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A Review of The Witches of Karres, by James H. Schmitz

A Review of The Witches of Karres, by James H. Schmitz

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witches-karres-aI decided to review The Witches of Karres mostly because I remember seeing some sequels, written by different authors, as James H. Schmitz died in 1981.

I’m not surprised; The Witches of Karres feels like it should have been a series all along. The setting seems designed for multiple adventures. The book itself is less a space opera than a space operetta — it never takes itself too seriously — but it’s still distinctly an adventure story, not a straight-up comedy.

Captain Pausert is a decent and friendly man, perhaps a touch too in love with his notion of himself as a square-jawed space adventurer. For instance, we find out quite early in the book that he faked a log entry about a desperate fight against pirates when he actually just spent a few hours blowing up asteroids — partly to test his ship’s guns, partly for the fun of it.

Still, he can’t resist helping someone in trouble, especially when that someone is an apparently helpless teenage slave girl. Despite the anti-slavery laws of his native planet, he’s quickly maneuvered into buying her, then her two younger sisters.

Pausert may be a bit bumbling at this point in the story, but he’s not quite stupid; he notices that the slave-owners are extremely eager to sell, and that there’s something slightly off about the three girls.

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Writing: Serial Characters and the Book Deal

Writing: Serial Characters and the Book Deal

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World Fantasy Award Nominee
World Fantasy Award Nominee.

A growing number of Black Gate authors have moved on to book deals, and some were published novelists before they appeared in the magazine.

Two of us, James Enge and myself,  landed book deals featuring recurring characters that had appeared in Black Gate short stories.

They were the Dabir & Asim stories for me (“Whispers from the Stone” and “Sight of Vengeance“) and the Morlock tales for James (six appearances in BG so far, starting with “Turn Up This Crooked Way” and “Payment Deferred,” and most recently the novella “Destroyer” in Black Gate 14).

Back before James got nominated for the World Fantasy Award in the Best Novel category (for his first novel, no less! — that’s Blood of Ambrose, if you don’t have a copy yet) the two of us got talking one day about the connections between magazine sales and book deals.

We decided to turn the thing into a public back-and-forth discussion about writing serial fantasy characters, starting with a look at the idea that short story successes lead naturally to selling books.

I’ve captured and condensed that conversation here for your enjoyment.

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Adventure Tales #6 Arrives

Adventure Tales #6 Arrives

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adventure-6Wildside Press continues their excellent pulp reprint series with the sixth issue of Adventure Tales, presenting tales of classic fiction from Nelson S. Bond, Arthur O. Friel, Talbot Mundy, and Zorro creator Johnston McCulley, and poetry by Poul Anderson and Clark Ashton Smith, among others. The issue is cover-dated Winter 2010, but the publication date on the copy we received was September 13.

This is a special H. Bedford-Jones issue, with three complete stories from the pulp master. As usual the issue is handsomely illustrated, with finely detailed reproductions of the original accompanying artwork. It also includes a reprint of the complete first issue of George Scithers’ legendary Sword & Sorcery fanzine Amra, which is pretty darn cool, and I hope future issues of Adventure Tales  keep up this tradition.

John Betancourt’s editorial laments the loss of Scithers, one of the most accomplished editors in our field. Scithers was founding editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction and edited both Amazing and Weird Tales in a long and varied career. He was a typesetter and Assistant Editor at Wildside until his death at 80 (and perhaps the loss of George’s keen eye explains the rather unfortunate back cover credit to “Frits Leiber,” for the poem “The Gray Mouser: 1” )

Overall this is a very handsome package, typical for Wildside’s pulp reprints, and there were brief fisticuffs atop the Black Gate rooftop headquarters to determine who would take home our sole review copy.  John Fultz sucker-punched Bill Ward and had me in a headlock when Howard Andrew Jones unleashed an evil trained chicken who swooped in and scored the prize. Howard retreated to Indiana and, in his latest mocking transmission back to headquarters, claims to be already at work on a review.

Adventure Tales is 152 pages and is now available directly from Wildside for just $12.95.

Blogging Alex Raymond’s FLASH GORDON, Part Three: “Tournaments of Mongo”

Blogging Alex Raymond’s FLASH GORDON, Part Three: “Tournaments of Mongo”

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tournaments-big-little“Tournaments of Mongo” was the third installment of Alex Raymond’s FLASH GORDON Sunday comic strip serial for King Features Syndicate. Originally printed between November 25, 1934 and February 24, 1935, “Tournaments of Mongo” picked up the storyline where the second installment, “Monsters of Mongo” left off with Dr. Zarkov being knighted by Vultan for saving the Hawkmen’s sky city from crashing to the ground.

Before Vultan can host Flash and Dale’s royal wedding, Emperor Ming and his daughter, Princess Aura arrive with Ming’s air fleet demanding Flash be handed over. Of course, Aura wants Flash for herself while her father wants to see him dead. Vultan invokes the ancient rite of tournament to determine Flash’s fate and Ming heartily agrees, certain it will mean the Earthman’s doom.

The obvious change beginning with this strip is that Alex Raymond’s artwork is being granted more space than before as Raymond decreases the strip from nine equally-sized panels to a more inventively designed seven panels to better showcase his stunning artwork which was steadily growing in both complexity and sophistication.

Raymond began to move away from word balloons in each panel to more formal narrative in small print at the top or bottom of the panel, often relegated to a single corner. This allowed Raymond to concentrate on majestic paintings depicting Mongo’s people and wildlife in all their glory.

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Writing Tools: Notebooks, the Kind with Paper

Writing Tools: Notebooks, the Kind with Paper

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Ye olde trusty notebook.
Ye olde trusty notebook.

From the time I was in grade school all the way up until after I graduated from college I wrote in notebooks. It seemed such a natural process that I wonder now how I got away from it, and why it was such a revelation when I took up writing in notebooks again.

In my school days I used to carefully comb through available notebooks  and select one with multiple subjects, college-ruled. Usually it would be a spiral-bound Mead, 8 1/2 by 11, but sometimes I’d experiment with slightly smaller sizes. When I was older and wandering through the Kansas City Renaissance Festival with my wife, I purchased a lovely Celtic leather notebook cover with an unlined sketchbook, and I filled a succession of replacement sketchbooks between those covers with my scribbles for years after.

As striking as that notebook was, though, I eventually fell out of using the thing. It became impractical to drag it wherever I went: my student days were over so I no longer had a backpack over one shoulder, and I didn’t have the kind of job where I always toted a briefcase. In those rare instances where I DID have a briefcase, it was already so loaded down that something weighing as much as a hardback book was a nuisance. I never used a notebook for writing unless I was at home, at which point I might as well have been writing on the computer. I thought that I had “outgrown” the use of a notebook.

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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.

The Weird of Cornell Woolrich: “Kiss of the Cobra”

The Weird of Cornell Woolrich: “Kiss of the Cobra”

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lair_of_the_white_wormNo, this isn’t a review of the Ken Russell film The Lair of the White Worm. The poster just fits so well with Cornell Woolrich’s 1935 story “Kiss of the Cobra” that I had to use it. You would almost think Russell was adapting Woolrich, not Bram Stoker.

My three previous installments exploring the fantasy and horror tales of suspense author Cornell Woolrich have all looked at classic works from his typewriter: “Jane Brown’s Body,” “Dark Melody of Madness,” and “Speak to Me of Death.” However, Woolrich was a prolific pulpster, and sometimes he pounded out sub-par work because the hotel room bill had to be paid. Any Woolrich fan can whip out a list of the writer’s suspense stories that simply made him or her cringe—and not positively. I’m as hardcore a Woolrich aficionado as you will likely find, and even I have to admit that some of his lesser stories are dreadful. His exploration of vampires, one of his potentially intriguing side trips into the supernatural, “Vampire’s Honeymoon” (later revised and retitled “My Lips Destroy” so Woolrich could sell it as a “new” piece), is the single most clichéd work about vampires I’ve ever read. Only the staking of a vampire using a broken hockey stick makes it remotely interesting. I can’t imagine Woolrich spent more than two hours cranking it out and then sending it off. It’s an indication of the power of Cornell Woolrich’s name on the front of pulp magazines of the time that it sold on its first try.

But some of Woolrich’s mid-level work deserves attention, and “Kiss of the Cobra” falls solidly into his opus of “weird stories.” It examines the concept of “foreign other” with fantasy displays that hint at black magic, contains richly sensual prose, and has a liminal sense of a were-creature. The suspense and hard-boiled crime aspects are also well executed, even if the mesh of the two sides isn’t that smooth. Much greater work was to come, but with all its flaws (such as the standard pulp era’s Euro-centric view of India and a protagonist given to generic wise-crack dialogue) the story remains worth visiting for horror and suspense enthusiasts.

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The Collecting Game: Urban Legends and What Entropy Means to Me

The Collecting Game: Urban Legends and What Entropy Means to Me

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entropy2There are indeed urban legends at work in the Collector’s market. For example, the entire print order of George Alec Effinger’s first novel, What Entropy Means to Me (Doubleday, 1972) was supposedly pulped before publication (almost certainly untrue).

We associate Doubleday with very short print-runs, quickie pulpings, and fabulously high collector’s prices. Many of the most expensive books in our field are Doubledays. (Specifically, early Heinlein, early Zelazny, early King.)

What Entropy Means to Me is not a rare book, even in non-ex-library copies. I have one. It may be that the price is still low because the demand is low, but this is not a hard book to obtain.

What I have always heard is that it was Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness which was mistakenly pulped prematurely. Apparently they planned to pulp something else, most likely Nine Princes in Amber, and pulped the wrong one, which resulted in Creatures only being in print a few months.

Meanwhile, most copies of Nine Princes were sold to libraries and were either defaced or destroyed. In retrospect this became a very sought-after title, and thus one of the great collector’s items of SF. There is one on Abebooks right now for $8,500.

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Blogging Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon – Part One: “Flash Gordon on the Planet Mongo”

Blogging Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon – Part One: “Flash Gordon on the Planet Mongo”

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Alex Raymond created Flash Gordon for King Features Syndicate to compete with the successful science fiction strip, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Raymond’s creation was decidedly more space fantasy than science fiction, combining elements borrowed from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, Alexandre Dumas, and Anthony Hope to great effect. Flash Gordon debuted January 7, 1934 with the strip, “Flash Gordon on the Planet Mongo” which would be serialized each Sunday through April 15, 1934.

fg-blb-1The strip kicked off with an exciting documentary-style depiction of an unforeseen catastrophe assailing our world. An unknown planet mysteriously appears in our solar system and is hurtling rapidly toward Earth. Destruction seems unavoidable. We are quickly introduced to a scientist, Dr. Hans Zarkov who is rapidly completing a rocket ship which he plans to man on a suicide mission to try and divert the oncoming planet from Earth’s trajectory.

“Flash” Gordon is a Yale-educated world-renowned polo player (I’m sure we can all name a handful of world-renowned polo players). He and a young woman named Dale Arden are the only known survivors of a plane struck down by a meteor heralding from the approaching planet. Flash and Dale parachute just outside of Dr. Zarkov’s observatory. Paranoid from overwork, Zarkov pulls a gun on the startled plane crash survivors and forces them to accompany him on his suicide mission to space. The first installment ends with Zarkov’s rocket ship on a collision course with the rapidly hurtling planet.

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Hyperborean Mice: Grim Swords & Sorcery Action… With Talking Mice

Hyperborean Mice: Grim Swords & Sorcery Action… With Talking Mice

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hyper-miceAm I a bad gamer if I really, really want to play this game?

I mean… a role playing game of heroic rodents, tiny critters struggling valiantly against barbarian rat tribes, gargantuan predators such as foxes and owls, legendary horrors that prowl the land, and foul sorcery.  All in Conan’s backyard.

Just listen to this product description:

The ancient White Lords, albino mice with magical powers, rule over the valley of Hyperborea, but their empire is crumbling. Barbarian rat tribes, deadly predators and political intrigue threaten to bring their mousy civilization to an end. Terrible predators like foxes and owls take the place of giants and dragons. Voracious shrew clans raid the Fallows, seeking mice and rats to fill their larders. Centipedes scuttle beneath the underbrush, seeking prey. Hawks force the inhabitants to stay under cover during the day, while owls stalk the sky at night… Legendary horrors stalk the land, unique predators with potent magical abilities of their own. The terrifying Mocker, a centipede whose only voice is the imitated cries of his victims. The serpent Ssaaa gathers a cult of worshipers to do her bidding in the valley. And no mouse dares stand against dread Hoorooru, the ancient ruler of Rookswood and the enemy of the gods.

It’s like Robert E. Howard was hired to write the screenplay for The Secret of Nimh. Scott Oden reports that it’s “Filled with REH and Lovecraft homages! Like an owl that’s worshipped as a god by clans of savage mice.” I got chills, I swear.

Hyperborean Mice was written by Frank Sronce and published by Kiz and Jenn Press. It’s 102 pages, and is available as a softcover book from Lulu.com or as a digital download PDF from RPGNow and DriveThru RPG. Show it some love and check it out, and let me know I’m not crazy.