New Treasures: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

New Treasures: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

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Her Body and Other Parties-smallCarmen Maria Machado’s short stories have appeared in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, The Long List Anthology, The New Voices of Fantasy, Nebula Awards Showcase 2016, and magazines like The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and others.

But it was Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe’s excellent Coode Street Podcast that alerted to me the existence of her debut collection. Jonathan writes:

When… Her Body and Other Parties was shortlisted for the National Book Award it went to the top of everybody’s “to read” piles. A smart, sensitive and thoughtful look at issues to do with sex, gender, violence and horror, it proved to be one of the very best books of 2017.

That’s a pretty strong endorsement. I don’t know about other folks, but the book sure shot to the top of my to read pile. Here’s the description.

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.

Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

Her Body and Other Parties was published by Graywolf Press October 3, 2017. It is 248 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Kimberly Glyder Design.

Peplum Populist: The Colossus of Rhodes (1961)

Peplum Populist: The Colossus of Rhodes (1961)

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Colossus_Rhodes_1961_French_poster

The Colossus of Rhodes may be my personal favorite Italian sword-and-sandal (peplum) film. This one has everything: epic scope, gigantic ornate sets, devious espionage fun, bizarre gizmos, numerous brawls and sword fights, amphitheater challenges, secret passages, a sadistic torture chamber, a dungeon with lions, ceremonial dances, an evil temple, a femme fatale, an earthquake, a slave uprising, copious practical special effects, a gratuitous ape costume, and the insane super-weapon statue at its center. The only thing it doesn’t have is a muscleman hero. But it has the best possible substitute: one of the all-time great directors of world cinema, Sergio Leone. A guy with director muscles to rival Steve Reeves’s actual muscles.

Before you get too excited, I must explain that The Colossus of Rhodes (Il Colosso di Rhodi) is the seventh best of the seven movies with Leone as the credited director. However, the other six are A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, Duck, You Sucker!, and Once Upon a Time in America. No shame coming in seventh to that bunch. The Colossus of Rhodes isn’t a baroque masterpiece, but it’s a solid neo-classical success.

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Birthday Reviews: Arthur Machen’s “The Coming of the Terror”

Birthday Reviews: Arthur Machen’s “The Coming of the Terror”

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Cover by Wilfred Jones
Cover by Wilfred Jones

Arthur Machen was born Arthur Llewellyn Jones on March 3, 1863 and died on December 15, 1947.

Machen had a strong interest in the occult and published his first poem, “Eleusinia” when he was 18 years old. He struggled as a writer before seeing more success in the 1890s, including the publications of his story “The Great God Pan” in 1894. In the early days of World War I he published the short story “The Bowman” which described phantom bowman from Agincourt called upon to help the British Expeditionary Force at the Battle of Mons. The story entered into popular culture as an actual description of the battle and led to the folklore around the “Angels of Mons.”

Machen originally published “The Coming of the Terror” in The Century, an illustrated magazine published from 1881 to 1930, although it grew out of Scribner’s Monthly, which dated back to 1870. The story was part of his longer novel The Terror and has rarely been reprinted only its own, only seeing print in 2003 in the Chaosium collection of Machen’s story’s The White People and Other Stories and that same year in Douglas Anderson’s anthology Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy.

“The Coming of the Terror” feels a lot like one of the stories H.P. Lovecraft would begin publishing five years later, but with significant differences. Machen’s tale of mysterious deaths during the Great War slowly builds from reporting on the crash of an airman who hit a swarm of pigeons to the seemingly unrelated deaths and disappearances in a small village in Wales. The deaths lead to paranoia that the Germans have somehow managed to attack the English countryside undetected, either using a strange new weapon or by infiltrating the citizenry.

While Lovecraft cites Machen as one of his sources (and Machen mentions the original village of Dunwich in this story), “The Coming of the Terror” really isn’t Lovecraftian in nature. Machen doesn’t use excessively purple prose to describe the sinister events occurring around his Welsh village of Porth. Furthermore rather than being witnessed by a single individual, the effects are widespread. Everyone is aware that something is happening, and the fact that the newspapers refuse to report on it just make the conjectures that much more horrific. Machen allows events to build slowly, from a single incident to several, their relationship to each other only explicit because they are all taking place in the same story.

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Experience a Darkly Gripping Vision of the Future with the San Angeles Trilogy by Gerald Brandt

Experience a Darkly Gripping Vision of the Future with the San Angeles Trilogy by Gerald Brandt

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The Courier Gerald Brandt-small The-Operative-Gerald-Brandt-smaller The Rebel Gerald Brandt-small

Every time a trilogy completes, we bake a cake at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters.

Today’s cake is in honor of Gerald Brandt’s San Angeles series. It opened with The Courier, which the B&N Sci-fi Fantasy Blog called “a darkly gripping vision of the future.” It was published in hardcover by DAW in March 2016. Here’s the description.

The first installment in the San Angeles trilogy, a thrilling near-future cyberpunk sci-fi series

Kris Ballard is a motorcycle courier. A nobody. Level 2 trash in a multi-level city that stretches from San Francisco to the Mexican border — a land where corporations make all the rules. A runaway since the age of fourteen, Kris struggled to set up her life, barely scraping by, working hard to make it without anyone’s help.

But a late day delivery changes everything when she walks in on the murder of one of her clients. Now she’s stuck with a mysterious package that everyone wants. It looks like the corporations want Kris gone, and are willing to go to almost any length to make it happen.

Hunted, scared, and alone, she retreats to the only place she knows she can hide: the Level 1 streets. Fleeing from people that seem to know her every move, she is rescued by Miller — a member of an underground resistance group — only to be pulled deeper into a world she doesn’t understand.

Together Kris and Miller barely manage to stay one step ahead of the corporate killers, but it’s only a matter of time until Miller’s resources and their luck run out….

The Rebel, the third and final volume, arrived in hardcover November 14.

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Birthday Reviews: Ann Leckie’s “The Unknown God”

Birthday Reviews: Ann Leckie’s “The Unknown God”

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Cover by Randy Gallegos
Cover by Randy Gallegos

Ann Leckie was born on March 2, 1966. Her first novel Ancillary Justice was published in 2013 and not only opened her Imperial Radch series, but won the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, British Fantasy, British SF, Seiun, and Kitschie Awards. The second book in the series, Ancillary Sword, also won the British SF Association Award. While Ancillary Justice won the Locus Poll for Best first novel, the other two books in the series won the Locus Poll for Best SF novel. Leckie also served as the editor for the magazine Gigantosaurus from 2010-2014.

“The Unknown God” appeared in the February 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy, purchased by Shawna McCarthy. It is related to her God of Au series of stories and was reprinted in January-February 2017 issue of Uncanny Magazine.

Awolo is the God of Horses, living for the past year as a human being in “The Unknown God.” Having fallen in love with the human Saest,who spurned him, Awolo cursed her and left her for dead. Leaving the city, he decided to see how the other half lives, going so far as to live among a group of atheists for a while.

On his return to the city, Awolo discovers that Saest has survived the intervening year, although she is still bound by his curse. Joining up with the merchant Nes Imosa, who doesn’t fully realize Awolo is the god, not just named for him, they go to seek Saest and remove the curse.

Leckie’s story depicts an intriguing culture with a complex and unique understand of the gods who inhabit it. While she doesn’t fully delve into the divine structure of the world (which is also featured in her stories “The God of Au,” “Marsh Gods,” and “The Nalendar”), but clearly knows the background of her world, so while it feels like she isn’t revealing everything, it does not feel underdeveloped, but rather leaves the reader wanting more.

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Goth Chick News: Reality Really Does Bite… Apparently

Goth Chick News: Reality Really Does Bite… Apparently

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Goth Chick dude

Given my avocation it probably comes as no surprise that for a time I never missed an episode of the Travel Channel show Ghost Adventures. The hand-held-camera “reality” series follows paranormal investigator Zach Bagans and a small crew as they spend the night in various locations around the globe which are reportedly haunted.

By any series standards, Ghost Adventures has had an amazing run since premiering in 2008. Allegations that Bagans and crew play loose with the facts, and emphasizes showmanship over hardcore research is a bit of a non-sequitur considering the subject matter. But somewhere around 2013 the productions values as well as the dramatic, over-acting went too far and for me at least, the show lost its gritty fun. Then in 2014 a member of the original crew, Aaron Goodwin went on record telling the us all the shocking news that the Travel Channel faked most of the paranormal activity documented on the show. At that point my willingness to suspend my disbelief had been stretched to the breaking point and I was done. However, here we are in 2018 and Ghost Adventures just aired their 182nd episode in January, with new episodes coming in March.

So, color me shocked that it took ten years, but I’m here to tell you about the inevitable – a Ghost Adventures movie.

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Future Treasures: Quietus by Tristan Palmgren

Future Treasures: Quietus by Tristan Palmgren

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Quietus-smallTristan Palmgren is a Missouri writer; his ambitious debut novel Quietus arrives from Angry Robot next week. Una McCormack calls it “A truly outstanding debut… Palmgren takes the staples of science fiction – post-apocalypse, first contact, interventionism – and integrates them seamlessly, breathing new life into familiar forms.” Here’s the description.

A transdimensional anthropologist can’t keep herself from interfering with Earth’s darkest period of history in this brilliant science fiction debut

Niccolucio, a young Florentine Carthusian monk, leads a devout life until the Black Death kills all of his brothers, leaving him alone and filled with doubt. Habidah, an anthropologist from another universe racked by plague, is overwhelmed by the suffering. Unable to maintain her observer neutrality, she saves Niccolucio from the brink of death.

Habidah discovers that neither her home’s plague nor her assignment on Niccolucio’s world are as she’s been led to believe. Suddenly the pair are drawn into a worlds-spanning conspiracy to topple an empire larger than the human imagination can contain.

As interesting as all that is, I’m more fascinated by this snippet from an interview with Palmgren at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:

Every time we read history, we change it. We bring our biases and myopias. If we’re honest, we can be aware of them. (And if we’re naive, we can convince ourselves that we’ve found all of them, or that being aware means we escaped them.)

Quietus embraces the observer. It’s about the paradox of being an observer – the biases we bring to history, the urge to touch…. Every time we read history, we bring ourselves to it like we bring ourselves to everything else we read. Our perspective lurks between the lines. Quietus, as does other science fiction and fantasy about history, takes the observer out of the hidden space and into the text. We confront ourselves as observers, and see what we bring without intending to. And by using the freedom of fantasy to play with the facts of the past, I want to make that past feel like the present.

Quietus will be published by Angry Robot on March 6, 2018. It is 464 pages, priced at $12.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Dominic Harman. A sequel, Terminus, is already scheduled for November 6, 2018.

Birthday Reviews: Wyman Guin’s “Trigger Tide”

Birthday Reviews: Wyman Guin’s “Trigger Tide”

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Cover by Ed Cartier
Cover by Ed Cartier

Wyman Guin was born on March 1, 1915 and died on February 19, 1989. Guin only published seven stories and one novel, The Standing Joy during his career. His most famous stories may have been “Beyond Bedlam” and “Volpla,” the latter of which was adapted for the radio show X Minus 1 in August 1957. Guin was declared the winner of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2013.

Guin’s first story was “Trigger Tide.” When it was first published in Astounding in October 1950, edited by John W. Campbell Jr., it appeared under the pseudonym Norman Menasco, although Guin reverted to his own name for his second story, “Beyond Bedlam.”

The story was reprinted by Groff Conklin in Omnibus of Science Fiction and was included in his collection Living Way Out (a.k.a. Beyond Bedlam). It was again reprinted in The World Turned Upside Down, edited by Eric Flint, David Drake, and Jim Baen.

Guin’s story is about an agent on a distant planet who is trying to assassinate a fascist leader, a task assigned to earlier agents who have failed. When the story opens, he is lying, beaten, on a shelf of quartzcar near the beach and must try to get away from the shore before the tide comes in.

The setting is the most intriguing part of the story. The world is made up of archipelagos of quartzcar. The crystalline structure of the material means that any landmass above the water line is a series of shelves. In addition, the five moons orbiting the planet caused a wide variation of tides. Furthermore, the tides wreaked havoc with the piezoelectrical currents inherent in the quartz.

The impact of this strange situation is felt at the climax of the story, which doesn’t feel like a deus ex machina only because the story feels like it is a set up to exploit the strange parameters of the world.

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Birthday Reviews: Tim Powers’s “Through and Through”

Birthday Reviews: Tim Powers’s “Through and Through”

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Cover by Phil Parks
Cover by Phil Parks

While 2018 isn’t a leap year, that doesn’t stop us from celebrating authors with that very particular birthday.

Tim Powers was born on February 29, 1952. Other authors who were born on leap day include Patricia McKillip, Howard Tayler, and Sharon Webb. Powers has frequently collaborated with James P. Blaylock, occasionally using the joint pseudonym William Ashbless, which is not only a pseudonym, but a poet both authors have referred to in their works.

Powers has won the Philip K. Dick Award for his novels The Anubis Gates and Dinner at Deviant’s Palace. His novels Last Call and Declare have won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and he won the Collection award for The Bible Repairman and Other Stories. Anubis Gates also won the Prix Apollo and Geffen Award, Declare earned Powers an International Horror Guild Award, and The Stress of Her Regard won a Mythopoeic Award and Ignotus Award. A translation of the story “A Soul in a Bottle” won the Xatafi-Cyberdark Award. In 2014, LASFS recognized Powers with the Forry Award.

In 2003, Subterranean Press published an anthology by Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock called The Devils in the Details, which contained a story by each author and a collaborative effort. Powers contributed “Through and Through.” The story was included in his collection Strange Itineraries and again in Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers.

“Through and Through” tells the tale of a priest doing a stint in the Confessional shortly after a woman committed suicide in his church. He had received her confession, but was unable to give her absolution. A week after her funeral, she returns to receive the penance he refused her the first time.

In other hands, the priest might have suffered from a crisis of faith, however Powers priest is grounded in the secular world, while easily accepting that the woman’s ghost can be in the confession. At the same time, he is trying to balance the changes that have been introduced to the traditional priesthood and sacraments he embraces, and those the Church is currently promoting.

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