A Master of Strange Short Fiction- Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography by RB Russell

A Master of Strange Short Fiction- Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography by RB Russell

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Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography (Tartarus Press, February 3, 2022)

Robert Aickman (1914-1981) was an iconic British writer especially known for his strange, uncanny stories, reprinted in several collections.  He also penned a couple of  minor novels, but he’s mostly remembered for his ambiguous but riveting short fiction.

In addition, he was also a very active, influential member of the Inland Waterways Association (IWA) and was instrumental in saving and promoting the restoration of the network of British canals. Those two activities have been the subject of two autobiographical books, The Attempted Rescue and The River Runs Uphill, respectively. 

Aickman was also the editor of several volumes of the cult series of anthologies The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories.

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May I Read You This Book?

May I Read You This Book?

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I would rather read a book, but I listen to a LOT of audiobooks. I listen to them in the car (fewer work commutes with the Pandemic); and often during my work day. My mind is wired so I can listen to an audibook/radio play and still concentrate on something else. I’ve had friends and coworkers tell me they can’t do that at all, so I feel fortunate. It lets me ‘read/re-read’ a lot of things I otherwise wouldn’t have time to get to. I use the Overdrive App to get them out of the library, and I do Audible.

Many a night, I fall asleep to an audiobook (not a problem when you sleep alone. Sigh…). Usually something I’ve read or listened to before and know reasonably well. Like Max Latin (Norbert Davis), Philip Marlowe (Raymond Chandler), or Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie). That way it doesn’t matter if I doze off.

Of course, If I REALLY like the book, or author, I tend to favor the narrator more (unless they are screwing up my book!). But I’m pretty objective in determining whether or not I’m glad this person is doing the narration. Today I’m gonna talk about some who I really like – and plugging some authors I like as well!

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Exploring the Dark Underbelly of the 41st Millennium: Warhammer Crime From Black Library

Exploring the Dark Underbelly of the 41st Millennium: Warhammer Crime From Black Library

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Three Warhammer Crime volumes: Bloodlines by Chris Wraight, Grim Repast
by Marc Collins, and the anthology Sanction & Sin (Black Library, 2020-21)

I flew to Tampa this spring, my first business trip of the year. Felt weird to be on a plane in a pandemic, even if we are at the tail end. Last thing I packed, as usual, was something to read.

My reading calendar for the month is always jammed up with books I’m covering for the blog, so I usually indulge myself in reading material on flights. I could have selected anything — the latest space opera, a magazine, some graphic novels, a Best of the Year collection. But what I brough instead was Sanction & Sin, a Warhammer Crime anthology, and it was a terrific choice.

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Vintage Treasures: Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions by James Tiptree, Jr.

Vintage Treasures: Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions by James Tiptree, Jr.

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Out of the Everywhere (Del Rey, 1981). Cover by Rick Sternbach

Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions was the last paperback Tiptree collection to appear in her lifetime, and the third from Del Rey. It includes two original novellas, “Out of the Everywhere” and “With Delicate Mad Hands,” the Hugo nominee “Time-Sharing Angel,” and one of the greatest science fiction stories of the 20th Century (very possibly the greatest), “The Screwfly Solution.”

The first four stories in the collection, including “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” and “The Screwfly Solution,” were published under the pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon (instead of Tiptree, also a pseudonym; the author’s real name was Alice Sheldon). These are the bulk of the Raccoona Sheldon tales, the only one not collected here is “Morality Meat,” which eventually appeared in Crown of Stars (1988). In his article “Where to Start with the Works of James Tiptree, Jr.” at Tor.com, Lee Mandelo argues that the Sheldon and Tiptree stories are fundamentally quite different.

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Future Treasures: Hide by Kiersten White

Future Treasures: Hide by Kiersten White

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Hide by Kiersten White, coming May 24 from Del Rey

Kiersten White won a Bram Stoker Award for Best Young Adult Novel for The Dark Descendent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, which Goth Chick reviewed for us in 2018, calling the audio version “my Audible obsession for nearly eleven hours… I am completely hooked.” White is the New York Times bestselling author of the Paranormalcy series and the Conqueror’s Trilogy, which began with And I Darken (2016).

Hide is her first adult offering, and I’ve been hearing good things. It’s a supernatural thriller about a homeless woman with a dark past who takes part in a high-stakes competition to spend a week in an abandoned amusement park without getting caught. Booklist says it “combines elements of Thomas Tryon’s classic Harvest Home, Netflix’s Squid Game, and Jordan Peele’s film oeuvre… with revelatory pacing reminiscent of Spielberg’s Jaws.”

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Random Reviews: “Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson

Random Reviews: “Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson

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The Martians, Cover by Peter Elson
The Martians, Cover by Peter Elson

Back in the days of Usenet, I started to put together a bibliography of science fiction that were built around baseball. One of the stories on that list is Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars.” Originally published in Robinson’s collection The Martians, a companion collection of short fiction to supplement his Mars trilogy that included Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. Four months after “Arthur Sternback Brings the Curveball to Mars” was first published in the UK, it made its US debut in the August 1999 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, one month before the collection would be released in the U.S. by Bantam Spectra.

Since that time, the story has been reprinted in Robinson’s collections A Short, Sharp Shock, The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, and Stan’s Kitchen and the anthologies Future Sports, The Hard SF Renaissance, New Skies, and Field of Fantasies (a collection of speculative fiction baseball stories). Demonstrating that interest in baseball is not limited to the US, the story has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Romanian, in all but the last case as part of the original collection. The Romanian translation appeared in Sci-Fi Magazin.
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Dumas’ Musketeers: Finding their Future in the Past

Dumas’ Musketeers: Finding their Future in the Past

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Court of Daggers by Alexandre Dumas,
translated by Lawrence Ellsworth (Substack, 2022)

Besides compiling the Cinema of Swords series, you might be aware of my other ongoing adventure fiction project, editing and translating new, modern editions of Alexandre Dumas’ Musketeers novels. This is an adventure in itself, as The Three Musketeers and its sequels amount to almost two million words in French, and the new English editions of the Musketeers Cycle will fill nine volumes when completed. Thus, it’s a big, multi-year project — and meanwhile the very shape of book publishing is shifting beneath our feet. But it’s shifting in ways you may find interesting, as the kind of genre fiction we celebrate here at Black Gate is even more susceptible to these changes than other literary forms.

The standard business of mainstream book publishing — at least, what seems standard because it’s what we grew up with — is under pressure from many different directions: cost of goods keeps increasing, which cuts into already slim profit margins, megacorp consolidation means fewer publishers and more homogeneity, and the internet, video games, and new digital platforms are all vying for the attention of an audience that is increasingly open to such new attractions.

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New Treasures: Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos by Edward M. Erdelac

New Treasures: Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos by Edward M. Erdelac

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Rainbringer by Edward M. Erdelac. (Cover by Jabari Weathers; (Kindle & Paperback Editions, 326pages. May 2021)

Rainbringer: The Symphonic Heavy Metal of Weird Fiction

Edward M. Erdelac has been writing entertaining weird fiction for over a decade. He pushes boundaries. One of his first spotlights on Black Gate was in 2014 regarding his Merkabah Rider (concerning the 19th-century Hasidic Jewish mystic turned gunslinger).  Erdelac also wrote an entry in Tales of Cthulhu Invictus mentioned in my recent 2022 review of Richard L. Tierney’s Simon of Gitta tales (this connection resonates since both Tierney and Erdelac extended the mythos of Robert E. Howard’s magical Ring of Set… more on that below). The author clearly has a knack for extending the landscapes (dreamscapes?) of modern fiction.

With Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos, Erdelac invites us to follow a fictionalized version of Zora Neale Hurston throughout the North American Twentieth Century. On the face of that description, you may not be hooked. Like most people, I presume, I had no idea of who she was…. or why she may present a wonderful lens into cosmic horrors. Read on! She’s a strong, witty survivor who is uniquely qualified.

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What I’m Streaming – May 2022

What I’m Streaming – May 2022

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Man – last week I realized how many good shows I’m streaming these days. Not too long ago I wrote this post about shows you should be streaming. And with almost no overlap (Bosch), I realized I could write one on the things I’m watching now.

You can click on this link to go to last week’s post, which included my thoughts on Halo, Outer Range, Star Trek: Discovery, and Star Trek: Picard: With a little more on one of those today. But let’s look at even more!

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Vintage Treasures: Zelde M’Tana by F.M. Busby

Vintage Treasures: Zelde M’Tana by F.M. Busby

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Zelde M’Tana (Dell, May 1980). Cover uncredited

F.M. Busby was a prolific SF writer in the 70s and 80s, with a number of popular series, including the Demu Trilogy and the Slow Freight trilogy. But his most ambitious sequence was Rissa Kerguelen, the tale of a young woman who leads a rebellion against a tyrannical Earth, which ran to eight volumes. It’s been out of print since the 80s. The book I want to talk about today is the final one in the sequence, a prequel of sorts, which focused on the origin of one of its most popular characters, Zelde M’Tana.

Zelde M’Tana is memorable for a lot of reasons. But the most obvious is that it featured a Black heroine on the cover, extremely unusual for a mass market paperback in 1980 (and, frankly, for the next 30 years). It’s one of the first times I can recall seeing a Black protagonist on a cover, and it certainty stuck out. I can’t recall exactly what I thought, but I’m reasonably sure that I took it as a marketing statement, a signal that the book was targeted for a Black audience, and I let it sit on the shelf while my eye wandered towards more comfortably familiar covers with white protagonists.

There’s a word in the English language for people like me, White folks who avoided books with Black people on the covers for reasons of simple unfamiliarity. That word is racist.

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