Vintage Treasures: The Worlds of Fritz Leiber

Vintage Treasures: The Worlds of Fritz Leiber

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The Worlds of Fritz Leiber (Ace, 1976). Cover by Patrick Woodroffe

Fritz Leiber died 30 years ago, in 1992, but he’s in no real danger of being forgotten. His Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories remain poplar and are still in print, and so are many of his acclaimed novels and collections.

I wish more of his work was readily accessible to modern readers though, like his splendid 1976 collection The Worlds of Fritz Leiber. In his introduction Leiber said “I believe this collection represents me more completely… than any other,” and it’s not hard to see why. It contains both of his 60s-eras Dr. Dragonet adventures (“The Goggles of Dr. Dragonet” and “Far Reach to Cygnus”), a tale in his ambitious Change War time-war series (“When the Change-Winds Blow”), one Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story (“The Bait”), and his Hugo and Nebula-awarding winning “Catch That Zeppelin!”

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Goth Chick News: Kicking Off the 2022 “Season” With the Halloween & Attractions Show

Goth Chick News: Kicking Off the 2022 “Season” With the Halloween & Attractions Show

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Given that I absolutely refuse to believe I am older than, say, 27 – it’s even harder to believe that we here at Goth Chick News have been covering Transworld’s Halloween and Attractions show for nineteen glorious years. But as Black Gate photog Chris Z and I once again headed south from Chicago at 5 a.m. toward St. Louis, I can’t help recall that this was the time I used to be headed home from somewhere…

But as we motored through darkened cornfields dodging various small animals and quoting the movie Motel Hell (“It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters!”), it dawned on me how many “firsts” this show represents in my Black Gate career; first trade show covered, first interview and first article in the top 50, though back then I think it was top 20.

Needless to say, not only does the H&A loom large professionally, the people we’ve met along the way mean it has an extra special place in my little black heart.

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Future Treasures: Time Troopers edited by Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio

Future Treasures: Time Troopers edited by Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio

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Time Troopers (Baen, April 5, 2022). Cover by Kieran Yanner

It’s a delight to see a brand new anthology from the dynamic duo of Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio. Their previous collaborations (Space Pioneers, Overruled, and Cosmic Corsairs) were a lot of fun — and they even gave a shout out to the readers of Black Gate in the acknowledgments of Cosmic Corsairs for their help selecting the stories.

Their newest, Time Troopers, contains new and classic tales of Time Travel for military purposes, and it comes packed with stories by Robert A. Heinlein, Keith Laumer, Poul Anderson, A.E. Van Vogt, Fritz Leiber, Robert Silverberg, Gene Wolfe, Edmond Hamilton, H. Beam Piper, and many more. It arrives in two weeks from Baen, and looks like another solid addition to the fast-growing Davis-Ruocchio library.

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Random Reviews: “S.P.S.” by Edo van Belkom

Random Reviews: “S.P.S.” by Edo van Belkom

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Tails of Wonder, Spring 1993, Cover by Calliope
Tails of Wonder, Spring 1993, Cover by Calliope

Throughout 2022, I’ll be reviewing short stories. Some of these may be classics, others forgotten. The two things that all will have in common is that they are part of my personal collection and they will be selected through a randomization process.  What works and authors I look at will be entirely selected by a roll of the dice.

One of the magazines in my collection is the first issue of Tails of Wonder, dated Spring 1993 and edited by Nicolas Samuels. According to a card tucked into the issue, the magazine was previously called (or meant to be called Sharp Tooth), but a name change occurred prior to publication. The magazine does not seem to have any existence on the internet that was just beginning to appear when it was released and most of the authors who appeared in its pages do not seem to have gone on to publish anything else. I have not been able to tell if there was ever a Tails of Wonder issue #2.

Among the authors who did continue to publish after their appearance in Tails of Wonder was Edo van Belkom, who had already been publishing fiction for three years, under both his own name and the pseudonym Evan Hollander. His contribution to Tails of Wonder is the short story “S.P.S.”  He would reprint the story in his 1998 collection Death Drives a Semi.

By 1993, the idea of virtual reality was mainstream enough that the next year the television show Mad About You included an episode in which one of the main characters decided to invest in a virtual reality device.  In van Belkom’s story, “S.P.S.” stands for “sensory perception simulators” and are beginning to be marketed to the general public.  The story is told from the point of view of the woman whose husband, Marty, has decided to buy one of the units.

Right from the beginning of the story, with the opening line, “My husband died during childbirth,” the reader knows this story isn’t going to have a particularly happy ending.  However in the slightly over two pages the story runs, van Belkom manages to accomplish a great deal with both technological extrapolation and character.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Postwar in the Greenwood

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Postwar in the Greenwood

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The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (USA, 1946)

In the middle of the last century, you couldn’t say “Robin Hood” without evoking the image of Errol Flynn in 1938’s classic The Adventures of Robin Hood — every movie and TV show in the next thirty years about the bandit of Sherwood Forest was made in its long, green shadow. The Robin Hood story depicted in the Flynn film became the de facto standard version of the legend, cinematic comfort food, with subsequent screen incarnations not straying far from its characters and situation. Still, there were good times to be had in that long, green shadow, and tales of Robin and his Merrie Men owned Saturday afternoons for the sleepy Fifties and well afterwards.

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Taking Stock SF Ideas in New Directions: James Davis Nicoll on Alexis Gilliland’s The Rosinante Trilogy

Taking Stock SF Ideas in New Directions: James Davis Nicoll on Alexis Gilliland’s The Rosinante Trilogy

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The Revolution from Rosinante (1981), Long Shot for Rosinante (1981), and The Pirates of Rosinante
(1982), all published by Del Rey. Covers by Chris Barbieri (book 1) and Rick Sternbach (2 and 3)

It’s good to know there are other writers out there who obsess over vintage paperbacks the way I do. Well, there’s Rich Horton and James Davis Nicoll, anyway. And I enjoyed James’ thoughtful Tor.com article this week on the long-forgotten Rosinante Trilogy by Alexis Gilliland, published in the early 80s by Del Rey. Here’s his take:

Gilliland also had a lot of fun drawing on stock SF ideas and taking them in directions other authors of the time did not. Cantrell is, among other things, a deconstruction of those marvelous old-time SF engineers who never saw a cool idea sketched on a napkin that they did immediately put into effect without ever considering the ramifications… I don’t know why these books were not more popular, why they are not better known, or why there has been no new Gilliland book since the 1990s. The books’ brevity might have worked against them. Only one is more than 200 pages and the other two are closer to 185. They’re also remarkably eventful books: there is about a thousand pages of plot crammed into less than 600… they were fun and innovative in many ways. For those interested in judging for themselves, at least they are back in print.

Read the whole thing at Tor.com.

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 42 & 43

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: Stay at Home – Days 42 & 43

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So, in 2020, as the Pandemic settled in like an unwanted relative who just came for a week and is still tying up the bathroom, I did a series of posts for the FB Page of the Nero Wolfe fan club, The Wolfe Pack. I speculated on what Stay at Home would be like for Archie, living in the Brownstone with Nero Wolfe, Fritz Brenner, and Theodore Horstmann. I have already re-posted days one through thirty-nine. Here are days forty-two (May 2) and forty-three (May 3). It helps if you read the series in order, so I’ve included links to the earlier entries.

Day Forty Two – 2020 Stay at Home

Lewis Hewitt called early this morning, which was a surprise. He was more prone to call after lunch or in the evening. Wolfe would say that he was excitable. But that didn’t really matter, because my employer was upstairs in the plant room; spending money, not earning it. I had only just entered the office after breakfast in the kitchen with Fritz, when the phone rang. “Nero Wolfe’s Office, Archie Goodwin speaking.”

“Archie, this is Lewis Hewitt. I must speak with Wolfe.” Now, normally, he would say ‘Mister Wolfe’ in this situation. And his voice would be a lot calmer than it sounded.

“Being the orchid fancier that you are, you know that he’s in the plant rooms upstairs from nine until eleven, every day but Sunday. And Sunday it ain’t.”

“Yes, yes, I know, Archie. But I need his help. He needs to come out here to my house.”

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More From Pathfinder’s Lost Omens Setting

More From Pathfinder’s Lost Omens Setting

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Since Pathfinder Second Edition is a complete revamp of the Pathfinder rules system, they have balanced supplement releases that focus on the rules with those that provide Second Edition expansions of their Lost Omens setting on the planet of Golarion. That setting has been explored in depth by Paizo for over a decade, in supplements for D&D 3.5 that predated the release of Pathfinder First Edition, so they have a large foundation to build upon with new setting material for Second Edition.

While some of those – like Lost Omens: Gods and Magic and the Lost Omens: World Guide – have had a lot of mechanics that can be incorporated into game play, their main focus is narrative, providing setting information that Gamemasters can use in planning out a story set in the world of Golarion. Their two most recent supplements in the Lost Omens line have focused a bit more on the narrative.

In Absalom: City of Lost Omens (Paizo, Amazon), the emphasis is on a single city. The “city at the center of the world,” Absalom is the largest, most cosmopolitan city in the entire Lost Omens setting. A variety of adventures and scenarios have been set there, including the entire Agents of Edgewatch (Paizo, Amazon) adventure path, so there’s no shortage of previous material for them to draw on in this 400-page tome about the city. …

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A Band of Black Hearted Bastards in a Comic Romp: Articles of Faith by David Wragg

A Band of Black Hearted Bastards in a Comic Romp: Articles of Faith by David Wragg

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The Black Hawks and The Righteous (HarperVoyager, October 2019 and September 2021).
Covers by Richard Anderson (left) and uncredited

I bought David Wragg’s debut fantasy The Black Hawks when it first appeared in 2019. It sounded right up my alley — the tale of a dysfunctional band of mercenaries drafted into a desperate conflict to protect a stranded prince.

I was delighted to see a second — and apparently, final — volume appear at the end of last year. The Righteous concludes the tales of the seasoned (and entertaining) mercenary band, and opens with them imprisoned and sentenced for execution for their part in the rebellion, alongside their employer, the knight Vedren Chel. A daring escape sends them on the run, and headlong into a brand new adventure.

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It All Started in Lockdown: An Interview with Wyldblood Editor Mark Bilsborough

It All Started in Lockdown: An Interview with Wyldblood Editor Mark Bilsborough

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What pushed you to get Wyldblood up and running? And for the uninitiated, what exactly is Wyldblood?

It all started in lockdown, as many things do. I’ve published magazines before, but nothing like Wyldblood, and it just felt like the right time. More importantly, I had the time, though for some reason that’s been quickly sucked away in a nasty combination of too much reading to do and the real world returning with full force.

Wyldblood is a small press and we specialize in science fiction and fantasy – speculative fiction, basically, though we’re not big fans of horror and stories that drip too much blood. We publish a regular magazine (we’re up to issue 8), occasional anthologies (we’ve got werewolves in Call of the Wyld and steampunk in Runs Like Clockwork), reprints of classic authors and, when we get all our reading done, we’ll be publishing original novels and novellas. We’re based in the U.K., but we’re everywhere, really. We lurk on the internet: wyldblood.com and @WyldbloodPress.

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