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Grey Maiden: The Story of a Sword Through the Ages

Grey Maiden: The Story of a Sword Through the Ages

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grey-maiden4I have a habit of buying books — a compulsion, really. Older books, mostly, from book fairs and small used bookstores. Things that look unusual, and which, in the absence of an immediate reason on my part to read them immediately, often sit on my shelves for some time before I get around to them.

So I don’t remember now exactly when and where I picked up a collection of Arthur D. Howden Smith’s Grey Maiden stories, only that it was some time ago. I wish I knew now, because I’d like to go back for more, if there are any.

Arthur D. Howden Smith (1887-1945) was an early pulp writer; the collection Grey Maiden (Centaur Press, 1974) has four out of seven — or nine, depending on what reference you look at — of his stories about the Grey Maiden, the first sword ever forged from iron.

Each tale follows a different wielder, each in a different time and place, as the blade’s won and lost among battles and wars and the rise and fall of empires. All were originally published in the pulp magazine Adventure.

The four tales in the collection I have (there was at least one other collection, with more of them) include a story of betrayal and revenge among the soldiers of Alexander the Great, an account of a group of Phoenicians retreating across Italy, a story of the ebbing of Roman power in Britain, and an imagining of the first collision between the Byzantine Empire and the followers of Islam.

The stories are bleak, violent, and possessed of a dark energy that makes them utterly compelling. The history perhaps couldn’t always stand up to intense scrutiny, but is used in such a way as to make the most exciting and brutal tale possible.

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SF writers as (or around) criminals: Homer Eon Flint

SF writers as (or around) criminals: Homer Eon Flint

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blind-spot1Last night at dinner we were discussing (as one does) Homer Eon Flint.

Since my guests were working on ideas for the 2011 Potlatch convention, we can be forgiven this. Flint was a local author, having grown up in San Jose, and there was talk of doing a panel on him.

I had not known that Flint was working in a shoe repair shop in SJ, or that he was killed in a car crash (perhaps after stealing it from a local gangster, perhaps instead murdered by that local gangster).

It’s covered on his Wikipedia page, and in the article by his granddaughter Vella Munn, “Homer Eon Flint: A Legacy,” available on the Strange Horizons site.

Munn’s piece talks with great respect of the work of one Mike Ashley in ferreting out facts without disturbing the family’s peace. Munn mentions that there were other writers in the area, with whom Flint (actually, Flindt) used to hang out when he lived here in the teens and early 20’s.

Forry Ackerman talks about Austin Hall meeting Flint in his shoe shop, in his introduction to The Blind Spot, the 1921 novel the two wrote together.

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Judgment Night: Space Opera and More From One of the Female Pioneers of the Genre

Judgment Night: Space Opera and More From One of the Female Pioneers of the Genre

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judgFamed with her husband Henry Kuttner for turning out superlatively compelling and complex stories for the pulps, both jointly and singly, Catherine Moore began writing in 1933.

But she had to wait nearly twenty years for any of her fine tales to achieve single-author book form, and the volume under discussion today is the long-awaited result. It contains five stories — one actually a short novel — from the pages of John W. Campbell’s Golden Age and Silver Age  Astounding.

The title piece is the novel, from 1943. A primal space opera, it concerns the star empire of the Lyonese, whose central world is Ericon, where ancient patron gods live, remote from day-to-day affairs of the empire.

But now the vast holdings of the Lyonese are crumbling under the assault of a younger race, the H’vani. The Emperor’s heir is Juille, a daughter, and she’s determined her dynasty will continue. She wages a one-woman campaign against the wishes of her doddering father to save all that her ancestors built.

But she doesn’t count on falling in love with the H’vani ruler — or the machinations of Ericon’s living deities.

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Take Me Down to the “Parasite Planet” (Where the Grass Is Really Disgusting)

Take Me Down to the “Parasite Planet” (Where the Grass Is Really Disgusting)

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parasite-planet-with-stanley-g-weinbaumLast week, our esteemed editor John O’Neill posted a wonderful reminiscence of one of the key science-fiction anthologies of the 1970s: Isaac Asimov’s Before the Golden Age. This hefty volume (sometimes divided over three paperbacks) is an intriguing mixture of autobiography, literary analysis, and miles o’ great pre-Campbellian magazine science fiction. Before the Golden Age is a classic piece of early pulp archaeology.

O’Neill’s post specifically made me recall “Parasite Planet” by Stanley G. Weinbaum. I did not read this story for the first time in Before the Golden Age, but in The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum. This book, which contains an introduction from Isaac Asimov and an afterword by Robert Bloch, is the first of Del Rey’s many “The Best of . . .” collections, a series I credit with getting me interested in many of the classic science-fiction authors of the mid-twentieth century. I still own my yellowed copies of The Best of John W. Campbell, The Best of Jack Williamson, The Best of Leigh Brackett, The Best of C. L. Moore, The Best of L. Sprague De Camp, and The Worst of Jefferson Airplane. (Wait, one of these things is not like the other. . . .)

I first read “Parasite Planet” in The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum, but the Del Rey edition was not my initial encounter with Mr. Weinbaum. That came through another of the great anthologies of the ‘70s (wow, I am really hitting “great anthologies” in a big way in this post), The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Weinbaum’s 1934 classic, “A Martian Odyssey,” was the first story in the collection, and also its oldest. The vote of the Science Fiction Writers of America that determined the contents of the collection picked the story as the second best SF short piece ever published, with only Asimov’s “Nightfall” besting it. “A Martian Odyssey” floored me when I first read it at age eighteen, and so I had to find out more about this Weinbaum guy who seemed to have vanished, since he was one of the few authors in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame whom I did not recognize from later achievements.

There turned out to be, unfortunately, a tragic reason for this. Weinbaum burst onto the SF scene with “A Martian Odyssey,” which was his first sale. He was immediately the most popular author in the field; everybody loved his work. Eighteen months later, in December 1935, Weinbaum was dead from lung cancer at age thirty-three.

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Frederick Faust, Bound for SF and The Smoking Land

Frederick Faust, Bound for SF and The Smoking Land

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smoking-landThe Smoking Land
Frederick Faust writing as George Challis (Argosy, 1937)

I’m returning to the subject of Frederick Faust for the third time this year. But I have a specific, Black Gate-centered justification for it: I wish to unearth his single novel of science fiction, a piece of Lost World and Weird Science strangeness called The Smoking Land.

Faust, under Max Brand and his eighteen other pseudonyms, made his reputation with Westerns, but he did write in almost every genre that appeared in the story magazines of the time. He penned historical adventures, detective tales, mainstream short stories for the “slicks,” and espionage yarns. In 1937, he authored his one true science-fiction work, the novel The Smoking Land, which appeared serially under the pseudonym George Challis in the old warhorse of the pulp world, Argosy, starting in the May 29 issue.

(In fact, this Saturday evening I stood face-to-face with one of the actual issues of Argosy in which the novel was serialized, housed in the pulp collection at Author Services in Hollywood. Actual surviving issues of the self-destructive pulps are rare finds, and they need special protection to survive. And hey look! One of the Argosy installments of The Smoking Land shares space with the Cornell Woolrich story “Clever, These Americans”! . . . Okay, so maybe only I care.)

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A Quick Quote on “Pulps vs. Slicks”

A Quick Quote on “Pulps vs. Slicks”

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As you read this, I’m in Atlanta to see my brother graduate from medical school. Which means that this is “time-bomb post” I put in the queue to automatically go off and post itself while I’m away. Which also means that I’m keeping this a bit short, as I don’t have the weekend to write up something more in-depth.

What I’ve decided to do instead is let somebody else do most of the work for me. I’m going to share a quote about the pulps that I came across when I was doing my research for my two posts about Frederick “Max Brand” Faust. This comes from Jon Tuska’s essay “Frederick Faust’s Western Fiction” from The Max Brand Compnaion (Greenwood, 1996). Tuska makes an interesting comparison between writing for the pulps and writing for the “slicks,” the glossy magazines that offered supposedly greater prestige for writers who could break into them. Tuska shows a reversal of how people view pulp literature vs. “mainstream” literature:

Both [Faust] and [his agent] Carl Brandt areed that the only way to cope with the depressed economy was for Faust to move into slick magazines which paid much better. Faust, studying the market, readily realized that restrictions in the slicks were more rigid and confining than they ever had been in the pulps. Writing for Western Story Magazine, he had to concern himself with such general notions as a pursuit plot, which [editor] Blackwell preferred, or delayed revelation. Writing for the slicks, he realized that the editors sought to dominate a contributor’s mind. Attitudes and ideas were everything. Beyond entertainment, which both pulp and slick fiction alike provided, slick fiction had to deliver an ideological message to readers which agreed with the editorial policies of the magazine and these were dictated by the advertisers and their agencies. Perhaps it is for this reason that so much of the slick fiction of the 1930s and 1940s had become hopelessly dated while pulp fiction from that same period still pulsates with imagination and iconoclasm. Ideology is time-bound.

In other words, take that Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s! Long live Black Mask, Weird Tales, and Astounding! (And Black Gate carrying on their legacy.)

See you next week.

The Spider vs. The Empire State

The Spider vs. The Empire State

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Layout 2The Spider Revival: Part III

The Spider vs. The Empire State
Norvell Page (Ace of Aces Books, 2009)

I have previously written about the revival in trade paperback of the adventures of The Spider, the bloodiest of all 1930s pulp heroes. My reviews of The Spider: Robot Titans of Gotham and The Spider: City of Doom, both published by Baen, contain plenty of background about the character and his main author, Norvell Page, so if you’re unfamiliar with the blood-soaked vigilante insanity of this region of the pulp universe, I’d advise that you start there.

This third collection of Spider adventures comes from a new publisher (Ace of Aces Books) and presents for the first time three connected novels that were originally published consecutively in The Spider Magazine. These three novels, which ran in the September, October, and November 1938 issues, form “The Black Police Trilogy,” one of the darkest episodes in the character’s history. Norvell Page and his editor Harry Steeger decided to put newspaper headlines and national fears into their pulp adventures: an allegory for Nazism, viewed as it might arise in the middle of contemporary New York State. It Does Happen Here might serve a good alternate title.

The first book of the trilogy, The City That Paid to Die, came out exactly a year before the Nazi invasion of Poland. The U.S. and the rest of the world were in an uneasy position with the seemingly unstoppable rise of fascism in Europe and the apparent weakness of the liberal democracies. A few small fascist sympathetic groups bubbled up in the U.S., but by 1938 the isolationist nation was becoming concerned about the ambitions of the regimes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. It was an era ripe for terror and panic—and Norvell Page seized those feelings to create a pulp adventure uncomfortably close to 1938 concerns.

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Because One Frederick Faust Post Isn’t Enough: The Sacking of El Dorado

Because One Frederick Faust Post Isn’t Enough: The Sacking of El Dorado

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frederick-faust-in-brentwood“So it will be when we are dead that perhaps our lives will stand for something.”

“A typewriter is almost like a human being to me.”

“Have recently sent thirty-eight poems to our leading magazines and received thirty-eight poems back from our leading magazines.”

“All that can save fiction is enormous verve, a real sweep, plus richness of character, blood that can be seen shining through.”

“Why is my verse so difficult, so dead, so dull to other people?”

—Frederick Faust, from various letters

I was surprised but pleased to see the positive reaction that my post about Frederick Faust, a.k.a. Max Brand, received last week. It was enough for me to want to spend an extra week on the author, specifically to take a closer look at an individual volume of his work. Faust has rarely received this sort of attention, as John C. Hocking pointed out in the comments last week, and so I’ll spend another Tuesday of your time talking about a man who was not only the most prolific of the pulpsters, but one of the most skilled and literary.

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Adventures in Pulp Awesomeness: The Clayton Astounding

Adventures in Pulp Awesomeness: The Clayton Astounding

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claytonOver at Dark Worlds, editor G.W. Thomas has completed the first of three planned reprints of the Clayton Astounding, the first incarnation of the grand old lady of science fiction.

Astounding changed its name to Analog in 1960 and continues to publish today, 80 years after its first issue hit the stands in January, 1930. In an era when most genre magazines last only a handfull of issues, that’s an incredible run.

During most of that time it’s been the single most important magazine in the field, discovering such names as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, and literally hundreds of others.

The first volume of this new series, The Clayton Astounding: Vagabonds of Space is 212 pages in paperback, and is now available at Lulu for $13.99.

This volume collects the best Space Opera from the Clayton years. According to Thomas, future volumes will include Out of the Dreadful Depths (undersea tales), Planetoids of Peril (stories set on moons, planets, and asteroids) and possibily “a book of space invaders, robots and mechanical enemies.” Yeah baby.

Here’s the description from Lulu:

Before John W. Campbell’s “Golden Age” (beginning in 1938) editor Harry Bates created an SF Pulp that was meant to entertain with stories of adventure and action in outer space and on far planets. This magazine has become known as “The Clayton Astounding” to delineate it from later incarnations. The first volume, VAGABONDS OF SPACE, represents the best Space Opera from the magazine’s first run of 1930-1933. Features stories by Harl Vincent, Edmond Hamilton, Anthony Gilmore, Sewell Peaslee Wright, Nat Schachner, Edwin K. Sloat and Jack Williamson. Each author is introduced with commentary by G. W. Thomas.

Fiction from an era when “space opera” meant sword fights in space with weird metal sticks.  All I need to know. You had me at “adventure and action in outer space and on far planets.”

Looking forward to the next volumes.

Somebody Has to Talk about Frederick Faust

Somebody Has to Talk about Frederick Faust

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…and I guess it’s going to be me.

When I first started blogging officially here at Black Gate, I wondered what would constitute “on topic.” Obviously, writing about new crop developments in Iowa would be “off topic” (and I don’t know anything about that anyway) but would writing about Godzilla (about which I know far too much for my own good) be considered “on topic” because I could count on at least half the site’s readership thinking it was interesting? I still wrestle with these questions, and perhaps that’s why I don’t sleep as well at night as other people.

One thing that I’m certain now is “on topic” is anything that has to do with pulp magazines. I’ve written about Norvell Page’s Spider novels (and will do so again soon) and mystery and suspense author Cornell Woolrich, and nobody’s taken me to task for either. So now I throw caution to the four winds and write about Frederick Faust because somebody has got to do it. If I’m going to write about pulp magazines, I have an obligation to write a post about Frederick Faust. You have no obligation to read it, but I strongly urge you to look below the cut because … this fellow is seriously interesting and you should give him a glance some time.

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