Tor Double #15: Jack Vance’s The Last Castle and Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings

Tor Double #15: Jack Vance’s The Last Castle and Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings

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Cover for The Last Castle by Brian Waugh
Cover for Nightwings by Mark Ferrari

The Last Castle was originally published in Galaxy in April, 1966. It won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. The Last Castle is the first of two Jack Vance stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series.

The Last Castle is set on a future Earth that humans have abandoned and later returned to. With their return, they brought a civilization which was based on a strong caste system Gentlemen were humans who lived in the castles which were established across the planets. Other humans, Nomads and Expiationists, lived outside the castles and were viewed as barely more than animals. Serving the Gentlemen in the castles were the Peasants, Phanes, Birds, and Mek, various races which were brought back to Earth with the humans in order to perform certain tasks.

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Goth Chick News: Fear Dome Las Vegas is Gambling on Our Nightmares

Goth Chick News: Fear Dome Las Vegas is Gambling on Our Nightmares

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We are so here for this news.

As you may or may not have noticed, recent years have seen Sin City embracing the era of mega, year-round haunted attractions, and the newest, Fear Dome, is here to stake its claim.

Following Universal’s lead with Universal Horror Unleashed, a permanent 110,000 ft² horror experience set to debut this August at Area15 in Las Vegas and another planned for Chicago in 2027, the trend is clear: immersive horror is evolving beyond seasonal frights into full-blown entertainment districts. Long-running events, from Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights to pop-up mazes, are giving way to permanent monstrosities like Los Angeles Haunted Hayride, and these “horror parks” are meant to terrify year-round.

If there’s one thing we here at Goth Chick News appreciate, it’s an over-the-top haunted attraction. And if said attraction also happens to be housed inside a massive, blacked-out inflatable dome that looks like it crash-landed from a Cenobite dimension? Well, sign us up and take our money.

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A Blurb Reader’s Bill of Rights

A Blurb Reader’s Bill of Rights

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I don’t know anything about the amount or quality of your reading. You might read quickly or slowly. You might be a sprinter who favors short stories or a marathoner who fearlessly commits to one multivolume series after another. You might read one book at a time or you might be the kind of degenerate who always has half a dozen going. You might read six books a year or sixty.

Whatever the nature of your reading life, though, I’ll bet that over the course of that life, you’ve read enough blurbs to make a volume as hefty as War and Peace (my copy of which does not bear a blurb. What would it even be? “If you liked Norm MacDonald’s Moth Joke, you’ll love this!” — Conan O’Brien”? It would be interesting to figure out just how long an author has to be around before blurbs are no longer considered necessary, but that’s a conundrum for another day.)

For readers, blurbs are a fact of life. They can be helpful, like a considerate stranger who gives you directions in a strange city, and they can be annoying, like mosquitoes or those people who keep calling me, offering to buy my house, and I don’t want to sell my house!

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The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part V: Lin Carter

The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet, Part V: Lin Carter

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Lin Carter’s Under the Green Sun series (DAW Books)

I consider Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline to be the first generation of Sword & Planet authors. Probably most widely known among the second generation — whether rightly or wrongly — is Lin Carter. Carter was an enthusiastic fellow who loved all things fantasy, including S&P and Sword & Sorcery. He promoted the genres, edited many collections of fantasy stories, and was a tremendously prolific author himself.

I’ve read 41 books by him and still have about a dozen on my TBR shelves. And that’s NOT counting the Conan books he was associated with. He was everywhere when I was growing up and our small town library had more books by him than by ERB himself.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hardboiled Gaming – L.A. Noire

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hardboiled Gaming – L.A. Noire

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”

– Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

Grand Theft Auto has been a hugely successful video game franchise for almost thirty years. From Rockstar Games, I’ve never played it. They also make Red Dead Redemption, which I tinkered with a little. It’s pretty high quality and I’ll get to it some day. Among their other titles, the one I have jumped into is L.A. Noire.

Set in 1947, you are Cole Phelps, an LAPD uniformed patrolman, and a WW II Marine veteran. You are assigned cases, and you go to scenes, collect clues, and talk to people. The goal, of course, is to collect enough information to catch the culprit. It’s open-world, but the path to solving a case is rather straightforward. I’ve only failed once so far, and it was clearly trying to tell me what I was missing, but I couldn’t pick up on it. I’m currently assigned to the Traffic division, which is way more than going out for fender benders.

There are also regular side quests which come in as radio calls. You can take the call and go take care of it. This often involves chases and shootings.

I have killed quite a few folks so far. It is frowned upon if you shoot someone that didn’t need shooting. But I’ve been killed (you restart the mission), so it can get tough out there for your and your partner.

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Daughter of DAW: An Interview with Publisher Betsy Wollheim, Part II

Daughter of DAW: An Interview with Publisher Betsy Wollheim, Part II

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Betsy Wollheim at Worldcon 75

This interview was transcribed from a Zoom meeting of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society on June 14, 2024, conducted by Darrell Schweitzer and hosted by Miriam Seidel.

Read Part I here.

Darrell Schweitzer: The other factor that must go into accepting a book for publication is that the editor has to see how the company can make money off the book. I have heard of books being turned down with a response, “This is perfectly charming, but I don’t see how we can publish it profitably.”

Betsy Wollheim: Usually a publisher has a few really big authors, so they can afford to publish a book that is brilliant, but may not be commercial. That was really my father’s attitude toward the Gor books. Ironically, John Norman enabled him to publish Suzette Haden Elgin, a feminist author. Patrick Rothfuss sells a lot of books — he’s an outstanding writer and his sales enable us to publish books that might not sell that well, which is lovely.

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Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Six Bored of the Rings by Henry N. Beard & Douglas C. Kenney

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Six Bored of the Rings by Henry N. Beard & Douglas C. Kenney

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This book is predominantly concerned with making money, and from its pages a reader may learn much about the character and the literary integrity of the authors. Of boggies, however, he will discover next to nothing, since anyone in the possession of a mere moiety of his marbles will readily concede that such creatures could exist only in the minds of children of the sort whose childhoods are spent in wicker baskets and who grow up to be muggers, dog thieves, and insurance salesmen. Nonetheless, judging from the sales of Prof. Tolkien’s interesting books, this is a rather sizable group, sporting the kind of scorch marks on their pockets that only the spontaneous combustion of heavy wads of crumpled money can produce. For such readers we have collected here a few bits of racial slander concerning boggies, culled by placing Prof. Tolkien’s books on the floor in a neat pile and going over them countless times in a series of skips and short hops. For them we also include a brief description of the soon-to-be-published-if-this-incredible-dog-sells account of Dildo Bugger’s earlier adventures, called by him Travels with Goddam in Search of Lower Middle Earth, but wisely renamed by the publisher Valley of the Trolls.

from the Prologue — Concerning Boggies from Bored of the Rings

My introduction to Bored of the Rings (1969, a scatalogical, offensive, and dated, but hilarious, parody of The Lord of the Rings), came at the hands of a friend of mine, Karl H., during a Boy Scout camping trip in the late seventies. My first memory of Karl is him at 8 years old being carried kicking and yelling over the school custodian’s shoulder after he’d been caught trying to scale the back fence. Two years older than me, we stayed friends until he graduated high school in 1982. I saw him once more after that before he disappeared into the wilds of the West Coast. When first his sister, and then his mother passed away, I didn’t find out until weeks after the fact and missed both funerals and him.

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Monster Mayhem, Part I

Monster Mayhem, Part I

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Kong: Skull Island (Warner Bros. Pictures, March 10, 2017)

In a slight deviation from our usual fare, for this list I am simply highlighting my favorite monster movies. So, no first time watches, and I’m not sure how many of these are still free to stream (but I suspect most of them if you are good at exploring). Also there are 21 films in this list, in no particular order, because I’m feeling saucy.

Let’s go!

Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Let’s get the histrionics out of the way. Yes, I’m choosing this over the 1933 original, but that’s not to say that I don’t love the Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack/Willis O’Brien classic. For nostalgic reasons, that film will always hold a special place, but for sheer entertainment value, I’m choosing Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ love letter to the monster mashes of old.

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Tor Double #14: Poul Anderson’s The Saturn Game and Gregory Benford and Paul A. Carter’s Iceborn

Tor Double #14: Poul Anderson’s The Saturn Game and Gregory Benford and Paul A. Carter’s Iceborn

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Cover for The Saturn Game by NASA
Cover for Iceborn by Marx Maxwell

The Saturn Game was originally published in Analog in February, 1981. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, winning the latter. The Saturn Game is the second of three Anderson stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series after No Truce with Kings.

In 1978, Andre Norton published the novel Quag Keep, widely considered to be the first representation of role playing games in fiction. Norton’s story had a role player fall into Gary Gygax’s World of Greyhawk and live out the sort of adventures that occur in role playing games. By 1981, role playing had become more broadly established, although still niche, especially when compared to today’s popularity. In 1981, Larry Niven and Steven Barnes published Dream Park, in which an amusement park ran what were essentially Live Action Role Playing Games. In the same year, Poul Anderson published The Saturn Game, in which a fantasy role playing game was used in a variety ways on a mission to Saturn.

The Saturn Game begins in the middle of a role-playing session as Anderson’s characters are killing time during the long journey to Saturn. In this sequence, Anderson introduces the reader to the characters, both who they are and who they portray in the game. One of the intriguing things about the importance of the game to the characters is that they are living an adventure: the flight to Saturn, but still feel the need to escape into their world of adventure, although not all of the characters play the game. …

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Goth Chick News: Something Wicked (and Corporate-Funded) This Way Comes

Goth Chick News: Something Wicked (and Corporate-Funded) This Way Comes

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Universal Horror Unleashed

In a move that has us polishing our Doc Martin boots and doing a goth happy dance, Universal Destinations & Experiences has officially announced plans to unleash its first-ever year-round horror destination in the Midwest. It’s called Universal Horror Unleashed: Chicago, and it’s set to rise from the bones of the old Tribune Distribution Center at 700 W. Chicago Ave; somewhat ironically, only footsteps from the new Bally’s Casino, which is generally populated by zombies. Groundbreaking kicks off in early 2026, with doors creaking open in 2027.

So, what is Universal planning? Consider it a haunted house on performance-enhancing drugs. We’re talking about over 110,000 square feet of immersive horror experiences, ghoulish bars, monster merch, and interactive stage shows. According to Universal’s promises (which we’ll hold them to, with pitchforks if necessary), this isn’t just a walkthrough attraction; it’s an ever-evolving horror campus that pulls from both classic monsters and modern nightmares.

Why did Universal choose Chicago you ask (besides our weather being a horror in itself)? Good question. Chicago isn’t exactly known for year-round scream parks, unless you count the CTA Red Line after midnight.

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