Black Gate – Page 829 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Amazing Stories, August 1967: A Retro-Review

Wednesday, March 18, 2015 Rich Horton Comments 5 comments

I have recently covered a lot of issues of Amazing (and Fantastic) from the Cele Goldsmith/Lalli era, which extended (officially) from December 1958 through June 1965. The two magazines were then sold to Ultimate Publishing, owned by Sol Cohen. Cohen (and managing editor Joseph Ross) immediately instituted a policy of publishing mostly reprints of stories previously published in Amazing/Fantastic, which lasted until Ted White took over in 1969. (White’s issues still featured reprints for a while, but by the time I was buying the magazine (in 1974) the cover would proclaim “All Stories New – No Reprints.”)

Joseph Ross (and Cohen) were briefly succeeded as editor by Harry Harrison and then by Barry Malzberg, both of whom (as I understand) resisted Cohen’s reprint policy. To make things worse, Cohen refused to pay the authors for reprinted stories (technically legal under the terms Amazing had originally bought the stories under). The then new organization SFWA took exception, and threatened a boycott, after which, I believe, Cohen agree to pay at least a nominal fee.

After Amazing and Fantastic stopped publishing reprints (and even before), Ultimate published a variety of dreadful magazines with different titles like Great Science Fiction Stories, and Thrilling Science Fiction, that were all reprint. (Again, all from inventory owned by Ultimate.)

I remember buying one early in my reading career – I thought I had found a brand new SF magazine, and was crushed to realize it was all mostly shoddy reprints. (There was a decent John Campbell story, probably “Uncertainty,” which appeared in the July 1974 Science Fiction Adventure Classics.)

Anyway, I happened to buy one of the Cohen/Ross era Amazings, mainly because it has a rather obscure Jack Vance story that I had not read. And I figured it would be interesting to compare it to Lalli’s Amazing. What is interesting is that, viewed objectively and ignoring the fact that most of the stories are reprints, this is quite a good issue, with at least one very fine story that has been largely forgotten.

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Dungeons & Dragons Releases Free Elemental Evil Player’s Companion

Wednesday, March 18, 2015 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 3 comments

The Dungeons & Dragons world is ramping up for their major event for 2015, which is the Elemental Evil storyline. I previously discussed this when it was first announced, but it’s worth mentioning again for one important reason: they’ve put out some free gaming materials!

Recently, Dungeons & Dragons released the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion as a free supplement, available through both their website and DriveThruRPG. This 25-page digital supplement contains some good material, a set of new races and spells designed specifically for use with 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. The 9 of the pages are devoted to descriptions, details, and character creation information for 4 races:

The avian species Aarakocra
The subrace of Deep Gnome
The element-linked Genasi, in air, earth, fire, and water varieties
The mountain-dwelling Goliath

There are also 13 pages of spell lists and descriptions, featuring a total of 43 spells, almost all of them linked to the four elements (or their related damage type, such as the acid-based spell Vitriolic Sphere).

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Witch Hunts and True Heroes: Reading Violette Malan’s The Sleeping God

Wednesday, March 18, 2015 Gabe Dybing Comments 2 comments

The Odin’s Day Poul Anderson work scheduled for discussion this week is The High Crusade. But, since I find that I have very little to say about it, I’ll focus instead on Violette Malan’s The Sleeping God.

Last week Elizabeth Cady asked Black Gate readers what she should read next. I would never deign to give her an answer. As a reader and a scholar, in general I find that book recommendations more often curse than bless. Here is my simple reasoning for this: There simply is too much to read already. I don’t even want to think about accommodating every well-meaning aunt, mother-in-law (notice the gender bias here? I’ll let it stand: I infrequently receive recommendations from men in the family), neighbor or co-worker who says, “Oh, I see you like to read. Well, you absolutely must read FILL IN THE BLANK.” These recommendations are all the worse (I’m sure many Black Gate readers can testify) when the recommenders are pushing a book on you for no other reason than that they have noticed that you read at all in a culture wherein so many don’t. As such, they often don’t recognize the fine distinctions of what genres or periods in which one might prefer to read.

On many occasions I have thought about and discussed reading through food metaphors. The title of the lengthiest work from food thinker Michael Pollan frames this discussion perfectly. The title is The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In that work, Pollan argues that a modern Homo sapien in what are considered “developed” countries is confronted in the supermarket with a similar complexity of choice that his or her distant ancestor experienced. In a state of nature, the human must choose amongst a variety of foods that grow in the wild. What is nutritious? What will make you sick? What should be sampled in moderation? Now, Pollan argues, the food system has processed these foods into – in some cases – potentially lethal formulations. In the supermarket, Homo sapiens face similar challenges that their ancestors did: What is good for me? What will make me sick? What might cause cancer?

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Helpless in the Face of Your Enemy: Writers and Attack Novels

Wednesday, March 18, 2015 Harry Connolly Comments 13 comments

Some writers plan their careers.

They scan the top of the best seller lists, think Hmm… here’s a police procedural, this one’s steampunk, these two are zombie novels, and this one’s about angels. Great! I’ve been wanting to try steampunk. I’ll write a steampunk murder mystery about a pair of mismatched cops. One will be a zombie and the other will be an angel. No, a fallen angel who has lost his celestial whatsit.

Which is a silly example, obviously, but authors manage the non-silly version to great success. As I recall, John Scalzi has said that he wrote Old Man’s War because MilSF seemed to be selling well. There are others, too, but I hesitate to name them because writing to the market has a bit of a stigma attached to it, although it shouldn’t. More power to them, I say.*

Me, I can’t do it. Not that I haven’t tried, but I can’t make it work. I don’t read fast enough to sample the sales lists widely, I can’t make myself write a book without screwing around with the tropes of the genre, and I suffer from attack novels.

Attack novel: ( əˈtak ˈnävəl) n: a story idea that a writer can’t stop thinking about, even (especially) when they’re supposed to be working on something else.

The first book I ever sold was an attack novel. So was the first book I ever started and abandoned. They haven’t all been, but when they come on me, all I can do is put them off until I finish whatever’s on deadline.

At the beginning of March, I released an attack novel that I started five years ago, and in every way that matters, it was a book I shouldn’t have written.

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New Treasures: Star Trek: The Original Series: Savage Trade by Tony Daniel

Tuesday, March 17, 2015 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I’ve heard about many different ways that Star Trek fans have paid tribute to Leonard Nimoy over the last two weeks. For me, it was by watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home with my family. My kids have seen many of my favorite episodes over the years, but this was their first exposure to Nimoy as a director.

Of course, that just whet my appetite for more Star Trek. So while I’m waiting for the next episode of the excellent fan series Star Trek Continues, I thought I’d browse the latest licensed novels based on the original series. I was surprised and pleased to find Tony Daniel, author of Earthling, Metaplanetary, and the excellent The Robot’s Twilight Companion (which I reviewed for SF Site fifteen years ago), has penned a new novel, Savage Trade.

The U.S.S. Enterprise under the command of Captain James T. Kirk is en route to the extreme edge of the Alpha Quadrant, and to a region known as the Vara Nebula. Its mission: to investigate why science outpost Zeta Gibraltar is not answering all Federation hailing messages. When the Enterprise arrives, a scan shows no life forms in the science station. Kirk leads a landing party and quickly discovers the reason for the strange silence — signs of a violent firefight are everywhere. Zeta Gibraltar has been completely raided. Yet there are no bodies and the entire roster of station personnel is missing…

This is Daniel’s second Star Trek novel. The first, Devil’s Bargain (2013), is a sequel to my favorite episode, “Devil in the Dark,” and features the return of the bizarre and intelligent Horta. Savage Trade features the return of the mysterious rock creatures the Excalbians, from the season three episode “The Savage Curtain,” in which Kirk and Spock join Abraham Lincoln and the Vulcan Surak match wits against against four of the worst villains from history.

Star Trek: The Original Series: Savage Trade was published by Pocket Books on February 24, 2015. It is 384 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital edition. Read an interview with Tony Daniel about Savage Trade here, and an excerpt from the novel at Barnes & Noble.

Vintage Treasures: The Boats of the Glen Carrig by William Hope Hodgson

Tuesday, March 17, 2015 John ONeill Comments 8 comments

Famous Fantastic Mysteries June 1945-small

The Boats of the Glen Carrig Grafton-small

The Boats of the Glen Carrig was first published in 1907, and it has been reprinted countless times over the last hundred years. It is currently in print in no less than five separate editions, including multiple digital formats. In virtually every sense it is a classic horror novel, by one of the great 20th Century horror writers.

It wasn’t always recognized as such. In fact, after its first appearance, it languished for decades, before it was showcased in Famous Fantastic Mysteries in June 1945, with a terrific cover by Lawrence. It was reprinted in the seminal omnibus volume The House on the Borderland and Other Novels the following year, one of the most important and collectible volumes Arkham House ever published.

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February Short Story Roundup

Tuesday, March 17, 2015 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 3 comments

Here we are again, people. It’s that time when I let you know what’s going on in genre magazines that might possibly appeal to fans of heroic fantasy. Whatever lack of love swords & sorcery gets from the big publishers, it’s doing quite well at the short story length in the ‘zines.

Swords and Sorcery Magazine Issue 37 kicks off its fourth year of publication with two decent enough stories. The first is “Old Bear and the Grey Bird” by Nathan Elwood. It’s narrated by Old Bear, a non-human native of a land increasingly dominated by human colonists. He’s almost nine feet tall, covered in thick gray fur, and two short horns rise out of his head. His people have retreated into the remote, hidden places of the land and most humans consider them legendary.

Despite his own efforts to escape interaction with humans, Old Bear feels moved to intervene when he comes across a burned and pillaged human settlement. When he spots several raiders about to kill the only survivor, a young girl, the hunter steps in to rescue her. The rest of the story is about him deciding what he should do with her.

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Manning’s Manly Movies: Beast of the Yellow Night

Monday, March 16, 2015 Nick Ozment Comments 1 comment

This week Nick Ozment and David Manning team up to track down the Beast of the Yellow Night (1971) in another installment of Manning’s Manly Movies…

[MANNING] Look what I’ve got.

[OZ] Another Mill Creek Entertainment 20-movie pack, huh? “Beyond the Grave.” Why? Why do you keep buying these things?

Why? Why not, my friend? Twenty movies for seven bucks on sale at Shopko — think of all the monsters and mayhem and manliness for a measly 35 cents a movie!

Or, looked at from a slightly different angle, you paid seven dollars to squander away approximately thirty hours of your life.

Not alone.

No! You don’t expect me to sit through those crappy movies, do you?

What do you think I’m paying you for?

You don’t pay me anything.

How much of my beer and whisky do you drink?

I have to tranquilize myself for these cinematic torture sessions.

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Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini on Astounding Science Fiction in the 1950s

Monday, March 16, 2015 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

We’ve had some discussion here in the last week on the relative merits of the top science fiction digests of the 1950s.

Bob Silverberg offered his opinion that Galaxy magazine took the lead in the field virtually with its very first issue in October 1950, saying “That first year of Galaxy left us all gasping.” And in his Astounding Science Fiction Testimonial, John Boston generally concurs, saying that 1958 was the last good year under editor John W. Campbell.

Over the weekend, I was surprised to run across an interesting and impassioned defense of Astounding magazine in, of all places, the introduction to The End of Summer: Science Fiction of the Fifties, a 1979 paperback edited by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, which collects ten short stories from Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, C.M. Kornbluth, and others.

Here’s the complete text of the editors’ Prefatory Note:

Six of the ten stories in this anthology are from John W. Campbell’s Astounding. This preponderance was not a publishing decision — Conde Nast gave us complete editorial decision — but our own.

No 70,000-word anthology devoted to the 1950s can give more than a sketchy representation of that tumultuous and fertile decade in science fiction. Accordingly it was felt that a deliberate bias toward Astounding had purpose and would give this book particular value. Concordance on the decade (which will come under increasing challenge as academia’s tanks roll on and on into our little backwater) overrates the not inconsiderable role of Gold’s Galaxy and the Boucher/McComas Fantasy & Science Fiction while somewhat minimizing Astounding, which is felt to have peaked in the forties.

Not quite so. This book is entered in evidence.

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Future Treasures: Thor Volume 1: Goddess of Thunder by Jason Aaronand and Russell Dauterman

Monday, March 16, 2015 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

When I was a kid monumental events in comics, like the death of Gwen Stacey or the defeat of Thanos, were discussed in excited whispers on the playground. Not so these days. When Thor, the God of Thunder, became a woman, Whoopi Goldberg made an exclusive announcement live on The View on July 15th, 2014. Times sure have changed.

Now, Thor didn’t actually change sex, or anything like that. Thor is still, well, Thor. But he’s the God of Thunder because — as has been well established in Journey into Mystery #83 and the awesome party scene in the upcoming Avengers 2 — he is worthy to wield the mystical hammer Mjolnir. Over the 52-year history of Marvel’s Thor, other individuals have also proven worthy, including the alien Beta Ray Bill, Captain America, Odin, and even Conan the Barbarian and Superman. Last year Marvel revealed a dramatic twist in the saga of Thor, when he became unworthy to lift the hammer for the first time, and the mantle of Thunder God was taken up by an unknown woman who lifts Mjolnir in Thor’s place. The first six issues of the new Thor comic will be collected this May. As predicted, the shift has drawn a whole new audience — including my daughter, who confesses it’s her new favorite comic.

Mjolnir lies on the moon, unable to be lifted! Something dark has befallen the God of Thunder, leaving him unworthy for the first time ever! But when Frost Giants invade Earth, the hammer will be lifted — and a mysterious woman will be transformed into an all-new version of the mighty Thor! Who is this new Goddess of Thunder? Not even Odin knows… but she may be Earth’s only hope against the Frost Giants! Get ready for a Thor like you’ve never seen before, as this all-new heroine takes Midgard by storm! Plus: the Odinson clearly doesn’t like that someone else is holding his hammer… it’s Thor vs. Thor! And Odin, desperate to see Mjolnir returned, will call on some very dangerous, very unexpected allies. It’s a bold new chapter in the storied history of Thor!

Thor Volume 1: Goddess of Thunder was written by Jason Aaronand and illustrated by Russell Dauterman, and will be published by Marvel Comics on May 26, 2015. It is 136 pages in hardcover, priced at $24.99. Digital editions are available through Marvel’s online subscription service.