Tag: Fantasy

One-on-Several Fights

On By Christopher LansdownIn TV & Movies, Uncategorized, Writing1 Comment

Incredibly popular in movies and other media are fights where one good guy takes on several bad guys and wins. Not quite as popular, but still popular, is explaining how unrealistic this is. And, to be fair, it is unrealistic. But it’s not as unrealistic as the critics make it out to be. After all, the entire social order of the middle ages was built around the fact that one guy, if he’s big and strong and well trained and armored and well-armed, can take on several less well-armed, less well-trained men and beat them (almost) every time.

We have, of course, all seen the classic triumph of cool-over-realistic which is a single good guy taking on a mass of bad guys in a featureless room where at least the good guy is unarmed and the bad guys helpfully wait their turn to fight the good guy one-on-one and be immediately dispatched with a single punch, not even necessarily to a vulnerable spot. And yes, this is nonsense. It mostly exists in reference to previous things, where they’ve taken what was cool about a more realistic fight and turned it up to eleven. It’s the fight-choreography equivalent of someone falling out of a building and we see them at least five feet away before we cut to commercial and when we come back someone manages to grab their arm and save them. It’s unrealistic, but it was intentionally unrealistic as a means of being more-cool-than-real. It’s cheating, basically. But this exaggeration no more means that every one-on-several fight is unrealistic than the exaggeration about falling means that people can’t stay on buildings.

An interesting example of this is from the movie Reacher:

When the head tough says that it’s five against one, Reacher (played by Tom Cruise) replies that it’s three against one. He’ll need to contend with the leader and two wingmen. The last two always run. And there’s a lot of truth here.

Before getting to the true parts, I do need to say that there is a problem with the casting of Tom Cruise as Reacher. While he’s a fantastic actor, he’s just way too physically small for the part. Tom Cruise is 5’7″ and about 150 pounds (that’s 170cm and 68kg in tyranny units). Reacher is supposed to be 6’5″ and 250 pounds (195cm and 113kg). When it comes to unarmed combat, that’s night-and-day. The amount of damage a muscular 6’5″ man can do in a single punch is so much greater. Plus all of the street toughs here look to be under six feet tall; a 6’5″ man would be able to hit them at distances they can’t hit him (the name “Reacher” actually comes from frequently being asked to reach things for people because of his heigth). He’ll also have an absurd advantage in any kind of grappling because of his substantial mass advantage. If you imagine this scene with a 6’5″ tall guy instead of Tom Cruise, as it was written to be, it will feel a lot less unrealistic.

But even with Tom Cruise, the basic psychology is correct. A lot of fight analysis and even fight choreography assumes that people in a fight are like video game enemies—all willing to fight to the death no matter how much damage they’ve taken. In reality, most human beings dislike pain and try to avoid it. Moreover, most people who become criminal toughs don’t do it because they’re hard working, disciplined, clever, capable, and adaptable and choose to not go into legitimate business because Evil is their passion. A great many people are happy to kick a man when he’s on the ground but would prefer to wait until he’s on the ground to engage. Cowardice—which is quite common—will have a very similar effect to people waiting their turn.

This aversion to getting seriously hurt will also influence the actual attacks people make. They’re going to be far more likely to only get a little close to the good guy. The downside is that they won’t be able to do much damage if they do hit him, but the huge upside—as far as they’re concerned—is that he won’t be able to do much to them. But they’ll still look like they’re doing their part.

A similar sort of thing will also explain the good guy taking bad guys out with a single punch. Now, a size, strength, and technique advantage will tend to make his punches far more effective than theirs, but the bad guys being cowards will also do a lot of that work—after getting hit, they’re going to be far more likely to exaggerate how much they were hurt. After all, they probably don’t care very much about the objectives of the evil organization for whom they work. As bullies, they’re happy to hurt people who are weaker than themselves but when it comes to fighting someone who is stronger, their chief aim is to protect themselves. This will be as much to protect themselves from the evil organization as from the good guy; if they just run away the evil organization might shoot them as a deserter. But if they fight a little bit and get a minor injury then play it up for all its worth, well, they probably won’t have done any worse than anyone else on their team. If you get hit in the head and it only hurts but you lie on the ground until the fighting is over, who is to know that you weren’t really knocked unconscious for a few minutes? Or if the good guys hits a bag guy in the stomach, will Team Evil really administer medical tests to find out if it was a genuine liver shot or if he was just lying down because it was much safer?

I know that in the movies Team Evil will capriciously shoot anyone who survived who doesn’t tell his story convincingly enough, but in real life foot soldiers aren’t unlimited and while there are certain advantages to having the people on your side believe that you’ll shoot them if they fail so they will consider fighting to the death, this has the unfortunate side-effect of encouraging desertion and never noticing the opponent because if you never start a fight you won’t get shot for not finishing it.

Also, soldiers who all fight to the death die a lot, and there are a lot of circumstances where a tactical retreat is far superior. (People who won’t retreat are very vulnerable to being picked off a few at a time because they won’t retreat to where there are superior numbers.)

Of course, the unarmed one-on-several fight is the most extreme possible example. In real life people often carry weapons and don’t tend to fight in large arenas. Somebody, like the good guy, who routinely gets into fights might well wear at least some level of body armor. Especially with modern materials, it doesn’t take a lot to get a pretty high level of protection from fists and knives. Body armor that protects against rifles is cumbersome enough that it’s questionably worth it, but armor that protects against handguns is significantly more practical. (And it works to add decorative abs and pectoral muscle bulges to body armor.) Add in a complex environment that a clever person who has practiced can take advantage of and the one-on-several fights become quite a bit more realistic.

Of course, any kind of fight is extremely dangerous and a one-on-several fight is particularly dangerous because it’s so much more likely that a mistake may get exploited. I’m just saying that they’re not laugh-out-loud implausible if written correctly.

The Conan Stories and Civilization vs. Barbarism

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Several years ago, in his series on the Conan stories, Mr. John C. Wright wrote about the theme of how barbarians were stronger than civilized men:

“Zaporavo was the veteran of a thousand fights by sea and by land. There was no man in the world more deeply and thoroughly versed than he in the lore of swordcraft. But he had never been pitted against a blade wielded by thews bred in the wild lands beyond the borders of civilization. Against his fighting-craft was matched blinding speed and strength impossible to a civilized man.Conan’s manner of fighting was unorthodox, but instinctive and natural as that of a timber wolf. The intricacies of the sword were as useless against his primitive fury as a human boxer’s skill against the onslaughts of a panther.”

As for me, I feel sorry for the man who is the most well-versed and skilled swordsman in the whole world being bested by a quick and strong adversary who is just born better than he. Hardly seems fair.

My own limited experience as a fencer gives a ripe and loud Bronx Cheer to the idea that natural talent can overwhelm trained skill with a blade. I have fought men stronger and faster than I, but less skilled, and have fought men slighter and slower than I, but more skilled. The victories are not just occasionally or even mostly to the more skilled swordsman, but inevitably. My stronger but unskilled foe could not land a single touch on me, no, not one. My weaker but more highly skilled foe did not let me land a single touch on him, no, not one.

On the other hand, if the reader is not willing to accept, as a given, that naked aborigines, scratching themselves with sticks, living in mud huts, drinking from mud puddles, and eating mud-worms are not stronger and faster than the Olympic Athletes or US Marines formed by training grounds or bootcamps of civilization, such a reader simply is not entering into the daydream of the noble savage, and into the spirit of a Conan story.

It is as stubborn as saying there is no such planet as Kripton, or no such thing as an Amazon, or that no orphaned millionaire fights crime in secret by dressing as a bat. The one unreal conceit to be granted the author is the ticket price for entering any fiction story. Anyone unwilling to pay is left outside, and will never get what this genre of stories are about, or what their appeal is.

Now, Mr. Wright is of course correct about the suspension of disbelief required, and how that is merely the price of admission to the fun. But there is one thing I would like to say in defense of the superiority of the barbarian over the civilized man, and that is, while Mr. Wright is certainly correct that the best that civilization has to offer will tend to massively overwhelm the best that barbarity has to offer, this is not nearly so true of the averages.

Barbarians—if by that we mean hunter-gatherers and not merely people who don’t speak Greek or else Germans—will be, on average, moderately strong and moderately athletic. They actually tend to be decently fed and decently healthy, since in the places where the hunter-gatherer lifestyle works it tends to work quite well and require quite a bit less work than agriculture does to meet one’s caloric needs without the same danger of famine as monocultural agriculture. They have very little in the way of refined sugars or alcohol, and often do a lot of walking and a non-trivial amount of climbing. (I’m painting with broad strokes, of course; there’s a great deal of individual variation.) This will not tend to make anyone nearly as strong as an athlete who trains specifically for strength and speed and who has access to great abundances of foods, as the cream of the crop of civilization has.

But on the other hand, civilized men in the age of mechanized farming, which was when Howard was writing and almost certainly what he was really writing about, could be almost unlimitedly soft and weak unless they specifically chose to be better. And even when they chose to be better than soft and weak, it was often a play form of it, like many modern martial arts.

Modern martial arts suffer from the same problem that all martial training has—you can’t actually practice killing people, so you have to practice the skill of killing people with equipment which prevents you from actually killing them. And, almost invariably, in addition to safe equipment you need to impose rules which prevent injury, too. These rules create an even playing field if everyone is following them, but they can create openings for people who are not following the rules.

The flip side of this, of course, is that experience can be easily misleading; generals of armies are known for often fighting the last battle, not the present one, and this will apply to fighters whose only teacher is experience no less than to generals. There are things you only learn by trying a thousand times, and no one survives a thousand fights to the death. Eventually you come across someone too tall, or too short, or just too lucky, for your previous experience to help you.

Howard’s solution in Conan is the raw fury of the barbarian; unmatched power produced by pure, bestial adrenaline. It’s nice in theory and even works if Conan is just a symbol for nature because hurricanes and volcanoes have orders of magnitude more power than any of the works of man. If Conan is just a man it may work in theory but it doesn’t work in practice—not against an expert.

But Howard isn’t really writing about experts, not real experts. Zaporavo is not meant to be a man who’s fought in a thousand real sword fights and is genuinely skilled at sword fighting because he’s practiced it. I mean, Howard literally wrote that, but I don’t think that he meant it. What he meant (I contend) was that Zaporavo knew the theory of sword craft, and had lots of experience in civilized sword fights, which were under rules because his opponents were also so civilized that they were detached from reality even in a duel to the death. That is, he had the virtues of civilization but also the vices of civilization.

Does that make sense for a long-experienced pirate who lived by his wits and skill? Oh heavens no. But the artistic point is that civilized human beings lost their contact with nature, which is far more powerful than our puny intellects.

And that was certainly going on in the 1930s. One of the curious things, if you knew people who grew up in the 1910s and 1920s, was that they were practically allergic to exercise. (Not all of them, of course; movements such as Muscular Christianity had been trying to get people to want to exercise since Victorian times.) This is a complex historical phenomenon I don’t have the space here even to sketch out with justice, but the short, short version is that a man in the 1930s could look around and conclude that his fellow men wanted to be weak and delicate while attributing to themselves all of the power of technology. They wanted, to use G. K. Chesterton’s phrase, “to sit on sofas and be a hardy race.”

Nearly one hundred years later, I don’t think that this can be appreciated as much because in the intervening decades professional athletes have become celebrated heroes of our culture. Laziness abounds, but the lazy will profess that they should be exercising.

There’s also the issue that the 1930s was the era of the Great Depression, when it looked to many like civilization was failing. I don’t mean failing to be perfect, as it is common to complain about now and in all eras, but failing to be even viable in the basic sense. It was failing to provide jobs for many and failing to provide food for some. (Under-nutrition was more common than outright starvation, but it was fairly wide-spread.) Under these conditions, it looked to many like the collapse of civilization back into barbarism was imminent. And, given what the second world war was like, there may even have been some truth to the expectation.

We have something a little similar in that many people were promised by schools and universities that they were becoming the elites of society when they weren’t. This has been described as “over-producing elites” and they are bitterly disappointed and mistake having been lied to for society collapsing. However, their anticipation of society collapsing looks very different, since they are (wannabe) elites, with at least pretensions to elite tastes.

I think that if we take this historical context into account, the symbolism of the tale rings a bit more true, and requires less effort to buy our ticket with the suspension of disbelief.

Cirsova Magazine

On By Christopher LansdownIn Interviews, Uncategorized8 Comments

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing P. Alexander, editor of Cirsova Magazine, over email. If you’re unfamiliar with Cirsova magazine, here’s the cover of their first issue:

They’ve got four issues out, and are working on their 2017 issues. Anyway, without further ado, here’s the interview:

Cirsova is subtitled, “Heroic Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine”.  In modern western culture, stories of heroism are often associated, I think, with children, because children are not yet sufficiently beaten down by the all-doubt of modern culture. But as Harry Potter showed, there are plenty of adults who are not cowed, even in adulthood. So who is the audience you’re looking for with Cirsova Magazine?

Well, the appellation of Heroic Fantasy is, in part, to distinguish it from much of post-modern fantasy where there are no heroes or the heroes are so horribly flawed that they are often shown as being as bad as, or worse than, the villains. While we have the occasional exception, most of our stories are about individuals performing brave and heroic deeds in fights against injustice and absolute evils.

I think that stories of heroism may be associated with children because of the post-war movement to destroy the notion heroism as childish. During their heyday, pulps were wildly popular not with children, but adults. In fact, Argosy, the first pulp magazine, abandoned children as its target demographic very early on in an attempt to save the publication from going under; they went on to decades of success and were the home to the most iconic and influential literary hero of the 20th century – Tarzan.

By the late 40s and into the 50s, the notion of heroes was dismissed and deconstructed. Romance and heroism as it had once been understood was being undermined in and removed from many outlets of publication and media in the maelstrom created by post-war cynicism, the Cold War, and critical theoreticians in pop-culture. Heroes became the domain of cheesy and banal Comics Code censored rags of the Silver Age, making it that much easier to place SFF heroics in the ‘age ghetto’.

The desire to see heroes and heroics, however, can’t be stamped out. It’s why everyone loves and still talks about Die Hard, Star Wars, and Alien. People like it when good guys stop bad guys and monsters against all odds. Cirsova Magazine is for every person who has loved science fiction and fantasy adventure, opened a book or a magazine with a spaceship or a guy or gal with a sword on the cover, and been let down. I can’t tell you how many times people have said that they’re tired of actionless, sometimes storyless, fluffy-puff pieces of thinkery masquerading as SFF that one seems to see coming out of the more well known houses and publications. Cirsova is for those people who have been let down and want those stories about heroes again. We will not let them down.

That sounds great! You mentioned the pulps, and indeed I’ve heard Cirsova mentioned in
connection with a revival of the pulps as well. (In this article by Jasyn Jones.) Did you conceive of Cirsova as being a revival of the pulps? Or do you even think of it as a revival of the pulps now? Or is it more like a spiritual fellow-traveller to the pulps? In short, what is Cirsova’s relationship to the pulps?

I originally conceived Cirsova when I’d been reading Planet Stories and thinking “I want to create something like THAT!” We ended up leaning a bit heavier towards fantasy than the sort of Raygun Romance that PS published, but that’s really the magazine that has the most direct influence on the publication, even down to the choice of interior fonts.

That said, we aren’t really “retro pulp”, but it may not be easy to explain why. I won’t say that pulp revival is a new thing or that we’re even an important part of what’s referred to as Pulp Revival or New Pulp. Those have been going on to varying degrees of success or influence for decades now. Pulp Revolution, on the other hand, is a fairly recent term that a few of our fans have tossed around to describe us and those like us and our approach to pulp.

Here is the biggest difference in my mind: a lot of what is “Pulp Revival” and “New Pulp” seems to focus largely on the campy aesthetic aspects of pulps, almost as though playing off the assumptions one would have from merely seeing a catalog of magazine covers rather than from actually reading the stories within. It’s cheesy and fun, I suppose, but the best way I can describe it is that it’s like the little kid who puts on dad’s shoes and suit from the closet to play businessman. You also see a lot strange politicization in submissions guidelines – I’ve actually seen a recently launched “Retro Pulp” zine that specifically positions itself as a ‘progressive’ outlet, warning off a lot of common (or assumed to be common) pulp tropes. The only thing we don’t really want to see at Cirsova are Big Men With Screwdrivers SF stories or stories about elves. As a result, we’ve ended up with a pretty incredible array of stories ranging from those that could be considered “progressive” to those that HAVE been ridiculed as puerile and full of unexamined privilege.

What we’re doing with Cirsova is not about being part of “Pulp Revival” or being part of a “retro” movement. We don’t want to confine ourselves to that niche. What we really want to do is bring the kind of story that was being told in the pulps, not the aesthetic, into the mainstream conversation about SFF fiction. We’ve been accused of being “regressive” publication by those who are ignorant of pulps, those who assume that pulps were full of nothing but racist and sexist trash, but in a sense they’re right about us – we’ve embraced the idea that SFF needs to regress harder. We’re using the pulps as a starting point and going forward as though the Campbellian Revolution never happened, as though Burroughs was still held as above ‘the Big Three’, as though Leigh Brackett was still the Queen of Science Fiction rather than LeGuin or Atwood, as though fun, adventure, heroics, and romance were still a good thing in SciFi.

I have nothing against any of the Pulp Revival, New Pulp, or Retro Pulp folks or those movements; we’re just doing something different and have very different goals.

It’s interesting that you mention people whose ideas of pulps are drawn purely from a catalog of magazine covers. One thing which comes to mind is that magazine covers often have little to do with the stories they are meant to represent, and I believe were in fact often done by artists who had not read the stories but only had the barest description of what the cover should look like. And further many of those publishing sci-fi magazines were businessmen at least enough to avoid going out of business, and had some realistic notions about what would catch the eye and how different that might be from the story which captures the imagination.

Have you drawn inspiration from other places, such as, for example, the penny dreadfuls which predated pulp fiction? And either way, have you read G.K. Chesterton’s  A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls, which I think has much wider applicability than just to the penny dreadfuls of his day?

Back then, as today, artists were frequently working on the cheap and under tight deadlines. Only back then, you didn’t have digital, which is a huge time-saver for many artists today. While Anderson’s work on Planet Stories turned out some gorgeous pieces, it’s pretty noticeable that he’d re-use several of the same reference photos for poses – there are a number of covers where the only real differences are color of the dame’s hair, her outfit and what she’s holding over her head (usually a sword or a whip). It was also part of a magazine’s brand, as much as anything else. Weird Tales often had lurid and provocative danger. Planet Stories had sexy and romantic action. Astounding had “wholesome” action (i.e. no dames), and as it reshaped itself post-war, it tended to have a lot of men standing around. or floating heads to indicate how much more serious it was, I suppose. Similarly, Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has often had a more abstract or impressionist aesthetic that jibed with its status as the ‘literary’ science fiction magazine.
As far as other inspirations, from the publishing end, I can’t really think of any, but from the storytelling end, I’d recommend Appendix N as a starting point for those curious to see just what it is I’d be looking for. When putting together the Dungeon Masters Guide for the 1st edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax, Tim Kask and others at TSR compiled a list of works and authors that had influenced the design and development of the game so that players would have a better understanding of where they were coming from. Any arguments about the cultural significance of the list itself aside, Appendix N undeniably includes many of the best action-packed SFF stories ever written. Jeffro Johnson, who has regularly contributed columns to Cirsova, recently published a bestseller on the topic.
I’d be lying if I said I was particularly familiar with the Penny Dreadfuls, though I am aware of them and did manage to make it a decent way into Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire before setting it down and not getting around to finishing it (the story itself was great, however the critical modern edition made the poor layout choice to use single column with tiny font in a volume roughly the size of a phone book).
You mentioned how modern technology helps artists to be more productive, and thus how art is cheaper for those who commission it. That segues rather nicely into the business side of things, which is, I think, a question on a lot of people’s minds. The pulps are today best known for certain types of writing and—to be blunt—a certain quality of writing. Not that reputation is more accurate here than it tends to be anywhere else in life, but one of the things which the pulps certainly were was cheap. Wood pulp paper was much cheaper than smooth, glossy paper, and so the pulp magazines could make money on fewer readers or smaller margins. Are you using a similar business model to the pulps but relying on the cheaper-still nature of digital distribution, or are you using a new sort of business model, or what?

Well, I would like to clarify that I don’t mean modern technology necessarily makes art cheaper, but it does offer a much greater degree of flexibility that did not exist in the past to collaborate and hash out what the art should look like (quick turn-around time on sketches and, in some cases, quick digital touch-ups and tweaks which were otherwise impossible).

Print on demand publishing has made indie and self-publishing more viable than it has ever been. Until fairly recently, self-publishing usually meant going to a vanity publisher and having several hundred books you’d never sell printed up only to languish in a closet. For Cirsova, Print on Demand through Createspace and Lulu means we don’t have any real overhead on stock. Our biggest per issue operating costs are paying our authors, commissioning cover art, and ordering proof copies, in that order. Once the issue is out there and we fulfill pre-orders/subscriptions, it doesn’t cost us anything.

We do have digital distribution, but Cirsova is meant to be something on your shelf. Interestingly enough, about half of our sales or more are physical, which is counter-intuitive to conventional wisdom about today’s market. Our softcovers are pretty cheap – with the exception of our first issue, which we have for $7.50, our regular issue price has settled into $8.50 on Amazon with an SRP of $10 (we did have a double-sized winter issue that’s $14.99). They’re a little over 100 pages, and 50k-60k words per issue. We do offer an edition for connoisseurs through Lulu that is hardbound with a dust jacket and foil lettering; these are a bit pricier, but they’re absolutely gorgeous. Prior to the Print on Demand revolution, putting out hardcovers with that degree of quality in those small quantities would be prohibitively expensive. This way, we can offer a quality product for a reasonable price, get a reasonable cut, and not have to be sunk out of pocket on physical copies we can’t move. Best of all, since we are not actually the ones selling physical products directly our readers, we don’t have to keep track of sales tax receipts. When I had a record label, the worst thing was having to fill out and mail in reports of 0 sales for months where we didn’t have any tables at shows or cutting checks for one or two bucks when we only sold a couple buttons or patches.

Our digital distribution includes typical eBooks and PDFs and the sort of stuff you’d expect from any sort of work published these days, but I’m not a fan and mostly make them available out of obligation to our fans and readers who prefer e-Readers or just don’t want the clutter of owning physical books. I always hate them, because to make Cirsova e-Reader friendly, we have to strip out all of the layout work that we put into it to give it a pulp magazine look and feel (columns, dropcaps, etc.).

The part about art being cheaper is more drawn from my own experience commissioning covers for my novels. A skilled digital painter can take advantage of the medium to be more efficient than, say, an oil painter can be. (Layers, undo, no need to wait for anything to dry, etc. seem to permit faster work for those who know how to take full advantage of them, allowing an artist to serve more clients.) I certainly don’t mean to suggest that digital painting has devalued art, because good art is of tremendous value. Anyway, thank you very much for your time, it’s been very interesting.
Fair point. Both have their advantages when it comes to economy. For instance, an artist working in a physical medium can sell the rights while still holding onto the physical piece, which they can then still sell; this allows for art to be more affordable for someone commissioning it because the artist can sell the rights and still have something of monetary value. As an example, I don’t own physical copies of any of the first four covers by Jabari Weathers, though I believe that one was purchased as a gift for a writer; if Jabari wanted to sell the originals, he absolutely could, and I know that’s part of why I was able to get such a great deal on his incredible artwork.
With all-digital art, it can be cheaper, as there’s no physical media required and an experienced artist can knock out a commission quickly, but there’s not an “original” that can be sold as well, so the artist makes their money solely on what they charge for the commission and whatever use rights they retain.
Interestingly enough, our cover for issue 5 is a hybrid – it’s digitally colored, but I got both the commercial use rights and the original line-art. (I was tempted to put it up on the block for this Kickstarter to defray costs, but decided I wanted to own at least one piece of original Cirsova artwork). 
Thank you for taking the time to talk with me about the Magazine!  I enjoyed it.
If you’re interested, here’s Cirsova’s 2017 kickstarter.