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9 Seasons of Hell on Earth: Some Thoughts About The Walking Dead, Part One

9 Seasons of Hell on Earth: Some Thoughts About The Walking Dead, Part One

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twd-2

I chose to finally write about The Walking Dead after nine seasons because of the departure of a major character, which changed the whole dynamic of the series, turning it into a different direction (Season 10 broadcasts Oct 6, 2019). For fans of the show, much of what is in this article is me stating the obvious. I know many people who have stopped watching the show after various seasons, for one reason or another. I also know people who have never watched TWD and never will, and some who have just started watching. There may be some hints and clues about certain things, but there are no real spoilers here. This article is about how the show affects me, personally.

Someone on Facebook commented that they stopped watching simply because the show is so sad, even depressing. True. This is not a comedy. There’s a lot of sorrow and sadness in almost every episode, a veritable trail of tears. Sometimes the grief on an actor’s face is enough to get to me. There are powerful emotions here: both love and hate, as well as fear and horror in the eyes of the characters; there’s also plenty of heart and soul poured into these scenes, which the cast so effectively conveys. As a relative told me when we were discussing the series over the Labor Day weekend, “My heart has been ripped out over and over again by what happens to these characters. I feel their pain, I feel their grief and I mourn with them.” I agree with her. I’ve gotten caught up in the lives and deaths of these characters. So please, bear with me.

Although I’ve read only a handful of Robert Kirkman’s graphic novels, I’ve been a fan of the television series since episode one, and still remain a fan. I’m not a mad puppy because the show’s producers and writers made some changes which aren’t part of Kirkman’s mythos. Certain characters that had been killed in the graphic novels became so popular on the TV show that the producers decided to keep them around. Other popular characters were killed off on the show and, as most writers know, characters and plot twists often demand to be heard and made.

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What Is Genre, Anyway? (AKA, I am Totally Lost)

What Is Genre, Anyway? (AKA, I am Totally Lost)

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Steampunk 1

This is… Steampunk Assassin’s Creed? It’s pretty cool whatever it is.

Good morning, Readers!

I have a wee problem. I’m absolute rubbish at categorizing works of fiction. Sure, some things fit quite nicely into easy designations. The Lord of the Rings? Fantasy, duh! Dragon’s Egg? Science fiction, duh! Battlefield Earth? Nonsensical drivel, duh! Sorry. I genuinely dislike that book. It’s alright if you like it. I just don’t. Anyway, what was I saying? Ah, yes. Genre.

Things, however, very rarely fit ever so neatly into a single genre, though, especially now when so many diverse voices are bringing fresh takes, pushing boundaries and deliberately blurring the lines between genre. This experimentation, this refusal to be bound by boring rules that are no longer relevant, has created some of the most interesting, immersive stories I have read in a long time (which is to say, I don’t get bored rereading all the same tropes over and over to the point where I can accurate predict the trajectory of a story from the first chapter). I love that I don’t get bored reading now. I was starting to, if I’m honest.

It’s all a lovely, fascinating, confusing mess.

In a world obsessed with categorizing everything neatly, however, it’s creating a little bit of friction.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: A Man Called Spade

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: A Man Called Spade

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Spade_Falconbook

You might have noticed that my column – heck, my byline – was absent last week. Having recovered from hernia surgery, I promptly decided to have a kidney stone. It ‘hit’ last Saturday night and for about twenty hours, it was the most pain I’ve had in my life (no wife joke here…). It seems to be comfortable and hasn’t passed yet, though it’s not so bad at the moment. But between missing three days at work, peeing nonstop, and trying to catch up at work while still feeling some pain, this week’s column was pretty far down the list.

So, I decided to re-run one of my hardboiled posts from well before I ever thought of doing an entire column on that topic. I LOVE The Maltese Falcon: book and movie. Not a lot of folks know Hammett wrote a few short stories about Sam Spade: though he seemed to have done so just for some quick cash; and his heart wasn’t really in it. Read on to learn a bit about it all.

“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)

In last week’s column, I mentioned The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart. (Did you follow instructions and watch it for the first time?) Over eighty years after its publication, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon stands supreme today as the finest private eye novel ever written. Bogie’s 1941 film proved that the third time is a charm, prior attempts in 1931 and 1936 having failed.

Sam Spade, the quintessential tough guy shamus, appeared in a five-part serial of The Maltese Falcon in Black Mask in 1929. Hammett carefully reworked the pieces into novel form for publication by Alfred E. Knopf in 1930 and detective fiction would have a benchmark that has yet to be surpassed.

Hammett, who wrote over two dozen stories featuring a detective known as The Continental Op (well worth reading), never intended to write more about Samuel Spade, saying he was “done with him” after completing the book-length tale.

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Betty and Ian Ballantine

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Betty and Ian Ballantine

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Betty Ballantine
Betty Ballantine

Betty and Ian Ballantine
Betty and Ian Ballantine

Ian Ballantine
Ian Ballantine

The Balrog Award, often referred to as the coveted Balrog Award*, was created by Jonathan Bacon and first conceived in issue 10/11 of his Fantasy Crossroads fanzine in 1977 and actually announced in the final issue, where he also proposed the Smitty Awards for fantasy poetry. The awards were presented for the first time at Fool-Con II at the Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas on April 1, 1979. The awards were never taken particularly seriously, even by those who won the award. The final awards were presented in 1985. The first Balrog Special Awards were presented in 1980 to Ian and Betty Ballantine. Special Awards were also presented in 1981, 1983, and 1985.

I wrote the following about Betty Ballantine in 2005 in my fanzine, Argentus, with the aim of having a Worldcon present a Special Committee Award to Ballantine. In 2006, L.A.con IV presented her with such an award.

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Superworld Comics

Superworld Comics

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Superworld Comics #1, April 1940 cover

Hugo Gernsback, the self-proclaimed “Father of Science Fiction,” has been lauded a thousand times for publishing the first all science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. Rightly so, for modern science fiction as a genre starts there. Amazing was launched in 1926, when Gernsback was 42. Gernsback lived another forty-one years and continued to throw off ideas as dervishly as in the first half of his life. Could it be that he has other, perhaps lesser-known, firsts to celebrate? Could it be that he also published the first all science fiction comic book?

Well, not quite. Pulp publisher Fiction House made a simultaneous launch of a science-fiction pulp, Planet Stories, cover-dated Winter 1939, and a comic book, Planet Comics, cover-dated January 1940, and so they get the credit. (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction gives first place to the most oxymoronically-titled comic, Amazing Mystery Funnies. That featured several sf strips, but those were never even more than half the contents throughout 1939.)

I’m burying the lede. Hugo Gernsback published a comic book!
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Thoughts on Our Ecosystem

Thoughts on Our Ecosystem

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pegasus

This is one of mine. I’m working on getting better.

Good morning, Readers!

One of my favorite conventions, Can*Con, is rapidly approaching (sure, it’s the only convention I can afford to go to, it being in my hometown, and all, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that it is, in truth, a wonderful convention), and I’m excited. This excitement, however, is also tinged with not a little trepidation. There are many reasons for this, but foremost among them is anxiety. I am anxious for a number of reasons.

First among those reasons are the sheer number of people. There will be a lot of them. Some of them will be important-types. Some will be just regular folk like myself. Being a very small, unimportant fish, struggling to grow, being surrounded by much bigger, more successful fish can feel a little suffocating. It’s difficult to get seen, and harder still to be heard.

One of the reasons I so love Can*Con is how, despite how it has continually grown, it hasn’t forgotten those of us who aren’t so big and important. When I first turned up there, I purchased a table to sell my one and only book, a self-published collections of short stories and poems called The Dying God & Other Stories. It was the only thing I had. Despite having only one book, and despite it being a self-published thing, I was welcomed warmly.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Paul Bishop on Lance Spearman – The Black James Bond

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Paul Bishop on Lance Spearman – The Black James Bond

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Spear_HeadShotEDITED“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)

Paul Bishop wrote the very first entry for our Discovering Robert E. Howard series (covering REH’s fight stories). I knew he’d come up with another great piece for the return of A (Black) Gat in the Hand – and boy, did he! I had never even heard of the Lance Spearman books, but what a cool story! Pulp magazines fell by the way-side for pocket paperbacks and comic books. Topics related to the latter two groups will be sprinkled in to this series. And today, Paul is going to tell us about a third entry: the popular ‘Look Books’ Read on!

‘Lance Spearman, has a charming way with girls and a deadly way with thugs’

Look-books—a term coined for magazines featuring a mash up of action photographs accompanied by comic strip style captions (also known as photo books)—are relatively unknown in America. However, in many other parts of the world, this comic book hybrid of captioned action photographs had a rabid following from the ‘60s to the late ‘80s. In Africa, look-books served as surrogates for films—as a means to tell film-like stories— at a time when commercial African cinema was not yet invented.

African Film Magazine (AFM) was the most popular of the African look-books. Alternately called Spear Magazine, every bi-weekly issue had eager fans clamoring for it at their local newsstand. Created by James Richard Abe Bailey, the character of Lance Spearman shattered racist stereotypes of the uncivilized, uneducated, spear-carrying Africans as portrayed in most Western comic books of the era. Each issue of AFM contained thirty-one pages of action filled black and white captioned photographs edited in urbane cinematic style.

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Call for Backers! New Podcast Derelict is a Science Fiction Thriller You Don’t Want to Miss

Call for Backers! New Podcast Derelict is a Science Fiction Thriller You Don’t Want to Miss

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Since J. Barton Mitchell and I are in the same writer’s group, I had the privilege of reading the script for the first episode of Derelict before it was cast. If you liked Mitchell’s book, The Razor, or are otherwise a fan of action packed, hard science fiction, you definitely don’t want to miss this. Mitchell has provided the following interview, discussing the project in depth, but first, check out the first episode, then go back the production of future episodes here.

Emily Mah: As a science fiction author, your novel Valley of Fires concluded the Conquered Earth series (and was awarded best science fiction novel of 2015 by the RT Book Review), which included Midnight City and The Severed Tower. Last November you had The Razor (picked by Amazon as one of the best Sci-Fi books of 2018). With Derelict, you’re exploring a whole new medium: narrative podcasts. Why turn to podcasting?

J. Barton Mitchell: I actually started on the film side of things, my first success was as a screenwriter, I came to fiction later on. As a result, I tend to think cinematically, even when writing books. The narrative podcast medium was kind of a natural fit because it’s sort of cinematic without visuals (odd as that sounds). It’s, basically, like you’re listening to a movie. The format also lets you do projects that would be completely impossible from a budget standpoint if they were in film or TV. Derelict would be over a $100 million dollar budget as a movie…but, as a podcast, I can make it in my basement, and it’s almost just as visceral and engaging. I think that’s really exciting. The other thing is that, for me, the best kind of storytelling is where the audience is allowed to participate in the storytelling process. In other words, they get to fill in the blanks with their imagination. The audio format allows for that in a major way, because (like a novel) it’s sans imagery. The audience has to imagine the visuals themselves. I think that’s really exciting too.

Emily Mah: So, no spoilers, but what’s Derelict about and why should I tune in?

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: “Enemy Mine,” by Barry B. Longyear

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: “Enemy Mine,” by Barry B. Longyear

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Cover by Vincent di Fate
Cover by Vincent di Fate

The Best Novella category was not one of the original Hugo categories in 1953. I twas introduced in 1968, when it was won by Philip José Farmer for “Riders of the Purple Wage” and Anne McCaffrey for “Weyr Search.” Since then, some version of the award has been a constant, with the exception of 1958. In 1980, the awards were presented at Noreascon II in Boston.

The Nebula Award was created by the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) and first presented in 1966, when the award for Best Novella was won by Brian W. Aldiss for “The Saliva Tree” and Roger Zelazny for “He Who Shapes.” The award has been given annually since then.

The Locus Awards were established in 1972 and presented by Locus Magazine based on a poll of its readers. In more recent years, the poll has been opened up to on-line readers, although subscribers’ votes have been given extra weight. At various times the award has been presented at Westercon and, more recently, at a weekend sponsored by Locus at the Science Fiction Museum (now MoPop) in Seattle. The Best Book Novella Award dates back to 1974, when the short fiction awards were split into Short Fiction and Novella lengths. Frederick Pohl won the first award. In 1980. The Locus Poll received 854 responses.

In January, I wrote about Barry B. Longyear, the winner of the John W. Campbell Award in 1980 and explored the vast amount of fiction he published in 1978 and 1979. At that time, I dismissed his biggest hit with a single line, “His breakout story, of course, was “Enemy Mine,” which will be covered in more depth in the article on that novella’s various awards for the year.” Now is come the time to discuss that story.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes on the Range

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes on the Range

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Hockensmith_HoRCoverEDITEDThat’s right: The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes is back! Well, for one week, anyways. A (Black) Gat in the Hand will resume next Monday. There were quite a few topics I never got around to covering during TPLoSH’ 156-ish week run. (Wow!) And one was Steve Hockensmith’s Holmes on the Range series. I recently got around to finishing the short story collection that I bought for my Nook back in 2011 (I’ve got a bit of a reading backlog, ok?!), and I decided I needed to finally write a post about it, before it got buried in the To Write list again. So, here we go!

There are a lot of ways to go about writing a Sherlock Holmes story. Some folks attempt to very carefully emulate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s own style, and turn out a tale that feels as if it might have been done by the creator of the great detective himself. Of course, success varies greatly. Hugh Ashton and Denis O. Smith are the best I’ve found in this regard. You can find stories ranging from pretty good to not suitable for (digital) toilet paper. I’ve had three of my own stories published with ‘meh’ results.

Some folks write whatever the heck they want, often with the name of Holmes being the only similarity to the famed detective. It is possible to find good Holmes stories that sound nothing like Dr. Watson’s narrative style, of course. And Holmes has been placed in different eras, and even worlds.

There have been Holmes parodies around for over a hundred years. I’ve written a couple myself, and they were fun!

There are Holmes-like successors out there, of whom August Derleth’s Solar Pons is the best. Yes, I’m aware that’s a subjective judgement, but it’s mine, and I’m the one writing this essay, so it stands. I’ve written about Pons more than once (here’s a good overview), and even contributed introductions and pastiches to anthologies.

But today I’m going to talk about one of Sherlock Holmes’ contemporaries; albeit, quite different and far away. Steve Hockensmith had been writing short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Christmas issue, and wanted to sell more to the venerable magazine. EQMM does an annual Sherlock Holmes issue, so he figured that was the way to go. But he wanted to write more than just another Holmes story.

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