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Stories of Isolation and Lonely Death: The Dead Astronaut by Playboy Science Fiction

Stories of Isolation and Lonely Death: The Dead Astronaut by Playboy Science Fiction

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The Dead Astronaut (Playboy Press, 1971). Cover by Pompeo Posar

Last summer I came across an intriguing aside on the SF anthology The Dead Astronaut by Playboy Press (1971). I can’t remember the name of the blogger who had re-cracked it, but the person noted that with everyone locked down and socially distanced, these decades-old stories of isolation and lonely death, mostly written between Sputnik and the Apollo landing, felt newly relevant. I agree.

While I admit I don’t have the knowledge base of some of the vintage SF reviewers here, I did like the stories enough highlight the collection and offer a quick review in case others wanted to experience the unintentional “prophetic” element of science fiction, as the editorial introduction labels it.

The collection’s introduction is signed simply “The Editors” but according to The Science Fiction Encyclopedia Ray Russell (1924-1999) edited it, offering a tidbit about each author and a story note or two in his brief introduction.

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Rakefire and Other Stories’ Sum Is Greater Than Its Parts

Rakefire and Other Stories’ Sum Is Greater Than Its Parts

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Rakefire and Other Stories released July 2020 via Pulp Hero Press

Nine weird adventures span the 216 pages of this grimoire. Penned by emerging thaumaturgist Jason Ray Carney, Rakefire promises to corrupt any reader. So let us get this disclaimer out of the way: the mere reading of this tome may thicken your blood with wonder. Red turning to black, your blood will never bleed the same. Read this review at your own risk.

The book blurb labels this “Fever Dreams of Sword & Sorcery in an Eld Realm of Unfathomable Beauty and Cruelty” and it also contains “enigmatic tales of horror and fantasy in the pulp tradition.” That summary is spot on. Most of the tales focus on the sorcery end of the spectrum. Jason Ray Carney’s writing style is reminiscent of Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith (full of pregnant shadows and intellectual skullduggery!). Excerpts throughout this review reinforce what to expect.

The majority of the stories (6/9) have been published in various magazines, but reading them piece-meal is like eating random snacks instead of a five-course meal. The confluence amplifies the lore threading them all together (lore discussed below). Plus, the three newly published tales extend the impact. Each is recapped below, and most have excerpts that emphasize the style and common milieu (while avoiding spoilers). This serves as a tour guide into Jason Ray Carney’s strange world.

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Into the Quantum with H. Beam Piper

Into the Quantum with H. Beam Piper

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Four covers featuring Piper's Paratime stories

H. Beam Piper wrote a great deal about Time. His books and stories seem split into two types: travel via mechanical means, such as in the Paratime Police stories, and consciousness travel, such as in “The Edge of a Knife.” This article will look at both.

Piper wasn’t the first to write science fiction about parallel realities. Murray Leinster was the groundbreaker for that in “Sideways in Time” (1934). In 1947, Fredric Brown brought us his delightful parallel reality story, What Mad Universe. That same year, H. Beam Piper published his first time travel story, “Time and Again.” This was not a tale about purposeful travel but accidental, through a hellacious explosion. And it wasn’t about physical time travel at all, but consciousness travel. We’ll return to this type of time travel later in the article.

Paratime

Verkan Vall is the hero of most of the Paratime police stories. His official title is Special Chief’s Assistant to the chief of the Paratime Police — Tortha Karf. Through his adventures we learn about the Home timeline of the First Probability Level and get a look at the complex spider web of realities that the Paratime Police oversee.

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In 500 Words or Less: Alias Space and Other Stories by Kelly Robson

In 500 Words or Less: Alias Space and Other Stories by Kelly Robson

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Alias Space and Other Stories
By Kelly Robson
Subterranean Press (400 pages, $40 hardcover/$4.99 eBook, April 30, 2021)
Cover by Lauren Saint-Onge

If there’s one thing that characterizes Kelly Robson’s stories, I think it’s the love and care that you can see in each one. It’s hard to describe in words, but it’s like I can see how she’s built each world around her characters in a way that either supports or challenges them, oftentimes both. Take Zhang Lei in “A Study in Oils,” surrounded by strangers he can’t trust but who are best placed to understand the pain he’s running from and his need to hide from an interconnected world, and to support him when he’s finally free. Or creche manager Jules, who has to face her past on Luna, no matter how much she wants to forget it, because of the choices everyone else makes around her in “Intervention.” Even fleeing a dragon in “La Vitesse” forces mother-daughter duo Bea and Rosie to understand each other better. Plus dragons!

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A Delightful Discovery Inside an Old Book

A Delightful Discovery Inside an Old Book

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You never know what you might find inside an old used book. I just made a wonderful discovery inside my copy of Witches Three. This is a “Twayne Triplet,” featuring three long stories (two novels and a novella) on the same subject — witchcraft. The novels are Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber; and The Blue Star, by Fletcher Pratt. The novella is “There Shall Be No Darkness” by James Blish. It’s a strong book – Conjure Wife, Leiber’s first novel, is an established classic of horror-tinged contemporary fantasy, and The Blue Star, which became the first entry in the classic Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, is widely regarded as Pratt’s best novel.

I have an ongoing interest in Twayne Triplets*, even though only two were ever published, so I grabbed my used copy of Witches Three eagerly many years ago. But while I’ve leafed through it before, I haven’t read it, partly because I already had copies of the other stories. (That said, I haven’t read my separate copy of The Blue Star, nor, I suspect, this version of “There Shall Be No Darkness.” (It was collected in The Best of James Blish but I believe that’s an earlier, shorter, version of the story.)

So yesterday the subject of Witches Three came up. I grabbed my copy, and opened it, and to my surprise I found, on the page facing the inside front cover, a pasted in label signed by Fritz Leiber! The label reads: “Conjure Wife came out of my year at Occidental College — Fritz Leiber.” It’s always a delight to come across something so unexpected!

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Meeting a Great Australian Fabulist, Angela Slatter: The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales, Tartarus Press and All the Murmuring Bones, Titan Books

Meeting a Great Australian Fabulist, Angela Slatter: The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales, Tartarus Press and All the Murmuring Bones, Titan Books

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The Tallow-Wife and Other Stories (Tartarus Press, February 24, 2021) and All the Murmuring Bones
(Titan Books, March 9, 2021). Covers by Kathleen Jennings, and unknown

Any new book by Angela Slatter is a reason to rejoice for any lover of good dark fantasy.

Slatter is a very talented Australian writer, a born storyteller or, to be precise, a great fabulist, an author of modern, complex fairy tales for grownups. The Tallow-Wife is a collection of stories and novellas the core of which is the long title story, a dark comedy portraying the downfall of a family hiding some unspeakable secrets. But, in turn, that narrative and the rest of the volume are strictly connected to the characters and events described in two previous books, also published by Tartarus Press, Sourdough and Other Stories and The Bitterwood Bibles and Other Recountings.

Thus, although each tale can be read as a stand alone story, the task may be a bit difficult — although always quite enjoyable thanks to Slatter’s exceptional storytelling ability — if you’re not already familiar with the characters and their previous predicaments and adventures. In fact all the stories are interconnected to form a complex mosaic.

Indeed in her Afterword the author admits,

My brain was trying to write The Tallow-Wife as a novel — to connect everything. But the fractured structure, the untidy threads are the whole point. In hindsight perhaps I should have just written a novel… I wanted to finish off some arcs that I’d left in the previous books.

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“Is There Anybody There?”: James Gunn’s The Listeners

“Is There Anybody There?”: James Gunn’s The Listeners

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The Listeners by James Gunn
First Edition: Scribner’s, October 1972, Jacket design Jerry Thorp
(Book Club edition shown)

The Listeners
by James Gunn
Scribner’s (275 pages, $6.95, Hardcover, October 1972)
Jacket design Jerry Thorp

The late James Gunn, who died just last year, became an SFWA Grand Master in 2007 and was inducted into the SF Hall of Fame in 2015, both recognizing his achievements in science fiction. His individual awards include an Eaton Award for lifetime achievement as a critic (1982), a Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to SF and fantasy scholarship (1976), and a Clareson Award from the Science Fiction Research Association (1997).

So while Gunn wrote a good amount of fiction, some fifteen novels and a similar number of story collections, it’s fair to say his profile was higher as a nonfiction writer and critic than for his fiction. His critical work includes Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction (1976), which presumably triggered the Pilgrim Award (but predated the Hugo category for nonfiction or related book), and Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (1982, which did win a Hugo Award). He also edited the prominent series of anthologies The Road to Science Fiction (1977 to 1998), and was closely associated with the Campbell and Sturgeon awards organized at the Center for the Study of Science Fiction in Lawrence, Kansas, where spent most of his life in academia.

The closest he got to major awards recognition for his fiction was the novel considered here, The Listeners, from 1972. It came in second for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, in that award’s first year, to Barry Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo, though it was not nominated for a Hugo or Nebula award. (Neither was the Malzberg.)
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A Book Most Extraordinary: Once on a Time by A.A. Milne

A Book Most Extraordinary: Once on a Time by A.A. Milne

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King Merriwig of Euralia sat at breakfast on his castle walls. He lifted the gold cover from the gold dish in front of him, selected a trout and conveyed it carefully to his gold plate. He was a man of simple tastes, but when you have an aunt with the newly acquired gift of turning anything she touches to gold, you must let her practise sometimes. In another age it might have been fretwork.

So begins Once on a Time (1917), A. A. Milne‘s charming and funny fairy tale sendup. In it, a war is started over one king leaping over another king’s land in his seven-league boots, a bad wish is wished (as well as a good one), lovers meet, and a slightly wicked countess plots to steal the kingdom’s wealth. It is a book that had me laughing aloud one minute and forcing my wife to listen to me read pages aloud the next.

Next to the gargantuan, multi-billion-dollar legacy that is Winnie-the-Pooh, it is quite easy to miss that Milne was an author of several adult novels, among them The Red House Mystery, a classic of Golden Age detective fiction. A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he became a columnist for the satirical magazine, Punch, played cricket on teams with P.G. Wodehouse, J.M. Barrie, and Arthur Conan Doyle, and served in the army during WW I. He was wounded at the Somme and spent the last two years of the war writing propaganda. After the war, his son Christopher Robin was born, acquired some stuffed animals, and inspired Milne to write the two books that would be his greatest legacy: Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), and The House at Pooh Corner (1928).

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Neverwhens, Where History and Fantasy Collide: Brilliance Gleams Beneath a Black Sun

Neverwhens, Where History and Fantasy Collide: Brilliance Gleams Beneath a Black Sun

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Black Sun-small Black Sun-back-small

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga Press, October 2020). Cover by John Picacio.

In the 14 months I have had this column, I’ve looked at “historicity and fantasy” from a variety of angles, one of which has been looking at current — and lauded — works by known authors, and assessing how well they weave the two together. Thus far, I haven’t been very kind. While I loved G. Willow Wilson’s The Bird King as a kind of modern fable, it creates its view of dying Al-Andalus by promoting a series of stereotypes about Christian Spain and the Inquisition that would be excoriated where the same treatment applied to the tale’s Muslim world. Conversely, Guy Gavriel Kay is the master of historical fiction masquerading at fantasy, essentially reinventing the earliest form of “Romantic fiction” with his post-Tigana work. Sadly, in Children of Earth and Sky rather than “jumping the shark,” Kay never gets up to speed, creating a tale that is so faithful to the history it is a thinly-veiled variant of, that nothing much ever happens.

So I thought it was time I praised something in this column — because I generally do like far more than I hate. And wow, what a gem I have to talk about with you today.

Over the winter holidays I read Rebecca Roanhorse’s debut entry into the world of epic fantasy: Black Sun. Billed as Volume 1 of Between Earth and Sky, this is clearly the start of an epic, yet just about works as a standalone tale in its own right.

Published last year, this is a departure for Roanhorse, whose work has mostly been contemporary fantasy, though again drawing on native themes. So what’s it about? Well, our official blurb actually does a pretty good job of teasing the plot. Here it is.

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Incredible, In More Ways than One: Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man

Incredible, In More Ways than One: Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man

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The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
First Edition: Fawcett Gold Medal, May 1956. Cover art MH.

The Shrinking Man
by Richard Matheson
Fawcett Gold Medal (192 pages, $0.35, Paperback, May 1956)
Cover art MH

I think it safe to say that Richard Matheson is best remembered today for his novels and stories that were adapted into films and TV scripts, including the dozen plus scripts he himself wrote for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone TV series in the late 1950 to early ‘60s. (An ironic exception is Matheson’s first-published short story, “Born of Man and Woman” (1950), which remains in print in the first volume of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.)

Matheson’s first six novels, at least, from I Am Legend (1954) to What Dreams May Come (1978), were all adapted into films. (Among short stories adapted into film was 1971’s “Duel,” which became a TV movie under Steven Spielberg’s direction). The earliest film adaptation came from his second novel, The Shrinking Man (1956), becoming the striking if dubiously plausible 1957 film dubbed, Hollywood-style, The Incredible Shrinking Man. I suspect more people have seen the film than have read Matheson’s novel. Yet while I’m reviewing the book here and not the film (which I last saw decades ago), I will compare the two on a few points, mainly because Matheson himself wrote the screenplay for the film. So the differences between novel and film may be instructive.
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