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Category: Vintage Treasures

Future Treasures: The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds

Future Treasures: The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds

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Arthur C Clarke A Meeting With Medusa-small Arthur C Clarke The Medusa Chronicles-small

Arthur C. Clarke’s A Meeting With Medusa won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1971, and 45 years later is still considered one of the great classics of SF. It introduced us to Howard Falcon, who suffered a terrible accident while exploring the hostile skies of Jupiter — an accident that nearly destroyed his helium-filled airship, and both turned him into the world’s first cyborg, his badly damaged body largely replaced with machines, and made him essentially immortal. When Falcon returns to Jupiter in a more advanced ship, he makes contact with giant jellyfish-like creatures he names “Medusae.” The Medusae may be intelligent, and Falcon’s experience with them changes him even more dramatically than his previous accident. Now Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds have written a novel-length sequel to Clarke’s classic tale, following Falcon’s further adventures to the limits of our solar system… and beyond.

Inspired by Clarke’s novella, The Medusa Chronicles continues the story of Howard Falcon, perhaps humanity’s greatest ambassador and explorer, and the centuries of his adventures among our solar system, the rise of artificial intelligence, and our expansion on to other planets, written with the permission from Clarke’s estate by two of our greatest science fiction writers, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds.

The Medusa Chronicles is an awe-inspiring work by two modern masters of science fiction who have taken the vision of one the field’s greatest writers and expanded upon it, combining cutting-edge science, philosophy, and technology into a transcendent work of fiction that offers a plausible future for our solar system through the eyes of one of its great fictional heroes.

The Medusa Chronicles will be published by Saga Press on June 7, 2016. It is 412 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $7.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Getty Images.

Parallel Universes and Space Marines: Rich Horton on The Games of Neith by Margaret St. Clair/The Earth Gods are Coming by Kenneth Bulmer

Parallel Universes and Space Marines: Rich Horton on The Games of Neith by Margaret St. Clair/The Earth Gods are Coming by Kenneth Bulmer

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The Games of Neith-small The Earth Gods Are Coming-small
Galaxy, June 1975
Galaxy, June 1975

Over at his website Strange at Ecbatan, Rich Horton looks at another obscure Ace Double.

Here’s an Ace Double featuring a couple of authors I’ve discussed before. I bought it partly because of that — both writers have proved enjoyable in the past, St. Clair often more than that, and, partly, frankly, because of the quite gorgeous Emswhiller cover on the St. Clair book, which for some reason reminded me of Wendy Pini’s cover for the June 1975 Galaxy.

I wrote before about Margaret St. Clair (1911-1995) as follows: “She was one of the more noticeable early women writers of SF, but somehow her profile was a bit lower than those of C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, and Andre Norton. Perhaps it was simply that those writers did just a bit more, and were just a bit better (taken as a whole) than her, but it does seem that she’s not quite as well remembered as perhaps she deserves. One contributing factor is that she wrote some of her very best stories pseudonymously, as “Idris Seabright.” 20 or so of her 50+ short stories were as by Seabright, including some of the very best (such as “Short in the Chest” and “An Egg a Month from All Over”). She also wrote 8 novels (four of them published as Ace Double halves). Her career in SF stretched from 1946 to 1981…”

Reading this book made clear to me another reason St. Clair is not as well remembered as Moore, Brackett, or Norton — she was much weaker at novel length than at shorter lengths. At least, that is, based on those I’ve read. The Games of Neith was a terrible disappointment to me — it’s really just a bad, silly, book.

Sadly the flip side, Kenneth Bulmer’s The Earth Gods are Coming, doesn’t measure up much better.

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Science Fiction Stories, January 1955: A Retro-Review

Science Fiction Stories, January 1955: A Retro-Review

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Science Fiction Stories January 1955-smallMuch has been made, justifiably, of Robert A. W. Lowndes’ habit of making bricks without straw over decades with Columbia Publications’ magazines, mostly Future and Science Fiction Stories. He fought tiny budgets and ridiculously irregular publication schedules to produce credible issues time after time.

This issue appeared during a fairly prolific time for the magazines, though. Science Fiction Stories was now bimonthly, and, shockingly enough, 6 issues did appear in 1955. For that matter, 4 more issues of Science Fiction Quarterly also appeared. Only one issue of Future, but that makes 11 issues total for Lowndes that year — almost as many as John W. Campbell!

This issue of Science Fiction Stories is light on features — only one is listed, “Voyage to Nowhere,” by Wallace West, but Lowndes notes “Twenty years ago, this would have been presented to readers as a story.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but 60 years later, I still say it’s a story, and I’m not quite sure why Lowndes wants to call it “a speculative essay.” So I’ll list it with the fiction.

The cover is by Ed Emshwiller, not too typical of his best work (and not illustrating any of the stories). Interiors are by Emsh, Freas, and Orban.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu, Part Seven – “Karamaneh”

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu, Part Seven – “Karamaneh”

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NOTE: The following article was first published on May 23, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 260 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

The_Mystery_of_Dr._Fu-Manchu_cover_1913-227x350karamaneh-1“Karamaneh” was the sixth installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu first published in The Story-Teller in March 1913. The story would later comprise Chapters 16 and 17 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (initially re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for U.S. publication). The story opens with Nayland Smith, Dr. Petrie, and Inspector Weymouth preparing a dragnet around the area where Dr. Fu-Manchu is known to have a base of operations. They have no illusion that they will capture the doctor himself, but hope to round up enough of his minions to deal a significant blow to the enemy.

Smith and Petrie are among a dozen Scotland Yard men combing the area. As they pass by a gypsy encampment, Smith recognizes one of the gypsies as a disguised dacoit who is wanted for murder in Burma (where Smith serves as police commissioner). While they fail to apprehend the man, they succeed in capturing the female gypsy before she can escape. The disguised gypsy woman turns out to be the mysterious slave girl who has repeatedly saved Petrie’s life since Smith first involved him in the affair. Rohmer does an excellent job of conveying Petrie’s mixed feelings of compulsion and revulsion when faced with this dangerous and exotic woman.

The reader shares Petrie’s ambivalence towards this complex character. She is beautiful and graced with a foreign otherness that defies precise identification and she has risked her own life several times in order to save Petrie, yet she has also willingly participated in the murder of countless other innocent men. Rohmer makes much of her unabashed stare that few men would be able to hold. Petrie is fascinated with her, but also feels ashamed that the object of his affection is opposed to all that defines a British subject at this point in time.

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Vintage Trash: Producers Releasing Corporation, the Poorest of Hollywood’s Poverty Row

Vintage Trash: Producers Releasing Corporation, the Poorest of Hollywood’s Poverty Row

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Strangler_of_the_Swamp_poster

The 1930s through 1950s are generally seen as Hollywood’s Golden Age. It was a time when major studios had glamorous stars and made blockbuster pictures with casts of thousands.

It was also a time when cheap production companies ground out quickie films on a shoestring budget, and sometimes, just sometimes, created something worth watching.

Welcome to Poverty Row, the result of the world’s insatiable appetite for film. In the days before television, many people went to the movies every day. Not only did they get a movie, but they also got a newsreel, cartoon, and a shorter “B” movie. Neighborhood theaters often showed B-movies as features since they were cheaper to rent and the audience of local kids didn’t care about great production quality, they just wanted to see some cowboys shooting it up. And that’s where Poverty Row came in.

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The Granddaughter of Fu Manchu

The Granddaughter of Fu Manchu

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MSMM 0181Mike Shayne, the redheaded tough guy private eye, was introduced in the decidedly more lighthearted detective novel, Dividend on Death penned by the pseudonymous Brett Halliday in 1939. The character was an instant success and Michael Shayne (as he was initially known) quickly became a cottage industry leading to another 77 (mostly hardboiled) detective novels through the mid-1970s, over 300 short stories through the mid-1980s, 11 B-movies in the 1940s, a radio drama series that lasted nearly a decade, an early 1960s television series that made it for a full season, a TV tie-in Dell comic book that lasted three issues, and his own magazine digest that ran for nearly 30 years. The character may seem like just another clichéd private eye today, but over the years a number of very talented authors hid behind the fedora and turned-up collar of “Brett Halliday” – Bill Pronzini, Dennis Lynds, James Reasoner, Frank Belknap Long, and the ubiquitous Michael Avallone among them.

The reason we have turned our attention to this particular ginger with the mean disposition is a trilogy of stories that appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in 1981 and 1982 featuring a character known as the Black Lotus. As the storyline developed “Brett Halliday,” in this instance James Reasoner, strongly suggested the Black Lotus was the granddaughter of Fu Manchu. Mr. Reasoner was cautious and did not name names, of course, but elements of the three stories read like a Sax Rohmer tribute – including the Black Lotus’ real identity, Leiko Smith sharing the surname of the protagonist of the Fu Manchu stories, Nayland Smith. The character’s first name (which is Japanese, rather than Chinese) was likely borrowed from Leiko Wu, the love interest from Marvel Comics’ contemporaneous Master of Kung Fu series (1973-1983) which licensed the Fu Manchu characters from Rohmer’s literary estate. I first learned of the Black Lotus storyline from Win Scott Eckert’s very useful Fu Manchu chronology. My friend, Don O’Malley was kind enough to send me scanned copies of the three issues in question in order that I finally have a chance to read them.

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Ancient Planets and Treachery at Every Turn: Rich Horton on The Ginger Star by Leigh Brackett

Ancient Planets and Treachery at Every Turn: Rich Horton on The Ginger Star by Leigh Brackett

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The Ginger Star Steranko-small The Ginger Star Boris Vallejo-small The Ginger Star Planet Stories-small

Over at his personal blog Strange at Ecbatan, Rich Horton reviews one of the great classics of science fantasy, Leigh Brackett’s The Ginger Star, the opening novel in the three-volume Book of Skaith.

I adore the great Brackett stories of the late ’40s and early ‘50s, particularly The Sword of Rhiannon, one of the great pure planetary romances; and other stories in the same loosely developed future (though The Sword of Rhiannon is really set in the past): “The Halfling,” “The Dancing Girl of Ganymede,” “Mars Minus Bisha,” “Shannach – the Last,” for example. Other SF was also very fine, most notably The Long Tomorrow, a post-Apocalyptic novel; but also The Big Jump and The Starmen of Llyrdis. Her slightly later story from Venture, “The Queer Ones” (aka “The Other People”) is excellent, and not terribly well known. The Eric John Stark stories fit into her Mars/Venus/etc. future – and they are quite enjoyable as well. Stark is portrayed as a nearly savage man, raised as an orphan on Mercury, and rampaging through Venus and Mars in the most prominent pieces.

The Skaith novels feature Stark as the protagonist, but they are set on a planet in another Solar System, Skaith. I had assumed that she set them there because the Mars and Venus of the earlier stories was no longer astronomically plausible, and perhaps that is the case, but it should be noted that in these books she does still portray Stark as a native of Mercury – also a highly implausible thing.

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The Iron Dragon’s Daughter: A Wholly Biased Review

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter: A Wholly Biased Review

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The-Iron-Dragons-Daughter-smallAh, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. John O’Neill asked me for a review a few weeks ago, and I thought, “Really? You want me to be objective when she and I are so very much in love?”

Because it is love, you know? And it burns hot enough to turn all negative comments to ash.

I’ve driven friends away with this obsession. “What do you see in The Iron Dragon’s Daughter?” they ask. “She’s so incoherent. She has practically no… no character.”

Yes, all right, all right. We’re talking about a book here. I knew that. Ink and paper, rather than flesh and bone. Born — apologies! — published in 1993. To some, like myself, it became a classic, but others greeted it with bewilderment and it has collected a slew (31%) of apathetic reviews on sites like Amazon.

The book has flaws, you see? It takes the type of liberties that would have most sane reviewers flinging stars away like wasps found on a beloved child.

“Where’s the plot?” they cry.

“Why is the main character so bland?”

Both of these accusations ring true. Michael Swanwick’s story does have an arc that flows from the first page to the last, but rather than a rushing torrent, what we have here meanders across an exotic plain of wonders, leaving half-finished tales behind like so many oxbow lakes.

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Once More Into the Primal Land: Tarra Khash: Hrossak! by Brian Lumley

Once More Into the Primal Land: Tarra Khash: Hrossak! by Brian Lumley

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oie_331744OeH2c07SWith Tarra Khash: Hrossak!, the British horror luminary Brian Lumley returns with six more stories of derring-do and magical skullduggery set in his primeval land, Theem’hdra. (Two years ago, I reviewed The House of Cthulhu, his first collection of swords & sorcery stories, here at Black Gate.) For those not familiar with the great island-continent, it’s another prehistoric land shoehorned into the Lovecraft Mythos timeline that includes Mu, Lemuria, Hyboria, Hyperborea, and several other forgotten places. It’s the sort of place endemic to tales of swords & sorcery, replete with strong-muscled heroes, conniving merchants, demon-haunted tombs, backstabbing villains, and dastardly wizards with faces hidden in deep cowls (all of which are found in this book).

Any moderately-read consumer of S&S will have experienced these elements, if not to the point of boredom, at least a whole bunch. To get away with the use of such hoary elements, an author must use them without a bit of irony, and with brio. Lumley does exactly that.

Lumley told Robert M. Price that his inspiration for The House of Cthulhu was the work of Clark Ashton Smith and Lord Dunsany, and it’s a claim only bolstered by the tales in this collection. While his prose is never as ornate or bejewelled as his models, there is a similar love for exotic, haunted landscapes draped in mystery and populated by ancient deities and uncanny magic.

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Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Six – “The Call of Siva”

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Six – “The Call of Siva”

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NOTE: The following article was first published on May 2, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 260 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

ColliersSivainsidious6“The Call of Siva” was the fifth installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu first published in The Story-Teller in February 1913. The story would later comprise Chapters 13-15 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (initially re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for its U.S. publication). Rohmer had built several of his Fu-Manchu stories on protracted paranoia and had previously made good use of a Limehouse opium den as a setting, but “The Call of Siva” sees him letting his plotline be dictated by the altered state of the waking dreamer for the first time and to great effect.

The story opens with our narrator, Dr. Petrie relating a strange dream which begins with him writhing on the floor in agony. Rohmer makes good use of Stygian darkness, Oriental tapestries, and Mohammedan paradise as suggestive imagery that Petrie’s queer dream, at once both mystifying and terrifying, is uniquely Eastern in origin. This point is confirmed as Petrie awakens with Nayland Smith as his cell mate. Only at this point does Rohmer resume something approaching a conventional narrative with Petrie’s murky recollection of he and Smith rushing to warn Graham Guthrie that he has been marked for assassination when they are abducted by unseen assailants from a passing limousine.

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