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Tor Doubles #24: Roger Zelazny’s The Graveyard Heart and Walter Jon Williams’ Elegy for Angels and Dogs

Tor Doubles #24: Roger Zelazny’s The Graveyard Heart and Walter Jon Williams’ Elegy for Angels and Dogs

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Cover for The Graveyard Heart and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Bob Eggleton

Tor Double #24 was originally published in August 1990 and is the final volume in the series which compiled a classic story along with a sequel (or prequel) written by another author. Walter Jon Williams used the world Zelazny created with an overlap of only a few characters to expand Zelazny’s story. Not original to the Tor Doubles series, Elegy for Angels and Dogs was originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 26 years after The Graveyard Heart appeared.

The Graveyard Heart was originally published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination in March, 1964. Opening at New Year’s Eve 2000, Zelazny offers a decadent society of the Set, who live to attend flamboyant parties and be seen, going into cryosleep between the parties to prolong their lives. Alvin Moore has managed to get an invitation to the “Party of Parties,” where he promptly falls in love with Leota, one of the Set.

Since the Set only come out of hibernation every few years to attend elaborate parties, there can be no relationship between Moore and Leota. Unable to accept this, Moore decides he must be admitted to the Set and goes about figuring out how to improve his chances of achieving his goal.

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Tor Doubles #23: Norman Spinrad’s Riding the Torch and Joan D. Vinge’s Tin Soldier

Tor Doubles #23: Norman Spinrad’s Riding the Torch and Joan D. Vinge’s Tin Soldier

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Cover for Riding the Torch by Wayne Barlowe
Cover for Tin Soldier by Ron Walotsky

Both stories published in this volume originally appeared in 1974, with Joan D. Vinge’s Tin Soldier appearing in April and Norman Spinrad’s Riding the Torch appearing four months later.

Tin Soldier was originally published in Orbit 14, edited by Damon Knight and published by Harper and Row. The story was also Vinge’s debut story.

Among Vinge’s best known works is her Hugo and Locus Award winning novel The Snow Queen, which was also nominated for the Nebula, the Ditmar, and the coveted Balrog. That novel took its inspiration from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Vinge’s first story, The Tin Soldier, looks to the same source, taking its title from Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” a fact referenced in the story.

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Ahoy, Matey! Plunge the Depths of The Great Eastern by Howard A. Rodman

Ahoy, Matey! Plunge the Depths of The Great Eastern by Howard A. Rodman

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The Great Eastern by Howard A. Rodman (Melville House, June 4, 2019). Cover artist unknown

Pop quiz. What do Captain Ahab, Captain Nemo, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel share in common? Okay, if you don’t know the first two, you have no business reading anything here at Black Gate. But you are forgiven if you haven’t a clue as to Brunel. I know I didn’t until I read Howard A. Rodman’s wonderfully inventive novel,  The Great Eastern.

Let’s look first at the main difference. Captain Ahab and Nemo are fictional. Brunel was a real person, and not just any person, but a renowned 19th century engineer who not only worked on Britain’s the Great Western Railway and Clifton Suspension Bridge, but also designed a series of of steamships called the Great Britain, the Great Western, and the Great Eastern.

So you can start to see where this is going.

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Tor Double #22: Leigh Brackett’s The Jewel of Bas and Karen Haber’s Thieves’ Carnival

Tor Double #22: Leigh Brackett’s The Jewel of Bas and Karen Haber’s Thieves’ Carnival

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Cover for The Jewel of Bas and Thieves’ Carnival by Luis Perez

This volume represents the third collection of linked stories. While Robert Silverberg wrote In Another Country to take place at the same time as C.L. Moore’s Vintage Season and Harry Turtledove’s The Pugnacious Peacekeeper was a more traditional sequel to L. Sprague de Camp’s The Wheels of If, Karen Haber provided a prequel to Leigh Brackett’s The Jewel of Bas. Although Haber’s Thieves’ Carnival appears first in this volume, I’m going to stick with my norm of reviewing the earlier published story first.

The Jewel of Bas was originally published in Planet Stories in Spring 1944. It is the final of three stories by Leigh Brackett in the Tor Double series. The story opens with Ciaran and Mouse, a raggedy couple who has recently gotten married. Leaving the city they have known for their entire lives, Ciaran convinces Mouse that they should take a shortcut he has heard of across the Forbidden Plains, despite its foreboding name and its reputation for causing people to disappear.

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Tor Double #21: Roger Zelazny’s Home Is the Hangman and Samuel R. Delany’s We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line

Tor Double #21: Roger Zelazny’s Home Is the Hangman and Samuel R. Delany’s We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line

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Cover for Home Is the Hangman by Martin Andrews
Cover for We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line by Wayne Barlowe

The twenty-first Tor Double is the first time both of the authors in a collection are repeats. It includes the second (and final) Samuel R. Delany story, We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, and the second of three Roger Zelazny story, Home is the Hangman. Delany first appeared in Tor Double #4 and Zelazny in #12. It is also unique in that it is the first time one of the stories (Delany’s) includes a dedication to the other author (Zelazny).

We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line was originally published as “Lines of Power” in Fantasy & Science Fiction in May, 1968. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and Nebula Award.

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Tor Double #20: Harry Turtledove’s The Pugnacious Peacekeeper and L. Sprague de Camp’s The Wheels of If

Tor Double #20: Harry Turtledove’s The Pugnacious Peacekeeper and L. Sprague de Camp’s The Wheels of If

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Cover for The Pugnacious Peacekeeper and The Wheels of If by Joe Burleson

While the eighteenth volume of the series included C.L. Moore’s Vintage Season and Robert Silverberg’s In Another Country, which takes place at the same time, this volume includes a story and an actual sequel. It also includes the first original story in the series (Silverberg’s story appeared in IASFM nearly a year before appearing in this story). From a production point of view, this is also the first volume that does not have an embossed cover.

The Wheels of If was originally published in Unknown Fantasy Fiction in October, 1940. The story is an alternate history tale that follows Allister Park. Park is a prosecutor in a world which seems to be our own. His current goal is to successfully prosecute the Antonini gang. He sees the successful prosecution as a stepping stone to being nominated for the position of District Attorney for the County of New York. However, when he awoke on Monday, April 11, it was clear that something was different. Park suddenly had a moustache and the New York in which he found himself was not the New York in which he was familiar.

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Tor Double #19: Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar and Charles de Lint’s The Fair in Emain Macha

Tor Double #19: Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar and Charles de Lint’s The Fair in Emain Macha

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Cover for Ill Met in Lankhmar by Sam Rakeland
Cover for The Fair at Emain Macha by Mel Grant

This volume of the Tor Double series offers something it hasn’t offered before.  Although several of the novellas previously published in the series have played with the tropes of fantasy novels, such as Jack Vance’s The Last Castle or Joanna Russ’s Souls, all of the stories published to this point have been science fiction. With Volume 19, the series offers two novellas which are unabashedly fantasy, Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar and Charles de Lint’s The Fair in Emain Macha. Not only are both fantasy stories, but both of them are parts of series exploring the characters who feature in them.

Fritz Leiber introduced the world to Lankhmar and his characters of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in August of 1939 in the story “Two Sought Adventure,” which appeared in Unknown. By 1969, he had published an additional eighteen stories about the adventurers, including one story which told of the Grey Mouser’s life before he met Fafhrd.

Ill Met in Lankhmar was originally published in F&SF  in April, 1970. It won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Ill Met in Lankhmar is the second of four Leiber stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series. A prequel to all of the previously published Lankhmar stories with the exception of “The Unholy Grail,” this novella tells how his two characters meet for the first time. …

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Tor Double #18: Robert Silverberg’s In Another Country and C.L. Moore’s Vintage Season

Tor Double #18: Robert Silverberg’s In Another Country and C.L. Moore’s Vintage Season

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Cover for In Another Country and Vintage Season by Wayne Barlowe

With this volume, the Tor Double series began an experiment and also a format change. Beginning with C.L. Moore’s 1946 story Vintage Season, Tor had Robert Silverberg write a sequel, In Another Country. Depiste the book cover proclaiming it “New!,” the Silverberg piece appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine eleven month prior to its publication in the Tor Double series.  In addition, this volume was published in the standard anthology format rather than tête-bêche, perhaps reflecting the two stories’ relationship to each other as original and sequel.

Vintage Season was originally published in Astounding in the September and October 1946 issues and credited to Lawrence O’Donnell. At various times, this story has been credited to C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, Lawrence O’Donnell, or to just C.L. Moore. Tor credits Moore alone for the story.

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Tor Doubles: The Westerns

Tor Doubles: The Westerns

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Tor Doubles

As I mentioned last week, in January of 1990, Tor began published a second series of Tor Doubles: The Tor Double Action Western series. Running for twenty months, the books in this series were anonymously edited and packaged by Martin H. Greenberg and Bill Pronzini through Tekno Books. Not only did they differ from the science fiction series in subject matter, but also in format.

While most of the Tor SF Doubles were published as dos-a-dos format, where the book needed to be flipped over to read the second story, this series was all published in a standard format, with the second story following the first. As it happens, a month after this series was introduced, the Tor SF Double was  published in the same traditional format.

The Westerns also differed because while the SF volumes mostly included stories by different authors (with three exceptions), each of the Tor Double Action Westerns featured two stories by the same authors, essentially making each volume a two story collection.

Over the course of the twenty volumes, twelve authors were represented, with Henry Wilson Allen appearing under two pseudonyms: Clay Fisher and Will Henry, Lewis B. Patten having two volumes showcasing his work, Zane Grey stories appearing in three volumes, and Max Brand showing up in a full quarter of the books published, including the first and last volumes. Also, while most of the authors who were published in the science fiction series were alive at the time their works were printed, only three of the Western authors were alive: Allen, Steve Frazee, and Wayne D. Overholser.

The last five volumes in the series were rebranded as the Tor Double Western series.

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Tor Double #17: L. Sprague de Camp’s Divide and Rule and Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon

Tor Double #17: L. Sprague de Camp’s Divide and Rule and Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon

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Cover for Divide and Rule by N. Taylor Blanchard
Cover for The Sword of Rhiannon by A.C. Farley

The seventeenth Tor Double, includes two stories, L. Sprague de Camp’s Divide and Rule and Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon, which are both fantasy stories masquerading as science fiction.

Divide and Rule was originally serialized in Unknown in April to May, 1939. Divide and Rule is the first of two de Camp stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series. It includes de Camp’s first of two stories in the series (both of which will be reviewed this month) and Brackett’s second of three.

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