A Wonderful Picture of a Far-flung Community of Writers: Quark, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker

A Wonderful Picture of a Far-flung Community of Writers: Quark, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker

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The 4-volume Quark anthology series, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker
(Paperback Library, 1970-71). Covers by Russell FitzGerald, Ira Cohen, Roger Penney, and Martin Last

These four volumes of Quark came out in 1970-71. The publisher killed the Quark enterprise after a year mainly because they weren’t selling, but also because of a really ill-thought-out review that Ed Bryant, who had a story in the first issue, wrote about the journal, in which he praised Marilyn and me, but went on and on about what a schlock publisher Paperback Library was.

Ed eventually submitted a novel to Paperback Library, and I happened to be in the office just after it came in. Cathy, our editor showed me his cover letter and read me her rejection note. His letter began, “You probably never heard of me, but I am an SF writer and…” Her answer back started off:

Dear Mr. Bryant,

You sell yourself short. I’m very much aware of who you are. What I don’t understand is why you hope to be published by a publisher you consider…”

and a), b), c) and d) she quoted back to him all the scurrilous things he had written about Paperback Library in his review. I felt sorry for Ed. He’d been my student at Clarion a few years before. But Ed’s was the review that made the publisher, Hy Steerman, decide that he couldn’t win for losing, and scuttled the paperback journal after the fourth issue.

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Cozy Catastrophes and Sinister Archaeology: Weird Tales #364 edited by Jonathan Maberry

Cozy Catastrophes and Sinister Archaeology: Weird Tales #364 edited by Jonathan Maberry

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Weird Tales #364. Cover by Lynne Hansen

As I write this, Weird Tales falls just two years short of celebrating its centennial — an astonishing feat, given that the fiction magazines in existence at that time, all considered far more prestigious than this lurid showcase of fantasy and horror, have vanished into time and space as if they never existed. (Only Argosy, revived in 2016 by Altus Press, matches it in longevity.) With such august placement in pop culture history, and given the differing tastes of its various editors (from Lin Carter to Ann VanderMeer), one might wonder if recent editions maintain the seminal publication’s pulp sensibilities while meeting exacting modern standards.

Under Jonathan Maberry’s editorial eye, that answer appears to be a resounding yes. With seven stories, four pieces of flash fiction, and two poems, Weird Tales #364 improves on its previous issue in the professionalism and sense of vision each writer brings as well as the sense of history infusing each work. As Maberry says in the introductory piece The Eyrie, “What delights me most as editor is that these stories are so diverse in terms of content, theme, styles, and genre. They don’t belong anywhere else — they are true Weird Tales.”

The magazine opens with Seanan McGuire’s “Too Late Now,” a Wyndham-esque “cozy catastrophe” lacking the coziness Wyndham brings to such works as The Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids. Alien vegetation has overtaken life on earth, leaving humans to scavenge for non-organic goods (the plant life grows on almost any formerly organic matter) in order to maintain some semblance of society. Boston (people have begun naming themselves after cities and states in an effort to maintain continuity with the pre-Invasion world) is forced to take a team to the place where she lost her partner Jersey. McGuire mixes the worldbuilding she brings to such works as Every Heart a Doorway and Middlegame with adept pacing and suspense.

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New Treasures: The Best of Michael Marshall Smith

New Treasures: The Best of Michael Marshall Smith

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I don’t pay a lot of attention to the limited edition small press genre market here because, well, most of their output is overpriced and aimed squarely at collectors. The exception is Subterranean Press, who do fabulous work — and routinely produce much more reasonably priced editions of their high-end volumes.

The latest author to get the Subterranean treatment is Michael Marshall Smith, author of Spares (1996), Bad Things (2009), and many other novels, and more than half a dozen short story collections, including What You Make It (1999), and More Tomorrow & Other Stories (2003). The Best of Michael Marshall Smith is a mammoth 568-page retrospective that gathers 30 of Smith’s best stories from his lengthy and successful career. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls it a standout collection:

This standout collection showcase Smith’s facility at imbuing genre tropes with humanity. Every entry offers something unexpected, while grounding inventive paranormal situations in recognizable emotion. Smith.. crafts a plausible sequel to Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann” with “Window of Erich Zann,” successfully transplanting the tale from Europe to Haight-Ashbury and exploring the protagonist’s capacity to see into a terrifying alternate reality. Smith’s first published short story, “The Man Who Drew Cats,” which won the British Fantasy Award in 1991, offers a searing window into domestic violence…

Here’s the publisher’s description.

In 1990, British-born author Michael Marshall Smith burst on to the literary scene with his first story “The Man Who Drew Cats.” It won the prestigious British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, and he went on to win the award again the next year. In a career that has now spanned three decades he has written nearly 100 short stories, published more than a dozen best-selling novels around the world, and scripted numerous movie and television projects. Now, to celebrate his three decades as a writer, The Best of Michael Marshall Smith brings together thirty of his most emotive and powerful stories (including all his award-winning short fiction), along with extensive story notes by the author.

Featuring evocative heading illustrations by Les Edwards, this career-spanning collection includes such memorable tales as “Hell Hath Enlarged Itself,” “More Tomorrow,” “To Receive is Better,” “What You Make It,” “Later,” “The Dark Land,” “What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night,” “Always,” and many others, in their definitive versions.

By turns touching, disturbing, and frightening, these stories are not limited by theme or genre, but reveal a writer always in command, and whose imagination knows no bounds. The Best of Michael Marshall Smith is the ultimate compilation of the author’s work, and stands as a testament to his mastery of, and commitment to, his craft.

The Best of Michael Marshall Smith was published by Subterranean Press in a deluxe hardcover edition on December 31, 2020. It is 568 pages, priced at $44 in hardcover and $6.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Stefan Koidl; the interior story heading illustrations are by Les Edwards. Order directly from the Subterranean website.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: 2020 Stay at Home – Days 22 and 23

Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone: 2020 Stay at Home – Days 22 and 23

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So, last year, 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 Hortsmann. I have already re-posted days one through twenty-one. Here are days twenty-two (April 12) and twenty-three (April 13). It helps if you read the series in order, so I’ve included links to the earlier entries. I enjoy channeling Archie more than any other writing which I do.

DAY TWENTY TWO – 2020 Stay at Home

No Easter parade. No church services. No family dinners at fancy restaurants. Things were very different this year. And speaking of fancy restaurants;

I don’t think I have mentioned that Rusterman’s is still open – sort of. A lot of places had simply locked up when the lock down order came. Sit-down dining was prohibited, so they decided not to struggle on. I’m sure a lot of them hoped that this whole thing would pass in a few weeks and they could reopen.

Quite a few restaurants shifted to carry-out and/or delivery only. And many of those couldn’t meet costs, and they closed: Probably for good.

And others have made it so far and are still trying to make it through. Rusterman’s is one of that group. Rusterman’s was run for years by Marko Vukcik, Nero Wolfe’s boyhood, and best, friend. Wolfe and I traveled all the way to Albania to find Marko’s killer and bring him to justice. In Marko’s will, Wolfe was made a trustee of the restaurant and for many years, he guided it well, though he eventually resigned that duty. Unfortunately, Rusterman’s, while still fine dining, went through a decline in the early 2000s, and Wolfe resumed his trusteeship. As you can imagine, he was quite demanding and the quality rose to previous levels.

We had ordered a dinner from Rusterman’s one Sunday, to support the cause and make sure it was still up to par. Wolfe found reason to grumble, but I thought it was fine. Delivering high-level cuisine can’t be easy.

Felix Martin was the manager, while William Dumfrey had come over from The Roosevelt to take on head chef duties. Leo ran the wait staff. I mention their names, because all of them were sitting in the office. I had put the red chair in the front room and moved three yellow chairs a proper social distance apart – and away from Wolfe’s chair and mine. Leo apparently didn’t feel far enough away, so he moved to the sofa.

Felix had called that morning and said that they needed to meet with Wolfe. I suggested a video conference, but they insisted on coming to the Brownstone. I don’t know that I could have convinced Wolfe to zoom, or skype, an entire discussion, so it was probably for the best.

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Our Most Unusual Pulp Adventure

Our Most Unusual Pulp Adventure

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10 Story Mystery, April 1943, and The All-Story Detective, October 1949

Based on my experience, I think that non-collectors often view us collectors as somewhat crazy. They just don’t approach things the way we do, particularly when it comes to whatever particular obsession drives us. They don’t understand why we collect, and they don’t understand what we do to collect, and they don’t understand that the desire to collect can often override what most folks would consider to be common sense.

Case in point: Many of my non-collector friends are often horrified when I relate to them the tale of our most unusual pulp collecting adventure.

On a late fall day about 15 years ago, I read an ad in an antiques magazine regarding an upcoming auction in a neighboring state. The auction mentioned pulps and showed a few. So Deb and I got up very early the day of the auction and drove for several hours. The auction was being held in a large, unheated building, and both of us were quite cold the whole time. We’d arrived with enough time to quickly browse through the material – there were several lots of pulps among the hundreds of lots being auctioned, but most of the material was non-genre, everything from tools and hardware to furniture to farm equipment to household items to architectural salvage. None of the pulps were particularly rare, but many were in nice condition.

I think the auction began around 11:00 a.m. Unfortunately, there was no order to it. Whatever item happened to strike the auctioneer’s fancy at any given moment would be auctioned off, with no rhyme or reason as to when something would be coming up. After a while a few pulp lots came up, which I won, but then he moved on to other things, leaving most of the pulp lots still to come. Every hour or so, he’d get to a few more pulp lots, and then switch to something else. Needless to say, it was extremely frustrating.

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Wandering a Monster-Ridden World: The Expert System’s Brother by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Wandering a Monster-Ridden World: The Expert System’s Brother by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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The Expert System’s Brother and The Expert System’s Champion (Tor Books, 2018-21). Covers by Raphael Lacoste

British author Adrian Tchaikovsky has been steadily making a name for himself since he burst onto the scene with his 10-volume epic fantasy Shadows of the Apt. He’s followed that with several ambitious new series, including the Echoes of the Fall fantasy trilogy and the far-future hard science fiction Children of Time series. His latest is a sequence of tales in Tor.com’s prestigious novella line, opening with The Expert System’s Brother (2018). Liz Bourke gave it an enthusiastic review at Locus Online.

The title of The Expert System’s Brother makes one expect a cyberpunk world, but the landscape initially seems like that of fantasy. Gradually, the reader becomes aware that what seems like a fantasy setting is in fact science fictional one: a setting where the inhabitants have forgotten how they came to live the way they do.

Handry has always lived in a village called Aro. He has a sister, Melory, and a small community, but when he’s 13, he’s involved in an accident. The village’s Lawgiver (one of a handful of people, like its doctor, who has a ghost inside her skull that gives advice and commands) is casting out a troublemaker, a process that involves physically severing that person from the community by the use of a specially brewed substance. When the ac­cident happens, Handry gets some of that substance on him…

Handry now becomes a wanderer, drifting from village to village… At the town-village of Orovo, he learns some more about the world: a ghost-bearer (the bearer of an architect-ghost) has been gathering and feeding the Severed in order that they may do the difficult and dangerous work of helping the now-overcrowded village-town set up a new village… Handry falls in with another Severed called Sharskin… a man who discovered a place he calls the House of the Ancestors, and who believes that the Severed aren’t made lesser than the other people, but are in fact made more: restored to their original state, before the ancestors fell from grace and gave their descendants over to the rule of the ghosts…

The Expert System’s Brother has an engaging voice. Told in first person from Handry’s point of view, it showcases Tchaikovsky’s growing ver­satility as a writer of long-form science fiction, depicting an interesting world with compelling characters.

The second volume, The Expert System’s Champion, arrived last week. Here’s a look at the back covers for both books.

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When Worse Comes to Worst: The Black Hole and Saturn 3

When Worse Comes to Worst: The Black Hole and Saturn 3

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The Black Hole (Disney, 1979)

Stephen Spielberg may have said that “the arc of the cinematic universe is long, but it bends towards quality,” but that’s a crock. (Actually, he didn’t say that. No one did. But I need to establish something here, so cut me some slack, will you?) Much as we may wish otherwise, cinema history, like the other, capital H kind, isn’t linear or progressive – it’s cyclical. This means that there will be times when things are trending up and times when they’re heading down, periods of boom and periods of bust, seasons when excellence commands the stage and epochs when utter crap towers so high over everything that it blots out the sun. Perhaps no film genre demonstrates this inevitable ebb and flow better than science fiction.

Never was this more evident than during the late 70’s and early 80’s, a low end of the bell curve era if there ever was one. For every Star Wars or Alien, there was a Metalstorm or a Spacehunter. Actually, given the iron logic of Sturgeon’s Law (“Ninety percent of everything is crap”), for every Empire Strikes Back there were nine (!) Laserblasts. In fact, you could argue that this arid stretch invalidates the law altogether – by proving Sturgeon wildly optimistic. Ninety percent? Anyone who spent time in the mall multiplexes during those years could be excused for thinking that the offal percentage was closer to ninety-nine than ninety.

(By the way, if you think I’m being unduly hard on these films, we can easily talk about some of the era’s other cultural products. How about music? Where shall we start – Martha Davis and the Motels? A Flock of Seagulls? Loverboy? Yeah… that’s what I thought. Back to crappy sci-fi movies it is.)

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Vintage Treasures: Swordsmen in the Sky edited by Donald A. Wollheim

Vintage Treasures: Swordsmen in the Sky edited by Donald A. Wollheim

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Swordsmen in the Sky (Ace, 1964). Cover by Frank Frazetta

I’ve been on something of a Don Wollheim kick recently. I looked at his 1989 Annual World’s Best SF two weeks ago, and last week I explored a collection of 30 DAW paperbacks he published in the 70s, including two rare Imaro volumes by Charles Saunders.

We’ve examined a few of Wollheim’s older anthologies in the past, but I couldn’t recall writing about one of my personal favorites, Swordsmen in the Sky, his hugely influential 1964 collection of science fantasy tales by Poul Anderson, Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, and others. I scanned the cover, drafted a quick piece, and checked for previous references to it — and that’s when I discovered a delightful review by none other than Charles Saunders himself, published right here at Black Gate, in the very early days of the BG blog. Here’s a taste.

Two of the stories Wollheim selected — Poul Anderson’s “Swordsmen of Lost Terra” and Leigh Brackett’s “The Moon that Vanished — are classics in the sense that they continue to fascinate with each re-reading, even though they were first published in 1951 and 1948, respectively. Anderson’s story is set in a far-future Earth that no longer spins on its axis, with Celtic culture surviving that catastrophe. Were it not for the scientific explanation for the seemingly magical power of the lead character’s bagpipes, “Swordsmen of Lost Terra” would qualify as sword-and-sorcery…

“The Moon that Vanished” is set on Brackett’s version of Venus, which was probably the best of all the fictional imaginings of that planet before space probes revealed the lifeless and hellish face hidden beneath its clouds. This story of a quest not for gold but godhead has proven more than equal to the test of time. Take away its interplanetary aspects and this story, too, is pure fantasy, if not sword-and-sorcery.

“People of the Crater,” by Andre Norton, takes place in one of those remote corners of our planet that will never show up on Google Earth. The titular crater is located in an unknown, mist-shrouded region of Antarctica, filled with strange creatures, sleeping gods, and magical science….

I was 18 years old when I first spotted Swordsmen in the Sky at the local train station’s book-rack during the year the anthology was published. The forty cents needed to purchase a copy jingled in my jeans. My sense of wonder was primed for fulfillment. Little did I know that the little paperback I carried out of that station would be a precursor not only to many other books I would subsequently read, but the ones I would write as well.

I have to tell you, it was a wonderful surprise to stumble on a forgotten BG contribution from Saunders, so recently after celebrating his work here. Read the while thing right here.

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Lords of Creation: A Tabletop RPG before its Time

Lords of Creation: A Tabletop RPG before its Time

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Throughout the decades, game company Avalon Hill has been associated with tabletop war gaming, and this was especially true in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the company has been known to dip into other types of games, mainly board games of one stripe or another and sometimes even tabletop role-playing games.

One of Avalon Hill’s earliest tabletop RPGs was Lords of Creation, published in 1983 and written by Tom Moldvay, known for his earlier work on Dungeons & Dragons.

Lords of Creation is very much a game of its time, but in many way it’s also a game ahead of its time. The D&D influence is obvious in the mechanics, especially concerning character and monster stats, but this game was one of the earliest to stretch beyond the boundaries of any single genre. Lords of Creation wasn’t just a fantasy tabletop RPG, but was meant to be a game for all genres, including science fiction, mythology, noir, and more. In fact, the back of the game box reads, “The ultimate role-playing game… a game of science, fantasy, science fiction and high adventure that explores the farthest reaches of your imagination! Splendid adventures take place throughout time, space and other dimensions.”

I didn’t get many chances back in the day to play Lords of Creation, probably because it wasn’t the most popular game around even if it has something of a collector’s following nowadays. Still, the few times I played the game, it was a blast, in no small part because of Moldvay’s ingenuity in making Lords of Creation something unique, at least for the time period of its original publication.

The box itself for the game is somewhat large for a tabletop RPG, though was typical for the Avalon Hill war games of the time. Upon opening the box, one finds a 64-page rule book, a 64-page The Book of Foes (you D&D players will recognize this as similar to a Monster Manual), a Game Catalog of everything Avalon Hill had to offer at the time, and three dice, a D20, a D10, and a D6, everything you need to play the game.

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Future Treasures: Amid the Crowd of Stars by Stephen Leigh

Future Treasures: Amid the Crowd of Stars by Stephen Leigh

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Stephen Leigh has had a long and successful writing career. I bought his debut novel Slow Fall to Dawn forty year ago. It turned out to be the opening volume in the Hoorka trilogy, an epic tale of space-faring assassins, recently collected in the handsome DAW omnibus volume Assassin’s Dawn.

In the four decades since Leigh has published some 20 novels and over 40 short stories, including six volumes in the Ray Bradbury Presents series and, under the name S.L. Farrell, the Cloudmages Trilogy and three volumes of the Nessantico Cycle.

His latest, Amid the Crowd of Stars, is a far-future tale of alien infection on far-flung planets. It arrives in hardcover from DAW next week. Here’s an excerpt from Publishers Weekly‘s starred review.

Leigh (A Rising Moon) puts an inventive spin on a familiar trope in this provocative tale of first contact set in the far future. Long before the novel’s start, a devastating meteor strike cut Earth off from other colonized worlds, forcing the now isolated colonists to biologically adapt to their adopted outposts. Now Earth starship Odysseus visits one such outpost, the planet Canis Lupus, for the first time. The crew finds a populace eager to visit the ancestral home world they never knew — but potentially harboring diseases lethal to earthlings. As Terran exobiologist Ichiko Aguilar explores the planet, she discovers a culture divided into Mainlander clans and the Inish: archipelago settlers whose bond with the arracht, a sentient aquatic species indigenous to Canis Lupus, represents first contact between humanity and extraterrestrial life…. Exploring big ideas about interplanetary travel, this finely crafted sci-fi saga is full of both surprises and charm.

Amid the Crowd of Stars will be published by DAW Books on February 9, 2021. It is 352 pages, priced at $26 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. Read an excerpt at Tor.com.

See all our recent coverage of the best upcoming science fiction and fantasy titles in our Future Treasures posts.