Black Gate – Page 467 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Birthday Reviews: Algis Budrys’s “Silent Brother”

Tuesday, January 9, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 2 comments

Astounding Science Fiction February 1956-small

Astounding Science Fiction February 1956-back-small

Cover by Frank Kelly Freas

Algis Budrys was born on January 9, 1931. He died on June 9, 2008. In addition to his career as a writer, Budrys edited and published the magazine Tomorrow, first in print and later on-line. He was also active in promoting the Writers of the Future contest and wrote a long-running and very influential book review column in Galaxy Magazine entitled Benchmarks, many of which were collected into book form in 1986. He was a Guest of Honor at LoneStarCon 2, the 1997 Worldcon in San Antonio. Budrys was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2007 and received the Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to SF and fantasy scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association the same year. In 2009, he received one of the inaugural Solstice Awards from the SFWA.

“Silent Brother” was first published under the pseudonym Paul Janvier in the February 1956 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. and was reprinted five months later in the British edition of the magazine. When Judith Merril included it in SF: The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume the next year, it was attributed to Budrys. Budrys included it in his collections Budrys’ Inferno, The Furious Future, and Entertainment. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg included it in The Great SF Stories #18. The story has been translated into German and French.

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January 2018 Locus Now on Sale

Monday, January 8, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

There’s a great quote in JY Yang’s interview in the January 2018 Locus that I want to share with you. Here it is.

I don’t know how to write poetry. I was on the Writing Excuses cruise recently, and one of the instructors was Jeffrey Ford, and he gave a lecture that was about the last five percent — how you can get your prose to pop. You can write perfectly decent prose, but he was talking about ways you can get your mind to come up with interesting prose…. He gave some examples — one of them was a joke off the internet about how if you’re standing behind someone at the ATM at night, to show them you’re not a threat, you can give them a gentle kiss on the neck. He asked what part of that makes the text sparkle? It’s the word ‘gentle,’ because [it] exaggerates the entire sentiment of the joke. He suggests doing wordplay on a daily basis, and coming up with new terms. That’s something I do. I don’t say I bathe the dog, I say I wash her. I say we prune her instead of cutting her hair and things like that. I try to say or do things in interesting ways, and that comes up in my fiction. I like fiction that has interesting but effective imagery. I don’t like things that are overdone, tortured metaphors or similes, purple prose. A lot of the writers whose prose I admire, like William Gibson and David Mitchell, they express things in interesting ways, but it’s very simple. One interesting adjective in the sentence makes it sparkle. That’s what I try to achieve in my writing.

I think that’s neat. And, speaking as an editor who read through countless thousand submissions in the decade plus we were buying fiction for Black Gate, I think it also contains an essential truth. Before you put that tortured sentence to paper to prove the poetic power of your prose, remember that the core of really effective writing is simplicity. Yang is the author of The Tensorate Series from Tor.com; we covered the first two volumes here. The third, The Red Threads of Fortune, is due in July.

There’s lots of other great stuff in the January Locus, including a feature interview with John Crowley, a column by Cory Doctorow, Best of 2017 lists from Amazon, Audible, Goodreads, and Publishers Weekly, and reviews of short fiction and books by Rich Horton, Gardner Dozois, Gary K. Wolfe, Russell Letson, John Langan, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Paula Guran, Liz Bourke, and lots more.

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New Treasures: An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

Monday, January 8, 2018 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Ah, the new year. When a reader’s mind naturally turns to new authors. Who will have the big breakout debut novel of 2018? Who will come out of nowhere to be the new John Scalzi, Mary Robinette Kowal, or George R.R. Martin? Place your bets!

I’m not much of a betting man, but if I were, I’d pay close attention to the end-of-the-year buzz from the major media outlets. This is where careers are made and broken. And for the last month I’ve been hearing a whole lot about Rivers Solomon’s debut science fiction novel An Unkindness of Ghosts, the tale of slum-dwellers on a generation starship.

It made several Best of the Year lists, including The Guardian‘s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2017, Publishers Weekly‘s Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Books of 2017, Library Journal‘s Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Books of 2017, and it was an NPR Book Concierge Best Book of 2017. PW called it “Stunning… a raw distillation of slavery, feudalism, prison, and religion that kicks like rotgut moonshine.” If I were a betting man, I might place a big bet on Rivers Solomon.

Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She’s used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she’d be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world.

Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship’s leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot — if she’s willing to sow the seeds of civil war.

An Unkindness of Ghosts was published by Akashic Books on October 3, 2017. It is 340 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback and $15.99 for the digital version. Read an excerpt at The Rumpus.

Birthday Reviews: Jack Womack’s “Audience”

Monday, January 8, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 1 comment

Jack Womack was born on January 8, 1956. His novel Elvissey, the fifth book in his six-book Dryco series, received the Philip K. Dick Award in 1994, tying with John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless. Womack has also worked in New York as a publicist in the publishing industry.

“Audience” was written for the anthology The Horns of Elfland, edited by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, and Donald G. Keller. It was reprinted in Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eleventh Annual Edition the next year and again in 2001 by Mike Ashley in The Mammoth Book of Fantasy. The story was nominated for the World Fantasy Award.

“Audience” was originally written for an anthology about music and Womack took that idea and decided to explore the importance and ephemeral nature of sound. His character tries to seek out smaller museums when traveling, avoiding the large, well-known places like the Louvre in favor of out of the way places which offer unknown exhibits. One of these museums is the Hall of Lost Sounds, which contains small rooms which allow visitors to hear collected sounds which no longer can be heard in their natural place.

Just as Proust noted how smells can trigger memories, Womack uses sounds to do the same thing. His curator gives a tour of the museum, commenting on where in his own life each of the lost sounds come from. The story also points out that sounds can change over time. A person’s voice as a teenager sounds different from their voice as an adult, and without recordings, completely vanishes. Even with recordings, the way a person hears their own voice can never be recaptured.

“Audience” is less a story and more a slice of life rumination which teaches the reader to examine their senses and memories in new ways.

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The Fellowship of the Ring and the Palantir

Sunday, January 7, 2018 Doug Ellis Comments 3 comments

Last week, I posted a few fanzines that I’d picked up in a SF collection a few weekends ago. These originated from the estate of a Chicago area fan who appears to have been pretty active in the 1960’s and 1970’s, even publishing his own fanzine. He apparently attended a number of SF conventions, including many Worldcons, during that period. Among the material are several program books and other ephemera from cons during that time, including the 1960 Worldcon, known as Pittcon. One of the more interesting items I picked up which has a convention tie-in is a copy of the Fantasy Press edition of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s The Vortex Blaster, which is inscribed by Doc to him, reading, “At the Pittcon 1960. Ain’t we having fun? With very best regards, Edward E. Smith, PhD.”

Among the events at that Pittcon was the organizational meeting of the first organized group of J.R.R. Tolkien fans, The Fellowship of the Ring. The FotR went on to publish the first Tolkien fanzine, I Palantir (the first issue of which contained the first piece of Tolkien fan fiction), edited by Ted Johnstone and Bruce Pelz. Among other contributors was Marion Zimmer Bradley, who had pieces in issues 2 and 3 (the latter under the name Elfride Rivers). I Palantir lasted four issues, from 1960 through 1966, before folding.

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Amazing Stories, November 1962: A Retro Review

Sunday, January 7, 2018 Rich Horton Comments 2 comments

The cover to this issue is by George Schelling. Interiors are by Schelling, Virgil Finlay, Jack Gaughan, Leo Morey, and Leo Summer. The editorial is about using computers to determine national policy.

S. E. Cotts’ book review column, the Spectroscope, reviews three anthologies: The Sixth Galaxy Reader, The Best from F&SF, 11th Series, and Groff Conklin’s Worlds of When. Cotts is disappointed in the two magazine-based collections, suggesting that in neither case was there enough first rate material for a book. She is happier with Conklin’s anthology, reserving the highest praise for Fritz Leiber’s “Bullet With His Name.”

I think Cotts was pretty much correct about the Galaxy Reader, which is weak, but dead wrong about the F&SF book — in particular, she failed to note the brilliance of Avram Davidson’s “The Sources of the Nile,” one of the greatest SF stories of all time. She also reviews Robert Silverberg’s The Seed of Earth, and is fairly well pleased with it (noting that it features a cliched setup) — and I pretty much agree with her judgment there.

The science article is the fourth in Ben Bova’s series about extraterrestrial life, this time dealing with the possibility of life around fairly nearby stars. Dr. Bova recently sent me a note crediting Isaac Asimov for his chance to write this series — it seems Goldsmith had asked Isaac to do a series about extraterrestrial life, but he demurred and suggested Bova as an alternative.

The letters are from Charles Dixon (complaining about Edgar Rice Burroughs), J. J. Tilton (responding in an annoyed fashion to S. E. Cotts, who had criticized him for criticizing her for disliking Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land), and Larry Shellum, also mad at Cotts, this time for a recent review of a Damon Knight anthology.

The stories are:

Novelets

“Left Hand, Right Hand,” by James H. Schmitz (12,200 words)
“The Planet of the Double Sun,” by Neil R. Jones (15,300 words)

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Birthday Reviews: Hayford Peirce’s “Mail Supremacy”

Sunday, January 7, 2018 Steven H Silver Comments 2 comments

Most days in 2018, I’ll be selecting an author whose birthday is celebrated on that date and reviewing a speculative fiction story written by that author.

Hayford Peirce was born on January 7, 1942. He began publishing short fiction in 1974 with the story “Unlimited Warfare.” He published his first novel, Napoleon Disentimed in 1987. “Mail Supremacy” was first published in Analog in March, 1975 and grew out of a joke letter that Peirce sent to editor Ben Bova, who encouraged him to develop the letter into a story.

The oddly named protagonist is an anagram for Peirce’s own name. The story has been reprinted in Lester del Rey’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Fifth Annual Collection, 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, edited by Joseph Olander, Martin H. Greenberg, and Isaac Asimov, Analog’s Lighter Side, edited by Stanley Schmidt, Imperial Stars 1: The Stars at War, edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowic, and Martin H. Greenberg. In 2001, Peirce collected the story, along with five other stories featuring Chap Foey Rider into the collection Chap Foey Rider: Capitalist to the Stars, published by Wildside Press. In 1979, the story was translated into Dutch and Italian.

Hayford Peirce’s “Mail Supremacy” is a short, light-hearted story in which Chap Foey Rider begins to wonder about the mail system and how it works. Rider, who runs an import company in New York, laments the loss of multiple deliveries a day and further notes that it seems that something mailed from a shorter distance takes longer to reach its destination than something mailed from a longer distance. He is more likely to receive a letter from his office in Los Angeles first than a letter mailed from nearby Boston.

He begins to test this by having his office managers mail letters and tracking their time in transit. Once he is sure that letters mailed far distances are being delivered quickly, he takes it to the illogical extreme and tries to mail letters to Alpha Centauri. “Mail Supremacy” doesn’t take itself seriously at all and in some ways is a satire on the idea of a Galactic Federation, even as it served Peirce as a starting point for his own series of stories about a Galactic Federation.

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Reading 2000AD’s The ABC Warriors for the First Time

Saturday, January 6, 2018 Derek Kunsken Comments 3 comments

I’ve been reading 2000AD for a bit now, and listening to the 2000AD podcast by the Molcher-Droid, so I’ve heard a lot about The ABC Warriors, but didn’t know anything about them. In fact, from the name alone, my first thought was that canned pasta Alphaghettis that my mother used to have in the pantry for when she was working and we had to make our own lunch. Little could I have guessed that ABC stands for the Atomic, Biological and Chemical parts of warfare, and the robots who fight in those kinds of wars.

As one of the comics bloggers for Black Gate, I recently got my hands on an advanced pdf of the fourth volume of The ABC Warriors. For clarity and disclosure, the publisher 2000AD is owned by the same horse-riding video game designers who own Solaris Books (my publisher), but I don’t get any bonuses or consideration if I review their comics. I just like comic books (as you can tell from my post history). So, I wouldn’t have reviewed this if I didn’t actually like it.

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Sinister Fairy Tales & Dreadful New Legends: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2017, edited by Paula Guran

Saturday, January 6, 2018 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2017-small

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2017-back-small

I’m not sure what’s up with Prime Books, one of my favorite small press publishers, but I heard they had some production difficulties in 2017, and as a result their schedule was reduced and many titles were delayed by several months. Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, expected in June, didn’t arrive until late fall, and Sheila Williams’s Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine: A Decade of Hugo & Nebula Award Winning Stories, 2005-2015, scheduled for last November, hasn’t shown up at all.

Whenever small press publishers experience publishing delays, I fret about them. Delays never help a book. Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2017, due in July, was delayed until December, and I hope it doesn’t get lost in the end-of-the-year crush. It’s a terrific volume, and well worth a look. Why not pick up a copy and help a small press that could use your support?

This is the 8th volume, and it comes packed with fabulous tales — including Amal El-Mohtar’s Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winning story “Season of Glass and Iron,” Victor LaValle’s Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Award nominated novella The Ballad of Black Tom, Brooke Bolander’s World Fantasy Award nominee “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies,” and stories by Aliette de Bodard, Jeffrey Ford, Max Gladstone, Kat Howard, N. K. Jemisin, Stephen Graham Jones, Marc Laidlaw, Seanan McGuire, Rachael Swirsky, Steve Rasnic Tem, Catherynne M. Valente, Michael Wehunt, Fran Wilde, Alyssa Wong, and many others. Here’s the complete table of contents.

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Peplum Populist: The Last Days of Pompeii (1959)

Saturday, January 6, 2018 Ryan Harvey Comments 1 comment

In August of the first year of the reign of Emperor Titus Flavius Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, the volcano Vesuvius erupted in the south of Italy and destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Thousands of lives were lost. Out of the fire, ashes, and pyroclastic flows, an Italian film subgenre was born.

The 1959 film The Last Days of Pompeii (Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei) is the most famous of the many journeys Italian cinema has taken into the story of Vesuvius’s first-century eruption. Ostensibly based on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s bestselling 1834 novel, the movie is a sword-and-sandal (peplum) riff that departs freely from its source so it can work as a vehicle for new megastar Steve “Hercules” Reeves. Reeves was at the height of his stardom and the peplum genre was also approaching the summit of its commercial success. There were loopier and cheesier days ahead for sword-and-sandal movies — I would argue more fun days — but for class and cash, The Last Days of Pompeii is a pinnacle. It lumbers sometimes under the weight of trying to appear like a serious prestige picture, but the lust for action entertainment carries it along. If you want to watch a dead serious epic from the same year, you have Ben-Hur. If you want to watch masses of polystyrene walls and pillars rain down on the cast and a hero slay lions and crocodiles, stay here.

Mario Bonnard is credited with directing The Last Days of Pompeii, but he fell sick on the first day of production. The man who took over the job was the assistant director, Sergio Leone. Yes, that Sergio Leone. Leone already had extensive experience working on Hollywood epics shot in Rome, including Quo Vadis. He proved he could helm a big feature with The Last Days of Pompeii, and soon after landed his first credited director job on another peplum, the fantastic romp The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), which I humbly submit is the pest peplum of all time. Two years later, Leone jump-started the genre that would surpass sword-and-sandal movies as the Next Big Thing in Italy with his Western, A Fistful of Dollars.

Although the eruption of Vesuvius is the reason the film was made, its story works as an ancient Roman drama even without the volcano. This isn’t a modern disaster film where the volcano is a constant subject of speculation with the actual on-screen disaster consuming the entire last third. Vesuvius appears in a few matte paintings and receives almost no mention again until the last ten minutes, when it interrupts the finale in the amphitheater to become the big curtain-closer. Forget the former plot, everybody run away!

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