Black Gate – Page 386 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Explore the Outer Rim with Space Pioneers, edited by Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio

Wednesday, September 12, 2018 John ONeill Comments 1 comment

Back in June I wrote a brief piece about Hank Davis’s upcoming Baen anthology Space Pioneers, a collection of new and classic SF tales of space exploration. Hank recently sent me an update on the book, and it keeps looking better and better. In June Baen listed it as 304 pages, but the PDF copy Hank sent me is a whopping 512 pages, packed with fiction by Clifford D. Simak, Poul Anderson, Fredric Brown, Larry Niven, Murray Leinster, Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Jerry Pournelle, Tony Daniel, and many more.

For a mass market paperback priced at $7.99, this is a real treasure trove. Here’s Hank:

I’m presently proofing the pages for Space Pioneers, coming from Baen around Turkey Day. Figuring you would like to see those pages, I’m passing them on to you, with the warning that this is the virtually unproofed version, so please keep that in mind.

Some of the typos I’ve seen so far, such as “Frederik Brown,” “Lester del Ray,” and other reasons-to-slit-editorial-wrists will be fixed, but I’m sure I’ll miss something until it is in cold, dry, unforgiving print for all the world to see…

And also attached is the nearly final version of the paperback’s wraparound cover. Aside from the back cover and spine now being visible, it differs from the one I sent you a few months back in having Robert A. Heinlein’s name on the front, replacing Jerry Pournelle, who will now be on the back cover. If it isn’t too late (and I won’t know that until the survivors return from DragonCon), I’m going to add Clifford D. Simak to the names on the back cover.

Hank’s co-editor for the project is Christopher Ruocchio, whose first anthology for Baen was Star Destroyers, (co-edited with Tony Daniel), and whose debut novel Empire of Silence has been getting lots of acclaim.

Here’s a peek at the updated table of contents for Space Pioneers.

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Magical Items at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum

Wednesday, September 12, 2018 Sean McLachlan Comments 1 comment

Bull's heart (c) Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

Bull’s heart pierced with iron nails and thorns as a protection
against witches. Found in a chimney at Shutes Hill Farm, Somerset,
date unknown (c) Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

A new exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum showcases 180 real-life magical items.

Spellbound: Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft explores the history of magic from the early modern era to the present day through objects ranging from Renaissance crystal balls to folk charms against witchcraft. It looks at basic human needs such as fear of death and desire for love, and how people have used magic to try to get what they need.

The exhibition also turns the question of magic and superstition back on the viewer. In the entrance hallway, you are invited to step under a ladder or go around it. The museum is counting how many people dare to tempt fate. I did, and I hope they post the statistics when the exhibition is over!

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We Buy Us a Robot

Wednesday, September 12, 2018 Steve Carper Comments 2 comments

Robot fever first gripped the U.S. in the 1930s. The decade saw a procession of robots across newspaper headlines, with everybody from industrial giant Westinghouse to 13-year-old Bobby Lambert making the news for robots they built. Tens of millions of households owned automobiles, telephones were never far from a hand, families huddled around radios, and electric appliances dotted modern kitchens. The economy might have hit a minor glitch, but despite that – and in many cases because of that, as newspapers strove to carry stories that looked forward to the glistening recovery rather than the gloomy present – robots seemed the obvious choice for the next major technology to invade daily life.

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Birthday Reviews: Stanisław Lem’s “Ijon Tichy’s Last Journey to Earth”

Wednesday, September 12, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 3 comments

Stanisław Lem was born on September 12, 1921 and died on March 27, 2006.

Polish author Stanisław Lem won the Seiun Award in 1977 for his short story “Rozprawa” and the Geffen Award for the novel Solaris, which was thrice adapted for film, first in 1968 for Soviet television by Lidiya Ishimbaeva and Boris Nirenburg, second by Andrei Tarkovsky in the Soviet Union in 1972, and finally by Steven Soderbergh in 2002. Lem has also received the City of Krakow’s Prize in Literature, several prizes from the Polish government during the Communist period, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, the Franz Kafka Prize, and was made a member of the Order of the White Eagle. In 1973 Lem was given an honorary membership in SFWA, but once he was eligible for a regular membership, the bylaws of the organization required the honorary membership to be rescinded, which caused an uproar among some members.

“Ijon Tichy’s Last Journey to Earth,” which was written as Ostatnia Podroz Ijona Tichego, was published in English in August 1999 in Altair #4, without a previous Polish publication. It was translated by a team comprised of Kurt von Trojan, Robert N. Stephenson, and Ela Wroaebel. The magazine was edited by Andrew Collings, Jim Deed, and Robert N. Stephenson. The story was later translated into German as “Ijon Tichys letzte Reise” and published by Wolfgang Jeschke in the anthology Reptilienliebe.

Stanisław Lem’s Ijon Tichy stories are not hard science fiction, but rather social satire, usually showing the title character traveling to distant planets and observing and commenting on their customs, which are often strangely reminiscent of human custom. Most of the stories have been collected in Lem’s book The Star Diaries. “Ijon Tichy’s Last Journey to Earth” has a recursive component in that Tichy refers to his own book The Star Diaries as a narrative of his travels and implies that the story he is currently relating will appear in a future edition of the book.

Tichy’s set up for the story is that he has been exploring the Cassiopeia constellation for the past six years (although his references to “Cassiopeia’s eight supermoon” indicates that Lem isn’t aware of, or care about, the difference between a constellation and a planetary system) and is returning to Earth for the first time in several years. Upon his arrival, he notices that men and women seem to have swapped traditional attire, with men wearing skirts and women wearing pants. Furthermore, it seems to him that people are being chased through the streets by people wielding butterfly nets. He seeks out someone to explain the cultural changes to him.

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Future Treasures: In the Night Woods by Dale Bailey

Tuesday, September 11, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I’ve been writing about short fiction at Black Gate for over a decade, and over those years the name Dale Bailey keeps popping up.

He’s had a successful series of tales inspired by 50s monster movies (“I Married a Monster from Outer Space,” “Teenagers from Outer Space,” “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” and “Invasion of the Saucer-Men”) in Asimov’s, Nightmare and Clarkesworld, and his fiction has appeared in many Year’s Best volumes. His novels include The Fallen (2002), House of Bones (2003), and The Subterranean Season (2015).

His latest is In the Night Woods, forthcoming from John Joseph Adams Books. The Kirkus review is pretty tantalizing:

Bailey’s novel has every aspect of gothic horror: the drafty manor, the shady servants, the tortured protagonists. The writing is dense with allusions and details, the narrative twisting and turning in the same way the Night Wood distorts the senses of anyone who wanders into it. The writing does get a bit convoluted and hard to follow at times, but it’s in keeping with the atmosphere of subtle dread that permeates the novel. The book is surprisingly short, and there’s a lot of buildup to a very quick climax… The succession of reveals in the frantic last 30 or so pages, however, is tense and disturbing, satisfying for any horror fan.

A modern gothic horror done right.

We previously covered Bailey’s 2015 collection The End of the End of Everything.

In the Night Woods arrives from John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on October 9, 2018. It’s 224 pages, priced at $23 in hardcover, and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Andrew Davidson. Read more here.

Here’s the publisher’s description.

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The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories is a Master’s Course in Classic Horror

Tuesday, September 11, 2018 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories Volume Three-small

The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories Volume Three-back-small

I’m a huge fan of Valancourt Books, ever since I stumbled on their eye-popping booth at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention. They’re an independent small press specializing in rare, neglected, and out-of-print Gothic, Romantic and Horror fiction, and two years ago they had a brilliant idea: why not assemble an annual anthology showcasing stories by some of their authors, modern and otherwise? The Editor’s Forward to the first volume gives you the idea:

The idea behind this anthology was, “What if we distilled the best of each part of our catalogue into a single volume? What would a horror anthology spanning two centuries, and featuring only Valancourt authors, look like?”

Pretty darn good, it turns out. These are substantial and attractive volumes, with terrific covers by M. S. Corley. The series has proven very successful, and the third volume arrives next month, with brand new fiction by Steve Rasnic Tem, Eric C. Higgs, and Hugh Fleetwood, and thirteen blood-curdling reprints from R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Helen Mathers, Charles Beaumont, J. B. Priestley, Robert Westall, and many more.

The series is edited by James D. Jenkins and Ryan Cagle. Here’s the details on all three books.

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Birthday Reviews: Ray Vukcevich’s “Ornamental Animals”

Tuesday, September 11, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

**Cover by Timothy Caldwell and Rick Lieder**

Ray Vukcevich was born on September 11, 1946.

Vukcevich was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award in 2002 for his collection Meet Me in the Moon Room. His novelette “The Wages of Syntax” was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2004. Vukcevich has published two collections of his own short stories, the novel The Man of Maybe Half-A-Dozen Faces, and a short anthology that collected one of his short stories and one of Kelly Link’s short stories that was given away at a World Horror Convention.

“Ornamental Animals” was published in the fifteenth issue of Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine sometime early in 1993. By the time this issue was published, Pulphouse had backed away from the weekly schedule it had initially set for itself (and never achieved) and claimed to be a monthly magazine, although only two issues appeared in 1993. The story has never been reprinted.

In “Ornamental Animals,” Amy Grindle is an aspiring model who has a habit of going through catalogs and magazines she appears in and clipping photos of herself from the pages, although her face has yet to be shown in any of them. On a whim, as she went through the catalog, Amy decided to purchase a set of two genetically modified cats, although she really knew very little about them or the company that makes them. Because of that, she was quite surprised when she eventually received her pair of “Fire Cats.”

Although Fire Cats look more or less like non-genetically engineered cats, they do have some differences, which Amy learns about quite quickly, partly due to the cats’ response to her and partly because once she received them she realized she should read the manual on their care and feeding. She quickly learns that although the cats are alive, they don’t offer any of the traditional benefits of pets. They are born without joints, except in their jaws, and therefore can’t move and must be fed manually. Even more intriguing is the talent that gives them their name. When certain conditions are met, the cat’s heads explode in flame, although the cats themselves are all right.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Erle Stanley Gardner’s “The Shrieking Skeleton”

Monday, September 10, 2018 Bob Byrne Comments 0 Comment

Even the best-selling Erle Stanley Gardner struggled to break into the better markets early in his career. Of these early days, Gardner said, “I wrote the worst stories that ever hit New York City. I have the word of an editor for that, and he hadn’t seen the worst stories because the worst ones I wrote under a pen name.”

Gardner sold his first two stories to Breezy Stories and they were published in 1921. Then we have this bit of fun…

In 1923, under the name of Charles M. Green, he submitted a novelette, “The Shrieking Skeleton” to The Black Mask (‘The’ was dropped for the May, 1927 issue). Gardner said that “It was a major opus as far as I was concerned, and looking back on it, I guess it must have been a dilly.” George Sutton was the editor at this time. While Joseph ‘Cap’ Shaw is given credit for making Black Mask the leading institution of the hardboiled school, Sutton published the first detective stories of Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett and was at the helm when Race Williams and The Continental Op debuted. He played a big part in the development of the genre.

Upon receipt of the story, somebody thought it was so bad, they sent it on to circulation editor Phil Cody (who would succeed Sutton as editor). They told him it was to be the lead story and they wanted a publicity campaign to promote it. Oh, those scamps!

Cody blew his top and sent it back to the editorial department. He wrote that the story gave him a pain in his neck and it was pretty near the last word in childishness. The characters talked like dictionaries and the so-called plot had whiskers on it like unto Spanish moss hanging from a live oak in a Louisiana bayou (???). He foresaw the end from the beginning and the story was puerile, trite, obvious and unnatural. He begged that the story not be used.

The joke having succeeded, the story was sent back to Gardner with the usual rejection slip (which Gardner was receiving by the dozens). The slip stated that just because the story was returned, it did not necessarily imply that there was any lack of literary merit, it simply did not fit in the schedule. Gardner (who later became good friends with Cody) knows this because Cody’s note was inadvertently included with the returned manuscript.

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Birthday Reviews: Pat Cadigan’s “New Life for Old”

Monday, September 10, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 2 comments

Pat Cadigan was born on September 10, 1953.

Cadigan won a Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2013 for “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi,” which has also won a Seiun Award. She previously won a World Fantasy Award in the Non-Professional category for co-editing the fanzine Shayol with Arnie Fenner. She won two Arthur C. Clarke Awards for her novels Synners and Fools. In 1979 her story “Death from Exposure” won the coveted Balrog Award. In 2006 Cadigan received the third (and most recent) Richard Evans Memorial Prize, given to genre authors who were considered insufficiently recognized for their excellence. Cadidgan served as the Toastmaster for MidAmericon II, the 2016 Worldcon in Kansas City.

Disney’s animated film Aladdin was released in 1992 and to take advantage of the popularity of the film, Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg edited the 1992 anthology Aladdin: Master of the Lamp, with stories based on genies, djinni, and the 1001 nights. Pat Cadigan’s story “New Life for Old” made its debut in the anthology. The following year, Cadigan included the story in her collection Dirty Work and in 1996 it was translated into French for Cadigan’s anthology Les garçons sous la pluie.

Cadigan’s djinn appears to 70-year-old Millie as she is polishing a family heirloom, a lamp that dates back to the family’s origins in the Middle East. Millie greets the djinn’s appearance with skepticism, based on her life experience and the drink she took that afternoon, although she doubts it is enough to get her that tipsy. The djinn does, however, make her an offer of one day of youth. If she turns it down, he’ll remove all memory of their meeting. Naturally, she takes him up on the offer and lives out a life of her youth.

Millie and the djinn reconnect after her day and she tells him all about it, reveling in what she was able to do and how she felt. However the experience wasn’t all she had hoped for and she realizes that a better, and more useful experience would have been to live a day as an old woman when she was younger. That way, she would better enjoy what she had rather than just one day that was wistful and nostalgic even as she was enjoying herself. Cadigan’s story is a quick tale that presents not only the good feelings that nostalgia can bring, but also a sense of the regrets and the difference in the view of someone young and someone older.

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Fantasia 2018, Day 22, Part 3: Lifechanger

Sunday, September 9, 2018 Matthew David Surridge Comments 0 Comment

For my last movie of 2018 in the Fantasia screening room I selected a Canadian horror movie called Lifechanger. Written and directed by Justin McConnell, it follows an entity named Drew (narrated by Bill Oberst Jr), who, born human, at age 12 developed the ability and need to change bodies with other people (which Drew does repeatedly through the movie, tying the film together with voice-over ruminations; thus the “narrated by” in the previous parenthesis). The process kills the other person, and leaves Drew trapped in a swiftly decaying body. For decades, he’s had to keep changing bodies every few days, the inevitable rot slowed only slightly by doses of cocaine. Lately, though, he’s convinced himself he’s fallen in love with a woman named Julia. Drew wants to be close to her, but how can he do that given what he is?

That the question feels meaningful makes the movie a success. It’s odd as a story, with beats in unusual places. Drew never seems too curious about his own nature. Which makes sense; by the time we meet him, he’s resigned himself to the terms of his existence. Still, the movie occasionally feels convenient; his habit of living a few days as one of his victims, for example, feels as though it’d be unsustainable. The plotting here is not the strongest, I think, and I didn’t feel tension build in a traditional way. But it’s an interesting film nevertheless.

This is a small-scale movie, a kind of neighbourhood supernatural horror story set in a suburb of Toronto. It feels a little like the low-budget horror films that filled video store shelves in the 80s, but viewed from a different and somewhat more sophisticated angle. It’s a kind of revisionist horror movie, taking the genre and taking a new look at its framework and structure, keeping what makes those things work while using a different narrative approach. The aim here is not gore, though there is that, but explication of character through the use of horror. As such it succeeds; Drew feels like somebody who’s responding as a human being in an inhuman situation — and so has become inhuman himself, and now accepts the inhumanity as natural.

Drew’s a monster, then, so it’s not surprising that he doesn’t consider being honest with Julia about his nature. The movie manages a tricky balance here: Oberst’s dry narration and the sharp script keep Drew at least interesting, though he’s fundamentally unsympathetic on a number of levels. Drew’s got a certain amount of self-knowledge but views mass-murder as merely a necessity for his own survival; being that self-obsessed, he stalks Julia, in a number of different bodies, trying to find out where she lives and whatever information he can that will help him get close to her.

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