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Vintage Treasures: Fantastic Novels, July 1948

Vintage Treasures: Fantastic Novels, July 1948

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Fantastic Novels July 1948-smallYesterday, I talked about finding a copy of the hardcover edition of Damon Knight’s Science Fiction of the 30’s on a sale table at Windy City Pulp and Paper for just $3.33. Items on the table were priced at 3 for $10, so before I could buy it, I had to find two additional items I could live with.

Didn’t turn out to be that hard. Right next to Knight’s dusty hardcover was a copy of the July 1948 Fantastic Novels magazine, with the gorgeous Lawrence cover at left. Admit it, that cover alone is worth $3.33. I snapped it up and didn’t even look inside.

I didn’t figure there was all that much to know about the contents, anyway. Fantastic Novels was famous for including a complete novel with each issue, which usually didn’t leave much room for filler. In addition to the cover story — Garrett P. Serviss’s 1911 novel The Second Deluge — this issue had only one additional story: Frank Lillie Pollock’s “Finis,” reprinted from the June 1906 issue of The Argosy magazine.

I imagine it had to be pretty cheap to produce a magazine containing only two reprints (assuming the editors paid anything for them at all). So what did the publishers of Fantastic Novels spend their money on? Beautiful art, that’s what. In addition to the cover by Lawrence, this issue had several full pages of art by Lawrence and the great Virgil Finlay. Click on the image at left to see the full-sized version. I have no idea what The Second Deluge is all about, but I want to frame this magazine and put it on my wall.

Alas, there were no other copies of Fantastic Novels to be found on the table — and no other hardcovers of interest. For my third item, I settled on an issue of The Original Science Fiction Stories from January 1956 that looked like it had just come off the printing press. It also has fiction by Randall Garrett and James Blish, so maybe it will turn out to be worth $3.33 too.  Either way, it’s fine by me; I got my ten bucks’ worth — and more — with the first two items.

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A Perfect Artifact from the Glory Days of 1970s Swords & Sorcery: Keith Taylor’s Bard

A Perfect Artifact from the Glory Days of 1970s Swords & Sorcery: Keith Taylor’s Bard

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oie_520266yr2OCRWhAfter several weeks spent among ghoulish haunts, a Cthulhu-haunted island, and nightmare dimensions, I thought a trip to ancient Britain — the sun-dappled forests of the High Weald and the rolling downs of the Vale of Kent — was needed. Yes, I’ve visited previously in reviews of Henry Treece’s The Great Captains and David Drake’s The Dragonlord, and Keith Taylor’s Bard (1981) is a return to post-Roman Britain in the days of Arthur and Saxon and Jutish invaders.

Bard is one of those books that my dad bought years ago and I never bothered to read. I didn’t know anything about it or its author, but I was done with my short-lived infatuation with Celtic fantasy. Nothing about it enticed me to pick it up… until I started blogging about swords & sorcery.

As I read articles and websites on heroic fiction, I quickly learned that Keith Taylor was an important voice in the field of Robert E. Howard scholarship and then I started seeing very good reviews of Bard. I remembered that a copy was tucked away in the attic so I went and retrieved it and I’m quite glad I did.

Bard is a fix-up of four previously published stories and one original tale about Felimid mac Fal of Eire, wielder of the magic sword, Kincaid, and player of the ancient harp, Golden Singer. Under the right circumstances, the harp allows him to cast spells and play songs to influence his audience. Blessed with talent, wit, and cunning, Felimid is able to enter the courts of ferocious Jutish warlords and survive encounters with monsters and sorcerers in haunted forests.

Though tied together by a pair of ongoing plots, Bard reads more like the scattered adventures of a peripatetic traveler than a novel. Despite its melancholic setting in a time of fading magic and invaders from across the sea, this book is tremendous fun. Felimid is a bold, lively character with a winning way, well worth any heroic fantasy reader’s time.

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Vintage Treasures: Science Fiction of the 30’s edited by Damon Knight

Vintage Treasures: Science Fiction of the 30’s edited by Damon Knight

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Science Fiction of the 30s-smallWindy City Pulp and Paper is a fabulous convention and, as its name implies, it’s focused mostly on vintage magazines and paperbacks. Wandering the vast Dealer’s Room is like stepping into a Cave of Wonders for fans of pulp science fiction and fantasy.

But it’s also a den of surprises and a pleasant one awaited me while browsing a table piled high with pulps and digest magazines. A hand-written sign proclaimed all items were “3 For $10,” so I decided to spend a few minutes exploring the heaped stacks. Buried under a loose pile of Science Fiction Quarterly magazines and Amazing Stories, I found a lone hardcover volume: Damon Knight’s pulp anthology Science Fiction of the 30’s, in much better shape than my tattered copy.

Well, that was certainly worth $3.33. It didn’t take much effort to find two other worthy treasures (a July 1948 Fantastic Novels pulp with a classic Lawrence cover and the January 1956 issue of The Original Science Fiction Stories with a James Blish cover story, which looked like it had just come off the magazine rack.) I plunked down my ten bucks and fled before the vendor changed his mind.

Science Fiction of the 30’s was one of two great pulp anthologies I read over thirty years ago — the other being of course Isaac Asimov’s marvelous Before the Golden Age. Those books, together with Jacques Sadoul’s art book 2000 A.D. Illustrations From the Golden Age of Science Fiction Pulps, ignited a love of pulp fiction in me as a young teen that never died.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: A Man Called Spade

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: A Man Called Spade

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Spade_FalconbookIn last week’s column, I mentioned The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart. (Did you follow instructions and watch it for the first time?) Over eighty years after its publication, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon stands supreme today as the finest private eye novel ever written. Bogie’s 1941 film proved that the third time is a charm, prior attempts in 1931 and 1936 having failed.

Sam Spade, the quintessential tough guy shamus, appeared in a five-part serial of The Maltese Falcon in Black Mask in 1929. Hammett carefully reworked the pieces into novel form for publication by Alfred E. Knopf in 1930 and detective fiction would have a benchmark that has yet to be surpassed.

Hammett, who wrote over two dozen stories featuring a detective known as The Continental Op (well worth reading), never intended to write more about Samuel Spade, saying he was “done with him” after completing the book-length tale.

But the public wanted more and his agent cajoled him into cranking out three more short stories featuring Spade. The first two appeared in American Magazine and the third in Collier’s in 1932 and they were collected into book form later that year as The Adventures of Sam Spade and Other Stories. In 1999, Vintage Crime published Nightmare Town, a compilation of twenty Hammett stories, including all three Spade short stories.

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Blogging Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon, Part Fourteen

Blogging Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon, Part Fourteen

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Barry Gordonkurtzman_flash_gordon_cvr11“The Swamp Girl” by Dan Barry was serialized by King Features Syndicate from October 31 to December 31, 1955. Just as Dan Barry guided the strip closer to its origins, he took two sidesteps in introducing a back-story for Dr. Zarkov that Alex Raymond never intended. “The Swamp Girl” introduces us to a hot-tempered, beautiful young woman called Zara, whose mother was the sole survivor when her rocket crashed on the swamp world of Malagua twenty years before.

As the story begins, Lisa (Zara’s mother) is succumbing to malaria just as her daughter has finally succeeded in repairing their rocketship. Zara sets off to visit her father’s home world of Earth and fulfill her mother’s dying request that her daughter bring the father she has never met to see her mother before she dies, so that her mother may reconcile with him.

Zara arrives on Earth with her pet black panther, Octavio. Their ship’s coordinates take them to the desert town where Zara’s father, Dr. Zarkov, lives. After upsetting the neighborhood and evading the police, both the swamp girl and her panther reach their destination.

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A World Mottled With Decay: The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton

A World Mottled With Decay: The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton

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For all their laughter, ghouls are a dull lot. Hunger is the fire in which they burn, and it burns hotter than the hunger for power over men or for the knowledge of the gods in a crazed mortal. It vaporizes delicacy and leaves behind a only a slag of anger and lust. They see their fellows as impediments to feeding, to be mauled and shrieked at when the mourners go home.
— from “Meryphillia”

The late Brian McNaughton’s 1997 collection The Throne of Bones is a book I want to on one hand praise and with the other hold it away from myself with a pair of iron tongs. It contains some of the best writing I have ever read in fantasy; by turns tense, dark, grimly funny, and occasionally majestic. And it’s set in a vivid world, parts of which will haunt me for a long time.

On the other hand, many of the characters are by far the most despicable I’ve ever met and their actions among the vilest put to paper. Lots of the characters’ actions are motivated by sexual appetites that are many things — mostly disturbing — but never even remotely erotic. So if this review leaves you curious about McNaughton’s work, be warned: while it’s not sadistic or very frightening, it is strong stuff.

The Throne of Bones contains nine short stories and the novella, “Throne of Bones” itself composed of six intricately intertwined stories. They are set within and on the edges of an old empire slipping into decay: crumbling cities, clashing religious sects, and feuding noble clans. The rich and powerful lead lives of luxury, while the poor live in squalor. Between them a small middle class live in dual fear of the nobility and of falling into poverty.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Science Fictional Humphrey Bogart

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Science Fictional Humphrey Bogart

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ReturnX_PosterInto the nineteen fifties, Hollywood operated under the studio system. A few major movie studios owned both the production and distribution channels and dominated the industry.

They cranked out “B” pictures to provide product to support the “A” films and keep the theaters they owned filled.

Actors, especially non-stars, made several films a year, either appearing higher in the credits on B films or as supporting actors in A movies. Those actors had very little power in the system as well.

In 1936, Humphrey Bogart (who had already twice failed to stick in Hollywood) received his first critical acclaim for The Petrified Forest, in which he recreated his Broadway role as gangster Duke Mantee.

He would really strike it big in 1941, first with  High Sierra, and then The Maltese Falcon  (if you haven’t seen this one,  rent it tonight and then leave an apology comment on this post for waiting so long). In the five years between Forest and Sierra, he appeared in twenty-nine films: most not as the star.

Bogart famously said, “I made more lousy pictures than any actor in history.” This was because Warner Brothers tossed him into every low budget B movie they could.

Sometimes it was so bad that he refused the part, which then got him suspended without pay. That’s why you see Dennis Morgan and not Bogie in the awful western, Bad Men of Missouri (with Wayne Morris starring – see below).

Bogie, in a career with over eighty credits and possibly the greatest star in film history, made only one horror/science fiction movie. And he considered it one of his worst. He’s got a point.

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Total Pulp Victory: A Triumphant Return from Windy City Pulp & Paper

Total Pulp Victory: A Triumphant Return from Windy City Pulp & Paper

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Super Science Stories Canada December 1942-small Super Science Stories Canada February 1945-small Super Science Stories Canada August 1945-small

Doug Ellis’s Windy City Pulp and Paperback Convention has wrapped up for another year (see my report from last year here). I got to see many old friends, meet some new ones, and also connect in person with a few for the first time — including Barbara Barrett, who traveled many hundreds of miles to make it to Chicago. Barbara has been blogging for Black Gate for many years and her early article “Robert E. Howard: The Sword Collector and His Poetry” is one of the most popular pieces we’ve ever published… but we’ve never met in person, and it was an absolute delight to finally join her for dinner — and give her a big hug.

In between all the meetings, reunions, and forging of new friendships, I also picked up a treasure or two. I’ll be reporting on some of the most interesting here over the next few weeks (the most common comment I heard as I put away my purchases was, “Something new for you to blog about!”), but I can’t resist telling you about one now.

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Vintage Treasures: Charles de Lint’s Wolf Moon, and a Tale of Roving Booksellers

Vintage Treasures: Charles de Lint’s Wolf Moon, and a Tale of Roving Booksellers

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Wolf Moon Charles de Lint-smallIt pays to know excellent booksellers.

On Tuesday, Rich Warren, co-owner of Starfarer’s Despatch, posted a pic of Charles de Lint’s 1988 Signet paperback Wolf Moon on Facebook and later this brief review:

What a blast. Just finished this one this morning. A tale sympathetic to the Werewolf, and told from his point of view. I know there are De Lint fans who enjoy his urban fantasy (Newford) more but the great writing is still present in these older fantasies.

My comment was concise, but completely heartfelt: “I need this book! Rich, sell me one!”

I meant it, too. Wolf Moon was reprinted in 2004, with a generic urban fantasy cover, but the 1988 paperback original, which boasts a fabulous cover by Dean Morrissey, showing a werewolf relaxing in The Inn of the Yellow Tinker, is much harder to come by.

Three days later, I returned from my business trip to Las Vegas. I drove straight from the airport to the Westin hotel in Lombard, Illinois, and arrived shortly before the Dealer’s Room closed at Windy City Pulp and Paper, one of my favorite local cons (the write-up I did on last year’s is here). I wasn’t in the room five minutes before I heard a friendly voice calling my name: Arin Komins, Rich’s wife and the other half of the splendid enterprise that is Starfarer’s Despatch.

“We have a book for you,” Arin said. We found Rich and, sure enough, he pulled a beautiful, unread copy of Wolf Moon out of his backpack.

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1939 Retro Hugo Award Nominees Announced

1939 Retro Hugo Award Nominees Announced

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Astounding Science Fiction May 1938-smallThe Hugos have become science fiction’s more recognizable award, ever since they were first presented in 1953 at the 11th World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia. In the decades since though, there’s been plenty of speculation in fan circles about classic SF published before 1953.

“Oh, Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth would have win the Hugo Award hands down back in 1951.”
“Are you kidding? The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published that same year — it would have been the easy victor.”
“You’re both crazy. The most popular SF release in 1951  was E.E. “Doc” Smith’s First Lensman, no question.”
“Wait a minute — what about Asimov’s Pebble in the Sky? It came out that same year!”

If there’s one thing fans like to do more than argue, it’s to prove they’re right. So in 1996, the First Retro Hugo Awards were given out, for SF first published in 1946. Retro Hugos have only been awarded twice since: in 2001 (for 1951) and in 2004 (for 1954). And for the record, the winner of the Retro Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1951 was Robert A. Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky.

Loncon 3 has announced that it will present Retro Hugos this year, for work first published 75 years ago. Here’s part of the introduction to the award from the Loncon 3 Hugo Award Administrator:

1939 was an auspicious year among science fiction enthusiasts. On  2 July roughly 200 of them got together in New York City to hold the World  Science Fiction Convention… As host of the 2014 Worldcon, Loncon 3 will be hosting the Hugo Awards for the best work in 2013. As Loncon 3 marks  the 75th anniversary of that first convention in 1939, we will also be hosting  a Retrospective Hugo Award process for the best work of 1938.

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