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Year: 2018

New Treasures: Wonderblood by Julia Whicker

New Treasures: Wonderblood by Julia Whicker

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Wonderblood-smallThere have been a lot of intriguing fantasy debuts already in 2018, and to really stand out you need to do something different. Julia Whicker’s Wonderblood, set in a post-apocalyptic America where magic is openly practiced, sounds like it will fit the bill nicely.

Margot Livesey calls it “A stunning debut… Julia Whicker evokes an apocalyptic America where medicine is illegal, everyone is searching for portents and only a severed head can offer protection.” That’s plenty different, anyway. Wonderblood was published in hardcover last month by St. Martin’s Press.

Set 500 years in the future, a mad cow-like disease called “Bent Head” has killed off most of the U.S. population. Those remaining turn to magic and sacrifice to cleanse the Earth.

Wonderblood is Julia Whicker’s fascinating literary debut, set in a barren United States, an apocalyptic wasteland where warring factions compete for control of the land in strange and dangerous carnivals. A mad cow-like disease called “Bent Head” has killed off millions. Those who remain worship the ruins of NASA’s space shuttles, and Cape Canaveral is their Mecca. Medicine and science have been rejected in favor of magic, prophecy, and blood sacrifice.

When traveling marauders led by the bloodthirsty Mr. Capulatio invade her camp, a young girl named Aurora is taken captive as his bride and forced to join his band on their journey to Cape Canaveral. As war nears, she must decide if she is willing to become her captor’s queen. But then other queens emerge, some grotesque and others aggrieved, and not all are pleased with the girl’s ascent. Politics and survival are at the centre of this ravishing novel.

Wonderblood was published by St. Martin’s Press on April 3, 2018. It is 304 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Ervin Serrano.

With a (Black) Gat: Raoul Whitfield

With a (Black) Gat: Raoul Whitfield

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Gat_Whitfield1(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Welcome back to our second post in With a (Black) Gat!

I don’t think that you can argue with the assertion that the Joe ‘Cap’ Shaw era was the highwater mark of Black Mask Magazine (and detective pulps in whole). Some good writers, like Steve Fisher, Cornell Woolrich and John D. MacDonald, made their marks on the Mask with Shaw’s editorial successors, but let’s be real.

Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are recognized as the two greatest Black Maskers, though Chandler only wrote eleven stories over three years. It was his novels (the first two drawing heavily on his Black Mask short stories) that launched him to legendary status. Carroll John Daly, creator of Race Williams, was the most popular writer in the stable, though Shaw disliked his work.

Erle Stanley Gardner (better remembered for Perry Mason, though his Cool and Lam stories are great) was one of the favored sons. Frederic Nebel, Shaw’s handpicked successor to replace Dash when he left the pulp field, belongs in the upper echelon. As does the less-well remembered Raoul Whitfield. And today’s gat is in Whitfield’s hand. Boy, did he like to use one!

“About Kid Deth” appeared in the February, 1931 issue of Black Mask. Raymond Chandler famously said, “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” Chandler may very well have developed this axiom by reading Whitfield’s story. I’m kidding!

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Birthday Reviews: Manly Wade Wellman’s “The Terrible Parchment”

Birthday Reviews: Manly Wade Wellman’s “The Terrible Parchment”

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Cover by Margaret Brundage
Cover by Margaret Brundage

Manly Wade Wellman was born on May 21, 1903 and died on April 5, 1986.

In 1956, his story “Dead and Gone” received an Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Story. Wellman’s collection Worse Things Waiting received a World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 1975, and in 1976 he received a Phoenix Award at DeepSouthCon. He received a World Fantasy Award Life Achievement Award in 1980 and in 1983 was a Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention in Chicago. At ConStellation, the 1983 Worldcon, Wellman was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame. He received a Special Award from the British Fantasy Society in 1985.

“The Terrible Parchment” first appeared in the August 1937 issue of Weird Tales, edited by Farnsworth Wright. The story was dedicated to the memory of H.P. Lovecraft, who had died five months earlier. In 1972, Meade and Penny Frierson reprinted it in the first issue of their fanzine, HPL. Wellman then included the story in his 1973 collection Worse Things Waiting. In 1996, Robert M. Price selected it for the Chaosium Cthulhu Cycle anthology The Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the Blasphemous Tome of the Mad Arab. It was also included in the Wildside Press e-book The Second Cthulhu Mythos Megapack in 2016.

While preternatural horror is often the goal of fiction set in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, humor also has a tendency to sneak in. Wellman’s meta-fictional “The Terrible Parchment” is definitely an early example of humorous Cthuliana, positing a copy of Weird Tales delivered to its subscriber and containing a page from The Necronomicon.

Although the idea of the characters being terrorized by the volume Lovecraft and so many of his followers have described works on a conceptual level, Wellmen’s depiction of the attack undermines the horror and turns the story into a more humorous work. As readers of Weird Tales, the characters are aware of The Necronomicon and its role in Lovecraft’s mythos, and Gwen even suggests that the book has achieved reality based on its legendary nature and fame, already occurring in 1937. The page’s method of attack, moving along the floor like an inchworm and seeping up the narrator’s leg, however, leaves much to be desired as a preternatural horror, as does his means of defense, stabbing at it with his wife’s umbrella.

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The 2017 Nebula Award Winners

The 2017 Nebula Award Winners

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The-Stone-Sky-N.K.-Jemisin-smaller All Systems Red-small The-Art-of-Starving-Sam-J-Miller-medium

I turned 54 years old today. And as a birthday present to me, just as it does every year, the Science Fiction Writers of America gave out the 52nd Annual Nebula Awards. This year they were presented at the SFWA Nebula Conference in Pittsburgh, PA, at the Pittsburgh Marriott City Center.

Unlike the last 2015 and 2016 events (which were held in Chicago), I was unable to attend, but they somehow went on without me. Here’s the complete list of winners.

Novel

The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

Novella

All Systems Red, Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)

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Birthday Reviews: Adam-Troy Castro’s “MS Found Paper-Clipped to a Box of Jujubes”

Birthday Reviews: Adam-Troy Castro’s “MS Found Paper-Clipped to a Box of Jujubes”

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Cover by Amy Sterling
Cover by Amy Sterling

Adam-Troy Castro was born on May 20, 1960.

Castro has been nominated for the Nebula Award 8 times in the three short fiction categories, beginning with a Best Novella nomination for “The Funeral March of the Marionettes” and most recently for the novella “With Unclean Hands.” “The Funeral March of the Marionettes” was also nominated for the Hugo Award, and Castro later shared a Hugo nomination with Jerry Oltion for “The Astronaut from Wyoming.” Castro and Oltion would go on to win the Seiun Award for “The Astronaut from Wyoming” in 2007. He won the Philip K. Dick Award for the novel Emissaries from the Dead in 2009. Four of his stories have topped the Analog Readers Poll, including “The Astronaut from Wyoming,” “Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl’s,” “With Unclean Hands,” and “The Coward’s Option.”

“MS. Found Paper-Clipped to a Box of Jujubes” was an original story included in Castro’s 2000 collection An Alien Darkness. It is the only time it has been published and was one of three stories first published in that collection.

It is only natural to look at a Ferris wheel and think about what would happen if it broke loose from its moorings. Of course, the reality of the situation would be deadly and horrific, but Castro paints a more surrealistic scene in “MS Found Paper-Clipped to a Box of Jujubes.”

Joe and Mary Sue are riding on a Ferris wheel, ignoring pretty much everything except for each other, when the wheel jumps from its holder and begins to roll down the midway and eventually out of the fairgrounds, gaining speed as its goes and causing Mary Sue to fall out of the wheel (unharmed). Joe just goes along for the ride as police try to stop the runaway wheel, treating it more like a speeding driver than anything else. Eventually, the wheel goes on to achieve cross-dimensional status and the wheel’s riders begin to work to regain control of the ride.

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Win One of Ten Copies of Todd McAulty’s The Robots of Gotham

Win One of Ten Copies of Todd McAulty’s The Robots of Gotham

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The Robots of Gotham cover wrap-small

Todd McAulty was the most popular writer to appear in the print version of Black Gate magazine. Locus said “Todd McAulty is Black Gate‘s great discovery,” and in their wrap-up of our entire 15-issue run, Free SF Reader wrote: “McAulty appears to be world class… If I was crazy enough to want to be an editor, I’d be trying to poach him, or wheedle work out of him, or kidnap him and have him chained up and guarded by a woman with blunt weaponry.”

We’ve been waiting for a long time for a full-length novel from Mr. McAulty, and at long last the wait is almost over. His massive debut The Robots of Gotham, a fast-paced thriller set in a world on the verge of total subjugation by machines, will be published next month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Early buzz has been mounting fast — Julie E. Czerneda calls it “Incredible,” Publishers Weekly says it “maintains breathless momentum throughout,” James Enge says it’s “The sort of book that makes people SF addicts for life,” and bestselling author Daniel H. Wilson calls it “A thrilling ride.” Early reviews from the public have been breathless as well — Joe Crowe was the very first to rate it at Goodreads, saying,

The whole story is a thrilling action flick in book form, with cool robots and conspiracies and things blowing up. Read it while walking in slow-motion away from an explosion.

You’ll have to wait until June 19th to buy the hardcover…. or if you can’t wait, jump over to The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, where they’re giving away 10 advance copies! You’ll need a Twitter account to be eligible, but how hard can that be? Easier than surviving the coming robot apocalypse, that’s for sure. While you’re contemplating, click the image above to see the beautiful ‘splosiony cover in full detail, with the end flap text and all those cool blurbs.

The Robots of Gotham will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/John Joseph Adams Books on June 19, 2018. It is 688 pages, priced at $26 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. The cover was designed by Mark R. Robinson. Get all the details here.

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in April

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in April

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Hell Hounds Banner

Joe Bonadonna had the top post at Black Gate in April, with his review of Andrew P. Weston’s Hell Hounds, the follow-up to his 2015 novel Hell Bound, and the second novel featuring the Daemon Grimm and his adventures in the Heroes in Hell universe created by Janet Morris.

Not to be intimidated, both Bob Byrne and Fletcher Vredenburgh placed two articles in the Top Ten last month. Bob’s feature on Arthurian Elements in the Conan Canon came in at #4, and his post on Tolkien’s Magic Sword Anglachel placed 9th. Fletcher claimed the sixth slot with his review of Andre Norton’s classic Witch World, and his look at Fred Saberhagen’s long-neglected novel The Broken Lands landed at #10.

There were a handful of folks in the Top Ten who weren’t named Joe, Bob, or Fletcher. Our feature on 40 Years of Gaming in Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar grabbed the #2 slot, and Ryans Harvey’s celebration of My 300th Black Gate Post soared to #3. James Wallace Harris asked if we are Fans of a Dying Art Form in our #5 piece, and our Vintage Treasure article comparing The Best Science Fiction of 1974 anthologies from Lester del Rey, Terry Carr, and Donald Wollheim was good for #7. Rounding out the list was our brief history of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine.

The complete list of Top Articles for April follows. Below that, I’ve also broken out the most popular overall articles, online fiction, and blog categories for the month.

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The Complete Carpenter: Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)

The Complete Carpenter: Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)

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memoirs-invisible-man-poster

The turnaround time on this installment of my John Carpenter retrospective was fast. That’s because there isn’t much to say about Memoirs of an Invisible Man. It’s the only film Carpenter directed strictly as a work-for-hire job. He came onto the film to get it shot after most of the creative pre-production decisions were already made. He didn’t take his usual above the title possessive credit, the only time that happened since Dark Star.

This article series by its nature takes an auteur approach to film analysis, and there’s not much to analyze with a movie where the director himself acknowledges he had little authorial voice in the final product. But there’s not much to analyze no matter the approach because this is a deeply mediocre movie.

Basically, if you want to skip this article and wait for In the Mouth of Madness, neither I nor John Carpenter will mind.

The Story

Chevy Chase plays Nick Halloway, a rich San Francisco investment banker who gets turned invisible by a scientific accident. Sinister government intelligence agent and hatchet man David Jenkins (Sam Neill) pursues Nick as a potential asset. Nick meets a pretty woman, Alice Monroe (Daryl Hannah), who helps him out. Eventually, Nick outwits Jenkins and goes to live in Switzerland with Alice, although he stays invisible. Roll credits.

The real story is what happened in pre-production. Memoirs of an Invisible Man was a Chevy Chase vanity project. He purchased the rights to H. F. Saint’s novel as a path to more serious leading man roles. This change in approach to what was supposed to be a comedy caused original director Ivan Reitman to jump ship, and screenwriter William Goldman (The Princess Bride and other movies far better than this one) followed soon after. Many directors were considered, and for a while Lethal Weapon’s Richard Donner was the serious contender. But then John Carpenter — not somebody you’d expect to helm a Chevy Chase movie of any type — ended up with the job. Possibly it was Carpenter’s track record working with visual effects and having directed another couple-on-the-run SF movie, Starman, that got Chase’s attention. Carpenter was engaged in a legal dispute with Alive Films at the time and decided to do the work-for-hire gig. Let’s see how that went.

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Birthday Reviews: Wendy Rathbone’s “The Beautiful People”

Birthday Reviews: Wendy Rathbone’s “The Beautiful People”

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Cover by J.K. Potter
Cover by J.K. Potter

Wendy Rathbone was born on May 19, 1960.

Although Rathbone has published several short stories and some novels, she may be best known for her poetry, which has been collected in Moon Canoes: The Selected Poetry of Wendy Rathbone, Autumn Phantom, Turn Left at November, Dead Starships, and Unearthly: The Collected Poetry of Wendy Rathbone. Rathbone’s poetry has been on the Rhysling ballot three times.

The only publication of “The Beautiful People” was in the 1998 anthology Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel.

Rathbone’s story looks at the relationship between Noah, a plain bartender, and Tam, the talented and attractive singer in a band. Both characters are outliers in a world in which people can undergo treatment to improve their looks and gain the appearance of perpetual youth. Noah refrains because he blames the treatments for his sister’s suicide and Tam avoids the treatment because he feels he doesn’t need them to look good.

As their relationship progresses, including marriage, Noah remains steadfast in his belief that the treatment is wrong and takes something out of people, while Tam seems to be increasingly concerned about his own imperfections, which Noah describes as extremely minor. However, Tam is a performer and feels the need to keep up with his competition and his bandmates, all of whom have undergone the treatment and are “naturally” impeccable, while he needs to groom himself to achieve even a semblance of a perfection he doesn’t feel.

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Venture Science Fiction, November 1969: A Retro-Review

Venture Science Fiction, November 1969: A Retro-Review

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Venture Science Fiction November 1969-small

This is Part 6 of a Decadal Review of vintage science fiction magazines published in November 1969. The previous articles are:

Amazing Stories, November 1969
Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1969
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1969
Worlds of If, November 1969
Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, November 1969

I approached Venture with a sense of trepidation, fearing that it was a place for cast-offs from Galaxy, there might be a diamond in the rough, maybe a good B-side. I am happy to report that I was totally wrong about that.

“Plague Ship,” by Harry Harrison, illustrations by Bert Tanner. This is an entire novel (about 82 pages, in -magazine). Normally I would summarize, but in this case, the people at Venture did it for me!

The interplanetary spacer, Johannes Kepler, was thirty days out from Earth when the meteorite hit the spaceship head on. Almost dead center. The survivors, led by a young medic, began a desperate struggle for their lives, not realizing that as bad as things were, they were soon to get worse.

That’s what is promised and rest assured that Harry Harrison delivers!

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