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Category: Vintage Treasures

Birthday Reviews: Stephen Gallagher’s “God’s Bright Little Engine”

Birthday Reviews: Stephen Gallagher’s “God’s Bright Little Engine”

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Cover by Michelle Prahler
Cover by Michelle Prahler

Stephen Gallagher was born on October 13, 1954.

Gallagher received the British Fantasy Award for his 2004 collection Out of His Mind and in 2007, he earned the International Horror Guild Award for Short Fiction for his story “The Box.” He has also been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and twice for the World Fantasy Award. In addition to his fiction, Gallagher is also a writer for television, developing the series Eleventh Hour and Crusoe. He wrote the Doctor Who serials “Warrior’s Gate,” starring Tom Baker, and “Terminus,” during Peter Davison’s tenure.

Gallagher originally published “God’s Bright Little Engine” in Peter Crowther and Edward E. Kramer’s 1995 anthology Tombs. Gallagher also included the story in his 2004 British Fantasy Award-winning collection Out of His Mind.

In “God’s Bright Little Engine,” Helen is an elder-care nurse whose life is focused entirely, and not entirely by her desire, on her patients. In her run-down apartment she has built one of her few relationships with Big Andy, the slow-witted handyman who lives below her. Their relationship, such as it is, appears to be based on his infatuation with Helen and Helen’s need to have someone fix things around her apartment.

The story revolves around the emptiness in Helen’s life. She doesn’t particularly like her job, although she is apparently good at it, she doesn’t like her run-down apartment, and she sees Big Andy solely in terms of someone she can exploit because he likes her. The status quo takes a turn for the worse when Helen returns home to find some repairs had been done to her apartment while she was at work. Following a confrontation with Big Andy, who clearly had found her spare key, she also discovers that he has been spying on her through the floorboards of her apartment.

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Proud to Be Ashamed: The Destroyer

Proud to Be Ashamed: The Destroyer

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(1) Destroyer Poster

There are guilty pleasures, and there are guiltier pleasures, and then there are the pleasures that have you wearing an orange jumpsuit and standing in front of a stone-faced judge with your hands and feet shackled together, wretchedly staring at the floor, unable to look anyone in the eye, so tongue-tied with shame and degradation that all you can do is whisper, “I just can’t help myself, Your Honor… I never meant to hurt anyone, and… I know it’s wrong, and… and, there’s no excuse… but… I just can’t help myself.”

That’s reading The Destroyer.

The Destroyer series was part of the wave of “Men’s Adventure” paperbacks that sprang up like mushrooms during the 70’s and drove decent literature like Jane Eyre and Valley of the Dolls off the shelves and into the outer darkness, there to be pulped and perish. The catalyst for the whole seedy genre was the 1969 publication of War Against the Mafia by Don Pendleton, the first entry in his wildly successful Executioner saga, which featured Vietnam veteran Mack Bolan waging a single-handed war against the Mafia, just like it said in the title.

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Birthday Reviews: William R. Forstchen’s “The Truthsayer”

Birthday Reviews: William R. Forstchen’s “The Truthsayer”

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Cover by James Warhola
Cover by James Warhola

William R. Forstchen was born on October 11, 1950.

Forstchen is a professor of American History, specializing in military history, the Civil War, and the history of technology. He may be best known in science fiction circles for his The Lost Regiment series and for a series of alternate history novels co-written with Newt Gingrich. Forstchen has also collaborated on fiction with Larry Segriff, Raymond E. Feist, Jaki Demarest, Greg Morrison, Andrew Keith, Ben Ohlander, Christopher Stasheff, and John Mina. He has collaborated with Bill Fawcett, Jennie Ethell Chancey, and Donald V. Bennett on non-fiction.

“Truthsayer” originally appeared in Susan Shwartz’s anthology Arabesques: More Tales of the Arabian Nights, in 1988. In 2007, it was translated into French as “Le diseur de vérité” for publication in the anthology Fantasy 2007, published by Bragelonne.

Forstchen retells the story of the fall of the empire of Khwarazm and the flight of Muhammad Shah from his empire in “Truthsayer.” Historically, Ala ad-Din Muhammad incurred the wrath of Chinggis Khan by murdering a Mongol ambassador who sought to establish trade between the Mongol and Khwarezmian empires. Chinggis led armies into Khwarezm to exact vengeance and the Mongol armies, led by the Mongol general Subutai, destroyed the empire, murdering millions while Muhammad fled, eventually to die of disease on an island in the Caspian Sea.

In Forstchen’s version, Muhammad is accompanied by Ali, a Truthsayer. In this world, Truthsayers, of whom Ali is the last of a long line, have the ability to tell if someone is telling the truth, and the inability to lie. At the same time, they have a magic to evoke the truth from people. Muhammad makes rare use of Ali’s ability, but includes him on his flight from the Mongols. In the end, Muhammad abandons his entourage and Ali learns from the Khwarazm general Maluk that Muhammad feared and hated Ali for the truth the man had forced the shah to confront.

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The Judges Guild Journal Third Ultimate Dungeon Design Contest

The Judges Guild Journal Third Ultimate Dungeon Design Contest

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judges guild journal 18 cover - Copy-small judges guild journal 18 contest announcement - Copy-small

Yesterday I was going through some old notebooks of gaming stuff from high school and found a piece of original art I’d completely forgotten about. Back then, my friends and I spent most of our free time playing role-playing games — particularly Advanced Dungeons & Dragons — and other war games. I subscribed to a bunch of the gaming magazines at the time, including The Judges Guild Journal.

In issue #18 of that mag (December 1979-January 1980) they announced The Third Ultimate Dungeon Design Contest — also referred to as the “Judges Guild Journal Bride of — the Son of — The Worlds First and Greatest Dungeon Creation Contest — Contest — Contest!!!” JG never met hyperbole they didn’t like.

Entries were due by February 29, 1980, and my 16 year old self decided to enter. There were three categories, based on the size of the dungeon you created (prosaically listed as Large Dungeon, Medium Dungeon and Mini-Dungeon). I worked up a medium dungeon, “Catacombs of the Undead.” One of my high school friends, John Sweet, who was a year younger than me and a talented artist, offered to do some art for it.

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Under a Blood-Red Sun: The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

Under a Blood-Red Sun: The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

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Of those values that Master Malrubius (who had been master of apprentices when I was a boy) had tried to teach me, and that Master Palaemon still tried to impart, I accepted only one: loyalty to the guild. In that I was quite correct — it was, as I sensed, perfectly feasible for me to serve Vodalus and remain a torturer. It was in this fashion that I began the long journey by which I have backed into the throne.

oie_91580lF5ljN9QBased solely on Don Maitz’s now classic cover art, I grabbed Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) from the library shelf as soon as I laid eyes on it. I cracked it open and dropped it almost at once. It was too dense and too alien for my teenaged brain to appreciate. To this day, Gene Wolfe, considered one of the most accomplished scifi/fantasy writers (see “Sci-fi’s Difficult Genius” by Peter Bebergal), remains a serious blind spot for me, even if I do have a large selection of his most important works gathering dust on the shelf.

I did finally revisit Shadow some years ago, but while I liked it and the next book in the sequence, The Claw of the Conciliator, I didn’t go on to read the remaining three volumes, The Sword of the Lictor, The Citadel of the Autarch, and The Urth of the New Sun. Well, it finally seems like the right time to give the series another go.

Urth is a dull, rusted-out world orbiting a fading, red sun. Within the Matachin Tower, in the citadel of the great capital city of Nessus, the Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, or the Torturers, service the clients sent them by the Autarch, absolute ruler of the Commonwealth. Once among their members was a young apprentice named Severian. From some future vantage point Severian has set out to narrate the great story that seems to end with him upon a throne, presumably the Autarch’s.

From William Hope Hodgson to Clark Ashton Smith to Jack Vance, worn-out Earth with fading-ember sun has been explored many times. For Hodgson it was a stage on which to tell a story of romantic heroism, for Smith, to spin tales of decadence and terror, and for Vance, cynically comic tales of adventure. With only the first book read, it’s not clear where Wolfe is going with this series. The myths and legends that are told by various characters throughout The Shadow of the Torturer are filled with angels and demons and premonitions of impending apocalypse. While there are elements similar to those in the works of the illustrious earlier sojourners to Earth’s dying days, Wolfe seems to be aiming for something deeper and more complex than his forebears.

Severian’s Urth is decrepit and weather-beaten. More knowledge seems to have been forgotten than is still remembered and the world staggers along, propped up more by tradition than by any real understanding or philosophy. While we learn man has traveled to the stars, that seems to be long in the past. The tower used by the Torturers, as well as those of several other guilds, are clearly long-immobilized rocket ships. The sand favored by many artists for their creations is atomized glass of long-vanished cities. What appears to Severian as a painting of a warrior in a barren land, to the reader it is obviously Neil Armstrong on the moon.

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Birthday Reviews: Robert Reed’s “Night of Time”

Birthday Reviews: Robert Reed’s “Night of Time”

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The Silver Gryphon-small

Cover by Thomas Canty

Robert Reed was born on October 9, 1956.

In 1986, Reed’s story “Mudpuppies” won the Writers of the Future 2nd Quarter Contest as well as that year’s Grand Prize. In 1995, his novel Down the Bright Way won the Grand Prix d’Imaginaire for its French translation. Reed won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 2007 for “A Billion Eves.” He has been nominated for the Hugo Award 8 times, the Nebula Award twice, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award 9 times, and the World Fantasy Award once.

“Night of Time” was initially published by Gary Turner and Marty Halpern in The Silver Gryphon, the twenty-fifth book published by Golden Gryphon Press in 2003. David G. Hartwell selected it for his Year’s Best SF 9 in 2004 and it was translated into Italian by Piero Anselmi for the Millimondi edition of the Hartwell anthology. Gardner Dozois also selected the story for his The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection. In 2005, Reed included the story in his second collection from Golden Gryphon, The Cuckoo’s Boys. He also used the story in his 2013 collection, The Greatship. “Night of Time” is tied to a specific memory. I attended the Worldcon in Boston in 2004 and I was reading Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF 9 on the plane. I finished reading “Night of Time” and realized that the person sitting next to me was Robert Reed’s wife and Robert was sitting on the other side of her.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: MORE Cool & Lam!!!!

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: MORE Cool & Lam!!!!

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Top of the Heap-small“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” — Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

Last week’s post was on Hard Case Crime’s upcoming reissue of The Count of Nine. Since I was in a Cool and Lam mood, I went ahead and re-read the prior reissue from Hard Case, Top of the Heap, which was only the third book from the imprint. I recommend reading one of my prior posts on the Cool and Lam series to help provide some background for this post. You can find them here, here, and here (last week’s).

As usual, a client is not up front with them, but he pays well, so also as usual, Bertha doesn’t care. Donald is always a little cautious, but business is business and he quickly delivers results. Once again, Bertha does nothing. But Donald keeps digging and the client stops payment on the check. Bertha is pissed at Donald.

As always, there’s a lot going on and Donald has angles everywhere, heading up from Los Angeles to San Francisco for most of the case. He’s actually less cagey with the police than he usually is, but the bay area’s Lieutenant Sheldon doesn’t think so and wants Lam picked up and brought to headquarters.

A dead gangster’s moll, a dead businessman, missing bodies, a wounded gangster, mining companies, an undercover gambling joint, a yacht club: you need a scorecard for this one.

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Birthday Reviews: Ray Nelson’s “Time Travel for Pedestrians”

Birthday Reviews: Ray Nelson’s “Time Travel for Pedestrians”

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Cover by Ed Emshwiller
Cover by Ed Emshwiller

Radell Faraday Nelson was born on October 3, 1931. Nelson has published under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ray Nelson, R. Faraday Nelson, and Jeffrey Lord. Nelson is also an artist.

Nelson’s novel The Prometheus Man received a special citation Philip K. Dick Award in 1983. In 2001 he was nominated for a Retro-Hugo in the Best Fan Artist category.

“Time Travel for Pedestrians” was published in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972, and has been reprinted in the various versions of that anthology, but has not been published outside of that work.

While the framing device in Ray Nelson’s “Time Travel for Pedestrians” may have been transgressive in 1972, when it was first published, the combination of rumination on masturbation and drug trips seems self-indulgent at a forty year distance.

Going beyond the framing device, as least as much as possible, the story offers numerous past life regressions for Nelson’s narrator, each one set earlier than the one before, each focusing on the conflict between the spread of Christianity and its competing belief systems, and each ending with the death of Nelson’s protagonist.

Intriguingly, the further back in time the narrator finds himself, the more receptive he is of Christianity, starting with a new age paganism, eventually becoming a priest in the Inquisition, and finally taking dictation from Mary Magdalen. While Nelson’s reflections on each of these vignettes offers different views on religion and belief, the framing mechanism intrudes, raising the question of whether the narrator is actually reliving past lives or if everything is part of the drug trip he has initiated, and which undermines Nelson’s story.

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Books and Craft: Parables for the Modern Reader

Books and Craft: Parables for the Modern Reader

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WizardofEarthsea-small The Tombs of Atuan-small The Farthest Shore-small

The Earthsea Trilogy (Bantam, 1975). Covers by Pauline Ellison

Early last year, I began a column here at Black Gate that I call “Books and Craft.” The idea was to shine a light on the writing elements that contribute to the greatness of classic works in our genre. (You might care to read my previous pieces on Nicola Griffith’s Slow River, and Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana .) I intended to write these on a regular basis, but life and work intervened. Today I’m happy to be back with a new “Books and Craft” post about books that have long been deeply special to me.

Ursula K. Le Guin died earlier this year after a stellar career of nearly sixty years. She was a master of speculative fiction, one of the most decorated writers ever to grace our genre. She was perhaps best known for her science fiction novels set in the Hainish Universe, but personally, I am most fond of her fantasy, specifically the first three of her Earthsea novels: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore. (In fact, my newest series, The Islevale Cycle, is set in a world of islands and seas that I meant as an homage to Earthsea and Le Guin.)

These three early Earthsea novels, often referred to as The Earthsea Trilogy, were published as children’s books. They were written, though, with a spare sophistication and elegance that appealed to a broad audience and brought them critical and commercial success. Earthsea is a world of myth, rich culture, and social complexity. By creating a network of islands and archipelagos, Le Guin ensured that her land would be home to a variety of traditions, customs, and people. And in making Ged, the hero of the series, dark-skinned, she brought a non-traditional protagonist to a genre that had, until that time, been overwhelmingly white.

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Vintage Treasures: Songs of Stars and Shadows by George R.R. Martin

Vintage Treasures: Songs of Stars and Shadows by George R.R. Martin

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Songs of Stars and Shadows George RR Martin-small Songs of Stars and Shadows George RR Martin-back-small

George R.R. Martin is the most popular fantasy writer in the English language, and indeed one of the most popular fantasy writers of all time. I know a great many aspiring young twenty-something writers who aspire to be him, or at the very least aspire to his career. Most have read his magnum opus, the Game of Thrones novels, but few seem to be aware that not so very long ago GRRM was also a struggling twenty-something writer. If you’re serious about studying his career, the place to start is his early short story collections, which gather the best work of a gifted young writer who even then was obviously destined for great things.

George’s second collection Songs of Stars and Shadows was published in paperback by Pocket Books in 1977. It contains nine tales, including four in his Thousand Worlds milieu, his Hugo-nominated “And Seven Times Never Kill Man,” his space dogfight story “Night of the Vampyres,” and “This Tower of Ashes,” which he calls in his Introduction “in my estimation the best short story I have ever written.”

George’s lengthy intro, in fact, is one of the best things about the book, especially for modern fans. It’s a delightful peek behind the scenes at the life of a young science fiction writer in the early 70s, enduring writing slumps, half-heartedly accepting thick research packets on lasers from new Analog editor Ben Bova, sleeping on the floor at science fiction conventions (with his boots as a pillow), and sneaking into the Playboy Club with Howard Waldrop. Here’s a colorful snippet that talks about how his first collaboration with Waldrop, “Men of Greywater Station,” came to be.

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