Amazing Stories, March 1976 (cover by Barber), Analog, June 1976 (cover by Jack Gaughan)
On a sunny day back in May of 1976, I went with my dad to his office. He was only going to work for a few hours, then we were going fishing. To kill some time, I went over to the drugstore across the street. There I discovered something life changing — science fiction digests!
I was a big SF fan already by that time (just short of my 13th birthday) but I had no idea that SF magazines existed. I bought the issues they had of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Amazing Stories and Fantastic Stories. How could I not, seeing those great covers!
Stina Leicht has had an impressive career over the last decade. Of Blood and Honey came in sixth in the 2012 Locus Poll for Best First Novel; sequel And Blue Skies from Pain appeared on the nomination list for the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Her two-book flintlock fantasy series The Malorum Gates wrapped up in 2017.
Her new novel Persephone Station arrives from Saga Press next month, and it’s a significant departure for Leicht — a space opera that Publishers Weekly calls a “sprawling, frenetic science fiction take on The Seven Samurai,” which sounds like something I need.
In this earnest space opera, an ensemble of badass women and nonbinary and queer characters fight corporate overlords on the semilawless planet Persephone.
A century ago, the Emissaries, hidden beings indigenous to Persephone, gave the gift of prolonged life to Rosie, a nonbinary cleric-colonizer, and Vissia, now head of the corporation that owns the planet. Despite and because of that gift, Vissia’s bent on exploiting the Emissaries until nothing is left. Rosie, now a crime boss, enlists Angel, the expelled former student of an all-female martial arts academy, and her team of revivified United Republic of Worlds soldiers, to protect the Emissaries. Unless they can be convinced to reveal themselves and join the URW, making the corporate claim on Persephone void, the odds are not in their favor…. Their gender-fluid nonbinariness is just one part of a delightfully complex, genuine, and amoral character who could make this novel worth your time.
Persephone Station will be published by Saga Press on January 5, 2021. It is 512 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover and $9.99 in digital formats. I can’t find any information on who created the cover, but I like it.
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The following is a memorial article from author David C. Smith for late author Charles R. Saunders.
Charles Saunders and I first began corresponding in 1977, when we were both writing for the semiprozines of the time. He wrote to me first, beating me to the punch, because I admired his work and had considered dropping him a line. As it turned out, I was privileged to know him for more than 40 years. I’ve lost count of the number of letters and emails we shared; unfortunately, all the early letters I received from him are now gone. I stored them in file folders in banker’s boxes that were destroyed when our basement flooded with 30 inches of water in 2001. I joked with him once about that: What will all the historians and fanboys do when they find out that I lost all your letters? There will be no history to write! He told me that he hadn’t held onto my letters, either, so we were even. We did not take it all that seriously. Now, of course, I regret the loss of those letters of his, as well as of his newspaper editorials, copies of which he sent me regularly.
Ironically, we never met in person, although we spoke on the phone just once. I called to bug him for the name and address of his producer at New Horizons, the Roger Corman outfit that had produced Amazons, based on Charles’s story Agbewe’s Sword. This was in 1986. I wanted to get my script Magicians at least read by someone in the business, and Charles was kind enough to help me make the contact, although of course nothing came of my effort.
I don’t recall much of what we discussed in those early letters; mainly it was back and forth musings about our stories, our hopes of seeing them published, and our shared interest in history, as well as our political and social interests, which were aligned. As time went on, we both had middling success with our fiction, seeing some of what we wrote appear as paperback originals. The botched debut of the original edition of Imaro in 1981 by DAW Books hit him hard, although for any of us who know his work, it felt absolutely correct to have Imaro in print from a corporate New York publisher. Imaro was followed by The Quest for Cush in 1984 and then The Trail of Bohu in 1985. And there ended the saga of Imaro, it seemed, at least for a time.
By then, Charles had moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, from Ottawa, where he had gone in 1969 rather than be drafted to fight in Vietnam. He had been radicalized in the late sixties in Chicago, where he had associated with the Black Panthers — which, despite the image of them propagated by the FBI, were concerned primarily with doing good for, and fighting for justice in, African American communities. He had grown to maturity during days of rage in our country; although he was six years older than I, inevitably, our politics were of a kind: we believed in and supported progressive causes on both sides of the border, especially social justice issues. (In the 90s, a mutual correspondent of ours referred to “feminazis” in a letter to Charles. Imagine his reaction to that.) And he was, I believe, twice married and divorced, something else we had in common.
We’re nearing the end of 2020 and like most of you, all I can think is, man. Good riddance.
There were a few highlights, of course. As always there were a number of exciting debuts, and that cheered me up a little. One of the most talked about SF debuts of 2020 has been Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds, named one of the Best Books of the Year by Library Journal, NPR, and Book Riot.
In The New York Times, Black Gate blogger emeritus Amal El-Mohtar says the word ‘debut’ “is utterly insufficient for the blazing, relentless power of this book, suggesting ballroom manners where it should conjure comet tails… this tale is profoundly satisfying… The book remained two steps ahead of my imagination, rattling it out of complacency and flooding it with color and heat.”
That sounds pretty good to me. Here’s the description.
Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s just one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying — from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun. Cara’s life has been cut short on 372 worlds in total.
On this dystopian Earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and therefore a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands. Now what once made her marginalized has finally become an unexpected source of power. She has a nice apartment on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. She works — and shamelessly flirts — with her enticing yet aloof handler, Dell, as the two women collect off-world data for the Eldridge Institute. She even occasionally leaves the city to visit her family in the wastes, though she struggles to feel at home in either place. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, Cara is on a sure path to citizenship and security.
But trouble finds Cara when one of her eight remaining doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, plunging her into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and her future in ways she could have never imagined — and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world but the entire multiverse.
The Space Between Worlds was published by Del Rey on August 4, 2020. It is 322 pages, priced at $28 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats.
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The original HBO series True Blood remains one of my favorites, even through its first episode aired way back in 2008. The show was based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels by Charlaine Harris, which also have a special place in my heart. Harris was my very first Black Gate interview in 2003 when she came through Chicago promoting the third book in what would ultimately be thirteen. Right around that same time, director Allan Ball got stuck in an airport due to a cancelled flight and picked up book three to pass the time. Ball was just coming off another HBO success, Six Feet Under, and fell in love with Harris’ characters, thus True Blood was eventually born.
If you’re unfamiliar, both the books and the series take place in Louisiana, at a time in the not-too-distant future where vampires have “come out of the coffin” due to the invention of synthetic blood. The story follows the adventures of telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse who falls in love with a vampire, then encounters werewolves, fairies, witches and more as the story progresses.
True Blood was very sexy, sometimes violent and occasionally corny, making it an addictive combination. It also made Anna Paquin, Alexander Skarsgård, Joe Manganiello, and Stephen Moyer household names. If you have never seen True Blood and don’t think you have the patience to wade through all seven seasons, which are still available on HBO or for rent, at least try Season One. Of all of them, the first is pretty much a complete story in itself. At the time, Ball had no idea if the series would get resigned, so though Season Two storyline appears in the final moments of the last episode, Season One still stands on its own.
Worlds of Tomorrow, February 1967, containing “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany. Cover by Morrow
This is the first of what I hope will be an extended series of essays taking a closer look at some stories I either consider to be particularly good, or interesting for other reasons. Of necessity, each of these essays will go into some detail as to the plot of the stories – in most case, in my opinion, this will not “spoil” the stories, but I know that I am less spoiler-phobic than many, so tread carefully.
I remember reading “The Star Pit” as a teen, probably in Robert Silverberg’s exceptional reprint anthology Alpha 5. It was a story I liked then, and loved on a reread a few years later. I remember it as one of the great underappreciated novellas in SF. But it’s been quite a few years since my last read.
In fact this is a story with a decent history of anthologization and recognition over the years, so my term “underappreciated” is off base. It first appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow for February of 1967 – and as Worlds of Tomorrow was widely considered the “third-string” magazine in Fred Pohl’s editorship, behind sister magazines Galaxy and If, that could be regarded as “underappreciation,” though more likely it reflected the difficulty of fitting novellas into magazines. (Interestingly, the magazine ceased publication after the next issue (May 1967) before a brief (three issue) revival in 1970 and 1971.)
“The Star Pit” was a finalist for the 1968 Hugo for Best Novella, which went in a tie to “Riders of the Purple Wage” by Philip Jose Farmer and “Weyr Search” by Anne McCaffrey. It was in Judith Merril’s SF 12, the very last outing for her seminal series. Robert Silverberg anthologized it twice – not just in Alpha 5 but in the Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels. Gardner Dozois put it in his anthology with a similar title (and ambition) to Silverberg’s: Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction. And Richard Lupoff chose it for What If? Volume 3, the third entry in his series of books highlighting the stories that he felt should have won the Hugo each year. (Unfortunately, the What If? series was cancelled after the first two books, and Volume 3 only appeared decades later from a small press.)
The Sky Is Filled with Ships (Ballantine Books, 1969). Cover by Jerome Podwil
Richard C. Meredith died tragically young in 1979, at the age of 41. He left behind a body of work that’s still read and discussed today, including the Timelinertrilogy, We All Died at Breakaway Station (1969), which John Clute and Peter Nichols at the Encyclopedia of Science Fictioncall “a bleak, well-crafted space opera in a kind of Alamo setting, where a scarred cyborg crew must withstand both external alien enemies and the devils of introspection,” and Run, Come See Jerusalem! (1976), a complex and effective alternate history set in a world where the Nazis were victorious.
Although he sold his first stories to Fred Pohl at Worlds of Tomorrow in 1966, rightly or wrongly I still think of Meredith as a Campbell writer. He bought his first copy of Astounding at the age of 13 and became an instant fan, faithfully purchasing every issue until John W. Campbell passed away in 1971.
Meredith’s debut novel was The Sky Is Filled with Ships, published as a paperback original by Ballantine Books in 1969 with a striking cover by Jerome Podwil. It was selected to be part of Singularity & Co’s “Save the Sci-Fi” digital reissue campaign in 2013, and that put it in the hands of a lot of modern readers. I was surprised to see that it held up well with them, and enjoys an impressive 4.51 rating at Goodreads. BJ Haun’s 4-star review is fairly typical.
The Sky is Filled with Ships might be my favorite book to come out of Singularity & Co’s “Save the Sci-Fi” campaign thus far. It’s an interesting little story that has some action, some space battles, some intrigue, and maybe a couple too many melodramatic bits.
The Sky Is Filled with Ships is 184 pages, and was originally priced at 75 cents. It has been out of print since 1969, though it’s available in ebook formats from Singularity & Co. See all of our recent Vintage Treasures here.
Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Laurence Olivier, Swashbuckler?
Laurence Olivier is justly renowned, even revered, as one of the finest actors of the 20th century, and was arguably the greatest English thespian of his generation — which is saying something, since his generation included John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Acclaimed as a stage actor, he also appeared in over fifty movies, and happily for us three of them fit under the umbrella of the Cinema of Swords.
Fire Over England
Rating: **** Origin: UK, 1937 Director: William K. Howard Source: Nobility Studios DVD
This film was adapted from the 1936 novel of the same name by A.E.W. Mason, the English historical fiction author best known for The Four Feathers (1902). Producer Alexander Korda was looking for a suitably inspiring and cautionary tale that would evoke the rising threat of Hitler’s Germany, and he found it in this story of England’s resistance to Spain’s warmongering King Philip and his invading Armada. Korda was also looking for a vehicle with a romantic subplot to show off his drop-dead gorgeous new stars, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who were already lovers off-screen. However, as undeniably attractive as Olivier and Leigh were, this picture really belongs to the actors in the roles of the opposing monarchs: Raymond Massey as King Philip II, and the unforgettable Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth I.
It’s 1588, mighty Spain threatens tiny England, and at the English Court, Spanish spies are everywhere and their assassination plots threaten the life of the queen. In her audience hall, Elizabeth receives the Spanish Ambassador, come to complain of the raid on Cadiz by Francis Drake, where he burned a Spanish fleet. Robson’s Elizabeth immediately establishes herself as a commanding presence, adroitly alternating between defiance and conciliation; she refuses to reign in Drake and the sea rovers, but gives Spain leave to punish them… “If they can.”
Apparently I haven’t been paying enough attention to DJ Butler. I can tell because when Serpent Daughter, the newest in his Witchy War saga, arrived in November, I thought it was the second in the series. Not so! There are actually four novels in Witchy War, and I managed to miss half of them.
I didn’t miss Serpent Daughter though — thanks mostly to Daniel Dos Santos’ knockout cover, which caught my eye the moment I spotted it in the Books You May Like tray at Amazon. A little digging revealed three previous installments, which have been labeled a blend of “alternate history, Appalachian Folklore, and epic fantasy.” The series opened with Witchy Eye, a Baen hardcover, back in 2017; Publishers Weekly gave it an enthusiastic starred review, saying:
In an alternate North America where magic is pervasive and the Appalachians are under the boot of Emperor Thomas Penn, 15-year-old Sarah Calhoun, youngest daughter of imperial war hero Iron Andy Calhoun, is content with her rural Tennessee tobacco-farming life, in which she gets to cast the occasional small spell… When the priest Thalanes, an acquaintance of Andy’s, arrives and helps to reveal that Sarah is not a Calhoun daughter but carries royal blood — and is being hunted by humans and magical entities in the service of the emperor… Butler’s fantasy is by turns sardonic and lighthearted; ghoulish shadows claw into the most remote areas and heroism bursts out of the most unlikely people. Sarah is the epitome of the downtrodden hero who refuses to give up until she gets what she needs, and her story will appeal to fantasy readers of all stripes.
I’m not quite sure how many books the series will run, but with four on the shelves already, I think it’s safe to give this one a try. Serpent Daughter was published by Baen on November 3, 2020; it is 608 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $8.99 in digital formats. Read the first five chapters of Witchy Eyehere.
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