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Vintage Treasures: Assignment Nor’ Dyren by Sydney J. Van Scyoc

Vintage Treasures: Assignment Nor’ Dyren by Sydney J. Van Scyoc

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Assignment Nor Dyren-small Assignment Nor Dyren-back-small

Sydney J. Van Scyoc is an American science fiction writer. She was born in 1939, and published her first story, “Shatter the Wall,” in Galaxy magazine in 1962. She was very active for the next three decades, publishing eleven novels and around 30 stories between 1962 and 1991, including Saltflower (1971), Starmother (1976), Cloudcry (1977), Sunwaifs (1981), and the Daughters of the Sunstone trilogy. Most of her novels were published as paperback originals from Berkley or Avon. In 1992, she reportedly retired to make and sell jewelry, but in 2004 & 2005 she sold two new short stories to Gordon Van Gelder at F&SF.

Assignment Nor’ Dyren, her second novel, is one of her most well known. Compared by some to The Left Hand of Darkness, it’s the tale of two human agents to the planet Nor’ Dyren who discover the inhabitants have a social order that divides them into three specialized castes. But the world seems to be crumbling — broken machines are not being repaired, there’is no innovation, and society has been in decline for over two centuries. Tasked with saving the planet, the human agents find themselves up against strange and sinister opposition.

We last covered Sydney J. Van Scyoc with her 1989 fantasy novel Feather Stroke. Assignment Nor’ Dyren was published in October 1973 by Avon Books. It is 222 pages, priced at 75 cents. Believe it or not, the gorgeously baroque cover is uncredited, and no one seems to know for sure who painted it. It looks a lot like the work of Paul Lehr, but it’s hardly likely there’s an unidentified Lehr out there. Click the images above for bigger versions.

A Concentrated Dose of the Best Our Field Has to Offer: Jonathan Strahan’s Best Short Novels 2004-2007

A Concentrated Dose of the Best Our Field Has to Offer: Jonathan Strahan’s Best Short Novels 2004-2007

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Best Short Novels 2004-small Best Short Novels 2005-small Best Short Novels 2006-small Best Short Novels 2007-small

Jonathan Strahan is one of the most accomplished and acclaimed editors in the genre. He’s edited the annual Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year since 2007, as well as some of our most highly regarded original anthologies — including the Infinity series (Engineering Infinity, Edge of Infinity, etc) and the Fearsome books (Fearsome Journeys and Fearsome Magics), all for Solaris. He’s also edited (with Terry Dowling) one of my favorite ongoing series, the five volumes in the monumental Early Jack Vance from Subterranean Press.

But the work that truly made me a Strahan fan was a brief (four volume) series he did exclusively for the Science Fiction Book Club, Best Short Novels. I’d been a member of the SFBC since the age of twelve but, after leaving Canada for grad school in 1987 and moving around after that, I’d let my membership lapse. I received plenty of invites to rejoin after settling here in St. Charles, but it was Strahan’s first volume in the series, Best Short Novels: 2004, that finally enticed me to do it. I’ve never regretted it.

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read “Beyond the Black River”

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read “Beyond the Black River”

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Beyond the Black River Robert E Howard-smallHoward Andrew Jones and Bill Ward continue their re-read of The Conquering Sword of Conan by Robert E. Howard, the third omnibus volume collecting the complete tales of Conan, with “one of the most famous Conan stories of all,” and one of the last, “Beyond the Black River.” It was originally published in in the May-June 1935 issue of Weird Tales.

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,” the borderer said, still starring somberly at the Cimmerian. “Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarism must ultimately triumph.”

Bill: So concludes “Beyond the Black River,” a story that might almost be REH’s thesis on his philosophy of civilization. It is a story that introduces new elements to Conan’s world, demonstrating again how flexible and expandable REH’s Hyborian blueprint was even after sixteen complete short (and not so short) stories and a novel. But it also maintains a continuity with what has come before, giving us perilous adventure with supernatural antagonists and, of course, Conan being Conan.

Howard: I think it builds nicely on what we’ve seen before. As it happens, though, it’s not exactly a great introduction to Conan himself, or even the Hyborian Age… It’s very different from the preceding Conan stories, feeling very much like a tale of Indian warfare, and Conan himself, while busy doing incredible things, is almost a secondary character.

Read the complete exchange here.

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Vintage Treasures: The Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

Vintage Treasures: The Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

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I’ve been on something of a Fletcher Pratt kick recently, ever since I purchased a fine collection of old paperbacks that included five of his books, including The Well of the Unicorn and Tales From Gavagan’s Bar (co-written with L. Sprague de Camp), both of which I recently wrote up as Vintage Treasures.

Way down in the bottom of that box was a copy of The Compleat Enchanter. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. Everyone who collects classic American fantasy has two or three (or five or six) copies of The Compleat Enchanter. It’s something of a classic, in a worn sort of way. It doesn’t get much attention these days, because it’s a light, humorous tale, the very opposite of the kind of thing that usually interests me. And so, out of habit, I didn’t give it much attention.

That was a mistake. I’ve ignored The Compleat Enchanter for the better part of 40 years, but when I finally picked it up this week I was quickly captivated. Yes, it is a screwball fantasy, about a psychology professor named Harold Shea who stumbles on equations that transport him into parallel universes, and who uses this ability to visit magical worlds shaped by the mythologies and legend of Earth. But it’s also crammed full of crisp dialog and surprising twists, and the unique charm of De Camp and Pratt, two American masters who were obviously having a lot of fun with the their creation.

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Vintage Treasures: Wasp by Eric Frank Russell

Vintage Treasures: Wasp by Eric Frank Russell

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Wasp 1959-small Wasp 1959 back-small

Eric Frank Russell is one of my favorite early SF writers. His prose sparkles, and his stories have genuine warmth and humor. His first novels, including Sinister Barrier (1939), Dreadful Sanctuary (1948), and Sentinels from Space (1953), made him instantly popular in the United States and his home country, the UK.

His fifth novel, Wasp (1957), is the story of a human saboteur, sent to the home planet of a hostile race during an interstellar war. All alone, he wages a campaign of terrorism to bring down a vast alien empire.

Like virtually all of Russell’s work, it remained in print for decades. Its first paperback appearance in the US was in February 1959, from Perma Books (above; click for bigger images). It was 170 pages, priced at 35 cents. The cover was by Art Sussman.

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Haunted Bushes, Serial Killers, and Mysterious Strangers: Algernon Blackwood’s The Listener and Other Stories

Haunted Bushes, Serial Killers, and Mysterious Strangers: Algernon Blackwood’s The Listener and Other Stories

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The Listener and Other Stories-smallThe Listener and Other Stories
By Algernon Blackwood
1907/1917

The Listener and Other Stories was Blackwood’s second fiction collection. It was published a year after the first one, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories. It contains “The Willows,” a novella that’s arguably one of his best known works and one whose reputation is well deserved. The rest of the collection doesn’t come off quite as well as the previous one but it has some good moments.

“The Listener”

An understated story, as with so much of Blackwood’s fiction. As the story progresses the narrator, who lives in a boarding house that isn’t exactly the Ritz, has various odd experiences and seems to be coming apart at the seams. Well done, but for some reason it didn’t really work for me.

“Max Hensig — Bacteriologist and Murderer”

No supernatural or weird content in this one but it’s not a bad effort. Max Hensig is a sort of prototype of the Hannibal Lecter type of serial killer, who happens to like poisoning people. Plays out as a cat and mouse game between the killer and a reporter.

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Vintage Treasures: Tales From Gavagan’s Bar by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

Vintage Treasures: Tales From Gavagan’s Bar by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

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In March of 1925, the great Lord Dunsany created the character of Joseph Jorkens for the short story “The Tale of the Abu Laheeb.” Dunsany would return to the character many, many times, writing over 150 Jorkens tales over the next 32 years. They were some of his most popular stories, published in widely-circulated magazines like The Strand, Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Evening Post and Vanity Fair. The Jorkens tales are widely credited with creating the genre of the “Club Tale,” which take place almost exclusively in comfortable settings like clubs or bars, where the narrator (himself, in Dunsany’s case) hears outlandish and fantastic tales from regulars and the occasional traveler from far away.

L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, both skilled American fantasists, imitated Dunsany with their own series of barroom tall tales, originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction between 1950-1959. The first 23 tales were collected as Tales From Gavagan’s Bar (Twayne Publishers, 1953). Bantam Books released a much-expanded paperback edition in 1980 (above), which contained six new stories and a chatty essay on the origins of the stories by de Camp, “By and About,” written in 1978, after Pratt’s death.

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Galaxy, October 1967: A Retro-Review

Galaxy, October 1967: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy October 1967-smallA bit of a change of pace here, a late ’60s issue of Galaxy. Frederik Pohl was the editor. It is billed as the “Seventeenth Anniversary Issue, and the conceit is that the contributors are all celebrating an anniversary in the field. For example, Pohl himself published a poem in an SF magazine in 1937, making this his 30th anniversary. George O. Smith’s first story was published in 1942, so his 25th anniversary. H. L. Gold is here as the founding editor. Fair enough. The contributor that puzzles me is Roger Zelazny. The cover says “representing his 17th anniversary, but never explains that. This was the fifth anniversary of his first published story. Does it mean he started reading SF in 1950? I don’t know – it’s not explained at all.

The cover is by Gray Morrow, illustrating Gold’s story accurately enough. Interiors are by Gaughan, Morrow, and R. Dorfman (his or her only appearance, according to the ISFDB, in SF). Willy Ley contributes a science essay in his “For Your Information” series, which ran from 1952 through 1969. This one, “The Worst of all the Comets,” is about the great comet of 1680, which has a 574 year period, and which one writer speculated was the comet that caused the Biblical Flood (by raining water on the Earth when it passed very close). Pohl’s brief editorial is about the changes since his poem was published, in 1937.

Algis Budrys’ Galaxy Bookshelf covers Damon Knight’s anthology Worlds to Come (he objects that too many of the stories aren’t really SF), a reissue of Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time (which, Budrys reminds us, is really a play), Robert A. Heinlein’s landmark collection The Past Through Tomorrow (his big Future History collection, which Budrys praises highly), and, most significantly, Samuel R. Delany’s The Einstein Intersection. In the Thomas Disch piece just reprinted in Stories for Chip Disch writes of Delany telling him happily that Budrys had declared him (Delany) the best SF writer in the world. I don’t know if this is the review that prompted Delany’s happiness (apparently it was his review of Nova), but it would certainly make one happy. One quote: “The man simply operates on a plane that Robert Heinlein never dreamed of.”

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Vintage Treasures: The Well of the Unicorn by Fletcher Pratt

Vintage Treasures: The Well of the Unicorn by Fletcher Pratt

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The Well of the Unicorn-smallIt’s no surprise that I don’t get to pick up as many novels as I used to — and I finish even fewer than I start. I tell myself that at least I’m pretty well grounded in classic fantasy… but even then there are embarrassing holes. Like Fletcher’s Pratt’s groundbreaking The Well of the Unicorn, which the great Lester del Rey called “The best piece of Epic Fantasy ever written.” It’s one of his two truly major novels (the other being The Blue Star), and it influenced an entire generation of fantasy writers. It has been out of print for decades, and there is no digital edition, but copies aren’t hard to find. I tracked one down last week, and I’m very much looking forward to reading it.

A rousing epic fantasy of romantic adventure and swashbuckling sorcery by the author of The Blue Star.

Outcast of the Well

The ruthless and greedy Vulkings drove young Airar Alvarson from his people and his heritage. But soon, aided by the mysterious enchanter Meliboe, he embarked on a desperate odyssey through a treacherous world where magic worked — sometimes at a perilous price. As one of a band of desperate rebels, fighting against his Vulking oppressors, Airar’s future quickly became enmeshed with a trio of women… each one seemed born to alter his destiny!

Gython: A snow blonde beauty who fired his blood with a heart as cold as ice…
Evadne: A savage warrior maid determined to have her way with her battles and her men…
Argyra: A princess of the Well from whose waters come peace. A lady who brought him only turmoil and strife…

In a flash Airar Alvarson was trapped in the bloodiest battles, the most sinister of intrigues… and the most amazing romance of all.

The Well of the Unicorn was first published in hardcover by William Sloane Associates in 1948 (under the name George U. Fletcher). It was first printed in paperback in 1967 by Lancer Books, and then Ballantine in May 1976, with a classic cover by the Brothers Hildebrandt. The Ballantine edition is 388 pages, priced at $1.95 (click the image at right for a bigger version).

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Beyond the Immediate Shiver: The Rim of Morning by William Sloane

Beyond the Immediate Shiver: The Rim of Morning by William Sloane

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The Rim of Morning-smallAccording to either Google or Oz the Great and Powerful (I forget which, and for God’s sake, don’t look behind that curtain!), over 300,000 books are published in the United States every year. That’s over 800 a day, every day, day in and day out.

Most, of course, are utterly worthless and are destined to vanish without a trace almost immediately (see Sturgeon’s Law), and given the magnitude of this never-ceasing flood of words, even worthy books by fine writers will inevitably go out of print sooner or later — most likely sooner.

But here’s the thing — even when they drop out of print, books that are good enough are remembered, and sooner or later, like Marely’s Ghost or that particularly embarrassing anecdote that your mother loves telling at every family gathering (especially when a new significant other is present), the good ones come back.

Hence The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror, an omnibus volume reprinting two novels that William Sloane wrote a long time ago: To Walk the Night (1937) and The Edge of Running Water (1939). The books have been reprinted a few times, mostly in paperback, over the more than seventy five years since their first appearance, but the last editions were over thirty years ago under the Del Rey imprint (see the hardcover and paperback editions in a previous BG post here.)

Sloane was not exactly prolific; the two novels collected here are the only ones he ever wrote (or are at least the only ones that were ever published; I for one am hoping that there’s a big trunk somewhere, stuffed with manuscripts that he never bothered to mail in.) Shortly after writing them, Sloane launched a literary career of impressive solidity, especially coming from a man who had mostly given up writing himself. He started his own publishing house, edited a pair of science fiction anthologies, taught at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference for over twenty five years, and eventually became the managing director of Rutgers University Press, a position he held until his death in 1974.

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