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Winter Reading: The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson with an Assist from James Stoddard

Winter Reading: The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson with an Assist from James Stoddard

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night land

If you’ve at any point heard some rumors, some whispers, some strange buzz about this book by William Hope Hodgson called The Night Land… maybe you’ve heard it is one of the greatest works of horror or dystopian dark fantasy…but you’ve also heard that it’s practically unreadable because of Hodgson’s choice to write it in a very weird prose style…”Penned in 1912, The Night Land is considered by many to be a work of genius, but one written in a difficult, archaic style that readers often find impenetrable.”

In 2010, James Stoddard (a fantastic fantasy author in his own right) wrote a “translation” into a more modern, readable vernacular. If you’re thinking of maybe reading Stoddard’s version, I must tell you this:

DO IT. Sooner rather than later. The fact is, one of the all-time great masterworks of sustained horror and imaginative vision, was, unfortunately, self-hampered by its author with his choice of writing it in a clunky, pseudo-archaic language. Stoddard did a supreme service to all of us by simply adapting the work into accessible modern English. I read Stoddard’s version, and via that gateway discovered what all the fuss was about. Yes, it really is that great an achievement: If Hodgson had written it in more accessible language, it would be as well known and celebrated today as any of the other seminal works of horror, fantasy, and science fiction.

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Vintage Treasures: Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home by James Tiptree, Jr.

Vintage Treasures: Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home by James Tiptree, Jr.

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Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home-small Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home-back-small

James Tiptree, Jr — aka Alice Sheldon — was one of the finest science fiction writers of the 20th Century. As Thomas Parker put it in his review of her Hugo Award-winning biography The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips:

Alice Hastings Bradley Davey Sheldon was a remarkable person — world traveler, painter, sportswoman, CIA analyst, Ph.D. in experimental psychology… and one of the greatest of all science fiction writers. If you don’t recognize her name, that’s partly by her own design.

Born in 1915, from an early age Alice was a lover of this new genre that was in those days still called “scientifiction,” devouring every copy of Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, and Amazing Stories that she could find, but it wasn’t until the mid 60’s that she tried her hand at writing any SF herself. After some false starts, she completed a few stories and in 1967, when she was 51, she sent them off to John Campbell at Analog, not really expecting anything to come of it. As she considered the whole thing something of a lark, she submitted the manuscripts under a goofy pseudonym that she and her husband, Huntington (Ting) Sheldon, cooked up one day while they were grocery shopping — James Tiptree Jr. The Tiptree came from a jar of Tiptree jam; Ting added the junior.

To Alice’s professed surprise, Campbell bought one of the stories, “Birth of a Salesman.” A new science fiction writer was born, one who would, in the space of just a few years, make a tremendous impact on the genre (as two Hugos, three Nebulas, and a World Fantasy Award attest, to say nothing of the James Tiptree Jr. Award, which is given to works which expand or explore our understandings of gender).

Tiptree wrote two novels, Up the Walls of the World (1978) and Brightness Falls from the Air (1985), but it’s her short fiction for which she is remembered. Virtually all of her short stories have been gathered in important collections such as Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Arkham House, 1990) and Meet Me at Infinity (Tor, 2000). But I don’t think it’ll come as a surprise to anyone that I prefer to read Tiptree in her original paperbacks, including her very first collection, Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home, released by Ace in 1973.

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Dune: Warts and All

Dune: Warts and All

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Dune Frank Herbert-smallI read Frank Herbert’s Dune for the first time during university and loved it. It was pretty obvious why it had won the 1965 Hugo and Nebula awards. When I was in my late 30s, I went back to it, and couldn’t get through even a few chapters before the crash-and-burn. What happened?

Bad writing to start with, mostly bad dialogue. The first bunch of chapters intercuts a lot between interesting things, like the Bene Gesserit and prescient memories, and Paul’s adventures, and cartoony super-villainy spouting Republic Serial Villain dialogue.

“Fools!”

“Those fools!”

“I’m going to get you!”

This execrable dialogue doesn’t even contain itself to the quotation marks. In-narrative close-third person dips into character’s thoughts spread the pain into the narrative and make George Lucas look like Hemingway.

We spend so much time with the villains in their self-congratulatory soliloquies at the beginning that I just stopped, scratching my head at how I could have enjoyed this.

Was I just a naive reading at 20, or had the style of writing changed so much between 1990 and 2010s that I’d gotten accustomed to different styles and aesthetics? I think probably it’s a bit of both.

But finally, in 2018, I finally tried again and pressed through and it turns out that after Paul and his mother are in the desert, the villains take a back seat. Then we get into the good stuff like the Fremen culture, some of the implications of the Bene Gesserit missionary work, the prescient memories as perceptions through time, and the sand worms.

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Oz Goes Thrift Shopping: “This is [bleeping] Awesome!”

Oz Goes Thrift Shopping: “This is [bleeping] Awesome!”

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Nick Ozment's loot-small

On Wednesday, January 17, 2018, after I clocked out from work, I decided to do a 5 for 5: Hit all five of Med City’s thrift stores (at least that I know of) — 2 Goodwills, 2 Salvation Armys, and a Savers. I also dropped in at Nerdin’ Out, a store that specializes in collectible comic books and action figures.

It was a challenge, as I had just sprained my ankle that morning, and the walks down the aisles started to feel longer and longer as the day wore on. By the time the sun was setting, I had adopted the limping, shambling gait of the recently undead. But the increasingly incredible finds that I kept stumbling upon at one store after the other released enough adrenalin to keep me going — all the way until I got home, pulled off my snow boot, and found my ankle swollen to double its size.

Here (sharing only the finds that would be of particular interest to readers of this site) is my haul. Not all pickin’ days are this fruitful, I assure you. If they always turned out like today, hell, this is all I’d ever do.

From schlocky VHS horror flicks and classic sci-fi paperbacks to giant rubber snakes and other rare collectibles, today’s pick turned up treasures from across the entire spectrum of what I hunt for.

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Birthday Reviews: Pamela Dean’s “Paint the Meadow with Delight”

Birthday Reviews: Pamela Dean’s “Paint the Meadow with Delight”

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Cover by Darrell K. Sweet
Cover by Darrell K. Sweet

Pamela Dean was born on January 18, 1953. Dean has published the Secret Country trilogy as well as three stand-alone novels. In the 1980s, she was involved in the Liavek series of shared world anthologies, contributing stories to each of the five volumes as well as the title poem for the fourth volume. She has been nominated for the Mythopoeic Award twice, for her novels Tam Lin and The Dubious Hills.

Her story “Paint the Meadows with Delight” appeared in Will Shetterly and Emma Bull’s anthology Liavek: Wizard’s Row in 1987, and was reprinted in 2015 in Patricia Wrede and Pamela Dean’s Points of Departure: Liavek Stories.

Although set in a shared universe, Pamela Dean’s “Paint the Meadows with Delight” stands on its own. The Benedictis are a large Acrivain family living in exile in the city of Liavek. While the father attends political meetings, the rest of the family lives in wait for the day they can return to their native country. One of the daughters, Jehane, is convinced the Acrivain god Acrilat has turned his back on the family because they have left their native land. The result is that the family is in turmoil and one of the sons, Deleon, has disappeared.

Jehane is determined to restore her family to their lost happiness and seeks out one of Liavek’s wizards to help. Jehane’s plan isn’t particular well thought out, in either her goals or her mission. She seeks both to have Acrilat leave her family alone and also to have the family able to return to an Acrivain that is politically welcoming to them. These goals, along with her search for her missing brother, take her on a miniature quest through Liavek, visiting Granny Carry, the Magician, and, at the Magician’s insistence, the House of Responsible Life, and Silvertop, another magician.

In the end, the success of her quest, or even who helped her achieve it, is questionable. The most that can be said is that Jehane may have been able to reconnect on some level with her younger sister, Nerissa, who she also learned has been quite active in ways that Jehane had not even suspected.

While the story can be read and enjoyed on its own merits, its place in the shared-world universe gives it quite a bit of background depth and its structure as a quest around Liavek allows Dean to touch on the characters and concepts created by the other authors.

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Time to Revise Your Lin Carter Bibliography

Time to Revise Your Lin Carter Bibliography

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The Brythunian Prints 1-smallAmong the couple of boxes of fanzines I picked up a few weeks ago was this oddity.

It’s the first (and I suspect only) issue of The Brythunian Prints, dated June 1967. I’ve not been able to find out any information at all on this title. It was a sword and sorcery fanzine, “published by the Brythunian Troop of the Hyborean Legion.”

The editors (Ken Hulme, Jim Feerhmeyer and Greg Shank) dedicate the issue “to L. Sprague de Camp and George Scithers for their kindness and cooperation!” Based on Shank’s editorial, they were apparently students at Toledo University, where they formed an organization called the Northwest Ohio Science Fiction Society.

The fanzine is 16 pages long, five pages of which are a S&S story, “Shandu the Magnificent” by Tom Trotter and Ken Hulme. It’s just as good as you would expect it to be. ?

The most interesting content is two pages of poetry by Lin Carter, under the general heading “War Songs and Battle Cries,” apparently reprinted with Carter’s permission from The Wizard of Lemuria and Thongor of Lemuria. The remaining content is taken up with editorials, limericks by John Boardman (four of which were reprinted from Amra) and a book review of The Fantastic Swordsmen edited by de Camp. The back cover is Tolkien related, as it pictures “Baggins and Trinket” (the Ring).

I’d be curious to know if anyone has any further info on this one.

Doug’s last post for us was The Fellowship of the Ring and the Palantir.

Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1954: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1954: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy January 1954-small Galaxy January 1954-back-small

Mel Hunter’s “Flight Over Mercury” is featured on the cover of the January, 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s much more interesting than the actual surface of Mercury, which looks a lot like our moon.

“Natural State” by Damon Knight — The major cities of the United States operate as industrial nations of their own while the rest of the country becomes agricultural. The cities repeatedly try to subjugate those in the country, but the cities’ technology can’t compete against the genetic engineering of those in the country.

Alvah is sent from New York to open trade with the outsiders — the Muckfeet — in hopes of bringing them into a civilized world and to support the needs of the city. When he meets with the Muckfeet, he finds that they consider him backwards – that those in the cities are the uncultured, uncivilized people. It’s up to a young woman named B.J. to reeducate him, if he’ll listen.

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Birthday Reviews: Robert Silverberg’s “When We Went to See the End of the World”

Birthday Reviews: Robert Silverberg’s “When We Went to See the End of the World”

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Cover by Dean Ellis
Cover by Dean Ellis

Robert Silverberg was born on January 15, 1935. In 1956, he won a Hugo for being the Most Promising New Author, nearly two decades before the John W. Campbell, Jr. Award debuted. He has subsequently won two Hugo Awards for Best Novella and one for Best Novelette. Silverberg has also received two Nebula Awards for Best Short Story, two more for Best Novella, and one for Best Novel.

He has won or been nominated for numerous other awards. Silverberg was a Guest of Honor at Heicon ‘70, the 28th Worldcon, held in Heidelberg, Germany. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999 and named an SFWA Grand Master in 2004. Other lifetime achievement awards include the Big Heart Award, the Forry Award, the Prix Utopia, the Skylark Award, the Milford Award.

“When We Went to See the End of the World” was published in Universe 2 in 1972 by Terry Carr. The story was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Award. Carr reprinted it the following year in The Best Science Fiction of the Year #2, and Isaac Asimov included it in Nebula Award Stories Eight. Lester del Rey also included it in his Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Second Annual Collection. It has since been included in several collections and anthologies and has been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, and Russian.

“When We Went to See the End of the World” is set at a cocktail party which in many ways seems very much of the early seventies when the story was written. Casual sex and marijuana are routine, but the main focus of the story is Nick and Jane telling the rest of the attendees about their recent excursion to see the end of the world.

Such excursions are new, only recently having come down from a price where only millionaires could afford to go, so Nick and Jane gained social status by being the first in their neighborhood to see the end of the world, and Nick sees the opportunity to have an affair with a neighbor’s wife.

Their status, and Nick’s chances for an affair, appear to be ended when a couple of latecomers to the party indicate that they have also taken the journey to the end of the world, although the world they saw was extremely different from what Nick and Jane had experienced. Before either couple can accuse each other of lying about their experiences, another couple announces that they completed the journey and saw someone else when they were there.

The story is a reasonably light-hearted look at a common idea in science fiction and presents a reasonable explanation for the multiple experiences the party-goers who visited the end of the world had. At the same time, since all of the activity takes place in the confines of the cocktail party, it is quite possible to read “When We Went to See the End of the World” is a story about people trying to one up each other, rather than relating their actual experiences.

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Vintage Treasures: Dark Imaginings: A Collection of Gothic Fantasy edited by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski

Vintage Treasures: Dark Imaginings: A Collection of Gothic Fantasy edited by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski

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Dark Imaginings 1978-small Dark Imaginings 1978-back-small


Dark Imaginings, edited by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski (Delta, July 1978). Cover by Joel Schick

Dark Imaginings is the first dark fantasy anthology I can remember lusting after in a bookstore. It was published in 1978, when I was 14 years old, at the lordly price of $4.95 — pretty steep in an era when a typical paperback was a buck fifty, even for a big oversized trade paperback.

In those days I would make weekly sojourns to downtown Ottawa every Saturday afternoon to hunt through the used bookstores on Bank Street for science fiction paperbacks, and I would gaze at it longingly on the bookshelf at WHSmith, or take it down and thumb through it. Joel Schick’s beautiful cover, featuring a canopy of dead, grasping trees in a twisted wood, spoke to me of dark tales whispered by strangers on Halloween. Man, I wanted this book.

And who wouldn’t? Dark Imaginings is packed with classic tales of gothic fantasy, including a Kull tale by Robert E. Howard, a Northwest Smith novelette by C. L. Moore, an Averoigne story by Clark Ashton Smith, a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tale by Fritz Leiber, a Cthulhu Mythos story by H. P. Lovecraft, a novel excerpt from Poul Anderson, and ten more stories. Each is illustrated with a sparse b&w pencil sketch by James Cagle. It’s a fine volume to curl up by the window with on a blustery winter evening, as I learned when I finally bought a copy, over a decade later.

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War Eternal: Beyond the Farthest Star by Edgar Rice Burroughs

War Eternal: Beyond the Farthest Star by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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beyond-farthest-star-ace-frazetta-coverIn 1940, Edgar Rice Burroughs created his final new adventure setting, the extrasolar planet Poloda. For the first time in a career that had ignited pulp science fiction back in 1912, Burroughs pushed beyond the solar system to the region of pure speculation. But what he discovered four hundred and fifty thousand light-years from Earth wasn’t an E. E. Smith space opera, or even an old-fashioned romp on a weird planet of monsters and savage humanoid tribes. Against the grain of its romanticized title, the incomplete short novel Beyond the Farthest Star isn’t an escapist tale, but a bleak meditation on a world mired in unending warfare. The title makes you anticipate Star Wars. Instead you find just Wars.

This is a stark work. It offers no illusions. There’s a dash of humor and some winking satire, but the overwhelming sensation of Beyond the Farthest Star is resignation to carnage. There are no valiant heroes on Poloda who become beacons for others to follow. There are only stalwart soldiers who fall in line to fight the fight, whatever it may be, and die in numbers tabulated by the hundreds of thousands.

We’re used to Edgar Rice Burroughs as a master of sweeping adventure in worlds where fighting means hope. It’s a shock to see him sitting glumly among the ruins of hope, waiting for the next wave of barbarians. Looking at Poloda from the perspective of the twenty-first century is to see a prophetic futurist emerging in Old Man Burroughs. The story the Old Man tells is not much fun. But it’s enthralling — and there’s nothing else like it in the ERB canon, even among the strange evolutions his work took during his last decade.

As with Savage Pellucidar and its sister books set on Mars and Venus, the Poloda novellas were planned to form a connected sequence for later hardcover publication. Part I, “Beyond the Farthest Star,” was written in October 1940 over twelve days, and Part II, “Tangor Returns,” was finished in December in five days. “Beyond the Farthest Star” appeared in the January 1942 issue of Blue Book, but Burroughs never submitted Part II for publication, probably because he scrapped the series after starting work as a war correspondent. “Tangor Returns” wasn’t discovered until thirteen years after Burroughs’s death. It was published along with “Beyond the Farthest Star” in the 1964 Canaveral Press omnibus Tales from Three Planets. Ace Books later released a paperback of the unfinished Poloda saga as Beyond the Farthest Star, with the first novella retitled “Adventure on Poloda.”

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