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Adventures in Pulp Awesomeness, Part Deux: Planetoids of Peril

Adventures in Pulp Awesomeness, Part Deux: Planetoids of Peril

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clayton-astounding1Back in April we told you about the first volume of this excellent new Clayton Astounding reprint series, compiled by Dark Worlds editor G.W. Thomas: Vagabonds of Space.

Vagabonds collected the best Space Opera from the Clayton years, the first three years of the most honored science fiction magazine in history: January 1930 – March 1933, when it was briefly owned by Clayton Magazines. This was the era before the pulp magazine was renamed Analog in 1960; even before the name was changed to Astounding Science Fiction — when it bore its original title, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, and was edited by Harry Bates, a skilled writer and editor whose landmark 1940 Astounding story “Farewell to the Master” was adapted as the classic film The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The Clayton years preceded the so-called Golden Age of Astounding when, under legendary editor John W Campbell, it discovered and promoted the work of young new writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Hal Clement. The fiction in the Clayton Astounding was raw, undiluted Buck Rogers stuff; the tales that first established the genre and defined for the American public what science fiction was all about.

G.W. Thomas followed Vagabonds with Out of the Dreadful Depths, pulp tales of undersea adventure, and now comes the third volume, Planetoids of Peril:

Not the Golden Age Astounding of John W. Campbell but the fun, Bug-Eyed-Monster-filled pulp of SF adventure. This volume is filled with tales of planets and moons covered with alien monsters and terrible chills. Featuring work by Anthony Pelcher, Sewell Peaslee Wright, Edmond Hamilton, Charles W. Diffin, Paul Ernst and Robert H. Wilson. With introductions and commentary by G. W. Thomas.

The Clayton Astounding: Planetoids of Peril is available from Lulu, priced at$13.99 for 218 pages. It’s also available in electronic format for just $4.99.

Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages

Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages

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games-of-cagesThe most interesting title waiting for me when I returned from our adventures at Dragon*Con was Harry Connolly’s Game of Cages, the latest in his Twenty Palaces series and the sequel to his first novel, Child of Fire.

We’ve been big fans of Harry since his first story appeared in Black Gate 2, and his “Soldiers of a Dying God” (BG 10) is one of the finest short pieces we’ve ever published. It’s been great to finally see him get some well-deserved recognition.  Child of Fire received some excellent notices, and Jim Butcher said it contained “Excellent reading… delicious tension and suspense.” Here’s the cover copy to Game of Cages:

As a wealthy few gather to bid on a predator capable of destroying all life on earth, the sorcerers of the Twenty Palace Society mobilize to stop them. Caught up in the scramble is Ray Lilly, the lowest of the low in the society — an ex-­car thief and the expendable assistant of a powerful sorcerer. Ray possesses exactly one spell to his name, along with a strong left hook. But when he arrives in the small town in the North Cascades where the bidding is to take place, the predator has escaped and the society’s most powerful enemies are desperate to recapture it.

We tracked down Harry at the exclusive club where he now writes, between eating oysters and sipping Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Before we were thrown out by the bankers at the next table, Harry did say a few words about his new novel, which Howard Jones managed to transcribe in the hidden notebook he always carries in his pocket:

Ray Lilly is an ex-con, an ex-car-thief, and current minion in the Twenty Palace Society, a secret organization that protects our world from deadly, magical “predators.” Ray may only be a driver — and a decoy — but he’s the only operative close enough to deal with an emergency situation: An auction has gone terribly wrong releasing a predator into a small town, and the bidders — murderous, wealthy bastards all — tear the town apart looking for it. Ray just has to hold out until his sorcerer bosses arrive, but it may already be too late.

Howard had a few choice words of his own about “wealthy bastards” as we dusted ourselves off, but at least we got an exclusive quote.  After his third novel, we’ll probably have to bribe his bodyguards just to get close to Harry. Don’t be one of the last ones to catch on. Check out Game of Cages today — the first three chapters are available online, and the book can be found at better bookstores near you.

Finding Deliverance in a dearth of heroic fantasy

Finding Deliverance in a dearth of heroic fantasy

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dickey-deliveranceI lay with the flashlight still in one hand, and tried to shape the day. The river ran through it, but before we got back into the current other things were possible. What I thought about mainly was that I was in a place where none—or almost none—of my daily ways of living my life would work; there was not habit I could call on. Is this freedom? I wondered.

–James Dickey, Deliverance

So you’ve read yourself out of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, closed the cover on the latest Bernard Cornwell and Joe Abercrombie, and you’re looking for something new in heroic fiction. But you can’t seem to find what you’re looking for. Rather than slumming around in the dregs of the genre or reaching for The Sword of Shannara (with apologies to fans of Terry Brooks), my suggestion is to take a look at modern realistic adventure fiction and non-fiction.

I read heroic fiction for the action, the adventure, the storytelling, and the sense of palpable danger that real life (typically) doesn’t provide. Likewise, I find that works like The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf by Jack London, Alive by Piers Paul Read, and Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer satisfy the same primal needs as the stories of an Edgar Rice Burroughs or David Gemmell. The best modern adventure fiction/non-fiction stories are bedfellows with heroic fiction: While they may not contain magic or monstrous beasts, they allow us to experience savagery and survival in the wild and walk the line of life and death.

My favorite work in this genre is Deliverance by James Dickey, and it’s to this book that I’d like to devote the remainder of this post.

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E.C. Tubb, October 19, 1919 – September 10, 2010

E.C. Tubb, October 19, 1919 – September 10, 2010

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zenya2British science fiction author Edwin Charles (“E.C.”) Tubb died on September 10, 2010, at his home in London, England. He was 90 years old.

Tubb published his first novel, Saturn Patrol, in 1951.  Thus began an extraordinary career spanning nearly half a century, and including over 130 novels and more than 230 short stories in magazines such as Astounding/Analog, Galaxy, Nebula, Science Fantasy, and many others. His short story “Little Girl Lost” (1955) was adapted for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery TV series in 1972.

While Tubb received acclaim for much of his early work, including his novel of Martian colonization Alien Dust (1955), and his generation-Starship novel The Space-Born (1956), he is remembered today chiefly for his Dumarest of Terra saga, which began with The Winds of Gath in 1967 .

DAW publisher Don Wollheim commissioned the series, featuring star-hopping adventurer Earl Dumarest and his relentless search for the legendary lost planet of his birth: Earth. The worldwide success of Dumarest of Terra led Tubb to switch almost exclusively to novel writing. Following Wollheim’s death in 1990, Dumarest came to a premature end after 31 novels with The Temple of Truth (1985).

The next novel, The Return, existed for years only in French translation, until it finally appeared in English in 1997 from Gryphon Books.  The ending of The Return was inconclusive however, and it was not until 2009 that Tubb,  at the urging of his agent (and at the age of 90!), wrote the volume that brought Dumarest of Terra to a true conclusion: Child of Earth  (Homeworld Press, 2009).

Later collections of Tubb’s short fiction include The Best Science Fiction of E.C. Tubb (Wildside, 2005) and Mirror of the Night (Sarob Press, 2003).  In recent years, and despite failing health, Tubb continued to write and publish, including the first two novels in his sword & sorcery Chronicle of Malkar series, Death God’s Doom (1999) and The Sleeping City (1999), both from Prime; the Space:1999 novel Earthbound (2003), and three novels in the Linford Mystery Library. His dystopian novel To Dream Again was accepted on the day he died, and is scheduled for publication by Ulverscroft in 2011. At least one other new novel, Fires of Satan, is rumored to be under consideration

I admit I’ve never read any E.C. Tubb — his heyday, the early 1970s, was a bit before my time.  But he was a fixture on science fiction bookshelves in virtually every bookstore I walked into for over twenty years, as ubiquitous as Asimov, Heinlein, and Frank Herbert. His passing feels like the end of an era.

Black Gate‘s Vaughn Heppner reaches #1 at Amazon with Star Soldier

Black Gate‘s Vaughn Heppner reaches #1 at Amazon with Star Soldier

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star-soldierStar Soldier by Vaughn Heppner, Book #1 of the Doom Star Series, has reached the Top of Amazon’s bestseller list for Series Science Fiction in its Kindle edition.

Number 2 on the list is the second volume in the series, Bio-Weapon — outselling Dune, Foundation, and Orson Scott Card’s Ender series, among many others. In the general Science Fiction Bestsellers list for Kindle editions, Star Soldier reached #2, second only to the brand new Zero History by William Gibson.

Star Soldier is a full novel, 82,000 words in length, and is available for download for just 99 cents.  Here’s the description:

It’s survival of the fittest in a brutal war of extinction! Created in the gene labs as super soldiers, the Highborn decide to replace the obsolete Homo sapiens. They pirate the Doom Stars and capture the Sun Works Ring around Mercury. Now they rain asteroids, orbital fighters and nine-foot drop troops onto Earth in a relentless tide of conquest. Marten Kluge is on the receiving end. Hounded by Thought Police, he lives like an ant in a kilometer-deep city. The invasion frees him from a re-education camp but lands him in the military, fighting for the wrong side. Star Solider is the story of techno hell in a merciless war, with too many surprises for any grunt’s sanity.

Vaughn has sold three really terrific linked Sword and Sorcery tales to Black Gate, the first of which, “The Oracle of Gog,” will appear in our next issue.  I asked him to tell us a little bit about the novels:

In many ways Star Soldier is based from my years of reading about the Eastern Front during WWII. Social Unity is like the Soviets. The genetic super-soldiers think like Nazis. Marten Kluge, the hero, just wants to be free. But there is precious little freedom in the Inner Planets of the Solar System in 2350… I’m writing hard these days. I’m working on the third book of the Doom Star Series, Battle Pod.

Congratulations Vaughn!

Imaro: The Naama War

Imaro: The Naama War

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imaro_the_naama_warImaro: The Naama War
Charles R. Saunders (Sword & Soul Media, 2009)

Here we have the long-awaited fourth volume in the “Imaro” series of sword-and-sorcery novels set in a fictional fantasy Africa. Imaro: The Naama War brings to a conclusion the many character arcs and plotlines that have built through Imaro (1981; revised 2006), Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush (1984; revised 2008), and Imaro: The Trail of Bohu (1985; revised 2009). The third book (which was the first written specifically as a novel instead of a collection of novellas and short stories) moves the tale of the Ilyassai warrior Imaro into the territory of the grand epic, threatening to plunge all of the continent of Nyumbani into a battle between the gods and the kingdoms they support, with Imaro as the fulcrum point. The novel ends on a cliffhanger, with the war about to erupt.

Now at last we have that great battle of gods and men, which Saunders started writing back in 1983. And it’s Epic. Big Capital “E” Epic. Charles R. Saunders more than rewards readers’ twenty-five years of patience with the single best installment in the saga of Imaro. This is sword-and-sorcery beauty, filled with bloody rage, bizarre magic, pounding battles, horrific monsters, and intense emotion. It is one of the best fantasy novels I have read over the past five years—and I’m actually glad I came late to reading the Imaro stories, because it means I didn’t have to wait so long to read the last and the best.

Imaro: The Naama War is the sort of fantasy trip I love to take, and I’ll admit that I felt an enormous rush of emotion and nearly came to tears during the thirty page wrap-up, where Saunders refuses to let the reader go from the passion of the story and the characters’ dramatic journeys. The escalation from the beginning to the unexpected conclusion is pitch-perfect. It is almost a textbook for how to build suspense and keep readers reeling with surprises while also maintaining their belief in the story’s inner truth.

So, yeah, this is kind of a good book. (Buy it here!)

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A Review of Jack the Giant Killer, by Charles de Lint

A Review of Jack the Giant Killer, by Charles de Lint

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jackJack the Giant Killer, by Charles de Lint
Ace (202 pages, hardcover, November 1987)

Charles de Lint’s Jack the Giant Killer is an urban fantasy novel, but it feels more accurate to call it an urban fairy tale. It’s set in Ottawa and makes frequent references to streets and landmarks; I have a feeling I’d get even more out of it if I were the least bit familiar with the city. Fortunately, geographic familiarity is not required to enjoy this story.

Jacky Rowan has just been through a moderately poor breakup. Her boyfriend stormed out after declaring her a predictable, boring shut-in. Partly because of his accusations, partly because of feeling empty and numb, she cuts off her waist-length hair, goes drinking, and then wanders down to a park, reflecting on her life and whether or not it means anything.

She has a distinct impression of someone watching her from the blacked-out windows of one house, but before she has time to reflect on that, she witnesses what appears to be a biker gang chasing down what looks like a small man.

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Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part III)

Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part III)

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William MorrisThis is the third in a series of posts looking at the question of who wrote the first otherworld fantasy: that is, the first fantasy to be set entirely in its own fictional world, with no connection to conventional reality at all. It’s an innovation traditionally ascribed to William Morris, but I think I’ve found an earlier writer who deserves that honor.

In the first post, I considered how to identify a fictional otherworld. I suggested four characteristics, of which a story’s fictional world needed to have at least three to be a true otherworld: its own logic (which might involve, say, the existence of magic), characters who we identified as residents of another world than our own, a coherent history, and a coherent fictional geography. In the second post, I considered ways in which older fantasies were linked to reality — by being set in the past, or in a place beyond contemporary knowledge, or being established as a dream, or as a story within a story, or as a myth. I concluded by discussing what I felt was significant about the idea of otherworld fantasy.

Before going on to present my suggestion for the writer of the first otherworld fantasy, though, I’d like to take a closer look at some past fantasies I thought came very close to presenting self-contained otherworlds. These are works which I don’t think are true otherworld fantasies, but which other people might choose to see as such.

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Of Policed Identities and Public Urination: A Review of The City & The City

Of Policed Identities and Public Urination: A Review of The City & The City

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city2The City and the City is a murder mystery. That is the first thing. Miéville makes it perfectly clear: the book explicitly follows the rhythms of this genre, the steps as strictly defined as the rules of a sonnet: the death, the jaded, world-weary but still tender-hearted investigator, the discovery that the victim was not quite what she seemed, the additional deaths, the dead ends and red herrings, the gathering momentum, the Explanation between murderer and detective, slotting all the puzzle pieces together in front of all the characters assembled, the wry denouement.

And the fact that an almost superciliously correct mystery can blend so perfectly with the surreality of a fantasy of superimposed cities is due to the fact that, as Miéville says in the Random House Reader’s Circle interview at the end of the book, the crime novel is “at its best, a kind of dream fiction masquerading as a logic puzzle. All the best noir – or at least I should say the stuff I like most – reads oneirically. Chandler and Kafka seem to me to have a lot more shared terrain then Chandler and a true-crime book.”

Spoilers below the cut. Don’t read them. It just tied for the 2010 Best Novel Hugo – just go read the book!

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Dragon*Con Report Part 2

Dragon*Con Report Part 2

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dragonconlogoI said a few words about Dragon*Con itself in Part 1 of my con report.  In this one, I’d like to share our experiences at the largest science fiction and fantasy convention in North America.

After a long  journey,  Black Gate publisher John O’Neill and I reached  Atlanta late Thursday afternoon. Reviews Editor Bill Ward acted as our elite scout, and was not only waiting with con badges, but had scoped out the route we’d need to follow to unload our boxes and boxes of Black Gate magazines and vintage science fiction paperbacks. While John and I have been corresponding with Bill Ward for several years, we’d never before met him in person, and it was a pleasure to be able to do so. Bill proved to be just as indispensable, organized, and articulate as he is online, and possessed a dry, quick wit as well.

Jason Waltz, owner of Rogue Blades Entertainment, shared a quarter of the booth with us, and although he and his friend John Whitman had driven down from Milwaukee and we had driven down from Illinois and Indiana, we somehow arrived within a few minutes of each other without coordination. I doubt it would have worked out as well if we’d actually planned it. Between the five of us we managed to get all the Black Gate gear and RBE gear unloaded within an hour. Unpacking it and putting it on display took a bit longer, and required additional time the following morning.

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