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A Patroller for a Vanished Federation: In the Hands of Glory by Phyllis Eisenstein

A Patroller for a Vanished Federation: In the Hands of Glory by Phyllis Eisenstein

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In the Hands of Glory (Timescape/Pocket Books, November 1981). Cover by Rowena Morrill

Here’s my new look at an SF paperback from the ’70s/’80s. Phyllis Eisenstein’s In the Hands of Glory is a book I eagerly bought and read back when it came out, in 1981. By a writer whose work I enjoyed. From a publishing imprint (Timescape, edited by David Hartwell) that I greatly respected. (Not to mention the Rowena Morrill cover which, let’s just say, overtly exaggerates certain physical characteristics of the protagonist relative to her actual depiction in the book.) And I had fond, but very dim, memories of the book. So I reread it.

Phyllis Eisenstein (1946-2020) was a Chicago writer. Black Gate is a Chicago-based ‘zine, and I’m originally from the Chicago area myself, and over the years I got to know Phyllis and her husband (and sometime collaborator) Alex fairly well, from meeting them at any number of conventions. Indeed, at this year’s Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention, I had a long conversation with Alex which touched on their time in Germany (Alex was in the military then) during which Phyllis drafted her first novel.

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The Great Escapes: James, Kindred, The Reformatory by Percival Everett, Octavia Butler, and Tananarive Due

The Great Escapes: James, Kindred, The Reformatory by Percival Everett, Octavia Butler, and Tananarive Due

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James (Doubleday, March 19, 2024), Kindred (Doubleday,
July 1979), and The Reformatory (S&S/Saga Press, October 31, 2023

Percival Everett’s James is receiving a lot of well-deserved critical praise. As the title indicates (and the choice of the formal name a key trope), this reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn elevates the escaped slave Jim from supporting stereotypical character to leading man status. Fearing he is about to be sold by his owner and separated from his family, James becomes a runaway not just for his own sake, but to find a way to free his wife and daughter. Along the way, he meets Huck who has just faked his death to escape an abusive father. So far we’re close to Twain’s original, and while Everett retains some events, the perspective shifts to focus on James’s journey towards safety and dignity.

As with many of Everett’s novels, James is a satire of white perceptions of Blacks, reinventing James as highly literate and articulate. In an ironic reversal of enslaver laws that prohibit educating slaves, all Blacks are well-spoken amongst themselves and only resort to uneducated and subservient slang when in presence of their white oppressors. James calls it a “slave filter”: “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them. The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us.”

Highly recommended, as is just about anything in the Everett catalog.

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What I’ve Been Listening To: July, 2024

What I’ve Been Listening To: July, 2024

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It’s a week off from A (Black) Gat in the Hand, as I am currently reading Pulp, but except for the constant revisiting of Norbert Davis’ Max Latin, I’m not listening to it (though The Continental Op is on tap).

I am constantly listening to audiobooks. I’m fortunate that my mind can multi-task, and I listen to them while driving, working, writing, when I go to sleep at night. It lets me get to things I wouldn’t have time to read. It’s often re-visiting something I read before. And I can fall asleep to something that isn’t new – no damage done. Here are some things I’ve listened to recently.

 

THE BLACK COMPANY – Glen Cook

A couple months ago, I scored a rare Q&A with the socially reclusive Glen Cook. It was mostly about his terrific Garrett, PI series, which I love. But it did touch on The Black Company. That series about a mercenary company is a foundation block for Dark Fantasy. I’ve read through the whole thing (except Port of Shadows, which I haven’t gotten around to yet) three times.

And over several months this year, I listened to the entire series on audiobook. As when I read it, I definitely like some books more than others. But it remains an epic, gripping saga. Again excluding 2018’s Port of Shadows, it’s ten books. I simply didn’t have time to re-read it (especially after re-reading most of the Garrett series for that Q&A). Listening to the books worked great. At least a book or two had a different narrator, based on gender needs. I liked the four narrators, with Marc Vietor reading the majority. That’s a key part of the audiobook experience. Definitely recommended.

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To Walk on Worlds: Matthew John’s Sword & Sorcery Collection

To Walk on Worlds: Matthew John’s Sword & Sorcery Collection

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To Walk on Worlds (Rogues in the House Podcast, 2024, 188pages). Cover art by Mike Hoffman

Black Gate highlighted Rogues in the House (RitH) podcast in 2022, and in a few years, that crew rapidly expanded with Sword & Sorcery publications that include: A Book of  Blades (2022)  and A Book of Blades Vol. II (2023), and a collection of John R. Fultz’s stories in The Revelations of Zang (2024)

This post reviews the newest collection of stories from RitH’s own Matthew John released this June: To Walk on Worlds is available now in eBook and paperback. Matthew John is fascinated with adventure fiction and moonlights as a writer and game designer for Monolith in addition to his podcast responsibilities.  This post reviews To Walk on Worlds with excerpts.

If Gandalf was an a**hole, then we’d call him a “Meddler” instead of an “Istar”

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In the tradition of Conan: The Kyrik and Kothar Novels by Gardner F. Fox

In the tradition of Conan: The Kyrik and Kothar Novels by Gardner F. Fox

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The Kyrik novels by Gardner F. Fox (Leisure Books, 1975-1976)

I’m getting ready to embark on a series of posts about Philip Jose Farmer, but got distracted looking through my shelves and decided to throw in a post about the Sword & Sorcery work of Gardner F. Fox, who I mentioned here a while back for his two book S&P series set on the planet Llarn.

While my small hometown library didn’t have anything by Robert E. Howard, they had various books claiming to be “In the tradition of Conan.” That’s how I found out about Howard. The first “In the tradition” book I read was Kyrik: Warlock Warrior by Fox, from Leisure Books, 1975. The cover was candy to a starving teen. By Ken Barr (although I didn’t know it at the time), the cover showed a muscled barbarian swordsman astride a pterodactyl with a nearly naked green-haired beauty beside him. My imagination ignited. And when I started reading it, I loved it even more.

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Little Madhouse on the Prairie: Wisconsin Death Trip

Little Madhouse on the Prairie: Wisconsin Death Trip

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Like many of you, I own a lot of books. Like perhaps not quite as many of you, I own a lot of very strange books, among them Aleister Crowley’s autobiography, a volume of Criswell’s predictions, a collection of “poems” by Victor Buono (he was King Tut to Adam West’s Batman; the title of his book is It Could Be Verse), a paranoid little volume called The Enemy Within that showed up one day on every driveway in my neighborhood in a rock-weighted plastic bag, and that blames literally everything bad that’s ever happened on the Jesuits (I’m probably the only person in town who actually read it — God, I hope I’m the only person in town who actually read it), the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (the Lord talked to Phil, and boy, did they have some weird conversations), the collected works of Charles Fort, several volumes of the Shaver Mystery… it goes on and on.

There is no stranger book on my shelves, though, than Wisconsin Death Trip. Catchy title, huh?

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: 7 Upcoming Attractions

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: 7 Upcoming Attractions

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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)

My life gets crazy busy in July, and stays busy to Christmas, when I get a break. It’s a task to get my planned weekly column done. Which can shift the ‘current one’ into ‘in progress’ status. Which is the case this week. So, here’s a look at some of the stuff I hope to cover in the current incarnation of A (Black) Gat in the Hand.

DAY KEENE

Last week I posted (finally) the Jo Gar essay which I started in 2018. Nice to check that off the list. The current ‘in progress’ essay is on a Day Keene story from the September, 1949 issue of New Detective. I’ve already written one post on Keene here. I think he is an under-appreciated hard boiled writer. That issue also has a story by Frederic Brown. And one by my all-time favorite writer, John D. MacDonald. So, maybe I’ll mine that one for more material. The fact you’re reading this post right now, means I still haven’t finished my Keene essay.

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Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 4 Anthology Now Available

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 4 Anthology Now Available

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The Best Of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly 4 (June 6, 2024). Cover Art by Karolína Wellartová

After gathering the cold fire and the breath of virtuous fish we were finally able to forge mithril and orichalchum into a fine mesh, through which we strained the very aether of imagination and distilled it into Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 4.  From issues #25 to #32 we bring you:

Sixteen stories
Ten poems
Twenty-seven illustrations; and
An essay on the Sword and Sorcery genre by Howard Andrew Jones

It was a labor of love and with copies sent to the contributors and the Kickstarter backers, we are ready to unveil it to the world! Order copies directly from Amazon.

In other news, we are open for fiction and poetry submissions for the month of July, so if you got it, send it!

Adrian Simmons is an editor for Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, check out their Best-of Volume 3  Best-of Volume 4, or support them on Patreon!

We Are All Time Traveling Together: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

We Are All Time Traveling Together: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

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The Ministry of Time (Avid Reader Press, May 7, 2024)

Perhaps second only to space travel, science fiction is obsessed with time travel and in particular the paradox that if we go back to the past, how do we affect the future; can we inadvertently or purposely alter our “present”? Sometimes the answer is that your somehow being in the past is essential to determining your present (e.g., Kindred by Octavia Butler where the protagonist travels back to antebellum South to ensure an ancestor stays alive). Other times the innocent butterfly effect (e.g., Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder) has disastrous consequences; even attempting something seemingly good, such as thwarting a presidential assassination, proves catastrophic (e.g., Stephen King’s 1/22/63 ). Then there’s the question of how visitors from the future to our present seek to change future events (e.g., the Terminator movie franchise).

H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine is a canonical SF work because it offers a technology, rather than magical intervention, that enables time travel (hence the title). In addition to its social criticism, The Time Machine is a quintessential adventure tale. The hero enters a strange land populated by equally strange different beings nonetheless still sort of like us, whose use of advanced technology causes disaster. The hero manages escape, but then mysteriously disappears, perhaps in search of something better than what awaits back home.

Which brings us to Kaliane Bradley’s Ministry of Time, in which she reverse-engineers a number of these time travel and adventure tropes.

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Truth, Lies, and Vinyl Wonderland

Truth, Lies, and Vinyl Wonderland

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Vinyl Wonderland (Castle Bridge Media,
June 25, 2024). Cover uncredited

Some months back, I was toiling away in the vast Indiana compound of Black Gate, when I received a text from publisher John O’Neill, who had just finished reading my new novel, Vinyl Wonderland. He told me how much he enjoyed it –– don’t take my word for it, ask him –– and then he told me how sorry he was.

“What for?” I asked.

“Well,” said John, “if you had to live through even half of what your main character went through, then you’ve had one hell of a rough ride.”

I thought about what John had said as I made my nightly rounds of the massive server farm that houses all of Black Gate’s backlogged posts (including over one hundred of mine). Eventually, I crawled off to bed, feeling hopeful that the local kobolds wouldn’t stage another uprising until next month, so that I could get a good night’s rest.

The morning brought clarity, as it often does, and I sat up in bed like a shot. “A liar,” I declared, quoting Quintilian, “should have a good memory!”

Fiction is a lie, after all, spun from gossamer truths, and therefore I, as a writer of fiction, must be a liar. It follows that to succeed in my craft, I must cultivate an excellent memory. Logic (and Quintilian) demand it.

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