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Year: 2018

Birthday Reviews: Cordwainer Smith’s “No, No, Not Rogov!”

Birthday Reviews: Cordwainer Smith’s “No, No, Not Rogov!”

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Cover by Kelly Freas
Cover by Kelly Freas

Cordwainer Smith was born Paul Linebarger on July 11, 1913 and died on August 6, 1966. As Linebarger, his most famous work was Psychological Warfare. Frederik Pohl revealed that Smith was really Linebarger in an editorial that ran in the December 1966 issue of Galaxy

Smith was nominated for two Hugo Awards, first for the short story “The Game of Rat and Dragon” in 1955 and later for the novel The Planet Buyer in 1965. His novella “On the Storm Planet” was also nominated for the first Nebula Award. He posthumously won the Seiun Award three times, for his short fiction “Think Blue, Count Two” and “A Planet Named Shayol.” His third win was for the novel Norstilia, which was also a nominee for the Jupiter Award.

“No, No, Not Rogov!,” was originally purchased by Damon Knight and published in the February, 1959 issue of If. Judith Merril included the story in The 5th Annual of the Year’s Best S.-F. and Smith used it in his collection You Will Never Be the Same. Knight reprinted the story in the anthology Science Fiction Inventions and it was one of Smith’s stories in his collection The Instrumentality of Mankind. When Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg were selecting stories of The Great SF Stories 21 (1959), “No, No, Not Rogov!” made their cut. Jim Mann opened the NESFA Press collection The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith with the story. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer used it in The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF. It most recently appeared in the Baen Books collection of Smith’s work, When the People Fell. “No, No, Not Rogov!” has been translated into French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

“No, No, Not Rogov!” is an indictment of the Soviet system. Smith tells about Soviet scientists N. Rogov and Anastasia Cherpas, whose professional competitiveness turns into respect and eventually a scientifically collaborative marriage. Whether or not they actually have any affection for each other can’t be determined from the story, although Cherpas does resent the crush that the scientist Gausgofer, who was sent to spy on them, develops on Rogov.

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E3 2018: Xbox Press Conference

E3 2018: Xbox Press Conference

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Every year, in early summer, the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) showcases the industry’s upcoming games, gaming tech, and gaming culture. Studios from around the world vie to create a buzz for their brands by announcing new games, new content for existing games, and upcoming new hardware.

The largest Studios, such as Xbox, Bethesda, Playstation, etc. hold live, large press conferences that can be viewed in person, streamed live, or be watched later on the internet. These press conferences are fairly long events, often lasting over an hour. Typical content for these events are live game demos, prerecorded demos, and short video teasers for games not far in development. These presentations sometimes include celebrities and often include developer commentary.

This year, the first press conference was held by Xbox.

As I have mentioned in the past, Xbox has been losing the “console war” to Playstation. With the Playstation 4 outselling the Xbox, the Microsoft brand had a lot riding on this years E3 conference.

In order to convince consumers that their consoles are the place to play the best games, Xbox needed to double down on compelling exclusive games, timed released games, and DLC. They would need to create games and content that they can get nowhere else.

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July Short Story Roundup

July Short Story Roundup

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oie_1083736EA4SAq7NIt’s that time again, folks. I’m taking a break from my ongoing reread of Glen Cook’s Black Company (6 books down, 4 to go!) to give you an update on the latest heroic fantasy short fiction. First, as usual, there’re the monthly two stories from Curtis Ellett’s Swords and Sorcery Magazine. The other source of stories this July is a collection from Howie Bentley. Most of the stories are reprints I’ve reviewed before, but there are some new things I’ll tell you about.

Issue 77 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine kicks off with “Gina,” the fiery (and bloody) story of a deadly young woman with the ability to control elementals. It’s by Gustavo Bondoni, an author whose work I’ve reviewed in the past. The story kicks off just as Gina is about to be “sacrificed to the fire-demons of Hell’s Gate.” Unfortunately for her captors, just as she steps off the precipice into the volcano’s mouth, they realize she is not the naked and defenseless slave they believe her to be.

Gina looked down again and smiled. She said a few words under her breath. Out loud she said: “Haggan,” and took that final step forward.

She did not fall.

The guard’s footsteps rang out behind her as the man realized that something had gone wrong and rushed towards her to correct it. Not only was he much too late, but he was also running in the wrong direction. Any intelligent person living in a city as infested with magicians as Hell’s Gate would have taken one look at the floating woman and run the other way.

Sadly, dungeon-keepers were not selected for their intelligence. The man kept coming as Gina turned back the way she’d come. A contemptuous flick of her arm brought a tongue of fire from the depths. A gesture sent it towards the rushing defender, who could do nothing but look down at his chest in horror as a searing lance thicker than his arm penetrated his sternum and emerged from his back.

Bondoni packs a lot of back story into this short work, as well as some solid, if not altogether surprising, character development. It successfully walks the line between feeling like something ripped from a longer work and a standalone effort. It manages to feel like an important incident from the larger story of Gina’s life, yet still work as a completely discrete story; something that makes me, as a reader, very happy.

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Birthday Reviews: Fran Wilde’s “How to Walk through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age”

Birthday Reviews: Fran Wilde’s “How to Walk through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age”

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Cover by Gary Freeman
Cover by Gary Freeman

Fran Wilde was born on July 10, 1972.

Wilde won the Andre Norton Award in 2016 for her debut novel, Updraft, which was also a Nebula Nominee and a winner of the Compton Crook Stephen Tall Memorial Award. She has also been nominated for the Nebula for her novella The Jewel and Her Lapidary and the short story “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand,” both of which were also nominated for the Hugo Award. Her story “Only Their Shining Beauty Was Left” was a nominee for the WSFA Small Press Award.

Wilde published “How to Walk Through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age” in the April 2015 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, edited by Sheila Williams. The story has not been reprinted.

Eleanor Reed is an embedded journalist, covering a war using implants which allowed her to submit her reports directly and her viewers to see what she saw, although the feed is censored in realtime by the army. Unfortunately, she is caught in an attack and injured. While recuperating at home, she spends time walking in St. Paul’s Kent Churchyard cemetery near her home in Chestertown, Maryland, with her rig seems to have developed a glitch. In addition to seeing what is there, she can apparently also see ghosts, particularly the ghost of the actress Tallulah Bankhead, who is buried in the cemetery.

However, the glitch in Eleanor’s implants began long before she arrived at the cemetery. When she was in country, she saw several of the members of the company she was embedded in when they died, and saw them leave their bodies. Although she is aware of the issue and trying to figure out exactly what is happening, using the ghost of Tallulah Bankhead as a test subject, she is also concerned that her handler, Ben, will learn about the images and try to use them for his own purposes, which she never really trusts.

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Sharpen Those Writing Pens: Rogue Blades Entertainment Open to Submissions for Three New Anthologies

Sharpen Those Writing Pens: Rogue Blades Entertainment Open to Submissions for Three New Anthologies

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Rogue Blades Entertainment’s Jason M. Waltz is one of the best editors in the adventure fantasy business. His books include the groundbreaking Writing Fantasy Heroes, Challenge! Discovery, Rage of the Behemoth, and Return of the Sword, one of the most important Sword & Sorcery anthologies of the 21st Century. But as exciting as those tomes are, what I want to talk about today are Jason’s future books — which promise to be as groundbreaking as his epic back catalog.

One of the great things about Jason is that, unlike many other editors at established publishing houses, he has open submission. That’s right — anyone can submit to one of his anthologies. And right now he has not one, not two, but three books open. The first is a swashbuckling pirates & crusaders volume, Crossbones & Crosses, and it sounds terrific. Here’s a snippet from the Submission Guidelines.

Pirates & Crusaders, ahoy! Hoist your banners, unsheathe your blades, kiss your crosses, and let’s search for booty on the seas and the sands! More of the age of steel than shot, though some rudimentary gunpowder is acceptable. NO fantastical elements! Write us your strongest swashbuckling adventures! Gritty, dangerous, and bloody, but nothing of this grimdark nihilism…

Stories should be 4k-9k words in length. Nothing either too much shorter or too much longer. Wow us with heroic storytelling!

Submissions will be open through the fall, so you have plenty of time to craft a story that will get our blood pumping. One of Jason’s other great strengths as an editor is his lightning response times — he usually gets back to you on the first 500 words of your story in the first week.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Dime Detective – August, 1939

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Dime Detective – August, 1939

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Gat_DimeDetectiveAugust1939

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Dime Detective hit newsstands in November of 1931. The pulp would become Black Mask’s most enduring competition. In fact, Black Mask would be bought by Dime Detective’s publisher and the latter would outlast the legendary magazine. I’m a big fan of Dime Detective and I’m working on a post about the magazine for Todd Vick’s excellent pulp blog, On An Underwood #5 (I’m sure you deduced that it’s Robert E. Howard-centric!).

Editor Kenneth S. White was given marching orders to lure as many Black Mask writers as he could, offering an extra penny a word – a palpable pulp inducement! Most pulps paid one (or even less!) cent per word. Two cents was a desirable wage, which is why so many of the successful pulpsters turned out such prodigious word counts. They needed to just to make a living. Black Mask paid three cents a word, indicative of its status and quality. Dime Detective offering an extra penny a word was significant bait.

Many of Black Mask’s writers jumped ship: Erle Stanley Gardner, Frederick Nebel, Carroll John Daly, T.T. Flynn and Frederick C. Davis among them. Norbert Davis, whose hardboiled humor wasn’t to editor Cap Shaw’s taste, flourished at Dime Detective. Davis is one of my favorites, which you surely know because you read this A (Black) Gat in the Hand post a few weeks ago!

When Shaw was relieved of duties in 1936, Raymond Chandler would quit Black Mask and write for Dime Detective.

Billing itself as “twice as good for half the price” (Black Mask cost twenty cents), Dime Detective lasted until August, 1953, by which time the paperback revolution had killed the pulps. Black Mask had packed it in after the March, 1950 issue.

The August, 1939 issue of Dime Detective screams out ‘Quality!’ It included Raymond Chandler’s “Trouble is My Business,” featuring his Philip Marlowe-ish John Dalmas. It effectively marked the end of his writing detective stories for the pulps. There would be one more mystery in Detective Story, but with The Big Sleep coming out in 1939, followed by Farwell My Lovely in 1940, he worked the detective novel going forward. In the lexicon of hardboiled, it’s Hammett, Chandler and everyone else (Some are inclined to make it a threesome with Ross MacDonald, but I’m not in that camp). Chandler wanted to write literary hardboiled stories. He succeeded. Sometimes, his prose is beautiful. Other times, it is overly pretentious. His plotting is…complex. I used to dislike Chandler’s works, but I’m warming up to him.

Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams (present here in “Gangman’s Gallows”) was massively popular in the pages of Black Mask in the twenties and early thirties – even though editor Joseph Shaw did not like Daly’s writing. Williams came to Dime Detective with Daly and appeared in 21 stories; three more the author’s rather ridiculous Vee Brown  (I’m not a big fan of crusading employees of the District Attorney who write Brill Building-type smash hits in their off time, making them wealthy).

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Birthday Reviews: Thomas Ligotti’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin”

Birthday Reviews: Thomas Ligotti’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin”

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Cover by Stephen Gervais
Cover by Stephen Gervais

Thomas Ligotti was born on July 9, 1953.

Ligotti’s collection The Nightmare Factory won the British Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award. He won additional Bram Stoker Awards for his novelette “The Red Tower” and his story “My Work Is Not Yet Done.” The latter work also earned Ligotti his first International Horror Guild Award. He won a second IHG for The Nightmare Factory. A translation of his collection Grimscribe: His Lives and Works won the Italia Award for International Novel.

“The Last Feast of Harlequin” was originally published in the April 1990 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Edward L. Ferman. Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow picked it up for the fourth annual edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell picked it for Best New Horror 2. Ligotti included the story in his collections Grimscribe: His Lives and Works. The Nightmare Factory, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, and Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. Ferman and Kristine Kathryn Rusch used the story in The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 45th Anniversary Anthology. Jim Turner selected it for Cthulhu 2000: A Lovecraftian Anthology and Scott David Aniolowski selected it for Return to Lovecraft Country. Joyce Carol Oates used it in American Gothic Tales and Peter Straub included it in American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now. S.T. Joshi used the story in the anthology A Mountain Walked. The story has been translated into German twice as well as Italian and Finnish. It was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story.

Ligotti presents the research of an anthropologist into clowns in folk culture in “The Last Feast of Harlequin.” An anonymous source sends the professor a note about a strange festival in the town of Mirocaw that features people dressing as clowns. Unable to learn anything about the festival through normal sources, including exchanging letters with the state’s Department of Tourism, the professor forgets about the festival until chance brings him to the town and he learns that the festival is held during the Winter solstice, bringing it in conflict with the more traditional Christmas celebrations.

Returning for the actual festival, with very little knowledge of what to expect, the anthropologist tries to learn from the townfolk why they do what they do, only to find that every avenue of inquiry is a dead end. The villagers don’t know why they have the traditions, they just know that they follow them. In the process, he does realize that one of his old professors is living there, apparently a derelict in a part of the town, which at first doesn’t appear to participate in the festival, but later he learns does with different rules.

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A Perfect Dream of Summer: The Mad Scientists’ Club

A Perfect Dream of Summer: The Mad Scientists’ Club

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The Mad Scientists' Club-small The Mad Scientists' Club-back-small

In 1970, when I was ten, my city (Bell Gardens, California) built a new state-of-the-art library — right across the street from my house. (It was then that I knew that I was the favorite of the gods. The vicissitudes of life have since led me to revise that reckless assumption, but then I no longer live across the street from a library.) Every time I walked through the building’s doors (five or six times a day, probably), I sent up a silent thanks to Richard M. Nixon, whose name was prominently displayed on the dedication plaque by the entrance, even though he really had nothing to do with the project. (He had other things on his mind in those days — boy, did he.)

I practically lived in that library, and I knew every shelf of the large children’s section intimately; I could have drawn a quite accurate map of the layout from memory, with large arrows pointing to the location of my favorite books, many of which I checked out repeatedly and read over and over again. I retain fond memories of those stories, though nothing in the world would persuade me to reread most of them.

This is because few things in life are more hazardous than returning to a beloved children’s book after the passage of many years. It’s doubly dangerous if the work in question is one that’s “just” a children’s book and not one of those — like Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan or The Wind in the Willows or the Little House books — that depth and brilliance and long endurance have accorded the status of literature.

There are exceptions, though, children’s books that might be less ambitious than the aforementioned classics but which can still engage an adult reader in search of something more than mere nostalgia. Exceptions like The Mad Scientists’ Club.

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Take a Monstrous Tour of Europe in The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club by Theodora Goss

Take a Monstrous Tour of Europe in The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club by Theodora Goss

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When Theodora Goss released The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter last June, Black Gate reviewer Zeta Moore raved, calling it “A Novel You’ve Been Waiting For Your Whole Life.” Here’s a clip from her review.

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter [is] a 400-page extravaganza featuring… the daughters of legendary characters from classic fantasy and science fiction… When Mary Jekyll’s mother dies, the young inheritor of her meager estate discovers her father — Henry Jekyll himself — associated with a troubling league of gentlemen endowed with brilliant scientific ambition. With the help of Diana Hyde, a feral and headstrong spitfire (and daughter of Mr. Hyde), and a miraculous and unwilling scientific marvel named Beatrice, whom her revered father has tainted with poison from noxious plants, Mary embarks on a quest to discover just what her father’s band of brothers sought to accomplish.

Along the way, they enlist the help of an exemplary detective named Sherlock Holmes, his cherished assistant, Watson, and Catherine Moreau, daughter of the most barbaric and daring scientist of them all. Unless you factor Doctor Victor Frankenstein into the equation…

The anxiously-waited sequel, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, arrives in hardcover from Saga Press on Tuesday. It’s a massive volume, 720 pages, and the second chapter in what’s now being called The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club.

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Birthday Reviews: José Antonio Cotrina’s “Between the Lines”

Birthday Reviews: José Antonio Cotrina’s “Between the Lines”

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Cover by Tarzo
Cover by Tarzo

José Antonio Cotrina was born on July 8, 1972.

Contrina’s novella “Salir de Fase” tied for the UPC Award for unpublished novella with Javier Negrete’s “Buscador de Sombras” in 2000. Contrina was also nominated to the Premio Ignotus for “Entre lineas.”

“Entre lineas” was published in Gigamesh, 25 in May 2000, edited by Julián Díez. In 2007, it was translated into English by James Stevens-Arce as “Between the Lines” and included in The SFWA European Hall of Fame: Sixteen Contemporary Masterpieces of Science Fiction from the Continent, edited by James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow.

Alejandro is studying advertising at university when he happens to walk into the wrong professor’s office in “Between the Lines” and is informed that by doing so, he has enrolled himself in the course Advanced Reading Techniques, a class he has absolutely no interest in. Since he hasn’t filled out any paperwork, he ignores the professor and continues on with his life, studies, and job, forgetting about the strange incident until he receives a letter from the university informing him that he has an incomplete in the class.

When he goes to protest, the professor insists that he is in the class and is required to do the coursework in order not to fail. He is given a copy of The Little Prince and goes off to read it, closely, and make notes about the book’s text, the author, and anything else he can think of. When he returns to the professor to discuss the book, the professor throws aside his work, telling him that he hasn’t read between the lines. Alejandro attempts to re-read the book and suddenly realizes that if he ignores the actual text, but looks at the negative space between the words, he can read a different book. Once he comes to this epiphany, he can’t help but see the alternative text everywhere he looks. Cotrina opens up a whole new realm of literature, on par with Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” with this version of reality.

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