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Category: Vintage Treasures

Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1952: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1952: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy December 1952-smallThe cover of the December, 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction was creating using a technique called “Camerage.” Editor H. L. Gold describes it as

A three-dimensional montage effect — but it’s not a montage… All the objects in the picture are assembled at one time, illuminated by projected colored lights… and are shot by a number of cameras placed on different planes.

To me, it looks a little odd — or at least this particular use of the technique looks a little odd. (Click the image at right for a bigger version.) Seeing an image online doesn’t quite match up with what you see on an actual copy of the magazine; I can’t quite explain the difference. But however you view it, the cover still doesn’t connect with me.

Ring Around the Sun (Part 1) by Clifford D. Simak — It started with a few inventions — a cigarette lighter, a razor blade, and a light bulb. These items would last forever, the manufacturers claimed. Additionally, another group supplied synthetic carbohydrates for consumption, helping humanity’s food supply. Each had its own effect on the economy, in both subtle and obvious ways.

Jay Vickers learns of the newest arrivals — the forever car and the forever house — with indifference. He doesn’t need a new car and doesn’t like the idea of a new house, no matter how reasonable the financing may be, even if it seems like they’re being given away.

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Vintage Treasures: The Cú Chulainn Novels of Gregory Frost

Vintage Treasures: The Cú Chulainn Novels of Gregory Frost

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Tain Gregory Frost-small Remscela Gregory Frost-small

Celtic fantasy has always been a popular sub-genre, but it really exploded in the 80s, in the capable hands of writers such as Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, C.J. Cherryh, Katharine Kerr, and R.A. MacAvoy, and with bestsellers like Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon.

In 1986 new writer Gregory Frost — whose debut novel Lyrec had been published by Ace two years earlier, and been well received — retold the great Irish epic Tain Bo Cuailnge (“Cattle Raid of Cooley”), the tale of the hero of Ulster, Cú Chulainn, Ireland’s greatest champion, who at the age of 17 single-handedly defended his people against the invading army of the sorceress queen Maeve. This began a two-book cycle retelling many of the tales of Cú Chulainn: Tain, published in 1986, and its sequel Remscela, which appeared in 1988.

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Where Truemen Struggle to Preserve Genetic Purity: The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad

Where Truemen Struggle to Preserve Genetic Purity: The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad

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The Iron Dream-smallEvery now and then, fandom needs to take a good, hard look at itself. Considering the recent Hugo kerfuffle, I thought it a fine time to read Norman Spinrad’s famous skewering of fan culture, The Iron Dream.

First published in 1972, this is a masterpiece of metafiction. It is a book within a book, containing the 1955 Hugo Award winner Lord of the Swastika, written by none other than that famous science fiction writer, Adolph Hitler. We are informed that after dabbling in radical politics in Germany, Hitler moved to New York in 1919. In the 1930s he became a sought-after illustrator for pulp magazines and started writing fiction. He was popular in fannish circles for his fanzine work and for his witty banter at conventions.

His best-known work is Lord of the Swastika, a post-apocalyptic tale where the world has been ravaged by nuclear war and most people have become foul mutants. Luckily there is one nation, Heldon, where the Truemen struggle to preserve humanity’s genetic purity.

Enter Feric Jaggar, a Trueman whose family was exiled due to political machinations and forced to live among the mongrel horde. Lord of the Swastika is the tale of Jagger’s triumphant return to Heldon, where he unmasks a plot by the mutants to take over the country and sully the genetic purity of the last real humans. Jagger’s political star rises, the masses rallying around him as he first faces off against a corrupt government, then unites the nation around him in order to start a massive war to wipe the Earth clean of genetic inferiors once and for all.

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John W. Campbell Jr. and the Knack for Being Wrong About Everything

John W. Campbell Jr. and the Knack for Being Wrong About Everything

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Analog October 1965-smallI’ve been listing copies of Analog (from a lot I acquired over the summer) on eBay for some time, and looking through them as I have. What strikes me forcefully — though of course I had been aware of it for years, being old enough to remember when JWC was still editing — is how John Campbell had an eerie ability to be wrong about just about everything, from Dianetics to the Dean Drive to supporting George Wallace in the 1968 election to the statement that television would never catch on because you’d have to stop what you’re doing and WATCH it.

It goes on and on, rather relentlessly. Only in Analog would you find, as late as the 1960s, an article on the positive benefits of smoking.

The latest one I’ve come across is the editorial in the October 1965 issue, in which Campbell lambastes largely straw-men “Litteraeurs” on their inability to write, dismissing approved mainstream literature (about which I suspect he knew very little) as “sex in suburbia” and making the famous claim that he gets more printable manuscripts from Cal Tech or Harvard Law School than from the Harvard Literature department. “How come they keep turning out Literature graduates that can’t sell stories?”

Of course the fallacy here is that the purpose of Literature departments is to turn out writers, and that “sell stories” means sell stories to Analog. I am sure the editors of The New Yorker or the major literary magazines would have had a different view. But this was a very common Philistine cant at one time. From at least the New Wave period, all the way up to the Sad Puppies, we have heard the complaint that these damned Literature majors are ruining Science Fiction.

That John Campbell was unquestionably a great editor while being so wrong about so many things is hard to explain — thought it does explain why the field seemed to be leaving him behind by the last few years of his life.

Darrell Schweitzer’s last article for us was Donald Westlake’s Famous Complaint.

It Is A Busy Omniverse: The Sword of Shadows: The Voidal Vol. 3 by Adrian Cole

It Is A Busy Omniverse: The Sword of Shadows: The Voidal Vol. 3 by Adrian Cole

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Tyrandire, the Palace of Pain, moves secretly and silently through unseen tunnels between the many dimensions of the omniverse, traversing any of them that its grim master wishes to visit. A minute moon, perfectly circular, colder than terror, Tyrandire speeds on its way like light, sometimes lingering like a biting frost. The energy that charges this oval missile is greater than that of any sun, indeed greater than the energy contained within an entire universe, for it is the will of the outlaw god, Ubeggi the Deceitful. Where Ubeggi seeks to go, his Palace of Pain takes him. He has many missions, all of them selfish, all of them corrupt, for the Weaver of Wars exists solely for his own amusement and he delights in knotting together the workings of more thoughful gods or undoing their orderly tapestries of fate. All the gods know of Ubeggi, and when his Palace of Pain nears their own haunts in the omniverse, they curse him, knowing that his mischief will be upon them.

                                                                                                                from Part One: The Weaver of Wars

And so, with The Sword of Shadows, we come to the end of the Voidal’s saga. For a series I have already called favorably “a study in sensory overload,” and “excessive, over the top, and incredibly phatasmagorical,” author Adrian Cole ends things as madly and wildly as a reader could hope.

Three of its eight chapters, were published previously as short stories: “The Weaver of Wars,” “At the Council of Gossipers,” and “Dark Destroyer.” Unlike the two previous books, this one reads more like a coherent novel than as a fix-up.

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Dracula: The Definitive Edition

Dracula: The Definitive Edition

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NOTE:  The following article was first published on January 17, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these first 20 articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 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.

Drac Def EdDracula by Bram Stoker is the subject of my very first article as a blogger. I follow several book review blogs, but had mixed feelings about starting my own. Blogs serve no useful purpose save providing a few minutes of distraction from the mundane. As a result, they are fairly inconsequential in the Grand Scheme of Life, but infinitely more useful than a politician.

Dracula is slowly gaining acceptance in literary circles as more than just a genre classic and deservedly so. Of course, mass acceptance for a novel that has never been out of print in its 118 years on the planet means that there are literally hundreds of public domain copies to choose from for the unwary consumer. The focus of this review is on Dracula: The Definitive Edition available from Fall River Press. This edition is recommended not only for Edward Gorey’s fine illustrations and Marvin Kaye’s impressive essays and notes on the text, but it is also affordably priced.

This gets my nod over the many annotated editions out there for the simple fact that Mr. Kaye gives the modern reader all they need to know to enjoy the novel in the context it was written without getting bogged down endlessly in railway timetables and notes on Transylvanian culture, cuisine, superstition, or topography. Nor does he become sidetracked in speculation on Stoker’s marriage, sex life, or physical and mental health. Mr. Kaye provides the salient biographical details and expounds on details that are relevant to better appreciating the text and nothing more. His essays are a model of efficiency and stand on the strength of their factual accuracy above the more verbose and salacious theories one comes to expect with literary classics.

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Vintage Treasures: The Sword and the Satchel by Elizabeth Boyer

Vintage Treasures: The Sword and the Satchel by Elizabeth Boyer

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The Sword and the Satchel-small The Sword and the Satchel-back-small

Elizabeth Boyer’s first novel, The Sword and the Satchel, launched her on a successful career as a fantasy author in the 80s and early 90s. Rather uniquely at the time, she drew heavily from Norse mythology, and the setting of every one of her novels is the Scandinavia of Norse myth — packed with deadly frost giants, sinister dark elves, quarrelsome trolls, mist-shrouded burial mounds, wizards, sorcerers, and dwarves. Her first series, World of Alfar, began with The Sword and the Satchel and continued in three additional volumes:

The Elves and the Otterskin (1981)
The Thrall and the Dragon’s Heart (1982)
The Wizard and the Warlord (1983)

Her other books include the four volume Wizard’s War series, The Clan of the Warlord (1992), and her final novel, Keeper of Cats (1995).

The Sword and the Satchel was published as a paperback original by Del Rey in May 1980. It is 312 pages, priced at $2.25. The cover is by Robert Florczak.

Vintage Treasures: The Deep by John Crowley

Vintage Treasures: The Deep by John Crowley

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The Deep John Crowley back-small The Deep-spine-small The Deep John Crowley-small

I bounced off John Crowley when I first tried him. It was 1977, I was thirteen years old, and the Science Fiction Book Club had just shipped me his second novel, Beasts, because I forgot to return their stupid monthly request form. The cover featured a lion-man in a broken cage, and I figured, eh, what the hell. I got about five pages in before I gave up, and re-read Robert Silverberg’s Collision Course instead (that book rocks).

That probably would have been it for me and John Crowley, if it hadn’t been for his fourth novel, the landmark Little, Big, which won the World Fantasy Award in 1982, and was nominated for every major award the genre had to offer. It wasn’t long before my friends were talking about it excitedly, and I was forced to re-examine John Crowley. (Mark Rigney did a brilliant analysis of Little, Big for us here, if you somehow missed it.)

It was Bantam Spectra who got me re-interested in his early novels, though.

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Future Treasures: Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti

Future Treasures: Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti

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Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe-smallBack in 1990 I bought a remaindered copy of Songs of a Dead Dreamer at a Waldenbooks in Champaign, IL. I’d never heard of the author, Thomas Ligotti, but the book sounded kind of interesting. I added it to my to-be-read pile, where it was quickly buried, and years went by before I really thought of it again.

In those intervening years, I learned the name Thomas Ligotti. So did anyone who read Weird Tales, Grue, or other horror magazines in the late 80s and early 90s. He was a singularly unique talent, and his fame quietly grew during those decades. In fact, when I launched the first issue of Black Gate in the year 2000, I had more-or-less decided not to put the names of authors on the cover, to keep the artwork clean and give the magazine a unique look, but I talked to a few other editors to get their opinion first. One of them was Darrell Schweitzer, co-editor of Weird Tales.

“We never noticed a bit of difference in sales when we put authors names on the cover,” he confided. “Unless the name was Thomas Ligotti.”

Ligotti’s first two collections were Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1985) and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991), both of which appeared first in small print-run hardcovers. Those editions — including the one I bought at Waldenbooks for three bucks — became highly prized collectors items. Both appeared in paperback, in June 1991 and October 1994, respectively. Those editions shortly went out of print, and also became became highly sought-after. In 2010 and 2011, after both volumes had been out of print for nearly two decades, Subterranean Press re-issued them with matching dust jackets. Those editions quickly sold out, and routinely command prices of $200-400 in the collectors market.

In short, if you wanted a print copy of Songs of a Dead Dreamer or Grimscribe any time in the last 20 years, you pretty much needed to be very wealthy, very lucky, or both. So you can understand why the impending release of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, an omnibus 464-page collection of both volumes in a handsome and affordable trade paperback from Penguin Classics, has generated excited buzz in horror circles.

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Aztec Empires, Amazons, and the Spanish Armada: Rich Horton on John Brunner’s Times Without Number

Aztec Empires, Amazons, and the Spanish Armada: Rich Horton on John Brunner’s Times Without Number

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Times Without Number Ace-small Times Without Number Brunner-small Times Without Number Del Rey-small

In addition to his reviews here at Black Gate, Rich Horton has been quietly reviewing neglected SF and fantasy classics on his own blog, Strange at Ecbatan, to great effect for the past few years. We recently highlighted one of his more intriguing choices, the 1961 Ace Double Wandl the Invader/I Speak For Earth.

This month he turns his attention to another neglected John Brunner masterwork, the 1962 fix-up novel Times Without Number, originally published as an Ace Double in 1962 (cover here).

This is one of my favorite time travel/alternate history novels, and it’s a novel that to my mind does not get the notice it deserves… This book is about Don Miguel Navarro of the Society of Time. It is set in an alternate 1988/1989 in which the Spanish Armada succeeded, and established an Empire. The Moors reconquered Spain, but much of Western Europe, including England, remained under Spanish rule, and the independent Mohawk nation in North America was also allied to the Empire. In 1892 the secret of time travel was discovered, and under the auspices of the Pope the Society of Time was established…

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