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Win a Copy of The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Four from Haffner Press

Win a Copy of The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Four from Haffner Press

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The Collected Edmond Hamilton Volume Four-smallHaffner Press has released the long-awaited fourth volume of The Collected Edmond Hamilton and we have a copy to give away to one lucky winner.

How do you enter? Just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with the title “Edmond Hamilton” and a one-sentence review of your favorite Hamilton novel or short story (don’t forget to mention the title of the story). One winner will be drawn at random from all qualifying entries and we’ll publish the best reviews here on the Black Gate blog. To give you the idea, here’s my one-sentence review of my favorite Hamilton story, “The Man Who Evolved.” (read the complete story here)

Arthur Wright and Hugh Dutton visit Dr. John Pollard on the night he first tests a ray that allows him to experience millions of years of human evolution… and witness a deadly experiment that threatens the entire human race.

See how easy that was? If you need more inspiration. we recently covered several Edmond Hamilton books — including Starwolf and The Best of Edmond Hamilton — and we reprinted his very first story, “The Monster-God of Mamurth” (from the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales) in Black Gate 2.

All entries become the property of New Epoch Press. No purchase necessary. Must be 12 or older. Decisions of the judges (capricious as they may be) are final. Not valid where prohibited by law. Or anywhere postage for a hefty hardcover is more than, like, 10 bucks. Seriously, this thing is huge and postage is killing me.

The Reign of the Robots, The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Four was published by Haffner Press on December 30, 2013. It is 696 pages, priced at $40 in hardcover. There is no digital edition. Learn more at the Haffner website.

Vintage Treasures: Starwolf by Edmond Hamilton

Vintage Treasures: Starwolf by Edmond Hamilton

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Edmond Hamilton Starwolf-smallLast week, I wrote about a delightful collection of 80′s paperbacks I bought on eBay for just 10 bucks — including John Silbersack’s Buck Rogers novel Rogers’ Rangers, well worth $10 all on its own. Sometimes it’s good when no one else shares your hobbies.

I’m still digging through the remaining 74 volumes and continuing to make marvelous finds. Like the omnibus collection of pulp novels by Edmond Hamilton, gathering together all three volumes in his classic Starwolf trilogy. It contains The Weapon From Beyond (1967), The Closed Worlds (1968), and The World of the Starwolves (1968), all originally published by Ace. That’s a lot of classic space adventure from one of the greatest pulp writers of the 20th Century. Well worth tracking down, if you can find a copy.

The only mercy a Starwolf could expect was death…

Morgan Chane was a Starwolf – a member of the most infamous band of interstellar pirates in the galaxy. He had flown with the raiding packs, rockets screaming, to plunder the rich and slaughter the helpless.

But Morgan Chane was also a Terran, adopted as a child into the Starwolf clan. And when a quarrel erupted, Chane discovered that the Starwolves weighed his alien birth more heavily than all the years of comradeship. Now he is cast out of the clan – and running for his life.

But where, in all the galaxy, can a Starwolf expect to find refuge?

Starwolf was published by Ace Books in October 1982. It is 456 pages, priced at $3.50. It went through multiple printings between 1982 and 1990, but has otherwise never been reprinted. There is no digital edition. The cover is by David Schleinkofer, who was obviously influenced by one too many viewings of Battlestar Galactica.

See all of our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Doctor Who and the Daemons – the Novel!

Doctor Who and the Daemons – the Novel!

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Daemons002 More than once on Black Gate, I’ve heard that the seventies were a dead zone for science fiction and fantasy. For teens in search of readily available genre “gateway drugs,” I suppose this might have been true for many, but my particular experience of growing up managed, against all odds, to be different. Ohio was my home base, a vanilla environment for “culture” of the fantastical sort, but luckily I had a smorgasbord of British relatives. One especially perceptive and sibylline aunt started sending me Doctor Who novelizations.

Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, that was the first I tried. Next, one of the best offerings in the canon, Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion.  I was in third grade and after facing down those blank-eyed Autons and their Nestene masters, I was hooked.

Note that I wasn’t in any way watching the TV show. In Columbus, Ohio, it simply wasn’t available, not until the early eighties, and then, when PBS did pick up a few random episodes, it was Tom Baker’s roost to rule. The Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton, and William Hartnell adventures I first encountered were absent entire.

What Tom Baker’s run taught me is that talented actors can be mired forever in substandard scripts and even worse special effects. This was a total and unpleasant surprise, because the novelizations were fast-paced genre gems, especially those penned by Terrance Dicks.  (Malcolm Hulke was the other regular adapter for the Doctor Who franchise, with a rotating cast of fellow contributors including Gerry Davis, Ian Marter, and David Whitaker.) How could such pacey, adrenaline-filled books arise from such hokey, hamstrung screen material?

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes – Creation to Death and Back

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes – Creation to Death and Back

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Ormond1In 1882, Arthur Conan Doyle (not yet “Sir”) opened up his own shop as a doctor in Southsea (England). Business was slow and his most notable triumph was marrying the sister of a patient who died of meningitis.

With some spare time on his hands, Doyle wrote fiction. Somewhere around 1886, he came to the conclusion that he could write detective stories better than the ones he was reading. He would create, “a scientific detective, who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.”

Putting the pen to the paper, he completed A Study in Scarlet (working title, The Tangled Skein) that year. Originally starring Sherrinford Holmes and Ormond Sacker, the names had settled into the now familiar Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.

Doyle’s stories of Holmes owe a debt to Edgar Allen Poe that has been discussed by far better minds than mine. The now mostly forgotten Emile Gaboriau was also acknowledged by Doyle as an influence.

Mystery maven and Doyle biographer John Dickinson Carr stated that Holmes was clearly based on Doyle himself, which seems overly flattering.

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Vintage Treasures: Universe 13 edited by Terry Carr

Vintage Treasures: Universe 13 edited by Terry Carr

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Universe 13 Terry Carr-smallLast Sunday, I was busy complaining about the apparent death of the original SF and fantasy paperback anthology series (as one does), when it occurred to me that I should probably read a few of the books I was talking about.

Nothing like waxing nostalgic and working up a good frothy indignation at the death of a vital part of American culture to remind you that your memories on the subject are actually kinda vague and unspecific. It’s a crime that Universe is no longer being published! It was a source of some of the most brilliant SF of the 70s! I think. Wait, which one was Universe again?

So I decided to start by reading Universe 13. Partly because Terry Carr really was a terrific editor and he knew how to put together a splendid anthology. But mostly because I found a copy in easy reach in a stack of vintage paperbacks and I didn’t have to get up out of my big green chair.

I’ve talked about Universe before, especially about Carr’s insight into the field. One of the most famous quotes about science fiction comes from his introduction to Universe 3, which I printed in 2012 and I’d like to reprint here:

When aficionados of this field get together, that’s a standard topic of discussion. When was science fiction’s golden age? Some say the early forties, when John W. Campbell and a host of new writers like Heinlein, Sturgeon and van Vogt were transforming the entire field; others point to the early fifties, to [editors] H.L. Gold and Anthony Boucher and to such writers as Damon Knight, Alfred Bester and Ray Bradbury. Some will lay claims for the late sixties, when the new wave passed and names like Ballard, Disch and Aldiss came forward. There are still people around, too, who’ll tell you about 1929 and David H. Keller, E.E. Smith and Ray Cummings.

The clue in most cases is when the person talking first began to read science fiction. When it was all new, all of it was exciting. Years ago a friend of mine, Pete Graham, tersely answered the question “When was the golden age of science fiction?” by saying “Twelve.” He didn’t have to explain further; we knew what he meant.

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The Novels of Michael Shea: A Quest for Simbilis

The Novels of Michael Shea: A Quest for Simbilis

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A Quest for Simbilis-smallThe stories that surround Michael Shea’s first novel, A Quest for Simbilis, have the stuff of legend.

In the early 70s, Michael found a copy of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth novel The Eyes of the Overworld in the lobby of a hotel in Juneau, Alaska. The book stayed with him for four years, through a brief first marriage and extensive travels, hitch-hiking through France and Spain, until he sat down to write an homage to Vance and a sequel to his novel. It was published in paperback by DAW Books in 1974 and was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award.

There are dangers to playing in someone else’s playground, and some at the time saw Michael as a dabbler, not really serious about writing. But nothing could have been further from the truth, as his wife Lynn noted in the announcement of his death at Michael Shea’s website on March 7th.

Michael published his first novel, A Quest for Simbilis, in 1974, and for all the years that I knew him, he wrote almost every day. Novels, short stories, and, his first love, poetry poured out of him up through the very last day of his life. Some thought of Michael as reclusive, when in fact he was just old-fashioned, a writer’s writer. Once a piece was perfect, he wanted to set it aside, forget it, and begin the next project. Even so, we, his family, feel that, along with our memories, his written works are what we still have of him.

Michael’s family have now turned his website into a forum where his friends and fans can “share their experiences, both literary and personal, as well as find access to new releases and formats of his work.” Visit the site here.

Jack Vance graciously declined to share the advance offered by DAW Books for A Quest for Simbilis, but allowed the book to be released as an authorized sequel to his Dying Earth novels. Eventually, Vance took the series in a different direction when he published a third book, Cugel’s Saga, in 1983.

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New Treasures: The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies by Clark Ashton Smith

New Treasures: The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies by Clark Ashton Smith

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The Dark Eidolon and Other FantasiesAt long last, Clark Ashton Smith gets a little respect.

The highly regarded Penguin Classics line — which scholars and teachers love to rely on when drawing up things like course reading lists — has been slow to embrace pulp writers, and especially pulp fantasy writers. But in the last decade or so they’ve been correcting that oversight, starting with Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, Oct. 1999, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, Oct. 2001, and more.) They’ve done a little better with other fantasy writers, including Lord Dunsany (In the Land of Time: And Other Fantasy Tales, February 2004), Arthur Machen, Shirley Jackson, M. R. James, and others.

Much of this has been the result of the efforts of editor S.T. Joshi, who now brings Penguin Classics their very first pulp sword & sorcery collection, gathering together the best work of the great Clark Ashton Smith.

Called “unexcelled by any other writer, dead or living” by H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, a prolific poet, amateur philosopher, bizarre sculptor, and unmatched storyteller, simply wrote like no one else. Now, The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, the much-awaited collection of poetry and prose from Clark Ashton Smith, introduces him into the Classics as a cosmic master artist who saw horror and wonder in all things, and in whose pen note a single sentence was safe.

This collection of his very best tales and poems, selected and introduced by supernatural literature scholar S.T. Joshi, allows readers to encounter Smith’s visionary brand of fantastical, phtantasmagorical worlds, each one filled with invention, terror, and a superlative sense of metaphysical wonder. The volume’s title story — a revenge tale that ends with macrocosmic stallions returning to trample a house they had formerly spared — is set in Smith’s Zothique story circle, in which the last inhabited continent on Earth watches humanity at the end-time regress to a pre-modern state.

The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies was published by Penguin Books on March 25. It is 370 pages — including 32 pages of Explanatory Notes on the stories by Joshi — and priced at $16 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Island of Fu Manchu, Part Four

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Island of Fu Manchu, Part Four

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island titanisland zebraSax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and the Panama Canal was first serialized in Liberty Magazine from November 16, 1940 to February 1, 1941. It was published in book form as The Island of Fu Manchu by Doubleday in the US and Cassell in the UK in 1941. The book serves as a direct follow-up to Rohmer’s 1939 bestseller, The Drums of Fu Manchu, and is again narrated by Fleet Street journalist, Bart Kerrigan.

The final quarter of the novel sees Rohmer really deliver the goods with Kerrigan and Sir Denis Nayland Smith successfully infiltrating the Haitian voodoo ceremony of Queen Mamaloi. While similar scenes had occurred in the past at various clandestine gatherings of the Si-Fan, the sequence most closely resembles the gathering of the followers of El Mahdi in 1932’s The Mask of Fu Manchu. Rohmer’s mastery of the art of suspense writing makes the reader believe the heroes are in genuine danger. While this is no small feat, considering the number of times Rohmer had penned similar scenes in the past, part of the success here is down to the climactic revelation of the voodoo Queen Mamaloi.

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Goth Chick News: Something Wicked Is Coming Back This Way…

Goth Chick News: Something Wicked Is Coming Back This Way…

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Something Wicked this way comes poster-smallOkay, at this point it’s pretty clear that Hollywood is out to remake every story that ever freaked us out as kids.

Last month, we heard Cary Fukunaga (True Detective) is finally set to direct an IT remake after five years in development hell. That was OK, since it’s not like clowns were ever going to be funny and harmless again anyway.

But this week, we learn that Disney is taking another run at their 1983 film version of Something Wicked This Way Comes and once again I heave that sigh which basically says ‘there they go f’ing up another classic.’

Not that the movie version of Something Wicked is entirely a “classic” that did well the first time around – because it didn’t.

Bradbury actually scripted the original film, but he and the director Jack Clayton had a difference of opinion over the tone of the movie. Clayton wanted something more “family-friendly” and Disney had a revised draft produced without Bradbury; but the first cuts of the film tested poorly. Additional effects and a new score were added and Bradbury was brought back in to write new material.

But it was too little too late. Bradbury always claimed much of his intentions for the movie were destroyed and Disney barely broke even.

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The Fantasy Novels of Lucius Shepard: The Golden

The Fantasy Novels of Lucius Shepard: The Golden

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The Golden Lucius Shepard-smallLucius Shepard was known chiefly as a science fiction writer, and for good reason. His most popular books, including Green Eyes and Life During Wartime, were science fiction and so was much of his most acclaimed short fiction.

But to disregard his fantasy contributions would be a major oversight. Shepard died earlier this month and to commemorate his profound contributions to the genre, we will survey his fantasy books, beginning with his third novel, 1993’s The Golden, a tantalizing mix of mystery and horror subtitled A Sensual Novel of Vampires and Blood Lust.

In the mid nineteenth century, vampires gather at Castle Banat, one of their most sprawling and ancient warrens. Their five-hundred-year breeding project has produced the Golden, a mortal of perfect blood, and they’ve come to drink from her in a ceremony that will incidentally make her one of the Family. When the girl is found murdered, the clan’s shadowy patriarch calls on the detective Michel Beheim to solve the crime. But Michel has been a vampire for only a short while, and though he was a talented investigator among mortals, he is ill-prepared for the task. Soon he is fighting to survive the bizarre terrors of the labyrinthine castle and the schemes of vampires who guard a secret that may forever alter the world of the undead.

The Golden won the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel in 1994.

The Golden was published in a limited edition hardcover by Mark V. Ziesing books in April 1993 and in a mass market paperback by Bantam Books in August 1993. It was 291 pages in paperback, priced at $4.99. It is currently out of print, but a digital version is available for $6.99.