Cynthia Ward Reviews The Gods of Opar

Cynthia Ward Reviews The Gods of Opar

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farmer08_bGods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa
Philip José Farmer & Christopher Paul Carey
Subterranean Press  (576 pp, $65.00 Limited Edition Hardcover, $45.00 Trade Edition Hardcover)
Reviewed by Cynthia Ward

Once upon a time, in a lost civilization known as West Germany, the Kreuzberg Kaserne U.S. Army Base let fifth graders leave school grounds at lunchtime. Every week, I crossed the street to the little base bookstore. In the late winter of 1972, I bought the first DC Comics issue (#207) of “Tarzan of the Apes” because I wanted to learn how the heck a human being ended up living with apes. When the writer/artist, the late, much-lamented Joe Kubert, ended his adaptation with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s original cliffhanger, I read Burroughs’s sequel, The Return of Tarzan, to finish the origin story. Then I found myself devouring every other Burroughs book reprinted in the early 1970s.

I couldn’t have been the decade’s only new Burroughs fan, because by the mid-1970s, his estate had authorized two different Tarzan-related series by other authors: the Bunduki novels by J.T. Edson and the Ancient Opar novels by Philip José Farmer. Both series produced a novel or two and then, as far as I knew, ended. The tie-in titles went out of print, their copyright was probably owned or controlled by the Burroughs estate, and Philip José Farmer died in 2009. I figured none of these books would ever see another reprint.

I figured wrong, because Subterranean Press has just released Gods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa, which is an omnibus of the two Ancient Opar novels by Philip José Farmer – Hadon of Ancient Opar (1974) and Flight to Opar (1976) – together with a third, new novel in the series, The Song of Kwasin, by Philip José Farmer and Christopher Paul Carey (Black Gate recently ran essays from Carey about the history of his remarkable collaboration with Farmer, and his discussion of Farmer’s ambitious creation, the lost civilization of Khokarsa.)

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Meeting Them Halfway

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Meeting Them Halfway

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eragon-coverThe new school year has brought me a fresh crop of tutoring students, which means I get to ask one of my favorite questions: What do you read when nobody’s making you read anything? In the nine years since I left the classroom and started making house calls, almost all my students have named fantasy as their favorite genre.

Not this year.

Mystery won’t be too big a stretch, especially since my mystery mavens have a taste for Poe. But what on earth will I do for my new kid who only truly enjoys sports biographies? Eventually, after I’ve earned his trust, I might be able to entice him to stretch his taste.

Meanwhile, here I am staring Tim Tebow’s memoir in the face, trying to stretch my taste to meet the kid’s. I suspect my Scarlet Letter trick would break down if I tried to read a football memoir as a failed fantasy novel.

Oh, man. What I wouldn’t give to face the Eragon quandary again.

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Spiritualism during the American Civil War

Spiritualism during the American Civil War

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a-fine-likenessSpiritualism was well established by the time the Civil War started. As the death toll mounted — a new estimate puts the body count at 750,000 — spiritualists enjoyed ever-greater demand for their “services.”

When you consider that the 1860 census showed only 31 million people living in the U.S., pretty much everyone had a reason to go to one. The Banner of Light newspaper ran a column with messages from dead soldiers of both armies channeled through a Mrs. J.H. Conant. One such message said,

As a favor of you today, that you will inform my father, Nathaniel Thompson of Montgomery, Alabama, if possible, of my decease. Tell him I died… eight days ago, happy and resigned.

Séances became popular with all social classes and even Abraham Lincoln attended a few hosted by the medium Nettie Colburn, a society favorite in Washington, D.C. The details of these meetings are hazy, but from what we know he went with his wife Mary Todd Lincoln, who grieved over the deaths of two of her young sons. The President may have gone along just to humor her. Apparently he found séances entertaining, once reportedly sitting on a piano with several soldiers as it levitated into the air.

It might seem strange that the President of the United States would engage in such activities, but his experiences were more the rule than the exception. Spiritualism was hugely popular with upper and middle class whites. Less is known about the working class or black experience with the Spiritualist movement during the Civil War, as there is little written record.

In my Civil War novel, A Fine Likeness, Union Captain Richard Addison visits a medium in order to speak to his son, who was killed at Vicksburg.

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Try the first Four Issues of Innsmouth Magazine for Just $3.99

Try the first Four Issues of Innsmouth Magazine for Just $3.99

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innsmouth-magazine-collected-1-4I haven’t done as much reading on my Kindle Fire as I thought I would. It’s not that I don’t like it — it’s more that I flat out haven’t done as much reading as I thought I would in the last 10 months.

But buying? That’s a different story. It reminds me of the months after we bought our first DVD player. Excited by our new purchase, we went a little crazy, buying all kinds of weird stuff. Two seasons of the marionette puppetry show Thunderbirds from 1966? Check. Every episode ever made of Space: 1999? Check. First season of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea? Still in the shrinkwrap. God help me.

It was the same with the Kindle. Give me a new toy, and I immediately want to dress it up. It wasn’t out of the box a month before I crammed forty books into it. I told myself I’d read them, but I didn’t. I think at heart I just loved seeing the little book icons show up on the menu page. It’s like having a library in your pocket.

I’m better now. Mostly I use my Kindle these days to read manuscripts, advance galleys from publishers, and online magazines like Locus. But there’s still the occasional digital title that grabs my attention and won’t let go until I hit the “Buy it Now” button.

The most recent is Innsmouth Magazine: Collected Issues 1-4, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles. Stiles, the author of “Roundelay” in Black Gate 15, is an up-and-coming dark fantasy writer in her own right. Collecting the first four issues of the highly regarded digital Innsmouth Magazine, this omnibus edition is impressive indeed. Individual issues are priced at $1.99, so it’s also a bargain.

It demands to be read, too. So far, I’m quite enjoying it. Nick Mamatas’ cleverly-titled “And Then, And Then, And Then…,” which takes its title from a type of denigrated narrative technique, takes that same narrative technique and uses it to very chilling effect. Most of the tales are very short — David Conyers’s “The Swelling,” the intriguing but rather predictable tale of a woman who’s suffered a devastating loss at sea and then inexplicably finds herself on a cargo vessel bound for Carcosa, is the longest I’ve encountered so far, and it barely qualifies as a novelette.

My only complaint about Innsmouth Magazine: Collected Issues 1-4 is the complete lack of any editorial content — or indeed, a table of contents of any kind. The only way to find out what writers or stories are in each issue is to painstakingly page through it. I expect magazines to have a little more structure, maybe an editorial or house ad, reviews. Something. It’s more like an anthology, in fact. Its starkness in this regard is almost, dare I say it, Lovecraftian.

Innsmouth Magazine: Collected Issues 1-4 was published by Innsmouth Free Press on April 8, 2012. It is available exclusively in digital format for $3.99.

Vintage Treasures: From Off This World, edited by Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend

Vintage Treasures: From Off This World, edited by Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend

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from-off-this-worldBack in May, at the Windy City Pulp & Paper show here in Chicago, I purchased four boxes of books from the vast collection of Martin H. Greenberg. I’ve been slowly unpacking them ever since. They’ve been a treasure trove of vintage paperbacks and fantastic old anthologies, occasionally with scribbled notes from (presumably) Greenberg in the margins.

I’ve written about a few finds already, including a fabulous anthology edited by Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend, The Giant Anthology of Science Fiction, first published in 1954. This week, I want to talk about another Margulies and Friend title, a collection of science fiction culled from Wonder Stories/Thrilling Wonder Stories and published in 1949: From Off This World: Gems of Science Fiction Chosen From “Hall of Fame Classics.”

The first thing to note is the gorgeous cover illustration, by none other than Virgil Finlay (click the image at left for a bigger version).

But equally impressive is the Table of Contents, which includes some of the best pulp SF stories ever published, including “The Man Who Evolved” by Edmond Hamilton; “The City of the Singing Flame” and “Beyond the Singing Flame” by Clark Ashton Smith; “A Martian Odyssey” by Stanley G. Weinbaum; and others by Jack Williamson, Henry Kuttner, Eando Binder, P. Schuyler Miller, and many more.

Editor Leo Margulies, who as editorial chief of Standard Magazines was also editor of pulp magazines Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, featured “Hall of Fame Classic” SF reprints in Startling. The 18 stories here are taken from those selections, all originally published between 1929 and 1937, as Margulies and Friend explain in their introduction:

Compiled as they are from ten years of HALL OF FAME reprint selections in Startling Stories magazine, they are in effect, the pick of science fiction stories that have survived both the years and today’s amazingly swift scientific progress. In themselves they compose a history of the growth of science fiction over the vital decades just passed.

Actually science fiction — or scientifiction if you will — is the newest development in contemporary literature. It is far and away the most imaginative.

Their comments become even more interesting when the editors turn to the rapid (and frequently horrifying) advance of science during World War II, ended just a scant four years before these words were written.

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Redrum Horror Unleashes The Thing in the Mist

Redrum Horror Unleashes The Thing in the Mist

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the-thing-in-the-mistI’m a fan of dark fantasy and horror, and pay attention to most of the major writers — especially those of the pulp era (1930 to about 1960). But I’m woefully ignorant of British horror, especially of the same period.

Fortunately, there are publishers working hard to correct that. And it’s always a delight to discover a major retrospective of a British pulp horror writer I’m not familiar with. That’s the case with John S. Glasby, who wrote around 25 SF and fantasy novels for Badger Books, most under pseudonyms such as “A. J Merak” and the Badger house names “Karl Zeigfreid,” “John E. Muller,” and “Victor LaSalle.”

Now Redrum Horror has published The Thing in the Mist: Selected Stories by John S. Glasby, a tantalizing collection of some of his best short fiction from the heyday of British pulp horror:

Between 1954 and 1967, British publisher Badger Books released over one hundred issues of the horror pulp digest Supernatural Stories, nearly half of which were written by one of the most prolific genre writers of his time, John S. Glasby.

Here, collected for the first time, are eleven of Glasby’s finest contributions to Supernatural Stories, tales of otherworldly terror and ancient evil in the Lovecraftian tradition. Guaranteed to chill and delight, The Thing in the Mist is a must-read for any fan of classic pulp horror.

This edition also includes an introduction by the late Glasby’s son, Edmund Glasby, and an informative afterword by longtime colleague, Philip Harbottle.

The Thing in the Mist: Selected Stories by John S. Glasby is Redrum Horror #6, and was published on September 15. It is 380 pages in trade paperback for $13.99, or just $3.99 in digital format. Get more details at the Redrum Horror website.

New Treasures: City Under the Moon by Hugh Sterbakov

New Treasures: City Under the Moon by Hugh Sterbakov

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city-under-the-moonConfession time.

I love a good book. I also love a well-marketed book. As someone who’s been a publisher in this industry for over a decade, it gives me real pleasure to see someone bring a new title to market with genuine energy, enthusiasm, and inventiveness. It’s even better — and frankly, much rarer — to see a small press or self-published book get anything like a real marketing campaign.

Hugh Sterbakov’s City Under the Moon may be the best marketed self-published book I’ve ever seen. Anyone trying to publish a fantasy novel in America could learn from this man.

Now, I’m not 100% certain it’s self-published. But when the publisher (Ben & Derek Ink Inc.) neglects to have a website, publish other books, mention their address, or even put their name on the cover, that’s frequently a big clue.

Admittedly, Mr. Sterbakov has resources most aspiring self-publishers don’t. He’s a writer for Marvel Comics and Seth Green’s Robot Chicken, and in the latter capacity he’s been nominated for two Emmys. His animated comedy script Hell & Back is now in production, staring Mila Kunis and Susan Sarandon.

How does any of this help him? Here are just a sample of the blurbs for his novel:

Bioweapon catastrophes, government conspiracies, military sieges, historical revelations, psychological warfare and werewolves. You want more thrill from a thriller? — Seth Green

Fast-paced, action packed and terrifying. — Mila Kunis

Superpowered teens, angst, action and comedy… I don’t get it. –– Joss Whedon

When you get blurbs from Joss Whedon, Mila Kunis and Seth Green on your self-published novel, you’re doing something right.

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Genre 2012: the Ghetto Remains the Same?

Genre 2012: the Ghetto Remains the Same?

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new-yorker-coverPssst.  Hey, buddy.  Yeah, you.  Come over here a sec.  Listen.  Did you know that by virtue of reading this, by virtue of even cruising this site, you live in a ghetto?

It’s true.

Let me explain.

Once upon a distressingly long time ago, when I worked in retail bookstores, life was peaceful.  Organized.  Every book had its place.  Each, by its nature, described in advance its own prized spot on the shelf.  Controversy in the rarefied field of what we bibliophiles archly referred to as Incoming Tome Location had been all but eradicated.

There was, of course, one pesky exception.  Genre.  Or, to be exact, Genre Fiction.  The breakouts for Romance and Mystery/Suspense were generally simple enough, a Maginot Line easily upheld, but woe betided Fantasy and Science Fiction (not to mention everyone’s favorite red-headed stepchild, Horror, the shelves for which invariably faced into an out-of-the-way corner, as if they attracted only trench-coated perverts and budding psychopaths).  Garcia Marquez and Italo Calvino were literature, and clearly so, by virtue of being international in stature.  But then, what of Stanislaw Lem?  How had he become marooned in Sci-Fi?  Maybe, we clerks said, speaking in clandestine whispers lest our overlords hear us, Lem’s titles could be cross-shelved.  Shelved, God forbid, in more than one place.

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Gustav Meyrink’s Golem

Gustav Meyrink’s Golem

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The GolemThe first thing I feel I have to say about Gustav Meyrink’s novel, The Golem, is that it’s intensely, thrillingly strange. Dreamlike, elliptical, informed by theosophical and occult symbols, it wrong-foots you; nothing in it develops the way you’d expect, not in terms of character or plot or imagery. And yet that strangeness feels almost like a side-effect, a byproduct of its insistence on its themes, on its vision, on its focus on the reality of Prague and on whatever it is that lies beyond that reality. Perhaps the strangest thing about the book, published in installments in 1913 and 14 and published as a whole in 1915, was that this odd esoteric horror story was also tremendously popular in its day.

It was Meyrink’s first novel. A banker with an interest in theosophy and the occult, apparently for a time a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he turned to writing after being thrown in jail for using spiritual guidance for his investments. He published a number of short satirical fictions, and then The Golem, which made his fortune. More novels followed, dealing with similar metaphysical themes. He died in 1932. The Golem remains his best-known work, certainly in the English-speaking world (though often cited as the inspiration for Paul Wegener’s multiple Golem movies, there seems to be no direct conection between films and book). It’s been translated several times; I have the 1995 version by Mike Mitchell.

Written in the first person, the book follows a gem-engraver named Athanasius Pernath who lives in the Jewish Ghetto in Prague (but is apparently not himself Jewish). Pernath is suffering from a strange loss of memory; a woman who knows him begs him to hide her in his lodging, but he cannot recall who she is. Then a strange man presents him with an ancient book of Jewish mysticism, whose elaborate first letter needs to be repaired. Pernath accepts the task; but this is only a sub-plot, and much of the action involves following Pernath through interactions with an odd set of characters around him — a sinister junk-dealer named Wassertrum; his bitter enemy, the medical student Charousek; the saintly archivist of the Jewish Town Hall, Shemaiah Hillel; and Hillel’s lovely but unworldly daughter, Miriam. We follow Pernath also through dreams and visions, through his life among puppeteers and whores and slumming aristocrats and deaf-mutes.

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Fall 2012 issue of Subterranean Magazine now Available

Fall 2012 issue of Subterranean Magazine now Available

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subterranean-magazine-fall-2012One of my favorite online magazines, Subterranean, has just released its 24th issue. Before issue 23, it was presented in a rolling format, with new fiction and articles available every week; but they’ve now switched to posting the complete contents all at once. That means you can now enjoy new novellas by Nnedi Okorafor and Kealan Patrick Burke, and novelettes by Maria Dahvana Headley and Brian Lumley.

The fiction this issue runs the gamut from apocalyptic horror to the mysteries of deepest Africa. Here’s the complete table of contents:

  • “African Sunrise,” by Nnedi Okorafor (31,000 word novella)
  • “Game,” by Maria Dahvana Headley (11,000 word novelette)
  • “Two-Stone Tom’s Big T.O.E.,” by Brian Lumley (14,000 word novelette)
  • “When the Shadows are Hungry and Cold (A Milestone Story),” by Kealan Patrick Burke (18,000 word novella)

Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death won the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and was nominated for the 2010 Nebula Award. Maria Dahvana Headley’s memoir, The Year of Yes, an account of the year she spent saying yes to anyone who asked her out, has been optioned for the screen by Paramount Pictures; her debut novel, Queen of Kings, was published in 2010. Brian Lumley is the author of the Necroscope novels; he received a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010. Kealan Patrick Burke’s novel, The Hides, was a Bram Stoker Award nominee, and his novella, “The Turtle Boy,” was a Stoker Award Winner in 2004.

Subterranean has just announced that in the next couple of weeks, they’ll offer an electronic edition of the current issue for just $2.99 for those who prefer to read it on ereaders. Watch the website for availability information.

Subterranean is edited by William Schafer and published quarterly. The Fall 2012 issue is completely free and available here; see their complete back issue catalog here. We last covered Subterranean magazine with their previous issue, Summer 2012.