Black Gate – Page 223 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Olivia de Havilland — First Queen of the Swashbucklers

Wednesday, August 19, 2020 Lawrence Ellsworth Comments 3 comments

This week we’re here to praise Olivia de Havilland, the great British/American screen actor who passed away last month at the age of 102. De Havilland was remarkable, not just for her stunning beauty, but for her sharp wits and indomitable spirit, all of which she brought to bear in nearly every performance. She was Hollywood’s first Queen of the Swashbucklers thanks to her defining roles in Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood, which launched her career and that of her co-star Errol Flynn into the stratosphere. (De Havilland’s reign was followed by that of Maureen O’Hara, but we’ll talk about her another day).

No matter how many times you’ve seen Blood or Robin Hood, you can’t help but delight in de Havilland’s performances as Arabella Bishop and Maid Marian. She’s far more than a mere attractive love interest for the hero, especially in the latter role, where she risks her life to save Robin Hood and the Saxons. Capsule reviews of those two films follow, and I’ll warn you in advance, they’re unapologetic raves. I’ve added a review of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, a lesser film in which de Havilland was third billed after Bette Davis and Flynn but which nonetheless has points of interest. Enjoy!

Captain Blood

Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA, 1935
Director: Michael Curtiz
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

After the success of swashbucklers Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo, Warners decided to go all-in on a remake of Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood. (There’d been a silent version in 1924, now lost.) The stars they initially had in mind for the leads bowed out, and in the end the studio took a huge risk and cast two complete unknowns: Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Luckily, they were both excellent, ideal for the roles — and even better, they had great on-screen chemistry together, so good they were paired seven more times in the next ten years. The director’s chair went to studio veteran Michael Curtiz, who in 1938 would co-direct another swashbuckling essential, The Adventures of Robin Hood, before his career pinnacle helming Casablanca. Add in Basil Rathbone as the villain, supported by a slate of the best character actors in Hollywood, with a stirring soundtrack by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and you have the makings of a true classic.

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Catching up with Tor.com Publishing — August 2020 edition

Wednesday, August 19, 2020 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Just some of the Tor.com releases that have accumulated in the Black Gate reference library since 2015

Arrgh. I can’t keep up with all the cool stuff coming from Tor.com.

You think it’d be easy. These are short little novellas, quick reads. I love novellas, and got all excited when they launched back in 2015, covered the first 33 releases in detail as they arrived, and watched in satisfaction as they started getting Hugos and Nebula nominations — and then virtually sweeping the nominations in the Novella category, year after year. And the books kept coming, and piling up on my desk, and then on the office tables at Black Gate‘s rooftop headquarters, and then spilling onto the floor….

Okay. I’m just one guy, I can’t keep up with the tireless dynamo that is Tor.com Publishing. But I’m not giving up. In the last few months alone, they’ve released brand new books by Jeffrey Ford, Alex Irvine, Carrie Vaughn (two!), Zen Cho, Emily Tesh, Eddie Robson — plus a new Murderbot novel by Martha Wells, and a New York Times bestseller by Tamsyn Muir. My readers deserve to know about it all, damnit.

So I’m in triage mode. Tor.com has been releasing a book a week for the past few months, and I can’t cover them all. But I can hit the highlights. So let’s take a look at three of their most interesting releases from the past few months.

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Star Trek Brought Women into the Science Fiction Community

Tuesday, August 18, 2020 Eleanor Arnason Comments 1 comment

In an August 7th post on his Whatever blog, “Oh, Christ, Not the Science Fiction Canon Again,” John Scalzi said, “As a practical matter, the science fiction “canon” is already dead.” The term “literary canon” refers to a body of books, narratives and other texts considered to be the most important and influential of a particular time period or place. (The Daily Nebraskan)

For me, and this is personal experience, the field began changing when Star Trek brought a flood of women, fans and then writers, into the science fiction community. That was at the end of the 1960s, when the first show was running. I was hanging out in Devra Langsam’s living room in 1967 or 8, when the first Star Trek convention was being planned. I don’t know if her Spockanalia was the first ST fanzine, but it was damn close, and I was in one of the issues. I also had a story in Star Trek: The New Voyages, a collection of ST stories written by fans, which was published in 1976. (I want my ST credentials to be clear. The story is listed as being co-authored by me and Ruth Berman. I helped come up with the plot, but Ruth did almost all the work.)

I was away from SFdom while I lived into Detroit, though I published my first stories while I was in the Motor City. I rejoined fandom in the 1970s, when Patrick and I moved to the Twin Cities. Sometime, either in the late 70s or early 80s, I noticed that most of the fans of color and GLBTQ fans were coming from media fandom. It struck me as very important that media fans be made welcome in book fandom and at cons, or else fandom as I knew it was going to wither and die. I started doing GLBT panels and panels on race and science fiction. The GLBT panels went well mostly. The race panels were problematic, largely because there were too many white people on the panels, including me. I also did a few class panels. These tended to blow up, because the issue of class is both hidden and highly emotionally charged in the US. Race in also hidden, at least to white people, but it wasn’t a topic I could handle.

I must have been doing feminist panels in this period, but I don’t remember them, except one at Minicon when one of the women on the all-woman panel said, “We are never going back.” I said, “It is always possible to be pushed back. Look at Nazi Germany.”

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Thank You — Yes You — For Helping Fill Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio’s Cosmic Corsairs

Tuesday, August 18, 2020 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

Cosmic Corsairs (Baen, August 4, 2020). Cover by Tom Kidd

I was minding my own business at Barnes and Noble last week, picking up random books and opening them to the Acknowledgements page, as one does. And what should I find in Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio’s new Cosmic Corsairs anthology?

For help and advice, many thanks to John O’Neil and his Black Gate webzine, R.K. Robinson, Jason McGregor, Chris Willrich, Rich Horton, Marie Bilodeau, and others I’m unforgivably forgetting.

I was very touched. Yeah, they misspelled my name slightly, but I wasn’t the source of good advice anyway. As Hank and Chris note, it was really you, the readers of Black Gate, who chipped in with great suggestions when we sent out a call for suggestions here last year:

Help Hank Davis fill a Space Pirate Anthology

Hank has been a friend of BG for many years, and we’re huge fans of his. His most excellent anthologies for Baen include The Baen Big Book of Monsters (2014), Worst Contact (2016), Things from Outer Space (2016), The Best of Gordon R. Dickson, Volume 1 (2017), and Space Pioneers, with Christopher Ruocchio (2018).

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The Party Always Comes First

Monday, August 17, 2020 Patrick Kanouse Comments 0 Comment

One often learns about small, independent, or quirky games from game store owners or fellow RPG enthusiasts. So it was from a friend and player in my ongoing Star Wars campaign that I heard about Party First by Gamenomicon published in November 2019. This rules light game has some intriguing mechanics and a setting waiting to be fleshed out by the ambitious game master.

After reading it, I imagined a group of friends were together one evening and wanted to roleplay, but they did not have their rule books and did not want to be weighed down with a lot of runway to get to a game. Pure speculation, but it has that feel that players can pick it up fast and be gaming in minutes. The book is only 46 pages. 46. I do not have a source book on my self that is that short, and while the brevity speaks to a rules light devotion that does not mean that the system is not well thought out or complete.

The setting is a familiar yet alternative Earth. I have long been interested in history, and World War I, the fall of the Russian Empire, and Rasputin have always been of interest. Party First hits all of that sweet spot for me. However, it is not Earth. Countries and people have recognizable but different names. Rus for Russia. Anglia for England. Dervish Empire for the Ottoman Empire (another particular area of history I enjoy). Vladislav Lesnik for Vladimir Lenin. All of these are laid out in an alternative history.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Norbert Davis’ ‘Have One on the House’

Monday, August 17, 2020 Bob Byrne Comments 0 Comment

“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 termsp for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

I’ve said many times that Norbert Davis is on my Hardboiled Mt. Rushmore. He’s not the first face carved in hardboiled stone, but he’s one of only four that are. Max Latin is my favorite Davis character, and he appeared in five issues of Dime Detective. There were five Benjamin Martin stories – all in Detective Tales. It was William (Bail Bond) Dodd that was Davis’ frequently recurring character. There were eight stories in Dime Detective between February, 1940 through December, 1943.

Dodd is a physically unprepossessing bail bondsman. He doesn’t actively seek out trouble. You can’t even call his adventures cases. “Have one on the House” was in the March, 1942 issue of Dime Detective. That issue also included a Steve Midnight story from John K. Butler. Midnight was a broke former playboy who found adventures as a night shift cabbie. There was also a Bookie Barnes story from Robert Reeves. Reeves broke into Black Mask in 1940 at the age of 28. He was serving with a bomber unit in the Philippines when he died in 1945, only one month before the war ended. He had continued to write while in the service. His budding career was cut tragically short.

Back to Dodd! Norbert Davis is remembered as perhaps the best at screwball hardboiled. However, then and now, that carries a stigma and he is generally dismissed because of it. And it’s both inaccurate and unfair. He could write straight hardboiled, like “The Red Goose,” which Raymond Chandler praised as influencing him when he decided to become a writer. But what Davis did so well was inject humor into his hardboiled stories, without overwhelming them with it. That’s the case with the Bail-Bond Dodd stories. It’s not that the characters are funny – it’s the situations that Dodd (and his assistant, Meekins) find themselves in.

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Unbearable Utopias and Harrowing Adventures on Alien Planets: The Best of Jack Williamson

Sunday, August 16, 2020 James McGlothlin Comments 3 comments

The Best of Jack Williamson (Del Rey, 1978). Cover by Ralph McQuarrie

The Best of Jack Williamson (1978) was, according to my research, the fifteenth installment in Lester Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series. Frederik Pohl (1919–2013) provided the introduction (his second in the series, he also did the intro for The Best of C. M. Kornbluth). Jack Williamson (1908–2006), who was still living at the time, does the Afterword. The famous sci-fi artist Ralph McQuarrie (1929–2012) provides his first (and only) cover in the series.

Jack Williamson’s writing career spans close to a century! He began professionally writing all the way back in the Hugo Gernsback “scientifiction” pulps, and continued all the way up to and beyond the Star Trek/Star Wars science fiction popularization of the late Twentieth Century. In addition to winning several awards such as the Hugos and Nebulas, the Science Fiction Writers of America named Williamson its second Grand Master in 1976, the first being Robert Heinlein (1907–1988). Also, in 1994 Williamson received a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement and in 1996 he was part of the inaugural class of inductees into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. He received various other awards before his death in 2006 at the ripe old age of 98.

Given this long and illustrious career, it beggars no disbelief that the fourteen stories in The Best of Jack Williamson represent over fifty years of his writing. Presented in chronological order, the earliest stories are pure juvenile pulps and progress up through the “New Wave”-ish/Harlan Ellison era to darker themes and more mature stories. Though The Best of Jack Williamson is clearly the work of one science fiction writer, it can also be seen as a sort of panoramic history of science fiction in the Twentieth Century in general. Williamson was diverse but various themes seem to recur.

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The Art of Author Branding: The Berkley Poul Anderson

Sunday, August 16, 2020 John ONeill Comments 30 comments

The first six of what would eventually be fourteen Berkley Poul Anderson paperbacks with this design,
including the first three books of the Polesotechnic League. Covers by Rick Sternbach
(Satan’s World) and Richard Powers (all others). July 1976 – December 1977

Back in May, inspired by Mark R. Kelly’s review of one of the very first science fiction novels I ever read, the 1977 Ace paperback edition of Robert Silverberg’s Collision Course, I took an extended look at Silverberg’s mid-70s career at Ace, and how the marketing department gave his books a distinct visual identity — one very different from the way his novels were later packaged at Berkley, Bantam, Tor and others.

In many ways this kind of author branding reached its zenith in the late 70s, and in the Comments section of that article there were plenty of suggestions for examples I should look at next. Joseph Hoopman suggested Avon’s black-bordered Roger Zelazny (great choice!) and their vintage A. Merritt, Charles Martel mentioned the distinctive Laser Books cover series by Kelly Freas, Thomas Parker expressed fondness for Frank Frazetta’s Ace paperback covers for Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Bob Byrne suggested Tim Hildebrandt’s gorgeous covers for the first half-dozen Garrett, PI books by Glen Cook, among other ideas.

All good choices, and if fortune holds I’ll look at many of them. But today I want to highlight a set of paperbacks more contemporary to the Ace Robert Silverberg — the 14 Poul Anderson volumes published by Berkley and Berkley Medallion between 1976 – ’79.

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Uncanny X-Men, Part 17 – 1976: Sentinels in Space and the Rise of Phoenix!

Saturday, August 15, 2020 Derek Kunsken Comments 0 Comment

Welcome to part 17 of my quixotic reread of the Uncanny X-Men, beginning in 1963. I’m seeing how far I can go. Issues #97 to #101 are special for me because they loom large in my personal experience of collecting the backstory. This post covers a special period for X-Men and Marvel history too.

The introduction of Phoenix as the new incarnation of original x-man Jean Grey was a gigantic development, with impacts on the Marvel Universe that continue to play out in comics in 2020. An argument could be made that the creation of Phoenix was as significant an event as the creation of characters like Wolverine or the Silver Surfer. Each character opened up new kinds of stories to be told in the Marvel Universe.

Issue #97 (February, 1976) was created by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum with Sam Grainger on inks, whom I personally find too rough to catch the finesse of Cockrum’s pencils. The issue opens with alien space ships and a huge space opera battle.

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Vintage Treasures: To Open the Sky by Robert Silverberg

Saturday, August 15, 2020 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

To Open the Sky by Robert Silverberg (Sphere, 1977). Cover by Peter Elson

I’m on something of a Robert Silverberg kick. It started when Mark Kelly reviewed Silverberg’s early novel Collision Course for us back in April, one of the first SF novels I ever read, and in a haze of nostalgia I ended up taking an extended look at all six Silverberg novels packaged up by Ace in that magical year of 1977. More recently I’ve been collecting some of his earlier books, and finding all kinds of interesting artifacts, like the 1969 anthology Dark Stars, and the 1967 fix-up novel To Open the Sky, assembled from five novelettes originally published in Galaxy magazine.

To Open the Sky is the saga of two religions that emerge in the 21st Century, both of which worship technology and atomic power. Over nearly a century the mysterious origins of both religions, and the secret ambitions of their founders, are gradually revealed. It’s the kind of epoch-spanning, tech-focused SF that isn’t written any more. Here’s an excerpt from my favorite review, a short but insightful piece by Thomas M. Wagner at sff180.

A fine example of pre-1970s Bob Silverberg, To Open the Sky is the absorbing story of an overpopulated and economically depressed world clinging to the outcome of a religious schism for its salvation. But is the schism itself a pure public relations ploy, a staged affair whose intricacies are known only to its elusive and enigmatic founder?…

Silverberg effectively constructs a narrative on an epic scale — nearly a century of time between 2077 and 2164 — within a taut 200 or so pages, demonstrating once again that the present-day tendency towards bloat in SF and fantasy publishing is not necessarily the only way to convey big ideas set against a big canvas. Noel Vorst is the founder of a new religious movement rooted squarely in science. Though there is plenty of spiritualist window dressing to appeal to the emotional needs of the disaffected, the promises of the Vorsters are materialist to a fault. There is the promise of potential immortality, as well as the ultimate colonization of the stars, both unfulfilled so far due to limitations of technology.

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