A lot of my Black Gate posts lean into the realm of the fantastic in sequential art, but until now, I’ve primarily stuck to the traditional comic book format, with some occasional diversions into older magazine-sized editions. A few weeks ago, I tweeted out a request for people to recommend web comics to me, because I’d never tried any.
Arthur Machen was born Arthur Llewellyn Jones on March 3, 1863 and died on December 15, 1947.
Machen had a strong interest in the occult and published his first poem, “Eleusinia” when he was 18 years old. He struggled as a writer before seeing more success in the 1890s, including the publications of his story “The Great God Pan” in 1894. In the early days of World War I he published the short story “The Bowman” which described phantom bowman from Agincourt called upon to help the British Expeditionary Force at the Battle of Mons. The story entered into popular culture as an actual description of the battle and led to the folklore around the “Angels of Mons.”
Machen originally published “The Coming of the Terror” in The Century, an illustrated magazine published from 1881 to 1930, although it grew out of Scribner’s Monthly, which dated back to 1870. The story was part of his longer novel The Terror and has rarely been reprinted only its own, only seeing print in 2003 in the Chaosium collection of Machen’s story’s The White People and Other Stories and that same year in Douglas Anderson’s anthology Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy.
“The Coming of the Terror” feels a lot like one of the stories H.P. Lovecraft would begin publishing five years later, but with significant differences. Machen’s tale of mysterious deaths during the Great War slowly builds from reporting on the crash of an airman who hit a swarm of pigeons to the seemingly unrelated deaths and disappearances in a small village in Wales. The deaths lead to paranoia that the Germans have somehow managed to attack the English countryside undetected, either using a strange new weapon or by infiltrating the citizenry.
While Lovecraft cites Machen as one of his sources (and Machen mentions the original village of Dunwich in this story), “The Coming of the Terror” really isn’t Lovecraftian in nature. Machen doesn’t use excessively purple prose to describe the sinister events occurring around his Welsh village of Porth. Furthermore rather than being witnessed by a single individual, the effects are widespread. Everyone is aware that something is happening, and the fact that the newspapers refuse to report on it just make the conjectures that much more horrific. Machen allows events to build slowly, from a single incident to several, their relationship to each other only explicit because they are all taking place in the same story.
Given my avocation it probably comes as no surprise that for a time I never missed an episode of the Travel Channel show Ghost Adventures. The hand-held-camera “reality” series follows paranormal investigator Zach Bagans and a small crew as they spend the night in various locations around the globe which are reportedly haunted.
By any series standards, Ghost Adventures has had an amazing run since premiering in 2008. Allegations that Bagans and crew play loose with the facts, and emphasizes showmanship over hardcore research is a bit of a non-sequitur considering the subject matter. But somewhere around 2013 the productions values as well as the dramatic, over-acting went too far and for me at least, the show lost its gritty fun. Then in 2014 a member of the original crew, Aaron Goodwin went on record telling the us all the shocking news that the Travel Channel faked most of the paranormal activity documented on the show. At that point my willingness to suspend my disbelief had been stretched to the breaking point and I was done. However, here we are in 2018 and Ghost Adventures just aired their 182nd episode in January, with new episodes coming in March.
So, color me shocked that it took ten years, but I’m here to tell you about the inevitable – a Ghost Adventures movie.
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At the one sixth mark in our journey through the year, here’s a look back at the birthday reviews that appeared at Black Gate in February.
February 1, Yevgeny Zamyatin: “The Cave”
February 2, Selina Rosen: “Food Quart”
February 3, Alex Bledsoe: “Shall We Gather ”
February 4, Neal Asher: “Owner Space”
February 5, Joseph H. Delaney: “Survival Course”
February 6, Eric Flint: “Portraits”
February 7, Karen Joy Fowler: “Always”
February 8, Mary Robinette Kowal: “Just Right”
Given to me by the same friend who told me about A Wizard of Earthsea, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) is another of the books that introduced me to fantasy and science fiction. The novel is a mix of science fiction, fantasy, and good dose of Christianity, and is completely unbound by any rules or expectations about genre. A children’s book, it is also an artifact of a time when fantasy wasn’t primarily a commercial designation. There’s a freshness to the book all these years later, and rereading it was an absolute joy.
Meg Murry is the fourteen-year-old daughter of scientists, and sister to twins Sandy and Denys and the strange, brilliant five-year-old Charles Wallace. Her father, employed by the government, has been missing for some time before the book’s opening, and there has been no word about what happened to him.
In her own eyes Meg is gawky and ugly, made so by her “mouse-brown” hair, glasses, and “teeth covered with braces.” Her self-impression and her worry over her father’s disappearance have caused her to become a poor student. Her principal, a man unsympathetic to her worry to the point of telling her she needs to “face the facts” about her father (implying he’s never returning), warns her she’s in danger of having to repeat ninth grade.
Full disclosure: I’m a little biased on this week’s podcast choice. I first discovered UnSpoiled when my friend, Maggie, was covering Stranger Things with network runner Natasha. In my defense, I’ve got a lot of friends whose podcasts will never be discussed here.
“UnSpoiled” has become one of my favorite podcasts: the one I’ll drop everything for. A fandom and analysis podcast, UnSpoiled covers a broad variety of material, but always with the same concept and format: there are two people discussing the work in question. One of them is completely familiar with the material, and one of them is coming to it for the first time, completely unspoiled. They go through one episode, chapter, or movie at a time, discussing the themes and artistry involved.
And it is really good.
Listening to other people talk about Fantasy and Sci-Fi is always a dicey proposition. It can be dull. It can be annoying. But it can also be amazing, and some of my favorite podcasts fit under this umbrella. (West Wing Weekly is a solid standout here, as is The Greatest Generation, which is working it’s way through Star Trek: The Next Generation one episode at a time.) What makes the UnSpoiled family of podcasts great is their choice of hosts and material. Natasha Winters, the founder and editor of UnSpoiled, is a smart and insightful reader. She has the kind of keen eye for human nature that makes for sharp assessments of story, and a true compassion for human foibles that make for both a solid sense of humor and a good base for criticism.
If you talk to Jim Butcher, he might tell you that he’s a “crazy hermit shut-in” and scoff at being referred to as the Jim Butcher — showing that even one of the greatest fantasy writers around might be as uncomfortable with accolades as the rest of us mere mortals. How do I know this? Because I got the chance to sit down with Jim at ConFusion last month, for an hour-long chat about his published work, his craft, and what makes him tick.
I’ve been a huge fan of Jim’s ever since a friend shoved Storm Front at me and insisted I read it, and I sincerely hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed taking part in it. There is a lot that can be learned from Jim Butcher, and I’m really happy with what we were able to get into here.
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W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868 and died on August 27, 1963. He was the first black man to earn a doctorate from Harvard University and taught history, sociology, and economics.
Du Bois helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. Most of W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings were sociological in nature, focusing on the plight of African-Americans. Throughout his career, he fought for equal rights for blacks and against lynchings and Jim Crow laws.
“Jesus Christ In Texas” was original published in Du Bois’s collection Darkwater: Voices from the Veil in 1920. It has been reprinted numerous times since.
Two of Du Bois’s stories have elements of the fantastic in them, including “Jesus in Texas.” As told in the title, this story is about a visitation of Jesus to Texas. During his brief time, he sees black prisoners used on a chain gang, the whites who are benefiting from their labor, and a prisoner who has escaped.
Fritz Leiber is one of the grand names of f&sf, winner of six Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, and two World Fantasy Awards. He is a member of the SF Hall of Fame, a SFWA Grandmaster, and a lifetime achievement recipient from the World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and Forry Awards. You wouldn’t think any novel of his from the epicenter of his career could be obscure, neglected, or forgotten. And yet, there’s the case of The Silver Eggheads.
As a novelet, “The Silver Eggheads” graced the cover of the January 1959 F&SF, normally as prestigious a slot available at the time. Yet the story has never been anthologized nor ever included in one of his three dozen collections. Possibly that’s because Leiber expanded it to novel length, published as an original paperback by Ballantine in 1962. (Yes, that is a Richard Powers cover, one of the few representational ones he did.) Ballantine reprinted it twice, but no other American publisher has touched it. This novel has been out of print in English for almost 40 years. A few foreign editions slipped in, for multilinguists and obsessive collectors.
As I wrote last time, this excursion through the bookshelves of my younger days was inspired by the recent death of Ursula K. Le Guin. I haven’t read much Le Guin outside the Earthsea books; most of her work hasn’t appealed to me. But the Earthsea books, especially the initial trilogy — A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1970), and The Farthest Shore (1972) — did and, I was glad to find out, still do.
In my article, “Why I’m Here: Part Two,” I described the Elric books as being like samizdat passed around between my friends and me. With so few books actually out there, we fellow fantasy fans read anything we could find, and in turn got it all into everyone else’s hands and read everything they passed along to us. After The Lord of the Rings, I’m sure there were no books as read, and read as often, as Le Guin’s three slender volumes.
There are several whys. The easiest is they are way cool, at least the first and the third. The second is more of a Gothic, and lacks the dragon-battling and dark magic of the others, like this: