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Year: 2016

March Short Story Roundup

March Short Story Roundup

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ssm50March has come and gone and now it’s time for the short story roundup. It was a nice month for short swords & sorcery storytelling. Not a spectacular month, but a nice one.

I’ll start with Curtis Ellet’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Issue #50. Now in its fifth year, SSM, like most low-paying publications, is a hit-or-miss proposition for readers. Both of #50’s stories are hits.

“The Altar of the Toad” by Davide Mana is a simple and solid story with just enough characterization, world building, and action to serve as a perfect example of the minimum of what I want from the genre. I don’t need every S&S story to be a staggeringly brilliant literary achievement, only for it to take me away from the blacktop and the sounds of honking horns for a little while.

Aculeo, an ex-legionary, and Amunet, an Egyptian sorceress, make a tremendous mistake when they respond to a plea for help from a blind woman:

“I prayed for delivery,” she said, her head tilted to one side. A strand of stringy hair had come loose from her coif, and brushed her wrinkled cheek as she spoke. “I prayed for warriors, to deliver my daughter from the mouth of the Toad.”

In this genre that sort of request is bound to bring trouble. It does, and with more than a hint of Lovecraft Mythos terrors. Even though there are plenty of intimations that “Altar” is part of a larger narrative, it stands perfectly well on its own, something I prize highly. Mana has self-published several other stories of Aculeo and Amunet and I am very curious how they stack up against this one.

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Small-Scale Epic Childhood: Memories of Playing at the Cabin on the Mogollon Rim

Small-Scale Epic Childhood: Memories of Playing at the Cabin on the Mogollon Rim

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Mogollon-960x371Some of my fondest memories are days spent at my Nan and Grandad’s cabin in Heber, Arizona, up on the Mogollon Rim nestled in the largest ponderosa pine forest on the continent. Surrounded by that fantastic landscape, it was easy to let one’s imagination run as free as the Mogollon Monster…

The Woodpile

The “woodpile” behind my Nan and Grandad’s cabin was mostly dirt, left over from when part of the lot was first cleared to make way for the trailer (the cabin was a large trailer home, actually, with a deck built on). The wood came from the pine trees that had been cut down, their trunks buried under the heaping dirt mound, giving the woodpile its foundation and shape.

It wasn’t so big, really, but to my cousins and me it was our own private mountain fortress. How many times did we flop down on it for cover as Injuns shot arrows at us, and then return fire over its crest with our wood-knot guns? Or, other times, the wood-knots were machine guns and we were out there fighting Nazis.

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Clarkesworld 115 Now Available

Clarkesworld 115 Now Available

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Clarkesworld 115-smallTangent Online is, as usual, more on top of things than I am. Their review of the latest issue of Clarkesworld magazine was posted yesterday, before I’d even had a chance to look at this month’s cover. Reviewer Jason McGregor does a fine job of writing intriguing summaries for each story (a subtle art, and I know that from experience.) Here’s his summary of “Touring with the Alien” by Carolyn Ives Gilman.

Avery is a woman with something in her past which leads her to a strange and rootless life, so she is able to go on a journey at a moment’s notice when an employer calls her with a strange job. Alien artifacts have appeared all over North America (why just North America?) and humans who may be abductees eventually appear from them. Avery is to drive one of these, and an alien, to St. Louis. Along the way, she reflects on her life (ultimately revealing the great tragedy of her life, which the reader suspected in a general way), her strange companions, the nature of consciousness, and makes a decision with enormous consequences.

Read his complete review here.

Clarkesworld #115 has four new stories by Carolyn Ives Gilman, Chen Qiufan, Gregory Feeley, and Sara Saab, and two reprints by Garth Nix and Elizabeth Hand.

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New Treasures: Great Ghost Stories: 101 Terrifying Tales, Compiled by Stefan Dziemianowicz

New Treasures: Great Ghost Stories: 101 Terrifying Tales, Compiled by Stefan Dziemianowicz

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Great Ghost Stories 101 Terrifying Tales-smallFall River Press is Barnes & Noble’s discount hardcover publisher. If you’ve ever visited a B&N superstore, you’ve likely seen dozens of their books piled near the check-out aisles. They specialize in low-cost editions of authors in the public domain, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, Washington Irving, and many others. They’re notable chiefly because their books are a great value, and also because you can’t find them on Amazon.com.

Stefan Dziemianowicz has edited more than 50 horror, mystery, and SF anthologies, many for Fall River — including The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: A Collection of Victorian Detective Tales, and Penny Dreadfuls: Sensational Tales of Terror. His latest is Great Ghost Stories: 101 Terrifying Tales, a nearly 700-page compilation of stories by Lovecraft, M.R. James, E.F. Benson, Jules Verne, Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, and 95 others.

Ghosts! They come in all shapes and sizes, all genders and species, and they have manifold reasons for manifesting — or, as is sometimes the case, not manifesting. For more than two centuries ghosts have haunted the imaginations of writers around the world, who have chronicled their exploits with a vividness and zeal that is just a little bit incongruous for entities whose relative lack of material substance leads many among us to question their existence.

Great Ghost Stories pays tribute to the long literary legacy of the ghost story by gathering together in one volume 101 of the best short ghost stories of all time. Here you will find ghosts of virtually every stripe and semblance: ghosts who seek revenge against the living, ghosts who dutifully keep appointments made while their hosts were still alive, ghosts who appear to convince skeptics of their existence, and even ghosts who don’t know that they’re ghosts. Some of the ghosts depicted here are helpful, while others are horrifyingly malevolent. Some have a disconcerting physicality — for example, the phantom limb whose owner claims committed the murder that he’s accused of. Others are so insubstantial — among them the lingering influence of a suicide that imbues a boarding house room — that their power over the living seems completely out of proportion.

The stories collected in this volume show the great variety of ghostly experience as conceived by some of the greatest weird fiction writers of all time. You don’t have to believe in ghosts to enjoy these stories–but you dismiss their power to terrify you at your own peril.

Great Ghost Stories: 101 Terrifying Tales was published by Fall River Press on March 18, 2016. It is 689 pages, priced at $7.98 in hardcover — less than the price of a paperback! The jacket was created by The Book Designers. It’s available at your local B&N store, and online at B&N.com.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: John Cleese as Holmes – Take One

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: John Cleese as Holmes – Take One

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Cleese_ElementaryJohn Cleese is best known, of course, as the sardonic Q opposite Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond in Die Another Day. Though not as well remembered, he also played a key role in the British comedy troupe, Monty Python.

I’m kidding!

On January 18, 1973, the final episode of Python’s third season aired. It was Cleese’s last episode with the group, which would continue on for one more season. That very same same day, Cleese’s next project aired – Comedy Playhouse Presents: Elementary, My Dear Watson. It was produced by Barry Took, who had brought the Python members together.

I’m going to tackle the Achilles heel (really, it’s more like the entire torso) of this show, the plot: or rather, the lack of one. It’s barely a story. Try to stick with me, and no, I’m not leaving things out: it really goes like this…

The show opens in a room full of dead lawyers, slumped over their desks, each with a knife in the back.  Some would say that’s a pretty good start, but let’s stay focused. Thus the show’s subtitle, The Strange Case of the Dead Solicitors. A policeman and a secretary exchange what are intended to be witty comments, which immediately brings the lame laugh track to the viewer’s attention. This is not the most robust laugh track you’ll come across.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Multiple Personalities of Omniscient 3rd Person: Spotlight on “Head-Hopper”

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Multiple Personalities of Omniscient 3rd Person: Spotlight on “Head-Hopper”

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lighthouse

This is part 8 in the Choosing Your Narrative Point of View Series

Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, does a brilliant job with our next POV style:

  1. Head-Hopper

If you’ve not read her novel, I urge you to do so. I also urge you to read it aloud, even if you’re sitting outside at a café, which I did a few summers ago. The book is graced with many long, complex sentences that loop and flow, and sometimes change point of view from one clause to the next. Reading it out loud helps the brain make sense of the phrases and clauses in a way that eyes-only reading can’t manage as well. When done well, as Ms. Woolf did, it is a brilliant writing stratagem. But it works best in stories where there is very little physical plot. The conflict comes mainly from the contrast of how different characters perceive the same moment, and in the shifting emotions of characters.

Which means, generally, it is not a good point of view choice for action-packed genre stories.

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Vintage Treasures: The Demon Breed by James H. Schmitz

Vintage Treasures: The Demon Breed by James H. Schmitz

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The Demon Breed-small The Demon Breed-back-small

Today’s Vintage Treasure is The Demon Breed, a 1979 Ace paperback by James H. Schmitz, which I bought the year it came out. Over the next few decades Schmitz would become one of my favorite SF short story writers, with delightful tales such as “The Second Night of Summer” (which I read in Gardner Dozois’s terrific anthology The Good Old Stuff), “Grandpa,” the Nebula nominee “Balanced Ecology,” and many others.

But in 1979 I was a fifteen year-old teenager, haunting the W.H. Smith on Sparks Street in Ottawa every Saturday, and I’d never heard of James H. Schmitz. But I knew what a bikini was. And Bob Adragna’s eye-catching cover, featuring special field agent Nile Etland and her otter companion crossing the floating atoll on the ocean world of Nandy-Cline as two sinister Parahuan observe from behind, spoke to my very soul. On the back of the book Andre Norton said something about a “detailed alien background” and “could not put it down,” but who paid attention to that? That cover told me everything I needed to know in two seconds. Bikinis, blasters, and bug-eyed monsters? Sold.

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Watching the Prince of Darkness Do His Work: Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Watching the Prince of Darkness Do His Work: Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

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Hard to be a God-small Hard to be a God-back-small

Throughout much of the staggering medieval fantasy Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the characters live as actors. Don Rumata, the protagonist, acts as an arrogant nobleman in order to conceal his true identity. In reality, he is a scientist visiting the distant planet of Arkanar from Russia.

Arkanar has halted its development in the Middle Ages. As a consequence of an evil overlord’s actions, the planet has descended into hellish chaos. Though he lives as a nobleman with all the power the fragile planet can offer, Don Rumata can do nothing but watch the Prince of Darkness at work from on high, as would a God.

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Future Treasures: Flamecaster by Cinda Williams Chima

Future Treasures: Flamecaster by Cinda Williams Chima

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Flamecaster-smallCinda Williams Chima is the author of two previous series that made her a New York Times bestselling writer: Heir Chronicles and Seven Realms. Her latest novel, Flamecaster, the opening volume in the four-volume Shattered Realms series, returns to the world of Seven Realms to tell the tale of the next generation.

Flamecaster introduces Ash, a trained healer with a powerful magical gift, and Jenna, an independent girl abandoned at birth who finds herself hunted by the King’s Guard because of a strange magemark on the back of her neck. Shattered Realms stands alone, and doesn’t require knowledge of the previous volumes to fully enjoy.

Adrian sul’Han, known as Ash, is a powerful healer with a gift of magic – and a thirst for revenge. The son of the queen of the Fells, Ash is forced into hiding after a series of murders throws the queendom into chaos. Now Ash is closer than he’s ever been to killing the man responsible, the cruel king of Arden. As a healer, can he use his powers not to save a life but to take it?

Jenna Bandelow lives a reckless as a spy and saboteur, striking back against the king. She has been warned that the mysterious magemark on the back of her neck would one day make her a target, but she never believed in the curse… until the King’s Guard launches a relentless search for a girl with a mark like hers. Jenna doesn’t know why she’s being hunted. She only knows that she can’t get caught.

In a twist of fate, Ash’s and Jenna’s paths collide in Arden, where chilling threats and dark magic abound. Ultimately, they’ll come to recue each other in ways they cannot yet imagine.

Flamecaster will be published by HarperTeen on April 5, 2016. It 536 pages, priced at $18.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition.

Otto Binder on H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard

Otto Binder on H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard

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Weird Tales December 1936-small

In late December 1935, science fiction author Otto Binder moved from Chicago to NYC to represent Otis Adelbert Kline’s literary agency. Among the authors he represented for Kline’s agency was Robert E. Howard. Binder had been to NYC previously, in late June and early July 1935, with his friends Clifford Kornoelje (better known in SF circles as Jack Darrow) and Bill Dellenback.

As I’ve mentioned before, back in 2001 I bought a few boxes of correspondence from Darrow’s estate, including dozens of letters that Binder had written to Darrow over the course of many decades. In going through them last month, I pulled this one and thought I’d post it today.

Once in NYC, Otto quickly resumed his friendships with Mort Weisinger and Charles Hornig, and rapidly met more figures involved in the local science fiction community. Less than two weeks after he’d arrived, he was invited to a gathering at Frank Belknap Long’s place, which was held on Friday, January 3, 1936. Binder and Long were fellow Weird Tales authors, with Binder and his brother, Earl, having sold WT some stories under their Eando Binder penname.

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