Robert Bloch’s Pocket History of Science Fiction Fandom

Robert Bloch’s Pocket History of Science Fiction Fandom

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The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1954. Cover by Mel Hunter

I’ve spent the last few days putting my book collection in order, and yesterday I came across this, the first sf magazine I ever purchased: the March 1964 issue of F&SF, from a little shop in the town of Port Credit, Ontario.

J.G. Ballard, Kit Reed, Oscar Wilde, Avram Davidson’s haunting little story “Sacheverell” — pretty heady stuff for a precocious ten-year-old. But what had the greatest impact, looking backward from 2022, was Robert Bloch’s article “The Conventional Approach” — a pocket history of science fiction fandom. I was already nursing an ambition to write, specifically to write sf, and here was what looked like an invitation to a subculture of like-minded enthusiasts and maybe even a roadmap to a career.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: The Murdering Spinsters

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: The Murdering Spinsters

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“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

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

In Brooklyn during World War II, a pair of black widows were luring men to their deaths. They preyed upon older, lonely men without family or close friends. With a “Room for rent” sign hanging in the front window of their idyllic-looking home, they fed arsenic-laced wine to their victims. A male relative who lived with them buried the bodies in the basement, with no one the wiser. The women were in fact little old ladies: think Aunt Bee as a serial killer.

But a nephew came over and found a body in window seat – the thirteenth victim. He slowly realized that his two loveable old aunts were killers. Then, his brother, a murderer on the lam from the police, showed up with his lackey in tow. It’s a hardboiled, true crime story that curiously, is largely forgotten today.

Just kidding! It’s actually Arsenic and Old Lace, a smash stage play that became a popular movie starring Cary Grant, Raymond Massey and Peter Lorre. The play ran on Broadway for 1,444 performances and is still in wide use today.

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In Hell, Everyone’s Pants are on Fire: A preview of Liars in Hell

In Hell, Everyone’s Pants are on Fire: A preview of Liars in Hell

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Liars in Hell, Volume 25 in the Heroes in Hell™ series. Copyright © 2022, 321pages. Janet Morris. Cover painting: “Orestes Pursued by the Furies,” by William Adolphe Bouguereau; Cover Design Roy Mauritsen.

In Hell, Everyone’s Pants are on Fire!

Faux News and Big Lies might feel like a contemporary pain, but rest assured, dear reader! Your curse has been shared. Liars have been meddling with humanity throughout history. Here ye the accounts of their eternal demise journaled by the damnedest writers in perdition. Note, that each themed entry in the Heroes in Hell™ series can be read separately. Hell has many entry points.

Going back some years ago to Doctors in Hell (2015, to be exact), we introduced a series of plagues in Hell, sent by Erra, the Babylonian god of plagues and pestilence. He and his Seven Sibitti were sent down into Hell to punish the damned in ways Satan should have been meting out punishment. Satan had become too lax, too lenient, and Erra and his gang had been sent on a “mission from God” to show the Prince of Darkness how it’s done. These plagues have remained the consistent, underlying arc through Doctors in Hell, Pirates in Hell, Lovers in Hell, and Mystics in Hell. And then, in 2020, life imitated art when the Covid pandemic began to spread across the globe. Now, with Liars in Hell, art takes its turn and imitates life as we deal with some real events that have happened over the course of the last seven or so years.

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New Treasures: The Siren’s Song by Andrew Paul Weston

New Treasures: The Siren’s Song by Andrew Paul Weston

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The Siren’s Song: The Cambion Journals, Book Three, by Andrew P. Weston (Raven Tale Publishing. Kindle edition; released July 2022).

Andrew Paul Weston has described himself as a “Former Royal Marine, Police Officer & Crime & Intelligence analyst, cursed with an overactive imagination.” His muse and expertise drive him to write action-adventure that spans genres. Black Gate’s Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed his internationally bestselling IX Series, military sci-fi that transports the lost Roman IX Legion across time & space to fight energy-eating monsters (book #1 The IX, book #2 Prelude to Sorrow, book #3 Exordium of Tears). And Joe Bonadonna covered Weston’s trilogy following the Devil’s hitman, Daemon Grim, set in Janet Morris’ Heroes in Hell ™ universe (book #1 Hell Bound, book #2 Hell Hounds, book #3 Hell Gate).

With The Siren’s Song (just released), Weston continues The Cambion Journal series which promises to be a six-novella series. It tracks Augustus Thorne, a “Cambion” (a half-demon, half-human hybrid). He’s cursed with a terrible hunger he can barely control, hunting and exterminating any Incubi and Succubae he can find.

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Future Treasures: The Year’s Best Fantasy: Volume One edited by Paula Guran

Future Treasures: The Year’s Best Fantasy: Volume One edited by Paula Guran

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The Year’s Best Fantasy: Volume One (Pyr, August 16, 2022). Cover by Liu Zishan

Paula Guran edited ten volumes of The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror for Prime Books between 2010-2019. She brought the series to Pyr in 2020, and it’s done well enough that this year Pyr launched a companion volume: The Year’s Best Fantasy: Volume One, also with Paula’s capable hand at the helm.

I’m delighted to see a brand new BEST OF series devoted exclusively to fantasy. This is a great volume to start with, containing a new Morlock tale by James Enge, AND a story by our first website editor C.S.E. Cooney (co-authored with her husband Carlos Hernandez), plus fiction from P. Djèlí Clark, Karen Joy Fowler, Sofia Samatar, E. Lily Yu, Isabel Yap, Catherynne Valente, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, and many others. It goes on sale next week.

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Random Reviews: “The Birth of A.I.,” by Cynthia Ward

Random Reviews: “The Birth of A.I.,” by Cynthia Ward

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XOddity, May 1998
XOddity, May 1998

Sometimes the roll of the dice produces a story that isn’t really all that easy to discuss. This week’s story, “The Birth of A.I,” is a (very) short humorous story about the birth of artificial intelligence by Cynthia Ward. The story originally appeared in the third issue of Xoddity in 1998.

Ward’s story is quite short, taking up about a page, and it mostly a set up for a punch line, although it doesn’t quite qualify as a shaggy dog story. The story also suffers from the fact that, written in 1998, computing power and the advance of artificial intelligence evolved in a very different manner than the enormous mainframes Ward discusses in her story.

The scientists in Ward’s story have been attempting to create a machine that can pass the Turing test, although the story doesn’t present it in those terms. Essentially they want to make a computer that has the same level of intelligence and sentience as a human being. When the story opens, they are on the verge of succeeding and Dr. Maria Denhurst is pondering what the artificial intelligence will be like and how it will react.

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IMHO: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF SWORD & SORCERY AND HEROIC FANTASY

IMHO: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF SWORD & SORCERY AND HEROIC FANTASY

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Weird Tales featuring “Devil in Iron” by Robert E. Howard, art by Margaret Brundage (~1934); Conan the Conqueror by REH and Lyon Sprague de Camp, art by Frazetta (~1967);  The Road of Kings by Karl Edward Wagner art by Matt Stawicki (1979); Kothar of the Magic Sword by Gardner F. Fox, art by Jeff Jones (~1969)

The Evolving and Cloned Barbarian

Conan, King Kull, Cormac, Bran Mak Morn — names that conjure magic, characters often imitated, but never duplicated. These creations of Robert E. Howard (circa 1930) started the Sword and Sorcery boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. Then there are the barbarian warriors inspired by Howard — “Clonans,” as one writer recently referred to these sword-slinging, muscle-bound characters. A fair observation, but in some cases, not so true.

I prefer to think of these “Clonan” tales of wandering barbarian heroes as “Barbarian Solo” adventures because the majority of these characters are lone wolves, without sidekicks or even recurring companions. This is a big part of their appeal, in fact, and in their own way, they are reminiscent of many cinematic westerns. I’ve read many, if not most, of the early Conan pastiches, including the novels based on Howard’s other creations. Karl Edward Wagner’s, Poul Anderson’s, and Andy Offutt’s portrayals of the Cimmerian come within a sword’s stroke of Howard’s original vision. L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, in commodifying the character, arranged the long, informal saga of Conan in chronological order and, by extenuating these adventures with dozens more, made of Howard’s creation a long-form series similar to the episodic success of a television show on a prolonged run of diminishing returns. For some readers, however, the advantage of this development is that it provided a sort of character arc as Conan grows from a youth to an older man.

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Blob Monsters, Killer Alien Plants, and Feral Automobiles: July/August 2022 Print SF Magazines

Blob Monsters, Killer Alien Plants, and Feral Automobiles: July/August 2022 Print SF Magazines

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July/August 2022 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Cover art by Donato Giancola, Eldar Zakirov, and Alan M. Clark

It’s marvelous to see a cover by the great Donato Giancola on Analog, of all places. Donato did one cover for Black Gate, our famous Red Sonja cover for Black Gate 15, our special Warrior Women issue. Analog‘s last cover was by NASA, the inside of a satellite or reactor or Easy Bake oven or something. This one is much cooler.

Shipping problems have delayed the arrival of this month’s F&SF, so I don’t have a copy in my hot little hands in time to do this article (again), but Tangent Online has the Table of Contents, so I can fake it. There’s lots of good reading in this month’s print SF mags, including stories by Jerry Oltion, Sean Monaghan, Bruce McAllister, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Rick Wilber, Will McIntosh, Michael Swanwick, Octavia Cade, Jack McDevitt, Paul Melko, Nick Wolven, James L. Sutter, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and many others. Let’s dive in.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Wally Conger on ‘The Hollywood Troubleshooter Saga’

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Wally Conger on ‘The Hollywood Troubleshooter Saga’

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“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

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Wally Conger and I chat on FB about our common interests in books, movies, and TV/streaming shows. We’re even co-Admins on a FB group dedicated to hardboiled/noir, and another one about Solar Pons. He’s also a big fan of the extremely talented James Scott Bell, so I was really happy when Wally agreed to write an essay about that author’s pulp series starring Bill Armbrewster! Take it away, Wally:

Hollywood and hardboiled noir will be forever intertwined. And James Scott Bell, a winner of the International Thriller Writers Award, writing teacher, and creator of at least four entertaining thriller series of books that I can think of (including the delightful Kick-Ass Nun stories), has recently underscored that fact with his ebook Trouble Is My Beat: The Bill Armbrewster, Hollywood Troubleshooter Mystery Novelettes in Classic Pulp Style.

Admittedly, that’s a mouthful of a title, but it’s good marketing. It describes exactly what this gem is. The year is 1945. The war’s just ended, the boys are marching home, and Hollywood is grinding out movies faster than Rita Hayworth is plowing through husbands. Bill Armbrewster is the “troubleshooter” for National-Consolidated Pictures — in other words, he works to keep the studio’s image, and the images of its “people properties,” squeaky clean.

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Vintage Treasures: Tales from the Spaceport Bar edited by George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer

Vintage Treasures: Tales from the Spaceport Bar edited by George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer

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Tales from the Spaceport Bar and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar
(Avon Books, 1987 and 1989). Covers by James Warhola and Doug Beekman

Science fiction has a rep for being serious stuff. Tales of dystopias, climate catastrophes and environmental collapse, dire warnings about worrying trends, that’s SF in a nutshell. Even dressed up in its best story-telling adventure garb, Star Wars or Mad Max-style, it’s still often perceived as all about desperate battles in apocalyptic settings.

Of course, science fiction is much broader and richer than that, and most of its best writers have amply demonstrated their love of whimsy and fun. One of SF’s best-loved sub-genres is the Club Tale/Bar Story, exemplified by Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Tales From the White Hart, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s long-running Gavagan’s Bar stories, Lord Dunsany’s Jorkens tales, Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers mysteries, Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Bar, Larry Niven’s spacefaring tales of Draco Tavern, and many others.

In the late 80s Weird Tales editors George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer assembled a collection of the best such stories, Tales from the Spaceport Bar. It made the Locus Award list of Year’s Best Anthologies (in 11th place), and was quickly followed by Another Round at the Spaceport Bar. Both books are a fine antidote to anyone who’s dabbled just a little too long on the dark side of science fiction.

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