What I’ve Been Listening To: June, 2025

What I’ve Been Listening To: June, 2025

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I continue to listen to audiobooks daily. I frequently drift off to sleep with a fifteen minute timer on. The BBC radio plays of the two Dirk Gently novels are regular late night listens. So is the terrific Marx Brothers homage, Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel. It was originally done by the Marxes themselves. BBC radio made a new version in 1990 and I frigging LOVE it.

Since I often have an audiobook on while I’m doing other things, I re-listen to things; or listen to books I’ve already read. It works great for me. I get some through my library app, but I mostly use Audible.

Here are some recent listens.

LEE GOLDBERG’S EVE RONIN

In the most recent What I’ve Been Listening To, I talked about Goldberg’s ‘buddy cop’ series featuring Sharpe & Walker. They are arson investigators in LA, and book one was pretty good. I just got the audiobook for number two, and I’m thrilled it crosses over with Lee’s Eve Ronin series. Even more thrilled that Nicol Zanzarella is doing Eve again – she’s terrific!!

The books are part of Kindle Unlimited, and number six is coming out later this year. I re-listened to all five in less than a week. Eve and her partner Duncan are a terrific buddy cop pair. Eve rose to fame when she was off duty and subdued a drunken action movie star who was smacking around his girlfriend in a parking lot. The video went viral on the Net and she parlayed it into a big promotion.

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Where Dreams and Nightmares Come True: Greyhawk Adventures: Saga of Old City by Gary Gygax

Where Dreams and Nightmares Come True: Greyhawk Adventures: Saga of Old City by Gary Gygax

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Greyhawk Adventures: Saga of Old City (TSR, October 1985)

Greyhawk…

A cruel city.

A harsh, pitiless city for a young orphan boy with no money and no friends — but plenty of enemies!

Enter the Old City of Greyhawk, that marvelous place where dreams — and nightmares — come true. Travel through the world of Oerth along with Gord, the boy who becomes a man as he fights for his survival in a world of mysterious wizards, fearsome monsters, dour dwarves, and beautiful women.
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You Can’t Handle the Tooth, Part III

You Can’t Handle the Tooth, Part III

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Boys from County Hell (Six Mile High Productions, April 2020)
and Twilight (Summit Entertainment, November 21, 2008)

20 vampire films, all first time watches for me.

Come on — sink ’em in.

Boys from County Hell (2020) – Prime/Shudder

Ah, British and British-adjacent horror comedies. When they’re done right, there’s nothing better, and this one is done right.

I had a blast with this one, I’d put it right up there with the likes of Dog Soldiers, Grabbers, Shaun of the Dead, Doghouse, Severance, and The Cottage. They all have something in common; a close-knit group, localized setting, extreme gore, and flowery language.

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Tor Double #10: Robert Silverberg’s Sailing to Byzantium and Gene Wolfe’s Seven American Nights

Tor Double #10: Robert Silverberg’s Sailing to Byzantium and Gene Wolfe’s Seven American Nights

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Cover for Sailing to Byzantium by Brian Waugh
Cover for Seven American Nights by Bryn Barnard

Seven American Nights was originally published in Orbit 20, edited by Damon Knight and published by Harper & Row in March, 1978. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Seven American Nights is the first of two Wolfe stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series.

Sailing to Byzantium was originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in February, 1985. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, winning the latter.  Sailing to Byzantium is the second of five Silverberg stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series and aside from the proto-series Laumer novel, it is the first time an author has been repeated.

Wolfe’s story opens with a short note from Hassan Kerbelai indicating that he is sending the travelogue of Nadan Jaffarzadeh back to his family, noting that Jaffarzadeh seems to have gone missing. The final paragraphs of the story are focused on Jaffarzadeh’s mother’s reaction to the travelogue. The majority of the story is Jaffarzadeh’s description of his first week visiting America.

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Vintage Empires: James Nicoll on Galactic Empires, Volumes One & Two, edited by Brian W. Aldiss

Vintage Empires: James Nicoll on Galactic Empires, Volumes One & Two, edited by Brian W. Aldiss

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Galactic Empires, Volume One and Two (Orbit, October 1976). Covers by Karel Thole

My fellow Canadian James Nicoll continues to be one of my favorite SF bloggers, probably because he covers stuff I’m keenly interested in. Meaning exciting new authors, mixed with a reliable diet of vintage classics.

In the last two weeks he’s discussed Kate Elliots’s The Witch Roads, Axie Oh’s The Floating World, Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance, and Emily Yu-Xuan Qin’s Aunt Tigress, all from 2025; as well as Walter Jon Williams The Crown Jewels (from 1987), Wilson Tucker’s The Long Loud Silence (1952), C J Cherryh’s Port Eternity (1982), and John Brunner’s 1973 collection From This Day Forward. Now that’s a guy who knows how to productively use his leisure time. Not to mention caffeine.

But my favorite of his recent reviews is his story-by-story breakdown of Brian W. Aldiss’s massive two-volume anthology Galactic Empires, which made me want to read the whole thing all over again.

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Heroes and Humanity: Jack Kirby at the Skirball Center

Heroes and Humanity: Jack Kirby at the Skirball Center

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Last Friday, as an early Father’s Day gift, my wife arranged for us to spend the afternoon at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, which is hosting a wonderful new exhibition dedicated to the memory and achievement of a great American artist. Titled Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity and running until March 1, 2026, the show is a must-see for any admirer of the King of Comics.

Jack Kirby is arguably the most influential person in the history of mainstream American comic books; his work, more than that of any other artist or writer, defined the visual grammar of the superhero. Along with his partner Joe Simon, he created Captain America in the 1940’s, soldiered through the postwar superhero slump of the 1950’s doing work in all genres — science fiction, war, horror, western, and romance (it’s an often forgotten fact that Simon and two-fisted Jack Kirby created the romance comic book) until, in the 1960’s, when DC showed that there was a reawakening market for costumed heroes, he teamed up with Stan Lee to create the “Marvel Universe”, though they didn’t know that’s what they were doing when they did it.

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The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part I: Don Wollheim, Edwin L. Arnold, and Otis Adelbert Kline

The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part I: Don Wollheim, Edwin L. Arnold, and Otis Adelbert Kline

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Swordsmen in the Sky (Ace, 1964). Cover by Frank Frazetta

Swordsmen in the Sky, edited by Donald Wollheim

If our genre has a holy grail to find, this would be it. I read this collection as a kid. Found it in our local library. And loved every single story in there. Took me a while to find a copy as an adult but it’s one of my pride and joys.

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By Crom: It’s Conan…I Mean, Starr the Slayer!

By Crom: It’s Conan…I Mean, Starr the Slayer!

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Having finished the first 100 issues of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian, I did a post last week on Roy Thomas’s memoirs and that series. Which OF COURSE you read, here.

I started reading the first Savage Sword of Conan Omnibus from Marvel, but I’m still in a CtB mood. So, I decided to write another post about it. Sort of…

The first issue of Conan the Barbarian actually followed the sandalled feet of Starr the Slayer.

Just for fun, Roy Thomas had written a sword and sorcery story, and he had Barry (not yet ‘Windsor’) Smith draw it. Starr the Slayer was a very Conan-esque barbarian. In the story, he was the creation of Len Carson (named after Conan pastiche writer, Lin Carter), who dreamed his plots. But mentally exhausted from this, Carson wanted to kill off his meal ticket. Starr somehow travels to Carson’s time and kills the writer for attempting to dispose of him. Uh, okay, sure.

Starr appeared in the fourth issue of the Marvel anthology, Chamber of Darkness, hitting newsstands in April of 1970 (CtB debuted in October of the same year). Smith both penciled and inked the entire installment for Starr, from Thomas’ story.

Thomas did not intend for it to be an ongoing character, though it seems entirely conceivable that if Marvel had followed form and developed their own in-house character (giving them all the rights), instead of licensing one, Starr could well have been Marvel’s sword-swinger.

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Mechanical Trees and Mini-Woolly Mammoths: May-June Print Science Fiction Magazines

Mechanical Trees and Mini-Woolly Mammoths: May-June Print Science Fiction Magazines

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May-June 2025 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and Asimov’s Science
Fiction. Cover art by Tithi Luadthong/Shutterstock, and IG Digital Arts & Annie Spratt

Back in February I was surprised to learn that the last surviving print science fiction magazines, Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, had all been sold to Must Read Books, a new publisher backed by a small group of genre fiction fans. I was very sad to see Analog & Asimov’s leave the safe harbor of Penny Press, where they’ve both sheltered safely for very nearly three decades as the magazine publishing biz underwent upheaval after upheaval.

But I was nonetheless cautiously optimistic. The magazines couldn’t continue to survive as they were, with 25+ years of slowly declining circulation — and indeed F&SF, while it claims to be an ongoing concern, has not published a new issue in nearly a year.

But after four months, that optimism is rapidly fading. The first issues from Must Read, the May-June Analog and Asimov’s, technically on sale April 8 – June 8, have yet to appear on the shelves at any of my local bookstores, and there’s been no word at all at when we can expect the July-August issues, scheduled to go on sale today. And there’s no whisper of when we might expect to see a new issue of F&SF at all.

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Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Five: From the Beginning — The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Five: From the Beginning — The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

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The Hobbit first edition dust jacket (1937). Cover by JRR Tolkien

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party – The Hobbit

Fifty years ago, when I first read this book, I didn’t imagine I’d still be reading it so many years later. Heck, I doubt I could have even imagined being as old as I am now. But I do reread it every few years. When I revisit The Hobbit, my journey is bathed in nostalgia as much as with the simple enjoyment caused by reading a charming book that I happen to know inside out, from the opening line above on through to the very end.

In my initial article on half a century of reading Tolkien back in January, I described my dad trying to get our first color tv in time to watch the Rankin & Bass The Hobbit. Remembering that again last week left me thinking more of my dad, now gone nearly 24 years, than the book. He was ten years younger than I am now when the movie first aired, which makes me feel incredibly old at the moment. For such a conservative man,  he was excited to see it — admittedly, in a restrained way. I think we liked it well enough, but leaving out Beorn irked us both. Beyond Tolkien’s books, our fantasy tastes rarely coincided (I’ve got a shelf full of David Eddings books he bought, if anyone’s interested), but with The Hobbit and LOTR, we were in complete agreement.

What’s there to say about The Hobbit here on Black Gate? Nothing, really. I imagine most visitors here have read it, many more than once, and have their own ideas on it. It’s one of the most widely read books in the world. Instead, I’m going to discuss some adaptations of the book. But first, a summary.

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