Manly Wade Wellman, whom Karl Edward Wagner called “the dean of fantasy writers,” was one of the great 20th Century fantasists, particularly in the field of the “occult detective.” He created several memorable occult investigators, including Judge Pursuivant and John Thunstone. But his most enduring creation is surely Silver John, also known as John the Balladeer.
Silver John, a Korean War vet who becomes a wandering singer in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, appeared in around 20 stories published between 1951 and 1987, chiefly in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and later in anthologies like Shadows and Whispers. The stories were gathered in several volumes over the years, and these books are highly collectible today. In 1988 Baen Books released a complete collection of the Silver John stories in paperback, John the Balladeer, with a captivating painting by Steve Hickman.
After the past several months of Socratic dialogue/pie fight/drunken Hell’s Angels motorcycle-chain melee (in other words, after dozens of articles and hundreds – thousands? – of comments on the Hugo debacle, for you late arrivers), we here at Black Gate have firmly answered the nonmusical question, “What are awards good for?” In a nutshell, we have established that awards can help writers find a wider audience, they can provide a bit of financial leverage for those who win them, and perhaps most of all, they can be tangible forms of validation and encouragement for those whose work is often difficult, lonely, and (unless your name starts with George, has two middle initials, and ends with Martin) financially unrewarding.
All of that being said however, consider this: Tolstoy never won the Nobel Prize for Literature. (He was passed over ten times.) Cary Grant never took home a Best Actor Oscar. Martin Scorsese didn’t win Best Director for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, or Goodfellas — he won for The Departed (do you really want to argue that one, tough guy?) and Howard Hawks, the director of Red River, The Big Sleep, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not, Rio Bravo, and (unofficially) The Thing From Another World, was never even nominated.
F. Scott Fitzgerald never won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction — but Edna Ferber did, the year The Great Gatsby was published. The Best Picture Oscar of 1952 went to The Greatest Show on Earth. (I’ll spare you some Googling and tell you that it’s a Cecil B. DeMille circus picture. Now you just take a minute and think about that.) Try watching The Greatest Show on Earth today — just try. Only don’t do it alone; you’ll definitely want someone present to hear all of your witty zingers and rude asides, or to perform the Heimlich Maneuver if you choke on a buffalo wing during the epic train derailment scene, in which Jimmy Stewart scales unheard-of heights of tragic heroism… all in clown make-up.
“To the Lords of Revelstone, I am Lord Foul the Despiser; to the Giants of Seareach, Satansheart and Soulcrusher, The Ramen name me Fangthane. In the dreams of the Bloodguard, I am Corruption. But the people of the Land call me the Gray Slayer.”
Lord Foul to Thomas Covenant
Lord Foul’s Bane came out in 1977, one of two books pulled from the submissions pile by the del Reys in their search for another Tolkien. The first was the Lord of the Rings-derived The Sword of Shannara (reviewed here), which makes total sense. But this? It’s a work full of crushing despair along with a miserable and unpleasant protagonist who refuses to be the hero people want and need. He also rapes a 16-year old girl. This is not the rolling green hills of Middle-earth and hobbits.
I can remember the reactions of people in my circle. My father hated it all around. My friend’s mom, a high school English teacher, loathed it as well, supposedly for its criminally bad prose alone. I myself found it dense, impenetrable, and dull. I was only twelve but I had already read LotR twice, so I just assumed it was no good. The only person I knew who read it and its sequels was a friend who read any and all fantasy without a drop of discrimination.
Even today much of the reaction toward Donaldson’s series is negative. In Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels, David Pringle describes it as an “unearned epic.” During Cora Buhlert’s dustup with Theo Beale over morality in fantasy she said she could never get past Covenant being a rapist. James Nicoll wrote that Covenant should win a “special lifetime achievement award” for the “most unlikeable supposedly sympathetic protagonist.”
I finally read Lord Foul’s Bane a few years ago and found it a fascinating book. I got sidetracked from reading the rest of the initial trilogy but my present desire to read some epic high fantasy brought me back to it. Also, my friend, Jack D., keeps asking me if I’ve read these and if not why not. I don’t think he reads a ton of fantasy so his love for Donaldson’s work is something that I found especially intriguing. So I went back and came away a captive of Donaldson’s strange first novel.
There’s nothing quite like finally laying your hands on a book that’s eluded you for years. That happened this week with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s first collection, Cautionary Tales, published in paperback by Warner Books in 1980 with a moody and gorgeous cover by Leo & Diane Dillon, showing a group of aliens and humans conducting a (surprisingly effective) seance. Cautionary Tales collects 13 science fiction and dark fantasy stories published between 1971 and 1978 in magazines like Galaxy andIF, and anthologies like Chrysalis. and Faster Than Light.
It has an introduction by none other than James Tiptree, Jr, only recently revealed as ex-Army major and CIA operative Alice Sheldon in 1980. Tiptree writes:
If you are looking for the jolly engineering dilemmas of plastic space jocks on the Aldebaran mail run, look elsewhere. You will indeed find a spaceship here, but what goes on among the all-too-real crew of “Dead in Irons” is harsh human shame, a story of innocence compelled to participate in ghastly deeds, able at the end only to strike one lost blow of vengeance. Deftly touched behind the grind of pain is a convincing extrapolation of the star civilization that bore it.
On the other hand, and just to surprise you, Yarbro has given here what is the only merry, even charming tale of After the Holocaust that I can recall: “Frog Pond,” And for still another facet, view the curdlingly mundane problems besetting a lady ghoul attempting to gain access to the city morgue, in “Disturb Not My Slumbering Fair.” (It should be noted that Yarbro does a brisk business in vampires in another of her many lines of work.) But for pure alien beauty, remarkably seen through alien eyes, “Un Bel Di” is quite unforgettable, even apart from the cruelty that is perpetrated there.
Steven E. McDonald is a Jamaican author who published a couple of stories in Analog and Asimov’s in the late 70s and early 80s. His first novel, The Janus Syndrome, was published in 1981.
I’m sure there were other SF or fantasy novels featuring a black male protagonist on the cover by 1981, but I can’t remember any. (F. M. Busby published Zelde M’Tana, featuring a black heroine on the cover, in 1980, and John Brunner wrote the first of his Max Curfew spy novels, A Plague on Both Your Causes, way back in 1969, but they weren’t science fiction.) As far as I know The Janus Syndrome broke the color barrier, at least among mainstream paperback SF publishers. It’s the first time I remember seeing a black hero so prominently on a cover, anyway.
Unfortunately, it didn’t sell. The Janus Syndrome did not usher in a new era of color diversity on SF paperbacks, and that’s a pity. There were no more novels featuring “the outrageous hero” Kevven Tomari from Bantam Books, or anyone else.
Terror By Night
By R. Chetwynd-Hayes
Tandem (186 pages, $1, June 1974)
I’m reasonably familiar with the horror and SF genres, but I have to admit that the name R. Chetwynd-Hayes didn’t ring any bells. But the kind of tacky cover — and the fact that this collection dated from 1974, before the great horror boom of the Eighties kicked in — was enough for me to take this one out for a spin. Chetwynd-Hayes wrote about ten novels and many more collections during his long career, most of them in the horror genre but some leaning more toward SF.
I’d place most of the stories in this collection in the category of solid but not exceptional, with the exception of a pair of stories that stood out. I liked it well enough that I’ll be keeping an eye out for more of his books in the future. I’ve listed all of the stories but only reviewed the ones I found interesting.
When Rohmer scholar, Dr. Robert E. Briney compiled a posthumous hardcover collection of the author’s rare and previously uncollected short fiction in the early 1970s, he included three short stories that were first published in This Week magazine in between Rohmer’s last two Fu Manchu novels. The stories were subsequently reprinted in sequence in Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine between January and March 1966 where the latter two stories were retitled. The hardcover collection, The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other New Stories was first published in the U.K. in 1973 by Tom Stacey. A U.S. mass market paperback edition from DAW Books followed in 1976. The collection was subsequently reprinted in 2001 as part of Allison & Busby’s Fu Manchu Omnibus – Volume 5. Titan Books will reprint the original collection as a trade paperback in March 2016.
“The Eyes of Fu Manchu” was serialized in two installments in This Week magazine on October 6 and 13, 1957. It first appeared in book form when Dr. Briney added it to the 1970 Ace paperback collection, The Secret of Holm Peel and Other Strange Stories. The story opens with Sir Denis Nayland Smith attending a lecture at the Sorbonne by an American scientist, Dr. Gregory Allen. Dr. Allen is a specialist in the possible chemical means of halting or even reversing the effects of aging. Sir Denis correctly believes Dr. Allen’s research will draw him to the attention of Dr. Fu Manchu. He makes plans to attend Dr. Allen’s upcoming lecture at King’s College in London with Dr. Petrie who is flying in from Cairo.
Rohmer mines one of his own life’s episodes when he encountered and began an extramarital affair with a young bohemian woman while on a voyage to Madeira. Here, Gregory Allen meets a young bohemian woman named Mignon while crossing the English Channel. Mignon is an artist and, upon learning Gregory abandoned his study of art for science, she makes some pointed remarks about his abandoning the bohemian life of freedom and truth for one of compromised values as part of the Establishment. Her words seem to sting Dr. Allen as much as her beauty and youth charm him just as Rohmer, the former bohemian turned established bestselling author and husband must have felt when he began his own affair with a younger free spirit on his voyage to Portugal years before.
When I was young, there was a peculiar sub-genre of science fiction that many folks attributed to the influence of John W. Campbell, the legendary editor of Astounding. If you were an SF reader in the 1950s-1980s, you read a fair share of novels in which mankind began a reign of conquest in outer space, carving a glorious empire among the stars. And when we inevitably crossed paths with aliens who frustrated our boundless ambitions, we’d show those godless E.T’s in relatively short order why you don’t mess with homo sapiens.
This always seemed to me to be a uniquely American branch of SF. Growing up in Ottawa, right across the river from the province of Quebec, my natural response when I met folks from an alien culture, with their own strange language and incomprehensible customs, was not to immediately attempt to assert my superiority. Instead you tried to score some French comics, and asked if they minded if you dated their sister. And if they drove a truck, you bought poutine from them, because that stuff was frickin’ manna from heaven.
To my mind Gordon R. Dickson (who was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1923) was never part of the Manifest Destiny in Outer Space crowd but, like most career SF writers at the time, he tried a little bit of everything. His 1969 novel None But Man, the tale of ‘brave human frontiersmen’ who defy a peace treaty and engage in guerrilla warfare against “unhuman Aliens” rather than surrender their homes, seemed pretty firmly in the “Nobody does war the way humans do” Campbell tradition.
As I’ve mentioned a few times, one of the great things about collecting vintage SF and fantasy paperback is the constant new discoveries. A recent discovery of mine is Ian Wallace, who published 14 novels between 1952 and 1989, all but two part of a series that began with Croyd in 1967.
“Ian Wallace” was the pen name of John Wallace Pritchard, a local Chicago science fiction writer. He was a practicing clinical psychologist, and spent much of his career working for the Detroit public schools system. His first novel, Every Crazy Wind, was published in 1952 under his real name; his second, Croyd, was published as “Ian Wallace,” and began a lengthy series following the adventures of an organization of time-traveling superhumans. In the opening volume, Croyd is assigned to protect Earth from an alien invasion, but finds his mind transferred into the “inferior body” of a human woman — and his own body in the employ of an alien agent.
Michael Swanwick’s third novel, Stations of the Tide (1991), was nominated for both the Hugo and Clarke Awards, and won the Nebula for Best Novel of the year. He followed it three years later with a very different book — a highly original fantasy in a bizarre, almost steampunkish setting, a place where elves use humans, trolls and dwarves as slave labor to construct the giant iron dragons used as war machines. When the children meet to plot the death of their supervisor, and a whispered voice leads young Jane to an old and broken junkyard dragon, she learns that escape is possible. But untold wonders and terrors both lie beyond the factory gates…
A human changeling child coming of age, in a world of violence and monsters, Jane toils unceasingly alongside trolls, dwarves, shifters and feys in the dank, stygian bowels of a steam dragon plant — helping to construct the massive black iron flying machines the elvan rulers use for waging war. Then one day, the cold, tantalizing voice of a rusting, discarded dragon speaks softly to Jane — whispering to her of freedom and vengeance… and the terrible wonders awaiting her far beyond the factory gates… Michael Swanwick ushers us into a remarkable realm of darkest fantasy, erotic dreams and industrial magicks — on a stunningly original and hair-raising ride toward the obliteration of another history and the end of all things.
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter was nominated for both the Clarke and World Fantasy Awards, and placed second in Locus magazine’s annual poll for Best Fantasy Novel of the Year (behind Peter S. Beagle’s The Innkeeper’s Song). It had one sequel, The Dragons of Babel, released over a decade later in 2008. The Iron Dragon’s Daughter was published in hardcover by AvoNova in January 1994, with a cover by Dorian Vallejo (above left), reprinted in trade paperback by Avon in September 1997 with a cover by J. K. Potter (middle), and released as #42 in the Millennium Fantasy Masterworks series in 2004 (above right, cover by Steve Stone). It is currently out of print.
