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Category: Pulp

Kirkus Looks at Astounding Science Fiction

Kirkus Looks at Astounding Science Fiction

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Astounding Science Fiction May 1938Andrew Liptak at Kirkus Reviews has posted a nice retrospective of one of the most influential figures in the history of our genre: John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction and the short-lived Unknown magazine. Here’s a snippet:

In 1938, science fiction would run into another personality who would change science fiction again: When 28-year-old author John Campbell Jr. was hired to edit Astounding Magazine. Campbell’s influence in the magazine market is commonly cited as the beginning of the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction, and represented a major shift away from the conventions of Gernsback’s pulp era…

With the release of the July 1939 issue of Astounding, the gloves came off. The issue’s table of contents contained a number of high quality stories from new and regular Astounding writers: “The Black Destroyer,” the first published story by A.E. van Vogt; “Trends,” Isaac Asimov’s first sale to the publication; “City of the Cosmic Rays,” by Nat Schachner; “Lightship, Ho!,” by Nelson S. Bond; “The Moth,” by Ross Rocklynne; Amelia Reynold’s “When the Half-Gods Go;” and “Greater than Gods,” by C.L. Moore.

Subsequent issues of Astounding featured a regular stable of authors who have become household names: Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard and Isaac Asimov, amongst many others. The magazine had changed the landscape…

The complete article is here. Thanks to John DeNardo at SF Signal for the tip.

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Affair of the Bear: The Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Affair of the Bear: The Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Oakdale Affair frontspiece Jack BurroughsYes, this is the 3,000th post on Black Gate. Discovered after the fact, of course. Never thought I’d be writing about a murder mystery centered on a bear for the occasion, but what the hey.

In the spring of 1917, as he was completing the last of the “New Tarzan Adventures” that would eventually fill the volume Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a short novel (40,000 words) titled “Bridge and the Oskaloosa Kid.” A reader of the previous year’s The Return of the Mucker might recognize the name “Bridge” as belonging to that novel’s itinerant poet and co-hero. Burroughs liked the character so much that he spun him off into his own story: a crime drama/mystery, something different for the author.

Editor Bob Davis at All-Story found little to appreciate about ERB’s new tact when “Bridge and the Oskaloosa Kid” landed on his desk. He argued that its twist ending stretched credulity past what readers would tolerate: “Lord! Edgar, how do you expect people who love and worship you to stand up for anything like that? And the bear stuff, and the clanking of chains!” Davis may also have objected to mentions of one of the villains injecting morphine to feed an addiction. Although Davis remarked that Bridge was a “splendid character” in The Return of the Mucker and “well worth a great story,” the editor didn’t think this was it. He bounced the novel back to ERB.

Burroughs had his own doubts about “Bridge and the Oskaloosa Kid,” criticizing his performance as “rotten” even before he finished. But his name was still good for a sale in a magazine in 1917, and the novel ended up at Blue Book, printed in full in the March 1918 issue under the more economical title The Oakdale Affair. Editor Ray Long paid $600 for it, considerably less than ERB’s standard pay-rate at the time.

A year later, a movie titled The Oakdale Affair starring Evelyn Greeley premiered from World Film Company. It was the fourth film made from ERB’s work, and a rare non-Tarzan one. Somebody must have liked the book, the opinions of the author and his editor be damned!

What to make of this unofficial third novel of the “Mucker Trilogy,” a crime thriller/mystery with a vanished heiress, murderous drifters, gypsies, an enthusiastic child detective, a deadly bear, a lynch mob, a couple of dead bodies, and a chain-clanking ghost in a haunted house? Did ERB stray too far in looking for somewhere else for his poetry-loving Bridge to roam?

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The Weird of Oz Recalls his First Visit to Barsoom

The Weird of Oz Recalls his First Visit to Barsoom

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warlord of marsBy the time I was in the third grade, I was reading a little bit of everything (still do). From Zorro to The Hardy Boys to Pippi Longstocking, I gave everything a try. But already I was being drawn more strongly to works of speculative fiction, especially heroic fantasy. The year before, I’d gotten hooked on C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.

I often did my best bouts of reading after I’d been tucked into bed and the lights were out. I’d sneak down by the door, sprawl out on the carpet, and read by the narrow band of light coming in from the bathroom down the hall (my mother would leave it on as a nightlight). On one particular night, I chose an old hardcover that I’d taken off my Granddad’s shelf. Whatever dust jacket had once adorned its fraying red cloth was long since lost, and the pages were becoming yellow and brittle. I gently opened to the first page and read these words:

In the shadows of the forest that flanks the crimson plain by the side of the Lost Sea of Korus in the Valley Dor, beneath the hurtling moons of Mars, speeding their meteoric way close above the bosom of the dying planet, I crept stealthily along the trail of a shadowy form that hugged the darker places with a persistency that proclaimed the sinister nature of its errand.

These are the first words of The Warlord of Mars  (1919) by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

This happens to be the third book in the Barsoom series, so I had no idea what was going on. But “the shadows of the forest that flanks the crimson plain,” the “Lost Sea of Korus,” the “Valley Dor,” and the “dying planet” piqued a part of my brain that wanted to explore, as the voice at the beginning of Star Trek used to announce, “strange new worlds.” And then that sudden telescoping in on the “shadowy form” on a sinister errand…I was hooked.  I was on my way to Mars — or Barsoom, as its inhabitants called it.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Bride of Fu Manchu, Part Two

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Bride of Fu Manchu, Part Two

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$(KGrHqJ,!p!E9dR9SnnCBPebmY)fDQ~~60_35The Bride of Fu ManchuSax Rohmer’s The Bride of Fu Manchu was originally serialized in Collier’s from May 6 to July 8, 1933 under the variant title, Fu Manchu’s Bride. It was published in book form later that year by Cassell in the UK and Doubleday in the US. The US edition retained the original magazine title until the 1960s, when the UK book title was adopted for the paperback edition published by Pyramid Books.

After Alan Sterling recovers consciousness, Sir Denis insists he dine out that evening in Monte Carlo to take his mind off the terrible situation with Dr. Petrie. Complying with his wishes, Alan drives to Monaco and spends some time at a casino trying to apply Petrie’s (really Rohmer’s) complicated system to break the bank, to no avail. While dining that night, he is startled to spy Fleurette at another table dining with a Russian nobleman and Mahdi Bey.

Observing them in public, Sterling convinces himself that Fleurette must be Mahdi Bey’s mistress. This devastates him as he has idealized her as his virginal dream girl since first glimpsing her on the beach at Ste. Claire. Sterling’s reverie is broken when he spies the Chinese agents of Dr. Fu Manchu in the restaurant. He then hears the mysterious sonic trumpet sound once more. He doesn’t understand the connection, but he is now certain that Mahdi Bey is somehow mixed up in the dangerous business and Fleurette with him.

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Vintage Treasures: Vampire, Edited by Peter Haining

Vintage Treasures: Vampire, Edited by Peter Haining

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Vampire by Peter Haining-smallI’m a fan of modern horror and dark fantasy — especially writers like Laird Barron, Dan Simmons, and Stephen King.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t also enjoy classic horror, particularly when it comes in the form of creepy and fun short stories. So when I discovered this little gem at the Starfarer’s Despatch booth — run by two of my favorite booksellers, Rich Warren and Arin Komins — at Capricon this weekend, I snatched it up immediately.

The text on the back reminded me of the monster movies I adored in my youth:

The Blood is the Life…

The distant howl of a wolf in the night… A faint but persistent tapping at your window-pane… An empty tomb… A solitary figure swathed in black, his face the colour of death but for his lips which are a deep scarlet …

Beware — for the Undead have risen from their graves. And they must feed …

Yeah, that brings me right back to 1975, when paradise was an issue of Tomb of Dracula and a ticket to the Saturday double feature of Frankenstein Conquers the World and Destroy All Monsters.

The contents look just as enticing — including stories by Bram Stoker, Richard Matheson, Edith Wharton, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury. Most of the stories read like 1960s-era Creature Features too, including Curt Siodmak’s “Experiment With Evil,” in which the intrepid Professor Windford responds to an urgent summons from Count Norlasky in the remote Austrian Alps. Long ago a curse was laid on the Count’s ancestral home, and for most of his life he’s battled demons, werewolves, and vampires in an attempt to reclaim it. But one opponent has vexed him more than any other, and now he’s fallen victim to a soul-sucking thing.

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New Treasures: Dream Castles: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Two

New Treasures: Dream Castles: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Two

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Dream Castles-smallI spent this past weekend at Capricon 33, a local Chicago science fiction convention. The panels and readings were excellent, and perhaps the highlight was a Saturday night panel titled “Judging a Book by Page 119.” Steven Silver, Rich Horton, Kelly Strait, and Helen Montgomery read page 119 of some of their favorite novels, and the audience was left to guess the book. Someone in the back row correctly identified Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade, and I was pretty close with Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood trilogy (although I got the exact book wrong), but the panelists  managed to stump us on Iain M. Banks Consider Phlebas, Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, Saladin Ahmed’s The Throne of the Crescent Moon, Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear, The Little Country by Charles de Lint, and many others.

I can’t spend more than an hour or two at a good convention without realizing I’m not reading enough good books. I scurried to the Dealer’s room first chance I got and spent a few bucks in an attempt to rectify the situation. I found plenty of great treasures, but the real gem of the lot was the sole copy of the out-of-print Dream Castles: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Two, which I stumbled on at Larry Smith’s table.

I’ve been looking for a copy of Dream Castles for nearly a year — ever since I bought the first volume, Hard Luck Diggings. Both were published by Subterranean Press, and both gather early pulp fiction from one of the greatest 20th Century science fiction and fantasy writers.

Dream Castles collects short stories and novellas from Astounding Science Fiction (“I’ll Build Your Dream Castle,” Sept. 1947), Marvel Science Stories (“Golden Girl,” May 1951), and many other pulps — including Fantastic Science Fiction Fantasy, Space Science Fiction, and Orbit Science Fiction. The short novel, “Son of the Tree,” originally appeared in the June 1951 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.

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Win a Copy of The Complete John Thunstone, by Manly Wade Wellman

Win a Copy of The Complete John Thunstone, by Manly Wade Wellman

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The Complete John Thunstone-smallHaffner Press has released the long-awaited pulp compilation The Complete John Thunstone, and we have two copies to give away.

To be completely blunt, I don’t want to give them away. You wouldn’t either, if you held this fabulous book in your hot little hands as long as I have. But that’s showbiz. If it were legal, I’d enter my own contest, like, three dozen times. (In fact, is that legal? Hmmm.)

Anyway. Yes, we’re having a contest. If no one enters, I suppose I get to keep the books. So… there’s a contest, but that’s all you get to know.

All right, fine. Bunch of complainers. Here’s the scoop: Just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with the title “John Thunstone” and a one-sentence review of your favorite Manly Wade Wellman novel or short story (don’t forget to mention the story). Two winners will be drawn at random from all qualifying entries, and we’ll publish the best reviews here on the Black Gate blog.

All entries become the property of New Epoch Press. No purchase necessary. Must be 12 or older. Decisions of the judges (capricious as they may be) are final. Not valid where prohibited by law. Or anywhere postage for a hefty hardcover is more than, like, 10 bucks. Seriously, this thing is huge and we’re on a budget.

Haffner’s archival-quality hardcovers  — including Henry Huttner’s Detour to Otherness, Terror in the House: The Early Kuttner, Volume One, and Thunder in the Void; Leigh Brackett’s Shannach – The Last: Farewell to Mars; and Robert Silverberg’s Tales From Super-Science Fiction — are some of the most collectible books in the genre, and The Complete John Thunstone promises to be no exception. Our original article on the book is here.

The Complete John Thunstone is edited by Stephen Haffner and was published December 22, 2012. It is 640 pages and priced at $40. Additional details at Haffner Press.

Poetry in Action: The Return of the Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Poetry in Action: The Return of the Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Return of the Mucker FrazettaThis upfront: The Return of the Mucker is less effective a novel than last week’s topic, The Mucker. The strange genre-mashings of the first book give way to the more familiar settings of the American southwest and northern Mexico. The Return of the Mucker plays as an outright Western for most of its length, and offers nothing as lunatic as samurai cannibals. As a story, it doesn’t hold together as well as The Mucker, getting weighed down with too much plot “business” while the first book stripped away extraneous aspects the farther the story advanced until it came down to only the hero and heroine, Billy Byrne and Barbara Harding.

Yet The Return of the Mucker is still a strong work that glosses over its shaky plot elements with a breakneck action finale, fitting developments of Billy Byrne’s personality that merge together his extremes, and one of Burroughs’s most intriguing characters: a hobo-poet hero named Bridge.

Burroughs’s working title for The Mucker’s sequel was Out There Somewhere, the name of a poem that inspired the character of Bridge. (More about that later.) Burroughs submitted the novel to All Story in March 1916, soon after completing it. Editor Thomas Newell Metcalf purchased the story immediately, and the first of five installments appeared two months later under its more marketable title. The Return of the Mucker was published in hardcover in 1921 from A. C. McClurg as Part II of a volume simply called The Mucker.

When the story begins, Billy Byrne is no longer “the mucker.” ERB makes that clear as a cloudless blue sky in the second paragraph: “Billy Byrne was no longer the mucker.” Barbara Harding cured Byrne of his criminal life and coarse ways: everything that defines the now outdated slang term “mucker.” But Billy Byrne surrendered his love for Barbara so she could marry William Mallory at the conclusion of the first book, and he’s now a man without direction — or a complete personality. If he isn’t the mucker, and he’s not with the woman who changed him, what is he? …

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New Treasures: The Complete John Thunstone, by Manly Wade Wellman

New Treasures: The Complete John Thunstone, by Manly Wade Wellman

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The Complete John Thunstone-smallIf you’ve been reading Josh Reynolds’s excellent series The Nightmare Men here at Black Gate (And if you haven’t, what’s your deal? It’s packed with monsters, ghosts, and ghoulies, and the stalwart men who face them in dark corridors. I swear, every column is like The Exorcist re-made as an Indiana Jones movie), you know he covered Manly Wade Wellman’s supernatural sleuth John Thunstone last February. Here’s a snippet:

Big and blocky, with a well-groomed moustache and eyes like flint, Thunstone is an implacable and self-described ‘enemy of evil’. He hunts it with the verve of a Van Helsing and strikes with the speed and viciousness that puts Anton Zarnak to shame.

Well read and well-armed against vampires, werewolves and all things dark and devilish, Thunstone seeks out malevolent occult menaces in a variety of locales. The sixteen stories and two novels have settings which range from the steel and glass corridors of Manhattan to the mountains of the rural South, or the pastoral fields of England. He faces off against Inuit sorcerers, demonic familiars and worse things in the name of protecting the Earth and all its peoples from the hungry shapes in the dark that would otherwise devour it and them.

I bet you’re sorry you missed it now. Anyway, Josh also plugged the upcoming volume The Complete John Thunstone from Haffner Press, which he noted would contain “both the short stories AND the two Thunstone novels.”

Sweet! That was worth haunting the Haffner Press website for (not that I wasn’t doing it anyway).  I checked on a daily basis… for months. Man, not for nothing did Stephen Haffner earn his rep as a painstaking craftsman and perfectionist. Just when I’d resigned myself to slipping peacefully into old age without seeing it, two review copies landed on my doorstep (with an impressive thud). Good timing too, as old age is a few weeks away at most.

John Thunstone first appeared in “The Third Cry to Legba” in the November 1943 issue of Weird Tales. This volume collects that story and 15 others, along with the novels What Dreams May Come (1983) and The School of Darkness (1985). It’s a gorgeous package, and I can finally settle in and read Thunstone’s exploits against vampires, werewolves, the diabolical sorcerer Rowley Thorne, and the enigmatic shonokins, a race who claim to have ruled North America before the coming of humans.

The Complete John Thunstone is edited by Stephen Haffner, and was published December 22, 2012. It is 640 pages, and priced at $40. Stay tuned to the Black Gate website, where we’ll announce a contest in which you can win a copy in the next two weeks. In the meantime, you can read additional details at Haffner Press.

Yes, The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs Really Is That Good

Yes, The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs Really Is That Good

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Mucker First EditionI spent last year on an extended trip to Mars exploring Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fantastical version of the Red Planet. But after reviewing all eleven books in the Barsoom series, the time had arrived to return to Earth and the early phase of ERB’s career. Spending too much time with the final sputterings of Burroughs’s Martian stories, when much of his talent was ebbing, has a strong depressive effect. Let’s relive the enthusiasm of youth. Or middle age, in the case of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Yeah, he was a late bloomer.

So, on the centennial of its writing, I land back on Earth with one of ERB’s grubbiest, most “realistic,” and finest works of adventure, The Mucker.

The Mucker and its closely entwined sequel written two years later, The Return of the Mucker, have long held high positions in the canon of ERB’s work — but only for enthusiasts. The general reading population, who might pick up a few Tarzan books or go through the first three Martian novels, has scant familiarity with this oddly titled work. Perhaps it’s the strangeness of the name “Mucker” — is this about the adventures of a sewer worker? — or simply that it doesn’t belong to one of the author’s famous franchises, but the book usually inspires shrugs of ignorance when brought up, mixed with measures of curiosity. Of all Burroughs’s novels, this is the one about which I get the most inquiries: “Hey, is that ‘Mucker’ thing worth reading? I’ve heard good things, but I just never got around to it.”

Let me answer the question for everyone who has asked or planned to ask: Yes, The Mucker (and its sequel) is good. Actually, superb. Burroughs gathered all the conventions from the stories and novels of the first fifteen years of pulp writing, most of which are unreadable today, and condensed them into a rollicking action yarn with fistfights, shipwrecks, cannibals, sword duels, a lost civilization, kidnappings (and not just of women), street brawls, piracy, and prizefighting. And he wrapped this all around one of his most interesting heroes, a man who goes from an alley thug without an ounce of sympathetic qualities (aside from questionable criminal “honor”) to a reformed hero in a tangled love tale.

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