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Year: 2012

Vintage Treasures: Into the Aether, by Richard A. Lupoff

Vintage Treasures: Into the Aether, by Richard A. Lupoff

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into-the-aetherWhew. What a week. About two hours ago I returned from Canada, where my family celebrated my mother’s 75th birthday on the shores of Lake Huron. It was great to see everyone again, even if it did mean sixteen hours of driving — and writing my last few blog articles in advance, so I could schedule them for publication while I was on the road.

Now that I’m back, I’m pretty tuckered. All I want to do is curl up next to a window, watch the wind and the rain, and read a good book. I’m not up to any of the imposing fat fantasies that pass for novels these days, and as I made a pass through my library, my hand alighted on a slender paperback from 1974 with an enticing Frazetta cover: Richard A. Lupoff’s Into the Aether.

Subtitled “Being the Adventures of Professor Thintwhistle and His Incredible Aether Flyer on the Moon,” it looks like just the kind of fantasy romp I need tonight. Here’s the enticing text on the back cover:

When the ‘Chester A. Arthur’, the world’s first and only coal/steam/paddlewheel-propelled spaceship rose into the skies over Buffalo Falls, Pa., who would have expected what followed?

Will Professor Thintwhistle and his crew be able to return to earth? Will Miss Taphammer ever find them? Will Jefferson Jackson Clay’s foul plot succeed? And what of the King of the Cats?

Find the answers to these and more thrilling questions in Into the Aether.

Richard A. Lupoff was fairly respected among my circle of discerning science fiction readers when I first purchased it, lo those many decades ago. His most popular novel was probably Sandworld, featuring as it did a desert planet and alien vampires, but his sword & sorcery epic Sword of the Demon was also highly regarded. I’ve never had a chance to read Into the Aether though, and it sounds like a lot of fun.

One of the definite rewards of having a library is that no purchase is ever truly wasted. I’m not sure precisely how long this book has been patiently waiting on my shelves, but for the next few hours I expect to be happily transported back to 1974. And from there, on to the moon.

Into the Aether was published in January 1974 by Dell. It is 220 pages in paperback, with an original cover price of 95 cents.

John Myers Myers, Silverlock, and the Commonwealth of Letters

John Myers Myers, Silverlock, and the Commonwealth of Letters

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SilverlockIt’s been said that this is the age of the mash-up: of art formed from the fusion of other works of art. A film like The Avengers blends together characters from five other movies. Fan-fiction interrogates texts we thought we knew, crossing characters from one tale over into another. At an extreme, a work like Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen imagines a world where every character derives from some other source, comes from some other story; imagines a world where all stories overlap and so make a strange collective setting. In fact, though, this is really nothing new. Crossovers, it has been said, date back to Homer writing of heroes coming together to fight the Trojan War. And League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style mash-ups have precedents as well; I have not read Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld books, nor have I read John Kendrick Bangs’ Associated Shades novels, which date back to the 1890s, but I have read John Myers Myers’ 1949 novel Silverlock, and came away from it with a few thoughts.

Silverlock imagines a Commonwealth of Letters inhabited by the world’s great fictional characters. Into this Commonwealth comes one A. Clarence Shandon, gifted with a white streak in his hair from which he’s nicknamed ‘Silverlock.’ A former business student, Shandon’s completely ignorant of books and literature, so does not fully realise into what sort of land he has fallen: a land where every character, every name, comes from fiction or mythology. The book follows Shandon through the Commonwealth, as he is forced to learn and grow in the course of a three-part journey.

The book is greatly beloved by some. My copy has essays by Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle praising it to the skies. For myself, I enjoyed it, with reservations. It’s a fun book, but I couldn’t help but feel that Myers bit off more than he could chew — or, perhaps, that the idea was setting up greater expectations (as it were) than he or anybody could fulfill. Still, the book did seem to me to be worth writing about, because whether or not it’s wholly successful in itself, it raises a host of interesting questions about the nature of fictional characters, and how they work, and how we read them, and how these things may change in time.

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Boxed Set of the Year: American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe

Boxed Set of the Year: American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by Gary K. Wolfe

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american-science-fictionWe’re lucky enough to receive a lot of review books here at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters. Having the latest fantasy and SF novels arrive at our door before they’re available in stores never gets old, let me tell you.

Of course, cataloging them all and dropping them in the mail for our trusted circle of reviewers gets a little routine after a while. But it’s worth it for those special titles that come in once or twice a month, the ones you drop everything to gawk at. I’ve been a blogger for 16 years, and a publisher and editor for over a decade, but at heart I’m still a fanboy. And every month there’s at least one new book that proves it.

And then there are those special items that come in once or twice a year that you know that you’re not going to bother cataloging or telling the reviewers about. Because you’re never going to part with it. Such a treasure arrived a few weeks ago.

I’m talking about American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, a two-volume set published by The Library of America and edited by Gary K. Wolfe. If I were stranded on a desert island tomorrow, this is the one item I would bring. For one thing, it’s big enough to practically be a life raft.

But just don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Western Civilization’s finest Arbiter of Taste, the distinguished Mr. James Enge, had to say on Wednesday:

Wow. Fritz Leiber, Leigh Brackett, Pohl & Kornbluth, Blish, Heinlein, Matheson, Bester, Sturgeon, and Burdys — all swept into the Library of America, and in appropriately lurid covers, too. Overdue, but somehow I never thought I’d see it.

Indeed. American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s is a gorgeous set of volumes collecting the most essential SF of perhaps the most important decade in the history of the genre.

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Dredd Sentences You to a Bloody Good Time

Dredd Sentences You to a Bloody Good Time

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dredd2012posterThe Charge: Attempting to re-start a film franchise about a classic comic book character.

The Verdict: Guilty.

The Sentence: Director is hereby ordered to make more Judge Dredd Movies.

Any Last Words: I am the law.

The upcoming re-make of RoboCop now feels even more unnecessary than it did before. Dredd has just handed us an over-the-top violent buddy cop SF flick that fills up that niche for the next year, maybe two. Dredd is an old-style Paul Verhoeven film in feel, although missing much of his satirical glee, and hits perfect for a September action movie, trading in any “mainstream” credentials for hard-R blood and guts on a narrow budget. It’s a wet blast for action fans and dark SF junkies.

You may recall a similar film, Judge Dredd, from 1995, which starred Sylvester Stallone as the dispenser of justice in the fallen future. Based on the character created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra that appeared originally in the UK anthology magazine 2000 AD, the Stallone movie was a big-scale epic aiming for broad appeal to become a summer blockbuster, hence the inclusion of a comic sidekick played by Rob Schneider and the sanding away at the harsher elements of the setting. Because of Stallone’s celebrity status, he spent much of the film without the Judge’s eye-shielding helmet on, which the character never removes in the comics. I haven’t seen Judge Dredd ’95 since it was in theaters, but I do recall enjoying it.

I can’t imagine I would feel the same way about Stallone’s colorful but silly film if I watched it today, and this new take on Wagner and Ezquerra’s character has crushed any wish to revisit it. Costing a tight $45 million (pocket change among today’s blockbusters), the British/South African production Dredd sticks closer to source material and ditches any compromise for the general audience: it is authentically brutal dystopian action that works on the simple plane of crunchy ultra-violence.

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New Treasures: Cult Magazines: A to Z

New Treasures: Cult Magazines: A to Z

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cult-magazine-atozYou get to meet a lot of great people at science fiction conventions. For some, the draw is the Featured Guests, and it’s certainly cool to meet Neil Gaimen, Pat Rothfuss, John Scalzi, Connie Willis, and other top-selling authors.

For me though, the true delights are in meeting exciting writers and artists I’m not always familiar with. A few years ago, as we were setting up our booth at Dragon*Con, author Rob Thurman, who had the booth next to us, wandered over and introduced herself. She turned out to be extremely cool and delightfully entertaining, and when I finally staggered home, bone weary from five days in Atlanta, I dropped into my big green chair with one of her Cal Leandros novels. If it hadn’t been for lucky booth placement, I might never have discovered what an entertaining writer she was.

The same thing happened at Worldcon in Chicago two weeks ago. During the rare slow moments in the Dealers’ Room, I was able to wander a bit and check out the nearby booths. I discovered to my surprise that we were next to Nonstop Press — publishers of Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010, The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, and Cult Magazines: A to Z.

Nonstop’s Emshwiller: Infinity x Two: The Art & Life of Ed & Carol Emshwiller, by Luis Ortiz, is one of my favorite art books. The distinguished Mr. Ortiz was in the booth, and I was able to introduce myself. He had several intriguing new titles on display and — keeping a wary eye on the empty Black Gate booth — I was able to peek at them.

My eye was drawn immediately to Outermost: Life + Art of Jack Gaughan, a beautiful 176-page hardcover packed with over 500 images, many familiar from countless Ace and DAW paperback covers of the 60s and 70s. Over lunch, Rich Horton had talked about Robert Silverberg’s captivating memoir of writing SF in the 50s, Other Spaces, Other Times: A Life Spent in the Future, and there it was. I couldn’t resist Damien Broderick & Paul Di Filippo’s entertaining Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels – 1985-2010 either.

But the most fascinating book on the table, by a considerable margin, was Cult Magazines: A to Z, edited by Earl Kemp and Luis Ortiz, a gorgeous oversized softcover jam packed with articles and full-color pictures of hundreds of pulp, horror, science fiction, fantasy, comic, monster mags and men’s magazines published between 1925 and 1990.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Mask of Fu Manchu – Part Two

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Mask of Fu Manchu – Part Two

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mask-of-fu-manchu1roh_fu5_djSax Rohmer’s The Mask of Fu Manchu was originally serialized in Collier’s from May 7 to July 23, 1932. It was published in book form later that year by Doubleday in the US and the following year by Cassell in the UK. It became the most successful book in the series thanks to MGM’s cult classic film version, starring Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy, that made it into theaters later that same year.

The second part of the book sees Sir Denis Nayland Smith of British Intelligence, the renowned archaeologist Sir Lionel Barton, his foreman (and the book’s narrator) Shan Greville, and the expedition’s photographer Rima Barton (Sir Lionel’s niece and Shan’s fiancée) make their way from Ispahan to Cairo, where they are reunited with Dr. Petrie, Sir Denis’s oldest friend (and the narrator of the first three books in the series). Believing that Dr. Fu Manchu is behind the El Mokanna uprising that has already spread to Egypt, Petrie is relieved that his wife is safely visiting her in-laws in Surrey at present and out of harm’s way.

While Petrie drives the group into town, an incident occurs where it appears Petrie has struck a pedestrian. An angry mob, resentful of the British colonialists, soon gathers. While Petrie examines the victim and concludes the man had been dead three hours before his corpse was pushed in front of Petrie’s car, Sir Lionel is nearly abducted. The aim of the accident was to get at the large trunk he carries with him, containing the relics of El Mokanna’s tomb from his recent excavation in Persia. The timely arrival of the colonial police is all that saves them from the enraged mob.

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Goth Chick News: The Grass May Be Greener Over There, Because That’s Where the Bodies Are Buried

Goth Chick News: The Grass May Be Greener Over There, Because That’s Where the Bodies Are Buried

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image0041As you know from last week, we here at Goth Chick News are very busy relishing the many tasty offerings that come along with the season.

In the Midwest, haunted attractions are dominating the GroupOn offerings, temporary Halloween stores have popped up in every vacant strip mall store-front with Midnight Syndicate music wafting out of their doors and even our friends over at Gorilla Tango Burlesque have gotten into the act with their latest show Boobs of the Dead.

Ah the season… no one can resist it.

From the West Coast, we are about to be smothered under a virtual onslaught of new holiday (i.e. scary) films including Frankenweenie, V/H/S, Sinister and…you must have seen this coming, Paranormal Activity 4.

So it was only a matter of time before the East Coast weighed in.

And there it was.

I just knew the New York-based team at Wunderkind PR wouldn’t let the season pass without gifting me a new horror offering, and considering this might well be the very last season ever (being it is 2012 and all), they really outdid themselves.

Instead of introducing me to a new Master of Horror, they introduced a new Mistress – and about time as well.

Ania Ahlborn, author of The Neighbors.

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Cynthia Ward Reviews The Gods of Opar

Cynthia Ward Reviews The Gods of Opar

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farmer08_bGods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa
Philip José Farmer & Christopher Paul Carey
Subterranean Press  (576 pp, $65.00 Limited Edition Hardcover, $45.00 Trade Edition Hardcover)
Reviewed by Cynthia Ward

Once upon a time, in a lost civilization known as West Germany, the Kreuzberg Kaserne U.S. Army Base let fifth graders leave school grounds at lunchtime. Every week, I crossed the street to the little base bookstore. In the late winter of 1972, I bought the first DC Comics issue (#207) of “Tarzan of the Apes” because I wanted to learn how the heck a human being ended up living with apes. When the writer/artist, the late, much-lamented Joe Kubert, ended his adaptation with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s original cliffhanger, I read Burroughs’s sequel, The Return of Tarzan, to finish the origin story. Then I found myself devouring every other Burroughs book reprinted in the early 1970s.

I couldn’t have been the decade’s only new Burroughs fan, because by the mid-1970s, his estate had authorized two different Tarzan-related series by other authors: the Bunduki novels by J.T. Edson and the Ancient Opar novels by Philip José Farmer. Both series produced a novel or two and then, as far as I knew, ended. The tie-in titles went out of print, their copyright was probably owned or controlled by the Burroughs estate, and Philip José Farmer died in 2009. I figured none of these books would ever see another reprint.

I figured wrong, because Subterranean Press has just released Gods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa, which is an omnibus of the two Ancient Opar novels by Philip José Farmer – Hadon of Ancient Opar (1974) and Flight to Opar (1976) – together with a third, new novel in the series, The Song of Kwasin, by Philip José Farmer and Christopher Paul Carey (Black Gate recently ran essays from Carey about the history of his remarkable collaboration with Farmer, and his discussion of Farmer’s ambitious creation, the lost civilization of Khokarsa.)

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Meeting Them Halfway

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Meeting Them Halfway

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eragon-coverThe new school year has brought me a fresh crop of tutoring students, which means I get to ask one of my favorite questions: What do you read when nobody’s making you read anything? In the nine years since I left the classroom and started making house calls, almost all my students have named fantasy as their favorite genre.

Not this year.

Mystery won’t be too big a stretch, especially since my mystery mavens have a taste for Poe. But what on earth will I do for my new kid who only truly enjoys sports biographies? Eventually, after I’ve earned his trust, I might be able to entice him to stretch his taste.

Meanwhile, here I am staring Tim Tebow’s memoir in the face, trying to stretch my taste to meet the kid’s. I suspect my Scarlet Letter trick would break down if I tried to read a football memoir as a failed fantasy novel.

Oh, man. What I wouldn’t give to face the Eragon quandary again.

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Spiritualism during the American Civil War

Spiritualism during the American Civil War

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a-fine-likenessSpiritualism was well established by the time the Civil War started. As the death toll mounted — a new estimate puts the body count at 750,000 — spiritualists enjoyed ever-greater demand for their “services.”

When you consider that the 1860 census showed only 31 million people living in the U.S., pretty much everyone had a reason to go to one. The Banner of Light newspaper ran a column with messages from dead soldiers of both armies channeled through a Mrs. J.H. Conant. One such message said,

As a favor of you today, that you will inform my father, Nathaniel Thompson of Montgomery, Alabama, if possible, of my decease. Tell him I died… eight days ago, happy and resigned.

Séances became popular with all social classes and even Abraham Lincoln attended a few hosted by the medium Nettie Colburn, a society favorite in Washington, D.C. The details of these meetings are hazy, but from what we know he went with his wife Mary Todd Lincoln, who grieved over the deaths of two of her young sons. The President may have gone along just to humor her. Apparently he found séances entertaining, once reportedly sitting on a piano with several soldiers as it levitated into the air.

It might seem strange that the President of the United States would engage in such activities, but his experiences were more the rule than the exception. Spiritualism was hugely popular with upper and middle class whites. Less is known about the working class or black experience with the Spiritualist movement during the Civil War, as there is little written record.

In my Civil War novel, A Fine Likeness, Union Captain Richard Addison visits a medium in order to speak to his son, who was killed at Vicksburg.

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