Actually, not one of you is wondering that, but this is my column. So… Writing about a thousand words a week often involves picking a topic on Saturday morning, and having something ready to go on Monday morning. I’ve actually been working on a few things ahead of time this year, which is kinda cool.
“Really, Bob? You mean, some stuff, you’re not just totally winging?”
Well, I wouldn’t put it so crudely, but yes. I’m trying to go a little deeper on a few things. Including number two below, which I am THRILLED with.
DOYLE ON HOLMES
For the entire month of April and into May, The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes returns to Monday mornings. Peter Haining’s The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a nifty book which had been published by Barnes and Noble. It has several items which are included in Jack Tracy’s foundational Sherlock Holmes: The Published Apocrypha.
It also has several additional items worth reading. Doyle wrote some essays regarding Sherlock Holmes, and I’m going to do a series on those. The posts will quote liberally from Doyle’s essays, with my own input. I suspect even serious Sherlockians haven’t read Doyle’s essays in some time.
And if you aren’t familiar with The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes, then you missed my first three years here at Black Gate, as that was the name of my column,.
GLEN COOK Q&A
I’ve written essays here, and here, on Cook’s terrific Garrett, PI series. I just finished a series re-read and enjoyed it more than ever. After the Doyle on Holmes series, A (Black) Gat in the Hand will be proud to present a brand new Q&A with Glen, talking about Garrett. I’m really excited about that one.
NERO WOLFE – THE CONRAD CHRONICLES
In April I’m going to a Nero Wolfe fan gathering at the ‘real’ Kanawha Spa, in West Virginia. It’s gonna be fun. I previously took two of the old Sidney Greenstreet radio shows, and wrote them up as Wolfe pastiches. The shows were not very Stout-like, and I worked on making them sound more authentic. A third pastiche is underway, though it hit such an unrealistic point I haven’t figured out how to fix it yet, and still keep the rest of the plot.
(In case you’re curious – Wolfe intentionally leaves the safe unlocked, somebody breaks into the Brownstone middle of the night, clubs Archie in the back of the head, and steals something and gets away. I mean, c’mon…)
I am doing the same with an episode from William Conrad’s TV show. The radio Matt Dillon, perhaps best known for Cannon (or maybe Jake and the Fat Man), starred as the corpulent detective in a short-lived 1981 series. Looking the part, he played a warmer Wolfe. With Lee Horsley (Matt Houston) as a very good Archie, and including Theodore Horstmann in the plant rooms, it’s an enjoyable watch. I am writing up one of the episodes as a full-blown pastiche:” again doing my best to emulate Rex Stout.
MORE CONTINENTAL OP
I wrote my best intro for Steeger Books’ first volume of Continental Op stories. I’m working on the intro for volume two. It will be an A (Black) Gat in the Hand entry after the book comes out later this year.
MISC
Of course, things are always jumping in and out of my thoughts. Having enjoyed Will Thomas’ Barker and Llewelyn novel, Anatomy of Evil, I’d like to write something about my fairly extensive Jack the Ripper library sometime.
A thoughtful essay on Raoul Whitfield’s hardboiled Hercule Poirot, Jo Gar, is a major goal for A (Black) Gat in the Hand. As is one on Wade Miller’s Max Thursday.
Multi-contributor series’ like Hither Came Conan, and Talking Tolkien, take a lot of focus and recruiting effort. I’ve tentatively tried, then abandoned, ones for John D. MacDonald, and Columbo. And a serious Solomon Kane attempt has been on my drawing board for several years now. Maybe we’ll see something for one of those in 2025.
And I’d like to at least commend Wheel of Time, which has been one hundred times better than the fan fic that is Rings of Power.
Ah well – so little time, so much to read and write!
Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every summer since.
His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’) and blogs about Holmes and other mystery matters at Almost Holmes.
He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE DEFINITIVE guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’
He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXIII.
He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.
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The God of Endings (Flatiron Books, March 7, 2023)
At this year’s Capricon I shared an autograph session with Jacqueline Holland. In the way of things, especially with customers sparse, I ended up signing a couple of my books for her and she signed a copy of her first novel, The God of Endings, for me. The novel was published in March 2023 by Flatiron Books, a fairly new imprint.
Jacqueline Holland got her MFA from the University of Kansas, studying with the wonderful Kij Johnson. She has published work in some impressive literary journals, like Big Fiction. This novel is fantasy, and she told me her next two novels will be science fiction. It’s a vampire novel, which is normally not my thing, but Jacqueline’s description made it sound intriguing, and not your standard vampire novel (certainly these are not sparkly vampires!) and it lived up to that.
It’s told by Collette Le Sange (a significant name, obviously.) She tells it in two threads. One goes back to her birth, in upstate New York around 1830. Her birth name is Anna, and her father is a stonecutter who makes gravestones. But sickness comes to her village, and when people start dying there is talk of witches. Her family is suspected, but they fall ill too, and eventually a man she does not know, her grandmother’s second husband, comes to take her away. She dies, though, and is buried. But her grandfather has done something, and soon she is born again, a vampire. Before long she is sent across the ocean to Europe, to live with her grandfather’s ancestral family.
On the ship there begins a repeated sequence: she befriends a sickly young girl, and kills a menacing rapist (drinking his blood, of course), only to have to abandon the girl in England. In Eastern Europe she is happy for a while with a found family: the motherly Piroska and the strange twins Vano and Ehru, one of whom is another vampire. But rumors of witchery come again, and Anya (as she is now called) escapes and is eventually rescued by a kindly artist, who comes to love her (despite her strangeness) and who teaches her to draw and paint.
But this too must end, and we go forward again, eventually to France as the Second World War begins, and she befriends a young woman and helps teach some Jewish refugee students only to be chased out again, then on to Alexandria, and another terrible loss. And finally she comes back to upstate New York, to her grandfather’s old house, and opens a private school, teaching young children again.
And the other thread is set in 1984, and Anna, now Collette, is teaching at her school. One young boy, Leo, shows remarkable artistic talent, but he is shy and clearly there are problems at home. His parents’ marriage is obviously in trouble, and against her will Collette agrees to help care for Leo while the parents, Dave and Katherine, work out their issues. Collette becomes close to Katherine, while noticing various danger signs. Meanwhile, Leo, though developing as an artist, seems to be getting sick.
And Collette herself is having difficulties — her thirst for blood, usually easily sated with an occasional sip from her cats, is getting worse and worse and she finds herself waking up with terrible scratches and evidence that she has been sleepwalking in the woods. Her dreams recall her past, with visions of Vano and Ehru. Dave and Katherine’s marriage is coming to a crisis, with unpleasant revelations and nothing but tragedy for Leo, who is also sicker and sicker.
The resolution turns on several crises: an explosive event involving Leo’s parents, an unexpected visit from someone from Collette’s past, Collette herself realizing what she has been doing in the night, Leo’s health turning for the worse. The conclusion is something I had expected for a while, but is still effectively sprung, and is very dark and oddly hopeful, indeed almost cathartic.
This is a really impressive first novel, very well written, very moving. It powerfully portrays the serial losses that Anna/Anya/Collette experiences — each one wrenching, as the reader hopes for happiness for Collette and her friendships only to see time, superstition, prejudice and war always intervene. It slackens a bit towards the middle, but not fatally, and it remains involving, and as I said the ending is very affecting. Highly recommended.
Rich Horton’s last article for us was an obituary for Brian Stableford. His website is Strange at Ecbatan. Rich has written over 200 articles for Black Gate, see them all here.
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The Bantam Spectra Élisabeth Vonarburg: The Silent City (August 1992),
In the Mothers’ Land (December 1992), and Reluctant Voyagers (March 1995).
Covers by Oscar Chichoni, Oscar Chichoni, and Stephen Youll
I left Canada to attend grad school at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign in August 1987, and when I did I lost touch with much of the vibrant Canadian SF scene. There were a few Canadian authors celebrated in the States — folks like Charles de Lint, Donald Kingsbury, Julie Czerneda, Peter Watts, Guy Gavriel Kay, and a handful of others — but they were the exception. I had to get used to not hearing favorite Canadian acts on the radio (like The Box and Gowan), and I gradually got used to a lack of Canadian representation in bookstores as well.
That’s why it was such a delight to see French Canadian author Élisabeth Vonarburg experience a brief but marvelous period in the sun in the mid-90s, when Bantam Spectra translated three of her most famous novels into English, and brought them to the attention of grateful American readers.
[Click the images for a broad spectrum of sizes.]
Solaris issues edited by Vonarburg: #53, 54, and 56 (1983-1984).
Covers by Louis Paradis, Benoït Laverdière, and Jean-Pierre Normand
Élisabeth Vonarburg was born in Paris, but she’s lived in the thriving northern metropolis of Chicoutimi in Quebec since 1973. She made her name early as the literary director of the acclaimed French-Canadian magazine Solaris, the oldest French language science-fiction and fantasy magazine in the world. She’s received many literary honors over the years, including “Le Grand Prix de la SF française” in 1982, and a Philip K. Dick Award special citation for In the Mothers’ Land in 1993.
Vonarburg’s first novel, Le Silence de la Cité (The Silent City), was published by Denoël in October 1981, and translated by Jane Brierley for its first English publication, by Tesseract Books in Canada in 1988. It made an immediate impression on North American audiences, enough to gain the attention of Lou Aronica and his team of editors at the new Spectra imprint of Bantam Books in the US.
The Silent City (Bantam Spectra, August 1992). Cover by Oscar Chichoni
The Silent City was published by Bantam Spectra in August 1992, four years after its Canadian release. With its disturbing themes of incest and body mutilation in a post-apocalyptic setting, American audiences didn’t quite know what to make of it. Here’s my favorite review, from Nic Clarke at Eve’s Alexandria.
At just over 250 pages, it’s a slim novel – by the standards of today’s science fiction, that is – but it has atmosphere and interesting themes to spare…. The overriding image I’ve retained from the book is of the titular City itself: a vast, gleaming sanctuary for knowledge and the knowledgeable, last bastion of civilisation in a post-apocalyptic landscape…
They conduct strange experiments upon the one genuinely young person left among them: curious, trusting Elisa, the last child born in the City. There’s a twisted fairy tale quality to the cocoon that is Elisa’s early life. When Paul (her ‘Papa’) isn’t slicing her skin in the name of science – for reasons that remain opaque to her for many years – he throws a masquerade party to celebrate the progress of his research into her uncanny self-healing ability… An unwelcome guest promptly turns up to the party and declares,
“I see you forgot to invite me… I’ve a gift for the little princess, nevertheless. When she turns twenty, she’ll prick her finger and live forever.”
Another, friendlier guest responds by mitigating the curse into a mere 200+ years. Nor does the creepiness of Paul’s exploitation of Elisa end with the experiments: as Elisa grows from young innocence to, well, slightly older innocence, the pair become lovers… The rest of the book follows Elisa as she flees the City (and Paul) for Outside…
But Outside it is less freeing than it might be, because the regressive post-apocalyptic culture that has developed in the Outside is – with regional variations – deeply and viscerally hostile to women, who are blamed for the genetic mutations that have blighted the human population. Men have been particularly badly hit, such that they are now scarce; women, numerous and hated, are little better than slaves…
Rich and fascinating… it has plenty of food for thought, and some primal imagery besides.
Read the full review here.
In the Mothers’ Land (Bantam Spectra, December 1992). Cover by Oscar Chichoni
In the Mothers’ Land, which shares a setting with The Silent City, is perhaps Vonarburg’s most widely-read English language novel. It was nominated for the Tiptree Award, won the Aurora Award for Best Long-Form Work in French, and received a special citation for the English translation from the Philip K. Dick Award committee in 1993.
It continues to be read and discussed today. I was delighted to find this brief 2010 review at Goodreads from none other than Lynn Abbey.
When I realized this was a post-ecological disaster, matriarchal, communal story with a crypto-Christian overlay, I almost set the book aside. I’m glad I didn’t. Vonarburg put a lot of thought into her world-building and then peoples it with well-meaning, fallible characters… there’s apparently a prequel, The Silent City, which I haven’t been able to track down yet.
Most of the reviews at Goodreads are in French, but you will find the occasional English language commentary, like this one from Ry Herman.
Truly, truly excellent far future SF about changes occurring in a matriarchal society. Complex and spanning years, this is a masterpiece from an author who should be better known in the English-speaking world.
But the best summary I’ve found comes from prolific reviewer William Leight.
In the Mother’s Land features a blurb by Ursula Le Guin, a sure sign of quality, and is rather similar to Le Guin’s “social science fiction” in the way that it invents a society and then watches it change over a period of years. The book follows Lisbei, the protagonist, through her whole life, allowing Vonarburg to introduce her post-apocalyptic future through the eyes of a child…
The society is, as the title suggests, female-dominated, partly because pollution (or something) means that very few males are born, and partly because the dominant religion, a sort of inverted Christianity, blames the downfall from an original utopia (our society today, about which not much is known in this imagined future thanks to a series of catastrophes) on men… Much like Le Guin, Vonarburg excels at inventing and describing her society, bad sides and good, as well as its fissures and fractures, and she does a good job with her characters as well, especially, of course, Lisbei…
As Lisbei slowly finds a place in the world, she loses the beliefs of her childhood and joins a liberalizing political movement that promotes, among other things, an improvement in the status of men. Along the way, we learn a lot about the society and its culture… And though the book is clearly quite feminist in its conception, it’s never a polemic: the bad guys (insofar as there are any) are the ones most closely wedded to the precepts of its non-violent, mother goddess religion, and so the most determined that men should be kept in their place… on the whole it was extremely well done.
Read William’s full review here.
Reluctant Voyagers (Bantam Spectra, March 1995). Cover by Stephen Youll
Reluctant Voyagers, the story of a woman who finds herself unexpectedly traveling between realities, received its first English translation in a Bantam Spectra edition in March 1995. There’s a fine discussion of the novel at Buried in Print.
The early pages of Reluctant Voyagers are not completely foreign; they’re set in Montreal and even if you don’t know the city well enough to know whether the author has messed with the geography, you can imagine the wintry walk… And you can imagine the disorientation Catherine experiences when the streets suddenly seem to slip away from her. It is no longer the city that she knows. Not quite…
Catherine is having trouble remembering the events of the past too. Not just the historical past, but her own personal past, events that she lived through… Over time, however, this memory loss becomes more than irritating. And, as if she needed another reason to feel like she’s going crazy, she starts seeing things — people, even — that others around her cannot …
There are a lot of ideas therein…. Or you can simply read it for Catherine’s story which, despite the amount of detail in the narrative which brings the novel to nearly 500 pages, is quite compelling as she works to unravel the truths and un-truths surrounding her in this strangely-familiar world.
Chase scenes, undercover operations, revolutionary hideouts: it’s like MI-5, but with different accents and secret meetings that might be in alternate dimensions… But enough answers are offered to leave readers satisfied. And it’s clear why so many people make such a fuss of Elizabeth Vonarburg’s fiction.
Reluctant Voyagers was the last of Vonarburg’s novels to be widely distributed in the US. She continues to be translated into English in her home country, however, where the first two novels of her ambitious Tyranaël series were warmly received: Dreams of the Sea (Tesseract Books, December 2003) and A Game of Perfection (Edge Science Fiction, 2005).
Here’s the complete publishing details for the Bantam Spectra Élisabeth Vonarburg.
The Silent City (261 pages, $4.99 in paperback, August 1992) — cover by Oscar Chichoni
In the Mothers’ Land (487 pages, $5.99 in paperback, December 1992) — cover by Oscar Chichoni
Reluctant Voyagers (469 pages, $5.99 in paperback, March 1995) — cover by Stephen Youll
The Silent City contains a 16-page preview of In the Mothers’ Land in the back.
Reluctant Voyagers was reprinted in hardcover by Tesseract Books in 2002. The others have been out of print for over 30 years. There are no digital editions.
See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.
]]>“The Good Food,” by Michael Ezell originally appeared in the 2016 anthology Beyond the Stars: At Galaxy’s Edge. The story feels like a classic science fiction story, placing a single human, his enhanced animal companion, and a computerized ship on an alien planet which has been seeded with plant life and insects in the first stage of a terraforming project.
The planet on which Jensen lands has demonstrated an anomaly. The vegetation around the landing base established by humans has died off, leaving a straight edge not too far from the landing plate in a pattern which could not be natural. However, there is no indication the planet has intelligent life on it.
Although Jensen, as the human, appears to be the commander of the mission, the actual situation isn’t quite as straight forward. Jensen, a former soldier, and Roy, his enhanced dog, are sent out of the ship to explore the region, while the ship’s computer, called Moira, stands ready to analyze any samples they might find that may be related to the anomaly. Their mission goes sideways when they discover a small creature ready to attack both Roy and Jensen, potentially at the head of a larger attack.
Unfortunately, the story not only feels like something that would not have been out of place in the magazines of the 1940s, it also feels like a story that has been told before. Although the specifics of Jensen, Roy, and Moira’s story may be different from earlier tales, the broad strokes are familiar and the story is relatively predictable.
However, plot isn’t everything in a story. Characterization matters and Ezell builds up Jensen’s character quickly in and in swift strokes. Through the character’s interaction with Moira, it becomes clear that as a former soldier, he really isn’t in the right role, even as hired muscle. Despite his training, Jensen’s first instinct is to open fire and he has to stop and reconsider before giving into the reflex. He also seems to have issues with following Moira’s directives, something that seems strange for a professional soldier, but something which may be indicative of a bias against artificial intelligence on his part.
In the end, Jensen’s instincts for reacting to their discoveries may be the right decision, but that comes across more as luck than through any specific actions selected by Jensen, Moira, or even Roy. Each of the three have different reactions to the threats which face them, although only Roy’s and Jensen’s are fully depicted in the story.
Steven H Silver is a twenty-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference six times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.
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Your Shadow Half Remains (Tor Nightfire, February 6, 2024). Cover by David Seidman
Nightfire is Tor’s new horror imprint, and it’s made quite an impact on the field in the the past two years. Some of its releases include the Locus Award-winning What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, Cassandra Khaw’s Stoker nominee The Salt Grows Heavy, and Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey’s The Dead Take the A Train.
Sunny Moraine’s novella Your Shadow Half Remains arrived from Nightfire last month, and while I was browsing Sally Kobe’s booth at Capricon it leaped enthusiastically into my hands.
The Casting the Bones series from Masque Books: Crowflight
(September 15, 2013) and Ravenfall (August 4, 2014). Artist unknown
Sunny’s previous books include Labyrinthian (2015) from Samhain Publishing, and the Casting the Bones series from Masque Books. I haven’t seen much early press about Your Shadow Half Remains, though I did see recently that Publisher’s Weekly called it ”A freaky and masterfully constructed tale… Read this one with the lights on,” and that sounds promising.
Library Journal published a rave review by Becky Spratford last year; here’s an excerpt.
Riley lives alone on the shores of an isolated lake in the home that belonged to her grandparents — that is, before they murdered each other. She lives in a slowly collapsing world, where for the last two years, looking a human in the eye, be it a real person, an image, or even a reflection, will spur them to violence, causing them to kill everyone near them. Then Riley meets Ellis on the road and dares to connect with another person…
Creepy from its first lines, this deceptively quiet roller-coaster of intense unease, palpable emotional trauma, and engrossing menace will appeal to a wide swath of readers.
Your Shadow Half Remains is a slender novella (162 pages) that even I can read in a few days. It’s at the top of my TBR pile. And every time I pass by my night stand it leaps into my hands.
Your Shadow Half Remains was published by Tor Nightfire on February 6, 2024. It is 162 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $11.99 in digital formats. The cover is by David Seidman.
See all our recent coverage of the best new science fiction and fantasy here.
]]>Dungeons & Dragons (USA/Czech Republic, 2000)
Heroic fantasy on the big screen was in a parlous state at the dawn of the 21st century, and anyone whose crystal ball was foggy about the immediate cinematic future could be forgiven for thinking that swords and sorcery films were at their nadir. The Barbarian Boom was long past, Kull the Conqueror had been terrible, the Merlin miniseries was mediocre, and Xena: Warrior Princess had run its course. It was a grim time, and especially if you were a fan of Dungeons & Dragons style adventure, the pickings were slim.
However, though 2001 would bring to the faithful Brotherhood of the Wolf, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Mists of Avalon, and most spectacularly, The Fellowship of the Ring, in the darkness before that dawn, the options were thin gruel or highly spiced but raw meat — as you’ll see in the films we’re covering this time ‘round.
Rating: *
Origin: USA/Czech Republic, 2000
Director: Courtney Solomon
Source: Warner Bros. DVD
There had been attempts to make a feature film based on the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-‘80s, but it took until 2000 for this first D&D movie to finally flop limply onto the world’s movie screens. Along the way, most of the things that could go wrong did, and the result is this genuinely terrible film. You can tell that the filmmakers sincerely tried to make a movie authentic to the game, but because they lacked the time, or the budget, or frankly, the skill, they failed to pull it off, and delivered a feature so awful, and that did so poorly at the box office, that it would be over twenty years before another D&D film achieved a theatrical release.
There’s just so little to recommend this movie. The story is hackneyed, the dialogue is dreadful, the costumes are shiny plastic, the sets are mostly either cheap or bad CGI, the direction is awkward and confusing, and the acting, oh lord, the acting…. D&D has one bankable star in Jeremy Irons (more about him later), but the rest of the actors are rank novices hired because the director didn’t want the audience distracted by overfamiliar faces or some such nonsense, so he cast for nonentities and was entirely successful, possibly the only thing he tried to do that worked out as planned.
D&D, of course, is known for its fantastic creatures, but barring a couple of rubbery hovering beholders, all we get here of the game’s creatures are a few guys in orc suits and far too many bad CGI dragons. At the end there’s a long aerial battle over what looks like Fantasyland from Disney World between squadrons of gold and red dragons and it’s just so embarrassing — it looks like an extended commercial for toy dragon action figures.
Then there’s the tone problem. For the first two-thirds of the film’s run time it’s a wacky slapstick comedy, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mad Wizard, in which a pair of hapless thieves get involved in sorcerous politics because one of them falls for the cute librarian mage whom the endangered empress has entrusted with a hopeless mission. That’s your plot. There are chases, escapes, silly disguises, ridiculous allies, sudden reversals, running jokes, and a lot of just plain running. And then abruptly one of the hapless thieves is killed, giving his life for the Cause, and the whole tone of the film shifts over to grimdark and serious. Which is a tone, let me tell you, that it can in no way support or sustain.
Okay, fine, so it’s a bad movie, there are a lot of bad movies, but you like D&D and would really like a reason to watch this anyway. I am here to oblige you. That reason is none other than the great Shakespearean-trained thespian Jeremy Irons, an actor who’s won nearly every conceivable award for his dramatic art, but who one day woke up to find that he’d signed on to act in this bona fide turkey, playing the part of an insane evil wizard hellbent on fantasy world domination, with a script that would make a high school drama class cringe.
So, what does Jeremy Irons do? Jeremy Irons totally inhabits this terrible role of a lifetime, because when Jeremy Irons is given a cheesy part to play, Jeremy Irons leans in and eats that cheese down to the last crumb. He dives so deep into the cheese that it’s kind of inspiring, reminding one of late-career Basil Rathbone when the great artist still gave it his all, no matter what low-budget claptrap he was chewing the scenery in.
So, there’s your pretext. I hope you’re happy.
The 13th Warrior (USA, 1999)
Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1999
Director: John McTiernan
Source: Touchstone DVD
This is a divisive film: most people either love it or hate it. But I’m not here to pick a side, because though this movie is one steaming hot mess, there are compelling reasons to watch it anyway.
Novelist Michael Crichton had long been a favorite of Hollywood, and after the gigantic success of the film adaptation of his Jurassic Park (1993), he could do no wrong as far as Hollywood was concerned, and Crichton agreed with them. He decided to make a film adapting his 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead, an innovative mash-up of the legendary Saxon tale of Beowulf with the real autobiographical account of the Arab Ahmed ibn Fadlan’s medieval sojourn among the Volga Vikings.
The plot, in brief: Ahmed (Antonio Banderas), an Arab noble, is exiled from Baghdad for an amorous indiscretion and sent north as an “ambassador” to the Bulgars. On the way his caravan is pursued by a band of Tartars, but the mounted raiders back off at the approach along a river of a longship filled with Vikings. Ahmed and his interpreter, Melchisidek (Omar Sharif), take refuge in the Viking camp, where Ahmed is shocked by the violence of the Northmen, who are led by laconic clan chief named Buliwyf, i.e., Beowulf (Vladimir Kulich). Word comes from the far north that the settlement of King Hrothgar is under attack by a monster; an oracle woman says that thirteen warriors led by Buliwyf must go to face this menace, but the thirteenth must be no Northman, so suddenly Ahmed finds himself attached to the band.
This baker’s dozen adventurers arrive at Hrothgar’s realm in the deep north woods to find it under siege by the Wendol, mysterious cannibal tribesmen dressed like animals who attack from the mist. After staving off a major attack on Hrothgar’s village in scenes reminiscent of Seven Samurai, another oracle tells Buliwyf that he and his men must attack the Wendol in their lair, and won’t succeed until they slay both the cannibals’ horned leader and his priestess mother. Though dwindling in number, the Northmen and Ahmed find and infiltrate the Wendol camp, and go on a dungeon crawl through their caves to kill the mother. The result of this is a climactic assault on the town in which Buliwyf faces off against the horrific Wendol leader.
The tale is all told through the viewpoint of Ahmed, who gradually gets to know most of the Norse warriors, though not very well because, frankly, there isn’t much to know: they’re the usual simple cardboard adventurers defined by a repeated mannerism or a weapon specialty. Buliwyf himself, silent and stoic, is more archetype than person, there just isn’t much to him.
There’s a bold use of untranslated speech early in the film that conveys effectively how disoriented Ahmed is among these folk whose speech he doesn’t share, until he surprises them by learning their language, after which the dialogue is conducted in English. Initially disregarded as a weakling, Ahmed also earns the respect of the bluff Northmen by killing their enemies — you know, the usual method — but using his own approach to fighting rather than theirs.
It’s all very manly, with the Norse warriors shouting battle cries and wordless victory roars so you’ll either want to pump your fist or roll your eyes, or possibly both. The movie’s raw meat is the combat scenes, which are frequent, extended, and woefully inconsistent: some of the fights are sharp, clear, and genuinely exciting, but all too many others are dark, confusing, repetitive, and visually messy, and what just happened is rarely satisfactorily explained.
Where the fights do work, they hold up well, and the action scenes have flashes of brilliance; the dungeon crawl is particularly memorable. The one sure thing is that the film is never boring. The cinematography of the scenery, shot in British Columbia, is simply gorgeous, but most of the close-up work with the actors is awful. Banderas does all right with what he’s given, but everyone else just grunts macho quips at him like, “Get stronger!” Sure, bro.
The film was expensive to produce and had a difficult production: Crichton was unhappy with it and eventually took over the direction, spending millions in reshoots that give the final film an erratic, variable quality, a whole that’s less than the sum of its parts. But 13th Warrior is the biggest and most influential Norse adventure film since 1958’s The Vikings, and worth seeing on that basis alone. By Odin, you might even love it — I recommend watching it with a drinking horn full of mead and taking a swig every time you’re tempted to pump your fist.
Where can I watch these movies? I’m glad you asked! Many movies and TV shows are available on disk in DVD or Blu-ray formats, but nowadays we live in a new world of streaming services, more every month it seems. However, it can be hard to find what content will stream in your location, since the market is evolving and global services are a patchwork quilt of rights and availability. I recommend JustWatch.com, a search engine that scans streaming services to find the title of your choice. Give it a try. And if you have a better alternative, let us know.
Previous installments in the Cinema of Swords include:
The Barbarian Boom, Part 7
Avenging Women
Mondo Mifune
Near Misses in the Near East
Banditti!
Zatoichi at Large
Invitation to a Keelhauling
Sequel Debacle
Deuces Wild
Beware of Greeks
Peak ‘90s Wuxia
Ashes of Time
Consider the Rapier
They Seek Him Here…
LAWRENCE ELLSWORTH is busily promoting the Cinema of Swords compilation from Applause Books that was born right here at Black Gate! The volume out now covers swordplay movies up through the ‘80s, but Ellsworth is continuing with new material for a Volume Two and is now working his way up through the 2000s. These later reviews are being published weekly on his new Cinema of Swords Substack blog, at cinemaofswords.substack.com.
Meanwhile, Ellsworth soldiers on at his mega-project of editing and translating new, contemporary English editions of all the works in Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle; the seventh volume, Court of Daggers, is available now as an ebook or trade paperback from Amazon, while the eighth, Shadow of the Bastille, is being published in weekly installments at musketeerscycle.substack.com. His website is swashbucklingadventure.net. Check them out!
(Ellsworth’s secret identity is game designer LAWRENCE SCHICK, who’s been designing role-playing games since the 1970s. He now lives in Dublin, Ireland, and is Principal Narrative Designer for the Dungeons & Dragons videogame Baldur’s Gate 3.)
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The Strange (Saga Press, March 21, 2023). Cover uncredited
I wish I could take credit for the headline of The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit for Nathan Ballingrud’s terrific novel, but according to the author, Karen Jay Fowler came up with it. I hope she won’t mine me stealing it because it is as spot on as any description I could come up with.
The more prosaic version is that The Strange is a Western riff on Ray Bradbury’s vision of Mars, but without the canals. A Mars in an alternate 1930s timeline when interplanetary space travel first began during the Civil War, an oblique reference (among a slew of oblique references to classic SF tropes and personages) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter, an ex-Confederate Barsoom warlord. Just as Bradbury had no interest in explaining how humans could actually exist on Mars sans space suits in a sort of off-world version of 1950s Illinois, or Burroughs how you can get astrally projected from an Arizona cave to Mars, Ballingrud just wants you to suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride.
Annabelle Crisp is the 14 year-old protagonist who, like Mattie Ross in True Grit, sets out on her own to right a wrong to her father when the townspeople and local law enforcement of the New Galveston colony on Mars fail to act. Annabelle’s father runs a diner robbed by desert cultists called the Moth (a reference to Mothra?), whose takings include a voice recording of her mother. The recording is particularly precious to Annabelle and her father because it is the only memento left of her; after their mother returned to Earth to deal with a family emergency, all contact ceased with the home planet for unknown reasons the colonists call “The Silence.”
Annabelle wants the recording back, and if the adults aren’t about to obtain justice for her, she will. Adding urgency to her quest, and her sense of injustice, is when her father is imprisoned for defending himself against several miners from Dig Town ransacking the diner after the initial robbery, killing one of them.
The source for this mayhem isn’t a simple case of frontier lawlessness, but rather a mineral ore that gives the book its title. Prolonged exposure to the Strange, whose properties are somehow used to provision “intelligence” to Earth technologies (called Engines), causes personality disorders… and eventually a green tint to victim eyes. (Allusions here to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and innumerable ghost stories, as well as Bradbury’s concluding story in The Martian Chronicles.)
To recover her mother’s recording, and obtain revenge against those who attacked her father, Annabelle enlists the help of the alcoholic Joe Reilly, who refuses to pilot his spaceship back to Earth to discover the cause of the Silence, and Sally Milkwood, a moonshiner and “carter” (yet another reference to guess who) of black market goods. But her only true companion and ally is Watson (pretty obvious reference there), a robot from the diner programmed primarily to function as a dishwasher. Adventures ensue, along with people turning out differently than they first appear, which is basically what growing up is all about.
Science fiction is for the most the literature of alienation, employing the notion of aliens and alien worlds as a metaphor for humanity’s estrangement as a result of industrialization and technology (the Golden Age of technological worship being the significant exception). In The Strange, Ballingrund employs the steampunk tropes of gears and oil and complicated moving parts that have never seen a microprocessor to depict a stranded world with deteriorating social norms literally grinding to a halt along with its machines.
But that may be reading too much into it. Sure, The Martian Chronicles are cautionary tales about the Cold War. But they are also just fun to read. Perhaps that’s the best reason of all to read The Strange. And to track all the literary allusions to classic SF and Western themes.
David Soyka is one of the founding bloggers at Black Gate. He’s written over 200 articles for us since 2008. His most recent was a review of The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente.
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1) BARKER & LLEWELYN IS AN EXCELLENT SERIES
Will Thomas has written fourteen novels and one short story featuring Sherlock Holmes’ “hated rival upon the Surrey shore” (“Adventure of the Retired Colourman”). Cyrus Barker is an Eastern-trained private inquiry agent. Thomas Llewelyn is his Watson. I had read the first several novels years ago.
Audible has most of them, and I went back to book one, the aptly-titled Some Danger Involved, and am about to start book eight, Hell Bay. I highly recommend this to Holmes, or Victorian detectives, fans.
Book six (Fatal Inquiry), featuring a character from earlier in the series, was my favorite. Until I read book seven (Anatomy of Evil). That one is a full-blown Jack the Ripper novel. Thomas clearly did extensive research. It’s grounded in practicality, not sensationalism.
I have a pretty good Ripper library. I’d like to dive back into that again some day.
I’m going to continue on with this terrific ‘Holmes adjacent’ series. Check it out. And Will is a Solar Pons fan – clearly a man of taste and refinement!
I talked a little about this series once before, in an essay on not starting your story at the very beginning.
2) WHEEL OF TIME IS 100 TIMES BETTER THAN RINGS OF POWER
The Wheel of Time is a massive series, covering fourteen books (including the prequel), and around 10,000 pages. I read it over the course of two decades, so I don’t know it nearly as well as I do The Lord of the Rings (I still dig into Tolkien’s world).
So, as I re-watched season one and started season two, I didn’t recognize every change from the source material, though I think I’m pretty attuned to it (I was kinda bummed they left out The Green Man).
Even with the changes, this has been a solid adaptation. They’ve left the story intact, adjusted some, and visually, it’s terrific. I’m enjoying this. Kate Fleetwood, as Liandrin, is stealing every one of her scenes. She’s superb.
I did a series on Rings of Power, which was a mega-budget fan fic. It did a few things okay, but season one was a massive disappointment, and I don’t care if season two never airs. Wheel of Time is a FAR superior adaptation of a fantasy epic. It’s a shame the WoT folks didn’t get to make RoP. They would have done FAR better. It airs on Amazon, and is worth watching.
3) I’M STILL LOVING GARRETT, PI
In January’s Five Things I Think I Think, I talked about Glen Cook’s Garrett, PI. At loose ends on New Years Day, I decided to re-read book five, Dead Brass Shadows (book four is my favorite in the series; I just picked this one at random). I finished that and moved on to the next one. I’ve now read nine in a row, in just over two months. I started the most recent (and possibly final) book in the series over the weekend.
I have quite enjoyed this re-read. And I’ve got a surprise coming for you Garrett fans. More on that soon. Here’s an A (Black) Gat in the Hand essay I wrote about the series.
4) MYTHOLOGY ROCKS FORTNITE
I play Fortnite with my teen son. I talked about the game here. We both get the battle pass each season and work our way through the quests to get all the rewards. It’s a fun thing we do together. I’m good. He’s better. We actually win about 20% of our Duos games, which is a pretty high rate. I play solo, but he’s the only one I pair up with. We played three games late last night, and won two of them!
There are different themes each season, with different skins (how your character looks, basically). Peter Griffin, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Optimus Prime, Clone Troopers, anime characters, and many more have been used recently. They rolled out a new season this weekend, and for the first time, it’s Greek Mythology. Mt Olympus and Hades are two named locations. And skins included Cerberus, Ares, Hades, Medusa, and Zeus.
Mythology is what got me into fantasy books, and Dungeons and Dragons. The Iliad remains one of my favorite books. I think it’s great that they’re doing Greek gods. And Zeus’ thunderbolts are a sweet weapon! Looking forward to working through the rewards.
5) THE SHERLOCK HOLMES SUBREDDIT IS PRETTY GOOD
I promote my blog stuff on Reddit. Man, Reddit generally makes FB look pleasant. The Lord of the Rings crowd loves to argue and be rude. Mods on Reddit are petty tyrants with no checks on their power. I may give up on it altogether. I don’t need Reddit that badly.
However, I will say, the r/SherlockHolmes subreddit has been pretty cool. I’ve posted a lot of shelfies; some of my old Black Gate posts; and some actual book covers. Folks are polite, and enjoy conversing in the comments. It’s been my favorite group, easily. Hardly anybody leaves a comment solely to disagree.
Five Things I Think I Think (January 2024)
Seven Things I Think I Think (December 2023)
Talking Tolkien: TenThings I Think I Think (August 2023)
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Ten Things I Think I think (August 2023)
5 More Things I Think: March 2023
10 Things I Think I Think: March 2023
Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every summer since.
His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’) and blogs about Holmes and other mystery matters at Almost Holmes.
He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE DEFINITIVE guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’
He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXIII.
He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.
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Dead Noon (Igotshde Productions, 2009), Mad at the Moon (Republic Pictures
Home Video, 1992), and Bullets for the Dead (Visionquest Entertainment, 2015)
I’m sometimes asked why I haven’t got around to watching Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon yet, and that’s because I’m too busy watching this sort of stuff.
Yep. Flaming bullets too.
Zombies, demons etc.
No, ma’am.
Here we are, the first of 20 horror westerns, and we get stuck in with a terrible one. Bookended with narration by Kane Hodder in a ten-gallon hat and oatmeal face pack, this is a deathly dull revenge flick. The story had potential, but the whole endeavour is buried in Boot Hill by terrible production quality, questionable direction choices and rubbish sound. The whole thing has awful interlacing issues too – it’s like watching a film through a video viewfinder.
Off to a bad start.
2/10
Excitement? In this economy?
Moon-induced hairiness.
Almost.
If you like slow burns, this is for you. Mary Stuart Masterson stars as Jenny, a 25-yr-old desperate to find the sort of love she reads about in her French novels, but married off to a scruffy-looking farmer. Things get complicated when it’s really his half-brother whose spurs she wants to jangle, and complicated further still when, about 50 mins in, her husband turns into a semi-werewolf. Shenanigans ensue.
It’s a nice looking film, but slower than a steer with a bum hoof. Oh well.
5/10
Plenty of shootin’
Zombies? Cannibal Lepers? The jury’s out.
A decent effort. Everyone gives it their all in this tale of a ganky-eyed bounty Hunter bringing in a bunch of bandits during an undead uprising. It looks good, albeit a bit clean, and the simple story just gets on with it, tossing in some black humour, guts and mad nuns. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s an ok time, and that’s a win for me when I’m doing these watch projects.
7/10
Eyes of Fire (Elysian Pictures, 1983) and Cowboys vs Samurai vs Werewolves (Uncia Films, 2015)
Some rifle action.
Witches! Demons! Mud people!
I went looking for weird, and I got bonkers. This here is a bit of a cult classic that I must admit I’d never heard of. In the woods of the new frontier, a shifty preacher leads a small flock of followers into the ‘promised land’; actually a witch-infested valley. There things rapidly go downhill, all accompanied by mad visuals and a bizarre soundtrack.
I really feel like this film could be a new favorite — it’s the closest to feeling drunk without touching a drop, and I found myself rewinding a couple of times because I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen. It’s strange, funny and totally out there, and going to the top of my list so far.
9/10
Yes, and katanas.
Werewolf, uncivil folks.
No. The direction, editing, sound, acting and effects are all horrible. A 2015 film shot on a 1999 camcorder. I hate-watched it, and gave it one mark for the title.
1/10
High Moon/Howlers (Copper Kid Productions/Quest Pacifica, 2019),
Grim Prairie Tales (East-West Film Partners, 1990)
Also distributed under the name Howlers.
Yes, and axes.
Werewolf biker gang.
Back to back films featuring cowboys, werewolves and a ninja! Granted, the ninja is only in it for five mins, but what are the odds? Anyhoo, this flick tells that time old story about a gang of werewolves and their ‘slayer’ dying in the Wild West and being resurrected in modern times. ‘Stranger out of time’ shenanigans ensue.
It’s a mixed bag, everyone gave it their all, but the film was hamstrung by a dull subplot about a marriage falling apart, and the werewolf makeups were a strange hybrid of ropey ‘Planet of the Apes’ masks and Michael Jackson’s were-kitty from ‘Thriller’. Chuck in some dodgy CG blood effects, and it’s all a bit meh.
6/10
An honest to god gunfight.
Some supernatural shenanigans.
I’m a sucker for anthologies, and with that love for the genre comes the knowledge that it is very rare for every story to be good.
This is no exception — of the four stories, two interested me, and the other two bored me. The good ones were SO different in tone from the dull ones, both with a couple of outstandingly gonzo moments (for those in the know, I’m referring to the ‘pregnant’ lady and the animated interlude in the gunslinger story). That said, this film gets more than half points, due to the extraordinary wraparound scene featuring Brad Dourif and James Earl Jones. Jones in particular is a force of nature in this flick, and worth the price of admission (surely this phrase will be extinct soon).
This YouTube quality was pretty awful — so try to find it elsewhere if you can.
7/10
Here’s the list of films I’ll be selecting from for this series:
They Wait
Mad at the Moon
Eyes of Fire
Luz: The Flower of Evil
The Wind
Western Religion
The Pale Door
Skinwalker
Gallow Walkers
The Burrowers
Kill or be Killed
Bullets for the Dead
A Vampire’s Tale
Devil’s Deal
West of Hell
Curse of the Undead
Curse of Demon Mountain
Jezebeth 2: Hour of the Gun
The Dead and the Damned
High Moon
Devil Rider
Hell’s Belle
Grimm Prairie Tales
Neil Baker’s last article for us was a review of the game Call of the Sea. Neil spends his days watching dodgy movies, most of them terrible, in the hope that you might be inspired to watch them too. He is often asked why he doesn’t watch ‘proper’ films, and he honestly doesn’t have a good answer. He is an author, illustrator, outdoor educator and owner of April Moon Books (AprilMoonBooks.com).
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World’s Best Science Fiction First Series (Ace Books, 1970). Cover by Jack Gaughan
If you want to understand science fiction, it’s not a bad idea to start by reading Year’s Best volumes. And if you’re going to do that, it’s not a bad idea to start with the World’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, an annual series that began in 1965 and lasted for an amazing 26 volumes. The last of which, The 1990 Annual World’s Best SF, appeared four months before Wollheim’s death at the age of 76.
The series survived both editorial changes and a switch in publishers (from Ace to DAW, in 1972), and was one of the only Year’s Best series to receive multiple paperback reprints. In fact, for collectors like me, its publication history is all rather confounding. Follow along while I try and figure it all out.
[Click images for the Year’s Best sizes.]
World’s Best Science Fiction 1965 and 1966 (Ace Books, 1965/66). Covers: uncredited, and Cosimo Scianna
Let’s start with the basics.
Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr started the series as World Best Science Fiction in 1965, a line of paperback originals for Ace Books, and edited a total of seven volumes together.
1 World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965 by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim
2 World’s Best Science Fiction: 1966 by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim
3 World’s Best Science Fiction: 1967 by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim
4 World’s Best Science Fiction: 1968 by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim
5 World’s Best Science Fiction: 1969 by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim
6 World’s Best Science Fiction: 1970 by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim
7 World’s Best Science Fiction: 1971 by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim
In 1971 Donald Wollheim left Ace and founded DAW Books, and took World’s Best Science Fiction with him. Terry Carr split off at this point as well, starting his own series, The Best Science Fiction of the Year. The first volume appeared from Ballantine Books in 1972; it lasted for 16 volumes, until Carr’s death in 1987.
The other three volumes of the World’s Best Science Fiction reprint series, which
repackaged the 1965-68 volumes with new covers by Jack Gaughan, all released in 1970
Now stay with me, because it gets a little confusing from here.
In 1967 Jack Gaughan became the cover artist for the series; he was replaced two years later with John Schoenherr. In 1970 Wollheim repackaged the first four volumes of World Best Science Fiction, 1965-1968, bringing them back into print with new titles and new covers by Jack Gaughan (see above) so that they’d more closely resemble the current editions.
World’s Best Science Fiction First Series (1965), edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr (1970)
World’s Best Science Fiction Second Series (1966), edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr (1970)
World’s Best Science Fiction Third Series (1967), edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr (1970)
World’s Best Science Fiction Fourth Series (1968), edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr (1970)
To help keep things super confusing, Wollheim re-used Gaughan’s cover for World’s Best Science Fiction 1967 for the reprint edition of World’s Best Science Fiction 1966 (now retitled World’s Best Science Fiction: Second Series), because that’s just the way we did things in the 70s.
The 1967-1972 volumes, published by Ace and DAW. Covers by Jack Gaughan
(67/68), John Schoenherr (69/70), Davis Meltzer (71), and John Schoenherr (72)
Wollheim didn’t abandon the idea of reprints just because he’d changed publishers.
In 1977 Wollheim again repackaged his earlier World’s Best volumes, starting with The 1972 Annual World’s Best SF, his first DAW title. He released one reprint per year for the next nine years, again with new titles and new cover art, and this time putting his name in lights.
Wollheim’s World’s Best SF: Series One (1977)
Wollheim’s World’s Best SF: Series Two (1978)
Wollheim’s World’s Best SF: Series Three (1979)
Wollheim’s World’s Best SF: Series Four (1980)
Wollheim’s World’s Best SF: Series Five (1981)
Wollheim’s World’s Best SF: Series Six (1982)
Wollheim’s World’s Best SF: Series Seven (1983)
Wollheim’s World’s Best SF: Series Eight (1984)
Wollheim’s World’s Best SF: Series Nine (1985)
Wollheim’s co-editor for the DAW volumes, starting with The 1972 Annual World’s Best SF, was Arthur Saha, though Saha never received cover credit.
All nine volumes of Wollheim’s World’s Best Science Fiction reprint series
(DAW Books, 1977-1985). Covers by John Berkey (1), Larry Ortiz (2), Segrelles
(3/4/9), Oliviero Berni (5/8), Bernal (6), and Graham Wildridge (7)
If you’re keeping track, that makes 39 paperback editions of the 26 volumes of the World’s Best Science Fiction volumes. There were also German editions of the first seven volumes published in magazine format (as Science-Fiction-Stories) by Ullstein, and paperback editions of later volumes from Bastei Lübbe.
Here’s the publication record for the nineteen volumes published by DAW.
8 The 1972 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1972)
9 The 1973 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1973)
10 The 1974 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1974)
11 The 1975 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1975)
12 The 1976 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1976)
13 The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1977)
14 The 1978 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1978)
15 The 1979 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1979)
16 The 1980 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1980)
17 The 1981 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1981)
18 The 1982 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1982)
19 The 1983 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1983)
20 The 1984 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1984)
21 The 1985 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1985)
22 The 1986 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1986)
23 The 1987 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1987)
24 The 1988 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1988)
25 The 1989 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1989)
26 The 1990 Annual World’s Best SF by Arthur W. Saha and Donald A. Wollheim (1990)
Arthur Saha made most of the selections, and Wollheim wrote the story introductions, a division of labor which in later years led to the occasional grumbles from Wollheim, such as his infamous swipe at Pat Cadigan’s “Pretty Boy Crossover” (in The 1987 World’s Best SF) for being part of something called ‘cyberpunk,’ which “has something to do with computers.”
Wollheim’s introduction to Pat Cadigan’s “Pretty Boy Crossover”
Why did Wollheim insists on titling his volumes World’s Best SF, despite their heavy American focus?
I think it’s because, at least at the start, he made an effort to include European science fiction. Including, in the first volume, “Vampires Ltd.” by Josef Nesvadba (translated from the Czech) and “What Happened to Sergeant Masuro? by Harry Mulisch (originally published in Dutch in 1957).
I’ve started digging into this legendary series of volumes, beginning with the first, which contains a Change War story by Fritz Leiber, a Federation of Humanity tale by Christopher Anvil, Philip K. Dick’s classic tale “Oh, to Be a Blobel!”, plus stories by John Brunner, Thomas M. Disch, Tom Purdom, William F. Temple, C. C. MacApp, Robert Lory, Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis, and many others.
Some of the magazine sources for stories in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965
Here’s the complete Table of Contents of World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965 (also known as World’s Best Science Fiction First Series).
Introduction by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim
“Greenplace” by Tom Purdom (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1964)
“Men of Good Will” by Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis (Galaxy Magazine, June 1964)
“Bill for Delivery” by Christopher Anvil (Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction, November 1964)
“Four Brands of Impossible” by Norman Kagan (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1964)
“A Niche in Time” by William F. Temple (Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction, May 1964)
“Sea Wrack” by Edward Jesby (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1964)
“For Every Action” by C. C. MacApp (Amazing Stories, May 1964)
“Vampires Ltd.” by Josef Nesvadba (Vampires Ltd., 1964)
“The Last Lonely Man” by John Brunner (New Worlds SF, May-June 1964)
“The Star Party” by Robert Lory (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1964)
“The Weather in the Underworld” by Colin Free (Squire, June 1965)
“Oh, to Be a Blobel!” by Philip K. Dick (Galaxy Magazine, February 1964)
“The Unremembered” by Edward Mackin (New Worlds Science Fiction, March 1964)
“What Happened to Sergeant Masuro?” by Harry Mulisch (De versierde mens, 1957)
“Now Is Forever” by Thomas M. Disch (Amazing Stories, March 1964)
“The Competitors” by Jack B. Lawson (If, January 1964)
“When the Change-Winds Blow” by Fritz Leiber (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1964)
Interestingly, this volume doesn’t contain any of the stories that made the Hugo ballot in 1965. There were only three:
“Soldier, Ask Not,” Gordon R. Dickson
“Once a Cop,” Rick Raphael
“Little Dog Gone,” Robert F. Young
Nebula Awards were not give out until the following year, 1966.
The final volume: The 1990 Annual World’s Best SF (DAW, July 1990). Cover by Jim Burns
World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965 was originally published in 1965, and republished as World’s Best Science Fiction First Series in 1970. The latter version is 288 pages, priced at $0.95. The original cover was uncredited; the reprint was by Jack Gaughan. It has been out of print for 54 years, and there is no digital edition.
Our previous coverage of books in the World’s Best SF series includes:
The 1975 World’s Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim (2018)
The 1987 Annual World’s Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha (2023)
The 1989 Annual World’s Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim with Arthur W. Saha (2021)
And our coverage of Donald A. Wollheim includes:
Donald A. Wollheim and the Death of the Future (2023)
Swordsmen in the Sky, edited by Donald A. Wollheim (2021)
The Macabre Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim (2020)
Would You Spend $44 on a Collection of 30 Vintage DAW Paperbacks? (2021)
The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Donald A. Wollheim by Steven H Silver (2019)
Birthday Reviews: Donald A. Wollheim’s “Blueprint” by Steven H Silver (2018)
Rich Horton on The Earth in Peril, edited by Donald A. Wollheim (2017)
The Editor As Author: Donald A. Wollheim’s The Secret of the Ninth Planet by Violette Malan (2014)
The Ultimate Invader edited by Donald Wollheim (2014)
Tales of Outer Space, edited by Donald A. Wollheim (2013)
Kirkus Looks at Donald A. Wollheim and the Ace Double (2013)
See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.
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