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The Top Five Books I Read in 2018

The Top Five Books I Read in 2018

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Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach-medium Alice Payne Arrives-small Redemption’s Blade-small

Okay, so maybe I’m one of those people who thinks, “Wow, how is it already a new year?” But then I think about everything I got up to in those 365 days and realize that time flies because I tend to keep myself pretty busy. Most relevant to my column here, that includes a ton of reading – and once again I’ve given myself the challenge of choosing my favorites, with a Top Five Books I Read in 2018.

In previous years, I’ve given myself the wiggle room that it didn’t matter what year the book was published in. I’m taking that away this time, forcing myself to choose from 2018 publications because, quite frankly, more recent titles need the signal boost more than something like Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. And I’ve managed to select a life-on-the-line, absolutely-have-to-choose #1 pick. For 2016, that title was An Inheritance of Ashes; for 2017, I went with The Nine by Tracy Townsend. But for 2018…

Life-on-the-Line Pick: Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach

The first time I saw Kelly Robson after reading her novella, I might have gone on a bit about a) how amazing it was and b) how there had better be a sequel in the works. (There is.) Lucky Peach is an action-packed, feels-jerking hopepunk story that somehow combines time travel, post-cataclysm environmentalism, transhumanism, tight character development AND a gut-punch of an ending. Seriously, go read this gods-damned book. Right now. Or if you’re not convinced, read my full review here.

And in alphabetical order, my other four picks for 2018 are…

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Titan Cover Art, by Paul Lehr

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Titan Cover Art, by Paul Lehr

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Cover by Paul Lehr
Cover by Paul Lehr
Cover by Paul Lehr
Cover by Paul Lehr
Cover by Paul Lehr
Cover by Paul Lehr

Peter Graham is often quoted as saying that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12. I was reminded of this quote last year while reading Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards (Tor Books) when Rich Horton commented that based on Graham’s statement, for him, the Golden Age of Science Fiction was 1972. It got me thinking about what science fiction (and fantasy) looked like the year I turned twelve and so this year, I’ll be looking at the year 1979 through a lens of the works and people who won science fiction awards in 1980, ostensibly for works that were published in 1979. I’ve also invited Rich to join me on the journey and he’ll be posting articles looking at the 1973 award year.

The Analog Award was launched in 1979 for works published in the magazine in the preceding year. The Best Cover category was added in 1980, so this was the first year the award was presented. The award has been given every year since then with the exception of the year covering works published in the magazine in 2002, when the award was replaced, for one year only, with a cover artist award, when it was won by David A. Hardy, who painted two covers for the magazine (May and December issues).

Paul Lehr painted the cover for the first installment of John Varley’s four-part serial for the novel Titan, which ran from the January to the April issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact.

The artwork from the January 1979 issue of Analog seems to depict the spindle that runs up the center of the torus moon discovered in orbit around Saturn. The tower looks like a mixture of organic parts, wires, and high tech platforms growing out of a small globe and inside a massive dome. The night sky with other moons of Saturn can be seen through windows and a rainbow-like arc stretches behind the tower.

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Rescued from the Vaults of Time: The Sapphire Goddess – The Fantasies of Nictzin Dyalhis

Rescued from the Vaults of Time: The Sapphire Goddess – The Fantasies of Nictzin Dyalhis

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oie_801451Zc9o2K4DDave Ritzlin, impresario of DMR Books, has rescued another writer from the distant, fog-obscured days of pulp fantasy. He has done for Nictzin Dyalhis as he did for the nearly-forgotten Clifford Ball (reviewed by me here). If you, like most people, have no idea who Dyalhis was, Ritzlin presents as much information as is available in an excellent introduction to The Sapphire Goddess (2018), his new collection of all nine of the author’s fantasy and science fiction stories.

A quote from the introduction:

Even though Nictzin Dyalhis was the eccentric author’s legal name at that time, it’s highly unlikely he was named that way at birth. He claimed that “Nictzin” was a Toltec Indian name and “Dyalhis” was an old English (or, alternately, Welsh) surname. Neither of these claims is true. Many speculated that his real name was Nicholas Douglas or Nicholas Dallas or something similar, which he modified into something more exotic.

Nonetheless, Weird Tales publisher Farnsworth Wright swore to Donald Wandrei that all the checks for Dyalhis’s stories “were made out to that name.” Whatever the reality, there’s something wonderfully perfect about a fantasist being remembered solely by a name of mysterious origins.

The nine stories in The Sapphire Goddess were published between 1925 and 1940. Eight were published in Weird Tales, with only “He Refused to Stay Dead” published in another magazine, Ghost Stories. Save for the explicitly sci-fi “When the Green Star Waned” and its sequel “The Oath of Hul Jok”, they are a mix of horror and heroic fantasy. Running through most of them is a theme of reincarnation or forgotten past lived in another dimension.

“When the Green Star Waned” (1925) and “The Oath of Hul Jok” (1928) are two adventures of the planet Venhez’s greatest heroes. The first concerns a journey to the now-silent planet Aerth to determine why no one’s heard anything from its inhabitants in years. Dyalhis’s first published story, it’s not an especially finely-wrought story, but it is very successful at creating a nightmare atmosphere, made all the more malevolent with horrible semi-material monsters from the dark side of the moon. It also seems to have introduced the word Blastor for ray guns. That alone is a more than worthy legacy for any pulp story.

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Birthday Profile: Violet Van der Elst

Birthday Profile: Violet Van der Elst

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Violet Van der Elst

Violet Van der Elst on the west stairs at Harlaxton Manor

A look at a minor horror author.

Violet Van der Elst was born on January 4, 1882. Her parents were a coal porter and a washerwoman and she worked as a scullery maid. In 1903, she married a civil engineer and eventually she developed the first brush-less shaving cream, which made her fortune. Following her first husband’s death, she married Jean Julien Van der Elst, a Belgian painter.

Her shaving and cosmetics business allowed her to focus, if such is the word, on other activities. Her primary activity was fighting against the death penalty in England. Another activity was running for office and she failed to be elected to Parliament three times, each in a different borough.

In 1937, she bought Harlaxton Manor, a hundred year old mansion that the previous owner had tried to sell and couldn’t. She saved the building from being town down. It was this connection through which I learned of her, since I attended college at Harlaxton. Van der Elst was convinced that she could contact her dead husband and used a private seance room for that purpose.

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Is Jack Reacher Today’s Tarzan?

Is Jack Reacher Today’s Tarzan?

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TarzanFor me Tarzan was always a movie, and sometimes a TV character. I knew intellectually that the stories were based on books. I even knew that the books were written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. But for me, at that time, it was all about the John Carter of Mars books. I did finally read one of the later Tarzan novels, Tarzan the Untamed, and while I liked it, it wasn’t enough to woo me away from Burroughs’ SF writing.

I’ve always been aware of Tarzan as a character icon, of course, the early 20th-century version of the noble savage. I’ve written about him before. I mention him as far back as 2014, one of my earliest posts for Black Gate, when I was looking at swords and ERB. More recently I’ve looked at him as an iconic character in the same vein as Sherlock Holmes and Robin Hood, characters which keep turning up on both big and small screens.

It’s only lately that I’ve actually started reading the books. Amazon had one of these get all 26 novels for $2.99 deals and it seemed stupid not to get them. So far I’ve read the first two, Tarzan of the Apes, and The Return of Tarzan. In general, they’re a lot of fun, and I’ve found them a lot less racist and a lot less misogynistic than I’d anticipated, given the time period of the writing. There’s definitely stuff that makes me either cringe or roll my eyes, but as I say, not as much as I expected.

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A Smattering of Sexbots

A Smattering of Sexbots

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sexbot vibrate pulse Liberty Antonia Sadler for Metro.co.uk

Sexbots are as ubiquitous today as Starbucks. My Google news feed overruns with stories on sexbot brothels. No modern genre, especially animated ones, can feel properly inclusive without a sexbot gumming up the moral works, which in some cases might not be a euphemism.

‘Twasn’t always so. Sexbots go back a surprisingly long way in the arts but were seldom allowed to explicitly ply their trade after a spectacular introduction. They appear for the first time, as far as I can discover, exactly where stereotypes suggest: in the France where ladies don’t wear pants, the underground world of Parisian pornography.

You’ve never heard of Alphonse Momas, and not merely because he wrote under a zillion pseudonyms, but during his free hours from his job at the Seine prefecture, he was the leading purveyor of pornography to fin de siècle France. Millenials didn’t invent sex and neither did the baby boomers. Momas’ titles are like a catalog from the modern explicit upwelling of anything goes 1970s porn: Mistress of His Son, The Notebooks of Miss Callypia, The Woman with Dogs, Bloody Buttock, Fetish Lovers, The Eater of Men, The Virgin Fall.

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Birthday Reviews: December Index

Birthday Reviews: December Index

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Cover by Rudolph Belarski
Cover by Rudolph Belarski

Cover by John Picacio
Cove by John Picacio

Cover by Duncan Eagleson
Cover by Duncan Eagleson

The final Birthday Review Index.

And so the journey begun on January 1 with a review of E.M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” has come to an end, 367 reviews and approximately 166,183 words later, plus a few extra guest reviews and words by Rich Horton and Bob Byrne. There was one date I couldn’t find someone to review (we need authors born on March 8) and I goofed on a couple of authors and wound up writing replacement reviews. Edward Page Mitchell holds the joint distinction of the earliest birth among the reviewed authors, on March 24, 1852, and the earliest published work, with his “The Clock That Went Backward” published in 1881. Rachel Swirsky in the most recently born author reviewed with Steve Perry’s “A Few Minutes in the Plantation Bar and Grill Outside Woodville, Mississippi” published in January 2018 being the most recently published story. I reviewed two stories entitled “Cat” and two stories entitled “Little Red in the Hood.”

January index
February index
March index
April index
May index
June index
July index
August index
September index
October index
November index

December 1, Jo Walton: “Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction”
December 2, Jerry Sohl: “Death in Transit”
December 3, John Dalmas: “In the Bosom of His Family”
December 4, Kurt R.A. Giambasitani: “Intaglio”
December 5, John Decles: “The Power of Kings”
December 6, Roger Dees: “Worlds Within WorldsEchoes of Pride”

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A (Black) Gat in The Hand: Saying Goodbye with a Black Mask Dinner

A (Black) Gat in The Hand: Saying Goodbye with a Black Mask Dinner

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“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)

BlackMaskDinnerEDIT

This is a pretty famous photograph in hardboiled/pulp lore. It’s of the attendees of the 1936 West Coast Black Mask Writers dinner. And it’s the only known meeting of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. But there was a lot more writing talent present!

From back left: Raymond Moffat, Raymond Chandler, Herbert Stinson, Dwight Babcock, Eric Taylor, and Dashiell Hammett.

From front left: Arthur Barnes, John K. Butler, W.T. Ballard, Horace McCoy, and Norbert Davis.

 

This post is going to focus on the man who was primarily responsible for making this gathering happen.

Dwight Babcock sent his first very first story to Underworld Magazine. They promptly lost it! He retitled it “At the Bottom of Every Mess,” and sent it to Black Mask, figuring he’d get a nice rejection letter. Instead, he got an acceptance letter and a $100 check. When most pulps were paying a quarter to a half cent a word, Babcock got a penny and a quarter cent per word for his first effort!

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God Of War (2018): Masterpiece

God Of War (2018): Masterpiece

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god of war

God Of War (2018) is an incredible work of art. I believe that it is the best game of this generation. I understand this is an incredible claim to make. Each component of the game, story, graphics, and gameplay complement each other, providing a fun and immersive game that resonates with the player.

(Beware spoilers if you have never played a God Of War game)

The God of War series of games began in 2005 on the Playstation 2. The first game was named, appropriately, God Of War, which is also the name given to the entire series.

The story begins in ancient Greece, with a Spartan Warrior named Kratos. Kratos is tricked into killing his wife and daughter by the Greek God Of War, Ares. Kratos, armed with the Blades of Chaos, and fueled by utter rage, kills Ares and ascends to become a God, the new God Of War. In the following titles, it is revealed that Kratos is the son of Zeus. Kratos, disgusted with the behavior and manipulation by the Olympians, embarks on a dark path, destroying allies and foes alike to take down Zeus and the pantheon of Greek Gods.

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Merry Christmas from Black Gate

Merry Christmas from Black Gate

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Black Gate Christmas tree

It’s been about as perfect a Christmas as you could wish for here at Black Gate — with the possible exception of the weather. After a ferocious November, and a whole lot of snow shoveling, December came in like a lamb and the snow melted weeks ago. I can’t remember the last time we missed out on a White Christmas in Chicago (and it’s forecast to hit the 50s by Thursday).

Weather aside, this has been a truly marvelous year for Black Gate. I look back at the last twelve months, and I know there’s a lot to be thankful for. But the thing I find myself most grateful for are those faithful readers who return every day, helping improve the site with comments and thoughtful feedback. We cherish all our readers, but it’s our regulars who have come to mean the most. Folks like Thomas Parker, smitty59, Major Wootton, Rich Horton, Eugene R, Glenn, R.K. Robinson, Aonghus Fallon, Joe H, silentdante, Charles_Martel, CMR, GusG, Jeff Stehman, Barsoomia, kelleyg, Allard, SELindberg, and many, many others, make the effort we put in every day worthwhile. Thank you.

It’s been an incredible run the last few years — an Alfie Award, a World Fantasy Award, and many other honors. We’re very well aware that the source of all that recent fame has been you, the fans, who work hard to spread the word and bring new traffic to our humble site.

So thank you once again, from the bottom of our hearts. On behalf of the vast and unruly collective that is Black Gate, I would like to wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Continue being excellent — it’s what you’re good at.