Skyward Inn (Solaris, March 16, 2021)). Cover by Dominic Forbes
Aliya Whiteley is the author of The Beauty (which I described as “dystopian horror filled with cosmic weirdness, strange fungi, and terrifying tales told around post-apocalyptic campfires” three years ago), The Arrival of Missives, and Skein Island. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably noticed that Whiteley is accumulating a rep for SF on the weird side.
Her newest certainly fits that mold. SFX calls Skyward Inn “A melancholy and compellingly weird tale of identity in crisis,” and Publisher’s Weeklysays it’s a “deeply weird story of missed chances, invasion, and assimilation.” I don’t know about you, but those sound like compelling endorsements to me. Here’s the publisher’s description.
Drink down the brew and dream of a better Earth.
Skyward Inn, within the high walls of the Western Protectorate, is a place of safety, where people come together to tell stories of the time before the war with Qita.
But safety from what? Qita surrendered without complaint when Earth invaded; Innkeepers Jem and Isley, veterans from either side, have regrets but few scars.
Their peace is disturbed when a visitor known to Isley comes to the Inn asking for help, bringing reminders of an unnerving past and triggering an uncertain future.
Did humanity really win the war?
Skyward Inn will be published by Solaris on March 16, 2021. It is 336 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover, $6.99 in digital format, and $24.99 for the audiobook. Read an excerpt at SciFiNow.
See all our coverage of the best upcoming SF and fantasy here.
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: The Forgotten Black Masker – Norbert Davis
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)
And I take a break from the world of Nero Wolfe to bring A (Black) Gat in the Hand back to Black Gate.
The first image graven onto my Hardboiled Mt. Rushmore is Dashiell Hammett’s. The Continental Op and Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key – I think he did the genre better than anyone. Very narrowly going up second is Frederick Nebel’s. I’m a fan of Cardigan, MacBride and Kennedy, Gales and McGill, and much of his other pulp stuff. Steeger Books has made a plethora of his material available, and I’ve got most of it.
My third choice isn’t one of the expected names, like Raymond Chandler (it’s taken me a couple decades to warm up to his stuff), Erle Stanley Gardner (I do LOVE Cool and Lam), or Carroll John Daly (Race Williams has grown on me a bit over the years). Or a worthy name like T.T. Flynn, W.T. Ballard, Paul Cain, Roger Torrey, or Stewart Sterling. Nope – it’s Norbert Davis.
And Davis is right up there with Nebel, but there is much more of the latter’s work available, and I think he produced a greater amount of ‘better’ writings. But the five Max Latin stories rank among my favorites in the genre. And I’m a big Bail Bond Dodd fan. In the longer format, the Doan and Carstairs novels are arguably the best in the comedic-hardboiled school. I believe that Davis is probably the most under-appreciated pulpster of them all. And I think that with the Jo Gar stories, Raoul Whitfield may well be able to press that claim as well.
Davis grew up in rural Illinois. Good ol’ Abe Lincoln, at 6’4”, towered over his contemporaries. Davis was 6’-5”, and that would have been almost a foot taller than the average American male around him back then. That’s a significant difference. He moved to the West Coast and enrolled at Stanford’s Law School: Davis was no dummy. While a student, he began writing pulp stories, and he was selling them. By the time he graduated in 1934, he was an established pulpster – which of course, wasn’t exactly as lucrative as a successful law career. He had appeared in Black Mask for the first time two years earlier, with “Reform Racket.”
Erle Stanley Gardner was a practicing lawyer as he built his writing career; finally giving up law. Davis took a different approach. An AB (the Latin designation for a BA) and LLD in hand, he never took the bar. Lawyering was not to be Davis’ career path. He would be a professional writer – though, sadly, for not nearly long enough.
Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Columbia College Chicago Alumni Fantasy Writers Look at the Changing Role of Heroes in Terry Pratchett’s Troll Bridge Film
The air blew off the mountains, filling the air with fine ice crystals.
It was too cold to snow. In weather like this wolves came down into villages, trees in the heart of the forest exploded when they froze. In weather like this right-thinking people were indoors, in front of the fire, telling stories about heroes.
This is the epic, atmospheric opening to Sir Terry Pratchett’s marvelous short story, “Troll Bridge,” set in his Discworld series.
As I write this, it is not too cold to snow, though it’s much too nasty to be outside. The wind is howling and the snow is blowing, and here in Chicago they’ve predicted we’ll get a foot of snow in 48 hours. Texas looks like the Midwest in winter, and there’s damned few snowplows in the Lonestar state. A whopping 80% of the US currently has snow on the ground.
In past winters, I have seen coyotes slinking around the park a block from our condo building, and one glorious Yuletime night, I saw a 10 point buck, antlers coated in ice, standing in the middle of Michigan Ave, on the Magnificent Mile. It was an icy, wind-whipped night, the type where the snow turns everything it touches into a glowing icicle. Only the buck and I were foolish enough to be out that night. That was 30 years ago, and I remember it clearly to this day.
As the wind howls past my window tonight, it takes little imagination to think packs of wolves might be coming down from the wilds of Wisconsin to stalk through the streets of Chicago.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the old TSR minigame Revolt on Antares, and that got me thinking about other microgames which were popular back in ye olden days, and that brought to mind one of my favorites, Car Wars from Steve Jackson Games, published in 1981, a vehicle combat game.
If you ever wanted to take part in the fast-driving, hard-hitting action of the Mad Max universe where guns and cars ruled the roads, and the plains and the deserts and the … etc., then you would do well to buckle in and pick up one of the versions of Car Wars which has been made available over the years.
But my first love was the original Car Wars which came in a small, black plastic box, though there were copies of the game which came in just a plastic bag (but who would want that when you could get your hands on a cool plastic pocket box, as they were called?).
The action came in various scenarios from arena battles to highway combat against marauders and the like, and that original pocket box included everything needed to get you on the road to war. Included were the six-sided dice needed for the game, a rules book, maps, vehicle sheets, and cardboard counter pieces of vehicles, road hazards, and more.
Covers by NASA, Maurizio Manzieri, and Warwick Fraser-Coombe
My regular trips to Barnes & Noble to pick up the latest print magazines are usually a fun affair. But it was bittersweet last month as, due to the ongoing uncertainty surrounding Interzone (and the planned retirement of its editor, Andy Cox), I assumed the Nov-Dec 2020 edition currently on the stands would be the final print issue of Interzone. Fortunately the magazine appears to be continuing, as least for the short term.
First up — the latest Asimov’s SF, with stories by Greg Egan, James Patrick Kelly, Kali Wallace, Michael Swanwick, and Black Gate‘s Saturday night blogger Derek Künsken. Here’s the highlights from Victoria Silverwolf’s review at Tangent Online.
The magazine opens strongly with “Glitch” by Alex Irvine. The setting is a future in which one’s consciousness can be recorded and then downloaded into a new body after death, if one can pay the price. People can also swap minds, using similar technology, or hitch rides inside the bodies of other persons. The story begins with the protagonist in a new body, after being killed in a bombing. The terrorists tried to block the minds of their victims from being resurrected, but a technical problem caused the main character to share his body with the mind of the bomber, who also died during the attack. He struggles to prevent the terrorist from taking over completely, while evading the authorities and fighting to stop another bombing. The author creates a vivid and suspenseful tale…
“Mrs. Piper Between the Sea and the Sky” by Kali Wallace is a tale of alternate history set in the 1940s. Aliens arrive on Earth, ending the Second World War when they destroy both Germany and the Soviet Union for refusing to cooperate with them. The protagonist is a British secret agent, sent to the United States to capture a former war hero who chose to work with the aliens. If necessary, she is ready to kill to accomplish her mission. She witnesses the devastating effect the arrival of the aliens has on plants and animals, and learns something about the relationship between the married couple. The premise is intriguing… The story’s mood ranges from Lovecraftian cosmic horror to spy thriller to domestic drama…
Mervyn Peake‘s 1946 novel, Titus Groan, was intended as the first in a series that would follow the life of Titus Groan, Seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast, a vast, city-like castle set in a land of indeterminate latitude and longitude. Unfortunately, Peake was afflicted with what is believed to have been Parkinson’s Disease, and so finished only two other volumes, Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959), and a novella, Boy in Darkness (1956). He succumbed to his illness in 1968, leaving only a few paragraphs and ideas for proposed future volumes. From those elements, his wife, Maeve Gilmore, completed a final book, Titus Awakes, which wasn’t published until 2009. By his son Sebastian’s account, it isn’t really a continuation of the series, but an attempt by Gilmore to address the loss of Peake.
Graham Greene helped edit Titus Groan into publishable form. Elizabeth Bowen and Anthony Burgess both thought highly of the book and Harold Bloom considered the Gormenghast trilogy the most accomplished fantasy work of the twentieth century. Michael Moorcock, a friend of Peake’s, has written several times about Peake’s artistry, and his own novel, Glorianna, is dedicated to Peake. Despite the support of so many writers, the books weren’t published for a second time until the late sixties by Penguin, and then as part of Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy line.
A satire of manners and a critique of blind adherence to dead tradition, despite having few clear fantastic elements it is easily one of the great literary works of fantasy. It might not match the success of The Lord of the Rings, but in its richness of imagination it does, and outpaces it in the depth and human variety of its characters.
Titus Groan opens on the day of the birth of its titular character and ends a year later when he is made Earl of Gormenghast. The story, while it revolves around his birth and accession, is not his, but that of several other characters, primarily Steerpike, a kitchen boy intent on forcing his way upward to a position of power in the castle.
Steerpike by Peake
Escaping the horrid Great Kitchen ruled by the even more horrid cook, Abiatha Swelter, Steerpike quickly realizes that the weight of Gormenghast’s customs and codes cannot be overcome, but might be subverted to his aims. Slowly, by charisma, guile, and plotting, he begins to do so. Subversion, arson, and murder are all relentlessly and remorselessly employed toward his ends.
Simultaneous to Steerpike’s ascent, Mr. Flay, servant to the current Earl, Lord Sepulchrave, is engaged in a war of wills with the cook, Swelter. Though the conflict plays out outside of everyone else’s observation, its conclusion has great ramifications in the second book.
Like a Dickens novel, the book is filled with numerous digressions and tangential side plots as well as a large assortment of minor characters. On their own, each may seem to do little to further Titus Groan‘s larger story, but taken together they deepen and enrich everything else in the novel.
Titus Groan is one of the great achievements of literary worldbuilding. Peake spent his childhood in China, the son of British missionaries. The segregated community he grew up in, as well as the model of the Forbidden City of the Chinese emperor, itself ruled by tradition and ritual, must have informed his conception of Gormenghast. From those raw elements, Peake created a world that is vast yet strictly confined, and limited by more than just walls.
Virgil Finlay painting for George Allen England’s “Darkness and Dawn” (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, 1940)
For decades, beginning with the very first Worldcon in 1939, held in New York City, science fiction magazine publishers sent art to the convention, to be auctioned off to fans to help raise money for the con. Particularly in those early years, so much art was sometimes sent that the con didn’t have time to auction it all, and at the end of the auction original interior illustrations from the likes of Virgil Finlay, Edd Cartier and Frank R. Paul would be tossed into the audience for free.
Sadly, no one has ever thrown a free Finlay at me.
The tradition that was started at Nycon 1 continued in 1940 at the second Worldcon, held in Chicago from September 1-2, 1940 – Chicon 1. One of the attendees, and a man who was actively involved in organizing that Chicon, was legendary fan and SF author Wilson “Bob “ Tucker. At the time of the con, Tucker was in the midst of publishing his classic fanzine, Le Zombie, and in issue #40 (July 1941), he posted the results of the Chicon auction. In his list, Tucker identifies (where he knows) the artist, the piece, the fan who bought it and the selling price. I include that list below; I think it’s a fascinating glimpse at the earliest days of SF art collecting.
Not every item was a piece of original art; some books, magazines, fanzines and ephemera were auctioned also, but the vast majority of it was art. Tucker notes that his list is missing some info, as the auction moved so fast and he was rapidly taking notes as each piece was being auctioned. He also notes that the list is only for the Sunday night auction (September 1, 1940), but he did not make the same sort of notes for the continuation of the auction the next night.
First, let me apologize for not telling you about this last summer. Max Brooks, son of Mel and writer of one of my favorite zombie tales ever, World War Z, dropped another excellent story last year, called Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre. I was certain I had written about it until I just went to look for the article and found I did not.
So, let’s start there.
I didn’t grab Devolution the moment it hit the shelves. Why? Because when I read “sasquatch massacre” I pondered the likelihood I could take this book seriously. I mean, come on. Big foot, in most of his iterations, cannot help but evoke images of bad reality TV, insurance commercials and debunked mythos. I wasn’t sure I could set these images aside and willingly go with Brooks into a tale where the words “sasquatch” and “massacre” were used in the same sentence while keeping a straight face.
Having met Brooks on a couple of occasions, I know how seriously he researches his subject matter. We discussed how much of what he describes in World War Z is based in actual science, and how many scientists and doctors he interviewed to get everything just right. So, I should have known better than to think he wouldn’t do exactly the same thing with his topic in Devolution.
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen (Ace, 1977) and Paratime (Ace Books, 1981). Covers by Michael Whelan
H. Beam Piper was one of my favorite science fiction writers in my formative years. I adored his Fuzzynovels — Little Fuzzy (1962), Fuzzy Sapiens (1964), and the “long lost” novel Fuzzies and Other People (1984), published twenty years after Piper died by suicide in 1964 — and they were one of the first science fiction novels I passed along to my children when they were old enough to read (they were a huge hit). Piper was also well known for his Federation/Empire future history stories, chiefly published in Astounding.
Piper was also a pioneering writer in the field we now call Alternate History, with his entertaining tales of the Paratime police, who patrol alternate timelines to both keep their existence secret and protect them from those who’d exploit or destroy them. They were collected in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, a fix-up novel composed of the long novella “Gunpowder God” and novelette “Down Styphon!”, and Paratime, which gathers five tales published in Astounding between 1948 and 1955.
The opening story “He Walked Around the Horses, originally published in 1948, offers an SF explanation for the centuries-old mystery surrounding the true-life disappearance of British diplomatic envoy Benjamin Bathurst during the Napoleonic Wars. Many of the tales are considered some of the finest to appear in Astounding, and have been anthologized numerous times, in The Best of Astounding (1978), Analog: The Best of Science Fiction (1985), Damon Knight’s Science Fiction Argosy (1972), and many other places. The 1950 novella “Last Enemy” was nominated for a retro-Hugo in 2001. (It lost out to “The Man Who Sold the Moon” by Robert Heinlein.)
Writing in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute claims, “Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen remains the most successful and enjoyable of all these tales.” It was published in 1965, just after Piper died. As Clute notes, “He died in his prime.”
In the Thirties, young Tyrone Power made an impression as a leading man in various cinematic genres, so Twentieth Century Fox gave him a contract. Power really wanted to play serious dramatic roles, but after his runaway success with The Mark of Zorro (1940) and The Black Swan (1942), the latter directed by Henry King, Fox decided Power was their Errol Flynn and slated him for more swashbucklers, which wasn’t what Power had in mind.
But then World War II got in the way, like it did for a lot of people; when Power returned from his tour as a decorated pilot for the Marines, he found that Fox hadn’t changed their plans for him, and he was cast in Captain from Castile, with Henry King once again directing. Power kept pushing for other roles, getting in a taut film noir and a couple of comedy parts, but Fox continued putting a sword into his hand for a couple more years before Power sheathed that sword for good. Fortunately, we got the classic Prince of Foxes before he did.
Captain from Castile
Rating: *** Origin: USA, 1947 Director: Henry King Source: 20th Century Fox Classics DVD
This is a magnificent failure, a classic case of Hollywood buying a novel for its strengths and then lacking the guts to put those strengths on the screen. And it’s a damn shame, because it could have been great. Samuel Shellabarger’s best-selling 1945 novel tells the story of a naïve young Spanish nobleman who runs afoul of the Inquisition; to escape persecution and certain death, he joins Hernán Cortez’s expedition to Mexico, becoming one of the conquistador’s trusted officers.
