Browsed by
Category: Reviews

Tor Double #18: Robert Silverberg’s In Another Country and C.L. Moore’s Vintage Season

Tor Double #18: Robert Silverberg’s In Another Country and C.L. Moore’s Vintage Season

Comments 0 Comment
Cover for In Another Country and Vintage Season by Wayne Barlowe

With this volume, the Tor Double series began an experiment and also a format change. Beginning with C.L. Moore’s 1946 story Vintage Season, Tor had Robert Silverberg write a sequel, In Another Country. Depiste the book cover proclaiming it “New!,” the Silverberg piece appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine eleven month prior to its publication in the Tor Double series.  In addition, this volume was published in the standard anthology format rather than tête-bêche, perhaps reflecting the two stories’ relationship to each other as original and sequel.

Vintage Season was originally published in Astounding in the September and October 1946 issues and credited to Lawrence O’Donnell. At various times, this story has been credited to C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, Lawrence O’Donnell, or to just C.L. Moore. Tor credits Moore alone for the story.

…

Read More Read More

Tor Doubles: The Westerns

Tor Doubles: The Westerns

Comments 2 comments
Tor Doubles

As I mentioned last week, in January of 1990, Tor began published a second series of Tor Doubles: The Tor Double Action Western series. Running for twenty months, the books in this series were anonymously edited and packaged by Martin H. Greenberg and Bill Pronzini through Tekno Books. Not only did they differ from the science fiction series in subject matter, but also in format.

While most of the Tor SF Doubles were published as dos-a-dos format, where the book needed to be flipped over to read the second story, this series was all published in a standard format, with the second story following the first. As it happens, a month after this series was introduced, the Tor SF Double was  published in the same traditional format.

The Westerns also differed because while the SF volumes mostly included stories by different authors (with three exceptions), each of the Tor Double Action Westerns featured two stories by the same authors, essentially making each volume a two story collection.

Over the course of the twenty volumes, twelve authors were represented, with Henry Wilson Allen appearing under two pseudonyms: Clay Fisher and Will Henry, Lewis B. Patten having two volumes showcasing his work, Zane Grey stories appearing in three volumes, and Max Brand showing up in a full quarter of the books published, including the first and last volumes. Also, while most of the authors who were published in the science fiction series were alive at the time their works were printed, only three of the Western authors were alive: Allen, Steve Frazee, and Wayne D. Overholser.

The last five volumes in the series were rebranded as the Tor Double Western series.

…

Read More Read More

Tor Double #17: L. Sprague de Camp’s Divide and Rule and Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon

Tor Double #17: L. Sprague de Camp’s Divide and Rule and Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon

Comments 2 comments
Cover for Divide and Rule by N. Taylor Blanchard
Cover for The Sword of Rhiannon by A.C. Farley

The seventeenth Tor Double, includes two stories, L. Sprague de Camp’s Divide and Rule and Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon, which are both fantasy stories masquerading as science fiction.

Divide and Rule was originally serialized in Unknown in April to May, 1939. Divide and Rule is the first of two de Camp stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series. It includes de Camp’s first of two stories in the series (both of which will be reviewed this month) and Brackett’s second of three.

…

Read More Read More

Tor Double #16: James Tiptree Jr.’s The Color of Neanderthal Eyes and Michael Bishop’s And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees

Tor Double #16: James Tiptree Jr.’s The Color of Neanderthal Eyes and Michael Bishop’s And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees

Comments 1 comment
Cover for The Color of Neanderthal Eyes by Dave Archer
Cover for And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees by Brian Waugh

And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees was originally published as a stand-alone novel by Harper & Row in March, 1976. The story lends takes its title from the poem “You, Andrew Marvell,” written by Archibald MacLeish, which also provided the title for Black Gate contributor Rich Horton’s blog. The poem is a look at the transience of empires, and Michael Bishop’s story follows suit.

In fact, published in the month following Vance’s The Last Castle and Silverberg’s Nightwings, And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees almost gives the feeling that the Tor Double series was a collection of stories about the collapse of civilization. In And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees, Michael Bishop describes and alien world which was settled by humans fleeing Earth six millennia before. By the time of the novella, they have split into warring factions and outright battle appears to be just over the horizon.

…

Read More Read More

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

Comments 8 comments
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.

…

Read More Read More

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

Comments 18 comments

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.

…

Read More Read More

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

Comments 4 comments
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. …

Read More Read More

Tor Doubles #13: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Blind Geometer and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The New Atlantis

Tor Doubles #13: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Blind Geometer and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The New Atlantis

Comments 2 comments
Cover for The New Atlantis by Michael Böhme
Cover for The Blind Geometer by Peter Gudynas

The New Atlantis was originally published in The New Atlantis and Other Novellas of Science Fiction, edited by Robert Silverberg and published by Hawthorn Books in May, 1975.  It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award and won the Locus poll.

The story opens with Le Guin’s narrator, Belle, returning home from a Wilderness Week aboard a bus where another passenger attempts to engage her in conversation, noting that a new continent is rising in the ocean, either the Atlantic or Pacific, but scientists have little information about it to go on. This exchange allows Le Guin to provide the reader with information about the climate change that is affecting her world. Manhattan underwater and parts of San Francisco are flooded.

…

Read More Read More

Tor Doubles #12: Roger Zelazny’s He Who Shapes and Kate Wilhelm’s The Infinity Box

Tor Doubles #12: Roger Zelazny’s He Who Shapes and Kate Wilhelm’s The Infinity Box

Comments 0 Comment
Cover for He Who Shapes by Wayne Barlowe
Cover for The Infinity Box by Royo

He Who Shapes was originally serialized in Amazing Stories between January and February, 1965. It won the Nebula Award, tying with Brian W. Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree, which appeared as half of Tor Double #3. He Who Shapes is the first of three Zelazny stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series. Zelazny’s original title for the story was The Ides of Octember, which was changed before its initial publication. He eventually expanded the novella to the novel length The Dream Master and the original title was used on the story when it was reprinted in 2018 in the collection The Magic.

The story focuses on Charles Render, a neuroparticipant therapist, and drops the reader into a session, in which Render is creating a reality for his patient, in which the patient is Julius Caesar in a world in which the assassins kill Marcus Antonius while Caesar/the patient longs for martyrdom. Following the session, Zelazny introduces Render and his techniques to the reader in a manner which leaves no room to doubt that Render may be adept and the technical part of what he does. But his bedside manner leaves much to be desired.

…

Read More Read More

Tor Double #11: James Tiptree, Jr.’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read? and Joanna Russ’s Souls

Tor Double #11: James Tiptree, Jr.’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read? and Joanna Russ’s Souls

Comments 7 comments
Cover for Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by Ron Walotsky
Cover for Souls by Dieter Rottermund

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? was originally published in Aurora: Beyond Equality, edited by Susan Janice Anderson and Vonda N. McIntyre and published by Fawcett Gold Medal in May, 1976. It won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Houston, Houston, Do You Read? is the second of three Tiptree stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series, with only three female authors previously published in the series (four, if you include Joanna Russ in this volume), Tiptree is the first woman to have a second story included.

Major Norman “Dave” Davis, Captain Bernhard “Bud” Geirr, and “Doc” Orrin Lorimer are completing a year-long mission to orbit the sun in a spacecraft, the Sunbird. Upon nearing Earth, they are surprised, and annoyed, to hear women’s voices on the channels normally reserved for Mission Control in Houston. It becomes clear to the readers, if not the characters, that they have entered a Buck Rogers situation. Their orbit around the sun has resulted in their spaceship being catapulted into the far future.

…

Read More Read More