Black Gate – Page 930 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Vintage Treasures: The Great Steamboat Race by John Brunner

Wednesday, June 11, 2014 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

John Brunner is one of my favorite writers. He wrote one of the finest SF novels I’ve ever read, the Hugo Award-winning Stand on Zannibar, and over a career that spanned 40+ years he produced nearly 60 SF novels and 15 short story collections.

I have virtually all of his SF output, but a few months ago I stumbled on a Brunner novel unknown to me: The Great Steamboat Race, published in a premium trade paperback edition by Ballantine in 1983. Based upon the true story of an epic race between the steamboats Natchez and Robert E. Lee down the hazardous Mississippi River on the July 4th 1870 weekend, The Great Steamboat Race is a massive historical saga and a significant departure for Brunner. It’s the only book like it in his catalog and Ballantine obviously sunk some money into the production — it’s packaged very much like a historical bestseller.

A decade before it appeared, a virtually unknown sword & sorcery writer named John Jakes escaped midlist obscurity by turning from SF and Fantasy to historical fiction with his novel The Bastard. That single novel made Jakes one of the most popular writers in America and the series that grew from it, the Kent Family Chronicles, eventually sold 55 million copies (to put that in perspective, that’s roughly twice George R.R. Martin’s sales for all the volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire.) Jakes’s success inspired many of his fellow SF writers to experiment with straight historical fiction, including Robert Silverberg (with Lord of Darkness, 1983) and a handful of others.

Although The Great Steamboat Race was well-reviewed, it was not a success. It was never reprinted in mass market paperback (although copies of the trade paperback edition are easy to find, even today) and John Brunner returned to writing SF and fantasy. He never wrote another historical novel.

The Great Steamboat Race was published by Ballantine Books in February, 1983. It is 568 pages, originally priced at $7.95. New copies are available on eBay for roughly the same price today.

Scenic Dunnsmouth

Tuesday, June 10, 2014 James Maliszewski Comments 2 comments

I have a complicated relationship with adventure modules.

As a someone introduced to Dungeons & Dragons during the Fad Years of the late ’70s to early ’80s, TSR Hobbies was only too glad to satiate my appetite for all things D&D with a steady diet of ready-made scenarios to inflict upon my friends’ characters. I had a lot of fun doing so and, even now, more than three decades later, some of the fondest memories of my youth center around the adventures those modules engendered. Having spoken to lots of roleplayers over the years, I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that one of the most important functions of TSR’s modules was creating common experiences that gamers across the world could share. To this day, I can mention the minotaur in the Caves of Chaos or the juggernaut from Acererak’s tomb and players of a certain vintage know exactly what I mean, because they, too, have had to deal with these threats.

At the same time, there’s a part of me – a snobbish part of me, I suppose – that looks down my nose at “pre-packaged” scenarios, seeing them as the adventure design equivalent of fast food. This elitist part of me prefers “home made meals,” created by the referee from hand-picked ingredients and prepared using original recipes. Anything less than that is a concession, whether it be to mere practicalities, such as time, or something far worse, such as a lack of imagination. Such pomposity wonders, “If you can’t be bothered to make up your own adventures, why would you dare to present yourself as a referee?”

I’ve favored each of these positions, to varying degrees, at different times in my life. It should come as no surprise that the “adventure modules are for the unimaginative” position was something I adopted most strenuously in my later teen years, whereas the “Cool! Queen of the Demonweb Pits!” position was what I adopted earlier. Nowadays, I’m more fond of adventure modules than I have been in quite some time, in part, I think, because there are a lot of really good ones being produced these days. A good example of what I’m talking about is Zzarchov Kowolski‘s Scenic Dunnsmouth, published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess in Finland.

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A Bomb on a Plane: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Four: Death Takes the Wheel

Tuesday, June 10, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 3 comments

All right, you kids — put those squirt guns away and stop throwing that popcorn; it’s time for this week’s exciting chapter of The Adventures of Captain Marvel. Today’s thrilling episode: “Death Takes the Wheel.”

Three title cards should bring any late arrivals up to speed. “The Scorpion – Sends his men to Oak Mountain Lodge for Carlyle’s lens.” “Billy Batson – Tries to beat them to the Lodge in his plane.” “Whitey – Fails to warn Billy that his plane will blow up at one minute past eight.” Now, speak the magic word and gain the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of… whew! I’m bushed. Never mind the rest; let’s get started!

In a flashback to the end of last week’s segment, a grinning Billy wings his way to Oak Mountain Lodge to retrieve the lens from Carlyle’s safe, blissfully unaware that an “atmospheric exploder” has been planted in his plane, while an agitated Whitey (there were a lot of them around in the 40’s) desperately tries to radio a warning to his friend. Neither he nor Billy knows that the plane’s radio wires have been cut.

As the time for detonation approaches, Billy glances down and sees the dangling wires; he reaches down and twists them together, restoring the connection just in time to hear Whitey say, “There’s a bomb wired to explode in your plane at one minute past eight! Bail out!”

On hearing this, Billy wastes no time in saying “Shazam!” Now transformed into Captain Marvel, he immediately opens the door and leaps from the plane, showing solidarity with all those who have ever been presented with a warmed-over airline turkey meal or an in-flight movie starring Rob Schneider. The airplane explodes (hope your insurance was paid up, Billy) and Captain Marvel flies away unhurt.

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The Constant Tower by Carole McDonnell

Tuesday, June 10, 2014 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 4 comments

When I started my blog (Swords & Sorcery: A Blog), one of my goals was to force myself to read new fantasy. I knew I’d get bored pretty quickly if all I did was write about books and stories I’d read many times. As a fan, it’s too easy to allow oneself to get comfortably caught up in a cycle of reading and rereading the same old dusty stack of Howard, Leiber, and Moorcock. My newer go-to books include Norton, Saunders, and Wagner, but most of their books are still between thirty-five and fifty years old.

Like any other person writing, I also wanted people to read my work. Another article about “Queen of the Black Coast” or “Adept’s Gambit” out in the universe was going to bore most readers as much as it would me while writing it. This meant finding my way back into the thicket of current heroic fantasy, which I’d stopped reading a long time ago.

Turns out I picked about the perfect time to start reading heroic fantasy again, as there was an exciting revival taking place. One discovery I made was Milton Davis and the tremendous efforts he was making to write and publish sword & soul stories. My interest was piqued by the idea that someone was doing something different in the genre, not just regurgitating the same heroic fantasy tropes that have been done to death.

When I went from looking at the amazing cover of his and Charles Saunders’s anthology Griots and actually reading the contents (reviewed at my site), I was hooked. Other than Davis and Saunders, I didn’t recognize any contributors to the collection. Several really grabbed me, but the story that I liked best was “Changeling,” a tale of daughterly duty and sibling jealousy by Carole McDonnell.

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New Treasures: Dead Man’s Hand edited by John Joseph Adams

Tuesday, June 10, 2014 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

John Joseph Adams is having a good year.

Back in April, he was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor, Short Form (his seventh nomination), for his work as editor of Lightspeed, Nightmare, and anthologies like The Apocalypse Triptych.

That’s not his only triumph this year — far from it. His popular anthology Robot Uprisings (co-edited with Daniel H. Wilson) was released on April 8, and the special Women Destroy Science Fiction issue of Lightspeed has just arrived, and is being recognized as a landmark issue.

But the JJA project I’ve most been looking forward to this year is his original anthology of Weird Western tales, featuring brand new stories from Alastair Reynolds, Joe R. Lansdale, Tad Williams, Seanan McGuire, Tobias S. Buckell, David Farland, Alan Dean Foster, Jeffrey Ford, Laura Anne Gilman, Fred Van Lente, Walter Jon Williams, and many more.

Dead Man’s Hand was published by Titan Books on May 13. It is 409 pages, priced at $16.95 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. Read more details — and the complete book description — in my April 13 Future Treasures post.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Collector the Barbarian’s Corner: Hunting the 1978 TRASH COMPACTOR MONSTER

Tuesday, June 10, 2014 Nick Ozment Comments 6 comments

Of course you’ll recall the Death Star scene in Star Wars when our stalwart heroes escape the Storm Troopers by blasting open a panel, jumping down a chute, and landing in a trash compactor.

Han Solo declares:

“The garbage chute was a really wonderful idea. What an incredible smell you’ve discovered!”

And then the walls start closing in. But not before our heroes discover that there’s something else in that there garbage, leading Luke Skywalker to observe:

“There’s something alive in here!”

…That is, another life form besides a princess, a farm boy, a space pirate, and his wookiee sidekick. Something that is only glimpsed — specifically, a tentacle and a single eye stalk.

God, I loved that scene.

What was that thing? It is usually simply referred to as the trash compactor monster, but seeing as how virtually every aspect of the Star Wars universe has been fleshed out via franchise tie-ins, it turns out it’s a “dianoga.” According to Wookieepedia, the Star Wars Wiki, it is not unique: dianogas “could be commonly found in trash compactors, garbage pits and sewers” and are “sometimes referred to as a garbage squids, sewer squids, or trash monsters.”

I had the original 1978 trash compactor set. Essentially a plastic box, it had a knob that rotated a screw to make one wall close in. In lieu of garbage, it was loaded with colorful bits of foam. When the foam, along with a couple of your favorite action figures, was sufficiently compacted, the door would pop open, spelling freedom for whomever you’d tossed in there.

It also came with the monster.

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The Godzilla Blu-ray Flood: Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster)

Monday, June 9, 2014 Ryan Harvey Comments 0 Comment

After a few years fighting battles among the cities of Japan and facing the hapless measures of the Japanese Self-Defense force, Godzilla got to go on a tropical island vacation and enjoy broiled seafood. The results were an entertaining variation on the classic Godzilla formula known as Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. Or maybe Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster. It depends on how strict you are about Toho Studio’s official English titles.

The arrival of the new US Godzilla triggered a flood of Japanese Godzilla films to Blu-ray, with eleven hitting hi-def on the same day, spread across seven releases. The oldest film on the slate is 1966’s Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, arriving courtesy of small label Kraken Releasing, a successor to ADV Films. You may know Ebirah better under its original U.S. television broadcast title, Godzilla versus the Sea Monster, with “vs.” spelled out for reasons best left mysterious. This Blu-ray is the first stateside release to have the official English title on the cover, although the movie’s title card reads Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster, no longer spelling out “vs.” Reasons more mysterious.

A brief backdrop to this odd G-film: In 1965, Toho Studios made a deal with U.S. animation company Rankin/Bass to co-finance a live-action movie featuring the return of Toho’s version of King Kong. The show would tie into a Rankin/Bass Saturday morning animated series, The King Kong Show. Toho’s writers created a script titled Operation Robinson Crusoe, but Rankin/Bass passed on the idea. The King Kong film eventually emerged in 1967 as King Kong Escapes. But Toho chose to recycle the Operation Robinson Crusoe script as a Godzilla project.

Toho also decided to make it a lower budgeted Godzilla film than the previous entries and placed a different creative team on it. Crime movie director Jun Fukuda replaced Toho’s A-list monster and science-fiction specialist Ishiro Honda. Although Toho Special Effects Department head Eiji Tsubaraya received credit for the VFX direction, his assistant Teisho Arikawa handled most of the hands-on work. Regular Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube was also absent, although his replacement, Masuro Sato, certainly was no B-lister; he was director Akira Kurosawa’s favorite composer and previously scored the second Godzilla film, Godzilla Raids Again (1955). Nonetheless, going with Sato — along with Fukuda and Arikawa — definitely gives the sense that Toho viewed Ebirah as a scaled-down production compared to the Honda-Tsubaraya-Ifukube epics of the previous years.

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A Monster Index for Shub-Niggurath, Cthuhlu or Azathoth: A Review of Lovecraft’s Monsters

Monday, June 9, 2014 James McGlothlin Comments 0 Comment

I love H. P. Lovecraft. Moreover, I think he is the foremost horror and weird writer of all time! I’m not going to attempt to defend that claim here other than to say that I personally love his writing style (purple prose and all), his creatures, his gods, his mood setting — all of it! Thus, as I’ve said in another review, I’m pretty much a sucker for any book advertised or alluded to as “Lovecraftian.” It should be no shock then that I bought the recent anthology Lovecraft’s Monsters.

This book is edited by the multiple award-winner SF&F editor Ellen Datlow. Datlow typically compiles her anthologies around certain themes. The title Lovecraft’s Monsters should thus be fairly self-explanatory. But in detail, each story in this volume contains a monster that is from, similar to, or inspired by one of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories.

New to Lovecraft and his monsters, you say? Ever wonder who Shub-Niggurath, Cthuhlu, or Azathoth are? Ever curious as to what shoggoths, “deep ones,” or the Hounds of Tindalos are? Wonder no longer! There is a helpful “Monster Index” compiled in Lovecraft’s Monsters, by Rachel Fagundes, that introduces all such beasties. Besides identifying which stories within Loveccraft’s Monsters contain these creatures, the index also points to where they are first found in Lovecraft’s original stories.

I should also point out that this is a very attractive book with creepy illustrations throughout provided by John Coulthart. In fact, there is one illustration for each story and poem (Gemma Files provides two poems here). Coulthart’s work provides the cover illustration as well. These are nice little extras not usually offered in anthologies.

But of course no anthology is worthwhile without some good stories. And thankfully Lovecraft’s Monsters does not disappoint. There are some very well-known authors here, including Neil Gaiman, Joe Lansdale, Caitlín Kiernan, Elizabeth Bear, and Laird Barron. Most of the stories are reprints, including some older works such as Karl Edward Wagner’s. But with the exception of one story, I had never read any of these tales before.

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Vintage Treasures: Weird Tales #290

Monday, June 9, 2014 John ONeill Comments 17 comments

I’m still unpacking all the treasures I brought home from the 2014 Windy City Pulp & Paper show in April. Although, as my wife Alice points out, things would go a little faster if I didn’t fondle everything for 20 minutes.

I found the artifact at right buried in a box of magazines and fanzines from the 70s and 80s I acquired at the show. It’s the 290th issue of Weird Tales, covered dated Spring 1988 — the Sixty-Fifth Anniversary issue, a landmark, and one of my favorite issues of perhaps the most famous fantasy magazine of all time.

Issue 290 was the first issue of Weird Tales from Terminus Publishing, under editors George H. Scithers, John Gregory Betancourt, and Darrell Schweitzer. It’s special to me because the Terminus era was my favorite incarnation of Weird Tales.

I suppose some folks will find that odd. Certainly the early pulp era of the Grand Old Lady of fantasy was its most fertile and famous period — the late 20s to mid-thirties, when it routinely published groundbreaking work by Robert E, Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Edmond Hamilton, and many, many others. Those issue are highly prized by collectors and key copies in good condition from that era routinely command hundreds of dollars.

But the Terminus years, which began in my mid-20s, marked the resurgence of Weird Tales as a vibrant, important and thoroughly modern fantasy magazine, publishing short fiction by the top fantasy writers of the time. It was also the first time I was able to enjoy it as a contemporary publication, rather than a highly collectible relic of a distant era, and I appreciated that very much. I had a subscription, and looked forward to each issue eagerly.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: When Elric of Melnibone Came to 221B Baker Street

Monday, June 9, 2014 Bob Byrne Comments 8 comments

Well, not quite. That title was just to grab your attention. But Elric’s creator did set a tale at London’s most famous address, 221B Baker Street. And it’s a pretty ‘normal’ Holmes tale; which you might not expect from the guy who created Stormbringer.

I enjoyed Fletcher Vrendenburgh’s post last week on Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion. I devoured the tales of Corum, Hawkmoon, Erekose, and of course Elric in my middle-school years.

Being a Dungeons and Dragons player, these books were awesome. I think I even used Rackhir the Red Archer in a game. If you’ve not read significant parts of that saga, your fantasy education is lacking.

Moorcock’s work encompasses much more than just the Eternal Champion tales. I’m a Christian and I was fascinated by the premise of The War Hound and all the World’s Pain (an excellent read: the sequel, not so much).

I even wrote a paper on the idea for a high school religion class. That got me an invite to see the teacher, a priest, after class.

Back in 1995, Moorcock wrote “The Adventure of the Dorset Street Lodger” as a privately printed chapbook which he let friends of his, who were opening a hotel on Dorset Street, give away to their first guests.

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