Kalen Anzai
For this article, we’re going to be shining the virtual spotlight on a fairly recent and intriguing addition to the Avex music label roster in Japan, the singer Kalen Anzai. Although she’s definitely not part of the popular trend of ‘virtual idols’, for a time there was some debate on that — not about whether she was an idol (as she’s clearly not, at least not in the strict genre sense), but whether she was actually real or virtual…!
A few weeks ago, I wrote about John Moffatt’s outstanding radio show, in which he played Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. I think it is, and will remain, unsurpassed. Today, we’re going to go back and look at the first radio series starring the fussy little Belgian detective.
By 1944, there had been a few radio appearances featuring Poirot. Including a production by Orson Welles, starring Orson Welles, for Orson Welles’ radio show. (It’s all about Orson). I’ll write about that one later. Sam Spade, Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, Ellery Queen, Philip Marlowe, The Falcon: detectives were popular radio fare. And an American actor and entertainment entrepreneur by the name of Harold Huber, set out to add Agatha Christie’s famous creation as a regular attraction of the airwaves.
Huber obtained the rights to Poirot for an American radio show. Agatha Christie’s Poirot debuted on February 2, 1945, featuring a live introduction from Christie, across the sea. Except, after about thirty seconds of silence, the announcer for the Mutual Broadcasting System explained that atmospheric conditions prevented the connection. MBS did have the foresight to record a short-wave transmission from Christie earlier that day, and played that in place of her live appearance. Having Christie explain that Poirot was busy, so she would introduce the series, was a pretty neat move in those times LONG before cell phones and podcasts.
SPI ad in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1978
I’ve been spending some time over the past few months getting my SF digests back in order. While those on the shelves were in order, I had bunches in boxes that needed to be incorporated, so it’s been a bit of work. But it’s been fun to look at them as I’m organizing them (which of course just slows that process down!)
I’d remembered that the first SF digest I subscribed to was The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but had forgotten that the first issue of my subscription was December 1976. My copy still has that helpful mailing labeled plastered over it. But on that copy at least, from the perspective of 45 years later, I don’t mind it being on there at all.
I’ve had great fun looking again at the various SF and fantasy gaming ads that were running in digests during that period. I think that the first game I ever ordered was TSR’s Lankhmar in early 1977 (being a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser fan, I couldn’t resist!), while I was in eighth grade, followed later that summer by SPI’s Sorcerer and Metagaming’s Ogre. Once I’d ordered a few things, my name found its way on to many mailing lists, so I wasn’t limited anymore to what I saw advertised in the digests.
I finally got around to listening to the epic podcast produced earlier this year by the staff and contributors to Tales From the Magician’s Skull. It features the brain trust behind my favorite sword & sorcery magazine, including its illustrious publisher Joseph Goodman, mastermind behind Goodman Games; editor Howard Andrew Jones (Managing Editor emeritus of Black Gate); and authors John C (Chris) Hocking, James Enge, and S.E. (Seth) Lindberg.
The whole thing is well worth listening to, roaming free-form over topics of interest to anyone who enjoys reading or writing quality short fantasy, including horror stories from the slush pile, the rising influence of Clark Ashton Smith and Warhammer, the importance of the establishing shot in fantasy fiction, other sources of quality S&S (including Adrian Simmons’ Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Jason Ray Carney’s Whetstone, Dave Ritzlin’s DMR Books, Cirsova, and Weirdbook), Icelandic sagas, the timeline of James Enge’s Morlock tales, Hocking’s Benhus stories, Howard Hanuvar tales, and the mysterious and untimely demise of an unusual number of magazine interns.
A couple of friends tipped me off that I was name-checked about forty minutes in, so it wasn’t a surprise when I heard it, but it was certainly worth the wait. The topic under discussion was the rare and classic Fighting Fantasy board games, including The Warlock and Firetop Mountain and especially Legend of Zagor. Here’s a transcription from around the 36-minute mark.
Howard: I bet John O’Neill has all of that, probably multiple copies in shrink.
S.E. Lindberg: Oh my god.
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Weird Shadows From Beyond (Avon Books, August 1969). Cover by Josh Kirby
John Carnell edited the highly-regarded British SF magazines New Worlds (from 1946-64), Science Fantasy (1951-64), and Science Fiction Adventures (1958-63). In the US he’s probably best known an an anthologist, editor of the long-running New Writings in SF (21 volumes from 1964-72), and individual volumes like No Place Like Earth (1952), Gateway to Tomorrow (1954), and Lambda I and Other Stories (1964).
I found a copy of his slender 1969 anthology Weird Shadows From Beyond in a small collection I bought on eBay earlier this year. Carnell’s thoughtful introduction both intrigued me and nicely set the mood for the tales within:
A freshly turned grave with one mourner filled with hate; a telephone kiosk at night with something outside trying to get in; a ghoul playing knucklebones on a tombstone; a bodiless evening dress suit dancing in a moonlit glade; an iron shark hook; a handful of perfect teeth; a witch and a were-leopard — these are but a few of the ingredients which are an integral part of some of the stories in this collection of bizarre stories. Stories told with the consummate skill of modern writers, for the tree of the macabre has come a long way since its roots spawned in the day of the Gothic novel.
Doubtless those giants of yesterday — Poe, Blackwood, Dunsany, Lovecraft, Bierce, Wakefield, and the many others — would be pleased with their foster-children and somewhat amazed by present-day techniques of story-telling, yet, while more than half a century separates the old from the new, both classes of writer have the same aim in view; to entertain and at the same time to cause an occasional shudder or an uneasy feeling at dead of night.
Weird Shadows From Beyond contains ten short stories published between 1956 and 1964, seven of which were drawn from Carnell’s Science Fantasy magazine. They include an Elric story by Michael Moorcock, a pair of stories by Mervyn Peake, and stories by William Tenn, Brian W. Aldiss, Theodore Sturgeon, E. C. Tubb, an original story by Eric C. Williams, and others. Here’s the complete table of contents.
In many ways the early 1980s were the heyday of classic microgames, also called minigames, with the popularity of such games as Car Wars and Revolt on Antares, but those were far from the only games available. For instance, TSR Inc. made its fair share of microgames, including Viking Gods.
Published in 1982, Viking Gods allowed players to take part in the battle to end all battles, Ragnarok. A game for two players, one player took the side of the Forces of Chaos while the other player was in control of the Gods of Asgard. Each side in the battle had a mission. The job of the Forces of Chaos was to storm across the Rainbow Bridge and destroy Yggdrasil, the sacred tree. The side of the gods had the job of either killing Loki or destroying his army while defending the tree.
A somewhat simple war game, Viking Gods still packed lots of combat. All you needed were the included map, the game pieces, and a pair of six-sided dice. When it was their turn, players were allowed to move their cardboard pieces two spaces across a map until they came up against enemy forces. Then combat could begin. Using the combat chart at the bottom of the map, the dice were rolled to determine the outcome of battle. Depending upon that outcome, forces could be pushed back a space or they could be defeated, wiped out. Another option was the battle could lead to a draw.
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My nostalgic roleplaying game (rpg) is Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP). That’s not a good one to bring to a table of what I term “casual” gamers. Casual gamers are the kinds who say, “Tell me what dice to roll?” MERP requires a level of energy and investment that leaks away while the GM performs all the calculations and looks up all the results on various tables. As one of my gamers tellingly noted, a few years ago when I was struggling to run it for a passive group, “Gabe’s apparently playing his own private game over there as we sit here waiting patiently for results.”
I’m not blaming the game, of course. This is the unavoidable result of this kind of game coupled with certain players. But I didn’t give up on this game until the player characters (PCs) randomly encountered a Wyvern. “Oh, man,” I chuckled, “this is going to be dangerous for you guys.” Well, it wasn’t. A lucky first hit Stunned my monster. Whether the effect lasted for one Round or eight really didn’t matter, because those PCs circled it and protracted that effect by wailing on it, as if they were those guys in Office Space, surrounding and battering at an office copier.
This is what we call being stun-locked, a known “problem” in Rolemaster systems. When it happened in my MERP group, I told my players, “I don’t think I want to play this anymore.”
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As signs of life begin to emerge following the zombie apocalypse that was 2020, our thoughts naturally turn to the fate of the many trade shows and live events we normally cover for Black Gate. Earlier this year I posted a list of tentative in-person conventions which hopeful organizers were busy planning. Now this week I am nearly giddy to report that the first one, Day of the Dead Chicago, which we have been covering for nine years, successfully occurred last weekend.
As you would expect, things were a little different in this brave new world, but let’s start with what was the same.
Days of the Dead is a horror and pop culture convention that has been around since 2011. That makes 2021 a big tenth-anniversary year for the event which began here in Chicago, and has since expanded to Las Vegas, Indianapolis and Atlanta. This year, DotD was hosted at the same suburban-Chicago hotel where it moved to in 2019. It had far outgrown its previous location where vendor booths and even some celebrity tables had been relegated to the hallways between banquet rooms, making Black Gate photog Chris Z and I repeatedly wonder what would happen if someone yelled “fire!” The new hotel is far better equipped to host the show which in past years has drawn upwards of 4000 guests over the weekend it occurs. But, if you can believe it, the very-scaled-back hotel bar was bereft of Fireball, depriving us of our customary pre-convention shot.
Bloody hell.
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The Tallow-Wife and Other Stories (Tartarus Press, February 24, 2021) and All the Murmuring Bones
(Titan Books, March 9, 2021). Covers by Kathleen Jennings, and unknown
Any new book by Angela Slatter is a reason to rejoice for any lover of good dark fantasy.
Slatter is a very talented Australian writer, a born storyteller or, to be precise, a great fabulist, an author of modern, complex fairy tales for grownups. The Tallow-Wife is a collection of stories and novellas the core of which is the long title story, a dark comedy portraying the downfall of a family hiding some unspeakable secrets. But, in turn, that narrative and the rest of the volume are strictly connected to the characters and events described in two previous books, also published by Tartarus Press, Sourdough and Other Stories and The Bitterwood Bibles and Other Recountings.
Thus, although each tale can be read as a stand alone story, the task may be a bit difficult — although always quite enjoyable thanks to Slatter’s exceptional storytelling ability — if you’re not already familiar with the characters and their previous predicaments and adventures. In fact all the stories are interconnected to form a complex mosaic.
Indeed in her Afterword the author admits,
My brain was trying to write The Tallow-Wife as a novel — to connect everything. But the fractured structure, the untidy threads are the whole point. In hindsight perhaps I should have just written a novel… I wanted to finish off some arcs that I’d left in the previous books.
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The Best of Walter Jon Williams (Subterranean Press, February 28, 2021). Cover by Lee Moyer
Walter Jon Williams began his writing career in the early 80s designing games for Fantasy Games Unlimited, most notably the Age of Fighting Sail role playing game Privateers and Gentlemen (1983). He had more success with science fiction in the following years, and his work — especially his novellas, which he’s justly famous for — have been nominated for numerous awards. With The Best of Walter Jon Williams, Subterranean Press has produced one of the most important collections of the year, gathering the most vital work of one of the most successful short fiction writers in the field. Here’s the jacket copy.
With the publication of his debut novel, The Privateer, in 1981, Walter Jon Williams began one of the most varied and prolific careers in contemporary popular fiction. His work encompasses cyberpunk (Hardwired), military SF (The Dread Empire’s Fall series), humor (The Crown Jewels), even disaster fiction (The Rift). But much of Williams’s best work takes place in the shorter forms, as this generous volume, filled to overflowing with award-winning and award-nominated stories, clearly proves.
With one exception, The Best of Walter Jon Williams reflects its author’s affection for — and mastery of — the novella form. That exception is “The Millennium Party,” a brief, brilliant account of a virtual anniversary celebration unlike any you have ever imagined. Elsewhere in the collection, Williams offers us one brilliantly sustained creation after another. The Nebula Award-winning “Daddy’s World” takes us into a young boy’s private universe, a world of seeming miracles that conceals a tragic secret. “Dinosaurs” is the far future account of the incredibly destructive relationship between the star-faring human race and the less evolved inhabitants of the planet Shar.
“Diamonds from Tequila” is a lovingly crafted example of SF Noir in which a former child actor attempts a comeback that proves unexpectedly dangerous. “Surfacing” is a tale of alienation featuring a research scientist more at home with the foreign and unfamiliar than with the members of his own species. Finally, the magisterial “Wall, Stone, Craft” offers a brilliantly realized alternate take on a young Mary Godwin, future creator of Frankenstein, and her relationships with the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, culminating in the creation of a monster who would “stalk through the hearts of all the world.”
These stories, together with half a dozen equally substantial tales, are the clear product of a master craftsman with a seemingly limitless imagination.
The Best of Walter Jon Williams contains eleven novellas and one short story, plus an introduction by Daniel Abraham (one half of the joint-pseudonym James S.A. Corey), and Williams’ extensive Story Notes (13 pages). Here’s the complete Table of Contents.