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Category: Vintage Treasures

Drawing Out What it Truly Means to be Human: The Best of Philip K. Dick

Drawing Out What it Truly Means to be Human: The Best of Philip K. Dick

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The late Philip K. Dick (1928–1982), oftentimes lovingly called PKD, still fascinates many today. As evidence I point to the popularity of two current series on Amazon: The Man in High Castle, based upon Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name, and now Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, an anthology show based upon various PKD short stories. And of course we just had the recent movie Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to the 80s Ridley Scott classic Blade Runner, based upon Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). It doesn’t seem that PKD’s influence is going away anytime soon.

In this spirit I’m excited to discuss The Best of Philip K. Dick (1977), the ninth installment in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series. Science fiction writer John Brunner (1934–1995) wrote the highly appreciative introduction and the cover sports a new artist for the series, Vincent Di Fate (1945–), whose art style fits very well with the earlier classic covers of Dean Ellis and Darrell Sweet. Since this volume returned to a living (at the time) author, the afterword was by PKD himself.

PKD has always had something of a cult following. He is often associated with everything from classic science fiction, to cyberpunk and realistic futurism, to the drug culture of the 60s and 70s (thanks to a famous Rolling Stone article in 1975), and even with religious mysticism. There are countless books about Dick’s life and work, plus a multitude of documentaries, many of which are available online.

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The Galaxy in Scale: James Blish’s Cities in Flight

The Galaxy in Scale: James Blish’s Cities in Flight

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Cities in Flight James Blish

There’s more windup than pitch in Thomas Xavier Ferenczi’s Tor.com column about Blish’s Okie series. But it’s someone writing about James Blish — not often seen these days.

I can’t exactly agree that these books are overlooked classics. They have a lot of the weaknesses and strengths of magazine sf at midcentury. They’re most interesting for their corrosive pessimism regarding democracy (as it is generally called), and their big-dumb-object sense of wild-eyed adventure. But the different parts of the fixups don’t work very well together; the world-building has inexplicable gaps; one gets tired of the characters out-wiling each other.

And gradually, in spite of all the repetition and confusion, the packrat crowding of irrelevant information, a symmetrical and moving story appears. Out of all the details in the book, some will be for you — not the same ones that hit me, very likely, but they will build up much the same impressive picture. Blish’s scale is the whole galaxy, a view that has to be awe-inspiring if he can only make you see it: and he does, I think, more successfully than any previous writer.

That’s from Damon Knight’s review of the core book in the group, Earthman Come Home. It was probably truer in the 1950s than it is now but, to the extent that it is still true, Cities in Flight is still worth reading.

Vintage Treasures: Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany

Vintage Treasures: Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany

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Driftglass was Samuel R. Delany’s first short story collection, and it was like a bomb dropped on science fiction.

Delany’s first work of short fiction, “The Star Pit,” appeared in the February 1967 issue Worlds of Tomorrow, and was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novella. That same year his groundbreaking “Aye, and Gomorrah” appeared in Dangerous Visions, and was nominated for a Hugo and won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Over the next two years Delany would receive an extraordinary eight Hugo and Nebula Award nominations for a string of brilliant stories, including “Driftglass,” the novella “We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line,” and the Nebula and Hugo-winning “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.”

All those stories, and five others, were gathered in Diftglass. It was the top-ranked collection of the year in the annual Locus Awards poll in 1972, beating Theodore Sturgeon’s Sturgeon Is Alive and Well…, Harlan Ellison’s Partners in Wonder, and Larry Niven’s All the Myriad Ways (and even placing above The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One on the overall list).

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Birthday Reviews: Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s “The Last Voyage”

Birthday Reviews: Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s “The Last Voyage”

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Cover by Greg Call
Cover by Greg Call

Patricia Kennealy-Morrison was born on March 4, 1946. Kennealy got her start as a music journalist, serving as the editor-in-chief of Jazz &Pop and becoming one of the first female rock critics. In 1970 she participated in a handfasting ceremony with Jim Morrison of The Doors, although the couple never filed paperwork with the state to register their marriage.

In the 1980s, Kennealy-Morrison began publishing an epic space opera series, The Keltiad, which followed a group of Celts who left the British islands around the year 450, although the books were set in the 35th century. The series was comprised of two trilogies, and a stand-alone novel, as well as the short story “The Last Voyage,” and Kennealy-Morrison has indicated she plans to write more in the milieu. When her publisher cancelled further books in the 1990s, she turned her attention to mysteries and eventually set up her own press.

“The Last Voyage” was the first short story Kennealy-Morrison published, although she had several novels in the Keltiad series by that point. It was included in her 2014 collection Tales of Spiral Castle: Stories of the Keltiad, published by her own Lizard Queen Press, and which included three original Keltiad stories.

“The Last Voyage” tells the story of Jamie Douglas, a Scottish knight in the service of King Robert the Bruce. Douglas is serving his king in Paris at the time that the destruction of the Knights Templar is about to occur and he works with the Knights to spirit hundreds of them away for a life in Scotland, far from the reach of the French king bent on their destruction. En route to Scotland, their fleet is intercepted by a spaceship carrying the descendants of Celts who fled earth centuries earlier who offer the Templars a new life among the stars. Many of them accept, although a vestige of the Templars, including Douglas, continue on to serve King Robert.

Kennealy-Morrison combines the plight of the Knights Templar with her existing series of novels, The Keltiad, which provides the background for her space-faring Celts. Set in 1312, the story is reminiscent of Poul Anderson’s earlier The High Crusade, set in 1345. Unfortunately, while the aliens in Anderson’s novel provide the impetus for the novel, the Kelts of Kennealy-Morrison’s story serve more as a deus ex machina. In addition, her prose tends towards the over-written and florid, reminiscent of a more Victorian style in both description and dialogue. Kennealy-Morrison presents an interesting secret history, but her link in to her series of novels doesn’t integrate well into the historical context she presents.

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Birthday Reviews: Arthur Machen’s “The Coming of the Terror”

Birthday Reviews: Arthur Machen’s “The Coming of the Terror”

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Cover by Wilfred Jones
Cover by Wilfred Jones

Arthur Machen was born Arthur Llewellyn Jones on March 3, 1863 and died on December 15, 1947.

Machen had a strong interest in the occult and published his first poem, “Eleusinia” when he was 18 years old. He struggled as a writer before seeing more success in the 1890s, including the publications of his story “The Great God Pan” in 1894. In the early days of World War I he published the short story “The Bowman” which described phantom bowman from Agincourt called upon to help the British Expeditionary Force at the Battle of Mons. The story entered into popular culture as an actual description of the battle and led to the folklore around the “Angels of Mons.”

Machen originally published “The Coming of the Terror” in The Century, an illustrated magazine published from 1881 to 1930, although it grew out of Scribner’s Monthly, which dated back to 1870. The story was part of his longer novel The Terror and has rarely been reprinted only its own, only seeing print in 2003 in the Chaosium collection of Machen’s story’s The White People and Other Stories and that same year in Douglas Anderson’s anthology Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy.

“The Coming of the Terror” feels a lot like one of the stories H.P. Lovecraft would begin publishing five years later, but with significant differences. Machen’s tale of mysterious deaths during the Great War slowly builds from reporting on the crash of an airman who hit a swarm of pigeons to the seemingly unrelated deaths and disappearances in a small village in Wales. The deaths lead to paranoia that the Germans have somehow managed to attack the English countryside undetected, either using a strange new weapon or by infiltrating the citizenry.

While Lovecraft cites Machen as one of his sources (and Machen mentions the original village of Dunwich in this story), “The Coming of the Terror” really isn’t Lovecraftian in nature. Machen doesn’t use excessively purple prose to describe the sinister events occurring around his Welsh village of Porth. Furthermore rather than being witnessed by a single individual, the effects are widespread. Everyone is aware that something is happening, and the fact that the newspapers refuse to report on it just make the conjectures that much more horrific. Machen allows events to build slowly, from a single incident to several, their relationship to each other only explicit because they are all taking place in the same story.

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Birthday Reviews: Tim Powers’s “Through and Through”

Birthday Reviews: Tim Powers’s “Through and Through”

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Cover by Phil Parks
Cover by Phil Parks

While 2018 isn’t a leap year, that doesn’t stop us from celebrating authors with that very particular birthday.

Tim Powers was born on February 29, 1952. Other authors who were born on leap day include Patricia McKillip, Howard Tayler, and Sharon Webb. Powers has frequently collaborated with James P. Blaylock, occasionally using the joint pseudonym William Ashbless, which is not only a pseudonym, but a poet both authors have referred to in their works.

Powers has won the Philip K. Dick Award for his novels The Anubis Gates and Dinner at Deviant’s Palace. His novels Last Call and Declare have won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and he won the Collection award for The Bible Repairman and Other Stories. Anubis Gates also won the Prix Apollo and Geffen Award, Declare earned Powers an International Horror Guild Award, and The Stress of Her Regard won a Mythopoeic Award and Ignotus Award. A translation of the story “A Soul in a Bottle” won the Xatafi-Cyberdark Award. In 2014, LASFS recognized Powers with the Forry Award.

In 2003, Subterranean Press published an anthology by Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock called The Devils in the Details, which contained a story by each author and a collaborative effort. Powers contributed “Through and Through.” The story was included in his collection Strange Itineraries and again in Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers.

“Through and Through” tells the tale of a priest doing a stint in the Confessional shortly after a woman committed suicide in his church. He had received her confession, but was unable to give her absolution. A week after her funeral, she returns to receive the penance he refused her the first time.

In other hands, the priest might have suffered from a crisis of faith, however Powers priest is grounded in the secular world, while easily accepting that the woman’s ghost can be in the confession. At the same time, he is trying to balance the changes that have been introduced to the traditional priesthood and sacraments he embraces, and those the Church is currently promoting.

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Birthday Reviews: February Index

Birthday Reviews: February Index

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January index

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

February 1, Yevgeny Zamyatin: “The Cave”
February 2, Selina Rosen: “Food Quart”
February 3, Alex Bledsoe: “Shall We Gather ”
February 4, Neal Asher: “Owner Space”
February 5, Joseph H. Delaney: “Survival Course”
February 6, Eric Flint: “Portraits”
February 7, Karen Joy Fowler: “Always”
February 8, Mary Robinette Kowal: “Just Right”

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Vintage Treasures: Dark is the Sun by Philip Jose Farmer

Vintage Treasures: Dark is the Sun by Philip Jose Farmer

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The first Philip Jose Farmer book I ever read was To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), the Hugo-Award winning first novel in his famous Riverworld series. Today he’s just as well known for his World of Tiers, Dayworld, and Tarzan novels, among many other other popular series. Farmer was famously prolific, and he kept at it right until the very end, when he died in 2009 at the age of 91.

I have more than a few Philip Jose Farmer books in my to-be-read pile. But the oldest, way down in the stratified layers near the floor, I bought back in 1980 . Dark is the Sun, one of his lesser known novels, is a far-future science fiction tale that reads like epic fantasy, and the classic Darrell K. Sweet cover certainly reinforced that. There are witches, thieves, gigantic walking skeletons, mobile plants, magic eggs, haunted jungles, and the threat of a collapsing universe… if you wanted to market a novel to a million young D&D players in the early 80s, you could have done a lot worse.

Dark is the Sun reminds me of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, with its fifteen-billion-years hence setting; the 1982 British paperback edition from Panther, to my mind, rather resembled Brian Aldiss’ far-future classic Hothouse (see below).

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Birthday Reviews: Stephen Goldin’s “The Last Ghost”

Birthday Reviews: Stephen Goldin’s “The Last Ghost”

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Cover by Gene Szafran

Stephen Goldin was born on February 28, 1947. Prior to becoming a science fiction author, Goldin earned a degree in astronomy and worked as a civilian space scientist for the US Navy.

Beginning in 1976, Goldin wrote the Family d’Alembert novels, based on a novella by E.E. “Doc” Smith. He followed that series up with the Parsina Saga and wrote the two volume Rehumanization of Jade Darcy series in collaboration with his second wife, Mary Mason.

He co-edited the anthology Protostars with David Gerrold and edited the anthology The Alien Condition solo. Goldin also collaborated with his first wife, Kathleen Sky, on both fiction and non-fiction. He received a Nebula nomination for his short story “The Last Ghost” in 1972.

“The Last Ghost” originally appeared in the 1971 anthology Protostars, edited by David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin. Lloyd Biggle, Jr. reprinted it in Nebula Award Stories Seven. Goldin included it in two of his collections, The Last Ghost and Other Stories and Ghosts, Girls, & Other Phantasms. It has been translated into French twice and German twice.

Goldin looks at a distant future in which immorality of a sort has been achieved by downloading people’s consciousness into machines. His two characters, which he arbitrarily designates as male and female, have both been downloaded into a computer for several thousand years.

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A Demanding Work that Sings all the Stronger in 2018: The Queen of Air and Darkness by T.H. White

A Demanding Work that Sings all the Stronger in 2018: The Queen of Air and Darkness by T.H. White

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In my early teens, I discovered and devoured T.H. White’s omnibus quartet of novels, The Once and Future King. The first and most child-like remains the best known: The Sword in the Stone. After this, and unjustly neglected (by Disney and the world in general), come The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle In the Wind.

In my later teen years, I concluded that The Once and Future King, taken as a whole, was the single best novel I had ever read. Having reached the ripe old age of fifty, it’s time to re-evaluate. Is White’s work still worth its weight in gold?

Perhaps you recall Book One, in which the young King Arthur, known affectionately as the Wart, meets Merlyn, gambols through a lifetime’s worth of transformational adventures, and draws a certain sword from a stone. Hysterically funny, dreamy and given to long flights of fancy about hawks and birds, The Once and Future King still works genuine magic, even when its digressions and mood swings threaten to topple the whole everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink mess into a stew of narrative anarchy.

In short, it’s a full meal and then some, and I, along with fantasy lovers the world over, adore it still. (Ursula K. LeGuin, R.I.P., lent her opinion to one edition’s jacket copy, saying, “I have laughed at White’s great Arthurian novel and cried over it and loved it all my life.”) Yet, many seem unaware that the cycle, tracing Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, continues.

Book Two began life as The Witch in the Wood, and arrived in print in 1939, just as the world fell off a precipice it hadn’t seen coming, and descended into a darkness from which it is still fighting to recover. Revised and expanded, The Witch in the Wood became The Queen of Air and Darkness, and no book better upholds the argument for valuing a work as the sum of its discordant parts.

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