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Vintage Treasures: Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions by James Tiptree, Jr.

Vintage Treasures: Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions by James Tiptree, Jr.

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Out of the Everywhere (Del Rey, 1981). Cover by Rick Sternbach

Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions was the last paperback Tiptree collection to appear in her lifetime, and the third from Del Rey. It includes two original novellas, “Out of the Everywhere” and “With Delicate Mad Hands,” the Hugo nominee “Time-Sharing Angel,” and one of the greatest science fiction stories of the 20th Century (very possibly the greatest), “The Screwfly Solution.”

The first four stories in the collection, including “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” and “The Screwfly Solution,” were published under the pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon (instead of Tiptree, also a pseudonym; the author’s real name was Alice Sheldon). These are the bulk of the Raccoona Sheldon tales, the only one not collected here is “Morality Meat,” which eventually appeared in Crown of Stars (1988). In his article “Where to Start with the Works of James Tiptree, Jr.” at Tor.com, Lee Mandelo argues that the Sheldon and Tiptree stories are fundamentally quite different.

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Future Treasures: Hide by Kiersten White

Future Treasures: Hide by Kiersten White

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Hide by Kiersten White, coming May 24 from Del Rey

Kiersten White won a Bram Stoker Award for Best Young Adult Novel for The Dark Descendent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, which Goth Chick reviewed for us in 2018, calling the audio version “my Audible obsession for nearly eleven hours… I am completely hooked.” White is the New York Times bestselling author of the Paranormalcy series and the Conqueror’s Trilogy, which began with And I Darken (2016).

Hide is her first adult offering, and I’ve been hearing good things. It’s a supernatural thriller about a homeless woman with a dark past who takes part in a high-stakes competition to spend a week in an abandoned amusement park without getting caught. Booklist says it “combines elements of Thomas Tryon’s classic Harvest Home, Netflix’s Squid Game, and Jordan Peele’s film oeuvre… with revelatory pacing reminiscent of Spielberg’s Jaws.”

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Dumas’ Musketeers: Finding their Future in the Past

Dumas’ Musketeers: Finding their Future in the Past

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Court of Daggers by Alexandre Dumas,
translated by Lawrence Ellsworth (Substack, 2022)

Besides compiling the Cinema of Swords series, you might be aware of my other ongoing adventure fiction project, editing and translating new, modern editions of Alexandre Dumas’ Musketeers novels. This is an adventure in itself, as The Three Musketeers and its sequels amount to almost two million words in French, and the new English editions of the Musketeers Cycle will fill nine volumes when completed. Thus, it’s a big, multi-year project — and meanwhile the very shape of book publishing is shifting beneath our feet. But it’s shifting in ways you may find interesting, as the kind of genre fiction we celebrate here at Black Gate is even more susceptible to these changes than other literary forms.

The standard business of mainstream book publishing — at least, what seems standard because it’s what we grew up with — is under pressure from many different directions: cost of goods keeps increasing, which cuts into already slim profit margins, megacorp consolidation means fewer publishers and more homogeneity, and the internet, video games, and new digital platforms are all vying for the attention of an audience that is increasingly open to such new attractions.

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New Treasures: Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos by Edward M. Erdelac

New Treasures: Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos by Edward M. Erdelac

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Rainbringer by Edward M. Erdelac. (Cover by Jabari Weathers; (Kindle & Paperback Editions, 326pages. May 2021)

Rainbringer: The Symphonic Heavy Metal of Weird Fiction

Edward M. Erdelac has been writing entertaining weird fiction for over a decade. He pushes boundaries. One of his first spotlights on Black Gate was in 2014 regarding his Merkabah Rider (concerning the 19th-century Hasidic Jewish mystic turned gunslinger).  Erdelac also wrote an entry in Tales of Cthulhu Invictus mentioned in my recent 2022 review of Richard L. Tierney’s Simon of Gitta tales (this connection resonates since both Tierney and Erdelac extended the mythos of Robert E. Howard’s magical Ring of Set… more on that below). The author clearly has a knack for extending the landscapes (dreamscapes?) of modern fiction.

With Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos, Erdelac invites us to follow a fictionalized version of Zora Neale Hurston throughout the North American Twentieth Century. On the face of that description, you may not be hooked. Like most people, I presume, I had no idea of who she was…. or why she may present a wonderful lens into cosmic horrors. Read on! She’s a strong, witty survivor who is uniquely qualified.

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Vintage Treasures: Zelde M’Tana by F.M. Busby

Vintage Treasures: Zelde M’Tana by F.M. Busby

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Zelde M’Tana (Dell, May 1980). Cover uncredited

F.M. Busby was a prolific SF writer in the 70s and 80s, with a number of popular series, including the Demu Trilogy and the Slow Freight trilogy. But his most ambitious sequence was Rissa Kerguelen, the tale of a young woman who leads a rebellion against a tyrannical Earth, which ran to eight volumes. It’s been out of print since the 80s. The book I want to talk about today is the final one in the sequence, a prequel of sorts, which focused on the origin of one of its most popular characters, Zelde M’Tana.

Zelde M’Tana is memorable for a lot of reasons. But the most obvious is that it featured a Black heroine on the cover, extremely unusual for a mass market paperback in 1980 (and, frankly, for the next 30 years). It’s one of the first times I can recall seeing a Black protagonist on a cover, and it certainty stuck out. I can’t recall exactly what I thought, but I’m reasonably sure that I took it as a marketing statement, a signal that the book was targeted for a Black audience, and I let it sit on the shelf while my eye wandered towards more comfortably familiar covers with white protagonists.

There’s a word in the English language for people like me, White folks who avoided books with Black people on the covers for reasons of simple unfamiliarity. That word is racist.

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New Treasures: DMR presents TERRA INCOGNITA: Lost Worlds of Fantasy and Adventure

New Treasures: DMR presents TERRA INCOGNITA: Lost Worlds of Fantasy and Adventure

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Doug Draa’s Terra Incognita. (DMR Books, May, 2022). Cover art by Lauren Gornik.

 

Readers of Black Gate will be familiar with D.M. Ritzlin (champion of DMR books) and Doug Draa (editor of Weirdbook Magazine and Startling Stories). Releasing this week is their TERRA INCOGNITA: Lost Worlds of Fantasy and Adventure anthology (Trade Paperback, 222 pages, $14.99;  Digital: $4.99). Order via DMR Books or Amazon. For this they gathered seven authors, including many Black Gate veterans (contributors or featured in the articles): David C. Smith, Adrian Cole, S.E. Lindberg, J. Thomas Howard, Milton Davis, John C. Hocking, & Howard Andrew Jones.

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A Tale of ‘Possums and Pigs:The Last Coin by James P. Blaylock

A Tale of ‘Possums and Pigs:The Last Coin by James P. Blaylock

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                                 “…One pig to rule them all,

                                    One pig to bind them, 

                                    One pig to bring them all

                                    and on the pier-end find them

                                   In Seal Beach, on the Coast.”

                                                                      William Ashbless

                                                                                                                                                     Myths of the Pacific Coast

How does one describe one of one’s favorite books? How does one describe a book that he and nearly everyone he knew who read it experienced tremendous joy and satisfaction from reading it? How does one describe a book he enjoyed so much he feared any future works by its author might detract something from that book’s perfection? Well, first, he needs to stop writing about himself in the third person, because that’s rarely good. Then he needs simply to write, “Read The Last Coin and you will have read one of the most charming and joyful books I’ve ever read.”

My friend Carl started me down the path of becoming a James P. Blaylock reader when he tossed me an already worn copy of The Digging Leviathan (1984 — his third book. His first two, The Elfin Ship and The Disappearing Dwarf I’ve reviewed here on Black Gate.) With its cabals of conspiracists, hollow Earth theorizing, and besuited axolotls, I was completely enchanted with the book’s story of two boys in California in the middle of the last century in search of a connection with their absent or missing fathers. It’s rougher than his later novels, but here Blaylock was already introducing many of the tropes, and even characters he would revisit throughout his career.

When his next book, Homunculus (1986) came out, I ordered a copy from the long-gone local book store, The Book Nook, something I rarely did. It’s one of the books K.W. Jeter was thinking of — the others being his own Morlock Night and Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates — when he coined the portmanteau steampunk in a letter to Locus magazine. I enjoyed the book, which turned out to be the beginning of the ongoing adventures of Victorian inventor-cum-explorer Langdon St. Ives and the villainous hunchback, Dr. Ignacio Narbondo.

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Return to the Middle Sea in All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay

Return to the Middle Sea in All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay

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All the Seas of the World (Berkley, May 17, 2022)

What does it mean to be an exile? How does that meaning bend across lines of nationality, of gender, of religion? How many different ways can being exiled shape, define, ruin, or even save a life?

This is just one set of questions raised by All the Seas of the World, the newest novel from master fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay. The novel, Kay’s fifteenth, comes from Berkley and will be released on May 17, 2022.

All the Seas of the World is the third in a sequence of novels set in the lands around the Middle Sea, Kay’s reimagining of the Mediterranean region of Europe and North Africa, in a time period akin to the early Renaissance. The first novel set in this time and place, Children of Earth and Sky, actually takes place after the second installment, A Brightness Long Ago. This third novel is placed chronologically between the two. Kay prefers not to refer to the books as a trilogy, and with reason. Though related, and featuring recurring characters, each book stands alone. Taken together, the stories here fit into a world history Kay began to build with The Lions of Al-Rassan (1995), and built upon in Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors (1998 and 2000), and The Last Light of the Sun (2004).

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Six Thousand Years of Galactic Empires, Space Pirates, and Fuzzies: H. Beam Piper’s Rich Future History

Six Thousand Years of Galactic Empires, Space Pirates, and Fuzzies: H. Beam Piper’s Rich Future History

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H. Beam Piper’s Federation and Empire (Ace Books, February 1982 and May 1981). Covers by Michael Whelan

H. Beam Piper is an enduring favorite of mine. I love his SF adventure tales, including The Fuzzy Papers and the stories in his Paratime sequence. But I haven’t really dipped into his more ambitious work, the Future History that tied together most of his longer stories. The Zarthani website dedicated to Piper’s work summarizes it succinctly:

Piper’s Terro-human Future History is a future-historical science-fiction series which imagines the expansion of the human race from its origins on Earth (Terra) out into the galaxy. Consisting of the novels of Piper’s famous Fuzzy trilogy — Little Fuzzy (1962), Fuzzy Sapiens (…1964) — and Fuzzies and Other People (published posthumously in 1984), Piper’s novels Uller Uprising (1952), Four-Day Planet (1961), Junkyard Planet (1963) — also known as The Cosmic Computer, and Space Viking (1962), and eight Piper stories originally published in pulp science-fiction magazines between 1957 and 1962 (originally reissued, along with an additional, previously-unpublished story, in the Piper collections Federation and Empire edited by John F. Carr, and more recently in Carr’s The Rise of the Terran Federation), the Terro-human Future History spans over thirty millennia of future history.

Piper’s Future History has been much celebrated and discussed since his death, and we’re long overdue for a closer look here. Grab your beverage of choice, settle back in your favorite chair, and let’s dive in.

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New Treasures: The City of Dusk by Tara Sim

New Treasures: The City of Dusk by Tara Sim

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The City of Dusk (Orbit, March 22, 2022)

Here’s another book that just jumped into my hands while I was minding my own business at Barnes & Noble this weekend: The City of Dusk, the adult debut by Tara Sim, the author of the popular Scavenge the Stars YA series and the Timekeeper trilogy. It’s the tale of four divine heirs of the great Houses — Life, Death, Light, and Darkness — in a once-great city faced with slow extinction now that the gods have abandoned them, and how they come together with a bold plan to save their city. Caitlin G. has a fine review at Fantasy Book Critic; here’s a snippet.

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