Black Gate

I ran into my friend Phyllis Eisenstein at the Windy City Pulp & Paper Show here in Chicago over the weekend, and the first thing she said to me was, “I’m retired!”

This is exciting news. Phyllis has been nurturing several writing projects for the past few years, and I’ve been impatiently waiting for them — and it’s great to hear that she’ll finally have more time to devote to them. Though I forgot to ask if it means we’ll finally get the long-promised third volume in her Book of Elementals fantasy series, which began with Sorcerer’s Son in 1979, and continued with The Crystal Palace (1988). The third volume, The City in Stone, was actually completed a decade ago, but was left without a publisher after the sudden collapse of Meisha Merlin in 2007. The first two volumes are now long out of print.

Phyllis’ other novels include Shadow of Earth (1979), In the Hands of Glory (1981), and the Tales of Alaric the Minstrel (two novels, Born to Exile (1978) and In the Red Lord’s Reach (1989), plus various short stories). Her work has been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, but these days of course she’s most famous for being the person who convinced George R.R. Martin to put dragons in A Song of Ice and Fire.

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When I was a wee lad discovering science fiction for the first time, I eagerly read and enjoyed all the most famous SF series. Dune, Foundation, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Amber — and Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld saga.

The first volume, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, won the 1972 Hugo Award, and it’s not hard to see why. The premise, that every human who ever lived wakes up one morning on the shores of a great river, was thoroughly original, and Farmer built on it brilliantly, crafting a science fiction novel peopled with famous historical figures, including Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Hermann Göring, a fictionalized version of Farmer himself (“Peter Jairus Frigate”), and especially the famed explorer Richard Francis Burton, who sets out to solve the mystery of this strange world.

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I don’t think Alan Dean Foster gets the respect he deserves. He’s an enormously gifted and prolific author who’s produced some of the most ambitious and successful series on the market, including the seventeen novels in the Pip & Flinx series (which my son read and re-read, awaiting each new volume anxiously), the 13 books of the Humanx Commonwealth, beginning with Nor Crystal Tears (1982), the 8 volumes of the Spellsinger saga, and many others. (My personal favorite Alan Dean Foster novel is probably Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (1978), one of his three Star Wars novels, but don’t hold that against me.)

For those of you looking for something maybe a little less ambitious and a little more manageable, Foster has also written several fine standalone trilogies, including Icerigger, The Founding of the Commonwealth, The Damned, and The Tipping Point. Perhaps his most highly regarded fantasy trilogy is Journeys of the Catechist, comprised of three novels published between 1998-2000 by Warner Aspect, all with covers by the great Keith Parkinson.

Carnivores of Light and Darkness (344 pages, $23 hardcover/$6.50 paperback, June 1998)
Into the Thinking Kingdoms (376 pages, $23 hardcover/$6.50 paperback, April 1999)
A Triumph of Souls (406 pages, $24.96 hardcover/$6.99 paperback, March 2000)

I was surprised and pleased to find a blurb on the back of my paperback editions from Todd Richmond at SF Site, who published a review of Into the Thinking Kingdoms back in 1999. I don’t think I’ll ever really get over how cool it is to discover blurbs I published on popular SF and fantasy books.

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Today’s Vintage Treasure is The Demon Breed, a 1979 Ace paperback by James H. Schmitz, which I bought the year it came out. Over the next few decades Schmitz would become one of my favorite SF short story writers, with delightful tales such as “The Second Night of Summer” (which I read in Gardner Dozois’s terrific anthology The Good Old Stuff), “Grandpa,” the Nebula nominee “Balanced Ecology,” and many others.

But in 1979 I was a fifteen year-old teenager, haunting the W.H. Smith on Sparks Street in Ottawa every Saturday, and I’d never heard of James H. Schmitz. But I knew what a bikini was. And Bob Adragna’s eye-catching cover, featuring special field agent Nile Etland and her otter companion crossing the floating atoll on the ocean world of Nandy-Cline as two sinister Parahuan observe from behind, spoke to my very soul. On the back of the book Andre Norton said something about a “detailed alien background” and “could not put it down,” but who paid attention to that? That cover told me everything I needed to know in two seconds. Bikinis, blasters, and bug-eyed monsters? Sold.

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