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Vintage Treasures: Copernick’s Rebellion by Leo A. Frankowski

Vintage Treasures: Copernick’s Rebellion by Leo A. Frankowski

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I don’t know much about Leo A. Frankowski. But when I saw his 1987 novel Copernick’s Rebellion on eBay, I knew I had to have it. It belongs to that peculiar sub-genre of science fiction my friends and I used to call, “Explore the universe and meet strange new aliens. And then ride them like a pony.”

Frankowski was an engineer who sold his first novel, The Cross-Time Engineer, to Del Rey in 1986. It became the opening book in a 7-volume series eventually known as the Adventures of Conrad Stargard, which also included The Flying Warlord (1989), Lord Conrad’s Lady (1990), and others. His other novels include A Boy and His Tank (1999) and The Fata Morgana (1999), both for Baen. He died in December 2008.

Virtually all of Frankowski’s work is out of print, and there aren’t a lot of publishers who would take a chance on him today. On his website he claimed “males with military and technical backgrounds often approach me as though I were something holy… [with an] excess of almost worship,” and famously identified those who disliked his work as “feminists, liberals, and homosexuals.” And anyone who objects to riding aliens like a pony, I’m willing to wager.

Copernick’s Rebellion was published by Del Rey in April 1987. It is 202 pages, priced at $2.95 in paperback. The cover art is by the great Ralph McQuarrie. It has been out of print since 1989, and there is no digital edition. See all our recent Vintage Treasures here.

Birthday Reviews: March Index

Birthday Reviews: March Index

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January index
February index

At the one quarter mark in our journey through the year, here’s a look back at the birthday reviews that appeared at Black Gate in March.

March 1, Wyman Guin: “Trigger Tide”
March 2, Ann Leckie: “The Unknown God”
March 3, Arthur Machen: “The Coming of the Terror ”
March 4, Patricia Kennealy-Morrison: “The Last Voyage”
March 5, Mike Resnick: “The Evening Line”
March 6, William F. Nolan: “Starblood”
March 7, Paul Preuss: “Rhea’s Time”
March 8, No Birthday Review published.
March 9, Pat Murphy: “On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away”
March 10, Theodore Cogswell: “The Wall Around the World”
March 11, F.M. Busby: “Tundra Moss”
March 12, Harry Harrison: “The Mothballed Spaceship”

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Birthday Reviews: Elizabeth Hand’s “Calypso in Berlin”

Birthday Reviews: Elizabeth Hand’s “Calypso in Berlin”

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Cover by B. A. Bosaiya
Cover by B. A. Bosaiya

Elizabeth Hand was born on March 29, 1957.

She won the World fantasy Award and the Nebula Award for her novella “Last Summer at Mars Hill.” She has won an additional Nebula for her short story “Echo” and three more World Fantasy Awards for her novellas Ilyria and The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, which was also a Hugo nominee.  Her collection Bibliomancy also earned her a World Fantasy Award. Hand received the James Tiptiree  Jr. Memorial Award and the Mythopoei Award for her novel Waking the Moon and she has won three Shirley Jackson Awards. Her stories “Pavane for a Prince of the Air” and “Cleopatra Brimstone” have both won the International Horror Guild Award.

“Calypso in Berlin” was originally published by Ellen Datlow in the July 13, 2005 issue of Sci Fiction. Paula Guran included it in her Best Paranormal Romance anthology the following year. It is included in Hand’s collection Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories. In 2007, the story was translated into German for publication in the Spring issue of Pandora.

In Greek mythology, Calypso was a nymph who lived on the island of Ogygia and kept Odysseus captive for seven years. Her name is a variation of the word “concealed.” In Elizabeth Hand’s “Calypso in Berlin,” the nymph has survived into the modern era and taken as her lover a man named Philip, whose business requires him to travel, so they only see each other occasionally. Philip is also married, which doesn’t particularly seem to bother Calypso.

When Philip ends their relationship, Calypso decides to relocate to Berlin, a city he loved. Once there, she realizes that Philip has become something of a muse to her, inspiring her paintings of him and without his presence, she can no longer paint. Using an old sweater of his and sympathetic magic, she draws him to her, regaining her muse. The magic Hand describes as Calypso ensures that he will always be in Berlin to inspire her feels very much in keeping with the motifs of Greek mythology.

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Space Pirates, Stowaways, and a New Frontier: Rich Horton on The Planet Strappers by Raymond Z. Gallun

Space Pirates, Stowaways, and a New Frontier: Rich Horton on The Planet Strappers by Raymond Z. Gallun

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Over at his website Strange at Ecbatan, Rich Horton continues to do excellent work highlighting books old and new. Check out his review of John Crowley’s new novel Ka earlier this week to see what I mean. Rich calls it “Wonderful… I feel humbled by my inability to truly capture the wonder of this book.”

Of course, for crusty old vintage paperback fans like myself, the real joy of Rich’s blog is in his almost whimsical selections of older titles. While he makes a focused effort to read the major new novels each year in preparation for Hugo voting (see his detailed thoughts on the 2018 Hugos here), when it comes to older books he seems perfectly content to review whatever library discard falls into his hands each week.

That gives his blog a delightfully unpredictable quality. No one in their right mind, for example, would review Raymond Z. Gallun’s The Planet Strappers, an undistinguished novel that was hurriedly forgotten a few short weeks after it appeared in 1961. But Rich would. You have to salute that kind of undaunted faith in the genre.

The truly marvelous thing about Rich’s exploration into the dimmest recesses of science fiction is how he manages to find so much genuine enjoyment in it all. And it ain’t generally due to the books. Rich has an almost unique ability to make fascinating connections between writers, pick up the nearly invisible threads of evolving tropes, and find enjoyment in the echoes of great ideas lost in muddled plot lines. A ridiculous plot, Rich has taught me, needn’t trouble you so much when it’s paired with a fascinating setting or a clever idea — especially when you can see how that idea was harvested and put to use years later by the writers that follow.

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Time Travelers, Witches, and Prophets: The Clingerman Files by Mildred Clingerman

Time Travelers, Witches, and Prophets: The Clingerman Files by Mildred Clingerman

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Last week I received an e-mail from someone named Mark Bradley. He said he’d gotten my address from Gordon Van Gelder, publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and that he’d recently self-published a collection of stories written by his grandmother, Mildred Clingerman, in the 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s. It contained all of the stories from her 1961 collection A Cupful of Space as well as many unpublished works.

I remember Mildred Clingerman! I’d tracked down A Cupful of Space decades ago, and her name popped up frequently in the vintage science fiction magazines I obsess over. I asked Mark for more info, and this is what he sent me.

First off, Mildred is my grandmother on my mom’s side. A few years ago I was contacted about renewing a copyright on one of Mildred’s stories from a school book company. I started rooting around on the internet and saw that Mildred still had a fairly active following. During a visit to San Diego I saw my cousin who had a stack of old F&SF magazines that I had never seen. I talked to my mom about possibly re-releasing her stories because maybe there was still a fan base. My mom had a good many stories that had never been published and sent them to me. At some point I started talking to Gordon about publishing possibilities. We went down a road with a university press that didn’t work so I looked to self publish. I put the book together, my wife did the cover art, had it printed in Austin and here we are. My mother and I participated on a panel at the World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio and the reception was very gratifying. We are very excited about the project and our hope is to re-introduce Mildred to an entirely new audience as well as give long time fans some new stories.

This is exactly the kind of project we heartily endorse here at Black Gate, and I’m delighted to have the opportunity to showcase Mark’s new book The Clingerman Files.

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Birthday Reviews: Patricia C. Wrede’s “Rakiki and the Wizard”

Birthday Reviews: Patricia C. Wrede’s “Rakiki and the Wizard”

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Cover by Collette Slade
Cover by Collette Slade

Patricia C. Wrede was born on March 27, 1953. Her novel Calling on Dragons was nominated for a Mythopoeic Award for Best Children’s Fantasy and her story “Utensile Strength” was long-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award.

“Rikiki and the Wizard” was written for the Liavek shared world series edited by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull. It appeared in the second volume, The Players of Luck, published in 1986. Wrede included the story in her collection Book of Enchantments and in Points of Departure: Liavek Stories, which collects Wrede and Pamela Dean’s Liavek stories.

Wrede tells a fable with the story of “Rikiki and the Wizard,” a pleasant take on a traditional lesson. Extremely powerful and lucky (for luck is magic in Liavek), the Wizard can never satisfy his need for fame and decides to trade his daughter Ryvenna to any god who will grant him the enduring fame he desires. In his hubris, the Wizard failed to consult with his daughter about this plan, which annoyed the gods, who feel that she should have some say in her own fate, and they agree to ignore his summons.

Rikiki, however, while a god, is also a blue chipmunk, with a short attention span about anything except his quest for nuts. Forgetting the bargain of the gods, Rikiki seeks out the Wizard and asks for nuts. While the Wizard tries to get rid of the chipmunk (causing the creation of the world’s geographic features, the way it happens in fables about gods), his daughter eventually gives Rikiki nuts.

Of course, there are different types of luck and different types of fame and in the end the Wizard gains his fame (although Wrede cleverly never gives him a name), and Ryvenna lives happily ever after.

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Vintage Treasures: Annals of Klepsis by R.A. Lafferty

Vintage Treasures: Annals of Klepsis by R.A. Lafferty

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Annals of Klepsis-small Annals of Klepsis-back-small

I haven’t used Goodreads much, but I’m beginning to see that’s a mistake. It truly is a marvelous resource for those looking for a wide range of opinions about books — especially those that have been out of print for decades. For example, here’s a small sample of reviews for R. A. Lafferty’s gonzo space-pirate novel Annals of Klepsis, published as an Ace paperback original in 1983. First up is Andrew:

A surrealistic apocalypse from a master of surreal apocalyptic fantasy. Lafferty’s novels function with the logic of a Bugs Bunny cartoon written by Kafka.

Astonishing how on-point that is a 2-sentence review. Here’s a snippet from a much more in-depth review by Printable Tire.

The book’s setting is sort of a blend of science fiction, in that it takes place on another planet, with “zap guns” (not called that) and everything, and fantasy, in the way Alice in Wonderland is fantasy. The very loose sprawling story takes place on Klepsis, a pirate planet, who for the last 200 hundred years has been in a state of pre-history, a state of legend. One of the thousands of things Lafferty postulates is that all pre-history and pre-legend does not take place in linear time, but because it is pre-history it all takes place at the same time; thus Hercules was a contemporary of Achilles, and thus the proportion of ghosts in this book.

And finally, here’s a sample from my favorite Goodreads review, from Raymond St.

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Birthday Reviews: Paul Levinson’s “The Protected”

Birthday Reviews: Paul Levinson’s “The Protected”

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Cover by Billy Tackett
Cover by Billy Tackett

Paul Levinson was born on March 25, 1947.

Levinson served as President of SFWA from 1998 to 2001, originally serving as Vice President, but succeeding to the Presidency when Robert J. Sawyer resigned. He has published a series starring detective Phil D’Amato beginning with The Silk Code as well as several short stories. His other series, starting with The Plot to Kill Socrates, concerns time travel. In addition to his fiction, Levinson has published several non-fiction books.

Levinson’s novel The Silk Code won the Locus Poll for Best First Novel in 2000. His story “The Chronology Protection Case” was nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Nebula Award, and won the HOMer Award. He received a second Nebula nomination for “The Copyright Notice Case,” and his third Nebula nominee, “Loose Ends,” was also nominated for the Sturgeon and the Hugo Award. His third Sturgeon nomination was for “Advantage, Bellarmine.” In 2004, Levinson’s novel The Pixel Eye was nominated for the Prometheus Award.

“The Protected” may have been published originally in Paul Levinson’s collection Bestseller: Wired, Analog, and Digital Writings in 1999. Two years later, it was definitely included in Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff’s Silicon Dreams.

Levinson tackles the rights of androids in “The Protected,” a topic which has a long history in science fiction as evidenced by many of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws stories. “The Protected” is less about the rules that govern androids, but rather the struggle between those who support androids’ rights against a group of Human firsters known as the Blood Party.

As an android who has a robotic brain inside a flesh body, Shara’s protector/lover is responsible for her security. When her creator Mark Wolfson agrees that she should be allowed to attend a conference which puts her in danger, her protector argues against it, but in the end he is forced to watch as she puts herself in danger.

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Walk a Mile in My Paws: The Valley of Creation by Edmond Hamilton

Walk a Mile in My Paws: The Valley of Creation by Edmond Hamilton

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valley-of-creation-edmond-hamilton-lodestone-coverWhat I’ve learned from my still inadequate reading of pulp science-fiction legend Edmond Hamilton is his mastery of pushing his stories in expected directions but in unexpected ways. I’ve developed enough of a sense of how Hamilton viewed his characters and his attitude toward humanity that I can anticipate the direction he’ll flip a tale in the middle — but I’ll never anticipate how he’ll do it. Almost every time, he exceeds expectations by taking the most daring path, both for his narrative and his prose.

The 1948 novel The Valley of Creation follows a theme the author explored in his cliché-battering short story “A Conquest of Two Worlds” (Wonder Stories, 1932), where a human turns against the colonial tyranny of his own race to side with oppressed aliens. Hamilton often used a cynical, bleak approach in his short fiction, turning to a lighter adventure mode for his novels. The Valley of Creation falls into this pattern. It challenges readers with a protagonist who discovers he’s on the wrong side of a conflict — the side of racial supremacists — and switches allegiance. But it’s done as a science-fantasy adventure with the zip expected of the pulps and a heavy dose of A. Merritt’s “Lost World of Super Science!” explorations.

The Valley of Creation was published in Startling Stories for the July 1948 issue, sharing a table of contents with stories from Jack Vance and Henry Kuttner. Lancer published the paperback version in 1964, a time when the paperback market was mining for the gold spread throughout the pulp era that might otherwise have flaked away with the rough paper. Hamilton did revisions for the ‘64 version, updating the timeline so its protagonist, mercenary Eric Nelson, is a veteran of the Korean War.

At the opening of the novel, Nelson is in the position of many characters from noir movies and books of the late ‘40 and ‘50s: a disaffected military man who’s seen too much and has now lost his way. Nelson and his four mercenary partners are stranded in Central Asia at the end of their tether after their Chinese warlord employer is killed. They then receive a strange offer from a man named Shan Kar — he’ll pay them in platinum if they come to his valley of L’Lan and fight “the enemy of his people.”

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Birthday Reviews: Edward Page Mitchell’s “The Clock That Went Backwards”

Birthday Reviews: Edward Page Mitchell’s “The Clock That Went Backwards”

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Cover by Will Staehle

Edward Page Mitchell was born on March 24, 1852 and died on January 22, 1927. Mitchell wrote early science fiction stories for the New York Sun in the 1880s, including stories of invisibility, time travel, computers, and teleportation, predating the works of H.G. Wells. From 1897 to 1926 he served as editor for the Sun. While he was the Sun’s editor in 1897, the newspaper published Francis Pharcellus Church’s famous essay “Yes Virginia.”

“The Clock that Went Backward” first appeared anonymously in the Sun on September 18, 1881. Because it didn’t include Mitchell’s byline, for many years the story was ignored and not reprinted until Sam Moskowitz included it in The Crystal Man: Stories by Edward Page Mitchell, a collection of Mitchell’s science fiction published in 1973.

Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh included it in Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fictio of the 19th Century and it also appeared in Edel Brosnan’s The SF Collection and Peter Haining’s Timescapes: Stories of Time Travel. More recent reprints include in Chad Arment’s About Time, The Tachypomp and Other Stories, a collection of Mitchell’s science fiction, The Wordsworth Collection of Science Fiction, the audio anthology Short Science Fiction Collection 50, and Swords and Steam Short Stories, edited by Laura Bulbeck.

It is also available on Project Gutenberg. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer included the story in The Time Traveler’s Almanac, noting that it may be the first published time travel story, predating both “The Chronic Argonauts” and The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The story has also been translated into Romanian.

Harry and the narrator are cousins who have spent considerable time with their Aunt, Gertrude. The most notable thing about Gertrude, beside her antiquity, is a stopped clock that she owns, which was made in 1572 in the city of Leyden in the Netherlands, where the family came from before immigrating to the United States. Following Gertrude’s death, when she willed the clock to Harry, the two travel to Leyden, with the clock, to attend university.

Naturally enough, with the guidance of one of their professors who could have been a distant ancestor, they use the clock to travel back to 1574 and the Siege of Leyden, where Harry rescues the daughter of Mayor Pieter Adriaanszoon Van der Werf and Professor van Stopp takes a key role in lifting the siege. The narrator returns to his native time, alone, and possibly the descendent of his cousin Harry.

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