Vintage Treasures: Legacy by James H. Schmitz

Vintage Treasures: Legacy by James H. Schmitz

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Legacy by James H. Schmitz (Ace Books, 1979). Cover by Bob Adragna

Although I purchased several of his paperbacks in my teens, I didn’t really learn to appreciate the work of James H. Schmitz until I read and reviewed Gardner Dozois’ terrific 1998 anthology The Good Old Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition, which contained Schmitz’s story “The Second Night of Summer.” In his intro for that tale Gardner wrote:

Although he lacked van Vogt’s paranoid tension and ornately Byzantine plots, the late James H. Schmitz was considerably better at people than van Vogt was, crafting even his villains as complicated, psychologically complex, and non-stereotypical characters, full of surprising quirks and behaviors that you didn’t see in a lot of other Space Adventure stuff… And his universes, although they come with their own share of monsters and sinister menaces, seem as if they would be more pleasant places to live than most Space Opera universes, places where you could have a viable, ordinary, and decent life once the plot was through requiring you to battle for existence against some Dread Implacable Monster; Schmitz even has sympathy for the monsters, who are often seen in the end not to be monsters at all, but rather creatures with agendas and priorities and points-of-view of their own, from which perspectives their actions are justified and sometimes admirable — a tolerant attitude almost unique amidst the Space Adventure tales of the day, most of which were frothingly xenophobic.

“The Second Night of Summer” is a superb tale of an attack on the planet Noorhut by mysterious and deadly inter-dimensional invaders — an attack thwarted single-handedly by the coolly competent Granny Wannattel and her friendly alien companion. That single story sparked an enduring interest in Schmitz, and I’ve read and enjoyed a lot of his short fiction in the past few decades.

That in turn stirred an interest in those 70s novels that have been gathering dust on my shelves. I recently picked up the 1979 Ace Books edition of Legacy, set in Schmitz’s richly-imagined galactic federation of The Hub, and find myself much more interested in reading it than any of this month’s new SF releases.

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American Gods on the Small Screen

American Gods on the Small Screen

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Like most of you, I read and enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, so I was happy to see it get the premium specialty TV treatment, although I didn’t have the time or the right subscriptions to watch it until this year. I just binged all three seasons, and it’s a gem. It has a few flaws, the most major being its pacing, which might be why Starz dropped it after season three, but even these three seasons are a work of art.

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The Japanese Giant Monster Golden Era Ends: Space Amoeba (1970)

The Japanese Giant Monster Golden Era Ends: Space Amoeba (1970)

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Earlier this week, while collating ideas for writing about the history of a particular giant monster who recently played a featured role in Godzilla vs. Kong (but who is neither Godzilla nor Kong), an alien sensation suddenly overpowered me. I had to go watch another giant monster movie, one I hadn’t given any attention to in fifteen years: Space Amoeba. 

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Future Treasures: Voyagers: Twelve Journeys through Space and Time by Robert Silverberg

Future Treasures: Voyagers: Twelve Journeys through Space and Time by Robert Silverberg

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Robert Silverberg is a Science Fiction Grand Master, a living legend of SF, and one of the most prolific and widely respected genre writers of the 20th Century. And here he is, 21 years into the 21st Century, still producing important books that command our attention.

Is Voyagers: Twelve Journeys through Space and Time an important book? Sure looks like it to me. It is, according to my count, his 50th collection, appearing almost exactly 60 years after his first, Next Stop the Stars, was published in 1962. It contains a dozen of his most celebrated stories, including tales of Spanish conquistadores who find the Fountain of Youth, a tourist in Mexico who makes a startling discovery, and spacefarers who find a nightmare world.

If you’re not familiar with Silverberg, this may be one of the most important and rewarding purchases you make this year. And if you are, you already know it’s an essential buy. It arrives in trade paperback from Three Rooms Press in two weeks. Here’s an excerpt from the enthusiastic Publisher’s Weekly review.

SFWA Grand Master Silverberg brings together 12 tension-filled speculative stories from throughout his long career in this impressive collection. Silverberg’s adventurous and melancholy tales are united in taking characters to vividly detailed settings, including a grisly ancient Egyptian embalming market in “Thebes of the Hundred Gates”; a “nightmare world” of “gaudy monsters” called Sidri Akrak in “Travelers”; and even the microscopic space between electrons in “Chip Runner.” Exploring themes of death and identity, the stories range from the bittersweet to the truly tragic, yet the collection never feels grim. These timeless topics also mean that even the decades-old stories still resonate… Readers will be won over by the immersive worldbuilding and clever plot twists of these thought-provoking stories.

Voyagers: Twelve Journeys through Space and Time will be published by Three Rooms Press on April 20, 2021. It is 448 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $9.81 in digital formats. Get all the details at the publisher’s website.

See all our recent coverage of the best upcoming SF and fantasy here.

Goth Chick News: Save the Headstone and Go Out Like a Viking

Goth Chick News: Save the Headstone and Go Out Like a Viking

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Creative disposal of earthly remains is nothing new. There have been countless examples, especially in the last ten years, as new generations seek ways to distinguish themselves from the mundane-ness of the past. We’ve seen furniture that converts to a coffin (“Chic design for life and death”), an option for turning your loved-one’s remains into a precious stone which is set into jewelry (“One-of-a-kind, just like them”), and organic burial “eggs” out of which grows an oak tree (“Life never stops”). And now there’s a way you can go out in a blaze of glory.

Literally.

The legislative assembly of Maine is currently contemplating a bill which would allow Viking-style funerals.

History tells us that in the days of Viking warriors, dead heroes were laid out in a wooden boat along with their belongings. The vessel was also filled with hay and other flammables, and then put to sea. An archer (whom you hoped had infallable aim) then lobbed a burning arrow at the boat causing it to go up into an impressive pyre which consumed everything, before the charred remains were taken by the sea. An non-profit undertaker service organization in Maine called Good Ground Great Beyond, which is sponsoring said bill, owns 63 acres of property in the state, upon which they hope to offer “open air cremations” including a Viking-style funeral service.

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“Is There Anybody There?”: James Gunn’s The Listeners

“Is There Anybody There?”: James Gunn’s The Listeners

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The Listeners by James Gunn
First Edition: Scribner’s, October 1972, Jacket design Jerry Thorp
(Book Club edition shown)

The Listeners
by James Gunn
Scribner’s (275 pages, $6.95, Hardcover, October 1972)
Jacket design Jerry Thorp

The late James Gunn, who died just last year, became an SFWA Grand Master in 2007 and was inducted into the SF Hall of Fame in 2015, both recognizing his achievements in science fiction. His individual awards include an Eaton Award for lifetime achievement as a critic (1982), a Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to SF and fantasy scholarship (1976), and a Clareson Award from the Science Fiction Research Association (1997).

So while Gunn wrote a good amount of fiction, some fifteen novels and a similar number of story collections, it’s fair to say his profile was higher as a nonfiction writer and critic than for his fiction. His critical work includes Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction (1976), which presumably triggered the Pilgrim Award (but predated the Hugo category for nonfiction or related book), and Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (1982, which did win a Hugo Award). He also edited the prominent series of anthologies The Road to Science Fiction (1977 to 1998), and was closely associated with the Campbell and Sturgeon awards organized at the Center for the Study of Science Fiction in Lawrence, Kansas, where spent most of his life in academia.

The closest he got to major awards recognition for his fiction was the novel considered here, The Listeners, from 1972. It came in second for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, in that award’s first year, to Barry Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo, though it was not nominated for a Hugo or Nebula award. (Neither was the Malzberg.)
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How Sword and Sorcery Brings Us To Life

How Sword and Sorcery Brings Us To Life

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Savage Scrolls, Volume One, edited by Jason Ray Carney (Pulp Hero Press, 2020). Cover by Jesus Lopez

When I was working on the introduction to Savage Scrolls, I re-read all of Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords introductions. Something caught my attention: Carter starts Flashing Swords 1 with an epigraph, a stanza from William Morris’s six-stanza poem, “Prologue of the Earthly Paradise.” It is a beautiful apologia of fantasy literature. The speaker, Morris, attempts to comfort his reader, a weary, disenchanted worker, by celebrating the transformative nature of the heroic poetry of premodernity. But Morris does so hesitantly:

The heavy trouble, the bewildering care
That weighs us down who live and earn our bread,
These idle verses have no power to bear.

Morris is not making hyperbolic claims for the power of literature here; he is no Percy Shelley, claiming “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

No. Morris is comparably modest. Do you have bills to pay? Taxes to file? Mouths to feed? Alas, admits Morris, imaginative literature will not help you bear these miserable burdens. But it might help in other, nuanced ways.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: I Heard You Like Swords

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: I Heard You Like Swords

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The Sword and the Rose (Walt Disney, 1953)

What? Has Lawrence run out of theme ideas? Has the well gone dry at last? Perish the thought! I was just looking at my list and saw there were several movies with “Sword” in the title that we hadn’t covered yet, and they’re all worth discussing, so here we are.

The Sword and the Rose

Rating: ***
Origin: UK/USA, 1953
Director: Ken Annakin
Source: Walt Disney Home Video

This is based on the popular 1898 novel When Knighthood Was in Flower by Charles Major, a Victorian historical romance that had been filmed twice before in the silent era, and has just enough swashbuckling in it for inclusion here. Despite its title, it’s not set in medieval times but during the early reign of King Henry VIII, telling the story of his sister, Princess Mary Tudor, and her (largely unhistorical) love for Charles Brandon, a mere captain of the guard. Brandon is played by Disney’s chosen leading man of the time, Richard Todd, in perhaps his best performance, though he was better known for Dam Busters (1955). Princess Mary is played by Glynis Johns, who has the impossible task of making her willful and selfish character seem adorable, but she’s so good she almost pulls it off. The leads are supported by a cast of fine British actors that includes James Robertson Justice as King Henry, Michael Gough as the Duke of Buckingham, and Rosalie Crutchley as Queen Katherine, all benefiting from a strong script with a lot of cutting gibes and haughty rejoinders.

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New Treasures: Glow by Tim Jordan

New Treasures: Glow by Tim Jordan

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Glow by Tim Jordan (Angry Robot, February 23, 2021). Cover by Glen Wilkins

I always enjoy finding a reliable new reviewer. Even more than that, I enjoy a reviewer who’s concise — one who can package a synopsis and recommendation in a single punchy, well written paragraph. John the Librarian, one of my recent discoveries, definitely has the knack. Here’s his review of Glow, Tim Jordan’s debut novel from Angry Robot, released in February, which features a young man on the run from drug liches and an unstoppable assassin in a near-future dystopia….

Just as humankind was on the brink of reaching the stars, fueled by new biotechnology that conveys near-immortality, the Earth was almost destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. Now, a once-great corporation is clinging to power from its orbiting stations, an Earth-side alliance seeks to overthrow it, and a new kind of artificial life lurks in the dark, where nothing is as it seems. Rex is an addict of Glow — a nanotech drug — who can’t remember who he is. When he’s taken in by a sect of nuns who promise salvation, he finds himself in a conflict that could destroy all he holds dear, hunted by something not of this world… In Jordan’s impressive fiction debut, the action and pacing are taut, the characters well drawn, the conflict compelling, and the world he creates is fascinating and immersive in its detail. His world building is reminiscent of the best space opera mixed with the gritty, violent dystopia of cyberpunk.

Glow was published by Angry Robot on February 23, 2021. It is 400 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback, and $6.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Glen Wilkins. Read the first three chapters (22 pages) at Issuu.com.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: A Brilliant Poirot (No, not Suchet this time)

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: A Brilliant Poirot (No, not Suchet this time)

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I have a somewhat odd relationship with works of Agatha Christie. When I started down my life-long Sherlock Holmes path as a boy, I also read a Hercule Poirot book by Christie. Didn’t care for it. My voracious reading habit grew, but I never felt impelled to try her again. The movies didn’t interest me at all. I discovered Nero Wolfe around age thirty (I think), but still never bothered with Christie.

It was the A&E television series starring Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton that got me interested in Wolfe. Similarly, I watched an episode of the British series starring David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, and I liked it. In fact, I thought that it was brilliant. On a par with the Wolfe series, and also Granada’s terrific Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett.

I bought a collection of the Poirot short stories, and my mind’s eye saw the images of the actors from the Suchet show. And I liked reading Poirot. I find the novels a little too long-winded, but they’re still not bad. And picturing Suchet always works. I didn’t mind the Kenneth Branagh movie, though I didn’t really like Peter Ustinov’s portrayal. And Tony Randall was as much Poirot as Warren William was Sam Spade (if you haven’t seen the latter: not at all).

I hear Clive Merrison’s voice when I write Sherlock Holmes stories. And I see Maury Chaykin when I write Nero Wolfe. And it absolutely is David Suchet who constitutes my depiction of Hercule Poirot. But there’s a second voice I also hear. John Moffatt (1922-2012) worked in both theater and film, and excelled on radio and reading audio books.

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