Black Gate

Joseph Payne Brennan isn’t discussed much these days. He died over twenty years ago, in 1990, the same year his last book was released, The Adventures of Lucius Leffing, the fourth volume featuring his Carnacki-like occult detective.

Brennan wrote only two novels. But he is mostly remembered for his classic horror stories, published in Weird Tales, Whispers, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and over 200 horror anthologies. His most famous story, “Slime,” featuring a sinister new form of protoplasmic life which emerges from the ocean, was originally published in the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales and has been reprinted more than fifty times. It has influenced countless horror stories ever since, from the Steve McQueen film The Blob (which Brennan successfully sued for copyright infringement) to Stephen King’s famous short story, “The Raft,” which also features a horrific killer protoplasm in a lake.

Brennan’s imagination wasn’t limited to primordial monsters, however. One of his most acclaimed short stories, “Canavan’s Back Yard,” imagines an overgrown lot so twisted and mazelike that most who venture into it never return.

Brennan isn’t someone I discovered in the magazines. In fact, up until this week, I was pretty sure I’d never read anything by him at all. He’s been mentioned a few times here on the Black Gate blog, most recently in Douglas Draa’s review of Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural, and in the discussion surrounding Robert E. Howard’s The People of the Black Circle.

But I’d been curious about his 1980 paperback collection, The Shapes of Midnight, containing both “Slime” and “Canavan’s Back Yard,” and my interest was heightened by the comments Doug Draa made on my People of the Black Circle article. So I became determined to get a copy, and in June I finally succeeded.

It’s a slender volume, just 176 pages, containing a dozen stories. The enthusiastic introduction is by a young horror writer who burst on the scene just six years earlier, with a successful horror novel titled Carrie. Here’s what Stephen King had to say about Joseph Payne Brennan, taken from his introduction to The Shapes of Midnight.

…

Read More Read More

Jack Williamson is a true legend among science fiction fans.

My favorite story about Jack Williamson concerns his first published story, “The Metal Man,” published in the December 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, when he was just 20 years old. The editor, Hugo Gernsback, was notoriously slow in paying his authors… so slow, in fact, that Williamson discovered he had broken into the magazine when he first laid eyes on the issue in a magazine rack and recognized his hero on the cover.

Williamson was one of the earliest pulp writers and he had an impressive career right through the 30s. He survived the coming of Campbell and continued writing into the 40s, 50s, and much later.

Which brings me to my second favorite Jack Williamson story. In the late 90s, Williamson was still regularly publishing short stories in major magazines, including “The Firefly Tree” (Science Fiction Age, 1997), “The Hole in the World” (F&SF, 1997), and “Miss Million” (Amazing Stories, 1999). A buzz began to go around fandom that if Williamson appeared in the magazines in the year 2000, that would mean he had been published in professional SF magazines for eight straight decades — a feat unequaled and very likely to remain unequaled for a long time.

Fandom held its breath. Jack Williamson turned 92 years old in the year 2000. And he published no less than three short stories that year: “Agents of the Moon” (Science Fiction Age), “Eden Star” (Star Colonies, edited by Martin H. Greenberg), and finally “The Ultimate Earth” (Analog).

“The Ultimate Earth” was nominated — and won — the Hugo Award for best novella of the year. It also won the Nebula.

As for Williamson, he kept publishing stories. Two in 2001, three in 2002, one in 2003, and an incredible seven in 2004 (including a collaboration with Edmond Hamilton – don’t ask how that happened).

…

Read More Read More

Back in June, I wrote a short blog entry about one of my favorite Ace Doubles, Tales of Outer Space and Adventures in the Far Future. I took the excuse to talk about one of the field’s true renaissance men, Donald A. Wollheim, who edited both books and launched several of the most enduring SF and fantasy publishing imprints in history.

Wollheim doesn’t get much credit for his amazing accomplishments these days. Which is why I was pleased to see Andrew Liptak at Kirkus dedicate his latest column to Wollheim and one of his greatest creations: the Ace Double. These compact and beautiful treasures occupy a very special place in my library. Here’s a snippet:

In 1952, editor Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Books introduced a format that would prove to be immensely popular, and cemented science-fiction literature’s role in bookstores afterwards…

Ace’s Double Novels were a distinctive part of the science-fiction community throughout the two decades in which they were published. The line helped to launch the novel careers of a number of authors, from Philip K. Dick to Ursula K. Le Guin to Samuel R. Delany, in addition to a number of other popular authors in the field, such as A.E. van Vogt, Margaret St. Clair and Leigh Brackett… the books were an innovative entry in a brand-new publishing world, one that found both considerable staying power and a platform for publishing a high volume of science fiction. The huge number of stories published allowed for something great to happen: Talented authors with interesting stories to tell broke into the field, allowing for their own voices to shape the genre as they continued to find success.

Read the complete article here. We last reported on Liptak when he looked at Astounding Science Fiction in February.

…

Read More Read More

And so we come to Fritz Leiber, in our continuing exploration of Lester del Rey’s Classic Library of Science Fiction series.

The Best of Fritz Leiber, published in 1974, was the second in the line, following The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum. Unlike Weinbaum and many of the authors who would follow him, Leiber was well known — even a star — to contemporary SF readers in 1974, thanks chiefly to his popular Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books.

Which brings us conveniently to the book’s first problem. Those stories were being published by Ace Books, who had five volumes of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in print by 1970, and the Classic Library of Science Fiction line was owned by Ballantine, which meant The Best of Fritz Leiber couldn’t include any of them. This is sort of like assembling a Best of Robert E. Howard collection that ignores Conan (which Del Rey books did in 2007, with considerable success, now that I think about it.)

Poul Anderson acknowledges this painful lack in his introduction, taking a moment to badmouth sword & sorcery while he’s at it:

It’s too bad that we have no tale of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser here. Not only did that charming pair of rogues… launch the author’s career, they are still going strong, to the joy of everyone who appreciates a rattling good fantasy adventure. But by no means are these stories conventional “sword and sorcery.” The world of Nehwon is made real in wondrously imagined detail… Here Leiber in his way — like the late J.R.R. Tolkien in his, and not vastly different — has done, and is doing, for the heroic fantasy what Robert Louis Stevenson did for the pirate yarn: by originality and sheer writing genius, he revived an ossified genre and started it off on a fresh path.

I could likewise wish that this book held a sample or two of Leiber’s horror stories. In my opinion, which Fritz modestly does not share, Lovecraft and Poe himself never dealt out comparable chills.

In other words, Leiber’s stories (and Tolkien’s) are good, so they can’t really be sword and sorcery… despite the fact that Fritz Leiber is often credited with coining the phrase “sword & sorcery” to describe his most popular work. Poul Anderson. What a doofus.

…

Read More Read More

This is the fifth volume in Lester Del Rey’s Classics of Science Fiction line I’ve discussed here (starting with The Best of Murray Leinster, The Best of Robert Bloch, The Best of Henry Kuttner, and The Best of C M Kornbluth.) I believe it may also have been the first, since it has the earliest publication date of the titles we’ve examined so far — April 1974 — and also because the cover design for the first printing (see below) was slightly different and a little rougher.

And also because, if you’re going to launch a series dedicated to the very best science fiction and fantasy writers of the century, it makes sense to start with Stanley G. Weinbaum.

This isn’t the first time we’ve covered Weinbaum’s career. The distinguished Ryan Harvey wrote a terrific retrospective three years ago, where he said, in part:

In a way, Weinbaum was science fiction’s equivalent of Robert E. Howard: a hugely talented author who died too young. But Weinbaum’s run was even shorter than Howard’s — a mere year and a half, with twelve stories published during that time. Posthumous work followed, but considering the immense talent that Weinbaum shows in his fiction — starting with his first story! — it is frustrating how little of this gold strike ever got to the surface for readers to mine.

We’re hardly the first fans to champion Weinbaum’s pulp science fiction. H.P. Lovecraft praised him highly, calling him ingenious, and stating that he stood miles above the other pulp SF writers in his ability to create genuinely alien worlds, especially in comparison to Edgar Rice Burroughs and his “inane” stories of “egg-laying Princesses.” And series editor Lester del Rey, in the June 1974 issue of IF magazine, said:

Weinbaum, more than any other writer, helped to take our field out of the doldrums of the early thirties and into the beginnings of modern science fiction.

Pretty heavy claims. So exactly who was this writer who won such adoration and devotion, even decades after his death?

…

Read More Read More