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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You Can’t Handle the Tooth, Part II

You Can’t Handle the Tooth, Part II

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Tsui Hark’s Vampire Hunters (Film Workshop, 2002)

20 vampire films, all first time watches for me.

Come on — sink ’em in.

Tsui Hark’s Vampire Hunters (AKA The Era of Vampires) (2002) – Prime

The original title is Era of Vampires, but for the North American release we end up with a spectacular bit of bait and switch trickery. Anyone who knows Tsui Hark’s work would be excited, after all, he gave us Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain and the Once Upon a Time in China series — but we have been fooled. He produced this film, and wrote the story, but the director is Wellson Chin, better known for romantic comedies. For those of you who don’t know what this means, imagine going to see Steven Spielberg’s Jaws: The Legend Returns, and it’s directed by McG.

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Tor Double #9: Isaac Asimov’s The Ugly LIttle Boy and Theodore Sturgeon’s The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff

Tor Double #9: Isaac Asimov’s The Ugly LIttle Boy and Theodore Sturgeon’s The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff

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Cover for The Ugly Little Boy by Alan Gutierrez
Cover for The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff by Carol Russo
The ninth Tor Double collects novellas by Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon, the only entries by either author. The Asimov’s story is The Ugly Little Boy and Sturgeon offers the oddly titled The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff. This volume is the first to include two stories that did not win, or even receive a nomination, for any awards. Leigh Brackett’s story in the previous volume wound up winning the 2020 Retro Hugo Award.

Theodore Sturgeon’s The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff was originally published in F&SF in November, 1955. The strange title is entirely fitting for the strange story Sturgeon has to tell. Just as two of the words in the title are framed by brackets, the story has a science fictional device framing it, in the form of a report by two aliens visiting Earth. In their report, which partly looks at whether or not “Synapse Beta sub Sixteen” exists in humans (and whether the species can survive without it), but also serves as an indictment of one of aliens by the other, the aliens set words in brackets when there is no exact English equivalent for what they are attempting to say.

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A Kind Heart and the Right Sort of Hands: Carbonel, the King of the Cats by Barbara Sleigh

A Kind Heart and the Right Sort of Hands: Carbonel, the King of the Cats by Barbara Sleigh

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Carbonel the King of the Cats by Barbara Sleigh (Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1957). Illustrated by V.H. Drummond

Over the past few years, I’ve started tracking down books I read as a child and still remember, to see what I think of them now. Some of them I’ve had to buy; but I live close to a university library, which still has others on its shelves. I just reread Barbara Sleigh’s Carbonel, the King of the Cats (illustrated by V.H. Drummond), originally published 1955, and enjoyed it enough to think it deserves a review.

Sleigh was clearly an aelurophile; this book is dedicated to one cat and to the shades of four others. I’m pleased that its feline hero, Carbonel, is a black cat (as his name suggests!) — a breed that doesn’t get as much love as it deserves. He has very convincing catlike manners, mixing condescension, sarcasm, and occasional affection. At the same time, he fits one of the classic story formulas, being a lost heir of royal birth, with a title that he hopes to reclaim.

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