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I Ain’t No Hero, See?

I Ain’t No Hero, See?

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Have Space Suit -- Will TravelI’ve got a friend I’ve known since we were nine years old who often says that we weren’t really brought up by our parents (neither his nor mine), but by the books we read. I’m not sure if we were lucky or unlucky, but those books were full of, well, heroes. The first book I ever read, by the way, was Treasure Island – I think having seen the movie helped me with the hard parts.

Aside: my parents didn’t come from cultures in which picture books were the norm, so we weren’t allowed to read them, nor comic books. Some illustration could be tolerated, but books with pictures on every page were for illiterate people.

Then my brother recommended The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That was the first fantasy book I ever read. Almost immediately after that I read Have Space Suit-Will Travel, my first SF book.

Not very long after these came Lord of the Rings – and every other Fantasy and SF book I could put my hands on. These were the books that raised me.

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Once Upon a Time in Zang…

Once Upon a Time in Zang…

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zangcover (1)…a fugitive author and a devious cutthroat began a revolt against the nine Sorcerer Kings whose power displaced the gods themselves. Like the revolt, which began in far-flung places, the Zang Cycle of stories would grow slowly and cover a lot of ground.

Now at last the entire story cycle is complete with the publication of The Revelations of Zang on Amazon Kindle. 

It all started with “The Persecution of Artifice the Quill,” in the pages of Weird Tales #340 (2006). The cover of that issue featured a horde of the faceless warlocks known as Vizarchs, who drag Artifice the Quill away in the story’s opening scene, a scene painted by the talented Les Edwards.

WT340
The Vizarchs are coming!

The story was a turning point for me: The fulfillment of a long-standing dream (getting published in Weird Tales) and the introduction of two characters I would return to many times: Artifice the Quill and Taizo the Thief.

I wrote eleven more Zang Tales and moved the series to the welcoming pages of Black Gate, where it flourished for many issues.

The first story to grab BG founder John O’Neill’s attention was “Oblivion Is the Sweetest Wine” — a tale of Taizo and his infamous heist in spider-haunted Ghoth. It ran in BG #12 (2008). I wrote one Zang story after another over a 3- to 4-year period, building toward a single climactic tale.

The cycle’s penultimate story, “Return of the Quill,” wherein Artifice finally returns to Narr and sparks a revolution, was featured in BG #13 (2009). By this time, Artifice has embraced the sorcery that he once loathed and learned to alter reality with his Great Art. He is the leader of the mystical troupe known as The Glimmer Faire.

Meanwhile, Taizo has taken his own dark journey through tragedy, sorcery, and suffering toward vengeance. These two main characters only meet twice during the cycle: Once in the first story, and once again in the last.

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Vintage Treasures: The Radio Planet by Ralph Milne Farley

Vintage Treasures: The Radio Planet by Ralph Milne Farley

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The Radio Planet AceAnd so we come to the third volume of Ralph Milne Farley’s Radio Men series, The Radio Planet.

Like the first two, The Radio Man (aka An Earth Man on Venus, which I discussed here) and The Radio Beasts (here), The Radio Planet was originally published in Argosy All-Story Weekly, in six installments starting in June 26, 1926, following the previous novel by some fifteen months.

Farley wrote several more Radio novels, including The Radio Menace, The Radio War, The Radio Pirates, and The Radio Flyers, between 1930 and 1955. Only a few were even loosely connected to the first three; most of them were futuristic pulp adventures set on Earth, and Ace didn’t bother to reprint them.

Yes, that’s right. After three popular Radio Men novels, Ralph Milne Farley continued to merrily put Radio in every one of his titles, even though most had nothing to do with Myles Cabot, Venus, or Mars. Apparently, the man had only a rudimentary concept of brand marketing. And liked radio.

In any event, The Radio Planet was the last novel to feature Myles Cabot. Two other short adventures followed: “The Radio Man Returns,” a short story from Amazing Stories (June 1939), and “The Radio Minds of Mars,” originally published in the January 1955 issue of Spaceway magazine.

Fortunately for young teenage fans in the 1970s, such as yours truly, there were two inexpensive paperback editions of The Radio Planet, which kept it in print for roughly a decade. Both were from Ace Books.

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New Treasures: Reviver by Seth Patrick

New Treasures: Reviver by Seth Patrick

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Reviver by Seth PatrickI really haven’t been very good to fans of supernatural thrillers in my New Treasures columns recently. Honestly, I don’t hate you guys, there’s just been a lot of top-flight fantasy to gawk at lately.

But look, here I am with a peace offering: a peek at a great-looking debut horror/thriller novel just optioned by the producers of The Dark Knight Returns.

Jonah Miller is a Reviver, able to temporarily revive the dead so they can say goodbye to their loved ones—or tell the police who killed them.

Jonah works in a department of forensics created specifically for Revivers, and he’s the best in the business. For every high-profile corpse pushing daisies, it’s Jonah’s job to find justice for them. But while reviving the victim of a brutal murder, he encounters a terrifying presence. Something is on the other side watching. Waiting. His superiors tell him it’s only in his mind, a product of stress. Jonah isn’t so certain.

Then Daniel Harker, the first journalist to bring revival to public attention, is murdered. Jonah finds himself getting dragged into the hunt for answers. Working with Harker’s daughter Annabel, he becomes determined to find those responsible and bring them to justice. Soon they uncover long-hidden truths that call into doubt everything Jonah stands for, and reveal a sinister force that threatens us all.

Am I keeping you hip, or what?

The first novel in a projected trilogy, Reviver looks like the real thing. And if it’s made into a movie, now you can spoil the ending for all your friends in the popcorn line.

Reviver goes on sale next Tuesday, June 18th. It is published by Thomas Dunne Books. It is 416 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover, and $11.99 for the digital edition.

See all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

SF Signal Interviews Scott Taylor on A Knight In The Silk Purse

SF Signal Interviews Scott Taylor on A Knight In The Silk Purse

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The Black Gate district of the city of TauxSF Signal interviews editor and Black Gate blogger Scott Taylor on the occasion of his sixth Kickstarter project: A Knight in the Silk Purse, the follow-up to his enormously successful shared world anthology, Tales Of The Emerald Serpent.

Nick Sharps: What lesson did you learn from the first anthologies campaign that has carried on to Volume II? Are there plans for future anthologies?

ST: Well, we learned that selling fiction is hard, and selling a anthology is even harder. Still, we were happy to get the backing for our first endeavor, and we knew that if we could just produce that work, people would get what we were doing and that would carry over to further volumes. So far, we’ve been right, and this new Kickstarter has built-in stretch goals that could see to the production of up to six full volumes of this series that would take us to the culmination of the story we all set out to tell.

A Knight In The Silk Purse returns to the Free City of Taux, a fantasy port of cursed stones, dark plots, and a cast of characters who have made a name for themselves in the infamous Black Gate District. It is edited by R. Scott Taylor and includes contributions from Martha Wells, Julie Czerneda, Elaine Cunningham, Todd Lockwood, Lynn Flewelling, Dave Gross, Juliet McKenna, and others. With 23 days to go, it is already more than halfway to its target goal of $10,000 (with stretch goals that go all the way up to $300,000).

Read more about the launch of Tales Of The Emerald Serpent here and read the complete interview with Scott here. You can also read his recent article The Joy and Pain of Kickstarter [and How Backed Projects Still Fail].

You can pledge to support A Knight In The Silk Purse at Kickstarter here.

Law vs. Chaos replaces Good vs. Evil?

Law vs. Chaos replaces Good vs. Evil?

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swords-dark-magic-256Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders dedicate their sword and sorcery anthology Swords and Dark Magic to Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, and Michael Moorcock as “the great literary swordsmen who made it possible.”  Creating one of the most memorable characters in the genre — the “anti-hero” of Elric of Melniboné — would be enough to earn Moorcock this acknowledgment.  But Strahan and Anders suggest that:

It might be his alteration of the battle of Good versus Evil into that of Law versus Chaos (with disastrous consequences implied if either side ultimately triumphed over the other) that made the most significant contribution to fantasy literature (p. xv).

For those who may be unfamiliar with this distinction, Moorcock’s fantasy universe (or multi-verse) is populated, and seemingly controlled to some extent, by the Lords of Law and the Lords of Chaos. These god-like beings seemingly have mysterious and unfathomable intentions.

But they often appear to desire to exert their Lawful or Chaotic control over mortals and their worlds. As Strahan and Anders note, results are calamitous for any such world and its inhabitants when the scale tips too far towards either Law or Chaos.

No doubt this “alteration” has been significant. Outside the realm of fantasy literature, Moorcock’s Law versus Chaos contrast is most notably seen in the early Dungeons and Dragons rules. Its famous notion of alignment spawned a whole cosmological picture upon which this historically important game was built.  (See Appendix 1 “The Known Planes of Existence” in Deities and Demigods.)

Nevertheless, I disagree with Strahan and Anders’s wording of this LC contrast. They seem to suggest — and they are not the first to do so — that Moorcock’s LC is a replacement of the traditional Good versus Evil dynamic within his famous sword and sorcery tales.

I want to suggest that it is rather an added facet. I’ll look at just one of Moorcock’s famous Elric stories to make this case.

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Oz Reviews The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg

Oz Reviews The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg

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book of skullsThis novel came out in 1972 under the Signet Science Fiction imprint, which is quite misleading. There is nary a hint of sci-fi in its pages. Rather, The Book of Skulls is a deeply compelling psychological study, a book full of mystery and existential dread.

The story is told by four narrators: Eli, Ned, Oliver, and Timothy, Harvard college students who are the book’s protagonists. Each of the forty-two chapters is prefaced by the name of one of the four, the narrator of that chapter, so we are constantly shifting among the four minds. We get four strongly delineated perspectives as the story unfolds through their cross-country road trip to their ultimate goal: an ancient mystery cult in the Arizona desert that may possess the secret to physical immortality.

Eli, we learn, came across The Book of Skulls during one of his forays into the rare and uncatalogued manuscripts section of the university library. Translating it, he discovered the bizarre claim of the Brotherhood of Skulls, that they can forestall death. Further translation revealed that to become an initiate into their secrets of immortality, four candidates must come, a four-sided Receptacle. But part of the demand of the initiation is that two of the four must die: “The Ninth Mystery is this: that the price of a life must always be a life. Know, O Nobly-Born, that eternities must be balanced by extinctions. As by living we daily die, so then by dying we shall forever live.”

Eli has talked his three roommates into going with him in search of the cult over spring break, and each has his own motives for going along, which are gradually revealed as we get into their heads.

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The Unfulfilled Superhero: Philip Wylie’s Gladiator

The Unfulfilled Superhero: Philip Wylie’s Gladiator

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GladiatorGrowing up reading superhero comic books, it was almost inevitable that I’d hear about Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel Gladiator. It was said to be the inspiration behind Superman, the original story about an ultra-powerful strong man who set about trying to right wrongs. Growing older, I heard more: that Jerry Siegel, Superman’s co-creator, had reviewed the book for a fanzine; that he’d swiped dialogue from the book for use in his comics; that Wylie had threatened to sue. These claims were, in fact, not true. It is accurate to say that elements of the novel (now in the public domain and freely available online) can be seen in Superman. It’s also true (as Claude Lalumiére observed to me when he sold me his copy of the book) that the novel seems to have had as much or more inspiration on the character of Spider-Man. But as I see it, the book really stands in opposition to the super-hero genre as it later developed; it’s a kind of deconstructing of the genre before the genre had been really created. Unfortunately, I can’t say I find much else to recommend the novel. Still, it’s worth looking at as a curiosity, to see what survived in later works and what was changed — and how those changes transformed the central idea.

Gladiator opens in rural Colorado, with a man named Abednego Danner, a biology professor at a small college. Danner develops a serum that, administered in utero, can make a living creature tremendously fast, strong, and tough. When his wife falls pregnant, he administers the serum to his unborn child, who turns out to be a son named Hugo. The book follows Hugo though his life, as he develops his tremendous strength, goes to college and becomes a football star, struggles to make money, goes off to fight in the First World War, tries to find his purpose, fails to end political corruption, and finally comes to an odd anticlimactic end struck by lightning on a peak in South America while doubting God.

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Vintage Treasures: The Radio Beasts by Ralph Milne Farley

Vintage Treasures: The Radio Beasts by Ralph Milne Farley

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The Radio Beasts brightLast month I wrote a brief piece on Ralph Milne Farley’s pulp novel An Earth Man on Venus, originally published as The Radio Man in Argosy magazine in 1924.

As part of the research I dug a little into Farley, and discovered his real identity was Roger Sherman Hoar, state senator and assistant Attorney General for the state of Massachusetts.

I also discovered he produced seven (!) sequels over the next three decades: The Radio Beasts (1925), The Radio Planet (1926), The Radio Flyers (1929), The Radio Menace (1930), The Radio Gun-Runners (1930), The Radio War (1932) and The Radio Minds of Mars (1955).

That’s a lot of radio action.

A lot of things have changed since the 1920s. But one aspect of pop culture remains consistent: when a property has seven sequels, someone somewhere made a lot of money.

We can safely assume that by the time The Radio Minds of Mars (great title) appeared in 1955, America had had its fill of radio adventure. But in the intervening years, the Radio novels were a hot property.

The Radio Beasts affirms that. It had multiple editions, beginning with its 1925 four-part serialization in Argosy All-Story Weekly. It was reprinted (in one installment) in Fantastic Novels Magazine in January 1941 — with a Frank R. Paul cover, no less.

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Joyce Carol Oates’ Gothic Quintet, Part V: The Accursed

Joyce Carol Oates’ Gothic Quintet, Part V: The Accursed

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The AccursedLast October, I looked at the four books of Joyce Carol Oates’ Gothic Quintet that had been published up to that point. I wrote about them in publication order, starting with Bellefleur, from 1980, a novel I thought truly brilliant. I had a slightly more ambiguous reaction to 1982’s A Bloodsmoor Romance, which might have been a function of my being less familiar with the books that had inspired it. At any rate, I was considerably more impressed with 1984’s Mysteries of Winterthurn and thought 1998’s My Heart Laid Bare a successful conclusion to the sequence. If ‘conclusion’ is the appropriate word. Earlier this spring, Oates’ fifth gothic was published, as though the sequence was returning to unlife after being laid to rest.

In fact, Oates wrote all five books in the early 80s, but only published three at the time. My Heart Laid Bare, the fourth, was published a decade and a half later. Now, a decade and a half after that, The Accursed has finally been published. It was the third book written, and so can be viewed as either a belated conclusion to the sequence or else as a kind of keystone to the gothic arch of the whole series. I tend to prefer the latter. My Heart Laid Bare seemed to move away from the Gothic toward a more purely ironic, though not wholly mimetic, form of storytelling. The Accursed is in keeping with the earlier books of the series, not without irony itself, but also filled with the sublime and seemingly supernatural. I found it clarified and extended themes and imagery of all five books, resonating and completing the overall sequence.

Given the structural complexity of each individual book, the way they build themselves up almost as jigsaw puzzles, and particularly given Oates’ choice in The Accursed to withhold the final puzzle-piece of plot until the final chapter, there’s something appropriate about the publication order of the books. The Accursed may after all be best read as the final book of the five. As such, it’s a bravura conclusion, every bit as dense with meaning and as extravagantly well-written as its predecessors. And as intricate, every image linking to each other and to the core themes of the book. But it also comes to seem that the five books replicate as a whole their individual structures: the themes build, and the plot follows.

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