second person storytelling I've ever encountered, which made me remember the otherwise very good but not too prominent story.

  The Sarcophagus by Robert Reed, set in the author's world of the Great Ship, was certainly one of the best depictions of our cyborg future in the anthology but the story itself didn't draw me in so deeply.

  Wizard, Cabalist, Ascendant by Seth Dickinson is a rather classic take on the singularity (or avoiding it). Tobias S. Buckell's A Cold Heart is a simple action-packed story and the topic of gaining back one's memory is not much explored. Action is also the major part of Madeline Ashby's Come From Away. Mercury in Retrograde by Erin Hoffman represents classic cyberpunk, also with a lot of action involved. Similar in this characterization, albeit less classic and much more innovative, is Negative Space by Amanda Forrest. Some other pieces could not have been more different from these: Tender by Rachel Swirsky, Married by Helena Bell and Memories and Wire by Mari Ness represent the more experimental and feeling-centered stories, the first one being the most experimental piece and the last the most "conventional" of these three. The Cumulative Effect of Light Over Time by Catherine E. Tobler was a thought-provoking read but its style would work for me better if the story was more concise. Genevieve Valentine's Small Medicine focused on personality simulation and perfect medicine and their impacts on life of a young girl and her family. The ideas and characters were strong but the story didn't really pull me in.

  Always The Harvest by Yoon Ha Lee is an interesting and enjoyable story, rich in character building and novelty of setting but not one where the reader is drawn in deep enough to really believe in the depicted world. Somewhat similar in its mythological representation of cyborg elements is Fusion by Greg Mellor, where certain augmented beings are perceived as angels. Oil of Angels by Chen Qiufan doesn't have much in common with Fusion despite the angels in title; instead, it deals with voluntary choice of memory loss and its implications. God Decay by Rich Larson had a promising premise built on augments in sport but the execution of the ideas would be better to take us further than it really did. A.C. Wise's Taking The Ghost was the only outright fantasy of the pack and set in this anthology didn't work very well for me.

  So how does our cyborg future look like in these stories? Most of the authors focused mainly on the negative side-effects while taking the positive side (life-saving therapies, survival in various environments etc.), which was explored countless times since long ago, more for granted. This aspect enabled a variety of views and greater focus on the characters. I would prefer the anthology to be organized to build more on the increasing level of cyborgification. Perhaps start with the very near future stories and move to the far future ones, which would give the reader a broader sense of the different ways through which our cyborg future might eventually take us. However, the order of stories in Upgraded made sense in terms of balancing the conventional and experimental, near and distant, optimistic and pessimistic sides of the stories. To me, Ugraded was certainly an enjoyable and sometimes thought-provoking one. The majority of the stories evoked some sense of wonder, curiosity and imagination in me. That, in my view, is a marker of good science fiction.

  © by Julie Novakova

  Movie Review: The House That Dripped Blood (Peter Duffell)

  Katharine O’Neill

  As a film studies student I watched a variety of films on my university course. One of the modules was Horror and Nation, and it was about that time I first saw 'The House That Dripped Blood', a 1970s film made by Amicus Productions. Since then, despite having nightmares from that particular film, it has given me a certain fascination for the old horror movies within the Hammer Horror era. As a result, I have revisited the same film again. And again. And again. I just can't get enough of it. Despite the fact it still makes me look at the bedroom door to make sure it's closed and under the bed for any monster at the ripe old age of twenty-five and a mother of one, it is easily one of my favorite films.

  There is certainly something to be said about the classic British film and that it has something that more recent horror films do not have: the 'horror' music. You're thrown straight in to the deep end, not given a false sense of security waiting for a scare toward the end. And how do the creators do that? The music. That and the fact their first shot is of a deserted house in the dead of night. The 'horror' music older films use sends a tingling down your spine, warning you of what is to come and to be prepared for a scare. The music has an ominous ring to it, using a range of percussion instruments, similar soundings to what you would hear with scenes of voodoo. And it is this music that sucked me in before anything happened.

  'The House That Dripped Blood' was right in the middle of the Hammer Horror era. It is different as in it is not a Dracula movie, which was also the rage in that time - more so than it is today - and it wasn't a Frankenstein film, another story that has become famous through the screen as well as the book. It has its own twist on the haunted house theme. Think of it as a 70s version of 'The Grudge' - whoever goes into that house and stays will suffer a grotesque fate, usually depending on their personality and attitudes when they go in. But instead of a ghost haunting the place, the house is haunted without any help from external forces.

  Because the film is based on four short stories all linked together, it is told in flashback. We are told the story about the house in the same sequence as the main protagonist, the Scotland Yard detective, who is increasingly skeptical about the happenings. He doesn't believe in a haunted house and that it might be responsible for the disappearance of a missing film star he has been brought in on. That role of the film star, played by Jon Pertwee, was certainly an interesting view for myself, having seen him in more comic roles such as in the 'Carry On' films and listening to him on the radio in 'The Navy Lark'. He pulled off a serious actor brilliantly, and it was worth the wait to see him.

  The film is certainly advertised well with an array of actors that everyone would recognize nowadays.

  Denholm Elliot starts off the ensemble, and he would later go on to star with Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones; Peter Cushing comes next, one of Hammer Horror's most distinguished actors and unfortunately typecast; Christopher Lee, the six-foot-four giant known for Frankenstein's monster in the 1958 film and predominantly Dracula; and Jon Pertwee, who filmed his scenes in between the first and second seasons of Doctor Who. For me, any one of those actors make the film worth watching, but at the forefront would be Peter Cushing, who is one of my favorite actors within the horror genre.

  All four stories are portrayed with brilliance, and the supporting cast pull off their parts well. Even though I do my normal check for discrepancies within a programme—I adore 'The Sooty Show' but I constantly tear it to pieces because it shatters my illusion that the puppets are real and I can see where the puppet ends and the hand begins—I co
uld not see anything off with the makeup. And you could certainly praise the makeup artists, for there was a lot of it to go around: from make-believe villains to waxworks to vampires.

  It seemed to have a lot of aspects that are common in horror stories but with their own twists, both macabre and inventive. It certainly scared me and after the first time I watched it I kept looking at the shadows, sure that there was someone moving about. And it was all to do with the lighting, the music, and the still camera shots that seemed to be frozen in time as the audience would be, holding onto their bated breath.

  Naturally, the inspector is very skeptical and doesn't believe that there is something wrong with the house. If we were in his position, neither would we. Whenever my fiancé is watching a film with me, he would scoff and accuse the character of being stupid if they do something that would inevitably be the wrong choice. He would go on to say what he would do in that situation but then I would point out that if we were put under pressure we wouldn't think rationally, either. Besides, rational thinking in a horror film doesn't make a very good plot.