Good afterevenmorn!
I am still thinking about Superman. This is largely because I liked one image and the various algorithms on every platform have since decided that it’s all I get to see. I have, therefore, seen almost every possible take on the character, and it has me thinking a great deal about the heroes in fiction and why we consider them so. Why are the heroes heroes? What about them or their stories make us believe they are? And are they really?
Let’s dive in.
“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)
Pulp Fest took place this past weekend in Pittsburgh. It’s a really cool event, and the Hilton Doubletree is a nice site. Steeger Books rolls out its summer line at this event. And for the third year in a row, there was a new Continental Op collection, with a brand new intro by yours truly. Getting to write about Dashiell Hammett remains a definite thrill. This volume wrapped up his pre-Cap Shaw career.
The talented Duane Spurlock wrote about T.T. Flynn’s Westerns a few Summers past. I’m a fan of those stories, and Duane did a better job covering them than I could have. I did write a Steeger Books intro for a Flynn book, though. Mr. Maddox is a bookie who makes the rounds of the horse racing circuit. And he finds dead bodies and crimes like Jessica Fletcher. I have the first two volumes of these novella length stories, and I wrote the intro for the third. So, here you go!
Thomas Theodore (better known as T. T.) Flynn Jr. began selling Westerns to the pulps early in 1932. Dime Western began its run, covering more than 250 issues over thirty years, with a T. T. Flynn story in the very first issue that December. Less than a year later, Star Western launched, with Flynn’s “Hell’s Half Acre” featured on the cover. He continued writing popular Westerns into the fifties, and he survived the demise of the Pulps by transitioning to Western paperbacks. His lone story to make The Saturday Evening Post became the popular James Stewart movie, The Man from Laramie.
But before roaming the pages of the Old West, Flynn was an accomplished mystery and hardboiled pulpster. The venerable Flynn’s (no relation), which ran for over 600 issues under multiple names, was less than a year old when his second story appeared in August of 1925. Three consecutive issues in December of that year included Flynn’s stories.
 |
 |
July-August 2025 issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and Asimov’s Science
Fiction. Cover art by GrandeDuc/Shutterstock, and Maurizio Manzieri
Back in February the last surviving print science fiction magazines, Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, were sold to Must Read Books, a new publisher backed by a small group of genre fans. I was apprehensive about what that meant for all three magazines, and indeed there were several hiccups, especially related to distribution. I had to wait more than a month after the on-sale dates for the July/August issues of Asimov’s SF and Analog to show up at my local bookstore, for example. But show up they did, and in fact the new September/October issues seem to be arriving more or less on time. Now if only we could see a new issue of F&SF…
The July/August issues are just as enticing as usual, with contributions from Rich Larson, David Gerrold, Suzanne Palmer, Dominica Phetteplace, Stephen Case, Robert Reed, Tobias S. Buckell, Derek Künsken, William Preston, Lavie Tidhar, Mary Soon Lee, Shane Tourtelotte, M. Ian Bell, Sean Monaghan, and many more.
It’s that time again. I can sense casual Black Gate users getting complacent, so here is a new movie watch-a-thon project. This time, based on my recent experience with The Substance, I’m going to be unearthing flicks that deal with transformation; Jekyll and Hyde riffs, body horror, self-made monsters. Bear with me as it’s often difficult to find films I haven’t seen before, but with perseverance and nightly prayer I’m sure I can get to the finish line in a timely manner. With that said…
Taking inspiration from the success of The Fly from four years prior, Italian director Luigi Montefiori (under the pseudonym G.L. Eastman) banged out this strange little film about a single-minded scientist and his doomed experimentation. There are plenty of similarities to Cronenberg’s classic: an ill-fated love affair, pseudoscience, baboons, slow body decay, and the dispatching of interfering busy-bodies, but its a bit of a slog due to some underwhelming performances, weird shot choices, and ropey effects.
As I mentioned last week, in January of 1990, Tor began published a second series of Tor Doubles: The Tor Double Action Western series. Running for twenty months, the books in this series were anonymously edited and packaged by Martin H. Greenberg and Bill Pronzini through Tekno Books. Not only did they differ from the science fiction series in subject matter, but also in format.
While most of the Tor SF Doubles were published as dos-a-dos format, where the book needed to be flipped over to read the second story, this series was all published in a standard format, with the second story following the first. As it happens, a month after this series was introduced, the Tor SF Double was published in the same traditional format.
The Westerns also differed because while the SF volumes mostly included stories by different authors (with three exceptions), each of the Tor Double Action Westerns featured two stories by the same authors, essentially making each volume a two story collection.
Over the course of the twenty volumes, twelve authors were represented, with Henry Wilson Allen appearing under two pseudonyms: Clay Fisher and Will Henry, Lewis B. Patten having two volumes showcasing his work, Zane Grey stories appearing in three volumes, and Max Brand showing up in a full quarter of the books published, including the first and last volumes. Also, while most of the authors who were published in the science fiction series were alive at the time their works were printed, only three of the Western authors were alive: Allen, Steve Frazee, and Wayne D. Overholser.
The last five volumes in the series were rebranded as the Tor Double Western series.
Look, I know I’ve been badly burned before when it comes to remaking classic horror, and the cinematic road to bringing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the screen has often been paved with both hell and good intentions. More often than not, the monster’s not the only thing that’s been poorly stitched together.
But this time it feels different.
Which I know has likely cursed this entire endeavor, but here we go.
Like a lot of people, I fell under science fiction’s spell during those intermediate years when childhood blurs into adolescence, and fortunately for me, there was a thrift store around the corner from my middle school, with shelf after dusty shelf of used paperbacks that you could buy for twenty five or thirty cents apiece. Every day when school was over, I would take my lunch money and go there and, attracted by the outlandish, gaudy covers, spend my daily seventy-five cents on sf paperbacks (sorry, Mom).
My first discoveries and greatest loves were Robert A. Heinlein’s juveniles and his Stranger in a Strange Land (way too young to be reading that one), Isaac Asimov’s robot stories (I had a thing for Susan Calvin), and Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and his wonderful, phantasmagoric short story collections S Is for Space and R Is for Rocket. Along with volumes from the anthology series like Star and Spectrum that were once so common and sadly no longer are, these books and authors formed the haphazard curriculum of my science fiction education.
One author was largely missing from my course, though — Arthur C. Clarke. Oh, I had read the three classic stories that turned up in so many of those anthologies — “The Star”, “The Nine Billion Names of God”, and “The Sentinel”, but of Clarke’s many novels, the only one I read back then was his 1953 evolutionary drama, Childhood’s End. Like Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land but for different reasons, I was too young (fourteen) to fully appreciate the book; I liked it well enough, but it didn’t spur me on to read any of Clarke’s other novels.
 |
 |
Planet Stories #29: Sojan the Swordsman by Michael Moorcock/ Under the Warrior Star
by Joe R. Landsale (Paizo Publishing, October 5, 2010). Cover by Kieran Yanner
When I saw this book, I immediately had to have it. A “Planet Stories Double Feature!” Planet Stories published quite a bit of Sword & Planet fiction back in the day, and of all the pulps, if I could have had a subscription to just one it probably would have been that one.
This “Planet Stories,” however, is a modern effort from Paizo Publishing that started out reprinting old tales from the original magazine, including some great stuff by Leigh Brackett.
This particular work contains two novellas, “Sojan the Swordsman” from Michael Moorcock, and “Under the Warrior Star” by Joe Lansdale. “Sojan” reprints a bunch of old Sojan tales from Michael Moorcock, which were linked together to make something of a longer tale. It was printed first in the collection, probably because he’s the better known of the two authors, but I think they should have done the Lansdale piece first. It’s considerably better.
“Hey!” (you say to yourself). “I wonder what Bob has been watching? It’s been since May. Well, dear reader, I can’t leave you unfocused on our Monday work day, so let’s take a look, shall we? And – Gasp! – it’s all current stuff. How about that? And this is all spoiler free.
BALLARD
Michael Connelly writes the Bosch books, which spawned a terrific, gritty, seven season streaming series. HIGHLY recommended watch. Bosch an LAPD homicide detective, underwent a career change, which is the subject of the succeeding series, Bosch: Legacy. That lasted three seasons. All of this stuff has been taken from the novels. In the final episode of Legacy, an LAPD detective named Renee Ballard (also from a Connelly book series) plays a central part. And that’s because she’s the star of her own new series on Prime.
It has been 15 years since The Chain Story Project hit the internet; in 2010, Michael Stackpole led a bunch of authors to write stand-alone adventures all shared via “The Wanderers’ Club.” All the stories were “chained” together with a common element but enabled every contributor to showcase their own characters/worlds. As standalone tales, they could be read in any order. And…. all stories were free to readers (at least for several months, many times indefinitely)!
Chain Story 2 has just commenced and will follow the same approach. This round, expect Sword & Sorcery with a common magical artifact represented in the logo. Learn about the project and the first three entries now on Black Gate. Shortcuts to the first three free stories are included below. Stories will be released every few weeks, so check the Chain Story website continuously, and you will also be treated to cool interviews (i.e., with S&S Champion Matthew John, who just released his second entry in his Maxus Cycle, Within the Weeping Eye).
We’ll aim to review the Chain Story Project as it develops again in a few months, but read this to get onboarded!
…