I’ve been reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire off and on for some time now. I’m well into volume 2, somewhere around page 1500 (out of about 2500). One thing that’s only recently occurred to me is how much the book seems to have shaped the idea of the historian in at least the English-speaking world. That is, there’s a sense of Gibbon as a scholar that comes across in the work — not just who he is, but how he operates — which I think created an archetypal idea of ‘historian’ for many readers.

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Two more posts up at Black Gate over this past weekend, as I caught up from missing a post the week before. I looked at M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books, and at Naomi Mitchison’s The Land the Ravens Found.

I visited a friend the other night who’s thinking of moving this summer. I came away with a few books as a result.

Here’s the list:

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I’ve developed a habit, now I’m in my (very) late 30s, of revisiting things I enjoyed as a child or teen to see how they’ve changed; how my sense of them has changed, but also how the passage of time has put them in a new context. I mostly do this with things that I greatly enjoyed. I don’t necessarily expect great revelations. I’m more interested in seeing if I can get a sense of what I used to think, and so see how it is I’ve changed as I’ve gotten older. I wrote a piece on Black Gate a while ago about going back to some old Justice League comics I read when I was six. That’s the sort of thing I mean.

All of which is just to say that I’m playing around with an old video game, Wizard’s Crown. To give you a sense of how old it was, I originally played the thing on an Atari 400; we’re talking back in the late 80s, then. I understand the game has some historical significance, as some gameplay aspects were later incorporated into some of the first D&D video games. It’s a standard fantasy game; you put characters together, and send them into some ruins looking for dungeons, in one of which is a powerful artifact — the Wizard’s Crown — which is your ultimate goal. It’s fun, a lot like Angband with multiple characters. Which is to say a lot like D&D. It seems repetitive now, and the graphics are (as you might expect) pretty simplistic, but I can recall how gripping it was when I first played it — and how frustrating, as I tried to figure out combat tactics.

I haven’t come to any conclusions about it; I’m not very far into the game. But I will say this: twenty-plus years ago, the game seemed huge in its scope. Now, as I go through it, it seems limited, bare-bones in its structure and rules. It’s entertaining, but you can see the size of it, in a way that I at least could not when I came to it as a teenager. Youthful inexperience, or a function of the growth of gaming technology? Maybe a bit of both. But it interests me, that lack of a sense of outline that I used to have. Not a wholly bad thing. It meant that I saw the world as unbounded. Perhaps both the game world and the more real one beyond.

It has been far too long since I’ve had a post here, so let’s do something about that. Here’s a look back at what I’ve been writing about at Black Gate over the past two months.

To start with, I looked at Brian Catling’s excellent, unconventional book The Vorrh. Then I wrote a piece on Jack Kirby’s magnificent run on Thor. After that I read a book called The Interior Life, by Dorothy Heydt writing as Katherine Blake. Then, after writing a piece on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, I found that February was Women in Horror Recognition Month; I was already working on a post about Peter Ackroyd’s history of England up to the Tudors, Foundation, but after that I wrote posts on Dion Fortune’s engaging novel The Demon Lover and Tanith Lee’s fascinating Secret Books of Paradys sequence, before considering whether Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca was horror or not.

I think I’m beginning to get happier, as a whole, with the stuff I write for Black Gate. I’ve been pleased with specific posts, but I think I’m beginning to get the hang of writing this kind of criticism; as though I’ve found some kind of form. That may just be a general sense of uplift as the weather gets better. Or, I hope, touch wood, it may be a sign that my health is taking a turn for the better. I’ve been feeling better overall since I changed my diet a little. So we’ll see.

I do intend to start posting here more frequently. That’ll be a good step forward, I think, if I can manage that.

I’ve been forgetting to link to my posts over at Black Gate, so let’s do a bit of catch-up now.  Just before Christmas I put up a post about Ursula Vernon’s Hugo-winning webcomic Digger. Then I followed that with some thoughts on Sean Howe’s interesting, if flawed, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. And the most recent post is a look at Teresa Edgerton’s excellent book Goblin Moon. Which has a sequel that’s about to become available again, meaning I’ve got yet another book to keep my eye out for …

I’ve started reading Charles C. Mann’s book 1491. I’m really just a few pages into it, but so far it’s quite well-written. I came across a mention of something that surprised me: in discussing the Olmecs and their accomplishments, Mann mentions that the idea of “0” (zero) as a number didn’t reach Europe until the twelfth century. I knew that. But he also added that the idea of the zero was opposed, and the number banned, by various authorities. I poked around a bit on the web, and sure enough found this link where Mann goes into detail about the medieval reaction to zero, and his sources for the information. Worth a look!

So I’ve begun slowly reading The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a classic Chinese historical novel. It triggered a thought, which I expect I’ll be considering more as I read further. That thought is this: modern western fantasy frequently seems to imagine a setting in some ways much more like historical China (and Chinese fantasies thereof) than like the medieval west. It’s a tentative thought, because I don’t have a lot of knowledge of Chinese history — some, but not a lot — and less experience of Chinese fantasy: the little bit I’ve read of the Romance, some Chinese fantasy films, and the like. Still, this is a thought I want to bear in mind as I read on in the Romance.

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I got a dozen books for Christmas this year (among other things). Here’s the list:

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Happy New Year to all and sundry! Here’s my latest post at Black Gate, a look at Sean Howe’s recent book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Worth looking at, I thought, for people interested in the field.