Alt History on Acid: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon

Alt History on Acid: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon

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Shadow Ticket (Penguin Press, October 7, 2025)

I never really fully understood what Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity Rainbow was about. Much like everyone else. As one critic put it,

I doubt that anyone could account for everything going on in Gravity’s Rainbow, even Pynchon himself, although I suppose he has an edge on the rest of us.

I sort of knew it had something to do with V-2 rocketry and associated penis imagery, fascism and political satire, conspiracies and paranoia, alt-history, combined in a hodgepodge of puns, jokes, silly song lyrics, and linguistic puzzles spread amongst loosely connected absurdist plot lines. And that is sometimes characterized as the

Great American Novel, like Moby-Dick. Unlike Melville’s readers, though, Pynchon’s readers can go for pages at a time without one clue as to what is going on with the plot, setting, or characters.

Which I think is the point. To not know what is going on. Because that’s the way life is; no controlling narrative, but rather a series of random occurrences that nonetheless shape the impenetrable human condition.

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Steamed: All My Video-Gaming Posts Here at Black Gate

Steamed: All My Video-Gaming Posts Here at Black Gate

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Hudsucker_RobinsElevatorEDITEDI have ‘landing pages’ here at Black Gate which I update when I add a new post to some frequent/favored topic. The Robert E. Howard one is the most active. And I have them for John D. MacDonald, Nero Wolfe, Douglas Adams (with help from friends), and Sherlock Holmes on Screen. 

Steamed was a site-wide video game column I thought up in 2020 that never caught…got traction. But I still talk about gaming sometimes, so I wanted a landing page for it, too. Here’s the introductory column, which was another of my Black Gate World Headquarters posts.

Folks might disagree, but I think I’m channeling my inner Douglas Adams pretty darn well with these BG World HQ posts. They make me smile. And links to my other gaming posts follow. As the picture shows, I think you can envision Black Gate World HQ posts in a Hudsucker Proxy vein. I do when I write them.

The pay phone on the wall by the door into the dungeon…cellar…basement…journalist’s suite below Chicago’s permafrost layer rang at the Black Gate World Headquarters. I vaulted over the wood plank that rested on two sawhorses, which served as my desk. The last person who hadn’t answered before the third ring had been sent downstairs. ‘Downstairs’ was rumored to be the lair of a beast that Conan wouldn’t be able to defeat.

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An Original Ballantine Adult Fantasy: The Children of Llyr by Evangeline Walton

An Original Ballantine Adult Fantasy: The Children of Llyr by Evangeline Walton

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The Children of Llyr (Ballantine Adult Fantasy #33, August 1971). Cover by David Johnston

This latest entry in my series of essays about mostly obscure SF and Fantasy from the ’70s and ’80s looks at a novel published in one of the most celebrated publishing series of the early ’70s. This was the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which ran from 1969 to 1974, under the editorship of Lin Carter.

I’ve discussed Carter’s work before, and I subscribe to the more or less standard view that he was not a very good writer of fiction, but that his contributions to the field as an editor were tremendous. And nowhere more so than in this series of books.

The first volume was The Blue Star, by Fletcher Pratt, a reprint of a 1952 novel. The final official Ballantine Adult Fantasy publication was #65, Over the Hills and Far Away, by Lord Dunsany.

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Tech Tok, Part 2

Tech Tok, Part 2

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Outside the Wire (Netflix, January 15, 2021)

Well here we are again.

For this new watch-a-thon, I’m returning to sci-fi, and in particular the elements that I love about sci-fi — forget about story and thoughtful metaphors for the human condition, I just want spaceships and robots and hardware. Bring it on!

Outside the Wire (2021) – Netflix

One of those Netflix flicks that does what every other Netflix flick does for its algorithmically chosen audience. Find a vaguely competent director, pay for a ‘name,’ and have the characters repeat the objective of whatever goal they’re chasing every 20 minutes.

In this one, a drone pilot is taught what warfare really is by being yanked from his cushy operations room and onto the front lines of a messy ground war in Ukraine. He is under the command of Captain Leo, an advanced android prototype, played by Anthony Mackie, and yes, they do get a Captain America reference in.

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Tor Doubles #31: Gordon R. Dickson’s The Alien Way and Naked to the Stars

Tor Doubles #31: Gordon R. Dickson’s The Alien Way and Naked to the Stars

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Cover for The Alien Way and Naked to the Stars by Brian Waugh

Tor Double #31 was originally published in April 1991. The proto-Tor Double, which included two stories by Keith Laumer, was the only volume up to this point to include content from a single author. This volume, with two stories by Gordon R. Dickson, is the first official Tor Double to include content from only one author. However, of the remaining five Tor Doubles, four of them would prove to be single author collections.

Naked to the Stars was an originally serialized in F&SF in October and November 1961. Although the story begins as a fairly typical piece of military science fiction, Dickson takes it into a different direction, which makes the story stand out.

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Into the World of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with Richard A. Lupoff and John Flint Roy

Into the World of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with Richard A. Lupoff and John Flint Roy

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Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure by Richard A. Lupoff (Ace, 1968) and A Guide to Barsoom
by John Flint Roy (Ballantine Books, January 1976). Covers by Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo

Among my prized possessions are these two books. Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure, by Richard A. Lupoff, 1965 from Ace books with an early cover by Frazetta, and A Guide to Barsoom by John Flint Roy, 1976, from Ballantine Books, with a cover by Boris Vallejo and some interior illustrations by Neal MacDonald.

Lupoff’s book has quite a bit of biographical material on ERB, but is mostly an examination of his work. It isn’t just a love affair with ERB but includes plenty of critical analysis. I find myself disagreeing with Lupoff on one particular conclusion he draws, but that’s material for another post. I much appreciated this comprehensive examination and refer to it often.

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By the King’s Command: Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer

By the King’s Command: Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer

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Every October, I perform a ritual that I suspect many of you also observe — I grab a handful of books off the shelf and spend the Halloween month reading the scary stuff, always trying to get in a “classic” or two that I’ve missed along the way. Last year that classic was Christine, one of the “first-wave” Stephen King books that I had never gotten around to, and the novel reminded me why the man is so enduringly popular… and also why I don’t read him much anymore. I enjoyed Christine, but five hundred plus pages of dated pop culture references and slangy, apocalyptic adolescent angst is a heavy load for someone of my advanced age to carry.

I didn’t read any King this October, but my Halloween 2025 reading had a King connection nevertheless. In his chatty 1981 grab-bag horror survey Danse Macabre, King includes a list of approximately one hundred horror books that he considers important for the post-World War Two era he discusses. (He was born in 1947.) I incorporated many of King’s choices in my own megalomaniacal list of essential horror, fantasy, and science fiction books, and over the years I’ve sampled a fair number of his recommendations. I’ve found the Master’s lineup hit or miss; there have been whiffs like Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn (which I absolutely hated, and which I’m convinced he inserted strictly for literary cachet), home runs like Ramsey Campbell’s nightmarish The Doll Who Ate His Mother, and books that may not be masterpieces but are still solid successes, like another one I read last year, Bernard Taylor’s grim English ghost story, Sweetheart, Sweetheart.

This year the first October book I read came off of King’s list — The Auctioneer, Joan Samson’s 1975 novel of rural unease. King marked some of the books on his list with an asterisk as being “especially important”, and The Auctioneer is one of those.

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The Many Faces of Epic Fantasy

The Many Faces of Epic Fantasy

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The head of a roaring black dragon emerges from fire and smoke.
Image by MythologyArt from Pixabay

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

I have been (over)thinking about the panels I participated in during this year’s Can*Con. What I can remember of them, anyway. I get so nervous before any kind of public speaking that the events often just get blanked out in my memory. But I am remembering some stuff that has me thinking more on the topics discussed. Since few folks were able to attend, I thought maybe I’d bring some of our discussions to you here.

One of the panels I was on was The Continuity of Epic Fantasy, and I was fortunate enough to be sat between Suyi Davies Okungbowa and Anuja Varghese, two incredibly brilliant folks with wonderful minds. Moderated by Y.M. Pang, this was a fascinating discussion about what epic fantasy was for us, and why we love it or hate it, and why it has been so enduring in genre.

The question of what epic fantasy is has been the one the stuck with me, because my fellow panellists brought up some things that have really stuck with me.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: 52 Weeks: 52 Sherlock Holmes Novels – Ashton’s ‘The Death of Cardinal Tosca’

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: 52 Weeks: 52 Sherlock Holmes Novels – Ashton’s ‘The Death of Cardinal Tosca’

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So, Paul Bishop is a friend of mine, and he wrote the very first post in Black Gate’s award-nominated Discovering Robert E. Howard. He talked about Howard’s boxing stories. Before those Pulps dried up, Howard wrote prolifically for them, with Sailor Steve Costigan his most popular creation.

Paul is a major Westerns guy, and with Scott Harris, he put together 52 Weeks: 52 Western Novels, in which a slew of folks wrote about their favorite Westerns. It’s a cool format, and 52 Weeks: 52 Western Movies, and 52 Weeks: 52 TV Westerns, followed. The ’52’ number flows nicely with reading one a week, right? I have read the Novels, and Movies, books, and I think they’re cool for Westerns fans.

Paul reached out to me last year, and asked if I was interested in contributing a chapter to a 52 Weeks: 52 Sherlock Holmes Novels, project. Write about a non-Doyle pastiche? Heck yeah!!! In the end, I wrote four of them, so I’ve got a good 7.6% of the reviews.

I covered Hugh Ashton’s The Death of Cardinal Tosca; John Gardner’s The Return of Moriarty; Michael Kurland’s The Infernal Device: and Frank Thomas’ Sherlock Holmes & The Sacred Sword.

Back in May I shared my chapter on The Infernal Device. The book came out in May.

Here is  Hugh’s The Death of Cardinal Tosca.

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From Decades of Robert E. Howard Scholarship: The Solomon Kane Companion by Fred Blosser

From Decades of Robert E. Howard Scholarship: The Solomon Kane Companion by Fred Blosser

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The Solomon Kane Companion by Fred Blosser (Pulp Hero Press, June 17, 2025)

If you’re familiar with Robert E. Howard Fandom, you already know who Fred Blosser is. I first encountered his work back in the early 1970s, when he was writing articles and reviews for Marvel Comics’ Savage Sword of Conan magazine.

For SSoC, Blosser authored well-researched articles about topics such as the Picts in Howard’s fiction, REH Fanzines, Howard’s Kozaks, and a history of Howard’s puritan adventurer, Solomon Kane.

Now Blosser has taken that last one much farther, producing a book called The Solomon Kane Companion, published by Pulp Hero Press, who kindly sent me a review copy. As I mentioned, Kane is a puritan, and his adventures take place in the Elizabethan era. He was created by Robert E. Howard while Howard was still in high school, and his first published appearance was in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales, in the story “Red Shadows.”

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