Apex Magazine - January 2017

by Apex Publications

  AM: You describe your piece “Blood Farm” as being influenced by both War of the Worlds and The Matrix , as well as mosquitoes, and that there was a 30 minute, self-imposed time limit to the piece. What value do you find in smaller projects like this, and how do the pieces, directly or indirectly, influence other, more finished pieces?

  Blood Farm

  AN: The smaller, quicker studies, like the 30 minute illustrations, have actually helped me refine my speed in iterating out ideas for larger projects. The tight time constraint forces me to come up with faster solutions and more efficient paths to resolving an image while also giving me some mental leeway in trying out very different approaches to painting, things that I might normally not have gone to if I had the time to default to my normal work flow.

  AM: Many of your pieces, such as “Moonpool Teleport,” use a chiaroscuro-like effect, especially involving fantastical light, fire, or energy. How important are the strong highlights and the overall darkness in challenging or intriguing the viewer?

  AN: I enjoy working with fire and lighting effects in general with a lot of my work, and I think the play of contrasting light and dark can be a strong tool in engaging the viewer. It seems that when presented with a dark environment, people tend to find the luminous things all the more attractive and find themselves drawn into a piece, especially a specific area of the piece. The fun play on that is you can throw subtle elements in the darkness, giving viewers something to explore further once the allure of contrast wears off a bit.

  Moonpool Teleport

  AM: In your DeviantArt gallery, many of your works have a lot of comments from viewers. How important have you found communities like that, and social media overall, to be? Has that support, or even lack of in the case of any bad comments, ever led you to change a plan for a piece or other pieces?

  AN: Art communities online, and social media, in my experience, have always been a very, very supportive collective, and I think there’s a great camaraderie that individuals can find in like-minded souls so easily. Art can be a difficult thing to undertake since oftentimes you’re putting a bit of yourself out there in all your works, even your sketches and doodles, so to have a mechanism that nurtures and supports that allows you to grow as an artist, gives you affirmation that taking that risk is worth it. It’s something I greatly appreciate and found very welcoming when I first really started striving to become a better illustrator.

  Lazarus Pit

  Conversely, commentary that only wishes to be contrary and not supportive or constructive in any way I’ll ignore. That’s not to say I dismiss criticism, which is very different, that’s something I welcome. I don’t let commentary sway my plans, not usually, since a lot of my work is personal and it’s just an extension of myself put out there. While I’m a part of a greater whole, a larger community, I feel that I should be ‘me’ when creating work that’s personal.

  AM: I was talking with another artist a few weeks ago, and we thought it was interesting to go back through larger galleries, those over 100 or 150 pieces, and see how the progress of both techniques and ideas have changed over time. With 380 pieces in your DeviantArt gallery (as of this writing), what do you feel has changed, if anything, over your portfolio so far? Aside from learning new techniques, how have your ideas evolved with further experience?

  AN: I feel the biggest evolution would be that I can express specific ideas much better now and that the work I do has a more individual cohesiveness within each image. Looking back at my earlier pieces, I can remember those feelings of stumbling about, trying to find a brushstroke or technique that could give me that visual element or feeling I was looking for. Those early attempts might have had a bit more ignorant bravado to them, like they were more uncharted explorations of the medium with a lot of guesswork and hope that something would come out ‘correct,’ but time and practice have given me a lot of opportunities to find and refine that journey so it’s a bit less of a mess, a bit more efficient.

  I do like having all of my old work up in a browsable gallery, though, and I don’t plan to curate anything out so long as DeviantArt will give me the space. I think it’s a good thing to have, not just for myself to look back on from time to time to see how I’ve come about, but I think it can also be a useful tool for aspiring artists to see a longer timeline of development and maybe give them some insight into how to progress with their own art.

  AM: Thank you to Aaron Nakahara for his enlightening answers and a look behind the artist’s curtain. To find more of Nakahara’s work, visit his extensive galleries at cobaltplasma.deviantart.com .

  Aaron Nakahara is a fantasy illustrator and game designer born and raised on the island of Maui. He’s done concept illustration work for Warner Brothers Interactive, Collision Studios, Active Gaming Media, White Wolf Publishing, and is currently illustrating cards for Stone Blade Entertainment’s Ascension deck building card game. In his spare time he dabbles with developing games for the iPhone, focusing on Japanese-style RPGs.

  Aside from doing fantasy novel covers and promotional art for indie games, Aaron is also working on developing Fields of Eleria , a head-to-head MOBA-inspired card game, set to come out in 2017.

  Russell Dickerson has been a published illustrator and designer since the previous millennium, creating works for many genre publications and authors. He has also written many articles for various organizations in that time, including Apex, and his work can be found on his website at www.darkstormcreative.com .

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  The Once and Future Chief: Tecumseh in (Science) Fiction

  Pointy edges can be blades, teeth, and the surprisingly dark part of a story. by Amy H. Sturgis | 2975 words

  He was known by whites on both sides of the Atlantic as “the Indian Bonaparte,” “the Indian Wellington,” and even “the Indian King Arthur”—all sincere compliments from an Anglo perspective—even before his tragic battlefield death in 1813 ensured that his life and myth would remain inextricably bound together. Arguably no other single representative of Indigenous America has so consistently captured the imaginations of mainstream writers over the past two centuries. After popular eulogizing, fantasizing, and romanticizing became long-established trends, Tecumseh’s literary afterlife took a new turn.

  The maddening “What if?” of Tecumseh’s story made him a natural subject to view through the lens of science fiction, and it was this genre that gave Tecumseh new (after)life as a symbol for Native America.

  Who Was Tecumseh?

  Tecumseh was a Shawnee leader who created a pan-tribal Native confederacy to oppose westward expansion by the United States in the early nineteenth century. The idea of a coalition didn’t begin with him. Tecumseh inherited a tradition of organized resistance from other great chiefs before him, such as the Ottowa leader Pontiac, the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, and his fellow Shawnee leaders Blue Jacket and Captain Johnny. The more personally charismatic, politically adept, and militarily savvy Tecumseh, however, forged an alliance of Native peoples on an unprecedented scale; members of his confederacy spanned the North American continent from Spanish Florida to British Canada.

  He gained fame as both an ambassador and unifying force for his people, and his military prowess was renowned. He exemplified cool and clever strategy in battle—knowing Tecumseh led the forces against him, the Brigadier General commanding Fort Detroit surrendered in sheer terror without firing a shot in 1812—paired with generosity and loyalty to his warriors and mercy and respect to his enemies. While he became a lasting symbol of Native American identity and resistance, he was a cultural purist, not a political separatist; he forged lasting partnerships with Anglo leaders, most significantly British Major-General Sir Isaac Brock, with whom he co-led forces against the United States during the War of 1812. Thanks to Tecumseh’s remarkable leadership of his pan-tribal Native army in alliance with the British during that conflict, he also became a Canadian national hero.

  His primary U.S. military opponent, Governor of the Indiana T
erritory William Henry Harrison, described Tecumseh in 1811 in this way:

  “The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay to him is really astonishing, and more than any other circumstance bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things. If it were not for the vicinity of the United States, he would, perhaps, be the founder of an empire that would rival in glory that of Mexico or Peru. No difficulties deter him … For four years he has been in constant motion. You see him today on the Wabash and in a short time you hear of him on the shores of Lake Erie or Michigan. Or on the banks of the Mississippi, and wherever he goes he makes an impression favorable to his purposes.”

  So potent was Tecumseh in the popular consciousness that multiple U.S. soldiers lied and fought over the notoriety of being known as the one who had killed him on the battlefield, and William Henry Harrison rode the distinction of defeating Tecumseh all the way to the White House.

  Of course, if you like your history on the more legendary side, you know that Harrison didn’t get the last laugh. He died in office, as did all of the U.S. presidents elected in years ending in “0” until Ronald Reagan, who came quite close when John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate him. That’s seven dead presidents in a solid 136-year run for the so-called Curse of Tecumseh.

  Tecumseh in Popular Literature

  During Tecumseh’s life, many whites on both sides of the Atlantic were fascinated by him even as others feared him. After his death, his fame only grew. He became a romanticized hero as well as an admired symbol of principled leadership. His fall at the Battle of the Thames (also known as the Battle of Moraviantown) ended his story in 1813 with an extra dash of pathos. He died standing his ground, fighting shoulder to shoulder with his warriors, after his British allies turned and fled the battlefield, abandoning the Native Americans to slaughter. The Major General in command of British forces, Henry Procter, was later court martialed for this cowardly flight and betrayal of Tecumseh.

  In 1818, Lieutenant Francis Hall, a British officer, published a poem in memory of a man he clearly revered. “To the Memory of Tecumseh” (as quoted in C.F. Klinck’s Fact and Fiction in Early Records ) exemplifies many such tributes to the tragic chief: “Tecumseh has no grave, but eagles dipt/ Their rav’ning beaks, and drank his stout heart’s tide …”

  Although Anglo culture found much to admire—and appropriate—in the chief’s story, Tecumseh was undeniably exotic and all the more mysterious and romantic because of this. In The Life of Tecumseh and of His Brother the Prophet (1841), Benjamin Drake quotes Judge James Hall on Tecumseh: “He was called the Napoleon of the west; and so far as that title was deserved by splendid genius, unwavering courage, untiring perseverance, boldness of conception and promptitude of action, it was fairly bestowed upon this accomplished savage.” Terms such as “genius,” “courage,” and “boldness” fit Tecumseh well, but he was not a Napoleon. The confederacy Tecumseh championed was not an empire in the making; it was an act of self-defense.

  Canada’s celebrated first novelist, John Richardson, actually fought with Tecumseh at his final battle at Moraviantown before writing about the great chief. In 1828, Richardson penned a verse epic entitled Tecumseh: A Poem in Four Cantos , which presents a portrait of Tecumseh as a self-sacrificing republican hero who ultimately welcomed his own tragic demise. James Strange French’s 1836 novel, Elkswatawa; or, The Prophet of the West , draws parallels between Tecumseh and Hannibal, the Roman military strategist who is often lauded as one of the greatest commanders in human history.

  Richard Emmon’s 1836 play Tecumseh; or, The Battle of the Thames, A National Drama underscores Tecumseh’s chivalric virtues and humane values—something of an irony, since it was commissioned to serve as campaign propaganda in support of then-Senator Richard Johnson, one of the men who claimed to have fatally shot Tecumseh during battle. William Galloway’s 1934 Old Chillicothe: Shawnee and Pioneer History distils earlier legends about Tecumseh, and its folklore remains the inspiration for a historical drama still performed today in Chillicothe, Ohio. Galloway both appropriates and assimilates his subject; Tecumseh falls in love with Rebecca Galloway, a white girl, who partially succeeds in Anglicizing him before he meets his final destiny. Galloway overtly compares Tecumseh to Hamlet in both his great promise and tragedy.

  After the turn of the century, the tide of Tecumseh-related fiction continued unabated. For instance, German author Fritz Steuben published an eight-book series of novels about Tecumseh’s life between 1930 and 1939. Tecumseh and his brother the Prophet play key roles in Alan W. Eckert’s 1967 novel The Frontiersmen: A Narrative , the first in his six-volume Winning of America series; Tecumseh also takes the spotlight in Eckert’s 1975 Tecumseh! A Play and his 1992 fictionalized biography of the chief, A Sorrow in Our Heart . Furthermore, James Alexander Thom published his novel about Tecumseh, Panther in the Sky , in 1989, and in 1995, it was adapted into the TNT original film Tecumseh, The Last Warrior . Recent works such as Rosanne Bittner’s Into the Prairie: The Pioneers (2004) and L. C. Fiore’s The Last Great American Magic (2016) have brought the tradition of fictionalizing Tecumseh into the new millennium.

  Tecumseh and Science Fiction

  More than any other Indigenous American leader, Tecumseh poised on the knife’s edge of what might have been. It’s undeniable that Tecumseh made history in ways that cannot be overstated, but the point here is that he might have transformed our world into something we can scarcely imagine.

  Herein lies the maddening “What if?” of Tecumseh’s tale.

  At the prelude to and start of the War of 1812, Tecumseh led his pan-tribal Native army in coordination with Major-General Sir Isaac Brock, leader of the British forces, against the United States. Tecumseh and Brock formed a powerful partnership; they came to respect, trust, and rely on one another to a terrific degree.

  Brock then wrote a letter to the new British Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, in which he discussed his ally: “He who attracted most of my attention was a Shawnee chief, Tecumset [sic], brother to the Prophet, who for the last two years has carried on (contrary to our remonstrances) an Active Warfare against the United States—a more sagacious or more a gallant Warrior does not I believe exist. He was the admiration of every one who conversed with him …” Brock noted what he had learned from Tecumseh about how the United States “corrupted a few dissolute characters whom they pretended to consider as chiefs and with whom they contracted engagements and concluded Treaties, which they have attempted to impose on the whole Indian race.” He explained that the British would claim Native American loyalty if they could include American Indians in the final negotiations for peace when the war ended, and urged that the British recognize Indigenous rights to the land taken from them.

  What does this mean?

  Brock was so impressed by Tecumseh that he urged the British government to 1) give Native America a chair at the table alongside Great Britain and the United States when the final negotiations to end the War of 1812 were made, and 2) plan to recognize Native claims to lands the United States had annexed, should Britain win the war.

  Either one of these actions alone would have redrawn the map of North America as we know it today.

  But neither happened. Indigenous Americans did not have a say in negotiating the post-war boundaries in North America, and lands wrongly taken by the United States remained under U.S. control. The honorable and sympathetic Major-General Sir Isaac Brock, Tecumseh’s ally and advocate, died at the Battle of Queenston Heights in 1812. A year later, Brock’s vastly inferior replacement, Major General Henry Procter, abandoned Tecumseh and his warriors five minutes into the Battle of the Thames, leaving Tecumseh to be slain. Both Tecumseh and Brock were in their early/mid-forties. Had either or both survived the war—Tecumseh as a leader, and/or Brock as a leader influenced by Tecumseh—much might have been different.

  Of course, no genre of fiction is better equip
ped to wrestle with a “What if?” than science fiction. Science fiction is the literature of the thought experiment, the story as simulation, the alternate history. Tecumseh’s tale has never ceased to fascinate—in part because Tecumseh’s dream of a unified Native America exercising sovereignty over traditional homelands is still a vision pursued by individuals and groups today—and science fiction has allowed authors to theorize different responses to the question “What would Tecumseh do?” In fact, one of the earliest modern alternate histories ever published, Guy Dent’s 1926 The Emperor of the If , involves Tecumseh. Other authors have followed Guy Dent’s lead; for example, both Eric Flint’s 1812: The Rivers of War (2005) and Erin Kushner’s Madison’s War: An Alternate History of the War of 1812 (2016) explore alternate histories of the War of 1812 and feature Tecumseh. On a slightly different note, the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) repeatedly refers to an Excelsior-class starship named U.S.S. Tecumseh , thus making the ship and its implied tribute to the chief part of Trek franchise canon.

  Orson Scott Card’s ongoing The Tales of Alvin Maker series of novels, short stories, and comics (1987-2015 and forthcoming) folds Tecumseh—who is referred to in the tales as Ta-Kumsaw—into a mythic alternate history of the American frontier. This serves as a stage for the coming of age of the series’ protagonist, Alvin Maker, who is supernaturally gifted with the “knack” for changing matter by force of will, and whose story loosely parallels that of Mormon leader Joseph Smith. Tecumseh’s historical brother the Prophet also plays a key role (and supplies the title for the 1988 novel and 2006-2008 comic series Red Prophet ), although it is Ta-Kumsaw who deepens Alvin’s appreciation of his own potential by explaining that his knack draws from the vital power of the land itself.