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Year: 2018

Future Treasures: Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah

Future Treasures: Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah

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Before She Sleeps-smallThe hit Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale has brought a whole new generation of readers to Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel — and spawned a growing subgenre.

One of the more interesting to me is Pakistani author Bina Shah’s upcoming Before She Sleeps, which Kirkus Reviews calls “a novel that is in explicit conversation with The Handmaid’s Tale… an overdue enlargement of the cultural conversation that Atwood’s novel continues to provoke.” The book has received considerable pre-publication buzz, and Publishers Weekly calls it “A haunting dystopian thriller.” Here’s the description.

In modern, beautiful Green City, the capital of South West Asia, gender selection, war and disease have brought the ratio of men to women to alarmingly low levels. The government uses terror and technology to control its people, and women must take multiple husbands to have children as quickly as possible.

Yet there are women who resist, women who live in an underground collective and refuse to be part of the system. Secretly protected by the highest echelons of power, they emerge only at night, to provide to the rich and elite of Green City a type of commodity that nobody can buy: intimacy without sex. As it turns out, not even the most influential men can shield them from discovery and the dangers of ruthless punishment.

This dystopian novel from one of Pakistan’s most talented writers is a modern-day parable, The Handmaid’s Tale about women’s lives in repressive Muslim countries everywhere. It takes the patriarchal practices of female seclusion and veiling, gender selection, and control over women’s bodies, amplifies and distorts them in a truly terrifying way to imagine a world of post-religious authoritarianism.

Bina Shah has written two collections and three previous novels, including A Season for Martyrs and the international bestseller Slum Child.

Before She Sleeps will be published by Delphinium on August 7, 2018. It is 256 pages, priced at $25 in hardcover and $17.99 for the digital version.

Birthday Reviews: Lawrence Watt-Evans’s “The Man for the Job”

Birthday Reviews: Lawrence Watt-Evans’s “The Man for the Job”

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Cover by Michael Whelan
Cover by Michael Whelan

Lawrence Watt-Evans was born on July 26, 1954.

Watt-Evans’s short story “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers” was nominated for the Nebula and Hugo Awards in 1988 and won the Hugo Award. Watt-Evans was nominated for a second Hugo Award for best semi-prozine, as the co-editor, along with William Sanders, of Helix SF in 2008. Watt-Evans has published under the names Nathan Archer and Walter Vance Awsten. He has collaborated with Brenda Clough, Kurt Busiek, Christina Briley, Julie Evans, Esther Friesner, and Carl Parlagreco, and Dean Wesley Smith & Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

“The Man for the Job” was published in the December 2000 issue of Realms of Fantasy, edited by Shawna McCarthy. The story has not been reprinted has also appeared in The Lawrence Watt-Evans Fantasy MegaPack.

Watt-Evans takes on several fantasy standard tropes in “The Man for the Job.” The story opens with five siblings meeting with a wizard to get help in ridding themselves of an evil dragon. The group includes four brothers and their sister, who is insistent that they include her since her livelihood is at stake as well as theirs. The wizard, Gallopius, talks about magic items with them, noting that in days of yore, wizards hid magic items in strange, exotic, and stupid places where the wizards wouldn’t be able to retrieve them when needed. While Gallopius can lay hands on all his own enchanted items, they will need to complete a quest to find the Helmet of Balanced Justice to defeat the dragon.

The quest also subverts the typical quest story. The helmet is located relatively near to Gallopius’s home, and was hidden three hundred years earlier, protected by three guardians. Although Gallipius is able to tell them the nature of the guardians, they are not ready for the state they are in. Watt-Evans takes the idea of a centuries old protection to its logical conclusion, as all three guardians have failed to withstand the ravages of time and they manage to retrieve the helmet with some ease.

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The 2018 World Fantasy Awards Ballot

The 2018 World Fantasy Awards Ballot

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Changeling Victor LaValle-small Mapping the Interior Stephen Graham Jones-small Tender Sofia Samatar-small

The 2018 World Fantasy Awards Ballot, containing a whole bunch of books I haven’t read yet, has just been announced. The ballot is compiled by the voting attendees of the World Fantasy Convention, all of whom clearly read a lot more than I do. Where do they find the time? Don’t they have blog posts to write, like normal people?

At least I have my membership for the convention, so I’ll be there to watch all the excitement unfold. It’s still a few months away, so I a little time to get caught up. Wish we luck.

As has been tradition since 1998, the coveted Life Achievement Award is being given to two recipients. This year they are Canadian author Charles de Lint and DAW Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth (Betsy) Wollheim. Both are fine selections, richly deserving of this recognition.

The winners in every other category will be selected by a panel of judges. Here’s the complete list of nominees, with links to our previous coverage.

Life Achievement

  • Charles de Lint
  • Elizabeth Wollheim

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The Last Video Store in my Neighborhood Closed and it’s Partially My Fault

The Last Video Store in my Neighborhood Closed and it’s Partially My Fault

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20180611_175922

It’s a sad day for Madrid, especially for the barrio of Malasaña. The last video store in the neighborhood has closed. After 14 years of swimming against the tide, Ficciones closed a month ago today. I haven’t been able to rent a video since.

Sadly, I might not have rented one even if it had remained open. I liked Ficciones, don’t get me wrong, but with all the oldies available for free on YouTube and Archive.org, plus all those wonderful series on Netflix, a local video store was more of a nice idea than a regular shopping experience.

And it’s only now that I’m realizing how much I and everyone else screwed up.

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Conjure Puberty: The Sword and The Sorcerer (1982)

Conjure Puberty: The Sword and The Sorcerer (1982)

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The Sword and the Sorcerer 3-blade-small

The Sword and The Sorcerer (1982)
Dir. Albert Pyun
Starring: Lee Horsely, Kathleen Beller, Simon McCorkindale, et al.

In case it needs to be said — spoilers.

Okay. Let’s go…

The Sword and the Sorcerer is the cinematic equivalent of the first homebrew table-top gaming campaign run by a 13 year old.

I know this because I turned 13 in 1982. I also know this because I likely ran my first homebrew table-top game that year. The step from 12 to 13 seems like nothing to an adult; we forget the power these thresholds hold for children. At 12 you are a child. At 13 you are a teenager. There is, I believe, a biblical injunction that calls for us to put away childish things as we leave childhood — but that never really worked for me.

When he was interviewed before his tragic death, the late, great herpetologist/artist/song stylist/adventurer and man of mystery Dean Ripa was asked to explain happiness. I’m paraphrasing, but his answer was something like “Everything I loved doing at 10 years old, I just kept doing.”

I can get behind that thought. What I loved as child I have kept. What you love is an act of self-creation. What you love reveals part of who you are — at least I believe that. Among the things that I loved enough to bring forward were books. Specifically, fantasy books — and more specifically — sword and sorcery books. Another thing I brought forward was a love of table-top gaming. Both of these things were so central to my childhood that I have carried them with me for the four decades since in one way or another. So as you might imagine, in 1982 I was completely stoked for the release of one movie over all others.

That movie was not The Sword and the Sorcerer.

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Birthday Reviews: Brian M. Stableford’s “The Growth of the House of Usher”

Birthday Reviews: Brian M. Stableford’s “The Growth of the House of Usher”

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Cover by Pete Lyon
Cover by Pete Lyon

Brian M. Stableford was born on July 25, 1948.

Stableford received the British SF Association Award for his short story “The House of Mourning.” His anthology Tales of the Wandering Jew won the Readercon Award for Best Anthology and his novel The Empire of Fear won the Lord Ruthven Award. He has also won several scholarship awards, including the Eaton Award for his book Scientific Romance in Britain: 1890-1950, the Pilgrim Lifetime Achievement Award from the Science Fiction Research Associastion, the IAFA Distinguished Scholarship Award, and the SF&F Translation Award. Stableford has published under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Francis Amery and Brian Craig.

“The Growth of the House of Usher,” the first of Stableford’s loosely connected tales of the Biotech Revolution, first appeared in the Summer 1988 issue of Interzone, issue #24, edited by Simon Ounsley and David Pringle. Gardner Dozois recognized it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection the following year. It was also reprinted in David Memmott’s fanzine Ice River, issue 4 in June of 1989. John Clute, Pringle, and Ounsley selected the story for Interzone: The 4th Anthology. Stableford included it in two of his collections of stories about the Biotech Revolution with the similar titles Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution and Sexual Chemistry and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution.

Stableford acknowledges early in the story that the title of “The Growth of the House of Usher” is a call back to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In Stableford’s story, set in the 23rd century, Rowland Usher has secluded himself away from his fellow man, living in a massive house of his own design in the delta of the Orinoco River in Venezuela. He has summed an own college friend to see the house and to let him know that Usher has chosen his friend to be his executor, for Usher suffers, as his father and sister suffered before him, from a deadly disease.

Despite being a science fiction story, focusing on using biotech to create buildings and improving biotech for even greater things, the story clearly belongs to the Gothic tradition, although while a lot of Gothic fiction is wary of technology (see Frankenstein), Stableford’s story embraces the possibilities. This is most obvious in the description of the massive home Usher has built, made of replicating biomatter which will continue to grow and improve long after he, and his friend, are dead. At the same time, even if technology and science can’t save Usher’s life, he still views it favorably, seeing the sacrifice of his own life to the disease as a means of helping science learn what ravaged his family in the hopes of preventing it in the future should it reappear.

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A Modern Masterpiece: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

A Modern Masterpiece: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

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The-Hazel-Wood-Melissa Albert-smallI usually need to read at least a third of a book before deciding to review it for Black Gate. While I always read the books I review all the way to the end, sometimes it takes that long to decide. But when I picked up Melissa Albert’s The Hazel Wood, I suspected I’d review it after only reading the first two paragraphs. I was sure of it once I’d hit page three.

That’s got to be some kind of record.

Something’s strange about our protagonist, Alice Crewe. From a young age, she’s always been on the move. Her most dominant memory is the view of the blue sky out the sunroof. But according to her mother, their car doesn’t have one.

When she was three, Alice was abducted by a kind stranger who drove off with her in a blue Buick. Even though her mother swears she’s never seen the man before, we wonder if perhaps six-year-old Alice could be right, and he’s actually her father.

Throughout Alice’s childhood, dangerous people and peculiar occurrences dog Alice and her mother like persistent bad luck, so they lead a semi-nomadic existence, uprooting themselves whenever something uncanny gets too close. Until one day, when Alice’s mother receives a letter informing her of her mother’s death. “This isn’t… forgive me, but this isn’t a bad thing. It’s not,” she insists. “It means we’re free.”

Alice’s grandmother’s death means that, for once, they can stop moving. The bad luck’s gone. When their home is subsequently broken into, it’s not a resurgence of the curse. It’s just New York City being, you know, New York City.

Or so teenage Alice thinks, until the day she’s working at a coffee shop and realizes that one of her customers is the man who kidnapped her when she was six. He’s sitting at a table reading Tales from the Hinterland, the collection of dark fairy tales written by Alice’s grandmother that’s so rare, Alice has never been able to read it. When he sees that she’s noticed him, he exits in a hurry, taking the book with him but leaving behind a bone, a feather, and a red plastic comb. For the first time, Alice wonders whether her grandmother’s disturbing fairy tales might not be fiction.

Maybe they’re real.

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Birthday Reviews: John D. MacDonald’s “Ring Around the Redhead”

Birthday Reviews: John D. MacDonald’s “Ring Around the Redhead”

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BG_MacDonaldOtherWorldsEvery so often, I prove that the Black Gate firewall needs some serious tightening up by jumping in and putting up a post where I don’t belong (many readers and fellow bloggers believe that would be the entirety of the Black Gate website…). So, if you’re reading this, the crack web monitoring team hasn’t seen it yet. Don’t tell Steven Silver. He might gnaw through the restraining chain around his ankle and crawl over to my desk in the cellar…basement…journalist’s suite to thrash me.

John Dann MacDonald, my favorite author and one of the best writers of the twentieth century – in any genre – was born on July 24th, 1916. MacDonald, Harvard MBA and a lieutenant colonel in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, was thirty years old when he began writing for the pulps in 1946. Through hard work and talent, MacDonald quickly became successful, selling to the mystery and sports magazines.

He graduated to the slicks more quickly than most pulpsters and he began writing paperback novels in 1950, mostly for Fawcett Gold Medal and Dell. And in 1960 he created his famous non-private eye, Travis McGee, in The Deep Blue Goodbye. MacDonald wrote over 400 short stories and five dozen novels.

It’s less well-remembered that in the late forties and early fifties, MacDonald wrote a great deal of science fiction: over fifty short stories and two novels. He tired of the genre and essentially quit cold turkey in 1952, writing only seven more stories and one novel (The Girl, The Gold Watch & Everything, which was made into a movie with Robert Hays and Pam Dawber) in the final thirty-four years of his life. He wrote that he tired of science fiction and simply quit writing it.

“Ring Around the Redhead” appeared in the November, 1948 issue of Startling Stories (His “Shenadun” had been in the September issue). It was anthologized in 1953 and again in 1967. I read it in Other Times, Other Worlds, a collection consisting entirely of science fiction stories by MacDonald.

Bill Maloney, an inventor, is on trial for murdering his next door neighbor. There’s no body, just some brain and hair bits. Anita Hempflet, the classic nosy neighbor (you know, the kind that says “I don’t mind anybody’s business but my own” and then proceeds to gossip like it’s an Olympic event) weighs in with her nose in the air, saying that Bill has been shacked up (remember: it’s 1948) with a pretty redhead who seems to be deaf and was wearing some odd, metallic clothing when she appeared.

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Next Year in Khatovar: She Is the Darkness by Glen Cook Part 1

Next Year in Khatovar: She Is the Darkness by Glen Cook Part 1

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oie_2353716i3KOHmsdA skinny, mangy mongrel raced past and on the dead run clamped jaws on a startled crow. He got a wing.

All the crows in the world descended on him before he could enjoy his dinner.

“A parable,” One-Eye said. “Observe! Black crows. Black dog. The eternal struggle.”

“Black philosopher,” Croaker grumbled.

“Black Company.”

One-Eye and Croaker from She Is the Darkness

It’s summer, I’m busy living a summer life. As Glen Cook books go, She Is the Darkness (1997) is a long one. Um, something, something, something. All that’s to say I’m breaking my review into two parts. It’s not what I’d normally do, but I don’t want to lose the momentum of reading the books back to back. Remember: beyond here lie spoilers.

At the end of the previous book, Bleak Seasons, the Black Company under the restored leadership of Croaker, aka the Old Man, aka the Captain, was girding its loins for the final march on the last stronghold of Longshadow, the last Shadowmaster.

Overlook is pretty much Glen Cook’s version of Barad-dûr. Its walls rise to a hundred feet, and are covered in protective spells. Inside lurk untold numbers of soldiers backed by the terrible sorcery of the erstwhile Taken, Howler, and Longshadow himself.

In the field, ex-Black Company chief-of-staff Mogaba leads Longshadow’s last remaining army. Aided by another defector, Blade, Mogaba cannot imagine himself being beaten, and lies in wait for the Black Company and the soldiers of Taglios to attempt to force the pass over the Dhanda Presh Mountains.

Oh, and the wife of new Black Company Annalist Murgen was murdered by the Deceivers. During an assassination attempt on Croaker in the Palace of Taglios, a group of killers found their way into the living quarters of Murgen’s family and left his wife Sahra and her son dead. While not a completely broken man, Murgen is allowing himself to become addicted to traveling through time and space on the spirit of the comatose wizard, Smoke. Officially, Murgen’s doing this to spy on Longshadow and other things important to the health and welfare of the Black Company, but really it’s to avoid the depression brought on by the killing of Sahra. It continues to be a poorly explained and clunky device.

The death of Sahra is also not as simple as it seems. There’s a terrible secret surrounding it, and even though his late wife’s family, including the thoroughly kickass Uncle Doj, know what happened, Murgen doesn’t uncover it for many months. In a series flush with emotionally raw events, what really happened the night of Sahra’s death is one of the hardest in the whole series.

The entire first half of She Is the Darkness concerns the movement of Croaker’s forces towards the showdown with Mogaba’s and Blade’s. Meanwhile Murgen, flying on the wings of Smoke’s psyche, spies for his commander and fills in all the gaps for the reader, giving us an inside look at the doings of the Company’s enemies. There’s no getting around it, much of the first half of the book’s a slog. It might reflect some sort of logistical and strategic masterpiece if it occurred in real life, but on the page it moves like molasses on a winter day. Nonetheless, the book isn’t a disaster, just frustrating.

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Birthday Reviews: Barry N. Malzberg’s “Tap-Dancing Down the Highways and Byways of Life”

Birthday Reviews: Barry N. Malzberg’s “Tap-Dancing Down the Highways and Byways of Life”

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Cover by Ron Walotsky
Cover by Ron Walotsky

Barry N. Malzberg was born on July 24, 1939.

Malzberg received the inaugural John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Beyond Apollo. His novel Herovit’s War was nominated for the Jupiter Award and he’s had nominations for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the British SF Association Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award five times and the Nebula Award six times.

“Tap-Dancing Down the Highways and Byways of Life” was originally published by Edward L. Ferman in the July 1986 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Although it wasn’t reprinted in English until appearing in The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg in 2013, it was published in French, Italian, and German translations within seven months of its original publication.

It would appear that Cecil’s big mistake in “Tap-Dancing Down the Highways and Byways of Life” was robbing someone who not only knew who he was, but also knew his parents. As his victim holds back money, calls him out, and points out how disappointed Cecil’s parents will be to hear about his poor life choices, Cecil decides that the best way out of the situation is to shoot his victim in the head. Malzberg is not telling Cecil’s story, however, he is telling the story of the intended robbery victim.

Cecil’s victim is brought back to life, or possibly awoken from a virtual reality scenario, Malzberg is never really clear on the mechanism. What is clear is that the victim is supposed to react to the robbery in a specific way and is not doing what he is supposed to, notably, giving Cecil the money and following his instructions in order to live another day. His unnamed handlers give him multiple opportunities to correct the situation and he keeps finding himself facing an armed Cecil with a gun, eventually deciding that he can’t live as a complacent victim in the world his handlers are trying to shoe-horn him into.

Malzberg’s story takes on darker tones when the reader considers who the victim’s handlers are and what their motives could be. They could simply be preparing people to live and survive in a more violent world, accepting what they can’t change in order to live another day. On the other hand, they could be conditioning people to being victims, making it easier on the criminal and violent classes to prey on the innocents.

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