A Tale of Finlay, Part 2

A Tale of Finlay, Part 2

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“The Conditioned Captain” illustration by Virgil Finlay
(from Startling Stories, May 1953)

In last week’s Finlay post, I told the tale of how, back in the last week of March 2005, I’d acquired 15 Virgil Finlay originals from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was an incredible purchase, but within six weeks it led to my acquisition of five more Finlay originals. Needless to say, that six week period was the greatest Finlay run of my collecting career.

I’d bought the Midsummer Night’s illos from California bookseller Peter Howard of Serendipity Books. At the time I bought them, he told me that his consignor on these had a few other Finlay originals which he thought he’d be handling for him. A week later, on April Fools’ Day, I received an email from Howard offering three more Finlay originals.

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New Treasures: The Swimmers by Marian Womack

New Treasures: The Swimmers by Marian Womack

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Marian Womack’s debut The Golden Key was published last year — bad year for a debut novel, I must say — but it still managed to get a lot of attention. Booklist called it a mix of “Spiritualism, the suffragette movement, and the fairy tales of Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald… an elegant sense of mystery and otherworldliness. This gothic fantasy will captive fans of historical fiction.”

Her second novel The Swimmers, set in an Earth ravaged by climate change, imagines a world in which the rich live in the Upper Settlement rings high in orbit, and the rest of humanity struggles to survive in a dangerously transformed world, a place of deep jungles and monstrous animals. Publishers Weekly calls it a “meticulously detailed sophomore novel set in a vivid, believable eco-dystopia… Readers will be captivated.”

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Humans Are the Real Horror; GCN Interviews Lt. Joe Kenda, Star of Homicide Hunter and Author of New Release, Killer Triggers

Humans Are the Real Horror; GCN Interviews Lt. Joe Kenda, Star of Homicide Hunter and Author of New Release, Killer Triggers

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When the crew at one of my favorite publishing houses, Wunderkind, contacted me about interviewing a former homicide detective about his new book, I had to give it some thought. Long before Black Gate and my current day job, I was working on a master’s degree in criminal psychology with a view to become a criminal profiler. As an undergraduate I became fascinated with the question of what happens in the human mind that tips a person from contemplating violence to committing violence? I wanted to look for patterns and to discover if violent behavior could by typecast.

At the master’s degree level, the weight of what I was studying started to hit me – hard. This was no longer theory, but a pursuit that was bringing me eyeball to eyeball with real violence. As a 22-year-old from a very small Midwestern town, I was in no way mentally prepared for what I was seeing and learning about. I left the program for what I thought was a brief break, but I never went back, changing careers entirely. I feel lucky to have made that decision before my interest in ghosts and made-up monsters was forever ruined by real horrors.

So, when Wunderkind reached out, sending me an advanced copy of Lt. Joe Kenda’s new book Killer Triggers, I thought about whether I wanted these two worlds to cross again. I decided I would read a couple chapters of the book before making a decision. Hours later, with the Killer Triggers completely consumed, the decision was made. Yes, this is a departure from the pretend worlds I normally write about, but the book is just – well – very good. It’s not uncomfortably graphic and Lt. Kendra has a sense of humor that I couldn’t help but fall in love with a little.

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A Year in Quarantine With the Criterion Channel

A Year in Quarantine With the Criterion Channel

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A year ago, a global pandemic forced me into quarantine. I don’t know what these last twelve months would’ve looked like without my subscription to the Criterion Channel. It wouldn’t be a catastrophe, of course — no worse than the actual catastrophe occurring outside my apartment walls. But the grind of dullness would’ve been far worse. I wouldn’t have the cinematic delights of dog revolutionaries, noir Westerns, a spiritual debate resolved in a gory barroom brawl, or a quality Christmas stalker film.

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Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage from Film to Novel

Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage from Film to Novel

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Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov
First Edition: Houghton Mifflin, March 1966, Cover art Dale Hennesy
(Book Club edition shown)

Fantastic Voyage
by Isaac Asimov
Houghton Mifflin (239 pages, $3.95, Hardcover, March 1966)
Cover art Dale Hennesy

Isaac Asimov’s early novels were published over a period of just eight years, from Pebble In the Sky in 1950 to The Naked Sun in 1957, with linked collections like I, Robot and the Foundation “novels” along the way. Some of his early short stories, published in magazines as early as 1939, weren’t collected into books until the 1960s, but for the most part Asimov had stopped writing science fiction by the late 1950s, perhaps because of the collapse of the SF magazine market, or perhaps because he’d discovered that writing nonfiction books was more lucrative and easier. As Asimov fans were painfully aware of at the time, a spell of some 15 years went by before he published his next original novel, The Gods Themselves in 1972, to great acclaim and awards recognition. (And then yet another decade went by before Asimov returned to regular novel writing, with Foundation’s Edge and a string of following novels derived from his Foundation and Robot universes.)

—Except for a book called Fantastic Voyage, in 1966, which was a novelization of a movie script.
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Lin Carter’s Imaginary Worlds #2 World Building and Naming

Lin Carter’s Imaginary Worlds #2 World Building and Naming

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Imaginary Worlds (Ballantine Books, June 1973). Cover by Gervasio Gallardo

So I had great fun reading Carter’s snarky, anecdotal, history of the Fantasy genre, Imaginary Worlds (1973), but I had actually come to the book for his thoughts on writing the Fantasy, and in particular Sword and Sorcery.

In hindsight, perhaps this was more of by way of exorcism.

Carter was adamant that Sword and Sorcery should have no content whatsoever: “It is a tradition that aspires to do little more than entertain and stretch the imagination a little.“

We can certainly agree that Sword and Sorcery doesn’t handle topical themes well. The clue is in the name.  Though I myself know many people with swords on their wall and grimoires on their shelves, I will admit that I am not entirely typical in this regard. The secondary worlds of the Sacred Genre are too far removed from modernity to explore it directly.

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Cinema of Swords: Three Counts of Monte Cristo

Cinema of Swords: Three Counts of Monte Cristo

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The Count of Monte Cristo (1934)

Your honor, I stand before you charged with three counts of Monte Cristo, and while I could plead insanity, instead I’ll Dumas best to explain.

(I slay me.)

Alexandre Dumas’s most popular and enduring novels are The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, and one of the most remarkable things about them is that he wrote them at the same time! They were published in simultaneous serial form in two different Parisian periodicals, with T3M finishing first because Monte Cristo was the longer novel. Though written together, the two are very different: T3M is an action-packed tale of youthful heroism, practically the definition of a swashbuckler, while Monte Cristo is a slow-burn revenge fantasy, a swashbuckler more in its themes than its action. It still holds up today; if you haven’t read it, or haven’t read it lately, I recommend the Penguin Books translation by the late Robin Buss. (I know a little bit about translating Dumas, so take my word for it!)

But enough about the book: we’re here for the flicks! Monte Cristo was filmed many times during the silent era, and at least three of those adaptations have survived, but this week we’re going to look at the first thirty years of its sound versions in English. Prepare yourself for the vengeance of Edmond Dantès!

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Releasing Lightning from the Bottle

Releasing Lightning from the Bottle

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In 1993, Bruce Campbell starred in an excellent television show set during the nineteenth century in which he went on adventure after adventure, often in the company of a beautiful woman, and always seeking “the next big thing,” which led to steam-punkish versions of modern inventions. The show was clever, fun, entertaining, thoughtful, and lasted one single season for 27 episodes.

In 2000, Bruce Campbell starred in a television show set during the nineteenth century in which he went on adventure after adventure, often in the company of a beautiful woman, many episodes features steam-punkish versions of modern inventions. The show was juvenile, intermittently fun, and lasted two seasons for 22 episodes.

The first show was The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. The second was Jack of All Trades. In the latter show, Campbell portrayed Jack Stiles, an American spy sent by Thomas Jefferson to the fictional island of Palau-Palau in 1801. Stiles was teamed up with British aristocrat and spy Emilia Rothschild (Angela Dotchin) and they tried to bedevil the French authorities on the island, represented by Napoleon’s brother, Governor Croque (Stuart Devenie) and his guard captain, Brogard (Stephen Papps).

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Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned

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Image by psychofladoodle from Pixabay.

I have been thinking a lot recently about life, writing and all the things that orbit around those things. Currently, while I’m waiting for things here in Ottawa, Canada to return to something approaching normal again (it looks like we’ll be close at the beginning of 2022), there isn’t much else I’ve been able to do. I find in my writing endeavors, I’m chugging along well enough, but a daily routine of writing at lunch isn’t really anything worth blogging about. As for films and television, I’m falling back to old favorites, as they are comforting and relatively without stressed. I know what’s going to happen.

It has been quite depressing to all my youthful hopes and dreams that I haven’t been able to make a living writing. I wasn’t expecting to become rich. But I was hoping to be able to scrape by. That has not materialized. It was a hard lesson to learn, really, particularly since I have to keep relearning it every time I get any time at all to think about life and where I am in it.

Writing, however, has taught me an awful lot about life that I’m extremely grateful for, that translates well in almost every other endeavor of mine.

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Check out the Latest Issue of Apex Magazine, Available Now

Check out the Latest Issue of Apex Magazine, Available Now

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Apex Magazine #122. Cover by Thomas Tan.

I’m excited to see Apex Magazine return to a regular schedule.

Apex published its first print issue on March 16, 2005, and quickly established a reputation as one of the finest new SF magazines of the new century. It focuses on dark science fiction and fantasy, and has won several Hugo and Nebula Awards. Catherynne M. Valente was the editor for issues #15-29, Lynne M. Thomas for #30-55, and Sigrid Ellis for #56-67. Jason Sizemore has been editor issue #68. The mag took an 8-month hiatus in 2019, and returned with a bi-monthly schedule in January with issue 121.

Issue 122 is packed with great fiction by Sam J. Miller, A.C. Wise, Sheree Renée Thomas, Annie Neugebauer, and others. You can sample individual stories for free; the complete issue is for sale for $4.99.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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