Hello, Friend! Are you a writer who struggles with Scene Development Instability, sometimes called SDI? I know, it can be hard to talk about in public, but let me reassure you, Friend, that SDI can be treated!
…Great, tell me more! Read on from 400.
I’m not actually a Writer! Read on from 300.
I only write short stories, so I’m immune to SDI. Read on from 200.
Venture Science Fiction, November 1957. Cover by Emsh
In this series of essays I have been taking a close look at stories I find interesting, trying to figure out how they work. So far the stories (and one poem) I have discussed are pieces I find particularly good – and this is hardly surprising, as surely it’s better to know how and what good stories do than weak stories. But this time I’m taking a look at a story I enjoy, but that I also think deeply flawed. Why? Partly because it’s by Theodore Sturgeon, one of my very favorite writers. But also this story seems very Sturgeonesque – so I hope that I can understand better what Sturgeon tries to do in his most characteristic stories, and why sometimes even while he does what he wants to do the story qua story doesn’t wholly work.
My favorite Sturgeon stories are “The Man Who Lost the Sea,” “A Saucer of Loneliness,” and “And Now the News …”. There are other very good and very well-known stories by him: “Baby is Three,” “Mr. Costello, Hero,” “Bulkhead,” “Affair with a Green Monkey,” “And My Fear is Great …”. And there are early stories that seem less truly characteristic of the mature writer, though they are still well-regarded: the SF Hall of Fame story “Microcosmic God,” horror stories like “It” and “Bianca’s Hands,” the possessed bulldozer piece “Killdozer.” I love a late ‘40s sense of wonder thing, “The Sky Was Full of Ships,” but that too is not core Sturgeon. But there are a few stories from his peak period, the 1950s, that have the emotional punch, and the moments of utter beauty, of the best of his work, but that for one reason or another don’t stick the landing. “The Golden Helix” is one. “The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff” is another – a novella that for half its length bids fair to be as good as anything he ever wrote, but which can’t quite find its way to a satisfactory resolution. And there is “It Opens the Sky,” the story I mean to treat here, which has pages of sheer loveliness, passages of great power, and a message that is Sturgeon at his most tender and optimistic. It is a story that brings me to tears, and yet frustrates me.
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The Dead Astronaut (Playboy Press, 1971). Cover by Pompeo Posar
Last summer I came across an intriguing aside on the SF anthology The Dead Astronaut by Playboy Press (1971). I can’t remember the name of the blogger who had re-cracked it, but the person noted that with everyone locked down and socially distanced, these decades-old stories of isolation and lonely death, mostly written between Sputnik and the Apollo landing, felt newly relevant. I agree.
While I admit I don’t have the knowledge base of some of the vintage SF reviewers here, I did like the stories enough highlight the collection and offer a quick review in case others wanted to experience the unintentional “prophetic” element of science fiction, as the editorial introduction labels it.
The collection’s introduction is signed simply “The Editors” but according to The Science Fiction Encyclopedia Ray Russell (1924-1999) edited it, offering a tidbit about each author and a story note or two in his brief introduction.
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)
I enjoy a good Western on the screen. Tombstone is my favorite, with Rio Bravo not too far behind. And I usually watch at least a little if it’s got Randolph Scott or Joel McCrea in it. So you know that Ride the High Country, with its breathtaking cinematography, is in the mix. And be it Maverick or Support Your Local Sheriff, I love seeing James Garner in a cowboy hat. I wrote about one of my favorite TV shows, Hell on Wheels.
But I’ve not read too many Westerns. Looking over the two-thousandish books on my shelves, I only see Steven Hockensmith’s Holmes on the Range series – which is in the Sherlock Holmes section, of course. And a fine collection of short stories by my second-favorite author, Robert E. Howard. And neither would be there solely based on their genre. I do have a few more Westerns in ebook format, which I’ve transitioned to over the past decade.
I’ve meant to write about T. T. Flynn’s Westerns. Flynn authored the Bail Bond Dodd stories, about a fairly tough, but not really hardboiled, bail bondsman, for Dime Detective. But I was smart enough to get Duane Spurlock to contribute a piece to A (Black) Gat in the Hand, which you can read here. Regular readers of that series (assuming there are any) know that Norbert Davis is on my Hardboiled Mt. Rushmore, second only to ‘Dash.’ So it’s not surprising I wrote an essay on his story “A Gunsmoke Case for Major Cain.” Another Davis Western post is likely somewhere down the dusty trail.
This past weekend, I decided to revisit a Western movie from 2008 which I had seen once before; but the plot details were fuzzy. So, kinda familiar, kinda new. What I did remember was that I thought it was pretty good. And a second view drove that home like a sod buster splitting a fence rail (okay, okay, no more of that. Too much, anyways).
A friend of mine with a long list of IMDB credits has said several times that Hollywood just doesn’t like big budget Westerns. And it’s true that we do get one of them occasionally, but they’re never billed as summer blockbusters. And heaven for-fend a franchise develop! Of course, television is more friendly to the genre.
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The Past Through Tomorrow (Berkley Medallion, January 1975). Cover uncredited
I’ve never been a big Heinlein fan. Not my fault. I enjoyed Starship Troopers well enough, but the next two novels I tried — The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and especially Friday — I bounced off pretty hard. I never tried again.
It didn’t help that I made most of my discoveries through short fiction in those days, and Heinlein almost never showed up in anthologies. Sometimes editors would apologize for omitting him, admitting (with some frustration) that they just couldn’t get the rights to the Heinlein tales they wanted. The problem was that by the mid-70s Heinlein was a star, the top-selling author in the field, and his entire short fiction catalog was locked up in his own bestselling collections.
I read collections, of course. Lots of them. But the seminal Heinlein collection, the one containing virtually all of his really important short work — including classics like “The Roads Must Roll,” “Blowups Happen,” “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” “Gentlemen, Be Seated,” “The Green Hills of Earth,” “Logic of Empire,” “The Menace from Earth,” “If This Goes On —”, and the short novel Methuselah’s Children — was the massive The Past Through Tomorrow. And that 830-page beast was just a bridge too far for a traumatized veteran of the first 100 pages of Friday.
Amazing Stories, November 1989. Cover by Janet Aulisio
An unexpected issue came up during my reading of the November, 1989 Amazing Stories. In 1979 I was 10 years old, and I barely remember being 10 years old. In 1989 I was 20, and I remember being 20; maybe not 100%, but I remember enough. In fact, I remember enough to know what 20-year-old me (20YOM) would think of the stories in the November, 1989 cadre. Sometimes, 20YOM’s views conflicts with 51-year-old-me (51YOM). So there are times I am literally of two minds!
On to it!
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To Drown in Dark Water (Undertow Publications, April 2021). Cover by Stefan Koidl
Undertow Publications, one of the finest small press publishers on the continent, just announced Open Submissions for novels and novellas. It’s caused a huge swell of excitement among many of the writing circles I keep tabs on — and a flurry of folks asking, “Wait, what kind of books do they want?”
Read the guidelines, people. Even better, pick up one of their excellent previous releases, including Simon Strantzas’s Nothing is Everything, V. H. Leslie’s Skein and Bone, Grotesquerie by Richard Gavin, or their top-notch magazine Weird Horror.
Or you could buy their latest, Steve Toase’s debut collection To Drown in Dark Water, just released this week with a magnificently creepy cover by Stefan Koidl. It’s already accumulated strong notices. Nathan Ballingrud calls it “an outstanding first collection,” and Bram Stoker winner Sarah Read says:
There are masters of folk horror and masters of weird horror; there are masters of cosmic horror and masters of psychological horror. But on the Venn diagram where all those intersect, there is only Steve Toase. To Drown in Dark Water is a masterpiece.
Here’s a quote from the rave review at Booklist.
It’s funny how different tabletop roleplaying games have aged over the years. For instance, the granddaddy of them all, Dungeons & Dragons, has waxed and waned in popularity since its inception in the 1970s, but at least to the general public it has always remained synonymous with the very notion of tabletop RPGs. Other games that were popular decades ago have now been all but forgotten, sometimes even by collectors and the most hardcore of fans. Some newer games have found purchase and are readily available, while untold numbers of RPGs have been created over the decades without drawing so much as a yawn from the market.
Perhaps surprisingly, some older games that were once popular seemed to have been pretty much forgotten by any potential audience but then decades later have suddenly sprang into popularity once again. My guess would be the age of the Internet and then the rise of social media have had a lot to do with this, with older gamers gathering online to talk about or even play their favorite games while drawing in a new generation.
One such game has been the Marvel Super Heroes roleplaying game from TSR Inc. Originally published in 1984 in the famous yellow box, with an advanced box set released in 1986, this RPG designed by Jeff Grub has had quite the uptick in popularity during the last handful of years. Not only are there multiple websites devoted to the game, but there are even Facebook pages and podcasts, plus YouTube videos devoted to discussing and playing the original Marvel RPG. There is even a modern version of the game (without the Marvel connection, of course) simply called FASERIP and free from Gurbintroll Games.
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Batman lurks in the dark
I love villains. They’re often at the center of what makes a great adventure story tick. They force our protagonists to take action, to face their worst fears and come out better, to outdo themselves again and again. They push character arcs, drive narratives, and illuminate the differences between regular people and heroes. In short, villains get the story up and out.
Ask an author what the most important storytelling element is and they’ll probably tell you it’s conflict. Conflict occurs when the main character meets a challenge to their goals. In sword and sorcery, that challenge is often a person. While there are the famed man vs. self, man vs. society, and man vs. nature conflicts as well, antagonists are some of the most engaging sources of conflict because they’re human. Or human-like. We’re programmed to engage more with characters than we do with snowstorms or oppressive governing entities.
The Adventures of Don Juan (Warner Bros, 1948)
Errol Flynn’s late-career swashbucklers are widely considered mediocre efforts, desperate attempts by an aging and fading star to recapture his youthful popularity, but that sells the films short. It’s true that by the late Forties, Flynn could no longer match the vigor and charm of his performances in Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and The Sea Hawk (1940) … but really, who could? Compared to any other standard, Flynn’s later sword-slingers are average at worst and mostly better than that. Flynn wasn’t keen to make most of these pictures; he was well aware that he wasn’t the athletic rascal he’d been almost twenty years before, but he was still a solid leading man and now and then the old charm shone through. Enjoy these films for what they have to offer, and you won’t be sorry.
Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 1948
Director: Vincent Sherman
Source: Warner Bros. DVD
Errol Flynn had given up doing swashbucklers after The Sea Hawk (1940), but with the revival of the historical adventure genre in the late ‘40s, Warner Bros. gave him a sword and put him back in trunk-hose for The Adventures of Don Juan. It must be said, Flynn doesn’t seem entirely comfortable in the role of Don Juan de Maraña, the scandal-plagued womanizing rogue who is forced to give up his naughty ways and turn over a new leaf. After disgracing himself by plucking forbidden fruit at the English Court, Don Juan is summoned back to Madrid by the Queen of Spain (Viveca Lindfors) and commanded to reform. And, however improbably, he does, because his soul is purified for the first time by his true love … for the queen herself. (No, really.) Unfortunately, purged of the rakish qualities that made the character distinctive, Don Juan becomes a conventional noble who gets entangled in conventional court intrigues, saving the queen from a conventional treasonous minister by foiling his conventional plot at the last minute—as usual.