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Birthday Reviews: Kage Baker’s “Calimari Curls”

Birthday Reviews: Kage Baker’s “Calimari Curls”

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Cover by Mike Dringenberg
Cover by Mike Dringenberg

Kage Baker was born on June 10, 1952 and died on January 31, 2010.

In 1999, Baker was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Baker won the Emperor Norton Award in 2003 for her story “A Night on the Barbary Coast.” The next year she won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for “The Empress of Mars.”  She received two nominations for the Mythopoeic Award, three nominations for the World Fantasy Award, and three nominations for the Hugo Award.  In 2010, she received for her second Nebula nomination and an Andre Norton nomination.  She won the Nebula posthumously that year for the novella The Women of Nell Gwynne’s.

“Calamari Curls” was first published in Baker’s collection Dark Mondays in 2006. In 2011, Ross E. Lockhart reprinted it in the anthology The Book of Cthulhu. Both of its first two appearances were published by Night Shade Books. In 2012, it was included in the Subterranean Press retrospective The Best of Kage Baker.

The small California oceanside community of Nunas Beach is a town that time had forgotten. Founded as a resort town in 1906, it grew with refugees from the San Francisco Earthquake, but quickly shrank again as people left to return to the rebuilt metropolis. The locals lived a quiet, unassuming life based around the ocean. Pegasus Bright, who had lost both legs in the war, ran the town’s only restaurant, the Chowder Palace.

The town is limping along, figuratively (and literally, most of the townspeople seem to be missing at least one limb) when outsiders come in to turn the delapidated shell of a restaurant across the street from the Chowder Palace into a happening dining spot, the Calamari Curls. Business at the new restaurant not only draws the townspeople away from the Chowder Palace, but brings more outsiders into town, where all the businesses except the Chowder Palace are able to take advantage of the newfound tourist trade.

Bright makes common cause with “Betty Step-in-Time,” a street performer and shaman, to do whatever they can to destroy the Calamari Curls. Betty researches the town and learns that the previous occupants of the building had all come to a bad end. Readers will readily identify the Lovecraftian influences at that point, if the name of the new restaurant isn’t already a clue. Although no elder gods are directly summoned, their influence does bring about Bright’s desired ends.

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The Verge on 13 Enthralling Science Fiction and Fantasy Books You Need to Check Out This June

The Verge on 13 Enthralling Science Fiction and Fantasy Books You Need to Check Out This June

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The Robots of Gotham McAulty-small The Book of M-small Summerland Hannu Rajaniemi-small

Andrew Liptak at The Verge has dipped into the thundering production pipelines at America’s publishing houses for the month of June, and returned with a secret list of the 13 very best science fiction and fantasy books — including novels by Paul Tremblay, Yoon Ha Lee, Peter Watts, Katie Williams, Alex White, Rob Boffard, Melissa F. Olson, and Black Gate‘s own Todd McAuty. Many bothans died to bring us this information. Use it wisely.

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty (John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 676 pages, $26 in hardcover/$12.99 digital, June 19, 2018)

In this future, the United States waged — and lost — a war against a coalition of machines, and it’s now under robotic occupation. A businessman named Barry Simcoe meets a Russian medic working with the occupying armies after his hotel is attacked. Together, they learn of a plot to unleash a plague that could wipe out humanity once and for all. Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review, saying that the book has a “breathless momentum,” and that McAulty “extrapolates a scary AI-overrun 2083 that’s only a few steps removed from today’s reality.”

Todd McAulty was the most popular writer in the print version of Black Gate. His stories included “There’s a Hole in October” in Black Gate 5, which Locus labeled “magnificent storytelling, begging expansion into a novel,” and Tangent Online called “one of my favorite stories so far this year.” It was reprinted this month in Lightspeed.

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Birthday Reviews: Joe Haldeman’s “Blood Brothers”

Birthday Reviews: Joe Haldeman’s “Blood Brothers”

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Thieves' World-Walter-Velez-small Thieves' World-Walter-Velez-back-small

Cover by Walter Velez

Joe Haldeman was born on June 9, 1943.

Haldeman received his first Hugo and Nebula Award for his debut novel, The Forever War. He won both awards again for his novella “The Hemingway Hoax” and his novel Forever Peace. Haldeman received the Nebula Award on two other occasions for his short story “Graves,” which also won a World Fantasy Award, and his novel Camouflage. He also has two additional Hugo Awards for the short stories “Tricentennial” and “None So Blind.” Forever Peace also was honored with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and Camouflage tied for a James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award and won the Southeastern SF Achievement Award. He was won three Rhysling Awards, the Ignotus Award, and the Ditmar Award as well.

DeepSouthCon presented Haldeman with a Phoenix Award in 1983. He was one of the pro Guests of Honor at ConFiction, the 1990 Worldcon in The Hague. Along with his wife, Gay, he was awarded a Skylark Award by NESFA in 1996. In 2004, he was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Southeastern SF Achievement Award. Haldeman received a Robert A. Heinlein Award from the Heinlein Society in 2009 and in 2010 he was recognized as a Damon Knight Grand Master by SFWA. In 2012, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

“Blood Brothers” was Joe Haldeman’s only contribution to Robert Lynn Asprin’s shared world anthology series Thieves’ World, appearing in the debut volume in 1979. Written for the project, its reprint life has been limited, appearing in Sanctuary, an omnibus of the first three volumes of the Thieves’ World anthologies in 1982, and again in the omnibus Thieves’ World: First Blood in 2003, which reprinted the first two volumes of the series. Haldeman also included the story in his own collection, Dealing in Futures, originally published in 1985.

One Thumb was a major character in the early Thieves’ World shared world anthologies, created by Joe Haldeman for his story “Blood Brothers.” Shown by other authors in the series as powerful and mysterious, Haldeman’s own depiction of the owner of the Vulgar Unicorn was of a nearly amoral man, given to theft, murder, and rape. In the course of Haldeman’s short story, One Thumb, also known as Lastel, commits an assassination, a murder, deals in drugs, and considers his need to rape women.

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Remembering Michael D. Weaver

Remembering Michael D. Weaver

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Mercedes Nights-small My Father Immortal Michael Weaver-small

I was on ISFDB and noticed that today marks the 20th anniversary of Mike Weaver’s death.

Michael D. Weaver broke into the SF field with Mercedes Nights in 1987 and looked like he was going to be The Next Big Thing (or one of them, anyway). He published seven novels in nine years before dying at the age of 37.

At St. Martin’s Press, I worked on his first two novels, particularly his second one, My Father Immortal. In those pre-email days, he would call almost every day about this or that. He came to New York for the SFWA Authors and Editors party with his girlfriend, whose name was Angel (if my memory serves) and whose dress and looks led some people to think she had been hired from an escort service. (She hadn’t.) I got drunk at the party and made the mistake of telling Mike how I thought his novel was ideal for teens — how the book worked as a great metaphor for adolescence. He didn’t call for several days after that.

If memory serves, he died in a freakish accident — something like falling in the yard and having his head land in a bucket or puddle, where he drowned.

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Birthday Reviews: Kate Wilhelm’s “State of Grace”

Birthday Reviews: Kate Wilhelm’s “State of Grace”

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Orbit 19
Orbit 19

Kate Wilhelm was born on June 8, 1928 and died on March 8, 2018.

She won the Hugo Award twice, for her novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang and the book Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. She won the Nebula three times for the short stories “The Planners” and “Forever Yours, Anna,” and the novelette “The Girl Who Fell into the Sky.” She helped establish the SFWA and Clarion Workshop, and helped run the early Milford Writers Workshops. Along with husband Damon Knight, she was a Pro Guest of Honor at Noreascon Two and received the Gallun Award for contributions to science fiction. She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2003. She received an inaugural Solstice Award in 2009 and in 2016, the awards was renamed the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award in her honor.

Wilhelm sold “State of Grace” to Damon Knight for inclusion in Orbit 19 in 1977. It appeared in her collection Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions in 1978 and in the collection State of Grace, part of Pulphouse Publishing’s Author’s Choice Monthly series in 1991. In 1980, the story was translated into French for the publication of Quand somerset rêvait, a translation of Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions.

“State of Grace” is the story of a deteriorating marriage in a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky. The narrator believes she has seen small creatures living in the oak tree in her backyard and she begins to work to protect the unseen creatures and take care of them, providing them with food, water and other essentials. Her husband, on the other hand, gets the inkling that there may be something in the tree that could be worth quite a bit of money and he decides he needs to capture them.

The argument over the tree escalates as she tries to help the creatures and he gets more and more anxious about their presence and his attempts to remove them, including a brief try to cut down the tree. When he goes into the tree, something causes him to change his mind and he accepts the creatures’ presence.

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Vintage Treasures: The Healer’s War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Vintage Treasures: The Healer’s War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

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The Healer's War-small The Healer's War-back-small

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough has had a long and fruitful career that stretches back to her first novel, Song of Sorcery, in 1982. Over the next 34 years she produced a virtually book every year, writing over 40 novels and 4 collections, including The Songkiller Saga trilogy, the Godmother trilogy, Nothing Sacred and Last Refuge, and over a dozen novels co-authored with Anne McCaffrey, many in the Acorna series.

Scarborough earned a reputation for dependable and often playful light fantasy, with such novels as The Harem of Aman Akbar (1984), The Drastic Dragon of Draco, Texas (1986), and her cats-in-space series Tales of the Barque Cats. But she was capable of more than that. Scarborough spent five years as an nurse with the US Army, including one year in Da Nang, Vietnam during the war, and in 1988 she turned that experience into The Healer’s War, which became her most acclaimed and celebrated novel. It won the Nebula Award the following year. Kirkus Reviews wrote “Scarborough writes powerfully and convincingly of the war,” and Publisher’s Weekly said,

Army nurse Kathleen McCulley’s… tour of duty at China Beach puts the young woman from Kansas through the usual mixture of empathy for the Vietnamese and anger at the indifference or outright racism of army personnel. The unanticipated twist is a hallucinatory journey through the jungle with a one-legged Vietnamese boy, a battle-seasoned but crazy soldier and a magic amulet given her by a dying holy man. Although its moralizing invites comparison with TV’s MASH and Twilight Zone, Scarborough’s light, fluid storytelling and the authentic, pungent background keep this novel interesting.

The Healer’s War was published in hardcover by Doubleday Foundation in November 1988, and reprinted in paperback by Bantam Spectra 12 months later. It is 313 pages, priced at $4.99 in paperback. The cover is by Braldt Bralds. It is currently available in print and digital formats from Open Road Media. See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Birthday Reviews: Kit Reed’s “The Shop of Little Horrors”

Birthday Reviews: Kit Reed’s “The Shop of Little Horrors”

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Dogs of Truth-small Dogs of Truth-back-small

Cover by Henry Sene Yee

Kit Reed was born Lillian Craig on June 7, 1932 and died on September 24, 2017.

Reed’s collection What Wolves Know and The Story Until Now were both nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. Her novel Where was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her books Little Sisters of the Apocalypse and Weird Women, Wired Women were short listed for the James Tiptree Jr. Award and the story “Bride of Bigfoot,” which appeared in Weird Women, Wired Women also made the short list. Her short story “The Singing Marine” was a nominee for the World Fantasy Award. In 1958, she was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best New Author of 1958, a forerunner of the John W. Campbell Award.

“The Shop of Little Horrors” was original to Kit Reed’s 2005 collection Dogs of Truth. The story has never been reprinted.

In “The Shop of Little Horrors,” Kit Reed explores the life of Lynn and Martin Larkin, a couple of New Yorkers who have made the decision not to have children. Ten years into their marriage, they are free to live the life they want to, travel as they desire, and mock those around them who have decided to have children. “The Shop of Little Horrors” specifically looks at one Saturday when they are relaxing at a coffeeshop watching the harried parents with their children on a beautiful day.

Their calm is destroyed, however, when one particular child invades their space. Stanley bumps their table, causing their cappuccinos to spill all over them and, when they are distracted mopping up the mess, the juvenile delinquent grabs and eats Lynn’s doughnut while Stanley’s mother is oblivious to the destruction he has caused.

The perfect days turns into abject terror as they try to make their way home in a city crawling with children. A lunch in the Tavern on the Green helps reestablish their equilibrium until they find themselves face-to-face on their walk home with a woman pushing an enormous stroller that contains six children.

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Future Treasures: Space Pioneers, edited by Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio

Future Treasures: Space Pioneers, edited by Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio

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Space Pioneers Hank Davis-smallIt’s been too long since we’ve checked in with Hank Davis, the mad genius editor at Baen behind the anthologies Things From Outer Space and In Space No One Can Hear You Scream. I figured he had to have something interesting cooking and, sure enough, when I asked him to comment, here’s what he told me.

Coming in December this year, looking for stockings to stuff, is Space Pioneers, a rough of whose cover is now on Baen.com, though the author lineup thereon may be modified…

After that, still in the works is Overruled!, an anthology of stories about courtrooms, lawyers, and other low-lifes. In the future beyond that will be an anthology of military sf stories involving time travel, whose working title is Time Troopers, but that may change. I was going to handle the Psychotechnic League stories by Poul Anderson, but was felled by health problems at a crucial juncture, so it’s in other hands. (The timing of those problems is also why the first volume of The Best of Gordon R. Dickson came out without my usual tedious introductions and notes, but I’ll try to give better value in the next volume).

I do hope that Space Pioneers does well, since I could do a *series* of anthologies on this theme without breaking sweat. My hat’s off (dangerous move for a bald geezer) to my co-ed, Christopher Ruocchio, who did much of the busy work (contracts, nudging agents, etc.) while I was still recovering, and who also talked me into using two Poul Anderson yarns, a suggestion I had absolutely no problem with (and I have a third in mind if there’s a Volume II). And that’s the current state of the pipeline. I should remind everyone that these will all be mass market paperbacks.

Sounds like a great line-up! Space Pioneers in particular looks like a terrific book, and a splendid addition to Hank’s catalog of top-notch anthologies. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for it, and making some more noise about it here as we get closer to the release date.

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Black Gate Book Club, Downbelow Station, First Discussion

Black Gate Book Club, Downbelow Station, First Discussion

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Downbelow Station-small Downbelow Station-back-small

Welcome to the very first post of the Black Gate Book Club!  What are we up to?  As Fletcher Vredenburgh said in his introduction to the Book Club:

The plan is to read Downbelow Station over the month of June and post a discussion of it each Monday afternoon. This time around, the Book Club participants will include Adrian Simmons, Charlene Brusso, Chris Hocking, and me. We’d love it if you’d read along with us and join in the conversation.

Of course, it is now Wednesday, not Monday, and Charlene had to bow out of this round because life intrudes. Never the less, Vredenburgh, Hocking and I soldiered on! Below is our exchange:

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New Treasures: The Rise of the Terran Federation, edited by John F. Carr

New Treasures: The Rise of the Terran Federation, edited by John F. Carr

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The Rise of the Terran Federation-back-small The Rise of the Terran Federation-small

H. Beam Piper was one of my earliest discoveries, and he quickly became one of my favorite SF writers. I snapped up every book with his name on it in the mid-70s, all Ace paperback editions with gorgeous Michael Whelan covers.

Piper committed suicide a few months after I was born, in November 1964. But his work has endured, and as recently as 2011 John Scalzi published Fuzzy Nation, a retelling of Piper’s most famous novel Little Fuzzy. Last year editor John F. Carr assembled an anthology of a handful of Piper’s Federation and Paratime Police tales, and invited Wolfgang Diehr, David Johnson, and Jonathan Crocker to contribute fiction set in Piper’s universe. He added a pair of essays by John A. Anderson, The Early History of the Terran Federation and Chartered Companies of the Terran Federation, and his own preface, The Terro-human Future History, and the result was The Rise of the Terran Federation, published in hardcover by Pequod Press. Here’s the description.

The Rise of the Terran Federation is new collection of new and old stories chronicling the rise of H. Beam Piper’s Terran Federation. With story introductions and essays on the establishment of the Federation, this book is the ultimate overview of the beginning of Piper’s crowning creation, the Terro-Human Future History. This collection will include some of Piper’s early Federation stories, like “Edge of the Knife” and Omnilingual.”

This collection also contains new stories about the aftermath of the Third and Fourth World Wars, the Thorans and life on Baldur. The Rise of the Terran Federation is an essential work for fans of Piper’s future history and his unique view of what lies ahead for mankind.

There are precious few SF writers whose work has endured five decades. Piper didn’t live long enough to see it, but his stories have entertained three generations of SF fans, and I expect them to still be in print 50 years from today.

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