Black Gate

I haven’t read much Jack London. He’s most famous of course for his novels of the Klondike Gold Rush, The Call of the Wild and White Fang, which are outside my field of speciality. But he also dabbled a bit in the genre, both at novel length (with his dystopian science fiction novel The Iron Heel) and especially with his short stories, which were routinely reprinted in places like Famous Fantastic Mysteries and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He had one posthumous SF collection, The Science Fiction Stories of Jack London (1993), a 211-page volume from Citadel Twilight.

But I’m more interested in his tales of terror, which include stories of death ships, spectres, the mysterious arctic, enormous wolves, and stranger things. Most of London’s tales of adventure were gathered in collections like Son of the Wolf (1900) and Children of the Frost (1902), but his supernatural fiction remained largely uncollected until it was gathered in Curious Fragments: Jack London’s Tales of Fantasy Fiction, a small press hardcover from Kennikat Press in 1975.

Three years later some of his most popular supernatural stories, like “A Thousand Deaths” (from The Black Cat, May 1899), and “Even Unto Death” (San Francisco Evening Post Magazine, 1900) were published in paperback for the first time, with several of London’s tales of suspense, in Thirteen Tales of Terror (Popular Library), edited and with an introduction by John Perry. Here’s a photo of the intriguing story teasers from the inside front cover.

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In a 2014 Vanity Fair interview, George R.R. Martin shared just how profoundly he was affected by the death of Tom Reamy in 1977.

Tom died of a heart attack just a few months after winning the award for best new writer in his field. He was found slumped over his typewriter, seven pages into a new story. Instant. Boom. Killed him… Tom’s death had a profound effect on me, because I was in my early thirties then. I’d been thinking, as I taught, well, I have all these stories that I want to write… and I have all the time in the world… and then Tom’s death happened, and I said, Boy. Maybe I don’t…

After Tom’s death, I said, “You know, I gotta try this. I don’t know if I can make a living as a full-time writer or not, but who knows how much time I have left?…” So I decided I would sell my house in Iowa and move to New Mexico. And I’ve never looked back.

In the same article George also commented on the relentless pace of production on Game of Thrones, saying “Long before they catch up with me, I’ll have published The Winds of Winter, which’ll give me another couple years. It might be tight on the last book, A Dream of Spring, as they juggernaut forward.” Might be tight indeed. Almost four years later The Winds of Winter remains unpublished, and GoT has long since passed the novels.

Who the heck was Tom Reamy? That’s a question the late Bud Webster attempted to answer in his inaugural column in Black Gate 15.

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Michael Shaara won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 Civil War novel The Killer Angels. It was a huge bestseller, selling more than 2 million copies worldwide, and became the basis for the 1993 film Gettysburg.

Most of Shaara’s legion of fans don’t know that he began his career as as a science fiction writer. His first publication was “Orphans of the Void” in the June 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Matthew Wuertz has been reviewing the entire back catalog of Galaxy since its first issue; he described the story thusly.

Captain Steffens and his crew explore the Tyban solar system. They find the third planet populated by millions of robots. The robots are telepathic, in the likeness of their makers, who are nowhere to be found. Yet the robots continue to await the return of their makers, for their longing to serve is their primary function. This was a marvelous tale of first encounters. It plays out well, with a touch of sadness that leads to great hope.

Over the next 30 years Shaara’s short fiction appeared in genre magazines like F&SF, Astounding, Fantastic Universe, and Galaxy. In 1982 he issued a single collection gathering most of his finest short fiction, Soldier Boy, published through David Hartwell’s legendary Timescape imprint at Pocket Books.

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