A Sea of Singing Fire

When the sun set, he grew stronger, and when the moon was high, Utuzan rose from his bed where a queen lay slumbering, and he wrapped himself in his dark robes. He bore no sword and no armor shielded his pale skin. On his arms and down his back were ancient inscriptions that would turn aside the stroke of bronze or iron, and they were the only protection he required. In his left hand he took up the glowing red jewel that was the beating heart of his goddess, and he went out into the dark.

Shedjia awaited him there as he had commanded, and she sat astride a dark horse, and she held the reins of a second in her hands. The beasts shied from his presence, but he spoke a single word and they stilled as he mounted to the saddle. The heat of the day had fled, and the breath of the animals blew forth as smoke.

He looked out over the hidden canyon where the tribesmen were encamped, the stone walls illuminated by a thousand campfires. The Emru were here, as well as the remains of the defeated Muzur and a dozen lesser clans of the desert places. He had gathered them here to be the fist of his power, his hand of iron and bronze and blood. Here slumbered his army, and close to hand was the queen he would restore to her throne. It was not his earthly power he sought tonight – it was that within his own ancient hands.

10,000 BC

Released in 2008, the unimaginatively-named 10,000 BC was an almost complete critical failure. Although it made money, it is often regarded as Roland Emmerich’s worst movie – and this is the guy who can count schlock-epics like Moon 44 and 2012 as part of his ouvre. All but devoid of historical accuracy, this still could have been an entertaining adventure full of cavegirls and monsters like we used to get in the old days, but its own desire to be serious kept it from being as fun as it might have been.

The story tries hard to present itself as a kind of primordial hero’s journey, with Steven Strait giving a terrible performance as protagonist D’Leh, though to be fair, he doesn’t have much to work with and is saddled with a pretty stupid script. His tribe of unwashed, racially-diverse cave people live in an inhospitable-looking frozen steppe, and you have to wonder why they don’t go somewhere more convivial to hunter-gathering, since they don’t seem to have any contact with any other tribes, and don’t seem to have a reason to stay where they are. They hunt mammoths to survive, when there would be a lot of easier prey to hunt, and the one hunt we see tries hard to be exciting, but does not really manage it.

All the action sequences in this movie are strangely inert. Part of it is the poor CGI, which makes the prehistoric animals look awesome but completely unreal, so they are obviously not there. They are not the worst effects ever or anything, but they don’t look as good as other movies of the same period – not by a long shot. The other problem is just clunky, uninspired direction which makes the action predictable, as well as a PG-13 rating which makes sure you don’t see much blood or anything visceral – literally or figuratively.

Anyway, a bunch of dudes on horses ride in and attack the hovels, carry off D’Leh’s girlfriend Evolet, and start the plot in motion. Now, there were no people riding horses in 10,000 BCE, but from this point on the movie diverges farther and farther from any kind of reality, and this is actually what starts to make it more fun.

Because in the pursuit of his captured tribespeople, D’Leh finds that the riders are the servants of a more advanced civilization in the far south, led by a mysterious figure who is referred to as “The Almighty” and who is worshiped as a god. The slaves are gathered up to work on the immense, stone pyramids the Almighty seems to want to build for some reason. It is heavily implied that the Almighty is the last of the Atlanteans, and we get a glimpse of maps of the Atlantic Ocean as well as modern navigation tools like a compass and calipers.

While this twist carries us way outside anything resembling history, it actually makes this a great setup for a Sword & Sorcery movie. Pulps in general and Howard in particular were obsessed with the Stone Age, and Howard himself wrote several stories about Paleolithic heroes in “The Garden of Fear”, “The Valley of the Worm”, and in his first published story “Spear and Fang”. The idea of a stone age warrior confronted with the remnants of an ancient civilization bent on world conquest is a golden concept, and it should have made for an awesome, exciting movie.

In the end, the film just was trying too hard to take itself seriously. Rather than jump into the pulpiness of the central idea and run with it, the film hinted and hedged and tried to pass itself off as a serious recreation of the Stone Age, when it was really nothing of the kind. In an effort to stay “realistic” they just veered away from anything that could have made this movie awesome. We could have had an Atlantean sorcerer wielding magic powers and conjuring demons, warriors riding mammoths into battle, a deluge or maybe a volcano. If you combined this idea with the first five minutes of X-Men Apocalypse you would really have something to go with. In fact I may have just come up with next year’s storyline thinking about that.

10,000 BC was a movie that should have gone down in the tradition of movies like When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth or One Million BC, but instead it tried to be Quest For Fire and hobbled itself out of the gate. Proof of the fact that if you have a pulp idea, you have to give it pulp execution.

The City of Midnights

The ancient city of Shendim dreamed beside the waters of the Nahar, the land around it a jewel of green in the expanses of the desert beyond. The high cliffs that rose on the western bank of the river glowed red in the sunset as though fresh from a fire, while the sky turned an endless blue studded with a thousand thousand stars. Eagles and carrion birds screamed in the dusk, and cranes stalked in the shallow waters among the reeds.

Down by the riverside, the city was built of white buildings that glowed day and night, their windows billowing with white silk curtains and hung with vines laden with flowers. The scent of the river was ever close, masked by incense and the smell of candles. The city was a maze of winding streets, stairways, tunnels and canals lit by hanging lanterns and haunted by the hum of dragonflies.

The white palace rose on a rocky promontory beside the water, above the city so its towers could be seen in every quarter. Each tower and wall glowed with dozens of lights, so that the palace itself seemed unreal, like something made by the gods themselves to float over the city, as if it were made of clouds. The white stone gleamed in the starlight, and those who passed near could hear music drifting from colonnade and garden path.

Queen Malika held her audiences at sunset, when the heat of the day began to dissipate and gentle breezes blew up from the river, rich with the smells of flowers and crocodile dung. She sat on her ivory-inlaid throne, an arch made from the tusks of elephants framing her. She wore white and was resplendent in golden jewelry studded with emeralds. Slaves kept their place to either side of her, fanning her with wide palm-fronds.

Water rilled down the fountain at the center of the audience chamber, and the courtiers gathered to speak to her and hear her judgments, to make alliances and agreements, and to aid in the functioning of the kingdom of Meru. Here in the southern uplands they were far from the intrigues of the Ashemu court, and from the ambition of the war-lords of Kadesh. Meru was at peace, and its young queen wished for it to remain so.

The Age of Chaos Arrives

The ebook has arrived after a bit of a delay (normally I like to get these out in January).  All 25 stories that make up the epic in one convenient package.  HERE IS THE LINK!