News broke last night that Steve Ditko had passed away at 90 years old. Ditko co-created Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, the Question, Mr. A (and by those last two characters was the direct inspiration for Alan Moore’s Rorschach), all of Spider-Man’s classic villains and several DC properties. He was also ironically famously reclusive.
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I was out to dinner with the delightful Patty Templeton last week — continuing a tour of the best ramen restaurants in Chicago — and when I got in her car I almost sat on a copy of a curious little book titled The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror. While Patty fearlessly navigated Chicago traffic to get me to the train station, I spent a few minutes figuring out what the heck it was. And what it was was a collection of contemporary horror stories with a whole lot of accolades on the back (and plenty more online, like BuzzFeed‘s “The 33 Most Exciting New Books Of 2018” and Publishers Weekly‘s “Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2018”). I don’t know why I didn’t know about it already, but this is why it pays to have cool friends. And here I am, telling you about it. Because I’m your cool friend.
From Mallory Ortberg comes a collection of darkly mischievous stories based on classic fairy tales. Adapted from the beloved Children’s Stories Made Horrific series, The Merry Spinster takes up the trademark wit that endeared Ortberg to readers of both The Toast and the best-selling debut Texts From Jane Eyre. The feature has become among the most popular on the site, with each entry bringing in tens of thousands of views, as the stories proved a perfect vehicle for Ortberg’s eye for deconstruction and destabilization. Sinister and inviting, familiar and alien all at the same time, The Merry Spinster updates traditional children’s stories and fairy tales with elements of psychological horror, emotional clarity, and a keen sense of feminist mischief.
Readers of The Toast will instantly recognize Ortberg’s boisterous good humor and uber-nerd swagger: those new to Ortberg’s oeuvre will delight in this collection’s unique spin on fiction, where something a bit mischievous and unsettling is always at work just beneath the surface.
Unfalteringly faithful to its beloved source material, The Merry Spinster also illuminates the unsuspected, and frequently, alarming emotional complexities at play in the stories we tell ourselves, and each other, as we tuck ourselves in for the night.
Bed time will never be the same.
The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror was published by Holt Paperbacks on March 13, 2018. It is 208 pages, priced at $17 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version. See all our recent New Treasures here.
Robert A. Heinlein was born on July 7, 1907 and died on May 8, 1988.
Heinlein won his first Hugo Award in 1956 for his novel Double Star. He subsequently won three more Hugo Awards for Best Novel for Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Although he has never won a Nebula Award, despite four nominations, Heinlein was the first person designated a Grand Master by the SFWA, in 1975. In 1980 he received the Forry Award from LASFS. He has won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award seven times, for The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, Red Planet, Methusaleh’s Children, Time Enough for Love, “Requiem,” and “Coventry.” In 1978, I Will Fear No Evil won the Seiun Award. Heinlein has also won the Retro Hugo Award four times, for “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” Farmer in the Sky, “The Roads Must Roll,” and “If This Goes On…” Heinlein was Guest of Honor at three separate Worldcons, Denvention 1 in 1941, Seacon in Seattle in 1961, and MidAmeriCon in Kansas City in 1976. The only other person to be a Guest of Honor at three Worldcons was John W. Campbell, Jr. In 1998, he was a Posthumous Inductee into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
“Sky Lift” was first published by William L. Hamling in the November 1953 issue of Imagination. Heinlein included it in his collection The Menace from Earth in 1959. The story was selected by Damon Knight for A Century of Science Fiction and was included in Off the Main Sequence: The Other Science Fiction Stories of Robert A. Heinlein. Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski chose to include it in Sentinels: In Honor of Arthur C. Clarke in 2010 and it was also reprinted in New Worlds to Conquer, part of the Virginia Edition, which reprinted all of Heinlein’s works. In addition to its English language publications, it has been translated into Italian twice, first by Hilja Pini for Urania #306 and a new translation, also by Pini using the name Hilia Brinis, for Gamma #14. Fritz Steinberg translated it into German for Unternehman Alptraum. It has also been translated into French twice.
“Sky Lift” is a strangely titled story about a medical supply run to the planet Pluto which has to be conducted under extreme conditions due to the urgency to get supplies to the distant planet (the title used in its first Italian translation, “Accelerazione ‘3g’” is a much better title). Like Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” which would be published in Astounding nine months later, Heinlein achieves emotional impact by creating a situation heavily stacked against the protagonists, Joe Appleby and Lieutenant Klueger.
Toronto police constable Ken Lam confronts the perpetrator of the Yonge Street van massacre,
April 23, 2018. The driver left his vehicle and repeatedly “drew” his cellphone as if it were a
firearm, pointing it and shouting at Lam to shoot him. Without firing a shot, the constable
forced the suspect to the sidewalk and handcuffed him.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. Besides its wonderful title (say it aloud!), the 1968 novel is worth remembering for its author’s uncanny predictions of what 21st century culture and technology might look like.
I use the word “predictions” hesitantly, since I feel that too often we lend a sort of second-rate legitimacy to authors who write stories of the future when we focus on such of their predictions that may have, in some way or other, “come true.” Jules Verne “predicted” the submarine, H.G. Wells tank and aerial warfare, E.M. Forster the internet, and so on. It becomes a form of damning with faint praise. If we focus on an author’s talent for alleged “prediction,” we can overlook the extent to which in expostulating futures, these authors actually wrote about their own time, and did so with insight and creativity. From this point of view, the extrapolations that didn’t “come true” are just as meaningful as those that did, but by focusing on just the “accurate” predictions, by depicting these writers as somehow Nostradamus-type prophets, we make clear that they’re not being judged for their literary value. Instead, they have been relegated to a room separate from that of the genuine canon of literary greats, their predictive ability categorizing each of them less as a genuine creative artist than as a clever algorithm, like a particularly well-programmed weather app.
Indeed, the SF genre is full of talented artists who remained within the genre and never particularly got their due as literary writers: the iconic status that such prolific genre authors as Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Harlan Ellison now enjoy was gained not when they wrote specifically “literary” books, but when they skipped that step and when straight into writing scripts for well-regarded films and TV shows, a kind of canonization into popular culture (reinforced by the knowledge that in these cases, their art gained them large paycheques) that any literary writer would envy.
Last time I talked about film remakes, especially those revolving around an iconic character. Today I’d like to take a look at remakes of TV series. Off the top of my head I think these fall into two categories, a film remade as a TV series, or a TV series remade as a TV series.
The most successful series made from a movie has to be M*A*S*H (1972) remade from the movie of the same name that came out in 1970. If I remember correctly, the series – based on the exploits of a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean war – ran for 10 seasons, or 8 years longer than the actual war. This series was so popular it’s still in reruns on regular network television. After the first couple of seasons it didn’t bear much more than a casual resemblance to the original film, but that’s not really the point. It was a successful transformation.
John Langan was born on July 6, 1969.
Langan’s novel The Fisherman received the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. His earlier collection Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters was also nominated for the award. The story version of “Mr. Gaunt” as well as his story “On Skua Island,” were both nominated for the International Horror Guild Award. Langan serves on the Board of Directors for the Shirley Jackson Award.
He wrote “The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons” for Jack Dann and Nick Gevers for the anthology Ghosts by Gaslight. Published in 2011, the story has never been reprinted.
“The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons” is the story of Mark Stephen Chapman, an author who has arranged to spend the summer at the home of Parrish Dunn, a spiritualist whose home, and especially the strange balloons he decorates it with, are intriguing to Chapman. On his way up to Dunn’s estate, Chapman meets Cal and Isabelle Earnshaw, who are also on their way to spend time with Dunn. Cal is dying and has hopes that Dunn can ease his passage.
The majority of the story is told as a series of conversations between Isabelle and Chapman, although occasionally Langan includes a page from Chapman’s journals, as Chapman shared much about his past with Isabelle. Chapman also talks about his life with Cal, who regrets not having lived the full life he sees Chapman as having had. The most enigmatic of the characters is Dunn, who appears occasionally, but rarely interacts with Chapman until the story’s denouement.
Until the end of the story, there is little fantastic that occurs. Dunn’s treatment of Cal and Cal’s response are all physical in nature, whether or not Dunn is an actual spiritualist or a charlatan. Chapman never really develops a relationship with Dunn and finds himself uncomfortable around the paper balloons. Eventually, when Isabelle decides she wants to take Cal away from Dunn, Chapman serves to distract him and learns the truth about Dunn’s balloons and why they are so disturbing, although Langan does not indicate why others have not felt the same concern about them.
Honestly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about this one.
Sony has recently been toying around with the idea of revisiting several of its franchises, which may be due to the clamoring of fans, but sounds suspiciously like a sincere and long-lasting drought of new ideas. Word has it they’re already casting another Charlie’s Angels (insert face palm here), with Kristen Stewart attached (double face palm), as well as having planning meetings around the most rebooted of all rebooted franchises in the last 20 years – Spider-Man.
This, when we can all name at least five books each which should become films immediately, but for whatever reason remain in development hell… if they even got that far.
But there we are. Life is definitely not fair.
However, this week we got some serious Sony reboot news – or it may be a spinoff, we’re not entirely clear yet. But we did learn that Rafe Spall (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) and Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick) will star alongside Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson and Liam Neeson in next year’s revisiting of Men In Black being directed by F. Gary Gray.
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Back in May, more or less on a whim, I paid $6.59 for a copy of the British paperback edition of Nebula Winners Fourteen, edited by Frederik Pohl. I already had the Bantam version (see below) but the gorgeously moody cover by the great Bruce Pennington hypnotized me, and what could I do?
I’m glad I did it, anyway. In this hot Illinois summer, a book I can dip into while relaxing on the porch is a perfect antidote, and having Nebula Winners Fourteen conveniently on hand has reminded me just how outstanding the Nebula anthologies were, and are, year after year. This one, for example, includes the three 1978 Nebula short fiction award winners, plus a 30-page excerpt from the winning novel:
“The Persistence of Vision,” by John Varley (Best Novella)
“A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn’s Eye,” by Charles L. Grant (Best Novelette)
“Stone,” by Edward Bryant (Best Short Story)
An Excerpt from Dreamsnake, by Vonda N. McIntyre
But it also includes some superb nominees, as selected by Pohl, including C. J. Cherryh’s Hugo Award-winning short story “Cassandra,” and Gene Wolfe’s massive 60-page novella “Seven American Nights.” I imagine Pohl got a lot of grief for cramming two long novellas into a slender paperback, displacing a lot of award-nominated short fiction in the process, but the years have proven the astuteness of his choice. “Seven American Nights” is one of the most acclaimed stories of the 70s, still discussed and enjoyed today, whereas the winner in the novella category, Varley’s “The Persistence of Vision,” is considered by many to be overrated (including by me.)
Jody Lynn Nye was born on July 5, 1957.
Nye began her career writing technical articles and gaming related fiction, including several choose-your-path adventures in the Crossroads Adventures series for Anne McCaffrey’s Pern and Piers Anthony’s Xanth. She followed those ups with The Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern and Magic of Xanth before beginning to publish her own works as well as collaborative novels. Many of her novels and short stories are humorous and she has also written military science fiction. Nye was good friends with Robert Lynn Asprin and collaborated with him on the later books in his Myth series before continuing the series after his death. Her own series includes the Mythology 101 series, the Imperium trilogy, the Dreamland series, and others.
She wrote “Theory of Relativity” for Larry Segriff and Martin H. Greenberg for the anthology Past Imperfect. Published in 2001, the story has never been reprinted.
“Theory of Relativity” is an epistolary story, although the framing device seems superfluous. It does immediately tell readers that they are in a slightly different world since Nye refers to both the book packager, TeknoBooks, and one of the books editors, Larry Segriff, disguised as Barry Seacliff, although it is questionable how many people would catch the two references since the book was published by DAW. This framing device does recur at the end, when Seacliff’s partner, Dr. Gruneberg (Martin H. Greenberg) is referenced.
The story opens with some techno babble about the time travel, or dimensional travel, device created by Dr. Rachel Fenstone. Once that information is out of the way, the story can really begin, with Rachel writing about her trip to another timeline, which appears to be closer to our own, to discover her doppelganger, June Fennell. The two women connect and once June is informed about Rachel’s experiment, they work together to figure out when their two worlds branched from each other, determining it happened shortly after their great grandfather came to the United States. Their next stop is to travel back to see him and figure out which of their timelines is “real,” although they each know it is their own.
The Alcazaba with the ruins of a Roman theater in the foreground
Last week I had the pleasure of spending five days in Málaga, a historic port on Spain’s south coast. Founded by the Phoenicians around the 8th century BC, it continued to be important during Roman times and well into the modern era. While it was never one of the major ports like Barcelona, it always saw brisk trade.
The main attractions are two museums dedicated to local-boy-done-good Pablo Picasso and a pair of impressive medieval castles. The first is the Alcazaba, which loomed over the town and we’ll talk about today. Next week’s castle is further upslope and is called the Gibralfaro.