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Category: Pulp

Happy Birthday, H.P. Lovecraft

Happy Birthday, H.P. Lovecraft

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the-call-of-cthulhu-for-beginning-readers122 years ago today, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the father of modern horror, was born in Providence, Rhode Island.

Here at Black Gate we’ve celebrated Lovecraft’s works in numerous ways over the years. In 2010, John R. Fultz interviewed the authors behind the landmark anthology Cthulhu’s Reign in “Cthulhu Has Risen…”, perhaps the single most popular blog post we’ve ever published, and last year he examined a brand new magazine celebrating Cthulhu’s creator, Lovecraft eZine. Matthew David Surridge took a detailed look at the master’s prose style in H.P. Lovecraft: The Style Adjectival, and Bill Ward told us about the silent movie version of The Call of Cthulhu.

We’ve covered numerous games, books, and audio adaptations, from Andrew Zimmerman Jones’s 2011 article on Age of Cthulhu: Death in Luxor to my review of Dark Adventure Radio Theatre’s superb audio play The Shadow Over Innsmouth. In the last week alone we told you about Ross E. Lockhart’s excellent anthology The Book of Cthulhu and the new RPG setting Clockwork and Cthulhu from Cakebread & Walton.

But there’s always more. So today, in honor of H.P. Lovecraft’s 122nd birthday, we’d like to present to you The Call of Cthulhu (For Beginning Readers), a faithful retelling of the classic horror tale… in the style of Dr. Seuss.

Created by artist Richard John Ivankovic, The Call of Cthulhu (For Beginning Readers) is a full-color illustrated version of the perhaps Lovercraft’s most famous story, originally published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales. The complete version can be browsed online here.

We think H.P. Lovecraft would have enjoyed it.

Discovering Galaxy Science Fiction

Discovering Galaxy Science Fiction

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galaxy-may-1952I’ve known about older speculative magazines for a few years – the pulp fiction magazines from decades ago. I listened to people talk about stories they read from those magazines, and it seemed like I was missing out on something.

I’m Matthew Wuertz, a fiction reader and writer. I’ve been a Black Gate reader since issue 7. I’ve met most of the Black Gate team over the years, and even took part in the 2010 Sword & Sorcery Panel Podcast with them at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus. I also have my own blog.

My wife’s van had Sirius Satellite Radio for a year, and I liked listening to the station that played old radio shows — including “X Minus One,” which had episodes of science fiction. One of the episodes was “Surface Tension” by James Blish, originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction. When I heard of the episode’s origin, my curiosity in pulp magazines increased. And now I had a title in mind. I recall thinking, “Would it be possible to actually get one of these Galaxy magazines in my hands?”

A short time later, John O’Neill posted the article “How Galaxy Magazine Saved Robert Silverberg from a Life of Smoking,” so I asked how one might acquire an issue. One of the answers was eBay, and John posted several links to active auctions.

At this point, my wife, whose eBay prowess amazes me, became involved. In mere moments, she was saving search results and tracking a number of options. After considering several choices, I chose an auction for 22 issues of Galaxy. So we made a bid. It was a long week until the auction ended, but we won.

When the magazines finally arrived, I was so excited. These were pocketbook-sized magazines with incredible art on the covers, like astronauts mining asteroids with jackhammers while their cylindrical rocket ship floats overhead. This was on the cover of my oldest issue – May, 1952. I was holding a 60-year-old magazine in my hands! I could hardly wait to open the musty, faded pages and read stories written long before I’d been born. See the complete lot here.

What lies within those pages will be revealed another time. I need to stop here. Those astronaut miners are waiting for me.

Escape to the Jungle

Escape to the Jungle

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jungle-stories-spring-1945-smallI’d planned a post about the business of writing today, but when we returned home from a family reunion and I learned about another massacre of innocents by another angry man with a gun, I just couldn’t muster the energy to talk seriously about the trials and tribulations of being a writer. Those trials and tribulations pale before what anyone in the assault was facing.

I couldn’t find much more to add to what I’d already said the last time this happened… what, two weeks ago? My God, people. Surely we can do better than this, somehow.

As a result, today I’m keeping things very light. In graduate school, one of my guilty pleasures was reading some pretty mindless escapist adventure. From the middle to the end of semesters, things could get more than a little hectic, what with all the projects and research papers, and it was nice to be able to just pick up a story and be entertained for a while by my old friend Ki-Gor.

Some years back, at Pulpcon, I missed the chance to become acquainted with the works of the gifted Ben Haas, about a decade before his writing finally hooked me. I didn’t discuss Haas here because most of his best work is western, but I took a long post live on my own site. At the same convention, though, I was wandering around the dealer room with writer John C. Hocking and sword-and-sorcery scholar Morgan Holmes. I stopped to chuckle at a ridiculous-looking pulp cover on display at one of the booths. Jungle Stories was emblazoned upon the masthead. Below, a beautiful and clearly evil dark-haired woman loomed over a bronzed jungle-man bound to an altar. Morgan said, “That’s actually a pretty good story.”

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Vintage Treasures: The Barbarians Anthology Series

Vintage Treasures: The Barbarians Anthology Series

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barbariansThere’s been some good discussion of Sword & Sorcery on the BG blog of late, from Brian Murphy’s excellent list of “A Half-Dozen Swords And Sorcery Short Stories Worth Your Summer Reading Time, and Howard Andrew Jones’s skillful examination of the writing technique of the genre’s patriarch, “Under the Hood with Robert E. Howard,” to Joe Bonadonna’s warm reminiscence of the very best S&S of his youth, “How I Met Your Cimmerian (and other Barbarian Swordsmen).”

I thought I was pretty well educated in Sword & Sorcery; but it’s the sign of a rich and vibrant genre that it can still surprise you after decades of collecting.

That’s exactly what happened when I found the artifact at left, buried deep in a paperback science fiction collection I recently purchased.

Barbarians was a major S&S retrospective anthology published by Signet in 1986. It was edited by Robert Adams, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles Waugh, and contained stories by Fritz Leiber, Fred Saberhagen, Andre Norton, Karl Edward Wagner, and many more. It’s a thick paperback original with 13 short stories.

And no, I’d never seen a copy before — or its sequel. Here’s the back cover copy:

From a beautiful huntress with glittering eyes and a killing kiss to mighty Conan’s struggle in a deadly place beyond magic… from a distant planet fated to do battle with the forgotten past to primeval swordsmen pledged to protect a besieged land — here are tales of titanic strength and unearthly courage, of savage warriors facing incredible challenges in the far-flung realms of the imagination.

Sounds pretty good. Not entirely sure how this one escaped me for all these years, but I’m glad I’ve stumbled across it now.

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The Return of Brak the Barbarian

The Return of Brak the Barbarian

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witch-of-the-four-winds2E-book publisher Open Road Media has announced the publication of two omnibus editions of John Jakes’ fondly-remembered Sword & Sorcery hero Brak the Barbarian.

Witch of the Four Winds and Brak the Barbarian will be available in digital format at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com on July 31 for $4.99 each (before discounting).

Brak the Barbarian first appeared in Fantastic magazine in the short story “The Devils in the Walls” (1963). Over the next few years, Jakes produced over a dozen short stories and novellas featuring Brak, that he gradually collected and expanded into five books, published between 1968 and 1980.

Brak the Barbarian contains the 1968 short story collection Brak the Barbarian and the novel Mark of the Demons (1969), plus additional Brak stories and an illustrated biography of Jakes with rare images from the author’s personal collection.

Witch of the Four Winds contains two more early novels: Witch of the Four Winds — originally published under that title in Fantastic magazine in 1963, and then revised and expanded in novel format as Brak the Barbarian Versus the Sorceress (1969) — and When the Idols Walked (Fantastic 1964, expanded and released under the same title in 1978), plus more bonus stories and an illustrated biography.

Jakes’ Brak the Barbarian stories were strongly influenced by Robert E. Howard’s Conan. In the YouTube video Open Road created to promote the launch of the digital editions, Jakes says:

I was directly influenced by Robert Howard, by the fact that there weren’t enough Conan stories to go around… I wanted to create a character much like Conan, put him in similar circumstances, and have a good time writing them.

For science fiction fans, Open Road has also collected two early SF novels by Jakes in a third omnibus collection: On Wheels (1973) and Six-Gun Planet (1970). It’s also available July 31.

Genre Prejudice

Genre Prejudice

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genreIt’s a lot easier for me to be generous about other genres than it used to be. I’m trying to decide if that has something to do with me mellowing with age, or if it’s because there’s a whole lot more sword-and-sorcery available than there was ten years ago … or if it’s simply that I don’t feel shut out anymore now that I’m writing sword-and-sorcery stories for a living.

Fantasy seems a lot more popular even among the mainstream readers than it used to be, although the dividing line between fantasy and sword-and-sorcery still seems pretty blurry. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to define the difference, but I often feel like I’m shouting in the wind. The common conception remains that if it’s got swords and magic, it must be sword-and-sorcery, regardless of pacing or the focus of the plot. But let’s set another discussion of sword-and-sorcery aside for the nonce and focus instead on genre prejudice.

I think a lot of science fiction and fantasy writers and readers feel like low faces on the totem pole because their favorite fiction is sneered at by people in the know. A while ago, I started to realize that MOST writers felt like their genre was being kicked to the curb. Horror writers have been going through a hard time now for a good long while. YA writers, well, they “only write YA,” and God help the urban fantasy people, whom are in fashion to be hated. As writers and readers, we all turn up our noses at all the things we find wrong with some one else’s genre. Really, that’s all that’s happening with the literary criticism of genre work. It’s easy for us genre people to detail the things we find annoying about literary fiction, but it turns out lit fic writers feel harried themselves.

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New Treasures: Philip Jose Farmer’s Up the Bright River, edited by Gary K. Wolfe

New Treasures: Philip Jose Farmer’s Up the Bright River, edited by Gary K. Wolfe

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up-the-bright-river2

There’s no truth to the vicious rumor that I select candidates for my New Treasures column based solely on awesome cover art.

I also have to be able to get my hands on a copy. That’s two criteria, which I figure gives me a balanced approach.

Which brings us to today’s special guest, Up the Bright River by Philip Jose Farmer, a short story collection edited by Gary K. Wolfe. And its awesome wraparound cover, courtesy of Bob Eggleton (click for even awesomer high-res version).

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Robert E. Howard: The Sword Collector’s Sword Collection

Robert E. Howard: The Sword Collector’s Sword Collection

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From Damon Sasser’s twogunraconteur.com website 3/5/2012
From Damon Sasser’s twogunraconteur.com website 3/5/2012

When I wrote “Robert E. Howard: The Sword Collector and His Poetry” in August 2010, it was to highlight REH’s interest in swords. The article listed each type of sword mentioned in his poems along with a definition, a photo and a snippet showing REH’s usage of it in verse.

At that time, the photograph at right was not available. In fact, it is one of three that were discovered earlier this year by Howard scholar Patrice Louinet, showing Robert E. Howard (r) and his two neighbors, Leroy Butler and Leroy’s sister, Faustine, dressed as pirates.

According to Patrice, this photo was taken sometime between 1923 and 1925. That would make Howard between 17 and 19 years old. It was during this period, in November 1924, that REH received a letter from Farnsworth Wright that Weird Tales was accepting his story “Spear and Fang,” which was eventually published in July 1925.

Whether the story had been written, sold, and published by the time this photo was taken is unknown. But REH’s love of swords and the adventure they brought were definitely a part of his life even at an early age.

The other piece of information not available in August 2010 regarded the sword collection itself. The article “Robert E. Howard: The Sword Collector and His Poetry” began with a quote from a letter REH wrote to HPL:

…Long ago I started collecting them [swords], but found it a taste far too expensive for my means. I still have the things I did manage to get hold of—a few sabers, swords, bayonets and the like.

While REH mentions collecting swords, at that time there was no further information regarding its contents. That has changed. Recently I received an email from Howard sleuth Patrice that sheds more light on what swords REH owned. Patrice’s sources are the notes that L. Sprague de Camp took to document his telephone conversations with Earl Baker. Earl was one of REH’s early Cross Cut friends and someone REH kept in touch with throughout the years.

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Return to the Golden Age with Tales from the Hanging Monkey

Return to the Golden Age with Tales from the Hanging Monkey

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hanging-monkey4Tales of the Gold Monkey only lasted one season in the early 1980s, but the series has developed a steady cult following in the years since its brief network run. Dismissed as nothing more than an inferior small screen knockoff of the contemporaneous Raiders of the Lost Ark, the series has finally started to earn the recognition denied it at the time. While it took a Hollywood blockbuster to convince network executives to green-light the series, the proposal had been around since the 1970s and the show was conceived, like Raiders, in homage to the serials and classic adventure stories of the past.

As much as Republic Pictures cliffhangers were an inspiration and the tall shadow cast by Humphrey Bogart in the classic Treasure of the Sierra Madre undeniably fell upon both properties, the longstanding tradition of South Seas adventures from James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific to the fondly-remembered Adventures in Paradise series from the Golden Age of Television left an even more indelible mark on Tales of the Gold Monkey.

The concept of a bar in an exotic location which serves as a literal and moral crossroads for travelers, expatriates, and fugitives had its roots in Casablanca and Old Time Radio’s nearly forgotten Rocky Jordan series. Tales of the Gold Monkey’s pedigree and neo-pulp credentials establish it as far more than just another Indiana Jones clone as the short-sighted and uninformed wags of the day insisted.

Similarly 30 years later, the newly published South Seas adventures anthology, Tales from the Hanging Monkey is more than just an imitation of the 1980s cult series whose title it recalls.

The exotic South Seas bar serving as the nexus for the adventures of strangers whose paths would never otherwise cross is present here as much as it was in numerous Golden Age scripts, but Bill Craig has created something enchanting that is at once familiar and pleasingly fresh. The delights of New Pulp works such as this one are similar to discovering an OTR series you’ve never heard of and wondering why it isn’t better known.

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Vintage Treasures: The Giant Anthology of Science Fiction, edited by Margulies and Friend

Vintage Treasures: The Giant Anthology of Science Fiction, edited by Margulies and Friend

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the-giant-anthology-of-science-fiction2Those four boxes of books I purchased from the Martin H. Greenberg collection have been the gift that keeps on giving. In the third box I found about 30 hardcover anthologies, dating from the 40s to the 70s, including The Giant Anthology of Science Fiction: 10 Complete Short Novels, edited by Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend.

This book is a treasure trove of vintage novellas from the Golden Age of SF and fantasy. Despite the “Science Fiction” in the title, a great many of the delights on offer are fantasy, as the term was used pretty much interchangeably with science fiction at the time. Just check out this table of contents, with original dates of publication:

  • “Enchantress of Venus,” Leigh Brackett (1949)
  • “Gateway to Darkness,” Fredric Brown (1949)
  • “The Girl in the Golden Atom,” Ray Cummings (1919)
  • “Forgotten World,” Edmond Hamilton (1946)
  • “By His Bootstraps,” Robert A. Heinlein (1941)
  • “Sword of Tomorrow,” Henry Kuttner (1945)
  • “Things Pass By,” Murray Leinster (1945)
  • “Rogue Ship,” A. E. van Vogt (1950)
  • “Island in the Sky,” Manly Wade Wellman (1941)
  • “The Sun Maker,” Jack Williamson (1940)

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