Browsed by
Category: Vintage Treasures

A Patroller for a Vanished Federation: In the Hands of Glory by Phyllis Eisenstein

A Patroller for a Vanished Federation: In the Hands of Glory by Phyllis Eisenstein

Comments 1 comment


In the Hands of Glory (Timescape/Pocket Books, November 1981). Cover by Rowena Morrill

Here’s my new look at an SF paperback from the ’70s/’80s. Phyllis Eisenstein’s In the Hands of Glory is a book I eagerly bought and read back when it came out, in 1981. By a writer whose work I enjoyed. From a publishing imprint (Timescape, edited by David Hartwell) that I greatly respected. (Not to mention the Rowena Morrill cover which, let’s just say, overtly exaggerates certain physical characteristics of the protagonist relative to her actual depiction in the book.) And I had fond, but very dim, memories of the book. So I reread it.

Phyllis Eisenstein (1946-2020) was a Chicago writer. Black Gate is a Chicago-based ‘zine, and I’m originally from the Chicago area myself, and over the years I got to know Phyllis and her husband (and sometime collaborator) Alex fairly well, from meeting them at any number of conventions. Indeed, at this year’s Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention, I had a long conversation with Alex which touched on their time in Germany (Alex was in the military then) during which Phyllis drafted her first novel.

…

Read More Read More

In the tradition of Conan: The Kyrik and Kothar Novels by Gardner F. Fox

In the tradition of Conan: The Kyrik and Kothar Novels by Gardner F. Fox

Comments 19 comments

The Kyrik novels by Gardner F. Fox (Leisure Books, 1975-1976)

I’m getting ready to embark on a series of posts about Philip Jose Farmer, but got distracted looking through my shelves and decided to throw in a post about the Sword & Sorcery work of Gardner F. Fox, who I mentioned here a while back for his two book S&P series set on the planet Llarn.

While my small hometown library didn’t have anything by Robert E. Howard, they had various books claiming to be “In the tradition of Conan.” That’s how I found out about Howard. The first “In the tradition” book I read was Kyrik: Warlock Warrior by Fox, from Leisure Books, 1975. The cover was candy to a starving teen. By Ken Barr (although I didn’t know it at the time), the cover showed a muscled barbarian swordsman astride a pterodactyl with a nearly naked green-haired beauty beside him. My imagination ignited. And when I started reading it, I loved it even more.

…

Read More Read More

Remembering Carl Jacobi

Remembering Carl Jacobi

Comments 1 comment


Revelations in Black by Carl Jacobi (Jove/HBJ, January 1979). Cover uncredited

D.H. Olson delivered this eulogy for Carl Jacobi on Friday, August 29, 1997 at Lakewood Chapel in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was included in Masters of the Weird Tale: Carl Jacobi, published by Centipede Press in May 2014. Our deepest thanks to D.H. Olson for permission to reprint it here, and special thanks to Jerad Walters at Centipede Press for providing the text.

When R. Dixon Smith asked me to speak here today, I was honored, but also somewhat taken aback. There are others, after all, who have known Carl Jacobi both better, and longer, than I. Still, when one is asked to do honor to a man whom one has admired for years, one can hardly say no.

First, to the “facts” as they may be found in the public record.

…

Read More Read More

A Year of Demonic Public Service: The Fallible Fiend by L. Sprague de Camp

A Year of Demonic Public Service: The Fallible Fiend by L. Sprague de Camp

Comments 12 comments


The Fallible Fiend (Signet/New American Library, February 1973). Cover uncredited

This is another in my series of looks at fairly obscure SF from the ’70s and ’80s. In this case, I rescued a book that I had bought used decades ago from the chaos of my bookshelves. Most of the other writers I’ve discussed so far have been somewhat forgotten (or were never really known at all) but L. Sprague de Camp is an SFWA Grand Master, and a writer I and many others remember with great affection.

De Camp (1907-2000) began publishing SF in 1937 with “The Isolingual,” and was from the beginning a popular and prolific writer. He wrote both Fantasy and Science Fiction, though by the end of his long career the bulk of his work was Fantasy. His preferred mode was lightly cynical humor — this imbued his SF such as the Viagens Interplanetarias series, and his Fantasy beginning with his Incomplete Enchanter stories written with Fletcher Pratt.

…

Read More Read More

Lovely Ladies and Pleistocene Behemoths: A Visit to the Hollow Earth with Edgar Rice Burroughs

Lovely Ladies and Pleistocene Behemoths: A Visit to the Hollow Earth with Edgar Rice Burroughs

Comments 11 comments


Caroline Munro, and a pair of Pleistocene behemoths, in At the Earth’s Core

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with “hollow earth” stories, a style of fantasy fiction that presents ancient, lost societies of people (and/or humanoids) living deep under the earth, where Jurassic and Pleistocene behemoths — as well as uncategorized horrors — struggle to survive in the subterranean jungles of a sunless world.

My favorite of this genre is the Pellucidar series, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which began in 1914 when At the Earth’s Core was serialized in All-Story Weekly, before the novel was published in book format.

…

Read More Read More

Christopher Moore and His Very Dirty Job

Christopher Moore and His Very Dirty Job

Comments 3 comments

When talking about banning books, nobody mentions Christopher Moore. No doubt Moore is upset about this, because he’s out to offend pretty much everybody. The fact that he does this with glee, panache, and massive gobs of bathroom humor probably doesn’t signify, and certainly won’t save his neck when the book-banning trolls finally come for him. The fact is, he’s funny, and there’s nothing the book-banners hate more than a healthy sense of the absurd.

An excellent case in point is Moore’s A Dirty Job, in which unassuming Charlie Asher, a second-hand dealer in San Francisco, becomes a “death merchant,” a sort of dogsbody for Death, who, it seems, has left the field, possibly never to return. It’s Charlie’s job to match dying people with their “soul vessel,” usually some knick-knack or other with sentimental value, in part so that the dead can find rest, and in part to prevent Orcus, lurking in the sewers, from eating up the soul vessels and rising again to usher in an age of darkness and doom.

That’s right, Orcus. Our old friend from the original AD&D Monster Manual. Etc.

…

Read More Read More

A to Z Reviews: “The City of Silence,” by Ma Boyong

A to Z Reviews: “The City of Silence,” by Ma Boyong

Comments 1 comment

A to Z Reviews

Over the past several years, the Anglophonic worlds has become more aware of the science fiction being published in modern China. This is due, in part, to the work and outreach being done by Science Fiction World, a magazine from China with a circulation of more than 130,000 as well as publishers like Neil Clarke who have sought out Chinese fiction to publish in translation.

Ken Liu, who has won multiple Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and a World Fantasy Award, has also worked to bring Chinese science fiction to English readers with his translation of Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem and the publication of the anthology Invisible Planets, which offered translations of a dozen short stories by seven Chinese authors. One of the authors included in the book is Ma Boyong, represented by his story “The City of Silence,” which Ken Liu translated into English.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Frontera by Lewis Shiner

Vintage Treasures: Frontera by Lewis Shiner

Comments 3 comments


Frontera (Baen Books, August 1984). Cover by Vincent Di Fate

I first discovered Lewis Shiner in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies, where he was a regular, and one of my favorite contributors. His first published story, “Tinker’s Damn,” appeared in the fifth issue of Charles Ryan’s Galileo magazine in October 1977, and he followed that with dozens more all through the 80s and 90s in places likes The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Twilight Zone Magazine, Omni, and especially Asimov’s Science Fiction.

His first novel Frontera, the tale of a high-risk expedition to a supposedly abandoned Martian colony, was published as a paperback original in what we used to call the Year of Big Brother, 1984 (that’s a George Orwell reference, for all you young folks). It was nominated for both the Philip K. Dick Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and was followed by perhaps his most famous novel, Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988), which garnered another Nebula nom.

…

Read More Read More

A to Z Reviews: “The Butcher of Darkside Hover,” by Jonathan Sean Lyster

A to Z Reviews: “The Butcher of Darkside Hover,” by Jonathan Sean Lyster

Comments 0 Comment

A to Z Reviews

Jonathan Sean Lyster only has two published stories, the first appeared in 2020 and the second, “The Butcher of Darkside Hover,” appeared in the  October 2022 issue of Analog. There is a strong resonance between “The Butcher of Darkside Hover” and the classic story “The Cold Equations,”  by Tom Godwin.

The story is set on a base located on the farside of the moon, although as the story progresses, it becomes clear that it is actually in orbit over the farside of the moon, which is one of the issues with the story. Lyster slowly provides details of his world, but never fully and in a manner that means the reader is putting together the pieces to get an idea of what his world looks like. The process means that the reader’s perception is constantly changing regarding the setting when it should be more focused on the problem presented for the characters and their solution.

…

Read More Read More

Worthy of His Hire: The Day’s Work by Rudyard Kipling

Worthy of His Hire: The Day’s Work by Rudyard Kipling

Comments 9 comments

The Day’s Work (Penguin Classics, October 4, 1988)

I spent most of my childhood and adolescence in a house with large built-in bookshelves, occupied by books passed on from my grandmother. Among the ones I read were multiple volumes by Kipling. One of the more memorable was The Day’s Work, which I recently added to my shelves of print fiction and which I’ve just reread: a collection of stories nearly all written during Kipling’s period of residence in Vermont, during the early 1890s.

A long time ago, I ran across a comment by some critic that if you wanted to read a conversation between a god, an animal, and a machine, Kipling would be the perfect choice to write it. The Day’s Work might be taken as evidence to support this; it doesn’t bring the three together, but it has one story with a conversation among gods, “The Bridge-Builders”; two with conversations among horses, “A Walking Delegate” and “The Maltese Cat”; and two with conversations among machines, “The Ship That Found Herself” and “.007,” the latter being about a locomotive newly put into service. Those five stories, out of a total of twelve, give the collection a strong feeling of fantasy, which must have been part of what appealed to me when I was in elementary school.

…

Read More Read More