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Wings, Wind, and World-Wreckers: The Best of Edmond Hamilton

Wings, Wind, and World-Wreckers: The Best of Edmond Hamilton

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Best-of-Edmond-Hamilton-SFBCJames McGlothin has been providing excellent continuing coverage on Black Gate of Del Rey’s famous “The Best Of…” anthologies that shaped many SF readers in the 1970s. He was kind enough to allow me to take a pile of notes I’d assembled for Del Rey’s The Best of Edmond Hamilton (1976) and do an entry in the series. I also sought the blessing of our editor John O’Neill because Edmond Hamilton is his favorite pulp author and I wanted to feel sure I wasn’t intruding too far into another’s territory. Both James and John are welcome to trash Edgar Rice Burroughs and Godzilla as much as they want after this.

I’ll admit to having absorbed less Edmond Hamilton than I should. I’ve read some of his short fiction, but only one of his novels, The Star Kings (1947), a science-fiction variant on The Prisoner of Zenda that’s about as thrilling as Golden Age space opera gets. (Because John O’Neill will ask, I read the original magazine version of The Star Kings, not the later book revision with the sequel-friendly ending.) I’m more familiar with the work of Hamilton’s wife, Leigh Brackett, one of the great science-fiction writers and one of my favorite authors of all time. Their marriage didn’t lead to frequent collaborations, as the marriage of C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner did. I’m glad Hamilton and Brackett maintained separate writer identities, and the feeling became sharper after reading this selection of what Brackett thought was her husband’s finest short fiction.

I’ve read many of the Del Rey “Best Of…” volumes, but few that I’ve enjoyed as consistently as this one. It’s not only because Hamilton was a superb writer — all the authors in the series were first-rank SF masters — but because of two specific factors.

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Ride Your Own Pet Sea Monster: The Abyss Surrounds Us by Emily Skrutskie

Ride Your Own Pet Sea Monster: The Abyss Surrounds Us by Emily Skrutskie

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The-Abyss-Surrounds-Us-smallWhat Anne McCaffrey did for dragons, Emily Skrutskie does for sea monsters.

In The Abyss Surrounds Us, first-person present-tense narration sweeps readers into the world of Cassandra “Cas” Leung. Since Cas is a trainer of Reckoners, genetically engineered giants of the ocean, her perspective gives us the joy of having our own pet sea monster. As Cas, you’ll strap on your scuba gear and swim alongside a massive tortoise, running your hands over and between its keratin plates. You’ll climb on its back and sit on its head. You’ll hitch a ride as it dives. You’ll command it in battle, sending it to charge, ravage, and destroy.

At the age of seventeen, Cas has worked her whole life to become a full-fledged Reckoner trainer. The day has finally come for her to go on her first solo mission, accompanying the legendary monster Durga as she protects a cruise ship in the lawless Neo Pacific. Cas’s first mistake is assuming that any escort duty in pirate-infested waters is going to be a cakewalk. Her second is deciding to go through with the mission despite signs that Durga’s sick. Her third mistake, after pirates have succeeded in killing Durga and overtaking the ship, is failing to take the suicide pill that would guarantee her a swift and painless death.

Defenseless in enemy hands, Cas has a brain full of information the pirates must never discover. But instead of torturing it out of her, the vicious pirate queen has other plans. She has acquired a Reckoner fetus on the verge of hatching. To avoid execution, Cas must birth the thing, raise it, and train it to kill the very people who would come to rescue her.

Once she’s got a lethal beast on her side, though, she can turn it on the pirates and escape. Or at least, this is what Cas thinks. Which is her final mistake.

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Helen’s Daimones by S.E. Lindberg

Helen’s Daimones by S.E. Lindberg

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51rwuiXOUeL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_There are strange territories in the wilds of swords & sorcery that have been visited successfully by only a handful of writers. They are places where, aside from some actual swords and sorcery, few of the common trappings of the genre are found. Magic may be phatasmagorical, the world — both physically and culturally — has no echoes of our own, and the hero is more likely to be a golem, a resurrected nobleman, or a little girl than an axe-swinging warrior.

Some of C.L. Moore’s Jirel stories and most of Clark Ashton Smith’s oeuvre mapped portions of these realms. In Throne of Bones, Brian McNaughton (reviewed by me here) brought back a detailed study of one nation. Michael Shea and Darrell Schweitzer mapped whole continents. They’re dangerous places, permeated by darkness and decay, and the scent of death is rarely absent from the thick, curdled air.

S.E. Lindberg’s short novel, Helen’s Daimones (2017), is one such tale of this diseased stretch of the world of swords & sorcery. I can’t say this book quite attains the same heights as Shea’s Nifft the Lean or Schweitzer’s The Mask of the Sorcerer (reviewed here), but much of the time it comes tantalizingly close. It’s always exciting to find an author hunting out the stranger reaches of fantasy instead of re-exploring places we’ve all been many times before. This is the third published (second chronologically) novel in Lindberg’s Dyscrasia series. The word dyscrasia is from the Greek, and refers to a bad mixing of the four Classical humors: phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile. In these books, there is no actual magic, only the disease Dyscrasia and corrupted souls.

Lindberg’s novel opens on his young protagonist, the daughter of a furrier, playing in the countryside.

Lithe, ivory-haired Helen crouched in the meadow. She spied the emerging fireflies, ready to play. A storm brewed on the distant, western horizon. Remote, thunderless lightning seemed to communicate to the fireflies with pulsing flashes. She wished she could interpret such magic.

“One day, I will understand your secret language,” Helen vowed.

She was accustomed to being apart from people, immersed in her own reality. Cloaked in a cougar pelt splotched with green dye, she was empowered by her feline familiar’s aura: Angie.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Casebooks (Vol 2) & The Thinking Engine

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Casebooks (Vol 2) & The Thinking Engine

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Lovegrove_MiskatonicLast December I wrote about Sherlock Holmes & the Shadwell Shadows, volume one of James Lovegrove’s Cthulhu Casebooks trilogy. And this December, it’s on to book two, Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities. I wasn’t quite as fond of the second installment, though not because it’s a bad book.

As I wrote in that first review:

The basic premise of the… trilogy is that Watson made up the sixty stories in the Canon. He did so to cover up the real truth behind Holmes’ work. And that’s because the truth is too horrible to reveal. In a nutshell, Watson has written three journals, each covering events fifteen years apart, to try and get some of the darkness out of his soul.

The darkness exists because Holmes, with Watsons’s assistance, waged a career-long war with the otherworld beings of the Cthulhu mythos.

Somewhere in another Black Gate post, I calculated the percentage that Holmes is absent in each of the four novellas which Doyle wrote featuring the great detective. Lovegrove chose to use that novella model and it’s my biggest complaint about the book. Holmes and Watson find a journal and read it. It reminds me of the Mormon interlude in A Study in Scarlet and it takes up thirty-five percent of the book.

Fully one-third of this novel has nothing to do with Holmes or Watson. It provides background to the mystery, but it could be a standalone story and it would have no more tie-in to Holmes than an account of my going out to lunch yesterday.

The flashback takes place in Arkham and it is essentially a Cthulhu short novella. Lovegrove got to write a Lovecraft pastiche within a Holmes pastiche. Of course, these three books are aimed at fans of the Cthulhu stories, so it’s not totally out there. I’ve read stories by Lovecraft, Derleth and others. I don’t mind them, but I’m not a particularly big fan. So, I’m not the target audience for the trilogy.

Those who are avid Holmes and Cthulhu fans are likely to enjoy this second book more than I did. But the fact is that this was a third of the book with no Holmes and/or Watson.

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Peplum Populist: Goliath and the Sins of Babylon (1963)

Peplum Populist: Goliath and the Sins of Babylon (1963)

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goliath-sins-babylon-US-posterWhen you have an Italian sword-and-sandal (peplum) film, and the hero of the title has an oblique name like “Goliath” or “Colossus,” the immediate question that comes to mind is, “Is this hero actually Maciste?”

The answer with Goliath and the Sins of Babylon is “Yes.” The Italian title of this 1963 muscleman epic is Maciste l’eroe più grande del mondo, “Maciste, The Greatest Hero in the World.” This isn’t strictly true, because in the rest of the world, Maciste habitually lost his name and was turned into Hercules or Atlas or Colossus … or Goliath.

And Maciste isn’t even in Babylon! This is another deception of the English-language title and dub. The setting is the usual vague Greco-Roman Mediterranean world that served as the backdrop for the majority of peplum flicks, where fictional kingdoms constantly warred with each other until a bulky hero appeared to help the underdogs to victory.

The story of Goliath and the Sins of Babylon isn’t much more complex than that description, although the events of the plot as it lunges from scene to scene create a needless tangle. The short version: The Kingdom of Cafaus (“Babylon”) has forced a cruel treaty on its neighbor, Nephyr, that demands an annual tribute of twenty-four virgins (upped to thirty in the English version). The current king of Nephyr, Pergasos (Piero Lulli), arranged for this awful treaty so he could keep the throne after his brother’s death. The wandering strongman Maciste (Mark Forest) arrives in Nephyr and befriends a group of rebel gladiators who plot to free the city from the grip of the king of Cafaus and his wicked agent, Morakeb (Erno Crisa), and place Regia (José Greci), daughter of the previous king, onto the throne of Nephyr.

Between the lines of this story is a naval battle, a chariot race, copious sword fights and wrestling moves, a populist uprising, a pitched battle between armies on horseback, a rush of lions and leopards mauling everybody in sight, comic antics with a dwarf, and jarring shifts in the story that can make it tricky to follow the specifics. There’s a lot packed into this movie, including chunks of other movies, which makes for a choppy narrative and moments of, “Wait, who is this guy again?”

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December Short Story Roundup

December Short Story Roundup

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CaptureDecember’s here, so it’s time for another roundup. When the luminous Mrs. V. asked me about what I was reading this week, it turned into a conversation about short stories, then and now. At some point I said something along the lines of short stories have always been hit-and-miss, with most stories being satisfying, some terrific, and even a big name doesn’t always knock it out of the park. In fact, anyone might hit a home run, so a magazine like Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, featuring unknown and lesser-known writers, is just as likely to contain excellent stories as any of Lin Carter’s anthologies. That’s why I persist in reviewing new short stories each month. There’s a chance each and every month that I’ll discover a story that measures up to the best of the past, and will be worthy of a place in some future anthology of great swords & sorcery tales.

That’s the sort of anticipation I have when I open up a new issue of HFQ each quarter. Adrian Simmons, David Farney, William Ledbetter, James Frederick William Rowe, and Barbara Barrett are the names on the masthead, and swords & sorcery fans should thank each one of them for consistently putting out the best new S&S and with far less attention than they deserve. I won’t say any of the latest volume, #34, is among the greats bound to last, but all three are very good. Can you really ask for more than that?

“Crazy Snake and the Demons of Ometepe,” by Eric Atkisson, brings to an end the multi-author tale begun last issue where alternate universes were at risk of domination by the Destroyer, a terrible trans-dimensional power. In “Between Sea and Flame” by Evan Dicken, Tenochtitlan fell to evil priests from the sea (not to Cortes) and the warrior Hummingbird found herself forced to back the lesser evil in order to save the word. Raphael Ordonez’s wandering ex-conquistador, Francisco Carvajal y Lopez, had to fight the Destroyer as well in “I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.”

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Self-published Book Review: Dark Healer by Harry Leighton

Self-published Book Review: Dark Healer by Harry Leighton

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There won’t be a review next month, due to the holidays, and most likely the month after that, since I’ll be reading for Mysterion, which will be opening to submissions in January. However, I’ll be happy to accept new book review submissions to review once I’m back.

Dark_Healer_Amazon_coverDark Healer by Harry Leighton is one of those novels about which I felt conflicted afterward. I really enjoyed the story, and thought it worked well at drawing me in and keeping me reading. But there were significant weaknesses in the prose that interfered with my enjoyment.  I’ll get to that, but first, let’s talk about the story.

Marlen, the titular Dark Healer, is a skilled surgeon and also a mage, mixing magic with the common healing arts in order to make his patients better. Better being the key word here—he can improve eyesight, enable quicker healing, make them stronger, even add extra arms.  He’s a regular medieval Mengele, but way more successful. When bounty hunters Jonas and Alia begin tracking him, it’s because he’s begun buying people at illegal slave auctions, specifically the sick and disabled. Some he makes well so that they can serve him, others he uses as spare parts.

Jonas has a history with Marlen. At one point, they were friends, but they had a falling out right at the beginning of Marlen’s turn to a darker path. Now, living with regret for his own actions during that desperate time, Jonas is determined to make things right by hunting Marlen down. His apprentice Alia doesn’t have a personal stake, but she’s utterly devoted to her mentor and father-figure, Jonas.

Daeholf, Trimas, and Zedek are on the run. Trimas is an exiled ex-General, Daeholf a former military scout and saboteur who had a falling out with his commanders, and Zedek is an elf, hated and feared everywhere in the Empire. Their goal is to keep their heads down and survive. But when they find that Daeholf’s cousin has gone missing, and discovered a farm where the farmers are the harvest, they are also set on the trail of the healer Marlen.

When the two groups team up to take down Marlen, they find themselves embroiled in an incipient civil war, and at its core, the monsters Marlen’s created.

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The Complete Carpenter: Starman (1984)

The Complete Carpenter: Starman (1984)

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starman-original-posterIt’s taken me exactly a year to go from Dark Star to Starman in my survey of John Carpenter’s career. At this rate, I’ll be at Escape From L.A. by this time in 2018. The timing works out on this one, however. There’s no “winter holiday” Carpenter movie — no, The Thing doesn’t count, that’s a “winter” movie — but Starman is as cheerful and uplifting a science-fiction tale as Carpenter has ever turned out, so it feels right for December.

Starman has quite the long history behind it. The script was in development at Columbia back in 1980 and went through a round-robin of writers. Columbia had the opportunity to do the Spielberg project that would eventually turn into E.T., but turned it down in favor of Starman — a decision the studio would come to regret when E.T. became the highest-grossing movie in history during the Summer of 1982 (when it squashed a certain other alien visitor movie).

The mega success of E.T. caused director John Badham to abandon Starman because he thought it was too similar to Spielberg’s movie. (Badham went on to direct WarGames, so that worked out.) Many other directors were on the film at one time or another — Adrian Lynne, Mark Rydell, Tony Scott, Peter Hyams — but John Carpenter had the pitch that stood out: film it as a love story/road movie in the classic Hollywood vein. Like It Happened One Night, but with an alien. Carpenter wanted to show he had the directing chops to tackle a different type of material. He was also still wounded over the poor reception of The Thing and wanted to deliver a hit for a big studio.

And thus we have a John Carpenter film for the whole family! Which is odd enough on its own.

The Story

Advanced extraterrestrials discover space probe Voyager II and choose to answer humanity’s invitation to “come and see us sometime,” as inscribed on the probe’s audio-visual disc. An alien observation ship heads to Earth, but the U.S. Air Force knocks it from its planned course so it crashes in rural Wisconsin. The disembodied alien aboard takes on the human shape of Scott Hayden (Jeff Bridges), the recently deceased husband of lonely Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen), by using DNA from a lock of Scott’s hair.

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In 500 Words or Less: Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird, edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski

In 500 Words or Less: Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird, edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski

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Ride the Star Wind-small Ride the Star Wind-back-small

Ride the Star Wind
Edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski
Broken Eye Books (445 pages, $39.99 hardcover/$19.99 paperback, February 2016)

When Scott Gable at Broken Eye Books offered me a review copy of Ride the Star Wind, an anthology that combines space opera with Lovecraftian weirdness, I told him straight up that I’m not really a fan of the Elder Gods, the Great Ones, and the rest. I get why Lovecraft’s shadow is so long (sort of) but honestly his writing never appealed to me, and I think his work is adapted too much, and usually badly. (I make one exception with Jonathan Maberry’s Kill Switch, which is awesome.)

That said… and work with me here, since I’m not supposed to curse… but @#$% this is a great anthology. I mean, after how much I enjoyed Never Now Always by Desirina Boskovich (also a Broken Eye title) I wasn’t really worried, but the stories in here hooked me way more than I expected.

Some are a little too weird for me, I’ll admit, but those are few and far between. If you’re into weird (unlike me) there’s material here for you, particularly Bogi Takács “A Subordinate Set of Principles,” which involves deadly creatures that are literally referred to by square and triangle symbols in the text because they’re impossible to describe. I’m going to have to reread that one.

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A Homecoming: Son of Mfumu by Milton J. Davis

A Homecoming: Son of Mfumu by Milton J. Davis

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DIhhmcBUQAAjNxv“…keep it old school. Don’t make it boring, pack it with action, don’t invert it, converge it, or subvert it. Have a hero even if he is a rascal. Have some gothic atmosphere and a touch of cosmicism. Give it technicolor and dream dust instead of shades of gray. Have the ending mean something.”  -Morgan Holmes, on writing a classic S&S story.

Milton Davis’ five volume series about the mighty and wily Changa Diop is swords & sorcery cast from a classic mold, the dimensions of which were first set down ninety years ago by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and C.L. Moore. Changa is a hero through and through. Even when he’s got one eye focused on making a profit, the other is on his own honor and courage. There are wonderful descriptions of a vibrant, exciting world designed perfectly as a stage for mighty adventures, but done so well it never impedes the action. Of action, there’s more than enough for any S&S fan, ranging from duels with pirates to epic battles with demonic conjurations. Heroes are bold and villains deadly. This is the root stuff of which good S&S is made.

Whenever you get bummed out about the current state of S&S, rest assured that there are authors hewing to something like Holmes’ cri-de-coeur. And they aren’t making copies of the tried and true, but crafting their own myths and legends, adding their rousing additions to this genre we love.

Starting with Changa’s Safari (2011), and continuing for four more books, Milton Davis has sent our titular hero to the ends of the earth in search of the means to avenge his father’s murder, and claim the throne of Kongo from the usurper and sorcerer, Usenge. Each comrade with whom he surrounds himself is skilled and memorable in his own way. Foremost, there is the blue-robed and silent swordsman known only as the Tuareg. Zakee is a young Yemeni prince rescued from a disastrous marriage, the irascible navigator Mikaili is an Ethiopian with plans to become an priest someday…just never today, and finally there is Panya, Yoruban sorceress and beloved of Changa.

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