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The Shock of the Old: The Professor Jameson Space Adventures by Neil R. Jones

The Shock of the Old: The Professor Jameson Space Adventures by Neil R. Jones

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Amazing_Stories,_April_1937-smallFew things are more exciting than finding an unheralded new author or reading an impressive new book fresh off the press. It is exhilarating to be present at the advent of a significant new work, to witness the beginning of an important writer’s career, or to feel yourself at the cutting edge of a genre. That sense of exploration and discovery is at the very heart of science fiction and fantasy.

These genres we love have roots that reach deep into the past, though, some of those roots extending into the cheap pulp magazines of the 20’s and 30’s, venues that at the time — and for long after — were utterly disreputable; anything that had even a whiff of such seamy origins was utterly damned in the eyes of critics.

Today’s top writers have moved far beyond those simple beginnings, and their finest works exhibit a thematic sophistication and literary polish that their progenitors can’t match, even as the best of those pioneers have finally achieved a hard-won respectability (penny-a-word pulpsters like Leigh Brackett and H.P. Lovecraft escaping the lurid confines of Planet Stories and Weird Tales to appear between the staid covers of the Library of America?! It’s about time.)

Writers like Neil Gaiman, China Meiville, and Susanna Clarke are expanding the boundaries of what can be accomplished with what is decreasingly called genre fiction, and for that we should all be grateful. Sometimes though, I must confess that I am compelled to put aside the careful work of the current generation for a while, because I just need a jolt of unadulterated pulp, and nothing else will do. (I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t around for the pulps, much as I wish I had been, so I have to rely on paperbacks, most of which are themselves now as old as I am, or older.)

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New Treasures: Stomping Grounds, edited by Neil Baker

New Treasures: Stomping Grounds, edited by Neil Baker

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Stomping Grounds Apirl Moon Books-smallApril Moon Books is a new press, but they’re not acting like it.

They’ve produced two of the most innovative — and frankly, most fun — anthologies of the past year, The Dark Rites of Cthulhu and Amok! Editor Neil Baker explains the concept at the heart of their newest release in his introduction:

Just one look at the face of Calvin as he stamps through a sandbox city while Hobbes looks on aghast, or the sheer, unadulterated joy of Stitch as he trashes a carefully constructed city in Lilo’s bedroom, reveals the stark truth; it must be a hell of a lot of fun to reduce a city to rubble under your mighty, scaled feet.

Stomping Grounds is the second volume of Short Sharp Shocks, April Moon’s short fiction horror line. The third, Ill-considered Expeditions, featuring tales of exploration and derring-do gone horribly wrong, will be released in April.

Stomping Grounds includes 17 short stories celebrating the joy of rampaging giant monsters from CJ Henderson, Aaron Smith, Michael Thomas-Knight, D.G. Sutter, and many others.

Here’s the book description.

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Redwing in Flight

Redwing in Flight

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RedwingThere’s a new anthology out that I want to talk about, partly because of what it is and mostly because I think it’s quite good. But you shouldn’t trust me on this. I’m going to be honest, in that I’m going to write what I think about the book, but what I think may be shaped by my connection to it: my girlfriend, Grace Seybold, is the editor. So.

The book is called Redwing, and it’s available as an ebook at Amazon and the Kobo store. It’s officially published by Grace&Victory Publications, a micropress consisting of Grace and graphic designer Victoria Feistner. There are ten stories in the book, all science fiction and fantasy, mostly by new or up-and-coming writers.

Redwing is entirely Grace and Victoria’s project; I had no input on it, and did not read any of the submissions until I read the final product after it was published. When I did, I was impressed. Any anthology’s going to be a mixed bag, but I thought the book did what good anthologies do: create a kind of overall feel in which the tonal variety of the stories becomes a strength, while still developing an identity as a whole. Anchored by some stories that I feel are stand-outs by any definition, Redwing seems to me to be an excellent small-press production.

Which is one of the things I find interesting about the book: its status as a creation of a small press. I’ve heard a lot about how self-publishing through Amazon and similar venues is now a viable choice for authors, but Redwing’s proof that changes in the market are also making things easier for people to found ‘micropresses.’ In this case, a micropress consisting of two people. Grace is a writer — with stories in venues including Tesseracts 12 and This Is How You Die — and a freelance editor; Victoria is a professional graphic designer, who has sold some stories herself. Between them, they have the skillset necessary to package a book. And so they did. Let’s take a look:

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Vintage Treasures: Horrors Unseen, edited by Sam Moskowitz

Vintage Treasures: Horrors Unseen, edited by Sam Moskowitz

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Horrors Unseen-smallAbout six months ago I bought a small collection of vintage horror paperbacks on eBay (see the whole set here). It was a delightful batch of books, mostly anthologies and short story collections from the 60s-70s, and I’ve been gradually working my way through it.

I previously covered Night Fear by Frank Belknap Long, Carl Jacobi’s Revelations in Black, and Anthony Boucher’s The Compleat Werewolf, from the same set.

Horror anthologies are still published today, of course, and we’ve covered several recent examples right here. But over the years the market has shrunk enough that they are nowadays exclusively published in hardcover, or (at best) trade paperback. The days of the cheap paperback horror anthology, when a wide range of titles crowded the shelves, are long over. I miss them.

Sam Moskowitz was a well-known editor with some 25 anthologies to his name, and Horrors Unseen was the last. It was the third in a loose series which started with Horrors Unknown (1971) and Horrors in Hiding (1973; edited with Alden H. Norton). Sam was a pulp enthusiast, and these books are crammed full of classic horror tales from the pulps — this one includes the first reprint of C. L. Moore’s “Daemon” from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, and other reprints from Imagination!, Colliers, and other places.

Horrors Unseen was edited by Sam Moskowitz and published in June 1974 by Berkley Medallion. It is 208 pages, originally priced at 75 cents. It has never been reprinted, and there is no digital edition, but it’s not a rare book and copies are available online for $2-3. The cover artist is not credited, but it sure looks like Vincent di Fate.

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George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter Will Not Appear in 2015

George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter Will Not Appear in 2015

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Martin The Winds of Winter-smallHopes that the sixth book in George R.R. Martin’s epic Song of Ice and Fire would arrive this year were dashed earlier this month, when Martin’s UK publisher Jane Johnson tweeted that the book was not on the 2015 schedule.

There was a flurry of speculation about the imminent release of The Winds of Winter late last year, triggered by a Twitter countdown from his publisher, but Martin put the rumors to rest on his blog, saying:

I don’t play games with news about the books. I know how many people are waiting, how long they have been waiting, how anxious they are. I am still working on Winds. When it’s done, I will announce it here.

It’s been almost four years since the release of the fifth volume, A Dance With Dragons; that book appeared six years after A Feast for Crows.

Given that two volumes remain in the series, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, and that Martin has said that he expects both to be big (1,500 manuscript pages each), fans are understandably nervous that the series may never be completed. More than a few recall the unexpected death of Robert Jordan, who left his 14-volume Wheel of Time series incomplete at the time of his death in 2007.

Altogether, it took Martin 11 years to produce the two most recent books. Martin is currently 66 years old; if he stays true to form, we can reasonably expect him to complete the series in 2022, at the age of 73. Jordan died at age 58.

For those who can’t wait, Martin offered an excerpt from The Winds of Winter on his blog two years ago; check it out here.

New Treasures: The Inheritance Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin

New Treasures: The Inheritance Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin

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The Inheritance Trilogy Jemisin-smallIt’s tough to come up with a title for a new fantasy trilogy these days. Titles are like web domains — all the good ones are taken, and most of the not-so-good ones, too. As Scott Adams had noted, if you want a completely original title (or web domain) nowadays, you’re stuck with a shrinking number of phrases that resemble monkey sounds.

Take “The Inheritance Trilogy.” The title has already been used a few times — mostly famously for the first three novels of Christopher Paolini’s best selling fantasy series, which began with Eragon. It’s also the name of an Ian Douglas military SF trilogy beginning with Star Strike, published from 2008-2009, as another example.

Well, we all know that good things come in threes. So I wasn’t all that surprised to see the omnibus volume of N.K. Jemisin’s first fantasy series published under the name The Inheritance Trilogy last month. If you can’t be original, go for something popular.

Titles aside, the omnibus volume of The Inheritance Trilogy is definitely a book you want on your shelf. Modern fantasy is a vibrant and exciting field, and talented new writers are emerging all the time, but precious few of them hold a candle to Jemisin. She is one of the most gifted fantasy writers I have come across in a very long time, and this new one-volume edition contains the complete text of her first three novels, in a single affordable (and massive) package.

The Inheritance Trilogy omnibus includes the novels The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, and The Kingdom of Gods. As a special bonus, it also includes a brand new novella set in the same world, The Awakened Kingdom, which appears here for the first time.

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The Barbarism of Bullfighting and Archaic Diction in L. Sprague de Camp’s “The Rug and the Bull”

The Barbarism of Bullfighting and Archaic Diction in L. Sprague de Camp’s “The Rug and the Bull”

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1974 Paperback edition. Cover art by Frank Frazetta.
1974 Paperback edition. Cover art by Frank Frazetta.

One of the many freedoms of Sword and Sorcery, it seems to me, is that it enables the adoption of a world that allows the writer to comment on just about anything on which one would want. One of Robert E. Howard’s purposes in the construction of his own Hyboria was to create a conglomerate of cultures, no matter how anachronistic their juxtapositions, so that his hero Conan might have any kind of adventure that Howard might think up. Whereas for previous tales, Howard perhaps had to construct different heroes for different historical epochs (Bran Mak Morn for the Celtic Picts, Solomon Kane for the sixteenth century, Kull for Atlantis), in the Hyborian Age Conan might be a thief, a soldier, a pirate, and ultimately a king, his adventures all the while providing Howard with powerful commentary on “civilization.”

So, too, writers after Howard have utilized this purpose. Dave Sim, through his creation of Cerebus the Aardvark, begins by commenting on the Sword and Sorcery genre itself (as well as the mainstream comic books of Sim’s time) and then goes on to explore High Society, Church & State, marriage – and this last, in Jaka’s Story, is as far as my reading has taken me, but I understand that Sim is so far reaching in his exploration of topics that in a much later volume he even explores the life and works of Ernest Hemingway through Cerebus taking on the position of Hemingway’s personal secretary!

Terry Pratchett uses the Sword and Sorcery milieu to ingenious satirical effect, cribbing directly (I believe) from Fritz Leiber in order to forecast to his readers, in the very first pages of the very first Discworld novel, just what tone and material his readers may expect. Pratchett’s initial perspective characters, soon abandoned, are Bravd and the Weasel (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, obviously). I quote the following description in order to give an example of Pratchett’s satirical treatment of Sword and Sorcery and to underscore, specifically, Pratchett’s debt to Leiber. For more humor, one might want to pick up this book and enjoy the way that these characters talk to each other – it’s impressively Leiberesque.

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A Blast From the Past: John Christopher’s The Tripods Trilogy

A Blast From the Past: John Christopher’s The Tripods Trilogy

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white1Long before YA fiction conquered the universe and millennia before the trilogy became the gold standard by which the world judges any given author, there lived Sam Youd, a British writer who worked under the pseudonym of John Christopher. Youd published The White Mountains in 1967, at a time when the United Kingdom was lurching away from the tight-laced, survivalist mode inherited from and necessitated by back-to-back world wars. Cue mods and rockers, Pink Floyd, the Swinging Sixties. Twiggy. Bowie. Cue a mind-set ready to dismiss the bleak past in favor of (in Christopher’s eye) an equally bleak future.

I first encountered The Tripods trilogy in the late seventies, and both my sister and I devoured the series more than once. In the first book, Will Parker, his loutish cousin Henry, and a whipsmart French lad, Beanpole, embark on a post-apocalyptic journey to the only haven they’ve ever heard of where humankind isn’t ruled by the fearsome Tripods, massive metal beings reminiscent of The War Of the Worlds. But in The White Mountains, the tripods have won: humanity has been enslaved through the use of “caps,” metal headgear installed without fail on a child’s fourteenth birthday. Will, Henry, and Beanpole are about to turn fourteen, and they are all too aware that after capping, their peers are never the same.

So book one is the journey. Book two, The City Of Gold and Lead, pits the boys, along with a stoic German, Fritz, against the creatures that operate the tripods, the Masters. Will and Fritz pose as slaves and infiltrate one of the three cities inhabited by the Masters.

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New Treasures: The King’s Deryni by Katherine Kurtz

New Treasures: The King’s Deryni by Katherine Kurtz

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The King's Deryni-smallThe very first Deryni novel — and Katherine Kurtz’s first published novel — was Deryni Rising, which appeared as part of Lin Carter’s prestigious Ballantine Adult Fantasy line in 1970. Keith West has been gradually working his way through the entire BAF line, and I found what he said about Deryni Rising very compelling.

When Lin Carter started the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, he began by reprinting works that were obscure and/or considered classic in the field at that time, but as he wrote in the introduction to Deryni Rising, he had hoped from the very beginning to be able to publish high quality new works as well. The first original fiction he published was Deryni Rising, the first novel by Katherine Kurtz.

I think he hit the ball out of the park when he selected this one.

Read Keith’s complete comments here.

Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni novels were some of the most popular fantasy novels of the 20th Century. Deryni Rising has been reprinted over 10 times, and more recent volumes in the series have hit the New York Times bestseller list. The series is still being published and now consists of five trilogies, a stand-alone novel, two collections of short stories, and a pair of reference books.

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Vintage Treasures: The Second Ghost Book, edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith

Vintage Treasures: The Second Ghost Book, edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith

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Great Pan Second Ghost Book-smallI’ve done a fair job of collecting American horror and dark fantasy paperback anthologies over the years. I have by no means a complete collection (or anything close to a complete collection), but after nearly four decades of collecting I’ve seen almost all the really desirable stuff, and I’m intimately familiar with the market.

That’s not remotely true of British paperbacks. Take for example the highly regarded Pan Ghost Books. They were published between 1952 and 1980, and there are a lot of them. How many? I have no idea. A lot.

The first, originally titled The Ghost Book, was published in hardcover from Hutchinson in 1926, and didn’t appear in paperback until 1945. The Second Ghost Book had a hardcover edition in 1952 from James Barrie, and was reprinted in paperback by Pan (under the imprint Great Pan) in 1956. If things had continued at that pace, we wouldn’t have much of a series to talk about, but fortunately they picked up a bit, with the third appearing in hardcover in 1955.

The books were a mix of original fiction and reprints. All three of the first Pan Book of Ghost Stories were edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith, who was also a contributor (under the name Cynthia Asquith.) The fourth volume was edited by James Turner; altogether the series had half a dozen editors by the time it petered out in 1980.

My first encounter with the series was with The Bumper Book of Ghost Stories, a fat omnibus of two later volumes, which I found at the Windy City Pulp & Paper show last year. That was enough to set me on the trail of the earlier volumes. I recently stumbled across a copy of the The Second Ghost Book, and it’s got a stellar list of contributors, including V. S. Pritchett, Lord Dunsany, Elizabeth Bowen, L. P. Hartley, and many others. It’s also got a fabulous cover.

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