Search Results for: steve carper

Invincible Warriors and Goofball Sidekicks: Robots in American Popular Culture by Steve Carper

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Cover by Emsh Steve Carper has been blogging about robots at Black Gate ever since his first post, The First Three Laws of Robotics, appeared back in November 2017. His delightful and entertaining articles have explored every facet of robots in America over the last century and a half. And now his first book on the subject, Robots in American Popular Culture, has been published by McFarland. Here’s what Steve tells us about it. Robots in American Popular Culture is the first truly…

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Steve Carper on the Solo SF Art of Leo Dillon

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Art for Stephen Barr’s “The Back of Our Heads” by Leo Dillon (Galaxy, July 1958) Leo Dillon, who passed away in 2012, was one half of the famous husband-and-wife art team of Leo and Diane Dillon, who won back-to-back Caldecott Awards in 1976 and 1977, and the 1971 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist for their work on Terry Carr’s Ace Special covers. They created some of the most iconic SF and Fantasy cover art of the 20th Century, including Harlan Ellison’s…

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Vintage Treasures: Night’s Black Agents by Fritz Leiber

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Nights Black Agents (Berkley Books, May 1980). Cover by Wayne Barlowe Nights Black Agents was Fritz Leiber’s first first collection — and in fact his first book. It was originally published in hardcover by Arkham House in 1947, when Leiber was 37 years old. It collects six stories published in Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds, plus one tale from a fanzine, and three new stories — including the long Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novella “Adept’s Gambit.” Needless to say,…

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Vintage Treasures: The Mind Spider and Ships to the Stars by Fritz Leiber

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The Mind Spider and Other Stories and Ships to the Stars (Ace Books, 1976). Covers by Walter Rane Last year I discussed the marvelous collection The Worlds of Fritz Leiber, published by Ace in 1976, and was astounded to find the author make this claim in the introduction. I believe this collection represents me more completely, provides a fuller measure of the range of my fictional efforts, than any other. I’ve tried to make it that way, without repeating stories from…

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Vintage Treasures: The Worlds of Fritz Leiber

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The Worlds of Fritz Leiber (Ace, 1976). Cover by Patrick Woodroffe Fritz Leiber died 30 years ago, in 1992, but he’s in no real danger of being forgotten. His Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories remain poplar and are still in print, and so are many of his acclaimed novels and collections. I wish more of his work was readily accessible to modern readers though, like his splendid 1976 collection The Worlds of Fritz Leiber. In his introduction Leiber said “I…

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Best of the Small Magazines: The Digest Enthusiast #11, Pulp Modern: Tech Noir, and Weird Fiction Review #9

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Covers by Rick McCollum, Ran Scott, and Colin Nitta One of the great pleasures of the science fiction and fantasy genre is the fine selection of small magazines, covering a wide range of specialty interests. It’s only the sheer size of SFF fandom that allows these magazines to exist, and for like-minded communities to form around them. Here’s a few of my recent favorites. The Digest Enthusiast was founded by Arkay Olgar in 2014, and has been published every six months by…

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Before Roomba

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Launcher of a million cat videos, the Roomba automatic vacuum cleaner was a success from its release in 2002. The catchy name helped, and the even catchier company name, iRobot, solidified the the concept and category of the machine in the public’s mind. The firm was founded in 1990 by three, definitionally nerdy, MIT roboticists, Colin Angle, Helen Greiner and Rodney Brooks. Undoubtedly familiar with Isaac Asimov’s famed collection of robot stories – and probably frequent visitors to the MIT…

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Silas P. Cornu’s Dry Calculator

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Digging through the vast, deep landscape of popular culture is very much like being a working paleontologist. Fragments of bones are everywhere, both on the surface and accessible through spadework. Unbroken samples are rare finds, interesting enough in and of themselves but truly valuable only if put into context. Also as in paleontology, trying to create a proper history grows exponentially more difficult every time a new site is opened. The older metaphor of an evolutionary tree of life that…

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The Diamond Service Brigade

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In 1931 the Mid-Continent Petroleum Company was hot stuff. Its 6,000 Diamond dealers owned the upper Midwest and could found as far south as Oklahoma, not surprising since it was the biggest employer in its home base of Tulsa. NevrNox Ethyl gasoline, the company boasted, provided the highest mileage of any product on the market. Mid-Continent was cutting edge, both in the science behind their formulations and in the way they presented them. 1931 was the year it pioneered a…

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A New First Comic Strip Robot

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Paleontologists constantly push the date of the first known human or the first known use of symbols earlier. Word detectives compete with one another to spot ever earlier uses of a word or phrase or bit of slang. And historians take their reputation in their hands whenever they state that such-and-such was the first one in history. In my book, Robots in American Popular Culture, I cited Hans Horina’s short- lived robot series, Professor Dodger and His Automatic Servant Girl,…

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