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Vintage Treasures: Somewhere a Voice by Eric Frank Russell

Vintage Treasures: Somewhere a Voice by Eric Frank Russell

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Somewhere a Voice Eric Frank Russell-smallI cover a lot of different writers with these Vintage Treasures posts. Some are authors I’ve long cherished, and some are folks I’ve never read. Frequently they’re books I’ve been curious about for a long time, and sometimes they’re simply odd discoveries from recent collections I’ve acquired.

But I think the most rewarding are those where I take a look at writers I’ve long overlooked. That’s the case with Eric Frank Russell, whom I really knew for a single story, “Dear Devil,” which I read in Terry Carr’s great anthology Creatures From Beyond many years ago — a great story, true, but a single story nonetheless. So I’m discovering him for the first time now by reading collections of his pulp science fiction, such as Men, Martians, and Machines and Six Worlds Yonder, and they are delightful.

I went searching for more in my library and found Somewhere a Voice, a 1966 Ace paperback that has now been out of print for nearly five decades. A great pity, I think, since Russell’s stories still speak to a modern audience and I’m convinced he would easily find readers today.

In the meantime, I can do my part to fight against the cruel modern neglect of Eric Frank Russell by spending a few moments talking about him here, and that’s what I’m going to do. Plus, I’m going to throw in a few pulp magazine covers, because it’s Saturday morning and I have nothing better to do.

Let’s start with the text from the back of the book, because that saves me the effort of describing it myself.

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Vintage Treasures: Pamela Dean’s Secret Country Trilogy

Vintage Treasures: Pamela Dean’s Secret Country Trilogy

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The Secret Country-small Pamela Dean Hidden Land-small Pamela Dean The Whim of the Dragon-small

We’ve been talking a lot about the early days of Dungeons and Dragons recently, and that put me in mind of the early novels directly inspired by fantasy role playing. The most famous examples are probably Andre Norton’s Quag Keep (1979) and Joel Rosenberg’s long-running Guardians of the Flame series, starting with The Sleeping Dragon (1983).

Pamela Dean’s Secret Country Trilogy is another early example, although it’s not as well remembered today. It began with The Secret Country (1985), featuring a group of friends who become stranded in the fantasy realm they thought they had created.

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Poul Anderson and the Northern Mythic Tradition: An Introduction

Poul Anderson and the Northern Mythic Tradition: An Introduction

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WaroftheGodsI first met Poul Anderson in the little, northern-Iowa town of Decorah, which is fitting, because Decorah has a very large Scandinavian population and takes evident pride in its Scandinavian heritage.

Only in a figurative sense, alas, do I say that I met Poul Anderson. Though, in the time in which I first read War of the Gods, there had been the slightest possibility that I might have met him, for Wikipedia reports that Anderson passed away on July 31, 2001, and the time in which I first became aware of his work was in 2001.

I read War of the Gods because of Dag Rossman (a professor at Luther College and a fellow fantasist likewise inspired by the Nordic mythic tradition) and a fantasy book club that he hosted. I didn’t stay with the club long, because I had to drive across the Minnesota-Iowa border from Lanesboro on back roads that were cold, desolate, and perilous during the winter months, and I had young children at the time, and sitters were always difficult to find – particularly because I was spending most of my money on publishing, with Nick Ozment, Mooreeffoc Magazine. Getting introduced to War of the Gods was the chief experience I took away from that book club – that and a copy of Tim Powers’s Expiration Date, which I always meant to return to the lender. Sorry, guy, if you happen to find me here.

War of the Gods struck me like a hammer-bolt out of the sky. How did I not know, I asked myself, that this book existed? Such is the way of many discoveries. Because, as I cast my memory back over the years, I realize that I should have known. I remembered a too-tall-for-his-age, very blonde, and (to my eyes, at least) somewhat ungainly kid whom I often had regarded with curiosity from afar. This was because I had noted, as so many in our tribe are astute at noting – particularly in those days when geek culture had not yet gone mainstream – that this guy read comic books and fantasy novels and science fiction novels. But I realized that I had no means with which to start a conversation with him, because he wasn’t reading what I was reading. Moreover, this kid’s first name was Poul. Perhaps because of his unusual name, perhaps because of his size, this kid, when I spied him from afar, was always solitary, and perhaps he preferred it that way. But he certainly seemed reasonable and social enough when I finally spoke to him, having come across him in the wilds of Eden Prairie (the parking lot of Lund’s grocery store may very well be “wild,” in the suburbs). Poul told me that Poul Anderson’s novels were awesome, that I should read them, that they were about Vikings and Norse mythology. He also said that I should be reading Walter Simonson’s Thor comics for Marvel, incidentally.

And then I never spoke to him again. And, unfortunately, I never took his recommendations.

Until much later, of course. Now, obviously, both of these oversights have been remedied.

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The Long Reach of Night: The Voidal Vol. 2 by Adrian Cole

The Long Reach of Night: The Voidal Vol. 2 by Adrian Cole

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oie_862634UE7X7d5eLast year I reviewed (quite favorably, after an initial aversion to it) The Oblivion Hand (2001), the first collection of Adrian Cole’s stories about the Voidal. To say they’re excessive, over the top, and incredibly phatasmagorical barely does them justice. They are all those things and much more. These traits are carried over into the second volume, The Long Reach of Night (2011), an even better book than the first.

The Voidal is a man, cast out by the Dark Gods onto the currents of the Omniverse as punishment for some unknown sin. He has been stripped not only of his memory but also of his right hand, which has been replaced with the Oblivion Hand — a sentient-seeming thing that carries out the will of his tormentors. The Voidal is endlessly tossed about parallel dimensions and planets of the Omniverse, wholly against his will, a scourge in servitude to some celestial tribunal.

By the end of The Oblivion Hand the Voidal had acquired an associate, the froggy familiar, Elfloq. Together they set out on a search, from one hellish locale to another, for how to restore the Voidal’s lost memories and free him from the control of the Dark Gods.

Like its predecessor, The Long Reach of Night is a fix-up. Two of the stories appeared in magazines previously, but the rest appear here for the first time.

It is Elfloq who is the real protagonist of this book. For much of the time, the Voidal is lost somewhere in the aether. In each story the familiar is forced to hunt for clues to where his master is, ever formulating a plan to get one step closer to their goals.

Sometimes Elfloq is forced to undertake some dangerous task in exchange for information. In the first story, “The Preposterous Library,” he must travel through the pages of a book entitled The Skullworks to a pocket world of the same name.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Best I’ve Ever Read…

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Best I’ve Ever Read…

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BoysLife_Cover

See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out.

And so begins the best piece of writing I’ve come across.

In the seventies and the eighties, Robert R. McCammon was a successful horror author. Usher’s Passing (a sequel to Poe’s classic), Wolf’s Hour (World War II werewolf yarn) and Swan Song (post-apocalyptic epic) were among his excellent works. 1990’s Mine was a different kind of terror tale, as was 1992’s Gone South.

To oversimplify, McCammon wanted to move out of horror and into new genres. And he was told to forget it: to not mess with the formula (shades of Brian Wilson and Pet Sounds). So he wrote two historical novels that weren’t published, and he quit.

A decade later, that first historical book, Speaks the Nightbird finally saw the light of day in 2002 and has spawned seven sequels and one short story collection. The next book is under way. I read the first two and enjoyed them. But they grow continually darker and I quit after book three. Too much for me.

McCammon has written a few other novels and novellas, back in the horror genre. But he returned on his own terms, and not with a major publishing house.

Two thousand is a low estimate of how many books I’ve read, and the single finest piece of writing I’ve ever come across is in the introduction to his 1991’s Boy’s Life. Which isn’t really too surprising, because that is the finest book I’ve ever read; in any genre. It’s not a horror book: it’s a coming-of age tale. It’s a book about the magic of our youth. And what happens to that magic.

One of my favorite authors, Tony Hillerman, said that Fly on the Wall, was his attempt at writing The Great American Novel. He feels he came up short. He would know, though it’s in my Top Five Novels list. But I’m gonna say that Boy’s Life is McCammon’s Great American Novel. And it’s in the running for THE Great American novel You ask me for only one book to read (beyond the Bible), and I’m telling you Boy’s Life.

Here’s the rest of that snippet from the opening that has stayed with me for going on three decades:

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Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1951: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1951: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy June 1951-smallHere’s a review of a magazine issue that Matthew Wuertz has already covered here in his excellent ongoing traversal of Galaxy from its beginning … but I happened to read it and John O’Neill assures me that another (not necessarily dissenting) view is always welcome.

This is from the first year of Galaxy‘s existence. To me it reflects an magazine increasingly confident of its place. The cover doesn’t illustrate any story: it’s by Ed Emshwiller, titled “Relics of an Extinct Race”, and it depicts lizard-like aliens investigating rock strata containing remnants of human civilization.

The back cover advertises a book called The Education of a French Model, which was the memoirs of “Kiki de Montparnasse” (real name Alice Prin), who was somewhat famous as a nude model, and mistress of, among others, Man Ray, in the early part of the 20th Century. Her memoirs featured an introduction by Ernest Hemingway, which the ad happily trumpets. Other ads were for Saran Plastic Seat Covers, and for weight reducing chewing gum (called Kelpidine!), and other than that for books.

Interior illustrations were by Elizabeth MacIntyre, David Stone, David Maus, and “Willer” — this last a somewhat transparent (and, I would have thought, unnecessary) pseudonym for Ed Emshwiller (who usually signed his word Emsh). I note that except for Emshwiller the names are all unfamiliar, suggesting that H. L. Gold may have been looking for “new blood.” (For that matter, Emshwiller was “new blood” himself, a Gold discovery who had only begun illustrating for the SF magazines that year. It’s just that he’s the one of these illustrators who became a legend.)

Elizabeth MacIntyre is interesting as one of very few women SF illustrators in that era (the only other one I can think of offhand is the great Weird Tales artist Margaret Brundage). Todd Mason suggests, I think sensibly, that both the different set of illustrators and the unexpected advertisements can be attributed to Galaxy‘s publisher, World Editions, which had wider ambitions than just publishing SF.

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The “Known World” D&D Setting: A Secret History

The “Known World” D&D Setting: A Secret History

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TSR's Known World
TSR’s Known World

Recently some old friends in Akron, Ohio, turned up a few pages of the pre-TSR homebrew Dungeons & Dragons rules created by Tom Moldvay and me in the mid-1970s. I was delighted to see them, as I thought all of our early collaborative work had been lost to history.

I first encountered Tom Moldvay in late 1973 at a meeting of the Kent State University Science Fiction Club. We hit it off right away, and quickly decided we ought to collaborate on something — we just weren’t sure what.

In early ’74 Tom came back from an SF convention with Dungeons & Dragons in its original white box edition. He DMed a session, I DMed a session, and suddenly we knew what we were going to create together: a fantasy world setting for D&D.

We had both read widely in world history and mythology, and enjoyed a lot of the same fantasy fiction; we traded Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy books back and forth until we’d read them all, as well as everything we could find by Howard, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Merritt, Haggard, Harold Lamb, Dunsany, Hodgson, Machen, and Zelazny.

We were both nuts about Clark Ashton Smith, Tom was a Michael Moorcock and Philip José Farmer fanatic, while I could quote chapter and verse from the works of Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber. So we knew what we wanted to create: a single world setting that would enable us to simulate the fictional realities of these, our favorite authors.

It was going to have to be a big world.

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Seven Lessons I Learned from RPG Games of Yore

Seven Lessons I Learned from RPG Games of Yore

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Final Fantasy 2 Super Nintendo-smallGrowing up, my brother was a huge gamer, and I loved watching him play. He used to rent a Nintendo at the library every weekend, as well as the Final Fantasy cartridge. He would practically turn blue holding his breath all week, hoping no one else would rent it and save over that one precious on-cartridge spot.

Then, when the Super Nintendo was announced, he saved allll of his monies and my dad drove us to the States (it was coming out only months later in Canada!) He bought it, and we stared at those “high-res” graphics on the box all the way back home.

I bought him Final Fantasy 2 (I know, I know, it’s IV, but back in the day, Google didn’t alert us of all these things. Wait, am I old?  I’m going to ignore that.) I had to get Dad to drive me to the States to get it again, and it ate up all of my hard earned paper route proceeds. Totally worth it to see him jump up and down.

BUT, on top of the games teaching me things through their acquisitions (saving, planning, emotional manipulation/whining), I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all learned many other fine lessons from playing pixelated heroes.

Here are a few of mine.

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The New York Times on Andrew J. Offutt

The New York Times on Andrew J. Offutt

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My Lord Barbarian-smallAndrew J. Offutt had a lengthy and successful career as a fantasy writer before his death on April 30, 2013 (which we reported on here.) He was one of the most popular writers in the Thieves World collective, with a trio of novels (Shadowspawn, Deathknight, and The Shadow of Sorcery), and his Conan pastiches, including Conan and the Sorcerer (1978) and Conan: The Sword of Skelos (1979), were highly regarded.

He also had an excellent reputation as an editor, in part due to his sword and sorcery anthology series Swords Against Darkness.

Offutt published fantasy under his own name, but the greater part of his output — chiefly early pornography — was written under a variety of pseudonyms. When he died he left his papers to his son Chris Offutt, who reports on his father’s unusual career in the Feb 5 issue of The New York Times Magazine, in an article titled “My Dad, the Pornographer.”

At 12, Dad wrote a novel of the Old West. He taught himself to type with the Columbus method — find it and land on it — using one finger on his left hand and two fingers on his right. Dad typed swiftly and with great passion. In this fashion, he eventually wrote and published more than 400 books. Two were science fiction and 24 were fantasy, written under his own name; the rest were pornography, using 17 pseudonyms… His primary pseudonym [was] John Cleve…

In the 1980s, John Cleve’s career culminated with a 19-book series for Playboy Press, the magazine’s foray into book publishing. The Spaceways series allowed him to blend porn with old-time “space opera,” reminiscent of the 1930s pulps, his favorite kind of science fiction. Dad’s modern twist included aliens who possessed the genitalia of both genders. Galactic crafts welcomed the species as part of their crews, because they were unencumbered with the sexual repression of humans and could service men and women alike. The books were popular, in part, because of their campiness, repeating characters and entwined stories — narrative tropes that later became standard on television.

Read the complete article here.

Vintage Treasures: Starshine by Theodore Sturgeon

Vintage Treasures: Starshine by Theodore Sturgeon

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Theodore Sturgeon Starshine Pyramid-small Theodore Sturgeon Starshine Pyramid 2-small Theodore Sturgeon Starshine Pyramid 3-small

For this installment of Vintage Treasures, we’re going to set the Wayback Machine for that far distant era of American publishing, when it wasn’t at all unusual for a midlist science fiction writer to publish a paperback collection clocking in at a slender 174 pages… and have it go through nearly a dozen printings in as many years. Ah, for the days when the American public had a greater appetite for short stories!

Starshine was Sturgeon’s thirteenth collection (thirteen short story collections! It boggles the mind). It included three novelettes and three short stories, spanning just over two decades of his career: 1940 to 1961. I’ve captured the covers of all the paperback editions in this article — if you’re an old-timer like me, maybe one of them will jog your memory.

The first edition of Starshine was the December 1966 Pyramid paperback (above left, cover by Jack Gaughan.) It was back in print less than two years later, in March 1969, with a new cover by Gaughan again (above middle). Why it needed a new cover, I dunno – I much prefer the original one.

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