On Wednesday, January 17, 2018, after I clocked out from work, I decided to do a 5 for 5: Hit all five of Med City’s thrift stores (at least that I know of) — 2 Goodwills, 2 Salvation Armys, and a Savers. I also dropped in at Nerdin’ Out, a store that specializes in collectible comic books and action figures.
It was a challenge, as I had just sprained my ankle that morning, and the walks down the aisles started to feel longer and longer as the day wore on. By the time the sun was setting, I had adopted the limping, shambling gait of the recently undead. But the increasingly incredible finds that I kept stumbling upon at one store after the other released enough adrenalin to keep me going — all the way until I got home, pulled off my snow boot, and found my ankle swollen to double its size.
Here (sharing only the finds that would be of particular interest to readers of this site) is my haul. Not all pickin’ days are this fruitful, I assure you. If they always turned out like today, hell, this is all I’d ever do.
From schlocky VHS horror flicks and classic sci-fi paperbacks to giant rubber snakes and other rare collectibles, today’s pick turned up treasures from across the entire spectrum of what I hunt for.
Pamela Dean was born on January 18, 1953. Dean has published the Secret Country trilogy as well as three stand-alone novels. In the 1980s, she was involved in the Liavekseries of shared world anthologies, contributing stories to each of the five volumes as well as the title poem for the fourth volume. She has been nominated for the Mythopoeic Award twice, for her novels Tam Lin and The Dubious Hills.
Her story “Paint the Meadows with Delight” appeared in Will Shetterly and Emma Bull’s anthology Liavek: Wizard’s Row in 1987, and was reprinted in 2015 in Patricia Wrede and Pamela Dean’s Points of Departure: Liavek Stories.
Although set in a shared universe, Pamela Dean’s “Paint the Meadows with Delight” stands on its own. The Benedictis are a large Acrivain family living in exile in the city of Liavek. While the father attends political meetings, the rest of the family lives in wait for the day they can return to their native country. One of the daughters, Jehane, is convinced the Acrivain god Acrilat has turned his back on the family because they have left their native land. The result is that the family is in turmoil and one of the sons, Deleon, has disappeared.
Jehane is determined to restore her family to their lost happiness and seeks out one of Liavek’s wizards to help. Jehane’s plan isn’t particular well thought out, in either her goals or her mission. She seeks both to have Acrilat leave her family alone and also to have the family able to return to an Acrivain that is politically welcoming to them. These goals, along with her search for her missing brother, take her on a miniature quest through Liavek, visiting Granny Carry, the Magician, and, at the Magician’s insistence, the House of Responsible Life, and Silvertop, another magician.
In the end, the success of her quest, or even who helped her achieve it, is questionable. The most that can be said is that Jehane may have been able to reconnect on some level with her younger sister, Nerissa, who she also learned has been quite active in ways that Jehane had not even suspected.
While the story can be read and enjoyed on its own merits, its place in the shared-world universe gives it quite a bit of background depth and its structure as a quest around Liavek allows Dean to touch on the characters and concepts created by the other authors.
Among the couple of boxes of fanzines I picked up a few weeks ago was this oddity.
It’s the first (and I suspect only) issue of The Brythunian Prints, dated June 1967. I’ve not been able to find out any information at all on this title. It was a sword and sorcery fanzine, “published by the Brythunian Troop of the Hyborean Legion.”
The editors (Ken Hulme, Jim Feerhmeyer and Greg Shank) dedicate the issue “to L. Sprague de Camp and George Scithers for their kindness and cooperation!” Based on Shank’s editorial, they were apparently students at Toledo University, where they formed an organization called the Northwest Ohio Science Fiction Society.
The fanzine is 16 pages long, five pages of which are a S&S story, “Shandu the Magnificent” by Tom Trotter and Ken Hulme. It’s just as good as you would expect it to be. ?
The most interesting content is two pages of poetry by Lin Carter, under the general heading “War Songs and Battle Cries,” apparently reprinted with Carter’s permission from The Wizard of Lemuria and Thongor of Lemuria. The remaining content is taken up with editorials, limericks by John Boardman (four of which were reprinted from Amra) and a book review of The Fantastic Swordsmen edited by de Camp. The back cover is Tolkien related, as it pictures “Baggins and Trinket” (the Ring).
I’d be curious to know if anyone has any further info on this one.
Mel Hunter’s “Flight Over Mercury” is featured on the cover of the January, 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s much more interesting than the actual surface of Mercury, which looks a lot like our moon.
“Natural State” by Damon Knight — The major cities of the United States operate as industrial nations of their own while the rest of the country becomes agricultural. The cities repeatedly try to subjugate those in the country, but the cities’ technology can’t compete against the genetic engineering of those in the country.
Alvah is sent from New York to open trade with the outsiders — the Muckfeet — in hopes of bringing them into a civilized world and to support the needs of the city. When he meets with the Muckfeet, he finds that they consider him backwards – that those in the cities are the uncultured, uncivilized people. It’s up to a young woman named B.J. to reeducate him, if he’ll listen.
Robert Silverberg was born on January 15, 1935. In 1956, he won a Hugo for being the Most Promising New Author, nearly two decades before the John W. Campbell, Jr. Award debuted. He has subsequently won two Hugo Awards for Best Novella and one for Best Novelette. Silverberg has also received two Nebula Awards for Best Short Story, two more for Best Novella, and one for Best Novel.
He has won or been nominated for numerous other awards. Silverberg was a Guest of Honor at Heicon ‘70, the 28th Worldcon, held in Heidelberg, Germany. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999 and named an SFWA Grand Master in 2004. Other lifetime achievement awards include the Big Heart Award, the Forry Award, the Prix Utopia, the Skylark Award, the Milford Award.
“When We Went to See the End of the World” was published in Universe 2 in 1972 by Terry Carr. The story was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Award. Carr reprinted it the following year in The Best Science Fiction of the Year #2, and Isaac Asimov included it in Nebula Award Stories Eight. Lester del Rey also included it in his Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Second Annual Collection. It has since been included in several collections and anthologies and has been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, and Russian.
“When We Went to See the End of the World” is set at a cocktail party which in many ways seems very much of the early seventies when the story was written. Casual sex and marijuana are routine, but the main focus of the story is Nick and Jane telling the rest of the attendees about their recent excursion to see the end of the world.
Such excursions are new, only recently having come down from a price where only millionaires could afford to go, so Nick and Jane gained social status by being the first in their neighborhood to see the end of the world, and Nick sees the opportunity to have an affair with a neighbor’s wife.
Their status, and Nick’s chances for an affair, appear to be ended when a couple of latecomers to the party indicate that they have also taken the journey to the end of the world, although the world they saw was extremely different from what Nick and Jane had experienced. Before either couple can accuse each other of lying about their experiences, another couple announces that they completed the journey and saw someone else when they were there.
The story is a reasonably light-hearted look at a common idea in science fiction and presents a reasonable explanation for the multiple experiences the party-goers who visited the end of the world had. At the same time, since all of the activity takes place in the confines of the cocktail party, it is quite possible to read “When We Went to See the End of the World” is a story about people trying to one up each other, rather than relating their actual experiences.
Dark Imaginings, edited by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski (Delta, July 1978). Cover by Joel Schick
Dark Imaginings is the first dark fantasy anthology I can remember lusting after in a bookstore. It was published in 1978, when I was 14 years old, at the lordly price of $4.95 — pretty steep in an era when a typical paperback was a buck fifty, even for a big oversized trade paperback.
In those days I would make weekly sojourns to downtown Ottawa every Saturday afternoon to hunt through the used bookstores on Bank Street for science fiction paperbacks, and I would gaze at it longingly on the bookshelf at WHSmith, or take it down and thumb through it. Joel Schick’s beautiful cover, featuring a canopy of dead, grasping trees in a twisted wood, spoke to me of dark tales whispered by strangers on Halloween. Man, I wanted this book.
And who wouldn’t? Dark Imaginings is packed with classic tales of gothic fantasy, including a Kull tale by Robert E. Howard, a Northwest Smith novelette by C. L. Moore, an Averoigne story by Clark Ashton Smith, a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tale by Fritz Leiber, a Cthulhu Mythos story by H. P. Lovecraft, a novel excerpt from Poul Anderson, and ten more stories. Each is illustrated with a sparse b&w pencil sketch by James Cagle. It’s a fine volume to curl up by the window with on a blustery winter evening, as I learned when I finally bought a copy, over a decade later.
In 1940, Edgar Rice Burroughs created his final new adventure setting, the extrasolar planet Poloda. For the first time in a career that had ignited pulp science fiction back in 1912, Burroughs pushed beyond the solar system to the region of pure speculation. But what he discovered four hundred and fifty thousand light-years from Earth wasn’t an E. E. Smith space opera, or even an old-fashioned romp on a weird planet of monsters and savage humanoid tribes. Against the grain of its romanticized title, the incomplete short novel Beyond the Farthest Star isn’t an escapist tale, but a bleak meditation on a world mired in unending warfare. The title makes you anticipate Star Wars. Instead you find just Wars.
This is a stark work. It offers no illusions. There’s a dash of humor and some winking satire, but the overwhelming sensation of Beyond the Farthest Star is resignation to carnage. There are no valiant heroes on Poloda who become beacons for others to follow. There are only stalwart soldiers who fall in line to fight the fight, whatever it may be, and die in numbers tabulated by the hundreds of thousands.
We’re used to Edgar Rice Burroughs as a master of sweeping adventure in worlds where fighting means hope. It’s a shock to see him sitting glumly among the ruins of hope, waiting for the next wave of barbarians. Looking at Poloda from the perspective of the twenty-first century is to see a prophetic futurist emerging in Old Man Burroughs. The story the Old Man tells is not much fun. But it’s enthralling — and there’s nothing else like it in the ERB canon, even among the strange evolutions his work took during his last decade.
As with Savage Pellucidar and its sister books set on Marsand Venus, the Poloda novellas were planned to form a connected sequence for later hardcover publication. Part I, “Beyond the Farthest Star,” was written in October 1940 over twelve days, and Part II, “Tangor Returns,” was finished in December in five days. “Beyond the Farthest Star” appeared in the January 1942 issue of Blue Book, but Burroughs never submitted Part II for publication, probably because he scrapped the series after starting work as a war correspondent. “Tangor Returns” wasn’t discovered until thirteen years after Burroughs’s death. It was published along with “Beyond the Farthest Star” in the 1964 Canaveral Press omnibus Tales from Three Planets. Ace Books later released a paperback of the unfinished Poloda saga as Beyond the Farthest Star, with the first novella retitled “Adventure on Poloda.”
Clark Ashton Smith was born on January 13, 1893 and died on August 14, 1961. Along with H.P. Lovecraft, he was one of the major authors at Weird Tales, writing stories which were similar to the dark fantasies Lovecraft wrote.
Smith maintained a correspondence with Lovecraft for the last 15 years of Lovecraft’s life. While Lovecraft wrote about Cthulhu, Smith wrote about the far future Zothique. Smith was named the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award winner in 2015.
“The Maze of Maal Dweb” first appeared in a limited edition chapbook, The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, published by Smith in 1933. A the time the story was called “The Maze of the Enchanter.” It received its first general publication, and under its better known title, in the October 1938 issue of Weird Tales, edited by Farnsworth Wright.
Smith included it in his 1944 collection Lost Worlds and it has frequently been reprinted since, including translations into Dutch, German, French, and Italian. Maal Dweb also appeared in Smith’s story “The Flower-Women.”
“The Maze of Maal Dweb” has Tiglari working his way through a swamp to retrieve his beloved, Athlé, from the titular lord of the solar system. Despite Maal Dweb’s palace being impregnable, Tiglari has somehow managed to acquire knowledge of the dangers that lie within, so he can arm himself appropriately for his quest.
Similarly unexamined is how Maal Dweb, a recluse who is never seen by anyone except the women he orders sent to him, can successfully rule his vast domains. Similarly, the palace is seemingly unpopulated except by the petrified forms of Maal Dweb’s previous victims. Rather than a living home in which to live, Maal Dweb sits like bait in his trap, waiting for doomed adventurers to come to him.
The World Fantasy Convention is my favorite convention by a pretty fair margin, and the highlight of the con every year is the presentation of the World Fantasy Awards. They were first given out at the very first World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island in 1975, and they’ve been awarded every year since. The list of recipients is like a Who’s Who of the major authors in the genre, and the award has come to be the most significant honor in American fantasy, alongside the Nebula and Hugo Awards (both more generally given to works of science fiction).
The Nebula Award winners are collected annually in the Nebula Awards Showcase, which has been continuously published for 51 years (we covered the latest volume, edited by Julie E. Czerneda, here), and the Hugo Winners were famously collected in some of the most popular SF anthologies of all time, Isaac Asimov’s The Hugo Winners, which ran to multiple volumes (we looked at that series here). But even most SF collectors are unaware that there are two volumes collecting World Fantasy Award winners, originally published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1977 and 1980.
Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author.
George Alec Effinger was born on January 10, 1947 and died on April 27, 2002. He was married three times, the second time to artist Beverly Effinger and the third time to science fiction author Barbara Hambly. He was a John W. Campbell, Jr. finalist in the award’s inaugural year and the Southern Fandom Confederation presented him with the Phoenix Award in 1974. His story “Schrödinger’s Kitten” received the Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Award in 1989. Effinger wrote the popular Budayeen series, comprised of several short stories and the novels When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss. He also wrote pastiches of several types of pulp adventure stories featuring his character Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson.
His short story “Albert Schweitzer and the Treasures of Atlantis” was written for Mike Resnick’s alternate history anthology Alternate Warriors, in which each story takes an unlikely historical figure and turns them into a fighter. The story has never been reprinted.
