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Category: Vintage Treasures

Vintage Empires: James Nicoll on Galactic Empires, Volumes One & Two, edited by Brian W. Aldiss

Vintage Empires: James Nicoll on Galactic Empires, Volumes One & Two, edited by Brian W. Aldiss

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Galactic Empires, Volume One and Two (Orbit, October 1976). Covers by Karel Thole

My fellow Canadian James Nicoll continues to be one of my favorite SF bloggers, probably because he covers stuff I’m keenly interested in. Meaning exciting new authors, mixed with a reliable diet of vintage classics.

In the last two weeks he’s discussed Kate Elliots’s The Witch Roads, Axie Oh’s The Floating World, Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance, and Emily Yu-Xuan Qin’s Aunt Tigress, all from 2025; as well as Walter Jon Williams The Crown Jewels (from 1987), Wilson Tucker’s The Long Loud Silence (1952), C J Cherryh’s Port Eternity (1982), and John Brunner’s 1973 collection From This Day Forward. Now that’s a guy who knows how to productively use his leisure time. Not to mention caffeine.

But my favorite of his recent reviews is his story-by-story breakdown of Brian W. Aldiss’s massive two-volume anthology Galactic Empires, which made me want to read the whole thing all over again.

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The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part I: Don Wollheim, Edwin L. Arnold, and Otis Adelbert Kline

The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part I: Don Wollheim, Edwin L. Arnold, and Otis Adelbert Kline

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Swordsmen in the Sky (Ace, 1964). Cover by Frank Frazetta

Swordsmen in the Sky, edited by Donald Wollheim

If our genre has a holy grail to find, this would be it. I read this collection as a kid. Found it in our local library. And loved every single story in there. Took me a while to find a copy as an adult but it’s one of my pride and joys.

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Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Five: From the Beginning — The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Five: From the Beginning — The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

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The Hobbit first edition dust jacket (1937). Cover by JRR Tolkien

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party – The Hobbit

Fifty years ago, when I first read this book, I didn’t imagine I’d still be reading it so many years later. Heck, I doubt I could have even imagined being as old as I am now. But I do reread it every few years. When I revisit The Hobbit, my journey is bathed in nostalgia as much as with the simple enjoyment caused by reading a charming book that I happen to know inside out, from the opening line above on through to the very end.

In my initial article on half a century of reading Tolkien back in January, I described my dad trying to get our first color tv in time to watch the Rankin & Bass The Hobbit. Remembering that again last week left me thinking more of my dad, now gone nearly 24 years, than the book. He was ten years younger than I am now when the movie first aired, which makes me feel incredibly old at the moment. For such a conservative man,  he was excited to see it — admittedly, in a restrained way. I think we liked it well enough, but leaving out Beorn irked us both. Beyond Tolkien’s books, our fantasy tastes rarely coincided (I’ve got a shelf full of David Eddings books he bought, if anyone’s interested), but with The Hobbit and LOTR, we were in complete agreement.

What’s there to say about The Hobbit here on Black Gate? Nothing, really. I imagine most visitors here have read it, many more than once, and have their own ideas on it. It’s one of the most widely read books in the world. Instead, I’m going to discuss some adaptations of the book. But first, a summary.

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Tor Double #9: Isaac Asimov’s The Ugly LIttle Boy and Theodore Sturgeon’s The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff

Tor Double #9: Isaac Asimov’s The Ugly LIttle Boy and Theodore Sturgeon’s The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff

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Cover for The Ugly Little Boy by Alan Gutierrez
Cover for The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff by Carol Russo
The ninth Tor Double collects novellas by Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon, the only entries by either author. The Asimov’s story is The Ugly Little Boy and Sturgeon offers the oddly titled The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff. This volume is the first to include two stories that did not win, or even receive a nomination, for any awards. Leigh Brackett’s story in the previous volume wound up winning the 2020 Retro Hugo Award.

Theodore Sturgeon’s The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff was originally published in F&SF in November, 1955. The strange title is entirely fitting for the strange story Sturgeon has to tell. Just as two of the words in the title are framed by brackets, the story has a science fictional device framing it, in the form of a report by two aliens visiting Earth. In their report, which partly looks at whether or not “Synapse Beta sub Sixteen” exists in humans (and whether the species can survive without it), but also serves as an indictment of one of aliens by the other, the aliens set words in brackets when there is no exact English equivalent for what they are attempting to say.

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A Kind Heart and the Right Sort of Hands: Carbonel, the King of the Cats by Barbara Sleigh

A Kind Heart and the Right Sort of Hands: Carbonel, the King of the Cats by Barbara Sleigh

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Carbonel the King of the Cats by Barbara Sleigh (Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1957). Illustrated by V.H. Drummond

Over the past few years, I’ve started tracking down books I read as a child and still remember, to see what I think of them now. Some of them I’ve had to buy; but I live close to a university library, which still has others on its shelves. I just reread Barbara Sleigh’s Carbonel, the King of the Cats (illustrated by V.H. Drummond), originally published 1955, and enjoyed it enough to think it deserves a review.

Sleigh was clearly an aelurophile; this book is dedicated to one cat and to the shades of four others. I’m pleased that its feline hero, Carbonel, is a black cat (as his name suggests!) — a breed that doesn’t get as much love as it deserves. He has very convincing catlike manners, mixing condescension, sarcasm, and occasional affection. At the same time, he fits one of the classic story formulas, being a lost heir of royal birth, with a title that he hopes to reclaim.

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Transcendent and Creepy: Rich Horton on The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Transcendent and Creepy: Rich Horton on The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

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The Forever War (Ballantine Books, 1976). Cover by Murray Tinkelman

Rich Horton continues to review classic science fiction novels at his blog, Strange at Ecbatan. Last month he turned his attention to Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, on the 50th anniversary of its release.

It’s definitely worth reading — a bitter and cynical look at war, some cool ideas including the effect of time dilation and lots of physics, a somewhat transcendent but pretty creepy conclusion. And, also, some very ’70s things, including pretty questionable — at times downright offensive — “sexual revolution” era sexual politics, and oddly 70s-ish notions of dystopia. My impression… I liked it then and I endorsed its Hugo and Nebula wins.

The Forever War is one of the most honored science fiction novels of all time. First published by St. Martin’s Press in 1975, it swept every major SF Award, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. In 1987 it placed 18th on Locus’ list of All-Time Best SF Novels, beating out The Martian Chronicles, Starship Troopers, and Rendezvous with Rama. It’s been in print nearly continuously for the last four and a half decades. Here’s some of the most noteworthy editions.

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Tor Doubles #8: Leigh Brackett’s The Nemesis from Terra and Edmond Hamilton’s Battle for the Stars

Tor Doubles #8: Leigh Brackett’s The Nemesis from Terra and Edmond Hamilton’s Battle for the Stars

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Cover for The Nemesis from Terra by Tony Roberts
Cover for Battle for the Stars by Bryn Barnard

This volume includes the story Nemesis from Terra by Leigh Brackett and Battle for the Stars, byt Edmond Hamilton. There are two significant distinctions for this volumes. The two authors represented  were married to each other and one of the stories was previously included in the Ace Double series. The Tor Double was originally published in May 1989.

The Nemesis from Terra was originally published as “Shadow Over Mars” in Startling Stories in Fall, 1944. It was previously published as part of an Ace Double (F-123, with Robert Silverberg’s Collision Course) in 1961.  The Nemesis from Terra is the first of three Brackett stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series.

Although set on Mars in the far future, as with many of Brackett’s Martian stories, The Nemesis from Terra feels more like a fantasy novel than a science fiction novel. It is a descendant of the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs and could easily be classified with the stories of Robert E. Howard, neither of which is a surprise.

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When Satire is Overwhelmed by Reality: Moon Missing: Edward Sorel’s Report on Future Events

When Satire is Overwhelmed by Reality: Moon Missing: Edward Sorel’s Report on Future Events

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Moon Missing (1962)

At about 1:46 am EST in the middle of the American night of April 4, 1965 the Moon disappeared. The American people were informed the next day at a Presidential news conference. President Kennedy was in no way responsible, said Allen Dulles, disgraced former CIA director but now Secretary of the Exterior, tapped to safeguard American interests in outer space.

Cartoonist, caricaturist, satirist Edward Sorel published Moon Missing in 1962. He had no need to prognosticate the future; the world around him gave him all the ammunition his ink Speedball B6 required.

So insistent are we today that the early Sixties were a more innocent time that the reality of the fear, paranoia, tension, and general unhappiness of the era can only be exhumed from period pieces. Sorel’s vision of the craziness ready to be let loose by a global event relied heavily on contemporary names in the news, but to find frighteningly many parallels in today’s world the names need only to be changed to modern equivalents.

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Tor Doubles #6: Barry B. Longyear’s Enemy Mine and John Kessel’s Another Orphan

Tor Doubles #6: Barry B. Longyear’s Enemy Mine and John Kessel’s Another Orphan

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Cover for Enemy Mine by Maren
Cover for Another Orphan by Tom Kidd

 

The sixth Tor Double not only includes the two title stories, Barry B. Longyear’s Enemy Mine and John Kessel’s Another Orphan, but also includes an excerpt from Gwyneth Jones’s novel Divine Endurance.  Divine Endurance was originally published in Britain in 1984 and in the U.S. as a hardcover by Arbor House in 1987. Tor was scheduled to publish a paperback edition of the novel in May of 1989, two months after this Tor Double hit the shelves. With the two title stories totaling only 158 pages, the decision was made to add a twenty page excerpt of the forthcoming novel.

Enemy Mine was originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in September, 1979. It won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, as well as the Locus poll. Enemy Mine kicked off Longyear’s “Dracon” series and was the basis for the 1985 film Enemy Mine, starring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett, Jr.

The year after the initial publication and success of Enemy Mine, Longyear published an extended version of the story, which has generally superseded the version that won the Hugo and Nebula Award. It is this revised version that is included in this volume.

Enemy Mine is set during a war between humans and the lizard-like Drac, both of whom see the other race as trying to impinge on their own nascent interstellar hegemonies. It is clear from the beginning that there is little communication between the races and the war has been taking place for quite some time and there is no end in sight. …

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Tor Doubles #5: Poul Anderson’s No Truce with Kings and Fritz Leiber’s Ship of Shadows

Tor Doubles #5: Poul Anderson’s No Truce with Kings and Fritz Leiber’s Ship of Shadows

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Cover for No Truce with Kings by Royo
Cover for Ship of Shadows by Robin Wood

 

Both Poul Anderson’s No Truce for Kings and Fritz Leiber’s Ship of Shadows originally appeared in issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Not only did their initial publication occur in the same periodical, but both of those original issues sported covers painted by Ed Emshwiller.

No Truce for Kings was originally published in F&SF in June, 1963. It won the Hugo Award and received a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 2010. No Truce for Kings In is the first of three Anderson stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series.

Colonel James Mackenzie is the commander of Fort Nakamura in a post-apocalyptic California who receives a message that Judge Brodsky has been deposed and replaced by Judge Fallon. This message is the indication to Mackenzie that a civil war has broken out. Although Mackenzie and his troops are loyal to the old regime, the letter makes it clear that Mackenzie’s son-in-law, Thomas Danielis, is aligned with the rebels, as well as serving as a hostage for the troops who are coming to relieve Mackenzie of his command.

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