What’s Coming Here on Monday Mornings…

What’s Coming Here on Monday Mornings…

So, you’re wondering, “What’s Bob gonna write about in the coming months?”

Actually, not one of you is wondering that, but this is my column. So… Writing about a thousand words a week often involves picking a topic on Saturday morning, and having something ready to go on Monday morning. I’ve actually been working on a few things ahead of time this year, which is kinda cool.

“Really, Bob? You mean, some stuff, you’re not just totally winging?”

Well, I wouldn’t put it so crudely, but yes. I’m trying to go a little deeper on a few things. Including number two below, which I am THRILLED with.

 

DOYLE ON HOLMES

For the entire month of April and into May, The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes returns to Monday mornings. Peter Haining’s The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a nifty book which had been published by Barnes and Noble. It has several items which are included in Jack Tracy’s foundational Sherlock Holmes: The Published Apocrypha.

It also has several additional items worth reading. Doyle wrote some essays regarding Sherlock Holmes, and I’m going to do a series on those. The posts will quote liberally from Doyle’s essays, with my own input. I suspect even serious Sherlockians haven’t read Doyle’s essays in some time.

And if you aren’t familiar with The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes, then you missed my first three years here at Black Gate, as that was the name of my column,.

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A Really Impressive First Novel: The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland

A Really Impressive First Novel: The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland


The God of Endings (Flatiron Books, March 7, 2023)

At this year’s Capricon I shared an autograph session with Jacqueline Holland. In the way of things, especially with customers sparse, I ended up signing a couple of my books for her and she signed a copy of her first novel, The God of Endings, for me. The novel was published in March 2023 by Flatiron Books, a fairly new imprint.

Jacqueline Holland got her MFA from the University of Kansas, studying with the wonderful Kij Johnson. She has published work in some impressive literary journals, like Big Fiction. This novel is fantasy, and she told me her next two novels will be science fiction. It’s a vampire novel, which is normally not my thing, but Jacqueline’s description made it sound intriguing, and not your standard vampire novel (certainly these are not sparkly vampires!) and it lived up to that.

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Vintage Treasures: The Bantam Spectra Élisabeth Vonarburg

Vintage Treasures: The Bantam Spectra Élisabeth Vonarburg


The Bantam Spectra Élisabeth Vonarburg: The Silent City (August 1992),
In the Mothers’ Land (December 1992), and Reluctant Voyagers (March 1995).
Covers by Oscar Chichoni, Oscar Chichoni, and Stephen Youll

I left Canada to attend grad school at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign in August 1987, and when I did I lost touch with much of the vibrant Canadian SF scene. There were a few Canadian authors celebrated in the States — folks like Charles de Lint, Donald Kingsbury, Julie Czerneda, Peter Watts, Guy Gavriel Kay, and a handful of others — but they were the exception. I had to get used to not hearing favorite Canadian acts on the radio (like The Box and Gowan), and I gradually got used to a lack of Canadian representation in bookstores as well.

That’s why it was such a delight to see French Canadian author Élisabeth Vonarburg experience a brief but marvelous period in the sun in the mid-90s, when Bantam Spectra translated three of her most famous novels into English, and brought them to the attention of grateful American readers.

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A to Z Reviews: “The Good Food,” by Michael Ezell

A to Z Reviews: “The Good Food,” by Michael Ezell

A to Z Reviews

“The Good Food,” by Michael Ezell originally appeared in the 2016 anthology Beyond the Stars: At Galaxy’s Edge. The story feels like a classic science fiction story, placing a single human, his enhanced animal companion, and a computerized ship on an alien planet which has been seeded with plant life and insects in the first stage of a terraforming project.

The planet on which Jensen lands has demonstrated an anomaly. The vegetation around the landing base established by humans has died off, leaving a straight edge not too far from the landing plate in a pattern which could not be natural. However, there is no indication the planet has intelligent life on it.

Although Jensen, as the human, appears to be the commander of the mission, the actual situation isn’t quite as straight forward. Jensen, a former soldier, and Roy, his enhanced dog, are sent out of the ship to explore the region, while the ship’s computer, called Moira, stands ready to analyze any samples they might find that may be related to the anomaly. Their mission goes sideways when they discover a small creature ready to attack both Roy and Jensen, potentially at the head of a larger attack.

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New Treasures: Your Shadow Half Remains by Sunny Moraine

New Treasures: Your Shadow Half Remains by Sunny Moraine


Your Shadow Half Remains (Tor Nightfire, February 6, 2024). Cover by David Seidman

Nightfire is Tor’s new horror imprint, and it’s made quite an impact on the field in the the past two years. Some of its releases include the Locus Award-winning What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, Cassandra Khaw’s Stoker nominee The Salt Grows Heavy, and Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey’s The Dead Take the A Train.

Sunny Moraine’s novella Your Shadow Half Remains arrived from Nightfire last month, and while I was browsing Sally Kobe’s booth at Capricon it leaped enthusiastically into my hands.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: The Darkness Before the Dawn

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: The Darkness Before the Dawn

Dungeons & Dragons (USA/Czech Republic, 2000)

Heroic fantasy on the big screen was in a parlous state at the dawn of the 21st century, and anyone whose crystal ball was foggy about the immediate cinematic future could be forgiven for thinking that swords and sorcery films were at their nadir. The Barbarian Boom was long past, Kull the Conqueror had been terrible, the Merlin miniseries was mediocre, and Xena: Warrior Princess had run its course. It was a grim time, and especially if you were a fan of Dungeons & Dragons style adventure, the pickings were slim.

However, though 2001 would bring to the faithful Brotherhood of the Wolf, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Mists of Avalon, and most spectacularly, The Fellowship of the Ring, in the darkness before that dawn, the options were thin gruel or highly spiced but raw meat — as you’ll see in the films we’re covering this time ‘round.

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The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit: The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit: The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud


The Strange (Saga Press, March 21, 2023). Cover uncredited

I wish I could take credit for the headline of The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit for Nathan Ballingrud’s terrific novel, but according to the author, Karen Jay Fowler came up with it. I hope she won’t mine me stealing it because it is as spot on as any description I could come up with.

The more prosaic version is that The Strange is a Western riff on Ray Bradbury’s vision of Mars, but without the canals. A Mars in an alternate 1930s timeline when interplanetary space travel first began during the Civil War, an oblique reference (among a slew of oblique references to classic SF tropes and personages) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter, an ex-Confederate Barsoom warlord. Just as Bradbury had no interest in explaining how humans could actually exist on Mars sans space suits in a sort of off-world version of 1950s Illinois, or Burroughs how you can get astrally projected from an Arizona cave to Mars, Ballingrud just wants you to suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride.

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Five Things I Think I Think (March 2024)

Five Things I Think I Think (March 2024)

And it’s another installment of Five Things I Think I Think. Because we all like to tell EVERYONE else our opinions, right? Social media was a godsend for mankind’s overweening self-absorption. Not that I have a problem with that…

Hopefully I hit on an item or two of interest.

1) BARKER & LLEWELYN IS AN EXCELLENT SERIES

Will Thomas has written fourteen novels and one short story featuring Sherlock Holmes’ “hated rival upon the Surrey shore” (“Adventure of the Retired Colourman”). Cyrus Barker is an Eastern-trained private inquiry agent. Thomas Llewelyn is his Watson. I had read the first several novels years ago.

Audible has most of them, and I went back to book one, the aptly-titled Some Danger Involved, and am about to start book eight, Hell Bay. I highly recommend this to Holmes, or Victorian detectives, fans.

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Neil’s Horror Corner: The Weird, Weird West, Part 1

Neil’s Horror Corner: The Weird, Weird West, Part 1


Dead Noon (Igotshde Productions, 2009), Mad at the Moon (Republic Pictures
Home Video, 1992), and Bullets for the Dead (Visionquest Entertainment, 2015)

I’m sometimes asked why I haven’t got around to watching Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon yet, and that’s because I’m too busy watching this sort of stuff.

Dead Noon (2009) – Prime

Stand-off with six guns?

Yep. Flaming bullets too.

Uncomfortable chaps?

Zombies, demons etc.

Any good?

No, ma’am.

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Vintage Treasures: World’s Best Science Fiction First Series edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr

Vintage Treasures: World’s Best Science Fiction First Series edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr


World’s Best Science Fiction First Series (Ace Books, 1970). Cover by Jack Gaughan

If you want to understand science fiction, it’s not a bad idea to start by reading Year’s Best volumes. And if you’re going to do that, it’s not a bad idea to start with the World’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, an annual series that began in 1965 and lasted for an amazing 26 volumes. The last of which, The 1990 Annual World’s Best SF, appeared four months before Wollheim’s death at the age of 76.

The series survived both editorial changes and a switch in publishers (from Ace to DAW, in 1972), and was one of the only Year’s Best series to receive multiple paperback reprints. In fact, for collectors like me, its publication history is all rather confounding. Follow along while I try and figure it all out.

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