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Tor Double #10: Robert Silverberg’s Sailing to Byzantium and Gene Wolfe’s Seven American Nights

Tor Double #10: Robert Silverberg’s Sailing to Byzantium and Gene Wolfe’s Seven American Nights

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Cover for Sailing to Byzantium by Brian Waugh
Cover for Seven American Nights by Bryn Barnard

Seven American Nights was originally published in Orbit 20, edited by Damon Knight and published by Harper & Row in March, 1978. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Seven American Nights is the first of two Wolfe stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series.

Sailing to Byzantium was originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in February, 1985. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, winning the latter.  Sailing to Byzantium is the second of five Silverberg stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series and aside from the proto-series Laumer novel, it is the first time an author has been repeated.

Wolfe’s story opens with a short note from Hassan Kerbelai indicating that he is sending the travelogue of Nadan Jaffarzadeh back to his family, noting that Jaffarzadeh seems to have gone missing. The final paragraphs of the story are focused on Jaffarzadeh’s mother’s reaction to the travelogue. The majority of the story is Jaffarzadeh’s description of his first week visiting America.

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Heroes and Humanity: Jack Kirby at the Skirball Center

Heroes and Humanity: Jack Kirby at the Skirball Center

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Last Friday, as an early Father’s Day gift, my wife arranged for us to spend the afternoon at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, which is hosting a wonderful new exhibition dedicated to the memory and achievement of a great American artist. Titled Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity and running until March 1, 2026, the show is a must-see for any admirer of the King of Comics.

Jack Kirby is arguably the most influential person in the history of mainstream American comic books; his work, more than that of any other artist or writer, defined the visual grammar of the superhero. Along with his partner Joe Simon, he created Captain America in the 1940’s, soldiered through the postwar superhero slump of the 1950’s doing work in all genres — science fiction, war, horror, western, and romance (it’s an often forgotten fact that Simon and two-fisted Jack Kirby created the romance comic book) until, in the 1960’s, when DC showed that there was a reawakening market for costumed heroes, he teamed up with Stan Lee to create the “Marvel Universe”, though they didn’t know that’s what they were doing when they did it.

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A Hand-Crafted World: Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction

A Hand-Crafted World: Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction

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Is there anything more dispiriting than the ceaseless quest for novelty, especially when it seems bound to end in disappointment? It’s something I feel just about every time I turn on the TV. We’ve never had so many viewing choices, but so often everything feels reheated, recycled; we’ve seen it all before. The genuinely different is so rare that when you do see it, you know it — and you never forget it.

Sometime in the 70’s I saw an old black-and-white movie on television; it was called The Fabulous World of Jules Verne and it was the most extraordinary-looking thing I had ever seen. Guess what? I never forgot it.

A few years later I saw a movie on the late-night tube about the world’s greatest liar, Baron Munchausen. This time I couldn’t say that I had never seen anything like it because there was one thing that it reminded me of — The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. It was only years later that I learned that both films were the work of the Czechoslovakian director, Karel Zeman.

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Trope Subversion, Level: Master

Trope Subversion, Level: Master

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Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

If video games aren’t your thing, you’re not going to like my post today. With the release of Doom: The Dark Ages and let’s plays popping up all over my YouTube feed, I’m going to nerd out today about Doom for a moment. Actually, I’m going to nerd out about one specific cutscene in Doom: The Dark Ages because it flips a common horror trope to highlight the mythology of the main character so perfectly, I’ve been nerding out since I saw the clip during an episode of Jacksepticeye’s let’s play just a little over a week ago. Welcome to my new hyper-fixation.

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By Crom: Marvel, Roy Thomas, and The Barbarian Life

By Crom: Marvel, Roy Thomas, and The Barbarian Life

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So, back in January of 2022, I did a post on Roy Thomas and the Marvel Conan comic he created in the seventies. I never read that comic. But for some reason in 2019, I decided to buy the first of what turned out to be his three memoirs about the series (mostly about the first 115 issues, which constituted his first run with Conan), and also one of the Marvel Omnibuses that had been put out recently. I ended up getting four of the high-quality Omnibuses, which are those 115 issues he covered in his books.

And I just finished, a couple years later, the first 100, which culminated with the death of Belit, from “Queen of the Black Coast.”

I also recently started the Savage Sword of  Conan Omnibus, which ran around the same time, and was black and white. It’s a more ‘literary Howard’ comic, and definitely different than the color Conan one (also less popular). 

Below is the original post I did. Then, an additional section, having read through the first hundred. I think this comic is definitely a must for Conan fans.  I prefer some of these stories to the Tor pastiches. They’re not all good, of course, but I have enjoyed my read through. And I cannot recommend enough, getting Thomas’ three books. Read one comic issue, then the accompanying short chapter from his book. It’s a terrific experience. Read on, MacDuff (a little literary malapropism for you).

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The Old-Fashioned Way: Tove Jansson’s Hobbit Illustrations

The Old-Fashioned Way: Tove Jansson’s Hobbit Illustrations

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Okay — close your eyes and visualize Middle-earth. I can’t be certain what you’re seeing behind your eyelids, but I think I have a good chance of guessing; five will get you ten that whatever you’re conjuring bears a strong resemblance to the Alan Lee Lord of the Rings book illustrations and to Tolkien’s world as envisioned in Peter Jackson’s films (on which Lee and John Howe did much of the production design).

The austere, rather chilly (once you’re out of the Shire, anyway) Lee/Howe template has become the default picture of Middle-earth for many — if not most — people, but there are other ways to view Tolkien’s realms and their inhabitants. I have already sworn my fealty to the first such visualization that I ever encountered: the beautiful Tim Kirk paintings that were featured in the 1975 Tolkien Calendar.

I am also partial to another version that’s not nearly well enough known, the gorgeous illustrations done by Michael Kaluta for the 1994 Tolkien Calendar. (Kaluta is probably best known for his comic book work, especially on the 1970’s Shadow for DC.)

One thing that makes both Kirk’s and Kaluta’s art so attractive to me is that its depiction of Middle-earth is just different from the one that has become the current standard. (Kaluta’s work is especially striking because it is so extravagantly colorful compared to Lee’s and Howe’s bleached-out work.)

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Four Things I Think I Think: May 2025

Four Things I Think I Think: May 2025

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Time to share a few things I Think I Think.

I mean, what’ the point of having your own blog column if you can’t share your opinion on whatever you want to? Right???

1 – The Black Company Remains One of My Favorite Series’

I’ve written multiple times that audiobooks fit my lifestyle these years. I still enjoy reading a print book, and the digital format has made a LOT of long out-of-print Pulp, available. But I listen to audiobooks while I work, write, game, drive, and even fall asleep. I get to stuff I’d not, otherwise.

Last year I listened to the entire Black Company series (minus Port of Shadows). I have read the entire thing at least three times through, and this was my first listen. Last month, as I was doing a couple of long runs, I decided I wanted to listen to The Black Company (book one). during them. And here I am a month later, on Water Sleeps, the second-to-last book (I only have Port of Shadows in hardback, so excluding that from the discussion at present).

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When Satire is Overwhelmed by Reality: Moon Missing: Edward Sorel’s Report on Future Events

When Satire is Overwhelmed by Reality: Moon Missing: Edward Sorel’s Report on Future Events

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Moon Missing (1962)

At about 1:46 am EST in the middle of the American night of April 4, 1965 the Moon disappeared. The American people were informed the next day at a Presidential news conference. President Kennedy was in no way responsible, said Allen Dulles, disgraced former CIA director but now Secretary of the Exterior, tapped to safeguard American interests in outer space.

Cartoonist, caricaturist, satirist Edward Sorel published Moon Missing in 1962. He had no need to prognosticate the future; the world around him gave him all the ammunition his ink Speedball B6 required.

So insistent are we today that the early Sixties were a more innocent time that the reality of the fear, paranoia, tension, and general unhappiness of the era can only be exhumed from period pieces. Sorel’s vision of the craziness ready to be let loose by a global event relied heavily on contemporary names in the news, but to find frighteningly many parallels in today’s world the names need only to be changed to modern equivalents.

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Tor Doubles #7: James Tiptree Jr.’s The Girl Who Was Plugged In and Vonda N. McIntyre’s Screwtop

Tor Doubles #7: James Tiptree Jr.’s The Girl Who Was Plugged In and Vonda N. McIntyre’s Screwtop

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Cover for Screwtop by Maren
Cover for The Girl Who Was Plugged In by Peter Gudynas

 

The seventh official volume of the Tor Doubles series offers two stories by women. Although the previous volume offered an excerpt from Gwyneth Jones’ novel Divine Endurance is addition to the selections from Barry B. Longyear and John Kessel, this is the first time women have provided the headlining stories in the series. James Tiptree, Jr.’s The Girl Who Was Plugged In and Vonda McIntyre’s Screwtop, both stories about women whose freedom was curtailed, are collected in this volume. As with the previous novel, this volume also includes an excerpt, in this case a three chapter piece from Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint.

The Girl Who Was Plugged In was originally published in New Dimensions 3, edited by Robert Silverberg and published by Nelson Doubleday in October, 1973. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, winning the former.

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The Lost World

The Lost World

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You may have heard about the recent statements made by Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, a man who combines all the best qualities of Dr. Jack Kevorkian and Alaric the Goth in one natty package. As reported by Variety on April 28th, the streaming mogul declared that the precipitous decline in in-person movie attendance which began several years ago and has reached near-catastrophic proportions in the years following COVID is easily understandable; indeed, it communicates a clear message:

What does that say? What is the consumer trying to tell us? That they’d like to watch movies at home, thank you. The studios and the theaters are duking it out over trying to preserve this 45-day window that is completely out of step with the consumer experience of just loving a movie.

Relegating the theater experience that has defined the industry (to say nothing of wider American culture) for the past nine decades to the dustbin of history, Sarandos shined a dazzling light on our murky cultural landscape:

Folks grew up thinking, I want to make movies on a gigantic screen and have strangers watch them and to have them play in the theater for two months and people cry and sold-out shows… It’s an outdated concept.

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