Wired has long been the best place to go to on the Internet for extraordinarily deep, well-written essays on issues important to my generation (I still consider one of their pieces, “The Doomslayer” by Ed Regis, the single most devastating essay against modern wacko-environmentalism I’ve ever read). Now Scott Oden has alerted me to their latest triumph, “Dungeon Master: The Life and Legacy of Gary Gygax.” Written by David Kushner, it is far and away the most in-depth and fascinating look at the creator of Dungeons & Dragons we’re ever likely to read, at least until the first full-on biography gets done. (Although not as spot-on about Gygax’s ingenuity as Kushner, Paul La Farge wrote a very fine article in 2006 for The Believer that covers some interesting areas of the story that Kushner glosses over, such as Gygax’s foray into Hollyweird decadence: living in King Vidor’s house in Beverly Hills, striking million-dollar deals, negotiating with a receptive Orson Welles to star in a D&D movie, and cavorting with beauty contestants in his jacuzzi. Who says D&D guys don’t have real-life fun?)

I discovered D&D as a sixth grader while on a week-long Boy Scout camping trip. How wonderful, then, to learn twenty-five years later via this article that D&D was created by men with ingrained sensibilities as patriotically American as apple pie. Witness the moving photo of Gygax the child saluting the flag, and the charming dedication to our country on the reproduced gaming program, which when you think about it was bravely written in the very face of the insane, take-no-prisoners counterculture movement of the late 1960s. And the whole story is infused with a heroic, Horatio Alger-like entrepreneurship — Alger’s pederasty aside, of course — that in its own way is as American as you can get. I marveled at the vast number of serendipitous discoveries Gygax made, the clever ways he seized on and integrated things from all aspects of his life into his imaginative dreamscape: wargames whose history dates back to H. G. Wells and beyond, the otherwise boring insurance company calculations used at his day job, stumbling on a catalogue containing “Platonic solids” such as icosahedrons — transformed by Gygax into twenty-sided dice. And of course, lurking in the background, fueling his drive towards merging fantasy with reality, there was the unforgettable and inspiring stories of Robert E. Howard:

In other war games, each miniature represented a unit — say, 10 or 20 men — and could be destroyed with a single successful attack. Gygax decided to make some of the miniatures in Chainmail represent a single character, designated “hero” or “superhero,” who could only be killed by several attacks. For the hell of it, Gygax included a supplemental set of rules that featured magical fantasy trappings: dragons, elves, wizards, and fireballs. He was a fan of the Conan the Barbarian books by Robert E. Howard and wanted to try to capture that sort of swashbuckling action in a war game.

Best of all, Kushner describes Gygax’s relentless, heroic struggle to let his imagination fly unfettered. He had to organize and fund conventions, endure ostracizing by his wargaming friends (who disdained the heresy of adding fantasy and magic to what they saw as realistic war simulations), and continually invest time, money, and ego on risky ventures with seemingly no chance of ever paying off. Nobody save Dave Arneson seemed to understand what he had — most of his fellow gaming friends didn’t get it, nor did the creative talent at gaming companies like Avalon Hill. My God, to think that Gygax was savvy enough to give the most famous RPG of all time the catchy, evocative, alluring name Dungeons & Dragons based on his gut trust in the effusions of a four-year-old girl! This is true genius at work — one man and a dream changing the world against all odds, step-by-perilous-step. It’s a great American success story, and Wired deserves immense credit for bringing it to light in such a magisterial essay.

Compare Wired‘s intelligent, learned, heartfelt coverage to the tripe Slate published on Gygax, and Kushner and Wired‘s achievement becomes all the more impressive. I’ve long seen online news magazines such as Slate and Salon as sort of anti-Wired, publications that veer all over the map in terms of quality, combining decent articles and opinion peices with monstrosities that cover their subjects in shallow, self-refuting ways. Too often the editors run essays that reek of ignorance and have absolutely nothing to recommend them, items penned by angry, bitter writers who take anarchistic delight in blithely pissing on things that millions of others consider sacred cultural touchstones. From The Searchers to to H. P. Lovecraft, the modus operandi of such authors entails stringing together as many derogatory, disdainful phrasings as they can muster into short attack pieces dripping with hate and scorn for their subjects.

And so it is with Gygax. To offset a decent if rather lackluster obituary by Johnathan Rubin, Slate has published a truly vile, thermonuclear philippic by Eric Sofge that dismisses Dungeons & Dragons as “sociopathic storytelling,” a “collective fantasy of massacre and greed” where poor defenseless Third World minorities like Orcs and Hobgoblins are mercilessly slaughtered by the fantasy equivalent of American imperialists in the name of treasure and experience points. To Sofge, Gygax’s primary contribution to popular culture is his “reprehensible moral universe,” a “small-minded, ignorant fantasy of rage.” Like liberal playwright H. R. Hays’ 1946 New York Times review of Robert E. Howard’s Skull-Face and Others that was titled “Superman on a Psychotic Bender,” this peice says far more about the politics and predjudices of the writer than about the worth of the subject. This is Gygax as nothing less than a pony-tailed Josef Mengele, a purveyor of “an endless hobgoblin holocaust.” There is no reason to ask if Sofge possesses any capacity for shame or decorum — just remember his name, and never trust anything he writes ever again.

But do go and read the Wired piece by David Kushner. If you have any interest at all in Gygax or the enormously successful and influential hobby he created, you’ll be touched and charmed by this lengthy, continually absorbing tale. And at the beginning of the article, Wired announces that they have lots more Gygax and D&D material set to be published soon, so keep a lookout for that stuff at their site. And here’s one more column in praise of Gary, this one from game designer Monte Cook, whose thoughts largely mirror my own.

Here’s a nice article in London’s Independent on the recently deceased co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, and I’m not just saying that because I get name-checked in it. Money quote:

D&D, in the popular imagination, is for geeks, the nerds, the unpopular kids at school, the ones whose mothers fed them in their bedrooms, otherwise they wouldn’t eat: losers, fit only to be sneered at by the cool kids.

But the geeks are now running the world, while the cool kids are sitting in vast fluorescent hangars in post-industrial hardship zones, calling you on behalf of Capital One in connection with your account; or wondering if you’d like fries with that.

Back in the 1970s, before PCs, Gygax was the uncool kids’ saviour.

Gary Gygax, 1938–2008

(hat tip: Jonah Goldberg and John J. Miller at NRO and Will Greenwald at Crave)

One of the seminal influences in fantasy in the twentieth century has left us for Valhalla. Gygax was a giant, a man whose enthusiasm and sense of adult play took a weird cerebral offshoot of board and strategy games and turned it into an accessible, endlessly stimulating, life-changing mythology for the Star Wars/Lancer Conan/”Frodo Lives!” generation of the 1970s and 80s. Those of us who risked life, limb, and reputation carrying our Player’s Handbooks and Monster Manuals cover-out through the hallways of Catholic school owe to him a large part of our imagination and happiness during those years.

As expressed in Bill Cavalier’s Gygax-heavy “The Other REH Days” in The Cimmerian V4n5, Gary created his game out of a host of fantasy influences, many of them writers long since forgotten in modern circles, and as a result D&D had the effect of introducing a whole new generation to the likes of REH, Leiber, Vance, and (despite Gygax’s protestations) Tolkien. I discovered D&D on the same Boy Scout camping trip that introduced me to The Two Towers, and life has never been the same since. And although I haven’t played the game since high school over twenty years ago, in terms of cultural and imaginative influence it has never been far from my mind. It was D&D that led me to fantasy as a genre, D&D that lured me to films like Conan the Barbarian and Excalibur and then to Robert E. Howard and classic mythology, D&D that forged for me the best friendships of my youth, D&D that spurred me to want to write and create in the realms of the magical and fantastic. For better or worse — let us be charitable and say mostly for the better — D&D is responsible for many of the tropes of modern fantasy literature. The open-ended nature of role-playing campaigns surely trained readers to crave longer and more numerous books than Tolkien’s trilogy, and the mashing together of various styles within a D&D game had much to do with the way later authors developed their fictional worlds. More than a few writers began their successful book series not as short stories or outlines but as D&D campaigns, with worlds and heroes built up over many years of gaming before ever being set into prose.

I met Gygax just once, at Gen Con in 1987. At the time he was on the outs in the industry, having been effectively shit-canned from his own company, TSR, and forced to eke out his role-playing living developing new, ultimately unsuccessful games on his own, trying vainly to make cultural lightening strike twice. Painfully shy but I suppose somewhat less so than many in the Milwaukee Convention Center on that day, I walked up to him and proffered a copy of his novel Sea of Death for autographing, mumbling something about how much I liked it. He was warm and gracious, and if I had possessed any social skills in those days I may have struck up a conversation about any number of subjects. But I didn’t — I ran back to my Mom and walked away, leaving him sitting there alone in a Hawaiian shirt, just another booth guy watching the teeming hordes of teenaged boys and older ex-hippies walk by, a king invisible in the kingdom he built. Things got better for him in his later years, as TSR was rescued from its suicidally bad post-Gygax management, and both it and Gen Con fell into the arms of people — Peter Adkison prime among them — who understood the peculiar imaginative alchemy which lies at the heart of D&D’s appeal, and who greatly respected the mind of the man who had conjured it into a post-Vietnam America, an America that in hindsight desperately needed it.

There doubtless will be memorials galore for Gygax throughout this year, culminating at Gen Con in August, but I had to get this little paean out as soon as I heard the news. William Buckley, the founder of National Review, died last week. It’s not out of line to say that Gygax was the WFB of fantasy, a guy who never ran for president or fought a world war, but whose vision and philosophy made a movement out of vast groups of scattered and disheartened peoples, one gamer–one author–one visionary at a time. “The material is herein,” Gygax wrote in his Introduction to the first edition of The Dungeon Master’s Guide, “but only you can construct the masterpiece from it.” Ever enticing, ever encouraging, ever dreaming the boldest and bravest dreams. That is the legacy of Gary Gygax, and it lives in the hearts of millions of people around the world.

UPDATE: If you’d like to send your regards and well wishes to the Gygax family, their friends have set up an email account at InMemoryOfGaryGygax@gmail.com. (hat tip: Scott Oden)

UPDATE II: The New York Times ran a good obit that was smart enough to mention Robert E. Howard in the same breath with Tolkien as the major precursors to D&D.

UPDATE III: John J. Miller at National Review Online calls this Gygax post “a wonderful tribute,” Tigerhawk says it’s “a very evocative remembrance,” the AOL Political Machine’s Justin Paulette considers it “a notable obituary,” and Howard Jones, managing editor of the best fantasy fiction magazine publishing these days, Black Gate, has picked it up as part of a Gygax symposium due to run on their website this Sunday. It’s nice to see that so many others share my thoughts and feelings about one of the greatest proselytizers of imagination in my lifetime.

UPDATE IV: For those in the Wisconsin area, here are the funeral arrangements, courtesy of RPG.Net (hat tip: Scott Oden):

Visitation is on Saturday, March 8 at 11 AM at:

Haase Derrick Lockwood Funeral Home
800 Park Drive
Lake Geneva, WI 53147
(282) 248-2031

A Funeral Service will follow at 2:00 PM, also at the Haase Derrick Lockwood Funeral Home.

In the evening, there will be an informal gathering to remember Gary with food and beverages. Time and location to be determined.

UPDATE V: This bit from Ansible #248, which hints at why David Langford has won nineteen Best Fan Writer Hugos in a row: “E. Gary Gygax (1938-2008), US game designer and fantasy novelist best known for his creation (with Dave Arneson) of the original, enormously influential Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, died on 4 March aged 69. I liked the on-line suggestion that fans should club together to build him a vast tomb full of the deadliest imaginable traps.” (hat tip: Don Herron)

Great and terrible flesh-eating beasts have always shared landscape with humans. They were part of the ecological matrix within which Homo sapiens evolved. They were part of the psychological context in which our sense of destiny as a species arose. They were part of the spiritual systems that we invented for coping. The teeth of big predators, their claws, their ferocity and their hunger, were grim realities that could be eluded but not forgotten. Every once in a while, a monstrous carnivore emerged like doom from a forest or river to kill someone and feed on the body. It was a familiar sort of disaster–like auto fatalities today–that must have seemed freshly, shockingly gruesome each time, despite the familiarity. and it conveyed a certain message. Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.

That’s from David Quammen’s memorable-if-not-haunting 2003 Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind, a meditation on how “the alpha predators, and the responses they evoke, have transcended the physical dimension of sheer mortal struggle, finding their way also into mythology, art, epic literature, and religion.” One of the alpha-est predators, arguably the iconic carnivore of the Cenozoic Era, is figuring very prominently indeed in the trailers and promos for the March 7 release 10,000 B.C., directed by Roland Emmerich: Smilodon, the sabre-tooth tiger. Aficionados of Nature red in tooth and claw hope the film’s CGI and editing create charismatic killer cats that surpass Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion sabre-tooth in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and reclothe the animal in the dignity that was shed with the Denis Leary-voiced Diego in Ice Age and Ice Age 2. In honor of the occasion, I’d like to pay tribute to the two foremost mega-felines in all of modern fantasy, the gliding, pouncing juggernauts of Robert E. Howard’s “Beyond the Black River” and Karl Edward Wagner’s “Two Suns Setting.”

(Continue reading this post)

The new movie Jumper was tops at the box office last week. Strangely enough, thanks to a quirk of fate, the film has a tenuous REH connection.

At the 2006 World Fantasy Con, I sat on a REH panel with Glenn Lord and Steven Gould, who is the author of the original novel Jumper on which the movie is based. The guy who was supposed to host the panel never showed up, and Steven was called in at the last minute as a substitute moderator. In the end this was fortuitous, for although he confessed to knowing next to nothing about Robert E. Howard, Steven had taken the logical step of reading Howard’s Wikipedia entry before heading up on stage, which allowed him to ask decent questions and otherwise do a good job. He also demonstrated a general sympathy and interest towards the subject that was well received by the audience (in contrast, several other popular authors embarrassed themselves on Howard panels by their boorish statements).

If you’re familiar with the World Fantasy Convention, you know how rare considerate panel behavior can sometimes be. In the worst cases you’re apt to meet panelists who proudly know nothing about the subject they’ve been assigned to discuss, and who then proceed to drown the audience in ignorance and self-appreciation. I was profoundly grateful that I had lucked into such a stellar moderator that day, and it’s nice to see the karmic circle now completing with the recent success of the movie version of his book. If you read Steven’s blog, you can tell how much of a wild head-trip his Hollyweird experience has been, and doubtless that initial break will further his life and career in ways he had never dreamed of. Like he says in one post of his blog, it was like winning the lottery. Good for him.

If only H. P. Lovecraft were alive to see this, it could have given him enough story plots to last a lifetime:

Mysterious Creatures Found in Antarctica

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) — Scientists investigating the icy waters of Antarctica said Tuesday they have collected mysterious creatures including giant sea spiders and huge worms in the murky depths.

Australian experts taking part in an international program to take a census of marine life in the ocean at the far south of the world collected specimens from up to 6,500 feet beneath the surface, and said many may never have been seen before.

Some of the animals far under the sea grow to unusually large sizes, a phenomenon called gigantism that scientists still do not fully understand.

“Gigantism is very common in Antarctic waters,” Martin Riddle, the Australian Antarctic Division scientist who led the expedition, said in a statement. “We have collected huge worms, giant crustaceans and sea spiders the size of dinner plates.”

The specimens were being sent to universities and museums around the world for identification, tissue sampling and DNA studies.

“Not all of the creatures that we found could be identified and it is very likely that some new species will be recorded as a result of these voyages,” said Graham Hosie, head of the census project.

The expedition is part of an ambitious international effort to map life forms in the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean, and to study the impact of forces such as climate change on the undersea environment.

Three ships — Aurora Australis from Australia, France’s L’Astrolabe and Japan’s Umitaka Maru — returned recently from two months in the region as part of the Collaborative East Antarctic Marine Census. The work is part of a larger project to map the biodiversity of the world’s oceans.

The French and Japanese ships sought specimens from the mid- and upper-level environment, while the Australian ship plumbed deeper waters with remote-controlled cameras.

“In some places every inch of the sea floor is covered in life,” Riddle said. “In other places we can see deep scars and gouges where icebergs scour the sea floor as they pass by.”

Among the bizarre-looking creatures the scientists spotted were tunicates, plankton-eating animals that resemble slender glass structures up to a yard tall “standing in fields like poppies,” Riddle said.

Other animals were equally baffling.

“They had fins in various places, they had funny dangly bits around their mouths,” Riddle told reporters. “They were all bottom dwellers so they were all evolved in different ways to live down on the sea bed in the dark. So many of them had very large eyes — very strange looking fish.”

Scientists are planning a follow-up expedition in 10 to 15 years to examine the effects of climate changes on the region’s environment.

No word on whether any of the scientists have developed the Innsmouth Look. Incidentally, I love how they sneak in “the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean” for those readers who slept through geography (or who are running for president.)

Head on over to The Wall Street Journal, where John J. Miller remembers David Gemmell in an article occasioned by the release of Gemmell’s last book, Troy: Fall of Kings, the final volume of his Trojan War trilogy. Nice to see one of the modern grandmasters of Sword-and-Sorcery fiction getting a posthumous boost in such a forum.

So I was digging through my Howardian archives on REH’s 102nd birthday, reading yellowed manuscripts, delicately handling crumbling photographs, when I came across a famous portrait of the Texan. “Valka!” I gasped to myself, “What a fitting image on which to dwell during this august anniversary!” Properly impressed, I thrice bowed reverently in the direction of Cross Plains, as is my wont whenever Howard’s shade looms before me so magnificently.

Later, I remembered that it was also the birthday of one of Howard’s greatest champions, the writer and critic Don Herron. Possessing a large cache of rare and precious Herronian memorabilia — don’t you? — I began sifting through that chest of immemorial treasures, when lo and behold I came across a familiar likeness, glimpsed through a glass darkly:

Murmuring appropriate benedictions, I turned northward and thrice inclined towards San Jose, where the spirit of the Bard of Cross Plains holds festival by night with the Lord of the Hammett Tour, and Schlitz ever pours in an icy froth from monstrous schooners built to fit nothing less than the gnarled hands of frost-giants.

Happy birthday, Bob and Don.

Steve Eng, known to many Cimmerian readers for his epic survey of Robert E. Howard’s poetry in The Dark Barbarian, has a new book of his own verse out. Titled The Defrauding of the Worms: Thirty Years of Poetry, it is the first in a projected four volumes that will collect the poems of Eng, who of late is incapacitated by Primary Progressive Aphasia (causing dementia and loss of memory). This book contains around two hundred items, including some that are about REH, so Howard fans have good reason to seek it out aside from a general love for solid versifying.

Don Herron has forwarded me a message from the REH Inner Circle group, where he and Frank Coffman were reminiscing about the 2007 Howard Days festival, specifically an event that occurred on our drive back to Cross Plains from Enchanted Rock State Park. We had all gorged on sausage and beer at a fantastic German restaurant in the ‘burg — that would be Fredericksburg, a town legendary for its amazing Teutonic cuisine. While the rest of our group dozed contentedly, Don Herron navigated down an endless Texas highway in the light of the dying sun. Suddenly, WHACK! — something fairly big hit the windshield full on. Feathers and gore splattered across the glass and up over the hood. In an instant it was over, leaving only a quivering glob of bird brains on the windshield to mark what had happened:

Everyone was startled into wakefulness by the sound, but the van itself hadn’t swerved an inch. Don drove onward, his nerves and thews all steel springs and whalebone, in total control of the vehicle:

Throughout the van rose a mad howl of exultation as we beheld the quivering remnants of that ghastly communion between bird and barbaric man. We beat our chests and tore our hair and tattooed a lugubrious melody on our shields, as drenched in ornithographic bloodlust as Solomon Kane in “Wings in the Night.” We knew, with a dread instinct older than Atlantis and Acheron, that this fallen creature was but an emmisary for enemy legions far more horrifying. Yet as the sun fled and darkness engulfed the world, we drifted back into an easy sleep, secure in the knowledge that the Dark Barbarian was at the wheel, holding the terrors of the night at bay with an icy stare that was hoary when the Earth was young.

UPDATE: I’ve been alerted that the people reminiscing were hoping to see some bird brain sunset pics. These two are the best I have: